Speaking to the Wall

I had hoped that by posting the link to this blog on my Facebook page I would get some response from somebody—that something I have said would resonate with someone and stimulate them to reply. Not gonna happen, I guess. I enjoy writing this blog; writing it has turned out to be therapeutic for me. But a speaker wants to be heard, after all, and a thinker wants to be challenged.

I guess I can understand on some level why people don't want to engage. I have to admit that I have a take-no-prisoners style of stream of consciousness writing. I admit that I am wordy and long winded, prone to wander off on rabbit trails, and frequently florid and over the top. Too, what I've written is very confessional and very personal. I've shared a lot of agony. It's as if I'm trying to exorcise my demons in Macy's window. It could be considered pretty exhibitionist. People don't want to engage; they just want to turn away.

People might not like my style. People might not like my story. People might not like me baring my soul so much. Still, I am what I am, and it's too late for me to change. So, I will continue to write—for myself, I guess—and maybe I'll find myself responding from time to time. Why not add split personality to my other admirable traits?

Love Offered--Forgiveness Granted (a little late)

I have written about how I felt abandoned by my home congregation during that lonely time in St. Louis. I have expressed the anger I felt—unquenched anger that led me to leave the United Church in Tallahassee, although I never really left (I still give money to the church on a monthly basis). No need to rehash all that.

But last week I was looking through some old papers and found a bundle of letters that various members of the congregation wrote me as I prepared to enter seminary. As I read through them, I realized that without their support I never would have gotten to St. Louis in the first place and that I never really expressed the gratitude I felt.

One person wrote, “You are a special child of God with special gifts...You have a hunger to know and to serve...You don't need a stole to begin to minister, because you are already reaching out to people around you in a real way.”

Another wrote, “You have a faith that comes through in your actions and that is a wonderful thing to see. When you have preached to the church what comes through is your basic belief in God and your obvious grappling with the many issues that arise as you move along your faith journey. Your lack of concern for your own glory and position is obvious and you serve us well.”

Another wrote, “I think you are spiritually and emotionally courageous...those are the traits which have drawn me to you and your friendship from the start. I remember how happy I felt the day you preached that sermon about the Good Jesus and the Bad Jesus—ah, ha! You had the guts to get up in front of God and mankind and admit your struggles. I have admired your honesty and courage ever since...”

And yet another wrote, “You have a gift for listening without judging. You listen with caring and help people to say things they might not feel able to say if they had to measure every word. You listen as one who is caring and knowledgeable about himself.”

I repeat these statements not to offer them up as truth about myself, although I hope there is at least a kernel of truth in there, but as evidence that I was once loved by the congregation that I so loved in return. As I read these and other letters, I realized that people who express thoughts like these are incapable of betrayal. Perhaps they did let me down; perhaps I expected too much of them. At any rate, I realize now that in my anger, disappointment, and, yes, sickness over my failure in St. Louis I lashed out unjustly at good people who did not deserve the dark thoughts I directed their way.

So, whatever harm they did me paled in significance to the love they offered me, and I forgive them for it. May I find forgiveness in my heart for myself.

A Sad Gambler's Tale

While I was in seminary in St. Louis, I chanced upon an article in one of those free Village Voice-type weekly newspapers that all the large cities have, or used to, anyway. You know--the kind that has all the weird personals for "escort services," massage parlors, etc., in the back and movie reviews and some truly cutting edge investigative journalism in the front. This article told the story of a convent located in the south county where the nuns had all banded together to oppose the extension of riverboat gambling to that part of the county. Their reasons aren't important. When the reporter pointed out that the nuns were being just a little hypocritical; they had, after all, sponsored a weekly bingo game for years, one of the nuns--I can't remember her name--laughed it off as penny-ante stuff: "Nobody ever killed himself over bingo." When I read that, I felt compelled to write her and tell her the sad tale of my little brother. What follows is his story, only part of which I related to the good--and she was good--sister.

Daniel Jesse Hyden ("D.J." as he liked to be called) was born in June, 1957 in Munich, Germany, the fourth of five children. He felt his place in the family galaxy keenly, both resenting his elder brothers and sister and feeling that he had to live up to us. After my younger sister came along, making us five, I think no one really paid much attention to him anymore. No one paid attention to him, that is, except for my father, who cruelly abused him--I mean, really abused him. Once, when I was in junior high school--maybe even in high school--I saw little D.J. in shorts. He turned away from me, and I saw that his thighs were a mass of bruises running from the back of the knee until they disappeared under his shorts. He told me that our father had beaten him with a metal rod for lying to him about something or other. He told me this matter-of-factly in a way that suggested he bore my father no ill will. Now my father had been violent towards all of us boys--he whipped us with a belt from time to time, and once he kicked me in the shin, leaving a scar that is plainly visible to this day and gives me pain from time to time where arthritis has set in--but I had never seen him inflict this sort of damage. (It turned out that my father made something of a project out of D.J. The beatings weren't an everyday or even regular part of their relationship, but they came frequently enough.) We kids just turned a blind eye and a deaf ear. Of all my youthful sins, that is the one that causes me the most grief and shame--my failure to do something to stop the madness. I could have called the authorities. Emotionally scarred as I was, I still knew that this was wrong. I failed my little brother then; when I think about it, sometimes, I cannot help but weep.

