Adeodatus in Wonderland

We are in station 5E. He’s sleeping. Most of the other beds in this room are empty now. A machine hums and chirps around the corner. The blue pad covers most of the blood on the sheet.

N’s little right leg is wrapped up, from the calf down around the ankle. He’s got a plaster splint to keep his foot immobile for a few days. His little somnolent snorts are a welcome emotional respite from the screams for mama.

This morning I slept in. S.’s alarm sounded a few minutes before seven. We’ve got the clock radio tuned to the local jazz station, so the day is welcomed with saxophone flourishes or piano improvisations. This morning we got the local traffic report first. An accident here. Construction there. Somewhere traffic was all messed up because of an accident where a party was ejected from the vehicle. Those were the words the dj used. A party ejected. That struck me as very technical language for what was a minor tragedy during this morning’s commute. For that ‘party’ and all of his friends and family, life would never be the same. For listeners adjusting their ties and backing out of their driveway it was merely information pertaining to where the most advantageous route would lie this morning. For men still laying in bed, looking at the ceiling and listening to their wives’ rhythmic breathing, it meant a moment of prayer and reflection on how quickly and permanently life changes.

I was cleaning up the kitchen from breakfast and last night’s dinner. Listening to Morning Edition. Instant messaging. Checking Craigslist. N. came into the kitchen crying, “Owie! Owie!” -- nothing I don’t hear at least once every fifteen minutes from at least one child every waking hour. But his limping foot was leaking red. I scooped him up and yelled for someone to get me a cold washcloth. R. came running. The little chubby foot was elevated. Pressure applied. It stopped bleeding within minutes, but I kept the washcloth firmly on the foot. When I lifted it once to check the damage I a line of red flesh, enough to make my head light and a cold sweat come across my forehead.

S. was still at the gym. Find the number. The front desk pages her. No response? Please go look for her. It’s important.

The kids prayed for their little brother. J.’s sensitive soul prayed with tears. M. was excited to visit the hospital. N’s little twin, L., was just mad that she couldn’t play in her underwear any more.

Later in the waiting room, when we could hear N.’s screams as they drove the local anesthetic into his wound, L. looked at me with a sad face. “Those stitches are really hurting him.” She stared out the window, frowning, until we stopped hearing the yells.

The bottom of the foot is evidently a pretty hard place to get good and numb. They had to shoot up the laceration twice more after S. and I switched places. I glanced once at that needle buried in the opened flesh and could only imagine the white-hot sting, that immediate, consuming, searing pain my three year old trooper endured. He yelled for mama, his little hands grasping the air in front of him. “I can’t see her! Mama! Owwwwww! My bones! My bones are hurting!” The doctor looked up from his stitching and told me he cried for me when his mama was by his side. The grass is always greener on the other side of excruciating pain. I sang a family favorite as the doc applied the plaster strips to protect his sutures, and he was soon sleeping, with a snort and a twitch but nary a scream.

So our lives were different for one day. Not so much trauma that we impacted traffic, but enough to impact our little house. Enough to get us to weep and pray and be a family.

“Ok. Here’s one.” She shifted in her seat and smoothed out her skirt with her palms. Looking nervously at her lap, she took a deep breath. “He makes horn noises.”

The counselor squinted at her. “Excuse me?”

“He imitates those little bike horns. You know, for kids’ bikes. With the rubber bulb on the end. He can sound just like one.”

The counselor nodded and jotted something down in his notebook. He glanced up at the husband to see him smiling out the window.

“So we are in Target looking for a birthday present for my nephew, and he hears someone honk one of those horns over by the bike section. You can hear those things pretty much across the store. So he answers back. Then the horn honks again, and he answers back. This goes on for like ten minutes. I’m as red as a beet, and he’s having a ball pretending to look at video games while engaging in this across-the-store mating ceremony. I swear it sounded like sick loons, and you could tell by the look on people’s faces that they did not find it funny. But there he was! Barely containing his juvenille glee. And he knew it bugged the crap out of me.”

“Good. That is a good start. An important step,” the counselor assured her. She nodded and composed herself. “What about you?” he asked the husband. “What compels you to sound like a bike horn?”

He turned from the window and sighed, not rudely or loudly but a sigh of familiarity. He looked at the counselor with a look of acceptance, his mouth still hinting at a smile around the edges.

She leaned over to catch the counselor’s attention again. “He does it out the car window, too. We’ll be driving along and he’ll see a kid on a tricycle or a tiny bike with training wheels and ‘Maaa-hoooo!’ Poor kid’s looking all over to find who is honking their horn at him, and this man grins like he’d just fooled a Rhodes scholar.”

