Perfection

If we follow the Galilean long enough in our reading of the Sermon on the Mount, he will throw us a curve ball. He does it several times. He never does it more bluntly and devastatingly, though, as in Chapter 5, Verse 48, when he tells us to

“Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

Wow. Now modern revisionists love to monkey with translations, particularly when they concern the love of money. The various translations of this “moral imperative,” however, vary barely a diphthong. They all translate, almost verbatim, as

“Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

Wow. We thought only the heavenly Father was perfect. What does he mean telling us to be perfect?

I can just hear Franklin Graham now, if he were ever to read the Sermon On The Mount. “Why he’s kidding of course, having us on for one of his little inside jokes. That must mean some of the other tripe about loving your neighbor and attending ‘the least of those among us’ must be jokes as well.”

“I wasn’t joking at all,” the Galilean told me not long ago. It seems that he intended “The Sermon” have some low-breaking curves mixed in with the straight fast balls. Amy Butler of Baptist News Global expressed it well:

“Most of us really like certain parts of the Sermon on the Mount — the parts about the lilies of the field and where your treasure is there will your heart be also. But there are lots of other parts of the sermon, and frankly, many of them are quite onerous. There’s the love your enemies part, direction about not being a hypocrite, hard words about divorce, and a warning against religious leaders who smile too much. If you listen to the whole thing instead of picking and choosing the passages you like, I will guarantee you’ll feel uncomfortable …”

So, what about “being perfect?”

I think it’s something that guitar players would know about. They know that when you try to emulate, or get to play along with, someone better than you, you will get better. You’ll never be a Chet Atkins, Hank Garland, Merle Travis, or Robert Johnson, but you’ll get better. It’s a heck of a lot more effective than trying to emulate me, or listening to a rock and roll “shredder” tell us how BB King did what he did.

That would be like me explaining exactly how Muhammad Ali followed up a left jab with a right uppercut, or how William Faulkner could describe, “… a Southern boy, fourteen years old … .”

But maybe the Galilean was talking about striving, not achieving. In seeking righteousness, wouldn’t it be a lot better to emulate a truly righteous person rather than a tv evangelist who simply wants a new jet?

I know what my anti-theist friends are thinking. “Are we to emulate a spirit figure who, we are told, once destroyed every baby on the planet because he got mad at their parents?

I think baseball players would understand this one. I think they would tell you that we have to figure out, in this short life, how to handle the curve balls as well as the straight fast balls.

Let’s close this morn with a “wee bit o’perfection.”

The guitar as a path
to righteousness?
I report. You decide.

Saturdays in the City

Saturday mornings were special in our South Broadway neighborhood in Little Rock back in the 1970s. The afternoons waited for more anguish in renovating homes, but mornings were a time for a soft, gentle re-entry into life.

Our neo-hippie neighbor across the alley would start things about the time the last family started moving about. Majestic tones of a symphony would drift through the area, something beautiful but largely unknown, like the piece composed by Edward Elgar for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. That’s when you knew he had coffee ground for visitors, deep, dark, rich coffee he ordered specially brewed from a small, obscure, company in Seattle called Starbucks. The thought of it would draw one like a tractor beam.

Weekends were also a prime time for discarding unwanted junk. You just put it in the alley and the city would haul it off come the new week. Unless …

Unless our neighborhood scavengers saw it and deemed someone’s else’s junk could be a treasure to a person possessed of high degree of imagination. Brenda and a resident of the last house to the south were the pilferes très excellent. They would meet in the alley to inspect the discarded items that each had placed in the alley and those of other neighbors as well. Sometimes their chatter mixed in the air with the sounds of Mahler.

“Why, the metal in it alone is worth keeping,” one would say.

“It has to be good for something,” the other would say.

“You want it?”

“Yeah, but you can keep it.”

“You can have the next one.”

They were courteous hoarders, these two. During a recent visit nearly 40 years later, a spouse and I agreed that both families still stored items rescued from destruction in that old alley.

Back to Saturdays, sometimes the lady at 22^nd and Broadway would stroll by in her Sunday best, white gloves and all. In all likelihood, she would hand you a present that she had just prepared that morning. It might be an empty chewing gum package wrapped in yarning twine, a tree’s twig with a ribbon, or something equally imaginative. All her gifts were assembled from items picked up during her morning walks. She’d hand it to you, smile with pride, and move on.

Another alley resident was true free-spirit, a nonconformist who, had she thought in those terms, might have considered herself an early feminist. She’s a grandmother now, and writes editorials for a statewide newspaper in what may be the most conservative state in America, no doubt causing waves that reach tsunami level. Good for her.

A couple from down the street might walk by and nod. I’m not sure what the younger did, but his partner was, for a tragically short period of time, the first openly-gay music director at one of the city’s oldest and most prestigious churches. We never knew where they went after the congregation of Christians voted to terminate him after hearing the news.

