Category Archives: Night Writer

Vorpal blades and manxome foes, Part 3 – of Tumtums and other trees

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 by the Night Writer

He took his vorpal sword in hand,

long-time the manxome foe he sought –

So rested he by the Tumtum tree,

And stood awhile in thought.

Most people who know me would likely say that I’m a pretty positive guy, strong in my faith. I’ve experienced many miracles in my life, including healing,  and I’ve learned to wield the “sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God” (Eph. 6:17). I’ve been blessed to have been used to pray and heal others, including a couple of dramatic cases, one of which was a true matter of life and death.  In fact, thinking back on it now, I can say that there are two people alive today because God used me to pray; once to open a barren womb and once to stop the effects of a massive stroke. Those are stories for another time, because I also have to say that despite these experiences, I found myself feeling low and more than a little alone after the Jabberwock announced, “Game on.”

The lowest point actually came between the time I had the biopsy done and when I got the results. It was a Friday night and I made the mistake of entertaining the jubjubs and bandersnatches late at night before going to bed. One of the factoids I came across was that if left untreated, prostate cancer metastasizes easily into the lymph nodes and into the bones, especially in the lower back and hips, and once into the bones is often fatal. My father ultimately died of lymphoma, detected via a bone biopsy,  and the very reason I had gone in for a physical in the first place was because I’d had chronic pain in my lower back and hips for a year that just never seemed to go completely away.

When I read that, well past my bedtime, I suddenly pictured cancer having got into my bones and lymphatic system because I had ignored the pain for so long. It was a fitful night, to say the least and I was not a jolly and well-rested fellow on Saturday morning. As I prayed scriptures of peace and healing that morning something strange happened. It was as if I dozed off for a few minutes where I was seated, which wouldn’t have been unusual given the lack of sleep and my stress level. The thing is, when I “came to” I was at once at peace. I had the definite sense that I had been somewhere else for a few minutes, but I had no recollection of where or what had been said, only that my attitude was completely changed. And as I went about my morning I started to think of reasons — some pretty obvious unless you’re trying to think clearly after midnight — why the pain in my legs and hips couldn’t have been bone related. As the day went on, my outlook continued to brighten, perhaps because I was such a clever fellow.

Then Sunday morning came around and during the praise and worship part of our service I suddenly had a picture in my mind of two trees in the Garden of Eden. One was the tree of life and the other was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. At that moment I realized that I had been spending all my time swinging from the branches of the wrong tree. I had turned to the knowledge that I had from my work in healthcare, to what I had found on-line and from other resources, and been bounced around pretty good. Not that it was all evil — it is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil after all — but there isn’t any peace in that knowledge, even when I had thought I’d “figured out” the fear that had disquieted me the day before.

I also realized that I while I had had knowledge of the Tree of Life, I had not been drawing on my understanding. That is, while I had been embracing God’s word, I had not been dwelling on His character and on the things He has done in my life.  I had talked earlier in the morning with my pastor about what I had gone through and what I thought I had realized. He was standing near me after I had this revelation so I walked over to him while the music was still playing and with a smile said, “You know, there were two trees in the garden.” He must have understood what I meant because when we moved into a different part of the service he asked me to come up front and handed me a New Living Translation and asked me to read Psalm 139, verses 1 through 18 to the congregation.

O LORD, you have examined my heart and know everything about me. You know when I sit down or stand up. You know my thoughts even when I’m far away. You see me when I travel and when I rest at home. You know everything I do. You know what I am going to say even before I say it, LORD. You go before me and follow me. You place your hand of blessing on my head. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too great for me to understand! I can never escape from your Spirit! I can never get away from your presence! If I go up to heaven, you are there; if I go down to the grave, you are there. If I ride the wings of the morning, if I dwell by the farthest oceans, even there your hand will guide me, and your strength will support me. I could ask the darkness to hide me and the light around me to become night—but even in darkness I cannot hide from you. To you the night shines as bright as day. Darkness and light are the same to you. You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit me together in my mother’s womb. Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex! Your workmanship is marvelous—how well I know it. You watched me as I was being formed in utter seclusion, as I was woven together in the dark of the womb. You saw me before I was born. Every day of my life was recorded in your book. Every moment was laid out before a single day had passed. Precious are your thoughts about me, O God. They cannot be numbered! I can’t even count them; they outnumber the grains of sand! And when I wake up, you are still with me!

