His name is Joe.
He moved here from Idaho
dreaming of being a poet
though he did not know it
to work a newspaper stand
for a portly man named Fran.
He scribbles rhymes on a receipt,
his life on perpetual repeat.
“That will be three seventy five.”
I’m not sure what keeps him alive.
But keep your chin up, Joe.
Meaning comes, only real slow.
***
Since the first time I cracked a book about robots and spaceships I have had a sweet tooth for Science Fiction. The first book was “Rivets & Sprockets” by Alexander Key in elementary school. And over time there were the big three SciFi franchises of Star Wars, Star Trek, and Battlestar Galactica which took some of the images off the page and put them onto screens both big and small. In those younger years I was particularly drawn to the spaceships as concrete concepts of wonder and imagination.
In my middle school years I had a grid paper notebook that I used to design my own spacecraft with pencil and ruler, from imposing battleships to the more diminutive fighters with all sizes and types in between. In the corner of each page I drew a box in which I gave the name of the ship, its class, and all its “specs”. I also remember having arguments with friends about things like which fighters were the best and why. I was partial to the one from BSG, but my favorite (at least for a time) was the Draconian Marauder used by the bad guys in “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century”.
Just in the past year I have discovered “The Expanse” on Netflix which is chock-full of spacecraft. For me it has been a kind of comfort food, though I focus more on the storyline and character development than I did as a kid with the spacecraft as a kind of cherry on top. My favorite from that show is probably “The Behemoth” which was repurposed from an intergalactic Mormon missionary ark, oddly enough.
Last night I watched the movie “Passengers” starring Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt. The opening scene was absolutely captivating and reacquainted me with the wonder of spacecraft I felt most acutely as a kid. In one scene later in the movie the ship slingshots around a star and the spectacle is breathtaking. If I were to get into an argument now about the most elegantly designed spaceship in SciFi movies I’d probably have to stand solidly behind the Avalon starship from this movie.
***
Purely out of a sense of nostalgia I watched the first Ghost Rider movie starring Nicholas Cage on Netflix this week. In elementary school I was fascinated with this dark and mysterious “superhero” who wore leather and had a flaming skull for a head. He apparently had made some kind of deal with the devil and become his champion of sorts, imbued with powers that included wielding hell fire and riding a magical motorcycle, except he double-crossed the devil and became a punisher of evil-doers. This somehow made him a good guy, or not-a-bad guy maybe? Like “the enemy of your enemy is your friend” perhaps? Regardless, it was not a comic my parents would have approved of so I kept my Ghost Rider fandom very much on the down low.
***
In the mid-90’s Carl Sagan wrote a book called THE DEMON HAUNTED WORLD: SCIENCE AS A CANDLE IN THE DARK. I’m not sure the significance of the ALL CAPS but its aim was to explain the scientific method to laypeople and encourage them to learn critical and skeptical thinking. I did not read it but I don’t imagine it was talking about demons per se and seems to have set up a false dichotomy between spirituality and science in the title, but I digress.
The first half of that title takes me back to the 70’s growing up in a fundamentalist Protestant home where my Dad was a preacher and the Second Coming of Christ was going to happen at any moment whisking believers up into heaven “in the twinkling of an eye”. This was in the wider context of a world seemingly split between freedom loving peoples and the soul-destroying Communists. From this Manichaean perspective flowed a great river of paranoia and manipulation justifying any number of egregious actions on our behalf at home and abroad, but also had its manifestations in individual hearts and minds.
And in the midst of this potentially terrifying portent of apocalyptic prophecy and mutually assured destruction was the existence of demons. They were everywhere! They were in Sunday sermons, my Christian comic books, movies shown at churches, and books written by charlatans like Mike Warnke who lied about being a satanic priest who converted to Christ (the latter assertion being even more preposterous than the former).
There were nights as a kid when trying to go to sleep I was convinced a demon was at the foot of my bed reaching out to grab me. I’d read about it in a Christian publication where someone had dabbled in the occult and suffered the consequences. At these moments I felt an abject terror which was proof enough that I was in the presence of something diabolic. I had a comic entitled “Somebody Goofed!” in which an older man befriends a younger man and convinces him to ignore God and simply enjoy himself in life. When that younger man dies unexpectedly he confronts the older man who he finds in Hell only to have that man pull his face off to reveal he is a horned demon who cackles “You goofed!”
