My life has gotten smaller over the years.
I grew up in Atlanta, which was a big city even in those days; moved to Birmingham, which was not as big as Atlanta but still pretty good size; then lived along the Gulf Coast in a series of places, and now find myself in a small town in Mississippi (population around 12,000).
People often ask me about the difference between living in a big city and a small town, and I used to tell them that it's not as big of a difference as they'd think. When you live in a big city, even though you are in a metropolis of millions of people with all the supporting businesses and entertainment that goes with it, you tend to spend most of your life in a relatively small part. You go to the local stores, eat at favorite restuarants, shop at familiar stores. In many ways, we tend to turn big cities into small towns by reducing the area to our small corner of the big town.
I used to say that, and I believed it.
I was wrong.
It's not that small towns are not without amenities. There is usually a Wal-Mart. And of course a big-box hardware/building supply store like Home Depot. There is one movie theatre (with four screens). There are a couple of cell phone stores, and a car rental place. When it comes to eating out, there is a Cracker Barrell and the usual assortment of fast food (McDonald's, Krystal, KFC, Burger King) near the on/off ramps to the interstate. There is also one Mexican restuarant, a couple of barbecue places, and a few Chinese places.
This little town also has a Piggly Wiggly, the only grocery store I've found other than the Wal-mart, and a library that is part of a three-county consortium which includes a nearby community college library that I can borrow from.
There are some things that strike me as unusual. If I walk around the block where I live (in a "downtown loft" across from the old railroad depot), I pass no fewer than five hair salons; at least five women's clothing stores; two jewelry shops; one women's shoe store. No wonder the state of Mississippi once boasted the most "Miss America" winners.
There are also three bakeries and a dry cleaner, and one block over there is an auto parts place and a pawn shop.
And of course there is a Dollar General, a company whose footprint rivals that of Wal-Mart.
It sounds great, and it is, until ...
There was the day when the Trophy Wife needed an accessory for her cell phone. No problem, I said, we'll run to Best Buy ... except there isn't a Best Buy.
One Saturday I woke up thinking it was time to get a new pair of tennis shoes, so I'd run over to Academy ... except there isn't one.
A Barnes and Noble or Books-A-Million? Forget it
There are exactly two men's clothing stores (not counting Wal-Mart).
There is no steak restuarant, but there is a good, locally owned and family operated pasta place.
So what do you do when you want to go shopping, or eat at a really good restuarant, or maybe have a choice of movies? To quote Johnny Cash and June Carter, you go to Jackson.
Like the "olden days,'' you plan a day trip to Jackson to do your shopping in the "big city."
Here's the thing, though: I like Mississippi. I'm not sure what it is, but I like the people. It's one of those places that if you're out for a walk and get tired, you can call the police and they'll come pick you up and give you a ride home and think nothing of it. Every shop is locally owned, and chances are if you're in there, you're going to run into the owner, or a relative of the owner.
And people take the time to talk. They may wear you out with talking, telling you about their families, their neighbors, the local gossip; but that's entertainment. That slower pace of life you always hear about in small towns? It's real. People seem naturally patient, as if they know it's hard enough to fill their days so why fret about wasting time?
And people know each other. Heck, most of them are related, even if only distantly. I met a mechanic with a last name I recognized, and asked him if he was related to this other family of the same last name. "Oh, I know them,'' he replied. "But they're the 'top of the hill.' My family came from out in the country. If we are related, they'd never admit it."
I don't know if "top of the hill" was just a phrase meaning 'better off' or he meant it literally. I'm guessing the former, because this is a relatively flat area, geographically. But I understood what he meant.
Do I miss a larger city? You better believe it. Not every day, of course. But there are times that I miss having choices.
On the other hand, the folks around here work hard at having fun. They don't have as many options as you find in a large city, so when they get together, they try to make it count.
I am part of a every-other-week lunch group, and we always have fried chicken, mashed potatoes, green beans, sweet tea, and cake. And every other week, I get an excited email or call from the same guy who says, "Razor" - he calls me Razor, which I guess is my Mississippi nickname - he says, "Razor! Chicken on the bone! Yessir, nothing better than chicken on the bone!" You'd think he absolutely lived for "chicken on the bone."
Like I said, you work hard to have things to look forward to.
I have discovered that a small town is like living in a large family. Sometimes it is fun, sometimes it's awful; sometimes everyone gets along, sometimes they divide into cliques. They'll apologize profusely for things that can't possibly be their fault (like the time I nicked the bumper of the car of the older lady who owns the shoe store below me; she apologized to me , as if parking her car between the white lines of the legal parking place in front of her store caused my carelessness!), or they may blame someone else for something that is clearly their responsibility.
But in the end, like a large family, they stick together. Even if they don't want to admit it, even if they say they can't wait to get away, they know that deep down, they have a bond, and they stick together because they know they'll be seeing each other every week for the next fifty or sixty years.
And I have found they approach newcomers with a sense of hope, as if they can't believe someone new has chosen to join them while at the same time feeling a sense of pride that their little plot of land has attracted someone new. There is an anticipation of what that new person brings: energy, ideas, perspective that they hope, of course, will improve the overall 'family' - but with as little uncomfortableness as possible.
It's complicated in the way that all large families are complicated. And maybe, in the end, that's the difference between the large city and the small town:
In the large city, it's so easy to be an only-child.
In the small town, you have to work to be left alone.
Thursday, March 6, 2014
Wednesday, February 19, 2014
Equal pay for equal risk
I am the son of a working mother, the husband of a woman who has been successful in every business endeavor, the father of a brilliant girl who I absolutely believe will make an impact on the world.
So when I hear about women not being paid the same as a man, only earning 77 percent of what a man earns, of this on-going inequality in pay, I say ...
Why not?
This isn't about talent or brains or work ethic. Across the board, I believe those things even out. I have worked with and for brilliant women, just as I have brilliant men.
But it all comes down to an old saying, "the greater the risk, the greater the reward."
And men, day-in and day-out, take the greater risk.
Don't believe me?
Say you're on a cruise ship, like the Titanic. You hit an ice berg, and the ship is going down. What do they say? "Women and children first." Women even before children! In every movie about the Titanic, you don't see the women left standing on the bow of the ship with the band playing "Nearer My God To Thee." It's always the men. It's expected.
But it's not just cruise ships.
What happens in a hostage situation? Say some guy is holding 20 people at gun point in a bank. The police have the place surrounded, and he is demanding a car to take him, unhindered, to the airport, where he will fly to Cuba. If he doesn't get what he wants, he will start killing hostages. And what do the hostage negotiators always say? "Give us something to show we can negotiate in good faith. Let the women and children go...''
Firemen are taught when saving people in a burning buildling to look for "women and children" first. A man can be up on the fifth floor, full-bore panic mode, but if there's a woman in the same room ... guess who comes out first?
So men get paid more than women? They deserve it, just for the fact that society does not value a man's life as highly as it does "women and children." Men are apparently considered replaceable; women are valuable commodities (and I can understand why). If that value doesn't always translate into salary, I'd say its more than compensated in other, very tangible ways. And until that changes .....
I'm kidding. Seriously. It's a joke.
But sometimes my mind just goes this way.
So when I hear about women not being paid the same as a man, only earning 77 percent of what a man earns, of this on-going inequality in pay, I say ...
Why not?
This isn't about talent or brains or work ethic. Across the board, I believe those things even out. I have worked with and for brilliant women, just as I have brilliant men.
But it all comes down to an old saying, "the greater the risk, the greater the reward."
And men, day-in and day-out, take the greater risk.
Don't believe me?
Say you're on a cruise ship, like the Titanic. You hit an ice berg, and the ship is going down. What do they say? "Women and children first." Women even before children! In every movie about the Titanic, you don't see the women left standing on the bow of the ship with the band playing "Nearer My God To Thee." It's always the men. It's expected.
But it's not just cruise ships.
What happens in a hostage situation? Say some guy is holding 20 people at gun point in a bank. The police have the place surrounded, and he is demanding a car to take him, unhindered, to the airport, where he will fly to Cuba. If he doesn't get what he wants, he will start killing hostages. And what do the hostage negotiators always say? "Give us something to show we can negotiate in good faith. Let the women and children go...''
Firemen are taught when saving people in a burning buildling to look for "women and children" first. A man can be up on the fifth floor, full-bore panic mode, but if there's a woman in the same room ... guess who comes out first?
So men get paid more than women? They deserve it, just for the fact that society does not value a man's life as highly as it does "women and children." Men are apparently considered replaceable; women are valuable commodities (and I can understand why). If that value doesn't always translate into salary, I'd say its more than compensated in other, very tangible ways. And until that changes .....
I'm kidding. Seriously. It's a joke.
But sometimes my mind just goes this way.
