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LEAVE THIS PLACE

2010-03-10T14:08:00.000-05:00

and never come back. You'll enjoy johncaspian.com much much more

ocean

2010-01-27T15:57:00.002-05:00

It’s 7:30 AM and my alarm won’t ring until 8:00. I just fell asleep four hours ago and I’m not ready for the day to start. The apartment is freezing and I dig deeper into the covers.

Outside, delivery trucks are making rounds to coffee shops, and last night’s empty bottles from Pearlz and McCrady’s are being dumped into garbage trucks, making the morning sound like breaking chandeliers. Inside, one of my roommates is in the living room, listening to a church service online, speakers at full volume, the music too loud and too clappy for falling back to sleep.

I want to yell, to ask him to please turn it down, but the possibility of sleep has already passed. A quick search for a clean towel reminds me I need to wash laundry today, so I skip the shower altogether. My room is a walk-in refrigerator. By the time I’ve dressed, my roommate’s radio squelches, calling him back in to work. The laptop closes, the door opens and shuts, his feet pound down the stairs, leaving the apartment quiet and new.

********

The day has gotten worse. United Way told our company two weeks ago that we couldn’t continue our work in any of the schools they help fund until we buy insurance. They also put a hold on our funding until we start back in the schools, which leaves us with no money, no way of buying insurance, and a frustrating Tuesday off work.

I decided to drive to a café across the bridge to catch up on some reading. The bridge is magnificent, spanning the Cooper River, gaining enough altitude in its two and a half mile stretch to allow cargo ships passage underneath and sun-burned tourists walking in the pedestrian lane a view of downtown’s steepled skyline.

My truck struggles to make it to the top. I just replaced everything there is to replace, and still I’m passed by crowded school busses. Shifting down to third helps but makes the engine sound angry, like I won’t let it take a nap, threatening to explode.

My phone rang. I looked at the caller i.d. to see if it was any news about the insurance. It was a friend I meet every few weeks for a late-night beer, probably calling to see if I wanted to meet up in the next couple of days. Conversations have to be shouted if I’m driving over thirty because of the noise from the wind forcing its way through the gap in the top between the windshield and the roof, so I waited until I pulled in the parking lot to call him back.

He could tell I wasn’t in a great mood, and I told him I just felt exhausted, tired from dealing with funding problems at work, and upset about waking up to a loud roommate.

“Was he banging around in the kitchen?” he asked.

“He was listening to a church service, really loud. And singing.”

When I said that I could hear the bitterness in my tone, like it wasn’t him making noise that upset me so much, but the way he was making noise, the reason. My friend could hear it too, and I imagined him in my room, waking up to a roommate worshiping at the top of his lungs, joining in the song and the moment before he even pushed off the covers.

It took a while for either of us to speak.

“John, I’m scared you’re losing your faith.”

********

In the café, a group of twelve – eleven women and one man – sit crowded around a table large enough for eight, brainstorming an art show to benefit Planned Parenthood. They’re discussing venues and lighting, drawing logos, debating calling the event “Re-nude” or “Re-newed”. The argument is lively, the two words thrown around with the emphasis stressed on different syllables, passed from mouth to mouth like communion. One woman asks if Charleston is too conservative a city to have artists painting portraits of live nude models while ticket-holders drink wine and hold plates of hors d’oeuvres. I stared at my book, flipping pages, my headphones in my ear to hide my eavesdropping.

********

Later that afternoon, I went to a movie by myself, feeling a bit like a failure, like I imagined people who catch a matinee by themselves on Tuesdays often feel. There were only three other people in the theater. One of them walked in five minutes into the show and sat three seats away, like we were friends, but not that kind.

The whole thing – the empty theater, the bag of Twizzlers, the feeling that I should be doing something more important – kept taunting me, telling me I needed more than this, making me want a cubicle with a better – or at least steadier – paycheck. What made everything worse was that the movie really sucked. All I wanted was a distraction, but it didn’t hold my attention at all. Every few minutes I pulled my phone out of my picket to check the time, wondering when the movie would end and if I would feel better or worse if I stayed until the end. I tried to cover the screen every time I looked, but after the third time the guy sitting beside me moved anyway, shaking his head, and sat two rows in front of me, where the blue glow wouldn’t bother him.

********

When the movie finished, it was already dark outside. I wasn’t ready to go home, so I drove over the connector toward the islands just off the coast. To the right I could see the bridge in the distance, the blue-white lights illuminating the suspension cables, such a beautifully arrogant contrast to the cobblestone streets it leads to. I live just on the other side, less than ten miles away, and I still I can’t remember the last time I drove out here to watch the ocean.

I parked on the wide shoulder of the road, facing away from the water, and opened the door, the air cooler and thinner than I expected. I climbed into the bed of the truck and sat down, with my back against the cab and my legs stretched out in front of me. Headlights from the left grew bigger, then passed, and I followed them around the bend until; they disappeared. The dew that had collected on the outside of the cab started seeping through my thin cotton jacket, dampening my shirt and back.

The January sky in Charleston is clear, empty, ink smeared over a waveless ocean. Staring at the Atlantic during the night can make you feel small, the same way sitting in a planetarium alone does, as if at any moment the expanse could forget you existed and your body would stop being a body, would melt into millions of molecules, each one floating off in a different direction. I wished my girlfriend was sitting beside me, our arms crossed in front of our chests and our sides pressing into one another, and thought about how perfect it would be to listen to some music if the radio hadn’t quit working two days before.

Lately, when I’ve been alone, walking around downtown, I’ve thought about all of the people I know and wonder why we’re all so different. I understand that that sounds like a trivial question, like we’re supposed to just accept that we are and move on to solve more important problems – factory farming and finding alternative sources of energy – but I haven’t been able to. It smacks me in the face when I open the door to my apartment and hear my roommates in the kitchen, laughing, making plans, inviting the whole world over for dessert. I stick my head in and say, “Hi,” then walk back to my room, aware that even though we’re friends, I’m the introvert that doesn’t fit in. I thought about it earlier that day, in a bookstore by the café, looking on the shelves and seeing names like Hitler, King, Lincoln, and Bush.

I thought about it then, too, staring into nothing. I thought about how some people understand math and others hear music when they silently read a sentence, how some people are born successful and others never stand a chance, how some believe so easily and others have to question.

That last difference is the one I fought with the most that night, and it made me remember the conversation I’d had earlier where my friend said I was losing my faith. I’m not – I don’t think I ever could – I’m just angry with it.

My book club just finished reading Toni Morrison’s latest, A Mercy, and there is a passage where two of the characters are sitting on a porch. One of them turns to the other and says, “I think God would like us if He knew us.” and when I read that, the book felt like it was breathing, like I was on the porch, like I was having the conversation, and I nodded me head. I don’t tell many people that that’s how I feel, but it is: like He doesn’t know me; worse – that He’s like a girl that grew bored of me; or worse yet – like I’m not one of the ones randomly chosen to be watched over. God seems really far away. I don’t tell people that anymore because when I did they always said, “When God seems far away, we’re the one who moved,” and in my head I punch them in the throat.

That same friend who said he was scared I was losing my faith asked me right after that what I wanted from God.

“What does He have to do?” he asked.

“I just want to feel cared for,” I said, “Like He’s for me. Watching over me.”

“But He is! You ride a motorcycle and haven’t been able to get health insurance for four years, and you’re still here.”

I knew that was true.

“I know. I just wish He made me feel that way.”

A minister friend of mine likes to say, “Feelings schmeelings. Feelings aren’t important. Truth is important.” But he also has a family, and loves them, and whenever he says that I wonder how his wife would feel if he didn’t tell her he loved her, or bring her flowers, or lift their daughter in the air after dinner while they laughed and washed the dishes.

********

The temperature dropped and I sunk deeper into the bed, stared up at the empty sky, then closed my eyes. There’s almost no noise, no city sounds, no nature sounds, only my shoe sliding against the metal bed and the creak of a rusty frame when I shift my weight to find a comfortable position.

It would be nice to sleep in the bed of the truck, not because I wanted to, but because I needed to, because home was more than eight miles away.

I think about it sometimes. About leaving. I’m not naive enough to believe a rural life is easier than an urban one, but lying there, it felt like the struggles that come with the former would be a welcome break. I thought about calling my girlfriend and asking her if she wanted to pack a bag and come with me. Somewhere a storm-heavy Saturday is spent inside a house instead of a closer coffee shop. Where I know fewer people but know them better.

“It would just be nice to have to use an axe,” I would tell her.

I thought back to waking up that morning, and how I was still mad about it, how relationships of any kind – with God or roommates - are really hard for me. Outside of my family, there are only two people in my life I’ve kept up with for more than five years.

I think I’m getting better at them, like some of my friends now - Jana, Nicole, Clell, Ahren – are all people that would drive through several states for a weekend visit long after we’ve all gone our separate ways. I can look at them and say that we are close.

There is a part in the Bible referencing Jesus that says he is a friend that sticks closer than a brother. That’s been hard for me to believe. When I was in the truck I thought about that, trying to really understand what that’s like. I don’t really have a reference point for that; I grew up without a brother, but I do have an older sister, and when I was twenty-five, the day after finding out my wife had been having affairs, I sat on the floor of her bedroom closet, weeping, hiding from my nephews. She walked in and sat down beside me, beside a pile of shoes, and didn’t say anything, but started to cry too.

Maybe it’s like that.

Maybe whether I’m here or there He remains, showing up in inky nights, girlfriend’s kisses, sister’s tears. I wonder when the day will come when I feel Him, when I look back and feel crazy for ever wanting to leave, to run, to walk away. When will I feel the unmistakable grace, where will I be, where will we be, where will we be?

this year's reads

2009-12-07T19:05:00.005-05:00

The Year of the Short Story
Before I moved into my new apartment (with roomates) my usual morning routine consisted of one cup of oatmeal, one pot of coffee, and one short story. A few of these collections were from familiar favorites, but some were great new finds. It feels right to start the list, like the day, off with these.

Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing by Lydia Peele
I chose it because it had the best title on the new release shelf. I wasn't disappointed. These stories, set mostly in rural mid-west and southern areas, feel like stories Carl Sandburg would enjoy.

It's Beginning to Hurt by James Ladsun
Another book I picked because of the title, and another win. Incredible characters in these stories.

The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami
Everything he writes is magic.

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
It's easy to see why she's a Pulitzer winner. Most of these nine stories start off slow but when I got to the last page I would have to cover the last sentence to keep fight off the temptation to see how they end. I loved this book.

Unacustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
see above.

Selected Short Stories of William Faulkner
I re-read these because I was introduced to a writer who obviously drew a lot of influence from Faulkner (more on her later). Faulkner's still not my favorite. Please don't hate me.

The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios by Yann Martel
A much lesser known work by the author of Life of Pi. A few of these stories were earlier works of his, and pretty raw (including the title story) but one story, The Time I Heard the Private Donald J. Rankin String Concerto with One Discordant Violin, by the American Composer John Morton will be one of those stories that stays with me forever, and is read again and again.

********

The New to Me Award
These are books by an individual many have read, but I'm just discovering. In high school, I always ended up in English classes that did more writing than reading; I blame that in part. My writing mentor/editor/friend/SideWalk Chalk chair Amy Hudock is a huge fan of this author, and has been trying to get me to read her work for several years. I'm glad I finally did. I'll list them in the order I've read them.

A Mercy by Toni Morrison
After the first chapter I realized I had developed a literary crush on a 78 year old woman. In many ways, this book was a prequel to her most famous work, Beloved, although this one was an easier read. A Mercy is told in six different voices by six different characters. The beginning, told by Florens, and a selection near the end narrated by Florens' mother are two of the most beautiful passages I have read.

Beloved by Toni Morrison
Once again, how someone can write such beautiful prose describing the most despondent situations amazes me.

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
This was my least favorite of the three I read, and it was still powerful. Each of these books circles around a single traumatic event in one character's life and the web it weaves describes more about the brokenness of the human spirit than any author I've read. An obvious influence in her writing style is Faulkner, which led me back to some of his works this year as well.

********

Classics, Read or Re-Read
It wasn't until my mid twenties (the thirtieth birthday is this week) that I began to appreciate and understand the timelessness of some of the classics. Not necessarily all of them in this section, but each author mentioned at least had some work(s) that will be read as long as people are reading. I tend to go back and forth between contemporary and classics... these are the ones from this year.

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
I read this directly after finishing the three Morrison books, just to appreciate who she appreciated.

The Mayor of Castorbridge by Thomas Hardy I'm a big Thomas Hardy fan, but holy moly he would have been the death of any party.

Deadeye Dick by Kurt Vonnegut
Maybe not one of his most famous books, but he could do no wrong.

For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
He's in almost every way the antonym of Faulkner. I appreciate them both. I love me some Hemingway.

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
The irony is not lost on me, but I always end up taking this book when I go camping in the mountains. Probably because it fits so perfectly in my backpack. I never get tired of it either.

De Profundis by Oscar Wilde
I found the collection of letters now known as De Profundis in the back of an old copy of Wilde's Dorian Gray, and it has become one of the writings that has most influenced my life. I've read it multiple times each year.

********

Poetry at Intermission
I haven't read a lot, but this year I've read a few that make me want to read more.

Harvest Poems by Carl Sandburg
A copy of Harvest Poems was given to me by one of my favorite people I met this year, Steve Bare. He told me it was one of the collections he is always re-reading. Many of them made me want to live in the midwest. "Explanations of Love" is the one that has stuck with me several months after reading.

Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake
I saw an exhibit on Blake in New York a few years ago, shortly after reading him for the first time. It made me appreciate him even more.

The Book of Hours: Love Poems to God by Rainer Maria Rilke
I first read Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet several years ago, and when I came across this book of love poems to God by a man who himself could not decide what he thought about God it moved to the top of my reading list. Rilke, along with Wilde has had a huge impact on me.
A selection from one of the poems (less about God and more about Rilke's understanding of himself while writing these poems):
"I would describe myself
like a landscape I've studied
at length, in detail;
like a word I'm coming to understand;
like a pitcher I pour from at mealtime;
like my mother's face;
like a ship that carried me
when the waters raged."

********

The Books about Faith/Living/Purpose
It's been a tough year, years really, for me and faith. The purpose of this list isn't to go into that... I've written about that stuff enough for now... but these are the books I've read for one reason or another that touch on one of these topics.

Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott
Plan B by Anne Lamott
Grace, Eventually by Anne Lamott
I grouped them all together because they were really all the same book. That's not to say I didn't like them, or take something from them, because I did, but it feels like reading the same good story over and over. By the third book she was running out of material. Still, she is a beautiful story teller, writer, and person. I disagree with some of her thoughts her diehards love her for, agree with a few things many despise her for, and appreciate her willingness to talk about it. She's a thought provoker for sure, but you can probably stick to Traveling Mercies.

