Walk ... And Carry A Big Stick

About a year ago I was headed somewhere on a beautiful day, sunroof open, Josh Groban blaring on the CD player, very pleased with the recent acquisition of my new (used) car and experiencing recurrent frissons of friskiness, when I saw the dogs. Now, just so you know, I happen to be a certified dog nut. Dogs send me over the moon. I cannot get enough of dogs. I love dogs -- the general concept of dogs but also individual dogs both known and unknown to me. Dogs almost always like me too. I was taught a long time ago the correct way to approach a dog who doesn't know you, and maybe I've just been lucky, but dogs' tails usually wag around me. I love to kiss their soft faces in the vicinity of their lovely trusting eyes. They're so awesome I get emotional just thinking about it.

I have taken homeless dogs in before and once one of them had puppies on my lookout. Although that was very hard work, it was so much fun. Mom was a Beagle we called Dixie, and I think her offspring had been sired by a big black dog who jumped our fence (name of Don Juan) to pay her the amorous attention she was clearly craving. Six of the cutest puppies you ever saw resulted from their brief but passionate encounter. I and my daughter Audrey delivered the puppies over an exhausting ten-hour period one Sunday in late summer. Despite our best efforts two of the little guys promptly died (I simply cannot talk about that) but three females and one male thrived. We named them Rosemary, Buttons, Bows, and Superman. They were all kinds of adorable and we have a beautiful framed picture of them to prove it. All four and their darling mama are now in other happy homes and we are left with one aging Chihuahua that provides more than enough diversion of the canine variety for one household.

But I digress. On said sunny day last year, as I tripped along a road near my house, reveling in a heady combination of my favorite tunes enhanced by the 12-inch woofer embedded in the back window ledge, newish car smell, and the persistent illusion of my own youngish self behind the wheel, I glanced over to the sidewalk and saw the dogs. Although I have seen these dogs several times since, that day was the first time I noticed them. There were three dogs being given walkies by an older gentleman, and two of them were in a double-harness contraption. The third dog -- the one closest to the road  -- was on a lead by himself. And he's the one that had the big stick in his mouth, and how I wish you could have seen him. He was a reddish color and I judged him to be a Labrador mix. On a personalized doggie timeline of American history his puppyhood would likely coincide with the waning days of the Clinton administration. He was not trotting or exhibiting any other high level of energy. He was simply ambling along, looking down at the sidewalk mostly, but he was carrying a long (at least four feet) stick in his mouth. He looked like a tightrope walker clutching his outsized balancing rod.

Now, I don't know for a solid fact why he was carrying the stick (whatever it is he's consistent because every time I see him, he has it), but in my mind the stick said, It was time to go for a walk and usually all we do is walkies but sometimes we go to the park and I grabbed this here stick because if I take it along maybe someone will throw it and give me a chance to run after it and fetch it back. And as engrossed as I had been in the sheer joy of a beautiful day and driving my car, I got verklempt at the sight of this dear beastie shambling along obediently on a lead, carrying his big stick and hoping against hope for a chance at a game of fetch. That sweet animal with his cherished toy, his klediment, spoke volumes about the wonderful humble nature of dogs -- not to mention the sweet impermanent nature of life.

The matchless Michael Jordan of Chicago Bulls fame was known for having a "love of the game" clause in his contract. From what I understand, it stated that he had the right to pick up a basketball and play whenever and wherever and with whomever he wanted. He didn't have to worry about whether he got injured during such a game; the Bulls had him covered for any eventuality. He (or his agent) invented the "love of the game" clause, and he would not sign without it. I like to think that the dog with the stick, like Michael Jordan, has in a manner of speaking insisted on having a "love of the game" clause in his contract. For both of them, despite having long ago attained grown-up status, retain a childlike wonder and an ageless playfulness. They stubbornly remain open to all of life's glorious possibilities and refuse to be denied even the most innocent joy.

