I was stumped.  I had started the phrase on the piano three times, assuming each time that my memory would get jogged and let me finish the piece, but every time, I got to one chord and nothing else would come.  Many of you know exactly how I felt.  You’ve been there yourself.  Just when you need it the most, the brain just shuts down, leaving you in the lurch.  Just in case you wordies out there have ever wondered where the term “in the lurch” comes from, it describes a position in the game of cribbage where you have moved less than halfway around the board before your opponent finishes the game.  It usually characterizes a desperate and embarrassing place.  And, that’s where I was this particular evening.

I was about 15 years old, having taken a number of years of piano lessons.  I wasn’t fond of the lessons, but loved playing the piano, so I sat down to the piano at home whenever I could.  The lady who scheduled special music at the church in which I grew up found out about my “talent” and tricked me into agreeing to play a song one Sunday evening.

I had grown up in this little church, a pretty brick building with hardwood floors and the hardest wooden pews you ever sat in.  At some point in my childhood, they bought pads for the seats, floral tapestry covered affairs that promised comfort, but didn’t deliver.  The old building wasn’t air conditioned; almost no churches or schools were in those days.  (I remember when simply posting the words “air conditioned” on a sign outside a restaurant made the establishment a four-star destination.)  The little church was cooled by the old original paddle-bladed ceiling fans and big single-glazed windows which could be opened either from the bottom or top, depending on the amount of air that was needed.  We would sit in our pews and watch the ushers as they moved around the room with long wooden poles which were notched on the end to adjust the fans.  The old ceiling units had been installed in a day before wall switches and could only be regulated by rotary switches on the center of the motors, which were about fifteen feet off the floor.  Well, maybe not that high, but it seemed like that to me growing up.  Frequently, the usher would get the speed too high and would have to return to the fan to adjust the switch again, as the prim and proper lady situated under the wind machine smoothed her hair back into place and frowned at the unfortunate man.

I suppose I was about 12 when the air conditioners were installed.  Two huge compressor units were set outside the building at the stage end, and two upright boxes about four feet by four feet wide and eight feet tall were installed in each corner of the building, right up on the stage.  The cold air was blown at high speed out of the top section of these and the return air was in the bottom.  Talk about a maelstrom!  I’m only partially speaking about the commotion that ensued every time the unit roared to life.  While the turbulence created by that much air blowing from one location was significant, it was nothing compared to the reaction of the good people there.  There was not just a little turmoil surrounding the installation of the air conditioners, emanating from the folks in the church.  It wasn’t natural, wasn’t a good use of God’s money, was too cold, too noisy, too ugly.  Honestly though, from my point of view, I didn’t have anything to complain about when it came to the air conditioning.  At least, not until the night in question.

It was a hot evening, but the units hadn’t started blowing cold air when I sat down at the piano to start my special.  I placed the book on the music rack of the old grand piano, nervously adjusted the bench and began.   I was playing a lovely transcription by Ted Smith of “Oh Worship The King”, a four page song which I had worked on for weeks.  The first page flew by like a charm.  This was going to be a breeze (probably not a good choice of words)!  The first page of my solo completed, I flipped to the next one.  After about two lines, the trouble started.  The thermostat triggered the big unit in the corner over my left shoulder into chaotic, gusty life!  I recalled momentarily, that one of the ladies who normally played the piano had requested that the airflow be directed downward a bit, so she could benefit from the cooler air.  That’s all the time I had for that thought, because the airflow caught the edge of my page and blew it right back to where I had just been playing.  I nonchalantly reached up and slapped the page back over, never missing a beat.  I knew this song!  Even with the page flipped over, the music continued unabated.  But the monster behind me had other ideas.  Whiff!  The page was back over again!  I slapped it once more, but to no avail.  Immediately it was back to page one.  By this time, I was on to page three, my practice time paying off for once.  I had this song down in my memory, so I didn’t even try to flip the page over again.  Playing from memory, I persevered onto the last page of music, the notes flowing from my fingers like liquid.  I was invincible!  No vexatious machine was going to ruin my performance!  Van Cliburn couldn’t have been more confident at that piano!