“That is the Tree of Life, John,” he said when I finished and returned to my seat. From that morning on I no longer had any fear about what was going to happen, even when I received word the following week that the biopsy was positive. I pursued the options that were before me with peace, supported by my wife who said she would agree on any course of action I chose that brought me peace. I smiled when I came across John 16:15, remembering the Tree of Life: “You did not choose Me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit, and that your fruit should remain, that whatever you ask the Father in My name He may give you.”

 

Next: Snicker-snack

 

Related Posts:

Vorpal blades and manxome foes, Part 1 – ‘Twas brillig

Vorpal blades and manxome foes, Part 2 – Jubjubs and frumious bandersnatches 

Vorpal blades and manxome foes, Part 3 – Tumtums and other trees

Vorpal blades and manxome foes, Part 4 – Snicker-snack

Vorpal blades and manxome foes, Part 2 – jubjubs and frumious bandersnatches

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by the Night Writer

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son

The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!”

We each have things that we fear. Some of these we’ll name, others are too scary to speak out-loud, or perhaps belong to a black grab-bag of things we don’t want to think about, let alone name. Let’s call the nameless and numberless, “Jabberwock”. Made up of myth, rumor and the darkest corners of our imagination, the Jabberwock is a shape-shifter. At once mysterious and familiar,  its features are indistinct and take different forms with different people, always representing that which lurks just outside the light of the campfire. Perhaps you know it.

That may seem too primeval for our modern era of science and reason. Surely we are past the time of clutching talismans and muttering incantations to protect us now that we have the internet, right?

The name of my Jabberwock floated on its spectral breath after I hung up the phone that evening last summer. Cancer. That beast has stalked my family for generations. Parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and other relations. My father’s brother has prostate cancer, and my father had it and then  ultimately died of lymphoma. “Beware the Jabberwock, my son.”

I know the jaws that bite, the claws that catch. In the days following the call I would also discover, however,  that the Jabberwock doesn’t hunt alone.

“Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun

The frumious Bandersnatch.”

Leading up to the biopsyI threw myself into research, following Google-trails through tulgey woods and brambles both to bastions of higher learning and to beacons of alternative therapies and secrets.  I set out looking for hope, but for every bright possibility there was twice the discouragement. Much of the information, even from the experts – such as the need for and effectiveness of the PSA test – was even contradictory.

Then there were the treatment options, should the biopsy come back positive. I read up on all the options, from the least intrusive to the most radical and the good things about each option would sound really good, but the bad things that went along with each sounded really bad. It looked as if there were no way out of the box I was in that didn’t have significant risks and ongoing quality of life issues. I would start my day in prayer and find peace, only to be taunted by Jubjub birds and having that peace leached away by frumious Bandersnatches with every mouse-click during the day.

And the biopsy came back positive.

Next: Of Tum-tums and other trees

Related Posts:

Vorpal blades and manxome foes, Part 1 – ‘Twas brillig

Vorpal blades and manxome foes, Part 2 – Jubjubs and frumious bandersnatches 

Vorpal blades and manxome foes, Part 3 – Tumtums and other trees

Vorpal blades and manxome foes, Part 4 – Snicker-snack

Vorpal blades and manxome foes, Part 1 – ’twas brillig

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by the Night Writer

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe.

It was late evening on a late summer’s day and golden light still shone through the windows like a warm embrace. I’d worked late and was eating a belated supper my wife had left in the oven for me when the phone rang.

“John, it’s Dr. P-. How are you doing?”

“Well, I thought I was doing pretty well but since you’re calling me at home late on a weeknight I’m guessing you’re not calling to ask me my ideas on how to solve the Twins’ bullpen issues.”

“Ahhh…heh…no. I’ve been going over your tests from your physical and wanted to share the results with you.”

