Do I Provide Hospitality to My Children?

IMG_0214Write an article about providing hospitality to your children: this was the intriguing gauntlet thrown down by Kris Camealy, my friend and fearless leader over at Grace Table, a wonderful website with beautifully written articles about faith and food and all manner of things. Here’s a snippet of what I wrote:

On long afternoons, my boys and I, we go into the back alley behind our house on James Street and throw baseball in the shadow of an old warehouse-turned-apartment building. When cars come through the alley, we step aside and watch them pass. I nod. My sons give small, uncertain waves. When one of us misses the ball, we race towards Prince and wait for the traffic to stop before scurrying between the cars and retrieving it.

The ball thuds into our leather gloves and it sounds exactly like it did thirty years ago, when my dad and I played catch on the candy-green grass. It remains a conversation of sorts, and the red seams still spin like the rings of a planet.

To read the rest of the post, head on over to Grace Table. And while you’re visiting, leave a comment, then have a look around. There are some wonderful pieces of writing there.

The Problem With Answers (or, The Problem With Siri)

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“I wonder how far away the sun is from the Earth,” my daughter said one afternoon. She’s like that. She wonders about random things.

“I don’t know,” I said, pulling out my phone. “Let’s look it up.”

She smiled. Then she laughed a small laugh, as if I was missing something so obvious.

“What?” I asked, grinning. “What’s so funny?”

“Nothing,” she said.

“No, tell me.”

She shrugged.

“You’re always looking things up on your phone,” she said. “That’s all.”

“What’s wrong with that?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, shrugging again. “You just are.”

* * * * *

Indeed. What’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with finding out, with knowing, with laying a concrete foundation? What’s wrong with facts and figures and measurements?

What’s wrong with answers?

* * * * *

I grew up on a small farm in central Pennsylvania surrounded by fields and animals and a stretching, blue sky. There was a church across the back country road and, beside it, a cemetery with broken-tooth headstones and hiding spaces for anyone brave enough. Behind the church, through a short expanse of woods, ran a small, winding stream where my friends and I would fish and build dams and have adventures.

If I didn’t know something, if I was confronted with an unanswerable question, I had two options: I could either search my father’s golden-bound set of Funk & Wagnall encyclopedias he had bought from a traveling salesman, or I could imagine the answer, pull it out of thin air, make it up. My world was one of endless possibilities, a world where gnomes might just be real, where miracles could happen, where the snapping turtle in the creek was the size of a large tire and would rip us to shreds if we strayed into the deep. It was a world of adventure and imagination.

You’re always looking things up on your phone, my daughter said, and for weeks I couldn’t figure out why that felt like an indictment. But the more I consider her words, the deeper the feeling burrows.

Could it be that we do ourselves no favors by having such ready access to answers? Could it be that our obsession with standardized test scores and Siri and GPS directions steals the wonder from our children’s world?

I can’t remember the last time I became truly lost. I can’t remember the last time a friend and I argued for hours about the year an album came out or wracked our brains for the name of that obscure 80s movie. These days, when such a question rises up, the answer is a few clicks away.

There is something about the quest for knowledge, and not necessarily immediate access to that knowledge, that creates a space for community, for relationship. There is something about questions, and the ensuing conversations, that bring me closer to my children. There is something about immediate knowing that closes things down.

I can’t remember the last time I didn’t have an answer.

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When My Son Sammy Played Football in the Shadow of a Prison

Image Credit: WGAL.com
Image Credit: WGAL.com

I parked the truck on Orange Street and the seven of us got out. We walked across the grass of Reservoir Park. To our left was a child’s play area, a few basketball courts, and walking path. To our right, to the west, rose the Lancaster County Prison, stone walls like the turrets of a castle. It cast long shadows on that late summer afternoon fading into evening.

Sam walked with a bounce in his step. He couldn’t wait for flag football, and he had worn his cleats and these long jogging shorts he inherited from Cade and couldn’t wait to wear – certainly not until they actually fit him. We walked into the crowd and tried to find his coach.

“Coach X?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “Are you Sam’s dad?”

“Here he is,” I said.

Sam paused, held back a moment. He’s normally full-speed ahead, climbing anything, trying anything, but he was suddenly quiet, unsure, staring at a group of kids where he didn’t know a single one. Coach X took care of that.

“C’mon, man,” he said, welcoming him into the circle of the team. “Boy, you got some serious swag. I like that.”

Sammy grinned, and the bounce was back in his step.

* * * * *

You hear a lot about the shootings here in Lancaster. I have some Facebook friends who’ve talked about how dangerous the city seems to be, how they would never move to the city, how they can’t imagine why anyone else would live there.

You know why I love the city? Because, a lot of the time, it makes me uncomfortable. There’s a disabled vet who sits on our street corner a lot, and I don’t always know what to do besides give him a bottle of water or $5 or sometimes just say hello. Every once in a while we can hear our neighbors across the street screaming at each other. At night cars pull up to the stop light blaring profanity-laced rap music. My bike and bag were stolen and someone hit-and-ran our truck, all in our first year. When we walk to church, we pass a line of homeless people lined up for breakfast.

But, wait, I’m not finished. Because it’s in the midst of this discomfort when people go out of their way to make us feel at home. Coach X welcoming Sam. His other coach giving licorice to the kids after practice. The folks at practice smiling at us when they walk by, saying hello, making us feel welcome. The kind guys (and Jenny) at the barber shop, treating my boys like they are little princes (even though they’re pretty nervous about getting their hair cut).

