There once was a man who grew weary
Of the pollen that made his life dreary:
“I’ve tried Netis and steam
Plus antihistamines
And I’m still mostly stuffy and teary.”
Peace,
Milton
Part of what makes working in a restaurant kitchen interesting is you never really know who is coming for dinner and when they are planning to come. At the Durham restaurant we take reservations, so we do know the answer a good bit of the time, yet last Sunday night we had reservations for forty and we served ninety by the time the evening was over. More than half of the people just showed up to become part of that evening’s story.
The Duke restaurant is even less predictable because our major client base is the student body and, even though we are a fairly spiffy sit-down restaurant, we are, in their minds, a dining hall. Who needs to make reservations for the dining hall? One night last week a group of seventeen walked in for dinner. They were followed by two groups of seven, two groups of six, and three groups of four, and all of them were seated within fifteen minutes of each other.
In what has become an unintentional series of blog posts, I thought I might add life is a restaurant to the list: you spend most of your time getting ready, you don’t know who is going to show up or how long they will stay, and the point is to feed people and let them enjoy being together. Not bad.
The idea has set me to thinking about the people who have wandered (wondered?) into my life, though I have to say the metaphor breaks down a bit here because the ones who came to mind were people who fed me as much or more than I did them. They came to mind because of what is going on at our church. We are getting ready for a big celebration of our own in early October marking the tenth anniversary of our congregation’s choice to be intentionally Open and Affirming, which is to say we welcome everyone. Period. The O&A designation has particular significance to the gay and lesbian communities because they are not always sure where they are welcome, when it comes to church. We wanted to make it clear.
I grew up Southern Baptist, so I know all the arguments and verses folks use to say gays and lesbians have to straighten up (pun intended) to be acceptable. I’m not writing to pick that fight. I started to write, “The conversation is difficult because no one comes in willing to have their minds or hearts changed.” Here’s the thing: I’m writing about this metaphor because it’s how my heart and mind were changed.
I’m chasing a metaphor, remember?
In the restaurant that is my life, I’m grateful for more people than I can count who have dropped in, but tonight I want to point to four people – four gay men – whom God used to shape my life. The first is my friend, Jay, who was my first gay friend. I don’t mean he was the first gay or lesbian person I ever met, but he was the first one with whom I developed a long-lasting friendship. When we lived in Boston, he came up from Texas every year for Thanksgiving and Christmas for about a decade and then, when he moved to Boston, he lived with us for a year while he was finding work and getting on his feet. We share history that connects us and stories that bind us together as intentional family. I’m thankful for Jay who has helped me learn to be a better friend.
The summer before I turned forty, I fell into an existential crisis about writing. I had said for years I wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t feel like I was writing anything. So I signed up for a summer session at the Humber School for Writers in Toronto, which is where I met Timothy Findley. I worked with him in the workshops that week and then he served as my mentor in a one-year correspondence course to write a novel. (Yes, I did write a novel. No, it has never been published.) In conversations during the week, Tiff and I talked about writing and faith and life. He had started in the theater and was working in a play with Ruth Graham and Thornton Wilder when he published his first short story. Graham read it and told him to write. We made a strong connection with one another and continued writing after the class was over. Tim was an excellent writer, a thoughtful and faithful person, and he was gay. I’m grateful for Tiff who helped me recognize I am a writer.
My favorite Christmas gifts over the past few years have been experiences rather than possessions. Ginger does an amazing job of finding things for me to see and do that last long after the events are over. One of the best gifts she ever gave me was a class in Byzantine Iconography. I don’t mean to learn about them, or to admire them, but to paint (actually, the verb they use is to write) icons. For a week one January, and then weekly for many months to follow, I sat in the studio with Chris as he invited me into the spiritual practice of iconography. I learned ways to pray I had not known before. I learned so much about the history and significance of the images we were creating. I learned I was pretty good at writing the icons. And I found a real friend in Chris as well, whose gentle and vulnerable spirit was as much a window into heaven as the icons were. And he is gay. I’m thankful for Chris who showed me I am an artist and taught me how to pray with a brush.
