advent journal: nothing new to say

When we came out of the restaurant, the air was raw – even people who know what real winter is would have shared my weather report. The wind was biting and we all braced ourselves as we walked to the car. We went out on a winter’s night because Reuben, my father-in-law, turned eighty today. We wanted to take him to Maggiano’s Little Italy because when we celebrated his seventieth we went to their restaurant in Boston, so we carried on the tradition, even in a different city.

But much has changed in ten years. And in the last two weeks.

Reuben’s Alzheimer’s appears to be picking up the pace of his disappearance, so these days of celebration and remembrance carry even greater significance. As we drove across town to the restaurant, he sang any number of songs that came to mind, beginning with his greatest hit, “Nothing Could Be Finer (Than To Be In Carolina),” and moving through much of Eddie Arnold’s catalog. When we got up from the pub table where they had us wait until our dinner table was ready, he took time to straighten all the chairs before he joined us. We asked questions about memories he can still find and he talked about growing up and going overseas in the Service. And then he effusively expressed his love for Rachel, his wife, and his eyes glistened and danced before they faded, once more, back into blankness. As we drove home, Ginger wished him happy birthday to remind him of why we were out in the cold and he began singing, “Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me,” with great gusto.

My task before we left for dinner was to make a caramel cake, which has been rather elusive in the years before we moved to Durham. Around here, people actually know what that is. For those of you not from the South, let me say it will meet whatever sugar fix you have. I have tried several recipes over the years and Reuben has been gracious in eating them and enjoying them, but they were never the same as he remembered as a child. Today, thanks to whoever it is that writes Smitten Kitchen, I found a recipe that made the cake I have been looking for. We got home from our sojourn and finished the evening with a good shot of sugar infused with a lifetime of memories. He made it to eighty. We are all here together in Durham, along with the pups.

What we are living through doesn’t get fixed by following the Star.

Christmas will come, Christ will be born, and Reuben will still be disappearing. We will have to tell him it’s Christmas – more than once. And what it feels like for us to live through this year is not new ground. As many Christmases as there have been, there have been people living in pain, losing one another, wondering what difference it makes that unto us a Child is born – which is not as cynical or as hopeless as it sounds. Much of the hope is the resonance of woundedness: we are not the first. We stand in the lineage that begins with certain poor shepherds and winds its way through hospital halls and houses, down the days shared by friends and families who know life’s crushing load all too well.

And Mary brought forth a son who came to both redeem and resonate: God with us.

When I came up to write tonight, I had a song swirling inside me, which I subsequently found on Youtube and watched, cried, and sang along several times before I began typing. The song is Kathy Mattea’s “Where’ve You Been?” (written by Jon Venzer and Don Henry). It tells the story of a couple who were married sixty years before one began to disappear. The final verse says

claire soon lost her memory
forgot the names of family
she never spoke a word again
then one day they wheeled him in
he held her hand and stroked her hair
in a fragile voice she said
where've you been
I've looked for you forever and a day
where've you been
I'm just not myself when you're away

I get to this point in my posts and I think, “I’m saying the same things over and over.” I am pulled to repeat carols and Patty Griffin lyrics I have posted over and over, I come back to what it means to be community – together, and what it means that God climbed into our skin and joined the circle of woundedness and wonder. I find comfort in the repetition because it’s one of the ways I am drawn to resilience. I read T. S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi” and come to the lines where he says

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This:

And I can feel him banging those words on the desk, the repetition compelling me to pay attention and let the words make their indelible mark on my heart by tapping at it again and again.

One of the people with whom Reuben shares a birthday is Peter Buck of REM. They have also been victims of my repetition over the years because “Everybody Hurts” is a hymn, as far as I’m concerned.

when you think you've had too much
of this life well hang on
'cause everybody hurts
take comfort in your friends
everybody hurts
don't throw up your hands
oh no don't throw up your hands
if you feel like you're alone
no no no you are not alone

On this night when the dark and cold are deep inside, when the light in Reuben’s eyes flashed for a fading moment, and when all I know to do is to cling to those I love and words I know so that Christ will be born again in my time, I have nothing new to say. But what I have is enough.

