Category Archives: People

Odd Things @ Death: The Happy Birthday Rotating Cake Plate

14 Thursday May 2015

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Luna moth

Alice Haskell was quite a lady—vocal, dignified, competent, self-possessed. I met her when the senior pastor assigned her Senior Women’s Sunday School classroom to serve as my office, a dual purpose. She was indignant that her space had to be shared; whether she was totally serious or not, which I never knew, we made our accommodations with each other, which included several lunches and suppers together over the months to come, and much sharing of experiences. She extorted a promise that was against my better judgment, that I would not leave her town until I had firmly planted her underground. That promise was sealed with an exchange of tokens, like any sincere covenant. She gave me a metal cake plate that one wound up and it rotated and played ‘Happy Birthday.’ Of course, it had a chocolate cake on it to seal the deal. I planted bedding flowers in her garden by her house. In due course, Alice died. I officiated at her funeral. Within a year I moved on.

We arrived in our new house, ready to unpack boxes upon boxes, on my birthday. Sitting on the couch we were looking at the job we hated to begin when one of the boxes, that was sitting on the kitchen counter around the corner, began to play “Happy Birthday.” We got up, went into the kitchen, opened the box and, of course, it was the cake plate, but how it managed to rotate and play its tune, packed as it was, inside the box, left us puzzled. “Thank you, Alice,” was the only response that seemed appropriate.

The El in My Name may be Divine

13 Wednesday May 2015

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self-portraitA lot of people do not like the names they have been given.

My middle name is Lynn. For a long time I admitted that with the same resignation and regret that a person felt when beginning an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting–  “I am an alcoholic.” For whatever reason some of us grow up not liking the names our parents gave us. In my case it is because the name is sexually ambiguous. Boys often find that a challenge. Gary is not; it comes from the Germanic word for a spearman. Chapman is as manly as they come. But a lynn is a woodland valley, and more women than men carry it as their name.

I have known several men whose first name was Lynn, who used it with no more obvious self-consciousness than a Ralph or a Horace. That is, they got used to it. They knew who they were, and there was no ambiguity to that, at least no more or less than anyone else felt. And if orientation were the issue, those friends of mine who were named Rick, Doug, Bob, Peg, Mark, Carol had to wrestle with that more, and their names had nothing to do with it. They came out finally and knew who they were, a realization that their names neither helped nor hindered.

Through the years I have used my middle initial “L” to differentiate me from the other Gary Chapmans who pop up, as a draft resister in Toronto, on the FBI’s wanted list; as a singer-composer of Christian music, married to a more famous partner; as a lecturer and writer on marriage and the family. Then someone always asks, what does the “L” stand for?

As a youth I hesitated to say, so my Scout friends made up an answer. So I had the nickname “Lindsey” for a while– they didn’t know how close they came– but I might as well have said “Lynn” proudly. Jewish friends called me “Gershon Levi” because “Gary” is often the nickname for the Hebrew name Gershon, which means “convert” after all, and they knew I was a minister from a Coen family, hence “Levi.” Levi sounded good to me; after all I often wore a pair of them.

The Women’s Movement developed and with it the recognition of androgyny– men and women have more in common than in difference, including essential human rights. An androgynous name, like, say,  “Lynn,” made more sense. My parents were simply ahead of their time, as they named their sons with ambiguous middle names. Still I knew the reality was that they were hoping for girls, more each time they had a baby, until they gave up. After all, I had to admit that I was happier with Lynn than with the names Laverle or Carrol, that my brothers had, or the Connie or Jan or Joyce that other guys have had.

Lately I have been thinking about willows and meadows and woodland valleys, and summer ahead, thinking Lynn is not so bad, a lovely place really, a good name for a sensitive man who enjoys children and the natural world, who identifies with women as well as men in their aspirations for freedom.

My middle name is Lynn. It is a little part of who I am. Other things I hope stand out more. If anyone needs to know you can tell them. But you can call me Gary…or Mister…or Doctor…first…if you don’t mind.

My Start at Chicago Theological Seminary

12 Tuesday May 2015

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

I was moving to Chicago’s Hyde Park near the University of Chicago campus, driving a small rental truck with our apartment’s furnishings. The direct route from the Stevenson Expressway to Woodlawn Avenue was Garfield Boulevard, and I had been driving on that boulevard for about three blocks when I saw the flashing lights of a police car behind me. I pulled over to the curb right away.

“Where are you going?” the officer asked.

“Woodlawn Avenue south of 57th on the UC campus,” I answered, with trepidation. What I did not need at this time was a traffic ticket that I had no money to pay.  “Did I do something wrong, officer?”

“It’s illegal to drive a truck on a Chicago boulevard,” he answered. “May I see your license?” As I pulled my license out of my pocket, he asked me, “Are you a student or a teacher?”

