Working to Rest

The house we live in is a cold place. It numbs our fingers and makes us shiver.

The upstairs, where we sleep, is colder than the downstairs, where our waking hours are spent. This rule has one exception. The thirteen-year-old daughter spends her nights downstairs with her younger sister, the feeble black lab whom she has known her entire life and who now needs her company, or anyone’s company, at night.

We can only afford to heat the house to where we can tolerate the cold without catching cold. This is the affording that we hadn’t known before we became a family. Then, at the brink of summer, there were fewer mouths to feed and a different season ahead of us. Now, in the icy air, we have trouble huddling up as a family, to keep warm or keep friendly.

The trouble lies as much in our busy-ness as it sits in our temperaments. We are busy with, and we struggle through, so much—the children’s schoolwork, meal preparation, church attendance, the general upkeep of the house—while we also struggle to keep our own hearts and minds.

We each keep our minds filled with the contents of our own worlds, and for a variety of reasons. The kids are in school and the parents are not at work, as it would be with most parents we know. One parent is on disability, after being bed-ridden for more than a year and recovering for about fourteen more, when her spine was injured beyond repair.

The other parent is seeking the same sort of income. For this other, panic attacks have littered his past; he presently faces deficits in memory, focus, and coherency, and the lethargy that brings on a sort of vertigo. These have been major stumbling blocks, of late.

For him, it feels as though the only coherent thoughts that come from him are those that he enters into a Word document, as he writes something to be read by others. There, he can collect his thoughts at his leisure, without the pressure of direct conversation, and then address those prepared thoughts to the reader. Extemporaneous speech is, for him, a dicey exercise fraught with land mines and quicksand.

These are the worlds of the parents. The kids have their own, as well.

Because there is no television in the house, the children focus on books and internet interactions. As they do that, the parents focus on the kids’ school work and the various lessons of life, while somehow pushing through their respective disabilities, to varying degrees of success. The children have one agenda; the parents have another.

With each of us in separate worlds, worlds collide when the sequestered ones mingle about in the house. This is most often seen in the partaking of meals, which aren’t shared together, anyway; they’re only served that way.

One teenager won’t eat downstairs, at the kitchen table, even when special occasions arise and special meals are prepared. As far as the other teen goes, the parents, out of an urge for self-preservation, have partitioned themselves from her, as she swings from pole to pole so quickly that they experience emotional whiplash, disturbing their desire to eat with her, or even at all.

When it comes to the parents, one of them is on a strict diet of watching the other eat, making the other self-conscious while he eats.

This is our current routine. It is the closest we have come to sharing meals together.

We are all so apart, it’s a wonder we’re ever together at all. When we find that we must get together, like to discuss a degree of respect for each others’ things or feelings, the temperature in the room rises quickly and the atmosphere can be likened to a police bust, or a domestic call that’s not easily diffused. The feeling of togetherness that we experience is only one of proximate geography, rather than hearts or minds that might think as one.

But we are raising teenagers, we keep telling ourselves, and the parents are also husband and wife, we tell ourselves, so perhaps things aren’t really as bad as it seems. The children will outgrow their teenage predilections, and may not be so obnoxious one day. The husband and wife, each struggling with their latent psychologies, will look beyond their individual struggles and come together in a place of understanding. This is what we hope for, as each day’s challenges are brought to bed, when all else is said and done.

We’ve got to learn patience, in this cold house without the same luxuries that most of America enjoys. We’ve got to be patient with each other—they with us, us with them, us with each other—lest the house would no longer be a tie that binds, but a snare that entraps.

Here is what we’re told, this time of year: “Chains shall he break / For the slave is our brother / And in his name all oppression shall cease.” We have faith in the chain-breaker; yet, I think we’re not clear on who we have enslaved, nor are we clear on who may have enslaved us. We need some soul-searching, to probe the depths of this question, lest the chains around us and others remain, decomposing at a slower rate than the atrophy in our bones and muscles—the parts of us once used to heal and comfort others.

Perhaps this isn’t exactly what we each had anticipated, when we first got together. Then, we believed that the needs within us couldn’t be met by another until we met each other. Nonetheless, we believe in commitment and are committed to seeing this through, until the end of ourselves, because that is the kind of cloth out of which we’ve been cut.

