The long December weekend began with a call from a colleague requesting a courtesy. The request involved me looking in on a young man who had once been a congregant of his. A romantic relationship had collapsed, and the guy was distraught to the point, according to his former shepherd, of self-destruction.
"I don't think he will off himself," he told me from his study, "but I sure would sleep better tonight if you would look in on him."
I did so, and found far more than a rejected suitor. He seemed very close to making that decision beyond which there are no more decisions to make. What followed was a marathon intervention that last about 72 hours and involved a couple of clergy, a former therapist, the ex-girlfriend in question, some folks from law enforcement and a few others. It ended at an altar rail in the sanctuary of a Methodist church in south Arkansas.
After begging, threatening, showing love both tough and squishy, and a lot of what was called in olden days 'exhortation', he finally collapsed to his knees at the chancel and threw up a desperate prayer for help. I stood by exhausted and nearing the point of being as lost as he was - until I noticed something that helped me understand Christmas in a way I never had before.
Inches from his bowed head was a nativity arranged on the altar of the sanctuary. It was as cheesy and cheap-looking as any I had ever seen, but all the elements were there: virgin mother and child, attentive husband, drowsy barn animals, wise men, amazed shepherds, all positioned on the straw of the manger. The creche told The Story, and it is The Story that contained the power to change things that day ... or any day.
The nativity's absence of factual basis is obvious and flagrant, even if one adheres to strict biblical interpretation. But in countless manger scenes and Christmas pagents - in the reverence of the magi's bowed heads; in the beatific look on Mary's face; in the awed adoration of shepherds who were struggling to understand the thing that had happened; in the humility of the setting; in the sheer fact of the baby's arrival and existence - our questions may not be answered and our quests for justice and intellectual coherence may not be satisfied, but our deepest needs are met, I believe.
His birth brings balm to our wounds, and a fellow traveler to our lonely journey. It is light in the darkness. It is hope where little or none would exist without it. It is the small green shoot that struggles up out of barren soil. It is both promise and possibility. It is the only real antidote to the despair of human misery, striving, and history - it is 'joy to the world.'
The weekend had a good ending - not necessarily a happy one - but a good one. It did not have a glorious, Hallmark kind of resolution, but he came in time to accept that his present state of affairs was not his final destination. Last I heard he was doing very, very well.
And me? I came to a place that has me in tears every time I sing, "Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel."
A Merry Christmas to you all.
Friday, December 24, 2010
Monday, December 6, 2010
Dandy Don
I just learned a few moments ago that Dandy Don Meredith died earlier today. He was 72 years old, lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and had suffered from some debilitating health conditions over the last several years. A native of Mt. Vernon, Texas, Meredith still holds the single game passing yards record for the Dallas Cowboys, and infused the franchise with a spark and verve that it needed under the tutelage of Coach Landry. He was Joe Namath with a drawl, boots, a reasonable amount of self-restraint, and razor-sharp wit. In the broadcast booth in the early days of Monday Night Football, Meredith more than held his own with Howard Cosell and Frank Gifford.
It is spookily ironic that his name came up in a conversation with a friend only hours before when after a rare Dallas Cowboys victory we were discussing how peculiar it was that some still refer to the 'Boys as "America's Team," an appellation that used to be common among sports fans in the south. Meredith and his Dallas teammates from the mid-sixties - Bullet Bob Hayes, Bob Lilly, Jethro Pugh, Lee Roy Jordan, Chuck Howley, Walt Garrison, Dan Reeves, Larry Cole, Mel Renfro - were heroes to many of us. They were men's men, took and gave out helmet-to-helmet hits because they didn't know there was any other kind, and judiciously hid their tattoos from both their fans and their mothers. An on-field celebration would have brought a rare flash of temper from Tom Landry. They were iconic and legendary, but not wealthy - they drove Ford and Chevrolet pick up trucks without a sense of irony, and did not advertise their brand of blue jeans. They were years away from the Age of Endorsement among professional athletes, although Meredith did like his Lipton Tea. When he said he was through with football as a player, he was done - he walked away and never looked back.
Our knowledge of these men was no doubt cursory and superficial -in the late sixties and early seventies they were far removed from the vicious 24 hour-a-day sports sycophancy we have today and could enjoy a reasonable amount of privacy. We could watch Pugh and Lilly crush a quarterback without knowing how many DUIs had been issued to Dallas Cowboy team members that month. We could cheer a Hail Mary from Meredith without knowing about the incident that occurred earlier that week at a Fort Worth strip club involving several members of the Dallas secondary and a transgender entertainer named Fantasia. We could watch Meredith or Staubach march their offenses down the field toward opposing end zones without the landscape being littered with news morsels about domestic violence, marital infidelity and substance abuse. As far as we knew, Lance Rentzel was just a great receiver with an incredibly sexy wife. None of us outside the esoteric world of professional bodybuilding even knew what anabolic steroids were.
Adoration requires a certain amount of naivete.
In those pre-Watergate years, it felt good to have heroes. I guess what we didn't know didn't hurt us. Only recently have we dropped the once-necessary connection between being an amazing athlete and being a good guy. Certainly the popularity of pro football , if anything, has exploded. But perhaps it's not because we want to be those guys like we once did. Now it's more cathartic and visceral, and far less sentimental, in that they get to exhibit both skills and acts of violence we can only dream of. We don't want them to be our buddies - they are our gladiators.