To Own a Dragon by Donald Miller
I found a copy of this book sitting by the sink in the restroom of Charleston Place and thought if it's not a sign it's close enough to a sign. He's growing on me. I've read Blue Like Jazz and liked it enough, but thought Searching for God Knows What was much better. This one, his description of life without a father was up there with Searching.

A Million Miles in a Thousand Years by Donald Miller
This was his latest, and an interesting read... He uses the making of a movie about Blue Like Jazz as a jumping off point to talk about the story our lives are telling.

Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
Another book I've read once the past few years, and will probably continue to do. He doesn't just give permission to wonder about life but celebrates it. I love him for that.

********

Memoir/Biography/Essays
Memoir is one of my favorite genres. The Lamott, Miller, and Rilke books would have all fit here as well. These are the others I read.

Dylan on Dylan edited by Jonathan Cott
If there's anyone I wish I could have been besides me it would be Bob Dylan. This collection of unedited interviews is the next best thing.

Lincoln's Greatest Speech by Ronald C. White Jr.
A study of Lincoln's 2nd inaugural address. Lincoln's understanding of the written word - syntax, sentence structure, voice, technique - and its ability to transform culture is almost unmatched.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, and American Slave by Frederick Douglass
Worth re-reading every few years. One of my "If I could have a conversation with anyone" choices for sure.

Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn
Sometimes I buy books just because of the cover, or title. Sometimes those books turn into my favorites. Sometimes they don't. This is one that didn't. It's an interesting story, for sure - Nick meets his father while working as a caseworker in a homeless shelter - just not one that I thought was told very well.

********

The Rest
Other books I've read this year.

Hold Love Strong by Matthew Aaron Goodman
A debut novel about life in the slums. It wasn't my favorite book of the year, but one I enjoyed and will read again.

The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
I read it again because I feel like any book someone writes that inspires an entire nation of people to kill him for writing is worth trying to really understand what he was saying.

Starting Out in the Evening by Brian Morton
I saw this movie before I knew it was a book. The movie starred Frank Langella in a role he should have won an award for. It was a perfect movie. The book was great too, but this was one of those rare circumstances where I felt like it really needed an actor to bring the character to life... Rent the movie. And read the book. But definitely rent the movie.

********

A Book I'm Reading Now That Is Making an Impact

Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer
Foer is hands down my favorite contemporary novelist. His first two books, Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close will always be read and re-read and re-read. I've been waiting several years for his next work, and it was a surprise to hear that such a gifted novelist was writing a nonfiction book about life as a vegetarian. This book is the story that came out after he and his wife, novelist Nicole Krauss, had a son and needed to decide what type of diet their family would eat. Foer and Krauss had previously had an on-again-off-again diet of being vegetarian, but wanted to decide once and for all. His research into the factory farming industry and the history of husbandry is eye-opening and the stories he weaves make it connect on a level that other books dealing with the same issue don't quite live up to. It's at the very least a pretty daring work by someone who could have been comfortable doing what he does best. The closest I've come to being vegetarian is the few months a year I go only eating vegetables and fish, but by the time I'm done with this book that could change.

********

Next Up

Atomic Farmgirl by Teri Hein
She's SideWalk Chalk's board advisor, executive director of 826Seattle, a wealth of knowledge, and an all-around incredible person. I'm looking forward to the read.

reaching.

2009-10-04T12:34:00.003-04:00

I only have a handful of friends that are Christians, and about half of them are struggling with what that means. Most days, I am too.

One of these friends, a guy active in his church, confessed a few weeks ago that he doesn’t know if he still believes the stories in the Bible are true.

“I mean, you can believe they’re true, and you can live like they are, but there’s no way to really know they are.”

I talked about this with my friend Mandie when we had church at a coffee shop. She told me that when she begins to doubt her faith, a couple of things happen.

First, she gets scared. I can identify with that. Sometimes I wonder if I believe the things I do simply because so much of my life has been invested in believing. For fourteen years I’ve tried, and failed, and tried again to live my life in a way that pleases a Father I’ve never actually met. Everyone who follows Christ is. I know that thought makes a lot of Christians cringe, but I hope they understand what I mean; we’ve never met Him in the traditional sense – never shared a handshake or a bag of Twizzlers. Asking yourself “What if it’s not true?” is a scary thing for most of us.

The exception would be my friend Nicole, who I’ve written about before. She told me once that she didn’t care if somebody proved none of it was true; she would keep following because she likes the way it feels and the results it’s had in her life. I walked home the night she told me that wondering if I felt that same way. I don’t think I do.

The second thing Mandie told me that happens when she begins to doubt her faith is her life becomes stagnant.

“Like nothing really matters, and I have no purpose.”

I can see the truth of that in my life. I get caught up in what I’m doing and forget who I’m doing it for, and it’s not long before my identity is tied up in the job I have or whether I wrote anything that week, or even attempted to. It’s pretty miserable, really. I start getting depressed, and begin feeling that if I don’t get the next grant and the nonprofit my friend and I run has to shut down then everything is my fault and I’m a failure. I worry about where I would go and wonder if I would have the strength to start all over. Again. I start to feel like I’m being used, and forget that being used is a privilege, not a sacrifice.

It’s evident in my friends’ lives, too – the ones who are wrestling with doubt. They’re feeling the weight of having to know the answers, feeling the pressure of tomorrow, feeling – worse of all – a loss of joy.

A few nights ago I went for a walk to think about these things. The season has started to change, and, as usual, when it does something inside me begins to wake up.

I thought about my friend Phillip and the night a few weeks ago when he asked me if I wanted to ride motorcycles with him to church.

“We can get pizza and beer after,” he had promised.

While we were riding across the bridge, I started thinking about all of the things I wouldn’t like about sitting through a church service. I thought about how the guitarist in the band would have just the right hair cut, and how while they played the crowd would stand, the girls with their hands outstretched and the guys with a fist in the air. I realize that this wasn’t fair, and that you get out of things what you put into it, and the truth is, the people I saw there and the few I met could not have been any nicer. Still, I felt out of place, like everyone else in the room was wearing a red shirt - and I knew we were supposed to - but the only color I had was blue. People didn’t whisper and point, but I could tell. I didn’t belong.

But I used to. And sometimes I miss it. Rainer Rilke called it “the great homesickness we could never shake off.” I rarely feel at home. Most Sunday mornings, whether I’m going to church or – more frequently these days – skipping, I think about the life I used to have, and wish I could have one more conversation with everyone, all of us crowded around a table on a porch. I want to let Nate know I forgive him, even though he’s never asked for it. Most days I do. Or maybe it would be best to not even mention it. I want us to be friends again. I want to hear about his life, and to tell him about my girlfriend and my job and the new friends I’ve made. I want him to be my church.

Sometimes, I think forgiving would be easier if I wasn't such shit at forgetting.
The relationship between forgiving and forgetting is the thing about Christianity that frustrates me the most. Jesus said that we're forgiven to the extent of which we forgive. It also says in the Bible that God is able to take our wrongs done to Him and throw them as far away as the east is from the west. If I'm not reading too much into that, it means that not only does he not hold my sin against me; he actually wipes it from his memory.

Maybe I've got it all wrong. Maybe letting go isn't as much about forgetting, about running away from a memory, as it is about returning to one- grace. Maybe God is so in love with us he's like a goldfish continually rediscovering the other side of the bowl; the slate's wiped clean and we get to wake up reborn, innocent and full of new life, not attached to life the way it used to be.

I passed Leroy while I was walking down King Street. Leroy is homeless, and in a wheelchair.

“Excuse me,” he said.

I took my headphones out of my ear and put them in my pocket.

“How far down there are you going?”

“I don’t really know,” I told him. “Planning to go to the Battery and just walk for a bit.”

He stared at me, like he wanted to ask me something but was embarrassed to.

“Can I take you somewhere?” I offered.

“Could you just take me to the first stoplight down there?” He lifted his arm and pointed to the stoplight. His hand was covered with bumps, one near his wrist was almost the size of his pinky.

“Yea… sure.” I said. I started to push him, taking small steps so my shins wouldn’t hit the back of his chair.

Four women dressed for a night out walked out of Charleston Place, and stood in the middle of the sidewalk, admiring each other’s shoes. They made me angry, not because I was in a hurry, but because I began to wonder what it would feel like to be trapped in a wheel chair and have to listen to people talk about their feet.

The women didn’t notice us, even though we were five feet behind them. Finally they began to walk, even slower than we were going.

I asked Leroy how long he’s lived in Charleston.

“Since twelve years before Kennedy was assassinated.”

When we got to the corner he said he was going left. I asked him where he was headed, and he told me he didn’t want me to go out of my way.

“I’m not really heading anywhere,” I said. “Just wanted to get out.”

“Well I’m going to the corner of Market and Church.”

I told him I would go with him.

While I pushed him to down the sidewalk, past the hotel and restaurants and candy stores, I asked him why he was going to the Market.

“I’m going to sell these pencils,” he told me, shaking a plastic cup full of pencils decorated with cartoon characters like it should have been obvious.

I wondered how many pencils he would sell that night, and what he would rather be doing if he could do anything, with anyone, anywhere. I wanted to ask him how long he’d been in the wheelchair, and if he still missed being able to use his legs, or if it had been so long he’d forgotten what it was like.

I wondered if he felt more complete than me.

I stood with him for a few minutes on the corner of Market and Church. Nobody wanted any pencils. I couldn’t think of anything that seemed right to say, so I just told him I’d see him around and started to walk. I went down to the Battery, and through all the residential streets south of Broad, and finally, around Colonial Lake. While I was walking I started to pray, or something close to it.

I told God that as much as I wanted to know the answers to all that happened in Columbia, as much as I wanted to figure out why my wife and friends and church and even He seemed to abandon me, I didn’t want to be stuck trying to figure it out forever. I wanted my life to keep moving. For a moment, sitting on the bench looking at the reflection of the moon on the water, I felt as if I was looking inside the period at the end of a difficult sentence, not just seeing a dot on a page, but seeing a rest, a space, a breath. I felt, for a moment, a return to who I used to be.

***

I’m sitting in a coffee shop, the same one I come to for church with Mandie and her friends sometimes. One of the employees just walked by with a wet rag, wiping crumbs off the table someone left.

“What are you writing about?” he asked.

I gave him my usual answer.

“I don’t know. Whatever comes out.”

I wish I could have been honest. What comes out are usually stories of longing.

Longing to be able to stand, and run. Longing not to doubt. Longing for purpose. Longing for a friendship I used to have. Longing for the ability to trust in God the way I used to, with no fear of getting screwed. Longing, somehow, for my past, and a completely separate future. Longing for somebody else, or occasionally, to be somebody else.
Longing to know everything is going to be ok.

When I’m still, usually in the mornings – sitting outside with my back against the front of my house – I recognize it’s really just a longing to live.

I want to live today and not just tomorrow. Or yesterday.
I want to learn from those around me, to absorb their strength and their grace. I want to dance with my girlfriend, even though I’m rhythmless. I want to put an extra pump of butter on my popcorn, run another mile, give something I thought I needed away. I want to write a story I love, and then tear it up anyway, because that one was just for me. I want to pass out high-fives as if they cured cancer; maybe they do. I want to study a globe, put one finger on a place I’ve been and another on a place I want to go. I want to sit in the grass with my back against a tree and remember the lava-lamp glow of the Northern Lights above a snow-covered field in Norway. I want to have a late-night beer with a friend, maybe Adam, or Drew.
Mostly I want to love to forgive.

***

Last night, driving home from Savannah, I caught the last few minutes of the Jazz Piano program on NPR. I don’t know who the guest artist was, but I felt like he could have been any of us. He was referencing a recent concert he had performed at Carnegie Hall.

“When I was playing, I heard two songs: the one in my head I wanted to play, and the one on the keyboard I was able to.”

The segment ended with an excerpt from the concert, and you could hear it, in the middle of the song, a pause and a groan, like he was stretching for something just out of reach.

leaping

2009-07-04T19:21:00.002-04:00

Sigur Rós - Glósóli from sigur-ros.co.uk on Vimeo.

I love it because it reminds me of being five and jumping from the back of our patterned cloth couch to the shaggy green carpet below. For a moment, I swear, I flew.

on bridges burning and being rebuilt

2009-06-15T00:04:00.002-04:00

There was this kid I grew up with that I didn’t like very much. I didn’t like him because when I looked at him I saw the things I wanted for myself, and in my adolescence, I didn’t know how to handle that. He was a few grades behind me, but popular with the kids in my grade, more popular than I was with them. He was some sort of basketball prodigy, and everyone knew it, and worse, he knew it too. Already, he was an inch or two taller than me, which wasn’t that big of an accomplishment. Two years later, when I got my drivers permit, I was still 5’2.

One Friday night, while all the students and alumni and faculty were sitting in the football stands, wearing green and gold, holding up banners, and yelling at referees, my friend Matt and I went into the gym and turned on the lights. We were shooting a few basketballs, banging them against the rim mostly, when this basketball prodigy kid came in with several of his friends. He asked me if I wanted to play him to ten.

I told him that was fine, and he asked what we were playing for. I had no idea; the thought of playing him for money or a snack cake from the vending machine added this strange urgency to the game, made me feel like it really mattered. I watched him stand there, just past the free-throw line, dribbling the ball between his legs, waiting for me to come up with something.

“Five bucks?” I asked. I still had the bill my parents gave me for the concession stand stuffed inside my sock. Why I put my money in my sock instead of my pocket I have no idea.

Somehow, through some sort of miracle, I won. I was behind the three-point line, and threw the ball toward the basket. It careened off the backboard and went in.

I couldn’t believe it. Neither could my friend. Neither could the prodigy. He said he wasn’t going to pay, because I had just gotten lucky, which I had, but still. I said some things, I can’t remember what, but they must have been pretty horrible because while I was saying them my nose was on fire and my mouth was full of blood that tasted like metal from where he hit me. It was the first time anyone had hit me.

I could feel my heart pumping all the way in my head. I looked at my hand and saw the blood from my nose and mouth all crimson and sticky, and looked at this kid and he looked so calm, so peaceful, and I remember wondering how he could look so calm and wondering if my friends could see my legs shaking. This rage just exploded inside of me, and we were on the ground and I didn’t care how often I got hit, I just wanted to hit him too.

When our friends pulled us off one another, there was blood on the gym floor and on his shirt and I knew some of it was mine but remember thinking some of it was his, too.

I’m only telling you this to say that that was my only memory of this kid until I was in college. I never talked to him again.

I didn’t keep in touch with anybody from middle school, or high school even, but during my sophomore year of college, my friend Matt – the one I had gone into the gym with – tracked down my phone number and called me one Sunday night.

We were talking, laughing, reliving. He lived in Louisiana now, was thinking about tech school, but not sure. He still had a few friends from our middle school days. I asked him if he remembered that night, and the lucky shot, and the fight.

“You know what happened to him, right?” he asked.

I had no idea.

