Rainy Nights

Speed

2011-06-23T21:00:00.000-07:00

This is for James who thinks he wants to be a cop so he can drive fast.

My first chase occurred in Plumtree, North Carolina. It’s several miles north of Spruce Pine on US 19e which is, as so well said by a local guy, “Crooked as a barrel of fish hooks.”

I was sitting in my 1972 Chevy Nova at Junior Vance’s Store talking to a local bootlegger who was the current night watchman at the Tar Heel Mica Company. Clayton was quite a character that I really ought to tell you about. As we sat side by side in our cars, a load of Toe River Boys drove past us in a souped up (tricked out to you young guys) Camaro headed north on 19e. They went into the curve at the bridge over the North Toe sideways. Clayton cursed them and I spun my Nova around flipping the blue lights on, clearing the bridge just before their tail lights blinked out of sight in the next curve.

We were smokin’ in the curves and I was driving with all the skill my buddies in the State Highway Patrol taught me. I dropped my right wheels off the pavement to let them track around a left curve and straightened out multiple curves by driving right down the center of the road. My siren was screaming and I was smelling rubber.

I squalled around a curve just in time to see them head up Powdermill Road and I spun the rear around making the left onto the road. It was paved and by this time I was almost on the bumper. We ran out of pavement and spun onto gravel. The raised rear end of the Camaro slid from side to side. Even with the sexy wide tires, the gravel stole the power of the huge V8 under the hood.

The Nova crept up on them and we ran out of gravel. I heard the high grass on the mound in the middle of the tracks slapping the undercarriage and could barely see the Camaro for the dust. Then, without warning, the Camaro’s front end dipped, and the car ploughed through a creek. My little Nova dove in after them. We were out of road all together. I could see that the driver had to slow way down because the lowered front end was hitting rocks. I dodged them by weaving back and forth to ride the tires up on the rocks and stone ledges to keep the oil pan and transmission safe.

Finally, at a tiny ramshackle cabin with a bare bulb for a porch light, the Camaro driver hit the brakes, the doors flew open and they looked back at me with utter amazement on their faces. I ran them out of road as fast as they could go in a Nova 6 cylinder stock family car with lights, siren and radio installed by the sheriff. In all those steep curves, that fancy car was at a disadvantage because they messed up the suspension by changing it to make it look hot. The weight of the huge V8 was a hindrance on the rocky path and no help at all. But what the heck, what does thinking have to do with speeding? The whole thing didn't go quite 4 miles and lasted about 5-6 minutes. I'd say we never went over 50 miles an hour on those mountain roads. Big deal.

Wanna know why the fools ran from me to start with? One of the guys in the car was AWOL from the Army. I cuffed him, put him in the back of my little family car, backed all the way out to the gravel very carefully avoiding rocks and tiptoed the car through the creek, turned around at the school bus turn-around and headed for Newland earning 50 bucks from the Army for catching the little stup.

Corky

2011-06-12T09:26:00.000-07:00

A cop up north tazered a cow that got out; incredibly stupid but it inspired me to tell you a story.

Dottie and I had a Welsh Corgi named Corky. Corgis are bred to be cattle dogs. They’re ankle biters and so short that cows kick over them. They’re really fun little dogs that look like a regular dog that had their legs sawed off. And, that’s the long and short of it (he snickered to himself). Corky knew all about cattle. When my neighbor’s cattle got out (which happens a lot with cattle), he’d bark with a particular sound. It got so that John would ask when I called, “Are they in the road?”

“I don’t know, John. I’m off today and still in bed.”

“How do you know they’re out?”

“Corky told me.”

“Oh, I’ll be right up.”

Anyway, we had a blast with that little character. One time he caught my oldest son, Chuck, eating his food. From then on, he would guard the bag and bite Chuck every time the poor little guy got near it. We finally had to hide the dog food.

Corky was bad to chase cars and would hide in the grass on one side of the yard near the road. When he heard a car coming, he’d start to wind up, not in circles like you’d expect but more like a twirling baton. When the car got even with him, he’d shoot along the front yard beside it until he got to the property line on the opposite side of the yard and lay down in the grass to wait for the next victim (how did he know where the property line was?). He actually wore a trail in the yard that, seen from the air, would look like an old-time barbell with round weights on the ends. He never really got in the road but people in the community would ask if we were the ones who had the crazy little dog that chased cars.

The funny thing was he never chased cars going the other way, just the ones on his side of the road. We worried about it but didn’t believe in chaining a dog and really couldn’t afford a dog lot at the time. So, we employed every suggested strategy we heard of to teach him not to chase cars. One was to drive past and when he chased the car, jump out waving and screaming and running at him. Then we tried driving past, jumping out smacking a rolled up newspaper in our hands. The next suggestion was to carry a super soaker squirt gun and shoot him with water. I even tried mace as a last resort and he went off to the back yard sneezing. After we washed the little nut’s face and eyes, he went back to his point of ambush on one side of the yard.

It sounds stupid but he learned fine. He learned what our car looked like. So, we borrowed cars. Corky smartened up. He then started looking for who was driving and wouldn’t chase anything with me behind the wheel. Finally, to keep him from getting hurt, we chained him in the back yard and took him in after we got home from work.

The problem with that was that he’d chase the sound of the cars and race from one end of the chain to another. He wore a muddy path in the grass running back and forth and was usually a mess by the time we got home. He also chased the sound of the cars inside the house. He’d wind up in the living room before we even heard the car, careen through the house into the kitchen and slide to a stop just before plowing into the refrigerator barking the whole way.

All of that created a real problem for me. I worked swing shifts with the Sheriff and when I was on midnight, I had to sleep during the day. Corky drove me crazy. I’d drift off to sleep and Corky would hear a car coming and start barking just outside the bedroom window. Pop, my eyes would be wide open. After staggering through several midnight shifts, he awakened me again one morning. I was very tired and furious. I thought you little b……, I’ll fix you once and for all. I got out a single shot 12 gage shot gun and a shell. I figured the roar of the gun might scare him enough to shut him up. I didn’t want to hurt him, so with evil glee, I opened the shell and dumped all of the shot out. With eyes heavy with sleep and a really angry disposition I opened the window, lifted the screen, laid the gun beside me on the bed and waited with growing anticipation. I thought, “I’ll try to hit him with the plastic wad and sting him along with the noise of the gun. That’ll fix him good.”
Finally, Corky started to bark and wind up. I looked up and he was right outside the window. He barked louder getting ready for the car. I eased up with the gun carefully slipping the barrel out the window so he wouldn’t notice it, aimed it, braced against the kick of the 12 gauge and pulled the trigger. Corky had noticed the movement and stopped for just a split second making the shot perfect.

Instead of the roar and mule-like kick of the gun, it just went “fop” and the white plastic wad sailed out of the muzzle so gracefully that both Corky and I could see it arch in the air and hit him between the eyes. Without the seal of the plastic shell and the weight of the shot, there was not enough pressure in the chamber to do anything more. When it hit Corky, his ears went up, he cocked his head and looked at it lying on the ground in front of him and then looked up at me as if to say, “What the heck was THAT?” Well, I cracked up laughing. I pulled the gun out of the window and laid on the bed laughing and when I regained my strength I knelt on the bed, leaned on the head board to look at Corky again. There he was still looking at the wad and back at me with his ears cocked. At the look on his face, my laughter welled up again and I shut the screen, lowered the window and fell asleep with the delicious feeling of joy that the brainy little dog gave me.

One day we came home from work and Corky was lying beside the road. When I picked his body up, I saw the broken chain where he’d worn it thin. I’d so hoped he’d never catch one of those cars he was chasing.

Uncle Ivor

2011-06-11T09:44:00.000-07:00

This is for his niece, Debbie.

Ivor was a mountain man who set many things in motion in my life when such things should be moving. One was the age-old ability to lie with great aplomb. Ivor was a master. He was a poised, talented story teller. I loved his lies. He sat in his open wood shed on the only chair. The customary audience (me) was relegated to “saw logs” (mountain for any length of cut-down tree from as long as a whole tree to short pieces ready to be split into “Stove wood”). He represented something that I missed growing up.

I was born in the Appalachians in South Western Pennsylvania. It was, underneath, coal mining country and on the surface, farm country. Just when I was getting the soil under my fingernails and one leg was getting longer the other from walking on mountain slopes, Mom and Dad moved us to Philadelphia. I really never could get used to it. People talked funny, school teachers were not friends of my parents and could even be cruel. I was also confused when someone would point out a hill. The whole damn place looked utterly flat to me. Furthermore, it took weeks before my legs evened up and I stopped walking in circles. I got along OK but the abiding disgust and outright hatred for that big city and, thereafter, every other city grew from the compulsion to bulldoze farms, build houses that all looked alike and pave over everything. “Progress,” city folk call it.

One of the many things I missed in that heap of civilization was learning how to tell stories and tell them well. There were very few places left anywhere where one could find real gathering places for men with a fat pot-bellied stove and thick sliced bologna and cheese sandwiches slathered with mayonnaise. In Eldora, PA, you had to go to a “Beer Garden” or one of the ethnic clubs in near-by towns. The industrial age had pretty much beaten the life out of my neighborhood with modern stuff that Ivor’s’ community was just getting to. In that dry county, good story-telling without sloppy drunks seemed to still be stocked with people like Ivor. Nor did they leave story telling up to producers, actors and special effects.

Special effects for Ivor was spitting sharply to punctuate his point, peer into the mountains thoughtfully, lean on his thighs and turn his hands open and up as if what he was saying was undisputable. He would also underscore his visuals by propping one hand on the thigh nearest me, twist his body to face me and speak with authority. Another one of his special effects was to quietly and thoughtfully get a rolling paper out of his overhalls, tap the right amount of tobacco onto the paper woven between his fingers to make a scoop shape, lick the paper and roll it, then stick the neatly made cigarette to his lip. Lighting it was a whole different set of effects. The cigarettes might dwell on its perch waggling with his lip movements until he had a different point. He’d snatch it from his mouth; point it at me pinched between thumb and forefinger. Then he’d start the lighting process.

One time as we discussed my conflict with a local preacher, he got out his lighter, flicked it producing a flame with the sound of scraping metal of an old Zippo lighter and said, “Well, I’ll tell ye” (the flame burned in his hand). “Knowing him and knowing you.” He put the cigarette in his mouth and moved the flame toward it taking a draw creating a coal on the end. Ivor clapped the lighter shut, stuffed into the bib pocket and said, “If there’s mud in the creek, there’s bound to be a hog in the spring.” He said that, upper body facing me twisted at the waist and one eye squinting against the smoke. He lingered just a moment then settled back to contemplate the mountain quietly making the wisdom of his revelation more dramatic.

I consider that to be one of Ivor’s most profound statements. I will admit for the first time as I write these words, the statement completely baffled me. Unfortunately, I was too young and daft to ask what the heck he meant. I was looking for affirmation that the preacher was a dumb cluck and that I was right. At first, I thought that’s what it was, but as time moved along, I slowly began to wonder just what he meant. Later in my life, as I studied that statement like a Buddhist koan, I began to worry that he was mocking me. As 60 crept up on me, I realized that as country and as roughly hewn as he was, he was a true southern gentleman. He refused to say anything that would harm either one of us and simply said there had to be something wrong and we should look for the source of the problem. Now that I’m somewhere near his age, I respect that very much. With all my education, I know that I could never say it quite as well and certainly never with as much color.

Well, anyway. I wanted to tell you about his lies. There are so many that I’ve forgotten over the years and so many that I remember I can’t begin to tell them all in one essay. I hope you have a picture of Ivor in your mind as I tell you one that caused me to laugh out loud which brought Ivor all the way around in his twisty position to laugh with me.

As described in the story, “Ole’ Ivor,” Our house was 5 paces from Henson’s Creek. Ivor had built the house and built a stone wall. He built a dry wall which is a wall built with no mortar. The rocks fit together so well that it had stood for 20 or 30 years before this incident. It supported the bank and kept the creek in its place all that time. There was a foot bridge (“foot log” in mountain terms) to the other side where we parked. It was made of 2 locust logs about a foot thick with boards nailed down for a walkway and a layer of plywood on top of that. The thing was about 20 or 30 feet long and incredibly heavy. It just laid on concrete blocks on one side and right on the dirt on the other about 5 feet above the water. It bounced with every step. It had had the lovely effect of scaring the wits out of my wife when I had the urge put extra spring in my step just to hear her fuss.

One night a storm roared through our part of Avery and between the sound made by the rain on the tin roof and the flooded creek was a thundering noise that we had to shout over. We couldn’t do anything but lay wide awake in bed. Suddenly, we heard a wham, bam, bubbalam, blaboom. I jumped up expecting to see one of our cars careening downstream and instead saw a washing machine tumbling over and over in the current and hit our bridge. Relief washed over me and I was about to close the door when I saw the washing machine forced under the bridge. The machine driven by the hydraulics of the creek wiggled against the weight of the bridge and lifted the lower end carrying it in slow motion downstream.
Me: “Oh, No!”

Dottie: “What. What the matter!?

Me standing in my skivvies on the porch: “We just lost our bridge!” All at once the machine shot out from under the bridge and the heavy locust logs settled down at an angle on the bank with one log propped on one side and the other propped on the far side. The bridge twisted like Christmas ribbon candy.

I lay awake all night with the sudden revelation that the house could be swept away if the creek got up high enough. I had another horrible vision of Ivor’s unmortered wall washing away to let the creek undermine the house. It was a nightmare of visions. The darkness made thoughts of losing everything including our lives so inevitable and so scary that there was only one thing to do – go talk to Ive.

First thing the next morning, Dottie and I both called in and took the day off until I could get the bridge set back right. As soon as possible, I slogged through the remaining creek water in the yard upstream from the house toward Ivor’s. He was already in place smoking.

“Whew, rough storm.”

“Yep, purty rough.”

“Old washing machine nearly took my foot log out.” Ivor squinted at the mountain and grunted. I paused a long time figuring out how to phrase my question without sounding too scared. “Ivor, you think this creek could get high enough to wash away my house?”

“Shoot,” he said still looking at the mountain. “I seed this creek get so high, ye could look plumb under hit.” A momentary silence took place and the tension broke inside me. I laughed it out into the mountains. Ivor did his twisty thing looking full at me holding his hand-rolled cigarette pinched in his fingers and made a duet of the laughter.

After a time and some instruction from Ive, I went back down stream, used a truck, some logs and the concrete blocks to prize (mountain for pry) the bridge back into place and never worried about flooding again.
God, I loved that man.

Charlie's Story

2011-05-08T05:51:00.000-07:00

One of the many things that I feel privileged to carry from my fathers is a steady hand and keen eye with firearms. An incident with my dad illustrates the pride we have in this skill. When living in the mountains of Avery County, North Carolina, Dad bought me a British 303 high powered rifle. We took it outside on a sunny day, set up a small piece of 2X6 scrap lumber and moved back about 50 yards. Not a bad distance for such a small target. The rifle had the typical military peep sight and a blade at the muzzle. Dad stood and took aim. The crack of the big ammunition echoed back from the surrounding mountains like a clap of summer thunder. The 2X6 spun into the air and tripped over itself as it landed in the grass. I went to it and looked, finding the hole from Dad’s round near one edge. I set it back up and walked back to him and he handed me the rifle.
I nervously accepted the heavy piece from him and positioned myself the way I learned in the Marine Corps as the “Off Hand Position” the stock pulled firmly into the shoulder and the left arm braced on the hip and rib cage – a skeletal prop. I wasn’t afraid of the kick of the rifle but that I wouldn’t measure up. My grandfather was the local pistol expert in his home town and I was sort of at the bottom of the line of succession. I mustered up some discipline, sighted the front sight blade within the “Rear sight Aperture,” took up the slack in the military-type trigger and squeezed off the round. To my dismay, dirt splattered behind the wooden block and the target didn’t move. Dad said with disgust, “Gimme that rifle! You’re no son of mine!” I was crushed at my miss and those words. I walked to the target just wanting to get away from him. I picked up the block and to my amazement, there was a hole drilled dead center! I laughed out loud and struggled to talk through the ecstasy. “No son of yours, huh? Whose son am I then, I hooted.” I took the block and handed it to him rubbing it in. “You hit it but mine went through so perfectly that it didn’t even move. That, ol’ man, was a PERFECT shot.”
All firearms were fascinating to me but once I had a substantial amount of experience under my belt as a cop, they became just tools with which I was very good. Out of a possible 300 on the range, I rarely fired lower than 298. Most officers are good with their weapons as you probably already know. What you may not know is that there are accidents with fire arms among law enforcement officers. One that always comes to my mind was the one that Charlie Harris told on himself.
I worked with Charlie when he was a deputy sheriff but he’d spent many years as a Winston-Salem police officer. He was also a part of the department’s pistol team and competed often. At the time, the police department in Winston was in the lower floor of the old City Hall. Above it was the city jail, courtrooms and offices. One day Charlie was headed out on patrol but had to go to the bathroom first and, he was having a little trouble with constipation. Charlie had been on the commode a good long time and decided to pass the time “dry firing.” Dry firing is something that’s taught in most small arms training. A shooter takes all the bullets out of the weapon – double checking that the weapon is empty and takes aim on some improvised or actual target. Charlie emptied his revolver and took aim on a light fixture just above the stall he was in. He squeezed off a couple of times and suddenly the pistol exploded in his hand. The light fixture shattered, the noise of the shot in the plaster and steel Men’s Room rang in his ears like a hundred bells and the room filled with the odor and smoke of gunfire. Charlie no longer had constipation.
He very quickly pulled up his pants, buckled his gun belt and very casually sauntered out into the hall. No one was around. Apparently the noise was contained in the room and the smell hadn’t slipped out of the room – yet. What worried Charlie more than anything was that directly above the Men’s room was a full courtroom. He rushed up the steps as fast as he could go, already out of breath and his heart raging from the unexpected explosion, shattered fixture and gunpowder smog in the men’s room. By the time he got to the door of the court room he was also sweating profusely. Charlie got a hold of himself, carefully opened the court room door and very timidly eased in looking at every inch of floor that he could see. Meanwhile, an attorney was droning on, a witness was squirming and the spectators and judge were sleeping peacefully. There didn’t seem to be any unexplained holes in the floor or wounded jurists so Charlie headed for the nearest exit, clambered into his assigned patrol car and got the heck out of there. Not a word was ever said about it.
I told that story to make my own seem less dumb.
Dottie let me buy a brand new Sig Saur 9 millimeter semi-automatic. It’s one of the finest handgun’s in the world. I was eager to qualify with it and was dry firing. I was always cautious with a handgun; especially so because I often taught handgun take-aways in defensive tactics and officer survival training. One had to be extremely careful because the students held the weapons on each other. We never had an accident in all the years I taught. I was always very careful.
I was lying on the bed, taking aim at a joint in the ceiling tile. I locked my right arm and cupped the right hand with my left pulling the right arm into a ridged gunstock – like extension of the pistol. It’s called the “Weaver Stance” developed by a deputy sheriff. You see disgustingly lousy imitations of it on cop shows all the time. I adjusted my eyes so that my focus was on the front sight blade with a slightly blurry rear sight and target. It takes hours of practice to get that front sight blade directly in the center and level with the rear sight groove. It’s called “Sight alignment.” Doing it quickly after firing a round is called “Sight acquisition.” I practiced sight acquisition and sight alignment over and over as I rested in bed. Without thinking I squeezed the trigger. Like Charlie’s revolver, my Sig exploded in my hand.
Chuck, my oldest son was on the phone in the kitchen and came flying around the corner stretching the phone cord into a squiggly line. “You OK Dad?” “Yeah, I screwed up and accidentally fired a round.” I felt really stupid and released the clip and ejected the round in the chamber.
Later, I called Dottie. “I got some good news and some bad news.”
“Oh, Gosh,” she said. “What now?”
I said, “Well, the good news is, the bullet went into a rafter and didn’t make a hole in the roof.”
“The bullet…the roof?” she stammered.
“The bad news is that I missed what I was aiming at.”

Today's Work

2011-02-12T10:49:00.000-08:00

I put my arm around a skeleton of a man today
And his bones said, "I love you."

I put my face against his head and his hair mingled
with my beard and they said, "I love you."

I put my heart next to his heart and they beat as one
And his lips said, "I love you.'

Mine replied,

"I love you too."

Sugar Bird

2011-02-07T17:27:00.000-08:00

Several years ago Sugar Bird was fired. Although it disturbed me it never seemed to affect him. I brought it up to him but he just whistled the first phrase of Winchester Cathedral, and said, "Sugar Bird's a pretty bird." It made me feel better about his termination and he went happily back to his seed.

The policy manual said, as a chaplain, I could do "Creative therapies" (That has been changed since then to be clearer). So, I bought the sweetest bird in the shop and began working to prepare him to become a therapy animal. I decided that I was going to take classes in Animal Assisted Therapy and get him certified. My supervisor agreed with my interpretation of the policy but we never got that far.

One day I got a call from the compliance officer who said, "We don't have a protocol for pet therapy."

"Animal Assisted Therapy," I corrected her.

"Whatever," she said. "We don't have a protocol for it." her words were brisk, clipped and officious. I felt like I was back in the Marine Corps. My suggestion that she allow me to do research and write policy for approval by management went over like a concrete airplane. "There's too much liability." The tone of her authority ratcheted like a pair of handcuffs as she recited the oldest management excuse on the planet for quashing creativity.

I broke the news gently to Sugar Bird because he'd gotten rather attached to several patients. One was a person who rarely talked but chattered on about her life when he perched on her shoulder and picked at her shiny glasses. Another lady enjoyed watching birds at her feeders and expressed interest in birds. I offered a visit from Sugar Bird. She didn't want to hold him but loved petting him as I held him. She fell in love with him so fast and so deeply that I must confess to smuggling him in to see her one day after the edict so she could say goodbye. She just wouldn't be satisfied until I did and Iron Mike, the compliance gunner never caught us. Sugar Bird and I stopped with that one felony.

The best story I have about Sugar Bird's short career with patients is about a man whose cancer went to his brain and he stopped doing everything but sitting and staring. The family gathered in the living room for our visit and we sat together watching Dave stare blankly. I got Sugar Bird off my shoulder and Dave's wife formed his hand so that it was resting on his thigh with his index finger extended enough for a perch and Sugar Bird stepped up.

At the feel of the cool, bony feet on Dave's finger and possibly the color of his feathers, Dave's eyes lit up and he focused on the bird with obvious pleasure. Sugar Bird cocked his head, seemed to make eye contact with him until Dave drifted off to sleep. Between the time they connected and our attention was recalled to them, the family and I talked together. Dave's wife suddenly pointed to the pair and said in a stage whisper, "Look at that! Isn't that amazing? They're both asleep!" Sugar Bird had picked up one foot, tucked his head under a wing and went to sleep too. Now it was our turn to be speechless.

We all sat with mouths hanging open until a sense of peaceful quiet settled over us and we became a part of the connection between Dave, Sugar Bird and the peace that passes all understanding.

Busted

2011-01-29T08:11:00.000-08:00

Newland is the highest county seat east of the Rockies. In my twenties, it was exactly a half a mile in diameter with the courthouse precisely in the center. Newland had a police force of two officers and a chief who were also sworn deputy sheriffs. The chief had a small office and a desk in the town hall which was a prefab double-wide, set up on concrete blocks and skirted with sheet metal. We also had a 19-something former highway patrol car with over 400 cubic inches of American iron for an engine, a 4 barrel carburetor that sucked gallons of gasoline with each punch of the accelerator and moan of the engine. It boasted one of the first electronic sirens and a bubblegum machine blue light mounted on the roof with a county radio bolted under the dash. There was a 5 round riot shotgun mounted barrel up on the passenger side of the hump with a quick release. We wore dark blue uniforms with a Sheriff’s Campaign Hat and specially designed badges and shoulder patches. We were sharp. We also had a collection of town boys whose petty crimes and sense of competition with the local law could make things interesting for a bored cop in a tiny mountain town.