Nick Saban, Mercedes, and car stories from the road
I saw a story out of Birmingham where Alabama head coach Nick Saban has agreed to be a partner in a Birmingham-area Mercedes dealership.
The article repeated the oft-told Saban story of how he wanted to own a car dealership when he first graduated from Kent State, that he was set to go to some kind of General Motors management school to prepare him to be a dealer General Manager, but because his now-wife Terry had one more year of school left, he stuck around as a graduate assistant on then-Kent State coach Don James' football staff and the rest, as the cliche goes, is history.
The relationship between athletic departments and car dealerships is legendary. Almost every college athletic department of note has an agreement with a local dealer - or often several, in the case of big-time D-1 schools - to provide athletic personnel with free cars in exchange for benefits that range from tickets to games, access to staff and players, promotions, etc. As more than one coach has said, it's like every car dealer wants to be a coach; and every coach wants a new car.
I'm reminded of a former Alabama coach who was notorious for being hard on his dealer-provided cars, demanding frequent changes and often at strange times. One of the strangest, however, was a matter of convenience for the coach and inconvenience for the dealership. This coach was driving up I-59/20 from Tuscaloosa on his way to Birmingham when his car broke down; I don't know if the engine actually stopped running or he had a flat tire or simply ran out of gas. But this coach was notoriously impatient (as most coaches are), and he was in a hurry, so he called the dealership and said, "I want a new car." Of course they said OK, and when would he like it? "Right now,'' the coach said. "Get someone to bring it to me." Of course, they said; are you at the athletic complex, or at your home? "Have your guy meet me on I-59 at" whatever exit or milemarker he was at. This wasn't normal, but then very few of the demands of high-powered football coaches are normal, so the dealer sent a guy out in a new car to meet the coach. Of course, when he got there, this coach took the new car, threw the guy the keys to the car that wasn't running, said "Thanks,'' and drove off.
NASCAR drivers have some of the funniest stories on rental cars. Back in the day when the drivers would fly commercial to the next race, they'd rent cars from the airport (this was before so many of them had their own private planes). On this day, a pretty famous driver, a crew member, and a couple media guys were all riding together back to the airport to catch a flight out of town, and they were running very late, to the point that they were close to missing their flight. "No problem,'' said the NASCAR driver. "I've got the collision/damage waiver." He drove to the front of the terminal at the ticketing level, got out and popped the hood of the car, pulled a wire, and then called the rental car company. "Hey, your car broke down and I need someone to pick it up,'' he said. The rental car company said, "Sure. Where is the car located?" He told them, "It's in front of the terminal,'' and he hung up and, needless to say, everyone made their flight.
It was a trip to Puerto Rico to cover the San Juan Shoot-Out basketball tournament where I learned what became a truism I've used over the years. The roads in Puerto Rico where terrible (and might still be, I just haven't been back in a long time), plus the traffic patterns seem more like figure-eight demolition derby than the, by comparison, organized traffic patterns most of us in the U.S. are accustomed to. The rental company told us we needed to get the collision damage waiver, which we did. A bunch of us were riding together, trying to find the practice facility of one of the teams we were covering, which was out in some fringe area. The guy driving missed a turn, and when we realized it he simply did a U-turn across a median, curbs, trash, over pot-holes - and we came up with the saying, "the only true all-terrain vehicle is a rental car with a collision damage waiver."
Words to live - and travel - by.
Saban apparently is a fan of Mercedes. His partner in the deal is an old friend of his from Louisiana, a Mercedes dealer from that state who was looking to expand into Alabama in partnership with Saban. The partner said that Saban has long been a Mercedes enthusiast and years ago expressed an interest in opening a dealership; that Saban told him, "I don't have a minute to run it, but I love the brand."
I can see why. Years ago, when I was at my first newspaper, I received an invitation to go to a SAAB ride-and-drive at Road Atlanta, a road course race track in our newspaper coverage area. SAAB brought in SAAB dealers from all over Georgia to test drive the new SAAB, compare it to other cars, and meet the company president who would be addressing the crowd to spur enthusiasm for the new line of automobiles. I was the only media guy there, and I'm sure they hoped I'd write a glowing report on the wonderful qualities of the SAAB.
Unfortunately, they made the mistake of putting a Mercedes convertable, a 560 Class or maybe 280, in as one of the test cars we could drive around the track. I say unfortunately because everyone wanted to drive the Mercedes, myself included. The line for driving the Mercedes around the Road Atlanta track was longer than any other car. SAAB dealers were jumping line when they could to get in the Mercedes and see what it would do on the track.
Eventually, the Mercedes just disappeared. The SAAB factory reps realized they were losing that battle, and took it out of driving rotation, forcing us to drive the SAAB and Volvo and Cadillac or whatever other brands they'd put up to compare to their new car.
I know I was supposed to write about SAAB, and how good of a car it was (and it was, it really was). But it was the first time I'd ever driven a Mercedes, and it was everything I thought it would be. How do you not fall in love driving a convertible Mercedes, top-down, around the picturesque Road Atlanta course, seeing how smooth it rides, how well it handles, how much just pure pleasure a driving experience could be?
So I wrote instead of starting my love-affair with this foreign-born beauty who, alas, was so far out of my economic class that I feared I would never be able to afford her.
Needless to say, I was never invited back to a SAAB ride-n-drive.
But I did eventually get a Mercedes.
The article repeated the oft-told Saban story of how he wanted to own a car dealership when he first graduated from Kent State, that he was set to go to some kind of General Motors management school to prepare him to be a dealer General Manager, but because his now-wife Terry had one more year of school left, he stuck around as a graduate assistant on then-Kent State coach Don James' football staff and the rest, as the cliche goes, is history.
The relationship between athletic departments and car dealerships is legendary. Almost every college athletic department of note has an agreement with a local dealer - or often several, in the case of big-time D-1 schools - to provide athletic personnel with free cars in exchange for benefits that range from tickets to games, access to staff and players, promotions, etc. As more than one coach has said, it's like every car dealer wants to be a coach; and every coach wants a new car.
I'm reminded of a former Alabama coach who was notorious for being hard on his dealer-provided cars, demanding frequent changes and often at strange times. One of the strangest, however, was a matter of convenience for the coach and inconvenience for the dealership. This coach was driving up I-59/20 from Tuscaloosa on his way to Birmingham when his car broke down; I don't know if the engine actually stopped running or he had a flat tire or simply ran out of gas. But this coach was notoriously impatient (as most coaches are), and he was in a hurry, so he called the dealership and said, "I want a new car." Of course they said OK, and when would he like it? "Right now,'' the coach said. "Get someone to bring it to me." Of course, they said; are you at the athletic complex, or at your home? "Have your guy meet me on I-59 at" whatever exit or milemarker he was at. This wasn't normal, but then very few of the demands of high-powered football coaches are normal, so the dealer sent a guy out in a new car to meet the coach. Of course, when he got there, this coach took the new car, threw the guy the keys to the car that wasn't running, said "Thanks,'' and drove off.
NASCAR drivers have some of the funniest stories on rental cars. Back in the day when the drivers would fly commercial to the next race, they'd rent cars from the airport (this was before so many of them had their own private planes). On this day, a pretty famous driver, a crew member, and a couple media guys were all riding together back to the airport to catch a flight out of town, and they were running very late, to the point that they were close to missing their flight. "No problem,'' said the NASCAR driver. "I've got the collision/damage waiver." He drove to the front of the terminal at the ticketing level, got out and popped the hood of the car, pulled a wire, and then called the rental car company. "Hey, your car broke down and I need someone to pick it up,'' he said. The rental car company said, "Sure. Where is the car located?" He told them, "It's in front of the terminal,'' and he hung up and, needless to say, everyone made their flight.
It was a trip to Puerto Rico to cover the San Juan Shoot-Out basketball tournament where I learned what became a truism I've used over the years. The roads in Puerto Rico where terrible (and might still be, I just haven't been back in a long time), plus the traffic patterns seem more like figure-eight demolition derby than the, by comparison, organized traffic patterns most of us in the U.S. are accustomed to. The rental company told us we needed to get the collision damage waiver, which we did. A bunch of us were riding together, trying to find the practice facility of one of the teams we were covering, which was out in some fringe area. The guy driving missed a turn, and when we realized it he simply did a U-turn across a median, curbs, trash, over pot-holes - and we came up with the saying, "the only true all-terrain vehicle is a rental car with a collision damage waiver."
Words to live - and travel - by.
Saban apparently is a fan of Mercedes. His partner in the deal is an old friend of his from Louisiana, a Mercedes dealer from that state who was looking to expand into Alabama in partnership with Saban. The partner said that Saban has long been a Mercedes enthusiast and years ago expressed an interest in opening a dealership; that Saban told him, "I don't have a minute to run it, but I love the brand."
