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the view from here

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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5

I’ve been staring at the screen for some time this evening because I feel like I have nothing new to say, or at least nothing new to say that’s not about our move. Most all of my thought and energy of late has been about me: how I will move, what I will do, how I will say goodbye. I’m starting to feel like Bette Midler in Beaches: “Enough about me. Let’s talk about you. What do you think about me?”

(You know things are out of whack when you start to feel like Bette Midler.)

Meaningful perspective – living in the context of a world bigger than ourselves – is difficult to maintain. The Duck Boats were hardly parked from the Red Sox parade when Curt Schilling began talking about the possibility he might not pitch in Boston next season. He’s 41, nearing the end of his wonderful career, and he may leave Boston if they don’t offer him a one-year contract at the same salary as this year: thirteen million dollars. (And his is not the highest salary by far.) He talks about the money (a) as if he deserves it and (b) as though he needs it to be able to live his life beyond baseball.

If we’re looking for meaningful perspective, let’s start here: no ball player is worth thirteen million dollars. No ball player needs thirteen million dollars. I will live my whole life and not make a total of thirteen million dollars and will have lived quite well on lots of levels, thank you. The only way baseball salaries make any kind of sense is if they are taken out of any context beyond professional sports. He’s a blinded by the money as I am by the moving boxes.

I got off early tonight and drove home listening to NPR where they were discussing the confirmation hearings for Michael Mukasey to be the new attorney general. The conversation swirled around his unwillingness to define waterboarding as torture. I had to do a little work to get up to speed on exactly what they were talking about. Here’s what I learned. First, a definition:

Water boarding as it is currently described involves strapping a person to an inclined board, with his feet raised and his head lowered. The interrogators bind the person’s arms and legs so he can’t move at all, and they cover his face. In some descriptions, the person is gagged, and some sort of cloth covers his nose and mouth; in others, his face is wrapped in cellophane. The interrogator then repeatedly pours water onto the person’s face. Depending on the exact setup, the water may or may not actually get into the person’s mouth and nose; but the physical experience of being underneath a wave of water seems to be secondary to the psychological experience. The person’s mind believes he is drowning, and his gag reflex kicks in as if he were choking on all that water falling on his face.

Second, an image of an actual waterboarding setup used by the Khmer Rouge:


Third, a little history. The practice, in various forms, goes back as far as the Spanish Inquisition and has been used many times across the centuries. After World War Two, the United States prosecuted Yukio Asano as a war criminal and sentenced him to fifteen years of hard labor for waterboarding US prisioners.

On the issue of waterboarding, the United States charged Yukio Asano, a Japanese officer on May 1 to 28, 1947, with war crimes. The offenses were recounted by John Henry Burton, a civilian victim: After taking me down into the hallway they laid me out on a stretcher and strapped me on. The stretcher was then stood on end with my head almost touching the floor and my feet in the air. They then began pouring water over my face and at times it was impossible for me to breathe without sucking in water. The torture continued and continued. Yukio Asano was sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor.

The issue has come up in the hearings because the CIA has been waterboarding as a means of interrogation in response to 9/11, as though we must become torturers in order to protect ourselves. Once again, we have lost any sense of meaningful perspective.

I’m not trying to stir up a political hornet’s nest as much as I am working to notice what gets lost when we become the center of our own universe, or even of our own existence.

  • Hurting others because we have been hurt doesn’t help us learn anything of lasting value.
  • Nobody’s worth thirteen million dollars.
  • My move is not the most important thing going on in the world, or even in my world.

I think I’ll just concentrate on that last one.

Peace,
Milton

P. S. – There’s a new recipe.

playgrounds and pain

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
4

When Ginger and I moved to Boston in August of 1990, we had been married four months. Now, five months shy of our eighteenth anniversary, we are (we verbalized as we drove into the city today) leaving home. We wondered aloud how we will learn to “let go” of this wonderful city and then began to talk in terms of “changing our grip”: we are headed south to find home in a new city and Boston will remain our hometown.

