Alternate title: Build a Little Chicken Puppet In Your Soul!
Let me back up. The other day, I had the following conversation with my husband:
Him: “Oh, I remember that guy! He gave you a really hard time a few years ago.”
Me: “Really? I don’t remember him at all. I have such a hard time holding grudges, because I have such a rotten memory.”
Him: “I know. That’s great about you.”
Me: “Ehh, not really. It’s not exactly a virtue. I just have a bad memory.”
Him: “No, it is a virtue. Sometimes virtues come easily, but they’re still virtues. And besides, you deliberately cultivate it.”
Me: “I guess so! I guess I could make up for my bad memory by keeping little notebooks about of stuff that made me mad, but instead I just . . . embrace the vagueness.”
Him: “I like you.”
Me: “I like you, too.”
Him: “Let’s watch Kolchak.”
Me: “Okay, but I’ll need a drink.”
Boy, his hat didn’t go on the hook, and he didn’t even care! Pshh, that Kolchak.
Seersucker notwithstanding, it was really helpful to hear this reminder that not all virtues are tortured out of us. I tend to think that virtues only “count” if they’re awfully hard, or if they run contrary to what we naturally want to do, or if they are the fruit of some soul-quaking struggle. Not so!
It is true that God sometimes asks really hard things of us. And it is true that everyone has some natural tendency that needs squashing or reversing. Original sin, you guys. It’s a thing. Everybody has something that needs some work, and God will use adversity and discomfort and trials to bring virtue out of us.
But it’s also true that grace builds on nature. Hey, there’s even a phrase for it! (I should write that down in a little notebook, so I don’t forget.) God really wants us to work with what we’ve got, even if it’s only a sieve-like memory. That’s . . . why He gave it to us in the first place.
It makes sense. If I gave my daughter a sewing kit, I’d be thrilled to see her happily using it to make things. I wouldn’t think, “Oh, but she likes sewing, and she has a knack for it, so I’m not all that impressed by this felt chicken puppet she whipped up.” No, I’d be delighted, and I’d encourage her to try her hand at something more complex.
Same with the behaviors that come naturally to us. We don’t need to preen ourselves on virtues that come easily; but we should recognize what those virtues are, so we can deliberately work on taking them to the next level. If we only work on the things that make us sweat and bug out, then we’ll be neglecting the gifts that God deliberately chose for us, and that’s just rude.
Bonus virtue! I asked my husband if I could share that conversation we had, and he didn’t remember it at all — and he doesn’t have a bad memory, either. He does remember that one jerky guy, though; he just doesn’t recall the part where he edified, encouraged, and illuminated me. One flesh: where two crazy people get together and, between them, come up with about 80%-worth of a virtuous, well-adjusted human being. In marriage, you not only get to build on your own virtues, but you can build on your spouse’s, too.
[img attachment=”98244″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”whats for supper aleteia” /]
I’m sorry this post is so long. I didn’t have time to write a shorter one.
***
SATURDAY Bagel sandwiches with egg, cheese, and sausage
I made the bagels in the oven in three batches, and burned all of them! A perfect record! I think the following may be the one and only picture I have of food this week.
Note the patient dog waiting for his commission, and note the child on stilts. Because it is dinner time.
I also made a quadruple recipe of blueberry muffins on Saturday evening, for Sunday breakfast. Blueberries were so cheap, I actually bought more than I could use, prompting my seven-year-old to say, “Mama! There’s extra blueberries?!?! Here’s what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna get a trout — a brand new trout, that no one’s ever used! — and I’m gonna . . .
“. . . Wait. Is it not called a trout?”
She meant “trowel.” She had the idea of shovelling blueberries into her mouth with a trowel. Which is probably the best recipe for blueberries.
Muffins are very easy to throw together, and I always think I can easily make them in the morning. But I can’t, because it is morning and nothing is easily. I used this basic muffin recipe from King Arthur flour, and they turned out fine. I took some pictures, but they looked exactly like blueberry muffins, if you can imagine such a thing.
Good tips from Good King Arthur: Add the berries to the flour mixture and mix thoroughly, to coat the berries and prevent them from sinking to the bottom of the cupcake tin. And remember that it’s okay to leave lumps in the batter! Overbeating gives you tough muffins, which would be sad, but not a bad band name.
