personal – Page 3 – shoutforjoy.us

“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

I have already relayed the fact that I was named for both of my grandfathers. What I haven’t mentioned yet is that I did not learn what my name was until after my 6th birthday.

When I was born at Swedish Hospital in Minneapolis, on June 14, 1955, my parents, B.J. and Charlie, had not yet agreed on a boy’s name. So the discussion continued. My mom, B.J., wanted to name me after her father, Cranford. Now Cranford Williams Ingham had never used his full first name. It was always shortened to “Cran”. Interestingly, his middle name was the last name of the doctor who delivered him, who was one of the few women doctors in Wisconsin in 1900. Charlie couldn’t stand the name Cran, so he said, “No son of mine is going to be named Cranford!” He wanted to name me Joseph, after his father. As I mentioned before, Joseph never used his name, either, except for perhaps as a child. People called him “Free” or “Freeman”, because he was a “free thinker” or atheist. He died two years before I was born of a heart attack. B.J.’s response to Joseph was, “Joe’s Bar, Joe’s Hardware, Joe’s Diner! It’s too common!” They kept arguing for three days after I was born. This is when I remind the readers that my parents met in law school. The hospital had to fill out the birth certificate before we were discharged. They told B.J. and Charlie that if they could not agree, they would just fill it out as “Baby Boy Coulter” and that would be my legal name until I was 16, the minimum age to legally change a name in Minnesota. (That wouldn’t have damaged me a bit.)

My folks arrived at the compromise and I was named “Cranford Joseph Coulter” with the agreement that I would be called “Ford”. The name Cranford was never spoken in our household. My sister, Sue Ann, who was almost 27 months old when I was born, got her F’s and S’s mixed up, so she called me “Sord”. Everyone thought that was cute, so they all called me Sord as well. It took a concerted effort to correct everybody, including me, to pronounce my name correctly as Ford, before I started kindergarten at Robbinsdale High School on Tuesday, September 6, 1960. That’s me (above) in my kindergarten picture wearing my Nixon-Lodge button on my wool tweed sport coat, like a proper little WASP.

During the summer of 1961, we moved out of the small, Dutch colonial on Shoreline Drive, Robbinsdale, and into the spacious, four bedroom colonial that my dad “built” at 4845 Lowry Terrace, Golden Valley. Charlie had acted as his own contractor, using the plans he had purchased from American Home magazine. It had won the prize for “Best Home for the Midwest”. It was the first home featured in a magazine to have a family room. It was a great house to entertain in. It had a formal living room and dining room, two fireplaces: one in the family room, and one in the basement. It had a master bath, a kids bath with two sinks, and a powder room just inside the back door and by the doors to the garage and the basement. My brother, Tic, and I each got our own bedrooms, since we were six years apart. Our sisters, Alison and Sue Ann, were just two years apart, so they still had to share a room until Tic went to college.

It was the last week of August, 1961, when B.J. took me to register for 1st grade at Noble Avenue Elementary School. We were standing just inside the doors at the end of a long hallway. A woman was sitting at a card table with notebooks with all of the pupils’ names and information in them. When it was our turn, the lady at the card table asked my mom for her child’s name. My mom said, “Coulter, Cranford.” I pulled on my mom’s arm and said, “My name isn’t Cranford.” She turned to the woman at the card table and said it again, “Coulter, Cranford.” This time, I hid behind my mom’s skirt and tugged on her arm, and exclaimed through tears, “MY NAME ISN’T CRANFORD!” She turned to me and said, “Your name is Cranford. Your nickname is Ford.” Then she turned to the lady at the card table and said, “His name is Cranford. His nickname is Ford. Mark his file.”

That’s how I learned that my name was Cranford. That evening, at dinner, my dad told me not to worry. As soon as I turned 16, we could legally change my name to Ford. All through grade school, none of the other students found out my real name. None of the teachers ever called roll with anything but “Ford Coulter” or “Coulter, Ford”.

