Losing childhood too...

If you've been following my posts about my oldest friend, Kyle Parks, you know he was in the picture Mike Miano sent and that Charles helped me find him and then Mike, again, found Kyle's obituary--ten years ago.

I haven't thought of him much. It's been 40+ years since we've spoken. But he was always in the background, Kyle and Billy Bridgeman and Joe Tagnisi, the kids I grew up with. These were the people of my childhood and now I know, 10 years too late, that Kyle is dead.

Toe-head he was, very short, almost white hair. Very put-together. A 'straight arrow'. A good, good guy was Kyle.

What I've been pondering is that with my knowledge of his death, my childhood has died as well.

Should have a long time ago, I guess. But the thing about me is this--I've had a remarkably happy and wondrous life. When that happens, I think, your childhood hangs around. There was nothing bad about my childhood or adolescence or young adulthood or my life since then. I have been profoundly lucky and wondrously blessed. So my childhood was still alive and well and fine until I found out Kyle was dead.

It's like the rope to the anchor broke and my boat is now slipping out to sea.

I don't want to be dramatic. After all I went 40 and more years before trying to find Kyle. But knowing he is dead is stunningly profound to me.

I'm fine--I'm always FINE--that's the uneventful and rather boring story of my life. I've always been 'fine' and will be even now.

But something has left the room of my life. Childhood, I think. It's silly to say I 'miss' Kyle since I let him float out there or over four decades without trying to find him. But now that I know my much delayed desire to find him is thwarted, well, something has left the room of my life.

I'm growing older--something Kyle never got to do--and I'm growing older knowing he's not there to look for anymore.

I'm going to sit with this for a long while. I need to ponder my childhood and how it seems to not be there anymore.

Top seven posts

So, I promised to give you the top posts in this week of my 5th anniversary as a blogger. There are two tied for seventh place and they couldn't be more different. The sublime and the ridiculous. The ridiculous is first.

 

Thursday, February 24, 2011

Real Men Pee Outside

I had a classmate in seminary who, for some quirky reason, wouldn't go to the bathroom in someone else's house. So, I'd encounter him out in the bushes around the 'garden apartments' we all lived in around Alexandria. Once I watched him pee off a balcony.

For most of human history, there were no bathrooms inside. For much of the world, there still isn't.

Ponder, I'd encourage you, that by the accident of your birth, you have had indoor plumbing you're whole life when 99% of the people who have ever lived and probably 75% of the people alive today, don't.

I used to have to go to my grandmother's outhouse when I was there in Conklintown. It had two seats though I never shared it. And, yes, there were Sears catalogs there to, you know, do the paper work.

I've seen signs in bathrooms that said "The Business isn't finished until the paper work is done."

Ponder this: most of the people on the planet don't ordinarily use toilet paper. A big reason why many cultures find it vile if someone eats with their left hand. Oh, by the way, a lot of the people on the planet don't eat with forks and spoon and knives. They eat with their hands--or at least the right hand.

Steve Arbogast, a seminarian I worked with, spent several years in the bush in west Africa teaching. He told me the worst part of his reentry into American culture was when he went into a Super Stop and Shop and walked down the paper aisle. The shear amount of toilet tissue sent him out of the store to his car. For his time in Africa, toilet paper had been an instrument of barter better than American dollars or Euros.

In the winter, walking from my grandmother's house down to the 'two seater', you passed the strawberry patch, the chicken coop and the storage shed. You don't want an outhouse too close to your house after all. Cold nights the chickens and a couple of ducks would be all assembled around the edges of the outhouse. Decomposing human waste gives off heat, after all. So you'd have to shoo them away with your feet even to go into the outhouse.

It might be appropriate to give thanks for whatever bathrooms you have in your house and for toilet paper.

And, it is kind of manly to pee outside. I'd never pee off our deck...not me...never...don't even think for a moment...even in the dark.....

Thursday, August 12, 2010

The Archangel Mariah

The questions that drives people in seminary crazy is this: "Why do you want to be a priest?"