***
SUNDAY Korean beef bowl, rice, watermelon
Amazing Husband Man made supper (easy, yummy recipe) while I went to Panera and did some work (first doing the “local oaf” routine). There was only a little bit of rice in the house, despite the fact that “rice” was written on the blackboard, and despite the fact that our van has rice all over it from the forty pounds of leaky bags of rice that were recently in there. I don’t want to talk about it. Everyone got a little rice, okay?
I felt sad and tired looking at all those uncooked drumsticks, so I solicited recipes on Facebook. It’s refusing to fetch that thread for me, but here’s one I remember, and plan to make: La Brea Tar Pit Chicken.
There were tons of wonderful ideas. As I always do when I ask for advice, I ignored it all and just made a quick Italian dressing-type marinade and then put the chicken under the broiler. It was fine; tasted like chicken.
***
TUESDAY Hot dogs, beans, chips
I think the kids made this. It was hot.
***
WEDNESDAY Spaghetti with sausage
Nothing to report. It was hot. OH, but we finally knocked “adults-only evening swim with fancy snacks” off the to-do list for the summer. Crackers, brie, cherries, beer, and scantily-clothed husband by the lake at sunset. Sometimes it all just works out. (Take note, parents drowning in Babyland! Eventually they do get old enough to leave at home and you can do amazing things.)
We didn’t feel emotionally strong enough to open the instant natural jellyfish, but the garam masala and the ginger paste smiled encouragingly. Here’s how that worked out:
I have zero experience with Indian food. Some guy said that he read 25 different recipes for chicken tikka masala, and the only thing they all had in common was chicken. And I had chicken. So I didn’t worry too much about missing kind of a lot of the ingredients in this recipe.
I had chicken breasts instead of thighs,
bottled instead of fresh lemon juice,
no ground coriander (I just put extra cumin),
butter instead of ghee,
ginger paste instead of fresh,
tomato sauce instead of paste and chopped tomatoes,
no cilantro,
and milk instead of cream.
I know.
I once read that, if you’re in confession and are all balled up with scrupulosity, just tell the priest, “I am unable to judge the gravity of my sins,” and let him work it out.
It turned out . . . good? I think? The good news is, I have an all-consuming cold, and could barely taste it anyway. Kind of a lot of work for a dish that, to me, shyly hinted at cinnamon. But after I took a few bites, my nose started running like an arroyo in springtime, so it must have been spicy, and Mr. Husband liked it.
Before I made dinner, we enjoyed a series of comic mishaps as we went to the bank, the other bank, the comic book store, the other comic book store, the candy store, the burger place, the library, the other library, a few other miscellaneous places, and of course the children’s museum, where my 16-month-old girl had a tense showdown on the musical stairs with a somewhat smaller 17-month-old boy. Oh, he stood down first, believe me. The other mom was like, “Wow, he’s never shy like this at home!” and I was like, “Lady, he did the right thing.”
So we got out of there, and then downstairs from the museum was a brand new Indian restaurant and grocery. “Fate!” I says to myself. “Fate has taken me in hand, and I will buy something in a bag that will round out this wobbly ethnic meal!”
To the helpful Indian lady, I explained my dilemma (basically, “I am white”), and she generously offered me a torrent of advice, gushing like an arroyo in spring, except that I couldn’t really understand her. I am fairly sure she said she just grabs whatever is in her cabinet if she doesn’t have the right ingredients. It was this that empowered me to use Hunt’s spaghetti sauce in my tikka masala.
I know.
After this, we suddenly had an urgent need to rush to the corporate office of the donut shop where my daughter works, and then it was closed anyway, but we’d already been out for eleven hours in a vehicle which blasts roasting-hot air on my feet; which meant that no, no, no, I was not going to do more driving to the other side of the other town to pick up rice, which had not spontaneously generated itself in the cabinet, despite being on the list.
I did, however, go to the local gas station (which, I noted with an interior sob, is owned and run by an Indian family) and got eight bags of boil-in-the-bag rice. I chose boil-in-a-bag brown rice, because I was sad about the whole whiteness thing.
I know.
We also had the dried mango candy and the chewy ginger candy, and they were fabulous. If all candy tasted like that, there would be peace on earth, and as our noses ran like arroyos in spring, our hearts would overflow with the gladness of ginger and tamarind, whatever that is.
As long as I’m single-handedly ruining Indian food, I think I’ll add capers if I ever make this again. It just sounds good. I couldn’t find any mention of capers as an ingredient of tikka masala, but why stop now? Maybe I’ll garnish it with diced marshmallows and serve it on a bed of Froot Loops.
