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lenten journal: tortilla sunset

tortilla sunset

when I walked into the supermarket
my dinner menu was still up in the air
everything depended on whether or
not they had Sweet Hawaiian tortillas

I picked up two ripe avocados in an
act of faith a couple of jalapeños too
pushed the cart past the deli counter
and turned towards the tortilla stand

street taco size is what they call them
circles of goodness made to be held
in one hand and eaten in three bites
I grabbed two packs and headed home

to pull the pineapple and chicken
out of the fridge and the mocajete
from the cabinet to smash avocados
and turned groceries into dinner

had there been no tortillas dinner
the chicken and pineapple might
have wokked with rice and cashews
or perhaps a piccata and potatoes

but the Sweet Hawaiian hand-helds
folded the day into a simple joy
as we ate and told our stories and
the pups waited for a taste of tortilla

Peace,
Milton

 

lenten journal: specifics

specifics

the way you call to check on me
the text that asks how are you

the time you left a note
the month you paid my bill

when you emptied the trash
while I was out of town

the day you came to see me
the night you drove me home

when you picked up the phone
long after your bedtime

when you stood with me
at the funerals

when you listened
when you called me out

the time you said you loved me
and the time after that

the time you sat with me
and said nothing

the gift in the mailbox
the food in the fridge

when you laughed at my jokes
when I cried and you did too

when I forgot what mattered
and you forgave me

the night you called
and said you needed help

your fingerprints on my heart
indelible evidence of love

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: I’m glad we’re all here

I’m late on getting to this story, but I am assuming I am not the only one who learned about The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse while watching the Oscars last Sunday night. I loved it, even though they didn’t use an Oxford comma in the title.

Over the past year or so, I have seen the book at friends’ houses, and even thumbed through it, but I still have not read it. I’m not sure why. The appearance of the book intimates a kinship with The Little Prince and The House at Pooh Corner–both favorites–but I never got past the cover. Though I still haven’t read the book (I will, shortly!), I watched the movie this afternoon. Twice.

The movie opens with a young boy walking across an unending snow-covered landscape with nothing in site, until a mole pops up through the snow to ask why the boy is there. He is lost, he says, and is trying to find his way home. The Mole befriends the Boy, and also expresses his love for cake. In fact, it feels like the Mole is searching for cake the way the Boy is looking for home. He asks the Boy what he wants to be when he grows up, and the Boy answers, “Kind.”

“Nothing beats kindness,” the Mole replies, “it sits quietly beyond all things.

He says a wise mole told him you could always get home by following the river and their journey begins. When they find a river, the boy wonders how to figure out which way to go.

The Mole answers, “If at first you don’t succeed, have some cake.”

As the tale unfolds, the meet the Fox, who has to be freed from a snare, and the Horse, who is also alone. There are plenty of reasons for them not to be together, but they choose one another as they navigate the landscape of lostness. They choose each other in profound and understated ways.

As the afternoon turned into evening, we went to our Lenten Supper and Discussion at church. We have been reading and talking about Forgive Us: Confessions of a Compromised Faith chapter by chapter. Tonight, Clara, one of our pastoral interns, led the discussion about how the American Church has treated Indigenous people. Home played a huge part there as well, since colonizers made a home here by taking way, well, destroying the home of the Native folks.

Though I wrote those last sentences in past tense, the displacement continues a way that is egregious and invisible at the same time. Unlike the quartet in the snowy forest, we have not chosen each other; we simply chose ourselves. We took what we wanted. We keep taking.

When the Boy and the Mole first meet the Fox face to face, he is in a snare. The Mole approaches him and the Fox stretches the ties that bind him as far as he can towards the Mole and says, “If I were free I would kill you.”

The Mole moves closer and before he chews through snare says, “If I don’t free you, you will die.”

If the story were rewritten as a fable of American history, the Fox, once freed, would have turned on the Mole and killed him, but he didn’t, which means we could have made different choices. We still can. We must, if we are to survive. Listen to this exchange:

The Mole: Sometimes, I want to say, “I love you, all.” But I find it difficult.
The Boy: Do you?
The Mole: Yes, so I say something like, “I’m glad we’re all here.”
The Boy: Okay.
The Mole: I’m glad we’re all here.
The Boy: We’re so glad we’re here too.

