Jess and I decided to take off work Monday. Instead, we went to the zoo, a top priority on our list of things to do this summer. The zoo parking lot was all but empty when we arrived, and to our amazement, we drove right up to the front and found a nice parking spot in ORANGUTAN ROW 1. The sun’s power had increased considerably in the twenty minutes it took to get from our house to the zoo. Halfway to the zoo entrance, I became disappointed in my decision back home to forgo sunscreen. I could already feel my neck turning the tender color of raw calamari.

Inside the zoo, near where a bearded employee handled an armadillo before a gathering of moms and screechy kids, we went over the zoo map I had snagged from the ticket booth. The layout of the place appeared to run in one big loop. The animals were sorted by continent. Nonetheless, all the ”continents” we visited maintained the same steady sweltering climate of the Sahara desert. I feared my body would eventually run out of sweat.

North America was our first destination. I figured this part of the zoo would be nothing short of taking a leisurely stroll through my backyard. I was partially right. Three steps deep inside the Western Hemisphere, I caught a dreadful odor that rivaled that of our garage trashcan the day after I threw away the dead mouse we’d caught in our basement. Nonetheless, we pressed on.

Just off the walking path, a sign called our attention to a low patch of weeds. It informed us that black ants were in there. I strained my eyes but could not make out even one anthill, not even an ant. Slightly puzzled, Jess and I never arrived at a solid conclusion over the ants’ whereabouts. The best I can come up with is that they probably filed their way to the nearest overflowing trashcan and got tangled up in a swath of cotton candy. To be honest, as long as they didn’t end up in my pants or something, I was fine with not knowing their mysterious location. By the time Jess had me posing for a snapshot with a tired old goat with stubs for ears, the ants had left my mind.       

Counting the invisible ants, there must have been a million animals in the zoo. Many seemed immobilized by the noonday heat, either slumped in a shady corner or sprawled out inside a hollow tree trunk. Some animals came off as rather pedestrian, like the mallards, that swam and quacked like the ones back home, but some were worth noting, namely the penguins.

Heavily influenced by Coca-Cola commercials, I have always pegged penguins for snow birds. These particular ones, however, were out and about in the sizzling sun. Not to be mean, but the poor birds looked diseased, as if they constituted a sort of bird leper colony. Instead of donning their usual tuxedo coats, the penguins hobbled out in something more like a dung colored blazer with the stuffing coming out. They were losing their feathers in clumps. What feathers remained mashed into a chaotic mess, looking as if the zoo staff had taken to cooling them off with fire hoses.    

It occurred to me that the penguins might be contagious. As I considered how life might be like living in quarantine, I read up on the penguin facts posted outside their habitat.  Apparently they make nests out of mounds of seabird guano, aka, bird poop. I wanted out. Though not totally undone of my suspicion, I was put partially at ease when I overheard a lady in a zoo polo shirt explaining to an equally uneasy observer that this is molting season.

So maybe they weren’t diseased. But it was an image I knew would stay with me for a long time. I’ve heard of molting, but never witnessed it first hand. I learned a lot from my visit to the zoo. Although it has its plusses, Nature can be very ugly at times. Especially during molting season.

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Since we bought our first house a year ago, my wife and I have adjusted nicely to home living, except for one thing. Whenever someone rings the doorbell, it throws our whole household into disarray. Our 9 pound dog starts yapping her Monopoly piece-size head off, and Jess and I suddenly go to acting like two parrots caught on fire. We dart madly about the house attacking each other with the same crucial question, over and over: “Who’s that? Who’s that?” This sort of thing usually continues until someone is able to drum up the courage to answer the door. And assuming the person at the door is still there, the other takes his place behind the couch peering at the door. That person (I’m not saying it’s always me. Okay?), having already dialed a ”9″ and a “1″ on the cell, will keep a finger ready over the final “1,” waiting, stiff-muscled, to the thump of his heartbeat in his throat. 

This tactic is extremely necessary — and may or may not be approved by Oprah – in case our  surprise visitor decides to grab ahold and make off with one of us. It’s not like we live in a bad neighborhood or anything. We are just neurotically suspicious. Besides, it has just been hard for us to adjust to the throngs of Girl Scouts in the area pushing Thin Mints.

Therefore, I have decided that from now on I shall wear jeans to bed. You just never know when that next knock at the door will be. And that scares me.     

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Recently, I learned I have a serious handicap: I don’t live in fear. 

It’s an inverted notion, I know, since living in fear itself tends to indicate a handicap of sorts. But I’m talking about fearing God. God struck me with this peculiar idea during one of our predawn meetings. Before, I always considered “the fear of God” as rather Old Testament, outdated, if you will, that is, after Jesus came on the scene. I was living in the era of Grace, free and fun, and…I know, I know, Truth too. But, as a Christian, my salvation already sealed by the Holy Spirit, I hardly worried about Hell at all. Except for those bad days at the office, you’d rarely find me cowering in the closet corner at the thought of God sending me packing to Babylon, if I stepped out of line. Although, now that I think about it, He very well could, if we reinstate the draft.      

