Dixie Cups and the Pale Green Jar

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A week ago, my grandson Carter had his tonsils removed and since then his throat’s been like sandpaper. He’s enduring the temporary discomfort of swallowing, and even worse for him, the elimination from his diet of his favorite snack food, Russet potato chips. For the person who may not be up on potato chip culture, Russets are the burnt chips that didn’t make the cut with the other golden ones that came down the factory line. However, they’re too scratchy for a tender throat, and Carter is learning that he may have to take a pass if he wants his throat to heal.

When I had my tonsils out at the ripe old age of seven, I was told I could eat as much ice cream as I wanted. For a child, hearing that was like winning the nutritional lottery, and developed in me a deep transcendent, almost devotional love of ice cream. The memories of it’s cool and soothing consistency sliding past my absent tonsils still touches off a sensory holiday in my throat. Just to take full advantage of the situation, I insisted on eating it out of a glass bowl with a plastic spoon, and when you have surgery at seven years old, you get your way on things like that.

As the time for my surgery approached, my mother and father had a talk with me about what I could expect. My mom was a nurse, and my father was a surgeon, so there was plenty of medical information they could impart, probably too much. For example, my father used the word “extricate,” instead of “take out,” to describe the process of removing my little helpless tonsils and adenoids. I heard the word “extricate” as “extra cake,” which was the perfect partner for ice cream, and likewise, I misconstrued the word adenoids for asteroid, like the ones circling the home of my favorite cartoon family, the Jetsons. Anticipating ice cream and cake, and endless hours of cartoons, the upcoming removal of my tonsils really didn’t sound bad at all.

Be that as it may, I took in every word of the lecture, including how my tonsils serve to soak up bacterium, and why they are a culture for the germination of all kinds of diseases. As my parents went further and further into detail, I began to cower in the corner of the couch with my stuffed chipmunk, Alvin, a character from another favorite cartoon of mine, The Chipmunks.

Now, I began to worry for the first time about how my body works, specifically the parts that were going to be removed, my tonsils and my adenoids, and I worried the surgeon might take out my tongue also if he hadn’t slept very well the night before. As I was a rather imaginative kid, I also wondered whether I could see the diseases and germs growing in my adenoids, and whether they would look anything like the asteroids I’d seen on the Jetsons.

Being that my father was a surgeon and had a few privileges the rest of us don’t have at a hospital, I asked him if the doctor slicing out my tonsils out could save them for me so I could inspect them for myself. So, good to his word, my dad came home shortly after my surgery with my tonsils in a pale green laboratory jar.

“Had lunch with you doctor today,” he said, “and as requested, here they are, your tonsils!”

I turned the jar around slowly in my hand, looking for any signs of scurvy or rickets, then finally said, “They look like my big toes.”

Yet, the oval pink globs were nothing like I expected. For one, they were floating, and secondly, they came complete with blood vessels and flesh parts still connected, as if they could be reattached in my throat should I decide I wanted to have them put back in.

As a side bar here, I realize that graphic descriptions of the human body are disgusting to most adults. Yet, one must realize I was being raised by parents in the medical field, which made the use of anatomical details perfectly fair game. For example, it wasn’t unusual around our house to have a few kidney stones on the shelf as conversation pieces, or a pair of forceps and a couple of retractors on the dinner table, maybe a few urine samples on slides under a microscope in case we got tired of looking at cartoons.

And so, as I sat and stared at most of my throat floating in the jar, eating a bowl of ice cream I immediately thought of how cool it would be to take them to school for Show and Tell. Yes sir, I thought, I’ll take my tonsil to school, oh yes I will, get up in front of my entire class with my authentic hoarse voice and tell how I was put to sleep counting backwards from seventeen, for no reason I could think of, looking up at a man with a mask on and the next minute I was wide awake with a nurse handing me a bowl of vanilla ice cream!

As luck would have it, my healing and return to school fell right before the Thanksgiving break, a time when teachers were desperate for anything that might keep kids interested and occupied, a time when kids were tired of pilgrim worksheets, and making scarecrows out of paper plates and colorful pipe cleaners.

On the big day of Show and Tell, I kept my tonsils hidden in my lunch box, believing at the time that presenting a part of my body in a jar would be more dynamic if there was an element of surprise. Under my desk I had tonsil facts written out on index cards, and as I went over those, I tried not to pay any attention to the pigtailed girl showing and telling in front of me, Elke Der-Glekenhausen, who was talking in English and fake German, passing around various German desserts samples in dixie cups.

Und dis von,” she said, “is my favoreet. Das its ein Schokoladen Pfankuchen. It is so yummy, but in Germany they say schmackhaften! Und dis one ist ein ApfelStrudel, made from real Deutsche apfels my Großmutter sent over a month ago. Und dis one…und dis one… und dis one.” On and on and on she went, ad nauseum, little Miss Muffet, Fraulein Elke Der-Glekenhausen.

I didn’t think she’d ever quit, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many dixie cups in my life, then or since. Kids were taking three and four pfankuchens and strudel’s apiece and I was getting more and more nervous because I didn’t want to have wait another whole day before I got to present. So, I was trying to move her presentation along by passing my deutsche samples right over to Reggie, who I shared a desk with. He wore size large T-shirt, so he really didn’t need any extra desserts, but he was throwing them back as fast as I could hand them to him, as if he’d never eaten a square meal in his life. I thought my plan was working, but just as things looked like they might be winding down, Little Miss Muffet Elke began to sing! Loud! I couldn’t believe my ears!

Here I was, waiting patiently for my turn at Show and Tell, to show my unique anatomical abominations floating in a jar, had practice my speech, and copied notes on index cards, and found myself in the middle of a round of Edelweiss from the Sound of Music, the German version, which had just hit the movie screens that weekend.

“Edelweiss, Edelweiss, Jeden morgan Grüßt du mich, du mich, Edelweiss…” and then Elke, the Miss Muffet of Show and Tell, raised her hand like a conductor of a symphony and signaled others to sing along with her, and every kid in class began singing, softly at first, mostly because their mouths were full of various German desserts, but then fuller, and I looked over at Reggie with a Dixie cup raised in each hand and he was singing too, spitting out tiny crumbs of Kartufelln.

The whole scene hit a tender spot in me. Maybe I was malnourished, maybe I was still mildly depressed from my throat surgery, I’m not sure, but I took a bite of a Gesundheit frosted cookie, which melted on my tongue instantly and was better than any ice cream I had ever eaten. In fact, for the first time in two weeks, I felt no pain at all in my throat, and forgot all about telling anyone about the anatomy of a tonsil, how they soak up all the bacterium that pass down our throat. I began to hum along, and then sing quietly myself – strange, meaningless German words like danke and Heimlich Maneuver, lyrics that had no bearing on the song whatsoever, but German words that sounded very German with my husky, raspy, surgically impaired voice. The pale green jar I had in my lunch box that was poised to wow my audience on Show and Tell day, never made it out of my lunch box. Somehow, talking about my surgery didn’t seem appropriate right before Thanksgiving in a classroom full of Wunderkind whose stomachs were full of Spätzle und Schwartzwalder-kirschtorte from Deutschland. My tonsils would have to live to show another day.

Yet, they never did.

I found the green bottle stuffed away in an old box some forty seven years later and took them over to show my grandson just last week and we sat on the couch together, and I put my arm around him as I sang an incorrect version of Edelweiss, and he ate his fifth bowl of ice cream for the day while looking intently at the pale pink blobs that were still floating in formaldehyde.