The counselor continued looking at the husband. “Is this true? Do you do this?”

“Sure. Sure I do.”

“And you understand that it bothers your wife?”

“I suppose I know that it bothers her. But, fer Pete’s sake: its funny.”

“Do you mind if I could hear it?”

“Sure!” The husband sat up straight and give his best bicycle horn imitation. The counselor nodded, impressed, acknowledging the veracity of the sound. She sighed angrily, crossed her legs and lay her tightly folded hands on her lap.

“Wow. That, uh, sounds just like a bike horn. Where did you learn to do that?”

She glared at the counselor. “Oh, nice. Now you are impressed with his great talent. What was the point of this whole exercise again? Would you tell me that, please?”

“I’m so sorry. I’ve just never heard anyone imitate a bike horn before, and, well, you have to admit that is one very good imitation.”

“I’m hard pressed to admit anything except that you two are idiots.” With that, she picked up her purse and left the office.

The counselor stood up to say something, but she closed the door behind her. He watched the door for a moment. The husband looked out the window again.

“You might consider curtailing the horn impressions.”

“I know.”

The husband slowly got up to leave, silently shook the counselors hand. As he opened the door to leave, the counselor said, “That was best horn impression I’ve ever heard, by the way.”

The husband shrugged a small shrug and said, resigned, “I know.”

It isn't often that the natural world tracks so closely with our liturgical calendar. The sky has been grey, brown and stolid for the last few days, and our world cold and slushy. The hopes of watching the tulips bloom are buried under this late spring fallout of frigid wet. True: the snow is as white and pure as it always has been, but this late in March it becomes a sinister blockade to the renewal of life. Our thoughts have turned to life again - leaving the back door open, wearing the new sandals, no yelling about socks. Yet the table is still draped...

Our Good Friday service wasn't as Easter-ish as it has been in the past, but it lost all the momentum of the last few years. Strange to speak positively of an emphasis upon sin, darkness, and death, but that is what Good Friday brings to the fore. See what your sin has wrought. See the price the Father has paid for our reconciliation, our justification. See the cup of God's wrath poured out upon the Innocent, all for our sinful race. Do not start your 'devotion' with a joke. Do not sing yet of the resurrection and triumph of God in Christ, and of his people.

You do not yet get to wear white or pastels. The world remains frozen. At most, we might whisper to one another "Sunday is coming," but we whisper with the awe and soberness of those who witnessed the death of the Lamb.

(We can look to tomorrow's forecast, but the day we live in has us shivering.)

I made the rounds with N. yesterday. Breadstore. Big Lots. Thrift Store. They are all in the same aged, dirty strip mall. The commercial property provides a perfect snapshot of the area’s demographic: discount retail on one end. Big chaotic thrift store on the other, and in between you find no less than three rent-to-own shops, two tax preparation storefronts (‘se hablo espanol’), and a range of shops catering to a mostly Latino population (video store with lots of posters of people wielding revolvers, pollo restaurant, dollar store). The place is in desperate need of a facelift: like a weathered sleeping drunk, you can’t possibly imagine this place as youthful and spry and full of hope. Last summer we sidestepped a guy powerwashing the sidewalks, which just made the decades of gum a different shade of grey.

No destination shopping experience, this strip mall. Except for that anchor at the south end, the Unique Thrift store (and yes, there are two of them). I have seen many a fellow church-goer far from their swank suburbs perusing the aisles here. Even those entranced by mountain living will make the trip to town for the Unique experience. At any given moment at least half the clothes on my body harken from its racks (like, oh, these NorthFace fleece pants I have on right now). I don’t think a single bicycle helmet or pair of my children’s shoes offers a different provenance. You need to shop smart, of course. I have seen junk priced above retail in there at the same time that a pair of brand new Vasque Sundowner Gore-Tex boots is marked $2.92. Doc Martins. Tilley Hats. EMS jackets. Bodum French presses. German beer glasses. Coleman camp stoves -- all found at the Unique. True, the kids have to keep their jackets on at all times: twice J. has had to go into the back and ask the ladies if he could have his back after setting it on the floor to look at the books. That’s understandable, though, given that all those jackets originally came from the Unique racks.

“Moving. 3/19 30% off 3/20 50%”. I stopped cold in my tracks, staring at the magic marker sign. Can’t be. This place is always humming. It is often pleasantly flooded with the smell of freshly baked bread from the Subway next door. Just yesterday I heard Russian, Vietnamese, Spanish, and English in the store. Did they lose their lease? Do the mall managers hope to lure in a more lucrative anchor there on the barely visible corner? Are they -- as we speak -- in hardball negotiations with Nordstroms and Joslins?

