Father Athanasius has Passed

 

My younger sister let me know yesterday (October 11^th, 2026) that Fr. Athanasius Wilson had passed in his sleep… at 94 years of age!

My mind rewinds 31 years and I am a university student commuting to Bloomington, IN to finish pre-med requirements.  I’d already spent 2 years overseas in the Army and then finished my degree at Indiana Wesleyan upon my return, but when I decided I wanted to try to go to medical school I had academic gaps to fill.  IU was the place to make that happen.

That summer of ‘95 I visited a friend who was still attending Indiana Wesleyan and we hung out at the house he shared with some other students.  One of his former roommates had transferred to Wheaton College where a group of them had started looking into the Orthodox Church as a little known (to them) but ancient expression of the Christian Faith.  Apparently it generated some negative buzz in the administration considering Wheaton is a premiere Evangelical institution of higher education.  As a result, there was an Orthodox periodical on the kitchen table that I thumbed through and then started reading.  The first article was “Flowers on Sartre’s Grave”.  The more I read, the more intrigued I became.

Back home I looked in the Bloomington phonebook for an Orthodox Church and found “All Saints” with a name and number there: Fr. Athanasius Wilson.  I called the number and his wife picked up.  I asked to speak with “Father Wilson”.  I heard her lower the phone and call out in a kind of sing-songy tone “Father Wilson, there is someone to speak with you.”  Having never talked to an Orthodox person before I was unaware that you address a priest with his saint’s name and not his family name and Loretta was being playful with it.  I told him about my recent discovery and desire to learn more and he invited me to come to the church where we could talk some more.  He also encouraged me to “come and see” by attending a service.

In the next few months I met with him in his church office to ask questions which is where I first met Subdeacon Dan who sometimes joined us.  At some point I met Father at a Thai Restaurant for lunch near campus where we had the buffet.  At our next meeting he chuckled about it and said the Thai food had not agreed with him and Loretta had forbade him from ever returning there.  I attended my first service on a Saturday evening (Vespers) because on Sunday morning I was still attending our local Wesleyan Church.  Entering that sacred space with flickering candles, the smell of incense, and the mysterious images of Christ and the saints surrounding me was like nothing I’d ever experienced before.  I was hooked.

After 2 years I moved to Indianapolis to attend medical school and when I got married we invited Father Athanasius to participate in the ceremony at Ss. Constantine & Elena.  I only saw him a handful of times after that due to moving out of state, but whenever we saw each other there was always a feeling of deep joy and love.

An interesting aside, when I met him in 1995 he appeared to me to be an “old man”.  I would have never guessed that 30 years later in my own “old age” he would still be with us.  He labored long in his role as a shepherd and spiritual father.  May his memory be eternal.

***

Have No Doubt - We’re in the Twilight Zone

 

Did you know we are in a Twilight Zone episode?  It’s from season 3 episode 8, “It’s a Good Life” (1961).

I loved the Twilight Zone as a kid.  I remember when I first saw this episode in rerun and was terrified by the premise and how it played out.  It seemed then and now (especially now) that this was the most disturbing and disquieting story I’d seen in that series.  And considering the tone of the show, that is saying a lot!

It’s a small town isolated from the wider world due to the fact there is a 6 year old boy who has god-like powers to control and warp reality to his whim.  The adults are terrified of him but try to hide that so as to not upset him.  They must think “happy thoughts” because he can read their minds and sense their intentions.  They are constantly second-guessing themselves about what he may want and how they can avoid running afoul of him.  Whatever he says is immediately acknowledged by them as “a very good thing!”  

When someone says or thinks something he doesn’t like he chides them with “You’re a bad man.  A VERY bad man!” and banishes them to a mysterious place he calls “the cornfield” from which they do not return or turns them into something horrifying which strips them of their humanity.

Does all of this sound strangely familiar?  A situation where a mean-spirited and self-absorbed child demands full acquiescence otherwise he will use his power to punish?  Where otherwise previously sane adults bend and contort themselves to kowtow to his will?  A person that never had to fully mature into an adult due to the distortions of his upbringing where the supreme attribute was to not be said “no” to?

We passed that “sign post up ahead” 10 years ago.

***

“Chernobus”

July 17th, 2026 - widespread fires from Canada have engulfed our city in dense smoke and barely breathable air.

