don't eat alone

I don’t do well in small spaces.

When life becomes claustrophobic – when my world begins to feel small – I get nervous, agitated. I don’t like feeling that I’ve gone through my day (or days on end) without doing anything more than dealing with my stuff. Between being ill, trying to negotiate the pedantic morass of selling and buying houses (could they make it any more difficult?), and dealing with relational issues at work, my world feels as though it is closet-sized and I’m looking in rather than out. I don’t like the feeling.

It was with relief and gratitude, then, that I stumbled on to today’s offering at The Writer’s Almanac, part of my daily practice of trying to look beyond and above, to find this poem by Canadian poet, Robyn Sarah:

Riveted

It is possible that things will not get better
than they are now, or have been known to be.
It is possible that we are past the middle now.
It is possible that we have crossed the great water
without knowing it, and stand now on the other side.
Yes: I think that we have crossed it. Now
we are being given tickets, and they are not
tickets to the show we had been thinking of,
but to a different show, clearly inferior.

Check again: it is our own name on the envelope.
The tickets are to that other show.

It is possible that we will walk out of the darkened hall
without waiting for the last act: people do.
Some people do. But it is probable
that we will stay seated in our narrow seats
all through the tedious dénouement
to the unsurprising end — riveted, as it were;
spellbound by our own imperfect lives
because they are lives,
and because they are ours.

Her name was new to me, so I did a bit of digging and found the poem is part of a collection called A Day’s Grace. I also found an interview, which held this response to the question, “How does spirituality inform your writing?”:

“Spirituality” isn’t a word I’m comfortable with, but if God is dead I must have missed the obit. (Don’t people confuse God with the belief in God? Belief may be dead — at least as a fundamental common assumption of our culture.) Can I talk about how spirituality informs my writing — no, I don’t think I can. But that doesn’t mean I don’t think it’s central. I think it probably is central. About the best I can do is to come back to that gasp of responsiveness to the world — the poet’s “O.” I try to be receptive: to the moment, to the world — of which language is a part. I try to keep myself open, to pay attention. To pay attention to the things that come my way, my daily “givens” — and to pay attention to language, as my chosen medium of response to those givens. In Hebrew the expression that translates as “Pay attention” is “Sim Lev.” It means, literally, “Put Your Heart (here).”

Jesus’ biggest temptations were about being everything to everyone, or capitalizing on people’s vulnerability to grab power; I think mine center around thinking life is going to be something other than what it is: one of these days I’ll get through all of this daily crap and get to the real stuff of changing the world and all. From that mindset, the daily details turn to drudgery because they are meaningless obstacles to what I need to be doing to feel as though I matter, creating a slow leak of grace from my life that is suffocating because the details don’t end and life is what it is.

And the poet says, “Put your heart (here).”

My world is small, by any measure. The ticket with my name on it is to a specific and short-lived show that will be missed by most of humanity. My world is small; our God is not. If I am most tempted to clamor for a bigger world as a way to a more meaningful existence, then I am most called to dive into the details, such that I begin to see just how much grace my little world can hold if I pay attention to all that passes so easily as incidental.

Jesus came to earth and spent his days walking and talking and eating and drinking and having any number of inane and, I’m sure, somewhat irritating conversations with both his disciples and the religious leaders who opposed him. He didn’t hold a World Evangelism Conference or plan Jesuspalooza. Perhaps it’s not so much that my world is small as it is my world is only as claustrophobic as I allow it to be. I can choose to see only the drudgery or I can put my heart (here) and discover the expansiveness of grace that underpins it all. If I’m paying attention, then the details, whether large or small, offer me the opportunity to be a conduit of that grace. If I’m focused on having a ticket to the wrong show then I contribute to the walls closing in on all of us.

Eugene Peterson’s version of Micah 6:8 says it well:

But God’s already made it plain how to live, what to do, what God is looking for in men and women. It’s quite simple: Do what is fair and just to your neighbor, be compassionate and loyal in your love, and don’t take yourself too seriously— take God seriously.
(The Message)

Justice, mercy, and compassion need specific street addresses in order to take root and grow. Grace needs a face, and hands and feet. Even under the canopy of as grand a gesture as the universe that surrounds us beyond our comprehension, it is the specificity of the Incarnation – that God put God’s heart (here) – that redeems the drudgery or the details and breathes hope into our imperfect lives. The tapestry of grace is being woven one small stitch at a time.

The best I can do with my life is to pay attention: to put my heart (here).

Peace,
Milton

I’m happy to say I’m beginning to feel better. Not yet one hundred percent, but better. Thanks for the kind words and prayers.

