Roger Wright – Chicago

My one and only love,

It is snowing at the foot of the island. Grey skies. A winter wind of moderation. And the ship is going down, our eyes will soon feel the icy waves, so there is not a lot of time, maybe just a second or two, and I wanted these last words to be with you.

Let it always be known what happened here. We were coming home to our land of snow. Not because the mouth of the river they called Mississippi wasn’t bountiful. The fish swam in swamp land waving grass under star light currents of plenty and all the music had a jump and merry melody. We really could have stayed.

But the land of snow called us home. We had winter in our bones. Acadian driftwood. Gypsy tailwinds. So we set the compass north again.

And just in sight of the tip of the island is when the fire started on the ship.

Someday they will find the mighty ship. They will puzzle at the semicircular metal collar several feet across, built into the hull. They will surmise correctly that it was an oven. All that will be missing is the smell of warm bread baking in the snow when the fire started up. And the scripture lines I said out loud as I realized that the fire would be stronger than the ship, at just that golden moment when we passed the tip of the island and I somehow saw giant towers from the future falling, hit by strange flying machines high in the air, a vision of fires blazing strong now just like the one by the oven in our ship. I said the lines out loud. I prayed the lines from Kings, but as I prayed I also just spoke like an everyday, ordinary conversation to you. As if we were home. In our own warm kitchen. And it was almost time for dinner, “but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence.”

The ship started to roll slowly, tip to the left, and began to sink beneath the waves. And I prayed again, the lines from the book of John,

“The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.”

A long time from now, my one and only love, when the children of children, carrying this deeply buried memory of you and I, are running, playing dancing joyfully in the snow, in a time that will come even after the towers in the sky had fallen and in that naked dawn when only a few survived, in that time so far from now, they will finally find our ship.

They will measure it off. Our 30-foot length of a wood hulled vessel. They will puzzle as to why we had an oven. Never having smelled our home made bread. And they will find our ship near where those towers had fallen from the sky. They will find our ship in the wet melting simmering heat of July. A heat like the one that drove us back home from New Orleans.

And when they find that ship in the middle of some hot July.

Somewhere, we will be feeling that gypsy tail wind, running with our little family, children laughing, tramping through the snow, looking up and catching frosty white flakes in our eyes like shimmering winter diamonds. The splendor of the winter. And the comforting chilly white winds of home.

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On Wednesday July 14,2010, workers in Manhattan excavating the site for a future World Trade Center came upon the remnants of a ship. It was estimated that the ship had lain undisturbed for over 200 years.

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Barack Obama, alone, leaned against the wall in the kitchen corridor underneath the Hotel Allegro in Chicago and looked at his watch. 


Next to him, a bus cart jammed with dirty breakfast dishes waiting to be washed.

In the dining room above, his introduction was winding down, and in 90 seconds, he’d get a running start for the stairs and go bounding up two at a time to spring into the good sized room for one last stop on this campaign for US Senate.


As Barack Obama stood alone; the smoke filled, back room, cigar chomping, nod and a wink echoes of generations of Chicago politicians paused for one eternal moment and all took a look.


Later that night, all these generations of dark and shaded political men knew, Barack Obama would be up in front of a room 10 times the size of the one in the Allegro. He would be thanking everyone. So they paused for one quick glance.


Santiago Cruz, 52 years old and smiling like the Columbian sunshine even when he thought himself alone, carrying a grey, plastic tub of dirty coffee cups and saucers, didn’t notice Barack Obama on the other side of the bus cart of dishes.

Swinging his grey tub up over his head to plunk it down on the top of the cart, Santiago looked to his right and saw the quiet Obama smiling. In the space of a second, Santiago wiped his hands on his pants and took Obama’s outstretched hand. And as Barack leaned in towards the man to shake, he bumped his shoulder hard into the cart, spilling all he dishes stacked on the top on to the floor, shattering in a million pieces and at the same time sending a jarring shooting pain all through Obama’s shoulder, a pain so sharp he winced and bowed his head.


And as he winced in pain without one real clear thought at all, Obama instinctively got to his knees to begin picking up the shattered dishes.

Santiago Cruz, still stunned by the crash, stood for a moment and looked down at the man on his knees picking up the dishes. Joining him then on the floor to do the same, Santiago heard the applause from the dining room upstairs and the beep of the other man’s cell phone going off at the very same time. Santiago Cruz and Barack Obama, both kneeling on the floor, their faces a foot apart, looked straight at each other and another kind of recognition registered on Santiago’s face.

Where he had been smiling before, where Santiago ALWAYS smiled, the smile took on a deeper tone. Something changed in that smile—and there was a tone of sadness in that smile, then hope flickered for just a moment and his eyes lit up to a new brightness and he said “OBAMA! OBAMA OBAMA!”

