don't eat alone

I couldn’t help but notice the teaser on the AOL homepage as I logged on to check my email: “What happened to Lindsay Lohan?” To top it off, they included this picture from her Parent Trap days. For those of you not keeping score at home, 20 year old Lohan was arrested for being high or drunk or both. I read the question twice. At best, it’s satirically rhetorical; at worst, it’s cynically stupid. My hunch is the latter. (Why is no one busting the club owners for serving an underage person?)

Some time during my late night TV viewing, I came across a BBC documentary called The Human Face starring John Cleese. The segment I saw was called “Famous Faces” and had to do with fame, which, as far as Cleese was concerned, is overrated in our modern culture. He ended the episode standing in a newsstand surrounded by magazines covered with pictures of movie stars and models. “All of these people are famous and they don’t have an idea between them that will be of any help to you.” As he walked out of the shot, the camera panned back to show a whole row of magazines with his face on the cover.

When I looked in Roget’s Thesaurus, it made a distinction between “widely known and esteemed” and “widely known and discussed.” What I heard in Cleese’s commentary was what appears to matter most in our culture is simply to be widely known; being esteemed carries very little currency these days. Being famous has been reduced to the lowest common denominator of the tabloids and, worse still, has turned us into cultural cannibals with voracious appetites for the salacious and the stupid. That’s what happened to Lindsay Lohan: we chewed her up and spit out nothing but bones.

In 1999, Ron Howard made EdTV about the ridiculous concept of someone putting his life on camera 24/7. Eight years later, in our reality show world, EdTV seems sentimental and naïve by comparison. Our twisted sense of reality means more people in our country know about Sanjaya than the Sudan.

I’m stating the obvious.

Since I saw Cleese’s piece, I’ve been thinking about my favorite Naomi Shihab Nye poem. I know I quoted it in the early days of the blog, but it feels essential word right now in reminding us what the word means:

Famous

The river is famous to the fish.

The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth
before anybody said so.

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
watching him from the birdhouse.

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.

The idea you carry close to your bosom
is famous to your bosom.

The boot is famous to the earth,
more famous than the dress shoe,
which is famous only to floors.

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it
and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.

I want to be famous to shuffling men
who smile while crossing streets,
sticky children in grocery lines,
famous as the one who smiled back.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.

The other day when I was downtown waiting in line to get my sandwich, a homeless man stumbled my way. He wasn’t wearing a shirt and was clearly drunk, even though it was just after noon. He started staring at me from several yards off and began veering my way as he stumbled along. As he got close, he said, “You’re bald,” and then he grinned. I smiled back, wondering what was going to happen next. His grin got bigger and he said, “And you’re AWESOME.” Then he went on his way.

Thanks to my crystal ball of a scalp reflecting the sun on an early summer day, I was fleetingly famous to a guy on the street. I smiled back and thanked him, but my fame was neither substantive or sustainable. I met a woman this week who is a social worker in Framingham working mostly with homeless teenagers. She talked about making an extra sandwich when she makes her lunch everyday and making sure she always has an extra pair of socks in her bag when she goes out to find the kids. They are always hungry and they need the socks because they don’t have any kind of access to do laundry. She may never get a movie deal or snort coke in the back of a fancy limousine, but she’s famous, I tell you.

As a buttonhole.

Peace,
Milton

I didn’t write last night because it was after midnight when I finally got home. I went with some friends to Fenway Park to see our beloved Red Sox play the Cleveland Indians. The Sox have been on quite a tear so far this season and had won five games straight. Our new pitching sensation, Daisuke Matsuzaka, or Dice-K as we call him here, was on the mound, the weather for the evening was picture perfect, and there was a blue moon coming up over the stands as darkness fell (you can see it between the lights and the press box if you look hard in my camera phone pic). My friend Doug and I drove into town with the top down on the Wrangler. We left early because Boston traffic is always a dice roll and got to town early enough to hang out in the Sunset Cantina and have a couple of beers. Then we moved on and met Jay and Marc. A good time was had by all, even though we lost.

