In a Garden, It's the Work You Don't See that Matters

Most of the raw beauty that goes into a garden is work you’ll never see. In my garden I never seem to be able to walk through without a bucket and clippers, picking up dead leaves and sticks, or replanting a plant that heaved out of the soil over the winter.

Years ago, I noticed I was getting bouts of lightheadedness when I worked out there, so during my yearly physical, I ask my doctor about it.

“What exactly do you do in your garden?” He asked.

I kind of knew by his question he’d probably never planted anything in his life, so I tried to give him a quick rundown of what work in a garden entailed.  

“So, it sounds like you are up and down a lot, changing positions, leaning, twisting, that kind of thing. Do I hear that right?”

“Yes,” I answered, “but…”

 “And how many times would you say you lean over to pick something up?”

“Well,” I hesitated, “maybe five hundred times.”

“Oh, really? Ok,” he said sitting down next to me on a stool. “So, here’s what happens. Your heart is pumping blood in a normal pattern as you work, and then you lean over, and it has to change and pump blood a different way as your brain reorients itself, and if you lean hard to the right, then you brain tells it to pump more over that way and so on as you change positions. See what I mean? After ten minutes of that back and forth, your brain has no idea where to send the blood, and it’s getting the shaft on the blood flow and oxygen.”

“Doc, I’m…I’m… getting light-headed just thinking about it,” I stammered.

Still, walking out of his office, I knew that those awkward positions were the name of the game in a garden – a lot of maintenance which translates to deep-knee-bends and squats of one form or another. In fact, most of what we see in a picturesque garden has a lot of sweat equity poured into the soil and under the soil that you’ll never see on top of the soil.

For example, in one area of mine just outside my back door, I have a bed of low-growing junipers where I mistakenly planted some bulbs that come up every year now. That is all fine and dandy and garden-esque, but the ugly foliage hangs out like strong perfume for about a month longer. Normally, one would leave the greenery to gather energy for next years’ crop, but those bulbs would take over, so I get a bit lightheaded, burn up a little chicken fat and cut the foliage down right away.

Every season, I think the lesson I re-learn is that most of the tasks that are going to be required of me in the wildness are rather mundane, requiring a good dose of patience and even reverence for the commonplace. And I think this is true of life as well. To get to the final round of knockout roses, we need be willing to get down and dirty with the uneventful and tedium of daily chores, weed out what isn’t necessary and give the seeds a chance to take root. The beauty of it is that those tasks that seem burdensome, even a waste of time, begin to build a routine that gives our life purpose and a sense of service.

Walla-A! Our lightheadedness disappears and the blood starts flowing again!

Old gardeners have a reputation for virtually living in their gardens, plowing and furrowing all their life and taking care of their garden plots like newborn babies. In fact, they spent so much time out there mulling around, poking at this or that, fighting insects, watering, pruning and the like, that they came to be seen in the neighborhood as a kind of figurehead, sort of like a composted version of the Statue of Liberty, carrot stick held high to greet the tired and “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

I have heard, or maybe I saw it in a movie – not sure – of an enlightened granny gardener who rose before the sun, put on her bib overalls and Land’s End rubber boots and headed out to work every morning in her vegetable patch. There, ankle deep in kale and beet roots, she reveled in nature’s applause until one day when she looked out and saw Glory and very quietly leaned over on their hoe and passed away, standing up.

It was such a peaceful way to go. For her family, it was as if she died in her sleep. One minute the wise grandmother was doing what she loved the most, mending wire supports and taking in the intricacies of the cosmos like a sage and the next minute she was talking to Jesus about whether to plant soybeans or sweet peas on Heaven’s back forty. Really, she was living her best life, growing a tomato as big as a cantaloupe, gathering the kind of knowledge one gets only by working season after season in tune with nature, exacting beauty from the faith they put into their handfuls of tiny seeds.

Gardener stories like these let us know that those that work the land have a deep love to be out there working the soil. The tasks and chores may be an extension to the very first story told in the Bible, that of a garden we read, that was tended to by the Lord himself, “with all sorts of beautiful trees.” There was work to be tended to also in the garden when grandmother passed on, and she went, it was said, just as the sun came over the horizon, when the humidity was low and the cool air was rising up off the dew.

Now, with this latest trend leaning towards letting a garden take care of itself, gardeners of the future will not go outside to look for chores. They will not pull weeds or put up a scarecrow or read labels on plants that say plant in partial shade. The new gardener will simply get in a truck and fly down the inside lane of a super-highway, broadcasting wildflowers into the median, throwing caution to the wind. They will let the earth take care of itself and become stewards of the newest trend, the latest thing, and lose the tried and true. 

 To which I say, NO THANK YOU. No thank you to any of that and yes to piddling endlessly in the planting seasons of our Springs and Summers. We need to bestow honor to our gardener troops out there who spend countless hours doing the mundane, tireless jobs no one else wants to do. Let’s get our stories in line here, before the jobs pile up and get out of control, while we still have a chance to shore up our edges, trim the dead out from the winter and toil under the cool of the dew before the sun comes up.

It's going to mean some dedication, a lot of sore muscles and maybe some Icey-Hot to get us back up in the morning, and it’ll mean a lot of leaning over and mixing up our blood flow getting back up again over and over, and for me anyway, a bit of lightheadedness. This kind of work may not win you a trophy or a ribbon. In your garden, you aren’t going to hear anything loud like the battle cry Remember the Alamo! You’ll work next to the robins who are picking at the newly turned soil and then catch the sound of some wisdoms floating along with the oxygen in your brain.

Still, I’d keep a rake nearby to lean on just in case. You’ll be tipping towards soil that is rich and worked to the bone and you’ll be disciplined and diligent, and wise like a sage. Nothing good comes out of a garden that isn’t prepared. It’s the work you don’t see that makes it beautiful and overflowing, and it comes, and goes, with the territory.

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.

Ten Reasons Why Ducks Are in My Will

When our seasonal mallard friends, Maude and Claude, return to our pond again this Spring, I think of their presence on our land as a visitation from some relative I only heard about occasionally as a child. We are now entering the fifteenth year our duck pair will visit and I still see them as a kind of stand-up replacement, in a rather comical way, of my great Uncle Leonard who I only met a few times, or my great cousin Audryella, who arrived with a purse that could have been a suitcase. Kids tend to remember details like that, the perfume on a relative when they hug you or whether they wipe their feet before they come in the door.

What is it, after all, that gives the stamp of effortlessness to some family members? Why is it that we can sense affableness with some and bristle at the company of others who don our doorstep? I have not seen our duck pair yet this year, but when I look out one morning and see their tubular forms floating on the pond, I shift gears towards Spring and feel some movement in our urban setting that feels like we just adopted a homeless chicken or opened our door to a miniature Fiat 500 without any wheels. It’s a low ride that squawks and only hits the ruts, but we love them just the same.

In fact, when Maude and Claude finally arrive after delayed flights and drop like a couple of duck bombs in our backyard, I began to wonder whether our dawdling ducks don’t possess all the strengths of character I am looking for in some kind of family legacy: regularity, humor, forgiveness, sharing, appreciation. Mallards I am told, return to the place of their birth every year, which mean that our mallard pair was born in our yard, and come back to reacquaint themselves, if only for a few weeks and natural inclination bordering on something like gratefulness, to where their life began. They are a rarity, as only thirty percent of ducklings survive the first month, and another fifty percent perish after that.

No one that I ever knew, past or present, has ever returned to the very spot where they were born. I was supposed to be born on Valentines’ Day, but my father, in an all-out race across our industrial city, tore across thirteen sets of railroad tracks setting off a rapid chain of contractions leading to my early delivery and hour and half early. I can tell you I have no desire to go back there or repeat that journey now, for fear that I might be forced to be re-born, a physical and spiritual position that I may never come out of alive.

But mallards do go back, every year, and at quite the risk. Hunters shoot thousands of them out of the sky like popcorn as they migrate, and great swaths of ducks lose their way as they are rerouted away from airspaces where they can be sucked into engines and ram into glass cockpits. It is hard to believe, but in past wars, both the British and French Air ministries conceived that ducks and other birds could be trained to attack enemy planes for those very purposes. I can’t really see our mallard pair diving into a F-14 Tomcat, but then I believe, like most ducks, Maude and Claude hold themselves to a higher purpose.

Back during those Great War days, as my grandmother worked on the assembly line at Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company she built enough equity in the company to later will me some shares that still yield a dividend years later. While the dividends are only a couple of dollars each year, it is that generational thing again that can only be felt and not explained, a sense of family appreciation that sees itself out the door and lets itself back in at around 8 pm when ice cream is being served.

I used to sit with my grandmother at about that time and share a dish while she explored the woods around the Virginia farm where she grew up and told me of evidence of Confederate raids during the Civil War. I did not know it then, but I was learning a second language as her stories inevitably fell into poetry, stanzas that were surprisingly long and complicated with language that was antiqued and nuanced, but smooth and silky like her hankies. The voices she recited were those of soldiers of many wars like the knights of the round table who  went out to battle with King Arthur and carried a hawk on their shoulder. And they spoke of the vultures who circled overhead as widows searched for their dead in the muddy aftermath of ancient medieval battle.

It is difficult to explain what is like to be raised in the company of poetic language. It is not a misspoken one, and does not respond to questions, but instead responds with words like “whilst,” or “perchance,” or a line from a sonnet or an epitaph from an English gravestone. It came from another century, had a slower rhythm that like a loon in the night, and you go to sleep by it, like a good Gordon Lightfoot song. And I don’t know a bad one of those.

In the mallard language it is only the male that has a call. The female relies on her quiet deflections, camouflage, and sheer luck to protect her ten chicks from others – fish or mice and bigger predators like possums, owls and roaming racoons. Although as many as ten eggs may be hatched over several days, in a remarkable bit of nature’s timing, all of the chicks will find their way out within an hour of each other. Can we humans attest to that same sort of sibling loyalty, of an emergence for the sake of our brother or sister and fall in line behind each other when our mothers tells us it is time to go visit our relatives? Or maybe revisit the place of our birth, wipe our feet and say hello, I’m the kid who lived here once.

I bought a dozen duck eggs at the grocery and scrambled up an omelet with feta cheese the other day. Duck eggs, for those of you who don’t know, are bigger than a chicken eggs, but I couldn’t quite wrap my tastebuds around them, attesting to my homogenized view of food. I have the same narrow view of body types, and I probably won’t be able to look at Maude and Claude when they arrive without wondering how they came to look so ungainly on a diet of mostly veggies. Their shape is disproportionate, and they cannot walk without shifting back and forth and, as if anything could make up for their awkward waddle, they sport a bill that looks more like a child’s beach shovel than a beak. This would not be the least bit important except that most recently, as my wife and I recovered from Flu A, we obliterated the peace of our household with deep raspy coughs very similar to a quack, which would be charming once or twice, but not for a whole week.

“Did I hear Maude and Cluade outside?” I said to my wife one day as we wobbled through our hallway full of Kleenex and air heavy with flu-residue.

“No, that was me sneezing,” she answered, “sounded pretty real, didn’t it?”

“Not really,” I answered. Sounded more like someone sliding into second base,” and went back to bed.

Still, this is not a fair assessment of a mallard’s call or coordination. The woodland duck is the only bird that can launch itself straight up off a pond or a lake from a sitting position, a feat that is accomplished by spreading their wings across the water and pushing up. It’s not something you are going to see unless you do a video and slow it down to observe what looks like a mallard push-up, followed by a panic attack of flapping wings. It’s not pretty, but how could it be with a body like theirs and a bill that looks like it was flattened in an iron press.

We have had a couple of seventy-degree days here, but Spring is just faking it. Still, I I find myself looking towards the sky for a couple of ducks scouting for their birthplace. The duck pair, when they arrive, will toddle forth exuding some ugly form of jet lag, and sit down on on the concrete porch warmed by the sun. They will stare at us as if they have just returned from an middle Eastern concert where the Sitar was played – on some high existential plane – and I’ll try to deflect my glance away from their wide duck bill, their paddleboat shoes, and a body the shape of a submarine sandwich. 

I’m going to do my best to be a good host when they arrive and come to sit and stare at me. I won’t ask them to wipe their feet. I know who their habits and their strange song, and it is a song that began when two unknown mallards made a brood of chicks we never knew anything about until the pair of them landed back in our yard. Now when Maude and Claude hear my raspy flu cough they will know it is not quite right, but they’ll answer quietly with a single quack, stand up and wander off to the quiet place of their birth, where their mother once sat and covered them with protection and maybe hummed a song from the Gordon Lightfoot playbook. And I never heard a bad one of those.

My Covenant with a Crocus

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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… 

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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.

In the Midst of Our Drift

There’s no backing out of morning. It’s going to happen no matter how I shudder when I pull the blanket back. Our wooden floors are piercing cold when I put my feet down – a kind of ice therapy that makes me feel that the day is beginning with resonance and energy and that there is no backing out of it. I walk down our long hallway without slippers, through a dull leftover light and into the kitchen. I can only embrace the chilliness when waking is confined to my feet and moves up one body part at a time, and when it doesn’t include any my brain.

In these early hours, I might open a shutter to see if the world is still there. My view is of stillness and hazy, indefinite distances. Everything seems a long way off, in some remote area that may or may not turn into a day of prospects. By contrast, summer mornings are packed with lawn services whose trucks and trailers pull up to curbs and fired up their furious leaf blowers. It’s not so much the noise that annoying, although it doesn’t help, but the way these trucks park way off the curb so walkers must figure out how to get around them without being creamed by oncoming traffic.

On these wintery mornings it is so quiet that I can hear myself thinking, and I’m drifting today to thoughts of an older lady named Tippy, a walker, who used to do laps around our block years ago. She was hit by an oncoming car when she came around one of those lawn trucks with the extended trailers. In the quiet renewal of winter, between the damp and the dinginess, Tippy’s presence, her quiet ways and fragility, are still recovering and finding renewal. There are no leaf blowers or zero turn arounds out there making a racket. They have been replaced this morning with solace and peace for Tippy. I can see her still through a louvered shutter I just opened. She is stopping to get the latest scoop on a neighbor and chatting with friends she has known all her life. My feet are still cold as ice, but I can see a light coming from Tippy out there, I can see her as if she is right next to me, and when I see her on these kinds of mornings, it doesn’t look like winter at all.

