don't eat alone

We’ve had a run of beautiful early spring days that have lifted all of our spirits and made us think winter was gone, at least for this year.

It’s a lie.

I’m sitting in my office watching the flying saucer sized snowflakes swirl around, taunting the Schnauzers and me: there will be no walk to the beach today. Even though the ground has warmed enough to refuse the snow a place to stick, the flakes still fall with force, still hold their power. This year is like the others; it will be May before spring comes for sure.

Even before the snow, today had an ominous tone to me.

I woke up with a sense of gloom, unable to get enough light. I went through the house flipping every switch; turning on every lamp, hoping their collective illumination would be sufficient. It’s not. The darkness I feel is within as much as it is without. I’m standing, once again, on the precipice of depression. This time it caught me by surprise.

I’ve been fortunate over the last three or four months. I have not had a major depressive episode, which is unusual for the winter months. January has been among the cruelest to me over the past five years, but not this year. I have enjoyed remembering what it felt like bask in the light for an extended period rather than chase is before it disappears. On the heels of such a great day yesterday, I was not expecting a trap door this morning. Whether this is an anomaly, like the snow, or the beginning of a free fall is still unknown. Now is the time I have to use all the tools I have learned to chase away the darkness as much as I can. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. I’m both hopeful and wary in the same moment.

What makes me most apprehensive on days like this is I’m being dogged by A Depression for No Apparent Reason. Nothing is wrong, nothing has changed profoundly, nothing is hounding me and I feel depressed. What ever makes the chemical tumblers turn in my body is wreaking havoc and about all I can do is take my Celexa, write, be glad I’m spending the afternoon and evening in the kitchen, which has remained a depression-free zone, and hope that my body will run out of whatever is doing the damage, or replenish whatever it is missing. (I never was good at chemistry; I don’t even know how to imagine what is going on inside me.)

Instead of science, I run to poetry. I don’t need equations as much as metaphor. I need a vocabulary that gives expression rather than explanation. In a wonderful book called Poems to Live By In Uncertain Times, I found this poem by Robert Bly:

Things to Think

Think in ways you’ve never thought before
If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message
Larger than anything you’ve heard,
Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.

Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,
Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose
Has risen out of the lake, and he’s carrying on his antlers
A child of your own whom you’ve never seen.

When someone knocks on the door, think that he’s about
To give you something large; tell you you’re forgiven,
Or that it’s not necessary to work all the time, or that it’s
Been decided that if you lie down no one will die.

Thinking about a bear showing up at the door helps me. I’ve been a bear fan for a long time; our house if full of them: stuffed ones, ceramic ones, cast ones, and carved ones. As I write each day, I have three that stare at me. One is seated with his arms around a hollow log, which serves as a penholder. One looks as if she is dancing, standing on one leg, balanced on a log, with the other leg and arms extended in joyful expression. She holds the coiled cords I need for my computer. The third stands, hands on hips and head slightly cocked, eyes sparkling, and mouth open as if any moment he will speak to me.

Looking around the room, I can count seventeen other bears (three of them Poohs), ten Spongebobs, one elephant, one Tigger, one Opus, one hippo, and one Velveteen Rabbit – all of them Keepers of Things That Matter.

I got an email note from an old friend yesterday in which he told me of a dream he had. Here’s how he described it:

In my dream, I took a trip to New Orleans. There was a vibrant but dilapidated street market scene on the outskirts of town somewhere, and a guide, a 30-something, large black woman who’d lived there all her life and had a sort of Caribbean vibe. The guide then took me and the group I was with on a tram of some sort toward the skyline of downtown New Orleans. The scene cut like a movie edit, and I was then on a horse, heading down the railroad tracks in a tangled, woodsy area, now actually somewhere in New Orleans proper. You were also walking down the tracks. We came to a rusted Quonset hut that had been built over the tracks, where they then turned into a dirt path. One end was wall-less, and the path led inside. We walked in, to the far end/wall, and broke into a two-part harmony, wordless singing that resembled something Turkish or Middle Eastern. The harmonies were strange and dissonant, often resting for many seconds on an odd combination of notes. This singing sort of unlocked the wall, which lifted away. Beyond it was more of the Quonset hut, this section built mostly of chicken wire and with windows that let a misty light through from the overgrown outside. Around the space, many things were hanging from the ceiling. These were all rusted, unrecognizable things salvaged and enshrined here after the hurricane.

Life is not an equation. Whatever my body is doing chemically is not the story of my life, even for today. As the snow falls, the animals huddle close, calling me to hear the strange harmonies that unlock walls, redeem destruction, and echo deep into the darkness.

