Coming Up For Air

"You don't remember me, do you?" is a loaded question. Often the answer is no. Saying this aloud is a confession that I don't prioritize people over my own thoughts. Nevertheless, this time the answer was a "yes" that was both emphatic and reluctant. This figure, tall, deep-voiced, and with a calm that could have been command presence was memorable, indeed. Twelve years ago, I hung my hopes on him in pumped full with the helium of heady optimism. As I was bringing my work gifts recognized, finally, and three years of experience into a new chapter in life in which I was also getting married, he stood in for a nice supporting role in my projected happily-ever-after narrative. He was a military veteran who, after retirement, had transitioned into the same human services field in which I worked. Since I was not physically built for military service, there was already, before I met him, masculine validation in the fact that we were going to be working toward the...

I love my church, once I get through the door. Before that happens, though, I encounter the Greeter. This blitz is something I have to prepare for each week. As she bubbles, I bristle. As she touches, I contract. I'm not sure how many cups of coffee fuel her effusive enthusiasm, but I'm adept at adapting spiritual reasons for the gulf of temperament that separates us. I contemplate the things of the Lord more seriously. I understand the mess the world is in more deeply. Anybody that sunny can't be that smart. What passes for my reasoning descends into the justification that if I have relegated someone in my instant appraisal to be less pensive and penetrating than I am, I can dismiss the possibility that I might learn from him or from her. The flaws in this thinking are obvious when its assumptions are spelled out on the page, or in someone else. I still carry my prideful preconceptions with me from setting to setting and day to day like a cumbersome hazmat suit I am conv...

Some aspects of 2017 were already not settling well with me. This is not unusual with me, or with man. When pressed upon by their particular years, Henry David Thoreau set out to live deliberately, and Huckleberry Finn threatened to light out for the territory. Neither of those were practical for a guy on a lunch hour and in a wheelchair, so I settled for a retreat to the green space situated in the middle of the college where I work. The combination of staid red brick and ever-renewing green grass colors my happy place. Even there, I had ready grounds for discontent. The grind of landscaping machinery drowned out the gurgling of the fountain at the center of the college. The green sod that represented superficial tranquility to me was being disturbed by turning spikes. Men about their taming, rectifying work stood between me and even the illusion of reflective solitude. I was about to grumble and retreat still further into my inflamed thoughts when the pomposity of this discontent occ...

I spent my reading week with men who demonstrated their mettle in the crucible of war in the middle of the 20th century. The warrior who stood out to me as most heroic, though, gilded her efforts with none none of Churchill's bluster, FDR's reserve, Kennedy's cool, or even William Manchester's attempts at command presence as a sergeant in World War II. This week's example of courage let her fear show, but she followed her notion of servant leadership, anyway. For almost half her life, this seventh grader's interest has been in serving people in other countries. Her inexperience didn't dissuade her from dreaming this dream. Her mom's job loss the previous year didn't distract her into what for some of her peers are all-consuming adolescent pursuits. The visible discomfort that came with talking to grown-ups about what she was called to do would not prove more powerful. She didn't write the Dr. Susan Jeffers's book Feel Your Fear and Do It Anyw...