Falling Forward, Away From Home Plate

Eric S. Wyatt, 1996 and 2007

April, 1 1996—Cincinnati, Ohio
Associated Press

Opening Day of the baseball season is sacred in Cincinnati; a day when much of the city comes to a stand-still to watch the annual parade, honor the stars of the past, and cheer on the current team that will—hopefully—bring home a championship in the fall. Opening day is supposed to be a joyous day, heralding the return of spring and breaking the grip of winter.

The snow falling at dawn was an ominous beginning to the day. With a sense of foreboding, preparations for the pre-game parade were made with glances skyward. Nervous parade coordinators hurried about their last minute duties while the flakes continued to fall.

Just before the parade was scheduled to begin, the sky broke and sunshine came pouring out. The large white flakes which had fallen throughout the morning soon ceased their assault. The sun's warmth lifted spirits as the lead float inched its way forward, into the streets of Cincinnati. No one could know the joyful excitement would be short lived.

There is a smell which occupies the senses as you pass through the gate of the stadium; a smell which envelops you. It is the accumulative smell of hot dogs and popcorn; of nachos and pizza; of hot pretzels, beer, coke, and cotton candy. It is the ballpark’s own, unique odor.

My daughter and I were in line a half-hour before the large iron gates were opened to the public. We were the first in line and I watched as Ophelia stood on her toe-tips, straining to catch a glimpse of the field through the iron mesh. We stood in the bright sunlight which had replaced the early morning snow. (“It isn’t supposed to snow in April, Daddy.”) Ophelia was peering through the dark interior of the stadium where vendors were setting up, trying to see out onto the sunlit field one level below us. She couldn’t have seen much of the playing surface—maybe the right field foul pole and the edge of the bull-pen. Even at her highest extension she was only as tall as my shoulder. I would have offered a ride on my shoulders to give her a better view, but I knew her response without asking. “I’m too old for that now, Daddy,” she would say.

That smell—the ballpark smell—was concealed from us as we waited, hidden by the damp breeze from the river blowing against our backs until the metal gates had swung open and we had pushed our way through the turnstile. We were submerged in the scent. It surrounded me, pulled me under, scared me for a moment with the intensity of drowning. I fought it at first; held my breath to deny the intrusion on my senses. Like the dream where I am thrown off of a ship in rough seas and find myself underwater—fearing I’ll drown but knowing I can’t hold my breath forever—only to find I don’t drown when I can no longer hold my breath; I can breath underwater like a fish and the initial fear is swept away in the glorious freedom of my new environment. I looked at Ophelia. She had stopped walking and was inhaling deeply; much more trusting than I. She looked up at me and smiled that smile a daughter can smile and melt her father's heart. I gave in and inhaled too.

Ophelia pulled at my hand, tugging me forward through the crowd now swelling around us. I had secured tickets from a friend of a friend, in the field-level boxed seats, four rows behind the third-base dugout. It was good to have a friend who had the finances to buy season tickets, even if he rarely used them. Ophelia knew the seats well from previous trips to the ballpark, and she made a bee-line for them.

She pulled me down a dark, sloping corridor which led to the lower level. We flashed our blue-colored tickets at the man standing guard to insure only those who had paid for the more expensive seats would be allowed down to the lower level. Ophelia led me from the sloping hallway out into the yellow-lit concession area—a broad concrete walkway entombed beneath the second level seats with only small openings revealing the natural sunshine of the day.

We headed toward one of the openings, Ophelia increasing her pace to a slight jog, raising her right hand to hold her red baseball cap in place. It took a minute for my eyes to adjust as we emerged from the underbelly of the stadium into the crisp daylight. The sun was shinning off the brilliant green Astroturf, stinging my eyes. Ophelia dragged me along, past the usher who was ready to escort us to our seats. I smiled at him as we scampered by. “She knows where she’s going,” I told the man. It was all right with me that we passed him by. I hate giving a tip to a person for showing me to the seat I had sat in a hundred times.

The sky was clear and blue by the time the parade finished its tour of the city; the sun’s warmth was slowly warming the Ohio River valley. Perhaps baseball was more than a symbol of spring this year. Perhaps baseball had actually brought the sunshine and warmth with it.

When the gates of Riverfront Stadium opened 90 minutes before the game, some of the players were already out on the field, trying to warm up in the chilly spring air. The early snow had canceled batting practice and the large, netted structure used in pre-game warm-ups was nowhere to be seen.

“They aren’t taking batting practice today,” my daughter said. Ophelia sat in the first seat, with the aisle on her right. I climbed over her and sat to her left.

I knew she was disappointed. I made it a point to arrive early to the games so Ophelia could watch the players swinging at fat pitches thrown by the hitting coach. She loved to guess at which balls would make it over the outfield fence and which ones would come up short. She was pretty good at discerning the home runs from the long flies almost as soon as the ball jumped off the bat—something very difficult to do from the stands.

“I’m gonna go get some coneys.” Ophelia jumped up and stuck out her right hand. I plopped a ten dollar bill in her hand and she raced off to the Skyline vendor.

“Bring me one,” I called after her. Ophelia had become my Cincinnati girl; a girl after my own heart. We spent most of our quality time together in the city; in the parks, or at museums, or shopping. Baseball and food were our favorite things to share. She loved the Reds games and loved Cincinnati style chili. She knew exactly where the chili vendor was located in the stadium, and had visited him at least once during every game we attended.

While Ophelia was gone, a man and a young boy came to claim the seats to my left. I recognized the man from previous games. He had season tickets or—like me—knew someone who did. He nodded as I stood to allow him and his son to pass by. They settled in under a large stadium blanket which the boy pulled up around his chin.

“He hates the cold,” the father said.

“Hard to believe its spring,” I replied. The cool wind was whipping around the circular stadium. “I hate to see snow on opening day.”

The man nodded and stuck out his hand. “My name’s Ray, by the way.”

“Nice to meet you, Ray.” I extended my hand in reply. “I’m Geoff.”

Ray and I talked until Ophelia returned. I found out he was a doctor in Northern Kentucky, with an office just across the river. His son was six years old and not nearly as excited about baseball as my daughter. “I’ve watched her before,” Ray said. “She really loves the game.” Her obvious enthusiasm made me proud.

When Ophelia returned she carried a tray full of cheese coneys and two drinks. I knew better than to ask for change. I was positive Ophelia knew exactly what she could get with ten dollars and was even more positive she had used every last penny. We sat and ate and waited for game time.

Numerous ceremonial activities accompanied opening day of the new season. The biggest event was the pre-game parade. The theme for the Opening day festivities was a twentieth-anniversary party, honoring players from the glory days of the Big Red Machine — arguably the best team to ever play the game. The pre-game activities culminated in the ceremonial throwing of the first pitch. It is an honor to be asked to throw out the first pitch, especially on Opening Day. This year the honor was given to Sparky Anderson: the well-loved former manager who had led the Big Red Machine to back-to-back pennants in 1975 and 1976.

The crowd erupted as Sparky’s name was announced. Fans everywhere jumped to their feet and applauded wildly. Even my daughter was caught up in the excitement. Though she could barely remember Cincinnati’s most recent World Championship in 1990, she knew more about the Big Red Machine than most of the people who had lived and breathed baseball in the 70’s.

I had all of the games from both the ‘75 and ‘76 World Series on video. Whenever the Reds had a bad year, I would watch those tapes instead of the actual games. My ex-wife—Ophelia’s mother—hated that. Carolyn hated baseball in general, but she became irate when I watched those games from years before.

“How many times have you watched those stupid games?” she would yell, standing in the doorway of our newly remodeled family room, her hands on her hips and toe tapping. “You already know every pitch by heart.”

“You don’t understand,” was my reply. And she didn’t. I tried to explain it to her, tried to introduce her to the game I loved; the game that held such deep meaning for me. She refused to go to the games when we were dating, and I was young enough—and in love enough—to overlook her disgust with the sport. After we were married, we moved to Michigan where Carolyn was a librarian in an elementary school and I worked as a photographer for a small, local paper. The Reds were hundreds of miles away, never on TV, and seldom even mentioned. They were no threat to our marriage.

A few years later, we moved back to Cincinnati, and at my assistance we went to a few games. The first game we attended bored Carolyn greatly. After that, she took a book to read any time she went with me to the stadium. It was embarrassing to have my wife sitting silently even while those around her were jumping and shouting. Soon, she began to refuse to go with me. By that point, I no longer cared.

It wasn’t just baseball Carolyn didn’t get. It was everything about me, about my love for Cincinnati. She hated the city. She hated the chili, didn’t see any charm or history in Mt. Adams, thought Eden Park was filled with perverts, compared the river to raw sewage, found no beauty or elegance in the Genius of Water at Fountain Square. She never understood why I enjoyed those things. In the end, she never really understood me at all.

It was hard to believe Ophelia was Carolyn’s child. Ophelia understood me, shared with me a fascination with the city of my youth; the city of her youth.

When Carolyn and I divorced, Ophelia went to live with her mother in a small town north of the city. She hated living there; hated being so far away from the zoo and the park down by the river with a giant wading pool. She would call me, tell me she wanted to be there with me, make plans to go there when she came down to visit.

Nine months after the divorce, Carolyn met and married a man who promised to rescue her from her imprisonment in the mid-west. She had always dreamed of living in Colorado or Montana. She wanted to be on the outskirts of civilization. To promise to take her there was to promise her the moon. She probably slept with him the first time he mentioned the idea.

Ophelia revolted when her mother told her the news. She locked herself in her room and refused to move anywhere with Carolyn and her new husband. She even staged a hunger strike for seven hours—until Carolyn gave in—demanding she be allowed to stay in Cincinnati with me. She moved into my small apartment with a view of the city the next day.

Two large doors behind home plate opened and various members of the grounds keeping staff dashed in and out, putting the final touches on the field. Not long after the ceremonial first pitch was thrown, the umpiring crew appeared in the passageway behind home plate and made their way onto the field. The crowd was still buzzing as the managers of the two teams emerged from their respective dugouts to give the line-up cards to the home plate umpire. The managers and other umpires crowded around the man who would be responsible to call the balls and strikes for the game. It was a meeting which mirrored the festive mood of the day as jokes and handshakes were exchanged. With a final laugh, the meeting broke up quickly with the managers returning to their dugouts and the umpires moving to their positions on the field.

As the last of the grounds keepers scurried into the area behind the plate and shut the door, the public address announcer and organist joined together to introduce the team: “And now, your 1996, Cincinnati Reds!” The players ran onto the field as their names were called and the organ player heralded their presence in a crescendo.

The booming voice of the announcer: “At first base, Hal Morris. At second base, Jeff Branson. At Shortstop, the 1995 National League’s Most Valuable Player, Barry Larkin...” Ophelia squealed at the mention of her favorite sports celebrity. The other 50,000 fans in the nearly full stadium joined her, forcing the announcer to pause before continuing, “At third base...”

The announcer finished the introductions and the players took their positions on the field. Everyone in attendance turned to face the large flag whipping high over the stadium above center field. The crowd grew quiet in anticipation of the singing of the national anthem.

With the last note still ringing through the stadium, Cincinnati’s pitcher, Pete Shorek, climbed to the top of the pitcher’s mound and pawed around with his cleated foot to landscape the pile of dirt to his liking. He dug out a shallow trench along the pitching rubber so he could plant his foot against the white rectangle seated solidly in the middle of the mound. Windmilling both arms in an effort to shake of the April cold, Shorek yelled something in to his catcher, Eddie Taubensee, who was settling in behind the plate with a few landscaping improvements of his own. Taubensee settled into his crouch, pulled on his protective mask, and waited to receive Shorek’s warm-up pitches.

Ophelia and I watched in silence as the infielders tossed a ball around and the outfielders played catch. Everyone was practicing their movements, warming up the muscles needed to play their game. The sun found a hole between clouds and shone down brightly on the field. Sometimes when the sun shone just right on Ophelia's profile, I could catch just a hint of her mother.

Before I met my ex-wife—before we began dating, began the cycle of break ups and reconciliations which culminated in the ultimate reconciliation of marriage and ended in the more binding break-up of divorce—there were other women. Sometimes there were other women in between our stints as well, but never, never at the same time, and never were the relationships filled with serious intentions. I was too devoted to Carolyn, and I never gave up on her—on “us”—even when months would pass where she would refuse to see me, to talk, to touch.

The bitterness of the final break up—the formal one presided over by a stern female judge who looked down her nose, over the rim of her half-glasses whenever I spoke—left me shaken, but the hate-filled words, the half-truths, the blatant lies did not diminish my devotion. I remained painfully devoted to Carolyn throughout my hatred, in spite of my increased awareness of who she really was.

It wasn’t love. There was no more love; at least not the kind of love defined by sappy cards, flowers, diamonds, or chocolates. That is the love we seek, the love we speak about: tangible love we can see, and feel, and taste; love which benefits the lovers, reaps rewards for the toil, sweat, and tears.

Devotion was another love; less rewarding and more troublesome, a commitment to the ideal, a remembrance of the good times only. I remained devoted to that ideal woman—the Carolyn I knew she could be—desperately clinging to the romanticized notions of youth, of love. That devotion had brought me back to Carolyn time and time again.

The crowd was still on its feet when pitcher Pete Shorek delivered the first pitch; a fastball right down the center of the plate. Home plate umpire, John McSherry, called the pitch a ball, much to the visible surprise of the pitcher.

With the first pitch delivered, the fans nestled into their seats. The first two batters were retired quickly with just five pitches, a good sign that Shorek had not lost the fine pitching form he had shown last season. The third batter, Expos center fielder Rondell White, stepped in and Shorek quickly threw two strikes. McSherry—a large man, made larger by the bulky equipment he wore under his dark blue umpire’s blazer—stood with his hands on his hips between pitches, staring out toward the pitcher or watching the batter from behind the black, wire mask he wore.

The Montreal batter was perplexed by Shorek’s pitches and he stepped away from the plate in an effort to gather himself. He looked out toward the pitcher, gripping and re-gripping the handle of his bat. The catcher waited for the batter to return, kneeling behind the plate.

McSherry removed his mask, tapped the catcher on the shoulder, and waved his right hand in the air, motioning out toward second base. The umpire stationed in the middle of the field was McSherry’s close friend, Jerry Crawford. He was in his standard position, legs spread wide and his hands resting on his knees. He straightened up, looked confused, and started to step toward home plate.

In between pitches Ophelia pointed out a fan a few sections away who was dancing with the Red's mascot, Mr. Red. There was no music playing, but the folks in that section were certainly enjoying themselves. My attention shifted back to home plate. The umpire had taken off his mask and turned away from the field. He was a large man, and as he walked toward the green-padded doors behind home plate he moved as if he had pulled a muscle.

There are about fifteen steps between home plate and the doors leading off the field: McSherry took twelve of them. He was three strides away—on the red-brown clay of the warning track—when he slowed, then stopped. His right leg locked, then seemed to give way. His right knee buckled and for what felt like an eternity, he wobbled in place; his head lolling from side to side. Before anyone could react, McSherry’s body pitched forward, rushing face-first toward the ground. He didn’t even raise his arms to soften the blow. He hit the ground stomach and face first, bounced twice, and was still.

The crowd fell silent instantly. The cries of the vendors walking the aisles ceased and the fans rose to their feet without a sound. I stood with them, straining to get a view of where the umpire lay, hoping to see any sign the situation was less severe than it initially appeared.

Ophelia rose next to me, leaning forward to see. I put my hand on her shoulder and she turned back to look up at me. I could see the confusion and concern in her deep, green eyes—so much like her mother’s, yet so different. Ophelia’s eyes were brimming with tears. Carolyn, had she been there, wouldn’t have even noticed anything was amiss. She would have been submerged in her book.

McSherry was lying prone on the ground when trainers from each team reached him. He hadn’t moved since falling forward, away from home plate. The trainers turned McSherry over, loosened his coat, and removed the thick chest protector. The other umpires—men who were like family to McSherry—were soon at their friend’s side. Players from each dugout slowly wondered out onto the field, the two sides meeting, mingling somewhere in the middle. The players kept a respectful distance. The other umpires soon joined them.

I felt Ray standing next to me, then felt his hand on my shoulder. I turned to him and our eyes locked. Ray turned to where his son sat huddled beneath the blanket. When he looked back at me, I knew what he wanted to ask before he said a word. I jerked my head out toward the field and said, “Go. I’ll watch your boy. Go see if you can be any help.”

