Lessons from the Driver's Seat

There are two types of drunks, or so I’ve heard:  crying drunks or angry drunks.  As he sat next to me in the passenger seat of my little compact car, I considered how little I knew about him other than his name and his obvious problem.  I was only out of university a few months with the ink still drying on my ministry degree and was setting up a new life in the southwest.  Would this guy I barely knew fly into a rage and leave my body in the street and steal my car?  Or what?  It was a situation I put myself in thinking I could help this poor soul. 

I had just been hired as a youth minister but the start up was slow and my mornings were kind of delayed – which was JUST FINE with me.  No need to go into the office, if I was going to be there in the evening with religious education classes.  So I was hanging around in my living room, playing guitar, enjoying life and looked out the window to see this guy wandering up the street.  I was renting a room in a house with some other Christian women; this guy lived in one of the similar men’s households up the street.  But this particular day he wasn’t walking so well.  I went flying out my front door – actually just glad to see a familiar face – and when I asked him how he was, he said, “well I guess you can tell...”  And he was right.   

All of a sudden thinking on my feet became a new talent I discovered.  “Hey, you know how I got a new job with teenagers?  I need to take a ride into the city to see one of the rehab places and kind of check them out, do you want to come for a ride with me?”  And that is how it began.  We talked, mostly about his predicament:  his ex-wife had laid down the law that unless he was sober, he had zero visitation rights with his ten-year-old son, and that was killing his spirit.  I talked to him about using that as a goal to get sober.  It was the most worthy reason anyone could want, and he was on board with the goal, but the thought of getting sober seemed to be beyond him.  I suggested a particular place and he replied: “Oh no, I hear that you have to be poured-through the door.” Huh?  You had to arrive drunk?  It made no sense to me.   

As we entered the city, the sight of some street triggered panic in him.  He said, “Hey, just let me out here.  I really need a drink.”  And that is when I wondered how this was going to turn:  crying or angry.  I had only one card that I could think to play:  “You know how God says it’s a sin to lead someone else to sin?  I can’t take you to a bar.  You wouldn’t want to make me sin would you?”  And that kind of tweaked his reasoning powers for a minute.  And then he started to be sad.  I won’t say he burst out crying - i can’t remember exactly – but when we pulled into the driveway of the rehab, someone was there to meet us in the driveway and my friend walked, almost dejectedly, into the building.  

 

A few weeks later, he was back in the neighborhood and things were different.  He was in the pool with …. his ten-year-old son playing water volleyball.  It is a type of joy I had never seen before – a reunion born of intense personal struggle on his part.  I was so proud of him.   

In retrospect, it seems to me that if I had a daughter who did what I did, namely:  drove into the city with a man she barely knew, I might be angry that I raised a child with so little good sense for personal safety.  But I will tell you this:  even though I was driving that little blue Plymouth Champ, Someone Else was clearly in the driver’s seat.  I somehow needed to learn to be brave for a greater cause.  Comfort and security don’t teach you those kinds of lessons.  If we leave people on a road broken and confused, we miss an opportunity.  I don’t know if every single opportunity is meant to be seized outright, or if it’s just that the voice of God or His gentle hand takes us where we need to go almost beyond our own reckoning.  I think the latter is the case. 

I don’t have an exclusive or even frequent outreach ministry to drunk people.  A friend once gave me a tour of her place of employment – an inner city outreach – and honestly, I was so freaked by the characters around me that I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.  The guy with a ring on his finger made of the tines of a fork kind of threw me over the edge.  Don’t' ask me why, I’m not exactly sure.  All I can say is that my comfort zone was very clear to me in that moment.  Only infrequently do I find myself in places that scare me to the core.  Perhaps the aging process has tightened my boundaries a bit more.   

I also don’t make it any kind of personal mission to pick up hitchhikers.  And yet less than a decade later, on the East coast, there was a new “Driver’s Seat Lesson” for me to be learned.  I was between jobs.  I was cranky because I couldn’t find a ministry job that paid a living wage.  I had a Master’s degree, some great experience and strong job skills and found nothing of interest anywhere on the horizon.  I was put-out with my circumstances and in a funk. 

