When Orange Comes Knocking

No color in the rainbow invades our existence with such totality as orange does at Halloween. Other holidays parade multiple colors around, mixing and matching them according to whatever trends are hot, but ask someone what color they think of at Halloween and orange will be the undisputed, and solitary champion.

Poets tend to stay away from using orange because no word in the English language rhymes with it. There are some close fits – slant rhymes they are called – words like “twinge” or “cringe,” but even a first grader will tell you those words don’t really rhyme with orange. Revolutionaries and trick or treaters will argue that the word “storage” come close to matching the polished sound of orange, but they are wrong. Storage is missing the soft “n” that allows the syllables in orange to move smoothly up to your doorstep and ring the bell without you knowing it.

I challenge you to try to practice saying it once or twice right now. Go ahead, say “orange.” Orange. Orange. You must admit, the phonetics are very pleasant and so smooth that a kind of peace comes over you when you say it. During your pronunciation, you may have found yourself wanting to lean over and kiss your spouse, and say something comforting like, “Hey, I’m headed to bed now, my love. Orange.” Then, your husband or wife might look up and say, “I’ll be along shortly, dear. Orange you too.”

This one word, this warm color extraordinaire, seems so affable, that it’s difficult to imagine it not rhyming with something, but it doesn’t. Occasionally we have all felt a bit of empathy for the single life that orange is living and hope that an urban poet will coin a new word that orange can have a rhyming relationship with. Perhaps it will be a word like “kneephorange” and will emerge out of an ancient Aesop’s Fable and make its way back into popular use. Unfortunately, orange stands out there alone right now, unable find a home in any current poem, leaving us wondering whether there may be something sinister lurking in its past, something we are not supposed to know.

According to Google, there is one word, sporange, which rhymes with orange. Sporange is an archaic botanical term for a sac where spores are made and refers to asexual reproduction in ferns. But using sporange in polite company this time of year, would be rude simply because everyone would think you meant to say orange. They’d wonder why you aren’t using orange on a regular basis when it is the essential word of this season. Why are you using sporange right now and not supplementing the spirit of fall with the real essence, the sentry guardian of the entire Fall season…orange!?

Last week I received a package I’d been waiting for, a set of Micro-Talkies which allow me to eavesdrop in on conversation anywhere in the continental United States, excluding Hawaii and Alaska. You, my loyal listeners, may think that my device is a phony just because it came when I sent in 1000 box tops of plain cottage cheese labels.

It was shaky reception at best, but amazingly, I was able to pick up on some very disturbing sporange gossip out of Plainston, Oklahoma. AS we listen in, Bernice, who runs the knick-knack shop by the ice cream parlor in Plainston, sits down for coffee with her long-time friend, Gladys. They are meeting to talk over the goings-on, like they always do, on the last Thursday of the month before Halloween.

“I just love your sporange pumpkin sweater!” Bernice begins, grabbing Glady’s arm to feel the fabric. It is so soft and cute as a button! Where’d you get it?”

“Oh, go on!” Bernice flusters, “You know I saw that in a display window at the Center for Ferns with a Cause. Imagine the luck! They were running a special on sporanges, and I says to myself, I says, ‘Bernice, that sporange sweater has your name written all over it.’”

“O honey, it’s a must have!” Gladys exclaims, gulping her tea.

“We been supporting the Sporange Botanical Center for years,” Bernice interrupts. “They do so much good for the community.”

“Yes, they do. You know my late husband Wilbur, God rest his soul, played the tuba for their annual fund raiser Spores Galore.”

And that’s when the static kicked in and my Micro-Talkies lost connection to Bernice and Gladys. For a moment as their voices faded, I thought I heard Wilbur’s tuba in the background, and it had an eerie ring to it, a deep howl of abandonment and loneliness. I envisioned Bernice and Gladys, sitting at a counter in a barely lit café on the side of Plainston where the streetlights barely flicker. They were looking nowhere, not even at each other, sipping their sporange tea as if posed in the nightmarish Edward Hopper painting, Nighthawks.

I took off my headsets, placed them aside, and drew a long deep breath. I thought I heard my own heartbeat … and tried to calm down. I remembered it was, after all, just a word we use at Halloween. Why would anything want to rhyme with it?

Orange. Orange.

One Tough Cookie

Last night, before Angel got out of her car, she looked around the warehouse parking lot. She didn’t want anyone to see her bungy-cording her door shut before going in to her second job stocking inventory. She slid over the front seat and exited out her back car door, then viewed the dark lot again. It’s not that she cared if her car was stolen, but for now, the bungie cord was an easy fix, easier than catching a bus. Stepping out in the drizzle, her pace quickened, and she called her sister.

“Hey, I’m headed into work. Are you home?”

Her sister Keilee, sits alone at a worn kitchen table, picking through her third night of Ramen noodles.

“Yea, I’m here. Did you hear anything back from mom? What’s this pile of clothes in the corner?”

“I know. So, I’ll get those to the laundry before I go to work tomorrow. Just leave ‘em there, they’re all dirty. No, no, nothing from mom,” Angel hesitates then enters the back entrance to work and grabs her punch card. Her shift goes from ten to six, with two twenty-minute breaks for a coke, the restroom, and time for a few texts.

“Don’t worry, she’ll call when she needs something,” then adding, “just don’t answer, and don’t answer the door either ‘til I see you in the morning.”

The young sisters struggle to make ends meet, and cross paths between jobs in their weary apartment at the end of a narrow unpainted hall, where the fire extinguisher has been ripped out from the wall. The metal numbers on their door fell off long ago, and even the outline is unclear. Keilee flips through the third loan bill stamped OVERDUE in red. The college loan money for that one was in the bank before their mom withdrew all of it, left, and went on a partying binge on the Treasure Chest Casino Boat two months ago. Her college prospects died, and now the sisters work to pay off their mom’s selfish weekend.

---

Today, Angel makes my vanilla latte. I never have to tell her what I want. She is alert, smiling and sprinkles on the right amount of nutmeg every time. She has been blindsided by someone she thought had her back, but she is trying to wear it with a smile.

“I started a second job,” Angel begins again, busy stirring.

“Oh. What are you doing there?”

“I’m stocking groceries,” she adds. “I don’t really sleep. But it’s paying off our loan, so it’s money.”

I venture deeper, “What is it you are paying off, exactly?”

She doesn’t stop the mixer. I can see the corners of her mouth begin to quiver, and she looks down to hide the hurt on her face. “My mom isn’t a very nice person.”

There is a long pause. I wonder if I’m asking too many questions.

“It’s my birthday today,” she says feigning happiness, then turns to hand me my drink.

“Oh really? Happy Birthday!”

I catch her glance but it’s an uneasy one. I know she is holding back the pain of having trusted her mother who stole her tuition from her, and the portal of hope that a college future brings.

“Are you doing anything special?” I ask.

“Not really, just working. Maybe spend a few minutes with my sister before clocking back in.”

“Let me buy you a latte!” I offer.

“No thank you.”

“Oh, come on,” I insist. “How about an oatmeal raisin cookie? Because it’s your birthday!

“No, really, I’m good, really, but thanks.”

I start to joke with her about being a year older and wiser, but she didn’t hear me. She was already on the other side of the counter, on the other side of older and wiser, taking someone else’s drink order. She’s gritting out her birthday today and floating on double shifts that don’t allow for stops and celebrations. It’s only Monday, but she is already tired, pushing buttons on blenders, cleaning up dishes in a sink that is always running, and then mixing in more of tired.

Today is not a birthday to remember. For Angel, it is a day she’ll want to put aside until her memory of this day fades, like the numbers on her apartment door, and new ones appear. Today, she has no candles or cake, just a heavy loan to pay off, and the difficult reminder that life is sometimes painful.

The rejections we get, the ones we didn’t see coming, can hurt us enough that we quiver the next time we put our trust in someone again. I walked away, latte in hand, thinking of a few buried hurts of my own, but behind me I heard a voice come through, Angel’s, that was putting her own suffering away for a while.

“Hey,” she says, “I hope I’m not too late but…well… I think I’ll have that cookie."

The Envelope, Please!

