The Flow of God: Living Water (Fourth Annual Posting)

Posted on February 13, 2017 by ganid11
Image of the galaxy M101 from NASA's Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescopes, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, and NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer Photo: NASA

Image of the galaxy M101 from NASA’s Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescopes, NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, and NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer Photo: NASA

“Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God…”

– Revelation 22:1

This post is surely my most presumptuous, but perhaps the most important. It is perfectly possible that, by conflating pure physics and pure God and presuming to believe that not only do Einstein and his intellectual progeny have it right, but that our loving, personal God was the one and only Original Thinker who designed and built the physical realities these Nobel physicists are uncovering – tiny grain by tiny grain – I have over-thought and under-calculated. After all, who am I, an Alabama-born, New York marketing guy who has spent most of his career promoting magazines, to discuss – or even think about – such high-falutin’ ideas as these?

Nevertheless, taking courage in the fact that Einstein, himself, was a patent clerk when he made most of his discoveries, I persist because I do believe I’m onto something here, however unprovable it may be, and as it is nothing less than a new way to perceive and/or visualize the tangible Love of God and how He delivers it, I can hardly not continue to make my case. Thus, as promised, here is the fourth annual posting of my second foundational essay, originally called “Living Water Boson.”

If you have, by now, read “Uncle Jesus,” my inaugural essay, then you know that my journey of faith began as a five-year-old when my Sunday School teacher, Nelle Lethcoe, told me that Jesus just wanted to be my Friend, so I invited Him to join me and my two imaginary little-old-British-lady friends for our usual afternoon tea, even as I invited Him into my heart, where He has continued to grow organically, if you will, for the sixty years since. And however nebulous such an experience may seem to you, life itself has reinforced our constant bilateral commitment and association to the point of undeniability as everything I came to know about Jesus and his personality in those early years has been borne out by everything that has happened to me/with me/for me since. Can angels really appear in flowered hats? Does Jesus really live? Ineffable are the realities of faith, as they were meant to be, but I can state without fear of contradiction that the longer one lives in a way that allows for benefit of the doubt, the more the doubt disappears.

Are the Science…

First of all, how can anyone believe that the earth is the only place with intelligent life in all this great universe? I have always felt that there must be millions of inhabited planets strewn across the substance of space, each one boasting  millions of diverse material creatures doing their best to get the most out of such a life, even as they bring delight to the eyes of our mutual Heavenly Father. I’m not sure how I first subscribed to this notion, but perhaps I simply came to believe that the velvet of the midnight sky teems with life because it is the inescapably logical extension of a larger idea: that our fatherly God, while loving and generous, is never wasteful (after all, He recycles everything) and would not have expended such a wealth of matter and energy for aeons of time across infinite space just to give His meager earthlings, so very recently arrived and rarely deserving, a starry, starry night.

“Logical,” of course, is the operative word, for while I believe God is vastly/ immeasurably/infinitely smarter than all of us combined, even we who walk and talk on the material plane do eventually figure out that to act against reason is to live in a fool’s Paradise, and if the importance of “means, ends and consequences” is apparent to even the least of us, how much more clear it must be to God. He is not irrational, however inexplicable His designs may seem from our limited view, and He never operates on a whim, since to do so might imperil His beloved children, whose evolution, I believe, was His very motivation for creating our universe in the first place. And if God is God, then the physical logic – the science – of the reality He created must, perforce, flow from Him just as surely as the joy to be found in a moving hymn or the inspiration in a sunset. In other words, the operating, actual rules of physics must also, by definition, be the actual rules of God, Himself. And if this is true, then those like me, who profess belief in Him, do our followers – and truth – a profound disservice when we dismiss demonstrated physical reality just because it conflicts with some long-held dogma or doctrine, however venerated that teaching may be. “Though science courses from the Source//Who spawned, as well, the spirit//The Source cannot be proven//So, they socialize over coffee//And miss the point.”[2]

Nevertheless, it is a rare thing, indeed, to find science contemplating the nature of God, so it was particularly refreshing a few years back when the popular media started talking about the “God particle,” also known as the Higgs Boson (though, for the sake of balance, I should here note that many scientists loudly poo-pooed the designation.[3]) Now, please allow me, for just a moment, to get into the weeds of this: the “Higgs Boson” is a “flash in the pan” sort of impossibly small particle that, in and of itself, is not all that important, but the fact that it exists, as was recently proven in the Large Hadron Collider, does matter because it proves that something infinitely greater, the “Higgs Field,” is no longer just a

Artist's rendering of the Higgs Field.

Artist’s rendering of the Higgs Field.

theory, but something real. Described as a vast circular skirt (or “sombrero,” since the scientific models show a big bulge in its center) of energy particles/waves that stretches from the very center-point of the whole mass of God’s created universe out to its very edges, the Higgs Field is a never-ending Mexican Hat Dance of universal ripples gliding inexorably across the entirety of space.

and the Spirit…

Now, having said all that, allow me to shift the light from science to spirit for a moment and consider something that might, at first, seem entirely unrelated: the oft repeated idea of “living water,” or the “water of life,” which is surely one of the most cryptic and mysterious concepts in the Bible. According to the site Openbible.info, there are twenty-nine scripture verses about “living water” and exactly one-hundred about the “water of life.”[4] Isaiah,[5] Jeremiah,[6] and Zechariah[7] all mention “living waters” in some form or another, the book of Revelation is overflowing with citations,[8] and perhaps the most famous Biblical reference of all is found in the story of Jesus and the “woman at the well,” when He, having no dipper of His own, asks her for a drink and then uses the opportunity to invite her to partake of the living water “and never be thirsty again.”[9] But, all that said and for all the mentions in our sacred writings, none of these writers actually define it. What, exactly, are all these people talking about? Just what on earth is this living water, anyway, and how the heck do we get some?

I suppose almost all of us with any introduction to Scripture have asked ourselves this question at one time or another, but probably not for very long since, this side of unwieldy theological dissertations, there is very little to go on. Many writers speak of it in vague generalities, but none explains it in any tangible way. To be honest, I never really gave the idea much thought, myself, until I backed into it when – just like my Uncle Jesus epiphany – it grew out of my ever-evolving daily prayers.

If you happened to read my “Uncle Jesus” post, you are already familiar with the part of my prayer that seeks to embrace all of our neighbors – from the neighborhood to the city to the world – having proved to my own satisfaction that it is a near mathematical certainty that nearly everyone on earth is much more related than we think – indeed, literal cousins – and more than that, that Jesus, himself, is equally certain to be our mutual great-uncle (going back about 62 generations).[10] But, this part of my prayer only comes near the end, after I have spent considerable time doing my best to align my personal, conscious will with His. In concert with my angels and to the best of my ability, I have settled over time on a sequence of thoughts and phrases that help me to attune my mindal wavelengths to His; to open my perceptions and align my motivations right down to the least whim with the will of God, until the love between us flows unimpeded in a joyful circle. Even Jesus began with “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done….”

So, I begin simply with a thank you to our Heavenly Father – whom I perceive to be both at the center of all things (“In the center of the center of the Universe//At the centerpoint of space and time//Sits the Source of the course of the Universe//The Supreme, the All Wise, the Sublime.”), as well as within my heart – for the day ahead and all the opportunities and challenges it contains. Then, I ask Him to please accompany my angels and me as we go from “moment to moment and place to place, task to task and person to person,” that whatever we may choose to be, do, say, or write is in accordance with His desire; that every joule of energy we may expend is spent as He would have it. Then – and this is where, for me, at least, the science and spirit begin to merge – I ask for His help in aligning myself as perfectly as possible with the steady flow of His living water, that I might drink deeply from those energizing gifts of the spirit He sends so very far, even to our little orb of jewel-encrusted iron spinning so silently through space: isolated, idiosyncratic, but never alone.

…Two Sides of the Same Sombrero?

Now, theoretical physicists tell us that without the Higgs Field there would be no material reality at all, and that would be that; that those invisible spokes of radiating energy are the foundational warp through which the weft of coordinate forces are woven into the fabric of time and space. In other words, to go back to our earlier analogy, if those ripples weren’t constantly conducting the energy of creation on its journey outward, all of it – every star, every planet, everything down to the last atom of hydrogen – would simply cease to be. But, that said, and however true that may be, I think the physicists are underselling their idea. They’ve discovered our Father’s transport, but neglected His cargo, for this phenomenon – this flow from the very heart of God to each and every person made in His image (i.e., as He imagined) – carries with it so much more, I believe, than mere being. Rather, it arrives filled to the brim with inestimable gifts pouring ever and always out upon us, even from today unto that day long hence when we, having finally followed His generous flow all the way back to its Origin, to the Center of the Center, may find ourselves standing in awe before the very Source, Himself, to sing His praise and respond in kind to His constant, omnipresent love of us and all creation.

Just to make it perfectly clear, what I’m proposing here is that both the “matterizing” Higgs Field and that mysterious Biblical “living water” are actually the same phenomenon, merely seen through the lenses of different disciplines and different times, requiring different words to have meaning. After all, even if you were a Son of God who completely understood the science behind these concepts while living as an itinerant prophet in First Century Palestine, how would you even being to explain it to your flock without any common vocabulary of physics? Given His situation, the “living water” description is about as accurate as He could be. How else could He have described it, if His goal was to assure His followers that the love of the Father is always engaged, and the more we are able to align with it – the more we can drink in of His largesse – the more we will be able to utilize the gifts He so generously and constantly delivers?

But what, really, does this living water do? How are we affected as it flows through and around us? As I have prayed my prayers over the years, consciously striving to align myself with the Father, His mind, and His flow the better to absorb it, I have also gained an ever-growing appreciation of, at least, how I see these treasures. Consequently, while it is possible that there are more of them that I have yet to unwrap, I am settled in my personal belief that our Father has graced us with at least seven identifiable gifts, invaluable life forces to help us along. Christ asks the impossible: “Be ye perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect.”[11] But then He makes it at least nearly possible through these endowments that may, when fully embraced, expand our awareness a hundredfold – even a hundred times a hundredfold – thereby transforming and multiplying our otherwise merely animalistic potential into something much, much greater for our long journey ahead.

Our Doting Granddaddy God

If Jesus is truly our flesh-and-blood Uncle and, according to both of them, God is His Father (if you include that voice heard overhead when Jesus was baptized[12]), then the Source in the Center must also, by definition, be our Heavenly Grandfather, and, like all grandparents everywhere, Granddaddy God is overly generous, especially considering what an unappreciative, even unnoticing, crop of offspring we truly are. Nevertheless, our Father is Mercy, Itself – He who forgives and forgets, apparently – and we are the clear recipients of His never-ending magnanimity; his constant flow laden with gifts for His beloved grandchildren everywhere.

As I have come to clarify my understanding in each of these gifts over time, they have fallen, really, into two groups of three, plus a bonus that arises naturally from the first six. The first three are gifts of energy, and are absolutely necessary for the lives we lead: The energies of Love, Light and Life. The next three are gifts of discernment and must be gifts from the Heart of God since we could live perfectly successfully without them – biologically speaking – but not nearly as well: Our otherwise inexplicable discernments of Beauty, Goodness and Truth. Because, I presume, He wished His children to share the wonder of His vast, utterly magnificent universe – the stunning results of His astonishing artistry – He has given us the means to do so. And, the seventh? That would be a marvelous gift arising naturally from the fruits of the first six: The gift of Hope, a loving grace note adroitly placed to complete our Father’s grand embrace of every single person.

And, all of these gifts have one extraordinary quality in common: each is universally accepted as something real by everyone – even the most cynical of philosophers – but none has any provable origin. These seven gifts of God exist simply because He said so, and I believe He said so that we might have life and have it more abundantly. Let us take them one by one:

The first, of course, is the energy we call Love. Now, you may not think of love as a form of energy, but, if so, you have forgotten your youth. Surely one is never more fulsome than when first flung into the throes of love. And as for the Love of God, well, that must surely predate all except God, Himself – even before the “Alpha” – since it is the only conceivable reason for building the Universe in the first place. You might even say the big bang was actually God’s own Love in action, and the miracle of the Love that even now continues to ride, astride His open arms, is the ability it gives Him to hold each and every one of us in His heart, one-by-one and One-on-one. “Were there not Love//Would be no fear//For there would be nothing to lose,//Would be no hope//For there would be nothing to gain,//Would be no life//For there would be no reason.”[13]

The second gift of energy riding the Father’s waves is Light, itself: physical, mental, emotional and, most mysteriously of all, the Light of Spirit. And, when I use the word “Light,” I mean it in all of its usual connotations (it is a word of many purposes). Of course, all actual light and “energies” of space (strong and weak atomic forces, gravity, the great spectrum of light energies that includes our visible light but also a great deal more) would require the Higgs Field/living water to exist in any case, but the Light of Divine peace “that passes understanding,” for those of us who believe, is also included in my definition; the alluring, consoling, protecting, adjusting, rewarding, distinctive Light of the Holy Spirit with hosts of angels under Her command.

And, the third of the energy gifts is that riddle called Life. Of course, if there were no bosons, and thus, no matter, then neither would there be any living thing. But even if the atoms and molecules required for life could somehow be assembled, I submit – in spite of recent claims to the contrary by overly optimistic biologists – that without the touch of God, the assemblage would simply sit, inert. The Love of God requires us, the Light of God illumines us, and the breath of God gives us Life.

But, even as beautifully, lovingly created as we are, without the next three gifts – those of discernment – almost all of creation’s blessings would tragically pass us by, utterly unnoticed. Truly the keys to life well lived, the discernment of Beauty, Goodness and Truth are capacities that I presume to have come from God since I can conceive of no other possible source. Consider: it contributes nothing to our evolutionary success to be awed by the Beauty of a dragonfly or transported by the colors of a sunrise, and yet we are. Goodness? Find me any other species in all the great array of nature’s diversity that has ever even approached the ideas of “right” and “wrong” – the “knowledge of good and evil” – and yet we are consumed by such judgments from birth until our very last breath. And, Truth? Well, we could discuss the “truth of Truth” forever, but no one can deny the healthy instinct that resides within each of us for telling truth from falsehood: the Spirit of Truth.

