Just a little red tricycle?

The low angle of the January sun reflected brightly on the little girl’s red tricycle. Gleefully she rode it as her mother walked beside her. They had just left a large Goodwill store.

I was driving by and just happened to notice. Traffic was light, and I quickly took in the scene.

The girl, perhaps three or four, was just beaming; her whole face shown with happiness. Mom,  carrying a load of clothes, wore a meek and gentle smile. But it revealed stress lines. They were headed to mom’s car, a Honda Civic that had seen better days.

The tableau touched me deeply, for I could see a possible story there. I imagined Mom might be a single parent. Perhaps medical bills, or needed car repairs had meant Santa would be late this year. This was the child’s Christmas. And I remembered a Christmas many years before when I was a single parent, too. I had lost a good job just before school started that year. I connected, for I had been there.

As I drove on, I prayed for mom and daughter. Whether they really were as I had imagined seemed beside the point, because prayer never hurts. We were well past Christmas. It was now the season of Epiphany. As I considered that, I remember how Mary, the mother of Jesus, had “treasured” things and “pondered them in her heart.” And now amazing things were happening. Mysterious men of the East followed a star. Angels sang in heavenly chorus. I pictured Jesus coming up from the baptismal water as the very heavens opened above him. The drama was afoot.

And so it was that cold winter day: not millennial drama, just a small scene played out on a suburban parking lot while its message nurtured an eternal truth. We sometimes may feel abandoned, lost, with little hope. Then one day, the truth sets us free. Epiphany is made personal.

So that’s what I prayed for the woman and her daughter. And a bright red tricycle became more than met the eye.

(WRITER’S NOTE – This was originally published on Jan. 7 a year ago in The Spirit, the weekly newsletter of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, Richmond, Va. It seems just as timely now as we near the close of the season of Epiphany. 

BOOK REVIEW: The Road by Cormac McCarthy

When I finished it, I realized I had no words to describe it … none that were adequate, anyway. But I shall never forget it.

Instead of words, I felt full of emotions. Words just did not work. I cannot explain The Road. You must do that for yourself. And you may discover that if you have never loved truly, you shall.

***

Will to live. Incredible tenacity. Resourcefulness beyond belief. Whatever the cost. And love.

The world, as we knew it, is no more. It is an ashen waste of some un-Godly holocaust.

A man and his young son are left. And they must move forward, to the south. And warmth. They hope.

At times. I had to make myself pick it up to continue. But I could not resist.

The pull of its narrative, and McCarthy’s post-dystopian style – maybe the makeup of  modern literature’s new best ever, we may one day say – captivated me and would not let go.

I’ve never felt that way about a book before.

You will see. You will see. 

Honor and 'Deflategate'

Many colleges and universities here in my native Virginia have codes of honor, most dating back many years and shining with that special patina of respect we in the Old Dominion reserve for the best of our traditions.

Absolute understanding of and respect for the Honor Code at my school was the first priority of freshman orientation in my day. So perhaps you can appreciate my astonishment about half-way through my first semester to awaken one morning to the news that several uppclassmen were no longer with us. They had been present the day before. And now they were not.

Well into the night before, the student-run Honor Council had found them guilty of honors violations. And now they were gone. I had known two of them for years. They had been like big brothers to me. I was very sad for them.

But it made the concept of honor very real to me.

And today in the world around us that same concept seems under siege.

Lying, cheating, and stealing seem to have slithered into many of our institutions, both at home and abroad.  

I first started thinking about this several years ago when I read Kurt Eichenwald’s Conspiracy of Fools, a devastatingly honest book about the criminal behavior at that once-paragon of American business – Enron. How else could that have happened without a certain sense of permissiveness, a sort-of winking, nodding, and foot-shuffling among people who deep down inside probably knew better?

And this morning when I picked up my newspaper I saw a Page One story that felt like a little foot-shuffling going on in an unlikely venue.

“Tech to give its athletes stipend for attendance,” the lead headline read.

Right way an alarm went off…and it got louder by the time I got to the Sports Pages where I learned that other prominent state institutions of higher learning were thinking about the same thing.

The alarm sounded this way to me: the professionalizing of big-time college athletics has let the camel’s snout get under the tent flap.

College athletics are incubators for the talent driving professional sports. And things have gotten awfully cozy over the years. This stipend business seems to bring the noose full circle. And since when are those stipends fair when we consider the great majority of students who will be denied comparable goodies?

It’s alarming too because money brings compromise, temptation, and worse to an aspect of higher education that’s shown its bad side many times. Anybody notice what’s been going on at UNC recently?

