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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are!

 “I am out with lanterns looking for myself.” – Emily Dickinson

Ever since my grandkids were old enough to fill a diaper, I’ve been getting to know them better by practicing a little ritual with them. It starts with the simple notion that as humans we have a natural desire to be recognized and acknowledged. Even as grown adults, as we play our own version of the game of hide and seek, we eventually want someone to look under the proverbial bed and find us. We crave are own space but we also have the innate desire to be around other people, and more importantly, to be verified and confirmed for who we are. We can be an island for a short amount of time, but as we were reminded of so vividly during Covid, our fierce independence brought out some deleterious mental side effects. So, this business of being near one another is a push-pull phenomenon. We need our own areas, our “personal space,” but we also don’t want to feel that we are alone either.

Growing up with two other siblings, when noise reached fever pitch and tempers were short around the house, one of my parents could be heard bellowing, “Can we have some peace and quiet around here!” Hearing that voice of authority, all three of us kids would get quiet and slink away, usually outside to play basketball until dinner time. Funny thing about that slinking, though. Inside the house, one of our parents began missing our company. I know they did, because we could look through the windows and see our mom and dad talking and gesturing, kind of intensely, and not really looking like they were enjoying their precious peace and quiet. It seemed, at least from our perspective, that they were the ones who were being loud and temperamental.

And guess what happened? In short order, at least one but usually both of them would come outside with us, those little hellions that only moments before had been the cause of the crises.  Dad would dive into the basketball game, which we had only just started when we saw them start to come outside, and my mom would walk amongst us passing out carrot sticks. I never understood the carrot thing, but apparently, she had learned through an issue of Better Homes and Gardens that carrots provide a wonderful re-bonding experience for families who are experiencing stress.

And so it was. We all had rejoined the family game. Where before we had gone hiding, each of us had shown our ID at the door of the family unit and found our way back into the show.

Earlier, I mentioned a ritual I have with our two grandsons, where I teach them what it looks like for me to recognize who they are. It begins when I appear at their door and anticipate that hug that all grandparents love. expect a hug. However, that doesn’t always pan out the way I would like.

Let’s say I’ve just walked in the door to their house and the kids are wild and crazy, running around like a herd of wildebeests on the African Plains of Instability. After a while, when they sort of burn themselves out, they wander over to me, and begin explaining everything that’s happened lately, including their latest toilet habits or when they tried to eat their cereal out of the dogfood dish.

They are still basically uncontrollably excited as kids are want to be, and it’s obvious that I’m not going to get that hug, which is a horrible thing for a grandpa. At this time, according to my ritual, I do nothing and say nothing but stand there, looking out into space as if they don’t exist at all in my world. I take that position because I know a secret about my grandkids. I know that eventually they will not be able to cope with not being recognized, that my lack of attention will eventually drive them batty. This is where things get interesting.

At this time, I simply look over to my wife or to their mother and ask, “Have you seen Cash or Carter? I haven’t seen them anywhere. The Cash and Carter I know always give me a hug. Hmmm,” I say, “I wonder what happened to them?”

Well, you can imagine what happens next… They come in for that hug like a couple of F-14’s on a mission from God. I mean, it works every time. Admittedly, it took a few times to get them trained, a couple of visits ignoring them, a few blank stares and so forth, but they did eventually learn that until they hugged me, nothing else much was going to happen. They began to recognize me to be the hugger I knew they could become. And the significance, I think, of what has become kind of a game in our family, is that now when I arrive at their house and begin with “Do I know you?”, they come right to me like wildebeests at a watering hole.

In her book How to Disappear, Akiko Busch describes in beautiful soliloquy the need for invisibility in our modern world where networking and wireless dialogue has made it almost impossible to be lost. Throughout her book she intimates that where once we could safely retreat and eventually be safely found, we now find it almost impossible to be invisible even for a short while. She follows that it is important for humans to have the capacity, and more importantly the freedom, to both be there and not be there.

