shameless commerce division

On October 1, Keeping the Feast: Metaphors for the Meal will be in bookstores.

I can’t believe it. Life, for me right now, is a flurry of activity. Perhaps the biggest learning curve is understanding the fine art of self-promotion. I am proud of the book and I want to get it to as many people as possible and writing to anyone to say, “Won’t you please spend your time and energy talking about me?” is not an erasy thing to.

That said, I need your help and energy in these next few days.

I have one week left in my Kickstarter campaign to raise money to fund a book tour. We have reached our basic goal, which means the project will be funded, and I am hopeful we can raise another three or four thousand dollars to help the tour continue through the spring. Please share the link and the story with as many people as you can.

The first leg of the tour will fall somewhere between November 6-19 between Durham and Boston. Right now, we have possible events in the DC area, Philadelphia, New York City, and in and around Boston. After the first of the year, I will aim west moving through the South and on to Texas. I would  love to hear any suggestions you might have about bookstores, churches, or events. I will have a press kit available early next week that will be downloadable.

Between now and the first of October, please go into your local bookstore -- particularly the independent ones -- and ask if they will be stocking the book. Whether on not you order the book from Amazon, you can go to the book page and write a review. My publisher tells me this is a significant action. If you know someone in your town who reviews books for newspapers, magazines, or websites please let me know and I will send a copy to them.

Thanks for your patience and support. When I get to your town, let’s have dinner.

Peace,
Milton

don't write alone

In four months, this blog will be seven years old.

One of the reasons I started keeping the blog was I wanted to be a writer. I had been writing for a long time -- I even had a draft of a novel that was already several years old, but none of it had anywhere to go. I had read Anne LaMott’s statement that a writer is one who writes not one who is published and, yet, I wanted to get my words out there to someone.

For me, writing alone makes about as much sense as eating alone.

As one who has never felt very adept when it comes to the skills of an entrepreneur, the blog platform was perfect. It wasn’t going to make me any money, but it wasn’t going to cost any either and I could write, put it out there, and see who found it. The words I have posted down all these days have given me a sense of purpose and accomplishment, have built relationships I never imagined possible, and have helped me claim my place as a writer. They also opened the doors for me to get a book published. Keeping the Feast: Metaphors for the Meal will be in finer bookstores everywhere and online in about a month.

In working on the book, one of the things I have had to learn is how to improve my entrepreneurial skills. I’m still learning. And I’m getting better. I’m proud of what I have written and I want to see it find a larger audience, yet I’m also learning that the task of being more self-promotional kind of calls me to live up to my own words, or at least the  quote by the Buddha that gave a title to this blog:

There is no joy in eating alone.

I’m the guy who makes a point of saying and re-saying that both life and faith are team sports. I don’t want to eat alone. I am also learning that I write best when I don’t write alone: when I remember I am surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses who encourage me, teach me, read me, and love me. I trust that the reasons stories matter are they are what remind us of how much we are alike and how inextricably linked we are to one another. We are at our best when we share with and pull for each other.

Saying all those words is easier than incarnating them.

But I’ll try. I need more than what I can do to give this book a good life and to have the chance to make the connections and tell the stories and share the meals I think were meant to come out of this project. My publisher is working hard, but book tours aren’t in their budget. Nor are they mine. I need help to see my dream become a reality.

It seems you can’t really dream alone either.

This week I launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise money for a book tour, which will give me some funds to buy gas and meals and hotel rooms and books so I can take to the highways and see who wants to eat and talk together. I am hoping to go to bookstores, churches, and dining rooms wherever I can we can share stories and meals. This link gives all the details.

The campaign is off to an amazing start. My request is that you share the link. Tell people about the book and the campaign and ask them to tell others.

And then invite me over for dinner.

Peace,
Milton

book review: god is not one

When it comes to faith, I started early.

I was five years old when I walked down the aisle at Westbury Baptist Church in Houston, Texas and gave my heart to Jesus. I was the oldest son and namesake of a Southern Baptist preacher, the son of two parents who sang me to sleep with hymns I still sing, and what I understood was Jesus loved me and the best thing I could do was love him back. So, as I have often joked, I turned from my life of sin and sex and drugs and gave my life to God.

I was about fourteen or fifteen when I began to come to terms with my faith in a more significant way, but even then it was pretty much me and Jesus. I didn’t go on a quest to search out the religious options available to me; I opened my heart to the God I knew. I have stayed a Christian and have bet my life on the reality of the Incarnation and the Resurrection, and I have to understand that one of the significant reasons I am a Christian is I was born into a family that taught me what questions to ask and where to look for both answers and more questions.

I realize I am a couple of paragraphs into my book review without mentioning Stephen Prothero’s new work, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter, but the book took me back to my childhood and how I came to faith because it challenged me to read through his descriptions of the “great religions” of the world with a different ear. (I have to jump to his conclusion for the quote.)