But I would have liked for Don Meredith to be my buddy. Thanks much, Dandy Don.
It is spookily ironic that his name came up in a conversation with a friend only hours before when after a rare Dallas Cowboys victory we were discussing how peculiar it was that some still refer to the 'Boys as "America's Team," an appellation that used to be common among sports fans in the south. Meredith and his Dallas teammates from the mid-sixties - Bullet Bob Hayes, Bob Lilly, Jethro Pugh, Lee Roy Jordan, Chuck Howley, Walt Garrison, Dan Reeves, Larry Cole, Mel Renfro - were heroes to many of us. They were men's men, took and gave out helmet-to-helmet hits because they didn't know there was any other kind, and judiciously hid their tattoos from both their fans and their mothers. An on-field celebration would have brought a rare flash of temper from Tom Landry. They were iconic and legendary, but not wealthy - they drove Ford and Chevrolet pick up trucks without a sense of irony, and did not advertise their brand of blue jeans. They were years away from the Age of Endorsement among professional athletes, although Meredith did like his Lipton Tea. When he said he was through with football as a player, he was done - he walked away and never looked back.
Our knowledge of these men was no doubt cursory and superficial -in the late sixties and early seventies they were far removed from the vicious 24 hour-a-day sports sycophancy we have today and could enjoy a reasonable amount of privacy. We could watch Pugh and Lilly crush a quarterback without knowing how many DUIs had been issued to Dallas Cowboy team members that month. We could cheer a Hail Mary from Meredith without knowing about the incident that occurred earlier that week at a Fort Worth strip club involving several members of the Dallas secondary and a transgender entertainer named Fantasia. We could watch Meredith or Staubach march their offenses down the field toward opposing end zones without the landscape being littered with news morsels about domestic violence, marital infidelity and substance abuse. As far as we knew, Lance Rentzel was just a great receiver with an incredibly sexy wife. None of us outside the esoteric world of professional bodybuilding even knew what anabolic steroids were.
Adoration requires a certain amount of naivete.
In those pre-Watergate years, it felt good to have heroes. I guess what we didn't know didn't hurt us. Only recently have we dropped the once-necessary connection between being an amazing athlete and being a good guy. Certainly the popularity of pro football , if anything, has exploded. But perhaps it's not because we want to be those guys like we once did. Now it's more cathartic and visceral, and far less sentimental, in that they get to exhibit both skills and acts of violence we can only dream of. We don't want them to be our buddies - they are our gladiators.
But I would have liked for Don Meredith to be my buddy. Thanks much, Dandy Don.
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Happy Halloween
If it hasn't already, Halloween is becoming the most celebrated event on the calendar. Sales of costumes and spooky paraphernalia are skyrocketing. We can count on the beastess and the ghoulles showing up at the fuel desk and the grocery store, and ordinarily sedate folks are given an invitation to let their inner outlandisher shine. We can be creative with Halloween in ways we cannot with Christmas and Thanksgiving.
Halloween's burgeoning popularity can be explained in several ways, but I think the most compelling is its embrace of the unsettling subtext of our common existence: the evil and chaos and macabre we think so far removed from the routine of our lives is actually with arms reach, much, much too close for comfort. Victor Turner figured this out several years ago with the publication of The Ritual Process: societies and cultures seek equilibrium by controlling this subtext by surfacing it and turning it into a ritual. Trick or treat ...?
Fiction and film are replete with this theme: witness the remarkable insurgency of vampire and werewolf flicks and books in the last five or six years. But of all the brilliant expressions in the media of the close proximity of evil and chaos to our ordinary existences, I think the most compelling was in a film that contained no creator-killing monstrosities, bloodsucking fiends, or alien invaders. I am referring to the final scenes of The Silence of the Lambs.
Agent Starling knocks on the door of an ordinary house in an ordinary town and encounters what seems to be an ordinary guy living an ordinary life. But when the moth flutters into view, Clarice realizes that she is a long, long way from ordinary. What follows will cook your hash, no matter how many times you've seen it. The basement contains horrors that stagger, and our heroine cannot see the malevolent presence though she can hear and feel his breathe.
The bringers of chaos, death and destruction are far closer than we think. Economic collapse and terrorist threats are the larger items dwelling in the basement we can feel and sense but often have difficulty seeing until a disaster occurs or a bottom is hit or a retirement account goes up in flames. But the smaller and subtler players can be just as frightening: the rages that produce words which cannot ever be retracted and leave ruptured relationships in their wakes; the despair and isolation that results in suicide, or, sometimes, homicide; the soulless conflicts of election-year politics that distance us even further from the civil public discourse that once was deemed mandatory.
Clarice had to rely on her instincts to survive the horror in the basement and to emerge alive on the other side of the terror. On what shall we rely?
Halloween's burgeoning popularity can be explained in several ways, but I think the most compelling is its embrace of the unsettling subtext of our common existence: the evil and chaos and macabre we think so far removed from the routine of our lives is actually with arms reach, much, much too close for comfort. Victor Turner figured this out several years ago with the publication of The Ritual Process: societies and cultures seek equilibrium by controlling this subtext by surfacing it and turning it into a ritual. Trick or treat ...?
