Letters From John

From left to right: John, Graeme and Ben

The next day we hiked down to the creek: Ben, John, Graeme and I. The descent into the valley was sheer, steep, and we clung to small trees as we slid into the field below. Once there we followed a winding path on high ground – that time of year the entire meadow was nearly under water, practically a bog. On the rocky banks of the stream we cast old lines, looked for fish in the still pools, then skipped rocks when we didn’t catch anything.

* * * * *

A few weeks later, long after Maile and I had returned to our house outside of London, I wrote a letter to John. I guess I wanted to somehow encourage him to keep on the straight and narrow, not to let his old life destroy him.

He wrote me back in a large, loping script. Now that I have kids, I recognize it as the handwriting of someone who is only learning to write, or perhaps hasn’t done much of it for a very long time.

John thanked me for writing. He was surprised and happy to discover that Shawn and John are actually the same name, just with different origins. He told me how excited he was to have started a new life, and how he wanted to help other guys in his situation.

* * * * *

A few years later we received sad news.

John was dead. The circumstances were questionable. He had died of a heart attack – we didn’t know if he had overdosed or if his heart had just given out after years of misuse and brokenness.

Not long after that, more bad news.

The pull of Graeme’s old lifestyle, the influence of his old friends, proved irresistible. He had left Ovis Farm, gotten back into trouble. The social workers were looking for him. The constable was looking for him. Then, one day, while running from police, he darted out into the road. He was struck by a car, and killed. He was only in his twenties, and his girlfriend was about to have his baby.

* * * * *

There’s a war waging right now for people’s lives. For some it’s trying to stay clean one more day. For others it’s that whisper telling them the time has come to end it all. For all of us, it involves choices. This or that. Life or death.

I guarantee you one thing: this struggle is so much bigger than the paltry little contests on the gridiron or the ball diamond that grip our attention. So much more hangs in the balance than a trophy or a title. Lives. Real lives. Why do we pay so much attention to entertainment, and so little to the contests that really matter?

There’s so much to do. I feel like I do so little.

* * * * *

“To preserve a man alive in the midst of so many chances and hostilities, is as great a miracle as to create him.”  ~Jeremy Taylor

* * * * *

To read part one of this story, go here: The Boxer and the Caged Wolf

The Boxer and the Caged Wolf

I remember my first trip to the southwest of England. It was like someone had taken all the beautiful things about the countryside where we lived, just west of London, and put them under a magnifying glass: the hills were steeper, the hairpin turns sharper, the green pastures somehow more alive.

As we turned off the highway and on to a single-track road, I began to wonder if we were lost. I had seen signs for Barnstaple, the closest town, but surely these roads weren’t meant for cars? They were lined with either high hedges or even higher banks. In some areas water ran through the road, small streams created by recent rains. We passed no other cars. Every few hundred yards a small space existed along the road where we pulled over and let the occasional tractor pass.

Then a narrow gap with a small sign: Ovis Farm.

We drove back the long, muddy lane and parked between a farmhouse and a converted barn. My brother-in-law Ben came out smiling, followed by my sister, Shar.

This was it. This was House of the Heroes.

* * * * *

Ben and Shar’s dream had always been to have a place to take the homeless men they met on the streets in London. Finally they had found a place. I couldn’t wait to look around.

We walked slowly into the kitchen – the table was surrounded by rough looking guys wearing ill-fitting clothes. Some looked so angry, I wondered if they were plotting the most painful way to tear me limb from limb. Others just looked sad, removed, as if they were caught in the midst of a painful dream from which they had no hope of waking.

But there were two men there that immediately caught my attention.

* * * * *

John was short, built like a bull. He looked to be in his late forties, although guessing those guys’ ages was always a losing proposition. He had a boxer’s nose and deep-set, solemn eyes. His smile looked like it had to fight its way through a broken jaw and more disappointment than I could ever imagine, but it still emerged. He smiled. A lot.

At dinner that night he ate as if he had never eaten before – the volume, the speed, the appreciation with which he threw that food down, it all gave witness to something that Ben told me later.

“He’s only been clean a few weeks now. We keep him busy with farm work, and he loves to eat. Keeps his mind off things.”

* * * * *

There was another, younger man sitting at the table. His name was Graeme. His hair was as black as those Barnstaple nights. He had a few missing teeth and dark purple rings around his eyes. When he smiled, he looked like a seven year-old boy; when he wasn’t smiling, he looked like a caged wolf.

Graeme followed John around the way a new puppy trails behind the old dog. Nipping at his heels. Yapping in his ear. Playful attempts to receive some sort of affection he never had before.

* * * * *

These men would eventually become our friends. Ben and Shar were always closer to them than Maile and I, but John sent me a few letters. They both sent pictures of themselves learning to roll soft pretzels. We hoped that, someday, when they had taken time to recover, perhaps they could manage or work at one of our stores in London.

But sometimes we cannot escape from the old things in life. Sometimes the past has a long reach.