Our obsession with ownership is malignant. It is eating us alive.

There is enough. We are enough. I know it sounds simple–to simple for those who want to complicate it with greed and power–but “I’m glad we’re all here” is a pretty good way to say I love you.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: parking lot poetry

parking lot poetry

I dress myself with rain
make a hat of the clouds
and a scarf of the wind
a coat of many shadows

I can see the stepping
pools across the asphalt
if I watch my step I can hit
every one of the puddles

I am a body of water
walking on water even
as water falls and finds
me thirsty for reunion

poetry in the parking lot
the drops sky diving
rather than just falling
gentle melancholy mist

I come home wearing
evidence of my epiphany
the pups storm to greet me
cloaked in rain of their own

life today is wet cold gray
better to make of it an
outfit than an adversary
I dress myself with rain

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: incidental contact

incidental contact

we saw a beautiful purple house
a woman and a man arranging plants
she spoke with a smile in her words
“I had all these plants in my house
it was like a jungle” she said as we
passed by never to see her again

after my third trip shuttling the
members of our group from the
Crystal Beer Parlor to our hotel
on a rainy Sunday one of them said
“You really know your way around”
all I knew was how to get back

the drive to the airport gave me
a sense of all the city we didn’t see
how many doors we left unknocked
all the stories we didn’t get to hear
places we didn’t eat and where we
did most of the menu was missed

the scrapbook of snapshots I carry
home in my mind is even incomplete
I can’t remember all that went unseen
but I went as a guest not an expert
for a week Savannah was my world
and they hardly knew I was there

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: tree hair

Our last full day in Savannah began with the Gospel Brunch at the Good Times Jazz Bar and Restaurant, which is a few blocks from our hotel. The music, food, and conversation around the table were all nourishing. (I had a roasted boneless quail stuffed with collard greens over grits–and a side of catfish.)

Then we walked down to the River to meet Demetry, whom I mentioned earlier in the week, for him to tell us about himself, Savannah, and the art and sculpture in the hotel.

As he was telling us all sorts of interesting things, he mentioned, as an aside, that Spanish Moss needs trees to stay alive. If it is lying on the ground, it will die. Then he said, “If you see it on the sidewalk, put it back in the tree.”

The Indigenous name for the hanging curiosity translates as “tree hair,” but the colonialists changed that–mostly in jest. The French looked at the grey wisps as they dangled and called them “barbe espagnol,” likening them to the long scraggly beards of the Spaniards, who in turn called it “cabello francés” (French hair), but the French name stuck.

When I first saw how much of it hung from the majestic oak trees around here, I worried that it was a parasite–like kudzu–but it is not. It doesn’t take any nourishment from the tree it inhabits. The moss feeds on the dust and particles in the air, as well as the moisture, which is part of the reason it needs the tree to live: it gets to hang in the air where all the particles are. It also holds moisture until its host is ready to absorb it, which means it feeds the tree during dry spells.

The tree hair is a good metaphor to describe how I feel about our time here. We have hung around for a few days, feeding on particles–stories, conversations, encounters, surprises, food–not as parasites, but as epiphytes: those who need others to grow. We have also had an opportunity to give back to Savannah in a small way, I suppose, though that was not our primary intent. But good relationships are mutual ones. Mark Knofler wrote (and sang) “sometimes you’re the windshield, sometimes you’re the bug.” Perhaps there’s another version that would sing, “sometimes you’re the oak tree, sometimes you’re the moss.”

After dinner we sat in a circle in the lobby of our hotel and talked about what was on our minds these days. Members of our group range from age seven to those in their late seventies. We took turns being the moss and the tree as we listened to one another. Not everyone in the group knew each other well before we got here. Some of our sharing tonight was gratitude for new connections, some was gratitude for the chance to deepen relationships that are as well-rooted as the oak trees.

Tomorrow we go home to trees that don’t know about tree hair. I hope we can remember how to continue to nourish one another.