My son just sent me this photo he took this morning while driving to his summer internship on the other side of Columbus.  He, my daughter, and I are watching “Chernobyl” on HBO and they are captivated by the whole phenomenon that played out at the end of my junior year of high school in the Ukraine.  We’re only two episodes in and they have been asking me a ton of questions about the time period and its cultural context.  

I am thoroughly enjoying it because I was a History and Political Science major at a conservative college where the Soviet Union was their favorite whipping boy and its dissolution was still a few years in the future.  And when I say “thoroughly enjoying it” I am well aware of the contradiction that that poses considering the horror of the situation and the potential it had for making a large swath of that region, to include western European countries, uninhabitable.

So my son sends me “Chernobus” and I can’t help but LOL at the creative spin he has put on this dark series we are watching together, tying it to our current pollution calamity where heavy smoke from Canadian fires has descended on our city.  He shared it in the chat that includes my daughter and so she added to the surreality of it by posting her own photo of a lifeguard getting ready to go out to the pool where she works.  These are strange times we live in…

***

Waffle House at Night

 

I walked through the door from the garage after a typical day’s work at the hospital, took off my shoes, and set my keys on the desk in the den.  Standing in the opposite doorway with the front door behind her stood my wife, a large box at her feet.  She had a curious smile on her face that threw me off.  It is a particular expression that I am not used to getting from her.  She gestured at the box and asked me what it was.

I had no idea what it was.  She and my daughter are the ones who get packages through the mail, not me.  I acted nonchalant about it but was intrigued.  When she left to pick up our daughter at school I double checked the label to make sure it was for me.  The sender was a friend and fellow psychiatrist which dialed up the intrigue for me even further.  We share common interests in writing and art (clues perhaps?).

I picked up the sizable box and took it to the dining room to begin the unboxing process.  It was securely taped and took some doing to get it open.  Inside was bubble wrap surrounding another box, also securely taped.  The suspense was building as I broke taped edge after taped edge.  Inside the inside box was more bubble wrap.   Was it something made of glass?  The wrapping materials were all over the table.

After what seemed like several minutes of careful work I found a 12x12 black square that turned out to be the back of a frame.  I gingerly flipped it over and found an image of my friend’s Waffle House painting that I’d admired from afar on Instagram.  My first thought was that he’d framed a print as a thoughtful gesture, but then the light glinted off it’s uneven surface and I realized it was the painting itself.  No way!

I let out a loud bark-like laugh and then just took it in: the brush strokes, the lit interior details, the glowing effect of street lights at night.  I took me back to days spent with Kevin McCarty, my friend and godson, in his studio apartment that was literally an art studio with paintings stacked against the walls and his easel in the middle of the room.  I would breathe in the smell of turpentine and walk over his paint-speckled floorboards.

The Waffle House holds special meaning for me.  My daughter and I flew to Florida a few years back for a field hockey tournament and we arrived at the hotel some time after midnight.  It was unseasonably cold; we were hungry and tired.  Across the parking lot was a Waffle House.  Inside was an elderly man at the cash register who peeked over his newspaper and pointed at a booth.  A waiter came 20 minutes later.

It was an odd slice of life that she was not familiar with at her young age considering the late hour, the dingy booths, the greasy food, and the paucity of employees.  Kevin liked visiting these kinds of places and befriending whoever might be there.  He even convinced a local greasy-spoon owner to let him set up his easel and paint some patrons who volunteered to sit for it.  So much caught up in so little a painting.  

***

Glen Hansard has Passed

 

What sad and shocking news to hear Glen Hansard left us this morning for the world to come.

He came onto my radar back in 2007 with the indie film “Once” where I found him and his music partner Markéta Irglová acting opposite each other despite the fact neither were actors.  That movie had an undeniable charm and the music was amazing.  My wife and I became instant fans and bought the soundtrack to the film and their two albums together as The Swell Season as they came out.

We watched the budding of their romance and bought the documentary about it on CD which is somewhere in the basement on a shelf last I saw it.  At that time I was just back from my deployment to Iraq and under the stress of transitioning to becoming the commander of our Combat Stress Control unit.  Glen and Markéta’s music was such a consolation and a soothing presence in my life at that time.

In 2008 we watched the Academy Awards because they were up for Best Original Song - the oh so lovely “Falling Slowly”.  It was up against three songs from “Enchanted” - quite the David & Goliath situation with the Disney juggernaut on one side and their quiet duet on the other.  We sat through the Disney numbers with the stage full of people dancing and spinning about to fully orchestrated music.  It was quite the spectacle.  But when it was time for the performance of “Falling Slowly” the massive stage was empty except for Markéta at a piano and Glen on a stool with his guitar.  The contrast was stunning.  The moment was magical and unforgettable.

