don't eat alone

I’ve been sitting here for an hour or so trying to figure out what to write today. I’ve finally decided to just sing a long.

Peace
Milton

At certain intersections of my life I have been aware of a clear memory of my father at my age. When I turned forty-one, I could remember Dad at that age because of one the persistent fragments of memory was the birthday card I wrote for him that year:

life begins at forty

at least that’s what they say

so look on the bright side of things

you’re one year old today

Yes, I’ve always been a poet. Tomorrow I turn fifty-seven and this memory of my father is perhaps clearest of all because of what that birthday meant to him: his father died at fifty-seven as the longest living Cunningham male to date. All of them had died young and died of heart attacks. Dad could hear the bell tolling. That fall he drove up to Fort Worth by himself to visit me, which was not a regular occurrence. He traveled to places that mattered to him and to see people he loved as though he was on a farewell tour. Fifty-seven came and went, as did fifty-eight and sixty; he died a little over a month shy of his eighty-fifth birthday. I am grateful on many levels.

That all the Cunningham males died so early meant I never knew any of my relatives beyond the generation that preceded me. My dad’s mother, Bertha, died a month after he was born; my grandfather (Milton I) died two years before I arrived. To this day I don’t know where either of them is buried. My dad had some great almost Paul Bunyanesque stories about his father, but even he knew little about his mother. When my folks moved from their house in Waco into an apartment, Ginger and I became the recipients of dishes and glasses, which now grace our table as often as possible, which feeds me in ways I had not expected. I try to imagine what it must have been like for my grandfather at my age, eating off dishes meant to be shared with his wife who had been gone for years and years and years. He did remarry. Marie, the woman I knew as “Grandma C” was a good woman who managed to live to be one hundred, but, as the stories go, they struggled in their lives together. Yet she is the one who saved everything of Bertha’s to pass down. Her fingerprints are on the glasses and plates as well. Family is often a difficult recipe to describe.

If my dad were still here, he would call me today and say, “Well, this is the last day in your fifty-seventh year,” making sure to remind me the birthday number marked the end of a year rather than the beginning. Then he would ask, “How does it feel to start your fifty-eighth year?” as a way of sending me off on a new adventure. His Fifty-Seven Farewell Tour not withstanding, he never seems to fear growing old; I think he just saw it as growing. Over the past several years, we had a recurring conversation where he would tell me he was going somewhere as an interim pastor and he would say, “I think this may be the last time I do this. I’m getting old.” Before too long, he would be telling me of his next church. He preached up until the Sunday before he had his stroke.

If it weren’t for my family history, Fifty-Seven would come and go as one of those birthdays that matter most as markers but don’t call for the kind of notice that the ones that end in fives and zeros demand. It’s a Rest Stop Birthday: relax, enjoy, keep going. Though my father is not here to see my turn fifty-seven, I’m grateful that he took the sting out it by living as long as he did. It is no longer a wall to be climbed, but simply a day to mark and, as I said, keep moving. I’m also grateful I like feel I’m on the cusp of new things and not making the club house turn. I’m grateful. More than ever.

Sing a long, won’t you?

for the harvests of the spirit, thanks be to God

for the good we all inherit, thanks be to God

for the wonders that astound us

for the truth that still confounds us

most of all, that love has found us

thanks be to God 

Peace,

Milton

The day has been grey, cold, and rainy here in Durham. If I were in Boston, there would be snow on the ground, adding a little poetry to the gloom. When I arrived at Cocoa Cinnamon I had a hard time finding a seat because the little room was packed with people who had brought each other in out of the cold for coffee and conversation. There was one empty chair at the table, so I was able to find my place.

I wanted to come here in particular today because it felt like the best place to come to continue my conversation with Wendell Berry’s book What Are People For?. (At this rate, perhaps, I should start wishing you a very Berry Christmas.) Since the book is a collection of essays, I’ve bounced around a bit, rather than reading cover to cover, and I have been struck by the recurring themes, even though the collection was written over a number of years and for a variety of publications, as far as I can tell. He answers the question in the title by describing how we thrive in community, which includes not only one another but the rest of creation and those who have come before us. The purpose of our existence is to connect.