Every year about this time I begin receiving mail about supplemental insurance programs to purchase. Encyclopedic envelopes carrying fancy printed brochures get stuck in our mail slot and fall back out on our porch where they get rained on. The advertised insurance offers give us enough kindling to warm us by our fireplace the entire winter. I am particularly impressed when insurance companies address me in capital bold letters with the word RESIDENT. When I read that, I want to run outside, like Steve Martin did in The Jerk, and scream to the world that I’m somebody famous.

Inside the envelopes, programs often offer a “window” of opportunity to change my insurance to something that’s better coverage, but I find that opening up that window gives me more health problems than I had before. I start getting headaches when reading about HDHP’s, and HDRA’s. One year I got those terms mixed up with my HDL and considered getting a separate insurance policy just for my cholesterol. When I called my doctor to make an appointment about it, I was told the specialist I needed belonged to an organization called Out-of-Network. As a result, I thought I had something additionally wrong with my TV and thought I’d better call the cable company. After an hour and a half of listening to an instrumental version of Lionel Richie’s “Stuck on You,” I was finally connected to a resource advisor in Ecuador who suggested I watch some old reruns of Andy and Mayberry to calm down.

The part of the window I do like, however, is the big plastic one in the envelope that frames my name, RESIDENT. One time, my grandsons and I pretended it was a picture window for a house we were drawing on the outside of the manilla folder. We began drawing the spiked grass growing in front of our new creative house and added a door and a chimney, but we had the most fun drawing tiny people on a separate piece of paper that we slipped back and taped behind the big plastic picture window.

There, behind the glass, the tiniest people you have ever seen became a family of pirates in the midst of a horrific battle. I didn’t try to explain to the boys that pirates generally don’t hang out in a living room and do battle in front of a picture window for everyone to see. There was a part of me, though, that found poetic justice in pirates invading an envelope formally owned and operated by an insurance company, so I let those kids draw like there was no tomorrow. These pirates had never filed an insurance claim for their long-scarred faces, their peg legs and their bouts of scurvy, and yet, there they were, holding pistols and knives larger than their bodies, screaming orders at each other from speech bubbles that extended out beyond the confines of the plastic window living room, out into the sky around our envelope house. What they were saying to each other is not fit to print here, but I’ll tell you it was some vile pirate talk, filled with threats, and foul insurance language. I made a secret pact with myself to keep my own speech bubbles small and within the privacy of my own living room.

One of the packages I received the other day boldly stated in capital letters: CONGRATULATIONS! YOU HAVE REACHED LEVEL 5. Imagine that I thought to myself! I had never reached level five of anything in my life! Somehow, unbeknownst to me, I had passed through four previously unknown levels and not even been aware of it! I can only guess that I had been such a quick learner at the other levels, that I was allowed to skip levels 1-4 and move immediately forward. For a moment my pulse and breathing slowed, and I felt all the muscles in my neck release. It was exhilarating to be excellent at something and not have any idea what that is.

Having been awarded a new level, Level 5, I thought maybe I had missed the banquet they had held in my honor. I imagine there were hundreds of people in attendance, and I was sitting at the head table, waiting for my name to be announced. The pirate in charge, Sir Rosis de Liver stood at the mic:

“Now it is my pleasure to announce to you, this year’s recipient of the International Level Five Award, an award given to a man some say has paid for everything out-of-pocket. While others bragged of guaranteed insurability, our recipient this year has almost single handedly kept our insurance company afloat with his high premiums. Unfortunately, because of a previously unknown condition we could not offer him a seat at the table, but we offer him a most sincere congratulations for attaining Level 5 and wish him the very best as he continues to meet his deductible.”

During the standing ovation, a lone tear fell down my cheek, but someone had to accept that award, and it was me, the RESIDENT.

On the Causeway Towards Mercy

As I watched the path of Hurricane Ian wreck devastation on the Florida and South Carolina coasts, the stories became more and more difficult to hear. While we all can relate to loss at some level, rising sea water goes to a level most of us cannot fathom. There are thousands who have lost all their earthly belongings and are homeless without utilities or clean water. Others have lost their family members to lethal floodwaters and storm surges. When I see the pictures and videos, my check to the hurricane relief fund for batteries and blankets seems piddly and will only provide a temporary emotional band aid for lost loved ones and memories.

Many years ago, when I lived in Florida and had to evacuate for hurricanes, I tried to escape north along traffic lanes clogged with thousands of cars, inching along north to safety, emphasis on inching. I didn’t know what I would return to, or whether my house would be spared. What I remember most was the panic I felt stuck in the middle of the causeway across the Choctawhatchee Bay on Highway 331 to the mainland. It was bumper to bumper traffic and water was lapping across the two-lane and under my car, but I couldn’t move forward or back. At that point the loss of my home and my belongings paled in comparison to the real possibility that I might have to abandon my car and begin running for land.

We have been in our present home nearly twenty years now. The subject of moving comes up occasionally, but I feel sick inside if talk turns serious. I made all the handles on our hallway drawers and cupboards by hand and steam-bent a piece of wooden molding to wrap around the folding table I built in our laundry room. Outside in the garden, it’s taken five years to train a crape myrtle to vine up an old tree stump and bloom around a birdhouse my grandson and I built together. These and a myriad of other improvements have given our house a rich story, chronicled by the arthritis that seeps into my hands to remind me that my story is personal, but not to hold on to these earthly belongings too tightly.

A year ago, I wrote a piece about the mammoth black gum in our back yard that was slowly dying. It formed a magnificent arching umbrella over our entire backyard, sending out invitations to a menagerie of animals from foxes to pileated woodpeckers. Last week it was cut down limb by limb, an agonizing process to watch. I had visions, magical ones, that by morning a new tree would be back, no doubt stirred from a storybook that was read to me long ago. It was not to be.

I wrote this over a year ago regarding the loss of our gum and the impending empty space:

“We are left to accept this fact about our tree: that all living things perish at some point, and to embrace the mystery of this death event as part of life’s cycle.”

Birds now bypass our yard for another landing spot. In turn, Ian’s power reminds me of how little I really have control over, and how nature’s unbridled strength is an example of how much the Almighty has control over. The mighty hands that formed all of nature to begin with preside over its destructiveness as well as its rebirth. A recent sermon I heard encourages us to count three of God’s mercies for every two things we grumble about. There, in the path of the hurricanes of our bellyaching we will discover we cannot fall behind or be left behind with God’s mercies always a step ahead of us.

During the removal of our gum tree, thousand-pound limbs were lifted over our house, but none fell _on_ our house. Ten men cut and dragged one hundred years of growth down our driveway, but not one of those men was injured, nor any of our landscaping maligned. When the stump was ground down our fears that some insect infestation slowly killed our tree were unfounded and we realized our tree had simply died in its sleep, the most humane of all ways to go and was the gum’s way of saying goodbye.

The question that arises about loss is how do we say goodbye while there is still time, while we are still together?

We do so by saying things like, I love you, I’m sorry, and I admire you. We ask each other questions like these: May I hold you? What can I do for you? Where does it hurt? The mercy we need from our losses is in the time we have now, before the loss occurs, to say what really matters in the present. We find mercy in our time together, our prayers together, and our lives together. Events like Hurricane Ian are teaching us that lesson again, a lesson that cannot be replaced by piled boxes in our garages, a caramel Macchiato, or the china gathering dust in our mother’s armoire.

Allan Redpath, British pastor and author said this “There is no circumstances, no trouble, no testing, that can ever touch me until it has gone past God and past Christ, right through to me. If it has come that far, it has come with great purpose.”

I know people who have been exceedingly generous in sending relief to hurricane victims through their donations, supplies and time. Perhaps though, as we indulge ourselves eating corndogs at our local Fall Festival, we can extend, with heads bowed, extra mercies to Florida, and at least for a moment extend our prayers to a place we’ve all been, to a place where loss created a tidal surge in our heart, and sucked the life out of us, and nothing mattered more than God’s grace and mercy.

With Every Spider Comes Great Responsibility

The outside of our house has been a spider haven this summer, with evidence of their presence in every corner and crevice. Wispy nets, carefully constructed, look like strewn white cotton candy, but I rarely see the spiders themselves. They hide behind our storm shutters and wait ominously for the slightest movement in their webs, only popping out when their groceries are delivered. It’s when you don’t see the spiders that you know they’re there.

