This scene, and the words I attached to it, is extremely moving to me. I guess that by my age, there is a lifetime of grief that will not go away in the short term. As a friend wrote, there are “So many missing springs.” Indeed. I can never see the daffodils, wild violets, and other spring flowers without thinking of my Mom. Ever since 2006, they have bloomed without her.
The scene is what I saw when I crossed the bridge where Rush Creek enters White Rock Lake. A few weeks before, I had taken the following photo, which I then captioned “Grow Old Along With Me” (an allusion to Dad’s favorite poem, Rabbi Ben Ezra by Robert Browning:
I walked right past this man on one of my hikes around White Rock Lake. But then I turned and asked “May I take your photograph?” I couldn’t understand his response, but he seemed to be saying “Yes.” We soon discovered that both of us speak Spanish, and I learned that he is from Valladolid, Spain. He says that the cat really seems to enjoy riding in this carrier, and it doesn’t tire him at all to carry her that way.
Since my shadow was falling right between him and the bike, I walked back just a little on the path and took my photo from there. Below, you’ll see the original. Late afternoon sun casts such yellow light that I reduced the warmth in order to separate the colors a bit. It’s still too yellow, if you ask me, but you can only push color so far before it looks fake. As you’ll see from the original, the bicycle was positioned too far from the man for an effective square crop, so I did what I rarely ever do: cloned with Photoshop. That’s how I moved the bicycle closer to him. Can you see my error? Look closely at the left handle bar in the photo above. And now that I look more closely, I see another two other errors. Good thing nobody was paying me for this!
Original Photo:
[EDIT 1/31/2020]: I ran into Raul again today. This time he was without cat. We sat on a park bench by the lake about 20 or 30 minutes and talked about Spain (he returns in two weeks), the history of the Moorish conquest of Spain, work attitudes in Spain versus the U.S.A., and unemployment there. He says there’s 20% unemployment (50% among young people under 35, who end up living with their parents as a result). He attributes the lack of enthusiasm for working in Spain to low wages and the fact that everyone is paid the same. On the one hand, it sounds dreary ($1000/month average income), but then the simpler life there sounds attractive. Raul is mid-50s, and is already retired. He says that’s common. He was astonished when I told him I expect to do some work until I’m 70. I didn’t tell him that my Dad was doing heavy-duty theology and writing well into his 80s. More than once, Raul pointed to his watch, exemplifying how the Spanish worker watches the clock. He said many do that right up until they retire, and then — shortly after — they die. My Spanish may be attrocious, but I’m pretty sure it’s a relief to Raul to hear it, even if butchered by a Gringo.
The art director looking over my shoulder was beside himself.
“Use CTRL-D!”
Minutes before, he had yelled “Stop the presses!” when he discovered an error on his print job. Now he wanted me to fix his error as fast as possible. Why was I not using every keyboard shortcut known to man?
My mind went back twenty years…. There I was, sitting in my carrel by a second-floor window of the college library. While writing a paper, I looked out the window and watched the ultimate frisbee match they were playing on the lawn below. Three minutes passed, and then I rebuked myself: “Why were you staring out the window, when you were supposed to be writing?!”
Another internal lawyer jumped to my defense, “Actually, you were thinking about this paper the entire time you were looking out the window. You didn’t waste a second. Back off, slave driver!”
The art director snapped me back to the present. “CTRL-D! CTRL-D! I don’t have all day!”
Art directors are paid to criticize, and this one was getting paid overtime.
“Listen here, punk” I thought, practically out loud. “You want me to hurry up because you made a mistake. Around here, they pay me to NOT make mistakes.”
Instead of pressing CTRL-D, I copied and then pasted: two steps to his one step. In the extra milliseconds, I was thinking about what I was doing, checking that the action was correct, looking carefully at the results.
“There, sir. It’s fixed. We’ll make new plates now. You should be back on press in half an hour.”
Late last summer, I was on one of my strolls around White Rock Lake. I stopped to collect seeds of Queen Anne’s Lace by the path. After filling a small plastic bag, I continued my walk. A few minutes later, I felt in the pocket for my car key. “Oh no!” It wasn’t there. When I reached into my pocket to pull out the bag, I must have pulled out the car key as well, and dropped it in the weeds.
Returning to the area where the key had dropped, I made a careful search. No luck!
The next day, I returned with a leaf rake, and tried pulling it through the weeds to turn up the key. Still no luck!
Worse yet, while I was raking, who should appear on the running path but Phillip Paris!
“Hi Phillip!” “Hi Brad.”
It was a training run. Naturally, Phillip just kept running. When he had gone another 20 yards, I couldn’t stand the humiliation.
