Category Disappointment

Picking the bones with buzzards

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I walked among the buzzards at an estate sale today.

An estate sale is where a house filled with the relics of a life is picked over like road kill by vultures, tugging and pulling remnants of his memory off the skeleton and carting them off to cars.

Under marital duress, I joined the kettle of vultures who gathered well before the scheduled 9:30 a.m. viewing. Senior adults almost exclusively, none of whom needed anything being offered inside. All of us curious about what we’ll see, about how this man lived, what he’d considered important enough to collect, gather and keep through his final days.

Curious to see if anything in the house was a treasure his children didn’t know of, something we could “steal” for a few dollars and store in our own lockers for our children to offer in our future estate sale.

I chatted up other vultures, most of whom were in good humor, happy to spend a morning picking at the carcass of a deceased man none of us knew personally. We weren’t hungry, really. But if we found a morsel we’d happily chew on it.

And besides, in the cycle of nature – birth, life, death – weren’t we doing our part? Just like real vultures keep the highways clear of road kill carcasses?

I learned our guy was 95 and died after living in the house 30 years. His closets, cubbies and cupboards were filled as if he’d just stepped out for lunch, telling the house, “I’ll be right back.” But now, except for how the estate sale team had arranged and tagged everything, it stands as a cavernous crypt.

I wandered with the flock, poking, pecking and prodding. He loved Christmas music and books on history and architecture. His shirts were once expensive – but dammit, too large. The tools in his garage were well worn. His china cabinet held fine crystal too delicate for me even to want to examine.

It was the bathroom that arrested me. The sink counter was covered with personal care items that revealed an individual vanity, as would all of ours – how he cared for his teeth, his hair, his nails and skin.

Inside the tiled shower stood a collapsible walker, tight and forlorn against the wall. Available. Unused. The walker had wheels on the front two legs, so he could lift the back two legs and roll it along, dropping the back to the floor to rest or stand when he’d gotten to his destination in the house.  

The walker – alone among all the mementos of a long life – stood in mute testimony to the infirmities at the end of a long life. And it moved me from carnivore to compassion. I left silently.

Oh yeah, we got an Elizabeth Geisler basket. It was a steal.

Beautiful killer

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This morning I saw the most beautiful fox ever. Larger than typical, with bright red fur, tail long and bushy, not matted by thorns. It looked fresh from a spa: fluffed, puffed, tufted, shampooed and blow dried. Eyes intense, intelligent, confident and controlled. Lithe, nimbly athletic, light of foot like a dancer. 

And I wanted to kill it.

Coming back from her sunrise walk, my wife heard the terrorized shrieking of chickens in the open range pasture just behind the cottage where we stay on my son’s property. She stepped quickly to the pasture where she saw a fox with a chicken in its jaws. When she shouted and clapped, the fox sprinted away. The chicken didn’t.

Granddaughter helped to bury the first two victims of the carnage.

As Sue Ellen told me what happened, she asked what to do with the carcass. “Make nuggets” seemed an inappropriate suggestion. 

Before we could fully get our minds around what had just happened, we heard the terrified squawking again. I rushed to the door and this time I saw the fox…with another chicken in its mouth. I threw open the door and for an instant was shocked silent by the fox’s beauty.   

But my anger at its audacity quickly overcame my admiration and I stepped out the door and shouted. It understood my threat and I was pleased to see it run away, leaping the fence as if the rails were a padded obstacle in tumbling class.

I grabbed my shotgun and followed the fox’s trail, knowing it would never show its head to me while I stumbled and tripped through its habitat. I felt better somehow, though, knowing I was “doing” something, at least dropping some “man scent” around so the fox would know who it was messin’ with.

The second chicken was still breathing, its legs twitching, eyes registering a resigned acceptance of fate. I dispatched it, then tossed it into the garden while I went to get a shovel. 

My seven-year-old granddaughter watched wide eyed the entire proceedings, dressed in the “farmer girl” overalls we’d given her for an early Christmas present the day before. 

Uncowed, she helped me dig a hole, her sudden awareness of the life cycle presenting her a sad, but not devastating new insight. 

The life cycle as presented on a National Geographic special sees the fastest lion chasing down the slowest antelope, and it all seems natural and normal, almost pristine, except for the dust. Eating a hamburger never makes me think of the feed lot on which the donor was raised. 

Yet, somehow, because we fed and cared for these chickens, tucked them in at night and gave them special treats from our vegetable shavings, it became a personal insult. 

Yes, they’re free range and hawks circle constantly overhead. Yes, the fox has to eat and yes, the prey/predator cycle is natural. But, the fox invaded my space with impunity, looking at me as if I was an inconvenient interruption at his meal, like a waiter who informed him he had an urgent phone call and he had to leave the cordon bleu to cool.