I have to plan for my early winter mornings though, get a strategy for them the night before. When our days go suddenly dim at 4:30 and I haven’t seen the sun all day, I move the day along by visiting my bird feeder and fill it to the brim with peanuts and a seed mix. I will be rewarded with an early crowd of enthusiastic birds.  Funny, because I used to hate waking up, as if I had a choice, because I dreaded the weight of the day’s to-do list. Now I let the birds take that responsibility – they can have all the get up and go they want, and all that’s required of me is to open the shutter and enjoy the spectacle at the bird feeder.

Winter is the time for ambitions to be put aside and for devotions to happen, a time to quietly drift, trusting in those first ideas that come along, the ones that fly in for some food and nudge me, not the ones that come in screaming for more. I have a few unfinished dreams from the night before that have been edged out by the arrival of the first sparrows. I like these birds, but especially when they are hungry. They are breakfast people, sparrows are, and are hustling about, picking and poking, nudging each other off perches, irritable and crabby until they see me getting my first cup of coffee, and settle down. They know where their next meal is coming from.

I don’t have to wake up very fast when Extraordinary is right in front of me. Birds, feathers, and flight...it is all a marvelous wonder, a bit of magic that keeps my eyes from going back to sleep.  There will be no sun today, but there is a lot of movement around the feeder, heated exchanges over a seed or two. We tend to overlook the phenomenon of flight when it is all around us, but in the winter, all kinds of birds of flight stirs the gray air, swirls it around and reminds us that the seasons are always changing. I feel like I have a front row seat to a disorderly circus with hundreds of cameo appearances, performers who make their entrance, grab a seed or two, then dive for cover. It is a chaotic play with no acts and no intermissions.

 When birds are eating, they don’t do a lot of talking or jabbering, and really, who wants a chatterbox in the morning anyway? Winter takes a long time to warm up to anything, and perhaps winter never wakes up at all to a talker. Birds are getting something done early, though. They are dressed and ready, and smart to join the early morning show so they can go straight back to bed and stay warm until April.

I don’t know this for sure, but I imagine that Tippy loved birds. She was a slight woman and had a bent look about her stance when she walked past my house. She was in her eighties, yet she always called me Mr. Bender when she saw me because, she said, that is how we talk to teachers. I hardly knew her at all, but she still addressed me as if I deserved a title. How can we not like people like Tippy, who give us titles when they speak to us? It is in the winter that I miss her the most.

I am posted by the window and trying to figure out which circus act is coming up next. The sparrows are changing their tactics as other birds wake up and are coming in as squadrons. They have to stick together as a group, but get pushed off easily by the titmice, and thrushes, who are quick and have pointed beaks. Visitors like house finches and juncos try to pile on two or three at a time, flitting, and fluttering, trying to be hummingbirds until a spot opens up. It is usually the spotted starlings, however, that clear the air. They are refugees from the 1904 World’s Fair and have learned to be pushy since then. Their long yellow beaks reach far into the feeder like needles and throw out everything but the   peanuts. I root for the little guy, the downy woodpecker, who steals in like a bandit wearing a red cap and will not be bullied by any bird. Seeds are being flicked off to the ground right and left for the doves who are allowing the morning to warm up on its own.

It seems as if time stops when everything is pitch quiet, when seldom is heard. I imagine that the birds know me as the guy in the window – the guy who bought tickets in the front row for their circus, but that is all they know. I’ve learned to recognize individual birds now, which songbirds will take the top perch, and which ones stick around for a second helping. I am in the midst of my drift here, watching the fledgling friends without names, winged performers, eat their breakfast at my winter seed-table.

The songbirds are a patch of color in an otherwise dull, misty morning.  I stand here at my paned window, both of my hands wrapped around the warmth of my coffee cup, and I’m thinking of Tippy.  She is the mourning dove who has yet to join the circus but will soon waddle in calmly with cold feet and give the winter its title.

Stark Waving Mad, and So Am I

My training as an artist has fine-tuned my sensitivity towards objects and environments that have poor designs, but recently my cup seems to be running over with frustration in the ubiquitous public restroom, where automated faucets and toilets, soap and paper towel dispensers have a mind of their own, turning on and off at will whether I am ready to use them or not. For the normal Joe or Jane hoping for a quick and private trip, a collection of technical gadgets awaits, with the intention of wiping us clean off the face of the next countertop.

Nowadays, I would almost rather have my bathroom privileges revoked than try to navigate the shiny appliances that greet me in a public restroom. From my view, it seems as if I have entered an operating room where I will be made to stay awake during surgery while questionable robotic objects perform their activities on me. I made the error of thinking I could make a quick dash into a public restroom, and hoping to make a good impression, fine tune my appearance and escape unscathed. I had no idea that I was about to enter an appliance nightmare, a situation ripe for ablutionary awkwardness.

First, the automated urinal did not flush on cue but continued blinking as if it had. I couldn’t just leave it there like that, so I stood waiting for a long second, hoping the sensor would see me. I thought ok, let’s move on, but just as I did, the urinal decided to begin flushing continuously, sending a waterfall over the porcelain cliff onto the floor. Trying to overcome my sense of failed responsibility, I leaned part of my body back, rather precariously, in order to stop Niagara Falls from becoming a scenic stop-over.

When that didn’t work, I wondered whether starting the whole process…yes, I mean the entire process…over again would somehow be picked up by the motion detector and turn off the waterfall. Just as I was in the middle of that deep thought, the bathroom door swung open and another person walked in. Rather than be caught in that no man’s land between are-you-going to-use-that-urinal-or-aren’t-you, I had to act like I had just entered the bathroom myself and had nothing to do with the mess I had created.  

Wow,” I said to the newcomer, “wonder how long that’s been running?” I took his lack of reply as an opportunity to move away towards a regular stall. I can tell you that pretending to use the bathroom when you don’t have to is not normal. I have enough trouble going when it is normal, but there you go.

When the bathroom emptied of visitors, I realized I had built up a lot of resentment about this trip to a public restroom, resentment that I believe was detected by the soap dispenser. When I approached the sink to wash up, I tried to do the special wave but nothing came out – not one puff of soap. Another couple of anxiety-ridden waves later I was still waving at a continuously flashing, beeping red light until, exhausted, the soap dispenser began to create a wheezing noise that made me think it might have pneumonia. For those of you who have experienced a raspy cough or an allergy attack, the sound of a soap dispenser in respiratory failure is not pleasant at all – the only recourse is to do more frantic waves to get it calmed down, a kind of CPR if you will. Apparently, soap dispensers in respiratory failure ARE still able to count our waves, because three minutes later, it suddenly began pumping out what can only be described as white loops very similar in appearance to Dannon yogurt.

Deciding to get the water going while the soap calmed down, I looked at the minimalist sink, a long slab that angled slightly downward to catch the running water. This slab had no lip on it, having been fabricated as one ridiculously modern surface made of unattractive concrete. I placed my hands under a shiny faucet tube, and began my special wave again, the one that looks like I am trying to swat flies away from a hamburger. Nothing happened. I waved faster. Nothing still. Thinking I could trick the sensor, I slid slowly down to the next one, but then the first faucet suddenly woke up and came on with a short blast that angled off the concrete straight up and across the wall-to-wall mirror. When I stepped back to avoid the splash, the second one came on with a similar blast and a noise that is normally reserved for a fasten-your-seat-belt signal on a plane that has declared May Day. In the meantime, another man suddenly appeared next to me, trying to adjust his tie through a mirror covered in a wide swath of splattered water.

“It was like that when I got here,” I say, glancing over, “but at least there’s plenty of soap,” I meekly pointed out.  

I am buying time here, hoping he will become very uncomfortable and leave. In my head, I am trying to figure out how to find the paper towel dispenser, dry my hands and clothes and get out of this public automated restroom hellhole. In some very dark corner of my mind, I am holding back thoughts of murdering one of these objects whose faked brilliance and pretentious armor seems unapproachable. Thankfully, some of the soap had turned to attractive foamy cumulus clouds which were now floating above my head. Their poofs were so attractive that I tried to scoop one out of thin air, and make a thin white mustache above my upper lip.

Let me just pause here to remind you that this very event is happening everywhere, from opening to closing time, in every public bathroom in the Continental United States, including cities formally thought of as rather clean, like Marion, Ohio and Temper Lake Kentucky. Just the wastage in water and soap alone has reached tragic proportions, and I haven’t even got out of the bathroom yet. I cautiously step towards the paper towel dispenser but slide on a river of water left by someone else. At a moment of unfortunate imbalance, I was forced to make a stab for the dispenser, but instead pulled out four feet of paper towels to regain my balance. Standing there, holding a huge wad, I begin to feel that I was not capable of navigating the changes modern technology has introduced to public restrooms.

I am aware that the automated waste can has detected me, and that a small slit is opening for me to deposit my paper clump. Being somewhat athletic, I believes I can be quicker than this spring-operated door and risking everything, quickly shove the wet lump in before it closes on my hand and exposing it to a glossary of unmentionable stains. However, the spring is a bit stronger than I anticipated, and my hand becomes stuck. In quiet desperation bordering on rage, I am talking to my other hand now, asking it politely to help me, to have mercy on me even if it means touching a variety of medical abominations on the trach can opening.

Out of nowhere, a small boy enters, a mere child, who takes out a huge glob of gum from his mouth and sticks it on the top of the back of my hand… and then leaves! It happened so quick I didn’t have time to object.

This child was very short and seemed to fly in under the appliance radar. I realize I am trapped in a motion detector crossfire in a public bathroom built for another race of small aliens who have big eyes, chew gum all the time and have cratered skin that morphs easily when exposed to shiny appliances. They are a race who can move so quickly in and out of bathrooms that beeps and blinks have no effect on them whatsoever. This is their home now, and they will eventually take over our planet simply because we cannot defend ourselves when our hands are stuck in automated trash cans. We will get one final look at ourselves in the mirrored waterfall that has tiny puffy clouds of soap rolling past. It’ll be a quiet end, with only the sound of urinals settling down for the night, and it will happen across our fair land in restrooms that we thought were meant for us – the public restroom, where privacy lost its power to the wave, but plenty of paper towels made a bed for us in the corner.

Coming Down on the Side of…So What?

I heard an interview conducted this week by a commentator regarding the preparations for the inauguration ceremony of our new president. As opinions swirled around the news desk, one journalist entered the mad swirl of conversation and announced, “I’m coming down on the side of so what.”

Considering the historic nature of the inauguration and the hoopla still circulating about Trumps return to the White House and so forth, I felt the comment came off as flat and apathetic – certainly not in keeping with any terms of engagement I’d ever heard. As the journalists’ conversation wound down, I started to feel that perhaps coming down on the side of so what may not be such a bad thing. In fact, the seemingly smart aleck attitude of so what may just be the kind of position I need to land on to spin out of my own obsessions – those thinking patterns that have gone around the pike one too many times for my own good. Maybe I’m getting older, maybe my repeating loops are a permanent part of my security now, or maybe they are the natural rhythm of a pendulum that swings out and then back again to the other side.

At the nursing home where my dad lives, I often observe the residents, many of whom have a degree of dementia, pushing through the hallways bumping into walls and furniture, but slowly making their way down to the dining area. Their pathway is a circuitous one, a journey with a loose definition of destination, but it doesn’t matter. One way or the other, their weight is going to shift their momentum one way and then the other until their chair bumps into the right dinner table. It’s the natural ebb and flow of nursing home traffic – everyone eventually gets to the right place in spite of the memory bottlenecks, physical impediments and fender benders.

Yesterday, as I came out of my dad’s room pushing him along, an elderly lady on her way to bingo sideswiped me so hard that I almost fell on top of her. She didn’t have the slightest idea that I was there or who I was. Truthfully, I don’t think she had the slightest idea who she was either. I was just part of the obstacle redirection she needed to correct herself, the one that gets the pendulum swinging again back the other way on the bingo trail of life. A few minutes later, I saw her playing five Bingo cards at the same time, randomly placing chips all over the table, enjoying herself immensely and coming down hard on the side of so what. She was cheating of course, but it was a beautiful thing to watch.

Funny thing about spatial awareness, that perception that we are right where we are supposed to be – the elderly don’t care about it, and children don’t need it. Kids don’t know anything about where they are on the great swinging pendulum of life and, as far as that goes, the elderly just don’t care anymore. Both groups seem to be at a point in life that is quite enviable, that place where it doesn’t really matter whether there is a hazard cone in front of them or not because the arc of their swinging pendulum is going to plow through it anyway thank you very much. Both groups of people are coming down on the side of so what, a side where apathy and awareness are mixed in a blender, and drunk like a protein shake. It’s a side we all may all be seeking. We just don’t know it yet.

Being in the middle of three generations, I see the theory of so whatness being played out all the time. I’ve written about serendipity, finding your bliss, and a whole host of articles on the benefits of being playful and in the moment. All of those existential states seem to me to pale in comparison to the state of complete oblivion, that weightless period where the entire world goes on hold for a split second and is unaffected by any forces around it.

For example, I recently, I witnessed my grandson playing an entire basketball game without knowing he was on the basketball court. He made several trips up and down, to be sure, but he might have as well been flying a kite or jumping into a lake. In fact, I believe he thought he was doing both of those things. If someone tossed him the ball, he came down hard on the side of so what and threw it back to them. Depending on the difficulty of the catch, he also might lay the ball down and walk away. On one particular fast break, he took the ball straight to the bathroom for a potty break, stopping the game for some kind of foul associated with a double dribble. There was no spatial recognition or sense of caring in the game; his external GPS, the one that keeps the rest of us from being run over by a truck, was simply not there.

So, when I observe people, young or old, that are coming down on the side of so what, I realize I am witnessing a portal of time that is fleeting kind of unrepeatable event. These moments are rare, like an eclipse, or the birth of a salamander with nine heads. They cannot be predicted and there are no charts to follow or algorithms that can tell us that something like that is possible. So, it was with utter astonishment that I witnessed the theory of so what play itself out quite dramatically during this week’s Presidential Inauguration.

I could set the story up here by going on and on about the historic nature of this event, but you’ve all already heard the news. You have also seen the loss of the election play itself out with Joe and Kamala, and the witnessed a super-charged air of optimism typical of an incoming President. You know why this or that person waltzed into the DC ceremony when they did, and why Melania was wearing a hat the size of Mar Largo. You heard Carrie Underwood take command of the United States Marine Band when they hit an audio glitch and sing her fool head off with an a cappella version of America the Beautiful.

