Giving

            We had finished our salads.  “Would you like a cookie?” I asked.  “I feel like a cookie.” 

            He hesitated.  “Sure.” 

            “Chocolate chip or oatmeal raisin?”

            “Oatmeal raisin.”

            I went to the counter, scanned the cookies and saw neither oatmeal raisin nor chocolate chip.  Instead there was a label “Oatmeal Chocolate Chip.”  Perfect, I thought.  I handed the only two in the rack to the clerk. 

            Up walked the young man whose eye had caught mine on my way to the counter.  Eyes meeting, we had smiled, nodded hello.  “Did you just get the last oatmeal chocolate chip?” he wanted to know.          

            “Yes,” I said,  “Did you want it?”

            “Well, I did, but that’s OK.”

            “Oh, here,” I said. “Take it.”  He held up his hand to wave it off.  “No, seriously, it’s yours.  A gift.”  He fumbled for his wallet.  “It’s a random act of kindness.  Accept it. Don’t mess it up,” I said. 

            He laughed and said, “Pass it on, eh?”

            “That’s right.  Pass it on.”  I selected a chocolate chocolate chip, a replacement cookie, from the rack and handed it to the clerk.  I pulled out my wallet.

            “You’ve already paid,” she said.

            “No, I haven’t.  I just gave him one of my cookies.  I owe you for this.”

            “You don’t owe,” she said.  I argued that I did.  “It’s on me,” she said, emphatically leaning toward me.

            “Oh, I get it.  Guess I better take my own advice.  A random act of kindness.  So I should just say, ‘Thanks.’  So, thanks.  Thanks a bunch.”

            If I were writing the Bible I would put in a verse that says, “What goes around comes around.”  In fact, it is already there, in Mark 4:  “The measure you give will be the measure you get, and still more will be given you.”  It doesn’t matter if it is the waiter you tip, the cookie you give away, the donation you make so that others might eat, the tithe you give to your faith community, the cup of cold water you offer a passerby on a scorching August day, the five minutes helping a child with a homework assignment:  giving is the most wonderful thing in the world.  It totally tickles God when creatures like us do what God’s very nature ensures that God does incessantly:  give. 

            “Go through your house,” someone once told me.  “Look at all the things you think you can’t part with.  Imagine yourself giving them away.  Practice parting with things.  Don’t give until it hurts, because it might hurt early on.  Give until your heart sings.” 

            The Great Giver of the Universe must feel that way eternally—just plain good.

Books

            I do not deny it.  I have largely avoided libraries during my adult life.  I have preferred bookstores instead.  I disdain library books because I cannot write in them, nor keep them.  And worst, I rarely check a book out of any library that I don’t wind up paying nearly the cost of it in overdue fines.  So I have purchased books.

            Right now, the hall outside our study is filling up with books.  Sometime in a day or two, I’ll box them up and take them to a secondhand bookseller who has promised to give them a good and, he hopes, temporary home.  If you wanted to, you could write my biography by looking at that stack.  In it are books I’ve had since high school, textbooks from college, theological tomes from seminary days, novels I have loved, manuals on golf from my twenties and thirties, cookbooks from my forties and fifties, books on yoga, meditation, martial arts, music, travel, languages, philosophy—the list reads like the guest list at a Dewey Decimal gala. 

            I’d be embarrassed to tell you how many of those books I have not read.  I’ve skimmed some, dipped into others, read a chapter or two from a good many, and have gotten no further than the table of contents in more than you’d imagine.  Some have been with me for forty or fifty years simply because I have nursed the fantasy that some day I’d have the time to read them.  Illusion’s over:  the jig is up. 

            Real estate in Washington, DC, is too expensive to use for storing things never to be used.  Our small study, like an obstructed bowel, needs unsentimental surgical clearing.  Not one but two book lovers, though committed now to purchasing in hard or paperback only what is unavailable digitally, keep books the way some people hoard money.  They are symbols of what we value, markers of identity, handles on formative ideas we don’t want to slip away. 

            I’d like to think—and more honestly put, I’d like for you to think—that my motivation in all this ridding of word-clutter was an impulse to simplify, a final sacrifice of verbiage for holy silence.  Or some such notion.  I’d like to think that at last I have reached the point of tossing over ridiculous notions of ever being as broadly educated as I once pretended I would someday be.

            No.  Unfortunately, the motivation is less lofty and more practical. I just have a lot of books to move into this cramped space from an office I’ve had to close.

            I need room.

            For hard-to-part-with books.

           

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2016

Related

            City living challenges me.  Though I love the museums, theaters, restaurants, concerts, and opera, I abhor trash.  I find rudeness hard to excuse.  I have learned to fear bicycles.  And, although I once was one myself, I increasingly disdain runners. 

            Not that I would want them not to run, mind you; but I continually shudder when someone flies past me from behind without warning.  Walking along the sidewalk early one morning, I stepped to the left, headed for the bakery.  At that precise moment a young woman, so light on her feet that I did not hear her approach, collided with me.  It could have been bad, a bump strong enough to knock one or both of us over.  Fate saved us.  She got by and I got by with a mere, “I’m sorry” from each of us.

