Call the world if you please “The vale of soul-making . . .” I say “soul-making,” soul as distinguished from intelligence. There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions, but they are not souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself.
— John Keats, “The Vale of Soul-Making”

Those were the first words I found as I sat down to lunch with Kris Kristofferson today – or, at least I sat down to read his interview in the most recent issue of No Depression magazine. The article updated the life of one who lettered in two sports in college, was a Golden Gloves boxer, both Phi Beta Kappa and a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, won Atlantic Monthly fiction contests, was an Airborne Ranger, and turned down a job to be an English professor at West Point so he could move to Nashville and try to be a singer-songwriter.

He is one of the best and, based on the list of things in the previous paragraph, one who left many friends, family members, and other observers confused, disappointed, and even angry at some of the choices he made. “It was a legacy,” says the interviewer, “that had to be lived down or shrugged off on occasion, or at least be put in jeopardy every now and then for it to mean or be worth anything at all.”

Kristofferson wrote it this way: “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”

Last week, as I was walking out of Half Price Books & Records in Dallas, I over heard one guy talking to another about a book he had found, Fifty Things to do When You Turn Fifty. My ears perked up because this is the year for me. On December 12, I will mark a half a century on the planet. Needless to say, I’m among friends as I mark that milestone; several of us were 1956 babies. Since I was cutting it close to meet friends for dinner, I didn’t get to do much more than notice the title. I did think it might be interesting to come up with a list of things to mark the weeks between my fiftieth and fifty-first birthday. Doing fifty things would break down to about one new thing a week. I’ve thought about giving it a shot.

Over lunch today, I read these lyrics to “Pilgrim’s Progress”:
(You can hear it here.)

am I young enough to believe in revolution
am I strong enough to get down on my knees and pray
am I high enough on this chain of evolution
to respect myself and my brother and my sister
to perfect myself in my own peculiar way

The lyric is full of questions, which makes me wonder if, rather than thinking of things to do, I might begin to put together a list of fifty questions to ask when I turn fifty. I’ll start with the one at the beginning of the above verse: am I young enough to believe in revolution?

Notice I didn’t say fifty questions to answer when you turn fifty.

I am one of the fortunate ones who gets to ask questions beyond where’s the next meal coming from and what will I do if Congress passes their insane immigration law. I’ve been given a sizeable helping of freedom. And it’s not just another word, as Kristofferson points out now, a long time after “Bobby McGee.” It’s an important word.

“There’s a responsibility that comes with freedom to do what’s morally right. I was always writing what I was feeling, but the stuff that I was becoming aware of in the 1980s, the things that were going on in the world, were important enough that they were something that I should be talking about.”

Freedom leads to love, which is both a promise and a burden.

“Love is the reason we happened at all,” he says. “It paid for the damage we’d done, and it bought us the freedom to fall into grace . . . The kind of love I’m talking about is the kind that you feel unconditionally for your children. And if you work at it, you can get to where it includes others too. Which isn’t as easy as it is with your children, but I think it should work there.”

Good words from the guy who wrote “Jesus was a Capricorn.”

I spent part of my morning writing letters to Nestle and M&M/Mars about their lack of initiative in making sure cocoa is fairly traded and child slaves are no longer to harvest it. I wrote about it a little over a month ago; I don’t want to let the issue fade from my consciousness. I watch people unthinkingly grab candy bars as they stand in checkout lines and I think about the children who are being crushed to make such a incidental act possible. If my godchildren were harvesting the crop, I’d be fighting like hell to get them out of there. I want to work to learn how to love others like that, too.

I want to believe in, foment, and be a part of the revolution. I don’t want to choose to let things stay like they are. I want to be strong enough both to pray and to act. I want to choose to keep asking good questions long after my fiftieth year. I want to make a nuisance of myself, make a fool of myself, make a true self of myself.

Maybe freedom is another word for nothing left to lose. Some days I think we ought to sell everything we have and join Christian Peacemaker Teams. then I wonder whether part of that pull is wanting to make a big splash. If I went there, I’d really be somebody – like Steve Martin in The Jerk. But there’s more to growing an identity than making a name for myself. I may still end up there one day, but for now I’m called to lose it all right here in my little town. Not quite as dramatic, but important nonetheless. Marshfield needs a revolution as badly as anywhere. Parker Palmer, again:

“I know God acts, “but I believe that God can only act incarnationally through the various forms of embodiment that god takes here on earth, including our own human form. There is no way for God to act if we, and other created beings, are unwilling or unable to give substance to God’s yearnings, God’s energies, God’s will.

I’ll bet ol’ Parker has been heard to hum at least the chorus of “Me and Bobby McGee.” I’ll come in on the harmony.