“I’m a student in seminary and a pastor,” I answered, as I showed him my driver’s license.”

“Excuse me, Father,” he answered as he crossed himself. “If you’ll just follow me, I’ll show you how to get there.” He handed my license back to me, walked back to his car, turned off the lights, and pulled in front of me, waiting for me to drive the truck into the traffic lane and follow. At the next corner we took a right turn, and then a left, following a street that ran parallel to Garfield until we reached the Midway. He waved me forward, and I pulled up beside him. He yelled, “God bless you in your studies, and remember not to drive your truck on a boulevard.”

“Thank you,” I yelled back, but I did not add, “God bless you, too, my son,” although I wanted to.

The Hunger Simulation at a church conference

09 Saturday May 2015

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

In 1974 a concern for food deficits and hunger swept through the church and the nation. Famine in the Sahel and the rediscovery of large pockets of hungry people in the United States moved many people to take part in study groups, organizing, advocacy, and simulations. Simulations? In order to identify with hungry people, those of us who were not usually hungry had to remind ourselves what hunger felt like.

I attended my first Illinois Conference of the United Church of Christ Annual Meeting at Dekalb, Illinois, in June of 1974. I had attended many conferences, many annual conferences of the United Methodist Church, but this was my first UCC Annual Conference. I did not know what to expect. My ignorance went so far as to include what my registration fee covered. It seemed like a lot of money to me at the time. I assumed it covered the costs of the meeting itself, housing, and meals. It was the latter item that revealed that I had assumed too much. The cost of meals was not included.

I did not have much money in those days, living paycheck to paycheck and paying off education loans. I had a family of a wife and two small children who needed cash more than I did, so I had about five dollars in my pocket and a gas credit card for the travel. What else would I need?

The conference meeting lasted about four days, and my loaf of bread and jar of peanut butter had stretched about as far as I could make it stretch. I had access to plenty of water. I also had a conference dinner to look forward to, with a ticket that was prepaid in my registration fee. I felt very happy that the fee had at least covered that one meal. The dinner itself was elaborately set up in a grand ballroom with white tablecloths, napkins, glassware, and tableware, no plastic or paper in sight.

The servers had specific instructions that began with the serving of about ten people out of a hundred with hors d’oeurves. Then came the salads which were served randomly to about fifty out of a hundred, including of course those who had already been served. Meanwhile the grumbling had begun from those who had not yet been served. The servers just continued their quiet compliance with their directives. As a newcomer I did not yet have a voice, but I was in tune with the times and catching on to what was happening.  When the main course arrived, about seventy people out of a hundred had full plates with meat, potatoes, vegetables, and bread rolls. The rest got small plates of rice. In front of me sat a small plate of rice.

The dessert that followed the main course came to about thirty out of a hundred. The grumbling increased in volume and anger, and the faces of those who had received and eaten the extra food looked appropriately humble. Everyone scarfed down what was set in front of them. No one within my view was sharing anything that they received, although I learned afterward that some tables had several sharers when the dessert arrived. By the next business session, facing an angry audience, the planners of the simulation extended their apologies and promised not to surprise the attendees with such an ill-conceived plan again.

The rice that I ate was probably the best rice I have ever eaten, and the portion, though small, satisfied my hunger. I could return home with a clear conscience to a place where I had enough to eat.

The River Flows Both Ways: Following the Mekong Out of Vietnam and Cambodia

05 Tuesday May 2015

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TRFBWcoverThe remarkable and poignant stories of Hung Nguy and Hue Nguyen’s family from the 1960’s to the 1980’s, when they moved from Svay Rieng, to Bo Dau, and on to Ho Chi Minh City, then back to the countryside, and finally sought to leave Indochina, are told in The River Flows Both Ways: Following the Mekong Out of Vietnam and Cambodia, written by Gary Chapman and published in October 2014. After five years, a series of failed attempts, imprisonments and refugee camps, three teenage sons finally completed the journey to the United States.

The book is available from https://www.createspace.com/4977913,  http://www.Amazon.com, and your local bookseller.

Members of the Nguy family are interested in other peoples’ experiences related to their experiences in Cambodia and Vietnam, and their emigration, and other published memoirs, reported to chaplinesblog.com, or Email at gchapman@scciowa.edu

Erosion under the sidewalk?

04 Monday May 2015

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cropped-circledance.jpgThe church that I served for nineteen years stood on a steep hill. When a crew broke up the sidewalk in front of the church in order to replace it several years ago, everyone wondered what they would find underneath it. After forty years sections were cracked and uneven, and holes had developed. When the street caved in a year before that, with a hole large enough to swallow a car, we thought that the same caverns might have developed in other areas nearby, including the sidewalk. Erosion had obviously taken its toll, at least in the view from the top. Would there be gaping holes, and even damaged drains and pipes?

