Green Card was the story tonight on WPCA-FM. It’s a tale of Alberto, a Paraguayan foreign student majoring in Economics and his girl friend, whose business internship portends a dazzlingly successful future. Their issue: stay in the United States while she rises in the corporate world or go to Paraguay, where he can work in a prestigious banking position. Alberto has a friendly professor in the Ethnic Music Department and the Paraguayan harp the professor learned to play conjures memories of home for Alberto. Alberto’s roommate, Lightfoot, is Native American with issues of his own on where he can fit into society after graduation. When we recorded the story, I had the inspiration to bring to the radio station an album recorded by Trio Los Paraguayos on the Epic label back in the early 1950’s. Hearing the playing of the Paraguayan harp is far more satisfying than my “bing-bong” reading of the harp’s sound. It made for a perfect finish to the story time. You can find Green Card in the ebook Yet More Break Time Stories and it is included in The First Gathering Of The Break Time Stories paperback. The paperback is available through Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble Booksellers.
Since we visited last I actually took a Sunday off. Wolf Creek UMC has a very capable Administrative Council president, Mike Mishler, who took the service. He’s done it before and handles things well. Per usual, he managed to slip in a Marine Corps story to illustrate an incident in the Gospel for the day. My “baby” brother, Greg, lost his wife since my last monthly post. Dr. Bunny Vreeland was an interesting and capable person and a good match for Greg. Words intended to comfort never seem sufficient when dealing with death and grief. They have a home in Oxnard, California, which is being gloriously flooded as I write this.
Tomorrow I’m reading a “mangled” fairy tale, Jack and The Bean Sprouts, for the Osceola Senior Citizens Club. After I read the story, I’ll be running out of “mangled” fairy tales; I have just one left (The Many Trials) that this group has not heard. “Jack” grew out of the time I served as a chaplain at what was then Good Samaritan Care Center in St.Croix Falls. I had a chat group every Monday afternoon and one day I asked the group to share what was their favorite childhood fairy tale. Jack and The Bean Stalk was the winner. Of course it just HAD to become Jack and the Bean Sprouts! In Amery’s Public Library on the 22nd of this month I’ll go serious with one story, Lost Wax and then lift things with Snow Job and The Four Dwarfs. Both stories can be found in the Six Short Stories paperback. I read both stories at the St.Croix Falls Library last Fall. One woman commented, “You brought us full circle, from tears to belly laughs! It was wonderful.” I’ll take a comment like that anytime!
I spent some time last week and yesterday scraping deteriorating decals from our pontoon boat. It was slow going with a heat gun that melted every plastic windshield ice scraper I used. Finally, I wised up and used a steel paint scraper. I kept telling myself that the exercise was good for me.