Roger Wright – Chicago

Listen to how this man takes on restoring his sight.

The facts are pasted in below.

But as the truth behind the facts drenched down in my soul, I could feel this golden orange Florida sunset on the water bathing my tired face and reminding me that the suns warmth will be back tomorrow. Stop for a second. Can you hear the waves? Listen. You are welcome here. If you are reading this, let your heart slow down just a little. Someone will hand you a glass of something cold and you can hear the sounds of the ice cubes tinkling, now your shoulders relax. The happy smell of the juniper berry drifts by singing gin songs. You are welcome here. This is a party for Rod. A celebration.

Rod is here. Telling the story. And the inspiration in the room rises like the tide. Courage is too weak a word to describe what he’s talking about. To know this kind of bravery, facts simply won’t suffice. You’ve got to come to the party. Listen to his story.

The story calls to mind theologian John Howard Yoder’s two “Perspectives” on getting things to turn out the way we want.
The “Majority Perspective” assumes that it’s power and wealth that makes something happen. Power and wealth simply make it happen. That’s it.

The “Minority” perspective never makes that assumption. The minority perspective uses imagination, uses courage, and is in it for the long haul. Knows that power structures fade. Learns to hope. Knows that there is something larger than ME. Goes beyond embracing the power and the money. Creates a party just like this one.

And sits there at sunset dreaming of a new day. Staying strong. Staying brave. Read what a brave man wrote here. Raise your glass to him.

Maybe you’ll be just a little bit braver too. I know I will.

Rod’s Letter:

My Dear Friends,

My business associate, Donna, is helping me prepare this letter.

As many of you know, I suffered a detached retina in my left eye in February of 2010.
Since then, I have had 4 surgeries and am expecting to have another next week. Hopefully once that surgery is complete my vision in that eye will be improved over what it currently is (approximately 20%). How much improvement is as yet unknown. However, it is expected that it will be approximately 20/70.

During these past months I have been able to rely on my right eye the vision of which has been 20/25 to 20/30 unfortunately the night of November 28th for some unknown reason blood flow to that eye was cut off and I was rendered totally blind in that eye. The following morning the pressure in that eye was reduced and some blood flow was restored. To this point, very little vision has returned. It is unknown if vision will ever return but to the extinct that it does, it will be limited. Therefore, I can no longer read or write as I once did.

I am sharing this with you because so many of you have become my friends and shared with me those things in your life that are of importance and interest, and I want you to know that I will miss continuing that exchange. But for the foreseeable future, I will no longer be able to communicate with you as I once did.

I know that for many of you this will come as a shock and that you will want to reach out and express your concern as well as good will. Trust that I know this in my heart, and therefore you need not send those wishes to me by mail. All is well. This is the beginning not the end of a new adventure… One that I anticipate will lead to restored vision. Until that time, I remain.

Your friend

Rod

Walking with purpose out of the snowy night cornfield where my plane went down on February 3rd 1959 and I died just outside of Clear Lake Iowa, I boarded the Sarah Palin bus for the trip to Spirit Lake where she was off to sell books and deliver her message.

Why? Because I’ve come across Sarah Palin before. Even now. She might have a different face, a different voice; she might look like a whole different person. But I know her. She’s always been here. And you can trust me when I tell you I have it on the highest authority that she always will be here.

So when she comes to Clear Lake, Spirit Lake, or anywhere in Iowa, I take a look. If only to just let her feel somehow in the tingling breeze at the back of her neck; that I am watching her.

I’m a musician. You might know my name. Might not. Might not know my music. Doesn’t matter. What matters is that when some folks hear the words “Clear Lake Iowa,” or when folks think about someplace called “Spirit Lake,” they think of me. So I’m here. I’m everywhere they still play my music. But I’m also here in Iowa. So when the likes of a Sarah Palin shows up to sell her books, I pay attention. There are other places I could be. Tonight there is a concert. Johnny Cash is playing. And I never miss him. But I couldn’t miss what was happening here either. So I looked toward their bus.

The bus was idling by the side of the road when I walked up to it. Three black SUV’s, bulletproof I noticed, all with tinted windows, had just driven up behind the bus. The lady, Sarah Palin, got out of the vehicle in the middle and immediately, even on this lost, snowy road with no one in sight, she was surrounded by men in long coats scanning the horizon and looking for trouble.

Of course none of them saw me.

We all climbed up on to the bus. They all were talking about how warm it was. Sarah barked out “Coffee!” and immediately there was a cup in her left hand.

Then they all went to a table in the back of the bus and sat down. One lady started working on Sarah Palin’s hair. Another on her nails. And as they all had their meeting, the tones in their voices were like military marches. Somber and serious. Lock step marching forward. These were very smart people. None of them were smiling. All of them were looking at little computers in their hands even when they talked. Every now and then, Sarah Palin would say something like, “I need more!” or “You know we have people we all answer to.” But through it all no one smiled. That’s when I saw the first difference between these people and my music. With these people, nothing was fun.

