personal – shoutforjoy.us

30 years have passed and so little has changed.

October 2, 2023 marks the 30th anniversary of my mom, BJ’s, passing. From August on of 1993 comprised a season from hell for us. On August 4, two days after April’s 17th birthday, she broke her leg with a spiral fracture, when she stumbled on the top landing of the attic steps from her bedroom. She started her senior year in high school in a wheelchair with a cast from her ankle to her hip. We had to borrow our friend Nancy‘s hospital bed, and place it in the living room, since April obviously could not handle steps. Since Nancy no longer needed a hospital bed, she used April’s flat bed.

On September 4, Nancy was found dead in that bed of an apparent heart attack. She was 50 years old. Her family asked me to handle her funeral and the burial of her ashes, etc. I took a several days off of the job I had just started with an auto parts company in Macungie to do this. I had just returned to work. It was a bright, warm day, the 13th or 14th of September. I was riding my Honda Helix scooter down the main drag of Macungie. A car ran a red light to my left and made a left turn into the left turn lane, next to me. I started honking, because I did not have room to move right and I did not know what this driver intended. At the next intersection, while I was honking and flashing my headlamp, a landscape truck ran the stoplight to my left. I hit his front, right fender and went airborne! I flipped three times at different angles to the earth. I rolled off the hood of the truck on the way down. My bike was still running. The anti-freeze was flowing toward me. I started to scream. I did not know what was broken, but did not want the radiator fluid to get into my wounds, so wanted someone to move me quickly.

Thankfully, a member of the volunteer ambulance crew worked at the bank across the street and had witnessed the whole thing. He was already on his way out the door before I hit the ground. I shattered my right ilium and fractured my pelvis, and got some cuts on my left arm and hand. I think that was September 10. The ambulance took me to Lehigh Valley Hospital. This was back when they just had a rotation of doctors with various specialties on rotation in charge of the ER. On my day, it was a hand specialist. He kept hovering over the scratches on my hands. They got stitched up beautifully! I kept on telling him that they were not the problem. My hip was the problem. They took an x-ray of my hips. They gave me crutches and told me to walk out of there. I screamed like bloody hell! They gave me another Percocet and told me to “buck up.”

I don’t know where or if I slept that night. The hospital ER called me the next morning and asked me if my hip hurt. I said, “No shit, Sherlock! I was only screaming as I left last night.” They asked me to come back to the ER. I said, “Why don’t I just schedule a CAT scan?” They assured me they weren’t going to make me wait around all day, but get me right in, since their gurneys are uncomfortable, and I had to get a ride with a neighbor who had a Lincoln Continental, since there was no way I could fold myself into our Subaru Justy. We were there for over eight hours! I determined there and then to avoid Lehigh Valley Hospital if at all possible!

At this point I needed a hospital bed and April could graduate to her flat bed, albeit, still in the living room. Nancy didn’t need her bed anymore, so someone retrieved April’s bed from her apartment. I used the hospital bed in the dining area and April used her bed in the living room. Bethann answered the phone, “psych ward” if she was upstairs and “orthopedics” if she was on the main floor. My doctor, Priscilla Benner, loaned me her cordless phone, so I could keep it at my bed, so we didn’t have any more injuries from trips and falls. The mailman delivered our mail directly to my bed. I was supposed to be horizontal for three weeks.

My mom died on Oct 2nd. So, it was a day or two over three weeks and Bethann and I were flying to Phoenix for BJ’s funeral. The airline seated me exactly opposite to the way I requested, so that my right leg was cramped behind the bulkhead. We had an extra hour delay on the runway. They offered a complementary beverage as an apology. I chose an O’Douls. What a mistake! I ended up puking out the door of Joan Bucher’s van when Les pulled over on the way home from the airport. That was my last O’Doul’s.

I have had six strokes, many (~50) TIAs, a brain bleed, and a couple of seizures. I have gone for several years without a neurologist. I thought I found a decent one. Then I read her notes on our visit. She had not listened AT ALL. She got things exactly opposite of what I had said. She ordered unnecessary tests, because she had not listened to my recounting of my history, nor had she read my chart. So the things she got right, she treated as if they were amazing new discoveries that she had made, instead of what we had found out at HUP in August of 2011.

I am allergic to 13 different medications, and have at least two auto-immune disorders. I cannot afford to have doctors who are sloppy and careless.

Now, directly to the headline. When I was nine or ten and sick with something, my mom made an appointment with our usual family doctors. The practice had grown to include five physicians. We went there in time for our appointment. We waited for over an hour. My mom was livid. She went to the desk and let them know what the problem was, and that it was unacceptable to have a sick child sitting in their waiting room for that length of time and unacceptable for Dr. Towne to treat us this way. We were leaving. We would no longer ever see Dr. Towne; would advise Dr. Linke to let him go, and will return when someone is ready to see her son or would go directly to the pharmacy. These are her son’s symptoms. We left.