“Ohhhh-kay.”

Dr. P- proceeded to tell me that my blood pressure was terrific, my cholesterol was so low that it barely registered on the chart, and that my triglycerides were a bit high but not unmanageable.

“Then there’s your PSA,” he said, “do you know what that is?”

“Prostate Specific Antigen,” I said. “My father had prostate cancer so I’m familiar with the PSA test.”

“Ah, your father, yes. Um, well, your PSA level is 8.6, which wouldn’t be high for a man in his 70s, but for someone your age…”

“53.”

“Yes, for someone 53, the PSA should be 3.5 or lower.”

“So….”

“So I’d like to schedule you for a biopsy with a urologist so we can investigate this a bit more and decide if anything needs to be done.”

“Ohhh-kay.”

We discussed further details and I put down the phone. Still sitting at the dinner peninsula in our kitchen I looked out the window into our front yard. Ash, poplar and maple were still glowing in the setting sun, though perhaps the light was a bit darker now. The windows were open and I could hear children, a lawn mower, distant traffic … and the  susurrant burbling  of a beast sliding through the shrubberies of Eden.

Beware the Jabberwock, my son The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

Related Posts: Vorpal blades and manxome foes, Part 1 – ‘Twas brillig Vorpal blades and manxome foes, Part 2 – Jubjubs and frumious bandersnatches  Vorpal blades and manxome foes, Part 3 – Tumtums and other trees Vorpal blades and manxome foes, Part 4 – Snicker-snack The Letterman

She was a black-haired beauty with big, dark eyes

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by the Night Writer

Just in time for Thanksgiving, the real Bob Seger is now on iTunes in epic fashion, rolling me away with a 26-song collection entitled “Ultimate Hits: Rock and Roll Never Forgets” for just $9.99. And just like Bob when he climbed out of his Corvette to watch the long train roll by in the classic video, I’ve had some time to think about his music and my life.

I liked Seger well enough when I was growing up but I wasn’t necessarily a huge fan. Perhaps it was easy to take him for granted because he was so ubiquitous.  It seemed as if he always had a song on the charts and playing in the background of most of my memories from my teens and into my 30s. They were songs of wheels and women, of loving and leaving, and of doing whatever it takes to have a good time that became an American bushido of masculinity for an era. The style was gritty but not too deep and it was a match made in Marketing when Chevy hitched it’s truck line to the Detroit-born and bred Seger’s “Like a Rock” hit, almost turning the song into a parody of itself. It did sell a lot of quarter- and half-ton trucks, though, and Seger sold a million tons of records as Americans found a certain resonance, real or hoped-for, in the words and images.

Yeah, I could picture myself taking a look down that westbound road and making a choice to get up with the sun and be gone with the wind all the way to Katmandu (but not to Fire Lake); of being rock hard and hard-rocking, and thinking that while I wasn’t good-looking I wasn’t shy and wasn’t afraid to look a girl in they eye, even if they all wanted to change me

Somehow it seems like yesterday, but it was long ago.

Because somewhere along the line I wanted to change, needed to change, and met the woman who could do that, the woman I could love and never leave, the one who still causes me to sit up at night marveling at the traces she’s left on my soul.

And those, my friends, are the memories that truly make me a wealthy soul. And I still believe in my dreams.

 For my money, “Like a Rock”  is one of the most creative and well-crafted music videos of all time. Though Seger was in his 40s when the video was released, it resonates more for me in my 50s. 

 

10 years ago, and 10 years on

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by the Night Writer

Ten years ago I wasn’t blogging, but I was writing. On Sunday, September 16 I published the first essay below –  “When the Towers Fall” – in the monthly handout I prepared for our men’s ministry at church. It was based on my observations of the past few days and the role of faith and biblical understanding in those circumstances. A month later I followed up with a second essay, taking off from the words of a certain televangelist to examine the nature and purpose of judgment. I share these two essays below for a picture of that time. Later this week I’ll come back and share how I think things have – or haven’ t – changed for me and my nation in the intervening years.

