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

making mistakes

Over the past few weeks I have been editing a book manuscript for someone I don’t know. When I grade student essays, I know whose paper is in front of me, which colors how I both read and comment, but this time I am not being asked to teach, only edit. The hardest part, in many ways, is not being able to picture who put down the words that are now looking back at me. Microsoft Word’s “track changes” mode has made the unfortunate choice to use red as the color of the altered text, which I fear carries all the baggage of every corrected essay the writer ever received along the way. I don’t know how she will read the red, my trail of wounds to her words, even as I struggle to find a way to infuse each stroke with some kind of encouragement.

In between editing sessions, I am still reading John Berger, who continues to amaze me. He is writing about being at the National Gallery in London on Good Friday and deciding to draw the figure of Christ in the Crucifixion by Antonello de Messina. He finds the painting, and then realizes he will have to work stealthily around the guards who wander from room to room. Here’s the paragraph that caught me:

I start drawing. Correcting error after error. Some trivial. Some not. The crucial question is the scale of the cross on the page. If this is not right, the surrounding space will exert no pressure, and there’ll be no resistance. I’m drawing with ink and wetting my index finger with spit. Bad beginning. I turn the page and restart. I won’t make the same mistake again. I’ll make others, of course. I draw, correct, draw. (52)

As I worked my way through the manuscript, I wished for a better way to explain myself, because I made lots of marks and changes. The commas are scattered across the page like confetti after a parade and I have to help sweep them up. In some places, the writer was so caught up in the emotion of the passage that they lost track of the tense and I had to call them into consistency. Then there were the places where the author moved from A to G or H without showing the reader how to follow, leaving rather philosophical potholes in the middle of the page big enough for said reader to get lost or give up. I recognized the errors because I have made them myself.

I worked in short shifts, seeking to stay fresh enough to be encouraging. I learned from my days of grading stacks of student essays that I had to pause every few pages and remind myself I needed to wield my pen with some measure of gentleness, rather than using the opportunity to demonstrate my expertise. I remembered that some days better than others. The word from which our word error comes meant wandering, as though the idea of an error or mistake carried with it the idea of having wandered off course. As I have been reading, I have carried that image, seeing the author out in the middle of a field, off the path they were shooting for, chasing an idea that had gotten away and dropping commas like bread crumbs, it seems. My choice was between correcting in a voice that sounded like a frightened parent (“Where have you been? You had us worried. Don’t ever wander off like that again.”) or a fellow traveler (“I’ve missed that turn myself; let me show you the way back to the path.”) As I edited, I became aware I was making mistakes of my own. When I got ready to send the manuscript, I spent an evening composing the letter to go with it, making sure the author understood the story didn’t belong to me and that my task was to offer suggestions and create a conversation.

As much as I wanted to throw pillows to soften the blows, I also know there is great value in failure. I took my job seriously and I mean what I wrote as I deleted and added to what had been given to me. Part of the way we find our way back from our wanderings is through those who have the courage to say, “You’ve made a mistake and have wandered off the path.” For the manuscript to be all that it can be, much needs to change. The writer needs to wrestle with what they wanted to say and what ended up on the page for the book to be ready for others to read. I expect to go through it again once the author responds, looking for more ways to improve it. To paraphrase Berger: write, correct, write.

One day, I hope, I will get to meet the author and hear the story behind how the book came to be and, perhaps, how they felt seeing my fingerprints all over their pages. Till then, I hope they can see beyond the red marks and hear my encouragement: the manuscript is worth revising.

Write, correct, write. How else will we learn?

Peace,
Milton

it begins like this . . . .

A couple of weeks ago, I arrived early for my shift at the computer store, so I got a coffee at the Barnes and Noble next door and sat down at a table to read a little of my John Berger book. The chapter I opened to started:

It begins like this . . . .

Just as I was settling in, a woman moved between the crowded tables to the only vacant one available. She was middle aged, as best I could tell, Asian, a little tired, and quite determined to make sure she got a table. She was carrying a large satchel and a stack of documents on top of it. She pulled out one of the chairs and placed her things in it. Then she opened the bag and retrieved some paper towels and began to wipe off the table. She cleaned it like it was her job, wiping away any remnant of those who had left only moments before she had arrived.

