don't eat alone

This morning after Ginger left for work, I loaded up the Cherokee Sport with two old grills, a broken hand push lawnmower that would have made Bagger Vance proud, and some other junk — all of which has been sitting on the non-driveway side of our house for at least a couple of years. – and took it to the town dump, I mean Transfer Station. Every time I go there, the same woman is in the little booth at the entrance. First she opens the sliding window and asks what I’ve brought to drop off. Then she asks to see my window sticker, punches the card the town issued me if I have any household trash, and instructs me as to where to dispose of the different kinds of rubbish I’m hauling because there are very specific places for different kinds of refuse. We have the same conversation most every time I go there, the only differences having to do with the different kinds of trash I’m carrying. I’ve never seen her leave the booth or walk around; I’ve never heard her ask different questions. Everyday from eight to four, she sits in her tiny little booth, punches cards, and tells people what to do with their trash.

My day had a different contour.

After my dump run, I came home to prepare food for the New Clergy Group that Ginger facilitates once a month. They are a wonderful collection of folks; my contribution to their gathering is to keep them fed as they talk. Each month I try to vary the menu, but I always have to make little bites of Brie and caramelized pears wrapped in puff pastry. The group meets for three hours, during which time I usually get out of the house. It’s probably three and a half hours before I come back and they are always still there. The meeting has officially ended and the conversation may have lightened a bit, but they stay as the tone of the gathering moves from one of colleagues to friends.

Then I headed for the Fall Planning Meeting of the Clergy Spousal Support Group, which meets as often as we can at Namaste, our favorite Indian restaurant in Plymouth. The group is composed of my friend Doug and me, since we are both husbands of ministers. Our planning meeting went well: we decided to keep meeting for Indian Food. I also anticipate the continued meetings of our subcommittees on Good Music, Barbeque, and Fine Ales. If our wives were not in ministry, we would still meet for lunch; that’s what friends do.

By the time we had finished eating and talking, the better part of the afternoon had passed. I went on to Kiskadee, since I was in Plymouth, and had a good cup of coffee while I tried to get a handle on my parting words for Sunday.

After an hour or so, I came home to fix dinner, since Thursday is one of the few nights during the week that I get to cook for Ginger and we get to eat together. There’s no better meal for me than one shared with her. We caught up on our days and enjoyed being with each other. I don’t know anything better.

The other night, while I was watching TV as I walked on the treadmill, a local television station had a story on Parker Brothers, who makes Monopoly and Life (and are now owned by Hasbro). They were founded in Massachusetts and still have a factory here. The visual in the story showed women in the factory putting the pieces in the game boxes, each person putting the same piece in the box over and over again. There was no way to do it creatively, no way to spend the afternoon eating Indian food with a friend.

Patty Griffin sings a song about a person who works at the Table Talk Pie Company in Worcester, Massachusetts, called “Making Pies.” The song begins:

It’s not far
I can walk
Down the block
To Table Talk
Close my eyes
Make the pies all day

Plastic cap
On my hair
I used to mind
Now I don’t care
I used to mind
Now I don’t care
Cause I’m gray

Did I show you this picture of my nephew
Taken at his big birthday surprise
At my sister’s house last Sunday
This is Monday and I’m making pies
I’m making pies
Making pies
Pies

My work week is four ten-hour days and I do my share of cooking, though I’m not making pies. And I’m not on an assembly line. I can end up making a whole bunch of burgers or Caesar salads in the course of a day, but it’s never the same thing over and over. Whatever my life is, it’s not the same ole same ole. I often take for granted that my life is normal. Driving away from the woman in the box today, I was reminded it’s not. Griffin’s song concludes:

5am
Here I am
Walking the block
To Table Talk
You could cry or die
Or just make pies all day
I’m making pies

Variety is a gift, not a given. I’m grateful for my choices.

