don't eat alone

When I was in elementary school and the first part of junior high, we lived in Lusaka, Zambia. One of my clearest memories is of our Sunday after-church ritual: we would come home and have lunch, and then Dad would wash the dishes and Miller and I would dry them. While we worked, we listened to a British music program called Top of the Pops, which was a hit parade of sorts, and they always debuted new music. New music, in those years, more often than not meant something new by the Beatles. The clearest memory of all is the day I heard “Hey Jude” for the first time. I don’t remember how the deejay introduced it, other than he was sure it was something monumental and different; then Paul started singing.

I bought the single the next day and wore it out.

I woke to the news this morning that record producer George Martin had died in the night. He was ninety. He was also the man who was responsible for “Hey Jude,” as well the Beatles being known at all, and also for helping to create most all of the memorable moments we know in their songs, which means he was responsible for much of the soundtrack of my growing up.

In an age where I can build a forty-plus track recording in GarageBand on my Mac, he recorded and produced the multilayered sound of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Magical Mystery Tour on four track analog equipment, which means he literally did it by hand—with scissors and scotch tape.

I didn’t know that was going on. I think the Beatles had broken up before I even knew who George Martin was. But I can remember what it felt like as a kid to listen to “Nowhere Man,” “Got To Get You Into My Life,” and as a teenager to find “Back in the USSR,” “Blackbird,” and “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” to name only a few—oh, and “Eight Days A Week” and “I’m Looking Through You” and “Rocky Raccoon” and “The Long And Winding Road” and “Get Back”—with your high heel shoes and I love that sweater . . . .

Someone I never knew, and who never knew me, put his fingerprints all over my life because of the way he made music, because of what he saw in the four lads from Liverpool that others had missed, because he put his heart and soul into his craft and believed in what he was doing.

I listened to Beatles songs all day as I was cooking for our Lenten dinner tonight at church and realized, even beyond my early years, these songs are at the heart of the soundtrack of my life. I am grateful, not only for the songs, but also for the gift of being of an age where I got to hear those songs for the first time when they were played for the first time. Thank you, George.

Now it’s time to say good night. . . .

Peace,
Milton

Towards the end of the day at work it fell my lot to help a woman whose phone was not working as it should. The repair was fairly straight forward and under warranty. That was not the story. Somewhere along the way, she had decided things were not going to go well. By the time she left, she had dealt with four of us, and no one—including her—had had a good experience. Her anger and attitude was so toxic it almost had an odor. When I realized what was happening didn’t feel situational—that this is how life felt for her—I became incredibly sad because of one detail I had learned early in our conversation: she was a middle school teacher. I’m almost sixty years old, I thought to myself, so I can take this, but there are some seventh graders that are getting killed out there.

I don’t know her story, other than the brief chapter I got to read. I assume she is a deeply wounded person. The point of talking about her is not to disparage her. But ending my workday with her took me back to something I read as I began the day with Wendell Berry, still talking about language.

I . . . am speaking simply from my own observation that when my awareness of how I feel overpowers my awareness of where I am and who is there with me, I am sick, diseased. This can be appropriately extended to say that if what I think obscures my sense of whereabout and company, I am diseased. (42)

As I read those words this morning, they took me to a different place, as did the rest of his essay, which i’m sure will its way to these pages in the days to come. As I sat down to write tonight, and reread some of his quotes I had set aside, I heard him in a different light, and I noticed that at some point this morning I had written in the margins, depression is dis-ease.

Disease. Dis-ease. Yes, another “dis-“ word to add to the growing list we are accumulating. Separated, disconnected from ease, from wholeness. I have learned over the years that the lie of depression—which can still hook me—is that I am alone. I could see it in her as she sat at the table tonight, even as she knocked the wind out of me. She believed the lie as well; she was dis-eased. The more toxic the encounter became, the more I realized, wherever her feelings were coming from, I was the one in the crosshairs, so I leaned into my coworkers and took myself out of the encounter before it became a power struggle, or before I responded out of my own hurt. As I was walking down the stairs, an old Randy Newman song came to mind titled, “I Just Want You To Hurt Like I Do.” When he sings it, he says (in his satirical way) that he wrote it as a kind of “We Are The World” sing-a-long. The opening verse says,

I ran out on my children
and I ran out on my wife
gonna run out on you too baby
I done it all my life
everybody cried the night I left
well almost everybody did
my little boy just hung his head
and I put my arm put my arm around his little shoulder
and this is what I said:

“Sonny, I just want you to hurt like I do
I just want you to hurt like I do
I just want you to hurt like I do
honest I do, honest I do, honest I do.”