No, our appreciation of Beauty, delight in Goodness and awareness of Truth are discernments that must have come from somewhere, but they didn’t arise organically. Nature cannot account for them, only Heavenly nurture. No other beings throughout the entire history of the planet have even come close to conceiving of such things, much less attaining the levels of perception necessary to inspire the building of great museums to beauty, temples to goodness or tribunals for truth, and yet, by God’s own Grace, we, His grandchildren, have done these things.

Finally, the seventh gift of the flow of the Father is a special one because it is not carried across the universe on waves of living water like the other six, but springs naturally, unbidden, from the human heart in response to God’s constant flow: the gift of Hope. For – at least it seems to me – even the most destitute, downtrodden or abased of us, once attuned to the Father’s Love, Light, Life, Beauty, Goodness and Truth, cannot fail but find Hope there, as well. Who could remain discouraged when showered in a constant stream with such rich and wondrous treasures? Hope is the bridge that carries us safely over life’s deadly chasms, the light at the end of every tunnel, and our never-failing spiritual salve, always at the ready to embrace us with its assuaging power, to lift us up and carry us forward past the inevitable disappointments of a material life. And, I believe, the living waters of the Father supply the fount of all hope.

I could, of course, be entirely wrong about all of this; simplistic and presumptuous in my analysis of the science of all these things, and I expect our cousin Dan, who actually studied with Dr. Higgs, will let me know if I’ve somehow slipped past the truth of things, but even if the Nobel Laureate’s ideas – the Higgs Field and Higgs Boson – have nothing whatever to do with the Father’s love, there is still that Biblical “living water” to account for, and however they may be borne from the Father’s heart to ours, I believe the gifts I have described are delivered on the wings of that flow.

Tools of Crystal

To receive such beautiful gifts from God, it goes without saying, is to be inspired to share them – which, after all, is why I am doing all this writing in the first place – so, once my daily prayer for alignment has harmonized my will with His as much as I can manage, I do ask for three additional gifts before moving on: a trio of crystal tools to help me share God’s grace with as many others as possible; to help me, as best I am able, increase the fruits of His gifts.

First, I ask for metaphorical mirrors – mirrors of all shapes and sizes – to reflect out the Light, Life, Love, Beauty, Goodness, and Truth in as many directions as possible, to as many people as possible, as much of the time as possible.

Secondly, I ask for metaphorical lenses to gather the light, the better to focus it, first, upon the Beauty, Goodness and Truth I may find along the way, as well as into shadowy corners where evils lurk, ignorance simmers, and fears feed upon fears.

And thirdly, I ask for metaphorical prisms to unfold the light, for what could be more affirming of our Father’s love of beauty than the rich, velvety jewel colors of His unfolded spectrum; the rainbow of His designing; a million colors in the Divine light given to all of us? And, I put it to you that, once such beauty has been seen and appreciated by His children – has delivered a foretaste of the infinite possibilities residing in His Heavenly paintbox – the gentle pull of such a Divine Designer, Caring Maker, Generous Host, and Loving Father is well-nigh irresistible.

Prayer, as I said above, is really an attempt, for me at least, to align my mind with God’s, to do my best to see and follow the path He has placed before me that I might become the me He would have me be. And so I begin every day by asking to be optimized in His flow – that very living water of which Jesus spoke to the woman at the well – the better to see and understand His desires. Then, fully aligned and equipped, I turn my supplications to the needs of others, and the issues of the day. But, dear cousins, that part of the story will have to wait until the third and last of this unintended series exploring our Father’s generosity, when we will also consider the unavoidable question: What is He thinking?!? How could we humans – frail, foolish and corruptible as we are – possibly be worthy of so much Divine attention?

If you’ve made it this far, thank you for sharing your time with me, and may our Father be with us as we continue to seek and follow His will as best we can.

GTW

March 7, 2014; revised February 13, 2017

© 2017 by George Thomas Wilson, all rights reserved

[1] https://inpraiseofangels.wordpress.com/2014/02/09/uncle-jesus/ , the Second Thread, paragraph 6.

[2] https://inpraiseofangels.wordpress.com/2014/02/25/wet-weathered-sunday/ fourth verse.

[3] The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? by Leon M. Lederman, Dick Teresi (ISBN 0-385-31211-3)

[4] http://www.openbible.info/topics/water_of_life

[5] Isaiah 58: “10 if you pour yourself out for the hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted, then shall your light rise in the darkness and your gloom be as the noonday. 11 And the Lord will guide you continually, and satisfy your desire with good things,and make your bones strong; and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters fail not.”

[6] Jeremiah 2: “12 Be appalled, O heavens, at this, be shocked, be utterly desolate, says the Lord, 13 for my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns, that cn hold no water.”

[7] Zechariah 13: “1 On that day there shall be a fountain opened for the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem to cleanse them from sin and uncleanness.”

[8] Revelation 22:1 (epigraph); 21:6: “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give from the spring of the water of life without payment.”; 7: 17: “For the Lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of living water, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”

[9] Gospel of John 4: 1-15: “Now when the Lord knew that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John 2 (although Jesus himself did not baptize, but only his disciples), 3 he left Judea and departed again to Galilee. 4 He had to pass through Samaria. 5 So he came to a city of Samaria, called Sychar, near the field that Jacob gave to his son Joseph. 6 Jacob’s well was there, and so Jesus, wearied as he was with his journey, sat down beside the well. It was about the sixth hour. 7 There came a woman of Samaria to draw water. Jesus said to her, ‘Give me a drink.’ 8 For his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food. 9 The Samaritan woman said to him, ‘How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?’ For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans. 10 Jesus answered her, ‘If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, “Give me a drink,” you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.’ 11 The woman said to him, ‘Sir, you have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep; where do you get that living water? 12 Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well, and drank from it himself, and his sons, and his cattle?’ 13 Jesus said to her, ‘Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again, 14 but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.’ 15 The woman said to him, ‘Sir, give me this water, that I may not thirst, nor come here to draw.’”

[10] https://inpraiseofangels.wordpress.com/2014/02/09/uncle-jesus/, the First Thread

[11] Matthew 5:48, King James Version

[12] Matthew 3:13: “13 Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to John, to be baptized by him. 14 John would have prevented him, saying, ‘I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?’ 15 But Jesus answered him, ‘Let it be so now; for thus it is fitting for us to fulfil all righteousness.’ Then he consented. 16 And when Jesus was baptized, he went up immediately from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and alighting on him; 17 and lo, a voice from heaven, saying, ‘This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.’” Revised Standard Version

[13] https://inpraiseofangels.wordpress.com/2014/02/14/love-notes

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The Family of God: Uncle Jesus

Posted on January 29, 2017 by ganid11
"Not even Solomon, in all his glory, was arrayed like one of these." - Jesus, Matthew 6:29

“Not even Solomon, in all his glory, was arrayed like one of these.” – Jesus, Matthew 6:29

[Note to my readers: If I am presumptuous enough to write a blog honoring angels, then it behooves me to periodically lay out for you exactly what I believe; what my religious inclinations are. Which is why I annually repost the first three essays ever to appear here (the second and third will appear in the coming days). Taken together, they draw a fairly complete picture of those grains of spiritual Truth I have allowed into my thimble through personal experience. That said, I also know that if Truth is Truth, then the Truth of Science and the Truth of its Creator must, when fully understood, line up without deviation, and this blog represents my best efforts to illuminate those places where this divine conjunction can most easily be seen.

Thus, basic arithmetic and my personal journey of faith join hands to underwrite this first essay, even as the discoveries of quantum physics support the second (“The Flow of God”), and geology and biology undergird the third (“Diamonds in the Rough”).  It is my sincere hope you find these observations useful to you in your own personal journey, but I simply offer them for what they are worth. [Of course, if you did read this when previously posted, there is no need for you to do so again. I have re-edited it, as I do every year, but it is largely the same piece.]

Our Uncle Jesus: Yours and Mine

[From early 2014:] Several threads of thought spinning in my mind – some for a lifetime – have recently come together in an unexpected way, presenting an idea so remarkable to me that it must be shared. Much as the bee buzzing from flower to flower is content to gather nectar with no notion whatever it is also pollinating the field it farms, these ideas all began as small things, snippets of experience, without a clue as to where my thoughts were taking me until we arrived: an insight I find so profoundly joy-filled, that it still takes my breath away.

So, whether out of sheer, naïve enthusiasm, or perhaps an overly-inflated sense of my own perspicacity (as some will surely say), or – and this would be my choice – as the flowering of some unseen but manifest spiritual inspiration, I am letting you in on my epiphany. That said, it is one thing to hope that I can share the full emotional force of what, to me, is a cosmic-level realization, and quite another to weave the word-tapestry to do so. Ultimately, after several false starts, I concluded there is no shortcut and the only way to get to the end is to begin at the beginning – to follow each thread as it was spun, some for a lifetime and others only recently – that they may come together for you even as they have for me.

The First Thread: “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep”

Christmas Card photo from those early years with my sister, Mimi, and me.

Christmas Card photo from those early years with my sister, Mimi, and me.

My parents were putting me to bed with nightly prayers long before I could remember it. I’m sure they started as soon as I could form the words. It was a tired world we lived in, a world where Norman Rockwell drove the Saturday Evening Post and the number one song on my third birthday was “How Much Is that Doggie in the Window.” After being held down as teens by the Great Depression only to be flung by the frightening excesses of WWII to the most exotic corners of the earth, all my parents Hank and Jane Wilson – and millions of their peers across the country – finally, really yearned for was the simple, the ordinary and the expected. So, it should be no surprise that the prayer we always, always said as they tucked me in – until I was at least of school age – was equally predictable: “Now I lay me down to sleep//I pray the Lord my soul to keep//If I should die before I wake//I pray the lord my soul to take.” And, then I would add my own personal coda: “God bless Mama and Daddy, in Jesus’ name, Amen.” Of course, the grandparents were soon included in my nightly prayers, and when my sister was born, she also joined the list, which, as the nights turned into years, continued to grow until it embraced a whole “village”: neighbors, friends, aunts, uncles and dozens of cousins. Early on, it reached the point that my parents, well-versed in what was coming, would just leave me to finish when we got to that part, and many were the nights I fell asleep still thinking of people to add, never even making it to the “in Jesus’ name” part.

And – perhaps not as consistently as I’d like, or as humbly – as best I’ve been able in the decades since, I’ve tried to continue widening my prayer’s embrace, adding others to my list until, finally, I grew to realize that, if every human being is equally a child of the same Heavenly Father, then what I really should do is embrace everyone – include all the people of the earth in my prayer – for who would I, could I, omit without kicking sand into the eyes of God if we are all – every human being on the planet – loved infinitely and equally by Him who made us; if we are each and every one of us truly a son or daughter of God, without fear or favor, or respect of persons, places or proclivities?

Of course, logistically, even as a mental exercise, it is not easy to visualize seven billion people as individuals. On the other hand, everything, even praying, improves with practice, and when you start, as I did in those early days, with only your parents, then, over a lifetime, expand your conscious embrace as best you can, bit by bit, to include family, friends and, ultimately, a planetful of people, the step-by-step growth in “inclusion acuity” does help.

Here’s how I do it: I still begin, as I have since those earliest days, with relatives and loved ones, then move on to our neighbors, actual neighbors. Living, as we do, in the midst of residential Manhattan, there are a great many neighbors, so I start with the ones we know who live next door and the families on the floors above and below, then stretch out my mind to include the unknown neighbors of the buildings beyond, and on out a little more until our ten thousand nearest neighbors – about the limit of my visualization capacity – are included. I pray for the shopkeepers and shoppers, the students and teachers, the parishioners and preachers, the elderly who live in the Jewish Home for the Aged just up the block and their caregivers, the sidewalkers and trash-talkers and derelict homeless sitting in the park. Whomever they may be and whatever they may be doing, I pray for our ten thousand nearest neighbors in that moment and their angels. This last part is important because, as my understanding of these astonishing spiritual helpers has grown over the decades, I have also come to appreciate how helpful they are in igniting the “Joy Profound” – that “peace that passeth understanding” – within each of our human hearts.

I pray that every neighbor may have a day of “angel gifts,” those inspirations and confirmations that always accompany true faith: synchronicities, coincidences beyond explaining, perfect timings, personal touchstones, delightful surprises, moments that cause us to say to ourselves, “I must be in the right place, must be doing what I’m supposed to be doing,” a sure sign that God is at work in our hearts, minds and lives.

And further, I pray that once ignited across the neighborhood, all that joy might generate positive energies enough to be pleasing in God’s sight, priming the pump of His grace enough to spread the phenomenon of love across the whole of the City, from our ten thousand nearest neighbors to our ten million nearest. To embrace all – from born and bred New Yorkers to the most recently arrived tourists who may chance to be here that day. Ten million are, after all, only 999 additional souls for each of the ten thousand already embraced, and I try to envision a range of fellow New Yorkers from the homeless in their shelters to the powerful in their penthouses, that all might catch a glimmer of the Light, for it only takes a glimmer to confirm the Light is on.

Finally, having fully embraced and envisioned, as best I can, my ten million fellow New Yorkers, I ask for God’s grace to expand my prayer one more time, from the whole of the City to the whole of the earth, from ten million to seven billion (which, as it happens, is actually less of a stretch, since it only requires adding 699 souls for each of those ten million already embraced). Seven continents, seven seas, seven billion sisters and brothers under one Heavenly Father. Ours is a world without signposts – there is no marker saying “God made this” – so we are left to our own conclusions as we seek our personal paths, look for the light, so my prayer has grown, ultimately, into a plea that all of us will have God’s help in our seeking.

