THE JOY AND PAIN OF PRETENDING

I have always imagined things differently than they actually are, which, in part, is responsible for the name of my blog, nonordinarytime [also titled: nonordinaryreality in a former setting]. I’ve been that way for as long as I can remember. I suppose on some level we call it fantasy. Maybe I’m missing a reality gene that other people seem to have—sensible people and not-so-sensible people. It poses the ongoing question for me: what is real after all?

          When I was a kid, I did a lot of pretending. Make believe came naturally to me. As a small child of 4 or 5 or 6, I had imaginary friends—or were they real? For instance, there was my Native American friend, Magua—which I found out later (in college, in fact) was the name of a Native American in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans. There was no way for me to know that at that early childhood stage of my life.  

          There were others, good guys and bad guys—but mostly good guys because I have never liked the dark side of people or things (which is an irony considering the days we’re living in now, politically and culturally). To this day, I’d rather not watch movies or TV shows that are too heavy with dark themes unless there is a guarantee of a happy ending of some kind. That’s me, and there’s nothing I can do about it.  

          I had real friends too, and they were always great fun to be with. But when they weren’t around or before I knew them, I made friends up and I made life up. Maybe it was a Disney influence on me. I don’t know. Something.

          When I was in the 4^th grade, my parents bought me a set of World Book Encyclopedias. I loved them from the very beginning when my father and I picked them up at the train station, took them home, opened the boxes, and the aroma of fresh new books came wafting into the air of the living room. I remember them so well, and I had that same set until we moved out of the parsonage in Cranbury in 2009, and we were, by necessity, downsizing.  I remember their red covers, the color plates of birds and flowers and fish and well-known paintings, the pictures of famous and infamous people of history, and the general themes of almost anything in the whole wide world. I’m not sure just how accurate they were with their information, but I took them to be true and that’s all I needed to know.

          In these days, I’m inclined to want to pretend about so many things: pretend that I’m younger, pretend that the world is a completely friendly place, pretend that there is no such thing as a pandemic or cancer or any other kind of illness, pretend that money is no object for anyone for buying food, clothing, and shelter, pretend that our government has kindness and goodwill and the interest of all people as its main objective, and the list goes on.

          Of course that would also be even better as a reality rather than a fantasy.

THE WHOOPS FACTOR

              I worked for a while for a company that had several buildings, and I was often given the job of delivering documents and papers from one building to another. It was a menial job, but as they say, somebody had to do it. One day I was sent to a particular building that had almost all glass outside walls.

          As a young man, I really wanted to appear to have my act together— smooth, and confident. After all, at that time, I wasn’t sure where my life was heading, and I wanted to make a good impression on people who might possibly have a role in it. I suppose this is as good of a time as any to confess “act together… smooth and confident” has never been an accurate way of describing me as a young man or even as an old man, for that matter.

          I entered the building with a smile and was greeted by a friendly receptionist whose desk was in this very large receiving area, with sofas and chairs with several people sitting in them apparently waiting for their important appointments with someone. She made me feel quite welcome and a normal part of the company we both served. I walked over to her desk and handed her an envelope containing some “important papers” for one of the executives in that building, and then I said my “have a nice day” and turned to leave, and proceeded to walk right into the glass wall, completely missing the door through which I entered only a moment ago..

          Chuckles all around—I had given an otherwise perhaps tense, serious-minded group of people a good laugh as the blood rushed to my face. Rather sheepishly, I turned to my audience and said, “I meant to do that,” which gave them a second round of laughter. Of course I didn’t mean to do it and I knew that they knew that I was joking. I didn’t work for that company for very long and all’s well that ends well.

          Embarrassing moments are only one of many kinds of life experiences for which a good laugh is just the right medicine to help us recover. There have been many articles and books written on that subject, but sometimes we are so caught up with intense emotions that we can’t see the door out of them that leads to the fresh air of joy and relief.

          I wouldn’t want you to think for a minute that I am not aware of the seriousness of pain, suffering, heartache, and sorrow. I am quite aware of life situations that are not humorous in any way, shape, or form. As a minister, I have sat with many families in my career who were going though extremely painful times, and I myself have had some of those as well. I would never want to trivialize the power of difficult circumstances.

