You Can't Fix Stupid

Ok…here’s the difference between me and this world.

This morning, I read the story of Markisha Jones and Gene Edwards of Chicago who were arrested for criminal child neglect. Their twin girls, Mia and Mya were celebrating their first birthday in a shared crib in the basement of a rundown apartment while Mom and Dad were upstairs playing video games. Apparently the alleged parents were quite fond of video games, as they had been so transfixed they had forgotten to feed their children. Father Gene finally noticed that his girls were starting to look “a little skinny” so he called 911, whereupon he and his gaming girlfriend were promptly jailed as Mya passed away on the dining room table. The unmarried couple was charged with involuntary manslaughter and felony child endangerment. Mia has been placed in protective care.

Our world will look at this story and immediately began constructing excuses. Like vegetables flying around inside of a blender, the facts in this case will be obscured beyond recognition by any number of tangential issues having nothing to do with anything as follows:

1. Jesse Jackson will show up soon bellyaching about the fact that the couple’s mug shots were published along with this story in a racist attempt to stigmatize the African American community.
2. A spokeswoman from Mothers Against Video Games will assail the manufacturers of whatever game they were playing while the kids starved in the basement, proclaiming this tragedy as undeniable proof that video games contribute to poor parenting.
3. Mayor Rahm Emanuel will take the opportunity to call for more spending on poverty programs.
4. President Obama will point out the fact that if he neglected to feed his girls for weeks while playing video games, they would look an awful lot like Mia and Mya.
5. Somebody from Planned Parenthood will point out how this whole sorry tale could have been avoided if only Markisha had had an abortion.
6. Somebody from Focus on the Family will decry the fact that Gene and Markisha were, in fact, unmarried and living in sin.

Meanwhile, we have a dead one year old child.

This is not a case of “babies having babies.” When the twins were born, their mother was 18, their father 21. Considering the fact that fifty years ago, this couple might have been on their second or third child at that age makes that argument sound ridiculous. My mother had two kids by the time she was 19 and four by the time she turned 27. Neither is this a tragic case of lack of adequate poverty programs. This couple qualified for free formula along with a plethora of other city, state and government handouts that could have provided all of the nutrition required for two growing babies. This is also manifestly not about the race of the parents. This couple could just as easily been Bubba and Jolene from Chicken Scratch, Kentucky. The only real, true culprits here are these two moronic pieces of pond scum slouched back on their sofa trying to get to the next level of Mario Kart while two innocent children perished from neglect in a cold clammy basement warmed only by a space heater. I’ll let all of the poverty pimps and the root cause crowd figure out how to blame this on the Koch brothers. I’ll let the politicians try to score cheap political points by spinning this tragedy into a fund-raising letter. While they are doing all of that, I’ll tell you what I would do if I were King. I would arrange to have Markisha and Gene hung by the neck until they were dead, or at the very least spend the rest of their pathetic existence behind bars. Then I would cut through all the red tape so that Mia is given to a family of responsible, loving parents who give a damn about children.

Sometimes, you just can’t fix stupid.

I Got Married Thirty Years Ago Today

Thirty years ago today I was standing in the clammy, molded basement of Winn’s Baptist Church with my best friend, Al Thomason, listening to organ music, and feeling my heart beating in my chest. For a second I completely forgot what my cue was supposed to be, adding panic to nausea. Then my Dad said, “Ok, that’s us.” It was finally comforting to be the son of a minister. Al and I followed him up the stairs, down a little hallway and into the blinding light of what seemed like a thousand faces. Every living soul who I had ever known was there, dressed to kill, grinning serenely at me as I followed Dad to the spot on the red carpet marked with a masking tape X.

I looked into the crowd, seeing everything and seeing nothing. Suddenly, the piano and organ sounded triumphant and everyone rose to their feet. Then, I saw her at the end of the aisle holding on to her father’s arm. For a brief moment I considered the possibility that I might either cry or flee… neither a consummation devoutly to be wished. I quickly recovered when she began to walk slowly down the aisle. The closer she got to me the calmer I felt.

I had spent the morning playing full court basketball with the assorted knuckleheads who comprised the male contingent of the wedding party, enduring a cascade of slurs attacking my manhood, judgment and intelligence, all informing me that my life was about to be over with the arrival of the old ball and chain. This is the way guys deal with sober, life altering events, with trash talk. When I made the mistake of informing them that I had arranged to have a dozen roses delivered to her house an hour ago, the news was greeted with howls of derision…”Awww, ain’t he just the most romantic guy in the world?? Let’s all go have a wine cooler and watch The Way We Were!” Now these very same knuckleheads were standing all over the platform in tuxedos, jealous that I was the one marrying the beautiful blond walking down the aisle.

