don't eat alone

The title of the interview was “The Pleasures of Disorientation”–a phrase that caught my attention. It was another in Conversations with Billy Collins, and from it came these words, in response to the question, “What is it about mystery and disorientation that is so appealing?”:

For disorientation to be a pleasure–an odd concept in the age of the GPS–one has to feel relieved to let go of the helmet of opinions we tend to wear everyday. . . . How refreshing to take a break from always knowing where we are, or at least fooling ourselves into thinking so.–Billy Collins (91)

My first thought went to my favorite coffee shops in the whole world, the trinity of Cocoa Cinnamons in Durham, North Carolina because, in their post this week about the tenth anniversary of their first shop on Geer Street (the shop that was the genesis of my Cocoa Cinnamon cookie), they talked about the tenth anniversary blend they are creating called, “Your Head is Round so You Can Change Your Mind.” The name, I learned, is an adaptation of a quote from artist Francis Picabia, “Our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction.”

In my sermon last Sunday, I talked about John the Baptist calling on people to repent–to turn around, to go in a new direction if they wanted to understand what life was really about; perhaps we could say he was calling them to disorient their lives.

Orient.

Sixty-six years on and it had never hit me that the word we use to talk about our perspective on life is the ancient word for the East when a definitive article is added, as in The Orient. It turns out, there’s a reason why. The oldest Latin roots mean “the rising, the part of the sky where the sun rises,” which, of course, is the east. Once the European travelers moved that direction, they used themselves as the center of the world and Asia became The Orient.

At its roots, orientation has to do with facing east–facing the sunrise. Our words origin and original share the same “rising” roots of something appearing on the horizon.

Perhaps we don’t make the connection so much anymore because North has become our primary direction–true north, the North Star–or maybe I am just slow to notice. Either way, when it dawned on me (see what I did there?), I went back to Collins’ words about dis-orienting, not so much to think about not looking east but to sit with “how refreshing to take a break from always knowing where we are.”

Not long after we moved to Guilford seven years ago, we were down at the marina at dusk watching a beautiful sunset and then I realized I was standing on the East Coast watching the sun go down. It was disorienting. When we got home, I found a map and realized our slice of the shoreline faces almost due south, even though we are on the eastern edge of the country, so we can see the sun both rise and fall. The explanation is not nearly as rich as the experience of surprise to see the sun set where I did not expect it to do so.

Billy Collins is right: it was a pleasure.

I was on a retreat many years ago and we walked into a room and all the objects in the room had labels on them that gave them new names. The chair had a “lamp” sticker on it; the one on the table said “coaster:” the lamp was a “rug:” and so on around the room. Our instructions were we had to talk about the objects using their new names as a way to disorient us, even though they didn’t use that word. We moved from those objects to philosophical and theological concepts that were the furniture of our thoughts to see what else we could shake loose and send our thoughts in new directions.

The Francis Picabia quote is even stronger to me juxtaposed with Collins saying we have to be willing to take off our “helmet of opinions we tend to wear everyday” because the caroming thoughts are all inside the helmet–not much can protect us from internal disquietude. We were built to be disoriented, to be caught by surprise. Perhaps the hunger for a map is more learned than it is inherent in us. We were made to wonder.

I did not know anything about Picabia before I started writing tonight. One article said, “Like no other artist before him, Picabia created a body of work that defies consistency and categorization, from Impressionist landscapes to abstraction, from Dada to stylized nudes, and from performance and film to poetry and publishing. A primary constant in his career was his vigorous unpredictability.” He appears to have lived most of his life without a helmet.

My friend Donna wrote this week in response to my newsletter and shared words she had heard in a recent sermon: “The opposite of faith is not doubt; it’s certainty!” Yes. Hope means looking at the horizon and finding joy in the fact that anything can happen. Certainty and cynicism are cousins. I write that sentence after I have wondered from a poet to an etymological dictionary to a coffee shop to a painter, making stops at an old retreat and a sunset on the East Coast, and written it all down as though you could see the thoughts changing direction.

