Tag: john blase

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Dear John ~ We Must Not Break

Dear John,

I know we’re not keeping score, and this free-flowing open-handiness, this total lack of keeping tally, is one of the signals of genuine friendship. Still, as your good and faithful words have landed in my digital mailbox three times now, I’ve been trying to write this letter to you. I just haven’t had the words. I’ve been scrambling to care for the congregation and complete a few projects and figure out Zoom (I’ve already learned to hate the word “Zoom”), and, with Miska, create some semblance of rhythm for our family — but mainly, I simply haven’t had the words.

The past couple weeks, it’s as if someone just flipped the whole Monopoly board. All the pieces are scattered. We don’t know which way is up. Everything is uncertain. I hear (and agree with) the call that we must not panic–we have to stick together, breathe deep, watch out for one another, trust the people who’ve trained their whole life for this moment, and trust The Mercy to hold us. And yet, the fear is real. We’re swimming through dark waters. It’s the voice of fools who say we have nothing to fear. Only, I believe that faith and hope and love are more powerful than fear—way more powerful.

We humans are quite a magnificent and resilient lot. There are plenty of reasons and times to point out the countless ways we’ve made a wreck of things. But right now, I’m drawn to the wonder of those police officers in Mallorca, Spain, making the rounds down barren avenues, folks locked in their houses — and pausing every few streets to get out of their patrol cars and serenade the block. I’m in awe of so many who are organizing grocery runs for their elderly neighbors, collecting toilet paper for those who don’t’ have any, and delivering food to school kids who’re missing their prime source of food. I marvel at the parents carving out a new reality, tending to their children and families with little guidance or sense of when this ends. And wow — isn’t it something to see folks committing the government checks they don’t really need to those who really do?

And then I’m stunned by the skill and courage of the researchers, burning all their energy and every ounce of their knowledge, to find an answer to this menace. I’m so grateful for doctors like my brother-in-law in Jonesboro, Arkansas, serving the vulnerable amid crisis–and then, exhausted, rushing back into the hospital to care for the tornado victims. I’m inspired by Dr. Craig Smith at Columbia University Medical Center in New York outlining their dire reality in a note to his colleagues. His sober description lands with an alarming jolt–but then he concluded with these spine-straightening words: “A forest of bamboo bends to the ground in a typhoon but rarely breaks. We are that forest and we must not break. By the people, for the people.”

That line is the one I want to hold up today. Each of us, in our own way and own place — with our own circle of people — We must not break. And by God’s mercy, we will not.

Your friend,

Winn

p.s. on top of it all, yesterday was the 1 year anniversary of our dog Daisy’s death. There were new tears in our house.

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Dear John ~ 6 September 2017

Dear John,

On Monday, I had every intention of getting a letter of to you, but you beat me to it. What kept me from writing my dear ol’ friend in Colorado? The City of Charlottesville, that’s what. We got a letter in the mail from one of our street inspectors giving us 10 days to trim back a long row of runaway Rose of Sharons that have been spreading themselves too generously out over our little lane. They were running wild, I’ll admit. And they were causing a problem on our narrow lane, skinny as it is. Even without the forest intruding onto the asphalt, two go karts would have to suck in their tummies to squeeze past each other without scraping paint. Did you know that in England, lots of the little avenues are referred to as a “close”? Like instead of Mulberry St., it’s Mulberry Close? Those Brits say what they mean; everything on those streets is in close, for sure.

Anyway, I had planned to trim the Rose of Sharons in a month or so when legitimate Fall weather hits, as I’m told that then I can prune away without fear of butchering them into oblivion. However, the inspector man said they had to go, butcher or no butcher. He obviously has little concern for our horticultural dilemma. I’d planned for the job to take an hour. Six hours later, I dragged my weary self into the house and called it a day.

