The Years

So, my friend Mark says something about covering 30 years of life in three blog entries of a few paragraphs each. We can all do this when we're just giving the highlights. Even our most mundane moments and most uneventful stretches of life are far too rich with experience to be recorded exactly. And so we summarize.

We summarize the circumstances and movements that make up the life we recognize as ours during any given period. Mark lived in Korea. I lived in Walnut, North Carolina. A few paragraphs can give the gist of those lives. Mark moved to California and Minnesota and Nashville. I moved to Nashville, back to North Carolina and then back to Nashville again. Our paths crossed there for a period of five years or so, although it seemed much longer than that. And then I left, returning to Nashville often at first but then less and less as the years moved on and Mark and I moved into different lives.

We summarize the little lives we live within our lives. I lived in the home where I grew up for 22 years, more or less. One stretch of chronological time. But how many lives lived within that period? A life as son, brother, cousin, grandson. A life lived with the White Water Band. A life lived on the basketball court. A life lived with friends at school and on the backroads and in the city. A life lived alone in the mountains. A life lived with God in church and on Glory Ridge. All of these lives taking place at the same time, different experiences woven together to make the big-picture life I can summarize in a few paragraphs if necessary.

Every period of life is like that, more or less.

This morning I was sitting at Jones OK Tires, waiting for my tires to be rotated and my oil to be changed. As I sat there suffering the aural and ideological assault of FOX News, in trying otherwise to occupy my mind, I was thinking about food. Well, not about food specifically. More about eating. I thought about breakfast, how in another life lived over five years or so in Nashville, Mark and I--and often several other friends--were together for breakfast almost every day. Right about the time I was at Jones, we would've been at DJ's Deli or at Mrs. Winner's. And I thought about how that part of my life, the breakfast part, is most often spent alone these days, eating cereal in the pre-dawn darkness before I wake the rest of my household (except for the cat, who is already awake and crying for me to pay some attention to his empty bowl). I thought about lunch and wondered whether or not I would return to Barberitos today for the first time since getting sick two weeks ago. (I did.) And lunch put me in mind of a period during which I ate with a friend once a week for almost a year. And then that stopped, and I never knew why. That question often haunts me when I'm sitting in my window seat at Barberitos, watching the lunch crowd come and go. All this to say, we do the same things daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, but the lives in which we do them change, changing the activities themselves.

So, I've been thinking about birthdays and deaths, illness and vacation, memories of the past and plans for the future. And farewells to friends leaving in the midst of lives we've shared, causing their lives and mine to undergo "a sea-change . . . into something rich and strange." (Shakespeare, or something close to it, from The Tempest.)

In spite of all life's ups and downs, I'm glad to be deeply into it with all the rest:

Empty islands, we may be,
But we're anchored all together in the sea. . . .

On the Mend

Sorry to leave the "Yuck" up for so long. I've actually been feeling a lot better since last Wednesday evening, but all the catching up at work and meeting prior engagements has kept time and energy I've regained all tied up. A couple of concerned calls received yesterday from good friends reminded me that I ought to update this blog to say that I am, in fact, on the mend.

Yuck

This color is called "pea green," and it's often associated with sickness. My world has been this color since the night of Friday the 16th, but I hope to be back soon.

Blue Friday

A gray and rainy Friday morning. Things need doing at the office, but I resist leaving the house. My to-do list is just a string of this and that and this and that, and I don't feel like doing any of it. By the end of the day, I need to deliver myself to my mother's house in North Carolina, where I'll spend the weekend helping out with groceries and keeping company and such. But I have a lot to do between now and then, between here and there.

Enough about me.

The world is off balance and seems not to notice.

Friends are bravely facing illness at home and in the hospital.

Outside . . . birdsong in the rain!

Keb' Mo'

Tonight we're going with some friends to hear Keb' Mo' (Kevin Moore) perform at the Orange Peel in Asheville. He's a fine musician and performer and an all 'round good human being. This should be a good show, and those of us going have been looking forward to it for some time now.

http://www.bluesquest.org/body_frame.htm

Vacation

I'm in Fayetteville, North Carolina, again, visiting with son, daughter-in-law and granddaughter. I didn't take the picture posted to the left, but I did see this sight yesterday (or the day before).

Anyway, I've been on vacation with the family. We went through Columbia (by the University of South Carolina, where I got my Ph.D.) to Charleston, where we ate some good seafood, visited Fort Sumter and saw Night at the Museum at the IMAX theater. After two nights there, we came to Fayetteville for two nights. Today we travel home.

More later.

To an Old Friend

Dear Dr. F------,

It's 2:42 a.m. in Montgomery, Alabama. I'm here for a conference, and to save on expenses, I decided to split a room with a friend. Unfortunately, my bedfellow is a terrific snorer, and while I'm a pretty terrific snorer myself, I have to be asleep to be so. I'm not. So I have my headphones on, listening to Steely Dan and Bruce Hornsby and mindlessly searching my past on the Internet.

And my mindless search came 'round to you.

I hope you're doing well and enjoying your retirement (semi-retirement?) Are you still teaching some? Writing some?

All is going well at ETSU. I've allowed myself to get drawn a little too far into administration, which I don't much like. But I like my work and the people I work with, so that keeps things in balance.

L---- and R------ are well. I can still see R------ leading you around--and calling you his leader--at parties when the gang and I were in the MA program at WCU. R------ is now 15 and preparing to wrap up his freshman year at. . . .

Well, the mp3 player has moved on to Bruce Springsteen, and I can hear in the pauses between songs that my roommate hasn't changed his tune. I guess I'm destined to be up the rest of the night--and on Central Standard Time at that!


All best--
Michael C---

Blogging Alabama

I'm writing tonight from the historic city of Montgomery, Alabama, where I'm attending a conference with some other members of my church in Johnson City. I'm probably not going to have time to do any touristy stuff in this historic Southern city, so I thought I'd nab this picture of the capital building off the Internet. What I will have time to do, it seems, is go to conference sessions about how a church grows big and strong--like when kids drink milk. This idea reminds me of an old American theological book written by a Puritan divine of the 17th century, a book titled something like Milk for Babes, Drawn from the Teats of Both Gospels. Like most early American books, the title was probably much longer than that, but the gist of it is there.

The company here is made up of good folks, some of my favorite folks. We've already had lots of laughs and food, and much more of both is sure to come. In between these, we'll go to conference sessions and learn about how this huge Methodist church handles ministry volunteers, praise music, contemporary worship and so on. Typically when I go to a conference--the professional ones I'm involved in--I attend only those sessions in which I'm to take part (chairing or presenting), and the rest of the time I hang out in my room or run around the city. Here, however, I'm actually committed to learning some stuff and taking it with me back to Cherokee Methodist. And because the first session is at 8:00 in the morning, I should probably get to bed.

Speaking of bed, I must confess that for the first time in memory, I'm sleeping with another man. Three of us are staying in a room, and we gave the senior roommate the single bed. So, I'll crawl under the covers now and try to get some sleep, in spite of the fact that J----, my bedfellow, has already drifted off and begun to snore.