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Wait! Not yet! I yelled into the mythical phone line running between Chicago and the white snow heavens of Door County deep in a frozen January sun. Can’t we just have just one more breakfast?

Remembering the great Door County/Chicago writer Norbert Blei’s story of Al Johnson shouting back through the phone trying to find out why he didn’t get his Chicago Tribune delivered. “Yes!” He bellows with a smile into the phone line. “That’s me. I’m the one. I’m Al Johnson. I’m the guy who put the goats on the roof of my restaurant! Now what can you do about getting that newspaper delivered?”

The news of his passing came just as the summer season started to gear up. In these hard times when a trip to the county, to the other end of that phone line, wasn’t possible, solely for the reason that the money wasn’t there anymore; I was thrown back hard to the County in any given January. Memories of all those years when a trip was possible. And I screamed through that phone line. “Just one more breakfast.”

One like this.

It’s blessedly early. You dip down Highway 42 from Ephraim, from Fish Creek, into the glory of the winter sunrise, a world that Al and his wife Ingert fashioned from a beauty so crystalline clear in the white winds whipping all that sunshine off the icy rhythm of Sister Bay that it made you sure that there really is going to be a brand new day.

A beauty so sharply defined that it almost makes your shoulders ache as you glide to a stop in front of Al’s Place. You leave the car, and then baptized for just a moment by that winter wind, you pull open the big wooden door. Walking right in, greeted by a nod and a smile and a good morning . . .because isn’t that all it really takes, your heart springs awake because there is a table by the front window.

As you walk to the prized window table, you silently pay your respects to the men at the back counter. The regulars. You’ve never spoken. You would never even think of it. You don’t know their names and they don’t know yours and that doesn’t matter in the least. Because it’s with them you get the gift of sharing this place, this winter morning wonder. Door County when it’s empty of all but those who live there all year round. You have been silently admitted into a family larger than any you could even imagine. As the regulars tell stories; your food arrives. And here’s the thing about the food: it’s always good. The Swedish pancakes, the lingonberries, the sausage, the eggs and the coffee. All through the years. Even in the dead of winter, that morning when you own the prized view out the front windows of the restaurant—the food is always good. And somehow seems to arrive before you’ve even said what you wanted.

And then Al. Even when he stops, he is always moving. His eyes forever scanning the room. That hard scrabble tough young man from the west side of Chicago. Finding his way to a winter paradise. Creating a family, one that went so very far beyond people who were also named Johnson. Seeing the simple and glorious beauty of Sister Bay and then stopping. Right there. To put the goats on the roof.
And building something that will last.

I put down the phone. Tired and sad that I’m not on the other end. In the County. Looking out at Sister Bay. Sitting quietly at the memorial. Just to be there. Determined now more than ever to find some way to get back. To get back in the autumn. But to be there most of all in the winter. To sit at one of the tables in the window. Still sad because Al is gone. But then . . .

Looking down at the table. As Al Johnson’s place holds us all and keeps us warm. Noticing my coffee cup has been refilled.

Without me even knowing how or when.

Excerpted from “Finding Work: When There Are No Jobs.” Copyright 2010 Roger Wright.

Part Six: Practicing Stewardship
Chapter 1: Finding Unity: Dr. King Tosses Me the Baseball

Remember—Stewardship means taking care of something bigger than you. And UNITY can be an idea that leads you to Stewardship.

How?

Unify ANYTHING. A family. A company. A fleet of cars. A herd of cows. And there is more to take care of. A need for more stewardship.

And if you can take care of MORE—-you can show more value.

The MORE you take care of—the more opportunity for stewardship. The more the opportunity for taking care of something larger than yourself. For Practicing Stewardship.

Examples of “Unity” run all through this story. The unity Dr. King advocated in leading the struggle for civil rights. The unity of parents and children. The Unity that can come from sharing a sport like baseball. And there are other examples.

In the story, the Unity is illustrated in grander, world changing terms like civil rights. But unity can also be a very concrete, pragmatic driving force when it comes to finding work. For instance, “I used to take care of one building. Now I take care of two.” At the Food Pantry we used to serve 30 people. Now the need has grown, so we serve 90. And the reason the need grew? The UNITY between the newly hungry and those whose struggles have been going on for years.

So as you read this selection, start thinking about UNITY in your own life. How unity can produce a larger need. And how practicing stewardship can help you fill that need.

What if you could somehow promote Unity in some specific situation? What if you could take care of more? And more? And more?

How might that help you find work?

THE STORY

I was 8 years old. Dr. King still had about three more years of work to do before he’d be shot on the balcony of a motel in Memphis. Gun shots that would set angry fires blazing and police sirens wailing pain in almost every big city in America and then land him squarely in the history books forever and a day.

He would be speaking in our village. And this was really different from anywhere else he had ever done his work.

