Taking Off and Landing

Is it Thursday already? Where did this week go? Where did this month go, for that matter?

Here’s a few options:

1) Moving. Mid-semester is the perfect time to pack up belongings and move across town. Tonight, I put the first coat of paint on my new room, which was formerly a nice teal-ish color. And packed up all the odds and ends in my room. And watched the season premiere of the Office.

2) Classes. Reading about 500 pages a week at this point. Seriously. It makes me scream inside some days.

3) Sarah Martin. One month in, and going well. This is the Internet, people.

4)  Baseball playoffs. I wish I could say I was watching any of the pennant races, but I’d be lying.

5)

6)

7) Season One of Scrubs. Finished last night during a coughing fit that kept me up at 3 a.m. Good times.

It’s been about three weeks since the last post, which is indicative of the fact that it’s back to school time. Classes are already two weeks deep, and I’m mildly swamped with about 400+ pages of reading a week. It happens.

Notable news:

–The Office Season 3 comes out Tuesday! Guess who’s spending most of Tuesday night holed up on the couch.

–Had a date on Thursday. Pretty nice, if I do say so myself. She has a great smile and loves her dayplanner; I have a toothy smile and could care less about a dayplanner, so we get along well, I think.

–New Springsteen album out next month.

–Austin City Limits festival in two weekends. This’ll be my 4th, and something I’ll probably continue to budget both time and money for so long as I’m living in this part of the country.

–Been reading a lot on tradition-based reasoning, Catholic theology, and the relationship between nature and grace. I could never be a Catholic by virtue of the protests that I have against Rome: women in the ministry, Mary, and that I don’t believe in a monolithic tradition that is controvertible with the see of Peter. I believe there’s a plurality within Christianity that is both necessary and healthy, and that we should always seek reunion, but to say that one must be a practicing Catholic to either a) think with the tradition of the church or b) live within this tradition that fuels such thinking is ridiculous.

–Writing a paper on Labor Day on HIV, Kenya, and revisioning sexuality in terms other than do it/don’t do it. Sound like a good thing to do instead of say, swimming or going to Austin? That’s what I thought too.

More substance later, but feel free to offer your own top six of the last week.

As I walked up, the first thing I heard was the mother wailing. These were not polite tears or soft sobs, but large, open, gutteral moans of grief. They were the sounds that the heart makes but the mouth does not often share in, utterances of dreams and sometimes of nightmares. She and her husband sat beneath a green tent in front of a box no larger than a tool box, suspended above an earth covered in green felt, the dirt politely dressed in matching green cloth.

Vincent and Doreen’s baby was born dead. We had known this was a strong possibility, that Ryan-David would, through the sentence of a genetic deformity, not live long. But to be born already dead: this was something else. I don’t remember the first funeral that I went to; I remember the ones that I have missed: my grandmother, Chip Conyers, my great-uncle. But these were the old, or at least the old-er, ones whose lives could be celebrated by recounting the shape of their life and the faith of their heart. But what do you do when death visits someone before their life begins?

Do you speak of how they kicked? Of how their punches on uterine walls sounded like drumbeats, rhythms and soundings of an unknown world? Of the shape the belly took, large like a medicine ball? Do you speak of their parents, their siblings? How do you talk about a life that did not come to be, and yet, as evidenced by the small box suspended above the earth, took on a shape and a name? For this was no miscarriage, but a baby borne to term, and dead. Death and birth are meant to be distant cousins, reunited only by the occasional love letters, but not meant to be bedmates.

The funeral took place in a section of the cemetery lined with little headstones mere feet apart, with dates mere months apart. Tiny hands and tiny spaces marked with tiny stones and tiny hopes under tiny bits of earth, a colony of children. It felt as if we were coming to a village, and offering up one to them that they instantly recognized as their own. These markers stood silent as we prayed and passed and read Psalms, and went home. The box was lowered into the ground and for the first time, I watched the actual burial, as a workman unveiled the dirt, moving soft shovelfulls into the hole. So softly, so quietly; we stood and watched as Ryan-David was separated from us. I couldn’t help but think of Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily and wonder if putting away the dead so soon was of any help to the grieving; putting a physical distance up does not stop love, but only defers into memory.

Death and birth are meant to be vast strangers. And one day, in the words of David, we will go to him, as he  cannot come to us.

It’s October. Late October, in fact, and it’s no less than 80 degrees outside. For those of you who loooove the hot, good on you. As for me and mine, my body has spent the last 28 years building up a resistance to the heat. Beginning in my youth, spending hours upon hours at the pool, to the teen years sweating it out in the sun behind a lawnmower, to college working in a warehouse without A/C–I have put in my dues. It’s time for me to rely on the skills of human ingenuity, and to start donning clothes.

