don't eat alone

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

Here’s what I learned yesterday: f you want to fill up your restaurant on St. Patrick’s day – at least in the Boston area – serve corned beef and cabbage (we threw in some roasted potatoes, carrot ribbons, and diced turnips) at a bargain price (all for $9.95, with dessert) and the joint will fill up.

How do we do it? Three words: volume, volume, volume.

Though I will admit to liking the taste of corned beef, I don’t really get the attraction of a boiled dinner, as they call it around here. Dropping anything, other than pasta, to cook in boiling water is my least favorite form of cooking. It’s easy, yes. As Robert said last night, you don’t really have to worry about anyone sending the plate back to see if you could boil it a little longer. Any other day of the year, we could put it on the menu and sell about two orders, but on St. Patrick’s Day that’s what everyone wants — that and a pint o’ Guinness or green beer, answering the question: if everyone was eating a plate of boiled stuff would you do it.

Yes.

I woke up before Ginger this morning and came downstairs to feed pups and read something to wake my mind up so I could come back up to my computer and write before I go back to the restaurant for a day that will involve far less water in our cooking. While the pooches were having breakfast, I picked up this month’s copy of Harper’s Magazine, one of my favorites, and turned to an article by Bill Wasik entitled, “My Crowd Or, Phase 5: A report from the inventor of the flash mob.”

A flash mob, according to the OED, is “a public gathering of complete strangers, organized via the Internet or mobile phone, who perform a pointless act and then disperse again.” By the time the dictionary had come up with a definition, the concept was passé, at least according to Wasik. For him it was a “vacuous fad . . . intended as a metaphor for the hollow hipster culture that spawned it.”

In the short life of the Flash Mob, they did some fun things in New York. My favorite was the word went out to descend on the lobby of the FAO Schwartz toy store in Times Square and – at a designated moment – everyone was to fall to their knees before the giant Tyrannosaurus, cowering and moaning as if they were the road company for King Kong. They did if for exactly six minutes and then all got up and left the store.

I hate to tell Wasik, but my brother was way ahead of him. In 1972 or 1973, when Miller was a student at Fondren Jr. High, he organized a locker slam during passing period. The school had those old clocks where the minute had jumped from one to the next. At lunch one day, he and his friends wondered if they could organize something by word of mouth. So they started telling people to slam their lockers at 1:32, the minute in the center of the passing period. He said, at 1:31 he noticed how many people were standing at their lockers. When the clock jumped, the halls reverberated with the mob action and everyone quickly moved to class.

Miller was never particularly philosophical about the incident; Wasik is talking about these kinds of human actions as artistic in some sense. He talks about seeing his actions as being connected to the experiments of Stanley Milgram, who did sociological experiments deindividuation (people’s inhibitions melt away when we don’t stand out) in the fifties; he also talks about Milgram’s work as art:

The Milgramite tradition in art would be defined, I think, by the following premise: that man, whom we now know to respond predictably to social forces, is therefore himself the ultimate artistic medium.

When he begins to think as an artist, Wasik makes an interesting claim:

It is precisely here that we who would make Milgramite art must keep vigilant: in resisting simple story lines and embracing, instead, the ambiguities in our data.

Thursday night we had a dinner at church – an unboiled one – to look at data from the US Congregational Life Survey we took back in November. We have more numbers and graphs than we know what to do with. The suggested interpretation is one of appreciate inquiry, which means starting with our strengths as a way of looking at how we can grow. I was surprised to see not everyone appreciates that approach. Our default setting, it seems – at least for groups that gather as church – is to focus on what we are doing wrong and try to fix it.

That’s not the way to make art.

I got a note from a friend this week talking about her aversion to organized religion. Though I have spent a lifetime in church, I share the same aversion. Organized religion, to me, has little to do with the creative and artistic expression that comes out of a shared expression of faith as we seek to learn together how to tell our story and embrace our ambiguities. Organized anything is designed to erase, or at least ignore, anything that is the least bit ambiguous. Organized religion is not church in its truest and most creative sense.

When asked why they come to church, I have never heard anyone say, “I just love the way it’s organized.”

I’m preaching tomorrow and the story I’m telling is Jesus’ feeding of the five thousand, which is his own encounter with a flash mob. The crowd kept growing and following, until he realized he needed to do something about feeding them. The disciples couldn’t see beyond organizing a meal as a logistical nightmare, as well as a budgetary crisis. Jesus saw it as a creative relational opportunity: here was a chance for everyone to see how our faith leads us to feed one another.

There were even leftovers.

At the end of “Alice’s Restaurant,” Arlo Guthrie finishes his wonderful subversive story by encouraging a flash mob of his own:

And the only reason I’m singing you this song now is cause you may know somebody in a similar situation, or you may be in a similar situation, and if your in a situation like that there’s only one thing you can do and that’s walk into the shrink wherever you are ,just walk in say “Shrink, You can get anything you want, at Alice’s restaurant.” And walk out. You know, if one person, just one person does it they may think he’s really sick and they won’t take him. And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they’re both nuts and they won’t take either of them. And three people do it, three — can you imagine — three people walking in singing a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and walking out. They may think it’s an organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day — I said fifty people a day — walking in singing a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and walking out. And friends, they may thinks it’s a movement.