He told me that earlier that year, that kid - who was now a junior - was arguing on the phone with his older brother, who was a student at some military college somewhere.

“Their parents were going through a divorce, and his brother was cussing at him, telling him how much of a fuck-up he was and how their parents were probably getting a divorce because he was always in trouble and stressing everybody out, and he just stood there, listening, and then he said, ‘You’re right.’”

Then he put a pistol in his mouth. His brother heard it on the other end of the phone.

I lay on my loft bed that night and listened to my roommate sleep in the bed beneath mine, and thought about the younger brother saying, “You’re right,” just like that, “You’re right,” and I wondered if when he said it he looked as calm as he did after he punched me.

I tried to imagine what he must have felt like, how wrong he was for believing it was his fault, or that his parents didn’t need him, or that the world would fix itself if he wasn’t around to keep screwing it up.

I knew it wasn’t my fault, that us getting in a fight in middle school had nothing to do with his suicide, but still, I couldn’t help but feel like I should have been a better person somehow. Like maybe if I had lost that game, or said, “Oh my god, that was a lucky shot, I should pay you,” then we could have laughed about it and maybe something, anything, something would have been different.

I lay in bed and cried these heavy tears and prayed and tried not to wake up my roommate.

****

A few weeks ago my friend Colin invited me to this prayer meeting he hosts. He asks me to come every few weeks, but I’ve always had stuff going on. I told him that I would probably get an anxiety attack if I did go. I haven’t been to church in several months. We were sitting at a bar eating pizza and drinking beer.

I told him that when I know it’s going to be a group of Christians hanging out, I usually find it easier to come up with an excuse, to keep working late into the night, or tell them I wanted to go to bed early because I have to get up early the next morning. They probably all think I have some dirty secret that I’m hiding, or that I’m watching porn, but the truth is I sit at home and read a novel, and if I do go out it’s to go for a long walk by myself. The strange thing is, when I’m walking through the crowds on Market or East Bay, I feel more connected to God. I feel like I can talk to Him easier, and like He wants to talk to me. More than that. I feel like He needs me. Not in the “He needs me because He can’t do it on His own” kind of way, but like He needs me. I wish I had the words to explain it.

Colin asked me why I think it is that groups of Christians give me anxiety attacks. It was a good question. I didn’t know the answer. I’ve been thinking about it, though, and I think it’s that you can only be told you don’t belong to the club so many times before you start to believe it.

After I caught my wife having an affair, the leadership in the church I worked for told me I wasn’t welcome there anymore. I remember sinking into the soft green chair of Mike’s office, the man who for all practical purposes had been my father and my biggest encourager at the church. He was the first one to hear about Caroline’s unfaithfulness.

I listened to him tell me I was going to have to take a few months off. I nodded my head.

“We’re going to tell people it’s a few months, but you need to know this is permanent,” he said.

I was too beat up to argue. The next week I asked the leadership team if I could meet with them.

They said, “No.” They told the church “there’s been unfaithfulness in the marriage, and John has been removed.” It was humiliating.

I’m lucky: I made it 25 years without having to feel that abandonment. I grew up with a great family, a mom that put snacks in my lunchbox and a dad that drove me to Florida every year to watch baseball games. Maybe that’s why it hurt so bad when it happened. When I did feel the pain of being thrown away, it almost destroyed me. Hearing Mike tell me I couldn’t be a part, seeing my friends Adam and Nate turn their backs because the situation was too messy, the whole thing was too much for me to handle.

I wanted to run away; to go to New York, or Boston, or Toronto. I wanted to get lost, live a new life, forget about church and relationships and community, to pretend the whole experience was a book I had finished reading. Instead I moved to Charleston.

I felt like the best thing for me to do would be the last thing I wanted to: I went back to church. For three years I gave all I had. I helped out with the small groups, and went to all the services, and joined an early-morning men’s group where we sat around a conference table drinking coffee and talking about our lives and wives and jobs. I’m not trying to say any of that was bad. I actually enjoyed it. Especially listening to the conversations around the conference table.

When I made the decision to leave the church, it didn’t have anything to do with not liking the music, or finding the sermons boring, or old women with fried hair looking down spectacled noses at me because I have tattoos. It was because I felt like the people I looked to for guidance and acceptance really didn’t care about how my life turned out. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it felt that way. It felt that way strong enough for me to walk away from something I had given the last decade of my life to. I began to believe something must be wrong with me – some intrinsic and flawed characteristic, a chromosome out of whack – something that would keep me from ever being let inside the circle.

I don’t know if this walking away is a permanent thing, or just my mind telling me I need a temporary respite from the institution of church, but I’ve noticed a beautiful thing since I’ve been gone. I’ve noticed people, lots and lots of people, good people, people who want to serve, people with hearts as big as music, people who would, and do, give the coats off their back.

I look at the way they give, at the relationships they build with kids in financially bankrupt schools and emotionally bankrupt families, and I see the complete joy that comes over the kids they serve every single week. I look at these people and I see Jesus. A handful of them are Christians. A few even go to church. Most of them are just vegetarians.

I hope this doesn’t come across in a way I don’t intend it. I don’t talk about the pain of the past because I want to tell a story, or feel like I deserve some sort of prize for not killing myself, because God knows I’ve had it better than some of these kids we see every week. I talk about it because I like questions.

Since most of the betrayal or abandonment I’ve experienced came from church, that’s where my questions tend to start. Why do I need to have a distant pastor of a mega-church, or a TV personality with a $50,000 car? Why can’t my church be my friend D.A., when we’re sitting in Marion Square late at night, drinking dark beer and asking big questions? Why can’t it be Bryan, when we’ve just left the movie, or are walking down humid streets to the smoke shop, and he makes a joke that’s slightly off-color, and we laugh these belly laughs, resonating off the narrow homes, and I realize we’re not laughing because the joke was so funny, but because telling crude jokes is so out of character for him? I’m not asking to persuade anyone. I’m asking to figure it out for myself.

I talked about some of this with a friend from high-school earlier today. He’s wondering the same things, feeling the same not-fitting-in-ness, tired of giving all he has to give. For as long as I’ve known him, he’s wanted to go to seminary and be a preacher. This week, the leadership at the church he’s invested in told him he didn’t have “the gifting,” and wasn’t “called”. I told him I was sorry, and that in some way, I understood how he felt. I wanted to scream curse words.

It’s not about feeling important, or special, or even “called”, it’s much more basic than that. It’s about feeling needed. To feel like you’re a part of something that wouldn’t survive without you - a business that would go under, a family that would disintegrate, a cause that wouldn’t have a voice – is a fundamental element, a longing we all share. Even though the thought of being needed is sometimes suffocating, the truth is, we have to feel that way to keep from imploding.

A preacher friend of mine sent me an email a few months ago after we had sat down for coffee and I had explained some of my frustrations – frustrations with the lack of support I had felt from the Christian community, and frustration at my own sin for harboring bitterness. She told me I needed to be careful because I had already burned bridges with some of the leadership at her church, and it wouldn’t be good for me to burn more.

I respect her a lot, and she’s always had good things to say, even if it’s hard for people (like myself) to hear. Still, something about that sounded off, almost right but not quite, a chord with a note that’s a half-step flat. It took me some time to process, like most things do, but what I came to is this: if we’re both trying to be like Jesus, shouldn’t burning bridges be impossible?
I should throw in the disclaimer that I don’t think she meant it as quite the grenade of an email it came across as, but still. It’s made me ask myself that question a lot. Wasn’t Jesus’ whole purpose, in fact, to show that there is no such thing as a burned bridge? Didn’t he come to reconcile: people to God (Our Father), people to their physical needs (Give us this day), people to people (As we forgive those who have trespassed)?

***

I walked through the empty streets to Waterfront Park late last night, and thought about burning bridges, and how, ultimately, burning bridges is saying, “I don’t need you. My life is better without you in it,” and I sat on the wooden swing and looked at the lights of cars crossing over the harbor, and thought about my friend whose church crushed his dreams, and the basketball prodigy that took his life, and struggled with all of these things.

Obviously, there’s a healthiness to some relationships dying. Surely, I’m not supposed to be friends with my ex, or the men she was sleeping with, or the leadership from the church that fired me.

But sometimes, when I think about drinking coffee with Mike, or the day I installed a sprinkler system with Nate, or mountain-biking with Adam, I miss them very much.

And this is what I’m trying to say: We need each other. Not in the “We can’t live without each other” kind of way, but more like “Why would we want to?”

2. home

2009-05-13T09:56:00.003-04:00

December, 2003; October, 2005

A beautiful two-story house with white columns on both porches and a palm tree in the front yard stands on a tree-lined street in a historic Columbia neighborhood. I drew the design of it on a napkin in Shoney’s; the builders were sitting across from me, and Caroline’s eyes were lighting up as she suggested changes she would like me to make.

“We can do that,” the builders nodded as they stared at the napkin.

It was Caroline’s idea to try to live downtown when we moved to Columbia. We didn’t really think we would be able to afford it.

Before we married, I had $80,000 in savings. The money came from several investments my parents had helped me make as well as the money I had saved while working two jobs in high school. After we married, we put a majority of that money down on a house in a suburb of Charleston; a cookie cutter home, in a neighborhood full of children and cul-de-sacs. Two years later we sold the house, quit our jobs, and moved to Columbia.

One day, soon after moving, Caroline and I were driving down a street filled with turn-of-the-century homes, when she saw and empty lot between two houses. The sign advertisement near the street said, “Land for Sale.”

“Stop the car!” she shouted. We wrote the number down and decided to call later that evening. Our hopes weren’t too high, but I could see the glimmer in her eyes and the smile she tried to hide as we talked about the great location.

That night, I called the number on the sign. The man on the other end of the line asked me more questions than I asked him: “Why did we move to Columbia? What did I do?” How old was I?”

I felt like a kid playing grown-up. He didn’t tell me the price of the land, but asked if we would like to meet at Shoney’s later that week.

“This can’t be a good sign,” I told Caroline. “He’s trying to save us the embarrassment of knowing we can’t afford it.” Still, we spent the rest of that week disinterested in all the other houses we looked at, and all the neighborhoods we drove through.

We walked into the meeting anxious and uncomfortable. There were two men waiting on us, both with gentle faces and heavy Irish accents.

“So, you’re a pastor, are you?” the taller one asked.

I always felt defensive when someone asked me that. Usually the next statement was, “A little young, aren’t you?”

Instead, the other man shocked me. “That’s great,” he said, “really, really great.”

We talked to them for an hour about everything but the land. We talked about church, about me and Caroline and how we were high-school sweethearts, about Ireland and Guinness. Both men had brought their families over eight years earlier. They started a construction company, building custom homes and mansions on the shores of Lake Murray.

Then, the taller one wiped his mouth, and pushed his plate away. “Let’s talk about the land, shall we?” he asked.

Here we go. I squeezed Caroline’s leg, and she patted my hand for encouragement.

“We bought that land five years ago with the intention to build a spec home to show off our work to the downtown community.”

“A 5,000 square foot home,” his assistant added.

“The house that had been there burned down the year before, and we paid close to $30,000 for the lot.”

My heart sank. $30,000, five years ago. Five years of the land appreciating in value. We could buy the land, maybe, but we would have to pitch a tent on it for shelter.

“Every time we were about to start building on that land,” he continued, looking at his partner, “David and I would pray about it and we would just get this feeling that that’s not what we were supposed to do.”

Did I just hear that right? They’re Christians, too? I didn’t hear much of what he said after that. Caroline’s hand was gripping my leg.

I snapped back when David said, “To sum it up, we’ve thought about it a lot this week, and we have decided the land is supposed to be for the two of you.”

We were ecstatic. They offered to build a custom home we could afford at a very reasonable rate. We paid $5,000 for the land. Six months later, we moved in. They had added custom molding and hardwood floors, a gourmet kitchen, and a palm tree in our front yard to remind us of Charleston. God, we loved that place.

********
On a tree-lined street in a historic Columbia neighborhood, stands a beautiful two-story house. There’s a piano inside, nice furniture, and a bedroom with a walk-in closet filled with Caroline’s shoes and my shirts. On the second story porch, just outside the bedroom, there is a patio table. On the patio table there are two bowls with the smallest bit of strawberry ice cream- long ago melted and now dried- coffee mugs- some of them half full- an ash tray filled with half-smoked cigars, an empty bottle of coke, playing cards, and a wadded up napkin.

There have been many times when I have gone back to that house with the intention of cleaning off that patio table, erasing the last but of my life that was the way life was supposed to be, but for some reason, I am never able to.

1. beginning

2009-04-28T14:14:00.003-04:00

That was its beginning. That was the house. That was the porch. That was the place.

****

April, 2005
The rain was coming down harder now, splashing the tin roof above our house. We sat on the porch, crowded around a patio table, laughing, joking.
Brandon and I were smoking cigars. Nate was smoking his pipe. Derrick was coughing and his face was taking on a greenish hue. He wanted to fit in so bad, but he had never smoked before. My God, he was funny, though! Several weeks earlier, he spent the night in an emergency room after racing Brandon out of a building and accidentally running through a glass door. It was those double doors that are found in libraries and auditoriums, the kind with the bar you push to make it swing open. Brandon’s door opened easily. Derrick’s was locked. The scars are sadly funny to us, covering his hands and arms and the left side of his face, the stitches recently removed.

“Those are disgusting,” said Christen, turning her nose at the cigar smoke and waving it away from her face. “How can you suck on those?”

“I like the pipe, but the cigars smell like poo,” Catherine added.

Stacey started laughing his high-pitched laugh. We looked at him, confused. He pointed at Derrick, who was obviously about to puke.

“Man, you really don’t look so good,” I told him.

“I just haven’t had much to eat today.”

“Whatever you have or haven’t had is about to be all over my porch. Why don’t you go to the bathroom?

He shot up and ran into the house. Nate was beginning to tear up, about to fall out of his chair. He was imitating the look on Derrick’s face. I stared at Christen until she looked back, and then I made this flirty look towards Adam, who wasn’t looking, batting my eyelashes and letting out a sigh. Christen had a huge crush on him, and only Caroline and I knew.

“John!” yelled Christen.

“What did I do?”

“You know exactly what you did,” she said, throwing a wadded up napkin at me. I caught it midair and fired it back.

“Let that be a lesson to you,” I joked as the napkin, wet from the moisture of her cup, got her square in the face.

Caroline’s leg, tan and tight, found mine underneath the table, and she began to rub it up and down. I turned my face towards hers and she held my gaze, her blue eyes the perfect contrast to the dark hair framing her face. She cut her eyes to the table and back, then smiled seductively. It was the look that meant, “If we don’t kick our friends out soon they are going to get a show, because I want you now. I want you right now, on the bed, on the table, it doesn’t matter.”

“I’m getting tired,” I lied, faking a yawn and a stretch.

“It’s only 10:30,” said Brandon.

“I know, but I’m old.”

