The two blog story posts I’ve posted in the last week:  Love doesn’t die just because she did and The Dimming of Hope have been writing exercises for me.  I have taken unique random scenes that have  given me second thoughts during my day, and created a story with a point out of the picture in my mind.  The former story was created during a rainstorm I drove through while passing a house.  The house had a small window at the top, and I wondered out loud if anyone was currently gazing at me through it.    The latter story I happened upon when I was pumping gas at a Mobil with my wife Carie.

Like M. Night Shyamalan, I placed myself in parts of the story for no apparent reason.

He grabbed his hard hat, keys, and what was left of his wallet, and headed out the door.  George Wikley emanated a complete sense of frustration at what was happening at his home this morning.  George woke up having to work like any other Saturday, and the idea of fighting with his wife AND teenage son wasn’t first on his “to do” list.

Let’s see, he thought to himself slamming the door of his 1950′s cape style house in Paxton, Massachusetts, They’re mad because I was too loud.  They’re mad because there was no food in the house for breakfast.  Gee, I wonder if there is anything else we can blame me for? I’m glad I wasn’t around for Pearl Harbor.

The problems George faced paled in light of hunger, AIDS, and famine in Africa, or war in several other parts of the world, or even financial difficulties that so many fought against right there in suburban U.S.A. because of layoffs and the economic breakdown.  No his problems stemmed from relationships.  He hated his wife, and he hated his son.

No, not really hated…but almost.

Communication at this point in the Wikley household consisted of asking George for money, asking George for more money, or swearing at George because he announced after the question (or sometimes before) that he had no money.  And so on a daily basis George yelled, screamed, and swore back, leaving him a zombie each time he walked out the door of his own house.

Thankfully this Saturday was sunny and cool, not really a normal late June day even in Massachusetts.  The last several weeks brought little but rain, rain, and more rain to his world, so if nothing else, today was a brief respite in the sky.  Thank you weatherman, he smiled as he opened the door of his Verizon truck the supervisor postion he held at the popular phone company allowed him to drive home.

After a few minutes of driving as the sun beat down on his face, the newness of the beautiful day wore off, and the clouds of his heart came flooding back to him, remembering the earlier fight with his family.  He transformed into a zombie again.  Realizing he needed gas before he drove in to get his orders for the day, he turned left instead of his usual right onto West Mountain St, then an immediate right onto W. Boylston St.

The Mobil gas station was the closest, so he drove in, got out of his truck, and started pumping gas.  Today he didn’t care what the environmentalists thought about the company.  It was the closest, and he would almost be late.  Plus his son was a newbie environmentalist, thanks to the local  “treehugger” club at the Wachusett School he attended.  He joked to himself, He always had the money sucking vampire traits of my wife, and the desire to change the world like me.  Sick combination.

Through the intense thinking going on in his mind today, he neglected to realize the pump kept stopping and he kept squeezing, causing the gas to eventually flow out onto his brown work boots.  That’s okay.  Brawn (his best friend at work) smells like gas every day at work. He jumped into his truck, turned the key, and began the short half a mile drive to work from this station.  He drove around the back of the gas station, and towards the exit deep in thought.

As he drove past the pump on the other side of the station, a women got out of the passenger side of a white GMC Sierra 1500, and leaned her arms on the truck bed, stretching her legs out a few feet into his driving path.  Besides the woman was blond, small, and beautiful, he had to get to work.  George always froze when he talked to beautiful women, so he decided instead to beep her out of the way.  Clearly her husband or boyfriend or whoever he was that was pumping the gas on the other side of the truck did not like the beeping of his woman from 4 feet away, because he moved around the front of the white truck and had a few words to say for George and his “stupid Verizon truck.”  But those were the only intelligible words he could understand as he drove out of the parking lot, and back the way he came.  So I guess I won’t tell that dumb idiot that he’s putting regular gas into a diesel engine.

George remembered when he used to care about people.  What they thought and who they were.  He remembered having a desire to help people and to do something important with his life, because as his priest used to say, “More bliss can be got by serving others than merely serving oneself.”  Yeah well, I wish I would have kept going to church and dragged my wife and kid along too.

George finally arrived at work thinking about what he used to be like and what he used to want. He parked next to Brawn as he always did, and the two walked in together as they always did.

“How ya doin bron (as George pronounced his best friends nickname)?”
“Oh, I’m great for a fat old man George!” Brawn responded.  But I’m about tired of  my wife and daughter.  You wanna trade families?

On Sunday Fellowship Church in Holden celebrated my 10 years of being a pastor in their organization.  It was such a blast, and I felt so humbled to be able to work on a regular basis with people as wonderful as the people here in this church.  It’s been a crazy ten years, I have a lot more gray hair, but I love it today just as much and more as I loved it my first week here on May 30, 1999.

I began preaching on Sunday morning when Steve, our executive pastor interrupted me, and said that the team was hijacking the service and we had a new guest speaker, and as he said this, an SUV pulled up from the parking lot (it was an outdoor service) and in it was my dad, my sister, and her fiance rolling in.