Peace,
Milton

Tomorrow (Wednesday) at two minutes and three seconds after 1:00 in the morning, the time and date will be 01:02:03 04/05/06. It will never happen again. The moment I’m waiting for is twelve minutes and twelve seconds after either noon or midnight on December 12 (my birthday) in 2012: 12:12:12 12/12/12.

This afternoon, I drove over the river and through the woods to get to Norton, Massachusetts, a town closer to Providence, Rhode Island than it is to Boston, to have my picture taken. Our church in Marshfield is taking pictures for a new church directory, but the picture taking times are during my burger flipping times, so Ginger chased down another church where Olan Mills was taking pictures and we drove over there to have our own unrepeatable moment captured for the book.

I’ve never been to Norton before. I didn’t even know where Norton was until about ten thirty this morning. As I drove in, I thought the same thought that crosses my mind any time I go into a new town: here’s a whole town of people who live meaningful and fulfilling lives without knowing me. There are counties, states, even whole countries where no one has ever said, “Man, I miss Milton,” or “I wish Milton was here,” or even “I wonder what Milton is up to these days.” And if they do talk about Milton, they aren’t talking about me.

Ginger got to the church before me, so she was standing in the foyer when I walked in. There were three or four other folks including the woman who was coordinating the appointments. She was a member of the church and, we found out later, one of the deacons. She was charming and funny and the perfect person to be keeping track of things. Ginger and I were the only two people there who were not church members or residents of Norton. I had fun listening to them talk about what was going on in their church and in their town. What was a town to stop in for a picture for me was home to them. Ginger and I both walked around to looked at billboards and see what kinds of brochures were on the tables. We caught a snapshot – an unrepeatable moment in their lives, but not the whole story.

I got my picture taken and drove out of town. No one noticed, other than my wife. I followed Route 123 (which I was driving on at 4:56) through Easton, Brockton, Abington, and Norwell, to get to Hanover for staff meeting. Don, Chad and I meet at our local Panera every Tuesday night. Now here’s a place where they know me. I’ve been in at least once a week almost every week since they opened. Since they always ask for your name when they take your order, most of the servers know mine. Mary always says hello when I walk in and then never charges me for my coffee. Andrea was behind the register tonight. When she said hello, I said, “What’s new?”

“We’ve got fresh chocolate chip cookies for you to sample,” she said and promptly went and got me one. Those folks in Norton have no idea who was in their town today, but if they ever come by Panera in Hanover, they’ll find out I’m huge here!

Don was late and Chad and I talked our way around the world – literally. He got to telling me about being in a small town in Germany one Easter. The tradition in the town was for the three congregations to each hold services at 11:00 pm on Saturday and then at midnight they all filed out of their respective churches holding torches, crisscrossed in the town square, and then entered each other’s buildings and held services in sanctuaries that were not their own. He said they did not speak as they shuffled past each other; they just moved from one church to another. It made me wonder how the tradition came to be. What was the explanation for the first time they did it? What words were said then that are now lost in the silent shuffle? What did it mean to them to carry lights and carry on in each other’s houses of worship? For Chad, not knowing what was going on, it was like being an extra in a George Romero movie. We both wished we could hear the story behind the shuffle.

Our Youth Ministry Team met tonight at Hanover, as is our custom on the first Tuesday of the month. This time we were joined by some of the folks from Pilgrim Church in Duxbury who are going with us, along with Ginger’s church, on a mission trip to Jackson, Mississippi in June. We are all in the process of raising money to get to Jackson, but one of the folks from Pilgrim has set her heart and mind on raising money to take to Jackson. She set a goal to raise $50,000 to take with us and the way she decided to do it is through a raffle. She started asking church members to donate prizes and ended up with everything form Red Sox tickets to tickets to fly anywhere Southwest flies, as well as about sixty other things. Our folks loved her heart and struggled with raffles not being a part of our church life. Then the woman started talking about what the money would be used for. Jackson was one of the places where people went after Katrina left them homeless and townless. Calvary Baptist Church was one of the places that gave people shelter and food. They also spent a lot of money helping people get on their feet. Their giving was more than tossing a couple of bucks in the plate; they sacrificed. Their church was also damaged and still needs to be repaired. The church is also working to help rebuild one of the towns in coastal Mississippi. Underneath all of that, it is a church that did not fly to the suburbs when the neighborhood “changed” but made a commitment to stay and minister.

When she finished talking, all of us around the table were a little teary. Someone said, “We have to tell that story. If people know the story, they won’t worry about whether or not it’s a raffle.” Until they hear the story, however, Jackson is just a name in a Johnny Cash song, just another town where no one knows them and they know no one. We all left the meeting ready to tell the story.

