I haven’t run into you and they boys in a while. I hope you are all well. I heard some nice things about Thulani today and I thought I would share with you.

Some of my 7th grade students were working on their art projects at lunch today. They were chatting about how they both used to go to at St. R’s.

Another teacher who was in the room asked them how their time was, she used to teach there. The boy said it was really rough that the kids were mean to him and he didn’t like it at all. Except the one kid Thulani. He was so nice to everybody. He was the coolest guy and my only friend. The girl also agreed that he was a really nice guy. “And the another cool thing about him is that some of his fingers were webbed and I always asked him to show me because it was so cool.”

You’ve got some great boys there!
Take care,
Amy

Brothers....

Thulani will be 13 on Friday.

This is hard for me to imagine.

I’ve gone from labor coach, where I held his mother’s hand as he entered the world, to seeing her look on eight days later, as we went away from her to our life together.

He’s gone from formula to solids, size 1 diapers to mastering bowel, bladder and countless other tasks.

He crawled. Walked. Then, ran. All on schedule.

We’ve been through the night-scares, nightmares, colds, sniffs, and stiff necks. We’ve spent one dreadful night in the hospital.

We’ve fought over brushing teeth, showering, picking up clothes, and changing sheets – and who gets the laptop and when.

We’ve come close to blows over homework, lost books, lost bags, lost assignments, lost grades, and lost tempers.

My son is now a young adult!

Thulani gets anxious when he thinks of me dying – says he’s not ready for me to die yet. When I tell him that one day I will die and that is unlikely to be today he settles down. Immediately.

He loves our house but wishes it had carpets. He wishes we were richer and cannot understand that I don’t.

He’s done several hundred thousand miles on United and Delta visiting a list of about 25 countries. He has had birthdays in South Africa, Switzerland, Romania, Canada, and Hawaii – but now, given the opportunity to travel, he chooses to stay home.

He loves the dog, his room (although he wishes he’d chosen the larger one!), his dad, his brother, his skateboard and bike almost in that order. He loves his school and his school friends and he lights up like a Christmas Tree when friends want him to have sleepovers.

He’s a people person with a charming personality – and can conduct a conversation with any adult who is up for it.

He’s cried over a mother he doesn’t know. He’s wept freely over a girl who told him they were no longer girlfriend and boyfriend.

I’ve cried a lot, too – over many things and over many precious moments. One outstanding memory of my own tears was when I listened as he read an essay he wrote in the fifth grade about his life in America. He read it to a gym full of adults who hung onto his every word. His essay, which was a gripping list of all of what he is grateful for, included his knowledge that his mother had given up much so he could have much more.

Yes. My April Fool’s baby is no fool.

He’s bright, aware, and caring.

Happy Birthday, my son. It’s been a joy to be your dad, every day of every one of the thirteen years we’ve had together.

Thanks. I have loved it. You are all the son any dad anywhere could ever want and I am so very proud of you.

And, I love it.

I love the tension. The push-pull energizes me as does the edgy atmosphere that sometimes pervades the house, the street, gosh, our very universe.

I was never one to affirm everything – “ah, honey, you walk (and cough, and sneeze, and draw, and … on and on and on it goes absurdly on with some parents) so beautifully” – but have tried to affirm my children when affirmation is earned.

I affirm when it I think it is appropriate. I try to affirm when I feel it necessary. And so I don’t think they feel short-changed when their experience pegs them a little lower than some of their peers at a variety of activities.

When Thulani doesn’t do as well at something Thulani doesn’t have to try to make sense of what ever it is against the backdrop of a dad who has lavished praise for menial or expected or routine or poorly accomplished tasks. When Nate struggles at a Math problem he knows well that I do, too – and so his battle is (I hope) meaningfully contextualized, somewhat even expected.

I think things might be a little different for all three of us if, like some parents I know, I’d applauded their every bowel movement.

Yet, my children are experts in certain areas and experts to a greater degree than I ever anticipated.