[T]here is a secular way to talk about religion. This . . . way does not assume that religion in general, or any religion in particular, is either true or false, because to make such an assumption is to be talking about religion religiously. It aims instead simply to observe and report, as objectively as possible, on this thing human beings do, for good or for ill (or both). (336)

I know. He said we should have a secular conversation about religion. He’s right. As I read through the chapters about the religions other than my own (Islam, Confucianism, Hinduism, Yoruba, Buddhism, Judaism, and Daoism), I began to see where our sound byte world has left me with a postage stamp view of a panoramic landscape, no matter which religion was being explained. As I read the chapter on Christianity, I realized a religion cannot be fully described, even in a very well written chapter. And he writes well because he writes with a keen secular eye, full of compassion and interest without choosing sides or seeking an agenda beyond the invitation for conversation.

What I learned, again, is the way to be a good conversationalist is to listen first.

He offers one phrase tag lines for each of the religions discusses and a formula for how he breaks them down (problem, solution, technique, exemplar) for the purpose of comparison, but the point is not to end up with a simplistic understanding; he’s making a case for understanding the religions of the world are not merely rephrasings of the same truth, as our emphasis on tolerance or inclusion often leads us to think. We will not learn how to talk to each other by finding ways to feel alike, or watering down what matters so our colors blend.

I hope for a world in which human beings can get along with their religious rivals. I am convinced, however, that we need to pursue this goal through new means. Rather than beginning with the sort of Godthink that lumps all religions together in one trash can or treasure chest, we must start with a clear-eyed understanding of the fundamental differences in both belief and practice between Islam and Christianity, Confucianism and Hinduism.

Some people are sure that the only foundation on which inter-religious civility can be constructed is the dogma that all religions are one. I am not one of them. Every day across the world, human beings coexist peacefully and even joyfully with family members who are very different from themselves. (335)

I read those words today, after returning from a family gathering for my youngest nephew’s graduation from Wheaton College. Trust me: he’s on to something.



Peace,
Milton

P. S. -- This review is part of a virtual book tour.

lenten journal: re-reading our lives

Today was the first day of the week that I have not had to go from school to the Duke restaurant. Instead, I came home to cook dinner. OK, first I took a basketball nap, meaning I dozed off watching first round games of the NCAA Men’s Tournament, and then I went grocery shopping, and then I cooked dinner. Around our table tonight were Cherry, Diane, and Julie, each one of whom we have known since she was sixteen, though they each marked that age in different years. Julie, our former foster daughter, is visiting from Boston, so I made Chicken Broccoli Ziti, her favorite, and the five of us sat around the table for three or four hours telling stories that moved through time as though it were a big old house with rooms of memories that could be explored at will.

I received my weekly email today from the Utne Reader, one of the things in my life that allows me to get caught off guard, to find a link to an article about “The Fine Art of Re-reading Books” written by Richard O’Mara. In the middle of it he writes of a recalled memory brought to light by his re-reading:

Why, I asked myself, had I not retrieved these memories before? Why had I let them lie there, darkened by the decades that had fallen over them like soot? My mind, or the office within it responsible for organizing and filing memories, apparently decided to lock away those recollections for good. It took the late Herr Remarque to spring them. That these memories had nothing to do with the book itself suggests that anything buried deep in the brain, when dredged up, can have clinging to it things that have nothing to do with the object recovered.

The article caught my eye because I am re-reading A Passage to India because one of my friends at the Durham restaurant wanted to read it. The last time I read it, I was teaching British Literature at Winchester High School, and I am finding the faces and questions of my students between the lines as I work my way down the page. When I was asked to teach the class, I asked my department head if I could do something other than start at Beowulf and march down through the years. When she said yes, I gravitated to colonial and post-colonial literature because it was what I knew experientially from my days in Africa and it was the literature that moved me. I knew from experience that offering literature that didn’t move me was to offer my students a corpse of a class: we would find no life there. That first year I went from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (still one of my favorites) to Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart to Forster to Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country, moving from colonialism to the days of independence, from separation to the first attempts at friendship across the divides caused by imperialism and conquest.

Ginger, Cherry, Diane, and Julie were all a part of my life in those days, though none of them was in the class or reading the books. As O’Mara said, I find the memories of the days we spent together stuck to the pages as I read again of Mrs. Moore and Adela Quested:

They had made such a romantic voyage across the Mediterranean and through the sands of Egypt to the harbour of Bombay, to find only a gridiron of bungalows at the end of it. But she did not take the disappointment as seriously as Miss Quested, for the reason that she was forty years older, and had learnt that Life never gives us what we want at the moment that we consider appropriate. Adventures do occur, but not punctually. (23)

The five of us around the table tonight, eating and drinking and talking, took me back to any number of Thursday nights at our home in Charlestown. For several years we had Thursday Night Dinners for whoever wanted to come. If you came once, you had a place card; once you had the card, you always had an invitation. You just had to call by noon on Wednesday to let us know you were coming. The number varied, but the experience was the same: long after we had finished eating we sat around the table talking and laughing and making memories, just as we did tonight. Yet, we didn’t sit down tonight to recreate something that happened years ago. We re-read our lives together and fell into the stream of memory and meaning that remains as present as it does past.

