But What If It IS Your Monkey? [R, 5-24-18

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life in the Years of Winter…  But What If It Is Your Monkey?   [R, 5-24-18

One of the few good things about daughter Mary Beth’s recent chemotherapy and surgery and recovery, her third bout with cancer, is that we got to spend much more time with her than usual.

We shared many stories from her past, including her high school graduation. I was very proud of her, for the obvious reasons. She had been an outstanding student. But more so because she chose to march in with the boy nobody else wanted to walk beside.

Speaking of undesirable boys, another of the boys in her class did not march in with the class at all. He was sitting up real high in the bleachers, where apparently he was hoping that his parents would not see him. They were sitting down low, with the other parents, because they fully expected to see him graduate. I have forgotten now what he did or did not do that knocked him out of graduation, but I do remember his parents--who were my church members--with quizzical looks on their faces, sitting there looking at the grads sitting on the stage and wondering where their son was.

I understand his reluctance to tell his parents that he was not graduating, to explain to them what he had done or not done. But what in the world did he think was going to happen? Didn’t he realize they were going to find out? Didn’t he have the good sense to know it would be worse if he let them come to graduation expecting to see him in a cap and gown on stage instead of a t-shirt and jeans in the top row?

A whole lot of people can’t think, or can’t feel emotionally, beyond what feels best, easiest, least bothersome, at the moment. That gives other people problems. I know, “Not my circus, not my monkeys,” but it if is your child or your neighbor or your fellow, voting citizen, it IS your circus, and they are your monkeys, and you can’t avoid dealing with them.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmai.com

I guess I’m thinking about boys and high school graduations because grandson Joe graduates from high school this weekend. I’ll be taking a few days off from CIW so I can concentrate on celebrating Joe, who was diagnosed with cancer at 15 months of age and died three times before he was two years old. Now he’s a tall, quiet, smart tennis letterman and tenor saxophonist, who starts college next fall at the University of Iowa, where he was a patient in Children’s Hospital throughout most of his second year of life. He’ll be a pre-med student.

Expectations in the Old-Age Olympics [W, 5-23-81]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winer…    Expectations in the Old-Age Olympics    [W, 5-23-81]

I have written of Bonnie Blair before, but during the winter Olympics in February, I thought about her a lot. We lived within an hour of Bonnie’s home in Champaign, IL for thirty years. That’s where our TV news originated. Our daughters and son-in-law all did graduate degrees at the U of IL there.

So we knew about Bonnie when she was just a little girl who liked to ice skate. We did not know this story, though, until she told it later in life…

As a little girl, she liked to go around with her father as he ran errands. One day in a store, he introduced her to the owner. He said, “This is my daughter, Bonnie. She’s an ice skater. One day she’s going to win a medal in the Olympics.”

Bonnie said she had never considered what she would do in life, but when she heard her father introduce her, she thought to herself, “Oh, I guess that’s what I’m supposed to do.” So she did. Five golds and a bronze.

The expectations of others have a big impact on us when we are children. They have a big impact on us when we are old, too.

Some folks expect us to keep on doing for others the way we always have, even though our health has declined enough that it’s really hard to do.

Some see us simply as a management problem.

Some see us as irrelevant, just taking up space, circling the drain.

Some do not see us at all.

Some, though, see us just as persons, folks who have all the same needs and hopes as others, even though we may be slow and forgetful. I like those people. I choose to forget those who expect too much, or who see me as a management problem, or as irrelevant, or who don’t see me at all. I say to those who see me just as another person, “Oh, I guess that’s what I’m supposed to be.”

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

BONUS: Helen says that what we remember most about folks who have died is how they laughed and what they laughed at.

Why Old People Remember Better [T, 5-22-18]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections and Stories on Faith and Life for the Years of Winter… Why Old People Remember Better [T, 5-22-18]

Recently [R, 5-17-18] I wrote here of my memories of Aunt Dorothy, my mother’s younger sister. [Mother was 5^th of 9 children and Dorothy 6^th.] In that column, I mentioned how some of my memory was not accurate, especially the things I had been told about Mother’s family, rather than those I experienced myself.

It’s probably a misleading distinction—between “heard” and “experienced”—because, as we shall see, sometimes “memories” we did not experience can be even more memorable than those we were there for.

In my column on Aunt Dorothy, I mentioned that her mother, my Grandma Pond, was especially hard on Dorothy, more so than any of her other children. I speculated that it might be because she came next after Margery, who died in infancy, and Grandma was still upset about Margery’s death, and resented Dorothy for taking her place.

