tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-57388055705625468492024-02-18T05:50:32.187-08:00Standing by WordsRandom reflections on writing, literature, and life from a Christian University professor.Gary Tandyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17494570091459554195noreply@blogger.comBlogger46125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5738805570562546849.post-40949935852251501872020-08-09T08:06:00.017-07:002020-08-09T09:50:23.044-07:00On Teaching Myth and Fantasy Literature in a time of Pandemic and Black Lives Matter<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgp_KFDWTAAXo8ZT_Sky3z3QEDNhQ9sMQdJRj-DOmvCeueH2KgX6uNb873mHM4FzT4djzd92_TxVJDl4vl8_4YfLOBEROf9-ovLhLR2h5WVU5LfOhNg-Ovm0EL9CGCx7-OL_dtRe8qdR0/s768/lord_rings_2001_69_-_h_2017.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px;"><img border="0" data-original-height="433" data-original-width="768" height="390" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgp_KFDWTAAXo8ZT_Sky3z3QEDNhQ9sMQdJRj-DOmvCeueH2KgX6uNb873mHM4FzT4djzd92_TxVJDl4vl8_4YfLOBEROf9-ovLhLR2h5WVU5LfOhNg-Ovm0EL9CGCx7-OL_dtRe8qdR0/w699-h390/lord_rings_2001_69_-_h_2017.jpg" width="699" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>For the past few summers, I've taught an online version of a literature and philosophy course focusing on the fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. The philosophical readings include Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, and John Stuart Mill. The course is designed to help general education students think about how philosophers and literary artists pursue truth, increase their skills in literary interpretation, and formulate or evaluate their own ethical frameworks for decision making. <br /></div><div><br /></div><div>This summer the course had a different feel, mostly because of the strange situation my students and I found ourselves in. The class began in June, after most of the students had experienced the March quarantine/lock down due to COVID-19. They had had to leave campus and return home to complete their spring semester through remote learning. And before the course began, there was the killing of George Floyd and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests in cities across the nation and the world, including in Portland, Oregon, about a thirty minute drive from George Fox University.</div><div><br /></div><div>Entering the course, I admit to entertaining some doubts about the reading list. I wondered if our time might be better spent reading literature of authors of color and the philosophers of civil disobedience. Or maybe some medieval and renaissance texts dealing with plagues and pandemics. But the students already had their books, and the philosophical readings were mandated by the liberal arts director, so I had no choice but to forge ahead. What I did resolve to do is to pay attention as a I re-read these familiar books for material that could be applied to current events. Perhaps there were messages in these books that might offer guidance for our troubled times. <br /></div><div><br /></div><div>And it turns out there were--messages, that is. Often the students made these connections themselves and talked about them in their online discussion posts. In the video lectures, I tried to draw out and highlight some of the points of connection I saw. Herewith I offer reflections on some of the values of reading older, non-realistic literature and philosophy--even in these tumultuous times.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>The value of escape</b></div><div>"Why should a man be scorned, if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home," Tolkien writes in his long essay "On Fairy Stories." The essay is essentially an apology (defense) of the writing and reading of fantasy literature, and Tolkien lays out four elements that he sees as fundamental to fantasy. This quote comes from the section on Escape, where Tolkien confronts the popular misconception that fantasy literature is mere escapism. For Tolkien, escape is not a negative term. And who can argue with his analogy in these times when we find ourselves trapped in prisons of our own making: greed, selfishness, and materialism. And in societal prisons of economic and health crises, prisons of environmental degradation and prisons of inequality and injustice. Of course, most of my students in the 18-25 age range don't need much convincing on this point. Not only have they grown up in a post 9/11 world and in a society where school shootings have become all too routine, most already are predisposed to love fantasy--whether it comes in the form of literature or movies or video games. For Tolkien, however, escape into the fantastic world led to another one of his four elements: Recovery. In the fantasy world, Tolkien believed, we could regain a clear view. We could "see things as we are meant to see them"--as things apart from ourselves. During the pandemic many have noted their renewed appreciation for the simple pleasures of food and drink, nature, and times of meditation and have talked about having a greater understanding of the truly fundamental and essential elements of life. As Tolkien notes, "It was in fairy stories that I first divined the potency of the words and the wonder of things, such as stone and wood and iron, trees and grass, house and fire, bread and wine."<br /></div><div><br /></div><div><b>The value of love</b></div><div>In the course, we read Aristotle's thoughts on the importance of friendship, and we read C. S. Lewis's <i>The Four Loves.</i> A couple of years ago, I started sharing with my students in this class a definition of love from a fellow C. S. Lewis scholar, Jason Lepojarvi. Jason's doctoral dissertation is entitled "God is Love, but Love is not God," and his definition stems from his reading of Lewis and Augustine. This time, I shared Jason's definition with them while we were reading Lewis's <i>Till We Have Faces</i>, a mythic novel that features a female heroine who loves fiercely but whose love is revealed as the novel progresses to be a selfish, possessive, and even devouring love. The definition goes like this:</div><div><br /></div><div></div><blockquote><div>"Love is an appreciative and responsive commitment to the other's flourishing insofar as possible and permissible." <br /></div><div></div></blockquote><div><br /></div><div>I share with students several aspects I like about this definition:</div><div><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>It views love as an act of the will, not of the emotions (though to appreciate someone would involve emotions)</li><li>It places the focus on the other, not on the lover's needs or desires</li><li>It is comprehensive, encompassing many types of love: from affection, to friendship, to romantic love. It also applies equally to non-humans, to how we treat animals and the environment. For example, a pet owner who neglects to feed or take his dog to the vet is obviously not committed to his dog's flourishing!</li><li>It is aspirational. Like Paul's discourse on love in I Cor 13, it sets a high standard that I fail to reach daily. Yet think of what my life and relationships would look like if I were able to meet this standard--even some of the time.</li></ol></div><div style="text-align: left;">While thinking deeply about the nature of love is always warranted, it seems particularly relevant now as quarantined family members have been spending more time at home together and as people of privilege think about the flourishing (or not) of their siblings of color. I find the discussion especially important for college students, many of whom are in the process of forming lifetime relationships. I hope that through reading about Orual in Lewis's novel they will become more aware of what love is not. It is not selfish; it is not possessive; it is not controlling. I warn them that if they find themselves in a relationship with someone who is controlling and manipulative, they should run the other way!<br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><b>The value of anti-racism</b></div><div>One of the important legacies of the Black Lives Matter movement will be the recognition, on the part of the white and the privileged, that it is not enough not to be a racist; we must be actively anti-racist. We must confront systemic racism, and we must proactively identify and seek to eradicate racism wherever we find it. While the works and life of a white British professor of Old English Literature might seem an unlikely place to find literary support for anti-racism, I believe it is there, and I make a special effort to point it out to my students. I direct them to two pieces of evidence, one literary and one biographical.</div><div><br /></div><div>For the literary evidence, consider Book II, Chapter 6 of <i>The Fellowship of the Ring</i>. The company wants to pass through the elvish land of Lorien. The elves are fine with this for most of the group including the men, elf, and the hobbits, but not for the lone dwarf. Haldir refers to the longstanding enmity between the elves and the dwarves, notes that dwarves are not allowed in elvish lands, and states that Gimli must be blindfolded and led through the forests of Lorien. Aragorn objects vigorously to this plan and notes that it is "hard on the dwarf" to be singled out. His solution to the problem is that all the members of the group should be blindfolded. "The company shall all fare alike," says Aragorn, in contemporary terms a great statement of solidarity. It's easy to see parallels between this event and traveling baseball teams during the days of segregation in the U.S. who said if the black members of the team were not welcome to stay at a hotel or eat in a restaurant, the team would look elsewhere for food and lodging. This is one of my favorite moments in the book, and it's even more interesting that Haldir blames the Dark Lord for the estrangement that divides the races and cultures of the dwarves and elves.</div><div><br /></div><div>For the biographical evidence and proof that the Lothlorien chapter reflects Tolkien's own views, I share a letter that Tolkien wrote to a German publisher who, before bringing out a German translation of <i>The Hobbit,</i> wanted to confirm that Tolkien was of Aryan descent. Tolkien wrote two replies, the less civil of which included these lines:</div><div><br /></div><div><blockquote>If I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people. . . . I have been accustomed . . . to regard my German name with pride, and continued to do so throughout the period of the late regrettable war, in which I served in the English army. I cannot, however, forbear to comment that if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this sort are to become the rule in matters of literature, then the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride.</blockquote>Clearly Tolkien had no time or patience for simple racism and was not afraid to call it out and denounce it in the strongest terms when he saw it, whether in a letter to a publisher or a fictional setting in his secondary world of Middle Earth. And the Lothlorien chapter becomes even more poignant given Tolkien's own statement that he thought of the Dwarves "like Jews, at once native and alien in their habitations." <br /><b><br /></b></div><div><b>The value of hope</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div>To return to Tolkien's essay, the final element of the fairy story is Consolation. Tolkien associates this with the happy ending, which he sees as essential to the form. He introduces his own created word, "euchatastrophe," to describe this literary phenomenon. Tolkien notes that often in fantasy tales the characters find themselves in perilous situations where all hope seems lost. But then a sudden, joyous turn occurs. It's easy to think of multiple plot points in <i>The Hobbit</i> and <i>The Lord of the Rings</i> that qualify as euchatastrophic moments, such as Gandalf or Tom Bombadill showing up at just the right time to save the hobbits or the dwarves.</div><div><br /></div><div>Significantly, Tolkien uses theological terminology to label this feature of the fantasy story: "eucha," from "eucharist," and he makes his intention clear as he connects the concept to the biblical story. The greatest story of all, the story of salvation, according to Tolkien, is euchatastrophic. For Tolkien, the chief euchatastrophic events in the gospel story are Jesus's incarnation and his resurrection. At just the right time, the son of God entered the world to dwell among us, and at just the right time, God raised Jesus from the dead. It's hard to imagine a more euchatastrophic biblical text than Romans 5:6: "For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly." Some translations have "powerless," which connects even more closely with the events in the novels.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div>So what does Tolkien's literary theory of fantasy have to do with us, as we face a pandemic that has killed 150,000 Americans and as protests continue nightly in major American cities asking for justice for people of color? Perhaps it reminds us that it's no good ignoring or denying that suffering and sorrow exist in the world. Tolkien is clear that just because fantasy stories have happy endings doesn't mean they don't have their share of sorrow and suffering. In fact, we could argue that for a large percentage of the novels the characters are living with hardship and suffering and that the heroes in his stories are those who use the virtue of courage to face hardship and suffering to make the world a better place. And as a result of enduring suffering, those heroes develop character, which sound very much like Paul's statement in Romans 5: "suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope." Finally, I can't think of a time in my own lifetime (unless it would be following the terrorist attack of 9/11) where, individually or collectively, we've been in more desperate need of hope. <br /></div><div><br /></div><div><b>The value of viewing life as a journey<br /></b></div><div><br /></div><div>At the Council of Elrond in Book II of <i>The Fellowship of the Ring</i>, after much discussion, Frodo agrees to be the one to bear the ring to the fires of Mount Doom. His words are significant:</div><div><br /></div><div><blockquote>I will take the Ring, though I do not know the way.</blockquote><div>At this point, I introduce students to a philosophical concept from <i>Christians Among the Virtues</i>, by Stanley Hauerwas and Charles Pinches. While reviewing Aristotle's ideas about the development of virtues through practice and habit, the authors raise the question of whether life is best viewed as a trip or a journey. They make the following contrasts between the two: When we are going on a trip, we know well where we are going; we know roughly how long it will take to get there; and we know what preparations to make. But when we are going on a journey, we often have only a hazy idea of where we are going; we don't know how long it will take; and we may not know fully how to prepare.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div>
<p style="direction: ltr; language: en-US; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-top: 0pt; mso-line-break-override: none; punctuation-wrap: hanging; text-align: left; text-indent: 0in; unicode-bidi: embed; word-break: normal;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Calibri;"></span></span></p></div><div>Hauerwas and Pinches use the metaphor to explain why it is important for us to develop the virtues. If our life consists of a series of trips, we have little need of the virtues, but if our life is a journey, with many twists and turns and visions and revisions, we have the utmost need of virtues like courage and perseverance and hope. <br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Haurewas and Pinches point out that in life we make some of our biggest commitments without knowing exactly where those commitments will lead us. Marriage is a good example. When I made a promise to my wife 45 years ago at a wedding ceremony in Tulsa, OK, neither I nor she could have predicted where our journey together would lead: where we would live, how many children, if any, we would have, what jobs we would pursue, how long we would live--the lists goes on. I ask the students about their decision to commit to a college for their education. As they look back on the one or two or three years they've been at the university, most readily admit that they had no idea what they were getting into! And even if they remain happy with their choice of a college, as most seem to be, they can all talk about unexpected events that have occurred since they enrolled: changed majors, new relationships, trials and tribulations, etc. <br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Frodo's decision to bear the ring is a great example of a commitment that will lead to a journey, not a trip. Frodo knows where he is going (Mordor), but as he indicates, in a larger and more significant sense, he has no idea of how he will get there or what will be demanded of him along the way: "I do not know the way." As the Hebrew writer says of Abraham, when he was called, he set out, "not knowing where he was going" (Hebrews 11:8). After this discussion, when I ask my students how they would want to describe their own lives, to a person, they choose to describe their life, not as a trip, but as a journey. <br /></div><div><br /></div><div>The journey theme is featured in the "Walking Song," which Frodo learned from Bilbo and which he sings in Sam's presence early in the novel:</div><div><br /></div></div><blockquote><div>The Road goes ever on and on</div><div>Down from the door where it began.</div><div>Now far ahead the Road has gone,</div><div>And I must follow, if I can.</div><div><br /></div><div>Pursuing it with weary feet,</div><div>Until it joins some larger way,</div><div>Where many paths and errands meet,</div><div>And whither then? I cannot say.</div></blockquote><div>Ultimately this is one of the main takeaways I hope my students carry with them after reading the philosophers and the works of Lewis and Tolkien. Our life is a journey. We can choose to stay safe and secure in our hobbit hole or take the risk of stepping onto the road. If we do, it will be our faith and our virtues that will sustain us on the way. Only these can give us the courage to say, like Frodo, "I will take the ring, though I do not know the way." It is just such courage we need in these perilous times.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div> <br /></div><div></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Gary Tandyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17494570091459554195noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5738805570562546849.post-71836301505081898542020-02-29T14:59:00.001-08:002020-03-08T08:00:34.737-07:00My First Best Friend<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQTu15A9NwtKphg1E5IZ56DK8wv4XKwQvWTJNZT0ofFn26sN5W6fVe46IYLz7V0h9h4sWzp369xvfh-q46h3bVQ77bYk8aSyEhz208W3Xiqyv27Ssx891P16tQdd2H-o99eiOHiBZWurQ/s1600/Dave+and+Me.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="240" data-original-width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQTu15A9NwtKphg1E5IZ56DK8wv4XKwQvWTJNZT0ofFn26sN5W6fVe46IYLz7V0h9h4sWzp369xvfh-q46h3bVQ77bYk8aSyEhz208W3Xiqyv27Ssx891P16tQdd2H-o99eiOHiBZWurQ/s1600/Dave+and+Me.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A photo from my birthday party in elementary school. Dave is on the left; I'm in the middle. Notice the matching white muscle shirts!</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
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A few weeks ago I learned that my childhood friend, David,
died on January 9, 2020, after a long battle with <span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">multiple myeloma. He
was a man of many talents and was an accomplished attorney and mover and shaker
in Washington, D.C. (see video, below). But to me he will always be my first best friend.</span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Anne Lamott says that anyone who has
survived childhood has enough material to write about for the rest of their
lives. I suggest a key criterion for surviving childhood is having a best
friend. It would be impossible to overstate the importance. That first
connection outside our immediate family with someone who gets us, someone who
shares our interests, someone who makes us laugh, someone we can talk with about
anything, share secrets with, and ask the questions we are too embarrassed
to ask our parents <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>likely goes a long
way toward establishing our healthy self image and giving us a model and
comparison for all of the friends we will make in the future.</span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">For C. S. Lewis, it was Arthur Greeves,
a boy of the same age in his Belfast neighborhood, who invited teenage Jack
over for a visit on one of his holidays from boarding school. On that first
meeting the two discovered their mutual love of reading—especially stories
about Norse mythology—and music, and they would maintain a lifelong
correspondence and friendship in spite of their differences (e.g., Arthur was
gay; Lewis was not).</span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Clive Staples Lewis had an unusual
first and middle name, which is likely why he declared at the age of 3 that he
wanted to be called Jacksie (later shortened to Jack). My first best friend
also had an unusual name, but it was his last name, Tittsworth, that would lead
to endless teasing by his classmates in elementary and junior high school and
would cause him as a college student to consider legally changing his name.
(Reportedly, when he approached his dad with the idea, George Tittsworth asked,
what’s wrong with the name David?)</span></div>
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Dave and I met as members of the 4<sup>th</sup> grade class
at Black Elementary in Wichita, Kansas. We had been selected for the class as
part of an initiative to provide a unique learning environment for “gifted”
students. The class size was small, and the instruction was designed to interest
students who, based on their test scores, were, presumably, ready for a greater
academic challenge than was offered in their regular elementary school classes.
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Of course, I wasn’t seeking, at the age of 10, greater
academic challenges. All I really cared about was whether the teachers were
nice and what the other kids in the class were like. The main change I noticed initially
was that my mom had to drive me to school and pick me up each day. Before that,
I had gone to my neighborhood school and I walked to and from school. </div>
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I liked the other students in my new school though I only
remember a few of them today. I remember Eugene Gilden, an extremely outgoing
fellow, who greeted me on the first day of class with a hearty “Hi, I’m Eugene.
Welcome to Black Elementary!” I remember Brian Slabosky, who had a sizeable gap
between his two front teeth that allowed him to perform impressive tricks at
the water fountain, much to our amusement. And I remember David Tittsworth. He
and I hit it off immediately and were soon spending afternoons after school at
each other’s houses. </div>
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Dave lived in the Riverside neighborhood, about three miles
from my house in the Indian Hills neighborhood of Wichita. Dave’s mom would
have passed our house when driving her son to and from school at Black
Elementary. Our moms had the thankless task of chauffeuring us back and forth
between each other’s houses. </div>
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C. S. Lewis suggests that friendship has to be about
something—some common interest that causes two acquaintances to become friends.
What did Dave and I have in common—besides being two boys in the same small
elementary school class? First, sports. I had fallen in love with basketball
early. I don’t know if Dave had before we met, but I remember we spent lots of
hours refining our jump shots on the hoop that my dad had installed at the edge
of our garage roof at the 13<sup>th</sup> street house. The long driveway
provided ample room for us to practice, not only layups and mid-range shots,
but what would have been three pointers, had the three-point shot actually
existed in those days. When the Kansas winter set in, we moved to the
basement of our house where we could play ping pong or pool. We spent most of
our time at the pool table. My Uncle Jim had managed to find a couple of sturdy,
slate pool tables in a bar/pool hall that was closing down in a rural
Kansas town and had purchased one for himself and one for my dad. Moving the
heavy slate and solid wood table down the long, narrow steps to our basement
was a complicated operation, but, once accomplished, I thought I was the
luckiest boy on earth to have a such an entertainment oasis at my disposal. </div>
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I loved playing pool with my dad, but he was a busy man. Five
days a week he was a junior high English teacher; on weekends he was the preacher for the Northside Church of Christ. So Dave became my
consistent pool playing partner. </div>
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Two boys with lively imaginations, however, can only play so
many games of 8 Ball before boredom sets in. So Dave and I would invent new
games—games that used the equipment of the table but were unrecognizable to any
player of traditional pool or billiards. The game I remember most we called
“Lag.” It worked like this: The pool balls were divided equally between the two
of us, and we would engage in a series of lag challenges. A lag in pool is when
the player strikes the ball from one end of the table to the opposite end. The
ball strikes the bumper and returns the length of the table. The goal is have
the ball come to rest as close as possible to the bumper nearest where the
player struck the ball originally. Some players use the lag contest at the
beginning of a game to determine who shoots first. </div>
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The wrinkle in our invented game was that lagging became the
game itself. Now that probably sounds like a boring game, but there’s more.
