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We tell stories

Jesus told stories. That’s how He taught. Because He knew people wouldn’t remember just facts. He told stories that stuck. Parables that people had to think about; that planted seeds, took hold, and grew in hearts, minds, and souls. And when it came time to remember Jesus, it was His stories that got written down so that we might know them (and Him through them) as well.

I love thinking about people gathering around as Jesus got rolling. You can kind of see the 12 looking at each other as He got going and thinking, “Ah, yep, the sower story again, I dig this one,” even though they’d heard it and probably still hadn’t gotten it. Jesus knew people would keep telling His stories, and His story; He counted on it. It’s why he walked the 12 through them; it’s why the Gospel writers went to so much trouble to write them down; and it’s why there are four separate Gospels, not just one condensed version. Telling the stories matters.

Stories last. None of us know Homer or Mark Twain, but we may know something about The Odyssey or Huck Finn. And likely they would rather us remember their stories than themselves. We may have never met Martin Luther King Jr., but we know his story and some of his stories. Neil Gaiman, a favorite modern day storyteller of mine,  gets it:

“Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds’ eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than 26 letters and a handful of punctuation marks. Or they are words on the air, composed of sounds and ideas–abstract, invisible, gone once they’ve been spoken–and what could be more frail than that? But some stories, small, simple ones about setting out on adventures or people doing wonders, tales of miracles and monsters, have outlasted all the people who told them, and some of them have outlasted the lands in which they were created.”

Our lives and thoughts are shaped all around by stories–our own stories, our families’ stories, and the stories we identify with. I loved being around our cousin Doug Hanks Jr. when he held court at Schooner’s Llanding, or at the Tred Avon Yacht Club, or at family parties. Even after his mother’s funeral, back at his house, telling stories of her life that had a crowd both laughing hysterically and realizing what a unique character was “Mary Hanks of Oxford.” I miss Doug’s stories and his storytelling and the way he made us all feel when he told them.

Jim Harrison is a favorite storyteller of mine. I never got to meet him, but I will be forever moved and shaped by some of his stories and poetry. He wrote that, “Death steals everything except our stories.”

I dig this story of a writer getting to know and remember him after an article:

“…we sat on your porch in Patagonia, watching you watch birds. There were hundreds of them, and you knew their names, rattling one off every now and then between long, choking drags of your American Spirits… you were gracious in the retelling of your wildest stories… you wrote from your bones, your marrow into poetry, novellas. And you made me believe that there was something to writing. That storytelling really was something romantic, magic even.”

If there is magic in stories, it is in how we remember them and how we connect to them. When we hear the stories that move us the most, it is not just because we connect with who wrote it, but because what is said speaks to us, becomes part of us. In our stories, we learn who we are; we are able to speak it and understand ourselves better. Our stories connect us, teach us, inspire us, and help define us.

What we hear in the stories that matter the most to us, is who we are.

“If a story is not about the hearer he will not listen… a great and interesting story is about everyone or it will not last.” – John Steinbeck, “East of Eden.”

What will we remember?

Remember. Never forget. And we shouldn’t. How could we? But what do we remember? What will we remember?

Those who lost their lives. Yes. Always. Those who responded, went straight into harm’s way to help others? Yes. Always. The fact that we were attacked on our own soil in a way that my generation and younger had never known, or maybe didn’t even think was possible? Absolutely. September 11, 2001, is for us what Pearl Harbor was for my grandparents.

But what else? A friend, Ted Daly, wrote this on September 11, 2013:

“Never forget, and here is what I would like everyone to remember:
Remember the two weeks following the attacks, when we were suddenly so nice to one another? We met and greeted our neighbors, we let drivers in front of us, we offered help to those in need, no matter how large or small the effort required…then, once the third week began, we were right back to the same old same old. Was it so hard, or the effort so unbearable? We could inspire each other to these same acts every day. What kind of world would that be?”

I hope we can remember that. Remember that in the face of tragedy and horror, we helped each other. That we cared about each other. That we didn’t call each other stupid because we didn’t hold the same political beliefs; that we could disagree and be kind; we could disagree and still support one another. I hope we can remember that, because even in the middle of heartfelt and right as rain remembering the lost and the responders, and the horror of that day, it certainly seems like we have forgotten how to help those people, our neighbors and our friends, who don’t agree with us.