On September 5, 1967, I started 7th grade at Carl Sandburg Junior High, Golden Valley, across the street from the Honeywell factory, where they manufactured the MIRV devices for nuclear warheads. Because of that factory, we were told, Golden Valley was the #16 priority target for a nuclear attack by the U.S.S.R. We were told a lot of things. Some of them were true.

Sue Ann had warned me that I had better talk to my teachers before they took attendance if I wanted to keep “Cranford” secret. I made sure to dash to every class on the first day of every semester in junior high to notify my teachers to mark their files with my name as “Ford”. None of them ever called “Cranford” out loud in my three years there. One leak did happen, however, at the beginning of second quarter in 7th grade. To be more efficient, homeroom was incorporated into 1st period. In my case, that was Mr. Nordstrom’s “Project Social” Sociology class. I was in the “Enriched Program” for Science, Math, Social Studies and English. The rule was that if one did test to qualify for all four subjects ‘enriched’, one was only allowed to take three of them and had to opt out of one of the subjects. However, there were ten of us, out of a class of 750 who scored so high that they allowed us to take all four subjects enriched. Two of the other boys also took German and choir, as I did, so we ended up with identical schedules for three years. The school wanted me to skip 7th grade, but my mom wouldn’t let me.

Back to the story. One morning at the beginning of the 2nd quarter, before the beginning of homeroom, I heard someone say, “Who is this Cranford Jose’ character?”

Mr. Nordstrom had posted the computer printout of the class’s grade point averages for the first quarter. The printout didn’t have enough character space for my entire middle name, so now I was the British-Mexican foreign exchange student. A few of my guy friends called me Cranford Jose’ or just Jose’ from then on. Half of the students from that class ended up going to the new, Plymouth Junior High for 8th and 9th grades. I stayed in touch with several of them. When I was starting my second year of college, I went to visit a couple of my high school friends at the main campus of the University of Minnesota. I was about to enter the Coffman Memorial Union, when I hear someone holler “Cranford Jose’!” from across the commons. It was my old, Finnish friend from 7th grade, Tapani Temul Lahti!

When I got back to Robbinsdale High School for my sophomore year, I decided to drop out of the enriched program for everything except math. (Math had been accelerated by a year since 5th grade.) I also decided to stop ‘correcting’ my name with the teachers. So any students who met me for the first time were introduced to me as Cranford (the kids from Robbinsdale Junior High). So half the kids knew me as Cranford and half knew me as Ford. I would sometimes encounter a group of kids and someone would address me by name, and the light would go on with someone, “Oh no! This Cranford person and this Ford person are the same person!” I had reputations. When I turned 16 just after my sophomore year, Charlie was ready to take me down to the courthouse to change my name. I disappointed him by letting him know that I preferred Cranford and intended to keep it.

My wife’s middle name, given to her at birth was Williams, for the woman doctor who had helped her mother survive several miscarriages and a still birth after the birth of her older sister Susan and helped her mom finally come to term and deliver a healthy baby girl, ten years later. Bethann dropped that name and has used her maiden name, Reber, for her middle name, since we got married in 1975. When we went to North Memorial Medical Center to deliver our first child, our doctor was out of town, so his partner showed up to deliver April. His last name was Williams. April’s middle name is Marie.

Scott

Scott was a good friend of mine in junior high. He was on the ski jump team. At Theodore Wirth Park, there was a huge, wooden ski jump. Next to it, was a smaller jump built into the hill. Scott would be there, training with his jumping skis. I would be skiing on the downhill slopes on the park board slopes on the Saturdays I couldn’t get away to Wisconsin, or after school. One Saturday, Scott found me and let me use his jumping skis on the smaller jump. What a thrill! He tried to coax me to go off the big, wooden jump. I knew I didn’t dare. The likelihood would be I would jump off the wrong side of it. Another Saturday morning, Scott finished with his jumping practice. He had forgotten to bring his downhill skis and didn’t have a ride home until later. He found me and persuaded me to share my skis. He let me use both my poles. He just used a single downhill ski. He taught me how to ski downhill on one ski! That was a useful skill. The rope tows were a little tricky. I would end up slowly wilting to one side and pull all of the other passengers on the line down with me into the snow.