Here is where we have ended up. Now, what was the question?

Peace,
Milton

I have had a quiet day today marking what would have been my mother’s ninety-first birthday. As I sat down to write, I went back to what I wrote for and read at her memorial service. They seemed like good words to repeat.

When my father died, I adapted a poem I had written for him a few years earlier, which allowed me to tell his story, express my feelings, and get through the whole thing without breaking down here at the podium. To my disadvantage today, I didn’t have a poem on hand for my mother. The memories and stories of her are stuffed in my mind and my heart like the pieces of paper crammed into one of the notebooks we found in her apartment this week, and they are full of emotion. There is so much to tell, so much for which to be grateful. What then shall I say?

My earliest recollections of her are in the kitchen. She loved to cook, and she loved to have people around her table. Both are things she passed on to me. So I thought the best way I could organize the thoughts and stories crammed in my brain would be to offer a recipe for the life of Barbara Cunningham.

Like the best recipes, this one is simple.

First, set the temperature of her life to tenacious. My mother loved being alive as much as anyone I have ever known. She was unflappable in her energy and determination. Whether it was telling first dates at Baylor that if they didn’t want to spend their lives in Africa there would be no second date, or pulling out her Texas drivers license during the Zambia Independence celebrations so that she could pass as a reporter for the Dallas Morning News to get into one of the festivities, or looking at the doctor when he came to visit her in hospice and saying, “If my goal is heaven, what do I need to do?”, she was going to get what she wanted. When he heard her choice to go into hospice, her primary care doctor said, “You have made a choice of courage and hope and not of despair.” Set the temperature on tenacious.

The first ingredient is a contagious faith. She wanted, more than anything, to tell people about Jesus. And she did, right down to the very end. It seemed every time she got on an airplane she came home with another story about someone she had called to faith in Christ. The story never stopped there, however. She had an amazing way of keeping up with those folks whom she had met through chance encounters. She wanted to know what happened after that first meeting, which leads me to my next ingredient: a hunger to connect.

My mother loved connecting with people and then connecting people with one another. One of her visitors in hospice this week was a Baylor student who came with his mother–they had driven all the way from Nashville. Mom found out he was interested in becoming a dentist. A couple of hours later, I came back into the room after stepping out to give her time with others who had stopped by. Mom told me to find her address book and call the young man because she had found him an internship with her dentist who had just left the room.

As I mentioned earlier, her love of cooking grew out of this hunger to connect. The table was a way to bring people together, o there was always room at the table for whomever she could find. Meal time was an event to be celebrated, even if it was just the four of our family eating ham sandwiches. It was also a time to try new things, which points to the next ingredient in this recipe.

A love of learning and a willingness to fail. I know—that’s two things, but I think they are tied together, particularly in my mother’s life. She loved to try new things. One of Dad’s favorite stories was about my mother getting ready for a big dinner party, which was only a day or two away. She was still figuring out the menu. They turned out the light and she said, “What have you ever seen done on top of a chicken?” A party was not the time to pull out old favorites; it was time to make a leap of faith, to go out on a limb, and if people didn’t speak up soon enough she would say, “Isn’t this good?”

And it was.

Around the time she turned eighty, she started taking piano lessons, partly because she regretted not doing it as a child, but also because she just wanted to learn something new. There was always room to grow.

Next we add an adventuresome spirit. When my folks were at Westbury Baptist Church in Houston, there were parents that would buy my mother a season pass to Astroworld so she could take their kids to ride the rollercoasters. One year they built a big new wooden coaster and advertised a free t-shirt if you rode it ten times in one day. Mom took several middle schoolers to the park. About ride number seven one of them said, “You go ahead, Mrs. Cunningham. We’ll just sit here and wait for you.” She got her shirt.

