Inklings From An Abecedarian Octogenarian

November 4th, 2015  |   

So even to old age and gray hairs, O God, do not forsake me, until I proclaim your might to another generation, your power to those to come.   Psalm 71:18

Jesus asked, “What do you want me to do for you?”

The blind man answered, “Master, I want to see.”    Mark 10:51

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Waking Up In Minneapolis

I woke up one day in Minneapolis, it happened to be the first day of October, and discovered that overnight I had become an octogenarian. There to ease the blow were my twin daughters and granddaughter Eva.

An octogenarian! I should have seen it coming when years ago I got an AARP card, or when I began to turn gray at age 39. Call them early warning signs.

The occasion was a chance to celebrate rather than commiserate, spending time with one another, eating, talking and going to see three plays together. They know I love the theater.  

It was a chance for them to see what an octogenarian looks like. Sons and daughters ought to keep an inquisitive eye on their parents. It’s payback for the way we did that when they were young. There used to be a time when I gave them the keys to the car. I am glad, at my age that they didn’t take away my keys, so I knew I would be driving myself home.

Fields Green To Brown—Hair Brown To Gray 

Driving back to West Virginia alone I spent time with myself. Call it what you will—thinking, reflecting, remembering, mediating, praying, listening to music. Like being in church. The terrain was its own holy of holies. The fields were full of icons –- combines in the brown Iowa cornfields, only recently green, harvesting the dead husks of spent corn crops.

Having already spent, hopefully not squandered, seven decades of my life, the journey from brown to gray hair, I think about how I have spent my time. Since I am writing these Notes on All Saints Day, I think about the people I have spent time with, the living and the dead. A requiem for the living as well as the dead.

As I tap the computer keys, stretching for words, having written so many of them in my lifetime, I sometimes wonder, when no one else is around, how many words I have left in me. Better still, how many will come to me, for words are gifts from parts unknown.

Flat As A Pancake

Flat as a pancake. I hardly ever hear that descriptive phrase used anymore. I think of it as I drive across Iowa and southern Illinois on my way home. Flat as a pancake country.

These fields, a portion of the Midwest, are where pancakes are incubated. From seed in soil, to harvested grain, ground to flour, then whipped into a pancake, drenched in syrup, it finally comes to rest on my breakfast plate. But not for long.

The fields call to mind the tiny town, Randall, Kansas, where I worked on a farm at age 17, harvesting oats and wheat, gathering hay, and plowing fields that had done their duty.

A city kid from Baltimore, I learned how to drive a tractor, wield a hay hook, and ride a combine. I can still remember the heat, a huge tornado, plowing all night, Kool-Aid at meals, reading “Gone With the Wind” late at night in bed, and a carnival that came to town and pitched a tent. Oh yeah, I remember that tent. Do I ever.

For a couple of dollars I could see people labeled “freaks.” At the end of the show, the audience was offered a chance to enter an extension of the tent. For a dollar we could gain admittance in order to see a half man, half woman.

It was there in that small space in Kansas that I discovered with my own eyes, shy a dollar, something surprisingly and mysteriously complicated — a hybrid human body. Seventeen years old, trying to navigate through a turbulent sea of testosterone, what I saw on that stage was beyond my comprehension. Gawking was my early initiation, my first step toward embracing the remarkable complexity and mystery of the bodies we human beings are just plain born into. I’ve since chosen to retire the word freak.

The CAT Complex In East Peoria

Outside of East Peoria, I see a huge elongated building, bigger than a Walmart. It’s the headquarters for the Caterpillar Company. They make farm equipment, bulldozers, construction and mining equipment.  

You can see caps, emblazoned with the word CAT, on people’s heads, particularly in rural areas of the country. Stop at any truck stop on my drive and I can buy one, along with beef jerky, a Mountain Dew soda, a Confederate tee shirt, Horny Goat Weed capsules, and a condom and Tingler ring from a machine in the men’s room. For the record, I bought none of those items, even though Horny Goat Weed tickled my imagination.