Many years ago, when my dad and mom lived in Texas, a saucer-size tarantula came out of a bag of groceries, having gone undetected in a bunch of bananas. As the story goes, my mom was busy putting the groceries away when the tarantula stealthily began to creep across the floor towards my brother. Gary, who was just a toddler, sat in the corner of the kitchen and looked at the eight syncopated legs approaching him with great wonder and reached out to grab the hairy spider plaything moving towards him.

This might be a good time to advance my theory that most women in general do not like bugs, with a particular dislike for spiders; coincidentally, many of my men friends find spiders quite fascinating. They’ll talk about watching the grisly eight-part documentary, “Spiders: Living in a World Wide Web,” then note that their wives will enter the room, and stand aghast at what is being shown with telescoping accuracy: a helpless moth being devoured, and the institutional voice of a narrator using words like, “predatory, venomous, mechanical, and cunning.” Family oriented are the last words we men hear before the click of the remote.

Following this theory, when my mom spotted the tarantula walking like a wind-up Tonka toy towards Gary, she reacted quite differently than a man might. She immediately screamed for my dad who raced in to behold a huge spider looking at Gary with a great deal of interest. While dad held the tarantula down with a broom, mom was struck with a sudden and unexpected empathy for the predator, and not being able to bear seeing the spider squished, instead boiled water to pour over it, favoring a slow agonizing, torturous burning death to the one-swat-be-done-with-it variety.

I have seen tarantulas behind the glass in miniature terrariums at the zoo. A mouse has been placed in their enclosure and scurries back and forth in front of them, trying to make friends. Simple conversation starters from the mouse are returned with an icy stare. As the spider shrinks itself back into a dark corner, preparing to pounce, they brood about their dismal reputations and past family history.

Years ago, Grandpa Spider move to Florida and never visited his grandchildren again. Dad Spider was a bully and was avoided by everyone. Mom Spider tried to comfort the neglected kids by spinning more webs, but tiny movements reverberated through the dysfunctional home creating a tangle of unhealthy imbalances. Family spider data from a 1978 University of Panama double blind survey indicates that over 73% of tarantula spider kids wander off, become bulbous, and isolate themselves in crates of bananas ready to be shipped to America. Spider kids have a tough way to go.

My son-in-law has a profound fear of spiders. When he discovered a spider creeping on a windowsill in his new home, he announced to his family that they may have to move immediately. I told him there might be other, less drastic options available. I don’t know what he is going to do as more and more houses in his neighborhood prepare for the fall season by throwing huge silk spider webs across their bushes and porches. Halloween for my son-in-law seems to carry a sinister, menacing weight, but I count my blessings that a broom is hanging nearby, and the water I’m boiling is for a cup of ginger tea.

The Desperado Round-Up of 1847

It was one of the darkest nights Lasso Luke had ever seen in the desert. The night before the moon had lit every yucca leaf like a branding iron, but tonight even the flicker of the close fire was swallowed in the black. Just beyond, the herd of steers had settled down, and only their slight rustle broke the desert silence.

“I’m ready for this drive to be over,” Lasso snarled, “My rear end’s sore and I’m sick of cold grits. Everything out here tastes like sand.”

Three-Toed Pete huddled near the flame, wailing a tune on his harmonica and had been stuck on the same note for too long.

Ain’t got a home,
Ain’t got no fire and no warm coals,
I aint got a home,
Ain’t got a home for my lost toes.

The next verse was the same, with a long note again held beyond what any cowboy could tolerate.

“I wish you’d sing about something other than your lost toes,” Lasso said, not looking up. “I’m still in a bad temper over what happened in Laramie. The nerve of that auctioneer asking us to round up! He got no idea ‘bout rounding up.”

Three-toed stopped abruptly, looked up now and shook his head.

“You’re right Lasso. We take care of our steers like they was our kin, then they expect us to give a couple more of them away cause the herd ain’t an even number. That auctioneer – HA! – I’ve a mind to cut his ear off.”

“Glad you didn’t, Three-toed, but I’m the same. Round up? What’s that all about? Got some nerve asking us to round up the herd.”

“Other day,” Three-toed butted in, “A man asks me if I care to round up for the Hatfields and McCoy feud? I told him they can fix their own feud! I ain’t giving a few extra of my herd for some cause I had nothing to do with. Those Hatfields and McCoys can pick themselves up by their own bootstraps and get moving like the rest of us had to. Go round your own self up I says to that clerk.”

“Cattle pies!” Lasso yelped, jumping up and spitting in the fire. “The OK Corral wanted me to donate a steer back in Tombstone for Wyatt, you know on account of when his brother got shot, then some charity cornered me about rounding up for some gruesome mess Calamity Jane got herself into there in El Paso. Cattle pies I said. When they find me dead and gone, dried up out here deadern’ doornail, there won’t be anything left to round up, and...”

Three-toed was up on his boots too, fuming.

“I had to round up when Butch and Sundance robbed that train outa Nevada Territory, and I telled myself that was it. I can’t be rounding up for every outlaw that walks into Dodge or wears a six shooter! You sees anybody rounding up for me? Won’t be long before they’ll be asking us to round up for a lot more than just our cattle! No sirs I’m rounding up no more. I’z doooone with a capitol D.”

It had been a blistering cattle drive, and it had brought out the worst in them both. The Rio Grande was nothing but a mud pit when they tried to cross over. Three prime steers got stuck in the mud and had to be shot right there and left to rot in the sun. With a head of eighty, they were already days behind auction when two more steers fell off a ridge near the San DeHoochie Pass, pinned down in a gorge twenty feet below. They had to leave them there too, snorting in misery, most likely to die by coyotes as soon as night fell.

“Play us something Three-toed,” urged Lasso Luke, leaning on his saddle roll, “Play another tune on that harp. I’m tired and I wanna forget my worries.”

Reaching in his saddlebag, Three-Toed Pete pulled out his harp again, blew off the sand and hit a middle C, just to hear it drift off into the starless night:

I got those round up blues,
oh yea, I does, I do
I had me ninety cattle
They rounded me up to ninety-two.
My horse is spent from round ups
I’m dang tired of ‘em too...
I can’t stand to lose more toes,
if they round up my shoes.
Oh yea, I got those Round up Blues…(harmonica fades).

Footloose and Fancy Free

Lately, my grandson Carter has taken to wearing his shoes backwards. This is not some disability or stubborn mindset by a child who is oppositional.

“Carter, you’ve got your shoes are on the wrong feet,” I point out to him as we were about to leave the house.

“I like them that way, Popeye,” he replied, and that was the end of that conversation.

I have to admire his assertiveness. He is learning early that life is a series of choices. Currently, his feet are the spokesperson for those decisions and growing independence. The backwards shoes are an amusing reminder that he is just a little boy figuring out how his feet work, and that he thinks out of the box like his grandpa Popeye. But when I watch him walk it looks like he’s moving in two different directions at the same time and may split down the middle at any moment. Wouldn’t it be better to have two left feet? In my way of thinking, at least you’d be going somewhere.

Like all funny habits, Carter’s insistence on not having a dominant foot, may put him the unique category of being amphibious, meaning he’ll be equally at home kicking a soccer ball underwater as he is on land. I don’t think there’s many marathons in his future, but he may be very good at several up-and-coming sports still in the developing stages.

Since the Olympics create about five new sports every two years, by the time Carter is twenty, his inclination to walk in two directions at the same time will put him in a prime position for an event I’m calling the “Bi-Shoe-Along.” This sport, which will require little practice and even less concentration, will be an international multi-tasking phenomenon. Competing athletes, knowing what it feels like to have the shoe on the other foot, will exhibit incredible empathy for their fellow athletes, and will, during the event encourage each other to put that best foot forward. These athletes will have their Nikes or New Balance walking shoes custom-made to fit the wrong foot, making the stock value of those companies sore to new heights.

Without getting too technical, the Bi-Shoe-Along will require participants to take two steps forward followed by three steps back continually until, after a hundred steps, they’ll finish in the same spot they started, all the while wearing their shoes on the wrong feet. I have some reservations about the future of this sport, but I think Carter may grows out of his odd shoe habit before the Bi-Shoe-Along catches on.