You know, though, how Charlottesville has been syphoning off so much of my energy in so many other ways lately. Our dear, broken town has been splayed across the news, and it’s not going away–last night CNN had a link to a livestream of our town’s City Council meeting–can you believe that? In the middle of Hurricanes and DACA breakdown and North Korea shooting nuclear missiles, there sits our town council with a lead-in from Wolf Blitzer. John, I tell you, on August 12th, I experienced the most vile and vicious ways we degrade ourselves and others. I know racism and antisemitism is still very much with us, but I’ve never seen it bare its fangs– so brazen, without any twinge of conscience. And then, later, I stood between two groups of people spewing the most evil, dehumanizing words at one another. I will never forget that. Never. And though I would never want three people to die to be able to get to this point, I am grateful that now our wounds, festering so long, are in the open, that we simply cannot ignore them. I hope that now we can embrace serious national repentance. I hope that we can truly become brothers and sisters, that we can make communities where everyone truly belongs.

You talked about the In-Between. I feel that all the time. I feel it, for instance, in trying to navigate how to live well in a time where we cycle from one crisis to the next, rarely without any moment to catch our breath or think deeply, certainly no time to think clearly. One downside (of many) to the 24-hour news cycle and firehose-style social media is that we are tempted to believe we can have (or should have) our finger and our mind on every issue, every crisis, every worthy concern. But we can’t. Only God can do that. If we think that we have no responsibility to engage the sorrows and injustices of our world, we need God to expand our heart. However, if we think that we are responsible to confront every sorrow and injustice of our world, we need God to chasten our bloated (and destructive) delusions.

Of course, for many of us, our overblown sense of responsibility comes from the shame blasted out from those who like to sound like God, only with a heap of self-righteousness poured on top. A long time ago, I gave up giving someone else that level of authority in my life. I’ve got my hands full trying to follow Jesus’ voice; I can’t tune in to the million-voice siren call on Facebook too.

All this reminds me of Ignatius who often signed off his letters with this inspiring jolt: Go set the world aflame! That’ll get the blood flowing, won’t it? We do need more people striking their match. However, Ignatius also regularly insisted on our need to foster a Holy Indifference. This Holy Indifference was Ignatius’ way of describing an abiding trust in God that keeps us from getting swept away in the emotions and demands of those things (and often good things) that simply take over more energy than they should. It’s not a call to apathy, not by any means. However, it is, as one writer put it,”peaceful acceptance, realistic expectations, and careful consideration.” If we have indifference but no flame, we’ll waste our life. And if we have the flame but no indifference, we’ll just burn, burn til there’s nothing playful or hopeful or curious left in us at all. 

I know saying goodbye to the kids was hard. I wish Miska and I could have walked over to check in on you and Mer after the farewells. I see those days coming toward us over the horizon. I’m going to be a blubbering dad when it’s our turn. But before then, Miska and I are celebrating our 20th. And we’re doing it in style. We’re heading to Ireland on Sunday to do a walking tour of the Kerry Way, just the bags over our shoulder, the mist on our heads, the green clover under our feet. We’ll walk from village to village. I can’t wait. I plan to practice a little Holy Indifference on the trail. 

Your Friend,

Winn

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Dear John ~ 5 March 2016

Dear John,

Out running this morning, I sighted two big-breasted cardinals, blazing red. I wonder what it would be like to have to live up such a brazen coat of feathers? It’s not like you could ever hide or blend into the crowd. I imagine that sometimes it’s a burden, but also gives them their strut. I think all of us need a little strut.

It’s interesting you mentioned the Carver story – I just bought my first collection of Carver stories. I was surprised to find I had a hard time getting into it, but I’m sure I’ll give it another crack. I love that image of you and your crackly Baptist knees kneeling for the ashes, with Easter burning in your eyes. Whatever else happens to us, whatever sorrows we experience, whatever fears, whatever blow to our hopes or passions, that Easter burning — that hope of life breaking loose — is what keeps our heart thumping and our eyes watchful. Truth is though that every year, come January and February, that fire dwindles. I need to remember the story again. I need to be pulled out of myself. I need God. I guess that’s why we keep showing up, isn’t it? 

