Dismissals

He lived alone, in a small house. It was a few days before Christmas. All around the living room were piles of shirts with the straight pins still in them. There were new pants, neatly stacked, winter coats, sweat shirts and laundry baskets of new socks. I thought him a hoarder but he told me, “When I was a boy, we were dirt poor. Now that I have more, I give to those in need.” Under a small tinsel tree on an end table, there was a can of Dinty Moore Stew and I had to ask: “Are you going to give away that can of stew?” He said, “That’s my Christmas dinner, like when I had nothing. That can…

I have been to Nashville. There, I visited President Andrew Jackson’s home, the Hermitage. I bought two post cards. One is a portrait of Andrew Jackson, astride his white horse, looking presidential. On the back of the postcard is the horse’s name: “Sam Patch.” The other postcard is a photograph, taken in 1867, two years after the abolition of slavery. It is the image of an aged African American woman with her two, small great-grandchildren. She looks into the camera’s lens. Her fingers are gnarled, her face is weary but determined. On the back of the postcard, it says she was “one of Jackson’s servants … the cook,” and that her name may have been Betty. There is no last…

A man in a wheelchair rolled slowly downhill in the middle of a busy road. Traffic in both directions moved past him. Some honked, some slowed and rolled down their windows: “You OK?” “You’re gonna get hit!” The man did not respond. At the bottom of the hill, his chair came to a stop and I stopped. Cars swerved, horns blared. A big pickup truck pulled crosswise and blocked both lanes. More horns. The man in the wheelchair looked at the ground. I helped get him and his wheelchair into the pickup. I asked the driver, “Where are you going to take him?” The driver said: “Anywhere. Anywhere this man wants to go, that’s where I’ll take him.” Go in…

Years ago, in the sheep barn at a county fair, I saw a dozen men compete to be the fastest to sheer a sheep. They had electric shears. Each man worked rapidly, holding the animal to the floor. The heavy wool rolled off in dense, thick mats. When the sheep came to its feet, there were spots of red from small cuts on pink skin. It was so with all the men, until the last. He was old and spoke to the sheep he would sheer, then set it on the ground and began, in long, slow motions, still talking. When, at length, the sheep was shorn and on its feet, there was nary a knick or scratch. The gathered…

Her name is Barbara. She moved out of the apartment next to mine a few weeks ago. She could not make the rent. The landlord came by several times and I overheard: “I’ll get caught up soon. Just a few more weeks.” I helped Barbara move in a year ago. She and her sister were trying to get an old mattress up the stairs, too big for the elevator, too heavy for them. I took one end and the three of us dragged it up to the fourth floor. When I moved in, I bought a new mattress. The store delivered it, set it on the bed-frame and I gave the men a tip. Now I was at one end…

There is bird loose inside a nearby grocery store. It is a small, dark bird, flapping and flittering about in the rafters, crouching on the ledge of the clerestory window and peering out at the world. I remark to other shoppers about the bird and ask: “How did it get into the store?” A young boy allowed, “When they were building the store, the bird made a nest in one of the shelves. Then the workers put on the roof and the bird was trapped.” A little girl speculated, “A wrong egg was in with the chicken eggs. It hatched and the bird was born in the store.” One boy told me that he takes a slice bread from his…

The history of the Torah scroll: Lovingly restored, Hebrew letter by Hebrew letter, this Torah scroll lives now with the Cleveland Kol HaLev Reconstructionist Jewish Community. The scroll is more than one hundred years old, though no one knows for sure. The scroll belonged to a Polish congregation. During World War II, the people of the congregation hid the scroll away. At the war’s end, no one reclaimed it. This only G-d can fully comprehend. Amen. Go in peace to love and serve The Lord! Josh

I was in Detroit, driving through what was once a pleasant neighborhood. In most blocks, there remained one or two homes with neat yards and a car in the driveway. The rest was overgrown, save for the shells of the few abandoned houses still standing. Driving was hazardous. In the middle of each street were neatly stacked piles of debris: Old Christmas trees, crates, tree branches and rusted trash cans. I cursed this strange maze that made me weave about until, at last, perplexed, I stopped. Each pile of debris covered an open manhole from which the cover had been stolen and sold for scrap, each pile of debris a warning to a motorist like me. Go in peace to…

A lemonade stand on a quiet street, a young girl at a card table. I pulled to the curb, “I’ll have a glass.” With great deliberation, she took a styrofoam cup from the stack and carefully poured lemonade from the plastic decanter. She peered into the cup. With a practiced movement, her finger went into the lemonade and brought up an errant speck of dirt or tree bark. She showed it to me on her finger tip, her finger wet with lemonade. Her smile faded, we looked at one another and said nothing. Then she brightened. “Wouldn’t you really prefer a new cup?” I took the new cup of lemonade, I thanked her, paid my tab and drove away. That…

He sat on the curb by his old car. I asked, “What’s going on?” He told me that a late payment had triggered an insurance lapse. Today the police pulled him over because his license was suspended. He said, “I’m stuck, man. I can’t drive till I get my license back, but I gotta drive to go get it.” I offered to take him where he needed to go. We went to his friend’s house to borrow money, to the insurance agent, to the local license bureau, and then to the state motor vehicle office in Canton to have his license reinstated. He walked out a new man. We did it! He thanked me and he thanked God. I thanked…

When I was a kid, I took up the notion to read straight through the Bible, beginning to end. As long as I was at it, I would mark with a red pencil all the rules for living, all the dicta and the laws. By mid-Genesis, my little pencil was worn to a nub and I ran out of steam. Reading the Bible straight through is a less-than-helpful idea yet I hear people say, “I am going to start at Genesis 1:1 and not stop until Revelation 22:21. Then I’ll know what’s in that Bible!” Please, let us have an intervention for these poor souls. Invite them to church! There’s plenty of Bible reading every Sunday. Invite them to Bible…

A year ago, in Sojourners magazine, I read an article by Danny Duncan Collum on the late civil rights activist and author Will Campbell. I saved that article and went looking for it as the conflicts in the Middle East and Ferguson unfolded. Collum, a Southerner like Campbell, wrote this: “Will Campbell gave me a grasp not only of the Southern tragedy and my people’s place in it, but of the larger human tragedy. Once I accepted the fact that even the vicious racists all around me didn’t make themselves and were not ‘the enemy,’ it was a pretty short step to the insight of the filmmaker Jean Renoir: ‘The really terrible thing is that everyone has his reasons.’ And…