Serendipitous laugher: Two experiences

By Allan Roy Andrews

             Experience No. 1:

Radio-television personality and humorist Art Linkletter died last week at 97.  Until about two years ago, when he suffered a mild stroke, Linkletter was still active on the philanthropic circuit.

             A few years before that, I heard Linkletter entertain at a small school fundraiser.  Linkletter, whose adoptive father was a Canadian preacher, told someone at that gathering that he “liked to help out small Christian schools.”

             In his comments that night, Linkletter told a joke that I have commandeered as a staple of fun found in growing older.  Here’s the joke:

“You know you’re getting old when you bend over to pick something off the floor and you say to yourself, ‘What else can I do while I’m down here?’”

I have learned experientially what Linkletter spoke of.  So I’ve used the joke a number of times, and it never fails to elicit hearty laughs.

Two of Linkletter’s books also keep me smiling:  Kids Say the Darndest Things, and Old Age is Not For Sissies.

Experience No. 2:

For the group’s edification, I recently read to my Bible discussion gathering a favorite poem by Billy Collins called “Flock.”

Here’s the brief poem:

It has been calculated that each copy of the
Gutenberg Bible . . .  required the skins of 300 sheep.
–from an article on printing.

I can see them squeezed into the holding pen
behind the stone building
where the printing press is housed,

all of them squirming around
to find a little room
and looking so much alike

it would be nearly impossible
to count them,
and there is no telling

which one will carry the news
that the Lord is a shepherd,
one of the few things they already know.

--from The Trouble with Poetry, by Billy Collins.  (Random House, 2005.)

After a moment of silent reflection, one member of our group put me—and several others—in stitches when he said,  “I’m having a Gary Larson moment,” referring to the prize-winning cartoonist of The Other Side who was noted for his surprising and often warped sense of humor.

“I can see a room full of monks, having just sheared a flock of sheep, taking up their calligraphy pens and writing verses of sacred scripture on the flanks of the shorn animals,” my friend continued.  “They probably had a difficult time keeping the pages in order!”

It was a wonderful moment, and if Billy Collins ever reads about our experience, I have a feeling he’ll be smiling broadly too.  And if Larson ever reads this report of my friend’s experience, he’ll probably be saying, “I wish I’d thought of that!”

             

'Faith at Ease Lite': Reforming this blog

By Allan Roy Andrews

             I attended a writer’s conference several months ago at which the emphasis leaned decidedly toward writing for electronic media, and the predominant and repeated axiom asserted:  online essays should avoid the curse of excessive scrolling; that is, keep those blogs to a maximum of 400 words.

             Readers, especially young readers, increasingly read on a computer (or on a pad device).  Newspapers have taken this pronouncement to heart.  At least one well-known newspaper, The Christian Science Monitor, during the past year abandoned print and offers its news online (there is a vestige of print in a weekly news summary).  Other major publications—newspapers and magazines--are leaning in the same direction.  Writers take note:  shorter is better.

             I once claimed I’d discovered the secret of writing a successful newspaper column.  Keep it under 600 words, I argued.  In the era of electronic blogging, 600 words means long-windedness.

             The standard is 400 words.  In taking stock of my archive of postings for this blog, I estimate my average entry is between 900 and 1100 words (and I claim to be an editor).  I’ve fallen prey to the notion that longer essays encourage deeper reflection.

             I repent.  I am taking a new tack and aiming for postings of 400 words or less; I call it “Faith at Ease Lite,” and in a way that title captures the conviction.  Eugene Peterson, using Job’s comforters as illustrations in his book, Subversive Spirituality (Eerdmans, 1997), reminds us that much of our talk about Christian spirituality is “chatter.”  I confess a proneness to such chatter, and my archives are convicting evidence.

             Of course, the other lesson urged upon bloggers at the same writer’s conference: Write consistently and often. 

             So I stop here, in the neighborhood of 300 words, and hope to be back more often.

             Be at ease.

            

             

Memoir Exercise: An Essay on Influence and Calling

By Allan Roy Andrews

November 20, 2013 -- Update note from a like-minded dreamer:

"If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me."

-- Herman Melville, speaking as Ishmael in Chapter One of Moby Dick.

          I can’t be too far from water.  I may not see it, smell it, sail on it or swim in it, but I have to know that it’s there.  Sometimes I think a river or a lake just won’t do.  Chesapeake Bay, which lies about one mile from my house, is OK, but it would be much better if it were the ocean.

