crdahlberg

Snap Judgments

It’s a pitiful scene–an obviously homeless guy staring longingly in the store window at the goods that he cannot afford. He hopes for better days ahead. His bags contain all his worldly possessions.

At least that’s the way I see it; that’s my snap judgment.

Maybe that’s the danger–it’s the way I see it. I have no way of knowing what the truth really is.

On my way to work this morning, my own pack was flung over my back containing the necessities for my day: lunch, coffee thermos, a book, iPhone charger, train schedules, camera, dental floss.

One missing essential from my backpack is an extra pair of clean underpants (in case I “were ever in an accident,” so I’ve been advised). But I believe if I go down that road, I’m concerned that I might actually consider undergoing a refreshing underwear change prior to an accident. Then the unexpected accident event might occur, and my rescuers would discover inexplicable dirty underwear in my backpack; that’s why I leave the clean underwear out of my pack.

So I was on my way to work this morning, hiking to catch the train, a podcast speaking through my Klipsch earbuds. Just ahead of me, a shabbily-dressed middle-aged man with a healthy head of black hair crossed the sidewalk.

Then he stopped, and he spewed his observations in my direction.

“You people catching the train always look like third-graders, wearing your backpacks to school!”

I removed my earbuds to hear him more clearly.

“Oh, yeah,” he continued, “and you people always have your cool earphones on!” He pointed to his ears and made a grimace.

Maybe he was looking for a fight. If so, I disappointed him. I kept walking. Nonetheless, the diatribe of this obviously imbalanced individual flustered me.

Maybe he hated me for no reason. Maybe he hated the lunch in my backpack. Maybe he hated all train riders.

Maybe he hated all third-graders. I examined myself and concluded that I did, indeed resemble a schoolboy, light-blue plaid shirt, tidy black pants, and newly-cropped hair.

Then I realized it: I looked successful, and he didn’t. And I received his snap judgement, just as I had judged the homeless vagrant staring in the store window for the things he could not afford.

A prominently-placed doorbell is installed on the wall next to the door that opens from the parking lot into the building where I work. When pressed, the bell rings directly into my room, requiring that I extricate myself from my chair, terminate my other activities, and launch myself down the hallway to open the door. This occurs despite a sign above the doorbell that gives clear directions for who may use and who may not use the bell. Instead, the doorbell’s presence appears to be a sanction for all would-be building entrants to disturb my workday as many as thirty times a day.

By the time I arrive at the door, I have had time to create a full-dossier snap judgment of the demented person standing on the other side of the door.

Instead of peering through the peephole to see who is there so that I can frame my attitude, I fling the door wide open, eyes aflame and staring, mouth corners drawn downward.

And each time, after I regain my composure, I realize just how vast the judgmental swamp really is.

One Year of Life

One year ago, when our first grandchild was born, we entered the Grandparents’ Club.

The first chore was selecting a grandparenty-sounding name. So far, I’ve come up with nothing clever or memorable to compare with Boop-pa, Opa, or Papaw, so I’m stuck with the traditional grandfatherly names: Grandfather, Grandpa, Grampa, Grandpappy, Gramps, Granddad, Granddaddy, and Grandpop. Maybe it would be a grand time to just give myself that name I’ve always dreamed of having. How cool would it be to have my grandchild call me Elvis, Dean, Jerome, Connery, Nash, Bronson, or Samson?

By now, I’ve fully entered the slow-motion process of baby-discovering-the-world, in which the baby carefully hand-selects tiny morsels of food, which are gingerly hoisted mouthward. There, the tongue fishes them from the tiny fist, or the finger foods are relentlessly smashed into cheeks, shoved up nostrils or implanted into ear canals.

The baby explores all body parts–whether belonging to the baby or a neighboring adult–eagerly investigating with the fascination of an early explorer setting foot in the New World.

There’s much to admire in a baby. When it comes, giggling arrives genuine and fresh as unspoiled spring water from an aquifer. A baby is still unable to imagine contrivance or fabrication to produce a desired manipulative effect.

Why do we feel so good when we’re with a baby? In their presence, we have entered a welcome Small World, where we can understand and mitigate the consequences of their apparently modest choices. We can offer solutions in this miniaturized world, something we are less confident to achieve in our own larger, intimidating arena.