In other words, this first thread – that began on those early nights as a blessing for “Mama and Daddy” and grew to encompass the whole wide world – has wound itself into the essence of my life even as it has stitched together everyone. And that, I find, is a source of imperturbable solace and strength. Richard asked me one day, after a passing stranger on the sidewalk had been particularly rude to us, why I wasn’t angry. “It’s hard to be angry with someone you just prayed for,” I said, realizing, even as I said it, just how true it was.

The Second Thread: Not All Unseen Friends Are Imaginary

At some point in the last 40 years, the US Forest Service decided to leave the ugly sawmill, but erase the mill town of Grayson, AL that surrounded it, the place where we lived from my birth to age seven. Now, all that is left of the simple but stately white house we lived in (and where this story took place), is this ivy-draped hole in the ground where our basement used to be. I had to clamber deep into the prickly underbrush just to find this. Very sad to me.

At some point in the last 40 years, the US Forest Service decided to leave the ugly sawmill, but erase the mill town of Grayson, AL that surrounded it, the place where we lived from my birth to age seven. Now, all that is left of the simple but stately white house we lived in (and where this story took place), is this ivy-draped hole in the ground where our basement used to be. I had to clamber deep into the prickly underbrush just to find this. Very sad to me.

Okay, now bear with me, please, reader, since the question I ask here is ponderous, but I promise to lighten up quickly: Who was Jesus, really? There are many available answers, but none can be proved. He called Himself “Son of Man,” whatever that means, and even among learned theologians, opinions are so scattered as to be of little use. There are those who believe He never lived at all, or at best, was a clever charlatan with big ideas. Many others believe He was merely a man, but a man who could justifiably sit alongside Siddhartha, Lao Tzu, Moses, Zoroaster, Mohammed and, one supposes, many other sages of old who might be named if they could but be remembered. I’d even go so far as to say that many “Christians” who go to church regularly really only believe Him to have been a man, a great man, perhaps, but, still, only a human who died on a cross and then went to Heaven like the rest of us hope to do, and, after all, aren’t all people who go to Heaven really “still alive?” So, perhaps, to say that Jesus lives is no great stretch….

And, then there are others, like me, who actually believe Jesus was something beyond extraordinary: the Creator Son of the Universe we inhabit; The One who made us and then became one of us the better to know and love us; an All-Powerful Personality who was, by choice, both completely Divine and completely human.

In my case, this thread of belief began to spin early on, for, if those nightly prayers were started before my memory tapes, our days at the Church of the Forest began even earlier. Mama had named it that, and it was the only church ever built in Grayson, Alabama, a tiny sawmill town located right in the middle of the Bankhead National Forest.

Just last February, Richard and I made a pilgrimage of sorts to see the church my parents built in the Bankhead National Forest. The town may be gone, but the church remains.

Just last February, Richard and I made a pilgrimage of sorts to see the church my parents built in the Bankhead National Forest. The town may be gone, but the church remains.

Think “Hansel and Gretel” and you’ll have the setting exactly, and my forester father was the woodsman! His boss, a kindly lumberman named Clancy, had donated the materials to build the church in 1948 once my newly arrived newlywed parents rallied the townspeople to raise it. That was two years before I was born and, by the time I came along, it was a thriving little Baptist church. (They held an election – Baptist vs. Methodist – after it was erected. The Baptists won in a landslide.) Truly a “poor church serving the poor,” to quote Pope Francis, it had nothing like the resources needed to support a full-time preacher, so a succession of itinerants – from “fire and brimstone” to “down and dour” – made their way through, and, when there was no one else, Daddy filled in handsomely.

It was there among friends – and everyone in Grayson was my friend – I began to discover my singing voice, and “Jesus” was the first word of the first song I ever learned, and the second song, too, come to think of it. His name was said before every meal we ever ate, regardless of where or with whom we may have been. His story was always front and center, whether at Wednesday night fellowship, or at Church School and preaching twice on Sunday, not to mention that He was right there in the pew racks, staring back at us even as we prayed to Him, with His flowing brown hair and deep blue eyes printed on cloud-shaped cardboard fans from the Double Springs funeral home. jesus fanIn short, Jesus was as much a part of my childhood as the pine trees and sawdust. Of course, that doesn’t mean I really understood who or what He was. After all, life was immersed in Him in those parts, and as is often said, “If you want to know what water is, don’t ask a fish.”[1]

One of my favorite things about Sunday School in those early years was its exclusivity. Because I was the only child in town anywhere near my age, I was often the only pupil in the class, but like the good troopers they were, my teachers never seemed to mind, and would forge ahead using the Southern Baptist study guides, week after week, even if we were alone. And, it was in just such a class, when I was nearly five, that a frustrated Mrs. Lethcoe said to me with some insistence in her flat, North-Alabama twang: “Tommy, Jesus just wants to be your friend!” Well, now, that was something I could understand.[2]

Imaginary friends come naturally when you’re an only child living in the woods with nary a playmate for miles, and one of the reasons I took to Nell Lethcoe’s suggestion so instantly was because I already had relationships going with two friends who were, apparently, invisible to others (as neither Mama nor my babysitters could see them). They were little old British ladies who wore printed cotton tea dresses and flowery hats. Their names were Mrs. Seafey and Mrs. Coctiff, and I honestly have not the vaguest notion how I happened to cast them in those particular personalities. Nevertheless, they were my steadfast friends and we truly loved each other.

You may scoff, if you like, at the idea of “real” imaginary friends, but, dear reader, ineffable are the realities of faith, as they were meant to be. Author J. K. Rowling got it right, I think, in that last pivotal dream conversation between Harry Potter and Dumbledore, when Harry asks his mentor, “Is this real, or is this all just happening inside my head?” and the Professor looks at him with love and replies, “Of course it’s happening inside your head, Harry, but why should that mean it’s not real?” Were Mrs. Seafey and Mrs. Cocktiff actually angels that only I, the innocent child, was permitted to see? I cannot say, but they were as real as real could be to me.

Every afternoon I would set the child-sized card table in my bedroom with my sister’s toy Blue Willow dishes and, at precisely four o’clock, the three of us would settle in for tea. We talked about all manner of things over the months of our association, from the death of an elderly friend to the love of my new baby sister, and, so, once the notion of a friendship with Jesus had been suggested, I wasted no time asking the ladies that very afternoon if they agreed that we should invite Him to join us.

Well.

I gather they assented, since, within a nanosecond of my posing the question, there He was, sitting right across the table from me looking a lot like His picture on those funeral-home fans, only vital, robust, alive. His familiar appearance put me at ease, and His voice was low and gentle like a mountain brook flowing over rocks worn smooth. We loved each other instantly, or, at least, I loved Him instantly, as I gathered He had already been loving me for some time. The ladies were tickled to a rosy hue, and we had a wonderful visit together for the rest of the afternoon as He and I locked in a friendship that has only grown stronger with each passing year for, now, six decades. It is often said that to truly believe, you must believe as a child. I know innately what that means.

We continued our afternoon teas for some weeks until, the final time, He told me it would be our last tea, but that He would always be as near as my desire; that I need but knock and He would never fail to answer any question or rise to any occasion. And, dear reader, after all this time enjoying His close association, nay, friendship, I can attest that He has been as good as His word to that little me all those years ago. To illustrate, I could relate many specific and moving examples, but this essay would be a book if I tried to tell them all in the fullness they deserve, so I only mention a few here without details [but with end notes]: when I was seven, I found myself unwittingly maneuvered into signing an official Baptist commitment card to be His missionary for life[3]; at nine, I received a special dispensation from the Bishop for early Confirmation[4]; at thirteen, in a profound prayer on the night of JFK’s assassination, I was led onto a professional path that held me fast for seventeen years, all the way through law school and ultimately to NYC; when I was seventeen, He helped me maintain my sanity through a very difficult relocation[5]; when I was nineteen, He confirmed to my satisfaction in another intense prayer that I was not a mistake and that my having been born gay was as natural and as much a part of His plan as the sun rising in the morning; and, when I was 23, during and after my mother’s losing battle with pancreatic cancer, two profoundly personal, inexplicable mystical appearances occurred to absolutely seal the deal of our relationship[6].

In the crazy days of my youth, I used to ask Him for signs that I was on the right path, but I long ago stopped needing them when I began seeing them all the time, and the long and short of it is that for me to say, “I believe in Jesus,” is to understate the case. I know Jesus. We are BFFs. I have seen Him with my own eyes sitting right across the table from me, and heard Him with my own ears in the most unexpected of times and places. I know that He lives because He is my ever-present Companion, my long-time, often disappointed, ever-forgiving, pro-active Loved-one, and the thread of our association has only grown stronger and more resilient through the mercerizing years I have spent dog-paddling, as best I could, through life.

Oh, there have been times, even years, perhaps, when my attention to our relationship has waned, but even then, when I finally came around, it has always been as it should be when old friends meet: as if there were no time between. That said, we are far beyond those days, and the bonds of our companionship – of our real, true, living relationship – are, for me, unmistakable and unbreakable.

The Third Thread: An Unexpected Obsession

Several years ago I received a letter addressed in an elegant hand on engraved blue note paper from someone I did not know, and, when I opened it, a confetti of small black and white photos fluttered to the floor. These, it turned out, were elementary school portraits of my mother and her siblings from the late 1920s sent by a distant cousin who had found them in one of her grandmother’s old trunks. I was thrilled to see them, and soon wrote back to thank her and, while I was at it, to ask some questions about her branch of our family.

She did get back to me, but once the questions had surfaced, I decided to look for some answers on my own by logging onto Ancestry.com. The site was new and offering a two-week free trial membership, and, well, oh my word, but did I fall down a rabbit hole! It was some months, as Richard will attest, before I finally emerged.

And, what a Wonderland I found! The more I uncovered about the people from whom I and my parents sprang, the more I wanted to know. It was like the best novel ever, full of surprises and sudden turns to drive me forward, or rather, backward in time, as I met thousands of fascinating forebears and – as a quite unexpected delight – reconnected with history in a fresh and much more personal way through their stories. It was an extraordinary journey, and as I continued, generation before generation, it became ever more clear just how rich the marvelous tapestry of family can be.

There are, as you might expect, some family lines for which the information only covers a few generations, but I was surprised by just how many lines continued back for hundreds of years. Indeed, there were so many leads to follow and historical eddies to explore, I ultimately limited myself to researching only as far back as the “original immigrant” in each line. (But not, fortunately, before I clicked on yet another little green leaf of 10th Century information to discover Lady Godiva, of all people, was one of my 31st great-grandmothers! Now, that was a rush.)

Lesson One: Families Don’t Grow on Trees

Which leads me to the first of my unanticipated discoveries down the rabbit hole: Families don’t grow on trees. A family is not at all the vertical construct we generally imagine. In fact, families are shaped nothing like trees at all. Rather, picture a field of daylilies where expansion comes both from family groups of tubers multiplying underground, as well as from their seeds – pollinated by butterflies and planted by birds – spreading the beauty into every corner.

Now, this is counter-intuitive because the shape of the family we know is actually treelike, with a trunk and branches that leaf out into our loved ones. However, even with 20/20 hindsight, we don’t perceive the reality. Instead of envisioning the great flowering field of more than a million 18-greats-grandparents that each of us, by definition, must have had only 450 years ago, we hardly think beyond those we can actually remember. But the math is irrefutable: 2×2=4 x2=8 x2=16 x2=32 x2=64 x2=128 x2=256 x2=512 x2=1024 x2=2048 x2=4096 x2=8192 x2=16,384 x2=32,678 x2=65,536 x2=131,072 x2=262,144 x2=524,288 x2=1,048,576. And, as hard as it is to believe, if you keep doubling it all the way back a thousand years, Lady Godiva, as it turns out, was only the most notorious of my 4.2 billion 31-greats-grandparents!

Lesson Two: We Are All Cousins

But that, you might well posit, is impossible. After all, there weren’t even 4.2 billion people on the planet in the 10th Century, and, of course, you would be right. But in the end, it’s not about the size of the population but the number of pairings, and it only took 2.1 billion of those. Plus, as it turns out, some of our ancestors were extremely good at conceiving. Consider two examples: Genghis Khan and the passengers of the Mayflower.

It has long been known that Genghis Khan was fond of procreation. It was even reported by Chinese observers as early as the year 1272 – only forty-five years after he died – that there were already twenty thousand of his progeny in positions of power across several neighboring regions.[7] And, in 2003, the American Journal of Human Genetics reported that over sixteen million men – and, by extrapolation, their sixteen million sisters – were all Genghis Khan’s descendants: thirty-two million literal cousins sired by one man only eight-hundred years ago![8]

The case of the Mayflower is similar. She landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620 with just over a hundred survivors, but forty-five of them died the first winter, leaving a colony of only fifty-seven Pilgrims. Consequently, if you are related to one of them, it is almost a slam-dunk certainty you are related to several, since they and their children had only each other for “acceptable” mates, and even after additional ships arrived, their numbers were exceedingly small for scores of years.