I hope it’s a moment we repeat over and over again.

Peace,
Milton

Saturday AOL played an April Fools joke on me.

Besides posting here, I send my Lenten Journal to a number of folks by email. I had it all typed and ready to send, hit the button and got a message in return that told me to go to KW: RATE LIMITS. I typed the phrase just as it was written and kept getting sent to a page on kilowatt-hours and electrical rates. I was stumped and I wasn’t laughing. I had no time yesterday to follow up, so this afternoon I sat down and, when I had hoped to be writing so I could watch the basketball championship, I tried once more to deal with AOL. I tried the online help, but could not get through. I dialed the 800 number and, after listening to a computer act like it was listening to me, I finally convinced her I needed to talk to a person and was put in an eight minute queue, hoping the next voice I heard would not be disembodied.

The first person I talked to talked me through dumping a bunch of stuff off of my hard drive and said everything would be fine. It wasn’t. I went back to the online help and got through, only to find I couldn’t converse for some reason. I picked up the phone again.

The second person I talked to should not be on a help line. He treated me like I was stupid. The reason I kept getting stuff on electricity was because I typed in KW, which stands for “keyword,” he told me as though I was the only one in the world who didn’t know that. When I said I couldn’t respond to the online help he told me it doesn’t work with Macs. When I said I wish that were posted somewhere he said, “Well, it’s common knowledge.”

“Could you be more dismissive?” I asked.

I don’t need this to be as painful for you as it was for me. The short version is I spent an hour and a half feeling dehumanized by a series of computer windows, computer voices, and computer experts. Though I finally figured out what was wrong, I didn’t deal with anyone who treated me as anything other than the problem. I was nothing other than the next one in line. Waiting in queue for AOL Help is something I will add to my definition of what Hell is like.

Ginger and I were in Boston again today. We had a few minutes to kill before our appointment, so we went into The Artful Hand, a wonderful art and gift gallery. ON the way out, I noticed a beautiful round glass platter engraved with words. I stopped and began to read.

“I am not a Christian, or a Muslim, or a Jew,” it began and went on to make a statement about the unity of humanity coming about when we all discard anything that makes us different from one another. That kind of sentiment drives me up a wall. It reminds me of going to a service at King’s Chapel in Boston, right after we moved to the city. On the front of the worship guide it said, “We are Unitarian in theology, Episcopal in practice, and Congregational in polity in order that we do not offend anyone.”

There are two things wrong with that statement. One, trying not to offend anyone is not much of a goal and, two, trying to please everyone is ultimately offensive. Trying to make us all the same works about as well as mixing all the watercolors together to make one shade: you end up with a murky mess that no one wants to look at.

At Bible study tonight we were looking at Jesus statement, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” We read the whole of John 14, beginning with Jesus’ words about his going where they would go also. The disciples were confused and didn’t appear to catch his drift, which had to be a bit disheartening to Jesus, considering the conversation was taking place just hours before his arrest leading up to his death.

“How will we know the way?” one of them asked.

“I am the way,” Jesus replied.

Growing up, I was told that verse meant Jesus was the only way to God. He was The Way, The Truth, and The Life. Anyone who didn’t believe that was going to hell, period. Christianity was the Truth. But over and over I keep finding out life doesn’t work out that way. Truth, in the best sense, is not propositional but relational.

I read some more of Blue Like Jazz today. Donald Miller talked about an experience he had in college. The school he attended did not have much regard for Christianity at all. In the midst of one of the school’s big party weekends, one of Miller’s Christian friends suggested they put up a confession booth in the middle of the school grounds, not for people to confess their sins, but for them, as Christians, to confess what had been done in Christ’s name that had nothing to do with Christ: the Crusades, colonial expansion, televangelists. They set up the booth and found their confession opened the door to talk about God’s love. Miller points out it’s not Christianity as a religion that matters (that’s what’s done the damage), but Christian spirituality, which is living like Jesus.

If the Truth is we have to believe one thing or we’re out, God ends up sounding a lot like the AOL guy who made me feel stupid: “It is common knowledge.” That’s not God. Jesus said, “I am the Way.” When I look at his character, I see someone full of grace and compassion, someone who noticed people no one else saw, someone who had time for those whom no one had time for, as well as those who did not have time for him. He wasn’t looking for people to sign a petition or join a movement. He wasn’t creating a club that could define itself by who it left out. He was demonstrating what it meant to be fully human, to truly live as one created in the image of God, which involved loving everyone and relishing in their differences.