Fiction and film are replete with this theme: witness the remarkable insurgency of vampire and werewolf flicks and books in the last five or six years. But of all the brilliant expressions in the media of the close proximity of evil and chaos to our ordinary existences, I think the most compelling was in a film that contained no creator-killing monstrosities, bloodsucking fiends, or alien invaders. I am referring to the final scenes of The Silence of the Lambs.
Agent Starling knocks on the door of an ordinary house in an ordinary town and encounters what seems to be an ordinary guy living an ordinary life. But when the moth flutters into view, Clarice realizes that she is a long, long way from ordinary. What follows will cook your hash, no matter how many times you've seen it. The basement contains horrors that stagger, and our heroine cannot see the malevolent presence though she can hear and feel his breathe.
The bringers of chaos, death and destruction are far closer than we think. Economic collapse and terrorist threats are the larger items dwelling in the basement we can feel and sense but often have difficulty seeing until a disaster occurs or a bottom is hit or a retirement account goes up in flames. But the smaller and subtler players can be just as frightening: the rages that produce words which cannot ever be retracted and leave ruptured relationships in their wakes; the despair and isolation that results in suicide, or, sometimes, homicide; the soulless conflicts of election-year politics that distance us even further from the civil public discourse that once was deemed mandatory.
Clarice had to rely on her instincts to survive the horror in the basement and to emerge alive on the other side of the terror. On what shall we rely?
Monday, October 11, 2010
Postmodernism and Rasslin'
Somehow three boys from Arkansas ended up renting a house together in Durham, NC in 1981. Ralph Smith, Mike McDonald and I christened our home on Iredell Street "Toadsuck East." The last time I was in Durham for the Duke Divinity School Convocation sometime in the early nineties, I was surprised to hear a div school student who was driving me to my hotel casually mention that he lived with two other guys in an old house over by East Campus called Toadsuck East (!).
Toadsuck was the sight of various mild debaucheries including a near arrest on our front porch in the wee hours of the morning when a group of young male seminarians rendered their falsetto version of "You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman," and the regular theft/kidnapping of the concrete lawn toads that flanked the front steps known as "Sonny and Cher." It was a fairly ... unstructured ... environment.
But there was one weekly event on the calendar set in stone. At 4:00P.M. every Sunday afternoon, we would gather in front of our television and tune it to TBS out of Atlanta for Georgia Championship Wrestling hosted by Gordon Solie. GCW in those days had no entry music or fireworks or bimbos or people named McMahon. It was a simple testosterone-charged soap opera populated by guys like Dusty Rhodes, Ole and Arn Anderson, Jack Brisco, Tommy 'Wildfire' Rich, Ivan Koloff, the Funk brothers, Rowdy Roddy Piper, and Koko Beware. The personas and story lines were there, but in an earlier and much more modest and benign form. There was never a moment's doubt about who the good guys and bad buys were, and when a wrestler crossed-over from one side to the other, the impact was thunderous. It was pure theater in tights and beer guts. There was a high degree of moral certainty and absolutely no ambivalence. The objects of our deepest love and darkest hate were clearly marked.
As the school year deepened Toadsuck was becoming something of an off-campus student center and others began joining us for our Sunday afternoon ritual. I recall waking up one Sunday afternoon in the spring having slept all morning and most of the afternoon following one of my third shift jobs, walking out in the living room, and seeing no fewer than a dozen seminarians - Duke seminarians - screaming, cheering and yelling as Dusty Rhodes dropped an Atomic Elbow on some hapless Somoan guy. I thought to myself, "How did this happen...?"
I was taken to task by one of my blue-blooded classmates that year who found this fondness for rasslin' to be a disgusting and pointedly egregious crime against Good Taste. Defensively I countered that in a time witnessing the rise of relativity and the erosion of absolutes, we damn well better have something that clearly delineates good and evil, the heroic and the villainous. He stared back at me stricken - probably not from the shrewdness of my retort but from its sheer ridiculousness.
It was ridiculous. But I had a point.
"Postmodernism" is a term not much in currency during my academic years, but from what I gather it refers to a very large, very general, and very non-specific trend in culture, politics, and art away from objectivity to subjectivity, from global narratives to multiple narratives, from absolutism to relativity, and from community to individuality.
Still unclear? Yea, me too, but haven't you noticed that in the movies the characters who used to be the good guys now aren't all that good, and the bad guys, with some exceptions, are not all that bad? No more black hats and white hats - they are all wearing gray. Marketers and advertisers used to exploit our desire for whiter teeth, bigger cars, sexier legs and cleaner floors, but now are going after our lust for 'personal choice' ("have it YOUR way ..."). The most interesting characters in our novels are not caught up in the simple decisions between right and wrong, but between wrong and wrong. Institutions from our churches to our schools to city hall to the White House are universally held in suspicion, and stuff we used to hang our hats on and could count on as sure things .. aren't. The center, alas, is not holding.
Sociologists adopted a French word for this cultural malaise: anomie. Another good French word for it is ennui. And it spawns some really nasty stuff from the more vicious forms of Christian and Islamic fundamentalism to Joe McCarthy to the Ku Klux Klan to the John Birch Society and its bizarre grandchild The Tea Party. It has been, and will continue to be, exploited ad infinitum by office seekers and various cultural pundits. It has turned Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin into significant power brokers and millionaires, and led Glen Beck and many of his followers to believe he is a messiah of some kind.
