Defining Incongruity

Defining Incongruity

It’s hard to explain the toilet bowl that sits on the guy’s front lawn under the expansive elm tree.  But it is most decisively there - in all its white porcelain glory.  And it is making a statement all by itself - whether he intends it to or not.  It makes me think of the word “incongruous.” 

How many things in life fall into the category of “incongruous” – things that don’t fit within the surroundings in which they find themselves?  This should be a continual source of entertainment, wonder and offense all at the same time.

I went to the bank the other day.  It has an interior ATM that is only accessible with your card after the bank closes.  As a result, people courteously sit in their cars and wait until the person in the bank ante room comes out.  The guy before me went in and I couldn’t help but glance toward his vehicle.  Wow.  In the back of his little station wagon-style car, he had quite a collection of “stuff.”  I’m being respectful.  But it would require the Sesame Street people to re-write a new song way beyond the realm of “One of these things is Not Like the Other.”

It was the adult sized accordion which caught my eye first.  It was not in a case.  It was sprawled out over the heap of everything else that was back there.  (I’m looking for a second-hand adult accordion so naturally my radar picked that up).  Then the exhaust system of a vehicle, including the catalytic converter piece, was on top of the interior heap running the full length of the side of his car.  And a suitcase-looking thing was crowning the area of “stuff” right behind the driver’s seat. 

I surveyed “himself” as he walked from the bank to his driver’s seat.  Is he a traveling musician?  The living picture before me almost looked formal:  white shirt, dark pants, and an almost Elvis- wave to his hair.  But then a real musician wouldn’t do to the accordion what he did.  Is he a junk-picker? Will that accordion with which I am now obsessed be on ebay soon?  Is he a tinker?  Who knows what a tinker IS anymore?

When I was growing up there was “The Tinker and His Son” that wandered around the tri-town area where I went to church.  Well, maybe it was his son, but maybe not.  I say this because the guy was all of four and a half feet tall, if that and his son was the measure of Andre the Giant.  Yes, that Andre the Giant, from WWF.  They seemed to wander around and I vaguely remember them pushing a cart.  The father was very old, and the son perhaps in his 40’s.  But this is all a kid’s perspective and is surmised from a safe distance away from the incomprehensible.  Maybe they were the precursors to homeless or under-employed people that claimed a neighborhood territory.  Or maybe he was just a door-to-door “tinker,” namely, the guy who will fix stuff or trade stuff for household items you think you need.  Perhaps they are akin to encyclopedia salesmen. 

Remember that scene from “Second Hand Lions” where Michael Caine and Robert Duvall are sitting on their front porch with shotguns lying across their lap?  They are waiting for the encyclopedia salesman to arrive.  And they aren’t inviting him on the porch for sweet tea either.  Were tinkers received with the same welcome?  Probably not, if they were part of your community’s historical cast of characters.  They were at least willing to do something for some financial support.

Back then I’m not sure we had homeless people who held signs that just flat-out asked for money like they do here and now.  People actually offered to work for money, well, like I do I guess.  I will type, teach, make jam, sell birds, sell puppies, and paint for green tender.  And that is in a large part why I’m not homeless – because I keep re-inventing myself to keep the roof over my head.  It’s just that little extra which softens my life up a bit. 

So we have things that are incongruous, like the toilet.  And we have people that are in the grey zone of congruity, like the tinkers.  And then we have the congruous and beautiful. 

That is when the school bus stopped in front of me and the two mothers guided their little elementary schoolers up to the bus.  The white woman turned and went to her car to get on with her day.  The African American woman waved at her and gave a thumbs-up sign to the kids on the bus and moved on to her day.  At that point I think I got something in my eye because all I was seeing was home town America looking beautiful and congruous again.

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Madeline on Her Own Terms

On Her Own Terms ….

It’s not that I needed a third dog.  It’s that I wasn’t really part of the decision process.  The decision had been made by Herself, and my role was simply to comply.  I often remind her when she gets testy with me that I know her like no one else does:  I caught her the day she was born.   And in her eyes there is always a bit of laughter – as if to say that every moment I get closer to understanding her.  She is leading me.  I am a slow study in this regard.

I tried to change her, don’t get me wrong.  But I am ever so aware that it is a losing battle.  At eight weeks old if you got near her when she was eating she’d give a little growl.  But that was not the first time.  The first time should have been on film.  She was only a couple of weeks old at most.  She was approximately eight inches long.  I was taking turns picking up each of the five little cocker spaniel puppies and getting them used to being held, talked to by people.  I held the little Queen in the palm of my hand, gently holding her on her back.  It was then that I heard it – a decisive little grumble coming from her belly.  She was not hungry.  She was growling! 