And it’s all Doug’s fault.

Somewhere around the third or fourth inning, while we were still up 2-0, Doug told us the Sox lost every time he came to a game. Our whole section took it pretty well, until the sixth inning when Dice-K rolled craps and the Indians scored six runs. Doug went down to get a beer as the Sox came to bat and the first three batters hit singles. When he came back to his seat, the bases were loaded with no outs. “Go back downstairs,” we yelled to no avail. The next three batters were retired and we lost the game 8-4.

Baseball is known for its superstitions. When Nomar Garciaparra played here, he had this ritual of tapping his fingers on his arm in three different places before he stepped into the batter’s box. Curt Schilling won’t step on the chalk lines between the dugout and the pitcher’s mound. Watch a game for long and you’ll see any number of players kiss medallions around their necks as they step up to the plate. When the bases loaded up last night, there were several in our section who put on our “rally caps,” turning our caps around or inside out, hoping to foster a change in the situation. Things weren’t going well as they were, so we were going to change what we could to see if that would make a difference. Neither turning our hats around in Section 29 or banning Doug to a beer run appeared to be either necessary or meaningful on the change meter, but it was what we could do.

I’ve been thinking this morning about what we get out of our superstitions. I’m guessing it gives Schilling a sense of preparedness. This is a guy who works hard to get ready for a game. He almost choreographs every pitch before the game begins, keeping copious notes on the hitters he faces. Stepping over the chalk on purpose maybe his way of reminding himself he’s ready. (And maybe not.) Sometimes it provides a sense of community. Whatever happened last night, we had fun together in Section 29. One thing I saw last night makes me think superstition can connect us to history and tradition. There was a father sitting with his little girl in the row behind us last night; she was probably four. He was wearing a glove. We were in seats where his catching a foul ball would have altered the laws of physics as we know them. I’ll bet he has taken a glove to every game he’s seen, regardless of where his seats were.

When we’re all bunched together in Friendly Fenway, our superstitions carry a harmless sentimentality that adds to the lure and luster of baseball on an early summer night. And they’re not true beyond the truth we choose to assign to them. Doug wasn’t the reason we lost; their manager pulled their fading pitcher faster than ours did. (Really, Doug. If I get tickets again, I’ll call. Really.)

Now I’ve got this song in my head:

very superstitious, writing’s on the wall,
very superstitious, ladders bout’ to fall,
thirteen month old baby, broke the lookin’ glass
seven years of bad luck, the good things in your past.

when you believe in things that you don’t understand,
then you suffer — superstition ain’t the way

If you read this post as I wrote it, you will sit and stare at the words to the chorus for about ten minutes. I think I’d make one change: when you believe in things you don’t understand and you suffer. Anj has an interesting post about a conversation with her sons which includes her saying, “Life is about discomfort, and one of our tasks is to learn to live graciously in the midst of that discomfort.” I’ll bet she knows the song.

I learned Hebrews 11:1 from the King James: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Faith is believing – trusting – what I don’t understand: that God is love and grace is true and I suffer. We all do. Making meaning of what we don’t understand requires more than stepping over cracks, throwing salt over our shoulders, or sending money to televangelists. Superstition ain’t the way. It has no substance.

However fun it might be, superstition is ultimately fueled by guilt: if I do (or don’t do) this, bad things will happen. Doug came back + we lost = Doug should be banned from Fenway. When it comes to nourishing our faith, guilt is nothing but empty calories. (I think I’m mixing metaphors.) The substance of things hoped for lies in the forgiveness and community; the evidence of things not seen is in the way we love one another.

Thank God for all I don’t undestand.

Peace,
Milton

I ate all three meals alone today.

Well, I was accompanied by the Schnauzers, so I suppose that’s not completely true. Ginger has gone to see her folks on the way to our adult mission trip to Biloxi and I had things to do around the house, so it was a fairly solitary day with the exception of my trip to Weight Watchers for the weekly meeting (I lost two and a half pounds!). As I have mentioned before, I’m close to being a serial weight watcher and my downfall the other times was deciding I didn’t need to go to the meetings to lose weight: I could do it on my own.

