Accidental Dinner Theater

After church Sunday my wife, son and I went to one of those cool pizza cafes where all the employees are young, hairy, and slovenly dressed and were treated to a comical drama about a poorly run restaurant. Thankfully, all of us had that wonderful patience working that comes from having no particular place to go or thing to do, so we sat patiently in our booth watching the dinner theater of an obviously shorthanded staff crippled by quiet but persistent incompetence.  

The show started downstage left with the table of older ladies next to us who apparently had all their checks mixed up with some other table’s checks. As the ladies chirped and quibbled over their bills, my wife noticed at center stage right the only two waitresses in the rapidly filling restaurant rifling through a stack of previously impaled checks, quietly but desperately trying to sort the mess out. And, up stage the hairy male minions unhurriedly went about their business of pizza making.

Shortly the waitress returned to the pleasant old ladies with many an “I’m sorry” falling from her lips. A quiet frustration rested on her dewy brow and her dewy upper lip and her dewy makeup coated cheeks as she took our drink order. Already alerted by our general observations that the service might be impaired, we ordered our meal with the drinks. Our drinks arrived promptly, and we sat back to watch the show.

Several minor players paraded past our booth, plates and platters in hand, presumably to deliver meals, but stopping at table after table unable to pawn off the proffered dishes to anyone. For all the world, they looked like they were offering hors d' oeuvres at a party with no takers.

One of these players, a male I think, could have passed for a hipster version of Gollum although his carriage was erect and his gait had a light spring on the upswing. His newsboy cap settled at his eyebrows and though he carried his hors d' oeuvres for multiple laps would hardly make eye contact to confirm the correct destination.

Another of the hors d' oeuvre toters, rocked the unwashed hippie with an Aunt Jemima do-rag look. He had a gauge in his ear big enough for a circus poodle to jump through. His anemic blue cords dragged the ground behind his dirty hemp shoes as he shuffled about delivering the wrong dish to yet another table.  

One of the players cast in the role of waitress, the one waiting on us, appeared from the rear to be too much flat bottomed waitress poured into too little denim, giving the impression of a woman wedged in a funnel. Everything about her seemed slightly distressed and in a mild disarray, her hair, her sweaty makeup, her fist full of meal checks. And there were the glances over her shoulder and away from those she waited on, as if some emergency compelled her attention elsewhere.

Her counterpart, dressed in a sheer blouse that seemed meant to suggest the airiness of a fairy, floated through the air from the waist up, but the skinny little legs protruding from the itty bitty pink shorts worked like pistons when the gaps in tables exposed their mechanics. Her hair too, looked disheveled along with the rest of the company, but that seemed to be in dress code. 

We ate our food (when it finally arrived… in stages), watched the growing number of diners slowly swamp the unkempt pizza drones, and vowed never to return to the accidental dinner theater.  

Winning Forever

This is an article I wrote for an ECS publication called Flight that came out this month. 

Our former Headmaster Mr. Steve Collums for as long as I can remember referred to athletics at Evangelical Christian School as “co-curricular.” I always had the picture in my head that he meant for athletics at ECS to “run along side” of academics in an effort to aid, enhance, and complete its mission beyond the classroom setting. Never in all my years at this school did it occur to me that winning should trump the lessons and relationships that come through the daily strivings of practice. Winning alone, even winning them all, cannot be co-curricular.

In 1999 as the last seconds rolled off the clock securing a 13-0 state championship season, I stepped across the white sideline and onto a field of wild, jubilant, mayhem. Players, coaches, and fans swarmed the field high -fiving, hugging, shouting, cheering, crying …displaying every possible emotion in the immediate aftermath of that victory. That kind of scene floats in the dreams of every high school player. It had floated in mine as a coach. We all came to know it as the “The Dream Season”. And that day, dreams became reality on the turf of Vanderbilt Stadium.

Yet, twenty minutes into the celebration, I distinctly remember asking myself, “Is this it?” The power of the moment had fled almost as rapidly as it had burst out at the expiration of the clock. Glory proved fleeting and it would only pause for a very short while before it dashed on leaving behind the sobering recognition that we would have to do it all again the next year if we wanted this feeling.

Fast forward to 2013. Once again I found myself treading the turf of Vanderbilt Stadium, only this time our team wouldn’t be playing there for a championship. We were walking through … practicing. We were on our way to another stadium and yet another state championship game.

