Monthly Archives: October 2015

An Incident on the High Road

23 Friday Oct 2015

Posted by in Miracles, Travel

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , ,

Gold Camp RoadWe were driving the high road from Cripple Creek to Colorado Springs, named the Gold Camp Road, nine miles following an old narrow gauge railroad bed. Actually Jan was driving, since she didn’t trust me to drive and sight-see at the same time. I do love the scenery, and it doesn’t get any better than the Gold Camp Road. It was a one way, one lane road beginning at Cripple Creek until a tunnel collapsed in 1988, and now it is a hiker and biker trail, so this event occurred before 1988.

The Alpine flowers were in multi-colored full bloom in mid-summer, the clouds were high and sparse for a rare rain-free July day, and the views of the mountain terrain and the distant foothills and high plains were forever. No one else was ahead or behind us for miles, and Jan was driving about 10 to 20 miles per hour on the loose gravel, since one side of the road was cut from the mountain rock, and other was a steep fall that had no visible bottom. Once in a while she would stop so that she could enjoy the scenery, take a break from a nervous hold on the steering wheel, and we could walk through the flowers.

In a few places the mountain rock was cut so that the single lane ran through a narrow canyon with rock on both sides. That would seem to be a secure place, but as we were driving through one of the longest of these narrow one –way passages, we saw a large dump truck barreling toward us at high speed. You could see the gravel dust billowing out behind the truck. It was not slowing down, although it was plain that there was not room for both the truck and our little Dodge Colt station wagon inside the defile at the same time. There was not time for Jan to back up, nor was there room on the shelf behind  us for two vehicles side-by-side.

Jan didn’t even have time to brake to a complete stop. The truck just kept coming at full speed.

This was one of those moments that seem to last a long time, because you know you’re going to die. You have time to review your whole pathetic  life in an instant.

Jan pulled the car against the right side until you could hear the panels scrape against the rock, and we both let out a loud groan in our prayers—not to become a can of sardines squished against the rocks by a truck that was large and heavy enough to destroy us without leaving so much as a dent on its bumper.

I don’t know how the truck managed to squeeze past us with just a scratch on our rear view mirror. I think it was divine intervention. We had some time left to mend our ways.

“I never saw a cross-eyed preacher…but I’d rather see than be one.”

21 Wednesday Oct 2015

Posted by in Disabilities, Growing up

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

,

Self-potrait 1988

I was seventeen when I had the opportunity for a surgery that would either correct or confirm a visible defect. By that time I had worked for years to overcome the “diploplia” that was gradually making my right eye, the near-sighted one, more and more dominant, and my left eye, the far-sighted one, less and less effective. I had worked on muscle control exercises, used more and more prisms in my eyeglasses, changed lenses every few months, and tried bifocals, but I was still losing ground steadily in the muscle control of my eyes. Surgery was the only option left, if I was to avoid being cross-eyed and losing the use of my left eye.

Many people have had to deal with that physical defect at a younger age than I did, and many have not had an opportunity to correct it, but, whatever age a person is, the social costs are present, and a teenager, hoping for a public career, finds those costs daunting. I was not looking forward to eye surgery, which came at the end of my senior year in high school, but I was dreading the loss of eyesight and visible attractiveness more.

Eye surgery to correct the muscle arrangements for both eyes involved a three hour procedure with my eyes removed from their sockets, the ophthalmology surgeon reported, a two-day stay in the hospital, and a three to four week recovery with my eyes bandaged.  It was my first surgery. I remember being nauseous afterward; my reaction to the sodium pentothal used for anesthesia was extreme. I don’t know what I said to the nurses, but I’m sure it was the truth. There was a general concern that the violence of my reaction was not helpful to my eyes, but I couldn’t do a thing about it. When I was returned to my room, I had a roommate, who happened to be a shooting victim in serious condition. I couldn’t see anything, of course, but his moaning and gasping did keep me awake throughout the night. It was a good time to pray, and his condition was clearly more critical than mine.

In the morning a tray was placed before me, and I felt my way through the various items on it. I poured the carton of milk mostly into a glass and proceeded to try to drink it, finding that it was actually cream provided for the sticky mass in the bowl, making my gag reflex return. My roommate was transferred to intensive care, I was told. All in all I was happy to go home the next day. I worried about the results of the operation for the next three weeks, until the bandages came off. The whites of my eyes were still red, but it was so much easier to focus and see without effort that I was greatly relieved.

The surgeon was pleased with the results, and, even though they weren’t perfect, they were so much improved that I no longer had to worry about loss of vision. In fact my eyesight steadily improved for many years.

I still wonder what my life and career would have been like without that surgery and its successful results. Like anyone with a visible disability, I suppose I would have adjusted and done my best to overcome the reactions of people around me and tried to compensate with other abilities. I am thankful that I didn’t have to.