Scott was a beautiful boy, and charming. He had a fort he had built behind his house. In the summer after 8th grade, guys and girls would hang out at his house. Couples would use his fort to make love. I was not aware of this until my girlfriend told me it was “our turn”. I declined. I was caught completely off guard. That ended my relationship with that redhead. That was OK. I am so glad I waited until marriage.

During junior high and into high school, Scott was one of those who called me on a few occasions contemplating suicide. My sister, Sue Ann, and I, it seems, were known as the suicide counselors for our junior high. How that came to be is anybody’s guess. All I know is that Scott and I spent time talking, listening, crying, laughing, renewing a reason to live.

We went to different high schools. The night in 1972 in our junior year when Scott killed himself, he did not call me. It still hurts. Scott was the fourth of my friends to commit suicide.

(You may purchase this painting on my art sale site: www.shoutforjoy.net )

First Haircut & Robin Center

Mrs. Pool lived next door (on the back door side). All of us kids called her Aunt Helen. Her husband, at least I think he was her husband, who had very little hair, gave me my first haircut in a little shop in the back of the house. I’m not sure of the relationship. I didn’t like him. I am told that I cried and screamed when he cut my hair. He didn’t seem to be around much. It wasn’t a regular barber shop. He was very quiet, unlike any other barber I’ve met since. Aunt Helen’s house was the one house in the neighborhood that was the typical cottage style, with a white picket fence. She baked cookies for the kids, too. It was a little creepy for a lot of the kids. I liked Mr. Kuperman much better. He had the shop in Robin Center. We could walk down there. It was only a block and a half away. He would always wink at my mom and give me the quarter change from the haircut, if I “was a good boy.” He was Jewish and had escaped from a concentration camp in Germany. He talked with a Yiddish accent, I ended up going to kindergarten and all through school with his nieces and my older sister was in his son’s class. I think his son and my sister ended up practicing medicine in the same hospital for awhile.

Robin Center was built in 1955, the same year I was born, the crest of the Baby Boom. The land it was built on had been turned over to the state as useless swamp land by someone who was fed up with paying city taxes on unbuildable land after the town had encroached on what had been a rural area prior to WW2. An enterprising citizen of Robbinsdale redeemed it from the government; then shipped in fill. At some places the swamp was forty feet deep. The shopping center had to be built on pylons. It has stood the test of time. It has had two face-lifts, one in the 1980s and one at the turn of the millennium. At this writing, it is still prospering.

Mr. Kuperman’s shop, the Mother Goose Stride Rite shoe store and the Fanny Farmer candy shop were all in a row there. A giant goose in the middle of the shoe store would dispense a genuine, 1921 or 1922 silver dollar each time we bought a pair of shoes. I was born with malformed joints in my ankles, knees and hips. Until I was three, I had to wear braces on my legs and feet when I slept. Whenever it was time for me to get shoes, there was only one choice for me to make: brown or black. They were always corrective wingtips. I couldn’t wear them home, because the special heels had to be installed. For all the good they did! I spent my entire childhood with bloody ankles because of those shoes! I remember the feeling of jubilation of successfully rounding the landing going up the stairs in the house on Shoreline Drive, only to have my face firmly hit the top step as my right toe predictably hooked my left ankle.

More than three decades later, October 1993, in a follow up visit with an orthopod after my acetabulum had been shattered and my ilium fractured in a motorcycle accident, the doctor asked me if I could walk. I told him that I had walked into his office, so, yes. He was looking at my hip X-rays and told me that this was impossible. He had been practicing his specialty for over 40 years and had never seen anything like this. I told him that it was rather difficult for the first three weeks after the truck hit me, but I was OK now. He said, “No, I’m looking at your good hip. You should not be able to walk!” I told him that I have congenital hip. He said that he knows congenital hip, and that there is no way I should be able to walk with these hips. This is not that. “Are you sure you can walk?” I told him that I used to run cross country. He looked at the X-rays again and just shook his head and said that it was “weird” and asserted again that with my hips, it should be physically impossible for me to walk. That’s how I received a professional evaluation that I am weird to the bone.

