Opening a Dusty Book

It has been just over a year since I left the university where I’d spent all of my adult life.  While I was there a few buildings went up and a football stadium came down.  We merged with another college, tried out and abandoned a suburban extension strategy, and grew deeper urban roots.  We changed from a white school with an engineering school full of men to a school of remarkable diversity in race and gender.  And it has been just over a year since I put something on the upper right corner of my desk here in my study in our new home town 250 miles north of University of Detroit Mercy.  It is a book of notes from those I worked with there for forty years, a book that I’ve left there until I took time to thank every one of them.  I’ve dusted it a few times, removing most of a layer of fine sawdust that finds its way through the filters between my basement workshop and my study here on the main floor where the sunrise finds me writing this blog. But the people remain unthanked.

I’ll be writing, these next several days and from time to time into the future, about some of the people who have been, in those forty years, especially important to me.  That they have been important to me is not why I’ll share their stories here.  I’ll tell their stories because they are examples of those flashes of light, those notes of song that stir each of us in our own lives, that awaken in us something that is very much alive, but asleep. 

The word education comes from the Latin educare, meaning “to draw out from”.   I think that they will remind you of such people in your own life, people in your own dusty book in the corner of your desk, who have drawn out from you those things of gift and beauty that you did not even know were there.  I hope this exercise of mine will help you re-member these lights in your own life.

I will begin tomorrow with a man with thick glasses who introduced me to sight.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Vocation: Calling by "Little" Name

“John!” 

I was walking from the art fair last Sunday toward our car.  I turned, looked back to look where I had just been, from where (I thought) I’d heard my name called.  I saw no one looking my way, no sign that anyone had called me.  John’s a pretty common name; I supposed that it was some other “John” being hailed, or maybe it was just my imagination.

I remember, some time after my dad had died, hearing his voice speak my name.  “Johnny.”  Just my name, nothing more.  But it was the diminutive, intimate “Johnny”, and not the formal, literal “John.”  We had become close, my dad and I, in the years when his congestive heart failure gradually wore him down.  From some well inside me kindness flowed out weekend after weekend, kindness to him and to my mom, his worn caregiver.  I was a patient listener, encouraging and consoling.  And in return for this, my dad had begun to call me “Johnny”, the name he had called me as a small child.

My mom came to visit us for a few days after he had died.  Hearing Kathy refer to me as “Johnny” she looked intently at me, with the kind of quiet, happy curiosity of a child looking at a Christmas package.  Perhaps the word to describe her look would be “wonder”.  “Kathy called you ‘Johnny’”, she exclaimed.  “That’s niiiiiiice.”  That statement of hers comes back to me again and again.  She used to call my dad “Frank,” but old photos of him when they were courting were marked “Frankie”.  There is only one time I heard her call him “Frankie.”  It was one of the times early in his twenty years of being a heart patient that we thought he was going to die.  She had taken his unresponsive face in her hands, put her cheek next to his, and said, “Ohhh, Frankie, don’t leave me.”  Her voice was like a little girl’s, soft and high-pitched. 

Frederick Buechner in his book Secrets in the Dark speaks of vocation as a calling to us, like “a phone ringing in the night” that we “have to answer somehow or, at considerable cost, not answer.”  But he also describes vocation as calling us like a child running up to us, happy to see us, reaching up to us like my granddaughters run to me, like my daughters and son used to do. 

Vocation is being called not only by name, but by the diminutive form of our name, the familiar, intimate name we were called as children, or as lovers.  It calls to our little, real self, not puffed up or grown yet, not sophisticated or calculating or posturing or adapting.   When we turn our faces to the thing that called us, we see something that finds us not only adequate, but wonderful.  It calls us not to something beyond ourselves, but to some well within ourselves, waiting for us to dip into it and to offer it to whoever is calling us by that name we were called when we were a child.

Maybe that voice I'd heard on Sunday was calling me to consider what had called to me in that day's experience, as I did in my blog yesterday.  Yeah, I think that's it. 

When do you hear something calling you, calling the child in you, the self who has been your companion since forever?

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Perhaps Like a Village

Perhaps like a village; perhaps that’s a way to describe it, our first art fair, the startup of "Wood for Good", sharing profit from selling my woodworking with local non-profits who serve the poor.   There was the man, Allan, who had big plastic bins full of “$3 toys” cut and sanded from 2x4s that his neighbors fed to him through the winter, and local builders.  His car hauler truck “my biggest seller”, he said, was clever, three cars cut, beetle-shape, the middle one upside down, nesting in the others.  It made me smile, my sleeping inner kid waking up.  And there were trains, too, locomotive, coal car, boxcars, and caboose.  One was from a piece of walnut his son had given him.  He’d loved that piece of wood.  His big-ticket item was a kind of log cabin dollhouse, complete with furniture and a fence around the front yard.

Bob and Elniecey were setting up next to us, new too, down at the end.  She had the weaving of African-American womanhood we’d left behind in Detroit, a warm weariness, a smiling through trials, a certain silent strength.  Bob was kind, quiet, behind her in her jewelry booth, busybusybusy the whole day, full of women trying on rings and earrings, their male companions straddling the double yellow line, the safest place, the greatest distance between all of the booths.  We talked a lot, Bob and I, now and then through the day.  They were from Austin, Texas, where he taught algebra in high school.  The conversation was warm, trusting, so trusting that I almost asked him how he lost all of his fingers on both hands down to the first knuckle, especially when we shook hands once or twice toward the end, saying warm goodbyes.

