Echoes In the Labyrinths

Of all the most gratifying things in my life, the accumulation of knowledge and tools to be able to fix virtually all things a homeowner might encounter ranks near the top. I’ve owned several older homes and repaired them all, literally, from top to bottom, tinkering with many of them along the way in a sort of self-taught process. I was also in the lawn and landscape business for many years, and, as a matter of pride (and admittedly, competition) always made sure I had the greenest lawn in the neighborhood to prove it.


I’ve had a wealth of tools. Some I’ve used often, but some have collected dust, or have done so until they were one day called into service to perform that rare function for which they were designed. I had a wealth of knowledge—still do, for that matter—it’s requisite to retaining ownership of your Man Card, I believe. At any given moment, either for my own purposes, or for the sake of giving advice to that less experienced Man Card carrier, or for the distressed damsel with a distressed home or lawn, I can flip through the file cards in the recesses of my mind and whip out the solution for a needed repair.

For me, the knowledge and experience that enables me to fix things is empowering.

But drain traps and plaster walls and wood floors do not—even if I try to attribute as much to them—have a mind of their own. Their performance and actions, or inactions, are pretty consistent and predictable based upon their condition and purpose. If A is wrong with them then they will do B, and I can perform repair C on them with tool D and get them to act and function in the manner I want them to. Or I can replace them.

But not everything in my life is so rigid, or fixed, or predictable, or replaceable, and it is those things—things I shouldn’t call “things,” really—that I struggle with the most. It’s a frustration for me when I can’t produce result Y from action or influence X.

Here is where the how-to books and the tools fall far short of what I can apply or need. In these situations, there are just too many variables. I understand the variables that lie between those two points of X and Y, and I understand equally that they should be both expected and maybe even appreciated, but the inability to produce the immediate or best result is what gnaws at me.

In those matters, like most anyone, I look back through life experiences in order to find the lesson, or the countering lesson, from which to draw. People I’ve encountered in my life are sometimes great examples to follow, but sometimes they are also great examples to not follow. Usually I am a pretty good judge of which category these people fall into, but I sometimes discover later I may have initially misjudged them.

One such person from my past was Gary Brandt, the Dean of Men at Southwest Baptist University, which was the college I first attended after high school. Dean Brandt was fond of inviting me into his office, where I would have to endure private lectures and chats on a somewhat regular basis.

For whatever the reason, certain things Dean Brandt shared with me in those chats have stuck with me all these years, some things more than others. I remember one particular visit, when he called me to his office to discuss an event with which I might have been involved, one I then viewed as a rather minor flirtation with the campus rules.

The relevance to me now makes the words he said then even easier to recall, and as I do, I can still hear them in his own voice:

“My job, Cody, is not to regulate every little movement that young men make on this campus, or to even force them into any kind of lockstep. My job, instead, is to provide them with the two walls of a comfortable hallway that leads them toward what it is they came to this college to achieve. They may bounce a little against one wall or the other as they move down this hall, but so long as I keep those walls sturdy for them, and keep them moving forward toward their goal, then I am doing all I can.”

Dean Brandt was a little wiser than I gave him credit for at the time. And, he was a little more generous than I gave him credit for as well; during any one of those private lectures he could have summarily dismissed me from his campus. I’d given him plenty of opportunity to do so (maybe).

I remember how I felt about Dean Brandt at that time in my life. I thought he didn’t understand me. I thought he didn’t even really know me. I thought he had branded me and judged me by what little interaction he had with me on campus and in his office, and by the rascal reputation I had—quite erroneously, mind you—earned in the school community. I was fairly dismissive of his counseling and advice at the time, and even came to think of our little meetings as something akin to chess matches between the two of us. He would lecture on the hypothetical event that I may have been involved in, and I would argue hypothetically in order to avoid any admission of the alleged participation.

Thinking back on those conferences years later, I realize that Dean Brandt exercised a great deal of patience with me, and I am grateful he didn’t grab me by my ear and lead me out of his office, off of the campus, and down to the Bolivar bus station. Just the same, I spent a great deal of my life viewing Dean Brandt’s judgment of my character with much the same indifference. I carried around a certain satisfaction of feeling accomplished, despite what he ever thought I would turn out to be.

I thought for a long time, should I ever have the chance to be in Bolivar again (how that would happen, I have no clue), that I would have to march into his office and show him what a responsible, upright, dependable, and accomplished man I was now, despite whatever I did to justify his judgment of me back then. Never mind the fact that (I believe) he long ago left his post at that college. I think he should have to meet me there in his old office just to satisfy that little fantasy of mine. He and the campus security guard as well. And the Dean of Women. And that one dorm mom for the women’s dorm.

But, I’m a little off point—just a little. How I felt then, or later (or still now, just maybe) about the “Wall” lecture I got from Dean Brandt is not so much what lasts with me right now as what it is he said. In fact, I remember those comments he offered me frequently these days, because I am now in the challenging position of being those walls for others. I am at work. I am for a couple of people I humbly mentor. I am at home.

