don't eat alone

According to Google Maps, my journey from Marshfield to Birmingham is 1201 miles – all of it on interstate highways. The path I chose to drive has taken me through one-fifth of our United States: yesterday I saw Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, and Pennsylvania; today I added Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama. And I’m still not to Birmingham. I got so sleepy I had to stop ninety miles short of Ginger.

I’ll be up early. Trust me.

These kinds of road trips are best suited for college students and not fifty-year olds, I think. Somewhere around Wytheville, Virginia my hips started to petrify so I decided to stop and walk for a bit. I went to the visitors’ bureau to find out what was around and discovered the Appalachian Trail crossed I-81 just south of where I was. I added a few miles to my journey and got off the interstate, winding my way up the side of a hill, only to find the park had closed about fifteen minutes before I got there. I looked around and saw the trail going up the hill on the other side of the road, so I parked the car and headed up the hill. I wasn’t too far away from the road when I realized there was a thin layer of snow on the leaves. I kept walking for about twenty minutes when I realized the sun was falling quickly behind the mountain and I wasn’t in the mood to participate in a casting call for the road company of The Blair Witch Project. I retraced my steps and continued my journey on wheels.

My friend Doug commented this week that the way we travel these days is unnatural. To be able to fly across country (or countries) in a matter of hours, or drive through ten states in a little over a day are actions our bodies and our minds don’t know how to translate. I’ve known a couple of people who have walked the Appalachian Trail from end to end, which is something like a six month venture. They started in the early spring in the south, so they could get ahead of the heat, and finished in early fall up in Maine, hopefully a little ahead of the winter. They made plans for shoes and supplies to be mailed to them along the way. And then they took off walking, taking in each step of the journey, feeling every bump of the trail.

My friend Billy and I used to make mix tapes whenever we got together. (We didn’t live in the same town.) When I talked to him yesterday and mentioned a mix CD I had made off iTunes, he asked if it was as fun as making a tape. It’s more efficient, but it’s not as fun. Making a cassette meant we had to record in real time – we had to listen to the songs. He and I would take turns choosing songs to add, making the mix a conversation of sorts, each song responding to the one before it and issuing a challenge to the song to follow. We never knew what we had made until it was completed. iTunes is the interstate of mixing: I compiled some great traveling music and I blew right by all the conversation.

Had I not stopped to unfreeze my hips, if you will, I never would have met the dear white haired woman in the visitors’ center who showed me where the Appalachian Trail was and I never would have walked among the tree skeletons, their fallen leaves crunching under my feet and their barren limbs reached skyward receptively.

I’m grateful for the highways that make it possible for me to have a late breakfast with Ginger tomorrow, which we will have to share with the Schnauzers. I understand there are some journeys that need to be mapped. And – I pray for more days lived in human time, sacred time, full of wander and wonder, listening and waiting for the next song.

Peace,
Milton

As I was working to find ways to get the last few things in the back of my Cherokee so I could head out of town, I found a mix CD I know I must have made but don’t remember doing so entitled, “Durham.” I put it in the small bag of things that was to sit next to me in the car and finished up. I had just reached the Mass Pike in the pouring rain when I remembered the disc and slipped it into the player. A couple of songs in, Cat Stevens sang from deep in my memory:

I listen to the wind
to the wind of my soul
where I’ll end up, well
I think only God really knows . . .

Last night, I went with my friends Betsey and Trisha to walk the labyrinth at the Hanover church. Don, the pastor (and also my dear friend) and Sue, his wife, were there also. Don had built a fire in the heart of the labyrinth and lined the perimeter with lanterns. The rows of stones delineating paths now covered with fallen leaves grew out of conversations some years ago after Betsey and Trisha went to Grace Cathedral in San Francisco and walked the labyrinth there. Among the many meanings carried by the stones, one of the most important for me is they stand as a testimony to faith among friends.

Betsey and I walked at the same time and I became quickly aware of the power of the metaphor that lives in the ancient practice. As we both followed the turns in front of us, we would pass close to each other and then, almost instantly it seemed, be on opposite sides of the circle and then back together again before we both ended up seated in front of the fire. We stayed there a long time, re-membering our friendship with tears and gratitude, sitting among the stones we once thought might never be stacked and straightened.

“This gives me hope,” Betsey said, “because it came true. Most things don’t come true.”

