Thoughts about April First...

April 1^st , 7:00PM,and no April Fools pranks pulled among the three of us at home—unless one calls four hours of cleaning the garage a joke. I suppose it’s because we’re on Spring Break. If this were a school day, all sorts of funny stories would be buzzing in the hallways.
 
Years ago, when I was teaching in Iowa, the bell rang to begin class, and a young man come up to me discreetly standing between me and 24 students. Jack was funny guy capable of pranks, so when he whispered, “Mr. K, your fly is down.” I said, “Yeah, right… ‘April Fools’ Ha Ha…”  His eyes widened, and he whispered it again so earnestly that I stepped into the hall and came back in with a wink and a nod in his direction. It was not a joke. He just nodded as if to say, “Gotcher six,” and kept the matter to himself, sparing me much embarrassment. That was almost twenty-eight years ago. The young man went off to college, graduated, got married, and became a chaplain in the Air Force (a position he still holds to this day). Thank you, Jack, for not taking advantage of a teacher on a day that would have excused it. 
 

Even with little anecdotes like that in my life, April 1^st as a date was pretty much like any other day until 1995. It fell on a Saturday that year. I had been gone all day working a wedding (back when I had a videography business). I returned home about 11:00 PM and was putting away my equipment in my downstairs editing room. Julie was asleep in our room on the main floor, and Emily and Kim were asleep in their second-story bedroom when the phone rang. At that hour a phone call is never a good thing, I listened with surprising composure as my brother-in-law told me the sad news: a few hours before, my father had died suddenly of acute myocardial infarction—heart attack. My mother and sister were still busy at the hospital, and they had asked him to call the brothers. I sat on the couch for nearly an hour before waking Julie to tell her. She began sobbing immediately, something my mind had not yet allowed my heart to do. I don’t remember how we told the girls. The rest of that week is a blur, and no one wants to read about such things anyway….

I'm writing this only to say that on April 1^st my siblings and I share an emotional connection. We go through the day with its jokes and smiles. We do our jobs and interact like any other day, but at some private moment … we share a twinge of heartache hidden deep inside--like a pair of folded white gloves tucked away in the corner of a drawer. [The funeral home issued white gloves for the pall bearers and told us to keep them.]

With that as a backdrop, let me tell you about something from yesterday that prompted this post....

Yesterday, my whole family was together for Easter Dinner: our three daughters, two sons-in-law, two grand-children, Julie and me. It was nice.

 Julie being from Kansas with plenty of KU fans in her family and me being a big U of M fan, the afternoon NCAA conference game was an event we’d been looking forward to. During half-time, my daughter Emily was looking through some old pictures. She and her mother are gathering photos for Natalie’s graduation Open House)  While I was getting ready for the second half to start, Emily handed me these old photo-booth pictures.

I had not seen them in years. The one frame where Dad is looking right at us (right at the lens) is hauntingly serene. My note on the back of the picture says it was August 31, 1978.  But some other part of my brain remembers details I didn’t jot down on the back: I can hear Grandma laughing, and ten-year-old  Jimmy warning that the pictures were about to start, and Mom concerned that she is not in the frame (and she barely was). Only half of me was in the booth. The closed curtain was draped over my back.

And there in all the hub-bub,
Dad is just sitting there in disbelief that we talked him into that curtained booth in the penny arcade at Cedar Point. Grandma rode the Blue Streak roller coaster that day (It says so on the back of the photos. She lived to the age of 99, and was adventurous right up to the end.) In the last frame, Mom is trying to give Dad a kiss. The whole trip to Sandusky was a lark. We hitched up the old Apache pop-up camper and spent the night at the campground on the point. We left in such a hurry that we forgot to bring a camera, but this strip of photo-booth pictures captures the spontaneity and laughter that  a regular camera would have missed. There is not one corner of a frame that tells anyone this was a Cedar Point in 1978, but they are four wonderful blinks in time. 

 A few days after packing into that photo booth, I was packing my '65 Delta 88 and driving to South Carolina for my senior year of college.  I was not sad about returning to school because I couldn't wait to see Julie. Four months later, I would propose to her on New Year’s Eve. My other three siblings were not with us that day at Cedar Point because they were married and not with us that day. As our new families and households began in the years ahead, they were all still very connected to the home we shared with Mom and Dad. If you are new to Patterns of Ink, there are many chapters about these people and the life we shared.

