Down by the Low and Cool

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Expressway to Distressway, and Beyond

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This week I had several appointments across town and for the first time in my life, sat down before I left with pencil and paper to strategically plan when and where I would make my exits and entrances in order to arrive on time. That is because right now there is not an intersection in our city of Evanspatch Indiana that isn’t under some kind of construction. Since there is no predicting where the next delay will begin or end, whether it will be a part of my strategic plan or not, I just closed my eyes and like playing a Ouija board, let my pencil wander aimlessly across our city. It’s a lot like that driving around here, never knowing whether at any turn I’ll be re-directed by an outside force.

So, if you thought you were going to get an easy ride through this podcast, that the trip was going to be the shortest distance between two points, then you may need to pack some extra Goldfish or Sour Patch kid snacks before you leave.

And Hello there! I’m Jeff Bender and you’re on a road trip today on Knee Deep, episode number 107, so buckle up and set your GPS to Instagram at authorjeffbender or go to my website at Jeffmbender.com and as we like to say here at Knee Deep, don’t forget the M as in more please!

It’s a given that most cities go through some road transformations over the summer – fixing curbs, spraying new lane lines and cleaning up leftover sludge that collected in the gutters over the winter. In addition, our city usually takes on a pet project like a new turn lane or round-a-bout that revitalizes the flow and gets rid of old trouble spots and bottlenecks.

We locals also know that by Fall, great swaths of potholes will have been repaired on our roads in readiness for the upcoming winter, along with a new stretch of the Hoosier Scenic Bike Path. By now, we are used to seeing yellow-vested workers standing around talking to each other waiting for the right moment to move a pile of asphalt back where it was yesterday, and multiple lanes of traffic trying to squeeze into one. It’s just part of the sweat equity we drivers put into our local culture – those road repairs that have to be made to maintain the ebb and flow of the go–and–flow.

However, (and in my world, howevers are very common) in the last few months, our fair city of Evanspatch Indiana has become a traffic nightmare. Every place I’m used to making a turn is not a turn anymore, and all the usual routes I’m used to taking have been re-routed. Thousands of Evansvillianites are doing the same thing, backing up, turning around after getting stuck trying to find a way out along a side street.  I see faces pressed to the windshield as if drivers are in a state of signage overload, inching along in a GPS fog. They ask, “Where am I, and how in the name of metropolitan transportation did I get here?”

I don’t know the facts, but I’ve heard rumors that our city was offered a ga-billion dollars by the state DOT if they’d tear up every main artery going east or west. If that is true, what should be a speedy trip across a medium sized town has slowed to a turtle’s pace this last summer. Like splotches of measles, construction obstructions every other block has left drivers looking for some quick and clean escape that gets them around the clogs, backlogs and the ubiquitous but ever-present Shetland sheepdogs.

Then, unfamiliar with the new route they find themselves on, drivers get impatient and angry, and well, you know the story, create new traffic nightmares that look more like stadium parking. Angled autos wait to make their move, and red lights don’t make a difference because intersections are packed with cars that tried to make the yellow.

I think some of our problem stems from a long, slow burning dysfunctional traffic history, one that began when the Ohio River decided to do the hokey pokey and bend itself about, which dictated that our city would grow along a long curve and eventually divide into several, if not more, distinct areas, all of which developed their individual labyrinth of street patterns and traffic puzzles. If you are a subscriber of Dispatches from Traffic Madness, a local newspaper, you probably know that about thirty years ago our town decided on a one-size fits all solution to our driving enigma by building a superhighway over the top and through the center of those patterns and puzzles. We named it the Lloyd Expressway.

For the most part, that metro zip-a-long was to replace Division Street, an old thoroughfare that connected businesses and barge stops with an intersecting railroad line and of course,  automobile traffic. Why it was named Division Street, I don’t know, because it doesn’t divide much of anything that I can see, except those that would rather travel at a lower altitude, below the newly built Expressway.

 Strangely enough, Division Street was not torn down, but remained to run parallel to the highway, but down below it. Like a little kid that tags along his bigger brother, Division became a kind of alternative car route – the Expressway’s buddy. Mind you, Division Street is not a service road. I know what they are – I’ve seen those in cities and they are really for kids who ride those miniature BMX bikes and people who suddenly realize they drank too much coffee and have to exit the highway for some privacy below under the overpass.