 The tunnel, the turf, the stadium ambushed me. I found myself walking alone on the same sideline I had walked 14 years earlier but now with tears streaming down my face. I sat on a bench and wept. I wept because the game of football had revealed the character of those young men to me and I missed them. I loved them. I loved the process of coaching those boys and watching them grow into men.

Frankly, that’s what we do in athletics at Evangelical Christian School. We love the process. Winning just doesn’t last long enough. Winning is just window dressing for the process called coaching. Our Athletic Director Geoff Walters seems cagey to some people when they ask him about the prospects of our teams and he replies, “I’ll tell ya in about 15 years.” What he means is that the success of our athletic program has nothing to do with wins and losses but has everything to do with the process of helping young people live lives of integrity and influence for Christ.

A recent conversation with Bill Edwards (’00), member of that 1999 Dream Season, confirmed yet again the long lasting power of an athletic program committed to the process of growing young men and women of integrity. “We had a group of godly men who invested in us not only as athletes but in life!  The coaches at ECS spoke truth into our lives and modeled for us what it means to be a godly man, husband, father, etc..”  Bill went on to say  “The influence that the coaches had in my life and many others is absolutely priceless, and I am so thankful to have had the opportunity to be a part of that community.  You just don't find that same commitment at the next levels.” Having played D-1 college baseball and spent a good deal of time in the minor leagues, he’s encountered plenty of coaches.

Kelsey Huggins (‘11) explains that the chief lesson of her ECS athletic career centered on grace. “The most valuable lesson I learned was one about grace. Our coaches not only taught us the skills and strategies to succeed on the field, but they showed us how to play with humility and walk away from a game with dignity.  Looking back, I don't remember the games we lost or the good plays I made.  Instead, when I look back on my recent days as an ECS athlete, I remember the grace and love my coaches and teammates showed me.” Kelsey has gone on to share those lessons of grace while working in Africa and Guatemala over the past year.

Early in May, Palmer Albertine (’00) delivered the chapel message centered on his relationship with his best friend and teammate from that 1999 team. Palmer’s passionate retelling of Brandon Fitzhugh’s (’00) tragic death was a powerful example of the same grace that Kelsey mentioned. His love for Brandon, whose life was spiraling out of control, was forged on the athletic fields of ECS and in an environment where Palmer was certain that “…their (coaches) real concern wasn’t about winning games, but about winning the eternal game.” That eternal perspective finds Palmer as an elementary PE teacher and coach at Presbyterian Day School where he is now investing himself in the lives of young boys and keeping the process that began at ECS going.

Countless other examples of the impact of the ECS athletic program live on in the likes of Barrett Jones and Morgan Cox, but theirs is a big stage. However, many more former ECS athletes play on smaller stages all over the world. Some of them are PE teachers, restaurateurs, preachers, missionaries, soldiers, cadets, moms and dads. Some sell stocks and bonds and some of them raise chickens in Africa. What they do doesn’t matter so much as why they do. And the why comes from an understanding that all of life is practice for eternal life. And practice matters.

I think the tears that clouded my vision last fall at Vanderbilt served as a fitting prism to see clearly once again that we are about something infinitely more important than a winning season. We are about winning people. Forever.  

Doubts of Confirmation

I don’t know why we are always so surprised and disappointed in our doubts. We are in good company. John the Baptist needed reassurance, Doubting Thomas, James the brother of Jesus, all of Christ’s followers for that matter wallowed in doubts and fears after the crucifixion. Then the physical presence of Jesus or in John’s case a direct word from the physical Jesus reassures. I suspect the desire for physical evidence springs from our origin as a people made for and satisfied by God’s presence. Our roots in the physical should give way to the winds of the Spirit more readily, but they don’t. We incline to the material world. But, once upon a time we thought more highly of Spiritual things.

Much of this life for a Christian strikes me as a walk on the road to Emmaus. We walk along with Jesus at our sides and don’t even know he’s Jesus. This of course has nothing at all to do with the fact that he is still Jesus. Then we find something of the familiar in his words or deeds and are elated at the revelation that he has been with us all along.