I don’t want to be a part of an organization; I want to be a part of a movement, a creation, a work of art. Maybe I need to make a substitution for the first hymn in the morning. Come on, sing with me:

“You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant.”

Peace,
Milton

Today may be St. Patrick’s Day, but yesterday was the meeting of the Greater Marshfield Clergy Spousal Support Group and Book Club (with subcommittees on Fine Ales and Spicy Foods), which meets with some regularity at Namaste, a wonderful Indian restaurant in Plymouth. The group is made up of my friend Doug, whose wife is in seminary right now, and me. We also make up the subcommittees.

Doug is a great guy with a big heart, a strong sense of justice, a great sense of humor, and a desire to grow and learn. He is a surveyor by trade, but that doesn’t even come close to telling the story. He is a master of the backyard grill, a lover of Buddy Miller and other great American music, a painter, and a drummer.

Our two-hour lunches take us all around the world, starting with the Indian food we both love. Yesterday it was Lamb Samosas, Aloo Tikki (spicy potato patties), Rogan Josh (a spicy lamb dish), Malai Kofta (vegetable balls in a spicy sauce), Poori, and Nan (two types of Indian bread).

Our book discussion centered on Parker Palmer’s The Active Life, which Doug read a little while back. Doug talked about being moved by Palmer’s idea of doing what you were most passionate about, which for him is painting. He went on to talk about the creative tension in finding such joy in working with oil and canvas and wondering if it was bordering on being too self-absorbed.

He reminded me of a story I heard on All Things Considered about Joey Cheek, an American speed skater, who won a gold medal at the Olympics and donated his $25,000 award to a foundation that provided play equipment for refugee children in Darfur. Cheek talked about becoming aware of the plight of the children while he was in Athens because, he said, people outside of the United States hear about this everyday. Thanks to the self-absorption of the American media, he knew little of the genocide that is the story of the Sudan. He decided he had to do something and his medal award gave him something to do.

The story connected to what Doug was saying in two ways. One, the kind of focus it takes to become a human NASCAR vehicle on a flat ice track must border on self-absorption and, two, he gave the money to buy play equipment, not food. In the interview, Cheek responded to the second thing by saying play was an essential part of childhood development, even where people are starving and homeless.

“If you don’t help people develop normally as possible then they stand little chance of ever knowing a normal life,” he said.

One of Palmer’s emphases that speaks deeply to me is his focus on creative tension. he talks about comtemplation-and-action, not as polar opposites, but as two things inextricably connected and full of creative energy. I think of it this way: if the poles are the Arctic and Antarctica, wouldn’t it be more interesting to live at the Equator than to pick one ice floe over the other? A speed skater who pays attention to more than his skating form is now helping kids who may have never seen ice; what kind of connections can we make if we pay attention?

Somewhere in our conversations over curry, Doug and I always end up talking about music. As I said, he’s a drummer. I play guitar and sing and I never got to be in a garage band when I was a kid. I still need to get that out of my system. One of these days, we’re going to finish lunch and head back to his house to set up the drum kit and jam. And one of these days, I’m going to sing in a band just for the hell of it.

As I was driving home after lunch, I thought about the band again, even though we didn’t get to talk about it yesterday. I even have a name: Love Dogs, which comes from a Rumi poem.

Love dogs

One night a man was crying,
Allah! Allah!
His lips grew sweet with the praising,
until a cynic said,
“So! I have heard you
calling out, but have you ever
gotten any response?”

The man had no answer to that.
He quit praying and fell into a confused sleep.

He dreamed he saw Khidr, the guide of souls,
in a thick, green foliage.
“Why did you stop praising?”
“Because I’ve never heard anything back.”
“This longing
you express is the return message.”

The grief you cry out from
draws you toward union.

Your pure sadness
that wants help
is the secret cup.

Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.
That whining is the connection.

There are love dogs
no one knows the names of.

Give your life
to be one of them.

I had a dream last night that Ginger and I were standing on the side of a golf course watching two teenage boys play. They were both on the same hole, but not together, or even aware of each other. One worked hard on his form and went about each shot methodically, as if her were reading from a manual. He was dressed like he had just stepped off of the PGA tour. It was obvious he was taking lessons and was working hard to make sure his form was exactly as he had been told it should be. He swung and the ball bounced up on to the green, but he didn’t seem to find any joy in his accomplishment. His brow furrowed as he began to contemplate his next shot, even though he was still a long way from where the ball had landed.

The second kid was in jeans and a t-shirt. He was carrying his clubs. He also had good form, but it came from a different place, from a place deep inside him. His movements were organic and even joyful. He swung with ease and the ball rolled up next to the one belonging to the first boy. He smiled, picked up his bag, and looked up into the trees as he walked toward the green, thinking about nothing other than how great it felt to be outside on a beautiful day.