No, this Division Street, the one that doesn’t divides anything, was actually left there to give hope to those on the new Expressway should they get frightened travelling at a high rate of speed and need a place to retreat. Division, the road with slightly lower ambition and purpose was ready and waiting down and over to the side below.

 As those drivers exited and submerged into the sub-city, they slowly gained back their composure, felt back in control again and reassured. Their blood pressure lowered, their heart rate decreased. They could breath again and take another handful of their Goldfish snackipoos. And best of all, they could still look up and catch a glimpse of the real highway above them, see traffic moving along at a good clip, and know they still had a viable option if they wanted one. Division was the kind of quiet guarantee that we Hoosiers from rivertown are used to having. And then, if a driver starts to feel left behind, or lonely, or has a moment of lapse or a spiritual stroke of some kind, they know that there is a great highway up above them, one they can access in a flash and escape the Hell they’ve been living in down below on a road that is named after something that was never divided at all but says it is.

Are you catching the pattern here? Exit or merge, merge or exit. When we get in our car to go somewhere, that kind of wishy-washiness works for us. We believe in gravity, yes, but we don’t want to be committed to it. We like the option of being able to rise should the need present itself. Most of the time it doesn’t, but there’s that bit of hope here in Evanspatch for that to happen, so we stay open to it, rising to get on the highway, then speed along until our energy and courage run out and the Distressway is just too much to handle and then down we go again to our divided, darker side, the road of almost good intentions.  

For us, having dual roads that are equally dysfunctional give us that opportunity to lower our expectations at a moment’s notice, should we need to adjust to what we perceive as challenging. We may or may not have left the dog some food in his dish when we left this morning, we may have yelled at our kids as they got out of the car for school, our wives may have used our best screwdriver to pry open the mayonnaise jar, but it’s ok. – we’ve got two roads in Evanspatch that don’t change, that are both less travelled, and we can take either one of them and know the Midwest will survive the change and that the mayonnaise jar will open when we get home.

 As you might imagine, having a major artery slash highway with a street running parallel to it has a practical advantage as well. If you part of a family that is not getting along very well, you can split up into two cars if going across town, one half traveling up above on the Expressway and the other half traveling down below on Division Street. As a result, If you come here, you may notice about twice as many cars out at night than in any other city in the United States. That is because families that split up earlier in the day are still out there driving around trying to connect with the other family car. Some of those families drive all night long, up the Expressway and down to Division and back again, playing endless loops of Cocomelon, leaving stuff animals behind as a signal that they were just there. Inside the minivan, kids are eating nonstop out of nervousness, chicken nuggets dipped in ranch-style dressing, waiting for a glimpse of the other family car coming up the next on-ramp.

It’s an ongoing little festival really, part of the culture here, a kind of all-night bonding exercise, like having a three-foot lager beer in an Irish Pub if you’re Irish or getting your picture taken next to a pack of wild dingoes in the Australian outback.

Here in Evanspatch, we get on the Expressway to find each other, so we can have a culture. We put up with the ga-billion dollar state grants that leave our highway infrastructure a preposterous labyrinth of jogs, and bogs and sheepdogs.

We look down off our Distressway, we see the other half of our family moving along at a snail’s pace, throw them some goldfish, or a couple of Legos, pull over to pick up the headless pink teddy bear our other car threw out the window, and then sigh and creep along until the next exit. No, if you are visiting, you’re not going to find our highway listed as a tourist attraction on the Evanspatch Chamber of Commerce map. No, you’ll have to get on the Expressway and discover it, like we do, by your natural human inclination to rise and fall. We natives like to call our dual highways, “The Road Less Travelled and the Road Travelled Even Less,” two road running parallel to each other doing the same thing, a little slower and slower each year. But hey, if you don’t make it this year, don’t worry! Until our supposed state grant runs out, neither road is going anywhere…very fast.

Water Under the (tallest) Bridge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“BENDER’S NAKED!”

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

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

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

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

By the Waterfall of Psalm 23 (Repost)

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

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

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

Psalm 23 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Surely, our cup runneth over.

