Home Blog Page 191

advent journal: back to work

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
9

Back in October I made a visit to Durham by myself to begin looking for a cooking job. I had the advantage of getting advice and direction from a local restaurateur who is connected with the church and knows the culinary landscape of the area very well. (He also opened his own very cool wine bar last Friday.) Other church members sent suggestions as well. I took it upon myself to be a bit of a culinary cyber detective, chasing down all sorts of links and tangents, looking for just the right place. One site I found was for a restaurant that had not even opened, yet the vibe the chef created through the web page pulled me in. By the time I made my trip they had been open a week and she was standing at the front door next to the host stand when I walked in for lunch. I talked to her for a moment, gave her my resume, ate lunch, and left to catch my plane back to Boston.

“When it gets closer to your being here, come see me,” she said.

Ginger and I came back about a month later to find a place to live. I took her to the place and, once again, Chef was standing at the front door. My gift to her this time was a copy of the menu from the place I was working in Plymouth.

“Awesome,” she said. “Let me know when you get to town.”

Last Friday — after we get into our house on Thursday – I went by the restaurant, this time to say, “I’m here.” I talked to Chef and her Sous Chef for about a half an hour and she said they wanted to look at some numbers and asked if I would come back on Tuesday, which I did. I got there yesterday afternoon and was treated to lunch (she makes killer hush puppies) and then we began talking about a job for me. I realized as she and Sous spoke, they were not speaking in theoretical terms; they were ready to hire me. Chef was talking schedule and responsibilities.

“Can you work tomorrow night?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said.

“Well, let me ask you this: can you come in tonight for an hour or so to see how I run the line because I have a meeting tomorrow night that I forgot about and I need someone running the line I can trust; and I can trust you.”

I’d seen this woman four times for a total of about an hour and she felt as though she could trust me. Funny thing: I felt the same way in return. I’m not sure how that works between people – the intuitive resonance – and I’m glad it does. I got to the kitchen about 6:30 last night and by 6:35 I was calling tickets and making sure the plates were going out as they should. The kitchen was new to me, the faces around me were unfamiliar, the menu was different, and I was right at home doing what I know how to do: improvisation.

I woke up this morning thinking about the progression of virtue as described by Samuel Wells: repeated practices nurture skill, skill develops habit, habit develops instinct: “a pattern of unconscious behavior that recalls a deep element of character.” Cooking is in my bones, in my DNA. I grew up in the kitchen and I’ve worked hard to hone my craft as a profession, even though I’m late to the game in many respects. I’ve got good instincts now about how to cook, how to treat the people I work with, and what it means to feed people well. So I smiled when I read this statement from a local news article about Chef:

“She wants to feed the neighborhood and everyone is important.”

I guess the trust that came so easily for both of us is evidence of a deeper resonance. I went in looking for a job and I think I’ve found a place I’m going to belong. What a gift.

About twenty minutes into my tenure last night, a ticket came through calling for one of the signature appetizers:

Zuke’s Pork Plate with house prosciutto, smoked ham, pork rilletes, and spicy chorizo served with artichoke pickles, grainy mustard, compote, and toasts

The line cook put a beautiful plate together, handed it to me, I called, “Table 13,” and handed it to the food runner. About fifteen minutes later, the server for Table 19 asked about her pork plate; I had called the wrong table, which meant one group got a free app and the other was sitting and waiting.

“Man,” I said, “I didn’t even last an hour before I started screwing up.”

“Hey,” said the server, “you lasted longer than most people.”

When the Chef came back and I told her of my mistake, she said, “Great! Now the people at Table 13 will think I’m really cool,” and she laughed.

I think this is going to be good. Stop by for dinner; we’re open late.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: “do try and keep up”

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
5

If you walk up Frazier Ave. between the bridges in Chattanooga’s North Shore neighborhood, you come across sidewalk sculpture like this:


Every so often, for three or four blocks, there is another dance instruction: the Waltz, the Cha-cha, the Mambo. I, of course, danced my way up the street by the time I came to the final installation:

As much fun as it was to jump around on the sidewalk, trying to follow the brass footprints, I wasn’t improvising. There’s more – much more – to improv than just doing the first thing that comes to mind or just going crazy on the street. A good improvisationalist spends a great deal of time and effort preparing.

Soon after I started writing this blog, I connected with Mark Heybo, who lives in England. He wrote a post about a group called Improv Everywhere whose mission is to create scenes of “joy and chaos” whenever they can. My favorite was an event they planned that required large groups of people, back packs, and cell phones. Three different groups of people entered a museum, one at a time, and checked their back packs as they went in, leaving their cell phones (with specific ring tones) on and in the bag. Once everyone was in the museum, three other groups of people began to dial the numbers in a very calculated fashion to create a sort of coat check symphony. Whether you see the event as creative or simply annoying to the folks who checked the bags, my point is their improvisation took a lot of planning and preparation, not to mention participation.