I can see why. Years ago, when I was at my first newspaper, I received an invitation to go to a SAAB ride-and-drive at Road Atlanta, a road course race track in our newspaper coverage area. SAAB brought in SAAB dealers from all over Georgia to test drive the new SAAB, compare it to other cars, and meet the company president who would be addressing the crowd to spur enthusiasm for the new line of automobiles. I was the only media guy there, and I'm sure they hoped I'd write a glowing report on the wonderful qualities of the SAAB.
Unfortunately, they made the mistake of putting a Mercedes convertable, a 560 Class or maybe 280, in as one of the test cars we could drive around the track. I say unfortunately because everyone wanted to drive the Mercedes, myself included. The line for driving the Mercedes around the Road Atlanta track was longer than any other car. SAAB dealers were jumping line when they could to get in the Mercedes and see what it would do on the track.
Eventually, the Mercedes just disappeared. The SAAB factory reps realized they were losing that battle, and took it out of driving rotation, forcing us to drive the SAAB and Volvo and Cadillac or whatever other brands they'd put up to compare to their new car.
I know I was supposed to write about SAAB, and how good of a car it was (and it was, it really was). But it was the first time I'd ever driven a Mercedes, and it was everything I thought it would be. How do you not fall in love driving a convertible Mercedes, top-down, around the picturesque Road Atlanta course, seeing how smooth it rides, how well it handles, how much just pure pleasure a driving experience could be?
So I wrote instead of starting my love-affair with this foreign-born beauty who, alas, was so far out of my economic class that I feared I would never be able to afford her.
Needless to say, I was never invited back to a SAAB ride-n-drive.
But I did eventually get a Mercedes.
Wednesday, February 5, 2014
Whatever happened to quicksand (and other childhood fears)?
The other day I was watching an old TV show, and one of the characters fell into quicksand, and it got me thinking: of all the things that I was afraid of when I was a kid (and I wasn't a particularly fearful kid, but I did have fears), three things topped the list - the Rapture, snakes, and quicksand.
The Rapture, for those who may not be familiar, is that point in the future when all current Christians are "caught up in the air,'' kind of like the Old Testament Enoch, who "walked with God and was no more," meaning he didn't die but was called directly up to be with God. We were taught that one day Christians would be walking, driving, working, shopping, eating, doing all those normal, everyday things that we all do, and then suddenly, poof! - or more Biblically, in the blink of an eye - they are gone.
When I was a kid both my parents worked, so after school I'd go home and then head out to play with the guys in the neighborhood, with the understanding I had to be home by 5:30, which is when my Mom typically got home from work. (I'm not sure when my Dad got home; in those days, he often went straight to a second job, or maybe he worked late, or something). So if I was not in my backyard playing football or in the driveway playing basketball (which were about the only two things we did back in the day), I was supposed to drop everything and be at home at 5:30 when my Mom got there.
However, there were those days - usually stormy days, when I had to stay inside - that my Mom wouldn't be home by 5:30. And sometimes it would get deathly quiet. And the clock would tick. And maybe there would be no cars on the street in front of our house. And when I looked out the windows I didn't see any signs of movement from my neighbors' houses. And I would have this horrible, sinking feeling that the Rapture had occured and I had been "left behind" (which, years later, would be the title of some very successful Rapture-related novels and movie).
Needless to say, I was terrified.
This was before cell phones, so I couldn't call my Mom to see where she was. It never occurred to me to pick up the phone and call someone, like my zealously-religious aunt who would never have let God hear the end of it if He'd made the inexcusable mistake of leaving her behind. And this was the time of three TV channels (four, if you counted PBS, which no one did), so it wasn't like I could dial in to CNN for an up-to-the minute report. And I had enough sense to know the stuff that was on TV was pre-recorded, so if all the TV engineers and programmers had been Raptured, these shows would continue to play until the non-Christians got in and changed them to shows glorifying violence and lying and being cruel and pornography, which is what I assumed would happen when all the Christians were taken from the world (as described by a rather frightening book I'd read called "In The Twinkling Of An Eye," which was a forerunner to the "Left Behind" series).
And about the time I had lost all hope, my Mom's car would come pulling into the driveway. But while you'd think I'd be running out to throw my arms around her, crying with joy and relief, I didn't. (If you think I should have been on my knees, praying for forgiveness, understand that by that time it was considered too late and while I could still become a Christian, I'd have to live through the seven years of Tribulation, so getting on my knees right then or the next day wouldn't have made a whole lot of difference). No, by the time my Mom hit the back door, I was back in "cool" mode, not letting her see that I was worried, casually doing something else as if I had not a care in the world.
It was only later that, I'm ashamed to admit, my sinful nature would take over and I'd be kind of sorry that the Rapture hadn't taken place, because it meant I would have to go to school the next day, and I would have to keep going to church on Sunday nights, missing the Wonderful World of Disney. Plus, that book "In the Twinkling ..." painted this picture of pure hedonism in the streets of every city, and as a boy I couldn't help but wonder just what previously veiled images I just might see.
Snakes: Snakes should be pretty self-explanatory. Who in their right mind isn't afraid of snakes? I mean, when God gets so mad at you he takes away your arms and legs and makes you crawl on your belly ... that's pretty serious (and why we used to call snakes "Mr. No-shoulders,'' as in 'don't go chasing that golf ball in the weeds because you might run into Mr. No-shoulders").
In high school, our church youth group used to go on these things we called "retreats" where we'd load up in the church bus and go off someplace, like the mountains of Gatlinburg, Tenn, (in the summer, when the rates were cheap; in the winter we'd go to the beach for the same reason). We'd often stay in hotels, with two double beds but four to a room.
And one night, three of the guys and I were in our room, talking (probably about what girls would be like after the Rapture) and I went over to pull back the covers on my side of the bed. As I did, I saw a snake curled up in the sheets, just lying there.
Now, I didn't visibly panic (even though I didn't want to). I didn't throw up (even though I could feel the bile in my throat). I didn't scream (my throat was too constricted to utter a sound).
What I did do was a pure act of cowardice: I simply put the blankets back over the snake, went to the far side of the room, and kept going like nothing had happened. I decided to wait until someone else pulled back the covers and let them deal with the snake. (But I admit I stayed close to the door, and my heart was pounding).
Sure enough, a few minutes later one of the guys went over, pulled back the sheets, and said, "Who put this in there?" and held up a long, rubber snake. We all laughed (although mine was kind of forced). But I still slept in the other bed.
The next day, we were on the bus, and several of the girls in our group asked me how I slept, if anything unusual happened. It turns out they, knowing my fear of snakes, had somehow got in and put this rubber snake in my bed, hoping to scare the you-know-what out of me. They were so disappointed to find out that one of the other guys apparently found the snake first, and that they didn't "get" me.
This is the first time I've ever admitted they did indeed "get" me, so if any of you are reading this: yes, you pulled off a good one!
Quicksand: Maybe you're thinking, quicksand? But when I was a kid, quicksand was everywhere. On TV, anyway.
I was watching a Rifleman re-run the other day (which is redundant, because they haven't made a new Rifleman episode since 1963 so of course it was a re-run), and some girl that Mark was kind of sweet on somehow fell in some quicksand, and then Mark fell in trying to help her, and just before they went under Lucas came and pulled them out. This wasn't unusual for TV back in my childhood. Tarzan movies (I was a huge Johnny Weissmueller fan) always seemed to have some episode involving quicksand. Cartoons like Road Runner would have characters falling into quicksand (and anvils falling from the sky, but that's another story). Cowboy shows like The Rifleman (which remains one of my favorite shows of all time, and thanks to AMC and DVR I can record and re-watch all 168 episodes) and Bonanza and Gunsmoke and The Big Valley almost always had an episode involving someone falling into quicksand. Even "The Princess Bride" has that scene in the Thieves Forest where Buttercup and Wesley are trapped in quicksand. And of course, there is the scene in Blazing Saddles where the railroad track ends in a bog of quicksand.
When I was a kid, I thought quicksand was everywhere, a very real threat that you had to watch out for. I remember reading tips on how to survive if you found yourself caught in quicksand (apparently, you lay back on your back and float and by increasing mass, you reduce the suction).
I am now grown up (I hesitate to call myself an adult). I have travelled a good deal of this country, both cities and suburbs and countryside and mountains and forests. I have been to Europe, and several Carribean islands (including Haiti, which seems like a natural place to find quicksand). My parents lived and worked in Africa for awhile. Never - and I repeat never - have I come across any quicksand, or know of anyone who has come across quicksand.
These days, you never ever even get a good quicksand scene in a movie or TV show. What the heck happened? Like polio and typhoid, did we manage to do away with the scourge of quicksand? Was this one of the great accomplishments of the 20th Century that we so take for granted that no one ever talks about it?
I no longer fear the Rapture. I've come to terms with snakes.
