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Finding Mohammad

Three or four months ago, I drove around with my friend Mohammad again. But this time we weren’t going to Philadelphia for one of his dentist appointments or dropping off a job application or going to a coffee shop to hang out or looking for a house out in the country. We were looking for a place where he could rent a moving truck. He was moving to Dearborn, Michigan.

He moved to the Detroit area, and seeing him off felt, I imagine, much like it will feel when I send one of my own children off to college or a new life on their own. Hope and excitement for him was all tangled up with sadness. I didn’t want him to go. I wanted him to be happy.

We talk on the phone once or sometimes twice a week now, and I get the update on how the kids are doing, how Maradi’s adjusting to her new job, how Mohammad is finding his way.

“How are you, my friend?” I ask him.

“Good, good,” he always says, and I think about the fighting in Syria that has moved south. I read the news differently now, always looking for mentions of his hometown.

“How are things in Dearborn?”

“Oh, things are okay,” he says, and I can tell things are not going as well as he had hoped. “We miss Lancaster!” he says, and he laughs, clearly surprised.

“Lancaster misses you,” I say, smiling.

I think of my friend Mohammad, a kind middle-aged man with four boys and a gentle wife. I wish I could introduce him to all of my friends who are afraid of Muslims, afraid of Middle Eastern people, afraid of the Koran, afraid of the call to prayer. This is your Muslim extremist, I would tell them. See? This is your terrorist.

He is, of course, anything but. He loves his family, enough to have made a harrowing journey with them when he could have tried to wait out the war. He wants a good job, something where he can make a living. He wants a good education for his children, hope for his boys.

In other words, he is us, the great history of us. He is American.

“Will you move back?” I ask him, trying to calculate how much that would cost him in rental truck fees and another security deposit on a home and all of the things that keep people in one place.

“We will see,” he says. “We will see.”

Mohammad and I have written a book together about his journey here and the growth of our friendship, and it releases on October 16th. Find out more about the book HERE. If you would like to be part of the book launch team, including involvement in a Facebook group, please let me know. All members will receive an advanced copy of the book in exchange for supporting the launch and reviewing the book online.

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A Summer Morning in Our Small City

I opened the windows. It was 68 degrees outside, and cool air flowed in over the sill like water pouring into a container. I could hear the traffic on James and Prince. I stepped out onto the front porch. Across the street, the same man stood in the doorway to the apartment building, looking out with blank, quiet eyes. Down the street, a woman sat on her porch, fanning herself, smiling at people who walked by. The barber shop was nearly open. The lights came on. The manager moved slowly on the other side of the glass.

Leo and Poppy played in the living room, and Maile came back in from her run, breathing heavily. It was the middle of July, but it felt like the end of summer was close. I looked out the window again. Poppy came up and grabbed my leg.

“Ug,” she said, her word for hug, and I reached down, picked her up, held her close. Her tiny arms wrapped around me. The sun came up over the buildings on the south side of James. It was another day in the small city of Lancaster. Another day.

Later, I drove away. Traffic stopped. I saw a man. He sat in the morning sun on the sidewalk, sorting through the trash. A few already opened and discarded bags leaned up against the brick house a few feet behind him. He reached in over and over again, deep into the black trash bags, all the way up to his shoulder, fishing around for who knows what. He pulled out a handful of trash, looked through it, and stuffed it back in the bag.

I sat in traffic and watched him. The light turned green. I drove on.

Morning commuters cruised south on Prince Street, the sun getting warmer, the day moving along. On the next block over, a road crew blocked off an intersection, letting one line of cars through at a time. One of the crew, a bearded young man, smoked a cigarette, coughed, let his mind wander, stood there for a moment after the light turned green. Something brought him back, and he waved his orange flag lazily, beckoning the next car through.

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The Best Kind of Messages (or, When Maile Finished Writing Her Book)

You know how days run along like a stream and all through that fluid movement you receive texts or emails or say hello to people you pass in the street and everything blends together into a seamless day but then something happens and everything stops, the sounds around you fade, and you see something, really see it? That happened to me yesterday at about two in the afternoon when Maile sent me the email in the photo. When I read it, everything else stopped.

She finished writing her book.

On the day she turned 40, she finished writing her book.

An upper-middle grade book that is delightful and moving. I can’t wait to read it in its entirety. I can’t wait for you to read it.

If you’ve been following along in this space for the last few months you’ll know that this has been a time of huge transition for our family. 3/4ths of our school age kids are going to public school in the fall. We decided not to move out of the city. And as a family, we began setting aside time for Maile to write.