Down by the Low and Cool

I walked out to the lower part of our property, along a pathway paved with fieldstone. There is cooler air around my ankles where the earth had been shaded all day by long blades of our monkey grass. This is the spreading kind, not the clump liriope, and it creates a flowing sea if left to wander freely. Only giant pavers have kept the pathway clear of this invasive plant, and I bend down to wave the trapped, cool air as if it were liquid, stirring the lacey spider webs that have sprung up overnight.

When I first planted the fifteen hundred bareroots throughout this section of my yard, a doubtful visitor laughed and asked me why I had planted rows of corn. The soil was rock hard and unforgiving but soon the rains of May sunk into the rhizomes, bringing up new blades everywhere. Like that tough soil, Adversity does not always take a shovel, but it is the very thing that builds our character.

After digging and digging, we know that the hard places in ourselves will stay that way until we face them with the right tools. We know that the difficult soil of our lives will stay only so long as necessary for God to accomplish what he will needs to in us. It may take a moment or a lifetime, but in the end, that area will become soft and pliable, and it will be easier for us to reap the hope we have planted.

 By the end of the first summer my backyard area was almost covered, and by the end of the next summer the area leading to my patio was thick with the tough, two-foot blades that would never have to be mowed again. It has taken a few seasons for the soil to become workable, but now I’m reaping the benefits. In late summer, the liriope produces dark purple seeds that smell like licorice if crushed. Gone is the groaning and pleading and bargaining with God for something better. This liriope, the not-corn of the unbeliever, is now swirling beautifully, moving, collaborating with a vortex of insects or a hawk that is watching from up in the pines. The roots are strong and spreading, and my field of lilyturf, as it is sometimes called, catches the slightest breeze that makes my garden seem like it is always moving.

In the twinkling of an eye, the evening begins its slow shuffle to nighttime, like a child who doesn’t want to go to bed.

“Ahhhh mom, do I have to. Just ten more minutes. Pleeeeeeze! I promise I’ll go right to bed,” the child begs.

A few birds are making their last flight across the yard to roost where the neighborhood night- cats will not disturb them. All day those same birds have rushed back and forth with tiny twigs and colored cloth, bits of trash and a receipt from Birds Unlimited. They vie for a spot by the pond for one last drink, and nervously rinse off before bedding down in their own country, the land of Woop Woop, where all the nightbirds go. Last are the hard-diving chimney swifts, the remarkable Jedi riders of Indian Summer, who thread the sky and dive down with their Wheewwwwww-yooooo- whoooo, wheeeww-whyooo – devouring a thousand mosquitoes in an hour before vanishing into the black skyline.

One pair of starlings is still working on their home twenty feet off the ground, squeezed behind a motion-detector light. The nest was unreachable, the lone object in the middle of a brick wall, a perfect hideaway to raise a hungry, chirping brood that appeared some weeks later. Yet, the high perch didn’t stop Mr. Grey Cat from pacing back and forth like a thief every night after the baby birds were born. Each time he did, the motion light was tripped, and the baby birds rustled in their nest, slipping perilously close to the edge. The cat was hoping for despair to take over, but Mom and Dad Starling said no to the flashing light and covered it with more sticks. They were not going to let fear steal their baby chicks or their hope. Mr. Grey Cat would have to find another spotlight. 

Now, as the world quiets down and the sky takes one more snapshot at the horizon, the flight paths of birds are taken over by fireflies, those luminary, magical little bugs that don’t bite or bother, but appear like stars before the stars come out. Their light is described by scientists as a cold light, as it is initiated by a mysterious enzyme, but for us who long for love like a firefly, we can see more warmth than cold, even if that warmth flashes for a moment. They are the lanterns of hope that lead us to another light, another firefly, not far away.

As kids, we stood in our backyards, watching for their tiny lights to flicker. We stood watching and guessing where one might appear next and, because we didn’t know better, we used their little lights as rings for our girlfriends, but those little lanterns soon flickered out just as quickly as our crushes.

At this hour, the sounds of delivery trucks are gone, and so too is their loud repetitious back-up warnings. The trucks never use the bright, yellow-striped spaces that have been reserved for them, and strangely, we aren’t allowed to use them either. Yet, all day long, barrel-chested delivery men have been jumping out of those trucks, hitting the ground like storm troopers and yelling, “NO one can park here! This zone is saved!” 

Along the back of my property is a line of trees and maintenance crews trim them on their smoke breaks for something to do. There used to be twenty of those trees, full reaching, but now they have been whittled down to only several tall white pines. Those two trees stand vigil in their own unmarked space, are bullied and pushed around, trimmed to within an inch of their lives, but they still stand quiet and full in a space that is reserved for no one but them.

Through our front door I can see straight through into the back yard. I have opened that front door many times, and let the events of the world enter, and let hope escape right out the back. When I do that, my living room becomes full of busyness and nonsense, and my kitchen is crowded with hogwash and discord. Like the yellow-marked parking spaces, fear becomes a zone that is too loud and selfish. There is no room for anything else with fear – it can quickly push our quiet confidence further towards the back door.

It is so much better to let hope in first, through the front door where it can be greeted and have plenty of room to move around. Soon, every room is filled with laughter, and the grey cats have slunk away. It is a lesson we learn over and over again and it is this: Hope never crowds a room, it only makes room for more hope.

Hope becomes the parent starlings who bravely guards its young chicks. Hope erases the yellow lines that tell us no. It lets the cat out the back door, the thief that tried to mix in with the crowd, the killjoy. Hope becomes the firefly that looks for love and healing, and who among us does not want healing in all of our rooms? Who among us is letting the events in the front door and hope go right out the back? Is it the delivery man, the storm trooper who pounds the pavement, doesn’t use the space given to him, yet doesn’t allow anyone else to use it either? It is very easy to allow ourselves to hoard our goodness, and make it known to others that we have something they don’t. Yet that is not hope.

Soon, bedtime will follow behind the last church chimes I am hearing a couple of blocks away. They meet the sun going down and together they whisper, “day is done.” Listening to the chimes, I am reminded that our stay here on earth is brief, that I have used up one of my precious days again, and that I must retire inside for the night, and let “the birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees and the moon up above” do the same.

My footsteps pass the chorus of liriope that sways in rhythm with all that is good. Back and forth the tall grass moves and swishes and masks my old-bone noises as I walk. I reach down and once again swirl the air that has been trapped down low by the hard pavers – down by the low and cool. Hope has been there all the time and hope always makes room for more hope.

I don’t have to feel like an outsider though, prodded and poked out of my good character. I don’t have to listen to someone who believes that corn is growing in my backyard. I do not have to fall prey to the grey cats and yellow lines. Hope, that enemy of fear, does not abandon any of us and is waiting just ahead, and stands in good company with the moms who are letting their children stay up for just a bit longer.

We can reach for hope, even if it is just a sliver, and let it follow us in the front door. It will keep the exhaust of a passing motorcycle out. Hope has that kind of power and fills us with fresh air every time. Inside and out, it is always there making room, down by the low and cool.

Water Under the (tallest) Bridge

Last summer my wife and I stood at the top of a scary canyon near Santa Fe, on the brim of the tallest bridge in the world. For a person like me that doesn’t even like looking down from an eight-foot ladder, the view was anything but inspiring. My feet tingled, my head got fuzzy and I couldn’t remember the last four digits of my social security number.

So, with the view and a healthy dose of vertigo, we gathered with a few tourists to look at the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge, the tallest bridge in the world, 564 feet, and I believe the narrowest bridge also, which meant that every person who risked walking out to the middle was pressed a little bit closer towards the hazy edge.