Yesterday, I had an appointment with another neurologist. He rescheduled three times to better fit his schedule. I was instructed to show up 15 minutes early. This irritates me! Doctors routinely do this. Why don’t they just set the appointment time as 15 minutes earlier? It’s a power play. On two accounts: 1) It’s disorienting. You now have two times in your head to remember. 2) It establishes the idea that you are arriving earlier and are waiting for him or her, establishing the fact that he or she is more important than you are.

Tony and I were ushered into the exam room at the quarter of time, went through the preliminaries, BP, chart corrections, etc., then waited until more than 45 minutes after the scheduled start time of the appointment. In other words, we were there over an hour. I had had it. The memory of my Dr. Towne non-visit had returned to me and I left in a not very graceful fashion.

It was not until after I had gotten home and realized the date that the full impact of perhaps why the Dr. Towne and Mom incident had seemed so immediate at the neurologist’s office. And I said some things at the neurologist’s office that my mom did not feel comfortable saying publicly as a woman in the 1960s would have, but I am pretty sure she said to them later, privately. She and my dad met in law school. She worked as a legal secretary at various times. Lawyers have to keep schedules, as well. There are ways to keep schedules and handle multiple important issues and people. Good legal secretaries know this. Good doctors know this. Skilled surgeons, who have to show up on time, know this. Not everything that needs to be said needs to be said by you, or needs to be said now. I believe sloppy schedules are largely the result of arrogance.

Afterword:

Today, (10/7/2023) I received an email from the neurologist, from a donotreply account, that said that I had missed my appointment. I emailed them pointing out that I was not the one who missed the appointment, rather it was the doctor who had. Furthermore, he had made my point regarding rudeness and arrogance by sending an email from a donotreply account, as there was no way to have a true two way, equal conversation using that.

Following Directions

My earliest memory of following directions in school was a kindergarten lesson. Mrs. Richardson gave us each a square piece of colored paper. We had scissors. She told us to round off the corners of the square. We would thus make a circle. I meticulously rounded off the corners of my square. What I ended up with resembled a television tube. I informed Mrs. Richardson that her instructions were faulty. She pointed out to me the other students’ results, which were various circular to egg shaped pieces of paper. I said they may be more circular, but they obviously did not arrive there by following her instructions. They just took the paper and scissors and cut circles.

She apologized and promised to do better in the future. We got along just fine.

When I was born, I did not come with a warning label. My parents rarely, if ever, intervened in any of my conflicts with teachers or administrators at school. My mom or dad would get a call, and they would say, “Take it up with Ford.” Or in high school, “Take it up with Cranford.” Needless to say, adults were a little shocked to hear that kind of response from parents, especially from two who were legally trained and were so involved in politics and the school board, etc. I was the youngest of four. I think it was a combination of my parents were tired of dealing with petty bureaucrats, and the fact that they knew that I could hold my own with these people any day. I guess they were right. After all, I had publicly humiliated both of our US Senators and sometime VPs on their international policy positions in open fora by the time I was 15. (Hubert Humphrey & Walter Mondale) But I digress. This is about following directions.

When I was in high school, I worked as a bicycle mechanic and part-time manager at my mom’s bicycle shop. She had a sewing machine and vacuum machine shop next door. One evening, she and my dad went out for dinner and left me to watch both shops. There was a door between the two. A couple came in. They were interested in a Viking/Husqvarna sewing machine. They asked me if I could show them how to sew a buttonhole. I told them, quite honestly, that I had never used this machine and had never sewn a buttonhole, but that my mom always told me “‘If you can read, you can cook’, so I will look it up in the manual.” That’s what I did.

I sewed a perfect buttonhole step by step and cut the slit. I was amazed! Instead of being impressed, these people were angry. They told me that I was trying to con them; and that I had certainly done that many times before, to make it look so easy! I assured them, that that was the first time I had ever sat down in front of a Viking sewing machine. Viking just wrote their instructions that well. They could try it themselves and have the same result. There was no convincing them. They left angry.

Sometimes, you just can’t win. I have replayed that scene in my mind countless times through the years. I don’t know if the price was too high, if I was too pretty, or what the problem was.

One thing I know: the directions were spot on!

And I know how to follow directions!

Just ask Mrs. Richardson.

Great Times and Great Opposition in Philadelphia Prisons

The Temptations

During my short tenure serving as a volunteer chaplain in Philadelphia prisons, I had increased the number of volunteers under my oversight from three to close to 500. We expanded services to both sides of the Women’s Detention Facility, which was severely under-served beforehand. We started GED and literacy tutoring for the Women for the first time. We started Project: Lydia providing toiletries and other personal items in a homemade cloth bag to every female inmate. We started GED and literacy tutoring in the House of Correction. When PICC opened, we immediately provided Sunday evening services and weekly Bible studies there, as well as tutoring. We brought the first rock concerts into the House of Correction. We brought The Temptations into PICC, without any outside publicity. They did it for the guys without any publicity for them. This was while I was starting Hispanic services at Graterford State Prison and leading two Bible studies a week there, and coordinating all of the protestant, evening services and Bible studies at Montgomery County Correctional Facility. I also organized training of all of the Liberty Ministries volunteers and reorganized the aftercare program for it to re-open in Schwenksville, after they closed the house in north Phila.