It was many grand and marbled moments, parades and promises of new programs, out with the old and in with the new. Mrs. Pomp rose to new heights and Mr. Circumstance himself was there also, no less evident than when the military band came into the Capitol rotunda singing at the top of their lungs.

I saw the pendulum of time swinging in all of it – raw evidence of strength and discipline marching out in perfect sync, up the aisle with every single step of every soldier of the Armed Forces Chorus. Apparently, some of the audience members didn’t know the soldiers were on their way up the aisle and as such were pretty much mowed down by a marine of immense proportions leading at the front of the pack.

At first, I thought it was a not-so-subtle way of putting our international rivals on symbolic alert, to tell them in effect, we are marching through now, and if you are in the aisle by mistake and not going to sing, we will probably knock you down. However, as various suited congressman and their spouses were knocked over like bowling pins, lost their balance or fell over outright, I realized that I was observing a living example of so what being played out by a marine right before my eyes. He was at the top of his arc.

Do you ever get tired of being cautious, of worrying about what may be coming up behind you? You may want to join a marching band or play basketball with a five-year-old, perhaps tool around in a wheelchair bumping into other people on your way to dinner. If you do, don’t say anything when you run into them. Just keep going until you run right out of the stadium, like Forest Gump did when he ran for that touchdown right out of the football stadium. Just keep running until you run into something. You’ll be at the top of your game, the top of swing, that unstoppable peak in the swinging arc of the pendulum. You won’t have any idea where you are, but so what! You’ll be making great time.

Turning Our Fires Into Faces

It's a miracle when everything in my house is working properly. Most of the time it isn’t, but when it is, I stand in awe and take a deep breath from our ionic air purifier. I’ve come to realize that a tell-tale sign that everything is running properly around the house is when all the cuts and bruises on my hands have healed. That means I haven’t banged my knuckles or let a pair of pliers slip from a maintenance assignment I gave myself here at the Bender Abode. Stopping to look around when all the gears are ticking smoothly, I take a moment to marvel at my domestic tranquility and be reminded that a lot of conveniences I take for granted are working continuously to make my life easier.

That fact was made ever the more apparent the last two weeks watching the horrific footage of fire damage in California played and replayed. Ravaged by the inferno, Hell warmed over on the residents in Palisades and burned down houses and schools to the bare earth. Watching the news clips of yet another American town succumbing to another disaster has left me taking new inventory on things in my life that are flaming away unchecked. Do you have any of those fires going on?

 As I watch victims interviewed, their faces bear a sad and stark resemblance to pictures I have seen of refugees from other countries that have been forced from their families and homes and have no idea what they are going to do next. The fires in California have created an emotional storm that has transformed a picture-perfect coastal town into a war zone – a humanitarian crises of unimaginable proportions. The faces aren’t from another country this time though. They are our faces, our people, in our country. And for those of us who have been around the block once or twice, who have experienced the unpredictable nature of life, we recognize the anguish and pain in those faces.

Many years ago, when I worked as a reporter on the Gulf Coast, I had to report on a forest fire that had started in the dry season. As I approached from a half mile away, I could feel the intense heat, and was soon pulled over by a state policeman that told me my gas tank might explode if I moved any closer. I got out of my car and walked the rest of the way down and took pictures of meteor-like fireballs that leapt over the street to engulf trees in flames on the other side. Intense heat will do that, and the hotter it is the farther it can leap.

What are the rest of us, the onlookers, to feel about the destruction we have seen in Palisades? For myself, there is a shudder that moves through my skin, a kind of creeping helplessness that wants to look away, as if I’m that reporter again, parked a half mile away watching firebombs on another planet.

In California, survivors wandering through what is left of their neighborhoods can barely speak, shake their heads, and begin to weep. It is heart wrenching to watch of course, and I found myself only being able to view so much of it. I see utility vehicles lined along the highway, National Guardsman, rescue efforts for animals, neighbors carrying neighbors down the blackened and scorched remnants of what was once picturesque and bucolic. All these pictures are made starker by contrast, as we look at one of the most gorgeous stretches of American scenery anywhere in the country, a stretch of highway only feet from the Pacific beach and a stone’s toss from a stunning Mediterranean stretch of rolling hills. Now this area, as the song says, is dust in the wind.

I don’t know if any of you out there have ever been in a place where all the layers of your life have been peeled away. That stripping down is paralyzing, a terribly raw and vulnerable place to be. If you have gone through such an exhaustive loss, you know that your life will never be the same again. Like an onion, the slicing and dicing of your life leaves a film, an odor, that never really leaves. You can try to close your eyes to it, but the sting of the afterimages still burns.

My onion appeared when I was thirty-three, living far from home, and going through a divorce that was 99% my fault. My career was in the dumps, I had perhaps one friend I could depend on, and was sleeping on the floor of a screened-in porch. My marriage was over, I was not able to eat because my depression had removed any desire for food.  Sitting alone one night on the only piece of furniture I owned, a rocking chair, I stared at a blank wall thinking of a line from a Gordon Lightfoot song that reads, “does anyone know where the Love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours...”

For those living in Palisades, folks who are squatting on a cinder block in the middle of what was once their home watching smoke still trickling from their burnt-out couch, they now have a front row seat to something on the scale Hiroshima, and their view of the love of God has all but disappeared. It went away with their big screen that was carted off by a scooter- looter, and when their photos of loved ones blew down the street and were covered in ash. For that person the love of God is some face trying to interview them on Fox, asking them unanswerable question about their future. Where does the love of God go when the waves of fire turn the minutes to hours? If we are human, we will admit that we have all had hours like that, when our faces looked like hell warmed over and desperation tried to speak but couldn’t.

For me, the love of God came through an unexpected drink of cold water from my mother. At the lowest point, when I was most desperate, my mother, a meek and demure lady showed up at my door in Florida with a thermos of cold water. It was sweltering hot that day, and my hungry-angry-lonely-and-tired dial was on full throttle.  I had come home from a dead-end job, rounded the corner to find her sitting on my busted concrete staircase, waiting for me.  

She had placed a soaking wet towel down to keep herself cool and the fire ants from biting her, but she was waiting for me, nonetheless. I sat down next to her, began to cry. She hugged me and told me things would get better, and that I could build something out of the ashes. Over the course of our conversation, she never pointed a finger, she never gave me any advice or told me what she thought I needed to do. She sat and listened until my words brought me to that one statement that we all face when our own Palisades goes up in flames. I imagine every one of us has been in that place, searching for words that are layered under that deep loss and sadness, that hardest part, that last layer of the onion.

Perhaps it is then, when we feel like we have lost everything and our personal town is burnt to the ground, we get to a layer we didn’t know we had and cut through it, shed the tears, and let go of our worst fear, and wave off that last bit of odor from life’s onion, and let a new life begin.  

I think my prayer for every residents of Palisades is that if they can ever return to the rubble of what was once their home, that they would come around the corner and find a person sitting there waiting for them with a cool glass of water who has time to hear their story and not judge them in any way, and help them peel back the layers of grief that hurts the most, so that a new layer of tougher skin will be able to grow.

I’m sure, coming out of this disaster, residents will never again hold on quite so tightly to their stuff but will have a more solid idea of what really matters. It will include a future that is stronger, perhaps more aware, no longer smelling of onions and total loss, but of something sweeter and refreshing. The person who is waiting down the street for them, the face they will look into, will never replace the home that burned to the ground, but it will begin to answer the biggest question they have right now, the most important question, and tell them where the love of God goes when a fire turned their minutes to hours.

Where Men and Mountains Meet

Years ago, I wrote about a mammoth black gum tree in our back yard that had been slowly dying back, limb by limb. It suffered slow demise when the ’08 ice storm crashed through our area. We hated cutting it down, but in so doing we avoided the danger of this recent winter storm where the weight of ice and wind left trees bestrewed at every possible angle. Like some weird postcard from Rome, split trees in our neighborhood look like ancient stone columns, that held up a coliseum archway before the Argonaut of weather came through and pushed them over.

Of course, like thousands of residents in this tristate area, we began hustling to stock up on groceries long before the worst hit us.  As the thunder sleet storm built up, we knew we would soon lose power and have to begin the process of improvisation, that semi-quasi state of survival that doesn’t quite tip the desperate scale but still requires small doses of anxiety medication.

The problem I have with being snowed in, and the accompanying frustrations that it brings, is that I can never really settle into that rustic cabin romantic ambiance I see advertised in mountain retreats, lodges and ski resorts. Don’t get me wrong, I love looking at the pictures and the momentary fantasies they bring. I even imagine myself glissading down a hill, coming to athletic stop along a riverbed where a pride of caribou look up at me with curiosity.

Yet even when I have been in those types of places, sitting in a lodge with my hot chocolate and pebble sized marshmallows, I still cannot get in the mood of a wintry wonderland. I watch people stumble into the lodge, squinting and unable to adjust to the dim light, with faces looking red from snow burns they received as they face planted down the bunny hill. They stand there like statutes wearing neon thermal clothing, their small red “finder light” blinking on and off so they could be located if they were swept away by an avalanche. Imitating Norwegian soldiers, their snow suits are also covered with commemorative patches and logos that indicate that they were once part of a special branch of the Swedish military who just returned from guarding a fiord on the upper crust of their homeland coast. We know though, that no human has ever set foot on that coast, whose frozen beaches reveal only the white vertebrae of narwhals that lost their way.

Vacation skiers who walk in for some warmth, maybe some encouragement, are weighted down with cinder blocks boots, and appear as if they have survived something extraordinary out there. When they begin to thaw and are able to speak an hour later, they brag about how they whizzed through a pine forests, planted their poles and kept their weight on the inside. Sadly, their words are unintelligible because their lips are still frozen solid and crusty. Relaxing in an armchair on a Sundance couch, nobody who is sitting around has any idea what they are saying. Multi-syllable words sound like a baby beaver who lost its mother and difficult consonants like B, F, M, and P are never attempted at all.  Last year, a downhill skier stumbled in and tried to speak, made the mistake of using too many “U’s and in so doing pushed her lips out too far. Paramedics had to be called in to help her, and when they ask her where she hurt, her lips fell off and lay quivering on the floor.

These are the things that happen when one is exposed to temperatures found only in meat lockers and cheap motels whose marquis are missing half of their letters. I have friends that return from ski trips and tell me all about their adventures on the slopes. I smile, of course, because that is what one does in polite society, but I have trouble getting past the obvious signs of their various injuries – a slight limp or broken nasal cavity, or loss of memory from high altitude oxygen deprivation. In addition, I feel embarrassed for them as they walk away with their ski passes, which melted in the dryer, are still stuck to their bottoms.  

So, all of my guilt for not being more adventuresome in the snow and ice, of not having any inclination to head out and be an extra in the sequel to Jeremiah Johnson, where I might run into Mr. Redford himself – all of these feeling are gone now, completely  replaced by a scene I recently witnessed, a treacherous scene just outside my daughter’s house, where her son Carter, five, was fighting for his life as he climbed a snow bank.

Lacking no imagination, Carter was pretending to scale the slick hillside as if he were in a documentary on mountain climbing. To the casual observer it would have only appeared like a scene of a child playing in the snow, but in Carter’s mind, it was a life-or-death attempt to reach an imaginary summit, possibly Mt. Everest.

And this will be the story we will read in a biography of his life many years from now:

“As he neared the summit, pickax in hand, little Carter, the only child to ever attempt a solo assault on Mt. Everest, felt his crampon slipping beneath the ice wall. He was losing his grip on the sheer sheet, an ice flow that never sees the sun, peering over his shoulder to look down into the mist. Below, was five feet of free fall down his front yard where his body would never be recovered. Could he make it to the top where only a few men have ever stood? He could see the flag a previous climber had planted at the peak – an image that would haunt him the rest of his life. Would he make it to the top and be able to take a selfie to show his own grandkids one day – that victorious moment when he planted his country’s flag and stood at the top of the world?

His thoughts filled with doubt. A memory of his grandpa flashed through Carter’s mind, a memory of a short, slow-witted man who had tried, valiantly, three times, to climb this same mountain. The record books say four. However, during the last attempt he had only one leg, having lost the other from an attack by a deranged Yeti in Nepal. After that, his homeland of Scotland would not recognize him as a legitimate explorer and they refused to enter his last climb in the Everest record books. Carter thought of this, and more, as insecurity swept over him.

The barely visible flag, that magical goal floating above him in the clouds, had faded from view and Carter lost his grip, and felt the snow give way beneath him on the treacherous ice.

‘Use your sticks,’ he heard his grandfather saying, ‘use the sticks!’

Yes, he thought, those ancient scrimshaw walrus tusks he had put in his jacket at the last second. Plunging one into the snow, Carter held on, then pulled himself forward and up, then stretched once more and plunged another tusk deep into the ice. Upward he inched, stab by stab, feeling the power of the carved symbols and figures surge through him as he strained towards his elusive peak.”  

‘I can make it,’ he yelled even as his strength appeared to be giving out, ‘I’ve got to hold on and keep trying…’

And it will be there, in Chapter Fourteen of Carter’s biography, entitled “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Climbers,” where the five-year-old’s epic assault will comes to a sudden, suspenseful close.

As a family, we hope to read it all someday. For now, we helplessly stood at the living room window, watching him act out the entire scene. He looked like a taco wrapped in a blue cellophane, and he made one last attempt to pull himself up, but he was losing ground. It was hard to watch him fail, and listen to his scream of desperation, I have to tell you, as he aquaplaned helplessly downward. We could see his mouth moving, narrating the entire epic scene himself, playing all the characters, including the barely audible voice that trailed off the imagnary mountainside.

We want to believe he survived, yes we do. I don’t know the final chapter myself, because I haven’t written the book yet, but the last scene, of him reaching up that precarious slope, screaming, clawing at the white earth, made me proud. I knew I would see him again one day, but it wouldn’t be in a ski lodge or on a winter vacation in Aspen or Sun Valley.  It would be in a photograph, where he will barely be visible through the clouds, and where on a bitterly frigid day, we witnessed the epic climb of one intrepid explorer from the safety of our toasty warm living room, far from any mountain.