There are several reasons that question so bedevils those studying for holy orders. First of all, everyone and their cousin has asked you that ever since the first moment you imagined it might be a possibility--you being a priest and all. Parish priests, parish discernment committees, bishops, commissions on ministry, standing committees, admission committees, seminary professors, strangers you meet at cocktail parties--there is no end to the people wanting to know why you want to be a priest.

A second reason is that a call to be a priest is primarily that: a Call from God to you. It's a deeply personal and profoundly important event or series of events. There is, even in his era of 'tell all', some needs for privacy. If what God has to say to you in your heart of hearts isn't one of those things you have a right to keep to yourself, then what is?

But finally, the most prominent reason nobody in seminary wants to answer that question is that, on the deepest level, you don't have a clue! For most of the priests I know--not all, certainly, but most--the 'call to priesthood' was as complex as a jet engine. There are lots of parts to it, most of which can't be extricated or distinguished from the parts right next to them or at the other end of the whole contraption. I doubt that there are many people who can explain all the intricacies of a jet engine. The same is true, it seems to me, about a call to ordination.

I once witnessed one of my seminary classmates lose it when asked the question. We were at some reception or another at Virginia Seminary and a well-meaning, sincere woman was talking with him and asked, "Why do you want to be a priest?"

He took a gulp of sherry and said: "One night I was sleeping naked with my window open during a thunderstorm. (Being southern he said 'necked' instead of 'naked') "And lightening came in my window, struck me on the genitals and didn't kill me....It was either become a priest or move to Tibet."

I swear this really happened.

Once the woman recovered from apoplexy, she said, in a gentle Tidewater accent, "I imagine that doesn't happen often."

"Only once to me," my friend said, looking around for more sherry.

Another friend, Scott, when he was a seminarian at Yale working with me at St. Paul's, New Haven, told me he was about to lose this mind with the Standing Committee of the Diocese of West Virginia.

"No matter how many times I try to tell them," he said, "or how many different ways...they still ask me why I want to be a priest."

"Why don't you tell them you want to be magic ?" I asked.

Scott laughed. "Are you crazy?" he said.

"Who knows," I told him, "it might shut them up."

After I preached at his ordination, Scott gave e a wondrous pen and ink sketch he'd based on 'being magic'. It's on a shelf in this little office where I'm writing. I still love it, two decades later.

I don't have to resort to tales of lightening storms or to the very clever longing to be magic. I know why I decided to be a priest. The sky didn't open up. I didn't hear God's voice speaking to me out loud and in English. It was simpler and yet more marvelous than any of that.

I was visited by the Archangel Mariah.
*
Mariah was the only member of St. Gabrial's Mission, the campus ministry at West Virginia University back in the 60's and 70's, who was older than 35, besides our priest Snork Roberts. Mariah was 82.

St. Gabrial's had a ministry of hosting international students in the basement of Trinity Church on Friday nights for games and food and companionship. Mariah was the source of that ministry. That's one reason she came to St. Gabe's. The other reason is she wanted to be with young people. She couldn't stand stuffiness in any guise. The three-piece suits and women in hats at Trinity's services were to much for her. She preferred the company of college students and week-end hippies.

I strain to remember her over more than 35 years of memories. She was a tiny woman--no more than 5'2" and most likely weighed about 90 pounds fully-clothed and soaking wet. She had wild gray hair that she wore tied back as best she could. And there was her face: her eyes were an indescribable color--green, blue, gray in different lights--and practically lost in the most remarkable set of smile wrinkles I've ever seen. Mariah smiled and laughed so much that she tended to look a tad Asian--there were slits for her eyes to shine through. She had all her own teeth and showed them off smiling and laughing. Her face, in spite of her age, was actually 'girlish', elfin, like the face of a loris or lemur--some exotic animal whose name begins with an 'l'.

