"If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings – nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;"*
I never really tested the warning, “You keep making that face and it’s going to stay that way.” However, it seems that now I know the truth in the warning, “You keep making jokes and you're gonna find out.”
I am self-aware enough to perceive the defense mechanism of deflection in my humor. There are also elements of reaction formation. For example, one of our student research assistants marched boldly, unabashedly, into my office the last week of the quarter before winter break and asked, “Do you have an extra MacBook charger I can borrow." I gave her that look that said, “You must be outa your ever-loving mind!” Then I proceeded to an audible rant: “You think I just have a stack of them laying around to be handing out. . .OH! I know what your problem is. You got confused and mistook me for Santa Claus seeing the white whiskers in my beard and the red in my sweater. Well, I am not here to give you presents.”
After I finished my rant, I lent her a charger. I just couldn’t have her thinking I was easy, or else she might become like the last staff member to whom I lent a charger, and I did not see it again for three months, just saying. Also, I had to disabuse this particular student of her unjustifiably generous appraisal wherein she said to me, “You should teach a class; you would be the best professor to have.”
It was all fun and games until Christmas Eve, when I found out. I was celebrating Latino style at a friend’s house, which meant big tent in the back yard, lots of extended family, eating a huge dinner late at night and then staying up even later to open presents. However, it also meant that there would be tasty pozole and tamales, so well worth missing my bedtime.
I was enjoying my dinner when I noticed this particularly winsome toddler with fetching almond complexion, dark brown eyes, and wavy hair, as she climbed all over her mother’s lap. Then she switched to get some lap-time with dad who was sitting next to me. I could see that with his large athletic build, dad was her favorite climbing structure. I enjoyed the scene until she started reaching over to me as if I was next. The crazy thing is that, without hesitation, her dad handed her over.
Next thing I know, I am holding this toddler in my arms as she is stroking and examining my beard with much fascination, and I am wondering, “What just happened here?” Fortunately, Candy Cane Lane was still playing on the big screen at the end of the tent, which gave me clarity. This poor child saw my red outfit and white whiskers and sincerely thought I was Black Santa.
As awkward as it was, there was also beauty in the moment, that a child could enjoy a place and time where everyone was family and everyone was safe, and she could presume that everyone loved her. Fortunately, soon thereafter we played the gift-giving game, and I was able to disabuse the whole room of the notion that I was some black Santa by showing them that I came to take presents, not hand them out.
“A man walks down the street.He says, "Why am I soft in the middle, now?Why am I soft in the middle?The rest of my life is so hard.I need a photo-opportunity.I want a shot at redemption.Don't want to end up a cartoonIn a cartoon graveyard"
I am forced to include a picture because most will not believe that it was ever the case that I was male pinup material. I was once called, “a paragon of physical excellence,” and, even if it was just a joke, someone wrote on the mirror of the men’s bathroom of fifth floor Gilmore Hall, my freshman dorm, in black lipstick liner, “Derek Taylor is the sexiest man I know.” Still the same, I never thought of myself as potential pinup material, until that day on the quad when a young sorority girl approached me and said that she wanted to nominate me for the “Men of Davis Calendar.” She asked for my permission and my phone number, and she said someone would call me about a photoshoot.
I half dismissed the idea with extreme skepticism following only making first runner-up in the Mr. Gilmore contest. Nonetheless, early the next week I decided to get a good hair cut, just-in-case. Now, getting a haircut always caused me great anxiety because of the awkwardness of having to tell someone how I wanted my hair cut. My freshman year it was made easier by a barber shop being extant in the Memorial Union with some skilled men who had cut a lot of hair through the years. Unfortunately, while I was away from school a couple of years sorting through the emotional residual of my childhood, the Memorial Union had been remodeled and the barber shop was no more.
I resorted to calling a local salon in town. More awkward than having to tell someone how I wanted my hair cut, I was compelled to ask the uncomfortable question, “Do you know how to cut black hair?” The woman assured me that she knew how to cut all kinds of hair. I should have suspected by her matter-of-fact tone that she might not have known I meant, not the color black, but the thick curly nap typical of black people. We were less than 4% of the student population of Davis at the time.
All skepticism was confirmed when I arrived. The stylist did not reveal that “Oh, you are black!” look that I have seen on other occasions. My skeptic alarm was sounded when she wet my hair with a spray bottle, and I started screaming in my head, “NO, THAT’S NOT HOW IT IS DONE” when she started pinching clumps of my hair between her fingers and cutting it with scissors. Still, I felt it would be impolite to question her technique. I remained calm until she finished and held up a mirror. Even then I remained calm, thanked her, and tipped her.
I went to the home of Kind Art Tutor, my then girlfriend, and she immediately was astounded at what had been done to my hair, “What was she doing, modeling the surface of the moon? Your hair is full of craters. It looks like abstract art. You should have just let me cut it.” That became the eventuality as I broke out electric clippers and let her try to even things out. The sides were too uneven, so they had to be taken down to zero. I ended up with something between a flat top and a Mohawk at the end of the day. Nonetheless, it was fashionable.
I wore it like that for a few days. Then Friday night at home, I decided to do further remediation which brought up the sides even higher. I was looking very Marine DI. But then inspiration hit, and, inspired by Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now (1979), I decided to go all the way, and just shave it all off.
I was surprised by the reception I got that Friday night at the party. Several females came up and just wanted to rub my bald head. I was getting more female interaction than that moment just before the Mr. Gilmore bathing suit contest when five women from my dorm floor stormed into my dressing room and rubbed my body down with baby oil while I stood in shock wearing nothing but a bikini brief.
I did not get such an enthusiastic response when I showed up for the Men of Davis Calendar photo shoot on Monday. It was not the look they were expecting. The photoshoot was the furthest thing from my mind when I did my close shave Friday night. If I had thought about it, that close shaven look had gotten me stopped by the police a few times in the Bay Area because I “fit the description” of a suspect. It was a look the police seemed to want to know better, but it was not the look they wanted in their calendar, so I did not make the final cut.
That is what makes making the final cut of the 2023 Alzheimer Biomarkers Consortium — Down Syndrome Study (ABC-DS) calendar so amazing. To qualify, I am not the main feature of the September pages. That distinction goes to Jimmy Day Keith, who plays Benny in Champions (2023) starring Woody Harrelson, Kaitlin Olson, and Matt Cook. I am honored to be featured in the insert above the days of the month, since I am hardly one to be pictured with the celebrity crowd.
What really makes being featured in the calendar so momentous is that The Divine Speaks in Irony, like when I was my most attractive by conventional standards, I was rejected, but years later when I am old and spent, I am sought out for a photo opportunity. I believe that we're are all involved in a divine comedy, but unlike Dante’s work we do not need to wait until the afterlife for the punchline. Many of the frustrating difficult moments of our life are just set-ups for a punchline that may not be delivered until years later.
In my life, one set-up, one which I struggled to resolve during my undergraduate sabbatical, was that my mother told me, “You are not normal like the other kids. You belong in an institution.” After my parents’ divorce, I took the option to go to Germany with my father because my mother told me, “Your sisters and I are going to California. You can come to California with me or you can go to Germany with your father. If you come to California with me, and you act the way you do, I will have you institutionalized.” My experience in Germany included certain adverse events, and after two years I came back to California for high school. During high school I stayed involved in sports, music, and academics. My strategy was to spend as much time at school as possible and avoid conflicts with my mother which would lead to me being institutionalized. I did not know that I was in the setup of portion of part of my life.
The punchline was not delivered until after I got my first job after college at the State Developmental Research Institute at Fairview Developmental Center affiliated with the University of California at Irvine studying self-injury in persons with developmental challenges, mainly autism spectrum disorder. I was hired for my training and experience in neurochemistry, but the punchline was that I was finally institutionalized at exactly the kind of institution my mother wanted to place me, but I had keys. Having keys makes all the difference at such a facility.
The follow-up to the punchline was that halfway through the interview with the director, The Sandman, I knew I had the job because the conversation had turned to skiing. During my undergraduate sabbatical, not part of the standard UCD curriculum, I worked a season at Heavenly Valley Ski resort in Tahoe. The Sandman had taken a ski sabbatical between completing his master’s and starting his PhD. During his career he had founded the Winter Neuropeptide Conference (WNPC) which met in Breckenridge Colorado, during the second week of February each year. For five years during my time at SDRI, I got an expense paid trip to Breckenridge for WNPC, and all I had to do was present a poster.
A corollary to that punchline was meeting the postdoc running The Sandman lab at the airport. That was back when the terminal at Orange County Airport was just a little shack. Nonetheless, the postdoc walked past me four times, even though I was the only man with an athletic build wearing a dark blue suit and magenta tie, as I said I would be. When he passed me the fourth time, I called out his name and he wheeled around and gave me that classic, “Oh, you’re black!” look of surprise. However, the Sandman’s look upon seeing me was “Oh, you’re black,” but more an expression of pleasant discovery. The Sandman was the graduate student involved in the civil rights movement at LSU back in the year that it got its first black graduate student. Thus for The Sandman, I was the hitting the trifecta: I was black, I had working knowledge of neurochemistry, and I could ski.
One of my favorite characters in the movie “Larry Crowne” (2011) is Dr. Matsutani, a slightly maniacal economics professor played by George Takei. During the first lecture for his course, Dr. Matsutani tells a series of economic jokes, and then burst out into manic laughter as if extremely amused by his own wit. The students just stare at him with a look of bemusement and trepidation. At the end of the movie right before the final he does the same, but abruptly halts his laughter to admonish his students, “By now you should be laughing with me.” This is that moment in this story, but I get the sense that not all of you are laughing with me.
That’s OK, because even though I call them punchline moments not all of them are funny-hah-hah, LOL or ROFL moments. Some of them are somber but poignant giving meaning to my life. Also, even though it is said, “Tragedy plus time equals comedy,” sometimes the set-ups are too painful to ever yield anything laughable, deeply meaningful but not laughable.
Case-in-point was October 5th, 2023. At 9:00 pm that evening I was on the phone with friends who were dealing with a child who was hospitalized for severe depression. I had the sense that the call was a divine appointment, but I did not know my role. At first I thought my role was to use my knowledge and connection from years working for departments of psychiatry to find an outpatient treatment referral for this young person. It took me a moment to gain the insight that I could best be a peer support to the parents. I had experience walking my goddaughter through years of her struggle with bipolar disorder. However, highlighting that this was a true punchline moment was that it was October 5th.
October 5th was the birthday of a dear friend from high school and college who committed suicide. That loss had a profound effect on me. Initially making me hesitant to ever form such a close bond with anyone. Yet, at the same time, causing me to realize that I had been blessed with something my friend had not, emotional resilience. I realized that when I was sitting in the hospital with him trying to do the math on why he was depressed, and I was not. It was years until I got the first hint of the punchline. On October 5th 2010, Dr. Willeumier and I got the go-ahead from our boss, Daniel Amen, to try to publish an analysis I had done of “Decreased cerebral blood flow in the limbic and prefrontal cortex using SPECT imaging in a cohort of completed suicides” (Translational Neuroscience; 2011). Oddly enough, the results of that study gave insights into why my friend was blocked on a physiological level in being able to maintain a positive view of self, independent of present circumstance. In addition to mourning the life of my friend, I have had to fight back the encroachment of depression numerous times in my life, but that experience was part of the setup to that moment on October 5th, 2023.
All along, it was as if there was a voice saying, “Wait for it. . . Wait for it…” That is one of the most important things I have learned in this life is to wait for the punchline. Some setups are painful and not all punchlines leave you laughing, but instead hit deep. However, The Divine speaks in irony, and in those moments, you find meaning, often of a profound nature, of your past suffering. Enhancing the punchline of being featured in the ABC-DS calendar is that also featured, as talented musician, is Dr. Ira Lot, who was one of the progenitors of the line of research that led to examining the parallels between Alzheimer’s dementia and Down's Syndrome. Years before that Dr. Ira lot was my mentor who taught me to do neurological exams, and collaborated with me on addressing poly-pharmacy issues at individual development team meetings for clients in my first job at SDRI at Fairview Developmental Center. The punchline of our paths converging once again, makes me smile.
I consider not drowning a high priority in my life. I suffer from congenital bouyancy deficiency issues. I first discovered this at Boy Scout camp swimming in a lake in Belgium, when I failed the survival float drill. Somehow, I remained in denial regarding my condition and experienced an incident where drowning was an imminent possibility, trying to swim across the channel leading into the harbor at Santa Cruz. The fear of a large boat looming down on me compelled me past the point of fatigue and nearly giving up mid-channel.
Nonetheless, my denial of my condition persisted until college, until Wally, performed an intervention. I had won my first collegiate wrestling match on a Friday night wrestling up at 190 lbs. against the US Air Force Academy. The next day I was competing in the 180 lbs. weight class at the San Jose State tournament. In the second round of the tournament the wrestler from Air Force academy took revenge on behalf of his teammate, trapped my ankle, and put his shoulder into the outside of my knee.
I heard a loud pop as I went down. I thought I had blown out my knee. However, the next week the trainer said that because of my heavy weight training and conditioning, muscle tension had prevented critical hyperextension; I had only stretched my lateral collateral ligament. He suggested that I rehab by swimming laps with the kick board in the pool. That is when my confrontation with my condition occurred.
I walked on deck at Hickey Pool during the noon lap swim time with great eagerness ready to crush rehab and get back on the mat. I must have looked a little too damned happy for my own good, because the attendant lifeguard at the time, Wally, felt compelled to check me with a strong interrogative tone, “What are you doing here?”
Like an eager puppy ready to play, I barked out, “I am here to swim.”
Wally quickly disabused me of all delusion regarding my aquatic prowess by stating unequivocally, “NO YOU ARE NOT! You are not a swimmer. You are not designed to swim. I have seen your body-type before, and you do not float, so don’t expect me to pull your brick-ass out of the water when you start to drown.”
The benefit to being neurodivergent and not interpreting social cues was that I was amused by this tiny little woman that I knew from a campus Christian ministry was doing such a bold intervention. Undeterred by her statement, I jumped in the water. I was totally in the wrong lane, the fast lane. Eventually, I would learn that my place was at the other end of the pool, in the shallow lanes with the slower swimmers. I was swimming next to all the masters’ swimmers and former high school swim champions. As I swam my first lap my heavy legs dragged in the water at a forty-five-degree angle revealing my hydrodynamic impediment. Fortunately, one of them, a pretty young blond female former high school butterfly champion called Hoss (a sobriquet given to her by Pat Kam because her last name was Cartwright, like Hoss Cartwright on Bonanza), took pity on my pathetic plight and started giving me tips to stay horizontal on the water. I became dependent on the kindness of strangers: Because of Hoss, other swimmers decided that the socially appropriate thing to do is give me pointers. Eventually, one day someone said I should swim in the slower lanes.
The good thing is that I eventually developed my own stroke, which is a combination of breaststroke and butterfly. My arms recover out of the water like a butterfly stoke but then pull more like a breaststroke. My legs do a double kick that starts first like a breaststroke and finishes with a dolphin kick. The undulating motion lifts my head out of the water allowing me to breath. I still do swim workouts. Presently I swim 120 bpm minute heart rate intervals, which means I swim an interval and then rest until my heart rate returns to 120 before swimming the next interval. I just swim 1000 yards (2*200, 4*100 and 4*50 intervals). The goal is to reduce the time of the workout by both increasing speed of the intervals and reducing the time it takes to get heart rate down to 120 afterward. If I don’t swim fast enough, my heart rate does not get above 120 during the interval and I get no rest. If I upgrade an interval to a butterfly heart rate will most assuredly approach its maximum (180) and I might get to rest up to a minute. However, before doing that I have to count the costs.
At the backside of every strength is its weakness, but at the backside of every weakness is its strength. Because I have buoyancy deficiency syndrome, swimming is a power workout for me. I still sit low in the water and my legs drag, but I don’t ever have to use swim weights to increase my power like some people do. It may not be pretty, but my stroke is my own, Wally.
Disclaimer:
Wally does not recall making the statements quoted herein and doubts she would have said them. Some disparity between what Wally said and what I heard is highly probably. I clearly remember Wally referring to my body density and how likely it would be a disadvantage to me swimming. There was no hostility in her tone when she said it, more like a serious concern hidden inside some brash banter. Her admonition may have been gentler like "Try not to drown because I don't feel like doing a water rescue today." My first telling of the story was to my wrestling teammates later that week, and I might have conflated their likely response, “no one would want to have to pull your brick ass out of the water” with what Wally said. Hypoxia may have further impeded an accurate consolidation of the memory. By my third lap, the strain of dragging my thick legs through water left me in a state of severe oxygen debt clinging to the side of the pool.
I was so low in the water when swimming freestyle, it moved the more advanced swimmers to have compassion on me and teach me how to create a pocket of air with my arm movement so that I could rotate my head into it and catch a breath. When I first started swimming laps at UCD, I could barely finish 50 yards without having to stop and recover a minute. So, any statement Wally might have made about me not being a swimmer when I walked on to the Hickey Pool deck that day was 100% accurate, even though I know part of it was said in jest because she recognized me as a fellow Navigator, the one who was on the wrestling team. She knew what I was really built to do, and it wasn’t swim. I was entertained that she had the boldness to call me out on it.