With my music, we started off with fun.

As the bus rolled toward town, it seemed like they were all coming up with little phrases for her to say. Kinda like I do when I write songs. But as I kept listening hard to all these little phrases they came up with, I figured out the second big difference between these people and me. Everything they said meant something else! It was as if they had all decided to talk in some sort of code where everything they said meant the opposite! They said, “Cut taxes” which meant, “Give me money.” They said “Freedom” which meant, “Start a war.” And it went on.

These people were working on destroying the very meaning of words! These people were killing words! Exactly the opposite of my songs.

Mile or so down the road, we came to town. Big crowd. Folks all excited as she stepped off the bus. But then she started talking. And that’s when I really saw the evil that was going on here. See, when I’d sing a song, I’d mostly do it to lift someone’s spirit. Even my sad songs. I wrote them and I sang them so sad folks wouldn’t feel so alone. But what she was doing was the total opposite.

She was trying to scare people.

Oh she did it with a smile. She was laughing now. Not like back on the bus. As she talked in front of people, she seemed to get dumber and dumber. I knew that was a lie because I had seen how smart she was back in the bus. But where this was all going was: she was doing her best to make people afraid.

Not afraid on the outside. Afraid on the inside. Like when you walk away from what somebody just said to you and you suddenly realize that you are really, really scared. And you didn’t know why. That kind of scared.

That was about the size of it. There were numbers of people; there were TV cameras, folks writing about her. You can find all that other places.

That’s not what I came here to tell you about.

What I came to say are the three things she did that were so very, very, different than the way I wrote and sang my songs. First, she didn’t have any fun. Second, she killed the words. And finally, she did her very best to scare all the people—making them feel good when she scared them. Like a roller coaster of evil. But underneath still scaring them.

She finished up in Spirit Lake. Back on the bus to leave the city limits, then back to the SUV’s to take her to the airport where she scurried up the stairs inside her private jet.

That was the last I saw of her. Scurrying up those stairs to her jet. So I looked real hard at the back of her neck. Just to make sure she knew I was watching her. And always would. No matter what little town she tried to terrify.

And as I stared hard those last few moments, I saw her scratch the back of her neck, as if she could make my stare go away. She scratched hard. Like she had something really itchy in her collar. Then she turned and looked out at my snowy cornfields here in Iowa. I could see it in her eyes. She would not give up. She’d never give up.

But she knew that I was watching her.

He was at the end of the silver counter huddled over his coffee cup, still in his painter’s whites, his cap pushed back on his head. Sleet storm wind blew wet down Irving Park Road and would have shivered the world if she hadn’t been there making her rounds with her coffee pot and her friendly open smile. She had always been a waitress. And she really didn’t mind working Thanksgiving. It wasn’t like there was a crowd waiting to flick on the lights in her third floor apartment, ready to great her with the smell of roast turkey, candles and wine.

So she circled the room as her shift counted down till six o’clock and it would be time to go home. She didn’t speak when she glided past his corner of the counter. But she looked straight at him. Her eyes clear. He would raise his head, offer a shy smile and a nod. Start to almost speak. But then he wouldn’t need to because she already knew what he was going to say. It was as if they were alone in their kitchen. Like the darkness settling in outside the steamed windows of the diner held them both to some unspoken promise of winter night warmth.

And when the clock went straight up six o’clock and she nodded hello to her relief, she went over and stood to lift her coat of the hook next to the sink. Her back to the painter. She stood there for what seemed like a very long time. Her shoulders tense. The painter in the corner looked up, cleared his throat, and stood as she turned around and looked in his eyes. He buttoned up his coat, looked at the waitress now ready to go out into the sleeting cold. Still not a word exchanged. As if the sight of the other were enough to propel each of them forward. He opened the door for her and she glided through smiling like a city street queen.

Once outside she linked her arm through his and they walked off together into the street light night.

Walked off together, having now found, as Harry Chapin once sang, a better place to be.

December 2050. As he punched in the security code that snowy night at the armed entrance of the gated community, Ricketts Glen, at the corner of Clark and Addison in Chicago, the wind was so cold that his hands felt as if he had plunged them in fire. The vacant, snow flake stares of the street people cowering in front of the Hyatt and Best Buy across the street were making her nervous, so he hurried to punch in the code. And he kept chattering. “You know there used to be a baseball stadium here. They called it Wrigley Field.”

“No way!” she said, shaking her long blonde hair back from her face and shivering all in one move. Her blue eyes wide. “I had heard there was like a church or something here?” He loved how most everything she said sounded like a question. Questions he pretty much knew the answers to. Maybe tonight would turn out better than he thought.