My family and I were walking to the “Village Green” to listen. A square block of open green near the downtown section of town where I walked with my Dad every Saturday morning to do errands. But this walk was different. It all seemed in slow motion. Nothing even close to this had ever happened here before. The population of the village was 13,000. By days end the crowd to just see him was put at 10,000.

I keep saying “Village”

Back then you could almost call it a village. Just 100 years before that day he spoke; it was a General Store on the Green Bay trail. A sprinkling of cabins in the woods, next to the giant, wild inland Lake Michigan on a road just named for Philip Sheridan, the Union General, friend of US Grant, who not too many years earlier had told his boss Abraham Lincoln: “Give me the troops and the guns,” and then had gone off hell bent after Robert E. Lee.

Into the 20th century when the river of money began flowing north from Chicago; and the big F. Scott Fitzgerald houses came to own the Lake Michigan Shoreline; the cabins and the trading post gone now—and you had to go even further north up towards Milwaukee, up to where the author Ray Bradbury staked out the overgrown deep green ravines and dandelion wine summers of his childhood to find the traces of wildness that once roamed the woods of our little village.

Bradbury called the little town he came from—about 10 or 15 miles due north of our village—he called it Greentown, Illinois. And from Greentown Illinois, Ray Bradbury would say “Give me the pencil and paper. Because I can tell a story.”

Green Town Illinois just up the road from us where Jack Benny would first hone his craft saying “Give me a microphone. Because I can make you laugh.”

Benny and Bradbury off to larger stages; but there was still a feel of a village on that slow motion July day when the families all walked hesitantly, almost gingerly, up to the green to hear the speech. Looked at from an aerial view filtered through the lens of a sociologist; at that point in time: this was a middle class awakening suburb with a string of massive wealth that ran along that same Lake Michigan shoreline. These weren’t homes. These were estates. Everybody else—like us—had a house. And everybody else was—like us—very, very white. As Caucasian as could be.

Now the town is just another suburb where kids, some of color, drive their own BMW’s and Mercedes to high school.

But back then it still had echoes of the small town village it once was. Walking up to the town square that day could have been something lifted straight from a Frank Capra movie with Jimmy Stewart coming home from the war being the featured speaker.

And not the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King.

There wasn’t a lot of talking in our family as we walked up to the Green. My Uncle Frank, a true Chicago, new deal, Stevenson should have gotten it, intellectual guy who was a college administrator AND an old line liberal Democrat who also had a Purple Heart from WW II—did most of the talking. (This is back before the idea that liberals could be war heroes too had been erased from our collective national consciousness.) Uncle Frank was pretty excited. So was my Mom. My Dad, who was often mistaken for a CIA agent when my parents went to anti-war rallies—was quiet—preferring to wait for some facts.

I was a skinny, crew cut, big headed kid in a wide stripped t-shirt tossing a baseball up and down who looked a little like an extra on the set of “Leave it to Beaver.”

And so because this was a village. And because I’ve always had this curiosity about the way things work —when we got to the Green and my Mom put down a blanket—it was no surprise when I said, “I’m going to go look around!” And my Mom said, “Make sure you’re back before he starts to speak! And I said, “OK Bye!”

The afternoon had started to build to this sort of cautious festival feeling. There were folk singers. A warm-up speaker or two—all of whom Uncle Frank had talked about or knew. The crowd was building steadily

Perfect for the little stripe shirted, story telling boy, me— to go practice something he still does: being invisible.

Quiet children who don’t want to be seen have ways of blending into the background so that even the most observant of adults would have to do a double take to make sure they saw a kid over there.

So that’s what I did.

Being invisible does not mean being still. “Still” prompts suspicion. (“How come that kid over there ain’t moving!”?)

So what I would do to keep moving but still stay invisible was to toss my baseball up to about face level, and let it plop down in my mitt. All the grownups would see the baseball; but I was invisible. I could watch and hear everything they said.

Up near the front of the crowd, behind the podium and microphone was where I felt drawn. A thicker, deeper crowd there. Easier to get lost. More policemen than I had every seen so it had to be safe. My Dad and Mom wouldn’t mind.

Everyone seemed to be waiting for him. For “Martin Luther King.” Everyone said the name as if it were all one word. “MartinLutherKing.”

I stayed there in the middle of all this waiting part of the crowd. And the longer I stayed, the more invisible I became, I began to hear a word repeated I hadn’t heard at all from Uncle Frank on the walk up to the big show.

I’d catch the word at the end of sentence—because the emotion of the sentence was put on the one word. The word was “arrogant.” I thought I knew what it meant. But I didn’t hear the word a lot—if ever—so I wasn’t sure.

I’d hear the word, laden with some sort of emotion. Then I’d see the same kind of look my parents would give each other when they wanted to communicate something unpleasant without using words. That knowing arch of the eyebrow.