In three different essays, Berry pushes hard against the tendency for a writer to see the surrounding world as “raw material” for whatever he or she wants to do rather than the real thing. He bounces off of a quote from an article written by William Matthews who says,

A poet beginning to make something needs raw material, something to transform. . . . For [the poet] subject matter is not important, except that it gives her the opportunity to speak about something that engages her passions. What is important instead is what she can discover to say. It is not, of course, the subject that is or isn’t dull, but the quality of attention we do or do not pay to it, and the strength of our will to transform. Dull subjects are those we have failed.

And Berry replies,

This assumes that for the animals and humans who are not fine artists, who have discovered nothing to say,the world is dull, which is not true. It assumes also that attention is of interest in itself, which is not true either. . . . Mr. Matthews’s trivializing of subjects in the interest of poetry industrializes the art. He is talking about an art oriented exclusively to production, like coal mining. Like an industrial entrepreneur, he regards the places and creatures and experiences of the world as “raw material,” valueless until exploited. (84)

Berry goes on to say whatever we say with our art —words, paints, you name it — has to be connected to real life, to “the territory underfoot.” Art for the sake of art misses the point, even as I may have lost you by this point in the post.

Here’s why I was taken by his discussion of “raw material”: I find art to be a meaningful metaphor for faith. I think of God as an artist when I look at all the wonders of creation around us; I think God calls us to be artists, filled with the imagination of the One in whose image we are made. What hit me today in my reading during Advent are the ways in which the Incarnation provides an example of “the territory underfoot” that Berry describes. To read Genesis is to see a Master Designer at work who first creates the raw material and then breathes and speaks and shapes things into existence. The birth of Jesus puts God right in the middle of things, down in the dullness, in the middle of what Berry calls “the beloved community”:

common experience and common effort on a common ground to which one willingly belongs. (85)

As much as anything else, the birth of Jesus is God’s way of saying being human is a good thing, or as Ginger says every chance she gets: we are wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and worthy to be loved. We were not put here as props for God’s special effects, or so Jesus would have someone to save; we were created to live in beloved community with God, created to tell the story of our days in whatever way we can as an invitation to one another to share both the blessings and the burdens.

Life and art and faith are all team sports.

This post, I fear, is headier than I hoped or intended. I feel what Berry is saying in ways I struggle to get on the page. At the heart of the picture of a poor teenage girl giving birth to a baby boy in a barn behind a motel in a town that wasn’t her own is God right down in the middle of us saying, “You are not alone; you are loved and you are not alone. We are in this together.”

Gloria in excelsis deo.

Peace,

Milton

My day began early after ending late the night before because I made a mistake and scheduled two catering gigs — lunches — at the same time in two different places. Thanks to my friend Laura, who has been a sous chef on several projects, both events went well. But after leaving my journal and the book I’m reading at work yesterday and a couple of other dropped details, I’m mindful of one of the ways my grief is affecting me. I have to slow down and pay extra attention.

As we were preparing to leave Massachusetts, our friend Jay came to say goodbye. As he was leaving, I followed him out because I had some errands to run. He drove off and I got into my Cherokee Sport and started out of the driveway. Just as I got to the street, I realized I had left something in the house, so I put the car in reverse and got out. I didn’t stop the car; I just got out and then stood and watched as the car slowly rolled back into the door of the Pod we had sitting at the back of the drive. Once they crunched, I got back in the car and put it in park. The windows to the house were open and I heard Ginger say, “Well, that doesn’t sound good.”

I felt like I heard the same crunch in my life in a couple of different ways this week.

I was a kid in Africa during the Sixties, which means I was growing up as many of the nations were growing into independence. We were living in Zambia when freedom came in 1964 and Kenneth Kaunda became president. It was an amazing night. The leaders I came to respect first in my life were the people who did their best to help their continent recover from the damage of colonialism including Kaunda, Julius Nyerere, and Nelson Mandela. Tonight, in the midst of my fragmented life, I sat down to write only to find that Mandela is dead. One of the great lights of my lifetime is gone.