“Pride precedes a disaster, and an arrogant attitude precedes a fall.”  The old Proverb was just waiting to kick in and boy, did it kick in with a vengeance!  Two lines from the end of the song, my mind went blank and my fingers stumbled to a stop.  Disaster!  But I knew what to do, so I went back to the beginning of that phrase and started confidently, knowing that it would come.  It didn’t.  All I got was the lurch.  You remember where that is?  Yeah, well, score one for the monster in the corner and zero for the wanna-be concert pianist.  Finally, frustrated and embarrassed beyond belief, I reached up and slapped the pages back over long enough to read the notes and I finished the song. 

One of my young friends played the offertory at our church last week.  She missed a chord.  I was so proud of her.  She kept going.  She finished the song with finesse and confidence.  When I complimented her later, she said, “But, I messed up.”  And I could tell her, “I know how it feels, but you finished.  No one will remember the wrong chord.  They will remember how well you played the whole piece.”  I knew whereof I spoke.  A few weeks after the disaster I’ve described above, they asked me to play again.  I was terrified.  It took all the courage I could muster, but I told them I would.  And, I did.  And the next time they asked me, I played again, and the next time.  I doubt that anyone who was there that night remembers my nightmare performance.  But what if I had never played in public again?  How do you suppose they would remember me?

I think, of all the things I like most in life, second chances rank right up there.  The chance to do something well that you were horrible at the first time.  The chance to help someone you ignored earlier.  The chance to redeem yourself.  I’m a great believer in redemption.  I’m not a golfer, but I really like the idea of a “mulligan”.  You get to take the shot again, since you muffed the first one so badly. 

“Overs” aren’t always an option, but when they are, take them!  You messed up big the first time, you can’t do much worse with a second chance.  And, I’m guessing you’ll actually do a lot better.

“Swallow your pride occasionally.  It’s not fattening.”
(Frank Tyger~Editorial cartoonist and humorist)

This blog is a century old.  Okay, not in years, but in the number of posts.  Tonight is number one hundred in the series and I’m still trying to decide whether it’s time for a retrospective look back.  I guess that would be a little silly, considering that we just started this little journey last fall, to say nothing of being more than a little presumptuous.  Maybe I should just start issuing a few reruns.  If this were a television series, it would have happened long ago.  Many TV shows go into reruns after as few as twelve consecutive new episodes.  Think of it, a couple weeks of new articles, then six weeks of recapitulations of those posts.  Come to think of it, we might just be better off to keep moving forward.  There’s probably still enough material left in the mental files for at least another hundred, so we’ll proceed onward and upward.  Well, onward anyway.  If nothing else, I have learned to persevere.

I’m remembering a lesson about perseverance and judgment I learned early in my retail experience.  I hadn’t yet been working for a year in my father-in-law’s music store, but I already thought I knew everything there was to know about running a successful business.  I understood profit margins and overhead, inventory management, and even a good bit about customer relations, but I needed to get a little experience in understanding people.  Danny was the right person to teach me a memorable lesson in people skills.

Maybe a little background would be helpful.  The old store was in the downtown area of our little city.  In the Seventies, downtown was a bustling area.  The Post Office was right across the street and since email hadn’t yet been heard of, everyone eventually had to make their way down to Broadway Street for the mail.  Additionally, there were two jewelry stores, various clothing stores, a five & dime store, even a drug store, and a hardware store.  It was a wonderful location to do business, so we had no lack of folks who passed through our doors.  Top Forty hits in the form of 45 records (yes, records!) drew in the young kids, and the guitars and pianos brought in the teenagers and adults.  Many days, all we had to do was to ring up sales at the cash register, so selling wasn’t much of a chore.