Perhaps most importantly, we can make happy and fun faces to the baby, and we will not be judged for it. We are free to sacrifice appearances to give them happiness.

And the doing of that–our creation of a joyous countenance–in turn, that generates the very same emotions within ourselves. The intentional, joyous emotion we present to them with our face reflects back to us from the child, penetrating our own heart and giving us joy.

No wonder we enter our night of sleep exhausted and weary, yet with the rewards marked by creases carved deeply by smiles and laughter, further identifying our furrowed faces as–grandparents.

Hawking Peace

It’s the same every week–go where the people are and infiltrate them with peace. Fortunately for him, his warfare-imposed disabilities do not impede this practice. And the months, now measured in many years, don’t diminish his efforts. He is a man transformed by his faith. He is a peace hawker, an oxymoron he likes to attach to himself, provocatively linking his passion for peace with an ardent commitment to activism.

He had weathered the Just Give Peace a Chance idealism of the ‘60s that greeted his stretcher as he was carried off the hospital ship. The chanting demonstrators that surrounded the gangplank were a curiosity to him more than a threat. This was all new. Three years previously, the din of the enthusiastic well-wishers for the brave young lads departing to Southeast Asia had cheered his heart. But all that had changed.The jeering was not the worst of it. The worst of it was two buddies cut nearly in half by machine gun fire. The worst of it was a girl who had decided she could not wait for his return. The worst of it was the sniper bullet that had ripped open a lung and opened his intestine.

He spent years looking for “the best of it,” the redemptive outcome of it all. It evaded him for a very long time. Peace had left him during the war, and he had never gotten it back.

His epiphany followed him late one night into Charley’s Bar, a dive identified by a dingy purple neon sign. Its flickering, burned-out script lettering resembled unintelligible Arabic scrawl.

Unlike the emptiness in his heart, he could spin his empty mug down to the bartender for a refill. This was familiar turf. He knew the pattern of the grain in the wood of the bar and the speed the mug needed to reach its destination.

But this time something in the emptiness of the mug and its spin on the bar grabbed his eye and his heart.

Yes, he had yearned for peace–longing for the absence of war had never left him.

But today, he realized it was different. He recognized, for the first time, what he had been hoping for–no war and no pain–was not enough. Peace, defined as the absence of warfare, still felt empty.

Peace, he recognized, is not only the absence of war. It is not simply a vacuum. It is not a neutral placeholder like a stalemated demilitarized zone.

Instead, it is the presence of something far more powerful. It is an active and penetrating force. Peace is a substance that steals domains and imposes goodness like a conquering army. It chases evil, conquers it and banishes it.

Today, in this crowd and for this crowd, a veteran of warfare again collaborates to give Real Peace a chance.

It is his opportunity to help rout wickedness and redraw the turf of good and of evil one more time.

A Dummy’s Guide to Walking on Water

The ability to walk on water doesn’t quite share the top echelon of human aspirations, such as being able to fly like a bird, travel through time, or (for a girl at least) fit into Cinderella’s glass slipper.

But it’s an ambition that might be up there pretty close to these other passions. After all, the Apostle Peter is reported to have done so—he walked on the water toward Jesus, until he looked down and panicked, losing his faith over what he realized he was actually doing—walking on water!

This video discloses that apparently the freak-out factor can be mitigated by inserted oneself into a plastic bubble and then bouncing out onto the surface of a small swimming pool, thereby approximating the water-walk minus the fear factor. If Peter had simply used an inflatable bubble, he could have spun his bubble all the way to Jesus without the need for faith.

Or, presumably, he just might have kept spinning and spinning like a hamster in an exercise wheel, going nowhere fast.

Remarkably, a short time ago historians unearthed a previously unknown writing by the Apostle Peter. This epistle didn’t make it into the New Testament canon because of its recent discovery. It consists of one chapter, which contains a scant three verses, and was evidently written soon after Peter’s own water-walk experience. Without a formal title given by the Apostle Peter, it is affectionataly referred to as A Dummy’s Guide to Walking on Water. Here, then, is the brief three-verse epistle in its entirety:

Find someone or something that is worth risking everything for.
Decide whether you want to risk everything for that person or thing.
Risk everything for that person or thing.