But I was missing the point. There’s real power to be had in fearing God. And I was just as surprised as anyone to find myself suddenly praying for the gift of this holy fear. After my many failed attempts to live like Jesus, who is sinless where I am not, I realized that fear–fear of messing up, fear of not being liked, fear of God bailing on me, fear of fear itself (props to FDR)–bullied me like the high school hoodlum (no offense, man…please don’t hurt me!). As it turned out, fear was often the ringleader to my compromising my faith. It loomed over me as an ever-present obstacle to my living life to the fullest, how Jesus said. I soon discovered a secret Peter crouched inside my heart, waiting to leap at the chance, given the right mix of scary circumstances, to deny his Savior three times, even more.

When I finally got it through my thick skull that fearing God wasn’t a bad thing, I started to see the benefits it offered. It boiled down to a near-mathematical equation: fearing God equals fearing nothing else. Wow! It’s like having a super power! If I could fear God, let’s see, I could face kings, wild beasts, and even the uncertainties of the Wendy’s acquisition.

Of course, this did not mean all the symptoms of fear would magically disappear. Oh, I knew my legs would still turn to spaghetti and my voice weaken the next time I was elected to stand up and give an impromptu speech to a room full of strangers (which I hope never happens). But–and here’s the big “but”–if I had the gift of fearing God, fear would no longer stop me from doing God’s will. How great!

This new revelation made me want to kick back and smoke a big freedom stogie (although I strictly smoke secondhand). But the image I’m trying to conjure is that of a free man, a truly free man, free in the inside, no matter the hostile environment, free to live the good life, free because of fear–the fear of God. 

Whew! Now, for my next act, I’m going to jump out of a plane. Not really, the thought of it scares me to death.       

Categories: Christianity
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Underoos were the bee’s knees when I was a kid. Cartoon underwear fashioned after superhero suits–what kid wouldn’t beg his mom for a pair? Let’s see, they had Superman, Batman, and Spiderman (my favorite), and, oh yeah, Wonderwoman, too, so not to leave out the girls. I wore Batman and Spiderman.    

Around the same time I donned these flashy undergarments, I was also heavily in to watching Saturday morning cartoons. Every Saturday from 9a.m. to noon, kids had somehow managed to gain complete control over all the TV stations in the world. I dabbled a bit in Smurfs and School House Rock, but the main attraction, hands down, was Superfriends. No normal kid could stand to sit still after absorbing a half-hour’s worth of the Superfriends (including the Wonder Twins with sidekick, Gleek, the caped space monkey) foiling, once again, the evil plans of Lex Luther and his Legion of Doom. So, after my cartoon fill, I’d suit up in my Underoos, dart outside like the Flash, and take to the skies in pretend flight through the neighborhood.  

Barefoot, half-naked, and unashamed, I fought crime in a pair of snug blue briefs and a Spiderman T-shirt. Often, an imaginary spiderweb did the trick for getting me around. I’d breeze through the summer lawns as Spiderman would the streets of New York. Whenever I reached the length of my web, I’d perch myself on an old, termite-ridden log that had rolled off our backyard woodpile onto the grass. A log always made for a nice imaginary flagpole, especially one that hung from the 50th story of the Daily Bugle. Up there, I’d ponder the crime-filled streets below. When it came time to move on, I’d flip my wrists over, bend them just slightly so, and emit two suddens bursts of sound: psst, psst. In my opinion, these sounds–a sort of hiss placed between a “p” and a stong ”t”–most accurately described my shooting webs from my wrists. Once my web grabbed hold of something sturdy, like a skyscraper, a radio tower, or a large man’s back, I’d give the web a tug for good measure, then sail off to my next destination.  

Sometimes it became necessary to set a web trap for the bad guys. This took a lot of psst’s. A neighbor curious to see what the fuss was about could look outside in time to see a streak of legs disappear around his house corner or behind a wall of trees. The same neighbor might also have wondered just who had taught this odd little boy how to run with his hands clasped in a ball above his head. It was like he hung from an invisible thread. He’d never play sports. 

One day, I had the Joker and his villainous cronies on the run. My plan was to cut them off in a back alley somewhere. So, I took a short-cut through my backyard and, to my dismay, landed my barefoot on an angry bee collecting dandelion pollen. A sharp pain shot up my foot. It worked on me like Kryptonite (blasted Joker!). But instead of falling weak and listless to the ground in typical Superman fashion, I burst into tears and bawled like the 4-year-old I was. Finally, I collected myself enough to hop home on my good foot. Mom doctored my war-torn foot and, although I didn’t quite know it yet, I had learned something: justice is not always embraced in this world.    