Peace,
Milton

what to do

while he is disappearing
we find ourselves
under the same roof
unpacking boxes
understanding
we have changed
the trajectory
of all our lives

while he is sitting
we push ourselves
to make him safe
and comfortable
without knowing
what he sees
or what he thinks
behind the blankness

while he is here
we will eat together
take turns staying
home with him
hear the same jokes
and wonder what to do
or so it seems
on this, the second day

Peace,
Milton

we are not alone

In my new vocational incarnation, I am reading more, both books I’ve had stacked around for awhile and those I’m reading again with students. My tenth grade class is reading one of my favorite novels, Alan Paton’s Cry, The Beloved Country, which tells the story of Stephen Kumalo’s search for his lost son. Kumalo is my favorite character in literature and the story is full of faith and humanity, as evidenced by this exchange between Kumalo and Father Vincent, his friend.

My friend, your anxiety turned to fear, and your fear turned to sorrow. But sorrow is better than fear. For fear impoverishes always, while sorrow may enrich.

Kumalo looked at him, with an intensity of gaze that was strange in so humble a man, and hard to encounter.

-- I do not know that I am enriched, he said.

-- Sorrow is better than fear, said Father Vincent doggedly. Fear is a journey, a terrible journey, but sorrow is at least an arriving.

-- And where have I arrived? asked Kumalo.

-- When the storm threatens, a man is afraid for his house, said Father Vincent in that symbolic language that is like the Zulu tongue. But when a house is destroyed, there is something to do. About a storm he can do nothing, but he can rebuild a house. (140)

Perhaps the passage has haunted me because the words sorrow and house show up in the same passage. Sorrow is spreading like ivy across our family as we watch Reuben, my father-in-law, fall deeper into Alzheimer’s. The doctor said he has moved from the “severely moderate” stage to “moderately severe,” and lest that sound like medical semantics, we can expect his disappearance to deepen in days and weeks rather than months. We are losing more and more of him and I, like Kumalo, do not know that I am enriched. What we do know is it is time to bring him to us.

Ginger and I are making plans for her parents to come and live here in Durham with us by the end of the summer. Rachel is his primary caregiver and will soon not be able to do it on her own, so the arriving of our sorrow brings us to a place where it is time to gather in close and cling to each other, borrowing from a lyric I wrote long ago. The practical implications of the decision begin with our becoming real estate tycoons for a time, selling their house in Birmingham, ours here in Durham, and buying a larger place to accommodate us all. (Anyone want to buy a house?) My recent job change brings with it the unexpected blessing of significant time off this summer; it looks as though I will spend a good bit of it in some sort of moving van.

There is plenty of fear to go around: fear of Reuben’s continuing digression, fear of their moving for the first time in a half a century, fear of how all of this gets paid for, fear of whatever else might happen. The sorrow, as in the story, is not far behind. Elizabeth Bishop is right: the art of losing isn’t hard to master. Sharing a house with Reuben will be giving absence an address in a way, his familiar yet vacant shell sitting down to dinner with us each evening. As he continues to forget, we, his family, are charged with re-membering both him and ourselves, putting the pieces back together on a daily basis, rebuilding what continues to fall apart.

Even as I write about it, I don’t know what to expect, or how to expect it.

The tenth graders wrote essays today, looking at the same passage I quote here, along with a couple of others that didn’t come from the book to give them something to bounce off of. Here are two of them:

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear. – Ambrose Redmoon

There is much in the world to make us afraid. There is much more in our faith to make us unafraid. – Frederick W. Cropp

As I read them, I can hear Julie Miller singing in the background,

you have come by way of sorrow
you have come by way of tears
but you’ll reach your destiny
meant to find you all these years
meant to find you all these years

The reason I keep coming back to Stephen Kumalo is his story says what Cropp’s quote says: there is more in our faith to make us unafraid, even to make us bold. From where we are in the story right now, things only get worse for Kumalo, as far as circumstances go, and his compassion and faith only deepen. Father Vincent knows of what he speaks: sorrow makes for strong building blocks when it is shaped by courage and love. Part of the journey for Stephen is to a deeper understanding that he is not alone, either in the depth of his pain or the struggle for change.

The same is true for us.