My friends called me for dinner.  I had become everyone’s #1 Choice of babysitter, especially for cranky kids because my tolerance was great.  I was actually looking forward to dining with this young family and having a peaceful evening with adults my age.  The caveat was this:  It was snowy and bitter, bitter cold outside.  I had to drive 15 minutes to get there in like, negative 5 degrees with a nasty windchill.  I bundled up and headed out in my slate blue Buick Skyhawk.  Down on the edge of the boulevard I turned the corner and saw a figure walking on the side of the road – sidewalks, long since swallowed up in winter precipitation.  She wore a red parka and was incredibly skinny.  This is the very weather that the founding fathers called “Fit for Neither Man nor Beast.”   

I pulled alongside her – the only car visible on the street for a mile – and said, “Can I give you a ride somewhere?”  She said, “I’m not going the way you are.”  I reassured her, “That’s not important.  I will take you where you need to go.”  She crawled into my front seat.  I’d be surprised if she was even 100 pounds.  Her parka may have swallowed up her frame, but it didn’t seem to be insulating her too well.  As she spoke to me, a tiny drop of moisture hung from the tip of her nose.  Welcome to the Eastern states.  You see it so often in December through February that your stomach forgets to hurl after a while.   

“Where can I take you?”  “Can you take me to Wolf Street?”  Sure.  We drive on.  I asked, “Where on Wolf Street?"  “Do you know where ‘Fantasy Nights’ is?”  Oh, man alive.   “Please don’t tell me you are a dancer …” I replied.  Trust me when I say she was not anything like the girls on the advertisements for such places.  She admitted:  “I tried it once.  They threw a chair at me.”  That right there will give you pause; the phrase Gentleman’s Club is also part of the whole picture of the Lie.  She shared with me her utter inability to secure a decent job.  She had no completed high school education.  She had no work experience.  Not even the drug store would trust her to run a cash register.  This woman was the portrait of why EVERYONE should strive to get a good education.  She was in her 30’s I think and unless she made a plan, she had absolutely no future.   

I suggested she try one of the warehouses in the area that made clothes.  She said, “But who would hire me?”  I had stopped the car in the neighborhood where she had asked me to take her by this time.  I looked at her earnestly and said, “You don’t have to tell everyone everything about your past.  But you do have the ability to earnestly ask someone in plain English to give you a new start.  I think you may find someone willing to help you.”   

As she exited the car, her response took me by surprise:  “ I guess I will just have to trust, won’t I?”  The very thing that I, with my education, my experience, and my “me-ness” was NOT doing:  trusting God.  I had been in a perpetual bellyaching mode and yet I had so many things going for me:  I had an amazing ability to pick up temp jobs, be comfortable in interview situations, networking skills, not having to worry about getting a ride or finding clean clothes to wear or going to a dentist to fix my appearance.  Here I was miffed that I couldn’t find a ministry job when I was failing Faith 101 by not putting it all in God’s hands with a grateful attitude.  Shame on me. 

Here she was, with her street smarts and bitter life experience that taught her to NOT trust anyone.  There is no way she could have been referencing the act of trusting people.  She was referring to Himself Upstairs.  And I got the message He had sent her to give me.  I still find it ironic that I drove her out of my way so that we could have our Lesson together – maybe she wasn’t real, perhaps she was an angel with a story to snap-me-out-of-it.  But it was a very important lesson, nonetheless. 

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Please do not take anything in any of the above 100% true stories as an endorsement for giving rides to strangers or picking up hitchhikers.  These stories are for instructional purposes, only.  Learn from MY experiences and stay safe. 

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Taking it With Me ... Maybe

 

The preacher quite confidently stated:  “You can’t take It with you.  You will never see a U-haul following a hearse.”  That being stated … now you can understand why when I was driving by a local cemetery last week and I saw a moving van parked in the center of the cemetery, I laughed so hard I almost choked.  The irony of that mental picture gives you pause to reconsider:  perhaps I can take something “with me”?  and if so, what can I take with me?