And miracle upon miracle it won the award!  Markéta gave a quiet yet rousing speech about the importance of art coming from the little people (my summation from poor memory but the feeling of it I think).  It was split in two because her first go at it was interrupted by the music swelling in to signal the end when she wasn’t nearly finished.  She looked unsure of what to do, stammered, and then stopped.  It was awkward.  When the commercials were over and it cut back to the show the MC (Jon Stewart) walked Markéta back to the mic and allowed her to finish her comments in full.  It was such a gracious and kind-hearted gesture.

She and Glen only made two albums as The Swell Season and then their relationship, both personal and professional, came to an end at some point.  Almost 20 years later in 2025 they reunited for another album, but now Glen is no longer with us.  His sweet and melancholy spirit will be missed but remembered in his music.

***

Intellivision

 

I saw an advertisement for Intellivision today on Facebook as a retro-offering and was instantly transported back to late elementary school in my mind.

I had a friend with an Atari 2600 which was beginning to saturate the market for home video game systems in the late 70’s and early 80’s.  It was not cheap ($199) and so despite its popularity there were not a lot of kids who owned one in our small town.  My friend lived out in the country a good ways, but that did not stop me from riding my bike out there over hill and dale on gravel roads with the sun beating down.  I had some serious envy issues considering I had to otherwise ride around town to various places to find the large standalone video games that cost a quarter a game.  You could blow through an allowance really quick in an arcade, especially if you weren’t yet very good at the game.  Some of my favorites were Missile Command, Robotron, Defender, Qix and Q-bert.

So imagine my surprise when my dad returned home from a business trip to Chicago with an Intellivision gaming console under his arm.  It was a convention for carpet installers and he had won it in a game or raffle of some kind.  I was excited but also confused.  What exactly was an “Intellivision”?  The controllers were more complex than the Atari 2600 and the games more sophisticated.  

My favorite was called “Utopia” where you and a friend had an island each surrounded by water.  The goal was to build up a successful civilization which included the possibility of eventually invading the opponent’s island if you had enough money and resources to do it.  Every 15 minutes or so a large rotating rectangular-shaped object that represented a hurricane would appear at the top of the screen and randomly spin itself down through the two islands and whatever it touched (houses, crops, castles, soldiers, factories, hospitals, etc) would be destroyed, ie, disappear from the screen.  It took a long time to play compared to most video games and required the ability to plan and strategize about the future of your island.  I loved it!

I came to realize from the types of games available and the better graphics that the Intellivision was a bit highbrow compared to the Atari 2600.  The downside was that there were not nearly as many games available for it and as far as I knew I was the only kid in my town that had one, which meant there was no trading or borrowing of games possible.  I ran into a similar problem many years later when my job provided a Blackberry phone and I bought a Blackberry tablet as well.  I loved that tablet.  It was a beautiful piece of technology but there were so few apps for it and eventually it died out along with their phones when the iPhone and iPad took over the market.

In the 45 years or so since that time I have built some things of my own in a sort of search for a Utopia.  I am not on an island and I have not been hit by a hurricane but I’ve had to meet and overcome some significant challenges that had the potential to be catastrophic, especially early on.  And at this very moment I am wondering why there were no churches to be built in the game?  I can’t begin to imagine what my life would have been like without the Faith to sustain it.  

***

Music & Memories

 

June 18^th, 2026

This past week or two I’ve been listening to Paul McCartney’s new album “The Boys of Dungeon Lane” while driving around in my car.  I didn’t realize when I initially sat down to write this that today is his birthday - 84 years old!  With each listen I’m drawn a little deeper into it and find myself surfing the memories with Paul on waves of music.  It helps that I read Ian Leslie’s “Paul & John” two months ago followed by Jonathan Gould’s “Can’t Buy Me Love”.  The first was recently published and got great reviews, so I asked for it for my birthday.  I chose to read “Can’t Buy Me Love” because of Ian Leslie’s assertion in his book that it was the best of the Beatle’s biographies.

My initial impression of the album was “Boy, Paul’s voice sounds like an old guy singing” (duh).  It is restrained, if not strained at times, and a bit warbly, but if I don’t try to compare it to his younger singing self I can appreciate it.  It helps that it is saturated with nostalgia which makes his musical narration more poignant.