When the Towers Fall

Ultimately, America’s secular façade crumbled even before its material symbols collapsed. I first turned on my radio – and heard the first words regarding Tuesday’s disaster – moments before the second tower was struck. The voices of the national news team were already urging Americans to pray for the safety of those involved. It sounded almost glib at first, but as the unreal became real and the horror increased by the minute, the references became more heartfelt, even desperate.

As our true helplessness and vulnerability became apparent, the call to pray was in every report and every story. And pray we did: alone, with our families, and in special services and vigils that themselves became news. All of this flying in the face of a culture and media that has said for years that faith and divine intervention are, at best, inappropriate if not impossible. It must have been like discovering that the kooky old aunt you’ve been keeping in the attic is the only one who knows where the family silver is buried.

But which is the true picture of America? Are we a secular society that merely pays lip service to faith when a crisis looms, or are we a nation of quiet faithful who allow ourselves to be cowed by society until circumstances give us a chance to break out? I know how our attackers would describe us.

Continue reading →

I am….Batman?

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By the Night Writer

Biblically speaking, the eagle and the bat don’t have much in common, other than you’re not supposed to eat either one (check out Leviticus and Dueteronomy). Aside from that the bat receives no mention while the eagle is referred to 25 times in the KJV, though not always positively. Yet culturally and spiritually we view the eagle as a regal and majestic bird, one that can set its wings and fly above the storm. Bats, if you think about them at all, are kind of icky.

I started thinking about this the other day when our pastor said that there are five areas that make up our life and they are, in order of importance: Spirit, Soul (our mind, will and emotions), Body, Social and Financial. The world’s wisdom, however, reverses this order. The basis of this understanding is the main part of a teaching I’ve done at Red Wing, but not the point of this post. Instead, my pastor said you have to look at the world’s priorities upside down as if you were a bat. As he said it, I suddenly got several bat-related pictures in my head.

First it occurred to me that bats really can’t see much at all so they don’t really “look at” anything. Instead, they navigate by sound. That is, they send a noise out ahead of them and steer according to the sound that returns to them, trusting they won’t crash into anything and that they’ll find food. Immediately I remembered that the Bible tells us we are to walk by faith (“the evidence of things not seen”), not sight. Secondly, i remembered that “faith comes by hearing”.

If we set our course by sight we can be led astray by shiny things that may not be good for us, like bugs drawn to a backyard zapper. If, however, we spoke the word of God out of our mouths and ordered our lives by what we heard, we’d be on the path to getting those five priorities in the proper order.

Of course, scripture also quotes Jesus as saying, “I do what I see my Father doing.” That implies sight, but – since God changes not – isn’t it easier to see what God is doing by looking at what He has done, using the word that is in our hearts, in our mouths, and ultimately in our ears?

Finally, the majestic eagle is an apex predator, which means it is mainly on the “look out” for it’s next meal. Many of those we would look at and admire – actors, athletes, politicians – and try to emulate are all in it for themselves. A bat’s next meal, however, is likely be a mess of mosquitos – something that actually helps us.

Hanging upside down is something the world thinks is weird or abnormal, yet it’s perfectly “normal” for a bat, just as I want those five priorities in their proper order to be the norm in my life. Yes, it’s tempting to want to soar like an eagle, but as for me — to the bat cave!

Elections in the steroid era

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by the Night Writer

Baseball may be America’s pastime, but America’s game is politics, and it’s played for keeps.

It was all very exciting when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa were in a tight race to break Babe Ruth’s single-season homerun record, and when Barry Bonds sledge-hammered his way toward Hank Aaron’s career record. Many people cheered as the dramatic numbers climbed higher and if anyone scratched his head and wondered outloud at the unusual displays of power and hat-size they were repeatedly assured that the game was clean and these were merely exceptional athletes plying their trade at the highest levels. After all, we were told repeatedly that Sosa, McGwire, Bonds and other sluggers of the era had never tested positive for steroids. Of course, that spotless record was likely the result that they had never been effectively tested for steroids. In fact, for a number of years Performance Enhancing Drugs weren’t even specifically against the rules in a game that has long winked at “gamesmanship”

Similarly, cheating in politics is as American as apple pie. Recently we’ve seen a series of extremely close political elections with enough curious counts and results that you’d of had to have botox injections to keep from raising an eyebrow. And as the Minnesota legislature debates a voter-ID bill requiring a state-authorized photo ID in order to vote, we again have those who claim the process is clean and that large-scale fraud has never been proven. As was the case with baseball, though, there has barely been an effort made to try to prevent it.

