I had a few moments to check my blog reader before heading to work and found two quotes from two very different people, Beth and Maggi, both quoting others. I read them in this order. First:
Everybody wants to be a rock star, but no one wants to learn the chords.
and then:
Seeing the other person as gift, striving to see God within them, does not make people less irritating. It does help me grow up . . . .
My first restaurant cooking job was in a restaurant that was open for all three meals. After my first breakfast shift, I asked the chef the best way to learn how to flip eggs in the pan with a flip of the wrist, rather than having to use a spatula. He went to the refrigerator and pulled out a flat of eggs (which is thirty of them) and said, “That flat costs me about three dollars. By the time you go through those eggs, you’ll be able to flip the eggs with ease. Pretty cheap lesson, if you ask me.”
learning breakfast
there are several secrets to good eggs open secrets, I guess – I can tell you the pan needs to be good and hot – (non stick helps, too) with a swirl of clarified butter and then the egg, broken (shell, that is) into the pan – and the white sticks like paint (try again.) (and again.) lower the heat so the egg doesn’t cook too fast – (try again.) and then rock the pan in a gentle circle till the egg moves and then, well, you flip it. (try again.) the yolk splatters like a paint ball. (try again.) (and again.) (And again.) they asked for over easy. (again.) these are too runny. (again.) the pan is cold. the butter is too hot. before you decide to scramble everything, try again and again. you will learn, if you try. again.
Not every lesson in life comes as easily or as inexpensively.
When we opened the restaurant at Duke last fall, we averaged about thirty customers a night; fifty was busy. Over the course of the semester, the number grew to where fifty was the average. This semester, we’ve seen our customer base expand to where sixty-five is a slow night. Tonight we served ninety and topped our highest sales amount to date. Getting busier takes some adjustment, because we have to rethink what “normal” is. When the number of covers we do every night (that’s restaurant lingo for the number of dinners we serve; why, I do not know) increases without the kitchen staff growing, what has to be done in a normal day of work changes, too.
When we first moved to Boston, I had a part time job at the Blockbuster Video in our Charlestown neighborhood. Arlene, the assistant manager, was married to a Boston cop. What I knew of the life of a police officer came from Hill Street Blues. I was surprised at how mundane the daily life of a cop really was. There just weren’t that many shootouts to be attended to.
Thanks to Top Chef and Iron Chef and the Food Network in general, my profession gets its share of play, making it look glamorous and interesting, when much of the day is fairly routine and mundane: chopping and cleaning and slicing and cleaning. Though I get to make cool stuff and wear a white jacket, what I do is manual labor, and somewhat repetitive. Not a day goes by that I don’t chop my share of onions and celery and carrots for the two soups I have to make. I bake the bread for dinner each night. At least twice a week I have to make desserts (the same ones). Ii cut steaks and fish and roast chickens. And then, as I said, there’s the cleaning: sanitizing the stainless steel countertops, sweeping and mopping the floors. Once a week, I take inventory for the coming week’s food order.
I also come home most nights and try to write, which is its own mix of mystery and mundaneness (mudanity?). Tonight, in my Writer’s Almanac moment, I followed the link to author of today’s poem (a jewel of its own), Mark Strand, to find one that had been featured a year or so ago:
What of the neighborhood homes awash In a silver light, of children hunched in the bushes, Watching the grown-ups for signs of surrender, Signs that the irregular pleasures of moving From day to day, of being adrift on the swell of duty, Have run their course? O parents, confess To your little ones the night is a long way off And your taste for the mundane grows; tell them Your worship of household chores has barely begun; Describe the beauty of shovels and rakes, brooms and mops; Say there will always be cooking and cleaning to do, That one thing leads to another, which leads to another; Explain that you live between two great darks, the first With an ending, the second without one, that the luckiest Thing is having been born, that you live in a blur Of hours and days, months and years, and believe It has meaning, despite the occasional fear You are slipping away with nothing completed, nothing To prove you existed. Tell the children to come inside, That your search goes on for something you lost—a name, A family album that fell from its own small matter Into another, a piece of the dark that might have been yours, You don’t really know. Say that each of you tries To keep busy, learning to lean down close and hear The careless breathing of earth and feel its available Languor come over you, wave after wave, sending Small tremors of love through your brief, Undeniable selves, into your days, and beyond.
Man. What he said.