Revisiting that first haircut, many children have traumatic reactions to the first clipping of their hair. Tonsuring in the taking of monastic or priestly vows in various religious traditions is rooted in this primal, childhood reaction to this. The first haircut signifies the infant’s entrance into the community. All transitions have their measure of stress or trauma. There was always a small clipping of hair, or tonsure, at infant baptism in the ancient church, and to this day in the Orthodox Church. Growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, hair, length of hair, hair styles, were all a big deal, and focus for fashion, discussion, and even conflict.

In Minnesota, it was against the law for women’s beauty shops to cut and style men’s hair or for barber shops to cut and style women’s hair. I knew this, because my mom told me about her beautician’s (who was a gay man) after hours business for gays, transvestites, etc. My parents were very active in the Republican Party. They had met in law school. They had no fear or problem with homosexuals. They would have defended this man had he ever gotten in trouble for his practice. I ended up disagreeing with almost all of their political views, but I am indebted to them for my basic sense of justice and the respect of true equality of all regardless of race, gender, mental ability, nationality, birth status, or age. They taught us very clearly that no human is illegitimate! Our next-door neighbors, who had escaped Auschwitz, were shining, ever present examples to never let anyone tell you that anyone else is sub-human!

How’d we get from haircuts to here? This is how this memoir will go, I’m afraid. I am in tears and catching my breath.

Monochromatic Hero and Suicide

On Sunday, I painted my first monochromatic painting. It is an 11″ x 14″ acrylic on stretched canvas of André Trocmé in burnt umber. He is one of my heroes. That turned out so well, I followed it on Monday with an 11″ x 14″ painting of Bobby Glaeser in phthalocyanine blue. Bob was a classmate and neighbor of mine growing up. In early December 1974, a year and a half after we had graduated high school, he killed his parents, his younger sister Ann, and himself, with a 12 gauge shotgun.

André Trocmé was a Huguenot pastor in southern France. Before and during the Nazi occupation of France, he led his city and the neighboring city and surrounding countryside to give refuge to Jews fleeing Hitler’s genocidal death camps. It started with the boarding school his church ran. He did not believe in discrimination, so the school accepted Jewish students, who wore the school uniforms and lived lives indistinguishable from the Christian students. It grew into families sheltering families. He trained them on how to blend in and how to respond to the authorities. They set up an underground railroad to help families escape from France to safety in non-Nazi occupied countries. No one in their network betrayed a refugee into Nazi captivity. His nephew’s class was raided, where he was teaching a few dozen Jewish children. The Nazis seized the children to take them to a camp. Trocmé’s nephew insisted on going with them, as their teacher. He died in the concentration camp. It is estimated that they saved over 3500 lives.

I read Pastor Trocmé’s story over 30 years ago. It was also made into a movie. As always, the book was better. He had corresponded with Dietrich Bonhoeffer and with Gandhi. He was a pacifist and had a strong ethical belief in honesty, charity and non-discrimination. He never made excuses for having to lie to the authorities. He felt that it was still sin, but to tell the truth would make him complicit in the deaths of fellow human beings, which would be a greater sin. He had been taught a hard lesson by his strict father, when he was a lad. He learned that it was not only right to do good; “it was essential to do the good on time!” It was his position that Hitler’s rule, the rise of the Nazis, and World War II was totally preventable, if only people of good conscience in Germany had done the good on time. Once he and his cohorts were in power, it was too late to stop him without doing evil and causing death and destruction. This is an important lesson and one that America needs to heed today.

We have both major parties putting forward the most despised presidential candidates in our history. Both are bigots. One is a capricious fool; the other is a shrewd politician committed to endless war. One would incarcerate Muslims and Latinos here; the other would (and already has) kill Muslims, Latinos and others overseas. They have 30% acceptance rating between them from the electorate. Yet people are deciding their votes on fear of one or the other, instead of doing the right thing and rejecting both.

It is time to do the good on time.

