July Favorites

​I have made a loose commitment to extoll a couple of things that I love per month. That didn’t sound so hard at the time but it was June when I decided it and there was still a breeze then. Now it’s July and it’s torrid. Everything sounds hard. Getting dressed? Too hard. Logging on? Too hard. Liking something and telling people about it? Sooooo hard.
 
But look at me! So devoted, so disciplined I am.
 
Here are two things that took my breath away this month. 

1. I feel like my job as a mom is easily measured. I have these private little benchmarks. For example, I take a lot of pride in being able to perfectly time how long the milk will last. I can easily see how well I’m doing (or not doing) by how well my knowledge of fractions and multiplication can help me buy loaves of bread if we are out of peanut butter and the turkey is 5/8ths gone and we’re having friends over tomorrow. I grab my glory where I can.
 
But, summer.
 
Summer throws a big fat steaming hot wrench in all my little successes and I can wake up one day and realize that the cupboards are bare and the fridge has been forsaken and the only thing I have to feed the kids for breakfast is Baker’s chocolate.
 
But it’s not my fault!! It’s summer! And I’m not quite myself. I blame Sponge Bob and the heat.
 
Enter Walmart. (Gasp! I know.)
 
Y’all, Walmart lets you drive through to get your groceries. Did everyone already know this but me? You literally click through your list, schedule your pick up time, drive to the side of the building, and they load your stuff for you and refuse your tip. It sounds like a mean trick and looks like a mirage in this oppressive heat, but it’s not! Walmart has actually provided more than just good people watching.
 
I don’t want to brag or anything but I had this idea many years ago— drive through grocery shopping. Because ideas are cosmic energies looking for hosts I feel I wanted this badly enough to transport it to Sam Walton on behalf of all mothers. You’re welcome. Enjoy.
 
 
2. When my husband goes out of town I often take the opportunity to unintentionally find the scariest thing on tv and spend the rest of the night frozen in my bed with the covers at my chin, jittery and jumping at every insect colliding with the window. In an effort to stay true to torturing myself, last weekend while the hubs was at a conference I found a documentary on Netflix about a death row inmate who wrote to a judge to demand his own execution called the Fear of 13. 
 
If you need another reason to campaign for the sanctity of life, or if you just want to remember the power of storytelling, then listening to the tricky truth as told by Nick Yarris, a convicted murderer, Fear of 13 should be next in the queue.
 
Yarris’s monologue keeps you pulled in close. He is thorny, eager, and melodramatic, and I listened to him the way I would an interesting drunk in a bar-- entranced but skeptical. He winds and weaves and probably lies a little but in the end, I pushed pause on a full still of his face and prayed some of my most earnest prayers for him.
 
Every now and then I will see a color in the sky and it will stop me in my tracks because no one made it up. It’s just there. On it’s own. Without embellishment. As if mere humans are the only ones capable of audacity. Fear of 13 is a perfect example of the truth being stranger than fiction. 
 
Gripping. Beautiful. Crushing. I highly recommend it.