Whimsy, plain and simple...

“…delayed gratification can be thought of as instant

gratification saved for a later date…”

– Author unknown

Three of them sit directly across the street from my house on Laughing Coyote Way in Oro Valley. 

While we have been living here now for several months, I feel certain I will always smile when I think of the name of our street.  I try to imagine what a coyote might look like when it begins to laugh…is there a small, yet subtle upward curve at the corner of the mouth in moments of insightful irony? Does it come at the end of a really good joke told in a language known only to them?  Do they bare their teeth with a wide-open mouth as they gasp for air because they are laughing so hard? Are they typically a joyful bunch?  I suppose I will never know the answer to these elusive questions.

The “Three of them…” however, I am referring to are not coyotes, but the trees in my neighbor Gail’s yard.

They are Velvet Mesquite, a hardy desert friendly tree, used in neighborhood landscaping and as common as critters and snakes in this part of the country.  Their bark is rough and thick in pieces and sections that look as though one could pull them off the sides of the trunk like so many oddly shaped snacks you might find at the grocery store. 

The leaves look like small ferns with a velvet-like appearance (hence the name) and they have thorns, long and sharp that could easily penetrate the tire of a car.  The wood is used for many things, but furniture and ‘mesquite flavored’ barbecue is its most common.  Farmers are not keen about them, because their taproot can penetrate deeper than 100 feet (30m), sucking up water that is needed for other things.

It is none of this, however, that caught my eye about these trees.  Two of them sit about 10 feet apart with branches tightly comingled as though they were one unusually shaped tree – the northern side much bigger. 

About 20 feet away and to the south is a lone Mesquite with a lovely shaped branch and leaf formation…except…except for its lowest branch that extends about 14 feet almost horizontally to the north.  This branch is oddly longer than the others on its frame.  That would not be so terribly unusual, I suppose, if the tree 20 feet away to its immediate north (the smaller of the two previously mentioned) had not also done the same thing.  The result is the appearance that these two trees are ‘holding hands’ (branches), deepening their friendship as their branches more fully intertwine.

Because I have not lived here that long, I did not have the opportunity to watch the slow and arduous dance that led these branches to ‘find’ one another.  On the other hand, if it is results that matter, there is little doubt this relationship took time and patience.  They say gratification delayed is the best, and I suppose this would be an extreme example of  “…delayed…” connection – if one could personify this natural phenomenon.  Of course, without being in the same neighborhood, none of this happens.

I suppose any number scenarios might be imagined in the context of this small grouping of mesquite trees.  I choose to humanize them with the natural inclination that living things desire to interact with and find friends of their own kind…you know, lions with lions…dogs with dogs…cats with cats…people with people… We – that would be humans – always want to know and interact with something (-one) new, often just to see what happens…when the result is the connection of friendship, nothing is better.

Plants and trees also seem to have an ability to interact in languages we do not fully understand, but it is known that trees communicate with one another through intertwining root systems.  Because of the way this develops, my guess is these trees already knew one another before making the ‘public announcement’ in my neighbor’s yard. 

Many mornings I sit in the little alcove just outside the front door of our home in a rocking chair beside a small café style table, eating breakfast, drinking a little coffee and thinking of connections with friends who have so enriched my life, as I watch the sun wake up the neighborhood and shine directly on those lovely Mesquite trees across the street. 

- ted

The end is the beginning...

As a well spent day brings happy sleep,

so life well used brings happy death.

-Leonardo da Vinci

“If I live the life I’m given, I won’t be scared to die.”

Seth and Scott Avett,

The Once and Future Carpenter

August 6, 1986…

Over my protest she said, “Don’t come until I call you. There is really nothing you can do.”

This was her way. In a crisis she always seemed calm, steady and focused.  She was my mother but when I think about her character, the example she provided her children, the consistent adherence to loving duty, she has taken on a bigger than life persona in my mind and of little doubt continues to influence me on a daily basis.

Dad was dying and there wasn’t much else for her to do other than sit by his side, holding the man with whom she had shared life’s journey.  While the circumstance was unique, it was not her first end of life experience.  Her mother had died as they were preparing a meal in the kitchen of their home in Toronto, and my father’s mother died of a heart attack while mum visited her in the hospital.  No, this was not her first experience with death in the presence of a loved one, but it was the most heart wrenching.  The others had been quick and unexpected…this was long and slow and difficult.