Bobby was a good friend in grade school and junior high. His family lived two blocks away from mine in Golden Valley, Minnesota. We would bicycle together, sled and skate together in the winter, and sometimes camp out in our backyards together in the summer. He was a beautiful boy! He was handsome, with thick, dark hair, athletic and smart. All the girls loved him. Most of the boys wanted to be him. He did not appreciate all the attention. He was shy and became more withdrawn in his junior and senior year in high school; to the point of not allowing any pictures of himself to appear in the yearbook. This painting is based on his two pictures in the 1971 Robin. The pose is from the soccer team’s group shot, but his eyes were closed, so I looked at his yearly picture for details of his face.

The last time I saw Bobby was in the spring of 1974. I was visiting a few of my friends at the University of Minnesota’s main campus. At that time Pioneer Hall was for both men and women; every other room for each gender. I greeted Bobby as he darted stark naked from the showers to his room. I was shocked at this, not because of modesty, but his apparent lack of it. He had changed, and changed radically. Early December, 1974, we heard the news that Bobby had shot and killed his father, his mother and his sister, Ann, then himself, with a 12 gauge shotgun in the middle of the night in their Golden Valley home. A neighbor discovered their bodies four days after when North Memorial Hospital called her to check on his father, because he had not showed up for his on call assignment. He was a doctor.

Bobby’s case was written up in a feature article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. He had suffered some sort of mental breakdown prior to this and had been in treatment. He left the treatment and had been alienated from his family. They reached out to him. He was home for dinner that night to discuss re-entering treatment as an inpatient. After they had all gone to bed, Bobby got his hunting gun and shot his parents and his younger sister while they lay in their beds. Then he shot himself.

The four of them had a joint memorial service at Valley of Peace Lutheran Church. Their were four, beautiful Christmas wreaths on stands in the front of the packed church. Pastor Stine gave this horrible message. He said, “Heaven is God’s gift to us at Christmastime. Bobby gave his family their Christmas gift early.”

I got up, then and there, and walked out of that church! What an ass! This was the same ignorant pastor who had kicked me out of confirmation class one month shy of completion for asking too many questions about heaven and hell, and how one gets to heaven, after my best friend, Steve Rainoff had died by falling through a skylight, chasing a soccer ball, in a locked school in New Jersey.

In the spring of 1975, the Mpls. paper had a feature article on Angel Dust. The authorities had just seen a rise in its use. The symptoms of its use and long-term effects sounded just like Bobby. I have always wondered if he could have been exposed to that, and that is what changed his personality so never know.

I painted his portrait in monochromatic phthalocyanine blue, from a happier time in his life. Bobby was a beautiful boy. He had all the advantages. That could have been me.

My Wonderful Weeds!

I was released from the hospital late Thursday night, after six days to treat an infection in the suture line in my chest a month after open heart surgery. I got home close to midnight because we had to wait for the delivery of the wound vac, which the nurse then had to attach to my chest.

Friday morning, I finally was able to walk in our little yard. I have not been able to weed or do any yard work this year. The crownvetch and the Queen Ann’s Lace are everywhere run amok. Yet I planted so many daylilies and native flowers over the years that they are holding their own pretty well! The Sears Tower bloomed for the first time! Gorgeous! It is so stately right next to the huge, gangly Purple Suspenders. The Coneflowers and the Buttonwood Bush are putting on quite a show out front, next to the hyssop and liatris and brown-eyed Susans.

The tulip poplar sapling that was poisoned by something, survived and has put out new leaves. The Florida Tetrapetal St. John’s Wort has surprised us once again. It never comes up where I scatter its seeds, but we always manage to have some in our yard. (The birds have been kind.) We just had one blooming in front of the house. While I was in the hospital a couple popped up in our Monarch Garden in front of the back shed and one is peeking up through the ‘weeds’ on the wildflower hill on the other corner of the backyard.

FL tetrapetal St. John's Wort is pale yellow, upper middle — FL tetrapetal St. John’s Wort is pale yellow, upper middle

There are little surprises on the wildflower hill: tiny false sunflowers, nearly hidden daylilies, native beebalm, a tiny holly bush. The rabbits scurrying through. It has an untamed beauty. I even appreciated the invasive, Queen Ann’s Lace as it just floated above. I wept as I beheld my wonderful, wonderful weeds!

