Dear Senator Alexander, Please Support the Health Care Law

Dear Senator Alexander,

As I have several times before, I am writing you as a citizen and small business owner firmly in favor of the present health care reforms. I support the Patient Protection and Affordable Care act recently made into law by Congress, and support continued efforts on the part of concerned citizens and legislators to improve the law until it contains a government-supported, single-payer option.

I am therefore writing you to urge you, in the strongest possible terms, to please cease all efforts to undermine or repeal PPAC. Furthermore, I am asking you to work to continue the momentum begun by the passage of the Act into law. This health care legislation is not perfect, granted, but it is an essential and necessary start. Too many Tennesseans face dire consequences if the law is repealed or if the enactment of its reforms are delayed. Please, for their sakes and for mine, change your position and stand in full support of the Patient Protective and Affordable Care Act!

Your recent vocal efforts in the Senate to spearhead the repeal effort take us backward, not forward. It is the wrong battle, waged against the wrong enemy. Speaking as one of the working poor, as a person scraping every day to make a business work in this economy, we are not the problem. We need Washington to give us support and increased safety nets like the Health Care law, not take threaten to take them away!

I realize we deeply disagree on this issue. Therefore I am hopeful that, if nothing else, I can appeal to your conscience on this matter. I am a Christian, and Scripture clearly states we must protect the least of these among us. When we do so, we honor our Creator. I hope, even if we disagree on much else, we can firmly agree on this point.

At a time when so many dire issues face our nation, I hope you will lead your colleagues in the Senate, as you have so many times in the past, to a higher ground of conversation than I have seen these past two weeks. Now is *not* the time to attach anti-Health Care amendments to each new bill. Now is *not* the time to fixate on repealing Health Care as some sort of "mandate" from the recent election. Now is the time to help the economy by moving forward, not dwelling in the past.

Thank you for your service to the state of Tennessee, and please know that I speak for a great many Tennesseans when I say that I support the Health Care law, and that repeal is not the answer.

Cordially,

David Dault

Dear Senator Corker, Please Support the Health Care Law

Dear Senator Corker,

As I have several times before, I am writing you as a citizen and small business owner firmly in favor of the present health care reforms. I support the Patient Protection and Affordable Care act recently made into law by Congress, and support continued efforts on the part of concerned citizens and legislators to improve the law until it contains a government-supported, single-payer option.

I am therefore writing you to urge you, in the strongest possible terms, to please cease all efforts to undermine or repeal PPAC. Furthermore, I am asking you to work to continue the momentum begun by the passage of the Act into law. This health care legislation is not perfect, granted, but it is an essential and necessary start. Too many Tennesseans face dire consequences if the law is repealed or if the enactment of its reforms are delayed. Please, for their sakes and for mine, change your position and stand in full support of the Patient Protective and Affordable Care Act!

Mr. Corker, two summers ago you and I spoke face to face at a town hall meeting. At that time you watched as angry voices heckled me because I asked you to help me and my pregnant wife by voting in favor of health care. That evening, you looked me in the eye and I had the feeling you were ashamed at what your constituents were shouting at me. Like me, I hope you feel we are better than that in this state.

Therefore I am hopeful that I can appeal to your conscience on this matter. I am a Christian, and Scripture clearly states we must protect the least of these among us. When we do so, we honor our Creator. I hope, even if we disagree on much else, we can firmly agree on this point.

At a time when so many dire issues face our nation, I hope you will lead your colleagues in the Senate, as you have so many times in the past, to a higher ground of conversation than I have seen these past two weeks. Now is *not* the time to attach anti-Health Care amendments to each new bill. Now is *not* the time to fixate on repealing Health Care as some sort of "mandate" from the recent election. Now is the time to help the economy by moving forward, not dwelling in the past.

Thank you for your service to the state of Tennessee, and please know that I speak for a great many Tennesseans when I say that I support the Health Care law, and that repeal is not the answer.

Cordially,

David Dault

Love and Loss in a Digital Age

Gmail is eerie to me these days. I still use it, but it has a haunted aspect.

A little over two years ago, my mother passed away. Despite this fact, her presence remains as a ghostly part of my gmail account. When I mouse over her name in my contacts list, a stylized picture of her face appears, hovering, until the mouse moves away. I have archived emails and voicemails the linger, despite her absence from this world. She still has a toe hold here. She remains, though departed.

I am thinking about that today. Today my friends buried a friend of mine. She passed away a little over a week ago, and the funeral was today. Thirty-six years old. Too young. I couldn't be at the funeral. It is eight hours by car, and my wife and daughter are both sick in bed. And yet, here on Facebook, I am connected to the events. I have managed to get a status update or two throughout the afternoon. It breaks my heart that I could not be there. I wanted to be. But the sting is lessened, somewhat, by these odd electrical connections.

And here, in various places, I have her emails and messages to me. I have inklings of places where she and I were connected randomly -- she quotes a lyric from one of my songs here, we have a mutual friend there. None of it adds up to the weight of her absence, but the weight nonetheless is palpable. Substantial. Like my mother, my friend Elizabeth still has a toe hold in this world.

For the last twenty years or more I have kept some records of things. Projects I have been a part of that make me proud. The files they kept on me from grade school and high school (yes. I have them). My poetry, such as it is, and my writings (even the bad ones). Pictures. Old cassette tapes. Every rejection letter from every school and job I ever applied to. I have these things.

Why? Because I want, to whatever degree possible, to leave a breadcrumb trail when I am gone. I want to have pieces that others can piece together. It won't add up to my life, I know, and the life it adds up to will probably only be a parody of the one I lived, a shadow play. But dumb show or not, I want to leave the breadcrumbs and have them be found. I want to leave a toe in this world.

When we were cleaning out my mother's house, there was so little time. So much got passed over, and thrown away, or lost. If she intended tidy endings and well-kept meanings for me, I missed them in the maelstrom. I have had to make my own meanings. So will you. Meanings are for the living, not the dead. No matter how much I would like to control my meaning when I am gone, the best any of us get is the phantom face during a mouse-over.