Someone once told me that you spend the first 50 years of your life accumulating stuff, and the next however many trying to get rid of it.  I don’t know.  I’ve got a perfectly good TV in the guest bedroom attached to a VHS player and both of them still work.  I have had two “bites” online to buy it.  Yes, I was actually the person to post them for sale (I have no husband to blame for such generic offenses).  I just can’t bring myself to click the button that reads: “Yes this item is still available.”  Mentally, it is not yet 100% available.  What happens if my Roku tv craps-out on me?  And yet I remember that I lived for 20 or 30 years after college without a television.  Some people looked at me like I was Joan of Arc when I told them that.  Other people were horrified.  I had one man look at me and say in a very condescending tone:  “Well, I don’t think that’s right.”  I couldn’t figure out who I would have offended by not participating in the nightly national holy-hour broadcast of Wheel-of-Fortune and Jeopardy!  To this day, his response puzzles me.

I keep purging clothes out of my closet.  That is going to be a never-ending process for a few reasons.  Firstly, because I keep buying clothes.  So I get one, I give one.  That’s the mentality. Except the quantity never really evens out.   Secondly, because in my closets and in my Rubbermaid bins I have other people’s clothes too.  I have clothes from 30 years ago that I still like that haven’t fit me for, oh, 25 years.  We will call those the property of:  Young Adult Me.  My acronym name would be Yame. It’s pronounced like “amy” only with an excitement in front of it that only the letter “Y” can bring:  I was young, I was slimmer, I was alive.  Yay-Me.

Then there is the batch of clothes that belongs to:  Suck-Crunch-Zip-Me.  That acronym will be Suczi go with the Polish pronunciation of “soo-chee.”  These are clothes that I have to suck my stomach in, crunch my legs down and zip on the count of one-two-threeeeee.  Suczi.  Well it’s better than Sucky.  Those are the clothes that I hope to get back into next year.  Those are not the clothes I am thinking about when I say YES to the ice cream, YES to the brownie, YES to the mini chocolate bar.  Note to self:  You cannot say YES to the Dress and YES to the Desserts as well. 

Then there is a small cache of clothes that belong to Wistme.  Wistme is the Wistful part of myself that thinks I’d knock-em-dead in that adorable black, lace bottom dress.  Someday.  Or that impulse-buy Orange and black bathing suit I grabbed on the boardwalk about ten years ago.  It’d make me look like a Mae West spin off of Bay Watch.  Maybe.  At least wistful me thinks so.  But I need to adjust a few locations of the real estate before I can slide into that piece of spandex.  Yep.  Not happening this summer.

Although, kudos to the friend that just lost 20 pounds by cutting carbs.  In one month.  My gosh, I’d be on a respirator in the ICU if I went without carbs for a month.  No.  I mean it.  I look at the fruit we’ve been farming in to the stores this winter and spring, prior to our local crops coming in and, man alive, who can eat it?!  Sure, the bigger container of strawberries is only like $3, but half of them are WHITE.  I don’t want to buy strawberries that look like the Polish flag.  I want them to be ready to eat or utilize (jams), not sit on the counter all day to ripen and in the process gather more fruit flies than true believers at the annual Baptist convention in the Bible belt.

And speaking of food.  I tried to clean the pantry the other day.  My carbs are all sitting there waiting for me, should I need them.  And really I cannot figure out why I continue to go to grocery shop once or twice a week almost hypnotically when I could feed an entire troop of Boy Scouts for a weekend with my pantry.  I mean it.  I have cookies in there from 2 Christmases ago.  I have a box of chocolates that is a few years old too.  Were they gifts?  Did I pick them up in a moment of wanton devil-may-care fever the last time I went to Harry & David’s at the Outlet Mall in Waterloo?  Darn.  They should call that place Alamo, not Waterloo.  Because I can’t seem to forget it.  (Remember the Alamo?)  I like driving out there and wandering about like a lost soul on Halloween in the misty moors of England.  I’m so happy that’s where I found that special liquid you use to protect your cutting boards.  If I actually USED my cutting boards I may need that liquid.  But my favorite wood cutting board was a gift and it just sits propped against the wall looking majestic in my kitchen …. Because I like it that way.  