For all of the frontiers that still may be, for all the places I want to go where I have not yet been, for all that appears to be undiscovered by me (though most of it already found by someone else), my daily life holds new things when I am willing to develop “a taste” for the mundane, and cultivate a sense of wonder in ordinary things.
Some time back, I got a note from someone who reads my blog and shared a connection to Coryell County, Texas, where I used to pastor, wondering how someone who used to pastor a part-time Southern Baptist Church outside Gatesville, Texas ended up as a chef and married to a minister in the United Church of Christ. Though there were a couple of amazing experiences that became altars along the way, for the most part it happened as Strand describes: the one thing leads to another, that leads to another. I followed my heart (and the woman I love) in big things and in small things, the daily gestures – not unlike the making of the mirepoix – that build a life out of the bricks we call days. I understand the fear of having nothing accomplished, though that speaks more to my own sense of not being enough than it does to what my life adds up to. In my best moments, brought upon by things like Strand’s poem, I know showing up for life everyday and doing what I can to be kind and open adds up in the midst of the cooking and cleaning. and the coming home each night to the one who loves me best, in all sorts of ordinary ways.
Last fall, when we were just getting the restaurant at Duke going, serving fifty people felt like a busy night. We wanted to be busier than that, but when we were averaging about thirty-five, fifty felt like a lot. Last Wednesday night, we served one hundred and eight people in a little over one hundred and eighty minutes. It was the third time in three weeks we had gone over the century mark. Needless to say, I came home tired. Our slow nights now are in the sixties; average closer to seventy-five. Tonight we served over ninety but the new thing was it didn’t feel hectic and busy like the other nights when got close to a hundred covers. I knew we had sold a lot of food, but my body didn’t feel tired like it did last week.
I suppose it has to do with what we have gotten used to, or what we have come to expect.
Roger Bannister was the first person to run a mile in under four minutes, which he did in 1954. No one had ever done that before. Within a year of his breaking the barrier, sixteen other runners had done the same thing, as if he had found some sort of gate in the fabric of time and left it open. The current world record for the mile is 3:43.13, set by Hicham El Guerrouj in 1999. In that record race, the person who came in fifteenth ran the mile in 3:53.64. So much for four minutes. Another couple of years and people will start talking about breaking the 3:40 barrier. And someone will.
We all those that’s-as-far-as-I-can-go lines in our lives; probably more than one. We see the horizon as a limit, rather than an invitation. It’s as far or fast as we can go, as good as we get.
When I was in seminary, I took voice lessons because I wanted to learn to sing better. I was not a music major, but one of the professors was willing to take me on. After a couple of semesters with him, I continued taking private lessons from one of the doctoral students. One of the lessons that stuck with me was how she helped me visualize a way to sing higher. Rather than talking about reaching the note, she experimented with other metaphors until she found one that let me relax and blow through my own barriers. When I began to think of myself sinking into the earth, grounding myself, and letting the note rise up out of me, I relaxed and hit the notes without strain or struggle.
It still works.
One of the most helpful ways I think about Jesus is to see him as the ultimate human being. For me, to take his humanity seriously is to see him as the most human that has walked the planet. We’ve let the word human mean faulty or broken, like the old Human League song: “I’m only human, born to make mistakes.” (Man – I can’t believe I actually made that reference.) Jesus’ self-awareness, integrity, compassion, intentionality, focus, open-heartedness, kindness, forthrightness, and grace were human traits. They are in us as well, much like the sub-four minute mile is in every runner who has ever broken the barrier.
Being truly human is being whole, not broken.
Tonight was easy, not because we were somehow exceptional this evening, but because we managed to catch a glimpse of what we are capable of doing. And we prepped hard. And we’ve worked on how to set up the kitchen and talk to each other and plate the meals. What we did to make the evening easier was to be cooks. Good cooks. We did what cooks ought to do and found we could do even more.
While I was in seminary taking voice lessons, a book came out called The Seven Last Words of the Church, which were, “We’ve never done it that way before.” In all the church-world blogging that goes on – emergent, mainline, and otherwise – there are a lot of good ideas, yet I’m often troubled by the tone. We somehow feel we need to castigate who we are as the church (or what someone else is doing) in order to think about who we are becoming. We come up with new labels, new buildings, new models, new slogans – all of them with historical antecedents. The discussions are good and interesting and, sometimes, even hopeful. Yet I hear the same mistake as the song I quoted (dare I label it Human League Syndrome?), because we keep talking about how flawed the church is because it’s made up of human beings.
