Category: A Family Man

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The Groove of Love

On a recent return trip from Memphis, a flashing engine light, a front brake grinding to bare steel and a battery calling it quits at a rest area all combined to provide us one heck of a day. As the drive drug mercilessly on, Miska sensed her family's spiraling weariness and, in a truly selfless act, broke out in song. Channeling Tina, she sang, What's love got to do, got to do with it. Miska raised her arms and put her body into it. The confines of the front seat and the restraint of the seatbelt was all that kept her from completely getting her groove on. I loved it. I joined in. The car was rocking. 

Since then, when it seems the family needs a quick pulse of levity, Miska or I will hit the first note, and the other catches up. Neither of us would ever be mistaken for musically gifted, but we let it rip none the less. The boys, let me tell you, are thrilled. They roll their eyes and groan and cover their ears. A time or two, though, I've heard them sing the tune themselves. Protest all you want, a good song snags you whether you like it or not.

A couple days ago, we realized the boys had never heard the actual version. They'd never heard Tina Turner belt her way through this sad tale of second hand emotions. Miska cued the single, and after the closing note, Seth said, "Mom, it's way better when you sing it."

Seth's effusive words tell the truth: Love has everything to do with it.

 

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Sons of Thunder

I'm slow to admit it, but I'll soon cross the line where I can no longer take Wyatt and Seth simultaneously in our Collier Men wrestling scuffles. Up to now, I could easily apportion one arm to each, grip them in a head lock and sing a tune until they cried uncle. 

In addition to growing stronger and larger, they're also smarter. They have learned the power of the alliance. Wyatt likes to stay low to the ground, so he causes a diversion, grappling with me on the floor. I can still manage him, but (especially if I don't want to lose a tooth to one of his roundabout kicks) I have to pay attention. While Wyatt gets me entwined, Seth climbs atop the highest part of the couch and (with a cry lifted from Nacho Libre) hurls himself through the air in a spread-eagle tomahawk dive. A dive that ends with a bony, 8 year old knee slamming into my ribs. 

These boys are relentless. Together, they're downright scary. If I want to postpone my inevitable demise as Wrestling King, then sooner or later, I'll have to go devious and sabotage their federation. I will have to sow discord among the brethren. 

But that won't work for long. Eventually, they'll lock arms again and charge me straight-on. I'll go down in a cloud of sweat and fury. And pinned to the ground, gasping for air, I'll wear the largest grin you've ever seen.

***

Speaking of fathers and sons, I have a piece, a letter to dads, over at the Washington Post.

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A Blessing on Father’s Day

Men of tender courage, strong hopes and firm presence: When you see your world – and move into it – you model our God who refused to be aloof and insisted on bold, visible love. With your daily labor, you carve life from the soil of this world. Like God, you bring order from the wild chaos. You name the truth, and your love has the power to touch the deep places of our soul. You are a poet, a craftsman, a priest. You are necessary.

For the ways you take on the weight of this world – and shield others from it,

For the many times you surrender your desires for the good of family,

For your faithfulness to your marriage, in a world that knows less and less about fidelity and loyalty, less about love,

For the times when all you want to do is fling your weary bones on a couch but instead you wrestle or sit down for a tea party or toss a football,

For the moments you’ve fought to the bitter end for what you believe is true and right, even if you lost,

For those of you who bear the scars from your own father,

For those of you who have become father for another,

For sticking around,

For keeping your word,

For laughing – and for being able to laugh at yourself,

For teaching us how to tell the truth, how to say “I’m sorry” and how to cry,

We bless you.

May the God who filled Father Adam with life and who filled King David with wisdom, boldness and tenderness and who brought our Redeemer into the world to enact and demonstrate selfless love, fill you with all grace and joy today. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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Foxy Lady

My wife Miska met a friend for coffee this week. They sat at a cafe table outside while a man in a white fedora passed them, back and forth, multiple times. He would go into the barber shop next door, only to exit a few minutes later and cruise near the ladies, giving them a smile or word. The fedora man would then repeat. He was working it.

On a final pass, he paused to slide Miska a note on a yellow post-it, a note addressed to "Foxy Lady."

I'd like to punch the guy in the face. I'd also like to shake his hand.

While I suggest he raise his fedora enough to clear his vision for a good look at things such as wedding rings, I appreciate his brazen courage. I of all men understand the beauty he encountered. The poor fellow didn't stand a chance.