Second impressions, as we’ve seen, can be vastly different than the first, but where the desire to experience a third or fourth impression may be lacking, we are pulled along no longer by that, but by choice and promise, vows made before witnesses on a glorious spring day, when we were dressed to the nines, where the lake on one side of the bridge drained to the creek on the other.

The cold house will soon no longer be occupied by us four. Soon it will be occupied no more, once the bank contacts the sheriff to remove us, since ours is a home under foreclosure.

This situation is due to circumstances beyond our control, those set in place before we became a household: payments not made by a prior wife in a prior family arrangement, or payments that could not be made, when the house was a rental, for a time. What or who is to blame now matters not.

These things have worked against us staying in this neighborhood where the children feel safer than they once had, when they lived next to the inner-city, with the city’s lawlessness bleeding through. We’ll each be asked to leave in the coming year, making stability for these young ones an impossible dream, but one that they long for, nonetheless. Every kid does, do they not?

We are in poverty, but not like that experienced in third world countries. Ours only feels like it when we compare ourselves to those with substantial income, credit cards, cable bills, cells phones, houses in the mountains and down the shore, houses with multiple pianos, the latest cars and SUVs, vacations and excursions—i.e., our relatives.

What we are in, if it is poverty, is not something we’re desperate to be out of; desperation is no frame of mind to be in. Yet, if the heavens were to open up and provide for us, we’d be happy to receive the blessing and even bless others in turn.

We do this sort of dreaming but it is not with exorbitance in mind. We just wish to build a place for ourselves in the woods, near where we were married—where we had visited, from time to time, before we made our vows. There, we think we can be free of so much of the tension that we absorb from the environment around us—from the state highway to one side, and the county highway to the other, possibly even from each other.

But freedom, as so many have found, is elusive. We may be dreaming, or we may be deluding ourselves. Sometimes, there is very little difference.

We’ve been married for less than a year and have yet to settle down. We’re still handling the remains of the house we had lived in after the wedding and before the move to New Jersey’s east coast. We’re still in that insecure place, but we are comforted knowing it is a temporary place for us, as we search for a dwelling to call our own. All this is unsettling.

What we have now isn’t a settling down. It can’t be; the dust is still flying and we’ve yet to cull the premises of the remains of so many yesterdays with so many connections that we’ve lost count.

We’re connected to the furniture, pictures, books, shelves, clothes, and so many other things that comprise our lives. They are so much a part of us that we hesitate to downsize too quickly. We hope that we may, after all, when the time comes, have room for what we’ve lived with these many decades—more than a century, between the two of us.

These are the things on our minds. Something else is on our hearts.

Day after day, we exercise our faith, believing that tomorrow will be better. One of us was a successful business developer, the other an effective security specialist. Even though we know we can’t be those things again, we believe that what was lost will return, though in another form—because we now find ourselves in another form, and we’re learning the meaning of these new forms.

We know that faith is the evidence of things not seen, and we try to keep the faith. We push through the darkness knowing there is light—either around the corner or down the road. Without us knowing that kind of faith, we can’t comprehend how, or if, we will see tomorrow.

We are in a time of transition, but like the children, we also long for the stability of a place to call our own, without fear of eviction. We long for the income to provide better for the children, in a world that places greater financial demands on parents than when we were growing up. We look for a place that, for all we know, may not even exist.

The stress of all of this makes the soul weary, the mind faulty, and the body weak, yet we know that this is what is called Fighting the good fight. We do not give up, because we have hope in a greater Hope than ourselves. In this, we are content to know that all of our needs will be met, and those that aren’t met may not be needs, after all, but just wants that ought to be pruned from the trees of our lives.

We know our weaknesses. In this, the advice we give ourselves may seem like a paradox, but it is yet effective.

We seek to not fight the weakness, for we know we have not the strength to fight it. Rather, we relax into it, knowing that from that place we can find another launching pad from which we can become stronger, perhaps in a way that we have never known before—in a place that we’ve never seen, until we have reached this very particular, special place in our lives.

We work very hard at not working. Instead, we only seek to settle into a frame of mind that permits us to see all things working together for our good. This is our only striving. In this is the peace that our souls long for.