          However I would want to say that we also need to be able to laugh from time to time, sometimes at ourselves and sometimes at our predicaments.  You know the old saying, “we’ll laugh about this later,” which is often true, but there is also laughter or relilef that is readily available if we choose to look for it.

          Those of you who know me well, know that humor, in addition to music, is one of my favorite things. In my preaching days, I was fond of using humor in my sermons. In general conversation, I often interject a comment or two with a humorous slant to it (which, by the way, not everyone finds all that funny). It’s just who I am. And in my own personal life, I love to watch stand-up comedy, read humorous books, watch light-hearted movies, etc. YouTube has become a good friend of mine as a wonderland of entertainment.

          As we’re going through this very difficult time of converging of crises, we are all experiencing different emotions, sometimes from day to day. Often there doesn’t seem to be a logical explanation as to why one day we’re up and the next we’re down. One thing is for sure, at least to me: in the midst of this, self-care is extremely important, health-wise and spirit-wise.      If I can offer any advice to anyone, I would say that from time to time, we should and/or need to be intentional about stepping aside from all that harasses us in the way of news and responsibilities, and allow ourselves moments to pursue some form of joy and relief for the sake of ourselves as well as for our contribution of good energy to the world around us.        

A SATURDAY SAGA Part 1

           

          On any given Saturday in the summer, when I was a kid, my parents might announce that we were going to go visit our relatives in Tuckerton, which also meant that we would be going crabbing. At that time of year, the crabs would have migrated into the briny creek waters fed by the Great Bay, and we would go to one of the clam and oyster docks with our crab lines, net, and a bushel basket to be filled for feasting.

          The crabs didn’t need much coaxing to be lifted out of the water, clinging to the bait we tied to the end of our lines. One after another would sacrifice itself for the sake of some “tasty” delight we were offering, and my dad would scoop them up and into the net. Most of the time our bushel basket would be completely filled, and Dad would cover the crabs with seaweed for the ride home in the trunk.

          When we got home, my mother would be cooking up the crabs in a big pot on the stove, and Dad would be standing at the sink, opening and downing the dozen or so clams that he bought at a clam house just before we left Tuckerton to go home. It was a regular event every summer and sometimes twice in a summer. Often my aunt and two cousins would be with us, and we would all get excited each time someone had a crab on the line as if it were the first time it happened.

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          Summer Saturdays in my childhood during the 1950’s always had something going on. If it wasn’t crabbing, it might have been going to the beach on LBI or on the boardwalk at Seaside or Atlantic City. Or it might be a day of playing all day with my friends, building a tree house, hanging a Tarzan rope, exploring the woods and beyond, going swimming in the creek, riding bikes around the countryside. The possibilities were endless.

          Saturdays in the life of a kid in those days, growing up in Medford, NJ had a unique feeling, at least they did to me. I really can’t describe it or explain it—they just felt different. And if I close my eyes, sit back, take a deep breath, and concentrate, I can recall that feeling, albeit for just a few seconds. And if you’ll pardon my sentimentality, as you’ve had to do for several other blog postings, I would like to share with you something that I don’t believe I’ve shared before. If I have, my apologies, because I am well-known in the family for telling the same stories over and over until everybody is looking at one another, rolling their eyes, trying to think of a way to politely make me stop.

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          One of the things gave Saturdays a particular feeling is that I would occasionally work with my father when he would be doing an electrical job on the weekend for someone in town or in the surrounding area. Doing that, I learned just enough, as they say, to be dangerous. But weekend jobs for him were a sideline because his fulltime job was in Philadelphia at SKF Industries. And I’m not sure he made much, if any, money on those weekends, but he did them, sometimes as a favor for a friend or sometimes just because that’s the kind of guy he was—kind, easy-going, and an overall nice person.

          He was very patient with me as his “helper,” but I did do some things for him that I know he would have rather not or could not have done by himself, such as crawling in tight spaces under porches, feeding wires through certain walls so that he could grab them at the other end. Things like that. But, by and large, the work itself was not the only thing that I think of when the memories of those days come surging back into and through my brain.