“You’re 25.”

“That’s ancient. I would be dead now if I was a dog. Besides, it’s not like we won’t be doing this tomorrow night. We do this every night.”

“Awwwww,” sighed Christen. She was always acting sentimental. Christen was a junior at South Carolina. She went to the same high school in Indiana Axl Rose graduated from. Their mascot was the Buckin’ Broncos, but on the school’s first basketball jerseys they misspelled it, and stuck with it. I was wearing a T-Shirt she gave me that said GO Buckin’ Bronchos! She had a hard time her first year at Carolina, being away from friends and family, and with no real place of belonging. Next to Caroline, Christen was one of my favorite people in the world. She was my biggest cheerleader, the one person who continually reminded me that what I was doing with my life was making a difference. “I love that we do this every night. I love all of you so much. You’re my family,” she said, “You’re my church. This is my church.”

This was my church. It wasn’t a building; it was a porch, a second floor porch; connected to a bedroom that was my sanctuary. The patio chairs were my pew, and the bodies in them were my family. Two years earlier, Caroline and I moved to Columbia to start a church, with no money, no place to meet, and hardly anyone to meet with. The church had grown significantly, but those few people who were there in the beginning were still our closest friends.

We said goodnight to everyone. Caroline and I shut the front door and went up the stairs. We turned the corner, past the computer, through the door and into our room. Caroline shut the door. She smiled. We left a light on.

Life was irresistible. This was my wife- gorgeous, intelligent, supportive. This was my sanctuary- peaceful, safe. That is my church, I thought, looking out the window at the table we had been crowded around an hour earlier.

I may always be haunted by front porches.

a prologue

2009-04-27T18:35:00.003-04:00

Why do I look at another woman's legs and sometimes see the tiny scar on hers?

"Tell me the story," I used to say, my fingers brushing over it.
"It's from a roller skating accident when I was a kid."
"I know."
"Then why did you ask me about it?
"I just like to think about you roller-skating when you were a kid."

I can remember the way the light reflected differently off that small patch of skin on Caroline’s thigh, as if off of smooth plastic, but I can't fucking remember which leg it was on. Sometimes her hair smelled like strawberries, but I can't remember what brand of shampoo she used. One of her ears had a second piercing, a small hoop she wore directly behind the first hole; several nights I have lost sleep trying to picture if it was the left ear or the right.

The church gave me one month's pay as severance. Why did I use all of it to buy an anniversary present for my wife who moved out five days earlier? I imagined her coming home, repentant, and the tears when she realized she had already been forgiven.

I never gave it to her.

Why do I have to remember the color of her eyes, like the horizon, where the sky meets the sea? She was beautiful. She is beautiful. Why do neither of those phrases sound exactly right?

If I had my choice, I wouldn't remember any of those things. I wouldn't remember the way the house felt without her, empty, worse than empty. Abandoned. I wouldn't remember the sound of nothing in the days that followed, the way the sun rose and the sun set and the food dropped off by my parents piled up outside my bedroom door, but I never heard her voice. Or the way my fist hurt when I cracked my Nissan’s windshield the day she sent her mom to pick up her clothes, and how it scared me when I realized I liked the physical pain more than the emotional.

But I do.

Here

2009-04-24T17:29:00.002-04:00

“His mom walked out a year ago,” the principal told me. “Went to Atlanta. She’s back now, but things aren’t good.” We were walking to the first grade classroom. “He’s the brightest first grader we have, but he’s a big discipline problem. Everything ends in a fight. He won’t focus on anything.” I learned that lately he’s taken to shutting himself in the bathroom and urinating on the floor.

I’ve never hung out with a six year old other than my nephews, but every Thursday from 12:30 -2:00 I go to the same school with a group of volunteers to help inspire fourth graders to write. The principal asked me if I would be willing to meet him.

“His teacher is convinced that he just needs someone to care,” he told me. “I told her I thought you, or someone from SideWalk Chalk, would be a good fit.”

He knocked on the door and the teacher came out.
“This is John,” he told her.

She stared.
I wish I’d worn a long sleeve shirt to cover my tattoo I thought.

“He’s the one I told you might could work with Ja’hiem.”

“Yes! Yes!” she said, and grabbed both my hands. I know if he has a mentor, or just somebody to spend time with him, it would help."

Ja’hiem was in the bathroom, urinating on the floor.
When he came out, the teacher told him to wash his hands and come to the door. “You’re not in trouble,” she promised.
While he washed his hands she told me the home visit she took was depressing. His house was filthy. “You can’t imagine.”

Ja’hiem walked across the room, weaving around the circular tables, confused.

“Ja’hiem, I want you to meet John,” she told him. I gave him a high five.

“The two of you are going to work together,” she said. He nodded.

I didn’t know what to do. What do you do with a first grader? I’m not ready for this.

“Maybe the two of you could go to the library,” she told me.

The library. I like libraries. I asked Ja’hiem if he could show me how to get there.
“This is the short way,” he told me. It was the first time I heard him speak.

When we got to the library I asked him if he could show me his favorite book. He walked me to a small display directly in front of the librarian’s desk filled. There were two rows of comic books beneath two rows of thicker books for young adults.
“This one,” he said. It was a comic book. Spiderman. “And this one, too”. The Fantastic Four.

“Who’s that one?” I asked, pointing to a guy on fire.
“Flame on,” he said.
“That’s his name?”
“He says that.”

I asked him if we could sit at a table and he could explain them to me.
He walked me through every page, not worrying about the words, but pointing out every different character. He told me if they were good or bad, and if they were strong or they could disappear.

“Maybe we should try to draw some super heroes,” I said.

No words. Just a smile. A little nod. I found some scrap paper and two pencils.

“Who would you be if you were a super hero? Can you draw him?” I asked.
“Are you going to draw one, too?”
“Yeah. But you have to give him a name. And it’s gotta be a good name.”

We stood the Spiderman comic between us so neither one could peek. I suck at drawing. I made a big face, with a disproportionately sized neck and torso. His legs were flowing off the end of the page. I put a cowboy hat on top of his head. He had two arms with different sized biceps, and he was twirling a lasso. Cowboy Coolboy.

I peeked over the comic book and looked at his. For a moment, I felt better. Mine is better, more realistic, more details! I remembered he’s just six. There was a small guy in the middle of his page with incredibly large muscles. Muscles bigger than his head. Muscles with muscles. In the top right hand corner he wrote: Super Strong and drew a box around the name.

I sat in the 6-year-old sized wooden chair at the 6-year-old sized table, and watched his face change when he explained how Super-Strong had a secret extendable arm under one of his boxing gloves, watched him laugh when I told him there was no way Cowboy Coolboy could win in a battle against Super Strong, so it would probably be best if they just joined forces. I asked him if he could draw the bad guy. Ja-hiem would look at me, draw, look at me, draw, and two minutes later, the world had Super-Ugly.

Spending a year with fourth graders has given me thick skin.

“How much days are you going to be here?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Are you coming next week, too?”

I saw the question behind the question, the “Tell me this isn’t just this hour.” the “Please don’t be one of them.” and ohmygod it was impossible to tell him anything other than “I’m here. I’ll be here next week. I’ll be here the week after.”
He kept drawing.
“Maybe we should draw our own whole comic book,” he told me.
“Yeah! Great idea.” We could do that. “We’ll have to ask your teacher.”

We left the library.

“I want to show you the other way I go sometimes,” he said. “This way’s the long way.”

We went to the end of the hall, down the stairs, and back to his classroom. He walked so close I could feel his hand brush the leg of my jeans.

I dropped him off with his teacher and watched her genuine excitement when she saw the pictures he had drawn, and listened to him tell her about how Super-Strong and Cowboy Coolboy were going to save everyone from Super-Ugly, and watched him, at least for one more moment, for one Thursday afternoon, be completely reborn. She told him tomorrow he could decorate a folder to keep the comic book in. He looked back at me and smiled.

When I left, I walked up the two flights of stairs to the fourth grade room. I watched six other volunteers, each with a crowd of smiling faces around them, help fourth graders use their powers of persuasion as they wrote letters to the principal. They’re trying to get him to pick a fourth grader of the year. There was no place, no moment, no situation I would have rather been in.

The difference is tangible. I swear you can feel it. You can feel it when a kid who isn’t used to being loved is loved, you can feel your chest exploding with color and ideas and imagination and joy, and those kids are here. They’re here. They’re here. You don’t have to go to the other side of the world to find someone to give to, or help, or love. I understand how romantic, and necessary that is, but they’re here, too. You hop on your bike.

He Found the Photograph While Searching for his Silver Cufflinks

2009-03-15T16:44:00.004-04:00

He wished he could see her again, spinning in circles on the shore, arms spread wide, dancing beneath branches bleached white by salt, and sun, and time.

42 Hungers. Please add yours.

2009-03-03T22:43:00.005-05:00

Hunger
for food
for justice
Mother- hunger
hunger to be a wife
a daughter
a friend
hunger for release
hunger for God
or for there not to be one
hunger for power
money
discovery
the hunger to explore
hunger to impress a father
for a gooey chocolate chip
hunger for revenge
or at least for things to be the way they were
to be noticed
to disappear
for a strike
from fasting
for a re-do
the hunger of a baby needing to be held
hunger to get the hell out of here
to be remembered fondly
hunger for a title
hunger for a field of tall grass to run through barefoot
for Chinese- Now!
for reciprocated love
hunger for a friend's pain to be gone
the hunger of a girl on a date who doesn't like people to watch her eat
new vegetarian hunger
for someone to tell you what you want to hear
for a meaning to life
for wisdom
to be a virgin, again
for our parents to understand
and for them to get back together
post-race hunger
hunger
to be heard
taken seriously
taken care of
to be a better person
for something dead to be reborn
for attention from the ones who should care
hunger for peace

fluorescence

2009-01-05T15:09:00.001-05:00

I never sleep. The three of us have opposite schedules, and I have no walls. My loft is also their home office.

Nick bought a two-bedroom condo for him and his fiancé. Then he called off the wedding. His best friend, Geoff, moved into the spare room and they offered me the loft.
“But I hate that part of Charleston,” I said.
“I’ll only charge you $200 a month,” said Nick.
“How about this: Instead of me living there I’ll give you $200 a month, buy you a shovel, and let you beat the hell out me. It’s probably just as enjoyable.”
“Come on, man,” he pleaded. “It’s cheap. Month to month.”
“Fine.”

Geoff was in the kitchen, 11:30 pm, boiling eggs. Nick was sitting in a chair in front of his new movie-screen-size TV. I was above them, wishing for walls.
“Hey Geoff,” said Nick, “if you could go back in time, where would you go?”
“Mumble mumble mumble something or other,” said Geoff.
“Yea, that would be cool.”
Oh God, please don’t let them ask me.
“John, are you awake?”
Silence, then: “Kind of.”
“What about you? Where would you go?”
To right before you asked that stupid question so I could tell you not to. “I don’t know.” That’s my standard answer to most of Nick’s questions.

“Would you go back and not marry Caroline?”
I lay on my mattress, my mattress with no bed frame, and my dark-adjusted-eyes looked around. Is this what my life is now? A mound of clean clothes beside me, separated from the pile of dirty clothes by a shirt that I am not sure of which stack to put it in. Records are scattered on the floor.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I loved her. I probably always will.”
The blinking light on Nick’s computer was a welcome distraction.

“Yeah, I guess so,” he said, his voice coming from below, breaking my concentration. “Well, would you go back and not do whatever you did that drove her to have an affair?”
What the hell?!! My dive from the loft took Nick by surprise. I landed on him, my knee driving into his stomach, but the sound of his breath forced out was not enough. I started swinging, landing three punches before he could lift his arms. His blood on my fist was warm, thicker than I thought it would be, red, although it stained the carpet black. “Who the hell do you think you are?” I shouted. I lifted him from the chair and threw him into his TV, cracking the screen. I could tell he was confused, but I kept on beating him. “All those times you were an asshole to your ex-fiancé, was that her fault or yours?” I wanted to shout, but my fist and my feet were my voice and it felt so damn good to punch, to kick. “You still use her for a booty call, then you tell her you wish you’d never met her, and you have the nerve to ask me that?!” my knee screamed, cracking against his head. He fought back, not out of rage, but survival, grabbing the spade from the mantle and driving it into my thigh. A red stain began to grow, spreading down the leg of my jeans, I thought I smelled lemon, then gasoline, and my vision was clouded but I didn’t stop I didn’t stop I will never effing stop I kept on beating him and beating him and beating him and

“I’m trying to sleep,” I said. My voice, quiet, detached, tried to make it past the half-wall of my loft and to his chair. Nothing in my life makes any sense, I thought.

****

It’s the Wednesday night leadership meetings, the fourteen people crowded around a dining room table big enough for ten, the whowantsmoretea and the saveroomfordesert and the somebodytakehalfofthis that I miss so much. Christen cleared the table because that’s how she showed she loved, coffee orders were taken, served, sipped, cups clattering, spilling, laughter, five conversations, everyone involved in each. That was the august of my belief.

But now I’m in Charleston. Yeah, it’s nicer than Columbia. Yeah, the weather. The beach. King Street and old homes and history. Yeah. I know. But it’s taken three years to find something that compares to Wednesday night dinners, a greater cause, a family moving forward, and getting there has been a struggle. Time full of false starts and misplaced hope.

There was grad school (two attempts). I picked the top programs in the country. I scored in the 9th percentile on the math section. They weren’t impressed. There was the job where I climbed the sides of hotels and scraped old stucco off, so new stucco could be put on. Manual labor is good for the soul, I told myself in October. Only for a few months, I said in March.

****

I had coffee with some friends while visiting San Francisco a few weeks ago and they were asking all these questions about this non-profit called SideWalk Chalk I started with a friend, about how great it has been and how fast it’s taken off.

“There’s this one kid, Khari,” I told them, “but some weeks he wants it to be pronounced ‘Car-ee’ and some weeks he wants it to be ‘Ka-haree’ and then he always asks which one I think it should be. He’s definitely one of my favorites.”

“You have favorites?”

“I know, I’m not supposed to, but still. And his brother, Mate’o. I like Mate’o, too. They’re totally different. They look just alike but don’t even live together. Khari’s the sweetest kid ever it’s all yessir nosir thankyou but Mate’o has been suspended on average one day a week. He used to never do any of his work the teachers assigned him. He would never write, never do anything, then we took a photographer to the school and got her to take pictures of the kids and helped them all write stories, and put them in a book and now Mate’o is so excited and he goes home every day almost and comes back with a new stor-“

“John, your eyes are going crazy.”

“I know. They do that when I’m excited.”

I told them about the other 100 amazing kids we get to work with every week and showed them the book the kids published because I always have a copy you’d swear my hands were empty but now there’s a book in them, I know, I know, I’ve just never been prouder of anyone than I am of them.