An author puts words to page because he or she can do no other, I suppose, trusting that answering the call to art is a worthwhile response, even if that response feels somewhat feeble and futile. How could the story of an old woman in India be a response to the British colonial enterprise? I don’t know how to answer that question with anything other than I am reading the book again, eighty-five years later.

Wait. I have one more answer. The story is as significant as our supper tonight. On this seventh anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq War, in the middle of the struggle for healthcare reform, in the silence and struggle that followed earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, in the middle of the change and grief and sorrow and hope that mark our own lives, we sat down for dinner together. We sat down with all of those who once gathered around the table in Charlestown, with the memories of our shared existence, and with the understanding that whenever the adventure presents itself we will be ready to remind one another to take the risk.

I left the table filled and ready for adventure, whenever it shows up.

Peace,
Milton

fast tuesday

It was somewhere in the middle of the day that I remembered today was Fat Tuesday, Mardi Gras, Shrove Tuesday, meaning tomorrow Lent begins. It feels more like Fast Tuesday: it got here quickly. I know part of the surprise for me is my work schedule keeps me from doing anything during the week but work. I leave the house each morning, Monday through Thursday, about ten-thirty and get home around nine-thirty at night, which pretty much kills the day. The other part is we have not found any continuing traditions around Fat Tuesday here in Durham that have helped us make the day more of a marker. All of that said, I think it’s kind of funny that it snuck up on me because I’ve been thinking about Lent for a couple of weeks now because I’ve been thinking about my Lenten Journal, which has been my practice for several years now: I write everyday, aiming for a thousand words a day, through Easter Sunday. I’ve known tomorrow was Ash Wednesday and it still caught me by surprise, thanks to what fills up my life and makes it harder to hear, or, should I say, to listen.

I have learned over the years that I must also be reading for my writing to spiritual practice during these days. Thanks to a referral by my friend Randy, I started This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession by Daniel Levitin, which promises to be quite thought provoking. Thanks to Ginger’s sermon a couple of weeks ago, I am rereading Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life. Thanks to Ginger’s Valentine’s gift to me, I have a couple of issues of Harper’s Magazine that always have something to surprise me and are always so eloquently written. Thanks to a study I am going to be leading at church for four Saturdays during Lent, I’ve been reading the Book of Job, and will continue doing so.

The season, it seems, is beginning with thanks, which is a good place to start.

Now, I’m going to take advantage of a chance to get a good night’s sleep.

Peace,
Milton

lost another one

It’s been close to ten years since I taught high school English, and yet this week I’ve had two occasions to go back to the Reading List and two occasions to mention Robert Burns. Three nights ago, I wrote about Of Mice and Men, thanks to Burns’ Night. Now, just three nights later, I am stopping to say thanks and farewell to J. D. Salinger, the author of The Catcher in the Rye, a tenth grade literature standard with its own reference to Burns in the discussion of the title line.

Holden: "You know that song, 'If a body catch a body comin' through the rye'?..."
Phoebe: "It's 'If a body meet a body coming through the rye'!... It's a poem. By Robert Burns."

Phoebe is Holden’s little sister, and an awesome person at that. Their discussion leads to one of Holden’s most honest moments, when he talks about what kind of seed the misunderstood line had planted in his heart:

Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be.

I have loved the image since the first time I read it, and I think I love it more because its built on a misunderstanding. Here’s this kid in Manhattan who had no idea what a field of rye wheat looked like, much less why anybody would be coming through it, but he gets captured by the verb caught, the verb that wasn’t there, and all of a sudden what compels him most is saving the children from running to the end of their childhood. All he could imagine was catching them before they fell.

It seems fitting, then, that Ray Kinsella kidnapped Salinger in Shoeless Joe, the novel that was the basis for Field of Dreams (Salinger wouldn’t let himself be pictured in the movie, so the author became Terrance Mann). Catcher was the book that shaped Ray into the kind of man who would build it so they would come. He was the catcher in the corn, if you will.

The first class with whom I read the book was a tenth grade class in Winchester. Every class is a bit of a dice roll, when it comes to the group personality that developed, and this one began as a lovely collection of misfits, in a way, and became one of my favorite collections of students of any year I taught. There were Pat and Phil, two friends. Pat was extremely depressed and Phil was a big Labrador of a kid who loved life and cared for his friend. Pat got out of high school because Phil cared for and about him. Brigid was as free as free spirits come (still is, I’m sure) and dove into the book with as much enthusiasm as she had when she led the class in celebrating Rex Manning Day. And celebrate we did. I think all three of them, in one way or another, recognized parts of themselves in Holden. Me, too.

I don’t know what made Salinger become such a recluse, but it does create rather amazing irony that an almost hermit-like author could give birth to such a people magnet of a character. Salinger didn’t really want to meet or catch anyone coming through the rye, or even the door; to Holden, it was all that mattered.