Peace,
Milton

In our Monday night Bible Study, we are working through the “I am” statements of Jesus as recorded in John’s gospel: I am the shepherd, the door, the bread of life, the light of the world. Tonight we were looking at John 15: “I am the vine and you are the branches,” a great metaphor, particularly because we had a roomful of gardeners. the image is comforting: Jesus is the vine – the source, the connector – and we are the branches – the outgrowth of that which is rooted in love. The metaphor rolls out pretty smoothly until you get to verse six:

“If anyone does not abide in me, he or she is thrown away as a branch and dries up; and they gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.”

What I remember about growing up Southern Baptist is thinking that any verse that mentioned fire or being burned was probably about hell, which was a lot easier to end up in than most people thought. As a youth minister, some of my kids and I began to develop a sort of add-on definition of hell that included being perpetually in seventh grade, on a road with constant speed bumps driving a Chevy Vega, endless meals of liver and onions, and Celine Dion for the soundtrack. Whatever hell is, Celine Dion will be involved somehow. And probably Air Supply.

My dad tells a story about my grandfather, the First Milton, who would qualify as a fire-and-brimstone kind of preacher. When my dad was about ten, my grandfather was preaching a revival meeting in Lexington, Texas, a small town in the central part of the state. The first night of the revival the crowd was restless. It was summer, they were hot, and who knows what else, but they were not listening to my grandfather’s liking. About ten mintues into the sermon, Grandpa slammed his Bible shut and shouted, “I hope every last one of you goes straight to hell and fries like a sausage.” Then he stepped down from the pulpit, told my dad to follow him, and they walked out of the service. The next night, when they came back for the service, the crowd was so big they were leaning in the windows to hear him. By the time the revival was over, as they say, the Lord blessed, the Spirit moved, and lives were changed.

Our gardening discussion tonight took us a different direction than hell. The point of pruning, ultimately is not to trim off dead stuff, but to promote growth. What is cut away is connected to what is left behind. You trim and prune to make the vine grow the way you want it to grow, and to produce fruit. An unpruned vine will produce less fruit. The pruning image, then, can be seen as having less to do with who is going to their best Jimmy Dean impression and more to do with what it takes to grow. Pruning is an act of grace, not judgment.

From there we moved back to the heart of the passage, which has to do with how we are connected to God and, thus, to one another. I asked each person to share one way they tried to connect and then articulate one way in which they saw one of the other people in the circle connecting. As we talked we passed a string of yarn from one to another, creating a web of stories and solidarity. (The idea comes from my friend John in Mississippi who did it with his youth group for many years.)

As people talked of how they tried to connect, they told stories of how they had grown. Three or four people in the group talked about being painfully shy and making a conscious decision to learn how to speak to others and be one of those who welcomed newcomers into our church. The people who shared that were not people I would have ever guessed had gone through such an intentional and painful struggle. They had done some serious pruning over the years and, in the process, grown a great deal. I don’t mean to say that shyness is wrong. What I heard these folks say was they felt a need, even a calling, to change and they set out to answer than call. They are vibrant and growing branches who are bearing fruit they worked hard to cultivate; as a result the whole vine is stronger.

In The Active Life, Parker Palmer centers his last chapter around a poem by Julia Esquivel called “Threatened With Resurrection.” Palmer moves from her poem to talk about how the prospect of resurrection, of finding life after death and loss, is often threatening because it means growth and change, both of which are at the center of what it means to be alive. Complacency kills us. Hell is where nobody cares, or everyone seems to let things just go on like they are without thinking about it. I’ve been in some situations like that and it is Hell. Trust me.

My brother mentioned something to me he had read recently (I forget the exact reference). He said a group of buzzards is called a committee of buzzards. A group of birds who gather to feed off dead animal flesh is called a committee. On the other hand, a group of rhinos – animals that can only see about ten feet in front of them (if that far), cannot go backwards, and go barreling along at about thirty miles an hour – is called a crash of rhinos. Miller’s question was, “Why are our churches filled with so many committees and so few crashes?”

Not for nothing: a group of alligators is a congregation.

(I can’t stop; here’s more: a bloat of hippos, an ambush of tigers, an intrusion of cockroaches, a coalition of cheetah, a charm of finch, a smack of jellyfish and a rookery of penguins. Rookery? That doesn’t work. I vote to change it to tuxedo.)

There should be a name – a particular name – for a group sharing stories like we did tonight, articulating how we are connected to one another.

I’ve got it: an embrace of friends.