I have absolved my consumer conscience through the Unique Thrift Store. Whatever we need we find there, maybe not on the first visit, but eventually. Kids need sneakers or a new parka or dress pants? Off to Unique with a ten-spot! This has been great for the family budget, but it has also slightly warped my internal understanding regarding consumption and possessions. You see, one can shop and buy lots of things as long as they are really, really good deals. The problem is, you still end up with a lot of stuff. And, too, the money saved should then be free for explicit Kingdom use, but it ends up back in queue to be spent on more amazing bargains. Worried about corporate behaviours, sweatshops, and the like? Don’t fret your mind – just buy the stuff used so the Big Moneygrubbers don’t see a cent of your money. Your hands remain clean, especially when you pay with plastic.

We will still have a nice thrift store around. There’s a nice one over on Sheridan. Twice as far away, but still only about a mile. That’s where I found J.’s lost bike, my crystal ashtray, and a Burley bike trailer for $15. They only take cash, though.

The ground is littered with sticks, and a dime-sized blister has developed on my thumb. Three down, two to go.

We moved into this little house in late July, 1998. The cherry tree had already given up its bounty (to the listing agent, I might add), but the nectarine and apricot trees were in all their summer glory. So too were the raspberries, currents, and a small blueberry bush. J. was three at the time and quickly tapped into his primal foragin skills. He didn’t’ have a solid bowel movement for weeks, all that fruit gurgling through his little frame with alacrity. The next summer was banner, too: we measured the cherries by the gallon (I stored them frozen in the breakroom fridge at work, to the annoyance of many people who never used the freezer but just didn’t like the idea of me keeping energy costs down by filling it with personal frozen items). Nectarines were sliced and frozen and gave us amazing smoothies into January. I made syrups and even a funky mead from all the currents. But then our edenic yard dried up. We haven’t had a harvest of note in at least three years. The drought? God’s curse upon his rebellious people on the corner of Linley and Vassar? Has my kindness with the reluctant pruners been misconstrued?

I am loath to slice into the growth a tree has seen fit to exhibit. “You need to grow up that direction, Ms. Peach? By all means. Here, though. Lemme tie up that branch with a little parachute chord…there you go. Have fun growing a gangly limb!” Suckers and sprouts and scores of crowded shoots are just the Way Things Are. I take the same approach to my yard: if the grass stubbornly refuses to grow in one section, let’s say a prayer, let it die, and cover it with decorative mulch or river rock. Except for the radical pruning prompted by the blizzard’s dead weight two years back, I am sad to say I have not pruned any of my trees (except of dead branches or limbs which took aim at my head) since we moved in.

As it turns out, there is no kindness in failing to prune these trees. They are not native creatures flourishing by God’s design: they are cultural artifacts, human adjustments to this cosmos which should make our lives that much better. But, like Kentucky bluegrass or Shi'Tzu's: you cannot expect them to thrive on their own. There is no wisdom, then, in letting them take their course. Very few things, it turns out, are better off as a result of neglect.

So I arm myself with red clippers, a pruning saw, and long-handled pruners and go at it. It’s spring, now. Time to attack all those sprouts and shoots which have so quietly grown up over the winter. Over so many winters. One thing that surprised me as I snipped away at the nectarine yesterday: why was I so surprised at the lack of fruit? Why did I think that just because I occasionally saw some blossoms and leaves showed up on time that it would produce the produce I knew it capable of? No organism with such distractions as these manifold sprouts and branches could focus on its mandate.

Grow, happy trees! Again fulfill your mandate! Give us your bounty which was ordained beforehand! Glorify your creator with juicy, pump fruits!

I haven't organized my flyboxes in years. Typically I just shove new patterns into the old boxes wherever they might fit, and if there is no room I toss the new flies into smaller containers and fill up the vest pockets with a confusing array of ad hoc Solo cups.

Most of my flyboxes, then, are museums to my whims and skills as a tyer -- snapshots as to what I liked and what I could manage with the abililites and materials in my possession in 1996. The system works just fine until I find myself standing midstream, staring into a crowded flybox with no idea where such-and-such a pattern is hiding. I know I tied up a few #18 olive-biot bodied CDC emergers, you think. Maybe they're in my chest pocket? Maybe I left that container in the fanny pack? Meanwhile the trout ignore your grey dubbed deer-hair emergers and your #16 olive parachutes.

There are but a few organizing philosophies regarding flyboxes. The first (in chronology and simplicity) revolves around What You've Got. You just plunked down several c-notes for a rod and reel, waders, boots, vest and polarized glasses. Your one flybox holds every bug you own, from a black wooley worm to #14 Beadhead Hare's Ears to some Pale Morning Dun quills the guy at the shop recommended. Streamers, attractor patterns, hatch-matching duns - they all go into that one box. At $1.50 - $2.25 per fly, this system may work really well. Until you start tying your own flies.

