(Originally posted on the website Continuum…)

WHILE browsing through some old photos I came across these of simple chalk flowers. It’s amazing how the image of something so plain can take you back in time, open many thoughts, and create significant desires deep in your chest somewhere. It’s a wonder how a small child’s creation can speak volumes to you when you have been so caught up in playing the adult! The images of some pastel colors on the sidewalk in your backyard, long worn away by months of rain and wind and feet, can bring such memories with them. Suddenly you hear the children’s laughter. You feel the warmth of the spring sun. You see the slight shiver of your five-year-old as those last few chilly breezes weave through her skirted legs. You hear a dog barking across the yards, bikes whizzing down the alley, and the lawn mower of that over eager guy who just has to be the first to cut his lawn. A picture speaks a thousand words… and a million memories.

OH! To have the freedom to draw chalk flowers without care! Remember days such as these? Remember when your greatest concern for the afternoon was that your sister might smudge your chalk creation by stepping on it? Remember how slowly the hours strolled along on those spring days? You could take your time and pick out just the right color. You could crouch and contort your body to get into just the right position to make your design perfect – without care that your neighbor was laughing at your methods. You could live the moment rather than worry about sustaining an existence. An unexpected afternoon shower might wash away an hour of work. You might cry for a few minutes. But as soon as the walk was dry, you were right back at it and your loss was forgotten. You were resilient. You were free.

But it seems we have a tendency to complicate things as we get older. We rob ourselves of our own freedom by our worry, our fear, our laziness, our refusal to grow and adapt. It is true that Jesus said that we must be as little children before God. But there is a difference between being child-like and childish. Too many of us have remained childish in areas where we should have matured. We should have learned earlier. We should have acted sooner. We should have been men. But we insisted on being boys. At the same time we cast aside the child-like qualities in order to become “grown up.” We soon grew out of our honesty. Humility and a teachable heart became weakness and stupidity. Wonder and awe were exchanged for pessimism and negativity. Hope and passion were sold for a few bucks so we could buy a beer and a nudie magazine. We thought we were becoming men. We only became insensitive to any beauty around us or in us.

What signs of beauty have we left upon our paths for others? Have we sketched with the pastels of kindness and compassion? Has love been the outline of all of our drawings along the way? Have we drawn images that will inspire those who come after us, creating a thirst within them for more quality in their lives? Or have we drawn base and obscene characters along our walk? Cheap cartoons with cruel captions to degrade and humiliate even those closest to us? Dare I mention the ones we drew in the blood of hatred? The ones that now may never wash away even under the torrent of a thousand storms of tears and apologies?

FRIENDS… We can go back! We can start again! Maybe we cannot erase all that we have drawn. Maybe we cannot scrub it all away. But while we are breathing we can continue down our walk and create new pictures. As men we can create scenes of depth and meaning. We can copy the simplicity of our children and paint lasting portraits of the meaningful things in life for them to follow. Remember when you practiced with the chalk. Stir up those skills. Get on your knees with the spring sun upon your back and draw. Draw! Draw! Blend your colors. Improve your strokes. You are an artist with a child inside of you. The child will inspire you. Be the man. Draw!

The little ones are watching.

(Originally posted on the website Continuum…)

LAST NIGHT we had our first substantial snowfall of the winter. We got at least six inches. Maybe more. I was at my Dad’s house. We were watching the Oakland Raiders play against the New York Jets. Football is something that I rarely watch these days. I don’t watch sports much. Come to think of it, I don’t watch much of anything on television. It was good to watch the Raiders though. It brought back a lot of memories. They were my team when I was a kid. Somewhere in the middle of the second quarter, the snow began to fall. The ground was covered almost instantly. It sure made for slippery driving conditions.

Given the treacherous, life-threatening roadway conditions, I felt that the prudent thing to do was to leave Dad’s promptly. I cleaned off the car, carefully made my way out of his housing development, stopped at the nearest Dunkin Donuts for a coffee. A man has to have his priorities straight, you know!

Later I picked up Joel, Sarah and Tim at their mom’s. They were happy about the snow and hoping to be off from school the next day. (No such luck, only a one-hour delay.) As we drove home and talked about the snow, one of them said, “Hey Dad, maybe we got all this snow because we saw the Snogies the day before.”

Now, I can hear you asking, “Snogies?? What’s a snogie??”

Good question! Let me explain.

ON SATURDAY, while driving the kids to their mom’s, I was telling them about an incredible sight that I saw earlier that morning. I was on my way to a business appointment with an old friend from high school. I could not believe what I saw along the way. I said to the kids, “You should have seen it!”

Their response was the same as yours, “Snogies?? What’s a snogie??”

“No! I said SNOW GEESE!”

Funny how we can misunderstand each other sometimes! What must have been in the minds of those kids for a moment when I said, “You should have seen it! There were THOUSANDS of snogies in that field!” Did they envision little gnome-like creatures? Is that what a snogie really is? Or did they imagine something hideous and grotesque? Something like overgrown, mutated, biting fairies? I would love to see the images in their minds for that moment before they realized what I was really talking about.

Truly, I never saw such a gathering of geese before! What makes it even more amazing is that Snow Geese are not so common in our area. Every year we have multitudes of Canadian Geese migrating through. I only saw one small flock of Snow Geese before. That was about a year ago. When I first saw these geese on Saturday, I was not sure what it was that I could see through the tree line across the field. They appeared as large pieces of white paper swirling along the ground. Then I thought that maybe they were gulls, common birds around here although not in such numbers. When I got closer to the scene I realized that they were Snow Geese. What a sight!

