don't eat alone

Corpus Christi, Texas
is bracing for a hurricane;
I am fasting, preparing
for my colonoscopy;
both I and my birthplace
are being evacuated.

Peace,
Milton

I got wrapped up in my mind tonight and found myself to tangled to write, so I untangled myself by browsing through some of the music my nephews have shared with me. Here are some folks doing great stuff.

Brett Dennen opens “Ain’t No Reason” by singing:

There aint no reason things are this way
Its how they always been and it tends to stay
I can’t explain why we live this way, we do it everyday

and it gets better from there.

Denison Witmer’s title track, “Carry the Weight,” nods at the old Beatles song and then very simply states

Carry the weight of your neighbor
Carry the weight of a stranger
I’m not afraid to say I don’t know what to do

JJ Alberhasky is full of good things, once you learn how to pronounce his name. The chorus to “Isabel” says:

Isabel it’s not so sad
He numbered every hair upon your head
Isabel don’t be afraid
He heard every word you ever prayed

The rest of the lyric fills those words with the poignant paradox of grace in these days.

OK, these last two are old friends who found me among the tunes tonight. First is Son Volt singing “Windfall.”

May the wind take your troubles away
May the wind take your troubles away
Both feet on the floor, two hands on the wheel,
May the wind take your troubles away

Finally tonight, Randy Newman has a new record on which he records a song he wrote for Bonnie Raitt, “Feels Like Home to Me.” I love her version, and there’s something moving about this crusty old guy singing this love song:

Something in your eyes makes me want to lose myself
Makes me want to lose myself in your arms . . .

Here’s to the melodies that carry us.

Peace,
Milton

The beginning of the school year has meant a move for me. I’m back at Duke, as the chef for a restaurant my boss contracts to run on the Duke campus. We are open Monday to Thursday nights, and then I still work Sunday nights at the restaurant where I worked this summer. I like being able to be a part of both places. The Duke restaurant was a new venture last year and I came on board in January. By the end of the school year, we began to get a pretty good idea of what we needed to do to really make it work. The restaurant is the nicest place on campus for students (or anyone else) to eat dinner. As Ginger says, “We never had a place on campus with salmon and sirloin and linen tablecloths and beer and wine.” And they can use their meal plan points to boot.

Last year, I worked from two until about ten, Sunday through Thursday. This year, my Sunday nights run until eleven because the other restaurant is open later, and, because my chef wants me to be a part of what happens at lunch in the same room at Duke (primarily a faculty restaurant), my days begin at eleven, rather than two, but still aren’t over until after nine o’clock. When I factor in the time I spend at home dealing with work email or refining recipes or doing other administrative tasks, I’m up to close to sixty hours a week.

I love to cook. I love what I’m getting to do at Duke. I get to come up with the menu, design how the dishes should taste and look, go out into the dining room and get to know some of the students who eat with us regularly, and hone my skills as a chef. When I’m at work, I’m not conscious of time. I get lost in the making and serving of the meals. I’m doing what I most love to do.

And I know doing it sixty hours a week is no way to live. Something’s got to give.

On our trip to Texas, I had time to read. One of the books I picked up was Much Depends on Dinner: The Extraordinary History and Mythology, Allure and Obsessions, Perils and Taboos of an Ordinary Meal by Margaret Visser. Though the book was published in 1986, it was new to me. Visser begins with the idea of a simple meal – corn on the cob with butter and salt, roast chicken with rice, salad dressed in lemon juice and olive oil, and ice cream – and then, as a self-described “anthropologist of everyday life,” tells more than you could ever imagine about each of the ingredients in the meal. She spends fifty-five pages on corn alone. Here’s part of what she has to say:

Corn, beans, and squash are as constantly wedded in Indian cooking today as they were in the past. . . And always they added ash: burnt hickory or the ash of some other wood, ot the roasted and crushed shells of mussels they had eaten, or (as in modern Ecuador) they burnt shells of land snails. All this was sheer tradition: corn, beans, and squash with a pinch of ash in every pot. Only very recently have scientists fully grasped the wisdom of the Indians’ behavior. Corn, we now know, is about 10 percent protein, but is deficient in the amino acids lycene and tryptophan, which people must get from food. In addition, although corn contains the vitamin niacin, almost all of it occurs in a “bound” form called niacytin, which makes it biologically unavailable to human beings. Corn, in other words, cannot feed people adequately if it is not supplemented by other foods, and beans and squash are excellent complements to corn. The holy threesome, in fact, enabled corn to be consumed as a staple. Wherever the rule has been broken, and corn eaten without the correct supplements, the consequences have been disastrous: outbreaks of pellagra and kwashiorkor, the agonizing diseases of nutrition deficiency. (32) (emphasis added)

Let me pull out the highlighted part, so you can see it as clearly, I hope, as it jumped out at me.