I could hear the ring tones as I read these words from Samuel Wells:

Ethics cannot be simply about rehearsing and repeating the same script and story over and over again, albeit on a fresh stage with new players. This does not do sufficient justice to the unfolding newness of each moment of creation. The Bible is not so much a script that the church learns and performs as it is a training school that shapes the habits and practices of a community. This community learns to take the right things for granted, and on the basis of this faithfulness, it trusts itself to improvise within its tradition. Improvisation means a community formed in the right habits trusting itself to embody its tradition in new and often challenging circumstances; and this is exactly what the church is called to do. (12)

As I was driving this morning, I heard the last bit of commentary after President Bush’s press conference today. He was talking about the new intelligence report that basically says Iran is not as dangerous as he — and others — have been saying, even intimating that “World War Three” is imminent. His response to the news was to say our foreign policy as related to Iran will not change. We’re going to keep acting, it seems, as though the old information were reliable, which means we will continue to be motivated by fear. I don’t know if he doesn’t know how to change, or if he doesn’t want to, or what is behind his recalcitrance, but he serves as a good example of what improvisation doesn’t look like.

The world is changing faster than we can understand. (I’ll bet you didn’t know that!) I live in Durham, North Carolina. Down the street from my house there is a small eight-shop strip center that is home to a Thai restaurant, an Indian grocery, an African grocery, a Chinese cooking school, and a Mediterranean delicatessen. I’m not in New York or London; I’m in Durham. I love it. And it means I’m compelled to think about life in America in new ways and do more than lament that the days of everyone looking and acting like me are over. As Steve Earle sings on his new album:

living in a city of immigrants
I don’t have to go traveling
open the door and the world walks in
living in a city of immigrants

When I lived in Dallas, there used to be a billboard on Central Expressway that someone with a sense of humor used to post pithy sayings. One of my favorites was

If you’re getting run out of town, make it look like a parade.

Such is the heart of improvisation. Wells begins his book talking about the church in its beginning years as a community of integrity, identity, and imagination:

The early church believed that its own fragile and vulnerable state was deceptive . . . They demonstrated this faith by maintaining nonviolence, the practice of confronting evil using only the weapons that Christ himself used. The early Christians also believed that they were a distinct people with a special vocation. Their form of life was dictated by no criterion other than faithfulness to Christ. Their identity was expressed in baptism. They believed their common life and servant practice were the heart of the gospel. They believed their calling was to show what kind of life was possible when communities lived in the light of God’s providence and they embodied this faith in their celebration of the Eucharist. (24-25)

They knew they weren’t in charge, or even safe, so they lived as if that was they way they intended it to be, incarnating in their own lives what they had seen in Jesus, which meant understanding authentic discipleship rarely draws rave reviews from those at the top of the heap. The “virtue” of their fellowship, as Wells describes it, finds its echo in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words about the faithful trusting that “right defeated is stronger than evil triumphant.”

Yesterday was our first Sunday at our new church and it was also the first Sunday of Advent and Communion Sunday. I also learned, as the children gathered at the front of the church with Carla, our associate pastor, that it was “Pennies for Hunger” day, which meant the children enthusiastically took baskets out among the congregation to collect our “pennies” for local hunger concerns. I loved the ease and comfort with which the kids moved around the sanctuary, as though it was a place they belonged – even when one of them dropped his basket of change on the floor. Someone helped him pick it up and everything was fine. I thought about the kids this morning when I read this post at Mr. Jones and Me:

Last year I met a tiny girl of three named Maeve. She was putting the final touches on an incredible sort of cabinet that was half-drawn with coloured crayons, yet some of the tiny drawers in it undid and pulled out; it was definitely magical.

I asked the child how she did it, and she grinned at me and said in a whisper, “It’s not that difficult to be magical. Do try to keep up!”

I’ve never forgotten she said that.

The folks at Pilgrim light the Advent candle at the end of the service rather than the beginning, which is a change in what I am used to. As one of the young people lighted the candle, we sang, “Peace, peace, peace,” as if it were as capable of being realized as being magical was to Maeve. She had the eye, the heart, and the vocabulary to see a world full of magic; what is our language of the heart?

Virtues are derived from repeated practices that a community continually performs because it regards them as central to its identity. Repeated practices nurture skill, an excellence that derives from repeated performance. Skill develops habit, a disposition to use skills on occasions and in locations different from the times and places where the skill was developed. Habit develops instinct, a pattern of unconscious behavior that recalls a deep element of character. This is the language of virtue. (Wells 24)

Advent is a season that calls us to rearticulate our calling, to remind ourselves to prepare and practice, to remember the body of Christ that we might be born again, afresh into a world that has long since lost sight of magic, or purpose, of peace. We are not merely waiting; we are getting ready.

Maeve’s words are prophetic: do try and keep up.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: nothing but the text

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
2

Today is Joseph Conrad’s birthday; he’d be one hundred and fifty, if he had lived. While the significance of the date has dwindled for most, I make note because Heart of Darkness is one of my favorite books. If I were to name three books I wish were not relegated to being considered “high school reading,” such that hardly anyone reads them after surviving high school, they would be

  • Heart of Darkness
  • The Scarlet Letter and
  • Frankenstein

Oh – and 1984. And Of Mice and Men. OK, I want you to go back and reread all of your high school literature. But that’s not my point. Besides being amazing stories, my top three were also the books in which I first began to deal with literary theory. I have editions of each one that came with critical essays in feminist theory, reader-response, and a deconstructionist approach, among others. It was then I first encountered Derrida’s statement: there is “nothing outside the text.”

I had no idea what he meant. I kept reading. I made my honors Brit Lit class (I was a high school teacher a decade ago) try to digest the essays; most of them threw up, metaphorically speaking. But we kept struggling together. I learned a great deal. I quit making them read the essays and tried to find a way to bring what I was learning from the theories into my teaching practice. What I learned that Derrida was saying (or at least saying to me) was the only way we have to communicate with others and make sense of our world is through the text: through language.