The summer after we moved to Marshfield, I feel into a deep depression. I’ve written about it any number of times in these pages, so I’ll spare you the story now. One of the people who helped me find my way and make meaning of those dark days was Ken, who began as a my counselor and became my spiritual director as I sought to shift from looking at the depression to trying to find a more holistic perspective. Ken and I share a love of poetry and, on more than one occasion, he would end our session by saying, “I have a poem for you,” and he would hand me a photocopied sheet of something by Mary Oliver or Rumi or who knows that appeared to have been written just for me. I don’t know anyone else who incarnates the grace of God anymore than Ken. And Ken is gay. I’m grateful to Ken for helping me see life is full of meaning, even when I was depressed.
All four people helped shape my life and my faith. God has spoken to me through them, God has incarnated grace and love and hope and faith in their words and actions. I am the person and the Christian I am today because of the love and care of these four men. These four gay men. Don’t get me wrong. They don’t get all the blame. There are many others, gay and straight, whose love has carried me. Still, in the restaurant that is my life I could not feed those who drop in had it not been for the nourishment offered me by these four friends.
Every Sunday at our church, Ginger begins by quoting a UCC slogan:
Whoever you are and wherever you are on life’s journey,
You’re welcome here.
Yes, I know it’s the UCC and that we are the liberals whose theology, as one Texas Baptist pastor used to say, “killed the Church of England.” (Another friend says it this way: if Christianity were a neighborhood, we’d be the last house on the left.) I also know, at the very bottom of it all, it’s about what you do with people way before what you do with Bible verses. One of the choruses I learned in youth group in the Seventies we sang last Sunday:
we are one in the Spirit we are one in the Lord
we are one in the Spirit we are one in the Lord
and we pray that our unity will one day be restored
and they’ll know we are Christians by our love by our love
yes they’ll know we are Christians by our love
Come, the table is now ready.
Peace,
Milton
When I first met Pete Cernoia, he was a mailman.
No, that’s what he did for a job. Let me start again. From the first moment I met Pete Cernoia I was glad I knew him. We shared a common love of music and guitar playing, as well as rather skewed senses of humor, but what made Pete shine was more than those commonalties. Pete Cernoia was as true an incarnation of joy as anyone I have ever met. He loved life the same way he played guitar: percussively, energetically, whole heartedly in that Springsteen-tramps-like-us-baby-we-were-born-to-run kind of way. And he never met anyone he didn’t want to help.
Our lives intersected when we both lived in Boston, he in Somerville and I in Charlestown, and then we both moved, he to Gardner, Mass. and I to Marshfield. Though we kept incidental contact, the heart of our friendship was for a season. I haven’t seen Pete in many years, though his fingerprints still feel fresh on my heart. We got word through mutual friends a few months back that Pete had lung cancer. The same friends sent word this morning that Pete died last night.
There are many, many people who knew Pete better than I did. All of us, no matter how well acquainted, were fortunate to feel his love at full volume. Tonight, I remember one night he and I sang together at the Coffee House at Cambridgeport Baptist Church. He asked me to sing one of his favorite songs, “Breathe Deep” by Lost Dogs. It has stayed one of my favorites down all the days.
Pete, this one’s for you, my friend.
Peace,Milton
to a member of Congress
who yells, “You lie” at our
President, like a drunk fan
yelling at a referee, or
a pastor who spews hate
from his pulpit, wishing
our President would die
a natural death because,
“We don’t need another
holiday.” The comments
are connected across
our continent by one
thing, one thread, one
ugly truth that is hard
to call out by name:
they are racist words —
all of them. I know
such claims don’t make
for beautiful poetry,
but I don’t know what
else to say.
Peace,
Milton
I still remember the Christmas morning when, after unwrapping most of our gifts, my mother pointed to two cards stuck on the tree, one with my brother’s name on it and one with mine. A string ran from each card, leading us in different directions all over our house until we came to find our guitars.
For almost twenty-nine years I have had a six string of some sort. Mom and Dad hired a guy to give us lessons, but I lasted with those about as well as I did with the piano lessons in the second grade. But I did sit on the side of my bed and try to play along with my records, learning chord shapes from my friends and how the chords went together from listening to people I loved to hear. Like any guitar-toting teenager, I dreamed about being a singer or being in a band, but I wasn’t one of those who spent his afternoons learning licks and doing whatever it took to be a musician.