Dave and I had created names for each of our pool balls. Over time, each ball
became a team member—a character with a name, a nationality, a back story—all
of which would be narrated with great detail and seriousness before and during
each lag contest. We even created a poster with a color-coded key showing each
team member and including some significant stats about them. While I can’t
remember the specific stories we narrated about our team members, I do know the
game provided us with hours of fun and laughter.</div>
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As I write about the Lag game my friend and I invented, I’m
struck by its nerdiness. It also indicates the relative affluence and privilege
we both held as members of the white middle class. We obviously had a lot of
free time on our hands. Our parents were not asking us to do chores after
school, for example. However, another game Dave and I invented to pass the time
is embarrassing to remember. It was a game we only played once, but because it
was connected to a historically significant event, it’s one neither Dave nor I
could ever forget. I can even attach a date to this game: November 22, 1963,
the date President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. As I recall, our teacher
had announced to our class that the President had been shot and that we would
have an early release from school as a result. David came to my house, and we
were in the basement when one of us came up with idea for a new game called
“Shoot the President.” I know, it’s horrible, but, in our defense, we were 10
years old and did not grasp the seriousness of the moment.<br />
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I recently recalled
this event when reading Sandra Cisneros’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
House on Mango Street </i>with my freshman class. Cisneros tells the story of a
sickly aunt who was confined to her bed and who she and her siblings and
friends would sometimes visit and help. Cisneros relates how when she and her
friends would play pretend, she would imitate her aunt’s awkward movements. The
other children would laugh, and Cisneros confesses to enjoying their laughter.
She also confesses how bad she felt when she gained enough maturity to
recognize how cruel and insensitive their pretend games were. In one of our
last email exchanges before my friend’s death, we recalled our twisted game
from childhood. Ironically, Dave went on to have a distinguished career in
government and politics in Washington, D. C., so he told me there were few
people with whom he could share the story. Probably better that it remained our
secret—at least until now.</div>
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Besides our love for playing and watching sports, another
common bond that Dave and I shared was that we came from families where church
was central to our home life. Dave and his family were members of the Methodist Church, and his father, as I recall, was the music minister and choir
director. Like my dad, Dave's father worked two jobs: in addition to his
church work, he was a State Farm insurance agent. My family were members of the
Northside Church of Christ where my dad was the preaching minister. As
mentioned above, my dad’s other job was as a junior high English teacher. </div>
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I think this similarity between our family priorities was
significant for our relationship. In our younger years as friends, it provided
some shared boundaries of behavior that no doubt made our parents feel good
about the two of us spending time together. As we moved into our teenage years,
we shared the experiences of testing some of those boundaries as we
experimented with smoking and drinking—practices that would have been
prohibited in each of our households. Finally, I’m sure both of us felt the
added burden of being sons of church leaders. In those days it was not uncommon
for church leader parents to put added pressure on their children to be “extra
good” so as to be role models for the other kids at church. Of course, that
same pressure often backfired with certain kids—thus, the experimentation
mentioned above!</div>
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Though Dave and I attended different churches, one event
from our high school years stands out. It was one of the only times we
participated in a Christian gathering together. Dave’s Methodist church hosted an
evening Young Life event where teens from many different churches (or no
church) would gather to eat pizza, sing, and hear a speaker. Dave was asked to lead the
singing part of the gathering, and at some point he invited me to join him in
that. We would play our guitars and lead the group in singing Christian
songs—not hymns, but more folky singalong, camp type songs. Dave was an
accomplished musician but more on the piano than the guitar. He had only
recently taken up the guitar. I had been playing guitar since fourth grade, but
I was pretty introverted and shy in those days, so it was a big step for me to
be on stage in front of a hundred or so peers. I’m sure I would not have been
able to do it without my friend to encourage me.<br />
<br />
There was another way in which
these events called me to step outside my comfort zone. My church sang only a
cappella in its worship services. No musical instruments were allowed in the
sanctuary in the tradition I grew up in. So I’m sure at the time it was
something of a shock to my parents that I was singing Christian songs in a
church to guitar accompaniment. To their credit, they did not forbid it—and
even came to one of the events at my invitation and, as I recall, never said
anything critical or negative about it. It was lots of fun. Dave was a ham,
who always loved to be in front of an audience while I was a wannabe ham. I was
scared to death the entire time but still enjoyed the experience. The only song
I remember from those singalongs was one Dave and I invented called the “Romp-Stomp
Medley.” We strung several bouncy Christian songs together (one, I think, was
“This World is Not My Home/I’m just a passin’ through”) and that was our big
finale. </div>
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Music would continue to be a shared interest that drew us
together. We listened to albums together and would often try to work out our favorite
songs on our guitars. In the summer before our senior year of high school, Dave
began hanging out with a kid named Matt Mitchell. Matt was funny, quirky, and
highly intelligent. Initially, the friendship was primarily between Dave and
Matt but eventually Dave invited me and we became a threesome. We spent many
evenings at Matt’s house, where I was amazed to find that Matt was allowed to
smoke in his room, his parents obviously being much more open-minded than Dave’s
and mine. Matt introduced me to lots of great music, and he also introduced me
to Lark cigarettes, which I began to smoke occasionally and furtively during my
last year of high school Many evenings of my senior year were spent in Matt’s
room, listening to music, playing music, and singing. Matt was super creative,
as was Dave, and the two of them composed their own graduation song (“Oh, we
hate, hate, hate to graduate/When we leave, we’ll feel bereaved” etc.). <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I would go on to have some great musical
experiences and meet other good friends, but for sheer fun and camaraderie, I
don’t think anything eclipsed those evenings of music with Dave and Matt.</div>
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Today as I look back some fifty years, it’s difficult to
pinpoint the times when Dave and I would both have said we were best friends.
Our closeness tended to wax and wane. For sure, during the period of time when
we were in 4th through the 6th grades, I think we both would have used the best
friends label. When we moved on to the more expansive junior high population at
John Marshall Junior High, things changed. While Dave and I continued to hang
out and still visited each other’s houses, we both met new friends at our new
school. Dave was more outgoing than I and made friends more easily. I tended to
be shy and quiet and was probably much less widely known at the school. We both
made the 8<sup>th</sup> grade basketball team, but Dave also made the 7<sup>th</sup>
and 9<sup>th</sup> grade teams. Dave, with his musical talents, participated
in music and theatre, which I did not, so I’m sure he met a whole new set of
friends there. I would say in Junior High we probably moved from best friends to
good friends status. In high school, we maintained our friendship and still
were often together outside of school, but we were not together constantly as
we had been in elementary school. In our senior year, however, because of our
friendship with Matt, I probably spent more time outside of school with Dave
than I had at any time since elementary school. </div>
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Dave and I also played on the tennis team together. North
High was a large public school, at the top of the sports classification system
in Wichita, and while basketball remained our favorite sport, Dave and I both
found the competition for spots on the basketball team too fierce. So we opted
for tennis. North High had a terrible tennis team, led by the Driver’s Education
instructor, who knew absolutely nothing about coaching tennis. However, for me
it was the easiest path to achieving a letter in sports and obtaining the
coveted red leather letter jacket that helped one achieve a certain status
among one’s high school peers. Tennis, however, was still a good experience.
Though our team was terrible and lost most of our matches, we had fun at
practice and enjoyed making fun of our coach behind his back. I was the sixth
man on the six-man squad. I can’t remember where Dave fell, but I know he was
ahead of me. </div>
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Both tennis and basketball illustrated a dynamic in our friendship. Dave’s family did not place much emphasis on sports while mine
did. My dad had introduced me early on to several sports, including basketball,
golf, and tennis. If I remember correctly, Dave had not played any of these sports
much until he met me. So I think of myself as introducing him to basketball and
tennis. The other reality was that Dave was a more gifted athlete than me, so
in both cases, after being introduced to the sport, he would quickly excel me
in that sport. This was a reality I had to learn to accept because no matter
how much I practiced, I was never able to match my friend in these sports. </div>
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When it came time to move on to college, Dave chose Oral
Roberts University in Tulsa, while I chose Oklahoma Christian University in
Oklahoma City. One of my strongest memories of my early years in college was
how much I missed my high school friends, Dave and Matt. I remember writing a
poem in my sophomore year where I compared my friends to trees
and bewailed the fact that they were growing without me. Dave and I did stay in
touch during our freshman years, and we even visited each other once or twice
at college. After my freshman year, I returned to Wichita, worked a summer job,
and resumed hanging out with Dave and Matt. Dave only completed one year at ORU
before returning to Wichita and enrolling in Wichita State University. Dave and
I were both English majors. I stayed all four years at Oklahoma Christian.
Throughout the college years, our interactions were less frequent, but we
always stayed in touch and every time I visited Wichita one of my first
priorities was to see him. However, since after my freshman year, I never lived
in Wichita again, opportunities to hang out were less frequent. I did attend Dave's wedding and played a Bob Dylan song at it. David went on to the
University of Kansas Law School. I married Janet and moved to Knoxville,
Tennessee, to begin graduate school in English, and at that point we began to
lose touch. </div>
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And so from the time we were around 22 years old until our
late fifties, Dave and I had very little contact. I would hear bits and pieces
about his life in Washington, D. C., as an attorney who was becoming
influential in politics and government but these snippets often came from his
mom running into my mom at the grocery store or the mall and sharing stories
about their kids. I continued to cherish memories of my best friend, but we had
each moved on to very different lives in very different parts of the country.</div>
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Then about seven years ago, Dave and I reconnected—first on
Facebook and then through a series of email exchanges where I learned about his
diagnosis of multiple myeloma. Interestingly enough while we talked about his
health challenges and what our lives were like currently, we talked mostly
about the old days and how much we loved growing up as friends in Wichita. We
recounted our favorite memories and laughed about them. At times we would
remind each other of events the other had forgotten, thus having the pleasure of
re-remembering and reliving those days. I will cherish those communications
forever because there’s nothing like a best friend. </div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
Here’s something strange: a couple of days before getting
news of David’s death, I had mentioned to Janet that I had been thinking about
him a lot lately. Over the Christmas break, I had gone back to rescue some old
emails from my inbox, which is when I discovered a long email string between
Dave and me when we reconnected after I learned of his health problems. </div>
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I had been mulling over the possibility of doing a road trip
to visit some of my friends from the past, including Dave. Janet said I must
have sensed something about his condition since he was so much on my mind. And
this is true. Though I had thought about other old friends—like Roger and
Richard—it was Dave that was on my mind most. They say parents often sense when
their children are in trouble or hurting, so maybe the same thing happens with
old best friends.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
About two years ago I learned of the death of Matt Mitchell,
the third part of the trio of friends from my high school years. It’s weird to
think that those friends I spent so much time with no longer walk the earth. I’m
now experiencing that sense of loss again that I felt when I left my friends to
go off to college, yet in a more ultimate manner. In another, deeper sense, I
know that Dave and Matt are always with me because I have those memories, and I
know that part of who I am today is a result of those early friendships.</div>
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I miss you.</div>
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May you rest in peace.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Your friend, </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Gary</div>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style>Gary Tandyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17494570091459554195noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5738805570562546849.post-74800861785807542792018-12-30T18:44:00.000-08:002019-01-06T08:38:14.809-08:00Clouds of Mourning, Sunbreaks of Grace<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguJiEcBHo0BR_Ncuo-4-Gh_oiKUU2XSAfzC8NT-nLle37aOVViMdmXsNwwmutaVKXEN4UiTHGzV-Eg2WLDBDvBH_dUD_-7aVjPwRbszJ_2_LDUPQ7ritLjGoaFLNP9Ayh_avrvmY4xzKg/s1600/Monte+Dees.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="240" data-original-width="320" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguJiEcBHo0BR_Ncuo-4-Gh_oiKUU2XSAfzC8NT-nLle37aOVViMdmXsNwwmutaVKXEN4UiTHGzV-Eg2WLDBDvBH_dUD_-7aVjPwRbszJ_2_LDUPQ7ritLjGoaFLNP9Ayh_avrvmY4xzKg/s400/Monte+Dees.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
My wife received the call on Monday afternoon.<br />
<br />
It was the Monday of a busy finals week for me, but the day had gone well. My department had met for our traditional finals week lunch, sharing Mexican food and stories and laughter. The scheduled all-morning Faculty Senate meeting had mercifully been canceled, allowing me to make some additional progress on my grading. If my luck held, I thought, I might be able to get all my papers graded before my final exams. Maybe, just maybe, I could grade those finals by commencement on Saturday when I could begin enjoying my four-week break early.<br />
<br />
Then the call that changed everything came.<br />
<br />
It was Janet's brother. He said the staff at the assisted living facility had been concerned about their dad. Monte's speech was slurred, and he seemed listless, struggling even to sit upright in his chair. Mark had taken him to Mercy Hospital emergency room, and they began the evaluation. Hospice had been called and would be there the next morning.<br />
<br />
I remembered the calls I had received about my parents. Though they were some years ago, I could recall clearly the circumstances and the setting when each call came. When my brother said, "we've talked to hospice and they said you should come."<br />
<br />
When you live 2000 miles away, those calls initiate not only a flurry of activity but lots of anxiety. Will I get there on time? Will I get there, stay for a week when nothing changes, then have to return? <br />
<br />
The next day we got the second call. We learned Monte had been sleeping a lot since entering the hospital. The hospice people were saying it could be days, it could be two weeks. This information was not very helpful, but as we talked about what to do, it became clear that Janet needed to get there ASAP. We changed our reservations from Saturday to the next day, Wednesday. I immediately began making arrangements with work study students and colleagues to proctor my finals scheduled for the next couple of days. We started packing, rescheduling appointments.<br />
<br />
Then the third call came. Janet was in our bedroom when she got the news from her brother that her dad had passed--peacefully, thank God--but also much more quickly than any of us had expected. He would have been 93 on his January birthday, had lived a long, full life. The last year and a half since his stroke had been hard. Janet tried to take comfort in the fact that her dad was no longer weak and struggling.<br />
<br />
The next 24 hours brought a flurry of activity interspersed with tears and hugs. We asked our youngest son, Garrison, to go with us if he could get off work, and he said he could. Before we knew it, we were in the back of an airporter van, beginning the trip south.<br />
<br />
In my experience, saying goodbye to a parent is one of the hardest things on earth. For me, this was the third time: first my mom, then my dad, and now, Janet's dad. No matter the age or circumstances, when it comes, it seems an event of enormous proportion. It's not an eventuality most of us prepare for because we think, contrary to reason, that our parents will always be there for us. And unlike mourning the death of a friend, when it's a parent, there's that sense of responsibility, the feeling that the mantle is being passed on to us--and we realize there's no way we are ready to take on that role.<br />
<br />
Grief is a fickle emotion. It comes in waves and it arrives at unexpected moments. I can remember when my mom died, my dad had asked me to call several old friends who were out of town and tell them about her death and inform them about the memorial service. I was doing fine until I was on the phone with Barbara, one of Mom's good friends. In the middle of telling her about the time and date of the service, I broke down and cried, blubbering, unable to continue talking.<br />
<br />
When I returned from Kansas and began the spring semester at the small college where I taught, I thought getting back to work would help. I would be fine, I told myself. I've had a week to grieve; now it's time to get on with life. But I was mistaken. At a college of 350, you know everyone and everyone knows you. Students are friends, as are fellow faculty members. So I couldn't walk across the courtyard to my classes without having conversations, and each conversation brought back the loss of my mom to the top of my consciousness, unearthing feelings I didn't even know existed. I realized that grief does not contain itself in a week or two week's break. It continues coming in waves and according to its own rhythms. <br />
<br />
Yet in the midst of mourning, this trip to Oklahoma and Arkansas reminded me, there are moments of grace, moments that interrupt the grief and bring joy and healing. Some are sad moments but they carry a weight of meaning that we don't often experience in our day-to-day existence. Here's some of the moments I'll remember:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>Phoning my pastor. Hearing the caring and compassion in her voice. The comfort I took from her prayer over the phone with me. Knowing that my family and I would be in the thoughts and prayers of many good people.</li>
<li>Emails and hallway conversations with my colleagues at school. Their ready offers to proctor finals or help in other ways. The comfort of knowing we were not alone.</li>
<li>Asking one of my classes to email their final papers rather than leaving a hard copy in my mailbox, which I would not be around to receive. (For some reason, I thought I would be able to grade papers on the trip. Silly me!) My students not only sent their papers but expressed their sorrow at my loss and made thoughtful comments about how they were praying for me and my family.</li>
<li>In Oklahoma, being welcomed upon our late-night arrival to Janet's brother and sister-in-law's home where our beds were ready and when I went to the kitchen the next morning, I saw the Peter Pan crunchy peanut butter Beth had left for me. (It's my favorite brand of peanut butter, but it's hard to come by in Oregon.)</li>
<li>Janet and Mark's first hug, sharing for the first time, in the flesh, the reality of their dad's departure. Mark's obvious relief that his sister was there.</li>
<li>After the 6-hour drive to Arkansas, being welcomed into the farmhouse home of Janet's aunt and uncle. Sitting at their kitchen table as multiple grandfather clocks chimed the hours and minutes, writing down what I would say about Janet's dad at the chapel and graveside service the next day. </li>
<li>The country breakfast ready for us when we woke up Saturday: eggs, bacon, biscuits with homemade apple butter and jellies--with all the coffee and tea we could drink.</li>
<li>Not long after that hearty breakfast, a potluck lunch for the family at the church building with fried chicken, ham, potatoes, green beans, pie because, as Janet said, the way you show love to people in these parts is by feeding them.</li>
<li>The joyful, tearful reunions between Janet and her aunts and uncles and cousins.</li>
<li>The shared stories by family and friends at the memorial service of their memories of Monte. One of his grandsons, a Navy man, had difficulty sharing through his tears but, more meaningful than his words perhaps was when he turned to Monte's casket and saluted his grandfather, a WWII veteran.</li>
<li>The funny and poignant stories sent by our son from South Korea, which Janet read, including the story about when Pops was teaching him to ride a bike and Jackson wanted to ride barefoot and Pops told him if he did his toe would get stuck in the concrete, this being warning enough to ensure that he would never ride a bike barefoot again.</li>
<li>Hearing stories about Monte as a child from his three surviving sisters including one about his teasing the girls in high school by hiding a mirror from them.</li>
<li>At the graveside, hearing Taps blown by the military honor guard--complete with a cow in the field next to the cemetery mooing along.</li>
<li>Watching Garrison and his two cousins serve as pallbearers, carrying their Pops on the last leg of his earthly journey. </li>
<li>The mercy of a dry, sunny day for the graveside service after it had rained hard all day on Friday. </li>
<li>At the close of the graveside service, Janet asking the family members to join hands and sing "Silent Night." With Christmas being a few days away, she thought singing together about peace and new birth an appropriate way to end this day of mourning and celebration for a good man--a loving son, brother, husband, father, grandfather, and great grandfather--and so we did and so it was.</li>
<li>On the return trip, stopping by the Tulsa neighborhood we used to live in and seeing the house that Janet designed and had built, remembering those times when our kids were young and fed the ducks in the pond in that neighborhood.</li>
<li>Back in Oklahoma, at Starbucks, having a chance meeting with some best friends from our Tulsa days. Spending an hour remembering good times with Darryl and Cathy and their four kids and our three and catching up on what all our kids were up to now. </li>
</ul>
Each of these moments was like a sunbreak--a word I only learned when I moved from Oklahoma to the Pacific Northwest. There's not much need for the word in the Southwest where the sun shines pretty much all the time. But, in Oregon, where most any day from November to June can be cloudy and grey, it's a word that comes in handy. <br />
<br />
When I served as academic dean at a small college in Portland, my office window looked out onto the soccer field. Most days during the spring semester, the soccer field was empty or, at best, home to a few birds. But when a sunbreak came, I could look out my window and be sure to see lots of 18-21-year-olds, throwing frisbees and footballs or just sitting on a blanket talking, reveling in the warmth of the sun.<br />
<br />
It seems to be human nature to appreciate those events that seldom come: Like sun in winter in the Pacific Northwest. Like times when we can express our appreciation for the life of a loved one. Those times, as Shakespeare said, where we speak what we feel, not what we ought to say. Those times, like Christmas, when we can sing Silent Night and reflect on birth, and death, and love that never ends.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Gary Tandyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17494570091459554195noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5738805570562546849.post-57457398700852774372018-07-22T19:12:00.000-07:002018-07-25T20:58:33.347-07:00The Road Goes Ever On and On<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Just over a week ago, my wife, Janet, and I drove from our home near Portland, OR, to Washington's Olympic National Forest where we dropped our son, Garrison, at the Bogachiel trail head. We said our goodbyes and wished him happy trails, knowing that we wouldn't see him again for about six weeks. In a few minutes he would be taking his first steps down the trail on a solo backpacking journey that would span many miles and numerous campgrounds, where he would eat lots of beef jerky and Clif bars, see incredible sights, and (his parents hoped) not have an up close and personal encounter with a bear or a cougar.<br />
<br />
Garrison had begun planning this trip months ago after deciding to leave the winery where he had been working for over two years. He left his apartment in McMinnville and moved in with us in Newberg for a few months to save money for his trip. His plan was to work at his current job until early July and then take about six weeks off before beginning a new one. <br />
<br />
I learned from observing Garrison that a journey like this takes lots of preparation. He spent many hours researching on the Internet, learning about the trail, downloading park maps, reading the stories of other backpackers and their experiences. He learned that the Pacific Northwest Trail (PNT) was a rugged 1,200 mile path spanning Montana, Idaho, and Washington. Most hikers begin in Glacier National Park in Montana and hike westward to the Washington coast, ending in the Olympic National Park. But he decided to take the opposite route, beginning in Washington and ending--well, wherever he has time to get to in six weeks. He won't be able to complete the entire 1,200 miles in that time frame. It made sense to me that he chose the opposite route of most hikers. Garrison's always been his own person and frequently makes choices that the rest of the family didn't see coming. As his older brother, Jackson, once said: the one thing you can count on with Garrison is that he will surprise you.<br />
<br />