Mariah's passion (what Joseph Campbell would have called her 'bliss') was the international students at WVU. Every Friday night you could find her in Trinity's undercroft playing cards and listening, playing backgammon and listening, playing some obscure board game and listening. Always playing. Always listening to the young people from faraway places with strange sounding names. WVU had a remarkable engineering program so their were hundreds of students from developing countries studying in the part of the middle of no where called Morgantown, West Virginia. One of the informal courses they all had to study was Culture Shock. In the late 1960's there were no ethnic enclaves in Morgantown, unless you considered Rednecks or Fraternity Brats ethnic groups. Those students from Africa, Asia, Central Europe and the Middle East had no contacts with their homelands besides each other. No internet back then and international calls were still ridiculously expensive. It wasn't like living in New York or DC. Morgantown was referred to by many of the students--many of whom, like me, were from the sticks to begin with--as 'MorganHole'.

At that time there wasn't much in Morgantown for anyone, much less people thousands of miles from home. And nobody much was interested in the well-being of those foreign students except Mariah. Mariah was interested in them with a vengence.

She welcomed them into Trinity's basement, into her home and into her vast, expansive heart. She got them to write home for recipes and tried to reproduce them as best she could from the local Kroger's selection of food and spices. She learned enough of each of their languages so she could greet each of them as they would be greeted at home. She matched them up with people at the University and in town--all of whom she seemed to know--who might have some faint connection or interest in Afghanistan or Bulgaria or Korea or where ever they were from. She was a one woman network of 'connections for those folks so far from home, those strangers in a strange land. t

There was something almost Biblical in her commitment to the strangers in our midst. She would welcome them all and do any and every thing possible to make them a little less anxious about finding themselves plunked down in such a place as Morgantown. Mariah was sometimes the victim of those she befriended. Being from a different culture and far from home doesn't make everyone trustworthy. If there is a lesson to be learned from working with any minority group--racial, cultural, economic, etc.--it is this: People, so far as I've been able to discern, are, in the end, 'just People'. We all share the same deep-down 'being of human beings'. The international students Mariah dedicated her energy to were no different than the outsiders and oddballs of the student body that Snork loved and cared for--some of them will rip you off big time!

The Lord only knows how much money Mariah parceled out to foreign students. And surely only the Lord knows how much of that money could have just as well been tossed off the bridge that crossed Cheat Lake outside of town. But she never fretted about it. That what she told me when I spoke to her after seeing $100 or so pass from her hand to the hand of a Nigerian I knew loved to gamble.

"Never mind," Mariah told me, "I'll just let God sort it all out...."

At one level that is ultimate foolishness. On another, deeper level, it may just be one of the best ways possible to live a life. And that, above all, was what Mariah was good at--living a wonderful life.

After I finished my MTS from Harvard Divinity School, I worked as a Social Worker. Bern and I lived on the third floor of a house down a charming brick street in Morgantown. During our time there, the home base for St. Gabrial's Wednesday evening Eucharists was the attic of that house, accessible only from our apartment We would gather up there--20 or 30 of us--and celebrate the holy mysteries seated on the unpainted floor. When we passed the peace there was always the danger of getting a concussion from smacking your noggin on the exposed joints and beams. It was a dimly lit, uncomfortable space, but it served quite nicely as the upper room of St. Gabe's.

It was after one of those outrageously informal communions that Mariah, who I had already determined was a saint (St. Mariah of the Nations) revealed herself as an Archangel, at least. After Mass--if I can dream of calling our attic worship that--we would all retreat down the stairs to the apartment where Bern and I lived. There was lots of food. People brought cookies and brownies (often with a special ingredient) cheese and bread, fruit both fresh and dried, nuts and seeds and we'd have some feasting. Plus there was always a lot of wine. Some of the St. Gabe's regulars would go down to the front porch to smoke a joint--not normal, I suppose, for most Episcopal coffee hours.

I was in the kitchen with Mariah. She'd managed to get me there alone by some miracle since people tended to clump around her wherever she was. There was something about how well she tended to listen to whatever nonsense you had to say that made her a people magnet. But we were alone in the kitchen when she said to me, balancing her wine glass and a handful of cheese with remarkable grace for somewhere her age, "When are you going back to seminary and getting ordained?"