In each of those settings, my emotional attachment, involvement, actions, and reactions differ accordingly and appropriately. But, each of them often give me cause to recall Dean Brandt’s sage advice that one day, and to varying degrees test my patience and resolve in trying to maintain those caring boundaries I am suppose to offer.

I have to remind myself that I cannot make those walls too narrow, and I have to be careful not to make them too wide. Within that delicate balance, I sometimes have to admit I tend to err on the slimmer side. I guess I have always thought that I would rather be at fault for providing slightly narrower corridors than for giving too wide a berth. But a narrow gauntlet does act as a crucible of tension sometimes, and I have to recognize the need to relieve the contained pressure by widening the passage. That is not always easy, when you judge the future or well-being of someone you love or care about to be affected in that balance.

And I can’t just pick up a tool and fix it, which is the most infuriating part, really. It would be easy, if I could only do that. Instead, what I have to hope for is that—in the end, when the outcome is likely more critical and the judgments their own to make, and no tool or manual is of any more use to them than mine are—the people for whom I maintain those walls may remember my words in much the same way as I remember Dean Brandt’s.

Balance

Somewhere in our lives, at the point where the lofty trajectories of our hopes, our expectations, and our affections cross, lie our thoughts, feelings, and perceptions of those close to us, those whom we love or have loved.

It can be a messy little spot on the map of our lives. It represents a place where we both love and fail each other.

Speaking only for myself, I know I am capable, at times, of taking people I love for granted. I say things to them and I do things to them that I often would not say or do to others. I expect things from them I often would not expect of others.

I also hope they will not take me for granted. I wish, at times, they were not able to say things to me that I never expect to hear from someone I believe loves me. Sometimes it’s hard not to feel that they expect too much from me.

They and I do all of those things to each other because within the binds that tie us we interpret a license to interact with each other in that manner. Be it solely emotional or legal, we see it as a tether that allows us that behavior, assumes a tolerance for it, and obligates us to withstand it without breaking those ties.

For those people in my life outside that personal circle, I can simply dismiss them if I choose. I can choose to not have them in my life by either losing or avoiding contact with them. I can express my disappointment in them and we can say our goodbyes if we cannot realign or come together, or I can quietly withdraw from them without a word. I can even—in today’s world—simply delete them. It can be as simple as that.

But, with those close to me I feel an obligation that translates into a contract fraught with moral, social, emotional, and even psychological complexities. I want their love and appreciation, and I want them to desire the same from me, hopefully at an equivalent level. However, that love and appreciation also comes with strings that can often get a little twisted.  Sometimes those strings tug and cause us harm.

I think I am both fortunate and cursed with the ability to feel intensely, or, as a friend once put it, I have a big heart. Depending on how you see it, that description can be either a compliment or a caution. I see it as an advantage because it allows me a satiating depth with people and things I love and enjoy. But, I know it equally as a curse, because it also affords that same depth of feeling in those people or things that cause me pain.

I am also observant, or at the very least, willing to be observant. I have always been curious about myself, and others, and human nature, and interaction. The upside of that curiosity is that it opens my eyes to things that others might possibly find trivial and mundane and makes them significant to me. The downside: I may not always like what it is I see, or I may see things not really there, or read too much into something.

And like many, I hold on, long and strong, to the memories which have a charge of emotion attached to them, be they pleasant or unpleasant.

Where the unpleasant is concerned, it seems to really stick with me. Somewhere in the back of my mind I keep an emotional chalkboard where I mentally tally the hurts. I know this of myself, and I try work on it, on the letting go and the erasure of those chalk marks, but it’s never easy. I find I can often forgive, but I cannot as often forget, and I am not sure I am really doing one without doing the other.

The forgetting part is what gets in the way of wiping the slate clean. Even when I try my hardest, the faintly erased marks flash up in memory whenever something resembling their previous scoring erupts in my present. “Here we go again,” I say to myself, and I begin questioning why I ever let myself be put in that same position.

However, I want to be in that exact position, actually, because my desire and need to forgive and forget is rooted in the addiction I have for that feeling forgiveness affords me. I enjoy that feeling of peace, and I appreciate the feeling I get from trying to rise to a selfless act.

It keeps me coming back to that conflicted space of vulnerability. I want the feeling of humility required to suspend my own needs.  I want to give of myself to another, while—at the same time—I fear it and see it as a giant leap of faith. I teeter between the confidence that my leap is taken with, and for, someone that will not make me regret it, and the dread that my faith in the other person, or persons, is foolishly misplaced. Therein lies the rub, because I know going in that those I want to love and trust are, like me, imperfect people.  They are people very capable of failing my expectations and saying, doing, or being someone or something other than what or who I hoped.

In thinking this through, it dawned on me that I may have hit on two of the most important components of an endearing and enduring relationship. When I look around me, those I know who have great relationships are those people who seem to have the desire and ability to be both humble and vulnerable with each other, on a consistent and balanced level.

It is as if those two qualities are the subtle subtexts of their relationship, signaling to each other—sometimes spoken, but most often only reflected—their trust in each other. Each entrusts their feelings to the other, and rewards the returned care of those feelings with reciprocating respect and sheltering. Not much seems necessary to prove to each other, nor does there seem to be any sort of competing or driving ambitions. Nor does one necessarily support or sustain the other disproportionately.