In addition to researching the trip, Garrison spent time training to be sure he had the stamina to walk 16-22 miles per day. Almost every weekend between April and June, he found trails from near Portland to the coast where he could do practice hikes. As the date drew closer he made several trips to REI for equipment he needed--including a GPS device so he could message us from the trail, allowing his mom to keep track of his longitudes and latitudes. Though I had moments of apprehension about his doing this trip alone, I was somewhat comforted by the extent of his preparation and training. Suffice it to say that he was much, much better prepared than Cheryl Strayed was for her Pacific Crest Trail hike recorded in her memoir <i>Wild.</i><br />
<br />
So the day finally came. Garrison packed all the possessions he would have for the next six weeks and hoisted his backpack in our living room, testing the weight.<br />
<i> </i><br />
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<i> </i>We loaded the Outback and, after a final stop at REI, headed up I-5. Janet and I were excited about our trip as well. Though we've lived in Oregon for 24 years, we've never been to the part of Washington where we would be driving today. I was excited to see Forks, WA, where the <i>Twilight </i>novels were based. Though I've never read the books, as an English prof, I'm always up for a literary landmark. I got the obligatory tourist picture by the sign.<br />
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As we drove on the beautiful road leading to Port Angeles, by Sequim with its lavender farms, and into the Olympic National Forest and its dense trees, I was surprised at how much this journey of Garrion's was affecting me. It was his journey, after all. Janet and I were just his means of transportation. Yet having observed him plan so carefully for something that obviously meant a lot to him, I felt I had become, if only vicariously, part of this adventure. And it was an adventure, a challenge--far different than a weekend at the beach. He never said, but I wondered if this was his way of testing and challenging himself. I certainly admired his resolve, moreso because it was something I would never have had the courage to do. When I was his age (he'll turn 29 in October) I was trying to complete my personal challenge of getting my Ph.D. by the time I was 30.<br />
<br />
William Butler Yeats says somewhere that our lives are like a spiral staircase. As we wind closer to the top, we can look down and mark points in our lives that feel similar to what we're currently experiencing. So a grandfather might look down and recall that turn on the staircase when he first became a father. Maybe that's what I was doing, reading my own experience into my son's. I can tell you this: if you gave me the choice of completing another doctorate or going on a solo six-week backpacking trip, I would immediately begin researching seminaries!<br />
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As we drove toward Port Angeles, my mind turned to the summer online literature and philosophy course I was teaching and to a text called <i>Christians Among the Virtues. </i>The authors, Stanley Hauerwas and Charles Pinches, after discussing Aristotle's theories of happiness, suggest that it's useful to think of our lives as a journey rather than as a trip. Around the time Garrison moved in with us and told us about his plans, I had read these words in my course text:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
When we go on a trip, we know well where we are going, roughly how long it will take to get there, what preparations to make, and so on. When we undertake a journey, we often have only a hazy idea of where we are going, how long it will take, or how to prepare.</blockquote>
The authors go on to note that virtues are required for a journey but not for a trip. Well, there was no doubt in my mind that Janet and I were on a trip (to Port Angeles and back home to Newberg) while our son was embarking on a journey--a journey that would test his virtues and his mettle and one in which there would likely be twists and turns and revisions along the way. This last point was confirmed when Garrison visited with a park ranger who looked at his trail plan and informed him that two of the campgrounds where he had planned to spend the night had been washed out and were closed. So even before he started, he had to revise the plan. I also had no doubt that not only his plans but Garrison himself would be changed by this journey.<br />
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I was also thinking of the last two books we had read in my summer online course: Tolkien's <i>The Hobbit </i>and <i>The Fellowship of the Ring. </i>I've always identified with the Bilbo at the beginning of the book more than the Bilbo that emerges at the end of his adventure with Gandalf and the dwarves. This tells you a lot about me, of course, that I resonate more with the comfort loving, second-breakfast eating, "Adventures make one late for dinner" Bilbo than with the spider-taming, master thief, courageous Bilbo. It also struck me how much of the narrative content of both books is basically the recounting of a long backpacking trip. Of course, the hobbits and their companions encounter extraordinary obstacles on their journey, but at least they have Gandalf watching out for them once in awhile. It's amazing how much literature involves a journey and that the external journey is always less important than the internal journey of the hero. Somehow I wasn't surprised when Garrison told me on the ride up to Olympic that one of the audio books he'd downloaded for the trail was <i>The Lord of the Rings.</i><br />
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After the Forks photo op, we wound our way further into the park and located the even curvier gravel road that led to the trail head. It felt like we were leaving civilization far behind as we went deeper and deeper into the forest. I thought about the quiet and solitude that Garrison would be experiencing over the next few weeks and was grateful that he's someone who's always needed his alone time and his space. (He's not even on Facebook, for goodness sakes, which is why I have to do posts to let his friends know about what he's up to.) And I thought of the beauties of nature he would experience and was grateful that he's always loved, like his mother and older brother, the outdoors. He told me when he was graduating from college that working a 9 to 5 job in a cubicle in an office building was pretty much the worst fate he could imagine. I was grateful too, I guess, or trying my best to be grateful, that he was the type of man who would plan and execute such an adventure--though I wonder where it came from. There must be some long-lost ancestor adventurer on Janet's side of the family he takes after. Like Bilbo, whose unhobbitlike wanderlust was attributed to his Tookish blood, there has to be some explanation.<br />
<i> </i><br />
After taking a few last family photos, we said goodbye and wished our son happy trails.<br />
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Janet and I retraced our path over the winding road back to civilization. I was feeling lots of emotions: a little sadness that I wouldn't be able to drink coffee with Garrison in the mornings and talk about his plans, a little concern, hoping he wouldn't run into danger or injury on the trail, and lots of admiration and pride that my son was doing this hard thing. I realized it wouldn't really matter if he completes his original plan. If he decides to catch the train back to Oregon in two weeks, he will still have done a remarkable thing. He will have seen things in nature and in himself that he will remember for the rest of his life. As Gandalf says of Frodo, there is more to him than meets the eye; there will be still more to Garrison, when he returns, changed, from this journey.<br />
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The Road goes ever on and on<br />
Down from the door where it began.<br />
Now far ahead the Road has gone,<br />
And I must follow, if I can,<br />
Pursuing it with weary feet,<br />
Until it joins some larger way,<br />
Where many paths and errands meet.<br />
And whither then? I cannot say.<br />
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<br />Gary Tandyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17494570091459554195noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5738805570562546849.post-22688128378839257712018-07-03T20:41:00.002-07:002018-07-04T07:07:14.288-07:00C. S. Lewis on Patriotism<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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In chapter two of <i>The Four Loves, </i>C. S. Lewis recalls a conversation with an old clergyman who was maintaining, with patriotic fervor, the superiority of England over all other countries. Lewis ventured a challenge: "But, sir, aren't we told that <i>every </i>people thinks its own men the bravest and its own women the fairest in the world?" The clergyman replied with total gravity (as grave, Lewis says, as if he had been saying the Creed at the altar) "Yes, but in England it's true."<br />
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This anecdote seems instructive for our time in the United States as we hear renewed calls for patriotism, demands for forced respect for the flag and an anthem, and insistence that, apparently, America has lost its place in the world as the most powerful nation and must be returned to its former glory.<br />
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In confusing, perplexing, and, frankly, scary times like these, it helps me to return to Lewis's voice. While I don't always agree with every idea expressed by Lewis, I can count on him to bring a reasoned and analytical approach to any question--and to do so from a perspective that is thoroughly Christian. One of Lewis's friends called him the most thoroughly converted man he had ever met, so it was impossible for Lewis to examine any realm of life without bringing a theological perspective to bear.<br />
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With that, here's a few gems about patriotism I learned from Lewis in my latest reading of <i>The Four Loves.</i><br />
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<ul>
<li>First, Lewis thought patriotism a topic worth considering in some detail. In a 24 page chapter on the "Likings and Loves for the Sub-Human" Lewis spends 9 of those pages discussing patriotism.</li>
<li>Lewis suggests that patriotism is complex and has several elements, pointing out that two very different writers--Kipling and Chesterton--expressed it vigorously.</li>
<li>Lewis sees clearly both the values and dangers of patriotism. Returning to the story of the patriotic clergyman, we should note that Lewis grants that the clergyman's conviction has not made him a villain, "only an extremely lovable old ass." But he immediately warns that the same conviction (the firm belief that our own nation, in sober fact, has long been, and still is markedly superior to all others) can produce asses that kick and bite. Lewis even notes: "on the lunatic fringe it may shade off into that popular Racialism which Christianity and science equally forbid."</li>
<li>Lewis notes that this dangerous patriotism is often based on a distorted view of our country's past. Lewis states: "The actual history of every country is full of shabby and even shameful doings," yet the patriot tends to ignore the shameful past, preferring heroic stories which cast the country in the best possible light--in spite of the fact that the glorious past celebrated is open to serious historical criticism. (Think of Trump's recent statement about our ancestors "taming" a continent.) To be fair, Lewis believes it is possible to be strengthened by the image of the past, but warns: "The image becomes dangerous in the precise degree to which it is mistaken, or substituted, for serious and systematic historical study."</li>
<li>As he does throughout the book, Lewis constantly reminds us that love of country (like all loves) becomes a demon when it becomes a god.</li>
<li>Lewis reminds us of another danger: "if our nation is really so much better than others it may be held to have either the duties or the rights of a superior being towards them." As evidence, Lewis cites the colonialism of Great Britain, noting "our habit of talking as if England's motives for acquiring an empire . . . had been mainly altruistic nauseated the world."</li>
<li>In summary, Lewis takes a balanced view of patriotism. He does not reject it entirely and sees cultural and social value in it. Yet he closes the chapter with some extremely strong statements about the dangers of equating our country's cause with God's, noting "if our country's cause is the cause of God, wars must be wars of annihilation. A false transcendence is given to things which are very much of this world." </li>
<li>Finally, Lewis closes the chapter with a bold statement about what can happen when the church mingles patriotism with the transcendent claims of the church and uses them to justify abominable actions. </li>
</ul>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
If ever a book which I am not going to write is written it must be the full confession by Christendom of Christendom's specific contribution to the sum of human cruelty and treachery. Large areas of 'the World' will not hear us till we have publicly disowned much of our past. Why should they? We have shouted the name of Christ and enacted the service of Moloch.</blockquote>
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Now this is not a quote from Lewis that I've seen made into a meme and posted on Facebook! But perhaps it should be. I hope Lewis's reasoned, common sense approach and Christian worldview can help us navigate the troubled waters we find ourselves in today. Lewis, of course, is not writing about the American situation, but his definitions and warnings seem more relevant every day.<br />
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Happy Independence Day!Gary Tandyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17494570091459554195noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5738805570562546849.post-47774582628947561332018-02-23T19:16:00.002-08:002018-02-23T19:25:12.279-08:00The Paradox of the Cross<style>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">“For God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God's
weakness is stronger than human strength.” I Corinthians 1:25<sup>*</sup></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Before the gospel is good news, it is paradox, so when Paul
describes the cross of Christ, the only way he can do so is with paradoxical
statements: foolishness is greater than wisdom and weakness is better than
strength. Might as well say green is yellow and down is up!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In our world, from sports to entertainment to business, we
love and celebrate winners. We don’t waste our time on the losers—in fact, we
ignore them. Who can recall the loser of the last year’s Super Bowl? </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">King Lear,</i>
Shakespeare pictures a world is which the philosophy of winning at all costs
has prevailed. The characters who seem to be winning are those like Regan and
Goneril and Edmund who are willing to lie, cheat, steal, and bully to gain
power. By contrast, the characters like Kent and Edgar and Cordelia who
demonstrate love and loyalty and self-sacrifice appear weak and ineffectual—in
short, losers. Paradoxically, the characters who appear to be weak and foolish
by human standards are strong and wise when measured by divine standards. As
Lear says of Cordelia’s death, “with such sacrifices the gods are pleased.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Paul, it seems, wants to encourage his readers in Corinth
not to view Jesus’s death on the cross as a loss, but rather as a victory—one
that demonstrated once and for all the rejection of the values of power and
violence in favor of those values that Jesus lived: welcome, acceptance,
inclusion, and self-sacrificial love. It demonstrated once and for all that
love conquers hate, that the foolishness of God is wiser than the world’s
wisdom and that the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Loving God, grant us a clear vision so we may reject the
violence and abuse of power so evident in our world and practice instead your
radical welcome and self-sacrificial love. Amen.</span></div>
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Gary Tandyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17494570091459554195noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5738805570562546849.post-38570206069104883972017-07-21T18:04:00.002-07:002017-07-23T07:27:24.561-07:00Keep Always your Fire and your Silver: Why I Teach<br />
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<br />
Why do we do what we do?<br />
<br />
The question appeared in an email the other day. It was asked by a fellow college English professor who I don't know personally. We're part of the same listserv group. He was suggesting the summer is a good time to reflect on larger questions like this. I agree.<br />
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Keep always your Fire and your Silver.<br />
<br />
This phrase appeared on the Facebook page of one of my high school friends, Matt. I hadn't seen Matt since my college days. In high school we were not best friends; he was more a friend of a friend, yet during the last couple of years in high school we hung out quite a bit--enough that I can still remember details about him: Matt was among the funniest, wittiest, and quirkiest people I've met. He loved poetry, and he introduced me to some great music.<br />
<br />
It was from a post from Matt's wife, Ann, on his FB page I learned Matt had died: January 17, 2017. Through a link on Matt's FB page, I was able to read his obituary, catching up on what he'd been up to in the 43 years since I'd seen him.<br />
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From the obituary I learned that Matt left university to work for a machine shop, then a tractor company; eventually returning to finish his degree and going on to receive his Master's in Education. He then worked in Substance Abuse education for the Wichita public schools before ending his career as a language arts teacher at two different high schools. He was said to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the works of Tolkien and George Martin and was described as a true wordsmith and grammarian who inspired his students to love words as he did.<br />
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On Matt's FB page, following his death, one of his students (I presume) posted a photo of a note that Matt had written to her. "Keep always your Fire and your Silver," the note said.<br />
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Intrigued by the phrase, I spent awhile Googling to see if Matt had been quoting from a poem or a song. No luck. The closest I came was a rap song ("Keep your silver, give me that gold") and the Scout song about making new friends but keeping the old; one is silver and the other gold. I doubted that either one was what Matt had in mind, so I'm going to guess the phrase was original with him.<br />
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When I saw my colleague's question about why we do what we do, I thought about why I teach; then I thought about Matt's note to his student. I hope my friend won't mind if I draw my own conclusions about his phrase and apply them to explain why I teach.<br />
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<b>Fire = passion/intellectual curiosity/loving your subject/valuing the life of the mind.</b> It's why I decided teaching was my calling so many years ago. I can't tell you the exact moment, but at some point as I sat in a college literature classroom at Oklahoma Christian University a professor sparked something within me. It might have been the way he got excited when explaining why Emily Dickinson chose this word and not that one or when asking why Donne began his poem with a trochee rather than an iamb. Whatever it was, the spark was lit and there was no turning back. That spark would eventually grow into a flame as I began to think about a career as an English professor. Later in grad school, I remember Dr. Bratton stopping in the middle of our discussion of Wordsworth's poetry and saying, "This is so much fun! I can't believe I get paid to do this."<br />
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I can't believe I get paid to do this. That's been pretty much consistently true for me over my 25 years of teaching writing and literature. But, of course, while it's true I love what I do (I get paid to read Shakespeare plays and Anne Lamott books and C. S. Lewis fantasy lit over and over, after all!), there's something else I've learned in those 25 years. Without students, my passion and love of my subject would be pointless. It's the chance to be the generator of that spark that eventually lights the fire in a student that brings true joy. It's seeing the light bulb go on for a student during a class discussion. It's reading the final essay of a student who has struggled mightily with the first two papers and realizing she's really understanding how to write an academic argument. It's sitting with a student in my office talking about graduate programs or how he hopes to use his writing skills in the nonprofit world. It's getting an email from a student who's just successfully completed her first year of grad school or teaching and having them thank me and our department for preparing her well. That's where the fire is. It's the fire that keeps me warm during the wet Oregon winters and keeps my spirits up in the long stretch between Christmas break and Spring break.<br />
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<b>Silver = unique gifts/what makes students different, special, and memorable/style/personality/quirky habits/connection</b><br />
If students were all the same, my job would be incredibly boring. I teach many of the same texts year after year, but it's the differences among the students who encounter those texts that keeps me interested. <b> </b>There's some students I'll never forget. Like the one who, on the first day of freshman writing was sitting in the windowsill at the back of the classroom. He had not merely scooted his chair near the window; no, he had gotten out of his chair, raised the lower part of the window as high as it would go, and was sitting on the windowsill, as if he wanted to get as far as physically possible away from me and that classroom. Oh boy, I thought, this one's going to be a problem. He turned out to be the brightest light and best writer in the class, going on to become a medical doctor. While in my class, he wrote his persuasive paper on why a persuasive paper was a dumb assignment, using the argumentative techniques covered in class so effectively I had no choice but to give him an A.<br />
<br />
There's some students I'd like to forget. No, I won't go there.<br />
<br />
Some of my most memorable students have been the ones who've had great challenges to overcome. Like the student whose twin brother had been killed in a freak car accident when they were teenagers. She survived the accident and had to live with that painful memory. She also had impaired hearing that was not entirely compensated for by the hearing aids she wore. In spite of these challenges (or perhaps due to them), she was one of the most cheerful, compassionate, and encouraging people I've ever met. She took on leadership roles at the college including president of her service club and asked me to be the faculty sponsor. Though it was an all-female club, I couldn't say no to this student. After graduating with her English degree, she went to seminary and today serves as a hospital chaplain. Her story and those of many other unique students I treasure in my heart.<br />
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Of course, as any teacher knows, each class has its own personality as well. This explains the phenomenon I've often experienced where I use the exact same material and class plan in two sections of the same class. In one class, it leads to the best session ever; in the other, the worst. A few years ago, I had a writing class of English majors who, for whatever reason, clicked as a group. Instead of a collection of individual learners, the class became a community with its own, rather quirky, personality. Someone decided it would be fun to have themed dress days in class and convinced most of the class members to go along with it. So one week would 90s garb, the next 80s, etc. During 60s week I wore my tie dye shirt and received great applause when I revealed it by unbuttoning my long sleeve shirt. My outer shirt was one of those with the western style buttons, so I was able to make the reveal rather dramatic. Needless to say, discussion was not a problem in this class though I did sometimes have to redirect them to the topic for the day.<br />
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So why do I do what I do? I teach with hope that something I do or say or emote in the classroom will light a spark in a student. I teach because I recognize what a difference fire can make in forging a life well lived. I teach because I hope each of my students will recognize his or her unique gifts, what he or she is especially good at, what makes him or her special, will value his or her silver. I don't expect them all to become English majors, but whatever they do, I want them to do it because they've identified what their passion is (their fire) and what makes them unique (their silver). I also figured out long ago I can't expect to connect with every student. That's why I have colleagues.<br />
<br />
Recently, I was reading some of Thomas Merton's reflections on the nature of the Bible. Merton quoted the passage from II Corinthians where Paul says to the church members at Corinth: "You yourselves are our letter of recommendation, written on your hearts, to be known and read by all men."<br />
<br />
Just so I would hope whatever small part I have in helping students nurture their fire and find their silver, those students would become my letter of recommendation, taking what they can from me and using it in even greater ways for a life well lived.<br />
<br />
To shift the metallurgical metaphor, here's what I want my students to know, in the word of John Prine:<br />
<br />
"You've got gold, gold inside of you.<br />
Well I've got some gold inside me too."<br />
<br />
Postscript: I wish I could revise all those graduation notes I've written to students over the years. If I could, I would boil them all down to a single line: "Keep always your Fire and your Silver." I may use it from now on, but if I do, I'll be sure to credit my friend, Matt.<br />
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<br />Gary Tandyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17494570091459554195noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5738805570562546849.post-43560411077648391822017-06-18T08:58:00.000-07:002017-06-18T08:58:17.060-07:00Lessons I Learned from Dad<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: left;">
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--></style>It's Father's Day, 2017. I'm missing my dad, who died on New Year's Day, 2012. I wrote this piece a few years before my dad passed and shared it with him and some family members. He didn't say much about it, which was typical of Dad--it made him uncomfortable to talk about himself--but I like to think it meant something to him. I shared parts of it at his memorial service.</div>
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Lessons I Learned from Dad</div>
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I'll skip the obvious ones: work hard, be a man of your word, love
Jesus. When I reflect on what I learned from my dad, it's more about actions,
behaviors, attitudes than it is about words he said (though he was good with
words, and I remember some of those too).<br />
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Teach us to care</b><br />
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As I look back on my experiences
with Dad, I remember him as one who cared, and by that word I mean something
like passion. Some of the things he was passionate about were the big,
important things: family, church, the needs of others. But some of them
were things that many would call insignificant. Take, for example,
basketball. Dad was an athlete and a coach in his younger days, and he
followed lots of sports, but the one I associate with him most is
basketball. During my growing up years, he was an avid fan of the Wichita
State Shockers, to whose home games he had season tickets. He took it
seriously. Wins were met with much rejoicing, but losses were mourned and
hashed and rehashed. I think it was from him I learned how to be a fan.