In the village in the morning in the time before the visitors came, those who were set up strolled the fire-engine width clear space between the east-facing booths and those opposite, glancing into the neighboring booths, smiling, exchanging good-mornings.  A kind woman approached, old-fashioned curly gray hair, old-fashioned glasses, old-fashioned warm smile, looking at our wood, our Goodwill banner.  She described how most of what she made came from garments from Goodwill.  “Hey,” I said, “Show me!”  We strolled down the lane, six or seven booths down.  She had what looked like a whole darned shop, two tents joined together, racks around the perimeter full of doll clothes, dolls along the top shelf “where the kids won’t  take them down and be brokenhearted if their mom’s can’t buy them.”  “What’s your favorite thing here?” I asked her.  “The bride dresses,” she said.  “I bought a bridal dress for $20 and made 19 dresses out of it.”  She showed me three of four of them.  $13.50.  I thought of my bread boards, the least expensive of which was three times that much.  Her prices seemed so small; I wondered how she could make any money.  “How do you figure the time you put into this dress, how much you’ll make on it for the time you spend.  She smiled that kind smile, not a seamstress but a counselor, a priest, a grandmother.  “I don’t; I just enjoy it.”

On the way back, I stopped into Allan’s and looked again at his best-seller car hauler.  $16.00.  I asked him how he figured the time he put into that truck, how much he’d make on it for the time he’d spent.  Perhaps he’d heard the response of the kind woman down the way, but I doubt it.  He had the same counselor/priest/grandfather look on his face when he said, “Aw, I don’t think about that; I just build ‘em and enjoy the heck out of it.” 

During the day the traffic in our booth was slow enough that I could stroll from time to time, to watch and learn.  The doll clothing booth was wonderfully busy, all women and children.  Allan and his wife sat in the opening at the back of their booth and just kind of smiled, calling out descriptions of their toys when people showed interest.  Bob and Elniecey had a good day, she said, as we were starting to pack up.  Enough to pay some of their bills, she said.  We had had a good day too.  I’d stopped thinking about how much we’d make for the time we put in.  I enjoyed the conversations on the double yellow line, my strolls along the lane, watching the neighbor vendors and their customers.  I enjoyed the neighbors and friends who came by, providing most of our sales, including Jack and Carol Crusoe, who came all the way from Gaylord, and hour away, not to the booth, but to Sears, and just happened to notice the art fair and just happened to see our booth, as surprised as we were to be in the same place at the same time.  It was Jack who had told me about these pallets of oak 1x2 boards that were being sold dirt cheap, these boards that I’d turned into breadboards by cutting and gluing and clamping and cutting some more and sanding and sanding and sanding. 

By the end of the day, Cecil happened to have run exactly 40% of our sales on his Goodwill credit card machine, and Kathy and I happened to have taken in exactly 60% in cash and checks.  That was the plan on this first “Wood for Good” sale – 40% of what we sold would support the homeless neighbors I meet there every Tuesday evening.  As we realized that perfect math, I thought that up there in the heaven that I doubt, the God who I don’t doubt was saying to me that He was seeing to it that it would be a pretty good day for us.  It was a pretty good day.  I didn’t bother to figure out how much we made for the time we spent.  I just enjoyed it.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

No Blog This Morning. Too Wrapped Up.

I sit here in the middle of so much life that I can’t get outside of it to write. 

When I was a freshman in college, I met a “fast” girl.  I had been raised slow.  But now I was 300 miles east of home, living in the dorm at University of Detroit and in the moment of my memory, I was in Cindy P.,s basement, a pizza on the table in front of us, a blanket wrapped around us, a space heater at our feet, watching a move on television.  At least I was watching the movie.  Cindy was making amorous overtures.  This had never happened before.  The girls I had gone out with in Des Plaines, the quiet little town outside of Chicago, had been slow, like me, when it came to what we did or didn’t do on dates.  I used levity to get through the night without getting literally carried away by her desire, on the second or third date, she realized that I was too slow for her, and she threw me out.  But on that first date, I remember remaining on the outside of the situation, looking in, as if I were watching the two of us on television.  From the outside, my observing self was able to feed lines to my in-the-scene self, to keep the me on the couch detached and in control.  I still remember reflecting on that detachment, before I’d even turned 18. 

This morning I have no such inclination.  I’m wrapped tight in the blanket of life’s experiences yesterday and today, and life is having its way with me.  I can’t write from the outside.  I can only tell you what is happening.  Yesterday morning Kathy shifted from helping me prepare for todays “Old Town Arts and Crafts Fair”, the debut of a dream of mine, “Wood for Good”, turning things I’ve made into doing good.  47 bread boards, 8 wine bottle holders, and a handful of left-over Chinese “Mom” and “Daddy” carvings are in the Subaru, along with the tent, chairs, racks, and paraphernalia that we’ll set up this morning (after the rain stops, we hope) for a fundraiser for Goodwill Inn, 40% going to help our homeless and 60% helping our home.  The week had been a kind of tussle as Kathy stood her ground in our first real shared business venture, she planning ahead while I would have put things off until the last minute.  Kathy having effectively stood her ground, the preparation was much better and more complete, allowing her to shift her full attention to preparation for Nadia’s 10^th birthday party.

There in her parents’ back yard, three 10x10 that had been put up in case of rain protected us from the warm sun.  The vestigial chicken coop was a perfect bar and buffet, balloons and streamers everywhere.  But the commanding vision was of a 20x20, 15 foot high metal roof held up by 10” thick pine poles wrapped with Italian Christmas lights, a stage for the children to perform their play, a traditional part of these grand gatherings in years past.  But this year, there was a new Director, replacing David, the father of the birthday girl.  She came gliding by as I was deep in conversation with Bernie the Farmer, deep in reflection on our lives with our fathers, and our brothers who have died. 