Reading Busch’s chapter on imaginary friends, I had the sudden recollection of my childhood companion and protector, Davy Crockett. Perhaps it was the popular TV series that inspired me, but I had long conversations with the “king of the wild frontier” as I set out down the street with my play-rifle and coonskin hat, loaded for bear. Like most kids who have an imaginary friend in tow, I used both voices in my neighborhood excursions – “the me voice” and “the Davy voice.” Unknown boundaries that could never be tamed in my own unfinished mind, were not so scary when my frontier companion, Davy, could be sent out ahead to scout the unknown, then report back to me. He was unquestionably loyal, fearless and adaptable to every “treacherous” adventure.

Who are the people that recognize us then? That depends on what your priorities are. If we continue our most important relationships by including ourselves in what author Jack Kerouac described as the “mad swirl of everything to come,” we run the risk of not being recognized by anyone after a while, or at least not available. They will see us only as a function of the activity we are involved in or perhaps only see us as their imaginary friend. However, if we come out from under the covers of our game of hide and seek and allow ourselves to be discovered, and in effect take off our Davy Crockett hat, we immediately can be recognized say, “It’s me! I’m here!”

Do I know you? It is not exactly what we want to be asked as we are greeted by those we love, because it cuts to the heart of whether what they are seeing is the truth, the real McCoy, or some imaginary friend that is our temporary stand-in. While you may think that I am manipulating my grandsons into hugging me, that this is only pretend game, their hug tells me all I need to know about who they really are at the core. They may be running around with underwear on their heads or eating cereal out of a dogfood dish, but I get a chance, if only for a moment, to recognize them for who they really are ­­– loving, caring, and empathetic. After that, I don’t care what they do, I know where to go, and who I’m going to find when I ask for them again.

One Big Happy Swarm

Here in my hometown, cooler temps and hints of Fall were followed by the effects of driving rain from Hurricane Helene. While I am thankful for that moisture here that converted the cracked earth in my garden back to soil again, the news cycle lately has been more than just heavy. And so, before jumping into this blog, I want to dedicate this podcast to the millions of people trying to recover from the damages of the hurricane in the southeastern parts of our country. Would you join me for a moment of prayer for those who have lost family members or been displaced from their homes?

Father in Heaven, we come to you always grateful that we have a God that is bigger than any crisis or storm. We are grateful that we can approach you simply by calling your name and knowing with confidence that your lovingkindness is always available and ready to answer our petitions for help. Father, we pray for all those caught in the fray of Helene, that you would restore their hope and that they would turn to you for assurance and know that the trials they are facing are not too big for you. We know you have deep compassion for their sorrows, so help them come to you in the difficult days ahead and find renewed energy. Bless them with the much-needed supplies for their families. Thank you, Heavenly Father, that you hear these cries for help and that you are ready to wrap your loving arms around them during this crisis. In Jesus name we pray, Amen.

Well, as the humbling pictures from the south continue to fill up our screens, we also have a country that is embroiled in the election of a new president which has been a storm in and of itself. Additionally, we have a Middle East war that has ramped up into a worldwide crisis.  So, as I began to write this week, I began to wonder whether anything I had to say would be worthy of putting out there that would either give credence to the grim destruction I was seeing on the news or somehow, lessen it. Is there a part of you, like me, that would like to stick your head in the sand and stop the scroll? In a world where it seems like chaos reigns, I sometimes give in to the helplessness of it all and then buy into the lie that there is nothing I can really do about any of it.

“Well,” a friend of mine once answered, as I sat obsessing about my problems, “I guess the devil has you right where he wants you.”

“Whaddamean?” I stammered.

But I knew what he meant, and it was true.

We cannot rise if we do not stand. We can easily forget what we are capable of with God and relinquish our armor without a fight. Instead, we plant ourselves at the mercy of the enemy who loves nothing more than to watch our world burn in chaos. In other words, we can give up before we start, and allowed the king of hate to move into our hearts. Folks, that ain’t good.

There is no doubt that it is heart breaking to watch thousands of our countrymen bearing the weight of a storm surge. Then, across the globe, as we witness missiles lighting up the Israeli sky, knowing they will be returned with twice the force, our fears go internal as nations pick sides and square off. Those fears, if we are not careful, can become a picture that is more about us playing the victim than one about helping those victims. We do not need to stumble around in chaos and confusion.  There is always something we can do when our efforts might seem insignificant, even if it is just a change of attitude.  

