Rainey Blogs on Some Days

I’m Turning Into a Stay-at-Home Man

2024-12-07T11:14:00.000-05:00

When my wife’s grandparents were in early seventies, my wife and I were in college in Southern Missouri and they came with my wife’s parents to visit us from Southern Illinois and stayed overnight in a hotel. This was the first time in their lives they had ever not been at home to go to bed at night in their own bed. Ever. First time. Let me repeat: they had not been away from home for one night in their lives. No vacations to the Grand Canyon, no overnight trips to the Grand Ole Opry, and no traveling so far from home that they couldn't get home by bedtime. I thought it was one of the craziest things I had ever heard at the time. Now I don’t think it is so crazy.

As I get older, I find that I like being home, keeping an eye on things, and seeing who is coming and going in the neighborhood. I work from home at least two days a week and this has only made me appreciate being at home more. When I’m home, I can take a look and see if my roof missing any shingles. I can tell you that no one else in my house would even think to check that. Are there leaves sticking out of the gutter? I’ve seen houses that have little trees growing out of the gutter, and I do not want that at my house, clogging them up because that water will find somewhere to go, and it is usually somewhere inside the house. Also, by being at home, I can put out the garbage on Monday night and Thursday nights. Otherwise, who will do it if I’m not there? I’ve occasionally been gone for a business trip or something and when I get back, guess what? Everyone was too busy to put the garbage out! I also like being home to put out the recycling on Tuesday nights so it can be picked up on Wednesdays. This is another of my big responsibilities and a good reason not to be away from home. We alternate between paper recycling one Wednesday, followed by plastic recycling the next Wednesday. Kind of complicated, right? But if I’m home, I manage it with ease (mainly by looking out the window before I get the recycling to see what everyone else is putting out).

Of course, there’s also the back end of the garbage/recycling day process too. After the town garbage truck comes and picks up the garbage, the men leave the garbage can or recycling bin by the side of the road, usually on its side. When I’m home, I go out and get the can right after they come by my house and put it back in its place at the side of our house. Otherwise, the can/bin is just left out by the road to be blown around or stolen. After one paper recycling day last year, our red recycling bin disappeared because no one was there to keep an eye on things, and now I have to use a gray plastic tote! (If I were home every day, this would not have happened.)

Now that I’m working from home sometimes, I’m also finding out what kind of neighbors I have. No one is supposed to put out their garbage or recycling before 6:00 p.m. the night before it is picked up. But guess what happens a lot of days? Yep, you guessed it! Some of my neighbors put the cans out early, thinking no one is paying attention. But I’m watching! I’ve seen my neighbor put her garbage out at noon the day before the garbage collection. Noon! So I’m sitting there in my living room, working from home and enjoying the beautiful view and keeping an eye on things, and now I have to look at a hideous brown garbage can outside by the road SIX HOURS EARLY! I had no idea she was doing this until I started working from home. But when I get up in the morning and look out the window, I often see her garbage overturned and her little bag of garbage strewn all over the sidewalk. Sometimes raccoons do God’s work.

Speaking of mornings, there are also responsibilities then too. Every day, I get two newspapers, so I want to make sure I get them early before they lay on the ground too long and someone steals them, or it rains and soaks them through the plastic and renders them unreadable. It used to be the delivery of the newspaper was very mysterious because they were always there by the time I got up in the morning, even when I got up at 5:30 a.m. But now, since fewer and fewer people actually have a newspaper subscription, I’ve noticed the newspapers are using the same carrier for the Wall Street Journal, New York Post, New York Times, and the Bergen Record. I don’t know how they keep all of that straight! I know it is a challenge because I’ve gotten newspapers I don’t even subscribe to in the morning, or occasionally I’ll get the paper I stopped subscribing to last year. And with one carrier for all of the papers, the papers are delivered later and later in the morning. In fact, I’ve had to go to work some days before the papers were delivered. But when I work from home, I am there even if they come at 8:30 a.m. So as you might expect, I prefer to stay home during the day so I can keep an eye out for the newspaper.

There’s one more thing I haven’t mentioned: Bulk Trash Day! That’s right, every other Thursday is Bulk Trash Day. It is a little complicated because every week has a Bulk Trash Thursday, but only half the town gets their bulk trash picked up on any given week, followed by the other half of the town being picked up the next week. Again, it takes a lot of planning and organizing to get the day right when you have bulk trash. Maybe it’s not like this in your town, but where I live, we distinguish between ordinary garbage and trash. According to the Leonia Recycle/Garbage web page, garbage is defined as “kitchen wastes only” while bulk trash is “household furnishings such as chairs, sofas, rugs and other misc. items.” So as you can imagine, Bulk Trash Day is a big deal. I have neighbors who always have bulk trash to set out by the road on Bulk Trash Eve (Wednesday night), but we often have nothing, mainly because we just keep using our old furniture and other junk while the neighbors throw out their old furniture and junk. I am often tempted go out and grab some of the stuff my neighbor has put out by the road that is better than what I have in my house, but I’m afraid I’ll get caught. So Bulk Trash Day is a big deal at a number of levels.

With all of these things going on during the week, you’ll understand why why I was excited to get back from our European vacation that included Spain, France, Italy, Greece, and Malta. It was a great trip and I really enjoyed the vacation a lot, but I was glad to get home to get back into the routine of garbage, recycling, bulk trash, and one more thing I just forgot: yard waste! I trimmed the hedges and the bushes in the yard this week, and now I have about three full cans of yard waste that I’ll need to put out by the road on Sunday because the town will be by on Monday to pick that up. So with Monday yard waste, Tuesday garbage, and Wednesday recycling, every other Thursday bulk trash, and Friday garbage again, there’s always something exciting going on in my neighborhood. It’s almost a full-time job.

When I was young, I couldn’t understand why my wife’s grandparents didn’t really go anywhere during their entire lives until they came to visit us that one time. I don’t think they ever went anywhere else. Now, with all of the stuff I have going on here, I totally understand. How can I go away when there’s so much excitement each day?

Letting Go of Parcels

2023-05-14T20:06:00.007-04:00

Today, I am feeling “off” in an “everything is fine but I still don’t feel right kind of way.” It went on for a few days until I finally became so desperate that I needed to go and sit on a boulder next to the constant roar of the swooshing brook at Flat Rock Brook Nature Center. I'm trying to let the sounds of the water drown out all of the oppressive thoughts in my head. Sometimes it takes a while.

This is the view of where I station myself, and I think the video captures the sound. (I know some people use this kind of soundscape for sleeping, but I use it today to combat oppressive thoughts.)

However, one unoppressive thought is conflicting with the rest in my head, a quote I used in the class I'm teaching this semester:
“A man whose hands are full of parcels cannot receive a gift. " C. S. Lewis

Lewis said this about spiritual dryness, and I guess this is a good description of where I am right now: spiritually dry. And my hands are full of parcels, which resonates with me since I work for UPS: United Parcel Service. But the parcels are for me a metaphor of oppressive thoughts about what I need to do, or should do, or ought to do. This is one of the ways religion is oppressive to me, the constant sense that I need to do more. I am mostly past worrying about what I need to stop doing. Now it is about the doing, and the doing is for me the hard part. My sins are sins of omission, the things I should do but I don't.

I have often heard faith explained as a matter of doing and being. I am oriented toward being, and things like contemplation and reflection. I'm not a doer, but the doers have a much better Marketing department, leading me and others like me overwhelmed with guilt and self-loathing because we don't measure up against those kind of expectations. So here I sit next to the waters, putting down the parcels of things I think I need to do and ought to do on a Saturday. While I'm sitting here, three different people walk by on the rocky trail barefooted, as if they are doing penance. I wonder if that is a thing now? But I'm here trying to empty my hands, and mind, so that God can fill them with his gifts for me. As I sit here, I keep feeling like I need to get up and go do something--get a haircut, grade the class assignment, test a computer program for work that is due on Monday, do chin-ups, or even move the suitcases from my March business trips down to the basement from my office on the second floor that I think are in my way every workday--but with each one of these thoughts, I am laying down the parcel so I can receive something else, something better. Being.

You might think it's strange that I would say religion can be oppressive to me since I would also say that my Christian faith is the very thing that saved my life.

During the COVID-19 lockdowns I actually never felt more alive because the doing was curtailed. Doing was not expected during the COVID lockdowns--we were told to stay home! So I worked remotely and taught classes on Zoom at night and preached sermons virtually and felt none of the burden of doing. I have no idea if any of this makes any sense to anyone else, but it makes sense to me. I think my doing is only possible out of a rich core of being. But excess doing hollows out that core and eventually becomes oppressive. And as I sit in these woods today, this is exactly what I'm feeling. I'm letting go of "should's" and "ought's" and "must's" and simply concentrating on being, listening, and thinking. The world has a certain momentum that will carry you along in ways that undermine who you are if you let it. Religion, corporate culture, and perfectionism are all things that bear down on me and get my soul out of whack. You might think it's strange that I would say religion can be oppressive to me since I would also say that my Christian faith is the very thing that saved my life. But there are also aspects of it, aspects that I'll call "religion," that I also find quite oppressive, things that are overwhelmingly tilted towards doing. These are the parcels I'm trying to put down. As I sit besides these waters, God really does seem to restore my soul, just like it says in Psalm 23. But I had to sit here awhile for that to happen. This is what I needed most today rather than another thing to do. Let's see how I do come Monday when the workweek starts again.

My Reflections on My UPS Career on Founders Day

2022-09-03T12:15:00.000-04:00

We were given a choice whether or not those of us who were having a milestone service year wanted to speak on Founders Day in our department meeting. Since the one consistent feedback I have gotten during my entire 25-year career at UPS was that I don’t speak up enough in meetings, I thought I would make up for the whole thing here today.

No one intends to have a long career at UPS. You come to work at UPS as a temporary thing while you are planning your life. Those plans do not include UPS. We come for the benefits, the tuition assistance, the non-standard hours that don’t interfere with classes or our other real jobs. Parents don’t envision their kids growing up and working for UPS. I think these are just the basic realities of life.

I worked the majority of my career in Information Services Learning & Development or Corp HR Learning & Development. I would have never lasted 25 years had I been in Operations. I know exactly how long I would have lasted in Operations had I worked in Operations: four months. I know because I worked twice for UPS. The first time I worked in the Meadowlands Hub, and I lasted four months. Two weeks as an unloader, and 3 ½ months as a jambreaker. I am not making the jambreaker thing up. It is a real job where you stand on a catwalk and wait for a belt to jam, then go down and turn off the belt, unjam it, and start it up again. It was easy but quite boring. So I quit again. I never put the jambreaker job on my resume because it takes too long to explain what a jambreaker is.

