Uncle John

Growing up, I think all my dad's male family members (who were older than him) had been in the military at one time or another. My memory is somewhat sparse so it plays out probably more as a caricature of who they were than as they existed.

There was an Uncle Joe (my dad's uncle) who fought in the Korean War. He rolled his own cigarettes. I vaguely remembering him saying that there were so many Chinese that they fought against in that war that bodies would pile up to the point that they would actually have to readjust their machine guns to shoot over the bodies that were there. He also said something along the lines that the North Koreans and Chinese would actually send people into battle without weapons and that when the people who did have weapons would fall in battle, those without would just pick up where they dropped off (meaning that there were some Chinese and N Koreans with weapons). Uncle Joe is dead - I remember how angry my dad was in how they buried him (his words - in a small pine box).

Uncle Bobby was older (my dad's brother-in-law) but I'm not sure that he actually served. I'm not sure that he didn't either. He still lives in Atlanta and I should probably call him about this. Uncle Bobby doesn't smoke.

There was an uncle Johnny - uncle Johnny only had one eye. As a small child (like under 5) he was very scary. There's not much I remember about him except that I think he rolled his own cigarettes too. He was also one of my dad's uncles. He was a Shannon (my granny's maiden name), as was uncle Joe.

This post, however, is not really about any of them. This is about John Wayne. I used to think that John Wayne was a distant relative of

ours, or a really good friend of my dad's. Part of this might be due to the fact that if the television was on (especially during the weekend and even more so after we got basic cable) we were watching a western.

My daddy's favorite westerns seemed to star John Wayne.

To me, he kind of resembled my dad (which might be another reason for the association). To some degree, I believed that all men knew how to handle a gun, had a southern / western accent, used brill cream and served in the military or was a cowboy (or both). The distance between then and now is great. I know how to handle a gun, but that's where the similarities end. Most people tell me that I don't really have an accent (being their words and not mine, I wonder if most of them think that my accent is in fact nondescript or if there is a geography that it might belong to). I don't use brill cream, but I do sometimes use pomade, wax or gel. I was never in the military. I own a cowboy hat and I've worked in a couple of fields but I've never roped a calf (though... I've known a people who have worked some rodeos).

The distance doesn't end there though. There's the realization that maybe manhood wasn't about that - but that whatever it is, I still don't measure up (and don't know a lot of people who might). There's the reality that all my dad's uncles, my dad... and John Wayne... are all dead. There's the reality that everything uncle John (Wayne) did was an act.

He did it to make money.

He did it to make movies.

He did it to make believe.

Strange that even when looking at an image of a somewhat type-cast multi-personalitied western idol... I still think of lazy summer afternoons in Alabama. I think of sweet tea in mason jars that would sweat just as much as we did, but taste and feel like a little bit of heaven on earth. I think of falling asleep in a t-shirt and a my tighty whiteys while my back was against my daddy's (he would normally wear the same thing). I remember afternoons that never seemed to end as they were inundated with black and white pixels intermixed with commercials for local tire stores and national brands. I remember humidity so thick that it was hard to breath and afternoons that were so hot that we all thought we would combust. I think of my dads menthol flavored Benson & Hedges and how their smoke would waft around the room - how it went in through his mouth, found its way through his lungs and then back out from where it came.

Honestly... this makes me want to rent a few westerns to fall asleep to.

When I Used to Write

When I was in the sixth grade, I fell in love with writing.

Unfortunately, that love affair (as a compulsive and ever-present desire) only lasted through my sophomore year of college. Every now and again, there would be glimpses of that love again - but nothing as it was before. Now, most of my writing tends to be somewhat "journalistic" as opposed to "creative," or "poetic." Most of what I write now has been condensed to one line (or one sentence...or one run-on sentence) about what my current "status," is. Or, more tritely, a one line zinger about your status.

But...I want to fall in love again.

What got me interested [in writing] in the first place was the fact that a teacher in a class I had (it was called ACE - but I never knew what it stood for; when I lived in Huntsville, it was called SPACE) really encouraged me to write. He encourage our whole class to write.

And to think.
And to dream.

It was one of the first times that I felt like the things that I could produce had the potential to be special - even if it was only to me. We produced a literary journal to sell to our other middle-schooled classmates.

As you might imagine, these were pretty hot commodities.