Doubting is far from uncommon and seems to me a confirmation that we were made for God’s presence where no dark glass obscures our vision. We will have that someday, when Faith and Hope are no longer needed because we are finally in the presence of the One who satisfies completely. 

Parting is such sweet sorrow

Parting is such sweet sorrow … but only for the Christian. For, it is only the Christian who has certitude that his partings with his brothers and sisters are only temporary.  No divide can be contrived that can keep them forever apart. Miles don’t matter. They represent a geographic inconvenience. Time doesn’t matter; it will one day be rolled up like a carpet.

Parting ultimately doesn’t exist for Believers. We are one body, and the body is never parted from itself short of great violence, but there is no violence that can tear one from the body of Christ. So it would seem that parting is a kind of failing of eyesight more than a statement of truth or possibility. We just can’t see far enough. Parting for a Believer is a dirty trick of the material world, but a Christian is spirit too and bound to all other Christians of the Body in that spirit.

I will soon be parted from two beloved friends. Chicago is a long way but I must remind myself that they’ve not left me, they’ve just run off over the hill a piece and out of view and will be back in sight soon enough.  That at least makes the parting sweet. We have not been sundered from each other in reality. We are still bound to the Body. We are still whole.

But I am in sorrow. I will miss them dreadfully. I suppose that really I mean that my eyes will miss them and my ears. I will miss their bright young faces and the lilt of their voices. I will miss the strong handshakes and the affectionate hugs. But I do not grieve like those who have no hope. My friends and I are bound by nothing less than Jesus Christ, our righteousness and that defies space and time. We will be together again…but not yet. 

Ambition Should be Made of Sterner Stuff

No one is likely to stab me for being ambitious. Sometimes I wish someone might see the flame of self-promotion in me and seek to snuff it out with his steely blade that I might not interfere with his rise to the top of whatever it is that we’re duty bound to rise to the top of.

I’m just not a riser anymore. But, I can’t work up any shame in the fact. Once upon a time I was. I wanted to achieve lofty goals; I wanted to be the best at everything I set my hand to--- in that competitive ME way. I wanted the trappings of the best, recognition and stuff. But then my son’s battle with cancer stripped the ambition away.

When he got sick, I didn’t want to be the best anything but a Dad.  I had always wanted that, but the battle with cancer whipped that desire into overdrive. The nagging feeling that time as Jacob’s Dad would very likely be short pressed in from all sides, but intuitively I knew that the only way to be the kind of Dad I needed to be meant teaching and treating Jacob like he would live to be 80. Yet, an 80 year old man wouldn’t be enough. Really, I wanted to build a man suitable for eternity.

Cancer invests fathering with a sense of urgency. For the longest I couldn’t decide if my urgency was a lack of faith that Jacob would be healed or simply the recognition that fathering requires urgency at all times because death keeps no clocks and runs on no schedules. I had every confidence that the Lord could heal Jacob but no assurance that he would. No assurance that His will would bend to mine and my son would live a long long time.

It wasn’t so much that I crammed stuff in, but the battle afforded uncounted opportunities to teach. Every difficulty proved to be a teachable moment. Every difficulty required that I father and that I be Fathered. Every difficulty required the mustering of courage, the mustering of faith, the mustering of perseverance. And even still the doubt would creep in, the feeling that God and Scripture could not be trusted. I taught Jacob what Scripture said anyway. Feelings are liars. I know that now.

For a little over three years, we fought on, Jacob, Heather and I. I fathered she mothered Jacob grew into a man. He died a man at the age of nine, the best man I have ever known.

After he died ambition lay moldering in the ash heap, without the power of a phoenix. It will certainly never rise again in its former iteration. I’ve learned to love different things now.  It’s just that none of them are things. 

Listening to Myself Talk

A power beyond reckoning lies in telling our own story. I had the strange sensation today of actually being able to listen to myself as I recounted an abbreviated version of my life story to someone. I had started my tale the day before in my classroom as part of an interview for some school publication but had to continue it today in the office of my interrogator. I had come to the part of my life where my son Jacob had been diagnosed with cancer when I began to hear myself.

