Grace That Brought Me Safe Thus Far

Here in our neck of the woods, a couple of warm days in early April brings out neighbors we haven’t seen since last fall. I saw one of mine come out of hibernation yesterday, wearing an apron that looked like a basket of Easter eggs. She and her husband keep their property in immaculate condition, and she was busy sweeping the winter dust bunnies off her front porch. It’s a season of new beginnings as our landscapes comes alive with pink and yellow bulbs, and our streets are ablaze with motorcycles racing at breakneck speeds.

Acceleration is, after all, part of what spring is all about. We are quick to soak up as much sun as we can, sing a couple of hallelujahs and kick things into high gear. Two thousand years ago, the same thing happened when new believers in Jerusalem rushed to get a glimpse of their new king Jesus, only to watch him be ridiculed, tortured, and sentenced to death on a Roman cross. He was the New Spring, walking with a greener vision among those “least, lost and the lonely.”

It is always interesting to ask a Christian about their salvation story, especially this time of year. There is never one of those stories that is boring, but they are often joyfully tearful. I have shed a few tears myself when I talk about the path that led me to need a Savior, and like many, they begin along a dark path with twists and turns that made me question my very existence or purpose.

Along my way, a mentor of mine likened the journey to walking through a dark tunnel. He encouraged me to walk looking ahead, even when the way was pitch black and dingy. Squinting ahead, down the narrowing space, he told me there was a light, a tiny dot, giving me a clue to the direction to be followed. I wasn’t clear whether this was a real light or a momentary flash. Stepping towards some unknown goal, with unsure footing and no handholds, would feel frightening and not worth the risk, and with each step I took, my mentor warned me the darkness behind me would beckon me to turn back, and sometimes that draw would feel stronger than the light. However, the only way to the end, he said, was through the tunnel, towards that beacon of light that would hush the voices behind me while fortifying the notion that there would be something better at the other end.

And so it is with the Christian walk, even in the midst our King’s death. We are moving forward in spite of the mostly unlighted tunnel we travel through. We try to lean in on the good stuff while watching the light enlarge and listen to only the true voices in front of us.

I asked my wife Carrie to marry me on Easter Sunday twenty-three years ago. She has been one of my true voices. I had no confidence really that I was going to be able to carry the responsibilities of being a husband and a new father to Emily, her daughter. After gaining some trust, I began picking Emily up at the crack of dawn on Saturdays and we’d go out for breakfast, order some greasy bacon and wash it down with Stewart’s Orange Cream Ale right out of the bottle. It felt like eating a plateful of lard and a glass of sugar all in one sitting, but it was worth it.

I had serious hesitations about pulling the trigger to get married though, fostered by regrets from the past, and a lack of trust in my own abilities. Fear paralyzed me and filled me with indecision and doubt. So, I created a protective box around myself that was comfortable and predictable, one that didn’t require much emotional or spiritual stretching. Boxes, as you know, are confining and restrictive, and come with sides and borders and rules and judgements, all of which I thought would keep me safe and keep others out. Those are the same boxes that can position any of us to be rigid and stand alone. Inside those boxes, being right is more important than having a relationship. Sharp edges and strong slants begin to illustrate our life as a series of hard lines drawn in the dirt.

As a nation we all paid witness to another school shooting recently that murdered helpless children and teachers in Nashville, Tennessee, adding to the list of many senseless attacks on the innocent in America. When President Obama went to Charleston in 2015 and gave the eulogy for nine other victims and their pastor who were shot in a bible study, he paid homage to the congregation and the nation. The president added to his remarks by singing Amazing Grace, a timeless song that leads with the words “who saved a wretch like me.” His voice crossed boundaries, if only for just a few minutes, that were those hard lines that had been drawn in the dirt of racial divide in our country.

As Christians we dare not think of what might have happened if Jesus had not been crucified on the cross. If he hadn’t been there, I for one, would not be here. Oh, I might have been born and I might be walking around, but I would be lost on the inside, the proverbial dead man walking. I would have turned around in that tunnel I spoke of earlier and walked out into my former life, climbed back in that rigid box and spent my time spouting off my opinions. And I would have missed a world waiting to be born again with the resurrection of hope and life. I would still be standing in that rigid box unable to peer out beyond its boundaries or even open my mouth to sing a few bars of Amazing Grace.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” was a line written by a man who knew about the grace at the end of our tunnels. Abe Lincoln, who was assassinated only a week before Easter, had in his pockets newspaper articles and clippings that offered words of encouragement to a nation healing from the ravages of the very darkest of tunnels, the Civil War. Lincoln had spent all his life fighting to erase lines of segregation and discord in our nation, so the words “that all men are created equal” might heal the lines that had been drawn on the battlefields. He too could be found in the church pews singing songs about a grace that had ‘brought me safe thus far,” and a grace that would “lead him home.”

Perhaps Easter might be more colorful, like my neighbor’s apron, if we quit drawing lines that dare anyone to cross them and begin drawing some dotted lines instead. Somewhere between those spaces we might let in someone new who has been lost in a tunnel looking for an opening. When we reach over and grab their hand to pull them through, we become the light for them in their tunnel and help them die just a little bit to the old self back there in the darkness. It is difficult to do this when we might be grabbing a hand that is soiled, wrinkled, or tired. No doubt it will be a hand that will hold some hurt, or maybe bear a scar from a nail that went right to the bone.

The hand might belong to my Savior, or it might belong to yours, but if you grab it, embrace it this Easter, you will be dying a little bit to an old self that was in darkness and but born again to a new person in the light of His amazing grace. On that walk, in that tunnel together, we will be singing hymns together, shaking off the old dust of our winter and drinking all the Stewart’s Cream Soda we could ever want.

What Comes Softly Calling in the Morning

Every morning at twenty-five after six, two mourning doves outside my window begin singing to each other. When I am sitting alone, sipping my coffee, I hear them begin cooing as the first rays of the sun clear the two oak trees across the street. Some people find the call of the mourning dove sorrowful, perhaps because its low and tender tone.

I am just waking up myself, allowing my thoughts from the night to pivot into those of the new day. The waking hour is one that adjusts slowly to a new field of vision, and doves come in gently. Their long silences between calls grant each other a chance for details to come into focus, and for their deeper dialogue to be flushed out under my azaleas. These birds do not come fully out of their shadows until they know where the light is; nor do they sing until the night dew is dusted off their feathers by the soft blue light along the horizon. The pair of doves I hear are not going into the new day; the day is coming into them.

When I hear the doves cooing, I think of a long horizontal line of windows adorning an old house I used to live in. I rarely see those kinds of translucent windows in houses anymore. They were not windows, really but thick glass bricks that allowed light in – energy portals – ideal for the slow introduction of sunlight into my childhood bedroom. The poet Ralph Waldo Emerson would have loved them. He well understood the importance of a modest start to each new day when he advised us to “begin it well and serenely, with too high a hope to be encumbered” by our old nonsense.

There are no other seconds like the ones we invite in first to our mornings. They get the front row seats, shape our consciousness, and form the mortar that holds everything together for the rest of the day. Synapses are firing, blood is moving upstream to soak our brains in thought, and our heart is picking up the pace. We can think about what we must get done, but we will miss a chance to lie still and let a prayer of hope and thanksgiving re-blanket us. We can worry about the porch light we left on, but another Light is more important.

Should I slug down my coffee? Download a shower? I fly out of our house like it’s the last call for Flight 758, now boarding for the end of the driveway. I have done that many times, only to make a trip back inside to grab the thankfulness I left at the door. These seconds we allow ourselves to wake up can pass us in slow motion. They can allow time to say, “hallowed be thy name” and make our thoughts count for the rest of our day. If there was ever a time to do it, the first five minutes when the doves are cooing is the time.

I read once where there is no progression without regression. It is true. What we think of as forward progression is merely a mask for quickness, or impatience. We may have skipped the small steps, like the bits of shame or rudeness or impatience that we dropped like litter along our hurry-up- and-wait path. Now we must go back and pick those pieces up.

I used to give a test to my students which had twenty complicated steps. They were not difficult steps, just complicated. It was a test that was titled, “Following Directions.” Did you ever take that test? The first step said READ EVERYTHING BEFORE DOING ANYTHING, but no one ever did. I watched my determined students frantically write, calculate, and scribble. Their foreheads were furrowed, their heads were bent hard. Precious seconds ticked away, and the more they hurried, the more involved the steps seem to get.

“TIME!” I called out.

“How many steps did you get done?” Student Fast asked Student Quick.

“I got down to twelve but couldn’t figure out the anagram in the word ‘signature.’”

That was indeed a true sign. At the bottom of the test, the last step read:

Now that you have read everything, sign your name at the top, turn your paper over and wait patiently for further directions from the teacher.

Each day we are given this test. We are tempted to skip over the first step. But within it are the inspirations of morning. That first step is the one still in its pajamas. It is loose, relaxed and navigable and help us reconcile our insurmountable worries.

These are the times when a sleepy child might crawl up on your lap to be warm because your calm and peace made you available. You look comfortable, and a child recognizes that kind of easiness. A child knows that your heart is a place of shelter.

“Do you have a heart?” they may ask, as they climb into your big arms.