Mindful of this shortfall, and being made of hardy stuff (especially the women), they tended to have a great many children – very often in excess of twenty – who, in turn, had a great many more. The result, in hardly any time at all, was similar to that of the Mongol Emperor, only this concentration of genetic inheritance included twenty-four procreating men rather than just the one. An article in the September 20th, 2004 edition of the Kingston Mariner relates: “a staggering thirty-five million people claim an ancestral lineage that runs all the way back – sometimes through fifteen generations – to the original 24 [Mayflower] males. That number represents 12 percent of the American population.” [9] (emphasis added)

In other words, we are all – and I do mean all – far more related than we think. Everyone reading this – however far away in time or space you may be from the here and now of this writing – is almost certainly my blood-kin cousin. And, even without the concentrated hubs arising from isolated populations or overreaching despots, this would still be unavoidable. Look at the math the other way ’round. Lady Godiva had eleven known children, but, again, for the sake of being ultra-conservative, let’s say she only had two who bore children, giving her four grandchildren who then only gave her eight great-grandchildren, etc., so that you generate the same multiples over generations as with the grandparents. Well, then, given a perfect progression, over 4.2 billion people living today share my 31st great-grandmother. And, the same calculus would also have to be true for every other one of my 4.2 billion 31st great-grandparents! How could we not be related? Seen through such a distant lens, the fabric of family is tighter than canvas and covers the whole of the earth.

Now, it is no doubt the case – at least common sense would allow – that Europeans are more related to each other than to Africans, who are more related to each other than to Asians, etc., but that said, we humans have been prone to cross-fertilization as far back as the Neanderthals,[10] and, it only took one 12th Century marriage between a Crusader and a Mesopotamian, for example, to join millions of previously distinct forebears into one family that, by today, has extended the bloodlines of both to a great proportion of the planetary population.

[Also, lo and behold, in the week this essay was originally published, The New York Times published an op-ed by A. J. Jacobs entitled “Are You My Cousin?” which made exactly my point using new insights arising from the growing list of genealogy-related websites.[11] Did I say “synchronicities”?]

A Joining of Threads

All these were fascinating, fun discoveries, but I still could not quite fathom my compulsion to keep looking deeper and deeper into family history. Why the obsession? What was my inner Father trying to tell me; teach me? I often took the question to Him in prayer, but the answer remained elusive. I did, however, after many hundreds of hours, finish the job of naming my forebears back to the original immigrants as best I could. I also followed a few lines as far back as the time of Christ, which proved to be 65 generations, more or less, and included Romans, Greeks, Persians and Semites. I won’t even bother you with the geometric calculation of their potential grandchildren, but it’s in the billions of billions and certainly includes everyone alive today with only very narrow exceptions, perhaps hidden tribes in the Amazon or outposts of Inuit.

Of course, I should have known, having prayed the question with a sincere heart, that an answer to my quandary would eventually appear, and, though it took its time falling into place, it was more than satisfactory.

As I did my research, my growing understanding of family ties did have an impact upon my prayers for others – from the neighborhood, to the city, to the planet as described above – since I began thinking of all our neighbors as something significantly more, as actual cousins however distant, and it really does feel different.[12] There is an undeniable intensification of the emotional investment when you truly see those you are praying for, however unknown, as literal family. Blood, as they say, is thicker than water, and what had become increasingly clear to me as I did my research was the utter impossibility of drawing any dividing lines between our one family of seven billion cousins. Family, as we learn from our very cradles, is always to be accepted with love and – in spite of foibles or follies, if necessary – not to be judged unkindly. How wondrous it is, then, once all are embraced as kin, to dismiss unkindness altogether!

And then, finally, one marvelous morning as I prayed, all these threads of understanding, some having taken a lifetime to work their way up through my consciousness, came together in a blink, as most revelations do. Prostrate in the dark of my bedroom, I came to that part  of the prayer where our nearest ten-thousand neighbors are my focus, and, almost without realizing it, prayed “for our ten-thousand nearest cousins… YOUR ten thousand nearest cousins…” And then I stopped as the full force of what had just happened washed through me. Of course! That was the point! I finally understood the truth! My oldest Friend, my dear Friend Jesus, who had been holding my hand since those days around the tea table, had inspired my inquiries, step-by-step, until I could finally, fully see the reality that we – He and I and, yes, you – are not only friends, but family!

And with the next breath came the next realization – flowing from my long-established understanding that Jesus was the eldest of a large family of children – that if they had been my long-ag0 cousins, then He was also, by definition, my long-ago uncle! Uncle Jesus!

The “brotherhood of man under the Fatherhood of God” is an old but valid trope that relies upon a wondrous nexus to connect us spiritually – God as Heavenly Father of all His material children. But how much more tangible is this new nexus, to be a member of the actual family of God? It’s one thing to ask a loving spiritual, but Heavenly, Father for forgiveness, and quite another to ask your favorite earthly Uncle for a favor.

The Family of Jesus

With all the emphasis upon the twelve Apostles, Jesus’s actual family gets short shrift. With the exception of Mary, we don’t really think much about them at all, though most experts agree He had several siblings.[13] Matthew, Chapter 13, tells us of four brothers named James, Joseph, Simon and Jude, and “sisters,” so one may conclude that, at the very least, He had six.

There also can be found records of later generations, including Judas Kyriakos (the last Jewish-Christian “Bishop of Jerusalem”), great-grandson of Jesus’s brother Jude,[14] but, of course, we have no way of knowing exactly how many nieces and nephews He may have had. Nevertheless, for the sake of discussion, let us continue taking an extremely conservative approach and assume that only two of them had children. If we then assume the same progression and double the number in each generation, by the 31st, around the year 1000 AD, Jesus would already have had 4.2 billion potential great-nieces and great-nephews, and given that it would take another thousand years to bring us up to date, each and every one of those 4.2 billion would likely, by now, have their own 4.2 billion!

And, if that isn’t assurance enough for you that we are all, almost inevitably, the nieces and nephews of Christ, add into the equation the undeniable consequences of the Diaspora – the spreading out of the Hebrews to the furthest ends of the earth – which began with the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem six centuries before Christ and would seem to be entirely unrelated to His arrival, but for the sake of making the point, if the Universe wanted to ensure that Jesus might ultimately – in the fullness of time – be the literal blood Uncle of His entire human family, it could not have gone about it in a more systematic or effective way. That said, I don’t believe any loving Father (or Uncle, for that matter) would so displace His family as has been done to the Jewish nation throughout history, but it is an inarguable fact that the result is a far more interrelated world than it would ever, otherwise, have become.

Of course, if you believe, as many do, that Jesus was conceived immaculately, then any DNA endowment would theoretically be purely that of His mother. However, (and I’m bound to get into trouble for this) if, as I, you believe that His Divinity is actually enhanced and His sacrifice ennobled by His having been the Creator Son of our Universe who allowed Himself to be conceived in the normal way – as the utterly vulnerable firstborn Son of Mary and Joseph – His endowment would, of course, include the inheritance factors from both families. Either way, the point remains the same. Whether His DNA was only hers, or some combination of hers and God’s, or a combination of hers and Joseph’s, her son was still the blood brother of James, Joseph, Simon, Jude and His sisters, and He was still the uncle of every child born to them and great-uncle of every grandchild.

As it happens, benevolent uncles were a big part of my childhood. My grandfather had several brothers, and my favorite relatives in the early years were my Great-Uncles Edgar and Powell, both of whom were long-widowed and doted on me at every opportunity. Beyond that, my mother’s brothers, Ned and Bubba – yes, Bubba – were fundamental to the health of my self-esteem as I grew up a stranger in a strange land. They were always there with a word of encouragement or even to help with more mundane things like buying a used car, or refilling the honey jar from the 55-gallon drum kept on Great-Grandmama’s back porch.

So, the realization that Jesus was not only my Friend, but my Uncle, as well, was a wonderful discovery, and one I took instantly to heart. Of course, it may not mean very much to you, if you don’t believe, as I do, that He is the Master Creator Son of the Universe who made not only our world, but the millions of similar worlds that populate our heavens; or if you don’t believe, as I do, that out of all the worlds He made, He chose this one as the site of his one-time-only materialization experience – from defenseless infant to Divine Teacher – the better to know us and love us as one of us, as well as to show us and all other material creatures across His vast, starlit creation the Way of Love through His perfected example. But, I do believe all of those things right down to the core of my beating heart and seeking soul, so for such a God to be, also, my literal Uncle is more than unimaginable, it is a gift of love and hope far greater than anything I could possibly deserve or even ever have imagined. God is my Uncle? Not only is He mine, but yours, as well.

And, that, my dear cousin, is news worth sharing.

– February 9, 2014 [Fourth revision, January 28, 2017]

© 2017 George Thomas Wilson, All rights reserved.

[1] I have been utterly unable to track down the source of this quote, though there are thousands of uses of it cited by Google, most of which attribute it as “an old Chinese proverb.” Nevertheless, the sentiment is sound.

[2] As an aside, in all the years following that day, in spite of spending countless hours in countless churches, I have not heard one other person put it quite so well. Indeed, for years I have told this story and always called Nell Lethcoe’s simple, emphatic statement to me the “most profound theological point I’ve ever heard.” At least, this was true until Pope Francis appeared, but it turns out that “friendship with Jesus” is also one of his favorite themes. As recently as 1/4/14, for example, he actually tweeted (tweeted!) “Dear Young People, Jesus wants to be your friend, and wants you to spread the joy of this friendship everywhere.” You have to love it when the Pope quotes your childhood Sunday School teacher!

[3] It’s a long story, but had my Great-grandmother Baker died either one day before, or one day after, the day she actually passed away, I would not have been shipped off for a week in mid-July of 1957 to Cook Springs Baptist Women’s Missionary Union Camp, and would not – as a seven-year-old! – have found myself, at the end of that week, compelled to sign a 3”x5” commitment card that, of all things, I would continue to be a “missionary for Jesus” for the rest of my life. I may have been too young and too innocent, but in full consultation with my teatime Friend, I made a knowing commitment and I am still striving to live up to it.

[4] Two years later, when I was nine – and still very much in the glow of my innocence – I discovered our preacher was to be transferred (we had become Methodists in a new town by then) and since I found Brother Langford to be the most Christ-like of all the preachers we had ever had, I asked him to confirm and baptize me before he left. It took a special dispensation from the bishop because I was three years too young, but I succeeded in confirming my commitment to my good Friend in the best way I knew how.

[5] When I was only six weeks away from the end of my Junior year, I was suddenly transferred from the tiny (300 students in six grades) rural Florida high school where my mother had been a revered teacher, to an Alabama city school of 2000 people in 3 grades where no one knew me and I had no time at all to learn an entirely new curriculum before spending my final high school summer working in a bread factory as a union trainee. I was miserable and had it not been for the embracing group from the Campus Crusade for Christ led by a wonderful woman named Cook, I’m not sure I would have made it through my senior year intact. But, thanks to my Friend, and His – and my angels’ – particularly strong and consistent overcare, often demonstrated to me in real, perceptible, ways, I managed to suffer through with only minor scrapes and bruises. I literally could not have made it through those torturous months without my faith.

[6] The first of these occasions may sound insignificant in the retelling, but it involved several entirely unlikely, nearly impossible, sightings of an out-of-place dragonfly that appeared in response to my prayers for guidance and strength during those painful months, and the message received was, essentially, “Your prayers are heard. Do not worry. Worrying only depletes your energies and accomplishes nothing.” From that moment on, though I did the best I could for her in the weeks that followed, and mourned her passing when she died, my worry ceased and those energies were put to better use. [since the original version of this post in 2013, I have written about the dragonfly experience in detail. The link, if you’re interested, is here: https://inpraiseofangels.wordpress.com/2014/11/02/the-dragonfly/ ] The second event was an actual, as-God-is-my-witness, cloud-based vision that included a clear-as-a-bell image of my Friend Jesus standing tall with the sun streaming through His flowing hair and beard, His right arm raised in a blessing. Of course, as is the case with all such personal “for your eyes only” touchstones of faith, I cannot prove either of these contacts really happened, but I know, and He knows, that they did.

[7] http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/11/science/a-prolific-genghis-khan-it-seems-helped-people-the-world.html “As for Genghis himself, Dr. Morgan cited a passage from ‘Ata-Malik Juvaini, a Persian historian who wrote a long treatise on the Mongols in 1260. Juvaini said: ”Of the issue of the race and lineage of Chingiz Khan, there are now living in the comfort of wealth and affluence more than 20,000. More than this I will not say . . . lest the readers of this history should accuse the writer of exaggeration and hyperbole and ask how from the loins of one man there could spring in so short a time so great a progeny.”

[9] Article by John Galluzzo printed in the September 20th 2004 edition of the Kingston Mariner and reposted on the History News Network website of George Mason University on October 23rd of the same year. Link: http://hnn.us/blog/7360#sthash.DzfuEwh8.dpuf

[12] Or, as A. J. Jacobs put it in his article “Are You My Cousin” in The New York Times on 2/2/2014: “…a mega[family]tree might just make the world a kinder place. I notice that I feel more warmly about people I know are distant cousins. I recently figured out that I’m an 11th cousin four times removed of the TV personality Judge Judy Sheindlin. I’d always found her grating. But when I discovered our connection, I softened. She’s probably a sweetheart underneath the bluster.”

[13] It is incumbent upon me at this point to allow that there are many who dispute whether the brothers and sisters of Jesus were His full brother and sisters, half brothers and sisters, or somehow the children of some other couple. For me, I go with the writer of Matthew, who said “His Brothers” and “His sisters,” without qualification of any sort.

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TBT/GTS#3: Peter Frazer, MD – A Life Redeemed

Posted on December 3, 2016 by ganid11
Peter Frazer at Grand Army Plaza in the summer of 1978, only a few months after we met. Photo courtesy Leath Nunn.

Peter Frazer at Grand Army Plaza in the summer of 1978, only a few months after we met. Photo courtesy Leath Nunn.