And if you’re a taxpayer, you need to understand that the Tech program alone referred to in the Times-Dispatch story (which you can read by link here) is going to cost $900,000. Where do you think that’s going to come from?

I think it’s high time we drew a line in the sand and sent the camel packing. Because with the  professionalizing of big-time college athletics, can the supercilious mummery of “Deflategate” be far behind?

(Click here to read about "Deflategate.")

Contrasts

In the news…

LBJ gets short shrift in the new movie, Selma.

Why am I not surprised?

The headline says: “Hollywood takes history into its own hands.” The review is an op-ed piece in the Richmond Times-Dispatch the other day. You can read it here. But the gist of it is that the president who “did more to bring about social equality than any President since Lincoln … had feet of clay;” and the real work of Selma’s legacy was done without the sitting President’s help.

Hmmm. I always think of Dr. Martin Luther King front and center facing off with frowning white guys with weapons. So where was LBJ?

Maybe the truth is in an attendant editorial cartoon showing a couple looking at a poster for Selma, the flick, with a caption reading: “It’s the original ‘I can’t breathe’.”

*

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the news we learn that in Richmond homeless folk are to be barred from under a new bridge by a $53,000 chunk out of the taxpayers’ hides for a high-tech fence. 

And the bridge is not that big.

But to hear the comments of various poohbahs interviewed for the story by the ‘paper, the tone is as if the homeless do not exist You may read the whole thing for yourself here.

What’s really going on is painfully evident to we the peeps – our “leaders” are dancing on the heads of pins while they are nowhere close to being angels.

*

So are Richmond’s homeless just as invisible as the shades of the poor slaves who suffered mightily and were buried on or near a plot other poohbahs want for a baseball park?

And it’s a baseball park that some say will never attract the fans that have turned out for the sport since my grandfather’s generation – Mooer’s Field, which was followed by Parker Field, and now The Diamond – all in the same general area just off an Interstate highway.

*

Meanwhile, your humble scrivener was rescued from all that folderol’s angst while “Adjudicating” at the Appomattox Regional Governor’s School Literary Arts division where his faith in humankind’s ability to deal with the world thrived surrounded by grace, humor, and budding  literary talent.

I speak, of course, of the several dozen eighth graders  from throughout the counties, cities, and towns of Central Virginia in the admission’s process for one of the region’s best secondary schools.

Absent was the denial, posturing, and all-too-transparent façade of adults leading the charge for a fence to keep homeless people from their age-old custom of sleeping under bridges…

I was like – if not THERE, then WHERE? Fifty-three large would make a pretty good down-payment on a homeless shelter, but a fence? Come on.

… and the ducking, bobbing and weaving of poohbahs defending the indefensible – suburbanites’ hootin’, hollerin’, and drinking gallons of celebratory milkshake cups of beer in a place that should be preserved, protected, and reverenced as a place of remembrance for what some would rather forget.

Child's Play?

Over several years during the 1990’s, I participated in a half dozen short-term missions, including four to the  Mexican city of Reynosa.

Located along the Rio Bravo (which is called the Rio Grande in the U.S.) opposite McAllen, Texas, Reynosa by then had become a magnet for people migrating from the country’s interior seeking better lives.To accommodate the influx of thousands, the government made available large tracts of bare, semi-arid abandoned land for the migrants. The tracts became shanty towns.

It was in one of those – home to some 25,000 people living without any utilities including running water – that our mission work centered.

We did what we could – working with local church partners that our sponsoring organization had arranged. The work was typical -- building, teaching, working with children and on two occasions providing medical and dental clinics, all the while working in high heat and humidity along an inhospitable  landscape of constant dust, scraggly desert plants and the occasional rattlesnake. It was bleak, but the people were not. They were uplifting to be with, their faith instructive and palpable even in the face of daunting circumstances. The children particularly were bright and lively, and they were learning English in their schools. So to practice with Norteamericanos, was a real treat.

For us, the work was challenging but enlightening. If you had not thought of poverty in an absolute way, here it was. The real deal.  Pretty unnerving – nearly unbelievable – to those new to our trips.

So as welcome respite, on a couple of evenings we would visit a Christian orphanage in Reynosa. It centered on a traditionally styled three-story baronial home surrounded by ancient cooling trees and plenty of room for  outside recreation for the dozens of children who were there.

They enjoyed having us play soccer or simply encourage them on their swings and see-saws. Meanwhile some tended to gravitate to individuals among us, and that’s how I met a little girl named Erika. Somehow she had learned that I might be able to help her with her English, and I readily agreed. She was about 10 and a very bright and happy child. Erika quickly invented a way to learn the names of each person in our group. She had one of those tablets with a film covering a treated flat background. Using a stylus, she could write or draw on the film and the image would appear. When you pulled the film up, the images disappeared and she could start over. So Erika and I walked around, and I introduced her to each of the 15 members of our group, while she wrote their names on her tablet. When we were finished, she read them to me and pointed out each person. Pretty good for a 10-year-old, I thought.