But, I'm veering from the subject. As I said earlier, D.J. both resented the rest of us--both Yolanda and I were academically superior, even if I was not of the very top rank, and Ron was in the band and popular--and felt he had to live up to us but couldn't. So, D.J. set out to be as unlike us as he could. He had been the family scapegoat, and he set out to justify that status. He became a bad boy. He cultivated a devil-may-care attitude. His academic performance was poor, He neglected his personal hygiene. He engaged in sexual escapades. He drank alcohol. He didn't smoke marijuana or do drugs other than alcohol, but the alcohol was enough to get him kicked out of the school orchestra and suspended from school more than once. Oddly enough, he did follow me into Bill Bowen's speech and drama milieu, but he quit in disgust after less than a semester, ever after referring to Mr. Bowen scornfully as "Bilbo."

After high school he joined the Army and eventually became a military policeman(!). But he left the Army after finishing less than two years. He told us it was because he got tired of it, but the Army doesn't let you out just because you grow "tired" of it. He never showed us his discharge papers, but I'll bet a hundred dollars that they didn't contain the word "honorable" (unless "dis-" went before it).

Eventually he got married to Beth and had five daughters. Despite our concern over the number of his progeny, we all breathed easier, knowing that he had a woman riding herd over him and knowing, too, that he held somewhat firm employment. He seemed to genuinely love his daughters, and, as they grew he became involved in their activities, going so far as to serve as a volunteer umpire for the girls softball league. He also started bowling, and he was pretty damned good at it--I really think that had circumstances been different he could have been a professional. Back then, he was a pleasure to be around most of the time. He was very affable and generous to his friends--a real "shirt off his back" kind of guy. Marriage and fatherhood seemed to have been good for him, and when he obtained a good-paying job working for the United States Postal Service in San Angelo, we all thought his future was secure. Actually, obtaining that job marked the beginning of the end. The first year of his employment there was the best year of his life, but it was all downhill from there, steeply downhill.

[Here's the part I told the Sister, more or less.] Carol and I were living with Forrest in Fort Worth. This was in 1992-93, I guess. D.J. gave us a call one night and asked if he could stay with us for two weeks while he trained for a position as a window clerk at the post office. It was better work and meant a substrantial pay raise for him. We agreed, of course, and the next Sunday, he drove up in his new car. The first night there, he told us that he enjoyed playing a little bingo, that he had seen a bingo parlor on his way to our house, and that he might enjoy a game or two while he was in town. Then he promptly disappeared, and we saw very little of him afterward. Out of the ten nights he stayed with us, he spent at least three hours playing bingo on seven. Carol and I thought this was way excessive, of course. We also thought it was "only" bingo, and he obviously had his life well together. What business was it of ours anyway? Too, I was dealing with my own demons at the time and hardly qualified to be offering him advice. He finished his class and went home; we thought no more about it.

The next thing we heard--several months or even a year later--he had been fired from his job at the post office for stealing. He was facing federal prosecution for taking money from his cash drawer to finance bingo and, now, his spending up to $100 a week on the Texas lottery. The prosecutor did him no favors by dropping the charges in exchange for restitution, which D.J. made by forking over most of the money in his retirement fund.

His wife, Beth, left him with the children and moved in with relatives in Stephenville, Texas. His life had spiralled out of control long before he was fired, of course, and his erratic behavior kicked up a notch as he began accusing his wife of infidelity with his best friend and doing very bad things that I found out about only later, after it was all over. His thinking also became delusional: he talked about suing the Postal Service under the Americans With Disabilities Act for firing him because of his gambling addiction. Yes, he paid lip service to admitting to his addiction, but the terible truth was that there was very little--or no--assistance to be had for gambling addiction back then, not even a 12-Step group. Not that we believed for one minute that he really believed he had a problem. I can only imagine the chaos at home and the life that his children were beginning to think of as normal.

At that point I think D.J. felt genuinely remorseful of the heartache he had caused, even if he didn't think he had an addiction, and resolved to do better. He landed more-or-less respectable but low-paying work, and he sent a little money to his wife in Stephenville. He made the trip over to visit his children; I think he still hoped to patch things up with his wife. But the monkey was on his back, and he could not throw it off.