Ray nodded without speaking, turned to his son, whispered something in his ear, and pushed past Ophelia and me. He walked slowly and deliberately down the five or six short steps to the edge of the top of the visitor’s dugout. Two police guards had established themselves on the top of the dugout to make sure the crowd remained under control during the delay in the game, not that there was any threat of unrest. Ray approached the guard closest to him who squatted down so he and Ray were at eye level. The man in blue nodded as Ray talked, listening carefully. After Ray’s explanation, the guard stood up and motioned for Ray to climb out onto the dugout roof. From there, Ray jumped down onto the Astroturf field and sprinted across to where the trainers were attending to McSherry.

Several other people were allowed onto the field. Doctors, I assumed, or nurses. Two paramedics emerged from behind home plate just as Ray and one of the trainers started to administer CPR. Ray was hovering over McSherry’s chest, arms straight and rigid. He pumped repeatedly, his voice traveling across the still, silent air: “One, two, three, four.” The Red’s team trainer was taking deep breaths and exhaling into McSherry’s mouth. The rhythmic thumping of McSherry’s rib cage echoed through the stadium. No one moved. No one spoke.

I didn’t want to watch the attempts to resuscitate McSherry. It was something I didn’t want to see. I had viewed the CPR films in college—was even certified at one time—but had never witnessed anyone actually putting the technique to use in a life or death situation. I knew the severity of the situation and that the man’s life was balanced precariously. I felt dirty for watching this intimate moment; felt like a voyeur peering into the neighbor’s bedroom.

I could not turn away.

One of the paramedics slid in next to McSherry, relieving Ray of his duties. Ray rose from his knees, took a few steps backward, then stopped to watch. The other paramedic had returned with a plastic IV bottle and a long stretch of tubing. Ray helped make sure the needle was ready, then held the plastic bag while the paramedic inserted it into McSherry’s left arm.

I pulled Ophelia close to me, tried to get her to turn away from the scene in front of her. She refused to look away. She clung to me tightly, but continued to stare in the direction of the crowd gathered around the fallen umpire. I heard a woman sob behind me. Saw a man with tears flowing down his cheek. The guards on top of the dugout had stopped watching the crowd and turned to watch the continued attempts to revive McSherry.

Fans in their seats could tell the severity of the situation by studying the faces of the players and coaches. Ray Knight, the Red’s first-year skipper, stood with his arm draped around Jerry Crawford. The sight of a manager and umpire embracing told the story. One of the other umpires was visibly sobbing into his hands, and players stood silently with ashy, stoic expressions on their faces. The only movement on the field was the rhythmic attempts by the medical personnel to resuscitate the fallen man. The crowd remained hushed.

Ophelia began to cry. She didn’t sob, but tears began to flow and her breathing became erratic and shallow. She swayed forward and backward unsteadily. I begged her to sit down, to stop looking at the tragedy being played out in front of us. She shook her head no.

My daughter doesn’t cry often. When she is physically hurt she doesn’t cry. Tears well up in her eyes and she growls with anger, but she doesn’t cry. To my knowledge, she had cried only twice: when my grandmother—Ophelia’s great-grandmother and close confidant—died a three years earlier and when I told her about the divorce less than a year later.

Ophelia was eight when her mother and I had decided to make our dissatisfaction with our marriage official. When had been mentally and emotionally divorced for years, almost since Ophelia was born. Physically, we still acted like husband and wife, mostly out of habit and instinctive need, but even that physical copulation left both of us hollow and used. It was a way to inflict pain on the other person, even more than it was a fulfillment of sexual desire.

Carolyn found another way to satisfy the physical yearnings soon after my grandmother’s death, and her infidelity was the final push the giant boulder of divorce needed to begin its rapid decent into the chasm of our life. We were separated less than a month after Grandma’s funeral, and—with the help of expedient lawyers—were divorced two months later.

Our daughter was, of course, the center of our war. We fought for her through our attorneys, through our actions, through our words. Our feelings were intensified because of our little girl. Carolyn and I fought—threw flaming arrows of accusation, rumor, and innuendo—not because we felt our actions and words were justified, but we fought because we could. Ophelia gave us something of significance to fight over; even though there was nothing substantial about the way we thought the situation should be resolved.

Carolyn wanted Ophelia, wanted to raise her and show her how to be a proper little girl, then a flirtatious teenager, then a sophisticated woman. I wanted those things to. I thought the girl should have been raised by her mother, by the woman who would have competent, reasonable answers to her questions.

But I fought for Ophelia as if I found Carolyn to be an unfit mother. I betrayed myself. I betrayed Carolyn. Most of all, I betrayed my daughter in ways she would never know or understand. Carolyn won. She won because it was the right thing—and because the battle field was slanted in her favor—but the victory was only partial, and only temporary.

After twenty minutes of emergency CPR, McSherry was placed on a stretcher. With his friend and fellow umpire, Jerry Crawford, by his side, McSherry was transported to University Hospital where he was pronounced dead on arrival. A local radio station had reported the umpire had a pulse at some time during the ordeal, but doctors later dismissed the rumor as untrue.

Ophelia continued to watch the men on the field until the paramedics took McSherry away. She sat down then, exhausted and still crying. I sat next to her, wrapped my arms around her, patted her back gently, and rocked. She buried her face in my chest and continued to cry.

She had cried the same way the day I moved out of the house. Carolyn refused to help me break the news to our daughter—actually left the house while I was packing my things, leaving me there to explain the situation to Ophelia alone. She wondered into my bedroom as I was packing a large suitcase with my clothes. She knew something was amiss; had probably known for years. She didn’t seem surprised at the sight of me packing to leave. I told her to sit down on the bed while I continued.

It didn’t take much explanation. Ophelia’s best friend at school was from a divorced family, and so were almost half of her class mates. She didn’t ask any questions about divorce. She already knew what it meant. She didn’t even ask, “why?” The answer to that question was painfully obvious to anyone who knew Carolyn and me. She nodded slowly as I explained where I would be living, and how often we would see each other, and how things really wouldn’t change much. She didn’t cry until I sat down next to her on the bed, hugged her tight, and told her that I loved her.

Ray returned as the players on the field slowly filtered to their respective dugouts. I had forgotten about Ray’s son until I saw Ray walking up the steps toward us. I quickly turned to check on the boy, ashamed of my lack of attention to the charge I had accepted. To my relief, the child was curled up beneath the blanket, his head resting against the seat, his knees drawn up below his chin. He was asleep.

The boy’s father didn’t speak, only shook his head slowly and averted his eyes. I didn’t ask any of the questions burning to be asked. Ray brushed by me, picked up his son, mouthed the words “thank you,” and carried his son into the aisle and up toward the exits.

I was happy for Ray. His son hadn’t watched the events of the day, hadn’t been affected by the somber scene. Ray probably wouldn’t even have to explain anything to the little boy other than his brief absence to assist other doctors in helping a sick man. Ray was fortunate, in that respect. I wondered what questions Ophelia would have, and how I would answer them.

Back at the stadium, the remaining two umpires were resolved to continue the game. “It is what John would want,” they later said. The players, however, were not in agreement. Led by Red’s shortstop, Barry Larkin, the players approached the managers, who in turn relayed their message to the umpires: there will be no game today. Larkin would later state the decision was the only course of action he even considered. Some people close to the team speculate the collapse of McSherry especially effected Larkin because of the history of heart problems in Larkin’s immediate family.

Everyone in the stadium waited to find out what would happen. There had been tragedies in sports before, and usually the game would continue. Many people believed it was the responsibility of the athletes to continue in honor of the sport and the person injured, but no one was really surprised when the stadium announcer told us the game was canceled. Most of the fans took the news in silence, though there were a few scattered “boo’s.” Those who acted rude were drunk mostly; alcohol induced stupidity caused people to do things they wouldn’t do if sober. The fans who did boo were quickly shut up by the fierce looks and spoken comments of others who found their actions offensive.

There were tears in the eyes of many of the people filing out around us. Children with confused faces were led by parents who would offer no real answers. The questions they would ask were unanswerable. There would be no easy way to explain why there was no baseball in Cincinnati that day.

Ophelia and I sat in our seats until most of the other fans had left. She wasn’t crying any more, but the streaks of her tears were still visible on her face. I tried to reassure her with a hug, but I knew my physical presence could only comfort her slightly. We were both shaken, silent, contemplative.

One of the stadium workers asked us politely to leave. He was trying to clean the rows of the trash left behind by the fans and we had stayed much longer than we should have. I extended my hand to my daughter and we walked slowly up the stairs and out the stadium the way we had come in.

The game will be played tomorrow, but the memory of today’s events will still live on. Going to a baseball game is supposed to be a way to escape reality—a place to forget about bills, and family problems, and conflicts at work. The ballpark is a place where old men can relive their youth, and youngsters can dream about their future. It is a hallowed ground where the cares of the outside world are suspended for three hours while grown men run around a field playing a child’s game. But, alas, it is only a game.

Today, the spell of baseball was broken in Cincinnati. Reality broke through the walls of the stadium and crushed the fantasies and dreams of all who had gathered there. Death is not a part of baseball. Not since 1906 has any player died of an on-field accident. Never has anyone simple lost their life because it was their time to go. Death stole the magic from baseball today. It stole some of our innocence as well.

As soon as we were outside of the parking garage beneath the stadium, Ophelia reached for the radio. She quickly turned to the local station which prided itself on being up to date and reliable when it came to news stories. There was a news report about McSherry and the cancellation of the game, but it gave us no new information. The station replayed the radio broadcast just as the Red’s announcers had reported the situation live. It was a stunning reminder of what we had witnessed.

The news was replaced by a local talk show celebrity; a man known for his often rude, risqué treatment of callers. He was quiet that day, obviously shaken by what he had seen at the stadium. He talked in hushed tones, recounting the events he had witnessed. He described the scene at the stadium, the shock of the fans. He gave details about John McSherry’s history as an umpire, and described the day as a tragedy. There was no edge to his voice; none of his characteristic “devil-may-care” attitude.

I had discovered Ophelia listening to his show a few months earlier and commanded her to turn it off. I didn’t want her opinions to be shaped in such a biased fashion and found the subject matter sometimes offensive, though I enjoyed the radio show whenever I had the opportunity to hear it. After yelling at her to shut the radio off, I quickly left her room, shut the door, and began to laugh. Carolyn would have been hysterical to know her daughter was listening to the one thing she hated more about Cincinnati than the Reds: Bill Cunningham’s radio show.

“I get in trouble a lot around here,” Cunningham said. “I do a lot of things to stir people up. I like to have fun when I’m on the air, and usually I do crazy things just to get people’s attention. Today, I’m gonna do something that may get me in trouble. In this day of political correctness, I know what I am about to propose may not sit well with everybody, but I’m not doing this to offend anyone. I’m gonna say a prayer for John McSherry, for his family and friends. Coming from a Catholic background, I feel I should recite the Lord’s Prayer. Whatever your faith, I hope you will join me praying for this man who has fallen today.”

His voice was shaky as he began, “Our Father, who art in Heaven...”

Ophelia joined him.

“Hallowed be thy name...”

I repeated the words with them.

“Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done...”

I noticed the woman in the car next to me was crying and saying the prayer with us.

“On earth as it is in Heaven...”

John McSherry, a twenty-six year veteran, was a gentle giant. His weight was listed in the National League handbook at over 280 pounds, but insiders say he was, in reality, over three hundred. McSherry was one of the few umpires who garnered respect from player and managers alike. Red’s radio announcer, Marty Brenneman, says he can’t remember a time when McSherry was involved in a heated argument. “Some people are confrontational out there,” says Brenneman, “John wasn’t like that. He didn’t go out onto the field looking for an argument.” Red’s outfielder Eric Davis concurred. “John was the kind of guy who would admit when he was wrong. He wouldn’t change the call, but he’d tell you, ‘I missed that one, Eric.’ He was one of the greats.”

Major League umpires travel together from April until October, and unlike ballplayers, they have no home stadium. Umpiring crews travel from city to city, not following any one team or a reliable schedule. Crew members who have been together for an extended time, like McSherry and Crawford, become as close as brothers.

Ophelia went to her room when we got home. I sat on the couch, in front of the TV. I didn’t turn it on, just stared at the black, lifeless screen. After a while, Ophelia joined me on the couch. She snuggled up to me, resting her head on my chest. We didn’t speak; didn’t need to. There was nothing to say.

The light from outside began to fade as the afternoon turned into evening. Ophelia stood and walked to the entertainment center where the TV was housed. She opened the cabinet below the VCR and dug through the stacks of video tapes, pulling one out to examine the label. Satisfied with what she found, Ophelia placed the tape in the VCR, turned on the TV, and joined me back on the couch.

The tape started where I had stopped it the last time I watched it. I knew what was on the tape the moment it began to play. Game Six of the 1975 World Series. The Reds and the Boston Red Sox. I was fourteen when the game was played, and I was asleep by the end of the game. I read about the dramatic events the next day in the paper. Since then I have watched the game at least a hundred times. I knew every movement, every comment by the announcers, yet I couldn’t keep my eyes off one of the best games in one of the greatest playoff in the history of baseball.

Ophelia watched with me, again snuggled against my chest. I ran my fingers through her golden hair as the Reds batted in the top half of the twelfth inning and scored no runs to break the 6-6 tie. They should have been out of the game—should have been the world champions and on their way home to Cincinnati—but the Red Sox had refused to quit, even when the Reds sported a three run lead with six Boston outs to go. There were no commercials on the tape. It cut from the top of the inning immediately to the Red Sox’s turn at bat. I knew what was coming. My body still tingled with excitement.

Boston’s catcher, Carlton Fisk, led off the bottom of the twelfth. The Cincinnati pitcher threw a low pitch—knee high, maybe lower—which Fisk launched into the air with a powerful, golf-like swing. The ball exploded high into the black of the midnight sky, seemed to disappear momentarily, then reappeared headed straight down the left field line dividing fair from foul. Fisk started to run, then stopped to watch the ball. The drive was deep enough to be a home run, but the question remained: would it be fair or foul? Fisk began to dance down the line, waving his arms in the direction he wanted the ball to go, repeatedly mouthing the words, “Fair, fair.” He willed the ball just far enough to the right. It hit the foul pole for a game winning home run. Fisk—still dancing—leapt high into the air, fists clenched and held skyward in victory.

Ophelia giggled beside me. She snaked her arms around me and hugged me tight. “I love that game, Daddy.”

“So do I,” I said. The Reds had lost, but the purity of the game was exciting. There was also comfort in the fact the Reds did win game seven and were the Champions of the World. “So do I.”

Ophelia giggled again, then pushed the button on the remote control to rewind the tape to the beginning of Fisk’s at bat. The crowd rushing onto the field was stopped in their tracks, Fisk ran backward around the bases, the ball jumped off the foul pole, headed back toward home plate, and Fisk reversed his dance and his swing. Then Ophelia played to moment over again. It was what we needed: an escape. We had gone to the game that day wanting only to live in the moment, to experience our favorite sport together. It took a taped game from my youth to transport us from the tragedy we had witnessed that day, and that transportation from reality would only last a short time. But it was an escape we both needed.

Ophelia stopped the tape after watching the home run for the third time. The game from 1975 was replaced by a newscast on the screen. The death of John McSherry was the lead story for the 6:00 news. The newscaster warned they would be showing footage of McSherry’s collapse. It was dramatic and emotional, he said. Viewer discretion was advised.

“Maybe you should turn it,” I said.

Ophelia shook her head, no. We watched the replay together.

“They shouldn’t be showing that,” I said. “It just doesn’t seem right.”

My daughter looked from the TV to me. “I don’t know. Maybe it is good for some people to see what death is really like. Maybe it will make them think about things, you know?”

I wasn’t sure I agreed with her. Wasn’t really sure how I felt. One thing I did know was the day had made me consider my life. It made me “think about things,” in Ophelia’s words. I smiled at my little girl who would soon be my grown daughter. I kissed her on the forehead and hugged her again, marveling at her knowledge and honesty. She knew me well; much better than her mother ever had, maybe even better than I knew myself.

I whispered, “I love you,” in Ophelia’s ear. We sat in silence and watched the rest of the news.

Flags at ballparks throughout the country will fly at half-staff for the rest of the week. A moment of silence will be observed before every game Wednesday and Thursday. Every major league umpire will wear a black arm band for the rest of the season in memory of their fallen friend.

The details of the death of John McSherry are reported here in the context of a fiction story. Any errors in the recounting of that day are due fully to my own faulty memory.

Chapter 1

I don't normally read Cosmopolitan. Honestly. I don't.

