Hitting an All-Time Low(note)

I came down with a head cold this week, and it is the beginning of summer. Even mollusks and paramecium know that one doesn’t get a cold in the summer. It’s just not medically or biologically appropriate. A cold is something one gets in the winter when there is no sun, and when our immune systems are not running as efficiently as they should. Colds, quite simply, were invented to go along with other things in the winter we can barely tolerate, like fruitcakes and Youtube videos of people slipping on ice and falling on their children. They aren’t appropriate, but we expect them in the winter, not the summer.

However, I have tried to look at my cold as a positive thing, a chance to rebuild a few new habits, sort of look at life a little differently. Here are just a few things I’ve tried since this summer cold came on:

• I’m sleeping sitting up to help with drainage, and because I’m in a perfect position to read, I leave a book over my head in case I wake up.
• I’m using a variety of containers to hydrate myself, and drinking out of vessels that are more fun like our frying pan, the crock pot and a conch shell.
• I take more liberties to say odd things, phrases that take full advantage of my semi-delusional state. Phrases like, “Honey, I miss the ant farm we used to have. Those guys were my friends.” Or, this one: “Have we touched down yet? I thought for a moment I heard the captain speaking.”

And finally, I go around the house complaining of symptoms unrelated to a cold like dry kneecaps, missing fingernails, and the sudden appearance of long, pirate-like scars.

I think one of the worst things about having a cold is having to hear people-commercials about new, over-the-counter remedies and miracle cures that will lessen my symptoms. Our mail lady, for example, cited how Roman soldiers slathered honey all over their bodies to cure a cold, and that this honey-smothering technique also made it difficult for an attacking soldier to get them in a headlock. Our mail lady would be capable of putting me in a headlock, so after her explanation, I keep a bottle of honey by the door in case she tries any sudden battle moves on me.

As a last resort, I did make an appointment with my physician. During the examination, he asked me more questions about my family than about my condition. I think, truth be told, that doctors don’t want to help you when you have a cold because the common cold offers no new medical challenge to them. It doesn’t present itself with bright purple and chartreuse blotches, or parts of a mustache falling off.

“Jeff, how are you doing?” the doctor said. “You sound a little hoarse.” I smile and cough on him, tell him I’m about to throw up and need to be in the ICU. Unfazed, he sticks a temperature gun in my ear, a move that feels like something my brother used to do when we were ten, and looking at me squarely, feels around on my tonsils and adenoids, which were taken out forty-five years ago.

“Have you tried Vic’s VapoRub?” he says, listening to my back with a telescope. When I hear that question, I can feel my blood pressure start to rise. No one, and I mean no one, uses the term Vic’s VapoRub anymore, I think to myself. In the twenty-first century, we just say Vics and everyone knows what you are talking about. I don’t walk around my house using the full names of products in conversation. If we need more creamer at the grocery store, for example, I just say that, and not “Hey honey, can you pick up another container of Vanilla Coffee Mate Natural Bliss Real Milk and Creamer, please?”

Still, there is one part of getting a cold that I enjoy, and that has to do with how my voice changes. Since I have a rather delightful habit of practicing various noises as I go about my day, like machine-gun fire, and baby tiger growls, changes in my voice when I have a cold offer a host of unique possibilities. And because my throat is all off kilter, I am able to hit a note at least two octaves lower than usual. As I practice my scales, particularly in the morning, I can sometimes hit a low C, a note so low that flocks of Canadian geese begin gathering in our front yard.

You might not really fathom how incredibly important my voice change is to the future of our family. Let me just say for starters that there is no one, NO ONE, in our family, our extended family, our nuclear family or anyone related to our Bender relatives that has ever been able to hold a tune. We have all been genetically engineered to sound really bad when we sing anything, going all the way back to the Revolutionary War.

Now, with a summer cold, and my voice wonderfully low, I thought this would be a unique opportunity to restore some credibility to the family singing name, or at least the part we played in history and possibly the founding of our country, although that is a bit a vocal stretch.

So, for your listening pleasure, I thought I’d try my hand at a few of the raw notes I’m, enjoying here at home. Never hog a good thing, I always say. Here then, is a little ditty I’ve always loved. Just picture me walking amongst the geese out front, enjoying each other’s company with my new low frequency, fresh from my summer cold, melody. And please, feel free to hum along if you like:

Sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter, don't you call me
'cause I can't goI owe my soul to the
VapoRub store

If you see me coming, better step aside
A lot of men didn't, a lot of men died
One sneeze of iron, the other of steel
If a winter cold don't a-get you, then a summer one will

(Repeat until exhausted…)

The Monsters In Our Room

As a couple, my wife and I don’t spend a lot of time in front of the TV, but each year my wife insists I spend some time watching the singing talents of youngsters as they compete on American Idol. I temporarily put aside my purest artistic thoughts and settle in to watch contestants stand on their mark and give the judges their best vocal shot.

This year, on one of the first nights of the show, a Hawaiian eighteen-year-old named Iam Tongi delivered an emotional version of a song called “Monsters,” written by James Blunt. When Iam finished his song, we put our TV on pause and looked out into space until we could pull our emotionally wrecked selves back together. He had delivered, and as all of America knows by now, Iam’s went on to sing his way to a breath-taking thirteen million views, and this year’s winner of the show. His other performances were breath-taking as well.

As a lifelong artist myself, one of the things that struck me was the courage Iam had to take on a subject as personal and intimate as the recent loss of his father. That’s not easy on a national platform. Vulnerable and tender, his audition let some monsters out from our cages and freed some dreadful emotions from their chains as well. At our home, Iam’s ability to take us with him in his grief softened our world here for a moment, and probably lightened the big world Iam had on his shoulders too. For those of you who haven’t heard the song, it carries a universal message to anyone who has ever lost someone, a message that encourages us to weep when we need to, but also to tackle our own difficult moments with poise when the lights go dark.

