I love visiting medieval or renaissance fairs where cooked food is served, music plays and the local farmers sell their produce. People wander around in strange costumes and talk about the affairs of the day or play games. These fairs were popular in the Seattle area twenty-five years.
 
I think the historical fair has been replaced or maybe revived in a new form called the Farmer’s Market.  This past weekend at the marked I got my book display set up then eased into my chair to wait for customers to come talk about books, words, grammar and commas. Commas are always a hot topic.
 
I closed my eyes in the early morning sun and thought about what I might buy for lunch a croissant? Perhaps some smoked salmon? I could get a carton of strawberries.
 
In a corner stall, a rock band tuned their instruments. A little girl with pink hair and a tutu passed my stall carrying a stuffed dinosaur. I sat up and focused on the sights, sounds and smells around me. I grabbed my iphone and set out to capture the fun. Come with me now, and visit our modern day market fair.

At the book booth we offer free samples where a customer can pick up a book and read a page or two. Lots of venders have free samples. Adults can get a taste of beer, hard cider, and wine. The chocolate and caramel booths have free samples as do the goat cheese booths. The strawberry sellers will let you taste one berry knowing that if you taste, you will buy. The flower seller will let small children carry home a free bloom.
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We didn’t want to travel to Oregon to view the total eclipse so we decided to view it from home where we have ninty-three percent coverage. Our house is surrounded by trees so we decided to take a ferry ride to view the phenomenon.  

​First, we needed to make box viewers because we are too cheap to spend money on the special glasses, and I didn’t even think about a lens for my camera. 

Below: This is an unusual number of boaters for a Monday morning. Lots of people seemed to think the open water was a good place to get an unobstructed view of the eclipse.
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I lived near Mt. St. Helens when she blew. Banks stopped loaning money into Cowlitz County after the eruption. Banks don’t loan money into communities sitting on top of an active volcano—something about risk. People went bankrupt. Unemployment reached eighty-seven percent in the small town where we lived.
 
We moved away immediately, renting out our beautiful view home on acreage. Hubby found a job in Seattle and never missed a day of work. I ended up in a job that wasn’t as much fun as teaching music, and we struggled for a few years.
 
Some people in the town we left got together, counted the community resources, and went to work with what they had to bring money into the community. One man started a microbrewery. Someone who owned a building started selling antiques on consignment. Someone else started taking people fishing. Little by little these people brought their town back one tiny business at a time.  Once out of trouble, they had very little debt because they hadn’t been able to get loans to build their businesses. If one small town disrupted by a natural disaster and an economic tailspin could make massive changes, why can’t others? Starting a small engine repair shop in your garage is going to do more for you than waiting for the government to hand you a job.
 
Why on earth does anybody expect someone else to give them a job? Think about it.
 
Business owners in much of this country are crying out for workers. We have food rotting in the fields in California because we don’t have enough workers, yet someone on the other side of the country is crying because they don’t have a job? Do they really need someone to give them a job, or do they need to get off their duffs and go where the jobs are?  Why can’t someone who doesn’t have a job in the east, take his oldest son, his brother and brother-in-law and load the pick-up with camping gear and go to California? Why do these people sit home and shake their fingers at someone who is willing to do just that?
 
Some days I just have to say, “What on earth are they thinking?” Lately I find myself asking this question more and more. People expect the government to get them their old job back. People expect the government to give their lives meaning and relevance. People expect the government to make them feel important and heard.
 
Meaning in life, relevance, importance and being heard are questions mankind has struggled with for centuries. These are the questions the artists, philosophers, and theologians have been grappling with since time began. These questions are always with humanity. Why on earth have people suddenly decided these are commodities for the government to hand out? Historically, governments have never considered such questions. It isn’t the government’s job to give life meaning. When did someone decide it was?
 
Once upon a time, I got an insight into how people develop such unrealistic expectations of life. I sat down with my sister-in-law to watch her favorite TV show. I hadn’t watched TV for years. The sitcom from the point of view of a social psychologist was fascinating despite being horrifically unrealistic.  The main character, with her perfectly arranged hair, perfect body and make up breezed into her clean kitchen and music played. When I go into my kitchen, music doesn’t play. When I get there, I find someone has left dirty dishes in the sink and the banana in the bowl turned black overnight and is attracting fruit flies – that’s real.
 
As the sitcom continued, every time the heroine said something halfway witty, creepy laughter erupted out of her walls. Thankfully, despite the fact that I am frequently witty and clever, creepy laughter never erupts from my walls. Folks, it isn’t normal for walls to laugh when you say something charming to the cat. Most of us go through life without anybody laughing at our jokes.
 