And I think when it fails, or doesn’t even begin to develop, maybe it’s not the failure of one person only, but instead a case where two of most important puzzle pieces are missing. Maybe one person is not solely to blame; it’s more likely that those two people simply fail to inspire those feelings between each other. Neither is a lesser person for it. They are just mismatched.

From what I see in those where it all comes together, it doesn’t seem to me that either person possesses humility or sensitivity as their central or most prominent characteristic, but instead that they each have those as innate abilities drawn out by, and enhanced by, each other. In each other they have found that “sweet spot,” where they are inspired by each other to be a better person, to take the greatest of care with each other’s feelings, and have a consistent desire to sustain and maintain that balance of care, respect, appreciation, and affection for each other.

Maybe that is the nirvana of a great relationship and what people are really referring to when they call something love. I’m not sure. I only know what I see.

© 2011 Cody Kilgore. All Rights Reserved worldwide under the Berne Convention. May not be copied or distributed without prior written permission.

The Divides

Last fall, not long after the school year began, a text message from Megan woke me up in the middle of the day and split me in two.

“a kid is threatening to blow up the school…im scared”

The rip of indecision came from the intuitive feeling that this was one of those drama-fueled teenage hallway rumors that can escalate from a stubbed toe to Armageddon inside the length of a lunch period. The first half of her text was a bit hard to believe.

But the second half of her text struck home. I realized she was genuinely afraid, because Megan almost never texts me unless it is something urgent. I often get a “dad my self-dye job went bad and I need It fixed,” or “these boots are only on sale TODAY!!!!!!” or “need a ride now,” but never before in her life has Megan ever sent me the words “im scared.” I pictured her very frightened there in her classroom.

I asked her to give me some time to figure out what was going on and contact the school. I was still finding it all very hard to believe, and found it even more unbelievable when she told me that the young man in question had been called down to the office but was back in his class. I thought that meant that someone was at least addressing the situation, evaluating it, and determining things were safe.

Then it struck me, at that moment, that all of these situations which have happened in the past and ended in tragedy were neither predicted nor prevented. “What if” thoughts started bouncing through my head about what quiet dangers may be lurking undetected in the halls of Megan’s school, and I suddenly felt the urgent need to know or do more. What did the school know? Was there any communication sent out? Did they know about the information circulating in their building, and what were they doing?

The woman that answered the phone at the school that day likely had no idea how poorly she chose her words to address such calls, because her response, after I explained the text message I had received from Megan was:

“We have the situation under control.”

And that was it. No further comment, no explanation that it was overblown drama, or any information or indication about whether or not the threat was real or only perceived. I waited, half shocked at the silence at the other end of the phone, and then asked her for more information. She said she could offer nothing more other than “the situation was under control.”

Michelle and I exchanged a few calls and my blood pressure just kept ratcheting skyward. Megan had sent her the name of the student and she had checked out his Facebook page, which—unfortunately for him—he had not made private. She described disturbing things, but I couldn’t check it out myself because, by this point, I was in the car on my way to pick up Kylee. Megan was also on the bus and removed from any immediate danger.

At Kylee’s school I had a quick conversation with the principal there to see if he had picked up any news of the ordeal from district communication. He hadn’t. Nor was the district office answering their phones.

Megan met us there and we talked as I drove them both to Michelle’s house. After I had dropped them off I drove home, still trying to figure out the reality of the situation and not having much luck in doing so. It bugged me to not know. There was too big a gap between the depth of Megan’s expressed fear and what I could get in information. And so, when I got to the intersection where I either turned home or turned toward the school…I headed west for the school for one last try.

I didn’t expect to find anyone there, honestly, since it as a good hour after the junior high had let out. In fact, when I got there the doors were already locked, and there was only a solitary car in the lot. But as I turned to walk back to my car and leave, I spotted a woman on the phone in her office which I thought to be in the vicinity of the deans’ offices.

I did what any reasonable father would do: I knocked on her office window and pointed at the door, hoping she would interpret this knock and the look I gave her as meaning I wanted in to talk with someone…now. She nodded at me and quickly hung up the phone, and then met me at the front doors with a smile. She introduced herself as the principal.

We went to her office and she patiently listened to everything I could tell her about what I knew from Megan, from Michelle, all the while taking notes on what seemed to be new to her. Then she took her time in explaining all that she could to me without stepping outside boundaries of confidentiality, while still trying to alleviate my fears as a parent. When I left, I felt confident that she was on top of the situation, and that there was no imminent danger to anyone. But, I did see she had quite a mess on her hands in dealing with the aftermath.

By the time I got home there were two e-mails from her, one a mass e-mail to all parents and another to me thanking me for my time and concerns and reassuring me that she was committed to everyone’s safe navigation through this event. My nerves started to calm a bit in her words, but I somehow still didn’t feel like I knew everything I could. I felt like I needed to know as much as I could about the young man who supposedly made the threats.