Bear-ly Making It

Ellen (not her real name) was a long way from home, wherever home used to be. Since she exhausted her savings after being laid off her job in 2005, home becomes anywhere in Sacramento that she can find to lay her head.

On this wet and stormy night, she would lay her head near the river, where I found her playing a card game she invented herself. Since she was playing it alone, I presumed it to be a derivative of solitaire, seven piles of cards being flipped and arranged in an indecipherable sequence. She had two names for the game, neither of which would appear in an English language dictionary.

I settled in on the neighboring bench to listen to her. The narration that followed was at times difficult to follow. I learned that Ellen had studied computer software and knows five programming languages. After being illegally dismissed from her previous, final employment, she sued them for wrongful termination. A flurry of unsuccessful lawsuits depleted her resources. Ellen bounced from couch to couch until she wore her welcome threadbare. The streets alone welcomed her.

Ellen’s verbal articulation and expressive voice made the veracity of her claims hard to dismiss, yet the warm shimmer within her voice showed she was not tired of life. She possessed a vibrant glow, as if, despite being encrusted with grime and worn with wear, at any moment she would uncover the golden nugget to forever change her fortune.

If she appeared on the Homeless Elocutionist of the Year television game show, she would bring tears and a standing ovation from the crowd, and even the most berating, hardened judge would cave in and give her a compliant thumbs up. This, despite her caked-on street muck and the impressive odors that accompany those with limited accessibility to bathing.

I probed, “So how are you managing to eat, Ellen, with no income?”

Her answer was oblique. Apparently foragers makeshift from a variety of sources which are difficult to easily enumerate.

Suddenly she dug within the plastic bags that apparently housed all of her worldly belongings, extricating a battered teddy bear with two bug-like antennae inexplicably sprouting from its forehead. A faded pink ribbon hung around its neck.

“We’re bear-ly making it!” she confessed, the bright tone in her voice contagious. Her widened eyes were eloquently expressive, with the easy capacity to grab me by the throat.

I squirmed uncomfortably, increasingly cognizant that my own life was stacked unaccountably in my favor.

One advantage of hearing a stranger’s story is that it leaves the option of our own opinions. Sure, Ellen’s story was gripping and persuasive. It challenged me. It bent my stereotypes of a homeless, down-on-her-luck woman.

If it were true.

With no way to establish the veracity of her story, it could all be fabrication. Aren’t the Homeless born manipulators, just waiting to hit up their audience with “The Ask” for a dollar or two? Sure, Ellen seemed accomplished and talented. But she might just as easily be delusional or conniving.

My mental arguments and counter-arguments were like the quick tides of water sloshing in a bathtub. I wanted to walk away, but I felt stuck.

Slowly and quietly, I pulled my wallet from my back pocket, realizing with a start that my choices were limited–I possessed only one dollar and a twenty dollar bills. I awaited a confirmation of which bill to choose, with no result.

But just in case those gripping eyes were telling the truth, I pulled out the twenty.

I thanked her for the time together. “Maybe this will help with your next few meals,” I nearly apologized.

I stepped into the dark and rain of this stormy night, and all the way back, I wondered whom I had really met–and what she had seen in me.

The Energizer Bunny Lies

We’ve all seen the Energizer Bunny, beating his drum interminably; we are told the batteries never run out. But out of camera range, he doesn’t keep going and going and going as advertised. Nothing does.

The all-young jogger passing me by, all-grinning, all-carefree, all-future-driven doesn’t really keep going and going and going. What I don’t know about is the slow drip her boyfriend is draining from her life.

The schedule-driven train hoists passengers within, clickety-clacking monotonously, horn religiously blasting watch-out-for-me-I’m-coming-through at each crossing gate, but it doesn’t keep going and going and going. A car stalled on the tracks or a broken crossing gate posts all red signals and eight-hundred passengers are late for their jobs, miss conference calls, forgo a college entrance exam.

A cold has the head in a vise, stabs the throat at each swallow and muffles the hearing with a throbbing ache. Chronic pain claws at the lower back, and the arthritic big toe tries to balance a lurching, ailing system that doesn’t feel like going and going and going.

