Prayers Of A Dog

When I observe my dog, I notice she comes to certain members of the family for certain things that she wants.

When I come home from work in the morning, she wants me to take her for a walk. She’s been inside all night. She needs a walk. As I come in the door, she begins with the soft whining. She becomes my shadow and with that continuous little whine. She’ll lie next to me if I get on the computer. If I take too long, the whining gets gradually louder. “Oh, great walk giver, I fawn at your feet to receive the chance to do my doggy thing and sniff the great sniffs of life!”

My son is the playmate. “Come on, boy! Let’s play ball! I want to get the stick! I just love to sink my teeth into those!”

My daughter comes home. “Hi, girl.” She gives the dog a hug. The dog is acting out her thoughts, “You’re next! Let’s play ball! I want to get the stick! I just love to sink my teeth into those!” My daughter goes to the computer and signs on. The dog moves on.

Now for the next few hours she goes from my son to my daughter to me trying to satisfy her desires. We love her, but there are other things we want to do besides play fetch all the time.

When my wife comes home, she is the “treat giver”. “Oh, gracious treat giver, I bow and extent my paw in fellowship and adore your very presence for you to bestow upon me a yummy treat!”

That sounds like the way some people pray to God! He is the “treat giver” or the problem solver. With that mentality, it’s hard to remember that we are meant for much more than being God’s pet. He is trying to mold and train us to eventually be at His side.

Christians are the bride of Christ. That suggests a relationship more intimate and more demanding than that of being a house pet.

You'll Shoot Your Eye Out!

I remember another time when Mom and Dad were gone and I was bored. I found those little beads of sugar in the cupboard. They were the ones that look like little silver BBs. I decided to try and shoot some out of my BB gun.

I had the ultimate BB gun. It wasn’t one of those pump BB guns that could almost have the power of a .22 rifle, but it was a wonderful gun. It was a Red Ryder BB gun. Yes, like the one in “Christmas Story”. By the way, I love that movie.

I figured out that you had to cock the lever and then drop one of the sugar BBs down the barrel to be able to shoot it without it becoming powder inside the gun. When I shot something outside, the sugar would stick to whatever I had shot.

I went into the living room where my bold brother was watching TV. I’m not sure if it was an accident or on purpose, but I shot the TV. I almost had a heart attack, because there on the screen was a spidery circle. I had seen such a spidery circle before on any window or piece of glass that had ever been shot by a BB gun. My life passed before my eyes so fast, that I forgot every moment. I knew my life much less my party was over!

I moaned as I approached the TV set. I slowly reached out my hand to touch the circle that would be seen by my parents and bring about my death. I was gingerly going to touch it, because I just couldn’t believe my eyes.

Sugar fell to the floor. I rubbed at the circle, and it all rubbed off leaving an undamaged TV screen. I about howled with relief, and then I laughed. I put the sugar BBs away, but I began to think of useful ways to use my newfound knowledge.

The Pitcher And Anxieties

Here’s more from Suburbia.

My bold brother and I were home alone. I was old enough for my mom and dad to be able to leave me in charge for a while.

My brother grabbed an apple out of the refrigerator. Coming into the living room, he got this idea of practicing his baseball pitching by throwing his apple at the couch. If it stuck between two of the back cushions, he had thrown a strike. If he didn’t get it to stick, it was a ball.

I was kind of bored myself, so I watched him do this. He gleefully explained all he was doing while throwing his apple.

As always seems to happen with every young pitcher, my brother threw a wild pitch. The apple hit Baby Sister’s picture shattering the glass in the frame.

I went to the picture and picked out all the glass and threw it away. I put the picture back in the frame without the glass and set it back on the end table. We then went on our merry way and played outside for the rest of the day.

It took Mom a week, but she found what I had done with the picture. When she asked me about it, I came clean and told her, but by that time enough time had gone by, that no one was punished for it.

The little kids in the neighborhood were pretty cute including my youngest siblings. Though the elementary age kids were the unspoken rulers of the neighborhood, including myself, the little kids added subtle ingredients to our lives.

My mom set me to watch the little kids swim in our blow up pool in the back yard. Actually, it was on the cement slab I mentioned in an earlier entry. There was usually Baby Brother, Baby Sister, Jojo and Ling Ling (the Phillippino kids), and an occasional little brother or sister from my friends.