When you're a fan, objectivity is not an option: you live and die with
the team. You invest yourself in their fortunes. <br />
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of course, being a fan has its
perils. You can go overboard at times. I remember the first time I
was fortunate enough to go to a Shocker game with him, I was amazed when he
voiced his displeasure at a call in loud, rather direct terms. And since his
seats were courtside, I'm pretty sure the refs heard him. I was surprised
because in every other setting in which I had witnessed him, my dad was a
quiet, unassuming man who seldom raised his voice, He was a gospel
preacher, after all; wasn't he supposed to be setting an example for
others? Looking back, I think the basketball arena provided a space
for him where he could set aside his preacher image and just be a
"normal" person. Unfortunately, the lesson I learned was that
it was okay to yell at referees, a practice which would get me into trouble
later when my sons played high school basketball. However, the enduring
lesson I learned was that part of living, part of being human is caring.<br />
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Teach us not to care</b><br />
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>From observing my dad, I learned
that some things are not worth caring about: status, position, material
possessions. I'm not saying Dad didn't like nice stuff; he did.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b>But he lived simply. No
need to rush out and buy a newer model TV, or car, if the current one was still
working. He was not a self promoter, believing that his actions spoke
louder about who he was than any words ever could. He taught me to be
suspicious of people who spent too much time caring about or promoting their
image. He also taught me that some things were worth more than
others. He would readily interrupt a quiet evening at home watching a
favorite TV program to go help a church member who was having car trouble.<br />
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One of my most embarrassing childhood
moments perhaps demonstrated this trait most emphatically for me. On a
hunting trip we stopped for gas. After the car was full, I asked Dad if I
could pull the car forward, ostensibly to make room for other cars, but really
because I wanted to experience what driving was like. I was 13 and had never driven any kind of vehicle. As it happened, the
car was in Reverse, not Drive, when I decided to hit the gas, a move that propelled
our car into the car directly to our rear. I felt horrible, of course.
What I remember about the incident today is that Dad did not say a harsh word
to me and pretty much acted as if it never happened.
Perhaps he knew that I felt bad enough already, but I've often wondered if I
would have reacted with as much grace had one of my kids pulled a similar
stunt. <br />
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Take time to rest</b><br />
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No one could ever accuse Dad of
being lazy. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b>Throughout
my growing up years, he worked what amounted to two full-time jobs, serving as
preaching minister for the Northside Church of Christ and as an 8th grade
English teacher at Roosevelt Junior High. Most evenings were filled with
hospital visits, and weekends were devoted to sermon preparation and church.
While he worked hard, he always made time for entertainment. He played
golf and tennis at least once a week in the summers, and our family had two
summer vacation rituals: we would spend a week at Table Rock Lake in
Missouri, which meant fishing for him and swimming for me and my brother.
And at some point each summer we would take off on a road trip, which meant
sightseeing for Mom and Dad and swimming in motel pools for my brother and
me. When I graduated from high school, Mom and I figured out that I had
been in 45 of the 50 states. This rhythm of work and rest was obviously
important to him because the routine never varied. This lesson I am still
trying to learn. So far, I've displayed more of dad's workaholic nature
than the rest and relaxation part. <br />
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Put other's needs before your own</b><br />
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Dad demonstrated a selfless attitude
in so many ways, big and small, but I remember most his social grace, what his
generation might have called manners. This characteristic manifested
itself in settings like the golf course, where I learned golf etiquette by
watching how he invited others to hit first and was careful on the green not to
step in someone's path to the cup. Having dinner at a restaurant, he was
concerned, not just about his meal, but about the well being of others at the
table. Perhaps the greatest test of this trait were the last five years
of so of Mom's life, where he cared for her as her memory and her ability to
care for herself deteriorated as a result of Alzheimer's. I don't think a
selfish person could be a caregiver in such circumstances. Dad performed
the role as if he had been preparing for it all his life, and I guess, in a
way, he had.<br />
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Find something you do well, something
you love to do </b><br />
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I mentioned earlier that Dad worked
two jobs, and I'm convinced he loved both. He never talked much about his
teaching job, but I suspect he enjoyed reading literature and discussing it
with his students. He loved words and has always been able to recite long
poems from memory. From him I first learned that words are important,
that books contain important ideas, and that poetry is entertaining. I
must have inherited some of his mnemonic facility as well since I can still
recite long sections of Eliot's <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Waste
Land</i> and the prologue to Chaucer's <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Canterbury
Tales</i>. I also remember the words to numerous Simon and Garfunkel and
Bob Dylan songs from the 70s.<br />
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I know he loved preaching. I'm
sure he didn't have as much time for sermon preparation as he would have liked,
but the time he did have, he used well. One example is telling.
Years before PowerPoint, Dad decided that illustrated sermons might increase
audience interest, so he got the idea of using a flannel board to illustrate
his Sunday evening sermons. So after writing a sermon, he would spend
hours drawing words and images on flannel-backed paper and cutting them
out. One of the church members helped him build a supersized flannel
board that could be hung off the edge of the baptistery at the front of the
auditorium. I'm sure these illustrated sermons were viewed as high tech in the
60s and 70s.<br />
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I made my career choice in college
based on what I loved, not on what I thought would bring in the most money, and
I still suggest to the college students I advise today to do the same.<br />
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Old dogs can learn new tricks</b><br />
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perhaps the most important lesson I
learned from my dad came from what I'm certain was the most difficult period of
his life: walking with Mom as she lived with Alzheimer's. About a year
after her death he was asked to speak to his fellow church members about the
experience. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b>I'm sure it was
the most personal sermon he ever delivered. What I remember are these
lines: "I learned something new about God through caring for
Ann. I noticed that the more helpless she became, the more I loved her,
and it hit me that God loves me, loves us, in the same way. He doesn't
love us because of what we can do or accomplish. In fact, it's the
opposite: the more helpless we become, the more he loves us" (my
paraphrase). Dad went on to reflect that in his years of preaching there
were probably times when he expected too much of the people he ministered to,
when he was judgmental of their weak attempts to follow Jesus. His
experience with his wife, he said, made him regret those times and wish he had
been more loving, more graceful, in fact, more Godlike in those relationships.<br />
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I didn't get to spend this past
Father's Day with Dad, but I was able to spend my spring break with him at the
retirement apartments that he recently moved to after selling the house he
lived in for some 54 years. He gets around slowly these days with his
walker, but he's still alert and can still recite long poems from memory--not
bad for an 88-year-old. Spending the week with him, I noticed many of the
same traits I talked about. Ever the gentleman, at dinnertime, if a
resident sitting at his table did not get served, he would flag down the waiter
and make sure the person was helped. Even though he had just moved out of
his home, he was more interested in talking about the new home Janet and I had
purchased in Oregon.<br />
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And he was still being a fan.
My visit coincided with NCAA March Madness, so we watched a lot of basketball
together. What I noticed was he still retained the old competitive
fire. If he had no particular reason to root for a team based on region
or conference, he would still pick a favorite, and he would react with emotion
to the ups and downs of that team throughout the game. He still
complained about the bad calls. He still cared.</div>
Gary Tandyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17494570091459554195noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5738805570562546849.post-7882771443391742532016-07-18T12:40:00.001-07:002016-07-18T19:34:43.713-07:00I Read Dead People<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I bought this bumper sticker at Powell's bookstore. While I enjoy being amused and, more often, disturbed by other people's, I don't do bumper stickers on my car, so I will place this one on my office door.<br />
<br />
It seems a good reminder these days as the news gets worse and worse. Almost every day brings word of another act of terrorism or violence.<br />
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Every other Facebook post asks me to give in to fear.<br />
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My conservative friends think the answer is more law and order and respect for authority.<br />
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My progressive friends think the answer is more honest discussion about the deep racial and economic divisions in our country.<br />
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It's so stressful, and it's so easy to allow myself to get sucked into the anxiety and negativity and hopelessness. It's easy to become obsessed with what's happening now.<br />
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It's at times like these it helps me to read dead people.<br />
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Here's a few of the things I mean by reading dead people--and a few reasons I think it's healthy to do so:<br />
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<b>By reading dead people I acknowledge that this has all happened before.</b><br />
C. S Lewis recognized an important tendency in Western society. He called it chronological snobbery and said it was the tendency to believe that our contemporary culture is unique and superior to all the cultures of the past. In technology, it leads to a preference for the latest device. In literature, it leads to a preference for the latest author and to a discounting of dead authors, which Lewis saw as an incalculable loss.<br />
<b> </b><br />
<b>By reading dead people I acknowledge the many ways the authors of the past continue to influence me today.</b><br />
T. S. Eliot, in "Tradition and the Individual Talent," noted how no contemporary author writes without the influence, either conscious or unconscious, of past writers. No poet can write without the shadow of Chaucer and Shakespeare and Dickinson over her. While this awareness can create anxiety for writers ("How can I ever write anything as good as Sonnet 30?"), it also fosters the humility necessary for creating great art. We are, in a sense, only able to write what we write today because of our literary forefathers and foremothers. Or as the Bible puts it: "you drink from wells you did not dig."<br />
<b> </b><br />
<b>By reading dead people I may just discover wisdom I can use today.</b><br />
Here's a little story about how reading literature works in mysterious ways.<br />
<b> </b><br />
A few months ago, I joined a book discussion at my church about Christian Wiman's <i>My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer. </i>You can check it out <a href="https://www.amazon.com/My-Bright-Abyss-Meditation-Believer/dp/0374534373">here</a>.<br />
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Wiman mentions that one of the authors who's been most helpful to him in matters of faith is Fanny Howe, in particular her novel <i>Indivisible. </i>Well, I'd never heard of either Howe or her novel but decided to make a mental note and read Howe's novel later in the summer.<br />
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Making a mental note was not a good idea since I promptly forgot about it (see reading too many FB posts, above). Then I was in Powell's the other day looking for something else and, miraculously, the Howe reference came back to me--not as Howe but as "that author that Wiman, I think, referred to in that book." So I found Wiman's memoir on the shelf at Powell's, found the passage where he referred to Howe's novel, and went to look for it. (Technologically savvy readers, please don't judge the fact that I'm not doing this search online.)<br />
<br />
As fate, or the literary gods, would have it, Powells didn't carry the novel, but they did have a book of essays by Fanny Howe, <i>The Winter Sun: Notes on Vocation</i>, at a reasonable price--so I bought it. You can check it out <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Winter-Sun-Notes-Vocation/dp/1555975208">here</a>.<br />
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In one of Howe's essays, she tells the story of Jacques Lusseyran, a Frenchman I'd never heard of whose life story, <i>And There Was Light</i>, was translated by Elizabeth R. Cameron in 1963. You would do well to read Howe's account for yourself, but here's some highlights:<br />
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Lusseyran was born in Paris in 1924. As a child he was fascinated by light, but at the age of eight, a minor accident at school rendered him totally blind. Lusseyran was not deterred. He learned Braille in six weeks and rejoined his friends at school. Neither did he let his blindness eliminate his appreciation for light. Howe writes:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The first thing he discovered, soon after his accident, was that there was a source of light that was not the sun; it hid within his body; he was flooded by it and because of it, he felt the presence of others and objects through their colors. </blockquote>
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Soon the Nazis occupied France, and he and his friends decided to form a resistance group made up of students. The group grew and thrived until they were betrayed to the Gestapo by an infiltrator. Lusseyran was beaten but refused to name names or cooperate. In July 1943 he was sent to Buchenwald.<br />
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In spite of this turn of events. he did not despair. Howe notes:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
He formed friendships, became a leader in the French Resistance inside the camps through translation and the transmission of overheard news reports in German to other prisoners. In January 1944, there were sixty thousand prisoners at Buchenwald. Six months later there were ten thousand.</blockquote>
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Now for the wisdom I gained from reading Lusseyran's story:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Near the end of his horrifying account, he tells readers how to get through torture, through imprisonment. There are three things to remember: 'The first of these is that joy does not come from outside for whatever happens to us it is within. The second truth is that light does not come to us from without. Light is in us, even if we have no eyes.' The third is friendship. If you can form close human attachments to those around you you have the possibility of surviving as a human being. </blockquote>
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Aren't those three things to remember amazing? And this also amazes:<br />
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I would never have heard those three things in just that way had a blind man from France not endured the experiences he did and had he not written them down.<br />
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I would never have learned Lusseyran's incredible story had I not read Fanny Howe's book of essays.<br />
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I would never have read Fanny Howe's book of essays had I not read Christian Wiman's meditation about his bout with cancer and his struggle to find faith as a poet.<br />
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I would never had encountered any of these ideas had I not read dead people.<br />
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But since I did and do read dead people, with my newfound wisdom, I may be able to survive another day of FB posts.<br />
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I may even be able to survive the Republican and Democratic conventions--at least with Stephen Colbert's help, who, I'm pretty sure, also reads dead people.<br />
<br />Gary Tandyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17494570091459554195noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5738805570562546849.post-14348031493846147022016-07-05T06:59:00.003-07:002016-07-06T20:47:54.941-07:00My Prairie Home Companion Prayer<br />
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Most Sundays at my church, there's a time set aside for sharing joys and concerns. Members who have something to share with the congregation come to the front, light a candle and place it in a bowl filled with sand, state their name, then say what's on their heart, concluding with "God in your love"" or "God in your mercy," to which the congregation responds "Hear our prayer."<br />
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It's one of my favorite parts of the service. Though many concerns center around health issues, either for self or a friend or family member, folks address a wide variety of of joys and concerns. One might share joy at a daughter's graduation or new job while another announces the birth of a grandson. One might relate grief at having to say goodbye to a beloved dog or cat while another mourns the loss of children caused by gun violence. Pretty much anything is fair game.<br />
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This past Sunday as I drove to church, I felt moved to share during joys and concerns time, but I wasn't sure the topic was appropriate. I'd been thinking about Garrison Keillor hosting the final performance of his long-running radio show, <i>A Prairie Home Companion</i>, on NPR, July 2, 2016, realizing I had probably listened to my first Lake Wobegon monologue over thirty-five years ago, and pondering how much pleasure the show had brought me over the years. That's a joy worth sharing, right?<br />
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As I turned into the church parking lot, I had pretty much convinced myself to do it. After all, I reasoned, though some people (likely the younger ones) will have no idea what I'm talking about, I know for sure we have a lot of NPR junkies in our congregation. I was beginning to compose in my head the words I would say when I lit my candle for Garrison and his radio show.<br />
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But then I remembered today was communion Sunday, and we don't do joys and concerns on communion Sundays.<br />
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So since I couldn't share my prayer of joy in church, I'll light a figurative candle here at my blog and share it with any virtual congregants who care to join me.<br />
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I'm Gary Tandy, and I'm lighting a candle this morning for Garrison Keillor and the <i>Prairie Home Companion </i>radio show. I realize it may seem odd to pray about a radio show, but this one's given me lots of joy over the years, and it feels right to express my gratitude for it.<br />
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When I first heard Garrison Keillor tell stories of growing up in a fundamentalist religious family in the Midwest, I connected easily with the world he portrayed with words. As he talked about being a part of a small movement that saw itself as the "true Christians," as opposed to those liberal and heretical Lutherans and Catholics, I realized that his Sanctified Brethren experience in Minnesota was not far removed from my own, growing up in the Church of Christ in Kansas in the 1960s and 70s. Apparently, as children we heard many of the same warnings: it's a dangerous world out there, so be careful what you see and read and, of course, don't smoke or drink alcohol or play cards or, heaven forbid, dance. Keillor said when he was a child he used to fantasize that instead of his own family, he had grown up with a modern family in New York where his parents encouraged him to smoke cigarettes and drink wine--and to call them by their first names.<br />
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Yes, Keillor poked fun at and looked satirically at the restrictive religious environment in which he grew up, but it was a gentle satire. Its tone was never hateful or dismissive. Though Keillor himself had changed, adopting radically different political and theological ideas than those of his family of origin, he was still able to speak of his family and the people of his town with genuine love and affection and to celebrate the many values they got right: hard work, loyalty, humility, compassion, common decency.<br />
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Above all, it was this tone that attracted me to Keillor and his storytelling because it was true to my own feelings and experience as I thought about my past, my family, my church. I admired this ability to look back and not to ignore the flaws or the damaging theology of his past but to continue to love and be grateful for the people who, as often as they made him feel guilty and shameful, made him feel loved and welcomed, valued and protected.<br />
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And it's precisely that tone, I think, that is missing in our current American society where we seem not to be able to disagree with people's politics or theology without demonizing them, where we seem not to be able to take an opposing position without denigrating those who hold a different position. Keillor has always provided a model of civility: he doesn't shy away from expressing his opinion, but he treats those who don't share it with respect. It's an approach that says we're still Americans, no matter how much we disagree. We still have much in common. We're in this together.<br />
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This is my prayer of joy for Garrison Keillor and <i>A Prairie Home Companion. </i>My intellectual, emotional, and spiritual life would not have been the same without them, and for that I'll be forever grateful.<br />
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God in your love.<br />
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Hear our prayer.<br />
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<br />Gary Tandyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17494570091459554195noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5738805570562546849.post-620402416710844062016-03-06T13:29:00.000-08:002016-03-08T06:11:21.667-08:00Belated Thanks to a Writer<br />
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As I opened my Facebook news feed on Friday morning and scrolled through the political posts, the selfies of friends, and the hijinx of assorted animals, I was stopped short by a notice that a friend had died. He was 70 years old, and the cause of death was his recently diagnosed pancreatic cancer.<br />
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Though I call him a friend, our friendship was extremely one-sided. In fact, I'd never met him, written to him, or even seen him in person. In spite of these facts, it felt like losing a friend because I had read and been intrigued by his books for over thirty years.<br />
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Pat Conroy. Writer of novels and memoirs, among them <i>The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline, The Water is Wide, and The Prince of Tides.</i> You can read more about his life and literary achievements <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/pat-conroy-best-selling-author-of-great-santini-and-prince-of-tides-dies-at-70/2016/03/04/9390e9a4-e288-11e5-8d98-4b3d9215ade1_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-more-top-stories_ob-main-conroy-12am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&tid=sm_fb">here.</a><br />
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Why do we as readers connect so strongly to some authors they come to feel like old friends? Why do we not make that connection with other writers--even the ones our friends or the critics tell us we should love?<br />
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You would think as someone who teaches literature for a living I might have the answers to those questions, but I don't. I know it goes deeper than subject matter or shared experience. The writer of a letter to <i>Sports Illustrated</i> complimented an <i>SI </i>writer on a recent article by saying the writer made him care about a topic in which he had no interest. So we can like an author, even if she writes about a topic we don't much care for.<br />
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And while shared experience certainly helps, it's certainly not essential. I've never gone on a whaling expedition, yet <i>Moby Dick</i> remains one of the novels that interests me most. That's where the vicarious quality of literature comes in.<br />
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Tone and style definitely have a lot to do with why I gravitate toward a writer, but as I look at my reading experience, I'm inconsistent on this front, Pat Conroy's style being an excellent example of that inconsistency. Conroy's style can be overblown and verbose. His early model, after all, was Thomas Wolfe of <i>Look Homeward Angel</i> fame. The article linked above notes that Conroy's first draft for the novel <i>Beach Music</i> was some 2100 pages long, so he and his editor spent four months trimming it back to a mere 650+ pages!<br />
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But in Conroy's case, I can forgive his florid and the over-the-top style because he tells such powerful stories. And those stories invariably revolve around family.<br />
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The <i>Washington Post</i> article points out that most of Conroy's novels were actually thinly veiled accounts of his own life experiences, especially the way growing up in the company of a verbally and physically abusive father shaped him. The article also points out this tendency caused many family members to quit speaking to him. I admire him for writing about his painful experiences anyway. As Anne Lamott rightly observes, if people didn't want you to write bad stuff about them, they should have treated you nicer while they had the chance!<br />
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All these reflections still don't answer the question of why Conroy's been one of my favorite authors, so I'll take a shot at it:<br />
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Back to the shared experience thing, I was not attracted to Conroy's stories of highly dysfunctional families because those stories mirrored my own experience. Compared to the children in a Conroy novel, my childhood looks like growing up next door to Disneyworld with a perpetual all-day pass.<br />
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I think I was attracted to those stories because, while far different from my own experience, they had the ring of truth. They revealed to me that there are parents who do horribly damaging and irreversibly hurtful things to their children. And they showed me that part of the human reality is that children who go through such trauma are forever changed, that they must live their entire lives dealing with and trying to come to terms with that strangest of all creatures: one who can seem to offer love and affection one minute but in the next perpetrate violence and hatred of the worst kind.<br />
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A few years ago, I was writing a nonfiction piece about my childhood for a class. I was wanting to illustrate a tendency of my mom's, specifically her fear that someone would think badly about our family. As a child, I often thought Mom was overly concerned about what people might think. It was the reason I couldn't wear jeans to church (even Sunday night service!), to cite a really serious example.<br />
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In trying to think of a story outside my own experience to illustrate this point, I remembered the secret that Tom Wingo has so much trouble telling his psychiatrist in <i>The Prince of Tides</i>. It's an horrific tale. One night when their father is away, three escaped convicts break into the Wingo house and rape both Tom and his sister, Savannah, before the older brother returns to the house and unleashes the family's Bengal tiger (something every family should have) on the convicts.<br />
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It's such a horrible tale you can understand why a child would supress it and be reluctant to share it with anyone. However, it's what the mother does after the event I've always found most fascinating. The mother orders the boys to bury the dead bodies, and they spend all night scouring the floors and walls to remove the blood. And then she tells the children they are not to tell their father about the incident nor tell any living soul about it as long as they live. Wow, I thought, that's someone who's really serious about keeping secrets! But then what parent would burden their children with such a secret?<br />
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I was pleased with myself for remembering the story and thought it added some drama to my nonfiction piece, but the members of my workshop group were not so sure. They failed to see a strong connection to the story I was telling and thought it could be left out without hurting my essay. When the instructor said something similar, I had to agree, so even though I was still reluctant, I decided to drop the Conroy story.<br />
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From this experience, I learned two things.<br />
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First, one reason I love Conroy is his ability to write really powerful stories and scenes that stay with you as a reader. In the case of my nonfiction piece, I had been so impressed with the story, I had tried to wedge it into a piece of my own where it really didn't fit.<br />
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Second, though I said earlier that Conroy's violent childhood was very different than mine, it's also true that most of us probably can find points of connection with the family stories he tells. My family never had escaped convict-rapists enter our home, but we weren't perfect and we even had our secrets, and when a child observes that it's somehow more important to keep the family secrets and the family reputation intact than to be open and have healthy discussions about our problems, some lasting, psychologically harmful effects can result.<br />