Just then, a street lamp posts an unanticipated sermon at its base—“Hey,” with an arrow pointing upward.

Upward. Oh, yeah. Upward.

A voice from somewhere enters the head, and the voice says, “I still see you!”

And with that, the world falls away.

We can keep going and going and going a bit longer.

Family Tree

When we lose confidence in the direction our lives are navigating, we may look to the example of those in our family tree who achieve success or recognition. Uncle Henry invented a greenhouse tomato humidifier that would hydrate the dirt without the need for a drip sprinkling system. Forebear Grandmother Merva developed a chili recipe which she marketed so successfully that the revenues allowed her to invest her fortune in NASCAR championship racing cars, each one emblazoned with a logo promoting her very own “Mother’s Butt-Kickin’ Beans.”

Some of us who lack such a prominent and impressive family tree struggle through life’s mundane struggles, hoping to come up occasionally for air.

This describes Steven, a student in my classroom housed in the parole office. Having attended my class for over two years, he struggles to maintain his fifth-grade reading level, suffering from dyslexia and other learning disabilities.

Steven has difficulties making appropriate behavior choices. A few months ago, he arrived in class with one eye swollen shut and his face badly bruised. Believing himself to have been disrespected upon leaving a bar, he took up fisticuffs with two fellow revelers, who got the best of him. Fortunately for him, he survived, and the assault charge was eventually demoted to disorderly conduct.

Within weeks he was re-arrested for carrying an illegal switchblade. Again, the judge reduced the charges since the blade only fractionally exceeded the legal length. Saved again. He will do community service.

Last week he earned himself another court date by threatening the clerk in the general relief office for not providing him the benefits he was convinced that he deserved.

As many of us do during times of emotional distress, he fished through his family tree to validate his self-worth despite his recent incorrigible behavior.

“I’m not a great example to my daughter,“ he began. “My brother, though, he really made something of himself,” Steven boasted. “Did you know he earned certifications to do plumbing, carpentry and auto body repair?”

“That’s amazing!” I responded. “What a talented guy!”

“Not only that,” he continued. “He was an ordained minister.”

I was impressed. “Where was his church?”

“Oh, he didn’t have a church,” Steven explained. “He had lots of time to study, though. He earned his vocational certificates and his ordination while he was in prison.”

I sat in shocked silence.

“Yeah. He did 31 years for murder before he passed away from cancer in prison last week.”

He stared silently and blankly at me, like an actor who has forgotten his lines.

“I’m going to miss him,” he muttered. “He was the best brother you could ever want.”

In the Dental Chair

If a street punk informed me that he would be removing my teeth, I would gallop my way to safety, feet pounding and arms flailing.

But a visit to my dentist poses no such threats. His job is to preserve and protect my pearly white crown-encased teeth. He has every inch of my mouth mapped, memorized and x-rayed. He knows my mouth better than I do. If a lunar rover were small enough, he could remotely land it between molars number 19 and 30.

He is a spelunker of sorts, exploring regions that I myself cannot see. I rely on him to do that task. He refers to tooth numbers like familiar addresses that he casually visits every six months, reporting their status to me like a barber shares the local gossip with his clients.

Sitting in a dental chair provides us time to think. Despite being in the presence of a small audience, we are not expected to say a word.

There’s time to think….

There’s a special relationship of trust we share with those who have more intimate knowledge of specific parts of our body than we, ourselves, do. They are witnesses of our inner workings and maintenance requirements. Still, it’s unnerving when medically-licensed spelunkers travel into the hidden reaches of our bodies that we will never be able to see with our own eyes.

I never met my adenoids—and never knew of their existence—until I was ruthlessly assaulted by a barrage of infections that made swallowing a fearful event of searing pain. As a child living in Germany, doctors whose language I could not understand told me my adenoids had grown defective through massive and repeated bacterial attacks. I was hospitalized and put to sleep; the offending organs were harvested by entering my nasal passage with cold stainless steel implements. That was my first experience with medical spelunking, the practice in which a physician explores parts of the body which are invisible to me.

Later, other physicians would pull, poke and examine other parts of me that I had never seen. “How’d you get that scar?” one doctor asked, pointing to the lower region of my back.