This new career of law enforcement was serious business for me. I could write a book of tickets a week in that little town (on midnight shift) and got the reputation of being willing to write my own mother a ticket. I probably would have done that if I’d had the chance just to say I did. One time, a group of irate citizens got up a petition to get rid of me. Luckily for me, the town leaders were of the Law and Order type and threw the petition in the trash.

Behind Greene’s Supermarket in Newland, NC, there was an empty field with a mound of dirt toward the back. It was an old pasture that looked like someone dumped a load of dirt for fill or something and stopped after one or two loads. The field was grown up with weeds about two thirds of the way to the mound and then it was just high grass. The town boys used to love to hang out at Green’s in the parking lot and raise hell half the night until the local residents complained. Then we’d run them off, arrest one or two for “Public Drunk” or just harass them into leaving by stopping them every time they moved a car.

One night Isaac Clark, the evening shift officer, called me and asked if I would come in early so we could work on something together. When I showed up, he met me at the Sheriff’s Office. I got in the car with him and we made a patrol around town and he explained the situation. The town boys had started going to the mound in the old field and he believed they were smoking pot. This was incredibly good news. Neither of us had ever made a drug bust before and this was our chance. The bad news was that the kids were smart in choosing their site for this heinous crime. No one could approach the mound without being seen from any direction. We had to figure out a way to get to them quickly enough to prevent them from ditching the stash. Having accomplished something similar one time in my short career as a cop, I was up for the adventure.

Sometime before that night, I noticed a group of boys gathered in a circle in front of a local gas station that was closed for the night. There was one orange glow moving slowly from hand to hand and I knew that it was pot. I made a couple of drive-bys and then eased the patrol car around the back streets and parked it a safe distance from the party. I slipped around the side of the service station stepping over the usual debris around the service stations of that era and when I got to the corner of the building, I peeked around. To my surprise, the circle had somehow drifted to within a couple of feet from my spot. I estimated the arrival of the roach to the kid right around the corner and stepped out at the right time, grabbed him by the arm, spun him around and said, “Hi, there. Wanna give me that and we’ll make a night of it?” The group scattered like sheep before a wolf. I heard discarded oil cans crunching and banging, people falling over old tires cursing and car doors slamming. Engines were firing all around and blue exhaust was left hanging where ratty old cars had been sitting. As quickly as I grabbed the ol’ boy’s arm he popped the roach into his mouth and swallowed it! I actually heard the ember sizzle as it hit the saliva in his mouth.

I couldn’t contain myself and my decorum as an officer of the law went out the window when I absorbed the whole scene. Before his tongue could cool and just about the time his eyes were about to pop out onto his cheeks, I cracked up. I clutched his arm more for support than to keep him in custody and laughed so hard that the tears fogged my eyes and my nose started to run. I let go of his arm and wiped my face with the sleeve of my pressed uniform and squeezed out between gales of laughter, “Go ahead, man. I got no evidence anyway.” He tentatively eased away from me toward his car looking back at me with his bulging eyes and gaping jaw until he disappeared into his wreck with rusted Tennessee plates and clattered off toward the state line.

Isaac was freshly returned from Viet Nam. Like most southern boys and especially the mountain bred kids, he was quickly made a point man for patrols. It was assumed that they knew how to handle guns and were well acquainted with moving through forests and thick underbrush. Most of those guys quickly died in the jungle because of the vulnerable positions they were assigned. Isaac told me that one of the reasons he lived was because he threw away the rifle he was issued and demanded a sawed off automatic shotgun. He said that he defoliated a lot of brush with that gun because he heard a bird flit through the limbs just ahead of him. He grinned and said, “’Course, a lot of times it weren’t no bird.”
Anyway, I determined as the senior officer, that Isaac should be point and decide how we would approach the band of weed smokers. According to his plan, we set off together, split up when we got near to being in sight of the mound and dropped to the ground. It was determined that one of us would go straight to the mound in case they split up and the other would go to the more likely direction of escape toward the road.

We slid on our bellies through the weeds and at the edge of the high grass; Isaac appeared running at top speed toward the mound. Half the town boys took off on my side of the field and without even thinking I took off after them. Amazingly, about half the crowd froze on the mound and long-legged Isaac simply ran up to them and caught them easily. I was racing with all the power a freight train trying to overtake a high speed rail transit and almost made it to the road. I was focused on making the leap up onto the shoulder of the road when I hit an old barbed wire fence about mid- thigh level and flipped over it like a tumbler. Rusty barbs ripped my uniform and gouged my legs and I went over completely on my back with my legs up toward the road and my head under the old pasture fence. I scrambled to right myself, snagging here and there on briars and barbs and struggled to the highway only to see – nothing. They were gone.

The street was empty. I stood breathing and catching my wind realizing that the only place the little thugs could go was across the road into the weeds on the other side. I eased myself down the shoulder of the other side. Having a freshly learned lesson under my belt, I examined every inch ahead of me before I stepped. I turned my flashlight off and stood listening with great discipline. I thought that I’d heard something to my right and slowly turned to listen again. I eased toward the sound, stopping to breathe quietly and test the air with all my senses. Then, I heard a snigger (mountain talk for snicker) just ahead of me. Those kids could hardly contain themselves in the game. I moved softly toward the sound, deeply focused and ready to leap to catch just one of them if I could. I took one cautious step after another until I stepped off into thin air.

I knew that the head waters of the North Toe River rose from springs in or near Newland but had never paid much attention to the marshy land in that area. I was unaware that I was in that area when I heard the kids hiding in the weeds just feet from me. As I stepped off into space, I plunged into one of those springs like a boulder in a quiet pond. The town boys couldn’t contain themselves. They burst into laughter and remained lying in the weeds on the other side of where I stood; waist deep in a little cove of spring water. They laughed until they were too weak to move and as embarrassed as I was, my determination to get them overcame my fallen pride and I struggled up the bank and nailed them as they lay in hysterics. “Nailed them” may be a bit strong here. Actually, I sort of waited out the hilarity, chagrined and dripping, then collected them for an impromptu march up Main Street to the Town Hall. I remember slogging up the middle of Main Street in Newland, my shoes full of water, my uniform soaked from the waist down leaving wet foot prints on the dry street. I think that they actually went with us because they were having so much fun that they could only anticipate more.

We seem to have come to a little truce after that. Isaac and I gave up trying to locate the stash after an unfruitful attempt at the art of interrogation and they moved future festivities elsewhere.

Ol' Ivor

2011-01-16T17:57:00.000-08:00

Our first house was right on Henson’s Creek in Spear, North Carolina. It’s a place in the road between Plumtree and Ingalls about 10 miles above Spruce Pine. Spear was named for a nearby mountain called the “Spear Tops.” It's one mountain with two very pointed peaks. It's incredibly beautiful and Henson’s Creek Road winds its way around the Spear Tops from near- by Mitchell County all the way to US 19e where the stream fed into the North Toe River. The Henson’s Creek Road was the route to Bakersville when it was the county seat before Avery was split from Mitchell County.

Dottie and I paid 4,800.00 for the little house. It was about three steps from the porch into Henson’s Creek and was squeezed onto the only flat spot on the whole 5 acres. It sat with its back almost against the mountain. Most of the land was so steep you had crawl up on all fours.

Upstream from our little place about a quarter of a mile was Ivor and Ruby’s house. They were born and raised right there in Spear. I would wander up to Ivor’s place through a couple of rickety gates and across his pastures. Often I’d find him sitting on a saw log under the roof of his woodshed. If he was in the house, I’d sit down and in just a minute, he’d stroll out of the house. The screen door spring screeched open and slammed the door behind him. Ruby would come to the door wiping her hands with a dish towel, wave then disappear into the dark of the tiny house. In my 20-something eyes, Ivor was an old man and carried an awesome load of wisdom for me to experience. He had stories, lots of stories about growing up in a place and time that are now only available in obscure books, old film and from rare people like him. I grew to treasure him as an elder and as a story-teller, he was a master.

Iv always wore bib overalls (“overhalls” in mountain talk) with a .32 pistol stuck in one of the pockets. “Snake gun,” he’d say and wink. He also kept in the bib pocket a cloth sack of cigarette tobacco, rolling papers and a lighter. He was never without a long-sleeved white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a brown, wide brim, sweat stained, felt fedora.

One time I asked him what he did for a living before he retired. He told me that he was a teamster. “Oh,” I said, “Who did you drive for?” He looked at me funny. I said, “Did you own your own truck or did you drive for someone else. I mean, you were a member of the Teamsters Union, right? You drove a truck.”

“I never drove a truck.” He said peering off toward the mountain behind his place and took a pull on his hand rolled cigarette. I was totally confused by that. It was like telling some kid today that your phone had a certain number of rings on the party line (what the heck’s a party line?). “I drove horses.” That boggled my mind. It never occurred to me that teams of horses had anything to do with the word “Teamster.” I thought teamsters paid union dues, had a shop steward to complain to about the boss and refused to unload their own trucks.

“You drove horses?”

“Yep - and mules.”

“All your life?”

“Yep. Got my first job when I was nine years old. They were building the Yellow Mountain Curve on 19e. Told the boss man I wanted a job. He asked me if I could drive a mule and handle a drag pan. I told him I could. I lied.”

A drag pan was a piece of horse or mule-drawn equipment that scoops dirt and moves it to another place and dumps it. But it didn’t dump its self. The driver had to lift up on the handles to make it scoop dirt and then press down to allow it to dump. No hydraulics, no electronics or motors, just rock hard muscle. The driver had to handle the mule at the same time, the reins draped around their necks. There was no riding. The drivers walked behind the pans in circles scooping and dumping, scooping and dumping all day. It was a man’s job.

“Iv, how the heck did you learn how to do that at nine years old? Did your dad teach you how to drive horses?

Ivor turned his upper body toward me, propped the nearest hand on his thigh with his elbow up. His cigarette stuck to his lip. “Naw. We was too poor to have horses.”

“How did you farm, haul wood and plow your garden?”

“By hand – just by hand. Like I said, we was poor.” He squinted his eyes at the ridge that ran behind his house and angled toward mine.

“How did you learn enough to get the job?”

“I hid and watched. I knowed I could do it.”

“At nine?”

“Yep.”

Iv said the boss man watched him until payday. He gave Ivor his pay and then he said, “C’mon, boy,” and walked him about a mile up 19e to Burleson’s store. In its day, it was a genuine country general store (I’ll tell you about that another time). He bought Ivor a shirt, new bib overhalls and his very first pair of shoes out of his own pocket. Iv told it like he was still amazed at the man’s generosity.

“How long did you work for them, Iv?”

Ivor was sitting on his log with his legs spread. He was leaning on his knees looking straight ahead as if telling the story to his mountain. At my question, he pinched the cigarette between his forefinger and thumb, pulled it away from his mouth and spit a stray bit of tobacco between his feet to punctuate. He looked at me from under his hat and said, “We built that road all the way to Spruce Pine.” He never said how long it took but he said it with great drama. I caught the meaning of his pride in doing the work of those hard days and the feat of building a mountain road with mules and men.

We both sat on our logs under the roof of his woodshed leaning on our knees and looking at his mountain. The only sound was Henson’s Creek just behind us pulling me away from my time into his.

Snap

2011-01-07T19:13:00.000-08:00

I once broke a guy’s fingers with my butt and a football. Sounds nasty but it wasn’t really. It was entirely satisfying for me and a learning experience for a bully. It was also a private little victory that made a bit of meaning out of years of unmerciful badgering, picking, teasing and even some physical abuse by school yard tyrants.

I was bullied a lot in Philadelphia schools. I was a country boy uprooted from the Appalachians of Western Pennsylvania and planted in the harsh culture of the big city. I didn’t understand the blustery strutting and crowing of young males bent on establishing pecking orders in practice for life on the streets. The guy in question was just one more tormenter plaguing my life.

He just wouldn’t leave me alone. Wherever we met; in the hall, boy’s room, or on the practice field, the guy was always messing with me in some way. He wasn’t sure about me physically, so he never laid a hand on me but it was constant, relentless harassment.

As far as the game of football goes, I loved playing center. The center’s main job is to snap the ball to the quarterback and block opposing linemen. The “snap” is when the center lifts the ball from the ground and hands it to the quarterback who has his hands placed right under the center’s butt and up against it. One of the things that fascinated me about the position was that, unlike other linemen, I had to snap the ball to the quarterback and then block in the same amount of time the other linemen had to just block. Getting better at whatever I do is a theme in my life. To be a better center, I reasoned that if I used a dumbbell with weights to exercise my arm in the same motion as the snap, I could increase my speed.

It worked but it also increased my strength. I was really unaware of that benefit but my quarterback knew it well. Apparently his hands would sting if he took the ball poorly. But Joe (the quarterback) learned how to take the snap from me. I noticed that I rarely ever felt the ball touch his hands. He was smooth - we were a team.

Bully apparently didn’t understand all that and one day when the coaches were busy teaching at some other place on the field, Bully started in on me about being the center. Joe said, “You couldn’t take a ball from him!” Bully scorned the idea and looked down his nose at me. Joe smirked at me and said to him, “Go ahead, try it.”

I felt weird to think that this guy would have his hands between my legs but I bent over the ball, took it in both hands as usual and took a peek back between my legs. Bully’s upper hand was against me with his fingers drooping down not splayed out like Joe’s. The light dawned as I looked forward and focused on the ball. When he called for the snap, I drove the ball backwards with all the force I could muster in my arm, chest and back.

Bully screamed. When I looked around he was dancing around holding his hand and cursing. He was bending over clutching his hand to himself one second and unbending, standing upward and lifting the injured hand to his eyes in the other. He kept that up that ritual of pain until the coaches rushed over to see what in the world was going on. He fell to his knees clutching his throbbing paw. I certainly didn’t expect such a spectacular result.

The back field coach asked Joe what happened. Joe shrugged and said, “He took a snap from Bradstock.” Coach shouted over Bully’s cry, “What! Why did you do that? You can’t take a snap from him! How stupid can you get?” Coach turned to me and gave me a dirty look. Bully was after all, a pretty good halfback. I shrugged and kept a straight face.

Bully wore a cast on his hand for a time, disappeared from the football team and left me alone. Justice can come from strange places and be really sweet for a country boy in the big city.

Hospice Memorial Service December 5, 2010

2010-12-05T17:13:00.000-08:00

On December 23rd, 1996, my father died. It was two days before Christmas and the day of our 29th wedding anniversary. At the end of his life a plethora of things happened that I can’t forget. The meaning of Christmas was changed forever, we almost completely stopped celebrating our anniversary and I became very angry with him for dying. Some people would be surprised, if not shocked, to hear that many of us in this room know exactly what I mean. But within that feeling of anger is a whole collection of feelings like a set of Russian Nesting Dolls. They fit one inside the other until the last one is almost too tiny to play with.

First, I was angry about how he died. He died of strep throat. He refused to go to the doctor until it was too late. His body was so infected the doctors couldn’t stop it. A simple round of antibiotics would have averted the whole thing. Nested in that piece of anger was that he was my hero. I was always learning something from him. He could wire a house, thread pipe, teach Sunday School, do Geometry in his head, manage one of the country’s largest water departments, fight fire, dig a perfect ditch with a shovel and pick, run a crane, fire a rifle with expert marksmanship and make jokes that would have me rolling on the floor. I don’t think I ever tapped the bottom of the man’s genius. All that talent was gone. The day I walked across the stage to get my doctorate, a symbol of my own abilities, he was absent – forever.

Over the years, I excavated the nesting dolls of anger pulling them out one after the other, each one getting smaller but more intimate. One in particular was that I didn’t have him to push against anymore. I couldn’t hold him, argue with him, and compare my strengths with his. I could no longer see him handle aging so that I could feel his strength in my own maturation process. Suddenly, My father was as thin as photographs and as wispy as memory.
In the book, Ten Poems to Set You Free, Naomi Shihab Nye writes:

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
A wound to tend with lotion and cloth.

When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to
Pick up,
Something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs
or change

But in the last few years, I’ve been working to get the last tiny doll out of the nest. It’s so tiny that it’s difficult to hold on to and so intimate that I barely want to describe it. I really want to keep it to myself and hide it. I prefer to look at the other nesting dolls of anger. The smallest doll in the nest is not anger but the seed of anger - fear. Anger is often the product of fear. There, at the heart of frustration and anger is a little, tiny doll – a seed that we keep hidden so that we don’t have to admit that really, we’re afraid. This little doll often calls to me and demands attention until I deal with it or bury it again in the nest of anger but it never seems to go away. I must take it out of its hiding place, put it out with the rest of the dolls and examine it, talk about it and make it a part of the story of who my father was and who I am.

When Dad died, I was there with the rest of the family. We had to take him off the vent. When the respiratory therapist turned the air down and he breathed his last breath, I saw so many things but the one that scared me was that I saw myself in his body. I knew that I too would be in his place someday and I was afraid. I’m still afraid though I face death every day in many different ways.

The New Testament says in one place, “God hath not given us the spirit of fear, but of power and love and a sound mind.” Marie Curie said, “Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.” If we have those little seeds of fear that are feeding our anger and we reach in our souls and pull them out to be examined in the light of day with the understanding of sound minds, they begin to lose the power to control us. From there we reshape them into the power to create. They then become energy that results in something positive rather than destructive anger.

As a hospice chaplain, when I see the fear in the face of my patients, I remember my own fear and I say to them, “You can rest assured, we are not going to let you suffer.” Then I reveal to them the secret of hospice workers everywhere. “After all, that’s what I want for myself.” The fear that we both feel about our end becomes common ground and both the patient the chaplain and the rest of the hospice team jells as a unit with the single goal of bringing comfort – not fear. That’s the wonder of being a hospice worker; we join you to bring comfort. We don’t remain above you with the authority of sterile halls and white coats. We don’t remain beyond you with technical language foreign to you ears. We don’t want you to be afraid we want you to be confident that you can handle the dramatic turns and twists that you’ll face as disease progresses and the end over takes. Now we want you to work out your fear and anger by remembering and honoring the incredible work of love you did to comfort and care for the people who needed you at the most difficult time of their lives. If only you could see yourselves as we see you – so strong – so loving so determined to see it through. I know, I know, most of you have told us how much you appreciate us and we thrive on that but to be with you is usually awe inspiring for us and we often learn to love you as if you were our own. Thank you for letting us walk with you to bring comfort and care.

Anyone in this gathering today would say that what we’ve gone through together is God’s work. Let me share a poem that I found in the book, Love Poems From God. St. Francis of Assisi wrote in his poem, “God Would Kneel Down,”

…Once (God) asked me to join Him on a walk
Through this world,

And we gazed into every heart on this earth,
And I noticed He lingered a bit longer
Before any face that was
Weeping

And before any eyes that were
Laughing.

And sometimes when we passed
A soul in worship

God too would kneel
Down.

I have come to learn: God
Adores His
Creation.

I don’t know why God allowed you or your loved one to go through what you went through but I know where He was; He was kneeling beside you. He’s with you in your tears and in your laughter. He’s also with you in your fear and anger.

This is the perfect season to take that last little doll out of the nest, set it on the table and use it to remember the incredible work each of you did to care for your family in spite of your fear. It’s a good time to remember the lives that inspired you so and taught you the value of comforting and caring regardless of the difficulties you face. Use the energy of your fear and anger to bring life, care and comfort to the frightened people around you.

We Thank You

2010-11-21T14:08:00.000-08:00

Several years ago, when I was the pastor at Pilot Mountain Friends Meeting, I wanted to write an entire message that was a poem. It's Thanksgiving again, So I offer it to you, my readers, as a Thanksgiving Gift.
Ken

We Thank You

For the vast space that extends beyond our ability to see; to send and to listen;

For the unspeakable beauty that glimmers mysteriously out there in places never before seen by us;

For the particles and waves that we use to send images back. The pictures riding like silver saddles on golden horses;

And for the shimmering beauty that we will never see because it exists solely for your pleasure;

For the strange and wonderful sounds that we hear coming from eternal places that pop and squeal in the language of creation even as it happens;

For the depth of the blackness punctured with the brightness of stars so distant that we see the light from them even after they die;

For the startling size of a clear winter night and the array of starry sequins that you have stitched onto the velvet of it all;

For the predictability of that sparkling curtain whose movement undulates with the power of your very being;

For the motion of the planets and suns and sizzling comets that can be measured so precisely we can know who you are by knowing the equations;

For our single moon that teaches us about the timing of your work when the seasons turn `round and `round like a ballroom dancer in a rustling dress;

For the pureness of its reflected light' a mirror held above us to remind us of the coming day;

For its absence that tells us that all things come and go just as you desire;

For the brilliance of our own tiny sun that glowers and burns with power that we can only imagine;

For the little blue marble that we live on that is positioned so perfectly that we get just what we need from our Sun, no more and no less;

For the coming cycle that tips us just far enough away to allow our trees and insects time to rest;

For the fall season when we
your cleansing breath color our world and then blow it all away for a fresh beginning

We thank you:

For this planet on which we live out our lives;

For the gleaming ice that caps both ends that supplies us with cool winds, unique wildlife and places to achieve our wildest dreams;

For the seals and the penguins and the fat blubbery walruses that bark and tangle themselves in slippery dances, humping themselves along icy ledges;

For huge polar bears that remind us that their world cannot be changed at our whim;

For frozen tundra that seems so hard and cold to the touch but is so delicate and priceless to the millions of living things that depend on its shallow life;

For the swirling slapping seas that surround those frozen caps and their foreboding turbulence that cuts continents into passes for our ships to 'round their ends;

For the grand expanse of oceans that are the salt of our existence and for the flavor of it when lick our lips after a cool splash in the surf;

For the churning power of those oceans as the sky and water clash in their expanse to move our weather across the planet that keeps us alive;

For the mystery of the depths that hold secrets which we are only beginning to understand;

For the darkness of those depths that cause us to wonder, search and probe like children playing in a pond;

For the wonderfully strange creatures that live in that darkness that create their own light, protect themselves from the great pressures of the deep and beckon us to join them in search of the meaning of you;

For the blueness and the grayness and the white caps that toss our imagination and reflect the sun when it rises in the morning East and slips into its Western night;

For the mauve, orange, blue, rose and a million rainbows of colors that the trio of sun, sky and sea sings to our muses;

For the inspiration of the muses who show us those hues and teach us to strike chords of color on canvass, hum symphonies in verse and open our most creative minds to your eternal creativity;

We thank you:

For the great bodies that plunge beneath the thrashing surface of the sea to inhale beings that are tinier than they are large;

For their wondrous songs that echo from the walls of water and into our wires and onto slivers of tape for us to hear;

For the sweet milk pumped from salty breasts and into their young who breath the air that we breath and share their youth with us;

For the myriad of other creatures that we swim with, wonder at, look to for the secrets of this world yet unknown to us;

For oysters, shrimp, white, blue and red fish. for sharks, octopus, slithering eels, shimmering smelt, soaking, saturated sponges and coral that makes the trees for their briny world;

For the weeds that wave in the currents and hide scampering life forms yet unnamed by the meager efforts of our researchers;

For the waves that crash and hiss on sandy shores, roar on rocky cliffs and seep into brackish swamps;

For the muck that the water and the earth makes in those swamps and the abounding energy that lurks there waiting for seed, egg or squiggling larvae to hatch and feed on its potential;

For the sour air rising from them that lifts a multitude of wings bearing singer, hunter and others that peck the earth clean;

For the birds that build nests as big as trucks and as tiny as a child's hand;

For the songs and cries and thumping of them that float and flitter between trees and blue sky;

For the wonder that they create in our children and the thrill of their acrobatics and plunging with saber talons ripping food from screaming life;

For the sharpness of their eyes, the whisper of their feathers and the grace of their flight;

For the mystery of the night hunters and the running scattering clowns with feathers fluffed in agitation;

For the fumbling of their young teetering the first fluttering flight;

For the brilliance of long legged flamingos, sassy rain forest parrots and twittering cardinals in eastern woodlands.