“Yes, I do. It’s right here,” but they have already gone back to sleep. They have been following their heart and read everything before doing anything, and they can read you like a book. They went back, regressed, and got quiet again as if they were still in bed. They had one more dream, an important one they wanted to see again. It was a rerun with Mickey and forts and Candy Land game pieces scattered over the rug and under the couch.

There are no quieter seconds like the first ones we invite in each day. They are the song of the mourning doves. Many times, I have made the mistake of beginning a day too loud and sacrificed a rare time that only comes when silence is hanging thick, and the world has not yet pushed to the front of the line. I have started a load of laundry or made a list of tasks I have no intention of completing. I have passed up the Good Book that is open and waiting for me, that great book with all the wonderful kindneSs and pAtience and loVe and HonEsty and wisDom. I walk by that beauty and choose instead to go outside to straighten out my trash bins I think are positioned at odd angles.

I have forgotten about the scarcity of quiet, about the cooing of doves. I stand looking up and down the street, perilously close to the curb, as if challenging someone else to be up this early. It is only five-thirty. Has the trash guy has come yet? I walk out into the middle of the street so that I can see farther down the street. Maybe the trash guy is down there, and then, not seeing him, I suddenly remember one time when the trash wasn’t picked up until long after lunch. Perhaps the trash man is not going to come at all today. Maybe he has taken a personal day to stay at home and binge watch Mortal Combat. Maybe…

Slumping slightly, looking ridiculous in my pj’s, I began to worry that our trash will be hauled off by some irresponsible noodnik, some substitute trash person. He’s probably the regular one’s brother-in-law, and probably only acquired the job through some kind of metropolitan nepotism. I am thinking now that I’m not liking him already and imagine he’s not going to put my trash bins back in the right place. He is not the real trash guy. He is the BROTHER-IN-LAW, for Pete’s sake.

When he arrives to pick up the trash at my house this morning, he will be twenty-five feet up in the air in his cab looking down at me while eating a McBacon-egg-and-cheese-biscuit that he thought he could run in and grab while his truck was picking up the McDonald’s dumpster. He will be finishing off his biscuit when the automatic arms of his trash truck come down to brutally clutch my trash bin. I will see him throw back his head and toss the last bite down his throat while the trash bin slams into my yard and shatters a sprinkler head on my irrigation system.

This is the fret and anxiety that Emerson warned us to avoid. It is the noise that trash talks its way into our thoughts and morphs into the urgency. Then it becomes the too-much-salt in a soup we cannot remove.

It is said that the ancient aborigines were so in tune with their environment that their feet could pick up the vibrations of an animal under the sand. We have the opportunity every day to be in tune with the vibrations of the morning and hear a familiar call of what is right outside our doors. It may be a truth we have been waiting for, or it may be the cooing of a pair of doves. Their world is spinning like ours, but they are quietly listening to the morning.

Ducknically, We Can Call It Spring

“To the extent that nature sounds are soothing to most humans, three in particular stand out:” says Florence Williams in her book The Nature Fix, “wind, water and birds. They are the trifecta of salubrious listening…”

In the Midwest as our winter tries to let go of its ego, we are teased with spring days that are still irritable, cold and blustery. It is a windy season, and a challenging time to put on the sailing gear and head out for the first time on the water. In college when I was on the sailing team, our regattas began in the spring, and we battled some gusty conditions, but oh man, did it make you feel alive!

When the sun begins to feel a hair warmer outside around here, we welcome two members to our family back home, two mallard ducks we’ve named Maude and Claude. Veering off from the flock in early March, our married mallard couple flutters down to our Airbnb and settles on our pond for Spring Break. Seeing them lets us know that warmer days are on the way. A couple of hundred feet up, I’m not sure howMaude and Claude ever spot our little pond. After all, the neon Bender Hotel sign fizzled out in 1997. Somehow though, though the miracle of migration, the mallard couple finds us. They swoop in for a couple of weeks, sleep in amongst our pine needles and uses our pond as their private jacuzzi. Really though, they don’t’ stop for the free breakfast, they stop because they are part of our family, our people.

And even though we know Maude and Claude are coming, like we know Spring will, we are always surprised and delighted when they arrive. All winter long I go out to the pond as the sun is coming up, look at our koi fish that have been anesthetized by the arctic cold and turn on the waterfall. Those mornings my breath comes out as a silky fog and dissipates over the pond’s chunky ice, and I linger in my slippers to say a prayer for someone who doesn’t have the warmth of a home to run back into. Then, Maude and Claude arrive on the scene. One moment I’m turning on the filter at seven o’clock, minding my own business, watching the waterfall spill out into the pond, the next moment I look up and there’s a duck looking at me like a preacher.

“What’s going on, Brother Bender?” Claude sings out, adding a Quaaaawwwk.

“Holy duckbill! Claude is that you? Where’d you come from?” I gasp.

“Ha! Gotcha didn’t I? I love doing that! Did I surprise you?!” says Claude.

“Aaaa, yea you did! You do that every year you ol’ drake! Where’s Maude? And how long you been paddling around out there waiting to scare me?”

“Oh, we’ve been up and at ‘em since dawn Mr. Blender. Maude warmed up our pond coffee about six o’clock this morning. Maude, you there? Come out and say hi to Mr. Blunder.”

Putting in her steps on her Stairmaster Water-Dyne, I see the faint rustle of Maude’s paddling feet from just behind the irises as she sounds off a greeting, “Quak-quwwaauk!”

“How was your flight?” I asked Claude, “You must be exhausted!”

“Oh gosh, the flight was good, but the flock acted terrible on the way in. We have strict rules about, well, kind of embarrassing to talk about, you know, doing that while we’re in flight,” Claude said, pointing to his back end. “We’ve had some complaints.”

“Oh, that so? Keeping yourself regular _is_ important, though. I get that,” I sympathize.

Paddling up closer Claude adds, “Well, some of the younger ducks like to drop the big white torpedo while they are flying, engage in some dirty bombing, you know, but down below it ain’t so funny I’m told.” He stretched out to for a drink to avoid my eye contact. Bathroom habits are a touchy subject with mallards.

“Well come on up to the house when you get settled in,” I say over my shoulder. “We’ll catch up on all the latest duck gossip,” and I jog back up to the house and out of the chill.

Later in the day, after lounging around the pond, Maude and Claude waddle up to our porch to take in low tea and some corn crumbs, the traditional snack for southern mallards. They both have a little extra gleam in their eyes and their flirtations are beginning to be obvious. Scooting up near Claude, Maude tells us they are thinking of starting another new family again this spring. “This will be the fourteenth one we’ve started in fourteen years,” Maude says.

Ducks, as it turns out are very open with their feelings when it comes to intimacy.

“Ok, so I thought I’d warn you, Mr. Fender, that Maude and I will be pretty busy in your backyard today, like you know, that kind of busy. I’ve got a little extra float in my boat and I’ve got our honeymoon suite set up out there by the pond. Maude has spent all day ruffling up her tail feathers and, whoa baby, look at those highlights! “

Maude shyly grins.

“We are thinking we’ll go for about 10 chicks this year. That’ll be a new record!” adds Claude.

Maude flings her head back and lets out a long warble. “You wish there, Mr. Stud-Ducky. You keep bringing me those corn kernels every morning and I might just surprise you!”

“Oh, Maude, I love it when you talk…”

“Ok, then,” I pipe in quickly. “We’re glad you all feel so comfortable here, but …. Oh my, would you look at that?” I redirected, “I think I just saw the first mosquito of the year!”

“Well, I’ll be a root cellar’s pushcart!” my wife says, “I think it is a mosquito!”

“Oh my, I’m so sorry Mr. and Mrs. Splendid. Seems we’ve been too forward, haven’t we?” Maude says. “It’s just that we think of you guys here in Evanspatch as part of our family. All year long we hang out with the flock, but there’s a lot of skittery gossip across our lake. Nothing worse than a flock of mallards cackling about the price of duck oil in China. When we get here, we can let our feathers down, and be ourselves for a couple of weeks. You guys are our people.”

That was nice to hear. I wasn’t going to bring up the subject, but lately some sticky conversations about family relationships had hung in the air like an annoying call from a telemarketer. Sitting with Maude and Claude, watching their easy nattering and relaxed saunters along the paths of our backyard, I’m reminded that spring is about new beginnings, bright red magnolia blooms and purple crocuses and snowdrops. Underneath, plant life wakes up, undulates, squirming to get out and crawls forth like green fingers across new mulch. I’m glad to be raking up the last of the dead leaves and looking out upon some clean emotional landscaping.

One romantic male duck, proudly struts about and reveals its brilliant green neck while his better half, the one he declared his for life, stays close by checking out his advances. It is a time for everyone to crack open a can of Less Complicated and share it with my what feels like good, with what feels like family, with what feels like our people.

Maude and Claude excuse themselves and get up to wander back out to the pond. They are simple folks and haven’t lost sight of what’s important. They aren’t trying to be the smartest duck in the room. They don’t brag about their kids or spend a lot of time looking at their own reflection in the pond. They are just people, part of our people, a couple of ducks who patiently wait all winter to say hello to the brand-new signs of life, inviting us back to days of longer sunlight, and the playful sounds of their new family of nine or ten or maybe even eleven. We are part of the duck parade this spring, watching a line of fuzzy orangish chicks, and celebrating with our busy new parents who don’t feel like company.