Later, after my Underoos grew too tight, my mom hit up Jo-Ann Fabrics, and I upgraded my superhero wardrobe to capes. I had a Batman one and Superman one. They both were very cool and did wonders for my crime-fighting. Although, as I got older I grew tired of pretend flying. I wanted to fly for real. So, one gray day, I tied on my Superman cape, went outside, and started jumping, both arms out, with the intent that I might eventually stick in the air. When my efforts failed, I turned to God.

“Please, God, give me the ability to fly.” Jump. Crash. Then again, “Please, God, I want to fly.” Jump. Crash, again.

I carried on like this for nearly an hour. Eventually my bones started to ache, and I realized (could it be?) I was a victim of unaswered prayer. Or worse, a prayer forever answered with a disquieting ”no”. 

What’s with this not letting me fly stuff? I mean, am I missing something? Is this not a noble request? 

I was mad. I had prayed really hard, with my eyes shut and everything. The thing was, I’d been to Sunday school and knew that God was all-powerful. If He wanted me to fly, then I could fly. It was clear that He just refused to let me.

In my teens and early twenties, I would sometimes look back at that day and think what a cute but silly prayer it was. It was a little-boy-with-an-overworked-imagination prayer. Of course God wasn’t going to let me fly. Why would He?  No one could fly, except Superman, and he, first of all, was a sun-powered alien, not a human, and, second, wasn’t even real. The whole thing made me laugh at myself. My prayer wasn’t practical, it wasn’t scientific, it wasn’t…wasn’t important, what with half the world starving the way it is.

But the funny thing is, now I see things in a different light. That little boy with the Superman cape may have known what he was doing. As I read the Book of Isaiah, I find a new answer to my boyish prayer. And the suspected answer may not have been ”no”. Nor do I believe God blew me off with a light, good-natured chuckle. But instead, if I’m reading Scripture correctly, I believe God’s answer was “wait”:

[B]ut those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles (Isaiah 40:31).   

 And besides, Superman is not the only person who can fly. According to Luke, Jesus flew up to Heaven. And if Jesus is the prototype of the resurrected man, it doesn’t seem so far-fetched that I should fly too someday. With that said, Jess has a sewing machine in the basement, and it looks like I have a date with Jo-Ann Fabrics. And maybe this time I’ll swing by DSW for some superboots, to ward off any Kryptonite bee stings.

Categories: Christianity, Fashion, Television
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The first notion I had of humanity’s vulnerability probably came when I was 3 from a Tom & Jerry cartoon. I dimly remember, every weekday, between 2 and 3p.m., plopping myself down in the brown bean bag in front of the TV. Baby blanket in hand, I’d will away the Calgon and L’Oreal commercials, just to hear the soothing swell of canned orchastra rise from our 24” screen. The Tom & Jerry theme song pumped the equivalent of black coffee into my 3-year-old veins, and it worked nicely to gear me up for a wonderful afternoon of cartoon violence at its best.

As I got older, it struck me how speedily Tom would recover after he took, say, a cannon ball blast to the stomach. The very next scene, there he’d be again hot on Jerry’s tail, no arm sling, no 9-1-1 calls, no emergency squads, just business as usual. It was amazing! Had this happened to your typical human, he’d certainly be dead, or at least severely maimed–but cartoons had it different, I guess. They had the remarkable ability to throw themselves back together again and start where they left off. A 1000 volt shock, where Tom’s skeleton would flash like a strobe light, did little but maybe slow him down a bit. He’d still be good to finish out the rest of the episode. Cartoons held the key to violence without repercussion.

And this is exaclty why Tom & Jerry was not a show for kids…or actually…it was, but, perhaps, it shouldn’t be for today’s kids. Hardly able to discern between fantasy and reality, today’s kids seem compelled to immitate what they see on TV. I, however, was immune to such urges. A cat chasing a mouse in circles with an ax hardly influenced me. Nor was I tempted to pull a similar stunt on my sisters whenever Jerry caught Tom in the mouth with a cast-iron skillet, breaking his teeth to the sweet song of shattering glass.

Although, in all honesty, I must mention here that my record isn’t completely clean. One day I caught myself employing a basic Bugs Bunny tactic–but only this one time, I promise. If I could take it back I would, but at the time, I was 5 and the temptation took a near-supernatural hold on me. Even now, I try to push my delete-memory button as I watch my cousin hanging precariously from the porch banister. I cry out to him, try to warn him of myself, who is moving across the width of the porch toward him. My cousin, so sadly trusting, pays me no attention. He reaches for the Matchbox car I had so wrecklessly flung off the porch and into the shrubs three feet below. Wishing not to pass up the opportunity, I go right to work peeling each of his fingers, one-by-one, from the banister. (You know, like how the cartoons do it. Except, he hung from a porch banister instead of the way-up-high I-beam of a skyscraper, or a cliff.) 

He looks up at me, startled, confused. E Tu Brute?  His irises are swallowed up by two black pools of pupil. I can almost see my cartoon grin in them. My cousin’s pleas for me to stop falls on deaf ears. I just finish working loose my cousin’s second to the last finger when I watch him roll off the porch side. His delicate blond hair disappear into the scratchy, tangled mess below. Tom & Jerry couldn’t have done it better. What a dreadful little boy I had become.