Perhaps during this time when the world seems to be going mad, you can close your eyes and revisit a part of last summer …when you were being dunked with huge buckets of water at a theme park, or maybe watching your grandson hit his first home run or were smelling your favorite meal being grilled out back on the porch. All those things were in the mix for me over the last few months, reminders that the best predictors of the future are what has happened in the past. If you close your eyes and picture your favorite memory, it can lift you to a better place, to a promising microclimate of hope instead of a desert of victimhood.

My memory begins just outside my back window where there was a buzzing, swirling whirlwind. In a roundish berm I built, I watched droves of bumblebees flying all over the place as they gather nectar. In that area, I angled three huge sandstone rocks near each other so they could gather the sun’s heat all day and radiate in inwards. Even during the winter, as plant life goes dormant, the rocks emanate enough heat during the day to turn the area into a small canyon that acts as a thermal pocket during the night.  Plants that would normally wither during the winter do not succumb as easily to the ice and snow or the thawing and heaving of the soil. It is an oasis for the eyes, in some dreary months when we’ve all had our fill of the grey and gray.

Last summer, however, that same area becomes a hotbed for a tough annual called gomphrena, a workhorse that produces blooms all summer, and thrives in one-hundred-degree temps when other annuals are wilting under the heat. By late summer they are three feet tall, bulbous and trying to outreach other in their head-to-head race to the sun.  When a fellow gardener visited me last July, we stopped to marvel the sea of bumblebees swarming over my miniature canyon filled with those giant purple flowers of gomphrena globosa.  

“Did you know you can pet bumblebees?” she asked.

“What? Pet them? You are joking aren’t you?” I asked, incredulous.

Before answering, she had already stepped into the tall mound of purple flowers and was surrounded by bumblebees. They were momentarily startled by her presence, performing fly-bys and barrel rolls, but each eventually settling down on their own flower top.

“You have to go slow,” she said as she reached in, “they are very social, not like other bees. If you’re careful you can rub their backs.”

Gently, she reached in towards a particularly porky bee and put her finger on the yellow and black striped body, stroking it magically for a few seconds before pulling back.

“See? They don’t seem to mind as long as you don’t move too quickly.”

 Now it was my turn to get my moxie going. Although my hand was not quite as steady as hers, I slowly leaned forward, and found the tiny fuzzy back of a bumblebee, letting my finger caress it while trying to ignore the ones that were wildly buzzing from flower to flower around me. In spite of the thought that I may need an EpiPen at any moment, it was exhilarating to connect with something that could zap me with instant pain. It was an even better experience when I shared it, with permission from their mother, with my grandsons. They too, were able to pet their own bumblebee before summer ended, and become, not paralyzed with fear, but part of the one big happy swarm.  

In these days when our country is ramped up with mega-doses of drama, including the political kind, you may be looking for some moments of lightness, levity, and laughter. I found mine in the smallest of places, on the back of a bumblebee, but even so, it lifted me into another realm where fear was a bystander and where wonder and delight and the joy of being alive had a chance to catch a buzz.

I didn’t think I had much to say this week. I was deep in the middle of the rockets flying, the pundits screaming and the catastrophic pictures from the south. However, on a very hot day last summer, I found some bliss in a petting a bumblebee and making it part of my own warm and fuzzy. I didn’t like the frenzy of crisscrossing flight patterns around me, and the thought of a painful sting didn’t do much for me either, but in stepping into the flower bed and beyond my fears, I found I was stepping away from my worries and the world’s madness. I found a bunch of bumblebees that were willing to work with me, and for a brief moment they let me in to their flower patch unimpeded. I was trying to pet them, and they were giving me their own kind of a pat on the back. In the middle of our shared world, the bees and I were going about our business, both looking, as I think we all are, for the same thing – some of that sweet, sweet nectar that is still out there.

