don't eat alone

A comment from my friend Jeff on last night’s post sent me on a bit of a musical journey today, so I thought I would invite you to make it with me as we head to the manger. After reading about our new house in Durham, he quoted the chorus of a Kenny Loggins record I remember buying in college, and listening to over and over.

please, celebrate me home
give me a number
please, celebrate me home
play me one more song
that I’ll always remember
and I can recall
whenever I find myself too all alone
I can sing me home

Maybe it’s that Jeff brought to mind an old song that has left fingerprints on my heart that sent me back in my mental jukebox, but I thought of a song Ginger and I found in a Toronto record store on our one visit there together. It was Carolyn Arends’ first album, and as soon as I could I got out my guitar to figure out the chords. It’s not hard to hear that she was singing in the aftermath of Dead Poets’ Society; the song is called “Seize the Day.”

seize the day, seize whatever you can
’cause life slips away just like hourglass sand
seize the day, pray for grace from God’s hand
then nothing will stand in your way
seize the day

When I go back through my musical history, there is a steady stream of Paul Simon songs. The one I have returned to in the past weeks is “Boy in the Bubble.”

these are the days of miracle and wonder
this is the long-distance call
the way the camera follows us in slo-mo
the way we look to us all, oh yeah
the way we look to a distant constellation
that’s dying in a corner of the sky
these are the days of miracle and wonder
and don’t cry baby don’t cry don’t cry, don’t cry

I guess you’re catching on that these are not particularly Christmas songs, yet these folks are fellow travelers on the road of life, of faith. Kris Kristofferson sings a song called “Let the Walls Come Down” that says,

on a cold dark corner i town
an old soul standing his ground
sang his heart right out at the world
passing him by
I can still hear every word
of a song that nobody heard
’cause he sang right out of his soul
into the sky, when he cried

let the walls come down
let the love come through
when it all comes down
well, it’s up to you

He may not sound like an angel chorus, but there is something sacred in his sound.

Jason Isbell is as good a songwriter as they come, and his last record has what may be my favorite love song, “Flagship.” The last verse says,

you gotta try and keep yourself naive
in spite of all the evidence believed
and volunteer to lose touch with the world
and focus on one solitary girl

I don’t know any other way.

I’ll finish this soundtrack with a song from Guy Clark, who died earlier this year–and it’s not “The Cape,” my personal national anthem. Instead, it is as true a word as can be said “Old Friends.”

and when the house is empty
and the lights begin to fade
and there’s nothing to protect you
except the window shade
and it’s hard to put your finger
on the thing that scares you most
and you can’t tell the difference
between an angel and a ghost

old friends they shine like diamonds
old friends you can always call
old friends Lord you can’t buy ’em
you know it’s old friends after all

O, rest beside the weary road and hear these angels sing.

Peace,
Milton

I haven’t written for the last few days because we have been traveling.

Wednesday night, after our Service of Reflection and Remembrance, Ginger and I loaded up a rented van with some furniture, pictures, and household goods we had packed in the barn and began driving to Durham, North Carolina (in New England, you have to specify; every state, it seems, has a town called Durham). Most of our belongings, along with my mother-in-law and the pups, stayed in Guilford, and we are going back there tonight. Still, the point of our trip was to put down roots. You see, we bought a house in Durham on Friday. It is, as Ginger likes to call it—thanks to a long affection for Sandra Cisneros’ writing—The House on Magnum Street.

Life in Guilford is good and we feel grateful and called to be there. The parsonage that we have made our home is lovely and cozy and, well, feels like home. And Stars Hollow. In our more adult moments, Ginger and I have talked about plans beyond—specifically how we can best prepare for retirement. When my mother died, she left money she hoped would go for a downpayment so we could have a house—a home—we could plan for. We looked up and down the Shoreline, as they call it in Connecticut, and spent lots of evenings talking about where our house should be, and we both came to the conclusion that Durham was the place. Our place. And so we bought The House on Magnum Street.

Since we didn’t leave Guilford until about 9:30 Wednesday night, we knew we would have to stop for the night along the way. When we looked at the map and saw Bethlehem, Pennsylvania was on our route, and we thought it only fitting and rather poetic to spend the night in Bethlehem the week before Christmas. It was after midnight before I tried booking a room on Expedia, so it would only let me book for the next night. We pulled off the highway and into the first hotel. No room. Same with the second. Not even the offer of a stable. We got back on the highway and drove to Allentown, where we found a bed and a complimentary breakfast before we got back on the road Thursday morning humming Billy Joel songs.