Another time in my elementary school years we were at a gathering with church members at someone’s house for “food and fellowship”. I remember them filling the room with conversation and laughter while I sat in the corner of a couch bored and tired from running around and playing outside with the other kids. Knowing my younger self I’d probably done something to get into trouble and was in a time out. I nodded off to sleep and when I awoke an indeterminate amount of time later the room was completely empty. In a growing panic I realized the Rapture had come and I had been left behind. It was the only feasible explanation to my young mind. I wandered around inside the house looking out the windows and sobbing. I went outside and called for my parents without reply. My mischievous behavior and disobedience had caught up with me. I sat back down on the couch where my father had just been seated seemingly only moments before and “listened” for him to talk to me from that other world and I asked him to come back and get me... that I was sorry... that I would change.
And then in high school I wrote a short story about someone who gets hit by a car and is knocked out but awakens to find he can see demons attached to people. He eventually stumbles into a mega-church looking for a respite from this terrifying new ability only to find the biggest demon of all sitting on the shoulders of the preacher at the podium. I submitted it to Christianity Today magazine for a C.S. Lewis writing contest for young writers. I did not win the prize money or get published but I did get a letter saying my story was a runner-up. For all I know everyone who submitted a story got a similar letter (it was not very good) but it signaled a change in my thoughts that looked to be a little less concrete and a bit more nuanced. It was the 80’s by that time after all.
***
Coming full circle back to the Ghost Rider I have another distinct memory from when I was 10 years old and we were visiting my Grandparents in northern Indiana. Grandpa Haney had a large farm with barns full of animals, tractors, and hay surrounded by hundreds of acres of corn. He was a quiet person and I never really talked with him as a kid, but on this one occasion I was with him at a grocery store. We stood in the checkout line and there was a comic book rack where I found a Ghost Rider comic and guiltily flipped through it while trying to be small and invisible. My Grandpa turned in my direction at which point I thought I was totally busted. Instead of chastising me he asked if I wanted that comic and I said “yes?” and he had me throw it up on the counter (face down of course). He had absolutely no idea what he’d just agreed to and I now owned my first and only Ghost Rider comic book.
In that particular comic Ghost Rider is racing Death himself who, strangely enough, is a fellow motorcycle rider with a flaming skull-head that is green. It was yet another deal or wager he’d agreed to (had he not learned his lesson with the devil?). At the end of the story they are racing up a mountainside road and as they ascend Ghost Rider kicks Death’s front tire sending him careening off a cliff and he goes on to win the race. I feel like I am in that very race even now and I have a strong suspicion I am not going to win no matter who or what I kick. But hopefully I can make a good showing of it without fear... or cheating.
***
to reclaim the glove
that fell down the hole
of encircling stairs
like Alice, but
no Wonderland.
***
The Thing in your dreams
is orange and obnoxious.
In a time when healing is
essential he simply hollers
“IT’S CLOBBERIN’ TIME!”
I am standing sideways in the ocean and feeling the warmish water lap over my legs just above my knees. It is a pulsing of the planet as the waves continually form to my oceanward side. I am looking at my children as they play in the surf several yards away from me.
This has happened twice now in the month of June on a family vacation in Hilton Head. On both occasions I suddenly understand I am standing there in that spot and there is no future and there is no past. There is only now and I am untethered from the tyranny of time.
The second time it happened I immediately remembered the first and knew I was inhabiting that same space though a year had passed. I wonder if this is how hypnosis works, dissociating from the confines of one’s self? In that moment I did not want to move, to breathe, only to be.
***
It is a lazy Christmas afternoon when the kids have disappeared to their respective places in the house to enjoy their gifts and share them with friends through the magical ether of electromagnetic waves.
I have sunk to the basement recliner in quasi-darkness where I hear the hum of the furnace most clearly. My wife is napping in the lower living room on our red love seat content with the fruit of her holiday labors.
I’ve read the first chapter of my Christmas present while sipping on some coffee that I dropped a black licorice toffee into in lieu of cream or sugar. It is a bit bitter at first, taking some time for the toffee to melt.
The book is fantastical and dreamlike and when I fall off into my nap I am still reading it behind closed lids, scanning the pages and knowing that is impossible, but that is how dreams work. I hear the occasional plodding of the dog roaming the house overhead on hardwood floors.
At some point my son finds me here and touches my nose with his forefinger which immediately pulls me out of sleep. He laughs and I feel grateful that he is in my world on this snowy day of days when a child sleeping in his mother’s arms transformed the world with love all those years ago.