All of this activity attracted some attention. It also engendered jealousy. When I started serving in the prisons, I immediately made some changes to approach due to what I saw, and laid down some rules. The first thing I did was to eliminate the “invitation” in services to come forward and “get saved”. Inmates are in desperate need of friends. They will do just about anything just to have a friend. There was a fellow who had a “ministry” in Berks County prison who published a newsletter every month. In it, he published the number of souls he had “saved”. Most months that number was far more than the total number of inmates who had passed through the institution that month. Talk about jailhouse religion! I told our volunteers that the invitation and decisional salvation was a con. It was offering them a quid pro quo. It is not the gospel. The gospel is about unconditional love. So we were not going to play a con. We were going to be their friends and sit down and talk with them and listen to them, etc., at the end of the service, without them having to play any games or make up a testimony.

The other thing that set us apart was that we allowed and invited anyone to come to our services or studies regardless of their dress or orientation. People want to get out of their cells! If that means they come shoot the breeze with us, fine. Other chaplains started to look askance at us. Apparently they had not read those parts that talked about how Jesus was willing to associate with people of low degree or that one of his most famous disciples had been a hooker.

I didn’t help my case any in my Bible studies or messages. So many of the men had taken in so much of the hard-nosed, fundamentalist preaching, and were very judgmental. Many could quote Bible verses out of context to promote bigotry and all sorts of nonsense. One Friday morning in PICC, I decided to use their proof text hermeneutic and make it tie itself in a knot.

A favorite passage among those who condemn homosexual love is Romans 1, where Paul seems to assert that homosexuality is the very depth of depravity. I quoted that, then I quoted what Paul wrote in 1 Timothy 1:15: “Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the worst.” What Paul was saying was not only did he consider himself to be the worst of sinners, but that everyone should accept this saying for themselves and consider themselves to be the worst of sinners. Well, who did Paul consider to be the “worst of sinners”? We know very clearly from Romans 1, it was homosexuals. Paul was telling us that we needed to consider ourselves to be homosexuals as he considered himself to be. We were to look down on no one! This stands fundamentalism on its head and brings us firmly back to the gospel as Jesus preached it, which is summed up in the two most ignored words that he spoke: “Judge not.”

I told the men I’d gladly keep company with the Apostle Paul and, like him, declare myself to be the chief of sinners.

This was during the height of the AIDS epidemic. It hit Phila. hard. It was hitting the jails and prisons especially hard. The prison superintendents asked the Interfaith Chaplains Board for our input on whether or not they should distribute condoms in the prisons. This led to a heated debate. I was very disappointed. The only two who supported distribution were the Roman Catholic Chaplain, Frank Menei, and myself. Those opposed to distribution stated that all sex was prohibited in the prisons, so this would be a mixed message. Frank and I pointed out that we all knew it took place. Sometimes it took place with less than willing partners. At least, this may give them an opportunity for some protection. We also said that as people of faith and conscience, should not our first duty be to the preservation of life, not the enforcement of our morals? I went a step further and said, if there were a safe way to distribute and exchange needles, I would be in favor of that, too. This did not make me any friends with the evangelicals and fundamentalists.

While this was going on in Phila. prisons, we had another storm brewing in Montgomery County. It involved Chick Tracts, The Nation of Islam, and Liberty Ministries board member Glenn Alderfer.

I never really liked wingtips anyway.

I was born with defects in my ankles, knees and hips. As an infant, until I was three, I had to wear braces between my legs when I slept. I still was horribly pigeon toed. The only kind of shoes I was allowed to wear until I was a teenager were wingtips. The only choice I had when shopping for shoes was black or brown. Then I had to wait until they put the special heels on them. For all the good they did! I still had bloody ankles and would trip regularly, going up stairs. I hated those wingtips. My nickname was Pidge. I had a note that said I was not allowed to wear tennis shoes (that’s what we called sneakers back then in Minnesota) at any time. I had to go barefoot for gym class. I played football (not very well) barefoot. Soon enough, you’ll see how this fits in with my initial hospital stay for my infection.

A friend from church stopped by on Sunday afternoon, interrupting my mysterious telethon, with a most thoughtful gift: a small stereo radio/ CD player, and the loan of a few CDs. Bethann brought me some more of my favorites: Sufjian Stevens, Raul Malo, etc. I listened to these through the night. At one point, I asked the nurse for some water. After what I thought was 30 minutes, I got out of bed and went into the hallway looking for my nurse and the cup of water. A nurse and an aide came toward me and asked what I wanted. I told them I had asked Linda for water half an hour ago and never got it. I’m thirsty. The nurse said Linda’s shift ended seven hours ago. The aide was scampering to get a chair and placed it behind be just as I fell down onto it. They helped me back to my bed and got me some water. You remembered the part about how I was on morphine, Fentanyl, and Percocet at this time. So I passed out for a couple more hours.