Gassed up, a fig Newton bar and a bottle of water on board, I drive east toward Bloomington where I will spend the night. I can’t help but think of the Caterpillar bulldozers that have systematically destroyed Palestinian refugee camps and homes. Since the Six Day War in 1967, these bulldozers have demolished at least 18,000 Palestinian homes. In 2003, one of them crushed and killed a young American, Rachel Corrie, as she protested the demolition of a Palestinian home in Gaza.

I like checking local papers while traveling. Eating breakfast at the Days Inn, I read that Caterpillar has laid off 250 East Peoria workers, 500 for the year—1,245 workers in various plants across Illinois. Later I learn that workers will be training overseas newcomers to take their jobs, overseas that is. Sort of like having the person awaiting execution sharpen the blade on the guillotine.

After breakfast I move on down the road, crossing into West Virginia. The place where Caterpillar equipment destroys our mountains, decapitating them for coal.

It—A Tiny Pronoun Facing A Big Task

Back home from Minneapolis, I run into a friend just back from a trip to Israel/Palestine.

“How was it?” I ask.

That’s one way to find out what he saw. “How was it?”  I ask that question even though I know his eyes have absorbed more than can be packed into the pronoun it.

“I saw more than I should have seen,” he replies, “and now I don’t know what to do about it.”

That’s a question with a lifetime warranty, issued at birth. What to do about what I have seen? That’s the question that nags at anyone who has seen more than he or she wanted to see, or should have seen, or tried not to see, or was grateful for having seen.   

While chewing on that question, I must take time to eat, and Bob Evans is always there on the road to feed me.

Reading Between The Lines

The term, “eat your words,” has a negative twist to it. It translates: gag on what you have said. When forced to do that, one’s words taste like crow. I know because I’ve had to eat a few of those meals. But I choose, instead, to embrace a more powerful truth about words. I live off a daily diet of words. I would die without a menu full of words. They are protein for the soul.

I have visited the hill on the northwest shore of the Sea of Galilee where Jesus is said to have delivered the Sermon on the Mount. I imagine people listening to his words, hungry for more than bread. That’s not difficult to do because I’ve spent my life reading and listening for the Word of God amidst the chaotic cacophony of the history into which I was born.

I am often asked if I believe the Bible stories are literally true. Are those words I’ve chewed on since I was a child, swallowed like communion bread and church potluck suppers, fact or fiction? In all honesty, I don’t pretend to know, and like Rhett Butler said to Scarlett O’Hara, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

That may sound profanely sacrilegious, but I refuse to be saved by definitions wrapped too tightly in restrictive garb. And, God knows, the church has too often tried to squeeze the numinous into pint-sized orthodoxy. Here a damn, there a damn, every once in a while a damn tames authorized certainty wherever it arises.

You want to embrace and be embraced by mystery?  I give you this to ponder: Read between the lines. Not just in the Bible, but books, newspapers, political commentary, cultural trends, social media, and most of all people. That’s right, people, what you hear them say or what you see. There is much to listen to beneath the lines. A narrative worth listening to.

A Visitor From The Czech Republic

I am drinking coffee at a downtown bookstore with a 29 years old gay man from the Czech Republic. He is in the United States to learn how we have organized for change.

Listening to him describe his organizing of gay rallies and marches in the Czech Republic, feels like a replay of early organizing around the same issue here in the United States. He’s been told that I have stories to tell, based in my own experience.

Long before my hair turned gray, the lines from Psalm 71 found a way to speak to me. Call it anticipatory revelation. They provided direction for my teaching and organizing efforts. “Even when I am old and gray, O God, do not abandon me, until I tell the next generation about your strength, and those coming after me about your power.” The example in the Bible of an older Elijah passing his cloak on to a younger Elisha, was the leadership template I wanted to embrace. Gray must pass to someone who is green.

These words might go well on someone’s tombstone: He passed away, but not before he passed on what he knew. And so I pass on what I know to this man who is 50 years younger than me. It is an afternoon well spent.

Czechs customarily protect their “personal space.” A hug and a kiss when meeting or parting are considered unusual. Nonetheless, I hug my new friend and kiss his cheek before he departs. And then I tell him, as an American, that it feels good to not give him weapons to take home, as my government does so often with nations all over the world.

The Third Way

We all know what someone means when they say, “It’s either my way or the highway.”

