My pending visit to New York City has been on my mind and on my tongue for some weeks now.  I had numerous people I love ask if I were going to see something on Broadway while in town.  Without those kinds of questions, it never would have occurred to me to do so.  My Sophomore year in college a group of us went to see The Phantom of the Opera; an experience which nearly cured my curiosity about the theater altogether.  However, one bad show does not an entire industry paint.  With the advice of Stacey, today I was able to navigate the daunting task of finding a Broadway show.

Stacey is not allowed to visit crowded places, and so I would be alone in this venture.  I left her apartment on foot with two hours till show time.  Like most of the systems here, the system for buying tickets to shows is smooth and well funded.  There is a ticket sales office under the red steps in Times Square where over a dozen uniformed staff stand eager to guide strangers to the system.  The TKTS booth sells tickets to day-of performances for half-price.  After a brief wait in line I had secured a seat to see Romeo and Juliet, and I still had over an hour to kill before the curtain call.  

While mulling about among the near crushing crowd of people in Times Square, I heard a tapping.  A high, staccato like a train bell ricocheted down the canyon of skyscrapers toward me as I searched out the sound-maker.  There, with a giant Hershey bar looming high behind him, sat the musician.  He had been playing his buckets, metal scraps, cast-iron fry pans and Postal Service box before I discovered him.  40 minutes later, when I broke the trance of his cow-bell mimic chime, black-top bouncing ring, tattered hollow-metal rap, and double-time, deep-bucket thump, he was still playing.  

The American dream begins here and has been beginning here for hundreds of years.  Talk to any two people on the street or in a cafe, at a corner or in a supermarket and you will hear it; one of those two had to learn English later in life to participate in this dream.  In three days, even though I’ve spent most of my time indoors with Stacey, I have heard representatives from every corner of the world.  One of the strongest driving forces I have witnessed here is that drive to compete with the immigrant.  The immigrant is a person who wanted success for their family so badly, that they did one of the most difficult things imaginable.

The immigrant reinvented their reality in a foreign place.  The immigrant negotiated a movement across continents and oceans.  The immigrant has brought their spirit to within our borders to lend to our nation their drive, passion, intelligence and heart.  Each of them is like an infusion of precious platelet, or white or red blood cells to the our nation’s circulatory system.  There is a buzzing pulse to this place with the hum of nearly 1000 languages.  This city is so very blessed.

Stacey has said on more than one occasion that everyone should live at least one year in New York.  I have not been able to find one New Yorker who disagrees.

In our reality, cancer is everywhere.  Cancer is like an inexplicable flash in the night sky; sometimes without an apparent cause, there it is.  At age 36, the generation before mine is in cancer’s full grasp.  The generation of my parents, their siblings, and their friends are coming forward with diagnoses too often for me to comprehend the statistics they prove.

Stacey is a few years older than I am.  Too young by any measure to be diagnosed with lymphoma, but there it is.  Stacey is the kind of person who would give her eyes so that someone born blind could see.  She would say something like “I’ve had my time with vision, lets give someone else the opportunity to see a sunrise, or to feel the thrill of love as it beams from a lover.  Y’know?”  When she sent out a request for caregivers to assist her during chemo therapy, I made my plans.

Q.So what do you call a bald 40 year old with a bandage around her right bicep an immune system that’s fighting for its life?  A. A daughter of God.  B. A loving banner bearer of our Lord.  C.  My American hero.  D.  The sunshine of the 16th floor.

When I was a boy I wanted to be an Eagle Scout, because both of my mother’s brothers were Eagle Scouts.  Wanting to follow in the footsteps of men I revered in my youth also lead me to go to college, but I never saw being a carpenter’s apprentice under my uncle Norman in that vein until recently.  Now I can see that I was, and still am, envious of his freedom in working, level of fitness, and mastery of craft.  My uncle could always work when he wanted, for as long as he wanted, and then take the family to Hawaii when he wanted.  At age 50 he could move more adeptly than most 30 year-olds.  On a construction site he can perform all of the trades involved in building a house from nothing.

I stayed on the guest bed at my Aunt Nancy and Uncle Norman’s house these past two weeks.  I still do not have a place of my own in the city, and this arrangement saves me from some two hours of commuting every day.  Norm and Nancy have always been generous, and I think they like having me around some.  A bonus of this proximity was that my uncle took the time to come to my jobsite in Crown Hill, to see my work.  On Tuesday evening he said “why don’t I come to your job tomorrow to put in that electrical box?  You can buy me lunch.”

And so he did.  This 65 year old master of mine came to one of my jobs to perform a task in exchange for some simple conversation afterwards.  As the two of us worked together in the rain, I was reminded of my nephew Noah last Summer.  Hopefully one day I will be giving him a hand as he builds his own name, and his own reputation.  Hopefully God will bless my later years in this way.

Last Sunday my father was out of town, so I rode to church with my mother.  Our church is a place where I know I will meet a dozen close friends and numerous acquaintances each week, and so I continue to go.  All Saints is where my walk with God became something I could tangibly recognize, and so it will always hold a special place in my memory.  After the service, Mom and I went to meet my little sister for lunch.  

Anne is young and full of the spirit for dining out.  She is a waitress, and lives alone in the middle of the heart of the city of Seattle.  She is surrounded by fine options for food and she seems to enjoy the introduction of others to fine things even more than she enjoys consuming those things herself.  Without my father there, the family dynamic was entirely different.  My father, like me, will say he doesn’t have an opinion about what happens next, when in fact we have very real hopes and expectations which are impossible to know or to meet.  