Danny now…there was a hard nut to crack.  The first few times he made his way into the store during his lunch hour, I tried to help him.  He would go immediately to the guitar section, so I attempted to show him various instruments.  Each time, he simply asked to see one of the twelve-string guitars, then proceeded to sit for half an hour and play it.  At the end of his lunch break, he replaced the guitar on the rack and walked out the door, thanking me for my help.  It didn’t take too many of these visits for me to understand that it didn’t make any sense to ask if I could help him with anything.  Invariably, he headed for the same twelve-string guitar, carrying it to the nearest stool, adjusting the tuning and then strumming and finger picking as many popular tunes as he could squeeze in within the half hour he was there.  With a “See you next time”, he would breeze out the door, to my great frustration.  After a few weeks of this, I had had enough!  After he left one afternoon, I turned to my father-in-law and blurted out, “We should tell him to go someplace else for his entertainment!  He’s just wearing out that new guitar.  We’ll never be able to get our price out of it after he get through with it!”  Dad Whitmore just smiled and said, “Give it time.  You never know…”

I have to admit, I actually started ignoring Danny when he arrived, as he was wont to do at lunchtime a couple of days a week.  With barely a nod to acknowledge his presence, I’d return to my task of sorting records, or checking in merchandise and would repeat the action as he left.  Thus it was that I was a little bewildered when one afternoon, he came back around the corner from the guitar department carrying that same twelve-string guitar in his hands.  I assumed that he had broken something or was going to point out some problem, but his words were simple and to the point.  “I’ll take it!”  He paid his money and walked out of the store grinning like that proverbial cat who had successfully consumed the caged songbird.  I was left standing at the cash register, holding his money, I’m confident with my mouth agape at the shock of this turn of events.

The long and short of the story is that some people need to be given time to make up their own minds.  They want to be sure of their decision and won’t be rushed.  Danny wasn’t sponging off of us for dinner time entertainment, as I assumed.  He was shopping.  Playing that guitar was his research.  When he was finally convinced that it was a good fit and that he could be happy with it for the long term, he made his purchase.  It was an eye-opener for the young inexperienced sales clerk I was back then. I think I had always expected that all thinking people would act just like I did.  Impulsive and quick to make decisions, I would never have taken the time and put in the effort to make the right choice that Danny did.  But, the lesson has been brought to mind again and again.  And, not only in retail sales.

Danny isn’t alive anymore, killed in a car wreck within a year of purchasing that guitar.  But thirty years later, I still think of him often.  The illumination I gained from his example that people approach problems in different ways encourages me to be patient with those less impetuous than I.  Patience is a virtue I have not completely mastered, but it has paid off over and over as I have matured.  In many ways, I have learned to make sure that people in my life know that I am interested in helping when they are ready to be helped.  Less and less do I have to worry at the problem, but am finally grasping the concept of letting things happen in their proper time.  Oh, it’s not always as easy as that.  Like the kid who keeps picking at the sore because it itches, I want to make things happen on my timetable.  Occasionally, I’m even tempted to give up on people, but the picture of Danny, sitting on that stool day after day reminds me to hang in there and give them time to come around.

I’m not trying to convince anyone to take any actions with my posts, but I’m thinking that perseverance is a virtue here also.  One hundred writing sessions have passed quickly for me and I’m content to keep plodding along for a few more.  I hope you keep coming in to sit on the stool, trying out the products I’m hawking.  Anything you see that you can use, you’re welcome to. 

“The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.”
(Leo Tolstoy~Russian novelist)

“The key to everything is patience. You get the chicken by hatching the egg, not by smashing it.“
(Arnold Glasow~American humorist)

“This is your brain.  This is your brain on drugs.”  It’s been a few years, but the images from the public service ad are still burned into our minds.  The man holds the egg, complete in its shell.  Seconds later, the egg is broken and placed in a searing hot skillet and is shown charred and smoking, with hot grease popping everywhere.  “Any questions?”  A vivid image of irreparable damage done by senseless thrill chasers, who don’t think about any consequences, and don’t look past tonight’s party or the next “high”.  I don’t want to talk about drugs (nor the accuracy of the imagery) tonight, but I do want to talk about messed up brains.