The Unremarkable Diet of Dora Hubbard: Part Two

We tend to move our lives in imperceptible ways, a tad to the left then back to the right again, until we notice we may have not made any real progress at all. Dora, our protagonist of last week’s episode, also felt her life was going in circles. Then she heard the voice of Dr. Adcock, a scientist being interviewed on Progressive Nebraska Radio about IBS’s, ignorant-based calories relentlessly entering our bodies, useless sources of energy that mess with us mind, body and spirit.  Dora’s life was about to change, as Dora tries to get her question in front of expert Dr. Adcock and unlock the secrets of her unremarkable, ignorant-based diet.

Sitting at her kitchen table, Dora stared at her computer screen, and as she began to type her first words to Dr. Adcock, an overwhelming sense of sadness overtook her.  While she had tried every self-help course and diet plan imaginable, even a cabbage and water plan for a month, she could not shake the feeling that there was something wrong with her physique and constitution. It was like a physical cloud of shame hanging over her, like a nasty spell that she could not shake. The thought that there may be some mysterious unhealthy force at work in her own body was driving her to get her question aired on Progressive Nebraska Radio with Dr. Adcock. She began to type.

Dear Dr. Adcock:

I was driving home from work today when I heard your interview on PNR. I almost had to pull over when I realized that all of the shame, I’ve been carrying all these years about my body could be a result of some mysterious and needless energy source, the Ignorant-based calories you mentioned last week. I am desperate to find myself again and to get some control over my life, and I believe your research may hold the key for me. Out of respect for your time, I will go straight to my question: What is wrong with me? Do any of us have control over our lives, or are ignorant calories you referred to in you interview on the verge of defeating us all?

Yours truly,
Dora from Trendy-Mart

Dora’s stopped and looked at her message, and then, with a wish and a prayer, she hit the send key, closed her laptop, and headed to bed.  The rest was up to cyberspace.

The sun had barely etched through her window when she heard her phone vibrating across her bedside table.

“He..hello. Hello,” Dora answered.

“Hello, this is Progressive Nebraska Radio,” came the automated voice. Please press the pound key if your birthday is November 4, 2001.”

Dora had to think about it, but hurriedly fumbled for the pound key. She heard a click on the other end and thought she’d been disconnected.

“Miss Hubbard? May I speak to Miss Hubbard please,” came a female voice.

“This is me, I mean it is her. I’m Dora.”

“Miss Hubbard,” this is PNR, Progressive Nebraska Radio. We received your question late last night and Dr. Adcock would like to speak to you on our show today. Would you be ok with talking to her live…today?”

“Today? Really?” Dora said, jumping out of bed, “You mean Dr. Adcock took my question? Well, yes! Yes, I’ll talk!”

“We go on the air in three minutes, and we’ll call you back just before you go on the air with her, ok?”

“Three hours? Ok I’ll be ready…”

“No, no Miss Hubbard, three minutes. Can you take the call in three minutes? We’ll call you right back in three…”  and before Dora could even answer the station manager had hung up. Dora scrambled out of bed in a panic, starting her coffee, racing back across her apartment to throw on a pair of jean and t-shirt, but no sooner had she fluffed her hair, the phone was ringing again.

“And now our next caller,” she heard a radio voice say, “is a woman who wrote to us with an urgent question, one that addresses an issue of concern for our expert, Dr. Adcock, a pioneer in the study of ignorant-based caloric intake and sustenance research. Our caller today has a lifetime of struggling with some deep-seated shame about her body and is hoping Dr. Adcock may be able to turn things around for her. What do you think doctor?

“Yes, I read Dora’s pleas for help and indeed it sounds like there are some ignorant-base calories unaccounted for. Dora, Dora?” Dr. Adcock called out, “Are you on the line?”

“Ahem, hi, hello, this is Dora. Thank you for returning my email and for having me on your show today.”

“Well, welcome to PNR. Glad you could be with us. How are you doing right now?”

“Well, I haven’t had my coffee yet, but I’m ok.”

“I understand you listened to our last broadcast, and were hit with a startling realization,” said the doctor. “Can you tell us a bit more? How can I help you?”