At one time I was told UPS had a policy that if you worked for UPS and left, they wouldn’t rehire you. That must have been a big problem, because nearly everyone in our country has worked for UPS. We have to let people come back. UPS hired me again in 1997.

When I came back, I worked full-time in Information Services Learning & Development. We were hiring lots of people in our group because all of our computer programs were being re-done and needed training because of Y2K. Since the programmers of the all of those aging mainframe programs either forgot or were too lazy to put the first two digits of the year in the date field, we thought when it switched to the year 2000 with just a 00 in the date field, everything would stop working and planes would fall out of the sky and the lights would go out. We must have done a real good job because nothing happened like that.

At that time, UPS was still kind of my second job. I was a pastor of a small church here in New Jersey when I started and a woman in our church worked in the UPS I.S. L&D department. She took care of the church’s finances so she knew I really needed to get an additional job since I was being paid a very low salary. Since we had come from the Midwest, we were naïve and it took us a while to realize we weren’t making very much money. So I came back to UPS while I was a pastor--again, just like the first time. At first, my boss called me “Rev” and in our meetings people would apologize to me for cursing. So it was a little awkward at first, but as time went on I settled in and people started calling me by my first name like our policy says, and cursing right in front of me.

In I.S. (or Information Technology, IT), the people are mostly computer programmers, so they are pretty smart but often socially awkward. I fit in pretty well in that environment, and my social skills were right in line with the environment I was in. (As you can imagine, my being an introvert was not a good fit for a pastor, and I still to this day usually have a family member call in the Chinese takeout order because I'm shy that way.) I was an instructional designer at first, and then I switched to being mainly a facilitator for the next three years. I am proud that I got certified to teach business writing with Franklin Covey during that time, and I saved the company thousands of dollars for three straight years that we didn’t have to hire a vendor to teach business writing.

In 2005, the department was downsized and I transitioned to become an I.T. business analyst. I was in that role in about four different groups over nine years, all moves that were made for me without my input. I was not as good of a fit in those roles, but by then we were a family of five at home--I like to call our family Five for Fighting--so I kept showing up to work and doing what I had to do to make a living. I applied for seven UPS jobs during those years and did not get any of them.

In 2014, I happened to see an L&D job in Corporate that looked like something that would be a good fit for me. So I poked around and found out that it didn’t require a relocation. For whatever reason, I love high taxes and paying tolls everywhere I go and don’t want to move from New Jersey. So Corp HR L&D hired me and I worked in that role for almost five years. I supported the driver training expansion from two to 10 sites, the transition from Success Factors to the Cornerstone Learning Management System, and many other things I can’t think of right now. Since that time I have felt like I was where I was supposed to be, and I even got promoted to manager in my 22nd year with the company.

As time has gone by, I have grown to appreciate this community-minded, diverse, generous, hard-working company that has helped so many of us make a good living, that has given my daughter a Casey scholarship, and has given me skills and knowledge that I have used in life both in and out of UPS.

I have now been here long enough to start thinking about what may be next for me. I feel like I am still contributing at a pretty high level, and I hope to go out like Tom Brady did when he retired after the 2021 season when they won the Super Bowl. Wait, he’s still playing isn’t he? It’s hard to know when to retire. But in the end, these companies are dynamic, ever-changing entities facing new business realities that may not allow us to decide for ourselves. So I did not set out to be at UPS for 25 years, but somehow it happened. And I’m grateful it did.

The speech ended with the previous paragraph. I had intended to include the poem below, but there were about 15 other people who would also be speaking in the one hour meeting, so I cut my speech down to about five minutes. But here in this blog post, I’d like to close with the poem as I think it really captures the placement of UPS Founders Day, which always occurs in late August, but also serves as a kind of metaphor for those of us who are in the twilight of our careers. It’s called “Sweet Summer Days” by Dennis Caraher.

I think it is a brilliant poem that has a refrain, “In these fading, sweet summer days.” I have always been sensitive to the passage of time, and even today as we are in the final days before the pool closes, the temperature is getting a little cooler, school is starting, and summer is almost over. It’s something I can feel, and it feels a bit like a loss to me. And when I think about my UPS career after 25 years of service, I know I am in the midst of “fading, sweet summer days.” My girls are adults now, another reminder that I am in the “fading, sweet summer days.” Soon the leaves will change, the air will chill, and we’ll be approaching winter. Until then, I will swim laps for the final few times this summer, sleep with the windows open at night to take in the cool air, and hold on to “these fading, sweet summer days” as long as I can.

Link to Fading Sweet Summer Days by Dennis Caraher

Locked Out: A Woeful Tale of Two-Factor Authentication with Google Voice

2022-04-22T09:57:00.016-04:00

This is my story of how I was locked out of my Google account for nearly two months because of a two-factor authentication (2FA) password reset attempt that I could not successfully complete. If you have a Google Voice number as your 2FA number, change it immediately! You will also be in the same basic situation if you lose your cellphone and access to your text messages.

It took 57 days to resolve this issue.

FIFTY-SEVEN DAYS!

Here's what happened.

The Beginning: A Mindless Password Reset Attempt

February 2. I am a remote worker using my laptop and receive a Windows update that prevents me from using the Edge browser I normally use on my work laptop. I decided to log in to my Gmail account using the Chrome browser (the first time on this particular device) after several months of using the Microsoft Edge browser, where my password was stored. I wanted to use the time during the update to check my personal email, but I couldn’t remember my password, so I thought I would just use the password reset function. This is how little thought went into the turn of events that happened.

The password reset required two-factor authentication. I think it is the first time I have ever had to use two-factor authentication for my Gmail account. My phone number for the 2FA is my Google Voice number associated with the same account. Since I am attempting to log in to a Google account and the 2FA is sending the text to a Google Voice number associated with the same account, I am unable to receive a text until I can log in. Either way, I’m screwed, and you are in the same predicament if you have 2FA sending texts to a cell phone number you no longer have access to.

Try Another Way sends a recovery code to my Gmail account that I am locked out of. Suddenly, I am locked out in an endless loop that returns to the screen to send a text to my mobile number.

I tried numerous times until I got this message in the screenshot below: “Too many failed attempts . . . Try again in a few hours.” (I will later learn that this message seems to require not a “few hours” but a one-week waiting period with no login attempts until the “Too many failed attempts” lock on the account goes away.)

No Humans Allowed

This message is on the account recovery page:

“For your security, you can't call Google for help to sign into your account. We don’t work with any service that claims to provide account or password support. Do not give out your passwords or verification codes.”

All research suggests this is a serious problem that may not be able to be resolved if you can’t navigate the automated processes. They do not involve humans in resolving login issues. At this point, the situation looks bleak.

The Mountain View Call

The next day, I called Google’s Mountain View number at 605-253-0000. The options related to my situation tell me to go to the online account recovery form. I pick other options to attempt to get a human being. After one hour and 15 minutes on hold, I got a person. He is reassuring and lets me know that my problem can be resolved when I explain about the Google Voice number being my 2FA number. (On the contrary to his optimism, online reading suggests the only resolution may be to open a new account, resulting in the loss of access to 15 years of work products, blogs, courses created, personal records, family photos, and bills associated with the Gmail account, and other things I am not even sure I can figure out.)

I am sent to this page and told to use the fill out this form option and it will be looked at by a human being.

I select the link and fill out the form below.

Finally, there seems to be hope that I can get the account access back. But within an hour (on the first attempt, and within five minutes on the second attempt at using the same form), I get this form message:

Even though I was assured these submissions are looked at by human beings, they are clearly just sending back a form email, or there is an automated response sent, or both. It is true that I should be able to log into my active account, but I can’t because of 2FA.

At this point, I am moving past denial in the five stages of grief into anger. I have never experienced a situation like this where a person can’t contact another human being to help them resolve a problem. But this is a new world we have made.

When You Get Locked Out of Your Google Account, What Do You Do?

This is the title of an article that saved the day for me. Sometimes, one person takes the time to do something that helps other people immensely, and this great article that was born out of anger and frustration of another user who was in the exact same position I was in helped me resolve the issue. The author was locked out of her Google account with a 2FA Google Voice number attached. You can read here article at the link above, but let me quote her key finding:

Since the [Google Voice] number is a VOIP number, they have to comply with FCC regulations. Google was denying me access to my account without cause. According to the FCC: FCC rules help to prevent telephone companies from abruptly discontinuing, reducing, or impairing wireline telecommunications service without proper notice, for any reason including bankruptcy. The discontinuance rules, which also apply to interconnected Voice-over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service, are designed to protect you from an abrupt change or termination of service and to allow you time to arrange for service with another provider.

In this case, it seemed the government was really here to help, so following this strategy, I submitted an informal complaint to the FCC on February 20. You can read the about this process at this link. I asked in the complaint for Google to unlock the phone number, thinking I would be able to port it as an additional phone line under my wireless carrier. Google had 30 days to respond to my complaint. But it didn’t exactly work out as I had planned.

A Mysterious Resolution

On March 24, I finally received the response from Google written apparently by an actual human being, through the FCC. Again, Google seemed to use a form email and told me to use their Help page to regain access to my account and requested the case be closed.

Five days later, I wrote back this response to the FCC:

Thank you for facilitating these communications. No, in my opinion this is not an acceptable response from Google.

In their response, Google is asking me to unlock my Google Voice number (XXX-XXX-XXXX) myself so that it can then be ported to a third-party provider. I am unable to do this because my Google Voice number is my two-factor authentication primary phone for my Google account. Since I am locked out of the Google account after a password reset that required two-factor authentication, I am also locked out of the Google Voice number associated with the account, leaving me stuck in an endless two-factor authentication loop where Google wants to text the two-factor authentication code to my Google Voice number that I cannot access. The only solution appears to be for Google to unlock the phone number so I can port it to another service provider, get the two-factor authentication text messages, and access the account.