What if we chose to look at our congregations of people as the reason for hope, rather than that which has to be overcome, or corrected, or fixed. What if we chose to be as human as Jesus in our dealings with one another? We might find love and trust are way more original that sin has ever been.
Should you be tempted to write me off as an idealist, let me say this: I can think of nineteen places I would rather go than a church committee meeting. Part of the reason I am no longer in vocational ministry is my own impatience with the pace of change in most churches. And I believe in the church, that same church, when I’m most in touch with my true humanity.
You see, I got from the kitchen to the congregation because, on this night when things went so well and we were at our best, I was working on the line with Chef #2, whom I have had to learn how to humanize, as (I think) he has also had to learn to do with me. We have both worked hard and we now work well together, even enjoy working together. My attitude changed when I began to see him as a person, rather than a problem. Writing him off was the easy unoriginal act; finding him and letting him find me has been full of creative, human things, changing both our cooking and our connection. We’re a sub-four minute kitchen, if you will, and still gaining speed.
Who knows where we’ll go – after all, we’re only human.
I was catching up on my Writer’s Almanac tonight and found yesterday was the shared birthday of Billy Collins and Edith Grossman. Billy Collins was the US Poet Laureate from 2001-2003 and holds the distinction of being a poet who actually sells books. Edith Grossman is a book translator, known best for her translations of Gabriel Garcia Marques’ books and what is for many the definitive translation of Don Quixote. Born five years apart, they share this day, as well as the ability to make language come alive for us, the readers.
Grossman describes her vocation in this way:
Thinking up characters and plot is not a problem translators have to face, but the imagination of language and how one says what one needs to say in the best way possible—the most effective way possible—that’s a problem that translators have to deal with constantly.
Collins demonstrates the imagination of language brilliantly also, in his own way. Here is his poem, “Litany,” which he said came about because he “stole,” as he said, the opening two lines from another poem that needed to be improved. (He also said it with a rather wry smile on his face.)
You are the bread and the knife, The crystal goblet and the wine . . . Jacques Crickillon
You are the bread and the knife, the crystal goblet and the wine. You are the dew on the morning grass and the burning wheel of the sun. You are the white apron of the baker and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.
However, you are not the wind in the orchard, the plums on the counter, or the house of cards. And you are certainly not the pine-scented air. There is just no way you are the pine-scented air.
It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge, maybe even the pigeon on the general’s head, but you are not even close to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.
And a quick look in the mirror will show that you are neither the boots in the corner nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.
It might interest you to know, speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world, that I am the sound of rain on the roof.
I also happen to be the shooting star, the evening paper blowing down an alley, and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.
I am also the moon in the trees and the blind woman’s tea cup. But don’t worry, I am not the bread and the knife. You are still the bread and the knife. You will always be the bread and the knife, not to mention the crystal goblet and—somehow—the wine.
One of my favorite books on preaching is Walter Brueggemann’s Finally Comes the Poet: Daring Speech for Proclamation. Just the title kills me: poetry as a daring use of words. Perhaps he could write a sequel called Finally Comes the Translator, since both are working to find the mot juste, the right word to say it best.
Spending most of my day in a bilingual kitchen where most of us know only a few words of the others’ language, I have a growing appreciation for what it would feel like to hear Abel or Tony speak and then actually to be able to know the right English words to choose to articulate what they said in Spanish. In real life, I’m the culinary equivalent of a hunt-and-peck typist, hitting a word here or there, but having no sense of how I might actually put a sentence together, much less a coherent thought.
In that same kitchen, to make the shift from the prosaic actions of prep work to the poetry of putting a plate together to send out to a diner (at least I hope that’s what’s happening) makes the metaphor even more alive for me. Should we choose to live imaginatively, we are both translators and poets of this life of ours, seeking how we might say what needs to be said in the best way possible. To borrow words from King Lear:
the weight of these sad times we must obey speak what we feel and not what we ought to say
We had been with Julia and Larry for a couple of hours Friday evening before the conversation turned to snakes, mostly because both Ginger and Larry were going to preach about them following the lectionary passage from John 3 where Jesus said, “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness . . .”