It is all there is. It is enough.

And so I say goodbye again to my dear, strange mother, as I do every time my mouse glances near her name and that face appears. And I say goodbye today to Elizabeth, though I am certain my goodbyes will echo again and again as I bump into her toe holds here in my digital world. Goodbye. I have loved you as best I could, and I love you still, in my own strange and halting ways. Please pray for me as I pray for you. I hope we meet again -- not as a mouse over, but, as promised, face to face.

I love. I miss. I hope.

Dear Senator Corker, redux.

Senator Corker,

I heard one of your Republican colleagues on NPR this morning saying that he thought the "American people had spoken" in rejecting health care reform. This is disingenuous.

When I looked you in the eye this summer at that rally and told you about the fears my wife and I had had as a young couple just out of school with no resources to pay for COBRA and a baby on the way, I appreciated that you seemed sympathetic to our plight. You were sympathetic despite the crowd around me jeering that we "shouldn't have gotten pregnant," implying, I suppose, that we should have destroyed or rejected our precious daughter, Maggie, instead of rejecting and working to change a system in which parents like us are forced to make tough and impossible choices for the convenience of maintaining the "status quo" of a health care system that is greedily and monstrously out of control.

As one of your constituents, I have contacted you in the past to say that I am in favor of a SINGLE PAYER SYSTEM and a GOVERNMENT OPTION. I am in favor of radically reducing and curtailing the influence of health care lobbyists on Capitol Hill (including the donations they make to the campaigns of you and your colleagues), and that your poor and working constituents especially do not have time to wait while you and the Republicans obstruct and play politics.

I am writing to say that I am STILL for these "impossible" outcomes. Moreover, I know I am not the only one of your constituents writing to tell you this.

What I think, sir, is that when you and your colleagues refer to the "will of the American people," you are simply only attending to the polls you and your benefactors in the health care industry find most expedient.

I think you and your fellow Republicans' behavior these last months during the debate on health care has been shameful. We need drastic, not incremental change, and we need it now. People are dying, sir. They are dying from a system that denied them access to care and to affordability; they are dying from "preexisting conditions."

The rhetoric that has flown in the past months about "denial of choice of doctors" and "death panels" ignores the fact that these conditions are already in place with the system we have, only they are factors currently of the "free market approach" you love and esteem so much.

In rural central Tennessee and now in Memphis, as an educator and a pastor, I have seen with my own eyes the devastation the "business as usual" approach to health care has brought to honest and hard working families. At the Saturn plant, in Culleoka, in Nashville, and here in Collierville and Memphis, there are a whole bunch of hurting (and dying) folks that just want the kind of access to decent, affordable, effective health coverage and care that you and your colleagues in the Senate enjoy every day.

Whether you call it "socialism," sir, or just good merciful common sense, I am an American, and your constituent, and I am asking you to get off your kiester and work for it.

Cordially,

Dr. David Dault
Assistant Professor of Religious Studies
Christian Brothers University
Memphis, TN

Hell yeah.

Brother West, tellin' it like it is.

C'est Interresant

I was just tidying up my corner of cyberspace when I came across a blip on the radar that intrigued me.

Apparently there is a blog in France, Things Which Must Be Disseminated, that picked up one of my old posts.

I can't vouch for the rest of the content there (I've only just discovered it, and have not done much exploring of the rest of the posts) but I was a bit tickled that someone around the globe found some use for something I had to say. Glad to have folks reading. Thanks.

2009 Update and Holiday Letter

Advent 2009 and New Years 2010

Dear Friends,

To say that this was a crazy year would be an understatement. So much has happened since our last holiday letter it seems impossible to fit it all onto only a couple of pages. We'll do our best to fill you in on the highlights, at least.

In January of this year we were still in Nashville. Kira had graduated from Vanderbilt with her master’s degree in December, and at the start of the New Year 2009 she was a few months in to her chaplaincy internship at Baptist Hospital. David had defended his dissertation in December, and was hard at work getting the rewrites done and last pieces in place to turn it in and be finished. We were both very involved in teaching at our parish, Christ the King, though the constant schedule of mentoring, on top of worship, was starting to wear on us a bit. David was also hard at work with a new semester of teaching at American Baptist College, and was working slowly but surely on his book for Yale University Press.

Winter took a sad turn in mid-February, as we learned of the passing of David's mother from lung disease. Kira and David traveled to Columbus, Georgia (David's home town) to see to her affairs and arrangements. They were well supported during this time by family and friends; thought the sense of loss has not yet fully passed.

March brought some distraction, due to a very hectic travel schedule for David. During the month he presented papers at conferences in Durham, North Carolina, in Indianapolis, Indiana, and in Manhattan. In addition to this, he was invited to come to the University of Virginia for several days to present some of his research to the doctoral students in the religious studies program there. During these travels Kira and David became experts at using Skype, a computer program that allows you to talk for free with your laptops. This was a welcome blessing of the Internet age.

As spring progressed we were winding up our long association with Vanderbilt University, and April was full of wonder as to what would happen next. Though David had sent out many job applications in the previous months, the bleak economy had diminished our hopes for a firm offer for the following year for teaching, so April was a month of waiting and hoping. Little did we know.

In late April we were surprised and overjoyed to discover that Kira was pregnant, and that we were going to be parents. We were excited and scared at the news, given the uncertainty of our income for the following year. God was gracious with His timing, however. On the evening of the day we found out Kira was expecting, David got a call from an old graduate school colleague informing him of an opening for the following fall at Christian Brothers University in Memphis. It was a last-minute position, filling a vacancy that had come too late in the year for a normal search. Would David be interested in applying?

