A little prayer

I was thinking about this in lab yesterday (Small class, it was data collection time, so I was mostly-uninvolved).

Me, circa 1976: standing beside my dad's basement workshop bench, holding up a dollhouse highchair (made of that cheap 1970s toy plastic): "Daddy, it's broken, can you please fix it?"

Me, circa 2016, looking at the world, then raising my eyes: "Daddy,* it's broken, can you please fix it?"

(*"Abba" roughly translates, according to some authorities, as "Daddy," so I'm not being too presumptuous).

As a child, I held up broken toys to my biological father and asked him to fix them. Today, I point out the broken world (or what I see as such) to a God I sometimes think of as "Father" and ask for it to be fixed, somehow.

(And yes, I know, that "fix" has come in different times and different ways over the past couple thousand years -the big one for my faith-path being just about 2000 years ago, but humanity is rebellious enough that we keep resisting those fixes)

But there's so much going on right now. From the big issues (all the ugliness over Brexit, and honestly I'm glad I don't live there because I don't know what to think on it. And the shooting in Orlando. And all the shootings that happen - but go largely unreported because it's black-on-black crime - in Chicago) to the people I care about having medical problems to financial concerns (and things like more stores closing) to the looming election this fall....everything seems so messed up and as I said yesterday, while I try to do good and try to bring some love into the world, what I can do is so tiny...And so literally all I feel I can do is say "It's broken. I can't fix it. Only You can fix it. Please fix it."

I don't know. I do recognize that part of this is the usual summer ick I get, where I'm tired and sad and I feel kind of trapped (this year it's worse, with the road construction getting to the nearest decent area to get groceries more difficult) and my allergies are bad but 2016 does feel like a year where a lot of stuff is just falling apart. Maybe it has always been so. I don't know.

I also think of my dad when I was a kid: most of the time he did try to fix stuff. He didn't always succeed, because even in the 1970s lots of toys were cheap junk that were not meant to be fixed. Or the fix turned out worse: I specifically remember I had a little pin of a mouse (I was very fond of mice as a child) that someone had given me (?birthday gift? Maybe?) and the pin-back fell off of it. So my dad tried to solder it, not fully realizing that the little mouse-figure was made of pewter, and probably a lead-based pewter at that (I've SAID the 1970s hated children; lead poisoning isn't just a 2010s thing). And it melted.

And being the child I was - soft hearted and prone to become irrationally attached to little things, I cried and moped around for the rest of the day. Oh, I didn't blame my dad; he did his best. I was just upset at the sheer cosmic unfairness of it, that I had this thing and it broke and my dad in good faith tried to fix it but now it was irreparably ruined.

(I actually still have that pin! My mom saved it for years in her jewelry box, I don't know why, and a while back she gave it to me. It's just a blob with a mouse ear on what must have been the head....but I also kept it, it's now in the bottom of MY jewelry box).

And for a couple years after that, every Christmas, my dad would seek out and buy for me some kind of costume-jewelry mouse pin....my favorite, as a child, was one I want to say I think Avon put out? It was a Dickensian mouse with square-framed granny-style glasses that were on a hinge so they would raise and lower.

But anyway. He sought out those pins as a way to try to make it up to me, for what happened, for the fact that he could not fix something I treasured.....

I don't know where I'm going with this. But it's something that popped into my head.

(I also wonder some times if some of the things I do, all the ridiculous toys I buy for myself, some of the other things I do, if it's me trying to make up for....I don't know, some LACK in my past? I don't know what it would be. Maybe if I could figure out what that hole was, I could more productively fix it, I don't know.)