Tasting Life Twice

Archive for the category “Stories Worth a Pint”

30 Apr 2011
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The Ex-Amish Formerly Known as Mose

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As an Amish boy, he got around by horse and buggy.  Now he is a car salesman.  He grew up without a television.  Now he loves watching TV.  In fact, he has appeared on a reality show, “Amish in the City”, as well as Jimmy Kimmel Live and Live with Regis and Kelly.  As a kid, he never had a football.  Now, as a devoted cheesehead, he loves watching the Green Bay Packers.  Interesting, isn’t it? 

This week I had Moses Gingerich, (since living in the English world, he has added “s” to his first name),  come and talk to our students on campus.  I’ve always been fascinated by border crossing stories.  Someone lives in one culture or sub-culture and then they have to adapt to a whole new environment, whether physical or ideological.  They step out of a comfort zone and stretch their legs in terra incognita. 

Moses grew up in Wisconsin, one of thirteen children.  His father died when he was twelve.  When he was fifteen, someone gave him a battery-operated radio and he started secretly listening to different kinds of music.  He became enamored with the country sounds of Garth Brooks and got a taste of the world.  He found he liked it.  He was eventually caught with the radio and then shamed and shunned by his religious community, who let it be known to him that he was, well, on the highway to hell  (though since they didn’t use batteries, I doubt they had ever heard of that song byAC/DC).

He eventually left home, looking to find elbow room for his questions and curiosity.  He found lodging with a neighbor family before later migrating south to Kansas and Missouri.  For a number of years, he worked construction before settling in to his current job.  In recent years, he has mentored other Amish kids who have left the community and are trying to acclimate to their new circumstances. 

Moses told me he is still very much interested in music.  Currently, he is listening to a lot of classic rock.  Once he finds a group he likes (Lynyrd Skynrd, Pink Floyd), he will learn everything he can about the group and listen to every song he can as if making up for lost time. 

He remains appreciative of some aspects of the Amish way of life and the people.  A few years ago, he returned home for his grandfather’s funeral.  (“I thought, they can’t keep me out of attending a funeral.”)  Out of respect to his family, he donned Amish clothes again (“can you imagine?”, he says) and tried to grow a beard on short notice.  Trying to return to the landscape of his childhood was not an easy trip to make.  But then again, border crossings seldom are. 

Posted in Border Crossings, Curiosity's Trail, Stories Worth a Pint and tagged , , ,
22 May 2010

Inspiration and Courage

image A thirteen year old boy from California became the youngest person ever to climb Mount Everest.  Jordan Romero

who climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa when he was 10 years old — said he was inspired by a painting in his school hallway of the seven continents’ highest summits.

"Every step I take is finally toward the biggest goal of my life, to stand on top of the world," Jordan said on his blog earlier.”

….The team planned to do something special for Jordan at the mountaintop but was keeping it a surprise even from him, Bailey said.

Jordan was carrying a number of good luck charms, including a pair of kangaroo testicles given to him by a friend who has cancer.

Posted in Curiosity's Trail, Stories Worth a Pint and tagged , ,
10 Apr 2010
2 Comments

The Remarkable Doctor – Janusz Korczak

A few weeks ago, I took a group of students to Europe for a history of the Holocaust tour.  Our travelogue can be found at www.watw2010.wordpress.com  In the weeks to come, I will add some of my photographs and reflections of our trip to Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic.

In the Jewish Cemetery of Warsaw, Poland there is a memorial sculpture to Janusz Korczak.  He is shown holding a small child and leading a procession of other children behind him.  Dr. Korczak was a pediatrician and children’s author and a leading pedagogue.  He also oversaw an orphanage that was forced to relocate to the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, after the Nazis assumed control over the city.  In August of 1942, the Nazis came to deport the children and orphanage staff to the Treblinka extermination camp.  Dr. Korczak was offered sanctuary outside the Jewish ghetto but he refused.  He insisted that he accompany the children. He, along with the children and staff, died in the gas chambers of Treblinka.

Korzcak is remembered in The Pianist by Wladyslaw Szpilman. 