That was one of the best days of my college career, because I discovered that swimming was a wonderful healing activity. These days, there is a item on my lab calendar for Wednesdays that says, "Derek in Therapy" from 0900 to 1030. My therapist is Dr. Pool, and with Dr. Pool I have worked through my anxiety by practicing breathing exercises. (The best breathing exercise is the butterfly stroke). I have performed physical therapy on my back by getting oxygen to my spine and lengthening my trunk support muscles. I have improved my cardiovascular health by improving vascular elasticity and cardiac recovery. All those things and the relief of stress has lowered my blood pressure. Whatever Wally said spurred something in me to try to prove that I could swim with the best of them. I still can't but I am so glad I keep trying. As for my friend Wally:
I thank my God every time I remember you. (Philippians 1:3)
I have always acknowledged that the strongest drives of man are for “Food, sex, a good bowel movement, a sensible nap in between, and a warm place to conduct all of the above, not always in that order.
]]>
I grow weary of people referring to prostitution as “the world's oldest profession," because that just isn't Biblical. Now, there are over 100 reverences to prostitution in the Bible, so prostitution was a thriving profession going way back to Old Testament times. We see that Judah mistakenly slept with his daughter-in-law when he was out chasing prostitutes (Genesis 38), and Rahab, a prostitute, was a historical figure in the history of Israel (Joshua 2,6) as well as the lineage of Jesus (Matthew 1:5). Despite these references prostitution is not the first profession mentioned int he Bible.
The first profession mentioned in the Bible is gardening. "The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it." (Genesis 2:15). The second profession mentioned in the Bible is zoologist: "Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name" (Genesis 2:19)
Now gardening has both intrinsic and extrinsic reward. As far as extrinsic reward it provides the most direct connection between working and eating. (2 Thessalonians 3:10). As far as intrinsic reward, the gardener fulfills the first divine directive of making the earth a fruitful garden. As such, I would argue that gardening and its more extensive counterpart farming deserve to be conducted in a sanctified manner, honoring the creator by not destroying what was created with pesticides and other chemicals just to make a profit, but that is a topic for a different discussion
By continuing to fulfill the divine directive to name and classify all the animals, zoologists have inherent value, but the extrinsic rewards do not tend to be as lucrative. The median salary of zoologist with a PhD is considerably less than that of a computer scientist with a bachelor’s degree. Thus, I limit my zoological interests to reviewing my phylogenetic cards on weekends. (I do have a latent preoccupation with catching one of the toads I hear behind the psychiatry office buildng at night to see if by chance they are arroyo toads, but to date they have remained elusive; I can hear them but I can't catch them.)
I will admit that the desire to maintain an income level enough to provide for my family has guided some of my decision making. For example, there was a point, after completing my six-year term as a national coordinator for a study of alcoholic cirrhosis at the VA Medical Center Cooperative Studies Program, that I applied for two jobs at the University of California at Irvine, one as a biochemist, and the other as a programmer. The biochemistry lab was doing work that seemed to be an extension of a that for one of my first-author publications, "Acidosis Stimulates Beta-Endorphin Release During Exercise" in the American Journal of Applied Physiology. The programmer/analyst job was at the UCI Brain Imaging Center and offered me the chance to continue my interest in studying the Brain. However, when contemplating the two jobs I noted that programmers, at the time, got paid $13K more per year than chemists." At the time, I had two children, Asha and Elliot, who were not about to eat $13K fewer groceries, so I decided I was a programmer.
Yes, I am all about the groceries. There is a certain wealth in having a full refrigerator. Above, I have mentioned making good career decisions as an assurance of having a full refrigerator. However, during the course of my career, coinciding with progression of my faith, I have come to see honoring The Divine with my first and my best as also assurance of having a full refrigerator. The inherent blessing in honoring The Divine with your first and your best is one of the first object lessons of The Bible. (Genesis 4:2-5). Later God gives us the assurance of having a full refrigerator, and meat on the grill if we do this. (Malachi 3:10). Which brings us back to the problem with prostitution.
Certainly, prostitution could not be the oldest profession because the customers would need something to trade. Given that the barter system existed before money, the first thing traded was food, the fruit of the gardener or farmer’s labor. The bread for services exchange is mentioned in Proverbs 6:26. Going back to the story of Judah we see that he was willing to trade a whole goat, a source of meat and/or milk, for a single encounter with a prostitute. Now, that does not make a lick-o-sense to me: “Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and you will delight in the richest of fare.” (Isaiah 55:2)
I have always acknowledged that the strongest drives of man are for “Food, sex, a good bowel movement, a sensible nap in between, and a warm place to conduct all of the above, not always in that order. Infact, food takes priority over sex, because I can go a lot more days without sex than I can go without food. ( I confess: I have given in to using the pleasure of food as a substitute during periods of long abstinence.) It just does not make sense to exchange a good meal at a nice restaurant for an encounter with a prostitute. In comparing the value, consider that we sometimes take pictures of a good meal at a restaurant and post them on social media. No reasonable person proudly post pictures of his encounters with prostitutes. (I know of one actor who did a televised interview displaying and boasting of his live-in arrangement with two porn actresses, but the general consensus is that actor was pushed beyond reason by drug addiction and possible mental illness.) Usually, most reasonable people, spend money trying to cover up such encounters, which ironically becomes unreasonable, because the coverup often cost more than the cost of the encounter, either monetarily or in terms of reputation. (Is $130K and years of professional and leagal hastles, worth a one night stand with even the best porn star?) Anyway, one of the Biblical assurances is that keeping company with prostitutes leads to squandered wealth. (Proverbs 29:3)
Of course, what do I know, I don’t get out. I am not even trying to be out there. As I head into Memorial Day weekend, I am content to stay home, tend to the few herbs I have growing in front of my domicile, and cook a good meal. Tonight, I will be taking some line caught tuna that my son Elliot landed on his last fishing trip, and marinating it in balsamic vinaigrette seasoned with garlic, fresh oregano and rosemary I grew, and basil. After marinating, the fish is removed, quick seared on each side in a pan, and set aside to rest on a plate. Then in the pan I sauté shallots, Italian parsley and a lot more fresh herbs. Just before the shallots are clear I add in the reserve of the marinade. While all this is going I will have a some fresh formed fusilli from the local Italian deli boiling, so I will add a bit of the pasta water to the simmering vegetables. Then I will put the fish on the bed of sautéed vegetables to simmer. I will finish with some diced ripe tomatoes and a half a cup of orange juice reduction to marry the sweet with the acid. After I eat, I will sit back and enjoy the afterglow of a good meal. The Lord will have richly provided; that is what satisfies.
Sometimes it is good to just be present in the moment. The modern age challenges our presence, because we get distracted by our technology; we can get so busy making sure we take pictures of our food and the place we are that we deprioritize enjoying our food, eating mindfully, absorbing the conversation and savoring the companionship. On this particular day, that was not the case. I was helped by being in the presence of my friend, coach, construction foreman and former high school algebra teacher, Harold Skip Cain. He is affectionately called "The Cave Man" by his long-time friend Dennis Burns, but to me he is my favorite luddite. He eschews the modern technology of the “smart” phone in favor of the flip phone. However, on this day, eschewing my smart phone was not such a bad thing.
I am no better than anyone else regarding the tendency to regress back to childhood when I am around someone from my childhood. The best part of my high school summers was working out. Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings started with getting up at 5:30 am, running to the American High School gym, where Skip would be there to open at 6:00 am. Then I pushed iron for an hour before running back home to shower and change. Thus, on the day after Thanksgiving this past year, the first thing I did was take Skip to my gym, the Anteater Recreation Complex at the University of California at Irvine, where I work.
Along the way we stopped at S&S Auto Repair in Lake Forest. I wanted to introduce Skip to one of my friends from the present day, shop owner Chad Shaw. There was something more. I knew that an auto shop was a familiar place to Skip, given he grew up working in his dad’s auto body shop. Skip’s stories of working long hours pulling dents, sanding and painting resonated with Chad’s experience in his early career. I had the privilege of getting to spend a little time with Skip’s dad when I spent the night at his paren’ts home in Modesto before going to work on their family cabin in Twainhart. Skip’s dad was a lot like Chad, imbued with an over-abundance of the Puritan work ethic. While visiting Skip’s dad’s shop I saw the newspaper clippings on the wall of the garage and office showing the history of his dad racing boats. Skip grew up water skiing. Chad has his boat parked behind the shop. Chad probably did not know why I stopped at the shop, but it was to just stand a moment in the presence of two of the hardest working men I know.
Regarding hard work, I was stunned by how hard Skip was working out in the gym a few years ago when I had visited him for the book reading for Days of Elijah. That was pre-pandemic. For this day’s workout we both realized we had lost some strength during the pandemic when our gyms were shutdown. We quickly readjusted our goals for he day’s workout to range-of-motion and muscle toning. The important thing was that we started the day out with a workout.
Back in high school the summer weight circuit would be followed by a nine-hour day working on houses. As we drove from the gym, Skip and I remembered days of Working Harder Everyday (WHE) Construction. Probably one of the best memories we shared was working on the three story twenty-two-bedroom house, called the Battle Ship, Skip’s Uncle Gordon owned in Vallejo.
We remembered cutting down the monster willow tree that was so huge that when I first did a walk-through of the back yard, I was confused by the willow branches hanging in front of my face. I was later astounded to realize the source tree was in the front yard but was big enough (5’ diameter trunk) to hang over the house to the back yard. Our funniest memories included the day Skip had me in the tree for six hours straight strapped to the trunk setting up rope pullies to lower branches before I cut them with a pole pruner. Many of these “branches” were between 9 inches and one foot in diameter, so they looked like small trees when I lowered them to the ground for Skip to go at them with a chain saw. When it came to intensity with a chainsaw, Leatherface had nothing on Skip Cain. Highlights of that day included Skip having me pull my lunch up into the tree on a rope, because he suspected, probably accurately so, that I would not want to climb back up in the tree once I climbed down. The peak moment of the day was me reaching the state of muscle tetany as all the muscles in my upper body locked up from depletion and over-exertion. When I cried out, Skip said, “Well then come on down you big baby.” I replied, “I can’t. I can’t move.” I had to rest leaning against the harness fifteen minutes before I had the strength and movement to climb down.
“All along, there were incidents and accidents, there were hints and allegations” regarding that willow tree. One of the funniest memories was the day football teammate, math tutor for Skip’s classes and fellow construction worker Tim Marymee and I felled a branch from the tree that was so big that it blocked the side of the street. A police officer rolled up in her patrol car and asked for our permits to block the street. I stepped forward as chief storyteller saying, “I am sure our foreman, Skip Cain, has pulled all the correct permits, but he is working up on the roof right now, and he would be pretty pissed if I were to bring him down to show you that paperwork mam.”
One episode in the saga of man and house against the tree that we will never forget is building concrete abutments in the basement to prevent the foundation from collapsing under the weight of the tree. Having gotten an A in his algebra class, Skip let me do the math on that one. One morning driving to Vallejo, I pulled out a pencil a started doing calculations on a brown paper bag of the angle of incidence, and width of each abutment based on the height of the basement wall, the mass of concrete we wanted to put against the wall. I showed the calculations on the bag to Skip and, after peering at it a while, he said, “That sounds about right.” I calculated the amount of concrete we needed for each triangle framed abutment and we picked that up from the Rock Yard on the way to Vallejo. Skip built a frame out of wood according to specs and set the rebar drilling into the concrete floor with a hammer drill. I then mixed the concrete by hand in a wheelbarrow. At the end of the day, we would each ceremoniously pluck wads of concrete dust and mucous from our noses before we got in the truck.
Speaking of the truck I cannot tell any story about Skip Cain without mentioning Skip’s 1962 Studebaker Champ, in which I learned to drive. A few weeks before my visit with Skip, coming out of the parking lot of my local post office, I noticed a man with the hood of his Nissan Pathfinder up. I asked him if he needed help, and he indicated his battery had died. I offered to give the stranger a ride to the nearest auto parts store to get a new battery. He was surprised by my generosity and willingness to wait while he removed his battery. While waiting for the old guy to grab his tools, I opened the AAA Westways magazine I had just received in the mail to a page with a picture of an old Studebaker. Then in the next second, I heard the old guy say his name was Skip, and that coincidence of encountering another Skip while looking at a picture of an old Studebaker, was like a spiritual confirmation that I was in that moment at the right place at the right time doing the right thing. As for my day with Skip Cain, before he got in the car I joking admonished him, “You are one person who cannot complain about my driving, because you taught me to drive in an old Studebaker Champ." In that moment as we drove off in my Chevy Cruz, I was once again in the right place at the right time.
Our drive the day after Thanksgiving was a lot more leisurely than learning how to hold the clutch while stopped on a hill with the weight of 20 bags of Quikrete loaded in the back of the Studebaker Champ. I gave Skip a tour of Orange County in Reference to my life. On the way to UCI we passed Back Bay and I told him about how I ride my bike to work along the trail in that estuary. I drove past Newport Marina and showed him where I go Kayaking. That evoked a memory for Skip of having a kayak as a kid. Then we went to a sports bar along the beach walk where I used to bike with my children. We had lunch and watched football at the bar.
It was good to be sitting and watching football with the man who taught me to play the game. When we ran into him earlier, Chad related his misconstrued recollection of an incident during a flag football game in which he claims I tackled him. My clear recollection is Chad was running with the ball toward me, and I simply planted my feet in front of him to absorb his momentum while reaching behind him to grab his flag. My intent was not to tackle him. However, inadvertently, the result did look a lot like a perfect tackle with my face on the ball, neck bowed back and arms wrapped just as Skip had taught me in practice. The only thing missing was the lift. Chad did remark to Skip, “So I should hold you responsible for teaching him how to tackle people and hurt them.”
After watching football, we took a walk out onto Newport Beach Pier and watched some children playing in the water. Watching the children evoked in each of us some of our best childhood memories. Skip’s family’s cabin up in Twainhart played a role in both of our memories. For me it was spending a Friday night at his parent’s house before going to work on the cabin. Skip’s mom made us the best breakfast with scrambled eggs with cheddar cheese and ham mixed in, big fluffy biscuits, sausage and gravy. The woman knew what Tim and I were about to endure working with Skip and his father on the cabin. We were well fueled to endure working straight through with no lunch, cleaning out the crawl space under the cabin. It was a cold early winter’s day, but with all that egg and cheese in us Tim and I were like gas burning, more like gas expelling, space heaters. To be honest, you would not want to be in that crawl space with us. The good thing was that Skips Dad had reached a kinder gentler age from when he used to work Skip at the auto body shop. He had his pockets filled with Snickers and Milky Way candy bars, and about every hour he would come slip Tim and me one each. Beyond an all-day supply of candy bars, the other perk that Tim and I enjoyed was at the end of the summers our junior and senior years of high school getting to go spend a few days at Skip’s family cabin in Twainhart.
My day with Skip was rounded out with a drive up Pacific Coast highway. I pointed out the trail I used to ride when I road my bike to work at the Long beach Veterans Affairs Hospital. I told him about one of my most perfect days. It was a sunny day in winter. To the right of me I saw snow covered mountains and to the left I saw a school of about five dolphin swimming parallel to me in the Pacific Ocean, the best commute you can have in Southern California. After dropping by to see my job site at the VA and that of another later job site by the Arco building, we went to watch more football at another sports bar by the water in Long Beach. We watched an exciting game between University of Florida and Florida State while enjoying a couple of beers.
I jumped at the chance to pay for dinner. Skip had bought me so many meals when I was in high school, all as an effort to bulk me up for the defensive line. One of the most memorable places Skip took me was the Cock’s Roost in Vallejo. The restaurant was the bottom floor of an old Victorian with chickens in the yard and several cock weathervanes on its main and auxiliary gables. The proprietor had gained her experience in the hospitality industry working for famous madam and former Mayor of Sausalito Sally Stanford. The restaurant’s theme, implicit in the name, was catering to the taste of men. In that regard, an all-you-can-eat buffet featuring prime rib and lasagna was the highlight of the restaurant. I did not recognize the proprietor at first. However, she had this habit of walking around the restaurant and greeting her regulars by hugging them from behind as they sat in a manner that enveloped their neck and head in her ample bosom. It was when she did this to someone at our table that I recognized her, as I am embarrassed to admit, by her ample endowments. This was because previously while going through the third-floor apartment of "The Battleship" to access a deck we were repairing; I noticed a picture of same woman kneeling naked in a bathtub with her elbow propped on the edge in a manner that displayed her impressive decolletage. The photo was even autographed.
Skip and I had not gone to the Cock's Roost for the entertainment but for the food. Where else can you get all-you-can-eat good quality prime rib? When I had visited Skip years later, Skip remarked that I had grown and changed. I told him, “Remember how you used to always try to feed me during the summers to bulk me up? . . . Well it finally worked! I am at a good playing weight for a lineman. [It’s just too bad I don’t have a team.]” Anyway, for our post-Thanksgiving outing I had chosen a less inappropriately themed dinner venue than the Cock’s Roost. Sure, the restaurant I chose had a brand which did emphasize female entertainment staff wearing tight shirts that highlighted their decolletage, but we were not at risk of them actually brushing them against the back of our neck. We were just there to watch football. The game was finishing right around the time I heard from Skip’s supervisor, his wife Jackie.
Not so surprisingly, my first introduction to Jackie involved football. The summer he met Jackie, Skip was scheduled to coach an all-star game. Skip asked me to meet him before the game, and he then introduced me to Jackie. I was given the privilege of sitting with her to watch the game. All things come full circle, and Jackie had extended me the privilege of hanging with Skip while she took their grandchildren to Disneyland the day after Thanksgiving. I am not sure she fully appreciated how much getting a day to hang with Skip, for me, was much better than a trip to Disneyland.