But, as I've already stated, what made this so much of a formative thing for me was the fact that my life was no longer ruled so much by what I could learn or experience by means of math and science nor was life so much about what I could gather from reading another's prose or poetry. Life meant that I could create with words (as opposed to LEGO's, or tinker toys, or plastic model pieces with plastic cement) and that I could manifest a world that was simultaneously other and familiar.

His name was Mr. Craft (I think his first name may have been "Bart," or "Barthlomew"...). He is one of teachers in my life who has really stood out - someone who helped me to sort of shake the snow globe that is my life and realize that there isn't just another side to the globe, but that there's a world outside of it too.

So if you've kept up - part of this experiment is as much about remembering who I once was as it is about telling you about who I am and who I want to be.

New Year...

It is 2:33AM.

I am baking bread.

It is the new year.

The night is more still than what I'm used to. Probably because it is now 2:34AM.

There is an occasional car that drives down one of the main streets. For some reason...none of the mufflers here seem to work too well.

At midnight, there were fireworks. I was mixing dough.

It is in the stillness that I can hear the clock ticking. My heart is beating. There is a low hum coming from the fan that Laura turns on to produce white noise when we're asleep.

And still...an occasional car.

Have I ever talked to you about my idea of the relative nature of time? I've talked to Laura a lot about it. This minute now is the fastest minute I've ever experienced, but it's not the fastest minute I'll ever experience within the breadth of all of time.

More importantly... does the shortness of this minute matter any more or less than the span of the minutes preceding or following this point in time?

In terms of time...no.

In terms of substance? Maybe.

I look at our Christmas tree. It's been up for nearly a month. This is something I've thought about for a while now, but just haven't found the time to write it out (until I decided to finish making bread at 2:43AM). That is, this Christmas tree is carrying the weight of sadness from the past. There are relics and ghosts who call out only to find themselves locked behind glass or lamps or plastic or yarn. They show the burden of years and bear memories whose depths are more than may be measured.

2010. Bread.

Thoughtless...

Tonight is one of those rarities where I just can't sleep.

We had dinner with a great many new friends in our new city from the church we've been a part of since we've been here [today = 5 months...I think]. In part, this was a celebration of the fruitfulness of a couple, and the fruitfulness of God's people. This couple had basically invited everyone who had brought them dinner after their giving birth of a new son. Needless to say, there were quite a few people there [hospitality is not patently Southern].

Fruitfulness is a wonderful thing. It is also a wonderfully scary thing. I imagine, however, when our first child comes along there will be a mix of emotion much to what I'm feeling tonight. I imagine that our child [our = me and La] will be a lot like I am; that literally scares me on more levels than you know [and I am not "just saying" this...] Part of what scares me is remembering how I reacted when taken to a grave site growing up.

That is, with indifference.

It was not with a flagrant disregard or in abject disrespect - it's just that I didn't know the person in the grave. I couldn't relate to who they were. I didn't have late night conversations with them, I never sat back and drank sweet tea on a hot Southern summer's afternoon with them, I never shot pool with them, nor did I play Scrabble on the living room floor with them.

But I did with my dad.

And so I think about taking my children to his grave in Huntsville, AL and how they'll react. What will they be thinking? I doubt that they'll have much of a thought of what life would have been with him - I never did [in regard to visiting the graves of people I never knew]. I don't ever think of life with my mom's parents, right [I had never met either of them before they passed]? Thinking about it the other way around - he'll never get to hold them in his lap and tell them about how goofy I was when I was their age. He'll never get cherish them, to see them grow, to see them change, or to be loved by them.

A lot of what I hoped for when he was still alive was that when I had a family, that he would get to see a different kind of faith being lived out than what he was accustomed to [being generally skeptical of "Chrsitians" altogether]. I literally used to dream about what it would be like to pray with my children in his house - how something like that might grip his heart [as none of our conversations re: Christ ever seemed to].

And now, all of that is...impossible.
And now, I rarely even pray with my own wife except for meals.

That aside, when I am in Huntsville, I rarely visit his grave. Being at his grave once was enough. His bones are there, his casket, a concrete vault, a suit [he only wore it twice in public that I know of - my wedding and his own funeral - he said it was what he'd be buried in], and a headstone paid in part by the US Government [your tax dollars at work in memory of a Vietnam Vet] are all there.