And my tchotchke’s.  How I love my tchotchkes.  I love saying the word.  It is Yiddish.  But intriguingly it has roots in an obsolete Polish word:  czaczko, which means the same thing:  trinkets and collectibles.  Now WHY and WHO would declare that kind of a word obsolete ever? - Probably this 30’something generation that I have an ongoing locking-of-horns with.  My friend’s daughter came to my house when she was a teenager and when I opened my microwave to pull out a package of cookies, the kid laughed at me.  Hard laughing.  Really?!  I had to explain to her that we don’t “waste storage space” in my house.  That generation never lived through the Depression.  Well, to be fair, I didn’t either, but I am prepared:  I’ve got storage.  I have two of my grandmother’s cabinets for safe-keeping my tchotchkes.  I mean, who wouldn’t want a mini Santa in a bathing suit carrying a surfboard with a beach ball at his feet?  Or the ceramic cow that was given to me, unpainted, and I painted it, but it never got fired up to high gloss.  I can’t part with it.  Or my three little exotic birds that are actually stampers for envelopes.  Find one of those today anywhere: I dare you.  Or the soft bisque praying angel that has a broken leg under her flowing dress.  I will get around to fixing her someday.  No one needs to know that one leg is broken.  Is it not a deep, spiritual truth that those who pray often have brokenness that is not apparent to the rest of the world?  So why would I want to throw out or give away a great spiritual lesson like that? 

Then there is the Bik’s Memorial Dog & Pet Kennel collection.  I could probably evacuate the Bronx Zoo with all my animal carriers.  Probably.  2 Large Dog Kennels, one medium kennel, three or four carry-on’s in case I need to fly somewhere with my birds-in-tow. 

To my credit, I have not moved my residences and worldly possessions as often in Central New York as I did when I lived in Arizona.  In Arizona, I moved six times in four years.  The last time I moved, my friend the Immortal Tom Walsh, said to me:  “Arabik.  This is it.  This truck aint moving your crap to another apartment, not one more time.”  I guess he meant it, because the following year he moved himself to California.  He fit all of his worldly belongings in the back of his steed-white El Camino.  I’m not kidding.  If I had to move my earthly possessions to another state, it would take …. Um …. Probably a herd of El Camino’s or …. A U-Haul …. Like the one I saw in the cemetery last week.  I will leave it at that.

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Being the Gift Horse

 

I winced as I looked at her smiling, fat face.  Her cartoon resembled her and those like her.  As I flipped the newsletter over, I know it was intended for me to feel glad that “Amber found a home.”  (that is her real name, they didn’t change it.)  When I opened the newsletter, the non-cartoon, black and white photo of her new digs and her comrades also made me wince.  No smiling faces to the camera, just bare backsides … in a mud pen.

This is not an appeal from a charity in a Third World Country.  It is, believe it or not, a Pig Sanctuary.  How my name got on their mailing list I will never know.  They are on the west coast doing their pot-bellied pig rescue efforts and wanting my east coast money to shore them up.  Not happening.

My neighbor sometimes has trouble starting the wood pile fire in the back so he is counting on me to come over there weekly and bring a paper bag FULL of charity appeals that I get in the mail so we can start the “camp fire.”  Someone must have sold my name on the lists under the headings of “Religious” and “Animal Lovers.”  For your entertainment, I will tell you “who” is after me:  the Salesians, the Franciscans, the Oblates, the Native American charities, the charities that feed children, the charities that rescue dogs and cats on Long Island (where I do NOT live) and save animals indigenous to other continents, the people that train dogs for veterans, and all veterans and police charities, local helicopter services, fire departments, and various politicians.  It is not an exaggeration to say I get about 20 pieces of charity junk mail each week.