Most of the time I ignore me when I talk; it’s just noise to me, but today the words found traction in my ears as I shared Jacob’s fight with cancer. It crashed in on my thick noggin that his story, my story were compelling testimonies of the grace of God. I listened to me tell about his resilient faith in Christ despite the terrible disappointment we all had when he first relapsed. I heard about the gracious kindness and patience he showed in the midst of difficulty and inconvenience. I heard me once again tell about his last words to me and his mother. He told us to “Be Strong”. Then he went to be with Jesus.

I wasn’t the only one listening today though. Another overheard the recounting of my story, his story. She was moved to tears and even moved to a sense of awe that I could even share so difficult a story. Then it occurred to me yet again that not only can I tell the story I must.

I have always known the story of my son Jacob had power for other people, but today I realized the power it has for me. That story is mine and no one can tell it like I can. No one can convey the joy and no one can convey the pain like I can. And no one can convey the grace that Christ poured out on me like I can.

My wife Heather has a different story. Many of the events are the same, but the telling must necessarily be different. That is her story and the power is great indeed. It is the power of a mother telling what a mother knows and feels. It is the story of the grace of Christ poured out on her and no one can tell it like she can.

We all have a story. And the story of all Christians is one of power. The power of grace poured out, running over us and spilling out into the lives around us. May we be faithful to tell our story. 

Stout Fences

“They were testing the fences for weaknesses systematically.” --- Robert Muldoon, Jurassic Park

I cannot help but think that there is something savage and carnivorous in us all that requires us to be hemmed in by stout fences. It doesn’t require much introspection to imagine the possible destruction I could bring on myself and others if my baser inclinations were allowed to run free. But even now the use of free in this instance is a lie. The phrase should run more like if my baser inclinations were set loose…sounds more like the releasing of an animal and would be more accurate.

We live in a culture that cries freedom but has only really cried let us be animals. Ours is a degenerate, base freedom that has grown only to mean lack of restraint. Our culture has tested the fences for weaknesses systematically and has breached the barrier that long held us back from the destruction that must come when men become beasts.

The beasts ripped a gaping hole in the fence of Marriage. Men and women in search of freedom dashed to pieces the idea that sacred vows are just that, sacred and inviolable bonds that can only safely be severed by death. For the freedom of sex with anyone and everyone, they dashed to pieces the idea that being constant and true are of greater worth than the treacherous pleasure of adultery. Destroy this fence and be free…. to wreck and maim countless lives, especially those of your children.

Having started down that road and destroyed the image of the sacred, absurdity and rabid insanity rush to pull up the posts and throw down the rails still standing. The sacred image and symbol of marriage that adultery defiles would be corrupted utterly through the ultimate perversion of same sex “marriage”. The fence once breached is the more easily destroyed in the name of freedom… the freedom to be absurdly less than even animals and defy the very nature of anatomy. And lives are destroyed and lies masquerade as truth.

We are so free now that we can destroy with impunity the weak and the helpless who prove to be inconvenient impediments to our freedoms. We are now so free that for years without interruption a man in Philadelphia can slaughter children by the thousands, get rich doing it and the silence is deafening. Animals have been known to eat their own young.

In so many places the fences lie in ruin and the velociraptors are free. Cultural destruction at the hands of free animals is inevitable… unless the men who are left hem us in again with stout fences. 

A Ruined Routine

Routine gives us security. For instance, the alarm goes off on my IPhone every morning of the work week at 5:00 am. I do the double click click and go back to sleep. Five minutes later I am double click clicking and trying to make up my mind if I really have to pee bad enough to get up right that minute. Five minutes later I am up and in the bathroom staring at the toilet bowl from on high, ---not the up close college stare. I let the dog out, start the coffee and jump in the shower. I brush my teeth first, lather up head to toe next, and then break out the razor to tidy up the beard outline. The curtain is pulled back from the right side; I grab my towel, close the curtain to dry off, then pull the curtain all the way back from right to left and step out. Any deviation from this routine can send the whole morning spiraling out of control. Routine is good.

Many mornings I stop at the rural Shell station just down the road from me. I park in the same spot most days, walk in, get my Diet Pepsi and ask for a sausage-egg-and cheese biscuit from the guy who has been working mornings forever. Our relationship represents the perfect world of mindless transactions. I ask for the biscuit almost every day; he walks over to the warmer, deftly plucks me a biscuit from the mass of biscuits with his shiny tongs, and plops it down on the counter and every morning, promptly asks me if I would like a sack, to which I reply every morning “No.” I swipe my card and every morning he asks me, “Debit or credit?” to which, every morning, I reply, “credit.”