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I'm grateful Pat Conroy had the courage to tell his family secrets and to write about his joys and sorrows in such a compelling way. I wish I had written and told him how much I appreciated his work while he was alive, but I didn't, so this will have to do: I will likely watch the film version of <i>The Prince of Tides </i>soon in his honor. And re-read his novels.<br />
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And, partly because of his example, I will continue to look for creative ways to tell my own story, for as Conroy showed us, magical things can happen when an author uses powers of memory and imagination to tell his story, which is in some mysterious and wonderfully complex way, my story and your story too because it is the human story after all.<br />
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<br />Gary Tandyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17494570091459554195noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5738805570562546849.post-47764234619637937892015-08-08T08:41:00.000-07:002015-08-08T09:42:26.888-07:00Rockin' in the Scholarly WorldI'm so excited,<br />
And I just can't hide it.<br />
<br />
The Pointer Sisters' 1980s hit song expresses well how I'm feeling these days about, of all things, my scholarship.<br />
<br />
As a university professor, I'm evaluated annually on my performance in teaching, service, scholarship, and, because I teach at a faith-based institution, the integration of faith and learning. Of these four areas, scholarship is the one that many faculty at my university worry about the most--especially because we teach four classes per semester. With that kind of teaching load and the expectations for committee work, other service, and active participation in a faith community, it can be tough to find time for the sustained intellectual and writing discipline required to produce journal articles and the occasional book.<br />
<br />
Personally, in order to amass the proper number of presentations, articles, and books (whatever that is; no one is ever able to give you a number) to be granted tenure, I chose to specialize. As a result, virtually every presentation and writing project I've undertaken for the last six years has been about a very narrow field of inquiry, specifically the rhetoric and style of C. S. Lewis's prose works.<br />
<br />
While specialization has its rewards--it's a good feeling to study one area so deeply that you attain some level of expertise--it also has its downsides. It can seem repetitive after awhile, and you begin to feel like a one trick pony. Whenever I tell Janet about my latest project, for example, she sighs and asks "Are you ever going to write about an author other than C. S. Lewis?"<br />
<br />
And this brings me to the reason for my excitement: I'm finally going to write about someone else!<br />
<br />
But it gets better.<br />
<br />
I get to write about two of my longtime favorite rock stars: Neil Young and Jackson Browne.<br />
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If I were to name my all-time favorite singer-songwriters in trinitarian terms, it would look like this:<br />
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Bob Dylan (Father)<br />
Neil Young (Son)<br />
Jackson Browne (Holy Ghost)<br />
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Truth be told, on some days I could replace Browne with John Prine or perhaps Emmylou (though more for her singing than her songwriting).<br />
<br />
So you can imagine how thrilled I was when the opportunity came along to write an academic article about two of my musical heroes.<br />
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It happened like this: I was scrolling through postings on a Christianity and Literature list serve when I came across one from a prof who was proposing to edit a volume on <i>Rock and Romanticism. </i>By Romanticism he meant the literary, artistic, philosophical movement in the early nineteenth century. The idea was to explore connections between Rock and Roll artists and the spirit of romanticism.<br />
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I immediately began to think about the British Romantic poets--Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats--I teach in my British literature class and how I've noticed echoes from their work in the lyrics of some of my favorite singer-songwriters from the 1960s an 1970s. Because I assumed Dylan would be an obvious choice, I opted for Young and Browne. I sent the prof a proposal for a chapter, and it was accepted.<br />
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My tentative title is "I Wandered Lonely as a Rock Star: Neil Young and Jackson Browne as Romantic Lyricists."<br />
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This is pretty much a dream writing project for me. I get to research and write about two singer-songwriters whose music got me through high school and college in one piece and whose works I've continued to enjoy over the years. I've also seen both artists in concert multiple times.<br />
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And it counts as scholarship!<br />
<br />
I've been doing preliminary reading--Neil Young's autobiography and a book on Browne, Cat Stevens, and James Taylor--and I'm feeling a little guilty. Should scholarship really be this much fun?<br />
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Because I'm stepping out of my scholarship comfort zone, it feels like--well, the Pointer Sisters say it best:<br />
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I'm about to lose control,<br />
And I think I like it. I like it.<br />
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<br />Gary Tandyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17494570091459554195noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5738805570562546849.post-82242518918756279652015-02-28T09:52:00.001-08:002015-03-01T07:38:54.576-08:00Tooth gaps, Chaucer, and Personality Types<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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In fourth grade, I thought the coolest kid in my class was Brian Slobotsky. Not only did he have an awesome last name, but he had this gap between his two front teeth that allowed him to perform an astonishing feat. He would get a mouthful of water from the fountain, form his lips in a circle, and shoot a thin stream of water through that gap, sometime aimed at the water fountain, but more often at one of us. His mad skill provided an endless source of entertainment for our fourth grade class.<br />
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When I studied Chaucer in college, I learned that in the middle ages people with a gap between their front teeth were thought to be amorous and overly interested in sex. Thus, when Chaucer introduces his Wif of Bath character, he points out that she is "gat-toothed," which apparently explains the fact that she has worked her way through five husbands.<br />
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It never occurred to me in fourth grade to question Brian's sexual proclivities, but who knows? I've not heard from him in awhile, so I suppose he could have lived a life of sexual adventure and serial divorce. <br />
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Whenever I return to Chaucer's <i>Canterbury Tales</i>, as I'm doing now with my early British literature class, I find it fascinating how they so readily equated physical traits with morality or immorality and with specific personality types. Gap-toothedness is a striking example, but there are others. Thus, the Monk, who plays against type with his love of hunting and eating and drinking (in a delightful phrase, Chaucer says it snowed meat and drink in the Monk's house), is predictably plump and has a red face, indicating his sanguine and jolly personality. The Reeve (the superintendent of a large farming operation), on the other hand, is thin as a reed, matching his fiery, choleric personality type.<br />
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It's easy enough to laugh at the simplicity and ignorance of our ancestors, of course. After all, we've studied human psychology enough to know that a person's physical appearance has little, if anything, to do with his moral character or personality type.<br />
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Or have we? Our obsession with the bodies, physical appearance, and dress of actors at the recently completed Academy Awards ceremony might indicate otherwise. It seems we're still not beyond assuming that someone who is beautiful on the outside is also good on the inside, or at least different than us, with a more sparkling or winsome personality. How many times have I made judgments or assumptions about a person's morality or personality traits based on the size of his waistline? Or assumed that a physically attractive student in one of my classes was, de facto, a good student or scholar?<br />
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When I worked in the corporate world, one company used a simplified personality test with the goal of improving interpersonal communications and productivity. The system looked something like this:<br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">The Four Personality Types: </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">•Otter-Expressive-Popular-Sanguine </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">•Lion-Drive-Powerful-Choleric </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">•Beaver-Analytical-Perfect-Melancholy </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">•Golden Retriever-amiable-Peaceful-Phlegmatic</span> </div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I don't remember using the animal designations, but all employees in the company took the test and were classified as Expressives, Drivers, Analyticals, or Amiables. They were then put through a training course (which I led) to help them understand more about their type as well as how to interact successfully with other types. </span></span> </div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I remember I was an analytical and that one of the owners of the firm was a driver, what we often call a Type A personality. That the test had some degree of accuracy was confirmed for me when I ran into him in the hallway early one morning and had this exchange:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Me: "Good morning, Bob. How are you." </span></span></div>
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Bob: "Great! Nothing like a good fight before breakfast!"</blockquote>
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Needless to say, Bob was the owner I had the most trouble working with.<br />
<br />
All this leads me to several observations:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>I do understand the usefulness of these tests. They can be helpful in educational or work environments. For example, if I (an anayltical) am trying to convince my supervisor (a driver) to approve a new company policy, I'm wise not to give him twenty minutes of background detail but instead get straight to the point with a few, well-chosen arguments. </li>
<li>These tests can be dangerous because they encourage our tendency to categorize and stereotype individuals. It's easy to think because a colleague or co-worker or student is an Amiable, for example, we can make any kind of unreasonable demand and they are likely to go along with it for the sake of the relationship.</li>
<li>These tests can be dangerous because they cause us to put limits on people's capacities and potential for growth. For example, I might have a colleague who is an analytical and tends to be uncomfortable making presentations to large groups of people. Normally I wouldn't even think of asking her to present before a group because I know how difficult it is for her. But what if an event is coming up where she is clearly the most knowledgeable person about the topic? Perhaps by asking her to step out of her comfort zone and present, I'm doing both her and the audience a favor: my colleague gets a growth opportunity and the audience gets the benefit of her expertise.</li>
</ul>
So ultimately I guess I'm saying that a human's personality is too complex and unique to be placed in a box--whether it's a personality test designation or a judgment based on physical appearance.<br />
<br />
Going back to Chaucer, I have to say those folks in the middle ages had more on the ball than we give them credit for. After all, the contemporary personality types I found through my extensive research (two Google clicks on the Internet) still use the medieval humours (Sanguine, Melancholy, etc.) to try to categorize the mysteries of human behavior.<br />
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<br />Gary Tandyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17494570091459554195noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5738805570562546849.post-77930825918176711772015-02-10T06:14:00.000-08:002016-01-18T08:25:36.715-08:00Deep in my Heart, I do Believe<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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You must imagine me sitting in church in the heart of America in 1963. The particular day or occasion is irrelevant. It might have been a Sunday morning or Sunday evening service. It might have been a Sunday morning or Wednesday evening Bible class. It might have been the Tuesday night of a week-long Gospel Meeting in the summer. (I spent a lot of time in church in those days.)<br />
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It might even have been a time when the preacher or Bible class teacher was discussing the narrative in Acts about Peter and the Gentiles, where Peter, a Jew, learns the hard lesson that God is no respecter of persons. <br />
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But here's what I've come to realize, and what I've been turning over in my head and heart since shortly before Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 2015. It's a reality I find both ironic and sad:<br />
<br />
In all those worship services and in all those Bible classes, I don't remember hearing about racism. Not even once. I don't ever remember anyone referring to the racial tensions in our country and addressing them in light of scripture. Not even when the story in the biblical text (e.g., Peter preaching to the Gentiles) would seem to demand it.<br />
<br />
Why was this the case, I wonder? I don't think it was because there were no racial tensions and no social injustice in my town. It was 1963, after all, the height of the Civil Rights movement, the year that Dr. King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech.<br />
<br />
I can think of at least two reasons why racism and social injustice were not discussed in my church. First, we were all white. We were vaguely aware that black Christians were worshiping in their own (black) churches on the other side of town, but we seldom encountered them and did not worship with them. My town was as segregated as my church. There were no black kids in my elementary school. Even in Junior High, there were few students who did not look like me. Only in high school would I go to school in an integrated environment.<br />
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Second, my church's approach to the Bible and theology, promoted, in direct and indirect ways, a dichotomy between the spiritual and the secular. Religious acts like Bible study, worship, and baptism were part of the sacred world; concerns of poverty and racism and gender equality were consigned to the secular realm. <br />
<br />
So rather than learning about the damaging effects of racism on society in church, I learned about it in school. In my junior year of high school, Philip Rhea (bless his heart), my honors English teacher, led the class through a selection of literature written by African Americans. We read W. E. B. Du Bois's <i>The Souls of Black Folks; </i>we read John Howard Griffin's <i>Black Like Me</i>; we even read Eldridge Cleaver's <i>Soul on Ice.</i><br />
<br />
And slowly through the reading and discussion of these and other books, a new reality began to open up to me, and I realized two things: that my black classmates came from people who were the victims of institutional and systemic racism, and that I was white, privileged, and middle class, and through no fault of my own, I was part of the problem. Finally, thanks to Mr. Rhea's reading list and the fact that some of the literature we read was recent, I learned that racism was not simply part of an embarrassing past but was active in my town and my nation in 1970.<br />
<br />
I wonder to this day how Mr. Rhea got approval from the administration and school board to teach these books in his class, but I'm thankful he did. In college, I would commute to another campus to take a class in Black Literature because my university did not offer one. Later still, I would decide to make teaching writing and literature my life's work, due in large part to my life-changing reading experience in that high school English class. If books could open up a whole new window on the world for me, I figured they were worth it.<br />
<br />
I just wish we would have talked about some of this in church.<br />
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I wish someone at church had told me about the racial injustice in my town.<br />
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I wish someone at church had named racism as a sin that stands as an affront to the Christian faith.<br />
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I wish someone at church had told me that Christians are theologically bound to seek the elimination of racism.<br />
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Some might wonder why I'm dredging up the distant past and claim that such blind spots no longer exist in the church. However, I've heard similar sacred/secular dichotomies expressed by my students at an evangelical Christian university. On a trip to the Iona Community in Scotland, we visited a service that focused on environmentalism and what we as Christians could do to reduce the carbon footprint and demonstrate care for the health of the earth. Several students commented afterwards that they enjoyed meeting in the ancient church but that the service "hadn't seemed like church," presumably because it focused not on praise to Jesus but on non-spiritual and earthly concerns. <br />
<br />
A few weeks ago, on the day before the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, I sat in another church service, and we talked about, of all things, racism.<br />
<br />
The pastor's text that morning was the calling of Samuel and the word he heard from the Lord to confront Eli about the sins of his family. She noted the events in the story could parallel what Christians need to do with reference to racism. For example, we should listen. We must listen to the stories of those whose lives are negatively affected by racism. We must listen to the stories from Detroit, and Staten Island, and Ferguson, for example. This listening, the pastor noted, will likely make us uncomfortable, just as the message Samuel was told to communicate to Eli was hard and made him uncomfortable.<br />
<br />
At some point during the service, we sang James Weldon Johnson's poem set to music, <i>Lift Every Voice and Sing</i>, a song that has come to be called the African American National Anthem. It's the hymn that Maya Angelou writes about so movingly in <i>I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings</i>, the song that brought hope to her and her fellow African American high school graduating students after a white speaker had told them they should never expect to rise above the level of being hired hands and domestic servants in society. Here's the second verse of that song:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Stony the road we trod, bitter the chastening rod, felt in the days when hope unborn had died;<br />
Yet with a steady beat, have not our weary feet, come to the place for which our people sighed?<br />
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,<br />
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,<br />
Out from the gloomy past, till now we stand at last,<br />
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.</blockquote>
<br />
We have few people of color in our church, but as I sang this anthem with my predominately white congregation, I couldn't help but feel there was something healing and healthy about it. I felt I was in some small way lamenting and abiding with my African American brothers and sisters, past and present. And I had a strong sense that as a Christian, that's something I need to do, even something I must do.<br />
<br />
The following Sunday we talked more about what it would look like to lament and abide in humility with people of color. And we talked about some practical ways we could respond to the institutional and systemic racism still at work in our society. We talked about how this is not just optional but part and parcel of what we should be up to as people of faith. And we closed the service singing<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
We shall overcome, we shall overcome, we shall overcome some day;/ Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe, we shall overcome some day.</blockquote>
<br />
Singing these words moved me and gave me hope.<br />
<br />
I don't know how many predominately white churches sing these songs in their services, but it might not be a bad idea to do so occasionally. It's a small thing, I know, and some might see the act as merely symbolic or insignificant in addressing the larger problem. But it's a place to start.<br />
<br />
Perhaps social action begins when our hearts are moved and we empathize and identify with the plight of people whose experience differs radically from ours. Perhaps singing the songs of freedom in our churches could be a first step toward seeking just treatment and equity for people of color. A small step, to be sure, but a step nonetheless.<br />
<br />
I'm reminded of what Allan Johnson says in his excellent book, <i>Power, Privilege, and Difference: </i><br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>If dominant groups <i>really</i> saw privilege and oppression as unacceptable--if white people saw race as <i>their</i> issue, if men saw gender as a <i>men's </i>issue, if heterosexuals saw heterosexism as <i>their </i>problem--privilege and oppression wouldn't have much of a future.</i></blockquote>
Singing the songs of freedom moved me a step closer to seeing racism as my issue. And, given my background, I'm grateful to be in a church where I no longer have to check my concerns for social justice at the door. <br />
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<br />Gary Tandyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17494570091459554195noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5738805570562546849.post-72009987754732686592014-09-07T16:47:00.000-07:002014-09-07T16:47:51.788-07:00A Story of Two Communions<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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This morning at church we heard reports from a team of 13 members about their recently completed mission trip to Ciudad Sandino/Nueva Vida, Nicaragua. Many of their stories involved difficult circumstances. They spoke of devastating effects of a hurricane on people already struggling to subsist on $2 per day. They spoke of coffee workers who slept (in the not-too-distant past) in flimsy wooden structures half the size of the pews we were sitting on. They described inconsistent medical care and inadequate medical facilities.<br />
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Other stories were more hopeful. Stories of a community of coffee plantation workers, many of whom had fought against each other in the country's civil wars but who now worked together in harmony, recognizing that "war distorts relationships" and preferring to look toward the future rather than remain stuck in the past. Stories of an American nonprofit that provided small loans to Nicaraguans, giving them the opportunity to start their own business ventures and build sustainable careers. One team member, Jane, told of the deep human connections she felt with the Nicaraguans they worked with and worshiped with, in spite of their differences in skin color, language, and economic standing.<br />
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<br />
On the way home, I stopped by Burgerville to grab lunch to go. (I'm eating alone this week while my wife and daughter visit parents and grandparents in Arkansas.) Apparently lots of other folks in town had the same idea. Since the drive-through was backed up, I parked and went in to order, where I found the line at the cash registers was backed up as well. <br />
<br />
After a few minutes, I had reached second place in line. A family of four--dad, mom, two elementary- school-aged children--was at the register in front of me. The mom and dad placed their orders fairly quickly, but I could tell it was taking awhile to get just the right orders for the kids. I noticed the delay, but it didn't really bother me. I wasn't in any particular hurry; plus, I was still thinking about the conditions in Central America.<br />
<br />
I placed my order, took my plastic number, and waited near the soda machine. There was also a line there. A man was standing at the machine with several cups, retrieving drinks for his group. Behind him stood the family who had been in front of me in line a few moments ago at the register.<br />
<br />
As the man put the lid on the last drink, he turned to the family waiting behind him and said, in a sarcastic tone:<br />
<br />
"Oh, are you waiting? I'm sorry. Oh well, that's okay. I had to wait for 30 minutes while you built your burgers." He laughed and carried his drinks to his table.<br />
<br />
The man's comment and tone bothered me. A lot. Not just because it was rude, which it was. Not just because it was untrue, which it was. (The family might have taken three minutes to order; it certainly did not take 30.)<br />
<br />
It also disturbed me because the man making the insincere and sarcastic apology was white and the family who took some extra time to order was latino.<br />
<br />
While I have no way of knowing this man's story or what's in his heart, this ethnic reality raised, at least for me, the possibility that what I had witnessed was something uglier and more serious than impatience and rudeness. <br />
<br />
I should know better by now, but I couldn't help catching the eye of this man and giving him a brief look--a look any one of my family members could easily identify. That look of disapproval that says "you should be ashamed of yourself." I couldn't not do something. I couldn't ignore what I'd witnessed. I doubt it did any good.<br />
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----------------<br />
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This morning at church, in addition to the sharing of the folks who went to Nicaragua, we shared communion. I love the liturgy of the communion service at our church, especially its visual nature.<br />
<br />
First, the pastor holds up a loaf of bread and breaks it in half, speaking words about the body of Christ. Then she talks about how Jesus shared the cup with his friends. As she speaks, she pours the juice from a large pitcher into two smaller cups. As she pours, she raises the pitcher away from the cup so the congregants can clearly see the liquid flowing into the cup. I don't know why this is so significant to me, but I notice it every time. <br />
<br />
The pastor then speaks words along these lines: "This is a table of life and a table of love and a table of welcome. You are invited to this feast whether you come often or have not been in a long time. All are welcome at this table. Come to the feast. All is ready."<br />
<br />
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<br />
I want badly to live in a world where the hopeful events that happened in Nicaragua occur with frequency.<br />
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I want badly to live in a world where white and latino (and all people of color) welcome each other and work toward common goals.<br />
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I want badly to eat always at that table where all are welcome. <br />
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But I also know I live much of my life in the middle of a very different reality.<br />
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A world where I'm so used to having my every need met immediately that I can no longer wait. (Didn't Paul have something to say about this to the Corinthians who refused to wait on their working class brothers and sisters to break bread?)<br />
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A world where I'm afraid that those who look differently and speak differently than me will cost me money or take my job.<br />
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A world where I offer rejection rather than welcome and exclusion rather than inclusion.<br />
<br />
--------------------<br />
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As we rose from our pews this morning and walked forward to take a piece of bread and dip it in a cup, we sang these words, words I so badly want to be true, not someday, but now:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Eat of this bread, drink of this wine;</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
come and be fed, come now and dine.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Eat of this bread, drink of this wine;</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
here all are fed, here all may dine. </blockquote>
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<br />Gary Tandyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17494570091459554195noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5738805570562546849.post-9148321608352404422014-07-03T09:31:00.000-07:002014-07-18T08:09:15.484-07:00Black Cats, Cherry Bombs, and Christian Patriotism<style>
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I must confess I don't really look forward to 4th of July celebrations these days. This is mostly due to Cordelia, our bichon frise, for whom the day is pretty much her worst nightmare. On the other 364 days of the year, Cordy enjoys our two daily walks. But July 4th is different. She'll be leading me down the sidewalk as usual (though I hold the leash, there's no question she's in charge), hear the boom of a firework, near or far, stop dead in her tracks, turn around, and hightail it for home. Once home, as soon as I remove her leash, she sprints straight for our bedroom where she crawls under the bed or curls up on her blanket in the corner of the closet, her body trembling and her heart racing. We've tried sedatives but those just seem to agitate her more.<br />
<br />
The second reason I don't look forward to fireworks day occurred a few years ago. We had just moved into our house in Newberg in June. On the fourth that year, we had gone to Cascade Locks in the Columbia gorge to watch the fireworks show, arriving back home late that evening. As we approached the driveway, we noticed that a couple of the slats in our wooden privacy fence were blackened at the bottom and one even had a red glow to it. We realized with horror that at some point during the evening our fence had been on fire.<br />
<br />
The mystery was solved the next morning when a neighbor from a few doors down came by to say he had been walking his dog past our house when he saw the small fire, got some water, and doused it. Apparently our across-the-street neighbors had been shooting fireworks in their front yard and had failed to notice that one of them had ignited our fence. Had it not been for our other neighbor, we could have arrived home to a much more disturbing scene!<br />
<br />
My current feelings about the 4th of July strike me as strange because growing up, Independence Day was, next to Christmas, my favorite holiday.<br />
<br />
For me, Independence Day did not mean freedom from British tyranny; it meant the freedom from restrictions about blowing stuff up. And how I loved to blow stuff up! <br />
<br />
I’m surprised my brother and I survived so many July 4<sup>th</sup>.