The call came at 4AM, August 7^th, and by 4:30 with a bag packed the previous evening, coffee, and a few snacks for the road, I was off for the 13-hour drive from Jefferson City, Missouri to Alliance, Ohio.  The trip was surreal as so many images passed through my mind of the man with whom I would never speak or hug or kiss in life again.  He had stepped from the platform to the train with a one-way ticket in hand from which there would be no return…the ride, he had spent his entire adult life looking forward to, had finally arrived.

My father’s death was not supposed to happen this way.  In fact, it was expected many years earlier.

November 1963…

The phone rang around 7:30PM.  Usually when calls came after 7 at night they were for my dad…someone ill, the unexpected death of a parishioner, a person needing some immediate counseling.  This evening, he had returned to the church office for a little more work. 

“Dreisinger’s residence” I said to the caller.

Dad was on the other end of the line.

“Ted, I want you to come to the office.  I have a few things to talk to you about,”

“Tonight?” I said.  “You mean right now?”

“Yes,” he said with an odd timbre to his voice.  “Right now.”

Backing up a bit…

Three weeks earlier, he had been in the hospital to remove a walnut sized growth in his right buttocks.  It had begun as a small irritant, but got big enough that he and his doctor thought it might be good to remove the thing.  The surgery was November 22, 1963…the day John Kennedy was assassinated.  I had gone to the hospital to see how he was recovering, and gave him the news of the President’s death.  He had not heard.  In spite of my father’s fear the Pope would be running the United States Government, he liked the man…I was 16 years old.

A week later he went to Cleveland, for what I thought was a ministerial conference with some colleagues with whom he had worked before bringing the family to Fairmont, West Virginia.  I really did not pay too much attention…it wasn’t that unusual.

The office…

The church was about a mile away from home, so I put on a hat and scarf, my coat, and headed out, responding to this curious request.

“Sit down,” he said matter-of-factly when I arrived.  “You are my only son and I have a few things to go over with you.”

In an instant, a sense of soberness descended like a heavy garment stifling the room. In that moment of immediate intimacy, the walls felt close…things slowed down…everything seemed a little out of focus.  It was like suddenly my father and I were the only two living creatures on the planet.  My heart beat faster and breathing became a bit labored.  You know the feeling…something was coming and it wasn’t good. 

Gravity…that’s it.  The situation was grave!

My father went on to tell me the visit to Cleveland had actually been to a cancer clinic.  The growth taken out of his buttocks turned out to be malignant and was a metastasis from his pancreas…a death sentence!

With the sense of an out of body experience, everything shifted to automatic pilot as my brain tried to understand what my father had just said.  He went through his files with me…the will…bank accounts…how I would need to help mother…plans to leave the city and return to Canada after he was gone.  I was to say nothing to anyone.  Mother knew, but the girls did not…he would talk to them later.  I was speechless!

A minister’s family is usually very protective about what goes on within the home.  These people are held to unmercifully high standards because of the calling.  The pressure often leads to one of two things, the children become public embarrassments or the family pulls up the drawbridge and fortifies one another, becoming closer.  This situation was the latter.  And so in the quietness of a family gathering, my father told us all he was dying. 

Life goes on…

Dad’s calendar over the next few weeks had been previously filled and there was a lot for him to do.

One event was to preach for an ecumenical church service at the Central Methodist Church.  No one in the community had any idea this vital and charismatic man was nearing the end of his life.  He was a master of protecting his emotions and this situation was no exception.

My father was articulate and passionate from the pulpit, but he viewed the weekly sermons as gifts from the Holy Spirit, providing him with as much, or more sustenance, than anyone in the congregation received.  He felt Sunday mornings were a ‘living experience,’ and not just words spoken from prepared text.  Of consequence, he never recorded his sermons…except and until this ecumenical meeting at the Central Methodist Church.  My task was to set up a reel-to-reel tape recorder and capture, what the family believed would be, the last time he would preach.