When our daughter Audrey was in fourth grade and her sister Stephanie was a seventh grader, they both participated in their school's intramural basketball program. Sluggish and clumsily-played after-school games were attended by patient parents and very few other "fans." The level of play fell somewhere between watching the clothes in your dryer go round-and-round and scrubbing at your shower grout with a toothbrush. On one such afternoon when Stephanie was helping out at the scorers' table and Audrey was on the court "playing," a tragic but wonderful thing happened. Audrey got the ball (a miracle in itself) and broke away from the pack, running full-tilt for the basket. Nearing the goal she lofted the ball, which arced perfectly, and with a breathless "swish" she scored two points ... for the other team. Her face, which for a moment had shone with pure unfettered joy and amazement, froze in horror when she realized what she had done.

Before anyone could react, Audrey turned and made a beeline for Stephanie, who immediately stood, reached across the scorers' table, took a sobbing Audrey in her arms, and provided sisterly comfort. People talked about it for weeks afterward. At the dinner table that night my husband and I assured Audrey that, even though she had made a mistake, she had played with all her heart and that was the important thing. She had played with exuberance, which is what matters. And those who loved her were there to help pick up the pieces when the wheels fell off.

Play with joyous abandon, even if you make a mistake once in awhile (or if you're like me, often). Sing off key, but sing. Play even when you've been hurt or humiliated or both, or when you're in foul trouble. With any luck, if you give it all you've got, there'll be an overtime! But whatever you do, play for the love of the game.

If You Can Read This, Thank A Veteran

Every now and then, on purpose, I dwell on the sacrifices made by the American soldier in all wars. It boggles my mind after just a few minutes and I can barely continue, but I do it anyway. Years ago I began reading The Long Gray Line: The American Journey of the West Point Class of 1966 by Rick Atkinson. It is the story of the experiences of a group of cadets while at West Point, in Vietnam, and beyond. I am almost ashamed to admit that I could not finish the book; certain passages are so graphic and so sad that they made me physically ill. I need to try again, and I plan to do it soon, because I don't want to forget what these men and their families suffered.

Another excellent book that I did finish, and which made a huge impression upon me, is entitled Good Night Officially: The Pacific War Letters of a Destroyer Sailor edited by William M. McBride. Yeoman James Orvill Raines's letters home to Ray Ellen, his wife of four years, contain some of the most romantic prose I've ever read; I get the shivers just thinking about it. I wish I could set forth here the entire letter that Orvill wrote, dated 30 July 1944, to be given to Ray Ellen in the event of his death. It reads in part:

My Darling Baby Ray Ellen, I hope that you never read this letter ... whether I am with you or in the sea, please realize that my love for you has been the greatest that any man has bestowed upon a woman ... you are a beautiful woman, Ray Ellen. This time I am having the last word on it. You are a beautiful woman and intelligent. Kind and generous. A wonderful woman to have for a wife. You made my life while it lasted the most happy life a man could have and may God bless you for it ... however I get it, My Darling, remember that my last breath was drawn in an effort to get back to you. That my last thought was of you and if I cried, it wasn't from pain of wound but pain of not holding you in my arms again. All the love, devotion and worship that any man can give a woman I give to you in this, my last "Good Bye Officially." Your devoted husband, Orvill.

That's what I'm talking about. After leaving for active duty on the USS Howorth in April of 1944, James Orvill Raines never saw Ray Ellen again. He was killed in action off Okinawa on April 6, 1945.

One night several years ago I decided I needed to see the film Saving Private Ryan. Normally I don't like war movies because I find them so depressing, but I wanted to see this one. I like the work of Steven Spielberg and I like Tom Hanks, and I liked the fact that it was a true story. I thought I knew something about what the Allied forces had faced as they took the beaches at Normandy, but nothing could have prepared me for what is depicted in the first 24 minutes of that film. I was dumbfounded at the sight of young boys being shot and killed before they could even get out of the Harris boats. And if they did get out of the boats, the horror of what they faced on Omaha Beach was incomprehensible to me. I don't think I blinked for a long time; I wanted to look away but I couldn't. Incredulous, I asked my husband, who has done a great deal of reading on the subject of D-Day, if that's what it was really like. He nodded, his eyes bright with tears.