We are not the first to watch helplessly as a loved one fade away before our eyes. We are not the first to struggle with the financial realities of what it means to be family. We are also not the first to trust that God is with us, as are a significant cloud of witnesses and fellow travelers. We are not alone.

We are not alone.

We are not alone. I might do well to let that begin most any paragraph I write because fear’s insidious intent is to erase that truth. We are not alone. I say it and remember it is as true for you as it is for me. In the midst of my real estate and reality, I am called to look up and offer a hand to you in your pain, even as I receive your offering.

We are not alone. What can separate us from the love of God? Will Alzheimer’s or distance or housing sales or debt? Will questions or sleeplessness or sorrow or fear? No. Nothing will separate us from a Love that will not let us go. We are not alone.

We are not alone.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: a sense of humor

Some time during the evening on Saturday I first noticed the little wisp that floated into my vision. It looks like a pen and ink drawing of a cloud, or a thin line of black smoke, except it has a certain bounce to it, based on my blinking, that makes it do a little dance and float down and then back up to the top of the frame. I learned today at the eye doctor that my smoky little dancer is called an eye floater, and that it’s probably here to stay. What looks like it is hanging out in front of me is actually something going on inside my eyeball, in the vitreous humor, and is part of growing older – at least for me. The humor in my sight is a bit twisted, it seems.

When we were in Texas for my mother’s surgery a couple of months ago, a friend came by to see her. He is a cellular biologist, which is actually a bit of a misnomer because he is way inside the cell dealing with particles smaller than I even know how to imagine. I asked what he was studying now and he told us they had just gotten a new microscope that allowed them to see exponentially deeper into the cell and its subparticles, and he began to tell us how these submicroscopic parts of us open up related to our emotions. When we feel good, they are open to receive nutrients; when we are angry or sad, they close. Then he said something even more interesting: “They open up the most when we laugh.”

Raymo tells of an Mediterranean creation myth that says God brought everything into being with seven laughs: Hha Hha Hha Hha Hha Hha Hha. (46) As he goes on to speak with his continuing sense of wonder about the universe, he says,

God’s Hha Hha Hha was no snicker, but a roaring belly laugh. (50)

I love the idea of all creation bursting forth in a fit of divine laugher. I picture everything from the giggles that made monkeys, the chortles that produced platypuses, and the guffaws that gave us hippos. By the time God got to humans, I picture the kind of laughter that makes your sides hurt and your nose run. I love the idea, and it’s hard to hear on a day like today. My in-laws are visiting this week, which means we are up close and personal with my father-in-law’s continuing descent into Alzheimer’s. This wonderful, gentle man who turned seventy-nine yesterday and has always carried a sparkle in his eye that gave us a glimpse of God’s creative laughter looks empty now. His eyes are vacant; he is in the room and he is not here. His very existence is being insidiously erased while we watch and our hearts are broken. The comfort we find is in watching our Schnauzers gather around him with a love that finds him when we cannot; he sits and pets them and they love him back, for which we are grateful, even as we are exhausted by the prospect of what is yet to come. As we prepare for Christ to be born again, we are also trying to prepare for the grief that is yet to come. It’s hard to hold wonder and weary together.

Yet what are the options?

Madeleine L’Engle tells of being asked at a workshop for high school students, “Do you really and truly believe in God with no doubts at all?” She answered, “I really and truly believe in God with all kinds of doubts.” (63) She continued to talk to the students about the three choices we had about how we live our lives. We can live as though the whole thing is a cosmic accident: a bad joke. We can live as though Someone started the whole thing but chose to remain aloof. Then she articulated her choice:

Then there’s a third way: to live as though you believe that the power behind the universe is a power of love, a personal power of love, a love so great that all of us really do matter to him. He loves us so much that every single one of our lives has meaning; he really does know about the fall of every sparrow, and the hairs of our head are really counted. That’s the only way I can live. (64)

My mind moves to melody in times like these, to those words put to music that find a way to carry the strains of laughter that endure across the years like starlight from distant galaxies just now bringing light to our darkness. Richard Thompson wrote

this old house is falling down around my ears
I’m drowning in a fountain of my tears
when all my will is gone you hold me sway
I need you at the dimming of the day