Thulani is a seasoned, charming, diplomat. He’s just as comfortable meeting boys and girls his own age as I have seen him embrace and encounter dignitaries. Thulani is charm. He has a natural ease with adults. The boy could run seminars on friendliness and hospitality and teach many hard-nosed adults whom I have met a thing or two about grace and good manners. Thulani gets people.

Nathanael is a natural athlete. There’s not a ball-game I don’t think he could master and his ease on ice-skates is something to behold. Nate’s body is his instrument and he plays it like a maestro. Athletics aside, his attraction to dogs and his way with them moves me every time I see him in action. Then, athletics and animals aside, give the boy a service task and he’s (usually) on it. He’ll cook with me. He’ll serve his brother food. He’ll mop the floors. He’ll offer me tender loving care if I am feeling under the weather.

Yes. The boys are wild right now. We fight over stuff.

They’ve discovered we are not as wealthy as most of their friends. They accommodate a dad who is older, a house that is older, and, hopefully, they have discovered they live in an environment where it is safe (usually) to live without pretending to be something they are not. There, – now that is, I believe, something worthy of both affirmation and applause.

Many children are sweet and pleasant and fit every stereotype of childhood. It is easy to see these children as gifts from God. I think such children reflect little of God because of their innocence. Even at their worst, in their grumpiest moods or when they whine and manipulate and lie, and when every cliché about the innocence of children is furthest from the truth, the child before you is showing you God.

Even the street-wise child you hear about in other cities – the child-thief who stands wide-eyed and “innocent” or trapped and angry – is God’s gift to us, and he also reflects God. It is in the willfulness and wildness of childhood that children reflect the divine, and not in their innocence.

God is not innocent.

I do not mean that God is guilty, but God is not innocent.

Can you look at everything around you – the complexities, the extremes, and the passions, the beauty and wildness – and then call God innocent? Can you feel the pain and anguish of your own love? Can you tolerate your own blessings and disappointments and then say God is innocent? I do not believe so.

And all children reflect God – not just the children’s choirs with their matching robes, forgotten words, and unsure harmonies – but also children who are criminals, or who, for whatever sociological reasons, are more like wild animals than they are human. Lost children reflect God as much as so called found children. Sometimes I think it is the lost children who are found, and the cherubs in our churches (the “found” children) who are the ones to be pitied.

It is children in churches who have so much to lose at the hands of people who can talk about God, but would typically fail to recognize God, if God surfaced in their morning tea. It is these children who stand to have God’s excitement deleted and replaced with a set of be nices parading as faith.

Children embody the wildness and the passion and the joys and the pain of God’s Godness. When they sleep and dream, or suckle and feed and search for warmth and comfort – be it at home in western wealth with a loving parent, or homeless on the streets of eastern Europe – God’s determination is reflected.

God lives in every suffering child, and hungers with every cramped stomach. God is in the children who are down and out as well as with the “churched” children who are thought of as saved.

Thank you, cherubs, in church choirs for your squirmy, untamed movements and your loud and predictable answers to the pastors’ questions. May you have the courage of your nature and press close to God’s Wild Heart. Resist the prison of meaningless tradition awaiting you. Its door beckons every time a condition is placed on God’s Love, or every time you are told there is more to do to make God love you. Every time you are told that somehow God’s love for you is your responsibility or that you can do something to make God love you more than God already does, run from such lies.

Thank you, street children, for your wildness, your lostness and your search for love. The lakes and the city fountains are yours in summer with the ice and the snow and the bite, also yours, following quickly behind.

Thank you to the baby I know, for your peace and sure gaze when you look at me, eye-to-eye, as certain as one man can ever look into the face of another. Thank you for falling asleep so readily upon my shoulder, your chest against my heart, somehow reviving me, connecting me to the place you so recently left.

One child goes off to sleep; the other turns his head a fraction off the pillow to say he is “starving.” I think immediately how little we know in a land of plenty about starvation, but decide not to enter dialogue with a 4-year-old about this important matter, especially when my bedside clock says 3:16 a.m.