She was tall, lithe, wearing big earrings, a flowing scarf, long, gossamer skirt, and high heels that were somehow exotic in the woods.  She was smiling a smile that was a blend of joy and confidence as she went by on her way from the house to the stage.  And when we had all finished our healthy and organic pot luck supper and our organic but way-too-goopy to be healthy towering three-level ice-cream cake with ten tall, lithe candles, the Director called for our attention, introducing the players and their roles.  The tight-rope walker thrilled us with all the right moves, helping us ignore the fact that the jute cord was stretched not in the air above us, but on the grass at our feet.  The lion tamer made puck the dog almost leonine in his stepping through the hula hoop ring.  The Fortune Teller predicted Nadia’s tenth birthday, and even predicted that she’d be chased off the stage by the little boy with the croquet mallet, at the very moment he began to do jump up and do just that.

And as we packed up our empty pans to go home, the Director came over and gave me a hug tighter than I remember getting from her before.  Maybe it was those high heels that let her get a better grip, those long arms of hers that could really wrap around me.  “Thanks, Bapa, for my birthday present; I really like it.” 

So this morning I can’t step out of my life and look at it from the outside.  It has its arms wrapped around me, holding tight.  I’m still in that woodsy back yard, smiling at that huge contraption of a gazebo/stage/lean-to that David and his dad had erected just three days ago.  I still see Amy and David’s friends, and their children and even their parents, the young ones running around, the older ones standing together, sitting together, little warm conversations, smiles breaking into laughter, non-verbal affirmation, attention in full measure.

And now I hear the rain, and imagine it washing Union Street, and particularly the area in front of Hibbard Flowers, where Booth #118, the Wood for Good booth, will just perhaps sell some wood, but certainly do some good, rain or shine.  So you see, I’m way too busy to write my blog this morning.  I can’t tear myself away. 

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Three pairs of glasses

Last summer I capsized my little kayak, out on the too-rough waters of the bay.  As I was going over I watched my glasses fall into the clear water and drift slowly to the sandy bottom, just out of reach of my foot.  I stood there chest-deep, my lifejacket preventing me from ducking quickly down to pick them up, as the wind blew hard against my half-floating kayak, dragging me slowly away from my glasses.  I pulled my kayak to the shore, where I could dump out the water and pull it up on the beach and then return to the spot where I last had seen my glasses.  No chance.  No glasses.  Unable to drive in my extreme nearsightedness, I walked the mile home, got an older pair, and walked back to drive the car home. 

The first thing I do each morning is to reach for my glasses, where I had left them the night before on the desk in my study.  I feel for them, unable to see without squinting and bringing my face down to the desk level.  The fact that I rely upon them for sight struck me one morning as I sat down at my desk in my morning rubric of reflection before writing this blog.  I looked around my desk and saw two other pairs of glasses; three in all including the one I was wearing.  I realized that each of those pairs of glasses led me to different things.  One pair is for my workshop, large bifocal lenses becoming thick around the edges, too ugly to wear in public but perfect for safety during woodworking.  Another pair is my good pair, its glare-free lenses saved from any scratching by careful cleaning; it’s the one I wear in public, when eye contact is important.  The third pair, the one I generally reach for, in my old pair, the one I wear around the house and don’t worry about.  I realized that the moment I put on the particular pair of glasses, I am entering a particular world, taking on a particular character.  I become a woodworker, or a social person, or a homebody, depending on which pair I put on.

I thought of my Polish grandfather’s silver-rimmed spectacles on the shelf above my workbench, under the “Boze Blogoslaw Nasz Dom” (God bless our home) sign that hung in his living room.  He was the woodworker, the quiet, monastic, mysterious person who passed down the woodworking gene to my dad, my uncles, and to me.  I imagined, in my reverie, putting them on and seeing as he would see.  The thought moved me, the idea of being able to see through another person’s eyes by putting on their glasses.

I imagined writing a book, a book that would be brought to life by the central character, a quiet, monastic person perhaps, who would put on other people’s glasses and take on that person’s life while he wore them, see their joy and pain, their hopes and fears.  What a great vehicle, I thought.  I imaged myself putting on Kathy’s glasses, and realized how hard it would be to write that book.  I’m not only nearsighted, I’m me-sighted.  I can’t begin to imagine what another person sees and feels.  Or maybe that degree of empathy is so difficult; the very idea of it exhausts me. 

This paucity of empathy struck me then, and strikes me now.  Could I write a chapter of a novel in which I put on Kathy’s glasses and feel her feelings, see her world?  What about my grandfather’s?  What about picking up a random pair from a lost-and-found and seeing as some stranger, who had capsized his kayak too.  I think it would make a great book, a quiet, monastic person coming to understand how little he knows of the lives of others, even those he loves.  It would take a hack of a writer; it would take a heck of a human.   

Wood for Good

During the last few weeks I’ve been “making a lot of sawdust”, as I describe working in my workshop.  I’ve been working on two projects, and both direct me to the same inner truth.

Terry is a friend-at-first-sight who lives directly across the street from us.  His open heart and ready smile make him a gift to all who see him, and I’m especially blessed to see him all the time.  I was honest with him right from the start that living on retirement income was scary for me, that I looked forward to finding some source of income to supplement our hopefully adequate savings.  I shared with him my dreams of continuing to work with the homeless here, to help build community partnerships as I did in Detroit, and to work with wood more, now that I have the time.  He also has known all of the developments with questions of my heart health, and has encouraged in the frightening times and rejoiced with me when we discovered that things look fine.

As a matter of fact, as soon as he found out that I had the all-clear from my doctor to resume heavy work, he asked me to build some cabinets for his home office.  A few weeks ago, measurements and ideas turned into drawings, and the drawings turned into a lumber order, and some of that lumber turned into some of the sawdust on my workshop floor.  There is a kind of Zen to woodworking for me, a kind of meditative calm that is within it, if I allow myself to enter.  I found myself in that calm again and again while doing Terry’s cabinets, and I found myself blocked from it too. 