“Well, that’s just baseball,” you might say. “That doesn’t mean politics is like that.” Of course not. Baseball players might be willing to cheat in order to gain fame, glory and riches, but politicians are above such tawdry motivations and designs. Baseball players cheat because a slugger can pull down $20 million a year or more, but that amount is bush league when you consider the amount of money that can be gained in furthering an agenda, feathering a nest and favoring your friends. Influence is much more valuable than an MVP.

If you doubt that, look at the amount of money generated just to gain the influence in the first place. The recent Wisconsin Supreme Court election – a race that would normally be reported in box-score agate type – generated some $3.6 million in outside political contributions. In baseball, $3.6 million barely gets you an average outfielder, or a good lefty set-up man. In politics, a good lefty set-up men may arguably be an even more valuable commodity to some.

Testing for steroids, and verifying voters, won’t eliminate the desire to gain an advantage, but it does make it easier for those scoring at home to have faith in the results. Major League Baseball dragged its feet on drug-testing because neither the owners or the players really wanted to look too closely at the situation. The owners liked the high ratings and interest that homerun races generated and the players liked the rewards that came with age and gravity-defying feats. It was the fans’ distaste and sense of injustice – and potential alienation – that forced action. Major League Politics drags its feet because neither party wants to change a system they’ve used to their advantage in the past.

Just as in baseball, though, the blatant hypocrisy and questionable results risk alienating the “fans”. The steroid era has cast doubt on the records and statistics of a generation of players, calling into question the validity of many records and tainting even those who played clean and diminishes the game overall. The same thing is happening with our election process. It is up to us fans to keep the pressure on if we want to see integrity in America’s pastime and America’s game.

Take the Highway to Hell and make a left at the Road to Serfdom

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by the Night Writer

The inane political bickering over spending cuts that do about as much good as an ice-scraper on the side of the iceberg that hit the Titanic, a debt-to-GDP-ratios of around 140% and yesterday’s S&P downgrade of the country’s bond rating made me think of an analogy that I shared on Mr. D’s blog the other day:

A car is barreling down the highway as the driver fiddles with the seat heater while balancing a Big Mac, fries and large Coke in his lap and staring at the GPS screen instead of at the road ahead. Meanwhile everyone else in the car is arguing loudly over what music to play through the high-tech, 12-speaker sound system and whether it’s too hot or too cold in the compartment, and who gets to drive next.

Suddenly they realize there’s a brick wall ahead. What to do? Hitting the brakes hard will toss people about, make them spill their drinks, bump their heads and hurt their feelings. Or you can just hit the wall. Either way, the car is going to come to a stop.

One option gives you chance to perhaps survive and eventually drive around the obstruction. The other results in a litte white marker beside the road, commemorating what once had been.

The choice is between the unacceptable and the unthinkable. And some just say, “Go faster.”

Don’t put all the blame on the current driver, though. The car turned down this road a long, long time ago and no one paid attention to the Dead End sign. There have been several drivers since then, and some have had more of a lead foot than others but no one’s ever seriously tried to change direction, though we have veered from the ditch occasionally.

It really is an old story, so old that few alive today can even remember it being any other way. How old? Check out the cartoon below I just saw today and that comes from a 1934 issue of the Chicago Tribune and it’s depiction of “young pinkos from Columbia and Harvard”, what looks like two versions of Stalin (the Road to Serfdom was thought to lead to Communism, not Socialism then) and the “Plan of Action for the U.S.: Spend! Spend! Spend under the guise of recovery – bust the government – blame the capitalists for the failure – junk the Constitution and declare a dictatorship.”