One of the things you gotta love, even if you aren’t a fan of Idol, is the simple character Iam shows us while on stage singing and playing his guitar. When he performs, he has no fancy dance moves, no glitz or glimmer, and rarely an accompaniment. He is just a man, one person standing in sandals and a t-shirt, sharing his buttery voice and handing you a cupful of grace as if you are the only person in the room. He invites us to walk with him through the loss of his father, his idol, and by doing so a chance to chase the monsters away.

After performing one evening for the judges, Katy Perry complimented Iamon his ability to tell a story. I had to pause there and think about what she meant and remember that not all stories have a beginning, a middle and an end. Some hold us in the middle and let us work it out.

In fact, isn’t it true that the stories we love the most are the ones that leave us wondering what the next chapter will bring?

Like Iam’s songs, our stories are layered, with some of those layers rising while others are sinking, with some so deep we may not feel them until…well…until a piece of art or a song comes along that reminds us of how truly vulnerable and human we are. Many times, they are the ones we learn the most from, the ones that become our salve for a loss we have no words for. These are the ones that make us hold our breaths and let us exhale it slowly while all that we have built up wash away in a song.

The thing about Iam Tongi, the songwriter, the Hawaiian, the human, is that the monsters he let you see in himself may be the ones you are fighting on days when it appears the rats are winning the race.

Some of you may know that my father is now one hundred years old. As one might imagine, he has seen a lot of history, and has a lot of layers floating around in his elderly frame. My father’s voice is still in my head, even when I’m not there listening to him at the nursing home.

When I am sitting with him and it’s just us men, I hear the strain of a man whose fatherly muscles are wearing out, whose voice is not as insistent or demanding. Those muscles are getting too tired for monsters, so we skip over the lessons on manners or why I should give more to the church or which insects to watch out for in the yard. We become just “two men saying goodbye.” The monsters are almost gone for my father now, and we talk as two people, two human beings with foibles and flaws, who are old friends that share some family history. I can tell you it is a sweet place to be, because Dad can finally quit worrying about whether he’s covered everything or whether he is still responsible for chasing anything away.

If that were the end of our story, it would be a very poor story indeed. If we all slayed our monsters, handled everything ourselves, then there wouldn’t be a need for anything or anyone else. The ending to all our stories, mine, Iam’s, my dad’s, is that there is no ending when you love someone. The stories we have, the monsters in our room, transfer to the next person who carries them for a little while until becoming too weary ourselves, close the door and go home. We should be so lucky that we have an idol, our precious Maker who will take us there with a song. It may sound a lot like Iam Tongi’s when we hear it again, but by then all our monsters will be nevermore.

Am I Getting Paid for This?

I’m not very good company on vacations. Taking time to relax somewhere else has always felt like an effort, and I don’t get into the flow of things for a couple of three days. At home I have my routine of gardening, fixing things, having a latte with my wife, or getting into trouble with the grandkids. I hear the term “obsessive” tossed around regarding my personality on vacations, but I would use the word “lost.”

As much as I try to loosen up when we get away, I find myself looking around for things to do to make me feel at home, which usually translates into doing pretty much what I do at home.

After we arrived at our destination this year, hashtag exhaustion, I began by rearranging the coffee cups so I could reach them in the morning, and then check out the fine print on the hotel shampoo to make sure I wasn’t going to asphyxiate on the aroma it leaves in my hair. I put out our Do Not Disturb Sign, even though it was only three in the afternoon, and try to to open my pressure packed suitcase without being hit in the head by my rolled-up belt. I notice my special travel-proof tube of toothpaste has exploded on the one good shirt I packed, so I take off to find some Dawn dishwashing liquid, but by then everyone else is ready to tour the resort, which really meant going to the front desk and asking for more towels and finding out when the Kiddie Climbing Wall will open.

Along the way, I pass men in brightly colored swimwear they would never wear back home, many of whom want to tell you about the construction company advertised on their hats. Over by the bar there’s more men dressed in floral shirts from Choccolocco, Alabama watching European soccer on a TV the size and shape of Montana, but I swing wide when I hear them ordering drinks like Murder at Sunset and Fatal Attraction, and I head back to the room to put on sunscreen. Along the way I hear music coming out of fake rock speakers in the ground. Naturally, they are playing Jimmy Buffet, but because the speakers are spaced fifty yards apart in the landscaping, Jimmy’s voice sounds like four brothers who tried to form a quartet in their garage.

This year I brought a book to read, a 900-page edge-of-your-seater I’ve been using at home to block a vent that blows cold air on my wife regardless of our thermostat setting. I’m not much for hanging around the pool, but feel obligated after applying twenty bucks’ worth of sunscreen, and open my book, skim over the list of chapters, and begin to read the Forward:

When I began writing this book some forty years ago, in a season that now seems like another lifetime, I was merely four years old. I was dressed in a white jumper typical of British funerals and was overtaken by a flashback of my great-grandfather who lay in state in that vertically stained and monolithic cathedral. Long before his death by an errant leopard attack, when our family was still animal lovers, he sat me on his knee, the only one left after The Great War, and began sharing with me his horrifying saga of being trapped behind enemy lines in the bloody trenches of Alsace-Lorraine. I looked now at his graven face, stiff and uncluttered by his customary salt-and-pepper beard, and I knew this great general, this lifeless unheralded man who led the last slingshot brigade of the twentieth century, was in fact, not related to me at all.

While vacation seems like an odd time to burst into tears, I found this book particularly moving, and knew instinctively I could never get to the end of it without putting my family through quite a lot of emotional upheaval. With the help of a passing weightlifter, I put the book down and headed out to the fitness center to schedule a family beach yoga session that starts at sunrise from a lady who could stretch like a FEDEX rubber band.

By six the next morning our family has finished the yoga session and watched the sun make its grand entrance over the horizon in a blaze of glory. Inspiring though it sounds, with everyone feeling lengthier and in-tune with their inner child, they opt to return to their rooms and go back to bed. I detour for coffee and run into our Hispanic maid, and in a fit of unbridled energy, offer to help her arrange the resort soaps on her cleaning cart, which was an epic fail, considering I didn’t know Spanish and she spoke only three words of English, two of which were “Good Morning.”

