We just acquired a canoe. It's brand new - only used once - and has two paddles & two life jackets, also brand new. It's all in our basement right now.
Why do we need a canoe if we live in the high mountain desert, you may ask? Good question, actually. There are a few lakes we could drive to & paddle around & picnic at, and we might. Or we might just store it till we move back to the midwest in a few years where there are rivers & lakes with water in them all over the place. (Sort of a novel idea, b/c we have arroyos here...aka, rivers with no water. And our lakes are pretty much all manmade and/or dammed, and small.)
The amazing thing about the canoe isn't so much that we have one now, but how we happened to receive it.
We received a call from a lesbian friend of ours yesterday afternoon. We know Gale through our local PFLAG involvement and she also goes to the same church we do. We happen to run into her at almost every music/arts event that occurs, but that's not uncommon in our small town.
Gale received the canoe from some (wealthy) friends who decided they wouldn't use it, and they encouraged her to pass it on to a gay or lesbian couple she thought would enjoy it. The first family she thought of who would enjoy it was ours.
"Thanks for thinking of us even though we're not gay," my husband said to her with a smile as they unloaded it from the roof of her car. Evidently Gale's response was something about how we do so much for the lgbtq community that it was effectively the same, and that she felt she was passing it on to part of the family anyway. Also, she thought our little Simon would have fun in it. Everyone loves Simon. :)
How cool is that. And Gale's got another canoe (her own), so we're thinking maybe we'll borrow hers & go on a Sunday canoe picnic with some gay friends to share the fun within the family. And I wonder if we could get a trailer for it, and pull it in the 4th of July parade for PFLAG or something. That would be fun...a rainbow decorated canoe? I'm not sure what the parade theme is this year, but maybe we could make it work.
What a lovely & generous family we are part of here in our little town.
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Reminds me of a story from our days in Africa:
One of the white missionaries, Orai, had grown up in South Africa and spoke the local language fluently. We knew Orai was well-respected among the black South Africans, but not how much until one day when an important meeting was scheduled.
This was a meeting in South Africa during apartheid, and the organizers of the meeting had invited only white pastors -- big mistake. My dad said to a black pastor, "You know, there aren't any blacks going to that meeting. I think that's a problem."
The pastor looked at him with a completely straight face and said, "Yes there are. Orai will be there."
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