“We thought we heard a siren…”

14 Wednesday Oct 2015

Posted by in Church, Small town life

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, ,

Monkeys see, hear, speak no evil, Bangra.com

Making our home in Iroquois, Illinois, during my final year of graduate school provided a challenge to Jan and me and to the people of that rural village. Jan was pregnant with our second child and in charge of three year old Alicia without a support system other than the new friends we were making. I was serving a temporary appointment as a “student pastor” of the only church in town. They had broken away from a yoke arrangement with a church ten miles away. They were getting used to having their own pastor, but one who had no more time to give them than their previous “shared” pastor. In addition I was working on a doctoral project which turned our life together into research on how they responded to historical critical approaches to the scripture and how they were coming to grips with the social and political changes in the world around them. (That was the year that the U. S. involvement in Vietnam came to a formal end with a negotiated settlement. Racial politics and sexual roles were in widespread transition.) I traveled back and forth to Chicago every week to keep up with my doctoral work. We packed a lot into that year. Somehow both they and we survived it.

While we had lived in Chicago, Jan had studied with a fine vocal coach, Elsa Charleston, and regained the wonderful voice she had developed in high school and her first year of college, before she traded her vocal performance major for a Christian education major. In Iroquois she was on her own. Almost every day she crossed the street from the little house they had rented for us to the church, and used the piano to practice. She did the vocal exercises she had learned to do, and she worked on songs that stretched her abilities. The exercises included the “Tarzan yells” that Elsa had incorporated to increase Jan’s volume, support, and range.

One fine fall afternoon, two of the church members were in the yard taking care of the mowing and shrub trimming when they heard a sound that they had never heard before. Henry Easter stopped his lawnmower, and Tom the barber stopped his electric hedge trimmer and listened. It was coming from inside the church! They checked with each other as the sound continued, and they decided that they would have to investigate. They entered the building cautiously and stood in amazement at the back of the meeting room. They were listening to Jan’s practicing. Finally she glimpsed them standing in the back.

“Do you need something?” she asked.

“We thought we were hearing a siren,” Henry answered.

They obviously didn’t know what to think, not only about Jan’s practicing, but about our presence in their community. When the year came to an end, I received my degree, Nathan was born, and our interim appointment to serve that congregation ended also. Many shed tears at our leaving. Were they tears of sadness, or joy, or both? I’m not sure.

The Excitement and Fascination of Large Population Die-offs

12 Monday Oct 2015

Posted by in Death, Events, Learning from mistakes, Nature

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, ,

Monkeys see, hear, speak no evil, Bangra.com

As Granddaughter Willow has spent several summers in recent years working at The Mammoth Site in Hot Springs, South Dakota, we have joined for many weeks in exploring the fascinating deposit of bones left by scores of mammoths and hundreds of other animals of many species about twenty-six thousand years ago in a warm water sinkhole. Few other specimens of the giant short-face bear have been discovered, and the skeleton found here is impressive. New finds occur regularly, and the excitement that accompanies the discoveries grows with the potential new information about life in another era. The mammoths are almost entirely young adult males who have wandered away from the herd and sought the late winter, early spring abundance of plant food at the edge of the sinkhole, only to slide in the mud into the water and be unable to get a footing to climb out.

Another fascinating location, directed by a former member of The Mammoth Site staff and friend of Willow, is near Waco, Texas, which the President recently designated as Waco Mammoth National Monument. There a natural disaster, presumably a flash flood, destroyed a large herd of mammoths and several other animals, including a camel and a saber-tooth cat, all at one time, 65,000 years ago. As excavators remove tons of earth from that site, even more information comes to light about animals, plants, and climate during that era.

The Gray Fossil Site in East Tennessee, whose vertebrate curator also serves as the new director of The Mammoth Site, provides a deposit of animal and plant fossils in a marshy area, as-yet-undated millions of years ago. So much information lies buried there, along with unusual species, like an extinct red panda, giant tortoise, tapir, peccary, alligator, and rhinoceros, that excavation is expected to continue for over a hundred years.

As a graduate student Willow now works in the collections of the University of Nebraska, including thousands of specimens from the Ashfall Site in northeastern Nebraska, where a plume of volcanic ash from a mega-volcano in Idaho killed animals, birds, and plants at a watering hole twelve million years ago, and left populations of rhinoceros, horses, camels, and many other species in the region extinct, and the land became barren for hundreds of years. Other discoveries in Nebraska and Wyoming continue to add specimens to a collection that will help to identify a long pre-history of information on interactions of climate and conditions with plant and animal life.

These locations join with others popularly known, like the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles or Dinosaur National Monument in Utah, in providing extraordinary locations for exciting discoveries that can change our perceptions of the world and its development through aeons.

The dark side of all of this excitement is the fact that each site is the remnant of the suffering and death of thousands of creatures. Without such tragic events we would know much less about the world around us. In the future, perhaps, we will care enough for our own human species to study and discover why tens of thousands of human beings kill each other with guns every year, with no personal or social benefits as a result. That should be of interest and fascinating, too, though it appears to be harder for us to get excited about understanding that tragic and unending story in our own era.

I’m Not Done Yet!