The next thing I know, I hear my brother at the piano singing a song that I had written for the occasion. I hardly recognized my own composition, so mesmerized was I by this vision standing next to me in front of God and man. In that moment, before children, before cars and houses, before success and failure, before dogs and cats, there was just the two of us listening to a poorly written but heartfelt love song. For the first time in nearly a month, I relaxed.

The whole thing would be over with in twenty five minutes. I remember little of what happened after that song. There were vows and the lighting of candles and at the very end we stood there for what seemed like forever waiting for Roger Harris to finish singing the Lord’s Prayer. Then it was over. I had married the most beautiful woman in the world and the earth was still spinning round. Despite the predictions of most of my groomsmen, hell had not frozen over.

Of course, getting together is a lot easier than staying together, but thirty years later, here we are. The kids are grown. She’s still beautiful, and I’m still here.

The very best decision I have ever made.

New Jersey

This morning I make what I hope will be my very last trip that features New Jersey as the destination. I mean, I don’t mind passing through the Garden State on my way to Maine, but going for a long weekend in New Jersey isn’t the sort of thing you brag about around the office. This will be the sixth or seventh such trip I’ve made since my son enrolled in grad school up there two years ago and let me tell you, it’s been an education.

For example, I’ve learned to fill up with gas in Delaware or Maryland before entering NJ, because once you cross the Soprano’s state line you have to pay a dollar more per gallon. Why? Well, it seems that a law passed in 1920 that restricted consumers from pumping their own gas is still on the books. Therefore, every gas station in the entire state is full service only and somebody has to pay for that attendant. I’m told that the pumpers have their own union, to protect them from any potential changes in the law that might eliminate their jobs. Of course that may be one of those urban legends, but when you observe how slow these guys move and discover just how little the word “full” means in “full service”, you have no trouble at all believing that these guys are union men.

Then there are the famous traffic laws that plague this state. One day years ago in Trenton, a committee of New Jersey’s finest public servants went out and tied on a 5 martini lunch. Then they all stumbled back to their back room in the capital building and devised the traffic plan from the pits of hell whereby somebody slurred, “Heyyyy, I gots an idea…Why don’t we make it illegal for anyone in New Jersey to make a left hand turn?!” This made perfect sense only to drunk legislators; nevertheless it became the law of the land.

So, when I’m driving down number one highway just outside of Princeton and I see my hotel on the other side of the highway, I can’t make a left at the light. No, I have to continue driving, oh I don’t know, another ten miles or so until I come upon a “loop road.” This is a creation born of the aforementioned 5 martini lunch whereby someone wanting to turn left must first turn right, negotiate a sweeping loop around to a stop sign, then merge onto another road that takes you back to number one highway where you sit for five minutes at a red light. Only after all of these steps can you then turn back onto your original road going in the opposite direction. This scheme is administered by the New Jersey Traffic Commission, a bureau under the auspices of the New Jersey Transportation Administration and Laundromat. This also explains why New Jersey’s Governor’s biggest scandal involved not kickbacks or sexual sin but…traffic.

Incidentally, the reason for this trip is actually a glorious thing. My son is graduating from Westminster Choir College with a Masters Degree in composition. I couldn’t be more proud of his talent and hard work. I also couldn’t be happier that he’s soon moving to Nashville.

Hard Questions

My gut instinct tells me that this blog is no place to hash out great theological questions, but spend enough time watching your father die, and theological questions become unavoidable. I suppose I’m tired of debating with myself, tired of questions that have no answers. For the past three and a half years this blog has been my own personal therapist, and much cheaper than going to a real one, so I will open up this topic to you in the hope that one of you will be able to provide a workable answer.

I have noticed, especially on Facebook, that whenever a favorable wind blows through someone’s life, whenever difficult circumstances suddenly work out for the best, or whenever some serendipitous event or fortuitous windfall arrives, no matter how trivial, Christian people are quick to give God the credit, usually with the horribly tedious formulation, it’s a God thing. However, when God is silent in the face of great unspeakable tragedy, when desperate prayers go unanswered, when the imponderables of life arrive on the stage, God is given a pass. We are told that it isn’t in God’s timing, or that God is trying to teach some valuable lesson to someone, somewhere, or what we are asking him to do isn’t in his will.