A few years ago I watched another war movie which, much like Schindler's List, another Spielberg masterpiece, I'm both glad I saw and I wish I hadn't. We Were Soldiers, starring Mel Gibson, depicts the circumstances surrounding a horrific battle that took place in the Ia Drang Valley of Vietnam in November of 1965. It was the first major battle of the Vietnam war in which Americans were involved. The movie features the haunting song The Mansions of the Lord, sung during the end credits by the West Point Glee Club. The song had a prominent place in the majestic state funeral of President Ronald Reagan (a WWII veteran), where it was sung by the Armed Forces Chorus as his coffin was removed from the National Cathedral. Below is a video of that segment of the service. It's longish but worth watching.

To fallen soldiers let us sing
Where no rockets fly nor bullets wing
Our broken brothers let us bring
To the mansions of the Lord

No more bleeding no more fight
No prayers pleading through the night
Just divine embrace, eternal light
In the mansions of the Lord

Where no mothers cry and no children weep
We will stand and guard though the angels sleep
All through the ages safely keep

The mansions of the Lord

In 2005 our daughter, Audrey, was given a trip to France as a college graduation present. Of course she was thrilled to be "going abroad." She was practically incoherent at the mere thought of seeing Paris with her own eyes. But one of the things she looked forward to the most was seeing the beaches at Normandy ... the beaches where Operation Overlord, D-Day, June 6, 1944, was carried out. Audrey enjoys history and as my husband is a WWII buff, she was well-informed about the events that transpired on D-Day. In the days before her trip, as a sort of readiness exercise, Audrey read her father's copy of Douglas Brinkley's The Boys of Pointe du Hoc: Ronald Reagan, D-Day, and the US Army 2nd Ranger Battalion. She brought her father a small bottle of sand that she collected from Normandy, and we all cried as she told us what it had been like to visit the cemetery there. The sheer number of the white crosses had a huge impact on Audrey and she said she would never be the same. I'm glad she had that experience; I hope to be able to see that sight myself one day. God Bless our troops and our veterans, and God bless America.

Update on Monday, November 12, 2007 at 02:05AM by Jennifer

Buried Alive!

A dear friend emailed me today to tell me that she had just returned home from a vacation on Marco Island, Florida. In the time it would take to pick up a starfish from the seashore, the mention of Marco Island brought back a flood of memories that I just had to sit and think on for a while. In December of 1968 I was an 11-year-old living in Oakland Park, Florida. One day the spectacular news story broke that Barbara Jane Mackle, a 20-year-old coed at Emory University in Atlanta, had been kidnapped at gunpoint from a Rodeway Inn in Decatur, Georgia (the bedroom community of Atlanta where, a little over a decade later, I would be married). The reason this was big news where I lived was that the lovely Barbara Jane was an heiress from Coral Gables, Florida, a privileged place situated only 35 miles down I-95 from where I lived with my family, but light years away from an economic standpoint.

Marco Island is a fabulous residential and resort community on Florida's gulf coast, about 100 miles west of Miami. Robert Mackle, Barbara Jane's father, was the wealthy land developer who, with his brothers, had been responsible for developing the island in the early '60s. Barbara Jane's kidnappers demanded and got a $500,000 ransom from her father, but not before they had buried his daughter alive in a wooded area northeast of Atlanta. This was the part that caught and held my attention when the story broke and over the days it unfolded in the television and print media. Barbara Jane had left her dorm to stay at the motel with her mother because she, Barbara Jane, was suffering from the Hong Kong Flu that had spread like wildfire through the Emory University campus. The next morning her mother planned to drive Barbara Jane back home to Coral Gables to spend the Christmas holiday in their mansion.

