High Priest of Hospitality

After finding our bags tumbling out of the baggage travelator, Greta smiled, thankful that our cargo had arrived and that we wouldn't be waiting at the airport for extra hours.  It had been thirty-three hours in transit since we left home in Adelaide, and now that we were in the Midwest (much different than the swimming-in-smog-and-cigarette-smoke of L. A.) it felt as if we could relax a little bit.  Even as we were waiting for our bags, I kept anticipating bits of conversation punctuated with profanity, as seems to be the trend nowadays, but the worst I got was,

"I wish the dang bags would show up."

I love it.  It had been a long time since I'd heard the word 'dang' or its cousin, 'darn,' which were the polite way to consign anything unsavoury to the lowest confines of 'heck.'

Midwesterners in their polite and self-effacing way can make people feel comfortable.  Even as we were moving out to the curb to await our pick up, some of the other travellers would apologise having their bag move in front of us, or brush against our arm as we jostled to the noisy street full of slow moving, honking cars with drivers craning their necks hoping that they wouldn't have to make one more lap around the entire airport.

It only took ten minutes for Aaron to arrive.  He was so excited, as were we, that it almost seemed as if he was going to leave the car in drive as he jumped out to meet us.  From behind the windshield, his bright shiny cheeks, flushed red with excitement (come to think of it, his cheeks are always flushed red with excitement) he waved.  Stopping in the middle of the road, cars tooting away behind him, he put on his hazard lights and rushed over to us.  A big hug in the middle of the chaos and confusion of the pick up zone, and then he grabbed one of our bags and lugged it over to the minivan.

I've known Aaron for twenty-three years.  The reason I know this is because it's the exact amount of time that I've known Christine.  We three, along with four others, met on Youth Encounter, a company (now defunct) in Minneapolis that put together Christian ministry bands which travelled around the globe sharing the good news about Jesus.  If most people would have been a fly on the wall that day we met, no one would have guessed that we were going to be a Christian band.  The Aaron of twenty-three years ago had long, long straight red hair - head banging kind.  His face sprouted red freckles and the tufts of hair on his hands were red also.  To top it all off, he had a red guitar.  Aaron's ability to stay up all hours of the night being social, laughing, or talking was legendary, but there's no time to get into that now.  Needless to say, the middle aged Aaron driving us home to his house was a very different spectacle.

I can honestly say this:  I never would have imagined that Aaron would be driving a minivan.  Let me qualify that - I never thought that Aaron would own a minivan.

People change.  I know that's an inevitable reality, but I think society far too often gives up on people because of their present without thinking about how God can change their futures.  How many times in the Bible have people been overlooked because of their present circumstances?  Gideon - too young, too poor, too this and that; David - same qualities; Mary, mother of Jesus - young Jewish girl with seemingly no prospects for royalty; Even Jesus himself.  Remember Nathaniel's words, Can anything good come out of Nazareth?

I am included in the group of humans (perhaps most of us are) who discount people by their present rather than look long term at their presence.  As I have known Aaron for these twenty-three years and counting, his incredible affability, his good humour, his kindness and his immense talent have allowed many people in the Minneapolis area to know of this middle-aged-musician-cum-stay-at-home-dad/home-renovator.  His ability to be hospitable is immortalised, in my own memory, best in our trip to the bowling alley later on in the trip.

Aaron, Beth (a true living saint) and their three children, Ellery, the youngest at just a couple of months of age, took us out for a jaunt to throw fifteen bound marble balls at ten pins.  In the easiest of circumstances, bowling with three children is a test of will power, but as Aaron bowled with his children, laughed with us and even helped Beth change Ellery's diaper after an incredible nuclear explosion, he then drove us to the baseball game.  Anything to take care of his guests.

The world would be an even better place filled with more people like Aaron.

53J

It certainly seemed like a good idea at the time.

53J - that was seat I chose - near the front of the plane, multiple rows from the bathrooms so I wouldn't have to hear the constant, intensely loud sucking noise following five hundred people needing to urinate at least twice per flight.  I wondered why there were so many spare seats around the front of the plane, but there was nothing in my consciousness that screamed 'Red Alert!'

I should have looked closer.

53J is, of course, two rows behind 51A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H,I,J which happen to be section of the plane reserved for young parents, or what I will affectionately call now, the Nursery.  As Greta and I took our seats, we smugly looked around at all the suckers who were sitting so much farther back in the plane.  We would be the first ones off the plane (other than first and business class - don't get me started on my covetousness of those always-out-of-budget seats), we had close enough access to the bathrooms and to top it all off, we had the window and middle seats.  The only thing that could ruin it would be...