In the past couple of days, I’ve had a chance to see people gathered together in several different kinds of groups. Saturday afternoon, I joined Lynn and Bob at their son’s lacrosse game. He’s in seventh grade, so the bleachers were filled with pretty much only parents who see each other at every game and, I’m sure, a number of the practices. James goes to the Episcopal School of Dallas and they were playing Christ the King Catholic School.

(“What do we yell?” I asked. “Kill Christ the King? Crucify them?” – I thought it was funny.)

This morning, while I was in a packed plane congregating anonymously with people united only by a common destination, both of my churches (in Marshfield and Hanover) were gathered for worship. I landed about one o’clock and Ginger drove me to Temple Sha-aray Shalom in Hingham for the annual ADL Interfaith Seder. We were taking the youth group from our church to participate and learn from the meal. Ginger and I grabbed a quick bite of lunch together and I arrived just in time for the cantor to lead us in the opening song:

Take me out to the Seder, take me out with the crowd
Feed me on Matzah and chicken legs; I don’t care for the hard-boiled eggs
And it’s root, root, root for Elijah that he will soon reappear
And let’s hope, hope, hope that we’ll meet once again next year

Needless to say, they are a congregation with a good sense of humor. They did a great job waling us through the elements of the meal and their faith tradition, as well as inviting us to find resonance wherever we could. Afterwards, the rabbi took us into the sanctuary to explain the symbols and show us their Torah scroll. She was wonderful in the connections she made and the way she explained her faith in both its meaning and its ritual. She then invited us to come up on the platform and she took one of their three Torahs out of its protective covering.

“This is our Holocaust Torah,” she said. She went on to describe how Hitler had kept many of the things he had confiscated from the Jews he killed so he could open an museum of an extinct people after he had exterminated them. When he was defeated, this particular scroll had been recovered with many other things in a warehouse in Czechoslovakia. The congregation to which it belonged no longer existed. Over time, the scroll made its way to America. She went on to explain the scroll itself was about one hundred and fifty years old, having been copied by mystics in the mid-nineteenth century. She then had us make two lines facing each other and, starting at one end, unrolled the Torah so that it stretched from Genesis to somewhere in Leviticus. With the two wooden spools at each end, we supported the sacred ribbon of parchment by holding our hands underneath.

“Some people think those who are not Jewish should not touch the Torah because it is holy,” she said. “I think people who have a sense of faith and what is sacred can appreciate contact with what is holy, even when it is not their tradition.”

One of the things I learned growing up as a Southern Baptist was there were different approaches to the Lord’s Supper. Open Communion meant anyone who was a Christian could take part in the meal. Close Communion meant it was just for Baptists. Closed Communion meant it was only open to members of that church. Even as a kid , I wondered why we didn’t trust each other to invest ourselves in the meal as we passed the grape juice and broken Saltines. How can you participate in a meal wholeheartedly if you aren’t sure about the other folks at the table?

In most of the UCC churches I’ve been in, Communion is open to anyone who needs it.

“No matter who you are or where you are on life’s journey, you’re welcome here,” we say. Grace doesn’t need police protection. What the rabbi offered us today was no different.

My hands supported one of the seams that stitched together two pages of the parchment. I could feel the ridge and the twine or sinew that held them together. As she told the story of the scroll, I tried to imagine the mystic scribe who so copiously copied the text, knowing the flow of faith and tradition was moving through him. I tried to imagine the Czech congregation that once touched the scroll as we were doing, who carried their faith with them to concentration camps and gas chambers, even after they were separated from their precious Torah. I thought about the photo exhibit I saw in the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. years ago of a Jewish town in Macedonia that was completely exterminated by Hitler, leaving only black and white pictures to chronicle their existence. They lined all four twenty-foot walls of the exhibit, hundreds of eyes looking back at me, unable to tell their stories.

I was standing between one of my junior high kids and the bus driver who brought the group over from Hanover; across from me was a woman from Baltimore who took her hands off of her walker to hold the scroll that held Moses’ articulation of the Law designed to keep both the Jewish faith and community alive for centuries to come.

And we were holding it between us.

My early Baptist roots tell me, when they opened the door and we sang for Elijah to come, I should have found a way to tell them they were waiting on the wrong guy. Jesus had already come. As the cantor sang in Hebrew and we tried to follow along, that was not what I wanted to say at all. With the scroll stretched out across my palms, I did not feel like a stranger or an evangelist; I felt like a fellow traveler. God was in the shared unrolling of that parchment just as God is in the shared meal we will serve next Sunday in our church. The love of God is wider than the measure of our minds.

One of the words I learned to day was “daiyeinu” – “it would have been enough to be grateful to God.” Each step of our story of faith is not enough to finish the story, but it is enough to respond gratefully, which is what we are called to do.