Stoplight daylily at the end of the driveway

Reset

On June 8, I had open heart surgery to replace my aortic valve, which had been damaged by an infection. It all happened quite suddenly. We only discovered the damage on April 4, when I had what we thought was a stroke. It turned out to be a severe TIA. It was serendipitous in that it triggered a battery of tests that uncovered the weakness in my heart. It needed fixing quickly. The doctors at Penn expedited my case. I had my heart catheterization on May 9 to make sure I didn’t need any bypasses or stents.

At 6am on June 8, Bethann & I went to the Hospital at U. Penn. and checked me in to pre-op. Later that day, I was so happy to wake up alive! Bethann told me that my first words were: “Where is my keyboard? I want my keyboard.” I wanted to write. Once I got my keyboard, I couldn’t focus to write anyway. I haven’t been able to focus to write or to paint since the surgery. My days have been full of visiting nurse visits, doctor visits, walks, naps. I have researched subjects to paint. I did one sketch that was less than satisfactory. I finally decided to start over where I started in April; with a self-portrait. That is why I call this painting “Reset”. I’m using it to reset my creativity to get back on track writing, painting, editing, etc.

This painting is based on a photo I took using my Mac just before my surgery. My granddaughter Isabella saw my hair blowing around in my face when we were riding in the back of their car. She said I looked like a rock star with my hair in my eyes. I had already started painting this when she said this, but had not painted the face yet. In the photograph, the computer screen is reflected in my sunglasses. I decided to paint a door opening into a light filled room, instead.

Godfather, 4438 Shoreline Drive

I am the youngest of four siblings, yet my memories have always gone back further than my sisters and brother. This is a painting of the house where I lived for my first six years (June 1955- June 1961). It still stands. The outside finishes and windows have been updated, but it is still the same tiny Dutch Colonial. It is almost totally obscured by trees on Google Earth. When we lived there, those Google Earth shots would have been impossible! The place was literally crawling with children! (also skipping, jumping, climbing, hiding & seeking, chalk drawing, running,etc.) 1955 was the crest of the Baby Boom after all. Crystal Lake was across the street. That is where the Ericsons, Hostermans and DeLays lived.

Our house was at 4438 Shoreline Drive, Robbinsdale, 22, Minnesota. First class postage stamps were 4 cents each. US flags had 48 stars. Everybody liked Ike. Our phone number started with KEllogg 7. I knew all this when I was three. My earliest and most powerful memory was being held in the arms of my godfather, Gordon, when I was just two years old, in the dining room of that house. He was looking out the door to the screened-in porch. I remember the feel of his laugh, and that it was one of the few times I felt truly happy and safe in that house.

Not long after that party, Gordy committed suicide. It wasn’t clear, at first, that he intended to. There was no note. Gordy had the form of acrophobia that would cause him to have a strong urge to jump from open heights. I have it, too. It is actually an idea, seemingly hardwired in the brain, that the scariness of being on the precipice would be relieved, if one would only throw oneself on the wind and fly. Gordy flew. His wings burned up like Icarus’ in the Sun. I simply never saw Uncle Gordy again; never smelled that smell; never saw that smile; never felt that embrace; never felt that laugh again.

That’s me in the painting, in the red jumper, asleep in Gordy’s arms. My therapist asked me, yesterday, when I showed her this painting, “So safety must be a big concern for you. What do you do to make sure you are safe?”

I asked her if that was a trick question.

We had much tears. The fact of the matter is, I have had little consciousness of safety since we moved away from that house. First Gordy disappeared, then we moved away from the Ericsons.