Continued

A Brief History of Love, in 617 Words

Students scurried across the large grassy area of campus. It was a hot, October day, and anyone fortunate enough not to have a class lay on the grass, some on blankets, some propping their heads on backpacks. They were surrounded by a protective layer of trees and academic buildings. The air was filled with potential and youthfulness and optimism.

One boy in particular, walking from one of the larger brick buildings towards Old Main, glanced discreetly over his shoulder at the girl, also walking slowly, about thirty yards behind him. They had five classes together, but had never spoken. He walked slower, waiting for her to catch up.

Then he noticed that she had slowed down. So he pretended to stop and tie his shoe. She slowed down even more. Finally he stood up and turned toward her.

“Hi.”

* * * * *

Four years later the boy and girl take a train from London to Paris. They leave early in the morning, when London is still quiet and dark. The train speeds across the English country side, grabbing hedgerows and pastures and even small villages and casting them back. Then darkness as the train disappears under the channel.

France emerges, feeling older and a little less friendly. The boy and girl do not speak the language. They wander the city, following a red line in a magazine to mostly small, out of the way shops. The Basilica of the Sacred Heart rises into the gray sky. Notre Dame sits patiently, waiting for another time in future history, when it will no longer be bothered by irreverent shouting and pesky strangers.

The boy and girl hold hands, walking through the rain, their shoulders pulled up towards their ears. A cab whisks them back to la Gare du Nord. The seats in the train are not good for sleeping – too straight, too rigid, but somehow the girl drifts off, her head on the boy’s shoulder.

* * * * *

One year after their first trip to Paris, five years after the boy stopped and pretended to tie his shoe on that grassy patch on campus, the boy and girl enter Paris again. This time by plane. This time they have a little boy with them, not yet one. He looks exactly like the girl, with blue eyes and a soft nose and a round face.

They stay two nights, but everyone gets sick. The boy spends the weekend finding medicine for the little boy. The girl spends the weekend in the motel bathroom, washing the little boy’s clothes which are covered in diarrhea.

During daylight hours the three emerge, pale and weak. They walk quietly through the Louvre, not out of respect, but because they are too tired to talk.

They consider going home early, but decide to stay. The French air is crisp and refreshing. They don’t want to go back to the motel. They wander the streets until the lights turn on and the waitress at the cafe takes their order. The city lights reflect off of the Seine.

* * * * *

Twelve years after the boy stopped to tie his shoe, eight years after their first trip to Paris, seven years after their second trip to Paris, they now live in Virginia. The boy stands at the kitchen counter. The girl leans against the wall.

They have run out of money.

Upstairs they can hear the little boy playing with two little girls. All three children look exactly like the girl. A baby boy, fresh to the world, sleeps in a baby swing.

“Now what?” the boy asks the girl.

* * * * *

The story continues HERE

The Fire That Wouldn’t Stay Lit

“Hah ahm stenly,” he said, shaking my hand with what must have been a bionic appendage. His fingers were like miniature coils of steel cable.

The first time I spoke with Stanley, who was the gardener at Rocketer (which is the name of the estate on which our little cottage was located), I could hardly understand a word he said. His Welsh accent had so many meandering sounds that listening to him was like trying to write out the movements of a stream. Think Alex Ferguson from Manchester United, but with marbles in his mouth.

He was showing me where I could find cut up logs to split for firewood. He even gave me access to his axe and wedge and the shed where he dumped all the cut-but-not-split wood. I discovered that I could understand him better if I squinted and turned my head slightly to one side. He was a nice man. He probably thought I was a little touched, what with the squinting and head-turning and all.

“Chust doont cuh-ulf yrrr fult,” he said over his shoulder, laughing.

* * * * *

The whole reason I was even chopping wood was due to another half-misunderstood conversation. After we had been living in our quaint little drafty cottage for a few months the utility folks called, asking how we wanted to pay for the first quarter’s worth of electricity we used.

“How much do we owe?”

“480 pounds.”

“I’m sorry, it sounded like you said 480 pounds.”

“Ah did. Four hundred and eighty pounds.”

Ouch. We had just moved to England. We still did the conversion with every pound we spent. Four hundred eighty pounds was equal to about $750.

“Would you like to pay in installments?” the kind lady asked.

Yes please.

* * * * *

“It’s got to be those electric baseboard heaters,” Maile said. She was right.

“We’ll have to use that thing,” I said, pointing to the furnace in the wall. “And that thing,” I said, beckoning to the fireplace in the front room. So off I went to find the wood that our landlord had so graciously offered us months ago. Which is when I met Stanley. And he told me to “just don’t cut off your foot.”

* * * * *

That night we switched off the baseboard heaters and got the fire in the furnace cranking. So hot, in fact, that it heated up all the radiators in the house to scalding levels. So hot, that I had to get up in the middle of the night and open most of the windows, let in the winter before the entire cottage floated away like a hot-air balloon.

Then, when we woke in the morning, we could see our breath in clouds. We shivered our way downstairs and lit the fire again, crouching beside it, shivering.

“Wood burns too fast,” I said, my teeth chattering. “We need coal.”

* * * * *

To read other stories from our time in England, click HERE.