Next thing, I am downstairs. I know I shouldn’t be but here I am, semi-comatose, boiling the kettle, throwing a bag of instant oatmeal into a bowl while my mother’s words from a quarter-century ago about no child ever needing to go to bed hungry reverberate in my head.

Oatmeal and a spoon in one hand, a filled baby’s bottle in the other, I reach the landing, and Mr. I’m Starving is fast asleep. I can eat the oatmeal or watch it coagulate like wallpaper glue since starvation got the better of him. He is sleeping so deeply I could swing him by his feet and he’d not waken. Not that I want to swing him by his feet, even though we’ve been through this routine a time or two before. I should be able to detect that “Dad, I am starving” might just as well have read, “Tag. You’re it.”

Now I lay me down to sleep and all I can see in the darkened room is the clock’s obnoxious florescent glow on the baby’s white bottle. It is ready and waiting for his next eruption of hunger. Have you noticed? Very young babies are never just a little hungry. It is never minor progression along a gentle continuum. It is never, “Oh. I think I will awaken now. I am feeling a little peckish.”

Babies do not do hungry like that. Babies erupt when they are hungry. It is a full-volume announcement, a blast, an emergency directive in a train station or sports arena. It’s fire-alarm urgency satisfied only with a full gob of rubber and the slow release of Simulac With Iron.

I feel myself drifting off to sleep when Rhino the dog, with full knowledge of my condition, bumps the side of my bed. He smiles, tail wagging, to announce his need of a bio-break an hour earlier than usual. The clock is self-righteously announcing that it is 3:46 a.m. I prepare myself to stand in the yard watching Rhino do his thing in order to prevent his taking the opportunity to climb through the hole in the back of the fence, and visit a long list of neighborhood pals he befriended, when I have been more tired, less vigilant.

Man and dog enter the house together. I am relieved no neighbors were out at this hour walking their dogs. I did not have to run for cover lest I be seen appearing on my lawn in boxer shorts. Rhino bounds up the stairs and I go to the crib’s edge knowing that any minute the baby will awaken.

Nathanael is not stirring – not yet, anyway. So I tiptoe over the wooden floors, for the creaking has been known to awaken big brother, and ease myself into bed. I turn my head from the clock and its glib 4:06 a.m. and wonder what it is with the sixes tonight. Grace has come and I will finally sleep.

The baby, sensing the imminent presence of Mr. Sandman, reacts and now I am cuddling an infant who drinks deeply of the bottle while nestling against my chest. He searches for something in my eyes I hope he finds. At the very first burp, he has forgotten he’s hungry and drifted to sleep when big brother walks in, trailed by the dog. He asks, as he sees the baby asleep against my chest and climbs onto my lap, if we can have a “group hug.”

As we hug, sleeping children draped over me like throw rugs, I thank God for women, two birth mothers, who in the great and heavenly game of tag, unselfishly and unreservedly declared me “it.”

As Charles Finney would say I was “digging my grave with my teeth.”

So, even though you’ve not asked (and also apparently not noticed) I thought it time to reveal my two-part weight loss secret to the world.

Part 1: I saw a book on Facebook entitled What Would Jesus Eat.

Although (brace yourself for a really long sentence) I’ve written “against” the use of those ridiculous WWJD bracelets (see my column under my pseudonym Richard McChurch – you got to use a pseudonym if you knock WWJD bracelets!) and, while I find ALL Jesus Junk (Jesus magnets, bookmarks, stickers, pencils, baseball caps, wall-paper, toothbrushes, deodorant, place-mats, curtains, bobble-heads, and so forth) in Christian Bookstores quite revolting, and while I have a hard time even entering your typical strip-mall Christian bookstore and even though this would have been a book I’d have judged and rejected by its title – I made the purchase. Yes. I bought it. I bought a book I’d typically reject if I did ever see it in the unlikely event I ever entered a so-called Christian bookstore.

I am pleased I did.

The book, by Dr. Don Colbert, offers a fine synopsis of three things:

1. What was available in the region at the time of Jesus.

2. What dietary restrictions He’d have followed.

3. What we know from the New Testament about His life-style (walk, walk, and more walking).

The book does not offer much of a daily diet but is an excellent help in setting some broad parameters for what to eat (grains, fish, fruit, olives, dates, vegetables) and what to avoid (processed foods, sugar, fast foods). (Wait! I had to BUY a book to find this out?)