And this from Kris Kristofferson:

there’s a song in my soul for the sun going down
when it dies at the end of the day
with a sadness descending as soft as the sound
of the light that was slipping away

the heavens above me seem empty and gray
as dreams that won’t ever come true
then the star spangled glory of love fills the sky
and my heart with the wonder of you

As Christmas draws closer, we will begin to speak more of shepherds and stars, weary and wonder, if you will, walking hand in hand to the manger: the tired tenders of someone else’s sheep lost in wonder at the angel band.

and ye beneath life’s crushing load
whose forms are bending low
who toil along the winding way
with painful steps and slow
look now for glad and golden hours
come quickly on the wing
o rest beside the weary road
and hear the angels sing

Christmas will come this year without bringing answers of what the days hold for our family and they will also come with reminders that God has never stopped laughing or loving. God didn’t inflict Reuben with Alzheimer’s to teach us a lesson or to prove a point. God didn’t set things in motion and then sit back to see how we deal with it. God is with us. In the midst of our pain, Love has taken up residence to show us the Laughter that brought the universe into being runs deep beyond our sorrows, deep into our beings, feeding our cells and our souls.

for the wonders that surround us
for the truth that still confounds us
most of all that love has found us
thanks be to God

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: healing in his wings

Over most of my adult life in faith, I’ve been fortunate to go to churches small enough to still take one of the Sundays in Advent for the Christmas Pageant, though the word pageant always brings a smile to my face. I can’t help but wonder which of the magi will win the gown competition and if any of the shepherds will do something other than shear a sheep for their talent. Vocabulary aside, something about the parade of bath-robed shepherds helps Jesus to be born anew year after year.

The first year Ginger was in Winchester, she had a number of the young people taking part. One of the girls, who had not grown up in church, asked to be King Herod. As the rehearsal continued and came to her scene, she broke character in the middle of her speech and said, “Wait a minute! Herod’s a bad guy.”

My favorite moment in Marshfield each year came when the angels appeared to the shepherds. The pulpit at the church was a wall of wood across the front, creating a ministerial fortress of solitude behind it. The angels, always some of our youngest and most enthusiastic participants, would jump up from behind the wall holding stars above their heads, their faces beaming, as we all sang, “Joy to the World.”

The pageant here in Durham is an Advent one, which, I’ve learned, means everyone shows up except Jesus. We had shepherds and angels and the star and the wise men who all gathered around Joseph and Mary, but she was still pregnant when we headed out for coffee hour. The days have not yet been accomplished; we still have to wait for Jesus.

I thought about our pageant several times yesterday and today as I have been with my father-in-law who has Alzheimer’s. I thought about it because I feel like one of those little towel-headed kids, all dressed up for the big event and all I’m doing is waiting. Ginger and my mother-in-law spent a couple of days together and I was with Reuben, who is to the core of his being one of the most gentle and hopeful people I know. In other years, we would have spent the drive talking about what he saw on the news, which he watched voraciously, or he would have asked me questions about my job and about Durham. Instead, he wondered if it was going to snow (because he thinks we still live in Boston) and asked about every thirty minutes what time Ginger and Rachel were going to come home. Today, I looked in his face as he sat across from me at lunch and his eyes looked vacant, as though he were fading like a face in an old photograph, except it was happening right in front of me.

As we drove yesterday, I was also waiting for word on my brother’s surgery to remove a tumor from his spinal cord. About ten o’clock last night I got news that was about as good as it could get: they were able to repair the disc, remove the tumor, and all indications were the tumor was benign (we’ll have to wait a couple of days for the official pathology report). More than one person said it was “an answer to prayer. God is good.”

It was and God is. I prayed the tumor would not be cancer, and that it would be as uncomplicated at surgery on one’s spinal cord can be. And I also prayed that Reuben wouldn’t get Alzheimer’s and that he wouldn’t disappear as quickly as he is. My brother is going to get to go on with life relatively unscathed – at least from this and my father-in-law is going to continue to lose his life incrementally. Holding both of them in my heart, I’m hesitant to say God showed up somehow and healed Miller because then I’m left with Reuben not being so fortunate.