Luck and Destiny: Two Ships that Pass in the Night

Of all the animals in the animal kingdom, man is the only creature who can willfully turn his destiny over to God. There is no other living creature on earth that can pursue a goal and then relinquish it to a higher calling. From the wolf who pursues his prey to the smallest deep-water shrimp living off bacteria, all living organisms are subject to the cycles of the natural world and able to make decisions that help them survive, but they cannot reverse them through a spiritual channel. Man’s ability to surrenders his power and abilities and purposely yield to a supernatural force is unique in all the animal kingdom. Sometimes, he may also choose not to use his abilities at all, but that does not mean they are not available. 

It is interesting that not even animals rely on luck. Their behaviors rely on a complex script mapped in their DNA. Patterns like migration and communication are so complex in the animal kingdom that scientists are still unraveling them. We do not like to think of animals as intelligent as we are, as decision makers, but they rely on their skill and knowledge just like we do. A wasp, for example, may buzz around a garage for hours before choosing the optimal spot for its next generation. Man, on the other hand, can add an entirely different layer to finding a home, and may call on a prayer for guidance when there is no other acceptable option. While surrendering may not the easiest solution, his ability to accept his destiny and allow for the death of his own determination distinguishes him among all living entities.

That last statement is not always the most comforting answer, but it is certainly a human one. When we finally drop our shoulders, take a deep breath, and give way to our higher calling, we do so by realizing that we are relinquishing some of our human power and strength in hopes of gaining some insight into what we do have control over. We can be sure it will be more than just luck, however. Our potential to depend on a “higher power” often runs counter to our other human traits, our ability to use logic and reasoning for example, but we sometimes find it much more compelling – and exhilarating – to throw our lot in with the random happy accident.

A preacher once admitted to our congregation that if “we do not impose our will on life, life would impose its will on us.”  I would like to say that those words led me to a life of uplifting and inspirational experiences, but they did not. Instead, they led to a life of rather common experiences that involved letting go of heartaches, disappointments, and personal baggage. They led to a relationship with an extraordinary God whose challenges required introspection, prayer, and finally acceptance, but they certainly did not lead me to random good fortune.

Like myself, most of the hardest learning curves come from the pain of growing, and growth cannot happen without change, a prospect that often is laden with a sadness as we let go of what is comfortable and move with faith towards the unknown. Perhaps we are feeling that our luck has run dry. Perhaps we discovered that we can no longer outwit ourselves. Maybe we find ourselves looking into the void, and able to finally admit that where we need to be is on our knees, seeking something more substantial, something with meaning and purpose.  Perhaps in those moments of surrender, we can address something beyond the natural world, something that gives us hope and reassurance in a world where our destiny seems unattainable or inconsequential. 

This kind of seeking can be a nail-biting one if you are human, this business of believing in something one cannot see. In that darkness, man addresses his vulnerability, accepts his limitations and finally is able to reach out further than he thought possible, towards an authority greater than himself. In so doing, he steps away from the precipice of luck, stands on the threshold of a new connection and begins a pathway that is uniquely human, a pathway towards God.

How do we even get to that space? What is the first step towards believing in the unseen, stepping out, so to speak, in faith? “It is not always pretty,” a pastor once told me, “…and it will not be easy, but it is always good if we lean into it.”

I’d like to say that there was a moment when I gave up on twists of fate – ditched the idea of luck and did an about-face. I would like to say at that moment I saw a clear vision of God’s plan for my life, but I have had no such experience. As a kid, I relied so heavily on my own skills and “smarts” that I never needed to rely on anything else. As I grew older, I pursued more knowledge and more skills to compensate and repeatedly came head-to-head with a growing discontent and dullness to my life.  Throwing the dice, balancing my wins and losses, I began to feel like I was part of a card game whose outcome was dependent on the luck of the draw. Occasionally, I hit pay dirt, experiencing a temporary high, but it was not long before the same blunt question appeared in front of me: “Where is all of this leading?”

Consider this example:

Many years ago, two ship captains squared off to do battle. Each captain had equal power on their ships, and there was no advantage on either side as the battle ensued. The two captains agreed on a few simple rules of engagement before their encounter. First, only one shot would be fired at a time until one of the fleets was completely sunk. Oddly, both captains also agreed that no matter who was victor, there would be no casualties.

As the battle began, each captain released one shot at a time into the night as agreed, some of the boats sinking with just two hits and some with five. With neither captain able to see the other’s fleet, where would skill come into play as they fired round after round of cannonballs into the void? It seemed that by shear chance some of those shots were hitting their marks while others were falling short, but when the smoke cleared, it was clear that one captain had devised a clear and crafty strategy for winning the naval conflict. 

How, you might ask, could such a battle take place in the dark, with no casualties, and yet finish with a clear winner, particularly when chance and sheer luck seemed to be playing such a critical part in the outcome?

Well, if you were ever a kid and played the game of Battleship, you’d know the answer right away. It's a game most of us played when we bored of television in the winter and the unleashing of a few cannonballs let off some pent-up energy. Do you remember? There we sat, cross-legged at our boards, trying to outwit our opponent, calling out coordinates behind a hidden board. 

“B5!” I’d yell out, hoping for a hit.

“Miss!” Came the reply. Then, “E3!”

“Rats! Hit!” And on and on it went until someone sunk a ship or perhaps the last ship to end the sea faring conflict, the game of Battleship.

Was it luck or skill when hit an enemy ship?

Let’s return for a moment to the two captains who are battling it out on either side of their boards, taking turns firing one shot after another from behind the helm of a hidden board, each calling out points on the “grid” ocean where their ships have been hidden. One captain is named Lucky Pete. He has one eye, the other having been lost to shrapnel. His enemy is a seaworthy opponent, Captain Truly Serious.

In the beginning both captains have an equal chance of tasting victory because neither knows anything about the placement of the other’s ships. However, here is where two very different attitudes may come into play. While Lucky calls out grid numbers, gambling for a hit, Truly Serious is taking into account his last shot and carefully adjusting his aim. Lucky is shooting in dark, depending on blind luck, so to speak, while his opponent employs a far more strategic approach. As the battle ensues, Truly Serious cannons become more accurate at producing hits. Furthermore, his fleet remains safe from random reports from the enemy.

Same boards, same number of ships, Yet Truly is clearly winning the battle by relying on his knowledge and maximizing his efforts on each shot. Lucky, on the other hand, continues to flounder and sadly his last ship sinks below the surface to Davy Jones locker.

We could easily make a case for having a very similar mapped-out design as opposed to the happy-go-lucky approach. However, at some point, we might come to the realization that our faith requires the same kind of difficult mental work that Truly Serious used – planning, thinking, and study. It requires the rearranging of some thoughts, and giving up on some coordinates that are not working out. It requires taking some responsibility for our decisions, the spiritual ones as well, as we pay attention to the hits and misses in our personal battles. We would eventually find out it is actually far more difficult, more unreliable, to guess at life’s coordinates, hoping an imaginary cosmic force will take over and land us a hit on an unknown target.

Although the game of Battleship does not mimic the high stakes of real life, and sometimes as ship captains we may feel we have lost our entire fleet, the game does illustrate the fine line between getting a lucky break, and the notion that we have some control over our own destiny. Whether we choose to use our most human gift, the one involving our spiritual nature, is up to us. 

In her book America the Beautiful, Blythe Roberson talks about the peace she finds in her interaction with nature, which she describes as the delicate interwoven relationships between every living thing on the planet, as we navigate our destiny…

“I don’t believe in heaven,” she writes, “but I believe that after we die, if we’re lucky and our family remembers our request not to be embalmed or cremated…our body continues on through those interwoven relationships, feeding a worm, or a mushroom or a tree…”

And what if we are not so lucky? What if the family member we are depending on is like Captain Lucky, that same ship captain who threw caution to the wind and used coordinates he pulled out of thin air? Perhaps it might behoove us to not to rely on him, but to tap into a strength beyond what we could muster by simply guessing. 

There it is. The word that stumps us. Beyond.

Of the accounts I have read from those who have seen heaven and returned, I have never heard of one person who said they felt as if they were being recycled back to nature. There is no mention of having spoken to a worm, nor of anyone who developed a relationship with a mushroom after they died. Instead, the accounts I have read describe a place of intense light, of overwhelming love, of well-being and peace, and often, the person recounts their near-death experience with unbelievable accuracy. Everything is seen as having a purpose; luck is not mentioned as having played a part, and for that matter, there is no mention of worms either. For this person, believing, is where living begins, and blind luck – firing shots in the dark at a mysterious target – is no longer an option.

Which kind of captain are we seeking? If we are seeking answers, it is by faith that we move forward and not by a string of last-ditch efforts, coordinates that we call out in panic in the heat of battle. Although it may seem simplistic, almost child’s play, I see Captain Lucky standing at the helm in our board game as he watches his fleet destroyed and be swallowed into the drink, wondering how he could have been so soundly defeated. It is too late now for surrender, as he will soon be down amongst the sea worms, being recycled back to nature, before he can acknowledge his defeat. That chance has come and gone.

Taking a Knee at Midfield

There is a special category of card I get every year. It’s the type whose missives are packed with a year’s worth of information and a picture all-in-one. Included in these twelve-month sum-ups are trips, surgeries, house remodeling projects, and usually, how the year went for their family pet as well. Sometimes, it is difficult to tell which figure in the photo is the animal or…is it a family member that just needs a bath and a good shave? In one card I received, there was tall, narrowness, a shadow of a figure that I thought was the bearded father, but who, upon closer examination, was an Irish wolfhound. The skinny dog was squashed between two college sons, beer mugs in hand and home for the holidays, who looked like they had not changed their clothes in a month. Below that there was a description of how the dog had lost its sight in one eye over the course of the year, and now, sadly, bumped into walls as it walked. This condition really seemed more descriptive of the two returning sons, who seemed barely able to stand upright for the Christmas Family photo.

While all of this is part of the unexpected fun we enjoy around the holidays, and God knows we all need our share of jolly holly-ness, some of the greeting cards I receive are apparently printed on home printers using an inferior ink that does not hold up so well in the mail, whose letters are smeared and blotty. These cards make me question the family’s integrity as they arrive with only a few words left that are legible – with questionable phrases like, “probably will be released in a couple of months,” or “due to mechanical failure after takeoff.”

On one card, in explaining the events of their last year on their card, the mother made this comment about their pet snake, a ten-foot boa constrictor named Sly, “who escaped from its cage and unfortunately could not be found in time for the Christmas family photo.” That might have gone over as just a passing comment except there were two toddlers in the picture. Even that could have gone unnoticed, but the father had handwritten this interesting tidbit of information beneath his two children: “Don’t worry friends! When our snake gets hungry enough, it’ll find us.”

Gulp.

I’m always taken aback by those cards that are really disguised as a business proposition. This year, I received a card from a heating and air company who I had asked for quote from twenty-five years ago.  The photo was of a fine-looking family with twelve, (twelve!) children, all dressed cleverly in somewhat grimy, dust covered coveralls holding typical furnace tools, wrenches, filters and the like. The father was holding some sort of rescue dog, an attempt, I think, to give some normalcy to the photo. I took out my magnifying glass, because I do that sort of thing, and upon closer inspection, saw that the dog was wearing a knitted sweater bearing the furnace company’s logo, “Bringing on the Heat,” as slogan I thought entirely inappropriate for a dog, or for a family of twelve.

One year, I tried my hand at one of these all-inclusive cards, except I thought I’d be clever and do a kind of Saturday Night Live version, thinking that the readers would see my parody as humorous or satirical or ironic or possible even genius. I didn’t hear back from any of the people I sent it to – for several years actually – except my neighbor across the street who thought I needed to have my head examined, and suggested I seek medical attention in the New Year, which would be in March since most of the medical community in this area goes to Florida for the winter. Just to be on the safe side, I made that appointment as suggested however, included my medical results in the greeting card I sent out the next year at Christmas, with a QR code that allowed you scroll through the MyChart whose password I can never remember.

I thought I’d learned my lesson after sending that card out and made a private vow to go into the new year being less tacky, perhaps even more classy in my outward manner, give my character some major or minor tweaking, leave out some of the cynicism and so on. I started off by buying some tickets to an NFL game and took my family up to Indianapolis to see the Colts play the Tennessee Titans, which was great fun. It was a couple of days before Christmas and accordingly, the football game was charged with skits and entertaining attempts at audience participation with hardly a dull moment with cannons firing off confetti, or Colts cheerleaders doing flips and cartwheels as they stampeded down the sidelines.

There were some sixty thousand people in the stadium, yet everyone was behaving, enjoying the Colts trouncing the Titans. Laughter was effervescing from every corner. My grandson and I had on ridiculous hats and tried to get on national television by doing some form of the “Gritty,” –all of which was adding up to a memorable outing by anyone’s standards. Of course, on one end of the field, a mammoth TV screen kept a running show of its own going, prompts that told us when to cheer, replays of touchdowns with fireworks, and interviews with the players. I had almost settled into my seat for along winter’s nap, popcorn in hand, feeling that life was complete and that I had reached some imaginary pinnacle in Lucas Stadium, when the screen began showing hilarious pictures of awkward family photos at Christmas time.

We’ve all seen these, of course, they are the same group of pictures we get every year from our friends on the cards I was talking about earlier. One family, for example had about forty- five family members, who were all laying on top of each other, and who had decided to place all the women on the bottom in a sort of epic failed attempt to separate the two sexes. Then, a few pictures later a photo appeared on the big screen of a family whose members had climbed a thousand-foot Ponderosa pine and were standing on branches at various altitudes, with smiles that looked like they might never see each other again.

Still, I was jazzed and laughing like a hyena on a caffeine high until a picture flashed up on the screen of a family, each one dressed in identical striped pajamas. In fact, there were so many stripes flashing across the screen that it had the effect of making everyone slightly  dizzy while looking at the mesmerizing pattern of ridiculous red and green crisscrossing lines. In fact, most of the stadium audience were forced to turn away from the optics just to give their eyes a rest, which created a moment of unusual silence. It was only for a split second, but it was just long enough to give my grandson time to yell out, “Hey, those are OUR pajamas!”

Which was true. Those very pajamas had succeeded in quieting sixty thousand fans, most of whom were looking at us now and trying to figure out how one family could be so unbelievable insensitive to their own appearance.

As I sat trying to make myself as small as possible, putting my jacket over my head and shushing my grandson, I felt the true nature of our family had been revealed to the entire NFL audience in attendance. At the same time, I could feel the chemistry in my body reduced to sub-atomic particles and knew some of the distinctive chromosomes of our family were being filtered out and destroyed, ones like the DNA that gives me my double chin from my great, great grandfather, and the manner in which I mispronounce our first president as Worshington instead of Washington.