NASA posted this picture of the smoke plumes in New York City, visible from space that day.

Station Commander Frank Culbertson, looking down from space, wrote this:

“It’s horrible to see smoke pouring from wounds in your own country from such a fantastic vantage point. The dichotomy of being on a spacecraft dedicated to improving life on the earth and watching life being destroyed by such willful, terrible acts is jolting to the psyche, no matter who you are.”

We may never get to see the earth from that perspective, but we can all hear and feel his words.

Never forget, from our own lives since 9/11. After. On September 11, 2011, I was working in DC, for the Coast Guard. I walked onto Ft. McNair and had lunch on the river bank. And I wrote this:

Sandburg and I sit on the river bank, eating lunch, talking about Chicago and how people are. On the other shore, two helicopters take off, bank over the river and fly directly overhead. These are the same helicopters that carried a different President to St. Michaels when I worked there and got to see him speak.

Then, like now, was after. After we looked at machines flying over cities differently. After flying machines were flown into buildings and the President we saw in St. Michaels got interrupted talking to school children; children that could have been my daughters, but weren’t. Children who wished they were in that school because it would have meant they were far away from New York and didn’t lose their parents.

That day, before, I was in Easton. I didn’t work in Washington, like now, after.

Now, I sit with Sandburg on the river bank of the Anacostia, watching planes landing and taking off at Reagan National. Watching Presidential Helicopters flying overhead.

Sandburg’s Chicago didn’t have planes flying into buildings. It wasn’t something he thought about. But our girls, and their children, will learn it as part of their history classes. It’s part of their story, part of our story, now, after. 

Now it’s 17 years after. We say we will never forget. We say we will remember. And we will. There is no doubt. But what will we remember? What will we do about it? And how will it change our lives?

To Call Each Thing By its Right Name

No one wants to be a grown up on Charlie Brown. No one wants what they have to say to amount to WA-WAH-WA, sounding off in the background, unintelligible. And yet, that’s what happens to the majority of words, of communication that comes our way and a good bit of what we put out into the world. We talk too much and say too little.

…only at a time when the fresh creation of meaning has become a rare occurrence, a time when people commonly speak in conventional, ready-made ways, “which demand from us no real effort of expression and… demand from our listeners no real effort of comprehension”–at a time, in short, when meaning has become impoverished. – David Abram, summarizing Maurice Merleau-Ponty in “The Spell of the Sensuous”

When meaning has become impoverished, what we get, and what we become, are grown ups from Charlie Brown.

But this isn’t what language is for or what it is meant to do. Language, words, gestures, expression, body language, is supposed to be us trying to convey, to express our wants, needs, fears, questions; trying to get someone to understand something of vital importance–otherwise, why bother?

If we go back to the feeling of being alone, unheard, not understood, language works miracles, it attempts to do the impossible: to communicate with another being something that is inside us. But only if we find the right words or the right way to get something across.

Abram talks about language also being physical and touching our senses as well. Maybe we can all reach back to a time, place, way we have felt someone’s words wash over us, where a gap has been bridged. But Abrams doesn’t just limit it to people.

If language is always in its depths, physically and sensorially resonant, then it can never be definitely separated from the evident expressiveness of birdsong, or the evocative howl of a wolf late at night. The chorus of frogs gurgling in unison at the edge of a pond, the snarl of a wildcat as it springs upon its prey, or the distant honking of Canadian geese veeing south for the winter, all reverberate with affective, gestural significance, the same significance that vibrates through our conversations and soliliquies, moving us at times to tears, or to anger, or to intellectual insights we could never have anticipated.

There have been times where I have physically felt God was communicating me without a word spoken, simply with the sounds and language of the landscape alive around me. In the mornings, I sit with coffee and listen to birds, cicadas, neighborhood dogs, the buzz of hummingbird’s wings as it goes to the feeder. Sometimes that language means more and says more than what we hear from people.

If our own language, our own words, are going to mean more, it’s up to us to use them wisely, and maybe less frequently; to look for, and listen for, the right words to speak our hearts and minds. And to listen to others who are making the effort to do the same.

I’ve had this notion in my crawl about reclaiming language, trying to come to meaning, to get back to the primacy of saying something worth saying. And then was moved all over again by words I’d heard before.