At first, I assumed she cleaned out of fear, determined to not be exposed to any lingering germs, but there was not an iota of anxiety in her movements. The more I watched her (trying not to appear as though I were studying what she was doing), I began to see that she moved with an artist’s flair. Rather than wiping anything away, she was creating cleanliness, if you will, laying it down like paint or polish, a varnish of intention preparing the table for the moment for which it had been created when she would sit with her tea and her notebooks in the light of the last of the afternoon sun.

It begins like this . . . .

I kept rereading Berger’s opening sentence as I looked back and forth between the words on the page and the woman at the next table who had finished her preparation and had seated herself to begin that for which she had prepared a place. I took out my Moleskin notebook and began writing down details so I could repaint the picture at a later time. She opened the satchel and pulled out a stack of about ten greeting cards, all still in their plastic sheathes. She carefully opened one of the envelopes, pulled out the card, and laid it on the table. As she turned to sip her tea, I read the card:

“Thank you for being special.”

That’s all of the story I was able to get. My time was up and my shift ready to begin. I wished for the freedom to lean across the chair between us and tell her it had been fascinating to watch her lay down her layer of intention, but I would have been the only one talking across tables and she had never turned in my direction during any of her work. She was also not the only story in the room; she was the only one I noticed. I marked my place in my book with the receipt from my coffee and made my way out of the store, wondering about the beginning I had seen unfold.

When I was a kid, my brother and I used to like to make up stories about people we saw in airports and such. OK, I liked to make up the stories; Miller was kind enough to listen, since we were the only audience each other had during our family travels. As you might imagine, my image of who the strangers were leaned toward the fantastic and intriguing. Everyone was a spy or some sort of exotic vagabond. It never crossed my mind to say, “The man in the overcoat is lonely and wishing his daughter would call to see how he is doing,” or “The girl in the corner has kept a journal everyday for seven years – and it all rhymes.”

I keep thinking about the woman and the table and the card and wondering how the story played out. It begins like this: on a winter afternoon, she prepared her heart and a table to make time and room to write the filling for a card whose outside read, “Thank you for being special.” Perhaps it was an expression of unflinching gratitude. Maybe, they were words that needed to be said to span a breach or heal a wound, but they weren’t words that came easily, so she had wiped the table and laid down a layer of love and a blanket of forgiveness in which she could wrap her words and write what she felt rather than what she ought to say. Then again, maybe she was a spy and the whole thing was a brilliant cover.

It begins like this . . . .

Berger was talking about being asked to restore a painting a friend of his had found in a junk shop that was worth something, though quite deteriorated. She had asked him to see if he could repair it and he worked to find a way to connect to the moment in the past when the painter had laid brush to canvas. After a couple of days of anguish, he wrote

I paint freely, inspired by the longing of what is there on the canvas. I discover how in the corner of a small room the light, falling on two peeling walls and half a dozen throw-down flowers, is a kind of promise from some distant, unimaginable future.

The job is done. There it is, a painting by Kleber, 1922.

A moment has, for a moment, been saved. This moment occurred before I was born. Is it possible to send promises backwards?

As I look back to my recent past and the incidental encounter with the woman at the next table – an encounter known only to me – I wonder why the image of her preparing a place hangs so fresh in my memory, why it matters I tell it tonight, or why I am moved by Berger’s idea of sending promises back in time as I think of her and her table and her greeting card.

I have better questions than answers.

Peace,
Milton

six years on . . .

On Tuesday, December 27, 2005, I began writing this blog with these words:

I've been staring at the "posting" screen for several days now trying to figure out how to join the world of food bloggers. Since I'm writing from a Mac and I don't know much about HTML, I'm still not sure about adding links and so forth. I wanted the blog to look less plain, but I decided to work with what I have rather than wait for everything to be perfect.

Tonight, Tuesday, December 27, 2011, I am still working with what I have rather than waiting for everything to be perfect. That train never comes. What has arrived in my life over these six years is a feast of friends and connections and experiences, along with the practice of writing which has helped me, challenged me, inspired me, and humbled me.

I am grateful for the journey.