Conrad didn’t write in his native language and yet his command of English makes his prose some of the most intricate and demanding of any writer. He set up the story to show how stories get passed along. The novel begins with a narrator talking about being on a boat with Marlow, who is telling of his adventures in Africa. When Marlow begins talking, the book becomes an extended quote, if you will, framed by the narrator in the same way most of our lives are experienced as we try to come to terms with one another’s stories. We don’t live much that’s firsthand. Tonight, I want to provide the frame for extended quotes that moved me today. First from Marlow in Heart of Darkness as he distinguished the European colonial effort from the Roman conquest of Europe when it was “one of the dark places”:

What saves us is efficiency — the devotion to efficiency. But these chaps were not much account, really. They were no colonists; their administration was merely a squeeze, and nothing more, I suspect. They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force — nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind — as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness. The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea — something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to. . . .

It was the phrase “an unselfish belief in the idea” that tied to my second quote, from Smith’s Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?:

Within the matrix of a modern Christianity, the base “ingredient” is the individual; the church, then, is simply a collection of individuals. Conceiving of Christian faith as a private affair between the individual and God . . . modern evangelicalism finds it hard to articulate just how or why the church has any role to play other than providing a place to fellowship with other individuals who have a private relationship with God. With this model in place, what matters is Christianity as a system of truth or ideas, not the church as a living community embodying its head . . . As such, Christianity becomes intellectualized rather than incarnate, commodified rather than the site of genuine community . . . The body is the New Testament’s organic model of community that counters the modernist emphasis on the individual . . . The church is the site where God renews and transforms us – a place where the practices of being the body of Christ form us into the image of the Son . . . Nothing is more countercultural than a community serving the Suffering Servant in a world devoted to consumption and violence. But the church will have the countercultural, prophetic witness only when it jettisons its own modernity; in that respect postmodernism can be another catalyst for the church to be the church. (29-30)

The catch phrase, or the phrase that caught me here, was, “the church, then, is simply a collection of individuals,” which took me back to Miles Harvey’s The Island of Lost Maps and an interview he did with a Mr. Atlas, who interpreted the word collection a bit differently:

“When I started with maps,” he added, “it was a miscellaneous assortment that had only a personal connection. I’d buy a map of a place because I’d taken a trip there or because I had relatives who lived there, something of that sort. And then after a few years I realized that really wasn’t the right way to go about it. That’s not a collection: it’s an assembly of items. And the way I draw the distinction is that selecting a piece for a collection has nothing to do with the individual merits of the item. It’s whether there’s a potential of relating it to other items. That’s what builds a collection: a sum is of greater interest than each of the individual members.” (246)

The collision of conquest, civilization, community, collection, and counter-culture (how nice of them all to alliterate) sends me to church, or at least to thinking about what it means to be the church. The last sentence of the last quote pulls me hard: a sum of greater interest than each one of the individual members. It also brings to mind a couple of stories, both old and new.

We didn’t bring much with us to Durham outside of what we packed in the Pod, which arrives tomorrow, but we did bring our Christmas decorations. Between the two of us, we have collected about seven different nativity scenes from as many different countries. I came back to the house last night to find Ginger had combined them all into one giant descent of humanity on the manger. Interspersed between the figures were the stocking holders that spell out P-E-A-C-E even as they hold the large empty socks begging for candy.

A number of years ago, when I was a seminary student, I was talking with a pastor of a small Baptist church in Houston who was working hard to grow an inclusive community and as such had spent a great deal of money making the church handicap accesible. He told me of an encounter with one of the mega church pastors, who was a friend of his, gave him some friendly advice related to efficiency and conquest, I suppose: “When handicap people start coming to your church, your church starts dying.”

Everyday since we arrived in Durham, someone has shown up at our house with food – good food. At church yesterday, I loved seeing the diversity of people that made us church, that made us far more interesting together than we were on our own.

I piled up a lot of words tonight. I think I’ll be quiet now and listen.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: going into labor

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
4

Everything has a past, or at least a precursor. Before there was a blog, or even email, I wrote a Lenten Journal to a specific friend as my spiritual practice during the season. When I got an email account, I started sending it to more and more friends, mostly because I could. The email list grew, Gordon Atkinson explained what a blog was to me, and two days after Christmas two years ago, don’t eat alone was born. I’ve continued my practice of writing everyday during Lent; last year I did the same during Advent. The discipline for me is less about the frequency that it is the focus. During these two seasons, I’m intentional about choosing two or three books for the journey and using my writing more specifically as theological and devotional reflection while, hopefully, not losing sight of the things that are my usual subjects.

I started thinking about books a couple of weeks ago, though the ones I’ve chosen found me rather than me them. Over the past couple of years (mostly since I’ve been blogging), I’ve read bits and pieces about the “emergent church,” without knowing much about what it was or who was writing about it. About the time I would begin to think I had a little bit of a handle, I would find something that would make me wonder. This Advent season seemed like a good time for me to become more intentional about learning about it. Based on the buzz I’ve read, I thought I would get one of Brian McLaren’s books, since he seems to be at least one of the most prolific emergent writers. Another blog lead me to McLaren’s own site where I was a bit put off by his article against consumerism that suggested one of the ways to fight back was to buy his book and give one to a friend. (I’m not trying to pick on him; he’s certainly not alone. Springsteen’s first single off his new album is called “Radio Nowhere,” decrying the loss of local radio and everything else, yet his website announces a satellite radio station; the Eagles’ new CD, full of protests against globalism and capitalism run amok was available exclusively at Wal-Mart in its initial release.)