I recently gave the Bi-Shoe-Along a try, but soon was so confused by walking first one direction and then the other I forgot where I was and had to call for my wife for help. By the time I had gone twenty steps forward and back, the pain in my arches had gone to the next level and my face was twitching uncontrollably like it did when I ate my first Brussel sprout. At the fifty-step mark, my brain was so confused that I began having a Fibonacci flashback to high school math class where I was asked to find the next number in a seemingly random sequence of numbers like 5…362…9,801, and so on until infinity.

As I finish this essay, I sit on the couch next to my grandson watching his favorite character on TV, Blippi, who is on a spiritual walkabout with an Australian child. I notice Carter’s toes are pointed in the right direction, and he seems perfectly happy. I, on the other hand, have an ice pack on both feet and believe I have caused irreparable damage to my arches.

Please subscribe to my podcast, Knee Deep, which airs this week. New episodes will be posted weekly as well, so join me and we’ll wade in together!

Unsinkable Ron

One of my very favorite things to do is pray for someone I don’t know, right on the spot. It’s challenging and gives me the feeling that no matter what else happens during the day, I have done something good for one person. You might think praying for someone without being asked is awkward, and it can be, but I’ve never had anyone say no to my offer.

The first person I ever prayed for off the cuff was a plumber named Ron who arrived at 6:30 in my art room to flush out a paint and glue-encrusted sink. My principal had already raked me over the coals about the clog, and given me a lecture about classroom management, the corporation’s mission, and the price of beans in China. At the end of that diatribe, her rigid hand came up from behind her desk to reveal what had already been pulled from the pipes, a large gooey bundle of pencils, over which she added, “Next time this happens, you’ll pay.”

When I returned to the art room, I was nervous about how the repairs were going, but busied myself preparing the room for a day of teaching middle school. While making small talk with Ron about ornery middle schoolers who pour Elmer’s glue down a pipe, Ron quietly opened up about his impending divorce. He continued to fill in the details of his life, and I saw a man broken by the loss of a wife and family, and the hopelessness of a life clogged up like the sink he was repairing. We had something in common and I was urged to pray for him. What would be his reaction I thought? I bowed my head, leaned into some awkward words, and tried to express the love that God promises. I knew it was there, but I didn’t know if Ron would put down his wrenches and pray or use one of them on me.

When I finished and looked up, a somewhat bewildered Ron thanked me and immediately went back to work. I was way too busy to think about my prayer, and too afraid to ask him more about his desperation. His plumbing called, my students were needy, his tools were clanking, and my hands were busy. But… God heard that prayer and came roaring into Ron’s heart like a freight train that day.

I could say that there are a lot of sinks out there that need attention. I could say that there’s a lot of gunk stunk in those sinks that water’s having a tough time moving through. What Ron and I didn’t know was the powerful way God would take a simple prayer and use it to rebuild him from the ground up, rid him of his vacant pipe dreams and hopelessness and fill him with good news and a new purpose.

Clogged sink? Yep, a year later I did it again, and Ron the Plumber had to be called back in to fix the sink. Ron looked like a new man though, and this time we were wading into the problem together. His life wasn’t perfect, but he had gotten through his divorce, had his kids living with him, and was wielding those plumbing tools like a medieval boss. His plumbing fixtures were allowing new life to flow. He was re-tooled, re-synced, re-glued and renewed. And then, after telling me about his year, he offered to pray for _me_ that day.

And man did I need it. The principal called me in later to show me the glob that had been pulled out of the sink again, but now I saw the gunk my students had shoved down those pipes, not as a mess but an opportunity. Without that clog, I would never have met Ron. And as my principal tossed the mixture of glue and broken paint brushes into the trash, I reached down and pulled them out, and later used that clump as the final touch in a work of my art, shown in the blog, called Jonathon’s Lunch Tray. It was a blessing all around.

If you run across a Ron in your life, even if he’s not a plumber, try this simple prayer:

Dear Heavenly Father, thank you for this beautiful day you’ve given us. Thank you that you have a plan for our life. I want to take a moment and lift up Ron who I just met and ask that you cover him in your love today. Let your presence be known in his life, as he serves others. Thank you for putting us together to pray, and help our day be fruitful all day long. In Jesus name we pray, AMEN!

We're in this Myotonic Mess Together

I have had one mixed up week. When I stop to think about it, the week was like a collage that needs some fine tuning. The weekend is here, and I’m still arranging the pieces to bring some order out of it all. I chose the swatches of color and texture, but there’s a few that found their way into the collage on their own, and several that will have to be recycled into another week, another piece. And dang it, I really wanted to knock your socks off with a fantastic blog that would add to your story, but honestly what you’ll read here doesn’t have a good frame around it yet.

First, my wife and I took our grandson out to eat last Sunday, and crossed a dangerous threshold when, in the middle of a large Sprite, my grandson emitted an enormous belch the size of North Dakota. As the restaurant around us went dead quiet, even my grandson slunk down in the booth to escape. I listened for some compassionate or sheltering sound, perhaps a noise to buffer the deafening silence but there wasn’t even a clinking fork to be heard. Nothing screened us from those stares, and even though we corrected our grandson on his manners, a mirror was held up to my wife and me. In fact, our shame was so palpable even the Spotify playing overhead switched itself off. Five minutes later, when I had the courage to resurface from under the table, I felt I was halfway between heaven and hell, with a mark on my head that said EMBARRASSMENT.

On a positive note, my father of almost one hundred years old changed rooms at his nursing home this week. Even though he only moved one floor down, changes come hard during this last season of his life. I’ve heard that moving is one of the top three worries for an adult, right behind death and public speaking. Of the three, most of us, including my dad, would choose the move. In his new room, he’ll be right across the hall from the laundry room, and since my washer at home is older than he is, I plan to do my laundry there while Dad distracts the staff. I can’t wait to send my yard shoes through the tough stain cycle and push a couple of the new buttons we don’t have at home.

The third loose end that I want to share with you, kind of clear up if you will, is the “newsworthy” video showing Hawaiian goats fainting when put under too much stress. I would say these YouTubes took the internet by storm, except that when you watch one the videos of these goats keeling over, they ain’t stormin’ nuttin’. One minute they are running around the barnyard more limber than a yoga instructor, the next thing you know, they stiffen up and fall over, out cold in the dirt. I’m perturbed by the attention these myotonic goats are getting because I’ve been stiff for the last five years and nothing about that picture ever went viral. If it had, you can be sure I’d be calling you and we’d all go myotonic together, by golly. Give me a break! Man o’man.

Lastly, and probably the most exasperating piece of last week’s puzzle, because it’ll never be fixed, is my displeasure over my very favorite coffee shop. To be sure, I love their coffee so much I would work there for Splenda. Sadly, they have made so many changes that buying their coffee almost isn’t worth it, emphasis on almost. My biggest beef is their drive-through system, which is not a system at all but a series of interlocking exchanges, merges and off ramps similar to those you’d find in Chicago or possibly Henderson. I would rather have an MRI than try to negotiate the traffic jam that commonly ensues there. So, today I went inside to make my coffee, but the coffee countertop has been replaced by a twelve-foot reconstructed portion of the border wall between the US and Mexico. I finally decided to take my coffee in my own hands, go home, fire up my four-cupper and reset my day.

I’d love some feedback on how all your pieces collaged together this week. It would be fun see how they look next to each other in a piece I could write next week. By the way, I would ask that you not scold me too harshly about that restaurant incident. My grandson and I had a burping contest the day before that happened, so I’ve got some growing up to do.

Running Away, Back Home

Did you ever run away from home when you were a kid? At first, it seemed like a good idea, but it wasn’t long before going back sounded pretty good.

I have tried running away from home a couple of times. I must have gotten the idea from one of the rambunctious characters in Leave it to Beaver or My Three Sons. Such sitcoms of the 1960’s reflected the optimistic life of “Camelot” as Jackie Kennedy called it, following a half century of world wars and ruthless autocrats. If I was going to run away from my home and leave those people looking out for my best interest, it wasn’t going to be for very long.

My grandmother was part of the nuts and bolts of how our house was run growing up, literally the chief cook and bottle washer. I couldn’t imagine skipping one of her breakfasts, the same ones she had eaten growing up on her childhood farm in Virginia. As kids, we ate our fried mush in her separate kitchen while she told us stories of depression vagrants who sat outside her mother’s kitchen hoping for handouts on their way to nowhere. She described those lost, runaway men as sunken and hollow, but filled with gratitude when given something to eat, as if they’d been handed Christmas on a platter.