We are also leaving those who have become family to us. The main point of our trip today was to say goodbye to Cherry, whom we have known since she was in high school and we met her doing a youth camp in Louisiana. She moved to Boston and lived with us for four years and has remained to make a life of her own, part of which includes being a yoga instructor. We met for lunch at Fajitas & ‘Ritas, the site of my fortieth birthday party, and then spent a couple of hours sipping coffee and talking as we sat together on Boston Common across from a playground packed with little kids. I was taken with one little girl in a pink dress who, rather than coming down the slide, slung herself over the side of it at the top, dangled, and then dropped to the ground below. She jumped up, climbed back up the ladder, and did it over and over without hesitancy or harm.

Cherry talked about some of the bodywork she has done in her yoga training. “The reason she doesn’t hurt herself,” Cherry said, “is because she doesn’t resist.” The little girl fell without fear; she didn’t brace herself as though the ground would hurt, she just let go and landed. “We get injured when we brace ourselves in fear,” Cherry continued. “We have to learn to trust the joy.”

John Updike wrote a story called “Trust Me” (in a collection by the same name) many years ago that begins with Harold, as a child, jumping off the edge of the swimming pool to his father’s arms, only to be dropped into the water and moves through various events in his life in which his trust is betrayed or he breaks the trust of one of his loved ones. Then the story ends:

The palms of his hands, less mottled, looked pale and wrinkled, like uncomfortable pillows. In his shirt pocket Harold found tucked the dollar bill rejected at the subway turnstile, extremely long ago. While waiting for Priscilla to relent and call back, he turned to its back side, examined the mystical eye above the truncated pyramid, and read, over and over, the slogan printed above the ONE.

As we sat in the park, I couldn’t help but watch the children moving up and down the chutes and ladders. Their play was not without pain — I saw them slip on steps and slam into the slides – but joy was the prevailing wind that filled their sails. They dove and jumped and climbed and slid head first without resistance, without fear, without thought that our afternoon was made for anything other than unadulterated joy. And we were three who have trusted each other for a long time struggling not to brace ourselves for the pain that comes with separation. While they played, we were saying goodbye. We were living a pain those children don’t know. They were living a joyous abandon we are hard pressed to find in our own lives. Who then, has the lesson to learn?

I couldn’t help but think of Randy Newman’s old song:

If I had one wish
One dream I knew would come true
I’d want to speak to all the people of the world
I’d get up there, I’d get up there on that platform
First I’d sing a song or two you know I would
Then I’ll tell you what I’d do
I’d talk to the people and I’d say
“It’s a rough rough world, it’s a tough tough world
Well, you know
And things don’t always, things don’t always go the way we plan
But there’s one thing, one thing we all have in common
And it’s something everyone can understand
All over the world sing along

I just want you to hurt like I do
I just want you to hurt like I do
I just want you to hurt like I do
Honest I do, honest I do, honest I do”

Buddha taught that life was suffering. I, who at this point in my life am shaped a bit like Buddha, understand how much pain is a part of the fabric of our being and I wonder, after watching the children play today, why I allow myself to see pain as the fundamental connector of humanity so easily. We were created for more than enduring life. Hell, yes life hurts. It hurts a lot. It’s not safe or secure or without danger. And we were created for more than hiding in the corner or bracing ourselves for the next blow. As the goodbyes stack up as high as the boxes in our house, as we prepare to leave home, as our hearts hurt, I want to know how to swing out over the side of the slide and let go and continue to trust that love will catch me.

When I was in tenth grade, we came back from Africa to live in Fort Worth, Texas for a year while my parents were on leave from the mission field. I was carrying fresh wounds of farewells and had no idea how to be an American teenager. One afternoon, I was invited to a church youth event at a local park. Two of the seniors, Cathy Shelton and David Piland, who both seemed so beautiful and cool to me, sang Elton John’s “Love Song.” It was the first time I had heard of Elton or the song (actually written by Lesley Duncan). As they sang, the sounds of the children on the playground behind them bled through the microphone underneath their voices just like it does on the record (as I discovered when I bought it). The children giggled and shouted and played as Cathy and David sang:

Love is the opening door
Love is what we came here for
No one could offer you more
Do you know what I mean
Have your eyes really seen

Thirty-seven years later, the juxtaposition of playgrounds and pain still speaks to me, calling me beyond the hurt to informed hope. Whatever we know of sorrow and skinned knees, however marked we are by wounds and worries, they are not what makes us human. We were born by Love, we are bound by Love, and Love will carry us home.

Trust me.