I had a fun thing happen today. The Duke Chronicle is the independent student daily newspaper at the university and they ran a story on three changes in Duke dining services; I’m one of them. They even came up and took a picture. And they said:

Though not a location for a brief meal, the Faculty Commons hopes to cater to a broader audience with the promotion of former line chef Milton Brasher-Cunningham in January. His background and experience are varied and his ideas and management skills will benefit the service, Elizabeth Tornquist, a member of the eatery’s staff, wrote in an e-mail.

“We are delighted to have him and feel that he will continue our Executive Chef Amy Tornquist’s tradition of serving fresh local foods, prepared with imagination and skill,” she said.

I feel like I’m finding a rhythm there and things are going well. Tonight when I went out into the dining room to see how folks were doing, one of the students said, “Dude, you’re the guy in the paper.”

That’s me.

Peace,
Milton

my head is stuffy
my body’s falling asleep
I’ll write in my dreams

Peace,
Milton

Cold/Flu/Whatever This Bug Is — 1
Milty — 0

Peace,
Milton

Tonight we only had two people come into the restaurant. I’m beyond trying to figure out how all the different things on the schedules of the Duke students affect when they come to dinner, but tonight left me puzzled. Ramon and I got a good bit of prep work done for the week ahead (I’m assuming more than two will show up the other nights this week) and I got a chance to get to know our new server who started just a few nights ago.

I came home from work in time to watch the Academy Awards with Ginger. Something about the juxtaposition of the three of us doing our job in an empty room at the restaurant and the actors and directors and other technical artists being given Oscars for their accomplishments struck me. Most jobs don’t give awards, or give time to say thanks to one another.

It must be difficult to be nominated because you have to go to the awards prepared to both win and lose. You have to think about who you would thank and what you would say if you won and you have to just sit there if you don’t. How can you truly prepare for both moments?

I wrote something down

on the off chance that I won
to say thanks to all the people
who got me to this point:
family, friends, colleagues, cabbies

you drove me, pushed me, loved me,
challenged me, called me, fought me,
encouraged me, found me, loved me
some more. You really thought I

could do it. You saw things in me
I wasn’t even looking for, aired up
my dreams, gave wings to my wonder,
and set me free to fly. Thank you

is what I want to say, but I
didn’t win. What I wrote will
stay here in my pocket. May I
say, “Thank you,” anyway?

Peace,
Milton

Sen. Barack Obama’s refusal to wear an American flag lapel pin along with a photo of him not putting his hand over his heart during the National Anthem led conservatives on Internet and in the media to question his patriotism. (AP)

Pledge of Allegiance

I was eight years old when they took down
the picture of Queen Elizabeth over the blackboard,
ending her reign over the classroom, making
way for our new President, Kenneth Kaunda,
as we stood and sang, “Stand and sing of Zambia.”

I was eleven, sitting in the middle of the front
seat of his old Ford pickup, listening to the radio
somewhere in East Texas while he went in to
buy some unfiltered Lucky Strikes, when they
said Bobby Kennedy had been shot to death.

I was twenty-one, on a bus in Lenningrad,
going to see the memorial for all those who
had died in Hitler’s vicious siege, when a man
— a survivor – offered to give me everything
if I would promise it would not happen again.

I was thirty-five, teaching school in Boston,
and talking with one of my Chinese students.
When I mentioned Tiananmen Square, he
looked up at me and said, “I was there.”
That’s as close to freedom as I ever stood.

I am fifty-one and they want me to believe
that what matters comes down to lapel pins
and hand signals. I don’t believe them.
I pledge allegiance to the God who made us
and calls us to stand together in love.

Peace,
Milton

It was an odd place to find a poet. She was seated at the end of a long conference table (the kind that hosted meetings that were anything but poetic) in a room, not much bigger than the table, designed for getting to the point rather than ruminating in metaphor. Yet, there we sat, some twenty odd folks (and I do think most of us were odd) on the ground floor of the Duke Clinic building, waiting for words to get us through the day.

I was there by happy coincidence. While everyone else had some connection to the hospital, I had come by way of Garrison Keillor, and then Barbara Crooker’s own website calendar, to take my seat next to her son-in-law who was also the one who had put the web site together. The event was sponsored by the Health and Art Network at Duke (HAND), which is a group that meets together regularly (they’re meeting next Friday to discuss James Thurber’s “The Catbird Seat”). I don’t know much more about them than that. I’m taken by the idea of intentionally looking at healthcare with an artist’s eye and, I’m assuming, vice versa.