Although times were grave during the Great Depression, her mother, my great grandmother, always had enough baked potatoes in the coals to give to homeless men who waited by her back kitchen door. Always resourceful, she cut those potatoes in half, one half for eating and one for them to keep in their pocket to warm their hands for their journey. The stream of sullen men never stopped. They appeared and then went off into the fog. They were roaming the countryside, looking for any semblance of home in a homeless country, and a half-baked notion of hope in their pocket.

Despite what she had seen, my grandmother had endless optimism, and could see the brighter side of any coin toss. She was unfazed by hardship because she had walked through it, observed it and come out the other side. So, while we listened to some sad chapters of history, she let us be kids as long as possible and helped us see a world where Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn had the final say. When I announced that I was running away from home one Saturday, my grandmother was unruffled.

“Grandma, I’m running away from home.”

“Oh, okay,” she answered, looking up. “Where are you going?”

“I’m going to live with the cowboys out west,” I replied putting my cap-gun in its holster.

“Well, I better make you a sandwich. You’re going to get hungry out there on the range rustling cattle and catching outlaws,” she said getting up from her sewing.

“No, Grandma,” I said quickly, “I don’t need a sandwich, I’ll be back before dinner.”

She helped me fill a bandanna with essential cowboy supplies like my matchbox cars, my Mickey badge, a package of fig newtons, a comic book, and a crayoned letter we both wrote to Wild Bill Hickock and his dog Skip. I tied the full pouch to a long stick, threw it over my shoulder, and went strolling off to the wooded lot two houses down where I settled into my new life on the range. The rumor is that I went back every fifteen minutes for something I needed, but I only remember twice, once for more fig newtons and once for a short break to watch Andy and Mayberry.

My grandmother had it right. She protected us from the horrors of what she had seen and had lived through herself but let me run away as long as I wanted. Grandmothers are wise like that.

Between Your Pew and Mine, Part 2

The process of finding Jesus as an adult is fraught with obstacles like busy schedules, egos, and worldly distractions. There are days I wonder whether I am walking the path, but I keep praying that my days will be fruitful. Talking about my faith around some people makes me nervous, as if the subject might bring up our differences and make us more divisive. In that conversation where you and I may not agree, I try to picture Jesus, relaxed but alert, standing back and smiling while we talk. He is ok with us disagreeing, but never ok with meanness or lies.

I have a feeling he was not as keen about Arthur’s pants being removed during a church sermon in my last episode. Arthur got too hot as you recall, having worn too many layers of clothing to church, and was stripping down while his grandfather dozed off. (History has not been kind to a few Bible characters who fell asleep when the Lord ask them to stay awake, but that’s another story).

There are any number of problems with this Arthur’s situation. Even if Arthur’s pants would have come off easily, which they didn’t, a church sanctuary is a holy place. An offbeat noise is expected now and then during church – someone drops their sunglasses, or has a coughing spell, that kind of thing. But it was going to be hard to get the holiness back as Arthur’s pant legs got stuck on his shoes initiating one of the greatest wardrobe malfunctions in history.

One could say this kind of jam is exactly what God uses to build our trust and help us make those spiritual leaps of faith. Leaping, however, wouldn’t have been in Arthur’s best interest under the circumstances, because G’pa suddenly came out of his winter hibernation to witness his grandson in a wrestling match with his pants… the pants carrying the upper hand so to speak.

With part of his brain still in deep REM, G’pa, the responsible adult here, blurted out a loud, non-denominational statement that coincided with a Bible verse being shown on the screen overhead from Colossians 3:8:

“But now, you must also rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander and filthy language from your lips.”

Then, he grabbed his grandson by one of four pantlegs available and tackled Arthur to the floor to avoid detection, which created the maximum amount of detection possible during a sermon. Undeterred, Arthur took this to mean his G’pa wanted to wrestle and began a full-on tickling match where G’pa’s shoes were flung off to get to those particularly sensitive spots.

Can I just stop here and ask you, my reading audience, if there is anything about tickling an older person that sound like a good idea? To me, it sounds more like a felony. Even with someone younger, tickling will probably end with a light slap or curt rejection, but an oldster? I’m just saying.

Massachusetts Mutual advertisement, Norman Rockwell

Of course, quite a bit of attention had been drawn to the tickling skirmish, but there was nothing anyone could really do but look straight ahead with extra concentration. Eventually, Arthur and his grandfather sat upright in the pew, both fully clothed. I did note the offertory plate skipped their row that Sunday. I’m guessing the ushers did not want to confuse it with another church activity, the Annual Clothing Drive, where G’pa’s socks or Arthur’s pj’s risked being collected by mistake.

Thinking back, I can’t remember ever seeing a congregation leave a church so relieved, and happy. No one was laughing, but a lot of people couldn’t wait to get to their cars so they could laugh. Somewhere between the pious and the pj’s, Arthur had lost his pants, but everyone else had peeled off one of their heavy layers also.

Between Your Pew and Mine

I’ve gone to several churches in my life, coinciding with house moves, changes in our family, and the evolution of my own faith. While I was growing up God seemed like a confusing entity, and things about the Bible were often taught in an adult language, as if learning about God needed to involve a bit of confusion. The mystery of our Creator didn’t bother me, but the confusion bothered me a lot.

Massachusetts Mutual advertisement, Norman Rockwell

Getting ready for church was pandemonium around our house on Sunday mornings. My mom and dad were, shall we say, overly concerned about how we looked and how the family presented itself when we were marched through the sanctuary. Since most of the clothes for kids in the 1960’s were fifty percent polyester and fifty percent cactus, my whole body twitched and itched while I sat in the pew and tried to pay attention to material way over my pint-size head. If God was all powerful, I wondered, why hadn’t he invented a comfortable fabric for children to wear to his house?

After church, my brother and I snuck back into the sanctuary to play. One of our favorite games involved racing up and down the pews. By laying on our backs and reaching back to grab the next pew, we could pull ourselves along the linoleum floor, sliding all the way to the back door, where we would pop out, swing around, and slide back. Our game of racing ended one Sunday when my brother, in a bid for the pole position in the Little Pew 500, reached for the next pew and grabbed the ankle of an elderly lady quietly praying, perhaps for kids like us.

That was a come-to-Jesus moment for at least two of us, not including the prayerful lady.

I’m often reminded of how receptive Jesus was when children came on the scene, and of the time he rebuked his disciples when they tried to shoo away some kids who were not as serious as his disciples thought they should be. I think Jesus wanted his twelve friends to recognize how important it is to protect our child-like faith wherever we can and admire that same freshness when we see it in children.

Fast forward to my adulthood when I entered church one Sunday to find a grandfather sitting with his grandson. I knew the grandfather because I had gone to school with his son, but I was unprepared for the “child-like freshness” I was about to witness.

Because of several church factors including high humidity and a particularly grueling sermon from Leviticus, the grandfather began nodding off, his head bobbing up and down like a carnival ride, signaling the advent of a long nap. The grandson, Arthur, began to get a bit too warm, having put on his church clothes over his pj’s he’d worn at G’pa’s sleep-over the night before. With G’pa falling asleep during the sermon, Arthur made the inspirational decision to take off his church pants to cool down and let off some steam…you know, get comfortable…kind of bring in the light, so to speak.

Sitting several pews behind, I began to witness an amazing exercise in physical acrobatics, which by themselves presented several challenges for Arthur. First, he had to be very quiet, less he woke his snoring G’pa, a former school principal. Next, he had to pull his pants off over his shoes because that seemed the quickest route to the personal freedom he was seeking. And finally, and most importantly, he had to do all of this while appearing as if he was not stripping down to the bare necessities in the middle of a Methodist worship service. (By the way, pant removal does not fall under the kind of fresh outlook Jesus was hoping for when he spoke about what we can learn from children and their innocence).

Next week…find out what happens when God calls G’pa to act, somewhere between your pew and mine. I think there is a Bible lesson here, but for now try to get Arthur’s dilemma out of your mind. You want to be clear-headed this Sunday when the humidity seeps in and the sermon gets a bit dry.

Longer by the Length

Today was a swim day for me – time to get in the pool and knock off some laps.

