Splices and Scenes from My Story

"Mr. Schumerth, whatever you do, don't grow out that beard!"
-One of my fourth graders

"We have to force ourselves to create these scenes. We have to get up off the couch and turn the television off, we have to blow up the inner-tubes and head to the river. We have to write the poem and deliver it in person. We have to pull the car off the road and hike to to the top of the hill. We have to put on our suits, we have to dance at weddings. We have to make alters."
~Don Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned while Editing my Life

"Yeah to all of my friends, you stick by me again
And you say you ride this rusty train 'til it ends.
Yeah 'cause I've been around the world just singing about a girl
Never once did you call me a fool
I hope someday to make it up to you

To my mother to my father to my sister back home,
And you know I want to tell you of those things that I've done
Oh and I've not forgotten, yes and I think about you often
You say you're proud every step of the way
And you know it keeps me going these days"
~Joe Purdy, "Brooklyn I'm Callin'"


When I was a sophomore Resident Assistant for Smith Hall at Anderson University, student leadership choose to read Donald Miller's Blue Like Jazz. The choice was typical of Anderson; every trendy Christian was reading Miller at the time, and he even came to our school and spoke in chapel. I enjoyed his stories, but was annoyed by his potshotting and thought he extrapolated a bit much theologically from pretty small experiences. I appreciated his admittances of his weaknesses though and loved the story of setting up the confession booth at notorious Reed College. Miller was one of my first exposures into a much different kind of Christianity. It wasn't "new" in a historical sense as the McLaren types might like to think, but it was new to me, this whole Christian-with-a-beer-in-his-hand-kind-of-thing.

I guess I sort of suspended judgement for a while, but made my way pretty quickly to Searching for God Knows What, which seemed to be a bit more philosophical/intellectual/theological, though still birthed out of his own experiences.

Miller has become the male Ann Lamott in some ways; he is to the modern Christian community what Augustin Burroughs and David Sedaris are to the homosexual community. All four names I have mentioned are witty and gifted at finding meaning in the seemingly ordinary, which is why, I suppose, they are all memoirists. Sometimes I think I could write memoirs and that maybe I even have stories to tell.

Because of the success of Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality (it was a New York Times bestseller), he rereleased Through Painted Deserts: Finding God on the Open Road, a not-quite On the Road about a road trip with friends. I recall reading it in May after my junior year of college in the Williams' (my roommate's family) backyard and thinking there was a little bit of Romanticism in what I hoped life would be. It became my favorite Miller book, which has happened with every Miller book except Searching for God Knows What, though it is my sister's favorite. She is a smart person and avid reader, so definitely don't discount it. To Own a Dragon: Reflections on Growing up Without a Father was, in my opinion, the book that set up his latest book, that is to say, it thoroughly explored the various male influences that came to partially fill the void that his father left.

I read Miller's latest book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing my Life, last weekend on the way to and from Nashville. In the three years between the books being published, he has apparently biked across the country, initiated The Mentoring Project, climbed the Inca Trail in South America, and participated in one of Barack Obama's task forces. In the book, he came full circle in a way by paralleling learning about the elements of story (as one of his books was put to film) with his own story: the characters, the inciting incidents, ambition, scenes, and overcoming conflict. So he told the beautiful story of meeting his father in Indiana, my own state. He also told the painful story of loving and losing, though I will not say more because I hope you read the book.

I have tried, at times, to dismiss Miller as a detached coffee shopper, though I know I, too, do a good bit of coffee shopping (yes, it can be used as a verb if I say it can), and Miller is simply too real, too poignant, and lives too richly to dismiss.


***


So sometimes, for the sake of your own story, you have to up and leave, drive somewhere, whatever. Which is what one of my roommates, Keyairra, and I did this past weekend, up to Nashville. She drove every second of the ten-hour trip (saint that she is), both ways, in her black 2009 Toyota Corolla.