After a long and emotional weekend, after saying goodbye to my friend’s dad, after reconnecting with old friends and then leaving them again, after finding my way home to Ginger, after finding myself holding hope in my hands between a bus driver and a seventh grader, it’s a good word to bring this day to a close.

Daiyeinu.

Peace,
Milton

I arrived at the church yesterday about twenty minutes before the service was to begin. I would guess close to four hundred people were already in the sanctuary. A giant blown up picture of my friend’s father was on an easel and a folded and framed American flag honoring his military service was on the table beside. Various sprays of flowers covered most of the platform. A string quartet was playing, alternating and playing with the pianist. I recognized the melody of one of the songs, “All Beautiful the March of Days,” a hymn I have come to love over our years in New England. The final verse says,

O Thou from Whose unfathomed law the year in beauty flows,
Thyself the vision passing by in crystal and in rose,
Day unto day doth utter speech, and night to night proclaim,
In ever changing words of light, the wonder of Thy Name.

The minister offered opening words and the eulogy, and then described how the service would go: each of five different speakers would share their memories of this man they loved. The first was his friend of forty-five years. The two of them had been accompanists for the church, had written software together at their job, had shared the kind of memories that bind people together. His words were both carefully chosen and unabashedly filled with emotion. I don’t think I’ve ever heard such a beautiful articulation of what it means to be friends.

What followed was one of the most amazing things I have ever heard: a flute choir. My friend’s mother is the orchestra conductor at the church (it’s a big church) and has the wisdom and creativity to work with the instrumentalists she has in the congregation. There were thirteen flutists, so she created a flute choir. They played “He Shall Feed His Flock” and it was transcendent.

As a congregation, we sang,

When peace like a river attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll,
Whatever my lot thou has taught me to say
It is well, it is well with my soul

Then the family members spoke — a brother-in-law, a granddaughter, a son – each one giving a different view of this man they loved, each one telling the same story of a person who loved to share of himself and what he had. Another friend spoke and then we sang,

Go in peace, live in grace, trust in the arms that will hold you,
Go in peace, live in grace, trust God’s love.

I’ve written before about how we measure our days. As I left the service, I couldn’t help but think of “Seasons of Love,” the song from RENT.

five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes
five hundred twenty-five thousand moments so dear
five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes
how do you measure measure a year?
in daylights in sunsets in midnights in cups of coffee
in inches in miles in laughter in strife

five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes
how do you measure measure a life

how about love

I felt honored to have been in the room.

Several of us went to dinner after the service and reception, mostly to have a chance to be together. I was the only one at the table who had not lost at least one of my parents. The talk turned to what it meant to live with that loss. Each person was at a different place on that journey; each one had a different answer in that moment. I felt like the same conversation on a different night would bring different responses. I also felt comforted to know that when it’s my turn to live through a day like yesterday, I know who will gather around me.

I got home about midnight, went to sleep quickly, and woke up this morning early so I could meet my parents for breakfast in Hillsboro, about seventy miles south of Dallas. Since I was in Texas, I opted for migas, a wonderful mixture of eggs, cheese, salsa, jalapenos, onions, bell peppers, and chorizo served, of course, with tortillas. The only thing missing was a side of frijoles. Man, it was good.

My parents are just back from a week in London, where they celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary. They had a blast seeing shows, wandering into little restaurants to eat, and – Dad’s favorite – visiting St. Paul’s Cathedral. He couldn’t say enough about the beauty of the building and the wonderful priest they talked to there.

“It’s not a museum,” he said, “It’s a functioning church.” Then he said the words I was waiting for, the superlatives he uses to describe the things that move him: “It was the most beautiful church I have ever seen.” He loves to describe whatever he is doing or seeing or tasting as the best ever, from cathedrals to cornbread. It’s part of what makes him who he is. It will be one of the things I say first when I begin to remember him after he is gone.

As I left the IHOP in Hillsboro, I tried to imagine what it would be like driving to meet just one of them, either my mom or dad, without the other. I couldn’t do it. I also can’t imagine what it feels like to be my friend’s mother, waking up today – as she has for the last week – by herself after fifty-three years of waking up together. I talked to Ginger for most of the drive to Hillsboro and half of the drive back because I miss her and I’ve only been gone a couple of days. I look at my grieving friend and I think of Ginger’s words to me as I was in the depths of my depression: “I can see you’re in pain and I’m with you; I just don’t understand.” It was profoundly enough for me that she stayed, even when she didn’t understand.

One other lyric: an old Rich Mullins song that came to mind as I sat here typing, “Hello Old Friends.”

