Pelican Brief

Today my good friend arrived at our home with his fiancee. Not out of the blue. We asked them to stay with us while they were going to be in the area attending a banquet at the Chicago Intercontinental Hotel near O'Hare.

Heather and I took them to our favorite pub, The Candelite in north Chicago. Afterwards we went to Techny in Northbrook, IL. Techny used to be the home of the Divine Word Missionaries. Basically, it was a place where they trained men who were preparing to go into seminary for the priesthood. Now it's mainly a retirement facility for older priests and also a retreat center. We didn't visit due to our interest in Catholicism or the Divine Word Missionaries. We were visiting because several years ago I visited the cathedral located there and remembered that it was just an amazing place nestled in the suburbs of Chicago. And I wanted to share it. I also really wanted to see it again. It's such a visual surprise, especially as you are driving along in the repetition and monotony of traffic lights, gas stations, malls, and fast food restaurants.

We walked through the lobby area and into the narthex, which is kind of like a foyer for all of you protestants out there. The nave (the sanctuary) was incredible. Relatively simple pews, but along the right and left were statues of the disciples. Each disciple was on a column and spaced between each column was a station of the cross. There were vaulted ceilings had ornate curves that met at a center. And I can't think of what that center piece is called, but I think I used to know. There were also beautiful stain glass windows of other saints. Of course these stain glass windows are nothing like the ones I've seen in England, but they were beautiful nonetheless. Unlike most stain glass windows in Europe, American stain glass windows in churches were not really used to tell the stories to illiterate people.  That's not a judgement on the people, but it was a reality at the time.

Go to Techny Towers to find out more about the cathedral and area. If you would like a short primer on the cathedral layout, go here. The Techny Towers Cathedral was laid out very similarly to the one in the article.

Near the front of the Crossing or Apse (see article above), there was an image of a large white bird with two of its chicks. The adult bird was picking its breast, and the blood was dropping down to the open-mouthed fledglings. I remembered that that was an image of Christ, and I knew it was adopted at some point in the early church, but I didn't know when. At first I thought it was an ibis.

Well, of course I had to look it up. It's a pelican. During the middle ages, the pelican became a symbol for Christ, virtually replacing the image of a lamb and flag. The pelican was thought to be a sacrificial and pious bird because it looked as if the mother picked her breast to feed her young with her own blood. While the image of them picking their breast to feed the young their blood, is a potent Christological image, it is an incorrect reading. Pelicans have never been known to pick their breasts to feed the young.

So how did this come about misperception come about? Well, based on my limited research, there are a few reasons. First, pelicans have rather large pouches on the bottom of their bills. When they are trying to get their catch out of their mouth to feed their young, they often have to press the pouch against their breast to push the rest of the food out. From a distance and from an unscientific mindset, it might look like its picking its breast. The second reason is that the pelican is simply resting its head, and this also looks like it might be wounding its breast for blood.

Regardless of whether or not the pelican was picking its breast to provide brood droplets, or if it was simply pushing any remaining fish out of its pouch, it was providing for its children in a sacrificial manner. I have always thought the image was rather haunting and beautiful. When I hear all this language referring to God and my faith in militant or legalistic terminology, it's nice to see God compared to a nurturing mother Pelican caring for her young. It's not the first time God is compared to a bird, though. The Old Testament speaks of God and his characteristics in many bird and bird-related ways: doves, eagles, and hens; wings and pluck. I'm sure there are others.

I really don't have a point to make. Just some observations. God bless.

You have died of dysentery: A Retrospective on My Life with Computers, 1984 - 1996

I've been working with computer for almost 15 years. I did not plan for this, and I did not necessarily study to work with computers, but then again, when I was in college, a job industry working with computers barely existed.

As with most humans my age, my history with computers began with a Commodore 64 in a school classroom. Sure, we did some school work on the computer, but most of the time it was Oregon Trail. Before I left the sixth grade, I had died of dysentery, typhoid or cholera many times. I'm not sure I ever made it to Oregon.

