a potato

We recently bought a 5 pound bag of potatoes . . . and found this large heart-shaped potato inside. Seems like a good thing for dinner today since it is our 48th wedding anniversary. Due to the lock-down, we are spending it at home, grilling steaks outside.

I think this is the first time I ever drew a potato. There are actually many unusual peaks, valleys, and distortions on the rough surface. The brown paint was supposed to be more all-over but it was applied in a very wet wash and that’s where it decided to settle.

Our son Matthew once had what we termed a “personal land yacht” he named Potato — his first car that he bought from Bill’s grandmother with a specialized license tag he added. It was years before I learned the story. A friend in high school called him Mateo, which somehow morphed into Potato, and became his nickname.

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I used to be a bit of a Bible snob. I would only read versions that were translated from the ancient languages by a team of scholars, never one man’s paraphrase version. Which is ironic given that the first time I read the whole thing, Genesis to Revelation, it was in fact a paraphrase — The Way paperback popular in the 1970s that my mother had sent me.

Our dear Pastor John in El Dorado, Kansas often quoted from Eugene Peterson’s The Message Bible — the quotes always fit his sermon but the words seemed a bit fanciful to me. But in recent years I’ve been listening to Wayne Jacobsen’s The God Journey podcasts; he too quotes often from The Message. I finally downloaded a copy on my Olive Tree Bible Study app — and I’m actually enjoying reading it, writing particular verses that really speak to me down in my journal. One more prejudice bites the dust.