I moved on to refill my coffee like I do at home, but in this case, it meant going back to the front desk to see if they have any Stevia. The concierge was now so accustomed to seeing me, he just looked at me and said, “Jeff, just go in the back and get it yourself.” While I’m back there I crossed paths with the reservation manager that had a jammed stapler, so we worked on that for a while making small talk like men do when they try to fix a stapler together.

By then it’s 6:30 and I’m ready to mow the resort’s small patch of zoysia grass in front of the marquis, so I mosey over to the maintenance garage, slightly left of the dumpster. Those guys are always up early, drinking coffee, standing around in threes, sometimes fours, doing exactly what they do at home. While negotiating for a lawnmower, we all agree I could rent out their back storage room with the 3000-gallon drum of gasoline for one-tenth of the price of our balcony room. “It could work,” Mower Guy says in native Floridian, “but we’ll have to clear it with the front desk.”

So, guess what? I head back over there, stopping on my way to talk to Cart Girl, freshen up my coffee in the room she’s working on, grab a beach towel, and re-arrange all her hotel soaps again, the ones no one really uses because they are shaped like seahorses. I tell her on the way out that Mower Guy has his eye on her, but since she didn’t understand a word of what I said the first time we talked, she simply hands me a complimentary hair net and shoe mitt and says “Ok,” which is her third and final word, rounding out her entire English vocabulary.

This is more like it, I tell myself. It’s starting to feel just like home. I’m getting a lot done, I’m finally relaxed. And miracles abound! It’s only quarter past seven! I am on vacation, with the rest of the day ahead of me! My family is still sleeping, I’m starting to find my rhythm, and if you aren’t doing anything, I’ll meet you in the lobby where I’ll be touching up the paint near the free cucumber water.

A Trip to Planet Eyeball

Many years ago, we found our little slice of heaven along the Florida coast, and it’s been a yearly stop ever since. Now we tow our family down for a week and build as many memories as we can shovel into a beach bucket. After a couple of days acclimating to laziness, I rediscover what playfulness looks like from two grandsons as we form a battle line against nature’s forces.

The red warning flag has been out for the last two days, and high tide’s been throwing everything that it has at us. As green foamy waves crash over one another, lines of brownish foam bubble-masses form on the edge of the surf and are pushed by the wind across the sand like aliens from an interplanetary dishwasher. Eerily skin-like, they seem to propel themselves along by their own slime, then suddenly peel off and evaporate into the beach as if to regroup to a world underground. Within moments, another line of bubbles has erupted from the surf and is racing towards us, slithering up to cover our toes.

“RUUUUN! It’s the Sudsy-Slime!!” I shriek. “RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!”

I gather the troops downwind just long enough for me to explain that this is imaginary goop that is invading Earth and taking over. It’s time for a group hug, just for safety I tell them and a chilly wind kicks up and dodges between us. A good excuse to throw the Star Wars towel around us for a moment, make a huddle for our next play, a plan of attack on the world. Alien slime is allergic to hugs, so I draw the four- and six-year-old in close, like a grandfather Jedi should, wrap both my arms around them, and tell them we are safe for now.

Their eyes turn big as flying saucers and I point to the sky where a pretend starship from Planet Eyeball just disappeared into the clouds at warp speed. My warnings can barely be heard over the crashing surf, and a new atmosphere is upon us. The war is on. It’s the Forces of Imagination and Play against the dreaded Sudsy-Slime!

Up where mom and dad lounge in their beach chairs, a colorful array of molded plastic toys are scattered about, now half buried by blowing sand. The toys are fresh out of the bag, but they seem like outcasts next to the warehouse of jetsam junk the sea has tossed up, chewed, broken and unspoiled.

Have you noticed that kids never get tired of what the sea deposits? It is the nature-nothings than become our necklaces, our talismans, and faded pictures on our mantels back home.

Today, the best choices are the scratchy palmetto husks, and we use them to write messages in the sand to a coast guard helicopter whirling overhead. Was that the interplanetary starship we saw earlier? Never mind, our letters aren’t legible. They are in kid language, indecipherable and washed away by the incoming surf, but they not wasted to us.

The sudsy foam pushes us further back and back even further, melting our capital letters away. We make another attempt to write in the sand again but there’s no time to waste! The camouflaged whirligig, our pretend alien above, has spotted us and is circling back! We are not grown up yet, not ready to be out in the open. We don’t want to be teleported up in a beam of ’phistication and ‘sponsibility or other words we aren’t ready for.

We split for cover up near the dune where high tide has already made its mark. In a small oval of shade, behind a few sea oats, we duck down and hide, but are not alone. As the copter whizzes by, we discover a casualty in the sand, a large snow crab, barely alive, surrendering to the heat and ocean’s brown slime.

“Oh my gosh, look!” says Six-Year-Old. “A crab! It’s still alive! It’s only got four legs! And a GIANT PINCHER!”

We bend low to watch the half-crab, still wiggling.

“I think I see one eye looking back at us!” I say, pointing to the skeletal creature.

“Us?” Says Four-Year-Old.

“Yea, there’s one big crab eye!” I whisper as if it could hear us.

We poke the crab, watching the beady, telescoping eye rotate around and look at us again.

“That eye is a spy from Planet Eyeball!” says Six-Year-Old.

“A spy?” Says the younger.

We stare for a moment at each other, then back at the alien monster from Planet Eyeball.

“What happened to it?” says Six- and Four-Year-Old.

I could give them a serious answer, one filled with knowledge and wisdom, but they are not looking for answers, really, not when there is a big eye, bulging, looking at _us_.

“RUN EVERYBODY! RUN!” I yell, and like retreating troops taking fire, we scamper over the dune. But we are taking a break from the Beach of Real and allowing our playful visions to succumb to the gravitational pull of the moon on a lighthearted sea. We are Sand Soldiers on leave from active duty, intrepid explorers saving the planet from the Sudsy-Slime of maturity, one crab eye at a time.

