don't eat alone

I’m writing tonight between our two Christmas Eve services. The early one at five is described as the family service so that folks know it may be a little louder than the ten o’clock service, which is candle light and Communion. For the first time in three Christmases, the room felt full. We sang the same carols you probably sang at your place and, as we sang “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing,” I was caught once again by the line

risen with healing in his wings.

Carols often leave me thinking English was built for Christmas. Just look at the rhymes in this song: king, bring, sing, wing. The whole thing comes gliding in on rather confident rhymes. The angels were making a joyful noise, after all, and Charles Wesley, the hymn writer, penned a victorious image.

After the carol, we read the opening verses of the second chapter of Luke that juxtapose the political machinations of emperors and governors with the birth of Jesus in a cattle stall, far away, at that point, from palaces or power or even angel choirs.

Sitting here at my computer, I turned to rhymezone.com–a site I have often found helpful–and typed “baby” into the search bar. The results were

babie, cabey, day be, gayby, haby, layby, mabey, maybe, may be, may bee, nabi, rabey, raby, sabey, slaby, smaby, taibei, taibi, they be, way be (emphasis theirs).

The best rhyme for baby is maybe, as far as rhymes go; they also share some harmony in meaning because both words speak of possibilities, or what might happen. The possibility born with the baby was that he would grow up, that he would become someone.

That possibility–that hope–is what is sustaining me this season. This year. I can’t find much sustenance in the certainty of kings, no matter how well they rhyme, but maybe, baby, in the throes of all we don’t understand and all the grief that we carry, we have something to sing about.

That’s enough for now. Merry Christmas.

Peace,
Milton

Thanks for reading. For the month of December, my book, The e-book version of The Color of Together is 99 cents at Amazon. Please check it out. Also, You can also subscribe to my free weekly newsletter, mixing metaphors. It comes out every Tuesday. Both my newsletter and blog are free and ad-free. If you would like to support my writing, you can become a sustaining member.

It turns out that the shortest day of the year is also the birthday of a number of people who matter to me, and two of them live Guilford. Ginger and I went to celebrate them and then stopped on the way home to celebrate some time together. It was only after we got home did I find out that CBS had aired “Homeward Bound: A Grammy Salute to the Songs of Paul Simon.” Tonight, as I sat down to write, I searched for it and found the entire concert at CBS.com and put off writing for awhile.

Paul Simon has been writing and performing songs my entire life. Literally. He and Art Garfunkel started singing together in 1956, when Simon was fifteen. By the time I was fifteen, they had released Bridge Over Troubled Water, their last album together, and I was trying to learn how to play his songs on the guitar I got that Christmas. I learned quickly that even though he sang the truth, he used way more than three songs.

As I listened to a wide variety of artists perform Simon’s songs tonight, I thought a lot about my father, which caught me by surprise a bit. The more I thought about it, however, it made sense because Simon and Garfunkel were the soundtrack of my growing up. I loved the harmonies to begin with and grew into the lyrics. And Dad liked a number of the songs as well. Because of the years we spent together as a family in Zambia and Kenya, he loved Graceland.

Maybe I also thought about my father because he had already showed up a couple of times today. The cover photo on my phone is a picture of the two of us talking as we sat on a stone step at a park of some sort near Princeton, New Jersey where the family had gathered for my nephew’s graduation from Princeton Theological Seminary in May, 2012. Neither of us knew that Ginger took the picture. When Dad died the following summer, I made it the cover photo on my iPhone and it has stayed there ever since. Quite regularly, I manage to take a screen shot as I put my phone in the tech pocket of my jeans. My photos have random copies of the picture with specific times and dates.

I did it twice today, making it look as though my father and I were together 11:46 and again at 1:15. When I scrolled back through my pictures I found four or five more, and then almost that many in the “recently deleted” file. Nine and a half years later, Dad keeps showing up.

I’m grateful.

Just recently I made the comment that I feel closer to my father now than I did when he was living. What I mean by that is, though he is physically dead, our relationship is still alive in my life. That a periodic photo of him shows up in my camera roll is an apt metaphor. The power of our memories are in how we remember them. He and I had a number of tough years and I wish he had found room in his theology to be more inclusive than he was. I don’t mean I am glossing over that. What I am trying to say is I keep going back to those moments where we found each other, or the places where I can feel his influence on my life, and I dig in there, mining the memories for new insight and sustenance.