celebrations without blowing <i>ourselves </i>up—or at least sustaining serious
injury.</div>
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My brother and I loved creating loud noises with any
kinds of explosives we could get our hands on. At the end of June, when the fireworks stands began to appear around the edges of Wichita, our anticipation began to build, and it continued to mount until the day we got to make our annual fireworks shopping visit.<br />
<br />
I still remember the smell of gunpowder and sawdust as we left the mid-day Kansas sun and entered the shade of the fireworks tent (though the shade didn't really make the 100 degree heat feel much better). Mom and Dad would hand us each some cash, and we
would go to work, our objective being to obtain as many high impact explosives
as possible on our limited budget. We always shopped for the loudest and
baddest ones.</div>
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Legal restrictions were less prevalent in those days, so
when I was a kid you could still buy Black Cat firecrackers: the ones that had
the most gunpowder in them. This, of course, also made them more dangerous than
the kind they sell today. Because we liked to hold a firecracker in our hand,
light it, then throw it, there was always the chance that the fuse would burn
very quickly and the firecracker would explode before or just after it left
your hand.<br />
<br />
Apparently, making firecrackers was not a science, so it seemed that
out of every pack, there would likely be one or two “quick burners,” the
problem being you never knew which ones they were. This happened to me often
enough that I remember how frightening it was. I also remember how much my hand
hurt when it happened. My mom was very aware of this danger because it was to
her I would go running when it happened. She would wrap my hand up in a cold
washrag until the throbbing stopped. Then I would be out the door, ready to
launch more Black Cats into space. </div>
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Next to Black Cat firecrackers, our favorite explosives were
cherry bombs and M-80s. Cherry bombs were called that for obvious reasons. The
looked like a cherry but in place of a stem, there was a thick fuse on top.
M-80s were shaped differently, consisting of a silver cardboard tube that held
the powder and a fuse that extended from the tube’s middle.<br />
<br />
As I remember,
these two were pretty equal in power. They were, of course, many times more
powerful than a black cat firecracker. So powerful that, even as reckless as we
were with fireworks, we would not hold them in our hands and light them. We
would place them on the ground, light them, and then run like hell. </div>
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A favorite pastime was to place a coffee can on top of
either an M-80 or a Cherry Bomb with the fuse sticking out. We would light the
fuse, run like we were being chased by a grizzly bear, and then turn to watch
the can being launched 10 feet or more into the air.<br />
<br />
Cherry Bombs and M-80s
were valuable commodities. They cost more than firecrackers. They were
cherished, hoarded, and saved, and while they would primarily be used on the 4<sup>th</sup>.
of July, we might save a few to use on special occasions throughout the year.<br />
<br />
I
liked to get my stash of M-80s and Cherry Bombs out occasionally just to look
at them and imagine the glorious day when I could set them off. Like Gollum
with his precious, I reveled in the uniqueness and promise of these explosives.</div>
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Our family’s tradition was to travel outside the city limits
of Wichita to the house of family friends. This family also had a boy who would
engage in the pyrotechnics fun with my brother and me. I’m not sure why we had
to leave Wichita to shoot fireworks. Perhaps there was a law that prohibited
shooting them in the city limits. Likely there was because I don’t
remember ever shooting fireworks off at our home. </div>
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I do remember though shooting tons of fireworks every 4<sup>th</sup>
of July. We did some stupid things, most of which would have been strictly
forbidden, I’m sure, had our parents known what we were up to. I already
mentioned the practice of holding, lighting, and throwing powerful
firecrackers. We also threw lighted firecrackers at each other—not a
brilliant idea given the potential for one to explode near an eye or an ear.<br />
<br />
One time a couple of us boys climbed up in a treehouse with
our fireworks and threw them down at the boys below while they in turn threw
lighted fireworks up at us. The perils attendant with such an activity are
obvious, and I can only think it’s a miracle that no one was seriously injured
in these exchanges. I suspect some of my mild hearing loss today can be attributed to those excessively loud noises my ears experienced on those hot July days long ago.</div>
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We never went to fireworks shows. We conducted our own. We would
buy a few of the roman candles and fountain type fireworks and set them off in
the driveway once it got dark, but these were much more expensive, and I think
we preferred to spend our money on the firecrackers and Cherry Bombs and M-80s.
We also liked bottle rockets, black snakes, and those little round pellets that exploded
when they made forceful contact with the ground. I don’t know what these were
called, but we loved them. </div>
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Their chief attraction was their use in the game known as
Surprise Attack. For example, let’s say you and your brother were standing in
the driveway after coming home from church. You could conceal one of these
little guys in the palm of your hand; then when your brother wasn’t looking you
could throw it right next to his shoe, scaring the daylights out of him. The
next step, of course, was to run like hell so your brother didn’t tackle you
and beat you up. It was a drill similar to lighting an M-80 in that respect. The
game of Surprise Attack was great fun, especially when you were on the giving
end—not so much of course when on the receiving end.</div>
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I’ve mentioned elsewhere that I was unique among the Tandy
boys in not taking to guns and hunting. This was not the case with fireworks,
however. I loved and looked forward to the 4<sup>th</sup> of July festivities
as much as any of the boys, and the fascination would continue after I had
children of my own. Fortunately, by that time, most of my favorite
explosives—Black Cats, M-80s, and Cherry Bombs—had been banned, so I didn’t
have the same worries as my parents did that one of my boys would lose a finger
or eye as a result of a 4<sup>th</sup> of July celebration.</div>
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It occurs to me as I write this that I never recall my
parents tying what happened on the 4<sup>th</sup> of July to any patriotic or
Christian message. Certainly I was aware of the Independence Day aspect; I’m
just saying I don’t remember our family ever talking about that or placing a particular
emphasis on it as a holiday. I never heard my dad preach a sermon about Independence Day.</div>
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These days it seems common to hear evangelical Christians
talk about nationalism and our country’s biblical foundations around Independence Day. I find the difference intriguing. Dad served in the military during WW II, and
no doubt would have called himself patriotic, but, at least as far as I
remember, he didn’t see a need to mix his patriotism with his Christianity. (Just to be clear, I don't object to love of country or to Christianity; it's just the combination of the two that frightens me. To use one example, consider the way the Third Reich co-opted the Lutheran church in Nazi Germany.)<br />
<br />
For
us, I guess, blowing stuff up was a good enough reason for celebration. We didn’t
need to cite chapter and verse for our practice. It was just good, clean, loud
(and sometimes dangerous) fun. Plus, there was the homemade ice cream.</div>
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Gary Tandyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17494570091459554195noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5738805570562546849.post-6497266397335859702014-06-25T18:12:00.000-07:002014-06-25T18:12:09.480-07:00Sports, Part 2<style>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2pPwloaFjc6Sgo2teopWo3W58RU0eq3ktq6dPdkopxs0H9nEBwYiKbI3oah9xJXVhn91c4f5O-xlucWfLeJTgA7AVmflHFuhiWTc4dpaYJFSiFnIhIxBhDMgOOcPFy1w8dr4oalBUJF4/s1600/Shockers.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2pPwloaFjc6Sgo2teopWo3W58RU0eq3ktq6dPdkopxs0H9nEBwYiKbI3oah9xJXVhn91c4f5O-xlucWfLeJTgA7AVmflHFuhiWTc4dpaYJFSiFnIhIxBhDMgOOcPFy1w8dr4oalBUJF4/s1600/Shockers.jpg" height="231" width="400" /></a></div>
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My dad's philosophy of raising and managing two active boys (my brother and me) was to introduce us to as many sports and activities as possible and see which ones stuck. For me, some did stick and become lifelong pursuits: chiefly basketball, golf, and tennis. Others, like fishing and hunting, did not. I still participated in them during my childhood years though because they were an excuse to get some dad time. </div>
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My brother and I were willing to endure the boredom that was
fishing with our dad for the glory that awaited us: swimming in the pool at Mac’s Hidden
Cove, our annual summer vacation destination near Shell Knob, Missouri. The swimming pool sat at the bottom of the hill and at the end of the dead-end
road that led into the hidden cove. It was visible from our second floor room. I would stand on the balcony
outside our room staring longingly at the blue water of the pool until it
opened at 10:00 a.m. when Steve and I would hold a foot race to see who could
be the first to dive into the water. With his five-years-older and longer legs,
he usually won. But that was no big deal because I knew I would soon experience the pure joy of jumping feet first into the water, making a huge splash, and then
standing in the shallow end of the pool, my teeth chattering as my small body
adjusted to the chilly water. </div>
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It was a good thing that I didn't often reach the pool before my brother because at another motel, when I did get there first, things did not turn out well. I jumped into what I thought
was the shallow end, but when my feet didn’t reach the bottom, I realized I was
in the deep end. I thought my young life was over as I flailed around underneath
the water, in panic mode, until I felt my brother’s arm around my waist,
bringing me to the surface and steering me toward the safety of the edge of the
pool. As much as I fought with my brother growing up, I’m grateful that he became that day and will always remain the
guy who saved my life. Were it not for him arriving at that motel pool when he
did, I wouldn’t be around writing this today.
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Of the sports my dad introduced to me, the one that I liked even less than fishing was hunting. Hunting
was a family activity (for the men anyway) and, as such, there was never any
question about whether I would participate, but would I enjoy it? Not so
much. Hunting trips in the Tandy family typically included Dad, my
brother, Steve, Uncle Jim (Dad's brother), my cousins, Bruce and Harold, and me. We only hunted
birds—pheasant and quail. Most times we would drive out to some fields near Wichita though there were a few longer trips to Western Kansas
where, presumably, there were more birds to shoot.
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My brother and cousins embraced everything about hunting
enthusiastically. They especially liked the guns. I was different in this
regard. I never particularly enjoyed shooting guns, and my main objective on
these trips was to avoid shooting one of my family members accidentally or
being shot myself.<br />
<br />
There was a legendary story that was always told on these
hunting trips. It was about Uncle Jim and his younger son, Bruce. As the story went, Jim and
Bruce were walking down the tree row when they heard a rustling in the trees just
ahead. Jim hollered to Bruce, who was walking slightly ahead of him, “Get
down!” Bruce obediently hit the ground whereupon Jim calmly took aim over him
and brought down a pheasant. The story made an impression on me, not just for
Jim’s trickery in getting the shot for himself but for the very real fear of
someday getting a load of buckshot in my ass because I had failed to “get down”
quickly enough. </div>
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My memories of these hunting trips are decidedly negative. I
remember walking lots of tree and hedgerows and not seeing any birds. I
remember being extremely cold. I remember the frustration of shooting at a bird
and missing. On the other hand, I don’t remember ever asking to stay home from
one of these trips, so there must have been something I liked about them. </div>
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What I liked was the fellowship. It was a good feeling to
spend time with the guys of the Tandy family, to hear the banter and teasing
that went on among the group and to be included as one of the men. This was particularly significant to me as the youngest of the bunch, always
feeling like I had to fight for my place at the table. </div>
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I also loved the stories that came from these trips, stories
that were told and retold and embellished with each retelling. Some of these
became legendary, like the one about Jim tricking Bruce to get a good shot for
himself. Another story in the legendary category went like this: We had
stopped for lunch at a café, and Uncle Jim had gone to use the restroom. He had
been gone for awhile when my cousin Bruce went to check on him. According to
Bruce, Jim cracked the bathroom door open enough to whisper that there
was no toilet paper. This presented a real problem since Jim had not realized
this fact until after he completed his business. Uncle Jim asked his son to bring him some toilet paper, but instead Bruce returned
to the table and announced loudly, “Jim Jam’s in the bathroom, and he ain’t got
no toilet paper!” This story was oft repeated at family dinners, much to the
dismay of my mom and my Aunt Sybil.</div>
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One of the most embarrassing moments of my entire life happened on a hunting
trip when I was around 13. We were heading back home and stopped at a gas
station. The attendant had finished filling up the car, and some of our group
were still in the store. Since there was another car waiting to get to our pump, I
offered to move our vehicle out of the way. Now my motivation was not to be helpful.
Rather I saw an opportunity to drive for the first time ever in what looked
like a fairly non-challenging situation. Dad made a decision that he would soon
regret and said yes. I got behind the wheel, started the car, and though I was
going for drive, I accidentally stopped at reverse, and promptly
hit the gas, backing into the waiting car, breaking our taillights and the other car’s
headlights. </div>
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Well I felt absolutely terrible. And my
shame was increased by performing this stunt in front of my brother and
cousins, all of whom had their driver’s licenses and for whom this event, in my
mind at least, confirmed their belief that I was a worthless little
twit!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Amazingly, Dad did not
yell at me or berate me or threaten me with a loss of allowance. He patted me
on the shoulder, told me not to worry about it, and went to trade insurance
information with the other driver, who was no doubt in shock and disbelief
about what had just happened. Years later, after I had kids, I would look back at this incident and my dad's reaction to it with considerable awe.</div>
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As I look at the trajectory of my life since my childhood,
these hunting trips take on added significance. As I said, I’ve never really
liked guns even though like most kids, I suppose, I was excited to get my first BB gun and practice shooting cans in the woods. When it came time to move on
to shotguns, I was happy to use one of my dad’s old ones, unlike my brother and
cousins who lusted after their own shiny new 12 gauges.</div>
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Years later I would become a faculty member at a Quaker
university, where the pacifist stand of the Friends denomination proved very
attractive to me. Since childhood, I’ve never owned a gun, and I’ve never
hunted. My brother and cousins, on the other hand, continue the Tandy
tradition to this day.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A boy who was afraid of guns
in Kansas when I grew up would have been called a sissy, and I guess by those
standards I was. As far as I know, of all the Tandy boys, I’m
the only one who didn’t continue the hunting tradition and pass it on to his
kids.</div>
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Even though my dad never played basketball with me, it's the sport I most associate with him. I realize now this is because I remember my dad not as a player of
basketball but as a fan of the game. </div>
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Dad was an avid supporter of the Wichita State Wheatshockers, to
whose home games he had season tickets. He took the game seriously. Wins were
met with much rejoicing; losses were mourned and hashed and rehashed. It was from him I learned how to be a fan. When you're a fan,
objectivity is not an option: you live and die with the team. You invest
yourself in their fortunes, in good times and bad. <br />
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><br /> </b>Of course, being a fan has its
perils. You can go overboard at times. I remember the first time I
was fortunate enough to go to a Shocker game with him: I was amazed when he
voiced his displeasure at a call in loud, rather direct terms. And since his
seats were courtside, I'm pretty sure the refs heard him. I was surprised
because in every other setting, my dad was a
quiet, unassuming man who seldom raised his voice. He was a gospel
preacher, after all; wasn't he supposed to be setting an example for
others? </div>
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Looking back, I wonder whether the basketball arena provided
a space for him where he could set aside his preacher image for a couple of hours and just be a
regular guy. Unfortunately, the lesson I learned was that it was okay to
yell at referees, a practice which would get me into trouble later when my sons
played high school basketball. However, the enduring lesson I learned was
that part of living, part of being human, is caring, even if it’s caring about
something as mundane in the grand scheme of things as basketball.</div>
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Years later, when my two sons played high school basketball,
Dad flew out to Oregon twice, both trips being planned around the
boys’ basketball schedules. I was curious to see how he would respond to
watching his grandsons play basketball. He was in his 80s, his hearing wasn’t
good, and he was having trouble seeing out of his right eye. I just didn’t
know how engaged he might be. </div>
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I should have known better. Where basketball was concerned, things hadn’t changed that much. He watched
the game intently, clapping and cheering at the right places, which were often
when one of his grandsons had completed a nice pass or scored a basket. And he
still monitored the referees closely. His voice was no longer as strong as I
remembered it back at those Shocker games, but it was loud enough that he
could still voice his displeasure at a bad call. When the referee called a foul
on Jackson, Dad waited for a quiet moment in the gym and then let out an
exclamation that sounded like “shoowee.” Though I don’t know the exact
definition of the term he was using, the meaning was unmistakeable: the referee had just made a
horrible call, a ridiculous call, and Dad did not want this gross miscarriage of
justice to go unnoticed. So he expressed himself in the loudest voice he could
muster: “Shoowee," as if he had just discovered a skunk had sprayed his sleeping bag.</div>
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Three years before Dad died, I was able to spend my spring
break with him at his retirement apartments. He had recently moved to Reflection Ridge after
selling the house he lived in for some 54 years, the house where I grew up and learned to play basketball on the driveway hoop. My visit coincided with
NCAA March Madness, so that week we watched a lot of basketball together. While he seemed feeble in many ways, when it came to basketball, he still retained the old competitive fire. If he had no
particular reason to root for a team based on region or conference, he would still
pick a favorite; then he would react with emotion to the ups and downs of that
team throughout the game.<br />
<br />
He still complained about the bad
calls.<br />
He still cared.