A thirty-year-old man, traveling alone, reading Cosmo – with this month's wiry, bronzed entertainment nymph perfectly posed amid the bold-typed headlines, staring out at whoever is sitting across from the reader – well, it's one way to draw raised eyebrows. And I'm not big on attention. The guy running the airport magazine kiosk from his wobbly-stool perch shot me a quizzical look followed by a presumptuous smirk. Part of me wanted to throw a copy of GQ or Men's Health on the counter to reaffirm my masculinity. My more cynical side was tempted to buy a women's hairstyle magazine, and maybe one of those glossy bridal catalogs-disguised-as-magazines. “Which name do you like better,” I would have said. “Susan or Miranda? All my friends tell me I look more like a Susan.”

It would give the guy something to talk about later; a better tale to tell. Maybe there is a magazine-kiosk-dude convention somewhere, and this guy could win some sort of prize. In the end, I ignored his stare, bought a pack of gum with the Cosmopolitan, and went to wait for my flight.

Generally, I make it a policy to stay away from magazines with airbrushed, tanned and toned perfection gracing the cover, whether written for men or for women. Real beauty is never flawless and pretending it is seems counter productive; a standard set too high. Beauty has its place. I'd be a hypocrite to say it has no role. But elevating random genetics and good luck to the level of a virtue that eclipses all other virtues is hazardous. As a songwriter friend once wrote, “God knows the world is cruel place when beauty don't grace your head.”

After taking the “Is He Marriage Material?” quiz on page seventy-seven (and validating the opinion of my last girlfriend: no, I’m not) I was reminded why I didn’t consider such a magazine worthy of the paper it was printed on. It was a news story the night before had peaked my interest in this issue of Cosmo, though.

Packing my bags with the 11 o’clock news as a sort-of-soundtrack, I saw a story that hit close to home: an interview with an actress, who I had gone to high school with, detailing how she had decided to move back to the Midwest to give her son a slower lifestyle than they were living while splitting time between Los Angeles and New York. The key to a slower, happier life, she said, was to find somewhere in fly-over-country to live and raise her child. She told the interviewer how she was looking forward to her son’s first day of school in his new surroundings, free, she hoped, from the drugs and violence and pressure found “even in the private schools in California.” During the interview, she mentioned an article in the issue of Cosmo I held in my hand. An article that ultimately provided little in the way of pertinent information, while being chocked full of useless tid-bits about some hunky star or another the actress had worked with. (Liam Niesson, apparently, preferred his espresso prepared in a stove-top, Italian-style maker, as opposed to more modern methods.)

The story hit close to home for three reasons: First, the actress being interviewed was Lila Broussard, a high-school classmate of mine. Second, that “slower, happier” mid-west town she talked of moving back to was my home town of Hamilton, Ohio. Finally, Lila’s son, Adrian, would be a student in the school where I taught; a student in my classroom.

The trip I was taking to South Carolina was supposed to be a “work free” trip. I had promised myself there would be no thoughts of the upcoming school year, no thoughts of the students and their parents, and no concern over lesson plans or room decoration. But the mention of the magazine article had intrigued me enough to break that promise to myself. A little work wouldn’t hurt, I figured. A “work free” trip would prove to be little more than an idle hope.

***

The twin-engine prop plane made a smooth landing after a quiet flight; the Sunday morning, South Carolina air was void of turbulence. The locals call the flight from Charleston the PJE – Puddle Jumper Express – and it was the last leg of my day’s journey from Cincinnati to Charleston, then on to the small, municipal airport at North Myrtle Beach.

After the plane rolled to a stop, I stood and stretched along with the four other passengers, ducking to exit the doorway. The bright, early-August sun darkened my self-tinting glasses, and the heat and humidity of a Carolina coastal summer morning welcomed me. Descending the stairs to the oven hot concrete, I looked toward the tall glass walls of the terminal area. The glass was a mirror of the world behind me, obscuring the terminal area excepting the occasional ghost-like figure moving behind the reflected scene. I caught my reflection and wondered at the pooch of “desk work fat” that rested above my belt. It was the first summer that I hadn't worked off the extra pounds. I made a mental not to address it later.

A gust of cool, dry air blasted past me as I stepped through the sliding doors and inside the airport building. My glasses adjusted to the darker, cooler atmosphere. A thin film of condensation clouded my vision. I removed my glasses and wiped them clean.

“What’s with the glasses, Grant?” said a familiar voice, the blurry form of its owner returning to sharp focus when my glasses were back in place. “I thought you gave those things up years ago.”

Cory Evans was sitting perched atop a stool at the coffee counter not far from the door. Typical of most Sunday mornings, Cory’s beard was gray, patchy stubble, and his hair an unkempt shock of white straw. Cory had always believed that a day of rest was designed to allow man to rest and not “an excuse to get all dressed up and in a hurry to impress those sitting in the next pew with your fancy clothes and shoes.”

“I’ve been having trouble with the contacts,” I said, walking to join Cory at the counter. “I’ve had to wear the glasses again for a couple months now.”

“You hated those things, working at the golf course and having them fall off your face ‘cause of the sweat. If I remember right, you tossed a pair of glasses into the big pond, right out in the middle by the fountain aerator. I think you might say you were a little frustrated.”

We both cherished that summer—now a dozen years in the past. For me, it was an adventure. For Cory, it was a summer of healing.

After graduating from high school in Ohio—the summer before I would journey off to Indiana for college—I decided to fulfill a boy-hood dream: to live on the beach. With no plan, and no money, I set off for the coast, and landed in North Myrtle. Initially, I had been clinging to the delusion that I could find a cheap place to live and work a few side jobs just to make ends meet. The rest of my time would be spent enjoying the sun, the sand, the ocean.

The reality turned out to be that there are no cheap places to live on the beach, and the cost of living in a beach community surprised me. Upon arrival, I learned it would be impossible to do much living if I didn’t get a good job, and work as often as possible. So, with the exceptions of Friday afternoons and Sundays, I worked as often and as long as the management of the Surf Golf and Beach Club would allow.

I did the kinds of work an inexperienced young man would be allowed to do on a lush, private golf course. Mostly, I was assigned to the digging or laying sod in “non-course” areas and weeding the flowerbeds around the clubhouse. I was not allowed near a green or tee-box without thorough supervision.

Working long days through the hottest summer on record left me exhausted at the end of every day, having turned what seemed like gallons of water into sweat that clung to my body in the profuse humidity. I would walk the mile to the one-room apartment I shared with a college student who also worked at the golf course and collapse face-first on the uncomfortable, still-damp bed beneath the window air conditioner that drowned out the ocean just a block away. Some days, I ended up sleeping from the time I got home until the alarm went off at 5:15 the next morning. But most nights, I was able to drag myself to the shower, clean up enough to not scare off tourists, and make it down to the water’s edge to enjoy the last hour of daylight on the nearly deserted beach.

It was the greatest summer of my life.

That summer, I met Cory, who became my excuse to return to North Myrtle annually. Cory was a retired North Myrtle cop who worked at the Golf Club a few hours a day to kill time and make some extra money. We became friends almost instantly.

Cory was right about my unusual disposal of a pair of glasses, though he was in error thinking it had been the pond at the 18^th hole where I had launched the spectacles to a murky grave. Trying to mow a steep embankment in the hot afternoon sun, struggling to keep my footing while being hassled by the glasses constantly slipping down my nose and startled by a snake slithering right between my feet, I ripped the glasses from my face and with every ounce of strength I could muster, tossed them into a collection pond filled with water lilies and snapping turtles.

The glasses disappeared into the water, reminding me of the first day I had been assigned to mow that bank. I watched a mother duck leading her young ducklings in a slow swim across the water, only to see one of the little ones suddenly disappear, just as my glasses did. The duckling had been snatched from below by one of the basketball-sized snappers in the pond. It was a phenomenon that would be repeated until the supply of ducklings had been exhausted, and the mother duck was left to make the slow paddle across the pond alone.

Cory woke us from our memories. “They finally caught the big momma,” he said. A waitress approached and I pointed to Cory’s coffee cup in reply. She poured a cup for me, and moved on down the line.

“Was Big Mamma the turtle Sid claimed was the size of a first grader?” I asked. The powdered creamer barely changed the color of the coffee, and I wasn’t anticipating the flavor would be any better than the aesthetic appearance.

“Sid’s crazy in a lot of ways, but he wasn’t far off in describing that monster.” Cory sipped from his cup. “They didn’t exactly catch her. A golfer, searching for a ball he had miss-hit, found her belly up on the edge of the pond couple weeks ago. Newspaper came out, along with some bio-EPA types. Said it was the chemicals we use on the course that killed her.”

“And it was as big as Sid claimed?”

Cory snorted in reply. “Almost. Bigger than I imagined. Thing must have been older than me. And our chemicals killed it? Hogwash. Monster died ‘cause it was old.”

I tried the coffee, which was even worse to drink than to look at.

“How have you been?” I asked, wondering if I would get a straight answer, or if I would have to dig for information about Cory’s health.

“Feeling better,” he replied. “Doc says I’m supposed to give up the cigarettes and the coffee, though I’ve not figured which I’d rather do without, so I’m still enjoying both.”

Cigarettes and coffee. Cory never went more than an hour without one or the other, and usually both. “Are you at least trying to cut back?”

“Trying, but it’s hard. I’ve tried to drink decaf, but it’s no good. Tasteless brown water. Kinda pointless, to me anyway. And those nicotine patches didn’t do much for me besides making my skin break out.”

We sat in silence; awkward because there was rarely silence between Cory and I. But I knew his health condition was worse than he would admit. Heart problems and a battle with pneumonia had kept him sidelined for most of the spring and part of the summer. Only in the preceding few weeks had he been able to return to the golf course.

Well, hell, you didn’t come here to see the inside of this airport or to talk about my addictions. What say we go hit the lunch buffet at the Captain’s Plank?”

“All the seafood you can eat and sweet iced tea to wash it down? Sounds like a plan.”

I dropped a few dollars on the counter, having barely touched the coffee, and followed Cory out to begin my vacation.

***

The Grand Strand area isn’t somewhere you go to get away from crowds, but if you know where to go, you can avoid them. Walking north along the beach, beyond North Myrtle and away from the large beach-front hotels, there is an area much less densely populated, where the ultra-wide beach gives way to sand dunes and tall beach grasses. By positioning a blanket just right among the mini-dunes, you can relax peacefully, relatively isolated from others, except the occasional long-distance jogger or middle-aged man in a loud-flowered shirt and black-socks-with-sandles, using a metal detector to find lost treasure.

By Wednesday, I had come to look forward to one particular jogger. She was a sun-streaked brunette, small in stature, and she wore a University of Kansas tank top. Her tan betrayed a more-than-casual interest in outdoor activities. She ran by me heading north every morning, not long after I had found my “spot” to read in, and would pass again thirty minutes later, headed back to the South. The second day she ran by me, we exchanged a quick wave hello, adding the actual words, “Hi” and “How are ya?” on the third day.

On the forth day of my vacation, instead of running on by on her way back south, the jogger slowed down and stopped to talk.

“So is this your house,” she asked, pointing behind me, “or are you just one of those people who hates the ‘stacked like wood’ atmosphere of the main part of the beach?” I knew she had been running for several miles, but she was barely breathing heavy.

“I’m an anti-crowd beachcomber,” I said. “I’m not big on sharing my blanket with greased up people all wedged in together. Plus, there are too many kids down there this time of day to get any real reading done. Last, but not least, that house is worth way more than I could ever afford.”The house on the property behind me was built up on concrete and brick stilts, and was probably worth at least ten times more than my annual salary. The “yard” of the house was the beach and dune area where I was sitting.

“Unemployed?” she asked with a smile.

“Teacher,” I replied.

“I’m Kathy,” the jogger said, extending her hand. “And I already knew that wasn’t your house.”

“Oh, really?”

“Well, I had a pretty good idea. Last week, when I was jogging by, there were about twenty guys up on that balcony. They whistled and hollered as I ran by. The language they used to try to convince me to join their little get together wasn’t very polite, or convincing. None of them struck me as a ‘sit on the beach and read for four straight days’ kind of guy.”

I offered her a water from the small cooler I had with me. She accepted, and offered a “I can't stay long” in return.

“So, would a ‘sit and read’ kind of guy, who was self-consciously minding his manners, be the kind of guy you’d consider having dinner with?” I asked.

Kathy smiled at me. “I don’t even know your name.”

“Grant. Grant Williams.”

Kathy adjusted the earphones of her radio, and put them back on her head. “How about we start with coffee, Grant Williams? Eight-thirty, at the café on Third Street?”

I agreed and Kathy the Kansas University jogger continued back south, down the beach.

***

“A date?” Cory asked. “Now that’s something new.”

“I wouldn’t call it ‘new’. Different, maybe, but not new. And, I'm not even sure I would call it a date.” I had called Cory from my hotel room, begging out of our planned dinner for the night. The normal itinerary for my vacation was to spend the day reading, sunning, napping, and generally resting, followed by an evening dinner with Cory where I would buy him an extra beer or two. The Coors Light would provide extra incentive for Cory to tell (and retell) some of the stories which I had come to cherish. He told stories about growing up in a beach community, working on the police force, and even a few about his time spent working at the golf course. Each story was tinged with his unique sense of humor and somewhat exaggerated. I took careful mental notes of the details of the stories, especially the words he used when imitating other characters. Cory’s stories had unintentionally – and unknown to him – become the basis for a novel.

“Well, I guess one night without you buying me dinner would be alright,” he said. “As long as you give me a full report tomorrow.”

***

The coffee shop was quiet, with just three or four other patrons enjoying the acoustic guitar playing on the sound system. Kathy the jogger had already taken a seat in a booth near the back, where I joined her after buying my coffee and a couple of cookies. She sat with her back to the wall, which is where I would normally sit so I could observe all of the action in the coffee shop. Since Kathy had beat me to the seat, I was forced to sit with my back to everyone else. As I sat down, I realized for the first time how much younger this girl was than me.

“You shaved,” Kathy observed.

When we had met earlier in the day, I had been sporting a three-day beard. “I figured it was proper to clean up a little.”

“I hope you don’t mind the coffee shop meeting,” she said. “I work here, and it’s easier to just meet up here than try to get home and get changed for dinner.”

“This is fine,” I said. “You’re from North Myrtle?”

“Just for this summer, I am. I thought it would be fun to live out here before going back to start law school.”

Fresh out of under-grad and on her way to law school made her seven years younger than me. I was starting to feel old.

“Back to Kansas?” I asked.

Kathy grinned. “Books weren’t the only things you were reading on the beach, huh?”

We both laughed. I told her about my summer in North Myrtle eleven years earlier, spent much like hers, working more than I thought I would, but enjoying it just the same.

After telling me about the anxiety associated with starting law school, she asked me what level I taught at.

“I teach elementary school,” I replied.

Kathy almost choked as she laughed at the same time she was taking a drink of her coffee.

“Didn’t you say you hated kids on the beach?”

“I think I said I didn’t want to be around the kids on the beach when I was trying to read,” I replied. “Just wait until you are a lawyer. You’ll want to vacation as far away from judges and other lawyers as you possibly can.”

“You’re right, of course,” she said. “Do you like teaching?”

I should have said yes immediately. I was rarely unhappy when the students were actually learning. I knew the joy of seeing a student “get it”, the way a furrowed brow would release and a smile would overtake an anxious face. I knew the pleasure of helping an underachieving student succeed, and a bright student reach for even higher knowledge. And yet I could only answer after pausing; continuing only with reservation.

“I love teaching,” I said, “when I get to actually teach.”

I went on to explain how little of being a teacher is actually teaching. I told her how most of my time was spent preparing for and reacting to standardized tests that were given at the wrong time of the year to be of any value, and how regardless of what level students are at when they come to me, I’m expected to help them learn at a fifth-grade level, even the ones who can only read and do math at a second-grade level. I explained the drag on time, energy, and resources created by the bureaucracy and politics of the educational system, and how frustrating it was to feel like so little of the effort I put into the job actually resulted in any kind of positive influence in a student’s life.

“You have so many parents that don’t care if their child does well,” I told her, “as long as we keep them out of their hair during the day. You have other parents who are so concerned with their own child’s school experience that they make demands and foster expectations that are to the detriment of the other students. You have students who are exposed to drugs, and guns, and sexual situations at a younger and younger age, and they become more crass, more violent, and more vulgar. And then, you have some fellow teachers, comfortable with the status quo, who don’t want you to succeed and who will even actively work to make sure you don’t.”