If I had one wish
one dream I knew would come true
I’d want to speak to all the people of the world
I’d get up there, I’d get up there on that platform
first I’d sing a song or two you know I would
then I’ll tell you what I’d do
I’d talk to the people and I’d say
“It’s a rough rough world, it’s a tough tough world—well, you know
and things don’t always, things don’t always go the way we plan
but there’s one thing, one thing we all have in common
and it’s something everyone can understand
all over the world sing along

I just want you to hurt like I do
I just want you to hurt like I do
I just want you to hurt like I do
honest I do, honest I do, honest I do.”

The song is hard because we know what it feels like to lash out, to hurt someone out of our own hurt, as if that creates some kind of bond, some kind of community. I remember being with Ginger one day in the line at a department store. We watched as the cashier lived out Newman’s song on most all of the people in front of us. She was hurting; she wanted us to share. Our encounter proved to be no different, except that Ginger had the wherewithal—or, I should say, the compassion—to say, “I hope your day gets better.” The woman caught herself, and then held up the line while she told Ginger her story. Her whole demeanor changed.

As I walked to my car, I thought again of Kumalo’s words from Cry, the Beloved Country that I quoted last night:

Pain and suffering, they are a secret. Kindness and love, they are a secret. But I have learned that kindness and love can pay for pain and suffering.

When the woman told me I had done a terrible job and she wanted to talk to someone else, I allowed her words to hurt my feelings. About all the kindness and love I could offer was to not strike back and to get someone else. I did not offer much in the way of healing. I will pray she comes to some balance where her feelings do not overpower her sense of where she is and who is with her, particularly in her classroom, so that she has more to say than, “I just want you to hurt like I do.”

We do share our pain in common, but it need not be contagious. We can be wounded healers. We can put each other at ease.

Peace,
Milton

I woke up to a surprise snowfall this morning, and nowhere I had to be immediately, so I sat down for my morning coffee and continuing conversation with Madeleine L’Engle and Marilynne Robinson. Even though their two books were written two decades apart and, as far as I know, independent of one another, I am fascinated by the resonance I keep hearing between them, and then, also, in me. Both of them were still talking about stars, about the universe, and what it means to find our place in it. Marilynne said,

The thought occurred to me that if the name of everyone on earth who is remembered for any kind of distinction were assigned to a crater or a mountain or a seeming rivulet somewhere in the visible universe, the astronomers would soon be out of names . . . . Scatter the names of all those who have ever lived over the surface of the knowable cosmos and it would remain, for all purposes, as unnamed as if was before the small, anomalous flicker of human life appeared on this small, wildly atypical planet.

Say that we are a puff of warm breath in a very cold universe. By this kind of reckoning we are either immeasurably insignificant or we are incalculably precious and interesting.

She went on to say she chose the latter. Madeleine was thinking about the universe as well, and our connection to—or separation from (dis-aster)—the stars:

Dis-aster makes me thing of dis-grace. Often the wonder of the stars is enough to return me to God’s loving grace.

To lose our sense of wonder is to grow rigid, unable to accept change with grace.

In the margin I wrote, dis-grace, and have wondered most of the day how we separate one another from the grace of God in the ways we treat each other. Madeleine couched it in terms of T. S. Eliot’s question in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: “Do I dare disturb the universe?” Part of her response was,

Sometimes simply being open, refusing to settle for finite answers, disturbs the universe. Questions are disturbing, especially those which may threaten our traditions, our institutions, our security. But questions never threaten the living God, who is constantly calling us, and who affirms for us that love is stronger than hate, blessing stronger than cursing.

In the margin I wrote, courage.

When I moved to Robinson’s book, she was talking about the same thing:

Western society at its best expresses the serene sort of courage that allows us to grant one another real safety, real autonomy, the means to think and act as judgment and conscience dictate. It assumes that this great mutual courtesy will bear its best fruit if we respect, educate, inform, and trust one another.

At its best, yes. She was also clear about the fear-driven world we live in these days. Though she wrote the essay a few years back, her words felt like a response to what is masquerading as a presidential campaign these days.

Over the years we seem to have become habituated, even addicted, to the notion of radical threat, threat of the kind that can make virtually anything seem expendable if it does not serve an immediate desperate purpose of self-defense—as defined by people often in too high a state of alarm to make sound judgments about what real safety would be or how it might be achieved and who feel that their duty to the rest of us is to be very certain we share their alarm.