          What I think of mostly is the time spent with my dad and the various places we worked. One of them especially came to mind the other day when I was reading a book about the Pine Barrens (Medford, by the way, is on the edge of the Pine Barrens—thus my wife takes great delight in calling me a “Piney”—which I don’t mind in the least). The place was located in a town or settlement called Retreat. I’ve not looked, but I’m pretty sure you won’t find it on any map. The closest town near it is Vincentown, but that’s beside the point for what I want to say.

          So one Saturday my father told me to get ready because he needed me to be his helper that day. I don’t remember if I had other plans or not, but if so, they didn’t happen because we were going to do a job in Retreat, which in those days, I had never heard of. As we travelled along back roads, I was staring out the window, wondering where in the world we were heading. Eventually we came upon an old ramshackle of a house, and I remember thinking to myself, who would live in that old place? And as fate would have it, or my father would have it, one or the other, that was exactly where we were going. We were going to be doing electrical work in that very old ramshackle house.

          I have to confess that I was a bit uncomfortable because I had never been in a place like that. When we went inside, I wasn’t any more comfortable, probably less so, because the people inside were a heavyset, late middle-aged woman and two men who looked rather scraggly and the overall sense was that they might be very poor. The house was filled with clutter. A few cats wandered around here and there, a saucer or two of milk on the floor, a kitchen sink with a hand  pump, a kitchen table covered with an oilcloth table cover, some pots and pans on the drain board.,

          My dad, being who he was, seemed to be quite comfortable with them, smiled and made small talk. Then they showed him what they wanted done and where. I don’t remember the exact job we did, but we were there all morning, and at noontime, they made lunch for us. It was, and I remember this very well: eggs, bacon, canned peas, and toast. At first I was very sheepish about eating, but they insisted that I needed to eat something. And I did—and it was delicious, though probably not very healthy.

          I don’t know if my dad got paid at the end of the day, but I did. My pay was in learning not to judge someone just because their lifestyle does not come up to some superficial standard that you set in your psyche. That was thanks to my dad because that's the kind of man he was, and to the people in the ramshackle house—very nice people who were friendly, maybe poor, but not poor in spirit.

I'M OKAY, YOU'RE OKAY

          When I was in grade school in the 50’s, we used to have Civil Defense drills by hiding under our desks—just in case. Just in case of what wasn’t all that clear, but it seemed like there might be some kind of danger that the desks would protect us from. Of course, when you think about it, in a real attack, should it have happened, the desks might not have been much protection. Yet, somehow the drills were taken very seriously and all of us kids, in the vagueness of our understanding, followed the teacher’s orders. Fortunately, the real life need for doing so never came about.

           Some form of danger, though, has always been with us. In general, the world is not a safe place overall. The kinds of harm that can come to us take many shapes and sizes. There are those that we call “natural disasters,” for which nature is blamed on being itself; there are those that are the result of “man’s inhumanity to man,” for which the meanness and lack of a sense of humanity that exists in some people brings disastrous harm to anyone within reach of its power; there are those that are the result of ignorance or lack of knowledge regarding the dangers of certain forms of nature around us—poisonous creatures and elements of nature including bacteria and viruses; there are those that result from a moment of carelessness or clumsiness or disregard for general safety.

          That list is very general and does not include all the possibilities of harm that can come to us as creatures on earth. Some are within our control and others we are totally helpless against. You could say that we live in a constant state of vulnerability from day to day.

          Now that I’ve painted a rather grim picture of human existence, I’ll tell you what I’m thinking about. To borrow the words of the title of a book by Thomas Harris from several years ago, I’m Okay, You’re Okay, that, my friends, is what we have to go on. That is the state of existence for most of us most of the time. Yes, it’s true that anything can happen any time—that’s always been the case; just ask the people of Pompeii if you can find any. Or ask anyone who has been the victim of a major event that suddenly brought about discomfort, pain, loss, illness, or any other form of suffering.

          The point is, though, that most of the time most of us are okay. I think that we do life an injustice when we are constantly on edge. Life, after all, is a gift and all that we have. We obviously need to take appropriate precautions in these days—wearing masks, social distancing, etc.—all those things, plus whatever we can do to make the world a better place (which is something we each need to figure out for ourselves). But as someone once said, “Worry is interest paid on trouble before it becomes due.”

          I don’t actually know whether our hiding under the desks would have been much help in an attack, and fortunately we never had to find out first hand. But after we did the drill, we all went outside for “play period."