Coming Home (Part 2/3)

This post is part two of my story. Part one can be found here.

There are roughly 684 miles between my spot in upper lot and my parking spot on the road alongside the house across the street from my home. It's a journey I've made at least a dozen times in the past few years; I thought that I knew every last stretch of road I would come across. But as it turned out, God had plans for using that very same road to stretch me.

This story is all true.

***

Tulsa is a bizarre place. I suppose it's because of how incredibly Christian the whole city is, but you can't seem to do much of anything without dealing with folk who are in the ministry.

Even so, I'm still always a little wary of telling people I go to ORU. ORU is a really polarizing place, for anybody who's heard of it--which, in Tulsa is everybody; they seem to either love it or hate it, both with very valid reasons. Nobody is knowledgeably indifferent. So when I got the smiling "Oh yeah?" that's always the response from the tow truck driver as we were pullling out of the QT parking lot, I thought that I might just be beginning a very long and uncomfortable ride.

Then the driver (I hate me referring to him as "the driver" and "the tow truck driver," too; the truth is I just never caught his name, or if I did I didn't care enough to remember it. Either way is a strike against me, not him) said, "I used to--back when I was in high school here--I used to go up to 41st and Harvard, up at ...'s--" He paused.

"Oh yeah?" I responded, faking like I belong in Tulsa and can actually communicate with anyone who really knows the city. Apparently, he was in the middle of a sentence, as he just kept going.

"...and it seemed like every time I went up there Brother Roberts was in the chair next to me getting his hair cut." A longer pause.

"That's funny," I said, sounding every bit as clever as I'm capable, I'm sure.

It was at this awkward pause in the conversation that I first noticed that we were listening to the country-western-Christian radio station...a combination I've stumbled across only in the bizarre milieu of Tulsa's brackish waters of cowboy and charismatic.

And so then he asked me what I was studying. And I told him that I'm a youth ministry major.

An aside is necessary here: I have no shame about my major (I can hear Prof Spears doing his "I am not ashamed of the gospel!" pastor impersonation here, which, if you ever have the opportunity, is completely worth hearing), but I really do prefer to live in peace with people and not hear them tell me about how I'm wasting my life or hear them tell me how teenagers are just all going to hell or hear them patronize me with a "Well, I suppose somebody has to reach out to them, too." It's gotten to the point where I've seriously contemplated manufacturing semi-pseudo-majors to tell people, especially people who -gasp!- I know that aren't Christians. Like maybe I'll tell them that I'm an Ancient Near Eastern Lit major. Or something.

Anyway, it was here that he told me that he was in the ministry as well, something which I still don't really understand his meaning. But, regardless, I asked him how he'd gotten here. Or there. I guess it all depends on how gripped by my story you feel at this point.

He had grown up in Tulsa. He was born in Birmingham, but only because his dad had traveled down there on the thin hope of finding work. All of his extended family, on both sides, lived in Tulsa at the time and, before his memory began to record everything, his immediate family returned. He had gone to school at OU for a time before enlisting. He served some eight years in the military before he became a golf pro. Seriously. Somewhere in Tulsa, there is currently a tow truck being driven around by some guy who probably still could beat the crap out of you and anyone you actually know at golf. And probably miniature golf, too.

Anyway, he worked as a golf pro (which is not the same as a professional golfer) in Tulsa for twenty-five years or so before he felt like God had called him to give it all up to enter the ministry. He served basically as an intern or a disciple to some local Pentecostalish evangelistish guy, signing up for a year-long commitment. About halfway through the year, one of the guys who was supporting the ministry he was working for offered him a job working for him.

Another aside. I know lots of y'all probably watched Friends or Seinfeld or ER or something else hip and relevant in the 90s and early 00s, but while I was in junior high and high school I watched a lot of Matlock. It's a great show. You can actually game plan the show based on what time it is. "Oh, we're at 30 minutes in, there's about to be a red herring and a black dude (whether it's Tyler or Conrad) is about to get beat up." Recently, while it was still on the air, I was heavily addicted to The First 48, which is a documentary show about homicide investigations.