Yet when the concrete was gone, there were the sand and the gravel that had been tamped into place before the last sidewalk was poured, with little evidence that the water flowing downhill for decades had done much damage to that base. Where the old window wells had been filled, there was no sign of subsidence. In a few places the curbing, damaged by snowplows and weather, had allowed some erosion, but not nearly what we expected.

There has been a lot of social erosion over the same forty years, at the same time that there has been significant progress in some areas of justice and equality and understanding of diversity among people. The frequent outbreaks of crime and violence, alongside some severe cracks in the moral stature of religion as people practice it, make us wonder what is happening to the foundation of personal and social life. Our world is awash in money and choices for some people, not all of which are constructive. Masses of people are themselves in danger of washing away, sold down the river. Are there gaping holes underneath? Or are the obvious cracks and holes and unevenness just a sign of a need to replace the obvious areas of damage? To work on and replace the surface?

Our answers determine how radical we get with our proposed solutions. We need to check the foundations, and tend to them, but do we need to replace them? Is there more there than we suppose or expect?

The Gospel that we revere is radical in the sense of being rooted where we believe it has always been—in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. You will not get the sense that people need to tear the world up or each other apart when you listen to Jesus’ words or attend to Jesus’ actions. They live quite substantially in many of the world’s spiritual leaders, even those who come originally from non-Christian faiths.

It is certainly instructive to break up the surface once in a while, if only to examine what lies underneath.

The unexpected guest at the cat bowl

27 Monday Apr 2015

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Monkeys see, hear, speak no evil, Bangra.comWhen visiting the farm, I tried to fit into the family routines and help out with chores as we always did, making our visit less work for our parents, and giving us more leisure time together. This included weeding and harvesting from the gardens, chopping weeds from the soybeans, mowing the yards, painting whatever needed painting, washing dishes, and feeding the animals. The cats were fed at the back door. They fed themselves part of the time of course. Why else have cats except to reduce the rodent population? To keep the cats from wandering away, we had to provide a basic menu of some of their favorite items—mostly table scraps.

One evening I volunteered to take the cat’s portions out to their food bowl. My mother cautioned me that there might be someone else there to greet me, but not to worry, that animal would be happy just to fit in with the rest of the cats. I wondered what animal she might be talking about. They always had some raccoons and opossums nearby, and a neighborhood dog would sometimes come, so that is what I expected to see.

I turned on the light and stepped out the back door to see the circle of cats around the feeding bowl, noting that one cat had an unusual coloring—black with a white stripe down its back. The skunk’s face looked up at me, among the other hungry feline faces, with a friendly dare in its eyes, “Feed me or else.” With some trepidation I tried to act quite casually, and put the food into the bowl carefully, so as not to offend any of them by slopping too much onto their beautiful fur coats. The skunk pretended not to notice that I was new to the task, and helped itself to its share with the rest of the cats, while I slowly and courteously backed through the door, like any proper hired servant.

The Consolation of Being Lost in the Right Place

23 Thursday Apr 2015

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Luna moth

Out of the Streator hospital with the newest calcium channel blocker, I was on my way to see a cardiologist in Pekin. No cardiologist was serving at Streator at the time, and my GP, Dr. John, referred me to Dr. Riaz Akhtar at Pekin, 45 minutes in the opposite direction. I hadn’t been to Pekin in many years and never knew my way around the city, so I got lost. (This was many years before Garmin and GPS, but I did have a little Pekin map.) Jan was not with me on this first visit, she was in school, and, after having survived three events in which I expected to die, another stress treadmill and echocardiogram sounded easy enough to do by myself.

Finding my way around Pekin was not easy, though, and I pulled into the cemetery along the main highway, to look again at the map. There was no parking along the busy highway, and the cemetery provided no traffic and easy parking. I scanned the cemetery, and was surprised to see a familiar name, Glen Sims.

The Sims family was my prior connection to Pekin, and I had visited them there twenty years previously. Before going to Pekin, Glen Sims had been my pastor, and he continued to be my mentor through my years of college and first year of seminary, until a malignant brain tumor suddenly ended his life fifteen years before. That was when I had last been there, in that spot, though I had no memory of where it was. I had just came upon the place when I was lost. Beyond my parents and wife, no one had influenced my life more. I missed no one more. Since events had brought me unexpectedly to this place, and I still had enough time to make my appointment, it seemed a propitious time for him and me to have a conversation, tearful and refreshing. He always had that effect on me, a mixture of tenderness and joy.