A Guilt Gift is sometimes enclosed.  The agenda there is that if the sender puts a gift in, you may somehow feel morally obliged to contribute back to their charity to offset their costs.  Honestly, that part of my moral consciousness died last year.  Finally.  All of this unwanted mail coming to my box like a trojan horse with Greek soldiers hidden inside has worn away at my moral veneer. The guilt gifts are predictable:  It may be a nickel taped to the letter urging you to return it.  It may be a fake two-dollar bill folded so you can see it in the window of the envelope.  Money is, after all, a great motivator.  holy water from a religious site, a medal with a saint on it, a religious symbol appropriate to whatever season is nearest (Christmas or Easter are common).  Sometimes They send me note pads, with or without my name, and often they are very cutely designed.  And have I got address labels.  I could wallpaper my bathroom with all the free address labels I’ve received.  Lastly, there are The Mass cards.

I guess I took it for granted that everyone knew what a Mass card was until my friend at work said, “what is that?”  I explained:  It is a card you get from a charity that you send to a friend or loved one and inside it is the inscription:  A Mass is being said for you on (insert religious holiday name here) at the Shrine of Our Lady of the Alps (I made that up).  So instead of you going to the grocery store or pharmacy to purchase a card for $5, you send $5, 10 or $20 to the charity itself as a donation to their ministry (feeding some people perhaps in a Third World Country or USA inner city).  Let me be clear:  You don’t have to request these cards.  Once you get on someone’s mailing list, they keep coming and coming and coming in packs of three or four.  Some of them are nice, some of them are too glitzy for my taste.  But “I hate to throw them out” so I have a few boxes of them, organized by category … because I don’t have anything better to do with my time(?).  Mass cards can be for birthdays, Mother’s/Father’s Day, Christmas, Easter, Thinking of You, or sympathy cards.  To be clear:  in order for me to use all the sympathy cards I got in the mail from the charities, Everyone I have ever known or met in my life would have to simultaneously drop dead, and I would STILL have at least 5 left over cards in my Mass card collection at home.

Money is important.  How we utilize it is also very important.  So how can we choose what charities to support financially?  First, I eliminate almost anyone whom I suppose already gets government funding.  As a former worker in a 501(c)3 charity, I want to support the underdog, the “little guy.”  Oftentimes the smaller charities are able to accomplish more with a dollar because they don’t get strangulated in red tape.  Although, there are a few donations I’ve made to illness-related charities in memory or honor of a friend who struggled with that illness.  Next, I look for the Better Business bureau symbol or the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability symbol - I want some indication that the charity actually exists and that someone holds them accountable for how money is used. Then I pick one for each month of the year and write the names on an index card to tuck into the back of my checkbook as a reminder when I’m writing out monthly bills to be faithful to those who need me.

It has been said that God cannot be outdone in generosity.  It is for that reason that even when times are tough and the take-home pay barely seems to take you home, we should remain generous.  We should remember those who have less than us:  people who will never own a vehicle or rent/own a home; children that were born into tragic circumstances; people who have put their lives on the line so that we may live in a free country; animals that rely on the compassion of humans to protect them from worse humans.  The need is endless.  But if each of us remains faithful to whatever need  touches our heart, then we will make the world a better place, one check at a time... even for pot-bellied pigs.  

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Accidental Speed Dating

 

It started with a sneeze.  And then there was about 8 minutes of relentless, one-way speed dating that I did not ask for which continued until I walked away.  As I told my father the other night on the phone, “It used to take me eight months to decide that I couldn’t tolerate someone’s nonsense.  Now it only takes eight minutes.” 

Last Saturday I went into Tractor Supply to look at blueberry bushes.  Their bushes were dried out; the flowerettes on them were crispy-dead and I can’t imagine who would be dumb enough to buy plants that looked THAT BAD.  So I went inside.  I heard chicks and ducklings in the tower-sized brooder calling so I went over.  I do not know why I don’t visit them every year:  they are so cool.  No matter what is happening in life, watching baby chicks just do what they do makes you feel better.  Whatever it is that they do.  And every now and then one sits in the corner with his eyes half-mast and you wonder if he is going to make it and then that wrecks the whole thing.  But I digress.