“Everybody has a snake story,” Larry said. And then we all began telling ours.
My seminary pastorate was near the little town of Oglesby, Texas, which was “famous” Rattlesnake Roundup every February. (They held the event when it was cold so the snakes weren’t moving too much.) Those who wanted to hunt the snake combed the land around the town, bringing in every rattler they could find, their goal being to lessen the snake population in their area. The rest of us just showed up for the festival where we saw rattlesnakes, touched rattlesnakes, and even ate rattlesnakes. One demonstration that sticks in my mind was watching a guy named Snuffy or Spunky lay down on an open sleeping bag. Once he was still, they began placing live rattlesnakes around him – twenty snakes or so – and then they closed the sleeping bag and zipped it up. Over the next twenty minutes or so, Spanky moved slowly – inched – to work his way out of the bag without any of the snakes biting him. When he was far enough out of the bag that we could see his chest, we could also see one of the snakes had coiled up on his chest and gone to sleep. Once his feet cleared the bag, Slappy moved his hands on either side of the sleeping snake and threw it across the pen he was in and ran off.
When the Israelites were besieged by snakes, Moses didn’t organize a snake hunt. Instead he fashioned a snake out of bronze and put it up on a pole. The people were told to look up at the snake if they were bitten and they would be saved. As Larry pointed out in our discussion, Moses didn’t chase the snakes away but gave the people a way to learn to live with the snakes instead.
During Lent, some folks have been meeting before church at coffee houses around the city to discuss different subjects. Ginger and Carla chose alliterative titles:
Ten or twelve of us gathered with our coffee and pastries and a page of quotes to spur our discussion. The opening words were from Henri Nouwen:
Gratitude . . . goes beyond the “mine” and “thine” and claims the truth that all of life is a pure gift. In the past I always thought of gratitude as a spontaneous response to the awareness of gifts received, but now I realize that gratitude can also be lived as a discipline. The discipline of gratitude is the explicit effort to acknowledge that all I am and have is given to me as a gift of love, a gift to be celebrated with joy.
Gratitude as discipline: the practice of giving thanks.
Yesterday was a perfect spring afternoon. The air was cool, but I could still feel the sun on my skin. The sky was cloudless, save a white whisp or two, and felt expansive even from my backyard. Standing there with our pups prancing around at my feet, it was easy to connect with something beyond me, with all that is transcendent and hopeful and promising. How could I not be thankful? It came bubbling out of me. Though I am deeply grateful in those moments, I’m not sure that’s the same discipline Nouwen was describing. As the idea hung with me through the afternoon and my turn on the line for the dinner shift at the restaurant, I kept wondering how gratitude grows from response to intention, and I remembered a poem by W. S. Merwin that is one of my favorites:
Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you we are stopping on the bridge to bow from the railings we are running out of the glass rooms with our mouths full of food to look at the sky and say thank you we are standing by the water looking out in different directions
back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging after funerals we are saying thank you after the news of the dead whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you in a culture up to its chin in shame living in the stench it has chosen we are saying thank you
over telephones we are saying thank you in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators remembering wars and the police at the back door and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks that use us we are saying thank you with the crooks in office with the rich and fashionable unchanged we go on saying thank you thank you
with the animals dying around us our lost feelings we are saying thank you with the forests falling faster than the minutes of our lives we are saying thank you with the words going out like cells of a brain with the cities growing over us like the earth we are saying thank you faster and faster with nobody listening we are saying thank you we are saying thank you and waving dark though it is.
We are called to say thank you not because everything is wonderful or there are no more snakes on the plain or we hit the lottery. We are called to practice gratitude because thanksgiving is healing, both for those we thank and for our wounded hearts. “If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, ‘thank you,’ that would suffice,” said Meister Eckhart. The way through the snakes and the dark and whatever else might foment fear or feed our anger is to give thanks, to practice gratitude, to train our hearts to sing a thankful song.
Even the hissing of summer lawns can’t drown out such a melody.
First, I have a favor to ask. Our church is participating in the Durham CROP Walk tomorrow, which raises money for Church World Services hunger relief both locally and around the world. If you are able, I invite you to support us in our walk. You can donate here.
The meal began with an amuse-bouche – something to entertain the palate: a small chunk of fish that tasted of smoky bacon topped with a beet sorbet. When the chef came to see how they liked the meal, he asked her which dish was her favorite and she picked that one.
