don't eat alone

The fact that Ginger and I have been in Guilford a little over a year now means we are beginning to do things for the second time; our inaugural year is over. Last year I was invited to serve on the Christmas Tree Committee, which, I learned, meets only once a year on the second Saturday morning in December to go out, cut down the tree for the sanctuary, bring it back and set it up, and then have coffee and doughnuts together. This morning was my second committee meeting, and there is now a beautiful sixteen and a half foot tall tree at the front of the church and an empty box of Beach Donuts in one of the trash cans. It was a good morning together. Not just a morning; a memory. We took one of the things off of the church’s Advent To Do List and turned it into a morning we will remember because we did it together.

For many years, my shared Christmas tradition with my nephews was that we sent each other music. I would box up a few CDs—some old, some new—in hopes of offering them something they had not found on their own, and they did the same for me. I have memories down the years of one of them calling to say, “I’m driving home from school and listening to Jackson Browne (or Jason Isbell or Patty Griffin) and just wanted to say how much I love this record.” When Scott, the youngest nephew, got married, one of his friends and bandmates came up to me at the reception and said, “Uncle Milton! I’m so glad to meet you. Thanks for sending all the music.”

The streaming services have made it so boxing up CDs doesn’t make as much sense anymore, so this year I decided I would box up books instead. I drove up the Shoreline to the Book Barn in Niantic, Connecticut, which is actually housed in four different locations around the little town.

The original location is an old house and several (unheated) out-buildings, carts, and trailers filled with books, and organized quite well. The other locations are in buildings that look more like storefronts, each one with specific types of books inside. I spent about an hour and a half at the original site and picked up several books that will be fun to send for Christmas. I also found one for myself: Donald Hall’s, Unpacking the Boxes: A Memoir of a Life in Poetry. Hall, a former US Poet Laureate, writes engaging and thoughtful prose as well as poetry. This was one I had not read, so it came home with me, and it was on the top of the stack when I put the books on the counter at the cash register.

The man behind the counter was one of the owners, I surmised from the conversation he had with the person in front of me, and, when it was my turn, I realized that part of his tradition in the store was to have a conversation with whomever was checking out. When he saw Hall’s book, he said, “I got to do a reading once with Donald Hall.” All he needed from me was an acknowledgement, and he was off on a wonderful story of how they had seen each other in the restaurant before the reading and were both dressed in jeans, maroon t-shirts, and denim over-shirts, as he called them. The whole time he was talking, he was ringing up my purchases. Then he put my books down, turned to me, and said, “When he read, he did it sitting down because he has had trouble with his legs as he has aged. But when I finished my reading, he stood up for me.” He smiled. “That was a wonderful day.” And he turned my trip to the bookstore into a memory that held more than the bag of books I carried to the car.

I’m looking at the stack of books that will make their way to Chicago and New Orleans early next week—Frederick Buechner, Annie Dillard, Paul Bowles, and Willa Cather, Desmond Tutu, Nora Gallagher, Anne Tyler, Steven Millhauser, Robertson Davies. All of them have a story behind why I pulled them off the shelf. I bought Buechner in seminary and he gave me lines from King Lear that I have hung on to:

The weight of these sad times we must obey,
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.

A passage from Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky led my friend Billy and I to write “Twenty One Times,” which is a lyric I’m proud and fond of. Nora Gallagher is one of a number of Episcopalian women (along with Madeleine L’Engle and Sarah Miles) whose writings have informed my faith. Desmond Tutu is one of my heroes. Anne Tyler gave me the image of the chair shaped like a hand, that helped remind me I was held when my depression was at its worst. Perhaps I should have told the poet behind the counter I was grateful for his story and his store because they reminded me that, even as Donald Hall stood up for him, the folks in these books have walked with me down the years and how I was sending them on new journeys with people I love.

Then again, maybe it was enough to hear his story and say, “Thanks for taking time to tell me,” which is what I did, and I drove home with a car full of books and memories.