I cannot imagine the inner hell he faced as he descended into what I can only think of as madness. I caught glimpses through the reports of my older brother who was on the scene. I know that he moved from room to room, from dead-end job to dead end job. He spent every dime he could lay his hands on, honestly or otherwise, for bingo, scratch-off games, and the lottery. He rented appliances from those rent-to-own places and hocked them to feed his addiction. He lived in appalling filth. His body--and I saw this--began to go septic; he had large open sores. As a taxi driver he ran up hundreds--maybe even thousands--of dollars in unpaid traffic tickets. Yet, though it all, he remained outwardly friendly and gregarious. He had a loyal following of taxi customers. If you asked him, he had not a care in the world.

One night, he called us--by then we had moved to Tallahassee--and asked for money. He said there was no future for him in San Angelo; he was planning to move to Del Rio to enroll in truck driving school--that all he needed was money to feed himself while he attended school. Carol and I talked about it. We wanted to help, but we were afraid he'd just spend the money on his gambling habit. We knew that he was lying; there was no way on God's green earth that any trucking company would hire him with his driving record. Finally, we spent $100 on McDonald's gift certificates and mailed those to him.

We'll never know whether he ever received the certificates. Two days later, D.J.'s by-now ex-wife called us and said that he lay in a coma in the ICU at Shannon Hospital in San Angelo. Within hours, with some financial help from my church, I was on my way, driving straight through--a nineteen hour drive. When I arrived, he was still in his coma, and the doctors were less and less confident of his recovery. I talked to his wife; she told me that one of his children had discovered him on the floor of his hotel room, slipping in and out of consciousness, an empty pill bottle on the floor beside him. The night before he had called her, despondent. His life was out of control, he said, and he didn't see any way out. The doctors concluded that the coma was the result of a failed suicide attempt. I spent hours in the ICU with him, holding his hand and talking to him, looking for any sign that he heard me. By then I had seminasry in my sights, so I prayed over him and anointed his head with oil. This did him no good, but it brought me a measure of peace.

D.J. lingered in his coma for over six months. Then he died. I went out to San Angelo for the funeral. By then I had become convinced that God was calling me to preach the gospel and was planning to attend Eden Seminary in St Louis. The last gift I gave my little brother was to plan and conduct his funeral, with the assistance of the pastor at First Christian Church. It was amazingly well attended. Hedy Bowen came. People whom we'd known years before came. One of his loyal taxi customers, a blind woman, came and told us of the many kindnesses he had done for her. We played that Elton John song, "Daniel," and to this day I cannot listen to it without crying.

So I told the nun that if she thought no one ever committed suicide over bingo that she'd better think again. Gambling is gambling, whether it's chump-change bingo, the state lottery or high stakes roulette in Monte Carlo. Gambling kills. But before that it lays waste to lives and destroys families. It is a God-damned thing, no matter who benefits.

Surprisingly, I received a reply from the nun. Even more surprisingly, she said that she had been moved by the story and felt chastened. The bingo games would stop, she said. She signed her letter, "Sadder but wiser."

My hatred for gambling in any form burns no less hotly today than on the day D.J. died. It truly causes me anguish to know that my state profits from the anguish and misery caused by this evil thing. Nevertheless, I cannot blame gambling alone for D.J.'s sad and tragic life. The seeds of his destruction were sown in childhood, and I had a hand in it. It doesn't provide much comfort to know that I was a victim, too. He had it worse--far worse--than any of us. I feel that if only I had loved him harder I would have found the courage to stretch out my hand to him. Oh, Daniel my brother: I miss you so.

Happy Mother's Day, Hedy Bowen

My sixth grade teacher was a beautiful and sophisticated woman on whom I had a huge crush. Her name was Hedy Bowen. At my tender age, she seemed to be the epitome of glamour. She had long blonde hair, which was always done up, she wore lovely dresses--it seemed as though she never wore the same one twice--and she smelled of heaven. She was always nice to me, but I wasn't her pet by any means. I was one of her smarter students, at least when it came to Language Arts and Social Studies. Not so much with Math. I spent a good year with her, and at the end of it, I went off into the timeless summer never to see her again, or so I thought.

After three years of Junior High tedium, I arrived at Central High School. For some reason I had decided to take Drama as one of my electives. I have no idea why, really. I guess it had something to do with not wanting to follow my elder siblings in Band or Orchestra, not to mention that my 7th-grade music teacher was an evil, child-hating ex-Marine who turned me off of choral singing for forty years. My teacher was a man named Bill Bowen, who, as it turned out, had a greater positive impact on my life than any other teacher. Almost everything positive that has happened in my life I owe, on somew level, to him. Bill, as you have guessed, was Mrs. Bowen's husband. (Her name was Hedy, but, to this day I cannot think of her in any terms other than, respectfully, Mrs. Bowen. I can barely think of Mr. Bowen as "Bill." Mrs. Bowen had moved from Travis Elementary, where I attendedcd 6th grade, to Central High and now taught Senior Honors English.