Needless to say, David was interested. So he sent in his application and waited on pins and needles as the process took its course over the next couple months. In the meantime, David had the opportunity to receive his doctoral gown and hood at graduation. Both Kira's parents and David's father, brother and step-mom traveled to Memphis for the event, which gave Kira and David the opportunity to give them the good news in person about Kira's "delicate condition." The next weekend, Kira and David were off to Gambier, Ohio for her brother's graduation from Kenyon College.

In June David traveled to Halifax, Nova Scotia for several days to present a paper at the Catholic Theological Society of America conference. When he returned he was happy to learn that he had made the list of candidates to be interviewed for the Christian Brothers' position. The telephone interview went well and David was guardedly hopeful that there might be a job for him in the fall. Kira had her first ultrasound, and we were elated to see an image of our tiny baby, and to learn that mama and Kritter (as we've begun calling the child) were both were healthy and fine.

In early July word came that David had been chosen for the Christian Brothers position, and we began some frantic planning and packing to prepare to move. This was complicated by two major trips that occurred during the month. First, David had been invited to spend another week at UVA, this time meeting with biblical scholars from around the globe who work on an interfaith dialogue project known as Scriptural Reasoning. Then, at the end of the month, Kira and David traveled for a week to Oak Island, North Carolina, for a vacation with Kira's parents at the beach. In between, we made a whirlwind trip to Memphis and hunted down a house to rent that was somewhat affordable and near enough to school for David to be able to walk to work, and made plans to move the first week of August.

All this time, Kira was continuing very successfully in her residency as a chaplain, and was highly praised by her supervisors and co-workers for her skills and poise with patients and their families.

In August David moved to Memphis with the boxes of books and furniture, and Kira moved into the home of her friend and co-worker, Kim Sheehan, in order to finish out the final weeks of her residency. During this time we again got very good at using Skype. David traveled back to Nashville on the 18th for our two-year anniversary, an occasion that was made all the sweeter with another healthy prenatal visit, this time with the first chance for us to hear Kritter's heartbeat and see some amazingly detailed sonogram images (though we elected not to learn whether it was a girl or a boy).

In the first week of September Kira finished her residency and said goodbye to Nashville. David had already been teaching at Christian Brothers for several days by the time she joined him in Memphis, and they set to work finishing the unpacking of the boxes and beginning the arranging of the house.

While David was happy to be employed, it was unclear what was in store for Kira, particularly since she was arriving in the city already quite well along in her pregnancy. A good friend (in fact the wife of the Vanderbilt colleague who had called David about the CBU position in the first place) put Kira in touch with the Church Health Center, a local nonprofit focused on faith and wellness. At Kira's first meeting with them, she signed a contract with them as a freelance writer, and began working thirty hours a week from home on various projects for the center.

In October David took a trip to Montreal for the American Academy of Religion conference, where he had some job interviews and started to work on some advance publicity for his book. He also had an interview at Christian Brothers for the permanent position of the job he now holds (he was hired as a visiting professor for this year). We were also paid a visit by David's dad and step-mom, who were passing through on the way home from visiting his brother in St. Louis.

Kira and David traveled to Washington, Pennsylvania for Thanksgiving and spent the weekend with Kira's parents and extended family. This was the last big trip we would take this year.

Now we have a new perspective on Advent. Kira and the baby are both very healthy, and she is very pregnant. We are counting the days until her projected due date (early January!), and anxiously awaiting the arrival of our new family member.

Meanwhile, we both keep writing, keep unpacking, keep organizing, and keep praying. Our prayers are for you and yours, this holiday season, for your health and happiness, and for a blessed New Year. Merry Christmas, and know that you are remembered and loved,

Fondest regards,

Kira and David

Senator Corker responds

Dear Dr. Dault,

Thank you for taking the time to contact my office about supporting a public health insurance plan option in comprehensive health care reform. Your input is important to me, and I appreciate the time you took to share your thoughts.

I strongly believe that no issue requires an innovative cure more than our country's ailing health care system. No matter whose statistics you believe, millions of Americans, including 800,000 Tennesseans, lack adequate health insurance. Beyond the chaos this causes to our health care system and the American economy, the human and emotional toll is enormous. I believe, as you do, that all Americans, regardless of medical history or preexisting conditions, deserve the opportunity to have access to high-quality health insurance coverage that is both affordable and transferrable between jobs. I also agree with you that increasing efficiency, reducing fraud, and maximizing competition between health insurance plans is the best way to achieve the best health insurance system.

I want you to know that I am meeting regularly with doctors, hospital representatives, the insurance industry, and patients like you to get a well-rounded perspective on every option available that presents a possible solution. As the Senate debates comprehensive health care reform, I assure you that I will be working with my colleagues to craft legislation with the best possible balance of choice, quality, and affordability among health insurance plans. The insight you have provided in your letter will certainly help my staff and I more effectively look in to this issue.

Thank you again for your letter. I hope you will continue to share your thoughts with me.

Sincerely,

Bob Corker
United States Senator

Christmas Letter, 2008

Dear friends and family,

We wanted to take a few moments and fill you in on our adventures over the past twelve months. We thought about sending a Columbus Day letter, but, after some discussion, that just seemed weird. So, Christmas it is. Enjoy.

The year started with some upheaval. Charles and Allyne stopped through Nashville on their way home from St. Louis. We had a fine visit and we gave them a tour of Nashville, ate a really huge breakfast at the Loveless Cafe, and showed off our wonderful little apartment in the Whitland neighborhood. David's dad remarked that he couldn't believe a place like that hadn't been turned into condos, given the real estate market. Little did we know.

In early January, we received word that the wonderful apartment building we were living in had been sold and was being turned into condominiums. With thirty days notice, we were asked to find a new place to live and move out. Mind you, this was occurring during the period when Kira thought she would be finishing her master's thesis, and David believed (oh, yes he did) that he would have the whole Spring to put the finishing touches on his dissertation and get it defended in time for both of them to graduate in May.