All this to say that I love trying to solve mysteries. So when the driver got to this point in his story, I assumed that the job was somehow going to be related to driving a tow truck. Maybe some of you made that same assumption. Maybe some of you have already skipped a couple of paragraphs down to see how this all ends.

I was wrong, as it turns out. This man--not the driver, but the one offering the position--had invented the world's fastest workstation computer. "Wow," I said, pretty genuinely impressed.

"Yeah," he replied, smiling. "I was the only one who ever sold one. The guy fled the country before any of us could figure out that it was all just a scam. We had all invested, too; my wife and I had put in $200,000, our whole life's savings."

"Oh man," I tried to sound sympathetic. Don't get me wrong; I totally felt bad for the guy, it's just that that amount of money doesn't sound real to me. I can't remember the last time that I had $200 in my bank account.

"Yeah," he continued. "Once the money was gone, that just led to more problems, which led to the divorce." The ease with which he said this part was the really really troubling part. I didn't know how to respond. Divorce is awful for everyone involved, is about all I can figure. I tried to exhale.

"Look at that!" he half-shouted. His excitement was palpable. "That guy's lost his whole wheel!"

There was, in fact, a car stranded on the side of the highway with only three wheels and a distraught looking man standing outside of it. I guess when you're around this kind of stuff all the time, it just becomes a game to see the craziest stuff.

We never got back to talking about his life. I have no idea how this amazing golfer who had savings in the six figures ended up driving around in a diesel powered behemoth, running chain under cars and taking those who could pay from places of brokenness to somewhere where there was restoration, in some sense or another. Within minutes we were at the Saturn dealership.

The waiting room was long and narrow with a TV at one end, a row of windows along the long wall connecting the service area to this holding cell, a row of chairs opposite and facing the windows, and a dining-type table with chairs that rocked slightly in the other end of the room. The lights only worked on the TV half of the room and a woman was sitting, reading some romance novel at the table. Another college-aged looking guy was standing up close to the TV, his backpack in the chair closest to it. He was talking on his cell-phone to someone from church. Well, I don't know that he was talking to somebody from church, but he did call him brother a lot and use a bit of other Christianese, and I watched so much freaking Matlock that I'm pretty sure I'm right. Oh, and the TV was on TBN; this is Tulsa, after all.

And so I sat down, pretty near the center of the room and pulled out the other half of my sandwich and ate and watched them push in my so so sad car. This lasted precisely two minutes and 47 seconds, at which point I needed a new stimulus. I watched the TV for as long as I could before I thought my eyes would start bleeding. (That lasted not so long.) So I pulled out a book and began to read.

An interlude goes here. I want to put in a separate title, that would say something like "The Story of the Book," but I'm afraid that that will be too confusing. So just imagine that there's a big bold title here. Unless that confuses you. In which case, imagine a happy place, take four deep breaths, and continue reading.

It was wrapped in newspaper with some sort of marker writing scribbled onto it. I think it said "From: K.... To: Tim" but I'm not sure, I didn't actually read it. (PS, not really a fan of including names of other people on my blog. it kinda feels like i'm outing them or something. just kinda realized that just now.) I wonder what that says about me. I mean, I can't even emotionally invest enough in an interpersonal relationship that I read what the other person hands to me?

Anyway, it felt like a book...and I was confused. What book could it be? The irony in this moment is that this was one of those we've-had-conversations-about-you-getting-me-this-gift-and-I-still-am-surprised moments I seem to have frequently. It's a good thing that I enjoy surprises because otherwise my absentmindedness would get really annoying really quickly. I tore the paper off. I smiled. She smiled back. This was supposed to be my last night in Tulsa til August, and she tried one last time to persuade me to come partake of 31 cent scoop night at Baskin Robbins with a large group of our closest friends. She was successful in this pursuit, though that's completely irrelevant to the story.