Hello old friends
There’s really nothing new to say
But the old, old story bears repeating
And the plain old truth grows dearer every day
When you find something worth believing
Well, that’s a joy that nothin’ could take away

I’m off now for a drink with my friend to clear the air, tighten the bonds, and tell our stories again, even as we write new chapters remembering what cannot be taken away.

Peace,
Milton

What then, is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to someone who does ask me, I don’t know.
Augustine of Hippo

While I was waiting to meet my brother yesterday afternoon, I sat in Starbucks and read A Matter of Time, a special edition from Scientific American. I don’t read the magazine on a regular basis, but I picked it up because time is one of the things that fascinates me most. As I began to read, I smiled at the fact that I was in a town where I don’t live, in a coffee shop where I knew no one, without a phone so no one could find me to tell me where to go next; time was of no consequence.

In one of the articles, “That Mysterious Flow,” Paul Davies writes,

Because nature abounds with irreverisible physical processes, the second law of thermodynamics plays a key role in imprinting on the world a conspicuous asymmetry between past and future directions on the time axis. By convention, the arrow of time points toward the future. This does not imply, however, that the arrow is moving toward the future, any more than a compass needle pointing north indicates that the compass is traveling north. Both arrows symbolize an asymmetry, not a movement. The arrow of time denotes an asymmetry of the world in time, not an asymmetry or flux of time. The labels “past” and “future” may legitimately be applied to temporal directions, just as “up” and “down” may be applied to spatial directions, but talk of the past or the future is as meaningless as referring to the up or the down.

(This is the place where Ginger stops reading; the time stuff makes her eyes roll back in her head.)

Davies says physicists prefer “to think of time as laid out in its entirety – a timescape, analogous to a landscape – with all past and future events located there together. They call it “block time,” where all times are equally real. One other quote:

Nothing other than the conscious observer registers the flow of time.

My brother bounded in from his meeting about the time I finished the article to say he only had forty-five minutes before he had to catch a flight back to Memphis. Our serendipitous encounter was going to be short-lived; we were now conscious observers. We made the best of what time we had. He showed me office at his new church (he’s moving to Dallas after his youngest son graduates from high school in May) and then left me there to write and make phone calls. I was once again without need of a ticking clock. I wrote, left messages, and waited for friends to call.

My friend did call to say some folks were gathering for dinner at Campisi’s North. I started that direction once I had finished my journal and pulled into a Half Price Books when I hit traffic. I got to the restaurant a little before everyone else, but the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament was on, so I was fine. There were eight or nine of us for dinner. We shared pizza and stories. At no particular time, we went our separate ways and I drove to Lynn and Bob’s, where we had some wine and did our own catching up. I don’t know what time I went to bed. It didn’t matter.

Davies says we miss something important in the conventional view that only the present is real. Though I have been moved by the “Carpe Diem” sentiment as much as the next person, I am also pulled by the timescape idea which says it all matters. We don’t lose the past, we are just father down the road.

I haven’t seen Lynn and Bob in over fifteen years. My friend whose father died and I have not had consistent contact for over a year. If only now mattered, we would all have some explaining to do. But there was no need. Our lives intersected once more on the landscape of life and we picked up where we had left off, past connected to present, friends no matter what time it is.

Where Davies equates time with a landscape, I want to draw an analogy of my own and create a new word: peoplescape. The best way I know to mark time – to find meaning in it – is through relational experience. What matters more than hours logged is really being together. One more extended quote – bear with me:

The distinction between pastness and futureness and “the” past and “the” future is graphically illustrated by imagining a movie of, say, the egg being dropped on the floor and breaking. If the film were run backward through the projector, everyone would see the sequence was unreal. Now imagine if the film strip were cut up in frames and the frames shuffled randomly. It would be a straightforward task for someone to rearrange the stack of frames into a correctly ordered sequence, with the broken egg at the top of the stack and the intact egg at the bottom. . . . It is not necessary for the film actually to be run as a movie for the arrow of time to be discerned.

Sixteen years of living a long way off from many of the people I love most makes for a huge stack of wishes that we could have spent more time together. It is easy to look at life gone by and lament what we missed. I have missed some things in the lives of my friends and family I wish I had not. And, still, I am in their peoplescape and they are in mine. I’m not sure much is accomplished with beginning our conversations after long absences with either apologies or explanations. All time is equal. We are here. We are together. We have memories to share, pizza to eat, and plans to make.

I look at the peoplescape of my life and I see those whom I call friends, some past, some present, and there are some still to come. Together they stack up for me into a life full of grace, love, and hope.

Peace,
Milton

Today has already been a long day and it’s only late afternoon.