I did manage to get up the courage to tip-toe out to the middle myself, only because I wanted to be able to say that I had done it; now I wish I had just come up with some convincing lie about it and told you I was sorry later. But in the interest of credibility, I walked out, letting cars pass within inches and running the risk of being knocked off into the Rio Grande. On the way, I noticed there were no speed limit signs posted, which meant that drivers who had the same fears I did were speeding as fast as they could to get across. I was mumbling some ridiculous prayers, the kind that are full of desperation and wholesale mismanagement of large portions of the Bible, when almost halfway across, I noticed a semi the size of Vermont bearing down on me, which shook every girder in the bridge and forced me to wrap my arms around the railing. After the double wide semi passed, I opened my eyes, the very thing I was dreading, and found myself looking straight down into the kind of rocky gorge you only see in wall calendars of the Grand Canyon and old episodes of Bonanza.

Luckily, or maybe not, an enormous man, I think Arnold Schwarzenegger’s brother helped me peel my fingers off the bridge rail and said:

“You aren’t scared of heights, are you?”

No,” I answered with a very high, squeaky voice, and then, quite out of nowhere, I hugged him as if he was Paul Bunyan, as if this with an enormous physique would be enough, should the bridge collapse, to cushion my fall from the tallest bridge in the world. I hugged him so hard, in fact, that he must have decided it was just easier to carry me along with him, and so began walking out the rest of the way with me still attached, hugging him, hauling me another hundred feet or so along a tiny gangplank to the middle of the tallest bridge in the world, whereupon, he let me down like I was a wrapper he’d just peeled away from a candy bar, patted me on the head, and told me to have a wonderful day.

I have to tell you, my whole attitude about the bridge, about semi-trucks, about humans a lot bigger than me, and about New Mexico changed quite a bit because of his kindness and, as it were, beefy body. One just does not get that kind of service on bridges anymore, and I was grateful, not for just the view, but for people who carry us when we are not able to carry ourselves. I know that sounds rather sentimental, and it is, but it is also appropriate, because at the time I was very emotional, in fact I was weeping, so it kind of makes sense in an old-fashioned viaduct kind of way.

Yet, no amount of thankfulness, or courage was going to get me to stand on the tiny concrete platform that had been built out over the bridge’s edge for tourists to get an even better view of the gorge or, for acrophobe like me, what death looks like from the top of the tallest bridge in the world, a place out in the middle of nowhere, where cell service is a waste of time, and ambulance service was last recorded in 1884. It was in that very moment that I realized my fear of heights was deeply rooted in a childhood memory of standing on the top of a wavering high dive at summer camp.

There I was, all of about seven years old, looking down into the third deepest lake in Wisconsin – me, a scrawny kid in a pair of blousy swim trunks several sizes too big. Taking a dare from my brother, I stood on the diving platform, at risk of being toppling off, which would be embarrassing since I’d been holding up the diving line for about an hour.

Kids had started to yell at me from below, some calling me names that hurt when you’re a kid, like sissy and chicken, and they were yelling them very loudly, which added tremendously to my anxiety. Their yells had attracted the attention of the entire camp population who were now watching my skinny toothpick body up there shaking and shivering from fear and hypothermia.

Finally, the counselor on lifeguard duty yelled up to me:

“BENDER! EITHER JUMP OR I’M COMING UP THERE AND THROW YOU OFF MYSELF!”

So, feeling for a moment that gravity did not apply to me and that Sir Isaac Newton and Copernicus and that whole ensemble of scientists were wrong, and that the world was holding me up there regardless of any theorems or gravitational efforts, I dove out, suspended for a long second in the air by a pair of parachute-like swim trunks.

However, when I hit the water at one hundred and eighty-five miles an hour, lake water rushed up my nose so hard that my eyes came right out of their sockets, and tiny marine life entered my brain which thoroughly rinsed out my sinuses along the way. Since I suffered from chronic sinus problems, the brain cleansing gave me special insights into Creation, the Apocalypse, and why Jesus loves the little children of the world.

As luck would have it, we campers had gathered for a movie the night before to watch a documentary on the Apollo moon missions. We sat on the ground of an outdoor theatre that had been set up for us, slurping our popsicles watching astronauts try to squirt toothpaste on their toothbrushes in zero gravity. There was no doubt in my mind that I could do a better job as I watched them misfire, and loops of light green toothpaste float away in the lunar module. Yes, I thought, I could have done a better job than that, thought of applying for the next NASA flight immediately. I saw myself, perhaps too gloriously, zipping around the earth and landing safely back down to earth with toothpaste to spare, perhaps even have my name on a commemorative plaque attached to the diving float at camp I was now attending. The plaque would read:

Lt. Colonel Jeff Bender,
 Apollo Astronaut and Camp High Dive Specialist

Unfortunately, my qualifications as an astronaut were forfeited the next day when I entered the lake at a high rate of speed, and my swim trunks, the ones that were seven sizes too big, shot right off me in the other direction, leaving me buck naked floating around in the third deepest lake in Wisconsin.  Honestly, I don’t think, even to this day, I have ever felt quite so naked, and free, as I did at that moment. With this kind of exposure, I could sense every single part of my body like never before – water rushing around me uninhibited – completely unrestricted.

However, as I floated in zero gravity, I looked down into the void and saw my patterned Bermuda-style swim trunks sinking into the abyss of Wisconsin’s third deepest lake. It was like watching a huge balloon disappear into the sky, only backwards. Now, reliving it, I think that moment was the most naked moment of my entire life. The only thing I have to compare it to was my birth, and I don’t recall anything about that

When I did come up for air, some two hours later, I looked up the next camper ready to dive, who instead decided to announce my situation to the entire camp population:

“BENDER’S NAKED!”

How this all translates to a fear of heights, I’m not sure, but I believe at the time what registered to me was that I should never place myself at any height where I might be at risk of falling and losing my clothes as long as I lived. Now, I stood in the middle of a bridge in Santa Fe, the tallest one in the world, and I could almost sense that my pants were going to pull themselves off and throw themselves into the Rio Grande thousands of feet below. It was an awful feeling, and with it came the weight of every car whizzing by me only a few feet away, including one semi-truck whose jarring vibrations had me saying my last rights and wondering when the last time I had updated my living will.

You might remember Paul Bunyan – the man who had carried me out to the middle of the tallest bridge in the world? Fortunately, he was still there with me, and had stepped out even further onto that tiny concrete platform, was leaning out over the bridge, marveling at the treacherous view of the rocky canyon hundreds of feet below and the brilliant cobalt sky beyond.

“Nothin’ between me and the deep blue sea,” he said, as if he knew the deep blue sea personally.

He was right. Except for one small detail. Way out in that great expanse of blues there was a long white line that marked the path of a jet. The contrail had a slightly greenish cast to it, like the color of toothpaste straight out of the tube, and it floated out there, free as the wind, as if it had no fear of heights at all, in zero gravity, above the tallest bridge in the world.

By the Waterfall of Psalm 23 (Repost)

In light of the recent and tragic shooting of Charlie Kirk, evangelist and disciple of Christ, I have removed my first episode of Knee Deep Season 4.

In its place, I’ve reposted this essay of mine from February 2024.

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me to lie down in green pastures; he leads me besides the still waters. He restores my soul; He leads me in the paths of righteousness for His name’s sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me. You prepare a fable before me in the presence of my enemies; You anoint my head with oil; my cup runs over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life; and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

Psalm 23 

As overnight temperatures dropped well below freezing, a thin layer of ice formed on the tiny pond in our back yard. I walked out to turn on the waterfall and stood waiting for the water to spill out and run over the tempered and glassy sheet. The frozen roof of ice cracks and moans, shifting under the weight, then finally buckles under a layer of water spreading and reaching across the pond. The old hard shell of protection must fall away to new living water and disperse itself with the flow and movement forward. Change is here but not easy, and different can be good in its offering of freshness and vitality. I am reminded of my ability to change also, to be resilient in the midst of this shifting water, that I can be flexible and shed the harder layers of my protective shell.