Your Signature Ride

So it was with some excitement that memories of the last few days of school came back to me recently, particularly the time-honored tradition of signing yearbooks, those journals that showcase photographs of various teams and clubs, and a flourish of loopy autographs. For some reason the photographs in my yearbooks were always blurry, as if the photographer had never taken a picture in his life and had only just been handed a camera and designated class photographer.

 When I was given my year book at the end of the school year and looked through it, I was astonished to find clubs and activities I never knew existed, like the Assistant’s Club, a club which consisted of all the extras who helped all the other clubs and teams get ready – like the water boys who picked up filthy towels in the locker room and Glee kids who made posters for the Chess Team and stuck them on lockers.

Flipping in a few pages to the club I was in, the Dennis the Menace Fan Club, I saw a kid in the picture who never came to one comic book meeting, who only showed up for the yearbook picture! Hey! C’mon! Cheater! Louse! All you guys, you knuckleheads who ran down the hall when they announced a team picture, I cry NO FAIR! You guys should have gotten together and had your picture taken as the Slacker’s Club!

Oddly enough, my memory of all thingsyearbook, came a few days ago in the form of an extremely long, bright pink Cadillac sedan, circa 1979, that puttered down our street. I normally lump all vehicles in the same general category, that is, transportation, and honestly, I may not have noticed this garishly pink car at all, except that it took about five minutes to pass me. In fact, I think it was about twenty-seven feet long, an old model sedan that could comfortably seat an entire circus family and their pet elephant.

“Wow, I’d love to drive that thing around for just one day,” I thought to myself, but no sooner had that thought crossed my mind that I noticed something else unusual about the car. Across its pink chassis, in all sizes and styles of writing, the car had been plastered with autographs and messages. From bumper to bumper, everywhere including even the tires, people had gloriously “Sharpied” their names with flamboyant well wishes and have-a-good-summers. This was no ordinary pink car at all. I was witnessing a living breathing version of a kind of elementary school mobile yearbook, and incidentally, many of the signatures were in cursive, that antiquated style of writing that wrote itself out of existence in 1995.  

Wow, I thought, wow. Instead of kids getting books to sign at the end of the school year, now they get a car! A pink car, mind you, with enough room to have a picnic and family reunion and a funeral at the end. Think of it, I thought. And I was thinking of it. I was thinking of my thought about thinking of it and my thought was this: Years from now when this generation of kids wanted to look up the friends they had had and the activities they were involved in, instead of dragging out the ‘ol yearbook and taking a trip down memory lane, they could literally hop in their own personal vehicle and be driving on memory lane.

How convenient, I thought, for kids! The whole idea of it was avant garde and retro all shoved behind the wheel of the great American automobile. Who wouldn’t want to get behind the wheel of your memory car, now a mobile unit chalk full of reminiscing, and read what your classmates thought about you, all the while moving towards a future destination that happened a couple of decades ago? And to add to the perks of this once in a lifetime cruise, kids could still be able to text and drive and lean out their car window while reading the autographs and messages off their door jam – maybe on a clear day with the top down, even a signature on their front bumper. Wow! What a rush!

I could see it all in my head as the funeral, I mean car,  slowly passed me by…parents and grandparents all gathered at their kid’s school, cheering as their children signed each other’s cars and then with a blast of exhaust fumes, took off into the past!

“Don’t forget!” a helicopter mom would be yelling as her daughter sped off, “Any signatures you see in the side mirror might be bigger than they appear! BE CAREFUL! Have fun! Don’t forget to text us while you’re driving!”

I was giving some serious thought myself of buying a car and having Staples photocopy my yearbook from high school all over it and start driving it around town without a license or any insurance. I could even round up some old buddies from grade school, maybe even throw in a few bullies who stuck gum in my hair. Yea, to heck with grade school grudges and the time the entire seventh grade saw me spill my lunch tray, let’s go all out for the mobile yearbook, Ya-hoo! I could the car being organized into clubs and activities with the see science club signing the mechanical areas, the Forensics Team signing the info-mation center, and so on right down to the kids in the Slacker’s Club, who, because they never did anything could sign underneath the car, maybe while it was moving. 

