Junk Dealer

The first time I tried hitchhiking I was 23 and standing on the edge of a highway running through a small town in Iowa.  The car pulled over with the window open. “Do you need a lift?” I had been waiting a long time and I eagerly exclaimed, “That’d be great!”  “Then stick a jack up your ass!” . 

Looking back I should have known.  It was a kid driving an older model, big boat of a station wagon.  He could barely see over the steering wheel. 35 years later I can still see his face as it tore away:  horn rimmed glasses, a bowl line haircut, laughing at me. He had passed me back and forth several times. It was such a small town that the main street was only about a quarter mile long.  Along with that there was probably no town cop and he was no doubt too young to have a license yet. In a small rural town the only after school program can be getting in the family car and cruising the strip.  Me standing on the edge of the road only added a new character to his routine. It must have taken him those few drive bys to think up his rejection punch line.

But I had been in training to learn to handle such rejections. I was in the Jesuit novitiate in preparation for priesthood, having recently completed the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola. The Exercises were contained within a 30 day silent retreat where I learned to contemplate desolation and see it as the way to consolation.  I fought back against the silence and its scolding to get me to sit still. I am a doer. I like to get things done and the idea of sitting and meditating for 30 days without talking had me squirming and looking for a way out. I became the clown at the silent meals with the other novices using contorted faces, flicking food, farting and whatever else I could bring out of my bag of sixth grade humor trying to get them to break down in laughter.  

When I sat in my room and tried to pray it just felt stupid.  So not me. This way of knowing God must be reserved for those more refined and capable than me.   “Lord I am not worthy” had me angry, fidgeting and eventually climbing out the window onto the roof. It took the Minnesota winter on the rooftop to send me back into the building.  Down into the basement, down into the boiler room. Dark. I found a metal folding chair. I was still a little squirrely but it was day 8 now of 30 and I was ready to sit. The heat and the darkness helped.   The boiler chugged, wheezed, and clanged. It was like an industrial age sweat lodge. The dry heat parched through me. I stripped down to Hanes. It was still stupid, but I felt if I at least created a physical foe to endure then I could make a game out of it.   Now it was about sweating it out. This went on for days: Prayer time going down into this brooder of Genesis waiting for the bang of creation. And nothing really happened. I was just doing time. Crossing off days on the calendar.  

I was over half way through these Spiritual Exercises when it happened.  I was sitting in that folding chair that I had by now put a pillow on. I was quite fond of such a dark darkness that didn’t need me to close my eyes to feel.  I just stared wide eyed into the darkness and each day the darkness seemed to push out further, revealing new horizons of nothing but dark. I kept walking into these horizons day after day until finally I felt the weight and could barely walk.  I was weighed down by an overflowing arm load of junk. Rusty, broken, unfixable. I began to see that I was carrying all the doubts, fears, self loathing, rejections of my life. It got heavier and heavier and I could barely stand. Then a building emerged ahead.  I strained toward it. It was an old, decrepit shack with a rickety porch and hulks of old rusty cars and equipment piled in the yard. The place had no paint. The boards had weathered to gray. I stumbled up the steps, drawn through the door. Inside were old shelves heaped with more junk like my own.  Creaky floors, dust and cobwebs over everything.  

I thought the place was long abandoned, but then I noticed facing away from me a hunched over figure in the back corner sorting through more junk. He seemed a continuance of the dust and weatheredness. Smoke stained white hair.  It looked like his bones were sagging him downward, slowly losing against the pull of gravity. He had an unusually large hearing aid on his bulbous ear. How could anyone be so old? I was exasperated like where in the world am I now and what am I going to do with all this junk? I couldn’t hold it any longer, dropping the pile that kicked up a dust cloud.  I shouted knowing he was probably too deaf to hear me: “Do you want any of this junk?”

It was the nimble pivot of a grace filled dancer.   The face turned to me and all I could see was a tender affirming smile and a soft yet unwavering light that was beyond young or old, man or woman, rich or poor, black or white, this or that.  I have never felt so much love than that moment of light, but I still doubted and thought I needed to yell again louder and whiningly to be heard, “ Do you want any of this junk?” The voice softly reassured me with a knowing smile “ Of course I want it.  It’s you and I made you.”

And that was it.  It left me with tears flowing into the sweat.  I sat there longer thinking there would surely be more to come.  Further light. Further conversation. Maybe a Q and A. I never saw that face again.  I sat through the rest of those 30 days and nothing happened. But the squirm was out of me.  I didn’t need anything more to happen. I was content to just sit knowing what I now knew.

It took me to write this to realize it as I look back on the 35 years since it happened, but I am  wrong to say that I never saw that face again. That face is all expansive and showing up in stories.  And everybody’s got a story. If there is honesty in the telling then that junk is dross for beauty, that everyman’s brokenness is the cog that turns outward into communion,  that rejection is the way to compassion and resiliency. That face is in everyone I meet if I take the time to listen closely and see them walking in seldom straight lines from desolation into consolation.

I drive a bus now taking youth on adventures that help them venture out of their bubbles into the glad heart of serving others and the joys of nature.  There is a quiet confidence and self knowledge that comes from taking up the adventure and seeing it through. Sometimes I see the boy from that little Iowa town with the bowl cut and horned rimmed glasses step up on the bus.  He sits right behind the driver seat and prods me on as we pick up speed and roll beyond the town limits into those dark horizons upon horizons through the night drive. 