Oops. Needless to say, that did not come to pass. We did not graduate in May of 2008. Instead, we moved, for six months, into a cave. At least, that was how it felt. It was an oversized, overpriced, under-heated and under air-conditioned behemoth of a place that was a semi-reasonable storage area for our things, but was by no means a home. The Cave had four windows total, and what windows it had backed out onto a high-rise construction site, which was noisy at the best of times and unbearably annoying the rest of the times.

So, like any sane couple, we fled the country.

Well, maybe it wasn't that dramatic, but we were overdue on a honeymoon, and Kira needed to see her ancestral stomping grounds in the Netherlands, and David was itching for a good excuse to learn (read: butcher) a new foreign language. So in May, Kira and David each packed a bag (one bag apiece! We took carry-on only!) and hopped the pond to Amsterdam's Schipoll airport. From there we were met by our good friend Alec, and we hopped a train to nearby Leiden, where we spent a wonderful ten days with Alec and his wife Kathy. We threw a weekend trip to Germany in for good measure, as well as several day trips to four beautiful Dutch cities and one really ugly one (Rotterdam). Kira got her first taste of international travel, and David got to taste many versions of Boerenomelete ('Farmer's Omlette'), and a pleasant time was had by all.


Upon our return to the states, we were overjoyed to join both sides of Kira's family, as the Bandstras celebrated Marjorie's 90th birthday in New Jersey, and the Hartgers celebrated Harold Sr.'s 90th birthday in Grand Rapids. There was much laughter, at least one new song, David discovered the joys of really huge family reunions, and again, a pleasant time was had by all.

In June we started packing up the Cave, in anticipation of moving (at the time, we weren't sure where, just that We Had To). Then, in good form, with our boxes packed, we skipped town and headed for the beach.

So early July was spent with Harold Jr., Susan, Philip, and Philip's friend Gabe at Oak Island, NC. A week of seafood, body surfing, pelican watching and oh-so-minor intoxication, that has come to be a yearly ritual, ensued. Nobody managed to tan, sadly, but we did see some fireworks (for several nights before, during and after the Fourth).

After our return, we moved again (second time in one year). The new place is a lovely little duplex with lots of windows and good places to take long walks through the neighborhood. It's not perfect, but it is a home, and we are thankful for it.

In August, Harold and Susan came to visit us for a long weekend, and Harold and David hung a ceiling fan and did some minor house maintenance. We took a tour of the Opryland Hotel and had a really huge breakfast at the Loveless Cafe. Then, in October, we made a trip to Cincinnati and spent a long weekend with Harold and Susan there as well, halfway between Nashville and Washington, PA.

Then, in Late October, we travelled to Chicago for the American Academy of Religion conference. David had several job interviews, and Kira slept in. While we were there we were very happy to catch up with several friends, including an old friend of David's from high school, Matt, who took us out on the town, including a wonderful dinner and a show at the famous Second City Improv Theater.

During the year, we also have been happy to have several friends visit us from out of town. At one point or another, Katy, Robert, and Henry all stopped through, as well as Kira's brother, Philip. In a couple of these visits, as well, we managed to work in a trip to the Loveless Cafe.

In late December, we will travel once again to Pennsylvania to see Kira's folks and, as has become our practice, flee Nashville at the slightest excuse.

Now, some specifics:

Kira did finish her master's thesis, and her degree. She got word in October that the thesis had passed, and she will officially graduate in May. Meanwhile, in September, she began a one-year residency in Clinical Pastoral Education, and is now working as a chaplain at nearby Baptist Hospital. Last January, after much soul searching, she joined the RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults) group at Christ the King, the parish we have been attending, and during the Easter Triduum she was received into full communion, joining David in the Roman Catholic Church. This fall she was asked to be an RCIA sponsor herself, and enjoyed becoming more involved in the parish.

In January David finally said goodbye to Central Presbyterian Church in Culleoka, TN, a rural congregation about an hour south of Nashville where he had served as the (covertly not-Presbyterian) weekly minister for the last five years. Thus, for the first time since they had met, Kira and David were able to sit next to each other during worship. David was also able to serve as an RCIA sponsor, along with Kira, and to become a more active member at Christ the King. In October, after many months of rewrites and agonizing all-nighters, he was given the green light to schedule his dissertation defense. On December 4th he defended successfully, and in May you can finally call him "Dr. Bozo," and no longer simply "Bozo." He continues to teach for American Baptist College here in Nashville, and in November he signed a contract with Yale University Press to write a book called The Accessorized Bible, about the phenomenon of "boutique" scripture.

It has been a remarkable (Kira suggested "tumultuous") year, and we count ourselves blessed. Thank you, each of you, for your part in our lives. With much joy and love,

David and Kira

A ribcage full of songbirds

Back in 1996, my Ground Hog's Day was interrupted. I was a passenger in a head-on car collision that, thankfully, everyone lived through. The event did, however, have some dire consequences. The driver went to the hospital with fractured vertebrae, and I cracked two of my left-side ribs. About three weeks after the accident, a guy I worked with said something that made me laugh, and one of the ribs broke all the way through. As I hit the ground, screaming, I remember thinking, "How can there be so much pain in me right now?"

Cleaning out some old boxes today, I ran across this, which I wrote a couple months after the accident, looking back at it. I've been dead-dog sick with the 'flu these past five days, and this seemed somehow fitting - so I thought I would share it. We are fragile things. That is what makes the preciousness of all these breaths so monstrously beautiful.

2.2.96: Invitation to the last dance. The life flashes later. All that hung in the air at that moment was clarity. Transparency. Lichtung. Giving over the body to limp buoyancy. Life collapses.

What we held, what we thought we held: these were not the same. No matter. There are certain points of inevitable closure. Boom.

At that point I was limp trusting; no other description is adequate. Later, in the hospital, fearful over Kay, the driver, I watched it on the news. It wasn't the same as being there. It never is.