          On the following night, Erika was excited to show me something, she said. Without the list, she led me around and greeted each of the 15 members of our group…by name. It was a remarkable demonstration.

Later, once the children had gone upstairs to get ready to sleep, three of us gathered for coffee in the cool of the evening under the trees’ canopy.

Our hostess was Elena, a local contact for our trips. She and I had become acquainted through working together on prior missions. We communicated in a working combination of English and Spanish which we called Spanglish…It worked.

 “I want to tell you a story,” Elena said to me that last night.

She recalled a time several years earlier when the city police brought an infant to the orphanage. The baby had been traumatized somehow, and did not speak or smile or make eye contact, Elena said. She just ate sparsely and slept. So Elena and a friend of hers agreed to pray twice a day with the baby. Days became weeks. And still the child did not respond. Doctors even said she might not ever. But Elena and her friend did not give up. They knew better …  and kept praying and holding and loving the little one, believing that God would heal her.

The day finally came when the baby girl made eye contact and smiled at the women. The child  began to get well, to come back to herself.

As I listened, I wondered where all this was going. And just then Elena said she had noticed what my bright little friend Erika was doing and how happy she was. 

Still I did not see the clues. But what Elena said next opened my eyes:

“La niñita … esta aqui …. Tu estudiante. Tu amiga nueva … She is Erika.”

I returned to work the next morning with a spring in my step – the heat and humidity irrelevant – realizing that I had just helped a 10-year-old miracle with her English.

Surviving addiction

“Risin’ up, back on the street

Did my time, took my chances

Went the distance, now I’m back on my feet…”

--Eye of the Tiger, Survivor, 1982

            What happens when a trusted partner, colleague, or family member becomes an addict?

There’s really not much ambivalence about it. As time goes by, they’re either written off or smart enough to join the minority who recover. Yet, for the longest time, they’re watched … very carefully and warily watched.

But here’s a wake-up call to any boss, spouse, child, or parent of an addict or alcoholic who has recovered – it doesn’t matter much what you think.

The committed, the diligent and the successful recovering alcoholic or drug addict know it’s what you do that counts.

Unfortunately, absent qualified professional help, reactions of those close to an actively addicted person may be tepid and ambivalent – like people walking across a room carpeted by eggshells with a little ground glass mixed in. That  plus the ever-popular denial can escalate to  new levels of dysfunction.

The Staunton (Va.) News Leader recently published the story of an addicted nurse and the difficult road she has traveled. This is not an unusual story at all. What is unusual is The News Leaders’ very-well-done story about Bonnie Zientek. The story is exceptional, and you can read it here.

Regular readers of this blog know that I have a story also. Find out more about it here.

And remember….  

Sometimes drug and alcohol problems show their worst during the holiday season. There is the subtle yet powerful pull of letting the good times roulez.

I know that feeling, and it is a lot like spitting in the eye of a tiger.

Sock Management

You are a business man. So you wear suits or carefully curated “office casual” attire, key factors in your success. But know that socks can mess that up.

Ever show up wearing your $295  leather-soled and -heeled shoes, and half way through the meeting with your boss she notices that one of your socks is black and the other Navy blue?

Depending on the environment, that could look like a lack of attention to detail. And leaving that impression could later come out sideways.

Believe me. It happens.

The pettifoggery of some bureaucracies – corporate or governmental – can be astonishing in its breadth, reach, and stickiness.

“It’s the little details that are vital,” said the legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden. “Little things make big things happen.”

My answer to this potential career-busting threat was Sock Management. I would only buy black cotton-polyester blend Goldtoe brand socks. Always.

But, there came a Christmas when …

… the spirit hit and I resolved to become more flexible, creative, and cheerful by getting out of my sock-buying rut – a portentous decision that threatened  my Sock Management program and had an immediate effect on my corporate persona.

Suddenly I was washing, drying, and sorting all manner of sock designs, the most conservative of which were new Navy blue cotton-polyester-blend Goldtoe socks.

But as we all know, washers – or maybe it’s dryers – will occasionally eat a sock. And that just kills Sock Management, because the sorting exercise starts looking like a committee of 16 squirrels chasing 15 nuts.

And, as sure as Santa, the day came when I’m sitting in the CEO’s office discussing world-changing possibilities when I looked down, and one sock was black, the other Navy blue.

So that’s how I came to be a free-lance writer, editor, and raconteur.

Sock Management. Keep it simple.