As the sun courses over my pond the frozen pieces break away to form a beautiful, complex puzzle of miniature icebergs. They melt and crack, recycling into the pond, adjusting, moving and seek new paths between the cobblers and stones.

In our prayer group, we have been studying Psalm 23, a song, a poem, of enduring hope and assurance by David, then a shepherd. It is not a long passage but fulfills the promise of God’s message to each one of us, that he is here with us for the long haul, from the moment we take our first breath until the moment we take our last and leave our bodies behind. The author David was in his early teens and must have written the verses to this psalm when he felt a sense of overwhelming peace and thanksgiving in the arid surroundings where he dwelled. He was a shepherd, his house was the desert, and in tending to his sheep, calling each one by name, he reveled in the totality of his natural surroundings, then poetically put his thoughts to verse. While resting in the green pastures and meandering brooks, out of the reach of the harshness of the desert sun, his flock grazed and rested too – some eating and renewing their energy, some perhaps reposed in the shade of a pond’s tall willows.

When night came, when the safety of his flock might be in jeopardy, stars from the heavens winked at David as he listened for signs of danger. There was always the risk of his sheep wandering off into the night or wild animals attacking the herd. He had to be alert to prideful lions who were known to prowl like thieves and slip in for a kill. All night he stood vigil for signs of their stealthy approaches, anticipating the morning where he would see God’s face in the rising sun that cast a brilliant light upon the valley of the shadow of death. Then, feeling its warmth against his robe, he could lay down his rod and staff for a moment and rest in the confidence that he was taken care of, that he need not fear evil, that all of his sheep were safe and that he would be protected when nightfall inevitably came again.

The 23rd Psalm is often recited at funerals to give hope and peace to those who are grieving. As we listen to the verse quoted throughout our lives, we are reminded that God restores us deep down, on a soulful level. Water will always flow down to the deepest point it can find, like God does, and then, when it pools and becomes still, it begins to seek another level further on. It washes out the grime and dirt as it moves. Like David who listened for his Father’s voice in the darkness of the desert, we are assured that God’s provision and peace will find its rightful resting place in our souls, restore and fill the icy holes of our heart, then spill over with the grace of new and flowing, clear and clean water. It is the same water that we all drink and can offer in turn to those that are hurting or injured or sick or lonely or tired, or lost. Our psalm for them is the same one that it is for ourselves because we have all been all of those things at one time or another.

When we dwell on God’s peace, reciting Psalm 23 that David wrote, we risk believing that God is there and listening to us. We walk out onto what we may think is some thin spiritual ice, wondering if God is listening, thinking that he is fragile and breakable, and that we must be out of our minds for believing he can hold us up. What am I doing here on my knees praying, we may ask? Why am I looking for strength and guidance and safety on such thin ice and brittle terrain? But as we pray the words of Psalm 23, our veneer melts away and is replaced by a peace that passes all understanding, and we begin to feel, just as David did, that goodness and mercy will surely follow us, just as it followed him out in the desert when he was herding his sheep, protecting them against enemies and leading them to the next watering hole.

During the weeks following my brother’s death, my mother was visited by a hawk every day. While it may have been hunting for the smaller birds near her birdfeeder, my mother had never seen a hawk anywhere near her property before that time. Being that my brother Gary loved nothing more than to be outside in the thick of nature, my mother was reassured by the statuesque form of the hawk who sometimes perched for an hour as if a sentinel guard, reassuring her of God’s presence and protecting her in her sorrow and grief. While God was nowhere to be found in the flesh, the hawk floated above with the provision of an Almighty presence over the landscape of her soul.

In our family, we have come to be reminded that God is with us, there, leading us besides still water when we are in the sudden presence of a hawk. While this may sound secular and “new age” to many Christians who may see the appearance of a hawk as nothing more than a chance meeting or questionable theology, my mother knew her Maker intimately, and knew the difference between a hawk and God, and recognized how God’s beauty is both revealed in nature and inspired by it in equal measure. We are to be reminded that it is God who made all creatures and has sovereign control over their whereabouts, and just as he helped David herd his sheep, he shepherds us and restores our souls, all in the same breath.

The scenery that David saw every day as a shepherd surely inspired many of the Psalms he wrote, including the 23rd, which contains descriptive imagery of a lush and verdant landscape, reminders of the nature God created for our benefit to enjoy. It was also part of a daily landscape that solidified David’s confidence in a perfect Father who would always be circling nearby – watching and comforting. It is interesting that David uses Psalm 22 and Psalm 24 as bookends to Psalm 23, describing Christ’s crucifixion on the one side and then telling us how he is coming for us on the other. In the middle, Psalm 23, which is where we live now, he is caring for us and offering us the still waters of his peace and restoration. Finally, in our pain and suffering, David indicates in Psalm 24 that Christ is coming for us where we will rest forever in His pasture of lovingkindness.  Crucifixion, caring, and then, His coming.

Surely, our cup runneth over.

It's All a Blur to Me

Most people I know have a collection of something. Whether its baseball cards or baby spoons, bottle caps or back scratchers, we all tend to collect and categorize, catalog and classify our stuff until we’ve got every Beanie Baby or Dollie Doll ever made.

I have collections, but mine are made up of items I never knew what to do with in the first place, like socks that don’t match and bottles of mysterious cleaning solutions in the back of the sink.  All of my reading glasses fall into that category. I could call it a collection except that I don’t know where most of my reading glasses are, which is the reason I have so many of them. Somewhere. The other day I found my favorite pair in the back seat of my car. That begs the question of why I would be reading in the back seat of my car, when I need to be in the front seat behind the wheel. In the meantime, I ordered another pair for my collection which I think are now sitting on a shelf at Lowes. Not sure.  

So, with a little imagination you can imagine the nice collection I’ve built up over the past ten years, enough glasses to start my own Warbly Parker Store at the mall – with different styles and colors, a pair that make me look svelte and debonair and another that is held together with electrical tape. Gone are the days when I have one prescription that meets all my needs. Here to stay are my bifocals, that special breed of glasses that have a line right in the middle of everything you are trying to see.

I have a conspiracy theory about the invention of bifocals, by the way, and believe bifocals developed out of a need to dispose of all the broken shards laying around on the floor of a glass factories. As pieces pile up on the floor, eye glass makers began adding in some glass fragments a little at a time to get rid of the surplus, first around the edges of the lenses where they wouldn’t be noticed and then, every so slowly, more and more into the middle, creating what we now know as the bifocal. This shady sort of recycling process created a kind of visual dependency among the now squinting public, who like me lost their glasses all the time, perpetuating a never-ending need for another pair with a new mixture of broken factory shards.

Many years ago, before I came up with that theory, I began wearing contact lenses, and at first, I was ecstatic.  My regular glasses had been rammed into my nose a dozen times playing basketball, and my parents finally decided it was going to be a lot cheaper for me to have contact lenses than nose surgery. I was soon to find out, however there were some down sides to wearing them. For starters they were hard and brittle and made your eyes drier than Death Valley.  For another they were difficult to clean and expensive, but we can get into more of those details in a minute.