“Uh, well. I was driving home, listening to you talk about these needless calories from bee stings and toothpaste backwash and realized that you may hold some answers for me. We’d just been talking at work…I work at the Trendy-Mart… about the calories in unlicked envelopes, and I suddenly realized I may be under the influence of those IBS’s you talked about.”

“Yes, yes, I understand, Dora, and you are not alone. But there is help. It sounds like you’ve tried about everything you can to get your weight under control, but somethings missing here I feel. Did I hear you say that you work at a discount store?”

“Uh, yes, I do,” Dora replied.

“I may be mistaken, but could it be possible that you are in contact with a lot of rather, not to be insulting, but rather untidy surroundings?”

“Oh, its filthy there,” Dora stated, with a disgusted tone, “I mean, the place needs to be hosed down.”

“Just as I thought. Dora, and I think I know your problem. You are getting your ignorant calories, hundreds of them each day from the ingesting of prehistoric micrometeor dust,” the doctor postulated.

“Meteor what?”  You mean like the space type? Are you saying I’m eating small meteors made of ancient dust?”

“Yes, in a manner of speaking, you are!”  

In her tiny apartment, Dora felt the urge to cough several times, and leaned over to put her air purifier on high.

“I thought asteroids were way out there in space?” Dora winced.

 “Yes,” the doctor continued, “but they break down into tiny bits and fall to earth over time and, well, Dora, and for all my listeners out there, new research has just been done involving the composition of common dust, and you know what we found?”

“I can’t imagine,” Dora excitedly answered.

“We found that the small particles that make up a common dust bunny are exactly the same as those found in meteorites, and in fact they are constantly entering our atmosphere in small chunks, building up in little piles.”

“Oh my,” Dora said, “Lately, they’ve been working me in Lawn and Garden, and I’ve noticed a ton of dust out there. Do you think…?”

“Dora, I don’t think, I know! You’ve been succumbing to a concentrated dusting of micrometeorites and all their traces minerals, especially, I suspect, palladium, one of the worst offenders of ignorant calories. Palladium in itself is not so bad, but it tends to weigh us down and makes us feel lethargic. Have you been feeling sluggish lately?”

“Well, I just got out of bed, but at work I don’t seem to have any energy…”

“…and do you feel the urge to shower all the time?”

“All the time, and I even rinse off at lunch time!”

“Well, there you go, Dora! I believe that you are a victim of meteor dusting, specifically palladium poisoning. You are being blasted with meteor dust, and your body is collecting it! I bet your IBS score has skyrocketed lately.”

“You mean I’m hoarding cosmic dust and carrying it around all day?” Dora exclaimed?

“Well, yes, in a matter of sp….”

“What do I do with all my palladium? Am I poisonous or contagious? How long do I have to live? Oh, no, no…Should I notify my next of kin or quit my job or give my cat to a friend?!”

Dora was whimpering now and heard the doctor’s voice fading away…

“Doctor?! Are you there?! Help me! I don’t want to die ignorant! I’m not a cosmic hoarder, really, I’m not. Help me please, help me…” Dora groaned.

She felt the gentle hand of Mr. Clemendorf on her shoulder, shaking her…

“Dora, Dora. You’re here, Dora, wake up. It’s me, Mr. Clemendorf. Dora?  Dora?”

“Wh..wh… what?” Dora said, sitting up to brush off her clothes. Have I been poisoned by a meteor?” Am I dead?”

“Dead?  But your pay is gonna be docked if you don’t wake up and get back to work. Break’s over.”

Mr. Clemendorf grabbed his Diet Coke dropping from the vending machine, turning back to Dora before he left. “Hey,” he said, “we’re switching you to Appliances this afternoon, so, let’s get out there, ok? Appliances! Let’s go!”  

Dora wiped her eyes and looked around, still trying to shake off the voice of Dr. Adcock. She wasn’t dying after all, not from envelopes, or bee stings or meteor dust. Suddenly she didn’t feel ignorant at all, but ready to tackle the afternoon. As she turned to clock back in, the late afternoon sun shone across the break room table revealing a thin layer of dust. Dora stopped for a moment to look, and then shook her head.

“Not my dust, not my problem,” she thought, grabbing her ID badge, “I’m in Appliances today.”