The Girl Behind the Fast Food Visor

Having stared at the dollar menu he had memorized but does because it just seems part of the routine, he approached (having known before he entered the door exactly what he was going to order) the counter and heard

exactly what he knew he was going to hear before he said what he was going to order. “Welcome. May I take your order?” He hardly heard her and momentarily forgot what it was he was going to order,

which he had known forever because it was what he always orders. She was short and had her visor pushed forward and down covering her eyes. She looked up just long enough to greet him and it was

then he saw her eye and the left side of her face. He quickly looked at her name-tag and she just as quickly looked back down at the register. A patch of grayish, plastic like skin had been attached tautly to the side of her face on top

of the cheekbone and the skin around her eye was scar tissue and red mucous membrane rimmed the eyeball and he wondered how she blinked. Congenital, a fire, a drunken father’s blow with a fireplace poker, a car crash?

He wondered if the kids at school ever taunted her or if she would be asked to the prom. He wondered if she ever looked anyone straight in the eye. The nanosecond was an eternity of wondering. He thought of the Buddha and that all of

life was suffering, and he didn’t want her to suffer anymore. He wanted to shout silently “Heal!” and he wanted fresh, new pink skin to form on her cheekbone and an eyelid and long beautiful lashes to grow under the Fast Food

visor and he wanted her to push that visor up and back and wink a coquettish wink at him with her left eye. “May I have a Sausage Muffin, please?” “For here or to go?”  “For here, Leah. What a beautiful name for a beautiful young lady.”

She continued to stare straight ahead at the register with her visor pulled forward and down and said, “Thank you very much.” He could see her lips and he thought/hoped he could see a little smile but she never looked him in the eye.

He moved down the counter to wait in the waiting place for the Sausage Muffin, opened the wrapper, lifted the bun, squirted some ketchup on the sausage, replaced the bun, closed the wrapper, grabbed two napkins, sat down by the window

as he always does in the routine, turned to look out of the window opposite the counter like maybe a passing car caught his attention, or like he was watching a little girl slide down the slide into her father’s arms

and then he started to cry.

All in the Family

I’ve been thinking about the family;

I’ve been thinking about what’s weird;

I’ve been thinking about the family;

I’ve been thinking that

thinking about the family

is a thing most feared.

Actually, thinking about one’s family

about one’s family being weird

is the endeavor feared by family.

Just about all that

are members of one’s family

avoid the things most feared

like thinking about the weirdness

and where it all comes from

uniquely lived in weirdness

of each person that

is a member of the weirdness

and won’t look at where it’s from.

And so perhaps it’s better

not to think about the family

and just live for worse or better

with just about all that

knowing all think it better

for all in the family.

Well, maybe not all in the family.

When I Was a Campus Minister

In 1971 when I was a campus minister representing ten denominations at a southern state university and I was just a child of twenty-five (I didn’t really represent all ten did I?), I taught an adult church school class in the downtown

Presbyterian Church using Will Campbell’s Up to Our Steeples in Politics. It was Sunday and as I didn’t have any preaching responsibilities given that I was a campus minister at a state school, I was asked to teach by a persuasive Christian Education person.

How could I, a twenty-five year old, teach anyone anything let alone something of significance regarding the Christian faith? One of the members of the class was a young, very young but not quite as young as I was president of a local bank.

He said that he was sick of all the minority (meaning black) poor people who kept complaining about how life had been hard and that they had been denied rights and privileges that so many others took for granted.

He said that he wasn’t part of the Civil War and that it was time for them (meaning blacks) to stop griping and pull themselves up by their bootstraps. When he said it, there was this (what I thought was a slow motion) really long period of silence.

I thought that silence was just me and my righteous really Yankee Christian mind trying to comprehend what it was that the really young Southern racist banker had just said, but, in reality, it was just about everybody else in the class

(except his really dull, smiley, oblivious Southern Belle wife) who just sat there not knowing what to say in part because they were respectful Presbyterians but also because they were just flummoxed by the statement.