About the same time, Ginger received an email note inviting her to hear Samuel Wells speak on his book, Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics. The connections made in the title intrigued me and I decided to let McLaren wait for another day. I wanted one more book and let Amazon do some searching for “emergent”; they provided me with Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism: Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church by James K. A. Smith. I punched a couple of buttons and both books showed up at our new house on Friday. The third book for the journey (one for each of the Magi?) is one I’m rereading: David Jensen’s In the Company of Others: a Dialogical Chistology.

An Advent season doesn’t pass that I don’t go back to Meister Eckhart’s words:

What good is it to me if Mary gave birth to the son of God fourteen hundred years ago and I do not give birth to the son of God in my time and in my culture?

Neither does an Advent season pass that I am not aware of the difference in giving birth and using birth as a metaphor, whatever the discussion. I’m a straight white male who has no idea what it feels like to have your body writhe and clench and ache, or for a new life to come bursting out of your belly. Several years ago, when our first godchild was about to be born, we were in the hospital with the mother to be. The nurse walked in and said to her, “It’s about time to herniate you membrane.” As I stood up to leave, the nurse assured me I could stay.

“Oh, no,” I said, “I make it a point to leave the room anytime someone says, ‘It’s time to herniate your membrane.’”

I will be the first, therefore, to say I am not an expert on childbirth, postmodernism, literary theory, the emergent movement, or theology, for that matter. My hope is my journey through the season is kin to the shepherds following the angel chorus, or the magi chasing the star: I’m just trying to get to the manger in my time and in my culture, which means, for me, it’s time to break some stained glass and let some different light seep into what has become an all too sanctified barn.

Yesterday morning my phone rang and the voice on the other end identified herself as someone who reads this blog and lives here in Durham. She called to invite me to a lecture on Sacred Harp shaped note singing and, she hoped, some singing as well. I drove to the Watts Street Baptist Church where the event was to take place. When I walked into the foyer of the church, there was a poster delineating some of the highlights in the church’s history, one of which was it was the first Southern Baptist church to ordain a woman in 1964 (four years after it integrated). As I read a little more about the church, I realized they, like me, had Southern Baptist roots that had sprouted into a tree of a different sort, if you will. As I said, everything has a past.

Shaped note singing was designed to do at least two things: one was to help people learn to sight read without having to read music. The shapes on the scale helped the singers learn the notes. The second thing was it was designed to be participatory. The singers sang to one another – together – rather than for an audience. They sang as a community of singers, or perhaps better said, a communion of singers, getting their pitches from one another, listening to one another, following the shapes, and creating rich, evocative harmonies. By the end of the 19th century, shaped note singing was losing ground because, as they handout I was given said,

pianos and organs had become more abundant, and printing techniques more economical. The old song books lost favor to modern hymnals and their completely different arrangements with the melody in the top line and harmonies more easily rendered on a piano or organ.

Then came my favorite line:

“Clearly,” according to the introduction in The Social Harp, “the pleasure of the singer has been sacrificed to the ineptitude of the pianist.”

The obvious bias of the statement notwithstanding, I came away from the quote with a question: what will it take for me to unleash the enthusiasm of the shepherds in me this Advent, or the tenacity of the three kings, to go into a labor of Love in these days, rather than to allow myself to be one of those slouching toward Bethlehem, or worse, one sitting silently while others give birth to Christ this year?

Peace,
Milton

hey, that’s for me!

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
4

We found this sign hanging off the front porch as we drove up to the house yesterday. I wish you could see the individual notes written all over the banner.

I do feel welcomed. Thank you.

Peace,
Milton

the last leg

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
3

As we got ready to leave Birmingham last Sunday, I quickly made a couple of CDs for the road while we were packing the cars, almost randomly picking tracks — mostly I picked artists I wanted to hear. Looking back on yesterday, it appears I picked a pretty good soundtrack.

put the message in a box
put the box into a car
drive the car around the world
till you get heard

— World Party

This was going to be the day: we were driving to Durham, to our house (OK, our rent house), to park in our driveway, and sleep in a room that didn’t require us to check in at the desk. The day played out with a few hitches, the biggest of which was we couldn’t get into the house we were renting until this morning; we were trying to get home, but it seemed to be a moving target. We left Chattanooga late in the afternoon, determined to get to as far as we could and we made it all the way, walking into the lobby of our last hotel (for awhile) at 11:47 pm.

I can hear your voice in the wind
are you calling to me down the long road
do you really think there’s an end
I have lived my whole life down the long road

— Cliff Eberhardt

Our last day in Chattanooga that left us with a couple more stories to tell. After I took Ginger back across the bridge to get some tennis shoes at Fast Break, we decided to find some lunch and came upon the Between the Bridges Café, a small lunch-only place with a whimsical flair. We were the only ones in the place since it was almost closing time (they’re only open from 11 to 2:30) and we got to talk to two of the three women who are the co-owners. We learned they were all former teachers (as am I) who wanted out from under the burden of school work to do something they enjoyed and something that allowed them to set boundaries they wanted to live with. One woman described how her school administrator had caused her to decide to leave teaching.