This particular time, it was my little siblings and Jojo and Ling Ling.

At first, Jojo and Ling Ling wouldn’t go anywhere near the pool. Ling Ling would just throw herself down and cry. Jojo helped us figure out what was wrong. When I tried to help him into the pool, he cried and said, “Jaws is coming!”

Apparently their parents had taken them to see the movie “Jaws” at a drive in. It was funny to see them so afraid of the water, but maybe it wasn’t.

Jojo got over his fear eventually. I would ask him from time to time if Jaws was in our pool. He would get a cute smile on his face and say, “Jaws is coming!”

About that same time, Baby Brother would start running into the house in sheer terror. He would usually run to Mom, but sometimes he came to me.

Every time an airplane or helicopter flew over the yard, he would be gripped with fear and start yelping and heading for the house. Sometimes my bold brother and I would laugh, but usually I was the one to calm him down.

How in the world did he become afraid of these? I thought maybe it had something to do with my friends and I shooting at the planes in the sky with our toy guns. We would always pretend to be shot and fall down dead.

As with Jojo and Jaws, Baby Brother eventually got over being afraid of airplanes and helicopters.

Smilin' Gordon

One of my favorite school chums from Suburbia was named Gordon. He was probably of Puerto Rican descent. I only say that because his mother didn’t always speak English and she looked like what I thought a Puerto Rican lady would look like. He could have been Italian. Hey, I was still getting over meeting the Philippinos across the street. I was so white bread, I had “Wonder” written on my forehead.

Gordon was a genius in my eyes. He was my age, and he was working on building and fixing television sets as a hobby. I had him look at my old three inch portable reel to reel tape recorder, and he fixed it in a couple of days. I didn’t mind paying the couple dollars he asked for either. I considered him a good friend.

Anyway, I got in the habit of calling Gordon, “Smilin’ Gordon.” It didn’t matter what would happen to the guy. He always had a smile on his face. I used to tease him by saying, “I’m Gordon, and I’m failing school and my house burned down,” while wearing an exaggerated grin. He just grinned along with me.

The only time I saw his smile slip a little bit, was when his mother would get after him for something or other. Every time I heard her, she was always yelling at Gordon or his siblings. When she’d see me at the door, she would change to Spanish or something and continue her tirade.

I remember one day not long before I moved away for good, I went to the door to see Gordon, and his mother answered the door. My heart dropped to my knees, and I must have looked like I wet my pants.

Gordon’s mother answered the door and smiled at me. She told me Gordon would be back in a little while. The woman smiled at me and spoke to me in a friendly tone. You could have knocked me over with a dandelion.

Dads And Sons

A boy looks to his dad for clues of what it is to be a man.

My identical nephews are a classic case. They are about 3 years old, and they found their dad’s razor in the bathroom. After some quiet moments, they came running to their mother (my Baby Sister) with blood seeping from their lips.

After trying to keep from freaking out for a moment, Baby Sister took them in hand. The boys wore band-aids on their lips for the rest of the day.

Baby Sister Instant Messaged me later, to tell me about it. Our banter went something like this:

ME: I guess they will grow up to have full beards now.
BABY SIS: Or scabby lips.

This hasn’t even phased their quest to be like dad.

They are preacher’s kids like mom and their uncle. Bless their little hearts. They insist on wearing neckties during every waking moment, and one of them always wants to wear his “pretty shoes.” Those are his black dress shoes. He gets very upset if they are even dusty.

Every boy still seeks to be like dad. They are looking to him to know what it is to be a man, and they want to know if they have what it takes to be a real man. Every boy’s heart is ultimately vulnerable to his father. One thoughtful or thoughtless word can change a boy’s direction for life.

He came to my emotional rescue

Mike And The Mechanics sang a song called "The Living Years". It talks about every generation blaming the one before for whatever problems faults they see in their present lives. The chorus goes on to say that it's too late when we die to admit we don't see eye to eye. I can't remember all the lyrics or I would just post the whole thing. You can even look the lyrics up online, but I'll let anyone who wants to, do that on their own.

I can see that song ring true in my own family. Grandpa worked so much, my dad told me, that he never came outside to even play catch with his sons when he was home. Admittedly, he was probably pretty beat.