During the previous months of restricted exertion (“Don’t lift more than ten pounds”) directed by my cardiologist during diagnosis of my heart issues, I had begun making breadboards from a pile of hundreds small pieces of surplus oak that I had long ago purchased from a furniture manufacturer up here.  The small pieces let me work for hours and days and weeks within my imposed limits, milling and gluing and forming and sanding and oiling dozens of breadboards.  As with Terry’s cabinets, I found myself drawn into that calm again and again, and found myself blocked from it too.

Two things drew me into the calm, the joy.  One was the delight of the work itself, the wood, the grain, the smell, the precision of the machines, the feel of the handwork.  The other was the good of the product, the use to which it would be put.  Wood for Good; that was the name I’d come up with for a dream I’d developed in my first months here, to do good with woodworking, turning wood into money for the homeless and poor.  But that phrase, “turning wood into money” was also the thing that blocked my entrance into that calm in my workshop.

Last weekend I rolled Terry’s virtually complete cabinets out of my workshop into the next room, clearing the way for final preparation for a first sale of my breadboards at an art fair here on Sunday.   The finished boards came off the shelf for a final touchup and oiling.  Those that were not complete came down from their shelf too, and made more sawdust as I took them through the many steps of shaping and finishing to add to our inventory.  The Old Town Arts and Crafts Fair will be the debut of my dream – “Wood for Good” as a way of sharing revenue with Goodwill Inn, where I have met so many talented, compassionate, struggling homeless neighbors and the good people who help them find jobs and homes.  At times I fretted about how many we would sell, how much my 60% would be, and I started doing the math and wondering if all the work was worth it.  As with Terry’s cabinets, doing the mental math blocked me from joy, held me outside the calm. 

There was a moment so profound that I noticed it, when I was drawn in.  While I was doing the endless sanding on one of the boards, I saw the faces of the people that I work with at Goodwill Inn.  I saw S., the kind, gray-haired woman that her roommates call “Mom”.  I saw D., whose worn face carries a warmth and kindness that hardship has not eradicated.  I watched them going through the food line, some hopeful, some worn.  The mental math disappeared.  The money was merely a way of turning the boards into good.  A similar thing had happened with Terry’s cabinets, as I found the endless details taking much more time than I had estimated, and the mental math figuring hourly profit was distracting me.  I thought of the cabinets in Terry’s office, in his home, in his home.  I thought of his wife, and their two kids, and the love and the struggles and the growing and loving.  And the mental math disappeared. 

A couple of Sundays ago our friend Fr. Norm Dixon had said it.  All is gift.  Mental math holds me away from joy and calm.  What invites me in is knowing that in these years of my retirement I’m free to work with wood for good.  Pray for good weather Sunday!

You can see more about my woodworking at www.LignumSacrumWoodworking.com  

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Whew.

Whew.  You know the sound.  Make it now, with your mouth.  Why do you suppose we do that, make that sound, when we are relieved?  When do we make that sound?  When have you?  

I think of running, pushing it hard at the finish, walking it off, letting my heart and my lungs catch up with my body’s need for oxygen.  Eventually, my breathing will slow enough that there will be one of those involuntary deep breaths, the ones that let our lungs really fill up, that let us kind of relax.  Whew.

Or I am working with wood, with the last of several cuts in a fine joint, a cut that will, if done wrong ruin several minutes of effort and a carefully milled part, if done right will complete it.  There is that sound, when it works out, when the cut is just right.  Whew.  Perhaps it’s a carving, a particularly expressive cut with the knife, my right fingers holding the wood, right thumb pushing the flat back of the blade, my left holding back on the handle, so that it will not go too far, protrude too deeply, making the perfectly natural sweep of an arc that requires such dexterity, that is more of a two-handed squeeze than a forceful gouge.

Or maybe when I was at the University and I was working with a couple of students who were having a problem with each other, and the situation seemed irreconcilable, but it worked out.  Something came to light, diffusing the tension, bringing some understanding.  Whew.

Or we’re driving through a rainstorm, struggling to see the road between the mad swashes of the wipers, pushing away the opaque water in front of them just to be followed by the splattering of huge drops, a narrow, quickly moving stripe of clear glass giving us our only look at the road ahead.  The rain slows, the drumming on the car roof abates, and I can turn the wipers down to the slow speed, the windshield now merely spotted by tiny specks of water, the pavement losing its sheen.  Whew.

Two days ago we found out that despite my returning to hard physical activity, a follow-up echocardiogram showed no growth in my aneurism, my very special, very rare SVA, which is really just a bulge in the artery coming out of the heart where no bulge is supposed to be.  (See ABOUT ME for details) No growth means . . . Whew!  

Whew what?  What comes after the relief?  The joint is cut, that carving stroke complete.  There is some satisfaction, some standing back and looking at it, but now I am an observer, and not a woodworker.  The students are gone, and I am sitting in my office alone.  My memory of the conversation lingers, but I am not a facilitator now, just a guy in an office.  On the drying pavement, we are making good time, and I can relax and drive.  But I am not the really good driver now, expert, adept. 

Last night it rained hard and steadily.  When in my sleep my body roused to semi-sleep to change positions, it was delightful to hear the rain, to think of the weight of it, the soakingness of it, the fertility of it on the grass and flowers and trees.  I thought of the ripening cherries on the trees along the peninsula that reaches north from here.  I thought of the budding grapes, the tiny clusters of them growing so slowly, but less slowly now for all of this wonderful rain.  This morning before writing, I walked in the still wet grass, on the spongy earth, after the storm.  It was as if the grass and the flowers and the trees, and from the north, the ripening cherries and the swelling grapes were saying it.  Whew.