Skip is more than just my first high school math teacher, my coach, the guy who gave me a job, or the guy who taught me to drive a manual transmission. He was one of the men who showed up to witness my life during high school. The last time I saw my father I was thirteen years of age, a couple of weeks before starting high school. All throughout high school, I entertained this pernicious fantasy that my father would show up to watch me play football, wrestle a match or perform in a concert. I was vexed by the unfulfillment of that fantasy. It took me years to fully appreciate that the people who showed up to witness that phase of my life were Ted Jones, the owner of the rock and equipment yard where we got our construction equipment and supplies, coach Dennis Burns’ dad Roy T Burns, Dennis Burns and Skip Cain. Whenever I came off the mat, I would come up in the stands to find Skip siting with Roy T Burns and Ted Jones, two guys who shared the most sardonic sense of humor I have ever encountered. They always had something sarcastic to say like, “We were wondering when you were going to stop playing with that guy and get around to pinning him.” At the end of the day, I texted Jackie, “Thanks for letting Skip come out and play with me.” All sarcasm aside, I was deeply appreciative of getting to spend the day with a person who redeemed my childhood and helped me transition to being a man.
]]>
I only say that because it is true. He sang a provocative blues number while accompanying himself incorporating a little stride piano technique in the mix. Not only was he technically proficient with both instruments, piano and voice, but he was entertaining. I was the opposite because I picked the wrong time to have an identity crisis.
I messed up, even though I had entertainment defined for me my senior year at American High School, when our Spirit week theme was “That’s Entertainment”. It’s simple, give the audience what they want. During high school there were moments when I rose to the occasion and gave the audience what they wanted, even when the request seemed odd. For example, someone suggest I dress up as Al Jolson for Spirit Day. At first, I stared at the requester wondering, “Does she realize that Al Jolson was not black?” Then I embraced the delicious irony of a black man, impersonating a white man impersonating a black man, and I did it. During the senior show I had appeared on stage as comedian Flip Wilson’s in drag character Geraldine with the sass, the walk, and the talk. Then I quickly changed stripping my panty hose for a suit coat and grabbing my handkerchief and trumpet to play and sing Hello Dolly as we recreated the scene from the movie. That was the second time I had performed an impersonation of Louis Armstrong, having played and sang St. Louis Blues my junior year in a show, accompanied by the very talented Coach Agee on piano.
If I had wanted to perform something accessible to the audience, I would have revised my Louis Armstrong impression, but that is where I had my identity crisis. Somehow on my own I had arrived at the same conflict that many black Americans during the 1950’s and 60’s had with Louis Armstrong, that he was a shine pandering to white audiences and therefore a sellout. I had forgotten that being popular did not detract from his virtuosity as a musician. It took me some thinking over years to dismiss the false dichotomy that you are either an entertainer or an artist; you are either Louis Armstrong or you are Miles Davis.
I was not there yet my freshman year of college. Being the only black person on my dorm floor of fifty residents, and one of four black people out of 200 residents in the building, I suddenly felt self-conscious about how I represent. I felt self-conscious about being seen as a stereotype instead of an individual. Somehow in only a few short weeks of college, I was infected with such thoughts, I lost myself in a momentary identity crisis. I tried to be Miles Davis instead and took an obscure beguine piece and reinterpreted it playing part of it muted. At the end the MC seemed to be the only one impressed, as she asked with genuine curiosity, “Is that your own composition?” I had not stopped to consider that there was a much vaster audience readily embracing what Louis Armstrong was doing than what Miles was doing. There was an inner circle of jazz aficionados that appreciated the artistry of Miles, but even some of them had to listen a couple of times to get it. Oh, and more importantly, I was no Miles.
Probably the only reason I finished as runner-up to Mr. Gilmore was because I managed to listen to my audience and give them some of what they wanted. There were a lot of females that urgently wanted to see me posing in a bikini brief, for the swimsuit competition, so I went out and bought the appropriate attire. With some trepidation I put it on, and no sooner had I done so, a troop of females from my dorm floor stormed into the dressing room rubbing baby oil all over my body. I went forth and struck some poses Mr. Olympia style. In that I was giving the audience, especially the female segment, what they wanted. During the Q&A session, by practicing my typical deflection with humor, I inadvertently made some innuendo laden comments in a low voice, and the laughter and oohs indicated that was what they liked.
For that I was rewarded with some attention later. During one of our “Penthouse” parties. A lithe and lovely young lady came right into my room and was chatting me up. She was a former ballet dancer and during the conversation she did a stretch where she raised her leg and put her foot on the top of my loft bed so that it was right at shoulder height. I admired her display of flexibility. Being slightly atypical, I had no clue what was happening until a female member of my dorm floor, who had observed the interaction, explained that she was coming on to me, hard. Being impaired in my ability to read non-verbal cues, I needed things spelled out to me. One morning in the men’s restroom and shower area I discover written on the mirror in three-inch-high letters with lipstick liner pencil, “DEREK TAYLOR IS THE SEXIEST MAN I KNOW.” Even if it was one of the guys on the floor pranking me, at least the potential truth was spelled out for me.
Mr. Gilmore insists I was ripped off and should have won, but I never felt slighted. If I had, the best outcome would have been to learn from the experience. People often speak of learning from our mistakes and pain, but we equally learn from being rewarded. I currently study brain effects of childhood maltreatment at the University of California at Irvine, and both animals and humans exposed to early life adversity, demonstrate that the brain becomes conditioned to have a heightened perception and response to threat and punishment and a blunted response to reward. I have also observed this interacting with adult survivors of child abuse. I should have been learning from the positive responses I got from women and seeking their rewards.
A few years later I was approached by female members of a sorority who were putting together a “Men of UC Davis” calendar. I was scheduled for a photo shoot on a Tuesday. However, the previous week I had gone to hair salon in town for a haircut, which got terrible botched. I had asked explicitly, if the woman who was about to cut my hair knew how to cut black hair. I had doubts because there were few black people in Davis. I knew she was messing up when she sprayed my hair with water, clumped it between her fingers and went at it with scissors. At the end I paid her, tipped her and then went home to fix the craters in my afro with an electric trimmer. At some point I decided the best thing to do was go bald. Later that night at a party I attended I was rewarded by a lot of women coming up an enjoying rubbing their hands over my bald head. I ended up embracing the look because it was tough and masculine. It turns out that when I showed up with a bald head for the photo shoot, the look was not appreciated, and I got dropped from consideration. Once again, I had pushed self-expression and failed to give the audience what they wanted.
That was the difference between me and the rightful Mr. Gilmore. At our reunion party I was pleased to learn that he had a successful career in theater back in New York before returning to California to work as a comedy writer for television. He was a true entertainer. Being an entertainer means recognizing and fulfilling the desires and expectations of an audience and seeking the reward of their laughter and applause. Now that Mr. Gilmore is selling real estate, his talent is shifted to fulfilling the desires of the house-hunting audience. I have come to appreciate the value of entertainment. I always say, the reason we have children is for the entertainment value. I am glad that my children grew up seeking the reward of my approval instead fearing punishment from me. That made the experience mutually entertaining. My greatest reward has been their expressions of appreciation, even for little things like spending an afternoon with them.
In the Bible there is a poignant moment in the story of Cain and Able when “the Lord said to Cain, 'Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door'...”. Still Cain wasn’t hearing any of that, and in a fit of rage he killed Able. My face was not downcast after the Mr. Gilmore contest. Over the years I have learned to appreciate the talents, gifts and abilities of others without being corrupted by envy. I truly enjoyed hearing about the successes of my dormmates at our reunion.
Luck being exhausted I needed to plead my case with The Divine. It seemed that my situation needed something beyond standard prayer at the level of serious negotiation. I know of several Biblical examples of such negotiation, but I decided to look first to the progenitor of negotiation with The Divine, Abraham, who went toe-to-toe with The Divine and wore him down until The Almighty was too through at the end of the negotiation (Genesis 18:16-33)? What was bold about Abraham’s negotiation technique was that he was not really making an offer, but simple questioning the nature and limits of The Divine as far as compassion and grace. That was like the modern negotiating technique of simply asking, “Is that the best you can do?”
If we are going to look at master negotiators with The Divine, we must consider Jacob, who was a skillful negotiator from an early age. First, he managed to bargain his brother out of his birthright (Genesis 25:29-34), but that was just his apprenticeship, his premier big deal. Soon thereafter, he moved on to negotiating his first deal with The Divine (Genesis 28:20-22) which established the tithe: Notice Jacob was not really putting anything into the deal except his word, so a 90:10 split is a good deal, like buying a stock on margin and getting a ninefold return on the stock price. With his bargaining career launched Jacob moved on to negotiating for a wife (Genesis 29:18) and cattle (Genesis 30:25-43). We must concede that Jacob may have literally used strong arm tactics in his greatest negotiation, but through it he gained the title Israel (Genesis 32:22-31).
Surely there is Biblical precedent for negotiating with the Supreme Sovereign, but why? We should ask the source, “what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them? (Psalm 8:4). Then we would get the answer, “You have made them a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honor” (Psalm 8:5). Perhaps the privilege of negotiation belongs to a child of God (Hosea 1:10). I know as a father I was always entertained by negotiations with my children. During the negotiations I would get to tell them things like: “All Christmas wish lists must be presented as type-written double-spaced documents” and “Oh! You mistake me for someone with money. I understand…It is the association that people have between rich and good looking, but I am one and not the other.” I was so entertained by the process that I did not get mad when at age fourteen my daughter Asha responded, “so, you really are rich then.” At the end of the day the negotiation process gave me opportunity to prove my character to my children; that I heard them and cared for them.
Therefore, we should surely negotiate with The Divine with fervor. We should follow the pattern of Moses who leaned into the negotiation as if the life of his people depended on it. (Exodus 32:11-14). One characteristic of Moses’ negotiation was that he was not making any promises, but instead boldly reciting the promises The Divine Sovereign has already made. This is a technique that I might be able to adapt. Trust is important in any negotiation, but in negotiation with The Divine, the most trustworthy one in the negotiation is The Divine. Moses simply cited the previous covenant, “Remember your servants Abraham, Isaac and Israel, to whom you swore by your own self: ‘I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and I will give your descendants all this land I promised them, and it will be their inheritance forever.”
There is no bluffing in the negotiation when the other party knows you better than you know yourself. As for my negotiation, I thought the best practice was probably to follow the human axiom of, under-promise and over-deliver. Broken promises hurt relationships. I could not bargain on my record, because I know I have failed at marriage, failed my children, haven’t always given what I should, and have struggled to break free of sinful habits. On the other hand, “The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin.” (Exodus 34:6b-7).
I paused to remember my negotiations with my children. Quid-pro-quo offers and promises, were not part of their bargaining. They were pretty good at just asking for what they wanted and not feeling the need to offer a sacrifice. They knew I would give them the best that I was able. In return I knew that they would be thankful for what they received. So may times at the end of the day they would just say thank you to me for taking them someplace or doing something for them.
Remembering that offered me hope for my negotiation. I found further hope in my negotiation in the story of the man who was healed from demon possession in Mark 5:18: “As Jesus was getting into the boat, the man who had been demon-possessed begged to go with him. (19) Jesus did not let him, but said, “Go home to your own people and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you.”
THAT IS SOMETHING I CAN DO! That is something I have done. That is something I can offer in this negotiation. I think I have taken every opportunity to tell people about my wonderful eight-day run-up to Easter this year that was filled with opportunities to proclaim the Gospel and get fed. Getting fed and sharing the Gospel started at Brother Mark’s house the Saturday before as we affirmed his fifth son at a bachelor/birthday event. At that event I met a young seminary student who bought me dinner on Tuesday to have a chance to question me. I told him about serving in ministry by putting aside that I am unworthy and praying, planning and preparing for every lesson and then praying some more that The Holy Spirit will show up.
I got a chance to put into action what I told him when I was called on 9:00 am on a Thursday to teach about Christ’s death and resurrection at 6:00 pm Bible Club that same day. By 6:00 pm I had a lesson that included a physical participation heuristic based on physiology, anatomy and science videos, scriptures, video-taped testimony of our pastor, and interpersonal sharing that included pictures and testimony from my experience in horticulture and the culinary arts; it was all in that lesson. The Divine knows my track record and knows that I write and tell the story of how much the Lord has done for me at every opportunity. I have been faithful in that, and in return I have been able to go forth being bold and courageous knowing that The Divine goes before me and will never leave me nor foresake me (Deuteronomy 31:6).
Reportedly Denzel Washington paraphrased it as, “"At your highest moment, be careful, that's when the devil comes for you," which is really an extrapolation and paraphrase of 2 Corinthians 10:12, “So, if you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don’t fall!”
Given that I don’t tend to go to movies, nor do I own a television, I did not see the Academy Award Presentation or the slap heard around the world which prompted this remark. However, when I heard what happened, it was like de ja vu all over again.
In the Old Testament 2 Samuel 12 there is the famous story of Prophet Nathan’s rebuke of King David wherein he tells David about a rich man who had lots of sheep and cattle, who, when he had guests drop by for dinner, decides to steal and slaughter his poor neighbor’s lamb which the neighbor had raised and loved as a pet. Then Nathan poses the question, “What should be done to such a jerk as that?” King David responds by becoming incensed and saying the rich man should pay four times the price of the lamb. Then Nathan delivers the punchline to David, “You are that man”.
When I heard the story of what Will Smith did, I was shaken by the thought, “I am that man.” No, I am not a famous actor, producer, director, musician and entrepreneur like Will Smith, but I have had a very regrettable moment during my senior year of high school when I lost my emotional regulation and punched a friend and teammate in the side of the head. Ostensibly, I was not upset because of an offense against me, but because I perceived that one of my classmates was making fun of another classmate behind his back. Perhaps, just as Will Smith could argue that he had to defend his wife’s honor, I could argue that I had to defend the honor of my performing arts tour roommate. However, deep down I know that my response was disproportional to the situation; like Will Smith, I had in a moment unnecessarily escalated a joke, maybe even a joke in poor taste, to the level of violent confrontation.
Like Will Smith I put my good accomplishments to that moment in jeopardy: I was a two sport athlete having success on the football field and the wrestling mat; I performed in two musical groups and had a decent GPA in college prep coursework culminating in already being accepted to universities in the spring of my senior year. Like Will Smith I received the mercy of not being arrested. Also, like Will Smith I received the grace of a Christian classmate who came to offer me consolation and prayer recognizing my distress and isolation over what I did.
Unlike Will Smith, I was only seventeen years of age at the time, but still there was a learning and recovery process. I have learned the 4Fs of recovery from mistakes: Fix it; Forgive it; Forget it and Forge ahead. Fixing it always means apologizing and doing the best to repair the damage you have done. Effective apologies have to go beyond a vague “I am sorry” to specific acknowledgement of the wrong. This is effective for both parties. How can I repair what I have damaged until I assess and fully acknowledge what I have done? This is no different than after an auto-accident having a professional tear apart and inspect your car for damages down to the frame. Just like an auto-accident some repairs take longer than others. As for the friend I hit, the bruising on his face would heal in a week, but the bond of trust would take much longer to repair. In some cases, an auto-accident is so bad that even though you do extensive repairs the vehicle never runs the same and is even labeled “salvaged”. As for my friend and teammate from high school, our friendship was knocked off trajectory; it would never run the same.
Forgiveness is a state of mind. How you handle the fixing phase influences the state of mind of the victim. At seventeen, I was too caught up in my sense of shame to effectively know how to handle the fixing and repair part. As it turns out, that was what led to the problem in the first place. I brought into the room that day a deep-seated sense of shame, unworthiness, and lack of power from previous childhood experience that left me without the tools to process my emotions and respond effectively. My reaction might be described as a reactivation of past trauma that had nothing to do with the present. I probably would have been so much more effective, if I had enough confidence in my social influence to approach my friend privately and state how and why his behavior disturbed me.
Forgetting does not flow easily from forgiveness, nor should it. If I had a regular habit of hitting people, then it would not be in my friend’s best interest to forget that, in case it should happen again. Remembering traumatic events can be protective but being overprotective can be destructive. In truth the human brain is designed to remember any arousing event and forgetting is unnatural. The best way to forget something is to remember something else. That is just like when you get one of those brain worm songs stuck in your head, the best way to get it out of your head is to sing a different song that is equally as catchy. If I present good behavior to my friend over-time, sing a new non-violent song, then with time the memory of the good will replace the memory of the bad. Thus, building trust can only occur over time because it takes a lot of repetition of the good to replace the recollection of the bad.
Forging ahead also means learning a new song. I needed to learn, practice and replace my previous responses to emotional situations. Over the years, I have learned how to not become emotionally overwhelmed by relying on higher truths, like Isiah 41:10. Even when there is real offense or threat, not just a misperception, I know I can stand and face it calmly. I remember things like being empathetic to others and calmly expressing my feelings. I know when to do so in private where I can be heard instead of in front of everyone where I make the other person feel defensive, and actually humiliate myself as much as them.
I have no intention of heaping more shame on Will Smith, but to instead identify with him. I would encourage him in this truth, “No temptation has overtaken you except what is common to mankind. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it.” (I Corinthians 10:13). I think more of us, than will admit, have had the urge to hit someone, because in the moment what they said really moved us toward rage.
