Author Archives: The Night Writer

Santa drives a tow-truck for Triple-A

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The Mall Diva went out of town overnight with some friends last Sunday, leaving her car parked on a St. Paul street outside the house they all had left from. Sunday evening St. Paul declared a snow emergency, and the owner of the home notified the Diva that her car could get towed if it wasn’t moved.

No problem. She called home and asked if someone could get her second key and drive over to her car and move it. Well, one problem: neither she or anyone here knew where that second key was. A messy search of all likely and unlikely places was fruitless (and keyless). Hmmm, what to do?

Just leave it and let the city tow it? No, the towing fee and the ensuing impound fees (since she wouldn’t be back until Tuesday morning) made the expense prohibitive (not to mention incredibly inconvenient).

The car has a keypad door lock; perhaps I could get a couple of people, we could go to the car, open the door, put it in neutral and push it into the driveway? No, the car couldn’t be shifted without a key in the ignition.

Wait a minute, we have family coverage from Triple-A for our cars! I called the company and inquired about getting a tow on a snowy night when there had to be lots of cars in ditches. Sure, they said, they could get a truck over there in three, maybe five, hours but they’d either have to tow the car to a garage or back to our house; they couldn’t tow it 25 feet into a private driveway.

So be it. Now we just had to hope that the AAA driver got to the car before the city driver did. As it was already about 10 p.m. we’d have to go to bed and wait until morning to see who won.

Waking up Monday morning, it was with Christmas-like anticipation that I went downstairs to see if there was something in the driveway. Hallelujah! Peace on Earth! Good will toward men! The Diva’s car was nestled in the driveway, in front of the garage door, leaving just enough room for me to back my car out and get around hers! Better yet, not even a parking ticket! Best of all, the towing was free under our AAA plan!

Others weren’t as fortunate.

The Nights before Christmas, 2007

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Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from Tiger Lilly,
Reverend Mother, Mall Diva and Night Writer!

(P.S. watch this space for an exciting announcement on December 31st!)

The end of an era

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I started playing Fantasy Football in 1984, back when Cliff Charpentier’s fantasy season preview was the Bible of preparation, even though it was little more than a compilation of players ranked by the previous season’s statistics. We tried to track our scores from tantalizing snippets on the evening news and had to run outside early Monday morning to grab the newspaper in order to check the box-scores by hand to find out if we’d won or lost. Walter Payton was my first-ever first-round draft pick and I finished out of the money that year.

Things have changed a lot since then. Fantasy Football is a billion dollar business and every channel with a football game but Fox runs continuous individual player stat lines across the bottom of the screen to help you keep track. Not that it’s necessary, because there are multiple services and websites that keep score in real time and I merely have to look over my shoulder at my computer screen to check the score of my fantasy game while I’m watching a real game. Oh, and for the third time in the last four years, my team is playing in my league’s Fantasy Bowl this weekend (as I write this I’m already down 12-0 since my opponent had Ben Roethlisberger playing Thursday night).

Win or lose, this is also going to be my last game.

It’s not that I’ve grown bored with my success or with the game. For the last 23 years I’ve been in at least one league every year, and often as the Commissioner. To some extent it’s been a year-round hobby as I’ve tried to stay on top of off-season moves and their implications and overall it’s been an interesting and often passionate pastime. I’ve always enjoyed the combination of luck and skill required to build a winning record: the pre-draft preparation and hunches on who were going to be the best players in the coming year, the way the best-laid plans could be thrown out the window by capricious injuries, and how you had to hustle to come up with alternate plans and players as a result. This year, however, it has all been more of a chore for me than entertainment.

To some extent it may be due to those nagging distractions called “life” getting in the way. My personal life has had a fair amount of tumult since last spring that left me with relatively little free time to dwell on football, and little inclination to do so when I could have. I think the biggest issue, however, has become the carnage on the field.