There’s something about the after-ness of urgency, when we are the shape in the sand formed by the wave that has passed, when we realize that we have had an experience, when our now is just the remains of that intense effort, its ripples on our psyche flattening out.  I am glad for the good news, that I’ve dodged the bullet, am not in such grave danger of a rupture of this bubble in my heart, or of open-heart surgery.  But there is something in the aftermath of the crisis that is like sitting in the silence of Orchestra Hall in Detroit the moment after the final note of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony has been struck, and plucked, and stroked, and sung, and blown; when the booming crescendo drifts out over the aching city and the wounded world, and into the orderly chaos of the universe.  That moment of silence erupts into an equal crescendo of applause, the whole house rising on their feet, hands expressing what words could not.  The Great Whew.

There is something in the aftermath of the crisis that makes me know that I have been changed, if I was ever alive at all.  And just now as I type these closing words of today’s posting, the sun breaks in the northeastern sky, under the fleeing clouds, over the ripening cherries, and the swelling grapes, and me, with this heart that is sound enough for me to work, and to love, to rise and applaud the run and the joint, and the stroke, and the resolution, and the drive, and the orchestra . . . and to stop once in awhile and remember, and to sip grateful lemonade.   

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Homecoming at the Homeless Shelter

Absolutely unchanged.  That was the very good news that we received from my cardiologist yesterday about my SVA, the bulge in the wall of my aorta called a sinus of Valsalva aneurism.  Aneurisms sometimes rupture, and sometimes the result is fatal.  So nine months ago when my doctor discovered this bulge, my life changed radically.  The possibility of sudden death became real.  And with that, life became more real, too.  

You may have had the experience of cleaning something up to sell it.  Maybe it was a car, or a piece of furniture, or even a house.  When we know we’re not going to see it anymore, it is as if we see it clearly for the first time.  Memories come back to us; we realize how much a part of us it has been. All the more with life.  That first day, that first week, that first month . . . they were made up of discreet moments of awareness, really seeing Kathy, our kids, our grandkids.  A visit to Detroit made breakfasts with my old friends were deep experiences, my eyes soaking up their faces, my ears absorbing their voices, loving the humanity of them, loving their love.    

I started writing this blog, calling It Free Lemonade Stand, inspired as I was to take the lemons that this SVA seemed to be, sweeten them with the faith that is generally easy for me, and share with my family and friends that I was OK with the possibility of sudden death, that if I died quickly I would also have died happy and grateful.  I didn’t want people to say “poor John”; there was nothing poor about me.  Lou Gehrig’s farewell speech at Yankee Stadium came to mind: “Today-ay-ay, I consider myself-elf-elf, the luckiest man on the face of the earth-rth-rth.”

During the next three months, I was, as directed by my doctor, a slug, undergoing tests to get a better sense of this aneurism, to determine whether open-heart surgery was called for, so that I could resume a life of normal activity.  I continued to write every morning, amazed that the material kept coming, these essays becoming again and again experiences of discovery, of describing boards at my feet and discovering that they were a bridge, describing dark rectangles and discovering that they were windows. 

Two months ago, in final preparation to schedule surgery to open my chest and patch the bubble, my surgeon suggested that we get a second opinion from Mayo Clinic.  To my surprise the surgeon there said that the team that he consulted with would not operate, but would watch for any change.  He theorized that this bulge may have been as it is from birth, not changing since then, stable and not threatening to rupture. Best of all, he said that I had no restrictions on activity.  So for the last two months I have resumed my active lifestyle, including the heavy woodworking that I love, and working with the homeless at Goodwill Inn.  This Sunday Kathy and I will set up a booth at the annual Old Town Arts and Crafts Fair here in Traverse City, selling the bread boards I produced during my slug days, little things made from little boards.  40% of the proceeds will go to Goodwill Inn, to help men and women like Herbert.

I’d met Herbert on my first visit to Goodwill Inn, two months before the discovery of that aneurism.  He was in the “Goals Group” that I sat in on, so I’d have a better sense of how they work, so I’d start my own with a bit more awareness and sensitivity and capability.  Over the next two months, I’d see Herbert every Tuesday evening as I served dinner, and sometimes he’d come to my goals Group instead of his own.  I loved working there with the talented people who happened to be homeless, as talented as the college students I enjoyed for four decades at UDM.  And they loved me too, sad for me when they hear that I had to drop out, that I had heart problems, that I might have to face surgery.  Last night I was surprised to see Herbert’s face across the serving line at dinner.  It had been six months since I’d seen him, and a big smile came to my face as soon as I recognized him.  He smiled too, but his face turned instantly grave. 

He reached his big hand over the counter to take mine, and asked “Are you OK?”  I’d not realized that he was among those I’d left nine months ago, not knowing if I’d ever see him again.  We held hands for a long minute, while we exchanged looks and words of gratitude, his to me because I was OK, mine to him because he cared so much, after all these months.  In that long handshake at the Shelter, both of us were home.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Reputation and Identity

“Who do men say I am?”  Regardless of ones belief, the Gospels have some great stories, and some great situations to climb into to get to know ourselves.  A pair of questions occurs in one of them.  Jesus is starting to get some “traction” in his work; people are starting to talk about him.  He’s sitting with his friends, those who hang with him, follow him.  And he tosses this question up.  “Who do men say I am?”  Did even this wise preacher and healer stop to consider what others thought of him, strangers, adversaries perhaps?  The responses from his friends to that first question varied.  Some people thought he was one thing, and some though another.  Perhaps he was, to them, the fulfillment of their own dreams; they made him who they wanted him to be.

His second question was posed to one of his friends, Peter: “Who do you say that I am?”  Does his friend know the real him?  Is he looking, in Peter’s response, for information or affirmation, for a clue to the identity that he wonders about or affirmation of the self that he knows?

How many of us have heard, particularly in our childhood and adolescence, “Just who do you think you are?”  We will probably recall that the question was asked rhetorically.  The speaker was suggesting to us that we were not who we thought we were.  Like many rhetorical questions, these were lost opportunities, times when both the person posing the question and the person to whom it is posed could learn something.