We came into this city feeling very much like the outsiders, but we’ve been welcomed by so many people, sometimes the very people others look down on. It’s been humbling and beautiful.

So before you talk about how dangerous the city is, before you make snide remarks about the people who live here, please, pay us a visit. Stay with us for a few days. I think you’ll be surprised.

* * * * *

Sam played flag football that night with some kids who I hope will become his new friends. His coaches modeled for him what it means to be a gentleman, an encourager, and a good human being. Craziest thing of all was that we learned this at Sammy’s practice, in the shadow of the Lancaster County Prison.

This is Why I’m Telling You This

APTOPIX Turkey Migrants

There is something I want to tell you
but it starts when we are far from home.
Stay with me.
Come along.
Don’t get lost.

Sometimes we drive back to our house late
at night, on long straight roads
from a friend’s place
after most people are sleeping.
We enter the city on Walnut, street
lights flashing on the windshield
a slow strobe revealing
hiding
revealing
our five children
asleep
eyes the shape of new moons
mouths agape, breathing in
the light that hits all of us
as if we are planets, spinning.

I try but cannot avoid all the potholes,
and the truck lurches. The kids’ heads
are on swivels,
fall to their opposite shoulder
they lick their lips and settle back
to sleep, mouths drifting open
again. Who knows where they are? What
universe their dreams have dragged
them to?

If we’re lucky there’s a parking spot
in front of the house beside the peeling
sycamore. But usually we must circle around,
park in an orbit
somewhere down Prince, across
from the minor league ballpark where we
sat in the sun just last month, roasting,
gulping down water,
soaking in the summer.

At that time of night,
when we return late from our friend’s house,
our truck is
light-years from home.

Or a few hundred yards. But this
(finally)
is why I’m telling you this.
Because we wake up the four oldest and
they grumble-stumble
down the cracked sidewalk
past the shadows, past the alleyways, around
the corner, towards home.

This is why I’m telling you this.

Because I
take 1-year-old Leo from his seat and his
arms hang limp, his legs sway like
pendulums
two separate clocks
keeping the time, counting the seconds
as they drip through the dark night. And
the movement of Leo’s legs reminds
me

of the little boy carried by the soldier,
his tiny legs swinging at the knees,
his waterlogged shoes
measuring the
seconds in drips, measuring
the time it takes to clear
the beach.

These are the longest moments
of all.

* * * * *

To find out how your church can help with the refugee crisis in Syria, please visit the website We Welcome Refugees.

Preemptive Love is a wonderful organization providing relief, education, and medical support to refugees throughout the region. Check out their work HERE.

Or find something else to do. We can all do something.

The Long Lines Between Us

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Abra walks with me to work
her pink flip-flops flapping the sidewalk
all the way to the cafe,  where she
sits on the tall red chair
huddled behind a swimming pool
of hot chocolate, and cuts out
photos from her magazines
to go with the letters at the top
of the worksheet: M and N and O.

Across from her
in my own red chair
I work with words to help a family
tell the story of their daughter, how she
pulled her hair out by its roots
strand by strand
how she cut long lines in her pale arms
with a broken tape case
how she poured her old pills
into a mason jar
where it stratified, a rainbow
of sand art, documenting everything
that didn’t work.

Abra draws long lines on her
paper, a rainbow of colors
and somehow gets hot chocolate on
her forehead, a dark mark on her
pale skin. We laugh, and I wipe
it off, and we watch the traffic go by below us
on Prince Street. Then, as Abra sits across
from me reading The Moffats,

I spill the words, the story of this tired
young girl, twenty years ago, who wrote her last
journal entry, explained how she would not
make it through October
how the pain was world-heavy
how she planned on walking into the water.

She was a little girl, once.

Life with my Abra is August, and it is hot.
Nothing like that October when the girl
walked into the water, nothing like that.
October has smooth breezes and rainbow leaves.
August shadows are dim and uncertain,  like
underwater lines – October shadows are long and
sharp.

The cafe windows are clouded with dust. There
is no clear view of the sky.

Abra and I walk home along the lines of traffic,
past cars idling,
waiting for the light to turn,
waiting in the August heat. We walk Prince Street, and
I hold her hand the entire way.

When I Made My Dad Cry (or, Stopping Time)

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Legend has it
my dad (who was the age I am now)
dropped me off at college
then cried the whole way home
watering the length of the overpriced
Pennsylvania turnpike with his
salty tears

While that is probably
an exaggeration
or perhaps he was weeping
at the price of the toll
there is still something about
your children growing up
that causes a deep longing
for the days to stop

When Leo takes halting steps
across the kitchen
I want to rise up
stand on my chair
and call out like Joshua
in the hopes that doing so
will keep the sun from moving

These days are gifts
the kind that wear you out
the kind that leave you exhausted
and drinking large mugs of coffee
at four in the afternoon
but these days are still gifts
the kind you want to hold on to
and sip on a little later

But no good comes of stopping
time or trying to reign it in
because these days will grow cold
if we don’t drink them down now

So once again I walk peacefully into
the river the water the current
and it carries me along
to a place where time is nothing
more than one moment after
another

or perhaps time is a road
where the toll we pay
is a heavy one
and there will be some mile markers
that we water
with our tears