If Howard Zinn worked to speak for the common people and tell their stories, then Salinger stumbled into speaking for American adolescence. I say stumbled, because I imagine that’s how he came upon Holden: he met a young man coming through the rye and decided to tell his story. Burns was the bridge between them.

Tonight, I am grateful for a man willing to listen long enough to hear a mistake underneath the lines of a poem, and to let that mistake give birth to a character that will now out live him for years and years to come, and continue to catch us before we fall over the cliff.

These are hard goodbyes to say to Zinn and Salinger. I never met either one, yet our chance meetings on the page caught me by the heart.

Thank you.

Peace,
Milton

of mice and me

Tonight is Burns’ Night.

Two hundred and fifty one years ago, on this night, the Scottish poet Robert Burns was born. Though I have a wee bit o’ Scottish blood in me, I’ve never been an avid celebrator of the anniversary, which Garrison Keillor describes as an evening when, “They read Burns' poems, sing his songs, eat haggis, and drink lots of whiskey.” Alas, the only whiskey in my house is Bushmills.

Burns stays with me for a different reason. As one who taught ninth grade English for a decade, I’ve read John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men more times than I can count, inviting students into the sad beauty of George and Lennie’s life together. The title of the book is drawn directly from Burns:

The best laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley

which is often paraphrased in English as, “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.”

You may not remember much about the book. The fact is George and Lennie never had really big plans. Lennie was mentally disabled and looked at life with brutal simplicity. If George had had plans before Lennie, he had already laid them aside to take care of his friend. When they did talk about schemes, they had to do with saving money to get a place together, a dream that hangs in front of them until the very last scene of the novella. George explains it this way, when Lennie coaxes him to tell how they are different from the other guys working alongside them.

Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world. They got no family. They don't belong no place. . . . With us it ain't like that. We got a future. We got somebody to talk to that gives a damn about us. We don't have to sit in no bar room blowin' in our jack jus' because we got no place else to go. If them other guys gets in jail they can rot for all anybody gives a damn. But not us.

What ultimately shapes us are not the plans we make, but the people we choose. I thought again today about the anniversary party I went to the other night. Though some attention was given to the various positions Rev. Cheek had held during his forty year ministry at his church, the stories that mattered were told by family and friends about family and friends, the laughter was as deep and resonant as the love that filled the room. Burns was right: the best laid plans won’t work out, mostly. What gives life its meaning are not our successes, for the most part, but those with whom we chose to share the failures, as well as the fun times. We call them our life stories, after all, not our life maps.

Here’s something Steinbeck wrote in his journal about a year after he published Of Mice and Men:

In every bit of honest writing in the world there is a base theme. Try to understand men; if you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love. There are shorter means, many of them. There is writing promoting social change, writing punishing injustice, writing in celebration of heroism, but always that base theme. Try to understand each other.

If I think of my life in terms of plans, and plans gang aft agley, it makes about as much sense as a street map of downtown Boston. I’ve gone from being a pastor to a chaplain to a youth minister to a high school English teacher to a chef, with a couple of detours here and there. I’ve not gotten rich, to say the least. If life is some sort of distinguishable path, I’m hard pressed to show mine as a success. The good news is I don’t think of life that way. Life, to use a borrowed phrase, is a journey without maps. We have to pay attention to the people around us in order to find our way.

Every chapter of my life has been filled with those who have offered love and encouragement far more profound than I have deserved, as well as forgiveness. As we close in on twenty years of marriage (this April!), I feel more than ever what I have said before: whatever any kind of final judgment may look like, I believe simply saying, “I was with her,” will be enough to validate my existence, for she is the love of my life.

I have had plans along the way; I still have some. To this point, none of them has worked out as I either hoped or expected. Still, I spent the evening cooking with Abel and Arnaldo and came home to Ginger and the Schnauzers, so I understand exactly what George was saying: I got a future because somebody gives a damn about me.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: connected to change

I woke, on this first day of Advent, knowing that the day was full, moving from church to work to writing (since my practice is to write everyday during the season), and hoping I could point my mind and heart in a direction that would give me something to say when I got home from work around eleven. Just before I left the house, I checked the Writer’s Almanac for my daily dose of poetry only to find that this particular First Sunday of Advent is the same day on which both Madeleine L’Engle and C. S. Lewis were born. And I said – out loud, “At least I know what I’m going to write about tonight.”

I met both writers when I was a child. Not in person, you understand. Mrs. Reedy read A Wrinkle in Time to us as reward for our hard work as fourth graders at the Lusaka International School; I don’t remember how The Lion, The Witch, & The Wardrobe ended up in my hands, but it set me off on adventures of my own as I climbed through the back of the wardrobe with Lucy and the others. I could fill up two or three shelves with books by the two of them, and write for several weeks about what each of the different books had meant to me. Therefore, I feel right in saying I met them when I was a child and they became my friends, though neither ever knew me.