“She was crazy,” she told us. “I think on the application it says, ‘Are you crazy?’ and if you answer, ‘Yes,’ they put you in charge.” There was more to the story. “But that crazy lady saved my life.” She went on to tell us of having a mammogram soon after she quit teaching (“I would have put it off until summer.”) and finding breast cancer, even as they were planning to open the restaurant. “I kept trusting God and coming in here. Some days all I could do was sit; other days I felt better and I did what I could.” The small café has gotten some good buzz and the women look like they are having fun chasing their dream together. Sounds like a pretty good deal all the way around.

he’s eight years old with a flour sack cape tied all around his neck
he climbed up on the garage figuring what the heck
he screwed his courage up so tight the whole thing come unwound
got a running start and bless his heart he headed for the ground

he’s one of those who knows that life is just a leap of faith
spread your arms hold your breath and always trust your cape

— Guy Clark

On the way back to our cars at the hotel I invited Ginger to ride with me on the electric shuttle so she could get a taste of the experience. The driver was the one I met my first night riding and he recognized me, even remembering my hotel. About halfway through the route a short, sturdy woman got on the bus and plopped down beside me. The seat cushion let out the same exhausted wheeze as she did when she dropped into the chair. “How are you doing today?” she asked. I said I was fine and reciprocated with the question. “Oh, I feel turrible,” she said, “just turrible.”

She was dealing with the headaches and stuffiness that come with a sinus infection and was quite animated and descriptive as she told us about it, which she did with both a dramatic and humorous flair. Ginger and I both laughed along with her at one point and she slapped me on the shoulder and said, “Now how about that – I got both of you laughing and I feel turrible. That’s pretty good.”

I’m a stranger here, no one you would know
I’m from somewhere else, well, isn’t everybody though
I don’t know where I’ll be when the sun comes up
until then, sweet dreams, goodnight America

— Mary Chapin Carpenter

We left this friendly city behind knowing I-24 connects to I-75, which connects to I-40 and that would get us to Durham. We drove out about four o’clock, which let us enjoy part of Chattanooga’s traffic and a good amount of Knoxville’s as well. It also put us winding through the mountains between Knoxville and Asheville on roads we didn’t know in the dark. Tennessee and Carolina don’t simply glide into one another, they crash, leaving a wreck of winding, climbing, diving roads that left me feeling (as I drove in the dark up and down a road I did not know) like the driver in some bizarre version of Space Mountain, going up and down the mountains, all the while navigating the giant trucks, those moving canyons of steel and wheels bearing down all around us, fueled by gasoline, gravity, and capitalism. Somewhere in the middle of it all, we crossed into North Carolina, one step closer to home.

dark and silent late last night
 I think I might have heard the highway calling
geese in flight and dogs that bite
signs that might be omens say I’m going , going
I’m gone to Carolina in my mind

— James Taylor

As we got out of the mountains and most of the trucks, the songs came round again and I smiled and cried as the words filled the spaces in the car not occupied by boxes and bags. About sixty miles out, Durham started showing up on the mileage signs and we both began to realize our journey was almost through.

there’s a highway rising in my dreams
deep in the heart I know it gleams
for I have seen it stretching wide
clear across to the other side

— Emmylou Harrris

Just before midnight, we pulled into the parking lot of the Holiday Inn Express where we stayed not long ago when we were traveling with the pups. A gracious and welcoming Indian woman checked us in and said with some surprise, “You’ve stayed with us before,” as though we somehow belonged. By the time we got to our room, it was Thursday – today – the day we will get to move in to our house, the day Ginger will go to her office for the first time as the pastor, the day we start living here. I queued the last song up on purpose:

dust in our eyes our own boots kicked up
heartsick we nursed along the way we picked up
you may not see it when it’s sticking to your skin
but we’re better off for all that we let in

and I don’t know where it all begins
and I don’t know where it all will end
better off for all that we let in . . .

— Indigo Girls

The driving is done; the journey continues . . .

Peace,
Milton

P. S. — I couldn’t help but add this little early nineties video treat.

the way home

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
4

John Wendland, my best friend in first and second grade, had horses. He was the youngest child in a big family and his two oldest sisters, both in high school, said they would take us riding. Mary, the oldest, pulled me up on the saddle behind her, told me to wrap my arms around her waist, and off we went. John was riding with his sister, Sarah. The horses moved gently across the field and then among a small stand of trees as we rode for about twenty or thirty minutes until Mary said, “I guess we’d better head home,” which apparently in horse language translates as, “Get back to the barn as fast as you can.” The animals broke into a dead run and I hung on for dear life, scared to death. I was still squeezing Mary when the horses stopped.

As Ginger and I are on the cusp of completing our one-way journey from home to home, I’ve thought a lot about horses, both those I’ve ridden (not too many since that frightening afternoon) and those I’ve watched run for the roses on television. In most races, the horses find a new level of effort, a different gear, when they make the club house turn and head for home. It’s language with meaning beyond the racetrack: it’s what matters most in baseball; it’s where the cookie is at the pig races at the State Fair (my personal favorite); and it’s almost always in a circle. This time, however, we aren’t going back home, we’re going to home. The reliable circle is taking on a new shape, following I-40 across Tennessee and Carolina, until we stop some time tonight in front of our new address.