The opening and closing tracks to Simon and Garfunkel’s Bookends album were versions of the same song, also called “Bookends.” It was a simple, rather haunting guitar line and these words:

time it was
and what a time it was
it was
a time of innocence
a time of confidences
long ago it must be
I have a photograph
preserve your memories
they’re all that’s left you

Simon was probably twenty-five or so when he wrote them, along with a line from another song on the record called “Old Friends.”

can you imagine us years from today
sharing a park bench quietly
how terribly strange to be seventy

I suppose it’s terribly strange to be most any age, and often difficult to put ourselves where we have yet to be, or perhaps where we were long ago. We live from one screen shot to the next, stitching them together into a life, tethered to our memories.

When I was twelve listening to Bookends, I couldn’t imagine my father and I as men sitting side by side on a stone step next to the Delaware River, yet we somehow managed to get there, together.

I am grateful he keeps showing up.

Peace,
Milton

Thanks for reading. For the month of December, my book, The e-book version of The Color of Together is 99 cents at Amazon. Please check it out. Also, You can also subscribe to my free weekly newsletter, mixing metaphors. It comes out every Tuesday. Both my newsletter and blog are free and ad-free. If you would like to support my writing, you can become a sustaining member.

The Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Connecticut is a building full of stories. The building itself goes back almost one hundred and fifty years when it first opened as a theater. When the original owner died a few years later, so did his vision for the place and the building became a militia base, a general store, and then a storage facility for the Connecticut Department of Transportation. Around 1960, someone caught sight of the original dream. They looked at the building and saw an opportunity others had missed, so they raised money and worked to restore it. Since 1963 it has hosted musical theater. Annie and Man of LaMancha both began there and went on to worldwide fame.

Last night, the Goodspeed hosted Ginger, Rachel, and I for a performance of a new musical, Christmas in Connecticut, which is based on the 1945 movie of the same name starring Barbara Stanwyck and is one of our holiday favorites. The tickets were my early Christmas gift to Ginger and her mother. None of us had been in the building before.

The first floor of the Goodspeed–at least what you can see when you walk in–is a grand staircase that leads to a mezzanine level that is a small lounge, restrooms, and more stairs. The theater itself is on the second floor. For the uninitiated, such as we were, it is hard to notice that behind the grand staircase is a bar with snacks and drinks. We were upstairs and in our seats before we realized we had missed getting water and coffee.

The show was good. The way they adapted the storyline from the movie to work on the stage was well done. The actors had strong voices. The plot was engaging. And by intermission, we were thirsty. I ventured back down the stairs to the main floor where I saw a staff person selling bottled water for $2. Cash only. I didn’t have two dollars. I climbed back up to our seats and reported to Ginger and Rachel and Ginger said she had two dollars. Cash in hand, I went back downstairs. A man and a woman were in front of me. The man swapped his money for water and smiled as he passed me. The woman turned and walked away and when I stepped up the attendant said, “I’m out of water.”

I dropped my shoulders and sighed. Then I worked my way back to the bar, but the line was about ten deep. I climbed my way back to our seats and reported to Ginger what had happened. As I was talking to her, a man a couple of rows back stepped close to me and said, “You were looking for water and I got the last one. I heard you sigh as I walked off. I had a drink before the show. You need this more than I do, so give me your two dollars and you can have the water.”

I thanked him, handed him the money, and took the water bottle.

I didn’t realize he had been in front of me, or that he heard me. I didn’t see him standing near me when I came back to my seat. His act of kindness only happened because he was paying attention and saw a chance to take care of someone else.

That’s the only contact we had. When the play finished, everyone began moving the same direction and then funneled to single file to go the stairs and out into the clear Connecticut night. It was incidental contact, but that’s what makes up most of our days–a series, or perhaps a collection, of brief exchanges that add up to a day or a month or a life much like a sequence of steps becomes a dance or a pilgrimage and an ordering of words becomes a sentence or a scene.

What stories do our lives tell by the way those exchanges unfold?