You know moments like Ash Wednesday get, for me, at the heart of what it is I think I’m supposed to be doing as a pastor. I stopped going to pastor’s conferences long ago and haven’t read many pastors books in quite a while. Most of the time, running into all that feels like trying to read Swahili. But standing in front of a line of friends, putting my finger on the forehead of a person I love, looking them in the eye, marking them with the cross, reminding us both of our mortality and our need for mercy and assuring us both that God’s love will carry us even through death — that calls something deep out of me. 

Ken’s dad died Saturday night, I’m not sure if you heard yet or not. I felt that one, returning to my own mother’s death. I hate death. I hate the separation. It makes me nervous sometimes when I think of the future we don’t exactly understand. I believe that our future is bound up in God’s love, and most days that’s enough for me. But I’m a man of dust and there are days when I crave more certainty about how this love I have for Miska, for Wyatt and Seth, for my friends, for this splendid world will continue. I want to have more clarity for exactly how none of it’s lost and how it goes on forever. But I find that God rarely considers that brand of certainty a high priority. I wish God would ask me my opinion on such things every once in a while.   

With you, I’m disappointed we haven’t found a home for publishing our letters yet, but I’m glad we keep writing. I’m glad it’s about friendship most of all. And sooner or later, when the time’s right, we’ll fling our stuff into the wide world, especially the other letters, the ones that otherwise won’t see the light of day. Until then we’ll work on getting Jubilee out there. I’m eager for March 22nd. I’m eager to get my hands on your finished volume. I need more Blase poetry in my life. 

 

Your Friend,
Winn

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Dear John ~ 31 October 2016

Dear John, 

I saw the photo of the three college amigos sitting on your couch, and they all looked happy. I know you and Mer were happy to have them there, though I suspect you gulped a few times when you saw the cashier ringing up the piles of food on each trip you made to King Soopers. We have that gulping experience often now with these young turks filling our house with testosterone and appetites. I, like you, am so glad to plop down the cash for groceries and sneakers and braces and burritos and jeans and deodorant (lots) and more groceries and then more sneakers followed by more groceries, Still, I am looking forward to the day when Wyatt and Seth are grown and footing the bill themselves and look back on these days and say, “I had no idea…” I’ve been looking back at my mom and dad a lot recently and thinking “I had no idea…”

Well, today’s the day the Big Tree’s coming down. It’s an ash, more than 100 years old, a real massive, regal tree. I’m sad to see it go. We never named this great tree, probably because we knew we wouldn’t have it for long and didn’t want to grow too attached. He has a twin who’s still strong and healthy, and I’ve christened the twin Stogie. Miska doesn’t like the name at all, doesn’t seem noble enough or earthy enough or something. I think we’re going to plant a Weeping Willow back near this spot, but I’ll clear the name with Miska this time. I’ve learned my lesson. Anyway, the tree crew arrived early this morning, and they are having a time out there. The guy up top, maybe 30 feet high, is cutting and whooping, and the boss man’s giving fist bumps to his compadre as they’re feeding limbs into the chipper. That chipper’s something, like Jaws just chomping and cracking those burly limbs like they’re nothing more than toothpicks. It’s good to see folks good at their work and taking such pleasure in it. 

A few hours ago, my friend Tom the master carpenter stopped by. He’s going to take a large hunk of the tree and build us a bench. This tree has been part of this property, providing joy and comfort, for more than a century, and it’s going to continue to do the same for decades more. Tom and I talked trees and carpentry, but then, as we typically do, we began to talk about life, about what we see in the world. We both see, as you mentioned, a lot of passions and a lot of fire (a lot of anger). What saddens me most about our current state of affairs is that we are losing our ability to truly hear the other. We are dividing and taking sides and building motes around our enclaves in ways that are ripping apart our common life (and I use common life in both senses: our shared life and our ordinary life – we’re destroying both). It’s like we’re all being tossed into that chipper and crushed to smithereens. I know that, at least on paper, somebody wins (elections, culture wars, theological arguments); but I don’t believe that the way we’re going about all this, anybody wins at all. We’re throwing one another, and ourselves, into these steel jaws of death grinding us down until there’s nothing left except, I guess, a mess of good mulch for starting over and growing something new. And maybe that’s the hope here, that somehow after we’ve razed things to the ground, we’ll see our folly and start to build something new, something that is really of course very, very old. I sure wish we could wake up first and not torch the whole thing. I do.    