December 1, 2016 – I didn’t really plan to post this on World AIDS Day. It just turned out that way, but I can’t think of a more appropriate time for this story or a more appropriate tale for this day, because, of all these stories – these Profiles in Grace that will continue to emerge from my keyboard over the next weeks and months – none spans the globe or the gamut of human experience more widely than the story of Peter Frazer. And, it is truly a story of redemption as, in the end, he grasped his personal demons by the horns and, with the love of a friend, conquered them. But, let me start at the beginning…

[NOTE TO MY READERS: This is the third in this series, written to illuminate the wonderful lives led by my too-many friends who were simply stopped in their tracks by AIDS during the 80s and early 90s. If you missed it, I encourage you to read the full introduction to and rationale for this series at the beginning of the first of these profiles here: https://inpraiseofangels.wordpress.com/2016/04/16/tbtgts1-randall-robbins-actor-teacher-leader-friend/ ]

How We Knew Each Other

Peter Frazer was my first real New York City neighbor.

In the last installment of this series, I told the story of George Falkenberry, my Alabama friend whose apartment provided the landing pad that made my entry into NYC in March of 1978 possible. Having arrived without any thought of where I might set up housekeeping – but with no doubt that it would happen – I set about asking every last person I met, regardless of the circumstances, if they knew of an apartment for rent (there being no computers or internet in those days), and I had only been at this for about two weeks when one night, while sipping on a Budweiser at the Wildwood bar just a couple of blocks from my temporary digs, I met an aspiring ballet dancer named Richard Karsten who allowed as how he did know of an apartment being vacated in his building that would soon be available.

I took the name and number of his landlady, and the next day had my first encounter with the memorable – nay, unforgettable – Renate Smulewicz, a fiery, red-headed Auschwitz survivor who, with her husband Jan Jacob (a brain surgeon), had used their reparations to invest in two Upper West Side brownstones. We took to each other instantly, and within minutes I had my first very own New York City home at 16 West 69th Street, only fifty yards from Central Park, for the grand sum of $285 per month. I moved in on May 15, 1978.

It was a lovely studio apartment (one big room with separate bath and kitchen) on the fifth-floor of an elegant but timeworn brownstone that had originally housed some well-to-do family of the Belle Epoque, but had long since been carved up into a dozen apartments of widely varying size. Though it was four floors up (counting the stoop) my apartment had two large, north-facing windows, a sliver-view of the park and retained much of its original character (especially after I was done wood-stripping and painting) with a mirrored Victorian mantle piece and matching oak shutters that folded out of sight into the window frames. It was perfect.

16 West 69th Street. My living room was just behind the two windows on the left side of the top floor. Peter's room was in the back. It's good to see the stoop still in place.

16 West 69th Street. My living room was just behind the two windows on the left side of the top floor. Peter’s room was in the back. It’s good to see the stoop still in place.

In those days, the Upper West Side was still seedy around the edges and just beginning to gentrify into the Yuppie enclave it became in the 80s, but the house I moved into had been very fine in its prime (The all-marble house across the street had been built by Enrico Caruso at the turn of the Century). Even the stairways still sported all of their original carved banisters and black-walnut paneling covered the walls, right up to the top floor. It was also the only house on the block that had managed to retain its wide, welcoming stoop, which became a favorite gathering place for many of us, in time.

Originally intended as servants’ quarters, the top floor included five residences: my studio plus four additional tiny rooms, rented individually, that shared a bathroom off the back hall. These “Single Room Occupancy” (SRO) rooms – for which Mrs. S charged $60 per month – were a vestige of the Great Depression, when they were as much as many people could afford, and those on my floor were occupied by four single men: Nicholas Skerchock, the iconoclastic long-time music transcriber for Andre Kostelanetz (I lived there for four years and saw him maybe five times, but we shared a wall, so I heard his banging for me to turn down the noise fairly often), two retired NYC policemen named McCollough and McCann who spent their days in a neighborhood pub and their nights in a stupor, and Peter, who, at 21, was seven years younger than I.

It took a couple of weeks of seeing each other around and about before we actually spoke. He had acquired the sullen demeanor of an abused puppy, so I gave him plenty of room, but eventually the opportunity presented itself, and we began to get to know each other a bit. I say “a bit” because, like Skerchock, he generally kept to himself, and I eventually learned why when he told me that he was a heroin addict and supported his habit by hanging out on East 53rd Street, the well-known place to go if you were in the business of picking up tricks. He also had a day job working for a placement agency as a temporary typist, so you might say he was a functional addict, but his sunken eyes and ghostly appearance were telling.

Within weeks of my arrival, Officer McCann died, and my new friend, Leath Nunn, took the empty room (Mrs. S gave him a free month’s rent if he would clean it out, which took several days of serious scrubbing). And, shortly after that, Peter moved out. He hadn’t even told me he was leaving – he was just gone one day – so there was no chance to exchange information, and I had no reason to think that I would ever see him again.

Until I did, nine years later.

It will be thirty years, this coming February, since Richard and I moved into the great apartment we still occupy today on 106th Street. We are just a  hundred feet, or so, to the east of Broadway, and it was while walking up that busy boulevard only a few months after moving into the area, that I saw Peter again, though this Peter Frazer was a much improved version in every way.

I almost missed him as we passed each other on the sidewalk, but I realized who he was just a second later and turned. “Peter?” I barked to make sure it penetrated. He turned around to see who had called, but the man looking at me was transformed in every way from his earlier self. The eyes were bright green-blue, alive and sparkly, his cheeks rosy, his step had acquired a bounce, and, of all things, he was wearing medical scrubs with a stethoscope around his neck.

He turned around and looked at me, but having grown a beard by then so my homophobic bosses at Rolling Stone would take me more seriously, I looked considerably different than I had in ’78, so I said, “Tommy. It’s Tommy Wilson from Mrs. Smulewicz’s.” I knew that would work because nobody who met her could forget Mrs. S.

“Tommy!” it finally clicked in as a smile spread across his face. “How the hell are you?” He still had his soft Australian accent.

He was on his way to class, but we spoke long enough for him to tell me that he had recently finished his undergraduate degree and was studying to become an M.D. at Mt. Sinai. You could have felled me with a puff of air. From then on, I would see him from time to time walking his dog, and more often than not, he was accompanied by his, by then, live-in girlfriend, Diane. This was counter-intuitive, I suppose, but you truly never can tell about people, and they clearly delighted in each others company, so I was happy for them both.

In due time, Peter finished school and began to build a thriving practice as an internist.  We continued to run into each other on the street, but after a few years passed, I began to notice the light fading in his eyes once again, his energies sagging, his complexion becoming pasty, but it never even occurred to me that he might have returned to his earlier habit. Tragically, by then, I recognized the all-too-familiar signs. He always smiled and said hello when we met, and he never complained or even mentioned it, but we both knew the unavoidable truth: he was dying of AIDS. I stopped seeing him on the sidewalk along about 1992. We never actually said goodbye, he simply disappeared from view.

Childhood and Family

Peter was born on the second day of January, 1957, to Helen and John Raymond Frazer of  Oxfordshire, England, but his early years were unsettled. They lived about thirteen miles south of Oxford at 9 Ash Lane, Ambrosden, Bicester, but for whatever reason, John and Helen Frazer decided in mid-1959, when Peter was two-and-a-half, to pull up stakes and travel to the other side of the world.

The two-family house where Peter lived as a toddler at 9 Ash Lane, Ambrosden, Bicester, Oxfordshire.

The two-family house where Peter lived as a toddler at 9 Ash Lane, Ambrosden, Bicester, Oxfordshire.

And, so it was that, on June 9, 1959, the family – John, Helen, Raymond, Jr., (nine years older than his little brother), and Peter – departed Liverpool for Melbourne, Australia on the ship Fair Sky. On the passenger list, his father is described as a farm worker, but as you can see in the photo, the Frazers didn’t live on a farm. I believe he was a horse trainer, but I’m still trying to confirm that.

In any case, Australia was their new home and that was where Peter lived with his parents and where he presumably attended school, played with friends and did all the usual things we do as children growing up, until, that is, when he was fifteen and – like far too many of my friends in those early days – he was disowned by his parents and summarily kicked out of the house because his gay tendencies had began to show.

After Leaving Home

Where do you go when you’re a bright, talented, good-l00king fifteen-year old who suddenly finds himself cut off and homeless in Melbourne? Though I have done my best to contact his brother Raymond, I have not been able to reach him, so I am woefully short of information about the early years of Peter’s wanderings. What is clear, however, is Peter’s determination to get as far away from home as he could in both miles and mentality; to find a place where he could both be true to himself and fulfill his destiny. Diane told me that he landed in New York when he was sixteen, so he clearly wasted no time getting here, and, once he arrived, I’m sure he found the city more than welcoming for a bright blonde charmer with an Australian accent. And, I suppose it’s no real surprise, extrapolating further down the predictable path he was traveling, that by the time I met him at age twenty-one, some of the bloom had faded from the rose. Five years of uninhibited frolic can take their toll.

But the real story here – the tale worth telling – is what happened in those years between ’79 and ’87, and that was a story I didn’t know until I started trying to put the pieces together for this profile. All I knew was that he was a lost, lonely pony when we met, but by the time we became reacquainted, he had utterly transformed himself into a bright, energetic doctor with patients and a purpose.  It was a mystery that had puzzled me for years, so I went digging for answers.

And, what I found was an old, old story, but one that never fails: the redemptive power of the love of one person for another. The astonishing transformation of Peter could only have happened with the help of a determined, loving helpmate who was willing to do the hard work, to forgive and forget and forge a future made of stouter stuff. And, in Peter’s case, it turns out that it was his friend Diane – the one I so often saw walking with him in our neighborhood – who rose to the occasion; who cared enough to see the potential pushed down so deep within him, and found a way to get it out.

The story begins in December of 1980, only a few months after Peter left Mrs. S’s. The temporary typing agency had sent him on assignment to the offices of McGraw-Hill, the textbook people, where, as fate would have it, a young and equally eager Diane Harriford had also been placed, and they met by chance over lunch one day in the company cafeteria. Something must have clicked, because, in the days and weeks ahead, they became close friends, but since Peter’s formal education had come to an abrupt halt when he left Melbourne, while Diane was already a college graduate and working on her first advanced degree, the disparity in their backgrounds severely limited their common vocabulary. And so it was that, as their relationship seemed headed into uncharted territory for both of them, Diane said to Peter, “Look, if you really want to hang out with me, you’ve got to get some education.”

Yearbook shot of Peter Frazer in 1985 as an undergraduate studying Natural Sciences at Fordham University. It took me six months to find a photo of him for this profile, and my sincere thanks to the Fordham University library for their help.

Yearbook shot of Peter Frazer in 1985 as an undergraduate studying Natural Sciences at Fordham University. It took me six months to find a photo of him for this profile, and my sincere thanks to the Fordham University library for their help.

I can’t really say, but that may have been the first time in his life that anyone had actually known him well enough, and cared enough, to insist that there was more to him than met the eye, and who was willing to help him realize the potential that she saw and that he must have known, all along, was buried deep within. After all, his inner voice had moved him halfway around the planet in search of personal fulfillment. Here, for the first time in his life I imagine, was someone who actually loved him him for his mind as well as his body and who wanted him to rise up to meet his possibilities. He must have realized that with Diane’s help and encouragement, he might just have a chance, and so it was that the very next month, in January of 1981, Peter enrolled in two college classes at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus, one in science and one in literature. He aced them both.

Encouraged, and with Diane’s promise to help support them with her teaching while he pursued his education, he enrolled full time the very next semester, and sailed through to his degree with straight “A”s and a perennial spot on the Dean’s List. Following graduation, he moved right on to the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai, and, at long last – after nearly a decade of study and work, all the while supported by Diane – Peter was graduated as a fully-fledged medical doctor in 1989. He was also diagnosed, that very day, with full-blown AIDS.

He must have known for some time that he was HIV positive, and one can only wonder how much that condition had played a part in his determination to become a doctor. Perhaps he had hopes of helping in the development of treatments for AIDS, or even a cure, but if so, his hopes would never be realized.

I cannot even imagine how devastating Peter’s news was to Diane. After nearly ten years together, almost all of it spent with Peter in pursuit of his education while Diane took teaching gigs to pay the rent, her dreams of a future in which each of them would prove a bulwark to the other, were dashed and, even worse, there was no one, no place, no easy target for the anger and pain and frustration she must have felt. I have the greatest sympathy for what she must have gone through, and for the endless months of suffering as she stood by his side until the end of his life.

As Peter’s condition worsened, his brother Raymond did fly over from Australia to assess the situation and do what he could do to help, though it seems his primary objective was to get Peter to agree to go back home to Melbourne, where he might spend his last days in the very home that had ejected him twenty years earlier. I’m pretty sure that Peter would rather have eaten nails than make that trip, and ultimately, when it became clear that Peter wasn’t going anywhere, that he was determined to remain with Diane, in New York, until the end, Raymond returned home alone. Peter died on May 28th, 1994.

Trajectory

Getting a handle on just how successful Peter might have become had he lived, how many lives he might have saved, how many positive ripples might have circled out from him as he contributed to the good in the world, is impossible. But we humans have a way of choosing for our friends – and especially our partners – those whom we believe to be our intellectual equals; whose perceptions and internal realities jibe with our own, and I believe we can extrapolate at least to some degree just what Peter might have gone on to accomplish from the success enjoyed in the years since he died by his faithful and generous partner, Diane, who has accomplished a great deal.

To illustrate, I found this telling biography accompanying an article in the International Journal of the Humanities she authored with a colleague following Hurricane Katrina:

“Diane Harriford is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of Women’s Studies at Vassar College. For the last twenty years, she has been teaching sociology, Women’s Studies, and African American Studies while engaging in various social movements. In the 1970s, she was an assistant to Bella Abzug, a member of the US House of Representatives from New York. Diane also worked closely with the Coalition of Labor Union Women. Currently, Diane is involved in the National Women’s Studies Association and the Black Radical Congress. Diane has spoken widely on women and slavery in the 19th century, on Black women and sexuality, and Black women in the academy. Most recently she has spoken in Brazil on the rise of Black conservatives in the United States and on Hurricane
Katrina in Tunisia.”