For me the magic of the guitar was that it always seemed to come with a group attached to it. I learned how to play because there were a group of us at Nairobi International School who all had guitars and we brought them with us and sat around during lunch (and some classes) playing and singing together. I have always had the good fortune to have friends who were better guitar players than I and who were wiling to teach me. In college, I found friends in my Baylor dorm who loved to sing and play and so we did, night after night. As a youth minister, I played and sang with my group because I loved how it made us feel connected. University Baptist Church was known for its youth choir, so the kids could sing well, so we sang every chance we could and they would find harmonies to add to what we were doing. When I play some of those songs, I can’t help but hear them still:
and the depth of God’s love reaches down, down, down
to where we are until we’re found, found, found
I’ve sung and played in a lot of church settings. When I wrote songs with Billy Crockett I sang back up for him a time or two. Then there was the weekend in Baton Rouge where he had a gig at the LSU BSU and I drove over to meet him. He was flying in – and was delayed. So someone there who knew I wrote with Billy suggested I sing until he got there. Of course I couldn’t sing any of our songs; he was going to do that. I took my guitar and sang everything I could think of. For and hour and a half. It’s still my longest gig.
Boston was a big Open Mic town. There were lots of little clubs and bars that set aside nights to let folks come in and take their shot. Club Passim in Harvard Square, one of my favorite rooms anywhere, had one on Tuesday night and I used to go and run sound. I thought about getting up there, but I never did. Actually, I never got up on stage in any club for Open Mic on any night in any town until last night.
I found out a couple of months ago that the Broad Street Café, just a block away from our house, has an Open Mic on alternate Wednesdays. Ginger and I have walked over a couple of times. The way an Open Mic works is those who want to perform show up at a given time (7:30 at Broad Street) and sign up for a time slot. Some places make you draw, others just take you in the order you show up. At 7:30, I was in the middle of the dinner rush, but I had remembered it was Open Mic and decided it was time to go and play. Part of it was I am singing and playing with my friend Terry on Saturday for a benefit and I wanted to feel ready for that. Part of it is I am working eleven hour days right now and feel like all I do is go to work and come home and I didn’t want to feel that way. Mostly, it just felt like it was about damn time I got up there with my guitar and sang for a room full of people who didn’t know me.
I called Ginger and asked for a date to walk over after I got home from work. By the time I got home and showered and we got to the café, it was working on ten o’clock and I only had to wait about three performers before I closed the evening. The two guys who sang before me called themselves “Lila” (not sure why), did a sort of acoustic hip-hop thing, and were both high.
I didn’t sing for a room full of people. I think there were ten or twelve. Fifteen if you count the dishwashers and the bartender. I didn’t care. I plugged in my guitar and started the intro to John Hiatt’s “Through Your Hands,” which in one of the songs we are doing on Saturday. It was hard to hear and it was my first public performance of the song and it was, well, a little rough. I did alright, but no one stopped their conversations to listen. Each performer gets to sing two, so I chose a more familiar song – no, I chose my favorite song for the closing number. I don’t remember when I learned the song, but it is one that lives deep in my bones, that moves me in ways I can’t articulate.
The song is John Prine’s “Angel From Montgomery.”
The first time I ever played it publicly was at a church banquet in Winchester, Massachusetts and I led into the song by saying, “I relate to this song more than any song I know.” Then I sang the first line:
I am an old woman named after my mother . . .
Last night I didn’t say anything. I just started playing the introduction and then singing the words and it felt good and I didn’t care that the high guys were talking almost as loud as I was singing because I was singing. At Open Mic. After all these years.
The lines in the last verse that has always killed me snuck up softly as I stood there after my eleven hour day, just a couple of phrases away from ending the evening of performers I didn’t hear:
how the hell can a person go to work every morning
and come home every evening and have nothing to say
“That’s why I’m here,” I thought. “It’s been a long day, but I still have something.”
I finished my short set and stepped down to talk to Ginger and to pack up my guitar. As we were walking out, I turned to one of the high guys and said, “Good job tonight.”
He smiled and said, “You, too, sir.”
“Just give me one thing I can hold on to,” says the song. Last night, for me, that was it.