And you thought rasslin' was bizarre.
Toadsuck was the sight of various mild debaucheries including a near arrest on our front porch in the wee hours of the morning when a group of young male seminarians rendered their falsetto version of "You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman," and the regular theft/kidnapping of the concrete lawn toads that flanked the front steps known as "Sonny and Cher." It was a fairly ... unstructured ... environment.
But there was one weekly event on the calendar set in stone. At 4:00P.M. every Sunday afternoon, we would gather in front of our television and tune it to TBS out of Atlanta for Georgia Championship Wrestling hosted by Gordon Solie. GCW in those days had no entry music or fireworks or bimbos or people named McMahon. It was a simple testosterone-charged soap opera populated by guys like Dusty Rhodes, Ole and Arn Anderson, Jack Brisco, Tommy 'Wildfire' Rich, Ivan Koloff, the Funk brothers, Rowdy Roddy Piper, and Koko Beware. The personas and story lines were there, but in an earlier and much more modest and benign form. There was never a moment's doubt about who the good guys and bad buys were, and when a wrestler crossed-over from one side to the other, the impact was thunderous. It was pure theater in tights and beer guts. There was a high degree of moral certainty and absolutely no ambivalence. The objects of our deepest love and darkest hate were clearly marked.
As the school year deepened Toadsuck was becoming something of an off-campus student center and others began joining us for our Sunday afternoon ritual. I recall waking up one Sunday afternoon in the spring having slept all morning and most of the afternoon following one of my third shift jobs, walking out in the living room, and seeing no fewer than a dozen seminarians - Duke seminarians - screaming, cheering and yelling as Dusty Rhodes dropped an Atomic Elbow on some hapless Somoan guy. I thought to myself, "How did this happen...?"
I was taken to task by one of my blue-blooded classmates that year who found this fondness for rasslin' to be a disgusting and pointedly egregious crime against Good Taste. Defensively I countered that in a time witnessing the rise of relativity and the erosion of absolutes, we damn well better have something that clearly delineates good and evil, the heroic and the villainous. He stared back at me stricken - probably not from the shrewdness of my retort but from its sheer ridiculousness.
It was ridiculous. But I had a point.
"Postmodernism" is a term not much in currency during my academic years, but from what I gather it refers to a very large, very general, and very non-specific trend in culture, politics, and art away from objectivity to subjectivity, from global narratives to multiple narratives, from absolutism to relativity, and from community to individuality.
Still unclear? Yea, me too, but haven't you noticed that in the movies the characters who used to be the good guys now aren't all that good, and the bad guys, with some exceptions, are not all that bad? No more black hats and white hats - they are all wearing gray. Marketers and advertisers used to exploit our desire for whiter teeth, bigger cars, sexier legs and cleaner floors, but now are going after our lust for 'personal choice' ("have it YOUR way ..."). The most interesting characters in our novels are not caught up in the simple decisions between right and wrong, but between wrong and wrong. Institutions from our churches to our schools to city hall to the White House are universally held in suspicion, and stuff we used to hang our hats on and could count on as sure things .. aren't. The center, alas, is not holding.
Sociologists adopted a French word for this cultural malaise: anomie. Another good French word for it is ennui. And it spawns some really nasty stuff from the more vicious forms of Christian and Islamic fundamentalism to Joe McCarthy to the Ku Klux Klan to the John Birch Society and its bizarre grandchild The Tea Party. It has been, and will continue to be, exploited ad infinitum by office seekers and various cultural pundits. It has turned Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin into significant power brokers and millionaires, and led Glen Beck and many of his followers to believe he is a messiah of some kind.
And you thought rasslin' was bizarre.
Saturday, September 4, 2010
Legacy
"What other people think of you is none of your damn business."
- overheard at a 12-step meeting in north Arkansas
When she returned from attending the funeral of a friend in south Arkansas, she reported to me, not so much to my surprise as to my amazement, that the 'ski trip video' came up in conversation - came up 18 years after the incident occurred.
We were a collection of kids and youth who called ourselves The Redbug Ski Club. Every spring we loaded up the buses, often with another church group, and journeyed to Colorado. We skied the greens, blues, and blacks of Breckenridge, Copper Mountain, Winter Park, Crested Butte, and even Wolf Creek, and ended up with a pretty fair group of snow skiers.
One year on a trip to Winter Park I brought along a cumbersome Magnavox VHS camera to record some of the action and make a few memories for the kids - I did not, and could not, fathom at the time the full extent of the memory formation which was to take place. This was back in analog days so we gathered at the end of day, tired but elated, and hooked up the camera to the television in one of the condos to watch the day's footage, uncensored, unpreviewed and unedited.
On this particular day I was filming the kids one by one as they skied toward me down a gentle green slope. When the last skier from the first group passed me, I turned off the camera and let in hang down at my side next to my hip while I waited for the next group to dismount the ski lift and make their way toward me - I should say, I thought I turned off the camera. What we saw that night on the television in the condo was a long segment of video that captured the snow around my feet, the tops of my boots and the tips of my skis - footage captured while I believed, wrongly, the camera and its super-sensitive microphone were switched off. The audience began to chide me good-naturedly for my lack of technical savvy. Then it happened. It came upon us like a thief in the night, unexpected and surprising. It had the clarity of a church bell at midnight.