I learned about Margery’s death and about Grandma’s harsh treatment of Dorothy from my mother, who cried each time she talked about Margery. I had always thought Mother was fourth in the birth order of the nine Pond children, and Margery was fifth. I felt sorry for Mother as the little girl who experienced her little sister’s death.

But checking the records, I learned that Margery was 4^th in birth order and Mother was 5^th. She knew about Margery and her death only by hearing about it. On top of that, Mother and her brother, Jesse, both came along after Margery before Dorothy did, so all my arm-chair psychology about why Grandma treated Dorothy meanly was just poppycock.

In recent years, much of my non-fiction reading has been in brain science [and anything, of course, by my niece Kira Vermond, Canada’s leading writer of non-fiction books for kids, and also Canada’s leading newspaper writer about finance, travel, etc. We won’t mention that she broke in by writing the jacket blurbs for Harlequin romance novels.]

I don’t read original brain research stuff, of course. I live a couple of miles from a major university library, so I would have no trouble getting hold of the “Journal of Behavioral and Brain Science,” but I am more comfortable with popularizers like Daniel Schachter, Malcolm Gladwell, Michio Kaku, Oliver Sacks, et al. So if you are a brain researcher, and have half a brain [especially the left side], you won’t ask me to critique your research.

From the scholars, I have learned that no memory is actually a memory. It’s not like a photograph or video that is exactly the same each time we open the album or run it on the projection screen. It is a story that we retell each time out of pieces that are scattered throughout our brains. We reconstruct it each time, and since the most recent time we did so, we have had experiences that cause us to interpret it differently, and so, quite possibly, tell/remember it differently.

Interestingly, the false stories we tell—false memories that we have created out of desire or that have been implanted by others—use the same neural pathways that “real” memories do. In other words, even if a brain researcher could see into our brains, s/he could not tell if the memory is factual or non-factual. In the brain, they look the same.

That explains why lie detectors are not admissible evidence; it’s possible to believe in a non-factual memory so completely that you come across as truthful. Sacks says, “Our only memories are narrative.”

One of the great thigs about being really old is that all our stories are completely true, because we believe them. [Also there’s no one left alive to dispute our version of them.]

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

Oliver Sacks, speaking as an experimental neurologist, in The River of Consciousness, p 121, says, “Our only truth is narrative truth, the stories we tell each other and ourselves—the stories we continually re-categorize and refine. Such subjectivity is built into the very nature of memory…”

A GOOD STORY IS A GOOD STORY—WITH ANY ACCENT [M, 5-21-18]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections and Stories for the Years of Winter… A GOOD STORY IS A GOOD STORY—WITH ANY ACCENT   [M, 5-21-18]

My doctor when we lived in Hoopeston, IL, Dr. Kosyak--always called Kojak by the locals, after the TV detective played by Telly Savalas—was Turkish. When he immigrated to the US, the first thing the government did was put him into the military, when his English was not yet very good. It never did get all that good. [1]

Even with his strange accent, he liked to tell stories, and I found him quite delightful. I knew all the doctors in town, and liked them all, but I chose Kojak as my personal doctor for the stories.

Dr. Kosyak was a macho sort who once decided to hunt grizzlies with a knife. He thought it would make a great story, and be no problem, since he was a surgeon and knew exactly where to stab the bear with the knife. The bear would be dead immediately and not able to retaliate. He got up close, and then the bear stood up on its back feet and roared. Kosyak said, “Standing there with my knife. I thought it a big knife. Now looked so small. Bear looked so big. Ran like hell.” [2]

One day I was walking down the hall in the hospital when the good doctor bounced out of a doorway, grabbed me by the arm, and with no explanation pulled me into the room. “Who this?” he yelled at the older man sitting on the edge of his bed. Neither the patient nor I knew what this was about, or if it might be a trick question, but with no other option, he said, rather meekly, “Rev. McFarland?”

“Right,” said Kojak. “You got brain back. No demented. Go home.”

In that period when he had first immigrated and was in the army, he was the only doctor on duty at his military base one weekend when a Marine brought his little boy in. The kid had fallen and had a big bleeding gash on his head. Dr. Kosyak started to take the kid back to the operating room. The Marine was not about to allow this foreigner to take his son off without going with him.

“Okay,” Kojak said, “but you faint, can’t help. Got to take care on the boy.”