Peace,
Milton

still here

these are the days of miracle and wonder
this is the long distance call . . .
-- Paul Simon, “The Boy in the Bubble”

I know I’ve been away . . .
I have seen many things
walking in our neighborhood
in conversations at church
and around tables at the pub
I even have stories to tell –
but tonight I write to say
the path from wonder to words
has been a bit cluttered
by stories I’ve collected and
kept that they might ripen
like the blackberries
in the backyard
so close to their season

Peace,
Milton

catch me, please

At several different junctures in my life, Parker J. Palmer has befriended me and mentored me through his writings (in particular, The Courage to Teach and Let Your Life Speak). I have never met him, nor have I ever heard him speak, yet I have found a healing resonance in his written words that have helped me in my vocation, my depression, and my faith. On Sunday, therefore, when I passed the table in the hall at church where there is always a stack of Christian Centuries and saw he had written the cover story, “Taking Pen in Hand,” I picked it up and brought it home.

I will take it back, I promise.

I was pulled, in particular, by two paragraphs, which means here come a couple of long quotes.

All of our propositions and practices are earthen vessels. All of them are made by human beings of common clay to hold whatever we think we’ve found in our soul-deep quest for the sacred or in its quest for us. If our containers prove too crimped and cramped to hold our treasure well, if they domesticate the sacred and keep us from having a live encounter with it – or if they prove to be so twisted and deformed that they defile rather than honor the treasure they were intended to hold – then our containers must be smashed and discarded so we can create a larger and more life-giving vessel in which to hold the treasure.

Doing that is called iconoclasm. It is a good thing to do when it needs to be done. Failing to do that is called idolatry, which is always a bad thing. So even in the church, we need to commit conceptual suicide again and again – if we are serious about the vastness of the treasure in comparison to our flawed and finite words.

Though I might suggest we would do well to read that passage at any or all of our churches’ annual meetings, the real power of the words hits me on a more personal level. Yes, one of my favorite quotes from the Chronicles of Narnia is that Aslan is not a tame lion. Yes, I have preached more than one sermon and had more than one conversation about the wild, untamed God to whom we belong. Still, I read the article and thought to myself, “It’s been a long time since I let God catch me by surprise.”

This blog is a couple of months away from being five years old. I feel good about my writing here and wish I had managed to turn a couple of my ideas into books. I’m back to teaching for a living and cooking for family and friends in a way that I feel I was built to do. My marriage is my favorite thing about my life. I keep playing my guitar and wishing someone would stop me on the street and ask me to be in their band. I have felt free of my depression for a year and a half and I am grateful. I am learning new things about what it means to be family in these days. Life is good.

And I wonder.

I wonder about the man I have talked to a couple of times at the grocery store who works with refugees from Nepal who are trying to make a new life here. I am showing the kids at school a movie about the continuing, though invisible, crisis in Darfur, Sudan, which I have kept up with for years and written about occasionally. I still think about opening a café like One World Everybody Eats where people pay what they can – or maybe a food truck, just because I like food trucks.

I’m not restless or unhappy, and I wonder – because people like Palmer speak to my heart:

“Why write,” said Jose Oretega y Gasset, “if this too easy activity of pushing a pen across paper is not given a certain bullfighting risk and we do not approach dangerous agile and two-horned topics?”

And why believe in God if the God we believe in is so small as to be contained and controlled within our finite words and forms? The aim of our writing about faith, and of our living in faith, is to let God be God: original, wild and free, a creative impulse that drives our living and our writing but can never be contained within the limits of who we are and what we think and say and do.

However the circumstances play out, I want to be caught by surprise. I love the imagery in that phrase: caught – like a child is caught when he or she falls, or a person is caught by a camera in that serendipitous moment where the image reveals a lifetime of feeling – by surprise – as though God was waiting to turn on the lights and yell when I come into the dark house at night.

I’m praying for the grace to open every door with a sense of anticipation. After all, Aslan is not a tame lion.

Peace,
Milton

getting ready

One of the classes I’m teaching this quarter is a Creative Writing elective. Hardly a day goes by that one of the students declares he or she is unable to write anything because of “writer’s block.” My response is generally one of amusement, since they appear to have plenty of ideas to talk about. And I also look at my writing for the last couple of months and find I have not put many words on the page. It is May 22nd and I have made four entries for the entire month.

I’m an not without ideas and have ample time, I suppose. I am also reading more these days and giving a good deal of energy to all that is involved with moving Ginger’s parents here to Durham to live with us. Yet the words don’t feel ripe, somehow.