As Barbara read her poems, she dropped details of her life like breadcrumbs, leading us to the deeper connection we shared as human beings. She has a new collection from which she read, Line Dance, and the title poem is less, she said, about the Electric Slide than the kind of spontaneous dancing lines that form at wedding receptions, each person affectionately linked to one another. She read the title poem and I kept looking around the room wondering what connections they shared. From there I began thinking of lines of my own, including the one that ran from me to Jimmy to his construction partner who fell off a roof yesterday and was in a room in Duke Medical Center awaiting surgery on his two broken wrists. I was going to see him after the reading.

Barbara lives at the intersection of health and art. Her poetry reflected her acquaintance with grief and with joy and the groundwater of faith that fed her words and her being. She has an autistic son, survived a still birth, had another daughter survive a traumatic brain injury – and those were the things she talked about. When she read her poems, she used her words this way:

Gratitude

This week, the news of the world is bleak, another war
grinding on, and all these friends down with cancer,
or worse, a little something long term that they won’t die of
for twenty or thirty miserable years–
And here I live in a house of weathered brick, where a man
with silver hair still thinks I’m beautiful. How many times
have I forgotten to give thanks? The late day sun shines
through the pink wisteria with its green and white leaves
as if it were stained glass, there’s an old cherry tree
that one lucky Sunday bloomed with a rainbow:
cardinals, orioles, goldfinches, blue jays, indigo buntings,
and my garden has tiny lettuces just coming up,
so perfect they could make you cry: Green Towers,
Red Sails, Oak Leaf. For this is May, and the whole world
sings, gleams, as if it were basted in butter, and the air’s
sweet enough to send a diabetic into shock–

And at least today, all the parts of my body are working,
the sky’s clear as a china bowl, leaves murmur their leafy chatter,
finches percolate along. I’m doodling around this page,
know sorrow’s somewhere beyond the horizon, but still, I’m riffing
on the warm air, the wingbeats of my lungs that can take this all in,
flush the heart’s red peony, then send it back without effort or

thought.
And the trees breathe in what we exhale, clap their green hands
in gratitude, bend to the sky.

A phrase from one of her other poems stuck in my mind: “the untidy closet of my heart.” “Untidy closet” in a redundancy, as far as my life is concerned. I’ve never had a closet that didn’t look as if it had been ransacked. I don’t have to live long in a place before the tiny little space fills up with things and I lose track of what I have in there. When I begin digging and sorting, often times I become an archaeologist of gratitude, finding little pieces of memory and meaning that pull me back into the line dance of life that is larger than I am.

In the untidy closet that is my heart I will need to find room tonight for the words I heard today and the healing they carried as they fell on me.

Peace,
Milton

My travel plans changed this morning. Ginger is not yet over her bronchitis and, well, for several reasons it makes sense to wait a week to go to Birmingham, not the least of which is Ginger and Ella can go with me. About the time I was deciding whether or not to go today, the phone rang and a blogging friend called to ask me to go see his construction business partner who fell yesterday on the job and broke a leg and both wrists; he is at Duke Medical Center. Barbara Crooker, a poet I’ve quoted a couple of times lately, is also reading there today.

We are a week away from closing on the sale of our house in Marshfield and, if all goes well, about a week and a half away from closing on the purchase of a house here in Durham. Needless to say, I’ve got plenty to do around here. Staying is not such a bad thing. The hardest part is shifting gears from how I thought the weekend was going to go to how it actually needs to play out. That shift always takes me a little while. As much as I like to see myself as spontaneous, once I get a plan in my mind I have a hard time letting go of it. I know my destination and I know how to get there, thank you very much.

The destination is still Birmingham, for all the reasons I mentioned in last night’s post. I had my itinerary all worked out: straight down the interstate, get it done, get back home. But I’m not traveling alone. As much as I know that, I need to be reminded – often.

Peace,
Milton

I’m taking the blog on the road this weekend.

One of our reasons for moving south was to be closer to Ginger’s parents in Birmingham. Her dad has Alzheimer’s and her mom has her hands full. They also have Lola and Gracie, our Schnauzers, who making things better there so much that Rachel refuses to give them up. A big part of the reason I’m driving over is to see all of them and another big part is to cook so they can have some soups and other stuff in the freezer for future consumption. It’s a little over five hundred miles from here to there: eight hours and fourteen minutes, according to Google Maps. I’ll take off early in the morning (well, early for me) and get back home sometime tomorrow night. The Cherokee is tuned up and ready to go. By the time I get back, it will have topped 180,000 miles and is still going strong.