In the meantime, though, we do things like say goodbye to good trees and make benches for sitting in the shade and thinking and welcoming friends. We give out candy to the neighborhood ghouls and minions. We wait for our children to make the journey home and we make trips to King Soopers with fat wallets that will quickly grow skinny. We write friends letters to remind one another we’re not crazy, that we believe in goodness — that we believe in this goodness very much.  

 

Your Friend,

Winn

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Dear John ~ 22 August 2016

Dear John,

I’ve been thinking about you and Mer a lot this weekend. Will to one side of the world, Sarah to another. I remember the day my dad dropped me off for my first semester at college. There was only one small item left in our van parked in front of the dormitory. It was one of those portable ironing boards, couldn’t have weighed more than 4 pounds, but my dad insisted he needed to carry it back up to the 3rd floor for me. I didn’t understand why until after climbing those few flights of stairs and dropping the board in my room, when my dad had no more excuses and finally had to say goodbye. Tears. I remember the tears. I had tears too after he drove off. Man, the love was deep.

I know you well enough to know there’ll be some red eyes over this stretch of days. That’s one of the things I love about you.

When you put all this together with Abbey starting high school, it’s overload. I know, we’re right behind you. Wyatt starts high school tomorrow, Seth’s full throttle in Jr. High. You know what’s the kicker? They both decided to play football this year. You know how I love the sport, and it was the best part of high school for me, but I never wanted to pressure them in any way to play. Not only is it a jerk thing to try to maneuver your boys’ passions, but also, as you know, we have lots more information on the perils of head injuries now. We’ve done a good bit of due diligence. I even sat in on a conversation with two experts: a pediatric neurologist and the guy who teaches the course called “Concussion” at UVA. Anyway, Wyatt and Seth wanted to play, and so they are. Thankfully, squads are teaching lots of new techniques. Did you know some teams are teaching rugby style tackling? My ol’ Texas coaches would sure be scratching their heads.

I will tell you, though, I love these days. As our sons’ bodies and minds and hearts are growing, I love seeing my boys step into new territory. I love seeing their wonder and their nervousness and their eagerness. I love how they are being challenged and are rising to the moment. I love how these rites of passage are stoking a new (old, really) fire in their young, strong bones. 

Given that high school and football are now both part of our family life, Miska and I decided it was time to introduce them to Coach Taylor and those Friday Night Lights. Boy, it was good. Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose. The boys were hooked, but then I knew they would be. I wish every kid could have a Coach Taylor.

Well, I know you’re somewhere in the air heading to Pepperdine right now. It’s brave of you to battle the airlines again after that hellacious weekend you endured. I hope the next two days are good. You’re a good dad, and I’m thankful for that. We need good dads.

 

Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose,

Winn

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Dear John ~ 13 June 2016

Dear John,

You are so right. On days like these, we need a friend. So, here I am, writing you back right away. Last evening, I heard stories of the police investigators making their way through the pile of carnage and how they kept having to force themselves to tune out all the telephones ringing from all the bodies. Friends desperately hoping someone on the other end would pick up. Family members refusing to believe the worst. Such loneliness and crushing sorrow. They weren’t able to talk to those they loved. I wish I could do something.