Their trip would be delayed. In the middle of the night, a man banged on the door of the Mackle women's hotel room, identifying himself as a police officer and saying that Barbara Jane's boyfriend had been involved in an automobile accident. When the door was opened, Gary Krist and his female accomplice bound and gagged Barbara Jane's mother and took Barbara Jane away in a car! I shuddered as it was revealed in the news that Barbara Jane's kidnappers had constructed a "coffin" for her, outfitted it with supplies that included water laced with sedatives, and buried her under 18 inches of dirt. She stayed underground, alone, for 83 hours, with only a little pipe coming up through the dirt to give her an oxygen source. What if a wild animal had come along and taken the little pipe that was for Barbara Jane to breathe through? She would have died.

But she didn't die; the kidnappers got their money (although they were later apprehended) and Barbara Jane was found by the FBI. I was fascinated by the picture of her that was printed in the newspaper, supposedly taken the moment they took the lid from her coffin. Imagine having been buried alive for three days, being dug up, having the top of the box removed, and instantly having flashbulbs going off in your face! I would have demanded -- and gotten -- that roll of film and thrown it deep into the woods. They could take my picture after I'd had a shower and put on some makeup. Even so, the picture they took of Barbara Jane has an eerie beauty to it. My mother said that you could tell from the picture that the kidnappers had given Barbara Jane drugs to keep her quiet. Her eyes do look dreamy.

Twelve years ago something happened to me that felt like being buried alive. The details aren't important; insert your own personal tragedy here. No ransom was demanded, however, and, unlike Barbara Jane, no one looked for me. No desperate hands dug into the earth, determined to locate my shallow grave and free me from it. I walked and I talked and I functioned for eleven years after the event, but it felt like I had been taken from my life in the middle of the night, shoved into a cold wooden box with drug-tainted water and a skimpy air supply, covered up with dirt, and left alone in the dark, terrified. I know I sound like a drama queen, but it's the truth.

A year ago, through what I consider to be an extraordinary set of circumstances, I was freed from that horrible box. The way it happened, however, is not as important as the fact that it did. Lots of lovely people helped me. God helped me. To some extent I helped myself. I can breathe deeply again; I can see the light of day. Praise the Lord and pass the mascara; I want my eyes to look extra dreamy.

Barbara Jane

Push ... Don't Pull

It has always amazed me how much people hate to see anyone go against the grain, and how much they despise those who set the bar just a little bit higher. Also amazing to me is how little people will settle for. I am intrigued by the scene in The American President where Michael Douglas's character tells Michael J. Fox's character that "People [in deserts] don't drink the sand because they're thirsty; they drink the sand because they don't know the difference." How true! People will guzzle sand and call it the sweetest water on earth. It happens every day. And most people don't like it when someone close to them comes to their senses and says, "Hey! This isn't water! It's sand!" Most people interpret that as censure at worst and mild criticism at best, and their first instinct is to resent it.

That reminds me in a roundabout way of something I once read about crabs, and people who enjoy the activity of "crabbing" will tell you this is true. It goes like this: If you catch one live crab and put it in a bucket, you must put a lid on the bucket because a single crab can (and will) climb out. However, if you catch another crab and put it into the bucket to keep company with the first one, you can leave the bucket lid off, because the crabs will latch onto one another and pull. Each will continually see to it that the other remains in the bucket; neither crab will ever allow the other one to escape. Two crabs is all it takes to keep them both contained, and they'll behave this way one hundred percent of the time.

It is another phenomenon of life that, although we may not always realize it when we ourselves are pulling others down, we recognize immediately when others are trying to pull us down. And it hurts! It really does. Having experienced this firsthand, to the extent that I can influence others I would really like it to be true that I encourage them rather than discourage them. This does not mean that I necessarily endorse every single thing they might do; it just means that, inasmuch as I myself want to be encouraged, I should work at being an encouragement to others. And if something unexpectedly good comes about for them as a result of my encouragement, by all means I should have the grace to be happy for them.