They are our people, and it is Spring.

In the Presence of Profound

Every now and then in our daily routines we catch a glimpse of something out of the corner of our eye that signifies a bigger picture. It may have seemed like something trivial at first glance. Later we realize what we saw gave us a wider perspective and became a marker for how to live better. We see a child stop to pick up a piece of trash and it reminds us of what a clean street could look like. Waiting in the rain for a bus, an elderly lady opens her Green Bay Packers umbrella, and we see enthusiasm in a new light.

The pictures we see out of our peripheral vision are made up of these kinds of snapshots, the ones that make up the movie passing before us. They are here and gone in a flash, but in the corners of our minds they hit pay dirt and register deeper in our consciousness. I saw one of those snippets come to life recently at the Greatest Arabian Horse Show, a competition at a huge arena near Phoenix, Arizona. It too was a snapshot that came and went quickly but widened my perspective for a moment.

A trainer in a rink was working with his horse, an auburn two-year-old thoroughbred named Profound Presence, who was still feeling her oats. Using a training stick, the seasoned trainer moved the horse delicately around the rink, communicating with the horse through simple gestures and redirection. The horse’s education came at a tender time for the animal, a coming-of-age experience requiring nuanced guiding to build its self- esteem. For any young horse, but particularly sensitive Arabians like this one, adolescence is a time of insecurity requiring discipline and monitoring. When such a patient approach is taken with a young Arabian horse, as I witnessed, trust slowly trots in to replace insecurities, and a show horse begins to develop. What begins as an awkward horse standing alone, like a girl at her first dance, transforms into a princess dancing elegantly across the floor.

But the horse I was watching had to first learn to be comfortable in the same space with her trainer, and the trainer had to learn when to give her that space. I posted a video of this training session on Instagram. Just follow me at authorJeffbender and you can see it there.

You will observe the horse trainer and his Arabian horse working together. These horses are readily identified by their long necks and trailing tails, creating the horse silhouette we have often seen in storybooks. I was struck by the developing relationship between the trainer and his insecure student. Although the video is short, there is much going on here that portrays a deeper lesson, and watching the two together, I was reminded of how much courage it takes to work through fear and come out the other side.

As the trainer directed the horse to move this way and that I felt that I was being taken to church with a lesson in humility. Certainly, the horse was going through some growing pains, adjusting to the uneasy space between itself and its teacher.

The snapshot I glimpsed was also a reminder of the history of the horse itself, a magnificent animal that has been rising from the Arizona red dirt for eons. It has a heritage that is emotionally stirring when we consider that thousands of years ago horses were completely wild, galloping across unbridled fields, with the only bits in their mouths being the bits of grass that fed them. Now, this thousand-pound animal, Profound Presence, was responding to the whims of a feathery whip, and I witness not only the animal’s musculature and power, but also its intelligence and sensitivity.

The Arabian is not a breed that is pushed around or forced into submission, unless you want a fight on your hands. Winning over the trust of an Arabian horse is a painstaking process. It is slow, and tedious work and often, the progress is undetectable. In the end, what learning takes place shows itself not in a performance but in their shared space. It is an emotional bond, a head space where they both can be comfortable, illustrated by this comment from the trainer:

“How many times do we allow another to be near us without making any demands on them?”

In my little brain the answer is not very often. The young horse is insecure in the ring, the physical space, but the shared head space they occupy covers a much larger area. Watching the back and forth between a horse and its trainer, I was reminded that these teachable moments we are invited into have the potential to be richer if we stop making demands on each other’s head space and own the space together. When we do, we often find a hallowed ground of mutual trust.

Interestingly, our Arabian thoroughbred was having trouble showing or “giving its right side” to the trainer. Every time the trainer approached that side of the horse, the horse turned away. This was an insecurity that had to be addressed and worked through, and it was going to take some courage on the part of the horse, and some careful coaching on the part of the trainer.

We can see immediately the parallels with our own insecurities and weaknesses. We all avoid our down sides like the plague, preferring to rest in the comfort of our strong suits, especially with other people. Who among us makes a point of placing ourselves around those who show us our weaker side?

Most of get very good at avoiding that kind of thing. We’d much rather trot behind the safety of our own fences than be in the presence of our weakness. Like our horse avoiding her right side, we can sometimes avoid our weaknesses, but we are left walking around looking at life out of one eye, seeing the world in halves and not in the whole. We become hollow versions of ourselves, untrainable, and put out to pasture.

When I was watching Profound Presence, I noticed the trainer used the word “demand.” However, he was not insistent as much as he was requesting the horse obey, followed by immediately “giving” or rewarding the horse with space to build increments of trust. Many times, the trainer gets in the horse’s face but does not challenge the horse’s space.

And guess what happens?

Given the freedom, the horse gently moves back towards the trainer as if to say, “I’m ok by myself, but I’d rather be with you.” It is that same kind of moment we all hope for with those we want to be close to. We give space, we back off, we quit making demands. This build trusts, with the result often a nuzzle from the nose of a Profound Presence.

“We got this,” the horse continues to say, “I may have a weakness, sure. I may be struggling here, I may be afraid, I may not like my right side and what is out there, but if you show me, and carefully help me along, if you direct me along this path I don’t understand, then I’m going to trust that path instead of my own and come your way. I don’t want to, but I’ll do it with your help.”

What strikes me so vividly is the willingness on the part of the trainer and the horse to stand together without demanding anything from each other. This seems to also illustrate what our human connections could look like if we yielded to our mutual uncomfortable spaces and helped each other through our weakness.

Is that even possible in the world we live in now? Can we walk into the ring and be shown our vulnerable areas without turning away? Can we trust that a Wiser teacher, a profound presence is there with us, nudging us forward into an unknown space? And finally, can we trot out into the world’s upheaval and know Our Trainer has our back?

There is a horse that is doing exactly that out in Arizona. She isn’t a horse that is trying to be profound, but a horse willing to be shown the ropes. There’s no kicking or stomping, biting, or running away. There are just a few graceful steps being taken by a teacher and a student willing to be in each other’s presence without demanding anything.

The Truth Is My Luggage Dances Better Than I Do

By the time we reach a certain age we realize that our perceptions of ourselves are not how the rest of the world sees us. For some, this realization comes earlier than others; perhaps someone tactfully pulled us aside and corrected us, or maybe through an experience we became aware that we are not quite who we imagined ourselves to be. Most of the time we just keep on doing what we think looks and feels right until we bump into something bigger.

A whole army of Greek philosophers debated this issue of what constitutes our reality, the tug-of-war between our actions and our thoughts. I know a few of these guys because I read their thoughts on a T-shirt:

Aristotle said: “To be is to do”

Socrates said: “To do is to be”

Sinatra said: “Do-be-do-be-do”

When it comes to my own actions, for example, my perception of myself is that I’m reasonably coordinated and able to move through the world with relative poise and agility. I play some sports, involve myself with physical activities of all sorts, swim and even jump over the occasional object. Once I even won a contest to see who could do the most pull-ups from a low tree branch. Over time I have developed a confident perception that my movements, my physical path through the world, is part of the liquid salve that helps lubricate the rusty, clanky mechanisms of human activity.

After last week’s getaway trip to Arizona where my coordination came into serious question, I realize I’ve been hiding behind some serious denial. I’ll get to more of the details later, but an incident with my suitcase caused me to take stock of my sad history of faux pas and seek help in the general area of idiocy. Quite honestly, I have hit, broken, ran over, fell on, and bumped into literally every object in my house. I have stepped on, elbowed, knocked heads with, and collided with all members of my family, church friends, and acquaintances. I won’t go into details, but if you just take the damage my lack of coordination has caused in petting zoos alone, I should be a prime candidate for wearing an ankle monitor.

I am, in short, a do-be-do-be-do waiting to happen, a “sad, strange little man” sticking my finger in the cupcake of life. Where I got the idea that I could effortlessly slip away on a vacation without a ripple in the middle of winter I have no idea.

To start with, my wife and I are not world travelers by any stretch. We circulate from the kitchen to the bathroom, open a closet here and there, and wave at the mail lady. We like our home quite a bit, and even in the winter when it appears the doldrums will take over, we don’t ever feel that leaving town is going to fix our attitudes. Now I know it’s not going to correct my coordination either. So, when we made big plans to take in some sights out in beautiful Scottsdale, like the Botanical Garden and The World’s Greatest Arabian Horse Show, I thought the excitement of a new environment would carry the day. I was going somewhere warm, I was with friends, and I had a new piece of luggage shaped like the one handcuffed to the President wrist protecting the nuclear strike codes.

Inside the case I had used the utmost precision to pack my belongings. I had tiny versions of all my toiletries, saved from a weekend at the Marriott Courtyard in 1992. I had a small tube of Crest (Crestette), one pieces of dental flo (singular of floss), a collapsible toothbrush (a toothbro) and small bottle that combined soap, shampoo, conditioner and could double as shave cream or deodorant depending on the size of your armpits.