We thank you:

For the towering friends of the fliers that the Indians called, "standing people;"

For their ceaseless breathing that loans us oxygen that reddens our blood and carries us onward;

For the reaching stretching limbs that the winds tease on gentle winter days;

For the leaves and needles that clothe their majesty beyond the wardrobe of human royalty;

For the shade that they cast on sultry days when the air is thick with the heat of Summer;

For the sweet fragrance that reminds us of a time when it alone was the note filling the nostrils of our ancestors;

For the crunchy walks that the trees give us when their leaves fall and the crushing under our feet is hollow against the cold air;

For the relentless growing that they do against the odds of weather too wet, too dry, too cold or too hot;

For the history that they record in their rings teaching us about the climates of their lives and how it was when -

For the things that they have given us; rafts, canoes, boats ships wheels, levers, walls for houses - roofs over tiny cradles;

For tools, clothes, twine, paper and an infinite list of things that we must have to be - just to be;

For their reaching roots that suck nourishment from the soil and unlike us, give it back by holding it together;

For their tenacity on mountain sides twisting and clinging seeking life in tiny cracks where no life could be expected;

For their feet soaking in water with knees lumping above the brackish blackness of the tea that they brew swampy and bitter;

For the moaning music of the wind moving through their limbs and the clacking of twigs frozen in ice;

For the crashing of them in death as they tear themselves from the sky and push through neighbors limbs to the earth where they will rot;

For their rotting that returns them to the soil and to the insects that will live on their pulpy flesh for another generation;

We thank you:

For the creeping life that provides us with life;

For their insatiable hunger that cleans the forest floor returning the minerals and nutrients to the soil for the young trees;

For their housekeeping that cleans the bones of death and sanitizes our world;

For their adaptability that returns them to us regardless of our plastic efforts to be rid of them;

For their reminder to us that your creation goes on in spite of our opinions and prejudice;

For their sticky feet that carries them to places where others can eat them;

For their sticky webs stretched between rocks and trees, houses and barns;

For their feeding on each other to maintain a scheme of balance that we cannot destroy no matter how hard we try;

For their feeding on us to remind us that we are a part of this creation and not separate from it in our sterile homes, offices and cars;

For the tiny wings that are more delicate than lace and lighter than air;

For the persistent gathering and buzzing that carries pollen between our plants and honey to our tongues;

For the flitting and flying that amuses us in the heat of a Summer afternoon when these things should be amusing;

For the flash and splash of a bass stretching into the air to reach some flying delight;

For their stinging that gives us pain and suffering that we may better know peace and tranquility;

For their hairy, many legged ugliness that teaches us that you and only you are the best judge of beauty;

For their cycles of life that comes with the warming of the sun and the growing of green things;

For the colors of the butterflies, the iridescence of dragonflies and the flash of lightning bugs in the night;

For the rich diversity of life numbered in the millions that point to the power of your creation;

We thank You:

For the creatures that like to live with us;

For their mewing and purring and affection when we need it the most;

For the snuggling warmth of their bodies and the patience with our children as they are lugged around and dressed like dolls;

For the barking and growling and courage when they are urged to protect when your care for us surges through them.

For the utter exuberance that pounds through us when their hooves fly us across meadows;

For the nobility of those who love us in spite of our cruelty and carelessness with their training, health and breeding;

For the chirping and singing and squeaking of all kinds of pets whose mysteries draw us into your bosom for comfort.

For the mooing, munching, snorting and clucking others who live only to give us their meat, milk, eggs and skin.

For their patience and endurance as we stuff them with hormones and chemicals to make them abnormally larger for our own arrogance and greed.

We thank you:

For all of this and for the time that it takes to thank you because with each utterance of thanks we breath in and breath out;

For air and the sun and the night and the stars and the morning that comes one after another until it is time to breath no more;

For the little children that replace us like the seedlings fed by the fallen trees;

For their running and flitting from thing to thing like birds in the woodlands;

For their soaring on hope and imagination like raptors on thermals high in the blue expanse of sky;

For their buzzing and stinging our quietude like mosquitos on a spring evening

We thank you:

For their questions that show us the depths of their minds like the endlessness of space;

For young adults because they are so sexual and aroused to life with a renewing that humans need to keep going on;

For challenging us and questioning us to see if the thing that has always been done is the right thing;

For parents whose singularity brings a focus of love that nurtures the young ones through the tribulation of growth;

For the solitude of parenting that reminds us that we are individuals;

For the pleasure of growing old in this kaleidoscope experience here on earth;

For the exhaustion of old age when the peace of a hard days work feels good in our bones;

For the humor of old people who know that everything is not really as serious as it seems;

For the ones that lie in their graves and the space that they gave us when they moved on like the old trees who tumble to the floor of the wilderness;

For their memories that teach us and nurture us and remind us about how good it has been. How good it is to be - just to be;

We thank you;

For all of this and for the time that it takes to thank you because with each utterance of thanks we breath in and breath out;

For air and the sun and the night and the stars and the morning that comes one after another until it is time to breath no more;

We thank you;

For You, Almighty Spirit of God, who bathes us in love; who lifts us like birds and carries us like thick healthy fish in the currents of life;

For You in who we swim - in whom we live

Thank you.

Ken Bradstock
1996

Peds

2009-09-30T19:07:00.000-07:00

His breath short, catching
wisps.
Her kisses full flowers
of herself.
Scattered on his pallid
face.
Her’s pressed into silent
wails.
Falling from her eyes - salty
motherhood
rubbed into sorrowful life
only 4
years old.

In a McDonald's

2009-09-23T18:29:00.000-07:00

Young Lady,
I am a poet
and
you are in love.
If I could pen the look
you gave him,
we could change the world.

(For a pretty girl and her boyfriend in Virginia 10/3/7)

Do Not Doing

2009-08-25T16:43:00.000-07:00

A few years ago Dottie, Paul and I went to visit friends who live in the Yukon. It was an unforgettable trip into a world of which I’d only read and dreamed. There are thousands of miles of pure wilderness unspoiled by convenience and machinery. In the evenings, Dale, Paul and I would go fishing and not even get out on the lake until 10 or 11 at night. The sun was still high in the sky and we’d fish until 1 or 2 in the morning. One evening we’d put in and had a lot of marshy water to go through until we could get out deep enough to move faster. It was a lake miles long and wide and we were the only boat in sight.

As we plowed through the shallow water a flash of movement exploded on our left and there within a few feet was a huge Bald Eagle coming out of the water with a fish in it’s beak. I looked in its golden eye and saw the silver fish still struggling against the edge of the beak. Water was slinging of the feathers and over the motor of our boat, I could almost hear air pushed through its wings like gusts through high county pines.

It flew beside us for a few yards and I had a chance to experience the power of that great bird from its piercing gaze to the reptile-like skin on its talons. Feather by feather, I soaked in the experience until the fan of its tail feathers flipped and ruddered the eagle out over solid land away from us. Out of danger from us, it stopped driving itself forward and stretched out into a glide until it disappeared in the high grass about 1,000 yards from the water.

It changed forever the way I read Isaiah 40: 31, “but those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not faint.”

We are hindered by our rational minds. The eagle has no such problem. He just does what he does without the interference of thinking. Isaiah says that the strength of the Lord is out of hope not calculation. The Zen Buddhists call it “Do not doing.” In other words, the eagle just soars with a strength that he just has without thinking. He doesn’t do it on purpose he just does it.

When we hope in our higher power alone, our strength comes from places we can’t point out. It comes from so far deep inside that it can’t possibly come from us. It’s deeper than we are, stronger that we are and not as limited as we are. And yet, it’s within us.

We don’t do that kind of power. All we can do is not do it and allow it to happen. Allowing it to happen is all we can manage. Or maybe all we can do is keep from stopping it. How many times have we stopped the power of God from coming through by telling ourselves that it’s all impossible?

Summer Night

2009-07-20T01:53:00.000-07:00

Now I come to the writing place.
My night soaked in
an impromptu storm of
summer.
Befriending my insomnia
and dripping with imagination.

No pen scratching in this place
but the clicking of letters.
springy
and inviting me to touch out
words grumbling around in my head.

I invite eyes to follow
rivulets of lines
falling
from the skies of my sleeplessness.
Come, follow my dreams interrupted.

The making of pictures
out of words and they out of letters.
Symbols from lost
winters
darkened with thousands of histories
fashing forward by some sort of magic.

Blump-Blumps

2009-07-11T16:42:00.000-07:00

I eased my aching joints onto a sort of park bench between the sliding doors and the registers at Lowes while Dottie paid for our latest treasure trove of stuff to fix up the house. The last of my bones where muttering their complaints when two employees came in the doors talking business. I hadn’t yet gotten into my usual dissociative state when I caught a piece of the conversation.

The short, plump, white girl said to the black one with the clipboard, “We partitioned them for the blump-blumps but it looks like we ain’t gonna get ‘em.”

The black girl must have looked as puzzled as I felt because then the white girl explained. “Well Alex got runned over and that customer got runned over and we thought if we partitioned for blump-blumps, it might slow ‘em down a little. There was a bit of silence and she studied the black girl’s face and followed up with, “I recon we ain’t gonna get ‘em ‘cause they came down here and surveyed and I ain’t seen no blump-blumps yet.”

Silence.

“You know, Blump-Blumps. Cars go blump-blump over ‘em.

One of my notorious laughs got started in my feet, surged up my thighs through my lungs and splashed all over the Lowes big box store and both the women caught it as it rushed by them into the rafters. Shorty said, “Oh, you know, we petitioned the main office for speed bumps.”

That petitioned me for a fresh roll of laughter and the black girl turned looking at me with the most amused look on her face when I delivered. “I couldn’t figure out what kind of language that was," she said.

Dottie rolled the shopping cart to the doors and I bounced up and said, “Neither could I.”

Gold Crowned Jesus

2009-07-04T07:46:00.000-07:00

Most folk believe that the Beatitudes defines Christians. In terms of the historical church, it does not. It points to the outsiders, the miserable and helpless common people. We have to keep in mind what the common people looked like in Jesus day. They were absolutely stuck in the filth of an every day existence from which they were not permitted to rise. In our nation and in our culture, the poor are not only permitted but in at least some cases, they are encouraged to rise to the very top where they can be very powerful. Our president is a case in point.

We are, as a people, not poor, not humble and certainly not meek. We are more often as Americans and specifically as American Christians, arrogant, manipulating and if we are dirty, our dirtyness lies in the fact that in comparison to much of the world, we are filthy rich. These are hard words and difficult to hear but if you have the ears to hear and the eyes to see, read the follow excerpt from Asian Faces of Jesus Edited by R.S. Sugertharharjah. The passage comes from Chapter 10, “Jesus and People (Minjung) by Byung Mu Ahn and is a summary of a play written by Chi Ha Kim, a Korean poet.

“The scene plays in front of a Catholic church, where a statue of Jesus made of cement is to be found. On his head he is wearing a golden crown. Below the statue there are beggars lying around. The time is early morning on a cold Winter’s day.

As time passes, first a potbellied priest and then a fat man, looking like the boss of a company, walk by. The beggars ask for alms again and again but are refused with contempt and scorn. Eventually a policeman is seen on the scene. Far from wanting to help them he immediately tries to drive them out of the place and demands a fine from them in return for his connivance.

After all of them are gone, one of the beggars starts to lament: ‘I have neither home, no grave to rest fro all the exhaustion . I am abandoned in an endless cold, in a bottomless darkness. I cannot endure it any longer, this miserable time… it is unbearable, really unbearable. But where shall I go, where can I leave for, where, where? As he so laments to himself in despair, his eyes filled with teas, meet the cement statue of Jesus. For a moment a vague expectation flickers in his mind. Yet pulling himself together he – with a critical glance at the statue – grumbles in his mind: ‘This Jesus might well be a savior to those who have enough to eat, who have a home and a family. But what has he to do with a beggar like me?’ And then he says in a loud voice: ‘Hey! How on earth can Jesus speak without a mouth? Can a lump of cement speak? Even though he were alive, he couldn’t open his cemented mouth. So what kind of relationship could there be with that lump of cement and me? – Hey, listen! They choose cement or concrete or bronze or gold to have a statue of Jesus made, so solid as to last for a 1000 or 10000 years.’

Crying out loudly the beggar, overwhelmed with grief, begins to weep. Right at that moment he feels something wet, like small drops of rain falling on his head. Is it raining? No! – When he looks up he finds the cement Jesus weeping and dropping tears. The tears are falling right on him. ‘How strange a thing! Really, there art tears dropping down from his eyes. I could never have imagined a thing like this. Could it be that this cement is made of some strange material?’

He watches Jesus intently, and only then does he realize that Jesus is wearing a golden crown. He begins to touch and feel the crown with his hands. Having found that it is real gold, the idea crosses his mind that if he sold the crown, he would have enough to eat and something to live on. Following an irresistible impulse he grasps the crown and takes it off.

At this very moment he hears a voice: “Take it, please! For too long a time I have been imprisoned in this cement. Feeling choked in this dark and lonely prison of cement. I wish to talk with poor people like you share your suffering . How eagerly I’ve been waiting for this day to come – the day of my liberation when I could once again flare up like a candle and bring light to your misery. Eventually you have come and made me open my mouth. It is you who saved me.’ These are the words spoken by the gold crowned Jesus.

‘Who put Jesus in prison?’ the startled and frightened beggar asks. ‘Who were they?’ The Jesus made of cement answers: ‘ People like the Pharisees did it, because they wanted separate him from the poor in order possess him exclusively. ‘ Then the beggar asks: ‘Lord, what is it that has to be done for you to be released, for you to live again and stay with us?’ Jesus answers: “ It is impossible to do so by my own strength. If people like you, that means the poor, the miserable, the persecuted, but kind-hearted people are not going to liberate me. I will never become free again. Only kindhearted people will be able to do it. You opened my mouth! Right at that moment when you took the crown off my head, my mouth opened. It is you who liberated me! Now come to me, come very close! Like you made me open my mouth, you may now make my body become free. Remove the cement from my body. And remove the golden crown too. For my head, a crown of thorns will just be enough. I do not need gold. You need it much more. Take the gold and share it with your friends.’ But at that very moment the pot bellied priest, the fat boss of the company and the policemen reappear on the scene, Immediately they snatch the crown from the beggar’s hands and put back on the head of the Jesus statue. The beggar is arrested by the policemen and charged with larceny, taken to the police station. And the Jesus, made of cement, returns to his former state – a blank, expressionless statue, dumb, nothing more than a lump of cement.

Perhaps Christianity in general has become so ineffective because we have petrified Jesus with our worship of authority, entertainment and plush structures full of glittering technology. Perhaps we need to look for the poor, the miserable, and the outsiders to take the crown off our cement Jesus.

Baptizing Maw

2009-05-08T18:10:00.000-07:00

Maw asked me to baptize her and then asked what church I pastored. At eighty-something she had never been baptized and never had communion. It was a little hard to explain, at first, that she wouldn’t be baptized into a specific church. I would be administering the sacrament as a hospice chaplain. She’s a smart lady though, and it didn’t take long for her to understand that the two men, who established the rite of baptism two thousand years ago, didn’t have a church and had never seen one. The institutional church has done more to pervert the teachings of those men more than any heresy that has ever existed. The wild, hide wearing, locust eating prophet and his cousin, the carpenter’s boy, would go into the water and come up from the ritual of baptism to see a dove and hear a voice declaring the mission of the one the world knows as the Son of God.

Maw wasn’t much into church and the ones she visited denied her the rite of communion because she wasn’t a member of their denomination. Neither was she into exclusivity so she decided years ago that all she needed was her belief in Christ and the life of the Christian. Sophomoric rules and initiations were for others. She worshiped with Dr. Stanley on TV Sunday mornings and raised her family in “the way they should go,” and they never departed from it.
The family was very excited about our little ceremony and the favorite granddaughter flew in from Atlanta. Maw’s daughter and her husband pitched in and made it about a big as celebration as Maw would permit (three family members, herself, the minister and a neighborhood mutt). Any more would’ve been too much and Maw would’ve rebelled.

When I rolled up past the horse pasture to the little farmhouse Maw lived in most of her life, I saw them sitting on the front porch and my heart warmed. We were going to do this outside where Maw could see better. I went in to the kitchen to prepare for communion and get a chalice of water for the baptism. When I came back outside, It occurred to me that there was no place to set anything, so I handed the paper plate with the elements to daughter and carefully set the chalice on the concrete porch. Favorite granddaughter and her dad sang a beautiful song to his guitar and I settled in to become as pastoral as I could. I reached deep in my chest for my cathedral voice and began to intone the ceremony when the little white mutt strolled over to the chalice and began lapping the baptismal water. We cracked up. So much for whatever holiness there was to this event. It’s hard enough for a Quaker to pretend to be ministerial anyway and what the heck, the pup was just thirsty. I was willing to baptize Maw with the pup’s water but daughter ran in to change it and I stood there holding the plate and laughing with the others thinking, “God, I love you.”

I drew a liquid cross on Maw’s forehead and we remembered that our deep joy and light laughter comes out of the agony of the one who has the last laugh. The elements always taste the same to me but the meaning of the Last Supper forever takes on the flavor of whom I’m with. Therein is the beauty of the Kingdom.

Bozo

2009-02-26T18:37:00.000-08:00

The man I worked for in the campus police department was an underhanded, manipulating jerk and I was sick of it. The job running student activities came open and I applied for it. I had absolutely no clue what I was doing in the job but it was different and I was given the job and a free rein. I took a salary cut to get it and it was worth the money.

Outrageous stories are a part of student activities on every campus but I was innocent of that until after the first year. I met quite a collection of characters over the 10 years I was in the business but none was as rich as Wade. He was a workingman and entrepreneur. The man was almost a mirror image of a younger but braver me. We matched in stature but his hands were as thick as 2X4’s and he seemed strong enough to lift a horse. Oh yeah, he’d had as many businesses as I’d had jobs. His current and most successful business was an entertainment company that provided carnival equipment and set-ups for private and company parties. He came into the office because he’d developed a curiosity for politics and he heard I advised Student Government. On a campus of 5,000 students, that can be a rather significant introduction to politics if you do it right. I described the leadership program I was developing and he was intrigued. I was intrigued by his can-do attitude and powerful personality. He got through the interview process and won the election as President of the SGA. He then had access to the board of trustees and the president of the college and I had a real partner in building my program. Wade had stuff to teach me. One of the things he knew about was clowns. When he told me that it’s a dangerous business, I scoffed.

The first SGA conference he attended was near Halloween that year and he packed 2 masks and 2 pairs of clown feet. One of the masks was Bozo. I took that one and he put the other on and we went to the dance Saturday evening after dinner. Immediately, one of the girls grabbed me and dragged me out on the dance floor. Since I’d never been a chick magnet, I considered this to be fascinating. Soon, however, there were 2 dancing with Bozo and in a few minutes, I was surrounded by dancing women and getting a little nervous. Wade pushed through the women and hollered over the music, “You better get outta here man, I told you the clown thing does stuff to people.” Remembering that he said that clowns get punched, pinched and have their clothes pulled off, I decided that I’d ease to the side and get out of the crowd.

Bozo’s harem wasn’t gonna let that happen. They moved with me. I moved-they moved and they moved in closer. One shouted, “I want that mask, Bozo.” I made a dive for the smallest girl, picked her up and swung her around to block the others and started running. I had bib overalls on and I felt some one pulling at the straps when I dove over one table and under another. As I rolled under the table I saw 10 or 15 girls coming around the ends and I scrambled for the door – pushing through the crowd as fast as I could go. I ran up the hall, my clown feet slapping the floor, found the key to my room, got in, slammed the door behind me, ripped the mask off and threw myself across the bed. Sweat was running off of my face like I’d been hosed down and I was breathing like a racehorse. I started to laugh when the door opened and Wade burst through, slammed it and collapsed on his bed laughing so hard I though he was going to pop an artery.

“Man (he laughed trying to get his breath) you shoulda (more breathing, laughter) seen that bunch (laugh breathe) of women (breathe, breathe, laugh) commin’ up the hall (he stood up and imitated the women looking around, trying door knobs) saying (laugh) saying (laugh and breathe), ‘Where’s Bozo. Where’s Bozo.”

We both collapsed to the floor between the hotel beds laughing so hard it sapped the strength out of us. After a time we settled down and I said, “Did you see those women come after me?” Wade started laughing again. “Damm, Wade. They were coming around the tables to get me.”

Wade was laughing and talking and breathing again. He said (when he could), “Man, they were coming OVER the tables too.”

“Your kidding!”

“No. I told you clown business is dangerous.”

“I need a shower. I’m not goin’ out there again.”

“I am. This is too much fun. I’ll see you later.” Wade went out the door without his mask or clown feet and I dropped any notions I had of Clown College.

Ezekiel's Dragon

2009-02-01T09:33:00.000-08:00

A dragon of wheels
a hurricane of hot breath and
whirring, slapping wings
sets its talons on the roof
of a hospital.

Ezekiel’s wheels
an angel disgorging angels
into its nest
bringing the suffering into

the arms of God.

Reaching

2009-01-14T18:05:00.000-08:00

I don't understand
the making
of money.

The craft of reaching
in another's
pocket
with the mind.

I only understand
the reaching
in another's
mind
for the healing-
crafting wholeness

My Wife

2009-01-06T19:16:00.000-08:00

-over 60 years in her body and 16 in her smile, laughs at her dog & squeals when he goes for her flying shirttail & gets her butt in his teeth instead. They rumble around the house tossing and retrieving squeaky toys.

She’s a hippie-girl from Pratt. Her hair is lighter red than it was in under grad-days and is streaked with silver. It still flows silky and long across her breasts and shoulders and I’m still in love.

Some people make a fortune in 41 years. I’m living in one.

I clear my books and writing stuff from a spot beside me on our bed and beckon with a finger. She bounces a ball, grins deep dimples at me, shakes her head, “No,” and chases the dog back into the living room.

Somewhere inside delight pushes against me and my fingers make my pen laugh.

2008-09-02T18:40:00.000-07:00

Bere

Deep in stone citadel
An oaken door with riveted steel
opens on sobbing hinges.
Brass keys jangle and captive Bere
cocks his head with sullen
affect.

Iron collar and chain
tether him to solid rock. He
paces in granite furrow.
Distanced respectfully, knowing his
power, I long to embrace -
affirm.

My creature - Bere;
muscled, agile and powerful. Able
to slash a horse,
capsize chariot and crush invader.
A specter of Celtic dragon
slayer.

His beautiful muscles
roll under heavy fur, like supple
sharks stalking
the grey deep. Flowing tissue
swells and abates. Molten
might.

Freed, he may snarl
at some delicate effete and be driven
into unforgiving
banishment. I revere him but others fear.
With but one Master, Bere is
chained.

My heart longs to set
him free. A craving for his companionship
pulls me closer,
my hand slides to my waist. Calling -
his eyes entreat,
incant.

A touch on my arm -
I turn to his Master. She regards my
frustration tenderly
and plucks the keys from my belt.
Knowing I want him
sovereign.

We stand close with
her breast against my ribs, her eyes
fixed to mine;
a lover's gaze. She frets
that a part of me is
confined.

Bere's chain clanks
taut, he strains the moaning links
trying to come.
She moves to him, calms him
with caress - face in
fur.

Only a girl playing
until I yielded her Bere. My life
nearly gone.
Roused with purpose, she grew
into dauntless woman. My
Athena*.

She fastened Bere
in stronghold, softening my soul.
Athena adores,
nurtures, exercises - empowers him;
Sustaining his virility and
mine.

Feeding on my game;
white, torrid canines tear tissue.
Red splatters rock
Bruin revels raw taste of the kill.
Dark, bottomless eyes seek
mine.

The great head turns
to me - with importuned countenance
trying to talk
by drawing jowl. My eyes rivet to the
canines. I contemplate powerful
jaws.