“Do you ever feel it is worth it?” Kathy asked.

“Yeah. There are still occasions where I think I’ve helped a student. But they are so few and far between, I wonder, sometimes, if those few victories are worth the fight.”

At some point I found myself reaching across the table, forgetting my earlier reservations about Kathy's age. My hand found hers, and – much to my surprise – she didn't pull away.

We continued to talk until the shop closed at midnight. Kathy told me all about her family back in Kansas, and her dream of working in the rape and sexual battery division of a big-city prosecutor’s office. I figured there was a reason behind her desire to spend her career working to put male sexual offenders behind bars, but that topic seemed too intimate for a “first coffee” night. I was suddenly self-conscious about holding her hand, and as she told me more about the kind of work she hoped to do, I attempted to release her hand, but she wouldn't let me. I could see in her eyes that she appreciated the gesture, but had decided to hold on.

When we left the café, I walked Kathy back to her apartment a few blocks away, she linked her arm through mine as we walked. The one-room apartment reminded me of the one I had rented eleven years earlier, with a small porch dominated by a whining window air conditioner. We stood in awkward silence for a moment, not really sure how to end the non-date.

Then, against my better judgment, I leaned down to gently kiss her. Almost immediately, I regretted the action.

“I feel I should apologize,” I said, knowing that no matter her reaction, the sentence sounded lame.

“It's ok,” she said with a smile and a sparkle of mischief in her brown eyes. “You aren't that bad a kisser.”

We both laughed. She reached up on her tiptoes to initiate a kiss of her own.

“Is it the age thing?” she asked. “Because, I'm not too worried about the difference.”

“That's part of it,” I replied, though admittedly my reservations about her age seemed to melt away pretty easily. “I also think a kiss should mean something. It isn't just a casual act. And, unfortunately, in this case, it doesn't seem like there is much chance of it meaning much in the long term.”

Kathy smiled. “Don't apologize. You never know what may or may not be meaningful.”

Kathy and I exchanged e-mail addresses, and said our goodbyes. I walked back to my hotel, strolling along the moon-lit beach, trying not to think about returning to work the next week, and after the night I'd had, thinking about things other than work shouldn't have been too difficult.

Yet, in an odd way, the night reminded me of the coming year, precisely because of how it had progressed.

Ever since I had learned that Lila's son would be in my class, it had reawakened parts of my own childhood I had forgotten about.

Lila and I had been classmates beginning in second grade. For the next five years we lived a similar life. We were both from single-parent families, with mothers who worked hard to keep us above the poverty line, flirting with middle-class affluence through the shunning of their own interests in favor of those of their children. Lila and I were school friends, playing four-square or kickball during recess and sharing typical grade-school experiences with a common group of friends.

By middle-school we didn't see each other as often, sometimes only having one or two classes together at any given time. She wasn't pretty then, certainly not one of those girls of whom people later say, “I always knew she'd be a star.” She was too tall, and her coordination never quite caught up to her height. She moved awkwardly, and – in hindsight – was self-conscious about it.

The pixie-cute girls were the ones the boys talked about most, pretending to ignore the growing attraction while working to impress the girls at the same time. The features that would eventually be alluring made Lila gawky and fragile. She had glasses and braces, and one eye was green while the other was brown. And while most of the other kids found the mismatched eyes unnerving, I always found it intriguing.

In eighth grade, Lila and I were in two classes together: math and orchestra. It was in orchestra where we talked most. I was the last chair of the second violins. Practice was something that bored me, and I allowed playing baseball with the other kids in the neighborhood and watching TV to be my after-school activity of choice. Lila chose to practice, and worked her way up to the second chair of the first violins. The conductor would often call on Lila to play parts for the rest of us to hear “the way it is supposed to sound.”

We talked immediately before class, as we stacked our books and folders on the table and unpacked our instruments, tightened our bows, and prepared to play. Lila would offer me the use of her rosin, because mine was inevitably missing or cracked into small pieces.

We didn't talk about anything of substance. Neither of us had a close friend in the orchestra. It was mostly filled with students a year older or a year younger than Lila and I. She would complain about a teacher or an assignment, and I would offer my own assessment of the situation which would make her laugh. When Lila would laugh at my jokes, I found her even more intriguing.

Near the end of the school year, our orchestra group took a field trip to see the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. Lila and I sat together on the bus, and again during the concert. When the lights were lowered and the music began to fill the auditorium, Lila shifted in her seat so that our shoulders were touching. After the second movement, she crossed her legs so that her foot lightly brushed against my leg.

At the intermission, we separated; Lila talking to a group of students from another middle school while I talked to our orchestra instructor. I returned to my seat first and looked around. Lila was still several rows away talking to another girl. When the other students began to return, the seat next to me was filled not by Lila, but by a ninth-grade boy who was not only our best cellist, but also the center for the junior-varsity football team. I was deflated by Lila's absence. I sat rigid in my seat, staring forward as the lights began to dim.

Just as my hope was dimming with the lights, Lila sidled down the narrow row, stood in front of the cellist and said, “Ryan, I think you accidentally sat in my seat.” As Ryan moved back down the row, Lila smiled at me and sat down. By the time the music resumed, Lila's hand was gripping the edge of her seat only inches from my own. Tentatively, I reached out my little finger, greeted with the electricity of skin brushing skin. To my surprise, Lila didn't pull her hand away from the touch. Soon we were holding hands surreptitiously. We stayed that way until the lights came up and we released our grip to join in the applause.

The ride back to Hamilton was strange. Lila and I sat silently for most of the ride, our hands again joined beneath a jacket draped across our laps. What had once been easy, humor-laced conversation was now awkward silence. I was enjoying the idea of holding Lila's hand while at the same time experiencing a mouth as dry as unbuttered toast.

Back at school, Lila and I parted ways, she to her mother's waiting car, me to wait for the number 18 bus. Before we got off the bus, she told me she was spending the weekend at her grandmother's house in central Ohio. “I'll be home by Sunday afternoon, though,” she said.

I spent Friday night longing for Sunday. It was painful to wait. I felt I wanted to hear her voice, to make her laugh, to reaffirm the friendship while acknowledging the new, added dimension of an obvious physical attraction. But it was all so new. My emotions were volatile. As Saturday wore on, the rush of that initial physical touch some how morphed into a building insecurity. What was she thinking? What was I thinking? What would our classmates think? Why should I care what other people thought? But I did.

Sunday came finally, and suddenly it seemed it had come too soon. I spent the afternoon pretending I was busy while debating myself whether or not to call her. Sitting in my room, I began to doubt that calling her was a good idea. To do so could jeopardize the friendship, I figured, because I had no idea what I would say if she actually answered the phone. The reason for calling was the very thing I had no experience talking about. Even worse, not calling would send a signal that I lacked interest, which was no accurate. As I tried to convince myself one way or the other, it was the one time I remember wishing for a sibling with whom I could discuss such matters.

By the time the sun was setting, I convinced myself that calling her was the only option. I would see her the next day. I would ask to use her rosin. I would turn to her to confirm the answer on a math problem. Three times I picked up the phone, three times I failed to finish dialing the number.

The next day, Lila hardly acknowledged me. Seeing that she was avoiding me kept me from taking the initiative to speak to her. In math class, she walked to the other side of the room to work with a different group of students. In orchestra, she was unpacked and seated at her chair by the time I came into the room. I attempted to rosin my bow with the ragged piece in my violin case, then went to sit two rows behind her. I couldn't concentrate on the music, transforming my barely adequate playing to something even less like music. By the third time through the piece we were practicing, I laid my bow on the music stand and just listened.

Lila didn't speak to me for two weeks. Finally, the last week of school, we were unpacking our instruments at the same time. I was still attempting to apply and adequate amount of rosin to my bow. Lila laughed at me and handed me hers. Hearing her laugh wiped away the silence of the previous two weeks. When I returned it to her, I thanked her.

“Don't mention it,” she said. I was pretty sure her words were filled with more than one meaning.

That summer, Lila transformed. Her body began to catch up with itself, evening out and beginning to show indications of who she would become. We saw each other a few times that summer during a summer enrichment program at the local branch of a state university. The easy friendship was replaced with a slightly more tentative version, but we were speaking again. But her world was expanding. She was invited more and more into the world of the more popular students: parties and teenage dramas I was close enough to know about, but too common to be a part of. Even as we were reestablishing a basic appreciation for each other, our spheres of influence were drifting further apart. One minute I was contemplating the amazing fact that perhaps I hadn't completely lost some slim hope of rectifying my mistake, the next I was hearing that Lila had gone to a movie with Joe Blackburn and allowed him to feel up under her shirt during a darkened-theater make out session.

I quit orchestra after the ninth-grade year, respecting the music enough to not continue if I wasn't going to practice in a way to do honor to the art. We had only a few classes together once we moved to the High School building. We still spoke when we saw each other, but I was quickly just a spectator in Lila's rapidly developing life.

***

The rest of the week went by quickly, as every good vacation week does. I was successful – for the most part – in keeping my mind off of the “real world” back home. Cory had arranged for me to play golf at the Surf Club on Thursday and Friday, free of charge. I found it was difficult to play golf on a course you had helped to maintain. I did not want to make divots in the finely manicured grass, which meant that I wasn’t hitting the ball the way I should. My score reflected my reluctance to swing naturally.

By Friday night, I was tanned, well-read, and well fed. Exactly the vacation I had been looking for. I left Cory’s house around eight o’clock to return to my hotel room, planning to go to bed early in anticipation of my flight home the next day. I dozed off to the glow of Sports Center (the Reds were continuing their post All-Star Game fade) in an otherwise dark room.

I awoke to a rumbling, growing growl which seemed to say: “Broussard.”

In that moment of post-sleep confusion, I struggled to identify the noise I heard. The TV was still on and I used the remote to quiet the set. When the sky outside my hotel room lit up in a strobe-like flash, my mind finally cleared enough to realize that what I had heard wasn’t some one shouting the name “Broussard” but was, instead, the rolling thunder of an approaching storm.

As the thunder intensified outside my window, that name continued to rattle around inside my head, as it had since I read it on the memo a week earlier. “Grant,” the memo said, “Adrian Broussard will be attending Adams Elementary next year, and I have assigned him to your class. Let me know if this presents any problems.” It was signed by the building principal of Adams, Margaret Luke. Adams had been the school I attended as a child, and the school where I had taught for seven years since graduating from college.

Adrian Broussard. The son of the girl who had been my biggest crush.

Trying to put Adrian out of my mind for one more day, I rolled over in bed, facing away from the window and the light display outside. I wasn’t really tired after spending a day reading on the beach, catching the last of the summer sun, watching people walk by, but I closed my eyes tightly anyway, trying to force myself to sleep. I wanted to sleep, to put the dreams of the past – and the thoughts of the immediate future of the upcoming school year – behind me, but the thunder rolling along the beach continued to overcome the steady hum of my room’s noisy air conditioner.

Instead of sleep, I thought about Lila.

In high school, Lila Simmons became the girl every guy wanted to date. The problem was – after her brief dalliance with Joe Blackburn – she never dated anyone from school, choosing college students from Miami University or even settling for the occasional high school dropout. She quickly became the kind of girl who was more at home in the bigger world outside our high school community. More and more she was in our world, without being a part of our world. Her unavailability made her even more desirable.

Lila’s social life was the hot topic for rumor mills among the groups of adolescent boys who gathered, almost instinctively, to discuss the most resplendent girl in school. Nothing was off limits when it came to talking about Lila. The boys found solace in our mutual disgust over who ever she happened to be dating, and the girls took comfort in finding ways to look down at her. “Serves her right,” we would say when we found out yet another college boy had achieved his short-term goals and moved on to other, “more mature” offerings. We didn’t exactly revel in her pain, but we looked at her with a level of self-righteousness.

But the hatred and grumbling were only superficial. None of us, had we been honest, felt “worthy” of Lila’s attention. We still voted her onto the homecoming court, supported her as Senior Class President, elected her prom queen, and reaffirmed that she was “Most Likely to be A Star” in the Senior section of the yearbook. It would have been easy to dismiss her as just another pretty face, but she excelled on every level. Hardly a week passed when her picture did not appear in the local paper, accompanied by a story detailing some honor bestowed upon Miss Simmons by her classmates or some civic organization. She was the queen of any number of local fairs and festivals, but her influence extended into more academic and philanthropic areas as well. She excelled in science fairs and academic quizzes, while volunteering time at the local hospital and even working on a building site with Habitat for Humanity.

Lila obtained an air of perfection. She was an icon to the students, and to the city itself. Hamilton had endured a period of decline; jobs and people were leaving by the thousands and the future was uncertain. People were looking for something to pin their hopes to, someone who could point to brighter days that surely lay ahead. In some other town, a politician or religious leader or business mogul might be that shinning beacon to energize the community, but in Hamilton that focal point was a beautiful, smart, engaging teen-age girl. By the time she graduated high school, she was among the most beloved people in the whole city.

But while she was talented and brilliant in many ways, the same could not be said about her when it came to relationships.

***

I dozed off, slipping back into a shallow sleep until the thunder brought me back from my dreamless slumber. I turned in my bed as the violent battle continued outside. I rolled over in bed again, trying to untangle the sheets entwining my legs. Again awake, I sat up on the edge of the bed and stretched my legs. I'm normally a light sleeper, and even more so when I'm in an unfamiliar place. I pulled back the heavy curtains covering the glass door to the balcony and sat in an arm chair to watch the lightening illuminate the ocean.

The wind picked up, blowing streams of fat raindrops against the glass of the sliding door that led to the balcony and its ocean view. As the lightening flashed I noticed the books stacked next to the bed, and considered using my insomnia for something more productive than reliving my adolescence. Instead, I continued to indulge the thoughts of high school, and the one girl who had been the center of attention.

At graduation, rumors of Lila’s pregnancy began to circulate, fueled by an incident the morning before at graduation practice. Just as Lila walked up to the podium to pretend to address the class with her speech, she visibly wobbled and had to be steadied by one of the faculty members up on the stage. They helped her sit down, but only moments later she ran from the stage, and according to one witness, barely made it into the girl’s restroom before throwing up.

The pregnancy rumor shocked everyone who heard it. Her older male companion at the time was an even bigger loser – in our most humble estimation – than the other guys Lila had been known to associate with.

His name was Leon Broussard, and he would have graduated two years before our class, had he taken the initiative to actually finish high school. Leon was the stereotypical drop out candidate: he neglected his work, talked back to teachers and staff, fought with other students more often than he turned in homework, and made it known that he didn’t care about any thing, or any one.

By the time he was seventeen, Leon had been arrested, held in a juvenile corrections facility, beaten so badly he was taken to the hospital, and stabbed by the jealous husband of a woman Leon had taken a liking to. When he dropped out of school during his senior year, Leon was kicked out of his house and lived in a stolen car for a few months until he found other arrangements (paid for by the wife of the man who had stabbed him, on the order of a civil judge and jury). Teachers began using Leon as an example of what would happen if you didn’t take school seriously. But at some point, he had captivated Lila Simmons, and the lectures that had at one time ended with the phrase, “You could end up like Leon Broussard,” no longer had the same impact. Sure, he had dropped out of high school and had several run-ins with both death and the law, but he had bounced back with a job working at his uncle’s auto body shop. He had a lot of money (at least to those of us working part-time for minimum wage at the local grocery store), he had his own parent-free apartment over the garage where he worked, and – more importantly – he had Lila.

In the months leading up to our graduation, Leon was involved in several questionable events. First, he began driving – and eventually wrecked – an expensive sports car which would have strained his auto-mechanic’s budget. Added to the new car, he began taking Lila to some of the more refined restaurants in town almost every night. To go along with the more posh surroundings he was finding himself in, Leon drastically upgraded his wardrobe, and even began to wear jewelry designed to sparkle in the light. The final unexplainable purchase was a condominium he secured in a new development overlooking a golf course just outside of town. The condos sold for a minimum of $125,000, but the realty agent who had sold Leon the house – the mother of one of my classmates – said that Leon had requested some modifications which increased the price even higher. She also said that he had paid with cash.

Leon was making some very non-mechanic wages somewhere, and he was living the high life.

The source of Leon’s extra income was a mystery, but it was obvious he wasn’t making hundreds of thousands of dollars fixing cars in a mid-sized mid-western town, a fact which became even more apparent when he quit the garage job altogether. Common opinion around town – and in the hallways of Hamilton High School – put the odds in favor of some illegal activity: gambling, money laundering, drug trafficking, or some other organized crime. For several years the county prosecutor tried to pin a few petty charges on Leon, but he was never convicted.