That has proven to be untrue over and over. I can’t lose weight alone.

On more than one occasion, I’ve thought the weekly communal weigh-ins are a pretty good metaphor for church: the accountability, the community, the shared purpose, the encouragement. Faith is not a solitary endeavor. The connection crossed my mind again today because Rita, our group leader, talked about dealing with failure, a familiar word for anyone who struggles with his or her weight. Hell, for anyone who is alive.

Part of what the pups and I did this evening was watch the Red Sox, who are playing incredibly well right now. I’ve been a Sox fan for as long as I can remember and they have taught me a great deal about failure, from waiting eighty-six years between World Series wins to just playing the game on a daily basis. Kevin Youkilis, one of my favorite players, is on a roll right now. He has hit safely in twenty-one games and had more than one hit in nine straight games. He is second in the league in batting average, hitting .358. Yet, even as well as he is hitting right now, he doesn’t get a hit almost two out of every three times he comes to bat. Most players are lucky to get a hit one out of four times at the plate. That’s not the way baseball teaches us to interpret the stats, however. They talk about what he’s accomplished, not how often he fails. There’s a metaphor the church could use more often.

Paul understood what baseball knows when he wrote in Romans, “More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.” Not hope in the sense of “I hope I do better next time,” but hope as informed confidence in our Creator for whom failure is never the last word. God is personally acquainted with failure, I think – as strange as that may sound – because of God’s relationship with us. From wondering why Adam and Eve didn’t show up for their evening walk in the garden, to see Abel’s blood in the dirt, to telling Noah to build the Ark, to the people wandering in the wilderness, to Peter’s denials and Judas’ betrayal, all the way down to some things I’d prefer not to share, I don’t think the world has gone quite the way God imagined it when God looked at things and said, “That’s good.”

God is acquainted with grief, with failure. If that were not true, the hope we’ve been promised could not hold the weight of the world. Redemption requires a Redeemer who abides on both sides of the equation.

To know God knows what failure feels like strengthens my faith because I’m reminded that what lies beyond failure is love rather than success. I’m always going to strike out more times than I hit it out of the yard. What will keep me swinging for the fences are the folks in the dugout who go out for beers after the game regardless of the score or my batting average. The meetings matter at Weight Watchers not because we all lose weight every week but because we keep showing up and pulling for each other. When you gain weight (like I did last week), the primary message is keep trying and come back next time.

Jan pointed me to this song by The Gena Rowlands Band that says what I’m chasing in both clearer and coarser terms (parental discretion advised). To live as Jesus calls doesn’t mean to live perfectly but to fail brilliantly – “lose your life to find it” is the way he said it. Then get up and go again.

No one is keeping score.

Peace,
Milton

PS — there’s a new recipe.

How I remember it is not how it happened,
I’m sure. Every time I go back to a memory
the light in the room is a bit different,
or people have changed clothes.
Most of us can’t remember our lines.
We’re like a junior high drama class
trying to fake our way through the scene
so we can go to lunch.

Memories are not photographs.
I can recall standing under the lightpost
wrapped in Christmas garland
(the lightpost, that is),
you in your big purple coat
and I with long dark hair –
even on top. It was a long time ago,
but I can still see the flash.

Yet, once my memory begins
to animate the scene, and we are
walking and talking on the streets
of Charlestown in the Christmas cold,
all the years of open invitations
I have seen in your eyes,
all the tears and conversations
and laughter add texture and tone.

We’re standing on both sides of my eyes,
but not as mirror image or still life
(life has never been still for us).
We stood there in the cold for that moment,
long enough for the camera to catch
and then release us to all the other
afternoons where we walked hand in hand,
even when no one had a camera.