One day, around 5th August, when I had taken a brief rest from work and was walking down Gęsia Street, I happened to see Janusz Korczak and his orphans leaving the ghetto. The evacuation of the Jewish orphanage run by Janusz Korczak had been ordered for that morning. The children were to have been taken away alone. He had the chance to save himself, and it was only with difficulty that he persuaded the Germans to take him too. He had spent long years of his life with children and now, on this last journey, he could not leave them alone. He wanted to ease things for them. He told the orphans they were going out in to the country, so image they ought to be cheerful. At last they would be able to exchange the horrible suffocating city walls for meadows of flowers, streams where they could bathe, woods full of berries and mushrooms. He told them to wear their best clothes, and so they came out into the yard, two by two, nicely dressed and in a happy mood. The little column was led by an SS man who loved children, as Germans do, even those he was about to see on their way into the next world. He took a special liking to a boy of twelve, a violinist who had his instrument under his arm. The SS man told him to go to the head of the procession of children and play – and so they set off. When I met them in Gęsia Street, the smiling children were singing in chorus, the little violinist was playing for them and Korczak was carrying two of the smallest infants, who were beaming too, and telling them some amusing story. I am sure that even in the gas chamber, as the Zyklon B gas was stifling childish throats and striking terror instead of hope into the orphans’ hearts, the Old Doctor must have whispered with one last effort, ‘it’s all right, children, it will be all right’. So that at least he could spare his little charges the fear of passing from life to death."

Posted in Insidedness, Photographs, Stories Worth a Pint, Tales from the Road and tagged , , , , , ,
06 Apr 2010

Goodness is Still Out There

clip_image002One of my students has a collection of letters from her mother. That, in and of itself, is not unusual. Most of us probably have some keepsake like that from a parent – birthday cards, a piece of jewelry, a meaningful gift. But what makes this present so special is that Stephanie’s mother died back in 1999, and yet, every year, she still gets a birthday card from her mother.

Andrea, her mother, had been diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) a few years earlier and knew that she was running out of time. Reminiscent of the movie My Life and years before the movie P.S. I Love You, she set down to write letters to her children – Stephanie, Nikki and Steven – who were 6, 4 and 2 at the time of diagnosis. While fighting against a degenerative illness, and often in great weakness, a loving mother committed to the project of writing these notes that would survive her death.

Andrea gave the letters to a friend and fellow flight attendant, Tammy Wright. After Andrea’s death, Tammy faithfully has kept these letters and passed them on at the appropriate time. Stephanie, Nikki and Steven receive a message from their mom on birthdays and at graduation. They will continue to hear her voice on other special milestones, such as when they marry or have a child. And for years to come, at each decade’s passing, an inspiring mother will still be encouraging her children to remain strong and live well.

Stephanie shared with me her most recent letter from her mother and gave me permission to share it with you. The story is a beautiful tribute to a mother’s love for her children and to her grace and courage in the face of weakness and loss.

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You’re in your twenties! Hooray, the teen years are fini! (Not that you’re out of the woods yet!) I’m wishing you sunshine, roses, and love!

I was pondering what to write in this note, and decided to tell you of several ‘random acts of kindness’ that I’ve been the recipient of since my illness. I choose this subject both because we often are unaware of the depth of human empathy and in tribute to those folks who engaged in the acts.

One occurred at Bell Helicopter. A dozen roses were delivered to my office. The card bore the name of no one I knew. After investigating, I learned they were from a fellow employee, a black woman I had never met. I took one of the roses to her as thanks. She told me she had seen me and was impressed with my attitude and strength and wanted to do something for me, so she sent roses. I was touched.

Another occurred when I discovered the business card of a jeweler I had briefly met a couple of years earlier at the Mt. Sunapee Crafts Fair. I bought 3 pairs of earrings there – unidentical, eg. rake and leaves, etc. – and told her how creative they were and that she should do more children-related ones. After finding her card, I had Noni call her for a catalog, and the woman remembered me! 2 days later I received the catalog w/a notation to take 25% off, a lovely, warm letter, and a beautiful pair of earrings w/3 pearl eggs in a nest on one, and 3 hatched baby birds on the other. They weren’t in the catalog and she knew from Noni I had 3 children and was ills, so I suspect she made them especially for me. It brought tears to my eyes!

So, goodness is out there!

With love, Mom

Posted in Quotidian: The Grace of Daily Life, Stories Worth a Pint, What is Saving Your Life? and tagged , , , | Leave a Comment
17 Feb 2010

The Civil Rights Movement

Last week our campus hosted Reverend Billy Kyles of Monumental Baptist Church in Memphis.  He spoke with our students about the Civil Rights Movement and the legacy of Martin Luther King.  Here’s an excerpt from his talk in chapel. 