Well, that was an insult. He wasn’t going to faint. He was a Marine! Of course, when the doctor started to work, the Marine fainted.

When Dr. Kosyak had finished, he carried the boy back to the waiting room to his mother. “Where is my husband?” she asked. Kosyak searched for the right English words, remember a new phrase he had heard for becoming unconscious, and said, “He passed away.”

He couldn’t understand why she got so upset.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

1] At that time, every Hoopeston physician had an accent. We had doctors from Germany, Taiwan, and Korea, as well as Turkey. The accent hardest to understand was the doctor from Arkansas.

2] Why do men, even smart, educated men, do things like hunting grizzlies with a knife? There’s really no explanation, except, as Tammy Wynette sang, “After all, he’s just a man.”

BAD NEWS BEARER [Su, 5-20-18]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Stories of Faith and Life for the Years of Winter… BAD NEWS BEARER     [Su, 5-20-18]

It was the first day of the new year when I had to go tell Evelyn that her husband was suddenly dead.

Arlyn had been cutting trees in the woods with a friend. A tree had fallen on him. The sheriff called me, told me to go tell Evelyn before somebody else found out about it and telephoned and told her while she was alone. He would get his wife and come as soon as possible, but he had to deal with some details first.

That was not an unusual request. I was often asked to break bad news to people. The sheriff assumed I was the proper person to break this bad news because Evelyn was my secretary.

But Evelyn was no longer my secretary. She was mad at me. Neither she nor Arlyn had spoken to me for several months. The sheriff didn’t give me a chance to explain, though. Just told me to go.

The high school band director had scheduled a “required” practice on Christmas day. Any student who failed to show would not be allowed to march in the big parade. Parents protested, not to the band director, of course, but to their pastors. The Ministerial Association passed a resolution protesting this misuse of Christmas.

I wasn’t personally opposed to a Christmas band practice as such, but I was opposed to making it required. Christmas is a family day for many. I did not think a kid should be penalized for going to see Grandma on Christmas.

I was not personally affected. Neither of my children were in band. We didn’t even go to band concerts. Mary Beth and Katie were in academics and drama and sports in school, plus church, so it was all we could do to keep up with those activities.

But I was the secretary of the ministerial association, so the letter of protest went out over my signature. The ministerial association did not have a letterhead, but I created one, and made it clear that this was not my resolution but that of all the preachers together. Didn’t make a bit of difference. It was my signature, so I got all the heat.

The band director himself came to see me. Since my children were not in band, we had never met before. He did not understand why I was upset. He was a hard worker, and if you’re a hard worker, you should not be criticized, and, besides, even though he was not a member of any church, he was “as religious as the next man.” [A direct quote] I didn’t see how that was relevant, but he seemed to think it closed the discussion with some sort of victory for him.

There are some parents in any community who become more invested in a particular school activity than their children are. For whatever reason, that was Evelyn and Arlyn on behalf of the band. A Christmas practice didn’t interfere with them; all their relatives lived several hundred miles away. Also, they had a son who played trumpet, and apparently they wanted him out of the house as much as possible.

Evelyn and Arlyn and their children belonged to my church, but none of them came to worship. They wanted to protest what they saw as me trying to destroy the band program, but they couldn’t boycott worship since they didn’t come anyway. So Evelyn quit as church secretary.

Church secretary is a demanding and underpaid job. It takes a rare combination of skills and temperament. Interestingly, I’ve rarely had a mediocre secretary. Either they were really good at the job, or very unsuited for it. Evelyn had adequate skills, but she had some emotional problems she tried to hide by being effusively and excessively sweet. It made folks mistrust her, wondering what she was hiding.

I think when she quit in a huff, she thought it would cause a stir, that perhaps the church would rise up and choose her over me, say we could not do without her and… well, we all have illusions of irreplaceability from time to time. That was a very healthy congregation, though. It was not into games or drama. The chairwoman of the staff-parish relations committee treated the whole thing as quite normal. She hosted a nice retirement party for Evelyn at her house and that was the end of it. Except then I got to hire her replacement.

Two, as it turned out. Frances wanted to work only in the mornings, and Rose wanted to work only in the afternoons, so they shared the job, and became best friends in the process. They were both in that “really good” category I was blessed with, along with Anne and Jeanne and Mary, who served as my secretary in other churches.

All that is irrelevant, though, when you have to go tell a woman that her husband has been killed.

