2023: Well Within Walking Distance

I have friends that head south during gray cloudy Midwest winters, but I find something restful about these monochromatic days of January. I hear no leaf blowers, there is no pollen upsetting my nose, and my hands finally heal from bug bites.

The lack of noise does give us all a chance to consider what is ahead in this new year, 2023. What would we like to do differently this year? Drink more water? Get up earlier? I have vowed to read more and be kinder each day (like everyone else), but on these quieter days of winter when the sun gets shy and hides, I wonder, what will I be most proud of when I’m sitting on the edge of 2024, looking back over this year?

It may not be my accomplishments.

In Bob Buford’s book, Halftime, he made the point that the second half of our lives is a time for more reflection and awareness and less about accomplishment. While our efforts to make things better in our world are not to be discounted, Buford stated that perhaps those things can happen more fluidly if we quit trying so hard to be significant by clawing our way to the top for a trophy. However, as I converse with a younger generation, I rarely hear New Year’s resolutions that include plans for deeper reflection or prayer. I do hear a lot about a “mindful” attitude of moving up the ladder of success.

Buford’s premise also closely follows the philosophy of another writer, Jack Canfield, best known for his Chicken Soup for the Soul series. Back before he became a household word, Canfield put out a series of cassette tapes that were meant to challenge prevailing motivational speeches. He said, in effect, that instead of setting goals and checking off our accomplishments, we should instead make our list of what we got done at the end of the day and then check off every item.

What’s that you say? You mean we make the list after we do everything we need to do?

At first this sounds like a ridiculous notion. Checking off everything you did after you did it would leave you accomplishing one hundred percent of everything you did, every day. If you are thinking that kind of list would leave you with a perfect success rate, then you would be absolutely right!

This is how that would look. Each day you would rise and begin living your life as it comes along, writing down things like, 1) Made coffee and read the newspaper, 2) yelled at the kids to get out of bed, 3) cleaned up the oatmeal that exploded in the microwave, and so on as the day progressed. By suppertime, you’d be looking at your list of things that you finished, and then simply check off every single one of them!

Now, imagine doing this for a whole year. Day after day, without fanfare or pressure, you would begin your day with no list, and at the end of the day you’d check each item off as “DONE” with the result being a successful year of completing everything you did. Of course, this is very similar to the adage: What would you do if you knew you could not fail?

My Canfield tapes are long gone, but I do remember how liberating his point could be compared to my own perfectionism. As I am reminded of advice from both Buford and Canfield, it seems I can look forward to a new year knowing that my resolutions are already checked off the list. You have to admit, that kind of freedom does give an energy boost to lofty goals and opens up the possibility of something even better than stressing over what we did not get done, for example achieving peace of mind.

Whoa, there horsey. Already I’m feeling withdrawal symptoms from my 3 X 5 cards. Where is that old familiar feeling of being overwhelmed going to fit in? How can I ever become the over-achiever I long to become?

Consider this absurd illustration, also by Canfield, of a couple witnessing their child’s first monumental attempts to walk. Let’s call their child Chuckie. As the parents oooh and ahhhh over these first steps, and watch Chuckie stumbles and falls, they suddenly are heard to say, “Oh, would you look at that? How sad. Little Chuckie just tried to get up on his feet and take a step. Oh, my! There he goes again. Oh! Fell right over. That’s too bad. Poor Chuckie… he’s probably not going to ever walk.”

Any parent who has raised a child knows how silly that sounds. To observe a child’s repeated falls as an indication they will never walk is almost too cruel to think about. We assume as parents that, through trial and error, our little precious Chuckies will eventually be able to take their first step, then another and another – all we need to do is nudge them along with love!

The idea of what our new year could be and how it could be different, perhaps needs this kind of shaking up, a paradigm shift.

One rainy day last week I was walking laps in the gym and eyeing an aggressive basketball game on the inside court. I observed ten very large men racing back and forth, out for blood, intensely pivoting, shoving elbows, and using every fowl word in the English language. As their intensity grew their play got more physical, until finally, the club manager had to be called out to put the ball players in a time-out. The remainder of us in the gym, going about our workout, were quietly thinking one thought:

“Give it a rest, guys! It’s just a basketball game!”

I’m certainly not trying to say that the ball players should have taken periodic breaks to involve themselves in some new-age rock worshipping or transcendental meditation. Disregarding a premature March madness, what was the end goal here for these men? They began playing ball with anticipation and fun but were shortly drawn into a display of very BAD sportsmanship and lack of maturity. Whatever they had hoped to achieve in their yelling and threats to each other was hampered, then spoiled by some imaginary trophy on the other side of Saturday morning hoops with the boys.

Perhaps a better goal for these men was not to have a goal at all.

What are we going for here, sports fans, in 2023? A banquet with a speech? Recognition? Are we going for the trophy as we spend another year flying up and down the basketball court?

I think both Buford and Canfield were offering something different and that is this: It’s a new year. Start at the beginning. Try the art of walking, and practice your walk until you can make it from one end of the court to the other without starting WW III. You’ll be sure to have a good year, a good 2023.

This seems very doable to me. In fact, I’ve checked it off my list already.