You Just Gotta Be – A Tribute to Gord

This past week we paid our last respects to one of the greatest songwriters of our times, Gordon Lightfoot. Credited with being one of the most influential, if not prodigious folk musicians of the last half century, he died at eighty-four this past week. Gord, as he was affectionately called, penned some 300 songs over the course of his sixty-year career and was the inspiration behind hits from Elvis, Paul Simon, Bob Dylan and the trio Peter, Paul and Mary, to name only a few. Quoting Dylan, “I can't think of any Gordon Lightfoot song I don't like. Every time I hear a song of his, it's like I wish it would last forever.”

When I first attended a Gordon Lightfoot concert over thirty years ago, the eight track tapes I bought during intermission eventually wore out my rewind button in my car stereo, as I looped Rainy Day People or Summertime Dream continuously. Before all those tapes wore out completely, I recorded them over to cassette tapes, then eventually bought his entire anthology of songs in CD, which we play like a bad habit around our house. When we heard he passed away quietly this week of natural causes, we dug up the scrap of paper where he scribbled his name, and we felt the loss of a song-friend we had known all our lives.

If you are in your twenties or thirties, you may not be familiar with his vast repertoire of evocative songs. If you are older, you know how one of his songs can transport you to some northern lake where you can hear the call of a loon, or to a small town where a lonesome train whistle whines. Either way, his songs left us with chapters of soulful and singable lyrics, and melodies you could whistle all day long. And if you will take a brain break in the middle of your day to listen to Knotty Pine, or East of Midnight, I can assure you the day will be transformed into another world where ships plunge through the Great Lakes loaded down with virtuoso guitar licks and penetrating, resonate harmonies. Are you longing for a moving adventure, a daydream that was never fulfilled? Pull up a listen and sit back. His songs are full of them.

I met Gordon Lightfoot in college when my studies weighed like a foreboding cloud and friends and family seemed distant. He was there when I retreated to my tiny room just off campus made a cup of tea, sat down on my futon with my Irish Setter, and put on one of his albums. I had no God that I knew of then, but I was kept company with his songs that transcending his own failed relationships, alcoholism, and lost homes. At least for a short time, I could immerse myself in Sundown or If You Could Read My Mind and know that I was free from whatever ghosts were creeping up the back stairs of my apartment. We should all be so lucky to find the safety of one favorite Lightfoot song, one that will help us find our own personal bridge between the wherefore and the why.

I saw him again in concert last fall when he walked out on stage in Columbus Ohio on what would be part of his last tour. During the performance Gordon had to be administered oxygen, which is a bit frightening to witness as a spectator, and there were more than a few in the audience who wondered why he would come out and put himself through another appearance. However, a few bars into each song, it was obvious he was going to go out of this life doing what he loved the most, celebrating the tracks of his life on stage with his fans. His playlist was short, perhaps 12 songs, but he had the same enthusiastic verve he always had, tapping his feet to each song, staying within a safer vocal range, and occasionally needing to be prompted on a few lyrics. Just a few weeks later, Gordon fell and broke his wrist and had to cancel the rest of that US and European tour. More than once I thought he may not make it through, but his rendition of The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald got a standing ovation, a fitting tribute to the “chimes that rang twenty-nine times for the wives and the sons and the daughters.”

What Gordon Lightfoot was telling us through his last go-round of fragile concerts, was that he was still on a magical ride connecting us to the tattle-tail sound of wind in a sail, drinking his second cup of coffee or wearing polka dot underwear. His iconic The__Canadian Railroad Trilogy, the unofficial Canadian anthem, came from his love of country as he sang us through a landscape of steel workers, then through the nickel mines of Sudbury, and all the whistle stops in between. He missed a few notes here and there, but don’t we all? For those of us who have been riding shotgun with him through the years, his renditions were reminders that Gordon’s life was still full to capacity and that he, like Don Quixote, would be the last Canuck standing:

Reaching for his saddlebag
He takes a battered book into his hand
Standing like a prophet bold
He shouts across the ocean to the shore
Till he can shout no more

Should you take the time to listen to a Lightfoot song, try one that didn’t make it to the top of the charts, and see if you aren’t moved either to dance, or to tears, or to start taking guitar lessons. At one concert I attended many years ago, he wistfully remembered the days when he was travelling from one gig to another, spending long hours in ramshackle hotels where Dylan or Willie might stop themselves and share songs all night long down in the lobby. Spending countless hours in my dorm room studying, I often had Gord playing in the background, but honestly, I always felt like I could have been sitting with him in a speak-easy having a drink, or in front of a fire swapping jokes. For a songwriter to tell a story, for him or her to take you on an adventure with them while they sing is indeed a rare and rousing trip. The beauty of Lightfoot’s songs is that we can still go there with him through his music, even if he is on another steamship that we hear on Lake Superior, passing us in the night.

As I wrap up this short tribute to Gordon Lightfoot, I invite you to google one of my very favorite Lightfoot songs called I’m Not__Suppose to__Care. You may listen to the melancholy of a man who spent some time out in the rain, who battled with desperation and depression and disappointment, but in the lyrics, you’ll also hear a singer that still had places to go and people to see, and the gift of his prolific songwriting to share. As he says in the song, “I’ll give you the keys to my flying machine if you like,” but along the way you may find yourself canoeing through his Canadian wilderness home, or perhaps sitting in front of a fire, watching the flames flicker out with one of his beautiful ballads playing softly, my love, in the background.

The Catch (Part 3)

Recess bell rang out and wild horses couldn’t have stopped us from getting out to that ball diamond…

My bulldozing buddy had pushed me right through the door to get me out first on account I’d given him four peanuts packages that I traded to other kids. I gave away my milk under the table for one pack, my butter patties to a tubby kid name of Caddy for another, and I split my hamburger in half so as to get one peanut pack apiece even though the buns were soaked clean through from the creamed corn they served us every single day until it ran out, which we was all glad for. It was a fair trade, all of it, and Upland, eating peanuts all the way, led me out the gym door, down past home and straight out to left field to get a good spot for a pop-up, gawking up at the sky like idjits looking for Martians.