I am a Christian and I notice the differences between me and those around me. On my best days, I see those differences as the things that give our life the color and texture God intended. On some of the other days, my judgment gets the best of me. Then Jesus says, “I am the Way – follow my lead.” When I hear him, I remember it was never about who gets left out; we are all invited.

Peace,
Milton

It was perfect.

Don was taking prayer requests before the pastoral prayer in our ten o’clock service. One of the men in the congregation, a retired surgeon who is full of both gentleness and whimsy, raised his hand. Don called on him and he stood up, his hymnal open.

“I wanted to make note of the hymn we sand this morning and these words,” he then read with great intentionality and drama:

“Time, like an ever rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away;
They fly, forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the opening day.”

He sat down to both laughter and applause. Here in Red Sox Nation, the first day of baseball season is a day we notice, even if our beloved team has yet to take the field. The Sox web site asks how people think the Old Town Team will do this year. Forty-three percent say we going to win the World Series. Only eleven percent thinks we are going to do poorly. Our hopes are high; we’re ready, once more, to have our heart broken. We’ll watch every game as if it were the playoffs, talk about it every chance we get, and never stop believing until we are mathematically eliminated. And we love to write about it, too.

Tonight, as I was driving to youth group, I heard an interview on NPR with Tom Goldstein, editor and publisher of Elysian Fields Quarterly, a baseball literary journal. He read “Baseball Enlightenment,” a poem by John Poff, a former major league ball player. Goldstein also talked about his father lamenting the loss of beginnings and endings and the way in which one sport season bleeds into the next. John Ydstie, the host, agreed, pointing out that Opening Day was sandwiched between the two days of the Men’s Final Four, which eclipsed baseball’s beginning. No one noticed like they used to do.

He also asked Goldstein why baseball was the one sport with a significant literary legacy. The editor pointed to the pace of the game. Any other sport requires you pay attention all the time, he said; there’s no room for conversation. If you turn your head and the batter hits the ball, you can turn back to follow the arc of the fly and watch the fielder run to catch it. You get to watch the strategy unfold, watch the plays develop, even watch the manager go out to the mound and the team converse with each other. It’s also the one sport, he noted, where you, as a spectator, have time to notice your surroundings, notice who’s around you – the one sport where you have time to think and reflect. When there is time for conversation and reflection, there is time to write.

I’ve lost track of beginnings and endings in my life right now. One week bleeds into the next without much sense of what is starting and what is stopping. Monday is the beginning of the week for most folks and it is my down day, at least until it’s time for Bible study. Tuesday is a catchall; Wednesday I’m in the kitchen. Thursday I have a chance to catch my breath before the Friday to Sunday marathon. It is a hamster wheel more than a trajectory with any direction; I could begin the description on Wednesday as easily as Monday and come out with the same sense of timing. In the midst of this season, I have fought to find time for conversation and reflection, because I have been determined to write. Life is moving quickly; I want to remember who I am and what is happening. I also want to be able to notice moments like this one:

How Baseball Becomes the Beginning of Longing
By Kelly Terwilliger

The hum of the crowd
is a warm pool, and you wade in happily,
the green field below as smooth as a freshly made bed,
and the sky fading peach into the cooling
air, the lights so bright, so white they trick the eyes
into seeing the whole world sepia, like an old movie
steeped in the color of nostalgia, the smells
of hot dogs and popcorn clinging to the very air
and somewhere inside, you can still hear the smack of the ball
you can feel the arc it makes over the stands and the boy next to you
so wanting to catch it he brought his tiny red mitt to the game
just in case, and he tells you again and again how it would be:
the ball, so hard, so fast it could hit him in the eye and blind him,
would come sailing right between the two of you, and he—he would snatch it
from the air as fast as anything, and it would be his! And how bare
and pointless the evening turns when he knows it is too late,
no ball will come his way tonight and you will go home
and he will be empty-handed and this was in fact
the worst baseball game ever and now he isn’t even sure why
he wasted his time coming, and you climb
that hill with him, his head down, his sandals flapping and the air
clear and darkening all around you, carrying the moon on its breath
like a not-quite-ripe baseball, just out of reach.

The numbers at the bottom of the page on my Word document tell me my Lenten Journal is now over 35,000 words. In a little over a month I have written a small book, I guess, and, when I sit down to write everyday, I feel like the kid with the red baseball mitt waiting for the homerun ball to hit his glove and going home, after every game, with nothing more than the moon and the hope of next time. As a lifelong Red Sox fan, I know both the hope and heartbreak of next time very well and I must say familiarity doesn’t make it any easier. If the option, however, is to not take your glove and go sit in the bleachers, I’ll keep choosing to head to the ballpark.