I took one pair of pants made from the same material as a parachute, a coffee maker that brews, sautés, or macchiatos with foam, and pair of monoculars, which is just one onucular, or technically half a pair of binoculars. Anyway, they were packed for those occasions when I would be looking at half of something with just one eye, or if I found myself wanting to imitate Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean.

Planning for everything, I even bought a book guaranteed to help me sleep through any turbulence. For those of you who are gardeners, it was titled Fifty Plants that Changed the Course of History. By the way, I had to stop reading the book during the flight when I read that the pineapple plant was involved in the invention of an unpronounceable polymer called Polyoxybenzylmethylenglycolanhydride, or plastic, that made up most of the interior of the plane I was on. I could no longer hope that reading that book would relax me if things got choppy when I had no trust in a pineapple polymer to sustain my flight at 38,000 feet.

Still, I felt ready for the trip. My luggage was organized like a Zen Garden, weather was good, planes were running on schedule, security people were smiling at me, and my bowels had moved, a feat of coordination in and of itself. Although this is way too personal to mention in a podcast, there is only one place we feel more helpless than when we are on a plane, and that is when we are on a plane on a toilet seat. You could say I felt very confident and prepared, which gave me a momentary vision of being in control of the gears of life that run the “Great Machine.” I was in that imaginary space, sort of like Leonardo da Vinci when he watched his the catapult invention launch a pine tree, or when the astronomer Copernicus witnessed Mars rotating around the earth.

But I was about to get a lesson in just how off course my sense of reality was. Right out of the first gate, my suitcase bolted away from me like a three-year-old on a sugar diet. Bolstered by wheels that could rotate in any directions independent of each other, my NASA-approved luggage glided gracefully away like Ginger Rogers. If you had bought a ticket for this, you would have teared up and had a past vision of your mom dancing with a broom in the kitchen. You would have wished your dad could have been there, and that he would have snuck up behind your mom and, gently taking the broom, finished sweeping the floor for her. Then, as if floating on air, he would have put the broom romantically back in her arms. Finally, you would have realized that these are the reasons you often lose touch with reality.

As my luggage shifted into cruise control, it careened down a hermetically sealed off-ramp and came to rests on a rubber mat under a drinking fountain, which came on automatically. There was a sinister looking child waiting in line next to me who watched the whole thing happen. Holding his toy superhero, he looked up at me warily, as if my luggage had stolen some special power from his toy. I could only shrug my shoulders to his parents and apologize.

“Wherever you’re going, I don’t want to go there,” his father remarked blandly.

That night, after reaching my destination and settling in, I considered abandoning my suitcase out in the saguaro desert where it would feel perfectly at home with the array of renegade exotic plants, skyscraping cacti, and things that slither about. Instead, I fell asleep thinking of the movie I, Robot and dreamt my suitcase crawled in bed with me and offered me a free tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s house if I would take along two of his best Samsonite friends.

I woke up in a cold sweat, unusual for Arizona, and was thankful that I was on a real vacation and that my suitcase could retire, at least for a week, like everyone else in Scottsdale.

Save Your Pennies! Better Yet, Save Your Breath!

There are very few things in this world that are still free, and we covet the few that we have, like good conversations, hugs, and the fried sausage samples at Costco. “Freedom is having your own individual toothpick, Charlie Brown,” said Lucy, adding, “That’ll be five cents please.”

I learned a lot about freedom in a course I took in college called Migratory Languages. It only met every other month, which fit perfectly into my ambitious college itinerary. The professor himself tended to migrate to and from his lectern, but he had a horrible temper that flared up any time the subject of our inalienable rights came up, especially the one about freedom. When he blew his gasket in class one day, his anger came from a deeeeeep place – his billfold.

Apparently, on his way to teach our class, (I think it met on every third Tuesday), he had stopped to put some air in his tires at a gas station, at the alienating cost of fifty cents. To him, the very idea that he was going to have to shell out money for something so universal, so commonplace as air, began to eat at him like Red Reaper Taco Sauce. By the time he arrived at our class, which I believe met on Sunday afternoons, he was a walking fire hazard, loaded for bear.

“WHAT IS FREE ANYMORE!?” he exploded in class, spraying tiny droplets of frustration all over the front row. “I just came from the gas station,” he said waving us off like we were on trial, “and they wanted to charge me for putting air in my tires. Can you believe it? Imagine that! You can’t even get air for free! Air! NOTHING is free, nothing! When I was a kid, you could get a piece of chewing gum for a penny, but not anymore! Heck no. Can you buy anything for a penny anymore? I don’t think you can. In fact, I’ll ask you right now. Does anybody in here know anything you can buy for a penny?”

“Probably not…” he answered himself, not missing a beat. “A penny just doesn’t mean anything. It’s thought of as worthless. We take it for granted in this country, the penny…”

But as he continued his tirade, breathing harder, my very own hand, palm outward, ignoring the signals from my limbic system, began to climb into full view, ready to be called upon.

“…and another thing…uh, yes…you there with the hand. Do you have something to add, young man? Something that you can get for a penny?”

“Yes,” my voice crackled, “I believe you can still buy time on a parking meter, sir.”

Lowering his trifocals, the professor stared down. In fact, he stared at me so long I thought I might earn another college credit hour. He reached for his folded handkerchief, and moped the sweat off his forehead with one neat stroke, then spoke:

“Young man… you might be right. Hmmf! I think you are onto something there. I believe you can still actually put a penny in a parking meter and get some time. Not much time, but a little,” and with that he patted the sweat off his head one more time, picked up his Naugahyde briefcase and said, “We’ll pick up there next time,” and left.

Photo by Acton Crawford on Unsplash

Meeting on the next crescent moon phase, Professor Flair stomped in to teach our class, straight from a faculty meeting…and he was hotter’n two snakes in a barrel. At his staff meeting, there had been a vote on campus parking, and half of the faculty spaces had been confiscated and given over to students and his space was one of them.

His lecture started off well enough, with a few newsworthy items on Indian dialects and Columbian idioms, then…something ticked him off.

“…and pretty soon they are going to be charging us for talking. Oh yea, you wait. They’ll come a time, and it’s just around the corner. You kids think it won’t, but it will. We will have to pay to speak. Talking won’t be free anymore, you’ll have to pay. Uh-huh, it’s true. Nothing is free anymore, nothing. Used to be you could get a piece of gum for a penny, or time on a parking meter. Not now! You can’t even get time on a parking meter anymore, not for a penny, not at all! There is no free parking anymore. Now you kids have taken my parking spot here on campus. Free is gone! GONE! I would challenge anyone of you to come up with one thing, just one you can still get for a penny. ONE THING! Anyone?!”

He scanned the room for signs of life, and someone behind me dropped their pencil on the floor. The soft wooden tone awakened in me something my grandmother said long ago, something about a sleeping dog, and then…I reconsidered. This was no sleeping dog. It was a sleeping pencil, and I made a decision to leave it right there on the floor.

“Anyone?” He challenged us again. “See! There is not one single solitary one of you that knows something you can get in this country for a penny! Haa!"

Suddenly, a one cent stamp came to my mind, and I thought of raising my hand again, but I had my freedom and according to the professor, there’s no price you can put on that. Not even a penny.

Part 3 of Now Showing: 20,000 Leagues Under the Living Room

Picking up on our story from last week, my brother Gary and I thought we had established strong boundaries in our sunken rec room, but there were subtle changes in the air. Our once loyal toy poodle seemed suddenly cool to us, and much more confident around our grandmother.

To be fair, Coco had not always been so smug. Before G’ma came to live with us, Coco constantly scooted underfoot, leaving us wary of flattening her into the parquet floors. Now I realize it was some early signs of what parenthood would be like, that is, things underfoot all the time. The stress of trampling our toy poodle, coupled with the reoccurring threat of a civil defense drill, kept the anxiety around our house at a riveting level.

It was during this period a new name for our poodle was born: Coco la Puff. For the males in the house, the possibility of bonding with a la Puff suddenly took a left turn and careened off a steep cliff into dark ravine. For Gary, it was particularly dangerous territory. He could not find any concrete reference to any “la Puff” in the World Almanac, leaving him with an agonizing intellectual void. For me, the la Puff made Coco seem aloof and fragile, and I began to liken her to more of a dust bunny than an actual dog of any kind.

Additionally, there was never any evidence that Coco had increased in size since her birth. From our observation, there were no growth spurts, no puppydom, and it appeared that she was simply born already grown, one pound, and would remain in this stunted state the rest of her life. And that knitted sweater G’ma had made for her? Gary and I were not impressed, as it could have been made at any point during Coco’s development and still fit her. It was, in our view, a random sweater made for a dog whose size would never change from the time she was born until the day she died.

Our imaginations soared with sarcastic humor, a humor that began to infiltrate where love for Coco once had been. Perhaps if our parents had bought a St. Bernard, or a Peregrine Falcon, our family would have been the talk of the neighborhood. As it were, we got a wind-up pet, an over-hybridized trinket with huge eyes. Gary and I, embarrassed as I am to say it, thought of Her Toyness as an afront to our warrior status.