It was a sad morning, but only a prelude. 

Worse, we came home after dark that night and I went out to check on the chickens, to make sure they had put themselves up in the coop, where safety lay behind a closed door. I looked inside and there was not a single chicken in the coop. 

With a sickening dread, I cast my light over the field and the beam fell on multiple carcasses, each with the head and neck gone. The goats huddled in their own shed, witness to the horror. I followed my flashlight beam around the pasture, accounting for all the chickens but one. 

I found her in the far corner, shaken and shivering. She didn’t protest a bit when I picked her up and put her in the coop, behind closed doors. I don’t know what killed the chickens and I don’t know how this one survived.

We named her Lucky.

  

Sometimes you bite even when you know there’s a hook

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Pardon me for a moment, while I pull the hook out of my cheek. Ahhh, there. 

The tractor had no good place to store my cold drink cup and I forgot about it sitting on the floorboard while I brush hogged the pasture last week. Suddenly I heard a clunk behind me that rang an octave lower than the screech of hitting a stone hidden in the thick, tangled mass of long grass. And, it was an octave higher than when I ran the mower over a concealed limb deposited in the same tangle by the floods of Hurricane Ida. 

I looked back quickly to see a gray metal mass skittering across the mowed grass, having been kicked out by one or more of the nine blades spinning beneath the mower deck. My cup. Drat. 

My wife has for the past year been making what she calls fauxbucha – a homemade kombucha…which for her is a vinegar, cayenne, honey and ginger drink that does wonders for our digestive systems and cures a host of ailments: among them constipation, fungus, the national debt and likely the heartbreak of psoriasis.

I drink at least one glass of it a day – over ice from my cold drink cup – which is now a mangled tangle of cheap Chinese metal laying in the field. 

I’m prone to make myself suffer the consequences of my stupidity, so I wasn’t going to rush out and replace the cup. But Sue Ellen knew I wouldn’t be as faithful in consuming her magic elixir if I didn’t have a cup to take with me. So, the hunt. 

We drove to the Walmarts, where she had purchased the original doomed chalice. But, we could not find an exact Walmart brand replacement. Instead, there was a similar Coleman cup for twice the price, or, a Walmart brand cup with a different lid.

Cup, with the important lid.

You might not think the lid makes much of a difference. But, the patriarch of our family is prone to spills and the cup I lost had a magnetic, snap closure over the opening where the drink came out. This one just had a hole. It cost less than the original, but…the lid had just a hole. A juggle or jostle would splatter the drink over my jeans, or Sunday-go-to-meetin’ shirt.

I wasn’t about to get it. Not gonna do it. Wouldn’t be prudent.

About to give up, Sue Ellen spotted a display of snap close lids…made specifically for the cup I wanted – the very lid the original cup had featured. Now sold separately, for just $2.74. In what world would a product’s favored feature be removed and then offered as an option at additional expense? Oh, yeah, in the American marketing world. 

I knew I was had. I felt like a fish eying a dangling worm, knowing a hook lurked inside, but too hungry to care. I resented my hunger. I resented the marketing ploy to put undesirable lids on the cup and then charge extra for the lid I wanted. 

But, I mentally added the $6.94 for the cup with the unacceptable lid, and the $2.74 for the lid that would make the cup acceptable, and found the $9.68 total still to be six dollars less than any other option and I bit the hook. 

Who knew fauxbucha would sting on an open wound?

It’s going to be a Covid Thanksgiving

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I just tucked my crying wife into bed. 

For months, we’ve been looking forward to seeing distant grandchildren and tonight we realized that Covid 19 restrictions will keep us from our visit.  They’re in a state with a sudden surge of cases – but aren’t we all.

We’ve watched the sad stories of isolated grandparents missing the hugs, kisses, smiles and simple touches of their grandchildren, and we’ve felt sorry for them. I’m a hugger and we’ve enjoyed that relationship with our local family. But now, “them are us.”

Our sadness is intensified beyond this failed visit by the stark realization we may not see the distant grands for months yet. If a negative Covid test is required for admission, and we are unwilling to take such a test simply to travel, what does that say about when we might see them? What does that reveal about fear? Or about the blanket of paranoia draped over America’s frail shoulders?

Covid-19 is not a hoax. It is real. A million cases a week in the U.S. and 1.4 million deaths worldwide attributed to Covid are evidence that some virus is circulating in the human population…after living for untold centuries in animal populations – or for months in a Wuhan lab. Who knows? But, the virus is not random. Like any bully, it picks on the weakest kids in the room. 