Peace,
Milton

One of my quirks is I don’t like to be late to a movie, and by not being late I mean I want to be there when the previews start. I want to see the thing that tells me to turn off my cell phone and put my trash in the provided receptacles. When I have a chance to see a ball game, I want to be there not just for the first pitch but also the national anthem and the team introductions. I want to see the whole story.

Friday morning Ginger and I decided to go out for breakfast and ended up at The Mug, a Marshfield institution and a place I had never been. We were up early and walked in about 6:45. There were two other people in the place besides the cook and one waitress who looked like she was working on a goodbye poster for someone. We seated ourselves and soon she showed up with coffee and menus. She was the kind of person who made me feel like I was a part of things even though I had never been in the place. I said, “I t looks like you’re getting ready for a party.”

“Oh the party’s for me,” she said. “I’m retiring after twenty-six years. Today is my last day. My birthday is coming up and I’m turning sixty and I decided I didn’t want to wake up sixty and still a waitress.”

She was about five three and looked much younger than sixty. She had a bounce in her step – even at seven in the morning – and an infectious smile that carried a touch of mischief. As the café began to fill up, it soon became apparent that we were the only ones in the place who didn’t know her. As people trickled in they would call her name and she would name them in return saying the kind of stuff you’d expect in a small town diner: “The usual this morning, Tim?”

I graduated from seminary in Fort Worth the year she stared waiting tables at The Mug. While she was writing her story on order pads and memorizing the favorites of her regulars, I went from hospital chaplain to youth minister to church planter to video store clerk to high school teacher to concert security guard to assistant pastor to chef. While she probably parked in the same place every morning as she came to work, I moved from Fort Worth to Dallas back to Fort Worth to Boston to Marshfield. And in the six years and change I have driven by The Mug everyday on my way to breakfast somewhere else, she has measured out her life and many others in coffee spoons, French toast, and home fries.

That’s all I know about her. She has been telling the story of a lifetime and I showed up just before the credits started to roll. All I got to see was the final scene where she poured her last cup and drove off to be with her grandchildren.

Yesterday morning, I drove down to Brant Rock where our favorite breakfast place is – Cosmo’s – to find it was no longer there. It was this great little spot run by a couple: he was the cook and she waited tables. Ginger’s favorite part was they had clouds painted on the ceiling. It was the kind of place where the food was great and you had to work to spend more than five bucks. We didn’t go in everyday, but we were there enough to be recognized and for it to feel familiar. I looked through the new window, standing next to the building permit taped to the glass, to see everything was gone – including the stars. I couldn’t find any hint of what was going to take it’s place.

This time, I missed the end of the story. The last chapter is gone.

Tonight I went to a goodbye party for some folks from church who are moving to Austin. They are a really cool couple I’ve gotten to know this year and I will miss them. I had a chance to spend more time with them on this their last weekend than I ever have in the past, so we got to fill in our stories for each other a little more before they left. They’ve asked Ginger to perform their wedding in October, so we will get to see them again and they are moving on to a new chapter in their lives. This time I got to say goodbye. Even though I have no idea how much more of their story I will get to know, that we got to intentionally write the end to this chapter makes a difference somehow.

One of the staples of high school English for who knows how many years is this diagram of a short story, showing how the action moves from beginning to middle to end, from rising action to falling action, from exposition to resolution.

Stories work out that way if you’re O. Henry, Hawthorne, or Hemmingway, but the stories of our lives are not so easily categorized and are certainly not told at one sitting. Sometimes we get to share the long version of our lives with one another and other times we only get a glimpse of a scene in which we are nothing but extras.

I’ll remember being at The Mug and watching our waitress serve her friends for a long time; she probably doesn’t remember I was there even now. The folks at Cosmo’s didn’t think to call me when they closed down. I was the newest acquaintance at the party tonight. Saying goodbye to me was far from the point of the evening.

At least five days a week I try to sit down and tell my story. Tonight I’m reminded that most of the life that gets lived is not my story at all. When the credits roll, my name will show up with all the names rolling by in the small print that moves quickly up the screen as “best boy” or “key grip.” Maybe “gaffer.” Better yet: “man with food and laptop.”