Peace,
Milton

Carl and I were the only ones at the restaurant for most of the morning, which is usually the case on Saturdays. He is the function chef and I am the lunch cook. Carl does brilliant work in his kitchen. Not only does he make great food, he does it in a way that he can serve two or three hundred people at once and have them feel as though they ate at a good restaurant, rather than chomping on a rubber chicken. He is also as wonderfully odd as he is talented. We took a break about eleven and he said, “I love the way spring smells.”

The sentence just struck me funny. I understood what he meant: the air is full of new sounds and aromas and possibilities. I just thought he said it in an amusing way. Then he went on.

“I just feel better in the spring. Everyone gets better looking, even ugly people – especially when they’re driving.”

I laughed and said, “Yeah, we finally get to roll down the windows and sing along at the top of our lungs.”

I thought about his comment at different times and smiled each time I did. If life is a beauty pageant, neither one of us is going home with a tiara, so it helps us both, I suppose, to know there are moments in life when we all look good. To think some of my best moments are cruising along in my lapis blue Cherokee Sport with the windows down singing, “Tramps like us – baby we were born to run” at the top of my lungs is a pretty good thought.

I also think I look pretty good in the kitchen. It’s a place where I feel comfortable, where I feel creative, where I love to be. It always smells like a new season in the kitchen and you can sing there, too. I like dressing up like a chef as well. This weekend, Robert, our head chef, told me I could do my own lunch specials, so, since it’s lunch in the pub, I created a burger. I made a Guinness barbeque sauce to start with. When I assembled the burger, I put the sauce on the burger, then bacon, melted Swiss cheese, and then topped it with fried onion rings. It comes with fries and a pickle for just $8.95. It looked awesome and it tasted great. Tonight, I got to make sushi. I made a spicy tuna maki roll.

Robert’s the one who first taught me how to make sushi. As soon as I learned how, he started delegating and made me the sushi maker in the restaurant. His ability to affirm and encourage others and let them shine in his kitchen is one of the things he does best. He likes seeing us all look good.

Last night, as I was falling asleep in front of the television, there was some story about yet another award ceremony for actors. The clip I saw showed Dakota Fanning receiving a best something award. She was graceful and grateful in the few words I heard. She is fortunate to work in an arena that seems to thrive on handing out awards. I realize that often it’s the same six people who get those awards, regardless of the event, yet I still think it’s an amazing thing. A billion people around the world tune in to watch the Academy Awards. Is there really someone in Azerbaijan tuning in to see if Heath Ledger was going to win?

I wish there was a ceremony for Dishwasher of the Year. I would nominate Thelma.

What Carl loves about spring is the equality of it all, it seems to me. For a few moments, maybe even days, at the beginning of a season that is all about beginnings, we all get to look good without it being a competition.

I drove home tonight listening to part of the Men’s Final Four on the radio. Usually, I’m glued to the television for the last of March. I love watching the tournament. This year I have seen only part of one game – in a year many have said was the best tournament ever. As luck would have it, my drive home was between the two games, so all I got to hear was the sports guys talk way too much about, well, everything. To hear them, nothing in the world mattes as much as what is going on in Indianapolis this weekend. And it is important. – just not that important.

After a few minutes, I turned it off and started trying to think of what to write tonight, which led me back to Carl’s comment, and then I thought of a scene In Young Frankenstein where they’re trying to capture the Creature and have realized they can’t overpower him. So Gene Wilder, in a stroke of genius, says, “Hello, Handsome!” and compliments the guy into submission.

Along with my burger, one of the things on our menu tonight was a Chicken and Corn Chowder that Eduardo made. It was really good and we sold a lot of it. When the servers complimented the soup I said, “Eduardo made it” and they would then say something to him. I watched the compliments land on him all evening and I saw the way they relaxed him. He got better looking as the night went on. So did I. I loved the people kept ordering the burger and we almost sold out of the maki rolls I made this afternoon. I had fun today.

After eleven hours in the kitchen, there’s not much more to tell than that. We worked hard, we had some laughs, we enjoyed being together, and we looked forward to a season that promises a whole host of days where we all look good driving and singing. I think I may have to put the Springsteen CD in the car for the ride to church in the morning. With one less hour of sleep, I want to look my best, and I do, according to Carl, when I’m singing with the radio.

Peace,
Milton

It was a great night.

We went into Boston about two o’clock because we had to go to the doctor’s office before our evening could begin. Ginger and I are three weeks away from her sabbatical and the Trip of Our Lives to trace the steps of Paul through Greece and Turkey (thank you, Lilly Endowment). To be able to make that trip, we had to make this trip to get our vaccinations. Our nurse, Dale, was excellent both in the information he had to give and his gentle manner in giving the injections. From there we met our friends Cherry and Dell for coffee and then began our evening adventure.