Peace,
Milton

 

lenten journal: small stories

Tonight we ate dinner at 2 Chefs Gullah Geechee restaurant in Savannah. Morolayo Akinrinnola and OriBemi Adetutu are the chef owners (and are married to each other), and they were the ones in the kitchen cooking all the goodness that graced our plates. Mine included fried chicken, collard greens, macaroni and cheese, and rice with gravy. Oh–and a cinnamon roll right out of the oven that was legendary.

But I am getting ahead of myself. That’s how we finished the day.

We began by letting Johnnie Brown take us on a two-hour Black history tour of Savannah, which included a number of stops and an incredible amount of information, but the highlight was visiting the Beach Institute, which was founded in 1865 as the first official school for African-Americans in Savannah. Today it is Savannah’s flagship museum for African-American arts, history, and cultural preservation. We saw exhibits showcasing the art of Rudolf Valentino Bostic, a folk artist who painted on cardboard with discarded house paint because he didn’t have money to buy supplies, and the wooden sculptures of Ulysses Davis, a barber who “whittled” in his spare time to create amazing work.

From there we went to lunch at Rancho Allegra, a family-owned Cuban restaurant that started in a house twenty years ago and now offers not only great food but is an important live music venue in the city. The food was flavorful and interesting. The people were friendly and kind. It was good to be there.

We then drove about eight miles out of town to the Pin Point Heritage Museum, which is located in the old A. S Varns and Sons Oyster and Crab Factory. We sat in the rooms where they had picked crab and shucked oysters hour after hour and listened to Gail, a woman who had worked in the factory as a child, tell us about how the people who worked there found ways to buy the land and establish their community, in large part around the Sweetfields of Eden Baptist Church. The community dates back to 1896. The land has remained in the hands of the descendants of those folks ever since, making it the largest amount of Black-owned waterfront property in Georgia, and one of the most cohesive Gulla-Geechee communities left in America.

We watched a documentary about the oyster and crab factory, looked out across the Moon River (named in honor of Johnny Mercer, who was from Savannah) and the marshes, and listened to Gail tell stories as we stood in the places where folks had done such backbreaking work for very little pay. The spirit of the people shone through in all of it. Gail also told us some of her story–how her mother and father got her through college, and how she found her way back to work in the museum because she wanted people to know the story.

Then we went to dinner. I’ve already told you about the food–well, my food. Others had fried shrimp, red rice, smothered shrimp, and most all of us had cinnamon rolls. After dinner, I asked Chef Morolayo if they could come talk to us for a minute. She told us about Gulla-Geechee food and how she had learned to cook from her grandmother. She also talked about Pin Point, and when we said we had been to the museum earlier, she said, “Did y’all meet my cousin Gail?”

That also seemed to open her up to share more about their life and how the restaurant came to be. She had a catering business that she had to close. Her husband was also struggling. They had lost everything, she said. They both decided to go to a culinary school they saw advertised on television, both got scholarships, and both got their certifications. Then they opened the restaurant. The other astonishing detail was they had eleven children, ranging from age thirty-one to five. Through all her story, it was clear that this was a woman who loved her life, as hard as it might have been, which was also what it felt like to look at Bostic’s paintings, or Davis’ woodwork, or hear Gail talk about why Pin Point mattered so much.

Some of our group were talking after we got back to the hotel, and it struck me that it’s not so much the actual circumstances of our existence as it is how we tell the story of our lives. None of the places we were in today are thriving in the sense that they feel secure about their future. Neither of the restaurants have webpages. Though the works of both Bostic and Davis have gained in value, both men died without their art doing much for them financially. Each one of their stories could be told as though their presence on the planet was incidental to humanity, just as the story of our trip from Connecticut could be told as though it won’t make a difference in the quest for equity and belonging in our country.

But that’s not the way the people we met told their stories. They told their small stories like they matter–and they do. Fame is not the same as significance any more than wealth and intelligence are synonyms.

The world is made of small stories of significance, of lives built of cardboard and wood chunks, of oyster shells and cinnamon rolls, all of them reminding us there is enough love–enough of everything–to go around if we are willing to share it.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: why are we here?

We decided to walk to breakfast this morning instead of eating at the hotel. When we walked outside and it was raining lightly, we were undaunted. The place we were going was about a mile and a half down MLK Blvd. in a direction we had not gone before, so we got to see some new parts of Savannah, some of which were those that are not benefitting from the city’s prosperity.