As I said, luck and injuries were a wild card in every season and something you simply expected (hoping that it wouldn’t happen to your team) and accepted as part of the randomness that made the game entertaining. Somewhere along the line, however, it started to work on me that these injuries weren’t just an inconvenience I had to work around, but something tangible, painful and even devastating to the real person involved. Not that the existence of fantasy football contributed to these injuries in any way, but it started to bother me that this was my “entertainment.”

Strangely enough, the turning point wasn’t a football injury. Last summer when pro wrestler Chris Benoit killed his family and himself there was a lot written about the wrestling culture and steroids and about how many wrestlers had died young or had serious personal problems. There was a lot of media hand-wringing about who was to blame — the promoters, the personality types drawn to being wrestlers, the lifestyle, etc. No one seemed to touch on what seemed to me to be the obvious: if people weren’t paying out big money to watch the shows, go to the events and buy the merchandise then there wouldn’t be the incentive for the performers to try to make a name and physique for themselves, travel 300 days a year and resort to drugs to buid themselves up and to ease or mask the pain and debilitations that came from being a human torpedo. As I self-righteously scoffed at wrestling fans for being enablers I had a chilling revelation of my own fandom.

No, it isn’t fantasy football that’s driving young men to seek fame and fortune in exchange for their bodies in the NFL (speaking as one who gave up a knee playing the game for free), but my attitude has shifted and I don’t know if will ever go back. I still enjoy watching the game and the big hits, but I can feel myself pulling back.

I made my “retirement” announcement to my league at the end of our regular season, before our play-offs, so the rest of the owners can start thinking about finding a replacement Commissioner now, when the season is at it’s peak, and not in the dog days of summer. I received a very gratifying email from one of the owners thanking me for the entertainment value I brought to the league (via weekly game summaries) and asking me to reconsider. In the message he said my passion and commitment would be missed and couldn’t be duplicated. I told him that I thought the passion and commitment may very well be duplicated by someone else — I just knew that I couldn’t duplicate it any longer, and that was the surest sign that it was time to hang it up.

It’s been a bit odd going through these final weeks as I’ve advanced through the play-offs. I’ve caught myself filing away mental notes about players for next year out of habit before realizing, wryly, there won’t be a next year. Oh well, wish me luck this weekend! I’ve got a 12-point deficit to make up and a decision to make of which two players to start between Ryan Grant, LenDale White and Brandon Jacobs, all while praying for good weather in New England so Randy Moss can catch three touchdown passes.

Other than that, it’s back to reality.

A stocking stuffer…

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“The Eternal Being, who knows everything and created the whole universe, became, not only man, but before that a baby, and before that a foetus inside a woman’s body. If you want to get the hang of it, think how you would like to become a slug or crab.”

— C.S. Lewis, from Mere Christianity

A ghost of Christmas programs past

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The Mall Diva’s Christmas program, Eclectica, went off as scheduled last Sunday before a packed house that included my mother who flew in from Missouri. The show was great with the only flubs being the charming ones that somehow make a show a more personal experience for everyone. Oh, and a couple of young angels from the manger scene got stage fright and refused to go on, but I’m sure it was noticeable only to their parents and the cast.

Of course, it all reminded me of the many Christmas programs I had participated in as a child, especially since I had my mom sitting next to me. The first one I can remember (barely) was when I was three or four and it must have been at an Air Base where my father was stationed. As I recall there wasn’t a stage as such, just something like a gymnasium floor with rows of seats in front of the performance area. I can remember sitting in a chair at the back of the “stage” while other acts performed before my group got to do our thing. I have no idea what our act was, but my parents caught my solo performance as I waited…casually picking my nose. Hearing about it often afterwards helped keep that in my memory banks.

My next solo was in kindergarten when our class of 12 performed “The Twelve Days of Christmas”. I was “Five golden rings!” I also couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket, which makes me think that perhaps my kindergarten teacher had some kind of twisted sense of humor. After all, she also assigned the kid with the lisp the part of “Seven swans a’swimming.” It’s safe to say we brought down the house.