When we finally do put a baby in the manger, we will sing

Christ, the highest heaven adored
Christ the everlasting Lord
Light and life to all he brings
Risen with healing in his wings

The last phrase always gets me: with healing in his wings. Both the beauty and mystery stir my heart. I love those words and I’m not sure what they mean; I only know they touch me at a place of deep yearning and hope. Run a Google search for the phrase and you’ll find it means a lot of different things to different people. When I look at the person the baby grew to be, the healing wings he sprouted have as much or more to do with the grace and forgiveness he showed people like Zacchaeus or the adulterous woman as they do with those who were physically healed.

God is good and would still be if Miller had gotten bad news about the tumor or had been left paralyzed by the surgery. God is still good even though Reuben is disappearing before our eyes. It was after Horatio Spafford saw all of his daughters die in a shipwreck that he wrote

When peace like a river attendeth my way
and sorrow like sea billows roll;
Whatever my lot thou has taught me to say
It is well, it is well with my soul

George Matheson was rejected by his fiancée when he told her he was going blind because she didn’t want to spend her life taking care of him. And he wrote

O Love that will not let me go,
I rest my weary soul in thee;
I give thee back the life I owe,
That in thine ocean depths its flow
May richer, fuller be.

O light that followest all my way,
I yield my flickering torch to thee;
My heart restores its borrowed ray,
That in thy sunshine’s blaze its day
May brighter, fairer be.

O Joy that seekest me through pain,
I cannot close my heart to thee;
I trace the rainbow through the rain,
And feel the promise is not vain,
That morn shall tearless be.

O Cross that liftest up my head,
I dare not ask to fly from thee;
I lay in dust life’s glory dead,
And from the ground there blossoms red
Life that shall endless be

What these hymn writers know is healing is something more profound than the absence of disease or the release of pain. I’m not talking metaphorically here. My mother-in-law needs healing for her heart learning to live with the husband she is losing. My brother’s healing will go beyond the surgery to include learning how to live in a way other than his gazillion hour-a-week schedule that was killing him long before they found the tumor. Whatever our circumstances, we all need healing.

And together, we wait.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: what it means to be family

Tonight after work I'm driving to Asheville to meet Ginger, who is driving from Birmingham with her parents and our other two Schnauzers who have lived in Birmingham since we moved south. Originally, they were only going to stay a month, but they were so helpful to my father-in-law as he lives with Alzheimer's that we have left them there. I will bring Reuben, my father-in-law, and Lola and Gracie back home with me while Ginger gives her mother a few days away as our Christmas present. (I wrote a poem about him here.)

When I get home tomorrow afternoon, I will spend the evening here, with Reuben, waiting for word about my brother's surgery to remove a tumor from his spinal cord. The surgery will not be over until about nine tomorrow night. I can't get to Dallas because I need to be here. Somehow, between Dallas and Asheville and Durham, we are all together, thank God.

This is what it means to be family.

Peace,
Milton

reuben

My father-in-law is in the middle stages of Alzheimer's disease. He and my mother-in-law left yesterday after an extended stay with us.

Reuben

Leah knew she was unloved
until she held the boy,
her firstborn,
and she named him Reuben:
“See, a son,” it means;
a love carrier --
“Because God has seen
my misery.”

The Reuben I know is a twin,
next to last in family line
a love carrier, too --
the hardest working man,
his blue eyes smiling
like a sunrise.
His labor, however, is not his legacy,
but the brilliant light I saw
in her eyes

and so I asked to be family.
He has loved me
like a son,
even when he didn’t understand
why I was cooking
or my earrings.
His faith stands as tall
as his shoulders;
love as deep.

He’s fading like an old photograph
left in the sun too long
I can still see him
the spark in his eyes that once
shone indelible now a dim
blip from a beacon
in an ocean of loneliness;
we haven’t enough
line to throw . . .

Whatever happy endings are,
they are not this.
This is wrong.
This is wrong. This is wrong.
Being right about that
changes nothing.
When he sits and stares into air,
looking for everything,
my heart hurts.

Reuben has lived a life of love.
We, the Loved, are a living
altar of humanity,
called and collected to remember
all he has forgotten,
all he has given.
I wish that felt like enough
but it isn’t enough.
It just isn’t.