The Google Voice number (XXX-XXX-XXXX) is still active and I can receive phone calls to it, but I cannot call out or receive texts at the number. I have taken several steps to resolve this issue:

Attempted numerous logins using various options to launch a different "path" of authentication steps.
Searched all of my devices for backup codes, but apparently I did not set them up.
Called the Google Mountain View support phone number and spoke with a representative after waiting 1 hour and 15 minutes, where I was advised to use the account recovery form "Request to restore your Google Account: Use this form if the above steps don't work." The account recovery form is apparently read by human beings; however, those 2-3 attempts ended with the following form response: "Thank you for contacting us about being unable to access your Google account. We've looked into your account and confirmed that it is still active, so you should be able to log in normally." I am still unable to log in normally.

I would appreciate it if Google would unlike my Google Voice number so that I can recover the account. Thank you.

Two days later, I mysteriously received this email from Google Support instructing me to “file a claim” using the link provided in the email.

The process is not exactly intuitive because to file a claim, you actually appear to start the login process again, but instead of getting the 2FA screen to send a code to your phone number, you key enter a valid email address. After that, it’s not clear, but submitting that email seems to “create the claim.” At that point, I stopped trying to do anything else and waited.

Two days later, I received a password reset email from Google at the email address provided through the process above. The password reset did not require 2FA. I successfully reset my password and had the account back after 57 days. It really shouldn’t be this difficult to resolve this kind of problem.

Other resources:

Gmail Account Recovery article from Google

My Prayer Life Is Like, "Whack" (-a-Mole)

2021-09-14T19:49:00.001-04:00

I’ve been a practicing Christian my entire adult life, and one would think that would result in a certain level of proficiency in certain practices such as what often occurs when one plays golf, tennis, or does various other activities on a regular basis. Prayer is not like this for me though. Prayer is like whack-a-mole. As soon as I knock down a mole that pops up--some sort of obstacle to my praying--another mole rises in its place. "Whack-a-mole" is exactly how I would describe my prayer life, a daily whacking away at things that prevent prayer.

But I am starting to think prayer is not something you master; it is not something you get good at and people think, “Wow, he’s really good at prayer.” I’m starting to think it is something else entirely.

I’ve whacked various moles of prayerlessness over the years with a variety of practices. Here are just a few:

Praying the Lord’s prayer
Praying the prayers of the apostle Paul
Praying the Psalms
Praying from the Book of Common Prayer
Praying from a paper list
Praying about things I read in the news
Praying by using a list from a prayer app (currently Echo)
Praying while walking around the neighborhood
Praying at a local nature center
Praying as thinking, which I learned from the movie, The Tree of Life
Praying breath prayers that last no more than a few words or a sentence
Praying on a bike ride using a prayer app

I also have sometimes prayed sitting with a cup of coffee in my hand, kneeling, standing, or lying face down. None of the types of prayer above or any of the postures that I have used am I able to sustain very long. Prayer just “don’t come easy for me,” and I am not proud of this.

My latest prayer innovation is a prayer bike ride. Actually, I learned this was possible from a pastor in our town who used to ride his bike to different communities around the county and pray for the churches in the communities. So I have implemented this method and it is currently my go-to method for prayer, albeit I stay local by riding to the nearby county park. Biking prayer is healthy and I can do it safely, even though it is a form of multitasking, something I am otherwise not very good at. I can pray for an entire 45-minute bike ride and go through my entire list of people and things that I want to pray about. The only problem is that as soon as I started praying this way, which I can only do every other day due to the rigors of riding a bike 10 miles, I seem to be unable to get myself to pray any other way other than some little breath prayers to God here and there. I think another mole just popped up.

With all of the different ways I have attempted to pray over the years, you would think that I would be better at it. Or at least that I would have demonstrated more mastery of the practice. But I am starting to think prayer is not something you master; it is not something you get good at and people think, “Wow, he’s really good at prayer.” I’m starting to think it is something else entirely.

Years ago I went to a church where it was widely reported that the pastor prayed four hours a day. This has actually turned out to be one of the worst things I ever heard, not for him, but for me. I spent the next many years comparing my prayer life to this standard, and I always came away feeling like I was not spiritual, not committed; just a mediocre person living a lukewarm life who didn’t love God enough to pray more than a little bit on certain days.

Years ago I went to a church where it was widely reported that the pastor prayed four hours a day. This has actually turned out to be one of the worst things I ever heard . . .

At this point I think I’m supposed to write how I conquered this challenge in my life and now I’m really good at prayer. But I’m not. Most days I think I’d rather do almost anything else than pray; that’s how unnatural it seems. For me, prayer really is like whack-a-mole, discovering new reasons not to pray and whacking them down day after day. Maybe prayer is like that for you too, like whack-a-mole.

19 Reasons I’m Thankful During Thanksgiving

2019-11-27T16:35:00.002-05:00

I took some time to think about the many things that I am thankful for. Here are a few that came to mind.

1. We attended an Army football game at West Point in October. Marcia lost her driver’s license while there. A few days later, we received an express envelope with the license. A woman who is an attorney in Houston, TX, found the license at the game, took it back to Houston, and sent it to us.

2. The four seasons of the year--Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall--teach me so much about the changes of life as I watch them unfold throughout a calendar year.

3. The opportunity to visit Spain, France, Italy, Greece, and Malta on a cruise with my family.

4. Free public restrooms, which is not the norm in Europe.

5. The Saturday morning Wall Street Journal, which I can read at a leisurely pace on the weekend.

6. The two cups of coffee I enjoy drinking every morning to start the day, and for Jerry’s Gourmet Market that sells my favorite (Lavazza) coffee at $2.99 along with a perpetual buy one get one free deal.

7. Flat Rock Brook Nature Center, where I still go from time-to-time to walk, think, pray, and journal. I am always able to regain perspective there.

8. The Transformation Life Church, where we have been welcomed back after leaving eight years ago. I was honored to speak in services there on November 9-10.

9. The policy at my company--UPS: “We address each other on a first name basis.” This has resulted in a collegial, egalitarian work environment that I really admire.

10. My family who loves me and treats me with more respect than I deserve.

11. The books and things I’ve read this year that help me understand the world and myself a little better:

a) Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic

b) Kenneth Woodward, Getting Religion

c) Kate Fagan, What Made Maddy Run?

d) First Things magazine

e) Rod Dreher, How Dante Saved My Life

f) And of course, The Bible

12. My hometown, Mt. Vernon, Illinois. It remains a large part of who I am even though we have now lived in New Jersey longer than I lived in my hometown.

13. The kindness Ernie Badger’s family showed to my great uncle, Tom Harvey, who moved in next door to them on Conger in Mt. Vernon in about 1977. They showed him genuine neighborly kindness during the final year of his life. This came to my mind in thinking about Ernie after his death recently.

14. My 3-4 bicycle rides per week through Leonia and around Overpeck Park.

15. The people who clear the asphalt paths at Overpeck Park that allows me to ride my bicycle there even a day after a big snow.

16. CBS White House correspondent Major Garret’s podcast, “The Takeout,” which I listen to every Friday when driving to work.

17. Hawthorne Christian Academy, the pre-K-12 Christian school that has been a blessing to my family in numerous ways through the years.

18. Two biopsies in the past two years have come back negative.

19. Adolpho, an eighty-something barber in Cliffside Park who cut my hair for over 20 years. He told me to do things when I’m young, because when I get older I won’t feel like doing anything.

Hopefully, you can come up with 19 things to be thankful for too!

Things Can Only Get Better

2019-06-30T10:00:00.000-04:00

And do you feel scared,
I do
But I won't stop and falter
And if we threw it all away
Things can only get better

--Howard Jones, "Things Can Only Get Better," 1985.

My youngest daughter recently got her driver's license. Since this is the third child to get a license, besides the parents' experiences at the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), you'd think I would be an expert by now on how to navigate the DMV. But the place of which I once said, “All of the ineptitude of the entire world converges at the DMV” is always a challenge, and my trips there are just far enough apart in time that I can never exactly remember what is supposed to happen or what the process is.

The first decision is always to figure out which parent will take time off of work to go to the DMV with the child. Since a school principal trumps every other job in the world, I am always the one selected to go to the DMV, even though I am the so-called head of the house. I was also selected when my wife was a teacher. So for the third time, I will do my duty. But my job was supposed to be relatively easy this time: meet my daughter at the DMV, get in the long line so that after she passes the driving test, she can join me at the spot in line and be processed for her license. This was the plan anyway.

The driving instructor picked up my daughter at 6:30 am to go and practice before the test. There was also another student with her doing the same thing. After they had both practiced parallel parking and were confirming their paperwork the driving instructor realized that my daughter's date for the driving test was actually not Monday, but Wednesday. Since this is our third child, we do not micromanage her scheduling, or tell her to do much of anything. This is one of the few times that strategy didn’t really work. So my daughter worked out a plan with the driving instructor where he would bring her back to our town and I would meet them near the high school, take her to school, and then I would go on to work since I had not actually left home to go to the DMV when the discovery was made.

At about 8:00 am, the driving instructor dropped off my daughter on a side street near the high school. Unbeknownst to both of us, as she was getting into the car, she dropped her driving permit with the DMV driving test paperwork in the grass by the curb. As I started driving her to school, she started looking for her paperwork and realized it was missing. At this point, the ride to school got tense with her frantically trying to figure out where the permit is and me discussing the benefits of using a Google calendar to manage appointments rather than paper calendars so that this kind of thing doesn’t happen again. She didn’t appreciate my wisdom at the time but I’m sure she will later on.

We finally arrived at school and then, since the only logical thing that we could think of is that she dropped the paperwork getting into the car, I decided to drive back to the drop-off point to check and see if I might be able to find the driving permit on the ground. I have to admit that on the drive in extremely heavy traffic, I am envisioning her driving permit blowing through the neighborhood, the problems we will have applying to get a new permit, and finally someone finding it and stealing her identity, and then my identity. (I know, but it didn’t seem crazy in the car!) For some reason, the song by Howard Jones from the big-haired 1980s--“Things Can Only Get Better”--came to mind, even though I don’t think I had heard it for at least 30 years--so I pulled it up on Spotify and listened to it three times on the way. And I heard something in the song I had never noticed before:

And do you feel scared,
I do
But I won't stop and falter
And if we threw it all away
Things can only get better

Jones sings that . . . I do part in a falsetto, and so I started singing along in the falsetto too. (Actually, I started screaming that falsetto part in the car!) And it made me feel better, just to acknowledge that I was scared that I wasn’t going to find the permit and I was scared that the whole thing might unleash a chain of events that might hurt my daughter, and eventually me. But the song reminded me that in spite of all that, things can only get better. And they did.