I love roadtrips (except that two hours before you get there, when I go crazy and it seems we're never going to arrive), and had previously traveled--with my before-he-got-married partner-in-crime, Chris Lloyd from Anderson--to Nashville for the fourth of July between our freshman and sophomore years at AU. We went down in part to see his mom and former youth group who was at the Opryland Hotel for the Church of God Convention. We weren't down for paying $100 or whatever it costed to praise God, but we showed up sweaty and dirty in the 100 degree heat and swam in one of the pools--of the shopping mall with a few rooms with beds in it that Opryland really is--while we waited for people to get out of sessions. The larger reason we had come was to hit on girls, admittedly, and there were lots of them there. We planned on staying the night, but ended up deciding (thanks Chris) to drive back that night, the eventual outcome of which was me driving into Anderson as the sun came up with Chris passed out next to me. But that was last time I went to Nashville; this time there was just as much to look forward to.

When I think about Tennessee I think about colorful foliage and slightly foggy hills, and my perception did not disappoint. The weather was quite mild, too. We got to know several TFA corps members in Nashville. We stayed with Sean, a tall and thin Ohioan Irish Catholic, who is passionate about food and teaches first grade, and his landlord Nancy who works three jobs and dates a guy in Oklahoma. She cooked us bacon and eggs for breakfast, hummed to a blues radio station, and told us how the Catholic Church is the anti-Christ (she claims to be a Mormon but has some attraction to the Seventh Day Adventists).

The reason for our trip was to hear Joe Purdy, the modern Bob Dylan in my opinion, with long, lamenting story songs that so fully express the joys and pains of human experience. The show was in a little bar and grill at Third and Lindsley. The show was great, though we wanted him to play another hour. Perhaps he was turned off by the annoying and drunk Kentuckyian blond who talked loudly through the whole show, sometimes walking up within a few feet of him and speaking to him as he sang.

He offered her a deal that he'd play which ever song she wanted to hear the most if she could first shut up for a whole song, but she couldn't do it.


***


Someday, when I make a school's calendar (which will obviously NEVER happen), it will look like this:

Semester 1: first week of August until the day before Thanksgiving. Labor Day and Veteran's Day off for students and teachers, a planning day off for students halfway through.

Semester 2: January 2 until mid June. Martin Luther King Day and Memorial Day off. One week spring break that coincides with Good Friday and Easter.

So basically, six-week summer break and six-week winter break. Seriously, how dumb is it to have five days off for Thanksgiving, then go back to school for thirteen days and then have three weeks off for Christmas. How much gets accomplished during that thirteen days that will be maintained by those students for the next twenty off? What a terrible idea, and then to come back after break and still be finishing up the same nine weeks; don't even get me started...

In my schedule, you pretty much every holiday off in the book for families, and more time to travel, really, but in all, more school for kids and teachers. President Obama gets that need right, though it shouldn't happen until school becomes more meaningful.


***


Notre Dame football is the girl that keeps cheating on me, knowing I'll take her back. Charlie, I've been really patient and defended you and the boys often, but seriously, it's been terrible while it lasted. I'll watch the Stanford game with no confidence that it will end well. How can there be an All-American type player at every offensive skill position and be 6-5 against a mediocre schedule?

My vote for a replacement is Charlie Strong, Defensive Coordinator at Florida, who used to coach at Notre Dame with Urban Meyer and Lou Holtz.

You heard it here first.


***


I wrote this post in several splices in various places, but am finishing it in rural Ohio, near Athens, which is where Ohio University is. My sister, Angela, is living on a communal farm that arranges and participates in work trips with groups and also works with the homeless population. They compost and garden and have chickens, as well as a creek, basketball court, and several cozy building. It is the kind of place at which you want to sit on the porch and read Wendell Berry. It's quiet and serene, but of course my family is loud and brash, and we're taking it by storm, shielding no secrets as always. It's in the upper 30s here, which I'm clearly not used to, and I left my blue Columbia jacket in Tennessee.

I told my family I would help in the kitchen today, which I'm clearly not doing. To friends, family, and enemies, though, near and far: Happy Thanksgiving!