At the end of the block, north, was a brick apartment building built behind the house facing Broadway. It was government-subsidized and boasted a diversified group, including a family who spent weekends travelling, with their young children, to far away churches where they spread their form of Christianity. The upper-floor occupants were more transient and sometimes deposited products of their weekend euphoria-spells in the alley. They never bothered anyone, though. “Like Mack and boys,” they tended to their own adventures.

That describes our life pretty well. We had our own little “Cannery Row,” which was nothing more than an obscure alley in a neglected part of town in a City that had been cruelly treated by those who create history. We were simply trying to preserve some of the better remnants of its history.

We’d start back at it just after lunch.

You know there's a dead
rat under the kitchen.
Ain't historic preservation fun?

Happy Hour

Why do people tackle the job of restoring an old home? I don’t know. I plan to write a song about it someday. I’ll call it A Special Kind of Crazy. That sure describes Brenda and me back in the 1970s. Did I ever mention that we were young, dumb, and full of fantasies?

Oh, I’ll confess, there were some bright spots mixed in with all the plaster dust, like the time it rained.

See, I promised once that I would tell you about built-in gutters. For the more sane and fortunate readers who have lived in apartments in adulthood, gutters and downspouts refer to systems that are built into or attached to a structure (or auxiliary structure garage, canopy, etc.) to facilitate the orderly conveyance of rainwater or melting snow from the roof.

Nowadays, gutters are simply metal troughs attached to the eave of a building. They are ugly, functional, almost impossible to keep cleaned, and fairly— son I say “fairly”—easy to replace.

Back in the day when our cottage on South Broadway in Little Rock was built, gutters were built into the roof structure. They were elegant, functional, unobtrusive, subject to deterioration in time, and frighteningly costly to repair, even more so to renovate. Here's sort of how they looked.

This was before the days of purists, so some folks simply put plywood over the gutters, roofed over it all, and then used modern gutters. That would cause an epidemic of apoplexy amongst the “History Police” these days.

At any rate, we were undecided when we called the most prominent roofing company in the Little Rock area to come out and examine the old roofing on our little cottage and provide some cost estimates. Then we would bring our own “experts” in, buy them some beer, and get the benefit of their experience on their own renovations. There would be plenty of time for lengthy discussion over the coming weekend, as two days of heavy rain appeared in the forecast.

Something happened. I’m sure it occurs in the best of companies or families. People failed to talk to one another. A crew from the roofing company appeared Friday morning, removed a section of roofing whereupon they noticed that it was that magic moment in Arkansas when the forces of the Dark One invade the minds of workers and wreak most of the heartbreak that disrupts normal, happy lives. I’m talking, of course, about “quitting time on Friday,” Satan’s Happy Hour.

With a whole section of wooden planking exposed, the crew left and the rains came. By Monday, the floor below, and Brenda’s piano, were soaked. She was looking for her pistol, and I was frantically calling the roofing company.

After much explanation, recrimination, apology, and allowing of “the coffee to cool,” a solution was reached. The original estimate on a new roof would stand, but the work would include, at no cost—son I say “no cost”—to the homeowners, the complete restoration of the built-in gutter system.

That’s how we got the replaced on our home, much to the envy of our friends and neighbors. We never told them the whole story, just let them think we were prosperous and possessed of the purest propensities in preservation. Our motto was, “If you’re gonna do it, do it right.”

Right.

Sometimes I wonder if those gutters still work.

Into each life,
 a little rain must fall.

The Great Falling

Things I think about when I see kids with their eyes glued to a cell phone.

It was back on February 17, 1980 and John Woodruff and I had just started our last “long run” before we planned to attempt the Arkansas Marathon in Booneville on March 1. We had delayed starting because we wanted to watch TV’s live broadcast of the demolition of the Marion and Grady Manning hotels on the Arkansas River. At the last minute, someone thought they saw a figure in one of the buildings and the implosion was delayed while they made a search.

We decided that the affair might take all morning and we’d best not test the limits of spousal endurance any longer. We took off. The first topic of conversation was how neither of us would have volunteered to check a building chock full of dynamite waiting to go off.

John had this funny way of turning his head toward you, but not his body, when something troubled him. “I guess somebody had to do it,” was all he said.

We crossed the gash through Downtown Little Rock that was to become Interstate 630 and weeded our way over to Main Street, planning to swing back and cross the Broadway Bridge so as to miss the crowds gathered at the hotels. We hazily thought we might run by on the way back and view the wreckage. We hadn’t heard any noise, and figured the search was still in progress.

Somewhere along Third Street, we turned west. Just as we did, a gap appeared and provided us a clear view of the two hotels. We slowed to take one last look at the historic facades.