Somewhere along the way, in a book on writing, I remember the author quashing the idea of writer’s block, or at least the inclination to feel guilty because the words weren’t making it to the page. A writer, the author continued, is either writing or getting ready to write; both take time and energy. I continue to turn those words over in my mind. These are days of preparation for, attending to, and listening.

I’m getting ready.

Peace,
Milton

apprenticeship

Language was opening me up in ways I couldn’t explain and I assumed it was part of the apprenticeship of a poet. (Jimmy Santiago Baca, A Place to Stand)

apprentice
c.1300, from O.Fr. aprentiz "someone learning" (13c.), from aprendre (Mod.Fr. apprendre ) "to learn, teach," contracted from L. apprehendere (see apprehend). Aphetic form prentice was long more usual in English. The verb is first attested 1630s. (www.dictionary.com)

apprenticeship 

I learned how to be a cook by watching
and listening to those whose hands
were already calloused before
I ever picked up a kitchen knife.
Now I have calluses of my own.

I learned how to be a poet by reading
and listening to those whose hearts
were already broken open before
I ever chased down a metaphor.
Now I have a hunger for words.

I’m three weeks away from my last shift in
the kitchen and the calluses
are already fading, peeling off, though
I am still making dinner at home.
Cooking is in my blood.

I’m five days away from my last writing,
though my heart has been opened
up already, I have fallen private,
forgetting to write out loud for friends
who gather like dinner guests.

I teach for a living, though my calling
is to learn, to apprentice,
to soak up smells and sounds, words and wonders,
to come to table and tablet that
I might taste and see what is good.

Peace,
Milton

creative writing

adjectives attach like
grammatical barnacles
explanatory sidecars
directing distinctions
guitars didn’t need them

until someone found
a Fender and plugged in
so we pulled out
acoustic and electric
to state the obvious

writing goes back
as far as the stories
and then one day some
scheduler needed a name
for a course and wrote

Creative Writing
legitimizing the mundane
and discounting words
it’s all creating whether
writing of stars or stones

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

tapping the walls

I love being married to a good preacher.

Sunday, she knocked it out of the park – or at least knocked me around a little bit, prophetically speaking. My musings tonight owe much to what she had to say yesterday.

I knew going in to church that her sermon was based on the Luke 5 passage where Jesus first gave fishing advice to the guys in the boat and then called them to drop what they were doing and follow him and “fish for people” instead. I don’t know the lectionary by heart, so I didn’t know the Old Testament reading was another favorite – Isaiah 6 – that begins with the sentence, “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord.” The verse intrigues me because of a sermon I heard many years ago (I cannot remember the preacher) that challenged me to see the sentence as more than a marker in time. Isaiah wasn’t describing a chronological coincidence; he was making a statement of cause: something about the death of the king opened his eyes. Though I hold no attachment to any dead royalty, something about the circumstances of my life right now brought me to the same sense of sight. These are days that rumble with the distant thunder of change.

Ginger then invoked a third voice that made for a formidable trinity (small t, but powerful nonetheless): Annie Dillard, with this quote from The Writing Life:

The line of words is a hammer. You hammer against the walls of your house. You tap the walls, lightly, everywhere. After giving many years; attention to these things, you know what to listen for. Some of the walls are bearing walls; they have to stay, or everything will fall down. Other walls can go with impunity; you can hear the difference. Unfortunately, it is often a bearing wall that has to go. It cannot be helped. There is only one solution, which appalls you, but there it is. Knock it out. Duck.

From there, Ginger went on to paint the scene at the shore: Jesus calling out to the fruitless fishermen to drop their nets on the other side of the boat, they can hardly get to shore with their oversized catch, and then he says, “Leave your nets (yes, that would be the ones filled with fish), follow me, and I will show you how to fish for people.”

Growing up Southern Baptist, I was taught this story was about evangelism, hook, line, and sinker. Jesus calls us all to catch people and reel them in. Fair enough. But Ginger took a step back from the whole fishing metaphor to look at what Jesus asked the disciples to do, which was, in Annie Dillard’s terms, knock out a load bearing wall. Fishing in Galilee was lousy work. I would imagine it was a career you were born into, rather than being a chosen profession. You went out everyday in your little boat (read that literally) and took your chances, unsure of the fish, the nasty little sea, and the storms. I suppose Jesus could have gotten them to follow quite easily had he asked when the nets were still empty at the end of a long night: “Your life sucks; come with me.” But he showed them what it felt like to come in with all the fish sticks Mrs. Paul could have wanted and then said, “Leave your nets and come on.”

