Time Pieces

I was so small that I could hide under the end table in the living room, next to the couch. I’d lay under the table and watch feet go by. My mom would play Marty Robbins’ Greatest Hits on our long stereo/TV unit. I was very impressed by this media device. It took up an entire wall and served as a table to put food on when guests were over. I stared at the speakers on the thing, with the green carpet soft beneath me. The green curtains flowing in the breeze. I could smell Windex in the air mixed with the smell of spaghetti sauce or some other thing going in the kitchen. It seemed that my mom was always cooking or cleaning. Washing clothes. Doing something in the yard. I’d sit under that table and watch the feet and listen to the voices. Hearing what happened in the house without me in the mix. Amazed sometimes at how long it took someone to ask where I was. I remember the light, the cast of it. There are many different kinds of light. Morning light, afternoon, evening. The light of bulbs in dark rooms. The light changes the colors. Deepens them or flattens them. Some days are days of deep color. Some days are grey. I remember.

The scene shifts and I am slightly older. I’m sitting on the inside of the house, looking out the window at the rain. I’m watching it trickle down the window. I’m impressed at how well the window keeps the rain out. It makes me feel more safe. I like the way the water looks, the way the light bounces off of it, as it rolls down the outside of the window. I like the sound of the rain on the window.

The scene shifts and I’m walking out the front door, completely encased in clothes and a coat and gloves and the snow is piled very high. The sun is bright and it is so, completely, white out there. It hurts your eyes to look at it. And I dive into that light and make tunnels in the bright snow. I want to be an Eskimo until I get too cold. I hate being too cold. It upsets my insides.

The scene shifts and I’m laying on my new bunk bed, staring at the slats above my head, holding up my brothers mattress. My brother is sleeping above me. Just before the light was turned off, I slid my glasses onto one of those slats, thinking that it’s great to have that little shelf there just for my glasses. The light is off. I stare at the light coming in from under the door. I listen to the voices outside my room. I can’t make out what they’re saying. I stare at that light until I fall into sleep.


Peace to you.

© LW Publishing 2011

Losses

 My youngest daughter still has a few words that she gets wrong, and we’ve learned not to make a big deal out of this kind of thing. I actually enjoy it. They get it figured out in the long run. But when they do, when the particulars of childhood are left behind, it makes me sad sometimes.

The current word that I love, that she gets wrong, is when something grosses her out. She says, “That’s exgusting.”

Frankly, I think it’s a better word than the original. It has a little more bite to it.

There are lots of things that you hate to see go with the kids as time passes on. The way you can hold them when they’re really small. The way they mangle certain words and make faces and laugh about certain things. The moments when they first try to be funny. Those cute little baby teeth, all lined up so perfectly straight and even, which get ejected and replaced by over sized, out of place teeth that are way too big for their current faces. And sometimes it seems to take forever for some of the gaps to fill in their smile.

You realize that kids lose so much as time goes by. Sweet things, like the ability to hide under small tables and watch the feet of the grown ups go by or fitting completely in the arms of your mom or dad, wrapped up with your head tucked under, feeling safe. Or the simple joy of playing with an empty card board box or the feeling of running on the grass, barefooted, with the belief that you are the fastest creature on the planet.

Sometimes we also lose trust in the people we look up to at way too young an age, which can be very hard to get back. And sometimes, unfortunately, we lose our innocence.

When I stop to consider all of the loss, all of the things we can lose as we leave childhood behind, frankly it’s kind of...

exgusting.


Matthew 18:2-4




Peace to you.

© LW Publishing 2011

When Knievel Was King

Oh yeah, I was totally and completely an Evel Knievel fan.

What? Like you weren’t? Right. Only if you weren’t born yet. And still, even then...

Of course, at first, my mom wasn’t too sure about this . . . fascination. After all, his name was “Evel.” It couldn’t have been more clear. But it wasn’t clear at all. Turns out his name was more of a gimmick. Hyperbole. And it wasn’t actually “Evil,” right? It was “Evel.” Vowels make all the difference. Turns out he was a nice guy. At least as far as Evel’s connection to me as a kid, he was an all American daredevil who jumped motor cycles over rows of cars, trucks or whatever else he could find, in ever increasing numbers while telling us kids to stay clear of drugs.

He set world records, jumping over things with that motor cycle. It was magical, my friend. Magical.

