Coming Up For Air

The Sunday crowd surged around me. Navigating in that environment with a wheelchair takes some concentration, so I was focused on the waitress who was leading my wife and me to our table. Once again, the week's strongest memory may have come from a voice behind me. The question in a preschooler-parent conversation was drowned out by the commotion around it, but the parent's tensely hushed," I don't know," was distinct. Observing my wheelchair passing, the little student of the world probably asked, "Why is he like that?" Had such a question, spoken or unspoken, come from an honest inquisitor in my field of vision, I would have snapped to attention. With Pat Conroy's narrator Will McLean in Lords of Discipline , I would have considered it my military duty to appear to be in a good mood. I am, after all, a diplomat for the disabled the world over. The initial impression I make on a person that young may shape how they see people with disabilities ...

The Ideal Writer would have turned around. He or she would be able to describe to readers every stretching contour on this wife's face as she beamed. Not being the Ideal Writer, or the Ideal Man, I maintained the proper, or habitual, forward-facing attitude of the inanimate rows of classroom chairs.  Posture unmoved, the back of my neck still felt warmer. The wife behind me in Sunday school was describing her husband's tears, but each tear as she recounted it seemed to set ablaze her fondest affection rather than douse it.   She recalled her normally calm, cool, and logical husband tearing up as he prayed for people whose needs especially moved him. That kind of emotional expression, she said, was "definitely not like him."  She especially treasured the affirmation that his identity went beyond the first few adjectives that usually categorized him. As they approach and are open to experience with other people, the calm can be passionate, the cool can be warm, and ...

Those who had the privilege of seeing Sandy Koufax pitch describe him as a Picasso on the mound, and in 1967 he was at his best. He won 25 games, hurled 13 shutouts, led the league in strikeouts, and then retired at the age of 31. When asked about the potential income he lost by retiring and avoiding further arm trouble, he said, "If there were a man who did not have use of one of his arms, and you told him it would cost a lot of money, and he could buy back that use, he'd give every dime he had." Koufax's perspective may be even more rare than his curveball was. We ordinarily fail to see the immense value in what we already have and what we use every day. When we tell ourselves we really want just one thing, sings penetrating Christian lyricist Rich Mullins in "My One Thing," what we really mean is that we want just one thing more. We recognize this greed and ingratitude when a child asks for one piece of candy, and then another, and then another, but we...

A few minutes of Sunday school small talk transported me to my friend's classroom. I've been there before, in spirit, as he conveys enthusiasm for mentoring student teachers. He even spoke graciously of the student teacher who insisted over the high school students' objections that Notre Dame in Paris was named after the football team in South Bend, Indiana. My friend continues to keep on good terms with that guy, who has found success in another line of work. This time, however, my friend was frustrated with a classroom atmosphere of coldness rather than comedy emanating from a very different student teacher. This semester, just as the material covered germinates interest and discussions on the part of the students, the current student teacher stifles them in order to insert his own opinions and deliver history as a closed subject. Even pedagogy was of little interest to him, as my friend's suggestions on how to help the students remember material meet with an indiffe...

"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...