That’s it. By dumb luck, I’ve hit some nerve and named his favorite dish, one that he’s been working on for months. He kneels down, and for twenty minutes we talk. Well, mostly he talks and I try to figure out what he’s saying. Lately, he’s been thinking about the idea of masculine and feminine foods. Do I agree that some foods are masculine or feminine? Before I answer, he tells me how he things about making them “dance” together. Sometimes, at night, after the kitchen has closed, he takes ingredients that he thinks will not work together and figures out how they could. Beets alone didn’t work with fish, but beet sorbet was sweet enough to offset the salt of the fish, for instance. He has many thoughts about sauce, which I miss entirely when he begins talking too fast for me to follow.
Dance works best for me as metaphor. I have good rhythm, I love music, I can feel the beat, but if you’re looking for someone who can really cut a rug, I’m not the guy. I appreciate dance. I even married a dancer, but I am not one. I do understand how, as John Michael Montgomery once sang, “life’s a dance you learn as you go.” Cooking is, too; I may not be much on the dance floor, but I’m a pretty good culinary choreographer.
culinary 1638, “of the kitchen,” from L. culinarius, from culina “kitchen.” Meaning “of cookery” is from 1651.
choreography c.1789, from Fr. chorégraphie, coined from Gk. khoreia “dance” + graphein “to write.” Choreograph (v.) is from 1943.
Culichoreographer?
We changed our menu a bit at Duke last week, following spring break, to keep with the season and to spark some interest. As we talked about what we might change, Abel asked if he could make the pasta sauce.
“I have a good idea,” he said.
We had a chipotle alfredo on our last menu, but he had different ideas. I watched him write his dance last Monday. He diced onions, celery, and garlic and sautéed them in butter until they had cooked down and then added Marsala wine and let that reduce.
“I need rosemary,” he said. And I got him bunches of it, which he chopped and added to the mix. He was cooking and tasting and thinking at the same time. “Now a little tomato paste.” He finished each sentence with something less than a period, leaving a sense of expectation hanging over the pot. He stirred in the tomato paste and then added chicken stock, some cream, salt, pepper, and a couple of other seasonings, and then let it all simmer – dance together – until he was ready to say, “Taste this.”
I dipped my tasting spoon into the pot and touched it too my lips. To call it a rosemary sauce is to sell it short. I could taste layers of flavor — movements, if you will: a beginning, a middle, and an end, all in balance and harmony. It’s awesome. It’s selling like crazy. And he choreographed the whole thing with the stuff we had on hand, creating a new thing out of all that was familiar and available.
Whether walking or dancing or skipping, there are only so many motions our bodies can make. Some come naturally; some take training and practice and skill. What makes the difference between how I look moving to music and a dance is how the movements fit together – the conversation between body and heart and mind that makes the simple movement of arm or leg become something transcendent.
Maya Angelou’spoem for Bill Clinton’s inauguration is one of my favorites because of its simplicity. I was teaching English in an inner city Boston high school at the time. I took the poem to my students and showed them she hardly used any words that had more than three syllables, or that were not just ordinary words.
A rock. A river. A tree.
People used those words everyday, but she put them together and they became a work of art, they became something that spoke for and to everyone.
I love the detail Flinn gives about the chef staying late to work with flavors he thought would work together and staying with them until he figured out how they did – to rehearse, to create his rough drafts – so he could choreograph a dish for his customers that would inspire them. He danced with his food the same way Abel worked on his sauce, or I love working on my soups, cooking and stirring and adding and tasting, over and over.
Why Jackson Browne has my soundtrack this particular week, I’m not sure, but “For a Dancer” popped up in my play list as I was writing tonight, moving me from the kitchen to the dance of daily life that calls us to choreograph and collaborate at every turn.
keep a fire for the human race let your prayers go drifting into space you never know what will be coming down perhaps a better world is drawing near and just as easily it could all disappear along with whatever meaning you might have found dont let the uncertainty turn you around (the world keeps turning around and around) go on and make a joyful sound
into a dancer you have grown from a seed somebody else has thrown go on ahead and throw some seeds of your own and somewhere between the time you arrive and the time you go may lie a reason you were alive but you’ll never know
For many of the years we lived in New England, we shared our Charlestown neighborhood with the USS Constitution, which was docked in the Charlestown Navy Yard. I even got to ride on it one Bunker Hill Day (that’s June 17 to those not from Boston) on its turn around cruise in Boston harbor. It is still the oldest commissioned vessel in the Navy. One of the things that means is the Navy can continue to repair it. Once a ship is decommissioned it loses its historical authenticity if anything is altered, but a commissioned vessel can be changed and kept up. The Constitution, as it is today, is only about ten percent original material, even though it is still recognizable and considered to be the ship it has always been.