Peace,
Milton

My plan for this evening was to write my blog post. Ginger was finishing her sermon for Sunday. The two of us were at a coffee shop in Branford, the town next to us. About seven, she said she was hungry and suggested we pick up a gift certificate we had at home for a restaurant across the town green from our house. When we pulled in the driveway, we both noticed the lights on in the barn. “You get the lights and I’ll grab the gift certificate and meet you back here at the car,” she said. I opened the barn door and found this:

Needless to say, I didn’t write tonight because love caught me by surprise. Our friends here in town threw a birthday party for me in our barn. (My birthday—my sixtieth birthday—is Monday.) Even in Guilford, Connecticut, it seems love surprises you by showing up in the barn. Gloria in excelsis de0.

Peace,
Milton

During the course of the day, this video showed up in the feed of a Facebook friend who lives in California.

If you don’t want to take time to watch the video, it is a promo for a new store Amazon is opening in Seattle in January called Amazon Go that allows you to shop through an app rather than having to stand in a check out line. You sign in with the app when you enter the store, pick out what you want, and then walk out. The app charges your Amazon account. The voice over said it was all possible because of something they call “Just Walk Out Technology.”

The string of comments and replies that followed was more interesting than the video in many ways, with people weighing in on everything from the frightening invasion of technology to whether anyone actually interacts with cashiers in a checkout line to worries about the jobs being lost to warnings about the end of the world. James Corden, host of the Late Late Show, commented, “That’s how I shopped all through high school.”

The layers of humor and concern are certainly there any time we confront a new technology, especially those designed to save time and make life more convenient, neither of which hardly ever seems to actually happen. And the discussions about the value of work, what meaningful work is, and why we should talk about a living wage rather than a minimum are crucial, but none of that is what set me writing tonight.

I want to talk about their catch phrase: just walk out technology.

I’ll start by saying I heard it completely out of context, probably because I’ve heard too many pops songs about walking out or walking away, Renee. To my ears, it felt as though they were taking words that meant one thing and turning them into something else.

Just. Walk. Out.

My gut reaction reminded me I don’t think of just walking out as a positive move. You just walk out because you have had enough, or you can’t take it anymore; you just walk out because you don’t belong or because you want to separate yourself; you just walk out because you are trying to take a stand or you just give up. You just walk out because you don’t what to do other than leave. It’s not safe. It’s not right. It’s over.

My Facebook friend heard the words another way and wrote, “It’s almost as if the quiet narrative is ‘Live efficiently, die alone.'”

I have several friends in Durham who own restaurants, coffee shops, and food trucks. They are good at what they do and intentional about the way they engage their customers, and, if you visit one of their establishments, chances are you will stand in line because it’s worth it. The lines aren’t there by design necessarily, but they are part of the equation because efficiency—as defined by the “just walk out” crowd—isn’t their primary value.

Yes, I understand standing in line to get a great cup of coffee or a killer slice of pizza is different from standing in the supermarket Ten Items or Less line when the three people in front of you are all breaking the limit. And the ten minutes you spend there are not going to do any ultimate damage. The promise of efficiency is overrated; rather than seeing how quickly we can just walk out, what if we began to look for ways to stay, to be present, to just hang out. We too easily let ourselves be content with billiard ball relationships, bouncing off one another as we head off to the next place. Sometimes we are in a hurry, and there is an emergency, but it doesn’t need to be our daily way of life.

As Jackson Browne put it, people, stay just a little bit longer . . . .

In my job as an editor, some days are big picture days and some days are detail days. Today was the latter. I spent most of it making sure certain words were where they were supposed to be, page after page. It’s not the most glamorous work, but one of the reasons I know I’m in the right job is it was boring either, because the details matter. If we get them right (I’m not the only one immersed in this project), then whoever uses the book will have what they need to their job well. So, I suppose another way to look at it is I spent the day doing stuff that matters, even if it was the small stuff.

Once we both got home from work, Ginger and I caught up on This Is Us while we ate dinner (that show does amazing things with details), and then we took the pups for a walk around the town Green, a detail that matters a great deal to them. When I sat down to write, I began by reading The Writer’s Almanac and I found in the details there that today is Willa Cather’s birthday. I love a number of her books, but my favorite by far is Death Comes for the Archbishop, which is the story of two priests who start churches in the American Southwest. More than anything, it is the story of a lifelong friendship, which means it is a story of significant details.

At one point in the story, the Bishop speaks.

“Where there is great love there are always miracles,” he said at length. “One might almost say that an apparition is human vision corrected by divine love. I do not see you as you really are, Joseph; I see you through my affection for you. The Miracles of the Church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.” (50)

“What is there about us always”—the details.