A Christmas Like Nobody's Business

There is nothing quite as exciting for a kid as Christmas Eve night, when the heavenly carpet rolls out and the magic of stars turns into morning. It’s magical for adults too. I used to get so excited on Christmas Eve that I couldn’t fall asleep. High octane anticipation was flowing through my bloodstream like nobody’s business, so much so that my dad would give me a placebo – a baby aspirin – and told me it would make me sleepy. Getting that aspirin on Christmas Eve may have been a strange tactic for a parent, but it worked. I took my tiny pink aspirin believing it would take me to some other universe during the night and awaken me like a locomotive whistling around the tree in the morning.

Still, imbedded underneath that brightly lit tree are memories that aren’t so pleasant.

My grandmother, who suffered from mental illness, almost burnt our house down one Christmas when she tried to fill the fireplace up with wrapping paper. This is not a Christmas we talk about much. It is too personal and too complex to hear this time of year. It’s part of our dirty laundry, and no one wants Christmastime to be tarnished with stains. No one wants that day to be filled with laundry that needs to be aired. We are looking forward to the clean crisp air of good tidings. That’s the air we want, the perfect family picture.

And yet, some of our most important Christmas moments, the ones we reminisce about, are the ones that took years for us to process. They are like the ones about my grandmother. They were difficult then, and they are still difficult to understand. They were frustrating and awkward and didn’t feel like Christmas at all, but they were part of the day. Those memories have pressed us to look in the face of what family is, in the light of stories that make us bristle and edgy, stories we are still trying to figure out. They have forced us to go deeper, do some heavy mental lifting, and see all of Christmas, not just the parts that are well lit under the tree.

Family and Christmas. How are those two ever going to be able to sit in the same room together?

Just ask the woman that is in labor on Christmas day what those pains are like. Like a mother named Mary. Ask the father what it’s like to be on the run and ostracized by a community. Like a father named Joseph. Talk to a blue-collar worker who had to work on Christmas Eve when everyone else got that day off. Ask the owner of a stable. And talk to some travelers who are tired and hungry and uncomfortable, trying to reach their destination by a star in the sky. Like a group of wise men.

None of those conversations would be easy or look like a family photo that went viral. You would hear confusion, and worry, and you would see tears. You would see frightened faces who didn’t know the future, who were stumbling along in the blind, asking a lot of questions no one had answered to. In our family we have had a few uncertain Christmas days like those.

Yes, we all have you say, but is it necessary to talk about them now? At Christmastime?

No, of course not. We don’t have to, but aren’t they what Christmas is really about? We can skillfully play our parts when we hear “Lights! Music! Action!” And that’ll work until there’s a cameo appearance, and then everything you’ve expected out of Christmas goes up in flames.

We’ve had a few of those cameos in our family also.

We had one this Christmas, a day that began to feel like a long series of bad bloopers. These were our outtakes:

The mobile van delivering my elderly father got stuck on a treacherous hill that took us two hours to get free. We spent the day trying to get him back home, which effectively cancelled the meal and the fun games we had planned. My son-in-law, shoveling a path in the snow, stressed over his father’s near-fatal heart attack while shoveling snow. We worried about the muddy wheelchair marks my dad embedded in the carpeting, and while we were busy worrying, the lasagna burnt up in the oven. We had two falls on the ice, kids that had meltdowns, and slowly, the miracle of Christmas began to fizzle out like a flat soft drink, with everyone just really wanting to be back home, in the safety of what was familiar.

They were our cameos, the family pictures that weren’t in the Christmas script. They came on Christmas day just like another cameo appearance long ago when a baby was born, whose birth was inconvenient and troublesome and gut-wrenching and cold and risky. Traveling was dangerous, meals were sparse, tempers were short, and the baby’s future up for debate. His was a birth surrounded by dirt and animals, and strangers and stress. It left those in attendance wishing they could just be somewhere else where it was warm and safe.

But…

It left the rest of the world with a Miracle – The Prince of Peace – and a birthday we’ll never forget. It’s called Christmas.

Two Angels from Ketchum: Part Two

Scottie, Jim, and the author

Last week I began a story set in Ketchum, Idaho, where several of my buddies and I had taken a leave of absence from college, cowboy hats and all. Living out west was a culture shock but working at the ski resort was no vacation. As Christmas day moved quietly towards us, homesickness crept in. We found ourselves on a desolate hike home after a night of broomball, isolated, cold and acutely aware that we were being watched, and stalked by wild dogs. I begin here with the last paragraph from episode one of our saga Two Angels from Ketchum:

We slowed for a moment, to take in the beautiful vapor drifting down against a midnight-blue background_,_ but as the air cleared, we saw the black silhouette of a feral beast revealed in the fog, square shouldered and unflinching, and looking…at us.

One beady pair of eyes was reflected but there were glints off to the side of others too, watching us, shifting in and out of the cover of wiry sagebrush. While one dog posed no threat, there was never such thing out here as one dog – those got picked off by mountain lions. It was difficult to see details in this lunar-like terrain, the lava plains of Ketchum’s high mountain desert, but more mongrels stood just beyond our sight, waiting for a signal to become a pack of coordinated moves. Like wolves, one leader becomes the front for a timely advance, a pestering attack, which gives the next dog an instant to move in and make a disabling bite or tear. Timely aggression, then an assail, that was the strategy of a pack of feral dogs.

We had heard stories of skiers who had lost their pet dogs one season and then sighted them on their next trip, adopted as orphans with a new pack family.