Turning, I feel his life
energy pulling at my back, the flow enshrouding
my legs making
me heavy, slow, as though I walk against
rolling white water of the
soul.

Struggling to the door
as if it were some distant shore, I reach it
because my Athena
leads me. "Some day you will need him," she
says, "He will be stung and
ready."

The door cried closed
slamming hollow in the tower. Shoes scuff
on spiraled stone
steps, ascending in synchrony, to the great
hall above. I stop her at the
top.

She, a step above, turns
and pulls my face to her breasts and holds
me tightly.
I melt into them, my soul's white water
bubbling into deep, tranquil
pool.

Soon, I am satisfied that he
is accessible and she is in control. Balanced
on the step,
the firmness of her breasts push us
apart and she bends to
kiss.

Girding my blade, I stare
out the long thin winnock at the world below.
Ready, I turn
seeing her pick up a brush, and move to the
stairs. I regard the sway of her
hips.

Athena stops at the tower
gate and says, "I brush him once more today."
I nod and
she fades into the tower like animated shade,
dissipating into memory -
vivid.

In the sally port, I clatter
to my mount and the animal senses my peace,
whooshing great
tides of air from flared nostrils,
unfurling bunched muscles to
calm.

The bridge bangs to prone, clanking
chains snarling at their winch and sunlight
slashes a glare
at us from the top. The horse beneath
me explodes from quiet to torrent.
Flying.

We clamber up the partially open
bridge and leap the remaing gap. I laugh at
his eagerness.
In the valley I turn to the fortress; staring,
knowing where I belong; where I
am.

*Greek goddess of wisdom and prudent warfare

2008-08-11T16:57:00.000-07:00

Imagine

Imagine Creation
Create imagination
with
incantation
of
everything
in the
i
of
Mage

Bricks & Lilies

2008-02-18T18:07:00.000-08:00

A friend is recovering from surgery. I sent her this. I hope that this photo and poem will bring you comfort as well.

Ken

I grew this lily,
laid the brick,
took the picture.

God fed the root,
made the clay,
painted with light;

Partners in beauty

Flashing needles,
knitting flesh into health,
Your mind & His;

Partners in creation

I Ache

2008-01-06T18:58:00.000-08:00

My son is sick again. My heart aches for him. Last Thursday he landed in the Emergency Department at one of the two medical kingdoms we have around here. He was checking in with the transplant team because his kidneys are failing and he’s going to need a transplant eventually. They found that his pulse was running away so they trotted him to the ED to be checked out. There were no answers. I found out later that ED docs are notoriously bad at diagnosing heart rhythm problems – gee thanks.

Then the next day he came down with a horrible chest cold and he’s been lying on my sofa hacking like a prisoner sawing out of jail. My ache for him is now 25 years old and there are more than just the medical issues. He wants to be like me so much but he can’t read. He couldn’t graduate from High School so he can’t get any college, He can’t be a cop, he can’t do anything that I’ve done because a couple of genes got screwed up when he was baking in the oven. It seems like all he can do is take care of his medical woes and defend himself from discrimination – both perceived and real.

Even his current employer who specialzes in providing services for developentally disabled people seems to take advantage of him. I want to haul my self down there and take a few folks up by the shirt collar but I can’t do that. What will he do when I’m too old or dead? He has to manage this himself. Dottie and I’ve worked and worked to get him to that place.

My heart aches all over again when I’m with other parents who have developmentaly disabled children. I look into they’re faces and see mine. Sometimes I’m staggered by their problems because they face more than we did. I want to give them everything I’ve got to see them through. But what happens after I’m too old or dead? One time a mother, who became angry at my agency, said that she wasn’t going to depend on us as much in the future. I said, “That’s a good thing.” I meant it. Her family and her children should be able to make their way without dependence on one agency. Rusty should be able to live as best he can so that he can have some of the dignity afforded able-bodied people. I purposely ignore some of his needs so that he’ll figure things out for himself. It kills me to do that and when I tried to relay some information to him that I found out about heart rhythms, he looked skeptical. I want to call his doc before he gets there tomorrow and fill her in but – he didn’t ask me to and I want him to have his manhood. In the mean time, I ache.

Flummoxed

2008-01-03T18:34:00.000-08:00

Nietzsche said,

"God is dead."

I think He's just

staring at us

with His

Mouth

Open.

How Nice

2007-12-04T18:35:00.000-08:00

A Woman Pours her

tears into my hands

Begs me to help her die

Another clutches my arm

to her breast

Milking hope from my fingers

I cry for them - for me

You make decisions in your

sunny office

Your nails polished -suit pressed

Appropriatly paid in your

last check

Noodling* God

2007-12-02T18:42:00.000-08:00

My theology is “muddy”
he said -
that Son of a Seminary.

If you want clarity, dig for

diamonds.

If you want God, reach in

mud.

When He bites you,

sling

Him in your boat.

RKB

*a way of fishing

It Takes a Worried Bird

2007-05-09T19:09:00.000-07:00

Chicken Little was in the woods
A seed fell on his tail.
He met Henny Penny and said,

“The sky is falling.
I saw it with my own eyes.
I heard it with my ears.
Some of it fell on my tail.”

He met Turky Lurkey, Ducky
Lucky and Goosey Loosey.
They ran to tell the king.

They met Foxy Loxy.
They ran into his den,
And did not come out again.

Chicken Little’s grazing through the rotting leaves and low bushes was suddenly interrupted by something that happened all the time in the woods. A seed fell. That’s it, a walnut or a pecan or perhaps an acorn fell. As soon as the pecan or what ever struck his tail, Chicken Little did what chicken’s do, he ran and flew. Chickens just simply do what is built into them when danger is around, they try to get as much distance between the danger and themselves as possible as soon as possible.

So not only does Chicken Little run, he talks as well. Of course he is yet to turn to see what hit his tail, he is yet to understand what the sky is made of and so he is yet to know that his assumption that the sky is falling is ridiculous. The sky cannot fall. I think that it’s interesting that neither the writer of this nursery rhyme nor the tellers of this story have ever given Chicken Little any more human characteristics than the ability to talk and the ability to clutch fatefully to his unreasonable anxiety. So why hasn’t Chicken Little over the centuries gotten any smarter? Well, maybe it is because we know that we just don’t get any smarter either.

After the pecan whacked Mr. Little’s tail feathers, he assumed something irrational. As he fluttered by Henny Penny he squawked breathlessly, “The sky is falling.” Well, Henny Penny assumed that Mr. Little was right and panicked right along with him. There they were clucking and fluttering and flying through the woods where they collected a whole group of bird brains; Turkey Lurkey, Ducky Lucky and Goosey Loosey. By now, I’m sure that Turkey Lurkey was thundering out in front because he flies the fastest, Goosey Loosey was honking frantically for her Gander and Ducky Lucky had left the safety of his pond to join the feathery stampede.

With all of that racket coming out of the woods and into the fields toward the seat of authority, Foxy Loxy’s ears perked up and his very keen eyes saw the flash of wings as the stupid flock floundered toward him. “Wait,” Foxy barked, and he did something that nobody else had done, he asked some questions. After all, anything that would cause such a mass exodus from the woods towards the king’s palace might be a danger to him too. It could be fire or hunters or some huge predator that Foxy had never encountered. “What on earth is going on?” He asked the foul flying by.

“The sky is falling, The sky is falling” they screamed in unison. I imagine that Foxy looked up and wondered what they could be thinking.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“To tell the King.” And then, I think maybe it dawned on him how utterly stupid this whole bunch really was.

“Wait, if the sky is falling, you’ll never make it to the king, after all there is a lot of sky between here and the palace.” Foxy’s words may have hit the group hard. After all, they were the first words coming out of rationality since the pecan hit feather-headed Chicken Little. I imagine the group skidded to a stop near Foxy and stood there breathing hard, their hearts racing. With one eye on the sky, maybe Turky Lurky, who would be the brightest of them might have asked what they should do. “Well,” Foxy might have said looking up at the sky, “The safest place to be when the sky falls is underground where it can’t hit you.” Maybe he started trotting in the direction of his den where his mate and pups were waiting for a meal. “C’mon, I’ll let you stay in my den where you’ll be safe and since I’m the fastest of all, I’ll go tell the king.” I can, in my imagination picture this whole stupid flock squawking and honking and clucking their doomsday predictions as they followed Foxy Loxy to his den. The rhyme finishes with, “And they did not come out again.”

Isn’t interesting that Chicken Little, though rightfully startled, talked himself into irrational fear and the rest of the birds ran from what was to them only imaginary. They weren’t started by the pecan. They didn’t react instinctively, they panicked at the irrational imagination of Chicken Little and they ran from an illusion, an imaginary fear straight into the jaws of a real predator. Foxy Loxy was some one to be greatly feared and yet their anxiety and panic made them so irrational that they ignored the real danger of an old and powerful enemy.

Anxiety does that to us when we allow it and those who fail to bring the rational mind into play when confronted with something unusual like a whack on the tail feathers with a nut, are primed to do just what Chicken Little did; run and flutter and cluck and gather a crowd around that runs and squawks and quacks.

A book I once read about the 10 dumbest mistakes smart people can make says that the very first stupid mistake smart people can make is to allow anxiety overtake their thinking. I understand anxiety. I have understood it in the past when I was about to key the door of a cell holding a very large and crazy individual. I know what anxiety is when called to a darkened house on a domestic call, knowing that there is an angry man with a shotgun waiting for me. I recognize anxiety when my mind reels with all sorts of imagined danger. We all know it and we all suffer with it at various degrees but the Bible also says that it is disrupting and should be given up.

(1 Pet 5:6-7 NIV) says
Humble yourselves, therefore, under God's mighty hand, that he may lift you up in due time. {7}Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.

(Eccl 11:10a NIV) says,
So then, banish anxiety from your heart and cast off the troubles of your body. . .

That last quote in Ecclesiastes gives us a really good idea about where needless anxiety fits in the spiritual world. It compares casting off anxiety because it is a trouble of the body. It is a result of over concern about outward things. I’m not saying that fear is not a good thing. It is. But anxiety is worry, worry, worry. Worry about how other people look. Worry about how we look. Worry about this and worry about that. Anxiety when we think that people don’t like us. Anxiety when we don’t have the right clothes or the right car or a spotless house. Anxiety is also a killer. It makes us sick - physically sick. Worse yet, it separates us from the care and love of God.

We cannot avoid the fact that anxiety can be more than the stupid irrationality of the flock. It can be a serious illness that cannot be cured with church cliche's. When your foolish worrying becomes unmanageable, go to a doctor and then get psychotherapy. It's no fool who asks questions and gets help when help is needed. After the angst is under control, rest in the peace that passes all understanding.

Loopy

2007-02-12T17:43:00.000-08:00

As a senior project in the final semester on the campus of a local university, I was assigned a project in the course called Statistical Mathematical Manipulations of Research in the Social Sciences 1492 section 2. I decided to do a study in folk psychology. This scholarly work was inspired by a country lady who, in the words of my son, "Has got it goin' on." We were discussing a mailing list for our church and she said, "I believe you ought to send Mr. and Mizriz (that's how you say Mrs. in country) Kindagood our newsletter. They attend the Primitive Church of the Immaculate American Flag."

I said, "Oooweee, we ought to steal them away from that outfit."

She said, "Naw, leave `em there, she's kinda loopy."

"Loopy," I thought, "That sure sounds better than; 'a little neurotic' or 'I fear she suffers from a personality disorder.'" I like it. As one who has been accused of being 'kinda loopy,' I appreciate the implications. I also appreciate the advice to leave the lady a content member of the PCIAF.

The very next day I went to see my professor. He said that the first thing I need to do is to form a null hypothesis. With that you can assume that you are wrong and set out to prove it. The technique confounds your critics because they are afraid to disagree just in case you are right, which is certainly wrong. Now that I was totally confused and thankful for the opportunity to explore abstract academic thought and perish before I publish something really bad, I began thinking of ways to be empirically inverted. Not a difficult task after something like 14 courses in the Social Sciences and an elective or two in Art. After much contemplation and research I formulated my hypothesis. Here it is:
It is not true that folk psychology has more descriptive terms for various mental disorders than real shrink shop stuff.
Like it? It may not be true, but then again it may be, depending on what academia nut reads it. It certainly is dull if not null.

Dr. Hellenist was buried in the valleys of his stacks of research papers like some archeologist in an ancient European trash mound when I arrived with my hypothesis. "Hey Doc," I hollered into the heap. "It's Ken. I've got my hypothesis done; you wanna see it?" A hand poked between two stacks of paper and I caught a glimpse of one eye peering over a Ben Franklin-like lens. I placed my work in the hand and said, "Don't lose it in there, Doc." He muttered something about grading papers and that I should come back later.

I did just that and saw him kicking papers back into his office from the hall. There were little beads of sweat on his forehead and he looked harried.
"Hi Doc, ya look at my hypothesis?"

"Oh, yeah, go ahead with your paper."
He forced his office door shut and tore his yellowed office hours schedule with his shoulder. He finished ripping it off, crammed it under the door and walked off without a word. I stood there until he turned the corner at the end of the hall and then looked at his office door. Taped to the battered wood was a poster that read "Publish or Perish, the Stuff of Which Real Teachers Are Made." Under the headline was a picture of some 1950's coeds with cats eye glasses in a convertible driven by a jock with a flattop hair cut. The message under the picture read, "Study Statistics at Iconphuzed U."

The next step was to create a survey, distribute it, recover it from trash cans all over campus, tally the responses, figure out who the standard deviants were who responded and pack all of those figures into a computer. I clicked the final figures out, hit "ENTER" and sipped a cup of coffee as the machine blinked a contemplative green light at me. My computer is one of the "old X Tees" and not one of the "New OH ESS TWO's," as the computer gurus say. I think it means that mine is older than six months and 30 nano-seconds slower at bite mastication or something. The new models have more megs to hertz, bigger and harder drives and floppier small ones. I can't always tell if we are talking about computers, transmission parts or bra sizes. It gets worse when you start discussing monitors. RGB, VGA, VCR, CD ROM. EM EYE SEA, KAY EE WHY, EMO, U, ESS, EEEEEEEEEEE.

Finally after an eternal minute and seven seconds (long enough to drive a real computer person to chewing his nails in frustration) I got my results.
We distributed 500 surveys to randomly selected campus punkers, rappers, Greeks, geeks and grungies. We got an excellent return; about 25. (I say,"about," because we had to tape one of the trash can recoveries back together and it wasn't all there) There were three groups of respondents. The largest group were the standard deviants who really took this study seriously and who all volunteered for labratory experiments if there were drugs involved. The next largest group of respondents were those who got help filling out the survey in the writing lab and then used the survey to wipe the dip sticks of their Harleys. The third were a few peppy freshmen who were initially impressed with being a part of a university study, but had an intellectual growth spurt after completing it. I saw one of those students get up from a bench, look around, saunter by a trash can and slip it in. She then hurried away when the swinging flap on the can squealed like a jail house snitch.

Anyway, the rest of the survey was really interesting. 89% of the respondents believed that folk-psych terms for mental disorders more accurately described the condition than the real terms, while 39% of those students didn't know what the real words were. Of all the respondents, only 22% knew what their race was and 5% of those thought it was the "Winston Cup."

But, enough of demographics. The meat of the survey came in section 3 where the respondents were asked to contribute their own folk-psych terms for mental disorders. The following is a partial list of the terms contributed by students.

Of all the respondents, 22% suggested, "His elevator doesn't go all the way to the top," and "She's about two bricks short of a load." Only 1.697% suggested, "One french fry short of a happy meal." Nearly 99% of the students surveyed used the old stand-by, "The lights are on but nobodies home," and "You ain' right, chu know dat?" One or two respondents from Eastern Tennessee offered, "About one daid `possum short of a country road." Four of the students were from, "up north" and stated that they could not complete the survey because they spoke "Proper English, and just could not understand this southern dialect." (They were all given tuition refunds, urban renewal grants to get out of town and went back to New Jersey. The entire campus rejoiced for three days)

A complete analysis of this study and list of folk -psych phrases will be published shortly in hard cover by IGOTCHOREBUCKS & SONS, Fantasyland Drive. Orlando, FLA. They are a respected publisher of doctoral thesis, masters thesis and other feces. Their motto is, "If you got a pile; Our market is fer-tile."

The day I turned my paper in, Dr. Hellinist was discovered dead in his office. They say that his office environment was polluted and he succumbed to a chronic case of white-lung thought to be caused by breathing particles of correction fluid in high concentrations. University officials denied OSHA claims that they were aware of the hazard and began requiring eraser training in freshman orientation.

The department chair was so impressed with my study that he invited me to sign a paper stating that I would never take another course there again in exchange for an A. I kinda figured school was too easy anyway. I took the A.

Airtha

2007-02-05T17:54:00.000-08:00

Old Mother Airtha circled the hearth once again
warming by the great Life-Fire.
Good health followed her ancient trek
except the shivering times.

Lately, she strolled the hearth-trip squirming
inside. Feeling uncomfortable.
Her skin burned in places
and there were strange repulsive smells.

Her breath shallow and wheezy.
Mother Airtha had never known
her kind to suffer this ailment.
The others never spoke.

Her dismal and dumb hearth mates
disparate, a dormant clan.
Airtha sensed her chafed skin and
looked at the others.

She pondered her fate. Are they dead?
Did they ever shiver with fever or ice?
Did they ever tremble
With life?

Airtha didn’t know. They were Before-Time.

The hearth fire scalded. Mother Airtha
gazed at the clan circles beyond – wondering.
Would Life-Fire light her death shell?
Ancient Airtha shivered with fever.

Sickening, retching deep in her pith,
she passed from conciousness.
Old Mother’s form fought sickness
Seeking to purge.

Airtha quivered, people ran
clutched, clenched, beseeched.

Surface rolled like shaking blubber
slashed from majestic Blue. Solid earth
moved like muck.
Mountains melted into naked heat.

Sun suffocated, disappeared in darkness.
Oceans slopped, slung from basins –
cascading, crushing. Cities crashed in Punk
crescendo, tin can pyramids in a carnival game.

Mankind clenched mankind and moaned –
Mourning civilization.

The greatness of the great Adamic ruler
fled from history
like packs of haggard wolves
from helicopter hunters.

Humans clung to Earth once again.

Ken Bradstock 1992

Dear Ken

2007-02-02T13:28:00.000-08:00

I came to your site from another blog who was a nurse. I have recently had my dad pass away here at home. We had hospice come to the house and I had never met the chaplain even though he had contacted me a couple times by phone offering help. Now, reading your stories which are so compassionate and so close to home, I wonder if I should have taken the chaplain up on his assistance. I want to thank you for writing of your experiences with those whom you have known. I find them so touching and you give me hope in a world that is too often hopeless. You also give me company and so I know that I am not alone in how grief has affected me. Thank you and the best to you. Joyce H.

I received the above in an email today and it touched me. I wish Joyce had left me a way to reach her. If she reads this, maybe she’ll reconsider.

It touched me for two reasons. First, many people turn down chaplaincy services in hospice care because their experience with ministers is negative or that they have their own pastor. Frankly, most ministers are almost completely untrained in clinical pastoral care. Even those with well-respected graduate degrees only have a smidgen of training in this very difficult specialty. I don’t blame Joyce at all for declining chaplaincy in her time of need but it frustrates those of us who are competent in this work. Most of my peers have a Masters of Divinity, which is a 90-hour graduate degree as opposed to 30 or 60 hours for most masters’ level programs. On top of that they have 2 years of hard work in a residency program for clinical pastoral care. One Chaplain that I work with has all of that plus a Masters in Nursing. She has more education than the M.D.s she works with. I hold a 30 hour Masters of Liberal Arts degree, 1 year of residency and a Doctorate in Pastoral Counseling with 2 years of clinical work in a hospital Psychiatric unit and at a battered women’s shelter. Understanding that while a degree doesn’t make one particularly competent, it does speak to commitment and willingness to learn if nothing else. Some ministers are incredibly talented and do well with death dying but I wish that I could avoid being painted with the same brush as the local preacher who has nothing to say but cliché and tired platitudes.

Second, Joyce is lonely and hurting and I want to help her find healing. I’m pleased that she found this little blog but I can help her with resources if we can just exchange emails. She’s an astute reader when she says, “You also give me company and so I know I’m not alone in how grief has affected me.” She recognizes the grief in my stories. I appreciate that more than I can say because it is my own grief that spawns the stories and it's that familiar ground that seems to have given her hope. It’s hard for us to live without hope. When I sit down to pour my heart out in these entries, I hope that my readers will share the healing with me and therein join me in the work of the Kingdom of God.

Joyce, I hope you continue reading here and that you’ll find peace and healing. Thanks for your note.

Ken

Spaces

2007-01-31T07:08:00.000-08:00

As a hospice chaplain, I look into the eyes of the dying every day. That gaze into the dark center of each one leaves me to wonder at the process of the leaving of life – the breathing out of energy from the vessel that it animated and the transformation of a living being into a body to born away. There, the eyes are moist and quick with life and here they fix onto something out of sight. Here they flick back to my face and there they look beyond again and again until they become frozen and cloudy.

It fascinates me because the drying of the dying eyes reminds me of the slippery beginnings of life when this same body was squeezed into the world and startled into its state of being eliciting streams of tears from that time to this. What is it that leaves leaving this person a dried husk? Is it just the physics of cellular functioning that ceases in a reversal of living? I want it to be more than that. I hope for my patient’s sake there is more to it than that but when I’m truthful, I want it to be more for myself. It’s my own mortality that I face when I look into those mirrored lenses of the soul. Sometimes I’m afraid that there is merely the cooling of my body and the exchange of the heat of life with the atmosphere when I die. All this learning, all this experience, all the hot flow of living surely cannot just fizzle out like a sparkling pyrotechnic.

Materialistic science says that it is so. There is no more to life than what can be observed. Yet, as I observe the cooling of bodies, I see changes in the space around them. I can observe others moving around the space they once occupied, shifting in and out, filling in here, emptying out there. On the surface of the bereaved family and community, the changes are social and are measurable. Anthropologists and sociologists study the matter constantly measuring the differences between cultures, writing paper after paper on the shifting family systems at and after times of death. But the movement I see speaks to me of deeper changes in the movement of energy and existential vacuum created from the drawing out of a being from its place in time and space.

Shodan's Prayer

2007-01-21T13:40:00.000-08:00

Years ago when I was in law enforcement, I studied the martial arts in a very traditional style and it took 12 years of hard work to achieve Shodan (first degree black belt). Soon after I tested for that rank with my Master, George Chartier, I wrote this poem.

Shodan’s Prayer

Though I master a martial art
so that I may pluck a flower
and cut with the pedal's edge
and crush bone
with its tender stem.

Though martial greatness I achieve,
That I might deflect
an attack with
only the blossom's fragrance.

Instead, I pray,
That I might master myself
so that the flower
might never be plucked
nor the bone crushed

That both may live
to feel
the morning dew
and the sun's
gentle warmth.

Jelly Bean

2007-01-20T18:51:00.000-08:00

The phone tickled my side and I knew what it meant. Super Social Worker called me from the Acute Care Unit in Pediatrics and said, “It’ll only be a few minutes and they want you here.”
“OK. I’m on the way.”

My little Honda Hybrid isn’t made for speed and I don’t speed anyway but it handles nicely. The trip to the hospital from across town was – shall we say – well done. As I puffed my way from the parking deck, my mantra was, “Hang on Jelly. Please. I wanna see you before you go. Hang on Jelly.” When I steamed into the room, I saw grandma holding her and grandpa sitting on the bed opposite and well with in hugging distance. Jelly was dying.
I made it in time to say goodbye.