Who are we to strangers?  How similar is that to who we are with friends?  And who are we when we are all alone?  If we answer all three of these questions, how different would the answers be?  I’ve always admired people who are consistent, who act the same with everyone, whose public face is the same as their private one.  Perhaps the word “authentic” is appropriate, someone who is as (s)he was written to be, who is consistent in character.  We know where they stand, and this lets us orient ourselves, know where we stand, who we are.  On the other hand, we use the word “chameleon” to describe those who have no such consistency, taking whatever color they happen to be standing on, camouflaging themselves.  When do we change our colors?  Why?  Other animals that don’t consider themselves created in the image of God (or do they?) change colors for two reasons.  One is for protection, to appear less to predators.  The other is display, to appear more visible to suitors. 

I don’t know that we ever “get it”, if we ever really know who we are.  Maybe it is foolish to even think about identity independent of others.  Perhaps we are who we are because of who we are with, because of who they need us to be.  Do we look in the mirror to discover ourselves, or into the eyes of friends, or of strangers?  I’m haunted by the fresh memory of our granddaughter who, for a year or so, couldn’t keep her eyes from her reflection, in mirrors, in windows.  I think she came to learn something, to come to some sense of identity, to rest in her own skin.  Now she joins us in finding ways to be authentic and open in a world with others, others who look into mirrors and into our eyes to discover or remember who they are.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Fatherless Son

Robert called yesterday as we were pulling into the driveway after Mass.  He’s always the first to call on special days: on my birthday, on Christmas, New Year’s Day, and yesterday, on Father’s Day.  Mass had been somewhat of a disappointment.  The priest’s homily was about the emasculation of fathers in the media, a call for men to step up to the plate and be real fathers.  By the time Kathy and I had walked to the car from church, we had shared the same longing; we had hoped he would tell the Good News and not just the bad.  We had hoped he would use Good Stories to give examples of God as a good father.  Why didn’t he remind us all of the father of the prodigal son, who watched from the hill every day for his goofball of a wastrel of a son, watched from there so he could see him from a distance, as he did that day of his return, hungry, dirty, and penniless.  Why didn’t he remind us that the father forgives, embraces us, shows affection and generosity? 

It was in my longing during his homily that I recalled my father’s laughter, playing with my older brother Dan and me, playing with us on the floor of the living room while our mom was grocery shopping.  He was often a hands-off Good Provider, quiet and private, fighting his own internal wars after returning from the Big War in Europe.  On these days when it was just the three of us, he would “rassle” with us, rolling around and pinning us, holding us away from him, us with our skinny little arms flailing, our little fists wanting to vanquish him, the strength of him, to stand on his chest and shout “We got him!  We got Dad!”  But we never got him.  He always won, repelling our four sinewy arms with his two strong ones, rubbing our necks under our jaws with the black sandpaper stubble of his day-old beard, his “I’m off today, no shave” beard.  And there in church, as the pastor’s voice droned on, I heard my dad’s laughter.  I reflected that of the six of us kids, it was only Dan and me who had this experience, of “rassling” with dad, of hearing that laughter, that delight in his little boys.  By the time the other two boys and then the two girls came along, our dad didn’t get down on the floor, at least not in my recollection.

When Robert called, I thought of his goodness in that.  I pictured him, the huge girth of him, the shiny deep brown face of him, the shining toothy smile of him, there in his cluttered little apartment on the East Side of Detroit, cluttered with things that are his now that he is off the streets, now that he is out of the joint away from the places where he was called dark-skinned and fat by light-skinned and thin “bruthas”.  The times we got together there in Detroit to fight homelessness form our contrasting angles Robert and I would talk, the young black single homeless guy and the old white guy with a house and a wife.  While we found in each other a mutual understanding, both of us quiet, deep, self-doubting and faithful, I always feel a certain guilt, a certain regret that I have so much more than he does.  And I feel, when he calls, a sadness for my distance from Detroit now, my cool summers up here, 250 miles north of his warm little apartment. 

I wanted to say something “Father’s Dayish” to thank him for his call, for remembering me even before my kids had gotten around to it, like he does on my birthday.  I said “I wish for you some good memory of your father, some good thought.”  His voice came back like a balled up little fist.  “John, I never knew who my father was.”

I guess he never stepped up to the plate, the man who planted the seed that would take root in Robert's mom, who I met, who had Robert’s warmth and solidity, who had his inner strength.  I guess maybe the pastor was talking to him, that man who wasn’t in church at all, who missed out on rassling with Robert, and watching for his son from the top of the hill, who wasn’t there to welcome his son and embrace him and forgive him for the foolishness that was understandable, him not even having a father.   

Too bad.  He has a son who is a good man, better than him.  That’s every dad’s dream, and he’s missing it.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Ware Farm: Bernie and Bud

Bernie watched in the background as his Dad (“you can call me Bernard, or Bud”) began to blink away the tears that came down the well worn paths of his memory of driving that bulldozer, the tears that broke from their stall when he spoke the words “the smell of death.”  He was in Frankfurt, Germany at the end of World War II, a soldier working in the reconstruction and pacification efforts there; his D4 Caterpillar Bulldozer moving the rubble created by our bombers, in the war that he just missed, the war that stopped Hitler.  “My dad was a litter carrier near there in Germany,” I told him.  “And now our son lives there.”  “He loved the beauty of Bavaria, and throughout his life he painted pictures of it.”  But for Bud, it was not the beauty of the Black Forest that remained with him, but the smell emanating from that concrete and stone and twisted metal.  He spoke of the bulldozer like an old man speaking of an old car, an extension of himself, turning him into a centaur, a Titan, half human, half god.  But in the middle of the image of strength and power, the clattering unstoppability of that D4, there was that smell, and the fresh tears with the same salt after 65 years.