The results weren’t nearly as satisfying as I’d hoped. I felt stangely empty inside. It must have been my first taste of remorse. He did not briefly stand on mid-air with a funny face and wave to the camera before he fell, leaving a humorous, smoky plume behind. No, gravity did its job right away. And further to my dismay, he must have hit his knee on a stump or a root or something, because an ear-splitting cry immediately rose from his new hiding place. I thought for sure it was the end of him. So, I did what any normal kid that age would do and ran like heck. The rest of the day, I stayed inside grandma’s house, across the street, where I peeked through the window curtains. Any minute I expected to see my uncle’s furious face emerge from the front door of their house across the street. I dared not come out until my parents said it was time to leave. And then I lay low in the backseat until we were at least a mile outside of town.

“Just sleepy, mom.”

On a good note, my cousin must have made it out of the bushes okay, because no police ever showed up to arrest me. And besides that, many years later, I attended his wedding. Even better, there appeared to be no physical damage from his fall. I detected no limp, no new stutter in his speech.

Unfortunately, my cousin had to learn a hard lesson that day (and maybe I did too): people aren’t cartoons. Fact: this world is rough; people get hurt. That’s just the way it is, or at least until heaven comes to earth, and maybe then we can live like cartoons, never feeling pain or hurt. But for now…were stuck here, with frail bodies and the rest of the package deal that came with the Fall of man. 

Anyway, after that little experiment with my cousin, I vowed to never mix cartoon behavior with reality ever again. That is, if you don’t count the little trick I picked up from The Little Rascles that gray Sunday morning, when I socked my sister in the nose, but in a funny, little-rascal-sort-of-way. After the shrieking and crying died down, I decided the same goes for Buckwheat and reality. … Okay, I shouldn’t ever be allowed to watch TV again.  

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I opened the Sunday newspaper and about fell out of my chair. In frightening, 75 font-sized letters, ones typically saved for only the worst of catastrophes, such as, say, an underground volcano erupting in downtown Columbus, the headlines read the following: BLIZZARD OF 2008.      

I suddenly had the sense that I’d dodged an assasination attempt on my life, that I’d ignorantly settled down for a picnic inside a lion’s den, and, by sheer chance, escaped without a scratch. Here I’d spent the Blizzard of 2008 cracking jokes, deleting spam mail, asking what’s for dinner, treating it as any ordinary winter weekend, while nature, in all its wintry fury (sore, perhaps, over the imminent return of spring?), had declared war on the Midwest, threatening to bury our houses to the shingles, sealing us forever in a snowy tomb. I might as well have had an absent-minded tea party in the middle of the Battle of the Bulge.  ”Pass the crumpets, please.”

Oddly enough, however, a comparison to war may not be far off. Although at the time I stood oblivious to any hints of danger to myself, I did detect a potential threat to our squirrel-sized dog, Phoebe. To put it simply, the backyard is our dog’s latrine. The snow on the ground had already accumulated several inches, enough to bury Phoebe to the neck. This posed a problem, since her fur is the color of snow, and if we had tossed her outside, a snow drift may have swallowed her up, and we’d have to wait till spring, when all the snow melted, to find her again. 

Armed with only a shovel, I dug a WWII snow trench in our backyard. This was necessary to prevent Phoebe from using the bathroom inside the house. While I worked, Jess occupied the open backdoor, keeping an eye out for enemies and, most important, for any deserters, namely Phoebe, who stood trembling in the wake of the path I had just cleared. 

At first, the trench bore a hard line, stopping abruptly a few feet out from the house. But the dog took badly to its cramped design. She touched her snout to the snow and sniffed timidly. With a clump of white clinging to her charcoal-colored nose and with her tail tucked between her legs, she did an about-face and made for the warmth of the house. Deserter!

With perfect military execution, Jess placed herself in front of the doorway, ending Phoebe’s feeble escape attempt. It was back to her Arctic potty. Phoebe did the only thing she could do: she licked the air and turned to face the elements. Just then, an icy, Lake Eerie wind kicked up. Phoebe’s floppy ears smoothed neatly back to her skull. Her tiny, white head rounded into the circle of a cotton ball. Another blast of wind, and she made slits around her oil spot eyes. Her pink underside shook.

“Go potty, Phoebe,” I said. 

She was expected to “go potty” in this?

 To move things along, I improved the design of the trench. I ran the trench around the corner of the house, where I scooped out a small clearing, to give Phoebe more privacy and room to maneuver. It was still cramped quarters, though, but in the end, Phoebe squeezed in several tight circles and did her business.

“Good girl!” I said. Phoebe then scuttled back inside the house. 

Victory was ours. The battle was nature vs. nature (if you consider Phoebe, being of the animal kingdom and all, as nature), and Phoebe had fought a good fight. We laughed at her struggle, at her silly animal instincts. But little did we know the joke was on us, for we stood unknowingly in the midst of the Blizzard of 2008.  