“Actually. . .” be began. He was being extra careful to try and sound smart. She had told him in the bar that she liked guys with big ah. . .brains; was the way she put it. That’s when she tossed off that killer smile. And he pretty much forgot everything after that. Except to try and sound smart. So he was trying to get the, ‘yeah, I’m older and that means I know stuff, kinda like a college professor’ kind of thing going. Starting sentences with words like “actually” seemed to fit. What he did not see was how her eyes zeroed in on his Ricketts Glen ID card when he pulled it out and signaled for another round of drinks. “Actually,” he said, “There was a church here. That was a really long time ago. A seminary. They trained ministers here. But the Clark Street bars got a little wild. That’s when they built the baseball park. Wrigley Field they called it. It was here until they tore it down to build Ricketts Glen.”

The security code took, he heard the buzzer, the green iron door whooshed open and he saw the man in the glass booth holding the Chinese made automatic weapon nod at him. He nodded back and then watched as she immediately unbuttoned her coat in the climate-controlled air. “Oh my God. It is like what, 69 in here or something?”

“To be precise, it’s kept at a constant 72 degrees Fahrenheit.” He said authoritatively. “So you like our little corner of the world?”

“I had like seen stories about places like this, but I’d never actually like been in one? So like, who is Ricketts?”

“Oh they were the family that owned the stadium and the baseball team.”

“So what happened? I mean look at this place,” she said, taking in the sweeping green grass lawns lit by artificial light designed to lower blood pressure, each of the homes with their own green space, gardens, streams sprinkling through the community all encased inside a translucent bubble thin as a microchip yet capable of deflecting a nuclear attack. “I mean this place is like heaven! These Ricketts people, they must have been like geniuses or something, right?”

“Well, depends on how you read history I guess,” I said like someone who should be smoking a pipe and wearing a faded corduroy blazer with patches on the elbow.

“The Ricketts kids bought the baseball team and the stadium for the same reason any of us would have. It was a toy. And their Daddy had the money, so why not?”

“Mmm,” she said, as we walked through the artificial summer air to my house.

“They wanted to fix up the stadium. So they did what any of the wealthy folks of that era would do. They went looking for other people’s money to pay for it.”

“So they like really did that back then?”

“Oh but of course my dear,” I said punching in the security code for my front door. As we walked in, the size of the rooms, the décor, maybe the music I’m not sure, made her eyes go wide again. “This place is something!” she whispered as she tossed her coat on a chair and begin to take it all in.

“C’mon” I said, the elevator is this way. I’ll show you my Tower Room.” Or, as some people called it, I thought, my bedroom.

“OK,’ she said, for some reason now a bit meekly. She then got a quizzical look on her face, “But wait, she said, these Ricketts people?” Why couldn’t they get other people’s money?”

“Oh, that’s the interesting part. I mean they really tried. The first place they went was of course to the government. That was back when the way the government worked was that if the politicians and the business people who owned them said something the right way, they could make anybody believe anything.”

“Huh?”

“Well the Ricketts tried to get tax money, bonds, to pay to fix up their stadium. And in those days people actually believed that the more money flowed to the rich people, the better life would be for poor people.”

“What? People like believed that? No way!”

“Oh yeah,” I said. Back in those days, people voted against their own self interest all the time. Why I remember reading about when all this was going on. The Ricketts kids said they wanted tax money that would have gone to schools or firemen to pay for their baseball team. And at the very same time, their Daddy, the one that actually made the money the kids were given, actually made a video saying that he wanted smaller government.”

“But that like, I mean I know maybe I don’t like understand this stuff, but that makes no sense at all! How did they like pull that off?” she said as the elevator door swooshed open unto the tower room. A 360 degree view of the twinkling Chicago night, the stars blending in with the city lights.

Kicking off her heels, she ran past the bed to the window, “Oh. My. God! This is like beautiful! No wonder they wanted to like tear down the baseball stadium!”

“Actually they didn’t want to tear it down. They did everything they could to get the free money. The Ricketts kids never really understood. They thought they were owed the money to fix up their place.”

“Really? They thought people would just like PAY them? With taxes?”

“Oh they tossed off all the usual garbage talk about creating jobs and it being a good thing for the community and they threatened to leave and they got a few politicians to try and make it law. They skipped a few politicians too.”

“Which ones did they skip?”

“The smart ones.”

“So like, I am really having trouble getting this.”

“Here it is in one sentence. They were rich people. They thought this was their due. Even though what they were saying was, pay me to fix my house before you pay a fireman to be ready in case your house starts to burn.”

“Wow! I never knew rich people could be that dumb.”

“Oh they weren’t dumb. This is the way a lot of people thought back then. Sure, it was all a con game, this idea that making rich people richer helped poor people. But it was so well played that most of the poor people believed it too.”

“Well I’ll tell you one thing,” she said, dancing over to the bed and leaping into the middle then motioning me over with her finger.