Standing in the doorway, watching my grandmother push Coco la Puff’s tail through the knitted fifth hole in the sweater, our pet became the fodder for cruel jokes, jokes that I was not old enough to laugh at yet. But laugh I did. Once a viable part of our family fabric, we imagined little Puff of Smoke a food source behind a large glass cage in a zoo, running around frantically, trying to hide from an Amazon boa constrictor coiled in a dark corner. This was resentment at its finest, and it took hold within the confines of a poodle.

Gary and I looked at each other, we looked down below at Coco, then back to G’ma. We didn’t know how or why or when, but we knew something had changed. Dogs may have extrasensory perception, and Coco may have had extraordinary intuition, but we brothers had the look. What we knew was that the family dynamic was changing forever. In that instant, somewhere between G’ma’s spilt luggage and the step down into our mid-century bomb shelter, Cocoa was relegated from our pet poodle to Grandma’s toy pet.

I’m not sure if that was a healthy switch. Now that I look back on it, Cocoa’s allegiance to G’ma seemed like it should have gone through Health and Protective Services, or an adoption agency. Or perhaps the switch should have gone through Goodyear Tire Company first, G’ma’s former employer, who might reconsidered her pension package.

Late that night, when Gary and I were tucked in and supposedly asleep, we began a hushed discussion, voicing our concerns.

“So, what is ‘tirement, Gary?” I asked. “Do you get it when you make enough tires at Goodyear? Or too many?”

“You mean re-tirement?” Gary said.

“Yes, that.”

“No numbskull, it’s got nothing to do with tires. G’ma worked making tires at Goodyear, and then she got old, and they told her they’d give her our dog if she left the company.”

“Nobody told _us_ G’ma was going to get Coco. Can’t you and I just make some tires and get Coco back?” I asked.

“Nope.”

And that was that. One day our poodle was sleeping under the sink in a casserole dish, snug as a bug in a rug, the next day she was glued to G’ma at the hip, being carted from here to there, secure from our footsteps and comments. Because of the one step down into the rec room, Coco was allowed to roam freely there, like a small rodent hunting for crumbs, occasionally stopping to lick herself free of any greenhouse gases that may have accumulated on her skin.

The problem was, for Coco, getting down that one wooden step, into this pasture of freedom. Since toy poodles feel very uncomfortable sliding across a wooden floor like Gary and I did, she had to negotiate a leap from the carpeted upper level to an Amish rug on the other side, a leap that appeared to us like sheer suicide every time she tried it. Noticing her hesitation, Gary began to move the rug ever so slightly outward, increasing the distance Coco would be “in flight,” so that Coco would be required to leap with increasingly more abandon.

Inevitably, Coco’s worst nightmare became reality. One afternoon, in the middle of an episode of the Road Runner, my brother and I watched Wiley Coyote free fall off a cliff and become a puff of annihilation on the desert surface below. Coco too, accelerated off the step and leapt into the void. But with the rug now too far to reach, she slid across the exposed wooden floor and disappeared under the edge of the Amish rug, coming to a dead stop, a small lump somewhere near the center.

There she froze, with not even a ripple coming forth. There was a moment, a heavy one, where Gary and I thought we may have committed second degree dog-slaughter. Fortunately, we began to hear Coco’s infinitesimal “yips” for help, the kind of yips we might hear in California, if Coco were lost in Nevada. During the throws of our unbridled laughter, it was unfortunate that our grandmother appeared on the step.

"Where is Cocoa?” she asked. “Gary?"

No answer.

“Jeff? Do you know where Coco is?”

I shrugged and attempted an innocent cough, but I saw the hurt in our grandmother’s face as she peered across the rec room expanse for any signs of poodle life. We did eventually rescue our former pet from under the rug, but we had lost her trust. From that point on Coco la Puff spent more and more time in the protective custody of G’ma’s arms, being hauled around like a fanny pack with legs, staring out at the world, and occasionally growling when she got too close to the rec room.

Later that same day, as Gary tired from cartoons, he turned to the World Almanac and discovered Darwin’s theory of evolution on page 3,722. He reported to me, much to my relief, that we did not need to worry about Coco. Since she was now in our grandmother’s arms all the time, Gary told me Coco la Puff would slowly be evolving into a new specie.

“That is why her legs are slowly withering away,” Gary announced at dinner that night, as G’ma served him a plate of tater tots. “Nature in her infinite wisdom has given Coco another person, our grandmother as a host animal to carry her around, which will slowly render her little toy legs useless. I read that in the almanac. It is a sad day for all America, but a great day for evolution,” Gary finished.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw an arm come across the table, and the bowls of crispy tater tots that had been placed in front of us, freshly baked in the toaster oven, were taken away. In their place, G’ma gave us Brussel sprouts, slightly purplish, probably from radiation. In her other arm she held Coco la Puff, her adopted poodle princess, and began hand feeding her one crispy tater tot at a time.

Coco was a tot-eating toy, a toy tot, and a tote bag, all in one, the one-pound manifestation of poetic justice. She had not sunk to a lower level as we had but had moved up the evolutionary scale into the protective custody of our grandmother. We could return to our sunken hide-away underground, but our future was sealed. We were destined to slowly atrophy into some other inferior species, the sad effect of natural selection, surviving on a diet of radioactive vegetables in the lower echelons of a mid-century ranch-style house.

Part 2 of Now Showing: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

Last week I introduced you, my loyal audience, to the sunken living room of the house I grew up in. Be that as it may, this room, the rec room as we called it, was lower by only one step and was only referred to as “sunken” by realtors to make small children believe there was a pirate ship buried at the bottom of it. If it wasn’t for my older brother Gary discovering in the World Almanac that “sunken” gave us immunity from Greenhouse gases I would have made a strong case for camping in our back yard. However, once we found out that our rec room was saving us from asphyxiation, we relaxed into a continuous stream of cartoons on TV and awaited the arrival of my grandmother and her world-famous sugar cookies.

It is critical for the progression of this story to note that the one step down into this inner sanctum was made from several slick planks of wood. To my brother and I, this finish was an invitation to practice a sliding entrance to the rec room, a skill that was preceded by several other athletic feats that had turned our new house into a first-class gymnasium. We had already transformed the door moldings into chin-up bars, and the tiled soap dish in the shower to a foothold to grab the showerhead and swing out over the drain like monkeys.

Some of our athletic motivation, in all fairness, was not ours but came from a new program instigated by President Eisenhower called the President’s Council on Fitness. While our physical education at school usually involved running around the playground knocking each other down, the national fitness program began a regiment of push-up, sit-up and rapid-fire jumping jacks geared to get us in better shape than Russian children. When I raised my hand in gym and ask if we would be able to beat up a Russian child if we went to war, I was hauled off by my ear to the principal’s office, whose Cossack heritage was displayed in a framed picture on his wall. Ironically, the principal made me drop and do fifty push-ups that counted towards my presidential fitness award at the end of the year.

My brother, however, took this fitness program to a whole new level and along with the pep song, Chicken Fat, decided to continue the drills at home with round-the-clock tests of strength, agility, and random acts of athleticism. I quickly followed suit, using the sofa as a balance beam for example, and considered it all part of my school homework; my mother and father, however, looked at it as the destruction of private property.

Nevertheless, the feat of sliding into the rec room took on an Olympic quality, as if each slide was being monitored and recorded by Eisenhower himself. Given that we were performing in our own minds in front of the President of the United States, my brother found it necessary to be as dramatic as possible by singing the first couple of bars of the National Anthem as he built up speed through the living room and den, hitting the wood step at a dead run and then sliding down into the rec room as if making a curtain call for a Broadway production. Over time, it became rather natural for us to take a slight bow afterwards, as if the Council on Physical Fitness was giving us a standing ovation.

This ritual became so repeated and such an integral part of our family, that it wasn’t too long before it was rather commonplace, and no one was paying attention to our appearance at all. It was taken for granted that if Gary or I were not in the rec room, we would be arriving shortly at full speed, hit our slide, and take a casual bow to an imaginary audience.

Of course, if you were the one doing it, the effect felt more noteworthy, as it took a significant amount of physical coordination to pull it off. Start your slide too early and the carpet before the step stopped you dead in your tracks. Start the slide too late and it became just a really dumb looking half-skip, not worthy of a bow, ovation, or admiring nod from any President. However, if the slide was perfect, that is, carried out with the utmost timing, it was a beautiful sight to behold, much like seeing Fred Flintstone slide down the neck of a brontosaurus.

Unlike Fred though, we hit our slide only one out of every twenty-five times and the result was so anticlimactic, that one wonders why we made the effort at all. On those few occasions where we did nail the landing, we took a bow that no one saw, made a few adjustments to our posture, and walked over to the couch and sat down. It was all very family oriented, very clean, very polite, followed by a half hour of Wild Kingdom sponsored by Mutual of Omaha, or maybe some Get Smart depending on the mood of my parents.

Their mood had been recently on the upswing for a couple of reasons. First, and most important, my grandmother, G’ma P, was soon to arrive from Ohio to live with us. She had worked on the production line at Goodyear all her life and was ready to sit down for a while. My parents turned our back porch into a charming apartment for her to stay in, and in exchange she agreed to do all the cooking and chores and take care of us. At the time, I thought my grandmother was getting a heck of a deal with the bonus of receiving all the grandchildren she could handle.