Categories: About a dog, Nature
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Driving to Marion Correctional Institute on a cold Saturday afternoon, I played Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” in my head. Besides “Jailhouse Rock,” it was the only prison song I knew. 

Who’s to say if this helped lighten my anxiety. All I knew was that sometime ago with the church I’d nonchalantly signed up for my first prison visit, thinking little that that day of service might actually come. And now – tada! - here it was. 

Our car carried us mind-numbingly up 23, toward our dreaded destination. Jess sat passenger, warming up her voice with the songs on the radio. She’d agreed to sing at the prison church service and would be the only female on stage. For all I knew, it’d been months since the prisoners had last laid eyes on a woman. I chose to think about Johnny Cash, instead.  

I dimly remember having a slightly selfish motive for going. Somehow, someway during the trip, I hoped to build more compassion for the downtrodden and for humanity, in general. What better way to do so than to toss myself into the center of the dregs of society.

Once there, I half-expected the prison chapel to be a dingy gymnasium. There’d be a makeshift stage and some plastic chairs set outside a beat-up, chain-linked fence for containing the prisoners. I imagined the guards occasionally clubbing a prisoner on the head if one tried to reach through and grab a piece of one of us. Innocently, having never set foot in a prison, I knew only this kind of scene. Perhaps, it came from too many movies, from the various concoctions of jailhouse life Hollywood has served up over the years. 

But, things looked a bit differently. The prison chaplain, a quiet bearded priest with a collar and a ball of keys on his hip, led us through several prison gates, closing each behind us with a definitive clank. Through the network of iron bars, I watched for signs of chaos or take-over attempts. I saw no prison riots, no Hannibal Lectors, either. Oh, you had the prison bars, the razor wire, strung along the compoud walls like deadly tinsle, and all of that, but minus these minor distratctions, the prison chapel looked, well, like a church. The room was spacious, the ceiling rose several feet, and an aisle split two lines of wooden pews.

Hmm…where do the prisoners sit? I saw no fences, no cages, nor anything else to keep us safely secluded.  Maybe they’d come chained together in black and white striped singlets, as was George Clooney and his buddies in Brother Where Art Thou? and forced to sit in the back with stern-faced guards in sunglasses standing over them.

“How many women you got coming?” asked Pastor Buddy, the prison pastor, a bald, friendly man who had used a cart to help transport our band equipment across the prison.

“About five or six,” I said, unsure. Although I tried to act indifferent, my eyes must have given away my thoughts: why do you ask?

“They won’t hurt anyone. Most of the guys are Christians. But keep the women seated inside of you. Some like to ask for phone numbers and addresses. Don’t give it to them.”

 Don’t worry, Pastor Buddy, that shouldn’t be a problem.

Before I could raise the long list of other concerns I suddenly had, such as prisoner-to-guard ratios and where the best place to go incase of a tornado, Pastor Buddy had moved on, leaving me alone to consider the increasing horror of my thoughts.

For the next half hour, I sat stiffly in the front pew, watching Jess and the band set up on stage. I considered the endless dangerous possiblilites of sharing a pew with convicted criminals. Would they start pushing me around about where I live? I shivered at the thought, or was it from the icey draft from the open barred windows.

Then, I worked through several scenerios of muscle-bulging inmates, smiling menacingly as they carried Jess away. Trying hard to squelch any instinctual thoughts of every-man-for-himself, I turned my focus to how, if the occassion called for it, I might protect my wife. My muscles suddenly felt useless and weak. Chaos was inevitable.

Like Jason Bourne, I scanned the place for useful objects to defend Jess with – a music stand, a microphone, my belt? How much more effortlessly could an inmate turn the same objects on me? I wouldn’t stand a chance. Suddenly, I pictured myself on the ground, helpless, arms covering my face, at the receiving end of a keyboard, a crash of dissonate chords breaking the air with each blow.

But then something gave me a moment’s relief: on my side, would be the adrenaline of pants-wetting fear. This promised an element of superhuman strength to my flick of a body, the kind that gives a toddler the strength to lift a car off his pinned parent. Wild with fright – this was my only means of defense.

To get a grip, I went exploring. The service was scheduled to start in an hour. To set up, the band and I had arrived two hours before the other church volunteers, so besides us and a few nice volunteers in navy pants, the room was empty.

In the back of the chapel, I found some christian literature available for the inmates. I leafed through a few pamphlets. Then, before venturing out, I poked my head outside the room. I scanned the solid block walls and linoleum flooring of the hallway to make sure no prisoners had got loose before it was time. I did not want to end up a human bargaining chip for some desperate criminal trying to bust out of the Big House. Hey, I must admit, stereotypes I didn’t even know I had filled my head. I’d seen Shawshank Redemption and various scenes of Cool-hand Luke; I though I was wise to the going-ons in prison.  