This was the South, but it was the mid-south being Bowing Green, Kentucky (a border state) and nobody wished to appear racist, but mostly all the other members of the class knew that the very young president of the bank

had been born with a silver spoon in his mouth and had never worked a cotton picken’ minute for anything he had and, most of all, his daddy had been the president before him. It took me, a stupid Yankee originally from

the south side of Chicago whose parents had fled the Roseland area with the rest of the white flight to the suburbs, to say, “Now, Cleon, what do you think Will Campbell would have to say about that?  Shall we all turn to page 93?”

Even at twenty-five, I knew he was a dumb-ass privileged southern white boy, but it was a Presbyterian Church and, besides to be perfectly honest, I didn’t have anything to brag about given my southern (that is south-side) background. And besides,

I was only twenty-five.  Thank God for page 93.

The Keys Kept Falling Off the Keychain

The keys kept falling off the keychain. They were all over the tub while he was taking a shower.  He got out of the shower and picked up the keys and put them back on the chain and then another key would fall

while she was getting into shape for her athletic endeavor, the nature of which escaped him but nevertheless she was working at it and he was toweling off and picking up keys, which now were all over the floor of the bathroom. He kept picking them up and reattaching them to the keychain.

She stood there in the room with him as he dried off and he just knew that she was slipping away.  She didn’t find the humor humorous anymore and she looked at him with a hint of distain.

Her friends kept coming in and going out of the bathroom helping her get all the stuff together that she needed for her athletic endeavor.  They were out of shape but that didn’t matter; all that mattered was that they were completely focused on helping her get ready for her vague and somewhat mysterious athletic endeavor.

Wrapped in a towel with the keychain hanging from the top edge of the towel, he followed them out of the bathroom down the hall. He was on one side of the long, wide hall and she and her entourage were on the other side.

While they were still in the bathroom, he had decided to beat her to the punch so he said that he thought they should get a divorce, aching inside and hoping that she would swear fidelity and tell him that he was the best thing since sliced bread, but she just looked at him with what looked to him as that same hint of distain.  It didn’t change.

As he stared at her as she made her way down the hall, he saw a short man with thick, wavy, red hair who looked somewhat older than she was but slim and trim and obviously in really good shape.  The red haired man was in front of her but totally focused on her and her needs.  Her husband saw the way she looked at the red haired man and it was the look he wondered if he had ever gotten as he thought back on it.

He knew then she had already decided on the divorce long before he had decided to go on the offensive while they were in the bathroom.  He looked down at the keychain and saw that some keys were missing. He remembered having heard them fall along the way. He retraced his steps picking them up as he went.

Some were still in the tub.

They Say the Devil is in the Details

They say the devil is in the details and that the proof of the pudding (and here the part that makes sense usually gets left off, that being) is in the tasting. What gets proven just by being a bowl of pudding sitting on a counter somewhere?

Doesn’t logic dictate that someone needs to spoon out a bit and place the pudding in the open space that will be used to ingest the pudding (chocolate or vanilla or tapioca) and come to some kind of conclusion as the pudding slides over the various taste

buds on the tongue, a tongue, which will then be used to help form the vibrations emanating from the vocal chords reflecting the decision made by the brain concerning the pudding?

It’s a complicated process that doesn’t get reflected in the truncated, “The proof of the pudding “for owners and players is” or “for the CEOs of the baled out banks is” or whatever “is.”

My own opinion is that the devil is in the game itself details and all, meaning, of course, the cursed game of golf often played by owners and players and CEOs and other not real smart people.

Sometimes as I approach the putt my arms feel like tapioca pudding and all I taste is the acid from the reflux. The truism that makes sense to me is that “the toughest part of the game is played within one hundred yards of the pin.”

I stand behind the ball and envision where I want the drive to go and then stand on the right side of the ball (because I am left handed), take a practice swing, waggle a bit, remember that the video advised “butt out and chin up,”

advice for life and golf (how clever she was) and keep my eye on the ball through the swing, rotating my shoulders as if my arms are a pendulum of a grandfather clock (thanks to my dad for that one) and as my arms move up

and over my right shoulder, watch the ball in flight. How sweet it is to see it fly high and straight and land in the middle of the fairway.  Alone, I wonder where the grounds keeper was to be my gallery when I hit it so sweetly.

I grab my fairway metal (that which used to be persimmon wood) go through the routine and remember again not to lift my head. The ball flies straight and lands just shy of the green. That’s two.  Now within one hundred yards,

I grab the new sand wedge, do exactly the same thing I just did for two strokes and swing, top and flub it and the ball rolls three feet. Repeating the exact same routine (how come it’s not working?)