Peace,
Milton

painting the town red sox

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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5

Here are the pictures of the Red Sox celebration in Boston today. I only had my camera phone, so the quality isn’t great and I didn’t get some shots, but here is our day in images (and a few words).

We rode in on the train, along with every high school kid skipping school . . .

our two favorite brands: Red Sox and Dunkin Donuts . . .

this woman, in her mid-sixties, did what she could to see the parade . . .

if you own the team, you get to ride in the front car . . .

some of our favorite pitchers . . .

they even let Gagne ride along . . .

Pedroia and Youuuuuuuuk . . .

Papelbon and the Dropkick Murphys . . .

Ginger and I celebrating our champions.

Peace,
Milton

love that dirty water

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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4

Some time this summer, as it became apparent that the Red Sox had an amazing team, I said to Ginger, “Wouldn’t it be great if the Sox won the World Series as we were leaving New England.” Last night, as you may have heard, they obliged. For the second time in four years, our boys are the champions.

Jonathan Papelbon, our amazing closer, has become somewhat famous for his dancing after clinching the American League East and then winning the ALCS. Last night, he seemed humbled in his post game interview. He didn’t show the bravado and the Bull-Durham-we’ve-just-
got-to-take-it-one-day-at-a-time mentality that makes for most of what passes as interviews on ESPN. The weight of winning seemed to settle him down. He didn’t gloat or brag; he just said thank you.

Most of the teams I’ve cheered for in my life have been of the close-but-no-cigar variety. I am a graduate of Baylor University, better known of late as the whipping boy of the Big Twelve. My freshman year at Baylor, our football team won the Southwest Conference for the first time in fifty years. Ginger and I were here in New England in 2004 when the Sox reversed the Curse that had kept them from winning a championship for eighty-six years. Tonight, I turned on the TV to watch the news and a commercial said,

The last time the Red Sox won the World Series,
gas cost over two dollars a gallon,
George W. Bush was president,
and the Patriots were the best team in football.

We’ve waited a long time for this.
Thanks to the Red Sox for winning the Series again.

This is the first time in my life I’ve rooted for the best team in baseball. We weren’t the come from behind kids this year. We led our division all year, tied for the best record in baseball, and won the championship decidedly. Yes, we have the second biggest payroll and we got to see the kids we’ve raised in our farm system – Papelbon, Youkilis, Ellsbury, Pedroia, Lester – come into their own. One local commentator said, “We watched our veterans play with a kid’s enthusiasm and our kids play like veterans. In 2004, the victory was a relief; this year we get to relish it. What an amazing gift. We won the Series in 1903, 1912, 1915, 1918, 2004, and 2007. I don’t expect to win every year, or even every four years. Hey – we won this year.

Tomorrow Ginger and I are going into Boston with a couple of million of our closest friends for the “Rolling Rally” of celebration, in what will likely be our last trip into the city before we head to Carolina. I’m sure the loudspeakers will be blaring the song that plays at the end of every Sox victory at home and, for the last time, we will get to sing

I love that Dirty Water
Oh – Boston – you’re my home.

Peace,
Milton

pan handling

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
3

This has been a week. Sunday was our last day at the Marshfield church, Tuesday I gave my notice at the restaurant (effective Nov. 11), Wednesday and Thursday we were in Durham looking for a house (and found one to rent, for now), and then last night I left work early because the hay fever that’s been dogging me all week finally got the best of me (I’m feeling better today). Life is moving fast and furiously.

I did stay at work long enough to help finish the prep work for the dinner service. Chef had a couple of new things to add to my station and a special, which meant I had to do some reconfiguring of what went where so the station could work. The cold top can hold up to eighteen sixth pans; the four drawers up to sixth third pans each (or combinations of six and thirds). I should explain: the pans are named for the space they take up. Two sixth pans, for instance, take up the same space as one third pan. You get the idea. My point is the way things are laid out has to change to accommodate the menu and the night of the week. Friday and Saturday nights require back up pans of the things we use most, and we try to get as many of those in the drawer as possible so the cook doesn’t have to run to the walk-in while things are busy. I spent as much time, I think, trying to figure out what needed to stay in the cold station and what needed to go as I did prepping things and filling pans. As I stepped off the line so Sous could take over for service, I noticed she began rearranging things because she had a different idea of how to make it work.

