Manger Wetter

Reaching my age in life has one definite advantage – the seasons of the past seem richer to me with every passing year.  Relationships intertwine.  Stories of how and when you knew someone sometimes span several decades.  And friends can even become family and then back to friends.

Such are my memories of Steve and Dan.  Steve is no longer with us, and Dan is the president of a college and an accomplished author.  Still, I remember them and their friendship from all those years ago.  Their friendship started before Dan and his wife Kathy became my mentors, before the Intervarsity Christian Fellowship meetings Dan led, before the long talks and the relationship advice, before Dan married my husband and me.

Back then Steve was a graduate student in Creative Writing at the University of Dallas where I became an undergrad.  I would see him go in and out of Dan and Kathy’s apartment at the end of my hallway (they were the dorm parents).  Steve had an unmistakable profile and a shock of red hair.  Those were the years before Steve became my brother-in-law; and long before he became a fireman, then a husband and father, then a pastor.

One simple poem brought all that back to me yesterday.  Steve was a poet (among his many other accomplishments) and the kind of poet whose words and phrases jabbed into my psyche like thorns amidst a meadow of wildflowers.  They were both good and sharp, both beautiful and piercing.  Unforgettable.

My former mentor Dan has published a book, and the title of his first chapter is a tribute to his friend, and my former brother-in-law, Steve.  The poem is “Manger Wetter.”  After reading it I went in search of the one picture I have of Steve and Dan together – in Boston in 1981.  I will never forget you, Steve, and neither will all those whose lives you have touched.  And Dan – Kudos.

Manger Wetter*

by Steve Mahan

Wrinkled, Crinkled

Red-skinned Squirmer

Famished Squealer,

Manger Wetter.

Gabriel salutes you!

Michael bows!

We here in Bethlehem

Bed you with cows.

We here in Bethlehem

Bed you with cows.

*Russ, Dan, Flesh-and-Blood Jesus, Second Edition: Learning to Be Fully Human from the Son of Man, Cascade Books, Eugene, Oregon, 2013. (from a chapter entitled Manger Wetter: Coming to Terms with Our Neediness)

SERIOUSLY??!!

Whenever anyone looks at me aghast and exclaims, “Seriously!!? I always say yes.  I am always serious.  I wish it weren’t so, because serious gets so little attention these days.  At a party serious gets a polite nod and a very short conversation. In the family circle, serious gets an “Oh no, Mom, we are not up for a poetry reading!”

I was born serious.  Or at least I inherited it from my mother’s early years.  The woman who raised me (i.e. her “early years) fretted over whether I would drown during my swim lessons at the local YWCA.  She stood at the top of the stairs during my high school dates and called repeatedly, “Lorraine, it’s getting late.  You have school tomorrow.”  On a brighter note, she would warn me not to take out the trash or drive to the local Krogers because “it’s dark outside.” 

During her empty nest years, she read tomes like The Story of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant, a ten-volume encyclopedia – for fun.  Then she started writing essays (all that knowledge had to go somewhere), and you can imagine that my sister and I were overjoyed to read her treatise on “What is Wrong with the World Today” in between chasing around our toddlers.

But then I had a different mother in her later years. She said things to me like, “You never really knew me.”  I yawned and thought, “What are you talking about, I lived with you for 22 years.”  She would interject wistfully into conversations on other topics, “You know, I used to go dancing every week; I loved to hike.”  Hmmm, yeah right.

“I knew how to fence.  I learned how to fly an airplane.  I was in the Civil Air Patrol during the War. I was a Nurses’ Aide and saved several people’s lives.”

What have you done with my mother!!  I screamed.

The tales continued to unfold, but my growing astonishment came from more than past stories.  She laughed.  She told jokes.  She could take down a whole room in laughter.  She smiled.  People universally smiled back at her.  And they repeated her one-liners to me.

What have you done with my mother? 

When we were at doctors’ appointments or on hospital junkets, she cheered up the whole staff, and sometimes I could hear the whispers and titters following us down the hallway.

One day she was in the hospital and the orderly tried to transfer her from the bed to the gurney for a trip to the CT scanner.  He bungled it and ended up laying on her.  She quipped unabashed:

 “Will you come back again later – it’s been a long time since I’ve had a man on top of me!”  She was 89.

Seriously!!!??

Mom, taking life seriously.

A GOOD LAUGH IS HARD TO FIND

We have very few good humorists these days.  We have what I call dumb comedy, we have dysfunctional comedy, and we have stand-up comedy.  But a humorist is something different. 