Decode this, then. A haunting of memory acid-etched into the body. So many choices have passed with no consequence before this, inevitable and unchangeable. How un-American it feels to be burdened: to carry a moment, one moment, for the rest of your life.

Every medium of conduction has its own factor of resistance. Circumscribe with mathematics, enlist physics, demand a clarity mere words cannot provide. But when such a pure transparency is achieved, what is seen? How clean the glass before it shatters?

So, left with moments incestuously entwined with-us, to re-learn the language of breaking points, tolerances. So. leaving the clean, broken glass, but carrying the breaking with us. For we, like glass, are dust put to purposes and pressures; liquid, brittle, revealing. We yearn ourselves to transparency. We hope, at last, to see through this; even this.

Open Letter to the Space Dudes

Dear NASA,

Remember that time y'all went to the Moon?

That was way rad.

Peace,

D.

The End of an Era

So the other night I made a pilgrimage, of sorts, and ran a bittersweet errand. I went to Nashville Used Musical Instruments and sold off the first "real" instrument I ever owned, my ancient Korg Poly-800 synthesizer.

Actually, "sold off" is generous. After lugging it around for the past fifteen years (the last time I seriously used it was 1996, for one song on the Feyerabend album) it had seen better days. It still worked fine, but was missing a power supply and a lot of its documentation. The upshot of this, however, was that the store was reticent to buy it off me, because the resale value was minimal given the work and parts they would have to put into it.

Now, you must understand, this was no mere piece of electronic junk in my universe. I had written my earliest songs on this thing, and (when I first received it, way back in 1984) it was a powerhouse of sounds and possibilities. While I no longer had a real use for it, I did not want to abandon it to some trash heap. It needed some sort of good home.

So we struck a weird sort of compromise. The Poly-800 had come to me, that Christmas all those years ago, with a pretty sturdy road case. The store agreed to buy that, and I told them I'd throw the keyboard in on the deal. So it goes (or rather, so it went).

In my fondest dream, some way or somehow this old synthesizer will find its way into a new home - maybe as the unit it now is, maybe as spare parts of some other keyboard - and some kid will get a hold of it this Christmas and more music will be made.

I'm sentimental, I know. But you must understand I hate, hate, hate parting with instruments. I form relationships with the things I make music with. They become a part of me. But in this case, it was clearly time to say farewell. Farewell and thank you. Thank you for "Keep Me Moving." Thank you for "Outside My Window." Thank you for "Renee," and for many many more songs through the years. Thank you.

Hell's Departure Lounge

This was my Odyssey.

All I wanted to do, you see, was get home. I had just spent a lovely four days on the North Shore of Massachussetts, travelling up the coastline visiting little towns and just relaxing. It had been so relazing, in fact, that I had begun to soften my hardline position that the world is a rude and ugly place. I had begun to feel what some people call hope (and hope, of course, is what Terry Pratchett refers to as 'that greatest of treasures.')

Ah. But then I went through airport security.

I had found a cheap round trip ticket on US Airways, which is the daughter company of a recent merger of USAir and America West - a merger which was being loudly touted from walls on posters and from thumped chests of ticket agents on buttons. Great things afoot, the atmosphere seemed to say. Here, in this place, the perils which have beset the airline industry as a whole are firmly held at bay.

It should have been simple: a short flight from Boston to Philadelphia, and then from Philadelphia to Nashville. Simple, in my life, implies a certain level of tolerance, of course, and Things Do Happen. But within reason, no? A certain level of tolerance goes a long way under Normal Circumstances.

But Normal Circumstances had, apparently, followed my lead and taken a holiday somewhere on the North Shore.

We were delayed getting off the ground, due to a bad weather system throughout the middle Atlantic states. Then, after an hour, we got off the ground, and were delayed in the air from landing by, again, severe weather. Once we got on the ground (after an extra 45 minutes in the air) we were delayed on the tarmac, three times, by what is called a "ramp closure".

Closing the Ramp, apparently, involves pulling back all ground crew from service and halting all traffic in and out of the airport. Nothing moves. Which means, of course, that the third time we stopped on the tarmac, 30 feet from the gate, that was exactly where we stayed. 30 feet from the gate. For another half hour.

Needless to say, I was late making my connecting flight. My connecting flight had miraculously managed to make it out in one of the windows when the ramp had not been closed. Now, this is understandable, and still well within my level of tolerance.

We were told that a gate agent would meet us upon our debarking from the plane, to assist us in making new connections. So, upon debarking and calling the nice person in Nashville who would have been picking me up at about that time at the Nashville airport and informing her that I was in the airport at last, only not the right one, I got in the line to talk to the station agent.

After about five minutes of waiting in line, the station agent suddenly announced loudly to the crowd that he couldn't help us anymore, and that we all would have to go to the other end of the terminal to wait in another line to talk to the customer service agents.

Thinking this a rather loose interpretation of the promise we heard on the plane that "an agent would be waiting at the gate to help," we all just stared at the agent, mute.

"No, I mean it," he repeated. "I'm leaving. You'll have to go to the other desk."

So I turned and made my way, like the rest, to the other end of the terminal. Ah, now being at the back of the line was an advantage, as it meant I got to a higher place in the new line. Tolerance. Sweet tolerance.

After an hour in the new line, though, tolerance was waning. Of the three agents at the desk, one kept leaving to talk on her cell phone, and the other two seemed about as efficient as, well, a post office after a bad fire. Ten minutes per person seemed to be the average, we determined (my stalwart co-queued companions and I), and we heard through the grapevine that the folks still not quite at the front of the line (which was not so far from us) had been standing where we were standing, two hours ago.

Lovely.

At some point, two more agents arrived, but the comedy of errors continued. The line moved a little faster, only now new plagues erupted. Computers began crashing. Printers ceased to work. The devil, it seemed, was in the details, and no one was bothering to pay attention to the fine print. I will spare you, gentle reader, of the many grumblings which ensued.