When I appeared at her door, Evelyn became her overly sweet self, as though she had not quit in a huff, as though we had not seen each other in months. “Oh, how thoughtful of you to come see me on New Year’s Day.” Maybe she understood that I could only be the bearer of bad news and was trying to put it off.

Neither of her children was home. No one there but Evelyn and me. I wanted to stall, wait until the sheriff and his wife got there, but I knew I couldn’t. I told her. She cried in my arms for a very long time until the sheriff and his wife finally got there. I never saw her again.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

WAITING FOR AFTERNOON-a poem [Sa, 5-19-18]

WAITING FOR AFTERNOON-a poem                        [Sa, 5-19-18]

I am waiting for the afternoon

Hurry midday

or lunch time

or whatever it is called

Come here quickly

for the morning

is a desperate time

full of angst

and toil and doubt

But after lunch, I fall asleep

My frantic desperate morning self

can rest in memories

of other summer afternoons,

when the hours held warm

hopes and cold tea

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

Not long ago, Helen gave me a copy of A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles. It is a lovely book. I don’t think anyone else today writes with the elegance of Towles. The characters and their relationships are all intriguing and inviting, and the story is one of acceptance and liberation at the same time. It is a slow read, not because it is difficult, but because it should be savored.

TIPS FOR BLOODY SITUATIONS [F, 5-18-18]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter…

TIPS FOR BLOODY SITUATIONS   [F, 5-18-18]

Our optometrist, who is very good at his job, says he went into optometry because he thought blood would be minimal. Good thought.

Blood can be off-putting. Helen’s Uncle Fred was so histo-phobic that he passed out just hearing the word “blood.” That happened once in a high school class, in Monon, IN. The principal came down to his classroom to help revive him. When Fred woke up, the principal said, “Fred, surely you’re not that squeamish about just the word, blood.” Whoops! There went Fred again.

So they learned to call Fred’s older sister, Georgia, who was later Helen’s mother, whenever Fred heard the word “blood.” Needless to say, this was very embarrassing to a high school girl. She never did like Fred much.

Of course, our optometrist had to go through a surgical rotation in med school. The first operation he observed, he didn’t, since he was on the floor.

Reminds me of our daughter Katie’s surgical rotation when she was in nursing school. The surgeon reviewed the staff to get ready, reminding each one of his or her job. “And what will you be doing, Katie?” he asked. She answered, “You mean after I throw up?”

Our optometrist says that surgical people have no mercy on the squeamish among them. They will ride you relentlessly with ridicule for just some little fault like passing out when you see blood.

So he learned some tricks, which I shall pass on to you, not because you are likely to be called on to observe surgery--and if you are, don’t eat Junior Mints during the process [1]—but you may be called on to assist when a family member gets sick, or there is a roadside accident.

I have from time to time wondered what I would do if I were in one of those roadside situations and a woman was having a baby, or someone was badly injured and a doctor had stopped and told me, “Stick your hand into this abdomen and hold that blood vessel closed while I…”

Those things can happen. Charles Ramsey was a medical doctor in Charleston, IL. He had not intended to be an obstetrician, but that became a large part of his general practice. He did his internship at the huge and gritty Cook County Hospital in Chicago. One day he was done with his shift and waiting for the bus. It arrived, and suddenly there was a great rush as everyone on the bus jumped off, including the driver, who saw the young Charles in his scrubs, assumed he was a real doctor, and grabbed him and pushed him onto the bus while saying, “There’s a woman having a baby in there.” He thought, “I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout birthin’ no babies.” [2] But, Dr. Ramsey said, the first delivery he ever saw, he performed, because he had to.

So I’ve assumed that in my more wise senior years, surely I am less squeamish, and if someone said, “The baby’s coming now, and you’ve got to…” or the doctor told me to hold that blood vessel, or do some other frightful thing, I would do it, because I had to, and wait until later to throw up and pass out.

Fortunately, I might be able to pull it off, because our optometrist has given us these tips: 1] Wiggle your toes. It helps to keep conscious and non-nauseated if you can move your body. You can’t dance around in a surgical suite, though, but you can wiggle your toes, and no one can see what you’re doing. 2] Stay involved, so that your mind is busy. Ask a question. Make a statement. Act like you’re interested. Don’t just stand there and think about it.

Not bad advice for life in general.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

1] The classic scene in the Seinfeld TV series when Kramer is watching an operation from an overhead observation balcony while eating Junior Mints and drops one into the patient.

2] The classic line spoken by Butterfly McQueen in the movie, “Gone With the Wind.”