Quicksand? That's the one I feel most cheated by. And if I mysteriously disappear one day, with no trace, maybe I'll have finally found quicksand.
Unless it was the Rapture.
The Rapture, for those who may not be familiar, is that point in the future when all current Christians are "caught up in the air,'' kind of like the Old Testament Enoch, who "walked with God and was no more," meaning he didn't die but was called directly up to be with God. We were taught that one day Christians would be walking, driving, working, shopping, eating, doing all those normal, everyday things that we all do, and then suddenly, poof! - or more Biblically, in the blink of an eye - they are gone.
When I was a kid both my parents worked, so after school I'd go home and then head out to play with the guys in the neighborhood, with the understanding I had to be home by 5:30, which is when my Mom typically got home from work. (I'm not sure when my Dad got home; in those days, he often went straight to a second job, or maybe he worked late, or something). So if I was not in my backyard playing football or in the driveway playing basketball (which were about the only two things we did back in the day), I was supposed to drop everything and be at home at 5:30 when my Mom got there.
However, there were those days - usually stormy days, when I had to stay inside - that my Mom wouldn't be home by 5:30. And sometimes it would get deathly quiet. And the clock would tick. And maybe there would be no cars on the street in front of our house. And when I looked out the windows I didn't see any signs of movement from my neighbors' houses. And I would have this horrible, sinking feeling that the Rapture had occured and I had been "left behind" (which, years later, would be the title of some very successful Rapture-related novels and movie).
Needless to say, I was terrified.
This was before cell phones, so I couldn't call my Mom to see where she was. It never occurred to me to pick up the phone and call someone, like my zealously-religious aunt who would never have let God hear the end of it if He'd made the inexcusable mistake of leaving her behind. And this was the time of three TV channels (four, if you counted PBS, which no one did), so it wasn't like I could dial in to CNN for an up-to-the minute report. And I had enough sense to know the stuff that was on TV was pre-recorded, so if all the TV engineers and programmers had been Raptured, these shows would continue to play until the non-Christians got in and changed them to shows glorifying violence and lying and being cruel and pornography, which is what I assumed would happen when all the Christians were taken from the world (as described by a rather frightening book I'd read called "In The Twinkling Of An Eye," which was a forerunner to the "Left Behind" series).
And about the time I had lost all hope, my Mom's car would come pulling into the driveway. But while you'd think I'd be running out to throw my arms around her, crying with joy and relief, I didn't. (If you think I should have been on my knees, praying for forgiveness, understand that by that time it was considered too late and while I could still become a Christian, I'd have to live through the seven years of Tribulation, so getting on my knees right then or the next day wouldn't have made a whole lot of difference). No, by the time my Mom hit the back door, I was back in "cool" mode, not letting her see that I was worried, casually doing something else as if I had not a care in the world.
It was only later that, I'm ashamed to admit, my sinful nature would take over and I'd be kind of sorry that the Rapture hadn't taken place, because it meant I would have to go to school the next day, and I would have to keep going to church on Sunday nights, missing the Wonderful World of Disney. Plus, that book "In the Twinkling ..." painted this picture of pure hedonism in the streets of every city, and as a boy I couldn't help but wonder just what previously veiled images I just might see.
Snakes: Snakes should be pretty self-explanatory. Who in their right mind isn't afraid of snakes? I mean, when God gets so mad at you he takes away your arms and legs and makes you crawl on your belly ... that's pretty serious (and why we used to call snakes "Mr. No-shoulders,'' as in 'don't go chasing that golf ball in the weeds because you might run into Mr. No-shoulders").
In high school, our church youth group used to go on these things we called "retreats" where we'd load up in the church bus and go off someplace, like the mountains of Gatlinburg, Tenn, (in the summer, when the rates were cheap; in the winter we'd go to the beach for the same reason). We'd often stay in hotels, with two double beds but four to a room.
And one night, three of the guys and I were in our room, talking (probably about what girls would be like after the Rapture) and I went over to pull back the covers on my side of the bed. As I did, I saw a snake curled up in the sheets, just lying there.
Now, I didn't visibly panic (even though I didn't want to). I didn't throw up (even though I could feel the bile in my throat). I didn't scream (my throat was too constricted to utter a sound).
What I did do was a pure act of cowardice: I simply put the blankets back over the snake, went to the far side of the room, and kept going like nothing had happened. I decided to wait until someone else pulled back the covers and let them deal with the snake. (But I admit I stayed close to the door, and my heart was pounding).
Sure enough, a few minutes later one of the guys went over, pulled back the sheets, and said, "Who put this in there?" and held up a long, rubber snake. We all laughed (although mine was kind of forced). But I still slept in the other bed.
The next day, we were on the bus, and several of the girls in our group asked me how I slept, if anything unusual happened. It turns out they, knowing my fear of snakes, had somehow got in and put this rubber snake in my bed, hoping to scare the you-know-what out of me. They were so disappointed to find out that one of the other guys apparently found the snake first, and that they didn't "get" me.
This is the first time I've ever admitted they did indeed "get" me, so if any of you are reading this: yes, you pulled off a good one!
Quicksand: Maybe you're thinking, quicksand? But when I was a kid, quicksand was everywhere. On TV, anyway.
I was watching a Rifleman re-run the other day (which is redundant, because they haven't made a new Rifleman episode since 1963 so of course it was a re-run), and some girl that Mark was kind of sweet on somehow fell in some quicksand, and then Mark fell in trying to help her, and just before they went under Lucas came and pulled them out. This wasn't unusual for TV back in my childhood. Tarzan movies (I was a huge Johnny Weissmueller fan) always seemed to have some episode involving quicksand. Cartoons like Road Runner would have characters falling into quicksand (and anvils falling from the sky, but that's another story). Cowboy shows like The Rifleman (which remains one of my favorite shows of all time, and thanks to AMC and DVR I can record and re-watch all 168 episodes) and Bonanza and Gunsmoke and The Big Valley almost always had an episode involving someone falling into quicksand. Even "The Princess Bride" has that scene in the Thieves Forest where Buttercup and Wesley are trapped in quicksand. And of course, there is the scene in Blazing Saddles where the railroad track ends in a bog of quicksand.
When I was a kid, I thought quicksand was everywhere, a very real threat that you had to watch out for. I remember reading tips on how to survive if you found yourself caught in quicksand (apparently, you lay back on your back and float and by increasing mass, you reduce the suction).
I am now grown up (I hesitate to call myself an adult). I have travelled a good deal of this country, both cities and suburbs and countryside and mountains and forests. I have been to Europe, and several Carribean islands (including Haiti, which seems like a natural place to find quicksand). My parents lived and worked in Africa for awhile. Never - and I repeat never - have I come across any quicksand, or know of anyone who has come across quicksand.
These days, you never ever even get a good quicksand scene in a movie or TV show. What the heck happened? Like polio and typhoid, did we manage to do away with the scourge of quicksand? Was this one of the great accomplishments of the 20th Century that we so take for granted that no one ever talks about it?
I no longer fear the Rapture. I've come to terms with snakes.
Quicksand? That's the one I feel most cheated by. And if I mysteriously disappear one day, with no trace, maybe I'll have finally found quicksand.
Unless it was the Rapture.
Friday, July 5, 2013
Making peace with the Saints
I grew up in a Southern Baptist Church, as a Southerner, and an American - which means I grew up with great suspicion and perhaps even fear of the Catholic Church.
Yes, I heard preachers come around saying the AntiChrist would be a Pope, and that Catholics practiced idol worship and this whole "praying to Mary" thing was blasphemy. As a lover of history, I also understood all the evils perpetrated by different Popes and the Catholic church as a political power. And there were issues with Immaculate Conception (Mary being conceived without sin?), needing to go through a priest to get to God, and there was the whole cannibalism thing of the wine and wafer served during communion supernaturally turning into the actual blood and body of Christ once inside your mouth.
A byproduct of that was a complete dismissal, if you will, of Catholic "saints" - particularly since I grew up believing in the Priesthood of all Believers and that all believers are also sanctified, therefore making them, or us, all saints.
Then I married a Catholic. And met some fantastic Catholics who were as "Christian" as I am. And recognized that any organized religion is going to be rife with fallen humans who do things "in the name of Christ" that surely embarrassed Christ (if Christ can be embarrassed; I don't know). The Catholic Church is highly organized and structured and has certainly had its share of fallen human beings placed in positions of authority who abused their power and used the power of the church for selfish gain.
My wife is no longer a practicing Catholic, having joined me in a more Protestant form of worship. Having said that, I also found myself reading a few Catholic theologians and discovering real beauty and certainly significant contributions to everyone's understanding of what it means to be in relationship with God.
That's a long introduction to "My Life with the Saints." No, not my life, although there is some of that; but rather a book by the same title by a Jesuit priest named James Martin.