When I was about 11 years old, my brothers and I rushed down the block to the neighbors house one weekday afternoon after school.  When we weren’t playing combat, they with their BB guns, we with our homemade slingshots, we occasionally undertook an organized game or two.  They had a huge front yard, ideal for a little “two below” football.  Of course, we didn’t have pads, hence the sissy rules that no tackling was allowed.  The defenders simply had to slap the ball carrier anywhere below the waist with two hands to stop the play.  I’m not saying that no tackling actually occurred, but as far as any adults were concerned, it didn’t.  That day, we had probably ten guys playing the game.  This was a luxury, since we usually could only get together a smaller group.  The bigger teams meant a better game, simply because there might actually be some blocking and the plays would be mixed up a bit more.  We were honored to have one of the running backs from the varsity team of our local high school playing with us, mostly because he lived at this particular house and his younger brothers begged until he grudgingly agreed.  Unfortunately, he was playing for the team I wasn’t on this afternoon.

I didn’t usually get my hands on the football much, since I wasn’t what you would call athletically gifted.  Oh, I was active enough, but my passion ran more to bike riding and tree climbing.  Football was an afterthought, something to do when everyone else wanted to.  Thus, it was a complete shock when my name was called in the huddle for a “reverse” play.  The center would hike it to the guy playing quarterback, who would hand it off to the guy to his left.  I’d come across from the right side and take the ball from him, running around the left end to make the game winning touchdown.  Well, that was the way I envisioned it anyway.  What really happened was that I found myself with the ball in my arms and the varsity running back chasing me before I got across the line of scrimmage.  I was a scrawny eleven-year old with this big weight-lifting six-footer chasing me and I did the only thing I could do;  I ran as fast as I could, turning my head to watch as he came at me.  Unfortunately I never saw him hit me, because I ran into the side of the house before he could reach me.  The brick house.  With my head.

The next thing I knew, it was three hours later and I was lying on the couch at my house with a wet cloth on my forehead.  Moms did that in those days.  Somehow a wet washcloth folded up and placed on the forehead made things right.  Not this time.  I had a horrible headache and asked through the pain, “What happened?”  My parents looked at me a little uneasily.  “You don’t remember?”  When I replied in the negative, they related the events of the past three hours, including the blood flowing everywhere as they were called to get me, the trip to the emergency room, and the six stitches in the side of my head.  Since I didn’t remember any of it, I assumed that I had been knocked out the whole time, but they assured me that I had never been unconscious.  Three hours lost, and I had spent them doing exciting things I would never remember!  With my eyes wide open, I had made the trip to the hospital, answering questions about the incident to the nurse and doctor.  Stitches were inserted into my head.  With a needle.  And I have to this day, absolutely no memory whatsoever of it happening.  They called it a concussion.

I hear of football players who sustain multiple concussions.  We use the word lightly, as if it were a simple bump to the head, signifying little.  “He just got a concussion; nothing serious.”  The brain smashes against the skull inside!  Damage is done, some of it permanent!  It’s not a little thing.  I only had it happen once, but my lost three hours will forever remind me of the seriousness of it.

One of my friends lightly dismissed the Super Bowl yesterday as a boy’s game with it’s pads and helmets, eschewing it for the “manly” game of rugby, played only in shorts, tee shirts, and shoes.  Every time I flip through the cable channels on the TV, I can find an “Ultimate Fight” going on, with some musclebound he-man taking on another beefy wanna-be champion in a brutal match.  These human cock-fights are now sanctioned and pay big bucks to the winners who will almost certainly pay the “ultimate” price either in paralysis, or strokes, Parkinson’s Disease, or even in so-called “boxer’s dementia”, a state in which the former fighter loses his mental facility completely.  These are all the result of the battering of the brain inside the skull.  And, in all of these “sports”, these all-brawn and no-brain thrill seekers risk it without a second thought, for stupid reasons; money, fame, notoriety.

I am now getting carefully down from my soapbox (wearing a helmet by the way, to avoid injury). But, I have experienced first hand the incredible loss of a loved one to the horrible thief we call dementia, through no visible cause that we know.  I am having a hard time justifying participating in actions which increase the risk and in some cases almost guarantee the occurrence of mental impairment.  Just my two cents worth on the subject.  I promise that I’ll do my best to never mention it again.

I am however, still mad about those three hours.  I wonder if a hypnotist could help me get them back into my memory vault.  As far as running into that house goes, I maintain to this day that it moved into my way.  I mean, who’s stupid enough to actually run head first into a brick wall?