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Collier Garden

winn_collier_writer_charlottesville_tomato

We've thrown three more tomato plants, all heirlooms, into the planter box. In separate pots, we've added both hot and sweet peppers. I'm not sure how many years we've attempted to grow something edible, but we've yet to taste a bite. Mainly, we've tried tomatoes, but over the summers we've been plagued by fungi, blight, operator error and a two-year old Seth who (we discovered after much bafflement over our uncooperative plants) plucked every newly forming red bud and tossed them.

We have garden visions, with either raised beds cut into our backyard slope or a custom tiered planter attached to our deck. What we've managed is humbler: a small redwood box from Lowe's, two buckets, a bag of soil and much hope. I watch the growth each day, looking for signs of disease or for the groundhog who drops by every so often, sniffing and lurking. I keep the soil moist, and I've sprayed an organic solution a time or two. But let's be honest, I'm at the mercy of forces I neither master nor understand.

We've planted another garden on this same plot of dirt. Miska and I've thrown two boys into the middle of our life. We try to be generous with the love we apply, and we do have our visions of how this family, this future, plays out. But mostly, we're winging it. And watching out the back window, warding off pests best we can. But mainly praying and hoping and watching.

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Love’s Whistle

One of my great disappointments in life is that I can't whistle. I can make some strange tinny noise while sucking in air, but it's a wimpish tone, with no bellow to it. And since I can only muster this neutered note while gathering wind, my chirp only lasts 10-12 seconds before I'm gasping for breath. It's embarrassing, particularly when your sons want you to teach them the licks. I still believe whoever whistled that opening for the Andy Griffith Show is a god. 

My dad, however – now he can whistle. When I was a kid, he'd tootle the usual tunes when a melody stuck in his head, but mainly my dad whistled to communicate. Whistling is dad's fourth language. A true linguist, dad has four primary tongues: English, Texan, sign language and whistling. Sign language was for when we were in a public setting and dad wanted to say something off the radar. It may have been as simple as granting me permission to exit church and go to the bathroom — but receiving confirmation via clandestine hand code made the whole thing excitingly cloak-and-dagger. Whistling, however, was for those occasions when dad wanted to reach every nook and cranny of the neighborhood. Dad had a powerful, looping whistle, and it signaled time to return home for dinner or chores or for an outing. That whistle was unmistakable. Dad could be a couple blocks away, and I knew exactly what it meant and would come running. 

I loved that sound. I hear it now. That powerful echo told me there was a place called home and that there was a dad standing there at the front steps waiting for me. 

St. John speaks of God as our shepherd and we the sheep. And the sheep, John says, know the Shepherd's voice. We know the whistle. John doesn't have much to say regarding our tenacious efforts to hear, preening toward every scrap of sound while anxiously deciphering its meaning (or not). John simply says the Shepherd speaks, and the sheep hear. And then the sheep follow. Of course, we could rightly protest with the hundred competing scenarios where things go differently, where the Shepherd seems difficult to hear – or where the sheep don't listen and don't follow. But of course, John doesn't say the sheep hear everything plain. We simply hear enough. We hear plain whatever we need to hear plain. That's the rub. Ever since Eden, we tend to believe we need more knowledge than we actually do.

But all we really need to know is the whistle. And to know that a Father filled with love waits for us at the front steps. 

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Common God

Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God:
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,
The rest sit round it, and pluck blackberries
                                                 {Elizabeth Barrett Browning}

 

Last week, Wyatt was exasperated. "Dad, you don't hear lots of things." I protested, but he appealed to Miska for backup. "Mom, dad doesn't hear a lot of things I say, does he?" I'd like to report that Miska, the one to whom I've pledged my life and love, the one who is my very flesh, shut this inquisition down cold. However, Miska is committed to the truth, blast her. My defense – what I wished to say but did not – is this: the reason I might miss miniscule tidbits from Wyatt (here and there, on the rarest of occasions) is because Wyatt says a lot. Wyatt, like his father, is a verbal processor which is to say that words, abundant words, gush from the spigot. Why speak three things when you can speak fifty? 

It's too easy for me to miss Wyatt's voice (which, I'm sad to say, means missing him) because at times it's everywhere. Having grown accustomed to the ubiquitous sound, I tune it out and mentally traipse off to god knows where.

After reading one of the Bible's more electrifying stories (say, the Red Sea opening wide for Israel or Jairus' daughter regaining life), I'm often vexed because I've never experienced anything of the sort. I haven't seen God do this stuff, I worry. So have I ever seen God at all? Hauerwas says that "we [don’t] see reality by just opening our eyes." True enough, but we also won't see reality by keeping our eyes shut. Our vision is off-kilter, and we need to learn how to see clearly. But to see something, we've got to be looking in the first place. 