If it were not for the final image of the game, a touching moment when the players gathered at midfield to pray, I might have branded myself as part of a family whose pj’s agitated an entire stadium audience at a nationally televised football game. However, a circle of football giants each took a knee, held hands and began praying audibly. I heard God come into the middle of them and speak using words like family, and fellowship, sportsmanship, and love and I heard the word Emanual. Men took off their helmets who, only moments before had been on different teams and had knocked each other down and some, even penalized for unsportsmanlike conduct.

Their heads were bowed and they were all praying and recognizing the blessing that God’s son brought to us by the birth of his son on Christmas. I heard them praying for those who didn’t know about Jesus, and for them to take a knee and ask for Him to come into their hearts today. The circle of players were putting all of their brilliant passes and interceptions and their runs and endzone dances aside, and putting on a different uniform, one of humility, and there was nothing – nothing – awkward about it.

Fifteen Minutes of Pancake Fame

Allow me to cut straight to the chase. I’m a breakfast person, through and through. My stomach makes noises only heard on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, so I couldn’t imagine starting my day without digging into the most important meal: breakfast. I know a lot of people who just can’t do breakfast, and I wonder why their bodily organs haven’t walked out on the job or given their owner a pink slip. On the rare occasion I do skip that meal, I face the consequences of a grumbling stomach that, when translated to English, sounds like this:

“Excuse me, EXCUSE ME! We need some help down here! A little sustenance please! It’s a team effort, you know and that includes you up there, Mister-lounge-around-the-house-like-you-got-all-day. Let’s get something down the pie hole stat, for crying out loud!”

In the background I begin to feel the vibrations off my esophageal passage as other major organs begins to pipe in:

“Breakfast, Breakfast, give us something that will last! Breakfast, Breakfast! All we got is fumes and gas!” (over and over til fading out…).

While I can drink the coffee and do the slow wake-up in the pajamas, look under the tree at all of the stash, throw open the shutters and throw out the trash, if I don’t eat something pretty quick after rising, it’s either because I’m in a coma or someone stole our refrigerator in the middle of the night. And since my wife does not eat breakfast unless it’s lunchtime, which is to say, she never eats breakfast, I fend for myself, diving into various oatmeal concoctions or an omelet, calming down the raucous crowd down along the beltline. Then it’s time to get out and let the honey have her kitchen back.

However, there is one breakfast every year that is sacrosanct in my family, one requiring mandatory attendance, and that’s the one on Christmas morning where I personally oversee the cooking of giant, platter size pancakes. Here is where I truly shine, an opportunity to prove that my skill set goes beyond the remote control and into the realm of the classic breakfast cake, and showcasing my cooking skills to the entire Bender clan.  Like Punxsutawny Phil on Ground Hogs Day, my pancakes emerge from the griddle on Christmas morning exuding a golden deliciousness and usher in the festive atmosphere with a declaration that Christmas is alive and well. Not only will those in attendance soon be slathering on the butter and syrup but they can put their name in the hat for a personal invitation to the annual Global Warming Convention for the Advancement of Pancakes, held every year at our house, whose keynote speaker is me.  

I’m not saying that my pancakes are renowned for their unique character and tasty consistency. Nor would I propose that my neighbors line up at sunrise, hoping for a deal-breaking give-away like a pancake version of Black Friday. I’m only stating what has reached near mythic proportions here in the Blunder enclave, the production of a griddlecake so yummy it practically cries to be in a food class all by itself.

Nonetheless, since my reputation has grown over the years, I get a bit of stage fright now, a bit wobbly at the knees, as the temperaments and mood of the morning falls on the success or failure of pancake making skills. I won’t make up an acronym for that feeling because it would not be appropriate but suffice to say that a great batch coming off the griddle can either lift the camaraderie and fellowship to delectable new heights or it can take on the frightening face of Jack Nicolson in The Shining,  a domestic nightmare that turns out flatter than a…well…yea….

But let’s be honest here. It's pretty hard to mess up pancakes and that is one of the reasons why my family gives me full authority over the kitchen for twelve minutes each year. And really that’s fair, because pancakes aren’t complicated – most of what you need comes already prepared in a container – add an egg, some milk and there you go, a gleaming hubcap on a plate with some serious mettle, hold the skid marks please.

But wait. We’ve forgotten one thing, one ingredient, that adds a special level of sophistication to the mix. That would be me, the cook, a variable soul who is afflicted with an overactive imagination, driven by random incongruities such as phases of the moon or the sudden molting exoskeleton of a hermit crab. Then, the recipe for pancakes takes an odd turn, as I throw out all reason and logic and lean solely on inspiration to design a pancake no one has ever seen before, a completely original slapjack. Understand, I’m used to dealing with my muse, that voice that tells me to go off the rails. Sometimes it’s more noticeable than other times, but it’s always there on the surface, an affliction kind of like a birthmark.

“What’s that on your skin?” someone might remark as I go off the grid.

“Oh,” I reply, “that’s just a birthmark. I’ve had it since I was a kid.”

“Interesting, I never noticed that mark at all,” the observer might say, looking rather intently at my arm, “If you look at the right angle,” they add, “it looks a little like the profile of Winston Churchill.”

“Hadn’t heard that one before,” I answer, “but thank you, I guess. Yes, that’s mine. It’s different, for sure. I’ve been told it means I was kissed by an angel, but man, she sure was a sloppy kisser…not something I’ve discussed with my wife, but anyway…”

And so it goes with my creativity. The mark is there, it’s part of me, and part of everything I do, including making those now legendary Christmas pancakes. As a result, my imagination rises to the surface as I mix the pancake batter, sprinkling in sunflower seeds and cranberries and spraying hazelnut whip cream to the final stack. While others who try to make pancakes access the left side of their cerebral cortex, I’m at the griddle with the right side of mine, producing new and different pancakes every year, mixing my batter with chutney or coconut and not to be forgotten…my very favorite… a virtual diabetic nightmare, peppermint Hershey kisses and Nabisco Fig Newtons.

And let’s get something straight right here and now. When I use the word “mix,” I am using the word very loosely when it comes to pancakes. In fact, I looked up the word “mix,” and did not find one synonym that I felt gave my creations the proper holiday flare, not one. I saw words like blend, mingle, stir, jumble and merge, but all of them sounded more like the seasonal parties I went to when I was single, the mingles where my alone-ness got mixed up with other single people’s alone-ness. Flapjacks aren’t meant to be singled out for Pete’s sakes, they are meant to be part of a community of other pancakes, so I searched for better suited word.

And I discovered these: fuse, join, unite and amalgamate. Do they even sound like anything having to do with pancakes? No, they don’t. They sounded like an episode of The Apprentice, which meant that I would have to join a consortium of small businesses, get an audience with Shark Tank and have a board of directors. No, I thought, there will be no amalgamation going on with my Christmas morning pancakes.

Finally, in one last attempt I found these synonyms for the word mix: meld, mesh and blunge, all of which I do anyway right before I brush my teeth and go to bed at night, which falls into the category of a little more information than you need right now.

So no, and No! with a capitol N. Inventing the unique pancake on Christmas morning demanded a new kind of all-encompassing word, a word that would both represent the larger global picture of pancakes, but also a word that would leave enough room for a spatula to slide in and take over, flip the pancake narrative, and make it a sort of one of a kind signature experience for my family so that Christmas breakfast would no longer be just the standard for our household, but more of a destination pancake, a once in a lifetime getaway that could never be ignored or forgotten.

The word I came up with is panoramacakes.

Yes, from now on I would be making the quintessential pancake times two, the panoramacake, a noun describing the full range of what is possible from a global perspective regarding everything pancakey. This would mean I could not only add anything I darn well please to the batter landscape but also sprinkle in that essential ingredient, the one that flips a regular pancake over onto its new side, revealing a panoramic vision for peace and goodwil, for all men.

Thus, as I add a bit of eggnog to the batter, I envision a small town in Germany where a plaid family gathers around the table, singing “Alles Gesundheit,” possibly sneezing, before sitting down to a towering stack of panoramacakes.  Then, as we travel across the globe, we see Australian children on a Christmas Walk-about, who have paused to sit down in the oppressive outback heat, take their daily vitamins with kangaroo extract, and eat a panoramacake with butter made from the milk of a wallaby. We begin to see the whole international picture now, how pancakes can be a unifying force on this special day, Christmas. Even in the barren and remoteness of Siberia, an area that has been purposely omitted from Google maps, a band of Russian herdsman who have been subsisting on nothing but fur and Yak hooves, sit huddled around a fire and make one mammoth panoramacake the size of Moscow and eat it from the outside in, and sip Vodka from their boots.

It's a beautiful picture isn’t it? One large, sweeping, round pancake, the panoramacake, an intercontinental experience that fills the griddle, starts to bubble on top, then rises into the morning air as it flips and rotates in silence like the earth does on Christmas morning, then falls to greet every member of the human race in every kitchen across the globe.

You say it’s just breakfast, that I really shouldn‘t be making such a big deal out of it, but now as you take your first bite, this panoramacake has expanded to the edges of your plate, and the syrup is running off the edge of your table onto the carpeting, across the Strait of Magellan and the Chwynoafx Peninsula in China, into the nickel mines of Sudbury to the Halls of Montezuma. Good will has amalgamated into that humble breakfast cake made with a little flour and a couple of free-range eggs, perhaps a few blueberries or boysenberries, and butter from a Yak if you are so inclined, syrup of course made from dried daisies, crumbled Oreo cookies and maybe a dash of ground sesame seeds and a Fig Newton with nutmeg or even turmeric…

Yuletide Aisle Dis-Ease

The holiday season is creeping up on us like the second hand in a scary movie. No one hears the ticking sound until the camera zeroes in on the gothic metal clock on the wall and the last few seconds tick off in slow motion. Will we make it out of the holiday Twilight Zone before the clock strikes twelve?

I can answer that with one word, Jane. NO. We won’t make it. We will reschedule our schedules and retime our timing until we are exhausted from rearranging our arrangements. We’ll convince ourselves we can go about our regular business and add three extra layers of life on top of everything else and still make our self-imposed deadlines. It won’t be easy, and it won’t look pretty, but we will succeed, at some point, in overdosing on obligations, guilt, and sugar plums dancing in our heads.

I have one piece of advice about the holidays to share before you get revved up with your seven swans a-swimming, and before you realize that there is a month-long holiday season that is beginning to hover ominously. If you heed my advice, you may make it through this month with some sanity, and it pertains to a little-known but often felt ailment called Yuletide Aisle Dis-Ease. This is an affliction you won’t be able to find in any medical book, a condition that has an especially strong presence when you are running in and out of stores and crossing off items on your shopping list.

Here is the set-up. You’ve made a quick dash into the grocery to pick up some banana nut bread for a coffee breakfast you volunteered for. That big scary second hand on the Hitchclock  is ticking, TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK (like that), in your head because your day has already been pressure packed with a to-do list a mile long. You enter the store, grab a cart and hose it down with antiseptic lotion, round the corner and sideswipe someone you haven’t seen in at least ten years.

Jane, I can tell you in one word if this is going to end well. NO.

The problem here is timing. When you run into an old friend at the beginning of your race though the store, it is like trying to stop for a yield sign. You were prepared to yield, but not to stop. In fact, you can’t stop. The yield sign isn’t meant for stopping and neither are grocery stores. But all injuries aside from the near cart pile-up, you exchange low impact hugs as well as buckets of inessential information. Both of you are talking simultaneously, as if you both just stepped out of an airplane together and have only 42 death defying seconds to get every word out.

This is when you must stop, grab a breath, and get a grip on yourself. You need a strategy. You must face the reality that you are going to run into this same person in almost every aisle after you say your goodbyes, because they are on the same holiday grocery aisle skydiving freefall as you are. Like you, they are also running late, feeling pressured, and will be trying to beat you to the next aisle so they don’t have to run into you again and have to think of a new way to say the things that were already said when you both stood catching up on the last decade of relational silence three minutes ago.

The ground is coming up fast on this fall. Jane, this is very dangerous territory, so breathe, get a grip on yourself, think ahead and follow this critical rule.

 Don’t ever use up your best goodbye in Aisle One.

You are going to need those witty sound bites again in the next aisle. Remember: Every aisle in that store holds the potential of another possible encounter with this same person, which will be even more conversationally awkward if you already used up your best goodbye. For example, don’t say: “Goodbye. It was great to see you. Let’s have coffee sometime when things slow down. I’ll text you my number. Ok, now. Take Care. Yes, love you too! Have a great holiday! Bye!”

Instead, just say, “See ya in the next aisle,” and peel out.

If you don’t, everything from this point on just gets worse. If you run into them again, which you will, you’ll be picking out something embarrassing like a tube of head lice shampoo, or hemorrhoidal cream. They won’t be able to talk about that of course, and since you already talked about everything under the sun in Aisle Three, their only recourse is to look down at their shoes and shuffle their feet around in circles as if they lost something down there. What other options do they have?

That’s the MOMENT! That moment is when you know you have Yuletide Aisle Dis-Ease, and there isn’t anything you can do about it. It’s the lockjaw of social encounters. You already have used up your best goodbye. You have shown your sweet holiday side. You’ve used up any reserves of Christmas spirit, all on this one person. Your shopping trip is now stuck in an irretrievable time warp right before your eyes. There is one second left on the Hitchclock. In your head you are thinking of abandoning your cart right there in Aisle Ten and getting your banana bread tomorrow. And you ARE wishing you had head lice instead of this Aisle Dis-Ease.

Say yes to planning ahead! YES! Save those nimble goodbyes until Aisle 4 or 5. Save them! Have a few in your pocket ready like the pull chord on a parachute. They will soften your fall during this holiday season when life gets insanely busy and long-lost friends who said they’d call but never did pop up suddenly like cardboard cutouts of Buddy the Elf. And when they do, don’t say “Son of a Nutcracker! Is that you?”

That’s the one you save for the deli section.

And the Toys Were Hung by the Chimney with Care

With all the anticipation of Christmas, it’s impossible to walk through the excitement without some kind of playfulness, and nothing but nothing says playfulness on Christmas morning like presents. As a kid I got so excited about what was under the Christmas tree that my dad had to medicate me before bedtime with a baby aspirin, which he told me would put me right to sleep. I didn’t want to miss anything during the night in case Santa dropped by, so I slipped the little pink pill to our toy poodle, Coco, who weighed in at about 9 ounces. After eating the pill, Coco wandered down the hallway half asleep to the kitchen where she snuggled into a box of baking supplies and slept like a dog, which she was.