Later, when the kids and I got to that spot, there were even more geese. I stopped the car to take pictures. Even from a few hundred yards away we could hear their honking. They were covering the fields. Every so often they would take off, circle the field and land again. We moved up the road a little closer and took more pictures.

As we watched the birds take off and land again, I said, “It’s like the Dance of the Snogies.” Snogies had already become our favorite new word. And now another element of humor was brought into the experience. When I said “Dance of the Snogies,” Sarah changed it to “Dances with Snogies” like “Dances with Wolves.” Remember that movie with Kevin Costner? Dances with Wolves was the name that the Indians gave to him. The white woman that he found among the Indians was “Stands with a Fist.” I think one of their leaders was “Kicking Bull” or something like that and one of the warriors that eventually becomes friends with John Dunbar (“Not Dumb Bear!” Costner’s character’s English name.) was “Wind in his Hair.”

The introduction of the “Dances with Wolves” concept into the whole Snogie affair was pretty funny. We came up with some pretty funny names. For me it was interesting too because I had just watched this movie on New Year’s Day. (Not that there is any New Year significance in that movie. Just thought I’d mention it.) One of the funniest names came out when we decided to be really crazy and run across the fields to see the Snogies close up. Tim had been holding a birthday cake while we were riding in the car. When I agreed to run across the fields, leaving my adult concern about trespassing behind, we opened the car doors and started to hop out. Sarah said to Tim, “Hey! Make sure you leave the cake in the car or else we will have to call you ‘Runs with Pastries!'” That one was the best!

We ran across the fields, about the length of a football field. We stood behind the tree line to get some pictures before the Snogies spotted us. It was only a matter of minutes before they did spot us. The noise of their honking and the sound of all those wings flapping all at once were unbelievable! It was an awesome sight to see so many birds take off! They flew away from us for several seconds. Then they all turned to the right and circled back! “Uh-oh! Now they are really going to spot us! Cover your heads!” We ran like crazy back across the field. “Aaagggghhhh! It’s just like that movie ‘The Birds!'” Halfway across the field we realized that the Snogies had turned back from us at the tree line.

We hopped back into the car, panting and laughing. Then I said, “Wait!” **gasp** “Wait!” **gasp** **gasp** “I got one! I got one!”

“How about ‘Runs with S**T in His Hair?'”

We drove away in laughter.

CORRESPONDING PICTURE GALLERY:

• Dances with Snogies

(Originally posted on the website Continuum…)

SUDDENLY, it is the last day of 2001. Zoom! All gone! I blinked and almost missed it. Still haven’t had time to catch my breath. What do I write? What do I say?

I must say that 2001 had two very distinct halves to it. The first half found me working my brains out and pushing myself to the limit, mostly for a promotion. Then I switched positions, got my brain all scrambled in Java class and kind of floated around half-numb for the rest of the year. For me, caught in the transition between two distinct job positions, the work was slow. But that half of the year also brought new and unique opportunities into my life. Someone wrote and asked why my journal writing virtually stopped. He asked, “Are you busy, sick, in love?” All I could say was, “Yes. Sort of. YES.” I became busy with side business. I will admit that I have been in love. If you have been in love you know that you become “sort of” sick and you become even busier.

NOW, do I want to give everyone all of the details of being in love? Not really. That is why journal entries around here have been rather sparse. It feels almost sacrilegious to write about it. There is almost a superstitious phobia that if I write about it I will jinx myself and the whole thing will fall apart. At the same time, there is such a desire to tell the whole world about her. You know, when you are in love you just want to tell everyone. There are certain pains and heartaches that accompany love. Somehow, telling someone about the one you love takes the edge off of missing them when you are not together. They seem closer while you hear your own voice talking of how wonderful they are.

SOMETIMES I wonder if the “certain pains and heartaches” in love are residuals from past relationships in which one has been hurt. Exposure to pain creates a reluctance to expose oneself to the same pain. Is that not the whole point of spanking a child? The physical pain is meant to condition their behavior and to teach them to avoid that which is wrong or harmful to themselves and others around them. Does not the heart have its own pains that are so much harder to bear than physical pain? Who can live with a wrecked and bleeding heart? Thankfully, as the body, so the heart, there are ways of healing. Yet, realistically, as the body, so the heart, some wounds leave scars. May the scars make us all wiser, more experienced and better equipped to love more deeply and sincerely.

Is love easy? Not true love. Infatuation may be easy. Love is not. Why? Because love is more than an emotion. It is a commitment. It is a decision of the heart to care for another person and to live for their well being. It is a conscious choice to love that person as much as you love yourself. Often it is a choice to sacrifice your own wants and sometimes needs in order to make another’s life better. It might be large sacrifices. It may only be small sacrifices. Usually it is the latter. Ordinary life does not consist of stellar performances of heroism very often. Rather, it is made up of repeated, mundane little sacrifices and commitments. It is the daily loving and caring for another person in this way that reveals the heart of the hero. It would be glorious, and I might venture, even easy to die for someone. But can I LIVE for someone day by day? Can I get past early-relationship-euphoria and love this human being with both her wonderfulness and her weakness? That is the test. The earth-stopping, history-making displays of one-time sacrifices on behalf of a loved one are awesome and great, the stuff daydreams are made of. But can I still see how beautiful she is when she first wakes up in the morning and kiss her before she brushes her teeth? Perhaps I speak as a fool. Perhaps I know nothing at all. You decide.

NOW, the moon is rising in the cold Northeastern sky. Time is running out on 2001. There is so much more that I could say but won’t. Why jinx myself at the beginning of a new year?