I made it back into town and drove to the exact spot where she got into my car, and right there in the grass was the permit. There was no wind on this beautiful day, and the permit stayed put right in the grass. I then called the principal (my wife) to let her know I had found the permit. The principal let the daughter, who has been maintaining a vigil in the principal’s office for most of the past hour, know that Dad found the permit. Order had been restored to the universe. Things could only get better, and they did.

Two days later, we tried again, and everything went perfect the second time and my daughter is now a licensed driver. I am still listening to “Things Can Only Get Better” and screaming that part in a falsetto that says, “And do you feel scared, I do!” And I have to say, it always makes me feel better. So much so, in fact, that I'm starting to think about going back to the DMV to turn in the 10 or so sets of license plates I have collected in my basement over the years.

*I took my oldest daughter to get her license eight years earlier. You can read about that here.

I Heard the Voice of Robert Plant Say, “Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down”

2018-04-22T22:28:00.001-04:00

The other day, as I prepared for my 30-minute commute to my office, I let Spotify pick a playlist for me and off I went to work. You may remember in recent years, I commuted in an older car, a 2002 Mercury Sable with a few quirks that made life interesting. But now I have a 2016 Honda Accord with Bluetooth. It starts all of the time, doesn’t break down and require towing, and this means I have to look for other forms of excitement while commuting. This newer car also meant my music went from cassettes/CDs to Spotify Bluetooth in a remarkably short time, so I’m sticking my hand deep into the musical candy jar each day with Spotify (yes, I heard about it from my children). On this chilly April morning, a few songs into my Daily Mix 1 playlist, Robert Plant, the former lead singer of Led Zeppelin, came on singing the lyric, “Satan, your kingdom must come down . . . Satan, your kingdom must come down . . . I heard the voice of Jesus say, Satan, your kingdom must come down.” I had listened to this particular song a couple of times last year and put it in a playlist I called “Offbeat Gospel” because it was, I thought, well, offbeat. Not so much the lyrics, but the combination of certain singers singing certain lyrics had a slight incongruence that I kind of liked. The playlist includes people who aren’t necessarily known as Christian artists--Alison Kraus, Marc Cohn, and Bruce Springsteen to name a few--singing songs that didn’t just feel gospel but that actually were legitimate gospel lyrics. Offbeat gospel.

As Plant sang about the impending demise of the evil one, I couldn’t help but think back to my days in community college. In my speech class, I did a paper on “backward masking,” which was taking a vinyl record and spinning it backwards on a turntable to see if there were messages “planted” (pun intended) in the song that could be heard. Sometimes, artists did actually put a message in a song that could only be discovered by playing it backwards, but mostly playing songs backwards was just a garbled mess of nonsensical sounds, except a few songs that made this list that includes Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” which if played backwards had the infamous words, “My Sweet Satan.” Now I have to admit, that when I listened to Stairway backwards, I could hear the words “My Sweet Satan,” but it actually didn’t sound intentional. But of course, anything played backwards sounds kind of creepy (satanic?), and given that Jimmy Page, the group’s lead guitarist, had bought the famous Satanist Aleister Crowley’s mansion, it seemed like there may have been something to it. That was plenty of information to get a good conspiracy theory going. So I figured I’d better steer clear of Led Zeppelin given all of their Satanic associations, and I pretty much did all of these years, although it might have had as much to do with the song being so long that it was rarely played on the radio as the years went by, just like another song that is over eight minutes long, American Pie. Radio likes three-minute songs so they can sell you stuff in between the songs, and a song that starts out, “Long, long time ago. . . “ and just keeps going and going messes up the whole business model.

One thing I find ironic is that it seems like it was actually easier to play music backwards in the old days of vinyl records on turntables than it is today. I never knew how to play anything on a Compact Disc (CD) backwards and I have no idea how to play something backwards on a streaming music service like Spotify now. (A search on the site about playing music in reverse did not yield anything other than playing a playlist in backwards or reverse order.) So it seems like the days of backward masking have finally come to an end, and you are much more likely to hear Robert Plant singing “Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down” than “My Sweet Satan.” In my opinion, that’s probably a good thing. And if you pull up next to me at a red light over the next few months while it is warm and roll down your windows, you might even hear me singing those lyrics along with him.

How Was Your Weekend? And the Retroactive Sabbath

2017-11-13T20:48:00.001-05:00

One of the questions I don't really like to answer comes on most Mondays at work. “How was your weekend?” The question might come from a co-worker or a former coworker or maybe even a complete stranger. This past week, I called our tech support hotline on Monday about a situation I’ve been having where people inside my company cannot call me from a work number. I let it go for as long as I could because it was really great for a while, but I finally needed to get it resolved. The tech had to get some other departments involved, and while we were waiting for them to get on the call, this otherwise total stranger I’ve never talked to before in my entire life popped the big question: “So how was your weekend?” I gave a vague answer and then pivoted out of it back to the support issue I was having. (I’ve watched far too many politicians answer questions for the past two years on Face the Nation, so now, like they always do, I use the pivot in my conversations.) This resistance to the question is likely because I'm not a person who enjoys small talk. To me, the question is a deep one and ultimately leads to a similar conclusion every week: the weekend was a disappointment. Friday evening holds so much promise but then when the weekend actually arrives, I'm lost and out of rhythm because the regular routine has been interrupted by unplanned, ad hoc days that somehow always seem to turn out the same way. What begins with so much hope ends with me feeling as if I never got to do what I actually wanted to do. But when you don't know what you wanted to do in the first place, it is hard to do what you wanted to do.

Right now this Saturday morning is starting like many start for me. I sleep a little later than usual, and I read the newspaper a little more thoroughly than usual. I think about several things I should do: go for a bike ride, take a prayer walk, paint the inside of the kitchen cabinets, paint the garage, replace the rubber gasket on the garage door, tighten the screws on our storm windows, or any other number of things that come to mind. I also think it might be nice to go to the Columbia-Yale football game, or even the Fordham-Holy Cross game. Both of these games are about 20 minutes from our house. but it takes a big commitment to go to a three-hour football game when you didn’t think about it until an hour before the game starts. If we do go to the football game, that will mean a bunch of other things will not get done, like tightening the screws on the windows. If you wonder why I keep mentioning the screws on the windows, it's because I noticed them a couple of weeks ago and they have been bothering me ever since. Also, as I mentioned above, the garage needs painting as both sides of the garage are peeling badly and needs scraped and painted. (I did the garage door last week, and that was exhausting!) Again, painting is one thing, but scraping and painting takes it to a whole new level of commitment and I’m just not sure I’m up for that on a Saturday. We also need to put away the outdoor furniture that sits on our patio since it is now November, and also since it is November we need to take the air conditioners out of the bedroom windows and put them away in the basement. But unfortunately, the closet where I keep the air conditioners has a bunch of other stuff in the place where the air conditioners are supposed to go, so it looks like I now have another project to clean out the closet. One thing always has something to do with another.

These are the kinds of things that go through my mind when someone pops the big question to me on a Monday morning: “How was your weekend?” Because by Monday you realize that the things you would have liked to do and the things you should have done were not done. And then the feelings of failure and self-loathing start in and you also realize the things that were not done will still not be done when the next Friday rolls around and another weekend starts. But there is one thing that always gets us through the weekend: the hope of calling for a retroactive Sabbath.

As early evening comes on Saturday and it becomes clear that none of the things I wanted to do and none of the things I should do actually will get done, my wife or I will say something like, “It's okay! We're taking a Jewish sabbath.” This means that we've simply been unable to accomplish one thing from Sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. When we figure this out, we retroactively credit ourselves for observing a Jewish sabbath. This allows us to live with our failure and lack of productivity and even turn it into a virtue. It is a ray of hope that would otherwise lead to Saturday evening despair. We can live with ourselves after all. We just observed Shabbat!

On Sunday, we have our worship services at our church. Our big decision for Saturday night before we go to bed is always, “Which service do you want to go to?” We have an 8:30 a.m. service and a 10:30 a.m. service. The 8:30 a.m. service has fewer people and it is shorter since there is a service after it. However, it is 8:30 a.m., so we have to get up early to go, realizing that when we walk to the car our neighbors will all likely still be sleeping and this makes me envious sometimes. Also, the music is loud at our church, and loud music 8:30 a.m. just seems wrong to me, especially after I've started the day reading the newspaper and drinking a cup of coffee in the quiet. But, if we go at 8:30 am, we get out at about 10 a.m. and it feels like we’ve still got a whole day to ourselves to try and accomplish the things we failed to do on Saturday. When we go to the 10:30 a.m. service, there are a lot more people, so not only is this a service longer because there’s nothing after it, there are also many more people to talk to. So when we go to the second service, by the time we get out, it feels like the day is over because we have to go home and figure out lunch, and after lunch all of the undone things start bearing down on us as we begin to realize that once again nothing will get done on day two of the weekend. So the second round of feelings of failure and self-loathing set in.

But then comes the awareness that Sunday is the Christian Sabbath, so we can now, in the absence of any accomplishments on Sunday besides going to worship, pronounce that we are observing the Christian Sabbath today after observing the Jewish Sabbath yesterday. So what appeared to be a weekend of epic failures ends with us being reclassified as a spiritual giants because we've’ve observed both the Jewish and Christian Sabbaths.

Now that I've given this some thought, I think I know what I'll say the next time someone says to me, “How was your weekend?” I think I'll just tell them, “I had a great weekend. I was a good Christian, and I was a good Jew. How about you?”

Thinking of Old Words on Memorial Day Weekend

2017-05-29T08:56:00.001-04:00

My Grandma Rainey always used a couple of anachronisms that now make sense to me as I've gotten older. She'd say my dad was born on “Armistice Day,” referring to Veterans Day when they disputed about his birth date because she insisted that his birth certificate actually listed the wrong date for his birth. (She ultimately went and had the birth certificate legally corrected to win the argument. He was born on Armistice Day!) And on this Memorial Day weekend, I now remember that she always used the term “Decoration Day,” which was the name for Memorial Day until she was 50 years old. That’s actually not a crazy thing to say, but I remember thinking it was at the time.