It was, medically speaking, a flatus. Its length, tonal quality, and volume were impressive. It sounded like something that had been professionally produced in a sound-effects chamber. There was no confusion about what we all had heard together for the first time and at the same time.
The room fell silent as the stunned Redbugs gaped at the TV screen and at each other. Then, in the amazed quietness, I bleated out, reflexively, the only words that came to mind in that instant: "It wasn't me."
The room exploded. Youth and adults, literally, rolled on the floor clutching their sides with tears rolling down their cheeks. Our intern minister David Eaton fell out of the stool he was sitting on. The hysteria continued unabated for the better part of a half hour. Even in the darkness of our charted Greyhound barrelling down I70 toward home, a chortle here and a giggle there would break the silence. When we arrived back in Fordyce, it was the first tale told. My son was ten years old then, and would regale his friends, and anyone who came to the house for that matter, with the lurid VHS tape of his father's gastric misadventure, until, mercifully, the magnetic tape finally wore out and the whole nasty incident fell into the oral tradition. I am thankful that the whole slew of embarrassing home video shows loaded with crotch shots and fainting grooms had not started airing yet.
Two years later I was the guest of a communications class at the high school talking with the students about public speaking and effective communication. After I had shared all of my wisdom on the subject, the teacher opened the floor for questions. A sixteen year old girl I had never seen before in my life stood up and asked, "Was you the preacher that farted on that video?" I think she was Missionary Baptist.
Legacies are tricky business. Politicians and other public figures talk about their legacies as though describing pottery making. The real footprints we leave, however, are of a different nature than what we want on the official record. They consist of what we think of as fairly small things - the accidents and missteps, the gaffes, the slips of the tongue, the moments of both humor and pathos, both true magnanimity and gross self-centeredness, the word of grace offered unselfconsciously, the averted gaze, the tender mercies both given and received.
"Yes," I answered, "that was me. And if anyone in your life claims to be beyond such things, preacher or not, don't believe a word they say."
- overheard at a 12-step meeting in north Arkansas
When she returned from attending the funeral of a friend in south Arkansas, she reported to me, not so much to my surprise as to my amazement, that the 'ski trip video' came up in conversation - came up 18 years after the incident occurred.
We were a collection of kids and youth who called ourselves The Redbug Ski Club. Every spring we loaded up the buses, often with another church group, and journeyed to Colorado. We skied the greens, blues, and blacks of Breckenridge, Copper Mountain, Winter Park, Crested Butte, and even Wolf Creek, and ended up with a pretty fair group of snow skiers.
One year on a trip to Winter Park I brought along a cumbersome Magnavox VHS camera to record some of the action and make a few memories for the kids - I did not, and could not, fathom at the time the full extent of the memory formation which was to take place. This was back in analog days so we gathered at the end of day, tired but elated, and hooked up the camera to the television in one of the condos to watch the day's footage, uncensored, unpreviewed and unedited.
On this particular day I was filming the kids one by one as they skied toward me down a gentle green slope. When the last skier from the first group passed me, I turned off the camera and let in hang down at my side next to my hip while I waited for the next group to dismount the ski lift and make their way toward me - I should say, I thought I turned off the camera. What we saw that night on the television in the condo was a long segment of video that captured the snow around my feet, the tops of my boots and the tips of my skis - footage captured while I believed, wrongly, the camera and its super-sensitive microphone were switched off. The audience began to chide me good-naturedly for my lack of technical savvy. Then it happened. It came upon us like a thief in the night, unexpected and surprising. It had the clarity of a church bell at midnight.
It was, medically speaking, a flatus. Its length, tonal quality, and volume were impressive. It sounded like something that had been professionally produced in a sound-effects chamber. There was no confusion about what we all had heard together for the first time and at the same time.
The room fell silent as the stunned Redbugs gaped at the TV screen and at each other. Then, in the amazed quietness, I bleated out, reflexively, the only words that came to mind in that instant: "It wasn't me."
The room exploded. Youth and adults, literally, rolled on the floor clutching their sides with tears rolling down their cheeks. Our intern minister David Eaton fell out of the stool he was sitting on. The hysteria continued unabated for the better part of a half hour. Even in the darkness of our charted Greyhound barrelling down I70 toward home, a chortle here and a giggle there would break the silence. When we arrived back in Fordyce, it was the first tale told. My son was ten years old then, and would regale his friends, and anyone who came to the house for that matter, with the lurid VHS tape of his father's gastric misadventure, until, mercifully, the magnetic tape finally wore out and the whole nasty incident fell into the oral tradition. I am thankful that the whole slew of embarrassing home video shows loaded with crotch shots and fainting grooms had not started airing yet.
Two years later I was the guest of a communications class at the high school talking with the students about public speaking and effective communication. After I had shared all of my wisdom on the subject, the teacher opened the floor for questions. A sixteen year old girl I had never seen before in my life stood up and asked, "Was you the preacher that farted on that video?" I think she was Missionary Baptist.
Legacies are tricky business. Politicians and other public figures talk about their legacies as though describing pottery making. The real footprints we leave, however, are of a different nature than what we want on the official record. They consist of what we think of as fairly small things - the accidents and missteps, the gaffes, the slips of the tongue, the moments of both humor and pathos, both true magnanimity and gross self-centeredness, the word of grace offered unselfconsciously, the averted gaze, the tender mercies both given and received.
