Stories from the Steps

A NEW SONG FROM THE ASHES OF 4,382 DAYS AGO:

“I waited patiently for the Lord
He inclined & heard my cry
He lifted me up out of the pit
Out of the miry clay
I will sing, sing a new song…”
From “40” by U2

On January 19, 2013, Miss Julie said the house smelled funny. Not an unusual statement by a wife to her husband if he forgot to empty the trash or a pipe backed up. Very unusual, however, after midnight & the hubs is asleep. The smell, proof of my dad’s theorem that nothing good happens after midnight, was smoke from faulty wiring igniting lumber & your reminder to check the batteries in your smoke detector as awakened by your spouse is not, on top of dodging falling, flaming joists, a good way to exit a home. In the intervening 12 years, home started again for the newly homeless behind the door to hotel room 131. I always thought the crossing sign prophetic & the no smoking icon God’s mix of irony & humor. Through the heights & depths of leaving the now demolished room 131, my disdain for the smell of vinegar, a smell I used to associate happily with my grandmother & the dying of Easter eggs but using it to remove the odor of smoke from laundry changed that, & the aroma of a campfire whether roaring or smoldering & just this week, a surprise school fire alarm resurrected old demons, there were friends I didn’t know we could count on who arrived, friends we thought we could count on who tapped out, I had to answer questions I never dreamed would be asked, I looked into the eyes of doubters & stared into my green eyed doubt in the mirror, we buried my father & my mother-in-law who, in another touch of irony, passed on January 19, 2017. I got let go from a job where I showed up, told the truth & did the best I could only to be told, “you’re a nice guy, just not our guy” & with those eight words the doubters returned & I returned to the crossing & a decision had to be made, cross the track where my best efforts again may not pay off or stay still & get run over. So to the doubters dismay, I kept getting up for coffee at 5AM with nowhere to get up & go. To say I waited, Miss Julie waited, my family waited patiently as the grit in our sandpaper got finer & finer, is a lie, but we waited & waited & waited & all we got as the Hawks vs. Doves unraveled civility & persecuted over masks & candidates & ideologies as the The Commandments waver between 10 Firm & 6 plus 4 Suggestions & everybody asked if we were better off than X or Y years ago & as I found that Charles Bukowski was correct when he wrote, “The nights you fight best are when all the weapons are pointed at you, when all the voices hurl their insults while the dream is being strangled” & found the crack in the spine of my Bible, ‘cause the Good Book falling apart is a good way to keep life from coming apart, purchased in February of 2013 after its predecessor succumbed to smoke & water damage pleasing as it was & is a principal factor in winning those night fights as my mom fights Alzheimer’s, was our sandpaper grit becoming more & more coarse in two beautiful daughters-in-law, two equally beautiful granddaughters, a place to work I never saw myself in & now can’t see myself out, prayed what needed praying for me & my tribe with less words & more honesty, & found people in 15 countries besides this one that have read & responded to my collisions of nouns & verbs, I got to have a positive impact on my own & other people’s children from K-12 as my scars became road maps both for “how to” & “how not to” & thanked God for a bride that vowed for better or worse & proved she meant it. All that to say this, I’m better off on January 18, 2025 than 4,382 days ago regardless of if I wear a suit & bow tie to worship or shorts & flip flops (done both if you’re curious) or who I voted for (not telling if you’re curious) or had a lovely steak dinner because we could afford it or a PB&J with chips or that one Valentines Day we had a frozen pizza to keep the lights on & I’ve found certainty in these 4,382 days revolving in God’s cosmos on this earthly spaceship in tithing my 10% because like Miss Julie, God made a promise he’s kept & even though I don’t have multiple seminary degrees & can’t read a lick of or derive words in Greek, or Hebrew, or Aramaic, I don’t believe God needs attorneys for His cause or to make apologies for Him. He doesn’t need those like those holding their own social media Chautauqua tent revivals, by posting about the tragedies & ensuing government travesties in fire ravaged Los Angeles to justify their God & their vote last November & others touting Carrie over Taylor (both with saved songs on my music streamer, if you’re curious) just because Carrie’s singing at the inauguration. God needs those who will testify for what He’s done, not their version of Him. God didn’t want Saul the lawyer to prosecute, He wanted Paul the witness to testify & me to be like Paul too & that’s my new song that’s 4,382 days old…

POSTSCRIPT: Sometimes, writing is the experience Hemingway claimed it to be, just sit at the typewriter & bleed. That’s what this was & if you’ve read this far, thank you. Yesterday, over coffee & scrolling the streaming apps, the U2 song, “40”, that led off this column & that I first heard around 1982 came on & I heard it differently & thoughts began to rumble & in the afternoon, I spent time with a 3rd generation beneficiary of my scars, & the magma formed & collected & moved & erupted early this morning into the 1100+ words you’re reading & if the dots don’t connect just right, well, I’m not sure an editor or journalism teacher would approve of an outline of gut to fingers to keyboard, nor would my father the English & History teacher. It might even be referred to as dumb, but that’s what you have here because it seemed right if the dots connected strangely or didn’t connect at all as there were a lot of those 4,382 days just like that. In the words of the aforementioned Bukowski, “…It wasn’t bad being dumb if the ignorance was all your own”. So, here it is, 12 years in all my bleeding ignorance. Hopefully, when my final accounting comes on the playing field where Grantland Rice penned the Great Scorer “.. won’t mark whether you won or lost but how you played the game”, God will pull this tome out of the folder labeled well played…