A noise emanated from the front, one that I'd heard many times before, but I'd forgotten how insistent and shrill and piercing and miraculous that it could come from such a small bundle of flesh.  As boarding was still taking place, a mother stood up quickly to rock the infant, probably less than two months old.  On her face was an anxious look, probably the nightmare that she'd been dreaming of for the last four months after they'd purchased the tickets.  Was this going to occur for the entire fourteen hour flight?

You bet your bottom dollar.

Her eyes were focussed on her baby, but her peripheral vision was on high alert for passengers who might be disconcerted by the bundle in her arms.

But that sound!  Like an alarm clock on extreme levels of steroids!

I looked at Greta who looked at me and our eyes widened with a realisation that this indeed could be a much longer flight than we could ever have imagine.  But that's when the humour started.  This baby's cry seemed to be like Tarzan's cry to the apes - AAAAAAA-aaaaaa-aa-aa-AAAAAA-aa-aaa-aa-AAAAAA.  Come to me fellow infants!  Bring your outside voices into the cozy confines of the fuselage!  We will unite as one to allow no sleep to this motley band of travellers!  Come.  Come share in the glory!

Within seconds the next parent popped up from her seat staring momentarily at Tarzan, eyebrows flexed, her own nightmare beginning.  Then the next.  And the next.  And the next.  They were like that 'Pound the Gopher' game where the contestant is given a mallet and gophers pop up all around him at various intervals.

All of the parents, mothers and fathers, were in different stages of mollifying nursing infants, when one baby would calm, the next would start up, which then in turn would set off the Nursery again.  Embarrassed faces, worried about the thoughts that were raging unseen and unheard towards them, knowing that every person from rows 52 through 57 was now pondering deep inside their souls, "Ah, so this is why there were so many good seats at the front of the plane."

As the cacophony continued (still before takeoff), the flight attendants were streaming towards the back of the plane with felt covered boxes filled with felt covered pouches which were handed to the residents of Fuselage City.  Greta and I opened the felt pouch and with simultaneous giggles noticed that the attendants had given us eyeshades, but also ear plugs.

Qantas thinks of everything.

As the plane began to taxi, I put my headphones in and turned on a movie, but the Nursery was in full force.  I turned the volume up, but it was impossible to entirely drown out the noise, and I'm sure God made us that way for a reason.  When people are hurting, lonely, distressed or anxious, our brains have been wired to do something about it.  When children scream that the pressure in the cabin is too much, we do something about it.  When children grow up and they scream about pressure, pain, loneliness or anxiety, we do something about it - not just placate them or distract them with toys, video games or even a nice little pat on the head - but listen, act and help.

The parents were doing a fantastic job of attempting to work with their infants, and I smiled four hours into the flight as the 'Pound the Gopher' game continued with moms and dads alternating the rocking, the shushing and the hoping that one of the other infants would not scream to wake their own child.  But never once did I see anything beyond frustration at the circumstances - none of the parents were angry with their child; it was only unmeasured love and everyone else was going to have to deal with their own selfishness.

This is what we do as faithful people.  In the midst of our own selfish desires to have everything we want on this long journey called life, together with people we may, or may not, have invited, flying over uncharted seas, suffering the 'potholes in the air' that Christine calls them, we take care of the kids.

When we alit in Los Angeles fourteen hours later less than two hours of sleep stowed in our bag of exhaustion, I put my carryon back together, pulled the earplugs from my ears and smiled at the parents.

They had made it.  Welcome to the club.

AAAAAAA-aaaaaa-aa-aa-AAAAAA-aa-aaa-aa-AAAAAA!

Goodbye 53J.

Here, There and Back Again

I remember reading Tolkein's The Hobbit when I was younger and my imagination was not only kindled but stoked to a raging fire by the incredible land that he had created.  After reading The Hobbit half a dozen times, Middle Earth was, I suppose, the Gen X version of Millenials' Hogwarts - a place of fantasy that seemed too real to be fake.  At the end of the book, we are told that Bilbo is writing his memoirs about his adventure and his understanding that the thirst for adventure is often drowned out by the desire to return home.

Bilbo's memoirs are entitled There and Back Again and in many ways, the title resonates deeply with me.

As I write this, it is 3:30 on a Wednesday morning.  I sit in the midst of two clicking clocks, one a cuckoo, and the other a mantle clock chiming to let me know that I'm up far too early in the morning and yet entirely helpless to go back to sleep.  My companion?

Madam Jetlag.