I won’t need a stunt double.

Peace,
Milton

Today is Bob Dylan’s birthday; he’s sixty-six. Though I’m not one of those who owns every Dylan record, I am one who has been marked by his words and music. He is someone who has articulated life both personally and prophetically. I thought I would take some time to say thanks.

I got my first guitar for Christmas of my ninth grade year, which was 1970 to the rest of the world. I was lucky because I had friends who already played and so I had a chance to learn quickly. One of the first songs I learned to play was

Come gather ’round people wherever you roam
And admit that the waters around you have grown
And accept it that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’.

I don’t remember the last time I actually played “The Times They Are A-Changin’” but I thought about one of the verses as I wrote my congressman and senators to decry the way the Democrats have capitulated on the Iraq war funding. I realize the issue is complicated and what bothers me most is I don’t see anyone in Washington who speaks and acts like a real leader. Dylan was way ahead of me. Over forty years ago he wrote:

Come senators, congressmen please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway, don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside and it is ragin’.
It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’.

There were eight or ten of us who would sit in a circle in the grass at Nairobi International School most everyday and play and sing. Even in Africa we felt the wind blowing, though the answers Dylan said were there felt elusive. I realize one of the things I learned from those days was life was fundamentally about searching for better questions. Though many of his lyrics roll out like emphatic prophetic hammers, their power is in the profound interrogative at the heart of it all. He wrote lines as full of symbolism as they were of syllables, lines that still stick in my heart and mind:

Far between sundown’s finish an’ midnight’s broken toll
We ducked inside the doorway, thunder crashing
As majestic bells of bolts struck shadows in the sounds
Seeming to be the chimes of freedom flashing
Flashing for the warriors whose strength is not to fight
Flashing for the refugees on the unarmed road of flight
An’ for each an’ ev’ry underdog a soldier in the night
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

His was music that made me angry and hopeful at the same time. His songs were some of what fertilized my life to help me become who I am now. Sometimes they made me scratch my head as I tried to figure out what he was saying, sometimes they connected me with those around me as we sang together, sometimes they burrowed deep into my memory and took up permanent residence.

Half-wracked prejudice leaped forth
“Rip down all hate,” I screamed
Lies that life is black and white
Spoke from my skull. I dreamed
Romantic facts of musketeers
Foundationed deep, somehow.
Ah, but I was so much older then,
I’m younger than that now.

Alongside of the politics, Dylan’s songs were some of those that taught me about the complex continuum of personal feelings. His lyrics were both simple and impressionistic, telling a story and leaving room for us as listeners to fill in the details.

I’m walkin’ down that long, lonesome road, babe
Where I’m bound, I can’t tell
But goodbye’s too good a word, gal
So I’ll just say fare thee well
I ain’t sayin’ you treated me unkind
You could have done better but I don’t mind
You just kinda wasted my precious time
But don’t think twice, it’s all right

How could he write a song where the characters were both unknown and achingly familiar? And who says, “Fare thee well,” anyway?

When I was discovering his music, Dylan was thirty. Today, I’m fifty and he’s old enough to collect Social Security. Daniel Pinkwater had a piece on All Things Considered this afternoon talking about the current resurgence (insurgence?) of folk songs. His lament was the young singers covering the songs weren’t connected to the original feelings behind the songs. “They don’t know who the original singers even were and are young enough for their parents to not know either,” he said. I hear his point and I want to give the current ninth graders with guitars room “for meditations in cathedrals of [their] own,” to borrow a phrase from Billy Joel. Dylan has had the stage for a long time and, one of these days, will be as forgotten as the rest of us. Permanence is not the point. Dylan appears to know that, as evidenced in this quote from The Writer’s Almanac:

Bob Dylan was once asked if he thought of himself more as a singer or a poet. He said, “I think of myself more as a song-and-dance man.”