This scene was played out every morning for several months with no mishaps, no prying questions about me, my family or my health, and certainly no feigned wishing me a great day. I came I bought I left. He could care less about me and my day. It was a nice arrangement. Then one morning all that changed.

The day started as usual, and I arrived at the usual time and the usual spot at my rural Shell station. I walked in, got my Diet Pepsi and came face to face with New Guy. He didn’t look like my Old Guy---a balding, frumpy fellow with an 8 o’clock shadow whose sparse hair was always disheveled and who had a haggard hang dog look most mornings.He had to be in his mid-thirties going on old. No, New Guy looked crisp. A thick head full of black, I suspect Persian, hair neatly combed and slick to the eye. His dark, bright eyes peeped out from behind his not unstylish glasses and his broad mouth peeled open to dazzling white teeth and the words, “Good Morning.”

The whole incident startled me. My routine appeared in jeopardy. I asked for my usual sausage-egg-and cheese biscuit. New Guy’s movement to the warmer seemed sure and practiced. He slid back the rear glass deftly but then haltingly took the tongs in hand. He repeated again what kind of biscuit I had requested and I concurred. He nervously clicked the tongs together and peered in amongst the biscuits like a clerk at Petco trying to decide which Neon Tetra to nab. He nervously clicked his tongs again and then started lifting every biscuit under the hot lights and looking at their undersides like he was trying to pick out a male kitten. After a considerable number of misfires, he settled on the biscuit with the right look and marched it over to the register.

 Without asking my druthers, New Guy commenced the painful task of rubbing open the plastic sack that I was apparently required to take along. His thumb and pointer finger couldn’t manage the task, so an application of saliva to the finger tips made the operation possible and my biscuit and Diet Pepsi were bagged as I swiped my card. I derived some security from the inevitable “Debit or Credit” utterance but that small comfort was destroyed with the beneficent benediction of “Have a good day, sir” being flung at my back.

I crawled in the truck depressed and out of sorts at such a bad start to the day and drove under a cloud all the way to work. Perhaps my Old Guy was just sick. Tomorrow’s a new day I told myself. But it wasn’t. 

For weeks now New Guy has been picking out my sausage-egg- and cheese kitten, forcing me to take a sack and flashing that dazzlingly bright smile of his. I suppose this is to be my New Normal. But, it is maddening that on those days when I lather up first and brush my teeth second and let the dog make the coffee and start my day out all wrong that I can’t just hustle in for my Diet Pepsi and biscuit. No, I have to wait for the search and wait for the bag and feel the weight of “Have a good day, sir” cast on my hurried back. But it is a routine…I guess. 

Hold the Fort

My sweet wife just asked me why she has to have a child who needs so much help on school work. I didn’t answer. I know her heart.

She wasn't faulting our kid or lamenting having a child with a learning need. Neither of us would trade Caleb for some genetically altered picture of human perfection. She was asking a question with deeper roots: Why is life so full of toil and vexation? Oh, she knows the answer. We both know the theology of the Fall of Man. What we struggle with is the accumulated weight of that Fall, the weight that bears down on us from every angle all the time with never a reprieve. Or so it seems. Heather speaks as a battle scarred mother who has lost a son to cancer after a long, loosing fight. I heard her words not as a complaint but as a plea, a plea for the rest promised in Christ.

Living makes us weary, and for the life of me I cannot see how anyone can look at this world and not see the weight looming over all creation slowly grinding all things down. What fool can look out their window at the world and glory in the progress of Man? Where is the upward climb from the primordial sludge? I look out and see a rapidly accelerating slide back to that sludge. Since we will not return to our real origins as image bearers of the Most High God, we return to the ones we fabricated. We reduce ourselves to single celled filth dwellers and wonder why we live in a world of filth.

But what to do for now, until Christ returns or calls us home? We do like Paul and pour ourselves out like drink offerings for those who need us and by so doing we pour ourselves out to Jesus. When Heather slaves with our son over the math that he just can’t seem to get, she does something eternal. She is pouring herself into another, someone weaker, someone who needs her just as much as she needs Christ. She wears herself out once again--- at a good thing --- and grows weary.