Peace,
Milton

This time of night the minutes pass faster than the words can move from my brain and through my fingers on to the page. As I look towards Sunday and bringing my time at the Hanover church to a close, I’m struck that serendipitously my farewell falls on World Communion Sunday. (I learned from Jan that it is also the fifth anniversary of the beginning of our bombing of Afghanistan.) Of all the aspects of Christian worship, Communion is my favorite. I even wrote about it in an earlier post. One of the reasons I love the Meal is its unending layers of meaning. Like any good meal, there’s more going on that just eating; like any good worship experience, God finds ways to surprise.

At a youth camp one summer many summers ago, we were closing the week by sharing Communion together. That night, we set up the elements in the middle of the room and let people come in various groupings to the Table to serve one another. I went to the table with my friend Reed. Before we served each other he said, “You know what blows my mind? We’re doing something every Christian before us has done and every Christian after us will do.” A few years later, I was with my friend Ken (who pastors here) and he was talking about being moved by Jesus’ words, “But I say to you, I will not drink of this fruit of the vine from now on until that day when I drink it new with you in My Father’s kingdom.” (Matt. 26:29) My friend Billy and I took his words and wrote a song, which I’m going to sing at Hanover on Sunday.

here’s to the day

pieces of life laid on the table
here is the blood poured out in love
fill this cup raise it up

here’s to the day, my friend

time draws a line down innocent faces
years mark the dreams that failed to come home
so you’ll say goodbye say goodnight
and here’s to the day remember

can you say it for the ones whose voices are silenced
can you say it for the ones who’ve never been free
can you pray for peace ache for peace
here’s to the day that’s coming
god speed the day

gather in close now cling to each other
sing to the night you don’t sing alone
fill this cup raise it up
here’s to the day remember

Jesus served his disciples the bread and the cup in the context of goodbye. Part of the deep meaning in the meal is love is stronger than forget (I know I’m borrowing that from someone; I just can’t figure out who). Part of the meaning is no one is around forever. We are all essential to God, but, in these days we call life, none of us is indispensable. When I was youth minister in Fort Worth, I tried to communicate my point by sticking my hand in a glass vase full of water.

“While my hand is in the water, you can see its place,” I said. Then I pulled my hand out of the vase; the water didn’t leave a hole where my hand had been. “The only evidence I have that my hand was there is that it’s wet.” The church in Hanover has gathered for around three hundred years and generation after generation, person after person, has left fingerprints all over the place and, one by one, they have been both remembered and forgotten. The point of standing in the Unbroken Line that brings us all to the Table is not to be remembered as much as to be in line. I’m proud of the fingerprints I’ve left at Hanover and the water will fill in behind me (I think that’s mixing metaphors) and the church, both in Hanover and around the world, will keep going. When November comes (we share Communion once a month), I will be in a different church, but still in the same unbroken line, leaving my fingerprints there.

Don’t let my theologizing fool you: I’m sad to leave. I’m leaving people I have grown to love. I’m leaving people I’ve grown accustomed to being with. I’m leaving things unfinished. I’ve spent my life saying goodbye and have yet to experience a time when it doesn’t suck to have to do it. I’m grateful we will get to say goodbye gathered at the Communion Table, where we can lean into the love that reminds us goodbye is not an ultimate word. One day, we will say hello.

Here’s to the day.

Peace,
Milton

Tonight was my last deacons meeting, preceded by my last staff meeting. For many months Don, Chad (our choir director and organist extraordinaire), and I have met at the local Panera each Tuesday evening at six to eat and discuss whatever we feel like talking about – and some church stuff as well. Our time together has a been an amazing idea factory. I will miss being with them each week.

As I left deacons’ meeting and walked across the parking lot to my car, the reality of this goodbye came to rest on my heart in a way it has not done before. I’m making the move I feel called to make and I’m going to miss these people terribly.

Since I came up to write tonight, I haven’t been able to get past the parking lot. So, I turned to The Writer’s Almanac hoping to find some words that might speak for me. I even read ahead through the poems yet to be broadcast this week. Thursday’s poem is one by Mary Oliver with which I find deep resonance, and so I share it with you. If you are a regular listener to Garrison Keillor’s daily dose of verse, act surprised when he reads it on Thursday.