Even though I had learned, grown and changed for the better from the seventeen-year-old me, In the year between June 30th 2020 and June 30th 2021 I was brought to the edge of a falling. During that period, I faced the stresses of a job lay-off, two job changes, unemployment payments being delayed a year, three friends dying, singing at a handful of funerals, taking classes and only getting three consecutive days of vacation. I remember having to extricate myself from a heated discussion with my supervisor by saying, “Excuse me -I need to step outside for a moment.” I then I left her office closing the door. While standing outside, I could hear in my head the explosion that I was tempted to set off complete with the expletives, I might use. At the same time, I realized that what I was feeling went way beyond the situation. I waited thirty seconds to let the thoughts stop reverberating in my head. When I went back, I instead stated, “I am sorry, I am sick and I need to go home.” I then left and took a sick day. It wasn’t a perfect exit, but a much better outcome leaving me and everyone else involved with less to fix and forget than my first impulse.
There is victory and peace in living in the present as opposed to being activated by past trauma. In the present of being nominated for an Oscar and having preserved his family through some challenges, Chris Rock’s joke, even if offensive, was inconsequential to the moment. A well-placed comment either during Will Smith’s acceptance speech or post Oscar interview would have had so much better effect of defending his wife’s honor and preserving his own. Likewise, a well-placed comment either in the moment or later in private would have more effectively preserved both of my high school friendships. Being present now means living out the knowledge I gained from past experience. Likewise, the best Will Smith can do now is complete the 4F’s and live out the very valuable knowledge he has gained form the experience. Still, even on the days when I think I have it all together, I need to be watchful, because it only takes a moment to fall.
I still I have moments of doubt and uncertainty, wherein by necessity I stop to ask the critical questions: Who am I? What am I? Why am I here? Not this moment: on April 16, 2021 I knew exactly why I was at church singing for the funeral of my friend Aedron Hardison.
I was there because upon receiving a text message from Director Gordon Jackson asking me to sing and said yes without hesitation. I did not receive that text message because I was a great singer; I have no such delusions. At that point I had eighteen years of experience singing in the first tenor section with the Robert Allen Layman’s Chorus, and one of the best parts of that experience had been singing back-up to my friend Reverend Hardison, who would come out of the choir to sing lead every now and again. This was my last chance to sing back-up for Rev Hardison. More importantly this was my last chance to demonstrate that I learned what Rev Hardison taught me, “just be faithful.”
Before you can teach you must learn and before you can learn you must attain the mindset to learn. Rev Hardison over the years had told me how he learned the importance of being faithful. Before he had the mindset to learn he was on his own program, at least so he thought. Then he realized that alcohol was controlling the agenda and undermining his ability to be present for what mattered most to him, his family. After removing the cloud of alcohol, he saw the value of what he had. Perhaps it was like running giddy toward a cliff and stopping just short of going over the edge, but close enough to see that you almost lost your life. All I know is that the man I knew for the previous eighteen years was transformed to someone who did not want to even risk going toward that edge again. He was doing everything he could to be present as much as possible with the people he loved and those he served in ministry.
I got to witness this running into him attending various of his grandchildren’s events, football or basketball games that his grandson Damani played, concerts in which his grandson Desmond performed and at his granddaughter Danielle’s dance recitals and many church performances for all of them. Even more, I got to experience this sharing a ministry with him, once a year going with him to a convalescent home to sing for a Christmas program. I am not the best at singing acapella in a small ensemble but that was never the reason I showed. After my second time participating Rev. Hardison said to me, “Now you know we are going to do this every year on the first Saturday in December, so you don’t have to be called, just show up; just be faithful.
One year it was just he and I because the announcement was not made in the rehearsal the week before. I learned that being faithful meant not backing down because you do not get the level of support you hoped for. He and I went into the music room and spent thirty minutes coming up with a program. I grabbed my trumpet and we decided on two things I would play on trumpet. He picked the Christmas song he best played on piano, and we added me singing accompaniment to that in the mix. Then we added an acapella Gospel song. I learned being faithful means operating on faith not self-confidence. I had no time to worry about if I could hit that E-flat above staff in Ave Maria playing the trumpet; I just had to show up and do it.
That’s what I learned from Rev Hardison, that being faithful meant just showing up being willing to serve. For example, I put out the word that my friend Gerald was losing his place to live due to hardship. Not many people are eager to answer the call to help someone move at short notice, mid-week, but Reverend Hardison showed up. His presence reassured me. There was some heavy lifting to be done and my resources were Gerald, a man with a double heart valve transplant due to complications post crushed leg injury, and Reverend Hardison in his late seventies. However, I remembered the story of Gideon that you don’t find strength in numbers but in the heart and mindset of those who go into battle with you. I knew Rev Hardison still had the heart to challenge his grandson to push-up contests. His help would be enough. Turns out I had to tell Rev Hardison that I should go first taking the couch down the stairs. Friendships are made in moments like that.
Yes, I did just dare to call Reverend Hardison my friend. At his funeral I was a bit envious of Reverend Sergeant because, he could claim without reservation that Reverend Hardison was his best friend. I know how much Reverend Hardison valued friendship. Sometimes when we were with the fellas talking after a rehearsal, just shooting the breeze as it were, one man might get to talking about another person and Reverend Hardison would cut them off by announcing that person’s name with emphasis like, “[INSERT NAME HERE] -that’s MY friend.” The emphasis on the possessive, was a friendly warning shot that let you know not to trespass in the territory of disrespecting one of his friends.” Perhaps Rev Hardison was not the quite the boxer he was when he was a young fit athlete, but still, I would not want to risk crossing the line of disrespecting one of his friends.
I have come to have some appreciation of friendship having managed to retain a few good friends over the years. One defining feature of friendship is the ability to forgive the faults of another. Reverend Hardison had forgiven me the time I was driving Brother Green’s van during the Reno Tour, and I did not pull over when he said he needed to relieve himself. He probably realized that I was still young and did not understand that when a man pushing seventy says he needs to go, that “please pull over”, does not mean keep driving to the next exit. He also forgave me when the one time I spoke too long at a funeral, was one where he was the presiding minister. He let me go a bit long before he walked over and gave me a body language prompt. Perhaps he understood that I was showing up and speaking for my friend John Wayne Moore, letting everyone know that the period of his life when he was on the streets was not to be disregarded, because even in those desperate days God had not abandoned John to his affliction; the Holy Spirit stilled communed with him.
Perhaps Reverend Hardison was able to forgive because he understood the importance of just being faithful to a friend until the end. Aedron Hardison left a rich legacy of athletic ability, musical ability, and spiritual devotion to his children and grandchildren. I do not presume to be a fraction of his equal. However, I keep showing up inspired by his example of, just being faithful.
I was tempted to ask the young lady follow-up questions regarding her alien abduction experience, but I felt that might evoke flashbacks to associated trauma. Besides, satisfying such curiosity would have only been a distraction from the mission. I had been distracted earlier, by the same panic a back-up quarterback feels when the first-string quarterback goes down late in the game when the team is within striking distance of going ahead in the score for the win. I was given a time-out between 10:00 AM, when I got the call to teach, and 6:00 pm, when the children’s Bible Club (AWANA), began to get my head in the game.
I had a standard routine for getting ready to get in the game that included prayer, planning, preparation, and more prayer. My prayers usually start out with prayers for an idea for the heuristic, because that usually takes the most planning an preparation. Unfortunately, my mind still wasn’t quite clear on the heuristic by mid-day, so I headed to a local shopping plaza to scavenger hunt for materials, at least that is why I thought I was there. After a futile search I ran into two fellow men’s chorus members in the parking lot. One of them was with another member who was no longer sings with us as he suffers from dementia. Recognizing the loyalty of fellowship shared by these men, was the slap on the side of the head that brought me to spiritual focus and the realization: Everything I needed was on the internet.
At 6:06 pm I took control of the zoom after opening ceremonies and began with having the club members pick a number between one and thirty and post it in the chat. Then I slid onto a slide, pictures from a random set of numbered pictures found on the internet that corresponded to the first six unique numbers. The imagination game was that the first volunteer had to pick one of the six pictures and start telling a story based on the scene the picture presented. The next volunteer picked another picture and did the same until six volunteers had composed a story. My young volunteers did compose a fine story:
I so wanted to spend more time on the alien abduction, but at that point I had a clear downfield vision and a gameplan of how I was going to get this lesson over the goal line. After preparing the heuristic, the slide show and the key verses, the additional prayer is always about the moment of convergence with the Holy Spirit. I could see my lesson coalescing with the design of the Holy Spirit in that moment. The theme for the night was Dream. Each child had been told to bring something that was either a fulfillment of a dream or dream for their future. One club member showed us her new roller skates and told us about her love of skating and how she had outgrown the pair of skates with which she had learned. I identified with wanting something for a while and finally getting it. However, I found poignant convergence in one young lady who told about her dream of being a writer and another young lady who told about her dream of being an illustrator.
Planning and preparation are part of due diligence, but it is the things that I did not plan for that reveal the work of the Holy Spirit. I had jumped from the theme of dream to specific topic of imagination for our heuristic in which we had written our own illustrated story combining our imaginations with pictures. I was anxious to move to the PowerPoint because some of the slides were based upon my Illustrated Book, “A Gift for a Special Child.”
The children were familiar with the book because they were the audience for my first book reading. However, they did not know the story behind the story. The story for the book began when I was buying a gift for the baby shower for a young woman from Africa expecting her first child as a single mother. Just as I was picking a gift from the registry at Target, I heard a voice tell me clearly, “You can buy those baby monitors, but that is not the gift that you need to give this child.” I found the voice disconcerting, so I figured it best to just ignore it and keep walking to the isle marked on the registry printout to pick up the baby monitors, then past stationary to get a gift bag and tissue paper. However, when I reached checkout, I was a captive audience for the voice as I was seventh in line. The voice reiterated its point, “That is a nice gift and all but that is not the gift you must give to this child.” Being stuck there with no other check stand open, I had no other choice but to answer the voice, “So what is the gift I should give this child?”
The voice said, “The real gift you need to give is the story you will tell.” I answered promptly and directly, “I ain’t got no story -you need to leave me alone.” The voice did leave me alone until bedtime, but then it was back with, “Those baby monitors are a nice gift, but the real gift is the story you will tell. I said once again, “I ain’t got no story; I’m going to bed.”
I did go to bed, and I slept well waking in the middle of a dream. I was still in that state wherein reality and dream state overlap. I suddenly alerted and sat upright in alarm realizing, ‘The dream is the story I needed to tell.’ I quickly began to write down the story. That same day I went to the baby shower and was bold enough to say, “I have brought a gift for the baby, which is in that bag over there, but the real gift is the story I am about to tell.” Then, I told the story.
My experience of receiving the story so matched with our “Dream” theme, but there was more to the convergence. There was also the element of waiting for God to ordain the time just as that young lady had to wait a couple of years to get her roller skates. For me there was a 14 year wait between the dream that was the story and the illustrated book. I had asked my friend William, a career educator and art instructor to illustrate the book the same year the story was written, but he was not ready. After 14 years he was retired from teaching, had just completed his first illustrated book and was living in Las Vegas where he needed two things: something to do inside to keep him out of the summer heat, and something to do so that his wife Melanie would not complain that all he did was play on his iPad all day.
I sent William the story to read and we set a date to discuss the book. Before we had our first editorial meeting William had already sent me five images. Each image was better than I had hoped for. I soon learned that William had been given such a clear vision for the story that he did not need editorial direction from me. I originally asked for twelve images, but he produced 28 plus a cover. The theme for our working collaboration that summer became Ephesians 3:20,” Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen”. The same was the key verse for the lesson which I had one of the children read aloud.
One of the slides for the lesson showed me at the Translational Neuroscience booth at the Orange County Black History Fair and Parade. This was a moment of convergence of many things in my life. I told the club members about how in my senior year of high school I applied two five different colleges under five different majors Biochemistry and Biophysics, Civil Engineering, Journalism, Religious Studies and Art. I chose to study Biochemistry and Biophysics at UC Davis for the arbitrary reasons of the university having a wrestling team and more of my classmates were going there. That choice eventually led me to working for Translational Neuroscience. However, I had come to appreciate something very rare.
In my life the Lord has utilized all my passions and I have been rewarded by so doing. I remember being astonished the first month that I had over $500 of net income selling art. I still rejoice that the most cherished gift I ever gave my grandparents was a copy of a short article and poem, “Patchwork” about them published in Marriage Magazine. This brought me to my other key verse which has guided me through life, Psalm 37:4, “Take delight in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.” More than financial rewards I find joy in my talents and abilities being used in ministry.
Let’s not completely disregard the need for remuneration. I admit that I stuck with biochemistry and biophysics because at the time the biotech revolution was occurring, and I felt that there would be a good chance of earning a living with the skills and knowledge I acquired with my degree. However, when I look at the unusual ways I have found jobs and my career trajectory, God’s provision becomes evident. I now realize that if I had chosen any other college and its corresponding major coming out of high school, God would have provided for me on my journey. This circles back to the main theme verse for the night’s lesson, Philippians 4:19, “And my God will meet all your needs according to the riches of his glory in Christ Jesus.”
A recent extraordinary event was two young people, who were previously in AWANA, are now grown up and engaged to be married to each other. If such a wonderous coalescence can come out of AWANA, then the two young ladies, one an aspiring writer and the other an aspiring artist, one day collaborating to write a great illustrated book, does not seem so farfetched. I was fortunate to be called that day to deliver the encouraging message to them that they should draw near to The Divine and trust The Holy Spirit as they follow their hearts, knowing that The Divine can do more than all they hope for or imagine with their talents, and that The Lord will provide from the wealth of both heaven and earth for their provision along the way.
]]>
My pastor, Ivan Pitts continues to provide food for thought posting his daily inspirational memes which provide a point of departure for further meditation, and this one did not disappoint.
“When you finally learn that a person's behavior has more to do with their own internal struggle than it ever did with you...you learn grace.”
I was helped in my understanding of how and why sometimes people’s behavior is driven more by their own psychogenic pain than by those around them, by the graphic portrayal of such in the movie “Lars and the Real Girl”. In the movie Lars, played by Ryan Gosling, adopts a life size “anatomically correct” sex doll as a transitional object to work through his fear of abandonment. (Watching the scene where Lars first unpacks the doll, I had to assure a female friend that the movie was not at all about sex or pornography). The doll presents a tableau rasa for him to project all of his intimacy and fear of abandonment issues. The undertone of the movie is replete with the delicious irony that he is using a pornographic fetish item as a transitional object to work toward true emotional intimacy and connection. (Hopefully, everyone understands that pornography is the anti-intimacy.)
Lars’s projective identification culminates with him engaging in passionate arguments with the doll expressing his jealousy of her and her good relationships with others. As Bianca is an inanimate object the fight has nothing to do with her actual actions and is completely based on unsustainability of Lars’ projection upon her of desired positive traits. It is the shattering of the delusional phase of the relationship, as happens in many relationships, but is particularly harsh when those involved come from backgrounds of trauma, as was the case with Lars, having lost his mother at birth and been raised by a grieving seemingly detached father. He shifts from idolizing Bianca to nearly demonizing her. Unfortunately, I did not understand such things as projection, mine or anyone else’s, in my early relationships.
In my early relationships I was one to get caught up in reacting to expressions of emotion and behavior that had nothing to do with me. I could not see that the person was arguing with themselves and against persons and influences from their past more than me and acting out patterns set in motion way before they even met me. I may have been the trigger, but I was not the cause. Sometimes we set off emotional mines in other people that were laid in their harbor by people we never met. Still, it hurts to be the target of their blast. I am a real man with real emotions.
Recently In a video Dr. Ramani Durvasula said something about how to defend from the blast. It was like how submarines evade depth charges, become silent and go DEEP. This means instead of reacting do NOT Defend, Engage, Explain or Personalize. This is good practice on a human level. However, no one went more deep than Our Savior who prayed for his executioners when Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” (Luke 23:34). Instead of reacting to behavior perhaps directed at you but not about you, quietly step away and give the other person some space to have a chance to become self-aware. From that distance you can quietly pray for them, and as you stand praying forgive. (Mark 11:25)
]]>I recently listened to a psychologist who said that sometimes the only way for people to change intractable bad behavior is to experience an emotionally transformative moment. These moments are often painful and sometimes include great loss, such as broken relationships, divorce, arrest, death of a loved one or accidentally harming someone like vehicular manslaughter. For the addict or alcoholic these moments provide their rock bottom, but transformative moments occur in the lives of people of all levels of social status and behavior, not just addicts. Sometimes these moments correct bad behavior and sometimes they help us rediscover the virtue in us.
King David had lapsed into bad behavior because he could not see the difference between G-d allowing him to get a woman he admired, Abigail, because her arrogant jerk husband, Nabal, died (I Samuel 25) and plotting to kill a noble man, Uriah the Hittite, because he coveted and then committed adultery with his wife, Bathsheba (2 Samuel 12). The correction of King David’s bad behavior began with confrontation by the prophet Nathan first to bring him to realization of having done wrong (2 Samuel 12:1-9) and then realization of the consequence of his bad behavior, that there will be violence and rebellion in his household (2 Samuel 12:10-12). Even though King David acknowledged his behavior was wrong in (verse 13), he still needed an emotionally transformative moment to change his behavior. The emotionally transformative moment came in the death of the son that was conceived out of that union, (verses 14, 20).
Though emotionally transformative moments can be beneficial they are not always something that someone would relish. Although David knew it was coming, he got downright ugly crying before G-d, laying on the ground and not eating praying for the life of his son, hoping desperately to forego the emotionally transformative moment of the death of a child (2 Samuel 12:16-17). Likewise, Jesus knew his emotionally transformative moment was coming when he would be handed over to be crucified (Matthew 26:1), and in a moment of true humanity he fell on the ground and prayed that he would be allowed to avoid it, but then acquiesced that it was the only way to actualize the salvation of humanity and correct our separation from God (Matthew 26:39).