Madeleine taught me about Advent, as well as the rest of the liturgical year. I have read and re-read The Irrational Season, which is a series of essays beginning with Advent (“The Night is Far Spent”), following the calendar through Epiphany and Lent and so on, and ending with Advent once more (“The Day is at Hand.”) I can’t get to my copy tonight because we have a friend visiting who is sleeping in the room where that book lives, and so I picked up one that stays here in the dining room, And It Was Good: Reflections on Beginnings, and paged through, reading what I had underlined many years ago. What I found reminded me that one of the strains of faith Madeleine has sung with resonance to my heart is that of connectedness.

Quanta, the tiny subatomic particles being studied in quantum mechanics, cannot exist alone; there cannot be a quantum, for quanta exist only in relationship to each other. And they can never be studied objectively, because even to observe them is to change them. And, like the stars, they appear to be able to communicate with each other without sound or speech . . . Surely what is true of quanta is true of the creation; it is true of quarks, it is true of human beings. We do not exist in isolation. We are part of a vast web of relationships and interrelationships which sing themselves in the ancient harmonies. Nor can we be studied objectively, because to look at us is to change us. And for us to look at anything is to change not only what we are looking at, but ourselves, too. (20,21)

My margin note reads, “Life is a group sport.”

This First Sunday also marks two years since Ginger came to what is now our church here in Durham. We moved because we felt God calling us here, which also meant leaving the Boston area, where we had spent all of our married life together, save the first four months. Two years means we have been here long enough to begin to find new friendships, which take time to grow, and long enough to be reminded moving does not mean forgetting. “I thank my God when I remember you,” Paul wrote, “because you have filled my life with joy.” Those words were burned into my heart because of a song the Youth Choir in Fort Worth sang to and for us as we were leaving them for Boston. Perhaps it is the lyric that best fits the ancient harmonies of which L’Engle speaks. Our daily lives are no more stable than the quarks and quanta, change being the defining word for all of us; what endures is love: love that calls our name from the past, love that greets us in the present, love that calls us into whatever the future might be.

Whatever it is, we will go together.

Seventeen or eighteen First Sundays ago, I went with Ginger to the church in Winchester for the first time. She had been the Youth Minister there for several months, but we didn’t have a car and I was in graduate school and teaching full time, so the prospect of losing a couple of hours to the commuter rail wasn’t an option for me. I slipped down Bunker Hill in Charlestown for early mass at the Episcopal church (again, thanks to Madeleine for the introduction) and then back home to study. Ginger came home one day and asked if I would be the prophet for Advent and walk in each Sunday in costume and read the lectionary passage. (Did I mention I had shoulder length hair and a beard at the time?) I think it was the second or third Sunday that Ginger came up with the idea that I should sing the chorus of “Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord” from Godspell as I came up the aisle, and then again as I exited. She has served three churches since then and I have sung my way to prophecy in each one.

The song has left an indelible mark on my heart, because it reminds me of the faces and stories that have gone with my ritual; these too, are words that fit the ancient harmonies. Today, as I walked out, the congregation sang with me. However we prepare, we will do it together, which means it will not be the same as every other First Sunday. As Madeleine says,

We do not love each other without changing each other. (21)

In what was then the second book in the Narnia series, Prince Caspian, Lewis wrote a scene that added another theme to my life. The children return to Narnia, much older now, and Lucy, the youngest, keeps looking for Aslan, the Lion. When she finally finds him – well, let me let Lewis tell it.

“Aslan, Aslan. Dear Aslan,” sobbed Lucy. “At last.”

The great beast rolled over on his side so that Lucy fell, half sitting and half lying between his front paws. He bent forward and just touched her nose with his tongue. His warm breath came all round her. She gazed up into the large wise face.

“Welcome, child,” he said.

“Aslan,” said Lucy, “you’re bigger.”

“That is because you are older, little one,” answered he.

“Not because you are?”

“I am not. But every year you grow, you will find me bigger.” (141)

God changes, too, along with the quarks and the quanta and the quixotic band of pilgrims that sang with me this morning, or in Marshfield, or in Winchester, or in any place where people gathered to watch and wait to get lost in wonder, love, and praise, singing in tune with the ancient harmonies that call us to connectedness and to change.

Peace,
Milton

shameless commerce

Last year I published a book through Lulu.com called Seven Summers at the Beach that included poetry and recipes from this blog as a way of saying goodbye and thank you for our years in Massachusetts. Lulu was hard to find and the shipping charges were outlandish. This week, however, Lulu informed me that my book was selected to be sold in the Amazon Marketplace and you can now find it here for a more reasonable shipping price.

Should you ever desire a copy.

Peace,
Milton

time pieces

After walking through Lent to Easter, a journey in which time stretches out like a path leading us somewhere, I came across an interesting list yesterday of things that all happened on April 14, making time feel more like a totem or a sculpture where the different blocks are stacked one on top of the other. The list is courtesy of The Writer’s Almanac:

• On this day in 1865, President Abraham Lincoln was shot at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C.
• It's the birthday of the woman who taught the blind and deaf child Helen Keller how to communicate: Anne Sullivan, born in Agawam, Massachusetts (1866).
• Shortly before midnight on this date in 1912, the RMS Titanic struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic.
• It was on this day in 1939 that John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath was published.