In the movie version of “Into the Wild,” towards the end, there is a scene on the magic bus in Alaska, where Chris McCandless is reading Boris Pasternak’s “Dr. Zhivago” and comes across this notion:

For a moment she discovered the purpose of her life. She was here on the earth to grasp the meaning of its wild enchantment and to call each thing by its right name.

Maybe that’s the challenge we need to give ourselves. To strip away the static, the clutter, the convention, the emptiness of the words so often around us. And to call each thing by its right name.

Let things sink in. Let them wash over us, trying to come to our own truth about them. And when we talk, when we pray, when we write, when we see, when we hear, to call each thing, and each other, by our right names.

Off the Map

Sometimes we end up off the map. Life was going along at a predictable, comfortable pace, or toward a place we could see, and then it isn’t. We’re left scrambling, confused, things are different. We don’t know how we got where we are and maybe we don’t know what to do or where to go from here.

This was part of conversation from a couple days ago. Being off the map is not a bad thing, it’s just different, and unexpected. It’s new territory. In many cases, it can be necessary. Because when we depend too much on maps and plans and where we are going, we lose the ability to see what is in front of us. We think we know what’s coming, so we don’t focus on what’s here. Being off the map can mean the freedom to be present.

Meister Eckhart is a Christian mystic I come back to again and again. He sees the beauty of beginnings, “And suddenly you know: it’s time to start something new and trust the magic of beginnings.” Add to that his, “be willing to be a beginner every single morning.” He echoes Christ telling us that unless we are willing to give up our old lives and be born again of water and the spirit, we are missing out. Both are pushing us off the map of what we thought life was going to be and into the possibility, the unknown of what life could be.

It’s more than a little unnerving to let go of what we (think we) know. And it’s a process, getting to a place to embrace beginnings, to let go. Sometimes one we didn’t ask to be a part of. But it’s also a process that starts before we realize it:

In the out-of-the-way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.

For a long time it has watched your desire,
Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,
Noticing how you willed yourself on,
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.

That’s John O’Donohue, walking us into new territory in “For a New Beginning.” I get where he is coming from. I’ve used the term “restless leg syndrome for the soul,” where you have this feeling where you can’t settle, but can’t fully identify or articulate. But you know something is up. Let me turn it back over to O’Donohue:

Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream,
A path of plenitude opening before you.

Though your destination is not yet clear
You can trust the promise of this opening
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is at one with your life’s desire.

Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm,
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.

Maybe when we focus on the map, we lose ourselves. Maybe the map we thought we were looking at, no longer describes where we are or where we want to go. Maybe it limits us, and it is in looking up, looking around us, and seeing in a new way, that we open ourselves up to possibility.

Because We Can

He wasn’t the real Mark Twain. But he was to us, sitting in an elementary school gym, white suit and mustache, telling stories. And we sat spellbound listening to a man who looked and sounded like Twain. We laughed til our sides hurt, leaned forward to hear what happened next, and teared up as he talked about the power, terror, and finality of the atomic bomb.

Almost 40 years later, I feel like I am sitting in that gym again, reading Neruda’s, “Ode to the Atom:”

Infinitesimal
star,
you seemed
forever
buried
in metal, hidden,
your diabolic
fire.
One day
someone knocked
at your tiny
door:
it was man.
With one
explosion
he unchained you,
you saw the world,
you came out
into the daylight,
you traveled through
cities,
your great brilliance
illuminated lives,
you were a
terrible fruit
of electric beauty

Neruda goes on to describe the horror at Hiroshima, the ordinary day and ordinary lives that were no more.

He uses the phrase, “terrible fruit,” which is meant to send us back to the garden and another fruit with consequences.

“That’s why we can’t have nice things,” is a phrase I like to use; it makes me smile while at the same time shaking my head. It applies to so aptly to so much of the world right now. We do things because we can. If we are able to do something, we must be meant to do it, right? We can take remarkable scientific discoveries and twist and turn them in ways that can destroy the planet; we can take absolutely stunning sweeps of land and landscape, and see it as a resource to be used, rather than creation to be enjoyed and appreciated. We can look at one another as competition, or as enemies not be trusted, rather than with kindness and cooperation. We can, we have the ability, to do all those things.