Friday, you know, will be the 1 year anniversary of the shooting at Mother Emanuel in Charleston. You remember how it felt when you and I stood on Calhoun St. in front of the memorial at the church, the deep sadness, wondering if we’ve all just gone mad? And now, a year later here we are again. One group gunned down because of hate. Another group gunned down because of hate. Have we? Have we just gone mad?

I appreciate very much Annie’s challenge to write words that will not enrage by their triviality. Yesterday, a friend dropped by to see our house, and her phone alarm went off at 6:00 p.m. It was a reminder about the moment of silence for the victims in Orlando. We all sat there, still. Those 60 seconds were the truest response I had all day. I wish we could have sat there quiet together.

 

Your Friend,
Winn

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Dear John ~ 21 March 2016

Dear John, 

I do hope you plugged in your lights; I love how you’re that guy on your block. And as I read your story about the man who looked like your father hitching a ride to Wyoming, I kept wishing things would have arranged themselves differently so that you could have pulled over and let him toss his bag in the back and then pointed north, maybe gotten him to Cheyenne and swapped your stories on the way. 

I have big news to share. You know that cozy craftsmen farmhouse we’ve had our eye on? It looks like the Colliers may load up our books and move on in. It’s old and needs some TLC, but it’s got good bones. There’ll be some elbow room there, space for Miska to do her gardening and room for the boys to roam a little. Good neighbors sprinkled around us. One of the things I like best is that it’s the kind of house deserving a name. Miska and I have always wanted to own a place with a name. Not too long ago, I looked at a house on a small parcel of acres boasting lines of gnarled oaks. The house was in disastrous shape, but there was a small slate sign on a post near the front driveway: Oak Grove – I almost turned a blind eye to the money pit and bought it because of that dinky little sign. I don’t know what all this is about, but I think it’s something about being responsible for a place with a history and a future, about belonging there, about being caretakers for something that is more than just the square feet where you place your pillow. Anyway, it’s not a done deal, and we don’t have a clue yet what we’d name it. Miska says we’ll have to feel the spirit of the place a bit before we’ll know her name. That sounds like Miska, doesn’t it? 

Did you notice how Wendell Berry and Jim Harrison were back to back on the NY Times By the Book section? There was some kind of literary voodoo going on there, to have two fellas you and I read and discuss so much tag-team in the Times. In the interview, Wendell was as contrarian as ever – those poor interviewers just trying to do their job. When they asked Wendell who he hoped would write his life story, he was appalled at even the thought. “Nobody,” he said. “As the only person who ever has lived my life, I know that most of it can never be documented, is beyond writing and beyond words.” In spite of his protests, I actually do hope someone will give us a good biography in the years ahead; but I honor how Wendell knows a life can never be captured in a book. It has to be lived, and this living of this marvelous life is a beautiful and profound mystery. And each of has to live this life for ourselves. Too many of us are constantly looking over our shoulder, watching for everyone else’s cues to tell us how we’re doing, to signal that we’re thinking properly or have the acceptable opinion or are doing something valuable. I’m sad to think of all the uniqueness and goodness that gets squelched this way.

I’m actually thinking about this particularly today because of you, my friend. Tomorrow is your birthday. If I’ve done my math right, this is 49. I wanted to write today and beat the crowd of well-wishers. I want to tell you that you are living your life well. You bump along, as all of us do, but you’re a solid man. I admire how you seek to be true to the people in your life, true to the things you believe. You live with the kind of sturdiness that all good men share, but you also live with a twinkle in your eye. You know some truths, and you keep searching for more – but you also know the mystery. Because of your friendship, I find that I am more myself. I find that I am less lonely. After God created John Blase, I just know he leaned back and chuckled and said, “Now that’s good. John’s gonna ruffle some feathers, isn’t he? Ha! That’s good.”