Secondly, my parents, particularly my dad, was glad he would not have to build a bomb shelter in the back yard during the Cold War but would be able to retreat to the confines of a sunken living room for safety should Russia launch an inter-ballistic nuclear warhead. Rumor had it that a lot of families with shelters had passwords to protect themselves against panicking outsiders banging on their shelter door, trying to gain access as they burnt to a crisp from the nuclear fall-out. The almanac Gary was still reading on the subject gave him an idea.

“Jeff, I think we need a secret handshake to let only certain people into the rec room,” Gary announced, “Give me your hand.”

I reached out, and let Gary cross a couple of my fingers, then he spit on it.

“Hey,” I screamed, “Don’t! That is gross.”

“No, we have to practice it, so when the siren goes off, we can check people in at the step,” Gary continued, and then, started to show me the slimy shake again.

I yanked my hand back. “Dad isn’t going to like this! Mom’s not going to do it, either. She’ll get the paddle out, and you’re going get it,” I objected.

Gary thought for a moment peering at me through his four-inch-thick glasses.

“Yea, maybe you’re right. G’ma might get mad and go back to Ohio. What about if we just make them do the slide instead?!” Gary said, eyes widening.

“Yea, that’s it!” I nodded, “Let’s say you have to slide to get in.”

So, at precisely twelve o’clock on a Friday in 1963, with our city’s nuclear test sirens blaring outside, my grandmother came to live with us.

Photo by Aboodi Vesakaran on Unsplash

Unfortunately, the nuclear signal blasting at one hundred twenty decibels made G’ma’s arrival very untimely. No one could hear the greetings, and the welcoming gestures were skipped in order to get the door shut as fast as possible. The ear-splitting sound made our toy poodle a nervous wreck and my mom raced to put her under the kitchen sink to deafen the vibrations. For Gary and I, however, it was simply a call to action. We reacted the same way we always did when the siren went off, as if the Russians were at our back door. We dropped everything we were doing and raced through the house towards the step to make a perfect slide into the make-shift bomb shelter.

When G’ma arrived with test siren blaring, we had to make a decision no child should have to make at such a young age, that is, whether to hug G’ma as she stumbled in with a lifetime of material belongings or make the life-saving slide into a safety zone one step below. That was what the Cold War did to families; it pitted them against each other and brought out the worst in families.

Gary and I went for the slide. We took off down the hallway in a dead heat, then I made a decision to bear left, cut through the kitchen and beat Gary to the step. As I rounded the corner, and taxied towards the rec room, I cleared the first row of G’ma’s suitcases easily, but Gary, who was only a few steps behind did not fare as well. For those of you keeping score, mine would have been eight at this point on the Fitness chart, and Gary six. He tried to wave at G’ma going by, which threw off his timing, thus hitting his slide to the wooden step too early, then tripping over the Goodyear carry-on G’ma had received at her retirement party.

“That’s a fine how-do-you-do,” G’ma said, as we picked ourselves up and dusted off the radiation. “How’ve you boys been?”

“Fine,” we both answered and began helping her pick up the scattered trinkets and Ohio souvenirs. “What is this?” I asked, holding up a tiny sweater with five holes.

“I made that for Coco,” she answered, “It’s a doggie sweater.”

“I didn’t know she got that cold,” Gary said giving G’ma a hug and kiss. “Sorry about the slide.”

“We usually make it,” I piped in, “but your suitcase got in the way.”

I’ll try to remember that the next time I arrive from Ohio.”

The cynicism, the untimely siren, and a den full of overturned baggage, left us with an uncomfortable silence. Our bomb shelter entrance had also been unimpressive, and not in line with evidence that Gary and I were part of any fitness club. Fortunately, our toy poodle, Coco, arrived none too soon to break the silence. She ran in to greet everyone, then suddenly turned sideways at the last second to present her back end first, a strange and awkward approach that had never been explained on any episode of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. No bigger than loaf of bread, Coco then stopped to sniff the knitted sweater G’ma had made for her.

“Would you look at that?” G’ma P said, “She knows it’s hers. That is so precious.”

We had assumed we might get a bag of sugar cookies from G’ma upon her arrival from Ohio, but it was our dog Coco that actually cashed in, and this changed our normally benevolent view of our toy poodle pet into the beginning of a growing, insidious jealousy. In our heart, we knew we were gaining a grandmother, but our tiny pet seemed to be switching allegiances, marking an upsetting imbalance in our family structure. Something was amiss here. Gary and I could feel it.

We slipped out of G’ma’s grasp, around the spilt luggage, away to the place we had come to depend on to feel safe, to gain insights, and to become re-oxygenated, our sunken living room. We may not have known how to handle this new family dynamic, but we were sure we could find the answer on the Zenith TV. It might take switching to any of the three networks, but a nod from Gary let me know that somewhere, perhaps in an episode of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. or Bonanza, we could find out how we could regain our rightful place with G’ma, ahead of our pet dog now sitting proudly, sneering at us, in its perfectly knitted sweater from Ohio.

Now Showing: 20,000 Leagues Under the Living Room

I grew up in a mid-century ranch-style house, very similar to what I live in now. Characterized by long hallways, carports, and picture windows, we also had what realtors have come to refer to as a “sunken” living room. When my parents told us we were going to move to a house that had a room below ground level, I envisioned a room with a subterranean culture buried at the bottom of an active volcano, or a lost world teaming with exotic creatures. I was so disappointed when we went over to see our new living space for the first time.

“Is that it?” I said, looking out across a vacant, planked wooden floor.

“What?” my mom said, “you mean this room? Yes, this is it.” She must have felt a bit of an extra squeeze from my hand. “What’s wrong, is there something you don’t like?”

“Well,” I hesitated, “I thought you said it was sunken.”

“Oh, honey, that’s just an expression. It means the room is a little lower.”

“One step?” I questioned.

“Did you think it was a lot lower, like you could dive into it?” She asked.

“Kind of. Gary told me it would be like going to a different world, like in Twenty-two Leagues Under the Sea,” I said.

“Twenty Thousand Leagues?”

“Yes, that’s the one. The one with Elvis.”

“Ummm, go find your brother please,” she answered which is always the way she answered me when my older brother tried to teach me something. But I took off to find Gary, who was checking out another fantastic house feature, a laundry shoot which he had told me was a door opening to an amazing water slide “straight down to the basement.”

That delusion didn’t quite turn out like I had hoped either, but it was all part of getting used to our move to a different home. Our sunken living room soon became known as the recreation room, rec room for short, which to me meant a place where destruction reigned supreme. Not only was that also false, but “recreation” was not an accurate description for the room. There was no ping-pong table or sling shots laying around, and the one time we tried to roller skate, albeit at six a.m., brought out the dreaded wooden paddle.

Just the same, it was clear that the only form of recreation that was going to happen in this rec room was watching our Zenith TV, a box that was only slightly smaller than a movie theatre, and watching it, mind you, only one step lower than if we were watching it from anywhere else in the house. My dad tried to explain the architectural connection between the word sunken and its recreational function, but like a lot of his lectures he soon digressed to a medical explanation, this one on transmitted diseases. He had undoubtedly been inspired by an article in “The Urological Monthly,” and his explanation became heavily peppered with medical terms, which were depressing and inappropriate for young audiences. When his carnal overtones stepped too far over the edge, my mom interrupted, sort of stepped up as it were, and put an end to his in-house medical conference.

“Ahem…John,” she interrupted looking up from her Life Magazine, “I think I’ve about heard enough on that subject. The kids don’t need to know about that yet.”

A few days later, the real information about our sunken living room came when my older brother Gary received his yearly World Almanac, circa 1964, which he read from cover to cover every year, including the copyright information and the glossary, both printed in a type size below the legal limit.

From the beginning of January, when the almanac arrived, through mid-December of the same year, Gary began a reading marathon that made him an enlightened scholar on almost every subject. He carried the book from room to room, reading as he went, bumping into objects as he went and blurting out his latest discovery. One year, when the almanac arrived with a corner bent, Gary had a meltdown and threatened to hit the mailman in the kneecaps the next time he arrived. The next day, as I watched him prepare for the ambush from our stadium-size picture window, Gary became distracted when he found the section on albatrosses… and let the mailman walk right on by!

Undeterred, as my brother continued to absorb the thick book like a sponge, he learned Major League batting averages, how to convert things to the metric system, and studied the sordid histories of Wild West characters, like maniac cowpokes who road bulls into thunderstorms and ate cactuses to stay alive. As Gary recited an ever-growing list of facts, I absorbed them for use in school to correct what my teachers were presenting in class. Not to digress but reminding a teacher in an English class that Edgar Allen Poe was a drug addict did not exactly endear me to the front row.

One morning, Gary brought his voluminous bible, the 1964 World Almanac, to the breakfast table, which offered a pleasant diversion from my father’s explanations of urine microbes. After carefully balancing the almanac so he could eat his Fruit Loops freely, Gary suddenly looked up and rather excitedly announced that, between the section on oceanographic anomalies and weather patterns, page 3,482, he had unearthed information on a new scientific theory called “The Greenhouse Effect.”

“According to the almanac,” he started, “you got gas rising from houses which blocks the sun and traps the heat inside everyone’s homes. Eventually, that gas will start to suffocate everything, even us.”

