don't eat alone

Somewhere in the middle of the afternoon today, I found what I thought would be the opening lines to a poem for my post:

when they ask how you’re doing
say something other than tired

The line came to me because of how tired I felt and I wished for the wherewithal to say something beyond the obvious when someone asked how I was doing. Answering, “I’m tired” is akin to saying, “I’m busy.” Both may be true, but they lie at the base of the hierarchy of meaning, when it comes to feelings. (Oh, are you reading this? That last paragraph was mostly talking to myself.)

Tonight, after a long day of work – long for reasons other than being tired, I met Ginger and some friends at Six Plates Wine Bar to listen to my friend, Terry, who is an amazing harmonica player and who plays once a month with a wonderful jazz trio who do an awesome cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne.”

There are nights when you gather with friends, and then there are nights when friends gather around you. Tonight, for me, was the latter. I had the opening lines early in the day; I needed my friends to show me where the poem wanted to go.

when they ask how you’re doing

say something other than tired
say something other than busy
look for something to say

beyond the shadow of circumstance,
past the pugilism of pettiness,
through the façade of failure

and say that thing; say it again

say it the way you sing that song
that bored deep into your heart
long ago, before you were tired

before you knew about busy,
when you could remember the truth
without having to be reminded

when they ask how you’re doing
answer a different question
tell them you know what it’s like

to be gathered around by friends
and harmonica music
you never get tired of that

Peace,
Milton

On nights like tonight
when I come home tired
and try to write, only
to have my little dog

begin bouncing her ball
on my feet, begging me
to choose her over words,
I think about monks

and those who cloister
themselves to meditate,
yes, and to write, to get
closer to God, seeing

isolation as the way to
make meaning of life.
I write in traffic, feeling
like the street performer

who juggled three things
chosen by the crowd –
a bowling ball, an apple,
and a working chain saw –

and kept them all in the air.

That’s contemplation —
and it’s a public act. (Now
I sound like I’m polarizing.)

Those cloistered clerics may
have had about as much
choice in the pace of life
as I, a juggler, myself,

who wishes for a couple
more hours of sleep,
and wonders how one
who unfamiliar with the

unabashed ambush of
canine affection finds
anything to say at all
on nights like tonight.

Peace,
Milton

By the time most of you read this (actually, by the time I finish writing), it will be April, whose first week holds a sort of harmonic convergence for me. The First of April marks the beginning of National Poetry Month (National GeekFest, as Ginger lovingly calls it); this weekend brings the NCAA Basketball Tournaments to a glorious close; and, Monday marks Opening Day for my beloved Red Sox. I suppose I should also mention Palm Sunday falls in there as well.

Basketball has dominated the airwaves for some time now and I know there will always be Sox stories to tell. Tonight I will tell you a story about poets, two of them, and let their words be the invitation to the month to come.

Several years ago – OK, a whole bunch of years ago, just after Ginger and I moved to Boston, I drove to Rochester, New York to meet my brother, who was living in Akron, Ohio at the time. We picked Rochester because it was about halfway. Meeting halfway was a good metaphor, even though we didn’t see it at the time, because we were at a place in our relationship where we were having a hard time finding each other. We gave it a valiant try, but were not very successful. (Later, we were.) I drove back to Boston, trying to make meaning out of what had happened and chose to drive home down Route 20 rather than the Interstate. Somewhere in the Berkshires, I met Jimmy Santiago Baca as he talked with an interviewer on NPR. Somewhere in my library is a paperback book of NPR interviews with the transcript of what I heard, but I’m not digging for quotes here; I’m remembering a moment. Whatever he said marked my heart as the sun fell behind me and I drove toward the ocean, toward home, toward whatever was next.

A couple of years later, I found Baca again as a part of Bill Moyers’ series, The Language of Life (which also introduced me to the Dodge Poetry Festival). I was teaching high school English in the Boston Public Schools and Baca made me believe poetry had a pivotal role to play in the lives of my students. I put one of his quotes above the board at the front of the room:

words can save your life.

Nathan Brown and I came to know each other through a mutual friend and have found a bond of our own that began with two important things: poetry and depression. He came to visit Ginger and me in Boston and, in the aisles of Wordsworth Books in Harvard Square, I handed him one of Baca’s books and said, “You need this.” A couple of weeks later he called me from a coffee shop somewhere in Oklahoma City doing his own version of Whitman’s barbaric yawp, almost unable to verbalize what Baca’s poetry was doing to him.

More years passed and I was driving one day when my phone rang and it was Nathan, again, on the other end of the phone. “Hang on,” he said, “I have someone who wants to say hello to you.” The next voice said,

“Milton, this is Jimmy Santiago Baca.”