Peace,
Milton

yard sailing

Since I grew up in Africa, one of the American phenomena I have struggled to understand is the Yard Sale. In Nairobi or Lusaka, the thought of selling stuff we were no longer using made no sense; we gave it away to any number of folks around us who needed it and more. We weren’t making some sort of moral choice, really. No one thought of having a yard sale. It wasn’t a part of the cultural lexicon. All these years later, I showed my Americaness (Americanity?) and dragged all kinds of stuff out into the driveway to try and convince someone else they needed it and could have it for a bargain price.

The occasion was nothing more than Ginger and I attempting to dispossess any number of items we have managed to accumulate over the years, from various Sponge Bob paraphernalia to a couple of antiques to bookshelves to kitchen utensils. Since Ginger is away, it fell to my mother-in-law and I to price our treasures and get them ready to sell. Ginger called a couple of times during the day and asked how things were going. When I told her what had sold she asked how I had priced it. In most every case she said, “You’re selling things cheap.” I realized about thirty minutes after we opened shop and the yard sailors began to dock in the driveway that my inclination was still just to give it away. I was trying to get rid of things more than I was trying to sell them.

Needless to say, the end of the day saw us a little less encumbered and not much richer.

When we first moved to Charlestown in 1990, we were newly married with very few possessions and very little money. Rosemary, the woman who helped us find our first apartment, said if you need furniture or things for your house, just drive around on Sunday night and you can find lots of stuff on the curb.

Monday was trash day.

She was right. Over the years we saw some amazing stuff on the sidewalks in our neighborhood. Curbside Stuff Swapping is a regional sport in New England. Here in Marshfield, I often see different pieces of furniture at the end of a driveway with a “Free” sign attached, only to drive by an hour or two later and find them gone. If the Yard Sailors are the ones who pay, perhaps these might be the Yard Pirates. Aaarrgh!

One of the interesting things I have learned – OK, relearned – about myself getting ready for today is, though I’m not necessarily an acquisitional person, I have a hard time letting go of things I have. It’s not so much stuff as status as it is collecting as comfort. Since home is not a geographical location for me, perhaps the trinkets and toys provide a sense of place: I belong here because my stuff’s here. There’s also something about depression that drives people to hang on to things. For all the stuff I did manage to get in the driveway, I didn’t part with any books or CDs, though both herds need to be culled. Certainly, there are a good number of both I want to keep, but, after all these years without hearing it, can I not dump my Hothouse Flowers CD (from 1988) into my computer and let that record go?

Then where do I stop: the Hooters, the Housemartins, the Rainmakers, Del Amitri, Mister Mister? And those are just the late eighties bands. (Yes, I’ve invested a lot in CDs over the years.) When I feel most fragile, it feels like the thread that unravels the whole blanket. I need the things as tangible evidence of the memory that life doesn’t always feel dark. My in-laws are here for a month or so and my father-in-law’s Alzheimer’s is slowly worsening. The present tense is no longer reliable for him. Tonight we sat around the table for thirty minutes after we finished eating telling stories from our past about different jobs we’ve had, then we talked about pets, and then we talked about crazy relatives, which is where any conversation with the Brashers always seems to land because they’ve got a collection of kin worthy of Flannery O’Connor.

His past remains trustworthy; it still recognizes him. He can go sailing on the bounding main of memory without fear of getting lost or capsizing in an unexpected storm. Tonight our sails filled with the spirit of our conversation and took him to the places he knows and is known. His eyes sparkled the way only his eyes sparkle and he laughed his big earthquake of a laugh as he traveled across time. When we got back to the present, he sat back down in the recliner and went to sleep.

Somewhere on a ski slope in the spring of ’86, I remember sliding off the chair lift and heading down the slope with some of the kids in my youth group just as Richard Page’s voice began to sing:

Kyrie eleison down the road that I must travel
Kyrie eleison through the darkness of the night

The whole eighties production with walls of guitars and monster drum sounds along with layers of background vocals, coupled with the spectacular spring skiing in Colorado gave me wings as I came down the mountain. And in the dark valleys that have followed, I’ve held on to those words even without the melody: Lord, have mercy.