People often cringe when I tell them I’m a lap swimmer and comment about how boring it must be to go back and forth, repeating those same motions without a background playlist or video. While swimming laps _is_ routine, it’s the lack of stimulation and interruptions that allows me to hear the cues life is throwing at me, the ones that I’ve been ignoring. Underwater the quietness of the pool takes over, truths bubble forth, and my brain is cleaned out. Lumbering slowly along like a manatee, I breathe steadier and more even, and some of life’s rigidity dissolves in the slow lane for a moment of calm.

Most of what I know about swimming I learned during the Red Cross courses I took at camp on Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin. Every day during instructional swim I jumped off a dock into frigid cold water and did warm-up “bobs” until my heart recovered, and then yielded to the drills of my counselors until I was ready for the next level of instruction. I would never have guessed in a million years that swimming would later become my go-to sport, and that it would have a re-energizing influence as I age.

Nowadays, after I have finished my swim workout and head to the locker room, I am met by weightlifters, basketball players, and step fanatics. They look defeated and blotchy as if they have been bitten by a South American spider, and they are so tired they can barely get their water bottles up to their lips. They drop their workout clothes where they land and then leave them there until the janitor picks them up with Hazmat gloves and put them in the Lost-and-Found basket. Other men, too tired to make it to the shower, plop down on the end of a bench with a towel on their heads, mumbling locker words. After a couple of hours there, hungry and tired, they manage to limp off to the shower, where they stand comatose until the club closes, or until all the hot water runs out.

Sometimes I try to talk to those athletes, you know, start up some lighthearted small talk about the world, but frankly, I get the impression they wish I would just be quiet and go away. There is no oxygen left in their bodies for conversation, and underneath their sweaty towel, where their faces look as if they’ve been through a medieval battle, they are wishing they never had to return to the gym again. Occasionally one of them will look up and say, “well, I’m glad that’s over,” but their voice trails off at the end as they nod off for an afternoon nap.

I don’t get that kind of vibe from swimmers. Not at all. Lap swimmers come out of the pool looking like their grandmothers just cleaned them within an inch of their lives. They are refreshed and shiny creatures, carefree and almost weightless. Oddly enough, they are also about a foot longer than when they went in, as if each stroke reawakened some muscle group that went to sleep during puberty, as if the lack of gravity and the buoyancy of water completely changed how everything was put together in their bodies.

In fact, most swimmers don’t look like they have any connective tissue at all when they step out of a pool. Amorphous, loose, reborn, they move over the earth on a blue stream of pool gel, which escorts them like a salve throughout the rest of their day. Up top, their hair is slicked back like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, and we can tell by the way they use their walk that swimming laps has transported them to another more beautiful space, a land far, far away. Lap swimmers are, in fact, the inspiration for that final scene in the Wizard of Oz where Dorothy says softly, “…and you were there, and you and you, and I love you all so very much, and I’m never, ever going to leave here again, because I’m home, I’m home Auntie Em, here in the swimming pool.”

Dorothy is there because being in a pool reminds her of when she was a kid. In fact, we all see ourselves in the middle of an old home movie saying, “Mom, watch this!” whereupon we hit the water with a square-on belly-flopper that doesn’t hurt at all because, well, it’s water for heaven’s sake! Our bodies are almost all water, so it’s water on water, no holds barred, Cowabunga Man, ain’t it great to be alive!

I took a break from swimming the other day to walk on the treadmill. I almost got run over by something akin to a construction sled bearing down hard on me like an Eskimo in the Winter Olympics. The sled pusher, being yelled at by a personal trainer, was grunting so loud I thought he might be a wild animal, and I watched as he pushed his sled across the finish line, exhale like a jetliner, flex his heavy artillery tattoo, then yell, “WHERE’S MY WATER?!”

I thought of telling him that a refreshing pool was right around the corner, but in my mind, I was escaping in the slow lane, somewhere between lap twenty-three and fifty-seven.

Boy in the Bubble, Part 2

We pick up the action from last week, where you’ll remember I was tunneling down into a neighbor’s yard to expose a magical “earth bubble” with the sole purpose of soothing my

end-of-summer boredom and of orbiting our planet should the yard bubble explode under me and hurtle me into the solar system. In the meantime, I had angered my neighbor who was bearing down on me hard on his lawn mower, and a gardener and his dog, one of whom was rabid. I was eight years old. Let’s pick up the action there, shall we?

As my long life and the whirling blade of a lawnmower passed over me, I took a huge gulp of oxygen, which included dirt and insect larvae, and ducked south for cover. I knew oxygen would come in handy should I find myself in the atmospheric void of one of Saturn rings or caught in a meteor storm. Actually, I remember that last breath quite vividly because it was promptly and unexpected sucked back out of me by the Toro lawnmower, a new bagging type that created a grass vacuum, and incidentally passed within an inch of my head. I was no sooner in the rear-view mirror, ready to take a giant leap out of my hole for mankind, than I had to duck back down to avoid a face-to-face meeting with the viscous teeth, numbering in the tens of thousands, of the Snarling Dog owned by Ancient Tool Man.

All my senses told me that these times were indeed the worst of times, and I was in the worst of trouble. Yet my fear, that illusive traitor, was blocked when off in the distance I picked up the voice of my grandmother, discharged like a drill sergeant, calling me home. My hearing, by the way, was one of the few bodily functions I still had operating at that moment.

You may be wondering how I could hear my grandmother given the layers of violence that surrounded me at that moment. However, scientific research, (or possibly the Nature Channel) has proven that kids, those tiny little creatures inhabiting Lawn Holes across our planet, can hear their grandmother’s voice from distances of up to twenty miles away. It is also important to note here that for me to not answer my grandmother when she called was tantamount to family treason, with no chance for parole or cartoons before I went to bed, whichever came first.

Fearing my grandmother over all other fears, I was just about to poke my head up again like a worm in a rainstorm, and run for my life, when I heard:

“SIT!”

and looked up to see my grandmother, all 4 foot seven of her, reigning command over all the earth, reference Genesis 1: 5 when as you remember from Sunday School, God divided the light from the darkness. In this case, Toro Man and Ancient Man divided themselves out of sight immediately, and Foaming Dog, being the only creature there obeying her command, was given a delicious crispy salted butterscotch macadamia nut oatmeal cookie, fresh out of my grandmother’s oven.

She handed me one too, patted the dog on the head, and holding my hand, escorted me through the meadow, bypassing Venus and Mercury, down a narrow brick path by our tool shed, where she met Ancient Man and gave him back his shovel and a warm cookie.

Summer was over, the sky was clear, school was nearly here, but there was nothing to fear at all.

Boy in the Bubble

Every year, late in the summer, an elephant enters the room for schoolkids. It’s a dreaded time when your summer is fading from view, being slowly eclipsed by the realization of the approach of another school year. For a kid, it is like watching your ice cream cone in slow motion fall on the hot pavement and melt away. Leagues are starting to dry up. Swim team is over. Yet summer is still here, hanging on until the last dog dies. It’s a hard time for kids. They are bored, retreating inside, sulking, but unable to speed up their inevitable pain and start the dang school year already.

I’m glad my parents did not try to bail me out of those moments of boredom with a last-ditch field trip to Pidgeon Creek, or with home movies of us as children running around in diapers. Either would have robbed my imagination of those moments where I had to get inventive and figure out what to do with my last few free moments before new spelling lists, times tables and the history of Colonial America consumed my waking hours.

I was in such a state late one summer, when in a fit of utter flatness, lethargy and discontentment, I decided to find out for myself whether the softer earth in the middle of my neighbor’s back yard was really there because of a giant air bubble rumored to be just under the surface. Twin brothers George and Wally Rickles had even backed up their claim by showing me how they could jump up and down on that spot with hardly any effort at all, as if the buried bubble just underneath them was propelling them upward.

“But if you take a shovel and dig down,” George pointed out, “and you hit that bubble, it’ll burst…”

“Yea, it’ll burst alright,” chimed in Wally, who was born 13 seconds after George and prone to repeating what his brother said.

“…and you’ll be spit right out into interstellar space. It’ll be like a volcano.”

…just like a volcano on TV,” piped in Wally, right on cue.

At the time, having watched all 75 episodes of the Jetsons a dozen times, I was quite familiar with interstellar space, and although I didn’t like the way the Jetson’s dog Astro ate metal scrapes, I was all in with the possibilities of a cosmic lifestyle.