Right now, more days than not, I spend about five hours a day on trains between Guilford and New York. I am fascinated by the conductors because I think their job is somewhat unique. They are in only a few rooms all day, but the rooms keep moving, and the people in the room with them keep changing, and their job is to keep up with who comes and goes and make sure people pay for the trip and get where they are going. Some of them move up and down the train without saying much except, “Tickets, please.” They don’t appear to be looking for anything more than the proper pieces of paper and plastic. Then there are those who focus on faces, who engage in conversation, work the car as though they were responsible for us.

I was on the early train this morning, which means we left New Haven at 6:02. Four guys sat down around me. One had on a Dallas Cowboys hat. When the conductor saw him, she lit up and said, “Now that’s what I’m talking about,” and proceeded to bring the whole section of our car to life. I more often take the later train, which means I leave New Haven at 6:32, and Joe is the conductor.

One morning, after he checked my pass, he took the ticket from the woman sitting next to me and said, “Well—how did it go?”

She smiled. “Okay,” she answered. “He was a little nervous, but he didn’t cry when I left.” Then she looked at me and said, “My little boy started preschool yesterday.”

And Joe remembered the detail. I watch him play similar scenes up and down the car on a daily basis, making sure to see what is there about him always.

We have been conditioned to think getting wrapped up in details means not being able to see the forest for the trees and getting overwhelmed by little things that don’t matter. Tonight, thanks to Willa Cather, the good bishop reminds me that when I see the world through my affection for the world, the small stuff shines with significance. There’s not a bigger picture than that.

Peace,
Milton

I could blame it on somebody, but I’ll just fess up instead: I’ve watched my share of Hallmark Christmas movies. Though I love a good character-driven, emotional landslide where nothing much happens other than profound sadness, I get hooked waiting for the two people to figure out they were meant for each other and go running back to find one another as the snow falls on Christmas Eve. After you sit through a few of them, you start to believe there’s a lot of love out there.

I know. This is where I turn back on the movies and say neither life nor love is really like that, but I wasn’t just setting the movies up so I could knock them down. I mean I’m the guy who went to lead the music for a midwinter youth retreat the last weekend of January in 1989 and looked across the room and saw Ginger with the folks from Royal Lane Baptist Church in Dallas. We were a few minutes away from starting to sing, but I made time to introduce myself and ask if she was with Royal Lane (“I used to go to church there.”), and ask what she did (she was doing CPE at Baylor Medical Center in Dallas—“I did CPE there.”), and then I spent as much time as I could the rest of the weekend. I got home from the retreat on Sunday afternoon and called her that night and asked her to go with me to see Lyle Lovett at the Caravan of Dreams in Fort Worth the next weekend. I had already bought the tickets as a birthday present for my friend Billy, who was going to drive up from Austin. When she said yes, I called him and said, “I’ll get you something else; I met a girl.”

Lyle was playing on Sunday night. And the church where I was youth minister had a Sunday night service. The plan was I would drive to her apartment in Arlington right after church and we could still make the show. That Sunday, an ice storm hit and church was cancelled, but not the concert or our date. I slid my way in my Toyota Tercel to get her and we started our life together that frozen night. If it had all happened just one month earlier, it would have been an awesome Hallmark movie.

If there was going to be a turn in this post, I suppose this would be the place where I say something about romance not being real love. Maybe another time. Tonight I want to talk about the romance. The way it makes the people in the Hallmark movies take chances, or swallow their pride, or believe something out of the ordinary might happen.

One of our Christmas traditions is watching Scrooged, Bill Murray’s take on Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Murray plays Frank Cross, Ebenezer Scrooge as a network television executive, who gets visited by the ghosts and then comes to himself, as they said of the prodigal son, with this speech:

I’m not crazy. It’s Christmas Eve. It’s the one night when we all act a little nicer.
We . . . we smile a little easier. We . . . we . . . share a little more. For a couple of hours we are the people we always hoped we would be. It’s really a miracle because it happens every Christmas Eve. And if you waste that miracle, you’re gonna burn for it. I know. You have to do something. You have to take a chance and get involved. There are people that don’t have enough to eat and who are cold. You can go and greet these people. Take an old blanket out to them or make a sandwich and say, “Here. l get it now.”