<br />
He was still a fan.<br />
<br /></div>
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A year after Dad died, the Wichita State Shockers made
an improbable run to reach the Final Four in the NCAA tournament. A colleague gave me a Shocker t-shirt, and I watched every game I
could. I cheered my heart out for the Shockers: the underdogs, the good guys, as my dad called them. I
complained to the television screen about the horrible calls the referees were
making. I lived and died emotionally with every three pointer made and missed. </div>
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But mostly I thought about my dad.<br />
How much he would have loved this.<br />
How much I
wished I could have been watching these games with him.<br />
How much I missed him.</div>
Gary Tandyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17494570091459554195noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5738805570562546849.post-24253497647267792232014-06-19T20:47:00.002-07:002014-07-14T09:21:37.428-07:00Sports, Part I<style>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlWbI41PAKFsMlOsIYnwvjhuoDxKAPwHnnnzZmU-hhtu7wTx-qGFRkjyIuWCHrWU5mCPbgLlxhwkhAVWcdg_vSMgp5XqGYPCbYkm5egTMyE4Kc6ZM2YnAVvce-e_Vf-89uC35BgothVMw/s1600/Golf2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlWbI41PAKFsMlOsIYnwvjhuoDxKAPwHnnnzZmU-hhtu7wTx-qGFRkjyIuWCHrWU5mCPbgLlxhwkhAVWcdg_vSMgp5XqGYPCbYkm5egTMyE4Kc6ZM2YnAVvce-e_Vf-89uC35BgothVMw/s1600/Golf2.jpg" height="265" width="400" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<br />
Growing up, I loved these sports, in order of priority:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
1. Basketball</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
2. Swimming</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
3. Golf</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
4. Tennis</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
33. Fishing</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
99. Hunting </blockquote>
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
My dad loved games and sports of all kinds, and he excelled
at many of them. He had been an intramural champion in college, and during his
military service in WW II, he was assigned as a coach/trainer to soldiers who
had been wounded in combat. He loved to watch sports on television (even
boxing, for which I did not share his enthusiasm), and he always participated
in softball games and pitched horseshoes at church picnics.<br />
<br />
My Uncle Jim and my
cousins, Harold and Bruce, often encouraged Dad to perform feats of
strength—like a one-handed chin-up or push-up. As a scrawny teenager, I marveled at
my dad’s physique and athletic prowess, and participated in intense but
short-lived weight lifting regimens in hopes of someday matching his impressive
biceps and formidable forearms, a goal I never quite achieved.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Basketball might have been number one on my list because I
grew up in Kansas, the home of James Naismith, who invented the game. More
likely, as with other sports, I liked it because my dad liked it. It was his
favorite sport to watch on television, and for as long as I can remember, he
and my mom owned season tickets to the Wichita State Wheatshockers home
basketball games. On infrequent but glorious occasions, I would be invited to
attend a Shocker game, usually when my mom decided not to use her ticket. Going
to see a game in person with my dad was the best, but more often I had to
settle for watching a Shocker away game or an NBA game on television with him.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Dad worked two jobs and was always busy. I don’t remember
him playing games at home with me and my brother much, outside of the
occasional game of eight ball once we got our pool table in the basement. But
when I got old enough, he did invite me to play golf and tennis with him. It
was because of sports we spent time together as father and son. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Golf was the best. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It’s 5:00 a.m. on a summer Monday in Wichita. Dad has just
left my room after telling me it’s time to get up and get ready if I want to go
with him to play golf, or more accurately, attempt to play golf. I rub my eyes,
put on my dark brown, horn-rimmed glasses, and search for my shorts, t-shirt,
socks, tennis shoes, and hat.<br />
<br />
I help my dad load the golf bags in the trunk of
the car, and we head to Sims public golf course, a five-minute drive from our
house. I don’t like getting out of bed so early, but Dad’s philosophy is it’s
best to play early and beat the heat. We live in Kansas, after all, and from
June to August, the temperature is likely to hit 100 degrees by late morning.
Besides that, there’s not too many other golfers willing to sacrifice sleep for
the cool temperatures, so most Mondays we are the first ones to tee off at the
course.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Or wait to tee off. Often we have to pass some time in the
clubhouse waiting for the sun to come up so it’s light enough to hit. The other
problem with ridiculously early golf games is the dew. Even though it’s dry as
a bone during the summer days in Kansas, the early morning fairways and greens
of the golf course are wet with dew. This is a beautiful sight as the rising
sun highlights the sparkling drops at the tips of the perfectly manicured
grass, but it’s not so beautiful for the golfer whose well-struck drive off the
first tee sails high in the air but only bounces once or twice before the ball
is swallowed up by the sodden blades of grass. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Putting is even more difficult
under these conditions. For the first four or five holes, the greens are so wet
you have to wind up like a major league pitcher before whacking your ball toward
the hole, only to see it stop two feet short despite your John-Daly-like
effort. Then around about the sixth hole, when the sun’s rays have restored the
greens to their typical parched condition, you strike your golf ball firmly only to see
it scoot past the hole and roll off the green, further from the hole now than
before you putted.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As a beginning golfer, I’m more worried about making contact
with the ball than with how far it goes. My dad is an excellent driver. He’s
learned to channel his considerable muscle into striking the ball so it
routinely travels 250 yards down the fairway. And straight as an arrow, the
ball usually ending up in the middle of the fairway in ideal position for an
approach shot to the green. I, on the other hand, if I’m lucky, strike the ball
on my first swing attempt and watch it rise like a blooper between first base
and right field and end up 50 yards down the fairway.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By simple mathematics, this means I take five
shots to gain the position my dad earned in one. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Dad is a patient man and
never complains that I’m slowing him down too much as he waits for me to catch
up. Apparently so are his friends, who are part of our group. The nice thing
about golf is that no matter how badly I’m playing, I can look forward to the
Pepsi and cherry moon pie my dad will buy me before we start the second nine.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Tennis had these advantages: it was played in the evenings,
so I didn’t have to get out of bed at an absurd hour, and it took much less
time than the three-four hours required for 18 holes of golf. With my dad, I
mostly played doubles, being called in occasionally as a substitute when one of
the three regulars he played with were unavailable. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Tennis was also the only sport I was able to letter in during
high school. I would have preferred basketball, of course, but I was too
short and too slow to make the team once I reached my large public high
school. Tennis at our school, on the other hand, was not a popular or in-demand
sport. In fact, the school had trouble some years fielding six players for the
varsity squad.<br />
<br />
This was partly a socio-economic problem. My high school was in
a part of the city with a less affluent population. At least in my view, tennis
was a rich kids’ sport, so the high schools located in higher income
neighborhoods tended to have the best tennis players. The situation worked to
my advantage since I was just competent enough to earn the number six spot on
the team, thus lettering, in spite of compiling a win-loss record of 0 and 7 in
my Junior year and 1 and 6 in my Senior year. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Our coach, Earl Fultz, was the driver’s ed teacher, and he
demonstrated a decided lack of interest in the sport of tennis. His chief
contributions included providing us with balls for practice and driving us to
matches at other schools. I don’t remember that he ever actually coached us. I
know he spoke to the team occasionally, but all I can remember is the
introduction he used on every occasion: “Now on this thing here, boys,” a line
that all the members of the team took delight in repeating, doing our best Earl
Fultz imitation, when he wasn’t around. We were largely left to our own devices in
practice, the only coaching we received being done by our peers. Thus, our team
record was not much better than my individual match record.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Fishing had this in common with golf: my dad liked to rise
absurdly early and hit the water before the sun came up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mercifully, I only had to endure fishing once
every summer when my family made its annual pilgrimage to Mac’s Hidden Cove
near Shell Knob, Missouri. On these trips, Dad’s main objective was to go
crappie fishing every morning. He loaded an outboard motor in the trunk of our
car and rented an aluminum fishing boat from Mac at the motel when we arrived.
Each morning he rousted me and my brother out of bed pre-dawn, and we walked
down the steep dirt path leading to Table Rock Lake and the boat dock. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I liked walking to the boat dock in the dark. It would have
been way too creepy had I been alone, but I wasn’t, so it all seemed kind of
adventurous and surreal. Once we arrived at the dock, and stepped onto the
wooden planks, we had to be careful to keep our balance as the dock moved up
and down with the motion of the water and with our weight as we walked toward the
stall where Dad’s rented boat awaited us. We would hop in the boat, Dad would
start the motor, then sit in the back of the boat and steer us out into the
middle of the lake. “Early morning is the best time to fish, boys,” he would
tell me and my brother, “before all the other fishermen stir things up.” Once
Dad found just the right spot, he would kill the motor, help us bait our hooks,
then we would sit. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
On most mornings, experience gave me cause to doubt my dad's maxim about early morning fishing. We were fishing, but in my mind, the sport as we practiced
it should have been called Sitting since that was what we were
doing mostly. And to me, an active ten-year-old, that was extremely boring.<br />
<br />
But
then there was the occasional morning when the fish were biting, where my
cork, which had only been in the water a few seconds, bobbed once then went
down, plunged beneath the still-dark surface of the water, and I fumbled with
my pole to find the handle and turn, feeling the tug on the end of my line,
knowing the fish was swimming further down with my hook, finally exerting
enough pressure to reverse the path of the fish until it broke the surface of
the water, and I was able to maneuver the fish into the bottom of our boat. I
didn’t like the slimy feel of the fish’s skin or the sharpness of its fins, so
Dad would often have to grab it and work the hook out of its mouth before
placing it in the wire mesh basket with the rest of our catch.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
All these sports—golfing, playing tennis, shooting pool,
watching basketball on television—I realize now were not primarily important in
and of themselves. They were significant to my childhood because they gave me an
excuse to hang out with my dad, and they gave him an excuse to hang out with
me.<br />
<br />
Had it not been for these sports, I don’t know where the opportunities to
converse with my dad, man to man, or, more accurately, man to boy, would have
come from. He was not the type of man to sit down for a father-son chat, and he
was of a generation of fathers who did not express their emotions openly to their
children. Such occasions would have been painful and awkward for us both. But
somehow it was easier to talk as you were strolling down a fairway on the golf
course, or sitting in a fishing boat shrouded in the pre-dawn darkness, or
during the television commercials of a college hoops game. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Perhaps my dad knew
these things, and that’s why he created these opportunities for me. Or maybe
he just enjoyed these sports himself and since I was handy, he invited me
because he hoped I might enjoy them too. Either way, I’m grateful. I have a much better appreciation of my dad and a stronger love for
him because of sports. Plus, I’ve also come to realize that by introducing me
to golf and tennis, he gave me the gift of two sports I could play and enjoy
for a long time.<br />
<br />
The greatest gift he gave me, through sports, was his time and attention. If sports were his love language, then I would listen and learn to speak it. That was infinitely better than getting no father love at all.</div>
Gary Tandyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17494570091459554195noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5738805570562546849.post-19881686890670443332014-03-13T20:10:00.000-07:002016-04-12T13:31:47.116-07:00Basketball Dad<style>
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<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2-6euSlL9NQPbenw_oGGYY2ZlueRpAOVEMIo6SY04QMcvMc95CJB6rpoSKPWDBXYU5qCJ7OwHfn4LwTKSXEddipy3plP81p_EAxhd86C7SOtjHYcBo-zTjDCLIlnGoKpQ_gOk_-IgSAA/s1600/Basketball.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2-6euSlL9NQPbenw_oGGYY2ZlueRpAOVEMIo6SY04QMcvMc95CJB6rpoSKPWDBXYU5qCJ7OwHfn4LwTKSXEddipy3plP81p_EAxhd86C7SOtjHYcBo-zTjDCLIlnGoKpQ_gOk_-IgSAA/s1600/Basketball.jpg" width="245" /></a><i>Recently I blogged about the nonfiction writing class I'm taking. Here's a flash nonfiction piece I wrote for a class assignment in imitation of an essay by Brian Doyle.</i><br />
<br />
For twelve years I watched two sons play competitive basketball, and here is what I learned about being a basketball dad.<br />
<br />
There are moments of unbelievable exhilaration. Like when your son splits two defenders in the post and glances the ball off the backboard and sweetly through the net at a critical moment in the playoff game. There are moments of incredible disappointment and sadness. Like when your son’s team makes the state finals against an opponent it’s defeated handily three times during the regular season, and the other team plays the game of its life while your son’s team plays the worst of its and loses by a single point. The moments of disappointment after a loss last much longer than the moments of unbelievable exhilaration.<br />
<br />
When a dad watches his son play his first competitive game in the fourth grade and his son receives his first pass only to hold the ball and look panicked and glance wildly around, the dad wants to yell “Pass the ball” to his son but knows he shouldn’t and really wants to run out on the court and help him but knows he can’t. When the son finally snaps out of his paralysis and dribbles the ball and plays well for the rest of the game, the dad breathes a sigh of relief and knows life can go on.<br />
<br />
When the basketball dad's son plays in one of those elementary school leagues that don’t keep score, the dad still keeps score in his head and knows exactly how many points his son has scored.<br />
<br />
Dads who believe they can watch their sons play sports without investing themselves too heavily and, you know, just watch the game for the pure joy of it and not care whether the son performs well or not are deluding themselves.<br />
<br />
It is a very bad idea to engage in conversation about a high school game with parents of the opposing team’s players while the game is in progress. It’s an even worse idea to make a comment to an opposing player as he returns to the bench, even when said player has just wrestled your son to the floor using a headlock move worthy of the WWF.<br />
<br />
The bleachers in high school gyms are among the most uncomfortable accommodations known to humankind, especially after four hours of sitting through the boy’s junior varsity game then the girl’s varsity game, then the boy’s varsity game.<br />
<br />
Most referees at the small high school level have serious deficiencies in eyesight. Dads who yell instructions and helpful admonitions to these referees fail to benefit their son’s team and only end up making themselves look foolish. Some (so I’ve heard) even get disapproving glances from the principal’s wife.<br />
<br />
When your wife suggests you take anxiety medication prior to viewing high school basketball games, it could be a sign that you’re taking all this a bit too seriously.<br />
<br />
During the years your wife and you are spending every Tuesday and Friday driving to small, out of the way high schools and sitting on those rock hard bleachers for four hours, you may complain about the time it takes. But when the last son graduates from high school, and basketball season rolls around in the fall, you recognize the gaping hole in your life and wonder what you’ll ever do with all that free time on Tuesday and Friday nights.<br />
<br />
There are online forums where a high school team’s fans can talk basketball. These forums would contain more civil discourse if basketball dads did not participate and get into debates with other basketball dads about the relative merits of their own son’s basketball skills. Basketball dads, however, seldom heed this advice, preferring to try to relive their former basketball achievements, or lack of same, vicariously through their children.<br />
<br />
In spite of how ridiculous basketball dads can be, some are lucky enough to have sons who gracefully accept their dad’s fumbling attempts to be supportive and who see through the childish and irresponsible behavior of the dad at their basketball games, understanding that on some level the dad is attempting to show love for the son, partly because the dad loves the game and it’s not really that the dad loves the son because he plays the game—even though it might appear that way. Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5738805570562546849.post-8681694007496527212014-02-21T22:00:00.000-08:002014-02-22T07:03:46.945-08:00Why I Decided to Go Back to School<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
As a college writing teacher, I often exhort the students in my classes to be disciplined in their writing practice. We look at quotes from famous writers and less-famous writers who teach writing. Every quote trumpets the virtue of establishing and maintaining a consistent writing discipline. Don't wait for the muse, they say. Instead, establish a time every day when you will put your butt in the chair and write! We all nod our heads gravely as we read these quotes by famous writers because we want to be disciplined writers; we really do. We pray to the god or goddess of our choice: please, please make me a disciplined writer. Please.<br />
<br />
But I suspect most of my students know as well as I do that tomorrow is likely to be no different than today. There will still be twenty or thirty pressing things that need to be done, and we will keep delaying that writing time and delaying it until we look up at the clock in a Facebook-induced haze and realize it's too late to start writing now. Oh well, there's always tomorrow, we say. And then tomorrow comes, and it's no different than today or the day before. And so it goes.<br />
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Last summer, when I actually had some time to write, I took Anne Lamott's advice and began writing everything I could remember about my childhood. My initial plan was to write a few hundred words per day, at most. But once I got started, I found myself writing twice that much, then three times, then four times that much and more per day.<br />
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I wasn't sure how to account for this sudden spurt of productivity. Maybe, as Flannery O'Connor said, anyone who survives childhood has more than enough to write about. At any rate, I figured there must be some stuff from my past that was wanting to get said, so without thinking too much about where this might lead, I kept going to the well day after day, and my writing bucket kept coming up filled to the brim and overflowing.<br />
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As fall semester began, I was hopeful I would stay on a roll, that my writing discipline and productivity would continue in the midst of class preps and grading and committee work. Alas, they did not. Almost before I noticed, the semester was half over and though I'm sure I composed some killer e-mails and writing prompts during those days, my 1000-1500 word days were a distant summer memory. <i>Ubi sunt</i>, I exclaimed. Where are the words of summer?<br />
<br />
As I pondered my writing problem, I thought maybe what I needed was some accountability. I had joined a writing group, which was helpful, but even this had not provided enough motivation to reclaim my writing discipline. Then I remembered an offhand comment my colleague and fellow writing teacher, Melanie, had made over the summer when I was telling her about my Lamott writing exercise. "You could always sit in on my Creative Nonfiction class this spring," Melanie said. So that's what I decided to do.<br />
<br />
For six weeks now, I've been making like a student, showing up for WRIT 250 at 9:40 on MWF. And not only have I been showing up; I've been turning in all my writing assignments on time. It's been great fun. Sure, I got a few quizzical looks the first day, especially from students that had had me as a teacher. One student asked if I was co-teaching the class and another if I was observing Melanie teach. But most seem to have accepted me fairly easily as part of the class.<br />
<br />
I've enjoyed sitting in on the class a lot. For one thing, as a teacher, it's just interesting to observe other people teach. A strange fact about college teaching is that we seldom get a chance to see our colleagues practice the art of teaching, so when we do, it's intriguing. I suppose it must be similar to a musician watching another musician perform. She can appreciate the performance perhaps more than the non-musician because she knows the degree of difficulty involved. Fortunately for me, Melanie is an excellent writing teacher, so I'm able to pick up a new tip almost every class period that I can use in my own teaching.<br />
<br />
Another benefit of going back to school is that I've been able to consider the teacher-student transaction from the student side of the desk, and I think it's making me a bit more aware of some things. At least it's giving me a greater ability to empathize with my own students.<br />
<br />
At times I've misunderstood an assignment or class activity and had to ask one of my fellow students for help. I try hard not to dominate discussions in the class, so after feeling I talked too much one class, I resolved not to say a word in the next one. Of course, that was when the teacher called on me to respond! I've sometimes had to rush to get an assignment printed and ready to submit only a few minutes before class. I understand better now how a student who's juggling assignments in five classes or so can sometimes experience problems in getting everything in on time and with high quality.<br />
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Fortunately, I don't have to worry about my grade. Since I'm not taking the class for credit, Melanie and I decided we would avoid the awkwardness for both of us that could come with grading. But I'm grateful for the time she takes to read and respond thoughtfully and helpfully to my writing.<br />
<br />
The most important benefit of taking this class is the incentive and opportunity it's given me to work on my writing. Having deadlines is essential. The assignments have been broad enough that I've been able to tailor them to fit my own writing project. I've been able to take the storehouse of stories and memories I wrote down this summer, select a few, and fashion them into short essays, some of which might become chapters in my larger project.<br />
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Oh, and at our Valentine's Day class meeting, I even won the prize for the best short essay on a romantic theme. My wife got a good laugh out of that one!Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5738805570562546849.post-16778520812937036132014-01-04T16:32:00.000-08:002017-05-31T11:37:26.729-07:00Shakespeare on Privilege<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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In Act 3 of Shakespeare's <i>King Lear</i>, Lear stops shouting at the storm long enough to utter this question:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are,/ <br />
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,/<br />
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,/<br />
Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you/<br />
From seasons such as these? (III.IV.35ff)</blockquote>
<br />