When she woke the next morning and made her wobbly entrance into the living room where we had gathered to open our presents, flour and baking soda fell around her like a scenic snowstorm. For a moment, I thought that maybe my pill had killed our poodle, and that she had died and gone to heaven where she was cleansed and returned as a celestial replica of our former pet. My mom began humming “Angels We Have Heard On High,” and Coco, embarrassed by her new powdery white coat came towards me bearing its toy poodle canines. As she approached, I noticed a strong hint of garlic in the yuletide atmosphere and felt the gaiety of the morning with kids in their pajamas and my dad with his scrimshaw pipe, sadly, get sucked right out of the room.

Thus, as with our family, we are reminded that Christmastime and the sensitive spirit of holiday cheer can change on a dime. We think we are navigating the most precious holiday of the year with the newborn Jesus ushering in new hope. We think we are building another layer of memories, tightening up our relationships, but our get-togethers are not always that straight forward and linear. All it takes is just one person or one incident to throw what should be a predictable line of behaviors into a downward and tragic spiral.

Shortly after hosing down the baking residue from our poodle, our family returned to the business in our living room, complete with twinkling lights and a perpetual nutmeg candle that had been burning every Christmas morning since Armistice Day in 1918. Taking their prominent places in the room were the two staples you could see in all our family photos, a Sears Silvertone record player, and a giant fireplace. The fireplace was built on a brick harth, which allowed us to sit close to it and let the heat penetrate us to the bone. As such it became a kind of a throne, where my mother could insist on drinking her morning coffee without interruption of any kind. Understand that watching her drink coffee for an hour on Christmas morning was pure torture for us kids and rivalled the pain of having our fingernails removed by a pair of plyers. While mom listened to the Silvertone, hot mug in hand, soaking up the heat, we were pumped to open anything we could get our hands on, or what was left of them, when given the go ahead.

I led off on Christmas morning by tearing into an unusually large box to reveal a wooden table of sorts with a lot of tiny bowling pins. This was Skittles, a game played by any number of people involving the winding of a top that spun out into various compartments to knock over standing wooden miniature pins. The farther the top spun into the table, the more pins were knocked over and the higher your score. As I busied myself winding up the top to send it careening and banging off walls my brother Gary had opened his first present, an entire US ARMY base. It came complete with sandbag walls, artillery, lookout nests, several tanks and a megaphone for him to yell out orders during the heat of a military engagement.  I believe there were some four thousand army men in all in Gary’s kit which was more than the entire standing army of the Netherlands at the time.  

By definition, these two presents, the Skittles game and the US ARMY base, supplied my brother and I with enough vocation for the entire next year, given our rather vivid imaginations and our deep-rooted desire to dismantle something when we were in the same room together.

What is important to keep in mind here is that when a kid gets present, whether it is at Christmas time or not, the toy is rarely used the way it was intended. That is because toys are invented by somewhat unbalanced people who had quirky childhoods and relied on something they made to escape the poorly lit recesses of their reality. Where you or I would find a stick on the ground, break it, then drop it back on the ground, toy inventors take the same stick and make it into a magic wand, or an antenna that can pick up conversations in a Russian submarine passing within feet of the border of Norway.

Toys change when they fall in the hands of a kid also because kids think differently. My brother and I were no exceptions. We quickly bored of the intended use of the Skittles game as we understood it, and the army base as well, ditching the directions and opting instead to combine the two toys into one super-toy.  Through a series of unnatural thinking patterns, we realized that the tops from the Skittles, if set spinning around on the living room floor instead of inside their box, could spin wildly around unchecked and mole over huge swaths of army men. I believe now looking back that on a small scale, we had invented the first weapon of mass destruction, a remarkable feat considering our age and that it was Christmas morning.

What happened then can be construed as either a stroke of genius or a miserable lack of parenting skills in our family unit. In either case, it seemed to my brother Gary that the point of the new game should be to figure out a way that the US ARMY soldiers could win every time. I had already discovered that a “V” shape in the leg of a wrought iron chair allowed me to set up the Skittles top in much the same way I did in the board game, so that I could yank the string and send the top spinning out directly across the living room floor. The problem was how to ensure that it knocked over just the enemy soldiers, which would mean the US ARMY would win every time.

“That is the way the Geneva Convention works,” Gary said. “I saw it on TV last Thursday on a Man from U.N.C.L.E. when Illya Kuryakin was in Moscow. You gotta run everything through the Geneva convention when it comes to war.”

I might have argued the point, in spite of the international consequences, but sitting on the brick hearth by the roaring fire had given me a sudden inspiration. If we took advantage of the fire and melted the army men together as one big military mass too large to be knocked over by a Skittles top, our boys in uniform would take on a supernatural power. As we began stacking the soldiers in a pile to melt, I remember Gary and I argues about which soldiers should pull rank and be on the top, whether it should be the guys throwing the hand grenades or the bazooka launchers, but in the end they all were thrown into the heap together, save a couple of army medics for emergency purposes.

I remember being mesmerized, as I watched details in the uniforms disappear, like the ammunition belts and walkie talkies, which melted and drip off. Soldiers who were saluting could no longer hold up their arms at 400 degrees Fahrenheit, and men who were carrying gear buckled under the weight, and tipped backwards until their legs gave out and joined the giant military puddle and a line of plastic smoke. That smoke, which contained chemicals not even allowed in modern warfare, began to permeate the room as the pile of two thousand soldiers became one. The smoke did not rise however, as Gary had planned, but sank down to floor level, liquid-like, as if trying to escape the wrath of my parents, if that could even be done, and began to spread out along the floor into other rooms.

The aroma of the nutmeg candle, which had been burning since 1918, could no longer be detected. There was a threat of the Armistice being revoked because of our country’s attempt to use a lethal plastic toy gas. As Gary had predicted, when these matters are not cleared under the auspices of the Geneva Convention, punishment of the noncompliant country, in this case us, would fall to the commanding officer, who in this case was my father. After he evacuated the room and cleared the air with an industrial size box fan, my brother and I spent the rest of Christmas morning peeling and scraping up thin lines of melted green plastic that had poured into the lines of brick mortar and solidified.

It was a tragic day all the way around, for everyone, that is, except my sister. She had opened her presents and played with them appropriately, and hadn’t tried anything fancy, and apparently hadn’t violated any international peace keeping efforts either. She had instead begun a rehabilitating all the leftover enemy soldiers destined to be run over by a Skittle top and she had instead begun carefully dressing each one of them in her new baby-doll clothes.

By contrast, we sat sweating by the fireplace, gouging out long lines of smelly plastic that imbedded with heads and hands, half melted and protruding while the enemy soldiers who had been earmarked to be creamed by a runaway Skittles’ top, were reinvented as a dainty and precious army of miniature baby dolls. Their identities had changed too, and there was nothing Gary or I could do about it. We heard them being called sweet, lovely names by my sister that made us cringe, names like Karen and Robin, and Kimberly and Dottie, and they became new toys like all new toys do at Christmas.

What You Bring to the Table This Thanksgiving

As family members buzz across the country to join their relatives and our country grinds to a crawl with Thanksgiving festivities, I’ve been asking people what long-standing traditions they practice as they gather around the table, perhaps something that had been passed down generation to generation and has now become part of their family rituals. One friend of mine told me that every year her family makes homemade noodles together and then puts them on top of their mashed potatoes at mealtime. I could make an argument for placing those two items in separate areas on my plate, but that is what defines tradition in their family. It’s part of this uniquely American gala called Thanksgiving, a time to rekindle what brings our nearest and dearest closer together, and in one case that means realizing that if noodles and mashed potatoes can get along on a plate for a couple of hours, everyone else can too. But also, I think it’s a time to exhibiting our gratefulness by revisiting our best table manners as we sit across from each other, thankful for all the blessings that have come our way in the past year.

If you were taking a course on table manners, and there was a final exam, it would be held on this holiday, Thanksgiving Day. While pencil and paper would not be present, passing the course would depend not on how well you crammed the night before, but how well you included the basic social graces your parents taught you, those simple rules of etiquette that score a lot of points on the final report at dinnertime. I won’t say I flunked the manners course as I was growing up, but my score wasn’t anything to brag about either.

One year, my brother and I decided to stage a contest at the table. We thought it would be fun to create volcanoes with our mashed potatoes, fill them up with gravy, carefully constructing a system of channels that allow the gravy to slowly leak out like lava onto the villages we had constructed with our other food. This would of course fall into the category of playing with our food, but we thought it was worth the risk to watch a natural disaster unfold on our dinner plate.  As our game progressed and the gravy ran off into the landscape of our meal, the winner, whose volcanic ash reached the edge first and would yell out, “Please evacuate immediately! Grab your children and run for your lives!”

That attempt at establishing a yearly Bender volcano tradition died a quick death, followed by a moment of silence, and the loss of our TV privileges for the rest of our lives or until we turned twelve, whichever came first.

All seriousness aside, I was fortunate as a kid to have a grandmother living with us, and she loved to cook year-round, but especially at Thanksgiving. In fact, I still have all of her newspaper clippings and hand-written recipe cards stored in a huge plastic box for every kind of dish under the sun, most of which included a couple of sticks of butter in the list of ingredients. And as if adding a couple of pounds of butter weren’t enough, it was common practice at our table to have more butter readily available on the table and a chunk of it on your plate as backup in case you experienced a butter-low and bottomed out during the meal. Under those circumstances, and given what we know now about cholesterol, I don’t know how my grandmother lived to be ninety-four. There is some evidence that she didn’t, but actually died several times before from butter overdoses, once at 37 and once at 72, but was revived both times using a now antiquated technique referred to as marginal compressions.

Obviously, our family threw out the healthy eating rulebook when Thanksgiving rolled around and while it sounds cheesy, I believe our parents balanced out all that thick cooking with equal amounts of laughter and love, and naturally, large portions of manners. The reminders to behave at the table were often summed up in old-fashioned sayings, sayings that made little sense to me at the time, such as “If you wear a hat at the table, you’ll die in a stable.” Every time I heard that, I visualized a horrible accident where I fell off a haystack in a horse stable and impaled myself on a pitchfork, only to find myself looking up at my grandmother, who simply looked down at me and said, “I tried to tell you but you had to learn the hard way, didn’t you?”

Respectfully, many of those old rules for civility still hold court with my family today as we sit down for the meal and let those etiquette tips whisper in our ears.  And notice I didn’t say “plopped down for the meal.”  It seems that current tradition supports the notion of landing on your dinner seat as if tossed from an airplane, which would fall into the category of skydiving, not table manners. In order of succession, we were not allowed to sit down at all until my father, the breadwinner, was seated and after that, the women. That sitting order is a lost art now, falling by the wayside into a set of forgotten mores that made eating a civilized activity, where knives, for instance, were balanced across the back of the plate after each use, and not laid back down on the placemat between bites.

While a more rickety construction of cultural changes have bent many of the old rules on table decorum, I’m now glad for the mandatory class I enrolled in every time I came to the table and waited before taking my first bite until my father picked up his silverware. While I did not always adhere to all of the regulations, good manners created a language of gratefulness and were a silent way of recognizing all the goodness that was laid out before us. It meant that civility would rule, meaning that no one would have the power to turn the dinner gathering into some kind of big-time wrestling match where etiquette was thrown clear of the ring for a cheap laugh.

As I was on the receiving end of the teaching, mealtime could at times seem very stiff and formal, a lot of hoopla over nothing. Both my mother and father did a lot of correcting and redirecting that ultimately developed an appreciation in me for what it takes to bring a meal to the table. While I didn’t like being told nine times to get my elbows off the table, chew with my mouth closed, and put my napkin on my lap, over time I began to understand that if someone was taking time to do the grocery shopping, prepare the food and present it, the very least I could do was to bring my best manners to the table and leave any slovenly habits I’d developed somewhere else.

Perhaps you are part of a Thanksgiving meal that looks more like a Viking reunion – where licking your fingers is normal, and huge bites of turkey are stabbed as if it the turkey was still alive. Perhaps the blessing at your home, if said at all, sounds like “Good food, good meat, good God, let’s eat.” However, by the time the sweat equity of cooking had poured itself into the marathon of overnight baking and broiling it was expected that we kids would try a bite of each type of food even if we didn’t like it, and not expect any seconds on our favorite dish until everyone had their first helping.

Did I like being corrected? No, but I see the pay off now as I mourn the loss of decency, replaced by people on their phones, reaching across the table for more food, and chasing their food around their plate with a knife as if it were dirt on a construction site. It makes me wonder how digestible their actions are when the meal is over and they go out into the world.

Manners, when we decide to bring them to the table, become the social glue that holds those tasty Thanksgiving casseroles together and demonstrate our gratefulness, good fortune and good bounty. As we lay our napkins on our laps and wait our turn for the favorite dish to come around the table, we avoid mocking the hard work that went into all the preparations. No doubt, you’ll get enough food this Thanksgiving, but your social graces and good manners will instill a silent but powerful message to those seated next to you of what thankfulness looks like and perhaps even establish some new traditions that will last longer than just one meal.

And one more thing…I would love to hear what table manner your parents instilled in you that held you in good stead as a grown-up. Send those gems to me and I’ll share them with my listeners next week on Knee Deep. There are some funny ones out there, and some that are written in stone, but regardless, send me the details! Until then, Happy Thanksgiving to you, my gracious fans, and I promise you this year, I’m going to refrain from making that mashed potato volcano. I don’t want to have to evacuate our family when the gravy spills over and overtakes the sweet potatoes.

Either Way You Slice It: Part Two

I had waited an entire day at Annie’s Brickyard Truckstop Diner, waiting for a call from a mechanic I never met at a garage I never heard of. There is nothing like doing nothing that will make you mind wander, and mine had been wandering plenty.

Whatever the mechanic was going to tell me wasn’t going to be good – I knew that for sure, but if he could patch up enough to get me across four states and home, I could live with whatever he told me. Until then, all I could do was wait, eat my breakfast, and watch semis roll in and out, dragging their dirt and gas fumes behind them. During the last day at the diner, I had read everything that hung on the walls, twice. In the narrow hall back by the restrooms, I had scoured hand-written notes on the bulletin board and read local notices about foreclosures, and OSHA regulations. Stapled along the edges I read notes like these: “Babysitter wanted, must have driver’s license,” or “Maytag washer, rusty but works great.” On and on they went, layers of them, some yellowed and illegible.  

