Coming Up For Air

I've been present in a few "holy ground" moments, and this was one of them. My wife and I got to be present in my brother's home as he returns there for the first time after a seven-week hospitalization for a traumatic brain injury. He took the steps in the front slowly and surely, and he proceeded similarly inside the house. As he hugged each one of his kids individually in the domestic environment they had been occupying without him, he said, "Welcome home." I've been trying to figure that out ever since in the month that has elapsed. Did his brain, much recovered though he would admit still subject to malfunctions, transpose the normal social order of our interactions? Aren't the kids, who have been in the home, supposed to be welcoming him there? I've noticed that when we anticipate someone's processing or interactions to be a little off, we can assume this even when they are not, so I was glad to get a chance to ask him what he meant. ...

This week went on without any particular Damascus Road experience, even of an intellectual variety. The days ticked off toward the weekend when I typically Come Up For Air in this venue. I was sure they would coalesce around something compelling, witty, or thought rich to share. I'm not quite ready to divulge the specifics of my real life predicament and preoccupation on my current unexpected life detour until I can make some sense of them, probably in retrospect. In the fleeting time for quiet, written reflection I've got, I was counting on hiding behind a five dollar words or genial anecdotes about other people. Even my socks wouldn't cooperate with my appendages spastic with cerebral palsy, or with my pretense of control. They were just the latest rebels in a morning of setbacks somewhat specific to CP, but we will let them stand in for stuff which, to visualize, would definitely qualify as Too Much Information. The clock was ticking loudly, marking off the looming expir...

In Saving Private Ryan , the troops are complaining among themselves. One approaches their commanding officer who keeps a somewhat mysterious back story to himself and asks why they never hear him complaining. Gripes go up the chain of command, he says. Never down. A real-life friend of mine reminded me of such differing or distorted impressions. In graduate school, while my life was somewhat in turmoil, she seemed implacable. She even managed to complete a major paper overnight after being out of town with her family in response to a dear grandmother's passing. "How did you do that? I would have been freaking out and would have been unable to write the paper," I gushed admiringly. "You didn't see me when I was freaking out," she said with stoic candor. Colossians 4 also speaks to the wisdom of sharing selectively. The first verse sets the ideal that authority would be used with grace, and the second gives us the appropriate outlet for where to file our comp...

In Star Trek:The Next Generation , the android on the crew, Data, tries to be a parent. When the circuits of his android daughter begin to break down, she returns to the lab where she was formed. That's what she was programmed to do. This was a "return to the lab" kind of week. I'm still reestablishing much of what had been my life's orderly circuitry, so I'll spare you splenetics on exactly what happened and trust time and perspective to produce a more evenhanded account at some point. Meanwhile, I return to three basic principles programmed, err, parented into me. They are my coordinates when I am otherwise adrift. (1) I have skills other adults will notice. The first time I remember really believing this as more than parental pablum was, not surprisingly, in reference to my writing. I placed highly in a contest against fifth-grade contemporaries, and I liked this. I remember more vividly, though, feedback from my father. I was moved by the earthshaking co...

When the woman who introduced you to Green Eggs and Ham asks if you ever laugh, that's a pointed question. Perhaps sharpened by the technologically efficient brevity of a text inquiry, that was the question with which my mom confronted me yesterday. Like Hermione in the Harry Potter series, my recourse when confronting anything is to go to the library.  That's what she and I always do. I've found it safe to filter the outside world through the C. S. Lewis section of my mental book reserve, and he offered me a retreat from the question at hand. In Mere Christianity , he cautioned against evaluating people against some scale for outward happiness that we imagine to be objective. People are different, he says. People's experiences are different. The woman of whom we wonder, "Does she ever laugh?" might have become a lot more free at expressing joy over the last year. She may, in fact, more deliberately focus on whatever is good, whatever is lovely,...

I didn't realize a blue shirt could mean so much. This is the status symbol employees of the fast food chain receive when they are promoted and are now distinct from the red shirts around them. For the son of a friend of mine who hasn't found particular validation as a student or athlete, the blue shirt was especially gratifying. His dad says the accompanying raise didn't matter nearly as much as the blue shirt others could see. For the adolescent venturing out into the working world much like where he will find himself for the next few decades, the harbinger of the blue shirt is altogether good. Too much of a good thing, or too much worth assigned to a good thing, is not. With much more work behind us than my friend's commendable son, how many of us are still looking for the blue shirt, or the next blue shirt, to designate us for separate praise from our working peers? Is the blue shirt, or its more expensive equivalent, an accompanying RESULT of work done heartily ...

“Comparisons are odious.” Here, humorist Oscar Wilde is uncharacteristically blunt. I didn’t expect to be prodded by him, nor that his warning be delivered and confirmed in a bit of light reading on the second 25 years of the Star Trek phenomenon. By such diverse fuel, though, are the warp engines of my transformation engaged. As Star Trek: The Next Generation has unexpectedly provided the eerily timeless décor of my mental furniture, rearranging its assumptions is thought-provoking. What if James Avery who later played Uncle Phil on the Fresh Prince of Bel Air robustly filled the role of Geordie in place of the tentative, maturing grace that LeVar Burton brought to the role? It could have happened. What if Wesley, the show’s much-maligned boy prodigy, was a girl named Leslie? It could have happened. What if producers insisted on   my initial, adolescent reaction that Patrick Stewart was too old to take the captain’s chair from James T. Kirk?  Patrick Stewart, who w...