Courage

(For Kathy)

I will try my best to be slow-eyed
And level;
Carried and cared-for
Even as I carry and care for
All that has been given me,
All that has been granted.

“Courage catching out,
Courage coming home,”

A cadence I have memorized
And whispered back
To shoreline, shoulder,
And hungry night, aching, full
Alive with both absence and presence.
I am trying
To give this same, simple wisdom
To you, this night:
Do not give —
(Don’t you dare give) —
Any more darkness
To the space between the stars
Than they have given you.

We gathered around your dining room table that certain night
And you telegraphed warnings.
You were quietly guarding
Your sister’s heart, and I shivered,
Watching you watch me.

Later, I won you over,
(Thank God)
Hinting at the way one
Conducts oneself in certain sidings
When the grainers coast like ghosts
And the bulls beat the night
And the bushes
With their Maglites.

You laughed that certain way
That understood the way I laughed.

Years later,
We hiked the ravine behind your house.
You held my son’s hand
And steered him well clear
Of ticks and poison ivy.
You won me over
(Thank God)
When you let him run ahead,
But kept close behind.
As the shadows grew long
And the sun dipped below the trees,
You called him to you
Before he knew that he was scared.

In certain asides,
We have sipped wine,
Together, you and I,
And stared obliquely
At the absurdity of it all,
And agreed upon certain finalities.

Tonight, I pray you understand:
I am pushing aside your mother, husband, brother —
Even sister —
To look you in the eye
The way that you looked into mine
That night;
To hold your shoulders
And say,
“Courage catching out,
Courage coming home.”

James and Kevin Get Robbed at Gunpoint

So, I don't get many requests for narrative retellings, outside of my kids. (Who are usually more than satisfied with anything I can make up on the spot that involves monsters who are scared of little boys, or the time I replaced the timing chain on the Honda and forgot to torque the crankshaft pulley bolt.) But there are a few things that friends and family have asked me to recount in writing that for one reason or another I've tended to avoid. Among them: The first time I hopped a train; my "road name" (Do I have one? What is it? How did I get it?); "Cuban cigars"(severely abbreviated version available here: https://portal.tiu.edu/uportal/tcphilosophy/cigarcw); and ... James and Kevin get robbed at gunpoint. This is a hasty recounting of the latter.

It was December of 2000, the day after Christmas. Or maybe two days. Pretty sure it was the 26th. I had recently returned from one of my "amorphous wanderings" and at the behest of my mother had agreed to spend at least Christmas and a couple of days at my parents' house. I don't remember if I called James, or if he got in touch with me, but one way or another we agreed that we ought to touch base before the new year.

I pause here to say a word about James. It's somewhat important to the narrative, for reasons that will hopefully become clear. James and I have been friends for a long, long time. I grew up in a neighborhood where there were no other boys my age: None. But I had the good fortune of having James's grandparents living next door to me, so James visited often, and at least once or twice a week I was given the glorious opportunity to partake in that particular brand of chaos that only little boys can generate. (I am well-acquainted with this chaos: Grand fate has determined that my good wife and I should be blessed with naught but a sea of XY-chromosomal knuckleheads in our house.) Over the course of time, James and I seem to have developed some sort of bizarre, Jake-and-Elwood, Vulcan mind-meld ... thing.

Anyway.

So James has always been this "come what may" character in my life: "What if the fire gets out of control?" ("It won't, because it's too wet for that to happen."); "What if rat patrol catches us with the truck when we're not supposed to have it?" ("We asked Doug and Pam if we could take the truck and they said it was fine."); "What if we fall out of the tree?" ("The tree limbs are like stair-steps -- it won't happen, no matter how windy it gets."); "Hey ... those sounded like gunshots." ("Probably.")

But circumstances had conspired to muck things up some: I was recently divorced and feeling a bit ... "red-eyed, stamping at the dirt, and nothing to lose." I'd recently learned to get up my guts to do things like hop on grain cars, turn awkward conversations with knife-wielding and belligerent half-drunk transients into weepy-eyed philosophy discussions, and carry a half-gallon of good water next to my person, always, no matter what. I learned that "West is dead and north is nice," and (somewhat inconveniently, given that last truism) that "North isn't always north." Too much whiskey, too much pipe tobacco ... shaking, crying, confessing streams of secrets to people with names like "The Texas Madman." There's nothing at all poetic about it now, I admit, but I swear it was grace all the same.

Anyway.