But what we end up with–war, pollution, a culture of outrage and hate–is a result of that view and those actions. How we see things and how we act, give us what we get.

At different points in our lives, I think each of us has seen, felt, or understood that things could be different than that. That life could be different. That the world could be different. We get to choose.

Whether you read the Bible, history books, or study psychology, we have read about and can understand other ways of living. At some point in our lives, maybe we can point to times, moments, people, when life felt incredible, our thoughts and hearts were elevated, and we got this feeling that we were on the verge of understanding  or being something more. Maybe it’s the feeling of being on vacation, or for a child, the feeling of Christmas morning. But then it fades and we are back to real life, our world of bills, deadlines, heartbreak, and sickness.

What if life, what if God was continually giving us clues how to bridge the gap–to make both lives the same? What if God knows we can do whatever we want, “because we can,” but is pulling for us to see things differently, and to make a life, and help make a world, where there is order, peace, and love, rather than everything running unchecked because it can?

What if by paying attention, by looking inside ourselves, and looking to God, we can rewrite our lives in ways we’ve only dreamed about?

Those are questions worth asking, conversations worth having, and a life and love to explore.

Everyday People, Everyday Grace

give me
the daily
struggle,
because these things are my song,
and so we will go together
shoulder to shoulder
– Pablo Neruda, “Invisible Man”

Neruda saw the universe in an artichoke, birds, tomatoes, socks, seaweed, and stamps. And in the people he encountered everyday: a bricklayer, a woman gardening, or a couple on the street.

My first double-take at Neruda was in the late 1990s, out of college, trying to figure out what should occupy my thoughts, where life was going to go, how to put things together. Funny, I’m still wondering those same things. A friend brought “Elemental Odes” around and Neruda takes the time to look at the everyday world around us, to really look at it, and see deeply into it. He elevates the humble. Everything is full of stories and we are connected to all of them. In the same poem, “Invisible Man,” he feels everything around him:

but I smile,
because when I walk through the streets
… life flows around me
like rivers

When my head gets stuck in the clouds, I often turn to Neruda’s odes as a way to reconnect. Sipping coffee in the morning, listening to birds in the yard, watching the dog bum-rush the bird feeder, or being in a church full of 700 people–pouring out into the parish hall and under a tent, rain coming down–brought together by the love of one person who connected us all. Each of these things, from the simple, to the profound can be an act of everyday grace, connecting everyday people, if we choose to look at them that way.

I know “Everyday People” is a Sly and the Family Stone song, but the version I hear in my head with that phrase is the Arrested Development hip hop version, “People Everyday.”

We are all people everyday and that’s what we’ve got to work with. Through struggle, uncertainty, celebration, and joy, we get up and we go. Anything we are going to come to know, we are only going to find through our everyday lives. When we find and feel grace in those moments, we find something more. I dig what Anne Lamott has to say about grace in “Traveling Mercies:”

“It’s unearned love–the love that goes before, that greets us on the way. It’s the help you receive when you have no bright ideas left, when you are empty and desperate and have discovered that your best thinking and most charming charm have failed you. Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually as grateful as you are to be there.”

I wake up, let the dog out, put coffee on. I walk through the yard, hearing traffic from the highway, I look at the tomatoes growing, and I sit down to read, to pray, to remember, to be grateful. And I hope to find, to connect with, to be everyday people living into everyday grace.

Why Our Tribes Matter

Your people shape your reality. Who you spend time with and what you do together is a huge part of how we see life. Our worlds, our realities, are made up in part by those we spend our time with; those with whom we build and share experiences. This may seem like a no-duh realization, but let it sink in.

David Abram’s book “Spell of the Sensuous” is a book I’ve known for a while that I need to spend time with. It looks at our (humans’) place in the world as part of a wider community, people, animals, mountains, rivers–things that for most of history have been viewed as part of one big, living system, but which we are coming, at great costs to ourselves, to see as inanimate. It’s a slow read for me, but there are “a-ha” moments on just about every page. The following thread comes from Abram’s book.

