For this most amazing what?

i thank You God for most this amazing

day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees 

and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything

which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(e.e. cummings)

It’s been a year of deep loss and broad discomfort.  There is no need to inventory the specifics just now; the simple acknowledgement of them suffices - the comfortless losses, the discouraging disappointments, the occasional physical blips that are the down payments on aging.  As Daylight Savings Time was running out of ticks and we prepared to “fall back”, I agreed with the meme’s sentiment that, “an extra hour of 2023 was like getting a bonus track on a Yoko Ono album.”  Just a little extra screaming.

But suddenly - and “suddenly” is exactly the way it feels - the year is nudging up against its close, and we stand at the door of Thanksgiving, knocking.  Inside, the familiar motions and smells both occupy us and intoxicate us - the roasting, the baking, the carving, the spooning.  But what else?  The poet Cummings’ prompt is a familiar ritual around the Thanksgiving table - counting blessings; naming gratitudes.  Anticipating, this year, more of a struggle when it comes my turn, I’ve determined to get an early start:

“I thank you God for most...”

How shall I complete my own edition of the poem?

Certainly I am thankful for the beautifully obvious - the daily presence of surrounding love, the sheltering warmth of a comfortable home situated amongst trees and prairie and sky and birds that routinely and reliably evoke and inspire and humble; the nudging nuzzlings of two idiosyncratic corgis who reliably comfort, forgive, amuse and forbid me from growing overly preoccupied with myself; for a flock of chickens who daily remind me that life is never a “big picture” but consists of food and water and a free range sufficient for that single day; and of course my own life and health, never mind the increasingly familiar stiffnesses and technological augmentations.

But now that I am thinking about it, the list spontaneously grows.  I’m thankful for the experience of garden grace, manifest in the form of nourishing abundance despite our inattentions.  I’m grateful for the fruit trees’ reminder that while I get fixated on and blindered by chronos - clock time - there is that other kind of time, kairos - the “right” time, God’s time - that progresses at a different pace; and that in their own “right time” we gathered in cherries and apricots for the very first time.  I am thankful that, even in the present absence of grief, I am kept company by dear and intimate memories of treasured moments shared, the echo of stories told and affections spoken.  I am thankful for friendships nurtured and renewed around the table and fire and the altar of creation, along with new ones gestating in the mingling of fresh exchanges.  

I am thankful, then, for the muchness of memory, but in equal measure, I’m finally realizing, for the expansiveness of possibility - the “moreness” that is yet in front of me that goes beyond leftover turkey and dressing and homemade pie.  It is the blue sky blessing of which the poet spoke:  the...

 

    “everything

    which is natural 

    which is infinite 

    which is yes”

Happy Thanksgiving, then - 

These hours and activities of palpitating gratitude for this new day, 

this fresh feast, 

for this infinite, 

awakening

 “yes.”

The Placement of Friendship

I’ve been thinking a great deal about friendship in recent days - recent months if the truth be told. I’m not alone. A surfeit of books is suddenly on the market parsing the intricacies of platonic intimacies - the how and the why and even something of the where. They are written by studied and erudite experts on the subject. I have very little to add...

...except the hunger. For friends.  

As noted in the prior blog, at the time of my Dad’s memorial service I enjoyed the banquet of reunion with a few precious friends from my youth. Independently, and then relationally we came to realize how formative had been these relationships, and how impoverished we would be without them - indeed, have become without them. Thus, the determination to reunite last week in Texas.

Appropriately, the first of those was a meal, around a borrowed table. And we ate - the food we had prepared, yes, but even moreso the feast of memory. Our wives indulged us the recapitulation. We had shared a lot of life together through those high school years.   We had much to relive.

I no longer recall the circumstances of our meeting, other than to say it must have been a shared classroom at school.  Both David and Eugene were smarter than me, but I managed to be just a good enough student to make it into the honors classes where they routinely lived.  It was - what?  Good luck?  C.S. Lewis once observed that, “We think we have chosen our peers.  In reality, a few years’ difference in the dates of our births, a few more miles between certain houses, the choice of one university instead of another, posting to different regiments, the accident of a topic being raised or not raised at a first meeting - any of these chances might have kept us apart.  But, for a Christian, there are, strictly speaking, no chances.”

We met, then, providentially.  I would have said that David and Eugene and I were inseparable throughout the season that was Cooper High School, but it turns out that while I was frequently distracted in the summers by selling ice cream on the streets of Abilene and going to church camp, the two of them were busy creating memories of their own.  But those are their stories to tell. As for the times when we were three, we took classes together, studied together, built outlandish projects together to satisfy the assignments of creative teachers determined to push and feed our own creativities. We recreated on film the lunar landing, utilizing Eugene’s garage and the pull-down steps to the attic. We built a paper mache raven roughly the size of a 5th grader who, if I recall correctly, spouted out phrases from Edgar Allen Poe via the tape recorder hidden inside. There was the snout we liberated from the fetal pig we were dissecting in honors biology that wound up suspended from the rear view mirror in Eugene’s car. Its continuing growth of hair was a constant amazement and amusement. Their were the school lunch hours spent at the home of one or another of us, nourished by homemade sandwiches made from the cheapest products we could find so as to save our lunch monies for more interesting expenditures.