Growing up in my house, we had an icebox to keep the food cold, but it actually wasn’t an icebox. It was a refrigerator, but the old names for things sometimes take a while to be discontinued from use. Somewhere along the way, I stopped using “icebox” but I do not remember when. All I know is that I think we often look down on older people because they say things like that or other things that make them seem so out of touch. I am realizing how many things I say that relate to some event or song from the 1970s or 80s and this would suggest how close I am to becoming an out-of-touch person as well. To deal with these thoughts of my own obsolescence, I tell myself to “live in the moment” and forge ahead with my life, even though I have no idea what it practically means to live in the moment.

This train of thought came to roaring into my head because I read an article on pastries in the Wall Street Journal on Saturday entitled “How Great Thou Tart.” (Maybe I didn't actually read the article. I may have just read the title—I can't remember now.) I thought the title was brilliant, but wondered if it would resonate with younger people who may have no idea that the title plays on an old hymn of the church, “How Great Thou Art.” It seemed as I read the news on Memorial Day weekend that I was seeing my place in the world as one on the back side of the river of time, familiar with things that will be lost to the current younger generation.

I am quite concerned about the state of world affairs right now. I don't know if this is normal for people of a certain age or if things are really worse than they were in the 1980s when I graduated from high school. I have a feeling it is actually not necessarily worse. It’s just that we now know about every single thing that happens everywhere and I don't think this is healthy. But now that I have children coming of age, I want them to experience a good life with freedom to flourish in their lives as I have had opportunities to do so in mine. I guess on this Memorial Day weekend, I'm more aware of the changes in the world, the current conflicts, the struggles among nations and ideologies that have required men and women to serve and sacrifice. I am free today to sit by a peaceful stream in a public park and write these words on a steno pad. This is the fruit of sacrifice. This is freedom. Thank you to those who gave so much for our country.

A New Keyboard for Christmas

2016-12-29T08:49:00.001-05:00

Created using my Android tablet and tiny keyboard, hunched over looking out indirectly at the sun rising over the golf course in Leesurg, FL.

My tablet now has a keyboard that I got for Christmas. Much smaller, not so easy to type or even press the space key because the space bar is so much smaller. I will inevitably end up fat-fingering the keys. But I can also use voice to overcome some of these typing faux paus. It really is a great time to be alive, except that I am spending so much to time with devices rather than people I love. Or spending time with people through devices I love rather than spending time with them directly. So I guess we are victims of our own devices.

It is the end of another year. I should be setting goals to 2017 but I probably won't. I am by nature a laissez-faire kind of guy. Everything I learned about planning and organization I learned in the corporate world, an alternate universe where people work and do things that they do not do in their home lives. I am thankful for this alternate world; it has forced me to do things I would not have been able to do. But on a vacation week like this, I revert back to laissez-faire, unplanned days that begin with quiet reading and coffee and then veer off in any number of directions. (I am in Google Docs and it keeps auto-correcting me with words I do not want. I know better than to edit while I type but I am doing it anyway. I am not proud of myself right now.) This is the first day I have taken time to journal, so not only am I rusty but I am also using this new keyboard, so let's just get through this and next time I will aim for profundity and such. Sometimes just showing up is enough, like when you go to work after a three-day weekend or a week-long vacation. I am just showing up to journal my thoughts, so there, I am doing this, I can do this, getting something down on the screen, which I have not done in a while because I am too busy or too lazy or I would rather watch TV or scroll through pages of banal Facebook pages. Did you know that I removed Facebook from this device before we left on this trip last week? Yes, I did, and the quality of my life has not diminished in the least.

I noticed we didn't get many Christmas cards this year. It seems to be fewer each year. It made me a little sad. I think it is Facebook's fault. Facebook has taken over everything. I liked Facebook at first, but then they had to monetize it. In fact, everything on the Internet was free at first, and then they had to monetize it. And that ruins everything. You can't give someone something for free and expect them to all of a sudden want to start paying for it. Or looking at creepy ads.

I've now been journaling for about 20 minutes. I'm getting used to this little keyboard, but I am not positioned properly for ergonomics sitting in a wicker chair all hunched over typing. But now I know it works, and I feel like I am accomplishing something by typing on a little Bluetooth keyboard on a beautiful December day in Florida. And that raises one more thing I wanted to mention: Christmas in Florida. It was 85 degrees on Christmas Day. To me, that is not Christmas. That is the evil Solstice. I feel like I have been put in a time warp and emerged in June. We exchanged gifts, and then the next day I am out in the hot sun playing Bocci ball and then swimming laps. Those things are great, but they are not Christmas-time activities. So I think I missed Christmas and got Solstice. I guess I will have to check the credit card bill in January and see if we really did miss Christmas or if it was just my imagination.

Wow, this was hard work!

The Passing of Time

2016-10-17T20:34:00.000-04:00

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.” Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

I have to admit something: I am obsessed by the passage of time. It is a constant presence in my life, as if I have some allergy that results in irritation or an itchiness that I must constantly attend to. I am constantly paying attention to the passage of time. I have no idea how this happened. Here's an example: I do not really want to be celebrated on my birthday like so many do. I prefer to take the day off from work and contemplate, not be rushed, sip the coffee slowly in the morning, sit by a stream for a little while, anything but be glad that I am another year older. The changing of seasons, say from summer to autumn, is also an emotional experience for me because I see it as a kind of dying, an ending to something that is now being lost. I wish I could see the new season as a new beginning, but I do not. I focus on the end. I mourn my way month-by-month through the cycles of life. I suppose this outlook on life may actually deepen the pleasures I experience because they are commingled with the pain of any experience's brevity.

I told my daughter the other day that I want to buy raw sugar in the brown packets because I love the way it tastes, but I then immediately said that if we did that, it would no longer be special when we get to have the sugar in a nice restaurant or on a cruise. It would become something normal, something always available. Maybe I love the raw sugar because my time with it is so limited, just as it is with seasons of the year, or certain people I've known, or even my own children. Children are born and you think you have them for a long time, only to find that "soon enough" their childhood and your youth is gone and though we should know better, we are still surprised by it when it actually happens. We have been in the same house now for 15 years, and even though moving out closer to where we work makes sense for a number of reasons, I want to stay put because staying in one place makes me feel as if I am marking time, preventing it from passing or at least slowing it down.

I recently heard a quote from Will Durant, who said that as we get older, life puts us under “general anesthesia.” I think I know exactly what he means. If you live long enough, you will feel a certain numbness toward life because of all that you've been through, even though you can't always explain what it all means.

The writer of Ecclesiastes, a book in the Bible, wrestled with life, apparently from the vantage point of nearing the end as the author looked back on what his life and the choices he made means. The profound statement in this book is when the author pointed out that “God has set eternity in our hearts.” Some people reject this innate longing for eternity and “live in the moment” (You can do a search for that phrase and find it is a current popular catchphrase), but Ecclesiastes correctly acknowledges the source of our yearning to break free from time's limitations seems to explain what I, and I think most people, are feeling. My sensitivity to time and its brevity is pointing me to something more than this life offers, particularly since I am likely two-thirds of the way toward the end of my journey. If this is all there is, then I am approaching the shore and had better be living in the moment because you reach a point where all that's left are moments.

Despite this longing for eternity, I still tend to focus on the loss of time in its many manifestations, like when I walk by the hourglass in our home that someone gave me years ago and I turn it over so that the sand runs down. I guess this is what I feel—the sand running down in the hourglass—every day of my life. Maybe this is how eternity in the heart looks, but I am not certain. But I do wonder how many more times I will get to turn the hourglass over. At this point, all I can say is . . . so far, so good.

My Morning Routine

2016-09-25T18:45:00.000-04:00

Like most people, I have a morning routine. If any of this routine is interrupted, my day is ruined. Here’s the routine: I get up when I get up. I do not use an alarm. If I go to bed early, I get up early. If I go to bed late, I get up a little later. This is very simple. If I’m driving to the Midwest and have to leave at 3 a.m., I use an alarm. Otherwise, I get up when I get up.

The next thing I do in the morning is go downstairs and start the coffee. When I make the coffee, I hate when I find the grinds from the day before in the metal filter . This is very disturbing to me and makes me angry, but my anger lasts only a moment. After I dump the grinds in the garbage and rinse out the filter, I am back on track. I can put the new coffee grinds in the filter, fill up the water to the 9-cup line for the three of us drinking coffee, turn on the coffee pot and away we go. By the way, I have never had a coffee pot with a timer that I can set to start up at a certain time so the coffee is ready when I get up. That would mess up my routine.

Next I go outside and get the newspapers. If I go outside and the newspapers have not been delivered, I say out loud, “No news is not good news.” If I had to walk through a spider web as I stepped outside in the morning, I sing to myself, “The Itsy Bitsy Spider is probably in my hair.” Walking through spider webs used to bother me because I was afraid of spiders, but I am not afraid of spiders any more. You cannot be afraid of spiders when you are the only male in the house with four other females.

After I bring in the newspapers, I come back in and go get my coffee. If the coffee is not finished brewing, I pour a cup anyway. I need my coffee! I add two teaspoons of sugar and a tablespoon of Coffee Mate powdered creamer to each cup. I think I may like the sugar and cream more than the coffee. Then I go sit in “my chair” next to the lamp and read the papers. I subscribe to two newspapers: The Bergen (County) Record and the Wall Street Journal. One is politically left-leaning and one is politically right leaning. I read the Sports in the left-leaning one first and then read the national and local news, scan the obituaries, and then read as much as I can of the right leaning one. When I finish that, I am usually down to the wire on time. Then I read a chapter from the Bible. I wish I were more spiritual and read the Bible first, but I don’t. But at least I do read it.

I don’t really like to talk to people much before all of this has happened. I think I am actually morning person, but not a talkative morning person. I am a thinking morning person. I need about an hour and fifteen minutes to get ready for a day. If I oversleep by an hour, I need about about an hour and fifteen minutes to get ready for a day. This is how I roll.

As for the coffee, I like strong coffee. My favorite coffee is any strong coffee that is on sale. If I have paid full price for coffee at the grocery store, it doesn’t taste as good. If I have gotten the coffee on sale and I had a coupon, it tastes even better than if it is just on sale.

I have been doing some variation of this morning routine since I was in the 5th grade. My Mom did not give me coffee in my bottle, but I know a woman who did give her daughter coffee in a bottle and she turned out alright. And I think I turned out alright too.