*** FRIDAY Mac and cheese
It’s still hot.
Oh, and I hereby escape copyright infringement for the photo at the top by providing a link to the source, which is entirely relevant to this post, which gushes and flows with cultural sensitivity like an arroyo in spring.
Hey, it’s that car! You know, that super crazy car you see driving around town! What is the deal with that car, anyway? What’s the story of that car’s owner, and what made him slip the bonds of what is normal and routine, choosing instead the path of the bonkers?
Whatever the story, That Car never fails to cheer us up when we spot it. Locally, we have at least five That Cars:
1. Duck Truck!
During the school year, we drop off the older kids at one school, then go home, pick up the younger kids, and drop them at another school, and then glumly wait for the glum carpool kid to turn up so we can all glumly get to the third school. We are not a morning people, and this segment of the day is nobody’s favorite.
UNLESS THERE’S THE DUCK TRUCK. Every so often, without warning and without explanation, there will be an enormously heavy, military-style dump truck parked in front of the school. Nobody knows why. There is no one in the driver’s seat, and the back is packed with miscellaneous furniture, auto parts, a blue plastic wading pool, one of those grubby dog igloos . . . and two geese.
That’s all I know. Okay, so it is a goose truck, not a duck truck, but shouting “DUCK TRUCK!” turns our day around. It’s wonderful. They seem like happy, spry, well-cared-for geese. They just happen to live in the back of a camouflaged dump truck parked in front of the school, okay?
2. Real Bill the World Exercise Champion!
This energetic man’s exercise biography is painted in white all over his brown van. He does unbelievable numbers of sit-ups and jumping jacks, and there are raw eggs involved, and he can run backwards for way longer than you’d expect. Even reading about it is exhausting.
The upbeatness of it all is fairly encouraging, but then I saw he had carved a slot in the side of the van and painted the word “TIPS.” It’s a college town, with lots of frat boys. I get mad thinking about what they must stuff in that slot. Why can’t they leave Real Bill alone?
3. The Repent Van!
Speaking of frat boys, we also used to see a terrible van with “REPENT” painted all over it. Surprisingly effective, at least on me. I would draw up to a red light, see the Repent Van, and think, “Well . . . but . . . okay, fine, all right, I will.” Can’t really think of an argument against it. What, I have nothing to repent of? What, I refuse to repent just because a terrible van told me to? If this van were a guy, he’d be dressed in camel hair and eating locusts, and then what would I do, eh? Just keep on driving to Wendy’s like nothing happened?
Recently, the prophet traded his van for a Pepto-pink Repent Jeep, and he added some fluttering “REPENT” flags. It’s less persuasive now; not sure why.
4. The Batmobile! ish
There is a guy who drives an old black Corvette with a bat symbol painted on the side. Sometimes, for a festival or parade, he also wears his Batman costume, although he is of slight build.
Batman-ish demonstrates one of those developmental stages you won’t hear about from your pediatrician. In children ages two to about nine, he elicits thrills, admiration, even a little hysteria. IT’S BATMAN!!!!! DADDY, DADDY, BATMAN IS HERE! Then, when the child turns eleven or twelve, they stop thinking, “When I grow up, I’m going to be just like him!” and they start thinking, “Gee, that guy spends a lot of time pretending to be Batman. Huh.”
The other thing is, you can tell he’s shy. He likes it when people say, “Heyyy, it’s Batman!” but he doesn’t look them in the eye. One time, there was a pretty woman in the passenger seat, but only one time.
5. So I says to my husband, I says, “That’s four. Now I just need one more to round out the post.” And he says, “Simmy, it’s you.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, all naïve, despite having been married to this man for eighteen years.”You mean, like, this post is so me? Or it’s on me to come up with something else?”
And he says, “You are the fifth car.”
That can’t be right. Just because it’s a frankensteinishly-rebuilt 15-passenger van with blue racing stripes and peeling pro-life bumper stickers, with a 10-cylinder engine that is always goading me into trying to catch some air on the awesome hill just before the police station. Just because I sometimes spend four or five hours a day tooling back and forth and back and forth around the same 15-mile radius, shouting back at Diane Rhem and trying to drown out the “BONG BONG BONG” of the “you left your lights on” alarm that we keep disabling with wire cutters and it keeps resurrecting itself. Just because it’s crammed with feral-looking children and makes a ludicrously suggestive “squeakity-squeakity-squeakity!” sound when you put it in park. Just because every time you open the door, four seltzer cans and a boot fall out, and every time you close the door, you have to thread the floppy rubber weather stripping back on first.