White Like Me: Grief & Remembrance

I miss my friend Michael. He met my parents and I at this time of year, on December 18th, one of the few dates in my life marked by life-changing events.

I remember the date because it was the day that I left for an eighteen-month Air Force deployment to southern Italy, with an electronic security group, there. We met in a Philadelphia Airport terminal, before getting on a DC-8 bound for Naples.

Michael was an interesting guy and full of life. He was a runner and a weight lifter, as was I, though I focused more on the weights than on the road-running.

Michael was a unique Christian. Once in a while, if he had gotten to the chow hall before me and was eating by himself, he would set a place for Jesus, on the other side of the table. He also enjoyed making fun of the devil, by giving him names; Old Turkey-lips was his favorite.

I knew Michael some thirty years ago and regret losing touch with him. I don’t mean to eulogize him; I just don’t know if, since the time I knew him in Italy, he had passed away.

I’ve looked for him a number of times, on the internet, but have had no success. I wonder why I miss him so much. I’m thinking that it may be because he was kind of a fascinating guy, or it may be because he was my first black friend.

As long as I’ve been an adult, I’ve only had a few such friends as Michael. A man and two women immediately come to mind.

Marvin was a co-worker I had, when I lived in Maryland and worked at a federal agency there. I worked with him and a few others on a government project that was as much of a learning experience as it was fun.

Marvin and the rest of us learned how to program a network and we learned about each other. Some of us had nicknames; Marvin’s was Marvinus, which was later shortened to Venus. He kind of was a Venus because, in the course of the project, we learned that he had a part-time modeling career.

I miss Marvin, too. But, since I had seen him last, I’ve been wondering if I had said the wrong thing or shouldn’t have said what I said.

A couple of years after the network project was over, and my ex-wife and I had moved to New Jersey, we went back to Maryland to visit. The trip included seeing Marvin, since we knew that his wife had delivered their first child about a year earlier.

We told Marvin about the town that we had moved to. He asked how we liked it there. I said that we do, but we haven’t been able to find any black people there, let alone make friends. What I said was that it was “Too Lily White for me.” Marvin gave no answer and just stared back at me.

As a result, I have felt guilty ever since making that remark. I have felt guilty for even thinking about it. I wondered why I would consider a distinction like race, let alone voice it.

I tend to heap guilt on myself. In this case, I was heaping white guilt upon myself and have been wondering, since losing touch with Marvin, if I should be slapping myself on the head for letting that thought arise and then letting it out. This is, for me, one of life’s unanswerable questions.

And then there is Landoria, and Louvenia. They’re known as Lani and Beanie. These ladies were other co-workers I had in Maryland.

They each initially appeared to not know what to make of me; though, once I became friends with them and understood their intense sense of humor, we connected. I still remember chatting with each of them in an alleyway—where the smokers had been banished to, while on their breaks—and how Lani would always share her Lorna Doones with me.

I felt, and still feel, honored to know Lani and Beanie. Unlike Michael and Marvin, these two and I are still connected, though only through social media. Still, I miss the face-to-face contact that I once had with them.

I also miss my classmate Barbara. I learned, years ago, that she had passed away, but didn’t know how it had happened. I learned at last year’s reunion that it had something to do with her family being at a South Carolina beach and with her trying to swim out beyond the breakers to possibly rescue her daughter and that, in the process, her daughter survived but she had not.

When I heard this, I felt awful for her and her family. A reunion with her won’t be happening, this side of heaven.

In our high school yearbook, Barbara said that she didn’t like being referred to as You people. I think that this is more than an expression of a pet peeve, but her desire to be seen as an individual and not simply as a demographic. From what I remember of her, she extended that same courtesy to everyone.

Beyond the few mentioned above, I have had a few other black connections. Sadly, they’ve each been short-lived.

One of these was the result of a chance meeting. When I was on a business trip to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, I found a bible lying in the parking lot, outside of my room. A name was on it, and I inquired at the front desk in which room the owner might be staying. I went there, and the owner—staying in the hotel, after his house had burned down—was glad to see his bible once again.

His name was Mr. Brown. He invited me to church. I went, and had a great time (a better time than at the mostly white church I went to, the first of the three weeks I was there); he then invited me to dinner at someone’s house. I had never been so well fed or so welcomed into a group of strangers than I was on that day.