I didn’t know much about what he did with his private life. That was the stuff of legends. All that mattered was the joy of waiting for him to jump, then the joy of watching him approach the ramp, then the joy of seeing the jump and seeing him land. When he crashed, it really upset me. I wanted him to make it. I didn’t want him hurt. It really was all about the jump, the risk, the daring do, and the flash of a smile when he was through.

For Christmas one year, I received a treasured gift. It was an Evel Knievel action figure with stunt bike. The most popular toy in the land of America at the time. It made the toy company over 300 million dollars. Viva Americana! Oh yes. It was a little Evel on a little motorcycle that you wound up with this round lever on a little red plastic platform. Zim zim ZIM, louder and louder. You would launch Evel and he would ride and jump over a ramp, over whatever you might put in his path.

Here’s what happened.

Someone broke my Evel. And when they did, they just shrugged their shoulders and walked away, like it didn’t matter. And no one did anything about it. It was not replaced. It was not fixed. I was left holding the sad and tattered remains with no hope of justice.

Now THAT was evil.

Peace to you.

© LW Publishing 2011

Trust Issues

One year, when I was in Elementary School, there was a poster contest for a carnival in town. It was a thing the city was putting on, so they had the kids in each school make posters to promote it, and each school chose a winner for best poster. If you won, you would get free tickets to the carnival, yada yada yada. So I went home and drew up a poster. It was Donald Duck, telling the kids to go to the carnival because it was going to be so much fun. Yada yada yada. And it turned out pretty good. I won the contest.

So the posters go up on the wall of the school, in the big hallway near the office, and they did some little ceremony with me. I can’t quite remember the details, but the principal shook my hand and such. Which was all cool. But then this one lady, she was a teacher or a secretary or something, I honesty don’t remember why she was there, but she turned to me and asked me a question. She said: “The picture is really great, but why did you spell the words all wrong.”

I was a little dumbfounded because what I had done was obvious. Or, at least, it should have been. Donald Duck has his peculiar way of speaking. A kind of scratchy duckese. So I had spelled whatever it was I had him saying on the poster phonetically to reflect that. No one had questioned this, all the way to the victory circle. And that’s what I told the woman. “I just tried to spell it like it would sound if Donald Duck said it.” It was, let me say it again: obvious. But the woman seemed surprised. She said, “Oh.” Then she looked at the poster for a second and looked at me and said, “Well. I think it would have been better if you had spelled the words correctly.” She said the word “correctly” as if it was a word I would have a hard time understanding. I remember that the principal gave her a look, but he didn’t say anything. After all, she was a grown up like him. He just gave me a pat on the head and sent me back to class.

Now. I mention all this because, in a small way, it was a life changing moment. For the first time in my life I looked at an adult and thought to myself: This is a stupid person. I wasn’t thinking mean about it. I didn’t look down on her. I just realized that she didn’t get something that was simple. Something I understood, and I was just a kid.

Seriously. I thought about it all that day, and again and again over the years. Grown ups CAN be stupid. Grown ups CAN be wrong. Some grown ups MIGHT not know more than kids, let alone other grown ups.

Can you see how this could change one’s world view? Can you see how this one little incident could undermine a kids trust in the adult world?

I’d like to say that the adults of the world have regained my trust. You know, in general.

I’d really like to.


Peace to you.


© LW Publishing 2011

Not What I Expected

When I was a kid, Christmas was a problem for me. I mean, it wasn’t just Christmas, but Christmas illustrates the problem.

I was one of those kids: I would build it up so much in my mind that when the actual day arrived, there was no way it could compete with the fantasy I had created. The food was good, but not quite as good as I had anticipated. The presents were great, but they never really satisfied like I thought they would. And if there was no snow, well, there you go. There’s nothing worse than a green Christmas.

In my own heart, this has been a thing I’ve had to deal with my whole life. I have a very good imagination. I can “envision” things. I can construct complex ideals in intricate ways within my heart. You might say I have big dreams. And I am surrounded by the phantoms of life, screaming with their common sense voices, “Wake up!”

Another example: One of the things that has kept me from recording music over the years is the fact that I have tried it and the results were always much less satisfying than the version I could hear in my head. I have now reached a point where I may be able to get something done right - we are at least trying - but I kind of worry about it in a way.

And it’s not just the music. I feel this way about a lot of things. The reality falls way short of the vision.

But it’s also true that, in some ways, life is much better than I ever expected. I never expected marriage to be such a great thing, and it’s the best thing that ever happened to me, apart from the work of God in my life. And I never had a single clue about what a joy being a dad would be. But it is revolutionary to the heart, soul and mind. I never thought about working in the Church for a living, not seriously. But that’s where I am and it is an honor every day.