Part 2: What has REALLY helped the pounds fall off me (which only ONE person has noticed) is a little trick I have developed to help me resist everything I should not eat. I invite you to use my little trick but I will warn you that it can put a strain on relationships.

I call food what it is and I do so loudly and I do so smugly.

Hope this helps you if it is weight loss you are seeking. While I am grateful for all food I find that if I name it what it is it is easier to resist.

“Dead Drugged Pig” (pork), “Executed Drugged Cow” (beef), “Drugged and Throttled Bird” (chicken, turkey) makes meat easy to resist.

If I think of sodas as “Embalming Fluid” I find plain water most attractive. If I call chocolate “Artery Plugs” sucking a carrot is a pleasing alternative.

See, it is all about loudly, smugly naming things.

Who wants to eat old dead drugged chicken that’s been sizzled in used coagulated dead drugged animal fat? Not me!

So long as I name stuff out aloud, and say things like “Funeral Food” when I see a spread of cakes or cookies or doughnuts, I know it does not endear me to many, but it does keep me moving steadily toward unrefined grains and extra-extra-virgin olive oil and whole heads of lettuce sprinkled with oil and vinegar JAJA (Just As Jesus Ate).

“Yes, Missus.”

“Since you worked here you have been to three funerals for your father!”

“Yes, Missus.”

“Now does he spring to life after each burial and die when you want to go back to the farm?  Are you not sure who your father is?  Are you just a plain and simple liar?  Which is it?  It is no wonder I get so cross with you, Tilley…”

“Yes, Missus.”

“…I like you, and you are good with my children…”

“Yes, Missus.”

“…but me and the Boss…”

“Yes, Missus.”

“…just can’t take your lies, and we have to work, we can’t stay at home with the children all day.”

“Yes, Missus.”

“Even now you can’t look at me straight in the eye.”

“Yes, Missus.”

“If you want this job your father had better stop dying so often.”

“Yes, Missus.”

“Do you hear me, my girl?  Now you know the Missus doesn’t want to be unkind…”

“Yes, Missus.”

“…but this is quite absurd.”

“Yes, Missus.”

“Do you think we are fools?”

[Necessary explanation: a Zulu maid would require permission to attend the funeral of her "father" -- which was ANY elder male in her community (her limited English and the Whites' often  ZERO ability in Zulu made this impossible for there to be mutual understanding. To NOT look in the eyes was a sign of respect and not (for the Zulu woman) as sign of untrustworthiness - as interpreted by the white woman in this vignette.]

I say I stumbled “literally” because I did. I was in the midst of cleaning my 8-year-old’s bedroom, my back bent to retrieve VHS covers of movies both boys had abandoned long ago, and there it was, a photograph album. It’s probably sixty or seventy years old. Somehow it found its way under “The Barney Bonanza.”

I remembered immediately how I’d paged through this very album when I was a young child. At eight, the thick black pages and the glued black and white photographs of people long dead filled me with awe. I saw again my paternal grandmother and shots of weddings of men and women whom I have never known among those of my parents and my siblings taken before I was born.

Today was no different.

Once retrieved from the rubble of my son’s room, the album’s allure worked. It was not only the array of relatives, and the pictures of my mother holding me as an infant, but now, because the album had made its way through the aftermath of the Second World War, through multiple house-moves during my parents’ time, and then journeyed across the Atlantic into my home in the USA.

I am surprised when anything survives a day or two when subjected to this all-boy rough-house environment – but here it was, under Barney, waiting to stop me in my tracks so I could page through the photographs and look at my father in his late teens or early twenties.

He’s beautiful.

His face appears soft and smooth. He has gentle features. His look is one of interest and compassion.