It was the night after Christmas, I believe, and James and I were walking. Let's say that I (and I alone) was smoking a great big, giant, conspicuously obvious and gloriously stinky Cuban cigar. We're walking, talking ... and in the street-lamp light a block ahead of us, I see two dark figures walking slowly, deliberately down the middle of the street toward us. So here is where things get interesting. James seems to notice them as well, but continues his nonchalant conversation, gloriously receptive to grace and God's pre-destination. I on the other hand am thinking, "Those sons-of-bitches have nothing at all good in mind." And in that moment, the following three reactions took place within me simultaneously: (1) We're two blocks between my parents' house and the Van Enks' old place; if we cut the chatter, bolt now, and start hopping fences we'll be safe and sound; (2) we have the shadows and they've got light in their eyes, lamp-lit like stars on a stage -- if we hit the ground now -- right this second -- we'll disappear; (3) I don't want James to think I'm afraid. Ah, good old pride. I'd spent the last three years trying to prove my fearlessness to an absent audience, and I just couldn't stop. Clearly, I hadn't learned to finesse the details between courage and stupid recklessness. And my best friend and I were about to pay the price for that.

The conversation ambled forward, and James and I did as well, relentlessly closing the space between ourselves and the two men walking down the middle of the street. As we grew closer, I observed the posture of the two men: The tall one had his hands jammed in his coat pockets, head down; the short one walked with his back arched, head held high, marching. Not good. As we drew parallel to each other, the short one said, "How are you two gentlemen doing this fine evening?" And my heart sank. Here we go. Any doubt I'd had about how this evening was going to end evaporated in an instant. Although we have never talked about it since, I have to believe that at this point even James understood that he was about to have an "experience." For my part, my thoughts went from "bloodless robbery" to "dead friends." I wondered what my mom would say to Ron Magers; how long it would take for my girlfriend to hear the news.

We continued walking, and at some point I actually closed my eyes and began praying, "Please let it pass, please let it pass, please ...." And then we heard the shouting: Non-descript yelling. For a split-second, I thought these two were staging some sort of fight with each other. Maybe they were drunk, or high. Maybe I was wrong. But no. The short one was marching toward us, presently, his hand extended, gun in hand. He was much closer than I'd anticipated. I don't know what made me look, but I saw the tall one dive into the driver's seat of a car parked alongside the road. How long had they been watching us? Just how orchestrated was this offense? I don't remember the exact words he used, but we were instructed to stop in our tracks. Somewhere in there, an order to let him see our hands was registered. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw James put his hands in the air. I was stuck in the moment. I was still trying to figure out the best way to approach this. While I was treasuring all of this away in my heart, the short one was marching steadily forward, small-caliber gun now pointed directly at my face. "I SAID show me those hands!" Ah. My hands were still jammed into my coat pockets; the fire-red cherry on the end of my Cuba-via-Winnipeg cigar still glowing happily in the post-yuletide night. And now the short one was marching blindly, angrily across the urban landscape, over curbside and storm sewer, rapidly and madly closing the distance between us, that black barrel now painting its shadow on my forehead. And I thought about the time James and I were shooting his dead father's guns out in Beecher, and I held that double-barrel 10-gauge that he liked to call "The Hammer," with both triggers cocked, when my foot caught a clog of mud in the field and I let both barrels go in one whisper-thin finger twitch, launching two heavy, solid-lead slugs not more than four feet in front of me. Such a hole in the heavy autumn earth they made. I imagined what my head would look like in the morning after the short one's careless, twitchy finger let adrenaline change his life and mine forever. I wondered what my father would tell my mother to give her peace.

And just like that, I was close enough to the short one's gun underneath the lamplight to be able to accurately describe it as a .25-caliber pistol to the police. My hands finally found their way into the air. "Throw your wallets on the ground!" we were told. Easy enough. "And there better be money in there or I'll kill you, both of you!" Oh. Well, now, there's a problem. I'd gotten out of the habit of carrying cash. Or, for that matter, I.D. Both were inconvenient freight when on the road. I honestly had no idea how much cash -- if any -- I had in my wallet. Three dollars? Maybe two. Wallets on the ground, now, the short one crouches down to begin examining the spoils. As he does so, I watch the gun carelessly slant this way and that, angled always toward my head. "Get out of here!" the short one barks. James and I begin backing away. Ah, sweet impotence. "What are you walking for? run ... RUN, motherfuckers!"

Well.