Warming up at a long communal table at the ski lift, we fell into conversation with a man who told us of his Siberian, “a gorgeous dog,” who had disappeared without a trace during one of his ski trips. Thought stolen, he’d sadly given up looking for him by the end of his vacation, and reluctantly left without his pet. Surprisingly, the next winter, while emptying his trash outside, he spotted his dog near the dumpster and called out his name, “Harley.”

“That dog pulled up short, looked right at me like he’d seen a ghost! Most beautiful animal you’ve ever seen. Pure white, with brilliant green eyes,” he said, “green as grass. He rode on the back of my Harley from the time he was a puppy.”

Jim and I had heard these kind of beer stories before out here, and we could never tell the truth from a Jackalope.

“What did you do after you spotted him?” I inquired.

“Yea… well…that’s kind of a sad story. My dog came back for handouts every night about the same time. He’d get close, enough that I could see his collar, but I couldn’t get him to come up to me. Not exactly a Disney movie, is it?”

He looked wistfully out past the slopes, as if he thought his dog might still appear.

“I guess the draw of the pack was too strong. He was there a couple of days, then I never saw him again.”

The beast in front of us, however, was not going anywhere. Nor would he be tempted by a handout, not that we had any. He ran to one side of the road, his ribs evident, and then stopped abruptly and posed for another nervous look at us. All around, other dogs were now slipping out of the darkness like spies from a foreign country. We heard their scamperings, and then saw one come out in full view, a muscley grey one, nose sniffing the air, and he joined the leader. Three more, then another three or four came up from behind, ready to bolt. We would not be able to. In and out of ruts made by ATV’s, the feral pack shifted back and forth, sneaking forwards, weighing their options. We stood like concrete statues and tried to look tall.

“Take one of these,” Jim said, and slowly let his pair of skates slide off his shoulder. Like his skis, Jim kept the edges razor sharp, and we both slid a hand inside a skate.

If Christmas brought our Savior, we hadn’t heard of him yet, and had not fostered the quieter voice of wisdom, either. The mantra we lived by in Idaho was predicated on scraggly beards, uncombed pride, and a god we thought we’d find on Experience Road. In spite of the all the signs around us, we hardly spoke of Christmas at all, and even though that day was near, we were busy manning up, trying to tough out the season by working double shifts delivering firewood and bringing towels to cozy resort cabins. In truth, Christmas had made us fragile and homesick, and searching in our sleep for a star to guide us.

Here, we chose instead a few choice words for the hungry dogs now circling. Those words were mumbled under our breaths – a lame gospel of fear for two boys trying to be men, looking more and more like dead meat.

“Well JB, this stinks. You got any swift ideas?” Jim said and motioned with his skate to the seven or eight dogs pacing out in front of us.

I did have a thought, a sighting really, of a faint light out in the distance, a glint of a trailer home, if we could make it.

“Uh, not a clue,” I replied. “They may run if we call their bluff. Maybe we can scare ‘em off. Or we could try to make it to that trailer homes down the road. I don’t know.”

“I’m thinking let’s freeze and wait it out. Hope a ride comes by. Watch that one on the left, JB. I think he’s the leader.”

The desert flatness let the wind blast right through us, finding a path through our layers, turning our worries to a cold sweat. My head was on a swivel, and I could hear a dog, maybe a second, growling off to the side. The threatening pack moved together now and in. One skinny dog feigned an attack, suddenly and snapped as it ran past, showing its pointed front teeth. I swung my skate blade out ten feet too late and heard a snarl in the quick of his moving shadow. Jim, over six feet tall, stepped over next to me, and we prepared to make a stand, back-to-back. We could make a few slicing swings, maybe get the leader, but the dogs were quick, could grab an arm and tear at us.

“They’ll jump at you, JB! Stay low and…” but his order was cut off by the sound of a high-pitched yelp just beyond the dogs.

From the periphery we caught the sight of a flurry of paws and teeth, a whirlwind of fur and legs. Jim and I, still swinging our skates, stepped away from a tumbling mass, and two fighting dogs viciously biting spun by and missed us by only inches.

The dog pack, alerted to the new dog, stopped momentarily, as we did, to watch as the two snapped at each other, almost in mid-air. But as quickly as this skirmish slowed, a new dogfight broke out more savage than the first.

Another wild dog charged in from the side with teeth barred to reinforce his packmate. It was a big Shephard mix. But before it could land a bite, it too was cut off by a second phantom dog, solid white, who raced in and cut off the Shephard. Both reared, both bearing incisors, snapping at the air, lost into a churning ball of fur. As quickly as it began, the biting ceased with a penetrating “Arrrrrriiittt! – an unnatural, beastly squeal that pierced the dark. The feral Shephard was thrown down, flattened on the ground outright. From the white gladiator standing over him came a low guttural growl as it pinned him and clamped down, a final vice grip on the vertebrae of the defeated.

We froze, and the sweat held back now beading our foreheads. In front of us, two white muscled dogs, pure in color as the snow, stood and looked up, each straddling a fallen foe. The second fight had ended exactly like the first, with a suffocating grip on a windpipe and a final snap. Where only moments before we had stood in an arena of terror, gnashing teeth, and telescoping jaws, dead quiet now filled this desert stadium arena. What was left of the wild pack scampered cowardly off into the abyss of sand and rock.