When emotionally transformative moments cannot be avoided, we should at least make sure we get what we need from them. I don’t like to shop in stores, but when I do have to go shopping, I like to get in, get the goods and get out. It helps to know exactly where the items you need are located. King David wrote Psalm 51 in his emotionally transformative moment. The Robert Allen Layman’s Chorus, with whom I am privileged to sing, performs a song with lyrics based on verses 10-12 of Psalm 51.
Create in me a clean heart
And renew a right spirit in me
Cast me not away from they presence Lord
And take not Thy sprit from me.
The goal is clear, to renew a right spirit, and King David makes it clear that is achieved by being contrite, repentant (Psalm 51:17). However, David makes clear that the actual transformation results from our contrite heart making way for a Divine cleanup and coverup operation (verses 7-10). I will humbly straighten my crown and carry on, remembering that my crown is not the symbol of my righteousness (Isaiah 64:6 Romans 3:22-23), but of The Divine's grace (Ephesians 2:8-9).
I know the pain of emotioanally transformative moments like when my mother died only weeks after I lost my friend Norman, separating from my wife, being laid off from a job, and recently a failed relationship. I continue to learn from these experiences which though difficult have transformed my life. I pray for those who are going through emotionally transformative moments, even my friends who have recently lost loved ones so close as a father, a spouse or a child, that in their healing. G-d will renew The Spirit in them.
]]>
For the past couple of months, on weekly walks to the park to go workout, I pass this billboard showing a man with his arm around a woman as he smiles at her. The billboard displays the caption, “My daughter’s breast cancer saved my life.” The billboard is like one of those things that once seen cannot be unseen. My immediate reaction was, “WOW DUDE! WAY TO BURY THE LEAD…way to make the story all about you.” Granted, the purpose of advertising is to be provocative; even I in my ignorance of marketing and branding (to which my daughter Asha can attest) understand that. Still, this billboard provoked the most unsettling questions starting with, “What was the outcome for the daughter? Did she survive? Did she have to have a mastectomy? Did she test positive for the BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes? Was she married? Did she have children? What is her long-term prognosis?”
Understand, I am not trying to be judgmental, just honest about my first impressions. Even in that I am subject to the scrutiny of, “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?” So, let us look at the plank in my own eye. Is it possible that my emotional reaction is really projection? Some, possibly even my own daughter, might likewise accuse me of burying the lead in the title of my first book, “The Asha Chronicles”, which indicates that Asha is the subject of the book. While there are some delightful vignettes sprinkled throughout the book depicting Asha being entertainingly Asha, a lot of the book seems to be autobiographical material from the author’s life, the author being Asha’s Dad, aka me.
Some of the autobiographical material can be easily justified because it is framed in the context of answers to questions Asha asked. However, some stories seem so obtuse and abstracted that the reader, especially the one for whom the book was written, might have difficulty seeing the relevance. To uncover the relevance the reader must understand that The Asha Chronicles is an anthology of essays and poems beginning with an allegory, “A Gift for a Special Child.” It is as much a story about being Asha’s father as it is a story about Asha as a child. As much as I have an alliterative affinity, anthology, abstraction and allegory do not amass as an algorithm for good parenting. This is hardly a how-to book on being a good father.
To the contrary, I accepted the role of father with full knowledge that I lacked the tools. I have not seen my own father since I was thirteen years of age. At the time of Asha’s conception, I had no contact with him in fifteen years. I considered my father as an example of what not to do as a father; never abandon your children. After my parents’ divorce, I did get a couple more years with my father than my sisters. After the “We are getting divorced talk,” my mother admonished me, “Your sisters and I are going to California. Your father is going to Germany. You can come with me to California, or you can go to Germany with your father. If you come with me to California and act the way that you do, I will have you institutionalized.” I knew she was serious because she had tried while my father was away on an assignment in Korea. In retrospect I can see where a woman would not want to be stuck with four children on her own when one of them, me, was not 100% neurotypical.
The good upside of not being 100% neurotypical is that it takes me a long time to interpret social cues and be discouraged from a relationship. Thus, I came back to California for high school without fully appreciating that my mother had encouraged me to go with my father. If I had to describe my relationship with my mother, I would use the phrase, “It’s complicated.” On one hand she is the woman responsible for my faith. I remember in high school coming home and finding her with her Bible open and being drawn into these one-on-one Bible studies when she asked me questions. On the other hand, I survived in high school avoiding further institutionalization by spending as much time away from home as possible through music, sports and some student government activities. My mother always maintained, “You’re sick and psychotic like your father. That’s your genetic heritage.” There were other things she would say over the years, even long after I left home. Even after Asha was born, I got a forty-page affidavit my mother had submitted to the court which detailed how I was sick and psychotic like my father and I had ruined her life. And that, oddly enough, was part of the inspiration for The Asha Chronicles.
After I got one of my mother’s long letters replete with a litany of accusations, I realized that much of it had nothing to do with me at all, but her rage toward my father, and her disappointment in life. I realized the best thing to do was tear it up and throw it away. In reply I wrote to my mother telling her that she had this very interesting life story that began in her childhood being raised by a sharecropping father in Arkansas. Her mother died when she was six. My mother was among the three of the eight siblings that survived and helped raise her younger brother Joseph and sister Lenora, my beloved aunt. In my reply I asked my mother to write out her life story. I realized that for the most part I only knew my mother as a role, mom, and not as a person. Her story could give insight to her pain, struggles, fears and attitude. My mother never responded, and I was left for years after her death trying to gain understanding by just reviewing over-and-over what I did know of her.
The opening allegory to the Asha Chronicles is “A Gift for a Special Child” with the theme, “It is important the gift you give to a child, because the gift that you give to a child will shape who the child becomes.” I must admit that the allegory was not originally written for Asha. It was written for a young woman from Africa, the father of her child, and her baby conceived out of wedlock. I had been in a store to buy a gift off the registry for the shower when that still quiet voice told me, “You can buy those baby monitors, but that is not the gift you need to give to this child. . .The gift you must give is the story you will tell.” I had no clue what the story was when I went to sleep, but the story was in my head when I woke up. The story was written with true empathy for the couple struggling to become parents within the context of a turbulent relationship; been there; done that.
I told the story at the baby shower wearing the colorful dashiki which is The Story Teller’s shirt. Two twin brothers from Nigeria listened intently to the allegory set in Africa. After the shower, I realized it was the perfect story to be the intro to The Asha Chronicles. The book was meant to shape who Asha becomes. Although in the book I recoil in horror at Asha exploring Emile Dickinson and writing poetry, I go on to give her personal examples of me expressing myself in poetic form. The book was written with the awareness that at some point Asha would come to realize my deficiencies as a parent and ask why? The book gives Asha some clues as to why, but it was only meant to give her confidence to asks further questions.
The gift was not only meant to shape who she becomes but respond to who she is. Asha is my daughter who grew up loving stories would read up to ten books a week in her childhood; the biggest trouble she got into in high school was library fines. The Asha Chronicles was presented to Asha on her 16th birthday, a Tuesday. When I picked her up on Thursday, she had already burned through all 253 pages. She remarked, “That was good Dad, when is the next one?” I stared at her questioning, “Does she think I can just poop out 253 at will?”
One of the most important things I learned in relationships is, “It is important to know where you end, and the other person begins.” The Asha Chronicles was just the intro volume. I am NOT meant to be the author of Asha’s life; I just wrote some stories for her in the first volume to give her a guide and a start. All subsequent volumes will be really her work.
]]>
I was such a sucker. I was actually sprinting to the task. My girlfriend, Kind Art Tutor, sometimes felt that Dave took advantage of me. This feeling was usually precipitated by Dave calling me in the middle of having dinner or studying with her and asking me to sub for another attendant who had canceled for the next morning. Perhaps I was a bit too easy as far as saying yes. I must admit there was one month, in which Dave was short of attendants, that I ended up averaging six mornings and a couple of nights a week of meeting his needs. It far exceeded the convenient part time job that would not interfere with school for which I had initially bargained.
Perhaps, I was pulled by guilt. After all I was healthy and had full use of my limbs. I was so healthy that some of my friends had half-seriously started calling me the “paragon of physical excellence.” People stopped me in the gym and offered me money to train them. I ran, biked and swam with my tri-athlete friends. My friend Kurt who was on the wrestling team with me always complained that all I had to do was stand in the middle of the quad and flex and women come over to talk with me. (I should have let Kurt know that I never had more women approach me than when I was walking with him, but I chose to protect him from an over-inflation of ego). Dave probably would have had all these things. He was a handsome man who resembled a young Harrison Ford. In fact, one of his favorite Halloween costumes was to dress as the Indiana Jones character. If he could stand he would probably stand about 5'10-5'11. In high school he had been both athletic and intelligent. He had everything I had and more until that drunk driver hit him as he was walking along the road.
Then again it was more likely that I was pulled by fear. I knew I had been blessed beyond what I deserved. I was acutely aware that it all could be taken away from me in a split second of error. In all of my years of playing football I could have hit someone wrong and be just like my friend Carl whose high school football career was ended by paralysis. There was that narrow stretch of roadway with no sidewalk along which I walked home from high school. It would have been the perfect place for some drunk returning from happy hour to make a wrong swerve and maim me.
What I feared most about being like Dave or Carl was losing my self-sufficiency. The worst torment for me is having to rely upon someone for assistance. I could imagine how uncomfortable it was to have to constantly seek help from others. I had anxiety attacks if I had to ask to borrow a pencil in class; I could imagine the torment of having to interrupt someone in the middle of dinner to ask them to wake up early next morning and get me dressed. I always figured it was not as hard for me to say yes as it was for Dave to ask.
I was probably the easiest person to ask to come by on Easter Sunday morning. Ironically, I usually did not work on Sundays because I reserved it for going to church, but on this most sacred of church-going occasions I could not ignore a plea for help. As usual, I found the spare key and entered the house as quietly as possible. If everything went well I could get Dave up and dressed before his children, who were visiting for the weekend, woke up. However, everything was not destined to go well.
Dave had been fighting off some intestinal disturbance. Apparently, whatever bug he had took advantage of him while he was sleeping. The result was projectile diarrhea. He was covered in the stuff from his chest down. I would need to clean him up some before I could grab him and put him in the shower. However, before he reached the shower, he would want to sit on his dump chair and get cleaned out internally to make sure there would not be further embarrassing accidents later in the day.
I had to work fast. The schedule was always tight with Dave. During the week he had to be out the door at 7:00 am to catch the bus. He was fastidious in his personal grooming. He wanted his tie straight and his collar neat. He was an attorney and he wished to look every bit as professional as anyone (able bodied or not) in his office. This morning I did not have to worry about catching the bus. I had to worry about his children, Ted and Katie, who would be awake soon wanting their dad to be ready to hunt for Easter Eggs and take them to church. I had to get him dressed and get the mess cleaned up before they got up. I certainly did not want them to see him in his current state.
I was working as fast as I could with my hands, but my mind wandered to a different place. I was asking the question. How could you love someone and do this for them? I was partly thinking about Dave’s marriage. He had met his ex-wife while he was hospitalized after the paralysis. She had been one of his nurses. I wondered at how an able bodied woman could fall in love with a quadriplegic. On some level it was not too far-fetched. As I had said before Dave was handsome and intelligent. Still the demands of being linked to a quadriplegic must have been great. The extra effort required certainly must have put a strain on the relationship. On the other hand, having to give so much probably helped to build the relationship in the first place. It sounds a bit twisted, but Love is a strange thing.
Having worked with Dave so much in the previous few months, I had developed some feeling of attachment to him. This was an unusual thought. Dave was one of the most demanding people with whom I had worked. When something was not just right, he had this habit of lowering his head and in a hushed tone of complete disgust muttering “no...No...No...No,” as his head shook just slightly. It made you feel really pathetic because you could not get his tie straight.
Nonetheless, I felt some bond to him. I did not want him to be embarrassed in front of his children. I was part of his life because of what I did for him: I was the guy that was willing to reach inside his body and clean out his bowels, I had massaged his back so that he could cough up the phlegm when he had pneumonia, and I had rushed through traffic to get him to work on time. I could not do these things with complete emotional detachment. With this thought in mind the corollary to my first question came to mind, “how can you not love someone and do this for him?” What a way to spend Easter Sunday morning.
Excerpted from “The Asha Chronicles” ©2007 Derek Vincent Taylor
The actual Dave: David Alan Rhodes (1952-2016) Obituary
I was one of approximately 50 black students in a high school of approximately 1450 students. Back when I went to high school our town was predominantly white with some people of Hispanic origin and few Asians. I was aware of numerous Mormon Students in my high school, and they were known for having fun dances at their church. I was even invited to one once but declined. I don’t recall being aware of any of my fellow students beings Jewish. During high school my most memorable direct encounter with anyone Jewish was with assistant wrestling coach Larry Kluger (aka Kluger-Buddy, now performing as Lariat Larry). My previous understanding of Judaism came from assiduously reading through the Old Testament after sixth grade in a Bible I had gotten for Christmas, by which I came to understand that the whole world would be blessed through the descendants of Abraham.
I was certainly blessed through Coach Kluger-Buddy who had one of the highest strength-to-body-weight-ratios I had ever seen; I was always impressed with how he could climb a rope either holding his legs perpendicular as if sitting in a chair or upside down vertically. Through him I learned what it meant to keep Kosher when he explained why he did not want cheese on his sandwich on a stop coming back from the Reno Tournament, “You should not gird a kid in his mother’s milk.” We had time to discuss common elements of our faiths and the Old Testament during the drive back prolonged by a crash of his VW Bug into a snowbank following a skid.
Still Kluger-Buddy was staff and not a student. Maybe the Jewish students were just doing a good job keeping their cover; maybe I should have kept a look-out in the cafeteria for which students were eschewing the pig-in-a-blanket, a cheese dog wrapped in biscuit dough, a perennial favorite. I probably should have also kept track of those who took the pig-in-a-blanket but traded it with a classmate for something Kosher; they probably felt undefiled if they never unwrapped the foil.
There were moments when I questioned the cultural awareness of my fellow students such as when during Spirit Week someone suggested I come in costume as Al Jolson, The Jazz Singer, for our spirit day theme of “That’s Entertainment?” I looked at that young lady with a squinted stare wondering, “Does she even know that Al Jolson was not a black man, but Jewish?” At first, I was troubled, but then I embraced the delicious irony of a black man impersonating a white man impersonating a black man. That same week in the senior show I did my Louis Armstrong impersonation singing and playing trumpet for a very talented classmate, Cinthia Fontana, who played Dolly Levi in a “Hello Dolly” sketch. When spirit week was over, I had a somber moment when I contemplated if anyone grasped the profound irony in my spirit day costume? Maybe it was no deeper than the irony of an Italian American Catholic playing Dolly Levi in our senior show. I worried that my mimicking of black face might distance me from my fellow black students. Maybe not all were aware that Al Jolson was an advocate for black performers on Broadway, or that Louis Armstrong identified as Jewish. Somehow the Spirit Week morning-after left me questioning, “What did I do to be so black and blue?” More importantly does cultural appropriation honor or dishonor someone?
One thing I have come to understand is the difference between laughing with someone and laughing at someone. Sometimes the difference is proximity versus separation. The closer you are to someone the more likely you are to laugh with them and not at them. When someone is telling jokes about another race or religion and there are no people from that race or religion in the room with them, then they are more likely laughing at them than with them. Maybe the young lady who suggested that I come as Al Jolson was intuitively aware that the character of a minstrel would be offensive, if it were not played by a black person. Maybe she wanted to make sure I was not only in the room, but the one telling the joke.
That brings me back to one of my conflicts in high school, “The Merchant of Venice”. I formed one of my closest friendships in high school working with wide receiver teammate, The Stork, on our freshman Shakespeare project. However, something seemed off about that play. Did Shylock represent the Jewish heart or did his character just perpetuate the negative stereotypes of Jews as relentlessly mercenary? Shylock’s Act 3 Scene I soliloquy seems to be an appeal to empathy from Christians towards Jews, but does it compensate for the context in which it is placed? The problem was we were discussing the play without any Jews in the room to give us perspective.
I chose to recite Shylock’s soliloquy for my class because on some level I identified with it. I could have substituted in “I am a black man” and made the same appeal to acknowledgement of my humanity, “warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a white person is?” Years later after my days as a wrestler had passed and I no longer had to make weight, I wrote this parody of that soliloquy:
I am a fat man. Hath not a fat man eyes to see the pizza delivery guy coming up his steps? Hath not a fat man hands too scoop up a piping hot slice, organs gurgling juices to digest that slice, dimensions of girth and height based on prior pizza consumption, senses that detect when people stare at us as we eat, affections for the person who buys us a pizza on our birthday, passions for the culinary arts which fired pesto pizza into existence; fed with the same food that comes in a box, hurt with the same weapons like criticism and body shaming, subject to the same diseases of diabetes and heart diseases, healed by the same means of diet and exercise, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a skinny person is? If you prick us, do we not bleed from our copious corpuscles? If you tickle us, do we not laugh as our stomachs give a jolly Jell-O Jiggle? If you poison us with tainted anchovies, do we not die a thousand deaths at the commode? And if you wrong us by messing up our pizza order, shall we not revenge by ordering from another restaurant next time? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that?