In looking for somewhere fun for dinner, we happened upon Betty’s Wok and Noodle House across the street from Symphony Hall. It’s retro diner meets Asian-Latin fusion. The food was amazing (Juan-tons!) and our server, Michael, made it even more fun. We left, full and happy – they even kept our leftovers refrigerated for us until after the concert – and walked across the street to find our seats in the magnificent hall. The orchestra was tuning up.

There are a lot of great things to remember about last night, but watching and listening to Joshua Bell play the violin is at the top of the list. The piece was Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D. Opus 35. (Once again, I run into my ignorance when it comes to classical music: I thought Opus was the penguin from Bloom County.) Neither he nor the conductor worked from a score. The room filled with melody as the orchestra began, and then Bell made the carved piece of wood sitting on his shoulder come to life. He stood the whole time, moving his body in sync with his bow, occasionally wiping his brow with the cloth that hung on the side of the conductor’s podium. In the sections where he was not playing, he turned to listen to the orchestra in a way that showed he was really listening and not just waiting his turn.

I don’t know how much time passed – twenty-five, thirty-five minutes. The program notes pointed out that Leopold Auer, to whom Tchaikovsky dedicated the concerto when he wrote it, declared the piece “unplayable.” Though he went on to learn and perform it, Tchaikovsky carried the wound of those words for many years. I wish he could have been in the room last night to hear the artist we heard play it as if it were written for him, moving from the big forceful movements to the high, tiny, whispers of sound that even reached us on the back row of the second balcony. It was a great night.

And it had been a hard day.

Gingers father has worked hard his whole life. I love to hear her tell stories of his days as a milkman and then a route driver for Golden Flake potato chips. I can remember going to Birmingham after we first married and waiting for him to come home so we could go out and pick a snack off the truck. He retired several years ago, but got a call this week to ride a route with an old friend who is recovering from surgery and needed some help. Monday morning he left the house at 4:30 to meet the guy. A little after five, the man called wondering where Reuben was; he had not showed up. When she found him, he told her he had gotten turned around on a road he has driven most everyday of his life. Wednesday night he came in tired from work and talked about his exhaustion.

“I can’t believe I’m so tired after only one day of work,” he said.

“You’ve gone to work for three days,” Rachel replied.

“No,” he said, “today’s only Monday.”

Reuben’s work ethic, like his compassion, lies deep in his muscle memory. He is a virtuoso of daily life, a man who knows how to run the scales of existence and pull from them a melody of love and grace. He is a man who timed his delivery route so he could get to everyone of Ginger’s softball games and dance recitals, even as he made sure he kept his promises to keep the shelves full at the Piggly Wiggly. He is a man who, when asked how he is doing, answers every time with gusto, “Fine, marvelous, outstanding.” He is a man who has accumulated very little in his life and feels rich and content. He is a mountain of a man who is mostly gentle and kind stacked on top of each other. For his whole life, he has played a concerto of hope, finding ways to affirm and encourage those around him, convinced to his bones that God is holding him and will not leave him alone. He, too, plays without a score; he lives the melody.

When Rachel called the doctor to tell what had happened and to make an appointment, the doctor said, “It sounds like Alzheimer’s.”

Only a chilling silence can follow that sentence.

We don’t know, yet, exactly what is going on. Thanks to the ridiculous inefficiencies of our health care system, it will be some time before we know because they don’t have any appointments available. What I do know is I’m troubled by the strains that are beginning to break into our lives. Only last Friday I sat at the funeral of my friend’s father; today I’m worried about my father-in-law. I’m not quite prepared for this particular movement. There is no score, and I don’t know this piece by memory, or even by heart.

Living outside Boston while Rachel and Reuben are struggling in Birmingham makes it all even harder to hear. What carries this far, for the most part, is the pain. It is both a low and piercing note, full of questions and yearning. Here is a man who has composed a wonderful life; he does not deserve for it to be erased, measure by measure, in reverse. Why does it feel, sometimes if feels as though all of our lives are like Saturday Night Live skits: we don’t know how to write a decent ending.

We talked to Ginger’s mother on the way home last night. Reuben had a better day. He had already gone to sleep.

“What makes one day better than another?” Ginger asked after she hung up.

“I don’t know,” I said. And we drove home, her hand in mine.

Peace,
Milton

Ginger and I are going to the symphony tonight.

(Let’s see – I’ll take “Sentences that Milton Rarely Types for $200, Alex.)