For the purposes of this story, it is important to note that when contact lenses first came along, they were made of hard glass that weighed in at about three pounds apiece. According to the little kid in the movie Jerry Maguire, the human head weighs about eight pounds, so with my new lenses in place, my head weighed in at an abnormally high fourteen pounds, which I feel is an unnecessary burden for a child but also explains why all of our old family photos show me slightly slumped over as if I couldn’t hold up my own head, which I couldn’t.

Another problem with the old contact lenses was that they were expensive, and so one didn’t have a collection of them in different styles and colors like shoes or designer underwear. You owned just one pair, and you cared for them as if they were rare and exquisite jewels. They were permanent, a lasting fixture, and were made so that once you put them in your eye, they stuck there with incredible suction. The pressure was just tremendous, and at night, when it was time to take them out, and you released them, they flew out of the eye like a cork from a champagne bottle and took part of your eye out along with it.

It is fair to mention that when something as small as a contact lens reports out of your eye socket, there is little chance of seeing where it went, or for that matter ever finding it again. This set up a kind of panic, an urgency for everyone in the vicinity to begin looking for it.  If you watch a professional basketball game from years ago, the entire game came to an abrupt halt. Players, coaches, cheer leaders and even audience members fell to their knees to find a player’s missing lens. 

To make matters worse, contacts were made a different color than the color of your iris so you could see them in your eye after you put them in. You wouldn’t put a brown lens on top of a brown eye, because you wouldn’t know if you had it in or not or or if that was just your own eye you were looking at. If you couldn’t tell, you might try to attempt to get your contact lens out and pull out your entire eye instead of just contact lens.

As a result, I chose the color green to go on top of my brown eyes. That would have been fine I guess, except that where I grew up, the carpeting in our house was mostly olive green. That meant that my contact blended in perfectly if one flew out and couldn’t be found without the help of the entire family getting down on their hands and knees, spreading strands of shag apart until someone yelled, “FOUND IT!”

I guess you could make a case for some family bonding going on down there on the shag, but in our family, it was mostly yelling and blaming and finger pointing and name calling, with some deep-seated blame thrown in for good measure. In the end though, when the contact was found, there was a kind of relief that came over all of us, a jubilation, as if we had all been witness to some kind of miracle. After all, just moments before one of the family members had been scorned and half blind, and now, with the restoration of sight in both eyes, there was healing and a renewed sense of community and family cooperation. Over time, one family member seem to develop a remarkable skill at finding contact lenses, and it was a position that held some esteem in our family, and that person received got you special privileges like more ice cream, fewer chores and vegetables, and more time on the couch watching TV.

Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to fast forward to a time at college when I had been working late in the art building. It was in the middle of winter, colder than a Parking Meter, and as I left the building to head back to the dorm, I was hit full in the face with a blast of arctic wind and lodged a small meteor under my contact lens causing me to scream as if I had been stabbed me in the neck with a cattle prod.

After removing the lens out of my eye, I carefully cradling it in my hand for a quick run back to the dorm. However, in the continued litany of things that were inconvenient about hard lenses, one had to keep them moist or they would crack. So, in that effort, I carefully placed the lens in my mouth …and then, through a series of malfunctioning brain signals, I promptly swallowed it.

I know. I’ll give you a second here to recover.

Now, let’s state the obvious and say that swallowing glass is something you learn as a child to avoid. It’s an early and easy lesson I think, so that I knew immediately that the flesh along my esophageal passage was going to be shredded as the swallowed lens sliced and diced its way to my stomach. Finding my way to the campus clinic, I stumbled in and, afraid to talk for fear blood might spurt out, I wrote my predicament down on a piece of paper for the nurse.

“Oh, no problem,” she told me without blinking, “happens all the time to college students.”

“Is there something I should do? Do I need an X-ray or MRI? Can you look down there and see if you can see it?”

“No, you’ll just have to watch for it,” she answered.

“Watch for it whe…?” I started, but caught myself, knowing this was not a question I wanted an answer for. And frankly, it’s not a subject I care to go into here either except to say that I did eventually find the little hard lens and was able to see and study again on renewed and remarkable level.

I think the lens, having travelled through my entire digestive system, was so thoroughly rinsed and disinfected that I gained a kind of visionary attitude about life, and an accompanying supernatural clarity and precision in my course work, beyond what one would expect from 20/20 vision, and finished that semester with a B average. In effect, both my sight and my universal visionary acumen became one. I began to see life as a journey little contact lenses make rather than the product of an end result.

I’d like to say that I’m thankful I don’t have to wear hard contacts anymore, and that the experience has taught me to be thankful for the ever-growing collection of eyeglasses I have, but it hasn’t. I still can’t find any one of the five pairs I’ve left around here and there, but then, I don’t’ think I have to worry about looking for them…aaa… there, if you know what I mean.

Par for the Course (or Horse)

My best memory of my father hitting a golf ball, was on a Wisconsin golf course. My parents had bought a little cabin on Elkhart Lake, a small, mile-wide fisherman’s haven, filled with sailboats and tourists escaping Chicago’s summer heat. When us kids went to camp, mom and dad would travel up for a few weeks to swim in the restorative spring-fed waters, play a bit of golf and generally get away from the medical pressures they were both under.  My father was an average but consummate student of golf. He read up on the latest pro tips, practiced his swing with wiffle balls in the front yard, (see podcast Living in the Land of Zoysia, 2023), and believed in his mind that Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus were his besties.

One day when the moon was still up and the sun was thinking about it, my father showed up at camp to take me out for nine holes on the links on a local golf course called Quit-Qui- Oc, an Indian name, the derivation of which literally means, “Waste of Time.” To this day, generations of locals around Elkhart Lake vehemently object to this translation, preferring to bath the local tourist atmosphere with terms of golf endearment, such as “scenic, charming, and leisurely.”

I did not want to go and reluctantly climbed into the car, because I knew I was being abducted as hired help, except that I would be paid by regular doses of my father’s wisdom, which boiled down to advice about getting a ball to go into a hole I couldn’t see some three hundred yards away. There may be a lot of wisdom a father could impart about life to his nine-year-old son, but none of that, not one ounce, in my opinion, comes from the game of golf. This is unfortunate and disappointing because there was nothing more important to my father than for me to learn the game, and to love it with all my heart and soul. That love included cleaning his clubs, scrubbing the dirt from his spiked shoes, and the worst part, dragging his sack of golf clubs around the course.  Golf was a religion to my father, not just a game, but an immersion of the soul, the proverbial 19th hole of spiritual enlightenment where one could witness God’s creation which to my father was our earth sliced into long green pieces, not the ones we have come to know from the book of Genesis, but something called fairways, run ways of manicured grass, referred to originally by David in Psalm 23 as “green pastures.” On the other hand, I saw the golf course more as the valley of death.

Still, we headed out, my father and I, stopping and starting, my dad flailing away, and me with his forty-five various clubs slung over my shoulders along the course at Quit-Qui-Oc Golf Course. For me, it would be three hours of punishment, walking over hill and dale carrying a sixty-five-pound bag of clanging clubs, each with a different purpose, but none of them one bit necessary from my point of view.

And by the way, I’m not alone in my opinion. The indigenous Indians from that area of Wisconsin called the Kettle Moraine, the Potawatomi, never used more than one kind of club for anything and got along just fine. Quit-Qui-Oc, which you’ll remember means “waste of time,” was itself a subtle warning to keep life simple, to use a minimum number of clubs in life.

As my father and I wandered aimlessly across the Wisconsin landscape, I longed for the day when golfers would invent a club that could be used for everything, a club that could be used for every golf shot imaginable whether your golf ball had been shanked, sliced or lost in a crawdad hole. Naturally, one would need to throw in a putter for good measure, but with a minimum of golf clubs, carrying around a heavy golf bag could be eliminated entirely.