After I was served what they called breakfast, the hospitalist doctor visited me. He sat down in an office style armchair. He told me, “Cranford, I’m afraid you are high.” I leaned over and puked on his shiny, brown wingtips. I said to him, “Well, it’s your fault!”

During the course of my stays he and I became good friends.

The beginning of troubles

Fred Benjamin leading the tour of his encampnent where he lived for 22 years.

It is cliché, yet apt in this case, to say hindsight is 20/20. My long ordeal of kidney failure, migraines, strokes, TIAs, aortic valve replacement, etc., all began with a scratch on the back of my neck in September of 2009.

Our dear friend, Michael Yezdimir, was dying in Abington Hospital. I felt terribly tired, but not particularly sick, when I went to visit him. I had a little scratch on the back of my neck, probably from a flying wood chip, either from icon production in my business or from working on renovating our barn to house the business. Michael passed away a few days later.

I first met Michael several years earlier. He had arranged to meet me where I was working as office manager at Diseroad, Wolff, Kelly, Clough & Bucher Architects in Hatfield, PA, for us to go out to lunch together. My pastor, Fr. Boniface Black, had referred us to each other. Mike had been raised in the Serbian Orthodox Church. All of the services were in Serbian, so he could not understand anything that was going on. He left the church. Later, he had joined an evangelical church and married and raised a family. He and his wife, Sharon, had three daughters. Mike was feeling drawn back to the Orthodox Church. He and I were the same age. I had made my journey into the Orthodox Church starting in 1997 and being chrismated in the Spring of 1999. Mike confided in me that he had hepatitis C and hemophilia. He also knew that his family would be quite resistant to Orthodoxy with all of its icons and incense. I’m sure this is why Fr. Boniface had referred him to me. Bethann had had a hard time accepting my conversion to Orthodoxy. We had waited for her to come around. That’s why I was not received until 1999, so we could be received together. Due to Michael’s health, Fr. B. did not wait so long to receive Michael back into the church. Sharon struggled for a couple of years, but eventually embraced it fully.

The scratch on the back of my neck became inflamed and terribly infected, probably from some of the people on the street giving me thank you hugs for the meals we served in the park. I am allergic to most antibiotics, so it got worse and eventually I had to see a surgeon to have it cut out. He pronounced me healed when he took the stitches out. I told him, “If I’m healed, why is there still pain and the feeling of heat there.” He said, “The incision is closed. My work is done. You are healed.”

The infection was not gone. A year later, October 2010, Fred Benjamin and I were leading a group on a tour of Center City Philadelphia from a homeless person’s perspective. My back hurt so badly I needed help getting up and down steps or over low walls in the encampments. I called my doctor. She ordered X-rays, a CAT scan, and blood work. She prescribed Fentanyl patches and Percocet for the pain. On Wednesday, I got a call from the hospital telling me that they read the images and they suspected bone cancer in my spine. I was to discontinue the Fentanyl and only take Percocet. We had to wait a week to test for cancer, and the Fentanyl had to be out of my system. Nothing definitive showed up in the blood work. The Percocet did nothing for the exquisite pain. I told Dr. Jerry Burke about this report. Now, Jerry is not my doctor. He is a very good friend who has saved my life three or four times. He saw patients at Grand View Hospital at that time and we went to the same church. The head of the radiology department, Dr. Joe Kyriakos, also went to our church. In fact, we were both in choir. Jerry called Joe and told him to look at the imaging again. He told him that no way did I have bone cancer. Bone cancer is almost always a secondary cancer. I had no history of cancer, but I did have a history of infection. Both Jerry and Joe volunteered from time to time with me to serve the homeless in Phila. with The King’s Jubilee.

I was in so much pain that Bethann did not trust to leave me home alone when she had to go to work on Saturday morning. She arranged for Serge Kaminski to stay with me. Even with two Percocets, I would scream in pain when standing up or walking.It was not pleasant for Serge. About 11am, Grand View Radiology called me, They said they looked at the images again and concluded it was not cancer and to please come to the Emergency Room to be admitted to the hospital. They were so sorry for the mistake. Bethann came home and took me to Grand View. To their credit, the head administrator of the hospital called me twice to apologize for their error.

In the hospital, they put me on a morphine drip, Fentanyl patches and Percocets, to manage the pain. They gave me MRIs from my brain to my tail bone, with and without contrast. I was in that machine for over an hour. I enjoyed the beat. I dreamed of a rock ballet to go with it. (That had nothing to do with the drugs.)

I had my cellphone with me. This was a mistake. On Sunday, while high on Fentanyl, morphine, and Percocet, I called everyone in my contacts list. I have no recollection of what I said to them. All I know is that they won’t tell me, and that several of them have refused to take any more calls from me, ever.

The Youngest

Concordia students seeing me off at the train station, Taken with my Brownie camera. It didn’t have a focus feature. I don’t know how it sensed the residual alcohol in my system.