The best way I know to finish my tribute is to borrow a few more words:

I’ll look for you in old Honolulu,
San Francisco, Ashtabula,
Yer gonna have to leave me now, I know.
But I’ll see you in the sky above,
In the tall grass, in the ones I love,
Yer gonna make me lonesome when you go.

Happy birthday, Bob.

Peace,
Milton

My day started with preparing breakfast for some of our church members. Ginger put out the word last week and invited anyone in the congregation born in or before 1932 to come over to our house. Five folks came and we had a great time. (I also tried a new dish that turned out to be quite good.) We ate and talked for over two hours, and most of it wasn’t about church. Between the seven of us, we can account for almost five hundred years of living – an awesome thought. As many times as we have all seen each other at church and around town, this was the first time I remember that this particular combination of people has been together.

My day ended with packaging fair trade coffee from Kiskadee Coffee Company, a local roaster, to sell to raise money at the North River Art Society Festival of the Arts this weekend as a fundraiser for our two mission trips this summer. We put a hundred pounds of coffee into twelve ounce packages – one hundred and forty of them. I think I got a caffeine rush just smelling the stuff. Derek, our coffee roaster, created a blend of Rwandan and Guatemalan coffees just for the fair so that once we’ve sold the batch that’s all there is. We’ll order more for other purposes, but this will be the one weekend and the one place where anyone can ever buy our Artist’s Blend.

In between the bookends of my day, I sat down to begin Barbara Kingsolver’s new book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which chronicles her family’s choice to eat locally for a year. What they couldn’t grow or find in their area, they did without for the most part. In one of her early chapters (I’m not that far along yet), she describes “waiting for asparagus.” What we see everyday in the supermarket actually has a very short two or three week growing season in April and May (where she lives). It shows up early and disappears fast. You have to be there.

The wonder of a passing moment is one of the reasons I love hearing live music: either you were there or you weren’t. A couple of summers ago, Emmylou Harris, Buddy Miller, Patty Griffin, Gillian Welch, and David Rawlings toured as The Sweet Harmony Revue. Each artist took his or her turn singing their songs and the others joined in and, as the evening drew to a close, they joined together to sing “The Weight” and “Turn, Turn, Turn.” No one recorded it. There is no live album. I heard it; I was there.

Which means, of course, I was not somewhere else.

Food & Wine last month had an interesting article on “The Insidious Rise of Cosmo-Cuisine” lamenting that “the cuisines of the world are merging into one giant, amorphous mass . . . [T]oo many chefs worldwide are creating menus that flit across so many borders and reference so many traditions that they – and we – lose any sense of place” (58). We can’t be everywhere at once, nor can we experience everything at once.

When we were in Turkey, one of the dishes I loved was called Imam Bayildi, which means “the Imam cried” (because the food was so good). The dish was made up of eggplant, tomatoes, onions, flat-leafed parsley, and olive oil. At the restaurant in our hotel, they used organic produce from their own garden and our server owned the olive trees and pressed them to make our olive oil. The simplicity and the sense of place gave the dish its flavor. They didn’t need Thai chilies or truffle oil.

I also read today about a Fair Harvest Exchange Program in Nicaragua, thanks to the folks at Global Exchange. Rather than a tourist trip, the eight-day excursion is to go and work along side of a family at a coffee coop during harvest season. You stay with them, eat with them, and work with them. They want you to be there.

Sometimes I go walking down the beach near our house looking for sea glass. At low tide, the beach is fairly wide: there’s no way to walk it all. I have to pick a line to follow and let the rest go unsearched if I’m going to be able to pay attention to the stretch of sand and stones in front of me. On the way back, I can pick another line, but I never get to see it all. For every piece of glass I find, I suppose, there’s at least one that I never see. If I’m at breakfast in Green Harbor, I’m not in Green Bay. If I’m listening to Emmylou, I’m missing a lot of other songs. If I’m eating from my garden, I’m not tasting other very good things. If I go to Nicaragua, I won’t be in Nepal or Nebraska.