The next thing I heard was this FWAH-FWAH sound.  I wandered toward it, wondering if they were torturing goats in the back of the store.  Nope.  It turned out to be a kid about 8 to 10 years old that was playing with a dog toy.  Relentlessly.  It was a noise worse than nails on a chalkboard.  Almost worse than the Styrofoam cooler that used to squeak in the back of our station wagon when my parents took us to the beach.  That sound actually makes me nauseous.  I do not know why.  But when I saw this kid, deliberately, rhythmically, incessantly, tweaking that dog toy and his mother just blah-blah-blahing to her husband who had draped himself almost hopelessly over the handlebar of the shopping cart … I had to leave the area.  The school teacher in my soul was about to kick-in and it would have been loud and very few people would be left standing from the blast.

I was so very stressed from that relentless FWAH-FWAH sound that I could not complete my mission to inspect the protein level in a certain brand of dog food.  That, and the bag was over 20 pounds and up on a higher shelf so I could not move it.  I stood there feeling a bit defeated.  Eight feet away, a man sneezed.  I said, “Bless you.”  He retorted with the very p.c. response, “I’m not sick.”  And I turned to look at him and said, “And I’m not worried about that.”  He added, “You know. Pretty soon we are going to have to all carry vaccination cards.”  And, non-plussed, I said:  “I’m not worried about that either.”  Then he began.

He told me about his four-year-old dachshund that just had $7,000 surgery at the major animal hospital in New York that is famous for both their surgeries and their price-gouging.  He told me about his little garden that is troubled by rabbits and squirrels – the reason why his dachshund has burned-out it’s joints digging or whatever after critters.  He told me about his lymph node under his right armpit that he had to utilize the mammography machine to get it checked out.  He told me he drove truck for a delivery company and that it makes him nervous when people accept packages from him and are not wearing masks, so he just slides things across their deck/patio to them. 

And all the while he is going on about this, I have this strange, but usual to me, train of thought going on in my head:

                He is kind of handsome.  Well-kept.  Nice eyes ... above his mask.

                He’s not skinny and that doesn’t bother me.  Apparently me being “not skinny” doesn’t bother him.

                I wonder where we could meet for coffee around here if I wanted to continue this conversation.

And then ….

                He’s got a mouth like he licked a potty.  I’ve heard every swear word I know, including the F-word come out of him.  Scratch the coffee.

And just like that, the impromptu speed date was done.  He got some practice in, and I turfed another man in short order.  Here’s why.  It’s not that I don’t use a few cow pasture words myself.  It’s that when a person is supposed to be on their GOOD behavior to impress you, if they talk like that so naturally, you are a FOOL if you think they are going to talk nicer to you later.  A DARNED FOOL.  I imagined him saying the F-word in front of my parents.  That aint’ gonna fly.  I imagined how he would talk to a girlfriend or wife when he got angry – which happens inevitably in every relationship.  I just couldn’t believe in his ability to change.

One of my friends said to me this week, “well people can change.”  I told her I wasn’t so sure anymore.  I know that I tried to give up the BULL SH*T word and I couldn’t do it.  I could NOT do it.  It just described powerfully so many situations that I needed it in my repertoire.  Why is it that I want a man who is genteel, who is educated but fun, who is more likely to excuse my own idiosyncrasies than to blurt back at me:  THAT is UTTER BULLSH*T!  It’s because of one simple thing:  I want to marry UP. 

It is unlikely that I will be raising children with someone when I get married, IF I get married.  I am old enough to presume that ship has sailed.  So I don’t need to evaluate a man as “father” material as I assess him for what he brings to the table.  I just have to ask:  Can I enjoy talking with this person?  Will he like watching re-runs with me?  Does he love dogs and will he help me with my dog business?  Will he want to walk with me by the ocean after eating spaghetti somewhere great?  I used to think I would be in youth ministry forever in some shape, manner, or form, so it would be so great to have a man who IS good with kids … almost fatherly to an orphaned generation … I might go back to youth ministry … okay, so I take it back.  Father-material is still on the table.  Plus the other thing ….

If I was to date THAT guy, he would always say:  “You know, you talk a lot.  The longest you let ME TALK was the day I met you at Tractor Supply.  From there on out, I can’t get a word in edgewise.”  And maybe that is all there is to it.

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