 

Your Friend,
Winn

 

P.S. Your comment about a nest in your beard reminded me of this picture. Remember ol’ Beardcat? He was a strange, crusty fella, wasn’t he? You don’t get the sense he was living looking over his shoulder. 

beardcat

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Dear John – 29 February 2016

Dear John,

Yes, Christ-haunted, I feel this as well. When Wyatt was still in a stroller, Miska and I spent a few days in Savannah, Georgia, Flannery’s childhood home. The whole city seems haunted. The Spanish moss drapes over the streets, hemming you in and filtering the light with an eerie glow. The ancient, knobby cobblestone down by the waterway, passing centuries-old warehouses and shops, feels like the sort of place where ghosts roam under moonlight. And the Bonaventure Cemetery – holy moly, that magnificent place gives you a hush and keeps you looking over your shoulder. I don’t think a book (Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil) and a city have ever been more perfectly matched. By the way, did you know they had to move the Bird Girl sculpture from the cemetery to the Tel Fair Museum of Art in 2014 because so many folks were messing with it? That’s sad to me, to think of her cooped up in a museum when her rightful place is under the trees keeping watch over so many loved ones. 

At any rate, Flannery hails from Savannah, there’s no doubt. Like you hail from the South, no doubt.

But you got me thinking of Ms. O’Connor. Have you read her essay “The Church and the Fiction Writer”? I wish more writers would take a listen, especially writers who share O’Connor’s faith. Flannery insists that fiction can never be used to uphold “the interests of abstract truth” but rather must see the world as it is and help the rest of us to see the world in all of its particularity, all of its beauty and all of its (to borrow from Flannery) grotesqueness. The job of any writer (and certainly any writer who wants to be faithful to the name ‘Christian’) should be to tell the truth, to reveal our desires and our failures, to unmask our pretense, to gives us this beautiful world and to make us stare at the ways we muck it up. And we should work hard to do this well, with real skill.

Anyway, Flannery says that writers who want to reveal mysteries will have to do it by describing truthfully what we see from where we sit. I think that’s what we’re doing, best we know.

Well, tomorrow’s Super Tuesday. I guess this whole thing’s heating up. Last week, I heard Marilynne Robinson say, “We have major work to do. The vocabulary of public life has become ridiculous.” So keep putting those poems to the page over there, keep telling us the truth about the world from where you sit. God knows we need it.

I’ll be seeing you soon. It feels so very good to write those words.

 

Your friend,
Winn

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Dear John – 21 February 2016

Dear John,

I’m glad you got your fence repaired. I’m glad you and your neighbor had the opportunity to move along the fence line shoulder to shoulder and feel the gratification of shared work. Some days I crave these tasks that require something specific of you (line up the posts, set the panels), work with an explicit goal and a clear conclusion. So much of my life feels elusive or at least never-concluding. Though some folks opt for a vision of the pastor as something like an ecclesial project manager (set budget goals and growth metrics, chart the course, and then track your progress to completion), I can’t comprehend such a thing. To walk with people in grief and joy and boredom, to point toward God amid our confusions and our shenanigans, to try to help us all be faithful to one another and to what is true – there’s no clear end point to this. But then again, I’m a middling pastor so what do I know?

A few years ago, we were finishing our basement and needed to install insulation in the walls and ceiling. A friend came over to help. We wore our long-sleeve shirts and our goggles, loaded up our staple guns. That itchy stuff was no joke, but we experienced a kind of pleasure to work down the rows, firing away, and then to look back when we were done and see what we’d accomplished. I’m sure some of my friends and neighbors will read this and I’ll be getting calls pronto to come over and help with projects. I can hear it now: “Well, Rev, I hear your struggles. I got just the thing…” 

You mentioned the Stegner Fellowship at Stanford and those two decades of amazing classmates. One of my favorite things Stegner wrote was a letter he penned to Berry, some 30 years after Berry had been his student. I love the letter for many reasons, but one reason is because of the unabashed affection Stegner showed, though Stegner admitted how “it embarrasses my post-Protestant sensibilities to tell a man to his face that I admire him.” Stegner told Berry that “from the first time when you first appeared as a Fellow in the writing program in 1958, I recognized you as one who knew where he was from and who he was.” Stegner went on to recount how he’d tried to talk Berry away from his Kentucky farm and back to Stanford, though Berry was disinterested and how Berry was offered some opportunity that Stegner insisted most writers would sell their soul to have – again, disinterested. Stegner reminded Berry of the dire warnings so many laid on him: “that you were burying yourself,” Stegner wrote, “that you couldn’t come into the literary world with manure on your barn boots and expect to be welcomed…”