Peace,
Milton
P. S. — And here’s the person who taught me the song.
The last three weeks have been a bit of a blur for me. The restaurant at Duke reopened with the new semester and there were still things to do at the Durham restaurant beyond my usual responsibilities, leaving me with one day off in the last twenty or so days until today. Things have gone well. Business is better at Duke than it was this time last year, our staff is working well, and I’m feeling good about the way things are going – and I am going non stop. In the meantime, my writing has been more private than usual, consisting mostly of my doing my best to stick with my Morning Pages; far too many nights I have chosen to sleep rather than post here, which is not an easy choice because it leaves me feeling lopsided and out of balance.
Mary Oliver says, “Writing a poem is making and keeping appointments between the heart and the learned skills of the conscious mind.”
By that definition, life is poetry: it’s all about keeping those same appointments between head and heart, between being and doing, and stepping into the traffic of the intersection where all those things meet to see how we might keep things flowing, rather than ending up in gridlock.
I’m aware these days, in my aching feet and tired bones, of the unity of our created beings, the oneness of body, mind, and spirit that give our words physicality and turn our actions into language. How I am able to think and feel and write is never separated from my body, even when I try to disconnect them. Oliver, again:
Language is rich and malleable. It is a living, vibrant, material, and every part of a poem works with every other part – the content, the pace, the diction, the rhythm, the tone – as well as the very sliding, floating, thumping, rapping sounds of it.
Ginger and I took Ella, our youngest Schnauzer, out for a walk this afternoon. Actually, I should say I joined the two of them on their regular outing since I was not at work. Walking has been a connecting activity for us over the years. There’s something about talking about thoughts and feelings as your feet pound the pavement that is both literally and figuratively grounding. We were talking about some of the choices we are making these days and how they are making us feel more responsible. She used the word first and it brought back something I have either heard or read (the source now lost in the file cabinets of my mind) about the way that word breaks down: response + ability – the ability to respond. The dictionary says the seven hundred year old roots of respond lie in answer, reply, and promise.
To live responsibly, then, we might say is living in a way that lets me keep my promises. When I let life get lopsided, I lose sight of the way in which, like poetry, every part of life works with every other part and I am not able to respond appropriately, by which I mean to answer life as an integrated being who has a sense of what is at stake in the slightest of encounters.
After our walk, we dropped Ella back at the house and took ourselves to dinner at Chubby’s Tacos, to use up the remnants of a gift certificate. The woman who appeared to be the manager, based on all the stuff she was trying to do during a very busy dinner rush, was task-oriented and terse, as I have experienced her on our other visits to the restaurant. She was not rude or unprofessional, but she seemed to be wearing her best relational Teflon so nothing would stick to her for long. The restaurant is small and our table was right next to the cash register. The manager was taking orders and we could see a large tattoo of a large dog on her calf. The woman stepped away from the register to do something else and Ginger asked if that was her dog.
“Yes,” she said. “We have four of them at our house.” The next thing I knew, the nonstick coating had fallen away and the woman came over to our table with some pictures she had pulled out from under the counter to show us photographs of her dogs, all of which had been rescued in one way or another. Ginger’s question had given the woman room to respond, to keep the promises we make to be human to one another, even as Ginger had kept hers by asking in the first place.
“The goal,” says Mary Oliver, “is to write memorably.”
Another +able words: able, in this case, to be remembered. The call, in this poem we call life, is to live memorably, responsibly – to keep our promises by fleshing out the details in such a way that the content, pace, diction, rhythm, and tone make more of our days than a recitation of what is wrong or what we wish would happen, and offer a slice of the story that belongs to and connects all of us.
When my life gets lopsided, I lose sight of my ability to respond, to answer, to play my part in the call and response of our existence and too easily convince myself that I am a solitary poet, composing a life that is mostly about me. The rhythm of life too quickly sounds more like metronome than melody and my words monosyllabic. When I choose to keep my promise to respond to the God who breathed me into existence, to Ginger who loves me unfailingly, to my singing Cuban dishwasher, to my tail-wagging Schnauzers, to those I pass in the traffic of life, I begin to remember I have one small part in a far larger work of poetic genius that calls me to be responsible, to keep my promises, and to live memorably.