The last ingredient is an extravagant sense of generosity. She not only shared what she had, but she looked for ways to help you share what you had, too. When she realized she was not going to be able to go back to Africa to live out her days working in an orphanage, we all go letters inviting us to help buy blankets and supplies. Over two years she raised almost $60,000. One of the things of which she was most proud is the scholarship fund at Truett Seminary named for her and my father because it was a way to keep on giving and a way to stay involved with missions and with Africa. And if she were here today, she might remind you that you can still contribute so that we can fully fund the scholarship. I’m sure the ushers will be glad to take your checks.

Set the temperature on tenacious and add a contagious faith, a hunger to connect, a love of learning and a willingness to fail, an adventuresome spirit, and an extravagant sense of generosity, and couch them in the love of a lifetime she found in my father and throw in that she was never afraid to both repeat and embellish a story, and you’ve got Barbara Cunningham, a recipe she was always willing to share.

Peace,
Milton

the reading list

I finished reading one of my Christmas books today: The Reading List by Sara Nisha Adams. Ginger gave it to me because “it looked like I would like it.” She was right.

The book centers around the relationship between two people: Mukesh, a widower who lives in West London and Aleisha, a student who has a job at the library for the summer holidays. She has her own grief because her mother is dealing with a severe mental illness. The other character is a reading list that Aleisha finds in a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird as she is putting books away. “Just in case you need it,” the list begins and then names To Kill a Mockingbird, Rebecca, The Kite Runner, The Life of Pi, Pride and Prejudice, Little Women, Beloved, and A Suitable Boy. I should mention that The Time Traveler’s Wife also plays a role in the book. (I should also say I have not read all of those and the novel still made sense.)

When Mukesh comes into the library looking for a book because he is trying to feel close to his wife who was a voracious reader, Aleisha gives him the first book on the list and also begins reading them herself. The circle of those involved in the story and affected by the books grows as the novel moves along and it is a wonderful journey.

One of the things that struck me was the was the characters’ view of life and even themselves was affected, or even altered, by the book they were reading. Part of the story was what they began to notice because of what they were reading.

Besides inviting me into the lives of several folks I will miss now that I have finished the book, the novel made me think about what books have altered the way I look at the world. The short answer, I suppose, is all of them; isn’t that the point of reading? Then I stepped back to think of novels, in particular–those stories that offer invitations into other worlds so we can get a better view of our own.

I decided to offer my own list tonight. In doing so, I am not claiming this to be a definitive list. These are the books that first came to mind. Also, I went with eight of them because that’s how many were on the list in the book. Last, they are presented in the order they came to mind.

Just in case you need it:

Frankenstein
Mary Shelley was a teenager when she wrote the story in response to a challenge to write the scariest story she could think of. I loved reading it with students when I was a high school teacher. The narration moves from the sea captain so driven to prove himself that he gets his crew stuck in the ice to the doctor so driven to prove himself that he creates a being out of spare human parts to the creature who is desperate to get the approval of his creator, and then it moves back out again. I could talk about this story all day. And into the night. Bring whiskey.

Cry, the Beloved Country
This South African novel was written before apartheid took hold, but the structure was already there. Alan Paton, the author, was a white South African who was an activist and advocate for racial equality. The story is beautiful and heartbreaking. Stephen Kumalo, the pastor whose son is chewed up by the system, may be my favorite character in literature.

A Wrinkle in Time
Ms. Reedy, my fourth grade teacher, read this book to my fourth grade class in Lusaka, Zambia in 1964, a couple of years after it was published. It was the first time I knew that a book could change your life. I still read it from time to time. And Meg Murry is my second favorite character in literature.

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
This was the first Anne Tyler novel I read and I found myself in the story because it is about trying to find home. Ezra, a boy who grows up without a sense of home, opens a restaurant and cooks what others are homesick for, hoping to create the home he never knew. Gee, I wonder why this book stayed with me?