When Jesus tried to explain what it meant to live compassionately, he said, “I was thirsty and you gave me a drink.” That statement makes more sense to me tonight than ever before because I was thirsty and a guy who didn’t have to gave me his water in the middle of a musical called Christmas in Connecticut.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Peace,
Milton

Thanks for reading. For the month of December, my book, The e-book version of The Color of Together is 99 cents at Amazon. Please check it out. Also, You can also subscribe to my free weekly newsletter, mixing metaphors. It comes out every Tuesday. Both my newsletter and blog are free and ad-free. If you would like to support my writing, you can become a sustaining member.

For my birthday Ginger gave me The Reading List by Sara Nisha Adams. I did not know of the book. From the back cover I learned it is Adams’ debut novel–at least in print–and the premise is a teenage girl who is working in a library finds a reading list in a returned copy of To Kill a Mockingbird and decides not only to work her way down the list but also to share it with others she meets–or so it says in the synopsis on the back cover. I am only a couple of chapters in.

But I’m hooked. The writing is engaging, the characters are intriguing, and I imagine I may work my way down the reading list as well once I get through the book. The reason I bring it up tonight, however, is a paragraph that is part of the prologue. The book opens with someone named Aidan entering the library branch.

He wanders over to the fiction shelves, the crime section, and runs his fingers over the spines, landing on Black Water Rising by Attica Locke. He has read it before, years ago. Maybe even more than once. As he starts to turn the pages, looking for an escape, memories rush in . . . of Attica Locke’s Houston, the city alive, vibrant, dark, full of contradictions and contrasts. Today he needs that kind of familiarity, he needs to step back into a world where there are scares, twists, turns, but a world where he knows how everything will end.

He needs to know how something will end.

In the years I taught high school, I read a lot of novels beyond the ones I read repeatedly with students. One reason was I wanted to read some new sentences other than those that were required, even though many of those books I still love. The other reason was I wanted to be a writer, which meant (I thought) I needed to write the Great American Novel, so I read as many novels as I could get my hands on, trying to learn how to tell a story.

Fiction or nonfiction, it is good practice to read while you write. In my work as an editor, that was my consistent advice to my authors. Beyond the research they were doing for their book, they needed to read things that made them believe in good writing, read sentences and paragraphs that caught their breath, read writers they wanted to emulate.

While I was teaching at Charlestown High School in Boston, I wrote a novel–Destiny–about the son of a Texas preacher who was trying to figure out who he was. Thanks to the folks at the Humber School for Writers and Timothy Findley, a Canadian author who was my mentor, I managed to figure out how that story ended and got it down on paper, but it never made it past the copy I turned in at the end of the course.

As I kept writing, I began to realize that what flowed out of me most easily was nonfiction–the stuff that fills my blog and my three books–and I also found my way into poetry, but I have not written more fiction. I don’t know if that is why my novel reading dropped off. It was not a conscious decision on my part. But the two novels I got for my birthday (the other one was Horse by Geraldine Brooks) have nudged me into deciding that the new year will begin with fiction, whether or not I write another novel, and beyond these two books I may go back to some old friends much like Aidan did when he picked up Black Water Rising.

And that leads me to thinking of my own reading list. I won’t give away the list in Adam’s novel, other than to say it holds eight books and is titled, “Just in Case You Need It.” Without claiming my list to be exhaustive or even permanent, here is a list of books that have been lifelong friends.

Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton

Frankenstein by Mary Shelly

A Passage to India by E. M. Forster

The Illusion of Separateness by Simon Van Booy

Saint Maybe by Anne Tyler

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

As soon as I publish this post I know I will think of revisions, mostly additions, to the list, but that’s alright.

Perhaps the power of a good story is that is offers us a chance to experience a real ending. Whatever happens between the covers of the book, there is a last page, a last sentence, a last word. Life, as you know already, is not like that. All of our endings are in the middle of something else that is continuing. Wherever we are, we are sustained by stories, whether printed ones we carry with us or those we tell each other when we stop to listen to one another as we move from middle to end to beginning to middle to whatever has yet to happen.

Reading lists make good guides for the journey. Who travels with you?

Peace,
Milton

Thanks for reading. For the month of December, my book, The e-book version of The Color of Together is 99 cents at Amazon. Please check it out. Also, You can also subscribe to my free weekly newsletter, mixing metaphors. It comes out every Tuesday. Both my newsletter and blog are free and ad-free. If you would like to support my writing, you can become a sustaining member.