While I was cutting and chopping, Ginger was home putting things into boxes that will travel to North Carolina so we can figure out how to set up our “line” there for the new menu that will be our lives in Durham. Many things will go, many things will be left behind or passed on to someone else, and we will have some new ingredients to add once we get there. All this shifting around is much easier to do in the kitchen than it is in real life.

Peace,
Milton

broken

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
9

“The jewelery box lid is broken.”
“I can fix it,” I told her, years ago.
I can fix it. I just haven’t done so.

The top of the box is a painting
of Boston Common on a snowy day
in another time, people walking
across the park at twilight.

The four pieces that framed it
lie on top of the dresser, waiting
to be remembered into wholeness.

I walk by every morning without
the glue or the intention to fix
what is broken. Now I have gone
so long that broken seems normal.

How did I become accustomed
to a life of unfinished and disrepair?
I can fix it; I just haven’t done so.

Peace,
Milton

*This is a response to the Poetry Party at Abbey of the Arts.

thanks for everything

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
5

There’s an old Seinfeld episode (I guess they’re all old now) where George keeps trying to figure out what to do after he tells a joke in a meeting. As soon as people start laughing, all he can think about is he doesn’t know what to do next and he ends up wrecking the moment. So he decides to take a page from Jerry’s standup and leave as soon as he gets the laugh, whether the meeting is over or not. The next time the joke works, he gets up and says, “Thanks for everything. You’ve been great!” and leaves the room, even though things aren’t finished just because he doesn’t know what else to do and he wants to go out on top.

In terms of affirmation and affection, Ginger and I could not be leaving Marshfield with any larger sense of our being loved. People have been amazing. The service yesterday was packed full of meaning and emotion; it was really good and really hard at the same time. Ginger baptized for the last time with the now almost seven-year old girl who was her first baptism standing beside her. We had ten new members join the church. And we said goodbye, even though there’s not an easy way to do that with people you love and there’s never a good time, if by good time we mean everything is wrapped up neatly.

This week, my task is to give my notice at the restaurant. Friday night, after Chef left, Sous was talking to me about how Chef has begun to move me around to different stations. She said, “He’s doing it because next year, when they open the new restaurant, he is going to put you and me in charge here to run this one.” I’m not sure I know how to describe the crash of emotions I felt in hearing the affirmation in a possibility that will not be birthed. I know, at least in part, what my future holds and it’s not here. I also don’t know how to be somewhere and not invest as though it’s something other than temporary, since the paradox of our lives is we live by eternal and temporal clocks at once everyday.

George wanted to leave them laughing because he didn’t want to feel uncomfortable; he left that emotion for those he left in the room. It makes for good situation comedy but lousy living. My part in our mutual grief is to carry my part of the weight. As difficult as it is to be the one who is packing up the plans in rented moving vans, I think it is harder, in some ways, to be the one who stays. I carved a place for myself at the restaurant: I have become the one who makes the corn sauce and slices the shallots and sees when we need to slow roast additional tomatoes. Just about the time they’ve gotten used to me doing those things, I’m going in to say I’m going to do them somewhere else. I know it’s my job and I get paid to do what I do, and I want more out of life and work than to walk in and say, “So long and thanks for the fish,” when it’s time to go.

The restaurant, like the church, will go on without me. Neither one will hang a sign on the door that says, “We can’t do this anymore because Milton left.” I’m not indispensable, and I’ve flavored the world I’ve lived in for these past seven years just as they have spiced up my existence. I’m aware that, like the widow in the lectionary parable yesterday, I’m repeating the same theme over and over in my posts: leaving is messy and meaningful.

When I was a youth minister, I took a glass of water one night at youth group and put my hand into it; then I pulled it out. “Here’s how life works,” I said. “As long as my hand is in the water, you can see its place. As soon as I pull it out, the water fills in. The only evidence it was ever there is my hand is wet.” That our lives will go on without the daily contact is true, but that’s not what I want to take away with me as I go. What matters is we got to spend any days together at all. Of all the churches and towns and restaurants in the world, I have been here for these days and I have been changed by those I have lived with. And now I go, soaked in love and encouragement, dripping with the hope of what lies ahead.

Thanks. For everything. You’ve been great.