In the margin I wrote, dis-courage.

I realize, as David Wilcox says, that there will always be some crazy with an army or a knife, but we are believing a lie when we allow ourselves to be dis-couraged, when we choose fear as the common currency of our culture. To dis-courage is to dis-grace one another, to live as though something can separate us from the love that breathed us into being and made us for each other. Robinson says,

And there is a much larger, more general sense in which we are creators of the universe. We would not be the first human beings to base a universe on fear, and to make sacrifices to allay in which seem unaccountable from the perspective of another culture or generation. We can channel and exploit minds and energies, bending them to use against imagined adversaries. These things have been done any number of times. The alternative is to let ourselves be—that is, to let ourselves be the reflective, productive creatures we are, unconstrained and uncorked.

Courage is not being willing to fight as much as being willing to define ourselves by our calling rather than our cautions, to be fueled by intention rather than suspicion, to live in wonder rather than wariness. To live with courage and grace is to question, to disturb. Madeleine, once more:

Whenever we make a choice of action, the first thing to ask ourselves is whether it is creative or destructive. Will it heal, or will it wound? Are we doing something to make ourselves look big and brave, or because it is truly needed? Do we know the answers to these questions? Not always, but we will never know unless we ask them. And we will never dare to ask them if we close ourselves off from wonder.

I am discouraged when I watch TV and see what passes for political discourse these days. The prospects for the upcoming election are frightening. But I must raise my gaze, go out into the night and stare up at the stars, watch Orion make his nightly trek across the heavens. We are here by the grace of God, born in original love, specks of some significance. Let us chose to reflect the ancient light of Creation rather than this present darkness as it appears on the news channels. Love is stronger than fear.

Courage.

Peace,
Milton

Today would have been my parents’ sixtieth wedding anniversary, so this morning I went looking for
Wendell Berry’s poem “The Country of Marriage” to set the tone for my day, landing on these words in particular:

Our bond is no little economy based on the exchange
of my love and work for yours, so much for so much
of an expendable fund. We don’t know what its limits are—
that puts us in the dark. We are more together
than we know, how else could we keep on discovering
we are more together than we thought?

My parents had a good marriage. No. A great marriage. They loved being together, and that increased as they aged. I paid more attention to how they related to each other as I grew older, yet, as I think back on what they were like when I was a child, I can say they always enjoyed being together. That’s the way they looked at life: together.

Though my father was and is remembered as a confident and self-assured person, my mother was the healing force in their relationship. My mother was the one who knew what she wanted out of life. She was going to Africa as a missionary. She had no interest in anyone who was not going with her. Dad didn’t grow up with much sense of family and belonging, and struggled to feel worthy as a person. Thanks to the love and compassion of Dr. W. R. White at Baylor, Dad found his vocation; thanks to the tenacious and enduring love of my mother, he found healing. They went through huge changes together, and they were committed to the promises they had made: to the form, to the structure.

My search for the poem also offered the serendipitous discovery of an essay by Berry called “On Poetry and Marriage: The Use of Old Forms,” in which he looks at a poem and a marriage as art that flourishes within a form, a structure.

Properly used, a verse form, like a marriage, creates impasses, which the will and present understanding can solve only arbitrarily and superficially. These halts and difficulties do not ask for immediate remedy; we fail them by making emergencies of them. They ask, rather, for patience, forbearance, inspiration—the gifts and graces of time, circumstance, and faith. They are, perhaps, the true occasions of the poem: occasions for surpassing what we know or have reason to expect. They are points of growth, like the axils of leaves.

One of the favorite chapters, or perhaps I should say verses, of my life is the decade or so when I wrote songs with Billy Crockett. What started out as writing stuff for youth camp turned into a challenging and wonderful journey. I had written poetry before, and I had paid attention to other people’s lyrics for a long time, but learning how to find words to fit the form and marry the melody in just the right way was hard work. I loved it.

We didn’t have a set process, in that the words always came first or vice versa. We would find an idea that appealed to both of us and then chase it down. The joke was, when I found the words first, he would say, “I love the line. The rhyme is good. Now say the same thing in six syllables instead of nine.” Committing to write songs meant committing to the form, to the structure.