We may all feel weak and susceptible to the bully, but in fact, we are not equally vulnerable. Statistically, 90-plus percent of those “kids” getting bullied have health weaknesses upon which the bully feasts. They already are obese, old, frail and with poor immune systems. Covid is a Darwinian herald, an ax wielding assassin rampaging through the human population, spotting these weaknesses and swinging its deadly weapon with lethal results.

In America, we make ourselves vulnerable by not paying attention to our health. We are pale and pasty from too many sedentary hours, eating food whose ingredients we cannot pronounce, demanding our doctors prescribe antibiotics for even the smallest sniffle. Or, we insist that they diagnose the undetectable, psychosomatic disaster that we’re sure will take our life before morning – unless we get a prescription for the miracle drug we just saw on TV.

If we are vulnerable, it is in large part because we delegate responsibility for our health to “professionals” – depending more on the cauldron of chemistry to correct our ailments, than on our own diet and exercise. 

On a visit to The Sixth Floor Museum dedicated to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, I was struck with a curious itch while watching the newsreels of Kennedy’s 1963 arrival in Dallas. Something was different, a bit off. Examining the video, I finally saw it. Everyone in the video, from his security detail, to the airline personnel, to the police and virtually everyone in the crowds lining the parade route, was thin. You’d have to look hard to spot a person who looked like he was trying to smuggle a watermelon out of Winn-Dixie under his shirt.

The National Center for Health Statistics at the U.S. Center for Disease Control showed that 42.4 percent of U.S. adults were obese in 2018. Obesity is the petri dish in which countless illnesses multiply.

The constant advertising of Big Pharma for costly remedies (whose list of warnings exceeds its list of benefits) pounds into us the misplaced trust in chemistry over personal care. We’re deluded into thinking we don’t have to take care of ourselves because “there’s a pill for that.” 

Instead, doctors I follow advocate steps to promote a healthy immune system. Encourage gut health by eating whole and fermented foods. Roll in the grass, get fresh air and inhale the microbes in the atmosphere, play with your pet, or the neighbor’s. Stop sanitizing every surface  because you’re killing good microbes and creating an environment that keeps your babies from accruing immunity to simple illnesses.

A new Mayo Clinic study shows that infants who receive antibiotics before age two suffer long-term effects for anything from allergies to obesity because antibiotics kill good bacteria babies receive from their mothers in the vaginal birth process.  Yet, they are too routinely administered, like farmers administer antibiotics to chickens and beef to promote quick fattening.

We are a sick nation, which makes us more susceptible to Covid-19 than we should be. Our health care system is really a sick care system, because health is not profitable. Local hospitals are advertising “well visits” and warning us “not to neglect regular doctor’s appointments.” Our hospital systems’ financial health depends on a steady stream of people with real and imagined ailments, funded through a complicit insurance system that gets more impossibly expensive every year.

And yet, a hospital system for which I once worked, is bidding more than $5 BILLION to buy another hospital in the state. Tell me there is no money in non-profit health care. 

Covid-19 is opportunistic. A virus spread through the air, and by contact, it attacks the vulnerable. Cases of “healthy” people becoming ill from it are extremely rare. CDC data shows that Americans, regardless of age, are far more likely to die of something other than COVID-19. Even among those in the most heavily impacted age group (85 and older), only 9.4 percent of all deaths between February and September 2020 were due to COVID-19. 

A significant cadre of doctors not linked to the machinery of hospital systems, Big Pharma and insurance companies, warn that closing the country down, sentencing elderly to die alone, killing the dreams and livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of small business owning families, subjecting millions to unemployment, hunger, depression, increased suicide rates and general malaise, will have longer term negative health effects on the population than will the virus. 

I have dear friends in the high-risk category. They are basically not healthy, either from long-term illness or age or obesity or some combination of comorbidities onto which Covid-19 loves to latch. I care for them as they stay secluded in what they hope is a safe bubble. But, I miss them. 

And I miss my grandchildren. 

Misusing military to defend corporate Interests

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Charles Frazier’s novel “Varina” imagines a long conversation with the wife of Jefferson Davis, the traitorous former senator from Mississippi and former U.S. Secretary of War, who led the disastrous rebellion against the United States in 1860 as president of an “imaginary country.”

In the book, Frazier – also author of the immensely popular “Cold Mountain” – taught me a lot about the “property rights” perspective of southerners who thought slavery the perfect melding of capital and labor to assure economic prosperity. 

Growing up in Wisconsin, we studied the Civil War in fourth grade and never thought about it again. About 1990 I mentioned that fact while interviewing for a job in Georgia. The Colonel Sanders lookalike who chaired the interview committee said, “Down heah, we call that the wawh of nawth’n aggression. And we’re still fightin’ it.”