At 3:45 this morning, Ginger and I were on the way to the airport. She drove me into Logan since leaving the car there for three days would have cost more than the plane ticket. We got to the exit for the Ted Williams Tunnel, which runs under Boston Harbor to the airport, and it was blocked. So was our second option. So, at 4:30 in the morning, we were wandering the streets of Boston, past landmarks that were once the backdrop to our daily lives, trying to find our way.

By 10:00 Central Standard Time I was getting in my rental car (a Mustang!) getting drive out of D/FW Airport. Since my cell phone fell out of my bag as I was getting out of Ginger’s Jeep, I spent more time in the rental car center than I had planned trying to figure out how to use a pay phone again. My first task was to find a way to get in touch with my brother, Miller, who, it turns out, was also in Dallas today. We connected and made plans to meet later, and I drove to Waxahachie to see my grandmother and tell her goodbye.

I drove to the nursing home where she has always been, only to find “she had not been there in years.” The nurse tried to tell me how to get to “Renfro,” the place she moved, but her directions didn’t make sense to me. Somehow I had lost my grandmother, much like I had lost my cell phone. I didn’t know what to do. I drove down to the Target store nearby and called my brother from another pay phone.

“I can’t find Grandma,” I said.

“I thought about it after we hung up,” he said, “They moved her. It’s a terrible place.”

“Do you know how to get there?”

He stammered, trying to think. “Gosh, Milton. We’ve been there a couple of times, but I don’t remember how to get back, or the name. It’s a terrible place.”

“Renfro is what the nurse at the other place said,” I offered.

“Yeah. That’s right.”

About that time I noticed a young couple standing behind me, looking as though they had something to add to the conversation.

“You lookin’ for Renfro?” the woman asked. “I can tell you how to get there.” And she did.

The sign in front of the Renfro Healthcare Center said, “History lives here.” I drove around the side of the building and parked in front of a veranda peopled with four or five feeble folks sitting in wheelchairs and smoking cigarettes. I walked up to the main door, punched in the security code posted above the key pad, asked for my grandmother’s room and found my way to her.

I’ve been trying to think of words to describe the facility where she is. The ones that keep coming to mind are “kennel for adults.” The rooms were like pens; the lights were dim and yellow, like the walls; everything felt worn and designed to meet minimum requirements. My grandmother was lying on a low bed that was more like a cot, her frail body and blankets all wrinkled together. Ms. Speck is the person who has been her caregiver for years. She is wonderful and cares deeply for my grandmother. She was feeding her from a plate of pureed foods of varying shades of green and brown. She would gently call my grandmother’s name and offer a spoonful, but Grandma was taking in very little.

What bothered me most was the giant purple and grey bruise that wrapped around the top of her right eye, and the two inch cut above the bruise that looked stitched, but I couldn’t tell for sure because of the dried blood over it. Ms. Speck said she had fallen in the night (when she was alone) and had bruises all over her body.

I swallowed hard and called her name, but she was unresponsive and kept staring at the wall.

“Ms. Sutton,” Ms. Speck said. Grandma perked up a bit, recognizing her voice. “Your grandson is here — the one from Boston.”

“It’s me, Grandma. Milton,” I added.

Her mouth moved in a sort of chewing motion and then she said, “I’m real sick. I’m real sick.” Her voice faded, she closed her eyes, and shut down again.

“I love you, Grandma,” I said, putting my hand on her arm. I stood there touching her for a few more minutes. “Goodbye.” I think I said it so I could hear it as much as anything. I left her yellow room and walked down the yellow hall and back out into the gray afternoon. The wind felt colder than it had been when I entered. Only one old man was still smoking on the porch. I got in the car and headed to Dallas to meet my brother. As I drove by myself, I couldn’t get past how alone my grandmother looked. Ms. Speck takes good care of her, but even she barely penetrates the distance between who is lying in that bed and who my grandmother was. To me, she is the one who could fry shrimp better than anyone, who loved to talk and tell stories of her life (and she had good ones to tell), who — on the eve of her wedding when she was eighty — called my mom, dad, and me into her room to show us the lingerie she had bought for her honeymoon.

I love you, Grandma. Goodbye.

I drove on to Dallas and another set of streets that had also once been the backdrop to my life. Since Texans don’t know much how to leave things alone, the streets here had changed more than those in Boston, strip mall layered on strip mall, development cropping up everywhere. I ended up in a Starbucks, which made my geography relative: I could be anywhere. Miller came over to meet me after his meeting to tell me we had about a thirty minute window before he had to leave for the airport himself. We made the best of it.

By tonight, I will be at the home of Lynn and Bob, friends from my days as a hospital chaplain. I was one of the ministers who performed their wedding. I’ve not seen them in a long time, but they were willing to take me in when they heard I was coming for the funeral. Tomorrow afternoon, I will say my goodbye’s to my friend’s father at a service that will be filled with people who loved him. On Sunday, I will go home to Ginger, to the best love I know.