“I have short-term memory loss, though I like to think of it as presidential eligibility.”
(Paula Poundstone~American comic)

“Know Thyself.”  The ancient Greek proverb sets warring emotions into action inside of me.  There are days when I pride myself in being aware of who I am, not only in the spiritual realm, but also in the practical, visible world.  These are the times when I’m happy with myself, with my thoughts, deeds, and words.  But underlying that pride is the realization that I really do know myself and the knowledge does not evoke anything approaching the “warm fuzzies”.  At the core, I know the selfish, loud, arrogant me and I don’t always like that person very much.  I don’t think you would either.

Tonight, I had to apologize for words I said earlier today.  I have hinted before at my argumentative spirit, a trait which I successfully control much of the time, but which rears its ugly head periodically, almost as if to remind me that I’m not really as reformed as I want to believe.  In the heat of an argument (one which I started myself), I made some statements which were personally derogatory, not of the man I was arguing with, but of someone else.  I suffered through the afternoon with the weight of those words and finally responded late this evening to my conscience.  Apologies made, fences mended, I’m still not sure all is right.

Words said and repented of may be apologized for, and even forgiven, but they can never be unsaid.  The damage done, however eloquently the mea culpa is communicated, can never be undone.  The words entered into the consciousness through the portal of the hearing ears and I can’t erase them.  Like Pandora with her fabled box, the painful utterances have escaped, never to be recaptured.

I’ll recover; my relationship with the other person will likely remain strong, but I feel the need for something else.  I’m not talking about penance; I understand and experience Grace and need no more.  I think what I’m feeling is a sense of loss.  Once I controlled those words in my head, but no longer.  They escaped through my mouth to other ears, there to wreak their havoc, whether or not it was their intended purpose.

Consider the great seagoing ships…Their size and mass is tremendous, but they are controlled and steered by a tiny (comparatively) rudder.  The captain stands at the helm and makes adjustments to that little rudder, and the ship goes where he wishes.  That’s the way it is with the tongue.  A tiny fraction of the total body’s mass, it too often controls the complete man.  This example doesn’t come from my thoughts, but was written centuries ago by a man named James, who was Jesus’ brother.  The tongue has throughout mankind’s history been the cause of innumerable quagmires, more difficult to escape by far than to instigate.  He reminds us further that the tongue is a restless evil, full of deadly poison.  I concur.

“Know Thyself.”  Tonight, I recognize who I am.  My tongue fully in check, I stand contrite.  I would like to believe that it will always be so.  I know it will not.

However, like salve on an open wound, the rest of James’ advice aids the healing process.  He tells me that the wisdom of heaven is first of all pure; then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere.  Peacemakers who sow in peace reap a harvest of righteousness.  I know who I am, but I also know who I want to be.

I’m still breathing, so there’s still hope…

“One reason the dog is such a lovable creature is that his tail wags, not his tongue.”

We rented our store space from Max for twelve years.  Max was an absentee landlord, his wife having inherited the aging shopping center years before.  It was obvious from the outset that this was to be a one-way relationship, with me paying the rent and Max taking it.  He made it clear that the party of the first part (that was me) was responsible for any and all costs involved with maintaining a business in his building.  What wasn’t so clear was what the party of the second part (that would be Max) was responsible for.  I think I’ve mentioned the great floods of 1986, all descending from above, not the other way around as floods often do.  The mention of lawyers was sufficient to remedy that little disaster, but there were a few other situations which defied clarification.

For a good number of years, things went swimmingly.  We didn’t have much cause to complain, although business could have been better, but the shopping center was great.  On one side of us was a hardware store.  We never had any problem with them, since there was a concrete block wall between us to act as a barrier to noises and odors.  On the other side of us, for those first few years, a great couple ran first a catalog store, then an appliance store.  Although there was just a sheet rock wall between us and the material didn’t even go all the way to the roof (more about this later), it was never a problem.  These folks were great neighbors who probably had more to complain about with us than we with them.