I stumbled across this book in a Barnes and Noble bookstore quite by accident, if you believe in such accidents, and bought it as a present for MG - a selfish purchase, because I knew I really wanted to read it. It took several years before I finally got around to reading it (it was first published in 2006), but I did.
And what I was reminded mostly was that it is easy to forget that these people that the Catholic Church venerates as "Saints" were, in the beginning, simply people with an amazing commitment to following God, whose lives reflected something special in that devotion, something I could learn from even as I learn from reading about the lives of Billy Graham and John Calvin and Martin Luther and Chuck Colson and Donald Miller and any number of other believers who have shared their spiritual journey with the public through their books and sermons.
Yes, some of them seemed to be bat crazy. They did things (a teenage girl leading an army against England? Visions in a pig pen in France?) that were hardly normal. Still, once you get past the craziness (any worse than an Old Testament profit lying naked on his side and cooking food over excrement to make God's point?), you have to admire the determination, the passion, the total surrender to an absolute faith that what they were doing was ordained by God.
I read the Bible. I study, as best I can, the Bible and look to it as "God's Word." But I also know there is great wisdom to be gained by learning how other people have interpreted those Words, seeing the example of the way others have lived their lives of faith, and read the stories of the Martyrs (My Southern Baptist upbringing encouraged me to read stories of the martyrs - many of the same lives the Catholic Church venerates as Saints; I guess it was OK to call them "martyrs").
Actually, that's not entirely true either. I did grow up hearing references to Saint Paul and Saint John. But then, consistency wasn't always the strong suit of the church I grew up in.
Martin writes at one point, "Some might argue (and some do argue) that all you need is Jesus. And that's true: Jesus is everything, and the Saints understood this more than anyone. But God in his wisdom has also given us these companions of Jesus to accompany us along the way, so why not accept the gift of their friendship and encouragement?"
A theologian whose writing deeply affected my life, C. S. Lewis, once said of the Catholic practice of calling on Saints that, while he didn't do it, if we do accept that Christians live on after death, why would asking a "Saint" to pray for you be any different than asking your neighbor or members of your Sunday School class to pray for you?
And so I found inspiration in Martin's brief stories on people like Joan of Arc, Therese of Lisieux, Thomas Merton, Ignatius of Loyola, Mother Teresa, Peter, Thomas Aquinas, Joseph ... not all of whom have actually been officially declared "saints" but who have made the first step of being "venerated."
I read, for the first time, this prayer from Merton that begins, "My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so ...."
I laughed out loud, at times, in reading the words of Pope John XXIII, a very humble and humorous man. He was once asked by a journalist, "How many people work in the Vatican?" To which the Pope replied, "About half of them."
On a visit to the Hospital of the Holy Spirit, he was introduced to the sister (nun) who ran the hospital, and was referred to as Mother Superior.
"Holy Father,'' she said. "I am the Superior of the Holy Spirit."
"You're very lucky," said the Pope. "I'm only the Vicar of Christ."
And during a dinner party in Paris, he was asked, "Aren't you embarrassed, Monseigneur, when there are women present who wear very low-cut dresses? It's often a scandal."
"A scandal? Why no,'' the Pope said. "When there's a woman with a plunging neckline, they don't look at her. They look at the apostolic nuncio to see how he's taking it!"
That humor was the trademark of a very humble man who, after three years of serving as Pope, wrote, "My sense of unworthiness keeps me in good company; it makes me put all my trust in God."
And it shapes the story of Martin and his own spiritual journey that, despite his being a Jesuit priest, is really not that different than any of us who struggle to develop a personal relationship to Christ.
At one point, in his relating to Peter, Martin writes of his own search for humility, "It's not the kind of humility I wanted,'' he tells a friend.
"What do you mean?"
"I wanted the kind of humility that when others saw me they would say, 'Wow, he's so humble! What a great guy! ... I wanted a humility I could be proud of."
At the end, in his conclusion, just when you could be feeling like you could never live with the faith of these people Martin writes about, he says, "Believing that God wants us to be ourselves is liberating. While I'm always called to grow, God asks only that I be myself, no matter what the situation. So when I'm listening to a friend tell me his problems, or hearing someones confession, or standing before a homeless man in the street, I don't have to say, 'What would Peter or Francis or Therese or John XXIII do?' Certainly they are models of Christian action for me. But God has not placed them in this particular situation. God, in his mysterious wisdom, has placed me here, with my talents and skills, as well as my weaknesses and limitations. Therefore a better question is, 'What should I do?"
In other words, the same place that it started for the people we look to as "saints."
I am one.
Now, if I can only consistently live as one.
Yes, I heard preachers come around saying the AntiChrist would be a Pope, and that Catholics practiced idol worship and this whole "praying to Mary" thing was blasphemy. As a lover of history, I also understood all the evils perpetrated by different Popes and the Catholic church as a political power. And there were issues with Immaculate Conception (Mary being conceived without sin?), needing to go through a priest to get to God, and there was the whole cannibalism thing of the wine and wafer served during communion supernaturally turning into the actual blood and body of Christ once inside your mouth.
A byproduct of that was a complete dismissal, if you will, of Catholic "saints" - particularly since I grew up believing in the Priesthood of all Believers and that all believers are also sanctified, therefore making them, or us, all saints.
Then I married a Catholic. And met some fantastic Catholics who were as "Christian" as I am. And recognized that any organized religion is going to be rife with fallen humans who do things "in the name of Christ" that surely embarrassed Christ (if Christ can be embarrassed; I don't know). The Catholic Church is highly organized and structured and has certainly had its share of fallen human beings placed in positions of authority who abused their power and used the power of the church for selfish gain.
My wife is no longer a practicing Catholic, having joined me in a more Protestant form of worship. Having said that, I also found myself reading a few Catholic theologians and discovering real beauty and certainly significant contributions to everyone's understanding of what it means to be in relationship with God.
That's a long introduction to "My Life with the Saints." No, not my life, although there is some of that; but rather a book by the same title by a Jesuit priest named James Martin.
I stumbled across this book in a Barnes and Noble bookstore quite by accident, if you believe in such accidents, and bought it as a present for MG - a selfish purchase, because I knew I really wanted to read it. It took several years before I finally got around to reading it (it was first published in 2006), but I did.
And what I was reminded mostly was that it is easy to forget that these people that the Catholic Church venerates as "Saints" were, in the beginning, simply people with an amazing commitment to following God, whose lives reflected something special in that devotion, something I could learn from even as I learn from reading about the lives of Billy Graham and John Calvin and Martin Luther and Chuck Colson and Donald Miller and any number of other believers who have shared their spiritual journey with the public through their books and sermons.
Yes, some of them seemed to be bat crazy. They did things (a teenage girl leading an army against England? Visions in a pig pen in France?) that were hardly normal. Still, once you get past the craziness (any worse than an Old Testament profit lying naked on his side and cooking food over excrement to make God's point?), you have to admire the determination, the passion, the total surrender to an absolute faith that what they were doing was ordained by God.
I read the Bible. I study, as best I can, the Bible and look to it as "God's Word." But I also know there is great wisdom to be gained by learning how other people have interpreted those Words, seeing the example of the way others have lived their lives of faith, and read the stories of the Martyrs (My Southern Baptist upbringing encouraged me to read stories of the martyrs - many of the same lives the Catholic Church venerates as Saints; I guess it was OK to call them "martyrs").
Actually, that's not entirely true either. I did grow up hearing references to Saint Paul and Saint John. But then, consistency wasn't always the strong suit of the church I grew up in.
Martin writes at one point, "Some might argue (and some do argue) that all you need is Jesus. And that's true: Jesus is everything, and the Saints understood this more than anyone. But God in his wisdom has also given us these companions of Jesus to accompany us along the way, so why not accept the gift of their friendship and encouragement?"
A theologian whose writing deeply affected my life, C. S. Lewis, once said of the Catholic practice of calling on Saints that, while he didn't do it, if we do accept that Christians live on after death, why would asking a "Saint" to pray for you be any different than asking your neighbor or members of your Sunday School class to pray for you?
And so I found inspiration in Martin's brief stories on people like Joan of Arc, Therese of Lisieux, Thomas Merton, Ignatius of Loyola, Mother Teresa, Peter, Thomas Aquinas, Joseph ... not all of whom have actually been officially declared "saints" but who have made the first step of being "venerated."
I read, for the first time, this prayer from Merton that begins, "My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so ...."
I laughed out loud, at times, in reading the words of Pope John XXIII, a very humble and humorous man. He was once asked by a journalist, "How many people work in the Vatican?" To which the Pope replied, "About half of them."
On a visit to the Hospital of the Holy Spirit, he was introduced to the sister (nun) who ran the hospital, and was referred to as Mother Superior.
"Holy Father,'' she said. "I am the Superior of the Holy Spirit."