Shortly after, Dadburny strutted out the long way so Miss English Teacher had time to adjust her view of him, and then, dropping his first pitch, WHOMP! Out that first ball went, curved along the third base line, clean as a train whistle only six feet off the ground the whole way, and like to take the hair off Upland’s head. Hit the corner pole dead on, took a bounce like it was in a pin ball machine, careened off’n two teacher cars and knocked out most of the letters on the school sign announcing OPEN HOUSE for next Tuesday. We tried not to laugh, but dang it, all that was left on the school sign was a P, and two E’s and it was a teacher who done it.

Dadburny, man, he looked irritated at all of us laughing out there in left field. But we were glad he hadn’t hit a pop fly, be’n that it took the pressure off of us for a while. But he weren’t glad at all, he was nervous jittery, and not smiling, because he was going to have to explain why he put a dent in two cars and left P-E-E on the school billboard. Miss Flimsy-English just smiled at him from over by first base where she was standing pretending to grade papers, but she had her eye on him like a mother hen.

I thought of my grandmother just then, how she told me to go meet the ball if I got a chance. I thought of being there with my notebook spread out on her kitchen Formica counter working on the science, and I felt for the first time like I wasn’t going to get a chance to meet that baseball, being so crowded around all these cotton-pickin’ kids in left field. I needed some space to meet a pop-up the science way if’n I got the chance, so I took off, yes I did, and ran like lightning over to right field where all the first graders were playing in the sand boxes, and four square, and poke-me-then-I’ll-poke-you type a games.

I ran out there where no one was and stood there by myself looking up to the heavens where I could hear my grandmother’s voice back home and could talk to her for a minute before Dadburnit knocked the snot out of another ball. I looked way up to the eternal, and it was quiet up there, and I swear I saw the finger of God pointing to huge cloud shape of a white popsicle, least that’s how I looked at it, and I closed one eye to line His finger up with my own. It was like God and me having a conversation and him having the last words, “Go out there and meet the ball!”

Then, it came…I heard the pop of a bat sound off like a firecracker. CRACK!

Danged if Danburnit hadn’t hit one to right field, and everyone in left looked a disappointment because no one was out there waiting for it.

But I was.

I didn’t move my feet one inch because I was nailed to the ground frozen tight like a tin soldier, I was. The ball went up to that finger in the sky pointing to a popsicle, went right through and broke the clouds like a jet on the Fourth of July. In the back I heard Miss Flimsy say “oh dear” as if she might have to catch it herself. But I wasn’t giving gravity any time to make a mark. I took off towards the sidewalk, then back a little, lined myself up and let both my hands go up to meet that ball, which came down like a brick square in the middle of them both, clamped shut and done stopped solid.

Later someone told me there was a solar eclipse that day, which I had to look up in chapter five on weather in the science book. But it didn’t make any difference. You could have heard a pin drop from here to Itchy Goomy. I was stunned myself, and believe, now looking back that I may have gone to the bathroom on myself. Probably not, but I could have.

That baseball looked a lot different in my hands that it ever had, kind of like it was glowing in my hands, bright as an evening star and I felt like it was a ball that I was meant to keep, standing there. But Mr. Dadburny had a different plan. He was so mad that someone had caught his pop up, so enfumigated in front of his lady friend, that he didn’t know exactly what to do. I think Miss Flimsy lost a little bit for him when I caught that ball, a little of her affliction for him left because I looked over and saw her look away from him, like she was embarrassed, and then she went to adjusting her spring dress.

Out of sheer meanness, Dadburny was so confused what to do he took off running me down! Came straight at me full speed like a locomotion! And here I thought he was going to come out and shake my hand or pick me up and hug me or give me a science ribbon he had in his pocket or something. Nope, he was gritting his teeth, mad as a hornet. He came straight at me like a bull, and I just knew he was about to run me down and knock the ball out of my hand and then say I dropped his pop fly. Then he’d have his perfect record of never having one caught, and he’d keep his girlfriend too. But you know what save me? You’ll never guess.

Off to the side, Miss Flimsy screamed “FRAAAAAANCIS!” At the top of her voice she did, like she’d seen a ghost!

And if the baseball field hadn’t been dead quiet before my catch, it was now.

“FRANCIS!” She yelled again, “Don’t do it!” She called him by his first name, like do-you-take-this-man-to-be-your-lawful-wedded-husband-Francis! And I heard it, and my friends heard it in left field, and the entire school heard it like a loudspeaker drill off a tornader. Oh man, you’d never think an English teacher like her dressing like a flower could yell like a dock hand, but there it was!

“FRANCIS! DON’T YOU LAY A FINGER ON HIM!!”

And his full speed run stopped like a ring in a bell, just short of running me over, and I saw a madness there, like pride gone crazy, his bad side ready to hurt me got caught right out there in right field by the gal he’d been winking at and rubbing elbows with. Now she saw the other side of him, that ugly side he’d been hiding from her all this time, and she didn’t like what she saw, no, not one bit. And I saw a row of his ugly crooked teeth up close like could bite me in half.

So, there you have it, and I told you I’d get to it and tell you the whole story. I loved the game of baseball, and one way or another, through all the lies and anger the finger of God came down like gravity unleashed, and my hand went up to meet that baseball, and forced Dadburnit to show the side he never hoped would come out. I can stand here and say it happened yes it did.

Shortly after that I got that C in science out of pure revenge from Mr. Francis Dadburny. He weren’t no perfect baseball hitter, he weren’t no science expert neither. He was a teacher I came to know by catching his pop fly, and having to pay for it with a lot of booking I didn’t care for one bit.

And it all made sense now from my view behind the backstop. That was the day after I ran all the way back to school and saw Francis come to his knees in the parking lot begging Miss Flimsy to take him back, but she weren’t having it, no she wasn’t. She had seen the light and there wasn’t any future in a man who’d knock a kid down on account of a pop fly, and she knew it. And then, I understood why I had got that C in science, and that revenge was spelt with a capital R.

Funny thing about that too. I never got another C in science again, and that is the truth as I stand here. I got a few B’s, but mostly what I got on my six-week report cards was A’s after that, bigger’n all get out. Capitol A’s, with remarks from Francis Dadburny like “works well with others,” or “good handle on vocabumalary, and so on and so forth and what have you. I couldn’t believe it. My punishment was cut, and I played ball after school every day, except for the days when I ran home because guess who was waiting for me at the gate?