Giddily waking up he exclaims the dawn light, soft and unwavering.

Love and Fishing in a Time of Quarantine- March 2020

Corona virus social distancing started soon after Timbeaux told his girlfriend she had to leave because she was getting too bossy.  Evidently it was a hasty exit: A beat up U-haul box of her high heeled shoes in various Easter colors, some with rhinestones, laid on the porch.  And her chihuahua mix dog still held court inside with Timbeaux scolding, “Shut up Minnie” and putting slices of cold pizza and pepper jack cheese on a styrofoam plate down on the floor for dog food. This treatment might have actually been a little better than the “Shut up you Mother Fucker! You know better than that!” that was reserved for the eight hunting dogs outside in the kennel. 

He’s been trying to date again after losing his wife to cancer a few years back. They raised some boys together. She was known for taking wood bees and tying a string of sewing thread on them as a leash and entertaining the children with her pet bee. Timbeuax carries the overlapped belly of middle age.  No shirt as he sits in his recliner with his feet tucked under him in a pose more like a Playboy pin up which was the only thing I could see that explained why he smoked the thin women’s cigarettes, “Misty.”   It was from this pose that Timbeaux became my instructor in Cajun arts or what he called Coon Ass Training.

What better time to learn how to survive from what the swamp gives then during this COVID torment spurring jittery news on a diving Dow Jones and shortages of beans-n-rice, ventilators, and toilet paper. We set out limb lines up and down the Tickfaw River going for the denizens of the muddy deep: Catfish!  We tied over 80 lines to limbs hanging down over the river, baiting the hooks with crawfish we caught in the ditches with a dip net.  We’d bait up then motor back up the river to check the lines, take fish off the lines, put them in a live well then eventually clean the fish and have a fish fry.  Next day repeat. During and after these fish fries the TV was on a loop of You Tube videos on catfishing and wild hog hunting in the Deep South.

And so our days of quarantine began:  We non verbally gave consent that our quarantine would include each other.  Timbeaux would teach me how to fish Cajun style and I would help him on ideas of what to write and how to spell his texts correctly to his new girlfriend. Just before we went into self isolation Timbeaux had met a gal while waiting in line at the Burger King. Since she said she couldn’t see him until the virus was over they texted back and forth and talked on the phone late into the night.  Eventually it got Timbeaux all tired out and he had to take a day off fishing to catch up on sleep. She worked at the local pharmacy and did allow Timbeaux to come by the drive thru to deliver her some fresh catfish fillets in a ziplock bag. Timbeaux said he wasn’t a dozen roses kind a guy. She said that her daddy was a shrimper down in Buras and that she much prefered a sack of catfish fillets to a dozen roses any day.

One day we were out fishing and I was in my usual spot in the bow of the boat running the trolling motor.  Timbeaux pulled up his hoop net to find four spotted catfish: 23, 21 17 and 14 lbs. He struggled to pull the gargantuan fish up out of the net.  I just thought they were heavy. I could see the top of his hands were scraped up from grabbing the fish. When he pulled the fish up he had grabbed them with his hand in their mouths.  The catfish have tiny teeth that scraped the skin off the top of his hand making it look like a floor burn. The brilliance of his blood ran down from the back of his hand onto the slippery shine of the catfish skin.  As the morning sun slanted through the river bank trees I knew this was the Church of Timbeaux and communion was being distributed.

He wouldn’t have told me, but I asked.  Timbeaux told me that he couldn’t close the grip on his hand because a circuit breaker box had blown up in his face while working at the plant giving him electrical burns over his hands and face. Four transformers were feeding into the box.  The grafted skin over the tops of his hands keeps him from closing his grip. The doctor said he would never be able to shoot a gun again. It’s all the motivation a country boy needed to have. I also asked him about the symmetrical scars on both sides of the bottom of his spine.  He said these were from the surgery he got after being tail ended and thrown from his truck on Highway 444.  That was the second time he had been tail ended and thrown from his truck.

Sometimes we don’t just watch fishing and hunting videos while we’re eating fish.  Timbeaux likes Creedence Clearwater Revival (CCR). His back hurts more than he ever would admit.  Those Frankenstein suture marks cause him to lean his belly into the kitchen counter to take some weight off his feet.  Leaning in he dips the fillets in the hot grease (fee-lays as he calls them).  I mention to Timbeaux that it’s kinda funny that CCR sings about bayous and catfish and they’re actually kids from San Francisco that went to Woodstock.  He acts a little surprised, “Really?”Later he talks about pro-Trump relatives: “They got flags up and everything.  I just can’t go there. That’s all they think and talk about.” His cousin Hollis stopped by one day and rails about Atheists in New York that want to outlaw God fearing Christians.  And “Pelosi should have been shot when she was born.”

Meanwhile Timbeaux keeps leaning in frying fish as CCR sings “Proud Mary” :  “People on the river just happy to give.” He smiles and turns to me: “Remember when Tina Turner used to sing this song...Man she had some legs! So good lookin she took out an insurance policy on em!”