At some point my parents purchased an Apple 2GS. I think I used it for basic word processing stuff and playing a game called Bard's Tale. This game had great pictures of fantastical creatures with wonderful scripted options like this:

Before you, you see 1 Grey dragon. 

Will your stalwart band choose to Fight or Run?  

 Honestly, this was a lot more exciting at the time. And the actual fighting hadn't even started. I know, riveting. See, look here:

Notice the grey dragon graphics.

I don't remember where or when I got back into computers, but I remember my parents purchasing an IBM PS/1 with a 386 processor (I believe) and something like 2 MB of RAM. I think it also had a 2400 Baud modem. The modems were still pretty new. The internet didn't exist in its current form, but there were things called Bulletin Board Systems, or BBSes. They were often computers or servers set up at someone's home or business where you could dial directly in using your modem. You had to enter the phone number on your computer and click Connect or Dial. And in a few moments you had that loud screeching sound followed by some small clicks. I think that's all called a handshake.

My Speech and English teacher in high school had a BBS set up at the high school. I dialed into it and played some basic turn-based war games with pretty much only five other people in my small town. At the time there was always the anxiety of someone in my household picking up the phone and severing the modem connection.

This is what a BBS menu looked like:

My teacher was also the first person to introduce me to the pre-browser Internet, or as we called it then, the World Wide Web. It was off the hook.

I took my IBM PS/1 with me to college. I really didn't see myself as a computer nerd, because I simply didn't know as much as other people did about them. I loved doing stuff on computers. I enjoyed having them, playing games on them, but I didn't know how to do stuff per se.

For the most part, that changed in college. I met some friends and formed a computer club. Yeah, that's right, we started Asbury College's first computer club.  Once we sent an email to a missionary in Russia using BBS systems. It only took around 3-4 days. We were so excited.

While at college, my fellow computer geek friends forced me to learn how to stuff on my computer beyond the  basic Windows 3.1 interface. I say force because they would mess with my computer while I was gone. Since Windows was still based on DOS, most of my friends knew how to mess around in DOS. They would get into DOS, change my folder structures, icons, etc. Oh, it was a hoot. So I learned. More and more.

We would often spend Friday nights in my friend's room on his computer, downloading files from a BBS in Texas. My friend had a faster modem, 14,4000, I believe. Oh, it screamed, baby. We downloaded a 3D video animation of the bird drinking water in only 3 hours. So see, I remember what it was like to really suffer.

Everything until graduate school was a blur of games like Duke Nuke'em, Lemmings, and I think later there was some Wolfenstein and Doom. Everything I learned about computers at that time was inspired by boredom or just trial-and-error. If something didn't work, I would try to figure out what was wrong. Or I would have some of smarter friends try to figure it out.

Oh, and how could I forget the dot matrix printers? This was a time when there was actual manual labor involved in loading paper in a printer. You had to line up the holes in the easy-to-perforate paper on the rollers. And then you had to roll the paper to a certain place so the printing started in the right area.

And then you had to hope and pray (literally and figuratively) that during your hour long printing session  there wasn't the horrifying, tardy-to-class producing printer jams. A print job on a dot matrix printer requires military vigilance. You can't leave. You can't get distracted by conversations with others. If that perforated scrolling edges starts to crimp up, the edges may start to tear off, and then the paper itself starts folding up and creasing, it's a profanity-laden disaster of ink and paper. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say it's on par with the Hindenburg disaster.

An aside: I attended a conservative Methodist college. People may joke about laying hands on printers and praying for them, but it happened. Oh yes it did.

The End is Near! Or, how I stopped worrying and learned to just to start write the stupid blog post.

I should have something to write, but I don't. I have ideas and images, but I don't feel inspired to write about them now. I mean, I have one or two huge themes I want to write about, but I can't bring myself to write about it right now. I feel like I need a huge swath of time, not just my lunch hour at work.

But I still don't know what to write right now. This is the part of writing I hate. When you sit at a keyboard, and you don't know what to write. And I've read everything about this by other writers. Some say if you don't have something to write, don't write. Some say if you don't have anything to write, write anyway. Even if it's mundane and crappy.