The whole time I was talking to them I was thinking that the thing that really feels right about SideWalk, the thing I don’t like to talk about out loud for fear of ruining it, is the volunteers we get to work with and the leadership meetings, ten of us crowded around a table big enough for six, the laughter, the refills, dreams realized and celebrated. We’re a family, Christians, Athiests, it doesn’t matter.

Charles with his blackberry that has all the information on anyone that ever lived in Charleston and holycrap how does he know so many people and Trish and Amy are talking about the next fundraiser idea while Heather waits until everyone is done talking and then says one sentence that makes perfect sense and sums up everyone’s great ideas and makes it work and I look over at Nicole and Mary Alice and they’re pouring more wine there’s so much wine here so much wine here so much wine. Jana and I look at each other and smile and finally something, something, one thing, finally, makes sense.

I wondered if it will happen again. Icarus and his wings of wax.

One of my San Francisco friends asked me if I felt like I was 100% healed from all the crap I went through before I moved to Charleston. I didn’t know how to answer.

The truth is, I don’t even know what that means. Does it just mean there are no more gaping wounds, or that there are no more maudlin moments when I hear something about the friends I used to have then, or does 100% healing mean you can’t even see the scar?

****

I sold my car this year, and when I cleaned out my glove box, I found my wedding ring.

****

Fuck it. I don’t even think about her every week anymore. But I don’t want to forget, if that’s what being healed means. I don’t want it to not hurt at all when I think about Christen and Nate and my friends that dropped me, because I like the person that hurt has made me.

Most of the time.

I like that I care for the despondent and don’t just say I do. I like that I lose sleep over some kid I just met because I know his home life sucks and his father thinks he’s the second coming of Jesus. I like that a lot of the homeless here know my name and I know theirs.

I don’t like the hard time I have with church, and those that make it up, or Christianity in general. I don’t like the anxiety I get when I hear someone say, “God is blessing the work you’re doing.” I’ve heard that before.

Icarus and his wings of wax.

When I wake up in the morning and the air is cool and my covers are laying on the floor and a lump has formed in my throat because they still haven’t fixed the heat I remind myself I’m not an atheist.
I’m not an atheist. I’m not. I’m not.
It used to be all of me that believed. Some days it’s just my chest.

It’s not that I don’t want to. Really. I do. It’s just that the whole thing wears me out. The relationship that’s turned into religion, the sign up for this event and this event and this one. I’m tired of ulterior motives, of institutional agendas buried just beneath, of sycophants and the political priests that revel in their words. I’m tired of church.

I still love Jesus. But if one more person tells me to read the Shack I don’t know what I will do but I swear it will involve -- I tried. I made it halfway through but there was an adverb in the first sentence and every sentence that followed and the whole thing just seemed so kitsch why do people listen to Wynona Judd tell them what to read anyway? but if I said that something, something, some thing about the half I read didn’t make me feel like things would be alright, I would be a liar, because it did.

I want to be in that place. We all do. I know I was born with the desire for belief, with the need for a relationship with God, and the innate longing that only He can fill. It would make it a lot easier though if Christians were any different from other people.
Fingers can (should) be pointed at me too.

****

I flew home to Buffalo for Christmas. My girlfriend went with me. Our plane sat on the tarmac for 40 minutes before the return flight. Something about the baggage door coming open unexpectedly. And then there was the announcement for turbulence, the keepyourseatbeltsfastened and the thisshouldclearupsoon over the intercom. There were air pockets and the mixing of warm and cool. My girlfriend had a panic attack.

But these wings are aluminum, I thought.

****

Airplanes: No part of them is able to fly, but we make them do it anyway. None of it makes any sense to me. I just love the feeling.

****

The first girl I dated after my divorce was a pilot. Some nights I would hike up to the top of the bridge and watch the planes coming in over the city, and wait for hers. “Good pilots don’t land,” she would tell me. “They tempt the earth to rise.”

on balance

2008-09-08T13:37:00.000-04:00

A beat up truck pulled into the middle of the field in Afghanistan during half-time, and a man and woman, both blindfolded and screaming, were pushed out. Another man, holding a microphone, told the crowds watching from the stands the sins of the two prisoners. Before he finished speaking, the guards escorting the two picked up their stones. They hurled them at two faces, two backs, two chests.

The whole thing was hard to watch, really, even in a movie theater when you knew the people were actors. I glanced over at my friend Nicole. She was obviously having a difficult time, and seemed like she was trying to focus on the floor, or the seat in front of her, anything but the screen. I should probably tell you that Nicole is one of the Godliest people I know. I’m sure there’s sin in her life, just like in everyone’s, but still.

I turned to the screen again, and saw another stone being thrown. It made me feel angry at those throwing them. I mean, sure the people being stoned had done some bad things. They needed to be punished. But they didn’t deserve that. Being angry at the people throwing the stones made me feel better, like I was a more merciful person than they were. I looked back at Nicole. She wasn’t hiding from watching it anymore, but at every stone thrown I could see her flinch. Tears were coming down her cheek. Not just one or two, but she was crying.

“Are you ok?” I asked

“I’m just so glad He came. I am so glad He came.”

I spent the rest of the movie thinking about the different way we saw things. I looked at the sinners and saw their sin and wanted mercy. She looked at them and saw herself.

********

Before I wrote this, I read through the ten commandments in Exodus to see how I measured up. There were only two of them I haven’t broken. Then I remembered those were the two Jesus set a new benchmark for when he talked about anger and lust. I can’t even get one of them right, and I’ve been following God with everything I have for twelve years now.

I don’t want that. I want to live in a world where Muslims aren’t the bad guys and Christians aren’t the good guys, but we’re all just people; broken, scarred, hopeful. I want to be in a community that doesn’t bash our leaders, sacred or secular, for failing, but instead tries to help them make things better. I want to belong to a church that doesn’t just ask me to value and support their expression of mission, but values and supports mine as well.

I’m an idealist. I recognize that. Sometimes I’m glad about it. but just as often, it's frustrating. Nothing is ever perfect.

I’m trying my best.

********

I sat in my chair in the kitchen listening to my neighbors above me laughing and stomping around, and I felt disgusted at myself for my capacity to blow it, and for the way I sometimes judge others even when I think I’m being merciful, and the way I sometimes look at other’s sin and fail to see my own.

But He came. He came for me. He came for you. He came for the man and the woman kneeling in the patchy grass while stones were being thrown. He came for those that were throwing them. I am so glad He came.

on swimming, December 2005

2008-08-03T22:44:00.000-04:00

I’m not certain of anything anymore. I’m a teenage lover sitting on a bed, skin tingling, scared to death but unable to stop, not having the slightest idea of how anything works. Until now life was so simple. I was a child, a child living in a world where everything was beautiful and was made up of baseball and summer crushes and black Reebok Pumps. Life is more complicated than that now, and during honest moments I admit that I can’t handle my life. It’s a rip tide. I can feel it tightening its grip on my waist and pulling me out to sea. It’s impossible to fight.

I was laying on a couch listening to music in a house I just moved into downtown. One of my roommates, Ed, was in another room watching an episode of “Scrubs”. Joe was gone. His new girlfriend. I felt like I had to get out of there. Away from it all. Away from my friends that I didn’t even know six months ago, away from my apartment that was not my house, from my life that I still couldn’t believe was my life. I wanted to drive – to Savannah, to Charlotte, to some town I’ve never heard of – it didn’t really matter. As long as I almost ran out of gas.

I rolled the windows down and shuffled the songs on my ipod. I cried. I cried because it was too hard to cry around someone else. Too hard for me and too hard for them. I was crying because I missed my life. I was crying because I was scared. I was scared to death that my life would be all downhill from here. I’m nowhere near as brave as I pretend.

I started to scream, cursing at the top of my lungs. “Fuck you!” I yelled, slamming my wrists on the steering wheel. I didn’t even know who I was cursing. Was it Caroline? You lied to me. We were a team. We were one. You did the only thing that was the only thing that would destroy me. And I let it happen because I was naive. For two years I was ignorant. You hurt me so much and I loved you so much.

Was it Nate? I thought you were my brother! Why weren’t you there? Why did I always have to be the one to call even though I needed someone to call me, to say ‘you matter to me’, to say ‘I was thinking about you just now.’? I needed you to come over… to kidnap me even if I didn’t want to leave the house… to take me out for a movie or a game… to start a bar fight just so we could punch and be punched, just so I could have human contact.

Was it Mike? I let you be my father. My counselor. And one week after I found out about the affair you were saying ‘You need to start over. Quit mourning. Get a new job. You offered advice but never a hug, which is all a father really needs to do. You never even said ‘I’m sorry you have to go through this.’ Why was that so hard for you to say? Why was an embrace so impossible for you to give?

Is it Adam or Christen or Stacey or Catherine? You went along with them. You could have made a difference. You said I was the best leader you had ever had. That I was your friend. That I was your family. Your church! I didn’t change. My circumstances did. Where were you?

I didn’t know who it was I was cursing while I crossed over the South Carolina border. Maybe it was me. It’s your fault! You let them hurt you. You could have stopped it all by refusing to care about any of them. You could have built a shell, a shield, a moat around your life. But you didn’t, and you are to blame.

Good God, what happened? Everything was so beautiful. Everything was so, so beautiful and so perfect and we were all sitting on the porch looking down on the street below and the whole world was made of music, the palm tree was the conductor and we were laughing and her face was glowing, always glowing, and it was late so I went to get more coffee and I walked past the computer and it was on, there was a message she wrote to him and it said “I miss you. I’m thinking about you I love you, I really do” and I died that night and everything went black all the music faded and I could see me dying, watching myself disappear the world was over now it’s over everythingwassosobeautiful Good God what happened everything was soso beautiful why didn’t I die that night I should have known but I didn’t know and now I know and it kills me inside why doesn’t it kill me outside I shouldhaveknownbut I didn’t know I didn’t know why didn’t I know I shouldhaveknownbutIdidn’tknowandnowIknowandIhatethisit hurtssomuch.

Every thought was a continuation of the past, a reliving of coming to terms, an acceptance of cruel reality: this was now my life. A carousel of questions was circling my brain.

What if? What if she had confessed instead of I had discovered? What if we had never left Charleston at all? What if I drove to her house right now?

“Let’s pretend this was all just a dream. We can move to Denver, or Nebraska, or Italy. We can begin again,” I could say.

What if my high school history professor was right? “Life sucks, then you die.”

What. If. I. Drive. This. Motherfucking. Car. Off. This. Motherfucking. Road. And. Into. That. Beautiful. Beautiful. River.?

I hit the brakes hard and pulled onto the shoulder of the road. My face was drenched with my tears.

Now. Now. This has to stop now. I don’t deserve any of this.

I didn’t want to die, but I didn’t want to hurt and not feeling anything anymore would be the best feeling imaginable. I cried until there was nothing left inside.

Oh my God, this hurts so much! My hands were gripping the steering wheel as if it was the last thing holding me back from ending it all. I looked through blurry eyes into the distance, into the space just past the furthest reach of my headlights, into nothing.

That’s where I want to be.

It would be so easy to get there. I just had to drive into the river, and not get out. Just the thought of the river seemed so… so peaceful. The engine was running, the river was there, my ipod was playing.

My ipod was playing.

I could hear the chorus coming through the speakers, soft, distant.

“Don’t give up now

A break in the clouds,”

Are you kidding me? Fifteen hundred songs to choose from and it had to pick this one? I don’t want to hear this song right now.

“We could be found

Rescue is coming

Rescue is coming.”

I squeezed my eyes shut. The notes were swimming around me. I wanted to skip to the next song; then everything would be ok. Then I could get on with it. The song was like a car wreck on the other side of the freeway. An eighteen-wheeler and a Mazda. The truck had turned over and the Mazda was on fire. Bodies were under sheets.

I couldn’t quit listening. I don’t need to hear this right now. I couldn’t get away from it.

“God, I’m so scared.”

“Don’t give up now.”

“You don’t understand how much this hurts.”

“I do.”

“I didn’t deserve this.”

“You’re not perfect.”

“I didn’t say I was. But I didn’t deserve this, any of this. I didn’t deserve to be fired. I didn’t deserve divorce.”

“I know.”

“Everyone is gone. Everyone, God. Do you understand that? Not just Caroline. Everyone. Everything. My friends. My church. My job. My trust. Everything. Everyone. Someone hit a switch and everything is different. Everything is wrong.”

“Rescue is coming.”

“When? Now? That’s what I thought. Damnit! I don’t need rescue. I’m fine. I’m alone and fine and dying.”

“Don’t give up now.”

I was trembling. I put the song on repeat. I laid my seat back and I swam. I swam through chords and pain and hope and hurt and I didn’t know what to do next what do I do now? what do I do? so I just lay there with my eyes closed and I breathed. I’m breathing. I can breathe. I’m scared but I’m breathing, I can breathe, I can breathe.

on wrists slamming against backs, March 2006

2008-08-03T22:29:00.001-04:00

My phone rang, and I made up my mind not to answer it before I glanced at the caller id. As a rule, I never answer the phone. I have more numbers saved in my contacts list of people I don’t want to talk to then of people I might want to call. It’s the first line of defense, and few violators ever make it past. Even friends are usually asked to leave a message, which is something I’m not proud to admit. Still, I’m horrible at saying no and in the event that someone is calling to request an outrageous favor, I find it best to have an idea of the purpose of our upcoming conversation.

This call, however, was from Brandon, who played in the band at the church in Columbia. He is one of the few people I let through unconditionally. There are two reasons for this:

1) Brandon has only asked me for one outrageous favor and it just so happened to be the last time we spoke. This is how the conversation went:

“Brandon,” I said making the “o” a long “o” as in the word “flow” instead of a short one which is something stupid I like to do.

“Johnny John John. What are you doing tomorrow?”

Think quick, John. Make up something. It’s too soon to have to commit to anything. A nephew’s birthday, a lecture on the beginnings of Yugoslavian civilization, anything, anything. “Nothing, why?”

“Because I was wondering if I could interest you in driving to Savannah to pick me up?”

“What are you going to be doing in Savannah?”

“Train hopping.”

-Silence-

“Train hopping?” I asked. “Like hobos with a bag on the end of a stick?”

“Exactly like hobos with a bag on the end of a stick, which reminds me, I need to find a good stick… and a knife to whittle with. What do you think you’re supposed to put in the bag anyway?”

“Well, I don’t think there’s any rule. A banana? A notebook to document your worthlessness?”

“Yea, that sounds good. So, you interested?”

“Call me when you get there.” I don’t count on there being a call, as this conversation is strangely reminiscent of the time he asked if I would be interested in trying to pull off a bank heist. “Every guy secretly wants to be involved in a bank heist,” he said. He was probably right.

2) Brandon is the kind of friend you can always count on to help, as evidenced by the conversation we were about to have:

“Brandon,” I said in the previously mentioned pronunciation. “What’s shaking?”