For a moment, I experienced a feeling I didn't recognize again until many years later, the first time one of my boys looked me square in the eye and said, "NO!" when I told him to do something. That "motherfuckers" was simply not necessary. I even made a point to tell the police afterward that the short one was left-handed, and had conspicuously avoided profanity. Until the end. Guns in faces, barked orders, careless trigger fingers ... but humiliation for humiliation's sake? Hadn't I lost enough face, already? Good God ... what more? Just how humble did I have to be? Abandoned for another man; no wealth, no ambition, no cash, no cache ... I brought three dollars and no I.D. to the table, and gave it all, and now the last of my dignity as we ran, James and I, through the night back to my parents' house. They thought we were joking when we burst through the door and I exclaimed, "Give me the phone! We've been robbed at gunpoint!" They laughed. Such a joke.

James went home to his good wife and a warm bed. I couldn't sleep in my childhood bed, alone, and ended up on the floor, blanketless and cold. I awoke at dawn and told God and the streets that they'd have to do better if they were going to upstage the terror of limb-severing boxcars silently gliding through the yard. And I marched the streets indignant and ugly until I found James's wallet, cashless but otherwise intact. My wallet was retrieved the night before by a neighbor. Two dollars were still safely ensconced therein. I like to think they knew they'd be drinking damnation upon themselves had they taken it. I like to think the short one saw my eyes.

So, what did I earn? What have I carried forward? In the most practical sense, I've learned to listen to that relaxed voice of reason that most of us ignore. When it's past eleven, and I've buttoned up the exhaust manifold, but that one stubborn bolt won't cooperate ... I stop. There's time for a glass of Scotch and a short conversation: It isn't worth a wrist and a paid-for family car to force my pride in the moment. After that night, I was much more introspective about the difference between "fearless" and "foolhardy." Many of the things I'd been routinely doing up until then suddenly seemed horrific and irresponsible. I had an alarming sense of responsibility to my undefined future, and the people who lived and loved there.

Ash Wednesday

Ash Wednesday comes and goes most years with little notice. Maybe you make your way up the concrete stairs to your cubicle in the morning, and you’re startled to see the imprint of ash on the forehead of a Catholic coworker. Ah. It’s Ash Wednesday, isn’t it? Or perhaps, like me, you log onto Facebook and see this, from a friend: “Knows that Ash Wednesday takes on new poignancy when one has the ashes of their child sitting on a shelf. We are dust, and to dust we shall return.” Indeed.

(And isn’t it strange how, before I awoke to the realization of the liturgical significance of the day, my wife and I in one accord thought we ought to head out one of these days to Resurrection Cemetery to visit our lost baby’s grave?)

Being a solidly half-Dutch product of the Evangelical Free Church in America, I am no scholar of the traditional liturgical calendar. (Until Wikipedia explained otherwise this very day, I thought Shrove Tuesday and Fat Tuesday were different days in separate weeks.) Sure, there’s Palm Sunday — replete with the congregation’s kindergarten faction parading down the church aisles carrying palm fronds and marching to the strains of “Tell Me the Stories of Jesus” — and obviously Easter, but Ash Wednesday … well, what’s a good protestant to do with *that*?

From what I’ve heard about Ash Wednesday, it seems that people either view it as an opportunity to prove to God a willingness to deny themselves one comfort or another as a nod to the way Jesus denied his own divine nature so that he might voluntarily suffer and die for our sins, or … as an acknowledgement of the weight and reality of death in our lives: “We are dust, and to dust we shall return.” Leaving aside for the moment the valid argument that the two views are in no way mutually exclusive, I cast my vote for the latter. The way I see it, before you can hope to in any way “identify” with the suffering of Christ, you need to be very clear on what your status is without his intervention. And that status is, dust … mud … nothing to speak of. After every grand argument; after every well-told story; after every Oscar nomination, every Nobel Prize acceptance speech; every standing ovation, every “journey of self-discovery” … the yawning emptiness of the grave awaits.

And that’s that.

The wages of sin is death. And who of us does not sin? And what is death but the reduction of all of our consequence to dust, ash … the return of our physical presence in this place and time to meaninglessness?

And now our formerly benign “Ash Wednesday” comes into sharp focus. The reality of this day, I think, is not best spent pretending that by somehow denying ourselves that slice of pizza, that swig of Scotch, that piece of chocolate, that we’re somehow communing with the Son of God. I think the time is better spent considering what life and death look like without the infusion of grace that God gives: “A meaningless movement; a movie script ending.” We are dust. We’re a vapor. Ah … but with an asterisk. The story of Lent is a story full of hopeful — and foreboding — foreshadowing: The Good News is that Ash Wednesday is meaningless outside of the dark shadow of Good Friday and the blinding light of Easter.

When I see myself graveside, grief-laden and barely able to push the top of my head upward against the falling rain, yes, I do find comfort in seeing Jesus there, head hung low and hiding a smile. “Just wait … it’s only dust, but dust isn’t what it used to be any more.”