Watching Storms

2016-09-09T06:36:00.001-04:00

Something I miss by living in New Jersey is the opportunity to watch a storm blow through. Right now as I write this on Labor Day weekend, I am in Leesburg, Florida (near Orlando), sitting beside a screened in patio and pool at my father-in-law’s house. I am protected from the rain by an overhang. The rear of the house overlooks a cow pasture. Hues of dark and light gray clouds bulging with water are moving across the sky just above the pasture. The crackle of lightning and the subsequent thunder in the distance remind me once again about nature’s power as the wind hisses through the trees and drops of rain, at times heavy and at times light, make disappearing circles in the pool. There is a raw beauty I love in a storm.

I am mostly unaware that I do not often get to watch storms. When I am in Florida, a rain or storm blows through nearly every afternoon, sometimes just taunting us with a threatening sky that does not deliver any rain, and at other times a downpour descends from the heavens. Living in the metropolitan New York City area means the houses are so close together that we just don’t get a good look across an open field to see a storm bear down on us when they do come to our area. I miss being able to do that, to run outside of a house and look out at an approaching storm. Maybe living among farmers for much of my life who needed rain to make a living gives one a different perspective on storms. People around where I live now just seem to see the weather as a nuisance, and expect someone to take care of this nuisance.

I’ve never really been personally affected by a storm. Maybe if I had I would feel differently about getting to watch something that is potentially so devastating. But if I am asleep at night and I hear lightning pierce through the sky nearby and follow that by the counting of seconds until the sound of thunder to determine how many miles away it is (the universal method I think I learned from the movie, Poltergeist), I am very much afraid, particularly if I can’t get out a full one-thousand one. Sometimes it sounds like the lightning actually is striking a home in my neighborhood, as the houses tend to be tall, unlike the Midwestern ranch homes so prevalent there. I tell myself that our house has been here since 1910, and if it has lasted over 100 years, what are the chances? Sometimes my heart feels like it is beating so hard during storms that I think I might be having a heart attack, and I vow to myself to eat less red meats and more salads in a moment of despair.

I know I said I had not been personally affected by a storm, but actually I have. Just not a literal one. My mother died as a result of a freak accident, so I know what it is like to have someone you love struck by lightning so to speak. One of the men who used to work as a laborer in my grandfather’s masonry business--I used to work for my grandfather during my high school summer years--told me one day about his daughter being killed when she was standing next to a tree that was struck by lightning. She was just a teenager at the time. He had always seemed fairly normal to me as I was around him on the job, but I also thought he carried a tinge of sadness if you watched him closely enough. If you ever get hit by a storm like that, unfortunately you do not get to watch it blow in and prepare for its arrival. It just comes on so suddenly without any warning. And then on the other side, you never actually get over it. For all of the talk about “closure,” the elusive word we always want to experience when something bad happens to us, it just doesn’t come. I have found that you simply learn to carry it around with you, just like the masonry laborer did. Just like I still do. Sometimes this burden of non-closure is a little heavier than at other times. For me, it is especially profound during the latter part of September, which is when my Mom’s freak accident occurred four days after my birthday, which now serves as the prelude to “the day.” But sometimes as the years have gone on, I have not paid attention to the dates and I get through without giving it much thought, a circumstance that causes me great guilt.

I don’t think the tinge of sadness I have described in the masonry laborer was as obvious to me then as it is now while I am writing this. I am recognizing its source now, years later, as the same sadness I carry around, the fate of the few of us who are on the wrong side of statistical improbability. “You have a better chance of getting struck by lightning than you do of _______.” Yes, you do, but sometime blank happens, the unluckiest kind of luck.

I have lived long enough to see the people in the family I grew up with go the way of all the earth. Normally, you get to watch the storm clouds gather in the distance and slowly move toward you. Sometimes they move just to the east or west and you are spared. But sometimes they come right at you. I guess when you watch a storm, you are actually watching life. The dark clouds in the distance pointing to those who were once young and strong starting to show signs of aging, weakness, sickness, and the slow decline. Finally, even though you may have gotten used to the storms passing by one way or the other every time, eventually one comes right at you.

We are all watching storms.

Chris Rainey Nominated by Himself to Receive Lifetime Achievement Award from MVTHS Sports Hall of Fame in 2017

2016-08-09T18:52:00.000-04:00

Chris Rainey (MVTHS Class of 1982) has been nominated by himself to become a member of the MVTHS Sports Hall of Fame for outstanding lifetime achievement in athletics. Chris was a three-sport athlete in football, basketball, and baseball, despite having a writer’s body, contemplative outlook on life, running the 40-yard dash in 5.7 seconds, and only being able to throw a football 45-yards with a modest wind at his back. Despite all of these limitations, he burst onto the football scene in the fall of 1979 during his sophomore year, being promoted to varsity after starting quarterback Chris Berner retired following the opening game of the year to pursue other interests. Rainey led the Rams to a 4-1 record during his five starts that season and completed over 50% of his passes, despite not enough being old enough to have a driver’s license or even shave yet. He was also starting third baseman for the legendary 1982 Rams baseball team, which won the South Seven Conference that year but lost in the Sectional playoffs to Murphysboro.

Career Highlights

Chris holds the U.S. record for the quarterback sneak with a 99-yard touchdown during his freshman year, a play also noted because it took over three minutes off the clock as Chris zig-zagged down the field. Although injury kept him out of the starting lineup for most of his final two seasons of football, he became known for being able to come off the bench and lead the team to victories after the starting quarterback would injure himself during warm-ups. Remarkably, Chris is also the only Rams quarterback to throw a 50-yard plus touchdown on his final play ever in a Rams uniform, throwing a trademark “Rocking Rico rainbow” high arcing pass to Ben Doggan, who made the leaping catch and ran down the field for a touchdown in a Rams rout of Bethalto in the 1981 finale in Rainey’s only pass of the game. When Chris spoke with himself recently to discuss his nomination, he mentioned an incident that concluded the 1980 football season that also shaped his life:

“I remember I was starting the final game of the 1980 season, also against Bethalto, because Steve was injured again, and I went out for the opening coin toss. The First Lady of the U.S., Rosalynn Carter, was there. We lost the coin toss, and the game, and I didn’t play well. I think I was 7-20 passing for 60 yards or something. It was at that time that I decided to become a Republican.”

Asked what else he remembers of his days as a Mount Vernon Ram, Chris said:

“I have to say, I remember the meals at Opal’s Smorgasbord with my teammates. Whether it was a football or basketball game that evening, there we were, eating fried chicken and mashed potatoes. I remember that I would ask other teams’ players what they were eating in their pregame meals, and the would usually say something like “Big Macs” or “meat loaf,” so the fact that our coaches were wise enough to have us eating (fried) chicken must have given us a big advantage over other teams. Nutrition wasn’t even really emphasized that much then, so our coaches were certainly visionary and forward thinking with respect to nutrition.”

Lifetime Achievement: Post High School Team Sports

After high school, Chris continued to exceed expectations and excel in various athletic arenas, running a 15:25 5K on the track in Florissant, MO in 1983 and a 34:58 10K that same year. He played quarterback for the Okinawa Camp Courtney Raiders USMC flag football team in 1984, although chronic knee problems and a desire to stay home and listen to the new Purple Rain soundtrack on his new Japanese stereo forced him to retire during that season. In 1986, he was starting pitcher for the Old Union Baptist Church softball team, pitching the team to a 5-4 record despite having the pressure of his father-in-law, the county’s chief sheriff’s deputy, as catcher. This was just another among several ways Chris displayed mental toughness in life and sports. In 1992, he made a basketball comeback after realizing that with a three-point line now in play he could use his “Rockin’ Rico rainbow” three-point shot that he had developed. He closed out that season with a 24-point effort on 8-11 shots from downtown in a playoff loss for his men’s church league team in Springfield, Missouri. In 1994, after moving to Northern New Jersey, he played shortstop on the Greenhouse high-rise condominium softball team, even though he merely lived in an apartment, and played well despite being given the number 3.14 (Pi), which meant he always had a target (or at least a mathematical expectation) on his back. Finally, Chris, at the age of 44, led his side to victory in the Englewood Assembly of God touch football classic in 2008, completing 12-20 passes for over 200 yards and pulling down one interception from his free safety position, a game notable because he received a cheap shot from fellow church member yet did not miss a play.

These notable accomplishments makes Chris a very strong candidate for the MVTHS HOF, at least in his opinion.

Lifetime Achievement: Individual Sports

Chris has also excelled in individual sports over the past 30 years following high school, gaining only one pound since graduating from high school (every year, that is). After not being able to do one chin-up in 6th, 7th, or 8th grade during the Presidential fitness tests and yet being unaffected emotionally by these failures because of his gift of high self-esteem, Chris today continues to do 25-30 chin-ups two-three days per week, finding “bars” wherever he goes in his travels, and always takes the stairs instead of riding in an elevator or escalator. He also has uncanny hand/eye coordination, revealed in a sixteen-year streak of catching any item that falls out of a cabinet without warning before it lands on a counter or floor. Spatulas, peanut butter jars, applesauce, aspirin bottles, etc.--his family has been repeatedly amazed at his ability to catch things that are falling before they reach the floor. In addition, in what has become something of an annual strongman competition, Chris carries three window air conditions from the basement to the second floor in the spring and installs them, and then uninstalls and returns them to the basement in the fall every year, an extraordinary display of power, endurance, and mental toughness.

Conclusion

We the members of the Chris Rainey for MVTHS HOF Lifetime Achievement award believe it is obvious to see that Chris is not an athlete who has gone through the normal cycle of high achievement in high school followed by a precipitous drop-off in performance after high school. Chris was a below average athlete who performed in above average ways both in high school and continues to achieve athletically in both team and individual sports even today as a slightly overweight, middle-aged man. Therefore, we nominate Chris Rainey for a MVTHS HOF Lifetime Achievement award in 2017.

(Chris Rainey is the chairman of the Chris Rainey for MVTHS HOF Lifetime Achievement committee.)

Chris Rainey to Read at Leonia Middle School Book Fair on March 9, 7:00pm

2016-03-08T22:23:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow, I am honored to be the guest at a special family-friendly event, sponsored by the LMS Home & School Scholastic Book Fair. I will read and discuss some of my work, and LMS teacher Eric Gugick will interview me about my writing life.

Before or after the author chat, take a minute to check out the book fair, too. There will be merchandise for all and a raffle for the kids with 10 winners! Refreshments will be served.

Wednesday, March 9, 7:00pm
Leonia Middle School

Book Fair doors open at 6:30; event begins at 7:00.

I promise not to wear the shirt I'm wearing at this reading.