Over the past six months as I have watched the sad deterioration of my Dad’s health, I have searched for answers to the question, “why?” For what purpose does Dad endure such a pointless and debilitating ordeal? For what reason is this part of God’s plan? I pray every night for God to allow Dad to be reunited with my Mother. I pray that God will take him home, peacefully in his sleep. But each day brings fresh suffering. I am forced to the conclusion that God’s silence in this matter is either some form of benign neglect, or that my Father’s suffering pleases him in some way, a possibility that disturbs me greatly.

While I am aware that God is under no obligation to answer every prayer that tumbles out of my imperfect heart, after all God isn’t some cosmic vending machine. But with each passing day as I see what Dad’s life has become, I sink further into despair and anger, and my feelings about God become more and more ambivalent.

Maybe we have lapsed into too modern a conception of who God is, proscribing ever more loving and compassionate characteristics to him than are justified by the biblical record. You want to know what’s a God thing? How about judgment and wrath? And from what I have observed over that last six months maybe pain and humiliation are God thing’s too.

So, there you have it. It’s the classic problem of pain I guess. Why do bad things happen to good people? If the purpose of Dad’s suffering is to teach someone a lesson, then whoever you are and wherever you are, please learn it already. We’re dying here. 

Hog Heaven

I have made a discovery that has convinced me of something I have always known instinctively, that capitalism is the single greatest engine of economic dynamism ever conceived by the mind of man. Yes, I know, like every economic system it has its weaknesses, income inequality, the boom and bust cycle etc… But while communism and other top-down government run economies are struggling to provide products as basic as toilet tissue to their citizens, the great capitalistic, market economy of the United States of America has brought the most indescribably awesome thing ever…Bacon-of-the-Month Clubs!

As is often the case at large family gatherings in the Dunnevant house, eventually, the subject of bacon comes up. Yesterday’s Mother’s Day picnic was no exception. Pam had forgotten to sprinkle the all natural bacon bits on top of the dish of baked beans when it came out of the oven, to her great embarrassment. Somebody made a crack about how if you don’t put the bacon on the beans, what’s the point? From there we were off to the races. Somebody else brought up the fact that Father’s Day was right around the corner, and wouldn’t it be cool if you could give your Dad the gift of bacon delivered directly to his door every month. “Only if it included sausage too,” somebody else added.

Well, if the mind of man can conceive of a thing, capitalism gives him the freedom and tools to bring it to life. A quick Google search revealed to me that there are no less than 25 bacon-of-the-month clubs in the United States, all competing for my business. All of them claim to produce the highest quality bacon on the planet. For instance, I leaned that grocery stores add water to their bacon to increase the weight so they can charge more, (the bastards!!) and that artisan bacon has no added water which means that it doesn’t pop and spray you with hot grease when you cook it. One club even claimed that you could cook their bacon while naked, a mental image that it might take weeks to get out of my head. Another club claimed celebrity endorsements from Mario Batali and Bobby Flay. Each club promised to deliver directly to my door in refrigerated packaging the finest artisan bacon made from only the finest ingredients, (pigs…they’re called…PIGS), smoked to perfection, thick and meaty to satisfy even the most discriminating palate. Here a quibble…bacon lovers don’t have palates, although we have been known to discriminate from time to time.

Reading through some of the descriptions and flavors was enough to make me wonder how in the world I was going to be able to wait until Father’s Day! But then, as is often the case with capitalism, there’s a catch, in this case, the price. Membership in this most exclusive club wasn’t going to be cheap. For a premium delivery of 2 pounds of the best bacon in the world, I would have to fork over $50 per month. That’s 25 bucks a pound for you Virginia Tech grads, and that’s not chump change. Of course if you sign up for an entire year’s worth instead of a sample three month membership, the price drops to $550 per year, which is like getting two pounds free! Still, that’s quite a bacon budget.

But the very thought of two pounds of bacon, the candy of meat, being delivered to my door every month, splatter-free, extra-thick slabs in flavors like cajun, honey BBQ, and vanilla bourbon seems too awesome to resist.

‘Merica!!!

