Brokenness and making things Right

     I was sitting here at my writing desk less than a week ago.  I would like to say that I was writing but that wouldn’t be the truth.  It was mid-morning.  The family was awake.  Other than this blog I had not written anything in weeks.  I’m at a dull spot in the novel I started in November for National Novel Writing Month.  I have not been thrilled lately to go to work on it.  And the only time I really will write is early in the morning; early meaning before six.  Once the kids are up I imagine the mojo is gone.  This may be all in my head, but whatever is in my head controls my writing so it tends to make the rules.  And the simple reason I’ve not written is that I have been too lazy to get up early.  My internal clock will still get me up around 5 am.  There will be an argument in my head urging, reminding of how much better I will feel all day if I get up and write.  The laziness wins, I sleep another hour or so and I end up feeling cross all day.  I get more depressed the more days I fail to write.  As much as I enjoy my job and love my wife and family, writing is a little thing I do that I like to define myself as.  When I don’t write I feel like a failure.  When I do, I just feel better all day.

     So that morning I was sitting at my writing desk.  I like to call it my writing desk, but I could just as well call it my Yahoo!/Facebook desk for what I do most at it.  From the boy’s room came a dull thud, then the voice of Harrison telling his two youngest brothers to stop throwing things.  They will most of the time obey him, but I felt like I wanted to re-assure them that what he said was a good thing.  I went in and found them playing a game where they were throwing stuffed friends from the floor to the top bunk.  I told them to go outside if they wanted to throw things.  I did not notice what had made the noise I’d heard.

     Later in the morning I had finally showered and was dressed.  Prajna and Jamie were sitting in the living room and she told me Jamie had something to tell me.  Jamie quietly told me that when he had thrown his toy mountain lion (it was hard plastic) it had struck the window in their room and cracked it.  When I had a look I saw it was actually broken, just no pieces had fallen out.  I told Jamie I was very disappointed in him and went off to make some calls about fixing it.

     Nathaniel had been the one to discover the break.      He had emotionally apologized to Prajna right away.  Characteristic of Nathaniel, he felt terrible and repentant and apologized right away.  Jamie, however had not apologized, even though he had thrown the toy.  I was off the phone later when Sarah came inside and asked what was wrong with Jamie.  He was outside crying.  I called him in and tried to talk to him but he didn’t want to talk.  His face was red and puffy. 

Jamie is someone who does not hide his feelings.  He is also someone who, if he feels a particular way, will imagine that he has always felt like that and will continue to feel that way forever.  That morning, the guilt and shame of breaking a window was all he could feel.  He may not have even been thinking about the window, just the raw, painful feelings weighing on him then.  I told him to come in my room at we lay down on the bed together.  I pulled him close.  I realized that what I told him next would have to be significant.  Being a dad can mean times for gas jokes, books read in funny voices, angry words about disobedience and admiration at creations on paper or from Legos®.  All of those are words that don’t need considerable thought.  This was not one of those times.  And it didn’t matter that I liked to think I was a writer either.  When I write, no matter how fast I’m going, I try to write good sentences.  This was not a time for the perfect verb.  I needed to reach out to Jamie through this despair that was shrouding him from everything good that surrounded him. 

I said a little prayer in my head and started.  I realized that this whole window was an object lesson in God’s forgiveness.  We walk in darkness from our sins.  I didn’t go into all the ways most people try to deal with that though denial, self medication and other habits and hang-ups.  I just told him that asking for forgiveness means that you can feel better because you really are forgiven and the sin is erased.  Jamie understood all of this.  He seemed unimpressed.  And then I remembered some words from a video series I heard at church.  In the video a dad was talking about a similar talk with his son.  It didn’t matter if I had not composed the next thing I said to Jaime.  Even if I had not made up the words, I still meant them. 

“Jamie,” I told him.  “There is nothing you can do, nothing, that will ever make me stop loving you.”

We stayed there for a little while, but our talk was done.  I don’t know if the time had calmed Jamie down, or the words I spoke to him.  What I do hope is that he never forgets them.

The window got fixed the same day.  We had a little money set aside from some extra work I had done the previous weekend.  I had worked pretty hard and was kind of hoping to use that money to maybe fix some stuff on my truck so one day I can take it camping again.  At least fixing the window did not set us back.  And it allowed for a priceless object lesson.

I was sharing the story with my friend and realized that it would be a good blog topic.  This might be the only writing I do for another week.  But I am not a full time writer.  Writing just makes me feel good.  Even though I put 40 hours or so in a week at work, that isn’t full time compared to the real full time job of being a dad.  And that morning trying to reach Jamie through is despair didn’t take fancy words.  It just took truth and love.  That’s something everyone can do.