I don’t want to be trapped…” I whimpered, “I…I’ve collected almost all the box tops from my cereal and…”

“Oh, no. That’s just it!” Gary interrupted, “We are safe! We have a sunken living room! As long as we stay in the rec room, below sea level, we won’t get any gas at all. The guy who built the house must have known we could die from the heat and gas, and sunk part of the house down to save us. All we have to do is go down there, and we’ll be safe from the Greenhouse Effect.”

From across the table, I studied Gary’s face for truth. What I saw calmed me, the face and thick glasses of my brother eating Fruit Loops. He was the living, breathing authority on everything from peas to porcupines. Reassurance came over me like one of my dad’s medical lectures. I knew right then that our new house was safe from outside influences, even if it meant that I would need to plan hourly quarantines in the slightly sunken area of the rec room.

This was the beginning of my love affair with, and everything on the TV, my one stop shopping for recreation. It wasn’t long before I learned to live my life vicariously through television programs and know that I would not suffocate from some mysterious green gas, or that my flesh would not melt off my bones in the middle of the night. It was, for me, the dawning of a new day, a pivotal moment where I realized that all I had to do to be safe was to go low when others went high and watch hours and hours and hours of TV. I began to accept, even relish, that one single step down as a small but necessary pilgrimage to wisdom and survival. Mankind might go up in flames, my friends might all perish tragically, but in the sunken room I was safe and, other than the occasional trip to the frig for more snacks, happy.

So…as life began to settle down in our new home, my life was looking pretty good. With the peaceful drone of non-stop television filling our home, I found all my fantasies about an imaginary sunken space wither away. I was not suffocating, our house was Greenhouse safe, and even though I caught a slight whiff of gas now and then, I trained myself to hold my breath down our long hallway and through the kitchen until I made the final leap to the safe zone.

As if life could get any better, rumor outside the rec room was that my grandmother was coming to live with us all the way from Ohio, a state Gary noted from page 845 of the World Almanac was actually “good morning” in Japanese. To me, however, Grandma’s arrival simply meant a lot of sugar cookies, and I could say good morning to them all day long. I was in some good head space, down in my sunken shelter where the air was fresh, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea with Elvis was on, and I was about to receive an endless supply of unnecessary sugar.

Tune in next week, for part two of Now Showing: 20,000 Leagues Under the Living Room. My grandmother’s arrival begins to bring out some of my most sunken behaviors, the inevitable effects of living too far below the earth’s surface, staring at an immovable box, and eating cookies three times a day.

Behind Every Shoe There Is a Great Slipper

In the winter we spend a lot of time in our slippers. Days are shorter, daylight is scarce. We tear out into the cold to empty the trash, but our feet race back in to find our slippers.

When our slippers go on, we don’t dig in our heels. Our shoes keep us a bit edgy, off our mojo, but our slippers remind us to slow down, and when we do, we seem to find out who we are again. One of the reasons we cannot find ourselves as quickly when we wear shoes is that shoes don’t know us as well. With slippers however, there’s an easy back and forth, a light conversation. We quit trying to stay on our toes. We loosen up and relax. We quit saying “I can’t do that I’m tied up right now.” The world grows warmer, and our walls come down. We open up and talk.

Slippers are the beginning of how the rest of our body wants to feel.

They are like comfort food for our feet. Not so much with shoes. And, to make matters worse, I grew up with some ridiculous rules about them. One rule was to always use a shoehorn when I put on my shoes so the heels would not be smashed in and ruined. The other rule was to always untie my shoes before taking them off. My grandfather, who I hardly knew, owned a shoe store in Cleveland, and barely scraped by during the Depression. Apparently, he passed these archaic shoe rules down to my dad, who clerked in his store. I did not clerk in a shoe store as a kid, but I still had to put my shoes on with a shoehorn and untie my shoes each time I took them off as if the Great Depression was still in effect.

Thus, I paced around nervously in my youth, tied up in knots over whether I was treating my shoes with historical respect. If I did not treat my shoes properly, my father would take the opportunity to lecture me about shoe damage, leading me to believe that we were all standing on the edge of another cataclysmic economic disaster. As a result, I thought The Great Depression was a painful period of history caused by mean-spirited people who had a lack of compassion for their shoes. It was if somehow history hinged on whether I kept my shoes protected and secure – like I was caring for a small child. Later in school, I falsely thought my father’s shoe rules would be enough to use on a history paper about the Great Depression, but when the graded paper was returned, the teacher had given me a D and scribbled the words “Narrow and Unpolished” in a small red box at the bottom. It was then that I began to wish all my shoes would turn into slippers.

Have you noticed that slippers never get sent back when they are given as a present?

That is because we love them right out of the box, even if they are a bit small or too narrow. If we do get a pair as a present and they don’t fit, we can have someone else wear them for a while to stretch them out. Or we get out a kitchen knife and cut out the little toe. No big deal. It’s a slipper. You slip them on, you share them, you slip them off. No rules apply.

We smash the heels down, we let the dog chew on them until we can get to Pet Smart and buy a real dog toy. We don’t make any commitments with our slippers, or take things personally when someone says:

“Oh, hi. Hey, I borrowed your slippers. They were a little small, so I cut out the big toe. Hope you don’t mind.”

No, we don’t mind at all, because we know our slippers are cool. They aren’t bothered by insignificant details. They accept, they flow, and they are accepted unconditionally. They are like a pet on your feet without the vet bills. We accept them, they accept us. We take them walking, we let the little pilings on them pile up, and we let them sleep right by our beds at night. They see our worst side, the side of us that gets sick, the side of us that gets tired, and the side that is sick and tired of being sick and tired. They see the side that goes _in_ the bathroom and the side of us that comes out. That may seem like a lot of pressure on something so light, but slippers don’t know pressure. God knows this too. He wears slippers all the time.

Slippers don’t know how to work, but they aren’t against it either.

They are masters at only taking on what they can handle. We are happy doing only half the job in our slippers, because when we put them on, we are not in work mode anymore. We are in slipper mode. We are not meant to shovel snow in slippers, but we can shovel the stoop. We can cook dinner in our slippers, but they remind us to stick to the simple stuff like grilled cheese and tomato soup, not stir fry with fresh veggies from the garden. We take out the garbage in our slippers, we walk over there to get a magazine in our slippers, maybe straighten up the pillows, but there is really nothing else to do once you get your slippers on. They are not work shoes; they are house shoes.

Isn’t it funny that we can have nineteen pairs of shoes, but only one pair of slippers? That is because one pair is enough.

I have no problem wearing someone else’s slippers, but I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing someone else’s shoes. Once in high school I was issued the shoes someone else wore the previous season for a sport I was playing. I knew immediately those shoes were going to make some poor choices because those shoes would be making someone else’s decisions, not mine. They would be making some other person’s steps_, not mine_. As a result, the first time I got the ball wearing someone else’s shoes, I ran the wrong direction and scored a touchdown for the other team. Looking back, I would have been more comfortable standing in my own endzone with slippers on.

Why is it we don’t like wearing other people’s shoes, but we have no trouble following other people’s footsteps?

That is not a good plan. We have to put down our own footsteps using our own shoes – the ones made for just us. If that doesn’t work, if those shoes get too big to fill, slide on your slippers. Relax. Throw away the shoehorn someone said you had to use, the shoehorn used one hundred years ago, the one from the Great Depression. It’s time to sink into your own self. Then, it won’t be long before you’ll get your footing again, become your own person. That is the soul your slippers have been waiting for.

A Dream in Full Swing

Last week, when I wrote about a French fry and band aid sculpture I made with my grandsons, I hit a chord with a lot of listeners. Readers texted me with personal stories about their experiences in art, ones that peeled back layers of hurt and frustration with former teachers, and even their own parents who were dismissive and discouraged them pursuing a path of creativity. As a result of those messages, many feelings from my own imaginative endeavors were flushed out.

If we consider investing in someone else’s future as valuable, encouragement in our everyday actions and speech is such a simple way to make that happen. With media available literally at our fingertips, a five-minute call to say hello, an extra lingering moment in a grocery line, or a thumbs-up text remind us that every single act of kindness, no matter how small, is never wasted.

Through your feedback, I was also reminded of some inspiring people who invested in my creative path, not only through encouragement but also by their example. They emerged at the right time to give me what everyone needs from time to time, encouraging words telling us that we are ok, that our direction is right, and that our efforts will yield results if we keep trying and not give up. Then, I saw them go out and take their own advice by trying and failing, then trying again.

This week it was purely coincidental that I found myself watching the Harlem Globetrotters on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday at the Ford Center in Evansville, Indiana. I looked around to see people of all races and ethnicities enjoying the dazzling talents of the brothers Harlem, drawing the crowd in with their athleticism and comic genius. Theirs is that rare gift of handling a basketball and making people laugh. Can you imagine them as children? You gotta know they were always cutting up, nailing three-pointers in the trashcan from the back of the classroom. Watching their antics reminded me that they were not always seven feet four inches tall, but were once small, like you and I, trying to figure out how in the world they could be of any use in the world with such a silly and ridiculous set of basketball skills, skills that were probably seen by their teachers as narrow or purposeless.