For the next few minutes, he told me how Nathan had invited him to come to the University of Oklahoma, where Nathan teaches. And a few words coming out of the radio on a winding road found a way to connect the three of us across years and circumstance. I wish the years had afforded me the chance to know both men better; I’m grateful for the connection that exists and, in that gratitude offer a poem from each one as companions for your winding road.

I Am Offering This Poem
Jimmy Santiago Baca

I am offering this poem to you,
since I have nothing else to give.
Keep it like a warm coat,
when winter comes to cover you,
or like a pair of thick socks
the cold cannot bite through,

I love you,

I have nothing else to give you,
so it is a pot full of yellow corn
to warm your belly in the winter,
it is a scarf for your head, to wear
over your hair, to tie up around your face,

I love you,

Keep it, treasure it as you would
if you were lost, needing direction,
in the wilderness life becomes when mature;
and in the corner of your drawer,
tucked away like a cabin or a hogan
in dense trees, come knocking,
and I will answer, give you directions,
and let you warm yourself by this fire,
rest by this fire, and make you feel safe,

I love you,

It’s all I have to give,
and it’s all anyone needs to live,
and to go on living inside,
when the world outside
no longer cares if you live or die;
remember,

I love you.

_______________________

Loose Words
Nathan Brown

I’ve intended to tape it back in
for months – page 455 of my
fraying paperback dictionary.

I have to slide it into place, fix it,
every time I look up a word.
Page 455 hangs by a thread.

And like I said, I’ve intended
to tape it back in for months,
but . . . I don’t know . . .

there’s just something about words
in constant danger of being lost
that keeps me from doing it.

Happy Poetry Month. Happy Final Four. Go Sox. Hosanna.

Peace,
Milton

I would like to say
at the end of the day
that I still had some play
but that would be (somewhat) lying

I would like to reveal
all the things that I feel
you know – keeping it real
but that would be (mostly) sighing

So I’m going to bed
with much left unsaid
and though that rhymes with dead
I intend to be quite death-defying

For a good night of sleep
and all that will reap
will for sure help me keep
my promise to keep lentifying

Peace,
Milton

My friend Gordon has been telling the story of his church in San Antonio at his blog at at the High Calling website. Part of the story is about the pastor who preceded him — a friend of many of us – who was amazingly gifted at offering grace to others that he was not able to accept himself. Ultimately, it destroyed him.

Of course, that’s the Reader’s Digest Condensed Version of a much more complex and complicated story. I thought about him today during Communion because Communion was one of the places he most creatively invited those around him to open their hearts to God.

We continued our Lenten practice, as a congregation, of celebrating Communion in different ways each Sunday. Today we came forward to the Table where the bread and cup were laid out and we served ourselves. The metaphor in our movement that spoke to me was the Meal was only as sustaining as my willingness to take and eat. I had to get up and come to supper. As I walked down the aisle, the tune playing in my head was a song our nephew, Scott, wrote for his older brother, Ben. I don’t know the story behind the song, other than it was a birthday gift. I know it speaks to me.

Ben’s Song (You Are Loved)

you’re hanging by a thread
it’s thinner everyday
but hold on –
there’s someone there to catch you

your plate had been wiped clean
there’s nothing left to eat
but hang in there —
you’ve been invited to a feast

you are loved
you are forgiven
you are safe inside
the center of redemption

your crippled body’s weak
you’re crawling on the ground
stand up –
there’s someone here to heal you

your eyes are old and blind
you’re groping in the dark
look around –
there’s a light that shines in darkness

you are loved
you are forgiven
you’re safe inside
the center of redemption

you’re wandering in a field
got lost along the way
but sit tight –
there’s a shepherd who will find you

you are loved
you are forgiven
you’re safe inside
the center of redemption

I spent some time tonight with iMovie, since I can’t for the life of me figure out how to upload music to Blogger, and made a (very rough) music video so you could hear the song, as well as read the lyric.

We are loved.
We are forgiven.
We are safe within the center of redemption.
Amen.

Peace,
Milton

can it be on these nights
when we are tucked in our home
curled up on the couch with
doughnuts of dogs at our feet,
the kitchen still holding the aroma
of the garlic I roasted this afternoon
the way we are holding life close,
with only a couple of lights burning

even the clouds have closed us in
still – beyond them the stars shine
small lights, from my view,
lights like ours, crossing the sky
constellations of community
each one a household shining
in the darkness; such is the stuff
of which universes are made

when we go to bed each night
we never turn off all the lights
two lamps stay burning in the kitchen,
both made from old fixtures;
can it be some sailor on a sea
we have yet to name finds his way
because our light is shining,
our kitchen light, our star?