He’s trying to tell me this is a vehicle that people around town notice and remember? He thinks that people say, “Hey, it’s That Car!” and they wonder what my deal is?
Yeah, well. REPENT.
***
Photo of Repent Van (actually a completely different Repent Van from our local Repent Van) by mike krzeszakvia Flickr (license)
We’ve decided, as a nation, that a woman who wants an abortion should be able to get an abortion. We’ve decided that she has the right to do whatever her conscience allows, and that her freedom to choose or not choose abortion is a choice that should be protected. This bill simply confirms that healthcare providers have consciences, too, and that their choice to participate or not participate in abortions is a choice that should be protected.
The phrase “custody of the eyes” always gets a lot of play in modesty discussions (which always ramp up around swimsuit season). In general, the phrase just means “watch where you look,” and it usually has to do with not staring at somebody else’s body parts. This is just good old, practical Mother Church teaching us how to behave so we don’t get into trouble: if you’re a man who is tempted into lustful thoughts by a woman’s cleavage, then keep your eyes on her face. If you’re a woman who’s tempted into lustful thoughts by shirtless joggers, then keep your eyes on the road. Don’t want to get burned? Keep your hands away from the fire. It doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with fire; it just means that you have to know what your weaknesses are, and act accordingly.
After receiving Communion, keep a “custody of the eyes,” that is, be conscious to not let your eyes wander around. Instead, it is proper to keep your focus in front of you, with your head toward the floor … A “custody of the eyes” is also important for those who are in the pews who have yet to join the Communion line. It is not proper to stare at those who have received Communion. The time of Communion is a very intimate, personal and for many an intense time.
Isn’t that interesting? The purpose of custody of the eyes is to help us focus on what’s important at the moment — and also to preserve the privacy and dignity of other people. That latter aspect — preserving the dignity of the other person — is often missing when we discuss custody of the eyes. We often talk about how important it is to keep custody of the eyes when we see some stranger who turns us on. The most basic purpose of this is just to protect ourselves. It’s not sinful to feel attracted to someone attractive,but we don’t want a simple and natural attraction to transform itself into lustful thoughts that corrupt our hearts; and so we avert our eyes when necessary.
But the other purpose of custody of the eyes, and the more profound one, is to protect the person we’re looking at — to avoid turning him or her into an object, something to be consumed, something to be subjected to our own needs and ideas. Something, not someone.
And so I’d like to introduce the phrase into yet another less-common context. Many of us, men and women, could use practice keeping custody of the eyes when we’re looking at someone to whom we are not attracted, lustfully otherwise — someone whose dress or behavior we don’t approve of, someone whose appearance repels us.
Lust isn’t the only passion that needs reining in.
Here’s an example. When I was shopping yesterday, I saw an enormously fat woman wearing short shorts and a cherry red shirt that was cut so low, it was hardly a shirt at all. I mean, gravity was being disrupted. Light was going there to die. Whatever you’re picturing right now, it was more outrageous than that. I mean!
So, as someone who takes modesty seriously, what did I do? I thought bad things about her. I jeered at her in my head. I imagined how annoyed I would be if I had had one of my young sons with me. I compared my weight with her weight. And I concluded that she — not people like her, but she herself — was what was wrong with America today.
This was all in a matter of a split second, of course. I didn’t stand there gawping at her; and pretty quickly, I caught myself. I made a conscious effort to think about something else, and I moved along. But if I had been practicing custody of the eyes, I would have moved along much sooner, because I need to protect myself — not against lust, but against the sins of nastiness, cattiness, and disdain. If I had been practicing custody of the eyes, I would have just moved along automatically when I realized my weaknesses were being exposed.
But that’s not the best I can do. How much better would it have been if I focused on protecting not only myself, but this woman. How much better if, by long, well-established habits of charity in my thoughts, words, and deeds, I had found it very easy to see this woman simply as another child of God.
This should be our goal whether we’re gazing at someone who is immodest, or sloppy, or whose style is too trendy, or too pricey, or too pretentious, or old fashioned, or bizarre, or pointedly too modest, or too anything. We should be accustomed to finding Christ in every face.