What we saw was the aftermath of the dog battlefield: Two wild dogs lying motionless underneath a pair of identical white Huskies.

“What just happened?” Jim said, looking at the two lifeless animals.

“Never in my life.” I stuttered. “Man. Where did those white dogs come from?”

“I don’t know, but I’m glad they did!” and we lifted our skate arm for a high five. We had come close to being violently bitten or worse, torn to shreds. The two Huskies gave a final sniff to the dogs lying beneath them, then playfully scampered over to us, perhaps to get a thanks, and we dropped our skates and reached out to pet them.

“Here boy, come ‘ere! Come ‘ere!” I said giddily.

I fell on my knees, overwhelmed by the relief rushing in and fear rushing out. I swallowed hard, choked up, and for a moment I thought I was going to cry. One Husky trotted up to me and I felt its warmth emanate as I buried my face in its fur. Standing, I gazed for a moment into the dog’s eyes. They were brilliant green, green as grass.

For the rest of our trip home, Jim and I were escorted to our apartment by these two beautiful Huskies, gladiators, who trotted out in front of us as if they were our own. We had not opened a present yet, nor would we need to. We were alive and we had a good story to tell. It was about a Christmas Eve night where home came to us by way of two angels from Ketchum.

Two Angels from Ketchum

Nobody liked the packs of wild dogs that roamed the town after dark, but no one wanted to deal with them either. Mornings held that condo trash would be scattered across parking lots, and someone’s pet poodle would be found torn to shreds, but local sheriffs maintained the wild dogs were just part of living in a small mountain town.

This was ski country in Idaho, where the rich and sometimes famous flew in from the west coast for a weekend of rowdy 3D’s: dining, downhill and drinking. Private helicopters dropped skiers off high above the timber line to ski spots unreachable to the locals, then picked them back up with waiting tequila shots or lines of coke, then whisk them off again to try another speed run down the couloir.

We boys were never invited to that party, and that was good, but we knew of the wild dogs. We knew they bred with the pedigrees that were left behind by their rich owners, producing a winter crop of feral litters every year. Those cute puppies grew up mean, street smart and massed in packs of ten or fifteen, sometimes more, harassing anything they could get their teeth into. It was winter in Ketchum, biting and dry, and left you wiping your nose from sudden nosebleeds.

We hired in as maids at Sun Valley, mostly for the benefit of a free ski pass and the right to call ourselves ski bums for the season. My buddy Jim was the leader. Tall, lanky, and rugged, he was an adventurer, and he talked me into taking a quarter off college and heading west in a VW van to shake off our sophomore blues. We had no money, the kind of no money that ordered hot water and used the ketchup on the table for a lousy version of tomato soup and if we were lucky, a nice waitress that gave us crackers.

Between shifts at the resort, snow piled up. So did the tourists. Wave after wave of them poured in and cut loose in their rooms, trashing them usually, and leaving trays of luxurious room service laying outside hardly touched. We didn’t want to be in college, but a meal plan back at school looked pretty good after a shift of cleaning rooms paid for on daddy’s credit card. We were putting on a good face, hanging through the holidays, but watching spoiled skiers spend money willy-nilly was a dismal prospect. With mid-December feeling heavy, we loaded our skating gear in the van for a night of free Broomball, a polite version of hockey, at the resort’s skating rink.

“Oh, here we go again!” Jim snarled as he slowed the van and reached up to get the frost off the inside of windshield. Our heater had broken somewhere in Nevada on the way out to Sun Valley.

“You gotta be kidding me,” I said, peering out. “They’re everywhere. And they aren’t moving for us.”

“Can you believe this? I’m only a foot away,” Jim said and inched the van closer. A lazy gathering of dogs, all sizes, had strewn themselves about the street and barely looked up at us.

“Look at that silver one,” I said, then added cynically, “He thinks he is king of the road. Rrruuff!”

“No fear at all, these dogs,” Jim added rolling down his window. “Git! Git outa here!”

The silver one circled around our van, slowly as if eyeing a possible kill. It was eerie, like being stalked by a woken zombie.

“Time for a different plan,” Jim said under his breath, his usual patience running thin.

And we were running late to Broomball. He didn’t like wasting time or gas money, certainly not on a bunch of wild mutts. With a long blast on the horn, and we made one final attempt to make a path through, but none of the dogs budged. We were being stared down with rows of white teeth that shone in our headlights.

“I oughta just run ‘em over,” Jim said, but put the VW in reverse.

It was the way everyone felt. The dog packs, brazen and mean, lay in the open road all the time, challenging anyone to make them move out of the way. One barked as we backed up, but it was a smug and stuffed-up bark, as if the dog was taking a chunk right out of the frigid air. Another joined in with a howl. This air was theirs to bite, as often as they wanted.

By the time we made it to the ice rink, the temp had dropped to single digits, and we ran in late to grab a stick broom by the fire pit and gliding out on the ice to blow off our steam. We were drifters like those dogs, away from our own kind, away from some other life we dumped back in college, and most of the time disdainful of it. We had something in common with those dogs. Loners, out on our own, on thin ice, looking for a free meal ticket. That was us and the dogs.