Jealous Devices

2016-02-29T20:41:00.001-05:00

Somewhere in the past year I lost the will to write, the discipline to sit alone and let words roll down onto a lined, white steno pad page. This is not entirely true and I have had a few exceptions to this trend, but in general this thing—writing—that has brought me such joy and therapeutic pleasure has diminished. Maybe my “dark night of the soul” that lead me to write so profusely has concluded and I no longer need it. Maybe the aging process is creeping over into writing, and just as so many things diminish as the sun starts to set on our lives, maybe my writing is diminishing as well.

During the past year I got an electronic tablet and the truth is that I now fritter so much more time away checking Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, and the Internet that used to be devoted to other things like writing. So yes, I'd say Nicholas Carr was right: Google is making me stupid, another creative analog native neutered by the digital age. Despite the self-hatred and loathing that comes after I've sat and stared into the blue glow for an hour or two, not unlike Plato's shadowy cave, I seem unable to stop myself. I write on steno pads to fight the power of the digital device, to tell the tablet it doesn't own me. When I use the wire-bound steno pad, Facebook and Twitter are not a click away, tempting me to abandon the creative process and go passive. Gmail does not hijack my train of thought, making me anxious because their might be, although extremely unlikely, an important email in the midst of all of those solicitations and offers that for some reason now unbeknownst to me now I actually signed up for, probably because it was much easier just to click the “I agree” check box than to actually read a legal disclaimer.

I still do not own a smart phone, but the electronic tablet has already accelerated the natural complacency that sets in when one becomes a man of a certain age. I fear if I get a smart phone, I will become like everyone else: tame, passive, oblivious to the world around them, fixated on the little digital device while interesting people and sunsets and glorious nature pass by without notice. When I show people my flip-styled cell phone, they always make me feel as if I am missing something, that somehow the real world is passing me by. I don't think it is. Maybe I' m crazy, but I don't need to know everything at the moment it happens. I don't want to be accessible 24x7. I don't need an answer to every question I have at the moment I think of it. I don't need to see the current status of every friend I've ever known. It's all too much for me to bear. I am just one guy who likes to sit and look out of the window on a rainy day, or step outside at the morning daybreak, breathe in the morning air while I pick up the newspaper, just as I have been doing for forty years. A smart phone would make me feel as if I am always falling behind and need to gaze at the little god in my hand. A smart phone is a jealous lover who demands your attention. And it looks like to me like she gets attention from her lovers, and when that happens, everyone else gets much less.

Please don't tell my tablet you heard me talking about a smart phone!

My Personal Top 10 Most Influential Readings

2014-09-22T10:29:00.000-04:00

I recently sat down and quickly came up with the ten books (and one article) that has affected me personally over my life (and that I can actually remember something about). Here they are. I think they reflect the arc of my life.

The list is in alphabetical order by author last name.

Carr, Nicholas. "Is Google Making Us Stupid?: What the Internet is doing to our brains." The Atlantic Monthly (July-Aug 2008.
Collins, Jim. Good to Great.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov.
Friedman, Thomas. The Lexus and the Olive Tree.
Gladwell, Malcolm. Blink.
Grudem, Wayne. Systematic Theology.
Kingsolver, Barbara. The Poisonwood Bible.
Kushner, Lawrence. Jewish Spirituality: A Brief Introduction for Christians.
Lewis, C.S. The Screwtape Letters.
Mintzberg, Henry. Managers Not MBAs.
The NIV Study Bible.

The Monotony of Commuting

2014-07-10T06:29:00.003-04:00

I have spent most of the past twelve years commuting at least one hour a day: 30 minutes to work, and usually 40 minutes to return home. I have tried a number of things to avoid monotony, such as taking as many different routes as possible. I may be the only person in the world who uses a GPS to commute home from work because I try new routes and end up in unfamiliar places. To make the most of the commuting time, I have tried a number of things. I have listened to the Bible and prayed, although it seems a little irreverent to interrupt the prayer yelling at someone who has cut me off. I have listened to Christian radio, which means I have heard the song "I Could Only Imagine" over 5,000 times. I have listened to pop radio. I have listened to the music of my youth to somehow re-energize portions of the brain and keep my mind sharp. Sometimes, I switch back and forth between Christian and pop radio, alternating between joy and guilt. I have listened to talk radio and sports radio. I have tried listening to the classic books on radio such as Les Miserables, but I cannot keep the characters or place names straight because the authors all use the original French pronunciations. I have listened to business books such as Good to Great to enhance my career, but seem to be able to only remember only one thing from the books, but I can't even think of that one thing right now. I have listened to sermons by Tim Keller. (I do not listen to my own sermons.) I have listened to books on my Kindle most recently, and am getting used to it, although I don't care for the electronic voice. I do oddly enjoy listening to the footnotes though, almost as much as the text of the book. I have practiced accents, even yesterday imitating the World Cup announcers on ESPN in the Netherlands-Argentina match. I also do a pretty good Vladimir Putin, although it is mostly him talking about the Brooklyn Nets, which I assume is his favorite basketball team.

With all of this commuting, you would think I would drive a nice car. I don't. To me, driving a nice car is boring. I drive a 2002 Mercury Sable. In the past few years, I have broken down a few times times and had to be towed. I find that more interesting than knowing with certainty that you will actually get to work. I have had to park in the parking garage at our office by backing in so I can get a jump start if I need one. For the past year, the a/c in my car didn't work, and the driver's side window didn't work. So during the summer, I would roll down the three windows to keep from overheating. The wind would blow through the car to create new hair styles each day, often something like the lead singer in a Flock of Seagulls from the 1980s. I could change my hair style based on how fast I drove to work. This is very interesting if you ask me, although now my a/c is working again and I don't have to wet my hair down when I get to work.

The car has a stereo, but the volume control has some quirk where sometimes turning the knob left decreases the sound volume, and sometimes turning the knob the same way increases the volume. (I'm not making this up.) I have turned songs that I hate up to full volume, and also turned songs that I love completely off because of this feature. Sometimes it is frustrating, but having a passenger experience this is very interesting. I've also experienced one other phenomena in commuting that I think is a little unusual: car dancing. That's right. Sometimes, on the way home, I will hear a certain song and the old moves come back right there in the car. Since I do have some dignity, I only dance in the car from the chest down so that no one can actually tell I'm going at it. If I was in stop and go traffic and you were next to me in the other lane, you would never notice that I'm actually dancing away to "Disco Inferno" because it's all done below the surface. I can moon walk, do the bump with the arm rest, and any other number of moves incognito. And even though my car is old, it is a luxury car with leather seats. So if I have put Armor All on the leather seats recently, it's ". . . slide, slide, slippity-slide, just forget about your troubles and your 9 to 5" and, if the traffic conditions are acceptable, I might disappear briefly while I drop down for a break dancing spin move before I resurface, hands back on the wheel in the 10-2 position. Car dancing is another thing that has helped break the monotony of commuting for me. What have you done to break the monotony of commuting?

My Olympic Moment

2014-03-10T20:12:00.000-04:00

A recent Saturday morning, Marcia and I had not even gotten out of bed and we had started a conversation about the Winter Olympics, which has sentimental value to us because our first baby's morning sickness period occurred during the 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville. And for some reason, during that conversation, I started rattling off the location of every Winter Olympics since 1980. I was a little uncertain about the order of Albertville ('92) and Lillehammer('94), but I later checked and found out I was correct. Even after nearly 30 years of marriage, this seemed to impress Marcia. I told her this was my gift, that I was Google before there was Google. I was the person who could produce reams of useless information just off the top of my head. For those of us with the gift, the smart phone—that disruptive technology—has all but displaced the Google-minded us. I'm now wondering why I was born in such a time as this.

I'm also noticing that as I push age 50, I sometimes cannot conjure up a fact like I used to be able to do. But overall, I can still make lots of connections that seem to be a little out of the ordinary. For example, the first time I heard Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines" on the radio, I immediately thought to myself, "That's sounds like Marvin Gaye's "Got to Give It Up," a record I had listened to over and over again when I was in Junior High in about 1978. I later read that there was a copyright infringement lawsuit suggesting "Blurred" borrowed from "Got to Give It Up." Of course it did. And now that there is Pandora and iTunes radio, I can go back and listen to the same songs I did when I was in elementary school and see if it somehow keeps the brain connections intact, or creates new ones. Just last week, I selected a radio station play for "LTD," Jeffrey Osborne's original group, and I felt as if I were right back in my room in 1975 when the song "Love Ballad" played. It was as if a door in my brain opened that had not been opened for many years. I have a feeling I may be doing some sort of neurotherapy on myself, but of course I'm just some guy with no training making excuses for himself to go back and listen to "Play That Funky Music, White Boy" for therapeutic reasons. It's almost ridiculous.

A few days after my Olympic moment, I was at work and went downstairs for a coffee break. I had my steno pad and Kindle, ready to take a few minutes to read, write, and relax a little with a cup of coffee. I paid the cashier for a medium coffee and walked to the atrium to find a seat, leaving my coffee at the cashier's counter. I realized this when I pulled out the chair to sit down. This was after I had walked all the way downstairs to the cafeteria from the third floor only to arrive at the cafeteria and realize I had forgotten to get money out of my wallet. So I had to walk all of the way back upstairs to get two dollars. So not long after my Olympic memory moment, a day of extreme mental ineptitude arrived, the glory now departed while I wonder if all of the Tab, Fresca, and Diet Coke--anything that causes cancer in laboratory animals--that I've been drinking over the years is finally doing me in. Until I figure that out though, I think I'll go put on "Boogie Oogie Oogie" and see if I can connect some old memories in my brain.

Grateful for High Self-Esteem

2013-11-28T09:40:00.001-05:00

Truth is, I have struggled with self-esteem issues all of my life. High self-esteem. I know, I know. Sounds counterintuitive but it is the truth. I first remember being in sixth grade in about 1976 and had gone to a Mount Vernon Rams high school basketball game with Becky, who was in high school. She was my, well, I‘m not sure if she was actually related to me or not. She was my grandpa’s (who was technically my great uncle) cousin‘s daughter. We went to the games together that year. It was at one of those games that I knew I was different.