Abrams goes back to Edmund Husserl, who is a guy at one point I was planning to spend a good part of graduate school for philosophy getting to know. Husserl grabbed the word “phenomenon” way before L.L. Cool J got a hold of it. Edmund said the goal of phenomenology  is to “describe as closely as possible the way the world makes itself evident to awareness, the way things first arise in our direct, sensorial experience.” And that without doing this first, all the fields of “objective” sciences had no context.

Another guy with a daunting name who peeled back the curtain of phenomenology is a guy named Maurice Merleau-Ponty:

“We must begin by reawakening the basic experience of the world, of which science is a second-order expression… To return to things themselves is to return to the world which precedes knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks…”

MM-P said you can only have a field like geography, “in relation to the countryside in which we have learnt beforehand what a forest, a prairie or a river is.”

Give me one more heady stretch here. When Husserl looked at the world he experienced, he had to account for the fact that there were other sensing beings with whom we interact with, and something like looking at a tree and clouds overheard, whatever the reality of it is, it’s “intersubjective,” experienced by multiple people. Hang on to your intersubjective hats:

“the very world our sciences strive to fathom… is rather an intertwined matrix of sensations and perceptions, a collective field of experience lived through from many different angles. The mutual inscription of others in my experience, and of myself in their experiences, effects the interweaving of our individual phenomenal fields into a single, ever-shifting fabric, a single phenomenal world or ‘reality.'”

Abram is skimming the surface of Husserl’s Emerald City:

“The encounter with other perceivers continually assures me that there is more to any thing, or to the world, than I myself can perceive at any moment… It is this informing of my perceptions by the evident perceptions and sensations of other bodily entities that establishes, for me, the relative solidity and stability of the world.”

Okay, now breathe. Grab a cup of coffee, put on some cartoons, or Shark Week. My apologies, no one likes to dig into the fabric of experienced reality without warning.

That’s an almost academic way to say, who we spend our time with becomes a part of our reality. We probably know that on some level, but when you dig into it, it carries even more weight.

I know my experience of the world, of life, is one of many, and I can’t get it all–there is way too much to take in. If I am honest and humble enough to admit that, I need other people to help me experience more, to understand more.

Like a lot of people, I drifted away from church somewhere through my 20s and 30s and early 40s, not seeing a relevance, not feeling connected to what I thought it meant to be a part of, or go to church. Over the course of the last few years, what I understand church to be, what that reality is for me, has been shaped, co-created in so many ways by the people at Christ Church Easton, particularly the Saturday “Alive at 5” service. Because that was where I saw, witnessed, experienced first-hand, people’s lives being transformed, by the honesty, love, and acceptance of the other people there; by the laughter, the tears, the joy, and the hope we found; by the Holy Spirit; by God’s love poured into people who shared it with each other, then went out, told others, and helped build a church family. I still like the word tribe.

When you have people who are willing to put themselves out there; people are searching for more out of life; people who are willing to step beyond the mistakes, missteps, and pain of their past in hope of being a part of something new, bigger than themselves, but of which they are a key, unique piece of the whole–the tribe you become a part of, build, invite others to, shapes your reality.

Let’s consider this post a preamble, an introduction. And let’s see what we can build from here.

 

Frosting or Fountainhead

Imagination and creativity are the mind’s stepchildren when it comes to priorities in society. When we call someone imaginative or creative, it sounds like a pat on the head. Art is something we indulge when we have time, when the important things are taken care of. What if we have things upside down?

“What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience?” – Rollo May

I miss artist Joe Mayer being in town. I got to know Joe when he was living in Easton, teaching art workshops, getting businesses to hang art by local artists, and philosophizing at Coffee East just about every morning. Joe was painting abstract watercolors and we talked art, writing, and life a good bit. Joe did a quick warm-up painting and wrote the above Rollo May quote on it. It has hung in my house ever since. May wondered what would happen if we looked at imagination and creativity differently. What if we gave them a spot at the head of the table?

What if our lives are our canvas? What if the decisions we make every day as to how to spend our time, what to focus on–what if we looked at those choices as creative acts?

Mike Vallely is constantly creating things. Mike V. is a professional skateboarder, who founded, owns and runs a company called Street Plant Brand. I met him in Ocean City when I was a teenager. His life, his company, his passion, his art are all creative acts.  He sings and plays music in bands, he has helped create what we think of as street skateboarding, works with and promotes artists, and makes his life about sharing his passion with other people. His motto is “Skate. Create. Enjoy.”