Tonight, at the end of a day that included working an extra catering shift to serve lunch to 330 people in the halls of Cameron Indoor Stadium to sharing another round of oysters with my friend Terry to wine and cheese with new friends, Ginger started thumbing through old photo albums getting ready for some cleaning and arranging we have to do tomorrow. As she turned pages, I saw myself as I have not seen myself in years; I, too, it seems, am about ten percent original material.
And still in commission.
About the time this picture was taken, Jackson Browne released what is still my favorite record of his – and it was a record: Late for the Sky. The second track, “Fountain of Sorrow,” begins
looking through some photographs I found inside a drawer I was taken by a photograph of you there were one or two I know that you would have liked a little more but they didnt show your spirit quite as true
you were turning round to see who was behind you and I took your childish laughter by surprise and at the moment that my camera happened to find you there was just a trace of sorrow in your eyes
fountain of sorrow, fountain of light youve known that hollow sound of your own steps in flight youve had to hide sometimes, but now youre all right and its good to see your smiling face tonight
Some of the pictures brought back very specific memories. I could remember when it was taken, what was going on, even details down to smells and sounds and feelings. Others were harder to place. Then there were inadvertent series: Ginger and Milton hugging each other over the years; Milton in the kitchen; Schnauzerfest. Since organization is not our strong suit, some albums had pictures from different years sitting next to each other, making me wonder how I got from one to the other.
And how I got from there to here.
I’m the liturgist for worship this Sunday. The gospel passage is from John 3 – the last half of Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus. Though the reading doesn’t begin until Jesus starts talking about snakes on a stick, I can’t help but notice Nicodemus’ bewilderment at having to be born again. Perhaps he had a hard time because he knew nothing of photographs (or Jackson Browne, for that matter). He had no albums to thumb through, calling him to remember his wonder years or what life was like in Pharisee School. As I turned pages, I saw myself born again and again, the photographs morphing from mounds of memories into gatherings of gratitude.
I know what it’s like to be caught up in your own world — I go to work in a windowless kitchen and stay there all day (there’s a lot to do) my world quickly becomes about my world unless someone bursts in or I break out
is that what happened to you?
is that how you decided you deserved the bonuses even though your company was broke and you needed money from the rest of us just to have a company? did you convince yourself that being rich and being smart were the same thing?
I have an idea:
come spend the day in my world. watch Tony, the dishwasher who speaks very little English and understands only the words that give him work to do and he smiles the whole shift and gets the occasional bonus of food to take home.
but you won’t come.
they say you’re too big to fail. I dropped a whole pan of potatoes au gratin — twenty four servings that took two hours to make — ten minutes before service began; and so we did without them because I, big as I am, failed. and that was just today
that was just today.
being not rich and smart are not necessarily the same thing, so I won’t claim to understand credit default swaps, but I do understand this: you may be too big to fail but your not too big to be wrong, or deceitful. Come clean. Quit stealing.
In my search for a writing prompt after a long, busy, and good day at the restaurant (we served more people than we ever have: 108 – in 180 minutes) I stopped by The Writer’s Almanac and learned today would have been John Updike’s seventy-seventh birthday had he lived only a few weeks longer. In the description of him and of his writing, he was quoted as saying, “My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me — to give the mundane its beautiful due.”
I looked up mundane just to see what I might find. We use the word to mean the boring, routine stuff, yet the roots of the word go back centuries and find their first meaning as “belonging to the world.” Mundane things are the stuff every day is made of. Related words include everyday, routine, unremarkable, workaday, quotidian.
I love that word: quotidian. For reasons that have nothing to do with etymology, quotidian always makes me think of quixotic, which derives its meaning from Don Quixote, one of the great characters of literature and an extravagant romantic.
A quotidian Quixote, then, would be an everyday romantic, I suppose.
Wait – I have a picture of one:
And now he must rest; tomorrow holds the promise of another everyday.