But the one performance I’ve especially been thinking about the last few days came when I was in fourth, or perhaps fifth, grade, when my dad was out of the service and we were living in Indianapolis. It was at Harrison Hill Elementary, either in Mrs. Boaz’s class in 1968 or Mrs. Zinn’s in ’69. The Viet Nam war was going on and I remember our teacher, whichever one it was, telling us that a local soldier had written a poem (he may have even been a former student of hers), and that it had been set to music and that a group of us boys were going to sing the new song in the program. Pretty cool beans for a bunch of boys at that time, especially for my best friend Trey and I, because it meant we could wear our toy army helmets and bring our guns (I was especially proud of my Thompson submachine gun replica). We practiced that song for several weeks, and I remember it was a pretty grim one. It didn’t seem much like a Christmas song at all, but the teacher said that it was going to fit into the program.

This show was just going to be a passing reference as I recounted some other programs, but I remembered the opening lines of that song and started wondering who the author was and what ever had happened to him. With the power of Google I searched the opening line:

“Take a man and put him alone, put him 12,000 miles from home.”

To my amazement, I found the poem on several websites, including that of a sometime commenter here, joatmoaf’s I Love Jet Noise. None of them had an author name, but several included the citation that it was found in the pocket of a dead Marine in the Quang Tri Province, June of ’69. Joatmoaf listed the whole poem, although updated for Iraq. The first verse was pretty much how I remembered it, though:

Take a man and put him alone,
Put him twelve thousand miles from home.

Empty his heart of all but blood,
Make him live in sweat and mud.


The rest of the poem doesn’t register with me, though it does seem even grimmer than what I remembered. Definitely not Christmas program material. While I don’t remember all the words of the song we sung, I know they weren’t happy ones. I do remember what happened next. The emcee of the program was a sixth-grader, dressed as Santa Claus. He’d been a great and jolly Santa all evening, but this time he came out, as planned, and spoke to us “soldiers” kneeling on the stage. He said that once upon a time there had been a young family with a new baby that hadn’t even been able to find a room in an inn and had had to give birth to their son in a stable. He said that even though things looked bad for them, they had had hope. When he finished his speech we exited backstage while an adult came up. As I led our small group down some steps I heard the adult say that the author of the poem was in the audience that night, and I heard a loud round of applause. I never did see or meet him. The show continued with Christmas carols about the newborn king.

Viewed through the fog of nearly 40 years, it almost seems like another world. Indeed, a world where kids could wear army gear and bring toy guns into the building, and where a Christmas program could mention the Savior and sing songs about His birth. It is also almost surreal that I could have been that close to the origins of what some might consider almost an urban legend in our internet age. The dead marine in Quang Tri might be apocryphal, but I remember what our teacher told us and I remember singing that song, and I remember the soldier being introduced, even if I never saw him.

I wish I had been able to shake his hand.

Ding…dong…ding….dong…Enough!

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Among Christmas carols, I’ve always rather liked the “Carol of the Bells” song, either with words or as an instrumental. It’s not an especially spiritual song, but it’s catchy and pleasant in a way that “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” isn’t (and whatever we’ve done to deserve this song, hasn’t the statute of limitations expired by now?). I’ve noticed, however, how over-exposed “Carol of the Bells” is getting as it’s been co-opted by TV commercials.

I’ve heard it many times with different commercials but can only remember three specifically: the two Garmin commercials, which I kind of like (love the “There’s that moose again!” and “Got a unibrow” lines) and the Hyundai “Holi-duh” ad because it is so nauseatingly obnoxious that I made a point of remembering who the advertiser was so I could never buy their cars. I knew there were others, but I couldn’t remember the products (a sign of bad advertising) so I Googled the subject so I could list them in a post I wanted to write.

It turns out, someone has beat me to it. Check out Christine’s post over at The Motley Yule. She says just about everything I wanted to say and more.