The book was Blue Like Jazz, and it was about three o'clock on Thursday afternoon when I started it. I kinda didn't want to like it...I don't like liking cool things. But it was just so freaking cool.

I couldn't put it down. Every minute it took the mechanics to figure out what was wrong with my car was just giving me more of a chance to read. When they finally came out, they had bad news. I needed two wheels, and they only had one. Another would be coming in the next morning. My RA came and picked me up, and I returned, a little defeated, to my now empty dorm room.

***

Peace, love, and joy to you all.

Part 3/3 should be up by Monday. Oh, and it's probably going to be even longer. Sorry.

Coming Home (Part 1/3)

Before I begin, I want to apologize for the length; I'm not going to cut it down any more than this, though, because this is the first bit of writing I've felt good about for some time. Take your time with it if you need to, parts 2 & 3 won't show up for a few days.

There are roughly 684 miles between my spot in upper lot and my parking spot on the road alongside the house across the street from my home. It's a journey I've made at least a dozen times in the past few years; I thought that I knew every last stretch of road I would come across. But as it turned out, God had plans for using that very same road to stretch me.

This story is all true.

***

First and foremost, I have some slightly embarrassing confessions to make. If you try to corner me on any of these in real life, I will deny that they are true. But we'll both know that they're true, because you just read them and I wrote them and we'll feel just like spies or bank robbers or two children who've stumbled upon a great and mysterious faerie land that we want so badly to tell everyone else about. But we won't. Get it?

One, I am a very slow reader. And I'm not talking about the technical, making letters into words and words into sentences part of reading, but the sitting still and focusing on something in front of me for hours on end part of reading. The last book that I read of my own volition was The Ragamuffin Gospel, which I loved. It took me nine months.

Two, I am kinda sorta afraid of the dark. Like not a lot, and not if anybody else is around, but it just takes me a few minutes to get accustomed to being alone in the dark.

Three, I don't actually know how to change a flat tire. I mean, I'm aware that there's this whole jack up the car, use tire iron, put spare on process to it--but I've never actually done it. I don't think it'd be that hard...I mean, they make directions, right? I'm really good at following directions...

OK, I think that's all that's really necessary at the start of all of this. Now we can descend gracefully into a story of coming home.

***

This story actually begins at the start of last week, but I don't really want to tell it from there. So instead, I'll start in the middle.

It was raining. I don't mind rain, I even kinda like it, but I absolutely hate being wet. It'd been raining in Tulsa pretty heavily off and on for a couple of days and the ground had already had its fill of water. Puddles were forming everywhere, and since I was rocking my Chucks, walking from the GC to Saga had never been so difficult. I arrived, ate some breakfast, and prepared myself for what was already shaping up to be a long day.

It was 8.25 when I poured the green Tabasco sauce (my most recent love affair) onto my eggs-and-other-various-breakfasty-things plate, and I still had to load my possessions into my Saturn Ion, clean (fervently) the room, and procure the Holy Grail of finals week (an RA's signature on my dorm check-out sheet) before noon. The morning was pretty stressful, but thanks mostly to the work of DW, my roommate, I was able to get signed out at 12:15, and on the road by 12:30.

I picked up my foot long BMT at Subway, as is my custom, with a bag of Sun Chips and a root beer and settled in for ten hours of pure joy behind the wheel of my car through some of the most consistent terrain God ever designed on this Earth.

In order to leave Tulsa, I have to do this weird etch-a-sketch type maneuver where I start by heading north on 75, then go about a mile east on 244, before turning west onto 412, which takes me most of the way out of Oklahoma. I remember it as a dance step. Anyway, right after merging onto 412, which is under construction, I found my way into a vacuous cavern of a pothole hungry for tires along the right side of the right lane.

Eight inches doesn't sound like much. At 70 miles per hour, it sounds like you broke the whole passenger side of your car off. Then the grinding noise starts. I never lost control or even felt like I was close, which was pretty incredible considering I was holding my sandwich the whole time. Also, I never even thought about swearing. But I was scared. Mainly of having to change a tire. I credit my hours of running from cops in Grand Theft Auto for this; say what you will about murder, drugs, prostitution, and profanity, but that game gave me a serious leg up when it comes to driving through difficult situations.