Composite Photo: 1) Buff Ballerinas -Rich Croce and Patrick Kam 2) Fine Fly Flapper Floozies -Diane Cater, Eddie Daniels and Maura Methaney 3) Seductively Sauntering Sultry Saloon Girls -Geneva Kaufman, Carolyn Lunsford, Janis Wiscarson, Kelly Ghent, Karrie Andrews and Doreen Ayers
]]>
For a brief second
Don’t be embarrassed
For an ethereal moment
While the club members were listening to the radio show as the heuristic, I was typing questions in the chat window, which meant the dialectic and heuristic portions of the lesson were happening simultaneously. I was also feeding them Bible verses relevant to their answers and preliminary conclusions about portions of the story. I was delighted to find out I had some truth-tellers in the group who were willing to call out the Texas Rangers for intimidating a witness who was mentally challenged. At the same time, the Texas Rangers were truth-tellers and dug deeper to understand that Carl’s confession was the false confession of a mentally confused individual. The club members were willing to call out Dan for being weak and lying. The club members recognized that Floyd was the worst kind of liar, the kind who maintained his lies even when evidence to the contrary was presented. Floyd’s first reaction when confronted with the truth was to throw his friend under the bus and blame Dan.
Through the heuristic and dialectic, we were able to ascertain some powerful truths like: A person may have his actions completely justified in his mind, but the result is wrongful death (Proverbs 16:25). We learned the dangers of hanging around liars (Exodus 20:16) because they can lead us away from what we know to be right to being partners in their crimes (1 Corinthians 15:33). Most importantly we learned that the divine nature is truth (John 14:6) and that embracing truth that sets us free (John 8:32) from a life of personal destruction and bringing destruction into the lives of others.
Now my friends who are full time teachers, especially those who have been teaching online during the pandemic would say my lesson was successful just in being able to maintain enthusiastic engagement of a group of young people for a full thirty minutes during a zoom call. I went a couple of minutes overtime, but my fellow leaders most graciously gave me a pass because they got caught up in the story and the message. However, I had forgotten that large group time is really the warm-up act for the main feature, the two-minute gospel share at the end. It was during that moment, I realized I had missed the mark. The leader sharing the lesson that night was doing a very artful job connecting the dots between the large group lesson, the theme night and the gospel message. However, as she spoke, I realized I had failed to give her the thread that made it easy to connect those dots.
I had failed to shape my message to fit the light of the world theme for the night illuminated by Matthew 5:16, “In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.” Granted I only saw the theme twenty minutes before club, but that is no excuse because there have been times I have developed lessons within a couple of hours of being called to teach. I am confident that if I had been in tune with the spirit, I would have seen the obvious bridge between the lesson I had prepared and the theme verse in only minutes. The bridge is set up in the preceding verses (Mathew 5:14-15)
“You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house.”
As Christians we are to bring light into the lives of others by speaking, living and in all ways embracing truth. When we don’t, it is like putting our light under a bowl. If we come under the influence of a liar that puts our light under a bowl. A person who lives and speaks lies is under the influence of the evil one, the father of lies (John 8:32). When someone associates with such a person their values become corrupted and not only do they start to lie, but, if under the influence of a liar long enough, they may be lured into other misbehavior, sometimes with tragic or deadly consequences. This is a cascade of error.
In “Last Stop” the cascade of error started when Floyd’s father failed to discipline his son, such that Floyd started getting into trouble. When discipline failed at home, he sent Floyd to military school. When that failed, he foisted his errant son upon Mr. Morton, his tenant farmer, to watch for the summer. By that time Floyd was an inveterate liar. Instead of the Mortons having a positive influence on Floyd, he had a negative influence on Dan leading him to not only lie but to participate in an atrocious act of derailing a train leading to the death of the train engineer and injuries to many passengers.
Dan missed a great opportunity to be the light in the story. He could have been the light by standing up to Floyd and speaking the truth when Floyd suggested putting the railroad tie on the tracks. Being the light is not always easy. Floyd was older and bigger than Dan, so that would have taken courage. For Christians, being the light of the world means having the courage to stand up and speak the truth even when the liar we confront has more friends, money or political power than we do. Failure to speak the truth can lead to our own destruction or the destruction of others. Even worse failing to speak the truth hinders others from hearing the Gospel, the truth that will set people free bringing glory to our Father in Heaven.
For three years in a row I had enjoyed this event called the “Sister Reunion”. The first was the first time I had seen my half-Korean-half-sister Kim, since I was thirteen years of age. During that first at the Welk’s Resort in Escondido, we enjoyed a late-night conversation swapping stories of our disparate experiences growing up with our father that cemented that although she has a different mother, she is fully my sister. That was also the first time I met Kim’s future wife Jasmine.
The person who helped facilitate the event was my second sister Melanie who is very judicious at using her timeshare and Marriot’s rewards points. In fact, the next year’s reunion included Kim, Jasmine, Jasmine’s sister Erica, Jasmine’s mother MIldred, Melanie and my daughter Asha at the Marriot Desert Spring’s resort. The year after was at a resort in Scottsdale, AZ. Although one consistent theme running through these events was make fun of “Big Brother,” me, I had come to look forward to the feeling of being a family that we shared for the first time in our lives. Mixed in with all the jokes was a lot of “I love you”, stated both directly and implicitly. I was looking forward to this year’s reunion and introducing the sisters to my woman Catherine, but that was not to be.
With the year 2020 came the pandemic and many dreams were not to be. I realize that my disappointment has been lite in comparison to some who have lost dreams like owning a business, their last semester on their college campus, graduation ceremonies, jobs, family reunions, wedding ceremonies and even family members. Maybe nationally we have lost part of a dream as our prosperous economy shrank by thirty-three percent. Perhaps even more significant has been the damage to our American ethos. As a nation we were founded upon a statement that “We hold these truths to be self-evident..”, but these days it does not seem that we hold any truths to be self-evident. We have become a nation divided in partisan camps with extremely disparate views on what is true. Whether we are discussing the economy, political events, racism or even the pandemic each camp is quick to declare any information contrary to their particular political narrative fake news. The camps have even maintained extremely contrary narratives about the pandemic and its severity.
This year, 2020, has been so much like a tsunami that has come in with turbulent force sweeping through our nation and turning on end everything we were clinging to for stability. There have been no constants. Even though people keep saying, “We are in this together” the tsunami of 2020 has left people scrambling preserve self and family. To some who have had loved one’s die the pandemic is real and to others who have lived in areas less impacted or have not experienced the death or morbidity of someone close the pandemic is just hype, possibly even a political hoax. I am among the less than 2 percent in Orange County California and the less than 13 percent in the nation more likely to suffer adverse consequences from the pandemic: I must remember the first person my life matters to is me. For me the rules of 2020 are like referee’s instructions before a boxing match, “Protect yourself at all times?” However, instead of each camp going to its’ neutral corner between rounds of political unrest and pandemic and then coming out fighting, it might be expedient if we could recapture some unifying principles and once again be a, “United” States of America.
You try to remember days of
childhood cheer, But all memories wash to gray
in your present tears. If you could comprehend the murmur That has fueled the ancient songs You would laugh You would dance in freedom For a thousand years.
On a Saturday morning in September I posted a group message on Facebook to my bandmates from my high school Student Association for Performing Arts. I asked about one of our previously hospitalized members, Kevin Baldwin, who had played in the trumpet section with me in band and then later transferred to playing bass with the rhythm section of the Jazz band. I was reassured that Kevin was doing better, so I used the occasion to post a song I had recorded to the group. Then soon thereafter I got a message that Kevin had died. Coincidentally, that same day Facebook reminded me that six years prior I had posted while on tour with the Robert Allen Layman’s Gospel Chorus in Mississippi reminiscing about my high school tours with the Student Association of Performing Arts. I was comparing the two experiences and entertaining the fantasy that we would all get back together and play music sometime. However, hearing Kevin was dead was like hearing John Lennon was shot and realizing the Beatles would never get back together; a hope was irretrievably lost.
Hope dips beyond the horizon
with the setting sun. For those who live
with hope inside them the journey’s just begun, Rays of warmth never depart from what lives within their hearts, The only gift
they can take with them when the journey’s done. A gift to set before the king when the journey’s done.
You'd think that people would have had enough of crazy Zoom calls; I look around me and I see it isn't so. Given the pandemic atmosphere, the best we could do to remember Kevin was a Zoom call. During the call Carol, Kevin’s classmate and former prom date, remembered that we had also been in Young Life with Kevin. Carol recalled after Young Life meetings jumping into Kevin’s red MG convertible and doing doughnuts in the gravel parking lot outside of the church where Young Life met. Carol did offer that she was not sure what that had to do with Bible Study? Perhaps everything and nothing.
When it came my time to speak I said, “Young Life did tend to be the theology lite of Bible Studies.” Instead of learning new hymns the song I most remember singing was “Take it Easy” by the Eagles. There was something in those song Lyrics that matched the spirit in which Kevin lived, “We may lose and we may win, though we will never be here again; so open up, I'm climbin' in, so take it easy.” Kevin new how to live in the moment and enjoy life. I was making it through high school by acting out my angst and it seemed that whenever I had a crazy impulse it was Kevin who was in the background saying, “Yeah you should totally do that.” For example, Kevin was one of my biggest fans encouraging my daily dramatic readings from Memoirs Of Fanny Hill, by John Cleland on our high school SAPA tour bus. Kevin also encouraged and provided musical accompaniment on bass along with Paul Camacho on guitar when someone suggested that I dawn a Hawaiian shirt and straw hat and sing the C&H Sugar theme song as a commercial in the middle of a Christmas concert.
What did any of this have to do with the Bible? Well we did learn that Christ declared his mission to be: “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” (John 10:10). I had only kept apprised of Kevin after high school through mutual friends. However, one thing I learned listening to people talk about Kevin’s adult life was that Kevin lived a very full life. He was a very intelligent man who was wildly successful in the financial world. He acquired things he loved like a collection of guitars and some fast cars. However, it was not just about the things but opportunities to share them with people that motivated Kevin. Several people discussed this quality that Kevin had wherein he spoke to everyone as if they were the most important person on earth in that moment. I am not sure how much theology Kevin absorbed from Young Life but in my book that is a pretty Christlike trait which we saw in studying incidents like Jesus talking to the Samaritan woman at the well. Jesus shocked the world by partying with sinners and tax collectors. Likewise, one of Kevin’s closest friends was a tax collector (IRS investigatory agent) and fellow guitar player Paul Camacho.
I enjoyed listening to some of the wild stories people told about celebrating life with Kevin while he was alive. “All along there were incidents and accidents; there were hints and allegations” of pushing the edge a bit. Some stricter more doctrinally minded people might cast judgement on some of the activities, but I would simply remind them that Christ did not come into the world to judge people (John 3:17), but to save them. Christ actually gave only one new command, that we love each other (John 13:4-35). In that regard Kevin fulfilled the law because people recounted his love and devotion to his parents. They also told of his generous hospitality as he always had a place for people to stay when they were in town. If he could get tickets to a good ballgame, he was bringing friends along with him. He loved people by teaching them and mentoring them in the financial world and helping others achieve success. The prevailing sentiment I got from the participants on Kevin’s memorial zoom call was everyone who spent time with him felt loved.
I was pleased to hear that my friend had attained so much success in life. His life course was not without setbacks such as a serious motorcycle accident, brain surgery and being robbed of a valuable collection of guitars. However, he demonstrated a good attitude going through these setbacks. He always recognized the strength and ability he had to keep going. Most importantly he maintained his kindness and generosity throughout. The current American ethos seems to be that success matters more than character. Our political discourse has become vicious and cutting typified by ad-hominem attacks on anyone who doesn’t embrace our ideology. Maintaining a partisan narrative seems to mean more than integrity and each side bends the truth for convenience. A just and merciful society is desirable but even the social justice warriors betray their integrity for clicks and likes. In the course of life attaining knowledge, wealth and title gives us status, but when the journey is done our most notable accomplishment will be the impression we left on those who came in contact with us.
It’s a race not won By the swift nor the strong So when you can’t go on Don’t fight the wind
and be carried by eagles’ wings
into the air Don’t fight the wind
and I will lift you up
beyond your cares Beyond your cares.
©2020: Derek Vincent Taylor
Biblical References for song "When the Journey is Done":
Song references.
]]>
Back in the theater I find that I am backstage with actors before a play. I am desperately looking for a script because I don’t know my lines. Before I can locate a script I am shoved in a line with actors going on stage. The toga I am wearing clues me in to the title of the play, “Shadow of the Cross” and I start screaming, “NO. I DON’T WANT TO KILL CHRIST AGAIN.” Somehow, I can’t extricate myself from the procession which only leads to the next level of this Jumanji-like nightmare.
As I go past the curtain instead of walking on stage I am walking upstairs into military barracks and suddenly I am wearing a soldier’s uniform. In a very short turnaround I am on the training field with rows of soldiers. Row by row soldiers are stepping into a line and marching between two sergeants facing each other. Some soldiers raise their hands as they pass these drill instructors. Trying to ascertain the situation I notice the World War I uniforms. Realizing what a raised hand means I start screaming, "DON’T DO IT! YOU ARE VOLUNTEERING TO GO TO THE FRONT."
Fortunately, I was able to force myself awake. As I reoriented to reality, I found reassurance in recognizing all the real life antecedents to my nightmare: my older sister sending me a brass ensemble CD as an early Birthday present, reading about the apparent moral compromise of Jerry Falwell Jr, and a picture of World War I and a meme on Facebook.
The picture of soldiers playing soccer between the trenches during the World War prefaced the story of the Christmas truce of 1914. The meme depicted Gaige Grosskreutz holding his bloody bullet shredded arm after allegedly being shot by 17 year old Kyle Rittenhouse using an AR-15 on the streets of Kenosha, WI and was captioned, “His palms are sweaty, Glock is ready, Attacks a 17 year-old with an AR-15, Arm spaghetti.” The meme had me scratching my head, “is this really a rhyming meme about shooting in the streets?” Then the meme left me shaking my head with the realization, “Yes, it is.” Nonetheless, meme’s are the modern language of the people and a gauge of public sentiment, so I read the comments until one struck me, “Should have shot that sum bitch in the head too.”
I reacted, “Wow!” However, I saw this comment had gotten several likes and even a love reaction so clearly I was missing something. I turned away from Facebook to cook dinner but that process was impeded by getting caught up in a political discussion. Eating late, having a margarita with dinner and political discussion gave me the pre-nightmare trifecta. Even worse I read more before going to sleep. The commentator had further stated;
“I hate to say it but I believe we the protecting folks need to open up more on these pussies who pray [sic] on the weak and old. Start shooting enough of these F----rs it will all stop. We as a nation have been to [sic] sympathetic to the political correctness of today's world and it has reached up and bit us on the ass. We need to stop this shit and restore order. Enough is enough. “
The one who originally posted the meme responded, “…agreed wholeheartedly. That is one of our primary jobs. Protect our families, protect our Republic” I sensed that he identified with “we the protecting folks.” This is where memes epitomize the American ethos, with each proudly promoting a particular partisan political perspective.
That is where I thought of the Jingoistic fervor of World War I George M Cohan song “Over There”
The song even makes reference to “Johnny, get your gun…Show the Hun you’re a son-of-a-gun!” Most of us can’t even say what a Hun really is because the distinct civilization ceased to exist 1400 years before World War I. Even more most of us cannot even explain why World War I was fought: How did a single assassination of an Austria-Hungary royal family member by Bosnian Serb Yugoslav nationalist lead to the mobilization of 70 million military personnel, the deaths of 9 million military personnel and 13 million civilians?
The short answer is alliances. Through a series of preexisting treaties countries were obligated to take sides regardless of the merits of the original dispute. That is the state America approaches, divided into sides based upon preset alliances and associations. I see people ready to go to war for their side endorsing a 17- year-old grabbing his rifle and travel 20 miles away from Antioch Illinois to Kenosha Wisconsin to be in the middle of the protest. Kyle clearly saw himself on the side of the police. Likewise the police saw him as someone on their side. Seeing him standing ready with his rifle and med kit the police thanked him for being on their side and tossed him a bottle of water.
Inadvertently, I became a target of the “us-and-them” mentality wherein “you either agree totally or you are the enemy.” Seeking further understanding I asked the commentator, “OK -you show up at a protest with your AR-15 who do you shoot first? What are your kill/no kill orders? Or do you just kill all the protesters and let it get sorted out in the afterlife? Have you ever been in combat? Have you fired a weapon at another human being before? I am just curious how you see this playing out in your head.”
That garnered an angry and dismissive response: “I believe you are just trying to start shit. Good day. If it has to be explained to you then you don't get it period.” At that point I just had to admit that I did not get it. I am not sure Kyle got it. Did he have a realistic anticipation of how things might play out? Retrospectively, I know how World War I played out. Even though they discovered they had more uniting than dividing them while exchanging gifts and playing soccer, weeks after the Christmas Truce the soldiers returned to killing each other. There would be three more years of skirmishes between trenches, three more years of bombardment, mustard gas and disease in those trenches. Every time the field marshal blew the whistle men would charge forth to kill those who were in the opposite trench with enemy body counts giving some distorted view of progress in a plodding war of attrition.
I was not sure that was where we want to be as a nation, because those people entrenched on the other side are actually Americans just as we are. “Johnny, get your gun” but when you take up a gun there is the possibility that you are going to end up shooting someone. Even if Kyle is acquitted in court by a self-defense argument, he still will have killed two people and possibly caused permanent disability to another. Can we differentiate between legal justification and a desirable outcome?