Jelly was a phenomenal little girl. She was two and a half when her life ended. What made her so special was that she wasn’t supposed to live through the day she was born. In fact, her rather high-powered specialists declared her un-alive. After all she had no brain. Well, she had a little nubbin of one but she was really um – you know – sort of alive. It didn’t make sense to the white coats who live by the numbers. When her little body shook and shivered, they declared that it wasn’t a seizure because she didn’t have a brain and seizures were brain activity. It kinda reminds me of something young boys say specifically to nauseate young girls; “Hmm, looks like it, smells like it, tastes like it, good thing I didn’t step in it.” The kicker was when they refused to make her an organ donor because she couldn’t be declared brain dead - she didn’t have a brain. Now I know there are other issues around that but give me a break! Sooner or later we have to get our heads out of the numbers, come down out of sterile labs, wipe the florescent light out of our eyes and get a little sense. Some people just need to go ahead and step in it. It doesn’t hurt a damn thing, fellas and it washes off.

Really, Jelly had great care from her medical team but what sustained her was the power grid she lived in. Her caregivers were her grandparents. They arrived at a hospital soon after her birth near here and found Jelly in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit; her basinet pushed to the side. When they wanted to know why she was over there out of the way, the rather calloused and insensitive staff just shrugged and said that she was dying. The grandparents were incredulous. This beautiful baby didn’t look dead to them – in fact, she looked pretty good and after ‘lighting into the staff and raising enough hell to rattle the gates of heaven,' Jelly got the attention she deserved.

That’s where this power grid came together because M&M (grandparents) immediately began tapping the resources they needed to keep Jelly alive. She got a hospice team from us and even got the best pediatric nutritionist in the state, my wife, Sweet Dottie Ann. I didn’t know Jelly then and Dottie Ann never told me who she was but I heard plenty about her anonymously. When I got my promotion to Peds, Jelly was the first patient Dottie and I could talk about over coffee in the morning. The power grid included M&M’s family, church and a collection of smoochy little girls that M&M have flitting around that house lovin’ and huggin’ on Jelly enough to wear the skin off of her. The fact is that the grid she lived on was charged with love of all sorts, styles and from many sources.

As a pastoral counselor I was fascinated to watch a family so healthy that it could not only overcome its dysfunction but also turn it into something healing and life sustaining. As a minister I was often staggered by the way I saw the kingdom of Christ operating around a little girl with no brain and no hope to live a typical life. As a philosopher and post-modern theologian, I couldn’t take my mind off of the existential meaning of the single-minded attention M&M gave to this little one’s life. As a man, I admired the sensuality of this couple that could nurture, protect and offer love as they did.

We buried Jelly today. I was invited to “Make some comments.” I worked for hours on a trip to Raleigh and back last night and even in spare moments while I was with some friends. I sorted ideas, the poetry of her life and the meaning of Jelly’s two and a half years to come up something that could match the profundity of what I experienced in that home. When I tackled it again this morning, I knew I couldn’t begin to say enough. All I could do was say something that might make my hearers pay attention to the power of the love of God that pours through us when it has a chance.

CKRW Radio Yukon

2007-01-06T19:18:00.000-08:00

Most Americans are ridiculously ignorant about Canada and Canadians. I would be as well except that Dottie and I were fortunate enough to have made a life-long friendship with a Canadian couple. They’d moved to Winston-Salem with their two young sons to attend Piedmont Bible College (now known as Piedmont Baptist College).

We were attending First Alliance Church at Wright and Patria Streets in Winston and I mentioned to one of the members that I was having trouble with our well. He said that Dale might be able to get inside the bored well to loosen the clamp holding the plastic pipe that descended into the 30’ well. I didn’t know him but when I was directed to him, it was obvious why he was suggested. Neither of us had expanded into middle age at that time and he was built smaller than me. I held my breath when I asked him if he’d climb down into my well thinking that anybody with any sense would laugh me out of the church house. He laughed, if I remember correctly, but now I know enough about him to know that it wasn’t all about the craziness of the idea. He more than likely laughed because the idea intrigued him.

A couple of days later when I’d carefully suspended a ladder by a ¾” galvanized pipe in the well, Peggy and Dale came out to have supper with us. I was scared to death that I’d asked this perfect stranger to hang himself over a 30-foot well and risk his life to loosen a screw for me. But after supper, he snaked himself down, down until he was within reach of the clamp. Once he got down there, I started handing him tools and he started handing me wise cracks.

The clincher in our friendship came when I said, “OK here’s a screwdriver. Please don’t drop it It’s my favorite…”
“Uh, oh.”
“…Screwdriver,”

Thirty feet is a long way down and the silence between his “Uh, oh” and the kersplunck of the screwdriver hitting water was long enough to build the kind of tension that makes for a very good joke. “Screwdriver” came out of my mouth with perfect timing just after it hit water. It released all of the tension in me about asking this really good guy and perfect stranger to do this really hard and dangerous job. I nearly died with laughter. It struck me so funny that I became weak with the perfect humor of our spontaneous little vaudeville act over a hole in the ground in my front yard.

Our friendship has survived over 30 years and about 3,000 miles of distance. He eventually got a Masters in counseling and moved to the Yukon. It’s amazing for me to talk to him. In many ways, our friendship is suspended in time. When I hear his voice on the phone or read something he’s written, it’s like he’s still sprawled on my living room floor playing Space Invaders on the Atari. In other ways there’s a distance that can’t be mended. We both have suffered wounds that have scarred over. We were young in body and soul and now we’re older with many miles and Kilometers logged in different places over different roads.

I’m sitting here in my study writing this while CKRW (Radio Yukon) pumps Rock ‘n Roll through a stream of electrons into my computer. I enjoy the ads coming from businesses there in Whitehorse and the weather reports (it’s clear and 18 below right now, a virtual heat wave). I listen to that station to remind me of he and Peggy and how much Dottie and I love them. It also connects me to many other things that I want to write about in this blog that bridge the ravines of heartache and trouble in my life.

Brotherhood

2007-01-06T08:34:00.000-08:00

The Wednesday before Thanksgiving last fall was cold and rainy. I was looking for a place to do the paper work from my last visit and pulled into the Community Mosque on Waughtown Street in Winston-Salem. The wind rocked my little Hybrid car and the rain ticked at the windows in a way that made me squint my eyes at the glass to see if maybe it was sleet. But it was cozy in there and I shut the car off, set up my laptop and clicked out a report while Aretha Franklin pelted out gospel on my CD player.
Some time later, as I snapped the computer shut, a car swung into the parking lot driven by a good sized man wearing the sort of skull cap on his head that made me think that he might be a member of the mosque. In times like these, it might be a good idea to check out strangers parked beside one’s mosque and I figured it would be smart to accommodate such security measures. I touched the button to roll the driver’s side window down. Nothing happened. I felt a little confused and reached for the ignition key to start the engine hoping the man wouldn’t get the idea that I was acting suspicious. Nothing happened and a little feeling of nausea accompanied the realization that I’d run the battery down and the car wouldn’t start.
I popped the door open and the man said, “Hi, having trouble?”
“Yea, I’m Ken Bradstock. I’m a hospice chaplain. I just pulled in here to write a report on my last visit and I think I ran my battery down.” He introduced himself and asked if I had jumper cables. When I said that I didn’t but would call Triple A, he said that another member was coming and he might have a set. He said that he’d pulled in to see who I was because they’d had some vandalism lately.
Another car pulled into the mosque, this one bearing a grinning man who jumped out and wrapped his arms around me. “Ken Bradstock. I was just talking about you this week!” It was my old friend, Kahalid Griggs. “Let’s go up in the mosque, man. It’s cold.”
I’d never been in this particular mosque and I stood at the door to the worship room, admired its simple beauty and felt a sense of the holy in that place. We talked for a short time and I dug my AAA card out of my wallet and turned to the door to get a good signal on my phone. “I guess I’ll call and get a jump, Kahalid,” I said.
“That’s alright, he’s got a set.” Kahalid pointed out the door and there was the first man carrying a brand new set of jumper cables through the wind and rain.
My mouth dropped open and I said, “Did he walk up to the Dollar Store and buy a set?”
Kahalid shrugged. “I guess he did.”
When my Hybrid purred to a start, I asked him what I owed him. “He grinned and said “Community Mosque is about service. You don’t owe me anything.”
As a hospice worker I’m usually on the giving side of these kinds of exchanges but as the cold rain stung my face, the kindness of those two men warmed my heart. I felt like we were together in a brotherhood of service. All I could do is thank them and that seemed to be enough.
When thousands of the members of this community thank the staff of hospice for our spirit of service and give so generously to keep us going, it’s enough. We need to serve you as much as you need us. It’s our calling. And just as those two generous followers of Mohammed offered service to this follower of Jesus, we find ourselves in a brotherhood of hospitality, generosity and service that makes our community rich above all material standards. It’s truly how the kingdom of God works.

A Promotion

2006-03-15T08:42:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago I got what I consider to be a promotion. I was assigned to the Pediatric Team. It excites me because my wife has worked with developmentally disabled children for years and I’m fascinated by her work. I’ve listened to her stories with rapt attention to the way she nurtures those kids and the thrill she gets out of seeing them make incremental progress.

We too had a baby who was developmentally disabled. Rusty has a problem with one little gene that prevents him from processing uric acid properly. We almost lost him when he was 2 months old and I still remember the deep soul ache when I held him or watched him in his crib at the hospital. It’s made him chronically ill for 25 years and Dottie and I have struggled with wanting to coddle him to giving him little shoves out of the nest. We’ve never done that overtly but when his wings don’t work so well, we always dust him off, lug him back up into the nest and nudge him into the air again. It always scares us and always swells us with pride when he gets some lift and happily flutters his little distances.

I was drawn to troubled little babies when I did my residency at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. It’s the only Pediatric Trauma Center in the State of North Carolina and gets the toughest cases in a three or four state area. I requested a 6-month rotation in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) as the chaplain. I had 30 babies under my care – some of them less than a pound in weight. Many of them couldn’t be touched because their little bodies aren’t developed well enough to tolerate the sensory input. But I got to hold many of them and the nurses called me their “Baby Holdin’ Chaplain.” In that role I’ve felt more of the power of the Spirit of God flow through me than in any other time as a minister. It’s a feeling of intense love that moves through my body in some mysterious way and leaves me feeling like the cells of my very tissue have been cleansed with the intensity of life at it’s most basic level. I found myself unable to pray to God “the Father.” I was compelled to pray to God as a mother and when I did, I was comforted and nurtured as was, I believe, the baby in my arms.

Mothers were my teachers in that unit. They taught me how to work with unfettered love without getting in the way. At first, I was a little put off by their behavior with me at the bedside. It was a little disconcerting to have a mom talk to me and never take her eyes off the incubator. It was like talking to a person’s ear all the time. They’d lean toward the side that I was sitting while their eyes remained glued to the baby and it’s various robots. Often, I’d just slide a stool over to the incubator, sit listening to the beeping, clucking machines and just be with mom and baby. Then I’d say something like, “Your baby’s beautiful.” Mom would lean the side of her head toward me and say. “Thank you.” I’d sit a minute or two and say, “Do you love her?” Sometimes mom would react as if she couldn’t believe I’d ask such a stupid question but the answer was always, “Oh, yes.”
“Do you feel your love inside you when you look at her?”
“Very much.”
“That’s how God feels when he looks at you.”

Most of the time my line of sight from the side gave me a perfect view of the tear that would well up in mom’s eye from the bottom, wash up across her eye and spill onto her cheek in a little Niagara of love.
“Can I pray for you and your baby?”
Often a hand would grope for mine and grip with white knuckles until I’d finished. Sometimes as I was praying, I’d peek to see what mom was doing and most of the time her eyes would still be glued to the child. What incredible love.

Now you know why I consider my assignment to Peds a promotion.

Wave After Wave

2006-02-11T18:55:00.000-08:00

The first time my oldest son saw the Atlantic Ocean was late in the evening after we set up camp on a Georgia coastal island. We mounted the dune that separated our camp from the sea and the poor little guy was over whelmed by what he encountered. He began to wail like we’d never heard and as the waves rolled in he held his hands up as if pushing the them back to sea screaming, “No, no. Stop.” But the waves didn’t stop and as young parents we were concerned that he understand that the waves would neither stop nor harm him. We dragged him down the beach toward the surf until we finally realized that our efforts to normalize the phenomenon were traumatizing him and we stopped, allowing him to retreat to the top of the dune. We thought that perhaps he needed to see it in the bright daylight without the deep shadows of twilight. In the morning, we strolled across the same dune only to see him react the same way. Eventually that day our 4 year old could play contentedly a little closer to the surf but he did so with one eye on the swells that threatened him so inexplicably.

Grief is much like the surf. It builds in a swell of sorrow and crashes in on us, pushing and pulling, turning and twisting our emotions. As it rolls up on the beach of our consciousness, it hisses out into drops of salty water leaking from our eyes - trickling down our cheeks in little rivulets that eventually run dry until the next wave. Some of us believe that there is something to be feared or at least avoided in the ebb and flow of grief. We believe that incoming wave is somehow harmful and we try to hold it back in as a futile manner as my 4 year old. The Bible makes it clear that grief is normal and healthy. The Book of Lamentations is an example of deep sorrow and sanctified grief. Ecclesiastes clearly states that there is a “time to morn.” The joy of religious assurance for eternity is not meant to stem the tide of human grief but to give hope for the future end to such pain. But to be human is to be awash in loss and grief and the waves keep rolling in.

Over the years, we discover that there are more and more losses. The swell of grief we once tried to ignore or push back is now the levee busting storm surge of complicated grief and we find we need more than the gently leaking of salty tears to express our grief. We may need more than a little help to heal. It makes sense to get that help from a professional. There are grief counselors everywhere; at funeral homes, Hospice, churches and counseling centers. We can’t realistically hold back our grief any more than we can hold back the sea. Sooner or later it pops out somewhere.

Candle Power

2005-12-18T13:58:00.000-08:00

Wednesday is Winter Solstice. it's the darkest day of the year for our hemisphere. For one half of our planet, Christmas comes at the sunniest time of the year. For them it's the longest day. It's fitting to celebrate the birth of Jesus at the darkest time because he was born into darkness in more ways than in terms of the Northern Hemisphere.Thinking about Winter Solstice correctly is to not consider it in terms of darkness, but in terms of the return of light. It's the day that the earth begins it's revolution back around to the side that gives the Northern Hemisphere more light. Thursday will be a little longer than Wednesday. So, Winter Solstice is the day that our Pagan friends celebrate the return of Father Sun. Those of us who are practicing Christians don't celebrate the darkness into which Jesus was born, but the light of the love God that he brought to us.Not only was it good timing in the celestial year but it was good timing in history. It was a dark time for Jesus’ people, the Jews. Jesus came at a time when oppression for Israel was at an all-time high. The Roman appointed governor was an exceptionally cruel man and his family was about as evil as human beings can get. Jesus brought a beam of light into that dark time for his own people in the midst of that oppression.He also came to oppressed classes of people regardless of the hemisphere in which they lived. It's a shame that his name has been used to further oppress people and subject them to even more cruelty as the church its power across both hemispheres. Jesus was a prophet for the oppressed not the oppressors. They usurped his name and the power of his message to bring more darkness common folk across the planet. Jesus belongs to ordinary people not governments or corporations. The very conditions of his birth speak directly to that. Jesus was born in a barn, midwifed by a carpenter, and nested in a feedbox lined with straw borrowed from beasts of burden. The fancy-schmancy plastic nativity portrayed by the popular church and paraded up and down the aisles of wealthy malls and department stores is distasteful at best and heretical at worst.Jesus came to us - those whose families come from slavery and poverty. He's been appropriated by the rich and powerful and they have no right to him. Governments are lying when they make a claim to him and use his name to further their whims of oppression and control. His name is used to make more money than to bring light to those who live in the dimness of poverty and despair.Last week, our part of the world iced over in a storm that weighted down trees and power lines until they were ripped from root and pole. It was a time that thousands of us were reminded that of the false sense of security that modern technology brings us. We had to spend too much time bailing out basements and preserving frozen food to enjoy the quiet from the lack of machinery in our homes. But in our little house, there were hours that we sat with each other in the light of candles and oil lamps enjoying each other. There was something natural in that short time that reminded me that that the light Jesus brought was not the mega-Watt lights of stadiums but the tiny candle of hope that fits in my heart. Multi-mega Wattage and amplitude speaks of power even when its boomed in the realms of sprawling, city-sized churches and well muscled denominations. Candles glimmer in the darkness for people too poor in spirit to imagine themselves important enough for such flickering hope. One kind speaks of boardrooms, control and power the other of strength of character and love.Sometimes I hate Christianity for the way its been used to sell, overwhelm and suppress. But then the glimmering light of Jesus coming into the darkness of my discouragement reminds me that the power of the light of Christ is not in halogen filaments but in the waxy wicks of single candles glowing in each one of us - one at a time. This is the light that the darkness has not understood and until the church disconnects its power and lives in the lowly flicker of the light of Christ, it won't understand it either.

A Good Pruning

2005-12-09T18:51:00.000-08:00

Did a little pruning today. I’ve got about 15 blueberry bushes that I planted 20 years ago and they’ve gotten a little out of control since I branched out with my education. Now that I’m back and paying a little more attention to our little plot of earth, the bushes have been staring at me like a green man looking out from under eyebrows of tangled twigs. The biggest one took the biggest hit today. It was far too tall to pick berries without a ladder and too tangled to even reach in and pick them.

I really cut the thing back and I’m a little worried that I might have gone too far. It won’t produce much this year and I’ll have to keep an eye on the sprouts that’ll shoot out in a long, straight crop of buggy whip-looking wood that won’t do anything toward making berries for this coming season. I’ll need to trim them to force smaller sprouts out lower on the bush.

The second bush wasn’t so tangled and I left a lot of berry-producing branches on it but I did a pretty good number on it too. I still have a bunch to do but this is the first year since I’ve had them that I started pruning this early in the year. I hope I’m doing the right thing by them. I certainly love blueberries and especially love walking by them and stripping the twigs of a hand full of thumb-sized berries. When they’re ripe in late July and early August, they’re sun-warmed and full of juice. It just makes my mouth water to think about them.

When I’m squeezing my loppers through a thick branch or clipping dead wood off of the living with my shears, I can’t help but think about God’s work in my life. I also wonder if he worries about me and how I’ll respond to the cutting. My bushes are a little more predictable than I and in some ways a little more resilient. After all, with the bushes, I’m dealing with wood and roots; God’s dealing with free will and a fragile ego. I’m never sure where those sprouts will pop out but God has to anticipate a thousand different probable outcomes with me. If he prunes this, will I move there? If this is whacked, will I flare up with anger or cower in pain? If that little habit is isolated and pointed out, will another as bad or worse show up?

I’m not sure he knows what’ll happen. I think it’s possible that God is able to calculate out the whole spectrum of possible outcomes for every scenario. But I don’t believe he can absolutely know which choices I’ll make until I make them. Granted, he may know before I’m fully conscience of my decision but he allows me my “head” (as horsemen call it when they loosen the rein and allow the horse to pick the path).

Out of that comes two things. One is that there is a sense of control for me. I can choose to be aware of God’s work in my life and respond in the best possible way. In my dealings with fruit, I don’t have to consider that the plants are aware of me as I am of the inner and outer workings of God in my life. It’s true that I’m dealing with a living thing just as is God, but it’s not quite the same. My bushes have no conscience ability to shoot a sprout here, die off there or flower at all. I can choose and be aware of choosing to go with the work of God in my life or not. I have some control until the day I die and possibly beyond.

Second, God must indeed have the pleasure and the agony of cropping, pruning and weeding a sentient (aware) being. It must be infinently tedious to work on the likes of this man who is just as capable of raring up to fight tooth and nail as he is to dive under a rock and hide (along with infinite variations on those extremes). I enjoy pruning, especially when I’m working with shaping. I’m not very knowledgeable about pruning fruit but I can shape a tree to make a beautiful thing. It’s not hard for me to believe that God is challenged by the work. Pruning for me is a work of art. I am too. God’s work in my life is a thing of beauty and as my soul grows it’s own way under the care of such a master artist and gardener, it becomes a masterpiece. I’m just not there yet – not quite.

Gratitude and Giving

2005-12-03T18:17:00.000-08:00

I watched the sleet come and go this afternoon with some disappointment. I like the way it peppers the windows and makes me want to snuggle up to one of my critters (or maybe even my wife). My house is a warm little place with lots of happy stuff trotting around like a pack of puppies. But, I’m grateful that the sleet didn’t get worse and make the highways slick. The foul weather always helps me get into Christmas too and when it hits this time of year, I think about all the good things in my life that comforts and warms me. It makes me want to give.
I think it’s interesting that the season of giving and light follows the season of gratitude. Gratitude is a spiritual discipline. When we practice gratitude, giving always seems to follow The kind that attracts me is the gratitude that shows respect for my effort to give, and for the meaning of the gift.
There’s a restaurant in my area of ministry that I always go to. One day I got excellent service and tipped accordingly. From then on, I began getting better and better service and my tips got higher and higher. Now when I go in, I don’t even have to order. “Find yourself a seat, Honey,” the waitresses drawl. “That’ll be ice water with lemon and a course chopped sandwich with lettuce and tomato. Right?” Right. My sandwiches are just a little thicker now and once in a while, I notice my desert doesn’t show up on the ticket. There’s a relationship between me and the girls that work there based on appreciation for each other. They go beyond what good employees are supposed to do and I go beyond what good customers are supposed to do. There’s a mutual attitude of gratitude and giving that’s mature and equal.
Is it possible to live all areas of our lives this way? Can we be parents and lovers and friends and children with a mutual attitude of gratitude and giving? Is it possible to drive our highways this way? To allow someone in and thank with a wave when they let us in? Is it possible to do business this way? Can we give a good deal as well as we get one? Can we set a fair price for good value? Can we be good employees and employers giving and taking with mutual respect? Can I work a little harder to save the company money and can my employer give me a few hours to get a child from day care?
Must I always get before I give? I believe that my attitude of gratitude is a spiritual exercise and it comes before any gift I might receive. I’m grateful first and out of that I give—not because I was given a gift and therefore I owe one in return. The waitresses at my favorite barbecue joint didn’t expect a better tip than usual, they just did a good job and I was grateful. Gratitude generates giving. When we give out of the expectation of a gift in return, we’re looking for payment.

Back Again

2005-10-13T19:50:00.000-07:00

I've seemed to have lost momentum since the last post. I was finishing my doctorate and frankly, I was exhausted. Since the last post all I've done is finish my final project, rest, play computer games and sleep. I'm getting caught up on all of that, though and am ready to start writing again. It took me about 18 years to come to this place and one of my struggles after graduation in May was just not knowing what to do. I wasn't even sure who I was without the constant effort to study, write, work, be a father and a husband and - whew. Things are a little more normal now and my threats to start another doctorate have gotten thinner and further apart.

So, I've got some things stored up to write about and hope to make posts more frequent. I hope I still have some readers - somewhere out there.

I'm shocked to discover that a set of total jerks have used my blog to advertise. Please do not click on these advertisers and please promise me you'll never use them. They're without principle or ethics. I certainly wouldn't want to do business with such low life, morally bankrupt business people. I'm asking the publisher how to get them off of my site and I've had to ask you folks who want to comment to please do the word recognition thing to protect us both.

A Rainy Night

2005-06-01T22:33:00.000-07:00

It’s dripping out there under the poplars tonight--my kind of night. The air is sparkling with the freshly washed scent of a late spring rain and the honeysuckle has added a spritz of sweetness. It all rinses the distress out of my mind/body and I feel like snuggling up to something sacred.

So I find my mind easing away from its moorings and drifting out toward the numinous edges of existence. The clicking of the keyboard is like oars dipping in water or the squeaking of the oarlocks. Every word is a stroke out away from the pilings of the material world and my muscles droop with relaxation like the gentle pitch of a wooden hull into the shallow troughs of gentle water.