Scripture commands us not to be weary in well doing, but does it command us not to be weary of having to do well? It strikes me that on some level we should be weary of this sin cursed world and long for another. But like good soldiers, we are called to fight on, weary as we may be, knowing that where and while we fight the weight of this world is pressed back and hope springs anew. The rest of Jesus is coming. We just need to hold our forts. 

Salute to Hot Biscuits

I just recently rediscovered the power of biscuits. The other evening I came in from the cold, dark, dampness of winter to be greeted by a cookie sheet bejeweled with golden brown goodness. Honestly it was a nostalgic moment as I wedged my butter knife into their flaky middles and gently pried upward in an attempt to get the perfect proportion of top to bottom. Then I sliced off a pat of butter, a generous pat, pinched its slippery sides with my fingers and tucked it between the two halves. Then I repeated the whole process for every biscuit on the sheet.

Biscuits and Karo syrup will forever represent all that is really good in the world to the little kid in me. Biscuits mean security. Biscuits mean Granny Lou and Aunt Motel and Aunt Lucille. Their homes were places I could go and stay a week or even two and never miss home. At their homes there were always biscuits, iron skillets, and the sliding of iron cookware on oven racks followed and the warm thump of oven doors closing. I don’t ever recall worrying about anything at their homes, except maybe if there might not be enough chocolate gravy for my second pair of biscuits.

Growing up so often ruins appreciation. I think I had forgotten the beauty of hot biscuits. So that night, to honor the biscuit, the ladies who made them for me, and the security of warm places, now and from my childhood, I ate three, butter laden, Karo sodden, perfectly parted symbols of warmth and security. And toasted their perfection with a tall glass of cold milk. Sometimes it’s good to be  a kid again.   

Honey Defies Physics

Honey defies physics. But it’s not just honey; it’s syrup and sorghum too. For that matter it is anything sticky and edible that a body might wish to keep contained in its container. Just last night I got so aggravated at the honey jar I would have thrown it against the wall….but it was sticking to my fingers.

 It was all sticky on the outside, and it had left its sticky circular foot print on the shelf, and it stuck all over my fingers, and I can’t stand sticky fingers. I ran the hot water and rinsed the outside of the jar off and swabbed off the shelf with a wet rag. Then I got out the “honey spoon” we got somewhere in Arkansas. It’s made out of cherry wood and has a flat end with a honey comb pattern cut in it. It is definitely a cool “spoon.” I dipped it in the honey, twirled the spoon about to keep the sticky goodness in its place and popped it in my mouth. Good stuff. I then rinsed the spoon clean, set the honey jar on the window seal above the sink and went on about my business.

I returned just a little while later for another small smackeral only to find the jar STICKY again and the tell-tale sticky foot print back, but this time on the previously clean window seal. Honey obviously is no respecter of glass. It respects the stupid plastic bear even less. How does it pass through solid materials to the other side and set up shop?

Sorghum does the same thing. There is no pancake syrup that a chubby glass or plastic woman can keep hemmed up for long. Karo has never seen a bottle it could not thwart with its sticky goodness. And chocolate syrup refuses to recognize its place.

Right now in our pantry four containers of sticky edibles have gripped their shelf with sugary toes and have to be wrenched loose in order to be pressed into service. I would clean the shelf, but why bother….. the laws of physics won’t apply this time either. 

Green Rubber Knee Boots

Nothing screamed freedom for me as a kid like green rubber knee boots. Each winter meant new boots for me and my little brother. Sometimes they were Christmas presents, but more often they were simply necessities of two boys who took their job of getting dirty very seriously and whose feet were apparently steeped in fertilizer each night.

Sometimes we would go with our folks to pick them right off the shelf at the store. These generally stood straight and proud on metal shelves with a little forward lean to them giving the boots an air of slightly bowing soldiers ready for service. They came shackled together with a length of thin white cord or perhaps a plastic thread. Depending on the model, they would sport long yellow laces all the way up the front and a strip of yellow rubber around the top. Sometimes we got the plain slip on kind with no laces, but I found that I loved the lace up version better.