Raised in northern Ohio, Jim knew hockey, but Scottie, the third stooge in our trip, was the real deal, a gifted skater. When he was sixteen, a car accident had thrown him across four lanes of traffic. Until then, Scottie was headed for the Canadian pro hockey circuit, he was that good. On land, he steps were hampered, and his brain damage forever tripped up his speech, but on the ice, he could move like a butterfly and skate circle around any of us. Me, I was fast but clumsy on the ice, an embarrassment really, but I travelled with two nimble northerners who vouched for me and got me through the gate for broomball.

“Lean..on the… in…inside.. of your skate, then….ppppush down,” Scottie told me when he saw I couldn’t skate in reverse.

His car accident had stripped him of smooth speech, and in the mornings before work, Jim and I had to help him with his coat buttons.

“You can’t…play…the….puck…always going…f..ff…orward,” he stuttered, and he taught me the virtue of holding the puck and setting up a play by passing back. Jim was more aggressive, a master of the poke-and-jab, and spent time teaching me how to stop without falling over the rails. That maneuver separated the skaters from the goats.

Nearing Christmas, a crowd of partyers had gathered with their colorful drinks and hired dates to watch us around the open fire pit. Scottie left early after the first half, leaving our team with a man down, and when the buzzer went off ending the game, our beards were encrusted with ice from our hard, frozen breath. Using a broom and a volleyball wasn’t real hockey, but it passed for entertainment when home was two thousand miles away.

“Good cross JB on that last goal,” Jim said as we carried our gear back to the van. He was a natural coach, patient, and ribbed me about my lack of skills without making fun.

“My big claim to fame tonight!” I replied. “Let’s face it, Jim, I’m pretty much just a warm body out there. I can’t get that stopping thing down to save my life. I spend more time on my rear end than on my feet!”

“Yea, you could leave some ice on the rink,” laughed Jim.

We walked stiff legged to the van, our soreness sinking in as some nasty, probably illegal, body checks began to ache. Our usual fare of mac and cheese awaited us at our flat, then a hot shower before hitting the hay. That thought changed when our van’s motor let out a couple dry coughs, then wouldn’t even do that, leaving us staring through the windshield, out across a frozen landscape.

Jim looked at me. “How’s your thumb working?”

“Yea, right. This stinks,” I said. “Maybe if we hoof it outta the resort we can get a lift. It’s still early.” But at six degrees, I knew that was wishful thinking.

A perfectly clear and infinite night sky lay between us and the five miles home. The only thing passing us was a shooting star, so we gave up on hitchhiking, put our heads down to block the wind, and walked without conversation. Packed snow muffled our steps and buried any sympathy. We never heard the truck behind us, and it barreled past, too suddenly for us to wave it down. A huge billow of icy sparkles went into the air as the pick-up took a curve, leaving a snow cloud hovering in front of us, lingering like a string of arctic Christmas lights.

We slowed for a moment, to take in the beautiful vapor drifting down against a midnight-blue background, but as the air cleared, we saw the black silhouette of a feral beast revealed in the fog, square shouldered and unflinching, and looking…at us.

Ten Tidings I Bring to You and Your Kin

Whether whipping up homemade eggnog or hanging some mistletoe, family traditions revive our Christmas spirit every year and put a little jingle in our snow boots. In our family we’ve noticed that what began as an after-thought now has become a regular staple during the holidays and set the tone for the “most wonderful time of the year.” While they may be called rituals by some and indulgences by others, our Christmas traditions help us to keep things light and take our minds off our worldly stresses.

I got the snow shovel out for this podcast and dug up a few of my all-time favorite Christmas traditions. These ten tidings are doozies! For a few of them, you’re going to need some outright pluck and daring because, admittedly, most of them are attention seeking and narcissistic. And, if I was honest, the world could probably do without any of them, but what’s the fun in that?

We are to be reminded that Christmas is supposed to bring out the child in us. After all, Christmas is about a child, Jesus, who came into the world pure as snow, and taught us all about a truth, one that could help us start fresh every day. The challenges Joseph and Mary faced as parents back in the day was serious stuff, but what gladness they must have felt knowing that on that shivery night of their son’s birth, the whole earth was sleeping under a new clean blanket of grace and hope.

If Jesus was five years old and knocked on my door this Christmas morning, I think he might come in and have some fun with the Ten Tidings I’m offering you here, and would no doubt have a few of his own. Here we go…

TIDING #1: If you have a message on your phone, or land line, change the message to a Christmas verse that you make up. My singing leaves a lot to be desired, and I generally ruin Christmas songs as soon as I open my mouth, but my off-tune singing can be funny. See what you think. Call my number, (812) 479-8264 and listen to the message. It may make you cringe…or put a Christmas song in your heart for the day. Your choice.

TIDING #2: Make huge pancakes on Christmas morning. They will be hilarious when you put them on someone’s plate. When I was camping one summer in Wyoming, we made pancakes as big as a frying pan and challenged each other to try to flip them over in one fell swoop. Pancakes are one of those versatile foods that will make you smile like a happy face. I like to put fake candy fried eggs in the middle of mine, or fig newtons in the batter, then add copious amounts of whip cream on top. Bring it on, then serve them up as if you are dead serious about pancakes!