My daughter has been with me on a few of these trips and she has been getting drawn into the music of The Beatles this past year.  I kind of picked up on it by some the questions she was asking and her ability to identify who was singing at any one time on a Beatles song.  She has also been able to recognize some of their influences on songs by contemporary artists that she likes.  The kicker was last week when I went to her room to ask her a question and found “Paul & John” sitting on her dresser looking a little rough around its edges.  I asked her about it and she said she’d had it in her backpack - a small price to pay for her burgeoning interest.

Yesterday I was going to pick her up from field hockey practice and my mind made an interesting connection while listening.  I was getting a familiar vibe, having listened to it a few times through already, and it hit me that it reminded me of Neil Young’s “Prairie Wind”.  That is an album I bought and listened to when I was deployed to Iraq in 2006.  Upon my return home my son was drawn to it and we had parts of it memorized with hand gestures we’d come up with to act out the lyrics.  He was 3 to 4 years old at the time.  Like “The Boys of Dungeon Lane” it is a nostalgic trip through Neil’s childhood and hits a lot of the same beats.  The main difference is that Neil’s voice was still Neil’s voice, love it or hate it (I love it).  

This connection makes me happy.  It ties together some of my own recent forays into writing stories from my youth and ties me to my children who are living out their own young lives many years yet removed from any true nostalgia.  They are looking forward and I am looking back and we are somehow meeting in the middle.

***

More Than Human

 

I remember seeing a book by Theodore Sturgeon when I was young and in the throes of reading weird Science Fiction tales: “More Than Human”.  I read the blurb, possibly on a paperback at a used book store or at the town library considering there were no personal computers or internet at the time.  

I loved stories about misfits and outcasts because somewhere deep inside I identified with them.  I didn’t really have a “best friend” growing up until my junior year of high school when I somehow acquired two.  I am exceedingly grateful for them, but so many formative years of feeling alone and overlooked was… ugh.

Until I found those two friends I wondered if there was something that made me undesirable or annoying.  It took moving to another town to discover them.  They were uber smart, creatively inclined, and mostly open to my spontaneity and impulsiveness, even when it sometimes landed us           in trouble.

It was the difference between feeling less than human over and against feeling more than human, or at the very least just meeting the bar of feeling simply human.  Maybe I could write a quirky Science Fiction short story: “Simply Human”.  It would feature the three of us becoming more than the sum of our parts.

*** 

San Francisco Then & Now

I was at a psychiatric conference in San Francisco this week and I have to say it was a bit on the boring side.  Of course I am comparing it to the same conference in the same city I attended 13 years ago.

At that time I was a young and robust 45 year old with friends to share in the experience.  One was a Russian-American friend who I’d befriended in Bloomington, Indiana in the mid to late 90’s.  He was studying choral conducting and music composition and eventually took a job in the Bay area, living in Oakland.  He picked me up in his clunker of a car and we trundled across the Golden Gate Bridge, wound through the hills of Marin County, and parked in the shadows of the giant redwoods.  He also took me to the grand and gorgeous Joy of All Who Sorrow Orthodox Cathedral to venerate the relics of St. John the Wonderworker of Shanghai & San Francisco - his dried out remains reclining in a glass-topped casket to the side of the nave.  We also visited the famous Japanese Gardens and a museum featuring Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring”.

Another evening or two was spent with an Armenian-American friend who I knew from our shared four year psychiatry residency at Walter Reed in Washington DC.  He was obviously there for the conference as well, but as an added bonus his brother joined us - up from LA as a lawyer on the lam.  The three of us roamed the city which included yucking it up on a nighttime trolley rolling up and down the hills of San Francisco and dining at an Italian restaurant on the edge of Chinatown. 

In those first two days of the conference I figured out the city bus system (BART) through trial and error and utilized it to visit various parts of the city to include a beach to the west of the Golden Gate Bridge for a photo-taking opportunity and the hilltop park that included the “painted ladies” houses featured on the TV show “Full House”.  This need to use public transportation was in part motivated by my decision on that first day to attend a Vespers service at the oldest Orthodox Church in the US.  In a kind of ascetic gesture I decided to walk to it from my hotel up and down those famous San Francisco streets, arriving an hour or two later with sore legs/hips and sweaty, understanding that this type of travel was unsustainable and not particularly efficient.