Posted in Stories Worth a Pint and tagged , , ,
12 Jan 2010

The Greatest Game I Ever Saw – Steroids or Not

Yesterday, Mark McGwire finally came clean and confessed to using steroids during the 90s.  The return of McGwire to the news, after years of being out of the spotlight, has reminded me of the greatest game I ever saw.

In the summer of 1998, I was fortunate enough to watch McGwire hit home run #62, the line-drive shot that broke Roger Maris’ previous record for home runs in a season.  As Tom Verducci wrote for Sports Illustrated that summer:

The home run is America—appealing to its roots of rugged individualism and its fascination with grand scale. Americans gape at McGwire’s blasts the same way they do at Mount Rushmore, Hoover Dam and the Empire State Building. "We have," Cubs manager Jim Riggelman said before Tuesday’s game, "a fascination with power."

That summer was magical.  McGwire was on a torrid pace to break one of sports’ most coveted records and one of the longest standing ones.  In the second half of the baseball season, we spent every summer night rushing to the television when McGwire came up to bat.  If we were barbequing, we went inside.  If out to dinner, we joined the rest of the patrons to catch what was going on.  Regular scheduled programs were interrupted for a live look-in on the individual at-bats of McGwire and Sammy Sosa.image

Tickets became increasingly harder to come by as fans were flocking to the stadium in the hopes of catching a piece of history. 

My wife at the time, Kris, knew how much I wanted to see a game at Busch Stadium and one day she called me and said, “Hey, I want to do something for your birthday.  Can you be free Sunday night or Tuesday night?” 

I told her I wouldn’t likely be free on Sunday evening and then she said, “Well, I might as well just tell you, I’m here at Schnucks and I’m trying to get two tickets for us to see a Cardinals game.”

“Kris, that would be awesome but I’m pretty sure they’re all sold out.”

“Well, the lady here says she can get us two seats but the only catch is that she doesn’t have two seats side-by-side.  She has individual seats but the seats are one row in front of the other.”

Through the phone, I could hear the Schnucks’ customer service representative say, “Now honey, I can’t promise you these tickets will be here in the next few minutes.  They’re going fast.”

I told Kris, “By all means, grab them.”  And so she did.  We had tickets for a game the following week, on Tuesday, September 8, 1998 against the Chicago Cubs.  Friends of ours had tickets the day before, a game in which Big Mac hit the record-tying home run in the first inning.  I nervously watched the rest of the game hoping that he wouldn’t hit it number 62.  Fortunately, he only got one that afternoon.

The following day Kris and I made our way to St. Louis.  When we were on the Metro Rail, the conductor said, “Mark my word, folks, today Big Mac will hit #62”.  The atmosphere outside the stadium was electric.  We found out that tickets were selling for $400.  Kris was tempted to sell hers and I told her if she did, I’d meet her after the game! 

We got to our seats and we were near the left-field foul pole.  There were nine-seats in our rows, and Kris and I had the middle seat in both.  The guy next to me said, “Now, I don’t normally do this but if Big Mac breaks the record tonight don’t be surprised if I give you a hug.  We’re all family tonight.”

There was a buzz in the air when the game started.  The Cardinals were playing their hated rivals, the Cubbies from Chicago, with people all over the world watching the game. Roger Maris’ family was at the game, seated near the Cardinals dugout.  Flash bulbs were going off every time McGwire came up to bat. 

In the bottom of the 4th inning, McGwire turned on a first-pitch fastball from Steve Traschel and sent it just over the left field wall, right below where we were seated.  The record home run was his shortest shot of the year, traveling 341 feet.  Pandemonium ensued.  While McGwire circled the bases, people were jumping up and down.  Strangers hugged and high-fived each other.  They stopped play for around ten minutes or so and I ran out to the concourse to snatch up a few souvenirs from the vendors.  Baseballs marked, “I Was There” were selling for $20.   After the game, Commissioner Bud Selig was on hand to honor the historic achievement.  When we left the stadium, commemorative editions of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch were already for sale. (That night also happened to be the first major league game of J.D. Drew, who now plays for the Boston Red Sox.  He came into left field and had his first two at-bats that evening.) We stayed in St. Louis late into the night to take in the celebration before eventually returning to Columbia.