I’ve been turning the list over in my mind for these couple of days, intrigued by the date they share in common, these two tragedies and two births, if you will. As one who shares a birthday with Gustav Flaubert, Edvard Munch, Frank Sinatra, Dionne Warwick, Jennifer Connelly, and Yuvraj Singh, I realize grouping by a date on the calendar is rather arbitrary and I’ve stayed intrigued by what the assassination, the sinking, the birth, and the novel might have to say together.

For someone of my generation (and perhaps others, too), all four things are larger than life. So much has been written and said about Lincoln, particularly our politicians trying to claim some sort of connection, that the man we think of now when we hear his name is probably not the same man shot in the theater that night. The tragedy of the Titanic has been romanticized and retold into an epic metaphor of disaster. Anne Sullivan is the one who was able to help Helen Keller, well, become Helen Keller. And Steinbeck’s book, which is sure to see a resurgence thanks to our current economic times, gave us Tom Joad, one of the great characters of American literature (and, by the way, you can watch the whole movie here for free), and his immortal words:

I'll be all around in the dark. I'll be ever'-where - wherever you can look. Wherever there's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad - I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry an' they know supper's ready. An' when the people are eatin' the stuff they raise, and livin' in the houses they build - I'll be there, too.

Here in the story of a day we see those who dreamed big, worked hard, failed enormously, died unnecessarily, and simply survived. None of the principals involved in the events I mentioned knew how the day would go. Lincoln was going to a play. Those on the Titanic were on the maiden voyage of the best ship anyone could imagine. As Anne’s parents held her, they had no idea who she would grow up to be. Steinbeck warned his publisher that the book wouldn’t be popular.

And I wonder how the rest of the days might have been different had Lincoln seen the end of the play, the Titanic finished its voyage, had Anne Sullivan not been born blind, or Steinbeck given in to his skepticism about his novel. Would Lincoln have handled Reconstruction differently? What metaphor would we use for futility instead of “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic”? What might have happened to Helen Keller? What else would be on high school reading lists?

But they did happen. All of them. On April 14th. And they helped to make the world what it is. And on April 15th, during the last half hour of a quieter than usual night at the restaurant, Ginger and Cherry came to dinner and Abel and I came out from the kitchen and sat with them, along with a couple of the servers, and we talked and laughed and learned a little more about each other. Our little gathering will never make The Writer’s Almanac list, but it will take its place, adding to the metaphor of time as a mosaic, each small glistening moment essential to the bigger picture.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: it's the little things

I finished Kathleen Flinn’s The Sharper the Knife, The Less You Cry today and found myself moved by her closing words:

As in cooking, life requires that you taste, taste, taste as you go along – you can’t wait until the dish of life is done. In my career, I always looked ahead to the place I wanted to go, the next rung on the ladder. It reminds me of “The Station” by Robert Hastings, a parable read at our wedding. The message is that while on a journey, we are sure the answer lies at the destination. But in reality, there is no station, no “place to arrive at once and for all. The joy of life is the trip, and the station is a dream that constantly outdistances us.”

How many tears did I cry because I didn’t get what I wanted? “The sharper the knife,” as Chef Savard had said, “the less you cry.” For me, it also means to cut those things that get in the way of your passion and of living your life the way it’s meant to be lived.

Of course, I also learned to make a mean reduction sauce and to bone an entire chicken without removing the skin, which is nice, too.

With a little searching, I found a copy of “The Station,” for which I’m grateful. He follows the words Flinn quoted with these:

"Relish the moment" is a good motto, especially when coupled with Psalm 118:24, "This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it."

So stop pacing the aisles and counting the miles. Instead, swim more rivers, climb more mountains, kiss more babies, count more stars. Laugh more and cry less. Go barefoot oftener. Eat more ice cream. Ride more merry-go-rounds. Watch more sunsets. Life must be lived as we go along. The Station will come soon enough.

With those sentiments swirling in my soul, I made my (mostly) daily journey to The Writer’s Almanac to find today’s offering, “Meditation on Ruin” by Jay Hopler:

It's not the lost lover that brings us to ruin, or the barroom brawl,
or the con game gone bad, or the beating
Taken in the alleyway. But the lost car keys,
The broken shoelace,
The overcharge at the gas pump
Which we broach without comment — these are the things that
eat away at life, these constant vibrations
In the web of the unremarkable.

The death of a father — the death of the mother —
The sudden loss shocks the living flesh alive! But the broken
pair of glasses,
The tear in the trousers,
These begin an ache behind the eyes.
And it's this ache to which we will ourselves
Oblivious. We are oblivious. Then, one morning—there's a
crack in the water glass —we wake to find ourselves undone.