Dad made a point of playing ball with us. He would get on the floor and wrestle with his kids. Even Baby Sister loved that. We boys treasure those memories.

When I was in the second grade, my dad signed me up for little league. I'm sure I was in agreement, but I ended up hating every moment of it. That was the first indication of the differences between us.

Dad loved westerns as he grew up watching black and white television as new technology. He and I used to watch John Wayne movies together to our mutual enjoyment. I still watch and enjoy them now.

The Lord Of The Rings somehow didn't reach him. The books fascinated me, and now I won't settle for anything but the extended versions of the most recent movies made of them.

The Hobbit captured me so well; I began to write in the runes that were used on the map of Lonely Mountain. My preacher dad thought for sure that I was getting into the occult.

Then he discovered I was getting into the Beatles! These were obviously Satan's favorite servants. What would he have done if I had liked Black Sabbath?

By now, my dad was filled with fear and making wilder and wilder assumptions of my spiritual condition. Things were said and done to drive me into thinking that no matter what I wanted was wrong and taking me to Hell.

I felt God wanted me to pursue my music. I taught myself to play guitar chords and practiced more than with the clarinet I played in high school band, but it didn’t seem of any value with my parents. I say parents because Mom seemed to be in on this too.

I felt persecuted. It made me feel like Jack Black in "School Of Rock". I'm going to play rock and roll and "stick it to the man." I felt rejected by my parents, which is something I heard a pastor say recently is the most painful kind of rejection.

Pile the experience from yesterday’s entry on top of this, and you can see that I was tripping hard well before my first hit from a joint or my first drink.

I told myself that Jesus Christ is not coming back in my lifetime, so I’m going to numb this pain with any and every kind of thing I could find.

Before I could get the nerve up to do myself in more quickly, the Lord came to my rescue. He came in the form of a guy who used to bully me a few years ago. He had just gotten saved, and he found me in the local video arcade.

He told me he was looking for “a spiritualist church”. As I listened to him, I realized he was looking for a church that believed in the working of the Holy Spirit. I told him my church believed this way.

All in a flash, I knew I could at least help him by inviting him to my church. I realized that I had a purpose with God and this time Mom and Dad would approve. I repented and decided I would go back to serving God. I also took this guy home with me.

I never sunk quite so low again, but that didn’t mean my problems were solved. I had started some bad habits that took a while to come out of, but God had rescued me all the same.

When Dad passed away a few years ago, I realized with the help of my cousin who is also a pastor, that I had all this unexplained anger that would boil up from time to time. It all stemmed from the despair of these years. My cousin also helped me to see that my dad had not felt self-confident about raising me because he missed the first 18 months of my life when he was stationed in Germany in the Air Force.

I went to counseling at my current church. I found that I needed to forgive him for all that had happened between us and ask for forgiveness for judging him for supposedly condemning me to Hell. I prayed this in a prayer with the counselor and felt freed from a burden.

My only regret is I couldn’t sit down with Dad to talk about this because he had gone to Heaven.

Now, my approach to my own son is different. I even shared what had happened between my dad and me with him.

My dad did lots of things right and nobly. His dad did lots of things right and even nobly, but we are all trying to pass on improvement to the next generation.

Southern Battle

I was a preacher’s kid for most of my growing up years. I was a PK before Promise Keepers stole the acronym. (No resentment there.)

When my parents befriended a family that had begun to attend our church, my siblings and I naturally were thrown together with these new kids. I remember the two boys’ names, but can’t quite put my finger on the oldest daughter’s name. Anyway, the boys were Robert and Bradley. I was older than Bradley but younger than Robert.

When my family went to visit them at their rather small apartment, my brother (boy #2), Robert, Bradley and I were sent outside to play. All the space available to us on the apartment grounds was mostly the filled parking lot for the building.

Robert got the great idea to have us all climb the six foot privacy fence and go into the almost empty lot where some contractors had dug up the dirt a bit and left a “porta potty” standing grandly in all it’s aromatic glory.

The hot southern sun had baked the once wet dirt beautifully. It left us with an endless supply of the most perfect dirt clods a boy ever threw with all his might at his little brother. Yes, we had a dirt clod fight.

