Merry Christmas

For those who grew up in Dallas but no longer have access to the Dallas Morning News, here is your annual Paul Crume fix. For others, who might not have ever read this I offer it to you as my present to you (and give myself the week off, to boot.)

This essay, first published by the Dallas Morning News on Christmas morning 1967, is a favorite of Dallas newspaper readers and the paper continues to re-print it each year. Some may remember when your morning paper was on your front porch every morning. Nowadays we’re lucky to get it in the vicinity of the front sidewalk somewhere near the property line. This probably explains the rise in sales of bathrobes. Dallasites remember the late Paul Crume as one of the best newspaper column writers until he retired in 1975.

On This Day, Angels Linger Close at Hand

By Paul Crume

A man wrote me not long ago and asked me what I thought of the theory of angels. I immediately told him that I am highly in favor of angels. As a matter of fact, I am scared to death of them.

Any adult human being with half sense, and some with more, knows that there are angels. If he has ever spent any period in loneliness, when the senses are forced in upon themselves, he has felt the wind from their beating wings and been overwhelmed with the sudden realization of the endless and gigantic dark that exists outside the little candle flame of human knowledge. He has prayed, not in the sense that he asked for something, but that he yielded himself.

Angels live daily at our very elbows, and so do demons, and most men at one time or another in their lives have yielded themselves to both and have lived to rejoice and rue their impulses. But the man who has once felt the beat of an angel's wing finds it easy to rejoice at the universe and at his fellow man. It does not happen to any man often, and too many of us dismiss it when it happens. I remember a time in my final days in college when the chinaberry trees were abloom and the air was sweet with spring blossoms and I stood still on the street, suddenly struck with the feeling of something that was an enormous promise and yet was no tangible promise at all.

And there was another night in a small boat when the moon was full and the distant headlands were dark but beautiful and we were lonely. The pull of a nameless emotion was so strong that it filled the atmosphere. The small boy within me cried. Psychiatrists will say that the angel in all this was really within me, not outside, but it makes no difference. There are angels inside us and angels outside, and the one inside is usually the quickest choked.
Francis Thompson said it better. He was a late 19th-century English poet who would put the current crop of hippies to shame. He was on pot all his life. His pad was always mean and was sometimes a park bench. He was a mental case and tubercular besides. He carried a fishing creel into which he dropped the poetry that was later to become immortal.

"The angels keep their ancient places," wrote Francis Thompson in protest. "Turn but a stone, and start a wing." He was lonely enough to be the constant associate of angels. There is an angel close to you this day. Merry Christmas, and I wish you well.

Namaste Christmas, Ya'll

Things are starting to get fun around here. I moved from Gautier to Pearlington Tuesday. It was the perfect time to move; most of the camps are empty the week before Christmas while volunteers stay home to finish their holiday shopping and attend all those office parties where everyone gets to see their boss drunk. We’ll get a new batch of volunteers the day after Christmas when everyone sobers up. I leave for home myself on Thursday so Tuesday was really about the only day I could make the move. I found out that I have already “fluffed out” a bit with material goods. It took both a pickup and my car to moved all my stuff. I’m already wondering how I’ll ever get it all home when I leave for good in April. But I have time enough to worry about that later. Today was a day to enjoy being back in my favorite PDA camp.

My first surprise was to find that there’s no TV in this trailer. The other one came equipped with a TV and I had gotten used to it. It might be an interesting experiment to live without one. The way the other managers talk, I may not even have time to watch it, anyway. There will also be a couple of other adjustments-- this trailer has a working shower which I didn’t have in the last one but it does not—yes, not, have a working toilet. I could give you a three paragraph explanation of this but it would be boring so I’ll skip it except to say that there is a chance I could have an indoor toilet sometime in the next three months. The good news is that I’m only about ten feet from the porta- potties. And they are the cleanest and best smelling potties in all of Mississippi. Really. That’s not a joke, it’s a fact. I’ve become something of a porta-potty connoisseur.

After I got settled in, I went looking for something to do. I realized that there are about three or four houses in this town that I could visit unannounced and be received with an outpouring of love, not so much for what a great gal I am or anything I’ve done but because the folks here in this town are just so darned welcoming.

