It's All a Blur to Me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Par for the Course (or Horse)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Boss in the Background

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Choose Two Puppets and... NEUTRAL PLEASE!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Covenant with a Crocus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stark Waving Mad, and So Am I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Turning Our Fires Into Faces

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Luck and Destiny: Two Ships that Pass in the Night

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consider this example:

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

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

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

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

“B5!” I’d yell out, hoping for a hit.

“Miss!” Came the reply. Then, “E3!”

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

Was it luck or skill when hit an enemy ship?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yuletide Aisle Dis-Ease

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What You Bring to the Table This Thanksgiving

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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