It’s normal and understandable to feel anger and frustration when someone makes life harder for us by presenting us with temptations. But it’s a horrible mistake to be content with our anger. There’s no point in fighting lust if we’re just going to dive headfirst into hate! That’s like curing your crack addiction by switching to heroin. Lust is a sin because it crowds out love. Custody of the eyes is a tool for achieving this end, and is not an end in itself. Its purpose is to help us to love.
That must be what true holiness looks like: not just snapping my eyes away from some no-good tart who can’t be bothered to look decent, but practicing custody of their eyes for so long that it’s easy to see the actual person in, to paraphrase Mother Teresa’s phrase, “the distressing disguise of the slut” (or the slob, or the fatso, or whatever). It’s not enough to think, “Oh, how trashy; better look away.” I should be learning to look at anyone and see Christ.
Custody of the eyes shouldn’t, ultimately, make us see less of a person. It should help us see more.
So interesting! Very similar to C. S. Lewis’ Perelandra, too (no accident, I’m sure). As a visual thinker but a sloppy reader, I’m always grateful to people who take the trouble to render accurate diagrams of worlds we’ve read about.
2. Will suffering make your marriage better or worse? Someday, I will read something I don’t like by Jen Fitz, but today is not that day. This is actually an old post, but it’s oh-so-worth another read.
3. Modesty and the Ontological Shaming of Both Women and Men My sister, Abby Tardiff, wrote this excellent piece about modesty and ontological shaming for The Personalist Project. If you’ve gathered the impression that we can correct the misogyny of the modesty police by coming down hard on men who are, by their nature, all piggies, then this short essay will recalibrate your thinking. On behalf of my sons and my husband, I’m grateful for this piece, and I’d love to see more understanding between sexes on what ought to be a shared struggle to learn how to treat each other well.
4. The always-entertaining Deirdre Mundy gleefully delves into the Church’s long history of body-snatching, still (um) alive and well in the highly unspiritual tussle over Fulton Sheen’s remains. I have a hunch Sheen would be vastly amused by the whole thing, even though I know the last few years have been painful and discouraging for the people who just want to see him canonized already.
Most of the poems from my last list are all tattered and stained now, so I’m picking out a new crop. I got a pad of card stock in earth tones for matting. Now I just have to remind my printer who’s boss, and voilà, everything is awesome.
Okay, fine, I wanted an excuse to buy card stock. I’m secretly in love with expensive paper. Not even my husband knows this about me, but now you know.
Again, here’s last year’s list. I haven’t read a new poet in ages, and would love to branch out. Can you suggest anyone — preferably with specific poems? It’s okay if the subject or themes are over the kids’ heads, as long as the words sound good. I’d like to stick to shorter poems with reasonably simple language.
[img attachment=”98244″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”whats for supper aleteia” /]
Okay!
SATURDAY Pizza
I had the worst time making a meal plan on Saturday. I struggled and sweated, crossed things out and switched things around, compared prices and looked up recipes and finally came up with a week’s worth of food without too much repetition, a few new dishes, and some wiggle room for busy days. Not bad!
The whole time, I was thinking, “This is a good week to try out a few complicated recipes, because next weekend I’ll be getting ready for the fourth of July, with fifty guests or so, and I’ll be too exhausted to do much. Phew, thank goodness the 4th isn’t this week.”
Well, you know how that worked out. So I hadda go back.
I treated myself to a whole new piece of paper.
***
SUNDAY Grilled ham and cheese, asparagus tart, strawberries, grilled bones. Yes.
I’m going to tell the whole stupid story, but I’m warning you, it’s stupid.
On Sunday, we were cleaning the house, fixing up the yard, and prepping food for tomorrow, so I wanted a quick, easy meal to throw together.
We were supposed to have savory ham sandwiches on Saturday, but I couldn’t find Hawaiian rolls, so I bought frozen rolls. Which the kids put into the freezer when I got home from shopping, so they were too hard to bake. Because this was the perfect time for them to realize that civilization really does depend on people putting things away. So I took them out again on Sunday, and . . . someone put them back in the freezer again. So I was reduced to making grilled ham and cheese, and then we also had strawberries that were being devoured by flies, and asparagus threatening to go rancid.