1934 cartoon blog

A trip back in time that made my future

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by the Night Writer

The reports last week were that President Obama and his family will be vacationing in historic Colonial Williamsburg, a village that has been preserved as a living museum recognizing the era of our Founding Fathers. Whether any of these Founding Fathers would recognize what their government has become is an open debate. Nevertheless, the mention of Williamsburg in the news caused me to at first casually, and then significantly, remember my own visit there in February of 1980.

I was working at my first job out of college then and my company sent me there for a week long training program. It was a trip back in time, and like time travel itself, seemed almost impossible. To get to Williamsburg from Phoenix I had to catch a 12:30 a.m. red-eye flight out of Sky Harbor, bound for D.C. Of course, it’s almost impossible to traverse the midwest without being sucked into O’Hare in Chicago, were I spent an hour and a half layover. Even D.C. wasn’t the final leg in my air odyssey: I then boarded a small, twin-prop puddle-jumper transport that looked like a pregnant guppy for the hop to Newport News. I remember that the entire backside of the aircraft opened like a drawbridge in order to load and unload luggage, and that when I took my window seat it appeared as if the wing propeller was spinning just 6″ away from my window.

After the “flight” (which felt more like driving the Baja 1000 in a buckboard) I had a final bus ride to get to Williamsburg, arriving at my hotel — one of the restored colonial inns — about 2 p.m. EST, only to find that my room wouldn’t be ready until 3:00 p.m. Whereupon I collapsed onto an overstuffed sofa in front of a large, blazing fireplace which, combined with my fatigue, soon had me stupefied.

Even with such a benumbing start, the week turned out to be very interesting and stimulating and the team I was thrown in with wound up winning honors for the week on our multi-phase communications strategy and presentation. One of my teammates would later that year offer me a position on her staff, a job that required me to move from Phoenix, Arizona to Minneapolis, MN (actually, my first apartment was in Eagan, roughly a mile from where my future wife was living at the time, though we wouldn’t meet for another six years). In the intervening years it had never occurred to me just how significant my trip to Williamsburg turned out to be. In those days I pictured myself moving around every couple of years to different jobs in different cities to find the place where I would eventually settle. I had mental lists of working in places such as Denver and Boston — lists where Minneapolis and St. Paul never appeared. Yet there I was in Williamsburg and as a result of that trip I found myself, in June of ’80, dodging tornadoes on Hwy. 90 through South Dakota and southern Minnesota, heading toward Mary-Tyler-Moore-land and my destiny.

I had no idea that my wife, children and ministry were waiting up ahead for me. Certainly none of those three were high on my list of priorities at the time. It apparently was on Someone’s mind, however, and that Someone was probably laughing at me grumping my way through that red-eye flight, the Chicago lay-over and the queasy puddle-jumper. I may have been asking myself, “Why do I have to go through all of this?”

I certainly wasn’t paying attention when the loving response came: “Because.”

And now I wouldn’t change a thing.

A beard, a club and a desperate attempt to survive St. Patrick’s Day

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by the Night Writer

What’s a little regurgitation on St. Patrick’s Day? Here’s a favorite piece describing the adventures – and misadventures – of my first St. Patrick’s Day in college.

I don’t think there will ever be a St. Patrick’s Day when I don’t think about my first semester of college when I enrolled in the Spring term at the University of Missouri-Rolla campus. UMR is mainly an engineering college but it was close to where I lived at the time and a convenient way for me to knock out some general liberal arts credits before transferring to the main Mizzou campus in Columbia.

St. Patrick’s “Day” was actually a 10-day party at UMR. The campus was about 90% male then, almost all in grueling engineering classes that seemed to require binge drinking in order to cope. The reason St. Pat is such a big deal at UMR is because he is deemed to be the patron saint of engineers for having driven the snakes from Ireland and thereby creating the first worm drive (engineering humor). The rites and festivities of the season were under the auspices of the St. Pat’s Board: upper-classmen (some I think were in their 30s) elected by their fraternities, eating clubs and campus organizations. For most of the year their duties seemed to be based around regular “meetings” marked by drinking and carousing. Come March, however, they were especially prominent in their filthy green coats (part of their semi-secret initiation rites) as they enforced the rules and protocols of the holiday (for those familiar with the St. Paul Winter Carnival – especially in the older days – think green Vulcans).

