Tag: letters

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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 ~ 14 March 2016

Dear John,

Being with you in Charleston was a real joy. It’s almost as if those long walks on that stretch of beach are becoming something of a tradition. I like tradition, not the stuffy can’t-alter-a-thing kind, but the living, breathing kind — the sort that grows up around you and reminds you that you belong to this world and that she belongs to you, the kind of tradition that, over the years, becomes the music score playing behind the beautiful story that becomes your life.

Seth may love tradition even more than me. You know how every year for his birthday I take him to a Clemson football game. It’s a great road trip, and Seth wants tradition from the time I pick him up early from school on Friday to the time we pull back into our garage around 4 a.m. Sunday. Seth wants to stop at the same spot for dinner (Zaxby’s). He wants lunch at the same spot on game day (Moe’s, the same Moe’s we ate lunch at after church most Sundays when we lived in Clemson) and then he likes to walk over, every time, to Judge Kellers and the Tiger Sports Shop to check out the latest Clemson gear. Seth wants the same chicken-and-biscuits after we leave the stadium (Bojangles), and during the wee hours of Sunday morning, somewhere in North Carolina, he wants to chow tacos from the 24 hour Taco Bell (why, I can not say). The whole thing’s an awful cholesterol binge, to be sure, but he gets such a kick out of it that I can’t say no. I’m a pushover.

Sometimes I’m around folks, usually Christians, who are eager to toss tradition, like getting rid of garbage. They want to scrub out the old words and seem apologetic about most everything from older generations, most everything that’s slow or out of fashion. It always makes me sad. I’m all for fresh eyes and new energy (and God knows we need to correct places where we’ve veered off course), but if we find ourselves abandoning all the people who have made us who we are, we are foolish and will sooner or later recognize how unmoored we’ve become, how lonely we are.

I too like the Charlotte airport (at least, as much as I could possibly ‘like’ any such space). If I’m ever forced to have a layover, I always hope it’s in Charlotte. I love all those white rocking chairs they have scattered about. If there was ever a place that needed a few hundred rocking chairs, a constant reminder to settle down and chill out, it’s an airport.

Your story about Abbey snagged me when you first mentioned it, and again when you reminded me in your letter. These sons and daughters of ours pluck at our most tender string, don’t they? Our boys have been driving us nuts lately, fighting like a mongoose and a cobra. But then I’ve noticed, here and there, both of them trying hard in their own way. One of them hugs us at most every turn, which of course is about as good as it gets. And the other one, whose a little more stubborn and sullen right now, told me the other day, “I’m trying to pay more attention to what I’m saying and not argue as much.” It doesn’t take much to melt a dad’s heart, does it? Just a crumb.

I look forward to the day when I can join you on that porch, or you on mine.

 

Your Friend,
Winn

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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 – 19 February 2016

Dear John,

I think you hit the nail on its ever-lovin’ head: power. It’s a nasty craving, isn’t it? I know I feel the lust myself more often than I care to admit. I hope that we, as a people, don’t stay on this bender so long that we raze the whole shebang to the ground. We might wake up one day to discover that we won — but that there’s really nothing left of whatever we’ve won.

Somedays, I feel sorta like good Sheriff Longmire. Remember the day when he’d pulled two bodies out of the river, murdered by the Mexican drug cartel and then that evening, he’d happened upon a fella in camos, with night vision goggles and an AK47, running after coyotes for sport? Longmire, per his usual custom, saddled up to the bar at the Red Pony with his pal Henry Standing Bear. He sat there silent, fiddled with his drink, then said, “Henry, I don’t know what’s happened to my town.”

That’s me. Somedays, I just can’t make sense of what’s happened to us. Often, I feel like the world I was made for doesn’t really exist anymore. Of course, this is my world. These are my people. So I just keep stepping forward and hoping that the little bit I have to offer matters. I believe it does.