Being the kind of guy who thinks that periodical change is not a bad thing, I wasn’t unhappy when they told us that they had purchased a building and were moving.  Silly me, I thought that life would always be this good; polite proprietors, quiet activities, no noxious odors.  Well, live and learn, is the only appropriate remark that comes to mind.  The parade of unsuitable businesses would begin very soon.

It started with a used furniture business.  While the owner was nice enough, the products which arrived on a sporadic schedule weren’t.  It seems that the fellow didn’t have much working capital, so the furniture was purchased from some fairly seedy locations.  We soon had an infestation of roaches, under shelving units, in pianos, and any nook and cranny they could find.  Not having an aversion to pesticides, we soon took care of the bountiful crop of creepy crawlies, but new ones arrived on a regular basis.  Fortunately for us, the would-be entrepreneur in the furniture business ran out of money and decided to enter a different line of employment, so the critter-infested “gently-used” items found a new home somewhere far away.  We breathed a sigh of relief, but the day was not far off when we would wish for the not-so-beautiful furniture to grace the premises once more instead of its replacement.

Within a few weeks of the home furnishings’ departure, a flat bed truck backed up to the front walk and we watched as thousands of pounds of dumbbells and barbells, benches and weight machines were moved into the space.  Never having been in a weightlifting gym, I was optimistic.  This had promise!  What could possibly be bad about having a gym next door?  The next day, that question was answered resoundingly.   As the whole building vibrated and reverberated with the sound, we found that when these men were finished with a particular weight apparatus, they didn’t gently replace them on the floor, but they dropped them onto the concrete below them, seemingly from a great height.  And, the thin walls were no match for the guttural groans and grunts emanating from the throats of the fellows when they were straining with the great load, making for some strange breaks in our conversations with potential guitar and piano customers.  Of course, that was immensely preferable to the noises which came from those same throats when the weight proved too much for them, or someone was hurt.  Those noises turned the air blue with unrepeatable phrases and curse words which came through the walls as if they were made of paper.  One day the expletives were especially  objectionable and continued unabated for some time, and I lost my temper.  Well, not so much that I lost my good judgment and tried to face down a ripped and angry body builder, but I walked over to the wall and pounded on it so hard that I broke a hole in the sheet  rock.  This result wasn’t what I had planned, but the noise did stop for the day, so it wasn’t a complete loss.

The best part of having these prima donnas next door was the advent of the beauty pageants which occurred on a regular basis.  Since the owner hadn’t installed mirrors inside, the muscle bound contestants would all troop outside and stand in front of the huge plate glass windows to flex and pose.  I assume this was to check their regimen and assure that they were working on the right muscle groups, but some of them enjoyed it way too much for it to be simply instructive.  I never knew who won the pageants, but after a few moments of doing this, they would crowd back inside and the grunts, groans, and curses would resume.  After we had suffered this situation for some time, we had all we could tolerate and a call to Max seemed to be in order.  In his quiet, unflappable manner, Max let me know that he was sorry for my trouble, but the gym had a lease too and he couldn’t do anything about it.  We gritted our teeth and endured the tumult next door for most of a year.  Then one lovely afternoon, we calmly listened as the owner of the gym told us that he had to have a space that cost less and would be leaving soon.  After he left, we were almost delirious with joy!  Surely there was no way to go from here but up.  The next neighbors had to be better.

The meat market opened up within weeks.  Their building had burned down (which possibly should have been an indicator of what the future held) and the city wouldn’t allow them to rebuild, so they would be hawking their wares from our neighborhood.  We didn’t see how this could be a problem.  A few days later, the smoker arrived.  The noisy saw cutting through the roof to enable a flue might have started us thinking, but we were happily ignorant.  Within a week, the first fire was built.  Inside of a few days, everything in our music store stunk of hickory wood smoke.  Pianos sold in that era still emit a smoke smell when the felt hammers strike the strings.  All the books (paper is absorbent too) stunk as they left the store, the tee shirts we sold wafted the not-so-pleasant odor of stale wood smoke to the nostrils of shoppers.  We had assumed that the walls would seal out any fumes and smells, even if they had not helped with the noise pollution of the last fiasco.  What we found was that the sheet rock ended just above the false ceiling.  Between that point and the roof, there was only a steel mesh which kept humans from passing between the two spaces, but obviously not this smokey stench.  We wished that the body-builders would come back and pose out front again.