“What’s that?” I said as she grabbed the front of my shirt and pulled me down beside her.”

“I’m sure glad that I didn’t live back when there was a yucky old baseball stadium here.”

“Me too. I said. Me too.”

Then no words. Only the snow. Falling on the bubble where there used to be a baseball park.

“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

James Joyce.

“The Dead”

It was in the men’s locker room at the East Bank club in Chicago that the guy with the big ears asked me the question.

I had no business being in that locker room. If W-2 forms had to be flashed to get into this East Bank Club today, I might be able to sneak in while security collapsed laughing. But that would be my only chance. Back then in the early nineties, when I recognized the guy but couldn’t remember the name, I thought he was some kind of lowest on the food chain politician like a state representative or something. Back then I could have afforded the membership. But I never would have done it. Give me the YMCA any day. Way above spandex heaven. The East Bank Club had two coat rooms. One just for fur coats. The only reason I was in the building is that the software company where I worked had reserved a room for an executive team meeting. And the only reason I was in the locker room was that I snuck in after the meeting. Figured this might be my only chance to sweat with Chicago’s elite.

So I was sitting on the bench after a workout when this tall skinny guy says to me, “Hey! You know where the gym is?”

And when I answered, “Man, I don’t know where anything is here,” the guy smiled. Now, when I say he smiled, that really doesn’t even begin to describe what happened. This guy had a smile that could fire the sun. So he smiled and said, “Hey don’t worry about that! My first time here too. I got this new job and I know a few guys, just a little friendly game of hoops. You can come if you want.”

The smile was so bright I almost said yes. But somehow the fact that he was taller, younger, undoubtedly richer and MUCH better looking took hold. That and the fact that I really didn’t play basketball. So I said “Sorry! But I’m sure if you walk for a mile or so you’ll find it.”

And he says to me, “Well, take it easy!” Then he padded off into the carpeted climate controlled distance and I finished getting dressed.

I got my bag packed up and realized I wasn’t really sure how to get out of the place either. The facility is larger than many small towns. So I went through this door and I found myself on a balcony type thing overlooking a basketball court where Mr. Big Ears and a bunch of other guys where hard charging, full throttle going at a very serious game of basketball. There was a Ref. Whistles. The whole deal. And remember, these were the Michael Jordan years, so basketball meant something big in Chicago. Everyone was a basketball fan. So I put down my bag and decided to watch for a minute. First impression was that there were two kinds of guys on the court. Rich guys who spent a lot of time at the gym and rich guys who thought they could play without putting in that time.

But Mister Big Ears was different. Everything about him was different.

The other guys on the court were playing basketball. Huffing and sweating and charging and talking trash. Not Mr. Big Ears. Oh he moved. He wasn’t winded at all. But while the other guys were all playing basketball, it was almost as if Mister Big Ears was playing chess.

His eyes drew my complete attention. I watched him watch the court, and it was as if he knew everybody’s moves, all the trajectories, everything everybody was about to do before they even did it. The guy oozed strategy like everyone else sweated. Like Jordon in a way. The guy had this ethereal sense of floating. You watched him and it was almost as if he wasn’t there. Like he was 5 steps ahead of the game waiting for everyone else to catch up.

Until his team started losing. That’s when everything changed.

He missed a pass. Somebody yelled “Barry!” And I saw a focus I hadn’t seen before.

And that was when the ref swallowed his whistle.

Maybe you’ve heard that before? Swallowing his whistle? It means, well it means a few things. But one of them is that the players now own the game. There are no rules.

And that’s when this Big ears guy turned it on. At first it was hard to see. The elbows to the opposing team came so quick, you really weren’t sure you saw them All you saw was his opposition grabbing themselves in pain.

Then there were the feints. Big Ears would charge —remember, there is no ref anymore—and totally fool the bumbling opponent. Even make him look kind of stupid.

The feints built into a rhythm. Big Ears team had pulled out ahead. The speed of the game cranked up yet another notch.

Then the blood.

I don’t know how big ears drew blood. I never really saw it. Another guy had come on to their team. A talker. He kept up a patter. Talked so loud, so hard it was as if his talk was a weapon in itself. Big ears team started laughing. Because the other guys had nothing. They had nothing and it showed. Meanwhile this James guy, bald guy with glasses? He kept talking,

All the while Big Ears was dodging and feinting and slipping in elbows so fast that I am still not sure, till this day, what I saw. It happened that fast.

All I know is that when the game was over, Big Ears team had won. That guy who was so good with the talking came over and put his arm around Big Ears. Both of them laughing.

But the strangest thing of all? The part I still don’t understand? I was up in this balcony or grandstand or whatever. I thought no one could see me. I was the one watching. No one knew I was there.

But as Big Ears walked off the court? He looked up at me. Straight at me. Eye to eye. And he smiled and waved.