The place where we had hoped to go wasn’t opening for breakfast today, but we did make arrangements to go there for dinner tomorrow. I’ll save my review until then. Our next destination was supposed to be Forsyth Park for the Greening of the Fountain, so we meandered in that direction and found Blue Door Coffee and Waffles, which was a quirky little gem of a coffee shop in a changing neighborhood.

The little building had two or three rooms with random tables and chairs. The walls in the room where we sat were covered with Arnold Schwarzenegger memorabilia. Other spaces had Star Wars stuff, and the bathroom was covered with Marvel comics. The breakfast sandwiches were made with mini waffles. The woman who served us moved from the country outside of Athens, Georgia. She had found a home working there.

We ate and then continued down Bull Street until it ran into the park and then we walked yet another tree-lined sidewalk until we got to the fountain. I did not know, until we got here, that Savannah had such an Irish connection. Nine of the original settlers of the city were Irish, and soon after the founding, a ship of Irish indentured servants bound for New England wrecked near Savannah and James Oglethorpe, who imagined a city that welcomed everyone, took them in. They were still indentured servants, but they got to stay. That was 1734.

When Irish immigration began to explode, in part because of the Potato Famine, Savannah remained a welcoming port when cities like Boston and New York were doing all they could to keep the Irish from getting in. The immigrants were crucial in building the infrastructure of the growing city.

With St. Patrick’s Day just a week away, we have noticed increasing bits of green everywhere. We will be back in Connecticut when the parade happens, but today we went to watch them “green the fountain.”

The festivities were to start at noon; we got there about 11:30, and the rain arrived soon after. As we watched people gather, I felt like they could be put in three general categories: those who made the event happen (men in green suits or kilts, lots of hats, Catholic school kids, a bagpipe player), those who knew about the event and came on purpose (both locals and visitors), and those who stumbled into it while walking through the park.

One of the last group was walking with a friend and was quite disoriented as she took in the crowd. She turned to the people sitting on the bench near me and said, “Why are we here?”

I thought it was a great question.

As those of us who were spectators waited, we watched three or four city workers carry small (green) pitchers of dye to the properly dressed folks on the other side of the fountain. Then, as the rain fell in earnest, many of them moved inside the fence that surrounds the fountain and the emcee began to speak. Though the sound system wasn’t adequate, you could glean by the posture of the people who could hear him that they said a prayer and the Pledge, and then some other stuff. One by one, with casual ceremony, they began to pour the dye from their pitchers into the water and we could see it begin to spread unit it finally got pulled into by the pump and the whole fountain sprayed green.

We cheered as though that was why we were there, and it struck me that, Irish or not, we gravitate to things that enhance our connectedness. As I sat down to write, I searched for the word “gather” on this blog to make sure I wasn’t reusing a title and found this post from last December about the Tree Lighting in Guilford. I wrote, “I walked home in wonder that we, as humans, are built to need each other, to think up reasons to be together.”

I mean, someone said they were going to throw green dye in the fountain and hundreds of people showed up–in the rain! As I read about the history of the event, which goes back to the 1980s, I learned of Fred Elmgren, who has participated in it since the beginning.

“I was there for the beginning, but I didn’t know it,” he said. “The origination of it was hooligans, dying the fountains, or people with good intention, maybe not even just hooligans dying the fountains and making it cool for St. Patrick’s Day. All of a sudden the realization, this stuff could ruin our fountain pumps. They knew they couldn’t stop it so they started dyeing it themselves.”

One of the things I loved about the event was the passer-by who asked, “Why are we here?” didn’t leave. She and her friend found their place in the crowd and stayed until green sprayed from the fountain, as did the old men in green coats with fancy sashes whose blood is probably as green as the dyed water, and me, who loved looking around at another gathering of people who can take something silly or accidental and turn it into a ritual of belonging.

The best definition of ritual I know is that it is meaningful repetition. What I saw today is that the meaning doesn’t have to be the same for everyone for it to remind us we are together. It just takes someone–like Fred Elmgren–to say, “This is going to happen anyway, so why don’t we mean it?” Who knows where it goes from there. As he said, he was there in the beginning and didn’t realize it. Forty years later, there we were standing in the rain, cheering for green dye because this is why we’re here.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: defined by defeat

I spent the better part of today walking with nowhere to go. It was a gift.I looked at houses, talked to dogs (and some people), found a bookstore, stopped for coffee, got lost without having to worry about it, read a bunch of historical markers, and saw a bunch of memorial statues.