HMS Dorsetshire

He’s Gunner E. W. G. Smith – my father who’d participated in the sinking of the Bismarck, my father who sold newspapers on street corners as a child, my father who hid under his bed when his angry stepfather ranted and threatened him with life in a children’s home.  This was my father, who’d never known his own or anything about him. This was my father as a young man, who’d, in later years don a Father Christmas outfit any month of the year and sing with tears streaming down his face about “the little boy that Santa had forgot.”

This photograph is taken before he saw action. I know.

It’s taken before he lost a cadre of close friends in combat. It’s taken before his ship, the HMS Dorsetshire went down in the Indian Ocean and before he’d spent two nights and a full day in the water singing “Nearer My God To Thee” with hundreds of men, many of whom held little hope of being rescued.

I know this is a “before” picture. Men didn’t look this pure and fresh after months at sea, after years of longing for home and frequent and enduring glimpses into the heart of human darkness.

I am glad I cleaned Nathanael’s room today.

Sometimes we walk to both and we don’t see the car for days.

I like it. I like not having to get in and out of the car. I like not having to negotiate traffic, something as synonymous with life in the USA as Disney, Fast Food, and the Fourth of July.

That’s the upside.

We are a 10-hour-drive to the nearest coast  – and, most of the east coast beaches are not worth the drive. The west coast, which has many wonderful beaches comparable to where I was reared, takes three full days of driving to reach.

Being landlocked is one thing but another is the weather. Indiana weather is erratic, neurotic, and downright psychotic.

Days ago I could’ve (but I didn’t) ice-skated across the street. Now, as I write, there’s a small lake in the street next to the sidewalk from last night’s rain. The weather is so brutal and extreme (it is as hot as blazes in the summers) that when we do drive anywhere (there are no grocery stores in walking distance) the streets are often full of potholes making some of America’s finest suburban streets resemble stretches of road you’d find in a rural stretch of South Africa’s Wild Coast. So, I am exaggerating but really not too much. Washington Boulevard is a challenge to drive right now, you have got to dodge potholes and loose pavement or, unless you drive a tank, you stand to severely damage your suspension.

But I do love living here. My neighbors are some of my best friends. My children are free and safe in the neighborhood and everyone knows everyone’s children. Even as I write Joseph (born a week or so before Thulani) from down the street has wondered into the house and it is quite likely he will eat with us, stay the night, and then wander down back down the street to his home sometime in the morning. His mom and I will talk sometime between now and nightfall unless he of course chooses to wonder off home and be gone just as quickly as he showed up.

Potholes and crazy weather won’t send us running, although we will drive to church in the morning – even though it is really close. I’m not sure I want to brave the elements which could be a snow-storm, an ice storm, the threat of a tornado – or a little or a lot of each. What else could you expect during March in Indiana?

Nate got a tooth knocked skew on the playground yesterday and so we paid an unexpected visit to the dentist. It was a baby tooth already easing its way out of his eight-year old jaw before the swing hit it.

While we were negotiating the mid-afternoon traffic, making our way back to school, I asked Nate (and I can only imagine that it was the “baby tooth” part of the moment that provoked me) if he ever thinks about his mother. His terse “no” stopped me pursuing the topic.

I didn’t tell him that I do – and that I do often. I didn’t tell him she frequently free-falls through my mind. I did not tell him that I know she lives somewhere in this large Midwest City.

I did not say I often wonder if we haven’t already run into her without realizing it, or if she’s perhaps seen us without us seeing her.

I didn’t tell Nate, right then in the car, about all that assembles in my head to tell her when he is being a perfect child; compliant, and funny – when he dances because he thinks no one is looking. It is then that I want her to see his vibrant personality and hear his subtle facetious intonations. I want her to hear him mimic my accent.

I didn’t, right there, tell him, while we were trying to get back to school in time for the end of the basketball game, that I want her to know that when he is not good, when he’s downright impossible, that I want to thank her for this gorgeous child. I want to thank her for this bright-eyed boy, who, along with his brother, has challenged, shaped, and reshaped everything I ever thought about love, all within the brief moment it has taken him to go from diapers, and mid-night bottles, and the pains of teething, to having a baby tooth knocked skew by a swing on the school playground.