The Illusion of Separateness
Simon Van Booy’s novel may be one of the most beautifully written books I have ever read. Some of the sentences are breathtaking. The story is one of connection where there seems to be none, as the title implies.

A Mapmaker’s Dream
Fry Mauro is a monk in Venice who dreams of making a perfect map. The thing is, he never leaves his cell. He creates his map based on the stories travelers tell him as they come through town. The more he learns, however, shows him how much he doesn’t know.

The Bluest Eye
Toni Morrison’s novel is another I read with high school students. Pecola Breedlove is an eleven year old Black girl who prays for her eyes to turn blue so that she will be beautiful, so that she will be noticed, and so her world will be something other than it is.

A Prayer for Owen Meany
The first time I read John Irving’s book, it was my subway book when I was on the T in Boston. I had to read it at home because I would get so involved that I missed my stops repeatedly. It is laugh out loud funny and ugly cry sad as well.

As I said, the list is not definitive nor exhaustive, but they are stories that have helped to shape me in various ways. I’d love to know what stories have shaped you.

Peace,
Milton

The afternoon that they moved my mother into hospice her doctor came to check on her. Although we all knew she would never leave the hospital, her death was not imminent. She looked at the doctor and said, “If my goal is heaven, what do I have to do?”

He smiled and said, “Stop eating and drinking.” And then he said, “I want you to know you have made a decision of courage and hope and not despair.”

By the time we got to January 8, 2013 she was beginning to tire, but she was also just four days away from her eighty-fourth birthday. She never said out loud that she wanted to live until then, but that’s how it felt as I sat in the room with her. On January 12 we sang to her and she had some cake, which was the last thing she ate. After that night, she didn’t drink anything. She died on January 15.

Aș we prepare to mark the seventh anniversary of her death, I have found solace in doing some of her favorite things. One of those, of course, is cooking. Saturday, I made her version of Taco Salad, which comes with its own story.

My mother was willing to give up lots of things to move ten thousand miles away from her Texas home and live in Africa, but I think the thing she missed most were Fritos corn chips. After three or four years, she wrote the president of Frito-Lay, which was headquartered in Dallas, and said who she was and where she was and then asked what it would take to get Fritos to Zambia. A few weeks later we  received two big boxes that contained twenty-four vacuum-packed tins (think coffee cans) of Fritos.

She gave two each to my dad, my brother, and me for our personal consumption and kept the rest in the kitchen to make Taco Salad, which we had every Saturday until the chips ran out.

When we moved back to Houston for good, we had it every Saturday.

The recipe is not hard: ground beef seasoned with taco seasoning, kidney beans, cheddar cheese, shredded lettuce, ranch dressing, and Fritos. I made it Saturday and we ate it all.

The other thing I have done this past week is puzzle. My mother liked jigsaw puzzles so much she made it a verb. Ginger gave me a puzzle of a VW bus for Christmas that came in a tin shaped like a VW bus because I have always wanted one. I did that puzzle last week. When I posted it on Facebook, a church member brought me a couple of others. Last night we started working on a puzzle of the doors of Paris–1,000 pieces–and I finished it tonight.

The two puzzles brought back memories of the card table in our den in Houston that always had a puzzle working. I can remember coming in at night after being out with friends and then staying up way to late because I would get pulled in to trying to find just one more piece. Sometimes, Mom would join me. Both the kitchen and the card table were places where she met me and I felt at home.

I wrote a poem last week saying that a puzzle is not a good metaphor for life because there is more to living that getting all the pieces to fit. When I finished the VW puzzle, I rethought my poem because one piece was missing. I didn’t lose it. It was never in the box. I finished the puzzle and had to live with it being incomplete. I thought, “Maybe sometimes life is like a puzzle.”

But the puzzles this week have not been metaphors; they have been a way to live with my grief that has led to gratitude along with the sadness; in their own way, I suppose, an act of hope and not despair.