"You're very lucky," said the Pope. "I'm only the Vicar of Christ."
And during a dinner party in Paris, he was asked, "Aren't you embarrassed, Monseigneur, when there are women present who wear very low-cut dresses? It's often a scandal."
"A scandal? Why no,'' the Pope said. "When there's a woman with a plunging neckline, they don't look at her. They look at the apostolic nuncio to see how he's taking it!"
That humor was the trademark of a very humble man who, after three years of serving as Pope, wrote, "My sense of unworthiness keeps me in good company; it makes me put all my trust in God."
And it shapes the story of Martin and his own spiritual journey that, despite his being a Jesuit priest, is really not that different than any of us who struggle to develop a personal relationship to Christ.
At one point, in his relating to Peter, Martin writes of his own search for humility, "It's not the kind of humility I wanted,'' he tells a friend.
"What do you mean?"
"I wanted the kind of humility that when others saw me they would say, 'Wow, he's so humble! What a great guy! ... I wanted a humility I could be proud of."
At the end, in his conclusion, just when you could be feeling like you could never live with the faith of these people Martin writes about, he says, "Believing that God wants us to be ourselves is liberating. While I'm always called to grow, God asks only that I be myself, no matter what the situation. So when I'm listening to a friend tell me his problems, or hearing someones confession, or standing before a homeless man in the street, I don't have to say, 'What would Peter or Francis or Therese or John XXIII do?' Certainly they are models of Christian action for me. But God has not placed them in this particular situation. God, in his mysterious wisdom, has placed me here, with my talents and skills, as well as my weaknesses and limitations. Therefore a better question is, 'What should I do?"
In other words, the same place that it started for the people we look to as "saints."
I am one.
Now, if I can only consistently live as one.
Tuesday, July 2, 2013
Where've you been? No where. What've you been up to? Not much.
A good friend called and wondered where I'd been. She said I'd been strangely quiet.
Now, this being the 21st Century, she wasn't wondering where I'd been physically, or that I'd been strangely quiet vocally.
She was wondering from a virtual standpoint - as in, where I had been from a social media standpoint.
So here is a quick summary of June.
I said good-bye to BP.
We sold our house.
MG had another surgery; hip replacement.
I started a new job.
We moved.
And now it's July.
I haven't said much, because each of those items is a story in itself.
First, BP.
I've been asked how I wound up working for BP in the first place. It was either a "God thing" or an amazing coincidence; it depends on your perspective.
In 2010, the buy-outs from the newspapers were getting smaller while salaries were being cut and employees were given unpaid furloughs. I never dreamed I'd ever leave the newspaper business. But if I were ever going to do anything different, I knew it was time.
We - the family - had decided to take a leap of faith move to St. Louis, where MG would go to work for her brothers and I had already lined up freelance jobs staying in sports. A friend in the trucking business offered us a truck to move our stuff, and The Heir and I were getting ready to pack up the house to make the move. However, that friend in the trucking business called and said if we could wait a week, he could get us a bigger truck for the same price.
So on the day I was supposed to be driving to St. Louis, I was free to go to the church parking lot where The Princess and the Young Prince were leaving for a week-long mission trip. While there, a friend whose son was going on the same trip told me BP needed media help on the Coast (the Deepwater Horizon accident occurred April 21st and this was June) and asked if I knew anyone who might be interested. I was - it was the biggest story of the year - but I thought MG had her heart set on St. Louis to be with her family again, so I told my friend to let me think about it.
Later, at home, I mentioned the conversation to MG and she said, "Why don't you do it? It's the biggest story of the year; you know you'd love to be in the middle of it."
Did I say I had the greatest wife in the world?
So on Monday, I emailed my resume to Ayana McIntosh-Lee, who would end up being the General Manager of BP in Alabama. On Tuesday, we had a phone interview. On Wednesday, I was in Mobile to "check things out,'' not sure if I really wanted to do this or not.
That first day, I met a young named Justin Saia, who would eventually become a great friend. His uncle, Vince, had been a friend for years but I'd never met Justin. We walked into the Incident Command Center in Mobile on the same day, recognized a press center that seemed to have no real plan, and sat down to start organizing how to reach out to local media.
That afternoon, I had taken a query from a member of the media, researched and written an appropriate answer, and said to Ayana, "I'm going to deliver this response to the media. Who do you want me to say said it?"
"You,'' Ayana said. "You're a BP spokesman."
I hadn't even actually accepted the job. What I knew about BP as a company consisted primarily of regular stops at the station near my house for gas and a breakfast of Diet Coke and Dunkin' Sticks (this was during one of my health food crazes).
And just like that, I was an official spokesman for the fifth largest company in the world, an international company based in Great Britain, facing perhaps the largest environmental/industrial disaster in modern history.
Pretty cool, huh?
Eventually, I got to work with a couple of actual, official BP "spokespeople" (Marti Powers and Dawn Patience), who were terrific. They not only organized a true BP Press Office but were tremendously helpful to me, offering encouragement and became great resources. Still, it was pretty much trial by fire. There was no handbook for crafting statements; in the beginning there was no legal review. It was just "hey, how does this sound?' to the team in the press room - Georgia and Justin and either Marti or Dawn - and then deliver the message.
All of us had very different backgrounds, but all those backgrounds offered a different area of expertise that worked. My buddy George, for example, had been an advance man in the White House. He taught me about planning, organization, and controlling the environment of a press conference or photo opportunity, things I was certainly aware of but never really thought that mucha bout.
And so I made the transition from one side of the notepad to the other. This was graduate school in the real world, working 24/7, sometimes 12 hours a day, through the summer and into the fall.
And I had a blast.
Eventually, BP decided to establish state offices, I was asked to move to Gulfport, Mississippi, as Director of Media and Communications. Again, it was a great team led by Heidi Grether. We did great work. I was allowed to do more than just respond to media, and met some terrific people with BP. It was seven years of experience in three and completed my real-world graduate degree in media relations, crisis communication, community relations, governmental relations, and response.
In the beginning I was dealing with local, national, and even international media. I took media on fly-overs of the well site; to barrier islands; up and down the beaches of Alabama and Mississippi. I worked what was basically a technology fair in the parking lot of Gulf State Park, where inventors came to show off their solutions for the oil spill. I got to be the "national spokesperson" for a project where recovered tar balls were recycled into car parts (I put national spokesperson in quotation marks because, quire frankly, it wasn't like it got a lot of attention. But I did do radio interviews all over the country).
I was part of meetings with govenors, members of congress, and mayors, sitting in on negotiations and updates, hearing their concerns and developing appropriate responses. There were some great moments and some boondoggles, stories that in some cases you just to be there to believe. But by and large I worked with people who were committed to the response, who sincerely wanted nothing more than to do the right thing and to do it well, and felt a real responsibility to the people of the Gulf Coast.
Maybe someday I'll share some of the more specific stories, like the report of a cat being run over by a Sandshark - a beach-cleaning machine that couldn't move faster than 2 mph, which means that cat had to be the slowest cat on the face of the earth; or the bar fight on Dauphin Island that ended with one guy getting hit in the head with a baseball bat and guns being drawn on both sides like an Old West standoff.
Toward the end, interest slowed down. We can argue whether things really returned to normal, but I do believe other than perception, things are very close to pre-spill condition. The federal government, in the form of the United States Coast Guard, recently determined the three states of Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi were essentially back to normal, and quite naturally the determination was made that there was no longer a need for a press officer stationed permanently on the Coast.
So I began to look for another job. Fortunately, my resume got a considerable amount of attention from a wide range of companies, attention I'd never have received if not for the experience with BP. Now, I have never trusted my own judgement and have always prayed that God would close every door except the right one. At one time, there were four jobs I thought - no, I knew - I had a really good shot at. In one case, the job was actually created for me!
But one incredible thing after another shut those doors - I'm talking about presidents and CEOs of companies getting fired or forced into early retirement; in fact, on three occasions top executives who wanted to hire me left the company, prompting on HR friend to ask me if I'd stop being his friend.
In the end it came down to Georgia-Pacific, a job that when I first applied for I didn't really consider but mainly wanted to get on the Georgia-Pacific radar for future opportunities. Then I interviewed and visited the plant in Mississippi and really liked the possibilities. I told MG, "I wish this job were in Birmingham. It would be my first choice."
Then, it became my first choice. My only choice. What I believe is the "right" choice.
The house: we'd tried to sell the house three years ago and had a contract on it, but the contract fell through. Lately, given all that had happened over the past year, we'd talked about whether we should sell. We loved the house; we'd gutted and rebuilt it to MG's specifications. Our kids basically grew up in that house. But after The Accident and with my travel schedule, the house was looking too big.
So one day, out of the blue, we get a call from a real estate agent who had a client who wanted our house. I said, "here's the price, take it as is, take it or leave it." They took it. I'd always heard stories like that and thought them too good to be true.