Ginger and I had been married four or five years when I came up with an idea for a love song: “Well Worn Love.” Even a few years in I had begun to realize that, the fire and excitement of new love notwithstanding, the real stuff of marriage—of love—was to be found in staying together and learning of levels that could not be seen at first sight. The idea came from seeing the steps of the Boston Public Library, worn little by little each day, adding up to a profound change of shape. Over time, the stairs reflected how they had been touched by those who came and went. Billy and I were traveling together and staying in a hotel that had a grand piano in the lobby. As he responded the lyrics I gave him, the song took on the form of a waltz, which is an evocative rhythm for me; it feels like a form, a structure for love. The song never made it to a record, but it’s still one of my favorites. The chorus says,

this is the story of two common hearts
that started out young and grew old
they have practiced a lifetime
the waltz of a well-worn love

I have never been much of a dancer, so I hear a waltz, rather than grasp what it feels like to spin together across the floor in three-quarter time. I hear the rhythm in the words, and the way the words fall on a line. When I read the words to the song now I can see I was writing about something that was not unknown to me, and yet still to be discovered. We had moved to Boston on our Great Adventure. My depression had not yet fully shown itself. We have written the waltz of our life together by showing up and keeping our promises—and we are still three decades short of the dance my parents knew. Listening to my mother tell the stories of her life, I could see, even though she had done many things, the form—the structure—of her life was being married to Dad.

Back to Berry:

Because the condition of marriage is worldly and its meaning communal, no one party to it can be solely in charge. What you alone think it ought to be, it is not going to be. Where you alone think you want it to go, it is not going to go. It is going where the two of you—and marriage, time, life, history, and the world—will take it. You do not know the road; you have committed your life to a way.

Here in Guilford, I am learning new roads, once again, and staying true to a form I chose a long time ago. As I have said many times, if I ever have to give an account for the value of my life, the best answer I know to give will be to point at Ginger and say, “I was with her.” And then I’ll start singing, “This is the story of two common hearts . . . .”

Peace,
Milton

Today’s words grew out of those suggested when I was crowdsourcing ideas for my Lenten writings. The suggestion was best friends. After hearing from some lifelong friends over the past several days in different ways, I made a slight adjustment.  Thinking about the words set me to thinking of songs, and so I offer another musical journey this evening, starting with a song by Rich Mullins (and guitar by Billy Crockett): “Hello, Old Friends.”

hello old friends
there’s really nothing new to say
but the old, old story bears repeating
and the plain old truth grows dearer every day
when you find something worth believing
well, that’s a joy that nothin’ could take away

Old Friends is the title of one of my favorite Guy Clark songs, here sung with James McMurtry and Nanci Griffith.

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

Simon and Garfunkel had a song called “Old Friends/Bookends” that came out a few years before Clark wrote his. I love this video of the two of them singing close to the age of the men they imagined in their twenties.

old friends
winter companions, the old men
lost in their overcoats, waiting for the sunset
the sounds of the city sifting through trees
settle like dust
on the shoulders of the old friends

One of my favorite friend songs that doesn’t have the word in the title is John Denver’s “Poems, Prayers, and Promises,” in particular because it reminds me of my old friend, David Gentiles. I love this version of him singing with the Muppets (with a slight lyric change) from a television special I remember without the help of Youtube.

and talk of poems and prayers and promises and things that we believe in.
how sweet it is to love someone, how right it is to care.
how long it’s been since yesterday, what about tomorrow
and what about our dreams and all the memories we share?

Patty Griffin sings a song of informed and weathered friendship in “Little Fire.”

my friend, you know me and my family
you’ve seen us wandering through these times
you’ve seen us in weakness and in power
you’ve seen us forgetful and unkind
all that I want is one who knows me
a kind hand on my face when I weep
and I’d give back these things I know are meaningless
for a little fire beside me when I sleep

Though Carole King wrote the song, I first remember hearing “You’ve Got a Friend” on James Taylor’s record. I found out she wrote the song in response to “Fire and Rain,” where Taylor sang, “I’ve see lonely times when I could not find a friend,” and King responded:

you just call out my name
and you know wherever I am
I’ll come running, oh yeah baby, to see you again
winter, spring, summer or fall
all you’ve got to do is call
and I’ll be there, ye, ye, ye
you’ve got a friend

We weren’t too far into our songwriting together when Billy Crockett and I wrote “Best of Friends,” which was for the University Baptist Church youth group, where I was youth minister. Sorry. No video on this one, but I have a whole movie library of memories that play when I hear this song.

these days of sunshine these days of rain
we pull together in days of pain
we share beginnings we share the ends
it’s worth it all in these days to be best of friends

Yes. It is worth it all.

Peace, old friends,
Milton