07 Wednesday Oct 2015

Posted by in Caring, Church, Death, Faith, People

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, ,

dock at sunset

When I came to Burlington, Ann Parks was a member of the Zion Church Consistory and a member of the Burlington City Council. Ann had built a reputation for community service and interest in progressive causes; chief among them was her campaign to open a refuge for the victims of domestic violence, which came to fruition as the Battered Women’s Shelter. She and a woman of similar energy, Marcia Walker, also on both Consistory and Council, and several other church members active in community life formed a powerful team for public good, the likes of which I had seldom seen.

Within a few months Ann received the troubling news that she had cancer, and she entered into treatment with the same determination that she exercised in other matters. She had a family—a husband, two sons who were nearing adulthood, and a daughter who was nearing adolescence. She had public responsibilities and goals that were notable, and she had a strong desire to overcome the disease that was threatening her life.

Months of treatment passed with signs of hopefulness. Then came the finding that the treatment had ceased to be effective, and something else would be needed. I met Ann in the hospital shortly after that discouraging news. I don’t remember exactly what I said, probably something to the effect that I was sorry to hear that the cancer was spreading again. I do remember her immediate response, “I’m not done yet!”

She definitely put me in my place. She was not ready to accept bad news and yield to it. Plenty of people needed her, and she had plenty of things to motivate her to keep going.

Unfortunately the cancer overcame her within a few weeks in spite of her determination. Her memorial service was held at the large central United Methodist Church, which had more space than Zion for the crowd that would attend, and its pastor was a better-known public figure to host the service. He did invite me to speak a few words as her pastor, and Ann herself had provided the theme.

Ann had been right, after all, to say, “I’m not done yet!” She knew that many things remained to be done in the agendas she had chosen to serve, or that had chosen her. Even though she was no longer there to do the work, anyone who counted themselves among her family, her friends and her associates, knew that they needed to carry on with the same heart and determination that Ann had shown.

If we have a calling at all, it is a calling to do something larger than we are by ourselves, and it is often a calling to be engaged in something that is larger than one lifetime can accomplish. It was Ann’s, and it is ours.

Jan identifies with her mother so much that…

01 Thursday Oct 2015

Posted by in Caring, Learning from mistakes, People, Travel

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

,

dock at sunset

Three and a half weeks after her mother fell and broke her neck, nose, and three other compression fractures in her back, as well as badly bruised her face, her mother continues in therapy and in the care of staff in a nursing home. Jan spent twelve nights in all with her mother, attempting to work out the challenges of pain-relief and sleeping medications, staff responses, and keeping her neck brace in position without her mother removing it. Finally, a tentative stability achieved, Jan returned to her own life and got some rest.

One night her mother had spent several hours preparing for her first grade class of school children, identifying their individual needs, and strategizing how to meet those needs. Of course she retired nearly twenty-five years ago, but she had taught for more years than that, and it is easy for her mind to return to those years, even as she also slips back into the early years of motherhood, or childhood with her own mother. Jan could easily identify with each stage of her mother’s concerns.

Jan was nearly caught up with her rest, as we travelled to Lincoln, Nebraska, for an enjoyable day with Granddaughter Willow, a trip that we had postponed because of Mother’s needs. On the way back, we stopped at one of Missouri’s remaining rest areas. Gary took the Nguy family beagle, Odette, into the pet walking area. Odette had stayed with Willow for six weeks but worn out her welcome with her persistent demand to be outside when Willow needed to study. We volunteered to take Odette back to O’Fallon. Jan sat in the car, finishing a phone conversation.

When Jan got out to walk to the rest station, her toe caught on a parking barrier, and she fell face-first onto a concrete curb. Her face was bloodied, scraped, and bruised, but her glasses somehow escaped with just a bend in an earpiece. Gary came running when he saw Jan lying flat, put Odette in the car, and checked Jan out. She was bleeding profusely, but the two small facial cuts were closing quickly with pressure. Her nose was pouring, so we used Jan’s tried and true method of a small compress under her upper lip, and it began to slow, and finally stopped after five minutes.

A rest area worker came quickly when she saw us on the ground. She was so focused on Jan’s visible injuries that she stepped on the glasses, but she was so eager to be helpful that we could not fault her. A pediatrician and his wife were next to help. The doctor admitted that Jan was older than his usual patients, but the injuries looked familiar. He checked her over, said that one stitch or a butterfly bandage might be useful, made sure that she was not feeling pain anywhere else that might indicate a break, and discussed what to watch for in concussion symptoms, which were not appearing—no headache, vision or dilation effects, or confusion. The rest area worker helped Jan into the restroom to get cleaned up.

We made stops at Walgreens and CVS forty minutes later to get bandages, antibiotic cream, and antiseptics. We passed four hospital signs during the rest of the trip, checking with each other about the advisability of stopping, but we arrived at O’Fallon six hours later.

Jan had copied her mother’s accident, in facial injuries, but not in broken bones, fortunately. She had two seriously black eyes and a nasty abrasion on her forehead to alarm and impress Alicia, Au, and Symphony. Alicia had fallen down her stairway a few years ago and seriously damaged her knee. Jan could easily identify with her mother and her daughter in an even more intimate respect.