So we began to move back to the house we'd kept in Cahaba Heights, that we'd been renting out. It has taken a lot of work, and it's not finished, but thankfully we had a place to go. We have been trying to cram 10 years of stuff into a house half the size of the one we left. It's been a sacrifice on the kids. But it's a great house. A great location. We were happy there before and I believe we can be happy there again for as long as we choose to live there.
Surgery: In the midst of all of that, MG had hip replacement. After the accident, when her pelvis was broken on all four sides (if a pelvis can have four sides) and the left hip shattered ("like an egg wrapped in duct tape smashed by a hammer" said the doctor), the hope was the orthopedist had put things back together to get maybe 10 years out of that hip before MG would need a replacement. A replacement hip was never a matter of "if" but ''when,'' and since January it was clear the "when" was "sooner rather than later."
It was disappointing, because in the fall MG was really doing (relatively) well. She was walking and doing physical therapy and even some exercises to strengthen her core. We saw a doctor in St. Louis who still believes she can make MG's drop foot better.
Understand, I'm a pessimist because down deep I'm a hopeless optimist who is terrified that if I give voice to my optimism I'll jinx it. But the truth is, from the day MG came out of the coma, I believed that in a year she'd be fine.
Then a year came and went, and she was not fine. In fact, her condition had regressed (primarily because of the hip). April was particularly hard for both of us. The reality hit both of us that this might be as good as it was going to get.
But we found a terrific surgeon who was experienced in putting artificial hips into patients with injuries like MG's, into a pelvis loaded with screws and plates. And the blessing was that when it was over, Dr. Moore told us that he hadn't even had to cut into any metal, and there was enough bone left so that if MG should ever need another replacement - if this hip should ever wear out - there was room to do another one.
Did the surgery make things better? You'd have to ask MG. I think the pain in her hip was certainly relieved, but the real problem is her lower back. The doctors have told us that her pelvis was put back together as well as humanly possible, but it wasn't put together the way God created it. All we could do was - as it says at the end of the Count of Monte Cristo - "wait and hope."
And I know we are people of hope.
I still wonder why. I still wonder why things haven't been worse. I still feel incredibly blessed - to still have The Trophy Wife with me, for my kids, to have a home, and to have a job I enjoy. I know so many people who have lost some or all of the above, so why we should be so fortunate ... I can only call it a "God thing."
Let me try to sum up some of what I've learned about God through this: I have known God was not a jack-in-the-box kind of God that just pops up by surprise at appropriate times in my turn-the-handle life. But over the last year, I've discovered what so many Old Testament writers seemed to say: that God is a wild thing, unpredictable, sometimes showing up with a roar and other times in the faintest whisper,
In the book of Jeremiah God says "I will surely save you" (30:10). That doesn't mean He doesn't allow us to get to the brink, or even at times feel like we've gone over the brink. The Children of Israel (to whom God was speaking in Jeremiah) certainly had gone over the brink a number of times. But God was/is faithful.
Albert Einstein was once quoted as saying "I am convinced (God) does not play dice." There is no gamble involved. He will surely save His people.
How?
God knows.
And as frustrating as that may be for me, at the end of the day that's about the best I've got.
Now, this being the 21st Century, she wasn't wondering where I'd been physically, or that I'd been strangely quiet vocally.
She was wondering from a virtual standpoint - as in, where I had been from a social media standpoint.
So here is a quick summary of June.
I said good-bye to BP.
We sold our house.
MG had another surgery; hip replacement.
I started a new job.
We moved.
And now it's July.
I haven't said much, because each of those items is a story in itself.
First, BP.
I've been asked how I wound up working for BP in the first place. It was either a "God thing" or an amazing coincidence; it depends on your perspective.
In 2010, the buy-outs from the newspapers were getting smaller while salaries were being cut and employees were given unpaid furloughs. I never dreamed I'd ever leave the newspaper business. But if I were ever going to do anything different, I knew it was time.
We - the family - had decided to take a leap of faith move to St. Louis, where MG would go to work for her brothers and I had already lined up freelance jobs staying in sports. A friend in the trucking business offered us a truck to move our stuff, and The Heir and I were getting ready to pack up the house to make the move. However, that friend in the trucking business called and said if we could wait a week, he could get us a bigger truck for the same price.
So on the day I was supposed to be driving to St. Louis, I was free to go to the church parking lot where The Princess and the Young Prince were leaving for a week-long mission trip. While there, a friend whose son was going on the same trip told me BP needed media help on the Coast (the Deepwater Horizon accident occurred April 21st and this was June) and asked if I knew anyone who might be interested. I was - it was the biggest story of the year - but I thought MG had her heart set on St. Louis to be with her family again, so I told my friend to let me think about it.
Later, at home, I mentioned the conversation to MG and she said, "Why don't you do it? It's the biggest story of the year; you know you'd love to be in the middle of it."
Did I say I had the greatest wife in the world?
So on Monday, I emailed my resume to Ayana McIntosh-Lee, who would end up being the General Manager of BP in Alabama. On Tuesday, we had a phone interview. On Wednesday, I was in Mobile to "check things out,'' not sure if I really wanted to do this or not.
That first day, I met a young named Justin Saia, who would eventually become a great friend. His uncle, Vince, had been a friend for years but I'd never met Justin. We walked into the Incident Command Center in Mobile on the same day, recognized a press center that seemed to have no real plan, and sat down to start organizing how to reach out to local media.
That afternoon, I had taken a query from a member of the media, researched and written an appropriate answer, and said to Ayana, "I'm going to deliver this response to the media. Who do you want me to say said it?"
"You,'' Ayana said. "You're a BP spokesman."
I hadn't even actually accepted the job. What I knew about BP as a company consisted primarily of regular stops at the station near my house for gas and a breakfast of Diet Coke and Dunkin' Sticks (this was during one of my health food crazes).
And just like that, I was an official spokesman for the fifth largest company in the world, an international company based in Great Britain, facing perhaps the largest environmental/industrial disaster in modern history.
Pretty cool, huh?
Eventually, I got to work with a couple of actual, official BP "spokespeople" (Marti Powers and Dawn Patience), who were terrific. They not only organized a true BP Press Office but were tremendously helpful to me, offering encouragement and became great resources. Still, it was pretty much trial by fire. There was no handbook for crafting statements; in the beginning there was no legal review. It was just "hey, how does this sound?' to the team in the press room - Georgia and Justin and either Marti or Dawn - and then deliver the message.
All of us had very different backgrounds, but all those backgrounds offered a different area of expertise that worked. My buddy George, for example, had been an advance man in the White House. He taught me about planning, organization, and controlling the environment of a press conference or photo opportunity, things I was certainly aware of but never really thought that mucha bout.
And so I made the transition from one side of the notepad to the other. This was graduate school in the real world, working 24/7, sometimes 12 hours a day, through the summer and into the fall.
And I had a blast.
Eventually, BP decided to establish state offices, I was asked to move to Gulfport, Mississippi, as Director of Media and Communications. Again, it was a great team led by Heidi Grether. We did great work. I was allowed to do more than just respond to media, and met some terrific people with BP. It was seven years of experience in three and completed my real-world graduate degree in media relations, crisis communication, community relations, governmental relations, and response.
In the beginning I was dealing with local, national, and even international media. I took media on fly-overs of the well site; to barrier islands; up and down the beaches of Alabama and Mississippi. I worked what was basically a technology fair in the parking lot of Gulf State Park, where inventors came to show off their solutions for the oil spill. I got to be the "national spokesperson" for a project where recovered tar balls were recycled into car parts (I put national spokesperson in quotation marks because, quire frankly, it wasn't like it got a lot of attention. But I did do radio interviews all over the country).
I was part of meetings with govenors, members of congress, and mayors, sitting in on negotiations and updates, hearing their concerns and developing appropriate responses. There were some great moments and some boondoggles, stories that in some cases you just to be there to believe. But by and large I worked with people who were committed to the response, who sincerely wanted nothing more than to do the right thing and to do it well, and felt a real responsibility to the people of the Gulf Coast.
Maybe someday I'll share some of the more specific stories, like the report of a cat being run over by a Sandshark - a beach-cleaning machine that couldn't move faster than 2 mph, which means that cat had to be the slowest cat on the face of the earth; or the bar fight on Dauphin Island that ended with one guy getting hit in the head with a baseball bat and guns being drawn on both sides like an Old West standoff.
Toward the end, interest slowed down. We can argue whether things really returned to normal, but I do believe other than perception, things are very close to pre-spill condition. The federal government, in the form of the United States Coast Guard, recently determined the three states of Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi were essentially back to normal, and quite naturally the determination was made that there was no longer a need for a press officer stationed permanently on the Coast.
