ENTERTAINING IN THE PARSONAGE10/07

To my grandkids with love
October, 2007

This morning I had an unusual visitor at my door. I say unusual because this lady has lived across the street from me for many years but I have never before had her come to my door. She was originally from Japan and came to this country many years ago.

She speaks English with quite an accent and doesn’t usually seem like she wants to talk to anyone. I have never seen her visiting with any of the neighbors. So that is the reason that I was somewhat surprised to see her at my door. She was carrying some goodies and a huge beautiful apple. She declined my invitation to come in but we stood at the door and talked for quite some time. I was delighted that she had gotten the courage to do this for me.

Then I remembered something about Far East culture that I had actually learned many years ago when we lived in Tempe. We were close to Arizona State University and often entertained students in our home We often invited students that had attended our church services to come home and eat Sunday dinner with us.

Well, on with my story. We had taken in the Wasono family from Indonesia--a husband, wife and two sons to live with us until they could get settled. They were relocating to do some upper level graduate work at ASU. We got to know them really well and they found an apartment close to us and we helped them get their oldest son Andre enrolled in first grade in a school close to them and us.

To help them until they could buy pots and pans I sent over six or eight plastic bowls that I had an abundance of and in doing this I learned the lesson that I referred to earlier.

I started getting back my bowls one at a time with some delicious Chinese food. It is a Chinese (and I think Japanese) custom that whenever you get something from a friend or neighbor in a dish you never send it back empty but always send something in return in the same dish. I was a bit embarrassed when this family faithfully one by one started sending these plastic bowls back with a generous amount of food inside!

Now back to my neighbor--About a week ago I had taken her some banana bread in hopes that I would be invited in to get better acquainted. You guessed it--I had it in a little black plastic container. In my mind, it was just a throw away but then I realized the reason why she had so carefully sent back in the same container a beautiful dessert and the apple.!

While I’m telling you about this it reminded me of something really funny that happened when the Wasono family had just moved to an apartment. We had gotten Andre, their oldest child, settled in school when one morning I got a phone call from the school nurse. She said that Andre had gotten his penis caught in the fly zipper of his trousers! She wanted us to tell his parents to please see after this that he was wearing underpants to avoid a future problem such as this!

I didn’t have a car to do anything about it so I called your grandpa who was at the church office. I started to tell him about this and suddenly started laughing uncontrollably so here was your grandpa on the other end wandering what had caused this craziness and I was standing there laughing. and couldn’t explain the situation.

Dear Andre has probably forgotten this long ago but this was something I guess I’ll never forget

My love to you and my prayers,