          This longing for the nearness of the sea is a warped gene I apparently inherited from my father.  His father was a schooner captain, as was my mother’s father, and as a young man my father went to sea aboard a cod-fishing schooner, serving mostly as a cook.  He hated it, and when opportunity presented itself to leave the bleak future of a fisherman’s life in Newfoundland—compounded by a worldwide Depression—he relocated to New York City and became an ironworker.  His work was far from the sea, but his consciousness was not, and our residences during my boyhood were within miles of New York Harbor or the Long Island Sound.  I recall him once saying he could never live in the Midwest because he had to be close to the ocean.  I didn’t realize it as a boy, but I recognize now that I instinctively knew what he meant.

            We are shaped for good or ill by our parents, often in ways we don’t realize.  I recall once sitting at dinner when I was in my mid-thirties (my father died when I was 32) and I leaned back and placed my hands over my face and eyes and let out a sigh.  I had no more made the sound when I shrieked, “Oh, my God!” (prayerfully, not swearfully).  I had caught myself in mid-gesture and recognized that I was repeating movements I had seen my father make hundreds of times, usually at the end of a good meal.

            Asked in any academic or social setting if I thought my father had influenced me or had anything to do with my “calling,” I would offer a scoffing negative.  The idea is absurd.  My father was not, as I have become, a worker of the mind; he was a man of manual labor.  He discouraged my pursuing his line of work.  Not because of any fear; he just wanted his sons to know a better way of making a living than he had known.  If he needed a business letter written or a simple math problem solved, he always asked me to handle the work.  Despite this difference, as I have grown older I have recognized the subtlety of inheritance.

            Desiring to be close to the sea is a good example of what I’m talking about.  My father could hardly swim, and I did not learn to swim until I was in my sophomore or junior year in high school.  Neither my father nor I have ever owned a boat.  I jokingly tell people that my family is one of the half-dozen families living in Annapolis, Maryland—the sailing capital of the East—that does not own a boat.  We live in a “water privileged” community, which means there’s a boat slip accessible to us (for a fee), but as far as we’re concerned water-privileged could mean we have flush toilets.

            When I was a boy, I was convinced I would one day join the Navy.  In high school, I explored the possibility of Navy ROTC.  I learned some harsh things in my investigation:  one is barred from Navy ROTC if one does not possess perfect vision (I don’t), and the ROTC manual even shocked me by asserting that one could be disqualified because of “extreme ugliness.”  The Navy has since abandoned such a criterion, and I learned much later that perfect vision is required only of pilots and line officers and it can be measured as corrected vision.  However, after that flirtation with Navy ROTC, I never thought of being a sailor again.

            Both of my older brothers joined the military soon after high school.  The oldest went into the Army; the next went into the Air Force.  Ironically, they seem to have missed the be-near-the-ocean gene:  The oldest settled in Indiana; the other in Ohio.  I alone stayed in college and never served in the armed forces, and except for a brief sojourn to study and break into journalism in the Midwest, I’ve stayed within striking distance of the Atlantic coast.  Eventually, I was called (I have a mild aversion to this phrase, but more on that later) to go overseas as a journalist (to the Pacific Ocean coast), and as God’s sense of humor would have it, I spent a decade of my adult life as a civilian editor for the Pacific Stars and Stripes, the Department of Defense newspaper that circulates on military bases overseas and on all the ships at sea.  After that experience, I probably knew more about the ins and outs of the military than did either of my veteran brothers but nothing about the sea except to note that Japanese use every part of a fish.

            I am surprised when I reflect on those who influenced me during my youth; many seem to have been niche players.  I grew up in Brooklyn, New York, an ardent Dodger fan, and my imagination and calling in those days was to one day play professional baseball.  My favorite player on the Dodgers was a strong, silent outfielder named Carl Furillo.  Decades after my meager baseball talents forced me to settle as a fan (alas, still a Dodger fan), I realized that Carl Furillo, often referred to as a “blue-collar” player, had strong hands, a thick neck, and the square features of my father.  In a 1989 eulogy by Carl Erskine, one of his teammates, Furillo was described as a mixture of iron and velvet.  That’s how I perceive my father.  He could reprimand his children or grandchildren with a bellowing “Don’t do that!”  A microsecond later, he’d lower his voice to a compassionate whisper and say, “Don’t do that, my love!”