So I began to look for another job. Fortunately, my resume got a considerable amount of attention from a wide range of companies, attention I'd never have received if not for the experience with BP. Now, I have never trusted my own judgement and have always prayed that God would close every door except the right one. At one time, there were four jobs I thought - no, I knew - I had a really good shot at. In one case, the job was actually created for me!
But one incredible thing after another shut those doors - I'm talking about presidents and CEOs of companies getting fired or forced into early retirement; in fact, on three occasions top executives who wanted to hire me left the company, prompting on HR friend to ask me if I'd stop being his friend.
In the end it came down to Georgia-Pacific, a job that when I first applied for I didn't really consider but mainly wanted to get on the Georgia-Pacific radar for future opportunities. Then I interviewed and visited the plant in Mississippi and really liked the possibilities. I told MG, "I wish this job were in Birmingham. It would be my first choice."
Then, it became my first choice. My only choice. What I believe is the "right" choice.
The house: we'd tried to sell the house three years ago and had a contract on it, but the contract fell through. Lately, given all that had happened over the past year, we'd talked about whether we should sell. We loved the house; we'd gutted and rebuilt it to MG's specifications. Our kids basically grew up in that house. But after The Accident and with my travel schedule, the house was looking too big.
So one day, out of the blue, we get a call from a real estate agent who had a client who wanted our house. I said, "here's the price, take it as is, take it or leave it." They took it. I'd always heard stories like that and thought them too good to be true.
So we began to move back to the house we'd kept in Cahaba Heights, that we'd been renting out. It has taken a lot of work, and it's not finished, but thankfully we had a place to go. We have been trying to cram 10 years of stuff into a house half the size of the one we left. It's been a sacrifice on the kids. But it's a great house. A great location. We were happy there before and I believe we can be happy there again for as long as we choose to live there.
Surgery: In the midst of all of that, MG had hip replacement. After the accident, when her pelvis was broken on all four sides (if a pelvis can have four sides) and the left hip shattered ("like an egg wrapped in duct tape smashed by a hammer" said the doctor), the hope was the orthopedist had put things back together to get maybe 10 years out of that hip before MG would need a replacement. A replacement hip was never a matter of "if" but ''when,'' and since January it was clear the "when" was "sooner rather than later."
It was disappointing, because in the fall MG was really doing (relatively) well. She was walking and doing physical therapy and even some exercises to strengthen her core. We saw a doctor in St. Louis who still believes she can make MG's drop foot better.
Understand, I'm a pessimist because down deep I'm a hopeless optimist who is terrified that if I give voice to my optimism I'll jinx it. But the truth is, from the day MG came out of the coma, I believed that in a year she'd be fine.
Then a year came and went, and she was not fine. In fact, her condition had regressed (primarily because of the hip). April was particularly hard for both of us. The reality hit both of us that this might be as good as it was going to get.
But we found a terrific surgeon who was experienced in putting artificial hips into patients with injuries like MG's, into a pelvis loaded with screws and plates. And the blessing was that when it was over, Dr. Moore told us that he hadn't even had to cut into any metal, and there was enough bone left so that if MG should ever need another replacement - if this hip should ever wear out - there was room to do another one.
Did the surgery make things better? You'd have to ask MG. I think the pain in her hip was certainly relieved, but the real problem is her lower back. The doctors have told us that her pelvis was put back together as well as humanly possible, but it wasn't put together the way God created it. All we could do was - as it says at the end of the Count of Monte Cristo - "wait and hope."
And I know we are people of hope.
I still wonder why. I still wonder why things haven't been worse. I still feel incredibly blessed - to still have The Trophy Wife with me, for my kids, to have a home, and to have a job I enjoy. I know so many people who have lost some or all of the above, so why we should be so fortunate ... I can only call it a "God thing."
Let me try to sum up some of what I've learned about God through this: I have known God was not a jack-in-the-box kind of God that just pops up by surprise at appropriate times in my turn-the-handle life. But over the last year, I've discovered what so many Old Testament writers seemed to say: that God is a wild thing, unpredictable, sometimes showing up with a roar and other times in the faintest whisper,
In the book of Jeremiah God says "I will surely save you" (30:10). That doesn't mean He doesn't allow us to get to the brink, or even at times feel like we've gone over the brink. The Children of Israel (to whom God was speaking in Jeremiah) certainly had gone over the brink a number of times. But God was/is faithful.
Albert Einstein was once quoted as saying "I am convinced (God) does not play dice." There is no gamble involved. He will surely save His people.
How?
God knows.
And as frustrating as that may be for me, at the end of the day that's about the best I've got.
Monday, April 22, 2013
Is insanity the insistence on meaning?
Somewhere, I read a line in a book or a poem that goes, "Insanity is the insistence on meaning."
I've don't remember the context of the line, so I can't say what the author meant by it.
But it struck a chord with me - maybe never so much as this week.
Life changes fast. If you've been living a sheltered life and didn't realize that before, certainly you understand it now - from terrorists setting off bombs at the Boston Marathon to an exploding factory that nearly levels an entire town in Texas.
I've don't remember the context of the line, so I can't say what the author meant by it.
But it struck a chord with me - maybe never so much as this week.
Life changes fast. If you've been living a sheltered life and didn't realize that before, certainly you understand it now - from terrorists setting off bombs at the Boston Marathon to an exploding factory that nearly levels an entire town in Texas.
One minute you're about to finish running what you thought would be one of the toughest challenges of your life, and the next you find out just what "tough" really means.
Or maybe you're sitting down to dinner with the family, just another quiet day in rural Texas, when you hear a noise and the ground starts to shake and the walls start to come apart and your world collapses - literally - around you.
The world is a scary place. It is a fact of life that none of us are as safe as we think we are.
You know that. You have your stories. Maybe you know mine.
One year ago early on the morning of April 21, I saw my wife off to the airport, settled back to watch some TV because I couldn't go back to sleep, and was completely unaware that life, as I had known it, was coming to an end.
One year ago early on the morning of April 21, I saw my wife off to the airport, settled back to watch some TV because I couldn't go back to sleep, and was completely unaware that life, as I had known it, was coming to an end.
I remember watching a policeman walking through my back yard, meeting him as knocked on my bedroom window, hearing him tell me I needed to get to UAB Emergency as quickly as I could because there had been an accident ...
This day, one year later, was supposed to be a magical date for me. Everyone said in a year, everything would be fine.
They were wrong.
They were wrong.
A year ago, I was worried about getting my kids summer internships that would be meaningful. MG and I were making plans for vacation, things to do before the next school year started. There were bills to pay and expenses to plan for and sports and friends and family concerns.
It was what we knew as "life." All those things are still part of our lives. But we've added new worries: doctors and physical therapists and when to schedule the next surgery; trying to find chairs that MG can be comfortable sitting up in, even if just for a little while; searching for a car that MG might be comfortable in for trips that take longer than 30 minutes; rethinking what to do on vacation, because the long walks where we explored new cities or mountains or beaches are now out of the question.
This is the new 'normal' for us, and yes, it's enough to drive you crazy. I'm considered a pretty emotionally stable person. People who don't know me as well as my wife does say I'm laid back, that I don't get too high or too low.
Yet this last year has been, at times, rather insane. I think of things for us to do and then realize we can't. I say things - "normal" things - to MG like, "what have you been doing?" and then instantly regret it, because what she has been doing is so limited, compared to the old days when that question might have brought forth a hundred different answers because every day could be so different.
Yes, a person can go crazy trying to figure out "why" this happened, or focusing on "what if" because a split second in time would have changed everything, or believing there is good that can come from even the worst circumstances and then worrying about somehow missing the "good" completely because you were focused on the wrong thing.
Meaning? I absolutely believe - know in my very soul - that life has purpose. But my faith is not one of arrogance. Sometimes I think it's born of necessity, because the alternative seems too terrible to face.
We live in a world of good and evil, and sometimes I think the only thing we can be sure of is that some days we see more of one than the other.
And through this last year - through this last week - we've seen good overcoming evil. We see the people who run to danger to help others; we've seen friends put their own lives on hold to care; we've witnessed people standing up in support of total strangers; we've watched people reach out across great distances because something inside them compels them to bring comfort where they can.
We've seen, I believe, a glimpse of Eden, of life the way we were "meant" to live.
Oh, the pain, the loss, the suffering, the injustice and unfairness doesn't go away. The Scripture I read teaches me that we live in a fallen world and that nature itself is groaning, longing to be restored to the way it was created. And like the very earth we live on, we humans long for perfection too. Weeks like this past one, years like this last one, the glimpses I get of earthly perfection only make me long for that perfect place even more.
So, yes, I'm Homesick for Eden. I yearn to return to that place I've never known. Deep is the need to go back to the Garden, to a place where I'm convinced we were created to live, a place that, deep down, we instinctively know is Home.
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