I heard then the same words I listened to as I drove today, sung by one of my favorite theologians, Steve Earle:

just because you’ve been around
and had your poor heart broken
that’s no excuse for lying there
before the last word’s spoken
‘cause some dreams
don’t ever come true
don’t ever come true
aw, but some dreams do

While I was in Hanover, my friend Doug was back at my house packing. He and some others had come over to help in the afternoon and when it came time for me to leave he said he was going to stay and work. That was at five-fifteen. When I called the house at nine, he answered the phone. When I got to the house, I found he had finished everything that needed to go in the Pod so the movers could take it. We loaded the last of it together, cleaned up the driveway, and then went back to his house for well-deserved beers and sleep. I felt him riding along side me as another of my favorite spiritual advisors, James Taylor, sang:

the secret of life is in opening up your heart
it’s ok to feel afraid
don’t let that stand in your way
‘cause everyone knows that love is the only road
and since we’re only here for awhile
might as well show some style
give us a smile . . .

I called my friend Billy to catch him up on my journey and to catch up on his. He talked about pulling an old book off the shelf – Anthony de Mello’s Song of the Bird – and finding an inscription I had written when I gave the book to him about two weeks after we met in 1984. We spent about a half an hour moving seamlessly between past and present finding ourselves close together on the journey, even across the miles. The rain and the Berkshires conspired to drown the signal from my phone, but the Indigo Girls provided the perfect soundtrack:

why do we hurtle ourselves through every inch of time and space
I must say around some corner I can sense a resting place
with every lesson learned a line upon your beautiful face
we’ll amuse ourselves one day with these memories we’ll trace . . .

I found my brother along the road once the storm cleared and we talked across two state lines. It has taken a lot of years and miles for us to learn how to be fellow travelers; that we have learned how is one of the things in my life for which I am most grateful. One of the reasons I called him is to say to him what I have been saying about him to others over the last couple of weeks as I have had occasion to have a few extended conversations with one of my nephews – his son. He has two and both of them live with a sense of confidence an integrity that is undergirded by a sense that they know they are trusted. Miller and Ginger (yes, his wife is named Ginger also) have did a great job raising boys and have done an amazing job incarnating love and grace as trust so that the boys have been able to grow into young men. They don’t treat the guys like kids anymore; they treat them as though they believe in who they are and who they are becoming. What an amazing gift. Guy Clark sang for all of them about the time I hit the Pennsylvania line:

you’ve got to sing like you don’t need the money
love like you’ll never get hurt
you’ve got to dance like nobodys’ watching
it’s gotta come from the heart if you want it to work

All across the five states on my sojourn, I talked to Ginger, updating her on my progress and trying to articulate the thunderstorm of emotions I’ve felt over the last few days in particular. The longer I live, the more I trust that grace means I’m not required to prove myself before God, or anyone else, in order to be loved. If, however, there is some sort of final accounting and I’m asked what I made of my life, I will simply point at Ginger and say, “I was with her.” I won’t have to say anything else. That we have had two decades together in New England and are now moving together into a new chapter is full of great things mostly because we are together. And so my travel day ended appropriately with Billy Joe of Green Day singing one of Ginger’s favorite songs:

so take the photographs and still frames in your mind
hang it on a shelf in good health and good time
tattoos and memories and dead skin on trial
for what it’s worth it was worth it all the while

it’s something unpredictable
but in the end it’s right
I hope you had the time of your life

Betsey’s right: life is full of things that don’t come true. Today, however, I have been carried by those things that are: faith, hope, and love. And Paul is right, too: the greatest of them all is love.

I am not alone, in my going out and my coming in.

Peace,
Milton

There will be more words from the road tomorrow; there is much to tell. For tonight, a final picture of me in our home.

Milty doesn’t live here anymore.

Peace,
Milton

I worked my last shift at the restaurant last night. About a week ago, I asked Chef if I could cook supper for the staff as my goodbye present. He prepares a “family meal,” as he calls it, from time to time. Now it was my turn. For our last supper, I chose to prepare one of my favorite dishes growing up: King Ranch Casserole.

The King Ranch was a giant ranch that took of most of Texas that lies between Corpus Christi (the city of my birth) and Brownsville. It was a cattle ranch, so there is some question as to whether they really invented a chicken dish. Texas Monthly ran an article some time back that expanded on the origins of the casserole:

No one seems to know who invented it. The casserole may have come to King Ranch, but the descendants of Captain Richard King prefer to tout their beef and game dishes. “Kind of strange, a King Ranch casserole made with chicken,” noted Martin Clement, the head of the public relations for the ranch. Mary Lewis Kleberg, the widow of Dick Kleberg, admits that her heart sinks every time a well-meaning hostess prepares it in her honor. Most likely the dish got its name from an enterprising South Texas hostess or a King Ranch cook whose preference for a poultry doomed him to obscurity.