I can’t help but think about that as I watch the confrontation between a schoolgirl and a school policeman in a Columbia, South Carolina classroom. I didn’t like what I saw.

That’s the way it was when the girl refused the policeman’s order to get up from her chair and leave the classroom. He tossed her from the chair and dragged her across the floor. As the video was played over and over and over again on television, the quest for who was right and who was wrong was debated vigorously, the girl or the policeman.

This turmoil was over a cell phone. Did it have to come to “my way or the highway?” Of course not. When conflict gets to that point, it’s time to look for a third way.

I do believe that the third way has to do with talking it out rather than duking it out, whatever the it might be. Perhaps the students, not involved, could have been moved to another room to complete their class. That would have provided room for quiet conversation between one or more people with the girl.

Doing The Hard Things

My daughter Elizabeth gave me a book for my birthday, “Levels of Life” by Julian Barnes. He wrote it as an epitaph to his wife, not on a tombstone but on paper. I ate it while in Minneapolis. Tasty, not saccharine, bittersweet and nourishing, the words fed me.

Digest this tasty bite: Early in life, the world divides crudely into those who have had sex and those who haven’t. Later, into those who have known love, and those who haven’t. Later still — at least, if we are lucky (or, on the other hand, unlucky) — it divides into those who have endured grief, and those who haven’t. These divisions are absolute; they are topics we cross

Since Judy died two years ago I have committed myself to doing the hard things, believing that grace lives between a rock and a hard place. And traveling without Judy is one of those hard places. This summer I traveled back to Delaware to walk the beach near where we used to live, mingle with people feasting on French fries, some of whom were willing to talk, if I was willing to listen.

I had daily conversation with a man, a retired policeman on vacation. The weather, as expected, was warm. It took him a couple of days, however, to warm up to me. It was like he was frisking me to see if he could trust me. It helped when he, once a military pilot, discovered that I had been a Marine. We were then free to tell war stories. 

During the war in Southeast Asia, he flew planes full of American weapons into Laos and Cambodia. On return trips, his plane was loaded with heroin. That was the deal our CIA had struck with allies there fighting the Viet Cong. Arms for drugs. This was not news to me because I had known that Southeast Asia had been awash with weapons and drugs. I just had never met a pilot who had flown those missions, nor did I know what he finally revealed to me.

He told me that he followed orders, as military men are prone to do. He flew back to the states—Miami, Chicago, Detroit—with his cargo. Heroin.

Hand In Hand

Eight years ago I shook hands with the then Senator Barak Obama. At a campaign rally, Senator Rockefeller introduced me to him as the West Virginia Patriots for Peace minister organizing against the Iraq War, working to get the troops home.

Two weeks ago I shook his hand again. This time Senator Manchin arranged for me to do that on the tarmac of the Yeager Airport in Charleston. He was here to attend a community forum on the national “epidemic” of heroin use and prescription opioid painkillers. West Virginia has the highest rate of drug overdose deaths in the country.

When Air Force One departed, lots had been said about addiction and the connection between drug use, poverty, prescription-doling doctors, inadequate rehabilitation resources, and drug education. The discussion continues.

What the President avoided, before returning to Washington to authorize sending more troops back to Iraq, and now Syria, was the connection between war and drugs. They go hand-in-hand. The truth is difficult to acknowledge. Simply stated: The three major U.S. wars in my lifetime, following WWII—Korea, Vietnam and the Iraq/Afghanistan—have been financed by drug production and sales. Poppy plants seed an addiction to endless war. On top of that, drug use on the part of combatants is the collateral damage that curses veterans and the people who live in war-torn lands. Taking drugs fortifies soldiers called upon to kill, and then are prescribed to treat them for the killing they’ve done. War and drugs are bedfellows.

Laced through our nation’s “War on Drugs” is the ugly fact that a war on drugs is actually a war on itself. War is addicted to and, consequently, dependent upon drugs.

An Abecedarian Octogenarian

Do I stay in Charleston? Do I sell my house, once our house? Do I keep fishing for words, while stumbling to write? Do I continue to travel? Do I stay in the struggle — in battles still to be fought? God knows, and maybe She will tell me. What I do know is that I intend to be an abecedarian octogenarian, in other words, someone just beginning to learn.

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