The sitcom had about twenty minutes of action disrupted by commercials that hinted that if you bought their paper towels you would look like the heroine in the sitcom and your bananas would never turn black in the bowl. At the end of the twenty minutes, our heroine had decided to have a garage sale, arranged the sale, priced and advertised then sold most of the clothes in her closet collecting two thousand dollars to pay off her credit card.  Heck, it would take me longer than twenty minutes just to determine if I had enough stuff to have a sale, and I certainly couldn’t raise two thousand dollars at a garage sale if I sold every stitch of clothing I own. Tee shirts with grease spots aren’t worth much.
 
There is no such thing as realistic TV or reality TV yet at least subliminally, we let the unreality slip into our psyche and influence our sense of self worth. Really, there is nothing wrong with anybody or their life if music doesn’t play when they enter the kitchen or if their bananas turn black and their clothes are too loose one week and too tight the next. That’s just the way life is and has nothing to do with success or value.
 
So if the walls don’t laugh at your jokes, your bananas turn black and music doesn’t play, where do you get your sense of value? The government isn’t going to give you value, meaning, relevance or even listen to you. Where to find relevance and meaning has been a huge question for humankind forever.  People have looked for meaning in lots of places, and they have found meaning, relevance and value. I suspect we all know where to find value for our lives.  We can find relevance at the food bank, if we volunteer to unload a truck. We can find meaning carrying the neighbor’s garbage to the corner.  We can find our sense of place in the world between the pages of a book. We can find our sense of power just weeding the garden or mowing the lawn. You can find your legacy in making life magical for a child.
 
Now, if you really want music to play when you enter the garage or kitchen, you can set up a motion activated stereo system that breaks forth with the Stars Wars theme every time you or your dog enters a room. Aaron Copeland’s fanfare for a common man is another great theme.  I suppose you can even have your sound system laugh at all your witty remarks, still we all have to do the hard work of loving and serving others in order to find meaning and relevance. Nobody, especially not the government, is going to give you a sense of value and importance. These things are earned through hard work.

Chapter 1: Brides Boats and Brawls
 
I tried to pounce on the ringing phone before it woke my cousin, Mandy, sleeping beside me. I whispered, “Pastor Maude Henderson.” I used my title because I didn’t expect people to call me at one-thirty in the morning unless it was business.
“Pastor Henderson? Detective Blakely, Kitsap County Sheriff’s office, here. Can you come around to seven-twenty South Oak Lake Drive? We’ve found a body, and well, someone suggested we call you.”
“I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
 
This story isn’t going to make any sense unless I explain the events of the previous day. The short story is that I officiated at a wedding. The short story won’t suffice to describe the chaotic, near-brawl that we called Fay’s Wedding.
First of all, Mandy, my cousin, is as close to me as a sister. She and her daughter Fay had been living with me because Harvey, Mandy’s husband, had been calling Mandy and Fay whores and sluts while jumping up and down on their possessions. He opened their mail, demanded to see receipts for everything they bought and generally scared the two women into hiding. My house on Oak Lake in the backwoods of Kitsap County made about as good a hiding place as any, so they moved in with me. 
Fay called her paternal grandparents and invited them to the wedding, explaining, “Dad isn’t invited because he said I couldn’t marry Jeremy, and he called me names. I’d like Grandpa to walk me down the aisle if he will. Don’t even tell Dad where I am or that I’m getting married because I’m afraid he’ll come and yell at me or try to stop the service.”
Friday night we had the rehearsal. All went well. Fay danced down the aisle on her grandfather’s arm. We laughed off mistakes about who stood where and went out for pizza in Silverdale after the rehearsal.
On the morning of the wedding, I drove into the church and finished printing copies of the Order of Worship for the wedding. I put them on the usher’s table and left to run home for a quick shower before my bathroom became too busy. 
As I locked the church building, I saw a group of men standing in a tight circle on the church lawn. Seeing my fiancé, Ralph’s, bald head in the huddle with the others, I figured the huddle was innocent until I recognized one voice as belonging to Harvey, Fay’s uninvited father.
He screamed, “Put me down. I have a right to be here.” 
I couldn’t quite make out the man-growl that came from the rest of the men, so I crept closer.
What a mess. Perhaps some identification of my other guests is necessary. The Mother of the Groom (MOG) has a sister married to a foreign president who our state department…, well, she had more than invited them to the wedding. She invited them to come for the week. The president, his wife, married children, and bodyguards came early along with the groom, and his whole family from Victoria BC. Fortunately, they rented a couple B&B’s a few miles away on Hood Canal.
From my vantage point near the church’s side door, I could see the foreign president who couldn’t be over five-foot-six had lifted Harvey off his feet and was glaring and snarling at him something about daughters. Ralph nodded his head occasionally, so I decided to leave Harvey to the men and go get my shower. Besides, I didn’t know what I could do since Mandy never got a restraining order.