I will detail for you, however, that when I finally got to have my time at the desk, it was with a gate agent that (I swear, I am not using this term in anything but the most accurate sense) was literally mentally challenged. Everything I said, or indeed anyone said to him, was repeated back, slowly, and pondered at great length before any action was taken. Watching him type was a Chinese water torture of one-fingered hunt-and-pecking. It should go without saying as well that it was when he finally was trying to print out my new boarding passes that the computer printer went down again. Despairing, after five minutes of watching his slow, bumbling attempts to fix it, I howled for a manger.

This was, in fact, the limit of my tolerance.

So now, armed at last with boarding passes in hand, I was informed that the airline does not offer hotel considerations for delays due to weather, and my flight home was leaving at 6:45 the next morning (it was then just after midnight). So I found the bar (ordered a two-fisted set of beers to brace my rattled nerves), and then the all-night Chinese restaurant in the other terminal (good egg rolls, sub-par shrimp fried rice), and had great impromptu conversations with my fellow refugees. I really didn't sleep at all that night, though there was one fitful nap on the floor of gate B-19, for about an hour. Never was I more glad that I always travel with my travel pillow strapped to my backpack.

The next morning should have gone smoothly. Instead of a direct flight, I was re-routed to Charlotte, and from there to Nashville. Fine. So I got to my gate, fueled with a breakfast of chocolate and vanilla swirl yogurt cone, and got on the plane. Thank you.

And there we sat on the plane. For two hours. Two hours, and a lot of that time with the air off (and it was hot). Apparently, we finally were told, the ground crew had put too much fuel on the plane, and it had to be siphoned off. Why they hadn't taken care of this the night before (since, trust me, that flight had been on the boards since 2am - I was checking) is beyond me.

So, needless to say, I got to Charlotte late, and missed my connecting flight.

(There is a funny word we used to employ in German class: abgefukt)

Now there had been snafu's all through the system, of course, and also some flights from Chicago had been cancelled that morning, so there were now a lot of people trying to scramble to get where they were going. The earliest I was told I could get on a flight was 5pm that afternoon.

Did you know that they now have places in the airport where you can get massages? I splurged and got one. If I was going to be shouldering burdens like some slacker caryatid, some transient Atlas, I wanted to make sure my shouldering equipment was in peak shape.

Refreshed, I stormed the nearest customer service counter I could find, with my trademark mix of sweet charm and steely assertiveness. By the end of my seige, I was booked on a 1pm flight. They had tried to route me through Atlanta. No, thank you. The thought of another connecting flight made visions of late career Tom Hanks movies dance in my head. I got to get out of this place, I kept repeating. Direct flights only, please.

When I got to the gate, the agent asked me (of course) if I would be willing to be bumped to a later flight?

No. No, thank you.

When I finally got back to Nashville, after twenty-two hours behind airport security, I had decompressed enough to remark, ruefully, that at no point had anyone offered me an apology, or anything other than grudging consideration. It was, though and through, a completely miserable experience.

The road to Hell is, of course, paved by the Tennessee Department of Transportation. But if you choose to fly, trust me, you'll be booked on US Airways.

You've got raisins on your knees!!

So we are one week into the whole Massanetta Conference experience, and one conference is over and done. It was a real learning experience, and I made a lot of weird turns along the way, but on the whole I'd say it was a good time had by all. I planned way too many songs the first couple days, and didn't do a good job teaching them to the crowd (I just sort of jumped right in), so some folks felt a little lost on the whole singing-along part. Such is my learning curve.

By midweek, however, we all seemed to have gotten our stride. Things ran a lot more smoothly from about last Friday on. On the last day there were Many Enthusiastic Folks who came up and talked to me and said I did a good job (I even got a half-serious offer for a pastor position, which I appreciated very much, but politely declined. Small matter of the dissertation to finish).

The next day, however, the co-director and I sat down with the evaluations, and darker clouds returned. So there was a stack of pages, each a distillation of a given groups comments. It was about half-way through that one page read, and I quote: "Play less songs" followed immediately by "Play more songs" as part of the comment stream.

I had not been aware that Franz Kafka was a conference participant, but apparently both he and Joseph Heller were in attendance, masquerading as 6th graders.

I am not complaining. The co-director and my fellow staff have been nothing but supportive of me during this, my first time as a music leader. I am just hard on myself. I want to get it right, y'know?

But let me tell you this (it's my favorite part). In additon to the 'middlers' (a polite name for middle schoolers) and the adult leadership (a group I nominally belong to, given my mentality and general hyperactivity) there is a group of twenty high school kids here, the 'Enablers' (yes - an unfortunate name for those of us still in twelve-step, but still).

These guys are just amazing. I am used to Montreat, where the youth from all over are cool and all, but this is just another level. These young folks remind me entirely wonderfully of the youth group I used to work with back in Decatur that made such a tremendous impact on me. The first day of the first conference I watched as they leaned out the windows of the conference center, calling to the middlers who were waiting outside to come in for the first event. There was this great sense of welcome and anticipation, and I loved watching it. The Enablers were bridge-building, making a space for these gawking and gangly about-to-be teenagers and allowing them to feel wanted and appreciated - a set of feelings not often conveyed to this age group by adults, let along by high school kids. Watching that happen - without an adult suggesting it or anyone being forced to - watching it happen naturally - has done more for my knee-jerk cynicism this past week than anything I have seen in the past year. It is a warm memory I will take with me and treasure for a long time.

I think we - the adults and the Enablers - have become a solid team. We work well together, and there is a lot of respect running both ways across the age divide. I've had several of the teens help me out with songs and I've pitched in to help with clean-ups and other responsibilities that normally fall on their shoulders. Their energy is infectious, and the adults I work with are stellar, as well. A good cross-section of recent seminary grads, seasoned pastors, and outdoors-y types. I feel like I am making friendships that will last a long, long time. I hope so.