Peace,
Milton
My friend David Gentiles posted an old Don McLean song on his blog today. That and my continued listening to Randy Newman’s Harps and Angels sent me on a little musical journey of my own this evening. And so, I offer a sampling of some of my favorite aging songwriters and some of their best work.
First, thanks to Davy, here’s another Don McLean song I’m glad he helped me remember, “Castles in the Air.”
It’s hard to let summer go by without a bit of the Boss,so here’s one of my favorite Springsteen songs, “If I Should Fall Behind.”
Back in an acoustic vein, here’s Jackson Browne’s solo acoustic performance of “In the Shape of a Heart.”
The Eagles covered Browne’s “Take it Easy” to start their career and added Tom Waits’ song, “Ol’ 55” to their On the Border album. (Well, at least it’s a segue to Tom singing it himself.)
Which brings me to another woderful writer of lyrics and melodies who sings them, well, creatively: Randy Newman. This song, “Losing You” was written for a friend who lost his son. It keeps knocking me out.
Thank you all, gentlemen. Keep up the good work.
Peace,
Milton
P. S. — Rick and Christy commented that the list lacked Guy Clark and John Hiatt. They are so right. Here then is John Hiatt singing “Through Your Hands,” which could just as well be a hymn —
and Guy Clark doing his best work with “Old Friends.” (Notice who is sitting in the circle.)
Their encouragement also led me to add another favorite from Lyle Lovett — who I took Ginger to see on our first date (singing a Steve Fromholtz song).
Peace, once again,
Milton
We have a new dishwasher at the restaurant at Duke. His name is Arnaldo and he is from Cuba. He is about my height and, I’m guessing not much over half my weight. His skin is dark – ebony – and yet luminous enough to let you see the lines worn into his skin by wherever life took him before he ended up in our kitchen. The way those lines shape and mark his face allow him to exude the same kind of calming presence as Danny Glover did when he turned to Kevin Kline and said, “Man, get yourself to the Grand Canyon.”
That’s it: he has Danny Glover eyes.
(And I hope the obscure reference makes you go watch the movie.)
He comes into the kitchen promptly at five, shakes my hand, and says, “How are you, Sir?”
Sir. So, you see, he has me smiling from the start. And then he goes to work. First, he washes whatever dishes and pots and utensils and bowls we have managed to stack into strange sculpture by the dish machine in the midst of our prep. He then cleans up his area to get it ready for dinner service and then asks me for something to do. Everyday. And with that question he moves from washing to being a part of the prep team, which is good because he actually is a cook; the job, however, was for a dishwasher and a job was what he needed. He doesn’t complain. He works and he smiles and he is kind. Kind in a way I rarely experiece. Kind in a way that changes the way the room feels when he walks in. Kind in a way that makes me glad we work together, even though tomorrow will mark four days that we have known each other. Kind in a way that makes me wonder about me and what it feels like when I walk in the room, whatever room that might be.
Our week has been, as they say in the restaurant business, a “soft opening”: we had eighteen customers the first night, thirty-six last night, and fifty tonight. I’m not much at geometric progressions, but if things continue we should hit a thousand soon after Labor Day. We are happy because it was well into September last year before we hit fifty. We are off to a good start. And we are all tired because we have been going full strength all week, trying to make things the best they can be. I’ve had three ten or eleven hour days in a row and there are a few more to come without much down time in between over the next couple of weeks. Yet, I find myself looking forward to work and one of the reasons is that I get to be around Arnaldo and share in his kindness.
As we move toward the end of the dinner shift and things slow down on the line, the cook’s job turns from creating to clean up and the dishwasher moves into full motion: the last hour is his heavy time, getting everything washed and put away. As Abel and I were wrapping and labeling things to go back in the walk-in, I could hear Arnaldo singing from the dish area. He was singing in Spanish, so I didn’t understand him, but what I did comprehend was he was not singing as though he needed something to get him through the stacks of pots and plates; he was singing like he had the afternoon off and the top down on the Wrangler, full of joy and life.
I am fortunate in these days to say part of what happens when I go to work is I get to watch and listen to Arnaldo sing and be kind. Tomorrow will be a good day.
I’m sure.
Peace,
Milton