But now I have an audience. I really don't want to bore you my beloved audience to tears. I have page views to think about! I don't want to just quote poems or write my name over and over again. Albeit, this is the advantage of having a journal. If you feel the need to write crap, you can write crap in your journal. No one will see it. No one will see it except for my biographer who will probably just making a passing aside to the odd habit of mind during writer's block to write out my name over and over again or to write dictionary terms. And then maybe some grad school student will take that aside and turn it into their master's thesis that never gets finished because they end up hitting the same damn writer's block.

Okay, three paragraphs. There we go. I'm getting somewhere now. I wish I had words for conveying to you how helpful and how painful and stressful this process has been for me. It's like exercise for me...sometimes. There are some days I hate exercising, well, that's most days. However, if you make it something else, like playing on the Wii or xBox Kinect or playing Frisbee or something fun I will probably like it. Heck, even something practical like mowing the lawn or cleaning the house, and I can get over that hate hump. Because I really hate it. But here's the thing, I feel awesome after I'm finished working out. Every dang time. And that's how it is with these posts. There are days when it is a horribly mundane and tedious process, but I did it. And I can look at it online and say, ha, I did it. I showed you, Once-Unfillable Space.

And then there are days when words and ideas are just flowing. And I finish and immediately read the post. I will even do further editing. I preview it. View it in landscape mode. Put a fedora on it. View it with denim. I will also check back on it more often than usual. It's like my baby. And I want to show people my baby. But honestly, I don't want to hear if my baby is ugly, not right now.

Later I will be open to criticism about the baby. In fact, later I may realize that baby is pretty darn ugly. But it's done. In the past.

But I think that's how it is with writing. Maybe it's not why I'm the habitual writer I would like to be. Maybe that's why I'm following through with this 40 day plan. But I had no idea how much it would affect my mood.

You can almost use If/Then statements to predict my mood regarding the upcoming blog post.

If I have plans in the evening, and I don't have time during the day, namely over lunch, to blog, my anxiety level will peak and usually become an all out whine-storm around 10 PM. At that point I may have already convinced myself to make a brief post. And I may have invented a new rule about blog posts on days where I'm busy and have evening plans.

If I have no plans in the evening, and I'm looking forward to relaxing with my wife, and I don't get my blog post finished over lunch, I will not be that anxious, at least up until 8 pm. If I have not blogged or started writing a blog post by 8 pm, I will start to get irritable and crotchety. My wife may not know why, but after our little banter I will explain why I'm really bothered.

Okay, back to this part of the post. See, unless I told you, you would have no idea I was just back earlier in the post adding more content. In fact, I added around two new paragraphs, some metaphors and similes that may or may not work and a whole lot of self-conscious blathering. And now, I'm back here at this place in this post, and I feel like the end is coming.

The end is near.

Let's not even get started talking about endings. Writing a good ending is very difficult. I once had a creative writing professor tell me the most important parts of a poem are the beginning and ending. I tend to think that's true, inasmuch as that's what the reader remembers later. However, I would argue the beginning is the most important because you can decide to just not read any further. And you, the audience, have completely severed your relationship to that poem. And that's why your first line almost has to be a like a hook. You have to bring them into the poem. Take them on this journey. And then, at the end, you can choose where you want to leave your reader. Ambiguity? Optimism? Cynicism? Anger? Wrapped up with a nice bow?

Ok.

I think this is it.

The end is here.

Not a post post

This is not a substantial blog post. I do apologize for the shortness. It's Halloween. Not many trick or treaters. The last trick or treaters were not even in costume. I said to one kid, “Who are you supposed to be?” And he said, "You, I'm supposed to be you."
Woah.

O-Dark-Thirty, Part Three

From "Morning Has Broken" by Cat Stevens:

Morning has broken, like the first morning
Blackbird has spoken, like the first bird
Praise for the singing, praise for the morning
Praise for the springing, fresh from the word

And then there is this from Nick Drake's "From the Morning":

A day once dawned, and it was beautiful
A day once dawned from the ground

One of my most bittersweet and beautiful pre-dawn morning was on the morning of September 8, 2000.  It was the morning of my second major open-heart surgery. My family and I were staying at an auxiliary house associated with St. Louis University Hospital for families visiting patients. It was right across the road from the hospital, where my surgery was to take place. I had been hospitalized a week before due to some heart-related issues and so they just let us stay in this house after I was discharged.