I looked into her little chocolate face and asked her, “What are you anyway?  An ewok?”  I swear to you a little spark shot out of her eye.  I knew that in this little dog was a Force that would shape the sort of human I was becoming…. Sappy.

It’s not that no one else wanted her.  My plan was to sell all five of the little dogs into good homes.  She was mapped-out to head through Western New York into Pennsylvania.  As my mother would say, “Oh, we have relatives in Erie”  - relatives that I haven’t seen since I was, oh, about eight years old.  It’s not like they would know this woman who wanted Madeline Grace.  I am told she had the puppy’s picture on her kitchen table.  Well, now I have the puppy’s picture on my desk at work.  My eyes flood up sometimes when I look at her.  One of her nick names it “Little Bear.”  She looks like a kodiak bear sometimes – and other times she ACTS like it…. And that is why the mapped-out plan got changed.

She was the last puppy to leave my household from that first litter.  I was home sick that day and the people were going to drive out about three hours to my house to pick her up.  While I was busy feeling ill on the couch, she was busy chasing dust bunnies under the coffee table.  And probably peeing on my floor.  But I was so torn-up inside about her leaving.  I did not “need” another dog.  But I looked at her in her bear-ish sort of disposition and began to worry in a way that I have not worried before, or since, about anything:  would she grow up to be nasty?  Would she be disciplined the correct way when she got bossy and out of line?  Would they call me in three weeks or three months and say they couldn’t deal with her anymore?  I was, in short, a mess about it.

And then I made the phone call.  I apologized profusely to the woman who was going to drive her mother out all this way – I told her the truth:  I just couldn’t let this dog go.  I truly don’t feel it was a selfish thing – all along I planned to sell her and other litters after her, to new homes.  I was happy to be a midpoint in the journey of love all these little dogs were going to take.  But Madeline Grace had played a card I didn’t understand.  She showed me a bit of her Alpha Dog personality and it made me wonder what I was really dealing with.  If I, who has had a handful of dogs; taken very expensive obedience lessons with a merciless trainer in order to correct a shelter dog that was a train wreck; and was fairly well read on dog psychology – if I couldn’t understand this little ball of fur & fire, how could anyone else?!  I apologized.  I was in tears. 

The woman was very gracious to me.   She simply said, “We get it.  We are dog people and we get it.”  I promised her a discount off the pick of the next litter.  I hung up the phone.  I wish I could say I felt relief instantly.  I did not.  But whatever I felt, it felt better than the “not knowing” I was imagining about this little dog’s future.  I knew the one thing that I needed to know:  The Queen had made her choice from the moment of that first growl and that spark of fire in her eye.  It just took me a few weeks to bend to her way of thinking.

I don’t think I need to detail that she is now the favorite that I’m not supposed to have because I have two other dogs that need to be equals.  She is the one to run to me if she hears me crying after a sad movie, a bad phone call, or a nightmare.  And when I go to sleep at night, my hand is on her little back just to make sure she is still in my world.

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 Thank you Toni for understanding.  I owe you one.

The Ghosts of Deep Valley Springs

In the height of my mania to find a house to buy – a process that took me ten years for a variety of unpleasant reasons – my friend Trudy read my soul outloud:  “It’s a Polish thing.”  I beg your pardon?  She continued with utter conviction, “The Polish people are tied to land.  You have to have it; it’s in your veins to put down roots.  You have a connection with the earth.”  I couldn’t disagree.  (Not that anyone disagreed with Trudy and could say they were right.  LOL.)

 

I never thought of it that way – that I am tied to earth.  And I think I always presumed all people are like me; but then I look at the folks who just are content to live in apartments forever, or rent what someone else owns and I see the difference.  I need dirt that I can dig into.  Real dirt.  When I bought my first real shovel I studied handles for a while to make sure that my new “best friend” would feel right, that we could work together to make things great.  I wasn’t buying a tool.  I was investing in a Collaborator of sorts. 

Sometimes in the spring when I come across someone who is stressed, I want to tell them to just go outside and play in the dirt.  Digging, planting, waiting, delighting.  It’s all part of weaving the tapestry of the landscape around you.  I get high just paging through the bulb and plant catalogs starting in February.  It gives me hope to survive the depths of the coldest winter. 