Messenger

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.

What she said.

Peace,
Milton

Tonight marked the beginning of my final week at the church in Hanover, which means the first in a series of last things. The Monday Night Bible Study group had a special gathering tonight for me (it doesn’t usually start up until after Columbus Day). The group has met on Monday nights for twenty five or thirty years. I started going because I figured the folks who were committed to the group would be leaders in the church whether they held any church office or not. Over three years of Mondays we studied and laughed and cried and prayed together. That group is one of my favorite things about the church.

One of the things Don did tonight was to ask people to tell me what they appreciated about my ministry. Their affirmation was overwhelming, deeply affirming, and incredibly humbling. The people who were speaking have great stories to tell in their own lives and were taking time to encourage and compliment me. As I drove home, I thought about how few jobs ever offer the kind of moment I got to have. I’m a fortunate person to have been able to sit in that room tonight, breathing in the love that filled it, and being offered words of healing and hope.

I worked lunch today at the restaurant, which means I got there about ten and left around six. I arrived to find Robert in the kitchen and all burners blazing; there was a brunch that no one had told him about until Sunday evening. He was on his own trying to feed about twenty five people everything from Eggs Benedict to pancakes to raspberry danishes — and all at a time of day he does not usually see. When breakfast was over, he and the servers who helped stacked all their dishes and pans in the dishroom and left. Usually on a Monday, Joe (the other cook) and I fill up the dishroom on our own because Monday is a prep day: everything was used up over the weekend and we have to restock. Today we made clam chowder, lentil vegetable soup, crab cakes, lobster salad, cole slaw, along with all the dressings and other little things that have to be done.

Pedro, the dishwasher, usually comes in around five or five-thirty, after working all day on a construction site. We have a running joke. He comes in and looks at everything we have piled up and says, “Why you no like me?” Then he smiles. Around two o’clock, Joe and I took some time to try and make some order of all the dirty dishes that were strewn around the dishroom. We stacked plates, put the silverware in the soaking tray, and tried to collect the pots and pans in a way that would at least make the huge collection of stuff to be washed a little more manageable. Pedro came in, looked at the stuff stacked up and dropped the Portugese equivalent of an F Bomb.

“Why nobody call for two dishwashers?” he asked. I didn’t have an answer. He felt disregarded and taken for granted. No one ever gets the staff together in a circle around Pedro in the dishroom and tells him how he has helped. They don’t do it at his construction job either, I’m sure. A couple of our servers say “Thank you, Milton” everytime they pick up an order to take to the table. I also hear them say thanks to Pedro when they take their dirty dishes to him. In a lot of circles, that’s as good as it gets.

None of us can ever get too much of some saying, “Here’s what I like about you.” Go ahead — sing along.

Peace,
Milton

I heard two things today at church I want to pass along.

After our ten o’clock service, Bob, who is a fellow NPR listener, asked me if I had heard this week’s SoundClips: Audio Experiences on All Things Considered. They have asked people to send in audio clips of meaningful or unusual sounds and then they do a short piece on what the sound is and what it means. This week’s feature was the sound of glass Communion cups being put in the cup holders after Communion at the Mayflower Congregational Church UCC in Oklahoma City. Vicky Werneke, who sent in the sound clip, said her pastor likes to refer to the sound as “the clicking sound of solidarity.”

Tonight at Senior High Fellowship, Tom, who is a fellow lover of odd movies, brought The Brave Little Toaster for us to watch together. Last week I mentioned we would do a movie night and Tom jumped at the chance to bring his favorite movie. I had never heard of it before I heard him talk about it. I don’t know why that’s the case because it is a wonderful piece of work. The story follows five appliances – a desk lamp called, Lampy, a small electric blanket called Blanky, a vacuum cleaner called Kirby, an old-fashioned radio who is nameless, and the Toaster (who is affectionately known as “Slot Head”). They live in a cabin that was the summer home for a child whom they love and think of as master. He hasn’t been back in a long time, so they decide to go to the city and find him. At some point in the story, each of the group has to do something sacrificial to help the others and to keep them going on their journey. Though the toaster’s bravery gets him the marquis billing, everyone in the group made an essential contribution in one way or another. They, too, understood the sound of solidarity.