The romance between Lila and Leon started over the Christmas break of my senior year, about the time he started driving the new car. By Spring Break, things really heated up. He bought Lila a large diamond ring, which he presented to her during a dinner in a revolving restaurant overlooking Cincinnati and the Ohio River.

The day school resumed, we were shocked at the brazen way Lila bragged about spending the entire break at Leon’s condo while her parents were out of town. She showed off the ring he had given her, prominent there on her left hand. Leon's condo became her home, and by the time the graduation rumors began to circulate, we were all more disappointed than surprised. By the time Lila began to show her pregnancy that summer, no one was even affected by the news.

The lightening and thunder outside my hotel room was subsiding, fading as the storm moved north, up the beach. I got up to get a drink of water, and returned to bed. I was suddenly tired, and three hours after turning off the TV, I finally drifted into a deep sleep.

***

I woke to a cloudy sky the next morning, ate breakfast, and finished packing my bags for my return trip to Hamilton. I had one last stop to make before leaving, and I was checked out and on my way there by ten o’clock.

The sun had conquered the early morning clouds and renewed its seemingly endless assault on the East coast by the time I turned my rented car down the access road snaking between the fourteenth and fifteenth holes of the Surf Golf and Beach Club. The cool air which had followed the storm the night before was long gone, replaced by the hot and humid weather typical of summer in Horry County, South Carolina. I parked next to the maintenance building and walked toward the open garage door.

It was hot there, even in the shade of the tall trees that served to hide the maintenance building from view of the golfers dotting the fairway of the fourteenth hole. The heat index – a “reverse wind chill factor” invented to give the weathermen in warmer climates something to talk about – would reach well over one-hundred by noon, but that wouldn’t slow down the men and women in white outfits who ambled along, chasing after their small, round, white prey.

It was time to say goodbye to Cory, and to the other employees of the golf club. I found him in his typical mid-morning position: sitting in a chair at the card table in the break-room area, one hand on his hip, and the other hand lying across his leg with a lit cigarette between his index finger and thumb. He head was bowed, staring down at the cigarette he twisted between his fingers. That pose, which Cory assumed daily, always reminded me of what the model for Rodin’s The Thinker must have looked like when the sculptor told him he could take a break.

Cory glanced up when I walked in. Seeing me he said, “So, this is it for another year, huh?”

“Afraid so,” I replied. “No one tracked me down on the beach and offered me a job doing basically nothing for twice as much as I make now, so I guess I’ll have to go back to teaching. Of course, if you wanted to take me up on my offer and come visit me in Ohio, you could see me again before next summer.”

Cory laughed his reply, “You’ve got to be kidding. Ohio’s too cold for these old bones.” He paused to take a drag of his cigarette then said, “You really should come down for Christmas this year. Unless of course you are planning to visit Kansas for Christmas.”

“I don’t think Kansas is going to be an option,” I replied. I knew I shouldn’t have told him anything about my coffee date with Kathy. He was blowing it way out of proportion.

“I hear in Kansas City, they got’s some purty lil’ women there,” he laughed.

“Stop misquoting blues lyrics,” I said. “I’m not going to be going to Kansas City.”

“Well, my offer stands. You don’t have any family left up in the cold North, and Jade and I would be happy to share the holidays with you.” At the mention of his daughter, Cory gave me a sly look and a watched for my reaction. I tried not to give him one, but the smile on his face told me my reactions had betrayed me yet again.

“Haven’t you tired of trying to fix us up yet? I asked.

“No, not really. And you oughta know by now that I won’t give up until one of you gets married.” He took another drag from his Marlboro. “When that happens, I might give on up. But only if I like who you choose to hitch up to.”

We both laughed at the comment. It was good to see Cory laugh. There had been times in our friendship when he did not – could not – laugh. After a bitter divorce, followed by a battle with his son over some money in a trust fund and that son’s subsequent suicide, Cory had little to laugh about. In the proceeding months, Cory’s health had deteriorated significantly, and even now I suspected he was putting on a braver front than was warranted.

We were silent for a few minutes. Cory remained in his chair, staring at the smoke rising from the smoldering cigarette in his hand, while I stood awkwardly next to the break table, trying to think of some clever way to say goodbye.

“Take care of yourself, Cory.” It was the best thing I could come up with.

“You do the same,” he replied, dropping the cigarette to the concrete floor and grinding it out with his foot. “And don’t let those brats get under your skin this year.”

His comment was a joke, but as with all good jokes, there was a kernel of truth. Cory knew that while I genuinely loved the kids I taught, it was becoming harder with each passing year to put on the brave face and charge into the daily battle.

“It promises to be an interesting year,” I told him.

We said our goodbyes, and as I waved to Cory who was standing in the doorway of the maintenance building as I pulled away, I thought it would be another year before I would see him again, and I suddenly caught myself wondering if he would still be there the next time I came back.

Maybe you’d better plan to come back here sooner than next summer, I told myself. It was something to think about.

***

Seated aboard the plane, watching South Carolina disappear beneath me, I noticed the woman next to me reading the same issue of Cosmopolitan I had picked up on my initial flight. She was reading the story about Lila, and I asked her what she thought.

“She can't be real,” was her response. “Its all too good to be true. Beauty and brains and a desire to 'rekindle family values' or whatever. Seems like a put on. Like its all just for show.”

I shrugged at the though. “Maybe it is all for show. At least the part about moving back to Ohio for family values and clean air. The air in Hamilton isn't that clean.”

“I wonder if all of it isn't just a story,” the woman said, closing the magazine and staring at Lila looking out at her from the cover. “Like maybe it wasn't as hard of a life as she makes it out sometimes, with having a kid and all of that.”

“That part wasn't easy,” I told her. “And Lila didn't make it up.”

“You know her?”

I thought about that. “I knew her. A long time ago. We were even friends, kind of.”

The woman looked as if she wasn't quite sure whether or not to believe this stranger who claimed some special knowledge about a famous celebrity. “So she's legitimate?”

“What she says about her decision to move back to Ohio,” I said, “may or may not be true. I have no way of judging that. But I do know that most of what is written about her life in Hamilton is pretty accurate, save a minor detail or two.”

I recounted what I knew of that summer after high school, and remembered the letters sent to me in Myrtle Beach by my best friend, Peter, who was working concession stands at Babe Ruth baseball games back in Hamilton. He was slaving away selling Cokes and Bombpops to Little Leaguers while I enjoyed the “glamorous life” of a golf course gopher. Nothing he wrote about the escalating drama of Lila’s life surprised me anymore. The spell she had cast over me had been broken. It was a strange change of circumstance: the girl I admired, envied, and longed for was now the girl I felt pity for.

Lila and Leon were married about the time she started to show. In his letters, Peter described seeing Lila and Leon fighting outside the movie theater, yelling and screaming as if they were behind closed doors rather than in public. Not long after that, his letter reported the latest rumor: Leon was leaving Hamilton, and his six-week marriage, behind and moving to New York.

After Leon left town, Lila filed for divorce. She and her baby lived with her parents through the hard times that followed. Her parents – who had hated Leon as much as anyone and who had begged Lila to end her relationship with him before she regretted it – never mentioned “that man” or the entire affair again, but few of the friends Lila had sacrificed during her relationship with Leon were not so forgiving. Most everyone she had been friends with left for college, or went somewhere else to work, or just moved to get away from the town they were sure stifled their creativity or sophistication. Lila stayed in Hamilton, working menial jobs, raising a newborn son.

But she began her trip back to respectability soon after her son, Adrian, was born. She began auditioning and winning roles in plays put on by the local Civic Theater group. She was talented, and enjoyed the stage. I saw her in a performance the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college, and immediately fell in love with her again. The play was weak, and the rest of the cast even weaker. Lila was not. She was radiant. She was beautiful. Her voice, her eyes, her smile, her self-confident walk all penetrated me to the core.

Soon, she had a central role in every production. The local paper raved about her performances, touting her as a great talent. Slowly, she began to regain the status she had enjoyed as a teenager. Eventually, she founded her own theater group to perform in schools and retirement centers. It was her idea of public service, and it caused a sensation throughout the city. Lila was again a beloved and popular figure. The icon had been restored.

She got her big break the year I finished college. A talent scout for a major ad agency – in Hamilton visiting an aunt – saw Lila’s portrayal of Elaine, the feisty girlfriend in Arsenic and Old Lace. After the show, the executive rushed backstage to meet Lila, forgetting the reluctance he had expressed to see a “bunch of bumpkins bumbling around a poorly constructed stage, lit with sub-standard lighting and wearing the same wardrobe as they had in last season's butchering of Annie Get Your Gun”. He asked Lila if she would be interested in doing a magazine advertisement photo shoot in Chicago, to which she – of course – agreed.

That ad was a success, and it launched Lila’s national career. One ad led to another, and another, and eventually to a series of television commercials. A television producer in New York saw one of the ads and contacted Lila, asking her to be the co-host of a new game show he was trying to sell to syndication. Lila left Hamilton and her son behind, and for the next three years, she was the Vanna White of the game show Double Your Dollar.

After getting her feet on the ground, and some money in her pocket, Lila brought her son to Los Angeles to live with her. Her game show experience led to a role in an off-Broadway musical, then a bit part in a Broadway play, which eventually led to a major role in a Broadway play. Reviews of her performance were mixed, but she became a sensation anyway. She was interviewed by Letterman and Regis. She was on a special episode of Oprah dedicated to successful, divorced mothers. Her work in ads, commercials, and bit roles in major motion pictures increased every month. She became a brighter star in her hometown.

Lila returned to Hamilton often and shared her wealth with her old community. She funded foundations and donated equipment and money to area schools. She donated her celebrity to various fundraisers. In Hamilton, Lila Broussard was treated like a queen. As my plane touched down in Cincinnati I realized, I, Grant Williams, would soon be teaching the Queen’s son.

I told Cory this school year would be interesting.

The Problem of Pain and the Mystery of Suffering
Reflections of C.S. Lewis and Bishop Fulton Sheen
Shared with the staff in our regular weekly meeting

“The second [operation of pain] is to shatter the illusion that what we have – whether good or bad – is our own and sufficient for us. As long as what we call “our own life” remains agreeable, we will not surrender it to Him…we are perplexed to see misfortune falling upon decent, inoffensive, worthy people…(but) try to believe – if only for a moment – that God, who made these deserving people, may really be right when He thinks that their modest prosperity and the happiness of their children are not enough to make them blessed: that all this must fall from them in the end, and that if they have not learned to know Him they will be wretched. Therefore, He troubles them, warning them in advance of an insufficiency that one day they will have to discover.”

“God gives his answer to the world’s question about the meaning of suffering through a demonstration. The dramatic climax of the demonstration of God’s love for the world, and the capacity of that love to give meaning to the most intense suffering, is the cross of Christ. When the Son takes all the world’s evil and sin and suffering upon himself and offers it to the Father in a perfect act of obedience, and when God vindicates that act of radical obedience and love in the Resurrection, suffering itself is transformed. When Christ redeems us by his suffering, suffering itself is redeemed. The Christ who died for all offers a share in his redemption to all – and offers us the possibility that, by identifying our suffering with his, we too can participate in his redemptive suffering for the world.”

...Goes a Long Way.

Traveling, and such...

We aren't that hard to please. Believe me. Cami and I aren't the kind of travelers who go out of our way to be upset by poor service or inconvenienced by local customs that are foreign to us.

There does seem to be a "bare minimum" of service that should be expected, though, I think. One of the things we've noticed while traveling is that more often than not, that minimum is not reached.

Yesterday, we ate at a small Italian place in Zephyrhills. The food was good, authentic Italian. The atmosphere was nice. But the service was poor. We were greeted at the door, but "warmly" wouldn't describe it. We were shown to our seat and waited for our waitress. (She really put the "wait" in waitress.) Our order was taken, but we had to pronounce the words for her. (We don't speak Italian, either, but ours was closer than hers.) We also had to read the entry to her so she would know that it came with a house salad and fresh bread. She promptly forgot the salad (thankfully, she remembered the appetizer) until she brought our entre. Then, she forgot the fresh bread. We finally requested it, again. (By this time, Cami was done eating.) When it came out, Cami split one of the rolls to butter it, and found that while the outside was warm, the inside was cold. And to top it off, our water glasses were refilled with sprite. I would have asked to speak to a manager, but none ever seemed to be around.

If this were one of those illustrations in a children's magazine, would you be able to answer, "How many things do YOU see wrong with this picture?"

Over Christmas, we were staying in Hilton Head. We went into the Target. You would think that the target, in Hilton Head, would be nice, right? The store itself WAS nice. But it looked like a bomb had gone off. Clothes and items strewn everywhere. And I am speaking literally when I say we had to walk around piles of clothes that had been knocked off racks or shelves and onto the floor. This wasn't the day after Christmas, but rather the 29th or 30th. There were more workers in the store than patrons, but they both ignored us (we were looking for someone for help at one point) and ignored the work that needed to be done. The only attention we garnered from an employee was when we were approaching the checkout line, and an employee - carrying a Snickers - rushed to jump in front of us in line so that she could start her break. Looking at the cafe area, there were - and I counted - eight employees on break, with the line jumper making number ten, and two more who were "working" at cleaning the tables (which translated into chatting with the other employees). It was 9:30 in the morning.

A couple years ago we were traveling to New York (Cooperstown and Niagara, to be exact). Along the way, through Ohio and Pennsylvania, and into New York State, we stopped at various places to eat. Fast food. Nothing special. We expected to order our cheese burger and drink, get pretty much what you get at any other McDonalds/Wendy's/TacoBell, and be on our merry way. A relatively clean place to eat, use the restroom, and move on. A smile or a "how are y'all doing" would have been fine as well.

All throughout that trip, though, we experienced poor service: The person taking our order seemed put-out that we were there, the floors and tables had been neglected for hours, the food was cold or not properly put together, the preparation of the food was slow, the restrooms were dirty, no one seemed to value our patronage in the least. It was so bad that at one Burger King, on our trip home, we were stunned to be greeted warmly by someone who genuinely seemed interested in our order, the food was fixed quickly-yet-properly, and the floors and tables were properly maintained. This treatment, which we had left Indiana thinking of as a "bare minimum" but had failed to encounter during our entire trip, was foreign to us now. So much so, we filled out a comment card and left it behind.

About a week later, we received a thank you note from the manager, thanking us for the kind words and telling us that they hoped we would stop in again, if we were ever back in the area. This small gesture proved to me that the responsibility for the mediocrity we see in various service industry areas falls on the shoulders of managers who either cannot or care not to motivate their employees. It isn't hard, really, to identify the basics of running a restaurant or a clothing store, especially a chain store which should pretty much look like other stores in the chain. (That is the purpose of a chain. If you order a Big Mac, you pretty much expect to get a very specific kind of hamburger.) Teaching someone to be a good employee can take time. Perhaps, in a service-oriented business, that would be time well spent.

esw -  Tuesday, March 27, 2007

High Priesthood During the Second Temple Period

Eric Wyatt

Paper One, M 101 – Old Testament, Winter 2006

Rev. Fr. Dennis O’Keeffe, D.Min

Return from Exile and Rebuilding of the Temple

When Cyrus, a Persian, defeated the Babylonians in 539 B.C. his success was seen as a part of Yahweh’s bigger plan of restoring His Chosen People.¹ Cyrus had been supported by the exiled Jews² and in return, he allowed them to go back to Jerusalem. The exile lasted over fifty years and most of those who remembered life in Israel were dead. Of those Jews who were living in Babylon, “most decided to remain behind in the comfort they had fashioned for themselves in Babylonia.”³ Those who did relinquish the temporal comforts of their relatively easy captivity returned to find a poor area inhabited by pagans in the North, and, in the South, peasant farmer Jews who had been left behind with little social infrastructure and no religious life.⁴

Cyrus decreed the Temple to be rebuilt and returned the sacred vessels stolen by Nebuchadnezzar. An altar was built first, so that a bare minimum of sacrifices could be reestablished. The High Priest and his brethren priests then oversaw the rebuilding of the Temple and the reestablishment and expansion of religious practice.⁵ The rebuilding of the Temple (and more so, the return of the exiled Jews who were taking back the lands those who had been left behind had slowly claimed) angered the Samaritan neighbors and others. The reconstruction was abandoned early on in favor of rebuilding the homes, shops, and other more pedestrian parts of the city. It isn’t until 515 B.C. that reconstruction truly takes place and the Temple is reestablished.⁶

Comparison of Temple Culture Between Pre-Exile and Post-Exilic Periods

Though the Temple was rebuilt, things were not the same: the exile had taken a permanent toll. “The intense spirituality of the First Temple cannot be compared to the Second. The constant miracles are gone. Prophecy is gone. The Ark of the Covenant is gone. And although there is a Holy of Holies, it stands empty.”⁷ The Ark was either taken by the Babylonians or hidden by King Josiah who had anticipated the invasion.⁸ Perhaps even more devastating was the loss of the spiritually challenging and supportive voice of the prophets.⁹ While the Second Temple is a spiritually different place, it is also much more physically humble structure.¹⁰ It is later expanded by Herod the Great (circa 30 BC), but even then it remains spiritually empty.