Curiously in “Shadow of the Cross” portion of my nightmare I was in a robe dressed as Pontius Pilate, but in the real life Shadow of the Cross production I played a Roman Soldier, a member of the execution squad which crucified Christ. I was screaming in my nightmare, because I did not want to be an executioner. After interrogating Christ Pilate concluded, “I find no basis for a charge against him...(John 18:38)” nonetheless the Jews wanted him crucified. Pontius Pilate “washed his hands in front of the crowd. ‘I am innocent of this man’s blood,’ he said. ‘It is your responsibility!’(Matthew 27:24)”. However, that did not give divine absolution for shedding innocent blood. At least Pilate took the time to hear Christ’s testimony. However, some seem ready to act as judge, jury and execution out on the streets of America. Later in the comment thread I posited that there was a difference between standing in your home or business with a gun for self-defense and forming a militia to patrol the streets of another town. The Second Amendment references a “Well-regulated militia”. However, even our well-regulated militia, the National Guard, has had undesirable results when turned on our citizens; remember the Kent State shooting which killed 4 and injured 9 others.
In as much as I respect the Second Amendment I think the Eighth Amendment which proscribes against “cruel and unusual punishment” deserves equal respect. There is a difference between enforcing the law and exacting punishment. Police officers are given guidelines for use of force as much as necessary to apprehend suspects and protect themselves. However, there are cases when police officers have overstepped those bounds to punishing suspects, even executing them. I am not one-sided on that issue. I don’t think defunding the police is the answer because in some cases increased funding might be needed to improve training and increase accountability (like buy body cameras). However, if trained police can make mistakes what can we expect from untrained flash-mob militias with no training or rules of engagement? What can we expect from a 17-year-old high school drop-out with a rifle? What can we expect if we allow America to devolve into two armed camps taking sides firmly entrenched in their political ideology?
I took a job that required me to be full stack database developer and administrator. I inherited some data that was in bad shape: It was not properly structured and it had a sub-optimal user interface. (That is polite understatement for I inherited a crap fest of mangled and tangled data). The person who initially built the database underestimated the importance of unique keys (i.e. lacked a basic level of understanding about data management) such that a single person was represented several times within the database often with different spellings of name, and different descriptive trait information attached. (In first grade we learn the importance of unique identity by writing our names on our paper before turning them in). Further compounding the problem was the use of a tabbed interface that allowed data entry personnel to inadvertently attach information belonging to one person to another; some instances of this were easy to detect by such things as pregnancy information being attached to a male while others could be easily lost in the mix. When I was hired I heard the boss complain the previous research team produced inconsistent results, and seeing how the data was managed I could see why.
The first rule of taking responsibility is that it is always your fault when things go wrong. Knowing I needed to produce reliable data sets for analysis, I immediately began to upgrade the database to an enterprise system from a flat file system. In the new system I began fixing the integrity keys. I exploited an algorithm developed at a previous job to identify duplicated subjects and merge them. During my first year I was often responded to requests for data with generous time estimates to allow for clean-up of legacy data.
Fortunately, during the second year our department received funding specifically to upgrade the database as well as design and deploy a new web interface. The good news was that I was in charge of design of both the new data structure and the new web interface. I also wrote the code for both. Given that I was doing all the design and coding I was the one that would be blamed if the web site was down, or if the data was not accurate. If you do the work you are responsible and if you have control you are responsible. By the third year when my new data system was up and my data acquisition team was entering data, I could no longer blame my predecessors because the data was now mine. Responsibility means taking ownership. The data was now under my administration.
You know you are responsible when you are the one losing sleep when something goes wrong. Recently, while upgrading a data storage system on a Friday night, I mistakenly executed a hard reboot when a restart seemed to stall causing the disk array to crash. I felt a profound wave of anxiety come over me seeing an error message on boot. The 15TB of data represented years of work by multiple persons. I instantly checked my mirror system in another building. Even though it had all the data except the previous week I could not quickly move it online because it was rebuilding its array with a new disk and the file permissions were not duplicated. It was an anxiety filled weekend. I knew if data were lost or work flow was interrupted I would be held responsible. That anxiety did not stop until Monday when the file system was repaired and the data was online.
In managing data I am in control of a highly important and valuable asset of the company. At one company I had a boss who proudly advertised that the company had the largest database of its kind in the world. He used that claim to bolster his other claim that he was the foremost authority in his field. However, he was not the one who spent four consecutive weeks including weekends running ETL processes to incorporate data to build the data from 3k unique subjects to over 50k. He was not the one who eventually set up a system by which we had 125k records incorporated. He wrote none of the extensive procedures and triggers that checked data quality and integrity. However, his name was on the door of the company so he was entitled to take credit. He owned the work in a different way.
Yes, give and take exists as far as credit is concerned. I have to give credit to Zombie and Pickles. Zombie was working at an administrative role but he had a desire and aptitude for programming. He ended up developing some apps that were invaluable in moving our key data elements from his administrative domain into our database on a daily basis. At first I coached him along but eventually I learned some tricks from him. He became a first class developer, but the boss was not willing to recognize his level of skill with commensurate compensation so he left to a more lucrative opportunity. Before leaving he coached Pickles, a young computer science student, into becoming a quality developer. My job burden was lighter when Pickles reached the point where I could write out specs and hand off programing tasks to him. Likewise, Pickles left for a more lucrative opportunity.
Taking credit and taking responsibility have different burdens. If I fail the boss looks bad and he might respond by firing me and blaming me for the failure. If I succeed he proudly puts his name on my work and leverages that to make a profit. Taking responsibility seems to possess some inherit virtue and therefore intrinsic reward. However, after five years of moving the numbers forward and not getting rewarded with a raise, I finally realized that I needed to give myself credit for being a full stack developer on my resume and monetize that elsewhere.
Enough of work, let’s examine taking credit versus taking responsibility in another context, a phone call I got at 3:45 on a Thursday afternoon. Brother John, the large group teaching leader for the children’s Bible club at my church was calling to ask me to sub in for him for the 6:00 pm session that evening. He was catching me at a bad time because having been reduced to forty percent time and only working Tuesdays and Thursdays I was preparing for the last two hour sprint to complete the week’s work. My initial response was, “I just can’t do it; I am at work and have two hours to complete all my work for the week.” I must confess, I felt a sense of weariness that club had stretched into summer when it was usually limited to the academic year (fall to spring). I felt a bit of resentment that I was being called upon with only two hours to prepare and get online. Then I was hit with a sense of responsibility.
Three weeks prior in the post-club leadership discussion one of the leaders had mentioned how much benificial activity was taken from the lives of children because of the pandemic. They had lost hours per week of structured time at sports, summer camps, choir and even social time on the playground. Therefore the hour and 15 minute condensed club time we spent with them had value in their lives. The pandemic had provided an opportunity to be impactful in the lives of the children. The same sentiment had recently been expressed by Emeritus Pastor Marv Fogleman during an encouraging phone call. Instead of being burdened with a responsibility I was being given an opportunity to take responsibility for insuring that the children had a quality experience.
My true burden was the realization that I had a lesson in my head regarding grace based upon the grace that I had recently experienced. I already conceived an Audio Daily Double lesson, Jeopardy style. The audio daily double was Donny McClurkin and Yolanda Adams singing, “The Prayer” with two sets of answers: 1) These attributes of The Lord are displayed in “The Prayer”; 2) These things are requested of The Lord in the song based upon The Lord’s attributes. The jeopardy questions led into a discussion of how faith keeps us safe. This led to my testimony on how just a week before faith kept me from panicking at work when it looked like I had crashed the data storage system. In the lesson we revisited the lesson with the video of a tortoise attacked by lions which was an analogy of the shield of faith. The tortoise could have panicked and tried to run away from the lions, but in faith the tortoise trusted his shield to protect him. Panicking for me would have been removing the disk array and trying to do disaster recovery in another machine to rebuild the file map. On Sunday I lay helpless waiting for the manufacturer’s engineers to log in and check the system, just as the tortoise lay helpless when the lions rolled him on his back. Likewise, as the tortoise received grace when a lion came back and turned him over on his stomach, I received grace Monday when I inadvertently re-seated the disk causing the file map to be found on reboot.
Some curious events at club that night included the club director, Brother Robert, having also prepared a message about grace in his five minute wrap-up. (Was that coincidence or part of a higher order plan?) Also, that evening we had a boy join us online from out of state who had just found our club through the web. After the wrap-up that young man responded to Bro Robert’s invitation to accept Christ. By taking responsibility I had the privilege to share in that moment. Brother Robert’s wisdom in recognizing the opportunity to minister to our children over the summer had led to that moment. I could not and would not dare take any credit for it. God’s work was accomplished despite my initial reluctance and bad attitude. I am merely God’s workmanship created in The Lord to do the work that God has prepared in advance for me to do. To God goes all credit and all glory. God does not have to take credit because it is freely given and truly deserved.
This pandemic quarantine shelter-in-place period has provided many people an opportunity to binge watch televisions shows and stream their favorite movies. I am not one to criticize if you got pulled into the Tiger King phenomenon. My personal choice to avoid that weirdness was facilitated by my refusal to renew my Netflix account after they doubled my monthly rate (admittedly complete pettiness on my part because there was no realistic expectation that I would pay just $6.99/month forever). Instead I have enjoyed movies on another streaming service, mostly re-watching old favorites that made some meaningful statement. Princess Bride’s overall statement may not seem so meaningful but I re-watched it because the character Vizzini is like the perfect exemplar of intellectual overconfidence.
Vizzini's death scene is infamous with the beginning of his demise being his declaration that Plato, Aristotle and Socrates are morons in comparison to his superior intellect. Confident that he has won the war of wits in guessing the goblet with the poison, he presumes the last laugh declaring, “"Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line"! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha...” before he keels over dead. However, antecedent to his demise, the early indicator of his intellectual hubris, was his repeated use of the word “inconceivable.” When the Man in Black pursuing them does not fall when the climbing rope is cut Vizzini declares it, “INCONCIEVABLE” to which Inigo Montoya admonishes, “You keep using that word: I don’t think it means what you think it means”. Inigo Montoya’s words deeply resonated with me because of some embarrassing moments of discovery of my own misconceptions, but also in seeing that level of embarrassing misunderstanding mirrored in The Artist.
Perhaps I would have been more like The Artist if I had decided to attend my back-up school as an art major instead of UC Davis as a Biochemistry and Biophysics major. We were eating lunch with the other Primero Dining Commons student staff before shift when he said the most cringe-worthy statement, “It is not easy being an artist and being so sensitive; I carry this burden of feeling so much. It is not easy feeling so much all the time.” Two hours later his behavior demonstrated that the word sensitive did not mean what he thought it meant.
As shift leader I assigned him to the dish room. On this particular day he was partnered with a tall blond girl from the Regional Occupational Program (ROP). Her freckles gave her a child-like visage despite her mature frame. She was devoid of any neural-stigmata (i.e. she had no noticeable features like Downs syndrome or microcephaly) which might make her condition noticeable, but clinically she was a person with mild intellectual disabilities. Midway through the shift I visited the dish-room and Blond-Girl was working the window where students placed their trays full of dishes, and after she rinsed them, The Artists was stacking them in dish racks and inserting them into the industrial dishwasher. All was right with the world until the harmonic convergence that caused most of the students to come to the dinning commons between 12:00 and 12:30 pm instead of spread out over our extended dining hours of 11:30 am to 2:00 pm. I quickly rallied helping prep more Monte Cristo sandwiches for the grill and then running food to the front to make sure supply met demand. We were running out of plates so I made a trip to the dish room, but I arrived too late. When I arrived the intake window was blocked by a haphazard pile of plates, bowls and cups and The Artist was screaming at Blond Girl: “WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU. ARE YOU STUPID OR SOMETHING? WHY CAN’T YOU DO YOUR JOB? WHAT ARE YOU A F@#$%#! MORON?”
I quickly intervened correcting The Artist, “That’s not necessary. It just got ugly here for a second. Let’s work together to clear the mess. I then swept the big pile to the left of the window and started organizing separate stacks of plates and bowls. This gave blond girl a chance to wipe the tears from her eyes and compose herself to resume working. I was so pissed off at The Artist that I felt the urge to visit violence upon him, but I controlled the urge. How could he make another person feel that way?
I was pissed off at The Artist because I could identify with how Blond-Girl felt. As I child I shared being devoid of neural-stigmata but possessing an intellectual disability. In fifth grade I literally ran away from the statements of my mother, “You are not ‘normal like the rest of the children” ending up twenty miles away. However my ultimate escape was to Germany with my father after my parents divorced. My mother said, “Your sisters and I are going to California. Your father is going to Germany. You can go to Germany with your father or you can come with me to California, but if you come with me to California and you act the way you do, I will have you institutionalized.” My intellectual disability was more of a lack of social intelligence, not reading verbal cues and subtleties of communication, not being able to make eye contact with people, and becoming emotionally overwhelmed in social situations like birthday parties or when my mother was screaming what was wrong with me. In that moment in the dish room I could see a bit of myself in Blond Girl as she was overwhelmed by the situation of someone venting their rage upon her. She surpassed me by finding the strength to respond, “YOU DON’T GET TO SAY THAT TO ME. . . YOU ARE NOT MY BOSS.” At the same time I was troubled because I could see myself as The Artist, also feeling overwhelmed but projecting his anxiety as rage upon another person. As a child I acted out my anxiety and rage by throwing and punching inanimate objects; I could do a lot of damage in a short amount of time. The Artist was directing his fear and rage at a person and not an object, but at least he was using words, harsh ugly words, but words.
I eventually learned to use words when I went to Germany with my father. My parents had bought many children’s books series but I preferred reading about science and history during grade school. Then in Germany I was left alone at night when my father worked and I started to read fiction. I tore through all the book series my parents had brought me up until that point and when I ran out of those I tore through all the books my father had from college literature classes (including reading all 1673 pages of the Collected Works of Emile Zola.) German television would go off at 10:00 pm and I would read until midnight. Two side effects of reading were becoming preoccupied with learning new words and becoming so enmeshed in the story that I internalized the experience of the characters on an emotional and psychological level, experiencing their fear when their lives were in peril and turning each page driven by their hope for the future. In retrospect reading probably sparked some development of empathy. While I continued to suck at non-verbal communication, I was able to examine life events and identify what people must be feeling. Thus by college I was able to recognize that Blond Girl must feel very threatened and hurt that The Artist was yelling at her, and that the Artist was just projecting as rage his own anxiety about the situation.
The Artist had humble-bragged about how sensitive he was. His use of the word was almost accurate as far as being “easily pained, annoyed, etc.” However he was only able to detect the changes in his internal milieu, his anxiousness, his fear. He was not actualizing the fuller definition of sensitivity in an interpersonal context, “having acute mental or emotional sensibility; aware of and responsive to the feelings of others.” He was not able to look beyond himself to see that Blond Girl was just as stressed as he was by the situation. He was missing the deeper implications of what it meant to be sensitive which was the rudiments of developing empathy, “the psychological identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.”
Over the years I have come to appreciate that there are different levels of empathy. For example William Jefferson Clinton had that very convincing way of looking directly in the camera and saying, “I Feel your pain [America].” In that moment he exhibited both cognitive and behavioral empathy, speaking and acting in a way consistent with the perceived sentiments of his audience. The next level of empathy is emotional. Apostle Paul when giving guidelines for putting love into action advises: “Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn. Live in harmony with one another.” By learning how to rejoice in the accomplishments of others I get 8 billion draws at the joy lottery per day. There is no deeper connection to another’s humanity than to sit with them during their deepest loss and absorb their emotion to the point of being stunned to silence or even shedding a tear, not intentionally acting out their emotion but letting it emanate from your viscera.
That brings us to the final level of empathy experienced in your body, somatic empathy. I suppose the closest a man can come is sharing morning sickness with a pregnant wife. Recently, I did experience an emotional and physical change come over me when a friend responded to a message with a sound clip of him laughing a deep belly laugh at my funny quip.
Still, for the consummate example of empathy on all levels I revisited another favorite movie, “The Green Mile.” John Coffey could sense the anguish that Paul Edgecome (aka Boss) was experiencing with his urinary tract infection. His level of empathy was such that he wanted to take away his pain by absorbing it into his own body, at the risk of being shot. Then when several days later Boss declared that The Mrs. was pleased several times over with the result John Coffee smiled celebrating a triumph that was not his own. John Coffey shares with Boss the experience being a pure empath when he shows him a glimpse of the consummate corruption of pure evil that afflicts Wild Bill’s soul. However before his death John Coffey ultimately expresses empathy for Boss in recognizing and yet assuaging the feelings Paul Edgecome has about being his executioner. The upside of complete empathy is the desire to heal others’ suffering but the downside is the ability to absorb the negative and even self-destructive emotions of other such as depression or anger. I have tried to sharpen my social intelligence. On my best days I probably achieve empathy on a cognitive and behavioral level, maybe breaching emotional. The experience of being a parent has imbued me with a certain cognitive empathy for the frustration my mother felt having a child who was less than fully neurotypical; I would have felt stressed and even overwhelmed raising a child like me. I aspire to enough empathy to be of help to others. “I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.”Pressing on toward the goal (Philippians 3:13-14)
You just want to take a moment and savor certain things. My woman made me a wonderful dinner the Saturday night before Easter Sunday consisting of pork loin smothered in a wonderful Marsala mushroom gravy, hand whipped polenta, seasoned roasted broccoli and freshly warmed bread rolls crunchy on the outside with gossamer soft warm centers. It was a meal so fulfilling that I did not want seconds, just that one more bite to savor. I reached over and grabbed an unfinished piece of meat off her plate, scooped up some gravy with a buttered heal of my bread roll, popped both in my mouth and very slowly masticated the mixture as I held it hostage in my mouth as long as possible before lubricating its descent with a final sip of a very sophisticated Pinot noir she had paired with dinner. It was a truly delicious moment. Some phrases are like that. They are so truly delicious that you just have to take a moment to savor them. That is just how I felt listening to a daily covid-19 briefing by Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti when he kept talking about the segment of Angelenos “experiencing homelessness.”