Some of the folks who navigated our driveway today were paying about as much attention as tourists on a cruise ship. Others were sailing a specific course. A young woman stopped with her father; they were looking for stuff to furnish her college apartment. They bought a book case I stained myself, a small cabinet Ginger fell in love with one summer afternoon, a couple of lamps, and a vase or two that once held flowers I gave my wife. They paid me about forty bucks and sailed off in their pickup to make new stories with our stuff. I wish I’d had presence of mind to ask her if she needed any music.

Peace,
Milton

P. S. -- There's a new recipe.

the calculus of being human

I’ve been surprised with a week to myself because The Owner didn’t put me on the schedule at The Inn – and he didn’t give me any explanation. I called Sunday night to see if I was working Monday (which I have done for the last eight months) and was told they had not yet done the schedule and would call me Monday morning. No one did. I called back Tuesday evening and was told I wasn’t working this week and The Owner was not available to talk about it. I was going to drive up there today to see if this is his bizarre way of telling me I no longer have a job, but I got started spreading the mulch I ordered in the flower beds and opted for a day of feeling productive rather than one feeling frustrated and angry. I can do that tomorrow.

About three this afternoon I came in from the yard, showered, dressed, and drove over to Panera to meet Ginger and our friend Don for coffee. Our conversation lasted the rest of the afternoon and went all around the world. Part of it centered on my father-in-law’s Alzheimer’s, which is steadily worsening. As his memory becomes less accessible he doesn’t seem like the same person and yet he is, still, to his core one of the kindest, gentlest, most hopeful people I have ever known. Don talked about a swami who spoke at an interfaith gathering who talked about the essence of the soul staying the same (at least the way Don remembered it). If you cut off your arm, the swami said, your soul would still have the same essence.

As the three of us turned that over, we began to think a little differently. The relationship between heart, soul, body, and mind is complicated and multifaceted. All four are essential to our humanity and are, I suppose, part of our “essence.” When one is affected, the whole person is affected. When my father had open heart surgery a decade ago even he could see he was fundamentally changed by the experience. He was still recognizable and he was different. One of our friends was in a car accident a number of years ago that left her a paraplegic. Before the accident, most folks saw her as a carefree spirit. In the years since the accident, she has completed law school and is in private practice. She was a nurse before. Her essence has proven to be one of resolve, hope, and tenacity. Coming to terms with my depression over the past five or six years has changed me as I’ve learned to live with a disease that plagues both my mind and my body chemistry.

The picture painted in Hebrew scripture is of heart, soul, mind, and body creating a unity: they are inextricably connected. Rather than one being the essence of a person, the different aspects of our humanity – the raw materials – live in concert, in equation. There is a calculus to being human: when the variables in the equation change, we change. If we learn to think differently, more than just our minds are different. If we face some sort of physical challenge or change, our hearts, souls, and minds aren’t left unaffected. The impact of the change doesn't stop at our skins. Ginger’s parents have been married almost fifty-one years. The changes in my father-in-law also have an impact on my mother-in-law, on their daughter, on me. None of us can stay the same.

I have been changed by my time at The Inn. I’ve learned a great deal about my craft and I’m a better chef. I’ve even learned a lot about the business, coming to a better understanding of dealing with food cost ratios and other fun stuff. Because I’ve had to deal with The Owner, I’ve had to learn how to speak truth to power without getting defensive or belligerent. I’ve also had to learn how to detach from the soap opera aspect and do my job. I’ve also had to learn to live with uncertainty when it comes to my job security, regardless of my performance. Though I can’t claim to have gone all Barbara Ehrenreich on the world, I have been changed by my first hand experience in the hourly wage, no benefits, no job security world that is The Inn, if not most of the restaurant business. As my equation of heart, soul, body, and mind has changed -- so have I.

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength,” says Deuteronomy, which I’ve always taken to mean, “Love God with all that you are.” One single aspect doesn’t hold our essence; it’s the whole intricate, complex, dynamic, amazing, and fragile package. It hurts to see my father-in-law slipping away. I hurt for my mother-in-law who is physically and emotionally present as her Loved One disappears.

The calculus of being human is hard work.

Peace,
Milton