Picking up the Bill

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An interesting, behind-the-scenes tidbit from The Writer’s Almanac about the Bill of Rights:

It was on this day (December 15) in 1791 that the Bill of Rights was adopted by the United States, thanks in part to a man who hasn’t gotten a lot of credit, George Mason. He was a lifelong friend of George Washington’s who wasn’t interested in politics, but when Washington was named Commander of the Continental Army, George Mason reluctantly took over his friend’s seat on the Virginia legislature. And then Mason was assigned by chance to the committee to write the new state constitution.

Mason had read the philosopher John Locke, and he liked Locke’s idea that all people are born with certain rights, and that government’s purpose should be to protect those rights. George Mason believed that the best way to protect those rights would be to list them in the constitution itself. And so he put together Virginia’s “Declaration of Rights,” the first government document in history that specified the absolute rights of individuals. Mason’s ideas about rights and freedom influenced a 25-year-old legislator named James Madison, who passed them along to his friend Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson would go on to use Mason’s ideas in his own draft of the Declaration of Independence.

Mason was asked to participate in the Constitutional Convention after the war, but he disagreed with the other delegates on numerous issues, especially slavery, which he thought should be outlawed in the new constitution. He fought for the inclusion of a list of rights, like the “Declaration of Rights” in the Virginia Constitution, but his idea for a bill of rights failed by a wide margin.

And so, when it came time to sign to the new U.S. Constitution, George Mason was one of the only men there who refused. He said, “I would sooner chop off [my] right hand than put it to the Constitution as it now stands.” His decision ruined his friendship with George Washington. The two men never called on each other again. But he hoped that his protest would encourage an eventual passage of a bill of rights, and it did. His former protege, James Madison, introduced the Bill of Rights into the first session of Congress in 1789, and Madison used Virginia’s Declaration of Rights as the model.

Even with the Bill of Rights, the U.S. Constitution didn’t provide full citizenship to blacks or women, among others, and it has had to be amended again and again over the years. But when we think of what it means to have a free country, most of our ideas about the meaning of freedom come from those first 10 amendments, adopted on this day in 1791, which include the freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, and the right to a fair trial. George Mason died in 1792, a year after those freedoms and rights became law.

I’ve heard this story — or parts of it, anyway — before, and I’ve posted about this as well, but the history stirs me. There are well-known heroes from the founding of our country such as Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, et al who capture the imagination and even inspire some of us to think about what it would have been like to be so-and-so, or to aspire to that kind of historical significance for ourselves in our own time.

My own aspiration, however, would be to be more like a George Mason, where the Cause or the Idea lives on even if one’s name fades from the knowledge of all but the most scholarly. I imagine Mason, inspired by the Vision of what could be and the unique opportunity at-hand, devoting his time, energy and treasure to the pursuit of creating not just a new kind of government but a new kind of human existence. I see him working with the great minds and characters of the day to bring the concept to fruition, only at the last, to see the vision defaced and even crippled.

How long, I wonder, did he pray and agonize over his decision to sign or not sign the Constitution? Or was it a simple decision of honor and conviction that hardly required a moment’s hesitation? Think of the pressures put on him by the other delegates, many who may have shared his views, but urged him to be “practical” or to be satisfied with what was already a remarkable achievement, or tried to discourage him from his “meaningless” protest that couldn’t stop what was already decided! What would I have done in that circumstance? What would you have done?

What difference would his signature then have made in our lives today? What our lives would be like if so much of what we now take for granted had not been enumerated, and what would happen should these ever cease to be defended. Let us think of what is at stake if we are encouraged to be “practical” or urged to refrain from our meaningless protests.

Nothing to see here

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Driving to a dentist appointment and then to work this morning I heard two news reports on KFAN summarizing the weekend shootings in Colorado. Each time the report said that the shooter, Matthew Murray, died of a self-inflicted gunshot. No mention was made of the role New Life church member and volunteer security guard Jeanne Assam played in preventing further carnage by using her personal sidearm to wound and knock down Murray. On the one hand, it’s probably a good thing for her that she has already drifted from the news (and that she take comfort in knowing she didn’t kill anyone), given the treatment she’d already experienced from her unintended notoriety.