By the way, for those of you unfamiliar with golf, a putter is essentially a bent metal rod, that was originally sold at Lowes for twenty bucks as a tool for cleaning out your gutter in the Spring. Now you can pick one up at Golf Pro for just under three hundred dollars, with an additional thirty-five dollar for the gutter adaptor.

Thus, instead of being weighted down, I began to imagine myself exploring the terrain, an intrepid explorer like Daniel Boone carrying one club over my shoulder like Daniel carried his rifle, looking rather powerful and rugged – a frontiersman and a force to be reckoned with, building forts in the wilderness, wrestling bears with my bare hands, and taking the occasional picture for the history books.

Moving across the frontier, there were times when my father was striking the ball with unusual ferocity, staying out of the sand traps and getting plenty of fluids. On those occasions, he would let me take a swing at a practice ball. For reasons I will never understand, those opportunities came on holes that were about a mile long, holes where any sense of distance or perspective was completely lost. As a result, when I whiffed the ball and it dribbled out twelve feet into a lake, the shot seemed even more miserable and farther away than when I began. Considering that the ball was now twenty feet underwater, in my dad’s eyes, the ball had actually travelled backwards.

“Awwww, that’s too bad,” Dad would say, apologetically, “maybe you’ll do better next time,” which was to say he might give me another chance next year when the golf course opened again in the Spring. These were the times when it was important for me to be able to escape psychologically, and simply sling my imaginary rifle over my shoulder and return to my imaginary status as Daniel Boone.

One afternoon however, we had come over a series of blue-green rolling hills, perfectly manicured like in the Garden of Eden, surrounded on both sides by rows of wispy pines, a picture straight from the Wisconsin Bureau of Tourism, complete with red barns off in the distance, black and white-spotted heifers mooing in nearby paddocks, along with the obligatory amber fields of grain. I think there was, actually a purple mountain in the background above the fruited plain and so forth, but it may just have been a Stuckey’s billboard off the highway.

Anyway, being in a particularly benevolent mood on this outing, my father let me take a rare second shot, and he teed up my golf ball in the middle of a small grove of trees, where my shot would not be seen by anyone when I made my usual shank. He placed the ball high up on a tuft of grass where it could have a fighting chance of rising into the air and then proceeded to give me a long tutorial on his secret triple overlapping grip, the one that later made my fingers grow sideways and caused me to have an unfortunate series of surgeries in my forties and fifties and sixties.

I don’t remember the exact nature of my swing, but when you are a kid and think you are holding a rifle, it would not have looked quite right from a golfer’s perspective. Somehow, I must have done enough right with my swing to connect with the ball, because I hit it as clean a s a whistle and the ball took off like a speeding bullet. The smooth arc it created was only matched by the distance it was covering creating a line that was straight down and across the fairway one hundred and fifty yards, clearing the fence of a local cattel farm, where it hit a horse square in the butt.

It was one of the most exciting moments of my life. I was witnessing my role as a frontiersman play out in real time, which is to say I had found some purpose to this game of golf beyond my wild west fantasies.

The horse had a completely different reaction and reared up like when the Lone Ranger yells “Hi-O Silver!” and bolted forth as if it had been shot out of the gate at the Triple Crown. My father and I stood with our mouths wide open, and any compliment I might have received from him for my miraculous shot was lost on an image of a terrified horse running like a bat out of hell, straight as an arrow and disappearing beyond the horizon of a picture-perfect postcard of a Wisconsin landscape.

For me, seeing my father bent over hysterically laughing changed my view of the game of golf forever. When we recovered and caught our wind, and stood upright, I picked up his clubs to move on to the next fairway, and remarkably, his bag of clubs seemed lighter. I felt they had a purpose now, and that each club was worthy. I began to take in the subtleties of the golf course as I looked ahead, and the strategies involved in each golf shot. I forgot about my Daniel Boone rifle and let go of the wild horses that were running away in my head. I knew my father was going to give me another shot at this game after all, maybe not today but soon, and it would, at least in my dad’s eyes, always be well struck.

(Posthumous note: My father died  last week on April 15th.)

The Boss in the Background

What we see in our life here on earth are but small snapshots of the greater vision that God has planned for us. We can look into each other’s eyes, but the bigger picture of the depths of our souls and character are known only by the one who made us. My father, 102, is seeing the bigger picture now and although still spunky and sometimes talkative, he often looks past me, towards a new and beautiful vista.

If you were to be given a new job to do, you would first have to come to grips with the fact that it is not the same as your old job – it is an entirely new undertaking. You would be in a new position and probably relate to people much the same way you always had, but your new endeavor would require you to put aside the way you used to do things in favor of your new responsibilities and skills. By in large, people are not very good at doing two jobs at once, and after hiring into your position, your new manager would certainly ask you to stop doing things the old way.

“Chucky,” he might say, “that is not how we do things here at the Acme Dynamite Company. When you hold the widget in your left hand, we ask that you pass it over to your right before you lay it down on the whatchacallit.”

You might ask your new boss to explain in more detail what the widget does in the first place or why the whatchacallit is even important, but you eventually realize that you would not be able to keep your job if you replied like this:

“Well, Mr. Dynamite, in my head I am still at my old job and it’s easier to do things the way I did it there. So, while I appreciate the suggestion, I’m going to pass on your suggestion and just slam the widget down here instead.”

That reply would not bode well for you. You’d be in a pickle, because your boss would see your defiance as an unnecessary headache, a mistake by HR, and then kindly show you out the door.  On your exit interview, he would point out that you have an inability to recognize that your new job wasn’t like your old one, and that holding onto the old job was not going to produce the rapid expansion and dramatic increases he has come to expect from his new employees at the Acme Dynamite Company.  He might even quote someone like the musician Tom Petty, who said, “It’s time to move on, it’s time to move on, where you’re going, I have no way of knowing.” And that really holds true for anyone’s future as the old job fades and the new one begins.

My father has had many jobs in his life and you might say he has had to wear many different kinds of hats. To my knowledge none of his jobs involved dynamite, for which I am thankful. Still, he always loved wearing hats of all kinds, some of them being athletic, some fatherly, some in the military, and of course a number of them in the medical field.  He has lived a very eventful and full life, a life of where he has been esteemed in many areas. He is 102 now, and so, in his last season of life, he is preparing for some new challenges and a new job, and putting on some new hats he hasn’t worn before, hats that are helping him prepare for the new position he is moving towards.

He does spend a lot of time in bed now, and what he notices around him and talks about does not have the clarity it once had. His stories are a bit shorter and the details he adds do not always fit the stories like they used to. I like to think that is because he is letting go of all the old jobs that will not serve him where he is going, and also to prepare him to meet his new boss and take on a new job. Our family has not seen him wear this hat before. It’s not one we recognize, but my father does, so he is trying it on for size.

During my lifetime when I had to change jobs, there were the growing pains of getting to know the new system, what my duties were, and my new manager. I have heard that my dad’s new manager will be someone that has known him all his life, someone that has great patience and love for my father, and that gives me great comfort as my dad moves towards his new season.

In the past, there was a time when he grabbed my father’s hand and walked him out of a Quonset hut on a POW island in South Korea, past Communist prisoners who wanted to do harm to him. There were times when He stood next to him at the operating table as one of dad’s patients was in trouble and told him where the next incision should be. There were difficult family moments times when his boss nudged him and suggested he tell his wife he was sorry for acting like a buffoon. None of these were easy jobs, but they helped introduce my father to a new boss that he was about to spend a lot of time with. I’m glad that is happening, because if you are going to spend a lot of hours with someone, it helps if you like them and they want you around.

