AN IN-FLIGHT EPITHANY

Legs stretched out, I-Pad open to a page turner mystery novel, I sat in my roomy exit row window seat ready for a relaxing flight home from North Bend, a small town in Oregon.  It was takeoff time and I was congratulating myself for the good luck that the aisle seat was vacant and I would have plenty of elbow and shoulder room during the flight. I would read and maybe even doze a bit. The flight attendant shut the hatch behind the last passenger to board.   He was a tall man, about six feet three, 275 pounds, wide shouldered, in his mid-sixties.  He was casually dressed, jeans, red wool plaid shirt and Nikes.

The flight was not full. Indeed, the man passed an empty row as he approached. I wondered why he didn’t sit in that row, which he’d have all to himself.  But no, he continued down the aisle, eyeing the seat numbers beneath the luggage compartments and, yes, stopped at my row. He checked his boarding pass, uttered, “Ah, here I am,” and plopped down beside me.

Yes, here he was, his shoulder invading my space.  I leaned against the cabin wall and focused on my novel, praying I’d avoid a tiresome conversation. He opened a paperback book and started to read.  Relieved, I sighed a quiet “thank you Lord,” and returned to my novel.

We were about 10 minutes into the flight when he closed his book, looked my way and asked, "What brought you to North Bandon?" 

I considered but abandoned the smart-ass answer, "an airplane," closed my e-book and resigned myself to spending the flight conversing with this stranger. Think positive. He might be interesting. I might learn something, I mused.

“I’ve been golfing at Bandon Dunes. I’m on my way home to Oakland. Do you live in San Francisco?”

"Oh, no, I live in North Bend. I have a connection at SFO to San Diego.  I'm on my way there to help our new youth pastor move to North Bend.  I’ll drive a truck packed with his furniture.  He and his wife will follow along in their car.””

“A church in North Bend?”

“Yes, First Baptist Church.”

“Are you the pastor?”

“I’m a member.  Once I was a Baptist pastor.  For 25 years.”

Oh, my Gawd, I thought. I'm stuck on this plane for an hour with this red neck, right wing, small- town Southern Baptist who probably was defrocked. Probably a Trump supporter, too.  I have nothing in common with this guy. What in the world can we talk about?   I knew that for the next hour I’d have to keep my far-left mouth shut, refrain from politics and certainly not discuss my church’s open arms to the LGBT community.

So, I proceeded safely.  "My son was a youth pastor. Now he’s the senior pastor at a Presbyterian church in Corvallis.”

Perhaps that information made him feel comfortable and safe to volunteer what I found to be really surprising.

 “Our new youth pastor is married to a Jamaican woman.”

 "Is she ...?"  I had stupidly nearly asked if she were black.  Of course, she was black.  "I mean, does the congregation know she’s black?"

“Oh yes. The congregation voted overwhelmingly to call this young man to shepherd the youth of our church.  We’re really excited to welcome him and his wife.”

This revelation put the lie to my biased pre-judgment of this stranger as a small-town bigot with whom I had nothing in common. Now I felt safe.  I told him that I had adopted black twins, had a black grandson and had been a civil rights lawyer for 40 years. Then we proceeded to chat about his church and North Bend and I learned, happily, that the pastor’s wife would not be the only black in North Bend.

After the plane landed and we were collecting our things, I turned to him and said,

“I’ve got to confess something.  When you told me that you lived in North Bend and were a retired Baptist preacher, I figured you for a small town, biased, right-winger. I decided that we had nothing in common, nothing to talk about. I apologize. I was so wrong. The fact is that I learned something important about me by talking to you.

.

“What was that?”

“That I, not you, was the biased one.”

“Well,” he said, smiling, “We haven’t talked about Trump.”

“And that’s a blessing,” I replied. 

We laughed, shook hands and went our separate ways.

(c) Kerry Gough 2018

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The Kiss and the Kill

                                               

                               Indelible Memories from My Childhood

                                                              1
                                                        The Kiss

We had just spent the day at the beach.  I was as happy as a ten year old boy can be. After two years in Alaska, my dad, who always saw the grass as greener across the fence, had packed us up, hooked up a used 15 foot house trailer and hauled all of us off, mom, my older brother and younger sister, down the dusty and sometimes muddy Alcan Highway back to the land of our origins, Southern California.  I, for one, even at my young and adventurous age, was delighted to leave Alaska for I loved sunny California and its beaches.  To run and jump into the cool ocean and then to lie in the sun, listen to the surf and enjoy the soothing warm ocean breeze caressing my body was heaven. 