This past Saturday, I heard the coach or Wichita State tell his team that to beat Ohio State they did not have to play a perfect game--it did not even have to be their most excellent game... all they had to do was play well. (And they did.) I found it interesting that he told them that, and I think it is true of life's demands in general. 

The home and people I sometimes write about here are far from perfect and often fell/fall short of excellent... we were and are people doing our best with the time and temperaments and tools granted us. Thank, God, we are not called to perfection, a standard we would soon resent. We are called to follow as best we can the example and teachings of Christ.... knowing we will fall short again and again....we are called to press on toward the mark. Complete (i.e."perfect") attainment is not required but apathy is forbidden, for in the end, simply put.... we are called to care. 
I was truly blessed to come from such a home.

My Mom Used to Sing This Song to us When We Were Kids...

I know it has nothing to do with the reasons we celebrate Easter, but my mother knew fun songs for all the holidays, and it was never an issue in our home to sing seasonal favorites that were incongruous with the sacred themes of Christmas and Easter. She had a good voice and loved singing at the piano (as I have written here before), but I suppose her truest gift was the abandon to break out in song a cappella whenever one came to mind. She used to sing this as we died hard-boiled eggs at the kitchen table.

The tradition of hiding Easter baskets in our house was equally welcome, a tradition that my siblings and I continued in our homes with our own children. It occurred to Julie and I yesterday, that it was the first Easter in 28 years that we did not make baskets. It's been an unusual year, but perhaps the tradition will pick up again.

A few years ago, I found this "Eggbert" record in an antique store--not the 45 RPM version in this video, but another version on a small-hole 78 RPM red record. Now all I need is a record player that plays 78 RPM. Haven't had a record player for years (and one with that speed for decades).

Parched

The ground is clumps of hard and crackled clay
where creeks and ponds and puddled mud once lay
in meadows draped in a purple haze
of cocklebur in bloom. Gone are the days
of soft, dark loam when just as spring's begun
the plowshare sliced from morn to setting sun.
Too long the wind and weathered walls
have whispered in the empty stalls
of barns and whined at windows in the night
where just beyond in the flickering light
a shadow prays…as another sighs,
and with calloused hands against their eyes
they plead again in soft steadfast refrain…
“Ours, O, Lord, yes ours… please send our roots Your rain.”

Tom Kapanka
©Begun 1-26-12;/ completed 2-8-13

I realize that this poem comes out of nowhere and doesn't fit the season or the recent events around me. I found a draft of it in a file on my external hard-drive today. It was just a bunch of lines that I did not recall even starting until I read them again. The date on that file was January 26, 2012. So the thoughts had sat there undisturbed for over a year, and then as I read them today, I remembered where they were going with it and finished them. Like so many things I write, if not properly read aloud, the lines run-on, but I trust the images come through. It happened to fall into a sonnet of sorts.

Two summers ago, while visiting Julie's folks in Kansas in July, I was in the car with my father-in-law. Many farms in that part of wheat contry still have the remnant of a barn with gaps between the boards that let in light and wind, but they are typically still maintained by someone no longer living there.

I saw rolling hills of cocklebur and said something about the purple cast they gave the landscape. My father-in-law told me the weed was an invasive species that takes over acres and acres of pasture, leaving them unfit for crops or livestock. He pointed out that the fields I was admiring were once good farm land but had gone feral many years ago. I had heard that term applied to wild animals (like cats found in abandoned houses) but never to land, and it made me ponder the farmer's plight: even in the best of times he struggles to keep the growing things he wants from those he doesn't--to separate the wheat from tares, so to speak. He knows that, left alone, the weeds win. That much he expects as part of life and Eden's curse. But there are other times, times of drought, when even the daily struggle of separating good from bad is lost for lack of rain, and in such times he is reminded of his total dependence on God. This is hard for farmers because they are problem solvers who believe hard work gives hands their worth.

 

Such were my thoughts when I began this piece more than a year ago before forgetting I'd begun it. I chose not to set it in time, and kept the praying couple vague (shadows). The flickering light could be a candle, a lantern, or a bare dim bulb. They could be settlers from a 150 years ago; they could be the grandchildren of settlers in the Dust Bowl of the Great Depression; they could be living on a barren farm right now.