One of the things Flinn mentions more than once in her book that I have come to find both true and necessary in my work in the kitchen is a good cook cleans up between tasks. Part of the reason is basic hygiene: if you’re cutting raw meat, you need to change the cutting board and clean your knife before you start dicing vegetables. Part of the reason is practical: you run out of counter space in a hurry if you don’t take time to put away and wipe down. When I fail to keep up with my cleaning, I learn (again) what Hopler is saying: the little details will kill you.

And they will save you.

Before I could get too philosophical, my mind first took a country turn after reading the poem and dug up Robert Earl Keen’s song, “The Little Things,” from my mental juke box. Keen can be as cynical as he is country, and this song is no exception.

It's the way you stroke my hair while I am sleeping
It's the way you tell me things I don't know
It's the way you remember I came home late for dinner
Eleven months and fourteen days ago

It's the little things the little bitty things
Like the way that you remind me I've been growing soft
It's the little things the itty bitty things
It's the little things that piss me off

I’m not sure why the song has stuck with me over the years, because I don’t like it. I mean it’s a catchy little country number, but the sentiment is crass in that Henny-Youngman-take-my-wife-please attempt at humor sort of way that, well, isn’t funny. It is, however, instructive because Keen articulates the very despair in the details that Hopler warns against. A marriage falls apart just like the rest of the world: it’s the little things.

Or it’s the little things that build a life together, whatever the relationship. We find our joy in the journey when we travel together, whatever the destination. Ginger and I had lunch today with a friend from Massachusetts. We were talking about a mutual acquaintance and Ginger made the comment that it was hard for her when the woman demeaned her husband in public. I realized when she said it that she had never done that to me in our twenty years together.

It’s the little things.

Ginger and I met this afternoon with Keith from Bountiful Backyards, a company here in Durham that describes themselves as “edible landscapers,” working to get folks to do more with their yards than plant grass and flowers, but to think more in terms of food productions, soil nutrition, and water conservation. Last fall, we had to regrade our front yard, so there is nothing but dirt and stepping stones (underneath our giant pin oak); we needed help seeing what could be. Keith had tons of ideas and we talked about several possibilities. One of the most helpful things he said was to think in terms of it being a work in progress; it didn’t all have to happen right now. Gardening is a journey of its own. We will make some plans, dig in the dirt, plant some stuff, on our journey to make this house more and more our home – with a yard we can eat!

Years ago, my friend Billy and I wrote a song called “Traveling Mercies,” part of which said:

take bread for the journey
and strength for the fight
comfort to sleep through the night
wisdom to choose at the fork in the road
and a heart that knows the way home

go in peace live in grace
trust in the arms that will hold you
go in peace live in grace
trust God’s love

Yes. It’s the little things.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: the joy book club

Ginger did two things for me today to begin my birthday celebration a day early: she arranged for us to go bowling with friends (isn’t 52 the Rented Shoe Birthday?) and she gave me the afternoon to read. Between cooking and blogging, I haven’t been reading much, so an afternoon with a book was amazing, as was my choice of novel to accompany me.

Earlier this year, my friend Joy Jordan-Lake published Blue Hole Back Home. I’ve written about Joy’s writing before here and here. She is a thoughtful and expressive writer in both style and content. Her book, Why Jesus Makes Me Nervous: Ten Alaming Words of Faith is one I continue to reread because I continue to find new things. Blue Hole is my first experience reading Joy’s fiction. She’s good at novels, too.

The story is narrated by Shelby Lenoir Maynard, or Turtle, who tells the story of her fifteenth year in Pisgah Ridge, North Carolina when a Sri Lankan family moved to the all-white town and became part of her pack of friends. The story pulls in faith, race, hope, courage, cowardice, love, friendship, adolescence, swimming, dogs, Southern culture, and the Boston Red Sox.

Here’s a better description:

When a fifteen-year-old Sri Lankan girl moves to the all-white Pisgah Ridge, Shelby Lenoir Maynard invites her to join Shelby and her brother and her brother's friends for a swim at the Blue Hole-less in a gesture of bold social reform than because it is simply too hot to think straight. Exotic, mysterious and fiercely independent, the new girl throws the entire town into turmoil. When two different members of The Pack, as Shelby and her brother and her brother's friends call themselves, begin exhibiting interest in the new girl and a third hints he may be conspiring with the local Klan, the Pack itself threatens to splinter. Throughout the summer, as the town's hostilities steadily increase along with the heat, the Blue Hole remains the teenagers' only place of real peace-and even that has its limits. Eventually, the tensions outside the Blue Hole erupt in betrayals, cross-burnings and a deadly explosion. Ultimately, though, Blue Hole Back Home is a story not only of the devastating effects of racial hatred and cowardice, but more centrally, a celebration of courage, confrontation, mercy and healing.

The story is powerful and the language is beautiful.

Here’s what I hope you will do. Go here and order the book, or go to your local bookseller and ask them to get it for you if it’s not on the shelf. In a world where Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber are getting big book deals, someone who has poured heart and soul into her prose deserves to be noticed and rewarded for her brilliant effort.