I loved threading those laces in and out and in and out and then cinching them down tight at the top to lock the legs of my overalls or jeans in place and make that puffy denim billow at the knee. You couldn’t maintain the billowy effect with the slip on kind, so you couldn’t look like a British soldier for very long with those. The only drawback to the laces was that over time the plastic tip would get worn off and then the laces would fray, then threading them through the eyes got to be a chore, and then the cockleburs would grab hold of the ends and make a spiky wad or maybe the beggar lice would gang up on the ends. Either way pulling the laces back through the eyes required some picking and pulling at the end of the day.

Getting boots at the store was nice, but nothing was better than getting boots in a box and even better was if they were wrapped up. Rubber knee boot boxes are big. They are wide. They can double as a lap desk. And the best ones have the hinged lid and open like a treasure chest. I can still remember several Christmases setting a wonderfully wide box with faint traces of vulcanized rubber seeping through the bright Christmas paper on my lap and waiting for the command for me and my brother to open them together. Of course we knew what was inside. We knew the weight distribution of heavy on both ends but light on the sides meant new boots hiding in the cardboard treasure chest. Sometimes a big sticker with a picture of the boots greeted us from under the shredded Christmas paper. But every time, raising the lid meant that a sweet rush of rubbery goodness filled the air.  Then you had to fold back that sheet of packing  paper and maybe pull the cardboard inserts out before you could try them on. And by all means get the wad of paper out of the toe.

I loved the slick inside. I loved wiggling my toes around all the space in the toe. There was always space in the toe, plenty of space for growing feet. Just had to wear more socks. Then came the requisite walk around the room and up and down the hall, booming along on the wood floor. But best of all was the bang of the back door, the clumping down steps and the heavy, thunderous thunk, thunk, thunking across the yard to the nearest mud hole. And freedom. 

The Power of Place

Grandma Connie died this summer at 102. Truth is I had stayed away from that side of the family, my dad’s side, for a long time. The whole thing was a colossal mess, the classic saga of a shattered American family. Started by teenage passion and destroyed by alcohol fueled immaturity and selfishness. My parents married in their teens and divorced in their twenties. My dad showed up occasionally, made promises with breath heavy with beer, and then left again. A gross, ridiculous, misunderstanding played out with my older brother living with my dad and being raised by my Grandma Connie and Granddaddy Bilbo.  

When we got older, my brother would come pick my younger brother and me up and take us to Grandma Connie’s. All too often my dad showed up drunk, wanted to fight somebody, or worse yet wanted to pull a gun and kill somebody. As the years went by I just had to distance myself from them all.  The trajectory of my life just couldn’t include drunken brawls, unhinged anger, and the violation of every game and fish law on the books. So I just stayed away.

Part of me wishes I hadn’t, primarily because of Grandma. I could sit and listen to her for hours, just sip on that instant coffee she always drank and listen. But during those years I had battles to fight of my own, and my emotional capital just wasn’t sufficient to spend any on gun fights and drunken rants from my father.

Then came the drive down for her funeral. I found myself on back roads passing just barely familiar land marks and grappling with memories welling up from deep down inside, stirring a longing for this place. I am not even sure they could rightly be called memories. They were more like emotionally charged impressions, nothing visually vivid, a series of blurred black and white slides projected on a wobbley screen. More visceral, internal, deeper than memory, more like my very marrow. My genes had their origin in the soil of this Mississippi county, and they longed to be here, to return to their native element. I felt free in my place.

 I am convinced the Bible is right; we are of the soil and the soil of our places matter. They speak to our bones. Two weeks after Grandma Connie’s funeral I was back with my son Caleb, to introduce him to my native soil. We went out to her house at the end of County Road 125, the very end. There was no going beyond Grandma’s house. It was the inevitable destination of County Road 125. 

She had always been a gardener, always growing things. Only now the growing things were left behind all round her house, but as if in some last, wildly fertile good-bye the pear trees heavy with fruit bowed their branches to the ground taking on the curve of a weeping willow more than a pear tree. The apples followed the pears' example. My son and I walked around the house amazed at the bounty, pears, apples, grapes and figs. Tomatoes in the vegetable patch flushed varying hues of red like mottled cheeked mourners, spent and aggravated by too many tears. The place seemed to salute her years of stewardship and mourn her passing at the same time.

I mourned too. I lamented the time I could have spent sitting with her taking in her wisdom. I mourned the relationship my children had missed. I missed my history. I missed the place. But now at least my bones could hear again.