Then there was David Anderson, my pastor for a time, when I lived in Maryland. He was a tall man with a radio-personality voice, and he did have a radio show.

He wrote a book entitled Gracism, which he described as "The art of inclusion," saying that regardless of our race, we can extend grace to one another by understanding and appreciating each other—not just for who we are as individuals but also for how our respective cultures have shaped us.

I still appreciate this man. He extended grace to my ex-wife and I for helping us to handle the bullying that my son faced, at the hands of some black boys who wanted him to know that Cracker was a term he needed to get used to hearing. Pastor David recognized that bullying and racism are just that, regardless of the direction they faced.

But I’m speaking about more than a few lost connections. I’m also thinking of my wife. She has had to endure two lost connections of this nature.

These were severe losses, more intense than mine. They caused her to question God about why he would allow such a thing to occur in her life, something she would never have thought of doing before that day.

My wife had foster-parent custody of two beautiful twin boys. During the course of a year, as she lovingly provided for their needs, she sought to adopt them. After the New Jersey Division of Youth and Family Services (DYFS) had placed Jacob and Jack with her, and after DYFS had awarded her Foster Parent of the Year, they gave her a call.

“Hello, Miss ———?”

“Yes, this is she.”

“I’m Sheila ———. From DYFS. I’m calling about your request for adoption, for the boys that you’ve been foster parenting: Jacob and Jack. Your request has been denied.”

“What? Why?”

 “You’re white.”

“Yes. I know I am.”

“Well, DYFS believes that it would be in the children’s best interest if you were black.”

This was the call in which my wife was denied the adoption and also denied a chance to foster parent these boys any longer.

I’m not a mother, but I know what it’s like to be an adoptive parent. And I know what it’s like to lose a child that you are adopting. Such a thing happened to me.

Fifteen years ago, my ex-wife and I were in the process of adopting a boy whom we had named and had brought home from the hospital. Within a week, the birth parents demanded Nathaniel back from us. The state backed them up, because these parents hadn’t yet relinquished their rights as parents.

This was a crushing blow. Yet, I’m sure that it wasn’t as difficult a time as it was for she who had been raising two boys for over a year and then was told by the state that they were no longer hers—though she had been doing a very good job of it and though the boys were also loved by her depression-era parents, who held and accepted them, regardless of racial attitudes in place when they were brought up.

My wife went to court, to retain the twins. She lost. The judge later apologized to her, but that was little consolation. Since then, the law, on who can adopt whom, has changed. Also little consolation.

She lost the boys and the connections, though not entirely. They were placed in another foster home, nearby, but didn’t much like it there. When they were a little older, they would run away from that foster home and to my wife’s home. But, because she lost in court, she relinquished them all over again.

I had thought that time would have healed my wife’s wound—that is, until very recently, when we were getting ready to leave our neighborhood Walmart. 

This is where we noticed a young, Caucasian woman taking out her own, African-American, twin, toddler boys. They were about the same age as my wife’s twins were, when she lost them. We didn’t say anything to the woman; instead, we admired her handsome boys.

I didn’t ask my wife about whether she had cried, upon seeing that woman’s twin boys, but I believe she had wiped a tear from her face. I regret not being more in touch with how this reminder had affected her.

We might have misread that woman’s situation. To us, it appeared that hers was close enough to my wife’s to be felt in the depths of my wife's soul.

I ache for my wife. She is doing much better than she was, years ago, but the damage has been done, and her heart is still healing.

For the both of us, it seems as though too many connections have been lost, due to neglect, simple and unavoidable circumstances, avoidable remarks, death, and state intervention. These are the connections that we’d like to have back.

We miss those who are lost to us because we loved them then, and we still love them. They are our friends, family, and co-workers. They look a little different than us, but we have great admiration and affection for them. We may even appreciate them more, because they are culturally different from us, and for how their culture enhances our lives.

These connections are different than the many mundane connections we may otherwise have, in our monochrome world. They allow us to connect to a unique people, with a certain style and excitement about life that the rest of us can only begin to appreciate.

These connections, as short-lived as they may have been, have enriched our lives. And while we mourn their loss, we try not to create others like these on our own. Instead, we wait for the magic moment when God will bless us with new ones.