My hallway adventure lasted only a minute before I made my way back to the safety of the chapel room. In the doorway, I ran into a bright, cheerful man who I’ll call Roy. He was on his way out, without a trace of fear in his face. This put me slightly at ease. I laughed inside, feeling ridiculous for overreacting all this time.

“Hi, I’m Roy,” he said, offering a friendly handshake.  Roy was lanky and bald, and wore a tightly-trimmed gray beard with a matching gray sweatshirt. His face beamed. He wore navy pants, so right away I pegged him for a volunteer. Although, I did not know what church he was with. 

I introduced myself and reached for his extended hand.

“I’m looking forward to worshipping with you today,” he said.

“Yeah, me too,” I said, awkwardly.

Then, he took off happily down the hallway in search of a friend.

Nearly fifteen minutes had passed before I saw my new friend Roy again, lounging in a pew and chatting with other volunteers in navy pants. I joined Roy and his friends, took a seat in the pew behind them. Roy turned and gave me a warm smile, which instantly included me into the group. I got some more questions ready to ask him, such as what church he went to? and, how long has he served in the prison ministry?

I figured, as long as I stuck with Roy, when the prisoners rolled in, I’d be okay. He really seemed to know his way around. 

“I’ve never been to prison before,” I confessed (like he couldn’t tell).

My words surprised me halfway out my mouth, because suddenly something clicked. I understood something I had missed earlier.

“What’d it feel like when those gates closed behind you? Weird, huh?” said Roy.

“Yeah, it was kind of weird…”

Wait a minute…navy blue pants… Nearly everyone around me has them on. I’m a volunteer, and I’m not wearing navy blue pants. What’s Roy’s tag say: I-N-M-A-T-E…ooh!

“I’ve been here sixteen years,” said Roy. “When I first got here, it was a very dark place. Of course, I was a heathen then. But God is doing great things in here. You can feel his Spirit at work.”

A young man sat next to me, clutching a Columbus State University class scheduling booklet.

“I get out in ninty days,” he said.

He planned to go to college and get a degree in business management. Then he told me about his plans to one day open a ministry for the youth called 3-to-6 – the peak time when kids got into the most trouble. Nonprofit businesses need managers, too.

“But the main goal is to save souls,” he said.

When the rest of the church finally arrived, many wore the same nervous, unsure faces I must have worn. Won’t they be surprised to learn about the good men who live here, harmless, loving, ready to serve, filled with a thirst for God, identifiable only by their navy pants and their broken hearts.

Nonetheless, my heart went out to my fellow church members. I sympathized with them as they absorbed their cold new surroundings with wide eyes and uneasy smiles, trying to pick out the inmates from the rest of us, trying to crowd out the piercing question with an open mind: Are the prisoners dangerous?   

“Can I get you some coffee? water?” Roy asked me.

“No, I’m okay, Roy. But thanks for the offer.”

Categories: Christianity, Community
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Kick-the-Can is a sore subject for me. I have nothing against the game itself. No, all kids should play it; there should be city leagues. 

But when I dare tap into the shadows of my elementary years, I see a sad sight, a kid, his eyes boiling with tears beneath a hot head of curly brown hair. Scuffed knees top his grass-stained socks, and his shorts are much too short by today’s standards. Once again, head hanging, he drags himself across the summer grass, the endless stretch of connecting neighborhood backyards, in route to the wounded milk jug. It is caved in on one side, where just moments ago a foot had met the plastic with mean force, echoing like a gunshot between the houses and throughout his soul. Again, all his prisoners are free, and his hard work is ruined - an endless, ruthless cycle.

With all the neighbor kids back in hiding, the world is a ghost town. The birds in the trees chirp occassionally to break the twighlight silence only to mock him. Tears in the kid’s eyes smear together the rich summer colors with a liquid worn out sky, as he goes after the confounded milk jug. This time they had booted it clear to Mrs. Moon’s. She’d probably come out and yell at him for setting foot on her grass. 

For two hours now he has been it. Now, two options lay before him: (1) he can retrieve the milk jug, set it back in its place, and go back to work again, collecting his escaped prisoners; or, (2) he can run the risk of being called a baby, quit, and go inside. If I know the kid as well as I think I do, he will choose the latter. 

This is how it was for me growing up. My neighborhood pumped out a brood of mean-spirited kids who shaved and would knock endlessly at my door to get me, a first-grader, to play kick-the-can.

“Come on,” they’d say, “we need only one more player.” Through my screen door, they’d disarm me with pleasantries and warm smiles, insisting we were friends and I’d be well liked – because that’s all I ever wanted, anyway – if I’d just come out and play this once. This time it’d be different. Besides, I’d be selfish not to play, because if I didn’t, mysteriously, no one else could. And, of course, young and naive as I was, I’d play. And two minutes later, I’d be forever it.     