The world is full of politicians, but we have only had a handful of true leaders. Mandela is one of those who did more than take care of his own agenda. I remember watching as post-apartheid South Africa came into being and Mandela went from prisoner to president. After twenty-seven years, a certain amount of righteous anger would have been understandable. The former oppressors braced for what was coming to them only to see the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Mandela helped his country incarnate a spirit of compassion and forgiveness. His determination and leadership strips the members of our houses of Congress of any excuse for their selfishness and intransigence. They are choosing to use violence and arrogance as their primary currency; it does not have to be that way.

Yes, I do realize that neither Mandela nor the transition to an independent South Africa was perfect and I am grateful — deeply grateful — to have been alive while he lived. In fact, I am amazed to think I have lived while Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, Stephen Biko, Rosa Parks, Jimmy Carter, Vaclav Havel, Oscar Romero were also living. My list is by no means exhaustive; these are the ones who came to mind sitting here at the coffee shop. As I think about them, I am reminded that many around the world are working hard to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly — and calling us to do the same by their actions.

Rest in peace, Mandiba. Thank you.

Peace

Milton

Friday night I am going to see John Prine.

It’s an early birthday present, and a great one at that. My friend Terry is picking me up from work and we are driving over to Greensboro to soak up one of my songwriting heroes. Today at work at the computer store, I told a couple of people (much younger than I) what I was going to get to do and they asked, “Who is that?” Even after I mentioned “Angel From Montgomery” they still stared blankly. Not that I was surprised. The song had been out twenty years before they were born.

Last week, one of the managers came in beaming because he had been to see Third Eye Blind the night before and all I could think was, “How many times could they sing ‘Semi-Charmed Kind of Life’ to consider it a concert?” I told Dan, one who is closer to my age, what had happened and he and I spent the next hour talking about Prine and John Hiatt and Kris Kristofferson and Joni Mitchell and Nick Lowe and — well, you get the picture. When I left work, I said, “I’m going to have to go home and listen to old records.”

In one of the quiet moments in the store tonight toward the end of the evening, I heard the piano of “Linus and Lucy” drift down from the speakers in the ceiling and it made my heart smile. Everyone in the room knew the melody — and it’s probably older than “Angel from Montgomery.” Perhaps the musical connectedness, or lack thereof, stood out for me because I was looking for connections. Today was a heavy day. That’s the best word I know. The sadness sat on me like chainmail, like a lead coat. I was grateful for work because it gave me something to do, something to bounce off of. During my lunch hour, I read an essay from Wendell Berry’s What Are People For? in which he talked about the necessity of connectedness, of community to live with and live through tragedy and grief. In isolation, we are left bitterness and anger; in community we find the grace to keep going.

I came back to the store with about fifteen minutes left of my lunch hour and was sitting alone, by chance, in the break room when one of my coworkers who is both young and acquainted with grief came in and sat down beside me. “I know yesterday was four months,” she said, “and I just wanted to tell you I can see your sadness, and you’re getting through it better.” I found comfort in her words because she talked about getting through the day rather than getting over something.

Soon after Dad died, I got a note from another friend who spoke of her “fifteen minute life” after the death of her father. The grief was so heavy she found she could only cope in fifteen minute segments, so that’s what she did. Over time, her life grew to twenty minutes, then thirty, an hour, and a day. What I am learning over and over again is I need the companionship of John Prine and those who have never heard of him, of those who know the road I am walking and those who don’t yet know to get through the day.

The insidious lie of depression is that I am alone. The fundamental truth of grace is that I am not. Grace always has a face. And that I can hold on to, even when to believe in this living is such a hard way to go.

Peace

Milton

I have spent the evening

baking, not writing.

I have swirled my sadness

into the mix of

butter, sugar, eggs

because I know

what to do with

butter, sugar, and eggs.

Baking the same cookie

doesn’t feel repetitive;

why does writing

about grief feel

as though I am saying

the same thing

over and over and over?

I think I’ll have a cookie.

Peace

Milton