“Hey, Phillip!” He stopped. “I know this must look crazy. I lost my key, and I was using this rake to help me find it.”
“Oh,” said Phillip with a smile. “I know how much you like the running path here, so I figured you were just helping with maintenance.”
“No, I’m just crazy when I lose something!”
That evening, I told Joshua my embarrassing story, and Phillip’s kind answer.
“What a wholesome response!” said Joshua.
“Yes,” I thought. “What a wholesome response. And how proud I am of a son who calls it for what it is!”
Being stupid and forgetful has its charms. For instance, there was that Saturday afternoon many years ago….
I was working in my home office when the doorbell rang. I opened the front door, and there was the Domino’s guy, already removing a large pizza from his insulated delivery bag.
“Brad Hepp?” “That’s me.” “Here’s your pizza.” “I didn’t order pizza.” “Well, somebody ordered it for Brad Hepp and they already paid.” “Okay. Thanks!”
I set the pizza on the kitchen counter, wondering how this could have happened. Did I dare take a bite? What if someone was trying to poison me?
That’s when I remembered a phone call I’d had just 30 minutes before with my buddy Marco, who lives up in Maryland. Like me, he is a webmaster. He was calling to share the great news that he had just sold a domain name for $10,000.
“Wow!” I told Marco. “Congratulations!” Then I mindlessly added, “Pizza for everyone!”
STILL THE BEST THING SINCE SLICED BREAD I really don’t understand why the Butter Bell isn’t in every home! You fill the top part with softened butter, then turn that upside down into the bottom part with its naturally cooling water. Left out on the kitchen counter, the Butter Bell keeps butter creamy for days, ready to slather on bread. Middle-aged men are thus enabled to maintain an attractive and protective layer of belly fat without fighting refrigerated butter. Get yours (dish, not man) at https://www.butterbell.com
Somebody you encounter today will be surrounded by ugliness. In a world still full of God’s glory, they’ll see only Satan’s graffiti. Even if God’s new creation has begun to spring in their own hearts, His creative power to quiver in their fingertips, they’ll be thinking only of winter and death.
Can you see past the ugliness? Ignore the delible marrings? Notice the buds of new life? See the melting of winter’s cruel embrace?
If the needle of your beauty meter moves today, then speak it. Write it. Draw it. Hug it. Dance it. Whisper it in the ear of one whose beauty meter is broken for now.
A passing motorist politely stopped his car to avoid messing up this photo. When I gave him the “thumbs up,” he rolled down his window and said, “That’s gonna be a helluva shot!” He could tell that the light was pretty special.
Confession: I had waved the motorist on when I saw him stop, and was slightly annoyed at him. “What’s his problem? Does he think I’m casing his neighbor’s house? Is that why he’s just sitting there?” It was only when he rolled down the window and spoke with me as a fellow lover of the light that my jaded assumption was rebuked!
At a recent luncheon at Dallas Seminary, a young lady asked the Australian speaker a profound question, which he didn’t seem to understand: “Does having grown up under monarchy help you better understand these concepts?” I immediately understood her because I think a lot about what is influencing my thinking. The following [above] poem is one attempt to discern how I am affected by having grown up under representative democracy. There have been societies where people didn’t spend a fraction of the time we do THEORIZING about how GOVERNMENT should use our neighbors’ money to effect justice and virtue. Sometimes it seems that’s ALL we do.
We Protestants love the phrase “Kingdom of Priests.” But I fear we may love it for the wrong reason. We love the privileged access we have to God, not the responsibility that entails with regard to God and our fellow man. We are in danger of exchanging “proxies” for “priests.” If you think this is a call to embrace one perishing political system over another, you could not be more wrong. It is precisely the reliance on foolishness of the left and foolishness of the right that I am trying to escape.
This is admittedly an odd poem to write on Christmas morning. Let me justify it. Here are some of God’s gifts that affect me deeply:
family and friends who recognize, but are unsatisfied with their limits
family and friends who accept me as I am, but encourage me to be more
eternity
Commentary
In case you are wondering…. I DO believe there is such a thing as truth. But we currently possess very little of it. I’m thankful that there is all eternity to explore and learn.
Rather I prize the doubt Low kinds exist without, Finished and finite clods, untroubled by a spark.
The tone is sarcastic. In my favorite part, the last two stanzas, the “Know-It-Alls” are speaking to those who think there is a world yet to explore. They refer to them as fools, whose ignorance is vast. What satisfying irony that the very thing they criticize is the seed of a superior inheritance.