Corn, in other words, cannot feed people adequately if it is not supplemented by other foods, and beans and squash are excellent complements to corn. The holy threesome, in fact, enabled corn to be consumed as a staple. Wherever the rule has been broken, and corn eaten without the correct supplements, the consequences have been disastrous.

One of the central quotes we used at the retreat on vocation was Buechner’s definition of vocation: the place where your greatest joy and the world’s deepest need intersect. As best I can read my spiritual GPS, I’m pretty close to that intersection. I would like to be feeding folks who needed the food more than I am, (I’m working on that) and I have a strong sense of calling and peace about doing what I’m doing where I’m doing it. Coming from a family of fairly intentional workaholics and having spent a lot of time and energy trying to learn a different way to look at life and work other than burning out for Jesus, I struggle to heed the traffic signal in my vocational intersection that tells me to stop and rest, or to go do something else that feeds me, such as spend time with Ginger or write or read or head for the gym.

Visser’s brief history of corn caught me because, even though corn was the crop that spread around the world once the Europeans learned of it from the Native Americans, it isn’t enough all on its own. In her history I found metaphor: work, even work I see as my spiritual vocation, doesn’t have the spiritual nutrition to sustain me all by itself. My life has to have its share of beans and squash if I am to be the human being I was created to be.

Human being, as someone else noted long ago, not human doing.

The days ahead, for me, are ones of discernment, working to figure out how to balance the recipe of my life so I am nurtured and sustained and I nurture and sustain those who matter most to me. Part of the task for me will be drawing some boundaries around my job and sticking to them, which doesn’t come easily for me (see earlier comment about workaholics). Part of it will be making sure how I actually spend my time matches with what I say matters most to me. Ginger deserves more than the dregs of my day; so do I. I’m not in a crisis, but I am aware that the recipe of my life isn’t quite right. And a good cook knows if something doesn’t taste right you change the recipe.

Peace,
Milton

I’ve always been a big fan of words.

I love their sounds, their meanings, the many ways they can be put together. I am pulled by poetry because it is words at their best, standing in fresh light, speaking deep truths, unlocking hearts. After the last couple of nights of convention speeches, I’m prepared to say politics is the opposite of poetry when it comes to how words are used, turning them from gifts into weapons, cheapening them by repeated use and misuse, throwing them around like hand grenades. It’s enough to make me less fond of words.

So tonight I pulled out a CD of a singer-songwriter we met on our Texas sojourn, Sam Baker, who is a nurturer of words. This is a man who knows how to tell a story in a way that pulls people in rather than causes them to choose sides. What strikes me about Sam’s songs is how his faithfulness to the description – to the story – without feeling the need to explain too much or somehow say, “Here’s the point,” lets the words say so much more than if he had chosen to be more directive.

The song that pulled me tonight is called, “Waves,” because I know some folks close to me who are living out the story Sam tells. I will resist the temptation to tell too much myself and let the song speak for itself.

waves

so many years so many hardships
so many laughs so many tears
so many things to remember
cause they had fifty years

and now the kids have got their own kids
and their own kids have grown
she told him not to worry
said he’d be fine when she was gone

he walks down to the ocean
bends to touch the water
kneels to pray
he writes her name in the sand
waves wash it away

there are sea gulls circling shrimp boats
that turn inside the bay
there’s an emptiness inside
that never goes away

he walks down to the ocean
bends to touch the water
kneels to pray
he writes her name in the sand
waves wash it away

That’s what words can do. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

(with apologies to middle schoolers)

I’m sitting between Gustav and Hanna
in the homeroom of life, wondering how
to make sense of everything coming through
the loudspeaker, the stream of non sequiturs
that passes for news and the endless storm
of chatter that follows, each of us choosing
sides without bothering much to choose our
words. Life looks and sounds a great deal like
a middle school cafeteria. Shouldn’t speaking
our minds beg us to use our minds before we
speak? Instead, our lunch table politics build
allegiances based on fear or desperation or,
for the lucky ones, popularity, none of which
does much for real conversation: “Hello – and
I really mean that.” We worry about hurricanes,
but the small winds of breath that carry our
words are more destructive. We wear labels
like bunkers around our hearts and look only
at those who look and act like us. We learned
our vocabulary and jumped through all the
right hoops, but face it: we’re seventh graders.

Peace,
Milton

He took the wings we weren’t going to use for dinner.

We serve a roast chicken dish, so we cut up the birds so each customer gets one piece that is half of a breast with the first section of the wing bone attached and a second piece that is the leg and thigh. Abel, the cook next to me on the line every Sunday night, took the rest of the wings and some of the other leftovers, but I didn’t see what he did with them. And I lost track of them because we were busy tonight. I don’t know what was going on, but people were out to eat to night here in Durham and about one hundred and fifty of them came to our place, About eight-thirty, when we had a small break, I looked up to see Abel filling a line of plates with food.