I thought “experiencing homelessness” was such a potent and juicy euphemistic phrase that I just wanted to take a moment and savor it; roll it around in my thoughts and mentally chew on it a while. The first time I encountered such a delicious term was when I went to work at Fairview Developmental Center to do research on self-injury. I quickly learned that the residents are called “clients” and no one is mentally retarded but instead they are “developmentally delayed.” At first I tripped over calling them clients but then I accepted it because indirectly their existence paid my salary, even though I could not bill them for the extra hours I spent reviewing their charts to participate in their individual development team meetings. I mostly had to take a moment to chew on the term developmentally delayed, especially the delayed part. I was still trying to swallow the term after nine months of doing weekly learning assessments with clients. Yes, I had one non-verbal client in the autistic spectrum who had learned to sort 241 items and could recall correct placement of any one of them at random, and then I had another client who after nine months had not learned item one. It was the second client who brought me to the realization: If we have a meeting scheduled for 12:00 noon and I call at 11:55 and said I was delayed, it would be implied that I am running late but still coming, but no matter how long I waited for that second client to learn the placement of the blue shoe, he was just not showing up mentally.
Retarded seemed so much more accurate for that client but with time the term had developed an undesirable stigma. Retarded was just like Negro had become for black people. For a while Negro was the correct term having replaced and sublimated the other “N-word” by taking it back to its Latin roots as in the Spanish negro which means black. The stigma of Negro was felt when one of three of my white college roommates told a story and referred to “a negro man” and the other two roommates’ eyes got wide and very embarrassed seeing I was standing there. I knew he had meant it respectfully because it was during his childhood that we transitioned to African American. (My birth certificate states I was born Negro to Negro parents and I did not become African American until around sixth grade). At one point Negro had dignity as in the “United Negro College Fund.” We had transitioned from “The N-word” to “Negro” to “Colored” (e.g. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, NAACP) to African American and back to black just like my clients would transition in their lifetime from retarded to developmentally delayed to persons with developmental disabilities to now persons with mental challenges. Likewise “experiencing homelessness” seems to be a transitional term removing the stigma.
It makes it seem like something that just happens, an acceptable phase of life. It removes the stigma associated with it and the connotations of mental illness, moral deficiency and uncleanliness. It makes it seem like they are no different than people who took a trip to a national park to experience the great outdoors. As someone who has done some camping and backpacking as well as some “experiencing homelessness” I can tell you they are not the same. As for the stigma of mental illness it almost becomes a chicken or egg argument. Out on the street I became acutely aware of those elements within me that were NOT neurotypical, those reasons my mother told me, “You are not normal like the rest of the children.” It was unfortunate because interpreting social cues and non-verbal communication becomes very important out on the streets. On the other hand it was fortunate because I was put in a situation where I had to learn or die. I also discovered that “experiencing homelessness” can erode your mental state. The sleeplessness alone can destroy your sanity. First of all every night you must find a place to sleep and when you do you are awoken by random things like security guards guarding the property, fights and even the sounds of gunfire, police shining lights in your eyes or just the cold of winter. There is also the uncertainty of every night going to sleep worrying about being robbed or just randomly attacked by one of those young people on a bum-bashing binge. Other uncertainties included what you would eat, if you would eat, where you would find a restroom and where you would find a shower. The real uncertainty is in questions like, “When will this end?” “Will things ever get better?” “Will I die here tonight?” Also the scenery of experiencing homelessness is not as pleasant as the scenery of experiencing nature in a national park: During my experience I saw a couple of dead bodies on the street; I saw a few violent assaults and I narrowly escaped a few. I saw people caught up in addictions and crime age five years in 365 days. Perhaps the biggest difference between experiencing homelessness and experiencing nature on a backpacking trip is you know that eventually you will be back at home safe and warm and safe in your bed with pleasant memories at the end of your backpacking trip. Not all my memories of “experiencing homelessness” are pleasant.
What is also deliciously intriguing to me about the term “experiencing homelessness” is that it is such a succinct third person passive voice term. I worked for the government enough to know the two rules of communication: 1) There is truth, but it must be groomed for public consumption and 2) when you want to avoid either taking responsibility or assigning blame then you revert to third person passive voice using phrases like, “Mistakes were made; errors occurred.” The term experiencing homelessness does not assign responsibility to the individual or the state, absolutely deliciously passive. Even though the State of California and the Mayor’s office has been discussing doing something about the thousands of people living on the streets for years suddenly with the new term it is no longer a problem, more like a season brought on by an act of nature; people experience homelessness just like they experience sunshine or rain. On the other hand I take responsibility for the choices I made leading up to my previous homelessness: I chose to be in a relationship with a woman; when our first child was conceived I chose to marry her; during our turbulent marriage I chose to go back after three separations; When I realized that me plus her was terminally toxic I chose to separate one last time and remove myself from the equation.; after the fourth separation I chose to make the priority my children having a consistent place to live and paid their rent first before seeking shelter for myself. Out on the street I had to make the daily choice to avoid falling into the addictions and vice that I saw around me. On Friday nights I chose to hang out in the prayer chapel at the VA playing hymns badly on the piano and having my own private worship service. One night a priest came in and threw me out because he thought I was destroying the sanctification of that otherwise empty space, but I was desperately trying to establish and maintain some sanctification of my inner space.
Thus I have certain empathy for those experiencing homelessness like the woman who approached me last Saturday in the parking lot. She was clearly trying to get my attention calling out to me. Usually I would be led by the Bible verse that says give to those who would ask of you and do not turn away from people who want to borrow from you. However in this instance I did not have a cent in my pocket to give her. (I was practicing social distancing by putting all my purchases on my card and avoiding exchanging potentially contaminated currency). In that moment I had forgotten the story in the New Testament about when the disciple Peter encountered a crippled man, “lame from birth”, begging. Realizing he had no currency Peter said to him, ““Silver or gold I do not have, but what I do have I give you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk.” With that the man was healed. Even still, Saturday morning I had forgotten that the Spirit of God resided in me and that I had something to give this woman. However, this woman was persistent like the woman in the Bible story who pressed through a crowd of people just to touch the edge of Christ’s cloak. Actually in my case there was no crowd of people, and all she had to do was traverse the parking lot and catch me as I waited outside the fishing tackle shop. She approached and asked, “Can you help me? I am sick. Do you know about healing? Could you just touch me so that I would be healed?” The Bible instructs us not to swear either by heaven because it is God’s thrown nor by earth because it is God’s footstool. Nonetheless, I must testify there are times when I think God speaks in irony through the Holy Spirit. This woman had put me in the place of Jesus in that moment when I felt empty and not very Christ-like. Very awkwardly standing on the sidewalk in front of the tackle shop I put my hand on her shoulder and bowed my head to pray for her.
There is the expression, “there but for the grace of God go I” that is used as a point of view regarding the homeless. (There I said it outright, just plain homeless). I realize in retrospect there with the grace of God I went. The Bible actually says that all things work for good to those who love God and are called according to his purposes. I grew spiritually experiencing homelessness. I developed empathy and compassion while experiencing homelessness. I lived my worst nightmares and realized that God had the power to bring me through even my worst nightmare of experiencing homelessness. Even still homelessness is NOT an “experience” I recommend or would desire to repeat. I pray for myself as well as all those who are worried about how they are going to make the rent during this pandemic shutdown or even its financial aftermath, because I don’t really want anyone to have that opportunity of “experiencing homelessness.”
For those playing along with the Bible home game some references:
For more stories about how God's grace was present with me even when I was "experiencing homelessness" read Days of Elijah
]]>
Granted during our high school years Tim and I developed this habit of last minute shopping starting around noon on Christmas Eve. Tim played wide receiver and defensive back on our high school football team and I played offensive and defensive lineman. We employed our skills in the last minute shopping frenzy. The most difficult assignment was trying to tackle the mom gift. He would cover the kitchenware zone carefully scanning the perimeter for potential gifts. We knew our limitations and shied away from women’s apparel, our weak zone. I might take housewares. Communication was key. As soon as one of us saw a potential gift we would converge on the location. Often I would block for Tim so we could muscle our way to a sales table. As a wide receiver Tim appreciated getting some downfield blocking; that did not happen often enough.
As an aside one of the funniest plays, one that we had to play over and over again with commentary in the Monday post-game film session was the time Tim successfully caught a pass on an out pattern. It was a play action option pass thrown to the left side of the field. I had pulled left from the guard position so I was in front of the quarterback as he threw the ball to Tim. I saw Tim catch the ball. Then Tim saw two defensive backs charging toward him ready to put a hurt on him and he just tossed the ball out of bounds like he did not need that level of abuse. It was one of those magic moments when Coach Vares would say, “This is the first time in all my years of coaching that I saw that move. What were you thinking son when you just tossed the ball out of bounds? Were you thinking out there?”
There were no such lapses Christmas Eve when we had to get a gift for our mothers. We never missed; we executed with precision and timing. Often we would arrive at 1200 and have completed the mission by hour 1400. That is why the repeated nightmare of not getting a gift for my mother is odd until I remember the time I did fail to give her a gift.
It was in August of 1999 a week after my friend and colleague Norman James died from a recurrence of cancer. I spent six weeks assisting his sister Linda in helping him make his exit from the world. We had just finished cleaning out his apartment. I still had his bike on the back of my car when I got the call that my mother was in Washington Hospital Fremont with a stroke. The only reason she had made it to the hospital was because my cousin Joseph Johnson had happened to go by to check on her and found her lying on the floor. Somehow I got caught in something that was a cross between an emotional and a physiological response. There was a part of my brain that said this was not happening even though my mother had recovered from a stroke five years before, even though earlier in the summer she had reported experiencing “spells which were probably mini-strokes (transient ischemic events, TIA’s). As a nurse she knew what they were and as someone doing medical research involving critical care I knew what they were but neither of us would say it. I knew the implications of a second major stroke but I still denied the urgency of the moment when a nurse from Washington Hospital called me. This could not be happening, because I was not ready for another emotional challenge.
Somehow it took hours before I realized that I just needed to go, even though I had my clothes already in the car when I got the call and there was no need to pack. I saw another emotional challenge and I did not want to run through it and take the hit. I wanted to toss the ball out of bounds and end the play. Somewhere around Magic Mountain I was overcome with this overwhelming sense of fatigue that was probably as much emotional and psychological as physical. I pulled off to the side of the road and napped. I could not believe how long I was asleep. When I awoke I drove with a sense of urgency toward Fremont but I arrived after sunset. When I arrived at Washington Hospital I was informed that my mother had slipped into a coma a few hours before. I had arrived too late to deliver her gift.
I did not need my friend Tim to help me pick out this gift. I did have a nurse from Washington Hospital who called me while I was on the road to tell me that if I wanted to speak to my mother I should get there soon. Unfortunately, I had already delayed too long by the time I got that second call that more directly stated the issue. I was looking right at the sales table but I did not see it, the gift my mother most wanted. She wanted that one last chance to see her son and say, “I love you.” That is my recurring nightmare, the sun is setting and the stores are closing and it is too late to get my mother the gift she most wants; I had already moved too slow and waited too long.
]]>My thought was: Is that such a bad thing? The first thing I do before rushing into conflict is win the war within. I stop to think what part of my anger has more to do with my own past hurt, fear, and fear of getting hurt again than with the actions of the other person. I must conquer the urges to act out and express my rage instead of reasonably stating my concerns, objections or even disagreement. Even still I battle gain to control my emotions and speak the truth with love. A proverb says, “A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.” (Proverbs 15:1).
I can think of an incident wherein by winning the war within I avoided unnecessary conflict. I felt unfairly criticized and attacked. A part of my brain was primed to fire back defensively based upon residual anger from past unfair treatment. I had to struggle to focus on the here and now and the person before me. I had to put aside my hurt inner child and my fear of another loss and reclaim my strength. I am a stronger person now. I can listen and discern between what part of the other person's criticism is true and what part has nothing to do with me. I realized that part of the other person’s emotion had to do with experiencing fear and stress beyond anything I had created. I realized that I could acknowledge the truth of my own contribution to the situation without internalizing and personalizing the other person’s angst. Instead of reacting I acted with reason demonstrating self-control. I gave the other person room to choose to deescalate. However, even if they did not I was going to maintain my good character.
Practicing this concept in a relationship and seeing someone’s heart transformed is a beautiful experience.
Perhaps this concept can also be applied to governments and international affairs. Consider that the United States has had troops deployed in Iraq since 2003. Before invading Iraq we had a conflict within to resolve. I am not sure that we resolved that conflict correctly. First consider that there was a strong status quo argument to be made. After the Persian Gulf War of 1991 Iraq was contained: It governed itself keeping internal forces in check while we kept the country's military in check with a "no-fly zone." The yearly cost of maintaining a no-fly-zone is fractional in comparison to the yearly cost of war, especially when you consider human life. (We could have written it off as pilot training, while enjoying the advantage of having bases in the region).
One thing that people do in building up to conflict is that they start to conflate different events to make a case for their outrage. In working ourselves up for the invasion of Iraq we conflated incidences of use of chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq war, evidence that certain pharmaceutical production facilities could possibly be retooled for biological and chemical weapons and stories of some shipping containers and storage facilities that could be stockpiles of chemical weapons to build the case that Saddam Hussein was a dangerous terrorist bent on destroying the world using weapons of mass destruction. Also in the mix were some tenuous at best connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda which were conflated to comic book mythical proportions to Iraq Being part of the “Axis of Evil.” Perhaps this was more our fear than reality. We had been traumatized by the attacks of 9/11 and we were afraid that someone was going to do it again. Those fears seem to have been projected upon Saddam Hussein. (At the psychological extreme the projection of fear upon another gets acted out with the decision, "I will hurt them before they hurt me.")
The person probably most in battle with internal conflict was President George W. Bush. Perhaps he was conflicted by the thought that he needed to finish what his father started with the first Gulf war, becoming convinced that the lack of regime change was a lack of success. Perhaps he was conflicted between the uncertainty about weapons of mass destruction and the certainty that as President of the United States he would be held responsible if another horrific act of terrorism happened on his watch. The only reason to look back is to avoid making the same mistake twice. I have looked back at times I have overreacted and engaged in conflict with another person to learn to be a much more thoughtful and restrained person, taking action when needed but not caught up in a cycle of reacting to either perceived provocation or threat. Perhaps as a nation we need to look back to learn to resolve the inner conflicts regarding our fears of the world compared to the reality of the world to avoid unnecessary conflicts, i.e WAR.
"Fools give full vent to their rage, but the wise bring calm in the end." (Proverbs 29:11)
An innkeeper was attending to the front desk of his small town establishment early one evening when a frantic young couple, a man and woman in their twenties, rushed in saying, “We desperately need a place to stay for the night but we don’t have much money. We were not planning to stop here but our car broke down as we were driving to the next state over to visit our sick aunt. We are stuck here until tomorrow which is the soonest they can get a replacement water pump here to fix our car. Do you have any rooms and how much are they?” The innkeeper appraises this young couple in their twenties who seem to be modestly appointed and says, “The least expensive rooms usually go for $80 a night.” The couple looks visibly disappointed and pauses to look at the dejection in each other’s eyes before the young man turns to say, “That would really be too much of a stretch for us because we are going to be near tapped out on the car repair; is there anything your can do?”
The innkeeper takes a moment to contemplate. He knows he has three rooms available the honeymoon suite upstairs that usually goes for $200 per night, the grand estate room with a view of the lake that goes for $150 per night and one of his bottom floor rooms that goes for $80. The innkeeper is preconditioned to be generous: He spent his teen years in foster care and was put out on the streets to fend for himself on the day he turned 18. He can remember some nights in his twenties when he had to go begging to sleep on a friend’s couch for a day or two because he was between jobs and between places to stay. It is easy for him to see himself in these young people. Then again he can also remember that he has a mortgage of $8000 a month on this Inn and he needs to meet payroll for three employees so he needs to maximize occupancy of his 15 rooms during tourist season. The only reason he is not fully booked is because it is only the start of tourist season. Still it is early evening on a Thursday night and chances are that guests might wander in without reservations. He knows the grand estate room and the honeymoon suite booked for the weekend starting Friday night and there is a good chance someone spending the night in town will want the bottom floor room on Saturday night.
He does not let himself get lost in the economic equations and turns to the couple and offers, “I can give you the manager’s special of one of our bottom floor rooms for $35 for the night but you will have to be out by noon tomorrow. The couple is smart enough to realize that he has just offered them a room rate at a well maintained surprisingly luxurious country inn with scenic views that matches the nightly rate at a truck stop motel. They thank him profusely for his kindness.
Being a good innkeeper of your mind means as much as possible keeping the big important rooms occupied with profitable thoughts. I remember a sign I once saw that said, “All of our guest make us happy, some by coming and others by going?”