Have You Read Geraldine Brooks?

At least two reviewers I've read call Geraldine Brooks' writing "magic." Perhaps that’s why "historical fiction" seems too restrictive to describe the four novels of hers that I have read.

She applies her magic to historical truths with amazing characters who find their ways through real history, not some academic recitation of it, nor just a bow to something distant. Her success comes by letting the reader be as close to that history as possible. To me the real magic comes from her extensive research and clever use of words and even sentence structure as they probably were used in the times she is telling. Here’s an example:

…He could tell such tales: of Barbary seamen who wrapped their copper-colored faces in turbans of rich indigo; of a Musalman merchant who kept four wives all veiled so that each moved about with just one eye peeking from her shroud. He had gone to London at the end of his apprenticeship, for the return and restoration of King Charles II had created prosperity among all manner of trades… (Year of Wonders)

People of the Book was the first of Brooks’ books I read, and I was hooked. Next came her Pulitzer prize-winning March, an amazing work that overlays a Civil War-era tale with the denouement of Little Women, if you can imagine. 

Then I read Caleb’s Crossing with its vivid descriptives and beautiful story line set in the early days of Massachusetts Colony, and how a young Indian brave became the first of his people to graduate from Harvard College.

Now I've just completed Year of Wonders, a gripping, honest, and respectful work set in a 17th Century rural English village besieged by the plague. More than half the town's residents die in awful suffering. But it is a redemptive work because of Brooks' "magic," her wonderful development of Anna, a true heroine, and the amazing feeling of somehow being uplifted as a person for having taken the journey with her through and to the other side of a living hell. Year of Wonders gives a whole new dimension to the concept of "cinematic" writing. And I was there. 

PolitiSpeak

     George Orwell proclaimed “newspeak” in the totalitarian future foreseen in his classic 1984. Newspeak, of course, would reflect the transformation of language into words that sound great but which are really equivocations covering up the truth.

     Well, has anyone noticed?

     We seem to have blown right past 1984 into our own dystopia in American political speech today.

     Not so long ago, for example, we were told by the House majority leader at the time that “we must pass the bill so you can find out what’s in it.” She referred to the contentious Affordable Care Act. It eventually passed, and we are still being surprised at what is in it, not to mention how unaffordable it is for many.

     Politicians have always had singular ways of speaking. John F. Kennedy would say, “Let me be crystal clear.” Ronald Reagan had a knack for leavening even the most contentious political situation with good humor and a warm smile.

     And then there was Richard Nixon. “I was not lying,” he said. “I said things that later on seemed to be untrue.” Thus was born today’s PolitiSpeak, which is now giving “newspeak” a run for its money.

     Today we have shortened Nixonian rhetoric considerably. We approach Orwellian dystopia every day when we say a bald-faced lie was just a “lack of transparency.” Or when the Vice President admits that he “misspoke” about something, and the newsies write he “walked his statement back.” Really? Walked it back to where? The truth, per chance?

     And then we have “the gaffe.” It’s everywhere in today’s PolitiSpeak. So much so that some DC wags have said that a politician’s gaffe is really just too much like the truth.

     Was that the case when one Jonathan Gruber, an architect of Obamacare, and an MIT economist who should have known better, said that the health bill deliberately lacked “transparency” because of “the stupidity of the American voter”?

     And he went on to call us “stupid” more than once.

     The arrogance is appalling – all the more when you  consider that many in our midst understand language that “sounds good” to be good. Maybe that’s why we have a few million “undocumented” or “unauthorized” immigrants among us today, and we can’t figure out what to do with them … short of admitting that they are here illegally.

     Still, there is “lingering debate,” folks speak “on condition of anonymity” with “varying degrees of enthusiasm” while “drafting errors” are supposed to excuse sloppy legislative writing.

     And so it goes. Lies and innuendo covered over by clever rhetoric.

     But our clever rhetoric that sounds so good falls far short of Biblical truth:  “…let your ‘Yes’ be yes and your ‘No’ be no, so that you may not fall under condemnation.” (James 5:12b, NRSV)

Serenity

Do you see what I see these days?

I watch people. I'm a news hawk. I move about town on most days. I go to malls...all that stuff.
And I'm seeing more and more of what I call dysfunctional behavior. Aggressive driving on the rise. Bizarre stories in the news every day. Inability to just "talk politics" anymore. Many are yelling at each other. I was threatened by three thugs in a crappy old Civic recently...all that stuff adds up to scary.

Of course, there is respite. I have my church and am active there. My family seems closer each day. Friends are more valued. ... and then there are just some concepts, some thought patterns, some images I try to meld into. Images like this one. I call it "Serenity."