My Sunday School teachers sensitized me to faith; my elementary school teachers implanted a love of the English language; my high school teachers led me to the delights of art and drama and journalism.  Once again it appears God has some cosmic comedy script he is following in designing my eclectic life.  I became a journalist.  Somewhat ironically, my high school graduated its last class in 2004 and has been since turned into a city magnet school called—I smile each time I say it or write it—The New York City Secondary School for Research, Law and Journalism.

Two areas of my life drew lots of praise and encouragement when I was a boy:  My singing and my writing.  I’m not speaking of creative writing, but of my skill with a calligrapher’s pen.  I won praise in art class for my lettering and script ability.  I grew up in an age during which one of the mainstays of elementary education was instruction in penmanship; in fact, everyone in my family, my father, mother, sister and brothers, each had a distinctively beautiful handwriting.  To this day, my children (whose penmanship deteriorated with their age) mock the compulsive possessiveness I show for my collections of pens.

Later, after a failure as an engineering student, I took my mechanical drawing skills and experience and began working as an apprentice draftsman.  Throughout that time, I was more captivated by the master draftsmen’s skills with lettering.  I read lots of books about the alphabet; I read entire tomes on the shaping of letters; in short, I taught myself to be a calligrapher.  I’ve never worked at it professionally, but during my second stint in college I became the poster-maker par-excellence for whatever event on campus needed hasty advertisements.  My children as pupils took a certain pride when I inscribed their names on brown lunch bags.  They frequently had to convince other students that the names on their lunch bags were not stamped or pre-printed.

Regarding singing, I probably could have been trained as a boy treble.  I sang solos often in church, and at the age of 10 I sang on radio.  A half-year later, I was a featured soloist in my sister’s wedding (and 23 years later, as an adult tenor, I sang the same solo selections at the wedding of my niece, my sister’s daughter).  My mother made overtures about sending me to school to study voice with a boy’s choir.  But sports were my passion and there was no way I could be made to sing instead of playing ball.  I still love to sing, but to me it is an ancillary joy, something I enjoy for the pure pleasure of it.  I tend to shun pressures to sing in church choirs or to join seasonal entertainment programs.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

[This memoir was originally composed for an online class in spiritual memoir writing using a prompt on influences of my “calling.”  It has been revised and adapted for this essay.]

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I confess that at a point in this memoir-writing exercise, I found myself paralyzed in answering.  That moment came when I encountered the writing prompt’s follow-up question regarding a time when I found myself “longing” to help a person or creature.

I’ve probably spent more time pondering this question than any other aspect of the assignment, and I have to say I can’t recall such a longing.  The word longing, in fact, seems totally foreign to my reflections.  Oh, I’ve known selfish longings for romance and fame and reward, but I think the question is probing my soul’s desire to serve others, and I confess that this language of longing has little meaning for me in that context.  I want to say that those who nurtured and influenced me instilled a kind of Nike ethic, if you will.  Longing seems counter-productive.  The operational and pragmatic phrase becomes “just do it.”

I think I have a similar sense of any “call” in my life to become a prophet, priest or journalist.  I’ve always thought a calling had more to do with matching one’s skills and talents to the job at hand rather than describing any mystical or spiritual setting apart.  This is not to say I don’t believe that God calls or sets apart; however, I’m not certain we are always able to grasp the intentions of God when we are placed in life situations that demand our just-do-it response, if I can borrow that phrase again.

Even the response of putting words on paper in an effort to complete this exercise ultimately came down to my responding to a just-do-it urging. 

I’d have probably felt a lot more comfortable with it if I’d been somewhere near the ocean.

                                                

A Parable of Grace from YouTube: Susan Boyle sings

A Parable of Grace
By Allan Roy Andrews

If you're among the seeming minority who has not yet viewed the seven-minute YouTube clip of the April 2009 audition of Scottish singer Susan Boyle on the "Britain's Got Talent" show, by all means view that video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxPZh4AnWyk before you read further.

Today (Nov. 23, 2009), seven months after her audition (and after her 48th birthday), Boyle's debut album goes on sale.  Pre-order sales at Amazon.com are at the highest for any pre-order of the year.  Incidentally, Boyle's performance on YouTube has been watched over 100 million times, setting her clips as an online record (the clip to which I've referred above has been viewed over 79 million times as of this writing).

Back in April, I used the clip of Boyle's audition for an exercise in a Composition 101 class I was teaching at a local community college.  I stopped the clip after Boyle introduced herself to the skeptical judges and audience and asked students to write their naive impressions of this woman who was about to sing.  Almost to a person, they described her as dumpy, dowdy, and not likely to impress anyone.