Americans love war. We must, we’ve been at war for 93 percent of our history.  We, among all nations, are the quickest to send our youth to other nations to kill their youth. In our minds, we’re always the good guys because we are “defending freedom.” “Freedom” is a malleable term with many definitions, depending on the perch from which you observe the march of time and of nations. 

Too often, our defense of freedom is really a defense of our corporate interests, the ability of American corporations to conduct business internationally without interference from local governments. And, that flag waving, slogan shouting defense is fueled by the whispers and checks of corporations who build the machines of war into the ears and accounts of politicians who buy them.

President Trump recently chastised military leaders for prolonging wars –we’re actively involved in seven  – to boost the profits of war machinery manufacturers. He is right in the fruit, but wrong in the root. It is politicians who prolong the wars, not the military. It is presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon who thwarted peace attempts in Vietnam because they felt they would not be re-elected if they cut and ran from that hopeless quagmire. It is Bush and Obama and Trump who insert, left and leave fighters all over the world.

Back to Frazier and his Varina Davis. She is telling her conversation partner about a letter from General Lee to her husband Jeff, warning against an action that “would bring down the reproach of our consciences and posterity’s judgment.”

“But then, it was too late to apply Lee’s advice more widely,” Varina said, “because we were in the middle of trying to pull apart a country to protect the wealth of slave owners.” 

 She went on to say how the war wrecked the South and cast it into poverty. 

“But not for the north,” she said. “Plenty made fortunes off the war. Give a real Yankee one little dried pea and three thimbles and he can buy groceries. Give him a boxful of cheap, shiny pocketknives and pistols to trade and he will turn it into a career. But give him a war, and he’ll make a fortune to last centuries.”

F-22 fighter jet pushed by Pentagon that the Air Force doesn’t want.

And that is why we have been at war for most of our history. There are fortunes to be made! Our military defends the oil fields of Kuwait and the shipping channels of the high seas. It props up impotent and corrupt governments such as Afghanistan and keeps shipping lanes open for our oil companies to bring their products to market. It defends against the nationalization of U.S. companies that drain resources from other nations without proper recompense.   

Our military budget of $716 billion is equal to the military budgets of at least the next 12 biggest spending nations. 

The defense department says we have 4,800 “defense sites” in at least 160 countries. The U.S. military is the nation’s largest employer, paying 2.15 million service members and 72,000 civilians who work among them.

Under the gossamer thin patina of “protecting our freedom” the U.S. muscles into the business of other countries, on behalf of business. We’re the largest seller of weapons in the world. Five of the 10 largest weapons manufacturers in the world are U.S. companies. Once a company secures a contract for a new fighter jet or aircraft carrier or tank, it is virtually guaranteed acceptance of massive cost overruns and extended years of full employment for their employees. 

Sometimes the commercial interests in weapons manufacture push the politicians on their payrolls to buy expensive tools the military doesn’t even want, such as the F-22 fighter jet at $150 million per and the F-15x fighter, at more than $100 million each.   But it means jobs – tax payer funded. And the local senator is loathe to agree to kill the product, even when the military says it no longer wants it. 

 The pipeline of retiring generals to the boards and staffs of these companies is an incestuous, bacchanalian orgy of gorging at the federal trough.  

Some of oldest monied families in the country conceived their fortunes through the sperm and egg of gunpowder and war, birthing both deadly destructive force and their vast fortunes: the gunpowder of E.I. du Pont; the plastics and chemicals like Agent Orange of the Dow family; and the no bid contracts handed to the Haliburton Company to provide services to troops in Afghanistan,  a company led by Dick Cheney until he left to run George Bush… I mean until he left to run as vice president with George Bush. 

So yes, Varina, your husband allowed himself to be drafted by his fellow southern politicians to tear the country apart to protect their wealthy supporters, and to weigh an economic theory against the blood of 750,000  citizens.

But, fortunes were made! And, as discomforting as it is to consider, politicians still use our modern military to create and protect private fortunes. 

I’m a veteran, one of America’s last draftees. I’m neither anti-military, nor un-American. Quite the opposite. I just hurt inside when anything draped in a flag is considered patriotic or anyone draped in a uniform is called a hero, when too often both are symbol and substance of corporate manipulation of our national leadership for their own ends.

I need younger friends

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It’s a vital part of “church” to be involved with people beyond Sunday morning. When the outside activities of the Bible study group my wife and I were involved with seemed awfully tame, we started a class that targeted a younger demographic – those 55-65 years old. 

Our activities would take us beyond local restaurants and dinner theater. We “youngsters” hiked at Hanging Rock State Park, rode bikes down the Virginia Creeper Trail and canoed the New River. 

One Sunday morning a sweet couple visited our class. When Sue Ellen noted the ages indicated on their visitor card, she called the church office and suggested John and Mary might find the older class more suitable. She was told no, they specifically asked for our class. 