“Precious Lord, take my hand, lead me on, help me stand” says the old gospel song, “I am tired, I am weak, I am worn.”

In the middle of a day of lost and found, that’s how I feel.

Peace,
Milton

Today is World Water Day 2006.

I woke this morning to the news that my friend’s father died last night about eleven. I’ve spent the morning making arrangements to get to the funeral to be with my friend, which means leaning into friends and co-workers who are allowing me to inconvenience their lives so I can keep my promises.

My grandmother lives in a nursing home in Waxahachie, outside of Dallas, where the funeral is going to be. She is nearly a hundred years old and is worn out. She is my father’s stepmom, since his mother died about a month after he was born. His dad remarried with my dad was eleven. She is “Grandma” to me. Since my grandfather died before I was born, and my father is an only child, she was the family on that side.

She is also the first person I saw live through a profound depression. I was a chaplain at Baylor Medical Center in Dallas when she spent a month on the psychiatric unit there, trying to climb up from the bottom. She was in her seventies then. When she began to get a little of herself back, she began writing letters to old friends, one of whom was a widower and an old friend. They began to correspond and then to date and, when my grandmother was eighty, they got married.

They were married seventeen years before he died. Ginger and I will be married sixteen years next month.

Though the story of her life is one of adventure in many ways, the last years have erased much of the joy. She has become reclusive and lonely, even though my parents are still around her. In recent days, her health has begun to fail more quickly. My trip tomorrow will give me a chance to say goodbye I didn’t think I was going to get.

My friend’s email said simply, “Dad died about 11 pm with much love around him.”

Though the circumstances of his death are tragic, he died surrounded by love – a good ending. It matters how we get to say goodbye.

In my years as a hospital chaplain, I spent many hours standing at the bedside with families as they said goodbye to those they loved. There was no right way to do it. People felt what they felt, coped as best they could, and looked for comfort and hope anywhere they could find it. I had no words to lessen the grief or to ease the pain; all I could do was stay with them. My supervisor used to quote Alice in Wonderland: “Don’t just do something; stand there.”

In those same years, my father and I were very distant from each other. I was an angry young man who didn’t really know how to get angry. I felt like I was not turning out the way my parents wanted and I took it personally. Though what I felt was not necessarily what they were saying, we were at a crossroads where we did not know what to do except keep banging heads with each other. I can remember driving home from the hospital on more than one occasion after I had dealt with a family around the death of a parent and praying, “God, please don’t let Dad die before we figure out how to talk to each other. I don’t want to live with that kind of regret.”

When Ginger and I married some years later, things had not progressed much. She and I packed up for New England and began to deal with how distance affects relationships of any sort. One of the decisions we made was to call my parents every Saturday morning. The purpose of the conversation was to ask what they had been up to, give a rundown of what we did during the week, and tell them we loved them. I had to trust the past would somehow figure itself out; I wanted to act myself into a new way of feeling in the present tense. After fifteen years of Saturdays, I’m not wishing for either of my parents to shuffle off this mortal coil. I know, however, when they do, that the air is clear between us.

As I prepare to say goodbye to my friend’s father, my in-laws are downstairs, back from Birmingham for another visit. My parents are in London on the trip they planned to celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary. The veil that hangs between the two dimensions we call life and death is gossamer-thin. Though it is probably time to just stand here, I keep looking for words of strength and meaning. I keep hearing echoes of T. S. Eliot:

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death?

I’ve always imagined the narrator of the poem stomping emphatically – even desperately – when he said, “But set down/ this set down/ This.” He was fighting, craving, straining to articulate the change in himself: how what he had seen had transformed him and left him unable to tolerate the indifference that seemed to be the tone of most people’s lives. He had seen too much. He had stared Love in the face and come away still trying to figure out what had been born and what had died inside, all in the same moment.

One of the things Ginger and I talk about a lot is doing our damndest to not miss the moments that matter most, the events and experiences that call us to build altars in the field so we can remember who we are and how we are connected, the times that come when we must “set down this.”

Going to be with my friend is one of those moments. I will spend the morning asking people at church to change their schedules so they can meet the truck delivering the pizza and cookie dough from our fundraiser tomorrow; I will ask one of my youth sponsors to understand why I will not be able to co-officiate at her wedding; I will ask the folks at the restaurant to work shorthanded for our two busiest weekend shifts; I will miss the last two days of my in-laws’ visit; and I will lean into Ginger for love and support and being willing to spend money we don’t have to get me to Texas.