Peace,
Milton

For the last seven years the first two weeks of January have belonged to my mother. She went into hospice just after New Year’s Day 2016 and died on January 15, three days after her eighty-fourth birthday. I got to spend all of those days with her.

Tonight, this story came back to find me.

In the summer of 1971, we came back to Fort Worth, Texas on leave from Africa. I was going into the tenth grade. My ninth grade year had been my favorite year of school to date because of the friends I had made and also because of the “folk group,” as we called it–a bunch of us who got together to play guitars and sing. That fall, I went to Paschal High School (Go, Panthers!) and became a part of the youth group at University Baptist Church. The group was welcoming and vibrant and pulled me in like I had been there the whole time. I loved being a part of it because I felt kind of lost.

Once I learned to name my depression, I look back to that year and can see it was with me then. For all of the good things happening, I can remember sitting on the edge of my bed and looking in the mirror and wishing I was anyone else but me.

That October they had a Halloween party at church, which meant costumes. My mother went all in on things like parties and costumes. She said she’d help me figure out a great costume. She had the sewing chops to make it, too. I decided I wanted to be a clown. We found some fabric to make a good outfit, a nose, and some makeup as well, but we couldn’t find a wig. Since I was a teenaged boy in 1971, I had long hair. Mom said, “We’ll just curl yours.”

And so we did.

Early that Saturday afternoon, she took a whole bunch of little rollers and put them all over my head. I couldn’t really go anywhere, so I sat on the couch to watch football with my dad, as we had done most Saturdays that fall. Dad was fidgety and kind of grumpy. It was weird–and I took it personally. I got up and went into the kitchen, where Mom usually was. I was visually upset. When she asked what was wrong, I said, “I don’t think this is masculine enough for Dad.”

I knew it wasn’t. We already were at odds over my hair. Now I was wearing curlers and already carried my own sense that I was enough, period.

Mom rolled her eyes. “Listen,” she said. “You don’t have to be masculine enough for him. This is a great costume. You’re going to be great. Ignore him and go have fun.”

I made it through the afternoon, got dressed and went to the party. My hair looked like a clown wig. The makeup completely disguised me. Mom dropped me off around the corner so no would recognize the car, and I decided not to speak and see how long it was before anyone recognized me. Nobody did. I finally spoke up after a half hour or so, excited because I had pulled it off. When I got home and told Mom, she was elated.

None of us ever revisited that afternoon because that was not our family way. As I have often said, we talked about our feelings every fifteen years or so, whether we needed to or not. The sense that I wasn’t the man Dad wanted me to be didn’t begin that afternoon. Over time I learned to see at as different perspectives on what masculinity meant. At different times I was also aware of expectations that my mother had that I didn’t fulfill, but the woman who taught me to cook and curled my hair one October afternoon helped to give me a sense of myself that I have not forgotten.

Peace,
Milton

On this Twelfth Night, this Epiphany Eve, i found myself going back through some old posts and poems. I wrote the first version of the poem below when we lived in Marshfield, Massachusetts in a house 660 feet from Cape Cod Bay. Walking the beach at low tide was a regular part of our lives. I am a long way from those shores, but I spent some time with the words again, made a few changes, and felt like it was a good word for tonight.

camelless

the Christmas tide is going out
the waves of wonder that crashed
against the sea wall of my heart
are receding, reminding me that
tides come and go, neap and spring
such is the rhythm of redemption

in my mind’s eye I still see the
Magi meandering, starry-eyed
along the now silent sands
the newly exposed beach is not
a breach, but an opening an
epiphany: Greek for “I get it now!”

come, let us walk along the shore,
wandering and wondering our
way between wall and water
between Herod and hope to
write our names in the sand
and see how long they last

The last two lines gave me pause when I think of so many people I love whose names the tide has taken away. Grief, it seems has its own epiphany. I get it now.

Peace,
Milton

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