Seriously. I’m leading a tour group of Guideposts readers to Branson, Mo, the “Live Music Capital of the World,” in early September. If you’re at all interested, check it out by clicking here. Come join us. We’ll have a ball. But the part about the audition tape…well, here’s a recording of “Danny Boy” I did with my friend John. He’s the guy at the keyboard. The singer is that funny-looking guy with the gray hair.
It’s not exactly an audition tape. We did it to say “Happy St. Patrick’s Day!” (Happy St. Patrick’s Day!) But it makes me think of all the great music we’re going to hear in Branson. We’ll have a chance to clap, holler and stomp our feet.
That’s what I intend to do in Branson. It’ll be good to have some face time with a Guideposts group, the best people on earth. And if you want I’ll be glad to sing “Danny Boy.” Live. In person. With you.
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For the second year in a row Carol is giving up worrying for Lent.
I think it’d be easier to give up chocolate. Last year when she said she was doing it, one of our friends exclaimed, “Carol, giving up worrying? That would be like Fred Astaire giving up his tap shoes.” She’s good at worrying. In fact, in the division of labor that couples often naturally take up, I assign all the worrying to her. It takes a load off me. Worried about catching a plan? Worried about a snow storm mucking up the roads? Worried about where the kids are? I let her do it.
But if she’s not worrying, I wonder if I’m supposed to do more of it. Pick up the slack. Or maybe I should give up worrying too. Some people claim that worrying is a sin. I’m not so sure about that. Worrying that cripples you so that you don’t even want to leave the house. That’s bad, of course. But those everyday worries, like how will Tim do on his history paper and will William be safe on his vacation to Guatemala…those are the kind of worries that lend themselves to prayer.
Now when I look across the table at dinner to Carol and check the worry shadows between her brows and see if there’s a new mark of calm, I throw in a few comments at grace, “God, keep us all safe and under your care.” I guess that’s what you do when you give up worrying for Lent. You put everything in God’s care.
I mentioned how hard it was to pray for the loss of a friend and I was still struggling with it until I thought of that visit we had at the hospital, the last time I would see him. He was reading the novel Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. Only a hundred pages to go.
I couldn’t pray just yet, or fumbled in my prayers, but I could read that book. It’s a doorstopper of a volume, 530 pages, and a lot to be lugging around with me for any free minute I can find. But it’s absolutely absorbing. The author, through some amazing combination of imagination and research, recreates the larger-than-life figures of Tudor England so that I feel that I know Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn and Cardinal Wolsey and especially Thomas Cromwell.
I can’t put it down. I talk about it to my friend, which is a way of talking about him to God. He was so smart and young and funny and full of intellectual curiosity which he managed to convey to his students (he was a professor of English, teaching classes online up to the very end). The book is a companion in my grief and many pages feel like prayer, partly because the subject is so rich in faith – that era when the Bible was first being translated into English and smuggled in to its first readers.
I read and feel some healing and the closeness of God, even if I can’t always understand God’s ways. It is a way of fulfilling the promise I made to my friend that I would pray for him.
This is something rare, a picture of Carol and me. In the annals of family photos it’s either me with the boys or Carol with the boys or it’s the boys and their friends. This one was taken last weekend when we were in California visiting Tim and Will. We were sitting on a rock at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena and Tim said, “Let me take a picture of you.” Snap.
Maybe this marks a moment of change. For years the camera was taken out to record those important times in our children’s lives – the swing of the bat and dash around the bases, the blowing out of candles on the birthday cake, the opening up of that long-anticipated box under the Christmas tree. You can just tell by looking at our photo albums, meticulously arranged and catalogued by Carol, where the center of gravity in our lives has been for some 22 years.
Don’t get me wrong. Every one of those pictures feels like a masterpiece to me, ready to put up on the walls of a museum. But then something happened, those boys with their Pirate birthday hats grew up and now we get to be the picture ourselves. Courtesy of them (remember, Tim was the one behind the camera).
It was a beautiful day and the sun was a welcome jolt for two snowbirds. Everything about the picture makes me happy – Carol, the day, the grass, the sunlight. How wonderful to have two grown-up kids who suddenly want to take a photo of their parents. That they even think about us seems an honor. Snap. There we are, smiling at the photographer with giddy joy.
I visited Frank in the hospital on Wednesday where he was being treated for cancer and it was clear that he was in a lot of pain. Every 15 minutes he could push a button and get a dose of whatever was in the i.v. bag, but from the way he winced, I knew the drugs were hardly strong enough. “I’m going to Calvary next,” he said, and I tried to hide the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. Calvary is hospice care.
Frank was so young, not even forty, and it didn’t seem fair. He was really bright and even with doses of a strong painkiller running through his system, his quick intellect was evident as we discussed Hilary Mantel’s brilliant novel of Thomas Cromwell. He had another hundred pages of it to go.
I was headed out to California, visiting my son at the Claremont colleges where Frank was also a student not so many years ago. “I’m going to Calvary,” he said again, “and then I’m going home.”
He didn’t make it home. He died last night, and now as I’m reeling from the news, I’m wondering how to fulfill the last promise I made to Frank.
“We’ll be praying for you,” I said.
“I appreciate that,” he said.
My prayers were going to be for some miracle or at least a release from the dreadful pain. Now my prayers are, I admit, full of anger and bewilderment. Why, God, why? I will pray for peace and pray for his wife Rosie and pray that he got to the end of the book he was reading and pray for some understanding of why some of us die so young. And selfishly I will pray for my own sorrow.
I will keep my promise because God asked us to be a praying people, but it’s a harder promise than I ever imagined it would be.
All week I’ll be thinking about what to get Carol for Valentine’s Day.