Since Robert had started the thing, he found himself all alone facing the rest of us. We naturally had him ducking and dodging. He was getting dirty twice as fast as we were, and I was thankful I would only have to answer for getting him dirty instead of being so dirty myself. It would have been hell to pay if mom saw us as dirty as Robert was becoming. Thankfully, too, it was Saturday, and we weren’t wearing church clothes.

Needless to say, Robert was feeling pretty overwhelmed by dirt clod impacts and began to focus on his own brother. He charged Bradley and flushed him from behind a small ridge of dirt, forcing him to take cover in the “porta potty”.

Bradley slammed the door and put the hook in the eye to secure it. My brother and I stood up to watch what would happen next.

Robert had accidentally or on purpose, gotten a rock and threw it with all his might at the “porta potty”. We saw a gaping hole in the thing, and the only sound heard was the whining of the bugs in the trees. There was no other sound.

Bradley’s hand appeared from the hole waving a foot of toilet paper, and he cried, “I surrender!”

The Magical Land Of Suburbia

Joe Cocker begins to sing and the 8mm film is rolling. On the screen is a family and two brothers with bikes are mugging for the camera. It’s “The Wonder Years” TV show.

I grew up within a couple years of that time in history. That could have been my neighborhood at one point in my life. I spent my third through sixth grade years in a suburb of a large city. The houses in my immediate neighborhood all resembled each other with the same color bricks and maybe three or four different styles. Ok, now I remember there were exceptions.

I think I will write occasionally about this neighborhood and its inhabitants because I plan to eventually get up the nerve to write down the story I made up about all the kids I knew in this magical place at such a magical time in my life. I call the story “The Magic Song.” This is only the ground work here.

We moved into a corner house with a detached double garage that was big enough to hold the car and eventually all our bikes and “big wheels”, and other treasures of kids in Suburbia.

I remember my black and yellow bike with the black banana seat with a sickly yellow stripe running down it. If I sat back far enough on the seat, I could easily “pop a wheelie” and then try to ride as long as I could just on the back tire. All you kids reading this may have to go to a museum to see this bike.

Since we had a corner house, we had lots of yard. We had a nice fenced in back yard with a cement slab six inches thick that was our patio or deck as you might say now. The side yard was between the fence and the sidewalk. We used this for football. The fenced in back yard had the swing set, but we still used it for baseball. The front yard had a plum tree or something like one in it and so us kids generally just lounged around out there. All this yard made it easier for the kids to want to come to our house to play.

The first day, across the street from the side door, I met my first girlfriend. She and her friend became regular visitors to the yard. Shortly, after that, I met the boy my age across the street from the front door that also came over quite a bit and educated me about the city’s professional baseball players and demonstrated their particular styles in our own games in the back yard.

Now I am the oldest of four siblings. There are three boys and a baby girl. I will refer to them this way: The brother younger than me but older than the youngest boy, I will usually call my brother. I’ll the youngest boy, baby brother, and baby sister is baby sister. Ok, you get the picture.

My brother, (boy #2), met his first friend two doors over from my baseball loving friend. I’ll call him Tattletale, and you can guess how I came up with that name. He was so anxious to tell on someone that even if he were involved in a particular incident himself, he would tell on himself as well as the others in the party. He’d be in just as much trouble, but it never stopped him from being Tattletale.

Tattletale was one of the kids that helped us out at Christmas time. We didn’t need to look at the Sears catalog so much as to look at the toys and vehicles in the driveway of his garage. They were the first ones to have cable TV. High tech toy of the rich in our minds back then.

These kids were our core group. Others came and went as time went on, but this was the first year.

My brother was four years younger than me. Baby brother was not quite two when we first moved to Suburbia, and Baby Sister wasn’t born until late that summer before I started school in that neighborhood.

They called my brother “the bold one”. He wasn’t afraid to ask for money from any of our adult relatives, which embarrassed me a bit. He was also to become some of the source of my frustration, but at the same time, we shared a room and a double bed. It could be either love or hate at any given moment.

One of his bold moments was the next year. My girlfriend moved away and some people moved in that looked of the Asian persuasion. In their house were two cute little Asian looking kids, and their first glimpse of us brought them running outside and pointing their fingers and shouting, “Bang bang!”