It turned out that Mr. Bowen already knew about me, that Mrs. Bowen had talked about me and told him that I would do well in his high school Drama and Speech program. Imagine that. So I spent the next three years as one of the group I have come to refer to as the Friends of Bill Bowen (FOBBs). We were students first, of course, but we shared a cameraderie that set us apart. We were invited to his house for Christmas parties, he took interest in our personal lives, and to a large extent guided my intellectual and social development. I came to love him as a father. And Mrs. Bowen--I was not fortunate enough to have her as my Senior English teacher; my grades just weren't good enough--but she took a deep interest in me as well.

I guess they saw something in me that I've never seen in myself. After I graduated from high school they seemed to take a special interest in me. I spent countless hours at their beautiful home. I have no idea how many dinners we shared. They both treated me as an adult; they sought and respected my opinions. We laughed at each others' jokes, Through it all, Mrs. Bowen kept me in thrall to her cool sophistication and casual elegance, even when her hair was down and she was barefoot in jeans and shirt. I became her son in many ways, I think. At least I thought of her as my "real" mother. (By the way, I know I was not unique in my position. There were a number of us who became this childless couple's extended family. I don't think I would ever have been as close to my dear friend April if we hadn't shared, independently, this special relationship.)

It was because I felt this familial loyalty to the Bowens that one Mother's Day I sent her a letter telloing her how I felt. I told her that even if she had never borne children, there were many of us who benefitted from being her "children," none more than I. I told her that I honored her on that Mother's Day and every Mother's Day. She would always have a place in my heart.

I guess the words touched her. She was a reserved woman, so I was flabbergasted when the next time she saw me, she put her arms around me, hugged me tightly, and planted a big kiss on my cheek. I treasured that moment then, and I treasure it now. The next time I hugged her, her husband lay dying in a San Angelo hospital.  That came at a low moment of my life--a period of darkness that I prefer not to think about--but I visited several times during that dark period. When I came down for Bill's funeral, I hugged her for the last time. It was only then I realized that she really was a small woman. She seemed really frail. She had always been the large sixth grade teacher I had met back when I was twelve years old.

Time moved on, and I moved to Tallahassee. When Mrs. Bowen died, April tracked me down, just as she had when Mr. Bowen was sick. April was far more attentive to the Bowens than I ever was. I don't know why I didn't attend Mrs. Bowen's funeral, but I regret that I didn't properly say good-bye to her. But on this Mother's Day, I remember her and honor her, just as I have on every Mother's day for thirty or thirty-five years. Here's to you, Mrs. Bowen. More of us owe you more than you could ever know.

****
Addendum: This is the last communication I received from Mrs. Bowen, shortly after my birthday in 1997. I reach for it from time to time when I am feeling low for its reassuring power. I set it out verbatim:

"Dear Douglas [she never called me Doug],  

"I hope that your birthday card arrived on time. Exigencies of the moment prevented my adding a post script.

"As I have been reflecting on the adjustments that I have made and need to make regarding retirement and being alone, I have thought of qualities that enable people to move forward in spite of adversity. I have thought of the need for enlightenment, determination, patience, and compassion.

"You possessed those qualities even when you were a sixth grade student. You have an inner strength which helps you to look beyond yourself and think of others. I am grateful for the many times that you thought of me during my moments of despair. I wish the best for you!

"H. Bowen" 

That was Mrs. Bowen, loving to the end. Aside: I have always had at least one person--never more than two--saying things like that to me. That has helped me hang on to what sanity I have. That is what gives me hope if not optimism for the future. Thank you Mrs. Bowen. And thank you to all the others--you  know who you are. I love you.

 

Mantra for Contemplative Prayer

Breathing in, I inhale God's grace and steadfast love;
Breathing out, I exhale my doubts and fears.
Breathing in, I inhale God's grace and steadfast love;
Breathing out, I exhale my doubts and fears.
Breathing in, I inhale God's grace and steadfast love;
Breathing out, I exhale my doubts and fears.
Breathing in, I inhale God's grace and steadfast love;
Breathing out, I exhale my doubts and fears.
Breathing in, I inhale God's grace and steadfast love;
Breathing out, I exhale my doubts and fears.
Breathing in, I inhale God's grace and steadfast love;
Breathing out, I exhale my doubts and fears.
Breathing in, I inhale God's grace and steadfast love;
Breathing out, I exhale my doubts and fears.
Breathing in, I inhale God's grace and steadfast love;
Breathing out, I exhale my doubts and fears.
Breathing in, I inhale God's grace and steadfast love;
Breathing out, I exhale my doubts and fears.
Breathing in, I inhale God's grace and steadfast love;
Breathing out, I exhale my doubts and fears.