One lunar rotation after my conversation with the Rickles twins, I climbed over the fence and borrowed my neighbor’s shovel. She was a gardener and left all her tools readily available throughout her yard, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, except for the two days when they all were carted off to be sharpened by an ancient-looking man in overalls who walked bent over up her driveway to gather them and then took about an hour to carry them back to his truck before he drove off. I offered to help him one year, but he threatened to turn me into a scarecrow, so I let well enough alone and went off to find my subterranean yard-bubble.

Once there, I furiously began to dig deeper and deeper, like a boss, pausing and waiting between jabs for the impending explosion I knew would jettison me over the neighborhood.

Since I was destined to fly into outer space, what would it matter if I went down a few more feet before blast off?

However, in my digging exuberance, I failed to notice Ancient Tool Man approaching, having come to claim the shovel I had “borrowed” from next door. This year, as an added attraction, he had brought his dog, a behemoth of a creature, who, coincidentally, was only let out of its cage at the local zoo once a year. (Reference: The Hounds of the Baskervilles).

It was then, as the rabid hound came bearing down on me, that going back to school didn’t seem all that bad, where observing how paramecium divide or learning how cambion is formed in a tree, in fact, looked absolutely thrilling.

I had only a second to pop my head up, jump up and make a run for it, until I noticed my neighbor, whose yard I had excavated without permission, suddenly appear in front of me moving at break-neck speed on his brand new three-speed Toro lawn mower. If it weren’t for the possibility of being decapitated, I might have done some early research for school regarding the underside of a lawnmower and all its movable parts. Instead I ducked down into my man hole and prayed the bubble wouldn’t release itself as the mower passed over me.

As both the maniac dog, Ancient Man and Toro descended on me…

PS. The end of this muse will be continued next week, as the end of summer, and the possibility of a radical new haircut for me come into full view. By the way, I might just stop here and mention that if you have bored kids and they are outside right now, you might take a gander out your window and check on them…

(Re)Calling All Grocery Carts!

I have a lot of adventures in grocery stores. That either means I’m preoccupied with food, or my life is redundantly boring. Or it could mean I need to consider a new title for my blog: The League of Extraordinary Refreshments, or Victuals of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Eatables. How about this one? A Day in the Life of a Guy from a City Where Compulsive Eaters Attack the Son of Armageddon, Part 2.

Ok, granted, that is stretching everyone’s gastrointestinal fortitude, but last week I had such a traumatic event at the grocery store that I’m implored to fill you in with its details.

Setting the stage here, I was having one of those mornings where everything was falling into place. My coffee tasted particularly refreshing, and as I headed out to pick up a few things at Schnucks, the traffic parted on my left and right to let me pass without pause, and lo and behold, I found the one shady spot to park, albeit slightly outside the borders of the store, but hey, one can’t be picky with temps soaring in the nineties, right?

All was smooth inside the grocery store also. Clerks were pleasant, the items I wanted were all in stock, (an anomaly in itself) and the smell of fresh kumquats wafted throughout the store. All was right and good in the world. At one point, I even entertained the thought that I was somehow ahead of life, leading the pack in the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Rat Race of Life. With pep in my finger, I poked in my rewards points, put my half-cart in high gear, and positioned my cruise for the scenic route through the parking lot.

However, somewhere out in space, the wake of a comet began an undetectable series of events, a fractal if you will, a land between shadow and object, another dimension in the Twilight Zone of grocery store events. My grocery cart, now moving at a steady clip towards my car, stopped as if it had hit a brick wall and tipped completely over, spilling all the contents into the parking lot. If I had not been so busy balancing myself like a circus performer over the top of the cart, I would have noticed that every single item I had purchased had a rolling quotient far beyond the legal limit. In layman’s terms that meant that everything that I had bought was spilling uncontrollably somewhere out of reach, as if they were part of some supermarket prison break.

My first thought was that I had caught a wheel on a giant pothole, making the cart tip over. However, no matter how I tried to turn or move the cart, the wheels remained immobile, and it wasn’t until I looked down at the attached red box contraption that I realized a GPS had detected I was beyond the store’s perimeter, signaling the wheel to slam on the breaks.

And by the way, for the record, this was a full-on lock up, not a skidding or rolling stop with air bag deployment. The slow-motion re-play on the big screen would not be pretty: I was the crash test dummy flying over the cart headlong in a seven inning stretch hoping to snag an avocado clean out of mid-air.

To be fair, I have never entertained the idea of stealing a grocery cart or taking my groceries home by way of one. I am intrigued by the fact that someone could simply walk down the street in broad daylight, leisurely pushing their stolen item home. I have seen people do that, but until I researched it, I didn’t know stealing a cart was punishable by up to 90 days in jail, or that stolen carts are a multimillion-dollar problem for the retail industry.

I also learned that it wasn’t worth parking in the one shady spot in North America if it means my cart is going to eject me onto 150-degree pavement like Tom Cruise out of a F-14, then scramble under another vehicle to retrieve my prescriptions.

“Where am I?” Cruise asked after a similar ejection in the Top Gun sequel.

“EARTH,” came the answer from a young boy.

That’s not what the GPS on my grocery cart said.

Room #306 Where Are You?

We had a third grandchild added to our family mix in the last couple of weeks.

The birth of Lyla has reinforced a philosophy we have and that is this: there are certain times in life when everything should come to a complete halt in a family, and those times are weddings, deaths, and births. No matter what else we have going on, when one of those three occur, we find some way to put our own agendas on hold. Once in a lifetime these are the occasion that call for a lot of attention and a bucket load of sensitivity, a “pouring out” of yourself.

There are certainly other life shifts that run a close second to those events like graduations, retirements, moving, and our calendars sometimes get chalk full of them. However, nothing trumps the Three Biggies, those huge life moments where the sight of our faces speak volumes, and our praying hands are essential.

I think part of the logic behind setting aside time for life-changers, like a birth for example, comes from the many new layers of feelings that float in or float away. Slowing down creates time to be gracious, to lean in on someone else’s joy or heaviness, to listen, to sit and have coffee, to recognize a temporary new normal. These are the times to stop and reset our vision of reality.

To illustrate how uncomfortable we feel when we stop, imagine that you enter a building looking for Room 306 to pay your water bill. You begin down a long corridor, and as you walk you notice the lack of other doors or windows on either side, making the hallway seem narrow and constrictive. You begin to feel a bit nervous and pick up your step to get to Room 306 because, let’s face it, you want to get out of the hallway.

Abruptly, another person comes around the corner and approaches, which causes you to shift a bit to the right so they can pass. This person is called Front Guy. And then, surprisingly you notice another person walking behind you, catching up. He is Back Guy.

This is the corridor most of us find ourselves walking much of the time, at least unconsciously, when life gets crowded with things and events. We become Mr. Hurry-Up-and-Wait Guy but then run smack dab into ourselves named Mr. Meeting-Myself-Coming-and-Going.

Now, including Mr. Front Guy and Mr. Back Guy, there are four people in the hallway with us trying to move around each other. They are all uncomfortable and want out of the hallway. They don’t talk because they are all nervous. They don’t move because there is no room to move. Everyone’s in too big of a hurry. What they do is bump off the walls creating headaches that need Tylenol. Nobody gets anywhere.

That is when we meet Wherever-I-Go-There-I-Am. It’s where we first started. It can be comfortable there and peaceful. It is where our new grandbaby Lyla is, and we love bumping into her.

Drop and Give Me Twenty

Remember when they told us that a computer would take the place of paper? At the time I had some swamp land I could sell you, too.

Now we write our words on every surface we can get our hands on, including our tattooed hands. TV and computer ads swell our brains, clog our vision, and personal signage demands our attention at every turn. We cover our children’s eyes when we pull behind a car that is F-bombed with a bumper sticker proclaiming a favorite cause or philosophy. It’s a visual pollution we are forced to inhale until we can cough away the tailpipe fumes.

I recently saw an advertisement for a lawn business on the side of a truck named “Kicking Your Grass.” I’m sorry, but were all the wholesome grass names in the English language already taken? I use a lawn service titled after the owner’s first name, Steve. He has enough confidence in his skills and services to mow a lawn without threatening to kick it anywhere.