I couldn’t imagine a better birthday present for a sports fan, especially one who had cheered for the Cardinals since childhood.  I told Kris it would be equivalent to getting her much coveted tickets to see Mikhail Baryshnikov perform live in some fantastic venue. 

It was an unforgettable night in the history of sports.

Posted in Family Matters, Fun Country, Sports, Stories Worth a Pint and tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment
28 Dec 2009

Not Your Average Technician

A TV technician came by the house this morning to do some work and his accent jumpstarted an interesting conversation.  I asked him where he was from and he said, “Columbia” and then laughed.

“How about before that?  Ireland?”

“Further south in the hemisphere.”

“South Africa?”

“You got it.” 

He went on to describe an interesting life.  He was born in 1969 and his family moved from Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to South Africa in 1973.  Later, as an adult, he worked as a commercial diver mining diamonds in various places along the eastern coast of Africa until he contracted cerebral malaria.  For two years he was hospitalized, almost dying on three separate occasions.  After getting better, he decided to spend some time traveling the world and he moved to Israel where he made clay pots as a craftsman.  When things got more dicey in the Middle East (“I decided it was their war, not mine.  I mean, I’m not Jewish.  I learned the language and became fluent but I had already had enough of that already.” He then took a job in Santa Cruz, California where he worked at a home for developmentally disabled adults.  It was there he met and married a girl who was on assignment for AmeriCorps.  (“Our live-in situation meant that we were were working 7 1/2 days a week and 50 hours a day, which meant there was never any privacy.” 

He and his bride and their young son decided a change was in order, so they moved to the Midwest so his wife could go to med school. 

I asked him if he would still be a commercial diver had he not contracted malaria. 

“No, I’d be retired by now, like all my buddies but I had to empty my banking account to pay two years of  hospital bills.  I went back to South Africa in 2005 and closed off that part of my life.  I sold my house and my toys and my Land Rover.”

He described the diamond trade and how they had trained guerilla fighters who provided security  for them when they brought up the diamonds from the water.  They would begin at 6 am and often, their work wasn’t done until 1 am the following day.  They would sort the gravel for karats and what they found would be sold in the UK or in Israel “rather than to the de Beers who were control freaks”. 

Posted in Stories Worth a Pint and tagged , | Leave a Comment
02 Dec 2009

Playing the Part of Those Who Forgive

Recently, I came across this beautiful story in a book by Thomas Long.  The author writes:

A minister friend of mine in Atlanta at a downtown church planned one evening to go out to eat with his wife to celebrate their anniversary. His wife met him at the church, and the two of them headed out to the parking lot to take the car to the restaurant. But when they got outside they encountered a crisis. An elderly woman, a desperate look on her face, was kneeling on the sidewalk beside a man, her husband as it turns out, who was lying on his back in pain clutching his chest. My friend’s wife ran quickly back into the church to call an ambulance, and my friend leaned over to comfort the man. “We have called for some help and they will be here soon…”, he began, but the man interrupted him.

“Charlie, forgive me,” the man said.

“I’m not Charlie,” my friend said. “My name is Sam.” What Sam did not know until later is that Charlie was the man’s son, and years before, the man had, in rage over something, disowned Charlie, and the two had not spoken in years.

The man looked up at Sam and reached out and touched his hand, “Charlie, please forgive me.”

“Just relax,” Sam said. “Somebody will be here soon to get you to the hospital.”

But the man suddenly clutched in terrible pain, and it was now clear that he would not make it to the hospital. With his last gasping energy he pulled on Sam’s arm and begged. “Charlie, please forgive me.”

Sam followed his faithful instinct, reached out and put his hand on the man’s forehead as a blessing and said, “I do forgive you. I do forgive you.” Those were the last words the mans ever heard in this life.

Posted in Stories Worth a Pint, Sunday Leftovers and tagged , , , | Leave a Comment
18 Nov 2009

How to Draw God

Last week I was walking across campus with a friend and colleague, Terry Martin who teaches art at William Woods University.  Terry was telling me a fascinating story about a autistic girl in one of his past art classes.  Young Katherine had sketched a spiral pattern on paper and when Terry asked her to talk about it, she said it was a picture of God.  The point in the center of the page meant that God is the smallest of all things.  The spiraling line extending off the page meant that God is bigger than all things. 