Afterward I drove straight to Dr. Akhtar’s office. After the tests, and at a later appointment, Dr. Akhtar gave his advice. He was a no-nonsense cardiologist. My moderate exercise and diet and propensity to let events control my schedule, instead of my doing so, must change. I must gradually build up my heart like any muscle, since it was woefully inefficient as it was.  I must live on a low fat, low carbohydrate diet, no caffeine, no alcohol, and I must run or swim, not walk, six days out of seven, for at least forty-five minutes, or else. Or else, what? They could put in a new heart valve, but he wouldn’t recommend it, since they would have to do it again within a few years, and life would not improve without these other changes anyway. Fortunately he didn’t expect me to jump into running immediately. He advised that I enter into that exercise slowly and steadily, under Dr. John’s care, since he happened to be a runner also. And the other “or else?” A rule of thumb, he said—seven years of experiences like yours and you can expect to be dead, if you’re lucky.

I was very glad to have had that conversation with Glen Sims.

The Surprising Gift of Healing Touch

22 Wednesday Apr 2015

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3 OwlsAfter four years of relatively stable health, using the mantra of moderation in exercise (mostly walking and bicycling), eating, drinking, and scheduling, I found myself in midwinter trying to fit too many things into a few days when a snowstorm hit. My little Chevette slid into a snowbank, and, being such a little car, I thought I could push it out by myself. That didn’t work. A farmer’s tractor did the job. For several days afterward the physical stress increased, until one night I was again in full-blown distress. It was a night of ice, snow, and wind. Our home in Minonk was thirty miles from the nearest hospital, and driving ourselves was out of the question.

Jan called the local ambulance squad. Two friends, Paul and Jim, responded, with oxygen, monitors, and radio, ready to make the trip, usually thirty minutes, this time more than an hour. Jan stayed home with the children. I prayed and meditated, hoping that the wild pounding of my heart, sometimes racing, sometimes taking an alarming break, would become more regular.

By the time we arrived at Streator, I was much quieter and wondering if we should have just stayed home. My blood pressure and pulse were abnormally high, my oxygen level low, my lungs sounded full, and the ER doctor said he heard a loud “click and blow murmur” that could bear some watching, so he reassured me that I had come to the right place. Again, the blood tests, oxygen mask, IV’s, unknown medicines (no penicillin!), standard protocols. The worst part was being away from my wife and family, knowing that the roads would be closed to traffic for the next day or two, but thankful for the telephone to reassure each other.

The next day went slowly but uneventfully, with stats moving steadily in the direction of normal. Toward evening, into the hospital room came Jan, accompanied by Leslie Barth, one of the Minonk gentlemen who always did more than expected. Leslie was a large, good-natured man, a farmer, who had a suitably large, four-wheel-drive pickup truck with a snowblade attached. He had heard of our predicament and volunteered to bring Jan to Streator.

There were several helping hands during that trip and that hospital stay, not least of all Jan’s, but the most memorable touch that moved me came from the large, warm, gentle hands of Leslie Barth, when he took hold of my cold feet, as they stuck out at the end of the light hospital blanket. He held my feet and warmed them, and his warmth filled me, as he told me to get well, take my time, not to worry about work that other people could do while I was recovering, and remember that I was loved, respected, and wanted by him and many others. Thank you, Leslie, for that and more.

Hospital #2 and the Nurse Who Knew

21 Tuesday Apr 2015

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Monkeys see, hear, speak no evil, Bangra.comDischarged from the hospital, with a clean bill of health as far as bloodwork and the upper and lower GI tests could show, and scheduled in a week  for a cardio-stress test at the hospital across town, I went home with my doctor’s instruction to check back in if the symptoms returned. Five days later in the evening I asked my wife to drive me to the other hospital, where my tests were scheduled, after a few hours of increasing chest pain and arrhythmias, breathing difficulty, dizziness, sweating and nausea. I wasn’t ready to ask my fellow rescue squad volunteers to take me. A fellow has his pride, after all.

The ER doctor checked me in, encouraging me with his words that my heart sounded like a train speeding clickety-clack down the track. It felt that way too. He sent me to a regular room where I proceeded to get worse. In the middle of the night the nurse came in with the news that my doctor had given some orders at last.

No heparin this time, nor intravenous nitroglycerin.  He wanted to know how I handled a regular dose of nitro, in the little tabs under the tongue, up to three if I did not get relief right away. I took three in a few minutes succession, and felt much better. Miraculously better, I thought. There was also something to settle my stomach, which I took, although it already was feeling better.

The nurse sat down at my bedside and told me about her experience with nitro. She told me that she had angina that was stable and benign most of the time, unstable when she became overly tired or stressed, and she used nitro tabs when she needed them. Her situation might not be like mine at all, only tests would tell, but she wanted me to know that people lived with that condition, and it was a good sign that I had responded so well.

When I went home that time, with nitro tabs and beta-blockers, and still non-committal comments from my doctors, until that postponed stress test and more time had passed, the most helpful conversation was that one in the middle of the night with a nurse who had her own experience and the audacity to share it. Her casual suggestions about work pacing, stress relief, rest, limiting caffeine intake, and trusting that answers would be found proved to be the timely help that was needed.