He called them to courage: come and see.

I know my sense of God’s presence has been heightened by the courageous moves my friend Gordon has made over the past couple of weeks. He has heard Jesus’ call and he has answered. After twenty years, yesterday was his last day as pastor of his church. He resigned to see what God has next for him. He’s knocked down most every wall around him. I am proud of and challenged by my friend.

Annie Dillard is actually talking about writing as she uses the metaphor of home deconstruction, the idea being that you can’t get too tied to any one sentence or paragraph. You have to be willing to lose them all and start over. Another writing book I read years ago suggested, when it came to rewriting and editing, to find the sentence you loved best in what you had written and discarding it to prove to yourself nothing you had written was sacrosanct. They’re right, unfortunately. Of course the other side of the page is being so self-critical that none of it feels worth keeping and you become paralyzed by even the smallest thing, unable to see beyond the minutiae that fill the page.

When it comes to writing/telling/living our life stories, the metaphor works fairly well. We have certain things about our lives that we cannot imagine doing without, and some of them are things we shouldn’t discard. I have no intention, for instance, of spending my life any other way than married to the aforementioned great preacher. Beyond our defining covenants, though, we are called to be willing to leave our nets, to pull down the house, to do what it takes to go when God calls. In that year that King Uzziah died, the passage ends with Isaiah answering, “Here am I, Lord; send me.” We cannot let ourselves become so convinced that we are living our best life that we are not willing to see what else God might have for us. And we have to find a way to an “Uzziah moment” when the despairing details of life pull us to a place where we see only empty nets and long nights and have no ears for those calling from the shore.

The other piece to Ginger’s sermon had to do with the four young African-American men who walked into the Woolworth’s store in Greensboro, North Carolina and sat down to be served at the all-white lunch counter, sparking a national sit-in movement. That happened fifty years ago this past week. The anniversary was marked by the opening of the International Civil Rights institute and Museum in the now renovated Woolworth’s building, and a group from our church drove up there after services yesterday. I had to work, but I did hear a piece on the radio that included interviews with a couple of the men. I was taken by this clip:

“We were totally exhausted,” he said, spending time—as college students always have—discussing “society in general, specifically people we loved and admired.” They gave their parents a hard time “because of what we thought they had not done.” The young men couldn’t understand how they could live with segregation. “To us, that didn’t make sense. Why not do something about it?”


Then they realized they were judging the wrong people. “Our parents didn’t do so badly; after all, look at us. All these months we had been talking and giving our parents hell,” he remembered. And with all the opportunity in the world, “I haven’t done one thing.” To walk away would be irresponsible.

And the walls came tumbling down.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m rehashing the sermon because I need to hear it again. I can hear the voice and I’m trying to figure out which wall needs to go, and praying for the courage to knock it out and the sense to duck.

Peace,
Milton

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

listening

I’m watching midnight come and go
the same way I do most nights,
sitting at the keyboard with a glass
of wine wondering what to write
and listening to some old friend
sing me into the solitude that
sows some sort of word play.

some nights I know the very song
I want to hear, but then some
send me searching for just the right mix
of moment and memory that
lets the words start wandering
into shape and sequence singing
in harmony, I suppose

because though the house is quiet
and I am the only one awake
I rarely think of myself writing
alone; I am panning for words
on the banks with anyone
who would find simple words and
polish them into brilliance

by listening and learning from
those who have panned and penned
already, because they show how to
line up words in ways that break
open hearts in ten words or less:
I was taken by a photograph of you
how did you do that, Jackson?

Peace,
Milton

*the lyric is from "Fountain of Sorrow" by Jackson Browne.

cleaning off my desk

I guess tonight might be the blogging equivalent of clearing off my desk.

I have not written as regularly as I would like over the last couple of months for a variety of reasons, this week however, it was not for lack of ideas. Before the time gets away, I want to comment on a couple of things and then make a request.

First, John Hughes died this week. He was the director of Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Uncle Buck, Wierd Science, Sixteen Candles, and The Breakfast Club, to name a few. As a youth minister in the 80's, I leaned into his movies to help me understand the kids in my youth group. And, for that matter, to learn a bit about myself as well. He was not the greatest director ever, yet he made movies that mattered to me and that I still watch and quote extensively.