I heard it in the way Bob and Tom brought something to me they knew would help us connect. What wonderful news it is when someone says, “I heard something the other day and it made me think of you.” Sometimes solidarity clicks as the cup hits the holder. Sometimes it sings in a song that carries a memory in its melody. Sometimes it whispers in a word of encouragement or connection. Sometimes it travels silently in a touch or an act of hopeful sacrifice. However it comes, it’s a great word.

I don’t hear the word without thinking of Lech Walesa and the Solidarity Worker’s Union in Poland, whose uprising in the summer of 1980 led to the overthrow of the Communist government there and contributed to the dissolution of Soviet control in Eastern Europe. They stood together and changed the world. I thought of them this week as crowds have begun to gather in Hungary to demand a more honest government. Walesa said, “The thing that lies at the foundation of positive change, the way I see it, is service to a fellow human being.” He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983.

Most of the noise in our world these days is divisive: we are labeled Red or Blue, black or white, right or left, right or wrong, us or them. War has become our primary metaphor for living. But listen – listen to the strain of hope underneath the cacophony of chaos. You can hear it in the clink of a cup or the word of a friend, in the bold marching of an earnest throng and the small gathering of people coming together to create a memory. It infuses life in everything from Communion cups to small appliances, youth groups to labor movements.

The sound of solidarity keeps on clicking.

Peace,
Milton

As the day fades, the thoughts in my head swirl like water going down a drain. I’m not sure I can make much sense of them before they disappear. Since Sunday is getting closer by the minute, I’ve been turning the idea of family as metaphor for church over and over in my mind. Here are a few random, yet tangentially connected thoughts that I will remember better if I write them down.

I was late getting to my adolescent rebellion, so my twenties were hard on me and my parents. One of my seminary colleagues called me one day and said, “I heard your dad preach today and he talked about you.”

“What did he say?” I asked.

“He said, ‘We face two kinds of difficulties in life: problems and predicaments. A problem is something you can do something about; a predicament is something you have to learn to live with. I used to think of my eldest son as a problem; now I understand he is a predicament.’”

Since I was carrying a chip on my shoulder the size of Cleveland at the time, I failed to see the humor and the grace in his words. Since then, we’ve both learned to live with each other rather than trying to solve or fix one another. I’m glad.

Here’s a great quote from Erma Bombeck: “The family. We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another’s desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together.”

In my search for quotes, one of the things I noticed was a majority of them focused on children. Neither Ginger nor I have ever felt called to have children of our own. We have amazing godchildren and have been foster parents, and we have spent a great deal of our lives helping raise other people’s children in one way or another. Family begs for a wider definition that we often give it.

I learned a new name tonight in my search for quotes: Mignon McLaughlin. Here were her thoughts on family: “Family quarrels have a total bitterness unmatched by others. Yet it sometimes happens that they also have a kind of tang, a pleasantness beneath the unpleasantness, based on the tacit understanding that this is not for keeps; that any limb you climb out on will still be there later for you to climb back” (The Neurotic’s Notebook). Both her words and the book title make me want to know more about her.

After my folks and I worked through The Hard Years, we had a conversation about how we had experienced those days. My mother said, “There were times we thought when we hung up the phone that we would never hear from you again.”

I can remember feeling surprised by her words. The thought that I could just walk away had never crossed my mind. I figured family stayed family whether I walked away or stayed. The challenge was not to find a way to escape, but a way to live with it. Dad was right: it was a predicament.

The church is a family. What then shall we say?

Peace,
Milton

After today, I have two weeks before my time at Hanover comes to an end.

Tonight we had the Stockholders’ Dinner for those who helped us go on the mission trip to Jackson, Mississippi. The evening went well and I sorely missed all our graduated folks who are now writing the first chapter of their college lives. One was there tonight because she doesn’t leave for school until Wednesday. The others who went on the trip and the adult sponsors were there to tell about our experiences. We fed folks, talked a lot, and then watched a movie that one of our college students made of the trip. We asked him to go along as “documentarian” and he filmed all week and then put together a wonderful twelve-minute film that really captured the emotion of our experience.