I was stuck in Checker Saddle – not even a town really – because of an overheating radiator and who knows what other headaches. No one knew me, and I had little to show for my joy ride across the country that was supposed to open the throttle on a long-distance relationship. It didn’t and I was stuck with this view of Annie’s parking lot, and smelling clouds of dust and oily asphalt, staring at a plate of pumpkin pancakes with pumpkin flavored syrup.

The pay phone rang, and my waitress grabbed it, balancing her tray of eggs.

“Anybody here got a pick-up being worked on?” She said, holding the phone out like a statue.

“That’s me,” I said, and got up to zig zag between tables to grab the phone.

“Hey Bud,” came the mechanic’s voice, “got your truck ready, but all I could do… really… is put Band-aids on it. I’ll drive it over and we can talk about what works.”

“Ok,” I managed, but I didn’t really want to hear it.  And did he say, “what works?”

That didn’t sound good, I thought, like my truck was dying a slow death. I already knew the tires were bald, the fanbelt was worn, and the tailpipe was held on by a bungee cord. The only thing I knew that did work was the color, a razor blue that couldn’t be ignored.  I stood in the parking lot, listening to the mechanic describe my truck on its last leg – the rebuilt carburetor and a battery that wouldn’t hold a charge – “enough to get you down the road,” the mechanic said, but no guarantees.

I handed him some cash and climbed in, adjusting the wing mirror.

“Oh! And don’t go over fifty!” It was the last thing I heard and I managed a wave, and glanced at the Brickyard marque flicker orange as I pulled out. The only thing looking east now was utter flatness and a monotony of tawny dust and boulders. Still, I had one good memory there at Annie’s when I heard a trucker mention that there had been talk of making the truck stop the new location for the United Nations, a nod to the soothing effect that the world’s best pumpkin pie had had on everyone who ever walked into the diner.

“Hey, believe it or not, that idea almost flew,” I heard him say. “Being right on the continental divide and all, the pie supposedly has some magical effect on people.”

But I couldn’t imagine a place like Checker Saddle, which fell right on the fold of my road map, being the location for worldwide diplomacy, the United Nations. Anyway, I had had enough of Annie’s and I leaned into the wheel for the long slog through some serious stretches of highway, hoping to make it home by Thanksgiving.

An hour later, when my coffee started to wear off, the mechanic’s comment came back to me. “What works” he said about my truck. Like that was less than what didn’t work?

 “I’ll tell you what works,” I said out loud, angry, “classic side paneled windows, that’s what , and wipers that run off a vacuum. That’s what works for me. Where do you find that anymore in a truck?” I knew right then it was going to be a long, slow descent back to the Midwest if I was going to start arguing with myself and I glimpsed at the expanse of farmland full of cows. Lots and lots of cows, standing frozen like cardboard cutouts.

My coffee was wearing thin and a parade of passing cars made me feel like time was moving backwards. There is nothing like doing nothing to make your mind wander, and past mistakes I had made seem to be riding right beside me. I was going over those bumps and potholes I had hit earlier in my life. Now they seemed deeper and felt more like regrets, deeper each time I went over them. I was picking fights with my own circumstances, and blaming everything around me, especially myself, until it seemed like I was trying to wipe clean even the parts of my life that were good. With a thousand miles of highway still to go, I was downshifting hard – on both my truck and myself – and anything that still worked.

The worst of it centered on the nasty and unnecessary comments I had made about Mr. Pumpkin and they began to rush forward. My sour opinions and judgements about the overly consistent nature of pumpkin pie, about its blandness and lack of personality, was rising to meet me head on. I could try to say I’m sorry for the succession of insults I had spewed out, or I could ignore these wrongs from my past and continue this same road.

I looked down the highway as the unchanging yellow lines swept by, lines that converged a long way off and ended at some dot on the horizon. My eyes had been staring at that dot for too long, and I was squinting hard, looking for some new point of reference. There was a destination out there – where the earth rose up slightly – and perhaps my guilt set it off, I’m not sure, but I thought I begin to notice veins of light, little pulses popping up along the landscape, just under the surface and they were igniting other lights out in front of me. I remembered reading about how pumpkin vines crisscrossed the earth and wondered if those thousands of interlocking pumpkin vines were sending a message to me. I realized they were the flashes of brilliance I needed to see. It was time to adjust my rearview mirror on life, get the gears rolling again, make amends where I needed to, perhaps to Mr. Pumpkin himself.

I came around a long bend and suddenly saw a tattered billboard with a tattered advertisement shredded from the weather. One lightbulb illuminated the torn surface: Something, something… it read, but I couldn’t put it together and slowed down. Then I saw this at the top in bold letters: BEST PUMPKIN PIE, NEXT EXIT. and perhaps the exit number, and that was all.  

I pulled over and stared up at it. I saw a faded picture of a plate of pumpkin pie and it enveloped me with a memory of what goodness and sweetness tasted like, and I let it seep into my bones and  through the blue color that was the only solid thing left to about my truck. Nobody had to be strong here, not me, not my Chevy. I just had to surrender to the past, let my heart make its apology to Mr. Pumpkin and his nation, and then, God willing, everything would fall into place for a while until the next sign for pumpkin pie came along. Follow the billboards home. Yes, I thought, that is what works, that’s what the mechanic meant. There was still more goodness out there for me, waiting, in the next billboard if I looked for it. And forgiveness would be granted to me at each sign as they appeared – that was what really worked.

Long hours later, I turned off the highway whose traffic had all but disappeared and wound my way through the old familiar streets of my neighborhood, and glimpsed the stop sign that was still bent from a bicycle crash that required ten stiches, and around the final corner. I hoped a family would be waiting up, and a door would open, and all my regrets would die there on the front door and be replaced by the smell of everything that had been baking for the last twenty-four hours.

I saw one glowing pumpkin at the end of the block holding vigil against the dark. It was sitting proudly beneath a maple I had climbed a million times, a tree that had been my childhood hideaway from too much worldly noise, a place where ridicule could not be heard. Now, sitting stately under the tree was one lantern of welcome, a large, lone pumpkin with a single word carved in capital letters, letters that filled the yard with their outlines. The message was a kind of transfiguration – a glowing radiance that had something to say about what the past meant and my return home. Carved in the pumpkin was one word, and it was JOY, and it beamed like a brilliant smile just for me, pure and orange.

Either Way You Slice It

I must admit I have been so confused about the identity of the pumpkin that over the years I have both extolled its great qualities one minute, then lambasted its merits the next. Listeners that have been privy to my stories about pumpkins, have been witness to the times when the leader of the Pumpkin Nation, Mr. Pumpkin, has railed on me for what he has called, “the ruthless and insensitive slurring of the pumpkin family, which is rooted in long-standing moral fiber and of course, high-quality topsoil.”

While I have not heard from Mr. Pumpkin in two years, I have a sneaking suspicion he is still angry at me due to my comments about his inadequate taste. This time of year, I am particularly sensitive. I believe Mr. Pumpkin has positioned his carved cousins everywhere I go, particularly on porches, where they can spy on me, and monitor my every move. Messages are then sent to him using a rarely used font called Gurmuhki Sandham Bold, a cryptic font that can only be decoded by pumpkin decoders at Pumpkin Headquarters.

Lest you listeners are taking all this lightly, let me remind you that this pumpkin family of Cucurbitaceous includes some 965 members that, if lined up next to each other, would circle planet Earth nine times, no small feat for a mushy carbohydrate that still hasn’t quite decided whether it is a fruit or a vegetable. Infrared satellite imaging has indicated an interconnection of family roots just below the earth’s surface, creating an intercontinental pumpkin communication system far exceeding anything scientists thought possible. From that system, a vast population of some 150 million pumpkins are produced and carved each year in our country, or one pumpkin for every two and half people. That half person, a tragic mathematical anomaly, would explain why so many pumpkins are never fully carved, and remain half-finished carved pumpkins with just one eye, or a half-carved mouth that has just a few teeth. I would mention some of the other deformities, but I run the risk of having my phone tapped or being followed in the produce section when I shop for melons.

The first time I became aware of the power of Pumpkin Nation was when my car broke down in Checker Saddle, Montana and I had to stay a night at Annie’s Brickyard Truck Stop, a motel and diner which according to a nearby billboard, had the best pumpkin pie east or west of the Continental Divide. For those of you who are geographically challenged, the Continental Divide is a boundary that divides North America’s river systems, with each side eventually emptying into separate seas. Reportedly, if a raindrop fell on the west side of the divide, for instance, it would end up in the Pacific Ocean. I don’t personally know how it would do that without stopping in Las Vegas to see Elvis, but that is the theory. Rain falling on the other side, however, flows east, stopping to flood an intersection near our home every time there is a downpour, and then eventually flowing into the Gulf of Mexico.

Interestingly, Annie’s Truckstop Diner was built squarely on the Continental Divide, which means that there naturally will be some interesting encounters with customers, and pumpkins there. While taking their seat on a stool at the bar, these patrons order a piece of Annie’s pumpkin pie, the most neutral tasting of all pies, and after taking their first bite, become anesthetized to any strong feelings about anything one way or the other. The service is not that great, really, and the view from the diner is not that scenic either, but the blandness of Annie’s pumpkin pie makes up for all that. Customers who come in wound tighter than a Swiss clock, step on the Continental Divide, have a piece of pie, and detach from their rough and tumble world.

Picture, for example, if you will, a piece of pie being served to an elderly couple who just stumbled into Annie’s. They are exhausted from traveling in their rented RV, and their partials hurt from sucking on too much hard candy. They dovetail into their booth, and begin eating their soft pumpkin slice, looking more and more relaxed as if they just entered a jacuzzi, floating in bubbles and ready to take on the next leg of their trip, a grueling nine-hour marathon to the flats of Iowa. It’s the pie of course that does that, but it is also the idea that while they were eating the world’s most mushy and agreeable desert, they were enjoying it while sitting on the continental divide, with no worries about falling off the mental deep end either way.

Apparently, people like that come in from across the nation all the time at Annie’s, knowing that the pumpkin pie has not been baked with any commitment towards either side of the line, or on behalf of one ocean or another. Folks that normally could not stand to even look at each other – are perfectly content to pull up a stool and order a piece of completely objective and uncomplicated pumpkin pie, pie that does not stand out in any way by taste or form or consistency and have conversations free of histrionics or drama. These people are in the middle of a carb high, a euphoric pumpkin haze that was documented by Cucumberly Ross in her landmark book, The Five Stages of Pumpkin Recovery.

So well-known is the diner’s reputation that Annie’s was recently offered up as a negotiating location after a recent statewide teacher strike. Both parties arrived, ate their pie and ironed out their differences in forty-five minutes.  The state agreed to put in more dry erase boards and give teachers Christmas Eve and Christmas day off. On their side of the Continental Divide, teachers agreed not to be so cranky when a child raised his hand for the fourteenth time, and both parties wiped the pumpkin pie off their lips with napkins that had a capital A printed on them, shook hands, and walked out laughing, telling jokes about how back in the day schools had only one fire drill per year.

Can you see now how a stop at the diner for a piece of pumpkin pie held this kind of magic? One day early last Spring, a biker couple sped into the diner’s gravel lot in a cloud of flying dust, came to an abrupt halt, and began making snarly comments to one another even before they walked through the diner door and let the unbiased nature of the Annie’s pie work its miracle. A sudden rainstorm came up, unusual for the area, and somehow, although the details aren’t clear, the angry bikers were washed down separate sides of the Continental Divide, eventually being carried to separate oceans to cool off. When they made their way back to Checker Saddle and to Annie’s again, calmer temperaments prevailed and they allowed themselves to eat the tasteless and uninspiring pie first before they spoke another word to each other.

Annie herself commemorated their decision by framing a picture of them sharing a piece, a picture that hold a proud spot back in the kitchen behind the oven. The Divide, coupled with the pumpkin pie, has that effect on people who use their words sparingly and eat first before spouting off opinions about how this or that ought to be or should be and could be, and give each other the what-for and why-not and Bob’s-your-uncle, and so forth and so on ad infinitum. Burst of anger just are not necessary when you sit at the capitol of stability – Annie’s Truckstop – with a plate of overly palatable pumpkin pie.

Be that as it may, I recently have had to confront my whole belief system on pumpkins, and although it has taken some time to come around, I have come to believe that pumpkin pie does have distinguishing merits beyond just its affable, monotonous nature. Recently a photograph came into my possession which shows me at the age of five, gorging myself on a canned version of pumpkin. It appears as if very little of the dish made it into my mouth, which I took as evidence that I had an eating disorder of some kind, yet I must admit that seeing myself at such a young age, vulnerable yet unmannerly, covered with orangey-brown crusty pie goop…well…frankly, I was flooded with emotions. Clearly, I had stuffed back a lot of pumplings, short for pumpkin feelings, over the years, that I am only now coming to grips with.

So, many years later, leaning back in my booth there in Checker Saddle, Montana with my triangular desert, I thought of Mr. Pumpkin, an old adversary, and hoped he was doing well. I had not heard from this leader of the Pumpkin Nation, as I said before, in almost two years and I had been very careful not to say anything negative about him. I had assumed he and his constituency – the gourds, melons, and zucchini – had moved on to bigger pastures, that he had forgiven me for references I had made on previous podcasts about pumpkin spice, pumpkin candles, pumpkin mathematical formulas, and one comment in particular, a slam about talk show hosts that wore puffy pumpkin sweatshirts.

Looking through the local newspaper, The Innocuous Herald, I read that both presidential candidates had bypassed Checker Saddle on their campaign trail, and therefore missed an opportunity to eat some pumpkin nothingness at the last stop you can make for miles in this part of Montana. They both could have sat for hours, and not only found nothing to argue about, but they would have left the diner with a new continence, an orange glow, as if they have been worshiping in a pumpkin field all day, praying for the future ripening of the next generation of pumpkins.

“Have time for a piece of pie?” Annie would have said to them, as they entered the diner.

“Time? Pie? Oh, well, gosh, yes, we do. I’ve heard it’s very, very good here,” they both would have answered as they sat down in a booth.