TIDING #3: The very best present you can give anyone during the holiday season is your good cheer. Bundle up at night and spread tons of joy around by loading up your car with kids and singing Christmas carols at the top of your lungs. Roll down your windows, let the cold hit you in the face, and open the throttle on that stereo! It’s time to bring out that private shower voice you’ve been hiding all these years and rock your neighborhood!

TIDING #4: Order a set of matching Christmas pajamas for everyone in your family and go to Starbucks together for a late evening hot chocolate. There’s something magical, possibly weird, about a family dressing in the same outfit and walking into a coffee shop. It looks like they just finished the curtain call in some sort of theatrical play. So, ask for a double helping of those tiny marshmallows in your pj’s. If you get some awkward stares, become theatrical and belt out a dramatic line like, “God Bless Us Everyone!”

TIDING #5: This is one of my all-time favorites. Buy a couple of dozen fake snowballs and have a strategically planned snowball fight in your house on Christmas morning. We have done it every year for ages and every year something gets broken, or someone gets hit in the face with a snowball. Don’t worry, it doesn’t hurt. It’s like getting hit with a large cotton ball.

TIDING #6: I couldn’t make a list without including something from my favorite Christmas movie, Elf. Try this: Get everyone in front of the big screen and in slow motion, play the snowball fight Elf has with a gang of bullies in Central Park. Just when Buddy is about to make that incredible throw and nail the fleeing bully, pause the TV and have everyone put their post-it on the TV with the name of a bully written down on it. When you hit play and Elf lets that snowball fly, have everyone scream "TAKE THAT, YOU COTTON-HEADED NIMMYMUGGIN!"

TIDING #7: Give a cherry pit pack to someone. This is without a doubt the best gift I have ever given. People love them. A cherry pit pack is a small cloth pillow filled with cherry pits that you can nuke in the microwave. The oil in the cherry pits stay warm for at least an hour and is so comforting you’ll feel like you are in a Norwegian spa. I began using mine to warm the bottom of my bed in the winter. My feet love it.

TIDING #8: Wear an oversized Christmas band aid on your forehead with holly or bells on it, and when people ask what happened tell them you ran into a reindeer. If they laugh, pull out a Christmas band aid and give it to their kid. They’ll feel healed immediately. (You can even order ones that look like strips of bacon).

TIDING #9: Remember this line? “‘Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house…” When you read that classic holiday poem, change one of the lines and see if anyone catches it. When I was a kid, my dad used to say, “Away to the window, I flew like a flash, tore open the shutters and threw out the trash.” We lay there in bed and knew that when Dad delivered that line it would be wrong, but we laughed every time he said it, and couldn’t wait to hear it again, and again.

TIDING #10: Make a Grinch Pie with one of your kids! Here’s what you do. Go to the grocery store and buy twenty dollars of the most disgusting food items you can find. Look for items like pig knuckles, canned tongues, or green slime Jell-O. There’s plenty of revolting items to choose from so just make it up as you go along. When I make a Grinch pie with my grandsons, we always throw in a dirty sock and add some yard debris, but that’s just us. Then for the coup’ de grace, dump the gloppy mixture into a pie crust, and present it to someone you don’t like, but really like a lot. As they try to thank you, give them a real present, and watch their Grinch heart grow three times bigger, just like Dr. Suess said it would.

As you go dashing through the snow this season, remember, there’s a child in all of us just waiting to come in and get warm. So is Jesus. He is waiting outside in the snow hoping someone hears Him knocking at the door. He is serious about his role as God’s son but has also come to show us great “tidings of comfort and joy.” Open the door! Invite him in for a colossal pancake and give one of my ten tidings a try. It’ll just be us family, and a new baby named Jesus.

Merry Christmas Everyone!

Big Wheels Keep on Turning

As some early signs of winter set in, our yard could be mistaken for a small mammal petting zoo. We have already had one dusting of snow, but in our yard, it’s raining squirrels. At any one time, dozens of them rush around as if it's Black Friday, pushing and shoving, barking at each other for the last discounted acorn on the shelf. These rodents have a heyday tearing up the landscape, so I trap them and cart them off to the Candy Cane Forest where they can look furry and cute and strip the bark off woodland trees to their hearts delight.

After releasing one such varmint, I was headed back home when a horizontal streak of lightning flashed by me. The wind chill was only twenty-four but sliding into the lane ahead of me was a man...yes…a motorized wheelchair. Shirtless! And helmetless! Who was this wheelchaired superhero? Had I missed the checkered flag? From what I could tell, he was in a race with himself and winning, taking the pole position, head lowered, leaning forward in the First Annual Lunatic 500.

While I often stare as drivers across the city violate traffic laws willy-nilly, here was a half-naked wheelchaired man with no fear and no apparent knowledge of the speed limit. Watching his devil-be-damned attitude, I had to wonder how he ended up in the wheelchair in the first place. Was he running from the law? Was he late to a wedding? Was he one of those daredevils that drives into a tornado while the rest of us are driving away from them? Most importantly, had I missed an email designating me as the pace car? I had to know.

But I was too slow. As smoke poured off his big wheels, Morgan Freeman’s iconic line from Shawshank Redemption came over me: “You either get busy living or get busy dying.” From what I could tell, Flash was making a bee line towards death if he didn’t either slow down or get some clothes on.