For the next hour, people read letters and my dad preached and it was just an amazing service!  So I wanted to say thank you to the people of Fellowship Church over the last 10 years for being so incredible, for loving Carie and I, and for making it so wonderful and easy for me to love what I do.

Thank you for “making my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and purpose.

This house - the inspiration for this story

The 83 year old man looked out of his upstairs apartment window wishing it would stop raining.  It seemed like that’s all it ever did anymore, and he couldn’t go out when it rained like this.  His cane probably wouldn’t hold up, and he would slip, or fall.  Either way, it wasn’t a satisfying image rolling around in his head.  Today he would be content to peek out at sheets of rain coming down in waves on the roof of the silver Nissan driving below his Brooks-E. Mountain St corner window view.

Days like this tended to bring back memories of his wife of 58 years.  Equal in age and life wisdom, she quadrupled him in energy and “spunkness” – the description the kids had given her when they were younger – until she left him for another life.  One he  never believed or hoped in, until that day.  The day of the car and the lights…and the rain.
“Why the hell did she have to drive all the time?” He thought to himself, feeling the new found flushness of his face.
“Because I still can,” he could almost hear her saying back to him, as smug as she always was, and as cute as she always would have been.  A tear emerged from the inside of his right eye.

Just as he was getting lost in his thoughts, that boy came around the corner again, the one that lived in the house next door, but was constantly walking over toward his house, and moving towards his entrance.  He knocked at the window, waving the boy away.  This was not a loving gesture by any means from his point of view, but the boy waved back, as if to say, “I don’t really care if you’re being mean and waving me away, I’m still gonna hang out here where you can’t come down and see me anyway.”

“Dumb kid” he muttered to himself, certain that he was quite clear as to what he wanted from the boy.  And even more clear that this generation of kids would ruin the world as he knew it.

It wasn’t like it used to be, for him or the world.  The world used to be so simple, and he used to be so loved.  She loved him.  He didn’t know why, but she did.  She always did.  Through their young adult life and through his career,  the kids and the bills – she loved him through all that.  And now, she was gone.  Sure the kids were still there, and their kids and even some of their kids, but about 3 months afer she left (he preferred to use this term), he realized their visits had been about her and not him.  Love seemed to be no more.

Despite the bumping and movement he heard in his hallway, he was tired and wanted to take a nap.  Tomorrow the senior agency would come and pick him up for his weekly appointment to “some kid doctor who couldn’t tell a cold from a cat” he would lavishly share with anyone who would listen in the waiting room.  He needed his rest.  “Damn noises in my hallway,” he spouted off, walking slowly away from the noise and towards his bedroom, where he hoped not to wake up.

In about two hours of napping, he dreamed.  Dreaming always takes so much out of you, and he was never a fan, but this time it was no use.  He couldn’t stop from dreaming.  He dreamed he was at a party.  The party must have been at his only daughter’s house.  She was so beautiful, though he never told her so, preferring to leave the “mushy” stuff to his wife.  It seemed that the party centered around him – they were celebrating him.  Whether it was his birthday or anniversary, he could not tell.  But he did see the sign that said his name, and for once his family all centered around him, smiling and laughing about his life.  He decided that he would take the opportunity during a quick lull to ask them all a question.  After all, they were all there, and he wanted to know.
“Why did you stop visiting me when she died?” He asked his room full of family members and friends.  Immediately their smiles turned to scowls, and they turned away from him, one by one.  Unsurprisingly, he opened his eyes in a cold sweat, and the daytime rain had given itself over to a nighttime drizzle.  He took a sip of the water sitting at the side of his bed.

“Finally, the son decides to show its face,” the 83 year old man thought, smirking to himself as he peered out the same corner window he gazed at .
“What?” the man watching TV in the other room asked, deafened by the volume of old reruns of Miami Vice blaring from the speakers.
He ignored his son’s question, only to ask one in return.
“Why are you here again?”
Begrudgingly, the man stood from his father’s favorite seat and said, “I told you dad, I am going to take you to the doctors office today.”  The younger man shut off the television and asked his dad if he was ready to go.
“Don’t rush me, I’m putting on my coat.”  The man reacted a bit more harshly than he should have, the son thought, and responded, “You okay dad?”
“I’m fine,” came the predictable response, with an unpredictable tag along.  “I just don’t understand why you people don’t love me.  No one loves me…like  she did.”  The last 3 words trailed off, but the meaning was clear.

Silence in the room for the next 5 minutes as the man readied himself for the doctor.  The son eventually broke the silence.

“Dad, who did you have fix your apartment door and paint the hallway?”
“No one.” The dad responded, looking at his son like he was an alien.
“Someone did it.  And did a great job too.  I asked your idiot landlord how much that was going to set you back, and he said he didn’t do it, and you didn’t ask.”

“Nope. I did not ask.  And if I did, he would have waited until I got in a damn car accident to do it.”  The words stung himself  more he thought they would.
“Well, someone must love you, because the walls didn’t paint themselves and the door didn’t fix itself.”

His son opened the apartment door for him, walked him slowly across the freshly painted hallway, and towards the newly-fixed front entrance, as a beam of sunlight shone through it’s window and splashed on the old man’s face.