When you’re cold, you can always put something else on. When you’re hot, they’re just some social situations when partial nudity is not an option.

**

Two weekends ago, I was enjoying a brisk New England afternoon, enjoying the sun coming down, while I wore a wool sweater, hands in pockets, zipper to the neck. I remember thinking, “This is how it should be. Autumn= cool weather.” Granted, I’ve never lived through a New Hampshire winter, and don’t know the joy of shovelling snow off my porch for six months straight. But there’s something refreshing to being in a place where you get at least three of the four seasons. For every blazing summer, there is a deathly cold winter, and it’s as it should be. C.S. Lewis once noted that seasons were God’s way of keeping humanity from getting bored with sameness. Something to that, I think, that rythym is a happy medium between bland sameness and wild, unconnected randomness.

So today, in lieu of any help from my natural surroundings, I celebrate rhythms: the happy mediums that are never the same, but always faithful:

1) Fresh vegetables. You can always get a tomato, even in the dead of winter. God bless ‘em.

2) Morning poops. God bless regularity.

3) Eternally recurring allergies. Knowing that you need five minutes of running before you’ll be clear: priceless.

4) Stories from panhandlers. I’ve started giving money if the story’s good. I don’t tell them that, but if the story’s the tired one about needing “three dollars of gas”, I ask if I can give them a ride. Dude told me one the other day about how he recognized me from campus and how he used to be a track star with his name on a plaque and everything. It was worth at least three bucks, but I only had two to give him.

5) Dog piss on my carpet. No matter how long I live in this house, I can always count on one of the dogs having come into the room and peed on a book if leave the door open while I’m out. Dorothy Day was the last casualty.

6)  Baseball. Thank you, Jesus, that I live in a college baseball town, so that there’s only a three month drought every year of being able to watch the greatest spectacle humanly constructed.

7) “the NEXT BIG THING“. By this, I mean, whatever book is about to change someone’s life, or band is about to melt our faces. I love being in with the cool kids as much as anyone, but there comes a point at which I don’t care that much. But it’s refreshing to see a highschool kid wearing the punk jacket with metal studs that he’ll swear he never owned when he turns 40.

In my first full day of freedom, nothing was accomplished.

No laundry.

No cleaning.

No errands.

Instead, I have to report that this is actually really good television:

And that, thus far, this album, which came out yesterday, is way better than their last crappy one:

And that this coffee tastes pretty good, especially when I’m drinking it in bed:

.

You have to love the month of May.

Is it amazing to anyone else that this will mark my 6th summer in Texas? I moved in August of 2000, in the midst of 30 days in a row over 100 degrees. As my friend Will, Georgian by birth remarked: “I’ve figured out what the Lone Star is on the flag: it’s the blazing, burning sun.”

It’s not even May yet, and it’s already hot as Nicole Kidman’s left eyelid. 98 today, 97 tomorrow; by Wednesday, they’re swearing up and down that we’ll get a break in the action and have a high of mid-80s. But like it or not, you can pack up the winter stuff; it ain’t coming back for a long while.

This is the time of year when I spend about five minutes every day debating whether or not to buzz my head again. I haven’t had a haircut since December, and it’s getting pretty out of control again; not quite long enough to pull back, but long enough to be a real pain when the humidity gets together with the heat and starts making noise. I spend a lot of days saying things like, “No, really, I sweat like this all the time.”

The kicker: at the farm in June, there is no A/C. Not in the common dorm area. It reminds me of my summer at Barnabas when we all got by on a squeaky ceiling fan and boxer shorts. My house? Even worse. Box units make a lot of noise and suck a lot of energy, and cool things down enough so that your sweat doesn’t evaporate immediately after coming off your face.

Here’s what I want for Christmas: Montana. The whole state. Or at least a retreat center there with a room staked out for me. If I see one church sign with, “If you think this is hot, dot dot dot” on it, I’m walking in, dragging the pastor out of their air-conditioned suite, and tying him to the first bumper I can find. I’ve worked whole summers in tin-roof warehouses, and this really is nothing.

…Nothing but a big heaping slice of hell on a cracker.

In continuation with the last post, which is truly a moment to celebrate, some more shout-outs to people I’m thinking of this morning. I’m back from the Carolinas with the motivation to grind out the last weeks of the semester, and the knowledge that God has not forgotten me here. There are many times when I feel like all the world misunderstands what the hell I’m doing, but God is weaving something to be believed, I think.