Kick-the-can was a big deal in our neighborhood. I don’t know who invented the game. Perhaps its orgins are from the Deep Depression, when all that anyone owned was an old can. As for us, we prefered an empty milk carton, because it got good hang time. Also, I vaguely remember the older neighbor kids having me stick my nose in it and breathe the carton’s spoiled insides – “Take a whiff,” I can still hear them saying - so there may have been other more sinister reasons why.   

Kick-the-can is not a complex sport. A can is placed in a designated spot, preferably, a nice dirt spot in someone’ s yard, but any agreed upon spot will do.  The person who is it (I’ll call him the ”jailer”) (which usually was me for hours on end) guards the can with his life. Everybody else hides behind houses, cars, bushes, or if they’re a good climber, in a well foliaged tree. The jailer (which, again, was usually me) must round up everyone he sees in hiding and put him in jail.  This is done by calling out the name of the spotted person and where he is hidden, and running like a maniac to jump the can and complete the prison sentence before some jerk kicks the can half way to China. For example: “I see Jason! Jump the can!” Once all have been captured, someone else gets to be it.

Whenever the can is kicked, everyone runs free, hollering and taunting the jailer all the way to their new hiding places. Say twenty kids are playing and nineteen are imprisoned, if the twentieth man kicks the can, everyone is free, the game starts afresh, and the jailer (which was always me) experiences the soul-wrenching feeling of having two hours of his hard labor, not to mention his only chance at freedom, crumble into oblivion, right before his eyes.

Sometimes, if the neighborhood kids were feeling particularly merciless, they’d form a terrible, human kick-the-can train. Appearing suddenly from behind a house or an oversized pine tree, they would rush the can. Of course, the jailer must shout the name of and jump the can for each person he sees. Impossible. Under such conditions, if the fourth of fifth person were unable to make it, the ”caboose” would, and off to Mrs. Moon’s yard I’d go, building up the courage to quit. 

The kick-the-can train was only one of the many strategies used against me. Another good one that particularly irked me involved switching shirts or hats and running behind the house to the opposite corner from where I saw them. They’d emerge about five minutes later after I’d shouted their name: “That was Scott you saw. I’ve been hiding here the whole time. And plus, this is a red shirt, see? It’s different than the blue one you saw. Now, close your eyes and count to fifty while I go hide again.”       

Besides this, we played many more neighborhood games. But whatever the game, they would all end in the same result: me crying and going inside. As a matter of fact, now that I think about it at the ripe old age of 32, that probably was the game. Anyway, my point is, if you’re a counselor and you want to get to the bottom of my psychological problems, kick-the-can is probably a good place to start.

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The oval is dead. Yes, you heard me right – the oval is no longer. And if you think that’s bad, the diamond’s dead, too. I first suspected they’d been running with the wrong crowd and had come to the typical tragic ending. Ended up, however, they were victims of a certain group’s desperate need to do something. 

My wife, a very reliable source and highly esteemed preschool teacher, told me the sad news just the other day. Her job is to know and love everything there is to know about shapes (and storytime). “What’s this, kids?” “Oball…(in unison)”

So you can imagine the gasps throughout the preschool halls the morning the moms arrived, kids in tow, and announced how if their child were to mark ”oval” for its corresponding shape on the kindergarten entrance exam, they’d wind up infinitely wrong, and perhaps a year older than their graduating class. Nope – now it’s called an ellipse. And the diamond, a rhombus.

The hard, cold imaginary truth of the matter is that this is what happens when you get a bunch of shape experts in the same room together. Realizing the shape field has experienced next to zero major achievements since King Tut’s day, when the wheel was dubbed the circle, and, therefore, their paychecks might be in danger, they did what any normal shape experts would do: they held a convention.

Someone needed to invent a need for change - and fast. Otherwise, what in the world were they getting paid for? No, seriously, what?   

 Since all the good shapes were taken, the assembly of minds unamiously agreed that the only real route to take was to rename a couple well-known ones. If anything, this would at least confuse the general public, not to mention the up and coming kindergartners, long enough to secure their jobs for the next few years (and, fingers crossed, open the opportunity for a nice Time Magazine write-up). Plus, the ellipse and rhombus sound a heck of a lot smarter than an oval or a dumb old diamond.

Well, this is all fine and well, I guess. A shape expert’s gotta make a living, too. But it dawned on me that I suddenly stood outside the with-it crowd. I no longer knew my shapes. I was an oval living in an ellipse generation. And, chances were, from old habit, I’ll still go on calling an oval an oval, only to be met, no doubt, by snickers and secretive giggles from those young lads in the know. I will be labeled with the folks who either can’t help or insist on calling a movie a picture show, or an automobile a horseless carriage.       

Worse yet, what about cards?! The Queen of diamonds is now the Queen of rhombuses (or rhombi; whatever its plural form). It’s dreadful; we are witnessing the extinction of those who call a spade a spade! This here was too much. I sat down, took some deep breathes. My head swam with the sense of a world spun out of control. Suddenly even my neighborhood felt strangely unfamiliar, like I’d slipped into a deep coma and woken up on Mars. I panicked, fearing for the triangle’s life, then the circle’s. Where does the terrible momentum of shape renaming stop? And, what about America’s votes on the matter? Does democracy only reach so far?