The heart or the city of Savannah is built around squares–twenty-three of them. They are beautifully cared for parks with giant shade trees and benches. Each one is named after a man who was significant to the city in some fashion (and it was all men) and most of them had some sort of monument or memorial to another man; I couldn’t find much connection. The Pulaski monument, for example, was not in Pulaski Square.

The first one I came upon was a large granite platform that held five figures who represented the Chausseurs Volontaire de Saint-Domingues–the voluntary soldiers of St. Dominic–who were gens de coleurs (men of color) from what we know as Haiti. They came with the French to fight alongside the American colonists against the British, who held the city in the Revolutionary War. The battle was known as the Siege of Savannah in 1779. They were free men for the most part; some enslaved men volunteered as well with the promise of being freed after the battle.

But they lost. The combined forces suffered heavy casualties.

As I moved from square to square, I found other monuments that centered around the same battle: William Jasper, Casimir Pulaski (who both died in the battle), and John Oglethorpe, who lived. Again and again, I saw ways in which this town defines itself by defeat–that defeat in particular. The statue of William Jasper has him posing with his hand against the mortal wound in his side. Though he is still fighting, it is not a victorious posture. The cost of the siege was enormous: almost 250 soldiers killed, 600 wounded, and 120 taken prisoner.

The defeat was not the last word of the war, I know. But there are not a lot of places with monuments to the victory, perhaps because what happened here was such a profound loss.

I am not one who finds much value in war, or war as a metaphor, so I see a whole other rabbit to chase when it comes to finding our identity in conflict, but I was moved today by the imprint of defeat on our lives, both individually and collectively.

I have never lived in an active war zone. I read about what is happening in Ukraine, or think about what has gone on in Iraq or Afghanistan, and I don’t know how to really imagine it. I look at the number of casualties and imagine the palpable absence that hung in the air like Spanish moss after the siege ended.

In a couple of the parks, I sat and watched people interact with the monuments. Some stopped and read, others took pictures. Most walked by carrying food, following pets, of talking to a companion. Even the largest of them is diminished in scale by the giant oaks that surround them.

Later in the day, Ginger and I walked to Whitefield Square, built in 1851 to honor the minister George Whitefield who founded the oldest orphanage in America. The main reason we were there is the First Congregational Church sits on one side of the square. It was built in 1895 and it was a Black church. The center of the square holds a beautiful gazebo surrounded by azalea bushes. There are markers about Whitefield, but there are none that tell that land was a burial ground for enslaved people. Andrew Bryan, the founder of the First African Baptist Church is buried there. I could not find a marker.

The same white people who so intently defined themselves by defeat were not as quick to put up monuments to their conquest and oppression. Those whose graves were erased left a legacy that became the struggle for Civil Rights, which has been fed by an enduring defeat in its push for equity and beloved community: We shall overcome . . . someday.

Hope lies in trusting that defeat is not the last word. The white colonists in Savannah used the defeat to define themselves as people who were determined to gain their freedom, even as they blinded themselves to the myriad ways they were refusing freedom to and inflicting defeat on an almost equal number of the population.

How we are defined by our defeat is not an easy question to answer.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: a moveable feast

Today Ginger and I walked all over downtown Savannah and its nearby surroundings. And I mean all over–as of this writing, I have 17,019 steps. I also ate well and had some great conversations.

We walked first to Forsyth Park, which is six blocks long and two blocks wide and lies south of downtown. Beautiful moss-covered oaks line the walks, and there’s an iconic fountain at the northern end that dates back to 1858. My favorite story about the fountain is what happened on the day it was dedicated. The city had just installed new waterworks and no one had thought to test the water pressure. Dignitaries and the wealthy white folks that lived around the park had gathered to see the new fountain. Everyone got soaked when they turned the water on.