As the youngest child of four I was always referred to as “the baby” of the family. My older sister, Alison, would delight to introduce me as her “little brother” once I was at least five inches taller than she was. She is four years older. Tic, the oldest (six years older than me) went from beating me up regularly, to taking me along on his dates without warning them. This happened at least four times. All but once, the girls would spend the evening talking and dancing with me and ignoring him. I think that was his intention. These girls were ones that my mom had set him up with. I always had a good time. The one girl who was not put off by my presence was a farm girl in Wisconsin. We went to the drive-in movie to see Psycho. I was in the back seat, and kept leaning over the back of the front seat saying, “psycho!” Tic had a hard time deterring this girl, even with my assistance.

Sue Ann was short and I was tall. I surpassed her height when I was in 5th grade and she was in 7th. Many times people either thought we were twins or dating. At one ski resort, the man setting up the T-bars thought we were on our honeymoon! We set him straight in a hurry! We were 15 and 17. Of course, we were in snow gear. She took me to her jr. high dances at Carl Sandburg. I would dance with five or six girls at a time. The silly 7th and 8th grade boys were all lined up against the walls, afraid to make a move. I would help her and her friends with their math and algebra. I was a year ahead in class. They were a year ahead of that. It didn’t matter. I have a freakish thing for math. I had “Elementary Functions” in my junior year of high school. It was basically intro. to calculus. Mr. Kadieski was giving a notebook test to grade our homework. I never bothered with homework, but aced the regular tests. He said, “This next one is a gimme. It’s the quadratic equation.” I said out loud, “Oh oh!” The other students were incredulous. They asked me how I got this far without memorizing the quadratic equation. I said, “I don’t know. I just look at the problems and I solve.” My brain plotted them on the Cartesian graph. The answers were always right. They hated me.

How does this relate to my siblings?

When my parents took a vacation to Hawaii, they asked Jean Hosterman to watch us while they were gone. Jean was in graduate school for her psychology degree. She took the opportunity to give the four of us a battery of tests. She let it slip that on the intelligence tests, we tested equally on the raw scores. She was flabbergasted. Tic was slightly above average for his age, which meant that my eleven year old self tested as a slightly above average 17 year old. She gave me a whole bunch more tests with blocks and puzzles, etc. Thinking back, this, along with the Iowa test I had taken the year before, set me up to be my dad’s greatest disappointment.

Tic went to Concordia College in Moorehead, MN, for a couple of years after high school. One weekend, I took the train from Minneapolis to visit him. I was twelve or thirteen. Tic shared a two room suite in the attic of Brown Hall with Curt from Dent, MN. One night that I was there we went to an upper classman’s off-campus, basement apartment with a bunch of theology students. They started me off with a Singapore Sling. Then I had a Whiskey Sour followed by a Screwdriver. Now, I was all of 95 pounds and 5′ 9″, maybe. I still remember the discussion we had about Luther, Melancthon, etc. These guys and gals were amazed! I not only didn’t pass out. I kept up with them or bested them in theology and church history. When it was time to go, a couple of the guys were sympathizing with my brother, figuring I was going to be a mess the next day. We went up the basement steps to leave at about 2am. There was snow on the ground. I took a step straight off the back of the steps, falling headlong into the snow. I slept in a recliner they had bought at a yard sale, until 4pm. I was just fine when I got up. It’s the family curse: no hangovers.

Tic’s real name is Thomas Ingham Coulter. Our dad gave him the nickname, Tic, from his initials. I don’t know if he still uses it. Ali and Tic don’t talk to me. When Sue Ann killed herself, my dad was so ashamed he convinced her husband and kids not to tell anyone else. Tic knew, however. The funeral was creepy. Ali and I knew something was amiss. I sat with Ali and her husband. When we processed out of the church, Ali grasped my hand tightly and said, “What the fuck just happened, little brother?” My dad had invited the extended family to dinner at a restaurant near the church. Last minute, I was invited and seated with my step-sister, Kris, and her wife. My dad had figured I would be offended by this, since I had been a fundamentalist Baptist the last time he had paid any attention. I found out later that he was not going to invite me at all. My Uncle Pete (Cranford Arthur) suspected as much. When my dad invited him, Pete asked him if he had invited “young Cranford”. My dad told him no. Pete insisted I be invited and that he and Barb would not come if he did not invite me. My dad relented. Pete and Barb did not come. They were so upset. I had a great time with Kris and her wife.

Ali called me from Minnesota a couple days after I got home to Pennsylvania to discuss her suspicions regarding Sue Ann’s death. Death certificates are private in Minnesota. She and I started to investigate on our own. After a month and a half on the phone for an hour or so every night, we finally got in contact with Sue Ann’s friends who had discovered her body and suicide note.

Sewing Shite Shirts

My mom, B.J., as I mentioned before, taught me that if I could read, I could do anything. This was most literally demonstrated to me in my experience with sewing clothes. In About 1972, when I was in high school, I was working for my mom as a bicycle mechanic, salesman, and pretty much managing BJ’s Bike Shop in Brooklyn Park, MN, adjacent to BJ’s Viking Sewing Center, where she sold Viking Husqvarna and New Home sewing machines and Eureka vacuum cleaners.