 Soon they’ll probably change my name. So, to avoid forever getting stuck with something ridiculous, I must get a jump on these guys. For now on, I declare my name to officially be Eoj (which is Joe spelled backwards) Oval (in memory of) Diamond (also, in memory of), Sr. (incase there’s ever a junior).   

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According to Yahoo! News, a man was recently spotted on Mars. This of course was made possible only through the highly technological advancements of satellite camera. The headlines of this real life ”My Favorite Maritan” chilling on the red terrain, made my pulse quicken and my imagination run wild. How’d he get there? Are there more of them? And, more importantly, does he love or hate President Bush?

So you can imagine the let down once I discovered that, in this special case, it turned out to be nothing more than a rock formation that just so happened to look like a man. Yes, this lame fact had been confirmed by ”scientists.” As the imaginations of my Martian-crazed mind lay dashed to pieces on the rigid red rocks of Science, a new, and perhaps more mysterious set of questions presented themselves: who are these so-called “scientists” referred to in nearly every serious news article?

In order to get to the bottom of this, I decided, on the spot, to conduct a make-believe study involving billions of imaginary tax dollars. I lounged back in my desk chair, threw ball with my very persistant 9lb dog, and turned my brain loose on getting the inside scoop on this slippery tribe of brainiacs. This of course required little to zero research on my part, seeing I really hate research.

Scientists – the term sounds so vague, yet so profound. At the thought, I am immediately wisked away to the picture of lab-coated men in spectacles and clipboards, huddled around a tall cylinder glass casing. Inside is Einstein’s brain, suspended in a preserving liquid of sorts, kept alive through, you guessed it, Science. A network of tubes hooked to the famous brain feeds directly into a massive mainframe that burps out only the purest forms of intelligence in regular intervals, such as the devastating ripple effect that would certainly transpire if Burger King really did stop selling the Whopper.    

The weird thing is, any latest news article about the discovery of an unusual back molar found in a remote field somewhere overseas that further proves -”according to scientists” -that man evolved from kangaroos, or the like, sends me nodding hypnotically along, powerless against the scientists’ rule of my mind. Unusual teeth equals evidence of evolution – check. Well then, I thought, if that’s the case, I know how the scientists could cut travel costs. If it’s unusual teeth they’re after, they need look no further than the closest county fair.  

Anyway, in my head, I decided to do a little experiment of my own, to see if these scientific claims wielded the same power on the minds of others. I went around making outlandish claims to all sorts of people. For example, I’d confidently state something like,”Bananas are really cocunuts in disguise.” If challenged, I’d simply say, “according to scientists.” 

“Well, why didn’t you say so?” Case closed. “I mean, if ’scientists’ said it…”

I tried the same experiment using God, who made the scientists, in place of ”scientists”. “You know, according to God, the first man was fashioned from dirt,” I’d say. Surprisingly, this didn’t convince anyone. Instead, I was met with a fusillade of questions.

“Which god? you’re god? how do you know your god is the right god? And you can’t tell me the words of the Bible have remained unchanged, untampered with all these years, what with human error, not to mention corruption.”

“I’m just kidding,” I’d respond, “I meant to say, ‘according to scientists’.”

“Well, in that case…”      

On another occasion, I noticed that the scientists can be real pranksters.  Why, just the other morning, I checked the news and was briefly paralyzed with horror as the headlines read something to the effect of ASTROID HEADS FOR EARTH, and below that, “scientists say”. It will arrive next Tuesday, and, if you’ve seen the movies Deep Impact and Armaggedon, you know what that means. The fact that the death asteroid would miss earth by millions of miles (which, apparantly, is quite close when you’re dealing with space), was cleverly hidden in the middle of the story - after I’d called off work and put in several calls to Ben Afleck about what to do. “False alarm,” I called to my wife. 

Billions of asteroids fire through space everyday. Why bring it up, unless to frighten the pajama pants off the reader? Practically speaking, if you’re going to talk killer, earthbound astroids, the least the scientists could do is rattle off the vastly unlikey odds that it might nip a polar ice cap or something. And start by saying, “Earth’s okay. Everyone will live.” No, the scientists have a different agenda: devilish pranks.    

And which scientists? All scientists? Every single one? It seems they always all agree. This is amazing. We should pattern world peace after these guys. You’d think there’d be at least one renegade, lounged in back, cooly blowing smoke rings, who’d occasionally object to a theory or something. (ex. “I don’t believe Barium is an element.”) 

Anyway, after all the hard thinking about scientists, my head started to ache. I’d learned some very interesting things about scientists today. And they are very smart, indeed. There’s no arguing that. But I thought of something the scientists probably never even considered: what if the Martians are made of rock?  

Categories: Mystery, Science
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