Our plane touched down yesterday afternoon in Adelaide, it's wheels skidded somewhat ungracefully on the tarmac, a jolt and a screech and then that growling noise of the engines that slows us down and always seems to make me feel as if we're about to crash into a wall at the end of the runway.  I looked past my daughter Greta's face to see a cloudy sky, marshmallow clouds painted grey on the underside, and I welcomed the thought of being back again.

The last three weeks had taken me there, back to the U. S. where I had grown up, not to a mysterious place of enchantment, of dwarves, dragons and surprisingly nimble wizards, no, nothing like that, just the Midwest of the United States, like an American Middle earth.  There are a startling number of positive comparisons with the Midwest and Middle Earth - the people seem settled, honest and open, roots pushed far down into the middle of the earth situated somewhere between contentment and frustration.  Talk of politics seemed to be anathema, although those who wanted to question Australia's views about the current American President's policies were plentiful.  I, perhaps, was probably the wrong person to ask, and as a pseudo Australian ambassador, I sadly professed to know only what the media asked me to swallow (or force-fed me, depending on the topic), and talk quickly moved on to other things, the weather being most prominent among them.

Midwesterners seem to be content to put their feet up at night, to have an early supper, an early nightcap and an early to bed.  They gather at church on Sundays; they meet at the local restaurant for lunch; their language is not often tainted by profanity (unless they might be playing cards) and as they watch the setting sun, they, as a stereotype, are quick to thank God for the day that had been dealt for them which had been shuffled from infinite possibilities.

But I get ahead of myself.  Perhaps we start from the end - knowing already where the trip has taken us, like Bilbo's reflection to Lonely Mountain (or Erebor) where a whispered treasure was located.  Traveling with thirteen other people, Bilbo finds that on his journey, his greatest treasure is the memory of what he experienced, not the souvenirs he put in his basement.

These reflections will be mine, and maybe mine alone.  In all our reflecting for writing memoirs we most assuredly misrepresent the reality of what actually happened because the emotional attachment to the memories clouds the factuality, but whether I write down a statistical representation of the places we went to or the feelings glued to them, I think in my own mind I find Truth.

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit, not a nasty, dirty, wet hole filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down and eat; it was a hobbit hole, and that means comfort...

I don't live in a hole.  In fact, it's quite the opposite.  In the front bay window that looks out over the cul de sac and into the front yards of various neighbours who, by all accounts, are hobbit-like like myself, except for one neighbour who is particularly attached to late night activities with thumping music and the sounds of various atrocities being perpetrated by video gaming (much to the chagrin of all the other middle-aged hobbits) is a quilt rack.  It is made of a nondescript wood, not that it doesn't have a description, but I don't know enough about wood to be able to label it.  The odds are it is something like maple, but I won't guess. (Even though I just did.)  On the three arms of the quilt rack are draped small blankets that are used at night for lap blankets.  All the other amazing quilts are situated on beds during the winter so the quilt rack looks almost bare.  Many of those quilts have been made by matriarchs in my history and each one of them has a story, but we won't set off onto that journey yet.

Before we left to go back to the United States, I pondered the adventure that was about to occur, or at least my expectations of it.  I knew that I would be visiting family and friends again, a trip into the Canadian boundary waters for fishing and fun, a trip into the past to visit my grandparents, but beyond that, I had imagined, or at least mentally created what we would be going to do.  It's a fun thing to imagine the future, and as of this point in my life, I have never painted the picture correctly.  Certainly, there are brushstrokes that have come true, but for the most part my imagination of the future is quite faulty.

When we imagine the future, our inner Da Vinci's draw the BCS (Best Case Scenario).  The reality of those pictures seem to be masterpieces and we can't wait to get to them, but more often than not what we get is a Picasso, a Cubist distortion of what we expect broken up into odd juxtapositions of reality and fantasy and it is in the eye of the beholder (and also the artist) to understand the TCS (Truest Case Scenario) of what occurred.

As I sat on the sofa before we left, I channeled my inner Jules Breton (If you don't know Breton's works, find them online - incredible pastoral scenes!) and attempted to paint a realistic picture of what was about to occur.  I knew that there would be mountains, rivers, lakes, plains and even a dragon lurking somewhere, and as I drew the map of my own Middle Earth, my heart bounced with anticipation.  What would be different?  How can the Midwest possibly be exciting?  What Smaug-like dragons would be slain on our quest?  What about traveling companions?

So here we start in my comfortable hobbit hole reflecting on the there and the back again.  Join me for a journey, if you'd like.