One of the people in Ginger’s church was kind enough to give us her tickets since she could not use them – with a parking pass. According to the BSO web site, we will hear Emmanuel Krivine conduct Mussorgsky’s “Prelude to Khovanshchina,” Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D, Op. 35 (with Joshua Bell), and Brahms’ Symphony No. 4 I have now said everything I know about what is going to happen this evening, and I have very little more to contribute when it comes to classical music in general. It’s not that I don’t like it, it’s that I don’t know it.

When I think of Brahms, I think of lullabies, though I am hard pressed to hum any of his at this particular moment. When I think of Tchaikovsky, I think of “The 1812 Overture,” complete with cannon that we get to hear every Fourth of July here in Beantown. What I know of Mussorgsky is from my old Emerson, Lake, & Palmer records, where they did their version of “Pictures at an Exhibition.”

There. I’m done, at least for the most part. ELP’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” sent me searching for more Aaron Copland. The Elephant Man introduced me to Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” through its soundtrack. But I don’t know classical music because I didn’t grow up with it; I wasn’t trained to listen for it. Part of the reason is Bulawayo, Lusaka, and Nairobi didn’t have Philharmonics in those days. Part of it is my parents’ musical tastes ran more toward hymnal than highbrow. The folks in my church joke that I don’t need a hymnal on Sunday mornings. I know them all by heart.

In first grade I took piano lessons, like many people. I went through seven teachers in a little over a year. My last teacher came out to the car one day and said to my mother, “He has musical ability, but it’s not ready to come out. Do him a favor and me a favor and let him quit taking piano. His talent will come out in good time.”

The problem (issue?) was I had too good an ear. Rather than learning how to read the notes on the page, when my teacher stopped to correct my mistakes, I would ask her to play and then repeat what she had played based on what I heard. She figured it out when she played a mistake and I repeated her error. My mother let me quit and I asked for a guitar for Christmas – my ninth grade year. I’ve always loved to sing. Since most of rock and roll exists because of three chords (G, C, D), I had all the music I needed around me. My soundtrack had six strings.

My brother, who grew up in the same house and got a guitar the same Christmas, would tell this story differently. He became a professional musician. He learned to read music, to love the symphony and the opera, he did the work of learning to read what is still a foreign language to me, other than knowing Every Good Boy Deserves Favor.In college, I was learning to play Dan Fogelberg while he was performing “De Fledermaus.” It was not a matter of what we were exposed to as children, it had to do with the ears we grew and what melodies we allowed to take root in our hearts.

I love live music. I love the idea of being in a room where a musical event occurs that cannot be replicated and was not recorded; you were either there, or you weren’t. In rock and roll, those kinds of moments come when an unexpected guest walks out on stage, or some sort of interaction with an audience member changes the set list. Live orchestra is shooting of a different kind of live experience, one where everyone has practiced individually and rehearsed together to bring the score to life by playing the score note for note. But there is no such thing as a literal playing of the score; it must be interpreted. The conductor makes decisions about tone and tempo. The players bring their own style to their craft. And then there’s the challenge of playing together.

Acoustic sets have been stylish for some time now in popular music, where a musician forsakes the band and plays solo with nothing but guitar, as if the stripped down version of the song is the truest one. I can’t imagine a violinist, a trumpeter, or a timpanist making a case for a solo version of any of the pieces they know. (“Wait for it – my drum comes in every forty-five measures!”) The composers wrote parts that could come to life only in the context of community. They had to have the band to make the whole thing work.

All of a sudden I’m talking as if I know the difference between scherzo and shinola.

I wonder what the musicians car hear when they play. Do they have a sense of the entire orchestra at work? Do the strings hear more than strings? If one sits in front of the big brass does one holy hear big brass? Does the guy playing the triangle wish he had a microphone so he could hear himself? Do they have to play the notes and trust the conductor to tell them if they are making music? Do those who play supporting notes ever really get to hear the melody?

We’re off to the symphony. I’m going to sit in an historic room and let the sounds wash over me, hoping to find resonance, to grow new ears. I’m going to find beauty in the diligent work of the players and the conductor. I’m going to be a part of an evening I usually miss, to see a side of the world I don’t usually see, to give attention to what I usually let flow by.

That’s always worth doing.

Peace,
Milton

I spent some time this morning reading Life Work by Donald Hall.