“Arrogant.”

I might have even heard somebody say “uppity.” That, I understood.

I was about to go back to our family blanket, when I saw the cars. And the cars held me riveted. There were SEVEN of them. All the biggest, blackest, shiniest Cadillac limousines—bigger than any car I’d ever seen driven by the rich people who lived on Sheridan Road. My eyes rounding up to become as big as my head. Cars were almost as interesting as baseball. I knew I supposed to be back with my parents—I was a kid who pretty much did what he was told—so I knew I probably should go back. But these were really, cool, cars! And I could slip back through the crowd like lightening once this enormous parade of black sheet metal rolled to a stop. I could not get my little 8 year old brain wrapped around the questions:

“Why does MartinLutherKing need so many cars? How did he get so many cars? Which car is he in?”

The cars rolled to a stop. And then what happened next held me in absolute awe. Out of each car came this parade of large black men, all dressed in the sharpest suites I had ever seen—all of them: looking every where. Scanning everything. Every face. Every sound, every nuance of movement. I had never, ever seen that kind of attention to ANYTHING as this strange little throng of maybe 20 African American men: set down right here. Right now. In the middle of 10,000 Caucasians’ moved as one to the podium.

Still as a rock now—the only movement the toss of my baseball—I then had my very first moment of sheer, overwhelming, breath stopping, heart pounding, stomach tightening panic: when I realized that this flying wedge of terrifying men—unlike any I had ever seen up close: was coming straight towards me.

I was standing right between this rolling thunder of men in suits and the microphone. I wondered if this is what it felt like to die. . . . .

With the first battalion of this wave 3 steps away—they were not moving fast—they were being very, very cautious as they rolled eyes always in motion; with the first man so close I could see the jagged shape of the red handkerchief in his breast pocket—it flashed into my 10 year old soul: that I understood what these men were doing.

They were looking around like that, staying so close together, never smiling, they were doing all that because all 20 or 100 or however many had gotten out of those cars were protecting someone,

They were guarding the man in the middle. The one I could see now. The one who looked so tired. I looked at that man and even I could see: that man is very, very tired. And I remember thinking, I wonder if he’ll take a nap when he gets home like my Dad likes to do sometimes on Sunday afternoons. That man with the tired eyes in the middle of the crowd. It did not occur to meat that instant that the man was MartinLutherKing. I was too scared for a thought that rational.

And then, just then my fear ratcheted up to yet another level that was totally new when I realized that the man in the middle of all this—whoever that man was: was the single, lone adult who —in the last hour of my wanderings—had actually seen me! He looked right at me! He looked right at me!

About 6 steps away. I was frozen. Even the baseball was hidden in the mitt.

Then here’s what happened.

The man at the very center of all this put up his right hand. His palm in my line of vision. Framed against an open, blue summer sky. And as he did this, as he raised has palm: everyone around him stopped moving! They just stopped. Right there. Like he had pulled some sort of magical brake that held them all.

Then that man with those bone tired eyes looked at me in a way that made me know that he had kids too.

Could that be how “arrogant” people look at kids? I sure didn’t think so. Of course I was only 8.

And while all those men in suits kept looking everywhere, surrounding him, protecting him, he said, “You play ball son?”

I nodded. Speech had totally left me.

Then he held out his hand—the one that that had stopped the parade—and here’s what he said:

He said, “Son. Give me the ball.”

I nodded. Handed it to him. He took it. Rubbed it in his hands, the same why I did, the players did, the same way anybody would. He closed his tired eyes for just a minute, I saw the faint lines of a smile when he said, “Got to make some time to play some catch.”

Then he tossed the ball back to me.

And thank God I caught it.

CONNECTING TO ACTION

1. Where do you see a need for UNITY in your life? With people? Organizations? Communities? Business? The exchange of goods and services.

2. If you were to pick one of those needs where you could add value, what would it be?

3. If you were to make that need for unity 10% less; what would be the result? For others? For you?

4. What exactly do you need to do to make that happen?

MY PERSONAL ACTION PLAN NOTES:

What do I need to do now to promote unity? Not in grand abstract terms. But concretely. What could I join together? Make larger?
What in my life is larger than me? And how can I help take care of it?

Maybe there was a hint of warm summer breezes passing inside the hospice at Weiss Memorial Hospital in Chicago when Marvin Isley, youngest of the musical brothers took his last breath at age 56.

The diabetes took his legs. He stopped performing in 1996. And he passed this Sunday morning.

Rising from the streets of Cincinnati to sing for the world, the band and their music changed with the times. This song was first recorded by his older brothers before Marvin even joined the band in 1973.

So. As another summer wind blows in off Lake Michigan; perhaps his bothers are singing this song for him now.

While somewhere else, this very second, one person is saying to another; “If you leave me a hundred times, a hundred times I’ll take you back.”

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