I was three glasses of wine and a trip to the porch past whatever state of sober grace the Body and Blood of Christ had provided me up in the attic. I was then, as I am to some extent today, a 'smart ass'. Ironic and Sardonic were my two middle names in those days. I can still be depended upon to lower or deflate whatever serious conversation I come upon. "Nothing serious or sacred' has been my motto most of my life. I never realized how annoying that can be until my son demonstrated, in his teen years, a genetic predisposition to that same world view.

So, in my cups, you might say, I replied in a typical smart-ass way.

"My dear Mariah," I said, "I'll go back to seminary and get ordained when I get a personal message from God Almighty."

She smiled that smile that made her eyes almost disappear and, after a healthy drink of what I assure you was bad wine--we drank only that vintage in those days--said words that changed my life forever.

"Jim," she said, "who the hell do you think sent me and told me what to say?"

Never, before or after, did such a word as 'hell' pass through Mariah's sainted lips. She was never even mildly profane. I stared at her, suddenly as sober as a Morman or a Muslim--or both at the same time.

She finished her cheese, put her wine glass in the sink and embraced me. I held her like a fragile bird. She kissed my cheek and whispered in my ear, "Well, you've gotten your message...."

She left me alone in my kitchen with dry ice in my veins and some large mammal's paw clutching my heart. I found it hard to breathe. Two trips to the porch and a full juice glass of the Wild Turkey I kept hidden under the sink on Wednesday nights changed nothing.

I called the bishop the next morning. Only after I had an appointment scheduled with him could I tell Bern what had happened and breathe naturally again.
*
When Mariah died a few months later, I was one of her pallbearers. She was light as air for us to carry--three international students and three members of St. Gabe's. Archangels don't weigh much. The are mostly feathers and Spirit. She was buried from Trinity Church. Snork did the service and did her prould in his homily of thanksgiving for so rare a soul. I was registered for seminary by then. Bern was up in New York acting in an off Broadway show. We would meet up in Alexandria in September. Mariah's granddaughter, Clara, who was a member of St. Gabe's as well, embraced me at the reception following the funeral. It was in the basement of Trinity where Mariah had spent so many Friday nights. Many of the foreign students brought ethnic food. Clara told me Mariah asked about me on the day she died. She wanted to know if Clara knew anything about me and seminary. I'd left my admission letter with Snork and he showed it to Clara. I tried to call Mariah but she was too ill to speak on the phone, but Clara told her the news.

Clara told me Mariah smiled they eye disappearing smile when she heard. She smiled through great pain.

"You tell Jim I told him so," she said to Clara and Clara passed that on to me.

Her last words to me: "I told you so."

That works. That will do nicely.

Losing Kyle

I've written a series of posts, all caused by my high school and college friend, Mike Miano. Mikey send me a photo, that Bern and I are in, of a group of people sitting around a table. I have facial hair, so I was in college. I expect this was a party in '66 or 67 or maybe even the Christmas of '65--long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away at any rate.

One of the people at the table is Kyle Parks, who grew up about 200 yards from me and who I knew from the Anawalt Methodist Church before we even started school. Both are mothers were school teachers and though my dad did coal-mining, ran a bar, worked with my uncle in the H and S grocery store, and picked up and delivered dry cleaning, he eventually sold insurance, just like Kyle's dad. Since we were both pretty smart, we were in the same classes for 12 years, often competing for the first chair (teachers reseated kids, where I grew up, after each test--highest score got the first chair...don't think they do that in this era of 'everyone gets a trophy', but it was sure a motivator for me!) I hadn't seen Kyle since we were in college (he at VPI, now Virginia Tech, and me at WVU). That photo made me realize he was my very first friend and I tried to find him online, but couldn't, being a Luddite, but my friend Charles, who reads my blog, found Kyle's father (Kyle Sr.) obit and then an address in Bluefield, WV.