The child’s insights are profound.  For as long as people have thought about these things, they have used spatial metaphors to stress both God’s transcendence and God’s immanence.  God is the great, mysterious “Other”, the Holy One who is high above the heavens, “in light inaccessible hid from our eyes.”  God is more than our eyes can behold and unlike anything else we can know or experience.  And yet, and yet….God is near to us.  He is present and in the neighborhood. The God who is big enough to fill all in all is all big enough to become small.  Taken together, the insights suggest that God is both without and within and that faith needs both a telescope and a microscope.  Now, how do you draw that? 

Follow the lead of a little girl.  When Terry told me this story, a flurry of biblical texts came to mind.  Isaiah, the Hebrew prophet said so long ago, a “little child shall lead them.”  Jesus reminded us centuries later, “unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” and “out of the mouth of infants and nursing babies you have prepared praise.” 

Or take Picasso who is reported to have said, “"It took me four years to paint like Raphael; it took me a lifetime to learn to paint like a child."

The original sketch is long since gone but I encouraged Terry to paint a piece in tribute to the little girl.  Here is Terry’s artwork and what follows is the story in his own words.

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Read more…

Posted in A Child's World, Biblical Midrash, Stories Worth a Pint and tagged , , , , , , ,
19 Sep 2009

Two Ladies on Top of the World – in Africa!

Last year I taught a course, “Journeys and Journals: Stories of Exploration” where we considered the nature of travel, the human quest for adventure and what happens when we step out of our comfort zone and experience “threshold anxiety” and the romance of differences. 

Jordan Floyd, one of my students at William Woods University, told our class of a fascinating trip she made a few years ago.  During her senior year of high school, Jordan was asked by her grandmother, “where do you want to go for your senior trip?”  Grandma said it would be just the two of them.  Without hesitation, Jordan replied, “Africa.  I want to go Africa.” 

Grandma had made a trip to Africa about a decade earlier and the stories from that exotic land has left a mark on the grandchildren.  Grandma agreed to take Jordan there, but on one condition: she had to climb Mount Kilimanjaro with her!  Grandma explained that the last time she was in Africa, she couldn’t talk members of her party into making the ascent up to the summit (19,331 feet). 

So two years ago, Jordan and her grandmother traveled to Tanzania.  Jordan says,

When we arrived at the mountain it was cloudy and rainy.  That was just our luck.  So we bundled up in a  image bunch of unnecessary layers.  When we got to the starting point we were greeted by these cheery faced men who were going to be joining us on our hike…we had eighteen shurpas, a first aide guy, a cook, a server and two guides.

It took them six days to reach the peak and two to return to the base.  Along the way, Jordan writes, 

my grandma and I talked about everything imaginable until we literally ran out of things to talk about.  Then we started thinking about how we could be shopping in Paris or on the beach somewhere amazing, but instead we were hiking.”

She continues:

The hike was good until the third to last day when we got to about 17,000 feet and were camped at the base of the steepest slope I have ever seen.  Msafiri, our guide, told us that is how we were going to get to the top.  I wasn’t really surprised because we passed people throughout the trail they told us we were crazy to take the Western Breach.  So, I looked up this slope and wanted to cry….that night was the first night we noticed how cold it was.  We woke at four am and ate some breakfast.  We put on all of our clothes because it was supposed to be real cold.  We started out climb in the dark.  Bad idea.  I was already really nervous from what I saw on the breach the day before.  The entire trail before had been straight up.  Unlike in the USA, it didn’t zig zag gradually up the mountain.  Msafiri told us that it would zig zag and not go straight up.  He lied.  African zig zag is two steps to the left and two steps to the right and then ten steps straight up.  I had to trade my grandma backpacks because somehow her bag was as a lot heavier than mine.  She has a tiny little body that if she accidentally tipped the wrong way it would be sayonara grandma….

….Once we made it up the hill, we were awestruck by the beautiful glaciers that sat on top Kili.  They had three glaciers that were on top.  They were huge, at least twenty feet tall that seemed to go on forever.  Not only were the glaciers beautiful, but it was as if we were in an airplane and on top of the clouds.  We could look across at Kili’s sister mountain as she stuck her peak through the clouds.  We finally reached the sign that said we were at the peak.  My grandma started to cry.  I was really happy for her that she was able to complete what she had wanted to do for so long and that I was able to experience it with her. 

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Posted in Adventure Stories, Stories Worth a Pint and tagged , , | Leave a Comment

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