I need this semi drifting into the darkness of God. It refreshes and heals me as it closes in like a cool veil. I wish I had a tent to sleep in tonight. The smattering of rain and the flapping tugs of the breeze on the fabric would help me feel a part of it, which is exactly where I need to be.
Thanks be for rainy nights.

Grinding wheel

2005-05-14T18:31:00.000-07:00

Tuesday turned into a grinding day with more dust produced than corn meal when I met a social worker at Danny’s house in a bad part of the city. I knew that it had been decided that he would have to be discharged but I was avoiding the topic. I didn’t want to let him go. He came to us in August because he was dying of Cirrhosis of the liver and was assigned to the East Team. Last month, the chaplain had all he could stand of Danny’s alcoholic craziness and asked me to take him. I relished the idea because I like hard cases and am usually bored by little ladies in well-appointed bedrooms who are attended by paid caregivers rented by well-heeled children. They’re sweet enough patients and they’re stories can be inspiring and precious but they don’t have enough grit and struggle to keep me fully engaged. Danny and his ilk are a different matter.

One of those of Danny’s ilk was another patient who got my attention named Richard. He was a man in his 40’s who had suffered from spinal meningitis about 18 years ago. He was a Heron addict and was dying of cancer. Richard had lived in incredible pain for years. He also had absolutely no church association nor had he ever had any spiritual training at all in his life. We’d had two visits and had gotten to the place that I identified his description of his religious feeling as “agnostic.” I affirmed that it was a legitimate religious position and that it could be the basis for a healthy spiritual search. That was during the first visit. Amazingly enough, Richard wanted me to see him once a week.

During the second visit, I got Richard to talk about his farm and when I pointed out that his love for the land by asking him about the smell of the soil when he plowed, his face lit up. I told him that the feeling that he had was spiritual. Richard was getting it but when the RN and the social worker got there an hour later, Richard had tampered with the pump and was blitzed. I wasn’t surprised – it was a typical response for an addict after such a hard session. I felt like Richard and I had the beginning of a special relationship and helping him with healthy spiritual formation was going to be exciting.

Both of those men were considered to be problems for their respective teams. Danny especially had made himself a headache with his alcoholic ways. Richard was on his way to sucking the team dry too. But I was making progress with both of them. It was a source of gratification and in the privacy of my car as I drove away from their respective homes; my work was a source of pride. The social worker on the Danny's Team had told me over and over that she was grateful for the way I related to and worked with Danny. It was making her job easier.

So Tuesday morning we sat there in Danny’s one room rent house and informed him that because he was not “declining” we had to discharge him. Danny’s face was incredulous as the information soaked into his mind. He became sarcastic and angry and he began to tear up and grieve the impending loss of the social worker and me. Within minutes, Danny began to decompensate and move into his shell like some hermit crab. I could feel the defenses going up and we were losing ground in minutes that had taken the social worker months and me weeks to build. Just as we began to pull off some pretty amazing work with him, my phone rang.

I cut it off. It rang again. “Go ahead and get that.” Danny waved at me and the damned little box.

“Ken. This is Adrian. Richard just died and the family said that they need you.” I flipped the thing shut and began to find a way to patch up this conversation so I could drive the 25 miles to Thomasville to face Richard’s corpse. It didn’t work. Danny believed we’d abandoned him and this was reinforcing that.

I was swamped with emotions because the struggle to keep Danny afloat was intense. I was angry at the system because while it’s true that Danny was not currently dying we were his only support in the midst of his mental illness. But I also know that the administration can and does often support some patients with special funds but that Danny, because of his difficult mental illness, would never be considered for that. I also am aware that our agency doesn’t do well with mental illness nor does our government. The treatment in our own mental health system in this county is sorry. I was also frustrated because my work was interrupted and I was unable see even the minimal success that I’d hoped for. I got into my car and headed to the farm swimming in frustration, grief and anger that I lost both of these patients in a space of a morning. My one hope was that Danny agreed to let me come back in the afternoon to finish the conversation.

At Richard’s farm deep in a rural county, the cars bearing friends and family had created a parking lot out of the secluded yard around the mobile home. Richard’s sister met me half way across the yard with pain on her face and hurt in her eyes. “Tell me he’s in paradise.” She whispered in my ear as she hugged me. I held her and said quietly, “Of course he is.” My heart ached and at the same time I worried that she would ask me to prove that in evangelical Christian terms and I couldn’t do it. My assurance had come out of my Quaker theology and sometimes that’s impossible to explain to Bible Belt Christians.

The funeral home was already there and waiting for me so we gathered in the bedroom around Richard’s body. My words choked in my throat in a way that they rarely do at a “time of death.” I stroked his hair and noticed how smooth his face was without the pain and spasms of both the cancer and the meningitis. I rarely feel affection for the bodies of my patients but I did for Richard and when the funeral home personnel needed me to help with Richard’s rather long and large body (he wasn’t fat but he was a big man) I was sickened by the placid and lifelessness of his unruly limbs that had to be gathered up and strapped down like meat on that narrow gurney.

Why was this so hard for me? Why do I feel grief for him even as I write these words? At this minute, I wonder how much more I can do in this business.

Later that afternoon, I swung by Danny’s to finish up our conversation. My hope was that we could formulate some hope in him and solidify his sense that he was being discharged because he was not dying and how that was good news. Danny was already drinking.

“Are you offended if a man takes a drink?
“No, but I’m offended if he poisons himself.”
“You ARE offended.”
“Yes, I’m offended that you are poisoning yourself with alcohol.”
“That’s not true.”
“It IS true, Danny. Your liver is dying because of your alcoholism and every single drink is poisonous for you.”

“Well, I’ll just take this to the kitchen then.” He pulled a bottle of cheap liquor from beside his chair. And walked sideways to the kitchen like a dog whose rear end is trying to get ahead of the front end. “I can’t talk to you without a drink.”

The visit got no more productive than that and I became anxious to get out of there because I was on the verge of telling him off. My anger was beginning to simmer at the top of the pot and it might spill down the side and into the flame.

The social worker was sorry that the visit went poorly and my frustration was coming out of so many different directions that I couldn’t figure out where to aim my anger. I snapped the phone shut after our conversation and didn’t know which direction to point the car. I just sort of followed the bumper until I ended up somewhere.

Losing the Goo

2005-05-11T22:31:00.000-07:00

My doctor has been after me for years to go to Weight Watchers to loose weight. She swears by the program as do a lot of people. I don’t know, maybe I didn’t go with an open mind. But at any rate, here’s the letter I wrote her after I checked it out.

Dear Patty,

I won’t see you for a while so I wanted to let you know that I checked out Weight Watchers just as I promised.

It was a very interesting meeting and I’m really glad I went. I’d had a bad day having lost two patients that meant a lot to me and was really wishing it wasn’t so late in the day because I needed supervision. I decided to swing by the Weight Watchers office to see if I could attend a meeting for a distraction or maybe even a little amusement.

A little lady in her 70’s met me at the door and invited me to stay for the meeting and if I wanted to join, I could sign up and pay at the end. I took her up on it and the room eventually filled with all sorts of people (mostly women). The lady in her bright yellow shorts and blouse eventually went to the front of the room where she began cavorting around the room grinning so broadly that I thought her nicotine-stained teeth would flash a welcome sign. Her voice was that of a long-time smoker and sounded like sandpaper on a rock. “Hi every body!” She graveled.

“Hi Zoe.” The crowd cheered back

“Why’s everybody so grim? Come ON people – I mean REALLY…. Did somebody DIE?” (I started to raise my hand and say with a cheery voice – “Yeah, Zoe – wanna list?” But I didn’t, I just flinched.)

“Well, we have a WINNER tonight! Come on up, Karen! She’s a 10 percenter! Yeaaaaaaaa! Everybody give her a hand. Yeaaaaaaaaaaaa!” Zoe’s face was forced into a game show host’s smile that utilized every crack in her nicotine-thickened epidermis. She smacked her hands together with her fingers all splayed, her hands vibrating out a fleshy tattoo that matched her cracked and yellowed grin in an odd Stephen King sort of way.

Zoe went around the room handing out a generous smattering of plastic gizmos and sticky stars to reward the crowd for whatever she thought might generate a “yeaaaaaaa” from the group like a second grade teacher. I should have been nauseated by this time but I found the whole thing kind of amusing that the room was full of adults who paid to be there and seemed to be caught up in getting gold stars for “only gaining .8”

She started on the other side of the room. “Do we have any celebrations in this section?”

“Zoe,” one girl spoke up, “I graduated from college last Friday.” Zoe sucked air and covered her mouth with the tips of her fingers.

“You did? Isn’t that WONDERFUL! Come ON everybody! Yeaaaaaaaaaaa! (smack, smack, smack, smack, smack)” Zoe ceremoniously tore off another star and handed it to the young woman. One section at a time, Zoe made her way around the room, not hearing a damn thing anybody said except what she could turn into a cheap cheer with her prancing and gooey demeanor.

“Everybody. This is Ken. He’s our guest tonight and a hospice employee. Hospice people are soooooo wonderful! I just love them. Lets welcome him. Yeeaaaaaaaa! (smack, smack, smack). Oops, you know what? I left something in the back room! I’ll go get it!”

Zoe disappeared stage right and reappeared with a miniature basketball and a swimming pool noodle. “I brought these things out so that we could talk about something very special tonight (her voice lowered dramatically so that it sounded like it was grating on a bigger rock). Do you remember when you were 7 and you played? What did you play when you were 7?” She pointed to one of the three men in the room.

“I played soccer.”

“I played softball” one woman volunteered.

“I rode bikes.” Another said.

“OK. I want everybody to break up into small groups for 10 minutes and talk about how you played when you were 7.

I waited until she was grinning the other way and scooted out the door without paying. When I got home, I jumped in the shower and washed the goo off. Then I weighed myself and you know what? You were right! When I got all the icky sap off, I weighed .8 less! Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! (smack, smack, smack, smack) I did lose weight at Weight Watchers.

Tell you what I’ll do. I’ll go back if you’ll give me a script for an unlimited supply of nausea meds.
Love,

Dr. Ken Bradstock

P.S. Dottie reminded me when I told her this story that Zoe was our dentist’s office manager and embezzled thousands of dollars from his practice. She also failed to file hundreds of dollars of insurance claims on our family’s care along with many other families. “Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaa! (smack, smack, smack, smack)

Mingo

2005-04-20T13:36:00.000-07:00

My middle son is a sweet 23 year-old who suffers with some mental and cognitive disabilities. He often appears at my bedside looking down at me with his eyes wide with the pain of his inexplicable life experiences and the expectation that I can make sense out of the things he’s forced to go through. This morning it was more than that.
“Daddy, Daddy. Mingo’s been hit on the road.”
“Oh, no. OK, I’m getting up.”
We’d adopted the Greyhound about 10 years ago and he was getting pretty old. He was one of the most beautiful creatures I’ve ever lived with. I’ve never experienced an animal that was so full of love and affection and serenity. He was a scaredy cat though. Everything frightened him and his nature was to put distance between danger and himself at the rate of about 40 miles per hour. That’s why we never really worried about him being on the road. Whining engines, humming tires, banging tailgates on monster dump trucks sent him acres away in seconds if they surprised him. So why did he walk out in from of one? I think his senses were diminished by his age and he just wasn’t aware of the monster that was about to eat him.
Mingo was mangled. His body was broken and twisted with his chest cavity ripped open and a lung globbed out on the asphalt. I took his bed out to use as a stretcher and felt the coldness of the lung when I picked it up to put it with him on his bed. One of his ribs was naked in the bloody hole. I suspect that his end was so fast that his mind never had time to grasp the flood of sensations as his bones broke and flesh tore.
Why write about such gruesome images? I write them because they’re stuck in my head and because I work with death every day. I know that I have to move them from the interior to the exterior in a way that will heal me from my loss and in a way that will help to heal my culture.
We don’t want to touch death as I did this morning. We sterilize it in our modern cathedrals of medicine and science with its bean counting and gowned and gloved priesthood. My two sons and I dug a grave with Ming lying in a wheelbarrow nearby. The middle son helped me lift him from the road into our one-wheeled gurney and the youngest cried as we dug the hole. I kept him home from school to do it because it was important for me to have him near and because he needed to touch death as a human being not as a subject of medical science.
“People used to do this for each other all the time. When someone would die, the men in the community would get together and dig a grave and the women would wash the body. There was no embalming and so they had to get the body in the ground fast.”
“How long ago, Dad? In the time of Jesus?
“For thousands of years before that, son.”
Except for occasional instructions from me on how to handle a shovel to cut roots or make the walls of the grave straight, we dug in silence. I knew there was healing in the work. I knew there was healing in the soil. The youngest likes history, so he made some comments about the family graveyards he’s heard about scattered around on family farms. The middle son just worked.
We soon loaded up and went to a nearby nursery and bought a beautiful little red, Japanese maple. I wanted Mingo’s body to feed something as beautiful as it decomposed in the earth. Then the three of us laid him in the ground and simultaneously covered him and planted the tree. We raked the spot clean; pressure washed the road where pieces of my good friend were still embedded in the lifeless black surface.
Occasionally people drove by either staring straight ahead or glancing at us as if the strange work crew they saw were alien to their road-world. Locked inside machines all protected from our humanity and their own, they didn’t even seem curious about life outside the windshield.
Life that melts into more life – cycles of living and dying and living again; I’ve got a little ceremony to plan for tonight to honor my buddy Mingo and his living out the plan of the Creator. My hope is that he misses me as much as I miss him.

Trailing the Crepe

2005-03-22T20:04:00.000-08:00

Well, I’ve got another funeral tomorrow and just to tell you the truth, I’m not happy about it. I never like funerals on the front end. I dread them because of the overcast of sorrow they carry around with them like dark and damp mosquito netting draped all over. I guess it’s the same thing that people feel about reading this blog. In the blog ratings (believe or not there are such things) this one keeps dropping. Who wants to read about death and dying? Who wants to go to funerals?

Actually, we have a chaplain where I work who loves to do them. He’s a strange bird but he’s loved by the hospice staff and his patients because he gets something about funerals that I only admit about half way through them; they are incredibly healing if they’re done right.

My sister jokes about an incident when she was attempting to be the teen sophisticate at a banquet with some very important people at the head table. She went to the lady’s room and upon her return, detoured across in front of the room to be seen. It was only after she was seated next to her date and her best friend that she discovered that she’d trailed a streamer of toilet paper all across her parade route.

I feel like that when I leave the family at the grave side except that the streamer is black crepe and after having facilitated so much grief, it flaps unceremoniously in the tail wind of my car like a coattail hanging out of the driver’s door. I’m glad it’s over they’re glad it’s over and we all hope that the preacher gets out of sight ASAP.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, there’s no resentment in that wish to be rid of me nor is there in my wish to be gone, it’s just that there comes a time when the healing has to be about drying tears not bringing them. The best thing for me to do after saying all the right things is to mount up and ride off into the sunset. It’s sunset on this tragedy that brings the cooling breezes of a more personal night and a restful slumber.

Meanwhile, I need to think about John and what I know about him and how to make poetry out of his dying. Not so that there is an abundance of pretty words but so that people can be free to weep and then to heal. And there it is. Just what Chaplain Fred knows about funerals that makes him so good – it’s all about healing. God, help me remember that.

Nanny and The Princess

2005-03-15T22:25:00.000-08:00

Steve’s a lucky man. I told him so when I was there last Monday. He was sitting on the steps leading from the basement room while his mother-in-law, Nanny, lay nearby on the sofa and his granddaughter rumbled up-and-down-and-all-around the steps, my chair and her Nanny. They’re 90 years apart in age. Nanny is 94 and Princess is 4. This was shared like some sort of insider knowledge that I was let in on rather than clinical information. I was intrigued with the idea as I watched Nanny and the Princess interact.

I asked the princess if I could write a story about her and publish it on the web in my blog and she grinned a little at the idea and said I could but I couldn’t use her name because of the HIPA law. We tried to figure out a name I could call her. Her pink jacket says “Princesses” all across the back like a team jacket for some Tinker Bell squad. So Princess it is.

Of course, in the words of Joe Friday, all the names in this blog are changed, “to protect the innocent.” I really didn’t want to change Steve’s name because his real one fits him and his solid masculine presence in Nanny’s darkened basement room. He loves her and I can see it when they have these little barbed exchanges that are two-thirds ribbing. It’s said in the house that he can do more with Nanny than even her daughter, Ann (I used “Ann’ here because it sorta fits her and I like the name). Ann exudes patience with Nanny and Steve. Sometimes I hear her exasperation and worry that this all is harder on her than anyone will ever know. But she is a feminine counterpart to Steve and it all seems to be working as well as it could under the circumstances. They are a pretty incredible team in the matter of caring for Nanny and the Princess.

I decided to write about this because the Princess brought me her Tinker Bell Squad Jacket and pointed out the three princesses embroidered on the back. She informed me that they were, “Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and some other figure that I never heard of from, no doubt, some Disney film. So in my ornery style with bright little girl types, I purposely got them backwards over and over in ways that had Princess standing with her hands on her hips saying, “NO, that not right.” (Except she did the “no” like little girls do when they’re annoyed – “NO wa”) I looked over at Nanny and she had a look of pleasure on her face that I loved and I knew I had to share the magic of the moment.

“Oh, this is Cinderella and THIS is Sleeping Beauty.”
“NO wa. THIS is Sleeping Beauty and THIS is Cinderella.”
“Okay, okay. I got it. Wait a minute, who’s THIS one? I know THIS is Cinderella – “
Groaning at my utter stupidity, “NO wa.”
(Nanny was still adoring her great grand daughter with her eyes and the love flowing from her, across the floor in front of the grumbling gas space heater, past my legs, spiraling all around the little girl was like pixie dust)

I looked up at Steve who had had an awful cold. “You’re a lucky man, Steve. You don’t feel like it right now but you’re a lucky man.”

“I dow id. Imb a lucky bann.”

There’s so much that’s hard about hospice but when I see a family create magic out of the sheer hard work of caring for each other, my spirit is lifted on pink sparkling pixie dust spiraling ‘round and ‘round between the heavens and the earth where love really works.

I’m a lucky man too, Steve.

Memorial Service for Irene

2005-02-21T06:54:00.000-08:00

Hospice work is about love and service. When I visit patients and their families, like most all hospice workers, I visit them all out of a sense of the love of God. But there are always patients that we go a little beyond that general sense of loving care. All of us in Hospice find people that we fall in love with and the team that visited Irene fell in love with her. I can’t speak for them but as I reflected on losing her, I’m aware that she was special to me for many reasons.

There’s always something about a person that hooks us into love whether it’s physical beauty, or the way a person carries themselves or perhaps it’s a sharp mind but there’s always something. Irene hooked me with her fish. I’m not sure if it was Irv’s demonstration of his love for her by digging pond after pond after pond or if it was the closed circuit TV over which she could watch them when the weather was bad, or the way she named the frogs that were drawn to the pools of water. On thinking about it, I think I fell in love with the way she delighted in them as she fed them. There was a look of the natural mother in her when she scattered the feed from the deck and like the rest of us in this world, I always need that kind of inviting motherhood.

As I sat with the family yesterday and heard about her love for children that were not born from her physically, I knew that I was right about her. She had a way of being the mother that flowed from her to everybody in the family and anybody else for whom she cared. The evidence was in the way she made sure that people were remembered with cards on their special days, dressing Elmo up in playful ways and even in over disciplining Bonnie a little because she was the first child.

But when we fall in love with others we get to move beyond that first attraction and I did so with Irene as well. It wasn’t long before I saw other qualities in her that attracted me. One was that very bright mind that was so well educated with travel and life in other countries. It was obvious to me that she was a wise woman whose wisdom came from the ability to learn quickly and turn learning into both creativity and practicality. When we love others as did Irene and the hospice team who served her, our love is fed by the things we learn about them and Irene was always surprising us with new dimensions of herself.

My first encounter with one facet of Irene was her naming two of the frogs after George Bush and Dick Cheney. It delighted me to laughter and Irene laughed with me as she enjoyed her own joke all over again. She could also laugh at herself as demonstrated when she always seemed to go the wrong way and find that the air tube was too short to get out on the deck. The fussing and clucking she did over that stupid tube was something that tickled me every time. Her family has better stories about her sense of humor but her battle with the tube and the frog’s names are the two that she gave me in our short friendship.

Another facet that I saw of Irene was her deep spirituality. The word, “spirituality” has become a popular one that’s used to differentiate between the systems of religion of which so many people have grown tired and a sense of the presence of God in our lives. While Irene saw to it that her kids got some training in religion, it’s obvious by the stories they tell that she wasn’t all that impressed with church religion. She was, however, a woman of God. I know that because as one who works in the spirit world all the time, I’m aware of those things and the Bible says, “our spirits bear witness.” In other words our spirits know each other beyond the physical appearance of our bodies. The presence of Irene’s soul was one of genuine love and I knew when I was with her that her relationship with God was good and healthy. There were things about spiritual health that she knew instinctively and while our conversations were pastoral and confidential, I can assure you that Irene’s soul was quite alive and mature. She liked to talk about soul matters and she demonstrated her wisdom to me often in the questions she asked and the things she caught on to as we talked. Irene was not as well trained as I in spiritual matters but her soul was far more mature.

Irene and I never talked about heaven or what she believed about that. It didn’t seem to be on her mind. I don’t think she was ignorant about the after life but she had a comfortable lack of concern about it. Another way of saying that is that in my opinion, Irene’s eternal destiny was settled in her mind and there was no need to belabor the topic. If the term “saved” is important to you, I can say with all honesty that I believe Irene was “saved.” Her eternal soul is safe in the arms of the Savior.

I don’t know how you’re going to go on without her but I know that you will. I know that she gave each of you a little of herself along with wonderful memories of an incredible mother and wife. Thank you for sharing her with us and allowing us to be apart of your family for a short time. Amanda, Leslie and I will never forget her and you as you all will never forget her. Use her memory to strengthen yourselves and to care for others. Use her memory to heal from the loss of her and most of all, use her memory to draw closer to God in whatever way is best for you and yours.

2nd James

2005-02-05T19:48:00.000-08:00

James’ neighborhood is an enclave of African Americans in a county that introduces itself with a confederate flag easily seen from the West bound lane of an interstate near here. The homes are a modern brick ranch style with basements (I think) and was, at one time, a very pretty neighborhood. It still is pretty if you squint your eyes to filter out the creeping shabbiness. It’s not the sort of shabbiness from neglect just from hard use and thin checkbooks. I like it because it’s occupied by working class folk who remind me of my own kind. Not that my family would put up with the level of wear found in this community much but that they certainly wouldn’t feel out of place here; nor do I.

My maternal grandmother never could see that the rolled felt siding ordered 50 years before from a Sears & Roebuck Catalog was threadbare and worn out. “Shabby” would be a fitting word for it as perched there near the top of a mountain in the Pennsylvania Appalachians. Her vision of that house was about the man that unrolled that stuff and tacked it up to make her home warm and beautiful a third of the way through the last century. After my grandfather died, the house became a memorial to him until she died some time later. I like to believe that the homes I see in James’ neighborhood have the same loving patina.

When I drove up Friday, there was a school bus pulling away and kids were scattering across yards toward various homes dragging book bags with their coats in odd positions – over their heads, hanging off backs, fronts and all the other odd ways kids drape fabric these days. I started to offer James’ grandkids a ride but realized that they didn’t know me well enough yet and I drove on to the house. I also knew that the house would be rumbling with their energy in a very short time and I wanted to get situated with James before it did.

I couldn’t wait to get back there with him because I’d already made three visits within a week so that I could get used to his toothless, stroked-out speech. I understood much more Monday and I was right cocky about how well trained my ear was by today. “G’on back,” Marcy said and when I pushed the door to his bedroom open, I saw James propped up in the hospital bed. I pulled the kitchen chair from its parking spot in front of the closet door, spun it around on one leg and straddled it so I could rest my chin on the back to listen to James. He had a space heater cranked up to blast furnace temps and I eyeballed the thing knowing it’d cook me before this visit was up. God, I hate the stuffy heat of old people’s sick rooms. I actually passed out visiting with one elderly man in a nursing home one time. I was with a chaplain on a ride-along right after I started with hospice during orientation. She’s a Holiness Pentecostal by denomination and I accused her of praying the Spirit into me but we both knew I’d passed out from the heat in the room. We still laugh about it.