***
When your world
is turned upside down
like a Christmas Tree
balanced on the point
of a star
Just lie there
on the floor
looking upwards
as you are and drink
in the beauty
Of the absurdity
of what you
do not understand
but trust will be
redeemed by love.
***
“I now walk into the wild.”
It was the last words of Chris McCandless, aka Alexander Supertramp, written on a postcard to a friend before he walked into the Alaskan wilderness. Four months later he was dead.
His post-college adventures included a kind of ascetic lifestyle that was preparing him for this audacious attempt to “live off the land” in an abandoned bus rarely occasioned by hunters in this isolated piece of Alaska.
It’s not that he didn’t like people. He was deeply loved by those who had the good fortune of crossing his path for a time and were enriched by the experience. I read their accounts in Jon Krakauer’s book “Into the Wild” as well as saw it played out in the Sean Penn movie of the same name. This was due in great part to his shedding of superficial concerns and focussing on what is most essential to simply being human. He made connections with people who saw his heart, honesty, and hard work as a rare commodity in a consumer-driven society where short cuts and pleasure-seeking cheapen so much in and around us.
I was fascinated to learn online that Chris has had his “detractors” or those who think he was just a foolish kid who threw his life away. I understand why some would think that but I also think they don’t *get* him or really understand his motivations. These were motivations that likely included seeking a deeper experience of the world by looking inward and minimizing external distractions. For someone who lacks an inner life the “external distractions” may be all they think exists and can be grasped.
Here I’m reminded of words by Fr. Roman Braga, the spiritual father of a monastery I visited a few times in my twenties. He had spent 11 years in the Romanian gulag as a young man (a year of that in solitary confinement) and spoke about an “inner universe” that is vastly more expansive than the external universe we know with its innumerable stars and galaxies. It is in this inner universe where we find the connection with God who transcends time and space. Didn’t Jesus tell us “the Kingdom of God is within you”? And what is larger than that?
So, I think his motivations were noble despite the fact it turned out tragically. I sought this type of escape oftentimes as a younger man traveling around the globe in search of something deeper in myself. It oftentimes put me in perilous situations but I always found a way through, looking for whatever might be just around the next bend. Maybe God Himself was sitting there on a stool smoking a pipe and waiting for me to arrive for a chat. And then as T.S. Elliot would have it “What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.”
My travels came to an end. Unlimited freedom came to an end (and none too soon for me to live out a few more years if truth be told). I had a family and carried on but in a different way of looking for that place that Chris thought he found by escaping into the wild.
***
The flying rake,
wind in his tines.
Fall has come
and bids him
Brothers, to arms!
Leaves are falling.
Beat them back!
***
I sit with my friends every morning on the wire and feel the breeze envelop me, a game of poise and balance. We are mostly silent, introspective, thinking survival thoughts but also the occasional existential question flits through. Why do we fly in the sky?
From this vantage point I see the people speeding by on the elevated ribbon below, their courses fixed and directional. Another existential thought or two flies through without lingering. What is simplicity? Freedom? I love this time to sit and think on a wire.
***
Paintings are windows on the world.
But before frames circumscribed our
view, there were these rectangled
openings in our homes & buildings.
Glancing out of them
the enormity of the great outdoors was
suddenly manageable to our finite
minds if not infinite desires to grasp
the place where we find ourselves.
It was a glimmer of light in the darkness of my middle school misery. A neighbor boy was taking karate and somehow I got invited to come along and see what it was all about. It was in the basement of a church in Paoli, Indiana which was one town south of ours. The Sensei was the owner of a local radio station and the epitome of manliness with his black belt and black 70’s ‘stache. My first impression was seeing him stand in front of the class in the classic horse stance yelling out commands as rows of fellow middle-schoolers punched the air with a loud synchronous “KEE-YA!”
I was duly impressed with the spectacle and told my Dad I wanted to join this group of warriors-in-training. I ordered my gi and went shopping for an athletic cup with jock strap holder. To be honest, it was the cup that had me most stoked. When your boy-bits need full protection it’s about to get real. So the neighbor boy’s Mom picked me up and drove us to my first official class. It was winter time and the tile floor of the church basement was cold on our bare feet after changing into our gi’s in the bathroom. The cup was tested for proper placement with a firm rap from my knuckles.