A friend was telling Susan and me how they had bought their daughter a parrot for Christmas. The daughter lives alone and could sometimes use the company. “Oh, that’s nice,” said Susan. “Oh yes!” said the friend. “She’s been all smiles ever since we gave it to her.” I could imagine the daughter smiling. I could imagine how she’ll teach the parrot to greet her when she comes into the empty apartment. Maybe she’ll even teach the parrot to scare off intruders! But parrots can be a little messy….
“She was so happy that we went right out and bought a second one for her! She just can’t get the smile off her face!”
Two parrots! Just then, my concern overcame my manners: “That’s a lifetime commitment.” “What do you mean?” asked the friend. “Parrots live a long time.” She looked at me with pity. “FERRETS, Brad, not parrots! Ferrets only live eight years.”
[bg_collapse view=”button-blue” color=”#ffffff” icon=”eye” expand_text=”Click to view the image that they sent me” collapse_text=”Hide the ferrets” ][/bg_collapse]
These friendly people call their home “Sunset House” for a very good reason. On one of the more glorious days in Dallas, they invited me to join them on the patio to share their spectacular view of the sunset over White Rock Lake.
Distillation of a dream that just had me. [MORNING EDIT: Every time I wake up in the middle of the night and post something that just occurred to me, I wake up the next day and semi-regret it. My 2 am thoughts are weird(er) than usual. Perhaps Ezekiel felt that way!]
I may only have two friends old enough to understand this…. In my midnight dream, I pictured myself as what one would see through the viewfinder of an old rangefinder camera. Ideally, the photographer would twist the focusing barrel until a sharp image and its ghostly double were perfectly aligned. But in my dream, the split images remained separate—out of focus. Such is the dream of an old photographer-poet.
focusing through a rangefinder camera; not there yet
“Sigh to…” Think “Try to…” but with the frustration of someone unable to change himself. However, “Good Lord!” is said in both exasperation (lament) and hope. He IS “bringing many sons to glory.”
I have been noticing recently that writing poetry is a way to access emotions and thoughts that have been suppressed in some way. So when I say that poets twist words to reveal the truth, I’m referring partly to the truth about what “lurks” in their hearts. Sometimes that truth is good, sometimes not so good! But at least the poet is getting closer to honesty.
At its best, poetry expresses beautiful truths in a way that helps both the poet and reader understand them better. That’s my goal.
I’ll be hard-pressed to fully explain this one, but let me try by recounting the occasion:
I had been praying for a friend’s father for about a year. He was a brilliant man whose mind and health were failing. My repeated prayer was that God would give him enough clarity of mind and grace to respond in faith to the Savior — if he had not already done so (my friend wasn’t sure). He was on my list of “People I Want to See in Heaven!” God knew all about it.
On Saturday morning, after months in hospice, the father passed away a little before noon. My wife and I heard the sad news shortly after.
A couple of hours later, I was taking my afternoon nap. To help me sleep, I placed a piece of dark, heavy clothing over my face. As I lay there in that artificial darkness, it was as though the sun had gone down. I thought of my friend, and I began to sob. Some of this was fresh grief for my friend. Some was the mounting grief of a lifetime of deaths. I’ve been here before — three years ago, when my own father died.
I thought of how convenient it was that I could press the artificial darkness to my face and express my feelings without alarming my family. How I’d like to stay there, not remove the darkening cloth — now wet — from my face. But this day had many more hours to go.
Yet to Explore
How does the sun relate to the father? How does that sun both create and respond to the reality of “newborn day”? I have been thinking lately about Romans 8, where creation is depicted as groaning as it awaits freedom from corruption at the “the revealing of the sons of God.” That figures in to my inchoate thoughts. Here’s one of those embarrassing things about poetry: I don’t yet know the meaning of my own words, but firmly believe there IS meaning.
At a reception in our church, I was talking with a friend whose family had recently experienced deep trauma, and was still reeling. A fellow who doesn’t attend our church joined our conversation. He was tall and powerfully-built, a tough guy. He greeted my friend and said, “I have been praying for your family A LOT.”
Since you weren’t there, and didn’t see his face or hear his voice, let me translate “A LOT.” Here’s what the tough guy was saying: “I think of you and your family so much, and pray for you so often, that I sometimes wonder if I have gone off the deep end. If you knew how often I pray for you, you’d be tempted to get a restraining order.”
“A LOT.” Do I love anyone that much? Am I such a weirdo?
This Advent mindset doesn’t come easy for me, but I’m trying…. When I say “Let’s not pretend,” it’s myself I’m talking to. Being a “glass one-fifth full” guy, I frequently gloss over my own disappointments. And I ignore the suffering of others all too easily. But I’m convinced that God will correct this, that God IS correcting this.