But I mostly left the time and characters vague to take the notion of being parched beyond dry land to a sort of personal, spiritual drought. This latter image needs no season, and like the farmer's plight can only be solved from above.

The refrain at the end is a variation on a line from Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89) I first read the poem entitled ‘Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend’ over 30 years ago, and though I cannot say I'm an avid reader of Hopkins, his earnest plea for rain and personal restoration has come to mind at various times of "drought" through the years.

Found after Half-a-Year...

It was Christmas Break, and a dozen volunteers and I were in the building working on the “Under One Roof” project. I was looking for a roll of duct tape in a large box that has been in the corner of my office since mid-August when we moved back into our building. Along with the tape, I found an object wrapped in paper towels with a rubber band around it. I studied the thing in disbelief—not wondering what it was but amazed that half-a-year had passed since I’d last seen it.

I had put this object in that box at 6:00 PM, June 29, 2012. How could I possibly remember that exact point in time?

Just a few weeks before that date, all the teachers had been asked to turn in their keys and remove their classroom belongings by June 20^th. With the help of dozens of parents and students, the classrooms were empty and four storage units a half-mile away were packed from floor to ceiling. The task took three days, but we met the stated deadline, and we were trusting God to direct our path between then and September. There is no earthly way to explain the peace and good spirit that the staff had as we stepped into the summer of 2012, but never did we better understand  I Peter 5:7, "Casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you."  I will admit, however, that the school was sadly quiet for the next nine days as the office staff packed and wrapped up the loose ends of the 2011-2012 school year.

On that last business day of the school’s fiscal year, Friday, June 29^th, the office staff had offered to stay and help me pack what little remained, but I assured them I was almost done and could roll out my last boxes on a kitchen cart. That final hour was quiet until the custodian stepped in to remind me he was scheduled to lock up and code out at 6:00. He and I were the last to leave the building that night, and it felt strange not knowing when or whether ever I would return.
 
That’s how I remember what time it was when I wrapped the thing in paper towels. That’s how I knew it had been a half-a-year since I had seen it.

The six months seemed a blur until I pulled off the paper towels and stared down at my found treasure. It was the blue coffee mug I used for more than 4,500 days since my first week at Calvary Christian Schools in July of 2000.

My wife  Julie bought it for me the week we moved to Michigan. One glance at its image and inscription and you’ll understand why she knew the then-new administrator of the Calvary Eagles needed it on his desk.
 

Isaiah 40:31 (ESV)

³¹ but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength;
they shall mount up with wings like eagles;
they shall run and not be weary;
they shall walk and not faint.

You all know the passage, but I’d like to share some thoughts about the first three verbs in that verse: wait, renew, and mount up.

Most translations imply that waiting is active not passive; it is doing not dreaming. In this sense, we wait not like restaurant patrons waiting for their meal but like the waiter who is “waiting on” tables. This kind of waiting is about service. Believers are those who wait upon the Lord with hope and expectation that what God says He will do. It is waiting in obedience to "occupy ‘til He comes." (Luke 19:13)

The second verb is renew. The promise that our strength can be renewed implies that it can also be depleted.  The truth is serving others can be exhausting. Some may ask, "What about the promise in the second part of the verse that says, 'They shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint. Doesn’t that mean that we will never get tired while serving the Lord?"  I don’t think so. Even well-trained  runners are exhausted after “pressing on toward the mark.” (Philippians 3:13-15)  I don’t think the word weary implies physical exhaustion as much as complete mental or emotional fatigue. In other words, being weary is not being tired from what you’re doing—it is being tired of what you’re doing. Weary is a dangerous place to be; it is dark and pathless valley cluttered with quit and overshadowed by the bad decisions of centuries past.

It is for this reason the Apostle Paul encourages us not to “grow weary in well doing.” (Galatians 6:9)   He is not saying “Never tire yourself for a worthy cause" but rather "Never become tired of the cause." It is healthy to be spent at the end of a hard day or a hard week. Such tiredness is to be expected in service. It is why God created the seventh day to rest.  He knows we need recovery time... renewal time. Sometimes we need a change of pace.