Now, when I sit by my father’s side, I don’t hear so much about the father or soldier or tennis player. What he says reflects the conversations he is having with his manager, the one that has been behind him all along, nudging him along in the right direction when my dad did not know what to do. My father is letting all his past experiences go because he will not need them anymore. He will soon pick up new tools that his new boss has laid out for him and begin fresh. He won’t have to know anything about his past jobs; he will only be required to recognize his Maker when he arrives and say, “Hey, I know you. You’re the guy who saved me when I…and you’re the guy who helped me when I… and aren’t you the guy that was there for me when I…hey…wait a second! I know who are!

I see evidence that my father is having bits and pieces of those conversations right now. As I sit by him and feed him and then kiss him on the forehead and tell him that I love him before I leave his room, I don’t hear him say the things I used to hear. His gaze is going right past me to the One who is standing behind me, to the One Father who is standing behind all of us. My dad is talking to him in utterings that are beyond my understanding, in a language that the Father taught him. It is a heart language that needs no words. There are real people who are rushing forward to love him and reintroduce themselves to him, people like his wife, Lois, and my brother Gary, and others who also long to be near him now.

When you start a new job, it is like that. Your old hats don’t fit anymore, and the old responsibilities don’t make any sense, and all your old bosses fade away. Franky, I wish some of my old bosses would have faded away much earlier, but that’s another story. Now, there is a new direction for my dad, and it’s with that new boss, the kind, gentle and loving one that has always known where my dad would land. Everything has brought him here, to this point, and as I look down at him in his bed, I see him looking not just forward, but past me and beyond all of us here, and I believe he going to do wonderfully well and absolutely love his new position.

Choose Two Puppets and... NEUTRAL PLEASE!

I did intend to get a bath and a scrub-down recently when I went through my local car wash. In fact, I hadn’t even planned to go through one at all, but after a series of pounding thunderstorms around here, and seeing no one waiting in line as I drove past, I pulled in and rounded the corner, paid my fee, put ‘er in NEUTRAL PLEASE! and headed in sixteen bucks the poorer. What happened next can be described as typical of the kinds of accidents I am prone to, this one ranking particularly high on the stupid scale.  

As I pulled forward, I decided at the last second to apply my brakes, roll down my window, and ask the attendant to give my bumper extra attention, whereupon I received a full-on plastering by his water cannon. I don’t know who was more shocked, myself or the guy with the hose, but the stream hit me right between the eyes, a perfect shot, and for the split second I was being hammered in the face, the sudsy water also covered the inside of my front seat and dashboard.

After the initial shock and a mouthful of soap, one might assume I would be glad for this bathing – that I got triple for my money – a car wash, teeth flossing, and the exfoliation of the first layer of my facial skin. People pay good money for that kind of thing, like at nail salons, but mostly what I felt was that I had never done anything quite so stupid in all my life. Extra soap notwithstanding, the water blast was one hundred percent my fault of course – the silver lining being that my sunglasses have never been quite so clean.  Running a close on the stupid scale was another time when I made a decision to make a last-minute dash out of an airplane taxiing down a runway – not a federal offense – but an impetuous decision, nonetheless.

Anyway, my hosing at the car wash did awaken me to an observation I’ve made over the years, one that has been poking at my conscience and general sense of mercy for those who seem helpless to handle the world at large.

If you occasionally run your car through a car wash, you probably have seen a multitude of stuff animals and puppets along the way, and you probably did not think much about it because, after all, you paid to get your car washed, not to go to a petting zoo or a Build-a Bear Factory. Lately, I’ve taken special notice of these animals, which are mostly Muppets by the way, and to the aggravation of the drivers behind me, I slow down to take a closer look and snap a few pictures of the ones that looked particularly miserable, which, really, is all of them. Sad to say, this last winter has been particularly hard on all things exposed to the elements with significant accumulations of ice and snow piled on the group of weather-beaten critters at car washes, most of whom look rigid and frozen stiff.

By the way, I refer to these animals not as stuff animals but as puppets because there is a sense that they may begin talking to you at any moment, evidenced by the fact that they are balanced precariously on a makeshift hand and that they pop up around every corner, kind of like, well, puppets do.  

All that being said, there are number of pieces worth examining here, observations that point to significant psychological ramifications, and the breaking of cultural norms that paint a dark picture regarding the care and supervision of our local puppet population.

I took the time to find the owner after my water-bathing-slash-trouncing to ask him why puppets are displayed at his car wash and was told that they give small kids some relief from the trip through – distracting them from robotic arm sprays, explosions and flashing signs warning of impending water vortexes and upper atmospheric changes that reflect the emission of toxic gases, not to mention the heaps of dirt and grime dumped on your car by the truck in front of you, and so forth. Yet, after his explanation I was left with the feeling that the manager had some sort of off-the-spectrum detachment evidenced by his hollow eyes, puffiness, and the fact that he kept repeating the same three phrases as if being controlled by a pull-cord coming out of his back.

In addition, I could only see half of the owner himself as the lower half was hidden behind a counter. Walking away, I had the sneaking suspicion that he had probably been raised by circus parents who ran one of those shooting galleries with a pop gun and a spinning target that awarded stuffed animals to winners as prizes, animals like pink giraffes and life-size teddy bears. In other words, I had a hard time buying his explanation.

In fact, my observation of the Elmos and Kermits I always see as my car moves along is that these mismanaged fluffy toys could not possibly provide relief to children trapped in their car seats and watch the puppets being hit in the face by hurricane force winds from mammoth fans built by Lockheed-Martin Aeronautics. It seems obvious that if you were a manager of a car wash wanting kids to have a good experience going through, you would not collect a bunch of stuff animals fresh out of a child’s bedroom, position them in a row of highchairs and allow their furry and fuzziness to be drenched and beaten to high heavens by water cannons. I believe those tactics are known as Riot Control, not entertainment and result in puppets that look faded and pale and slumped over as if their blood sugars have bottomed out. Certainly, we are not to believe that God’s puppet creatures are part of the “Ultimate Deal” we are offered, which includes a clear coat, tire shine and wheel bright for an additional nine dollars.

Secondly, while one can make the case for keeping these animals clean, and while I can see some benefits to covering a car wash puppet with layers of clear coat or car wax, I am under the impression that animals generally clean themselves with only a few volunteering for a commercial cleaning of any kind. I know, I know… there was a case a few years ago of a buffalo that wandered through a do-it-yourself car wash in Butte, Montana, but you must admit, such cases are rare, and in this case the buffalo had a history of mental health issues like repeatedly wandering away from the herd, and inciting stampedes through busy intersections.

 I have my own personal history with puppets, my first being a tiger puppet my grandchildren affectionately call Tigger, as from the famed Winnie the Pooh stories. My grandmother gave him to me when I was three or four, and he is still furry with a strong voice, able to perform behind a counter or couch pretty much at a moment’s notice. We like Tigger around our house. He has been treated well for over sixty years, except for one incident where he fell into the bathtub when I was four, but he was quickly extracted and dried off with a fluffy towel, good as new, returning to perform at a very high level within minutes. This, I believe is the normal life of a puppet, one sprinkled with affection and lots of affirmations, and makes our Tigger the first toy pulled off the shelf when the grandkids come over to play. He is like a furry version of Mr. Rogers around here, without the slippers and the song about being my neighbor.