Fast forward another miserable year and the butchers left for greener pastures.  We were not optimistic about new neighbors, but didn’t await our fate quiescently.  It was time to take matters into our own hands, since Max pretty obviously wasn’t in our corner.  Before the little Hispanic grocery store opened, we had started looking for a place to purchase.  There were some minor problems, but before events could get the better of us, we found the perfect building in a great location and purchased it.  At last we were masters of our own fate.  Never again would we have to sit by as our business was damaged by an insensitive, absentee landlord.  Our troubles were over!

I’m not going to fill more pages with more words to describe the ways in which that statement proved false.  Suffice it to say that it didn’t take into consideration the expenses of owning our own commercial property.  Parking lot repairs, a new roof, ice damage, replacement of an almost new air conditioner compressor;  the list could go on and on, ad infinitum.  What I will say is that I’m learning to enjoy all my days, even the bad ones. There will probably be more of those to come.  That won’t alter the fact that among the dark, dreary things we wish we could forget, there are some amazing, wonderful times; times that light up the memories, making those bad intervals fade into inconsequential footnotes.  I will tell you in all honesty that those years when the music store suffered through bad neighbor after bad neighbor, those years were actually some of the best in my memory.  We enjoyed our children as they grew up through that era.  Good friends drew even closer and we matured ourselves.  What a wonderful season in our lives.  When we talk about the hard things, like those above, it’s to laugh about them, knowing that even those events were blessings of a sort.  They are part of what helped us to mature, to grow stronger.  Funny how that works.

Masters of our own fate?  That’s preposterous, if not downright stupid.  I’ll take the hand of God and the presence of His gifts any day.   I’ve said it before and will say it again; Life is good, because He is good.

“Fate is not the ruler, but the servant of Providence.”
(Edward G Bulwer-Lytton~British politician and novelist~1803-1873)

“And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good…”
(Romans 8:28a)

“Your cheatin’ heart will tell on you…”  The silence of the late night in our quiet neighborhood was torn by the words, bellowed from the front porch of the little house behind us.  In between the phrases, the mutilated chords sounded from the old battered guitar in Ricky’s hands.  The nearly forty year old man was inebriated again, drowning his unhappy memories in the bottle, as he always did when life got to be too much for him.  The little rental house had seen a parade of interesting characters in the years we had lived in that old house, and Ricky and Joy seemed determined to leave their mark on the block in which we lived.

Through a number of conversations and interactions at odd times of the night and day, I pieced together their story, at least the part they wanted me to know.  They had moved here from a neighboring state partially to escape the horrific memories of a young child killed in a freak accident, and also to escape the stigma of what was considered a mixed-race marriage.  She was nearly full-blood Choctaw Indian, while he was White, with no trace of Native-American heritage, evidently a union just as objectionable in the culture of southern Mississippi as if a White man had married an African-American woman.   They thought that a new start in far northwest Arkansas might be just what they needed to get straightened out, both in their marriage and in their addictions.  Unfortunately, moving doesn’t leave behind memories or harmful behaviors, and they quickly found themselves foundering in the same disastrous pattern again.

A couple of weeks after the concert on the front porch, I heard Ricky’s voice clamoring at the foot of my front steps.  “Hey Paul!  Come out here!  I want you to talk to me about Jesus!”  First of all, you should know that when Ricky wasn’t impaired by alcohol, he was one of the softest spoken men I knew.  His voice was never raised and if he had stood next to the door and called me, I wouldn’t have heard him.  Quite clearly, he was drunk again, but he wanted me to talk with him about my faith, so I did.  I spent an hour with him and his wife in their tiny living room, with both of them paying close attention, well…semi-close attention.  They seemed to nod every once in awhile and it was pretty obvious that in spite of their concentration on my words, there wouldn’t be much memory of the conversation in the morning.  I suggested we talk about it again some other time and said goodnight.  The next day, neither Ricky nor Joy wanted to discuss anything more momentous than the weather.