Join the Joy Book Club. Please.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: fifty-two christmases

It’s been a long time since I felt ready.

Perhaps it’s because this past year has been one of settling in, rather than moving on. Maybe it’s because I’m an hour and a half away from December and I don’t feel depressed (which is new for this time of year – at least in recent memory). Then again, it could be because I’ve spent the better part of the year working hard at my job and not reading as much as I’m accustomed to do, or writing as much as I wanted, and I’m ready for a centering season to remind me who I am and who I want to become. Perhaps all of the above are true. What I know is I am stepping into the season with energy and expectation, rather than the desperation of Advents past, which is enough to release a river of gratitude.

I feel awake. I feel alive. I feel thankful. And I’m determined to read.

My practice in Advent has been to pick a couple of books as traveling companions, and I usually chose ones of a theological nature. This year, I invited one and one invited me to take a bit of a different road to Bethlehem. My friends Lori and Terry gave me God: stories, which is a collection of short stories that have spiritual themes edited by C. Michael Curtis. From my bookshelf, I chose The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art by Joyce Carol Oates, a book I don’t remember acquiring. I want to grow as a person, a Christian, a writer, and a reader during these days, and I’m hopeful my traveling companions will help me find my way.

I was the prophet today during worship, as I am each Sunday of Advent, walking down the aisle singing, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord,” and then delivering the prophetic passage for the day, which was Isaiah 64:1-9. Isaiah’s prayer/sermon was first spoken during the Babylonian exile during a time when the people of God had chosen to be held captive by their fear rather than being compelled by their calling. It’s not one of the passages that rings with resonance because of a phrase made famous; it’s not even that easy to understand in some places.

The opening story in Curtis’ book is “Exodus” by James Baldwin. It centers around Florence, the daughter of a freed slave who, after hearing her mother’s story of walking off the plantation one day, dreams of the day of her exit, and finally chooses it, even though she must leave her mother on her death bed.

Oates’ tells first of “District School #7, Niagara County, New York,” the one room schoolhouse where she began her education and learned to read. Though her recollections gave me pause to reflect on my first school days, she described a world I have never known.

I was not moved, particularly, by any of the stories I read today. I didn’t come away with a quote or anecdote to share or remember. All three feel like people who get on the bus at your stop and ride with you awhile, rather than ture traveling companions. And so I’ve taken time to notice them a bit, in the same way I used to study people riding on the bus in hopes of remembering them for characters in my stories at a later time. I see a story of a prophet calling out to people who feel trapped and have allowed themselves to resign to it; a woman who feels trapped and chooses to break out at great cost; and a woman who looks back on a trap she escaped without knowing she was ever in it. When I look at the stories that way, I’m familiar with all three, for I have stories to tell of living in all three conditions.

As a high school student I learned about the arc of a story, which had not changed by the time I became a high school English teacher: introduction, rising action, climax, falling action, denoument – all of it driven by conflict (person vs. person, person vs. nature or technology, person vs. his or herself). Tonight I start my Advent story with much conflict to speak of. Since I’ve been using a bus metaphor, so I’ll stick with it, for now. My story opens on a season of open road, riding on a bus with two books I don’t know well on a journey that leads to an ending I already know.

This ought to be riveting, don’t you think?

I used to play golf. My last summer of college was the best of my golfing career. The reason was we played everyday. A group of us took early classes and then headed for the links every afternoon. Since it was summer in Waco, we had no trouble getting a tee time; it was one hundred and fifty degrees. Playing the same course everyday gave me a chance to grow as a golfer because I learned from both my mistakes and my successes. That summer – and only that summer – I was an under 90 golfer.

After fifty-two Christmases, there are still things for me to learn from walking the same road to Bethlehem, singing the same songs, hearing the same words, and welcoming Jesus into our hearts and our world, again. Well, that’s not exactly right. I will do well to remember the destination may be the same, but the journey will not. I am starting from a different place, both physically and personally, and I have some different companions. And I feel ready, which, as I said, is a new starting place for me.

We’ll see where the story goes.

Peace.
Milton

lenten journal: seven summers at the beach

We’ve just spent the last nine hours traveling miles and miles of interstate and classic rock and got back to Durham to find a small package on our doorstep I have been waiting for. Back in September I began putting together a book of poetry and recipes from this blog as a way to say goodbye to New England. The book is called Seven Summers at the Beach, which is how long we lived in Marshfield. I took advantage of a very kind offer from Jeff to do the design work and layout. (Big props to Jeff.) The book is now done, thanks to Lulu.com, and available at my “storefront” there. Though there is still much for me to learn on the marketing and publicizing end, I’m anxious to let you know the book is there. Lulu is a self-publishing site that prints the books as they are ordered. I got mine in about a week. It costs $15 for the print book and $8 for the e-book download. (I realize this isn’t necessarily the stuff Lenten meditations are made of, but this has been a long time coming).


If you’re interested, you can click the Lulu button to the left of this post, click on the book title above, or go to my storefront and follow the instructions.

Peace,
Milton