When Luke tells the story of Mary and Joseph’s journey, he says they went to Bethlehem because “he was of the house and lineage of David”—it was where his family was rooted. We don’t know how his branch ended up in Nazareth, but he knew where to go to be counted. Ginger’s family roots were in Birmingham, but her parents moved in with us six and a half years ago and then her father died; she still has cousins there, and loves Alabama football, but there is no home place to find. Though my family’s roots are in Texas, we stayed moving so much that mine never grew there. Though we didn’t know much of this little city when we moved here nine years ago, it has become our home. Our place to come and be counted.

In true Brasher-Cunningham fashion, we closed on the house at noon and had a party that night. On the way to the close, we went by the TROSA Thrift Shop and bought vintage furniture, as they say: chairs, small couches, a dining set. As the house filled up with friends that evening, I realized something. For the first time in my life, just days after my sixtieth birthday, I was doing a new thing: I chose a place rather than moving because of a job or family situation. I have moved many, many times, and moved to places that matter in my life. Places I love. The House on Magnum Street marks the first address chosen because it is where we want to end up. When i verbalized my epiphany to some of the folks at the party, one of them said, “I know. I read your book.”

The first completed draft of This Must Be The Place ended with the chapter on Durham, and our house on West Trinity Avenue, which is just around the corner for The House on Magnum Street. I had just signed off on the manuscript when Ginger told me it looked like we were heading to Guilford. I e-mailed my editor to say I needed to add a chapter. I wrote the Afterword on the plane back from my initial trip to Conncecticut; I had to imagine myself into a new locale, which has turned into a wonderful place to be for us. Our days on Church Street are far from over. We have a house, a church, and a barn. It seems, also, that our days in Durham are not done either. We are finding our way home by another way—a way that offers our hearts room to live in two places; there may have been no room in Bethlehem, but there is room in Guilford, and there is room in Durham.

Tonight we are flying back to Connecticut to keep the promises we have made there. Tomorrow morning, I’ll be back on the train to New York, and come home to Ginger and Rachel and the Schnauzers as we get ready for Christmas—and carols in the barn Christmas Eve. There will be room in our stable for whomever shows up. Friends will move into The House on Magnum Street on Thursday, using it as a place from which they can move their lives to Durham on a more permanent basis, and they will celebrate a Christmas of their own.

This Christmas, I’ve found home by another way.

Peace,
Milton

I’m seventy minutes away from the end of my sixtieth year, as I sit down to write, and I have a confession to make: I am not a mathematician. I did, however, just stumble upon something as I was trying to figure out what words to use to close out this decade and begin the next. One of the songs that has shown up more than once on this blog is “Seasons of Love” from the musical RENT. We all know it well enough to sing along for at least a couple of lines:

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?

That math is pretty easy: 365 x 24 x 60 = 525,600 minutes.

But here’s my where my end-of-decade foray with figures surprised me. I decided to see just how many hours I’ve been alive and so I did my calculation: 60 x 365 x24 = 525, 600 hours, which begs the question, how do I measure my life?

in hugs
in hope
in sorrows
in laughter
in late-night discussions
in friendships
in cookies
in stories
in houses
in schnauzers
in books
in words
in songs
in meals
in surprises
in failures
in faces
in grace
in gratitude
and yes, in love

The list is by no means exhaustive. I’ve spent nearly half of my life with Ginger, which is enough to have made my life worth living all on its own. I feel overwhelmingly fortunate to be me: to feel so loved and so cared for, to have so many stories to tell of all the ways love has found me. I’m going to borrow and bend some of Guy Clark’s words to finish up my fifties and see what is to come:

I’m sixty years old with a flour sack cape
tied all around my head
still climbing up on the garage
and will be till I’m dead
all these years the people said
I was acting like a kid
I did not know that I could not fly
and so I did

I’m one of those who knows that life
is just a leap of faith
spread your arms hold your breath
and always trust your cape

I think that equation will keep working for me.

Peace,
Milton

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