Last night, as Ginger and I walked back to the hotel from a wonderful dinner, a woman stopped us on the sidewalk. She was small, maybe five feet tall, with glasses and grey hair kept in a long braided ponytail that exuded an elegant simplicity. “I’m a street poet,” she said. “May I share a poem with you in exchange for some money so I can find a place to spend the night?” Ginger and I looked at each other and then back at her and nodded. She started reciting a list of things I thought was the poem, only to find out, when she finished, that it was simply a list of topics on which she was willing to recite. Ginger was fooled as well. We tried to think back on what she had said.

“Did you say ‘philosophical’?” I asked, grasping at straws.

“I said ‘positive,’” she answered.

“Positive is good,” Ginger said, and the woman began to speak in a quiet, rapid rhythm. I’ve been trying to come up with an adjective to describe how she came across: resilient. Yes. Resilient. She is probably someone who has gotten more good news than bad, who appeared (to Ginger’s well-trained sensibilities) to be probably dealing with some sort of mental illness, and who stood on the street with the poise of a poet to risk sharing her words, hoping for a compassionate response. Her voice was soft enough that I couldn’t get most of the words, but I do remember, “we are all children of God,” as one of the lines.

I don’t think I’m belittling her condition to say I found some resonance with her homelessness as we stood together on the sidewalk. These past three days, when people find out we aren’t from Chattanooga, they ask, “Where are you from?” I respond with a longer answer than they were expecting, I’m sure: “I was living outside of Boston and I’m moving to Durham, North Carolina for my wife to start a new job.” I’m between addresses. I’m heading for home, but the road doesn’t go in a circle this time.

My coffee shop du jour is Greyfriar’s. (Chattanooga is a good coffee town.) I rode the shuttle from the hotel with a new driver who told me Durham had a great NASCAR track (speaking of ovals) and a new set of characters and found a great cup of coffee, a wonderful cranberry-cinnamon scone, and a wall plug by the table. The barista came by the table to see how I liked the scone and we talked about scones for far longer than most people would consider normal. The three guys at the table next to me are spending more time talking about chess games than I consider normal. The latest arrival at the table is the most vocal, with the look of one of those guys who plays speed chess in a New York park. He’s reading from a book on chess and has been reading aloud such that I can’t help but hear. He talks with the rhythm of a street poet in a poetry slam, determined to win with his words. He’s talking faster than I can write down what he says, or even understand it, except for this sentence: “The more you learn about playing chess, the more you realize what you don’t know.”

I’ve not ridden many horses since that second grade afternoon. One afternoon in Mexico, where Ginger and were on vacation, I agreed to go riding because Ginger wanted to ride horses on the beach and the desk clerk at the hotel assured me the horses stayed in line the whole time. No one would bolt for the barn. When we got to the starting point, the man put Ginger on a small horse and then said to me, “Hermano grande! You need big horse,” and put me on the Mexican equivalent of a Clydesdale. The ride was uneventful until we got to the beach, where my horse decided not to stay in line but to trot into the ocean, walking parallel with the others but with water over both his legs and mine. I could hear Ginger behind me, laughing. All I could do was hold on and keep saying, “Be nice, Big Damn Horse, be nice,” until he came out of the water and turned toward home.

Life, this time around, looks more like an opened paper clip (you know – where the outside leg kicks straight out) than a racing oval. Tonight we will stop driving and stay awhile in Durham; a long while. In moments like these, the soundtrack of my life seems to rise up, over even the guy next to me who is still talking about chess:

The Way Home

If you’re ever in the Richmond Jail
With no one around to go your bail
If you’ve lost your way it might help to know
Jesus is the way home

If you’re trying to put that whiskey down
And you realize you’re losing ground
You don’t have to walk that road alone
Jesus is the way home

You don’t have to worry where you’re at
Or why you’re there he knows all that
You just let the Good Book be your map
Jesus is the way home

If you think nobody understands
And life’s not going like you planned
There’s a friend who’ll show you how to go
Jesus is the way home

There’s a garden down in Alabam’
Not too far south of Birmingham
Painted signs and crosses by the road
One says Jesus is the way home

For the Bible tells me so
Jesus is the way home

Thanks to Kate Campbell for the song, to Chattanooga for the welcome and rest, to family gathered in Birmingham, to all those back at home in Massachusetts, and to those waiting at the home just down the road in Durham. We’re making the club house turn.

Peace,
Milton

baby got background

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
8

Ginger and I are officially in The Week of Transition between Marshfield and Durham, so we snuck away for a couple of days together in a town where neither of us had ever been: Chattanooga, Tennessee. Yesterday, we spent a good bit of time at the amazing Tennessee Aquarium and found a pretty good burger and a great shake at Cheeburger Cheeburger. Today, as we often do on vacations, we chased different muses. Her favorite form of relaxation involves wraps and massages; mine has more to do with bookstores, street food, and aimlessly wandering around town. Tonight, we will find each other for dinner and have a chance to swap stories and relax together.

We are staying on the outskirts of the rejuvenated downtown area. The city has a free electric shuttle that runs well and frequently, which I have made good use of – particularly today. I just got settled in at a great coffee shop this morning when I got a phone call that required of me to deal with transition issues, so I rode downtown and back to the hotel twice with the same shuttle driver who gave me a little history lesson on each trip (did you know Coca-Cola was invented in Chattanooga, not Atlanta?).