In 1995, when an ex-offender, strung out on heroin came to my place of work and pulled a gun on me, I was too numb to be afraid. My safety was not on my radar. My concern for my safety was beat out of me at an early age. I just calmly sized up the man, determined what his real motives were, and helped him achieve them in a way that was best for everyone concerned. It involved me driving with a loaded gun poked in my ribs for 17 miles. He got into rehab, not prison, and, as a side benefit, I got to live. I knew he was serious and I knew he could pull the trigger. He had done so before, after all, in an armed robbery. But it would not serve his best interest of surviving the car ride, avoiding prison, and getting free of heroin to do so. I had met him in my role as a volunteer, prison chaplain. I did not share this story until more than ten years after it happened. No one at my job had been aware that I had been held at gunpoint from my desk in Hatfield. My wife did not know about it. She was shocked when she learned of it in when she was proofreading a fundraising newsletter I wrote ten years after the fact. She asked me why I never told her. I said, because I knew it would upset her and she would worry about me. She said I would be right; so how come is it OK to bring it up now? I told her, because the man who did it has been dead for a few years now. She felt better then.

We have gotten ahead of our story. This is a memoir. There are no rules for these things to be absolutely chronological, as long as there are good stories, right? I’ll try to tell good stories, and some of them, I dare say, most of them, will be true.

I grew up in Minnesota, in an upper middle class household in the suburbs. I cannot tell my story without the undercurrent of death and especially suicide. 18 of my close friends, including my sister have killed themselves. An additional 24 friends and associates have also taken their own lives, for a total, so far, of 42. Even so, my life has not been only darkness. I have been inspired by many personal heroes, some of whom I have known. Unfortunately, several of them have had violent deaths, a couple by their own hands, as well. My hope is that my writing and painting may not just interest you and pass the time, but may edify and even challenge you, in some way.

(If you want to purchase this painting, or others by me, visit www.shoutforjoy.net)

Nebraska

Oh, to be young again!

Or, in my case, for the first time. I spent most of my time as a child with adults, or at least older children. I would help my older sister with her homework. My brother took me to college when I was 13, got me drunk; and I still held my own in theological discussions with the divinity graduate students into the wee hours of the morning. I still remember the discussion nearly 50 years later! I was born old! This was not the case for Nebraska.

Even though Nebraska had had a pretty hard knock life so far, he remained childlike, cheerful, confident; just a downright happy guy and a joy to be around! We hosted Nebraska (yes, that is his real, first name) for a weekend in our home, while he was staying at Liberty House prison aftercare program in Schwenksville, PA, in 1986. I was Mennonite Chaplain and Volunteer Director with Liberty Ministries at the time and had helped reorganize the aftercare program there, after it had closed in Phila. Nebraska was one of the early residents. He was just 20, and had already been in prison. He had been raised in the foster care system. Who knows if he actually committed a crime? He was a dark skinned, black youth. He was irrepressibly cheerful. That is enough to get one locked up in any number of towns and neighborhoods in Pennsylvania.

We had a great time with Nebraska. The one memory that sticks out is our trip to Ikea. We all went to Ikea together, all seven of us: Bethann and I, our four daughters and Nebraska. Now Bethann and I were about 30. The girls were 9 and under. In the store, we got a little spread out, but we could see each other. One or another of the girls would exclaim, “Mommy, come see!” or “Daddy, come see!” when they saw something they liked. Then Nebraska exclaimed, “Mommy! Mommy! Come see!” loud enough for the whole floor to hear, and they all watched Bethann answer. We have been tickled by that scene every time we have recalled it, in the 30 years since!

We don’t know what happened to Nebraska after that weekend. I was so busy overseeing over 500 volunteers in eight different jails and prisons and starting several tutoring and other programs. We never saw him again in prison or in aftercare, or on the street, so I’m taking that as a good sign. But I don’t know.

This I do know. Nebraska was not a throwaway. He was not a ‘taker’. He was, and hopefully still is, a beautiful human being, and our brother someplace.

Kenny

Kenneth Cobbs challenged me and instructed me like few other persons in my life in such a brief time. I can count on one hand the people who have had this kind of impact in this short a time, and they all seem to totally, irretrievably disappear. At least Kenny left me with a couple books of his poetry, including one poem about me. It is not particularly complimentary toward me. I was alarmed when I read it. Kenny and I discussed it. He stuck to his guns and defended it. This was how he felt. It cut me to the quick. I was grateful for the critique and thanked him for his honesty. I asked his forgiveness, for that was not how I wanted to come off or how I intended our ministry to be perceived. At the time, I published it in The King’s Jubilee newsletter as a confessional, with an appeal to help please, let’s all do better.

