Sunday Afternoon Tea

I’m still under the weather due to these antibiotics. Well, to be honest… I am miserable. But that usually means they are working to rid the body of the dreaded infections.

My long time friend, Sheila, brought veggie lasagna and soup (and chocolate chip cookies) over for our dinner yesterday. There is a reason we’ve been friends since our boys were little… even if her family does work for Obama’s campaign.  🙂

Fortunately, I’d started today’s post before I was given the antibiotics so here’s Part 1, which means Part 2 will conclude next week… God willing and the creek don’t rise… and I survive the medicine given to make me well.

fall scents for your home


Recently I sat in front of the library watching people. I must say, that was not my original intent for I was there to meet my husband. Not knowing when he would arrive exactly… I had brought a book to peruse hoping the time would pass quickly.

However, the book could not compete with the people walking by… especially as one or two or a group would stop and ask directions. I hope the guy I told to keep cutting through parking lots found the building he needed.  “You can’t miss it”, I promised. At least you can’t if you stay on the correct parking lots.

I texted my daughter at one point, telling her the campus was full of freshmen and their parents looking completely bewildered and lost. It can be difficult finding their way around a college the size of a city with over 60,000 students… not including thousands of staff. No wonder they have the deer in the headlight look.

Memories surfaced of my own first days on campus and how I thought I’d never find my way around. I was thinking of the changes that had taken place in the years since I was a student. The world is a completely different place, one I could not have imagined in a million years.

For one thing, at that time Russia and the United States were still involved in the Cold War and would be for many more years. Russian children and American children both grew up with a mushroom shaped cloud hanging over their future.

I first realized how much world events had changed when our family was attending my son-in-law’s PhD graduation. I was perusing the PhD graduates in the School of Science when I came across a graduate in Nuclear Engineering… from Russia! Now, that would not have happened thirty years earlier.  🙂

When I was eighteen, Nixon was just opening U. S. relations with Communist China… a place most American youth knew nothing about. My son has told me in his building and those surrounding him at Married Student Courts, all but one other family were from China.

When my husband started classes at the University, there was a dress code. Now one walks through campus on a summer day and most of the women are wearing very little. Most college coeds can out drink, out swear, and live in immorality more than the men would have considered when I was in school.

Hubby loves to tell new students that he paid for his tuition the first two years of college with money he earned as a paperboy in high school. It now cost more for one semester (not including books) than his entire collegiate career.

Do you remember the famous book by Alvin Toffler called Future Shock? His definition of Future Shock was “too much change in too short a period of time”. When his book came out in 1970-ish, I thought about the amount of change my mother had seen in her life as she went from riding in a horse drawn buggy to seeing a man walk on the moon.

I now know a little how she felt.

I heard Thomas Friedman speak on TV recently… I think it was on Book TV on C-Span, when he gave a statement I could hardly believe. He told people to look up the Index in his bestselling book The World is Flat and look under the words beginning with “F”.

Do you know what was not there in that recent book? Facebook…

These are just a few instances of mind boggling change. I have told my son that young people today have no idea how much this country has changed from its’ Christian morals and traditions.

Families such as the one I grew up in who did not attend church had Christian boundaries and morals. Even the TV shows we watched and many of the movies we saw still had Christian values and morality as their base. I remember a TV show that was canceled because people complained about its’ premise… a man and a woman living together who were not married (and this was the 70’s!).

Just a couple nights ago I was watching Dragnet on one of the digital channels that shows old TV shows and was startled to hear Friday quoting Scripture! Have you seen the Beverly Hillbillies rerun where they visit Petticoat Junction during the Holidays and Jeb is asked to “say grace” over dinner? People didn’t think twice about prayer and the Word being a part of everyday life.

So what can we do in the midst of a world turned upside down?

We can make certain that our homes be places of refuge from a fast changing world. We do still have some control… some more than others… over our own little part of the world.

More ponderings on this subject next week, I need my pillow.

Originally posted on Coffee Tea Books and Me.

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Sunday Afternoon Tea
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