Ginger asked me when I got home if I was sad. The short answer to her question is yes and I also feel good about the move I’m making to cook full time. Within about thirty minutes, I had descended into a strange funk that gave off such a toxic vibe it almost had an odor. I came upstairs to try and figure it out. I’ve been sitting here for an hour, and I think I understand it better: leaving feels like failure to me. I know I’ve worked hard the last three years. I feel good about what I’ve done. I’m grateful for the relationships that formed in the time I was at Hanover. I can hear the compliments and affirmations that have come from folks in the church AND leaving feels like failure to me. It always has. On a visceral, guttural, core of me being level, something tells me I’m leaving because I’m not enough. I’m on my own now because I’m not enough. The song that keeps running through my head (and showed up out of nowhere) is David Bowie’s “Ground Control to Major Tom” about the astronaut who goes out on a spacewalk and never makes it back:

here am I floating like a tin can, far above the moon
planet earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do . . .

I don’t know how to articulate more than that tonight because I’m falling asleep and my exhaustion is probably exacerbating the intensity of the emotion. I do know it’s more than an Oskar Schindler saying, “I could have done more.” Of course I could have — and I did a good job. It is also something other than desperately needing someone to tell me they’re proud of me. The best I can describe it, I feel a sense of failure in the disconnect and, at some level and quite forcefully, what I hear – even in making this move for reasons I believe in – is I am more alone, therefore I failed.

I know the voice is insidious. I know it’s a lie. And it wounds my soul and makes life miserable for Ginger. I don’t know anything else to do right now but to name it and work hard to do more than just stink up the place.

Peace,
Milton

We are in the middle of a string of beautiful early autumn days in New England. I have the day off and I’m sitting at my MacBook in the Kiskadee Coffee Company in downtown Plymouth relishing the afternoon. My mother-in-law is continuing her good progress: it looks like she’ll go home tomorrow. Amazing.

I got out of the house because I wanted to write at some other time than midnight and the Nap Monster was lurking behind the couch, with the two Schnauzers acting as his minions, determined to put me to sleep beneath the soft sea breeze. Once I finish writing, I plan to go home and allow myself to fall prey to their devious plot.

One of my favorite things about working at the Red Lion Inn is the variety of people with whom I get to interact. The staff in the function kitchen is from El Salvador, the dishwashers and some of the restaurant staff are from Brazil, the manager is French, the owner is German, and the servers are an interesting collection of twenty-something white people. Together we make a good team. Life in the kitchen is often hectic, yet also offers room for conversation. Two such moments caught me by surprise last week. The first was finding out that one of the Salvadorians, a gentle good-humored guy who is among the most helpful people I know, fought against the rebels in his country years ago. His brother told us about it with a great deal of admiration. Now, he strikes me as a kind and peaceful guy, but in another time and another place, he was different.

The second surprise was similar: I was talking to one of our servers, a twenty-one year old white woman who weighs about a hundred pounds soaking wet, and found out she was in the National Guard and had served a year in Iraq as an Army aircraft gunner (I’m not sure my military terminology is precise). She will probably have to go back to the Middle East after the first of the year. I still can’t picture her in a plane strafing the desert for insurgents.

We live much of our lives like billiard balls, bouncing around and grazing each other on the way to whatever the pocket is. My encounters last week remind me of how quickly I allow myself to decide I know who someone is, when all I know comes from brief contact or my own preconceived notions drawn from external circumstances.

In the first restaurant where I cooked, I came out from the kitchen late one afternoon with a carry out order. The man who came to pick it up said to me, “You look familiar. You a cop?” When I said no, he responded confidently, “Hockey player.” I said yes so he could get going. My large frame and shaved head had led him to his own conclusions. He wasn’t looking for his mind to be changed.