And, a ton of very meaty pork ribs. I had bought pretty much all the pork in the world for spiedies, realizing way too late that it would have been sufficiently delicious to just grill some pork ribs, rather than cutting the meat off bones, trimming it, cutting it in chunks, and then stringing it on skewers, which are just basically artificial bones. I was, by this time, in the same state of mind as Dave Barry’s wife, when he caught her opening boxes they had never opened from their last move, taking out the contents, and packing them into new boxes so they could move. Except with pork.
So that all went into the fridge, and then we had all these bones, and also tons of marinade, because I don’t know how to make enough of something; I must make outlandishly excessive multiples of everything.
[img attachment=”111109″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”garlic and lemon zest” /]
Go ahead, make the “mother of ten children” joke. I can take it.
So we grilled those bones, and they were good.
The three-ingredient asparagus tart, I made purely out of spite, because I was hot and supper was already crazy late, and I was still mad about the freezer rolls. I don’t even know what fontina cheese is. I used mozzarella, colby jack, and parmesan, I think.
So of course it was delicious. The whole freakin’ meal was delicious. Even the freaking ham sandwiches on regular bread.
[img attachment=”111114″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”ham and swiss” /]
*** MONDAY The cookout to end all cookouts!
Hamburgers, hot dogs, spiedies, veggie burgers, pasta salad, vegan pasta salad, vegan bean salad, potato salad, chips, pickles, watermelon, corn on the cob, enough beer to float an aircraft carrier, and enough cookies to make a young child’s mind pop like a piece of popcorn.
which we set off before it was even really dark, because we are old and tired and halfway dead. We read the Declaration of Independence, we drank beer, we jumped on the trampoline, played in the stream, poured sand on our heads, and laughed and chatted and had a magnificent time.
***
TUESDAY Leftovers to end all leftovers!
Actually there wasn’t all that much left over. There was my mother-in-law’s mixed bean salad, though, which I ate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
I don’t have the recipe yet, but my best guess is:
Chick peas
Black beans
Kidney beans
Jalapenos
Roasted red pepper
Roasted corn
Cilantro
Red pepper flakes?
Lime juice?
***
WEDNESDAY Hostages; harsh browns
The kids made this while I died. I don’t even remember Wednesday. It was so hot.
***
THURSDAY Chicken fajitas with radish relish; corn chips; Flushies
Chicken, pepper, and onions with generic Mexicanish spices and sour cream on tortillas. This is the same dish I was unimpressed with last week; but I made it again because I was dying to try the pickled radish thing a few readers suggested.
We have a bumper crop of radishes in our pathetic little garden this year. It goes so nicely with our bumper crop of dislike for radishes. But they are so byoootiful, I love them anyway.
Gorgeous! I could just eat them up, if they didn’t taste so much like radishes.
I misplaced the actual recipe, so I just sliced a bunch of radishes up and mixed them with fresh lime juice, a little white vinegar, a little sugar, some chopped jalapenos, and some chopped cilantro, and then let it all sit for about half an hour. Kicky! Snappy! And most of all, byoootiful:
They really were pretty good along with the chicken. Hot meat with cool, crunchy veggies is so nice in summer.
[img attachment=”111121″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”chicken and radishes” /]
Oh, so the Flushies. I had a little temper tantrum at supper (something about how I have to beg and plead people to come sit down so they can do me the gracious favor of eating the food I’ve prepared for them), so my husband had me go lie down while he took all (all!) the kids out for those chipped ice drinks with red syrup in them that you get from the 7-11. You know, Flushies.
***
FRIDAY
There’s some basil languishing in the garden. I think I’ll gather it up, mix it with pasta, and call it a week.
Police arrived, assessed the situation, and wrestled the gun away from him. During the struggle, Ray brought out a handgun and fired it. Police eventually got Ray under control and took him into custody.
He had two guns.
He was openly threatening the lives of passers by.
Horrible things happen. Incredible things happen. Other people exert their influence. People die. Events that bond one group of siblings will fracture and alienate another. There are simply too many variables in life for anyone with a conscience to claim, “Just do such-and-such, and your kids will turn out thus-and-so!” Beware such dangerous nonsense.
However, according to an extremely unscientific poll I conducted, parents can do some things — and avoid some things — to help influence their children so they will be more likely to remain friends with their siblings when they are adults.
![“I Saw the Figure Five In Gold” by Charles Demuth [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ANY_Met_demuth_figure_5_gold.JPG){kind=link}