Normally, my pervading thought would be empathy and compassion for the wheelchair bound, but I didn’t feel compassion at all. I had horrible PTSD from an experience in a car, when, on the Fourth of July, a formation of Blue Angels approached me over a country hill and almost caused my airbags to deploy. (By the way, my family was riding with me and was only saved by diving out of the car into a cornfield).

Here, I realized I was witnessing a man who laughed in the face of dangerous adventures. Volcanic potholes? Laughable! Construction hazards? Ridiculous! Semi-trucks? Watch out! Shortly after I spotted him again, bright red from windburn, he roared through a double row of moving cars with a huge smile on his face, made a raised “defiant fist” to a texting driver, and then blasted into an intersection bringing a herd of hybrid cars to a complete and silent halt.

This was not a man who played the victim. There was no sad story here, and no one looking for pity. This guy had his Big Wheels, he had his moxie. He had come out of nowhere like a meteor from interstellar space, burning up our limited atmosphere on a historic path to fulfill his destiny. His earth knew no bounds, and as far as he was concerned, well, “Houston, we don’t have a problem here.”

After I pulled over to take my anxiety medicine, I observed him deftly shank a sudden wheelie next to a telephone pole, stopping only inches from a pedestrian WALK button, which he punched so hard it stopped all cable service in the surrounding area for at least a couple of hours. When I’m walking about town, I can never get one of those buttons to work for me, but after watching him, I think I can now! All you have to do is hit it as if you want to kill it, and that red button WILL STOP TRAFFIC!

Now, before the signal turned green, he took off again on two wheels as if on a wild mustang. On a pole connected to his wheelchair, a tall yellow caution flag waved furiously, signaling that he was ready to jump back in the fray and possibly a national news cycle. Something moved me deep inside, and I had a strange feeling I was in a scene of Braveheart, as if my own courage had laid dormant for years. If my sunroof had been opened, I might have stood up and recited the Pledge of Allegiance or sang God Bless America. Instead, I broke into a spontaneous applause, one handed of course, while keeping my other hand free to give him an encouraging thumbs up.

But he never saw me. He was on a mission. This was a man on a high-speed race with adrenaline, who rounded corners on two wheels, and who wasn’t going to let a fast ride on a cold day be waisted because his shirt was still in the dryer! We’ve all seen this guy. We know him and we move aside when we see him coming. Why? Because we are making room for the turbo-lane he’s creating for himself out there in Braveheart. He’s fearless. He’s seen Shawshank Redemption and heard the line, and he is getting busy living.

Hello Darkness, My Pumpkin Friend

As most of you know by now, my relationship with the pumpkin family has walked a tenuous line over the years. Last year, after an interview with Mr. Pumpkin (see Nov 12 and Nov 20 blogposts), where he passionately defended gourds across the nation, I thought I had heard the end of him. Then last week, a piece of pie I was eating succumbed to Pie-librium, tipped precariously over, and through a random sequence of events, caused the accidental stabbing of a nearby napkin holder. I tried to leave the diner quietly, knowing pumpkins are a temperamental lot. I tried; I really did try.

However, late into the night, when my inner beasts awaken and spirits trinkle down the floorboards of our house, I heard an abrupt THU-wump! at our front door. Slipping out of bed in bewilderment, I caught a contentious whiff in the air. In the flicker of the streetlight outside, I saw a hooded figure drop an unmarked envelope through our mail slot. Then, the figure vanished into the shadows, and all was quiet.

But a damp, earthy atmosphere filled our foyer. It was an odor that had a jarring effect on my memory. There was something bland but contentious…something Cucurbitaceae in the air, and I felt a marrow chill race up my spine. Carefully, I opened the following letter:

Photo by Kimi Albertson on Unsplash

Dear Mr. Blunder:

Remember me? I remember you…I know where you live. I follow your podcast, and last week’s disturbed me…grated me. You have once again insulted the Pumpkin Nation and raked our good nature across the pumpkin patch by introducing the absurd notion that our balance, our very temperament, is determined by an ancient math formula.

To suggest that a fake formula called “Pie-librium,” was the cause of your accident while eating a piece of pumpkin pie and resulted in the stabbing of a nearby napkin holder with your fork, was a fibrous insult to pumpkins everywhere. Tipping over on our crust! HA! May I remind you that the triangular shape of pumpkin pie is one of the most stable of all forms found in nature? That tipping of your piece of pie and blaming it on pumpkins? JACK-O-LANTERN’S YOUR UNCLE! That one’s on you, and you, alone. Your story was nothing more than pulp fiction, and I for one refuse to sit by and let you darken our fine heritage.

You may or may not be aware that Indiana, your fair state, is the second largest pumpkin producer in the United States, with some 118 million pounds of pumpkin processed every year. Even as I write this letter, the entire gross tonnage of pumpkins across Indiana are lining up, soldiering together on porches, for the upcoming Thanksgiving season. We are not tipped over as you suggested, or in any way losing our balance. There are a few of us who have cut out our tops to spite our carved faces, but in general I speak for all gourds in defiant opposition to your theory of shifting equilibrium, your boneheaded mathematical equation for “Pie-librium.” We can sit proud on any plate, proud of our mushy and unremarkable taste that always blends with, but doesn’t stand out during, a Thanksgiving dinner. Our national slogan, “Stable on the Table,” marches forth.