Peace,
Milton

the litany of farewell

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
3

Yesterday I had my final meeting with my spiritual director, Ken, who is also a dear friend and a lover of poetry. We shared poems as a part of our litany of farewell; I share some of them, now, with you.

The Layers

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.

Stanley Kunitz


Fishing in the Keep of Silence

There is a hush now while the hills rise up
and God is going to sleep. He trusts the ship
of Heaven to take over and proceed beautifully
as he lies dreaming in the lap of the world.
He knows the owls will guard the sweetness
of the soul in their massive keep of silence,
looking out with eyes open or closed over
the length of Tomales Bay that the herons
conform to, whitely broad in flight, white
and slim in standing. God, who thinks about
poetry all the time, breathes happily as He
repeats to Himself: There are fish in the net,
lots of fish this time in the net of the heart.

Linda Gregg

By a departing light,
We saw acuter, quite,
Than by a light that stays.
There’s something in the flight,
That clarifies the sight,
And decks the rays.

Emily Dickinson

Peace,
Milton

here’s to lights & virtues

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
8

I’ve had my share of days when I wondered why I was on the planet; Sunday was not one of them. The wonderful folks at our church here in Marshfield and several other friends gathered to remember what our years here together have meant and to wish Ginger and me well in what is to come as we head south to Durham in a few weeks. The evening was affirming, amazing, and crammed full of fun and meaning.

When we leave Coffee Hour this coming Sunday, we will leave the church for good. Ginger’s final service will include a baptism and the welcoming of ten new members into the congregation. The closing of this chapter of our lives together falls in the middle of the manuscript of a story far larger than ourselves.

The story Ginger told from the pulpit was one of gratitude: Jesus’ encounter with the one leper who came back to say thanks for his healing. She talked about how easy it is to be hard on the nine who didn’t return and cautioned us not to take the easy path so quickly. We don’t have any idea of what was going on in the hearts and minds of those who didn’t come back to Jesus. She recounted how one of our foster daughters, who lived with us for six months while her mom was in prison and she was in middle school, told us how much she loved us but she couldn’t see us anymore because we were a reminder of the most painful time in her life. Even healing hurts sometimes.

So does love. Leaving people you love is like trying to unmix brownie batter: the ingredients don’t separate easily. When I first started doing weddings, the image I had whenever I said, “What God has joined together let no one tear apart” was of two pieces of metal welded into one. Tearing them apart would leave both pieces damaged. The relationship between a pastor and a congregation is, by definition, not as permanent as a marriage and the attachments are deep and difficult to release. We have loved our days here in Marshfield almost as much as we love the people we have gotten to share them with. It is hard to say goodbye and that’s a good thing. The tragedy would be to leave and not hurt at all.

Jackson Browne has a song on his World in Motion record that fits here:

here’s to lights and virtues
here’s to truths yet to be known
knowledge to light the darkness
the search for things of your own

here’s to lights and virtues
here’s to reaching higher ground
a life of hope and purpose
here’s to strength yet to be found
honor — though it goes unrecognized
and truth — though liars abound

the pleasure of love and friendship
the courage to be alone

One of the passages of scripture I know I have quoted before and find to be one of the true touchstones of my life is John’s description of Jesus as he prepared to wash the disciples’ feet: “knowing he had come from God and was going to God . . .” We were breathed into existence to live our lives in a circle of grace and gratitude. I’m a fortunate person to have had a night when a room filled with people took the time to tell me they loved me and gave me the chance to tell them the same. The pleasure of love and friendship fuels the courage to move farther round the circle, and deeper into grace.

Peace,
Milton

P. S. — Speaking of church friends, there’s a new recipe.

message in a bottle

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
5

I am one who walks along the shore
looking for answers and sea glass.
If it were not for the cleansing tides,
the beach would be a well-worn path,

but twice a day the waves come
and wash away my searches and sins
and lay them at someone else’s feet,
or let them sink into the deep.

I imagine an armada of ambivalence,
anger, and angst floating and sinking,
like bottles tossed by castaways
wishing life would feel less lonely.

As the waves wipe away the first
of my footsteps, she starts a fire,
uncorks the wine, and waits
for me to find my way home.

Peace,
Milton

*This is a response to the prompt at Writer’s Island.

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