That right there is why these movies hook me: the there-I-get-it-now moment, and then that there is time for them to circle back on their mistake, or their stupidity, or their pride and let love get the best of them.

So i’m down to the last paragraph and this really did turn out to be the gospel according to Hallmark. I think I am as surprised as you are. It’s not the whole story, but it’s a good one. Sometimes for love to find us, we have to get out of our own way. Sometimes what we are looking for is right in front of us. Sometimes, when you walk across a room and introduce yourself, it turns into a lifetime. Wait—that’s a different channel . . . .

Peace,
Milton

As the first week of Advent comes to a close, here are some songs that can help make up a soundtrack for the season. They aren’t necessarily Christmas songs, but they speak to me.

First is Amos Lee’s “Cup of Sorrow.”

I want to drink from your cup of sorrow,
I want to bathe in your holy blood.
I want to sleep with the promise of tomorrow,
I know tomorrow may never come.

Karla Bonoff is one of the song writers whose songs run across many years for me. “Home” is one I keep coming back to.

the people I’ve seen
they come in between
the cities of tiring life
the trains come and go,
but inside you know
the struggle will soon be a fight

and home sings me of sweet things
my life there has it’s own wings
to fly over the mountains
though I’m standing still

This past summer, as I mentioned earlier, I spent a week with Steve Earle and Shawn Colvin at Camp Copperhead, a songwriting camp. Here’s my favorite song from their collaborative record, Colvin and Earle called “Tell Moses.” The last verse says,

Ferguson, Missouri, people in the streets
hands above their head standing up to the police
waiting for a hero to step into the breach
‘ain’t nobody coming so it’s up to you and me

tell Mary, tell John
say the hourglass is empty and the judgment day has come
tell preacher, farmer Brown
say Joshua’s blown his trumpet and the walls are comin’ down
sell sister, brother too
tell them where they’re gonna meet us and what we’re gonna do
tell Steven, tell Shawn
there’s a message in the music, everybody sing along

water is wide, milk and honey on the other side
water is wide, milk and honey on the other side
water is wide, milk and honey on the other side
keep on traveling along

Thanks to my summers at camp with the folks from Wilshire Baptist Church in Dallas, I learned of David Ramirez and his song “Find the Light.”

I wish upon you an easy life
I wish upon you hard times
I hope you know that both joy and pain
each need their moment to shine
I wish you ears that are quick to listen
that you’re slow to use that tongue
but most of all I wish upon you love
as the sun sets the moon begins to rise
so even in the darkness you’ll find the light

Following the light, I’ll move to a song called “There’s a Light” on Emmylou Harris‘s record, “Light of the Stable.” The song was written by Beth Nielsen Chapman.

there’s a light, there’s a light in the darkness
and the black of the night cannot harm us
we can trust not to fear for our comfort is near
there’s a light, there’s a light in the darkness

I was with some friends not long ago who reminded me of another of Beth Nielsen Chapman‘s songs, “How We Love,” which feels like a good closing song.

life has taught me this
everyday is new
and if everything is true
all that matters when we’re through is how we love
faced with what we lack
some things fall apart
but from the ashes new dreams start
all that matters to the heart is how we love
how we love, how we love
with the smallest act of kindness
in a word, a smile, a touch
in spite of our mistakes
chances come again
if we lose or if we win
all that matters in the end is how we love

Peace,
Milton

I know. It’s still the first week of Advent and I have already missed a day writing. I have a good reason: I went to see Billy Joel at his monthly concert in Madison Square Garden. Last night was his thirty-fifth show, and my first in the Garden.

Last Christmas, Ginger and our friend Jay gave me tickets—for a show on January 7, 2016. Later that afternoon, my mother called to say she was going in the hospital and my brother and sister-in-law were on their way to help. I got there at the first of the year, as she was going into hospice. Needless to say, we didn’t make the concert. She died on January 15, three days after her eighty-fourth birthday.

Jay was able to return the tickets and bank the money with the ticket agency and I started looking at a time to reschedule. Last night we finally made it. He sang for nearly three hours and I sang most of it right along with him—me and 18,000 of my closest friends.