We have heard your podcast Mr. Blunder. We have your number and it is not P/E or any other formula. Let this letter be a warning to you. As President of the Indiana Chapter for the Development and Homogenization of Pumpkins, I can assure you that any more fibrous material slung in our direction will be carved, squashed and pureed. We will ripen and march on Washington if we must and demand that the word “equilibrium” be edited out of all Thanksgiving dinner conversations and ground up in the food processor of the English language. We will march – the entire pumpkin nation, including my close cousins – the watermelon, celery, gourds, and zucchini. You want numbers? You want math? How about 975 species?! There’s some math for you, and it is US! WE ARE PUMPKIN NATION.

Signed,
Mr. Pumpkin

His letter fell from my limp hands. Past lyrics from an old Paul Simon song drifted through my head: “Hello Darkness, my pumpkin friend, I’ve come to talk with you again...” and I was scared. How would I sleep at night knowing my very digestive tract might take a beating this Thanksgiving from the Pumpkin Nation? How would I get past my fears of candle-lit, stalking pumpkins?

And then, as the streetlight flickered through my foyer and shed its warm light across his letter, I notice something. Maybe in was nothing, I don’t know. It was hardly noticeable, but there in Mr. Pumpkin’s organic signature was a blotch, a spattering, a spill, and an odor that jogged my memory. I hesitated, but then brought the letter close to my nose, and smelled something familiar. It was…nutmeg, maybe a touch of cinnamon, or tarragon, and a carbohydrate daze crept over me. I felt sleepy again and safe, at least for another year.

Staying Ahead of the Carve

One day not too long ago, having suffered through what can only be described as a series of unreasonable challenges, I decided to grab a coffee and collect myself. I would not necessarily describe my day as combative, but it was close, and came to a head with an uncivil disturbance – my neighbor blowing all his fall leaves down the city’s sewer drain. At a local coffee house, just to shake off my disbelief, I ordered my drink with a piece of pumpkin pie, sort of a last nod to Fall and the slow demise of municipal plumbing.

I rely on pumpkins when life gets dicey. I find comfort in the fact that they are not exactly round, ready to roll around, but slightly oblong in form, and always look ready to settle down where they are, even during my turbulent times. Frankly though, I’m not sure what happens to pumpkin after it goes in my mouth, due to its featureless consistency. I have neither a memory of chewing it or swallowing it once it goes in the pie hole, but it has an anesthetic effect on me. I can only guess pumpkin goes down the same way my neighbor blows his leaves down the sewer, disappearing down a vast hole, mindlessly, with no evidence that it was ever part of the fall landscape.

That afternoon, exchanging sips of coffee with the nothingness of my pumpkin pie bites, I felt its creaminess absorb all my worries. Like a friend who has no opinions on anything, my pie sat there looking interested, but never said one thing, and I fell into a kind of pumpkin haze. A tiny smile perked up in the corner of my mouth, giving birth to hope, and pumpkin peace. For a moment, I even imagined my law-breaking neighbor floating gently over our city, lifted by his Honda 350 leaf blower. The table where I sat was wobbly with uneven legs, and my seat was an horribly uncomfortable, a hybrid stool of some sort, but never mind. I had my balance, my coffee and a piece of neutral pumpkin pie.

My first two bites went down like cake, without effort, but as I unceremoniously sliced into the third bite with my fork, the equilibrium of my pie triangle shifted ever so slightly towards the crust, causing what was left of my pie wedge to tip up, vertical, on the plate. This rarely happens with other pies that I eat, but pumpkin is so homogenized, that any interruption of its specific gravity, any deviation in the slicing process becomes the perfect culinary storm. I had upset the pumpkin scale somehow and I would pay the price.

The thought of my pumpkin, that most uninteresting of all foods, misbehaving in such a detached manner shocked me. I had always assumed that the lightly oily bottom of the crust would be a kind of glue that would stabilize the rest of the wedge. I sat dumfounded in fact, unaware that as my pie shifted, it had caused the table to also shift to its three good legs, causing my plate to begin a perilous slide off the edge of the table. What was meant to be a frantic grab for my pie plate with my free hand instead became an incompetent mishit on the upturned fork which fired off my table as if released from a medieval catapult, then impaled itself in the napkin holder next to me. Incredibly, the elderly couple seated nearby, apparently in a pumpkin haze themselves, didn’t look up at all! My fork was vibrating only inches from their pie, and they didn’t budge!

I realized right then that I had upset one of the most precious laws of physics, The Law of Pie-librium, that is, the square of pumpkin pie stability, represented by P/E is inversely proportionate to its neutrality, represented by our mental state. The formula, which you remember from college, appears as:

P/E ∞ 1/☺︎

This immutable law, being one of the hallmarks of pumpkin neutrality, is best left alone, not altered in any way, even when you are eating. I did have a fleeting moment when I entertained the idea that had my piece of pumpkin pie been less consistent, more bumply, or fruity, or weighty, that perhaps I would have been able to eat it without incident. But then, that is just not the bland and unimaginative nature of pumpkins. So…I shook off that notion, got up off my defective stool and left quietly, out of respect for the indecisiveness of all pumpkins everywhere. One cannot change the immutable laws of nature and pumpkins, and wisdom, in the end, prevails. You either eat your pumpkin in tranquility or live long enough to see yourself become the formula.

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."

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.

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.