Author Bob Goff thinks of Tom Sawyer Island at Disneyland as his office. He does some of his best thinking there and meets with people there. Why? From his book, “Love Does:”

“We all want to have a place where we can dream and escape anything that wraps steel bands around our imagination and creativity. Tom Sawyer Island is a place where I conspire with people, where immense capers have been launched, and where whimsy runs wild.”

Bob G. and Mike V. dream different dreams for their lives, but each of them have made their lives about following and achieving those dreams. They put their imagination into practice. It’s not art in the sense of learning to paint, it’s art in the sense of learning to live.

God’s created each of us to be unique–with our own dreams, loves, fears, passions, and imaginations. And we each have our own lives. When we set out to align our dreams and our lives, and use our imagination and creativity to build them into one, we move toward the life God intended us to live–based on wiring us that way. I think that’s what Rollo May is talking about. What if art and imagination aren’t the frosting or the fringe, but the focus or the fountainhead?

What can we create, or make of our lives? What do we have to say?

 

You Don’t Know How it Feels

Tom Petty was right. I don’t know how it feels to be him. Or anybody else. And no one else knows how I feel, really. And that can be one of the lowest, loneliest feelings, sitting with the fact when it comes to how we feel and what we go through, that we keep running into places and points that we are sure that no one else gets it.

And I think probably we’ve all been there and that we’ll end up back there when it comes to dealing with other people. As close as we get to someone, or as long as we’ve known someone, things can still happen that throw us for a loop and leave us in the land of alone.

Then we have those moments when a glimpse of light shines in. They can often come at seemingly random and unexpected times. As C. S. Lewis put it, “Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one.” I can’t hear that quote now without seeing Charlie Mackesy‘s sketch in my mind. I like that the drawing moves beyond just people.

I go back to a Sunday afternoon during high school when a bunch of us were skimboarding on Boone Creek, a picture perfect Eastern Shore day on the water, when out of nowhere a friend said, “Did you ever have the thought where everyone else in the world is a robot and you are the only real person?” And I stopped in my tracks, astounded that anyone else thought that stuff, because it seemed like a thing that was just for sci-fi books, not conversation with your friends, and I had thoughts like that several times a day.

We all live out different scenarios and imaginings in our heads that we think are only ours. It takes guts to put them out there, and sometimes they fall on deaf ears, but sometimes, there is hope that not everyone else is a robot. Or maybe that is part of their robot plan 😉

The funny thing is, the older we get and the more of those thoughts we have stored up, the more quirky we feel like they are to the point where we are sure no one else could understand. And we’ve had more time and experience to be broken, to feel lost, to be confused. So when a connected moment like that happens, we can almost lose our breath.

Shared connected moments are sometimes just that: moments. Encouragement and affirmation; a nudge to keep going. Maybe we can share ourselves and provide a moment like that for someone else, maybe we encounter someone who does that for us.

I know when it comes to parenting right now, I have a 16 year old who might as well be quoting Tom Petty in just about any conversation we have. And sometimes I say, you know, at 46 I still feel that way. Sometimes people don’t know how it feels. But we all share that feeling, of not being understood. Of no one getting it, or us.

And that comes in different waves and different depths. T. H. White, in his book “The Once and Future King,” throws the full depth of that struggle out there:

“There was a time when each of us stood naked before the world, confronting life as a serious problem with which we were intimately and passionately concerned. There was a time when it was of vital interest to us to find out whether there was a God or not… Further back, there were times when we wondered with all our souls what the world was, what love was, what we were ourselves.”

I dig those kind of questions and that kind of discussion. But in our busy lives, it doesn’t have to run that deep. Sometimes it’s just wondering if anyone else puts their hand out for lightning bugs to land on, or still skips shells, or likes hot sauce on their eggs, or tries to find their own new constellations when they look at the stars.

But I think part of what I take from White, part of what I want to tell my daughter, part of what I need to remind myself, is that before we get too caught up with whether anyone else feels what we feel, we first have to spend time with, reflect on, pray on, understand what we ourselves are feeling.

We don’t know what it feels like to be Tom Petty. Do we really know what it feels like to be ourselves?

“Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” – Carl Jung

Who are you when you look into the fire of your own heart? Then let’s ask what we do with that in the world.

I’ll Never Be on Oprah

Being a father and a son, gratitude and all the feels well up on Father’s Day. About four and a half years ago, my father turned 70. We had a surprise shindig for him at the Oxford Community Center, which was the Oxford school where he went for kindergarten through 8th grade. He got roasted by a number of folks, and I spruced up my remarks and published them on Eastern Shore Savvy, a cool online magazine that has since gone away. And along with it, all the articles that were once online.

I missed having that article around in particular, so I found my draft of it, and bring it back here, for Father’s Day, four years later.

I’ll Never Be on Oprah
From Eastern Shore Savvy, January 2014

My father just turned 70 and I think I can beat him in a foot race. We used to race in front of our house in Oxford, maybe 50 yards to the end of the street. I was in high school the first time I managed to beat him.

My father grew up in Oxford when you could have horses and chickens there. He shares his name, Robert, with his father. He went to school in the building that now houses the Oxford Community Center. He met my mom, who is from Towson, Md., through a mutual friend in Ocean City when they were teenagers. He graduated from the University of Virginia in 1966, the first in his family to do so. The Vietnam War was in full swing and the draft was happening. So he enlisted in the Army. The classes that completed basic training before and after him went to Vietnam. My dad was sent to Germany.

After the Army, my father returned to the Eastern Shore. A friend convinced him to think about public accounting as a career. In 1974, when I was two, he joined Beatty, Satchell and Company, a CPA firm, became a partner and has worked there ever since.

I have a lot of classic memories of growing up, father and son stuff. We’ve always had baseball—from learning to play catch in the back yard, to going to Orioles games at Memorial Stadium. To this day I’ve seen more professional sporting events at Baltimore’s now leveled ball park than anywhere else. I remember Dad playing first base on his office softball team, and when I got old enough, and good enough in little league, that’s the position I wanted to play.

During my last year of little league, my dad had taken to filming our games on his Betamax camcorder—he was convinced that Beta would surely outlast VHS—he created priceless audio while filming the last play of my season. Playing in Cordova, I slid safely into home plate on a wild pitch, stood up and raised a badly broken wrist up in the air. You hear a few gasps in the bleachers and then dad saying, “Oh sh**!” right before the tape cuts off. I haven’t watched that tape very often.

As an accountant, my father planned our family trips around CPA conventions—to Disney World, the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tenn., and to Boston. We drove like the Griswolds in the movie “Vacation,” as I wasn’t big on flying, and we stopped to in Charlottesville, Va., to dad’s alma mater, the Natural Bridge and the American icon, South of the Border, where Pedro straddles the line between the Carolinas.

Growing up in our house, Halloween quickly became our favorite holiday, because it meant helping build and being behind the scenes of the Kiwanis Club haunted houses, which were well known and epic to almost anyone that lived in Talbot County between the late 1970s to mid 1980s. I’ve seen my dad as Frankenstein, as a mad scientist, and a swamp creature, among other things.

There are some things a son picks up from his father. When I started drinking beer, I always went for Miller Lite. When watching the Baltimore Ravens, we yell the same words (in the same pitch) at the television when they throw an interception. I learned that real Christmas shopping is done on Christmas Eve, and not a day before.

There are some traits or inclinations that aren’t necessarily passed down. I’ve got more hair than my father does. I don’t eat as many Snyder’s Pretzels. And numbers don’t speak to me the way they do to him. With any father and son I guess there are going to be striking similarities and head-scratching differences and I think as I’ve gotten older I have learned to marvel at both.

A lot of writers get noticed for having troubled upbringings or non-existent parents, and they have become great despite what they’ve had to overcome. Dad has given me the creative disadvantage of raising my sister and me well. He taught us, by the way he lives, the difference between right and wrong. He’s been the consummate provider, working so that my mother didn’t have to, and making sure we could go to college. He has provided the example for me, of how to be a father, and set the bar immeasurably high. I’ll never be on Oprah.

When we get together for holidays or family dinners or kids’ sports games, my father has accepted the mantel of “Granddaddy,” which is what my sister and I called his father. As a father now, I think I feel maybe what he must have felt then, surrounded by your parents and your children. I’m not sure it gets any better than that.