Like Diane, Peter had the chops, as jazz people say, to play his own tune, a beautiful tune reflecting realities forged in the fires of life lived hard, but tempered, at last, by the love of others, and had he not been so rudely and roughly brought down, there is no telling just how many contributions he might have made to the betterment of us all. He was a bright, clever, intrepid and determined man of charm and grace, and the world is a poorer place for his loss.

Post Script

When he died, there was a tiny paid death notice in the New York Times stating that Diane and his brother Raymond would be announcing the time of his memorial service. And, in due time, it was held in the beautiful, soaring Cathedral of St. John the Divine, right up the street from where he lived and loved and practiced his medicine. And, it is entirely appropriate and just, it seems to me, that the priest who officiated at the service of my friend Peter – former addict and street hustler turned loving partner and gentle healer – was none other than the fabled Bishop of New York, The Right Reverend Paul Moore.

There is no panel for Peter in the AIDS quilt, but there should be. And while these Profiles in Grace are written to illuminate the lives of those we lost rather than to document their deaths, there was another article published after Peter died – a touching and painful-to-read piece about the last years of his life – that was dedicated to his memory by its author, Professor Carolyn Ellis of the University of South Florida. If you would like to read it, you can find at this link: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/240761189_Speaking_of_Dying_An_Ethnographic_Short_Story  .

I was able to speak with Diane about all this only once, back in the summer, and she was very up front about the pain of it all, and how difficult it is, even now, to talk about Peter and their time together. Nevertheless, when I suggested glossing over some of Peter’s earlier difficulties, she was quite clear that I should tell his story accurately, warts and all. “It’s already out there,” she told me, “I wrote the story myself and published it some years ago, so please feel free to tell it like it was. It’s no good to anyone if you don’t tell the truth.”

And so I have. Peter Frazer, if there were a dean’s list for life, you would surely be near the top. We hardly knew ye, my friend, and you are truly Gone Too Soon.

Acknowledgements:

First and foremost, I have to acknowledge Diane Harriford for her help in making this  profile possible. I am also indebted to Professor Carolyn Ellis of the University of South Florida for helping me connect the dots, to the delightful and extremely helpful Patrice M. Kane at the Walsh Family Library of the Fordham University Rose Hill Campus for sending me the yearbook photo and a copy of the death notice, and Google Streetview for both the photo of the house in Ambrosden as well as Mrs. Smulewicz’s house on West 69th Street. Thank you all.

© 2016 by George Thomas Wilson, all rights reserved

Posted in Angels, belief, biology, Death, health, Holy Spirit, Love, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

#dollyofanothercolor

Posted on November 26, 2016 by ganid11

30438688463_6bb766bd43_oI’ll make this very brief. I was heading downtown on the subway today and sitting right across from me was a little Asian girl about five years old who was clearly in love with her new plaything, a beautiful African-American doll with big bright eyes and huge smile. And, as I watched her adjust the dolly’s dress and pull up her tiny socks, I had the happy casual thought that, thanks to that little doll, here was a child who would never be prejudiced against people of color .

And, then, it hit me like a slap of angel wings! Of course! Dolly of Another Color!

But let me digress: over the course of the past few months, I think we have all learned something about our country, our local areas and even ourselves when it comes to racial prejudice. When the Supreme Court came out with the Shelby decision a few years back (that basically eviscerated the Voting Rights Act) they said the Act was no longer needed since racism, by and large, no longer existed in America; that people of color need not worry any more about being disenfranchised. Of course, recent events have made it very clear to all of us that those five foolish men got it horribly wrong. Racism is not only alive and well in this country, it’s truly much worse than we thought.

If Donald J. Trump’s election has done nothing else, it has allowed this subterranean truth to rise to the surface and expose the underbelly of racial attitudes in our country, and it is not a pretty sight. But you can’t fix a problem until you know you have one, so it can only be to the good, however ugly, that this election has shown truth to power, has brought this great infection of our national body politic to a place where, at least, it can be treated and, some day with a great deal of effort and love, cured for all time.

Examples are rife, if you need them, but apocryphal is the tale of two Clay, WV women, both government officials (including the mayor), who, after the election, found themselves in hot water for calling Michelle Obama an “Ape in heels.” I suppose they suddenly felt empowered, now that their man had won. The mayor, who had retweeted the comment with the additional note, “You made my day!,” said later in her apology:  “Those who know me know that I’m not of any way racist,” and the astonishing thing is that I have no doubt that she really believed what she said!

“O wad some Pow’r the Giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!” – Rob’t. Burns

You see, one of the greatest difficulties in confronting our racism arises from our inability to even see and gauge our own attitudes because we came by them as naturally as breathing from the time we were born, and like any other resemblance we may have to our families, they are practically invisible to us. As Rogers and Hammerstein so perfectly said in South Pacific:

“You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You’ve got to be carefully taught!”

“Okay,” I can hear you say, “But what can I  do about that? I’m not the one who’s got the problem, and even if I were, this is a bigger issue than any one of us can confront. At least, not without creating more heat than light!”

Well, that’s where #dollyofanothercolor comes in.

The beauty of this idea is that it accomplishes two very important – hugely important – things, but first, my proposal: That we all do whatever we can to encourage everyone we can to make sure that every young child we know is given a dolly of another color this year for the holidays. This could include action figures for boys as well as dolls for girls (or vice-versa if you object to gender-specificity in toy giving), but the important thing is to help the child grow to have affection for the toy, and by extension, to inoculate him or her from a lifetime of disrespect for ‘the other.’

That’s the most obvious reason to participate in this push, but there is another, more subtle beauty to this proposal, it seems to me, and it goes right to the problem of our inability to gauge our own degree of prejudice. If you say to your sister you’re thinking about giving her child a dolly of another color, she will learn, from her own reaction, just where she stands on the issue of prejudice, and you will, too. How would you feel if it happened to you? What degree of prejudicial feeling do you have buried deep within that might surface? Surely this is something we all need to learn in these days if we are ever to have any chance of truly cleaning out the rot of racism that is apparently marbled throughout the land.

So, I’m going to do what I can to create a meme: #dollyofanothercolor to try to move this idea into the mainstream. It may not work, but I can try, and I’ll know this campaign is a success when I read a news item someday close to Christmas that the toy companies are finding it difficult to meet the demand for dolls of color because so many of their white customers have been demanding them. It’s a tiny thing. It’s tangible. It’s inexpensive. It’s therapeutic. And anyone can do it!

To help me move this needle, I’m reaching out to Dolly Parton and some other Dollys I know in hopes of making a Youtube or two, and I invite you – no, urge you – to join me in this effort by whatever means, including sharing this post or writing your own. We have to address racism where it starts, and for almost everyone, it starts in the nursery, so that’s where we have to go.

Thanks for listening. Know hope. Sending with Love. #dollyofanothercolor

© 2016 by George Thomas Wilson, all rights reserved.

 

Posted in Angels, belief, faith, God the Father, Holy Spirit, Love, prayer | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Recipe: Green Bean Casserole Made Fresh (No Cans!)

Posted on November 24, 2016 by ganid11
Green Bean Casserole made with all fresh ingredients for the 21st Century.

Green Bean Casserole made with all fresh ingredients for the 21st Century.

I agreed during the summer to publish this recipe, but what with life and such, I never actually did. I was reminded of it when I heard someone yesterday on the radio talking about what they were having for Thanksgiving dinner, and on the list was “green bean casserole.” We all know the one – all our mothers made it, and most of us have, too – that combines beans and Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup and is then covered with those French’s (nee Durkee) fried onions in a can (for which, as far as I know, there is no other known culinary function).

It’s a great, easy comfort-food vegetable, which is why, some months ago, I thought of it when preparing a birthday dinner for a friend who is one of the most straight-ahead beef-and-potatoes fellows you’re ever likely to meet, but since I was coming up with this menu in the 21st Century and in a place thick with foodies who would look askance at the very idea of using a canned, preservative-heavy soup as a sauce, I decided to try a different approach and recreate the exact taste and experience of the original dish, but using only fresh ingredients (except, of course, for those overly-processed but tasty Durkee’s onions – sorry French’s, but they’ll always be Durkee to me – for which there is no substitute.)

I have also decided, after several bakings, that adding a few slivered almonds to the mix for a bit of crunch is not a bad idea, either, so that option is included below.

Granted, the Campbell’s Soup idea is easier, but I think you’ll instantly appreciate the improvement in taste and feel on the tongue, and am confident that your family will gobble up this vegetable so fast you’ll wish you’d made more. No doubt about it.

RECIPE: (For 8-10 people.)

Ingredients:

Two lbs. fresh green beans, snapped or cut into  2″ pieces.

(TIP: This recipe was invented using prepackaged fresh beans – like those sold at Costco and other big box stores – which generally come in quantities of about 2 lbs. sealed and  wrapped in plastic with all the beans facing in the same direction for compactness. Don’t open the package! You will save yourself a great deal of time and trouble if you simply place the package, flat, on a cutting board, then while pressing down on it with one hand, cut the plastic (and all the beans) into thirds right down to the board with a large, sharp chef’s knife or equivalent. Two cuts and you’re done! My original technique was to rinse and then cut the beans, but you’ll find that this way is much more efficient.)

3 TBS butter

2 TBS flour

1 1 lb. package fresh mushrooms, sliced (I use standard button ones)

1 medium sweet onion,  medium chopped

1 1/2 cups chicken stock (approx.)

3/4 cup heavy cream

dash of salt

1/4 teaspoon freshly ground pepper (I just grind it into the pan, so approx.)

1/2 cup slivered almonds (entirely optional)

2 ‘cans’ French’s fried onions (Since your college years, the cans have shrunk and morphed into plastic 8 oz. containers pinched at the waist to make them seem larger, so these days, it takes two.)

Preparation: (Note: This can be done well ahead and set aside until time to bake for 1/2 hour before serving.)

Step 1: Parboil Beans

Finished Green Bean Casserole a la George

Finished Green Bean Casserole a la George

Once cut and washed, place beans into a large pot of water at a rolling boil for 10 minutes. When done, they should be tender but still have a slight crispness to them. Always test to achieve perfect doneness, then immediately place in colander under rapidly flowing cold water until they are quickly and completely cooled. Set aside while making sauce.

Step 2: Make Mushroom Sauce

Turn on oven to preheat to 350º if planning to cook right away.

Melt butter in a medium skillet over medium heat. Add onion and saute until transparent. Add mushrooms and continue stirring until onions begin to brown and mushrooms are thoroughly covered in butter.

Add flour by sprinkling over mixture to help it blend. (Note: the usual roux ratio rule [Aside: Try saying “usual roux ratio rule” three times fast. I couldn’t do it for laughing at myself every time I tried. I highly recommend it.] is equal butter and flour, however, since the mushrooms absorb a considerable amount of the oil, I pretend I only used two tablespoons of butter when calculating the flour.) Stir constantly for at least two minutes until flour has had time to cook, and roux forms and begins to have that nutty roux smell. Be careful not to burn.

Add chicken stock and stir until completely incorporated. Add cream and do the same. Add salt and pepper. Continue stirring until thickened and the consistency that undiluted Cream of Mushroom soup in the can would be if heated. If it is too soupy, you can dissolve another tablespoon of flour in some hot tap water and add and stir till it thickens up. If it is too thick, you can add a little more chicken stock until you’re pleased with your result.

Step 3: Combine

Mix sauce and beans (and slivered almonds, if you decide to add) in a large bowl until every bean is well covered, and place in well-buttered casserole dish. Pyrex 9″ by 13″ or similar should work.

Cover with fried onions right out of the cans.

Bake in a 350º oven for 30 minutes until sauce is bubbly around the edges and onions are browned.

Watch with wonder as this vegetable dish is the first to go!

© 2016, George Thomas Wilson. All rights reserved.

 

 

 

 

 

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An Open Letter to the President-Elect

Posted on November 19, 2016 by ganid11
Sunrise or sunset? Fire Island Pines, NY

Sunrise or sunset? Fire Island Pines, NY

“I have often … in the course of the session … looked at that sun behind the President without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting. But now at length I have the happiness to know it is a rising and not a setting sun.     – Dr. Benjamin Franklin as quoted by James Madison upon the signing of the U.S. Constitution, September 17, 1787

Thanksgiving, 2016

An Open Letter to Mr. Donald J. Trump

Dear Mr. President-Elect,

I cannot even begin to imagine what it must have felt like to have the weight of the entire world land on your shoulders as it did only ten days ago. You have my prayer that your stewardship may be righteous and wise.

What an extraordinary opportunity you have been given by the people of this country! You not only won the job, but you managed to do so with almost NO prior commitments to satisfy, no grand donors to please, and not even, really, much of a platform to constrain you, though you have accepted the one proffered by the Republicans, at least for now, even if much of it is contrary to your instincts and history.

Consequently, you must surely be thinking already about how best to make the most of your “clean page,” how best to write into history a Trumpian legacy that can only be seen as so profound, so right, and so brilliant an accomplishment for the future of all Americans, that we would all be looking for the best way to add another face to Mount Rushmore. No incoming President in history has ever been so free to shape a new tomorrow as you now are, so what shall you do with such an open invitation? Well, I have an idea for you.

You may not like it at first blush, but I urge you to give yourself a little time to let it sink in and work out the ramifications. I believe it will grow on you. It comes in the form of an Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and here it is:

 “No person or persons, corporation or business entity of any kind shall be allowed to gain speculative profit from the suffering of any human person or persons, where suffering is defined as any and all illness, injury, birth anomaly, death, bereavement, imprisonment, destitution, loss of property or the value of said property.”