The final game of the 2022 World Cup and the annual Christmas pageant at church both kicked off at ten o’clock this morning. Since I was only able to record one of them, I saw the pageant in person.

As is the case in many churches, the drama is designed as a retelling, or a reenactment, of the Christmas story, or at least the story that has been passed down by our tradition. The play is not designed to be a theological investigation as much as a celebration of Christmas, our church, and our children.

The kids and the adults who have led them have worked hard over the past couple of weeks to put the play together. The whole thing unfolded more like a tableau, with each group–angels, shepherds, magi, and animals–all making their way to the manger. The various roles are assigned, often, by age, so as the kids grow up they play different parts. The littlest ones are the animals, who are allowed to dress as any animal they want. My favorite this year was the little pink pig. As I said, theological accuracy is not the point; the story is, and that story is about our life together.

As I watched and listened, I returned to a question that has always puzzled me: Why do we call it a pageant? My earliest introduction to the word had to do with Miss America, so when I also heard the word used to describe a Christmas play, I was puzzled. I still am.

According to the etymological dictionary, we don’t really know where the word pageant came from, other than it shows up in the late 1300s and might have roots in the Latin word pagina, which means page or manuscript. In the 1400s, pageant could mean a stage on wheels or the scene of a play, and then grew to mean a story or a tale, often an historical one. Since church plays predate evening gown and talent competitions, I will assume the word attached to bathrobe shepherds before it became connected to bathing suits and sashes.

The story that emerged over the four weeks of football matches–and carried with it a sense of history–was that of Lionel Messi, the, five-foot-seven, thirty-five-year-old forward for Argentina who is arguably one of the best players of all time, but he had never won a World Cup. His team was in the finals against France, the reigning champion. For Argentina to finally win with Messi would be a story for the ages.

Where our collection of motley angels and shepherds created a pageant that was joyful in its imprecision, Argentina’s teamwork was precision incarnated. For their second goal, they moved almost the full length of the field with six one-touch passes, each player placing the ball on his teammate’s foot in a way that no one seemed to break stride. It was pageantry: an elaborate display of skill and collaboration, as one dictionary puts it.

Messi entered this morning (well, it was morning here, but evening in Qatar) with everything on the line. This was likely his last chance to win a World Cup for his country. Our children (and adults) showed up today with varying levels of anxiety, I’m sure, but nothing at stake in any ultimate sense. However things rolled out as they told the story, it was going to be a great day. Anything that went wrong–or didn’t go as planned–would become part of our collective lore and memory, part of–to borrow from an old REM album–life’s rich pageant.

Actually, the album title doesn’t have an apostrophe in it, but Peter Buck said it came from a line from the movie A Shot in the Dark, one of the Pink Panther films, where Inspector Clouseau opens a car door and falls into a fountain. Maria, the woman with him, says, “You should get out of these clothes immediately. You’ll catch your death of pneumonia, you will.”

Clouseau answers, “Yes, I probably will. But it’s all part of life’s rich pageant, you know?”

Messi was not alone in his display of skill today, nor were the French players who had their own story to tell and came up one penalty shot short. Though there were individual honors to bestow at the end of the tournament, the shared trophy is what matters most. We had a few standout moments in our pageant at church–Baby Jesus bouncing up and down as teenage Joseph held him, Herod booming “I am troubled” so forcefully that she frighted people on the back row of the sanctuary, and one angel who walked down the aisle waving her arms like wings–but the shared story was what mattered most at our place, too.

In life’s rich pageant, triumphs are not the whole story. Kylian Mbappé is the twenty-four year old forward for France who had an amazing tournament and is sharing the story of disappointment with the other members of the French squad. During the regular season, he and Messi are teammates, which is another story. As we celebrated our children this morning, we also prayed for one of our longterm members, in his mid-nineties, who was hospitalized. Then, this afternoon, Ginger and I walked the Schnauzers and then walked ourselves.

Yes, Inspector, you are correct: it’s all a part of life’s rich pageant.

Peace,
Milton

Thanks for reading. For the month of December, my book, The e-book version of The Color of Together is 99 cents at Amazon. Please check it out. Also, You can also subscribe to my free weekly newsletter, mixing metaphors. It comes out every Tuesday. Both my newsletter and blog are free and ad-free. If you would like to support my writing, you can become a sustaining member.