The scene marks a turning point for Lear, who up to this point in the play has shown concern about only one thing: himself. Now as he finds himself naked on the stormy heath, rejected by his daughters, at the mercy of the storm, he has a change of heart. We could say of him what the narrator of <i>The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe</i> says of Edmund when he sees the squirrel family who have been turned into ice sculptures: "For the first time, Edmund felt sorry for someone besides himself."<br />
<br />
Lear's question, of course, is rhetorical. The poor naked wretches of the world have no defense against the pitiless storm. More important, as Frederick Buechner points out in his meditation on this passage, Shakespeare's play confronts us with this reality: the poor naked wretches of this world are all of us. Whether we are young and full of hope or old and cynical, we are all of us as vulnerable as Lear to the pitiless storm that is life--with its failures and sorrows, its victories and joys, its maddening paradoxes of injustice and redemption, blindness and sight, betrayal and loyalty, hatred and love--a sobering and frightening picture of which Shakespeare paints in the play.<br />
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But Lear continues with this reflection:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
O, I have ta'en<br />
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;<br />
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,<br />
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,<br />
And show the heavens more just. (III.IV.39ff) </blockquote>
"I have taken too little care of this." The pronoun in Shakespeare's line is wondrously ambiguous. What is the "this" that Lear has taken too little care of? The poor naked wretches of the world, I suppose, and probably also the condition, the plight of the poor, the homeless, the neglected, the oppressed. At the very least, Lear must be confessing his own ignorance or lack of concern for his society's most vulnerable. He's been king, it seems, for a long time. No doubt he's lived a sheltered and pampered existence, especially when compared to the lives of those on the lowest rung of the social ladder in his kingdom (see, for example, Poor Tom, the homeless man whom Edgar disguises himself as in the play). <br />
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Lear's powerful lines came to mind again this week as I read a book called <i>Power, Privilege, and Difference</i> by Allan G. Johnson. My church is using the book for an adult education study sponsored by its Beyond Racism task force. I'll quote a couple of relevant passages from that book:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
If dominant groups <i>really</i> saw privilege and oppression as unacceptable--if white people saw race as <i>their</i> issue, if men saw gender as a <i>men's </i>issue, if heterosexuals saw heterosexism as <i>their </i>problem--privilege and oppression wouldn't have much of a future.</blockquote>
Johnson goes on to list several reasons why dominant groups in society tend not to engage with these issues, the first of which is this:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Because they don't know it exists in the first place. They're oblivious to it. The reality of privilege doesn't occur to them because they don't go out of their way to see it or ask about it. Dominant groups have no idea of how their privilege oppresses others. This obliviousness allows them to cruise along and tend to the details of their own lives with only an occasional sense of trouble somewhere "out there" just beyond the fringe of their consciousness. This lack of awareness also gives them a low tolerance for hearing about the trouble, for when the normal state of affairs is silence, any mention of it feels like an imposition.</blockquote>
<br />
Both quotes seem to describe Lear's situation perfectly. As king, at the top of the social ladder of his day, it was easy for Lear to remain in a state of ignorance, even obliviousness, about those at the bottom of the ladder. It was only when, stripped of power, wealth, and privilege, Lear himself had to "bide the pelting of the pitiless storm," it was only then he began to identify with the poor and oppressed, to feel, as he says, "what wretches feel." Only then did Lear go from having a vague sense of trouble somewhere out there to having a sense that the problems of the poor and the marginalized were his problem, his issue.<br />
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I get the impression when I hear some people dismiss or minimize the idea of privilege (whether race, class, gender, or sexual orientation) that they assume it's a relatively new concept dreamed up by political liberals and sociology professors. But it's not.<br />
<br />
Shakespeare knew about privilege. And in the character of Lear, he painted a striking picture of what it means to own our privilege. He also gave us a clue about how we go from a state of oblivious disregard to a state of caring identification.<br />
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Through no fault of my own, I am a white, middle class, heterosexual male. Like it or not, these realities place me in a position of privilege in my society. Those facts ought to compel me to ask some hard questions about privilege, power, and difference.<br />
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Frequently, I suspect, they will prompt me to say, "I have taken too little care of this."<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5738805570562546849.post-72168977729518425462013-11-25T19:38:00.000-08:002013-11-25T19:38:07.552-08:00Under the Family Tree<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I often walk by this tree on the George Fox campus on the way to my office. Some mornings, when I'm thinking about what discussion questions to ask in my Intro to Literature class, I walk right past it, as if this magnificent tree didn't even exist. Other mornings, I notice the tree, taking the time to admire its striking size and symmetry, taking the time to pray, as Mary Oliver says, by paying attention.<br />
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Recently I was struck again by the breadth of the tree, the way its lower branches seem to have stretched ridiculously far in an attempt to cover as much space as possible.<br />
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The space underneath the tree's spreading branches looks inviting. There's just enough room for a person to stand under the tree--lots of people, in fact. It looks like it would be cozy under there, and perhaps on rainy Oregon mornings, it would be dry.<br />
<br />
One morning last week as I approached the tree I had something like a vision. I saw my son under the tree. Well, I didn't literally see Jackson, but I imagined him. Right there. Standing under that tree.<br />
<br />
But he wasn't alone. Standing next to him were people he, and I, know well. Some were family members; some were not related to us by blood. Some we had seen a week earlier at his wedding. Some we haven't seen in years. The people under the tree were various ages: some in their thirties, some in their fifties and sixties and eighties. Some of them are no longer living on this earth.<br />
<br />
Jackson's grandmothers and grandfathers and aunts and uncles were there. His youth minister and a former pastor were there and couples from churches we attended when Jackson was growing up. His teachers were there as were his basketball and soccer coaches. Several of his college professors were under the tree. Two special couples who had boys close in age to Jackson and who helped us raise him were there.<br />
<br />
I saw gathered under the tree all the people who have taken an interest in my son's life over the years. There they were, standing next to someone they loved and cared about. None of these people had to care and invest in Jackson's life and well being. But they did. I hope they know what a difference they've made. I hope they know that he would not be the person he is and we would not be the family we are today without their love.<br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">In an essay I have my writing classes read, a mother with an adopted daughter says, "family is
defined by bonds much deeper than birth, or skin color, or genetics. Like
anyone lucky enough to experience 'found' love, I believe that family is
defined only by the heart." Or to misquote Donne, no family is an island, entire of itself. Looking at those gathered under the tree, I knew what every parent knows eventually: you are not in this alone.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">I'm grateful for the family tree--that its branches stretch wide and offer shelter to a diverse group. I'm thankful for the people underneath the tree. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">They all looked happy under there--cozy, solid, secure, sheltered, connected, loved. They seemed comfortable, next to my son, under the tree, standing there like it was the most natural thing in the world.</span></span></div>
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5738805570562546849.post-13624188835652530572013-11-23T19:22:00.001-08:002013-11-23T19:22:25.782-08:00What I Owe to Jack<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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November 22, 2013, was the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Jr. You may know that C. S. Lewis, the British literary scholar, popular apologist, and writer of fantasy fiction died on the same day, as did Aldous Huxley, author of <i>Brave New World.</i> The day was also significant for followers of Lewis because the author was honored with a memorial in Westminster Abbey's <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/10452711/Does-CS-Lewis-deserve-a-place-in-Poets-Corner.html" target="_blank">Poet's Corner</a>, his marker now sharing the space with those of writers like Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Shakespeare, George Eliot, Dickens, and Austen.<br />
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This honor is a welcome one, not just because Lewis deserves it based on the quantity and quality of his writing, but also because it provides validation for what a number of Lewis scholars have been saying and writing for years: Lewis was not simply a "popularizer" of the Christian faith; he was a writer of the first rank who made a significant contribution to modern letters in a variety of genres.<br />
<br />
All this has caused me to reflect on and be grateful for the role that Jack, as he was called by his friends, has played in my own life, not only academically but personally. Specifically, three areas come to mind for which I'm particularly grateful.<br />
<br />
<b>His Christian Intellectualism</b><br />
<br />
Lewis was the first Christian author I encountered who did not make me feel I needed to check my intellect at the church door. I grew up in a church environment that often felt decidedly anti-intellectual. Certain books and ideas were off-limits, or at least considered dangerous. Occasionally someone would question why we even needed to read books other than the Bible--maybe some commentaries, as long as they were written by members of our group, but that should be sufficient.<br />
<br />
In Lewis, I found someone unafraid to tackle any concept or idea, whether it was the validity of religions other than Christianity or the efficacy of petitionary prayer. His willingness to examine and analyze ideas fearlessly convinced me that Christian faith and the life of the mind were not mutually exclusive categories.<br />
<br />
<b>His Belief in the Primacy of the Imagination</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
The first book of Lewis's I ever read was <i>Mere Christianity</i>, and it was life changing, giving me a new and more inclusive vision of spirituality and the church than I had yet encountered. Lewis's apologetic books were so influential for me that when it came time to select a dissertation subject, I chose to focus on his nonfiction works including <i>Miracles, The Problem of Pain, The Four Loves </i>rather than on his fictional works like <i>The Chronicles of Narnia </i>or <i>The Screwtape Letters. </i><br />
<br />
But if you ask me today which Lewis books I treasure most, I'll likely mention his fictional works, especially <i>Narnia, The Space Trilogy, </i>and <i>Till We Have Faces.</i> <br />
<br />
What fascinates me about Lewis's fiction is the power and range of his imagination, the way he can create and populate other worlds, bring talking animals to life in a believable way, and illuminate a spiritual concept through a well-crafted metaphor. In fact, what I learned from reading Lewis's fiction I was able to apply to the apologetics. As I realized when studying <i>Mere Christianity</i> years after my first reading of the book, Lewis uses imagination, not only in his fiction, but also in his nonfiction. To give one example, in <i>Mere Christianity,</i> he uses toy soldiers coming to life and a child's dress up game to illustrate theological concepts. As Michael Ward said in a recent <a href="http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2013/november/cs-lewis-better-apologetics.html" target="_blank">article</a>, Lewis believed that imagination precedes reason and that clear thinking is not even possible without the power of imagination.<br />
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<b>His Authentic Life</b><br />
<br />
One of the joys of making C. S. Lewis the focus of my modest scholarly agenda over the years has been the opportunity (or the excuse) to read about his life. While Lewis himself described his life as boring, I've always found him to be an engaging human being.<br />
<br />
He wasn't perfect, by any means. For example, his attitudes toward women, as Dorothy Sayers noted, were often silly at best and misogynistic at worst. <br />
<br />
But from what I've been able to discern he really tried to lead a life consistent with the principles of the faith as he understood them. He was a generous man, who spent most of the money he made from his books on charity, often on people he knew personally who needed help. He was loyal to his friends. He promised Paddy Moore, his British army buddy, that he would take care of Paddy's mother and sister if anything happened in the war, and he did, caring for Mrs. Moore until the end of her life--often at great sacrifice of his own time and professional responsibilities. He was a loving brother to Warnie, even when he had to make yet another late night trip to the pub to help Warnie home after one of his drinking binges. And in spite of profound differences with Tolkien on how fantasy stories should be written and other issues, the two remained lifelong friends and supporters of each other's writing. <br />
<br />
The play and movie <i>Shadowlands</i> have contributed to an overemphasis on the last few years of Jack's life, especially his romance with Joy Davidman Gresham. But I still love the story, and I appreciate that Lewis followed his heart and married the divorced Joy when members of his church and many of his best friends and his brother advised him not to. The romance did Lewis a lot of good including widening his view of women's roles and capabilities and inspiring him to write <i>Till We Have Faces</i>, his personal favorite of all his fiction and one that features a female first person narrator.<br />
<br />
Over the years my appreciation for Lewis as an author has not diminished--but it has morphed. The qualities of his thought and writing I value today are different ones than I valued in my twenties. The certainty of his tone and detailed, step-by-step logic are less attractive to me now than his personal tone, his confessions of doubt and spiritual struggle, and his flights of imagination. I've also discovered other authors whose work and thought are more reflective of where I am on my spiritual journey these days--Frederick Buechner, Annie Dillard, Wendell Berry, and Mary Oliver, to name a few. Yet, having said that, if you think I'm not extremely grateful for the life and works of C. S. Lewis, then you don't know me--and you don't know Jack.<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5738805570562546849.post-25399792481172345312013-11-13T14:19:00.000-08:002013-11-29T08:32:42.616-08:00A Wedding Toast for My Son<style>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoBBbj9EQrZeOgSyz5eoyAmfpgn0dTT8DrKESgF4FB7zqGXJCa_zeBMT553TObpEBTRhGZg6pY78_zmIAl_G39Cxv-Ke2yaDY0xZJYP_S75ZEqr7-CfkLFzOV61m1svTJ_TI8BvCphBGI/s1600/Jackson+and+April+Wedding.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoBBbj9EQrZeOgSyz5eoyAmfpgn0dTT8DrKESgF4FB7zqGXJCa_zeBMT553TObpEBTRhGZg6pY78_zmIAl_G39Cxv-Ke2yaDY0xZJYP_S75ZEqr7-CfkLFzOV61m1svTJ_TI8BvCphBGI/s400/Jackson+and+April+Wedding.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">April Scott and Jackson Tandy, November 9, 2013</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
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To April and Jackson:</div>
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As Jackson’s parents, we knew early on that our son was the
adventurous sort. He’s always been up for a new experience and a new challenge.
There was the time, for example, when he leapt off the porch with a triumphant
yell in imitation of his favorite superhero—only to land in the bushes and get
pretty scratched up. Whenever we would take Jackson and Garrison to a
playground, the other kids would be playing on the slides and monkey bars while
our boys climbed on top of the play structure. Then there was the time I walked
out of my class at Cascade College, heard a voice above my head, and looked up to find
Jackson perched high in a tree by the soccer field.</div>
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In addition to <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">adventure</b>,
another word I associate with Jackson is <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">wonder</b>.
He’s always had a capacity to be influenced by the outdoors and by nature. He
doesn’t just look at the creation; he experiences it, soaks it in, and revels
in it, not only seeing it but seeing himself as part of it. Often he writes
beautifully about those experiences.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
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The third word I associate with Jackson is <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">community</b>. All his life he’s had the
ability to seek out good people and form communities. His first, built in,
community was our family of five, and as a parent, I’m so grateful that Julia,
Jackson, and Garrison have always been, not only brother and sister, but also
good friends. As time went on, Jackson began to collect brothers from other mothers—first,
Kyle and Joel, then Landon, then Nick, then Ean, then Michael, and Brad, and
Evan, and Chris, and Dylan, and the list goes on. And he also collected new
sisters along the way: Danna, and Abby, and Cori, and Saryl, and Deborah, and
that list could go on as well. Everywhere Jackson has lived—from Portland to
Oklahoma City, to Ketchikan, to Juneau, to Asheville, to Wrightwood—he has been
a part of amazing communities with members too numerous to mention. The fact
that so many members of those communities have made the trip to Joshua Tree is
testimony to the closeness and enduring nature of those bonds.
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /><span style="font-size: small;">And I believe in April, Jackson's found someone who shares his love of adventure, wonder, and community (though I'm thinking she has more sense than to dive off the porch headfirst pretending to be wonder woman). So my toast is this: April and Jackson, I wish you a long, happy life together. May you continue to pursue adventure, may you continue to stay close to and be one with this good earth, and may you continue to seek out and form communities of good, caring, and fun people who bring peace and joy to your lives.</span><br /><br /></span><div class="MsoNormal">
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5738805570562546849.post-66077701897719888322013-08-31T20:15:00.000-07:002013-08-31T20:15:48.540-07:00Transitions<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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As I prepared for the beginning of the fall semester, I watched through my office window as this scene unfolded. Three people: a new student, a mother, and a father. Father embraces son, then backs away so the mother can get her goodbye hug. I keep my eyes on the dad, an athletic looking fellow wearing a baseball cap. As he steps away from his son, his shoulders drop, and his hands move to his face to wipe away, not sweat though it is a humid day in Oregon, but tears. The dad stretches his arms high above his head. He removes the baseball cap, placing his other hand over his eyes. Mom, who has just finished a long embrace with her son, notices and hands him a tissue. <br />
<br />
Transitions. Goodbyes, see you laters, and godspeeds.<br />
<br />
They happen all the time. When you reach my stage of life, you've seen--and experienced--a lot of them. As I shared vicariously this family's moment, I thought of some of my own most poignant goodbyes. Like saying goodbye, for the last time, to first my mom, then my dad. Those goodbyes have a finality to them like no other, and you never forget. My mom's been dead for 10 years, but I still catch myself occasionally picking up the phone to call her on Saturday mornings, as I did every Saturday for 28 years. <br />
<br />
Many goodbyes between parents and kids contain a mixture of excitement and sadness. I'm sure the parents I watched hugging their boy outside Minthorn Hall were excited about the opportunities ahead for their son. I'm sure they were also beginning to face the reality of what their lives would be now without him as a consistent presence in their home.<br />
<br />
Goodbyes become harder when you're not totally comfortable with the transition your child is undergoing. One of my all-time toughest goodbyes was to my daughter as I left her in a remote Alaskan town for her first teaching job. The principal at the high school told me that they closed school when temps reached 40 below. This information was not comforting to me. My wife, who rode back to Oregon with her after she completed her teaching year, later told me that if she had been the parent on the trip up, she would not have left our daughter there. <br />
<br />
As I watched the family outside my office window, I also reflected on my role as a college teacher. At some point in my college days, I remember being introduced to the <i>in loco parentis</i> concept. It's the idea that faculty and administrators at colleges and universities function, to some extent, in place of the parents. As a student, I thought the concept was a sneaky way to justify policies I didn't like, such as curfew. But my years as a teacher have led me to believe there's more to the <i>in loco parentis</i> idea than that. I think of the faculty members at my undergraduate college who opened their offices to me and listened, with interest and without judgment, to my hopes and doubts about God, and church, and life. I think about scores of students in my 21 years in higher education that I've connected with, and I hope, mentored. And I think about the 23 students in my First Year Seminar class, who I met for the first time on Friday after they had said goodbye to their parents, and I hope I can connect with a few of them. (I did promise to do anything I could for them--except lend them money.) I guess I believe that part of my role is to ease the transition a bit by trying to be, not a substitute parent, but a good listener and co-learner with my students.<br />
<br />
I'm not sure why these thoughts of goodbyes and transitions are so much with me these days. Maybe it's because our youngest son graduated from college last spring and was the last one to move out of the house. Or maybe it's because our older son will get married in a few months--another transition. Though both of these are joyful transitions, they are also, as all parents know, filled with sorrow that we are letting go of people we love, and that our lives will never be the same again. And even though we know the letting go is right and good and necessary, a part of us still hates it. Or maybe I'm just a sentimental fool, as my much younger friend called herself in a recent blog post.<br />
<br />
I suspect, however, that I'm not alone. A colleague posted on Facebook that looking at the photos of new student and parent goodbyes on the college's web page made her cry as she anticipated the time when her sons would make the same transition.<br />
<br />
As I reflected on the family saying their goodbyes outside my office, it occurred to me that I've probably not been sensitive enough to those who were saying goodbye to me as I took off on a new adventure. Often the person leaving has a lot to be excited about and a lot to look forward to. That excitement about the future can sometimes overshadow the sadness of parting. Perhaps, then, it's the parents who have the toughest road ahead in this scenario. <br />
<br />
It reminds of a day long ago in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Janet and I had married three months earlier. We had loaded all our earthly possessions in my orange VW Super Beetle and were driving to Knoxville, Tennessee, where I would begin my Master's program. We had said our goodbyes to her mom and dad with hugs and many tears. While I think I understood something of what her parents must have been feeling as they watched this guy drive away with their only daughter, taking her to a place far away, I now realize--because of the goodbyes I've said since--that I really didn't have a clue. <br />
<br />
Had I been choosing the background music that day, it would have been Dylan's "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right." I now understand the song that was actually playing on the radio as we pulled away was much more appropriate. It was Willie Nelson's "Blue Eyes Cryin' in the Rain."<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0