It’s not a new book to me. When I was finishing up at Winchester and preparing to move to the South Shore, my friend Jack loaned me his copy. Donald Hall was a poet who lived in and around Boston; his love for the Red Sox was as passionate as his love for words. The bookmark I keep in the copy I bought after I gave Jack’s back to him is a ticket stub from a Sox-Mariners game on Sunday, May 4, 2004. I sat in Section 27, Box 67, Row D, Seat 1. Hall was paying attention to Spring Training in the chapter I was reading today, much as I am, with the Sox just days away from opening an new season and, with it, new hope. Hall writes:

Absorbedness is the paradise of work, but what is its provenance or etiology? Surely it is an ecstasy of transport, of loss of ego; but it is also something less transcendent: To work is to please the powerful masters who are parents – who are family, who are church, who are custom or culture. Not to work is to violate the contract or to disobey the injunction and to displease the dispensers of supper and love, of praise’s reward. Not working becomes conviction of unworthiness. We prove ourselves worthy by the numbers of work . . .

As I like to say: I average four books a year – counting revised editions of old books; counting everything I can damned well count. Counting books, book reviews, notes, poems, and essays, I reckon I publish about one item a week, year-in, year-out. Were I fifteen years old, this would be the moment when I would pretend to blow on the backs of my fingernails, then rub them on my shirt.

Work, work, work.

The numbers make a difference to me, somehow. At the end of the night, I can tell you how many burgers I cooked, how many onions we sliced for onion rings. I can also tell you my journal will be over 31,000 words after I finish today’s post. When I open my blog each morning, my first move is to click my statistics counter to see how many hits I got the day before. At least I am learning how to check it only once a day. In some way, each one of the numbers reflects some aspect of my effort, and they also have nothing to do with what I have done. If I cook forty burgers on an evening it’s because I got forty orders, not because I somehow worked harder. Whether one hundred or three hundred people come to the web site, I’m still writing a thousand words a day. Yet, Hall is right: we do prove ourselves worthy of the numbers.

Worthy. That’s a haunting word to me.

Worthy: having value; being suitable; desirable; meriting respect or esteem.

That takes numbers, if not to prove to other people, to prove it to myself. Five years of cobbling together a resume that includes line cook, security guard, and pastor – as well as extended segments of life where I existed as Unemployed Depressed Guy – and it takes some serious spin to make the numbers work, to make me feel like I’m pleasing the “dispensers of supper and love,” to make me feel productive.

When we first moved to Charlestown, I went looking for a job to help pay the bills. I ended up as Assistant Manager at the Blockbuster Video down the hill from our apartment. The pay wasn’t great, but we got free movies and there was always popcorn. I had fun roaming the store trying to suggest lesser-known movies to widen people’s perspective to more than the new release wall. Thanks to me, more people in Charlestown saw The Year of Living Dangerously and Eyewitness than would otherwise have done so. One night, I asked a woman if she was finding what she wanted.

“Oh!” she said with some surprise. “I don’t usually talk to the help in places like this.”

I went back behind the counter in an identity crisis. Growing up in a minister’s home meant not being taught much of a distinction between who you were and what you did, at least in our house. Was I the guy who handed out copies of Terminator 2, or was that just what I did? Did renting videos justify my place on the planet? Since when was I “the help”?

I learned to make a distinction. I was a person who happened to be trying to pay some of the bills by working in a video store. That wasn’t all of me. The lesson was a good one to learn and a hard one. If someone like me, who internalized early on that love was earned, figures out that what I do and who I am are not the same thing, how do I earn love? What do I have to do (be? – even the verb is an issue) to feel worthy?

Here’s one of the ways I have tried to respond:

Daily Work

In the crush of afternoon traffic I am one
Of an unending queue of cars, staring at the stoplight.
From my driver’s seat I can see the billboard:
“Come visit the New Planetarium You Insignificant
Speck in the Universe.”

When the signal changes, I cross the bridge
Over the railroad yard, then left past the donut shop,
And park the car in front of my house.
Only my schnauzers notice because
They are home alone.

I have been hard at work in my daily orbit,
But I stopped no wars, saved no lives, and I forgot
To pick up the dry cleaning. Today
Would be a good day to be Jimmy Stewart,
For some angel to show me I matter.

As I walk the puppies down to the river,
I wonder how many times have I come to the water
Hoping to hear, “You are My Beloved Child.”
Instead, I stand in life’s rising current only to admit,
“I am not The One You Were Looking For.”

I stand in the stream of my existence between
The banks of Blessing and Despair, convinced that
Only Messiahs matter, only heroes are worthy,
That I have been called to change the world
And I have not done my job.

Yet, if I stack up the details of my life like stones
For an altar, I see I am One In the Line of Humanity,
A Drop in the River of Love; I am a Speck
In God’s eyes, of Some Significance.
So say the schnauzers every time I come home.

It’s one of those questions I keep asking.

Peace,
Milton

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.