In the end, I realize that my expectations are not the stuff of life. They can guide some of my decisions, but reality has a taste of mystery to it that I have had to learn to embrace because I can’t figure it out and I’m honestly getting tired of trying. The world inside my head does not define the world on the outside. And, while I don’t need to abandon my dreams, I do need to be sure I have a good and meaningful connection with what is real.

I can imagine a great Christmas, or a great whatever.

But simply enjoying the one I have can be a much better thing sometimes.


Peace to you.
© LW Publishing 2010

Drive-In

Growing up, I lived a few streets away from the Jolly Roger Drive-In theater. When I was really little, we actually went to this theater a few times, but into the 1970's, and I have no idea how they got away with this, the theater started showing some hard R and maybe even X rated movies, it’s a little hard to remember, except that my parents were outraged, of course. And, so you understand, this was not in the middle of nowhere. This was in the middle of a suburban neighborhood and any kid was free to go over to the street that ran next to the theater and feast on carnal knowledge better left unknown.

But they showed other things too, especially in the late sixties and early seventies. I remember watching one of the Ray Harryhausen movies on the street that ran next to the theater, trying to figure out what the people were saying, but still amazed at the images on the screen. I believe it was one of the Sinbad movies, but it’s hard to remember.

Almost all of my movie viewing during the first 10 or 13 years of my life was done at a Drive-In theater. I saw Disney’s The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes (good old Dexter Riley, played by the incomparable Kurt Russell). I saw some Disney Animated films, and I always loved every minute of it. I would watch my siblings slowly doze off as the night wore on into the second show, wondering how they could stand to miss the movie.

I loved the popcorn and the “shrimp” roles that had who knows what really in them. I sure don’t think it was shrimp. I loved the atmosphere. I loved the way the gravel made noise under the car as you slowly made your way to just the right spot to park and see the show. I loved everything about the Drive In. The whole thing.

I think my favorite Drive In experience was when I saw Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory at the Ecorse Drive-In. This was in a suburb outside of Detroit. I would have been a very impressionable eight years old at the time. My family and I were eating at a little burger joint we went to a lot that was across the street, near the Ecorse Drive In. When we pulled out of the restaurant, instead of turning left for home, like we usually did, we turned right and went into the Drive In. I still vividly remember this moment. We all shouted and screamed, we were so happy to be going to the show. My parents laughed at us.

You need to understand that we almost never did this. We couldn’t afford it. So it was once, maybe twice a year at best. For us, this was a very big deal indeed.

And it was Willy Wonka. And it was amazing.

This movie still holds a special place in my heart, partly because it’s such a great movie, with strong songs and a performance by Gene Wilder that is completely worth the price of admission. But also because I can still remember the light of the movie shining on my parents faces in the front seat. I remember looking and thinking about the shape of their faces. I remember the smell of the popcorn and the glow that filled our car as we huddled together quietly in the dark, listening to the little speaker hanging on the window.

Entranced and at peace, we were a family. We had scars. We had been broken. Life was not perfect, but this was one of the good days. We were one.



Peace to you.




© LW Publishing 2010

Kite

It was the month of March, and the principal of Edison Elementary announced that we would be having a kite flying contest the next day at recess. This caused immediate excitement among us kids. This was a big deal.

So I went home and told my mom, but there was a problem: My dad was at work and, the thing is, my dad was almost always at work. My dad worked all the time. He was hardly at home at that point in our lives. And mom didn’t drive. So I had no way to get a kite. What’s a boy to do?

Fortunately, I have a great mom.

We found some sticks, mom and me, and we made a kite. A very special kite. It was made out of my moms nylons, pulled over the sticks into a kite shape. And it was amazing. I tried it in the front yard and the thing was like a bird. It wanted to soar. It was extremely light weight and it caught the wind like a miracle . . . and I knew, I KNEW, I was going to win that competition the next day. Who needs one of those dumb store bought kites anyway?

The next morning I got ready for school and I literally had a smile in my heart. I’m not kidding, there’s no better way to describe it. All was right with the world as I got ready and took my kite out the door, headed for the bus stop. When I got there, the other kids weren’t sure what to make of my kite, but when they started to think about it, they realized it could work. I could be the king of the playground. It actually caused a little buzz on the bus as we drove to school.

When we arrived at school, everyone got up to get off the bus. Suddenly, the kids behind me started to push. They were just messing around. They weren’t thinking. It was normal kid stuff, but they pushed so hard that I couldn’t stop it and I fell forward into the kid in front of me, crushing my kite, breaking it into several pieces. It was completely destroyed.