Here's the last bit. So part of my task in preparing for this gig was to write the conference theme song, and I did. It ends with the proclamation, "Massanetta, you've got reasons to believe!" which is greeted by an enthusiastic cheer by the Enablers (again, very supportive). But the other morning, between conferences, I walked through the lobby of the lodge where I'm staying and was serenaded by Enablers and staff, singing (to the tune of the theme song), "Massanetta, you've got raisins on your knees!" (This was apparently composed by one of the Enablers while she was in the shower a couple mornings ago, and it has spread like any good meme does)

Tonight, at the kick-off of the new conference, as I reached the end of the theme song the first time through, I couldn't be completely sure... but I think I heard that being sung at me from both sides of the hall, where the Enablers stand. And from the back, where the adult leadeship sits.

It was hard to finish the song, because I was laughing pretty hard at that moment.

I am very glad I came here.

I'm the Guy that does that Thing

So I am AWOL from my normal life again, this time for a good two weeks. I have fled, once again , to the wilds of Virginia - but this time to the mountains, not to the sea. Oh, and I am about to be surrounded by 300 some-odd middle schoolers.

Because, you see, I have skills. Arcane and strange skills that involve the ability to make a fool of myself in front of large groups of people without collapsing into embarrassment, which comes in handy when you are wanting to do things like, oh, get hundreds of twelve-year olds to sing along with you.

I am, once again, doing that youthworker thang.

This time, though, it's a little different. Instead of being a grunt, I am actually the music leader at the Massanetta Springs Middle School Conferences for the month of July. Which means, hallelujah, I am being paid to be a musician (as most musicians will tell you, this is a rare and wondrous honor).

I've never done anything like this before. I've done some small-scale song leadership, but here I am hooked up with wireless microphones and power-point projectors and I am referred to in the planning schedules as one of the "Big 3" (along with the Keynote leader and the Recreation leader) and I get my own room. If you've never been to a youth event before, lemmetellya - your own room is worth more than gold.

So I have gotten my callouses back from playing guitar so much, and I have learned or re-learned about forty songs of various stripes from traditional hymns to "contemporary Christian" hits. Plus I've written one of my own - the theme song for the conference (which is standard practice for the music leader to do).

I premiered it for the staff this morning, and they were very enthusiastic about it, which was a very good thing (as I was and remain quite nervous about the whole enterprise. But hopeful, and prayerful, too).

So tomorrow the youth arrive, and this thing gets off the ground for real. I'm quite excited. And hopeful. And nervous.

And prayerful.

Doc at the Radar Station

So I am like many people in this world in that I have certain irrational fears. Phobias. Yeah.

Phobias, by their very nature, are a bit strange. You get a low-grade anxiety attack from, say, spiders. Being in high places makes you woozy. You can't stand to touch cotton balls. These are all fears that have no basis in anything objectively threatening (at least not threatening in that moment of fear, per se) and yet drive those of us who have them to distraction and avoidance.

Well, yes. I am phobic. I have a set of these fears as well. Most of them are standard issue. I am afraid of heights (and the vertigo can get pretty bad, which made my stint working with Outward Bound interesting), and I am mildly claustrophobic. I really don't like talking about blood. As abnormal fears go, these are pretty normal, I imagine.

But folks sometimes have a second set of these things - like the cotton example above. I've known two people with that cotton phobia. They can't open aspirin bottles by themselves. Think about it. Some phobias are so common that we don't knock them - the heights one, for example. But when you are afraid of cotton, I imagine sometimes you get some funny looks.

I feel their pain. I, myself, have a peculiar phobia that gets me funny looks and into funny situations.

I'm radiophobic, you see.

No. This is not an irrational fear of lite-rock FM stations (though perhaps there should be a fear like that) nor of common household appliances descended from Marconi and Tesla's early recievers.

Nope. Radiophobia is an irrational fear of things like X-ray machines and nuclear power plants (though irrational here is not meant to mean ignorant - though that is often a confusion. There is much maligning of "radiophobia" as a knee-jerk antipathy to nuclear things on the part of an uniformed public. That is not what I am talking about. I am talking about a genuine phobia here - a real condition that apparently I share with the likes of Thomas Alva Edison and many others).

Now it should be noted that there are plenty of reasonable and rational fears of these things - what with Chernobyl and dirty bomb threats and the like. With reasonable fears you can take reasonable precautions, and minimize risks to safe levels such that normal life can continue, well, you know, normally.

But (and trust me on this one), there is nothing like an unreasonable fear of X-ray machines to make you aware of just how many unsympathetic dental hygenists there are in the world.

The dialogue ususaly goes something like this:

"Um. I know this might sound crazy, but i'm really uncomfortable sitting here with the X-ray machine turned on. Could it be turned off while I'm here?"

"It's not firing. It won't hurt you."

"I realize it's not firing. I realize it won't hurt me. I'm sorry. It has nothing to do with that. It has everything to do with it being in the room and being turned on. I just have a fear of X-ray machines."

"But it's totally safe," she says, the look of incomprehension starting.

"I have no doubt of that. That actually isn't the point. The point," I say, anxiety building, "is that I am just... afraid... of it."

And as you might expect, this dialogue rapidly goes nowhere, largely for the fact that dental hygenists are, to a fault, a very by-the-numbers sort of population (think about it - you clean teeth every day. These folks have a low need for out-of-routine circumstances). It follows that they would try to reassure me with by-the-numbers rational arguments of safety and the like.

The point is is that this is a phobia, and reasoning with me just does not help. I'm sorry.

Now, before you get the wrong idea - I do not completely collapse in a heap there in the examination room. I do manage to survive with the machine on (they are rarely willing to de-energize it), and I even manage to occasionally get an x-ray done when I am assured that they are absolutely necessary. But it does bring on a low-grade panic attack, and I have just learned to live with that.