"Yes," I answered, "that was me. And if anyone in your life claims to be beyond such things, preacher or not, don't believe a word they say."
Friday, August 27, 2010
Goodbye, Jo
Got word a couple of days ago that Jo Adair Trussell died after a battle with cancer that was, all things considered, mercifully short. Jo was my secretary at First Methodist of Fordyce when I was down in the piney woods of south Arkansas trying to help build the kingdom back in the day. She was also a loyal friend, a 'work spouse,' a surrogate mother, a comrade, and a confidant. Physically she was strikingly attractive and elegant in a delightful, willowy way, but even had she been plain, those in her sphere would have been drawn to her because of the unparalleled loveliness within.
Sadly the word 'pious' has taken on a host of negative, pejorative connotations. When we hear it we think of the thin-lipped, grim pharisees among us who shamelessly exhibit a personal relationship with the Diety like the tabloids reveal the latest on Angelina and Brad. This is unfortunate. I wish we could rehabilitate the term and use it in the sense John Wesley did when he talked of 'vital piety,' a life rooted in and built upon the spiritual verities and mysteries that run in the deep waters of human existence and experience.
Jo was a model of piety - never arrogant, always open, forever humble about her limits and limits of her understanding, devoted, peaceful - but pious, nonetheless. I sense the world shrank a bit when she passed out of it. I certainly did.
Sadly the word 'pious' has taken on a host of negative, pejorative connotations. When we hear it we think of the thin-lipped, grim pharisees among us who shamelessly exhibit a personal relationship with the Diety like the tabloids reveal the latest on Angelina and Brad. This is unfortunate. I wish we could rehabilitate the term and use it in the sense John Wesley did when he talked of 'vital piety,' a life rooted in and built upon the spiritual verities and mysteries that run in the deep waters of human existence and experience.
Jo was a model of piety - never arrogant, always open, forever humble about her limits and limits of her understanding, devoted, peaceful - but pious, nonetheless. I sense the world shrank a bit when she passed out of it. I certainly did.
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Milepost 3
"The unseen exists and has properties." - Richard Ford in The Lay of the Land
(Note: the following is fictional - mostly.)
If pressed, I would call myself an agnostic when it comes to matters paranormal - UFOs and extraterrestrial life, telepathy and clairvoyance, conspiracy theory, non-corporeal intelligence, and the like. I don't reject the existence of these phenomena outright, but the evidence is inconclusive and my experience with them is limited to say the least. When I was seven years old I saw what I believe now was a dirigible shaped craft over my grandparents' house in Cotter, AR, but I was too young and too scared at the time to recall much about it. And I was too much a liar for anyone to believe me.
So when the hazy presence of Kyoung materialized in the passenger seat of my rig, I was more amazed than frightened, oddly calm and curious. Besides this wasn't the first time I had seen him - just the first time inside the truck.
The first sighting took place nearly a year to the date after I had been the first to arrive to the one car accident that killed his wife and three daughters and led to his suicide a few months later. When the new SUV, just hours off the showroom floor in Ogden, crossed the median while rolling over, I don't know, six or seven times, I thought the objects flying off of it were tires and luggage, only to discover after I brought my rig to a slippery stop, the airborne objects were human beings.
The cars behind me contained a couple of nurses and some Marines with paramedic training. Mr. Kyoung's injuries were serious but not life-threatening so I wrapped him in blankets from my rig while the others tended, unsuccessfully, to Mrs. Kyoung and the kids. Over and over in his broken English he asked me if his family was alright, and over and over again I lied and told him they were fine as he slipped in and out of consciousness.
That was is December, two weeks before Christmas. My first post-mortem sighting of him was in the following March. He, or what was left of him, stood on the shoulder of the road looking out over the icy desolate landscape wearing the same clothes he was in the day of the accident. By the time I got the truck stopped and ran back to milepost 3 Kyoung was gone. The next time I saw him was 3 weeks later and he was wearing a hospital gown, still looking out over the wasteland. Then in late May I saw him at dusk keeping vigilance in a black suit. When he claimed my passenger seat the next December he was back in his accident-clothes, weeping softly into the translucent hands that covered his face. He was there only moments. We exchanged no words and I couldn't tell if he was aware of my presence.
That was four years ago now. Our freight lanes changed and we rarely run that stretch of interstate anymore. I have told no one about Kyoung and only a few about the fatal crash that took everything from him. But if we start running the northwest again I fully expect to see him still mournfully scanning the landscape for his precious children and their mother.
I am at a loss to understand these things. I could have manufactured these materializations, and they could have been waking dreams and visions. But I do know that we walk daily through a world rich in leftover pieces of time, people, history and pain, and that some of these become attached to us through combinations of circumstance and chance. Ask folks who live close to places like Gettysburg, PA and Andersonville, SC and dying towns in the desert and the south. I know that some cannot or will not move out into whatever that next place is and their mourning becomes a final destination rather than portage. Those who mourn like this are not blessed, as The Sermon says, but stuck.
I mourn for those stuck at Milepost 3.
(Note: the following is fictional - mostly.)