And I would still love to know the punch line to the joke Judd Nelson was telling when he fell through the roof.

Here is a tribute montage someone else put together that is worth passing along.



Second, and leading into third, we went to see Julie and Julia last night, which is a story about blogging as much as it is about cooking and finding out what matters most.



One of the things I found in the movie was a push to figure out why I am writing these days. What I mean by that is I know why I write (because I am a writer), and I want to do more with this blog than ramble this way and that. So, the "third" in this litany is a request. I am thinking about taking on some themes -- a week, or perhaps longer for each -- and writing in a particular vein for that time to see what sort of shape my writing might take beyond my fairly regular posts, and to see what I can learn and how I can grow. Though I know the days of regular commenting on blogs has passed, I am asking for suggestions of themes or ideas you think might be worth me tackling. And we will see where it goes.

Thanks for reading.

Peace,
Milton

P. S. -- Speaking of Julia Child, I couldn't close without posting this favorite Saturday Night Live clip.

turn the page

Durham has a lot of good things about it, but a good independent radio station is not one of them. And so I spend my days in the kitchen listening to classic rock and hold the distinction of being the only one in the kitchen for whom the songs were my soundtrack for high school and college. One of the songs that plays daily for reasons I don’t understand is Bob Seger’s droning plea for the masses to have empathy for his rock star life, “Turn the Page.”

here I am out on the road again
there I am up on the stage
there I go playing the star again
there I go turn the page

I mention the song not because I’m in the mood to do a little Bob bashing, but because I’ve been reading and thinking about writing and wonder how different I am from Bob when I use this space to write about what it feels like writing.

here I am back on my Mac again
there I go blogging away . . .

What I’m reading these days is Julia Cameron’s The Right to Write (brought back into my view by my blogging buddy, Simon, who is always worth reading) and she is giving me much to think – and write – about. Here’s the latest paragraph that has hounded me:

[Writing] all the time, whether or not we are in the mood, gives us ownership of our writing ability. It takes it out of the realm of conjuring where stand on a rock of isolation, begging the winds for inspiration, and it makes it something as do-able as picking up a hammer and pounding a nail. Writing may be an art, but it is certainly a craft. It is a simple and workable thing that can be as steady and reliable as a chore – does that ruin the romance? (35)

Before I answer her question, I have to back up a bit. I have not written as much as I would like over the past couple of months because many nights I haven’t felt like I had something to say. Cameron got me thinking a week or so ago when she said,

Writing is about getting something down, not thinking something up. . . . We can either “think a plot up” or we can “jot a plot down.” We can either “think of something to write about” or we can write about what we happen to be thinking about. We can either demand we write well or we can settle more comfortably into writing down what seems to want to come through us – good, bad, or indifferent. (10-11)

She then quotes Henry Miller:

“Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music – the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls, and interesting people. Forget yourself.” (11)

Ginger and I have been working on the room in our house that is our shared creative space. A home office, perhaps; we prefer to call it the studio. The biggest task continues to be to find a place for everything, which means, first of all, we have to go through the stacks of stuff that have lived on the floor now for some time. I spent the morning and part of this afternoon going through stacks of papers and old journals and, with Cameron’s words ringing in my ears, realized I’ve had seasons when I have been a better listener to my life than I appear to have been over these days when I felt I had nothing to say. I learned – again – I am a better writer when I speak in concert with my listening and offer harmony to the melody that is already playing, if you will.

Yesterday’s poem provides a good example. I found this poem on the Writer’s Almanac several days ago and noticed it came from a book of poems by Charles Darling called The Saints of Diminished Capacity. I wrote the phrase down in my journal because it was so rich and because it seemed to describe those close to me who are dealing with fresh grief and are having to play hurt through these days. When I sat down to write yesterday, I understood – again – what Cameron meant when she said we write things down, not make things up. I just wrote what I saw and heard, and what I felt and then I spent some time doing my best to craft the words, to revise and edit, to make my offering an adequate reflection of what I had seen and heard.