I flub it again except this time the ball flies on a straight trajectory to the far edge of the green.  At least I’m on.  That’s four and I’ve already lost par.  Putter in hand I take a swipe and the ball travels true to the target landing two feet short.

I approach the ball, my hands get sweaty, my head gets dizzy and my legs are rubber. I pull the putter back and then skim the grass instead of hitting the ball solidly and it moves one and a three quarters feet forward. I look at six inches and it is worth just as much

as the two hundred yards off the tee. Picking up the ball I say that’s a triple bogey for me and I hear the Devil laughing as I walk back to the cart and hear his sage truism “Life is always toughest when you are within a hundred yards of the pin.”

We Roomed Next to Each Other

We roomed next to each other; he was a baby-faced kid who liked the symphony “From the New World.”  I felt like I was in a new world.  A northsider, his dad took us home and he dropped me off on the southside at a home I hardly knew where my mother lived up stairs and you had to walk along the side of the old home to get to the stairs that took you up to the little apartment.

We used to live in the nicest house in the neighborhood, but after my dad stepped in front of a train one evening, my mom had to sell it and move into a little apartment about a mile away and then after another year or so, I lose track, to the apartment in the old home owned by members of the church to which my mother and father had belonged.  I think she got a pretty good deal, but she had to hide any empty bottles of vodka she used to use for the Screwdrivers she enjoyed from the landlords who wouldn’t have approved.

I was a transfer student from junior college where I, as the audio-visual guy to make a few bucks to pay for books, brought movies around to classes and in between runs would listen to every thing Claude Debussy ever wrote and others recorded.

I sat and listened to him and other Impressionists as I looked at Monet’s haystacks lined up along the wall. I saw the fawn between stacks and I heard the sea as it roared over those mounds and my head bounced back and forth and back and forth rhythmically to the mesmerizing, plaintiff sounds of Ravel’s Bolero, before Bo Derek’s butt swayed back and forth and back and forth rhythmically as she walked on the hot sand to the water as Dudley drooled.

But when I left j.c. for the four-year school, I forgot all about the artists, musicians, works of Shakespeare and English composition and I felt so dumb. I listened to Dvorak through the wall and thought that I had never heard classical music before.

The northside kid’s dad was an attorney downtown and they belonged to the church of churches. My dad had been an elder in a little, suburban congregation and none of them knew what to say after what the coroner graciously determined was an “accidental death” but everybody knew otherwise. I didn’t go back much after all that.

We graduated and he went east to school, of course, and I stayed local for graduate school because the president of the school helped me figure out how I was going to graduate in four years so I could take summer Greek and go to his school.

Years later, the baby-faced kid had become the president of the school where I was getting a doctorate.  My sister asked me if I was jealous of his success.  I wasn’t but I did wish that he had invited me to his inauguration party. He shook my hand and laughed loudly and handed me my diploma and I left.

He fell on hard times. I see him now and then. He looks pretty old. I think about him when I hear Symphony #9.  He had had a great laugh and a baby face and a ton of talent and I still wish he had invited me to his inaugural dinner party.

I’ve Been Kardashianed and So Have You

I’ve been Kardashianed and so have you;

We’ve been Kardashianed and what do we do?

Kim decided her beau has to go

And it was just seventy-two days ago

That they tied the marriage knot

And all hell broke loose about

What everyone thought was a sure thing

And turned out to be a few night’s fling

On the viewing public, that wise population

That always jumps up to the T.V. sensation

And validates that we are the dummy down generation.

We have all been Kardashianed in this land

And throughout the Euroworld so recently planned

Thinking we were so Euro smart

We all succumbed to the giant Wall-Mart/street fart

That looked just like a bubble

Until we saw all the rubble

That was left in the wake of 2008

When only the banks were given the gate

And we and the Euros and the Scandinavians

Sought any kind of relief from the several Kardashians;

But that relief was so far away

Because the Great Greek president was a day away

From announcing a referendum

That would marry us forever to Kim Kardashian

And thinking this thing through

And all our money, too

What do we do?

What do you think about money markets?