As I pulled over, on a bridge (which is totally not what you're supposed to do), I joined a line of about eight or nine other vehicles who had also hid the pothole-o del muerte. I looked into the passenger side mirror of my car, seeing if I could see any damage. The fact that I could see warped edges of the rim stretching inches out away from my car was my first clue that something was more wrong than a spare could fix.

I called my mom. She put my dad on the phone. I got out of the car and surveyed the damage: both passenger side tires, rims, and wheels were done. Finito. The police were now on the scene, blocking off the lane which had claimed two perfectly good wheels from my now forlorn looking car, so I walked over to them to see what I should do. They wanted me off the bridge, and said that they would come down and escort me off the highway once the road crew arrived.

Devoid of any other options, I retrieved the rest of my sandwich from my car, sat down on the guardrail halfway between my car and the cops, and had a picnic.

About twenty minutes later, one of the patrolmen drove up to my car and, with the words "You ready to try this?" sent me to my car to get it to the QT at the next exit. As it turns out, mucho difficult to drive without tires on half your wheels...it seems like everything's going to explode at about 30. I made it to the QuikTrip, there in North Tulsa, at which point the officer literally said "You're safe here, but I wouldn't go too far in any direction." I thanked him for the advice and, for the first time, examined my surroundings. A chain link fence surrounded the QuikTrip. A chainlink fence with barbed wire at the top. I locked my doors.

It was shortly after this that she drove up and parked in the space next to mine. I had heard her engine making strange noises as she used the same exit I had just used to leave 412, distracting me from my reading; I watched her the whole way in. There was a baby in the car with her, in whatever it is that you put a baby into while in the car with a blanket over the handle, making a little tent. And I smiled, I felt comforted with the knowledge that people--rich, poor, black, white, North Tulsan, Springfolk--are all the same.

But she didn't get out at first. I thought that was odd. She had parked quite a way from the store. I tried to focus on my reading. She was out of her car now, looking under the hood. There were tears in her eyes. Just when I was beginning to debate offering help of some kind, she got back into her car and got out her cell phone. Surely she has help on the way, I thought.

She rolled the passenger side window halfway down. It was warm and humid by this point in the day; not hot like August, but not weather for sitting with your infant in a car. I tried desperately not to notice. My car was hermetically sealed; I had my A/C running. I had a drink. I tried again to focus on my book. I tried to send my mom a text message that the tow truck would be another half hour.

Just then, the loud, terrible beeping of a truck in reverse captured my attention. The tow truck had arrived. I got out of my car and greeted the very nice, older gentleman walking toward me. We chatted about how quickly he had gotten there (he had been downtown filing some paperwork) and how I had gotten myself into this predicament. And then there she was.

She was standing outside her car, now, with her baby in her arms, tears streaming down her face. She called out for help. She asked the tow truck driver to help her. She asked how much it would be; she didn't have insurance, so the driver told her that the rate was something a mile. I don't remember what it was, but I know now and I knew then that it was too much. She pleaded; the auto shop was just up the road a block or two. He said OK.

I sat there. I wanted to say "Take her first, then come back for me. She has a baby. She needs help." But I didn't. I couldn't? No, that's not it. I just didn't. And I hated myself for it. And I still hate that part of me for it.

The tow driver lifted my car onto his flat bed. I kept my back to her and her car. Before we left, he went over to her and said one last thing. I couldn't hear him over the idling engine, and his back was turned so I couldn't even read lips.

I hope it was good news.

Then I climbed into the truck and we were on our way.

***

Peace, love, and joy to you all.

Part 2/3 should be up by Tuesday of next week.

Wasting Time; Still Learning About Life

That was an example of incorrect usage of a semicolon.

Oh well.