One of the snippets I found today reminded me of an afternoon I was walking across Boston Common. A guy who looked as though he had spent the night in the park was standing up on a small brick wall playing his guitar and singing. As I walked past, he was singing these words by James Taylor:

everyday I wake up just the same
waiting for something new
every night I have myself to blame
for dreams that haven’t come true
especially today I’m feeling blue

If I had been writing the soundtrack for a movie I couldn’t have scripted it any better. Sunday, in her sermon, Ginger recounted an experience she and I had walking through Davis Square, one of our favorite Somerville haunts. There was a homeless man sitting on the curb and and as we passed he said, rather loudly, “Change.”

I blurted back without thinking, “I’m trying. I’m trying,” as Ginger reached for coins in her pocket.

Writing draws me because it is such a wonderful metaphor for living, as much as anything. Listening makes me a better writer; listening makes me a better human being, as well. You get the idea. Our choice of words make a difference. If I write (or live) feeling that I have a story to tell, I’m not sure that lasts very long. None of us likes to be told things very often. But from my listening to life, I have a story to share, the way we share sandwiches or rides or sunny afternoons, then I may be on to something strong enough to make you, well, turn the page.

Peace,
Milton

mixing metaphors

Walk into any professional kitchen and you will most likely find two things at a premium: knives and cutting boards. In fact, in many restaurants, it is customary for the chefs to provide their own knives. Practically, it means when you get a hold of a cutting board, you make the most of it – and you use it more than once. Of course, it has to be washed well if you are using it to prepare raw meat of some sort, but as far as veggies and bread and most other things, the way of the restaurant world is you wipe it clean between each action (or flip it over) and keep working on your next project. Whatever the task, it works best when you clean your work area of whatever you were working on before and then move on to the next thing.

How nice it would be if life were so easily segmented.

A chance to submit a piece of writing this week brought with it the residue of relationships and the trace elements of insecurity that somehow seem connected to much of life (at least for me) and have set me to thinking how I might clean my board, so to speak, so I can make a clean offering to the project. Perhaps it begins with finding a new metaphor.

Soup making is a regular activity in our kitchen. I love making soups mostly, I think, because it means seeing what new thing can come from things that already exist. Our soups, for the most part, are made from what we have on hand; other than some dried beans, we don’t order anything exclusively to make soup. After brunch on Sunday, for example, I set aside the last of the pinto beans (along with some extra we made), the salsa fresca, some caramelized onions, and some sautéed poblano peppers to become our soup for tonight. All I have to do is add some vegetable stock (our beans are vegetarian – I’ll keep them that way for the soup), adjust the seasonings, and puree the mixture and we will have something wonderful to offer our customers made from the things we carry, if you will.

Granted, the leftovers of life don’t always offer such a flavorful recipe, but the creative tension that lies between cleaning the board and making the best of what is left appears to be the path I’m pulled to walk in these days, if I wish to do more than let my insecurities get the best of me. And I wish. I want to clear out those things capable of turning toxic and hang on to all the tasty tidbits that add flavor to what I have to say. Sometimes those are easier to distinguish in the kitchen than they are in the rest of my life.

One of the lessons I learned from one of my chef mentors is you make soup ahead of time. You don’t, for instance, make tonight’s soup this morning. The bean soup I’ll finish today will be for tomorrow night or Thursday. We have a chilled carrot soup with orange and mint I made on Sunday that has been waiting to debut today. A little time lets the flavors marry to become what they want to be together, rather than merely a collection of ingredients. A good soup takes time, and patience. When we heat it up to serve, I will check the seasoning balance again to see how they have matured together, what they have become given some time.

Sometimes our insecurities get the best of us (and by us, I mean me) in situations seasoned too heavily with history. I struggle when I feel pulled back into who I was, rather than who I am in these days. Growing into wholeness as a human being requires some of the same sense of timing and patience as soup making, it seems; rechecking the seasoning and the ingredients added to my life along the way will help me remember who I am and who I have become, even as I step back into a context that connects to who I was. Growing into that same wholeness requires I clean the board, if I am to make an honest offering, and wipe away what is not healthy or useful and get to going on the work at hand in the context of the relationships as they are in these days, not as what they once were.

The best cooking is simple. By simple, I don’t mean quick or expedient, but well-chosen ingredients prepared in a simple, patient, and straightforward way that allows them to, well, be themselves. When we were in Turkey a few years back, my favorite dish was made of eggplant, tomatoes, onions, parsley, and olive oil. That was it – and it was amazing. Life, perhaps, is the same way. I have an invitation to write, which I love to do. I have a chance to lean back into an old friendship to find something new. The call, then, is for me to work in the same simplicity, patience, and straightforwardness and trust that it, too, will be a flavorful offering.