So I did the next thing any reasonable father would do: I Googled, and I found his Facebook page, and I searched it for any telltale signs of imbalance, and for the things that Michelle had previously described to me. Sure, there were some things on his page that I probably wouldn’t put on my own, but they seemed more like the kind of things a teenage boy interested in zombie-killing video games would post more than anything. There was a reference to gasoline that kind of raised my radar a little, and a reference to an anarchist, but he seemed more a young man being a little provocative than being threatening. I think I remember being a little provocative at that age as well, when I wanted attention.

By the next day, through conversations with Megan and others (and my Googling), a clearer picture of this student came through. For whatever reason, he was a young man without many friends in his own school, and he was apt to do and say things that sometimes were meant to shock and gain attention. It was his way of being noticed in the sea of anonymity we all know large schools can be. But he didn’t know how to distinguish between things appropriate and inappropriate to say within the context of school, or within social norms. He apparently did not know that some things said may call all kinds of wrong attention to him, or that they may actually cause real fear in others.

After the fact, I actually felt for him. He did, in fact, make an inappropriate comment in the school hall that caused someone concern. But, because that comment became more and more distorted as the lines of communication stretched out wider and longer, the entire school had—by that afternoon—begun to paint him as a monster that threatened them all. By the end of the day he sat at a precarious edge, where either someone could reach out to him and pull him back, or where the entire student body could push him socially, and psychologically, off the edge to become the very thing they all feared him to be.

And I began to wonder whether many of the young people whose tragic actions we have heard and read so much about had once been at this same juncture. Was there a moment in their lives when they could have been pulled back from that chasm by someone who recognized their actions as a cry for meaningful human contact? Was there a tipping point in their lives where they decided to make real the things that people whispered about them in the halls? What might have changed with a little understanding instead of foregone conclusions spread rampantly?

The next day Megan came home from school and said that she had been to the principal’s office that morning along with several other students. I imagine a number of those visits happened all day in her office, with a number of different students. Megan didn’t give me all the details, but she did tell me that they talked about the young man, about everything that happened the previous day, and about being responsible with sharing rumors and information.

I remember Megan’s sincerity and maturity when she told me all this, and how she seemed to have taken a genuine lesson from it all. I also remember feeling very proud of her when she mentioned that she and some friends toyed with the idea of reaching out to this student, helping him feel less isolated.

I’ve never asked, so I don’t know if she ever did, or if anyone did. I hope so, because it seems to me a situation where the fate and future of One and Many are intertwined and shaped by each other, And that’s probably not a bad lesson to learn as young as when you’re in junior high.

© 2011 Cody Kilgore. All Rights Reserved worldwide under the Berne Convention. May not be copied or distributed without prior written permission.

Depth Perception

What if we could, when it matters most, suspend our disbelief in order to see things with more clarity?

Doing so is difficult. Take, for instance, the philosophical theory about the differences or parallels of perception and reality. It may very well be that reality is only that which we personally perceive—kind of like the idea that a tree falls silently in a forest without there being anyone there to hear it. Most would say that the tree does indeed make an audible sound in its fall, but we can also grasp the feasibility of that concept enough to lend its inception some credence.

That idea extends even further, however, with those who posit we actually only live in a dream state and that our reality is simply a perceptually constructed one, the premise of Poe’s quote that “all that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.” Most people jump off the bus at this juncture; it is a little frightening for us—science fiction kind of frightening—to imagine that our reality is neither tangible nor true.

Like most people, I exit at that same point. I rationalize it (now, and as I did once before to the frustrations of my philosophy professor) with the argument that countless beings would all have to be constructing the interactions between ourselves and the realities and different outcomes that arise from those interactions. We would all have to be dream-state constructing the same world, and determining and perceiving all the variables the same way, and all accepting them as our personal and shared truths. Either that or (and I shudder at this thought) everyone and everything in our world is simply a creation of our imagination. That seems even more inconceivable.

But honestly, when I do that, when I argue that, I am really only using logic to fend off my fears. I am afraid that what I want to believe is both real and true, because admitting that it isn’t, or even just allowing the smallest of doubts about it to creep in, would shake the very foundations of everything else about me and my life. If X is not true, then certainly Y may also be false because Y is related to X, and so on and so on, until all the dominoes are laying on their side. Chaos.

Interestingly enough, thoughts along those lines took me back to a time when I was trying to examine and salvage a faltering relationship, and took to books by experts to find ways to attempt this. One of the more interesting books I found (the authors of which I cannot give credit…it was long ago burned) made the point that when couples argue they argue from positions of fear and defensiveness.

A simple example: if my wife/girlfriend and I would argue about why I didn’t manage to take out the trash that week, we would both be retreating to our defensive corners and trying to protect the most basic ideas we have about ourselves and our realities. My not taking the trash out would represent to her my disregard for her feelings by doing something she hoped I would do, which in turn would mean that I do not care about her needs, and meant I did not value her as a person or care about her, which also meant she was not a person worth caring about, either by me or by anyone else.

Likewise, I might be feeling that her initial request was her asking me to do a demeaning and menial task, that her calling me out on it meant she was willing to hurt my feelings, or to call into question my skills or abilities as a partner (or a partner who is capable of caring and courteous acts). I might be thinking she meant I was not a good mate for her, or anyone else, and thus, a less worthy person.