I also learned about the social makeup of the city from the people who got on and off the shuttle as I rode. The publicity for the shuttle makes it sound as if it is primarily a method of transit for tourists; in reality, it provides a free and safe way for street people to get around. Most of them, it appears, keep a fairly consistent schedule. My driver knew all of their names and made unscheduled stops when she came to the places where those folks needed to get off the bus. Since I was the new guy, they were happy to tell stories, give directions, and provide reviews for most any institution or activity in the downtown area. I had conversations about grandmothers who dipped snuff and how things weren’t like they used to be. One guy swapped Thanksgiving recipes with the bus driver. A woman got on wearing a Winnie the Pooh hoodie, so we talked about Pooh for a couple of blocks.

My favorite interaction was between two women who were new to town. One was a large woman with boxed blond hair that was passed its prime. She was wearing bejeweled sunglasses and had a silver post puncturing her bottom lip. Her companion, Wendy, was slight and mostly silent. She had mousy brown hair that fell on both sides of her face. She sat timidly, clinging to her shopping bag. They got on the shuttle with me on my second trip downtown.

“I cain’t (that’s how she said it) believe this bus is free,” she repeated three or four times.

“You’re not from here?” asked the bus driver.

“Well, I am now. But I’m from Memphis and then I lived the last seven years in Nashville.” She spoke with the authority of a traveler who was well acquainted with life on the street. “Ain’t nothin’ free in those places.”

She then began to ask about a bar and grill she had seen the night before. We all started saying names of places as we moved down Broad Street, only to find out the bar she was looking for was on Market, one street over. My hunch is she wasn’t up to walking over there. She changed her focus. She and Wendy were going to the Convention Center to look for work.

“With my background,” she said, again with confidence, “I can get a job at the Convention Center.” Then she asked the most wonderful question: “Wendy, you got a background?”

“Yes,” said Wendy, without giving anything away.

My first stop, after a killer chili dog at Chazzy Dogs, a street vendor near the aquarium, was the Hunter Museum of American Art. The woman who gave me my ticket had a sort of Jessica Tandy sensibility about her and gave me a wonderfully lilting explanation of the collection that left me welcomed and hopeful as I made my way among the paintings and sculpture. I recognized a few names, saw a couple of Hopper watercolors that did my heart good, and found a thoughtful exhibit on museum architecture that also included information on Chattanooga’s background: downtown was not always like it is now, to say the least.

I walked across the Walnut Street Bridge (now only for pedestrians) to the North Shore neighborhood of shops and restaurants, mostly because I was in search of a new pair of sneakers. I’d worn out the ones I was wearing. The woman at The World Next Door, a fair trade shop, pointed me to Fast Break Athletics, where I received service like I had never had in a shoe store. The man who waited on me was the owner and told me the story of the shop as he fitted my feet with new shoes. My hot dog was history, so I walked (comfortably) a couple of blocks down to the Mud Pie Coffee House, which appears to be going through a transition of its own. What drew me in was the menu in the window that announced “new Cuban dishes.” The place was under new ownership, who were Cuban, so they were adding a bit of their background to the storied little haunt. If everything tastes as good as the “Cuban Tamale” I had, they are going to do well.

I kept walking in no particular direction after lunch and saw a barbershop. Normally, I would see no need, since my head is shaved, but I packed my beard trimmer in a box I have yet to find, so I went in to inquire as to the possibility of getting my mustache and beard shaped up. A southern version of Lorelai Gilmore was happy to help and made me look a little more presentable for the grand price of three dollars. New shoes, a sharp beard, a full stomach – what else could I need but a good cup of coffee and wifi? That was to be found two blocks up at Stone Cup Roasters, a funky little dive overlooking the Tennessee River; they are hosting this post, even as I write.

Cities that don’t know me have fascinated me for as long as I can remember. (I wrote a poem about them some time back.) I’ve slid into town as a traveler on the way to Somewhere Else, using this place as a way station and respite in my journey. I’ve walked up hills and down streets and in stores, wondering at times what it might have been like if this were going to be home, if this were going to be the place where I let myself belong, all the while knowing I am only passing through.

The sun is setting now, outlining the Walnut Street Bridge as its giant lighted snowflakes begin to twinkle. In the background I can see the aquarium and some of the other buildings on the southern shore of the river. My bus driver has finished her day. Some of the people I rode with are probably bedding down on the back porch of the library where a number of homeless people sleep, as last night’s driver pointed out. The chances of any of us ever seeing each other again are slim. Tomorrow night, we will drive into Durham intending to do more than pass through; we are going to make a home there. The prospect is as daunting as it is promising. A good bit of our lives gets lived out like the shuttle bus, full of incidental contact and anecdotes, each of us getting on and off without much regard for our fellow travelers. Home starts to happen when we sit down together and ask, “You got a background?” and then listen and wait to what needs to be said beyond, “Yes.”

Peace,
Milton

once-in-a-life time

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
7

highway eighty-four ran due east across the
Central Texas night, I remember the moon
rising over the top of the telephone poles

the road was lonely enough for me to turn
my headlights off in deference and drive
in the dark to the light as if I would reach it

every Sunday night after, I drove and waited
for the moon, but it happened only once
how does one keep once-in-a-life time?

all the sands in the hourglass aren’t enough
to make a beach to hold a tide to pull
the moon close again, close enough for me

to turn off my lights and trust what I can’t see
to find myself lost in the night and light
I don’t drive that way much anymore

down all the days, could it be enough now
to say, one night I drove into the moon
and not need it to happen ever again?

