Coming Up For Air

I could hear her poise across a large, family-style restaurant table and through the surrounding din. Her composure made a particular impression projected from a 14-year-old kid. Madison, not her real name, held forth on the differences between her structured biological family and the freewheeling style of her best friend's family surrounding her now. "How can you not have a bedtime?! How can you be allowed to use your devices whenever you want, even take them to bed?!"  I've come to appreciate the less structured family that she was comparing her to own more and more as I've spent time with them. Even so, it was hard to argue with the results Madison presented as Exhibit A in favor of more strict, more culturally Christian parenting. Then she continued with the clarity a few minutes' hearing taught me to expect. This is a direct quote, not an abridged summary sharpened to make a point: "All my parents' rules have taught me is how to be a really good...

I love a good behind-the-scenes story, and the first volume of The 50 Year Mission was just that for a Star Trek fan. In it, the reader got to see the convergence of actor and character as Leonard Nimoy developed Spock's famous, "Live long and prosper" Vulcan greeting directly from Nimoy's heritage in Judaism. Nimoy defended Spock from caricature and settled into identification with the iconic creation with his famously evolving pair of autobiographies, from I Am Not Spock to I am Spock . As much as actor and character merged, the book relates that Nimoy once broke down emotionally on set during a relatively ordinary writer's meeting. Even for one who embodied Spock's logic so professionally and so convincingly, human emotion had to go somewhere. The members of the 4077 on M*A*S*H understood this as well. Veteran Army nurse Margaret Houlihan remains coolly professional while reconstructing boys mangled by combat. Even her periodic acerbic bluster seems und...

On the political drama The West Wing , a family friend who has known the show's president for decades says that, even to his kids, he has been the king of every room he has ever walked into. Still, Jed Bartlett has to grow into the role, and he needs help. When President Barlett slips out of a White House Christmas event to attend to a crisis, he needs a subtle reminder from a trusted aide. "Sir, your absence in the other room is conspicuous." I felt that a couple of times this week. Twice, I wrangled my unruly ego, all the more inflamed for being recently wounded, into a manageable, if temporary, subordinate position. Twice, I resolved to learn from the candid experience of someone I trusted. Twice, their personal absence was as conspicuous as that of the fictional president. Oh, the people I looked to were physically present, but their offering didn't have the authentic ring of personal experience. Instead, they trusted market-tested phrases as their broad-...

About a month ago, my brother was in an auto accident. When I asked about subsequent trouble with his back, he was philosophical. What happened, he said, was that my back tightened in order to protect my spinal cord. Now, anytime I'm under stress or try to lift anything, even something small, the same response kicks in. I have to retrain myself. Retrain himself he did. A lifelong independent person and freethinker who tends to shun accolades or confirmation from the crowd, on social media or otherwise, he nevertheless posted a picture on Facebook of his graduation from physical therapy. He could now return to work. Perhaps it was in the spirit of celebrating the celebratory, the completion of his first week back on the job with the shift that ended about 11, that he decided to defy middle-age and go to hear his uncle's band. When he left, it was raining heavily. The car was new to him. It collided with a concrete barrier. He totaled the car and broke a couple ribs, but human vu...

Saturday Night Live had a sketch back in the 90s in which a contestant with a gift for clairvoyance was participating in a game show. He kept buzzing in and expecting his foresight to give him the answers to the questions on the show. All he could enunciate, though, was "big gray rock." At the end of the sketch, indeed, the set was demolished, you guessed it, by the meteoric arrival of a big gray rock. His sense of impending crisis was taking priority over any chance the contestant had to show off lesser knowledge. Thus I come to this week's opportunity to come up for air. This isn't supposed to be a particularly religious space. I have another blog for that at BrianEsh73.LiveJournal.com where I faithfully, and enjoyably, get to pray my way through a verse in the Gospels where concerns for people's clicks and reactions are decidedly secondary. I've even gotten confirmation this week from a trusted source that my language overly saturated with biblical metapho...

Reading is the music that accompanies the machinery of a mundane week’s routines. Pastor Tim Keller, storytelling philosopher Mark Twain, craftsman of the gripping narrative Stephen King, grieving but resilient widow and Facebook luminary Sheryl Sandberg, and the ever buoyant and timeless Henry David Thoreau had their chances in this reader’s weekly batting order. A country boy from small-town Florida with no education beyond high school and a penchant for locker room language and antics shouldn’t have had a chance. Nevertheless, Chipper Jones drives home the motif for the week when he confesses in his memoir Ballplayer , "Nobody knows my swing inside and out the way he did. He built it." There is theology there that crosses the white lines of the baseball field, if we would have it. Chipper’s father takes a detailed and proprietary interest in the mechanics of his son’s work to an extent we wouldn’t expect from the stranger on the street, or even a passionate fan...