Then I realized it:  all these catalogs are advertising the same exact plants.  It was the cartoon picture of the stupid dinosaur next to an old tree that gave it away.  I thought to myself, “wait a minute.  I saw this exact picture last week in the other magazine.”  I dug it out of the recycle bin and compared it in utter disgust:  exact same picture.  In fact, the pictures of the purple perfection hedge rose and the rose of Sharon hedges were exactly the same in all catalogs as well. (They cartooned the picture of the hedges, I think, because in real life, they don’t grow-in as well and tightly as you’d like them to do.  So the catalog people draw what they think YOU WANT the hedges to look like in the Ideal World … where none of us lives.  My rose of Sharon hedges look like sticks right now.)  I started comparing mailing address labels.  Apparently there is a warehouse-greenhouse combo somewhere that they ship all these out of.  Close your eyes and think about that for a minute.  Not for too long – don’t fall asleep!  But imagine all of these long greenhouses growing all of these plants and sorting all of these orders and then shipping them out to all corners of the States to people just like me- people hoping for beauty and color to augment the soundtrack of life.

These catalog companies have tapped into the truism that we are all rooted in earth.  I did not invent this idea; it is as old as the book of Genesis.  The name of the first man, “Adam” means “earth.”  So that line from the Hebrew Scriptures that is utilized at gravesites everywhere is actually a play on words:  “You are dust and to dust you shall return.”  “You are Adam and to adam you shall return.”  Kind of cool.

My love for the land is varied – farmlands, forests, a warm beach on a sunny summer day – it’s all good to me.  Different kinds of land; one love.  I have the joy of driving through farmlands every morning on the way to work.  I’ve been driving the same three alternating routes for about five years now.  Not much seemed to change until the other week.  Let me explain.

My brain, for five years, was giving me very basic words as I passed by the sights for five mornings out of the work week:  Empty barn.  Empty barn with roof collapsing.  Old farmhouse.  Garage.  More empty pole barns.  That was the north side of the road.  I kept wondering what was keeping them from either repairing or demolishing the barn with the roof collapsing.  I know for years my Uncle kept the family barn up, despite his sisters pleading (or nagging, depending on how you hear it) with him to tear it down.  I get it.  There were memories there for him.  Pieces of his childhood that he could contemplate at his leisure, just by looking into the back yard.  Was this old barn of Central NY also holding some farmer’s heart captive as it bowed its roof piece by piece, plank by plank, to its dirt and concrete floor?

On the south side of the street were a series of old farmhouses.  Then something happened.  Someone spray painted numbers on them.  Just one digit in a series.  All of a sudden instead of seeing the farmhouses as individuals, I saw them as a collection.  I realized they were all part of one story.  Both sides of the street were connected because of the land and the vocation of the people who had lived on it.  These three forest green colored houses were part of a group.

White shutters were taken down and laid beside the front of the houses.  Debris of life like broken swingsets were moved.  Doors were torn off.  And then across the street the bulldozer came and brought the great bowing barn to its proverbial knees.  This one piece was somehow the emotional center of all this community.  They just crashed it and trucked it away load by load to be burned by someone who had no connection to its original purpose I imagine.  Another building that was behind it also was demolished.  I was glad to see the junk go in a way, but in another way I can feel the three green houses across the street standing like bewildered sisters watching the land appear again where the mighty structures once loomed. 

The barns were a symbol of life and vitality.  They housed the moans of momma cows in labor, and probably the gasps of elderly cows surrendering their spirits.  Kittens must have prowled their hay lofts and a young farm girl was kissed by her boyfriend in the stall where she groomed her horse.  There echoes the sound of a farmer throwing his wrench in frustration at the dirt when the tractor wouldn’t start and he needed to begin plowing to plant the corn.   A woman in a pink dress and white apron walked across the street with a thermos of hot coffee cooked on the gas stove and handed it to him.  He winked at her.

This was their life.  They built it together.  Surrounded by family – aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents.  They are the ghosts of Deep Valley Springs.  And the houses alone stand as witness as the land is returned to its original state.  The spray painted numbers on them remind me that they are part of someone’s plan now.  Next year at this time, perhaps new families will come to put new houses up and make new memories.  I wonder if, when they shut off the filters from their in-ground pools and turn down their loud music, they will hear the lowing of the spirits of the cows who lived in the barn?  The cows always remind people that we are Adam, and to adam we shall return.

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Going Fishing, again ....