            The same thing could happen in a small town, or a village, or out in the countryside.  But packed into a small area, hundreds of thousands of people continually bump into each other, jostling one another, competing for space, needing elbow room, or just trying to carry on daily routines like running, hoping and expecting that nothing and no one will interfere.  Cities magnify the dilemmas of human community.  Poverty is more visible, stress and anger more audible. 

            In a strange way one is more dependent on the tolerance and kindness of others in a city.  Life would be unbearably brutal if there were not some unspoken pact that hosts of strangers would be, on the whole, nice to each other, anonymously respectful.  Exceptions occur.  Assaults happen.  Tempers flare.  Yet for the most part, human inhabitants of cities get along remarkably well. 

            I grew up in the country, went to school in small towns, have lived in suburbia much of my life.  I could believe indefinitely in such places that I am an individual, far from the madding crowd.  City life pushes me to recognize that other humans are not others at all.  They are parts of me and I of them.  There is not a dime’s worth of difference between my DNA and that of the runner who collided with me.  We are as grains on the seashore, as stars in the same constellation, as two molecules of water tumbling down a cataract.  The poor are parts of me, and the rich equally so. The most basic project tying us all together is survival.  In G. K. Chesterton’s words, “We are all in the same boat in a stormy sea and we owe each other a terrible loyalty.”

            Those who know that are, in Jesus’ words, not far from the kingdom of God.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2016               

Wrecked

The big snow of last weekend is receding.  It is now down to a mere 20”.  Rain today and tomorrow might do some of the work of removing it.

Temperatures have risen, but life is far from back to normal.  Traffic on side streets is still jammed. Sidewalks are treacherous.  And there is no place to park unless you are already parked.

Yesterday I set about the chore of digging out the car.  Job all done, snowed piled high on the few available feet between automobile and sidewalk, I looked at my finished project and said, “Damn ’f I move you.  Not about to ride around looking for a place to park after all this.”  So I will wait till the snow is much more nearly gone before I elect to drive anywhere. 

All dug out and no place to go.

We had a couple of huge snowstorms six years ago.  It was weeks before we could go anywhere.  Not because the roads were impassible, but because there was no place to park when we got to our destination, and no place to park when we returned.  Literally.  Truly.  And, believe it or not, life changed permanently.   The months-long break kept us away from weekly dancing.  It interrupted and nearly killed our regular yoga discipline. It prevented regular visits to the gym for I don’t know how long. 

What do people do when something really calamitous happens?  War, for example.  When the entire landscape explodes, when the high-rise that is home looks like a pathetic trashed doll house with no façade, and one-time private family quarters hang exposed for all to see, what do people do?  How do they cope?  

Of course, I shouldn’t complain about something as minor as a snowstorm.  It is a hangnail compared to the horrors of an eviscerated world.  So I won’t complain.  I think I’ll be grateful.  Not because we got off easy, with minimal disruption, but because this irritating little incident is about the only thing in my life that can make me a tad more aware of what many in the world have to deal with day in and day out. 

Much of the world’s population is in the fix of the rabbit at the beginning of Watership Down crying “Zoar!” because an earthmover has bulldozed his warren and the tragedy is unbearable.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2016

Aging

Written in 2012

            We in the family called him “Tad.”  He was my mother’s first cousin, one that from the tone of her voice when she spoke of him or from the light in her eyes when she saw him, was perhaps her favorite.  A pretty good artist, Tad once responded to Mama’s commission to paint for her a fairly large rendition in oil of a still life of magnolia blossoms.  A better painting was his depiction called “Autumn at Tiger Bay,” the memory of the woods around their ancestral farm.  Not only talented, Tad was incredibly good-looking.  A head of coal-black hair that never turned to very much gray, sharp features, dark eyes with a kind look all gave him beauty.

            Tad—Calvin King Burroughs was the real name he bore—died recently at the age of 93.  His son sent me a bevy of photos taken throughout his father’s life.  One of the earliest shows an incredibly handsome youth in army uniform with his company in World War II.  In other snapshots he is playing with children, then grandchildren, dressed in a dinner jacket on a cruise perhaps, showing up for graduations, plucking oranges from a tree, sporting a cowboy hat, sitting in a backyard with extended family all around, holding the hand of his wife, a graceful man in his old age.

            Not all of us are so lucky as Tad.  Bodies fall apart sometimes at a very early age.  Bones snap, muscles weaken, teeth gray, brain cells atrophy.  Few of us, in youth or mid-life or even well past retirement age, figure that we will be among those who fade and wither away.  We imagine that we will escape the ravages of age, or most of them.  Go to a nursing home?  Not I!  Lose my memory?  Not if I can help it.  Become stooped, hard of hearing, bleary-eyed?  Never, as long as I am committed to being young.  Tad was lucky that way.  I talked to him a couple of years ago. His memory was incredibly sharp.  His good looks never succumbed entirely to wrinkles and spots.

            Fighting mortality, falling for one promise after another than we can beat death, is the chief human preoccupation, the seed of all our neuroses, the foundation of our gargantuan schemes for amassing power and control.  All of it is about staving off the inevitability of death.  Saving us from aging is a growth industry.

            Mortality is a gift, one of the Creator’s finest.  We are born, we live, we die.  Why fight it?  The issue is not how long we can look young, but how we can live every day to the fullest, gracefully aging all the way.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2012