He began his prepared remarks by saying, “I am grateful to be here today, amongst Christian believers, whose duty it is to be a shining light and example for Christ in the World.  If this were to be the last sermon I were to preach,” he paused, looking at my mother, “these are the things that I would say…”

He went on to express the importance of brotherhood, fairness, duty and Christ’s mercy, challenging each person to be living ambassadors for Christ in a world that so desperately needed Him.  My father never used the pulpit to fear monger or punish.  He felt the Gospel message was to uplift, not laden people with the burden of guilt…there was enough, probably too much of that, in his opinion.  That afternoon was no exception.  While no one but our family knew the truth of the matter, everyone in the room was touched by the passion, power and confidence of his words that day.

The unexpected…

Life has a way, however, of unfolding in the most unpredictable of ways.  As it turned out, my father did not die.  While he believed his life was spared by a miracle, it is more probable the cancer’s origin was misdiagnosed.

He lived another 23 years, and though crippled by the unrelenting and ever increasing grip of Parkinson’s disease for the last 13 years of his life, he continued to be lifted by the Holy Spirit from the pulpit Sunday mornings and minister to those for whom he had been called.

Time and gravity…

In the end, however, as it had always been, his life partner was there at his side. 

When he struggled in life she was there, and as the last breath of air escaped his lips, yet once again it was she that brought him strength, helping him up the final steps…escorting him home.  It was her gift…an unspeakably intimate, loving moment that was hers and hers alone to share – her “…duty…” for the man she had so deeply loved. 

To her, however, it was not a goodbye, but rather a small hiatus, for he was waiting at the station on April 26^th, 2006, when she arrived, and I have little doubt it was a joyous reunion…for the scripture says, “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh (Gen 2: 24).

And so it is written...

- ted

Ash Tuesday…

“If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any

further than my own back yard.  Because if it isn’t

there, I never really lost it to begin with.”

Baum, LF: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

“Hey Kid!  What the hell are you doing?”  The man yelled as he got out of the car.  “I could have killed you!!”

I had made a sharp right turn at the corner, going as fast as I could on my green Monark bike – cutting him off…I never saw the car.  I was so scared, I thought the guy was going to kill me anyway!

It was the early 1950s and while I had only had my brand new used bicycle for a few months, it almost all ended at the corner of North Street and East 212^th.  A member of my dad’s church had given him the bike, he had it cleaned up and it was the biggest and best Christmas surprise of my entire life.

North Street was two blocks long before coming to a dead end in this lower middle class neighborhood, on the North East side of Cleveland, Ohio.  It was a quiet street lined with modest working class houses.  On the corner of Chardon Road and North was the our first home in the United States, just across the front lawn from the First Baptist Church, now many decades later the Bible Baptist Temple.

One thing is certain, after that experience and for the rest of my bicycle riding life, I kept a sharp look out for traffic. 

Present day…

Four o’clock Tuesday afternoon. 

I have known this day was coming, and yet much like Christmas or summer vacations when I was a youngster, time seemed to slow down as the day approached.  It was something I had wanted to do for a very long time, but never had the opportunity.

Nine of us showed up at the appointed time in the basement of an old warehouse at 44 West 6^th street in downtown Tucson.  To say this place was in a warehouse district romanticizes a facility with no restroom accommodations (a portable outhouse in the parking lot) and a cold water sink, with no drainage, causing waste water to fill a five gallon – frequently emptied to the cactus patch in the same parking lot – bucket under the sink.

This unlikely band of folk would NEVER have met under other circumstances.  There was a taxi driving West Virginian…a snowbird physical therapist and nutritionist couple from Alaska...a six foot six, ‘fine arts trained,’ native American/Canadian Indian whose reservation lay on both sides of the border near Buffalo, New York – think ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’…a young gal from Pittsburgh, PA…a government conservationist who oversaw regional development projects…a bright eyed tiny thirty something African American woman…a 62 year old ex-investment money guy who had retired, independently wealthy at the age of 45, from a financial house in New York City…and me!

We did have one thing in common…none of us was from here!!

This eclectic group found itself together to take a bicycle building class with the Bicycle Inter Community Art and Salvage Cooperative, known to the local community as BICAS.

BICAS – what???