The choice is not between having a little or having it all; the choice is between living in the savoring the sacredness of the particular or stressing over all that I’m missing. I was at breakfast with friends this morning. Whatever else I happened, I’m thankful I didn’t miss it.

Peace,
Milton

Let God Be Named

Let God be named by our farthest reach,
Not by our fears, or the rules we preach,
By what unites, not what tears a breach,
Let God by named by love.

Let God be named by our deepest dream,
Our hearts’ desire, our brightest beam,
Pushing past doubts that around us teem,
Let God be named by love.

Let God be named by a faith that’s strong,
Faith that will stand in the face of wrong,
Faith bound for home though the road is long,
Let God be named by love.

So call the Name who has giv’n us light,
Who leads us on through the darkest night,
Who pours out grace and who gives us sight,
Our God, whose name is Love.

Peace,
Milton

Our garden is almost planted. The rain finally stopped some time last night so I got out this morning and put in the rest of the tomatoes and a few other things. Instead of annuals, I’ve filled most all of our containers and with various kinds of herbs. Here is the complete list (I think):

• three kinds of lettuce
• six kinds of tomatoes
• white eggplant
• four kinds of peppers
• rainbow Swiss chard
• Brussels sprouts
• broccoli
• fennel
• green beans
• butternut squash
• zucchini
• summer squash
• garlic
• sweet, purple, Thai, lemon, and cinnamon basil
• chocolate, orange, and lemon mint
• Greek oregano
• sweet marjoram
• arugula
• cilantro
• strawberries

Wow! That’s the first time I’ve written down an inventory of what is growing in our yard. Pretty cool. Now comes the hard part: waiting both to see what makes it to the bearing stage and to eat what we grow – as well as give a bunch of it away.

After I finished planting, I came in and showered and drove to Plymouth to file for unemployment compensation. The last time I was there was when The Owner laid me off in January. Since the players were still the same in today’s scene, the script, as it were, was still in the computer so my trip didn’t take long. When I was first substitute teaching in Boston I got laid off and had to file as well. They’ve done a lot of work on the “career centers” since then. The office in Plymouth is spacious and clean and the people behind the counter are friendly, at least by New England customer service standards. One side of the office is lined with cubicles where the folks who work there help you get in the system. The other side of the room has a few cubicles with computer terminals where you can go online to look for jobs or take a tutorial. There’s also a long table with newspapers and other employment circulars. There were a couple of folks ahead of me to see a counselor, so I browsed both the print and online versions of the classifieds to see what I could find. The guy who processed my form was nice and efficient and we finished quickly. As I was walking out, I saw the guy who processed me the last time with whom I made a pretty good connection. I stopped at his cubicle to say hello and was surprised at how much of my case he remembered. Then he said, “Hey, I looked at your blog and go back there from time to time.”

I needed that.

I took a back road home so I could stop and see if there were any other interesting vegetables or herbs at some of the small nurseries on Route 53 with a mind to ending up at the gym. I was determined to get there, even though I’m still learning to like it, because it helps with my depression. And it gives Ginger and I a chance to act out one of our favorite scenes from Designing Women when Mary Jo says she likes jogging because it releases endorphins and Suzanne says, “Endorphins – you mean like Flipper?” My body was ready for the exercise today and I got a good workout. Tomorrow is weigh in at Weight Watchers, so I will get to see another benefit from my time on the elliptical machine. (In related news, there’s a new recipe.)

What the three strands of my day have in common is both working and waiting: the now and the not yet, or (perhaps better) the what will be. I planted things that will take anywhere from five to ten weeks to produce what they were created to produce. I set things in motion in Plymouth that will give me some money coming in (starting in a couple of weeks) and create some possibilities for what comes next. I’m going to spend a lot more time watching Sports Center while I work the machine (let the machine work me?) to transform my image of myself both physically and mentally. It’s all good and it all takes time. When it comes to my depression, the same formula applies: work and wait.