Dad still had his 1941 four door Chevy, the one we’d driven from Alaska.   He was driving.  Mom was in the middle and next to the door was Audrey, wife of Chili West, one of Dad’s best friends from childhood.  I have no recollection why Audrey was on this family outing to the beach, but she and Chili and their kids were long time family friends, so her being along wasn’t strange or unusual.
I was sitting in the middle of the back seat between my brother and sister. It would have been just another drive home from a nice day at the beach, with nothing particularly memorable about it, until I did something that I cannot forget.

An arm lay across the top of the front seat.  Tiny, tiny bits of salt sparkled among the colorless, nearly invisible fuzz on that lightly tanned arm.  I must have assumed it was mom’s arm because, for some reason, and I have no recollection why, perhaps just being a kid loving his mom for taking him to the beach, but anyway, I leaned forward and I kissed that arm.

Audrey turned her head, smiled at me and said, “Kerry, how sweet.”
To my horror, I had kissed Audrey’s arm!   I sank back into the seat. If only I could have disappeared into it. My face burned with embarrassment.  I could not escape. I sat there, trapped between my smirking siblings, suffering Audrey’s repeated exclamation, “Oh, Kerry, how sweet, how sweet!”

                                                             2
                                                       The Kill

We returned to Alaska two years or so later, back up the Alcan Highway, this time in Dad’s 16 foot Federal truck loaded with all our belongings and equipped with a small sleeping and cooking space at the rear of the flat bed.  Dad loved to hunt, and to hunt was a major motivation to abandon his friends and relatives in Southern California and return to Alaska, the last frontier, where we would last a year or two before he would tire of the cold dark winters and pack us up to head back to good friends and the warmth of Southern California.

One year during caribou season dad took me along on the hunt. We left Anchorage and drove a hundred miles or so north on the Glen Highway, pulled off and parked on a wide spot in the road. Flat treeless tundra stretched for miles to the north.  We got out. Dad’s hunting buddies pulled up next to us.  We all stood there, three grown men and me, hunters, providing for our families. This was the first time dad had taken me on hunting trip, and I was so proud, feeling so grown up, standing there, all of us pissing on the gravel, marking our presence.  It was such a man thing.  I felt so grown up, so pleased to be there with my dad and his friends, one of the gang.

Dad raised his binoculars to his eyes and scanned the treeless tundra, searching for the caribou that always migrated through the area this time of year.  He spotted several caribou about 500 yards distant.  He had a 30.06 rifle with a scope.  The caribou were well within range of the 30.06 but dad wanted to get closer, to let me to have the shot.  “We’ve got to get closer,” he said, “and we’ve got to stay down low, behind the brush.”  Dad loaded the rifle. We started moving stealthily across the tundra, feet sinking several inches into the tundra, water rising in our footprints and wetting our boots as we crept from scraggly brush to scraggly brush. We approached within 250 to 300 yards. Dad and I lay flat, dad resting his elbows in the tundra as he spied on a group of three caribou.  He handed me the binoculars.  “Look at the one on the left.”  The binoculars were heavy and awkward in my hands, and the image jumped around and everything was out of focus. I had to sit with elbows on my knees in order to hold the binoculars steady.  Turning the focusing screw, eventually I was able to find the large bull. “Look at his spread,” dad whispered. “It’s darn near trophy size.”  The bull caribou was huge, noble and majestic.

Dad handed me the rifle.  He sat on the tundra.  “Lay the rifle on my shoulder,” he said, “that’s the only way you’ll be able to hold it steady and find him in the scope.”  I sat behind and slightly to his left, and laid the stock of the rifle on his shoulder. I took it off safety.   “Aim about halfway up his body, just behind his shoulder.”  I did as dad said. I found the huge beautiful animal in the scope, placed the scope’s cross hairs half way up his body and behind his shoulder and slowly pulled the trigger.

The caribou dropped to the tundra.