If pressed, I would call myself an agnostic when it comes to matters paranormal - UFOs and extraterrestrial life, telepathy and clairvoyance, conspiracy theory, non-corporeal intelligence, and the like. I don't reject the existence of these phenomena outright, but the evidence is inconclusive and my experience with them is limited to say the least. When I was seven years old I saw what I believe now was a dirigible shaped craft over my grandparents' house in Cotter, AR, but I was too young and too scared at the time to recall much about it. And I was too much a liar for anyone to believe me.
So when the hazy presence of Kyoung materialized in the passenger seat of my rig, I was more amazed than frightened, oddly calm and curious. Besides this wasn't the first time I had seen him - just the first time inside the truck.
The first sighting took place nearly a year to the date after I had been the first to arrive to the one car accident that killed his wife and three daughters and led to his suicide a few months later. When the new SUV, just hours off the showroom floor in Ogden, crossed the median while rolling over, I don't know, six or seven times, I thought the objects flying off of it were tires and luggage, only to discover after I brought my rig to a slippery stop, the airborne objects were human beings.
The cars behind me contained a couple of nurses and some Marines with paramedic training. Mr. Kyoung's injuries were serious but not life-threatening so I wrapped him in blankets from my rig while the others tended, unsuccessfully, to Mrs. Kyoung and the kids. Over and over in his broken English he asked me if his family was alright, and over and over again I lied and told him they were fine as he slipped in and out of consciousness.
That was is December, two weeks before Christmas. My first post-mortem sighting of him was in the following March. He, or what was left of him, stood on the shoulder of the road looking out over the icy desolate landscape wearing the same clothes he was in the day of the accident. By the time I got the truck stopped and ran back to milepost 3 Kyoung was gone. The next time I saw him was 3 weeks later and he was wearing a hospital gown, still looking out over the wasteland. Then in late May I saw him at dusk keeping vigilance in a black suit. When he claimed my passenger seat the next December he was back in his accident-clothes, weeping softly into the translucent hands that covered his face. He was there only moments. We exchanged no words and I couldn't tell if he was aware of my presence.
That was four years ago now. Our freight lanes changed and we rarely run that stretch of interstate anymore. I have told no one about Kyoung and only a few about the fatal crash that took everything from him. But if we start running the northwest again I fully expect to see him still mournfully scanning the landscape for his precious children and their mother.
I am at a loss to understand these things. I could have manufactured these materializations, and they could have been waking dreams and visions. But I do know that we walk daily through a world rich in leftover pieces of time, people, history and pain, and that some of these become attached to us through combinations of circumstance and chance. Ask folks who live close to places like Gettysburg, PA and Andersonville, SC and dying towns in the desert and the south. I know that some cannot or will not move out into whatever that next place is and their mourning becomes a final destination rather than portage. Those who mourn like this are not blessed, as The Sermon says, but stuck.
I mourn for those stuck at Milepost 3.
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Superlatives ... (Part One)
The Best Non-Franchise Truck Stop Cafe Johnson's Corner Truckstop, Loveland, CO - if you go have a cinnamon roll
The Best C.B. Handle for a Lot Lizard "Burning Bush", Wells, NV
The Best Toll Road The Pennsylvania Turnpike (I76/I70) - also the PTPK is the nation's oldest
The Best Place to Get Killed in the Winter I80 across Wyoming
The Best Audiobook Narrators [even great books have difficulty surviving poor narration]Will Patton (reading James Lee Burke), the late Frank Muller (reading Larry McMurtry), Joe Barrett (reading Richard Ford), Simon Vance (reading Richard K. Morgan) , Stan Freed (reading Richard Russo)
The Best Late Night Radio weekend editions of Coast to Coast with hosts Ian Punnett and Richard Knapp (midnight to 4am, CDT) with replays of classic Art Bell shows on Saturday night before the live broadcast (8pm to midnight)
The Worst Late Night Radio the remaining editions of Coast to Coast with George Noory - nice guy who really blows
The Best Drives Monument Valley, Arizona/Utah; Columbia River Gorge, I84 in Oregon; California Highway 152 between Santa Nella and Gilroy; Shenandoah Valley (in the fall), I81 in Virginia
The Best Place to Slaughter Wildlife while Driving at Night anywhere in West Virginia
The Best Reasons to Never Ever Patronize Fox News or Fox Sports Radio Andrew Breitbart, Glen Beck, and Stephen A. Smith
The Best C.B. Handle for a Lot Lizard "Burning Bush", Wells, NV
The Best Toll Road The Pennsylvania Turnpike (I76/I70) - also the PTPK is the nation's oldest
The Best Place to Get Killed in the Winter I80 across Wyoming
The Best Audiobook Narrators [even great books have difficulty surviving poor narration]Will Patton (reading James Lee Burke), the late Frank Muller (reading Larry McMurtry), Joe Barrett (reading Richard Ford), Simon Vance (reading Richard K. Morgan) , Stan Freed (reading Richard Russo)
The Best Late Night Radio weekend editions of Coast to Coast with hosts Ian Punnett and Richard Knapp (midnight to 4am, CDT) with replays of classic Art Bell shows on Saturday night before the live broadcast (8pm to midnight)
The Worst Late Night Radio the remaining editions of Coast to Coast with George Noory - nice guy who really blows
The Best Drives Monument Valley, Arizona/Utah; Columbia River Gorge, I84 in Oregon; California Highway 152 between Santa Nella and Gilroy; Shenandoah Valley (in the fall), I81 in Virginia
The Best Place to Slaughter Wildlife while Driving at Night anywhere in West Virginia
The Best Reasons to Never Ever Patronize Fox News or Fox Sports Radio Andrew Breitbart, Glen Beck, and Stephen A. Smith
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Friday Night Lights
Treat yourself to a few episodes of NBC's Friday Night Lights. Those who say it's just a football show may also tell you that Moby Dick is just a whaling manual (F. Buechner). The acting, writing, and production style place the show in a class of its own. Kyle Chandler in the role of Coach Eric Taylor does a fine job of portraying a man who is driven and simple but not stupid, and Connie Britton as Tammy Taylor lights it up every time she's in the action. There are no weaklings in the supporting cast either. The characters are realistic and engaging. The stories it tells are our stories. When you watch, you laugh, you cry, you ache, you sing, and at times you soar.