The phobia is interesting to observe, though. I think because of it I am more aware (hyper aware) of radiation sources we encounter in our daily lives than the average person. Dentist's offices and airports are obvious. But I notice smoke detectors, and the wicks on gas lamps, and certain areas of the college campus I live near - because I know that each of these is a source of (largely unnoticed) radiaton exposure. And I avoid them. Or, if I can't avoid them, I live with it and just have my blood pressure go up a bit.

What put this in my mind is the fact that, because of this odd phobia of mine, I have an obsessive knowledge of radioactive things. I know way too much about how atom bombs and reactors work. I could probably name off the top of my head at least five dozen nuclear accidents or contaminations from the last forty years (at least one of which happened near my old home in Decatur, GA), and I will never ever go picking up scrap metal (just trust me on this one). And as with any true paranoid obsession, the combination of the fear and the knowledge means that, for whatever reason, the universe never ceases to delight in having fun with me about this.

So, for example, my first girlfriend, after our first kiss, was talking to me about her family and her life and she was talking about her father and saying he had a weird job and I said, "Well, at least he doesn't work at a nuclear power plant or anything..."

But, in fact, he did.

And I have in fact had three realtionships with people somehow connected by family to the nuclear industry (all of which I would find out after I got involved with them. it's not like I go looking for this). Needless to say, family visits were not a high point in those affairs.

And so yesterday (this is really what brought it to mind) I was getting my hair cut, and the stylist and I were making conversation. AndI asked how long he had been cutting hair. Not too long. Oh, what did you do before this?

"I was a health physicist in the nuclear industry."

Aha.

So we had a very good conversation, in which I was able to employ some of my obsessive knowledge. I asked about, among other things, whether the Cherenkov effect is as beautiful in real life as it seems to be in the pictures (it is); whether it is scary to stand that close to an operating nuclear reactor (it is). He was pleased to realize I knew quite a bit about his job. I was less pleased to realize that, in some ways, I knew just as much about his job as he did, and occasionally more.

"So why are you cutting hair?"

His first answer had a lot to do with changes in the industry, about restructuring and outsourcing and downsizing. And I took that at face value. it wasn't until near the end of the conversation (and the haircut) that I got the rest of the story.

"Thank goodness, " I said, "it sounds like you were pretty safe, and never had any trouble."

"Well, actually, when I was working my last job," he said (and he named the plant, and a part of my brain suddenly went "oops" and I got very quiet), "they were a bit lax, and several of us got exposed to iodine and thorium isotopes. So they sent me home for a few months, and then I got the letter about not coming back. I don't like to think about it. I joke sometimes that I probably glow inside, or that I got cancers I don't know about. Though I don't imagine that's really something to joke about."

It's one thing to read about something. It is something else to meet someone who has lived through somehing you have read about. Those are two different things.

So yeah, I have a soft place in my heart for the cotton-phobes of the world, because, like me, they have an irrational fear. And strange phobias are pretty funny. But there are also points when the irrationality of a fear begins to shake hands with the reasonableness of being afraid, and at such moments (I shout from the rooftops to the dental hygenists of the world) I don't imagine it's really something to joke about.

Marching to the Ocean, Marching to the Sea

Douglas Copeland called it the notion of the "poverty jet set" - the overeducated folks who work McJobs in order to have the money and freedom to (as often as possible) jump ship, skip town, and junket to exotic locales. For better or worse, the ultimate McJob might in fact be graduate school.

At least, that is the way it seems from a distance.

The reality (as reality often is) is far more complex. Take me, for example. I really haven't taken a 'vacation' in probably ten years, but one might reasonably argue that my whole life is, in fact, one big goof off session. Seriously: I occasionally write, I eat very well, I sleep (sometimes), I watch a lot of episodes of the X-Files.

What is there to get away from?

And yet, recently I was graced witht he chance to get away from my life in Nashville; to take a vacation from my goof-off life of graduate studies and really goof off. To go, in short, to the beach. And I went. And it was wonderful.

I was not alone. Making the fifteen-or-so-hour trip with me was my intrepid companion and fellow gung-ho Catholic, Burt. We burned our way across Tennessee and then took on the wilds of Virginia in a rage of driving and loud music and really good conversation. I kept saying "we must be at least half way there by now!" and Burt would just calmly shake his head no and consult the map. It was (from the standpoint of driving) insane, but (from the standpoint of one's relation to life and the universe) a good position to be in. If the trip is insanely long, you might as well enjoy it. [There's a life lesson in there.]

Okay. And the beach was fantastic. We were in two houses on a private beach on the Chesapeake Bay. To get there, you had to drive northwest from Virginia Beach - over a long long bridge that had tunnels that went underwater (cool and scary). We arrived at like 4:30 in the morning and so didn't get a good look at the place until the next day. I have to say, it was truly perfect. Being in the bay, the waves never got terribly high, and the tides were mild for the most part (there was one day whe several folks got marooned on a sandbar, but that might have had more to do with the alcohol levels than the water levels). The one thing I missed was body surfing, but that was a small price to pay. The water was warm at good times and cool at good times, and I had fun wading and swimming.

Did I mention that while I was at the beach my car rolled over to an amazing 200,000 miles on the odometer? This is, I think, some sort of karmic justice (as if I believed in karma, as if I believed in justice. But still). This is, you see, the second Nissan Sentra I have owned in my life. The last one (from mid highschool to mid-college) was a lemon. This one, Lord bless it, is a peach. It runs and runs and runs, despite being old and looking like baked - over Hell. I call it the Grey Ghost, my car, but it also reminds one of the Energizer Bunny.


So the car and the beach were fantastic, but I cannot neglect to mention the people, as well. Shane, Virginia, Jimmy, Burt, Katy, Heather, as well as Melissa, Luke, and Lindsay (who came down from D.C.) shared laughs, got drunk (repeatedly), played card games and made merry in the surf and the sea. It was good to be among friends old and new, away from the cares of Nashville, and inebriated with sand between my toes. (Oh, and at night, the stars. My goodness, the stars).

I was gone just long enough to be ready to come back. A perfect vacation, and a wonderful time.