We weren’t going to shut the door on anyone, even though they were the age of many of our parents. And what a wonderful addition they were to our class. Ironically, Mary, who had a teaching doctorate with a specialty in English as a Second Language, had recently worked in Colorado for a man who was a young boy in the same church where Sue Ellen and I were members years ago. 

When we learned that John and Mary’s ministry careers were primarily among students, we understood why they wanted to be in our class, among people a generation younger. They’d always worked and lived among young people and we were a touch stone to that earlier era. Being around younger people made them feel younger. 

They could not physically do everything we did, but if they attended a game night they gave it everything they had.

And goodness, their insights from a life in Christian service at home and abroad enriched us all. When they moved to Tennessee recently to be closer to their son we showered them with a surprise and rousing send-off with class members and friends holding signs and singing hymns. 

Steve, left, my son Austin and me at RAGBRAI 2010.

I’m at the point in life where some of my friends are turning…old. My army buddy Steve turned 70 today. When I rode with him last summer in Omaha he took another spill on his skinny tired road bike. He’d only recently healed up from a previous spill that broke some ribs and bruised him ugly. 

At his wife Linda’s insistence, Steve recently purchased a hybrid bike as his main ride. Now, Steve is a guy who hikes, skis, swims in the ocean and likes to ride his road bike long distances. He’s on no medicines and gets synapse collapse in his brain when he sees the number 70 pop up in relation to his age.  

This hybrid bike has fatter tires, a smoother ride and more stable (read: forgiving) handling. But, in his mind, it’s like he traded a Mustang convertible for daddy’s Buick. 

“I’ve never felt so bad about a purchase in my life,” he said, when I called him to wish him happy birthday. “I felt like it was the first step toward turning in my car keys because the kids don’t think I’m safe to drive anymore.”

After a shared laugh he said, “I felt it was like going to the vet to get fixed.”

Of course, he made sure Linda felt his pain. But 44 years of marriage has coated her sympathy nerve with a layer of Teflon, which is to say she wasn’t hearing it. 

He confessed that after an initial “getting acquainted ride” he likes the bike a lot. He even says it just might be nimble enough to use for RAGBRAI next year, in riding across his home state of Iowa. 

Between John and Mary and Steve the lesson for me is clear: I need younger friends. 

What part of our one body are refugees?

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“The way we are, we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain’t in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don’t.” – Burley Coulter in The Wild Birds, by Wendell Berry

Across the globe two waves of people ebb and flow, washing up, then back into each other like waves at the beach, roiling where the water that rushed to the sand loses momentum and falls back toward the ocean, just as the next wave pushes past it. Water lemmings rushing to their own demise. 

These are the human tides rushing to get out of somewhere, and the waves of people rushing to get into somewhere else. 

According to the UN Refugee Agency almost 70 million refugees wander the world, including 41 million displaced in their own countries,  fleeing turmoil, famine, war, drought, disease. The very uncivil war in Syria spiked a large increase since 2011. 

Refugees may live in squalor for years, hoping for a new home that never materializes. (Getty image)

You’ve seen the images of frightened families lugging everything they can carry, dragging their chins and bins down dusty roads in a long stream, desperate to leave behind whatever demon is tearing up their lives. Where are they going? Away. Just, away. 

They’ve cast their lot on their god and on their hopes that the milk of human kindness will somehow give them succor in whatever crowded, dirty, hungry, dangerous camp they land in next week or next month when they “arrive” at this safe haven. 

That human teat is drying up. 

Witness the wave of wanderers who washed up on the beach of the Mexico-American border and are now hunkered down waiting for a chance to present their plea for asylum to a skeleton crew of U.S. judges, operating under a “first, deny” mandate. Or the governments – and citizens – of Greece and Turkey who are saying “no more.” Stemming the easy movement of refugees from any European Union nation to another is a significant – if unspoken – element of the vote for Britain to leave the EU. 

Post-racist societies? I think not.

In October, for the first time in years, an entire month passed with no refugees officially resettled in the United States. None. The U.S. has been generous in the past with refugee resettlement, although not as generous per capita as some other nations. Under the current administration, the cap is 18,000 per year, a historic low at a time when the number of refugees is at a historic high.

This, as thousands wait for their applications to be considered. Many are huddled in squalid camps in the shadow of ports of entry, wondering where their children are, from whom they’ve been separated. Others wait in camps on the other side of the world, victims of conflicts in which we meddle – to keep the oil safe, and our access to it, secure.

Resettlement agencies, funded per capita by the number of refugees they resettle, are laying off workers and some are closing altogether. If/when our country is more open to welcoming “the tired, the poor, the huddled masses” whose industry has helped to make this country strong, resettlement agencies may not be well positioned to gear up smoothly to start again conducting their business. 