The Great Oak Tree Pollen String Plague of '14

Ok, I’ve lived in Richmond for 53 of my 56 years, and at my current address for the past 15 years, and I have never seen as much of this stuff falling from the sky as I have over the last two weeks. Oak pollen strings, they are called, and yesterday I gathered up two trashcans full out of my back yard. The entire time I had to wear this dorky face mask that made me look like some HazMat guy cleaning up toxic waste, which actually is not far from the truth. But seriously, what’s the deal with this stuff?

Despite yesterday’s Herculean efforts at removal, this morning my deck is covered again. With every hint of a breeze comes a flurry of new arrivals. Some of them get tangled up in spider webs and just hang there, twisting in mid-air, taunting me. So, I will once again do battle with this latest plague on suburbia. I will fight with a leaf blower, a rake and my trusty face mask. But as bad as they are in my back yard, you should see the guy down the street. I think he’s from New Jersey or somewhere up north and isn’t accustomed to these charming seasonal plagues of the south. He’s trying to ignore them. As a result, the curb outside of his house is home to several oak tree pollen string tumbleweeds, all the size of bushel baskets. This is what they do apparently if left unattended. I wonder what this guy thinks will happen next? Will they eventually become car-sized, break free from the curb and gobble up some kid playing in the street? Will the oak tree pollen string fairy come magically in the night and take them all away?? Come on dude, this is Short Pump, not Newark.

Remembering My Crazy Mother

Tomorrow is Mother’s Day, the second such observance since my Mom passed away. This year the day does not bring with it as much sadness and loss. Maybe it’s just the passing of time, but this year when I think of Mom I’m remembering funny stuff. The woman was hysterical.

It was very easy to get my Mom riled up about things. There were topics you learned to avoid around her, words better left unsaid if you knew what was good for you. But I was mischievous enough to intentionally provoke her every now and then just to watch her “get up in the pictures.”

Me: Oh great. I see from the church bulletin that we’ll have to endure another boring Lottie Moon speaker Sunday.

Me: Jeeze, that Billy Graham sure is a stiff!

Me: I don’t know about you, but I sure am getting tired of singing the same old hymns every Sunday.

Either of these three conversation starters would guarantee an unhinged 15 minute speech that would begin with Mom being so flustered that she would forget which of her children she was actually talking to. It sounded something like this:

Mom: Now you listen to me Donnie..eh, er, Linda, I mean…er, Paula,  phooey!!! Douglas!

My Mother was a woman of high passions and could argue with a fence post about virtually anything. She would sprinkle her speeches with veiled physical threats which to people who didn’t know her might lead them to believe that she was some sort of violent thug. I’m glad that no social worker ever overheard her say stuff like this:

Mom: Boy, stop that crying or I’ll take this rolling pin to you and give you something to cry about!

Mom: If those John Brown people over at Safeway keep raising the price of milk, I’m gonna go over there and wipe the floor up with them!

Mom: Donnie, if you put your hand in that bowl of strawberries one more time before dinner, you’re gonna draw back a nub!

Of course, she never made good on any of her threats. Or maybe she did. There is the curious case of my third grade teacher, Mrs. Carbunckle (not her real name…I’m taking no chances here). It was my first year in the New Orleans public school system, and Mrs. C wasn’t enamored with my inability to stay in my seat, neither was she fond of my penchant for paper airplane construction. Anyway, one day I got home from school with very red ears and started complaining to Mom about how horrible Mrs. Carbunckle was and how she was constantly boxing my ears for no reason! I immediately endured a 15 minute tirade from my Mother which sounded something like this:

Mom: Let me tell you something, Mrs. Carbunckle is a saint to have to not only put up with you all day but another 25 hellions just as bad as you! She is your teacher, and what she says goes, and if she had to box your ears today it’s because you deserved it!! You only have one job in that classroom and that is to sit still, shut up and do what you’re told.

Me: That’s more than one job Mom. That’s like three jobs.

Mom: Don’t back talk me!

To my Mother, teachers were some sort of cross between Joan of Ark and the Virgin Mary. They were always right, and I was always wrong. Still, I found it odd that within a week of the above conversation, Mrs. Carbunckle was transformed into the most docile, gentle, smiling, solicitous teacher in the history of education. I learned 35 years later that Mom had, unbeknownst to me, paid her a visit that included the admonition that if Mrs. Carbunckle ever laid a hand on me again that Mom would come over there and mop up the classroom floor with her. Apparently, Mrs. C believed her.

So, tomorrow I will miss my Mother, but no more grief, just some great memories.