That first class ended with a Simon Says-type competition to execute the move yelled out by the Sensei without delay or error. There were about 15 kids there and they were falling like flies. The winner of this game would get a cool iron-on for the back of his gi that included two large Chinese characters that denoted we were practicing “Kenpo Karate”. It was down to just me and another kid when I punched instead of kicked. I was disappointed but not deterred. A week later I was ultra-focussed and able to win my iron-on badge of excellent obedience.
This was the era of the late 70’s/early 80’s when safety was not foremost in anyone’s mind, especially when it came to male children. At times the Sensei, or his adult brown-belted assistant, would have us put our backs against the wall in a seated position and keep us hanging there until our stomach muscles and legs started to burn and spasm. But wait, that’s not all! They would then come around with a wooden club and hit us in the stomach with it to further toughen us up. KEE-OUCH!
Another example of this was when he would have us all stand in a large circle with our arms held out to our sides parallel with the ground. When he stood in front of you you had to stand perfectly still and accept getting punched in the stomach with a loud KEE-YA to try and dissipate the blow. Some of us flinched and fell backwards when he appeared to begin his strike, so he would wait for us to recover in order to receive the full benefit of his punch.
And then there was poor sweet Benjy. He was a skinny freckled blonde boy with a disarming smile that made everyone love him. He stood bravely before the Sensei with a closed wooden door about 3 feet behind him. The Sensei did not even wait for Benjy to mentally prepare himself but immediately launched into a skip with side kick that lifted Benjy up off the ground and carried him through the air, body hitting the door, and slumping to the floor like a rag doll, dazed. Our eyes were the size of ping pong balls. He killed Benjy! But then Benjy let out a good natured groan and slowly got back up on his spindly legs while holding his stomach, a sheepish grin on his face.
My turn was coming. It was another night and we were sparring against each other when I found myself in the middle of the circle with the Sensei as my opponent. I did not think it was going to be a particularly fair fight, but when my name was called there was no walking away or leaving for that matter. It was winter after all and I was barefoot in only a loose fitting white uniform with jock strap. So, we stood facing each other and he gave the command to bow. He bowed, I bowed, and that’s when it hit me.
What hit me? Well, his foot to be exact. Apparently it is an unspoken rule in karate that you must never take your eye off of your opponent. When I was at the depth of my bow looking down at the floor he snap kicked his foot straight into my abdomen. I immediately collapsed to the floor unable to breathe. I was making some kind of gasping gargly noise with all the breath knocked out of me. I thought I was going to die because no matter what I did my lungs would not fill up with air. The Sensei took a knee beside me and kept telling me to “breathe out” which seemed counter-intuitive, but I tried and after what seemed an eternity I found I could breathe again.
Another activity that had the potential to end badly was the “leaping over all your fellow students” exercise which I loved. It started with a piano bench sitting next to a mat which you jumped over head first, landed on your hands, tucked your head, and rolled. After everyone finished jumping the bench a student was instructed to get on all fours next to the bench and you would jump over him and the bench. This was repeated by adding another kid, etc.
There was a tall and lanky boy who I’ll never forget. He did not look particularly coordinated walking around the church basement-cum-dojo, but when he took to the air to jump over the obstacle his legs would fan out into a Y-shape as his body made a high arcing curve. When he landed he could execute a perfect tuck and roll up to a standing position in one fluid motion. It was a thing of beauty and grace that I never tired of watching.
As each student added himself to the line of bodies to jump over the excitement in the room grew. At about 5 bodies the number of volunteers quickly dwindled until at 7 bodies the beautiful swan diving student gave up and there was only me left to attempt it. I backed up almost to the entrance at the far end of the room and took off running as fast as I could across the basement floor. When I reached the bench I launched myself nearly vertical over the students, aiming for just past that last kid. It was not pretty but I cleared them with nothing to spare and my “roll” was more like a land, head tuck, body slam and bounce at the far end. I was willing to attempt 8 kids but I believe the Sensei sensed disaster and ended the exercise.
Returning to the subject of sparring, after several weeks of classes we got to put on boxing gloves and were paired up to fight. I was facing the neighbor boy whose Mom was giving us rides to the classes and when Sensei said “fight!” I fought! I pummeled the poor kid, releasing all my pent up anger and frustrations on him (there was no lack of that in middle school). He had this frightened look in his eye that seemed to be asking me to let up or show mercy, but Sensei wasn’t having it. “Get your hands up! Fight back!” he yelled. But then the neighbor boy started crying and the match was stopped.