Now, before you stop reading please give me a chance to elaborate. This is specifically about profit gained over and above the cost of doing business where monies paid in to provide actual goods and services are minimized so that monies syphoned away to pay to speculative investors can be maximized. There is nothing in this proposed Amendment to prevent the owner/operator of the Acme Funeral Home from making his fortune by paying himself a million dollars a month in salary if he wants to, or Pfizer from paying their CEO a billion. That is not profit, as you well know, that’s operating expense, however dubious. Nor does this amendment dis-incentivize the research and development of medicines or medical advances, it simply ensures that the monies made in the sales of drugs and medical equipment go into enhanced research and development, rather than advertising, promotion and all other expenses geared to delivering profit for shareholders. And, yes, it also would mean that all insurance companies would have to convert to the not-for-profit model already in use by many of them. A few adjustments, surely, Mr. Trump, but on balance, a vast improvement in life on earth for all of us.

As long as suffering is profitable, Mr. President-elect, the unfettered capitalist – and we all know a few – will be incentivized to encourage it. Private prisons will continue to lobby for stiffer laws, harsher sentences and bloated populations NOT because they are wise, but because they are profitable – human suffering be damned. Likewise, hospitals will continue to extract every last possible drop of money from their patients not because extra tests or procedure are needed, but to increase the return on investment for their shareholders; and funeral parlors… well, you see my point.

HOWEVER, if you, the capitalist’s capitalist, can pull off such a groundbreaking change in life in America – such an enormous improvement in the life of every single American – then you will be right up there with Mr. Lincoln, it seems to me, as the man who, once and for all, freed human suffering from the clutches of unbridled capitalist greed.

You have a clean page here, Mr. President-elect, an unheard-of gift for an incoming political leader. My sincere prayer is that you will make the most of it, for the most of us, in the most positive possible way. Delivered with love, this is my proposed solution.

“I see things as they never were, and say, ‘Why not?’”
– Robert F. Kennedy

Thank you for your time and attention.

Sincerely,

George Thomas Wilson
inpraiseofangels.wordpress.com
NYC

© 2016 by George Thomas Wilson. All rights reserved but you may copy, paste, share, send or reproduce at will.

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TBT/GTS#2: George “Bud” Falkenberry, Born to Act

Posted on November 17, 2016 by ganid11
This portrait of George "Bud" Falkenberry - a Christmas gift to his mother from his father the year he died - was sent to me by his sister, Anne Falkenberry Knight, for this profile.

This portrait of George “Bud” Falkenberry – a Christmas gift to his mother from his father the year he died – was sent to me by his sister, Anne Falkenberry Knight, for this profile.

Of all these profiles I expect to write – and as you will come to see, there are far too many – this one is the one I want most to get right because, even after more than 30 years since we last spoke across a restaurant table in the East Village, I still miss him. I miss his broad smile and the dimples that framed it, his bright eyes and sharp wit, the way he used to shake his head full of dark-blonde hair back and forth when he was happy, and his amazingly expressive face. And, the tragedy here is that we are all – you and I and everyone else – missing the brilliant work he would have done, would still be doing, for George Falkenberry was a profoundly talented actor well on his way to fame and fortune when AIDS came to call, but I get ahead of myself…

[NOTE TO MY READERS: This is the second in my series of Profiles in Grace, written to illuminate the wonderful lives led by my too-many friends who were simply stopped in their tracks by AIDS during the 80s and early 90s. If you missed it, I encourage you to read the full introduction to and rationale for this series at the beginning of the first of these profiles here: https://inpraiseofangels.wordpress.com/2016/04/16/tbtgts1-randall-robbins-actor-teacher-leader-friend/ ]

How We Knew Each Other:

It was the first week of the 1970-’71 school year at Birmingham-Southern College, and I was standing near the student union sharing summer stories with a friend when I saw someone I’d never seen before bouncing across the quad in a joyful, “glad to be here” way that got my attention. His gait and bearing said, loudly, ‘I’m no freshman’, so, as the newly elected yearbook editor who thought I knew everyone who had been there for more than a semester, I was intrigued. “Who is that?” I asked the person standing next to me who just happened to be a drama major.

“Oh, that’s Bud. Bud Falkenberry. He just transferred in from some art school in North Carolina. He’s from Selma.”

But, what I had seen in that fleeting moment, what I had recognized instantly without even so much as a word to go on, was something I had long since given up any hope of ever finding: a younger brother. We would come to realize almost instantly, once we met, that we were cut from the same cloth, bathed in the same waters and reared in much the same way by our upper-middle-class progressive southern parents. Our vocabulary was identical, and we could finish each others’ sentences from the start.

I was blessed with two sisters who are and always will be stars in my eyes, but the second boy my parents wanted never came along, leaving me to wonder in my youth just what having a brother would be like. Until I met George. We bonded faster than superglue the moment we met, and remained fast and cherished friends until he withdrew to the woods at the end of his run, fourteen years later. (And, for those of you who knew him in earlier times, I always called him “George” because that was the way he introduced himself to me, even though everyone, up to then, had always called him by his nickname, Bud, and many still do. I think, looking back, that I may well have been the first of his new Birmingham friends to be so honored. I suspect that after an unhappy freshman experience, he was  more than ready for a new script, a new role, a new name, and what better place to start than as a new student in a new school?)

George and I were both born to rock-solid Alabama parents – couples proud to have done their part in WWII and even prouder to have found peace in a place where they could explore their own possibilities and raise their families – who were so secure in their own selves and beliefs, that the very idea that anything “wrong” could spring from their partnership was simply inconceivable. And because they felt that way, and loved us so much, even when we began showing signs of idiosyncrasy that other parents might have found alarming, they had the confidence and wisdom to allow us the freedom to grow into our own personalities without limit, however it may have perplexed or concerned them, and however it may have been frowned upon along the ultra-conservative ground from which we sprang.

At base, I believe this was the reason that we bonded so swiftly as friends, and why our friendship only grew more firm and secure through the years. That said, there were three specific occasions that helped to confirm our affection for each other, any one of which might have been enough to keep us close for life.

The first instance happened later in the same school year and involved a road trip to Selma and that yearbook. As with most annuals, the one I produced began with a light, fun section showing candid shots of students in various activities and poses around campus, and one of those photos was a shot of Sam Hobbs, also of Selma, one of the brightest, most thoughtful and popular Seniors, caught sleeping soundly on one of the couches in the student lounge. I chose it because Sam had a great sense of humor, and he happily went along when I proposed using it.

But then, over the Christmas holidays, tragedy struck. Sam was killed while doing what he loved most – riding full out on his Motorbike across a New Mexico desert. Well, I immediately did what I could to pull the photo from the yearbook, but those early pages had been submitted months before and were already printed, trimmed and ready for the bindery. There was nothing I could do, aside from adding, at the end of the book, a black-bordered remembrance of Sam written by a fraternity brother who, as it happened, had also taken the earlier photo.

My friend Sam Hobbs taking a nap in the Birmingham-Southern student lounge. It was this photograph that made our trip to Selma necessary.

My friend Sam Hobbs taking a nap in the Birmingham-Southern student lounge. It was this photograph that made our trip to Selma necessary.

Nevertheless, I knew that Sam had paid for his copy of the yearbook in advance, and that it would have to be delivered to his family, and I simply couldn’t allow a situation to happen where his mother or father, unaware, might turn to that opening page to see Sam lying there, his arms across his chest in such an all-too-prophetic photo. So, I turned to George, who had known the Hobbs family his entire life, and asked if he would accompany me to Selma to deliver that yearbook in person to Sam’s mother. And so he did, and though it was a sad, sorrowful meeting, Mrs. Hobbs was as gracious as she could be to both of us.

And, of course, we were both somber as we were driving away, when George said, “Turn around, Tommy, and let’s go to my house. I want to show you something.”

“Okay,” I said as I made a u-turn, “What is it?”

“Vivien Leigh,” he said.

Now, I already knew that he thought Vivien Leigh was one of the finest actresses ever to hit stage or screen, so it was no surprise, really, when he told me that some years earlier he had painted her portrait – as Scarlett O’Hara – and he was rather proud of the way it had turned out.

Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara, by George Alan Falkenberry, c. 1968

Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara, by George Alan Falkenberry, c. 1968

He’d been away from home for a couple of years by that time and the portrait had been relegated to the attic, so I stood at the foot of the folding ladder while he went up to get it. It really was very good for such a singular effort, and I told him so, before he returned her to her gable and we headed north, once again, to Birmingham. It may seem a simple thing, but, to me, showing me his handiwork that hot spring day was another affirmation of our brotherhood. We each wanted the other to know our souls.

Our second bonding experience was much more straightforward and took place the next school year when we were both cast in a major school production of Marat-Sade. He, by then, was the departmental star, and there was never any doubt that he would be cast in the leading role as Marat, and I, as the only Birmingham-Southern student who played the flute, was cast as the piccolo player written into the script. I’m truly grateful for having had the opportunity to watch him work in those rehearsals and performances. I already knew he was good, and I began to understand just how talented he was.

George Falkenberry as Marat, with supporting cast, as featured in the Birmingham News, 1972.

George Falkenberry as Marat, with supporting cast, as featured in the Birmingham News, 1972.

But, of course, both of these experiences pale in comparison to the third one, which made it an absolute certainty that our friendship would be lasting. In the most studious and cautious way possible – for these were days when it was truly jail-worthy – we approached our mutual friend who we knew was well-versed in these sorts of things (after all, she did gigs with Nell Carter at Society’s Child in downtown Birmingham on weekends and knew all the local jazz musicians) to help us procure some marijuana. In spite of being a college graduate, I had never tried it, but now that I was out of a dorm and into my first apartment, the coast was clear. And George was as eager as I was to see what all the fuss was about. And so we did.

Well, we laughed for at least two weeks. We laughed at funny things and we laughed at not-so-funny things, and when we were done laughing, we made up more jokes to keep it going. Those were surely the most astonishing, uplifting, revelatory weeks of our times together and also, without doubt, the most ‘brotherly’ few weeks we were able to spend together. About the second or third day, he came into the apartment already laughing and said, “Tonto Jokes!”

“What?” I asked.

“What you call,” he then rejoined in broken English, “two-thousand pound digit?”

“What?” I asked again, mystified.

“TON TOE!,” he said, very pleased with himself.

And so, for the next two weeks, we sat on the floor of my still unfurnished Southside apartment and made up Tonto jokes. They were really terrible, and not even all that funny, but we laughed till our sides split, and then came up with another one and laughed some more. “What does prime minister’s spouse say when prime minister talk too loud?”

“I don’t know.”

“GOLDA! MY EAR!”

Childhood and Family

George at seven.

George at seven.

As the son of a drama teacher and newspaperman, George, like I, was blessed with sympathetic parents. Oh, they may have done their best to harden our skins, but, for the most part, they allowed us to bloom as God intended and we were both mindful of just how fortunate we were. But, that said, George’s family was considerably more newsworthy than mine, for want of a better way to say it, because George’s father, Roswell Falkenberry, had become the editor and publisher of the Selma Times-Journal during tumultuous times – beginning in 1963, two years before the march to Montgomery, and continuing until his retirement in 1974. Personally, I cannot even imagine the pressures he must have had to endure – the slings and arrows coming from every direction – and yet, in all that time, he remained steadfast in his support of peaceful and level-headed

George about eleven

George about eleven

integration at a time when all the forces around him were doing their best to defeat it. His stand was courageous and, really, heroic (for which he received the Alabama Press Association’s “Journalist of the Year” award in 1965 – the year of the March – for “his policy of unbiased reporting” and, only three years ago, in 2013, he was posthumously inducted into the APA’s Hall of Fame).

Mr. Falkenberry stirred up a bit of a ruckus in 1965 when he was quoted in Jet Magazine saying of Dr. Martin Luther King, that “personally, I think he’s a great man… One of the greatest men in the world when it comes to what he’s trying to do.” So, it is perhaps no surprise that it was also in 1965 when the Ku Klux Klan came calling to burn crosses in George’s front yard. He was only 14 at the time, and one can only guess at how frightening that must have been for him, but I have little doubt that he found a way to use the experience to add yet more range to his acting, to enhance his reservoir of emotions in ways that stayed with him for the rest of his life.27974780095_f932999805_o

And what a range it was! I might despair of telling just  how expressive he could be, but as it happens, George, like Randy Robbins who was the subject of my first TBT/GTS profile, also had a movie to his credit, although unlike Randy, whose part in 27361188353_d454266d69_oOrdinary People was the last best achievement of his budding career, in George’s case, the movie role came while he was still in high school, arising out of the fact that Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was filmed in Selma, and the producers used as many local actors as possible to enhance the authenticity 27873097732_964a784fa3_oof the piece.

George’s best scene is a three-way conversation between him, Sondra Locke, and another Selma fellow (who, quite coincidentally, is another good friend from ‘Southern). And even 27361661604_330ee5f72e_othough I’m illustrating here a few screen shots to demonstrate the range of George’s facial repertoire, I could have taken another twenty rapid fire photos and had another score of completely different facial expressions to show you.

After Leaving Home

Today, the North Carolina School of the Arts is a well-respected institution that has, over the years, produced hundreds of performing artists who populate the stages of Broadway, opera houses and dance companies around the country, but it was still finding itself in 1969, when George enrolled, and by all accounts his time there was not happy. And, so, the next year, he transferred to ‘Southern, which was not only the school that both of his sisters and his father had attended, but also, as fate would have it, sported a theatre

George in character during the Birmingham-Southern years.

George in character during the Birmingham-Southern years.

department that, under the august leadership of Dr. Arnold Powell, was not only as good as any small school in the country, but was also receiving national attention for its brand-spanking-new, state-0f-the-art theatre facility with a split/revolve/lift stage that was the first of its kind in the world.