Then it happened. We heard the explosion, saw a cloud of dust fly from the earth, and saw each of the grand old ladies buckle as a person does whose knees have given way. We stood and stared like two country kids seeing a circus elephant for the first time. It last only a few seconds and dust filled the space where so many deals had been brokered, so many liaisons had been consummated, so many memories created, and so much history made. So quick and easy do the forces of destruction destroy.

Did I mention that John was a master of the understatement? He turned to me in that funny way of his and said, “Well we got to see it after all, didn’t we”? Then he took off toward Fort Roots Hill. I followed.

It was a moment I’ll never forget and I still bless the luck of our accidental timing that day. John and I would remain friends, with his even becoming my editor years later, until his premature death from cancer. His passing would create a hole in our lives, much like the hole in history that the demolition had created on that cold November morning. But we would always have Demolition Day. Of all the moments we shared, sometimes trying to make our feet take one more step, sometimes trying to untangle my turgid narrative, or sometimes just sitting and talking of shoes, and ships, and such, we never shared a more intimate moment than the day the Great Ladies fell.

Fallen but not forgotten.

Jogging Through The Past

When I left you yesterday, it was February 17, 1980, a wintery day in Little Rock. There were clear skies, and the chilly temperature was perfect for jogging. My friend, and sometimes running, buddy John Woodruff, and I were set to follow an advance team of faster runners on a 20+ mile jog, our last before the Arkansas Marathon coming up on March First.

We had but one regret. There was excitement in Little Rock that day. Two icons of Arkansas history were to be imploded that morning and the whole city was prepared to watch, either in person or live TV. The majestic Marion Hotel and its neighbor, the Grady Manning, had been fixtures in the city for ages. Our schedules would force us to miss their end.

Jewish businessman Herman Kahn broke ground on the Marion Hotel in 1905. The hotel bore the famous nickname "The Meeting Place of Arkansas." The Marion Hotel had five hundred rooms, a marble fish pond in the main lobby, green carpets, and green leather couches. The bellboys also wore green twill uniforms. Interestingly, Kahn’s great-grandson, Jimmy Moses, as a dreamer and developer, is making a significant impact today on the physical setting of Little Rock.

Pulitzer Prize winning author Richard Ford, before he was a famous writer and during summers as a boy, lived in Room 600 of the Marion, where his grandfather, Ben Shelley, was manager. Other famous guests of the hotel included Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Douglas McArthur, Will Rogers, Helen Keller, and Charles Lindbergh.

In our time though, the Marion and Manning had been more widely known for phenomenon tinged with notoriety. They were favored meeting places of the Arkansas legislature. In an infamous bar, in the Marion, known as the “Gar Hole,” many, in not most, of the legislative decisions that determined our state’s future were made during that era. Note to my out-of-state friends: the gar is a trash fish, native to Arkansas lowlands, that grows to great lengths. They say the bar had a stuffed one on the wall, but I never saw it.

Stories abound, some even repeatable. I’ll share one that I heard years after the Gar Hole ceased to exist. An old barber, who had worked in the Marion during the heyday of legislative history, told it to me. It occurred, this story, during the reign of State Representative Paul Van Dalsem, one of the acknowledged bosses of the legislature for years. Yes, he’s the one who became locally infamous for his remark about some female detractors. All he said was that in Perry County (his home), such would-be troublemakers were kept “barefoot and pregnant.” Arkansas women were a little touchy back in those days. Many still are. Others have become inured to such degradations.

Anyway, according to my barber, the representative became outraged when he heard that the Gar Hole was raising the price of a beer from a quarter to thirty cents. Almost immediately, a bill appeared on the legislative agenda that would seriously and adversely affect bars in our state fitting the description of the infamous Gar Hole. Next day, it was announced that the price of beer stayed at a quarter. The bill disappeared into the dustbin of legislative history.

So that was what the City of Little Rock and the State of Arkansas were going to lose that day. One might say it was the end of an era. One would be more accurate in saying that the day would begin the evolution of an era.

As William Faulkner once observed in his famous novel, Requiem for a Nun, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

The Paul Van Dalsems and his pals from the Arkansas Legislature still hang out here, in spirit, if not in body. They all changed political parties a few years ago. Don’t ask me to explain. The answer is highly complicated but terrifyingly simple. Decisions affecting our state are still being made in bars and secret meeting places. Those places just aren’t in our state, where innocent-looking barbers might overhear.

But John Woodruff and I knew nothing of all that on this fine winter morning. All we knew was that we were off on an adventure in a city that we both loved.

Our seat of government?

It was cold and clear that morning February 17, 1980 as our small band of adventurers gathered on South Broadway for our last long run before the Arkansas Marathon, coming up on March First. My neighbor and a friend were going to run ahead since they were slim, lightweight fellers with a flair for speed. My running buddy, John Woodruff, and I would follow. We were fairly lightweight ourselves, after months of preparation. Still, “slow and steady” was our style.