One evening, she could not staff her shop, so I had to look after both stores. There was a door between them, so I could hear the door chimes on either side. A couple came in to look at a Viking sewing machine. They wanted to see how it did buttonholes. I told them that I had never used the machine and had never made a buttonhole in my life, but I would attempt it by following the step-by-step instructions in the manual that came with the machine. I sat down in front of the machine, turned it on, positioned the fabric, lowered the presser foot, opened the manual to the proper page, went through steps 1 through 5 and made a perfect buttonhole. I was astonished! They were not impressed. They were upset. They thought I was conning them and that there was no way it could be that easy. They felt I had to be an expert, when, in fact, I was a rank beginner.

After that I played around with little projects like making little book bags out old jeans legs and such. My first real sewing project was several years later. It was a pair of rusty maroon jeans. I tend to sew like my mom cooked. Sure, she always read the recipe; then improvised. On that first pair of jeans, I eliminated the outside, side seams. This meant I had to use the pattern to figure out curved darts from the waist band to my hips, where the side pockets insert. It meant I had to configure a whole different layout for cutting the fabric. I also stitched my initials in a sort of double line wave on the back pockets, instead of the boring zigzag the pattern called for. I mean if one is going to go to the trouble of making one’s own clothing, why would one want it to look like it came off of a store rack?

My second project was a pair of faux suede, dark green jeans. This time, I made them fitted to the knees, then straight down. I put a different style “CC” on the rear pockets. One day at Finland Mennonite Church, the man behind me asked me if I would make him a pair, only he wanted his initials on the pockets. His name was Chet Cassel. I said I had to maintain my artistic integrity and I could only sign them with my own initials.

The family on our front step on 4th St., East Greenville, July 1983. I’m wearing the outfit I made.

In 1978, I sewed myself a long, flowing, navy kaftan out of shiny, swimsuit fabric. I was working full time and going to seminary full time. A mentally handicapped neighbor came to our door and I answered it wearing it. She said, “Oh, I didn’t know you were a priest.” I told her I was in seminary. Then it dawned on me, that she was referring to the kaftan. In 1982 I made myself a set of Indian style drawstring pants and shirt in green and light green stripes. My friend’s NY Italian father asked her “Who’s the giant cucumber?” when we visited Manhattan. I walked with Bethann and our friends through Central Park, China Town and Little Italy, dressed in them.

In 2014, our friend, Kork Moyer, read about shite shirts and shite shirt nights in pubs in England. He is a rock musician. He said he really wanted one. I felt the same way. So, that August, while visiting our friends, Marie and Pete Mattson, in Lewes, Delaware, we went to Mare’s Bears Quilt Shop to pick up some fabric for twirl dresses. I spotted some beautiful avocado fabric. I love avocados! I use them a lot in my cooking. Then I found a gorgeous bundle of Robert Kaufman fabric fat squares. I persuaded Bethann to let me use my vacation mad money to buy these to make myself a shite shirt. I added to these bits of eggplants, corn, tomatoes, and peppers fabrics for the pockets and cuffs for a total of 15 different fabrics. I used 9 different buttons from Bethann’s stash. I have gotten comments everywhere I have worn this. I have shown it off at a few different fabric and sewing machine shops and received oohs and ahs. They seem to be amazed that a man was able to do such a thing. This was my first project on the serger machine. I also did various fancy topstitches over all of the seams in metallic gold thread to add a little more pizazz. I finished it the evening of September 17, 2014.

We showed my shirt to Bethann’s boss, Kathy, and her husband, Steve. They hired us to make him a short sleeved one. I did the major part of picking out the fabric. I pieced the fabrics together, topstitched the seams. The featured photo above the headline is the fabric at that point. Next I laid out the pattern and cut it out. Bethann assembled and finished it. It was finished on September 17, 2019, exactly five years after I finished mine! I modeled it for photos before Bethann delivered it today. Kathy and Steve were delighted! Steve is a pharmacist. I hope he wears it to work.

Fred

Fred’s presence was always a little more than one could contain. One never knew quite what to expect, except that he would be high energy, assertive, and want to be involved.

Fred Benjamin lived on the streets for over twenty years. He landed there after his dad died and the pre-paid rent on the loft he had shared with him ran out. That was the story as I heard it from Fred. I learned at his funeral, it wasn’t as simple as that. Fred had a brief marriage and there was a son left behind along the way. Fred was proud of his son, when he finally mentioned him. He is a career military man, stationed overseas. I met him at Fred’s funeral. Man, was he pissed! He let his dad have it in the most honest eulogy of the day, speaking from a broken heart, like only true love can.

Fred volunteered with The King’s Jubilee regularly. He liked to take charge, a little bit too much at times. He had a different perspective than your average, suburban volunteer. After 20 years living in a box, a social worker approached him to help him move off the street. Part of the process was a psych eval. Fred asked her, “What? Do you think I’m crazy?” She replied, “You have been living in a box for 20 years. Do you think that’s normal?” Fred conceded, “OK. Point made.”