Veteran’s Day prompts such thoughts. I’m one of America’s last draftees, destined for the Army in September 1972 when my draft lottery number came up one. First. Uno. Clarity. 

America has been involved in global conflict for my entire life. Every day, if you count the unresolved status of the Koreas. “All we are saying, is give peace a chance,” we sang as students, marching Easter morning while Viet Nam still raged. 

Of the 195 countries in the world, we have troops in 177.  Some would say the presence of American troops IS giving peace a chance. Others would say the presence of our troops in other countries is the seed that grows the tree of resentment, whose fruit is conflict.

Geography is a wicked stepmother.  I’ve stood with my foot on the spot where the states of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah meet. An inch or two either way and I’m in another state. 

A baby born on the south side of the river is Mexican; born on the north side is American. The pregnant wife of a Russian oligarch flies to Miami to have her baby and suddenly an americantsky grows up in Moscow.   

As Wendell Berry’s character Burley Coulter says, “We are members of each other,” whether we know it or not.  

Somehow the attitude that “I’ve got mine, too bad about you,” seeped into the mantra of humanity. Freedom isn’t a pie, where there is less for me if I give you a slice.

When we close our arms, our doors, our hearts the body suffers. How many of the 5,000 children in American custody – separated from their parents in a misguided and cruel effort to discourage people from South America from trying to come to the U.S. – will never be reunited with their families? Some are too young to remember their own names, to say nothing of their parents’ names, or from what town and fear they fled.

            We are members of each other. As the Bible says, we are members of the same body. (Romans 12:4-5) 

            Today, my heart part hurts. 

Lonely at the Lake

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A dip in Hyco Lake saved the day.

Deep in his heart, every man longs for a battle to fight, an adventure to live and a beauty to rescue. – John Eldredge

Of all the great memories from my cross-state bike adventure with my friend Mark,  the most lasting image came from a moment off the bike. 

It was our second day, and hottest. The bank sign said 96 degrees when we rode past. It seemed we climbed all morning and early afternoon as we left the NC mountains and navigated around bodies of water, racing down to them, then slogging back up to level ground. Now, we were crossing Hyco Lake on a short, flat bridge when we looked longingly at the dark, calm water. 

“Every time we cross a lake on a hot day, I want to jump in,” Mark said. I shared the sentiment and when I saw a cabin with a “For Sale” sign on it at the far end of the bridge, I rode into the short driveway, intending to walk unnoticed to the end of its dock and jump in. But, as we rode into the cabin site, the owner came out to attend to something on his deck. 

Unthwarted, I rode up and asked if we could take a dip into the lake from his dock. Skeptical at first, he said, “Go ahead.” 

Mark, hoping tryouts are still open for Olympic underwater dancing team.

Mark stripped to his bike shorts and jumped in. I didn’t want to ride the rest of the day in wet shorts, so I got nakie and jumped. Oh my goodness. Given the day, the ride, the heat, the perfect water temp, the freedom, it was heavenly. 

After we’d gotten refreshed, we air dried a bit. I wiped myself down with my sweaty jersey, put on my dry shorts and walked back up to the cabin. Mark squished his way up to where the owner was back out on the deck. We chatted long enough to learn that he was from Massachusetts and had bought the cabin three years ago to be near his son and grandchildren, who lived about an hour from there. 

“That must have been great,” I said. “Lake house, grandkids, lots of fun.” 

“They only came twice in three years,” he said. “And my relatives from Massachusetts never came.” So, he’s selling the place and moving in with his sister back home. 

I can’t get the image out of my mind. He’s not a rich man, he said. The lake home wasn’t a vacation spot. He planted his life there so he could be near his son and grandchildren – an hour away. They came only twice in three years. 

No one visited from Massachusetts. Not once. It costs 80 bucks to get the yard mowed, and his boat looked like something you’d put your supervisor in, hoping to create a sudden job opening. He couldn’t stay. No reason to.

He was a lonely man, lonely enough to leave his grandchildren and move in with his sister back home. We thanked him, wished him well, and took off – up the hill away from the lake and on to Roxboro. 

I don’t know the family dynamics. Maybe he was hard to get along with, maybe he mistreated his son’s mother. But to uproot your life in your retirement years, move 700 miles to be close to your grandchildren, and then be ignored – that just struck me as too, too sad.

There are lots of lonely people out there. For lots of reasons. Don’t let some of them be your grandparents. And, don’t be afraid to say hello to strangers.

It makes even a stoic cry

normanjameson 3 Comments

I handle bad news relatively well. My exuberance over good things isn’t excessive – unless of course, you’re talking about the winning shot hit by my child or grandchild. Those who know me might call me stoic.