I must begin with an update on James, our music director, who was in a car accident a week ago last Saturday in which he escaped from a burning car and sustained smoke inhalation injuries. The doctors kept him heavily sedated and intubated for much of the week while they, for lack of a better term, vacuumed out his lungs. They called it a bronchoscopy. They were able to clean out his lungs and they began regenerating quickly. He was released over the weekend and is spending time with both his family and his in-laws. We are relieved and thankful.
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On Sunday nights I work at the Durham restaurant my chef owns, rather than at Duke. From time to time, the house manager and I pass the evening by trading ear worms – those songs (usually bad ones) that get inside your head and won’t go away. You know what I mean:
we had joy we had fun we had seasons in the sun but the stars we could reach were just starfish on the beach
Sorry about that. Really.
This morning, I was reading email and blog posts and came across what turned out to be a heart worm for me, if you will, because it has stuck with me all day. And that has been a good thing. The poem came from a post at Maggi Dawn’s blog and was written by Hafiz, a 14th century Sufi mystic.
Even after all this time the sun never says to the earth, “you owe me.” Look what happens to a love like that, it lights up the whole sky.
Here’s why the poem bored in and stayed with me.
On three very specific occasions over the last week and a half I have had the same choice to make, a choice that is not easy for me. I’ve been standing in line – once at Petco (where the pets go), once at Food Lion, and once in Old Navy – and the line, from my perspective, was longer than it needed to be. The reasons were different in each case, yet some of the circumstances were similar: there were registers not open, other employees around. It ‘s the kind of needless inefficiency and inconvenience that drives me nuts. No – it makes me mad. I don’t understand why people whose businesses depend on customers don’t pay much heed to customer service. In most cases I can work myself into quite a state in the time it takes – usually a long time, it seems – for me to finally get my turn at the register.
To get what I’m owed.
I went into Petco to get a new harness for Ella, who chewed through hers – for the second or third time. She’s also chewed through five leashes, but they have a lifetime guarantee and the store keeps replacing them. Not so with the $30 harness. When I got to the front of the store, six people were already in line and the employee at the register was paging the manager. I was not close enough to hear what was going on, but we stood there about five minutes before anyone came to open another register. The rest of us moved to the other line and things were going along swimmingly until the guy in front of me pulled out a coupon the computer didn’t recognize. Seven minutes later, it was my turn.
At some point in the first line, I could feel myself begin to get, shall we say, edgy. I had some other errands to run. I didn’t like them wasting my time. (As if it were mine to begin with.) On this particular day, however, I had the wherewithal to hear another voice. I decided I had time to wait. I wasn’t going to let it get to me. Maybe it was the guy in front of me (that’s right: the guy with the coupons) who began grumbling and gave me some sense of myself. Maybe Hafiz’ poem was already working its way to me somehow. But I relaxed and the time passed quickly. When I finally got to the register, the man behind apologized for my having to wait.
“That’s alright,” I said. “It’s not like the last ten minutes were going to change my life.” He laughed; I did, too.
Then he handed me my receipt and said, “I gave you twenty percent off because you were kind to me. I wish there were more people like you.”
“You have no idea,” I wanted to say. I thanked him instead and wished him well, and I went on my way thinking I wish I was more like the me I saw in that moment, or at least more consistently me in the incidental interactions of life where I am most capable of feeling I am owed something. I have found myself in the other two interactions I mentioned. I haven’t gotten any more discounts, but the woman at the Food Lion did call me, “Honey.” Then again, I think she did that to everyone in the store.
“Look what happens to a love like that,” Hafiz wrote. “It lights up the whole sky.”
His words stick in my heart because when I allow love like that to break through me in the billiard ball moments of life, where we bump into one another and go our separate ways, I’ve seen how kindness can illuminate. I’ve also seen how hard darkness can fall when I choose to demand what I think is due me. Trust me, I know how to bring down a room. Tonight, with the poem close at hand, I found an old song by an old friend, Bob Bennett,
I’ve no need to be reminded of all my failures and my sins for I can write my own indictment of who I am and who I’ve been I know that grace by definition is something I can never earn but for all the things that I may have missed there’s a lesson I believe that I have learned
there’s a hand of kindness holding me holding on to me
I am not owed; I am the debtor. Here’s hoping my heart worm doesn’t go away.