The park is beautiful and well-used. We strolled along the walkways and then we saw a huge monument-forty–eight feet tall–at the other end of the park. Apple Maps told me it was the Confederate Memorial. I took a moment to search for more information and learned it was erected in 1875, just a decade after the war had ended, unlike many of the monuments that went up across the South in the 1920s along with Jim Crow laws. That doesn’t justify the monument, but I found it significant that it was an expression of grief.

After white supremacists marched in Charlottesville, the town questioned what to do about the memorial. A local tour guide and blogger, and a native of Savannah, wrote:

Savannah began it’s own introspection and realized, perhaps with some relief, that we hardly have any offending statues to fret about. We really love to avoid unpleasant conversations and difficult decisions in this city. But what to do about the one really big statue in Forsyth Park?

The city changed the name to the Civil War Memorial and replaced the plaque so it now reads:

This memorial was originally erected in 1875 to the Confederate dead, redesigned in 1879, and rededicated in 2018 to all the dead of the American Civil War.

The Georgia legislature and the governor passed laws that made it illegal to do much more.

I started to write that it feels like a lot simmers under the surface in this town, but simmer is too strong a verb. Walking underneath the moss-bearing oaks and down the brick sidewalks in the Historic Section, you can feel the stories, but it is hard to find folks who want to tell them–or even know them.

We ate lunch at the Crystal Beer Parlor, the oldest continuously running restaurant in Savannah, which opened in 1933, and was one of the first places that served alcohol after Prohibition. The place stays busy and never takes reservations. We sat at a bar that ran the full distance of the large rectangular room that was the main dining area. One of the servers was stocking glasses at the bar and Ginger asked a couple of questions. He told us he moved from Houston about fifteen years ago. When we compared notes on our times in South Texas, I found out he went to the high school nearest the one from which I graduated.

We were going back down to the river and walked past The Grey and one of the people that worked there was spot cleaning the windows. He said hello and I told him that my secret hope was Chef Mashama would be in the window and I would get to say hi. He smiled and said she was in Africa this month, but if we came back right at five we could get a seat at the first-come-first-serve diner bar. His name was Laron. As the conversation continued, I told him how I had been inspired by the book and he said, “You gotta come back. I love working here.”

Since it was not yet four, we walked down to the river to check out the JW Marriott because the wonderful desk person at our hotel had said it was worth seeing because of the art and mineral collections there. The hotel is more of an events center that encompasses four or five buildings along the waterfront. As we approached the entrance, a man greeted us and Ginger stopped to ask a few questions. His name was Demetery. That turned into him giving us about a fifteen minute orientation to what was there.

As we talked, he told us he was a science major at Savannah State and planned to go to medical school. He works part time at the hotel. When Ginger talked about our trip and asked about local activists we might contact, he said he was a part of the Savannah chapter of 100 Black Men, and then told us about what they did. Ginger asked him if he would talk to our group and he agreed.

On the river walk in front of the hotel we found a kiosk and in it was Amelia, a local artist who is chasing her dream–no, she’s making it happen. Her artwork is whimsical and enchanting; her personality was engaging. I bought a sticker for my journal that reads

Normalize being a kind human being.

Then we went back to The Grey. I didn’t see Laron, but we did get seats at the bar, which had been the segregated lunch counter in the old Greyhound Bus Station. The room filled up as soon as the doors opened. The menu was one page and was made up of descriptions so brief that they bordered on ingredient lists. We had planned to just get drinks and appetizers, so Ginger found a cheese plate and I perused the menu trying to figure out what one thing would be my culinary souvenir. I chose

Trotter Toast
chicken liver mousse, dates, aspic

That’s all it said. The dish arrived with more description: sourdough toast spread with chicken liver mousse, crispy pig’s trotter meat, dates, and sherry aspic (a jelly made from the trotter stock). I didn’t order it because I eat those things all the time. I ordered it because I loved the way Chef Mashama had talked about her food and I wanted to try something unfamiliar. I wanted to trust that she knew what she was doing and would make it worth the trip.

She did. It was one of the best things I have ever tasted.

It was a fitting close to our purposeful meanderings, and a good metaphor of a day made up of some ingredients we knew well and some that caught us by surprise. All together they became a day of hope and sustenance. I would order a day like this any time.

Peace,
Milton