BICAS is an award-winning Cooperative that has been in business for 25 years serving Pima County, Arizona and surrounding areas.  It provides affordable transportation resources for practically anyone.  More than 5,000 folks use the facility every year and the organization provides some 2,200 hours of annual community service.

One of the ways it helps people afford bicycle transportation is through its ‘work trade’ program.  Since the organization is a not for profit, it depends on a small group of ‘members,’ and volunteers who do whatever they have the skill set to do…breaking down donated bikes, sorting parts, cleaning up and if one has a little skill – ‘work trade.’  Put in a few hours of work at a credit rate of $8.00/hour and before you know it, one can afford a bicycle.   Everything is donated from the community, and except the workstations where folk work on bikes, the rest of the facility is filled with every imaginable kind of bicycle and used parts.

Folk who want to work on their own bicycles, can rent a workstation for $4.00/hour or $12.00/day…tools and designated bike mechanic helpers are available at no additional charge.

Setting the context…

I am a child of the sixties, and walking into the place was like entering a time warp…the twilight zone…a black hole in the Cosmos.  Many of the staff are tattooed, pierced, hair dyed and attired as though they had been in a 1960s commune and unbeknownst to them, transported to this millennia. 

It is not just appearance, but their spirit, was throwback as well.  This is a collective of the some of the most gentle, thoughtful, and kind souls I have met in a very long time. Bicycle skills? Icing on the cake! 

How this happened…

When first arriving in Oro Valley last November, I took a county sponsored bicycle safety class to see what the ‘rules of the road’ were in this part of the country.  Things are a little different here…for example; it is illegal to ride on the sidewalk or against traffic, both of which, if stopped, have pretty hefty fines.  Riding against traffic on the sidewalk creates an additive fine for both violations, exceeding $500.00!  These people take bicycle safety seriously.

At this course, I learned about the bicycle Co-op, BICAS, as a resource in the community where one could learn to build a bicycle.

“Build a bike! “ I thought. “Are you kidding me?”

The course…

Ash, our lead instructor and Stephanie his assistant could not have been a better team to take an awkward group of ‘no nothings,’ and in five evenings, turn them into fairly confident neophyte bicycle builders!

My partner was Bob, and we were, by far, the oldest folk in the class.  ‘Ruby’ was our bike, and in fact, she was a pretty straightforward ‘build.’   Building a bicycle, it turned out, meant taking the donated two-wheeler…stripping it down and piece by piece rebuilding it.  Everything went well in this five evening, 20-hour course – refurbishing and repacking the hubs, bottom bracket, brake and gear cables – until the last evening. 

The final class was winding down and each group of two were putting final touches on their ‘rebuild.’  Bob and I had actually been a bit ahead of the rest of the teams, when it appeared our rear derailleur seemed to not want to cooperate.  As twilight approached, and the other students drifted away having completed their bikes, Bob and I were still at it.  After swapping out another derailleur, we discovered the front shifter needed to be replaced.  In the end we were the last ones to test our bicycles in the parking lot and on the street.  Ash then took the final test ride for the concluding approval and the task was successfully done.

Postscript…

It is difficult to express how diligent and talented both Ash and Stephanie were in the class.  In fact, while they had us do all of the work, they provided constructive and deliberate instruction during the course.  Without their guidance, one might say babysitting, I am certain Bob and I would still be trying to figure out how to break down the hub on our front wheel (the first task on the first night).

Postscript two…

When I saw that bicycle in front of the tree that Christmas morning, I cannot say how I felt having something like this that belonged to me…something changed, something that ignited a sense of freedom.  Maybe I was only permitted to ride the two blocks North Street afforded me, but those two blocks were mine, and ride them I did.  I felt an empowerment that, unbeknownst to me, would quietly and subtly influence the rest of my life.

Six decades later as Bob and I watched Ash take Ruby for her final test ride, something stirred inside...something had once again subtly changed.  Maybe we had only refurbished a donated bicycle, but I felt the now familiar sense of empowerment that comes with accomplishment and has so deliberately influenced my life.  I was six years old again and grateful for that driver who through quick reflexes, and I am certain a significant amount of fear himself, allowed a little boy to live to ride another day.

- ted