You’ll never guess in a million years. And it wasn’t grandma neither.

It was of all people, my dad! Sure as Lincoln standing there with a mitt on, ready to catch some with me, and not make a mention of that C I got and all the while, don’t you know, he’d talk up a storm about, yep, it was the science. Mostly about cell my-toesies, but he talked about Einstein’s Theory of Relatives, and Copernicus, and Otis and Wilson Wright and all the rest of the gravity geniuses, like a meeting, a great meeting of minds. And I was right there in the center of them all, like we were having the World’s Fair of Science and playing catch together with my dad jabbering a mile a minute.

But it didn’t bother me one bit. By then I knew all of those science people in the book, and some that weren’t and could talk up a mean streak about every one of them myself, all the while throwing a dadburn baseball back and forth with my own dad ‘til Grandma yelled out back told us class was over and come in to wash up and smiling as we ran in, saying if we didn’t come now, she was going to call us out at the plate, even though, in a million years, I knew she weren’t never would.

The Catch (Part 2)

We’re picking up from last week where I was stuck at home studying science, a subject I had no capacity for, and then had run all the way back to school, hoping some semblance of a ball game was still on. But I was about to see more than I had bargained for…

Way down deep where a willow root meets reason, pieces I hadn’t understood at the time came together and began to make a whole picture. I wanted to yell across the field, when I saw them two love birds together, my teachers both, and yell out something that would ruffle their feathers and it was all I could do not to. I’m glad I didn’t though because if I hadda I wouldn’t have seen that flashback of me on the field catching that once in a lifetime ball and all the things that happened after, and the reason I got that C from Dadburny. I would have gone right past that picture in my own head and gone into science the next day the same way I came out, ready to light a fire, mad at the world, but I didn’t.

Instead, what happened in right field replayed itself down to the last detail, and like I said, made sense of everything forever.

First off, you gotta understand that recess bell meant we were out the door for baseball. You gotta know that was all of what was on our minds. We had to be excused of course, but when my lunch table was dismissed and that, I found David Upland, the biggest kid in the fifth grade, and stayed right behind him, straight out to the ball field. I had to give him my package peanuts for it, but it was worth it because walking behind him was like having a bulldozer in front of you. There wasn’t anyone gonna bet in front of David Upland and beat us out to the ball field.

So, about the time jacket weather came in and we were out on the playground rotating around, dodging the puddles to make a catch, we found ourselves looking at a brand-new batter one day. It was Dadburny. He was on lunch duty that week and had decided he could take a turn at bat anytime he felt like it, and not to be surprised, I noticed his lady, the one with the soft elbows, was out there with him, pretending to grade papers, and hooting for him like a cheerleader.

This wasn’t rocket science, no sir, what I was watching.

Dadburny came up to the plate like he owned it, carrying, mind you his own bat. That bat wasn’t wooden either like from our gym class but made of the same thing they make rocket ships out of. Rumor had it that NASA make it for him from a combination of nitroglyceride and Boron, which turned out to be one of those periodicals on the table that would blow up like lighter fluid if you jingled it, which explained why he could hit it so far.

Anyway, Dadburny waltzed up to the plate, looking over at his gal, his prized possession with her dress flowing in the spring breeze. He had his sleeves rolled up and his tie tucked down in his shirt, and began to hit pop flies out to us, the whole crowd who’d seen him come up to bat and come running. Nobody pitched the ball to Dadburny either. He pitched to hisself! Toss the ball up a little outa one hand, then clock it clean out near the fence every time.

Every day on his duty, pop up after pop up, he’d knock the cover off the ball and it would sail towards the fence, become like a dot in the sky and sometimes land in the crossing guard’s yard across the street. What’s worse for those of us trying to get under it, he’d hit it straight into the sun, so kids would run like Jim Thorpe to get under it, knocking each other down, stepping on the first graders, yelling “I got it, I got it, It’s mine, it’s mine, look out and so forth and so on and what have you, and then when that ball started its accel-er-i-zation down like an arrow towards our hands held straight up, it got lost in the sun and came down like an arrow and land with a dead thump in the grass that hadn’t been mowed yet.

We were all there, right under it, a ton of us, every single kid that had ever been at that school and some that hadn’t, were standing there like it was Jesus second coming, and not a one of us could do anything about it when the ball accel-amalated down that last twenty feet.

And then here it comes, the excuses.

“I had it but you got in my way. I called it when it left the bat you idjit, next time I’m pushing you away,” and so forth and so on and what have you. No one dared pick up the ball laying there like a bomb ready to go off, so here we go again with the excuses. And I was joining in with the worst of them.

“Dadburny said it was my turn to catch it, Dadburny said this and he said that and my dad said I could catch it today,” and on and on it went until Dadburny hisself had to put the bat down and come out and keep us from the kind of annihilation piled up on top of one another. It was the biggest, awfullest bunch of whiners you ever saw, and then recess bell rang and we all had to go in dirty from fighting and mad and ready to go home and slam the door on our way in.

Truth was, we were scared to death of those pop flies. And Dadburny could hit them like no tomorrow, one after another. They left his aero-nautical baseball bat like vengeance in a bottle, and they went up and up and up. Whatever wind repellant or resistance on the chapter on the physics of flight in the science book went right out the window and broke every rule. Man, how those pop ups flew!

And truth, there was no way on God’s green Earth any of us had the guts to get underneath one of them and catch it. Kids would beg him to hit one right to them, and I tell you he would! Right to them on the nose, with strict instruction for the rest of us to let Jamie, or Sally catch it. Here it come down, and they’d step away at the last instant, just like the rest of us, right when they could have stuck their hand out and caught it with their eyes closed. It was pitiful cowardly.