My friend Neil Warren, founder of eHarmony, says that you shouldn’t get the same old thing for the loved one in your life. You should show a little imagination. Forget the long-stemmed roses or the standard box of chocolates. Use your creativity.
About the only time I did that was when I forgot all about Valentine’s Day (sometimes we husbands forget, at our peril). At the eleventh hour, and I mean well past eleven o’clock, I scrambled through my bureau, hoping not to wake up Carol. There at the back of a drawer I found these pink heart-shaped Post-It notes. Never mind that Carol probably gave them to me three or four Valentine’s Days back.
Like a Christmas elf or the Easter bunny, I started writing every nice thought I could on the notes and then used them to create a path from the bedroom to the bathroom to the kitchen. At the end of the trail I made another card that said it all: “I love you.”
“Wow, Dad,” said our son, Timothy, seeing the display the next morning.
“That was great, Dad,” said William, our older son.
“You remembered!” Carol said, giving me a kiss.
“Just barely,” I said under my breath.
I promise to be a little more organized this year, but here’s a comforting thought: the Holy Spirit grants all sorts of creativity to anyone trying to say “I love you.” My friend Neil is probably right. Do something different. Surprise your mate.
It was really rainy day and I wasn’t paying any attention to what was going on outside my window. I guess I was staring at the smaller window of the computer screen. Midday I had to go outside to meet someone for lunch. I took the elevator down and looked outside. Poring rain. And no umbrella.
If I’d only paid a little attention. If maybe I’d even checked the weather forecast before I left home. But no. Always in a hurry. Dashing here and there. Totally oblivious. I didn’t have an umbrella in my office. Didn’t have a raincoat. I could see myself turning up at the lunch meeting as wet as a drowned rat.
In our building in New York, Guideposts editorial offices are on the 22nd floor. And here I was down in the lobby, staring at rain. Florence is the lady at the desk in the lobby and I figured maybe she would have some suggestions. “Florence,” I asked here, “where is a place I can buy an umbrella?”
“Borrow mine,” she said.
“Don’t you need it?” I said.
“Not until 4:00 when I leave.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Of course.” She handed me the biggest, widest, sturdiest umbrella I’d ever seen. “Take it.”
I did. It was a Godsend. I arrived on time for my lunch meeting, perfectly dry. I didn’t even leave it at the restaurant (why are umbrellas so easy to leave behind?). I returned it to Florence with greatest appreciation.
Sometimes it is the kindnesses that you least expect that make for a perfect day – even if the weather is awful.
We were at a rock concert and I was asking myself, “Why are we supposed to stand when we pray?”
First of all, the question. At our church, sometimes we sit when we pray but often we’re expected to stand. That morning, when we did, I wondered if there was a reason for it. Did it help a person get in touch with God?
The question was still in the back of my mind at the rock concert. I have to confess the concert was Carol’s idea. The band is one of her favorites and they were playing at a theater ten blocks from us. How could we not go?
We were, of course, almost the oldest people there. The kids sitting next to us were college students. In fact, they’d driven all the way from Morgan State in Missouri. (Hi, Zach. Hi, Julie.)
The music was great, the band in top form. The audience was psyched, soon everyone was dancing in the aisles. By the second song, the crowd was on its feet. “Down in front,” I wanted to shout. Then I joined in. Standing up and doing my own 50-something version of a dance.
That’s when it hit me: We pray on our feet because it’s a way of celebration. Everyone stands up at church just the way these kids do at a rock concert because they’re grateful and full of joy. It’s a way of showing our enthusiasm.
“Great concert!” I told Zach and Janet. “Have a safe trip back.” It was a prayer I said on my feet.
I was reading a psalm on the way to work. Psalm 30. It’s got some great lines in it, one of my favorite, “weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.”
I thought about how wonderful that was, that the tough stuff only lasts for a while.
My commute is on the New York subway and this day I actually had a seat on the A train. I could close my eyes and think about all the terrible stuff going on in the world – the devastation in Haiti, people out of work, a friend in the hospital – and remind myself: it doesn’t last forever. Joy comes in the morning.
I started to get into a pretty good mood, hopeful and at peace. I had to get off the train at 59th to change to the D train. I stepped into the car and took a seat, closing my eyes again. All at once I heard a strident voice calling out, “READ THE BIBLE!” “Oh, no,” I thought, “it’s the Bible lady.” She’s always pacing the cars, haranguing the passengers, yelling at everybody to read the Bible. I can’t begin to tell you how loud she is.
“I wish she’d shut up,” one of the passengers muttered.
I echoed the thought. (I know, I know, I had just been reading the Bible myself.) Then she started reading a passage I recognized. I settled down and listened to the words: “…weeping may endure for a night but joy comes in the morning.” All their sweetness came out and she was transformed in my eyes.
In some countries people throw out old pots and pans on New Year’s Eve to get ready for the new. In our neighborhood it was the “Second Annual Electronics Recycling Event.”
Who knew there was such a thing? Carol had spotted this one coming weeks in advance. An environmental group had commandeered a corner of the park for Saturday morning and we were invited to bring our gold, frankincense and myrrh…and all those electronic things in the house that we didn’t need anymore but couldn’t throw away.
There was that giant old computer screen and the tape player gathering dust on the shelf (who played tapes anyway?) and modems from before the days of wireless. We packed three boxes and two bags of stuff. I had no idea where it all came from. We even asked our neighbors if they had electronics to get rid of.
“Here let me take that,” said the guy at the park. I handed him a computer that had seemed modern at the millennium. How fast things aged.
I returned to the house feeling a little wistful. I like using things up until they wear out – my favorite jacket I bought at a church rummage sale 25 years ago – but you can’t do that with electronics. They become outdated long before they wear out. I wondered if the same thing was happening to me. Would I become outdated before I wore out?
Maybe not. As long as I recycled. It's good stewardship.