Ware Farm (click for a link) brought Bernie back from wherever life had taken him until age 37.  Who are our dads to us at that age, when we are just starting to notice the flaws in our own perfect scenario, the lives we’ve made away from them, free of them?  The farm, Bud’s farm, had grown, replacing Bernie and the other grown kids with a dozen employees.  And Bud saw it as time to let Bernie take over, to be relieved of the incessant demands of nature. 

New varieties of apple are created by grafting the branch of one tree to the trunk of another.  The sap from the old tree flows through the new branch, and something is created that is something of each.  So too with Ware Farm.  Under Bernie’s husbandry, it is Certified Organic.  The dozens of employees the Bud supervised have morphed into a kaleidoscope of interns, attracted by the reputation of the farm as a dance of nature’s generosity when tended nature’s way, when served rather than manipulated, when nurtured rather than controlled.   The generation of siblings that Bud provided has been replaced by the kids of “members”, families like our daughter and son-in-law who purchase “shares” of the Ware Farm CSA, Community Supported Agriculture, turning the family farm into the families’ farm.  It was at the members’ picnic last week that Kathy and I got to meet Bud, listening to his stories while Bernie watched from a few feet away, while our granddaughters worked joyfully with one of the interns, planting the “Kids’ Garden” again this year.

Bud smiles as we ask him how he feels about what his son has done with the farm.  He blinks away tears, cleansing tears, tears of an old farmer who “missed” the killing of the war, but smelled the death buried there, and returned to conceive this son, who would grow into a pacifist, calm as a pre-dawn pond.  And that son would graft onto the dad he had left long ago, and Ware Farm would flow through his veins, and turn into the gift that it is today, to those of us who sit down at breakfast today with yesterday’s strawberries, and look at pictures of happy grandchildren, there in the dirt, the smell of basil and thyme and rosemary in our memories, and the way Bernie watched his dad telling us stories, watched him as he grew young, even as he grew old, seeing the roots, in those post-war vignettes, of his own intentional pacifism, his peacemaking with this soil.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

A God Who Surprises and Delights

Imagine for a moment a God who provides, who surprises and delights.  Now stop and imagine it again.  Rest in it; that’s what it inspires. 

A few years ago, our daughter Amy and her husband David noticed that the mature, perfectly formed maple tree that shaded their back yard began to lose its uppermost leaves a bit earlier than the rest of the tree.  Soon they saw squirrels eating the bark from the upper branches.  Year after year more branches gave up the ghost and pretty soon the beautiful tree was dead.  Insects began infesting the branches, and woodpeckers began making holes in them to find the insects.  Branches began rotting and falling into the yard.  David felled the tree and cut off the lyrically curving branches, tying some of them with jute cord into hemispherical frames in which the girls could play.  Others were piled in the woods behind the yard to continue their decomposition.  I looked at the gray log, the marvelous, straight, giant of it, and thought of the lumber that was in it.  “It’s rotten,” David said.  “It’s spalted,” I replied; “Let me know if you want to get rid of it.”  Finally after several weeks of working around the monster log commanding their back yard, David said I could do what I wanted with it. 

The next morning I was in their yard studying the tree when I heard Jim coming down the road, his rusty old truck pulling the trailer-mounted sawmill.  My friend had told me about him, a quiet old man who was nothing but muscle and bone and knowledge about trees and how to mill them.  He was on the short side, thin and gray.  He looked as worn out as the tree.  As we worked, I asked him about his life, and he told me about land, and trees, and turning them into lumber that he could sell.  He lived, it seemed, off the land that he had been on since his youth, doing what his dad had done before him.  I thought of him as an extension of the forest.

Though the first two hours, the log was cut into workable lengths, and those logs were dragged behind my Subaru through the woods, around the house, into the driveway to the mill.  As Jim guided the mill through the logs, their rotten, gray exterior peeled away and exposed the rich, bright grain and hues of the hard maple, embellished by nature’s paintbrush, the spalting caused by moisture following the trails if the infesting insects, the chemical and biological changes turning colors, bleaching random sections and bordering them with deep purple.  It turns out that that old rotten tree, gray and lined with cracks opened into stacks of beautiful planks, alive with color and substance and promise.

Amy brought the girls from music lessons, David came home from work, and we all took a break for lunch.  We got to know Jim.  It turns out that he was much more than he appeared.  It turns out that he was a substitute teacher, loving especially the young kids, kindergarten and the primary grades, full of wonder and hunger for learning.  It turns out that he doesn’t sub as much as he used to when it was the people who knew how much the kids love him would call him when a teacher was needed, because now it’s all done by computer, and Jim is off the power grid, living off the land and needing to take his laptop to the place he has his morning coffee to plug it in and access the internet to check for substitute teacher needs, and they’ve usually been taken by someone who can log in from their bed and snatch them up.  It turns out that he’s a voracious reader, with a mind bright and active like the colors in that tree, colors and patterns that we could never imagine, looking at the grey wornness of it.

By mid afternoon, Jim was gone and the driveway was piled with treasure.  The worn, gray man and the worn gray log had turned out to be so surprisingly and delightfully beautiful inside, overflowing and abundant.  We were left with so much more than we had anticipated, plenty to share.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Just Like Your Mother Used to Make, Honey

I’ve been seeking, since the celebration of Corpus Christi a couple of weeks ago, to focus each morning on feeding and being fed.  I wake and reflect on ways I’ve been taught and reminded that like the example of the Good Man Jesus (who some believe is the Son of God but most agree was an exemplary human): we are fed, and are called to share.

This morning, I woke up empty.  This daily blog is going on nine months now.  There have been only a few days when technology or travel prevented my posting.  When I began, it was because mortality gave me an urgency to share, to leave behind all that would die hidden, all that was bright and good, anyway.  But this morning I just sat, despite a very good day yesterday, rife with providence.  A felled tree was transformed by labor and a wonderful machine  from a backyard obstacle into beautiful, promising planks.  The spent energy was replaced by abundant, delicious, wholesome food at the evening’s pot luck supper with the other members of our CSA, (Community Supported Agriculture) Ware Farm.  I’ll share about that tomorrow.  But it was that very feeling of emptiness that fed me this morning that provides me with . . .