For us. There was a small stack of diced potatoes, some carrots and onions, a wonderful looking burnt orange colored sauce, and a stack of small chicken bones – the leftovers – on each plate. He had made enough for everyone in the kitchen. I picked up my plate at the same time as the Shift Leader and we both made the same sounds of satisfaction as we began to chew our food. The dish was amazing. The Shift Leader handed Abel the left over chicken – the good pieces – and said, “Make some more.”

As he began to cook, Abel motioned to me and I moved closer. He was holding fresh herbs in his hands. “This is it,” he said. “You take some mint, some cilantro, some thyme, and a little chipotle peppers. And some of the Dave’s spice mix (a sort of red salt mixture: cayenne, chili powder, paprika, etc.), then you just cook it slow. That’s all.”

This is a guy who comes everyday to work at our restaurant after having worked a full shift at another restaurant. This is a guy who knows a lot about what he does and doesn’t get the credit because, as they say, he’s not from these parts. And this is a guy, in the middle of a very busy night, who took time and thought and effort to cook dinner for those of us who stand along side him in the kitchen every week.

This is a good guy.

Rich Mullins has a song that says

Talk about your miracles
Talk about your faith
My dad he could make things grow
Out of Indiana clay
Mom could make a gourmet meal
Out of just cornbread and beans
And they worked to give faith hands and feet
And somehow gave it wings

That’s it. In the middle of a hectic night, Abel gave us wings. No one flew, but we watched as he took what was broken and discarded and with care and creativity filled our stomachs and lifted our spirits.

Not bad for a Sunday night.

Peace,
Milton

Life is clipping along for me at a speed that makes reflection feel a bit like a luxury. Though I’m grateful for most of the things going on right now, I’m always wary of going too long without taking stock and doing my best to listen. They don’t call it break-neck speed for nothing, I suppose. We headed to Texas a couple of weeks ago to help lead a retreat with Gordon and Jeanene Atkinson (Gordon’s already posted here), which enabled us to tack on a few days and see family and friends. One of my favorite things about our sojourn was the first day, which Ginger and I did in true Brasher-Cunningham fashion.

On our first date, I took Ginger to see Lyle Lovett in Fort Worth. As it turned out, Lyle was playing the Bass Performance Hall in Fort Worth the weekend we arrived. In my mind, I bought tickets for Friday night, which meant we could land Thursday in San Antonio, drive through Austin to eat lunch with David Gentiles, and the end up in Waco at my parents’ house. Friday afternoon, then, the ninety minute drive up I-35 to Cowtown would not seem so bad. Ginger drove to Birmingham on Wednesday to leave Ella with my in-laws and our other Schnauzers. Early Friday morning – I mean early – we both got up to catch flights that would let us meet up in Dallas and fly together to San Antonio. At about five, I pulled the tickets out of the envelope to see that they were for Thursday night – THAT NIGHT – not Friday. So we kept our schedule, seeing Davy and stopping at my folks, but then we kept going on to Fort Worth. When I handed the usher our tickets, he showed us to our seats and said, “You’re just in time.” As my butt hit the cushion, Lyle walked out on stage:

I went to church last Sunday
So I could sing and pray
But something quite unusual
Happened on that day . . .

We had not been in Fort Worth in more than a decade, so we weren’t quite prepared for the transformation of the downtown area. What I remembered as a concrete jungle is now a vibrant mixture of residences, businesses, and entertainment (though I’m not sure where they shipped all the homeless people). We walked around until we got our bearings, had a bite to eat, and then – even though we had only been in Texas for twelve hours, spent time in four cities, and still had an hour and a half to drive before we could sleep – we drove around to see the house where Ginger was living when we got engaged and the first apartment we shared after we married. Once again, they were hard to find in a city that appears to have gotten on fine without us.

I was a youth minister in Fort Worth when I first began talking about the idea of appropriate insignificance. The concept was new to me, though I’m sure it wasn’t original. What it means to me is each one of us is uniquely created in the image of God and of incredible value because we’re breathing and (not but) no one is any more valuable than anyone else. One night I was talking about it with the kids and I took a glass of water and stuck my finger into it.

“As long as I leave my finger there, the water moves to make a place. But when I take my finger out,” I said as I removed it from the glass, “the only evidence it was even in the water is my finger’s wet. The water filled in behind me.”

For most of our time in Texas, we were in places we had been before. Though we had not been to Laity Lodge before, we stepped back into the Baptist life that is our heritage, and I stepped among many people who had known my family, if not me, for a long time. What I took from the trip, most of all, was the treasure of having time to sit around tables with friends I keep up with but have not had a chance to see in person for years. We shared meals, told stories, laughed, cried, and tightened the bonds that remind us of what matters most.