George on stage with Wren Rolinson, who also moved to New York with him, smoothing the way for me.

George on stage with Wren Rolinson, who also moved to New York with him, smoothing the way for me.

And, as soon as he landed on The Hilltop, as BSC is colloquially called, George had found his home. Every college theatre department has its favorites, its stand-outs, its stars, and from the moment of his first audition for his first part, there was little doubt that he would be filling that role during his time there. He played a succession of leading parts during those years, culminating as Marat in Marat-Sade (me with my piccolo off to the side), before graduating in 1973.

His Trajectory

Following graduation, George moved in Birmingham theatre circles for a short while before striking out for Atlanta where, if memory serves, he worked with a children’s theatre company for a couple of years before finally heading for New York. We were both well settled in our minds and hearts, long before we met, that we would end up in New York City. It was, in many ways in those days, our only option if we truly intended to live our lives out to their fullest extent. The only question was which one of us might make it first. Who might be there in time to pave the way for the other?

Well, as it happened, between taking two years off after ‘Southern and then my law school years in Tuscaloosa, George arrived a couple of years before me, and by the time I rang his doorbell on March 2, 1978 – his 27th birthday as it happened; I arrived in the middle of the party and a 28″ snowstorm with two large suitcases and $350 in my pocket – he was already well ensconced, with three other Birmingham-Southern theatre graduates, in an enormous parlor-floor, floor-through on West 68th Street, only half a block from Central Park. Because his roommates, Bobby Thompson and Wren Rolison, were also my friends, and my arrival was timed to coincide with the departure of the fourth roommate, Glenn Shadix, who had decided to move to Hollywood to seek his fortune in the movies, I had a bed to use for a few weeks until I could find a place of my own. (Glenn did, in fact, make quite a name for himself in several Tim Burton movies, and returned to New York for a season, about fifteen years ago, to live with Richard and me while filming a television pilot for Fox that never, ultimately, made it to air. Unfortunately, Glenn also succumbed following an accidental fall from a wheelchair a few years ago, so even he is Gone Too Soon.)

George out and about in the late 70s. I found this photo online and am not sure whom to credit.

George out and about in the late 70s. I found this photo online and am not sure whom to credit.

To be honest, I can’t remember which school George chose for his acting classes (there were several great options in those days), but he was always busily pursuing his craft, with fellow students coming over nightly for readings and rehearsals, and he had even found a way to expand his professional network with his “day job”  – found through the LendAHand cleaning service – as the three-days-a-week “maid” of Louise Lasser, whose turn as Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman had kept the country doing belly laughs for a couple of years by then. Indeed, when I arrived I was quick to comment on the original Hirschfeld drawing of Ms. Lasser hanging on the apartment wall, and was told by George that “Louise asked me if I would please hang it here since she hates it, but this

Louise Lasser by Al Hirschfeld

Louise Lasser by Al Hirschfeld

way she can say she has it up.” (I did reach out several times to Ms. Lasser for this article,  but she did not respond.)

And so, for the next six years, George and I continued to grow along our personal paths – I in the public relations arena and he with his acting. Wren moved back to Alabama and Bobby’s boyfriend, the poet Tim Dlugos, moved into the floor-through, until they gave it up in the early 80s and moved to Long Island City across the East River in Queens. At the same time George moved south to 4 East Fifth Street, where he lived in the only pink-painted brownstone in the city, as far as I know. He took the Hirschfeld drawing with him, and it continued to hold pride of place in his living room for as long as he remained there. I assume, by now, it’s back with its rightful owner.

And, then, one summer day in 1984, George called and asked me to meet him for lunch. That was a first for us, but I was delighted to do it. At that point, I was also living in a downtown apartment, so it was an easy walk to the diner where we met. And there, over salads, he was the first of my friends to tell me he was diagnosed with HIV, was already showing symptoms of AIDS, and had made the decision to leave the city and move into a friend’s country house in Greenwood Lake, NY, where he could “die in peace.” I saw many friends fall in those years, and no two of them did it quite the say way, but of all of them, George’s goodbye was the most abrupt. As he told me, if he couldn’t be his best self, then he didn’t want to be in New York, and his good friend Harry Endicott, who would be his generous care-giver for the rest of his life, had been kind enough to make the offer. I never saw him again. He died three years later.

Post Script

Unlike many of his peers,  George’s final years in the country were peaceful ones according to his elder sister Anne. “His ashes are scattered there in the lake. His last year he spent gardening and cooking, and the spring after his death, all the bulbs bloomed in profusion!”

She also told me that Harry also died, a few years after George, but not before sewing a bright-blue panel for the AIDS Quilt.

George's panel from the AIDS Quilt contributed by Harry Endicott and showing his tulips by the lake where his ashes were scattered.

George’s panel from the AIDS Quilt contributed by Harry Endicott and showing his tulips by the lake where his ashes were scattered.

And the painting? Well, a few years ago, after both his parents had died, the Falkenberry home was broken up and all the furnishings divided between Anne, Rennie and George’s brother John, but since no one had a good place for the portrait, they decided to donate it to the Old Depot Museum (Selma’s local city museum) for a silent auction. There, Stephen and Carol Brooks were so enamored of it that they not only purchased it, but hung it over the fireplace in their historic home, the George Baker House,

Vivien Leigh where she now hangs over a historic, haunted fireplace. I'm sure George is pleased!

Vivien Leigh where she now hangs over a historic, haunted fireplace. I’m sure George is pleased!

which is not only on the Register of Historic Places, but infamous as one of Alabama’s most haunted places. As the story goes, a civil war skirmish took place in the yard during the Battle of Selma, and a wounded Union Soldier crawled up under the stairs to die. It is said that the blood is still visible, and the house is featured on the Alabama Ghost Trail.

I think George is delighted about that. He surely did love that painting.

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the kind assistance of several people in the preparing of this profile, including Anne Falkenberry Knight, John Falkenberry, Rennie Falkenberry Edwards, Wren Rolison, P. Vaughan Russell, Esq., and Carl Stewart. Thank you all very much for your help.

© 2016 by George Thomas Wilson. All rights reserved.

 

Posted in Angels, Death, health, Love, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 9 Comments

“Consider the Lilies…” 2016

Posted on November 5, 2016 by ganid11

27616611933_c52852c0e5_oHow can you not give your whole heart to the unlikely miracle of the day lily, a flower, as we learned from Superstorm Sandy, that takes fully two years to form and then, in one magnificent thrust of proud determination and exorbitant beauty, pops open in mere minutes to reveal itself to happy pollinators in waiting, only to completely wither away with the setting of the sun?

Of course, if nobody’s there to catch its astonishing display of frills and filigree, wondrous colors and welcoming outstretched petals, it could come and go with no more notice than that of the attending bumblebees, its years of patient effort all for naught, its resplendent, twelve-hour display never seen. Which is why, I suppose, I try so hard to catch them at their best and share them with all of you. After all, as my friend Jesus said, “…Not even Solomon, in all his glory, was arrayed like one of these.”

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fixed

Like I said, little botanical miracles, and, like Jesus said, “Not even Solomon…”

Sending with love and gratitude.

© 2016 by George Thomas Wilson. All rights reserved.

Posted in Angels, belief, biology, faith, miracles, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Summer’s Bounty, June to September, 2016

Posted on November 3, 2016 by ganid11

As I write this, there is hard cold rain blowing horizontal out the windows. The pool man was here earlier to tie down the cover for winter and I was reminded by the radio a few minutes ago that this weekend marks the fourth anniversary of Superstorm Sandy. Could there be a better time, then, to celebrate the wonders that God and Her angels wrought in our Cedar House gardens this summer? After all, these gardens found themselves under six feet of Atlantic Ocean when that great gale came, a salty saturation that wiped out pretty much everything, even including a 30′ lush southern magnolia that had cheerfully withstood fifteen Fire Island winters and become a community favorite in the doing, but couldn’t take the poison. It was one of three that I had given to Richard for Christmas many moons ago, and the good news is that, finally, last year, the least of the original trio put out a triumphant new shoot from the roots, so my love gift lives! And this year, the reborn tree actually bloomed. confirming, to me, at least, lines from a poem I wrote long ago, that “The dream is stronger than the night.”

Our triumphant magnolia blossom, hopefully the first of many more to come. The fencing is to keep the deer from eating it.

Our triumphant magnolia blossom, hopefully the first of many more to come. The fencing is to keep the deer from eating it.

Of course, gardens, like kitchens, are favorite spots for angels, so please allow me to credit my spiritual companions for much of this renaissance. They know they have my gratitude.

As with last year’s tours, I’ll start with the deck plantings and then move into the gardens around the house. Please enjoy and feel free to share. May all our storms be gentle ones in the days and months ahead.

[Editor’s note: Even I am frustrated that many of these photographs – especially the vertical ones – only show partially on my laptop screen, but if you click on any photo, it will open up in “fit your screen” mode and be easier to see.]

Decks and Such

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Entry Deck

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Pool Deck

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The Shady Side

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The Sunny Side

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And there you have it. Believe it or not, this is only 10% of the photos I had, and I know I gave short shrift to the day lilies, but that is because there were so many great ones that, like last year, I’m also be doing a dedicated day lily post as a follow-up to this one.

Thanks for visiting! Hope you enjoyed the tour.

Love to all!

© 2016 by George Thomas Wilson. All rights reserved.

Posted in Angels, faith, God the Father, Love, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Hillary, Plain and Simple, by Allen Bird

Posted on September 22, 2016 by ganid11
TBT: Allen Bird in about 1960 posing for the yearbook on the Century High School football field. Hopefully he'll forgive me for dredging this up!

TBT: Allen Bird in about 1960 posing for the yearbook on the Century High School football field. Hopefully he’ll forgive me for dredging this up!

For several years, beginning in 1957, Allen Bird’s daddy worked with my daddy at the Alger-Sullivan Sawmill Company in Century, FL (at the time, the largest sawmill east of the Mississippi River). My mama taught Allen how to type at Century High School and Daddy taught him to play tennis. His mama sat next to me in the church choir with her delicious contralto voice, and they lived right across the street from us for all that time. After graduation, Allen served in the Navy, then got a law degree from the University of Arkansas before getting his LLM from New York University about 1973. In other words, as my sainted Great Aunt Mary Belle would have said (however judgmentally), Allen Bird is quality folk.

And, as fate would have it, after graduation from law school, he joined a small Little Rock practice called the Rose Law Firm, where he and another freshly minted attorney, Hillary Clinton, struggled in tandem for more than a decade to build the firm and their careers.

In other words, as fate would have it, I am

Ed and Mabel Bird and their three sons, Eddie, Allen and Sam (with Sam's wife, LeAnne) back in the days when we were all great friends.

Ed and Mabel Bird and their three sons, Eddie, Allen and Sam (with Sam’s wife, LeAnne) back in the days when we were all great friends.

blessed to have a childhood friend who is the perfect antidote to all the hype and bluster on the 24-hour news. A real, solid friend from way back when who actually knew Hillary Clinton during her salad days, and who, for fifteen years, worked as closely with her as pretty much anyone else on the planet. Until now, both he and I have remained very circumspect regarding this election. After all, there has been more than enough sturm und drang to go around. But, just the other day, Allen finally threw in his two cents about the bright young attorney he knew from the inside-out during those years, and as I found his words both refreshing and informative, I asked and gained permission from him to repost them here in the hope that they will also be instructive for you. That said, wherever you fall on the spectrum, I’m wishing you all a marvelous fall weekend!

From Allen Bird:

About Hillary.

Although I normally try to keep my comments on Facebook apolitical, I think I have some personal insight into her character and personality, and I have been thinking for some time about posting something about Hillary.

For over 15 years I saw her almost every day and had at least some casual conversation with her. She and I, and other partners, helped run a small business together, the Rose Law Firm. I saw first hand her creative and practical solutions to our challenges.
I was with her during the good times when things went well, and the bad times—when her husband was defeated in his run for re-election as governor. I was with her and Bill when they had disagreements, and when they celebrated.

I was neither of their best friends, but I think that I know her—and she is an honest, kind, ethical, intelligent and caring human being. I went to her when I heard she was pregnant and saw the tears in her eyes when we talked about the awesome responsibility of parenthood. Gosh, it’s hard for me to believe that she and I are both now grandparents.

I worked with her on various legal matters and saw her passion for her client’s cause and her brilliance in forming the best argument for their success.

I was with her when we had some ethical issues to resolve and never once did she veer from the path of solid and responsible resolution.

She asked me to represented her and Bill during some of the Whitewater investigation relating to the spec house they built at the Whitewater Estates. She never once asked me to do anything unethical or take any position not ethical or supported by the law.

I haven’t had much contact with her since 1993 when she and the President-Elect moved to Washington. Maybe she has morphed into something I wouldn’t recognize, as her detractors claim—but I don’t think so.

It now amazes me that her adversaries have been so successful in their campaign to demonize Hillary by constantly investigating her for the last decade and why so many Americans now think that she must have done something wrong or there wouldn’t have been all those investigations. Once we all had respect for the Congress and assumed that if the Majority Leader or others with titles said it–it must be so. Not any more.

Yes, I will vote for Hillary because I know who she was as a young wife, mother, and lawyer. I’m not afraid of a strong woman leading our country—in fact I welcome it.

I am not interested in your views of Hillary today, so don’t feel compelled to respond. All I am offering is a snapshot of Early Hillary. Take it or leave it.

I trust her to be my leader and Commander In Chief, because I know her.

Allen Bird, reprinted by permission

© 2016 by George Thomas Wilson. All rights reserved (but this time around, please feel free to share, post, reprint or skywrite).

 

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