“They’re both good,” Ginger said in the dream, “but only one of them is enjoying it. He’ll do this the rest of his life.”

I woke up and thought, “Be a Love Dog.”

Peace,
Milton

PS — Apropos of nothing except today’s date, here’s an Irish soup recipe that I’m making today at the restaurant.

One of the great things about working in restaurants in the greater Boston area is I get to work with Brazilians. If it were not for them, the restaurant industry would cease to function in eastern Massachusetts. We have three folks who work in our kitchen as dishwashers and prep cooks: Thelma, Wesley, and Wanderson (I love that name). I love their friendly spirit and their incredible work ethic. Wesley is always asking what to do next; Thelma sings while she makes onion rings. (Now there’s the first line of a children’s book!)

The biggest challenge of our working together is the language. I speak no Portuguese and they speak very little English. We have somehow found a way to communicate, even in the busiest and most hectic times. When I say the English name of something – potstickers – they respond with their phonetic repetition of what I said –poschticko – and we both know what we are talking about, which I guess qualifies as our own restaurant dialect.

Milton, for some reason, is a familiar name to Brazilians. I spent most of my life thinking only my family inflicted people with this name (I was named after grandfather and father), but I would not feel so alone on the streets of Rio. One of Brazil’s best loved singers is Milton Nascimento, so he’s my lead when I meet now folks from Brazil and tell them my name: “Like Milton Nascimento,” I say and they smile and nod and start to sing. Wesley even said, “Milton is my father’s name.”

“Mine, too,” I told him.

I found an interview with Milton Nascimento where he spoke of the powerful role women had played in shaping his love of music and the way he sings. As a young boy, he imitated the women singers he heard because women sang with their heart and men sang to show power in their voices.. When his voice changed, he was heartbroken because he did not think he could sing in a way that mattered because he could not sing like woman.

“And then the radio was playing a song by Ray Charles and I became very quiet with my eyes close and I said, ‘My God, man can sing with the heart, too.’ So, Ray Charles saved my life,” he said.

His comment makes me think of two things. First, was the record Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, an album that my parents had when I was a kid. I get goose bumps now when I think about hearing “You Don’t Know Me” for the first time – and then again for the ten thousandth time. The second thing I thought of is my favorite song, which has nothing to do with Ray Charles.

If I only got to keep one song, it would be John Prine’s “Angel From Montgomery,” particularly when Bonnie Raitt sings it. The song came to mind as Nascimento talked about how he learned about heart from listening to women sing. I was going to sing “Angel” one night at a coffee house and prefaced it by saying it was my favorite song. I went on to say I identified with the lyric more than any words I knew. Then I sang the first line:

“I am an old woman, named after my mother . . .”

The audience couldn’t help but laugh. And I don’t know that I would have said it any differently because I do feel like the old woman in the song. She speaks from the heart.

Make me an angel that flies from Montgomery
Make me a poster of an old rodeo
Just give me something I can hold on to
To believe in this living is just a hard way to go

Thanks to cell phones, Ginger and I both talk to each other on our way home from work. She calls when she’s driving home from the church; I call as I’m winding down Route 3A in the dark after I leave the restaurant. More than once, as I’m dialing the phone, I think about the lyric to the last verse of Prine’s song:

There’s flies in the kitchen, I can hear ‘em a buzzing,
And I ain’t done nothing since I woke up today.
How the hell can a person go to work in the morning
And come home in the evening and have nothing to say

Wesley, Wanderson, and Thelma all work at least one other job besides the time they put in at the restaurant. Thelma has a husband and two children back in Brazil; she is here to send money home. She cannot go back and forth easily, so she stays here and still finds it in herself to sing and dance while she works. One night, one of the servers needed some help getting a dessert ready and Thelma picked up the pastry bag and began to make wonderful designs on the plate with the chocolate ganache. That’s when we found out she had worked with pastry chef in Brazil. We didn’t know because no one had thought to ask.

When we were redoing the kitchen in Charlestown years ago, we called a guy who advertised in our neighborhood paper to come tile the floor. Vic was from Bosnia and had fled the violence there with his family. In his home country, he was a filmmaker; he became a tile guy here because it was what he could do to make money. The tiles we picked were three different sizes, rather than being a straight pattern. He was elated when we told him he could decide how to lay them out. He approached our floor like an artist to his canvas. It was beautiful. The other thing we shared in common was he wore Chuck Taylors. When we paid him for his art, we gave him some new Chucks as well.

Ray Charles has saved the life of at least two Miltons. I have to say, for me, the same goes for Bonnie Raitt, Patty Griffin, Nanci Griffith, and – of course – Emmylou Harris:

I would rock my soul in the bosom of Abraham
I would hold my life in his saving grace
I would walk all the way from Boulder to Birmingham
If I thought I could see I could see your face

When I’m driving in the dark and the girl from Birmingham who makes my house a home answers the phone, I hear her voice and I feel her heart and I know there will always be something worth saying.

Peace,
Milton