My first stop was to check on Dallas. I knew she had taken on a project to get Christmas toys for the kids staying in foster homes. I’m a little dim on the details but I did remember somebody gave her a bunch of money to shop for over a hundred kids. So I wasn’t at all surprised to see her office in the back of her house absolutely packed with toys. She had it all down on an excel spreadsheet with the kid’s information and toys and all that stuff. Then she had what amounted to a miniature store right there in her house. All the footballs were in one section, dolls in another, CDs in another corner. I had come because I knew she would probably be at this stage about now and there had been word of a “wrapping party.” But I saw clearly that this was beyond wrapping, it was sorting and bagging. We visited for a while and I noticed wheels going around in her head as she described her system. When I suggested I might be more use to her by just getting out of her hair to let her concentrate, for once, Dallas didn’t argue with me. Santa didn’t need any distractions tonight.

So I decided to go into Waveland to shop a little. This is the town with the closest Wal-Mart. “Close” meaning about a 40 minute drive down roads with no lights and nothing much but trees. Wal-Mart always causes me to zone out after about 15 minutes and I think I was in the store a good 45. So I emerged slightly zombie-like. But, as I came out the store in a trance and walked past the Salvation Army bell-ringer something made me stop dead in my tracks.

Now you need to know something about me: I have a remarkable deficiency in remembering faces. Words and names I’m OK with but remembering faces is one of my greatest failings. I also have trouble with directions. But I can say with some pride that there is a perfectly good reason for this. I have “poor design memory.” I think I told you this already a couple of months ago. Some people have bad hearing. I have poor “design memory.”

I tell you this so you will be properly impressed when I say that I stopped in my tracks right there as I was leaving Wal-Mart in Waveland, Mississippi and realized I knew this lady. Tossing manners aside, I bluntly asked the bell-ringer what her name was. I knew that I knew her but needed the confirmation. It was Miss Dorothy, the only bleached blonde black lady I’ve ever met. And here’s what makes my spotting her so magnificent: she had on a Santa hat and I couldn’t even see her hair. It was Miss Dorothy’s face I remembered. Her butter-soft, weathered and gentle face. I was so glad to see her I probably startled her. Obviously, she didn’t remember me. I was only one of hundreds of people to go through her kitchen at the Missionary Baptist Church for lunch while we worked on the houses in Pearlington. But she was the lady who fed me. She was high on my list of memories, eating being pretty far at the top for me. In fact, it is Miss Dorothy who is responsible for one of the best lines in any recipe I’ve ever heard. When I asked her how she made her cornbread she started out, “Well, first you take a pound of butter……..” Does that explain why I love her cooking?

We talked a bit and I had to apologize for missing her gumbo when I was here in April. I left early to go home that Friday. Usually Friday was catfish day but that week she made gumbo. And, man, oh man, how I hated to miss it. She started cooking it at 4am. She caught me up with why she wasn’t in the kitchen a couple of months ago when we were there. She was in a car accident and messed up the ligaments in her right hand. She showed me the bandage from the surgery she recently had. She gets the stitches out next week. All the while we had this conversation she interspersed her news with a rabid ringing of the bell and a hearty “Merry Christmas!” to anyone who walked by. You would have thought she was getting a commission from the Salvation Army or that Jesus Himself had asked her to ring the bell. I haven’t seen as joyful a bell-ringer in a long time, maybe ever.

It was probably one of the best feelings I’ve had this Christmas. I glowed during the whole drive back to Pearlington. It was a “Namaste Moment.” The Spirit in me had greeted the Spirit in her. The Christ who lives in me had recognized the Christ who lives in her. It wasn't Miss Dorothy's face I remembered; it was her soul.

Here’s wishing you a Namaste Christmas.

Giving

This is the Season of Giving. Let me tell you something about Giving. I have seen Giving and I know what it looks like.

First, I’ll tell you what it’s not. Giving is not downloading a list on an excel spreadsheet your kids emailed that not only list every thing they want but includes the price and prioritizes the wish list in order of how much they want stuff. This isn’t giving; this is a business transaction. By the same token, it’s not the fruitcake you have mailed on your behalf every year to a relative who always sends you a fruit basket in return. This is more of a greeting than business transaction. But neither is really giving.

I’ve seen giving and I know what it looks like.