A humorist sees life in a special way because he has lived – and survived to tell about it!  A humorist may appeal to the regional or to the universal, and yet everyone laughs.  A humorist isn’t funny in every line; sometimes he is poignant.  Sometimes an unexpected zinger will send you into stomach-crunching guffaws, but often he will also bring you to tears.

A humorist makes you think about life, makes your life richer, and makes you feel so good you want to go out and love everybody.  A humorist doesn’t weigh you down with judgments, pour vinegar over your skin with sarcasm, or purse up your lips like you’re eating lemons.

A humorist doesn’t try to make you laugh in order to get attention.  Oh, they may get a paycheck from what they do, but they’re really after something else.  They are after putting something right with the human condition – for themselves and anyone who will listen.  And they do this without teacher’s pointer, coaches’ whistle or conductor’s baton.  They are not pundits.  They are much too sneaky for that.  You laugh before you know what hit you, and then you cry before you processed what you were laughing about.

Have you figured out who I am talking about yet?  It’s not Owen Wilson, though hats off to those who appreciate his humor.  It’s not Jerry Seinfeld or Ray Romano.  I am talking about Erma Bombeck.  I am talking about Bill Cosby.  Does anyone else come to mind?  If you haven’t heard of either of them you’re wet behind the ears and, unfortunately, among the disadvantaged.

When I listen to Jerry, Ray and Owen, I sometimes titter or snigger, but after awhile I begin to feel depressed about the human condition.  The same with many of the plots in the so-called “romantic comedy” movies.  Seeping into my subconscious from these is an unformed question: “Is our existence truly banal, superficial, and meaningless?”  On the contrary, after reading Erma or Bill I pick myself up off the floor, or off the couch, straighten up taller, and rejoin the human race.  Emphasis on human.

All comedians like to quote the proverb, “Laughter is good medicine,” but some medicine is better than others.  Some medicine doesn’t work.  Some medicine makes you sicker, or sicker with different illnesses.  Good comedians heal you with laughter that feels and smells like the world after a spring rain.

Take Erma for instance.  Sometimes her references are regional – what Midwestern cook has not begun to fear the pot of green pea soup that refuses to disappear?  And sometimes they are American-universal – like the mother who fell on her knees after going into her son’s bedroom and prayed “Please, God.  No more. You were only supposed to give me what I could handle.”  But the real reason they are universal is because they cover a universal subject – motherhood.  I’m sure even the Zulu mom could get a laugh out of her reflections on “Spit” in its various motherly uses.

So will you please pray with me that God sends us a few more good humorists!  We need them more than we know.  Not only may our health depend on them (Norman Cousins famously claimed that his did), but our will to wake up tomorrow.

I’m a realist – I’ll never be like Erma or Bill, making the world a saner place through laughter.

But I’ll leave you with a good Erma quote, in typical self-deprecating manner (which is comedic genius):

“I like to imagine that after a person has read our waters are polluted, the world is in flames, streets are crime-ridden, [and] drugs are rampant… [that] she’ll read how the dryer returns only one sock to me from every two I put in and I tell my kids ‘the other one went to live with Jesus,’ and maybe [she’ll] smile.”*

I did, Erma.

*Forever, Erma, Erma Bombeck, Andrews and McMeel, Kansas City, 1996.

I’M CELEBRATING TODAY!!

My mother chose life …  and I’m glad I was born.

My mother almost didn’t deliver me.  There was too much against her.  She had started to miscarry numerous times, and endured several trips to the emergency room, and various uncomfortable procedures.  From early in her pregnancy she was on bed rest, and couldn’t even stand up long enough to  wash the dishes.  Her husband, my father, was not very understanding and supportive, and tended to think of such behavior as laziness and an inconvenience to him.

Worst of all, however, was the attitude of the medical profession at the time. They told my mother that her inability to carry me to term was evidence that I was malformed in the womb and that nature was trying to do her a favor by sloughing me off.  The term they used for me was that I was a “little monster.”  If abortion had been legal, they would have been within their professional rights, in fact it would have been a professional duty, to suggest an abortion.

MY mother was hearing none of that.  To her I was a precious gift, sent by God, and she was going to fight for me with every ounce of strength within her being.  And the medical professionals had better get on board with that, and her husband better get on board with that, because THAT’S THE WAY IT WAS GOING TO BE!  My mother chose life.  And that is why I am writing this to you today. 

That is why I am alive.  That is why I have four children.  That is why their two lovely spouses have excellent partners.  That is why there are four wonderful grandchildren -- Violet, Noah, Elizabeth and Shane -- who  are gracing our world and growing up to to love God and to make it a better place. 

My mother chose life.  She chose ME. She chose the way of love and sacrifice.  I am glad I was born.