It was my sister, mom, dad and I all staying in one room the size of your standard hotel room.

The night before I was nervous about what would happen the next day, but in a lot of ways I just felt like I was going to have a nice, enjoyable long sleep.

And hopefully I would wake up. But if I didn't, I was certain about where I would be headed. I was really sad for my family having to go through this again. Actually, I should say, I was sad for my family having to go through this all my life. I mean, this was only my second major surgery, but they have lived through my first two surgeries as a baby, my life dealing with a kid who had yearly heart check ups, monthly blood draws, minor dietary restrictions, etc., and I was still pretty much all boy. I don't think I ever really took my own health condition that seriously. That changed after the surgery in 2000.

And my poor little sister had to deal with an older brother that already loved being the center of attention getting even more attention.

At any rate, I spent some of the evening writing out some of my favorite scriptures on a small piece of notebook paper. I used to carry a notebook in my back pocket. I used it to jot down ideas, poems, quotes, etc. I wrote these scriptures as a meditation exercise, but also to give my mom something to focus and read while I was in surgery. There was a good chance she might be nervous.

I remember waking up in darkness the next morning, possibly around 4:45 AM. I don't recall if it was to the alarm or not, but I slept pretty well so I may have actually just woke up. I walked into the bathroom, took off my clothes and jumped in the shower. I then got ready to prepare my chest for the surgery. The doctors and nurses told me it would help if I could shave my chest (which is funny because I have hardly any chest hair), and also swab down my chest with the iodine rub. I think that's what it was. I also already had a hospital gown that I could wear over my jeans on my walk to the hospital.

So I stood there in front of the small mirror and shaved my chest. It was kinda fun, I guess. And then there was the next step, which just felt weird. I opened these packets of iodine and rubbed the cool, orange liquid all over my chest and belly. A lot of it dripped into the sink and onto the floor. I repeated this process until I looked like a Jersey Shore wanna-be. At that time I would have called it a fake'n' bake. I think I then slowly put on the hospital gown shirt thingy, underwear, jeans and socks.

My parents and sister were up and getting ready.

As I reflect on it, I'm certain everything felt surreal for all of us. For my parents, well, they had been through this before, so they really knew what I was getting into. My sister really had no idea what would happen, but I think she was just devastated by the whole thing. I was at peace. I believe God gave me this peace, but I also believe I had no idea what was going to happen (as I said, I was a baby during previous surgeries). And maybe that was part of the peace God gave me...the unknown. I wanted more than anything to transfer this peace to my family, but I had hoped that my sense of peace would help them feel at peace.

I remember joking about things. About my chest being orange. Should I just wear my pajamas?

I remember receiving a phone call from a friend, Walt Howard, I believe, because he had just found out about this. I felt horrible I hadn't let him know, but I was so appreciative of his call. I think someone else may have called too, but I can't remember.

We left the house. And this is the part that I remember really well. Or at least, my mind has retained this image of my memory, but it may have been altered over time.

As we walked across the road, I looked to the east and caught a glimpse of the morning sky. I don't believe the sun had started to peak over the horizon yet, but it was illuminating the sky with grey, white and purple colors. I remember feeling this sensation that I often felt at rather inspired moments in my life. It's this feeling as if the world is lit on fire.

Elizabeth Barret Browning said it better than I ever could:

Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries,

I had this incredible sense of God's presence and the beauty of life all around me. I think I smiled. I remember looking at my family and smiling as we walked into the hospital.

It was a morning that felt like the first morning and the last morning. It was a time when I was completely in the now. My past was behind me. My future was uncertain, so there was no point in planning, making to-do lists, or anything like that. I was on a precipice.

I have shared this moment with other people. I've journaled about it as well. I still find that my words fail me, and they fail you. This moment was a gift.