I know that I often think about Abraham Heshel’s words: “The cure of the soul begins with a sense of embarrassment, embarrassment at our pettiness, prejudices envy and conceit, embarrassment at the profanation of life. A world that is full of grandeur has been converted into a carnival.”

I believe there’s something to this – a healthy sense of embarrassment, but I believe even more in “the world full of grandeur.” This is why, most days, I return to hope. Isn’t this world grand? We’re making plans for summer vacation, we’re mapping out a trip to Acadia National Park and then into Canada, to Prince Edward Island. I’ll tell you, just looking at the photos of those two spots is enough to make the heart light, enough to make you remember all the gratitude you feel for beautiful places and clear skies and the marvelous people you love.

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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Letter From My 90yr Old Self

My friend John Blase received a letter from his 90yr old self, and he invited me to do the same…

Dear Winn,

I like you. You’re sure to like the man you become, but it's important for you to hear that I enjoy the man you are now. It's a powerful temptation to perpetually believe some future triumph or distant decade will signal your arrival. Winn, you've already arrived, two firm feet planted on solid ground. You're here. You're living and loving. Go with it.

This isn't to say you won't be arriving more, becoming more solid, more true. You will. But don't worry about getting there. Fretting over your story means you'll think too much and toil too hard. You've been writing long enough to know the contrived dribble that splatters on the page when we strain to make something rather than live something. Whenever you're pressing, it isn't believable. It isn't believable because it isn't true. Be true.

I encourage you to live attentively. Watch for the places where your heart is most tender or your anger most righteous. Watch for your tears. Watch for your laughter. Tune in to the yearning for slowness and quiet. Perk up when you want to punch a fellow in the face. Don't judge the right or wrong of a thing too hurriedly. Live from leisure. Curiosity is your friend, but curiosity needs room to breathe. I don’t know if an idle mind is the devil’s workshop, but I do know a leisurely mind is the soul’s friend. Remember when Ken shared his belief that we need to move toward the pain? Definitely pay attention to that. Don't be afraid of suffering. Don't be afraid of loneliness. Don't be afraid of making your mark. Don't be afraid.

I know all that appears a tall order. Let me help a little with the fear. The boys will know they're loved. They'll wrangle with some of the doubts you hoped they could avoid (they didn't kill you, did they?), but they won't doubt your love. They'll remember your tenderness more than your impatience, your presence more than your absence, your good more than your bad. Love truly does cover a multitude of sins. Speaking of fear, you'll also be glad to know you won't fight your darker demons forever — for a while longer, but not forever. It's not that you'll rally to an epic showdown where you vanquish what torments you; you're simply going to grow tired of the merry-go-round. One of these days, you'll wave down the operator, hop off and go for an ice cream instead.

In other words, you're going to become more and more the man who, in all the right places, learns not to give a shit. It's a strange thing that the good men learn to care more and, at the same time, to care less. You'll become scandalously tender, but you'll hold your tenderness and your strength with such openness that it doesn't require validation. Remember when your pastor told you to get comfortable keeping your own counsel? You will. You'll trust your wife and your sons and your friends, believing that others' good eyes and good hearts will sometimes see more clearly than your own. But you won't give credence to the people critiquing your life or your work or your way. You, Winn, won't give a shit.

And your sketch-of-a-dream comes true, complete with the worn tweed jacket and the worn books and the worn friends. You and Miska spend the next decades pouring the flames on love. The two of you become quite the spectacle. Your love weathers the seasons. More than weathers, it flourishes, love and laughter run wild. You grow foolish together, and you love others well. Keep listening to Miska. She hears things. She sees things.

Keep writing; you're heading in a fine direction. Don't spend an ounce of energy trying to tap into the flavor du jour or run after whatever it is everybody’s running after (I still don’t know). Like the song that’s been working on you says — don’t build your ego on a hungry crowd. Just keep being true, and generous. Tell us what you see.

I like you, Winn. You'll like you too. Might as well start now.

Sincerely,

your 90yr old self

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