My friend Doug is a painter. He and his wife were in Maine a couple of weeks ago and he took the opportunity to paint some wonderful landscapes. One of them was of the bay at sunrise. He talked about how they got up early, made a pot of coffee, and drove in the dark to the site from which he wanted to paint. In the early morning twilight, he set up his easel so he could be ready to catch the moment. “You only have a few minutes to get it down on canvas,” he told me. And he got it; the painting is beautiful.

What works for the painter is not a good metaphor when it comes to dealing with one another. Too often we do a quick study and then paint the portrait of someone, frame it, and hang it on the wall in our minds as if we have captured the essence of that person the way Doug captured the sunrise on the water. Such a two-dimensional glimpse is not good art when it comes to friendship. In the late ninties, a movie called Smoke told the story of Auggie (Harvey Kietel) who owned a smoke shop in Brooklyn. Every morning at eight o’clock, he walked across the intersection from his store and took a picture of his shop. He kept each and every photograph in albums behind the counter. When one of the other characters asked him why he took the same picture everyday, he was quick to point out it was not the same picture. He was taking a picture of the same store at the same time everyday, but the details were always different: the weather, the people walking by, the traffic. The art of friendship requires us, as artists, to commit ourselves to picture after picture, offering a more complete image of our subjects by learning from the details and the differences.

My Salvadorian co-worker is more than a soldier or a prep cook; the Italian-American woman is more than a server or a tail gunner. I have to be willing to keep taking pictures if I want my friendship to be good art.

Peace,
Milton

Last night was my one night this week to not be working in my restaurant, so Ginger and I went to eat in someone else’s place.

We got a call a couple of weeks ago from friends in Winchester who wanted to get together for a meal. It’s Restaurant Week in Boston, which means a number of restaurants usually out of our price range are offering a prix fixe menu of appetizer, entrée, and dessert for $30.06. (I don’t think they intended for the price to be the name of a rifle; rather, I think the six cents has to do with it being 2006.) That these places think thirty bucks is a bargain also lets you know we were not in our usual haunts.

The restaurant we chose was Olives in the Charlestown neighborhood of Boston, which was our neighborhood for twelve years before we moved to Marshfield. We loved it there. But for all our years in the community, this was only the second time we’d been to Olives because it’s one of those skip-the-house–payment-and-sell-the-children-so-we-can-eat-dinner kind of places. Based on our experience in Charlestown, we also stayed away because of the attitude of the place: Todd English was never a very good neighbor to the folks who lived near his restaurant and treated the community as though we should consider ourselves lucky to have him.

The host last night seemed to have picked up his attitude. Ginger and I arrived before our friends and stepped up to the host stand to let her know we were there. She treated us as if we were an inconvenience from the start. With her Euro-chic hairdo and her librarian-chic glasses, over which she looked at us, it was all I could do to keep from saying, “OK, what you do for a job is check reservations and hand out menus; don’t cop a ‘tude with me.”

I didn’t say that. Ginger and I walked across the street to City Square Park and waited for our friends. When they arrived, we went back in together and the other host showed us to our table. The food was quite good, though quite sparsely portioned (two tablespoons of “creamy corn polenta” doesn’t qualify as a side dish, Todd) – as was the wine, which was plentiful (thanks, Josh) – but the feast of the evening for me was the friendship. Betsy, Josh, Dave, Sue, Ginger, and I have shared a lot of years together. Children we saw born are now in middle school. We’ve all moved at least once. We’ve been through job changes, family tragedies, as well as triumphs and celebrations. We spent the evening rekindling memories and catching up on what is going on in real time. I came away full and happy.

A few years back, Ginger preached a sermon on the Ten Commandments in which she took the “don’t” statements and turned them into “do” statements: “Thou shall not covet,” for example, became “Be content with what you have.” You get the idea. The quote that has been on this blog since day one is, “There is no joy in eating alone.” Our wonderful dinner together last night leads me to follow Ginger’s example and look for a positive rephrasing: there is great joy in eating together. What makes a meal is whose around the table. The food tastes good when it was steeped in friendship.

