VOLUME 2, CHRONICLE 20, BOTH INDEPENDENCE DAYS & THE ANCHOR:

PREFACE: The 6 or 7 minute read that follows in 3 chapters, is my pastor’s fault. This Sunday past, he took pies in the face before our congregation at a post service hot dog lunch because the boys beat the girls in a canned food drive for a local food pantry during our Vacation Bible School. While some were  thinking they wished they’d beaten the Methodists to the $11.98 buffet, my mind went to the guy doing the jackknife dive in his preaching clothes. The pastor of the same church in my youth who got wet instead of getting pied at the end of VBS.   
      Our country is celebrating its origin story with cookouts & fireworks. We all have our origin story, like Batman in an alley or Spiderman in a lab, something to understand how we got from there to here. I’ve tried over the last 96 hours to avoid this, but as the Greek stoic Epictitus said, “If you are called to be a writer, write”. Writing is my oxygen, one of my purposes on this rotating ball & while it is much easier & less painful to tell someone else’s story, here you go, I hope this is what that Grecian philosopher had in mind…

CHAPTER 1, 7/4/1975 INDEPENDENCE DAY: Every summer it happens. EVERY summer. A boy, girl, or both in my church’s student ministry or someone new to our church will find out our back parking lot used to house swimming pools & a recreation center. It happened last week with an adult as we hosted around 50 kids on that asphalt. I guess it’s time to grab a scalpel, rip open my chest & share.
       Independence Day, 1975, is a tale of watermelon, nose bleeds & character building, ’70s style. July 4th, the day we as Americans celebrate, two days late, Thomas Jefferson’s breakup letter to King George III. A letter signed by ol’ Tommy Jeff & 55 other men brave enough to face the Philly heat in powdered wigs & knickers & the possibility of hangman’s noose. One signer & future president John Adams, predicted the day would be celebrated with “.. fireworks & ball games…” He must not have been familiar with Baptists, as we celebrated the 199th anniversary of 56 treasonous souls, the tax evasion & the vandalism of tea ships by hundreds more, & England folding like the 1964 Phillies by blowing a 13 colony lead in the New World division with “dinner on the grounds” at our church recreation center, featuring deacon grilled hot dogs & burgers served with the options “lukewarm” or “charred in Hell’s crucible”, all without the words & music of Lin Manuel Miranda hailing our forefathers.
      On that Friday, for a few moments I set aside my trusty Wilson T2000 tennis racket & my vain attempts at impressing older girls, the ones with drivers licenses & the ones my age that didn’t have them yet, all of whom I was scared to talk to as they lounged with their Sun-In, baby oil, zinc oxide, & AM radios & 8 track players on towels lining the shuffleboard court for a new event that, with a paraphrased tip of the cap to Santayana, “if it didn’t kill me, it made me stronger.”
      The event? The inaugural of many “Annual Greased Watermelon Battles”, two teams of young people perched on opposite sides of a pool & a floating, petroleum jelly encased watermelon in the middle of the water. The goal, get the melon out of the pool on the other team’s side. As the teams split & strategized, one of my teams older members, a young man that I looked up to, a young man that would go on to a fine career in law enforcement & have a positive impact on many young men including my sons as a Sunday School teacher, approached me, a hyper competitive, afraid to talk to girls, soon to be 8th grader & gave me my role in the plan.
      My smaller stature would be an advantage for our team. My job, be first to the watermelon, go under the other team & come up at their side of the wall. The whistle blew, and I went in & grabbed the slick fruit. I quickly discovered that “small stature” was a euphemism for “sacrificial pawn”. A discovery I made under the swirl of tornadic egg beater kicks of the feet owned by the contest’s older & bigger knights, rooks & bishops. Feet that used my head like the feet of Liverpool’s Mo Salah use a soccer ball.