In an argumentative and self-protective game of Six Degrees, we would both end up raising the stakes over a silly bag of trash and turning the entire thing into a war to ward off our most basic fears of self-perception and self esteem.

That book went on to offer ways of working around this, but my girlfriend at the time never read the book, and the application of their advice must have escaped me. At least it did then.

No, check that: I think it still has.

I know this because of a recent conflict in my life with people important to me. As it was happening, as it was building to a ridiculous crescendo, I could feel within myself both anxiety and fear building to levels that clouded my interpretations of others’ words and deeds, and it was only in my understanding of this in myself that I began to realize it was what was prompting the same within them. We had all retreated and raised our hackles and bared our claws in a display of primal instinct.

Once I could recognize that, it became easier to understand the actions, but did not make the resolution and reconciliation any easier, because that meant that one or both of us would have to be humble enough to admit some wrongdoing and reach out to each other. Just like with couples, this is probably the hardest step.

In retrospect, what I learned about myself in all this was that I may have been (or still am) a little hypocritical of my mantra to “seek first to understand, then to be understood.” At some point in the process my emotions took over and they short-circuited the Six Degrees process I needed to think through in order to understand my gut reaction, or—just as importantly—their actions and reactions. If I had been adept at doing so, whether they had been or not, I might have helped steer things in a different direction, or been humble enough to see things through their eyes and agree to disagree in a manner that would not have been destructive or damaging.

And that doesn’t have to apply to my closest of relationships either; it works for acquaintances and friends and peers at work as well, if I care enough to be the kind of person to try and apply it. It might make things a little easier at work, or relieve a little of the stress that so often comes with the holidays and time with family, or possibly even ease the tensions that seem to build during election cycles. I don’t necessarily have to attempt this as a means of respecting or caring about someone else more; it might be something I want to do for myself in order to be a better person.

Which will, in turn, probably make me a more likable or lovable person to others. Which will then tell me that I am indeed a good person. Which will then tell me that my foundation of self esteem is a little more solid, and that my perception of myself is a little more real and true.

See how that works?

© 2010 Cody Kilgore. All Rights Reserved worldwide under the Berne Convention. May not be copied or distributed without prior written permission.

Not One

Not One.

Not one single name did I know, or even recognize, in the list of names that I was reading, but I could still feel something for each and every one of them. Something painful. It emanated from the page, at first as a realization that they themselves were very real people—even though their images were only abstract to me—and then as a realization of their connection to someone else.

It was their age that struck me first. So young. Lives measured in too short of terms. I thought back to what it was I was doing at their age, and then forward to everything that I did with my life after that point. So much missed.

Here in Iowa, in the early days of Our Aggression in the Middle East, government buildings and businesses would lower their flags to half mast whenever someone from the state lost their life over there. At first it seemed to be rare, rare enough that the local media would often feature pieces about the soldier and their families, would still treat them as someone real—flesh and blood, belonging to someone.

But, after a while, I began to notice fewer of those pieces while the flags seemed to stay continuously at half mast. I began to think of them as permanently positioned there, and thought they would be until the end of the war. Over time I lost sight of them. I struggle now to remember the last time I noticed them, if they still have been flying low. Shame on me.

That particular day had been a dismal day for soldiers from Iowa, and so the paper chose to headline as much and list their names and ages. I think the oldest was in his early twenties. It made me curious about the average age of our men and women over there in active duty, curious enough to go out and research it on the net, even compare it to previous wars. It seems our soldiers today are a little older than in previous wars, but are still too young for this, in my estimation. Why is it a country sees fit to throw its best and its brightest, its bravest and most ambitious, its most fit and most promising, into the carnage of war?

I’ve never known anyone personally who has died in conflict, not in this war or any other. I can’t say that I’ve ever experienced the loss that a father or a brother or a son might feel over a loved one who went away in fatigues and never came back. I’ve never had to imagine what their final moments might have been like, or lose sleep over the empty feeling that I never had a chance to be with them or say goodbye to them, or in any way be even remotely connected with them in their passing. I’ve never had to answer that knock at the door that brought the news, news that would have to take your breath away. News that shattered the separation between the assurance and concrete comfort of a loved one in my life, and the immediately real absence of them. News that swiftly produces a sudden vacuum, a huge, gaping hole in your life.

Being a parent and just imagining what that would have to be like is both too potentially real, and too frightening. What would I ever do?

Because the conflict is usually so distant from our homes and the tolls often just a list of names in the news, we become jaded to the real costs of war, unless it strikes us personally. We objectify the enemy. We romanticize the warrior. We cling to an idea of war as right versus wrong, as good versus evil, as justified by our virtues versus irrational campaigns for power. But I think we fail to realize that it is, in reality, our attempt to press our life on to theirs, our attempt at Manifest Destiny, or—quite possibly—a product of our own greed and hunger for power. We strike a muscular pose on the world’s stage.