Giving is the people who saw Hurricane Katrina on TV and came to help. The first responders gave of themselves. They were people who knew to bring not just a chainsaw but a tent and a case of bleach. The Presbyterian Church has had volunteers in the Gulf Coast from almost the day after the storm. I met the guy who helped draw up the plans for our disaster response, John Robinson. He said he took a phone call from an early responder and told him he could send some guys with chainsaws. The guy on the Gulf said, “No, you don’t understand-- when they come they’re going to have to bring everything." They would have to bring their own tent, generator, food and water. Thus was born the concept of the volunteer villages that provided a complete city for volunteers.

Those early and brave ones slept in pup tents on the ground. They disinfected everything with bleach to combat mold and germs. They ran generators when they had gas for them. They fought mosquitoes, gnats, mold and bureaucracy. Later, they got trailers, pick-up trucks and cell phones. This meant that they were able to sleep inside on a mattress but by that time they spent so much time hauling plywood and drywall their muscles didn’t notice the small comforts.

Most of them couldn’t say why they came except that they felt a call. They cried with the people who had no homes, then, at night back in their trailers, they cried that they couldn’t do more. They called home to tell their churches to send help. They called home to explain to their families what it was like and why they were gone

What they were giving wasn’t something you could wrap in red paper and put under a tree. They gave themselves.

Rich Cozzone was one of the early ones. I met him on my first visit to Louisiana six months after the storm when they were still building volunteer villages. He served as a village manager then, and when I was in Mississippi in October this year I saw him again. By this time he was coordinator of all the PDA villages in the Gulf Coast. He was typical of many of the volunteers I’ve met who went home to his family periodically but kept getting the call and came back to give again.

All the village managers got an email Friday morning about 8am. The message said everyone needed to come to PDA headquarters in Gulfport to discuss something serious. We couldn’t figure what the meeting was about since we had all been together at a meeting only the day before. No one had ever gotten an email like that so we all dropped everything and piled in our trucks and drove from all along the coast to gather.

That’s when we got the news that Rich Cozzone had been killed in a car accident. He had given everything.

The details are sketchy. We know Rich left friends after dinner at 7:30. His car was discovered after midnight in the trees by the road. The only consolation we’ve had is that he died instantly and never felt a thing. As the PDA staff sifted through theories we remembered it was foggy that night. I think he just missed a curve and hit the trees at full speed. We are left with questions that have no answers in this lifetime.

The staff has gathered several times to grieve as a family. But as night falls and we need to return to our camps and volunteers, there is something new. People now ask each other to call when they get back to camp safely. I can tell you that I’m a lot more conscious of my driving now.

I’m also aware of just how much time I’ve been spending on the road. It’s not unusual for a camp manager to drive from one camp to the other in a day’s work. The six PDA camps are spread the width of the hurricane damage from Texas to Alabama—four states. The storm was that big. There are that many people who need help.

I never thought what I am doing here as being dangerous. And if I had, I would have pictured it in the form of falling off a ladder. I could have a wreck on a busy freeway in a big city as easily as a deserted highway in Mississippi. But even if the volunteers thought about this work as dangerous most of us still would have come. Most dangers we face can’t compare to what the survivors of this storm went through. I would be embarrassed to try to compare the two.

So this Christmas brings me a new understanding of what giving means. The day we met to hear of Rich’s death we had stopped in the middle of work to gather. Afterwards we went to the Sanctuary of the Lakeview Presbyterian Church in New Orleans. This church had taken about three feet of water from the storm and had been gutted and totally rebuilt. So we sat in a brand new Sanctuary with bright paint, new hymnals and bibles, new pews. Everything around us was pristine. We were a stark contrast: As we held hands in a circle all were wearing the standard PDA work clothes that we put on that morning thinking it would be a day like every other: blue t-shirts and jeans spattered with drops of paint and joint compound. The man next to me had a band-aid on one of his dirty and calloused hands. That’s what giving looks like: calloused hands and band-aids.

If we are to call this the Season of Giving we need to lay aside the Nativity story in Luke once in a while and remember John 3:16. God understands Giving. Rich Cozzone’s wife understands Giving.

Honesty

It’s been a very educational week. Here’s some of the things I’ve learned in the last week:

· A lot about RVs. How to change the propane tank on my trailer and how to light the pilot light on the trailer water heater. How to dump the holding tank. I won’t explain that last one but it is very important.

· How to replace a broken thermostat on the tent heaters.

