VOLUME 2, CHRONICLE 7: THE NEIGHBORHOOD STRIKE ZONE, let me tell you girls (& everybody else) a birthday story. Today would’ve been my Dad’s, your Great-granddad’s, 93rd birthday. It’s my 12th time without him & I’m getting better at Dr. Suess’ instruction of “don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened”. In my youth, that lawn chair meant one thing, the batter’s strike zone in neighborhood wiffle ball games. A pitch nicking anything but the legs was a strike, as true as the words of Jesus & no lawyer alive could argue to reverse the judgment. As I’ve gotten older, that chair, though long gone to the great patio in the sky, has meant more. Your Great-granddad was something.
For himself, he swung a bat & slung a baseball from behind home plate & 2nd base well enough the Philadelphia A’s of Connie Mack sought him out. Uncle Sam got him first & for him, he slung a machine gun atop a tank. Later, he slung plaster, paint, & airline tickets for his family, & slung the gospel for his God. The gospel slinging wasn’t just an 11 AM Sunday morning thing, it was slung during the showdown of the week’s other 167 hours, the hours when the audience wasn’t captive, when that “loving your neighbor” dictum was either lived or rejected, & oh how he lived it. Those color pictures, that’s him & our next door neighbor Pete on one of their last adventures. They constantly brought to life writer Dan Jenkins fictional ruffians Billy Clyde Puckett & Shake Tiller. This trip, it was 75 year olds getting henna tattoos, parasailing, & the rest, undocumented because even if you believe in a Savior that raised from the dead, sometimes you’ve got to raise a little cane. That lawn chair sealed the friendship, whether it was in our carport over a pack of Salem’s & a pouch of Red Man, on Pete’s deck churning ice cream, planning their next exploit, or navigating life’s minefield they were side by side. Today, we’ve given it fancy names like “accountability partners” & “life groups” or an event center hosts a $300 weekend seminar for a notebook to write down answers you had all along, but from August 1968 until September 10, 2013, those two just called it friendship. There’s another part of loving your neighbor, when the webbing of the lawn chair is less comfortable, when your neighbor is a different cut & color of glass in God’s kaleidoscope, when The Beatitudes go from conceptual to physical. Our family was friends with a number of Jewish families, among them, the Feinstein’s & their Newfoundland Willie across the street. Their sons bracketed me by a year. Daniel, the oldest, was obedient to his parents religious path & did all a young Jewish man could to be observant of his Hebrew faith. Micah, the youngest, had no such inclination & his greatly distressed father occupied the matching lawn chair in our carport, explaining to my Dad his dilemma, his desire that his son needed & would benefit by a belief in a higher power & if the son didn’t believe in his father’s God, because of the way your Great-granddad lived, he would like for my dad to talk to him about his God. A spiritual wiffle ball to the strike zone. I was busy shooting basketball as this conversation took place, ignorant of the ramifications until Mr. Feinstein called me over & explained. As he finished, in his New Jersey side of Philly accent, he said “…your father, we have a word for his kind, he’s a ‘mensch’. Do you know what that means?” I shook my head from side to side in the negative, unsure if he was complimenting my father or we were about to throw hands in my defense of my father. “It means he’s got integrity & honor, it means he’s a man.” The man that was your Great-granddad was born an original, like all of us, from God’s grand blueprint. He, unlike most, lived as the original, not some copy. He lived his existence in the strike zone with integrity & honor & that’s a nice legacy for him to gift you on his birthday, batter up…