(I have told my children many times to never begrudge anyone something good that happens to them, or something nice that another might receive. Why? Because it may be the best thing that ever happens to that person! It may be the last year, or month, or week, or day, or even hour, of their lives. Let them be happy, and be happy for them. It won't diminish you one bit.)

Once you have encouraged someone, and perhaps opened up a whole new world for them by doing so (yes ... you have that power), don't be afraid to let them go where they need to go. Don't feel as though you have to remind them all the time that they're not perfect; they probably already know that. Give them a nudge. Stand on the sidelines and cheer. Remove obstacles from their way if you can ... but whatever you do, don't pull them back down. Maybe you've helped them to realize that they had been drinking sand all along, and calling it water. Maybe your "seeing" them as someone capable of accomplishing a dream helped them to see it themselves, and to set goals and find the wherewithal to pursue them. So don't pull! Push ... gently ... with a smile and a steadying hand outstretched, in case they need it. In case they fall.

The Kindness Of Strangers

Why does it have to get dark so early? This evening I had a late-starting deposition (my second of the day) because the deponent was a physician who would not agree to be deposed until after office hours, which apparently conclude at six. It was nearly dark when I left home (and also very cold), and it was completely dark by the time I got to the street where the doctor's office supposedly was, securely embedded in a warren of streets behind Lexington Medical Center. The building is very small and set back from the curb behind some trees, and there is a sign but it is unlit! I couldn't find it and I was going to be late. I ran into a bigger office building where two very nice ladies offered to call the doctor's office for me (I had run out of the house without my cell phone ... something I do about once every three months). We reached the doctor's office and a man answered. He asked me several questions regarding my whereabouts and then said: "Stay right where you are. I'm coming outside." Then he hung up. I held the dead phone in my hand, completely flummoxed. It seems when it goes dark so early outside, my brain goes dark too.

I may be extremely literal, but I didn't think it was a good idea to literally stay right where I was (behind a reception desk in an office building about to close for the night). So I thanked the nice ladies profusely (they truly were darlings) and went back out into the dark, to my car. Instead of turning right out of the parking lot, however (I had already investigated that stretch of road ... twice), I turned left. Immediately I saw him -- the man who had told me to stay where I was -- standing in the driveway of my destination, not fifty yards away! The address I had been looking for had been there all along; I had driven past it at least three times. I felt so silly but the nice man put me at ease. "It's really dark out here," he pointed out. "And we're hard to find." Indeed, one of the two lawyers also had trouble finding the office, making us late getting started. I was gratified; after all, misery still loves company.

Much later, on the way home, I stopped at the store for a few groceries. I'd had a long day and I was tired. I had finished up and was nearly to the big doors that open all by themselves, leading to the parking lot, when through the muzziness that was my brain I sensed that someone behind me was trying to get my attention. "Ma'am? Ma'am?" was what it sounded like. I turned around, and there was a very pretty young lady holding something out to me. "Is this yours?" she asked, smiling. It took a few moments for my eyes to focus on the wallet one of my daughters gave me for Christmas last year. I was appalled ... I had left it on the ledge where I had paid for my purchases! "Uhm ... yes! Thank you!" I said, and she smiled real big and walked away. What a sweetheart. She saved me a whole lot of trouble.

Homeward bound at last with both my groceries and my wallet, checking to make sure my head was still on my shoulders, I mused that in a world where there is so much cold and so much darkness and so much confusion ... so many who have lost their way ... I need the help of a lot of people to get me through the day. Like poor Blanche DuBois, I need every smile I can get, and every little bit of reassurance anyone can spare. I need every kind voice available, saying "Stay right where you are; I'm coming outside." I need the Lord to give His angels charge over me, lest I dash my foot against a stone. And to even things out, I need to be looking out for everyone else too, and trying to shed some light on their path. Because if we're not careful we'll all get lost in the darkness ... and it's cold out there.