Our path would take us from South Broadway, over the Arkansas River to North Little Rock. From there, we would follow the path of an old urban renewal project to the base of Fort Roots Hill. This was a former military base, the land having been traded to the Federal Government in 1892 in exchange for the property now known as MacArthur Park. The base was named for Congressman Logan H. Roots in recognition for his work in the negotiations

 After jogging up the hill, some 500 feet or so in elevation, we would turn around and head back south through Little Rock. We would head for the new interstate bypass that would soon circle the city to the south and east. Most of the roadway was complete to the south. It was suitable for jogging all the way to the Arkansas River, where they were just beginning to build the new bridge. We would pass north of the community of College Station, south of Little Rock’s airport, turn around at the river and come home, a little over 20 miles we figured.

Did I mention we were young and foolish?

You were actually supposed to be a little ahead of that distance with a couple of weeks to go. We started late in our preparations, and, as I have hinted, we were not good about reaching cognitive and reasoned conclusions. So, with our wives not thinking of us at all, and with gentlemen all over Arkansas then-a-bed and, no doubt thinking themselves accurs’d they were not there, most certainly soon to hold their manhoods cheap while any would speak of our “Demolition Day” run, we started, our brave band of brothers.

Demolition Day run? Oh, did I forget to mention that they were going to blow down a couple of old hotels in Little Rock that day? Stay Tuned.

Across the River and up to the
top of the hill we went, back in the day.

Theology Time

Perhaps I should call these Sunday morning musings, “Life As the Sermon On the Mount.” There are such beautiful passage within this short sermon that one certainly could form a life’s guidance from it. Even a non-Christian can. Actually, it’s many “Christians” I know who would be best-served to read it. That’s just my opinion, though.

Today, we get to a segment that puzzles me. It’s almost what I would call a “spiritual oxymoron.” For you Ivy League grads, an oxymoron refers to a figure of speech in which apparently contradictory terms appear in conjunction (e.g. “faith unfaithful kept him falsely true”). I used one yesterday in describing a long-departed friend as having a “simple and complex soul.” I thought it described this person well, but who am I to say?

Back to the Galilean, he puzzles the hell out of me when he gives us the passage recorded in Chapter Six, verses 25-34. Here he is, on the one hand giving us a whole list of concerns in terms of: do, dare, or desist from. On the other hand, he is saying, “Don’t worry about a thing.” Now a real hard-core evangelist might not struggle with that. But, “Don’t worry, just hate anyone who is different” may not work as a life-guide for most of us.

I understand the advice in not allowing worry to destroy our lives. I do. I heard this week something about someone having a “panic attack.” I worry that I might offend, but I place panic attacks in the same category as so-called PTSD. That is to say the malady probably exists, but it is highly over-diagnosed, over-publicized, over-sensationalized, over-used as an excuse for bad behavior, and extremely, extremely rare. Enough said about that.

So, worry can be carried ridiculous extremes. On the other hand, legitimate concerns can save lives, families, neighborhoods, and nations. Had we exercised proper concerns, America might indeed find itself becoming that “shining city on a hill” instead of whatever it is that we are becoming. In fact, the Galilean himself has shared with me that we need to be more concerned about what is happening. He didn’t elaborate, just said, “Ya’ll (he is from Lower Galilee, you know) need to think about what ‘great’ really means.”

Anyway, here’s my take on today's segment of The Sermon on the Mount. The speaker here faces what any public speaker in history faced. That is the need to talk in terms that the average listener can understand. When the “nail” of your message is faith, the hammer of your message must not waiver with thoughts of “what about this or what about that” or “have you considered this or have you considered that?” Those questions are for philosophers and scientists, not messiahs. The question posed on The Mount was a simple and complex one.

A point comes to mind. I worry that I’ve never read, in one sitting, Alfred Lord Tennyson’s magnificent poem In Memoriam, the opus he wrote in memory of his beloved friend Arthur Hallam.  I received an “A” in a graduate-level literature class at the U of A once, after I claimed I had. But that darned thing is too long, obtuse, and crammed with meaning to digest all at once. Like the movie Lawrence of Arabia, I’ve probably absorbed it all in small pieces. Some things are better done that way, like The Sermon itself.

Back to In Memoriam, I particularly love two passages in it. One is when Tennyson cautions the “touchy-feely” crowd against seeking moral guidance from the animal kingdom with, “nature red in tooth and claw.”

The other, and more to the point here, is, “I must lose myself in action lest I wither in despair.”

We can, therefore, take much from this portion of The Sermon, even though we must actively use our heads. Whether we turn to faith, statistics, history, or our own ability to persevere against all odds (here, the history of our African-American brothers and sisters can provide a guide), we can place worry in its proper place.

We must. We owe that much allegiance to a work that contains one of the most beautiful passages ever recorded:

“And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these.”

Peace