I leaned forward with my arms folded across the back of the chair and said a sentence or two to prime James’ stream of talk smugly thinking that I now had his speech down and was really going to hear some good stuff this time. James started talking, “Ah waa goa from taaa mma muu-m ann.” He pointed to one of the pictures on the wall. “My wife died,” I interpreted from a few sounds I recognized. “Ma nabooo gana sic annn nied abouu yara anooo.” I leaned forward and turned my concentration up until I was practically split from all reality but James’s moving lips and his one clear eye. James went on – and on and on and my eyes got heavier and heavier and I caught my mind wandering like a drifting phonograph arm with a worn needle.
Soon, I noticed that my eyes kept trying to roll up as the lids slid down. I pulled them down with sheer determination, raising my eyebrows to lift the lids. I was hot and could feel the cuffs on my shirt beginning to irritate my wrists, the blood right under the skin was slowing to a consistency of roofing tar and I realized that I did not understand anything of James story. I rubbed my eyes, refocused myself and shifted in the chair casting a hateful glance at the fiery little space heater. Dammit! I thought I understood this man. I was getting frustrated and losing focus on James and thinking too much about myself. I had to refocus over and over but it didn’t help. His speech was so slurred that I just couldn’t catch much of anything. Finally I noticed beads of sweat on his forehead and I interrupted with, “Are you hot? I noticed you’re sweating a little (Thank you Jesus)”. Yeah, ah goa a ann oou feer yuss lugg e euu. I found the fan, Unplugged the damm heater and just knew that things could only get better But they only got cooler. I never could understand what James was saying. I left the room sad and pretty well discouraged. Marcy said that his speech does get worse with exhaustion. He’d had quite a few visitors before me that day.

The Book of James

2005-01-24T19:11:00.000-08:00

The RN said on the phone that the family was ready to see me. They’d said at first that James is Holiness minister and that he had plenty of spiritual support and did not want or need a chaplain.
When I arrived I found a vibrant, active home in dire need of paint and furnished with – whatever - including homemade shelves nailed into rickety boxes. Painted with what was handy, the shelving system in this well worn home was stuffed with everything from kitchen things to linens. It was a mish-mash home that seemed to have one rule: damn the decorating, full speed ahead. I was escorted into the very back bedroom where James was enthroned in an older model electric chair with a joystick on one arm. He was one of the darkest men I’ve ever seen with a craggy face and hands that felt like leather gloves. He offered me his left hand because the right was disabled in a stroke about 30 years ago. His daughter told me with considerable pride that daddy never would concede to the stroke but set out at once to lick it and invented ways to go on with his manual labor. I admired him as soon as soon as our skin made contact. That thick slab of a hand grasp mine and I looked into the very face of honesty and integrity. Behind James was a faded photograph of a handsome minister in the robe and sash of a holiness preacher and the walls were lined with a picture gallery made up of children, grandchildren and great -grands. James’ deceased wife had the honor of several portraits all frayed and boxed in five and dime frames. I made the rounds asking about each picture until I got to a clipping of Karlov the wrestler and I said, “And this must be a picture of you.” I peeked a look around to see if he was laughing and saw a grin sneaking around his weathered cheeks. The next item was one of those mechanical Santa Clauses with a saxophone. I suspected that back in the day he had gyrated to Jingle Bell Rock or something. I think maybe his batteries had weakened a week or so after Christmas several years ago and he had an honored place in this room because some grandchild had given the gift. James was still grinning when I pointed at Santa and said. “And that’s me.” He laughed out of his belly and the one eye that was not weeping and cloudy brightened from the deep joy the joke brought to the surface.

My first goal, as with any patient was to convey the sincere respect for life experience and the Spirit of Christ that lives within. I made a special effort with this man because he was marginalized by many more factors than his status as a dying man. First, he needed to know in his heart that I respected his faith practice. The holiness tradition is often regarded many as “low church” and the faith of the unwashed poor; not a well thought of belief system among the well-bricked main line denominations. It was also important in my mind to let him know in as gentle a way as possible that I respected his experience as a man of color. I figured that genuine respect was not something he would have often received from white men in his time. But mostly, my theology as a Quaker demands that I respect him as a bearer of the Light of Christ. We don’t demand that one receive some ritual baptism or say words of acceptance so common in the protestant church. We believe that Christ dwells in the heart of every person.

My second goal was to hear the story that I’d hoped he’d know that I treasured. A man with as many scars on his hands and arms as James has many more on his heart and I wanted to hear about them. They speak of grizzled humanity and a life full of living. I tire quickly of whining rich people whose compulsive achievements gild only their financial portfolios and who suffer in only the trendiest ways. Their accounts grow full on the backs of men like James and their eyes avert away if they must look upon his suffering. But the Kingdom belongs to this dark-skinned man according to the teaching on the Mount.

Beat Me Daddy, Eight to the Bar

2005-01-10T18:44:00.000-08:00

Joyce is an 80-something woman whose face and smile still reflect the beauty drawn out of her by the law of nature that dictates that everything wears out. Her lips are still full and sensual and her hair is almost perfect in even its pure white condition. Her bones are covered with soft skin from what I can tell by holding her hand. They’re prominent now rather than hidden by feminine padding and strapped upright into a wheelchair. One of those alarms that consist of a clamp, a cord, and an obnoxious buzzer droops between her shoulder and the blanket on her bed. I suppose it’s there to warn the staff if she drifts too far from her designated spot.

Joyce is sagged over the foam pad that keeps her in her chair and over in a corner of the room is another sagging human; head drooped to the chest and tied safely in facing the wall, never rousing during my entire visit with Joyce. Once again, the nursing home gives me a sense of overwhelming despair even in this one which is uncommonly beautiful.

When I met Joyce on my first visit I also met her long-time buddy. The two of them were two thirds of one of those Swing era trios with close harmony and bouncy music. I asked Joyce and her friend if they were called “The Andrews Sisters” and they laughed a sparkling kind of laugh that girlfriends enjoy in the moment of a private joke. I added my Santa Claus basso to it and we filled the hall with musical joy. Since then, whenever I feed my Andrew Sisters CD to my car stereo, I think of her. “Beat Me Daddy, Eight to the Bar” and “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy from Company B” makes me strip the age from Joyce in my mind and I see her and her buddies swinging to the mike and get down close to it -cheek to cheek as they meld harmony into one glorious sound. I can picture her sensuous lips shaping the air into the silly poetry of “Pennsylvania-Six- Five Oh, Oh, Oh” and the kids at the dance sing with them as they shake off the horrors of World War II. God, why am I so down about this withered presence I see tied to a chair? I don’t want her to go away. Maybe it’s my own mortality that I’m facing – again. Maybe I’m dying with my patients and my own experiences are promising to melt into the soil of the grave like hers.

“Does it surprise you that someone my age likes the Andrews Sisters? I sure wish I could hear you sing, Joyce.”

“Come on along, Come on along to Alexander’s Rag Time Band. Come on along. Come on along, it’s the best band in the land. Da, da, dadada, Come on along…” Joyce gave me a sample of her lead voice and she swayed in her chair as if she were on stage again. We were both laughing by this time. She ran out of the words she remembered just about the same time as me. We laughed her to sleep and I sat there and held her hand grieving her dieing as she slept slumped over her pad.

Bang Bang

2004-12-31T23:46:00.000-08:00

Suburbia hasn’t yet paved over my neighborhood. We still are somewhat of a rural community with gunfire celebrating New Year’s Eve rather than middlin’ to pricy wine corks popping in contractor grade kitchens. We do have “Little box” developments rising like tombstones out of formally gorgeous meadows but fortunately we’re not overrun with overdevelopment – yet.

I bring this up because as I was ambling toward the study out under the poplars tonight, I could hear the guys up the road firing at the moon and I was enjoying it. Screw the development. I’ve always hated the same ole’ singsong, ticky-tacky little houses pasted together in rows on streets with idyllic names. “Meadow Brook,” “Oak Wood,” “Maple Grove,” “Deer Run;” all names to give the illusion of what was once there and what the developers want people to believe it’s like living there and people just buy into it. “Well, people have to live somewhere,” and “You can’t stop progress,” are platitudes that I’ve heard over and over.

I think rather than “progress” it has more to do with making money at the expense of the future. I can’t figure out why people – especially my generation, buy into such lies. Such incredible mediocrity – such blandness and trite living that fills our lives in this time. God, I hate it. The billboards, TV and radio ads are lies. I know this for a fact not because I have some divinely imparted wisdom but because I’m with real people in their homes when they don’t have on their Avon or Mary Kay faces. I get to wade through muddy yards and dog crap to visit in old junky singlewide mobile homes and park on concrete drives next to the Jags and the Benz in other neighborhoods. I get to really know what makes life – and death worthwhile. And I want you all to know this – it absolutely has nothing to do with what the Pretty People tell you. It has nothing to do with what comes out of those sensuous lips pasted on the well-groomed heads that stick out of GQ forms. Life is about good family, faithful friendship and most of all unmitigated love. Period.

Tonight as thousands pack Times Square and Hollywood types wax sentimental about trivial glitz, other “thousands” are doing the stuff that makes the world go round and being paid little to nothing for it. Personally, I love that little button every electronic device has called “OFF.” I prefer to push it firmly and plant big sloppy kisses on my boy’s faces while they struggle to get away. I prefer to stroke my wife’s magnificent undyed, unstreaked, untouched red hair and hold her hand. I prefer to stroll to my study to write to you about what’s in my heart and stop to listen to the guys up the road aim high and plug the moon in celebration of a new year.

Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky tacky
Little boxes all the same
There’s a green one & a pink one &amp; a blue one & a yellow one
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky & they all look just the same

And the people in the houses all went to the university
Where they were put in boxes & they came out all the same
And there’s doctors & lawyers & business executives
Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky tacky
Little boxes all the same
There’s a green one &amp;amp;amp;amp; a pink one & a blue one & a yellow one
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky & they all look just the same

And they all play on the golf course & drink their martinis dry
And they all have pretty children & the children go to school
And the children go to summer camp & then to the university
Where they are put in boxes & they come out the same

Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky tacky
Little boxes all the same
There’s a green one & a pink one & a blue one & a yellow one
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky & they all look just the same

And the boys go into business & marry & raise a family
In boxes made of ticky tacky & they all look just the same
There’s a green on & a pink one & a blue one & a yellow one
Little boxes all the same

“Little Boxes” By Malvina Reynolds

Rev. Flea Collar

2004-12-28T16:30:00.000-08:00

Sunday’s are my day to do my ministry in a flea market. (I can visualize heads snapping to attention all across the land – “Did he say flea market?”) Yep – I said flea market. I get up on Sunday mornings, get my black trousers on, iron a black clerical shirt, open a fresh Harts Mountain collar, and slide it into the tabs of the shirt. (He snickers into his sleeve)

Seriously (that’s what all those really bad stand-up comics say isn’t it? “But seriously folks”) Really, y’all, I have a ministry in a flea market. It’s the best ministry I’ve ever had. One of my former students from Forsyth Tech called me one day four years ago and told me that he was opening a flea market and wanted me to come over on Sunday Mornings and do a service for the vendors.

Wade built a chapel in the market and gave me office space and BOOM- I was a flea market chaplain. I minister to the vendors by holding a 30 min. service from 8-8:30 Sundays, write a devotional newsletter and make rounds. Wade gave me a little contract as a small business chaplain and I’ve done everything any pastor does except have nervous breakdowns. I’ve got none of the pettiness, egocentricity or craziness of the typical parish ministry. Most of my congregation are recovering alcoholics, people who want nothing to do with the church and don’t expect me to wear a tie or any other form of uniform. They let me minister to them, pastor them and care for them without pretentiousness or bickering over - whatever church people bicker over that seems so important to them. They are risk takers and the kind of people who scrounge and scrape for a living and aren’t a bit impressed with my collection of degrees. I get hugs, they laugh at my jokes and listen to my messages (which- by the way are quite extemporaneous. I’m not at all compelled to spend 8-10 hours a week in sermon preparation every week. I’ve done funerals, weddings, counseling and settled some disputes in the market. Most of what I do is community building. There’s another church that rents space in the market and Bruce (the pastor) and I don’t have any sense of competition. Sometimes he even invites me to speak and once in a while he fills in for me. Bruce is one denomination and I another and guess what – it just doesn’t matter.

My own pastor is a woman who once said to me after a day of meetings with other pastors that she was “sick of white men in business suits.” Whew, me too. I love pastoring in jeans and pull over shirts. I love being with the common people that Jesus loved. I love being one of them in my flea market ministry.

So Tired

2004-12-22T20:25:00.000-08:00

I’ve had enough. About noon yesterday, I packed my care book, filled out Paid Time Off forms and clipped my unfinished work onto a clipboard and left for home.

Three funerals in two weeks is plenty for me. I couldn’t stand the idea of looking at another dying face. The feeling that I get is like some inner tank is sucking air and there is a sort of sputter in the engine. There’s no power and it reminds me of the greasy shops that I’ve worked in where mechanics said stuff like, “She’s starving fer fuel.”

I cruised on home genuinely relieved that I didn’t have to share in any more grief until after Christmas. Some of is my own stuff. My own Dad died at Christmas and that anniversary is tomorrow. I need space to do my own grieving. I know that I can’t be with patients when I’m “starving for fuel.” I made a terrible mistake one time while doing a rotation in the NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit) where I was the resident chaplain for over thirty babies and their families.

One day I was exhausted from work on another unit and I decided that I needed to get a break. It occurred to me that the NICU energized me so it might feel good to be with the babies. After I was in the unit for some time I was called to the bed side of little one who was in crisis. I’m not going to relate the whole story because the upshot was that the family read the tired set of my face and my demeanor to mean that I was convinced that their baby was dieing. The next day I was called into the nurse supervisor’s office for that unit and told that I was forbidden from going near the baby. It was like I was slapped. The family believed that they were protecting their child from some sort of magical influence in me and that my presence would kill the child. As my supervisor and I processed this insult, I realized that there are some things that cannot be hidden. When I’m tired, I just need to rest. I’m NOT Superman.

We are incredibly stupid about this in our country especially in the helping professions. We have this whacked out notion that we must never stop and that rest is a waste of time. I tell the people on my team the self-care is not selfish care. One thing that bugs me is the attitude from some of my fellow ministers that I’m weak if I rest properly and use my time off wisely. That gloating little smirk pasted on some nerdy little “man of the cloth” when I announce that I’m tired irritates me. A country lady who was a member of a Friend’s meeting I once pastored used to say, “I believe I can lay the Quaker down long enough to handle that.” I don’t believe the lady was really prone to violence but I thought the saying expressed my feelings exactly.

Well, I’m going to be and sleep late tomorrow. I believe that Monday I can see my patients with a full tank and a rebuilt carburetor.

My Half of Georgia

2004-12-10T19:46:00.000-08:00

Part of my job is to drive all over hell and half of Georgia (No offense intended to people who live there. It’s just a saying but God knows, they do have my sympathy). The mileage that we accrue in hospice home care is pretty incredible. The up side is that we get a lot of fresh air but the down side that every mile increases the odds that we’ll be involved in accidents or experience some of the harsh reality of the road first hand.

My turn came today when I hurried to a twisted pile of metal on a busy interstate and helped four other men pry a demolished door off of a little girl’s foot while her daddy held her bleeding head and tugged her loose. She was a beautiful little 5 year-old with red ribbons tied in her hair and stomach contents running from her nose. I noticed how her long, silky eye lashes and honey brown skin contrasted with the blood seeping from her eyes and my soul staggered with sorrow for I suspected the meaning of that leak. But she breathed and her heart pulsed. As her daddy sobbed her name, I rubbed his shoulders and told him that God was near. The eyewitness to the accident was clutching my hand so hard it hurt while she prayed in Spanish. I heard her prayers going to Mother Mary and I loved she and the Holy Mother for it and I’m a born Protestant.

Soon I got my beautiful prayer partner and our frantic daddy out of the way of the pros. We were about 3 feet away when a paramedic walked up to daddy and knelt at his feet. He started to back away when I realized what she was doing and I said, “Stand still.” Daddy’s boot had come untied and the paramedic in her immaculate uniform knelt on the rain-puddled interstate and tied it without a word then went back to her place near the ambulance. My soul staggered again, this time with awe, for I knew I’d seen Christ.

There’s no need for me to become sentimental about the spiritual implications of the scene nor is there a need for a sermon. The rest of my life I will see that grief-filled man standing in the middle of the road with the paramedic kneeling in the rain performing that simple act of compassion. That awful, obscene wreck became a sacred place for a few minutes because it brought together at one point in the universe a critical need, authentic and compassionate people, and the presence of God.

A Hospice Memorial Message

2004-12-05T15:18:00.000-08:00

This is the message that I was asked to deliver to about nine hundred attendees at our annual memorial service today.

It’s hard to be still, isn’t it? When we’re quiet, there is a fearsome change within ourselves that clears the way for stuff to come to the surface that we almost cannot bear. Maybe that’s why we are such busybodies in this day and time. We seem to be franticly keeping our minds occupied so that the silence will not draw out our deepest hurt and we’ll have to face our injured souls. That could be what all this running around with cell phones glued to our ears; window rattling music and madness on the highways is about – avoiding our wounded souls.

Perhaps that’s one of the reasons the holidays are so hard for those of us who have lost loved ones. It is the silent night – holy night of our year. It comes upon the cold clear midnight when sacred time settles on us and we feel the traditional stillness leaking up all around. My Dad died at Christmas a few years ago and since then the holidays are different for me. I kind of avoid them. I drift right up to Thanksgiving, help my wife fix the food and float along until January 2nd. I don’t know what else to do with the ache in my heart but to ride it out. Others seem to scamper around kicking up sparkly tinsel dust, spending themselves into oblivion to keep the hurt deep under the surface. Whatever our strategy is, we want to avoid the pain of our losses and find ways to keep our souls under wraps until it’s safe and, you know – sometimes it never is safe. Our deepest places are locked down and we move further and further from ourselves until we are machine like in the way we live. I once met a young woman in a psych unit here in the city who had cut herself and when I just had to know what made her do that, she said, “Well, Ken the only thing I can tell you is that the pain on the outside is less than the pain on the inside.” I was stunned at the power of her statement. Most of the people in this room can relate to the terrible hurt that lurks in the heart from losing loved ones and the experience of finding it bubbling up at this time of year. But suffering is a part of being human. We all suffer with our losses. We all know the overwhelming ache of our wounded souls.

But what to do with this hurt? Can we live with it day-to-day and year-to-year? I think we can. First we can learn to live with this ache in our hearts. We never “get over it” as some well meaning folk want for us. We just learn to live with it. Grief is like a stream of water. If the loss of our loved one is like a rough, jagged rock that is thrown into the dry bed of our sorrow and the stream of grief is allowed to flow over it, eventually the edges of the loss begin to wear down and round off like stones in a creek. That’s why the hospice professionals that cared for your loved one wanted you to begin the grieving as soon as you were ready. They know that it is truly a healing thing. So one thing that we can do is allow the stream of grief to flow over us.

Another thing we can do is to practice our faith as fully as we know how. There are lots of different religions represented in this room and I know that if you have a good, healthy spiritual life, you can find comfort in your practice. I don’t mean going to a church or synagogue where people will be small minded and cliché, I mean to be with people that will uplift and comfort and practice the rituals, prayers and traditions that will help heal our souls when the holidays open up those still spaces that we seem to dread so much. In doing these two things we can be ready to do the most important piece of living with the sorrow. We can be prepared to never forget the love and the warmth of the one who has left us.

Allowing our grief to flow as it should and learning to be with it when it does permits the sharpness and the pain of the loss to heal. Practicing our faith fully gives us hope and comfort beyond what we can immediately feel and holding our missing loved ones in our hearts gives us the memories we need to carry on with our lives, as we believe they would have us do.

My dad was a high school graduate who was replaced in his job by two college-trained engineers. He was a stalwart Christian and he had a capacity for cruelty. I’ll never forget his untrained intellect and how dedicated he was to his profession; it helps me commit to my calling. I’ll never forget his devotion to his faith; it helps me keep my faith. I’ll never forget his cruel teasing because even that helps me remember to be caring and compassionate with those who are weaker than I.

Do you let the grief flow freely as it should? Do you find ways to practice your faith? Do you remember those that you’ve lost and the gifts they gave you to help you go on? And while the ache of the loss still pulls the strings of your heart tight in this holiday season, are you able to find way to play beautiful music on them to comfort yourself and others?

Morning and Evening

2004-11-23T19:07:00.000-08:00

William is a male nurse whose military training gives him an air of assurance and command. He’s not arrogant or demanding at all but one is always aware of his confidence and capability. He’s also straight-laced enough that when he tells stories on himself, they’re hilarious.

William responded to one of the C.N.A.’s this morning who said that she was flabbergasted when a patient asked that she tuck her breasts inside her panties. “Flash” (That’s what I call her because she’s speed limit challenged) was telling us about it without revealing the patient’s name and the team was rolling with laughter. William, who tells these things with his glasses on the tip of his nose, one-upped Flash by saying that soon after he started with hospice he was assessing a woman and couldn’t find a bowel sound with his stethoscope.

William said, demonstrating with an imaginary stethoscope, “I placed the stethoscope here and didn’t hear anything. I moved it over here, and still didn’t hear anything. I moved it over here and glanced up at her, and she was smiling (William demonstrating a sly grin) --still no sound. All at once, it came to me, it wasn’t her stomach I was listening to; it was her breast.”
William paused with the timing of a professional comedian while we died with laughter and then said, “I was so embarrassed. I mean what do you say, ‘Please lift it up so I can get under it?’”

I had to tell that because that’s how the day began today. It ended with a man dying while I held his hand. His wife was on the other side of the bed and she and the social worker worked at trying to get some medication ready for him. All at once his breathing changed, his eyes rolled up into the extreme right side of the sockets; he made a face and died. His wife called his name desperately, threw herself back on the bed, then, still sobbing, laid her head on his chest while me and the social worker comforted her.

It never seems to get easy. It was up close and personal and we were both exhausted after it was over. I am amazed at how intimate this work is because people throw themselves into our arms as if we were family. They expose their most intimate feelings with us with almost complete abandon and we are found to be trustworthy 99.99% of the time.

If I had known how this day would end, I would’ve turned my car into a local park and hidden out in the abandoned camping sites while the rain and wind whispered me to sleep. I would have waked long enough from time to time to pray and prepared for the death; cleansing myself for the sacred transition. I would have watched the clock with dread and finally eased out of hiding to travel a sort of “Green Mile” to the dying man.

But, it didn’t happen that way. A routine visit writhed and twisted into a different creature and my partner and I had to shape shift as well. Fortunately, the shape of our compassion is just under the surface and the shift into it is usually readily done. We are authentic people who live out our ideals.

Foggy Daze

2004-11-12T17:35:00.000-08:00

It’s a rainy evening here in Tobaccoville and that stirs mental whirlpools that draw me into myself but my little study is a little too well insulated to hear the music of the rain outside during times of cool weather. I could open the door but then I’d over work the heater and – well, I just get quieter in my solitude and hear the drops tap woodenly on the deck and ping the metal of the air conditioner once in a while. I’m satisfied with that.

I snarled at my 16 year-old tonight. It’s a long story but after he went up the road with his buddy (walking, not driving tonight) I realized that my grumpy disposition came from a day that I just didn’t know was hard.