The High Priesthood was initially restored as a hereditary office; reestablishing the pre-exilic line of the High Priest Zudok.¹¹ The other Temple priests claimed descent from Aaron and the minor clergy were descendants of Levi. At times after the exile, the High Priest served the role as sole and primary community leader for the Jews.¹² Some Jews were looking for the return of the Davidic monarchy, and at times the ruling power was divided between a ruling governor or King and the High Priest, but on balance, the High Priesthood acquired a more and more civic role, especially during voids when no monarch could claim the throne.¹³

Even though the exile was over, the long-term effects remained. “But when prophecy disappeared and central authority was weakened, it became easier for people to stray and for various holy institutions (like the High Priesthood) to become corrupt.”¹⁴ The loss of prophecy was a result of the spiritual weakness of the Jewish people who had returned from exile with the purpose of reestablishing the glory of Jerusalem only to put God on the back burner to focus on their own needs.

Duties of the High Priest and Others Within the Second Temple

The Temple life and use demonstrates the stratified holiness of the Jewish culture. Into the courtyards could come Yahweh’s people; a Holy people, especially when compared to the surrounding pagans. Into the Temple building itself the priests and Levites – endowed with a greater holiness through heredity and their vocation – could enter. Only the priests could engage in activities which dealt with the altars or incense (making the priests an order higher than the Levites)¹⁵, and only the High Priest could enter into the Holy of Holies.

Like the Temple itself, all aspects of the priesthood – especially as expressed through the chief priest – were intended to express symbolically the Holy and set apart nature of Israel. Israel was to be a holy nation by maintaining the covenant relationship with God, and the priests embodied this truth. If all of Israel is to be a “kingdom of priests¹⁶”, then the priestly class served as the set-apart representatives of a set-apart people. The fundamental purposes of the priesthood were reconciliation and mediation on behalf of the Israelites, and the object of reconciliation was holiness. The qualifications to be a priest, the kinds of defilements that would interrupt their work, their mode of ordination, and their dress were all symbolic and representative of the larger relationship between God and His people.¹⁷

The priestly caste, therefore, dealt with all ritualistic acts that required holiness: burning on the altars, slaughter on the altar of holocaust, sacrificial blood rites, pronouncements of what was pure and unpure, and blessings of the people.¹⁸ The priests in the Temple were charged with overseeing anything having to do with the lamps, the incense altar, and replacing the loaves on the table of showbread.¹⁹ With the Second Temple period, the priest became the sole administrator of animal sacrifice, a function that had earlier not been restricted to the sanctuary.²⁰ Another additional duty of the High Priest in the Second Temple period was the collecting of additional funds to finance the building and expansion projects. This is a function that would have been accomplished by the monarch in earlier times.²¹ At the same time, the priesthood, with the High Priest as its head, took on additional responsibility to act in a judicial role.²² While the priests remained responsible for making law and legal judgments known to the people, the Scribes eventually became the ones who acted as jurists and theologians who interpreted the law.²³ One way to have edicts or laws “published” in the ancient world was to have it read aloud, and this was one of the duties of the Jewish priesthood.²⁴ The Holy of Holies was forbidden ground except for once a year – during Yom Kippur. The High Priest alone was allowed to enter the Holy of Holies to perform special rites in the presence of God on that day. He was to offer two sacrifices for sins of ignorance or omission: one for his own sins, and one for the sins of the people.²⁵

The Levites took care of more basic liturgical duties, and took assignments from the priests to perform required administrative functions.²⁶ Keeping order and discipline – given the fact that an estimated 200,000 persons were sometimes within the Temple walls, with their money for tributes and possessing natural human tendency for behavior to devolve in large crowds – was a major consideration. The security function was typically assigned to the Levites.²⁷ Physically enforcing the ceremonial cleanliness within the Temple was a security function that trumped other aspects of the Law, including the observation of the Sabbath.²⁸

Giving of Torah could be done by anyone skilled in the law, not just the priests. As the corruption of the priesthood expanded, the teachers of wisdom and those scribes who could instruct in the law gained to confidence of the people.²⁹ The scribes were responsible for assuring the correctness of the copies of the sacred texts which were used in the synagogues. The teachers of the law went out to the people, teaching them in the estimated 450 synagogues within Jerusalem itself.³⁰ As the role of the law increased – speaking for God in lieu of the voice of the Prophets, and resisting the institutional corruption of the priesthood – the role of the priests diminished somewhat.³¹

The Corruption of the Priesthood

During the Second Temple Period, the spirituality of the Jewish people suffers greatly from outside influence and their own spiritual weakness.³² The decline of the High Priesthood mirrors the more universal decline of Jewish spirituality. When the Greeks conquer the Persian Empire in 312 B.C., they also gain control of Israel. The inclusion of Israel into the Greek empire

By 175 B.C., Jerusalem looked more like a Greek city than a small hill town full of religiously-oriented Jews who were devoted to the keeping of the Divine Law and fulfilling the Covenant between the people and Yahweh. Jason – the High Priest who broke the line of generational priesthood by purchasing the title from Syrian King Antiochus IV – made the building of a gymnasium a priority to modernize Jerusalem and to become a player in a larger world stage. With the addition of a gymnasium, Jerusalem could become a host of Greek sporting events and a player in international society. The Hellenization of Jerusalem was deepened.³³

The addition of a gymnasium was not problematic because of the sport, but because of the way sport was conducted. The Greek sportsman competed nude, and Jewish competitors stood out as different from the non-Jewish counterparts who did not bear the physical sign of the Covenant. This began a trend of “reverse circumcision” to make the Jewish sportsman “fit in”.³⁴ This practice, which would have been an abomination in the past, was not condemned by the priesthood in this ever-increasingly-Hellenized Jerusalem.

Even though the increased profile of Jerusalem was seen as positive to the civic leaders in the Temple, much of the population found the increase of Greek influence troublesome. Jason was replaced by a more orthodox High Priest who led a renewed wave of orthodoxy. But this was short lived.³⁵ Antiochus Epiphanes – possibly at the urging of those Jews who were embracing Hellenization – saw orthodoxy as an opposition to his policies, and he undertook a systematic effort to criminalize Judaism, outlawing the practice of circumcision, observation of Sabbath, and possession of the Scriptures. He ordered pigs sacrificed in the Temple, defiling the altars, and set up statues to the God Jupiter in the Holy of Holies. And while the Jews eventually rebelled (the Maccabean revolt) against such practices, many assimilated Jews initially cooperated with them.³⁶

The years that followed the Maccabean revolt were a time of back and forth warring with the Syrians, often aided by self-serving and Hellenized Jews. Even once the Syrians were effectively eliminated from the picture, the Jews were plagued by infighting and Civil War, which eventually led to the rule of the Romans. In 37 B.C. Herod was appointed King. Herod was the grandson of forced converts to Judaism. He murdered forty-five of the Sanhedrin (the Jewish Supreme Court), a High Priest, and most of his own family.³⁷

The infighting extended into the priestly class. Many of the priests were members of the Sadducees faction. The Sadducees reject the oral law as God-inspired, claiming an obligation to the written Torah only. Contrary to Orthodox Judaism, they promoted a sort of private, personal interpretation of the law in the areas where the written law was unclear. This personal interpretation was popular among Hellenized Jews and was a source of turmoil within Jewish society, and is considered a major factor in the corruption of the priesthood.³⁸ For many who subscribed to the Sadducees’ philosophy, the ritual of worship was important, but the reason for the worship was lost. An example of this thinking led the Sadducees to conclude that the ritual uncleanness of a knife used during a murder inside the Temple building was worse than the loss of life itself.³⁹

While there were good and holy priests scattered into the mix, by the time of Christ the priesthood had become as much of a stumbling block as it was a conduit to God. Faithful Jews were looking for a savior – a Messiah – who would restore Israel to national prominence, kick out the foreign interests, and reestablish Orthodox worship to Zion.⁴⁰ The concept of Messiah was “flexible within a broad concept… [which] different claimants could quite easily reshape around themselves.”⁴¹ And while the Jewish mindset was turned toward the ouster of external rulers, the heterodox state of the Jewish leaders and teachers was the real, internal enemy from whom Israel needed rescuing. The culmination of all of this led to the rise of the Christian sect and the eventual destruction of the Temple and the scattering of the Jewish people.⁴²

Prophecy

Preparing Ourselves

This I declare, brothers: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does corruption inherit incorruption. Behold, I tell you a mystery. We shall not all fall asleep, but we will all be changed, in an instant, in the blink of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.
1 Corinthians 15:50-52

But if Christ is preached as raised from the dead, how can some among you say there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then neither has Christ been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then empty is our preaching; empty, too, is your faith. ..For if the dead are not raised, neither has Christ been raised, and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is vain; you are still in your sins...If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are the most pitiable people of all.
1 Corinthians 15:12-14, 16-17,19

Various Fastings

“Our motive in Lenten renunciations ought not be limited to penance in reparation for sin. Rather, exercises of self-denial are for the sake of arousing in us a deeper hunger of soul. The image of fasting is especially apt here. Even mild forms of self-abnegation in our eating habits do more than simply empty us of indulgent tendencies. By keeping the self waiting, refusing it immediate gratification, we open ourselves to a fundamental spiritual truth: The willingness to deny ourselves awakens in us a capacity to give ourselves in greater love to Our Lord...In this sense, all practices of self-denial are exercises of love meant to refine our spiritual focus, so that the bridegroom who may have faded somewhat from our need becomes again our primary love.”

Fr. Donald Haggerty

This is not only true with food.

(Though on a side note, I think we, as Americans, underestimate the power that an abundance of food has over us. We rarely want for anything. Our groceries are full of items from every corner of the globe. As a semi-regular cook, I love having the variety of things to use to make meals. How many of us, if we really set our mind to it, couldn't have a meal of almost any style in front of us in less than an hour from when we decide, finally, what it is we want? We sometimes spend more time debating the merits of this food choice or that one than we do actually consuming the food. We grow so used to the variety and selection that we can't decide: “No, what do YOU want for dinner, dear.”

And yet, do we always see the abundance around us for what it is: a glorious gift from a loving Father? I doubt it. I absolutely enjoy a good meal, but how often do I really stop and acknowledge that I am blessed by God to have such tasty opportunities? I like to think that I am grateful more often than not, but it is still good to be reminded.

Which is why we practice certain disciplines of diet within Lent: to put food into perspective. “No meat on Fridays” really isn't that hard to do. A nice piece of fish, some pasta, a cheese pizza, a nice salad and cup of soup...wow, what a sacrifice, right? But what I've found is that, in our daily lives, it is really difficult to THINK before you EAT. The sausage biscuit that I warmed up in the microwave is half-consumed before I even think about it. So even little efforts of avoiding meat on Fridays of not snacking in between meals or giving up a favored treat help us gain perspective. The hunger of the body helps to feed the hunger of the soul...but I digress.)

Oddly, the quote of Fr. Haggerty above reminded me of Seinfeld. That is probably some level of heresy, though I certainly don't mean it to be so.

(In fact, I see Seinfeld as being very indicative of the human tendency toward self-involvement. In its absurdity, it illuminates pettiness and selfishness in our own lives. I find that illuminating quality to be compelling, in addition to finding it terribly funny in the farcical circumstances that surround the show...another digression.)

There is an episode of Seinfeld where George gives up sex. He gives up having it, simulating it, and even thinking about it. He devotes himself to reading and studying and channels all of the energy he used to devote to sexual gratification into other areas of his life.

He gets smarter. He enjoys life more. He teaches Derek Jeter how to hit.

Fasting isn't just about food. It is about anything in our life we come to value too greatly. It is about TV, impure sexual impulses, video games, excessive overtime, college basketball, a good cigar, a hobby, a fine wine, mmmm chocolate donuts (wait, that's food right? I told you.)...what ever it is that deadens us to the movement of God. Not just “negative things”,either. TV, sex, games, work; none of these are evil in and of themselves. But we have a hard time keeping them in perspective in our lives. We allow them to take large chunks of our day away from us, and when we do, we allow them to supplant something more beneficial. Maybe it is our job, or our family, or our time with God, but ultimately, when anything becomes so dominant that it begins to obscure a properly ordered relationship, it is a problem.

George's self-denial opened up new worlds to him. He was able to feed other hungers that had been masked by his preoccupation with sex. The same should be true for us. When we deny the pull of some external thing, we should find that we can be more attuned to other matters. Maybe we can give more of ourselves to our family, our co-workers, our fellow parishioners. Maybe we can feed our hunger by turning to God.

Eventually, George gave in to his impulses and returned to his semi-bumbling ways.

Sometimes, we do too. Maybe it is the Monday of Easter that we go right back to whatever we gave up for Lent. Maybe it creeps back in slowly. (Sometimes, by the Grace of God, we actually free ourselves from some spiritual habit or another.) But that is the beauty of the liturgical cycles. Next year, about this time, we'll be presented with the opportunity to right our course yet again.

Loving Father, help me to hand myself over to you so that I can love you as you deserve.
Renew the call of love you made to me and rekindle my desire to follow you.

A Prayer for Homecoming

Our Father, we have wandered
And hidden from your face;
In foolishness have squandered
Your legacy of grace.

But now in exile dwelling,
We rise with fear and shame,
As distant but compelling,
We hear you call our name.

And now at length discerning
The evil that we do,
Behold us, Lord, retuning
With hope and trust to you.

In haste you come to meet us
And home rejoicing bring,
In gladness there to greet us
With calf and robe and ring.

O Lord of all the living,
Both banished and restored
Compassionate, forgiving
And ever caring Lord.

Grant now the our transgressing,
Our faithlessness may cease,
Stretch out your hand in blessing,
In pardon and in peace.

esw - Saturday, February 24, 2007

Prayer and religious practice ought not to be used for enhancing one's image. Its thrust must be soli Deo - for God alone. At prayer the furthest thought from one's mind must be "what will people think" to see me praying...After all, Jesus did not say: "Take care not to perform righteous deeds"- period. He went on to [add]: "in order that people may see them." That is the kind of self-advertising that poisons one's good works and that Jesus dissuades us from indulging in. Purity of motive in praying and in doing good works is at the heart of the matter.

The First Station – Jesus is Condemned to Death

Pilate said to him: “So you are a king?” Jesus answered: “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice.” Pilate said, in answer: “What is truth?” At this point the Roman Procurator saw no need for further questions. He went to the Jews and told them: “I find no crime in him.”

The tragedy of Pilate is hidden in the question: what is truth? This was no philosophical question about the nature of truth, but an existential question about his own relationship with truth. It was an attempt to escape from the voice of conscience, which was pressing him to acknowledge the truth and follow it. When someone refuses to be guided by truth, he is ultimately ready even to condemn an innocent person to death.

The accusers sense this weakness in Pilate and so do not yield. They relentlessly call for death by crucifixion...When [he] brings Jesus, scourged and crowned with thorns, before the crowd, he seems to be looking for words, which he thinks might soften the intransigence of the mob. [Maybe if they see Jesus as a man, they will relent in their obstinate insistence on crucifixion.]

Pointing to Jesus he says, Ecce homo! Behold the man! But the answer comes back, “Crucify him!”

[Pilate] is increasingly convinced that the accused is innocent, but this is not enough for him to decide in his favor.

Thus was Jesus, the Son of the living God, the Redeemer of the world, condemned to death by crucifixion. Over the centuries, the denial of truth has spawned suffering and death. It is the innocent who pay the price of human hypocrisy. Half measures are never enough. Nor is it enough to wash one's hands. Responsibility for the blood of the just remains. This is why Christ prayed so fervently for his disciples in every age: Father, “sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth.”

From John Paul II's Way of the Cross

Lord Jesus Christ,
you accepted an unjust judgment.
Grant to us
and to all the men and women of our time
the grace to remain faithful to the truth.
Do not allow the weight of responsibility
for the sufferings of the innocent
to fall upon us and upon those who come after us
To you, O Jesus, just Judge,
be honor and glory forever and ever.