Jesse and Chelsea Robertson: I don’t get to see or talk to them often. Chelsea, Jesse and I all worked at Camp Barnabas once upon a time, and though, to be honest, the amount of time Jesse and I have spent together is really poor, I really like the guy. And Chelsea? What’s not to like.

Amy Bigbee and LeAnn Gardner: why include them together, when separately they have written volumes of the books of my life? Because I got to see them together this weekend, and my heart rejoiced and was quieted and challenged and sent back to bear fruit.

Seaner: Is there a wrong time to thank God for Sean? The man’s Whitman, Rivers Cuomo, and Gentle Ben all wrapped into one. And his girlfriend’s really fun. Another Barnabite who’s stuck around.

And to Celina, whose birthday was this weekend while I was trucking it across a bridge in Charleston. I can’t think of a better reason to smile than because Celina is in the world–a compassionate, beautiful, intelligent woman with great taste in music. Except for the Shins. But I overlook that.

And there are thousands more. You know who you are.

As if life couldn’t get any better, a certain sound approaches.

It begins as a whoosh, a flushing of air through a leather toilet.

And then, the chatter of little birds, eating peanuts and crackerjack. They will never come back.

And then, the sound erupts like a tree giving birth:

It’s baseball season.

For Ben Franklin, beer was the sign that God loves us. For Teillhard Chardin, joy was the sign of the presence of God. I’ll have to opt for baseball, which, in the eternal myth, is reborn every year from the ashes of an old season, forever to waken me to eternal bliss.

Holy crap. I’m Whitman meets Harry Carey. If you see Jesse, tell him my first fantasy pick was Pujols.

Again.

Not that it’ll do the Redbirds any good.

Again.
***

In the spirit of the new season, enjoy this game.

I’ve been thinking to put this up for months. Over the last year, occasionally my house would all be at the same place and the same time. And we took pictures. Chris left for New Mexico this summer, and there’s a new roomie who may not be down for the dumb pictures, but, for the time being, a few pictures.

And to those concerned, the beard picture is on its way.

The infamous Duke pictures. Watch out for the dude in the bra.

Two summers ago, I shaved my head and we ripped up the carpet.

From left to right at a Rock Star Party: Jimmy Buffett, Toby Mac, Tupac, Willie Nelson, Barry Gibb

Once upon a time, we were relatively clean-shaven and naive.

Then, a year later, we were hairy and a little less innocent.
**

There will come a day when we’ll all go our separate ways. But until then, I’ll enjoy it.

I sit on my couch again in Waco for the first time in a week. Pooped. I fight the urge to take a nap, as I do four loads of laundry, unpack a suitcase tastefully named “HEAVY” by the airline, cook green beans, drop off dry cleaning and a hundred other things under the heading of “Crap We Do Because We Must, Not Because It’s Fun”.

The wedding? Well, thanks for asking. It was amazing. As I mentioned, it was my first, taken mostly from the Book of Common Prayer, and as such, involved a lot of congregational interaction and prayers, Communion. When you’ve never led a wedding service before, to do the wedding AND lead your first Communion in the space of thirty minutes is a pretty big deal. I found myself kicking into ultra-responsible mode, taking charge, and as one who is a confirmed passive-ist, this alone is enough to rejoice for.

Nerves. On fire. Rings? Yes. Bridal party? Yes. Communion wine? Yes. Minister, competent? To be decided. The groom and I walked to the front as the music played, followed by the wedding party, and when the bride approached, smiles, my fears subsided. It was party time. And with booming voice I began: “The Lord be with you.” We stood over a beautiful New Mexico lake, in the dry Western heat, and began a new life.

It was four days of driving, crossing two time zones, two states, two countries, and a six-hour reception. Needless to say, while I as the presiding minister was in possession of my faculties, there were some that found the floor of their condo a perfectly fine place to spend the evening. Two words: Open Bar.

The weekend by the numbers:

Breakfast burritos: 5
Cars rented: 2
Communion Wine Goblets: 2, full
Communion Wine Goblets left at the end of service: 2, 90% full.
Money lost in casino: 10$
Money John won in casino: 235$
Number of Guyavaras bought in Juarez by group: 6
Times Hayden Christensen made dumb statement in Star Wars III: 37
Times congregation stood in service: 5
Inebriated guests: 7
Awkward moments involving religious disputes: 4
Available bridesmaids: 0
Drunken Toasts: 0, thanks to a discerning bandleader.
Number of Assinine Pro Football Players sitting behind me on the return flight: 1. Apparently, making money is a license for being a complete tool.