Yet King Ranch casserole’s general origins are easy to discern. Certainly it owes a deep debt to chilaquilas, which also contain chicken, cheese, tomatoes, tortilla chips, and chilies–the staples that campesinos often combine to stretch one meal into two while retaining a semblance of nutrition. But the dish owes as much to post-World War II cooking, when casseroles made with canned soups were the space-age cuisine. Because they could be made quickly and made for later use, casseroles liberated the lady of the house. ” The perfect entree for a minimum amount of time in the kitchen for the hostess,” the McAllen Junior League cookbook notes. The recipe made its way from one woman’s club to another, networking in its most fundamental form. ” It was one of those recipes that everybody just had a screaming fit trying to get,” Mrs. Joe Gardner of Corpus Christi recalls.

If the women of the fifties loved this recipe because it freed them of the family kitchen, their children love it because it takes them back there. They have adapted it to their taste, of course: Trendy cooks now substitute flour tortillas for corn, while the truly convenience-crazed use Doritos. Purists doctor the recipe for sour cream–a move back toward Mexican authenticity. Houston’s Graham Catering has come up with a low-salt version. Even that bastion of Junior Leaguedom, San Antonio’s Bright Shawl lunchroom, has changed with the times. Chef Mark Green has followed the lead of the late Dallas gourmet guru Helen Corbitt by dropping canned soups; he now adds his own “roux” of milk, shredded cheese, garlic, and sliced mushrooms. “It sells good,” he says. “It goes fast.”

My version is more like Mark Green’s than my mother’s; I didn’t open any cans. I made enough for at least twenty; the twelve folks working ate it all. I posted the recipe here.

I timed the serving of our meal to happen before the dinner service got busy, so we all stood around in the kitchen with our bowls and talked and laughed. “The reason I cooked dinner tonight,” I told them, “was to say thank you. This has been my favorite kitchen to work in and, even though it’s been a short time, I’m sad to leave. Thanks for our time together.”

At the end of the evening, they gave me a card, a Red Sox lottery ticket with a chance to win season tickets for life (it wasn’t a winner), and bought me a couple of Guinesses for the road.

“We’ll miss you,” one of the servers said. “You’re nice and you can cook; do you know how hard that is to find in this business?”

I was grateful for the compliment.

Peace,
Milton

the home of the Penguins

the home of the Yankees
(I wonder if they suck, too)

the home of the Pioneers

the home of The Office
(Steve Carell is from Marshfield)

and, for tonight (or what’s left of it), our way station after leaving Marshfield tonight with our U-Haul trailer and the pups. I fly back on Friday to close up the house, but we are officially in transition — and spending the night in Scranton/Wilkes-Barre.

Peace,
Milton

hardly four days have passed since
we stopped trying to save daylight
and let it sink all too quickly into
autumn’s mid-afternoon sunsets

dawn breaks; how can daylight
be anything but a lost cause?
then again, darkness falls and
suffers the night in silence

I am awake wresting an idea
who refuses to become a poem
it was yesterday when I started
the longer night hasn’t helped

when I am waked by the first chards
of daylight against my window
I will see these words and it will
dawn on me what I wanted to say

Peace,
Milton

There’s an old joke about a preacher standing up one Sunday and saying, “Today we are going to confess our sins to one another and find forgiveness.” Members of the congregation began to stand, tentatively at first, and tell their secrets. The pastor would respond, “Thank you. You have confessed and you are forgiven.” As the service continued, the confessions became bolder and more outlandish. When one man spoke of his relationship with some of his farm animals, the pastor said, “Oh, brother – I don’t believe I would have told that one.”

From time to time, I come across culture watchers and social commentators who lament the loss of privacy in our society, pointing out (and often pointing at the blogging world) that we are giving our privacy away more than it is being taken from us. The question is a live one for me as I sit down to write: how much do I tell? In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott says if you want to be a writer you have to write as if your parents are dead. I understand her point about getting past some false internal filters and I don’t want my parents’ deaths to be the prerequisite for my being able to put pen to paper (fingers to keyboard?).

So “how much” is not the first question. What comes before is I must ask, why am I telling the story of my life? Needing to speak or be heard, or feeling as though I have something important to say are not adequate reasons on their own, I think. A quick trip through my Bloglines feeds each day reminds me my voice is not more important than another’s. At the bottom of it all, I write to connect – and by that I mean something beyond having folks comment on the posts (though I like reading the comments); I mean working to be one of the voices that pulls people together rather than one of those that tears things apart.