The last song he sang before his encore was piano man. We could see it coming when he strapped on the harmonica holder. As he came to the last chorus, the house lights came up so we could all see ourselves, Billy stopped singing and let us take the vocals:

sing us a song, you’re the piano man
sing us a song tonight
‘cause we’re all in the mood for a melody
and you’ve got us feeling alright . . .

He picked up the closing piano part, we all cheered, and couldn’t help but wonder what it felt like to realize a song he wrote almost forty-five years ago had brought him to that particular moment: a moment he was built for.

Annie Dillard wasn’t at the concert, but she’s been talking particulars as I have been reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek this week. I mentioned her “tree with the lights in it” a couple of days ago; she also described an encounter with a puppy that pulled her into the present tense. And then she said,

I had thought, because I had seen the tree with the lights in it, that the great door, by definition, opens on eternity. Now that I have “patted the puppy”—now that I have experienced the present through my senses—I discover that, although the door to the tree with lights in it was opened from eternity, as it were, and shone on that tree eternal lights, it nevertheless opened on the real and present cedar. It opened on time: Where else? That Christ’s incarnation occurred improbably, ridiculously, at such-and-such a time, into such-and-such a place, is referred to—with great sincerity among believers—as “the scandal of particularity.” Well, the “scandal of particularity” is the only world that I, in particular, know. What use has eternity for light? We’re all up to our necks in this particular scandal. (80)

One of the reasons I love live music or theater or pretty much anything is it matters that you are there in the moment. Stuff happens that isn’t recorded or ever duplicated. If you wanted to experience it, you had to be in that particular place at that particular time. Like last night when, in the middle of “In the Middle of the Night” Billy and the band broke into a cover of “Take it Easy” and sang the whole song. Just for fun. And I was in that particular room on that particular night to see it.

I have been at concerts where I was moved by an artist’s performance, only to buy the record later and find I didn’t really like the music. There was just something about being in the room, being in the moment—that particular moment. The reason stories carry truth better than statements is because they are about a particular someone in a particular place, whether it’s Scout, or Holden Caulfield, or Stephen Kumalo, or Daisy Buchanan, or Mary figuring out how to give birth in a barn.

Richard Rohr writes,

When you start with the specific, you have a beautiful doorway to the universal. On the other hand, when you start with universal theories, it makes it very hard to ever get back to respect for the particular. In fact, you tend to find a reason to see that the particular is never good enough. It is always flawed and imperfect. There is inevitably a reason why this particular person or thing cannot be included, because it is seen to be abnormal, poor, broken, leprous, sinful, or unorthodox. Look at our Christian history: it seems to have been a nonstop search for who is unworthy and who does not belong. What a horrible waste of energy. 

The particular pulls us into the present and pulls us towards one another. As Rohr says, we do damage to one another when we deal in labels and concepts, when we think truth lives in the propositional rather than the personal. Look at Genesis: creation moves from the swirling universe, focusing closer and closer, getting more and more particular, until everyone and everything is named. At the end of his all-wrestling match, Jacob grabs the stranger and says, “Tell me your name.” Make it particular. Then he wouldn’t let go until he got a blessing; and he walked home with a limp.

Listen to Billy Joel and you hear how the particular creates a place for everyone:
Anthony works in a grocery store, saving his pennies for Sunday . . .
Brenda and Eddie were still going steady in the summer of ’75 . . .
Come on, Virginia, don’t make me wait . . .
I’ve seen the lights go out on Broadway . . .
I’m in a New York state of mind . . .
It’s nine o”clock on a Saturday, the regular crowd shuffles in. . . .

As I try to listen for any hopeful sounds in the blasting white noise that passes for public discourse these days, I am reminded that the voice of God, and the voices that sing harmony with the divine, don’t need megaphones or manipulation. As I write, the image that comes to mind is just after the giant angel chorus has excelsis deo’d the shepherds to the manger and the sky is a little less crowed and a bit more starlit, but a couple of voices remain to sing in the background:

don’t go changing to try and please me
you’ve never let me down before
don’t imagine you’re too familiar
and I don’t need you anymore
I would not leave you in times of trouble
we never could have come this far
I took the good times I’ll take the bad times
I take you just the way you are

Everybody sing along . . .

Peace,
Milton

P.S. I found a recording from last month’s concert at the Garden. Here is “Piano Man.”