And, thus is was, whenever we talked.  If they were sober, no mention of beliefs would be countenanced.  But the next time they went on a bender, the shout at the foot of the steps came like a thunderclap.  This time, I suggested calmly that, since they weren’t themselves, it wouldn’t be beneficial for me to talk with them just now.  I would however, be happy to talk with them anytime they were sober.  Ricky went home, but we didn’t talk about it again, since they wouldn’t allow it.  I was stymied.  I couldn’t share my faith verbally, so I did the only thing left for me;  I tried to show them God’s love in my actions.

Ricky lost his license (for obvious reasons), so he needed transportation to and from work, about a mile away.  I drove him a time or two, but couldn’t be around every time he needed transportation, so I gave him my old Raleigh bicycle to ride.  There was one semi-humorous episode that the bicycle engendered.  One night, there was a knock on the door and Ricky was there.  “Paul, you’ve got to call the police!  Someone has stolen your bike!”  Knowing that he was impaired again, I suggested that it might just have been misplaced.   After a few moment’s thought, he brightened.  “That’s it!  I left it up the street at my friend’s house.  I’ll go get it now.”  I thought about his condition, but didn’t stop him.  A few moments later, I heard the sound of the bicycle’s brakes coming down the hill and knew he had found the bike.  Of course, the sound of the brakes was prelude to a loud crash and muffled curses as he ran off the road into the ditch.  I waited and he re-appeared a few moments later, this time pushing the two-wheeler.  “I’m all right!”  he shouted as he passed.  “Just a scratch!”

We had many opportunities to show God’s love to this couple in the next few months, but the most intense was the day Joy decided she had had enough and took an entire bottle of Tylenol to end it all.  They were both drunk and it took quite some time for Joy’s action and the consequences thereof to penetrate Ricky’s stupor.  He called 911 and we became aware of the situation when the ambulance arrived, its siren screaming.  The paramedics refused to allow the drunken man in the ambulance when they transported his wife to the emergency room, so I took him in my car.  I have to admit, it was embarrassing to get out and go into the hospital with him.  My reputation!  What would my friends or customers think?  The doctors even refused to talk with him in his condition, so I refereed for them.  After finding out that Joy would recover, although with possible permanent damage to her liver, I took the man home to sleep it off.

I know of one more blow that life had to deal to this troubled pair.  It was one of the last times I was to see them.  Ricky was cold sober as he asked me for help one more time.  They had gotten word from Mississippi that their oldest son had been killed in an automobile accident.  As usual, they had no funds and he asked to borrow some gas money.  We didn’t have much back then, but they needed it more than we did so the bill was placed into his hands as I said, “Pay it back if you can.  We’ll be praying for you.”  They were gone a couple of weeks and came back, but only stayed in that house another few days.  Ricky and Joy moved away, giving no indication of where they were going.  I still don’t know where they are today.

What an anticlimax!   I can hear the exclamations now, “You made us read all that for this lame ending?  No miracle turn-around, no ‘happily-ever-after’ conclusion?”   I promise you that no one is more disappointed in the ending than I am.  I invested my time, my money, my bicycle;  I invested myself!  And this is what I get?  Nothing!  No happy resolution, not even a vestige of hope to reassure me that my expenditure wasn’t wasted!

Ah!  But it isn’t the ending.  For all I know, it was just the beginning, or possibly even just a continuation.  I wrote in my last post that our accomplishments are always a team effort.  I’m still not sure if that message was helpful for any of you who read those lines, but it was more like a slap in the face to me.  I’m pretty sure that I didn’t do the planting for Ricky and Joy.  They had some knowledge of who God is before I met them.  I just watered what someone else planted and the conclusion doesn’t depend on my efforts.  I may never know the rest of the story.  And, finally, that’s okay with me.  It’s not my responsibility to manufacture happy endings.  That’s completely in Somebody Else’s hands.  I’ve got my commission and I’ll keep plodding along, keeping my eyes peeled for the next soul that needs a drink of cool water.  That, I can do.

“Where there’s life, there’s hope.”
(Terence~Roman playwright and dramatist~195 BC-159 BC)

“Morever, it is required in stewards, that a man be found faithful.”
(Holy Bible~I Corinthians 4:2)