Thanks for listening while I worked this out.

Peace,
Milton

chuck taylor afternoon

In the middle of a sunny
Chuck Taylor afternoon, I sit
in the space between work

and obligations, hoping
for time to read and write
and then the day descended –

closed in from all sides
like shrink wrap on a shiny toy
and I had only a moment

this moment

to write away the defeat
brief lines offering a chance
to slip away from suffocation

and slide back into sunshine
and the promise that this
is not the only afternoon

for me and my Chucks.








Peace,
Milton

a quick plug

I'm excited because this coming weekend I'm headed to Jackson, Mississippi to help lead "A Writer's Conference" at Calvary Baptist Church, along with Tim Sean Youmans and Justin McRoberts. If you are anywhere in the area, the conference is free and runs all day Saturday and Sunday morning. I even get to preach while I'm there. I'm sure I will come back with good memories and good stories.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: on nights like tonight

On nights like tonight
when I come home tired
and try to write, only
to have my little dog

begin bouncing her ball
on my feet, begging me
to choose her over words,
I think about monks

and those who cloister
themselves to meditate,
yes, and to write, to get
closer to God, seeing

isolation as the way to
make meaning of life.
I write in traffic, feeling
like the street performer

who juggled three things
chosen by the crowd –
a bowling ball, an apple,
and a working chain saw –

and kept them all in the air.

That’s contemplation --
and it’s a public act. (Now
I sound like I’m polarizing.)

Those cloistered clerics may
have had about as much
choice in the pace of life
as I, a juggler, myself,

who wishes for a couple
more hours of sleep,
and wonders how one
who unfamiliar with the

unabashed ambush of
canine affection finds
anything to say at all
on nights like tonight.

Peace,
Milton

a story for christmas

Several years ago, Ginger asked me to write a story for Christmas Eve. What came out of me was a Dr. Suess-ish sort of tale that has found a life in many places on Christmas Eves since. The story begins this way:

As we gather together on this Silent Night,
To sing ‘round the tree in the soft candlelight,

From a Faraway Christmas, from time that’s grown cold,
Comes a story, you see, that has seldom been told.

Of all of the legends, the best and the worst,
From Christmases all the way back to the first,

This little tale isn’t often remembered
From then until now, down through all those Decembers.

But I found an old copy tucked away on a shelf,
And I turned through the pages, and I thought to myself,

Of all of the times between now and then,
This is the Christmas to hear it again.

This year, you can hear the story in a different way -- on audio CD. My friend Terry Allebaugh added a wonderful harmonica soundtrack, my friend Claudia Fulshaw created beautiful artwork for the cover and the insert, and I read the story and added a couple of other touches. I'm proud of what we did and excited to share it.

In the sidebar to the left is the PayPal button that will make your purchase possible. The CD is $10.00, plus $2.00 for shipping. If your order is over $50.00, shipping is free. (That's in the U.S.) I will sign, seal, and deliver (or at least mail) the CDs myself.

Entrepreneurship is not my gift. I'm grateful to Gordon Atkinson for his encouragement and technical advice, to Claudia and Terry, and to Ginger for calling the story out of me in the first place.

The story runs on several different levels and is appropriate for most any age. I hope you enjoy it.

Peace,
Milton

waiting for the plumber

One could wish for a day that was carbonated,
words rising effervescently, even effortlessly
to the top, bubbles of hope bursting on the
surface. Today is not that day; nor yesterday.
I’m waiting for the plumber to come find the
block on our main drain, somewhere between
here and the street, underneath the growing
grass and the nascent hasta, underground
where the words are trapped in the sludge,
unable to bore their way to the surface, or to
flow through to the drain under the street.

One would think, in these days so full of
friends and family and meaning, the real
struggle would be to keep the words from
coming; how could I keep from writing?
My life goes on, breakless and brakeless,
trading exhaustion for expression, even as
my heart fills up and overflows. My body
stops and my mind races on; my brain
finally tires and I toss and turn. Be still,
I say, but I can’t. Instead, I pace the house
looking for words, waiting for the plumber.


Peace,
Milton