I was ecstatic! I wrote him a letter on Thursday night, addressed it, put a forever stamp on it and carried it around in the book I was reading all day Friday. Then, this morning I get another email from Mike Miano.

In it was Kyle's obituary.

I suddenly realized why I had passed up a dozen or more opportunities to mail that letter on Friday, including leaving it in the basket on our front porch.

He died in Raleigh, NC on Tuesday, September 7, 2004 at Rx Healthcare from complications following a heart attack.

I discovered, after his military life (which wasn't mentioned in the Obit, but I know he went to Navy Flying School) he worked 25 years as a mechanical engineer for Goodyear in Danville, Virginia. I also discovered his hobbies were 'model railroading, cycling and cheering for the Virginia Tech Hokies." He moved from Bluefield, where my letter was going, to Cary, NC to be near his grandsons.

His brother Ralph, who was younger than us and I knew from birth, is also dead, along with Kyle's parents. But he had two daughters: Mandy in Apex, NC and Kelly in LA, his grandsons from Mandy and two sisters, who I vaguely remember. No mention of a predeceased wife or any wife at all, which caused me pain because Kyle's picture could have been in the dictionary beside the definition of 'straight arrow'. The Kyle I remember was no nonsense and 'down the middle' and a divorce must have pained him mightily.

I just reread the letter I wrote to my first friend who I hadn't seen for 4 decades and hadn't known was dead for a decade of that time. It wasn't good enough to re-start a friendship after all that time. It was full of humor and irony and joy as I told him about my life since we last talked. But it wasn't good enough to do our years of friendship honor.

I tend to have 'serial friendships'--I move on and make new friends, always have. I know Mike Miano and John Anderson from my past, I know them still though I haven't seen Mike for decades either (he has a pocket cross of mine that I won't get back unless I see him again) and though I see John, who I've known for well over thirty years a lot since he lives in New Haven and we share many friends, I need to ponder what I've lost by 'moving on' the way I tend to do.

I've lost Kyle, that's obvious. (I had already imagined establishing an email friendship with him once he got my letter. But that, alas, will not happen, not in this life or the next or anywhere in between.)

I've lost a lot of people I truly loved because, like a duck sheds water, I shed friends and move on.

It's worked for me and I've always had lots of friends. But after seeking, finding and losing Kyle--all in one week--I need to ponder 'friendship' for a while.

I'll let you know what shows up.

ok, that didn't work, something new....

 (I tried to edit this and send it again. That didn't work. The point is, as you can see, a week from tomorrow is the 5th anniversary of my blog. I wanted to send you the first one tonight and next week I'll send you the 7 most viewed blogs over that time. Just my little way of celebrating that I've actually had the focus and patience to do this for five years....Enjoy....)

 

 

Sunday, March 8, 2009

Sitting under the Castor Oil Tree

The character in the Bible I have always been drawn to in Jonah. I identify with his story. Like Jonah, I have experienced being taken where I didn't want to go by God and I've been disgruntled with the way things went. The belly of a big old fish isn't a pleasant means of travel either!

The story ends (in case you don't know it) with Jonah upset and complaining on a hillside over the city of Nineva, which God has saved through Jonah. Jonah didn't want to go there to start with--hence the ride in the fish stomach--and predicted that God would save the city though it should have been destroyed for its wickedness. "You dragged me half way around the world," he tells God, "and didn't destroy the city....I knew it would turn out this way. I'm angry, so angry I could die!"

God causes a tree to grow to shade Jonah from the sun (scholars think it might have been a castor oil tree--the impications are astonishing!). Then God sends a worm to kill the tree. Well, that sets Jonah off! "How dare you kill my tree?" he challanges the creator. "I'm so angry I could die...."

God simply reminds him that he is upset at the death of a tree he didn't plant or nurture and yet he doesn't see the value of saving all the people of the great city Ninivah...along with their cattle and beasts.

And the story ends. No resolution. Jonah simply left to ponder all that. There's no sequel either--no "Jonah II" or "Jonah: the next chapter", nothing like that. It's just Jonah, sitting under the bare branches of the dead tree, pondering.