I stopped the clip after Boyle finished her rendition of "I Dreamed a Dream," from the musical Les Miserables, and asked the students to write a second reaction to the video.  Again, there was almost universal shock and surprise at the power and quality of this singer's voice.  The most frequent expression of these freshman writers was how the clip underscored the truth of the old aphorism:  "You can't judge a book by its cover."


This, of course, was part of the writing and literature lesson I hoped to impress upon the students, and I asked them to write a third response after they heard what the astonished judges had to say after Boyle had sung. Most of them saw what I saw:  three judges confessing their biases and repenting of their prejudicial expectations.


The three judges, Simon Cowell (best known to American TV-audiences as the seemingly harsh and abrupt judge of "American Idol"); British actress Amanda Holden; and Piers Morgan, the author and editor turned talent scout and judge; each responded to Boyle's performance with honest surprise and repentance.  Holden called the performance the "biggest wake-up call ever" to the cynical negativism she and the audience displayed and told Boyle she felt it a "complete privilege" to have heard her sing, and Morgan, the first to vote on Boyle's audition, said he was in "total shock" and gave her the "biggest yes" he's ever given anyone on the talent show. 


Similarly, the audience, many of whom rolled eyes and snickered at Boyle's introduction, spent most of the time of her performance on its feet in a rousing ovation to her talent.


For me, the seven-minute clip was a parable of the triumph of grace.


For the record, Boyle did not win the competition; she placed second to an acrobatic and precision team dance act called "Diversity."  The Great Britain audience that watched the final competition of "Britain's Got Talent" was a record-setting 17.4 million viewers.  But one might say that "winning" is a matter of interpretation, as is demonstrated in the dynamic of many of the parables of Jesus.  The Good Samaritan and the widow who gave her mite, along with many others, turn out to be the "winners" of the scriptural stories.  In the parable of "Britain's Got Talent," Susan Boyle emerges a winner.

Briefly hospitalized for treatment of exhaustion after her highly publicized performances on the British talent show, Boyle has put together her first album, a mixture of well-known songs and Christian hymns, including renditions of "Amazing Grace,"  "How Great Thou Art," and the Christmas carol, "Silent Night."

A reprise of her attention-grabbing first audition singing of "I Dreamed a Dream" is on the album as well.  Two cuts I find surprisingly attractive are calm and thoughtful renditions of the Mick Jagger song, "Wild Horses," and another of the John Stewart (one-time member of The Kingston Trio) number made popular by The Monkees, "Daydream Believer."

Excerpts of the album are available at http://www.susanboylemusic.com/gb/music/


I concur with the advice Simon Cowell gave Susan Boyle at the end of her audition, "You can go back to the village with your head held high . . . ."

Conversing with a five-year-old

By Allan Roy Andrews
-------------------------------------
This essay is an expansion and rewrite of a column I published during my tenure as editor of Pacific Stars and Stripes in Japan. That column, originally titled “A Ride Home from the Airplane Base” was published in 1996.
-------------------------------------

My middle son, now in his twenties, was one year old on the day my wife, our oldest son, and I took him on a Boeing 747 and flew for about 17 hours to Tokyo, where I became a civilian editor with the Department of the Army working for Pacific Stars and Stripes, the U.S. government’s daily newspaper for overseas military personnel stationed in the Far East.

The newspaper’s offices were located in downtown Tokyo on a tiny U.S. installation known as Hardy Barracks, and most personnel with the paper—both military and civilian—were housed at the larger military base, Yokota Air Base, about 50 kilometers west of Tokyo. Civilians were granted base privileges comparable to military personnel, and the Department of the Army paid most of us who worked as civilian editors the salaries we’d be paid if we were serving as colonels or captains in the armed services.

My wife was no stranger to Tokyo, she is the daughter of American missionaries, and had been born at a hospital near Tokyo and had lived most of her life in a western suburb on the Seibu-Ikebukuro train line before going stateside to attend college. For that reason, we did not choose to live on base, but instead rented a house “on the economy” in the neighborhood in which my wife had been raised. Our Japanese home was about 30 kilometers outside Tokyo and about 20 kilometers east of Yokota.