We still think we can win wars on foreign soil. We have too quickly forgotten the lessons of Vietnam. Our adversaries are no longer neat formations of uniformed minions, but instead are subtly different shades of the very people we believe we are there to protect, fight for, save. They no longer identify themselves for our easy killing, no matter how ingenious our killing devices, because they know they are no technological match for our massively funded weapons programs.

We still fight wars by rules long forgotten by others because we believe our wars are a matter of principle. They fight like the confederate that didn’t see anything wrong with taking a shot at Grant, atop his horse on a nearby hillside, as he looked over his troops going to battle.

This particular war was started with suspect reasoning. WMD’s never materialized, but just the threat of them—like a page ripped from the book written by decades of a Cold War nuclear threat—was just enough to raise our collective fears, sufficiently quell our questioning on whether or not it was the correct thing to do. Why do we feel like we have to stretch our long tentacles of weaponry into lands on which we’ve never lived, into a history so vastly different from our own, and into a way of life we will never understand?

We have no place there. We shouldn’t, and cannot, impose our definition of life and democracy on them, despite our convictions in how well it works for us. They are entitled to their way of life, and the mistakes they may make in living it, just the same as we are entitled to our way of life and the mistakes of our own history. And whatever threat we perceive is brewing there could just as easily be defended against, if not more so, with all those resources better utilized here at home.

But, my biggest question, the one that bothers me most, is this: at what point do we, either as a nation, or as a government representation, or as a presidential leader, so easily make the switch from thinking of a young man or a woman as a real person and convert them into an expendable resource? At what point do the functions of their living—breathing, speaking, feeling—disappear and make us able convert them to machines? At what point do their souls become invisible to us?

My questions are simple, maybe too simple. But I can’t get past them.

Why can’t we bring them home and stand them shoulder to shoulder along our border with Mexico, become our solution to southwestern states’ concerns over illegal immigration?

Why can’t we disperse them in dozens to our international airports and let them become the security that many of us would trust far more than that offered by insufficiently-paid people in poorly fitting suits?

Why can’t we let them swell the ranks of policemen and policewomen, and make our streets safer for everyone?

Or, for that matter, why can’t we let them become doctors or lawyers or artists or musicians or anything else they would dream to do with the rest of their lives, so long as it is not something that makes them a part of a grotesquely large and ugly killing machine? Why can’t we just stop making them machines?

Let them have the lives they deserve as much as any of us, without it being violently cut short, so far from home and loved ones, by an enemy neither they nor we will ever even see, let alone know or understand.

Because not one young man or young woman’s life is worth any attempt to convince a different culture in a faraway land that they should want our way of life.

Not one young man or young woman’s life is worth even a billion barrels of oil that might be sent back here with them, strapped on their backs.

Not one young man or young woman’s life is worth them bringing Osama Bin Laden himself into custody.

Not one young man or young woman’s life is worth any reason anyone can give me for us sacrificing it.

Not one.

© 2010 Cody Kilgore. All Rights Reserved worldwide under the Berne Convention. May not be copied or distributed without prior written permission.

Just Sayin'

I wondered if Kim was catching me stealing glances down the row of manicured back lawns that stretched down the block. “Kim is a friend,” I thought to myself. She gets it.

Her kids—as well as a couple of others from the neighborhood—were buzzing orbits around her on the sidewalk, on the parkway. They were still releasing energy bound up from a full day in classrooms, now set off by the sun and fresh air on the walk home through the neighborhood. Kim smiled, kindly, in between the snaps to keep the kids corralled back off of the street and their interruptions of our conversation. I checked Megan and Kylee to see if they were looking for the same things and felt a little relief in seeing it held no interest for them.

The sunset maple was gone, I noticed, but the willow was still there. There was a grill on the flagstone patio where before the outdoor furniture rested. It looked bare, with just the grill there. It needed something more, I thought. Hours and days went into hauling off the dirt and setting all that stone level, and it deserved something more than just a solitary grill resting on it.

Kim and I chatted, as best I could, while I tried to keep my attention held on her. I was in the car, Megan and Kylee with me, idling in the middle of the street. We were close enough for easy, conversational voice, but the distance between us seemed both vast and tangible. Today it felt just a bit uncomfortable there, being in the neighborhood.

I remembered how much I hated that willow, even in all its tenacity and grace. I thought it a weed tree. It was her favorite, her choice. I begrudgingly planted it and wished it dead, then later debated for two years over killing it and setting it ablaze. A fitting end for it, I thought.

I felt the curious urge to drive around the corner, see if the garage door was open, but then thought better of it. It would be picking at the wound, obvious and maybe hurtful to the girls. It would be selfish and silly and serve no good purpose. Not now.

How long ago was it? I was already struggling with remembering it in the context of time. Two years? Three years? How long didn’t matter.

One evening in particular burns in my memory even though I can’t put a date to it, or frame it with any other life events. I was sitting at my desk, paying bills and mapping out my finances. The girls were at their mother’s house for the evening. In the figures scrawled across the pages it was all too obvious. The promotion didn’t happen. The raise was way less than expected. The reserves were all gone and the 401k was tapped. I wasn’t asking family—even if they could help—to throw money down a rabbit hole that didn’t show any promise of a bottom. It was game over.