I began thinking back, wondering what might be different if some of my eighth-grade friends or teachers had signed my pink car rather than the hard copy yearbook I store in garage or attic or basement somewhere. How would those messages be different and most importantly, would the car have greater resale value if one of the signers later became famous? Lots and lots and lots of questions here – maybe requiring me to get a lot bigger, longer car down the road.

For example, my math teacher, Mrs. Nixon, was a distant cousin to the then current president, Richard Nixon, who sent his best wishes to our class at the end of my sixth-grade year. I could see her signature, and maybe even his, taking a prominent position on my driver’s side door. Now after Watergate, I don’t know, I would have to consider buffing it out, but still…

Then there was Kim, a coquettish blonde in seventh grade who claimed I was the first boy to kiss her. She wrote in my yearbook that my breath was bad, but also wrote that we could try kissing again the next year. I don’t remember having that breath that was that bad or breathing that hard when I got ready to kiss her, but still, she was reasonably cute and I can tell you that if she had written it on the hood of my pink car, I’d probably go a bit easy on the jet spray when I washed it, just for old-time sake.

Finally, I thought of all those messages squeezed in the corners and on the back pages of my past yearbooks and frankly, most of them from kids I’d never heard of or seen the entire school year. Why were they suddenly taking up space in my yearbook?  Like, there was a ton of messages that expressed in one form or another that I was a good person, as if they had been watching me all along in the background. Who were these people? I have no idea. I always like this curious one – “I hope I can be in your homeroom next year.” It was signed by Bernadette, who by the way, was in my homeroom for a whole year and sat right behind me. 

Most of the messages all had a kind of generic quality to them, and probably wouldn’t change or have more flavor even if they had been written on a pink sedan back in the day. While there would be those expressing the typical expressions of good will and well wishes for a brilliant summer, they all would still be reminders of how quickly time rolls by and that, ultimately, we make our sharpie mark on the world with something more than a passing signature.

Yet, in a last flash of pink dazzle, I did manage to catch a glimpse of the license plate as the bright pink Cadillac-turned-yearbook lumbered by me. It was a message full of hope and promise, and summed up what we all wanted to hear when another school year comes to an end, and we are looking down the road towards our future.

It simply read: YOU’LL GO FAR, and it was printed in all caps.

It's All a Blur to Me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Goodnight from Beetle Street

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“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.” Lao Tzu

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It’s only early May, but around our house we are already taking advantage of the longer hours of daylight, especially in the evening. It is beginning to feel like there is almost another day available as the sun lingers in the sky until seven instead of three thirty.

I had read recently about the value of taking a short walk after dinner, that such a walk moves the food along the digestive turnpike and that there will be fewer pileups. So now, when everything is cleaned up in the kitchen, and the leftovers are cordoned off in the frig, my wife and I hit the pavement for a short jaunt around the block, maybe two blocks if we ate too much guacamole.

We have been diligent about this walk after dinner, and we’ve found there is something funny that happens when we take in the details of the neighborhood at the same time every night. For one, we start to notice how our neighborhood operates. One would think that our walk would get boring, that we would yearn for some different scenery, develop a need to see new people and walk elsewhere, break up the rhythm a bit. Instead, we find contentment in a ritual where subtle changes define our short walk – our one square block universe.

Last night as we strolled along, I stopped to peer closely at a shiny iridescent beetle in the gutter that was wiggling on its back. I thought it might need a little help getting going again, so I reached down and turned it over. When it tried to take a step and flipped over on its back again, I figured it was on its last leg and I left it alone. The next night, and the next one after that, we stopped again to check on the beetle, and amazingly, it was still upside down wiggling its crusty legs.

“It’s still moving, hanging in there,” I said. “Man, that’s a long time for a beetle to hold out,”  but by the fourth night it had stopped and lay still and stiff.

And yet, this is what our walks are about, noticing what has moved and what hasn’t, who has put out a flag for Veteran’s Day or who is now parking their car on the street even though they have a perfectly good driveway to use. Most of what we notice is superficial, but most of it is reassuring if we are going to be real about this notion of a slow walk. I am comforted, for example, knowing that if someone asked me how long it takes for a beetle to die once it has turned over on its back, I could say with some authority that it takes about four days.