“Uh, it’s nothing, I don’t think,” I pondered, his question catching me off-guard.

Finally I recalled what he was referring to. Decades earlier, my back had skidded across the bottom of a too-shallow landing-pool at the end of a steep slide ride at a water park, reddening the water and my swimming suit with pink blood. I had never grown personally acquainted with the wound except by gyrating wildly using a three-mirror setup in my bathroom. Even with that arrangement, I could only view the reflection of the wound. My physician, however, trumped me. He, unlike me, was an eyewitness to the medical history permanently etched upon my spine.

Some explorations are far more intimate. At my annual general physical exam, my doctor reserves the prostate exam ritual for the grand finale. Like a pitcher winding up for the third called strike, he extends his arm high into the air and outstretches his fingers. The end of the windup: he pulls the rubber glove on with his free hand and releases it. The rubber glove snaps loudly as it protectively seals his hand, which he flexes to ensure a secure fit.

He asks me to prepare myself. Then he strikes, quick as a serpent.

“Ugh!” I groan. That’s the worst part of the physical exam! I hate that!”

He masterfully pops off the rubber glove. “I get that a lot,” he responds impassively. “It’s no picnic for me, either!”

There are, apparently, some spelunking destinations nobody really wants to visit. I will trust his report to enlighten me concerning this region of my body that he knows far better than I.

Suddenly I return to reality. I am back in the dental chair. The two faces stare down into my gaping mouth, which by now is developing stretch marks. But all is bliss; compared with my recollections of other medical experiences, today’s dental provocation seems minor: the sting of the needle entering my moist unsuspecting cheek, the drool forming droplets and descending my numbed lower lip, the artillery of the drill destroying my ten-year-old twelve-hundred-dollar-after-insurance dental bridge, long past its useful life.

I stare down the blinding lights that have the illuminating intensity of construction zone flares. A sense of warm satisfaction blankets me like the heavy dental x-ray resistant shield that often lies across my lap; I recognize that, during the past 20 years that I’ve been a faithful client of this dental enterprise, my dental repairs have funded the purchase of the hyper-electronic double-thrust orbital magneto drill that is now chewing up my teeth.

No wonder I feel connected.

Let the spelunking continue.

I deserve it.

Pupamobile

“Shhh! Quiet!”

A woman’s voice in the dark directed me to squat down and be silent.

“It’s happening!” her male companion’s voice chimed in. “I’ve never heard of anyone witnessing this!”

In the pre-dawn dark of the parking lot, we all sensed we were about to behold the rarest of spectacles–the metamorphosis of a pupamobile.

“What stage is it in?” My heart was beating hard now, as I hid behind the hood of a black and yellow Mini.

“We’re not sure,” the woman replied. “We think it’s been going on awhile! The old skin is already starting to slough off!”

Sure enough, beneath the pupamobile’s old skin, wrinkly and starting to shed, a smooth and shiny surface was emerging.

Dyed-in-the-wool automobile enthusiasts only whisper at this apparition. Creepy as the appearance of the horseback-riding wraith of Sleepy Hollow, the transformation usually happens out of eyesight and earshot. Even the hardiest of auto devotees have not witnessed this event.

Like many insects, birds and mammals, automobiles have evolved sophisticated measures to guard against extinction. As a molting snake sheds its skin, certain automobiles secretly undergo metamorphoses and transform themselves. A pupa encapsulates a caterpillar in a chrysalis, leaving its adolescent life behind, transforming into a brand new kind of butterfly creature.

Likewise, this car was leaving its old form behind. The new form was emerging just beneath the tinfoil appearance of the old skin. The sweet smell of caramelized transmission fluid accompanied the mesmerizing transfiguration. A soft puff of air briefly kicked up dust as the reborn auto adjusted to its new springs and footing.

“I feel like I’m on the set of Invasion of the Body Snatchers!” the man whispered hoarsely to me.

I had to admit, it was eerie. There was no grind of metal on metal as one might expect. Instead, there was a gentle sound like the fluttering rustle of tinfoil and the transformative skin texture of something giving birth.