Peace,
Milton

*this poem was prompted by the Poetry Party at Abbey of the Arts.

get out the map

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
2

I woke up before everyone else in the house this morning, thanks to Gracie, our youngest Schnauzer. I started the coffee pot and then started looking for something to read, having already devoured the latest issue of The Nation yesterday morning. I remembered packing some books among the pots and pans that have traveled with me, so I dug around in the garage and found The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime by Miles Harvey that had been living in the still-to-be-read pile that stayed in the kitchen in our former home. I poured my coffee and opened the book. I made it to the end of the introduction when I found my writing prompt for the day and set it aside to turn to my MacBook:

Filling in a life, it turned out, was like filling in a map, and my search for Gilbert Bland soon transformed from an investigation into an adventure. (xxii)

In a world where we can dive into Google Earth and see most anything from space, the idea that our known world was been “one of the dark places,” as Marlowe sets out at the beginning of Heart of Darkness, is something we let quickly fall out of our consciousness. The closest we get these days, I suppose, is gazing into the images of deep space Hubble sends back to us, leaving us to make the same sort of conjectures as those of people like Gerard Mercator’s 1569 image of what he thought made up our planet. Harvey describes it:

Gazing at Mercator’s chart, I see a planet strikingly different from our own, a world full of blank spaces and never-never lands. North America turns into an amorphous blog that reaches so far west it is almost joined to Asia at the hip. South America has an unaccountable protrusion from its southwestern shores, a topographic tail feather that makes the continent look something like a giant waterfowl. This beast is, in turn, perched upon a peculiar nest – a huge polar landmass, many times the size of present-day Antarctica. Known as the Great Southern Continent or the Unknown Southern Land (or, to more optimistic cartographers, the Country Not Yet Discovered), it was a place ancient geographers had dreamed up to complement their belief that the Earth was perfectly symmetrical.

The inclination to draw the map and then go exploring seems to be deeply rooted in our human nature; we do our best work, perhaps, in pencil, eraser at the ready. Our need for maps, in a more metaphorical sense, speaks to our need for certainty, as if life were some sort of cosmic mall (God forbid!) and we stand in need of the diagram with the “X” and the arrow that says, “You are here.”

Harvey’s book reminded me of another, this one a novel: A Mapmaker’s Dream: The Meditations of Fra Mauro, Cartographer to the Court of Venice by James Cowan. Mauro is a monk who sets out to draw a map of the world without ever leaving his cell. He does so by relying on travelers and adventurers who come and tell him what they saw and experienced. His world, if you will, is overturned when he meets a Muslim mapmaker who is drawing the world from the perspective of those who come and talk to him.

Same world, different maps.

Where Harvey’s words took me first, however, was back to the conversation around the table Thursday night as Ginger and I sat and talked with all of our parents. When I read, “Filling in a life, it turned out, was like filling in a map,” I saw my father sitting at the end of the small table in the kitchen telling stories of his adolescence I had never heard, or at least did not remember. His words called me to go back and redraw my map of him, filling in some of the dark areas I had, until now, filled in based on my own assumptions. I also had a chance to describe what it was like to live with diagnosed depression over these last seven years in a way I had never been able to talk to them in the past, giving them the chance, I suppose, to do a little corrective cartography of their own.

I haven’t lived in the same town as my parents in over thirty years. I know a great deal about them and we talk regularly, but I don’t know how they live on a daily basis, or who their friends are, save a few who have been around for many, many years. I don’t know most of the books they read or the places they eat, what they talk about over dinner together or what they do for fun, beyond what I remember about them from the days when I did see them daily or what they tell me when we talk in our couple of hours of phone conversation each week.

My parents are my example here because the scene around the supper table is what set me to thinking. In most any arena in our lives, I need to be reminded my maps need revising. When I was teaching high school English, one of my colleagues made a comment about one of the students he was struggling to reach. The student was not making it easy for him to do so. The teacher, in frustration, was ready to write him off. I knew the kid from church youth group and was able to fill in a few of the dark places in my colleague’s map of the kid. “What I have to work to remember,” I said, “is I see these kids for forty-five minutes a day, five days a week, on my turf and working on my agenda. I’m fooling myself if I think I know who they are based on that little slice of life we share together.”

“Faith,” says Frederick Buechner, “is a journey without maps.”

What I have always taken from his words is God calls us to a life of trust rather than certainty. There is no way to nail this thing down, to find the “X,” to know for sure where we are headed next, other than, like Jesus, we have come from God and we are going to God. I can do pretty well with that when it comes to living out my minister to teacher to minister to chef life story (that’s the abridged version), yet I think I’m less flexible when it comes to mapping those around me. I can far too easily label people and use them as road markers to help me stay among those I agree with most easily. Like Fra Mauro, I have mapped too many folks based on what someone else has told me and made assumptions far beyond what is right or fair.

What I heard in my dad’s story the other night was not as much something new as it was something more. At this point in our lives, we’re both pretty good at letting each other be who we are and sharing both a deep sense of affection and appreciation. He just filled in a little more of his map and gave me room to do the same.

Now that’s something to be thankful for.

Peace,
Milton

1...190191192...240Page 191 of 240

EDITOR PICKS

POPULAR POSTS

POPULAR CATEGORY

©