In the eight years plus that I held the job with Stripes, I learned to drive around the Kanto Plain in a series of automobiles we purchased during our tenure. All of them used, all of them Japanese-made cars—Hondas, Nissans, and Toyotas—all of them with steering on the right, and most with standard-shift that required me to learn to shift gears with my left hand. Because Stripes was an evening newspaper, editors began work around 5 a.m. Tokyo’s commuter trains did not begin running until closer to 6 a.m. Thus, I became an adept morning commuter and fairly competent at reading Japanese road signs.

At that time, gasoline was sold on base for about half of what it cost at a neighborhood Japanese service station. As a result, we made frequent trips from our home to Yokota Air Base, not only for gasoline, but for inexpensive shopping, entertainment, and, despite our growing love for Japanese food, a welcomed taste of America.

On one particular occasion I was driving home from the base with my five-year-old son as a passenger beside me. It was dusk when we left the base, and I could see that he was on the verge of falling asleep. I recall that it was this son who insisted we should call the place we’d just left “the airplane base,” not the air base, which makes good sense if one thinks about it.

“The best thing you could do,” I said to him, “is lie back and go to sleep.” We’d already eaten supper. Neither of us was hungry, and we were both somewhat eager to get back to the comfort of home.

“Go to sleep?” he said, a bit astonished. “Go to sleep without any diaper pants?”

“You don't need diaper pants,” I said, trying to be an encouraging father and strong male who shared grown-up mastery of the sphincters.

“What if I pee all over the seat?”

“You're the one who knows if you're going to pee,” I said.

“Well, Dad, let me know if you think I'm going to pee.”

“You're the one who knows if you have to pee.”

“Yeah,” he replied, “but let me know if you think I'm going to pee.”

Seeking to stop this circular talk, I said, “Well, you shouldn't have to pee, because we went to the bathroom just before we left the air base.”

“You mean the airplane base,” he said. O.K., I thought, we’re off that topic.

“You know what, Dad?”

“What?”

“Sometimes just after I pee I feel like I still have to pee again.”

Sometimes a father can do nothing or say nothing more. I've discovered that some conversations are best unfinished; or rather, they're best finished by the child rather than the adult. Children know when such conversations are supposed to end; adults don't.

Several minutes later, he picked up our conversation. “How long before we get home, Daddy?”

“About a half an hour.”

“A half an hour and how many minutes?” he asked.

“A half hour is 30 minutes, so about 30 minutes,” I said.

“No, Daddy, a half hour and how many minutes?”

“A half hour is 30 minutes.”

“But Daddy, a half hour and how many minutes.”

At that point, I realized again that adults often don't know when such conversations are finished, so I figured I'd better invent an answer just to keep us from going around in what I perceived to be endless circles.

“A half hour and two minutes,” I said, grabbing a number from the air and wondering what I'd say if he replied, “That's thirty-two minutes.”

He didn't say this, and I was happy; I don't appreciate precocious mathematicians. He seemed to understand (even if I didn't).

“Oh, is that what you meant?” he said as he glanced out the window at a truck we were passing.

“Yes, a half hour and two minutes,” I repeated, happy to have worked my way out of that conversation.

“Well, you said a half hour. I must have been confusing you,” he concluded.

Children also have a way of making adults feel small and foolish, especially when we attempt to be too rational and meaningful. After a few more minutes passed, my son turned theological:

“Can I ask you some Bible questions, Daddy?”

“Sure.”

“These are going to be really, really, really hard questions,'' he said in a tone meant to reassure me that I shouldn't feel too bad if I couldn’t answer them. To drive this home, he added, “I’m not sure I even know the answers myself.”

“O. K.”

“What day did Jesus die on the cross?” he asked.

I recall that this conversation took place shortly after Easter, so I assumed he was recalling something he picked up in Sunday School.

“You mean what day of the week?” I asked.

“Yeah, what day of the week?”

“It was Good Friday,” I answered.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, that's what the Bible tells us. Then it says that on Sunday -- Easter Sunday -- he rose again.” I'm really not trying to sound like a proselytizer, I just figured I'm repeating what he's learned.

“Is that when he went up to heaven?”

For me the conversation had subtly shifted. “Yes, I guess so,” I said, pondering exactly when Jesus went to heaven.

“When he died on the cross he was already in heaven,” my son pronounced with the aplomb of a dogmatic theologian.

I remained silent. The mystery of this conversation had already gone beyond me.

“Here's another really hard question,” he continued.

“On what day did David begin to play his harp?”

“I don't know. Was it a Monday?”

“I don't know.”

End of discussion.

I loved those drives; they provided conversations that kept my mind turning long after the wheels of our car had come to rest at home.