And of course I took lots and lots of photos, but at that time it was with an actual camera.  I had a small BlackBerry phone from work that was not designed to take photos like smartphones these days.  A memory that stands out perhaps most clearly from this trip was the night I was returning to my hotel from hanging out in Chinatown and happened upon a homeless man sleeping against a wall.  On the wall was a large Levi’s Jeans advertisement of a beautiful model standing probably 10 feet tall gesturing down to the sleeping man.  The juxtaposition was so striking that I literally ran back to the hotel to retrieve my camera and returned to take the photo, leaving a tip in his cup as a thank you.

Upon my return to the Midwest I couldn’t stop thinking about that photo and I ended up writing a poem inspired by it.  It was my first published poem/photo combo in the pages of “So It Goes”, the literary magazine of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library.

***

Fast forward to 2026 this past week; I am now a 57 year old with much less hair and a graying beard.  My camera was at home collecting dust in the back of a closet but my phone and its handful of photo-apps was busy taking new pictures of San Francisco.  Another friend from residency had contacted me to meet up with her and her friends at a restaurant on the far side of Chinatown right across the street from the one I’d been to 13 years ago with Vahag and Varand.  It was a little over a mile away and I decided to walk to it as a street photography opportunity.

One of those photos was of a flyer taped to a light pole: Bruce Lee - Double Feature.  An image of Bruce Lee from “Enter the Dragon” was just what you might expect to see in Chinatown and brought back memories of my younger years when my dad took me to a Bruce Lee double feature at a drive-in theater when I was in middle school.  This opportunity had been provided by my Kenpo Karate sensei who was running his school out of a church basement in Paoli, Indiana.  He gave our class free tickets and his blessing to watch inappropriate movies for our young age.  At the time I was into buying throwing stars from advertisements found in my comic books and making nunchucks from an old wooden broom handle with my dad’s power tools on the down low.  My mother eventually figured out she was missing the broom and accurately surmised that I was the guilty party.  

In my early twenties I visited Chinatown in Washington DC after returning from two years of Army service in Korea between my junior and senior years of college.  I had the summer free and decided to visit DC where a Korean friend had started school at American University and a college buddy of mine was now working post-college.   I roamed the city as was my wont and in Chinatown I came across a bonafide pair of yellow-with-black-stripes Game of Death nunchucks!  Of course I bought them and today they are in a box in my attic waiting to be gifted to a future grandchild that will surely ruffle feathers.

So back to this past Sunday… after I got back to my hotel from dinner I was looking at the photos I took and examined the Bruce Lee one more closely.  The bottom half of the flyer had a picture of “Saikat for SF” and an internet search revealed he was a candidate running for Congress who had worked with Bernie Sanders and AOC.  I also learned it was “free admission” and at the “Great Star Theater”.  Another internet search revealed this was the oldest theater in Chinatown and a historic landmark.  Last of all I saw the date and realized it was happening the very next evening.  I scanned the QR code and it sent me to a site where I could RSVP for the event.  I filled it out and was notified I was in!

When I arrived the next night at the Great Star Theater there was a small line out front and volunteers taking down people’s information while they waited.  The young man who approached me had very long hair and a beard.  He asked for my phone number  and then my zip code.  I was feeling some serious imposter-guilt but I held the course.  “Are you registered to vote in SF?”  My answer was succinct, “No”.

In the lobby they had a catered spread that I bypassed and headed into the theater proper.  The building structure and seats looked old and worn out.  Colorful shapes were projected on the ceiling and viewing screen with music playing over the speaker system.  I found a side seat and settled in.  Next to me standing in the aisle was an animated young man hamming it up with two women who he’d just met and they were taking selfies together.  I suddenly became aware of the music playing - a smooth jazz type song that I recognized from my late teen years.  For a brief moment I felt like I was in a dissociative dream state.  It was my favorite song by a jazz guitar duo known as “Acoustic Alchemy”.  I had their album “Red Dust & Spanish Lace” on cassette that I would listen to on my Walkman until that Walkman with tape inside was stolen in Korea.  The song was “Girl with a Red Carnation”.

The movie started and the first thing I noticed was the 70’s wicka-chaka-wicka-chaka soundtrack.  The crowd was into it and laughed and cheered at the appropriate moments, especially when Bruce was kicking some bad guy’s ass.  The feeling of community and connection in celebratory mode was palpable and something I’m not used to where I live in the Midwest.  Before the intermission, where Saikat and company were going to talk, I slipped out the back.  On my walk back to the hotel I felt reality slowly reasserting itself after being caught up in something that was almost like being in a movie where I was an extra or, at the very least, registered to vote in SF.