Her finishing this book seems like an affirmation in so many ways, mostly that we are doing the right things and moving in the right direction and taking better care of each other.

* * * * *

We celebrated by going out to Wasabi, our favorite sushi place, and we took the kids and Leo was super-tired and Poppy was mostly grumpy and wouldn’t let Maile eat her food but we celebrated anyway, all of us raising our glasses (of water, of root beer, of Sprite, of lemonade), a resounding “Cheers!” sounding out. Leo laughed at that.

* * * * *

So we’ll take the next month or two and focus on revisions and then she’ll wade into the publication process and who knows how that will go but we’re hopeful. Always hopeful.

Thanks for all your encouragement.

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“Daddy, what’s inside gum?” and Other Questions

Another 7:00 p.m. finds me in the same place, the same white chair in Leo and Sam’s third-floor bedroom, the dusky light glowing white, Leo sucking on his finger and reaching his foot up towards the ceiling. He barely napped in the truck today while we were going to pick up Lucy, but even a five minute snooze seems to add hours to his day.

“Daddy, why can’t I chew gum in bed?” Leo asks.

It’s nearly a month since my book The Edge of Over There wandered off into the wide world, trying to find its way. Next week Maile and I are driving 20 hours to Minnesota for a book event with my friend, Steve Wiens. When a book is a month old, well, it’s a strange time, because things can start to feel a little quiet. If you’d like to host a little reading in your house, and you think you can get 15 to 20 people there, let me know. I’d love to come hang out and talk about these books of mine.

“Daddy, what’s inside gum?”

Maile’s away tonight and I got Poppy down and once Leo’s down the rest of the night will be in front of me. The older kids can take care of themselves. I’ll get a little work done, maybe play around with the next novel idea I’m working on. Do a little reading. Try not to get to bed too late because early enough Poppy will be shouting from her bed or Leo will come wandering down, needing to use the bathroom. This is the humdrum passing of a life, these quiet days, these uneventful days, and as I get older, I’ve grown to love them, these days when nothing sensational is happening, these days one month after a book release.

“Daddy, why do I have to go to bed?”

Being a writer is such an emotional yo-yo. One week, I’m on top of the world. The next week, I’m wondering if writing is worth it. Worth what? I don’t even know. But I don’t think about it very long, because then another heady day arrives. It’s a constant back-and-forth: confident, doubtful, easy, hard, encouraging, despair, determination, ambivalence. (It took me five tries to type ambivalence before spell-check gave me the all-clear.)

“Daddy, how much longer until I will wake up?”

It’s a good life. Even with all the questions. Maybe because of all the questions. Leo’s. Mine. All of them. Leaning into the questions, the doubts, the wonderings, the curiosities, for me, makes life interesting.

This is Leo when he was much younger, shortly after I gave him the haircut that landed me in serious hot water with Maile. His hair is long again, and all is right with the world.
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Why I’ve Never Been so Happy About a Messy Bedroom

One thing I’m learning about life is that it can be very easy to spend an inordinate amount of time on minor things and brush over major things as if they don’t even exist. I find this especially prevalent in the way people in the US practice Christianity, the way we run businesses, and the way parents interact with children. Also, marriage. For some reason, it can be easier to spend all of our time obsessing over minor issues when there are major things that are crying out for our attention. Maybe that’s the reason. Maybe occupying ourselves with minor things is a good way of avoiding the major things.

Anyway. As you may have read a few months ago in one of my most popular blog posts ever, we have made time for Maile to write again, but only after several difficult conversations and a wake-up call on my part that I wasn’t extremely proud of. Such is life. I allowed myself over time to get caught up in minor things and completely missed something my wife desperately needed: time to write.

I was reminded of this again yesterday when I arrived in our bedroom aka dumpster aka heap of stuff.

In my experience as a married person, as time has passed, we have naturally divided up the household responsibilities. We are nearly 20 years in, so by now we have certain things we take care of. I try to do the dishes in the morning and fold a few loads of laundry before I go to work, and Maile takes care of the kids and the house during the day – a huge undertaking – and then we divide and conquer at night. On Saturdays, everyone pitches in.

But some duties get cast into a kind of neutral zone where whoever gets sick of something first will take care of it. The kitchen floor is generally one of these things, and as it gets gradually worse and worse I am usually the first person to cave and wash it. As I’m washing it, I usually look up at Maile and she gives me a grin and says, “I knew you couldn’t take it much longer.” Our room is generally the area where Maile gets sick of the mess first and takes care of it. Actually, she usually keeps it very clean.