He was able to move off the street into an apartment. Fred had a temper and could be ornery, but he was loyal and with his charm and smile, one could not stay angry at him for very long, even if he got out of hand. He kept fights away from volunteers more than once or twice. One time, he pulled a knife in response to someone who attacked a woman. We rebuked him for going too far. He said he had to take care of things the way he knew how to. He stayed away for a few weeks , until things simmered down, then came back calmed down and resumed serving.

Fred and I led three tours of how the homeless live in center city Philadelphia, in 2010. This painting is based on a vidcap of Fred explaining how he lived in his box under the bridge by the police station. It takes a special set of skills and knowledge to live homeless. These people are not just “bums”. They are survivors!

After four years in his first apartment, they moved him to a different apartment. He had adopted a cat. His blood sugar had gotten very erratic and he had some episodes where it went dangerously high. The Wednesday before Fred died, I spoke with him on the phone to get together with him to go over nutrition and supplements to more naturally, better control his blood sugar. We were to get together the following Monday. His mother could not reach him on Saturday morning. She went to his apartment and had police and fire break in, when Fred did not respond. They determined time of death to be 7:08 am, July 18, 2015.

There was a meal after Fred’s funeral. Fred’s mom did not invite any of his homeless friends to attend. I asked her why not. She said she didn’t want her lady friends to be worrying about their purses. I said, “Do you realize Fred lived in a box for 20 years?”

I did not attend. I waited outside for my ride.

My Home Apothecary

Friday, I spent most of the day making capsules at our kitchen table. I have two capsule machines: size 0 [~500mg] and size 00 [~600mg]. With either of these I can make 24 capsules at a time. It is a slow process, but not difficult. It has allowed us to reduce our use of pharmaceuticals and improve our health dramatically. Back in September 2013, I reported about talking to my doctors about ginger and turmeric. I make those capsules. Since I make them, I can add some black pepper into the turmeric capsules, which is an added bonus, not yet available off the rack at drug stores. Turmeric is much better activated when combined with black pepper. This way, I don’t have to remember to add black pepper to every meal when I am taking turmeric.

I have managed to stay off Lipitor due to turmeric. With the turmeric and ginger, I have not had to have a Synvisc or cortisone injection in either of my knees for three years now. They were at the point of talking about replacement. They seldom bother me anymore. The site where the infection had eaten into my spine is totally clean and restored, as if nothing had happened there, according to the last MRI. This is what powerful, natural anti-inflammatories can do for you.

I also made 600mg cinnamon capsules and 500mg green tea capsules, Friday. These serve similar purposes. They both help regulate / reduce blood sugar and are powerful antioxidants to prevent cancer and other degenerative diseases. These take some careful choosing and preparation, however.

There are basically two kinds of cinnamon. The most commonly available is Cassia Cinnamon. It is produced mainly in China, Vietnam and elsewhere in Asia. The Chinese bark is darker brown. It does not curl up tightly in the drying process, and, most of the time, isn’t smooth. It takes some effort to break up the pieces. It is what is sold for baking spice as it is much less expensive than Ceylon Cinnamon, also known as “True” Cinnamon. Cassia Cinnamon has a sharper or hotter flavor than Ceylon Cinnamon. That may taste great on your rice or snickerdoodles, but it is not what we want. You don’t want to ingest large quantities of Cassia Cinnamon, because it contains large amounts of coumarin which can damage the liver.

The bark of Ceylon Cinnamon comes tightly rolled and smooth, with an orangey color. It has a relatively sweet flavor. It was originally produced in Ceylon, modern Sri Lanka. Now it is also produced in Mexico and India, as well. It is more favored in South American cuisine than Cassia Cinnamon. It has more health benefits than the Cassia, without the coumarin danger. Another word about cinnamon; if you have Type AB blood, you are most likely allergic to it. Cinnamon has many health benefits. I t is an antioxidant. It lowers so-called bad cholesterol and reduces the uptake of glucose in the blood when ingested 1/2 hour before meals by those with Type 2 Diabetes, among other things.

One would think it would be a simple matter of going to a food store and buying a box or tin of loose, green tea. Read the fine print! On my last trip to Assi Market, it took me over 20 minutes in the tea aisle before I found a box of simple green tea, nothing added, vacuum packed. It was from China by way of an Irish importer! Green tea has a range of benefits. It lowers cholesterol and blood pressure. It can lower blood sugar and improve the metabolism to digest and burn fat. This is especially important for those on a low carb diet. There is evidence that it is good for the brain to prevent Alzheimer’s disease. It can help prevent stroke and congestive heart failure. No wonder there are so many Chinese!

From time to time, I also make coriander, to help the kidneys; and garlic, to fight a cold or infection. I’m allergic to at least six classes of antibiotics, so I have to do my own homework and do my best to stay healthy. Using herbs and minerals, I have managed to avoid knee surgery, and those expensive injections for years, and reduce the number of prescription medications I regularly use from six to two, while improving my cholesterol, and more importantly, my inflammatory numbers. I now have put my Type 2 Diabetes into remission using nutrition. When they discharged me from the hospital in 2011, I had diabetes from the kidney failure and steroids they had put me on to fight the Stevens Johnsons Syndrome. So I think the time and effort are worth it.