“Quick John, I’m in a hurry and I just need a yes or no from you and we will never talk about this again. Do you have homeowner’s insurance?”

“…Yea, why?”

“Loud and clear. Later.” He hung up

Loud and clear? What the? I tried to call him back but there was no answer. No. Please God, no. Whatever is happening or about to happen can’t possibly be good. He picked up on my third try.

“Brandon!” I shouted using the normal pronunciation.

“Hey, man.”

“Please tell me nothing is happening to my house.”

“Don’t worry about it man.”

“Brandon! One more time… tell me nothing is happening to my house. I don’t want anything to happen to my house.”

“You need to make up your mind. First you tell me you have homeowner’s and then you call me back and tell me not to let anything happen to your house. Which one is it?”

“Neither… I mean both. I have insurance and I don’t want anything to happen to my house.”

“But I thought—“

“Brandon, what are you trying to do to my house?”

“I just feel like the best way to make sure you don’t get screwed is to have the house burn down and let you collect the insurance.”

“And I won’t be getting screwed when I’m being passed around prison like a peace pipe?”

“Like a what?”

“Never mind. The point is, don’t burn down my house.”

“But that’s the beautiful part… I’m not going to burn it down; the cigarette is.”

“No Brandon. No cigarette.”

“But that guy on your block last year… he fell asleep with the cigarette in his hand. Didn’t he make out like a bandit?”

“Once he got out of the hospital, but you’re missing the point. Promise me that my house will still be there tomorrow.”

“Fine, fine. Can I go in and borrow your Boondock Saints DVD?

“Yes. You can have it. You can have any of the stuff you want.”

“Good. Because I grabbed it yesterday. I was going to put it back before the house burned so you could stick that to the insurance company, too.”

“Bye Brandon.”

For some reason, I loved that guy even more after our conversation. Everybody needs a friend like that; a friend that would want to burn your house down, or take a club to the guy that messed with your daughter, or would sell his car to help you get out of debt. It’s people like Brandon that make me not give up on life. He was the only guy in Columbia that didn’t drop me when I needed friends the most.

He understood that I hated it when I had to go back to Columbia to take care of any business with the house or the divorce, and he stays with me so I don’t have to be pissed off alone. We sit on the steps outside and smoke cigars. Big cigars. The kind that could probably kill a man. We’ll share a six-pack of Newcastle. We won’t say anything, but I will have a conversation with him in my head.

“Thanks for staying here tonight.”

“No big deal.”

“But it is. It is a big deal. The biggest. It’s the Niagra Falls of deals. The Grand Canyon. You only think it’s not a big deal because you can’t see it from where I am, you’re not sitting where I am sitting, with your feet dangling over the edge, and all that energy behind you, pushing you, beating you like a million wrists slamming against your back. You being here is definitely a big deal.”

“Well, you’ve been there for me. You drove me back from the ski slopes – ten hours, through the night – that time my brother held a knife to my throat because I was breathing and he was just out of rehab, angry at the world. I just sat in the car. I was too angry to say anything.”

“You didn’t need to say anything.”

“I don’t know what to say now.”

“You don’t need to say anything now. You’re here.”

We would sit there long after the cars quit driving down my street. We would be sitting there when all of the lights in all of the homes on my block had been turned off. We would watch as young men – alone, wearing undershirts and baggy shorts – left the park, or the bar, or the river, and walked through Elmwood, crossing before our eyes as they continued down the hill, under the train trestle and towards Earlewood.

“What do you think his life is like?”

“It’s simple. Maybe complicated.”

“It’s lonely.”

We would sit there until we were ready to pass out from exhaustion; tired of following the thoughts zigzagging through our heads.

We would walk inside. Brandon would sleep downstairs on the couch in the room that used to be crowded with those who were not lonely; a family of people from different families: Adam and Nate and Christen and Stacey and Caroline and Mike and Catherine and Kris and Daniel and Jon and Jessica and Cindy and Ksenia. I would go upstairs, to the room that used to be a sanctuary. I would lie down on the bed but I wouldn’t get under the covers. It felt safer on top. I would leave a light on so that in that instant I woke up, wondering where I was, I would know that something was not right and I would not have to relive finding out for the first time all over again.

Finally, I would fall asleep. If I dreamt no dreams, or dreamt the dream where everything was over, then I would sleep until the heat from the sun came through the window that no longer had a curtain and warmed my face. If I dreamt The Dream – the one where I saw them, his hand sliding beneath her skirt, her eyes telling him it’s ok, her ring on the table beside the bed – I would wake up suddenly, rolling over to vomit into the trashcan I placed beside the bed. Then I would try to read something funny, and be thankful that Brandon was downstairs.

in Lewiston- L.W.I. assignment 2, draft 1

2008-07-13T22:43:00.000-04:00

I can’t breathe. There’s no air in this room, even with the window cracked. That last breath was probably my last, and this is where it ends, in this apartment, this bedroom, this shrine to my childhood my parents have created. There’s the game ball from a no-hitter. A plastic trophy for graduating kindergarten. A framed newspaper article with a picture of me sliding into second, spikes raised thigh-high (I dare you to tag me, I dare you), a prom photo from the only one I didn’t take her to.

The radio is on in the kitchen. I can hear the sound hurtling from the speakers, banging on my door before creeping through the space underneath, swirling around the room until, finally, it spills out the cracked window and lands in the snow three stories below.

“Just hear those sleigh bells jinglin’, ring ting tinglin’ to…”

“Christmas was yesterday!” I want to shout.

I focus on a fan blade and count its revolutions.

Four. Five. Six.

This entire apartment smells like potpourri. Pine. Maybe I should be on medication. Which one is it they give you for stuff like this? Zoloft? Lexapro? I don’t know. Maybe Lexapro. I wonder if everybody’s family stresses them out? Maybe I can go for a walk alone.

I know I shouldn’t. I only see them a few times a year. We’ll spend the day together. Sit in the living room. By the tree. Or go for a ride through western New York. You know… visit. See the sights. Buffalo. Tonowanda. Niagara Falls. Indian Casinos.

I’ll probably have to talk.

“You’re thinking of moving where” she’ll say. “That’s where “they” all live. Don’t touch anything. Try not to breathe.

My mom is still convinced you can get AIDS from drinking out of a water fountain.

Yesterday, in the car, I told them I was going to vote for Obama, just to see their reaction.

“No you’re not!”

“I think so.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah.”

I wasn’t serious. Or maybe I was. I still don’t know. I’ll vote for whoever I think lies the least. That probably means I’ll vote for the best liar.

Twenty-one. Twenty-two. Twenty-three.

When was that sliding into second picture taken? ’96? ’97? It had to be 96.

After the Obama comment I thought I should push it a little farther. Further? Farther or further?

Thirty-five. Thirty-six. Thirty-seven.

“We have a new roommate.”

“That’s good. Is he nice?”

“Yeah. Most nights he sits on the balcony and smokes a joint. He offered me one, but I said ‘no’. I think a group of us might go sky-diving next month for his birthday.”

I could hear my mother gasp and saw her grip tighten around the passenger door arm rest, and watched my father’s shoulders shaking as he tried not to laugh. She thinks I hang out with the “wrong sort of people”.

“I hang out with lots of people,” I told her.

The truth is, I’d rather hang out with a pagan that is real than a priest that tells lies. I’ve known both. Why didn’t I say that? I always think of things to say the next day.

Fifty-nine. Sixty. Sixty-one.

I shove a foot out from beneath the covers. Why do they keep it so hot in here? Even with the window cracked it’s hot. They probably can’t control it. The whole apartment’s on a timer. The heat is on at night. Off during the day. There are old people that live here. People whose children are older than my parents. People who need the heat to make it through the night.

I am the young, the strong, the youth in bloom.

My phone beeps. I sit up, press my feet into the carpet, and reach towards the nightstand.

It’s a picture message from a friend I’d like to date. She’s blowing me a kiss.

“Can’t wait to see you,” the caption reads.

Should I be getting into this? She’ll probably break my heart, like the last one.

I want to go for a walk. By myself. I want to walk in the snow and get coffee and leave the little cardboard sleeve behind so I can feel the cup radiate through my fake leather glove. I want to see my breath between sips.

But I can’t. I need to “visit”. I need to be a better son.

They’re good parents. They’re great parents. They were there “then”. They dropped off food outside my locked bedroom door “that week”, and picked up the untouched meal they left earlier. They wanted to help, would have done anything to help, would have…

They’re great parents. I need to be a better son. Show them I love them. You never know which Christmas will be the last.

They’re healthy. I think they’re healthy. They’re healthy, right?

I open the bedroom door.

To the Child We Might Have Had - L.W.I. assignment 1

2008-07-10T11:51:00.000-04:00

To the child we might have had,

You would have been a girl.

********

We were floating; rolling over waves in the blue-green Caribbean the night she told me she wanted a baby. I looked at the steeply-pitched red roofs dotting the St. Croix hillside, watched the palm trees dance in the breeze to the rhythm of the sea, then reached over and placed a hand on her suntanned belly.

“Really?” I asked. “Do you think we’re ready?”

“It seems like the right time. Good jobs, good house. If I get pregnant soon, I would have three months of summer off as soon as my maternity leave was over.”

We dried ourselves while sitting on the narrow rocky shore.

“What do you think about Willis Boykin if it’s a boy?” she asked. “We could call him Boykin.

I thought about her father, who had died five years earlier in a farming accident. It was still easy to picture him sitting in his blue chair, watching the History Channel after sharing a family meal. Boykin.

“What if it’s a girl?” I asked.

“How about Julia Claire, after your sister?”

“I like it. Or… and just hear me out… we could name her ‘The Baby to be Named Later’. She can choose her name at her Sweet Sixteen, with all her friends there, and a camera crew from a Reality Show filming.”

She pushed me backwards onto the beach and put her arms on both sides of my chest. “I know one thing,” she said. Her espresso colored hair framed her sky-blue eyes and tickled my face, and I acted like I couldn’t move. “She’ll be born more mature than you.”

We walked across the grass, still damp from a late-afternoon rain, and climbed the stairs to our room, the same room we had shared on our honeymoon. It was our fourth anniversary, and our last night on the island.

We turned off the lights.

Later that night, I sat in bed beneath the open window and watched her sleep, lying on her side, her head heavy on the pillow, hands clasped between her knees as if she were praying.

I tried to picture our daughter’s face, I know it will be a girl, I’ve always known, I’ve always known, wondering if it would be like her mothers: slightly round, tanned, with delicate ears. I fell in love with her before she existed, fell in love with the thought of her, with the anticipation of her becoming.

Julia Claire.

********

When I was a child, I sat on the edge of the green bathtub in my parents’ bathroom and watched my father’s reflection in the foggy mirror as he shaved thick cream that smelled nothing like the cool whip I assumed it to be away from his face. He was always humming, always making music as he stretched his face this way and that while swirling his razor in the sink full of water.

“How do I look?” he asked, putting the smallest bit of cream under my nose and pretending to shave it off with his finger.

We walked to the living room and sat on the couch, me in shorts and cowboy boots, him in a coat and tie with a bouquet of flowers on his lap. Soon, my mother escorted my eight-year-old sister into the room. She was wearing a white dress and stockings, black shoes, and a bow in her hair.

“Daddy, see my makeup?” she asked. “Mommy put it on me.”

“And you just look beautiful!” he said, bending down to kiss her head before giving her the flowers. “I’ll have her home by eight,” he told my mother. I watched as he put her arm in his and walked her to the car.

********

I fell asleep our anniversary night with the sound of the water playing on the shore and the touch of my wife’s warm breath mixing in my ear.

Once home, we painted one of the guest bedrooms dark blue in case we had a boy. I could stand in it and transport back to 1985, and watch myself building a fort around my wooden bunk beds using blankets, blocks, and dart guns.

Caroline painted the room next to it pink, a horrible, nauseating pink. She walked me in, with her hand over my eyes. When she uncovered them, I was swimming in Pepto-Bismol. She tried to cover her smile with her hand.

“Christen and Catherine are coming over later. We’re going to try to fix it,” she laughed.

“Maybe we’ll just have a boy.”

For twelve months, we tried to get pregnant. We paid attention to the days on the calendar, planning special dates on nights she was more likely to conceive. We bookmarked sites on the internet with conception tips. She told me, “As a sophomore in high school I lived in fear of getting pregnant. Now I’m afraid I never will.”

We tried on days neither of us wanted to.

“If we don’t try now, it might not happen this month.”

“If we start now, we might be able to watch the Simpson’s at 10”

“Maybe this is the night.”

But it wasn’t.

“Maybe we should see a doctor,” I said.

“Not yet. If it doesn’t happen next month.”

December.

January.

February.

Why can’t we just go see a doctor?

********

I wanted us to go on dates like my dad and my sister. I would treat you like a princess, and would teach you to expect the guys that would one day chase you to treat you the same. And you just look beautiful.

You would learn to be a lady, learn to be picky, learn to never settle for something that wasn’t the best.

I would have worn a suit and tie. Would have shaved, too. I think I look like I’m twelve when I shave, but if you wanted me to, I would have.

I have a Mustang. Had a Mustang. It was a ’65. We could have put the top down. Or left it up. Whatever you wanted. I know I would have kissed your cheek after I opened your door and helped you with the seatbelt, and held your hand after we took it off.

Oh my God. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I am so so sorry.

********

I thought she was scared it might be her. She had battled bulimia for eleven years. No wonder she’s scared to go to a doctor. God, what would that be like for a woman to find out that in trying to make herself into someone else’s definition of beauty she had robbed herself of the ability to make the most beautiful thing of all?

I was scared it was me.

“Maybe you ride your bike too much,” she told me.

I rode seventeen miles round trip to work each day, another fifty miles a week through the pine-covered forests of Harbison State Park. I was addicted to the feeling I got on top of a hard fought hill, to hearing the river on my left rushing over rocks, sounding like a distant train as I sped by on the off camber trail.

Maybe she was right.

I bought a special saddle- one that was guaranteed to “alleviate pressure leading to impotence.” I quit riding to work.

She didn’t get pregnant in March. Or in April.

I quit riding my bike.

********

I am so so sorry. I am so so sorry. Oh myGodIamsososorry. She sent me a text message. That’s how I found out. In a text message. I’m telling you in a letter. How could I not have known? How could I not have known she was taking the pill? How could I not have known that the only thing she wanted more than having a baby with me was not having one with him?

You would have just looked beautiful.

I love you,
Your daddy

expanse

2008-04-24T09:28:00.000-04:00

Nothing.

Empty.

Void.

but there was You

so there was everything

and for the first time

the expanse heard Your voice

You said "Become"

and it became

light.

shape.

existence.

and it was good.

You are so good.

Then You knelt.

You formed man.

You formed me.

not with words

but with hands.

tender hands

unscarred

hands that had not yet felt nails

You placed Your nose on mine

and then spoke:

"Breathe"

and I breathed You in

Your breath my very essence

You are so good.

but I fell.

sinful.

separate.

shamed.