One of the relationships in my life that has found a way to stretch over the miles and years is with my friends Joy and Mark, who live in Iowa and both teach at Waldorf College. Joy is also a writer. Their first son was born with multiple birth defects; he is now sixteen. She wrote a book about their lives so far called Involuntary Joy. This week, in response to my Playgrounds & Pain post, she sent a wonderful email message, part of which said:

I’ve just returned from a small book signing. A few women–who have already read Involuntary Joy–shared comments that will be helpful as I attempt to move forward with finding an agent/national publisher. Everyday I see my son’s joy over things that I might miss if he had not taught me how to look. I’ve explained that reality the best way I know how: Involuntary Joy. However, asking others to share the journey through reading makes for a bold invitation. The ones who accept are rewarded from the ride that is that portion of our life’s journey. But I’m finding that some start to read and nearly quit because our life’s pain is too much. (The ones who’ve talked to me have not quit reading, but admit they almost did.) One woman–who said she loved the book–suggested that it might be necessary to not tell everything in order to find other readers. I’m extremely open to such. In fact, would welcome the opportunity to have someone attempt to define what parts of our lives aren’t necessary to share. But I have this lingering wonder: What kind of journey would they be taking with our family then? Can the rewards of a less intensely painful read be as great? Would the concept of life’s involuntary joys become as fully known?

Her questions sent me first to Mary Oliver’s wonderful poem, “Wild Geese”:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Joy and Mary’s voices harmonize to remind me when we share our despair with one another we give birth to joy – and kindness. In a recent post, Jen Lemen, another scribbling woman* who speaks to me, wrote:

We float on the sea of otherness together, our differences folded into the kindness of not having to be alone–no matter how young your sorrow or how old your hope.

I know there are days I have written out of my loneliness, craving comments and community; at my best, however, I work to write in solidarity rather to feed my need to not feel by myself. I dig into the words as one among many who are mining our pain and circumstance hoping to strike the veins of joy and kindness that sustain us all. As I sit solitarily at my computer, I learn again (even as I change metaphors) that I am one voice in the great cloud of witnesses and participants in our shared humanity – even today I have quoted Joy, Mary and Jen. I close with the words of Bob Bennett’s song, “Hand of Kindness.”

I’ve no need to be reminded
of all my failures and my sins
I can write my own indictment
of who I am and who I’ve been
I know that grace by definition
is something I can never earn
but for all the things that I may have missed
there’s a lesson I believe that I have learned

there’s a hand of kindness
holding me, holding me
there’s a hand of kindness
holding me, holding on to me

forgiveness comes in just a moment
sometimes the consequences last
and it’s hard to walk inside that mercy
when the present is so tied up to the past
in this crucible of cause and effect
I walk the wire without a net
and I wonder if I’ll ever fall too far
but that day has not happened yet

‘cause there’s a hand of kindness
holding me, holding me
there’s a hand of kindness
holding me, holding on to me

“There is no joy in eating alone,” it reads at the top of the sidebar on this blog. There is great joy and kindness in not having to be alone even as we eat and write and pray and grow and live holding on to one another.

Peace,
Milton

*with an ironic nod to Nathaniel Hawthorne who lashed out at “those damned scribbling women” whose books often outsold his.

When Ginger and I moved to Boston in August of 1990, we had been married four months. Now, five months shy of our eighteenth anniversary, we are (we verbalized as we drove into the city today) leaving home. We wondered aloud how we will learn to “let go” of this wonderful city and then began to talk in terms of “changing our grip”: we are headed south to find home in a new city and Boston will remain our hometown.

We are also leaving those who have become family to us. The main point of our trip today was to say goodbye to Cherry, whom we have known since she was in high school and we met her doing a youth camp in Louisiana. She moved to Boston and lived with us for four years and has remained to make a life of her own, part of which includes being a yoga instructor. We met for lunch at Fajitas & ‘Ritas, the site of my fortieth birthday party, and then spent a couple of hours sipping coffee and talking as we sat together on Boston Common across from a playground packed with little kids. I was taken with one little girl in a pink dress who, rather than coming down the slide, slung herself over the side of it at the top, dangled, and then dropped to the ground below. She jumped up, climbed back up the ladder, and did it over and over without hesitancy or harm.