Work and wait. The words remind me of William Carey’s words, “Attempt great things for God; expect great things from God.” He is one of my father’s heroes because of his persistence. Carey went to India as a missionary and was there for three years before anyone he met chose to follow Christ. I’m not sure I’m dealing in the Great Things department in my life right now, but I like the combination of verbs: attempt and expect — work and wait.

What is true for great things, I trust, is true for small things.

Peace,
Milton

Some days – perhaps most days – I write because I think I have something to say or I have a conversation I hope to begin. Some nights – like tonight – I write to show (myself) I can make the letters line up in words and sentences to make some sort of meaning. I write to prove to myself I can and to refuse myself the option of falling into the deep.

Today was a good day. In worship we celebrated our confirmands as they chose to become followers of Christ. I had coffee with a friend after church, a good nap in the afternoon, and Indian food with some other friends this evening. And I feel like I’m living under the weight of one of those lead blankets they put over you when you have your teeth xrayed.

Another friend sent me the link to this article by David Grossman in the New York Times where he is writing about writing and says:

It is hard to talk about yourself, and so before I describe my current writing experience, at this time in my life, I wish to make a few observations about the impact that a disaster, a traumatic situation, has on an entire society, an entire people. I immediately recall the words of the mouse in Kafka’s short story “A Little Fable.” The mouse who, as the trap closes on him, and the cat looms behind, says, “Alas . . . the world is growing narrower every day.”

Grossman is writing about the effect of living in the midst of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and (at the risk of belittling his observations by connecting them to my personal state of being) I find resonance in his quoting of Kafka. The world is growing narrower everyday for me.

I also found resonance in this paragraph:

Writers know that when we write, we feel the world move; it is flexible, crammed with possibilities. It certainly isn’t frozen. Wherever human existence permeates, there is no freezing and no paralysis, and actually, there is no status quo. Even if we sometimes err to think that there is a status quo; even if some are very keen to have us believe that a status quo exists. When I write, even now, the world is not closing in on me, and it does not grow ever so narrow: it also makes gestures of opening up toward a future prospect.

Again, he is speaking in more global terms than any individual’s psychological struggle, much less my depression, and I understand how the world can change when I put words on paper. Part of our UCC ritual at confirmation is to ask the young people if they promise, with God’s help, to resist evil and oppression in Jesus’ name. While we were getting ready for church this morning, there was a television preacher who promised a CD that would cure depression if I would just believe enough to send him some money. (His actual tone was less cynical.) Another made it sound as though it were just a matter of my strength of will: if I were sincere enough in my prayers and committed enough in my mind and heart, I would feel better.

Damn. If I’d only thought of that sooner life could’ve been so much easier.

The question to the kids did help me as I asked myself if I promised to resist.

Resist: express opposition through action or words; withstand the force of something; refuse to comply.

The image that came to mind was that of freedom fighters from World War II Europe to Mandela in South Africa looking for ways, both big and small, to keep the world from growing more narrow and to resist what was destroying their humanity. Every person that has refused to comply with whatever sought to narrow their world has gestured toward “some future prospect” that is not necessarily painless or perfect, but is something beyond the status quo. I’m not saying my personal pain is on a par with those is Gaza, Jerusalem, or Darfur. I am saying the act of resistance is a personal act regardless of the size of the oppressor.

One of the things Ginger said to the confirmands today was:

As you face the demons that accompany adolescence and adults adulthood, remember that practicing our faith and praying empowers us to live as Jesus taught refusing to nurture those inner demons who hinder us from being who God calls us to be, hinder us from wholeness, from being all that we can be, wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and worthy to be loved.

As a congregation we repeated the words, “I am wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and worthy to be loved.”

Though I feel as though I’m living a lead-plated life, I will move my hands to write and resist, looking for words to widen the way to wholeness and connectedness, harboring hope, and refusing to comply with the narrowing way. If I can write it, perhaps I can live it.

Peace,
Milton