We were on the early side of dinner. By the time we left, the place was packed. I looked around the room and saw circles of friends in varying number around each table, laughing and talking. When we passed the host stand, her demeanor had not changed. I wondered if she had any idea of what she was a part of.

When I put plates up to be served at the Red Lion Inn, I imagine they are going to tables filled with friends like ours was last night. That possibility is what makes my job most rewarding: I’m feeding friendships.

Last night, I was fed.

Peace,
Milton

When the room gets too dark to see, the best thing I can do is stack up the words of others so I can climb up to look out the window for little flickers of light. In these days when I’m daunted by books, I’m even more grateful for poems. Small as they are, they stack up big; a few choice words well placed make the light easier to find.

My stack today started with Stephen Dunn, then W. S. Merwin, then William Stafford, and then Naomi Shihab Nye.

Lights From Other Windows

Driving west tonight, the city dissolves behind us.
I keep feeling we’re going farther than we’re going,
a journey that started in the deep inkwell
out of which all our days are written.
Nothing is said to indicate a monument,
yet I perch on the edge of some new light.
The hills could crack open and a pointed beam,
like the beams on miner’s hats, could pick us off this road.
Signals blinking, we arrive in a bright room
of greetings and hands. But when the stories spill,
I feel myself floating off alone into the night we just left,
that cool black bag of darkness, where black deer
nibbled invisible grasses and black fences divided one thing
from the next. A voice in my earliest ears not this, not this
and the lit windows of childhood rise up,
the windows of houses where strangers lived,
light slanting across black roads,
that light which said what a small flicker is given
to each of us to know. For seconds I dreamed their rooms
and tables, was comforted by promise of a billion other lives.
Like stars. Like knowing the Milky Way
is made of more stars than any naked eye can count.
Like having someplace to go when your glowing restlessness
lifts you out of rooms, becomes a wing,
takes you farther than you will have traveled
when your own life ends.

Sometimes Ginger and I walk down to the beach at night. We are fortunate to live far enough away from the primary sources of ambient light in our area to be able to see lots of stars. There is a row of large houses along the sea wall, most of which are only inhabited in the summer time. I get frustrated when we get to the beach and one or two of the houses have left their outside spotlights on, washing out my view of the stars. I don’t always want more light. They have their reasons for the lights being on; I have my reasons for wanting them off. Neither of us is particularly concerned about the other.

The earliest helpful definition of depression I remember being helpful defined it as “anger turned inward.” Over the years I’ve come to understand turning inward is the primary motion of depression, regardless of what is turning. Whatever depression is, it is overarchingly self-focused. Part of that comes, I think, from not having the energy to look out and from seriously needing help without always knowing how to ask for it. But the lie is that there is no energy. It’s there. Since it can’t get out, it bores deeper into the darkness inside, pulling everything with it like an emotional black hole. As the depth of the darkness increases, so does the call to stack up whatever I can find so I can keep looking out the window – outside of myself – for lights from other windows to pierce my darkness and help me see something else.

Gracie woke me about six-fifteen this morning and I came downstairs with the pups so Ginger could sleep a bit longer. I let them out and fed them and, after a few tosses of various toys, Gracie and Lola were ready to sleep again. I was awake with only infomercials, music videos, Walker: Texas Ranger, and the news channels to keep me company. Though most of the news outlets were talking about Lebanon, all they were talking about was us. The reporter on MSNBC asked someone from the State Department who was working with evacuating Americans, “How long before you will be able to get all the innocent people out?” She was speaking only about the Americans, as if all the Lebanese were not innocent.

I could not ask for a better example of the destructive power of a self-focused life. The battle raging in the Middle East is not about us, no matter how hard we try to make it so. As long as we insist on making ourselves at the center of attention, we will not be a part of bringing any kind of redemption to the situation.

I’m working hard to take those words to heart in my own life. I’m depressed and struggling. In comparison with life in Beirut, my struggle hardly registers. Both things are true. The only life I can live is my own. I am not the center of things.

I need light from other windows.

Peace,
Milton