But Berry paid the small minds no mind. And I am so glad. I too, in my own way, want to be a writer who gets manure on his boots. Maybe that’s part of what pastoring does for me these days (there’s a metaphor that could go wrong easily). I know you understand what I mean, letting our words emerge from the real things of this life like putting up fences and getting braces on the kids and spending time out in the woods, things like loving and dying, like laughing and grieving, praying with someone who’s got the world on their shoulders. 

I’d like to think that’s some of what you and I are doing, keeping our boots dirty. I think we are.

 

Your friend,
Winn

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Dear John – 15 February 2016

Dear John,

Apparently I’ve passed my crazy dreams on to Miska. Mine have faded, but Saturday night, Miska dreamed that Donald Trump asked her to be his spiritual director. She remembered this only a minute or so before I was supposed to stand up to give Sunday’s sermon. She leaned over and whispered her dream in my ear, and I slapped my hand over my mouth to stifle a cackle that would have interrupted the Scripture reader who was diligently reminding us of how God led Israel into a land flowing with milk and honey. I had to recover before I stepped up to the lectern. 

This morning, I read Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s tribute to Antonin Scalia. Did you know they sat side-by-side at the opera regularly, and their families celebrated every New Year’s Eve together? Ginsberg, the liberal stalwart, called Scalia, that fiery conservative, her “best buddy.” She even praised his dissents for pointing out the ‘applesauce’ and the ‘argle bargle’ that needed to be sliced from her majority opinions. I like that – argle bargle. Watching coarseness overrun the political scene and finding ourselves bombarded by the various kinds of flash-mob flareups that happen about every 17 hours on the Facebook feed, it’s easy to believe we have devolved so far that the anger consuming us has stripped us of our most basic humanness: a charitable spirit, neighborliness, a willingness to listen rather than merely snipe and score points. But then you’re given a small gift, like a note where Ginsberg calls Scalia her best buddy and you gain a little hope again. I wish I had words to describe the estrangement I feel from the dominant storylines in our world. But I don’t right now, so I’ll just say that I needed to hear Ginsberg’s kindness and warmth.

Last word on these sorts of things – but since we’re thrust yet again into the electoral carnival right now, I do wonder why anyone with more than a pea-brain’s worth of sense would want to be president? These days, that job sounds like my worst nightmare.

On to better topics – I like your vision of Pony, Montana. I’m willing to carry your ashes there should you land on such a request, but I think we should plan a trip — while we’re still breathing. There’s lots I want to do in the years ahead. On Ash Wednesday, the gravity and humanness hit me at a new level. I can’t say why. But marking that black soot on the foreheads of so many friends, looking them in the eye, touching their body with the sign of the cross, remembering our frailty and the fleeting days of our life — I had a steady lump in my throat. I held it together, but only barely.

A month ago, I bought Paul Kalanithi’s When Breathe Becomes Air. Per the usual, Miska’s gotten to it before me. Kalanithi, a 36-year-old neurosurgeon, was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer, and as his world came unglued, a question dogged him: “what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life?” Miska says that Kalanithi tells his story beautifully, I look forward to it. I know this question has my attention. I want to live well. I want to love well. Also, I have to say again: I despise cancer. 

We’ve been handed another snow day. We got a few inches, but they say ice is on the way. Looking out my window, Carter’s Mt. has a lacy fog flowing over the ridge line and fingering toward the white-dusted trees, as if the Northern Queen is breathing fresh winter over us. It’s going to be a grand day. 

 

Your Friend,

Winn

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