Preparations have begun for Script Frenzy 2007, which is basically the screenwriting version of NaNoWriMo, which I did last November (if you want a copy, I've still got a few pdfs of it here in the store, just e-mail me at tmargheim [at] gmail |dot| com). Anyway, I downloaded this program for writing scripts that are properly formatted (which is important), and I wanted to take it for a spin.

So I started writing something. At first, it was just me basically writing what precisely I was doing, only in properly formatted (which is important) screenplay. But since I'm alone in here, it was difficult to really test out its capabilities for writing dialogue. So I improvised artistically, and tried to remember what I've [apparently] worked so hard to forget, and write down some interconnected flashbacks of circa a year ago properly formatted (which is important).

I got sick of it. Maybe it was remembering, maybe it was the tediousness of my dialogue (which is certainly possible), maybe it was just boring; regardless, the lesson is in closing the software:

INT. DORM ROOM -- NIGHT

TIM sits alone at his computer, finishing his failed attempt at adapting his life into art. He clicks the X.

COMPUTER
Do you want to save your changes?

TIM
(voice over)
No.

He clicks no.

COMPUTER
(beeps)
USE EXTREME CAUTION. You responded that
you do NOT want to save your work.
Are you ABSOLUTELY sure you want to do that?

TIM is slightly stunned. He ponders this choice for a moment.

GIRL
(voice over. the voice is echo-y
and cannot be understood)
No matter ... pain ... remember, ... still ... your life, you know?

TIM sighs.

TIM
(voice over)
The echoes of shadows that never were.

TIM clicks yes. The screen goes blank.

TIM
Peace, love, and joy to you all.

FIN.

Deja Vu: A Relationship Existentially: Wal-Mart

Tonight was weird.

I was reminded of so many different things tonight. That's what was weird about it.

And I would be reminded in weird deja vu ways, like I couldn't actually remember what this was hearkening back toward, just that it was somehow hearkening back. I guess it was just a night facing the wrong way.

I remembered seepage, storage bins for clothes, speeding back through the parking lot and screaming at each other so that we could get her keys. I remembered getting donuts just because I was already out there, 16 Blocks, and telling secrets via an IM guessing game.

But more than anything other, I remembered a story that went down before any of the rest of that.

It was a little over a year ago, when it was just starting to get coolish at nights down here. I was out with the girl who was occupying all my time (either with her presence or her phantom staring back at me in my mind), and I was really nervous. We were, I suppose, interested in each other. I was filling my car up with gas, chatting with her through the door she'd opened for just such a purpose.

At this point a man walked up and accosted me. He asked how things were going. I could sense where this was going to take me. He looked me in the eye and told me this long story about how he needed just $24.78 in order to pay his rent at the Days Inn just down the street. He told me all about how he had done the whole Seed-Faith thing and he was just broke now from having given it all away, and I closed her door.

I told him that I didn't have the money. He looked at my car, at her, and he looked back at me and called me a liar. I don't think she could hear. On second thought, my car isn't very sound proof. She may have. I hoped that she didn't. I told him that I really didn't have any money, that all this--except her, I suppose--was my parents' money, not mine. He said something rude.

As I started to walk back around to the other side of my car, I told him that we'd definitely be praying for him. He told me not to. "Don't pray for me, pray for yourself. You don't know God, man," he said. I told him to have a good night. He walked away.

I went out and had a great night.

But it gnawed at me. Had I done something wrong? We talked about it and she took my side. She said that God would provide what the man had needed, and if it wasn't me it wasn't me.

The next morning I was driving to church, prepared to teach about Micah 6.8 ("He has told you, O Man, what is good, and what does YHWH require of you? To act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God."), and it just gnawed at me and rang in my heart. "You don't know God."


And tonight was kinda like that.

God, please know that I did the best I knew how; please bless my (probably failed) attempts at walking out this faith that you've entrusted to me. God, know that whatever I did or didn't do that I did it all with the best of intentions. God help me.


Peace, love, and joy to you all.