At least, until she hung out with Christie Purifoy and Amy Knorr at the Festival of Faith and Writing. Maile asked Christie how she did it – how did she write and raise children and take care of the house? Christie smiled and told Maile that when she was in the depths of a project, sometimes things didn’t get done. She got behind on the laundry. Or picking up around the house. Or cleaning the bedroom. She fed the kids easy food and let them entertain themselves and did what it took to make time to write.

Yesterday, I walked into our bedroom aka dumpster aka heap of stuff, sat on the bed, and finished up some writing I needed to do. I could have tidied up. I’m not saying it’s solely Maile’s responsibility. But we’re both busy, we’re both creating, we’re both living, and it’s just not at the top of the list right now. It’s in the neutral zone, waiting for someone to grow tired of it. And that’s okay.

As I was working, Maile came in with the biggest smile on her face.

“Only a few thousand words to go,” she said. “I’m at 56,000 words, and I think it’s almost finished.”

I congratulated her. She will finish by the end of the week. What an accomplishment.

She looked around the room.

“I know the house is a wreck,” she said, still smiling, “but I just keep thinking about what Christie said. I’m going to get this book written, and then we can get back to some kind of normal.”

I’ve never been so happy about having a messy bedroom. I think about the time that Maile has been able to put into arranging these words, the look on her face when she comes out and says she’s written 1200 words that day, or 1500 or 2000. I hear it in her voice when she wrestles with a character or a plot point or something she hadn’t expected. She goes deeper into her writing than I do. She comes out dazed, like someone just baptized.

There is so much we are learning, so much about being married and doing what you love while serving each other and not letting the minor things write our story.

We’re getting there. And we’re learning a lot along the way.

* * * * *

If you’d like to help us afford some kind of cleaning service, you could buy one of my books. Just kidding. Any extra money will pay for Cade’s braces.

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That Thing We All Want

A small group of children, all cousins, stood on a driveway in the forest-covered hills of central PA, giddy, waiting. Every year, for the last 13 years, our extended family has gone away together for a week, and at some point during those 13 years, Uncle Ben began a tradition of creating a treasure hunt for them. Every year, the search grows more intense, the prizes more spectacular.

It was a year of rain, and we were all happy to be outside, stretching our legs or, as Maile’s grandmother used to say, blowing the stink off.

“This year,” their uncle said with great fanfare, “we are welcoming a new member to the treasure hunt team. Leo will be joining us for the first time. Give it up for Leo.”

Leo wasn’t expecting the welcome. He was overjoyed to be with the big kids, and his face overflowed in a grin.

There is so much power to being included, to being welcomed in.

* * * * *

I have a few very early memories. Jumping from the back door of the trailer where we lived in Missouri when I was 2 or 3, into the waiting arms of my grandfather. My sister burning her hand on the kerosene heater when I was 3 or 4. Arriving at our trailer park’s swimming pool in Laredo, Texas, when I was 4, only to discover it was abandoned, empty, and filled with snakes.

And this one: waking up on a normal afternoon, only to discover I had slept through Mr. Rogers. Seriously! I was so little, yet I remember that day! I was devastated. But why that memory, seemingly unimportant, so random? Maybe that’s less the sign of an unimportant memory as it is the importance certain messages hold for children, for all of us really, about being loved and accepted.

I remember one song in particular Mr. Rogers used to sing:

There are many ways to say I love you
There are many ways to say I care about you.
Many ways, many ways, many ways to say
I love you.

And of course the famous,

I like you as you are
Exactly and precisely
I think you turned out nicely
And I like you as you are

* * * * *

When I saw Leo erupt with joy, smile a mile wide, I was reminded, for the first time in a long time, how wonderful it is to feel accepted, how important it is that we include each other whenever we can. I wonder why I don’t include more people in my life, in more ways? Usually it’s because I’m afraid I will receive less, or maybe I’ll become less important, or maybe they’ll change the way I currently do things. Usually it’s based out of fear.

Who do we tend to exclude? Often, children. Often people who don’t look or sound like us. Refugees. A strange neighbor.

Including and loving people, bringing people along on our journey and offering grace, will change the world.

Who can you include in your life? Who, currently on the outside, can you invite in?

This is Leo at the very moment Uncle Ben announced he would be included in this year’s treasure hunt.