Imagine for a second you are a puppet and have been hit all day long with winds of up to fifty miles an hour and succumbed to the equivalent of several hundred thunderstorms of washes, again, part of the advertised Ultimate Deal. You have kept a smile on your face for the kids who are making dumb faces at you as they slide by listening to Blippy on high, and now its quitting time and the car wash goes silent. You are a puppet and you are alone and exhausted and just hoping none of the other puppets are staring at you take a break for a nap and nod off. Suddenly, out of nowhere, Doppler radar has picked up tornadic activity and the National Weather Service ramps up their siren to a couple of hundred decibels. Reacting as puppets do, I would come straight up off my chair, experience some kind of puppet cardiac event, and then keel over dead until morning, when I would awaken to a new day with a blast of water from something like a howitzer. What a nightmare for a puppet! That’s not entertainment!  C’mon! 

 I’ve done a bit of research, interviewing some twenty-three kids between the ages of three and eight, and have found only one child who described a sense of comfort by seeing a stuffed animal at a car wash. In all fairness the small child was only two, with a vocabulary of a meager nine words. Several other children I spoke to said that some of the puppets they saw were missing limbs and/or a head, and one sobbing child told he that she had recovered a small pink leg in the vacuum area, a report that is still under investigation with Puppets Protective Services. (Side note: the child is under investigation also, but that is another podcast).

All in all, I have to tell you quite honestly, that even though my car may look shiny and new after a good car wash, there some lingering puppet residue here that has left me feeling kind of sad and tossed aside, even feeling kind of incomplete, and these thoughts led me to run my car back through a second time to rid myself of the smell of guilt. I feel in some way that I have turned a blind eye to the line of little car wash animals longing to sit quietly on a couch, snuggling next to a toddler, perhaps drink tea at a tiny table with tiny silverware, perhaps be squeezed like a pillow now and then. I grieve these animals deeply.

Yet, I have had other thoughts of dressing in camouflage and conducting a clandestine operation in the dead of night, sort of mono-SWAT Puppet team if you will. Here I would sneak around to the local car washes and cut those puppets loose, including all the Kermits, who would scurry off puppet-style to freedom. This could be the start of something like a Disney Catch and Release program, only there wouldn’t be any fireworks or Epcot pamphlets being handed out. The beauty of my operation is that the released animals could live out their days in relative fluffy and stuffiness and never have to submit to another wax-on and wax-offing as long as they lived. It would make me feel a lot better, a lot better, knowing I had done my small part for those puppets who are unable to do it for themselves, an empowering notion if you stop to think about it. I might even submit it to DOGE for consideration. Just saying, it’s got possibilities.

I think these thoughts may be the very line of thinking I was engaged in that day when I spontaneously rolled my window down and was sprayed in the face by the attendant with a water cannon. I was grateful that it took almost the entire car wash before I could focus again, a trip where I was unable to see any puppets as the spray cannon had blown my contact lenses out of my eyes and burnt my upper eyelids.

However, as I came near the end of the tunnel with a clean car, I was able to make out a very pale, yellow Big Bird with one eye. He was bravely trying to wink and wave goodbye at me as I left, but he had a thunderstorm brewing next in line, and he couldn’t possibly take his eye off that Ultimate Deal.

My Covenant with a Crocus

We sit on the edge of a chair ready to jump up at the first signs that Spring is near, that avenue that brings us home to renew life, give us Easter and take our hats and coats at the door. Welcome everyone to a short introduction to a flower in this episode, a poetic attempt to wrap you my friends in what is ahead on our earth. Put away your doldrums for a walk with me through a magical forest where you can rest and lay it all down… 

Open! Open! Be Open! A few yards on the edge of the forest growth, a crocus heaved out of the soil and blinked. For a few days as a Spring snow fell, it glimmered through a canopy of stick saplings and fallen leaves, a lone beacon above the sepias and brindled wood. Just a week before, it belayed its portion of life upward, some each hour, until its green blades thrust into the frail air for the first time. Hundreds of those awakening tubers lay hidden in the forest beds – like explosive mines triggered to erupt. Freezing and thawing and freezing and thawing in the humus, they wait for the Watchtower of Time to open the earth’s door and see what the world had to offer.

I stooped down to see if the cerulean flower was real or a crinkled candy wrapper, but my careless footstep strayed too near and its bell sloped away and drooped over. It will straighten out again, I thought, but it was not to be, not under my solid footprint. Instead, the bulb must wait an the Angel of Patience before rising above the forest floor again.

These exchanges, the ones I have with Mother and her nature, between a petalled flower and my own blues, require delicacy and time. There is no place for harsh and heavy footsteps. Indeed, it had only taken one careless move to flatten a new flower that was innocently checking out its new digs for the first time. It was just getting to know this earthy brown, and looking forward to the blueprint it would have on the landscape. On the edge where crocuses reached for sunlight, in the brown ground, five one day then five more and five the next, their oval shapes remind me that each is precious in the Woods of Discovery.

Standing to the side of me is the silent hologram of a Hiker who travelled all night just to watch the same flower pop up. At a loss for words, his figure flickers on… and off and on…and off as life ebbs from the indigo crocus, and he turns and walks away to tend to another fallen flower.

This woodland opening is congested with menacing, prickly globes, preparing to stick their prongs into my coat and not give up any ground. They became stubborn and bitter and jab at my intrusion. I have been one of those thistles and did the same once or twice to a passerby when all that person wanted was to bend down low and peer inside a crocus petal and glimpse the Woods of Breakthrough. Today, I am the thistle who had good intentions, but instead became brash and selfish and thought the enchanting trail was reserved just for me. I thought the woods was my Woods of Breakthrough and no one else’s.  Now, I’m left alone with thistles and barbs and waiting again for the brown ground to become a field of blooms.

Hope! Did I forget that hope always works just under the surface of a cold soil.  This bulb will rise again when the Hiker comes back, like He always does, with his cane reaching out to tap me gently.  He will hover lightly over the underground, reach out and free the burdens that bind us all down, teach us how to forgive ourselves, and the flower we thought would never talk to us again. It will and it will open and flourish and welcome the showers of friendly rays and rain showers. We, it, they, us will burst forward from brokenness to speak to God every morning and be ok with falling asleep in His arms every night. That will be and will be the bedtime story we will tell the little ones.

While I wait, every noise from this Surrender Forest assembles tones down and tunes up. I can hear them warming up for the symphony through the pines. A lone oboe holds its note, a long low note and I remember how solid something very, very small can be. Truth, like the sound of a flower, comes out of its hiding place and says to me, “Watch as you step. You are not out of the woods yet, but you cannot go back the way you came either.”

 Many times, I have awaited the view around the next curve. Over there, behind the giant sycamore whose bark is smooth and more patterned as it goes up. Above that, where an arena of grace opens, I see a silently circling red-tailed hawk. It seems to be falling asleep up there in the clouds, spiraling ‘round and ‘round and ‘round until it becomes only a dot in the sky. The hemlocks and cedars wave goodbye as a final condolence, sending their needles down to soften the Surrender Forest of heavy eyelids. 

I can say I’m sorry again for mistakes I’ve made and hope my sorrow will also fall to rest as seasons sweeps around our blue Earth and come back to visit the blue crocus. I stand in the company of Auburn and Copper and Russet and feel the calm of the paper-thin blanket of the late snow falling, the later snow that fell, and the latest of all snows that is still falling as if it were preparing a picnic spread. I am invited to sit with friends who will eat and laugh away the hours until we are all covered in white snowflakes. They tell me that tomorrow will begin well again, and taller than the Brambles of the Past. There is another crocus, a tiny blue oboe beginning to hold its reassuring note and we can hear it holding its own in the company of something bigger, growing bigger and bigger than the promising, wide blue yonder of sky.