The certainty washed over me, a wave of disbelief, like so many before since she asked for the divorce. I’d come to recognize that each new step in the grinding and slow legal process would shake me from my fragile denial, remind me that it really was happening.

I got up from my desk and went to my room, and curled up on the bed. I looked at the walls around me and wondered how and when I would make them just that to me—walls. I had to forget the suede-textures and fall colors I carefully chose and painstakingly painted. I had to forget the river birch in the front lawn, prairie grasses clumped around it, that sunset maple and the willow (that damnable willow) and the hours invested in planting, pruning, and maintaining. The same for the Japanese maple in front of the windows; it would now become a Father’s Day gift I would not be able to take with me. The garage (man, how I wanted to see what he did—if anything—to that garage), painted, the floor coated with epoxy, the walls lined with cabinets, the workbench handmade, a lifetime of accumulated tools on the walls—all that would have to somehow become meaningless material.

I told myself things. I told myself I tried everything. I told myself it was a product of the divorce. I told myself I was like so many in the area, in the state, in the country. I told myself it was the economics of the times and it was unstoppable, that it was a larger-than-my-life freight train rolling over thousands. I tried to tell myself it didn’t define me, wouldn’t define us. I was grasping for something that would help me shake the feelings of shame and blame and guilt.

But none of it was working.

And I worried. I worried about the whispers, about what the girls might suffer at the hands of their friends if they chose to be either cruel or, at the very least, inconsiderate. I hoped with all hope we could hold out for the end of the school year before we had to move, could slip quietly into an apartment during the summer when everything would be less obvious. We had an exchange student with us at the time, and I didn’t want to face having to uproot her as well. She never wished for anything like this as a part of her American experience.

We did make it through that school year, and I was able to shift mental gears from feeling beaten to feeling empowered. The work and preparation that had to go into finding someplace else to live and making it a home took over, and the disconnect began. Anticipation replaced fear and uncertainty and dread and melancholy, as best it could. The garage sale helped me sell every little unnecessary remnant of what would soon be our former lives.

I took the girls with me looking at apartments, tried to give them some sort of investment in our new home. They seemed eager and excited. I couldn’t tell if they were just trying to help me (What had she told them?) or if they never really had much invested in wherever we lived. I remembered how many times we had moved for my career when we were all still a family and wondered if that afforded them some sort of detachment. I envied them for that, because this house was home to me, more than any others had been.

We haven’t gone back very often since; it’s only Kim with whom we keep in contact, and the invitations to visit have been few and far between. Whenever we have gone back, the girls and I would take different roads into the subdivision—avoiding the street we lived on—so as not to tempt the feelings I felt I could barely keep suppressed beneath the surface.

It wasn’t so much the house as it was the intangibles I missed, struggled to let go. There was a void where before there were feelings of community and belonging. When we first moved I used to call and see if there was a fire pit gathering planned during one of my weekends off, see if we could stop in, but somehow came to think that maybe I was inviting us back into something that made everyone a little uncomfortable. After a while I quit calling to see if they would call to invite us, and wasn’t surprised to never hear from anyone. Disappointed, but not surprised.

Those days, our house still sat empty, and everyone—including me, I think—still identified us with it. We’d built it, after all. But, now it’s sold, and the new owners have likely filled any and every void we may have left for the neighborhood, financially or emotionally. I imagine they’ve joined in those fire pit gatherings we so enjoyed, our absence now barely noticed, if at all.

It’s only days like today—when we are in the old neighborhood—that some of those old feelings resurface. I don’t want them to, but they do anyway. I wish those feelings away as best I can for myself, and hope nothing similar is being processed by the girls. I wish them all the protection their youth and naiveté can afford them.

Later that same day—in another cozy subdivision not far from our apartment—I drove Megan to her singing lesson. She’s been several times now, and I’ve never even gone in to meet her teacher. When I take her, I sit outside in my car on the quiet street that meanders past landscaped lawns, three car garages, and bicycles splayed out under basketball hoops in the drive, all the while feeling out of place, detached. This isn’t me, isn’t us. Not anymore.

© 2010 Cody Kilgore. All Rights Reserved worldwide under the Berne Convention. May not be copied or distributed without prior written permission.

"All That We See or Seem..."

I was digging around in some old boxes the other day, in search of something I just knew I had stashed and kept somewhere for safekeeping because I knew I would surely want to have it as a memento later. I was not having any luck finding this particular item, but I was finding all sorts of other memorabilia that I had long forgotten I'd kept. After a few minutes I gave up on what I thought would be a few minutes of searching, and let it turn into a much longer trip through memories.

Among the things I found which were most interesting was a list of the “100 Things I Want to Do In My Lifetime.” I can’t remember at what age I originally wrote this; it may have even been prompted by a speech I once heard by Lou Holtz, the then-venerated coach of Notre Dame football. But I had not heard that speech until I was in my thirties, and I am pretty sure I remember dreaming up this list in my early twenties sometime.