For us fifth graders that had to put up with him in science, it was even worse. Dadburny, gloating after recess because no one caught his flies again, sat back watching one his projector movies he’d put on so he didn’t have to teach, showing black and white movies from the 1920’s about the production of bombs, and the invention of first Henry Ford automobile, and then we watched another one on the first flight with Wilbur running after the first plane to get off the ground, like what was Wilbur going to do if’n he caught up with that plane? Grab it and hang on for dear life in mid-air? I saw that Kittyhawk film a dozen times, and every time I watched it, I still thought Wilbur’d jump on with Orville and take a ride with this brother. That’s what I would have done. If my brother went up in a paper airplane like they was, I’d grab something, maybe a wheel or the antennae or something and go for a ride! You go all the way out there in the field with your own hand-made airplane and not go up in it with your brother? That just made no sense to all to me.

So, I raised my hand one day and asked Dadburny the question all of us had talked about at lunch and was all thinking.

“Sir, is there more to this film?” I asked him after the film ended, two minutes before the period bell rang.

“No, Jeff. Why do you ask?” he answered.

“I just wondered if both of Wilson and Otis ever went up together at that first flight at Kittyhall.”

“It was Wilbur and Orville at Kittyhawk. And the answer is no, that’s a silly question, and the film is over,” he said looking right through me. Then he went over to the door, leaned out and looked down the hall to see if Mis Flimsy was out there with a new dress on, while I sat with no answer to my first science question ever.

So, with science there, and Kittyhawk and flight and the Russians attacking us down in Cuba at a missile conference, we kids were pretty riled up by the time it came to the ball field and catching one of Dadburny’s interstellar pop flies. We loved baseball, but we were scared to death of being clocked in the head and being laid up forever with dane bramage and such like. It was a fear we had, and it built and built all week because we knew Dadburny would be hitting those flies higher than the ones he hit yesterday. All the power he could bring to the science was on the speed and trajectory God could muster. I read about it every single solitary day after school on account of that C, with Grandma right there. Rate times time, xylem and phloem and all kinds of rocket science behind it. I had read so much science that his pop flies had science written all over them. They weren’t even part of baseball I had read so much. They was just pure science, Astro-man-omical feats of space and time, calculated by my Grandma and me.

So I told her about it one day. It was on a Thursday, the day before the last day Dadburnit would be on duty. She met me there at the gate after school, like always and, for once, I couldn’t wait to get started on the science. I told G’ma the whole story about the baseball pop flies, and how I’d like nothing more than to catch one.

“How do I do it, Grandma? Every kid in the world is out there, and the ball comes down so fast.”

“Well, let’s see if there is anything in the science book about catching a ball,” she said handing me a cookie.

And sure enough, in the chapter on flight, there was a small picture off to the side of a little kid hitting a baseball out of Fenway Park, like an old souvenir postcard you’d find in the bottom of a box.

“Here, look at this, would you,” she said and pointed to the diagram. Underneath, in small italics, G’ma read the words out loud: “An object falling has no power against the unparalleled force of gravity. There it is,” she said, pointing to the picture, “there’s your answer.”

“Does that mean gravity is more powerful as that baseball comes down?” I asked, frustrated.

“Yes, it does. It’s coming down with gravity behind it. The closer that baseball gets to you, the more the earth pulls it down harder. It’s a fact of science,” she said, “so if you want to catch that ball, you have to go up and meet it before gravity has time to grab it away from you. You have to meet the ball,” she said and raised her hand up like she was out there stopping the ball herself, which she would never do in a million years. But I got her message like a missile meets the nanny and it took hold with me.

The next day was Friday, and the last day Dadburny would have duty outside. All our gear was out there on home plate, ready for the rotation to start, but here comes Dadburny ready to bat again and knock the cover off and embarrass us all as we stood there afraid the ball would come down and bust our heads open.

Tune in next week, friends and baseball fans, for the conclusion of The Catch. I was wishing I’d never even heard of baseball when I first got that C, but as I looked at the whole field from behind the backstop, I saw the mess Dadburny had got hisself into by showing off to Miss Flimsy and not teaching us a darn thing, and you’ll have a front row seat to the replay of it all.

The Catch (Part 1)

We were still wearing jackets and long pants when we ran outside at recess and found our baseball gear laying on home plate. April air said chilly, and the grass was soggy from the sudden thunderstorms that dumped an inch an hour. Baseball at my public school meant we rotated from right field around through the infield until you got your chance to bat. Sometimes the outs came one after the other, as in a couple of flies and a strikeout. Other times one batter dominated the rotation until the bell rang to go back inside. We didn’t do teams at recess, weren’t allowed to and that, until school was out at three and the teachers went home. That’s when we put on our gloves, picked sides, and chewed the Juicy Fruit we’d been saving all day. That’s when serious ball started, and the minor leaguers from recess went home.

I went home too that spring, because I got a lousy C in science and was grounded from anything after school until I had studied science for a solid hour. For me, that was hell to pay.

My grandmother noticed the agony I felt. She could read it in my face. She didn’t agree with my dad either, that decision to ground me. I knew she didn’t because she was there to meet me at our back gate after school, when I came in looking like spilt milk. We kids were everything to her, so much that she had passed up many a suitor who had come to call on her at our house, passed them up to help us kids grow up. She chose being a grandmother instead, chose to get to know us. She knew my temper, she knew how I liked my toast and that, and she knew about me and baseball in the spring. She knew what missing those after school games did to my insides when I had waited all winter to get my baseball mitt out again. I had a face like a walnut, ready to cry when I got that C, and she hurt right alongside me with that ugly face. One way or the other, even if it meant that she had to learn the periodic tables and whether Krypton had nine molecular molecules or ten, she was going to get me back on that ball field again and let me be a ball player. She was my Kryptonite.

“Come on in, let’s get started,” she’d say, and close the gate and I’d mope into her kitchen, part of a tiny off-apartment in the back of our house, and sit down to study cell division or the food chain in some faroff country I’d never go to. Next to a plate of oatmeal cookies, I learned that I wasn’t that bad at science, that I was worth more than that dang C-grade, and that my grandmother was going to see this thing through. She may not have known one single solitary thing about baseball, but she knew me, and we were like a science team, hand in glove. We read that thick book out loud together. We looked at the complimacated diagrams and then we underlined the important sentences together. Then we copied and underlined them again, this time in red because my grandmother was mad at the whole business, like me.