That may have been my last class because I lost my ride soon thereafter and there would be no transition for me from white belt to yellow belt that a few others had recently made. Now as an adult and parent I can only surmise that my beat down of the neighbor boy was directly responsible for him quitting and/or his mother no longer giving me rides, though at the time that thought did not even cross my mind.
***
There are a few other loose ends of memory that need to be tied up before I finish.
The adult assistant (who was a brown belt in Kenpo as I mentioned earlier) was highly skilled in the martial arts, even more so than the Sensei it would seem, and had likely studied other martial arts as he had an old faded black gi. During classes he would sometimes walk around working his nunchucks at a high rate of speed which was one of the coolest things I’d ever seen.
When we did an exhibition at the halftime of a Paoli High School basketball game he further wowed us with a crazy flying kick. He had two men stand on chairs and hold a piece of wood between them at their head level. It was well above his own head and nearly level with the basketball rim. He was rather short but he ran and leapt into the air and extended his leg with a high kicking motion busting the board in two sending the pieces flying!
It was a few years later when I was in high school that I learned he had been shot and killed in a bar. Apparently he had gotten into a fight with someone and they knew they were outmatched and so pulled a gun and shot him. As the song says, “for all those born beneath an angry star, lest we forget how fragile we are.”
And not too long after that I learned that poor sweet Benjy had prematurely passed as well, riding his dirt bike in the country, body thrown one last time and killed at the age of 16.
Life has a way of pealing your paint,
sharing in the work of helping remove
the accretions of time and carelessness
as we grow older and less self-obsessed.
***
Suspended in the dark unknowing
of retained innocence.
Find this place.
Rediscover love in the days
before the world crushed your heart.
***
Walking the highways and byways
of Russia
as a pilgrim all those years ago,
sometimes a destination in mind
but more often simply wandering
free to see what there was to see,
capturing it with a cheap camera
in the days before digital everything,
an analog heart in a vast land
awakening from a deep slumber.
***
I found two bookmarks in the one book which for me is a rare phenomenon. Like movies, there are precious few books that I’ve revisited in my lifetime. Something about those initial reactions that I prize maybe a little too highly. God knows repeated readings of particular books can yield up varied treasures.
But there it is, maybe a hang up but also not an ironclad principle. “Everyday Saints” by Archimandrite Tikhon is an exception to this rule. I read it when it was first published in 2011 over a 3 day period when I was bed bound from a particularly nasty flu. It was the perfect companion because it made the time flow by with little notice.
The stories are vignettes of varying lengths that claim the Pskov Caves Holy Dormition Monastery in Pechory, Russia as their home base and heart, but spread out over nearly the entirety of that vast country as the author travels hither, thither, and yon. Each story focuses in on a particular person bringing to light their quirks and foibles in the context of the oftentimes inscrutable workings of Divine grace. It is cliche, but I don’t know of a book that had me literally LOL’ing, becoming tearful at some particularly poignant moment, or gasping in surprise to the extent this one did.
In my twenties I read an inordinate number of books that explored the impact of Communism on Russia, Eastern Europe, and China. Many of them were nonfiction like Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago”, Pu Ning’s “Red in Tooth and Claw”, and “The Private Life of Chairman Mao” written by his personal physician. But there was also fiction in the novels of Milan Kundera and Boris Pasternak. I seemingly could not get enough of this type of thing, but with “Everyday Saints” I found something even more intriguing. Instead of unredeemed melancholy (an addiction of mine) I found something healing and life affirming.
Like the Bible it is a book that can be read for spiritual nourishment, but is also a collection of simply human stories that could be enjoyed by anyone who shares that humanity regardless of their beliefs.
Metropolitan Kallistos Ware has sagely said: "It is not the task of Christianity to provide easy answers to every question, but to make us progressively aware of a mystery. God is not so much the object of our knowledge as the cause of our wonder." And this is Everyday Saints in a nutshell.
***
It’s a church basement, light filtering through a high screened window. His thin wrist is being held firmly above his head as he spins like a ball on a tether trying to avoid getting hit by the belt, his pants around his ankles.
“I’m sorry Mom, I’m sorry Mom, please stop, I’ll never do it again” jumping... panting... sobbing... “I promise, I promise, PLEASE, I promise!”
The slapping sound of leather meeting flesh bounces off cinderblock walls and echoes down a darkened hallway, but not loud enough for anyone else to hear. There will be no rescue. It is unbearable, but he must bear it.
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