I’ve heard the rumors of such pupamobiles over from the whispers of those who claim to have witnessed strange happenings in junkyards and on remote street corners. Usually, the resulting machinery was hideous and ugly. 1957 Chevy Bel Aires with tiny undersized wheels and bouncy hydraulic suspensions. Ford Coupes, grotesquely jacked up and featuring oversized, monstrous, chrome-plated V8 engines. A rare exception was the Prius, the noblest pupamobile of them all, which evolved when a Toyota was sequestrated overnight too close to an electric trolley line.

But what freak of nature might emerge from this transformation?

I could only hope and pray for a miraculous metamorphosis, an automotive transmutation yielding value and substance.

A train whistle in the distance reminded me that I was about to be late to board my locomotion to the place of my employment. As I apologized to my friends that I would have to dash to the train, I left a final plea.

“The pope is in Cuba,” I whispered. “Have you seen that old thing he’s riding in?” The world-renowned Popemobile had definitely lost its luster. “Let’s pray this automotive transmogrification doesn’t morph into another worthless lowrider. Let’s pray for a miracle–a new Popemobile!”

“A new Popemobile!“ they murmured excitedly in unison. “Let’s pray!”

As I regretfully hustled away into the darkness, I glanced back at my new friends one more time.

In the dim light of dawn, I could barely make out their profiles, their outstretched fingers frantically crisscrossing their bodies with the Sign of the Cross.

The Fence that Separates

A dog lodged its head in the fence between my neighbor’s house and mine, and this is what the dog explained to me in a later interview:

I don’t know exactly what drew me down the street and around the corner to the chain-link fence. It may have been the smell of exotic garbage. I’ve got a penchant for bacon grease and a nose for medium rare New York strip steak fat trimmings. Or it could have been the scent of an opossum lumbering just behind the gate.

I can’t remember. My kind is better at sniffing out and chasing down high-curiosity sights, sounds and smells. Immediate gratification is our strong suit. We’re not known for figuring out cause and effect; our only reminders to stay on the straight and narrow come by way of a tug on the leash.

So when I dashed down this street, my nose led me to the gap at the bottom of the metal fence pole, where I dug the black dirt back just enough to fit my head through. The trouble was, with my shoulders wider than my head, I couldn’t move forward. I couldn’t go backwards, either.

I was stuck in the fence long enough to work up a panic. The more I struggled, the more I drooled. The more scared I got, the more I had to pee. So I did. I was fast becoming an unsanitary disaster.

It was getting dark, and I realized that I am perfectly morsel-sized for a wandering coyote or two, so I started frantically hollering for help. My yelps eventually brought a guy dressed in lounge pants out the door of the neighboring house. Stooping down, he spied me, stuck in the fence and petrified. He closed in, and I wanted to either bite or run. Of course, I couldn’t do either. He quickly disappeared and returned with his wife, a glowing flashlight strapped to his forehead.

I was surprised to suddenly see the guy’s wife peering at me from the opposite side of the fence–from the inside the fence, the side that my head was on. With her was the woman who owned the house. I gulped. What could this mean? I peed again.

The owner reached down for my head, and I wanted to bite. I don’t know what came over me, but I found myself licking her hand instead. I was ashamed. Ugh! I was acting like a puppy!

I felt the guy with the flashlight on his head tugging at my legs. He was pulling them—trying to collapse them from under me. I fought back, straightening them with all my might. What was he trying to do?

With the woman forcing my head down and the man forcibly pulling and crumpling my legs from beneath me, the pressures were too great. I snarled, then collapsed. Someone pushed my head downward and backward, toward my body, back into the shallow ditch in the dirt that I had originally excavated. Of course! They were pushing my head back through the widest part of the hole!

Suddenly, my head let go of the fence. I jerked my legs down and propelled my body backwards. I was free! Gloriously free!

My legs started pumping on their own, carrying me away from the hole and the fence and the people. Halfway across the lawn, I paused and looked back. The man and two ladies still knelt beside the chain-link fence and post, looking back at me. For an instant, I felt that I owed something to someone. I should find some way to express my thanks.

But I knew little about gratitude. I only knew about survival. Like a fence that separates, I could not grasp the sort of emotionally-charged grateful recollections of life and living that is reserved only for humans.

My instincts took over instead. There! What was that sound? Was it a cat? An opossum? I hurtled myself down the street into the darkness and never looked back.