This pattern of work and rest, anticipation and reward, is also implied in the second part of Isaiah 40:31. If you can’t run another mile, then walk instead, but don’t stop. Don’t faint. Regroup. Refocus… ReNEW your strength... then carry on. That is what  my coffee mug says. The verse implies a pattern of exertion and renewed strength.
 
This brings us to the third verb of Isaiah 40:31: mount up. The female bald eagle can have a 7’ wingspan and weigh up to sixteen pounds, the maximum legal weight of a bowling ball. She can also carry over four pounds of prey in her clenched talons. Assuming that circumstances have grounded an eagle, stopped it in its tracks, the most difficult part of flight is what Isaiah calls “mounting up with wings.” The hardest part is taking off, regaining momentum.

Mounting up, and up in search of the wind or an updraft takes non-stop effort—it is more grueling than graceful. There is a big difference between “mounting up with wings” and soaring. To the observer, it’s  like the Olympic contrast between watching the 200 meter butterfly in a churning pool and a 700 ‘ ski jump from a snowy slope.

There are over 7,200 feathers on a bald eagle, the largest being those used for lift and thrust on the wings and maneuvering on the tail. Imagine the strength it takes to power those 7’ wings and raise the weight of a bowling ball to altitudes above 10,000 feet (over two miles up in the sky). Our favorite pictures of eagles show them soaring at that height. Wings outstretched in effortless flight—like that poster behind the coffee mug above or this one below.
From high in the air an eagle can swoop down at 35 MPH, and use the speed to regain its former altitude. As Newton put it,“A body in motion tends to stay in motion.” But from ground level… from a stand-still… “mounting up with wings like eagles” is hard work, but the hope of soaring gives strength to weary wings. Someday we may share more of the details of lessons learned and God's provision in those six months that my mug went missing, but for now let us take Isaiah 40:31 to heart. We have soared and will soon soar again, but for six months we have been in the hard-work phase. Never have so many supporters been doing so much for Calvary Christian Schools. We are waiting on the Lord, but not idly waiting. We are fully occupied, serving Him with hope and anticipation. We will not grow weary of the effort but when we need to catch our breath,  we will change our pace, renew our strength, and not faint. We will press upward toward our high calling and will give Him the glory when in HIs time we soar.

With that in mind, let us turn our thoughts from the little mug on my desk toward much bigger things.

On behalf of the School Board, staff,  consultants and many supporters now assisting CCS, allow me to give you a sneak preview of  a billboard that you will soon see at two locations on the main highways near our school:

Tom Kapanka, CCS Administrator

Speaking of George Bailey

Last week I wrote about our new puppy named for the hero of Frank Capra's Christmas classic, It's a Wonderful Life.

 

Last night, our school family felt like they were in the last scene of that movie when all the neighbors come into the living room of the Bailey home with a laundry basket full of collected money for a friend in need.

 

I'll not go into detail here, but our laundry basket was full and running over, and those present know what that means about the offering. It was well over DOUBLE the ambitious goal.

 

Imagine with me that the picture below is of over 600 "neighbors" not in Bedford Falls but in Fruitport, Michigan, gathered not at the Bailey home but in the living room of our school with standing room only in the back, the best attended Christmas program in the history of our school.

 

 

Our annual Christmas concert is full of traditions. For instance, the band plays "Sleigh Ride" each year and invites alumni and alumni parents to come up with their instruments and join in that iconic song. This year there seemed to be more "joiners" than ever, packing the stage. Then at the end of the program, a new tradition began: the high school choir (left of picture) had about 20 alumni, parents and teachers join them in singing the Hallelujah Chorus. I was one of the adults singing with them, and at the end as we closed with a congregational song, I could not resist taking this picture of our friends and family. It was a wonderful night in a wonderful life. We give Him all the glory!



Meet Bailey...the Best Stocking-Stuffer Ever!

I have not had time to write as often as I'd like here at POI over the past year, and I miss this dimension of ordinary living, but I wanted to share this picture of a very happy puppy named Bailey on my blanket-covered lap. Julie and Natalie typically have him, but they plopped him on me a few nights ago as I was watching the news, and I snapped this picture with my phone.
 

Bailey weighs less than three pounds at nine weeks and will be six or seven pounds as an adult.