I had left to go to the bathroom all by myself and then to get popcorn and a soda. Looking back, it was a little scary for a sixth grader to go to the bathroom all by himself. I had gone during the third quarter to avoid a big crowd, but there were still plenty of people in the men’s room. Somehow I did it, even though there were old white men with slicked back oily hair going to the bathroom and smoking at the same time. There were also young black men with huge afros using picks to comb their hair in front of the mirrors. A high school basketball game in Southern Illinois on a Friday night was a big deal, and going to the bathroom by yourself in a place like that when you are in sixth grade was a big deal, but I did it. That gave me a lot of confidence.

Then I had to go get the popcorn and soda. This I managed to do also, even though as an introvert I struggle in situations like this, and was on my way back to my seat, which happened to be on the last row of seats under the balcony up an aisle of stairs. I began to ascend the stairs holding the popcorn in one hand and the soda in the other. About halfway up the stairs, I tripped and went down face first, beginning an immediate descent in reverse down the stairs. Somehow, I was able to hold the items straight up and out from my body and when I reached the bottom of the stairs, popped up quickly. Most of the popcorn was still in the box and most of the soda was still in the cup. When I got to my feet, I could feel the heat rushing to my face, which must have been quite red, and I could tell everyone was looking at me and that they were impressed by the grace and athleticism I had displayed in falling down the stairs. Then, as if on cue, the crowd erupted, jumping up and down and cheering wildly for me. It was as if they had stopped watching basketball and were watching me.

After regaining my composure, I started up the stairs again, this time taking two at a time. I reached the top of the stairs and scooted into my seat, relieved that my ordeal was over. I watched the rest of the game, went home, and suffered no ill effects.

I’ve often reflected on this event over the years. An ordinary person would have been crushed. A traumatic life event like falling down the stairs at a basketball game holding popcorn and soda would send many people reeling, maybe even affecting them well into their adult years. However, I’ve realized that I am unaffected by these types of things because I have high self-esteem. When a traumatic or humiliating event happens to me, my esteem slips down into the normal range for a time before it builds back up. (See figure below.)

　

Chris's Self-Esteem Ranges from High to Normal

I’ve seen this pattern over and over through the years. Poor employee evaluations at work, writing horrible poems, always burning the popcorn when I try to make it at home, inability to stop scaring our cats, or bad hair days at least three or four times a week--none of those things seem to faze me. So now, when something bad happens to me, I’ll look over at my wife and say, “Thank God I have high self-esteem.” I‘ll probably say it a time or two today, especially since it is Thanksgiving Day.

Fall Poetry Festival at Leonia Library at 2:00 p.m. on Sunday, October 20, 2013

2013-10-17T21:48:00.000-04:00

I will be reading this Sunday , October 20, 2013 at 2:00 p.m. in the Leonia Library Poetry Festival with Fred Stern, an event that will feature some of Northeastern New Jersey’s best poets reading from their works. (I am grateful that Mr. Stern lets me read in these events. I am uncertain if the $26 bill I always mail him when I find out there is an event influences him or not.)

I plan to read a few new, unpublished poems written over the past year that I hope to publish in a forthcoming collection whose working title is Passages of Time.

Open microphone will follow if time allows.

Praying with Sartre and Foucault on My Birthday

2013-09-30T21:37:00.001-04:00

Recently I picked a little French restaurant in the NoHo section of New York City for us to go to on my birthday called Le Philosophe. It turned out to be quite an ironic choice, albeit an accidental one. Earlier in the same week, I had attended my daughter's middle school soccer game in Haledon, New Jersey. I arrived in the second half to find our team well ahead and to find the other team with two players on the other wearing Islamic headscarves, including the goalkeeper. (I am uncertain if there is any connection to the headscarves and our soccer victory.) I do not recall thinking to myself, "Well, if we were in France, I don't think they would be doing that!" although earlier in the year I had read the first chapter of a book called Why the French Don't Like Headscarves, which is about the ban on Islamic women from wearing the hijab, or headscarves, in France. I guess it turns out that having a secular society doesn't necessarily correspond to having more freedom, although it would be fun to see what would happen in France to a cleric walking around with a big mitre on his head. (I think I recall a man saying to me once that he had considered the priesthood, and he thought he could have lived with celibacy but not having to wear that big funny looking thing on his head.) Anyway, I doubt if there is a ban on that in France.

I really hadn't given much thought to the French at all that week despite the soccer game. However, a residual, subliminal thought must have slipped in because when I went to pick a restaurant for Sunday afternoon on my birthday, I chose a French restaurant for a late brunch. It may also be that I know that Sunday brunch is cheaper than Sunday not brunch, but again I think it was a subliminal thing rather than a full blown, conscious decision.

By the time we finished at our church and arrived home by about 1:15 p.m., I had one of my world-class Sunday migraine headaches. For some reason, I get them on Sundays more than any other day of the week. While I have sometimes wondered with all of the headaches whether or not Christianity agrees with my constitution, or that Pentecostal church music is just a little too loud for me, in the end I keep plugging away at my faith, inconveniences and all. But that day, I needed to lie down for about half an hour to let the Excedrin Migraine do its magic after I got home. (I also lie down for a half hour on Sundays I don't have the headaches for other reasons.) But the half hour rest made us late for the reservation, and as a result we had to pay to park instead of driving around the block several times looking for free parking on the street like I usually do. This is the kind of thing that can nearly ruin a night out for me. I drive old cars so I can park on the street and not have to pay or worry about the car getting hit, bumped, or dinged. But on this afternoon, there was my 2002 Sable being dropped off at a parking lot with an attendant that would later ask for $28 for us to get it back. Bummer.

The most striking thing about the restaurant when we walked in was a large mural with black and white photographs of people that I did not recognize. Not one. We figured the pictures must be of French people, given this was a French restaurant (although the owner was Japanese). At that point I started lamenting my educational gaps, which apparently included nothing on the French. (I also have a big Shakespeare gap as well and know next to nothing about his plays.) The only Frenchman I could remember was Yannick Noah, the tennis player (not on the wall) and Alexis de Tocqueville (also not on the wall I don't think) who turns up frequently because of Democracy in America, which I like to quote from although I have never read it because it is a really big book.

After I prayed to thank God for the meal—I usually pray when we are out in public places although I try to do it discreetly, unlike my mother's second husband who would stand and lift his hands in the air in a restaurant while I crawled under the table—we ate a nice brunch with good food and great service. We then asked about the pictures on the wall. A server brought us the laminated print of the mural with the names of the people. I did not recognize most of them even with the names. I had only heard of Joan of Arc, and then I found two names that I did recognize: Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault, two of the preeminent philosophers of the twentieth century. Both of them were atheists. And it was a little later, while waiting for the Blue Man Group show to start, that I realized another ironic moment had occurred with the French: We prayed together in a French restaurant on my birthday while Sartre and Foucault looked on, certain that they would not have approved of such a thing.

Head of the Line

2013-09-26T21:48:00.000-04:00

When a person’s last living parent dies, there is not only a profound sense of loss and finality, but also another aspect of the grief that may not be so readily apparent: the end of being someone’s child. After waiting in the family line for a lifetime, the grieving son or daughter now moves to the front of the line. And it is as this point that he or she realizes that the next train into the station will be coming for them.

I think the grief of losing a parent is not just the pain of losing a mother or father, but it is also grief at the loss of one’s own youth to the throes of advancing age. The mist of our lives is evaporating, and nothing like the loss of a parent can make it any more apparent. Mortality is on full display when our last living parent departs because each of us knows our own death must also be lurking out there in the murky waters somewhere.

I am not yet fifty, yet I have been standing at the head of my family line now for several years. It is a burden that has something of a “patriarchal” feel to it, as if I am the one that people are looking to even though I feel as if one of my feet is always on a banana peel. I have never felt as sure of myself as I felt in adolescence. Now firmly planted in middle age, I feel a certain precariousness that makes getting my through each day seem as if I’ve gotten away with something. I feel unqualified for this phase of my life, but if you live long enough, you will eventually reach the head of the line. So here I stand, waiting . . . hoping someone will cut in front of me.

The Formless Void

2013-08-30T22:19:00.000-04:00

A couple of weeks ago I was sitting at an outdoor table at a Hilton Resort in Orlando, Florida, occasionally looking up from reading and writing. I found a quiet, unoccupied area overlooking the pool. I am like a cat and will try to find a corner wherever I can to be alone in the quiet. It is just after 7:00a.m. and there is a glorious stillness before the sun climbs its ladder into the sky and heats up the day while frenetic activity resumes. Because these twin summer deities—sun and activity—know people will attempt to squeeze every minute out of vacation, the two will triumph over mortals trying to relax a little on vacation. Haven't you noticed vacationers always return home exhausted? I will be no different after getting up early each day to watch the sun rise over the cow pasture behind my in-laws' Florida home where we stayed most of this trip. Getting up early to watch the sunrise is something I believe is worth letting go of a little sleep for.

Since we were at the pool last night and I saw the disarray of the lounge chairs pulled out of alignment by people in bathing suits and the discarded towels strewn all around that were used to towel off or to save an empty lounge chair, I marvel at the transformation that has taken place before I even got up this morning as a man named Eweka cleans and picks up the final misplaced pieces. His work is now nearly complete: order is restored poolside. The truth of what I am witnessing becomes clear to me while I am writing on my steno pad: Eweka is doing God's work, which I tell him a few moments later when he ascends the stairs and wipes down the tables in my area. What do I mean?

Work is what God was doing at creation, bringing organization and order to the chaos of the formless and void earth. Work is taking the existing raw materials and forming them into something useful or beautiful. So whether it is preparing the pool for another day of vacationers, organizing a business's administrative processes and work-flows, building a home, composing a song, or painting the lines on a roadway or parking lot, work is part and parcel with what God was doing at the beginning. The earth was "formless and void . . ." (Genesis 1:2) and needed further work, so God spent the rest of the week of creation filling in the details and organizing it: light, vegetation, land and sea creatures, sun, moon, and stars, and finally human beings. Then God rested on the seventh day.

I myself love taking random words and disparate thoughts and organizing them together to create essays, curriculum, procedure manuals, or poems. I am most fulfilled in my work when I get to do those types of things. But what I realized is that there are a number of other ways to work in a way similar to what God was doing in the creation. Even a teacher takes the formlessness of a young mind and helps fill and organize it with knowledge, skills, and abilities. So there is not just one way to work: Society needs all kinds of people to bring their gifts and talents for the common good, even something as seemingly insignificant as cleaning up the poolside for vacationers. It certainly meant a lot to me that day.

Now I need to finish this entry and take on another aspect of my work: the formless void of the dirty laundry!