In all of human history, only the most recent of us have had the opportunity to move around the globe so expeditiously. Thanks to my car and five hundred miles of interstate highway, I can make pretty good time – until I hit Atlanta. But it was not so long ago that the distance was marked in days, even weeks, rather than hours.

The technology will also let me do something different over the next couple of days as far as my writing goes. My practice for Lent is to write a thousand words a day. Giving myself the liberty of including today’s total in the mix, even though I’m only traveling Friday and Saturday, I’m going to find my three thousand words along the way, taking the opportunity to see what I can hear and see as I travel to be with my family.

I’ll see you down the road.

Peace,
Milton

The path from the restaurant to my car leads me across the heart of Duke’s West Campus five nights a week. Most of the time, not too many folks are out walking when I am, but tonight the Quad was rather well populated with students all standing and facing in the same direction and staring up into the sky. My first thought was they were waiting to see if the Pentagon was going to be able to shoot down its own spy satellite before it fell to earth. I finally asked a girl and guy who were standing near to the sidewalk.

“It’s a lunar eclipse,” she answered, “but it’s behind the cloud now.”

I had no idea that was even happening today. My NPR time gave me nothing but stuff about Castro and the primaries – at least those were the stories I got to hear during prep time. But as I kept walking and trying to look up to see if the clouds might part, I thought of Psalm 8:

I look up at your heavens, shaped by your fingers,
at the moon and the stars you set firm –
what are human beings that you spare a thought for them?

When I sat down to write tonight, I still had the moon on my mind. Ella came in and barked to be taken outside one last time before she went to bed and we stood out under what was by then a clear sky and a moon free of the shadow.

And I started thinking about songs. While Ella trotted in the dark carrying a pine cone in her mouth, I sang softly,

I’m being followed by a moonshadow
moonshadow, moonshadow
leaping and hopping on a moonshadow
moonshadow, moonshadow

My favorite part is the bridge:

will it take long to find me
I asked the faithful light
will it take long to find me
and are you gonna stay the night

Italo Calvino has a wonderful short story called, “The Distance of the Moon” (in Cosmicomics) in which he describes the time near the beginning of human history when the moon was close enough to touch. At high tide, people could reach the moon by ladder; they would visit and then get back before the tide went back out. The natural flow of the universe was to expand, so each night the distance became a little greater, as did the risk of climbing to the moon, until finally it was no longer in reach.

Perhaps we keep singing because we can’t get there so easily. And so Shawn Colvin sings (with Ernie)

So if I should visit the moon
Well, I’ll dance on a moonbeam and then
I will make a wish on a star
And I’ll wish I was home once again
Though I’d like to look down at the earth from above
I would miss all the places and people I love
So although I may go I’ll be coming home soon
‘Cause I don’t want to live on the moon
No, I don’t want to live on the moon

There are probably enough moon songs to line the lyrics end to end and reach the cold hearted orb that rules the night, but I think my favorite is Paul Simon’s “Song About the Moon” (from my favorite Paul Simon record, Hearts and Bones):

If you want to write a song about the moon
Walk along the craters in the afternoon
When the shadows are deep
And the light is alien
And gravity leaps like a knife off the pavement
And you want to write a song about the moon
You want to write a spiritual tune
Then nah nah nah
Presto
Song about the moon

If you want to write a song about the heart
Think about the moon before you start
Because the heart will howl
Like a dog in the moonlight
And the heart can explode
Like a pistol on a June night
So if you want to write a song about the heart
And its ever-longing for a counterpart
Write a song about the moon
The laughing boy
He laughed so hard
He fell down from his place
The laughing girl
She laughed so hard
The tears rolled down her face

Hey Songwriter
If you want to write a song about
A face
Think about a photograph
That you really can’t remember
But you can’t erase
Wash your hands in dreams and lightning
Cut off your hair
And whatever is frightening
If you want to write a song
About a face
If you want to write a song about
The human race
Write a song about the moon
If you want to write a song about the moon
You want to write a spiritual tune
Then do it
Write a song about the moon

Tonight was a good night at work. We were busy again – which is great news – and everyone did well. I reworked the dish the critic had maligned and it was better, too. As hard as I worked today, I came out into the night somewhat energized. Maybe the moon’s game of hide and seek and the folks staring together up into the clouds and stars was contagious. Maybe we were all a little bit washed in dreams and lightning. What I came to tell is the clouds passed and our shadow left the moon unscathed. I know because it didn’t take long to find me and send a shadow of its own while Ella searched for pine cones in its soft glow.

Peace,
Milton