And there was the music. David and I, both aspiring guitar players, listened endlessly to songs we wanted to play, scribbling down the words and picking out the chords.  Let’s just say that our resulting renditions were...close.  As we have recently listened afresh to crude recordings of those efforts, we’ve had to agree that we were pretty good - but not as good as we thought we were. The father of a classmate owned a Mexican food restaurant in town, and we found work playing their on weekends - $10 apiece per night, dinner, and tips (of which there were none) - despite the fact that we knew only one Mexican song. We had a blast, and even found our way into holiday marketing.

But college and the life beyond have a way of pushing the pieces in different directions on the game board.  We graduated from colleges in three different towns; grad school gave us little time for anything other than grad school, and getting married.  The waves of life rolled over us, and when we took the time to stand back up and look around, we were far apart, in more ways than one.

It’s a challenge, I have discovered, to reconnect from a distance.  Even when we manage to be in the same place at the same time, once the life news updates have been shared and the old stories retold, it’s time again to part.  We have a past together, but what about the present, to say nothing of some ineffable future.  Perhaps Lewis is on to something when he observes, “Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; friends, side by side, absorbed in some common interest.”  Like a paper mache raven, a moon landing in a garage, picking out chords to a song, or tossing a football in the yard after a cheap lunch.  Are living friendships only realistic, then, in close proximity?

Perhaps, but I am determined to disprove the premise.  God knows we have ample technologies available to bridge the distances.  At this stage of life, we have more flexibility with our time, a little extra money with which to travel, and perhaps most importantly, an annually escalating sense of urgency.

As for the absorption in some “common interest,” well, surely there is something out there.  We are honors class kids, after all, with experience at bringing to life the fruits of creative imagination.  Sure, some of them blew up - literally - but most were worth the effort.  

Like friendship, itself.

The Strangely Warming Attraction of Opposites

We met as teenagers at church camp - Mike, reared among the east Texas piney woods, and me, among the mesquites and wide open spaces of the west.  Those geographic differences became metaphorical for the others that even casual observers came to discern.  Throughout those high school years, Mike played football and lifted weights, while I was on the speech team and sang in the choir.  Later, in college where we roomed together for all but our freshman years, Mike ruled over social life while I toiled in the library.  Mike was outgoing and attracted attention, filling up a room with his winsome presence.  I usually filled up a chair just on the edge of the light, observing the rowdier goings on.  I made A’s while Mike made friends.  I awkwardly dated while Mike fought off the sorority girls.  Correction:  he never even considered fighting them off.  Even our fraternity brothers thought of us as the “odd couple”.  Two more dissimilar characters had rarely occupied a common room.  

But we did; and it worked.  I helped him study, and in my own indirect way, encouraged his academic progress.  He fought more than one combatant on my behalf  - conflicts always born of misunderstanding and mistaken identity.  

Beyond college, I officiated at his weddings  - twice.  He participated in my own.  I spoke at his father’s funeral.  He appeared at my bedside when I was diagnosed with cancer, with a plan to fly me to a research hospital across the country.  I declined.  When my first marriage disintegrated, he flew to Iowa - a state he couldn’t even pronounce without a profane modifier - to hold my hand and buy me a steak dinner.  Some years later, when Lori and I became engaged, he was among the first to hear the news. 

Despite our more visible and, to some, comic divergences, our lives have almost eerily paralleled - our families, our eventual vocations, and on and on.  

But of course time and distance and quotidian demands refocus our attentions.  We have drifted apart over the recent decades since that church camp meeting 50 years ago.  Sure, we check in from time to time - a Christmas card, a text message, a phone call from time to time - but we hadn’t shared a room in a very long time, or inner thoughts, or the warp and weft of the heart.  Fondly and sentimentally attached, to be sure, but from a distance.

Until this summer, at the memorial service for my Dad, at which time we acknowledged the deficit wrought by our distance, and resolved to do better. 

The context of death has a way of refocusing attention on life.  The entertwined fingers that mutually shaped our lives, we concluded, are too precious to let atrophy.  It was the same conclusion of yet another reunion of friends in the context of that grief, and those, too, have received fresh batteries in a shared determination to honor and reanimate the force of those formative relationships.   We’ve made a down-payment on those latter ones, but between Mike and me and our beloveds, we have actually made time.  Over the course of days and nights, we shared a rented house and well-composted memories, and became current with each others’ lives.  Hearts touched, once again, and were touched.  Pain and laughter, songs and images, bread and wine all muddled together in the common moments that stretched into days, until the key was turned in the lock and we once more drove away in different directions.  

But not before we remembered and recreated a treasured moment from those younger days.  A cowboy hat, a guitar, and two brothers from the opposite ends of the universe.  It happens that way, sometimes.  Where one least
expects it, life - a flower emerging from the pavement; tree roots encircling a bolder; rain in the desert; sweetness growing on a cactus...

...and disparate personalities, friends.

Here’s to the next 50 years.