      After a little back & forth, our team emerged victorious. While the squad celebrated victory, I celebrated breathing as my mom & our lifeguard Wanda, attended my bleeding nose that I pretended didn’t hurt. Soon, I felt a tap on my shoulder from the young man I looked up to. “Are you okay?”, he asked. I nodded in the affirmative, thankful for his compassion. A thanks I quickly found to be as misguided as his compassion was misunderstood when he responded, “Good, it’s 2 out of 3, same plan, let’s go!”. They don’t build character like they used to.
     Our church celebrated our 75th anniversary in 2021 & I had the opportunity to do a video segment with the now a little older, “young man”. His compassion over this incident remains unchanged. The “pool” & “rec center” were interchangeable terms, like “coke” & “soda by any other name” are interchangeable below the Mason-Dixon Line. The rec center was put on life support Labor Day 1986 & met its demise in summer 1991 by the twin bulldozers of an actual one & the attitude of “I’m sure we have people for that” & letting life imitate art in the words of Joni Mitchell, “…they paved paradise and put up a parking lot…”.
      The pool’s been gone way longer than it lived. It lived because men like my dad & men named Vaughn, Ellis, Kines, Raper, Case, Bowman, Secondine & others were the people we had for that & didn’t wait on someone else to go do it, but it’s not dead. From conversations, pieces are alive in women that were once girls I was afraid to talk to on the shuffleboard court, in men that as boys failed to garner female attention, in groups, efforts of rocking the pool or blind man’s bluff or under the pavilion where sounds of ping pong backed countless hands of Rook or Spades at redwood stained picnic tables to beat the heat or wait out the rain are recalled. The lifeguards of my youth, Jerry, Wanda, & Andra will be pleased to know that I interrupted destruction in 1991 to claim a piece of “the wall” that sat behind the diving board & sat the behinds of those who misbehaved. The theme song to a popular police series of the time, “Beretta” stated, “…don’t do the crime, if you can’t do the time…”. I did some time on the wall & will spend the rest of my time with a piece of it. And speaking of that man named Vaughn…

CHAPTER 2, 7/7/1975, THE OTHER INDEPENDENCE DAY:(Chapters 2 & 3 aren’t suggesting the best way or promoting the right way, it’s simply a statement of my way, though sometimes, at the end of the day, I’ve not done my best work.) It was a Monday night when that guy diving into the pool, with the wall from Chapter 1 clearly visible behind him, the pastor of my church at the time, Rev. Marshall Vaughn, asked a life changing question of faith.
      My nose, as noted, had been bloodied in the pool next to that diving well the previous Friday, “would I have faith in One who bled from me”? He asked & I answered yes on the other side of the fence, up there in the right hand corner of the photo on July 7, 1975, at a weekly gathering of our church’s youth group. A thing called RAP Session, a gathering of junior high & high school students hosted every Monday by Brother Vaughn, at a time when “rap” was lingo for talking & not yet a music genre.
      The faith I answered yes to was made public the following Sunday, July 13th, when he invited a guest speaker into his pulpit & I took that speaker’s hand at the conclusion of the service, a hand that belonged to my father. A faith proclaimed more publicly two weeks later being dipped in cleansing baptismal waters, dipped by the man in the suit. It’s also a faith I tried to run from as a young man, a faith I have sprinted to as I’ve gotten older, as Chapter 3 will reveal. I hate to think where I’d be without that faith and without the influence of men like Marshall Vaughn. Without it, I couldn’t anchor to…

CHAPTER 3, PRESENT DAY ANCHOR:
      I’m a pilgrim, often not a smart one & one with as much egress as progress, one looking for a rock to anchor my Mayflower. As I’ve seen civility crack, especially since 2020, as words & elbows are sharpened & fires are lit in opposing war camps like the 80s Lakers & Celtics, & posts are made by others for God & against Him, for their party or their denomination & against the other, desiring understanding of their point or acknowledgement of how smart they are & a middle ground, as long as the middle is in their backyard, here’s my rock, my Plymouth.