Cherry talked about some of the bodywork she has done in her yoga training. “The reason she doesn’t hurt herself,” Cherry said, “is because she doesn’t resist.” The little girl fell without fear; she didn’t brace herself as though the ground would hurt, she just let go and landed. “We get injured when we brace ourselves in fear,” Cherry continued. “We have to learn to trust the joy.”

John Updike wrote a story called “Trust Me” (in a collection by the same name) many years ago that begins with Harold, as a child, jumping off the edge of the swimming pool to his father’s arms, only to be dropped into the water and moves through various events in his life in which his trust is betrayed or he breaks the trust of one of his loved ones. Then the story ends:

The palms of his hands, less mottled, looked pale and wrinkled, like uncomfortable pillows. In his shirt pocket Harold found tucked the dollar bill rejected at the subway turnstile, extremely long ago. While waiting for Priscilla to relent and call back, he turned to its back side, examined the mystical eye above the truncated pyramid, and read, over and over, the slogan printed above the ONE.

As we sat in the park, I couldn’t help but watch the children moving up and down the chutes and ladders. Their play was not without pain — I saw them slip on steps and slam into the slides – but joy was the prevailing wind that filled their sails. They dove and jumped and climbed and slid head first without resistance, without fear, without thought that our afternoon was made for anything other than unadulterated joy. And we were three who have trusted each other for a long time struggling not to brace ourselves for the pain that comes with separation. While they played, we were saying goodbye. We were living a pain those children don’t know. They were living a joyous abandon we are hard pressed to find in our own lives. Who then, has the lesson to learn?

I couldn’t help but think of Randy Newman’s old song:

If I had one wish
One dream I knew would come true
I’d want to speak to all the people of the world
I’d get up there, I’d get up there on that platform
First I’d sing a song or two you know I would
Then I’ll tell you what I’d do
I’d talk to the people and I’d say
“It’s a rough rough world, it’s a tough tough world
Well, you know
And things don’t always, things don’t always go the way we plan
But there’s one thing, one thing we all have in common
And it’s something everyone can understand
All over the world sing along

I just want you to hurt like I do
I just want you to hurt like I do
I just want you to hurt like I do
Honest I do, honest I do, honest I do”

Buddha taught that life was suffering. I, who at this point in my life am shaped a bit like Buddha, understand how much pain is a part of the fabric of our being and I wonder, after watching the children play today, why I allow myself to see pain as the fundamental connector of humanity so easily. We were created for more than enduring life. Hell, yes life hurts. It hurts a lot. It’s not safe or secure or without danger. And we were created for more than hiding in the corner or bracing ourselves for the next blow. As the goodbyes stack up as high as the boxes in our house, as we prepare to leave home, as our hearts hurt, I want to know how to swing out over the side of the slide and let go and continue to trust that love will catch me.

When I was in tenth grade, we came back from Africa to live in Fort Worth, Texas for a year while my parents were on leave from the mission field. I was carrying fresh wounds of farewells and had no idea how to be an American teenager. One afternoon, I was invited to a church youth event at a local park. Two of the seniors, Cathy Shelton and David Piland, who both seemed so beautiful and cool to me, sang Elton John’s “Love Song.” It was the first time I had heard of Elton or the song (actually written by Lesley Duncan). As they sang, the sounds of the children on the playground behind them bled through the microphone underneath their voices just like it does on the record (as I discovered when I bought it). The children giggled and shouted and played as Cathy and David sang:

Love is the opening door
Love is what we came here for
No one could offer you more
Do you know what I mean
Have your eyes really seen

Thirty-seven years later, the juxtaposition of playgrounds and pain still speaks to me, calling me beyond the hurt to informed hope. Whatever we know of sorrow and skinned knees, however marked we are by wounds and worries, they are not what makes us human. We were born by Love, we are bound by Love, and Love will carry us home.

Trust me.

Peace,
Milton

Here are the pictures of the Red Sox celebration in Boston today. I only had my camera phone, so the quality isn’t great and I didn’t get some shots, but here is our day in images (and a few words).

We rode in on the train, along with every high school kid skipping school . . .

our two favorite brands: Red Sox and Dunkin Donuts . . .

this woman, in her mid-sixties, did what she could to see the parade . . .

if you own the team, you get to ride in the front car . . .

some of our favorite pitchers . . .

they even let Gagne ride along . . .

Pedroia and Youuuuuuuuk . . .

Papelbon and the Dropkick Murphys . . .

Ginger and I celebrating our champions.

Peace,
Milton