What I want to do is use this blog to do simply that, ponder about things. I've been an Episcopal priest for over 30 years. I'm approaching a time to retire and I've got a lot of pondering left to do--about God, about the church, about religion, about life and death and everything involved in that. Before the big fish swallowed me up and carried me to my own Nineva (ordination in the Episcopal Church) I had intended a vastly different life. I was going to write "The Great American Novel" for starters and get a Ph.D. in American Literature and disappear into some small liberal arts college, most likely in the Mid-Atlantic states and teach people like me--rural people, Appalachians and southerners, simple people, deep thinkers though slow talkers...lovely for all that--to love words and write words themselves.

God (I suppose, though I even ponder that...) had other ideas and I ended up spending the lion's share of my priesthood in the wilds of two cities in Connecticut (of all places) among tribes so foreign to me I scarcly understood their language and whose customs confounded me. And I found myself often among people (The Episcopal Cult) who made me axious by their very being. Which is why I stuck to urban churches, I suppose--being a priest in Greenwich would have sent me into some form of shock...as I would have driven them to hypertension at the least.

I am one who 'ponders' quite a bit and hoped this might be a way to 'ponder in print' for anyone else who might be leaning in that direction to read.

Ever so often, someone calls my bluff when I go into my "I'm just a boy from the mountains of West Virginia" persona. And I know they're right. I've lived too long among the heathens of New England to be able to avoid absorbing some of their alien customs and ways of thinking. Plus, I've been involved in too much education to pretend to be a rube from the hills. But I do, from time to time, miss that boy who grew up in a part of the world as foreign as Albania to most people, where the lush and endless mountains pressed down so majestically that there were few places, where I lived, that were flat in an area wider than a football field. That boy knew secrets I am only beginning, having entered my sixth decade of the journey toward the Lover of Souls, to remember and cherish.

My maternal grandmother, who had as much influence on me as anyone I know, used to say--"Jimmy, don't get above your raisin'". I probably have done that, in more ways that I'm able to recognize, but I ponder that part of me--buried deeply below layer after layer of living (as the mountains were layer after layer of long-ago life).

Sometimes I get a fleeting glimpse of him, running madly into the woods that surrounded him on all sides, spending hours seeking paths through the deep tangles of forest, climbing upward, ever upward until he found a place to sit and look down on the little town where he lived--spread out like a toy village to him--so he could ponder, alone and undisturbed, for a while.

When I was in high school, I wrote a regular colemn for the school newspaper call "The Outsider". As I ponder my life, I realize that has been a constant: I've always felt just beyond the fringe wherever I was. I've watched much more than I've participated. And I've pondered many things.

So, what I've decided to do is sit here on the hillside for a while, beneath the ruins of the castor oil tree and ponder somemore. And, if you wish, share my ponderings with you--whoever you are out there in cyber-Land.

Two caveates: I'm pretty much a Luddite when it comes to technology--probably smart enough to learn about it but never very interested, so this blog is an adventure for me. My friend Sandy is helping me so it shouldn't be too much of a mess. Secondly, I've realized writing this that there is no 'spell check' on the blog. Either I can get a dictionary or ask your forgiveness for my spelling. I'm a magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa ENGLISH major (WVU '69) who never could conquer spelling all the words I longed to write.

I supose I'll just ask your tolerance.

my favorite photo

It's down to the right of our kitchen fireplace. It is a photo of my daughter, Mimi, taken, I think by her fiancee, Tim.

It is a photo of her face--or half of it anyway, the right half.

Her face is up, the way your face goes up when you are amused. She is smiling. You can see the right side of her face and she is smiling greatly and her right eye is closed. Her blonde/brown hair is shoulder length.

And what you see, on one side of her face, a a deep, two inch long, comma shaped dimple.

Mimi has dimples to die for and in this photo you see the right one in all it's glory.

My second cousin, Kim, pulled me aside when she was a child and Mimi was a teen and said to me, solemnly and with great concern, "Mimi has holes in her face!"