You acted.

You came.

Stretched Your arms

past sin

past shame

into the expanse

and those unscarred hands that formed me

were pierced

You spoke:

"It is finished."

so it was

redemption.

rescue.

You are so good.

You are our Ebenezer.

because of Your blood we can shout:

"This far our God has brought us!

This much our King has done!"

He has raised us to the heights

breathed new life into cancerous lungs

breath that will never die, will never fade

but will carry an eternal voice

preceding from our mouths

and resonating throughout the heavens

every space will hear it, every wall will echo

when with all voices one we proclaim

"Holy, Holy, Holy, are You our God

Worthy is the Lamb

Your right hand is full of righteousness

and Justice is Your name."

these things, these things, we ascribe to You

the Son:

goodness and mercy, beauty and splendor

strength and power, power and peace

the Lion and the Lamb

Thank You: You pray for me

with miraculous heavenly groans

Thank You: You came for me

and called me to be Your own

Thank You for the cross. Thank You for the cross.

You are so good.

This far our God has brought us,

This much our King has done

He has raised us to the heights,

and He breathed.

We breathe You in

on August 2006

2008-02-19T09:21:00.000-05:00

It’s raining outside, sheets of rain coming down, drowning everything. I’m reading verses about peace and comfort and a future, but none of it is making any sense today.
   “My help comes from the Lord.”
   “He will not allow your foot to slip.”
   “The Lord will protect you from all evil.”
   “I will make up to you for the years the swarming locusts have eaten.”
   It’s all pretty frustrating right now.
   I saw a woman the other day and it looked like she was having to blow through a tube to propel her wheelchair down King Street. I hated that she had to live her life like that. I realize that she could be happy, and it’s very possible she has a lot of joy in her life, but even so, I was angry that she had to roll around when others got to walk. And I know that none of us deserve anything but the worst from God, but sometimes you just get tired of seeing people who have every advantage and blow it time after time after time and they still get chance after chance with seemingly no consequences for their actions; and then you look at others who have every hardship and still do right and it never works out.
   Somedays, it’s just hard to trust. Hopefully that’s ok to say. Somedays, the peace that surpasses all understanding just isn’t there, no matter how much you long for it or how much time you spend with God.
   Like the days you wake up at 3 AM and your brain immediately starts spinning with thoughts you had two hours earlier when you finally fell asleep. Or when you have to watch your child die. Or when someone’s not perfect, but they’re perfect for you, and even so, the best- or only- way you get to love them is to let them go. Or you lose your job.
   Then what?
   I once asked my friend Greg if it was possible to love but not trust. He asked me what I meant. I told him Jesus said, “If you love me, you will obey me,” and I was obeying Him in every way I could think of, but I just wasn’t really able to trust that “The Lord guards my going out and my coming in”, or that He wanted me to have life in all it’s fullness.
   “I mean, it hasn’t been days, or weeks, that I’ve been beaten down. It’s been years."
   Greg told me that it sounded to him like I was trusting God with my actions, even if I couldn’t trust with my brain during that time, and that that was a good thing, that acting in trust even when all the evidence says you shouldn't sounded a lot like faith. I guess that made me feel a little better. If he had said “His timing is not ours”, or “God won’t let you deal with more than you can handle”, or one of those lines I probably wouldn’t have wanted to talk to him for a while.
   I guess the questions I’m wondering are some of the most universal: When will it be my time? When will then be now? When will--
   I flipped over to Habakkuk and read the whole book. It’s pretty short, and full of hope. He was asking the same questions we all do. When I finished reading, I drank the last bit of tea and watched the rain fall straight down. I usually like the rain. Sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I get tired of thinking.

**********

   The rain has stopped, and I need to escape. I throw my mountain bike on my rack and drive off, leaving my house, leaving my memory behind. Thirty minutes later I’m riding down a trail. It’s hot out here. God it is hot, but I soak it in. I need it. I need every bit of humidity in the air, need to feel like I’m breathing underwater. I’m amphibious. I’m an amphibian and I’m in the woods and I’m underwater.
   Every one of you should see me ride my mountain bike. I can go so fast you wouldn’t believe your eyes. My calves are like pistons the way they pump up and down; they’re a blur, they’re like the drawing with the bird on one side and the cage on the other and if you spin it fast enough the bird looks like it is in the cage, but I’m not a bird I’m a beast and my bike is my freedom and my calves and the bike blur into one.
   You should see me go so fast. I can bomb down a hill like you wouldn’t believe, my arms gripping the handlebars and vibrating while the bike tries to throw me, but I am my bike, it’s a part of me, and I can pedal that effer into the ground- and when I reach the bottom of the hill I will climb right back up to the top of the other side. I can climb like a goat, like a goat being chased by a bullet, and it would take your breath away to see because you would swear I was going the same speed as I was when I was going downhill- no, faster, “He’s going even faster, my God, he’s going so fast!” you would say and you’d be right because I would be at the top before your eyes even made it to the top, and I would breathe in so deep, just to feel my lungs expand inside my chest.

I can ride through the woods and bend my bike around trees growing so close together it’s like my bike is made of rubber. I can go over anything, things other riders dismount and carry their bikes over, rocks the size of a Volkswagen. I can ride up it, almost vertical- you’d swear my bike was vertical- and down the other side without any hesitation, or I could pedal hard and blast through that effer like my bike was a bulldozer.
I can ride so fast and I can ride so slow, so slow you’d swear I was a statue- still, lifeless, made of concrete- and I stand there with my pedals horizontal and my body balanced perfectly and stare unblinking at the setting sun and it is so amazing- my muscles are itching, ready to explode into movement and energy and the wheels of my bike are pleading with me, begging me to let them roll so fast, so fast they would leave the trail and swim through the humid air, leaving everything behind- all of the lies and pain and heartbreak- and finally, finally, when they have begged enough I give my permission and my piston calves pump again and we are flying, all hot and sweaty with dried mud caked onto legs and arms and face and frame and I love it, love every last moment of it because I am alive and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop me or slow me down or hurt me because I’m invincible, unbreakable, shatterproof, and I am alive, breathing and sweating and living and moving and you tried to stop me, tried your damndest, but you failed, you will always fail and I will always win because I already have won, don’t you see that? can’t you see that? why don’t you see that? I already have won. I forgive you. I forgive you. I am forgiven. I am free. I am the righteous, I am the wicked, I am the rain- renewable, resilient.

on rescue

2008-01-28T12:58:00.002-05:00

My friend Amy asked me how I could love a God that let so much pain and heartache come my way. I told her I needed to think about that for a while.
********
I spent May of 2006 in New York City, and while I was there, I wanted to run away from God. It felt like He had abandoned me, and honestly, I was ready to be done with Him.
Most days, I would go into Washington Square and watch the NYU students sing songs with a hat on the ground in front of them. There was one kid that was there every day in the early afternoon, with curly black hair sticking out under a fedora, and I would watch him dance to a jazz trio playing just beside the fountain. I watched him swing his arms and shuffle his feet as cotton candy clouds swam across a perfect blue sky, and felt like he was speaking to me, whispering, pleading with me: “Let go of everything.”
I couldn’t do it.
I realized that none of the people who were closest to me ten months earlier had any idea where I was, or what was going on in my life. It was the loneliest I had felt all year, in the center of the world, surrounded by strangers. A man walked past me, towards the dog park, and I wanted to grab his arm and tell him everything. I thought he would tell me he was sorry, and somehow that would make me feel less alone. I saw a guy selling pretzels and my mind flashed back to a conversation I had once with my friend Nathan, when he told me the thing he remembered the most about a trip he had taken to Germany was the size of the pretzels they sold there.
“They’re not like the ones here,” he said, “they’re bigger, much, much bigger! You should see the size of the pretzels there!” I smiled, for a moment, when I remembered how excited he was, but it made me feel angry.
I thought about Caroline, and remembered a dream I had a few weeks earlier; she had thrown me a surprise birthday party – the way she did every year – and all of my friends were sitting on my second story porch telling me everything that happened must have been a horrible dream, and I was still their friend. We spent the night laughing and drinking coffee and eating ice cream and everyone felt like they were exactly where they were supposed to be, and everything in life made sense.
I wanted to walk away, to forget about being a pastor, or even a Christian. What I really wanted was a new identity. I imagined how good it would feel to commit the most horrific sins I could think of, to live in a place of complete depravity.
There was a surfer kid from Sweden, Daniel, staying in the same hostel with me. He had been traveling around the world for a year, going to all the famous spots, buying a board, and selling it when he left. The night before he was leaving New York to go back home we went to a bar on MacDougal Street.
The place was packed. We spent the first thirty minutes standing in the middle of the crowd when a booth finally opened up. We were drinking our second pint when these two girls asked if they could share out table. I don’t remember their names. They were both Rutger's grad students, and had just taken their final exams. The girl that sat next to Daniel was a tall Indian girl, wearing the shortest skirt I had ever seen. When she sat down, Daniel put his arm around her, pulling her close. He ordered a round of drinks.
The Yankees were playing the Red Sox, and every pitch, half the people in the bar would curse the TV. I could feel the bass from the house music thumping through my body.
The girl sitting next to me kept leaning over and speaking into my ear. I liked the way it felt when her hair brushed against my cheek, blonde and curly, and the way her breath tickled my ear, like the smallest little feather.
Daniel and the girl sitting next to him were oblivious to us. I could see, just over the edge of the table, that her leg was draped across his. I wanted to feel the girl next to me, to reach down and put my hand on her leg, to feel her hand on mine. My mind was racing with thoughts about what the night could lead to, and the promise of feeling a connection, even if it was fake. I decided that if I had the chance, I would go back with her, across the Hudson.
She said something I couldn’t quite hear. I looked at her, confused, and she leaned in closer.
“I’m going outside for a cigarette. Save my seat… or you could just come out with me.”
Before I could answer, she slid out of the booth and walked out of the bar.
Daniel looked up long enough to nod his approval and then looked back at the girl beside him. I grabbed my backpack, left some money on the table, and began to fight my way through the crowd.
I knew what I should do, and what I wanted to do, and the tension between the two left me dizzy. When I walked outside, I saw her off to the right with her back to me, smoking.
I wish I could say it was my integrity alone, or my morals, that made me turn left and walk away, but really, I just wanted to go scream at God for a while.
I went inside my favorite coffee shop on MacDougal, found a table in the corner, and started to journal.
It took me a few minutes, looking at the page, but eventually I was able to write down some of the thoughts going on inside me. I wrote about feeling abandoned and alone, about being twenty-six and scared my life was over, about how sad it was when your life ends before you die. Before long, I was no longer writing to me, but to God:
“How long is this going to last? I can’t take the loneliness anymore. I want to quit hurting so bad. I want to feel hope again. I want to feel like there’s people who miss me. I want to feel like I have a home, not just a place to live. Everything about me seems insignificant. How long is this going to last God? What the hell is going on? Are you even there? Do you remember who I am? You said you were close to the brokenhearted. You said that! Is that a lie, too? Just words on a page? This is it… this is the breaking point for me… because what this world is flaunting looks so good right now, like a distraction, like a drug to numb me. This is it. I can’t keep fighting. I’m hanging on to you with a thread too thin to see.”
The more I wrote, the faster the words started pouring out. Angry words. Pleading words. I couldn’t keep up with my pen. It was a release, a thousand threatening clouds letting go of their floods.
The strange thing was, in the midst of my anger and my cursing and my rage I began to feel less alone, not all at once, but as if someone I had been waiting on had finally walked into the room…
“I want you, God, but I’m afraid I’m about to settle for something less”
…and sat down at my table, watching me write…
"I hate this! I hate this! God what is going on with my life?"
…and smiled at me. I kept writing, and eventually, it felt like I was sitting with a long lost friend, one who I thought had forgotten me, one I didn’t quite know how to talk to, and when I was finally able to look at Him I could see a single tear of understanding escaping from His eye, and in that tear was all the pain and hurt and hope that the world had ever known, or ever would know, and when the tear left His face and fell on my page I could hear it, I could feel it deep inside me, and I swear it was the most transcendental experience of my life, and it was as if His hand wrapped around mine and He began to write:
"Now you can see me. Now you can rest."
I have never felt more connected to anyone or anything and after sitting there for minutes, hours, days, I started to walk back to the Subway just off of 4th and as I walked down the cool, dirty streets I walked with a friend and somehow I knew He was proud of me. I don’t know how I knew it but I knew it all the same, and I knew He wasn’t proud of me because I did the right thing or resisted the wrong thing, none of that seemed to matter, it didn’t matter, it didn’t matter, He was proud of me because I was longing for something only He could give. He was proud of me because I was His.
********
I told Amy I loved God because I spent the night with Him once, and it was the greatest night of my life.