One day, I will call him and he will do the same for me. We are friends.

Peace,
Milton

On a normal Saturday night, I come straight home from work so I can try to sleep since Sunday morning comes early. My job at church requires I make it to an 8:30 am worship service. But last night – even though I knew I was preaching today – was not an ordinary night.

I left work and drove to Ann and Doug’s house (Doug of support group fame), having been given instructions to shower there (so I didn’t smell like food); Ginger would meet us there and lead a midnight expedition to Krispy Kreme Doughnuts (their spelling) in Dedham, a town about twenty miles away, and the closest Krispy Kreme.

We were on the road by about 10:30. I called the donut shop to see how late they were open and the recorded message said 11:30. We were golden.

If you have never had a Krispy Kreme doughnut it is truly a thing of beauty. it is shaped like any other donut, but their particular combination of flour, butter, sugar, and yeast (and whatever secret narcotic they add) is as good as it gets. The KK tradition is to make fresh doughnuts all day long in their store. The baking process is doughnut theater: you can see the whole thing. The bakers cut the dough into cute little life preservers, let them rise in clear ovens and then set them free on a river of hot oil. When they have had time to cook on one side, they are summarily flipped over and they float along until both sides are perfectly done. Then they rise from the oil on a slotted conveyor belt that allows them to drain just before they go under a rain of sugar glaze, which coats them perfectly. As they round the corner on the conveyor belt, an employee picks them up by putting a stick in the hole and gently lifting, offering the confectionary wonder to the next person standing in line.

As you can see, I was ready for a damn doughnut.

We could see the store about a block ahead of our arrival. The hot light was not on. We pulled up just to see the employees coming out of the store for the night – at 11:00. They closed at 10:30. There we were at Dedham in the middle of the night with a hankering for donuts. We did what any self-respecting New Englander would do: we headed for Dunkin’ Donuts (also their spelling), the official coffee shop of the region. Ginger had a hunch that the one in Stoughton, the next town over, would still be open. Ann, Doug, and I – who had just trusted this woman to get us to Krispy Kreme, trusted her again. At 11:20, we were sitting in the Double D with coffee and donuts. Lots of donuts. I also learned when it’s close to closing time the guy behind the counter gives you twice what you ask for.

As we drove from one donut shop to the other, Ginger said, “Don’t you just love throwing all sense of adult reason to the wind?”

“Baby,” I said, “it’s pretty much the way we live everyday.” We all laughed hard.

We drove a long way to get to the one Krispy Kreme shop in Massachusetts. When we got there and it was closed, we ended up in one of the who-knows-how-many Dunkin’ Donuts shops. Driving from Marshfield to Hanover on my way to church this morning I passed six of them – in twelve miles. We got end-of-the-day donuts for free and four cups of good coffee (always good coffee at the Double D), and we made an indelible memory even though – or perhaps because – things didn’t go as planned.

The point was going together.

My blog buddy, Mark, sent me a link to Improv Everywhere (which, when typed like a web address looks like Improve Everywhere), a group committed to creating scenes of “joy and chaos” anywhere they can. My kind of people. Their last “mission” was to organize a group of sixty people who checked their book bags at the Strand Bookstore in New York, each with a cell phone inside. Another sixty waited down the block and began dialing the numbers at a specified time and in a specified pattern to create a cell phone symphony. The writer said they got the idea when they heard a phone go off randomly in a book bag one day. Even the security guard smiled as the music began. The account of the incident shows the kind of planning and cooperation it took to create the kind of joyful chaos they were after.

Those kinds of memories don’t just happen.

We don’t usually see Ann and Doug after ten on a Saturday night. Ginger, Ann, and I all have church jobs on Sunday; Doug goes to church for free. I don’t normally think about anything other than cleaning up the kitchen after our busiest night of the week and heading home any more than most people think of a making an orchestra out of a bunch of cell phones in book bags.

Thank God for dreamers, for artists, for lovers of donuts who don’t look at the clock, or what needs to happen next, but look at the rest of us and say, “Why not?”

Thank God Ginger doesn’t just dream that way occasionally. She’s always got some crazy idea, many of which involve late night food. It’s one of the reasons I love her.

I fell asleep as we were driving home, even after I had eaten two donuts and had a medium Turbo Hot (coffee with a shot of espresso). This morning came early and I spent a lot of this afternoon taking a nap. I woke up thinking about our late night donut run.

When I lived in Dallas years ago, there was a billboard over Central Expressway that said, “People that never get carried away should be.”

Carried away. The way a coach gets carried off the field after an upset win. The way a raft is pulled down the river. The way four friends drive off into the night in search of donuts and memories.

Yeah – like that.

Peace,
Milton