And she does. They are wondrous. They give me joy, as this photo of one of them does....

Finding Kyle

Charles, one of my friends who reads my blog found the obituary for Kyle's father, Harry Kyle Parks Sr., on a web site called 'locatethegrave.com' or something like that. Really, is that a website people besides Charles and Fred and Bill (three members of my group I go to every Tuesday morning--who between them, I've come to believe, know Everything About Everything) actually know about?

Anyway, the 2001 obit said his surviving son, Harry Kyle Parks, Jr, lived in Bluefield, West Virginia--a town of 25,000 when I was growing up, probably much less then because the 'business' of Bluefield was to be the 'city' for the coal field and the coal field isn't there anymore. We went to Bluefield (which is called 'nature's air conditioned city' and lemonade is freely given out by the Chamber of Commerce when the temperature reached 90 degrees...I never got free lemonade all the time I was there) when we wanted to 'shop'. It was 25 miles away from Anawalt, where Kyle and I grew up, across either Peel Chestnut or Elkhorn mountain. Either way it was almost an hour's drive since the mountains were significant and the roads across them were full of KYA ('kiss your ass') turns and curves. Either way you went through Bluewell, where Lindy's Drive In was located. No one ever went to Bluefield with out stopping at Lindy's where the hot dogs with chilli and slaw were the specialty. I still long for a Lindy's hot dog.

So I emailed Charles to thank him for actually finding Kyle when I couldn't and told him I'd try to find him if he was still in Bluefield. Of course, I couldn't. But Charles emailed me back with Kyle's address and phone number. I'm not sure what web site he used (Jim'sfriendsaddressesandphonenumber.com perhaps) but I am delighted.

I plan to write Kyle a letter tonight, since even Charles couldn't provide his email address and see if he'd like to be in contact. I'll send the picture that started all this. Kyle and I haven't spoken or seen each other since we were 21 or 22, so it's a ghost from the past 44 or so years. Who knows how he will react. We didn't part on bad terms in any way--our life journeys were just leading in different directions: his to the military and mine to the protest movement.

I've thought and thought of who I've known (who weren't family) longer than I knew Kyle. Surely Mike Miano who started all this non-sense of searching for a long lost friend who I've known where he was and have had sporadic contact with since High School and College. And maybe Mike Lawless, though the last 10 years haven't been a 'contact time' for the two of us. And then there is John in New Haven who I met when Bern and I lived in Morgantown and he was in graduate school, or maybe even when we were both in college. And since the years since college have been many more than the years before college, John is surely the person I've know longest and still relate with often and always (he goes on vacation with Bern and Mimi and Tim and Sherry--who I've know since 1980--and me).

But this Kyle thing has gotten under my skin. I'm going to write tonight. I'll let you know what happens....

Don't let your boyfriend show you how safe guns are....

A 36 year old man in Michigan was demonstrating how safe unloaded guns are to his girlfriend and fatally shot himself in the head. Three children under 12 were in the house but, thankfully, did not witness the shooting.

Nor is this the first instance of a gun safety resulting in the death of the demonstrator. Two such accidents were reported in 2013 according to the Huffington Post.

It is a tragic irony that even demonstrations of gun safety can result in gun deaths.

None of what I'm saying is meant to make light of tragedies. Quite the contrary, I just want to mourn the senseless deaths of these 3 men and contend that a gun, by it's very nature, is unsafe. Guns are meant to kill. Many people use them safely and for sporting purposes, but by the very nature of guns they are not 'safe' in any understanding I have of that word.

I don't know if I've ever mentioned why I don't own a gun though I grew up in a gun culture in the mountains of West Virginia. I don't own a gun because I know I would use it if I ever felt threatened by someone and, to paraphrase what Kurt Vonnegut once said about nuclear weapons, "I'd rather be the poor, innocent, unfortunate son-of-a bitch that got short than the mean, awful, nasty son-of-a-bitch who did the shooting." Really.






I