on good people and paralytics

2008-01-21T11:11:00.000-05:00

So I've been thinking about a story I read in one of the accounts of the life of Jesus. It's the one where He is teaching in somebody's house, and the place is packed, and there's a noise coming from above and everyone looks up, shielding their eyes from the debris beginning to fall, and then the daylight is bursting through a massive hole in the roof and the backlit faces of four men can just be made out as they peer down at the crowd. The four guys on the roof didn't look too long; they were seeing if the hole they had torn in the stranger's roof would be big enough, and when they were satisfied, sure that it would be, they tied some rope to the four corners of a mat and lowered their paralyzed friend to the floor, right next to Jesus, and they waited to see what would happen.
When I read the story, I could feel the tension growing, could choke on the dust in the air and hear some of the religious leaders shouting, their voices adding to the chaos of it all, and see the crowd about to boil over and in the midst of it all there's a man laying on a mat.
This is one of the stories in scripture I have a hard time with.
I was talking about it one morning with my friend Greg. Greg was on the team that launched the Hubble Space Telescope, but he has trouble finding his way around our zip code. Even so, Greg can somehow listen to someone talk about big issues in their life, find his way to the core of what is being said, and ask the questions that point the person in the right direction.
"I can't figure this paralyzed guy out," I told him. I wrapped my hands around the warm mug of coffee and looked at my reflection in his sunglasses. "Everyone else in the story is doing exactly what I would do if I were them. The friends are trying to help the helpless. Jesus is looking for the greater truth in the situation and offering it as a teaching moment. The crowds are making noise. But then there's the guy on the mat."
"What's so hard about the guy on the mat?" he asked.
"I just don't know if I could do it; I mean lay there and let people carry me."
He leaned back in his chair and crossed his hands behind his head. "Do you think that's a pride issue for you?"
I wanted to tell him, "No, it wasn't," and that I didn't have an ego and I thought of others more than I thought of myself and I hung out with homeless people and all that stuff, but something inside me told me I should just shut up and at least entertain the thought that I had a problem with pride.
I wondered if the man had been left paralyzed after a tragic accident at work, or if he had been born that way, and now his limbs were contorted from decades of muscles in atrophy. In the end, I decided that it didn't matter; it's always hard to be carried.
Greg said we all have some sickness and disease that can leave us helpless and if we want to be healed we have to let others help. I confessed that that was hard for me, because the disease I struggle with is individualism. "I haven't always been like that," I told him, "but somewhere along the way some wires inside me got crossed and I learned the best way to not be abused was to avoid." I'm certainly not alone in that.
He reassured me that a part of that was healthy, that if someone has a reputation of being a gossip you shouldn't confide in them, and if someone has a track record of lying you shouldn't trust them. "The problem," he said "is if you write everybody off because you're scared they will hurt you, or because they have hurt you before, then pretty soon you're left with no one to carry your mat and no way to be healed."
We talked some more; about people needing to be carried, about how I sometimes put up walls, and how I could be intentional about having that sickness in me healed. After we finished talking I went to the park near my house and started to journal some of my thoughts. I wrote about how I craved community, but still distanced myself from the people I could have it with. I wrote that I wanted to quit being someone that put up walls, and if I truly wanted that I would have to be intentional about inviting people to be a part of that process. I wondered if I even had four friends I trusted, or, even less likely, four people in my life I hadn't alienated myself from.
The beautiful thing about that time in the park was that, when I started to think of people in my life, I was able to identify four friends easily.
There's Brandon; the only guy in Columbia to stick by me, to stand by my side and say "This isn't right," when I was fired because my wife had an affair. He would rage with me when I felt like screaming, he would do ninety down the highway throwing bottles at signs and watching them explode and then sit silently on my porch while we smoked and asked ourselves, "Why?"
We ride, and crash, motorcycles. We go climbing, and camping. We drink Guinness. He told me once that things were going to get better, and i could hear in his voice that he wanted it to be true.
There's Petey. I thought about how he never knows what to say, and how that frustrates him, but I'm fine with him just being there.
A few years before all "the bad stuff" happened, Petey and I went on a road trip. Six cities in two and a half days, or something absurd like that. I can't remember if we slept or not. I do remember if you took all the words we said to each other during the trip it would probably be less than the words in this paragraph. That trip- the driving, the baseball game, the absence of unneeded words, was one of my favorite memories. There could never be a person who cares more about others than Petey.
There's Heather Peebles. You would not believe the crush I once had on her. One night, at a rec league softball game, I ran back from shortstop to make a tough play on a ball blooped over my head. I dove just as my roommate came charging in from center field. My head hit his knee.
When I regained consciousness, several of my teammates- all doctors- were standing over me.
"John, what day is it?" they asked.
"Heather Peebles," I said. I couldn't understand why they were all laughing.
"How many fingers am I holding up?"
"Heather Peebles."
A few weeks later, Heather and I were sitting on a dock, pretending it was warmer than it was. I could tell she was cold, shivering even, and i knew we should go inside. Before we left, I worked up the courage to ask her if I could take her on a date. She shot me down. It turned out I was seen more like a brother, and we were doomed to life as friends.
She is an amazing friend. She constantly tells me how my life is an encouragement to her, and how she's so proud to have me as one of her friends, and for some reason, when she tells me things like that, I believe her.
She can say things that are hard to hear with such love it's impossible to think she has anything but my best on her mind.
There's my high school friend, D.A., who I reconnected with after moving back to Charleston. He's the definition of a persistent friend. D.A. refuses to let me put up walls, and he does it by telling me everything going on in his life, the good things and the bad, all the triumphs and all the sin. We will sit at a bar, or on the pier down by the Battery, and talk about the messiness of life, and when we're done, none of our problems are solved, but we feel less alone.
There's others, too. Trey and Theresa and Sarah. Liz, Drew, Kate, Nicole. I could list more. The point is, I would do anything to help any one of them, but it's hard for me to ask the same from them.
That day at the park I decided that that was stupid of me. All of them would love to carry me if I needed it, and they wouldn't feel like they were doing me a favor, they would feel like they were being my friend.
I decided I would let them carry me, let them help me break down the walls I've built up. Heather told me that she was glad for that, and that if I didn't let them, I'm not being fair to them because it was something they would benefit from as well.
Sometimes, paralyses is forced on you; you're abandoned, abused, lied to, dumped, or fired. It's hard to get over. Sometimes, you're born with it. There's something innate that keeps you from being whole.
Sometimes, you can feel that change is coming, you can feel it in your chest, as if at any moment your atrophied muscles and forgotten limbs are going to explode into motion, and all you can do is lay there, still, and full of hope.

on self-worth and cigarettes

2008-01-10T12:33:00.000-05:00

"Draw what it feels like when you're not able to write," Amy told me. 
"Do what? 
"Just draw it. It can be whatever you want. I'm going to the restroom." 
She was trying to help me overcome my "writer's block". I stared at my pint glass, almost empty, before taking the last sip. There were dollar bills with people's names, or football teams, or hometowns written on them, stapled to the walls and ceiling. A man sat down two stools to my left and asked the bartender how many were up there. I rolled my eyes and imagined being the bartender, vowing to break a bottle the next time someone asked me that. 
"Thousands," he said. "We've never actually counted. 
I drew a stick figure with out-turned pockets, and his hands held up as if to say, "Nothing". I drew a dollar sign over his head. 
"You feel poor?" Amy asked, returning from the bathroom. She raised her glass to her lips and I could smell the soap on her hands. 
"Worthless," I said. "Most people define their worth by the amount of money they have. I guess sometimes I define mine by my ability to express myself." 
"Because if you can write it, you can control it?"      I looked at her face, but couldn’t hold her gaze.
"I've got to go," I said. "I'll call you later." I paid for our drinks and walked down Vendue, turned left on East Bay and went towards the Battery.

  **************  

I remember learning to pray in Sunday School when I was five or six. My class met in something called the FamilyLifeCenter - which was the church word for gymnasium - in the room next to the coke machine. Our room had concrete walls, brown carpet that wasn't soft, and a chalk board. Three doors down was where they kept the roller skates with dirty orange wheels that were off limits except on Wednesday nights.      Our teacher told us that we could ask God for anything, because He was always listening. 
"What are some things you would ask God for?" she asked us. 
"To keep my family safe," one kid said. 
"To help me not get in trouble," said someone else. 
She wrote everything we said on the chalkboard, and put our names beside what we were praying for. When it was my turn I told her I couldn't think of anything right now, and she told me that was okay. 
"Now," she said, once the chalkboard was full, "let's get in a circle and ask God for these things. 
We grabbed our folding, light brown metal chairs and put them in a circle. 
"Who would like to go first?" she asked? 
I raised my hand. 
"You don't even have anything to pray for," my best friend, Travis, told me. 
"So what," I said. 
"That's fine," our teacher told me. "John can go first, then Travis, and then we will keep going around the circle." She told us to close our eyes. 
I sat there for seconds, minutes, days, unable to think of anything to say. All I knew was I didn't want Travis to have anything to pray for, either, so I finally prayed for his prayer request.  We were all holding hands, so when I was done I squeezed his hand, because that's how our teacher told us to let the person next to us know it was their turn. He looked at me with his eyes wide open, shaking his head. He didn't say anything. After a few seconds I started praying again; this time asking God for everything else on the chalkboard. 
I prayed for Melissa's cat, who was older than her, and who was sick and might have to go to kitty heaven. I prayed for some new kid, David, who lived with his grandmother and had to wear an eye patch because a mosquito had somehow bitten him on the eyeball - I asked God to please not let him have to wear glasses when the eye patch came off. I prayed for Will, that he wouldn't be in trouble anymore for pulling his pants down in daycare and showing everyone his "he-he". Everyone laughed and the teacher told them to keep their eyes closed and be quiet. When I was done with the things on the chalkboard, I prayed for our teacher, that she would have a good day, and then I said "A man". We all opened our eyes and class was over.
My Sunday School teacher told my parents that I was such a good young man, and that I was more worried for everyone else than I was for myself, and told them how I prayed for everyone in class that day. I remember how good it felt when my mom said, "I know he is," and my dad laughed a little bit and put his heavy hand on my head.

  ************  

I walked around the Battery for over an hour that night, watching the red and green lights of boats passing each other on the silent water. I thought about my stick figure, and writer's-block, and how worthless I felt. I thought about everything bad that had happened over the past year and a half.
I had caught my wife with another man. She left me to be with him. The church I had started fired me when I told them about it. My friends abandoned me. I lost my house, and most of my savings account.
I lost who I was. 
That night, I grew tired of thinking about myself. 
What am I doing? What a stupid thing to believe... that my worth and my identity is dependant on my ability to fill a page with words…
or my job as a pastor…
or a house with a palm tree…
or someone else’s commitment to me.
If Christians are right, that God really did become a man, and if I believe that, shouldn't I feel worthy just because Jesus said I was worth dying for? Is there anything more defining than that?
At some point in my life, I really did start thinking about others more than myself. Why was I letting what happened in Columbia make me spend so much time thinking about myself?  
I worked my way back down East Bay Street. It was Friday night, and the sidewalks were filled with shaggy-haired guys and girls in heels walking in and out of bars. 
I saw a man I had met a few weeks earlier named Leroy sitting on a concrete step outside a tobacco shop. Leroy is in his fifties, tall, powerful, with a voice like Barry White's. He doesn't have a home. His wife threw him out- I'm not sure why. He also doesn't have a job. He was sick for a while, he says, but "I'm getting a construction job on Kiawah Island. The boss say's he'll pick me up for work in the morning and start me out at $10.50 an hour."  I don’t know if this is true or not. 
People usually walk by Leroy, looking the other way so they won't have to feel guilty when they tell him they have nothing to give. Sometimes I do, too. 
That night, I saw Leroy the way God saw him. I didn’t look down on him, or want to help him out of pity. That night, I saw Leroy as the son of a King, named by God.
I asked him if he wanted to go eat some chocolate cake. I don't like cake, and I'm sure there are things homeless men need a lot more than chocolate, but it just felt right.
"You know I do," he said, his smile full of dirty teeth. 
We went to a coffee house; I ordered a piece of cake and coffee, Leroy got cake, a piece of apple pie, and hot chocolate. 
"And don't forget the whipped cream," he told the girl behind the counter. 
We sat at a table beside the window, $27 worth of pointless calories in front of us, and talked about nothing. We laughed for an hour; at stupid things we had done, at people tripping on the uneven sidewalk outside, at how bad of a dancer this woman was who was moving her body to the Damien Rice cover a guy was playing on his guitar. 
"I'm the epitome of a white boy who can't dance," I told him, "and even I think she's bad." 
We left the coffee house and walked back to the tobacco shop I had seen him outside of earlier. He sat back down on his step, like it was his La-Z-Boy, and the street was his television.  
"I'll be right back," I said, disappearing inside. 
I came back with a pack of the same cigarettes I had seen him smoking weeks before. He took one, and I told him to keep the rest. We sat for a while. Neither of us said anything. I remember thinking it was the most fun I had had in a long time.
Before I left, I reached across and patted his knee, as if we had been sitting on those steps and looking at that street since we were kids; lifelong friends with mortgages already paid. Then I put my hand, now heavier than my father's, on his shoulder. 
"I had fun tonight, Leroy. Be looking out for me... let's do this again soon." 
I got up, wondering if he thought it was weird that I had touched his knee. Maybe it was, but I once read that babies can die if they aren’t touched enough… it had something to do with not knowing who they were. Maybe it happens to the homeless, too. Maybe it happens to all of us. 

“God fashioned man out of dirt from the ground, and blew into his nostrils the breath of life. The man came alive – a living soul!”
Genesis 2:7

After the Trencher

2007-09-09T09:04:00.000-04:00

My favorite part was after the trencher, once it's loud, vibrating blade finished digging through the earth, and we began to lay the pipes. After the trencher, the world was silent. Even when we were working in a yard like the one that day, near the overpass, things seemed quiet.

This was our third sprinkler installation. Nathan and I worked together at the church I started a year-and-a-half earlier. I hired him to lead the band. Kind of hired him- we paid him $500 a month, when we could. In that year we had become closer than brothers- two introverted kids in their early twenties standing on a stage each week in front of a growing crowd, both of us clueless about what we were doing.

It was his idea to start installing sprinkler systems. We could both use the money.

"We can make three, four hundred dollars apiece for a few days work," he had told me.

It was less like a few days work and more like paid vacation. This world was so different from ours. Our days were spent with lofty ideas, with late night strategy meetings in coffee houses full of couches and indie kids wearing scarves and wool hats. Our days were filled with noise; with music my God there is always music, always noise.

These days were our antonym. There was something pure about looking forward to a beer, about using PVC pipe, tobacco, and swear words, about dirt beneath our fingernails and sweaty shirts laid out on the driveway. These days seemed... these days seemed... sacred.

Out here there was nothing fashionable. There was no music, no iPods. Out here, after the trencher, our soundtrack was a shovel sliding into earth, an axe against a root, and, occasionally, one of our mouths giving voice to a long-internalized thought.

"This root is so damn stubborn" wasn't idle talk, it was a declaration of good finally triumphing over evil when the last fiber would snap. "How about a gatorade?" didn't just ask if a similar thirst was shared, but asked, "Can we just sit for a moment, just be still, just be?"

So when he said, "John, there's something I've been wanting to tell you," I knew it was a statement that divided time.

My knuckles, cut from scraping against gravel, whitened around the twisting pipe.

"Ok," I said, staring at the dirt beneath my knees.

"I got offered a job at a church in Charleston."

Staring at the dirt beneath my knees.

"Ok," I said. But I need you here, Nate. Not because you lead the band, not because I'm your boss, not because of the church. None of that matters, it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter.

"They offered me $45,000 a year. And benefits."

Staring at the dirt beneath my knees.

I need you here because you're my brother. I nodded my head. Out here, in this sacred place, it didn't seem right to express fear. Or tears. I didn't say anything, couldn't say anything, but in the seconds that passed, calendars changed. A.D., with all its hope and peace and joy walked into an empty tomb, wrapped itself in sheets, and fell asleep. I was staring at the dirt beneath my knees.

I twisted my wrists and the two ends of the pipe creaked to life. I turned my head towards Nathan. He had quit working. He was smiling, watching the worry inside express itself on my face.

"I told them 'Hell, no.' Told them I already had a church. Told them I believed in what we were doing here. Told them I believed in you." He dropped his eyes back to the trench, to the pipe that was almost finished.

"You bastard. Why would you tell me all that?"

"Well I can't just say I love you."

********

Later that afternoon, as we filled in the trenches, burying the pipe, lightning streaked across the sky.

"Looks like we're going to get wet."

I followed his gaze, past the lifeless trencher, above the graffiti-covered overpass, and to the darkening sky with its flood-heavy clouds. When we finished, we could sit in the grass and listen to the splashing as the downpour made us new. I looked down at the shovel, at the rust colored dirt, at the veins in my forearms, and felt the salt slip into my eyes.