As we walked in the rain, laughing at the weather and the sloppy sky, the three of us simply enjoyed some moments of being family together.

I have been working on a deck project in Crown Hill for the past week or so.  Since getting home, God has faithfully provided as much work as I have the time to undertake.  I am working for the Pigott family.  They are travelers, like myself, or at least they were before Gretchen was born.  They have been a delight to work for thus far.

Yesterday I poured a small concrete pad which the stairs off the deck will land on.  As Robert and I did a brief walk through of the progress, I asked that he not allow his dog in the back.  No one likes to revisit their work to find the unintended, vandal paw marks of confused, lead-footed beasts.  Robert understood, but said that he would not be able to keep his wife from it.  This gave me pause to think.

My friend Hannah and I had recently discussed the “signing” of concrete by those who did not place it.  Though this is a tradition of the passerby in America, to me it has always smacked of bathroom stall scratching and Sharpie name scrawling.  It is vandalism.  Yeserday, however, when Erika came to the back to see the work, I handed her a 2&1/2″, 10D nail to make her mark.  It is her concrete, after all.

And what an honor it is to participate in the creation of something lasting.  And what an honor it is to have it signed by her.

My brother is my favorite person.  He is my only brother.  As he will readily tell you, we almost lost him a few years ago to drugs.  My family has already lost more than one young man to those most tempting of distractions; our nation’s most reliable cure for boredom.  Boredom is a luxury of the rich.  There was a time when my brother needed to be on his own, a time away from us, the family.  Now that he is ours again, now that I can talk with him at my leisure and whenever the desire finds peak within me, I do it far too seldom.  It is good for me to reflect on the wisdom of God when looking through the lens of Brandon’s presence in my life.  He is the only brother I was ever meant to have.  We were designed for loving and standing by one-another.

On September 7th I flew from Seattle to Tucson to be with my brother.  I had a loose agenda in mind, but mostly I wanted time around him.  His life has gotten steadily busier since he graduated from Teen Challenge, and it will only get more busy and packed full of responsibilities as he and his fiance race toward marriage and all that comes with being married.  Now, with him having a life in the city of Bisbee, Arizona, nearly 1700 miles away, he is more accessible than I may soon find him.  I need to respect the shortness of life, the numbering of my days, and the precious opportunities we’re given to show love.

Brandon, you should know, that before the beginning of time, God intended for us to be brothers.  He knew then that we would fight, wrestle, argue, laugh, grow, and pray together.  He is proud of you, as I am.  He is happy for your life.

This morning I woke up at my sister’s family’s house in Tucson Arizona.  I had scheduled my visit to my Arizona family a few months ago and I intentionally purchased my ticket to fly in one direction or the other on this day.  I don’t like being made to feel afraid, and I bristle at bullying.  Let the lasting effect of the efforts of a few well funded cowards be precisely nothing.

My sister and her kids spent the morning cleaning the grounds around their suburban home.  Today is my brother-in-law’s day off, and so there were six of us at the table for a mid-morning breakfast of waffles and peaches.  The Tucson Airport was quiet this morning.  On the flight from Arizona to my connection through Las Vegas, I sat next to an average sort of mid-to-late-forties American woman on the airplane.  “How is your September going?”  I asked.

“Oh, good,” she replied at length.  “It feels like the beginning of the Holiday Season,” she went on.

“Even today,” I said.

Now thoughtful, the woman cocked her head slightly and said “what’s today?  O, well, I wouldn’t think of today as…”

“A holy day?” I interjected.

And, so, here we are; living in a time when we can say that our fears have subsided.  The corporate realization that life, this life, our way of life, will continue as it has.  It will continue as we decide.  Our actions will not be dictated to us by hate-filled strangers.  We will go on raising our children to care for the gifts that God has bestowed on us.  We will go on forgetting injuries and pursuing paths to peace; for that is the will of God.

From where in this world can we not draw our instruction on how to live?  Could we not as simply and without thought conclude that it is to the trees and their colors that we gather purpose and direction on how next to grow, next to root, next to green, and lastly to golden pre-brown; leeching color to prepare our beds with insulation in the form of moisture-less decaying crowns?  Who has designed the seasons that it should not be so with us as it is with the vine maples of Wallingford and the Japanese maples of Edgewood?  What more perfect rose pink can be found than in the tips of these past golden, soon falling umbrellas?  Do not feathers, when underfoot, remind us of the peacock, crow and flamingo?  As we molt and leave decay, do we do so gloriously, or with dark, downcast, sorrowful looks?

All according to God’s plan.  And with all, be it death or Spring, birth or rainbow-scattered Fall, He has designed for us contemplate, witness, rage, and celebrate.  I wonder at passing wonders as I drive my parents’ Volkswagen down a stretch of freeway.  And, in between my times of grave confusion and general consternation, do hope to pause at the glory of this season; both in life and in this city’s life.

Today, like a hurricane without the wind, a deluge brought Renton two months of rain in two minutes.  I, for all of my pounding on the floors and walls, was but a decibel-poor tinker at the clamouring art.  How quickly did the sky darken and commence to turn my world to mud?  Quick and strong and full, rain was again an element of creation unto itself. 

In those moments

I feel a division both of desire and nature 

Is it time to rattle like so many

Worried pecking hens in a straw filled house 

Or like a mallard should I emerge

Centered within a falling salt-less ocean

Stand as simple as a bouy

Slow and rock, rocking never tipping

In the wake of things?