FNL takes me for brief visits to night lit football fields in towns across Arkansas on Friday nights in the early 1970s. I don't revel in some made up glory days and don't have a particularly jockish outlook on life. Nevertheless things happen in the Friday night milieu that shape us in various measure, for better or worse, and tattoo our souls and spirits.
I'm not talking about how "the tough get going when the going gets tough," or how "there's no 'I' in 'team'." I guess there are various degrees of truth sports cliches, but I'm talking about the transcendent moments:
when for a few seconds or a few quarters you and your teammates played better than you actually were, and you sensed something you later in life would learn is called 'synchronicity';
when your heart soared high above the stadium lights as the girl you wanted to walk you off the field actually showed up and did so; and when your heart broke when she didn't, but your father was there, silent and strong, and the meaning of things like 'manhood' and 'family' began to come into focus;
when you learned that underneath your pain and doubt there lay remarkable reserves of strength and endurance which would be there when you needed them in some immeasurably more terrible time in the future;
when you learned that defeat and disappointment are but way stations and not final destinations;
when you looked across a huddle into the eyes of guys who would never sit at your dining table or cruise Frank Brannan's with you in your car or worship with you at your church on Sunday morning but to whom you were utterly bonded in that moment with a unity never achieved by integration, constitutional mandates, or social engineering.
Like all good art, Friday Night Lights gives us a glimpse of the Eternal in the midst of the temporal - of the Sublime amid the mundane - of the Magnificent disguised in the trivial. Good work. Good game.
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Adios and Gracias, Flying J
Where the Lowes sits now in Conway, AR, there used to be back in the day a small truck stop named Clawsons, run by the family of a guy who was a fellow Wampus Cat. You might not recognize the place by its real name, and probably knew it as G.J.'s, an abbreviation for the Glittering Jesus Christmas decoration placed in the front window at yuletide. At G.J.'s you could get a burger and fries that would change your life, a honey bun as big as a manhole cover slathered in real butter, and a little taste of the subculture that brings you your food and your stuff and everything else you consume in your life. Clawsons and places like it have been fading out steadily for several years, and as cafes like Pharoah's in Shippenburg PA and Johnson's Truck Stop north of Denver struggle to hang on, they have been replaced by franchised operations like Flying J, Pilot, Petro, TA, and Loves.
When I left 22 years of parish ministry 12 years ago many friends and acquaintances were confused as to why I wanted to acquire a commercial driver's license and hit the road at the wheel of a big rig. There are many ways to address this and I maybe in the future I will, but for now let us say that I left a life fairly rich in amenities and took up a life with very few at all. And because the amenities are few and far between, the ones I do enjoy I also cherish and tend to guard rather jealously.
For several years I and the outfit I drive for have patronized the Flying J Travel Centers across the country. Although it is a part of the driver culture to bitch about truck stops and truck stop food, the Flying J has actually done an excellent job providing services: clean showers with clean towels, fresh (mostly) and reasonably priced food, friendly waitresses and c-store clerks, and enough merchandise to take care of modest material needs and mechanical repairs. At times, at the end of a particularly hard road, a Flying J somewhere on the road has been a virtual oasis for a tired driver.
Word has come down that Pilot, another national chain of travel centers, has merged with Flying J (read: 'bought out'), and rescued it from bankruptcy. Binness is binness, as they say, and anyone with enough sense to rub two nickels together can hardly blame either of these companies for undertaking this task. The stores will be remodeled to resemble Ma Pilot, and the Country Markets, the Flying J restaurants/buffets, will replaced by scaled-down Dennys and maybe even an IHOP or a fast food franchise of some kind.
I will freely admit that I suffer more and more these days from a grouchiness that may or may not be age-related. And I notice that my resistance to change seems to expand as I add on years. But I dread this transition. I hated seeing the Mom and Pop truck stops and cafes slowly wither away years ago, and I hate seeing travel centers which offer a wide range of services and amenities get turned into convenience stores and chain restaurants with truck parking. We have yet to see what this hybridization will yield, and for that reason I am still willing to give the benefit of the doubt to this merger. But this definitely sucks.
The trend toward homogenization of American culture continues to encroach upon all segments of society, even the fairly remote world of the professional trucker. Whatever flair still exists is being inexorably swallowed up in familiarity and monotony, the sadness of which is exacerbated when places give themselves throwback names like Cracker Barrel and Po Folks. Rocking chairs on the porch and clever handles that feign illiteracy will never bring G.J.'s back to us, or the Flying J for that matter.
So, Flying J, goodbye and thank you very, very much.
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