But, sometimes, I find belly laugh humor in the simplest things like word play and irony. And then, out of the blue, an item will reach out from a page or conversation, or television commercial with such poignancy it strikes every raw nerve in me and makes me blubber like a baby denied its lolly. Such as, a McDonald’s commercial around Olympics time, showing a dad teaching a little girl to swim, then showing that same dad cheering on his grown daughter in the Olympic pool.

The tear trigger probably depends on an aggregation of what I’ve been doing and reading and experiencing and all the right elements coalesce to strike an emotional nerve. It happened today at lunch.

Reading in the September Reader’s Digest about teachers who changed lives, I came upon a story reprinted from 1991 about a sweet natured, but very talkative boy named Mark Eklund and his teacher who was struggling to get across a tough math concept to her junior high class. When students wouldn’t settle down, she had them write on a sheet of paper every class member’s name. Then, they were to write the nicest thing they could think of about that student – for every student – and pass the list back to her.

On Monday, she distributed their classmates’ comments to each student and heard them murmuring as they read what others said about them: “I didn’t know others liked me so much,” or “I never knew that I meant anything to anyone.”

The boy grew up, as boys do, and one day the teacher’s father said, “The Eklunds called last night.” She immediately recalled the talkative bright, polite boy and asked how he is.

“Mark was killed in Vietnam,” the father said. “The funeral is tomorrow and his parents would like it if you could attend.”

At this point, I had to pause reading because all the pain, disgust, frustration and rage I generally keep tamped down relating to America’s gross, blind, selfish, lying, cruel relationship with Vietnam burbled to the top and leaked out my eyes.

Resuming the story, teacher Helen Mrosla stood at the coffin when a pallbearer asked her if she was Mark’s math teacher. When she nodded, he said, “Mark talked about you a lot.”

After the funeral Mark’s mother pulled a piece of paper out of the wallet that was on Mark when he was killed. “I knew without looking that the papers were the ones on which I had listed all the good things each of Mark’s classmates had said about him,” Mrosla wrote.

One by one, each of Mark’s classmates from that year showed their former and favorite teacher the paper she had returned to them, folded and creased from many readings. When she finally sat down and cried, it was both in appreciation for finally knowing what that little gesture had meant to so many so long ago, and in frustration and anguish over Mark’s totally unnecessary death.

And I cried reading it, for the utterly wasted life of Mark Eklund and the other 58,208 American soldiers who died there, and the 2 million others on both sides. Youcan say these “lives”weren’t wastedbecause these men and women accomplished other things with their lives, made babies,influenced siblings and friends, bought carsto keep the wheels of American industry turning. But their lives were wasted because the war was a hopeless exercise in political overreach that never had a chance to achieve its stated purpose.

And what made my tears well up and wash down my faceand my guts clenchwasrememberingthat the politicians who prolonged the war KNEW it. They knew it for years. President Johnson couldn’t withdraw troops or he’d lose the election in 1964; Nixon sabotaged peace talks in 1968 so he could beat Hubert Humphrey.

According to a story by Bob Fitrakis in Common Dreams, Henry Kissinger, then Johnson’s adviser on Vietnam peace talks, secretly alerted Nixon’s staff that a truce was imminent.

Nixon calculated that peace in Vietnam just prior to the election would put Johnson’s VP Humphrey in the White House, instead of him. Revelations from President Nixon’s papers showed that he dispatched Anna Chennault, his liaison to the South Vietnam government, to convince the South Vietnamese to back away from the peace talks, promising a better deal when he was elected president.

Chennault was successful. South Vietnamese’s corrupt leadership backed away from the peace talks and we spent another 20,000-plus American lives and 100,000 wounded in the next five years. And in 1973, Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the same settlement he helped sabotage in 1968.

And I weep.

I weep to think of the promises, shenanigans, falsehoods and power of the military industrial complex that keeps America engaged in conflicts around the world. We are the most war mongering nation on earth. In the 243 years of our history, we’ve only been at peace for 21 years. We’ve been at war for 93 percent of our history.

It’s so common we don’t even think about it, unless you’re a parent, child or spouse of a soldier deployed.

When dealing with other nations who we perceive to be acting in a way contrary to our best interests, we rattle our sabers and say “every option is on the table,” meaning that we’re not above or beyond engaging our belts of military might to spank you into submission.

Depending on which source you quote, the U.S. spends more on its military than the next 7-12 nations combined. Yes, that includes Russia and China.

In the incredibly illuminating HBO special Chernobyl, radiation was so high that no machinery could operate to clear debris.Radiation killed operating systems within moments. So, the Russians used “bio-bots” and shovels. Yes, bio-bots – humans who were not told of the danger into which they were thrusting themselves.