Then there’d be a misty warmth, not dominating, but a delicate, trickling waft that might smell of nutmeg. Its omnipotence would drift upwards, not to the left or right, but straight up, because at Annie’s Truckstop, this most blasé desert, inert pumpkin pie was being baked in the oven. Annie would then serve them each a piece, and their plates would slide silently across the table, uncommitted, neither east nor west, but directly on the continental divide.

Happy 102nd and Climbing, Dad!

In the wee hours of the morning last Tuesday, we learned of our country’s new president, and although there were still a few states left to weigh in, all the hoopla of rallies, and slogans and posters was fading into the background of new leadership. As it happened, my adrenaline was  burning like a newly lit birthday candle as my own father, leader of our family, turned 102 years old the day after the election. He had seen 18 different presidents come and go in his over one hundred years, and although he couldn’t remember what any of them had done with their four or eight years in office, he did mention the time President Regan’s dog, an Irish Setter named Peggy, squatted on the White House lawn to do her business. As a urologist, my dad noticed things like that. Well, Happy 102nd Birthday Dad, and welcome everyone else to Knee Deep, episode 83. I’m reprinting an essay I wrote about him several years ago when he turned one hundred, an essay that gives credence to his role as a soldier, a father, a grandfather and now a great, great grandfather and one I think is worth republishing given the historic nature of this week in our country. For more stories and glories, visit IG @authorjeffbender or go to my website at jeffmbender.com. This episode is dedicated to all the loyal and brave leaders of our government who keep us safe and allow me to have the freedom to even have this podcast. Thanks, and Happy Birthday Dad!

When I was in college, I went to hear a speaker named Tom Hayden, a political activist. Hayden was thought of as kind of a kook at the time, speaking about the blunders of the Nixon administration, and against America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. He made a comment during his lecture I did not expect to hear from a man who had spent his life rebelling, and the comment stuck with me ever since. In describing a demonstration where he and other protesters were surrounded by American tanks that had their muzzles pointed down at their sit-in, he came to grips with his own anger and realized he didn’t like himself very much.

I’m paraphrasing here, but in essence Hayden said this: “Many of you sitting out there can’t stand your parents. You don’t like who they are and what they stand for. I can tell you, that day when I was looking down the barrel of a tank, I realized that whatever I was so angry about wasn’t my parents’ problem. I was my problem, and if I didn’t learn to forgive my father or mother, I would never learn to like myself, because in the end, we are all the products of our parents, and the sooner we come to the end of who they are and start looking at who we are, the sooner we can start making a difference.”

That was the moment I realized I didn’t like my father very much either, or myself.

If we are smart, we go through life keeping the best of what we have learned from our parnets and not dwell on our own mistakes. Those of us who choose to ignore our errors, however, risks dragging our anger into the future for the next generation to deal with. Our blunders, when ignored, are dumped in the corner like so much dirty laundry and left there stinking until they unwearable.

How do we learn from our past and let go of it at the same time? We do so by taking time to look both backwards at the things our parents taught us, and forward at the same time, like Tom Hayden did. At some point, a healthier world must do the same thing, that is, look in both directions to accurately see where it is going. If we can take that stance, of looking at ourselves in the middle, and press forward, we will be able to take responsible for cutting off the dangerous cycles of the past, reload the washing machine of history so to speak, and try a more thorough rinse cycle on ourselves.

We may begin with a dangerous assumption that our independence and courage will fix the world, but if we are taking a close look at our parents and who they are, we learn that our interdependence, relying on each other, makes the world better. We can try to live without looking at our shadow, but inevitably, as we stand motionless, we will realize we have become one dimensional without it, with no history of the darkness or the light that got us here. It is our history that marks our past – is the best and the worst of what we have done thus far – and it is best to pay attention to it before we too are looking at a tank looking back at us.

I have only seen my father cry one time, and that was after the funeral of his mother. I have no doubt that my father wanted to cry when one of his patients died during surgery, or when he was alone, serving out his military stint in Korea, but other than that one time, I have never witnessed his tears. When I was very young, I once ask my grandmother why my dad never cried. Her answer, which made a strong impact on me, is that he didn’t have time to cry.

 From that answer, it would be a mistake to think that he led a charmed life, that throughout his lifetime, there was not much cause to cry. His history tells a different story. Before Dad was ten years old, he had lost his only brother to muscular dystrophy, a fact that may have established his resolve to become a doctor. My father also watched the early passing of his mother from the fog of a tragic mental illness, and he tried to love his distant and dismissive father who held everyone at arm’s length. My dad was also deeply saddened when Gary, his oldest son, died at fifty from a sudden heart attack and left him with a burden of guilt both as a doctor and a father. Many times, I’m sure, he has held himself responsible for not securing a healthy future for Gary, but I have not seen my dad cry.

In the story of how my dad conducted himself, I do not see a man that was so callous that he could not cry, but, like those of his generation, a man that had seen so much pain that the outpouring of emotions were not a luxury he could allow himself. When President Kennedy stated, “It is not what your country can do for you, it is what you can do for your country,” my father was already looking forward to a place where our best history was in front of us, and trusting those inalienable rights spoken of in America’s declaration. His was not from a generation that whined and cried. It was a generation whose survival would not come by way of spilt milk as the world became unhinged by ruthless dictators, diseases, and great depressions. Men did not cry together as much as they pulled together, they did not fuss as much as they held on, and they did not crusade as much as they went into combat.

My dad was a witness to the loss of personal freedoms in the hopelessness and hollowed eyes of North Korean prisoners indoctrinated to believe that human life is completely expendable and worthless. Framed in his study is a written statement, conveying the distressing nature of communist ideology:

“As an American doctor serving in Korea my assignment has been serving Communist prisoners of war for many months and giving medical support. In spite of the hazardous nature of this work, the task proved to be the most revealing experience of my life. I have been able to work in intimate contact with an enslaved people who are the products of a communist dictatorship providing for me a vivid contrast with our democratic ideology.

One notices that propaganda had so entwined their minds in the roots of suspicion and antipathy that many refused medical care and died or suffered severe complications even when they could see all about them the compatriot lives that had been saved by the skill and sincerity of Americans.

Justice was wielded through kangaroo courts. Prisoners who showed disobedience, dissention or the slightest suggestion of reluctance to accept the Communist doctrine or purposes, were often bludgeoned or stabbed to death by their leaders.

The attitude toward others was rebellious and aggressive; cooperativeness was replaced by unreasonable demands. Agreements were made to be slyly violated. These men lived in an atmosphere of mutual distrust, with the curse of fear as the chief instigation for their actions.

Their only God was their leader, their only religion Communism. One noted a complete loss of individualism; These people could no longer think for themselves. They became automatons, puppets to be easily moved into destructive or suicidal actions by the capricious strings of their leaders. So immune to the slavery had they become, that is separated from their leaders their spirits withered like a leaf separated from it stem.

As the months passed, I came to realize that in the past I had accepted American citizenship with smug naivete; but that in the future I would regard it with the deepest respect and humility. I had learned by sharp contrast that the preservation of individual character and integrity and respect was a most cherished possession of Americans. Freedom of worship of a God and religion of our choice is a unique privilege not enjoyed by the enslaved peoples of the world. I had learned that justice according to the whims of a dictator or excited mob results in death; that “justice for all” is a percept only of a free nation. I had learned that government structures built on sophistries, fear, and guile result in personal degradation and the ultimate results border on slavery.

And finally, I had learned that our ultimate happiness as Americans was a function of valuable heritages of freedom and justice and inviolate respect for individual human dignity. I am proud and thankful for my American citizenship.”

When dad wrote that in 1952, he did not know his future. If any of us make it to one hundred years old, like he has, it may be because we don’t give ourselves the luxury of crying when the proverbial barrel of a tank is pointed at us. In our longest season, when our own sun is sinking, the one where our lives cast the longest shadow, we will be able to stand firm as my dad did and know the difference between right and wrong, between evil and good, between adversity and triumph. We will be forward looking, as my dad has been his last one hundred intrepid years, and not give in when darkness is the easier path to take. Rather, we will walk forward as he did, in the light of a brighter future, with an “inviolate respect,” the same one that determined my father’s legacy, and then know that it can be our legacy also.

It WAS Melba Peach, with the Crock Pot, on the Porch

This last week I threw caution to the wind and tried to squeeze in one more Indian Summer project before Old Man Winter got cranky. Ignoring all the safety labels that suggested I do otherwise, I decided to paint the beat-up seventy-year-old concrete on our back porch. The pamphlets on staining concrete suggested application temperatures above fifty degrees and emphasized avoiding any foot traffic for two weeks. I disregarded all that information and applied the paint when it was thirty-seven and then walked on it the next day. I was convinced that any damage I made would look better than the decrepit concrete pad which, by the way, had an enormous glaring stain in the middle of it. Over the years I’ve had plenty of time to study that stain, and I have concluded that its mysterious shape bore an eerie resemblance to the chalky-white victim outlines you see in detective movies.

I’m not saying the shape had to be the result of a murder, of course. It could be that the outlined person/shape could have resulted from a person falling off our roof, except that the shape looked more like it had shifted forward, not straight down, leaving me to conclude that the victim was hit from behind. Secondly, the human shaped stain had to be made from something that could withstand all types of weather and could not be washed away easily, like grease. Using my deductive reasoning, I concluded it was probably the grease from spilt burgoo soup, a local favorite of southern Indiana, and the murder weapon, of course, would be the crock pot that was holding it.

At first, I thought the grease stain might come from a crock pot of chili, but now I don’t believe that is the case. People at a Fall party in Indiana normally devour chili as if it is their last meal, so there wouldn’t have been any of that left as the murderer left our back door, crock pot in hand. Burgoo, while popular around here, does not have quite the same appeal, and there would have been some left over that would have emptied itself over the concrete after the victim was knocked on the head – a horrible thought – but necessary if we are to get to the bottom of this back porch mystery.

After years of looking at the stain, I could not entertain the idea of looking at that human-like shape much longer, crying over spilt burgoo as it were, and so I began focusing on the chore of picking a paint sample from the thousands of choices available at the local paint store. Turns out, the number of color samples there numbered in the hundreds, giving me full reign to use the word plethora, as in there were a plethora of color samples available for me to choose, and not when describing the remains of an enormously beaked flightless dinosaur, unearthed in the Ngorongoro Crater in 1922.

As Halloween was approaching, I narrowed my color samples down to a batch of twenty-seven different oranges, resulting in a lot of squinting that required me to use a small bottle of moisturizing eye drops. At that point I considered just gluing all my samples down in a repeating patten and not paint anything at all. Who cares if my porch looked like a checkered Amish quilt from Vermont? As long as the burgoo stain was covered and there’s no evidence of murder, I asked myself, does it really matter?

Turns out, it did matter, quite a bit actually, because everyone of the color samples I picked had a name suggestive of a unseemly murder, names that were evocative of all things slightly sinister. I had read the entire collection of Agatha Christie’s mysteries, and knew, of course, that suspicion by its very nature is never slight, and that all my paint samples were absolutely, very, very, slightly suspicious. For example, one choice for our porch was a color named Delicious Fog, a dark gray with a hint of orange if you looked at it when there is a full moon. I thought immediately of a scene from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of Baskervilles, when a savage murderous beast is heard howling from the bogs of the Grimpen Mire, and decided then that using Delicious Fog might suggest that our porch was part of some cover-up and that through infrared technology one might see a stain had been scrubbed for hours with a hard bristled brush to erase evidence of a murder by crock pot filled with leftover burgoo.

As I looked through other favorite samples, I noticed that all of them had, as I said before, a suspicious character. For organizational purposes, I divided them into three categories, first, second-, and third-degree orange samples, the least offensive being the third-degree kind. Burnt Cavern and Rustling in the Night immediately came to the forefront as options, with Terra O’Cotta floating in as a close second. Terry Who? A quick google search led to one Terry O’Cotton, close enough I thought, a now deceased Irish gang member whose body was found at the bottom of a ceramic brick kiln. On that tragic and gory note, I eliminated the color of Terra O’Cotta altogether. My wife has some stellar Irish heritage running through her veins, and invading our cozy back porch with a color that puts her ancestry in a bad light, even if a terra cotta orange, might create some marital discord, particularly if we all took a ceramics class together.  I moved on to the next level, a striking, no pun intended, series of second-degree orange samples.

Here, the names began to get downright dark, names like Knives Out Tan, Thrown Headlong Off A Rusty Bridge, and the worst, Deader’n Doornail Bronze. All of these, mind you had the orange tint or shade I was seeking, but left me feeling that, instead of covering up the shape of a creepy chalked outline, I would be covering up evidence for, and thus somehow complicit in, some kind of wrongdoing. It seemed unlikely that I would be implicated in a crime just by making a poor color choice for a back porch, but stranger things have happened in the grisly business of second-degree orange choices. I had a family, and a legacy to consider, which seemed to me, as I studied the names on the swatches, superseded any selfish wishes I had for beautifying my back porch.

At this point in the process, I began to get very anxious. I was running out of orange possibilities. Out of literally hundreds of possible choices, I was now left with only a few selections, and unfortunately, they were all first-degree samples, the most gut-clenching and nefarious of all. These samples give even the most experienced detective night sweats and have names whose records are stamped with the word UNSOLVED and left sealed in the archives of police records. No one looks at those records once they are filed away, much less consider them as a color choice for a back porch. They are case mysteries, with inconspicuous suspects and missing murder weapons. Occasionally, there is a breakthrough, as in the case of a detective who was only days from retirement and gave one of the unsolved files a last look. He deduced the fatal weapon used was an icicle, which quickly melted, leaving nothing but an irrelevant puddle of water.  That color sample’s name? Icicle Orange. And that is a sample you put away and don’t ever mention again.

This is a very tender subject of course and we are a tender, sensitive group at our house. Something as simple as a color choice, while seemingly harmless to most families, is like a slow leaky faucet around ours. We have sensitive minds around here that drip slowly, and those drips begin to sound louder and louder as they echo off the metal of our stainless-steel brain late at night. Our thoughts turn our psyche into a dark rusty orange around our house and by Wednesday we realize that we haven’t talked to each other since last Saturday, that we have been bothered by some torturous noise in the background, or possibly what is beneath that layer of Icicle Orange we used on our porch.

I realized that, and found myself back at the paint store, this time inspecting much more tranquil selections, gray swatches with names like Open-Minded Synchronicity or Light Drizzle and my personal favorite, Warm Flannel Pajamas. Those names did not have quite the punch that the orange samples had, but then punch wasn’t a word that we were using anymore, especially not ever on our back porch.