    

           

Scary Ailments in the Mystique of Summer

     For a child in elementary school, a day in the middle of summer is an invincible island surrounded by both wonder at the unknown and disregard for anything unpleasant.   The last day of school was weeks ago and is little more that a quickly dismissed memory.  The beginning of the next school year is in the future.  The future meant flying cars and Mars Colonies.  September was invisible and unknowable.  If it wasn’t happening right now or as soon as the cool of the coming evening, it didn’t exist.  Yet while the unpleasant was never considered, any type of wondrous possibility could happen.  Evil robots may have replaced the neighbors in the house with the surrounding eight foot wall.  A lightning bolt could have almost hit one of us had it not been for a quick dive onto a rubber inner tube.  And we all wanted to believe that a giant squid had actually come up out of the local lake and sat on our friend’s face.  If he told us its butt stank, we had to believe.

     One afternoon while reveling in nothing to do, a friend came into the yard and announced to us that he had found a dead bird.  I don’t think I had ever seen anything dead before and didn’t know if any of my friends had either.  We were all about 7 or 8 years old.  When we played dead in pretend games we copied how actors in the movies did it, splayed out, eyes closed.  But most of the time we couldn’t keep our upturned faces from grinning.  Of course we all wanted to go see the dead bird.

     I think there must have been 5 or 6 kids that set off from the green backyard, teaming with drifting cottonwood fluff, for the quiet afternoon street.  There was at least one girl, an older sister.  The sun was bright and no-one wore baseball caps back then unless they were in a game.  I was the last in the group.  Maybe I was a little scared of looking at something dead.   We all followed our friend to a vacant lot.  Nothing grew there, and at one corner everyone gathered and made a little circle.  Dust rose with everyone footsteps.  I moved into the circle and looked down.  There was a little dead sparrow.

     Its eyes were open to the bright daylight.  I don’t remember seeing blood or anything broken looking.  The only true sign that this bird was dead was that it was lying motionless on the hot dusty ground.  I didn’t feel frightened.  There was a little sense of awe and something else.  Seeing something dead wasn’t as scary as I thought it would be.  I felt just a little relief at this.  I thought how uncomfortable the bird would be if it were alive.  It must be really dead.

     Apparently, however, the bird didn’t look dead enough for another boy and he reached forward to touch it.

     “No!” the girl shouted.  “Don’t touch it. You’ll get Fizzy-Whiz.”

     Now I felt a little frightened.  Dead things weren’t supposed to be scary, right?  But what was Fizzy-Whiz?

     Part of the group of kids looked shocked or as frightened as I felt.  The boy with his hand stretched out to the bird, however, looked doubtful.  His sister leaned in.

     “Mom got Fizzy-Whiz once,” she said. 

     The boy withdrew his hand.  At that moment of our hot dusty afternoon the magic of summer that made anything possible also made very real the condition known as Fizzy-Whiz.  The circle around the dead bird widened.  Perhaps for each young mind there was a different image of this syndrome.  I think the more vivid someone’s imagination, the worse it could be.  The boy who had been sat on by a squid almost leaped back. 

     Second grade started months later.  Cavernous corridors and polished wooden floors replaced the infinite expanse of outside.  The magic of summer and trepidation of dead things faded to sentence diagrams and word problems.  And in the structure, security, and school bells, not everything was possible anymore.  Everything must have a rule or reason.  But sometimes the most awe-inspiring ideas cannot be squelched even there in the confines of a public education.  Because the mystique of summer never completely faded that year.  No-one ever even thought about touching a dead thing again.

    

           

cue the music

Don’t bother to cue the Stand by Me music here. It wasn’t that type of a moment. I was probably seven or eight years old and playing with some friends. Another kid came running up and told us we could go see a dead bird so we all took off. Very soon we were there in a vacant lot in a small circle around a grey bird lying motionless on the ground.
Okay imagine the music if you have to, but I for one wasn’t thinking that whole: this bird wasn’t sleeping; it would never fly again; this bird was dead.
I don’t know what killed it. I think I would remember seeing blood or mutilation. I don’t know if The West Nile Virus existed in the mid ‘70’s. I just thought that it looked very uncomfortable there on the hot dusty ground. One of my friends reached out to touch it. Then his sister yelled at him.
“No, don’t!” she said. “You’ll get fizzy-whiz.”
A dead bird wasn’t scary, but this disease I had never heard of was.
To this day I caution my kids to not touch dead animals because they will get fizzy-whiz. Anyone reading this may warn people too.
“Mom got fizzy-whiz once,” the girl continued. I think the circle expanded away from the dead bird then. And like a rock in the pond that girl’s information can spread to the world.