It’s the kind of experience one gets on a leisurely walk, and in fact, my wife and I walk so slowly that we feel our pace might be subconsciously slowing down neighbors who notice us, causing them to yawn, and forget that they still have a good two hours of daylight left. Instead of going outside for a bit, they put on their pajamas and going right to bed.

Out ahead I see a yard where the Wasserman’s have left their hose running. However, at my pace, I don’t feel obligated to tell them water is running down the street into a sewer drain two blocks away or that their water bill will probably be about four thousand dollars next month. I think the Wasserman’s can worry about that next month, not this one, so I’m not in any hurry to tell them what they should be doing with their garden hose. I’ve just spent about twenty-five minutes watching a beetle die, and it’s time to let things go, just walk past their swampy yard that is now a breeding ground for the Nile virus and let the Wasserman’s get into their pj’s, and let the water from their yard find its way back to the Ohio River.

The last two nights, as my wife and I walked listening to our digestive tracts in the background, we decided to take an informal count of the Hosta that are coming up in people’s yards. When I was a kid, nobody grew Hosta, so Hosta are for me are an adult phenomenon. We had pasta back in the day, and the word “lotsa,” but no Hosta. All of the Hosta we observed growing around the block were planted in full sun for some reason even though it clearly states on the label that they like full shade. However, we just count them, we don’t judge the labels and we don’t try to change a Hosta. That is not what a slow walk is for. We know the Hosta we are counting will all look like that dying beetle in about a month – crispy from the intense sun, flipped over and turning  a pale anemic yellow.  

We were up to around 226 Hosta before we stopped counting and peered into a neighbor’s huge picture window where a big screen TV was playing. In fact, all around us, we could see people’s big screens better than our own screen at home and started planning out which big screen we are going to watch or whether it would be better to move up and down the block and watch a variety of shows. Sometimes, at we stop and watch TV on our walk, the residents will stare at us as if we are the actors on their TV but by then my wife and I have moved on to another big screen a couple houses down.

“You know,” I say to my wife between houses, “I think we should just cancel our cable bill.”

“I know,” she answers, stopping to squint through a window, “Why do we need it when we can watch whatever we want on our walk? Oh look, the Halberson’s are watching Knotting Hill. I love that movie.”

“I’m watching an old episode of Friends over here” I add. It’s the one where Joey and Chandler get mad at each other over nothing and Joey moves out. Remember?”

“I’ve seen that one,” she says, “Let’s see what the Bassett’s have on. I think it’s up two houses.”

My wife and I have talked about what it would be like to ring someone’s doorbell and ask them if they would mind changing their program, say, to that documentary on Disney Omni for Walkers. We try to imagine their reaction when they answer the doorbell, and we make our request for them to switch channels.

“Excuse me. Hi. I’m Jeff and this is Carrie, your neighbors,” we’d say. “We were just out walking like we do every night after dinner, getting the food pushed along y’know, and wondering, since we stop here every night, if we could bring a couple of lawn chairs and sit in your yard and watch your big screen, and if you would mind at about 7:15 or so, changing the channel over to the Disney Omni for Walkers. There’s a special on called ‘Mysteries of the Mesopotamia – The Quest for Alexander.’ Would you mind? We’d just be right out here,” I say pointing out to our lawn chairs.

We try to plan what we are going to say or do if they say no and ask us to get off their property, whether that would be a good time to invite them out for a slow walk to look at beetles and Hosta, but by then we have rounded the corner and are almost home. 

It’s taken about an hour and a half to get around the block, and we are now walking so slow that the water that has been running out of the Halberson’s hose for nine hours has caught up with us and is trickling by us in the gutter. It’s dusk and streetlights are coming on, and there in the gutter stream, passing us, is the shiny dead beetle we were watching for three days, upside down. It is passing by us, which makes us wonder whether at our current pace, death is catching up to us, that perhaps the benefits of a slow walk after dinner is not such a healthy idea after all. Perhaps we should just skip the slow walk, stay home after dinner, and let our digestive tracts fend for themselves.

“Shall we head inside?” I say to my wife, letting out a huge yawn.

But she doesn’t hear me. She is watching a gardening special playing across the street on a neighbor’s big screen TV, and the host is interviewing a man who has cultivated a new variety of Hosta that thrive in full sun and grow as big as houses and stay green and vibrant all summer long.

Par for the Course (or Horse)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.