· I learned that Kerosene is stored in blue cans, not red or yellow

· To get hot water with an “on demand” system you have to run hot water in more than one shower stall to “encourage” the system.

· A whole lot of things about spiders: The difference between a black widow spider and a brown widow and a brown recluse. What an egg sac for a brown widow looks like (white with spines sticking out). It’s actually kind of pretty. I learned from the pest control man that the biggest brown widow spider he had ever seen was found in the dining room of our camp. Thankfully I learned this while he was spraying it with poison.

· A lot about propane ovens. While learning how to light the pilot light on a propane oven, the repair man actually told me I should find a man to do it for me. It was sort of funny to him that a woman wanted to do this herself.

· I gained renewed respect for tradesmen like those guys who clearly thought propane and bugs are the most interesting thing in the world. It’s refreshing to see someone love their job, especially when it’s not a very glorious one.

· I’ve learned a little about blackberry phones, not the fruit. I still probably know more about the fruit than the phone at this stage. But I do enjoy carrying my whole office in my pocket. This one even has the new map feature called “my location” and it really works.

· I learned a lot about Americorps—more than I can tell you here. Look them up on the internet. It’s a great program every person 18-24 should consider, kind of the domestic Peace Corps, fashioned after the Civilian Conservation Corps from the depression years. We'll be hosting a group of 12 Americorps volunteers the rest of my stay here at Gautier. They've got a bunch of houses to work on for the next three months.

· One interesting thing I learned about Americorps is that the US Government owns the van these kids drive all over America and our government doesn’t have the same age restrictions the car rental places have. On one mission trip last year our church had a 22 year-old airline pilot who could fly a commercial airplane but couldn’t drive the rented van. But the US Governmentt will let an 18 year old drive their van anywhere, anytime.

Yesterday when I was standing in line at Wal-Mart I overheard a conversation between the checker and another customer about their FEMA trailers. The conversation started with a comment about formaldehyde that had been found in the trailers. The checker had been to the doctor twice from exposure to the chemical. But the lady behind me in line was overjoyed with her news, "They came and got my trailer yesterday!" The lady had moved into a FEMA cottage. They are bigger but still not permanent housing. This didn't dampen her excitement:" My sanity has been restored! We have running room now!" I looked at the grandchild she had in the cart and understood. I've been living in a trailer for a week now and I simply can't imagine being in it for two solid years, especially with a child. She said the new cottage has two bedrooms and is 50ft long. But when I asked Mical about them he said they're flimsy and very narrow. Then he held both arms out and said they're only this wide.But that didn't seem to matter to the Wal-Mart lady. She has "running room." They get to keep this cottage until 2009 or they get their homes rebuilt.

But here’s my favorite thing I’ve gleaned from my week: One of the most honest places I’ve found on the face of the planet certainly isn’t a church sanctuary, goodness no, but a Waffle House Restaurant.

I have always enjoyed a meal at any Waffle House I go to. I love their food. I love to watch them cook. A fine ballet is a faint second to the performance of a good short order cook. These people can keep seven orders going at once in their head and on the grill. I always try to sit at the counter so I can be close to the action. And I love being around the customers who frequent them. They are invariably honest people with no pretense. People with old scars and fresh wounds. They don't have the time or money to spend on fancy things. So, Monday I treated myself to lunch. Even though it was lunchtime I always get pretty much the same thing: eggs, bacon, hash browns, and toast. And, of course, coffee.

I noticed what great coffee cups they always have at Waffle House. They’re good solid thick white, no nonsense cups. Honest cups. I could tell the one I had was brand new because it was still shiny. It probably hadn’t been through the dishwasher but a few times if at all. I fell in love with the cup.

At the end of the meal the waitress brought me the check and I motioned her close, “Is there any way I could buy this cup?” She looked to her left, right and behind then leaned toward me and said they don’t sell the cups but she could give me one of the ones they have that is chipped and ready to be thrown away. But I really wanted a nice cup, a shiny new one just like the one I was drinking from and, I told her I was quite willing to pay for it. She looked around again and this is when I noticed a small man with a wimpy mustache scurrying around behind her. She told me that as long as her manager didn’t see me I could just have that one.

So I did the most honest thing I could do in the situation. I broke the eight commandment and stole the cup. Yes, just walked right out of the restaurant when the manager wasn’t looking. After leaving a big tip, of course. I like to keep things honest.