My teacher tried to help me put it back together but it was useless. Nothing was going to fix it. It sat next to my desk, pathetic and hopeless.

I can remember, during recess, looking up in the sky at the other kites, floating above our heads all around the playground. All the colors. The wind moving gently through a perfect blue sky. It was beautiful. Everyone was having a great time.

Well. Almost everyone.

It’s a hard thing to feel joy and happiness passing you by, like a bus going to paradise, and there’s nothing you can do to make it stop and not leave you behind. It is a bitter thing to lose opportunity and hope, then have to stand watching others taste the joy you wished for but cannot have.

Sometimes I don’t know how we survive childhood without losing our minds. Seriously.

Peace to you.



© LW Publishing 2010

The Same . . . Only Different

It's bizarre. My kids all have the same birth parents - moi and the better half - but they are totally different. Sure, they look a little bit alike, but they act like they were raised on different planets. Perhaps in different universes. And the thing is, I did not make them that way.

What I mean to say is, I haven’t raised them all that differently. Frankly I don’t have the time or the energy to treat them each as unique and special individuals. But they turn out to be unique and special individuals anyway. They seem to manage it without my controlling it, and that’s fine with me.

But you see these unaccountable differences all the time, from day one. When it’s time to eat we toss the same food in front of them all, but they don’t eat the same food. Toss down a plate with some chicken, broccoli and a slice of bread and kid C will eat the broccoli, kid A will eat the slice of bread and kid B will eat the chicken. They specialize in their own diversity with no help from myself or the better half. We simply try to keep up with the vagaries of their immaturity, which we personally find pretty challenging. We’re late bloomers, so the definition of our current lifestyle is “tired.”

One of my kids is a total people person. Like her mom. It’s all about relationships. She doesn’t like animated movies much because there aren’t any real people in them and that’s pretty much all she cares about. She likes to be with friends all the time. ALL the time. And she like to write stories about people. She’s a storyteller. And a computer whiz.

One of my other kids is a self contained unit. She loves playing with other kids, but she can go solo for hours at a time, fiddling away with toys and dolls and blocks. She likes watching musical movies, but she could watch static, it’s all the same to her, just as long as she can play with her dolls while she watches the show.

My other kid is a scientist. She mixes anything she can find (that isn’t locked down) up in bowls to see what it will do or what it will smell like. She likes to play teacher and she’s a good artist. She likes animated movies, old sci-fi movies and movies with animals in them, pretty much anything, as long as her sisters don’t touch her while she’s watching it. No touchee touchee.

I’m telling you: I have nothing to do with any of this. I did not create or plan their differences. They came out of my wife looking and behaving totally different. And yet they all have one amazing thing in common.

They are astonishingly beautiful.





Genesis 4:20-21
Peace to you.




© LW Publishing 2010

Rich

There is this story, this thing that happened, and it’s just about the only story my dad liked to tell about me as the years went by. Because of that, I’m going to tell it here. His face would light up when he was telling it. The light was the humorous leftovers of embarrassment. Something he could laugh about NOW that wasn’t so funny when it happened.

It was simple really. And somehow indicative of my life as a whole.

My family and I were at a restaurant. Unusually, it was a sit down joint. Big Boy? I dunno. I think we were on vacation. I was maybe 4? We ate. We had a nice time. Dad paid the bill and waited at the door for us to catch up. When we did catch up, as we were walking out the door, I showed my dad my amazing luck.

Me: Hey dad, look, I’m rich.
Dad: What?
Me: I’m rich.

I had a handful of money.

Dad: Where did you get all that money?
Me: Off the tables. People left it there. I’m rich!

I had cleared probably 5 or 6 tables on my way to the door. I was amazed at how all of those dumb people had forgotten to take their money when they left the restaurant. Somehow no one noticed me doing this. Which happened to me a lot.

Mom: Oh my goodness! (For her this was like swearing.)
Dad: That’s not for you!!!

Dad grabbed the money out of my clutching hands and put it on a table near the door. He furtively ran back out of the restaurant in embarrassment. My siblings looked at me with concern, thinking I would go to jail for what I’d done. But the police had bigger fish to fry. So, in lieu of incarceration, mom and dad just explained to me what a “tip” was. And ... my dad loved this story. It always made him laugh. Like clockwork.


I was robbed.




Peace to you.


© LW Publishing 2010