We ran towards the kill, as much as you can run through wet tundra.  Dad carried the rifle, ready to stop and shoot if the caribou got to its feet and started to run away.  It did not. No coup de gras was necessary.  I had shot it through the heart.  It had died instantly.  Even in death, the caribou was majestic, and I had killed it.

There are no photographs of me standing proudly with rifle in one hand, the other holding  one of the points of the caribou’s huge rack.  I was not the brave young hunter.  There are no photographs because I walked away and cried. I felt like I had killed one of Santa’s reindeer.

The caribou’s rack was in fact near record size in points and spread.  For years it hung over the garage door in my folks’ place in Anaheim where they retired when the unforgiving cold of Alaska once again moved them to the hazy warmth of southern California, never to return to the frigid north.

                                                             3
                                                The Memories

I have no idea where that rack is now.  Mom, dad and Audrey are long dead. What I do know is that the memories of the kiss and of the kill reside indelibly on the surface of my mind.  It takes only a random sight or sound to usher them full blown to my consciousness, filling me with ancient embarrassment and lingering regret.

Kerry Gough ©2018

DON'T CALL ME HOMELESS

As the middle aged couple exited upscale La Farine Bakery on College Avenue, a disheveled elderly man sitting on the sidewalk with a paper cup between his feet greeted them with a friendly “Hello,” in a tone that suggested he knew them. 

Neither of the couple responded, but as they walked by, one of them said, “Who is he?” and the other replied, “I don’t know, just some homeless guy.”

The old man shouted, “Don’t call me homeless!”

How convenient we find it to label and dismiss our fellow human beings with a thoughtless adjective: homeless, druggie, right-winger, racist, lefty, egoist, narcissist and hundreds of other nouns and adjectives uttered pejoratively. I confess that I have been guilty of such labeling in several of my politically directed blog posts.  I regret it, for to do so is to be intellectually lazy, to fail to make the effort to see beyond labels and to acknowledge that usually there is some good even in the persons I may passionately detest.

Having volunteered some years ago at a charity which provides Saturday evening meals to hungry people from the Berkeley streets, I had the opportunity to meet and chat with some of them. They were living on the streets. They were indeed homeless.

But they were more than that.

I met a professor who had a Ph.D. in economics,  a corporate executive, a mechanic, a school teacher, a construction worker and many others who had for one reason or another fallen upon hard times. Also at these meals usually there were teen-age boys and girls who were victims of physical and emotional assault and had fled their tormentors, often their parents or other relatives.  And of course there were drug and alcohol addicts, coming in from the streets for a hot meal, perhaps the only nourishing meal of their day or week.

They were all our fellow human beings. All of them at one time had parents who in most cases nourished and loved them, teachers who endeavored to educate them, employers who trusted and depended upon them, and many of them had themselves parented and loved and cared for their own children.

If we take a minute or two to contemplate the lives, activities, endeavors, employment, education, contributions, and family life of our dearest friends and neighbors and then dare to empathize with the men, women and children camped out under the freeways, we are compelled to accept that dwelling in those tents and under those tarps are people who in better times enjoyed comfortable lives similar to those of our friends and neighbors. They could have been our friends and neighbors. 

In our social lives it is so easy to define ourselves simplistically and unrevealingly:
     
        “Hello, my name is Kerry. I am so glad to meet you.”
        “I’m Bob.  What do you do, Kerry?”
        “I’m a lawyer.  And you?”
        “I’m a doctor.”

What have Bob and I learned about each other?  Really nothing. We’ve comfortably hung labels around our necks. If we really are interested in a new acquaintance, we should do as Joseph Ciza, a nurse who risks his life in war torn areas of eastern Democratic Republic of Congo does.  When asked “What do you do,” he responds, “Do you want to know what I do, or do you want to know who I am?”

That old man sitting on the sidewalk does not have a home.  But don’t dehumanize him by hanging the homeless label on him. 

Imagine the many possibilities of who he is.

(Thanks to Michael Barram, Ph.D., Professor of Religion at St. Mary’s College and author of Missional Economics, Biblical Justice and Christian Formation, and Arthur Ammann. M.D. author of Lethal Decisions, The Unnecessary Deaths of Women and Children from HIV/AIDS for their thought provoking remarks which moved me to write this blog.)

©Kerry Gough 2018