Later, going onto CNN.com and FOXnews.com, however, I discovered that not only had Ms. Assam disappeared from the front page, so had the entire story. A search of both sites turned up several stories from December 10 and 11 and one or two from the 12th but nothing posted today. Yes, time and the news march on and there’s literally fresh meat every day, but it sure seems as if this story faded fast, especially when you think of the ongoing coverage that followed the recent Omaha mall shooting (there’s still stories appearing this week) and the earlier Virginia Tech massacre. VT in particular brought many ongoing articles about the killer’s background, the victims and the vulnerability of the public. Now it seems, for the most part, that the “public’s right to know” is being under-served in comparison. That’s a good thing if it means that the media has learned to tread more respectfully around the lives of people suddenly thrust into tragedy who now find their suffering part of the nation’s entertainment menu.

Or are there other reasons? Think of it, you’ve got a madman “loner”, multiple guns, “assault rifles,” revenge motives, dead white women (always good for two or three nights of headlines and at least one Special Report on Fox) and beautiful blondes — you’d think Colorado would be covered with TV vans, news choppers and producers looking for anyone to sign away the movie rights. And all of this while there’s a TV-writer’s strike going on. Is the story being dismissed with a shrug because mass shootings are now so commonplace? That shouldn’t be an issue this time because you’ve got the perfect “man bites dog” novelty angle — an armed private citizen stopped the killer.

Say, you don’t think this has quickly faded because an armed private citizen … nah, it can’t be that.

It’s probably just as well. First, Jeanne Assam was mugged by the media and her former employer (isn’t it funny how chatty the Minneapolis Police Department is getting on personnel matters and when slandering innocent victims of crimes like Mark Loesch) and then Youth With a Mission (YWAM) gets called a cult in the most recent story on the Fox site:

Several former missionaries have accused YWAM (generally pronounced “Why-Wam”) of being a cult that uses brainwashing methods.

Rick Ross, founder of the Ross Institute of New Jersey, which tracks cults, does not agree.

“Youth With a Mission is not a cult,” he said. “However, I have received very serious complaints about Youth With a Mission from former staffers, family members and also others concerned, such as Christian clergy.”

Rev. Jonathan Bonk, the director of the Overseas Ministries Study Center in New Haven, Conn., said that missions like those YWAM offers appeal to those looking for something other than the consumerist lifestyle.

“They want to be attached to a cosmic project that gives their little lives some kind of sense of purpose or meaning,” Bonk said.

“They want to be attached to a cosmic project that gives their little lives some kind of sense of purpose or meaning.” Great, first smear a hero, then sneer at the victims. Matthew Murray writes “You Christians have got it coming” and from the media pews comes a hearty “Amen.”

To give credit where it is due, the Denver Post has done a very good job of developing the story and bringing additional information to light, including a story that described how Murray was able to get his weapons and included a report of an earlier incident he had had with staffers at New Life Church. The paper also reports on how one of the staffers killed at YWAM had once been as spooky as Murray, and has a touching story about how the Christian families of the killer and the victims had reached out to each other.

Finally, I will refer you to the Anderson Cooper interview with a wounded witness of the New Life shooting that also includes a very interesting discussion with Murray’s one-time roommate at YWAM.

Update:

Here’s another good article from the Denver Post that looks at more of Assam’s past than just the Minneapolis PD incident.

Meme!!! Mwhahahahaha!!

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My sister, the Mall Diva, tagged me with the ‘7 Things That May Or May Not Be True About Me’ meme. So, let’s get started:

1. I’m currently a purple belt in Tae Kwon Do.
2. I’m trying to clean my room.
3. But I don’t have a convenient place to put my weapons arsenal.
4. I have two loud birds that very rarely shut up.
5. I love sky diving.
6. I’m an undiscovered writer.
7. I like being alone so I can sing as loud as I want without anyone hearing or caring.

Now it’s up to you to deduce which of these are true, and which ones I just put down off the top of my head. Have fun!

Ciao for now!