I laughed hysterically, watching a little person Globetrotter being chased by an opponent and sliding headlong across the referee table, then turn to see my grandson howling too, and knew he was probably going to try that stunt at home the first chance he got. Maybe it was the basketball game, maybe it was my grandson, but I suddenly recalled a detailed scene from my own childhood.

I was in the back yard at our old home where I grew up, watching a black man named Mitchell Kelley, who my parents hired to work in our yard. He was dependable to a tee, so much so, that mom and dad began to enlist him for all kinds of chores. If this sounds patronizing, it’s not. My dad tried to do the things Mitchell did, but he was constantly injuring his hands which stopped him from performing the surgeries his patients were depending on. Reaching up to clean the leaves out of the gutter, Dad sliced his hand wide open on a ragged edge of steel one fall and was out of work for a month.

Mitch not only cleaned gutters, but he also trimmed trees, prepared soil beds, repaired our shed, cleaned our carpets, and many other domestic tasks. Mitch did whatever was on the list that day, then went to his second job as mechanic at Sears. While my father was establishing his practice, Mitch was the one I saw during the day. I knew my dad, and I knew his rules, but Mitch was often there when I was lonely or longed for a father figure to hang out with.

Mitch’s showed his best skill through his kindness, which including cooking breakfast for me on Saturdays when I had risen earlier than I was supposed to. I had a habit of waking up the neighbors in my pj’s at six o’clock, and once erected a barricade at the end of our street in my Zorro outfit, declaring to a passing police cruiser that my street was not big enough for the both of us, and if he didn’t leave, I would be forced to put a Z on his chest. That incident grounded me from getting out of bed for about a month, so I found my way out to the kitchen instead, where I found Mitch cleaning.

“Jeffereeee!” He’d say and rub my head. “Want some eggs?”

“Ok, Mitch, how’d you get so big?” I’d say in my Pj’s and Zorro cape.

“You eat, that’s how! Breakfast little man, breakfast!” Mitch would say, then take an egg in each hand, cracking them perfectly into the pan with no shell. “In the army,” he’d say, “I had to learn to crack eggs one handed. When those officers come through, you bess have their meal ready!”

Standing next to this tall man, I saw only eggs and milk whirling in a pan, and his enormous hands mixing, and listened to Mitch’s army stories of soldiers marching through the Mess for a meal. Mitch’s powerful hands, hands that held greasy wrenches and pry bars, carefully corralled my meal on a plate with toast that somehow, magically, was already buttered. I watched an immovable man with a gentle skill set, who could deftly crack an egg in one hand for either a cranky general or a hungry toddler who wasn’t supposed to be out of bed yet.

As I began to go to school, Mitch was still there at our house, always working, never chit chatting, never speaking unless spoken to, always working, improving, cleaning up after our family, working to make our lives better. I wonder how many times he went to his second job irritated that he had to work so hard cleaning up after other people. The answer, seen in his character, is never. He was not a slave to anger or bitterness, but to something inside, something bigger than himself.

Mitch must have known I missed my dad’s company. If I saw Mitch’s car from down the block on my way home from school, I knew I could fly through the back gate and be scooped up by his big hands and lifted to the sky. Whirling and twirling, I looked down to the world below and saw a mountain and felt the rush of God’s love without knowing who God was, felt the loftiness of God’s heart before knowing how to read the Bible, and knew unequivocally that one person loved me enough to move the earth under my feet and surround me with the strong arms of acceptance.

“Jeffereeeee!”

It formed an image in my mind of a voice I could expect from every black person growing up. I believe it also formed a lasting image in the minds of my mom and dad, who as a medical team never turned down anyone that came in their office no matter what their condition, race, or status. The patients would be taken care of in the same way Mitch took care of my parents at home, without malice or prejudice.

Mitch was leading by example. He had it right, he had listened to the speech and was living and teaching the dream, one where a little white boy like me would grow up and be able to play with a little black boy, one where we both would be scooped up in each other’s back yards, lifted up by those big hands towards the sun, and there would see a new world big enough for both of our dreams.

I'll Have a Pink Horse, and a Side Order of Fries

What was once my art studio has taken on a whole new character since my grandsons opened the door and came in. Now, I work off a table that is two feet high and I sit in chair that makes my thighs feel like I’m in the middle of a workout with a personal trainer.

Come to think of it, my grandsons are my personal trainers. They put me through a program that challenges my heart rate and endurance but unfortunately hasn’t done a darn thing for my muscle mass.

The heavy lifting I’m doing with them now usually involves broken crayons, stickers and scissors that have penguin handles. The top of our Elmer’s glue bottle is so encrusted with glue boogies that it looks like a prize-winning fungal experiment at a science fair. In my studio, where I’m building relationships and art, big words like composition, symmetry, and perspective are gibberish to the three- and five-year-old. Instead, we talk about the excavators on Blippi, or the best way to eat a popsicle and we make hats to celebrate imaginary holidays like “Take Your Possum to Work Day.”

Last week, I tried to teach the kids some basic color theory, you know, stuff about the primaries and secondaries. You may remember from grade school that using paint had its challenges in art class. That’s because somebody always stuck the blue brush in the yellow paint, and the only way you could correct that color was to ask the teacher for black paint to cover up the dark green that came out of the rusty container. For that reason, my early art paintings were dark and depressing, and made my parents worry that I was influenced by episodes of the Twilight Zone.

When we boys create a new episode out in our kid-cave, we have no idea what we’re doing, and even less of an idea what we want to see when we are finished. I rarely talk to them about the elements of art like texture or space or anything else that resembles an art principle. In fact, at this point, I can’t really tell where their projects stop and mine takes over. Accidents, serendipity, and outright flukes have officially become the governing rules of our working studio, with a healthy dash of mystery thrown in for good measure. That is just how our art works.

Yesterday when my heater went out in the studio, I called a repairman to fix it. When he walked in, he stopped for a moment, looked at the artwork on the walls, and said:

“Oh, wow! Did your kids do these?”

“No,” I answered, “those are mine.”

He stood for a moment in silence, staring at the art works, and I wondered for a moment if he was going to ask me if I had been sniffing too much gas from the pilot light. Then he said, “I always loved art, but my teacher didn’t like what I did. I took a horse I had drawn up to her desk once, which I thought was pretty good and she said, ‘Horses aren’t pink, go back and do it again.’ After that, I never really thought I was good enough for art.”

After a half hour or so, my heater was up and running again, but fixing a rejected artist and his hurt would require some overtime. With the right voice at the right time, our technician could have been the next Henri Matisse or Marc Chagall, both of whom marked their place in art history with the wildest of color schemes. His rejected pink horse would have been a horse my grandsons would have had a thousand questions about. They would have seen it as something to look for flying enchantingly through the clouds, but they would have been upset if a teacher made them change its color. After all, that would take away all the magic.

Before he left, my repairman and I agreed that of all subjects, art should be the one subject that allows many different answers. Some, like math or spelling may have only one best answer, but when we begin insisting that our children invent, draw, build, or design according to one formula, we have gone down the slippery slope of putting a stamp on what the answer has to be, and according to one art teacher, what all horses have to look like. By dismissing our children’s imagination, their sense of mystery, we say NO! to unique ways of problem solving, and in fact dismiss art as a viable learning process altogether, and of course we know what happens after that…Poof! We throw the subject of Art out of schools altogether.

Where mystery go’eth, there go’eth art.

We know this, and we know that volumes and volumes of books, as well as gardens, museums and galleries are devoted to beauty as it is revealed through artists seeking answers to their visions. When we allow this mystery to have a place in our lives, we enter their complete and satisfying universe. It is a transcendent vision, is it not, that is revealed when an artist presents us with that one-of-a-kind pink horse, the horse that guides us out of the eerie woods and lights our understanding of our world.

What is so revealing about the way kids invent is that they are undaunted by anything – materials, tools, and even time itself. The only thing that matters to them when they create is the experience, and the more mysterious the experience, the more engaged they are! Their discovery cloud overhead may look a bit wild and unpredictable until that cloud opens up, and at that moment, the full effect of a child’s imagination unleashes its energy. That is just how art works, and it is part of the child in all of us.

Of course, all artists, including my grandsons, go through different phases in their development. Like Picasso, who went through a Blue Period and a Rose Period, we boys are also going through a stage called the Food Period. It began recently when my grandson went for the yellow paint and his brush came out with the remnants of a withered French Fry and parts of the plastic wrapper from a Smucker’s Uncrustable chocolate-flavored-hazelnut-spread-sandwich.

“I didn’t see that coming,” said the five-year-old.

So…we painted the French fry, stapled the wrapper around it and designated it an official work of art. And just in case our sculpture, ala Claes Oldenburg, attracted the interest of a major Soho gallery, we mounted our sculpture securely on a podium of wood, and titled it Uncrustable Sandwich with a Side Order of Fries #1.

We were so excited about our creation that we thought we would make a bunch more, develop a whole series of these hazelnut uncrustable sculptures, but then, first we would have to make another trip to McDonald’s to get more fries.

And folks, that’s just how art works.

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:

Photo by Sergey Platonov

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

Photo by Heshan Weeramanthri

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

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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.