     I’ve never been to seminary, I can’t parse words in Greek, the only Greek I know is Pi Beta Phi because I married one. I am, however, good with my mother tongue, be it KJV, ESV, or CSB so I’ll drop anchor. It’s a faith I’ve tried to use as a bargaining chip to get my misdirected way & a faith used in knee scraping desperation after I followed an ambulance carrying my child or stared at a winter sky from a room charred by flame.
     It’s a faith that has, in the last little while, taken the man in the mirror from a stranger with my face & clothes to someone I recognize & actually like. A faith that has led me to recognize that the scars from the exit wounds, self inflicted by my pride & errors, can be road maps for others. It’s a faith I’ve learned to express in knee bent thanks. It has allowed me to live in a way “that I ain’t what I wanna be or gonna be, but I ain’t gotta be what I used to be”.
     Even with my relationship with Christ, I have taken selfish detours, covered myself with soot & ash from bridges I’ve ignited to light my way, survived on the grace of manna while wandering in a wilderness of my own making, & traveled the rocky, prodigal path of an imitator when smooth roads of truth were available.
     Now, I stick with loving God first & trying to treat my neighbor right, be he LBGTQ+ or WASP, pro choice, anti-abortion or pro life, pro gun, pro marijuana, votes & worships & looks like me or not, donkey or elephant or independent, red or yellow, black or white, & when my firmness & his stubbornness are the same thing, ’cause he’s a pilgrim just like me.
     Then, try to remember that 1 Timothy 2:1-4 applies to everybody in government, not just the victors I voted for or desire for office. Next, I cling to chapter 3 of Malachi & keep doing that tithing thing. No bargaining, no negotiation, just my wallet & my heart for the windows of Heaven pouring out. 
       Pouring out not like a cosmic slot machine with a lot of digits to the left of the decimal in the checkbook but in a wife that vowed for better or worse & stuck around to prove it, wonderful boys & their wives & being called Papa, a full refrigerator, a job I didn’t know I needed that evolved into the job God built me for & provided more oxygen for gasping lungs, readers in 19 (20 if you count California) foreign countries of my words, seeing my boys & a daughter-in-law dipped in the same baptismal pool as me, children not my own that liked it when I showed up for their events, not only weathering storms but dancing in the rain, and occasionally walking through what seems like Hell, but walking, me & Miss Julie, like we own the place.
     Tithing worked for my Dad during Tricky Dick’s corruption & Jimmy’s ineffectiveness. It’s worked for me as Donnie & Joe’s dueling administrations & the ‘24 ballot said, “hold my beer” & it worked when Ronnie & George & Bill & W & Barack held the Oval Office & it worked as proved by my grandmother’s 1947 tithing statement when Truman ran the show & it works whether bull hooves or bear paws are pounding Wall Street’s pavement. It worked when job loss led to too much month at the end of the money & friends bailed when me & Miss Julie’s friendship failed to meet their financial requirements & it worked when I had the corner office & my own coffee maker.
      I’ll trust that the ground at the foot of the cross is level, no one sin greater or lesser than any other as we all have a favorite that does us in. When the final accounting comes, every denomination is going to be wrong about something & that’s probably why Jesus saved His simplest & most profound words for children.
     And it works as I & my family navigate the “some days are easier but none of ‘em are easy” minefield of my mom’s dementia. Me & my mom reversed roles & navigated every Sunday morning, the original church staircase we first climbed in 1968 up until October 20th of last year. Three days later, in one of its more sinister acts, dementia forced what became permanent residence in a memory care facility. I still bang the metal grates that served as 1960s safety every Sunday to hear the noise like I did in elementary Sunday School. A reminder that the noise & God are still the same. I banged it last Sunday on the way out with my free hand. The other held the little hand of one that calls me Papa.
     Lastly, I apply the advice (cleaned up because this is a family show) of Coach Morris Buttermaker to reluctant, sponsored by Chico’s Bail Bonds Bears outfielder Timmy Lupus, “Listen Lupus, you weren’t put on this earth to sit on the bench, now get your tail out there & do the best you can.”…and that’s the rock this doing the best he can pilgrim is anchoring to…