What we are talking about here, of course, is free speech, one of those inalienable rights our forefathers gave us to ward off tyrannical censorship. The fine line, that between censorship and discretion, is one we have been walking ever since. It’s the line that gets stepped on when your free speech and my free speech cross over each other. In other words, my grass is yours until your dog poops on it, then it’s your job to clean it up. Not doing so sends us down a slippery slope of resentment, revenge and in this country even violence.

One of the saddest chapters in my life was my college days. I did a lot of dumb things back then. For example, I brazenly wore a t-shirt that said, “Spare the Sperm, Save Our Whales.” I thought the slogan was funny and got a lot of cheap laughs when I wore it. Now, I see that t-shirt as the exhortation of vulgarity, and an example of a derogatory jingle posing as a magic charm. I wonder how many parents had to cover their children’s eyes to protect them from my offensive whale trail?

I had an interesting conversation with ex-Marine the other day. He told me a story about a fellow Marine who couldn’t get anything right, and every time he messed up during basic training, it cost everyone in the unit. None of the Marines were allowed to take their frustration out on him in any way. Instead, when their fellow marine screwed up, they all paid by joining him in more marching, more push-ups, and more grueling drills. Their commanding officer made it clear that in battle there is no time for emotions. They would not be saved by their feelings or their opinions, but by their clear-headed thinking and the training of the guy next to them.

Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, Joe Rosenthal of the Associated Press

Hmmmmm. No time for emotions. Interesting. I wonder if the Marines have been onto something all these 250 years? You’ll not see a loud trendy sign polluting a Marine’s front yard, or a Marine wearing a t-shirt encouraging another shot at Willy Barracuda’s Tequila Bar. Their training has taught them to watch each other’s back, and that there is a risk in embedding oneself in their own impulses. They are trained to drop and give their fellow Marine twenty push-ups rather than pushing a personal viewpoint.

Unfortunately, the wholesale proliferation of our culture’s ridiculous signage has become part of the quicksand our country is slowly sinking into, one individual at a time. We cannot wiggle free of our polarized stance until we look to the guy next to us and give up some of our freedom of bad speech. In simple terms, that means editing our words, wherever we put them out there. In exchange, we may find ourselves able to get out of the quagmire we fell into and really be free. Perhaps we need to look at the values that matters most, instead of looking at the individual who matters most.

That Marine I met wouldn’t have been caught dead wearing one of those Save the Whale t-shirts, or any other with the latest logo, trend or cause. He would have been too busy, down in the trenches, doing something about it.

The Overcoming Life

We tend to think of summertime as a time of renewal and growth, of greens and warmth, and a shedding of our winter protection. It is not always so. Life has seasons too, but they are not seasonal like the weather. They arc through as plots and subplots, but they are not scheduled like classes for us to pick and choose. We do not sign up for the seasons we want or need, we sign up for everything we get.

Oswald Chambers, the great theologian, once said that God does not give us an overcoming life, but a life as we overcome. He knew better than to tell us to look for a clear winner or loser, or to rely on the joys of summer like our grills, our pool parties or baseball games. Rather, he was warning us to expect a series of battles in which we would be challenged to find our great Protector. He knew something about life’s mercurial nature, a mysterious sojourn through special effects like fog, cliffs, and winding pathways that would cause us to grasp at nothing, trip and sometimes fall. He knew those would also be our seasons.

Recently I had a good friend die rather suddenly. He was one of my buddies, a guy I could hang with, laugh with, goof around with and yes, commiserate with. Chuck and I didn’t see each other often but when we did, my life filled up with a renewed hope for what lie ahead. He made my difficult seasons easier, and through our exchanges, the fog lifted for a while. Now Chuck is out there, above me, but still with me, encouraging me to lean into my faith, but I still miss his presence in front of me.

I am letting go of the once-beautiful gum tree that formed an enormous canopy over my yard, which I call a garden. The difference between a yard and a garden is that you live in a yard, but you grow in a garden. The gum will be cut down this fall and I will have to let go of how the sounds, light and water moved through it. The birds will have to get used to landing somewhere else, and I will have to have faith that new life will spring forth as God and my garden decide what to do with each other.

I don’t like loss. It’s not the adjustments that hurt – it’s the soreness I get from stretching those faith muscles I haven’t used in a while. They are there and ready, but I’ve been ignoring them for fear that they might break if I put them to use, or they might ache if I ask them to sing and breathe again. Loss is not a spectator sport. We will be immersed in it whether we like it or not, and to insist on sitting on the bench will only make it worse. Our garden and our friends would not want us over there by ourselves.

Over the past year I’ve sent out over one thousand queries to agents asking them to read my book called Something to Write Home About. Though the book has evolved, gotten tighter, more readable and richer, agents are still not responding. Through the myriad modifications and marketing efforts, my book is not getting off the ground. It may never launch, and as time goes on, I feel a subtle nudge to let it go, and let God take me down a new path, perhaps a new book. It may be time to recognized that my determination to hold on and keep trying has taken on the mask of stubbornness, which sound a lot like the dark side of being stuck.

So, I listen closely to the sound of new birds moving around. They are the ones looking down from above and seeing things I cannot see. They are in other yards, waiting to move in and take up creative residency in the new tree I will plant someday where branches reach out again and cover my sense of loss and sadness.

Without Chuck, without the old gum tree, without a book agent, life will not be the same. New muscles are stretching everywhere while God and loss figure out what to do with each other. They look like the same person, but they are both the beginning of something new.

And, Oh the Places You'll Go!

The hardest part of a race is when you’re in the middle of it. When I was teaching, the winter months weighed in heavy and found me trudging, just barely, through thickets and mud. The corner seemed to turn around spring break when being able to finish another school year became doable—a genuine, palpable entity.

For teachers, parents, kids, and the whole community, finishing this school year marks the end of an achievement and a feeling of moving forward. It’s not spring or summer but a pass to the next season, another level whether that level is kindergarten, seventh grade, or high school.

“Did you get bored with the same level of teaching, year after year?” a friend asked me the other day.

“Whaddaya mean?” I asked.

“I mean, I know the kids change, but when you are a teacher, you don’t change grades. They move up and on, but you don’t really…move.”

It was a fair question. I knew enough to know my friend’s question was climbing a different hill.

On the surface, it is true. Teachers don’t move up or down by levels as kids do. For them, there is no sense of graduation, no certificates of achievement, and for the most part, little recognition. Teachers are working hard to make sure the accolades are going to all their students that have grown and matured in some way, either academically, athletically, or even socially. That is part of the job of being a teacher. It’s all for the kids.

As I gave this more thought, however, a memory came back to me. I was out on the playground at the end of one school year talking to another teacher when a sick feeling came over me about my own past teaching year. I realized that in so many ways, I had let the kids down by my lazy teaching methods and my lack of enthusiasm. While during the year I had thought I was smart by taking short cuts in the classroom, I had undermined the very thing that was motivating me to teach. I wasn’t moving forward with my own learning, the learning that gave me a sharp edge, the learning that kept me one step ahead of the kids and engaged.

The kids were moving up, but I wasn’t, and that was the problem. It was a feeling I never wanted to have again.

Learning should always be exciting. If it’s not, something else is going on, but it’s not learning.

Do teachers move up? Not by grade levels, but by maturity they must move if they are good teachers. They might be singing, sliding, dancing, or wiggling, but there is movement going on if there’s really learning going on in their classroom. It’s the moving that matters.

I think I was one of the lucky ones to be teaching a subject that I loved which was art. But it is the same for all subjects. We teachers always learn from the students, and as they learn, the classroom changes and moves. There in the back and forth between student and teacher, learning starts to fill the air and the environment becomes electrically charged.

What makes teaching so full and fascinating is that every effort a kid makes is the first of its kind anywhere. Have you ever thought about it? Every new mark on the page, every new report or experiment a child makes is the first of its kind anywhere and contributes to the energy in the room, and in that sense, to the world. That kid is taking a step that is a first for them, always original and fascinating to behold. There is nothing more exciting for a teacher than to see the lightbulbs going off and ideas popping like French fries.

“May I be excused?” says a student raising his hand in the famous Far Side cartoon. “My brain is full.”

No, you may not be excused. Your brain is on a bullet train! Grab a hold of a good teacher, thank him or her for the school year, but hold on for dear life! If you’ve learned anything this year at all you’ll put on your seat belt and lean into your next learning curve!

And, oh the places you’ll go!