I’m working with a woman and her paraplegic daughter whom I’ve known for years and who ended up on my patient census accidentally. I could have transferred them to another chaplain but didn’t. After all, I’m practically a doctor and, what the hell, I know myself well enough to know if there are conflicts (?) Today, I realized that I was utterly confused about what I saw in the family dynamics and felt anxious about my diagnosis and spiritual assessment of the patient and her caregiver. I asked the social worker on the team if I was doing any damage and she said no, not that she could tell. My clinical supervisor would undoubtedly remind me that all dual relationships are fraught with danger but I got caught up, not so much in my pride, but in my deep wish to help these folks through their crisis.

I haven’t seen them in years and my friendship with them came out of one I had with their father/husband - a fellow officer when I worked in law enforcement. He was able to give me opportunities that have an effect on my life even today, 15 years later and shared with me liberally. He died shortly after I left the department and I grieved his death with anger and depression in those days. I have the chance to give back something special by helping his family through another terrible loss.

Human relationships are very powerful things and those of us who tinker with them are subject to all manner of problems if the work is not done with squeaky-clean differentiation and crystal clear goals. My lenses are foggy right now. My work over the next few days will be to get defrosted so my friends will have the best possible care.

First things first, though; I just called my son out to the study to apologize for growling at him and make it clear as to what I expect so that he can get the car.

I think I’m feeling a little better.

Message of the Week

2004-11-09T17:17:00.000-08:00

The "Message of the Week appears in the Winston-Salem Journal each Friday. Our Hospice is scheduled to supply the column twice a year. I was asked to write this Fall's column. Here it is.

This is such a beautiful time of the year. It’s a time when our side of the earth tilts away from the sun and we take our turn in the darkness of longer nights. The land uses the darkness to heal and let go of the busyness of summer. Some insects die off, some sleep and the trees release the leaves from tethers that nourished them in the heat of summer days and preserved them through summer storms. It’s a time of gathering and taking stock in the terms of traditional family farming.

Dying is also a time of letting go and taking stock for those who are making that transition and for those who are caring for them. Over the last century, dying has become an artificial struggle of life against death and the sterile coldness of medical science has made the natural processes of death a sort of enemy. The Hospice Movement restores the richness of the warm and artful practice of medicine in which death is a part of living when it comes in God’s time. It saddens me as a minister to hear that people believe that Hospice is about death when those of us who love our patients and our work see it as life-giving and full of positive human experience even when things get harder than we like.

If we are among those who only see the autumn as an annoying season of obnoxious leaf blowers and leaf collection trucks at the curb, it may be difficult to fully appreciate God’s gift to us in the season. If we only see dying as a time of failure and hope only in clicking, beeping robots plugged into human bodies to keep them alive for a few more days, then we miss God’s gift of a peaceful, humane death.

The book of Ecclesiastes is often quoted as evidence that God’s timing is perfect. It says that there is a time to be born and a time to die. Just as we can be certain that the earth will continue it’s rotation and our friends in the Southern hemisphere will experience fall about six months from now, we will pass through our time of darkness and emerge into rebirth and spring. The ministry of Hospice is to midwife us through the difficult transitions in the last season of life. Hospice tries to make every moment of that time as comfortable and sacred as possible using the very best of the science and art of medicine, the very deepest of human compassion, and the finest expression of God’s love.

Chaplain Ken Bradstock
Hospice and Palliative CareCenter

whaddjusay?

2004-11-04T20:19:00.000-08:00

This business is not all grim. John is 97 years old and is married to his second wife, Jean. She’s just a young thing and his children don’t approve of the marriage. These wild mid-life crisis can be hard on families and the children are having a tough time getting used to their stepmother, she is, after all, only 76. Most of the kids are in their 70’s and mom is the right age to be their sister (for God’s sake) it’s a scandal that they’ve had to deal with for the last 25 years. The family isn’t sure this little fling will last and this hussy will probably break dad’s heart sooner or later. What’s worse is that dad is a preacher and marrying a woman that young will probably ruin his ministry some day. (It’s just not the decent thing for a man of God to do).

John is indeed a preacher and learned his craft under the great Billy Sunday. And he can certainly preach. One of the delights of my visits is to get him fired up enough to preach. He has a thousand-mile stare that comes over him as he sinks into the rhythm of a real Southern evangelist tent preacher with a rich, booming voice to match. John has enough Bible memorized to write his own version and he quotes freely with only a little hesitation to give the words time to maneuver the calcification of his timeworn mind. The connections he makes across passages tend to be a little mixed up at his age but for the most part he could probably still hypnotize a congregation – given enough Geritol.

This couple is a delight to visit because they are very much in love. I went into see them just last week and asked John what he’s been up to. He got a little smile on his face and she laughed and said “Yeah, Honey, (She says “honey” with a real North Carolina mountain accent that sounds much sweeter than it looks in print) why don’t you tell the chaplain what you’ve been up too. John laced his fingers and laid his hands on his tummy and said in mock dignity, “You see Chaplain, what my wife is referring to is my attempt to clean my hearing aids in the most efficient manner.”

Jean, who could not contain herself, was already laughing, “Yeah, Chaplain. It was efficient. He soaked his hearing aids along with his teeth.”

“John! Is that true? You soaked your hearing aids?”

“Yes, Chaplain, it’s true but my question is, why would that woman ask me to tell the story and then go on and tell it herself?”

By this time Jean and I were laughing through tears and John was grinning through his clean white dental plate. “And,” Jean choked out, “he claims to hear better now than before he soaked them.”

I love it.

Anne Jean 2

2004-10-04T19:09:00.000-07:00

Anne Jean quit leaning away from me after a time but continued staring with her wide blue eyes and as things lightened between us, some of the locals started sensing a friendly corner with a new face. They swerved by to say things like, “I’m going to the birthday party” and “My doctor says I’m OK.” I noticed that some made several passes as if to be sure that they had all the facts about the new guy sitting with Anne Jean. After writing my notes to chart and before I left, one of the nurses said that Anne Jean’s daughter arrived and took her to the monthly birthday party.
As I walked through the halls to the dining room, I noticed that I always feel odd moving about in a nursing home. I feel privileged and special in those places because almost everybody looks up at me from a bed, a wheel chair or from the hunkered shuffle they all seem to do behind aluminum walkers. It makes me feel artificially powerful and I’m self-conscience about it. I know that what separates me from them is a little time and the thickness of some fragile blood vessel. I look for their former lives in their faces. Which one was the pretty high school cheerleader and which one of those men was the competent factory boss? Was this one an athlete and that one always timid? Were all of these teetering old ones squealing, running children, highly sexual adolescents and self assured middle agers? I’ll never forget the day that my dad sat bewildered and at a loss for words as I verbally worked him over. He had been an incredible and often cruel tease and I, in my late forty’s with a well-educated mind in my arsenal, caught him with his pants down and let him have a round of pent-up anger. I was amazed as he sat there unable to keep up with me mentally as I threw barb after barb into him and then realizing he was down for the count, went for his throat. With my mental teeth on his jugular, his belly exposed I backed off and piously told him that the difference between he and I was that it would end here and this teasing session was over. I went to the kitchen and called my mother to the room and pointed out the defeated master looking glumly at his feet and told her that I thought that he now knew how it felt and I was finished. I went back in the room and watched TV with him but our relationship was never the same afterward. I was disappointed in his weakness. I was as stunned as he that his mental capacities had diminished through some unseen and untraceable change in his brain. Is this all there is? I have to wonder about the end of my own usefulness and the beginning of my helplessness.
I’ve spent years training my mind and now I question the wisdom of that effort as I look through this building for my patient with a diagnosis of simply “Dementia.” At some point the formation of the firing chain of my synapse containing the words of Socrates, Freud and a hundred wonderful teachers and professors will begin to deform, calcify. The incredible possibilities of what even my meager brain could concoct out of those firing chains will become smaller and smaller. I became anxious as I looked over the icing smeared faces at the feeding tables and the dull-eyed servers who handed out ding-dongs as if they were assembly line workers in a factory.
I saw Anne Jean and her daughter, a plump 30- something woman who has come from feeding her babies to feed her mother. She holds the fork-speared cake with dexterity, as I’m sure she does with the babies, and Anne Jean eyed the suspended fork with the same look of anticipation. My mind swam with mixed and up-side-down emotions. It always happens to me in nursing homes.

Anne Jean

2004-10-02T16:10:00.000-07:00

Brighthome is a nursing home in a town near here that has the architectural demeanor of a government building that recalls the old descriptor, “Built like a brick shithouse.” That’s not necessarily a bad thing when one needs a durable shithouse but when I pulled in the parking lot the first time to visit a patient, I was sure that the odors wafting about in the place would match its looks. It didn’t and when I got in the halls, I discovered that most of the residents seemed happy. When I got a referral to see a patient there just last Friday, I was sort of looking forward to it.

Anne Jean is a fifty-something woman who is pitifully thin with limbs that are drawn to her body and a wide-eyed look about her that looks like she’s scared most of the time. I knew from the referral that she is “non-verbal” so I sat down beside her in the day room with the expectation that everything I did with her would be based on her non-verbal and para-verbal responses to my presence and interaction. When I spoke to her she leaned away from me and looked at the floor and away in a way that said she was afraid. So, as I introduced myself, I softened my presence and assured her that I wouldn’t hurt her.

In the chair on the other side of Anne was a young man who was watching TV and my interaction with Anne. He was dying to join in and be a part of what Anne and I were doing but controlled himself until I started singing “Jesus Loves” me to Anne. He couldn’t contain himself and started singing with us just a shade too loudly but with all the gusto of one who was utterly unaware of the effects of his own zest.

Anne Jean responded with sounds – I can’t describe them anymore than that but they were just that. I wish I could say that she was singing but I wasn't sure that’s what it was. Later, when I met her daughter, she said that she was singing with us. I was glad. I used to see a woman up here in town that responded to me by playing patty-cake when I sang to her. Sometimes I’d get a chair and sit opposite her and play with her.

Don’t get the idea that my singing is anything special. One woman I saw in the same facility threw me out of her room. After singing something like ‘Jesus Loves Me” I asked her how was it? She screwed her face up in a horrible grimace and said in a high, penetrating voice, “It just makes me sick. Get out. Get out.” She emphasized, “sick” by drawing the word out as if it were spelled “ssseeack with her lips pulled back to her ears and her nose wrinkled as if I’d offered her road kill to eat. My critics have not always been that harsh but I get the point and only sing when I’m fairly sure that a patient’s condition will not be exacerbated with my music or that I’ll be struck by some flying object.

Back in operation

2004-09-28T20:00:00.000-07:00

Well, It's been a long wait, but I got my new laptop. The old man was arthritic and freezing up a little to often. I can begin posting again tomorrow. Thanks for your patience.
Ken

Endings I

2004-09-12T18:44:00.000-07:00

This and the next two posts are from a document that I pulled together from a small collection of my assessments of patients. It was interesting to see them together as one document and I thought my readers might find it interesting as well.

Pt. was deeply reflective today, talking almost non-stop through the entire visit. The conversation turned to his most private and precious dreams concerning his belief that he was called to minister. The pt has elaborate dreams of ministry that display a generous spirit and deep need for recognition. There was in this session a sense of bargaining as if he were offering his dreams as something he would carry out if God would give him time. From time to time the pt was teary and wiped his eyes when he spoke of his dreams.

The pt also needed reassurance that his sins were forgiven and God loved him. He may have believed that his disease was punishment but changed his mind thinking, perhaps that it is a mire from which God will raise him to prove to others that miracles can occur if one has faith.

_____________

This patient is difficult to assess because of her advanced stage of brain disease. She is an accomplished artist yet she states that she can no longer make art because she “wouldn’t know where to begin anymore.” This tells the chaplain that her greatest skills of deep expression are no longer available to her. When asked questions for spiritual evaluation such as “What do you hope for,” the pt gets lost in thought and fails to reply unless prompted. At the more shallow level of religious training she affirms that she wants to go to heaven but after stating so, she returns to absently picking at specks and lint within her view. Prayer comforted the pt and the chaplain sensed that his presence was comforting as well.
The pt’s Patient Care Giver was responsive to the chaplain as well but as a lapsed Catholic and a nominal church attendee has few religious skills. He was, however, open to the chaplains comments and listened carefully to chaplain’s words. When the chaplain offered him support, he began weeping and excused himself ending the visit.

Back Seat to Science

2004-09-09T17:45:00.000-07:00

Science is eating away at the soul. It seems that with every new discovery there is less and less need for faith in a creator. Biochemistry, DNA and pharmacology explain the mysteries that are built into belief systems. When I announce in team meetings that this or that is happening with a patient, the reaction from the medical staff is that the medication is working, period. They are well trained and adept at using chemistry and skill to heal and the work of God in the patient’s healing is crowded more and more to the corners. I often feel like a second-class member of the team, or the middle child who is always struggling for validation and approval.

This is a problem for people of faith in all religions in our time and it’s a problem for our patients. It seems that the knee jerk response is to throw one baby or the other out with the bathwater. Fundamentalists and conservative Christians pick through science and throw out according to how much it threatens their beliefs. Scientists often throw out religion as superstition or fairy tales. Of course there are degrees of both of those on either side. While the nurses that I work with are practicing Christians, they usually don’t integrate their faith and medical science as well as they could. Perhaps it's because no one has suggested it or, for that matter, the church is so stuck in past eras that its leadership is unaware that there is a need.

It seems safer to maintain a schism between religion and science because nobody is healing the rift between the two. The church is responsible for the split between science and religion and in this day, it is either yielding too much ground to science or denying its place through sentimentalism and irrational thinking. The fear of Darwin’s theory is quite paranoid and irrational just as one example. To attack scientific inquiry as if it were itself an attack on God is ludicrous. It’s as if God were some Greek mythological character that needs protection from his enemies. Such anthropomorphic and thin concepts of God are probably at the base for why some scientists scorn religion in the face of rational thought at the start.

The Peace that Passes all...

2004-09-06T13:48:00.000-07:00

Great comments from Sparky and Beppe on the last post. Your words were really encouraging. Thanks.

The social worker called me the Friday before Charlie died. She asked if I would be willing to make a joint visit with she and the RN. “Of course.” I said. "Just let me grab a burger and head out that way.” She wanted us to be there because the RN said that Charlie was in what we call, “terminal agitation.” That means that he was confused and moving around everywhere not being able to rest. The medical people who do “Palliative Care,” know that there are several problems with terminal agitation. One is that it takes some one to watch a patient 24/7 to make sure that they don’t get hurt and usually that person is the patient care giver (the husband, wife, adult child, etc.) In the hospital or nursing home, the patient is usually tied down to prevent injury but with hospice care, families are reluctance to do that. Another problem is that the agitation prevents the patient from dying a quiet, peaceful death. So, the patient is disturbed, the care giver is disturbed and the process becomes painful and suffering is increased.

Charlie was in terminal agitation and he was able to get out of bed so I knew that it must have been pretty wild around the house for he and Beverly. I dreaded it because I’d gotten attached to Charlie and I knew that this was going to be hard for me. I didn’t want to see him in the last stages of his disease. I got there before the rest of the team and Beverly and Charlie’s daughter, Cathy were literally herding Charlie out of the way of harm. He would get into bed, then get up and go to the bathroom but he’d head the wrong way. He had O2, so the tube would get tangled and someone would have to guide him around the obstacles to keep him safe. Then he’d sit in his chair, forgetting that he wanted to go to the bathroom.

Charlie was skin and bones. He was a skeleton and I was sick at heart when I saw him. Finally, after trying to get his attention, Beverly said, “Look, Charlie. Ken’s here, why don’t you go sit with him.” Charlie suddenly saw me and came across the room like a drunken man and I caught him as he nearly fell into my lap. He sat on the sofa next to me and I rubbed his back. God- he was all bones! Charlie sat there for the longest time and I took full advantage of the time by talking quietly to him to try to ease his agitation.

Soon after the social worker arrived, Beverly and Cathy got him to lie down for a while. By the time the RN arrived, Charlie was sound asleep. We gathered in the living room and our team RN explored the options with our support. The family was relieved when they heard what we could do for Charlie. The RN tried to talk to Charlie about it but she couldn’t ‘rouse him. There was so much relief in the home that in time, the social worker and I were able to leave. The RN worked late into the evening getting doctors on the phone and lining up the pharmacy to get her the medicationthat Charlie needed to control the agitation. Charlie died two days later about as peacefully as anybody could with his disease.

Harley Davidson Spirituality

2004-09-01T17:50:00.000-07:00

After the suicide threat, things started getting a little better for Charlie and Beverly. The Hospice team was able to make them more comfortable – he with the appropriate level of medications and she with coping strategies. The social worker on the team came up with a new blender out of our special funds so that Charlie could begin eating again and he put back on a little weight. I was able to do some gentle spiritual care with Charlie.

It wasn’t easy doing pastoral care with Charlie. He was almost devoid of any spiritual development and what he did have was shattered by the behavior of the church. Charlie’s soul was severely traumatized and there was no spirituality left to help him cope. I was walking on thin ice with him spiritually from day one. If it hadn’t been for my style as a minister, I’d never been invited back after the first visit. Fortunately, the subject of Charlie’s chopper kept coming up. I’d ask him to take me to the shed to start it up and we’d stand there and listen to it run. One day it occurred to me that the closest experience that Charlie had to a genuine spiritual experience was in the saddle of that Harley. I started encouraging him to ride and mentioned it to the rest of the team as well. Our conversations started to center around how it felt to be in the wind and free. It seemed to me that Charlie’s attitude, sense of humor and general coping ability was improving. He was becoming more hopeful even in the face of the horrible death that was just around the corner.
One day when he and Beverly and I were sitting around talking about dying and what eternity meant, Charlie said, “I think I believe in reincarnation.” I was pleasantly surprised because this offering from him was totally opposite of his bitter stated position that when we die-we die just like the other animals. It pleased me because it seemed that Charlie was in the process of pulling the pieces of his fractured soul together and he was spiritually healing. It was bittersweet for me because I knew that we didn’t have much time and I contemplated the possibility of this healing under healthier circumstances and how far it could have gone. I grew attached to Charlie because he’d responded to me and gave me the supreme pay-off for doing Hospice work – ultimate healing even in the face of death. I was elated to see it and his work fed my soul.
Not that Charlie was thinking like me or that he was following my beliefs or theology. None of that matters to a chaplain anyway (or it’s not supposed to). We are not evangelists. God knows there are enough of those around in every shape and form. Evangelism is the easy work. Most have a canned message that takes a salesman’s attitude and the memory of a few simple verses. Evangelists don’t have the burden of nurturing people after they’ve scared the hell out of them and left them with a rudimentary system of faith. They drive to the next “revival” and all but forget about the new converts they’ve left at the altar. Fundamentalist evangelists are particularly annoying because they think that everything revolves around their beliefs. They are usually so ignorant to everything but the subject of salvation that they are able to spread as much damage as they do the “gospel.”
Chaplains work with the doctrine and theology that is given to them by the patient. If the church evangelists and pastors haven’t done their jobs by the time they come into the clinic, there’s very little that can be done except heal the wounds left over from a very dysfunctional church experience. Charlie was no exception. He was deeply wounded from wacky fundamentalist behavior. If I’d had time with him there might have been far more healing.

Spiritual Care and Suicide

2004-08-30T09:00:00.000-07:00

Within a couple of weeks of meeting and assessing Charlie, I got a call from triage that he was threatening suicide and Beverly wanted me to come out there. When I arrived, Charlie was sitting in his chair and looking about as ugly - mean as I can imagine he could get. The reality of his prognosis had gotten to him and he was very aware of the horror he was facing. He said that he was just going to walk off into the river. He told me angrily that he never threatened suicide that he was just going to take a walk in the river and never come back. Beverly was in a state of despair and the house was full of tension. I was a little scared myself even though I’m fairly well trained and experienced with suicidal people. I suspected he could be violent and he had a gun cabinet full of weapons. But I heard him out and listened for his ambivalence. When dealing with suicidal people that’s what your looking for. If there is energy pulling the person into self destruction there may also be energy pulling them to life. If there is no ambivalence, it’s an immediate emergency. When I heard where the ambivalence was, I began emphasizing it to build the energy toward life in Charlie. He resisted for some time like a Bass on a hook. I knew my line was a light one and he could break it and run anytime but I gave him slack and reeled then gave him some more.

Finally, the Spirit spoke to me and I confronted him with what I thought would make or break this session. I told him he was acting like a drug addict. When that soaked in, he was angry with me but I told him that he was only thinking of himself and that’s what addicts did. If he had been a well man, he might have hit me at that point but I got his attention. Beverly saw what I was doing and jumped in to help. She agreed with me and Charlie clamped his mouth shut and glared at us. I prayed, God help direct his anger at me and not himself. One thing that I knew about Charlie was that he was proud that he had cleaned himself up without anybodies help but Beverly’s. I’d hoped that calling his attention to that would snatch him out of the river into the boat with us. Finally after a little more time he said through his teeth that he wouldn’t kill himself until he’d said goodbye to some friends and his kids. I grabbed the opportunity and asked him to sign a contract with me to not hurt himself. He signed. I breathed.

Charlie owned one of the most beautiful Harley Davidson choppers I’ve ever laid eyes on. It was featured in one of the motorcycle mags on the front cover. He and I had talked about his bike on the first visit and he’s taken me out to the shed to show it to me. He started it for me and we’d both stood there and let the vibes from that powerful machine sort of massage us. This day, Charlie sat in his chair scowling even after he’d signed the contract and when I got ready to leave, he said, “I know you don’t want what I have. I know you don’t want to go through what I’m going through. You don’t want to be me do you Ken? I was stuck. Then the Spirit spoke to me again and told me that it was Charlie’s sense of humor that would get him through this awful time and I stood up and said, “Your right, Charlie, I don’t want anything you’ve got – except that motorcycle. I want that motorcycle.” He looked up at me and a smile ploughed through his despair and cracked the scow on his face just a little. He took my hand and snarled, “You ain’t getting’ my goddam motorcycle, Ken.” I laughed and when to my car. I prayed that the joke between us was a sign of his innate strength.

Meet Charlie

2004-08-28T19:11:00.000-07:00

Tough day today. I did a funeral for a patient who hooked me. That means that I got involved emotionally because of the way that I identified with him. I know where the hook is and got supervision, processed it all with my peers and got through it OK but it's still a struggle.

It’s not unusual for Hospice Chaplains to be asked to do memorial services and this one certainly came as no surprise. Charlie (I can’t use a patient’s real name) was fiftyish and very much an outsider. He was an escaped felon who was convicted in a southern state for some sort of drug offense about thirty years ago. About twenty-five years ago, he met his wife who informed him that it was either she or the drugs. He chose her, cleaned up his life and set up a construction business in her name. He became successful and landed here in the piedmont of North Carolina. They bought their first home and several acres with river frontage and made a good life. He didn’t tell her a thing about the conviction until he got sick. She didn’t even know all of those years that he was living with an assumed name.

The tragedy came when Charlie was no longer able to work. The business collapsed and there was no safety net because he hadn’t paid social security or income taxes for many years. She did, and of course they filed with the business but Charlie’s name was never used. When I met them they were backed against a wall and this snarling beast of a disease was keeping them pinned. They had no income and no possibility of one. Even Beverly, Charlie’s wife, was unable to work because of her own medical problems. Hospice had no hope of reimbursement from Medicaid either but we did what we usually do and cared for them anyway.

I was referred to the patient by the social worker who saw existential problems and asked me to see him. I did, but Charlie was quite cynical about religion and had been hurt by the church many times. Fortunately, Charlie identified with me early in my first visit because my hair was as long as his. I determined in my spiritual assessment that Charlie had no developed spirituality and his soul seemed traumatized and shattered. I knew that if Charlie was to be comforted existentially, he and I would need to pull at least a couple of the shards of his soul into proximity to one another. I decided to see him once a week.

Welcome

2004-08-25T05:26:00.000-07:00

I just discovered blogger. What a great idea! I'm due to go see some patients right now but I'll make an entry tonight.