We played along and dropped like we were dead, and then got up and shot back. We were having such a wonderful time, that the little boy was walked across the street to play with us, but the little girl was taken into the house. That’s when my brother asked the little boy, “Are you Chinese?”

A frown appeared on the little boy’s face and he said, “I’m Pilipeeno and you die! Bang, bang!”

Our first cultural exchange.

Spare change?

I was walking in a park a couple of weeks ago when a woman came up to me from a small group of friends who were obviously camped on a picnic table for an unknown amount of time. She asked me for a couple dollars for a bus ride.

Now all kinds of thoughts run through your head. Is she scamming me for money for some sort of illicit habit? Does she not want to work for a living, but rely on the kindness of people she puts “the touch” on?

I felt I should give her the money. In my head there were these imaginary people scolding me for just wanting to give her the money. I have a couple of dollars that I knew wouldn’t break me or rob my own family of their basic needs. Why not?

Then the “moral missionary” and “pastor” from my upbringing speak up. I should make this some noble gesture as a “witness” for Christ. I could impart some life changing gospel message to her as I give her this money. Is that so important to justify giving money to someone that might actually be scamming me?

This “moral missionary” and “pastor” persona in my head is a legalistic, judgmental jerk in the eyes of someone who finds themselves in a tight enough spot to ask someone for money on the street.

I can remember spending my cash foolishly then coming up short and feeling the need to ask for money to cover my shortage for something I thought was more urgent than the foolishness I had put money into.

Real need or not, why all this turmoil?

I had to go back to the initial response. I felt I should give the money. It was God’s still, small voice speaking to me. I truly believed that.

The “moral missionary” and “pastor” persona could just as easily been the voice of someone other that God, as is the case with fellow believers more often than you would think or hope.

Maybe I compromised a bit. With the money, I gave her a “God bless” to pacify the “moral missionary” and went on my way.

I walk this road.

I've spent quite a bit of time working on my family's genealogy. I find it very interesting to discover the details of how my ancestors lived, moved and settled from place to place. I find I can estimate quite a bit from just a few facts recorded in public records.

My favorite thing to look at from time to time is my grandmother's diary dating from 1929 to 1934. She went from high school graduate to wife and expecting mother in those five years. When I read of her outlook on life in those years, I realize she hadn't changed all that much to the time when I knew her as my grandmother.

She wasn't a great author, but I can draw strength and life lessons from this valuable family document. Because she was open enough to write her thoughts down as honestly as she could, I feel I know her so much better than others in the family. I am richer for it, and feel I love her more fully than a lot of my family members outside of my wife and two children.

That was my father's mother. My other grandmother one-upped her. She spoke to me of quite a bit of her past as well as her hopes for me. I enjoyed the fact that though she didn't have it easy, she didn't give the uphill to school story. She told me how she faced things head on without trying to make me feel guilty about my own present life. She didn't write a diary, but spoke to me over coffee on Saturday mornings when I would leave my family sleeping at my mother in law's house to visit with her when I was in the town she lived in.

I was successful to some extent with my father and mother in drawing them out.

The oral history is rich. The stories should be treasured, good or bad. Time has a way of putting perspective on the high emotional and colorful stories. We can draw from these experiences.

I say all that to say this. I want to be open with my family, especially the ones that come after me. Sure, everyone has a desire to leave something behind in an attempt at an immortality that can be pointed to in a book or a song or family heirloom. The lessons and knowledge of the past experiences can be valuable.

I have recently come to know someone in my family that is in school near where I live. A strong desire welled up within me to want to get to know this person and share anything I have. I have come to realize that the openness I was willing to show was well received, but a bit uncomfortable for the recipient. It has to be a two way street. I woke up to this and found I could adjust. Not everyone feels as I do, so I could smother someone.

The machismo in me then kicks in and I think...I don't need to feel rejected or silly, I'll just turn away.

A couple I knew when I was overseas in the military had taught me about being open with people. You take a risk when you reveal yourself to others. You leave yourself open to possible hurt. They also taught me and I was soon to find out that the rewards of that lifestyle far outweighed the hurt.

The times I felt hurt or as I said above rejected or foolish, I realize tell me I am living more fully than if I were so careful of what others thought of me. This openness is who I want to be. To live this way is a gradual change and never overnight, but so far I can walk this road.