Part of the tradition was that all freshmen males were to have beards in the week or so leading up to St. Pat’s, and were to carry shillelaghs (an Irish cudgel). Most people think of shillelaghs as being a bit like walking sticks, but at UMR there were specific requirements: the shillelagh had to be at least two-thirds the height of the student and at least one-third his weight, and it had to be cut from a whole tree with at least some of the roots showing. The punishment for being caught beardless by a Board Member (and they usually traveled in packs of two or more) was to have your face painted green. The penalty for being without your shillelagh was to be thrown into Frisco Pond. Frisco Pond was actually the town’s sewage lagoon, but was called Frisco Pond because the St. Pat’s Board of 1927 rerouted the Frisco railroad into the pond after one of their meetings. I’m sure it seemed like a good idea to them at the time.

Fortunately I was able to cultivate my first beard, red and wispy as it was, and I cut myself a suitable cudgel. Carrying books and a shillelagh of the stated dimensions was a challenge, and even more so when certain professors wouldn’t allow them into class, meaning they had to be stacked in the hallways and guarded because Board members liked nothing better than to snatch unattended shillelaghs and then wait for their rightful owners to appear — followed by a honking procession to Frisco Pond. (I did mention the campus was 90% male and fueled by alcohol, right? During St. Pat’s week the campus looked like No Name City from “Paint Your Wagon.”)

The reason we carried cudgels was in case a Board member approached you with a rubber snake and demanded that you “kill” it. This generally meant pounding on the snake with your cudgel until the Board member (not you) got tired. I weighed about 170 then; you do the math as to what my shillelagh weighed, minimum. I was fortunate to go largely unnoticed (as unnoticed as a guy carrying a tree can be) through most of this period. This was especially remarkable given that one of my friends from my hometown was on the Board. Toward the end of the week, however, he came up to me in the dining hall. “Red,” (for my beard) he said, “I think I see a snake.” With chants of “snake! snake! snake!” I was led outside and my “friend” tossed said snake on the ground. It landed, however, in a flower bed. “Freshman! Kill!” was the command. Hoisting my club over my head (and somehow not tipping over backwards) I brought it crashing down onto the hapless rubber creature — and even more hapless plants in the soft earth.

“Hit it again, it’s not dead,” was the order. I looked down once, then again. “Oh, it’s dead, alright,” I said. Actually, it would be more accurate to say, “Missing, presumed dead” because the rubber snake was nowhere to be found in the newly-created crater. Rather than wait around for CSI, or the gardener, the small group repaired to the dining hall to toast the success of the mission and I survived the week, the highlight of which was the St. Pat’s Parade.

In those days the St. Pat’s Board would be out early in the morning with mops and barrels of green paint, painting Pine Street in advance of the parade. High school bands from around the area would march, car dealers would drive demo models with pretty girls in them and various and sundry other parade standards would be present. In particular, however, I remember the Precision Pony Team: a group of students scooting along on empty pony kegs strapped to skateboards with rudimentary heads and yarn tails attached to the kegs. They wove patterns and formations down the street, stopping periodically to lift the tails of their “mounts” and drop handfuls of malted milk balls.

Much like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, the event culminated in St. Pat (not St. Nick) appearing on the route, riding a manure spreader and attended by his Guard. The duties of the Guard were largely to keep St. Pat vertical (he’d probably been drinking for four days straight) and to bring any fetching lasses from the crowd to St. Pat for a good luck kiss. (I did say the campus was 90% male and fueled by alcohol, didn’t I?).

After this particular St. Patrick’s Day all the other ones I’ve experienced have just kind of faded from my memory.

Note: the annual UMR St. Pat’s parade and related festivities still go on, but in a much more muted manner. A couple of alchohol-poisoning deaths were a factor (sad and true) to be sure, but I also think it was because some of those Board members finally graduated.