There are no memories there.

It is an unfamiliar place...a literally lifeless place. It was a place that he'd only been to once and was never able to leave. It was the last place I saw his body, but not the last place that I saw him. And if I were to ever take my children there, they might remark about the trees, the landscaped lawns, the pond down the hill, but not about how life was with him; they'll never know that life or his.

Tonight is one of those rarities where I can't sleep - even after being surrounded by new friends, after enjoying good food and drink... even in bed with my own wife... as the loneliness of death is weighing upon my own heart.

I was once a bully...

I grew up in a kind of rough neighborhood in Huntsville. It wasn't the worst, but it was not the best by a long shot. I never knew it, but I kind of remember my dad saying something about not really liking living in Huntsville after we moved out to the burbs. There was an apartment complex nearby called Jackson Square - my parents never wanted me or my sister to go there. Part of their fear [and I kid you not] was the fact that mostly black people lived there. Part of their fear, too, was the drug dealing that was going on there. Part of their fear was the violence.

To be honest, I didn't hang at Jackson Square much. I just didn't have any interest.

I did, however, hang out with the kids who lived behind me a lot. We used to always pick on this kid named Donald. I was a real jerk to him. Every now and again we would just beat on him - looking back, I can't even understand why we would put a child through so much hellish brutality or why that same child would just keep coming back for more.

The "ringleader," so to speak, was a guy named Ron. Ron was pretty indiscriminate with his blows though. I think I probably received the hardest hit from him of us all in more ways than one. I remember that he was once so mad at me that he just walked up to me and hit me in my face [really, on my chin] and then he just walked away.

There was a time when I seemed to simply thrive off of violence - whether dealt or endured. When we moved out to the burbs, however, all that seemed to change [kind of]. I wasn't as much of a jerk as I was before. To be honest... a lot of that changed when I moved from elementary to middle school. I had changed from a neighborhood bully to a band geek.

I know God's forgiven me for all that crap that I put other people through, and I'd like to think that he could give me the ability to forgive others in the same fashion. In college, I remember being overcome with conviction so much to the point that I hand wrote a letter to Donald - a letter apologizing for what I did to him. He wrote me back. He said he forgave me. He said that the whole neighborhood had changed during the decade that I was gone. He said that Ron became a Christian and that everyone was better. He talked about how good everything was now.

That was nice, but I'm not sure I believe him.
Just like the bully - always right in his own.

My wife and I were talking one day about her artwork. She is incorporating a lot of people, events and artifacts from her past in this piece she's working on now. We discussed how we are the sum of our experiences and how who we are now communicates who we were. The Christian is more than the sum of his own [or her own] experiences though. What makes a Christian is not so much this one experience with a God who swears He was once a man, but a hope of an experience that can come all at once or never in our lifetime that has it's roots in another experience that happened all at once so long ago. Even in a world that doesn't acknowledge God, there is a sense that we are more than the mere sum of our experiences.

When I loved violence as a child, I didn't necessarily love it because I experienced it. I observed it. I had knowledge of it. But I didn't experience it first hand. Is knowledge the same as experience? I would think no. I watched westerns and war movies with my dad - he had experience with violence as a soldier. He would tell me stories of some of the actors - how this man had fought in this war and what was significant about this move and the heroes portrayed. Those were men and times who were familiar with the experience of violence. So, when I inflicted violence upon others, was it necessarily because I had experienced violence?

No.

It may be hard to follow - but we are more than what we can see. We are more than what we are doing, or what we have done. A similar thought came over me last night as I was walking through a local K-Mart [yeah, they still have those here]. I looked at all the people wearing red vests. I thought about how they drone about. Then I started to wonder where they live. I wondered if the corporate heads tried to make them seem inhuman by making them dress in uniform. I wondered if there was a more devious motivation to all of it. I digress. Here again, these are more than the sum of what they do. They are more than the sum of their experience.

In a way, I guess we are a sum of all of human experience in a non-reincarnate way. As a Christian, I believe that part of who I am is built upon the experience of Adam in the garden in his disobedience. As a Christian, I believe that who I have become and who I am becoming is built upon the experience of Christ in the garden in his prayer of obedience.

So...sorry for going from entertainment to deep thoughts. Caught me by surprise too.