I believe in the value of stories from all cultures to teach common truths and to give us insight into our human experience.  With this thought in mind I reference a story from the (my) Christian tradition that, very much simplified says this:

                After the death of Jesus, but before they had come to understand that He had risen, the 

disciples who walked with Him for 3 years were devastated.  In no way, shape or form did they see the horrific events of Christ’s murder as “part of God’s Plan,” at least not at that point.  It was when they tried to go back to what they used to know and used to do before they followed His way,              that they started meeting Him everywhere in the events of daily life.  They met Him in the Garden where His body had been laid, but was now gone.  They met Him on a long dusty road to a town called Emmaus when they were traveling in the wrong/backwards direction from where they should have stayed.  And they met Him after they said, “I don’t know what else to do, so I am just going to go fishing again – because it’s what I used to do before I met Him.”  And then…. He comes walking on the water to them and asks them “Children, have you caught anything?”  (nope.)  In other words, going back may have been a time-filler, but it wasn’t a successful route to take.  Eventually, He got them back on the track again.

It has been helpful in my personal life – and I invite you to examine your own path – to see if the “return to fishing” step occurs.  For me, it does.  Every time I decide to step away from the part-time ministry world, I always seem to need to go fishing.  Not literally.  But I return to what it is that I did before I was utterly consumed with giving 110% to ministry. 

At one point, I looked at this movement as a weakness.  That perspective has drastically changed.  Now, I see my need to rest myself from the intensity of the efforts I was putting forth.  I need to be healed from the most recent wounds incurred by people who should have cared about me as a colleague, and as their trusted professional.  They are people who would have done well to believe the best about me and my teaching goals.  It would have suited them well to learn, in the words of St. Francis, “to seek first to understand…”  for in reality, their conclusions were based on a faulty information, and their own misunderstanding.

One of my dearest friends often comments how she loves the song, “All Are Welcome,” and I want to tell you why I, on the other hand, cringe when I hear that song.  I will give you snippets of the lyrics:

                 “Let us build a house where love can dwell and all can safely live,

                a place where saints and children tell how hearts learn to forgive.

                Built of hopes and dreams and visions, rock of faith and vault of grace;

                here the love of Christ shall end divisions. All are welcome, all are welcome,

                all are welcome in this place.

               

                Let us build a house where prophets speak, and words are strong and true,

                where all God’s children dare to seek to dream God’s reign anew.

                Here the cross shall stand as witness and as symbol of God’s grace;

                here as one we claim the faith of Jesus. All are welcome, all are welcome,

                all are welcome in this place.”

This song is about a dream that we all long for but refuse to let occur because we both knowingly and unwittingly block the flow of grace and truth.  WE want our churches, our places of worship, and even our workplaces to be places “where all can safely live” and “hearts learn to forgive” – as long as it is US that is being sheltered, and OUR weaknesses that are being forgiven.  We aren’t going to be the ones to extend that to other people unless the work of God’s grace truly moves  in our hearts and changes the way we do business.  Churches and businesses are still comprised of human beings, and in that fact resides our continual struggle with self-oriented interests and behaviors.

And we are less likely to do that forgiving and safe-place-creating if the leaders among us are the first to refuse grace.  Are our leaders committed to truth?  Will they educate themselves in the issues of the day and how they relate to people’s lives – and how our ministry (if in church) or business needs to address modern concerns?   Are our leaders willing to give ear to an explanation when they hear something on the grapevine and don’t understand it?  Are our leaders willing to risk losing “the big donor” or the power broker” or the “tribal leader” because they won’t agree to punish and crucify a designated victim? 

Prophets and educators – both religious and secular – I think are people cut out of the same cloth.  We are willing to be circumspect in our view of the world.  It’s not that we don’t have a center.  In fact, sometimes we have a very strong center of core beliefs, but we force ourselves to be open to seeing things from different directions so we don’t miss an important detail.  Sometimes even in the midst of a faulty world system, there are shreds of truth – because otherwise people wouldn’t be attracted to an outright lie.  The professors that I admired most in university were the ones that did not teach just one discipline as a stand-alone concept; they were the people who could integrate all the other disciplines toward the final goal of truth.  I strive to be like those professors.

An excellent example was when I taught religion in a Catholic school.  I reached out to the English teacher (who formerly was a nun) who was using the movie “Fiddler on the Roof” in her classroom.  I asked her if we could work on a curriculum for it together because I was addressing this same movie a year earlier in Old Testament class.  She looked at me completely disconnected and said, “What does this movie have to do with religion?”  Seriously. 

In response, my main points to her were 3:  the demonstration of Jewish faith culture in that movie; the personal relationship Rebbe Tevye had with God; and the role of Tradition in forming our decisions and challenging our mindsets.  She declined to collaborate.   And who lost out on a richer approach to education?  The students did.

I am disappointed that a good classroom experience or relevant topic cannot be explored because of people who just “don’t get it.”  But as I am now figuratively speaking, “going fishing,” I am more concerned with locating a future spot where my collaborators will get it.  We’re going to do great and relevant ministry on that day. 

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