Peace,
Milton

I finished Kathleen Flinn’s The Sharper the Knife, The Less You Cry today and found myself moved by her closing words:

As in cooking, life requires that you taste, taste, taste as you go along – you can’t wait until the dish of life is done. In my career, I always looked ahead to the place I wanted to go, the next rung on the ladder. It reminds me of “The Station” by Robert Hastings, a parable read at our wedding. The message is that while on a journey, we are sure the answer lies at the destination. But in reality, there is no station, no “place to arrive at once and for all. The joy of life is the trip, and the station is a dream that constantly outdistances us.”

How many tears did I cry because I didn’t get what I wanted? “The sharper the knife,” as Chef Savard had said, “the less you cry.” For me, it also means to cut those things that get in the way of your passion and of living your life the way it’s meant to be lived.

Of course, I also learned to make a mean reduction sauce and to bone an entire chicken without removing the skin, which is nice, too.

With a little searching, I found a copy of “The Station,” for which I’m grateful. He follows the words Flinn quoted with these:

“Relish the moment” is a good motto, especially when coupled with Psalm 118:24, “This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.”

So stop pacing the aisles and counting the miles. Instead, swim more rivers, climb more mountains, kiss more babies, count more stars. Laugh more and cry less. Go barefoot oftener. Eat more ice cream. Ride more merry-go-rounds. Watch more sunsets. Life must be lived as we go along. The Station will come soon enough.

With those sentiments swirling in my soul, I made my (mostly) daily journey to The Writer’s Almanac to find today’s offering, “Meditation on Ruin” by Jay Hopler:

It’s not the lost lover that brings us to ruin, or the barroom brawl,
or the con game gone bad, or the beating
Taken in the alleyway. But the lost car keys,
The broken shoelace,
The overcharge at the gas pump
Which we broach without comment — these are the things that
eat away at life, these constant vibrations
In the web of the unremarkable.

The death of a father — the death of the mother —
The sudden loss shocks the living flesh alive! But the broken
pair of glasses,
The tear in the trousers,
These begin an ache behind the eyes.
And it’s this ache to which we will ourselves
Oblivious. We are oblivious. Then, one morning—there’s a
crack in the water glass —we wake to find ourselves undone.

One of the things Flinn mentions more than once in her book that I have come to find both true and necessary in my work in the kitchen is a good cook cleans up between tasks. Part of the reason is basic hygiene: if you’re cutting raw meat, you need to change the cutting board and clean your knife before you start dicing vegetables. Part of the reason is practical: you run out of counter space in a hurry if you don’t take time to put away and wipe down. When I fail to keep up with my cleaning, I learn (again) what Hopler is saying: the little details will kill you.

And they will save you.

Before I could get too philosophical, my mind first took a country turn after reading the poem and dug up Robert Earl Keen’s song, “The Little Things,” from my mental juke box. Keen can be as cynical as he is country, and this song is no exception.

It’s the way you stroke my hair while I am sleeping
It’s the way you tell me things I don’t know
It’s the way you remember I came home late for dinner
Eleven months and fourteen days ago

It’s the little things the little bitty things
Like the way that you remind me I’ve been growing soft
It’s the little things the itty bitty things
It’s the little things that piss me off

I’m not sure why the song has stuck with me over the years, because I don’t like it. I mean it’s a catchy little country number, but the sentiment is crass in that Henny-Youngman-take-my-wife-please attempt at humor sort of way that, well, isn’t funny. It is, however, instructive because Keen articulates the very despair in the details that Hopler warns against. A marriage falls apart just like the rest of the world: it’s the little things.

Or it’s the little things that build a life together, whatever the relationship. We find our joy in the journey when we travel together, whatever the destination. Ginger and I had lunch today with a friend from Massachusetts. We were talking about a mutual acquaintance and Ginger made the comment that it was hard for her when the woman demeaned her husband in public. I realized when she said it that she had never done that to me in our twenty years together.

It’s the little things.

Ginger and I met this afternoon with Keith from Bountiful Backyards, a company here in Durham that describes themselves as “edible landscapers,” working to get folks to do more with their yards than plant grass and flowers, but to think more in terms of food productions, soil nutrition, and water conservation. Last fall, we had to regrade our front yard, so there is nothing but dirt and stepping stones (underneath our giant pin oak); we needed help seeing what could be. Keith had tons of ideas and we talked about several possibilities. One of the most helpful things he said was to think in terms of it being a work in progress; it didn’t all have to happen right now. Gardening is a journey of its own. We will make some plans, dig in the dirt, plant some stuff, on our journey to make this house more and more our home – with a yard we can eat!

Years ago, my friend Billy and I wrote a song called “Traveling Mercies,” part of which said:

take bread for the journey
and strength for the fight
comfort to sleep through the night
wisdom to choose at the fork in the road
and a heart that knows the way home

go in peace live in grace
trust in the arms that will hold you
go in peace live in grace
trust God’s love

Yes. It’s the little things.

Peace,
Milton

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.

Peace,
Milton

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:

The Continuous Life

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.

Peace,
Milton

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.

Peace,
Milton