The list ran the gamut; it hit on everything from visiting that rare travel spot (“Tour an Aztec or Incan ruin,” or “See the pyramids”) to civic or charitable tasks (“Help with A Habitat house,” and “Fulfill a Dear Santa letter”), and even the less ambitious (“Handcraft a piece of furniture,” or “Have a recipe published”). There were the obvious ones that I have had all of my life, like getting a novel published, or doing a photographic safari in Africa, and some that I will now never get to do in my lifetime because they can no longer happen. Not unless Pink Floyd comes back together, or Dean Smith returns to coaching the Tarheels again.

Most of the list is very ambitious, although I did not think so at the time, I'm sure. I am betting that I believed it would all happen one day, with little doubt. I believed I just had to keep pushing toward the opportunities, keep hoping, keep my eyes open, and keep that hunger for seeing and learning new things. I think I've always had a hunger for learning (although my high school teachers, or Principle Klaasen may not have thought so), as well as a thirst for a certain level of adventure.

At one point in my life I let that hunger and thirst get dulled, blaming it on the responsibilities of being a father and a husband, and of providing a living for my family. I took it even further—too far—because it became more of an excuse for not living life to its fullest, and became an excuse for not even living life well. I let it make my life…well, a little mundane.

But I must have had that urge still living in me somewhere, because it tried to manifest itself in other pursuits. Instead of feeling the need to “Dive the Andrea Doria,” or “Drink a beer in Munich,” I set my sights on clawing my way up that next rung on the corporate ladder, buying a bigger and (supposedly) nicer house, or a bigger SUV. I became very good at all that.

Funny, but the one thing that was not on that list was finishing my degree in college, even though it would later become one of the most significant (for myself) accomplishments in my life. It was unfinished business, so I can’t imagine why I would have left it off the list, unless I wrote that list during my somewhat angry “I don’t need a sheepskin to be successful” days. That would date that list to somewhere in my early twenties, when I had run out of money for school, was rising fast in the ranks of the railroad contracting company I worked for, and traveling quite a bit. To know when I wrote it, it also helps to see the nature of what is on the list; there is nothing there that a father could reasonably run off and do with a family in tow.

The completion of my degree would later happen at a crucial time for me. I was forty, and my marriage was in trouble. In fairness, it was likely in trouble—at least in part—for one of the very reasons I was working so hard, to be a good provider. I was a certified workaholic. I thought that hard work would get you everything you needed, or all the rewards you hoped you would one day earn. I was always chasing that proverbial carrot that dangled just out of my grasp, sure that my equally proverbial ship would come in if I could just reach out and grab it. Every day was just one more lunge. But the time and effort I invested in that took away from what I should have been giving more energy and attention toward, and so that ship hit tough waters, and eventually rocks.

In the midst of all that, I began looking around for other ways to satisfy my need for learning and new experiences, and finishing my college degree was just the thing. I had a campus less than five minutes from my office, they offered a number of the classes I needed online, and I was alone in the town since Michelle and the girls had already moved back to Des Moines ahead of me. I thought it was a productive idea that would fill my time, my mind, my curiosity, and keep me out of trouble. And, that it did.

I was soon drifting further and further away from career ambition and enjoying more and more of the other things in life. A different perspective of Corporate America began to take shape in my mind, and I began to see myself as having been a little bit foolish in my addiction to work. I approached my role as a father differently and relished it more. I tried to be a different and better husband, thinking that I could still save our marriage.  It was a little too late for that.

Eyes opened, I moved on, with the desire for learning and experience now returning to replace the need to achieve career success and material possessions. I no longer needed those things, and instead wanted a life enriched in a different way. I wanted my dreams back.

Sometimes I worry if I am too much the relentless dreamer, and that I am sometimes fooling myself with what I think I can achieve, or am addicted to whatever it is that I do not have in my life and feel the need to pursue. It reminds me, when I think about it, of a gambler who is sure that their one big jackpot is surely going to happen for them, if they can just keep playing, just keep in the game. It’s probably a good thing I don’t gamble.

But still, I believe in myself, and I believe in the different types of pursuits that I have in my life now. I believe they are better than I’ve had during the “middle” of my adult life, and more in line with my true self. They may still be only dreams at this point, but I think we all have to harbor some sort of hopes for ourselves that are outside the scope of our everyday lives. Without them, a little of our spark dies, and we let more and more of our spirit and core erode, or just fade away. Can you imagine a life without any dreams, or something similar to a dream?  Something to which we look forward? I can’t. I could only imagine it to be like a slow death.

So I keep alive the thought that I am supposed to—no, destined to—do something more with my life. I’m not sure I could kill it even if I wanted to, anyway. It has always been a part of my life, further back than I can remember making that list of 100 things those many years ago.

When I was looking back over this list, I noticed that—for all the dreaming and wishing I did back then—I had a pretty fair amount of them I could now cross off the list. I know that they were things that were (then, when I made that list) far removed from my life and its possibilities. But, I have forty-two of them completed at this point, which puts me just about on track, given that I am only about to the halfway point of my lifetime right now.

I guess it pays to dream.

© 2010 Cody Kilgore. All Rights Reserved worldwide under the Berne Convention. May not be copied or distributed without prior written permission.