And if we seek, we shall find. We will find the God who holds the very world together, the one in whom all joy and creative energy and holy silence exist. God's life is pregnant in the delight I encounter with my sons and in the way my imagination expands toward those mysterious mountains I've known so long. God occupies the truths that have grabbed me and refuse to let me go. God rests in the quiet spaces that call me forward and inward. God chuckles in my laughter. God seeps from the pages of my many hardbound companions. God exists in the fierceness that eventually rises against my fears. From one astounding woman, God has spilled copious measures of pleasure and deep knowledge and love, love and more love. 

We miss God, not because God is so hidden but because God is so common. Blackberries are scrumptious — but by God, man, the bush is aflame.

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Spark

We have a cat in our house. I've never been fond of these coy creatures who strut about like they own the joint. However, Wyatt loves cats, and I love Wyatt. So on Wyatt's ninth birthday, we adopted a felis catus that had been abandoned in a cardboard box on the doorstep of our local vet. They couldn't nail down the cat's age, but she is well beyond kitten. They pulled most of her teeth, rotted as they were. We have no idea of the cat's original name, which was welcome news to Wyatt because this meant he could pick a new one. For a boy, naming your pet is half the reason for having a pet at all. We purchased a litter box and a couple toys and new feeding dishes. Spark took up residence in Wyatt's room, settling on Wyatt's bean bag as her nest and perch. 

We assume Spark has abuse in her background. She was skittish her first months in our home. In high school, a friend spotted a cat sunning on the sidewalk where we walked. He snagged the feline by the tail and twirled her, screaching as only a terrorized cat can, above his head in large, looping arcs. At the height of one of his whirls, he released the cat, catapulting the shrieking projectile toward the roof of a building near us. She survived the ordeal, but all that to say that the world can be cruel to the Sparks among us.

The beauty for Spark is that she's found herself a Wyatt, a boy who will hug her and talk to her and who would surely punch in the nose any ruffian who intended to toss her on a roof. Some mornings, Wyatt will come downstairs with his t-shirt covered in white cat hair, proof of all the play and love he's pouring on that little creature who has now found a place to belong. 

Each of us have a bit of Spark in our story. And, I pray, everyone of us has a Wyatt. 

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Subtlety

We're told the way of the world will be won by big players and big ideas. Cultural landscapes, so we're told, shift with the tremors of voluminous visions and cataclysmic bursts when a people or an idea swells to an irrepressible quake. We are told these things, and perhaps those who tell us know what they're talking about. There are even a few spherical truths that have transformed me. So, I won't argue. 

But I will offer an alternative account: my world turns on subtleties. That fresh path of freckles on Wyatt's nose. The coffee Miska made this morning, with extra grinds since she knows I prefer it stout. The friend bristling with anger but who, if you brush past the prickly and into the raw, you'll discover fear and maybe sadness too. That lone bird scooping the air with his broad wings. The tender curve of Miska's bare back. The midnight "I love you, dad," from a boy named Seth who can barely keep his eyes open. A God who became a man, a man with a name and a story.

On my run this morning, I stopped at a red light. A fellow walking to work downtown came up beside me. We stood there, ready to pounce on the flashing symbol telling us "Walk." He pulled out his ear buds and said, "I've seen you since the first of the year. You're doing a good job." My crosswalk mate noticed a face, a human. He pauses at the subtlety of a stranger. I'm glad he did.

Miska has these words from Mary Oliver up on our kitchen blackboard:

that light is an
invitation to happiness
and that happiness, when
it's done right, is a
kind of holiness,
palpable and redemptive.

What Mary's offering is subtlety, no way around it.

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Sins Still

In the car this weekend, Miska told Wyatt and Seth they needed to keep the noise in check when they got home.

"Why?" Seth asked.

"Because dad's studying," Miska answered.

"Why is he studying?"

"Well," Miska explained, "he's studying for a sermon."

"Oh…" Seth murmered, contemplating some ephemeral mystery before finishing: "Dad's the best pastor in the world."

The wheels were turning…

"You know," Seth added soberly, "Dad's like God to me."

There was no way that Wyatt, ever the stickler, was going to let this pass unchecked. "Well, maybe God's helper."

"Yeah," Seth said, reconsidering, "he still sins."

 

Children splatter extravagant love, unlike we adults who fastidiously measure our responses so as not to get carried away. Children also blurt out the truth, reminding us – whenever we get a little big for our britches – that we're not nearly so much the stuff as we pretend. Thank God for the children. 

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