Kenny had given me two booklets of his poetry that he had typed up. He managed to photocopy several copies and staple and fold them. He would sell them for $5 each to raise a little cash. I made some copies for him. I told him I would retype and reset the booklets in nicer fonts, with full color covers. I did this. He never showed up to retrieve them or the money for the copies that I sold for him. I never saw him again. I contacted the nuns who he said he was visiting that week. they had not heard from him. I left my phone number. I have searched for him every couple of years, since, to no avail. That was in 1998. I keep hoping that he chose to disappear and become a Buddhist monk somewhere. He was an intense person, wise beyond his years, yet I fear the world was too rough for him. He had been part of the MOVE family and had not recovered from the terrorism inflicted by the city, and the lies and machinations to frame Mumia Abu Jamal for killing a cop; after Mumia dared to report sympathetically about MOVE.

Kenny took me down a peg. I was glad for it. He did it with honesty, in the spirit of true brotherhood and love. I have gone back again and again to our conversations and his critiques to see how I measure up “according to the Kenny scale.” If he knew, he would laugh so loud!

I painted this from emotional memory. Kenny’s skin was darker. I have a hard time with painting dark skin tones and still getting feature definition. Sorry. My counselor and I talked about this painting today. This is the first time I have obscured a part of a face. I think this is because both of us were blocked in some major ways. He was dealing with PTSD from Mayor Goode’s bombing of West Phila. I was a recovering fundamentalist; had been abused by clergy, yet still playing the clergy game. Kenny’s right eyebrow is raised. This was done subconsciously on my part, but it makes perfect sense. Whenever I think of Kenny, I think of our conversations and his piercing, unflinching criticism. It is rare that I can find someone who can give as good as get. “Faithful are the wounds of a friend, but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful.” (Prov. 27:6) I measure my progress on stepping down from my “god complex” and getting over being a “white knight” on the “Kenny Scale”. This is the raised eyebrow and slightly more open right eye. (his right) The background color of orange and shirt as bright red were chosen because of the MOVE fire on Mother’s Day, 1985. My missing front tooth is from that night, as well. But that’s another story.

I think I’m doing pretty OK on the “white knight” problem. I’ve been invited to events by black friends. When I have shown up, I was the only white guy there. I overhear their friends ask, “You didn’t say he was white.” My friend says, “Oh, I forgot.” At one party, they replied, “You forgot?!” My friend said, “Yeah. Chill. Just get him a beer. Talk to him for a while. You’ll see he forgot, too.” I think Kenny would be just OK with me now.

You may purchase this painting from www.shoutforjoy.net

Ya Gotta Have Art!

“Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.” – Simone Weil

My art has become an obsession. I now have four paths for my art, and it consumes most of my waking hours. This is probably an improvement over thinking about the current election cycle, no?

The first path is decorative; the faux finish subway tiles, including the cartoon characters, etc. The second path is painting portraits to illustrate my book: “Other People’s Children”. These are portraits of people whom I have known whom society has labeled throwaways: the homeless, prisoners, etc. The third path is a challenge from my psychologist to explore the abstract. This is a tall order, as I believe in order to do abstract well, one must have a firm grasp on realism. You see my problem.

The fourth is meta in that it goes beyond all of these to challenge my own stated belief in the universal pro-life position. I need to paint a portrait of serial killer Gary Heidnik that is done with love and respect, recognizing that he was born with all of the same potential and hope that I was. I was once in his presence and could feel evil emanating from him before I turned to see who it was. Yet, immediately I was struck by the fact he was still alive. There was still hope for change, still potential for good. He was still a fellow human being. We should never go down the rabbit hole to attempt to understand why he did what he did, yet there are those two words of Jesus of Nazareth that keep calling me up short: “Condemn Not!”