As Lyle sang when he closed the show:

That’s right you’re not from Texas
That’s right you’re not from Texas
That’s right you’re not from Texas
But Texas wants you anyway

Peace,
Milton

There are new recipes here (with a story) and here.

A friend sent me the following email message from a woman who wants to open an ice cream shop in Rwanda. It’s an awesome idea and she needs us to vote for her in order for her to see her dream become a reality. Please read the following letter, follow the links, and vote for Rocky Road to be an ice cream flavor in Rwanda and not a metaphor for life.

THANK YOU FOR TAKING A MOMENT TO READ THIS EMAIL TO THE END!

Loved Ones, Friends, Friends of Friends, Friends of Loved Ones, Total Strangers…

If ice cream or some other such treat has ever put a smile on your face, given you a break from a hard day, made you feel more in love, soothed your tears, or made a kid you know shriek with glee, please read on:

My friend Alexis and I opened Blue Marble Ice Cream in Brooklyn NY less than a year ago. It went well, and now we have two locations. We are kid-friendly, eco-friendly — it’s a special place (more details on our website www.bluemarbleicecream.com or on our new Facebook page, check it out).

Now, for an expansion we never saw coming, WE NEED YOUR HELP. Blue Marble Ice Cream is launching its third location. Not in Soho, not in LA, not in Chicago.

In Rwanda.

Encouraged by a friend in Rwanda yearning to bring joy and laughter to her community, we are launching a nonprofit to start a shop in this developing country where milk is a natural but relatively untapped resource.

NOW, to help this happen, we ARE NOT asking for money, we are asking for your VOTE.

American Express has launched an initiative called Members Project, which invites cardmembers to post their dreams of change online for the chance of winning funding to help them come true. AmEx is devoting $2.5 million to the winners, so the stakes are high!

Our project is called “Sweet Dreams: The Power of Ice Cream.” This project is still in early development, but it is building momentum and we promise to share more details with you very soon.

Here’s what we need from you:

1) Click on this link to CAST YOUR VOTE FOR OUR DREAM. It is simple and takes all of 20 seconds. A minimal investment for such a worthwhile endeavor! 🙂 www.membersproject.com/project/view/FY1ZKE

2) Send this email to all YOUR loved ones, friends, friend of loved ones, friends of friends… This is all online, so LET’S GO INTERNATIONAL! TELL EVERYONE, EVERYWHERE!!!

3) Please, do this now. They are only accepting votes until September 1 — this is all word-of-mouth, we have no other means of promotion, so PLEASE help us spread the word that may lead us to much needed funding for our very worthy project.

We only heard about this opportunity at the very last second and posted our project with no time to spare – other projects have had up to a month already to assemble votes. Please help us catch up! And read below for the full project description.

As friends, as ice cream lovers, as Brooklynites, as compassionate members of a global community, let’s bring some sweetness and joy to Rwanda!

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Jennie Dundas, Blue Marble Ice Cream

420 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn NY 11217

(718) 858-1100

Peace,
Milton

I think this is the longest I’ve gone without posting since I began writing two and a half years ago. Though I’ve had several gaps in the past related to my depression, this is not one of them. Ginger and I went to Texas and had a great time with family and friends. I’ve had time to read and think and dream and even play guitar. My heart and my head are full.

So is my schedule.

Duke began classes today, which means my restaurant on campus opened this evening. I’ve got a week of twelve hour days ahead of me. I’m having a blast.

More will follow. I just wanted you to know life is good.

Peace,
Milton

We started out long ago and
high above the river and ended
up here, again, last night watching
the rain fall in the darkness, looking
down across the river valley. Here,
in a land defined by drought, it has
rained since we arrived – not
sprinkles, but sheets: the kind of
deluge that sticks your shirt to skin
running from the car to the house.

I expected to wake up this morning
and see a stream running between
the banks below, life flowing again
in the dry bed. I was not disappointed.
The questions, I think, have fed
our lives between the two rivers;
we were never much for answers,
when it comes to what matters most.

Why am I moved by stories of Eden,
you wondered once: Adam and Eve,
in their garden between their rivers.
What does their sadness mean?
Life flows to sadness like our rivers
to the sea. It’s all headed downhill,
and – not but, AND – life fills with
joy and grace the way the showers
feed the streams and soak the land.

By the time we said good night to
the river and each other, the house
was strewn with empty wine glasses
and coffee cups. I carried a full heart
back to my room. Now that I’ve had
my morning coffee, I think it might
be time to run out under the rain
and soak in the grace and gratitude.

Peace,
Milton