“G’ma, we can’t mark in the books,” I’d say. “Mr. Dadburny will fine us at the end of the year.”

“Let ‘em fine us,” she’d snarl out loud. “Anyone who gives my grandson a C is gonna get marked up,” and that was how she felt about science book vandalism. What began as my prison after school and boiled over each day as I saw my friends go out to play ball, slowly melted away in the few minutes around her, eating a cookie and marking science up with red at her Formica table. An hour later and not a second more, right when enzymes and protoplasm and metaba-bolism collided in my brain, she told me I was done and could put the book away until tomorrow. And every day after, Monday through Friday, the last thing I heard from her as I blasted out the door with my mitt, was, “Knock ‘em dead!”

Deeper still, what she did by meeting me at the back gate of my miserable science grade, helped me collect my anger towards my father. He wasn’t there helping me memorize the inert gases, but he had big plans for me to go to college, yes he did, andmajor in the organic chem or bio-chem or whatever. From there it would be on to medical school, then, right on schedule, take over his practice tosave people from being sick. It was planned, this whole trip up thedoctor scale, starting not with baseball, but in the pursuit of a medical practice, and something he called a legacy. That was what this grounding was all about, and it all began with good science grades.

For me, my discipline or punishment, or whatever that was, was really rooted down deeper in being out on that ballfield in the spring, a sport my father had no interest in watching or playing. He wouldn’t let us watch it on TV either, thought it was a waste of time. Baseball had no future, he said, and was a game for spectators, so we missed seeing Mickey Mantle and the series and Willie Mayes. Instead, the rotation of the earth on its axis was more important, which I could care less about. I sat slumped, laboring over Science for Thinkers: Observing _the World Around Us, but my mind was rushing back up to the baseball field at school, cutting across the boulevards, hoping the ball game would still be on when I got there. Usually by then, only a few second graders lingered, still waiting for their ride home from day care – not exactly the kind of competition I was looking for.

Late one day, I ran nonstop back to school using every shortcut I knew. No one was left on the ball diamond, but I caught a glimpse of my science teacher, Mr. Dadburny leaving the building late. I quick hid behind the backstop when I saw him come down the side stairs. I could see every detail, and I can tell you he was not carrying his science book anywhere. He wasn’t interested in science. I saw what he was interested in though, and it was my English teacher. She was young and not married, and new to our school, and his hand was lightly pressed on her elbow as he walked her to her car.

It wasn’t the first time I had seen him with her. “Mr. Dadburnit” – the name we called him behind his back – had been wooing this teacher gal since the beginning of the school year with overtures he thought none of us saw. But us kids saw him moving on her, and gossiped about the way he slipped down to her room between passing periods to talk in those low teacher whispers as we went by to our next class. Under his arm he carried a stack of papers to make it look like he was on a copying run but then, he’d stop when he got to her, start up a little chit chat, then compliment her on her dress. Never went any further down the hall with those fake copying papers, so we all knew it was her and not us kids he was working on. And I knew it wasn’t science he was working on either or looking to see if I had written down a two or a three for the H-two-0 water formula on my test. He didn’t look at my paper when he graded it; he had no science written all over him, front to back, and was about as slick as a cat in heat.

“Well, would you look at that,” he’d say, flirting with her between classes, “There’s the bell. I guess I better get back. No telling what the little rug rats will be up to!” Then he’d wink at her, up close, one of those winks that looks stupid, more of a nod-wink, a gesture just shy of what he was building to next. “Time flies when you’re having fun!”

Then his lady friend would smile, and say something, maybe like, “See ya at lunch Mr. D” and let her dress flow some, whereupon he’d lean back up to her and whisper, “Call me Chet, we’re all friends here,” and wink that nod again.

Well, we weren’t all friends. I got a crappy C in science, I couldn’t play baseball after school, and I had a science teacher who was a dadburn flirt. Now, after studying volcanoes, and sound waves, and some unknown planet behind Pluto I had run all the way back up to school and spotted him walking Miss Flimsy out to her car, touching her elbow on the way down the stairs. And it was then I had a flashback and understood something about how the world works, and why I got that C, and why it didn’t matter anymore.

I can tell you Mr. Dadburn-you, he carried no brief case or folder of papers to grade like the other teachers, nothing but his coffee mug in one hand and her on the other. Punched out of his job every day and left it all behind when the bell rang. He had another life, some life that didn’t include one thing about our edumacation or our progress or good grades. He had his meal ticket, yea he did, and he had a gal, Miss Wink-a dink he was working on that he saw every chance he got, like at her fund raisers and that. But he was a fake, a louse, and had no more interest in science or teaching than a rock. He gave grades, yea he did do that, when they were come due, but that’s all he did. He gave them away like candy, and without even thinking about the damage they were doing. They were packaged in plastic, cheap, in bags of a hundred at a time, like half-off Halloween candy at the drug store, and then he’d fling them on the ground for us to fight over like inmates in a prison.

As far as I was concerned, I got my low grade from him for one reason, and one reason only. I’m going to tell you about that and you’ll see how it all came together out on the ball diamond that spring, where the ground was still muddy around the bags and no kid in his right mind would cheat. That was the baseball field where a got my C from.

My average ability in science, I can tell you, had nothing to do with what I knew or what my test scores showed. That C that kept me grounded, it was about what happened one day when I was playing right field at recess, way out where no one ever went except the first graders who played tag. No one hit it out there, but that’s where it all started. And now, seeing the two of them together through the screen of a backstop, and the right field behind them, I knew where my C in science came from.

It was also the moment baseball came to life for me and everything about it, and the dreams I had of rubbing the dirt in my hands and holding that red leather stitching hardball on a cold day, and tagging a bully named Mike Hinkley out at second. And the dream of the one glorious catch I made that one day out in right field, a catch that changed my science edumacation and me… well, really forever.

Tune in next week for Part Two of The Catch, when everything I had knew about Mr. Danburnit and Miss Flimsy and my grounding came together in right field and stole a page out of the baseball handbook that you could never find in any classroom.

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.