I have set up two men my age down on the street with capsule making machines. One went to a walk-in clinic with bad arthritis in his knees. He was handed a prescription for a medication that would cost almost $400/month. He came to me. He said, “What are these people thinking? I am coming to a free, walk-in, clinic. How do they suppose I am going to afford this much for their drugs?” He paid me $15 for a capsule machine and a starter supply of ginger and turmeric from our good, bulk supplier in Amish country. This set up cost The King’s Jubilee about $30. He wanted to pay. I gave him a low ball number. He will stick to it and do it, if it cost him something. Although, he is a serious person. I started supplying another man, who used to be homeless, who then volunteered with us, with ginger and turmeric and green tea capsules. This started after he disappeared for a couple of weeks. He reappeared and told me the reason for his absence was he ate a chocolate bar and it put him in the hospital. I got tired of making his capsules, so I gave him a machine and bulk spices. The next week he said, “That’s really hard work! You must really love me!” His daughter was able to stop her insulin after she started faithfully using the green tea and turmeric. He passed on the love!

Bubble blowing class

For a few summers when I was little, the six of us would pack up a pile of gear and supplies into the back of my mom’s ’59 Pontiac station wagon for a week or more of family camp at Camp Lawton on Deer Lake near St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin. Just about everyone in Epiphany Episcopalian Church of New Hope, Minnesota, went. Epiphany was the third of the four churches my parents started, which is pretty unusual for a functioning agnostic and a Buddhist atheist.

There were all sorts of classes and activities for various age and skill levels; crafts, hiking, archery, fishing, swimming, etc. We all ate together. We had campfire together, then the children went to bed. There weren’t any beds. We were in sleeping bags on the old wood and canvas cots we brought from home. We did not necessarily go right to sleep. The parents stayed up for some late night conversation and libations. Did I mention it was an Episcopalian camp? Sometimes, we would mix it up and kids would “trade families” staying overnight in friends’ tents. We learned about how to do graffiti on the canvas by writing on it with toothpaste. The toothpaste would bleach it. Also, if you pressed on the canvas when it was raining, it would leak at that spot; a useful skill to annoy a bullying, sleeping, older brother.

There was a wood-fired sauna near the lake. We could get real heated up, working our way up to the top bench, then run down into the lake for a good shock to the system. This was on the “men’s” end of the beach. It was only designated this way for the moonlit skinny dipping. Some of the men would go full Finnish style in the sauna on those occasions. The women and girls were on the other end of the beach (about 50 yards away). My mom pointed out how, at that distance, in the moonlight it looked like everyone was wearing swimsuits, you know, with their tan lines. Sure, mom.

The stated topic was bubble blowing. Since we are finally at the lake …

Every year I had swim lessons I was in the beginner class, leaning over in knee deep water, blowing bubbles, turning my head, taking a breath and blowing more bubbles. I could never get out of bubble blowing class, because I could never float without moving my hands. My feet sank! I am now 64 years old. I still cannot float without moving. My feet still sink. I have heavy feet! I could never pass the test to go out to the floating raft to play and dive off with the rest of the kids my age. It got to the point where when it came time for bubble blowing class, I ran up the hill to our tent and hid under my cot, crying. It was no better when I went to Camp Manitou, the YMCA day camp. As part of their program we had swim lessons in the YMCA in downtown Minneapolis. We had to swim naked! They said that was so they could see who did it if anyone peed in the pool. It was not the best experience for this boy at nine years old, who could only blow bubbles and doggy paddle.

This was ridiculous! I lived in Minnesota, which is Sioux for “Land of Lakes” and I couldn’t swim! Finally, in 1966, the Golden Valley Country Club built a pool. My folks were very active there. In fact, my dad, Charlie, was president for a couple of years. The pool was open 9am to 9pm, 7 days. I basically lived at the pool. I was 11. I taught myself how to swim by mimicking the old folks who were swimming laps morning and evening. They were members of the “Mile-a-Week Club.” I also watched the swim team practice and tried out the other strokes. The pool opened the end of May. By the end of June I joined the swim team and the Mile-a-Week Club. I was the only child in the club. I still could not float unless I was moving. By the end of July, I was swimming two miles a day. A mile is 71 lengths of a 25 yard pool. I was never a speedster, but I could beat anyone on the team for distance. Also, whenever the coach wanted to demonstrate the form of a stroke, he would have me do it. He would use me at meets to compete in the long events above my age class where there were few or no entrants from other clubs. I was always entered in my maximum allowed events, so even though I wasn’t super fast, I racked up a lot of points for being there and finishing. Sometimes it made the difference between winning and losing a meet.

When I was 13 or 14, our family bought a lake place on Loveless Lake in Polk County, Wisconsin. Once a summer, I would swim around it, about 3 miles, with my sister, Sue Ann, guarding me on our waterbike.

The other day I swam four lengths of the pool. By the end, I was going so slowly my feet were sinking. It’s hell to get old.