When you begin knocking out a dozen or so bugs at a sitting, that one box gets full awfully fast. Now we need to be a little more sophisticated in our cataloging and organization. You have two ways to go: river-specific boxes, or species-specific. If you fish specific rivers often and don't mind several boxes full of redundant patterns, this will work fine. Except when you use up all the Blue-winged Olive Mayflies in your South Platte box and you need to take along your Green River box.

The better solution is to have species-specific boxes loaded to the gills, as it were. So if you are heading to the Arkansas River in April, you take the caddis and small mayfly boxes. Colorado in August? Caddis, terrestrial, and bigger mayflies. And if you plan on swinging by the Frying Pan during that trip, be sure to include the small mayfly, attractor dries, and Green Drake boxes. You see the trouble with this solution, don’t you? You might end up waddling onto the river like some fishing commando, bulging with ammo boxes. The price you pay to catch wary trout during dryfly season. [The observant reader will look at the box pictured above and say, Wait just a minute, Commando-A. You call this a baetis box, but it clearly is packed with not only trico patterns, but also SJ worms and not a few scuds and midges. What gives? Excellent! A little sleuth work would reveal that you are witnessing the evolution of a box before our very eyes. This particular Morel ultralight flybox began its life as a whim purchase to hold Bighorn bugs on a trip in 2000. It then was pressed into double-duty, holding patterns for the finicky trout in the Cheeseman Canyon stretch of the South Platte. Rather than purge its history, I just filled all its empty spaces with baetis patterns and called it good.]

A few final notes for anyone still reading: the retail value of the box above is well over $400. It holds around 325 flies. You can imagine the heartbreak this causes a guy when he loses a box (which I have done. More than once). Another note: my current library of flyboxes includes the following: a Wheatly swingleaf, for both caddis and larger mayflies; a small bristletack box for green drakes (including flavs); a small box for hoppers; a midge box (including Mysis patterns); an attractor nymph box; a 16-compartment aluminum box for attractor dries; a big ol’ streamer box; a big box for lake and small streams; a big box full of carp patterns; a mostly empty aluminum clip box for wetflies (including kokannee nymphs); and a stonefly box (which is a work in progress. Not a lot of opportunity for fishing exclusively for stones around here). The bass and pike flies are tossed into big organizing containers rather than proper boxes. I suppose if I ever fish those I could just toss them into an old margarine tub. No need to get fancy with bass or pike.

Denver Seminary hosted D.A. Carson for its Spurgeon Lectures this week. I loaded the kids up with their schoolwork, kissed St. on the cheek and flew out the door to hear this prolific writer speak on suffering.

And quite a speaker Dr. Carson turned out to be. Engaging. Serious. Funny. The topic is hardly an easy one to expound upon without a morose fog descending on the assembly. My notes on the first day are downright anemic simply because you did not want to leave the flow of oratory to scribble something down.

After the talk, Pat turned to me and asked if I would like to join him and some others for a little coffee and refreshments with Dr. Carson in the President's office. Sure. Ok. Gotta get back to the kids sooner than later, but one cup of coffee and a few melon chunks with Don would be fine. And since I had never set foot in the president's office during my four years of schooling, I thought, why not now?

Even if I was wearing jeans and fleece at least I had shaved that morning.

Dr. Carson came in and shook hands. "I understand I am supposed to be meeting with distinguished people. So what makes you distinguished?" he asked Dr. Means on my right, a pastor of 20+ years and retired seminary professor. Quick! Hide!

Rather than run out, I was pressed into sitting down. Only for a few minutes! I insisted. Dr. Carson sat down and began the introductions. As it was, I sat at the far clockwise position, last in line. Pastors. Professors. The brother immediately before me graduated in 1997. He is from Liberia and has served as a missionary and teacher in Ethiopia. Currently he is back in the US teaching in churches about the role of Islam in Africa, but he is making plans to return to Liberia in six years to run for president. Of Liberia. "Wow," the group murmurs. "And you? David, was it?" I don't belong here. The melon cubes were not worth this terrific price.

One day I imagine I will be able to sit around such a table without awkwardness. Even if nothing "distinguishing" marks my resume, there will be this settled contentment which allows me to sit with those who are wise and godly, to sit at the gates without shame. The day I am no longer consumed with the small things.

[I'll write some on the content of the lectures in a bit. Right now the family is in the van, waiting for a run to Sam's club.]