Despite all the pseudo patriotic jibberish slobbering from elected officials, they see our soldiers as bio-bots. Don’t like Saddam Hussein? Make up a justification to send our bio-bots to Iraq and take him out. But don’t touch Saudi Arabia, the hot house from which 9/11 was hatched, because they buy billions of dollars in weapons.

We know that no matter when we leave Afghanistan, things will return to the tribal antagonisms and violence that have been a way of life there for centuries. The “peace” our bio-bots enforce is temporary and fragile and will never be permanent. The administration knows it but hey, there’s always another election around the corner.

We treat the sale of weapons as if they were tractors, or computers or cars. Just another manufacturing product, when in fact, weapons produced in the U.S. supply antagonists in conflicts raging around the world. Our bio-bots are being shot at by guns made in the good old U.S. of A.

“Quite frankly,” says Danny Sjursen, US Army strategist and historian, in a story in The Big Think, “Selling arms is one of the last American industries that’s left. It’s one of the last things the United States does well, that we’re still No. 1 at — No. 1 at dealing arms in the world.”

Military gets big increases in the budget while education and innovation get slashed. The biggest “welfare queens” are corporations that make billions and pay no taxes. We’re lobotomized by daily news’ fascination with sexploits, celebrity and kittens. And somehow a prominent pastor in Dallas says the president would have biblical backing to launch a nuclear war.

Dear God, on what planet am I living? Hand me a handkerchief.

Caught from behind

normanjameson 2 Comments

Basketball shot

We trailed the Fall River Pirates by 14 points with just six minutes left in the fourth quarter of a high school basketball game. Everybody beats this team, and we had too, earlier in the season.

Yet, we were getting creamed. Their fans were rocking. Ours were bewildered. My team finally put together a little rally to unveil a glimmer of hope. I was a starter, but not a star. I could shoot the ball, but as my coach told me, “You may not be tall, but you’re slow.”

The ball bounced off the opponent’s rim and I had a clear path to the rebound. I took it on the run and dribbled as hard and fast as I could the length of the floor toward our basket. Somehow a defender was there, between me and the basket. I should have slowed, faked left and gone right to the rim for a layup.

But, I didn’t dare slow down to make a move, because I was terrified of being caught from behind.

Our senior point guard could catch people from behind and knock the ball out of their hands and I always thought the guy who lost the ball must have been totally humiliated. Caught from behind. How awful. How embarrassing.

Instead, I dribbled right at the defender, and elevated to the apex of my 4-inch vertical, and shot the ball in his face. As any athlete can tell you, certain moments burn themselves into memory like a hot poker writing script on your belly, and you can recall them as if they happened after breakfast this morning.

I remember that shot because when I went up, the only thing I saw was a floating rim: no backboard, no bleachers, no lights, no ceiling, no defender. Just a big rim floating independently above me. I released the ball and fell down. I didn’t even know if I’d made the shot.

That moment returned to me last weekend during a mandatory quiet period at a four-day men’s retreat. The overall theme of the retreat – a “basic” event through Ransomed Heart ministries – was recovering a man’s masculine heart.

Speakers assumed every man carries with him at some level a wound inflicted by his father, a wound we must identify and forgive before we can be whole. After another thoughtful presentation, we were sent out to find a quiet spot at our expansive, wooded conference center to contemplate several questions relating to both our earthly and heavenly fathers, and our own willingness to grow into sons.

We were to consider the questions, “Where do you feel unfathered?” and “Where and how is your Father inviting you to become a son?”

“Since we are the sons of God, we must become the sons of God,” according to George McDonald.

I don’t know how those questions prompted the spirit of God to impress upon me the 48 year-old-memory of that rebound, race and shot moment, but the ultimate revelation for me is that I’ve lived my life afraid of being caught from behind.

It’s why I worked so hard, so long, at so many tasks, in so many places. It’s why I bit my tongue and choked down insights, information or contradictions I should have offered, rather than risking the opprobrium of my bosses, or peers.

It’s why I actually told W.C. Fields, my first and best boss in denominational life, that I was too busy to accept his invitation to ride with him in his glide plane on a beautiful spring afternoon. Dumb. One of my few regrets.

I had not learned to live into my position as a son of God, bold and free with a warrior spirit.

John Eldredge, author of Wild at Heart and the amazing Beautiful Outlaw, says a man’s greatest need is validation. I was too afraid someone was going to catch me from behind and expose me as insufficient, not enough, inadequate. If so, from where would come my validation?

Of course, the point is that all the validation a man or woman needs is to recognize we are children of God. No one can catch me from behind when the Father is reaching for my hand to pull me over the finish line.

I made that shot by the way. And we went on to win in double overtime.