Amen

We adore thee, O Christ, and praise thee;
Because by thy holy cross thou hast redeemed the world;

Lord Jesus, crucified!
Have mercy on us!

For the sake of your sorrowful passion,
have mercy on us, and on the whole world.

Jesus is all alone. Far off now are the days when the words of the Man-God brought light and hope to men's hears, those long processions of sick people whom he healed, the triumphant acclaim of Jerusalem when the Lord arrived, riding on a gentle donkey...Lord, where are your friends? Your subjects, where are they? They have left you. This running away has been going on for twenty centuries...We, all of us, flee from the Cross, from your Holy Cross. Blood, anguish, loneliness, and an insatiable hunger for souls...these are the courtiers around your royal throne.

From The Way of the Cross, Josemaria Escriva

And they will ask him: what are those wounds that you bear in your hands? And he will reply: I received them in the house of those who love me. (Zach 13:6)

Jesus was led away,
and carrying the Cross by himself,
went out to what is called
the Place of the Skull, Golgotha.

Loving Father,
Who has blessed me with an abundant life,
I thank you for my life, family, friends, talents, and material possessions.
Remind me constantly that everything I possess is a Gift from You.

Lord, I desire to honor You,
Help me be a faithful steward of Your gifts,
To seek Your Will in every facet of my life,
To seek Your forgiveness when I sin,
And to offer you sacrifices of thanksgiving and praise.

Help me to continue my spiritual journey,
And renew my relationship with You daily,
Help me recognize when I am taking my gifts for granted,
And when I am relying more on self than I am on You.

This I ask, through Jesus Christ, our Lord,
Who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
One God, forever and ever,

Amen.

Similarly, not many of us will fess-up to hating stewardship, but many of us hate what we wrongly believe stewardship to be. It can be seen in the eyes-glazing-over response when the topic is discussed, and even in the direct challenge, “Stewardship is a gimmick. It's just a code word for getting more of my money. When the church needs money, then you tell me I need stewardship.”

Below is a short list of misconceptions about stewardship. As you read these, try to hear what I am saying about stewardship, not what you think I really mean.

1. The Church Just Needs My Money – This is partially true. Our parish does need money to operate. We have a beautiful building and vibrant ministries, both of which require monetary resources to maintain. In the coming weeks, St. Joan of Arc will be kicking off a capital campaign with a goal of paying off this facility, and the financial support of our parishioners will be needed if we are to reach that goal. But beyond our basic needs, the Church provides a way for individuals to maximize their charitable contributions through the power of consolidated effort. Many small gifts can have the impact of one large gift. By financially supporting the parish, we are able to reach others through educational opportunities, help care for the needy, attend to the hurting, and facilitate the ultimate mission of the church – the salvation of souls. In all of this, it isn't a faceless, bureaucratic church that requires money, rather it is support of our continual effort to reach others. Each of us benefits from the ministries of our parish, and – more importantly – many outside our immediate church family also feel the loving embrace of Christ through the work we do as His hands, His feet, and His mouth.

2. The Church Just Wants Free Labor – Often this is said when someone wants to focus only on monetary giving, and ignore the Time and Talent sides of the stewardship triangle. The thinking is, “If I give enough money, I can be exempt from the other.” As Catholics we do not have an “either/or” faith; rather it is a “both/and” religion. Just as we don't say “faith or works”, neither do we say “treasure or time”. We are called to give of our talent and time because in doing so, we give in a way that helps us balance our lives. We all know that “time is money”. When we give of our money – even if we are genuinely tithing – we are personally seeing a 90% return on our investment of time. When we give of our time also, we are giving God 100%, and in doing so, insuring that we keep our focus properly balanced.

3. If I'm Not Giving, Someone Else Will Take Up The Slack – It is easy to selectively hear. Most spouses do it on occasion. Children do it often. Lawyers and political pundits have made it an art form. Parishioners are good at it as well. We selectively listen to announcements, selectively read the bulletin, and selectively choose to participate in the life of the parish. More often than not, we assume that God is speaking to someone else; that if I fail to step up, someone else will take up my slack. Often times, that is the case. But every time I fail to act, I am contributing to the lost potential of what St. Joan of Arc could really be. When my priorities are not grounded in the Great Commission, I am injuring the work of the church. Granted, not every program offered here is right for every parishioner, not every cause is one that sparks interest, and it isn't necessary to put an envelope in the basket every weekend. We are accountable, however, to guard against a lax and irresponsible tendency to expect others to do what we as individuals are called to do. Stewardship is a method of helping us avoid that kind of lethargic Christianity.

There is a brochure available in the book rack under the bulletin board located near the elevator. It bears the title, Stewardship, Tithing, and Sacrificial Giving: Our Response to the Gifts God Has Given Us. It is ambitious to believe all of those topics could be covered adequately in one brochure, but hopefully you will find the information there to be a useful introduction to those issues.

Over the next few months, I would like to touch on those same ideas here in Voices, starting with the often heard – but sometimes elusive – concept of Stewardship.

The basic premise of Catholic Stewardship is simple: God is the giver of everything we have. He is the source of our abilities, our possessions, and our very life. We are responsible, then, for safeguarding and utilizing those gifts in a way that is pleasing to God. When we do this, we are being stewards of our resources.

The common premise in Stewardship materials is reflected in the phrase, “Talent, Time, and Treasure.” These are the things we have been given by God to manage, and the areas where we are encouraged to give back to the Lord a portion of what he has blessed us with.

But on a deeper level, the “Talent, Time, and Treasure” mantra is specifically focused to address those areas of our lives which subtly and slyly become roadblocks in our Christian development; the areas where we begin to forget our total dependence on God in favor of relying on our own abilities, our own wealth, our own freedom. It is easy to forget – or at least ignore – God’s role in providing us with these things. By giving back from what we have been given, we not only are reminded of the source from which our blessings come, but we demonstrate our respect the Giver.

The call to stewardship, then, is a call to conversion: conversion of our hearts to recognize and honor the gifts of our Creator. As Catholics, we attend Mass at least weekly, pray on a regular basis, and perform works of charity in an effort to tune our individual will to the Divine Will. In a similar manner, stewardship should be a means of Grace through which we strive to be in tune with the Divine Will in the areas which we often find to be barriers to a deeper communion with God: our pride, our possessions, and our personal freedom.

Stewardship is our continual effort to put God first in every area of our life.

In the last Voices, I wrote that a Catholic understanding of stewardship is, at its core, a call to conversion in areas of our lives that can easily become subtle and sly roadblocks to developing a deeper spiritual life. In other words, the THREE T’s of Stewardship (Talent, Treasure, and Time) are concepts specifically targeted to address what I would label the THREE P’s: Pride, Possessions, and our Personal freedom.

None of the THREE P’s are bad in-and-of themselves. There is a natural pride that comes from using and utilizing the talents God has given to His Glory. Our possessions have been given to us to be useful and beneficial aids in our earthly life, and having those things to share with our families and others is a blessing. Our freedom is a God-given gift meant to be treasured.

However, because the THREE P’s have positive aspects, it is easy to be deceived into forgetting the Source of those gifts. We can quickly learn to rely on the gifts rather than the Giver. These gifts become – to our perception – our own abilities, our own wealth, and our own freedom, and we begin to rely on our limited resources in lieu of relying on the unlimited nature of God. In short, we become too “self” oriented: self-sufficient, self-centered, and selfish.

It is easy to become convinced that we can – and even that we should – rely on our own efforts; a proposition that often ends in disaster as our personal inadequacies surface to remind us of our reliance on God. Man was created with a dependence on God in both the spiritual and temporal (physical) areas of our lives, but the more we are blessed with physical gifts, the harder it is to remember that these “things” are not of our own creation.

In an effort to keep our gifts in a proper perspective, God calls us to give freely of the things we have been given. By returning portions of our gifts to the Giver, we recognize God as the Origin of all we’ve been given, and we honor Him. Giving is an act of worship, and a conscious cooperation with the work of the Church. Our giving should be guided by four principles:

1. Give back to God, in gratitude, a portion of everything we have been blessed with: monetary gifts, time, and talents should all be given to support and further the work of the Universal Church.

2. Give in a way that properly honors God as first in our lives: give first, not just a portion of “what is left” at the end of the month.

3. Give in a manner that is sacrificial, not just what we can easily do without. A gift easily parted with is not as precious as one which will be missed.

4. Give to a point where the Biblical concept of a tithe is the minimal baseline of the time, talent, and monetary resources which you share with others. If that is not yet the reality in our lives, we are called to consider ways to gradually increase our giving until it is a reality.

When we return our gifts to God, we are reminded of our dependence on Him. The act of giving is a physical manifestation of our desire to love, serve, submit to, and honor the One who has blessed us so richly.

But, stewardship isn’t a gimmick. Stewardship is a means of grace which enables us to be in tune with the Divine Will in areas that easily become barriers to a deeper communion with God: our pride, our possessions, and our personal freedom. Stewardship is about converting our hearts to both recognize our dependence on our Creator and to honor those gifts He has given us.

As Catholics, we recognize our need to be forgiven, our need for redemption, and our need to be reconciled to the Father. But do we recognize our need to be thankful? It isn’t just a by product of “being brought up right”. Being thankful is an actual need. In our thankfulness we are to offer praise and glory to God, but we are also to give back a portion of what we have been given.

The Biblical standards for offering back to God a portion of what we have been given are high, and they cannot be reached or maintained without vigilant prayer. Without grace, the price seems too high and we give reluctantly or in anger. Sometimes we choose to give nothing at all. Through prayer and petition to the Father, we can learn to be good stewards, and in doing so, learn to keep our time, talents, and treasures in their proper perspective.

When it comes to time, we are called to give one-seventh of our time to prayer, personal devotion, celebrations of the Christian community (weekly Mass, for example), and family. In our culture – a culture with more free time than any other – we are also called to invest our time in the building of the kingdom, through volunteering in our local faith community.

The Biblical mandate regarding treasure is “one-tenth of the annual harvest”. One-tenth of the income given to the work of the Church is a daunting task, and one that can only be obtained through sincere prayer and effort.

We are instructed that 100% of our talent should be utilized for the Glory of God. Even if it is something we think someone else could do better or we are afraid of the criticism of others. Anything that we do well should be nurtured and expanded, and that includes offering that talent as service to the Church.

As a local parish, we do a good job in a lot of ways: we have nearly 1000 adult volunteers, we have many generous givers, and we have people of vast and varied talents who utilize that for the betterment of the community. We are an active and vibrant church. But when we do these things, we demonstrate how much more we could do if everyone participated.

Every Christian is called to give of all three: Time, Talent, and Treasure. Everyone. (It is “and” not “or”.) But to thrive in our giving of any of these “Three T’s”, we must be open to the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives, helping us to set priorities and manage our resources in a way that will free us to increase our offerings to the point that the Biblical guidelines are a minimum of what we do on a regular basis. Please consider the prayer below. On a regular basis, ask yourself these three questions and then pray about your answers:

1. Do I regularly thank God for all He has done for me, honoring Him as the Creator and Source of all blessings?

2. Do I return gifts to God in a manner consistent with Biblical precedents, giving from my “first fruits”, not just what is left over?

3. Do I honor God by giving my gifts in a sacrificial manner, not just when I have excess time or money to give?

Then, pray, asking God to open your heart to His Will:

Loving Father,
Who has blessed me with an abundant life,
I thank you for my life, family, friends, talents, and material possessions.
Remind me constantly that everything I possess is a Gift from You.

Lord, I desire to honor You,
Help me be a faithful steward of Your gifts,
To seek Your Will in every facet of my life,
To seek Your forgiveness when I sin,
And to offer you sacrifices of thanksgiving and praise.

Help me to continue my spiritual journey,
And renew my relationship with You daily,
Help me recognize when I am taking my gifts for granted,
And when I am relying more on self than I am on You.

This I ask, through Jesus Christ, our Lord,
Who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
One God, forever and ever,

Amen.

But these are basic guidelines for our giving back to God, not our “bare minimum requirements”. When we offer back to God out of the abundance he has given us, we should do so not out of a sense of duty or a fear of “not crossing all the t’s and dotting all the i’s” in our spiritual journey; we should give joyfully, in a state of worship and adoration of the Giver.

How do we accomplish this? Here are some guidelines:

First, we are called to give back to God in gratitude a portion of everything we have been blessed with. There is a common catchphrase: An attitude of gratitude. When was the last time you placed your offering in the basket on Sunday morning and said, “Thank you God for giving me the ability to give this back to you.” When was the last time you volunteered at the Church and said, “Thank you, God, for this opportunity to serve others on your behalf.” How many of us use our many talents on a daily basis and remember to say, “Thank you, God, for giving me both my talent and the opportunity to utilize it.” Somewhere along the line, each of us has failed to be grateful for what we’ve been given. By giving back – in gratitude – we are able to acknowledge our thankfulness in a very tangible way.

Second, we are called to give our gifts to God in a way that best honors Him. We do this by giving to Him first, not from what is left over. This is true in all areas. If we are blessed with a talent, we are called to make sure we are utilizing that talent for the good of the Gospel. If we volunteer time, it should be carved out of our hectic schedule first, not “fit in” to what ever time we have left. If we give of our monetary resources, it should be the first action we take, not what we do if there happens to be money left over. Putting God first shows honor; including Him only as an after thought does not.

Third, we are called to give with “no strings attached.” True giving is a return of our love for God unconditionally, just as He loves us unconditionally. Funding for special projects or “pet ministries” is a wonderful thing, but those gifts should be made in excess of our regular gifts to the parish. When we volunteer, we must be willing to take direction and do things in a way consistent with the overall good of the parish, and not have an attitude of “my way or the highway.” Giving with “no strings” is serving others; giving with conditions sometimes means being served.

Finally, we are called to give in a manner that is sacrificial. Giving sacrificially makes a gift Holy, and it isn’t a true sacrifice if it is too easily given. Why is the trinket bought for you by a child (with his or her own money they were saving for a new game or toy) so special? Not because of the value of the gift, but because the child had to give up – or at least put off – something they wanted in order to make the gift possible. It is the same with God. If I say, “I’ll volunteer on Tuesday nights, because there is nothing good on TV on Tuesday’s anyway,” am I really giving my time sacrificially? As we give up or put off things that we want, we are saying to God: “I value You, more than these other things.”

These principles of giving can be a hard pill to swallow, at times. Each of us fails to give in gratitude, give in a way that honors God, or give sacrificially from time to time. Part of our Stewardship Journey is recognizing when we fail, and praying for the Grace to do better in the future. When I recognize my own faults and work to improve my “attitude of gratitude,” I am cooperating with the Grace being freely offered. In that way, Stewardship is given to us as a means to greater Grace.

As a result, there are benefits to sacrificial giving. Once you cooperate with Grace and give in a sacrificial manner, you may notice that you begin to see giving in a different light. There is a satisfaction in being generous and a fuller sense of community in the parish. There is an increased awareness of God actually being first in our lives and recognition of our dependence on Him for all that we have. And, there is a heightened sensitivity to our society’s materialism and consumerism, and an increased awareness to our own susceptibility to those things. Our giving grounds us deeper in the fullness of God’s Grace. As Martha Stewart would say, “That’s a good thing.”

Throughout the year, I have heard a number of people asking a question similar to one of these two:

What if I haven't been giving of my time, talent, or treasure?

Each of us is called to understand and respond to the principles of stewardship which I have summarized over the last few months. Each parishioner is responsible to be a good steward of his or her own resources, and to encourage that same stewardship within the Parish. In order to best understand our individual role in the continuing efforts to be wise stewards, we must periodically submit ourselves to God's Will via prayer – either before the Lord Present in the Blessed Sacrament, or in another quiet prayer time – listening and discerning what God would have you give of your time, your talents, and your financial resources.

It is easy to dismiss the stewardship model as a “gimmick” because it runs contrary to our human tendency to see our resources as “our resources”. By laying the issue at the feet of Christ in prayer, we are allowing God to change us and mold our relationship to Him. If each of us will discern ways to unite ourselves in the stewardship of God's abundant gifts, we will strengthen our Church.

I give, but would like to give more. How do I find a way to do that?

Again, through prayer, begin to discern ways to find more time to give, discover additional opportunities to utilize your talents for the betterment of the Church, or uncover additional financial resources which could be given to build and strengthen our local congregation. Opportunities to give abound here at St. Joan of Arc. Ask God to help you take advantage of the opportunities offered.