Waseineswirhaben Soup!  (Vahss-EYEness-veer-HOBben): was eines wir haben is German for “whatever we have.”  When my mom was visiting one summer, I was in the kitchen cooking, and she asked what I was making.  “Soup”, I said.  “What kind?” she asked.  I smiled, remembering Julie, the old Ukrainian lady who used to answer the Marygrove College girls’ cafeteria line question, “Julie what kind of soup do we have today?” with “Just like you mudda used to make, Honey.”  To my German mother, I replied, “whatever we have soup.”  I described to her the great meal that came from thinking we had nothing, from looking in the back of the refrigerator, and in the bottom of the bins there, to see what half-wilted vegetables and bits of this and that would be tossed into the compost pile in the next cleaning.  Those ingredients, like loaves and fishes, seemed to multiply, drawing from the rest of the kitchen forgotten spices, the dregs of the barley or the can of beans or the ziplock bags of chicken cuttings in the freezer, wings and backs and giblets.  And soon the soup pot was full, and the aroma was wonderful.

At Marygrove, Harry the cook wasted nothing; and the stock pot was always on the back of the big black stove.  Everything that was left from preparing the day’s meals for the 300 students and staff went into that pot half-filled with water, and not into the garbage.  The next day the pot would be the first thing brought from the cooler.  The heat was turned up and while breakfast was being served, Harry would be chopping carrots, or celery, adding spices and maybe some starch, and by lunchtime, there would be a rich, tasty soup among the offerings on the cafeteria line.  It was, I think now, the best part of the meal.  It was nothing but what would have been thrown away, considered useless.

I think of Harry and days like that one with my mom visiting, and I think of how delicious that soup always is, made from the "nothing" that we had on hand.  And now that I have cooked and served up this soup for you, I realize what I’m gonna cook for you tomorrow and the next day.  Jim and the WoodMizer and the Maple tree, and Bud and Bernie and Sandee and Ware Farm.  Meanwhile, check your fridge; there’s some Waseineswirhaben Soup waiting for you there.  Bon appétit!

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

City Year - Graduation Day

Today is Graduation Day at Hero School.  In my Detroit and in 18 other cities in the US, and in London and South Africa, hundreds of 17-24 year olds will celebrate today the end of their year of service.  Look at a description of their program:

At City Year, we define idealism as “the belief that you can change the world, and the passion, skills, and courage to do it.”  Everything we do at City Year is grounded in this concept and the idea that each of us can make a difference.  To inspire others, share the power of service, and promote the value that each of us can make a difference, City Year corps members proudly wear the City Year uniform. With the uniform, City Year corps members express their full-time commitment to solving social problems, training outstanding new leaders and building a more beloved and just community and nation.

Here is a City Year Detroit “Starfish Story”, a story about making a difference with just one student.

Tiara was a fifth grade student. When I first met her, Tiara was way behind in her reading skills, reading only at a 1st or 2nd grade level. I began working with Tiara daily. We made small goals:  “OK, you got 2 out of 20 on the last spelling test; next week let’s get 5!” These small goals worked, and by December she was consistently getting 10 to 15 correct answers out of 20. Her spelling was getting better but reading continued to be a problem, so we kept at it. In October, she was reading about 20 words a minute, in January we were up to 40!  I noticed that Tiara needed practice reading, something she rarely, if ever, did at home. I talked to her about the importance of reading at home with her mother.

One spring day when I was working with Tiara, we started reading. She was like a whole new person! A paragraph that took her 40 minutes to read before now took only 10!  She credited the difference to at home reading time with her mom! I was so proud. Additionally, I had been stressing to Tiara the importance of speaking up in class. She lacked the confidence to answer questions posed by the teacher, even when I knew  that she had the correct answer. I challenged Tiara to answer at least one question out loud each day. She began responding to this challenge, and started speaking up more and more. This was affecting her social life also. At lunch she used to always just sit silently. Then I began seeing her laugh and talk with other girls. I think that her increased literacy helped her gain confidence in more ways than just academics; she  felt like an equal with her classmates instead of an outsider."
- Colleen Kushlak, City Year Detroit Alumna

I rise early, here in my retirement, and come to my desk to write.  Facing the prospect of death a few months ago made me aware that there are things in me that I want to pass along.  They are most often stories of people like these young heroes, who would, for the last year, rise early, put on their khaki pants and Timberland boots, their Red Bomber Jackets or something cooler emblazoned with CITY YEAR in bold black letters.   They’d gather in the Compuware Plaza, or in front of the Detroit Library, or on one glorious morning, the campus of my UDM, to do physical training, their red and black and white and yellow and brown hands clapping and reaching in cadence with their “ONE – two – three …onetwo – three…TWO – two – three…twotwo – three….  And then they’d go, like Coleen, to encourage Tiaras, by their example to discover that there are things in her that she wants to pass along.

I can’t write about these young people at City Year Detroit without blinking tears.  It was almost ten years ago that I was invited to speak at their “Breakfast of Champions” , surrounded by Corps members and staff and a room full of people who supported them.  As an introductory video showed Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy and JFK, I noticed Penny Bailer blinking tears.  Today she will blink them away again as she gives one more congratulatory sendoff to this graduating class of City Year Detroit, young people like Colleen who every day make a difference, who know from the example of Penny and their fellow corps members and from the Tiaras they’ve met that they have something inside them, bread for the world, a bag of rice they’ve been given and must share.

Learn more about City Year Detroit at http://www.cityyear.org/detroit.aspx

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.