Every decision we make requires us to set priorities in our lives. The stewardship model is an attempt to help us define those priorities in light of what God expects from us. Making God the first priority in the areas of time, talent, and treasure isn't easy, but nothing that is good comes easy. The most powerful shift in thinking within the church comes when each of us make time for other things after we have returned our thanks to God, rather than be content to find ways to “squeeze” God into our busy schedules.

There is a brochure titled Stewardship, Tithing, and Sacrificial Giving: Our Response to the Gifts God Has Given Us located in the book rack near the kiosk area of the church. Please take one as a handy way to review the principles of stewardship. Also there, you will find a small blue card. On one side is the printed Prayer of Stewardship, and on the other side a “Examination of Conscience” for stewardship-related matters.

During Advent and the Christmas season, let us each pray that in the new year every parishioner will find ways to give a little more, stepping up toward the expectations God holds for each of us.

As a paid staff member, I have a duty to my job, as well as the normal responsibilities of a parishioner, when it comes to managing and utilizing the resources or our spiritual home. Members of the ministerial staff – both ordained and lay, paid and volunteer – work to be accountable and responsible to the best interests of our parish. In every action, we are called to balance the immediate needs of individuals with the long-term needs of the parish at large. That is true of how we manage the finances of the parish, as well as the physical resources we are blessed with.

It is obvious to every visitor to St. Joan of Arc that we have a beautiful facility which allows us to do things many churches can only dream of doing, right here on our campus. With that blessing, though, comes responsibility: maintenance, cleaning, and scheduling. And with the execution of those responsibilities comes the opportunity for others to either participate in the stewardship of the parish, or to actively oppose it.

How do the individual members of the parish participate in the stewardship of our facility? We are called to a share of stewardship by utilizing the facility in a responsible manner. This includes the following:

• using rooms or areas for activities consistent with the mission of the church;

• using rooms/areas for activities that fit well in the area being used;

• taking care to not damage the building, including furniture, walls, etc.;

• leaving the area clean and cared for;

• reporting problems to the parish staff so repairs can be made or problems addressed;

• respecting those using other parts of the facility by keeping noise level down, not interrupting other meetings, and using only the space needed;

• recognizing the need to schedule rooms, and to only use rooms for activities that are on the parish schedule;

• use the facility in a way to minimize costs.

The first few of these require a little thought, but aren't that difficult to accomplish. Obviously, the parish facility should only be used for things that are consistent with Catholic teaching. We have an active parish with many ministries utilizing the space available and it is only practical that ministries of the church have first priority to the spaces and it is a practical thing for the leadership of various ministries to only utilize the space that is actually needed for that ministry, based on the number of people involved and the type of activity. As we all use the facility, we should take great care to maintain it to the best of our ability, making sure we don't cause any damage, cleaning up messes when they occur, and reporting maintenance problems promptly.

The final three of these take a bit more resolve. All three of these can be addressed through the application of a generous dose of Christian Charity.

We are a big parish with many activities planned. When we are using the building, it is easy to forget that other ministries and groups may be using it at the same time. Often, in our exuberance, we forget ourselves and accidentally interrupt another meeting or make it more difficult for someone else to accomplish their ministry. There are two ways to address this. First, by being aware of the other activities going on around us in the parish. Second, by actively reminding ourselves that while our event or ministry is important to the health of the parish and the spread of the Gospel, all around us other equally important activities are taking place.

Because we are so active, it is important that we utilize our space in the most efficient way possible. Even though we have more space to use than ever before, it is still limited space. The need to utilize the Parish Schedule is paramount to a smooth operation of ministries. Stacey Jones is the staff member responsible for scheduling the facility, and all activities should be funneled through her office. She will work with ministries or individuals to make sure the room being used is the best fit for the event, that no one else is already scheduled to use the room, and that all legal issues are covered in preparation for the event. Failure to properly schedule an event can lead to conflicts between ministries, using parish space in an inefficient manner, increased inefficiency in housekeeping duties, and – in some cases – even putting the parish in legal jeopardy. Again, none of these are intended consequences, but are the reality of our need to properly schedule the facility. Please remember this when planning an event: an event, ministry, fund raiser, or meeting cannot be held here in our building if it is not on the official parish schedule at least one week prior to the event.

Finally, we should all use the building in a way to minimize our financial costs. This includes little things like only using the automatic doors if you have a legitimate need to and big things like taking care to not damage church property. Everyone should be aware of things like not leaving outside doors propped open, turning off lights not in use, not using the elevators unless needed for a physical reason or to move large quantities of materials between rooms, walking on the paved areas whenever possible outside, and supervising children at all times. When we fail to do these things, we increase our use of energy resources, increase our housekeeping and maintenance costs, and shorten the longevity of our material possessions.

If each of us will take the time to consider these points as we go about our normal routine at the church, we will be able to further the cause of stewardship while protecting and maintaining our beautiful facility.

The Catechism says this: “Grace is a participation in the life of God. It introduces us into the intimacy of Trinitarian life.” It is in this context that we should look upon the concept of Christian Stewardship, not as a “gimmick” to get people to do more and give more, but as a means of more fully participating in the life of God.

But just as in other forms that God's Grace takes on, the grace offered to us through Christian Stewardship requires our free response to the free gift offered. God has placed in each of us a longing for truth and goodness that only He can satisfy, and that longing is filled through the free grace given us in various areas of our lives. This longing is sometimes referred to as the “God-shaped hole” in our lives.

The grace of Christian Stewardship is aimed square and true at the heart of the “God-shaped hole” in many of our lives. How often do we – such modern, sophisticated, and self-sufficient people – find ourselves worried, distressed, or overcome by problems of finances, priorities, time, and ability? The grace of stewardship is offered to counteract these “modern” concerns, and yet it isn't forced upon us in some legalistic manner. It is offered to us freely, requiring only our free consent to flow in our lives.

Stewardship as a grace challenges us to let go of our false notions that we are somehow in control of our own lives, our skills, our talents, our material possessions, even our health. Stewardship is an attitude of recognition of our total dependence on God, and an acknowledgment that we are only caretakers of what belongs to God. All of God's gifts are good, and as caretakers of His gifts, we are called to use them responsibly, use them for His greater glory, and share them generously with others. And since God never stops giving, our opportunity – our responsibility – to reciprocate by giving back to God and by sharing with others never ends. This is why we are to offer back to God our time, our talents, and our treasure.

How does stewardship become a grace? It helps us develop a lifestyle that acknowledges God's Divinity and Sovereignty. It helps us reduce undue anxiety over our finances, our material possessions, and our circumstances. It helps us develop a lifestyle of sharing which allows us to participate in the extension of God's Grace to others. It allows us to face the truth that what we are – and what we have – is not ours, but belongs completely to God. It attacks our sinful pride at its source, and replaces that pride with gratitude and thankfulness toward God.

Stewardship is not a gimmick or program. It is a way of life. It is our free consent to the ordering of our lives which God has instituted for our conversion.

A simple explanation of this is that – at least on some level – talent is directly tied to our gifts of both talent and treasure. The amount of our monetary gifts which we have available to share with the church or other worthy causes is impacted by our vocational talents. Similarly, the areas in which we volunteer are tied to our areas of spiritual talent – our areas of charism. In both cases, our talents – whether vocational or spiritual – are gifts given to us by a loving God who desires that we play an active role in His working in our world.

But, it will serve us well to consider the talents we each have outside of this basic framework. Why? Because as Stewards, we are called to not just maintain and protect our talents, but we are to develop, grow, and increase them. Sometimes this requires measured risk taking.

In St. Matthew's Gospel (Chapter 25, verses 14-30) we are given the parable of the talents. Those who took measured risk and saw a return on the investment are praised for returning to the master more than what he had given them. The servant who fails to realize a return on the talents given him, is chastised for allowing fear to paralyze him into inaction.

Conversely, in the 31^st chapter of Proverbs (verses 10-13) – in a section sub-titled “The Ideal Wife” - we find praises heaped upon the wife who works hard and increases her wealth to share with the poor, is innovative in her working, manages her household resources in a way which multiplies and not just maintains, and ultimately uses her God-given talents to facilitate the entire state of affairs.

In our own lives, we sometimes find ourselves playing the role of the fear-paralyzed servant more often than we follow the example of the woman in Proverbs. We find ourselves in this position for two common reasons. First, we hold to the (false) notion that most of our gifts aren't “sacred enough” to be used in the church; that if we can't sing, or teach, or directly minister, then our talents aren't useful. The second belief is that even if our talents are really needed, there is probably someone out there who can do it better than us, so it is their responsibility to share, not ours.

Both of these attitudes are a a result of a kind of fear: a fear of making ourselves vulnerable and a fear of “outside the box” thinking.

The truth of the matter is that our talents – no matter what they are – can be used to the Glory of God, and we have a responsibility to use them. Each of us is different, and we each have something unique and eccentric to offer. When even one of us fails to share our talents – when we let our human fears paralyze us – we weaken our Spiritual Home.

Sometimes sharing our gifts requires creativity, especially when it comes to using talents which aren't immediately recognizable as “church” talents. Consider these real-world examples:

• A protestant church in Indianapolis, where a man who's talents are mechanical in nature, ministers to fellow parishioners by offering car repair and maintenance services free of charge.

• A Catholic church in Charleston, South Carolina where several building-gifted individuals have built multiple portable homes to be used by Hurricane victims.

• Our own “Sweat Equity” volunteers who have utilized mechanical, building, maintenance, electrical, and other talents to help maintain and expand our parish building.

• The “Grand Auction of Unusual and Eccentric Talents” which helped a church raise thousands of dollars by auctioning things like ski lessons, computer or math tutoring, cleaning services, babysitting, yodeling instruction (seriously), cooking lessons, sewing, home decorating help, and other “secular” talents.

In the coming months, each of us will be asked to find new and creative ways to utilize our talents in the service of Christ. Be thinking about how you – a unique, important part of our parish – can lend your talents to the increase of our Spiritual Home, the benefit of our local Catholic community, and the furthering of the Gospel message.

- In Orange City, the woman who had been reported as "trampled" by Wal-Mart shoppers who were vying for a $30 DVD player turns out to make these kinds of claims quite often...9 times in fact.
- In Ocala, there was bomb that fell to earth near some hunters. The lead-in reads: "Part of the Ocala National Forest is a designated Navy bombing range, but a group of hunters say Navy pilots missed their target and dropped a bomb only 400 yards from them on Thanksgiving day." I'd say the hunters were just mad because it is clearly muzzle-loader season, not bombing season for deer...
- "Perverts" in Seminole (I kinda think the name is ironic, don't you?) were in for a surprise: "Local 6 News traveled with officers on a sting operation at the Environmental Studies Center located just off state Road 17-92 in Seminole and found adults, mostly men, exposing themselves and soliciting undercover officers for sex. "
- In Ormond Beach, a 77-year-old man named Rupert Sessions fell for the Nigerian email scam (You know, where if you just send Mr. Ombtumbu your bank account info, he'll send you $7 million...) and reportedly lost approximately $400,000.
- And, finally (actually there is more, but I'm tired of typing this stuff) in Orlando, a man was caught, on tape, operating a fake law firm staffed by convicted drug felons. The clients knew it was a fake firm because he kept taking their money and not getting them anything in return...oh, wait a minute......

1. Every child should have access to a flu shot.
2. Flu shots should be available cheap enough that economic status isn't a barrier to receiving the shot.
3. If the Flu shots are cheaper (or even free), we will have greater numbers of children who are given the shot.
4. The way to ensure more children get the shot is to use the purchasing power of the Federal Government to buy the vaccine on behalf of children.
5. The way to ensure the governement doesn't break the bank in buying up all this vaccine is to impose price caps and regulations to limit the profit the "greedy" drug companies make (those bastards!).

So, how did the plan implemented based on the above guidelines work out?

For starters, we learned that not every child will get a flu shot, even if they are cheap or free. The percentage of children covered tops out around 75%. Providing a child with an immunization is a noble and compassionate goal. But, even if given on a proverbial silver platter, not every parent wants a flu shot for their child.

We also learned that when the Federal Government imposes price caps and profit caps on American drug companies, there comes a time when the motivation to research, develop, test, produce, and market a drug is no longer there. Tiny profits (or even, in this case, actual losses) combined with an ever-increasing threat of gigantic liability rewards for sometimes-ridiculous lawsuits cause the American companies to throw up their hands and say, "Enough. We aren't in the business of producing things to give them away for free."

So, we were left to depend upon a foreign manufacturer of an important product. That supplier made a mistake, and WE are paying for it. We are paying for it because in an effort to do something good, we ignored the reality of how the world works. And, if we aren't careful, it won't just be flu vaccine that we have to worry about, it will end up being all of our prescription drugs.

It is a fine line to balance: on one hand, it seems "greedy" to charge $30 or $40 per dose for a drug it costs only pennies to manufacture. On the other hand, the cost of production is only one small part of the actual cost of a drug. The money spent on research, development, and testing over the sometimes-several-decades it takes to develop a new medication is staggering. To undercut that profit margin which allows for continual development of new prescriptions is a ticket to a stagnated industry, and ultimately, if there is no profit, to the end of the industry altogether.

Imagine, if you will, the idea of everyone owning their own car. A new car, even, because the old cars that some poor people drive are gas-guzzling, foul-smelling, death traps without modern safety features. Think of the number of lives we could save every year by providing everyone with a brand new car, not to mention to cleaner air and less dependence upon foreign oil!!!

But, those greedy car companies charge between $20,000 and $35,000 for a modern, American-made car. And you know the actual cost of the metal and aluminum and fiberglass for a car is probably less than $2,000. If cars only cost $2,000, almost everyone could afford a new one, and those who can't, we could buy them one!

Of course, we wouldn't FORCE anyone to take one of the cars we provide for them. They could buy some other car, if they wanted to waste their money. We wouldn't FORCE them to join up with our Universal Car Coverage plan, but who in their right mind wouldn't choose to?

Yeah, the car companies will complain that we aren't considering the labor costs of tooling the parts, then assembling them. And we aren't thinking through the fact that they pay people to design and refine the cars. Or the cost of having an HR department, and a payroll staff, and a legal staff who deal with all of the regulations imposed by the Department of Labor, the EPA, and various other Federal Agencies. They will balk at losing $15,000 or more, per car (and under our plan, that's PER AMERICAN) but they are just being greedy.

And we'll all be surprised when they close their doors, right? How greedy.

Hopefully, this event will produce a corrective action within the healthcare industry.

But I'm not holding my breath.

ESW - October 2004

• The New American Bible Online
• The Catechism of the Catholic Church Online
• The Nazareth Master Catechism (Comparative Catechism)
  
  
  

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  The blogs below are a great place to get some inspiration.
  
  

Some Favorites:

• Great advice, and you're right. The more I write the more I'm getting a hang of how the "flow" should go.
• Thanks for your support. It's nice to get constructive feedback. I think I need to work on more of the physical details but I always feel too wordy when I describe too much and am afraid of boring a reader. I guess finding a good balance is key.
• I sincerely appreciate the thought and effort you put into your critiques. Thanks for your time. You're dead-on about the delayed start, Eric. I shot for quirky without a clear sense of direction and I didn't fully clean up my meandering.
• I really appreciate the helpful comments - these are what I call a critique!
• Wow...thanks, Eric. That was one of the very best critiques I've ever received, here or anywhere else! Right on about the cliche. I didn't give it any thought when I wrote it. I usually avoid cliches but...well, sometimes they seem to be right, to fit. LOL...I sure didn't know that pigs don't sweat much. Now, I'm going to look it up and find out why! Thanks, again...very much.
• Thanks, Eric for the detailed critique. I can see a lot of sense in a lot of what you say. I know I have a tendency toward passive sentence construction, and no matter how hard I try it still sneaks in.
• I think you've given me a lot to think about and pointed me in the direction of improving this chapter, which is very much appreciated.

• Light Critique and Edit: Gives a general critique of the work, points out major flaws in story structure, character development, plot points, point of view inconsistencies, and the like, while providing feedback on major errors in grammar, punctuation, and spelling. As with any good critique, it should also point out the work's strengths and offer suggestions on how to magnify those strengths.
• Heavy Critique and Edit: Takes the approach above, but offers a more detailed view. Where a light critique and edit will typically run from one to two pages, a heavy critique will often run in excess of five pages, with a much more specific format. Less generalization, more specifics.
• Line Critique and Edit: This is the most intensive format: line-by-line, page by page. Every thought that comes to mind on how to improve the manuscript.