He's named in honor of main character in the holiday classic, "It's a Wonderful Life." Was there ever a truer friend to the underdog than that selfless George Bailey who lassoed the moon for his girl, saved the Bailey Building and Loan, stood up to Potter, hid ZuZu's petals in his pocket, and helped an angel earn wings?

That's a lot to wrap up in a name for such a little puppy, but that's how the family (and even extended family) settled on his name. It was not until days later that we learned there was a children's story about a dog named Bailey who goes to school... a fact that was icing on the cake.

Readers here at POI may recall our Westie "Rudyard Kipling"--better known as "Kippy" who was a member of our family for over 13 years. It was last Christmas Break that we experienced that difficult day when the math of "dog years" and reality of crippling pain leaves no alternative but that sad anddreaded drive to the vet who truly understands why tears come easier than words as you talk through the steps of saying goodby to a friend.

The sadness of that day (and an assessment of our own stage in life) kept our home puppy-free for nearly a year, but in late September Natalie began showing us pictures of what breeders call a "multe-pom." Her kind hints met firm resistance for weeks, and then one night, I said, "Nat, I'm fine with the idea, but you know Mom has good reasons ..." I barely got out the sentence,  and to my surprise, Julie was ready to join in Nat's excitement and call a breeder in Rockford. Once the pictures of Bailey came  to her phone, there was no turning back. She was ready to have a little friend in the house again.

When my girls are happy, I'm happy... and I'll admit it. I like little Bailey, too. They can put him in my lap anytime they want.

A few nights ago I was trying to take a picture of him in front of me on the kitchen floor. He suddenly scampered behind me and crawled up through the tunnel under my arm as if to say, "Shoot, if you're going to take a picture, you might as well be in it with me. We boys have to stick together."

We were there to see Cabrerra's last hit for the Triple Crown

Final Thoughts From Cabo San Lucas

on Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea

“He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish….” That is the opening line of Hemingway’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning novella, The Old Man and the Sea. (Written in 1951 and published in 1952).

Spencer Tracy’s rendition of Santiago in the title role in the 1958 film won him an Oscar. I confess, it was the film that I saw first as a young man. Not until college did I read the short book.

I memorized portions of the story for a presentation to illustrate my professor's premise that words "have muscles," and when read aloud (as the dialogue of this particular book was clearly meant to be) it is impossible to tell the story of Santiago’s struggle without feeling the teeth-gritting strain of the narrator’s voice. (View this full-version of the film beginning at 52:30.) You can feel the pain in his bleeding hands, the ache of his shoulder, the hunger in his belly, and the genuine affection in his heart as you hear the old man speaking aloud in the open sea.

I first studied Hemingway’s kinesthetic language about thirty-five years ago, but on occasion the portions I memorized come back to me the same way hundreds of King James verses flit in and out of my mind when their meaning is most needed. I don’t mean to equate Hemingway with scripture but both have been etched in my memory far better than the facts and figures of more recent years.

So why would those lines come to mind here in Cabo San Lucas? Two reasons really. The first is simply visual.

The landscape and the sea I’ve seen every day seem to fit the description of Hemingway’s village in 1951. The old man’s sea was the Gulf of Mexico of the shore of Cuba (about a decade before the revolution). The island of Cuba and the cape of the Baja Peninsula are as far apart as the California and Florida, but the look of the fishing village and the simple hard-working people that lived there circa 1950 seem mirror images. Cabo San Lucas was a desolate place when Hemingway wrote his last great work. It was a fishing village with shacks much like those on the book jacket above. Hemingway mentions a shark factory in his opening pages, and Cabo has the remnants of a tuna factory just where the east beach of the cape juts east and runs about a half mile to “Arch of San Lucas.”

Once tourism became the goal, the large-fish industry gave way to sport fishing only, and besides the smell of a tuna factory does not bring the kind of investment that has changed the landscape of these beaches over the past 50 years. After WWII Bing Crosby and some other California investors built the first “destination” hotel in Los Cabos, but the real development of this ten miles of beach came in the past 20 years. The RIU Palace, where we are staying was built in 2004.

But if a curious eye looks beyond the new construction to the older parts of Cabo San Lucas (down by the marina and the old tuna factory and the remnant of shacks and huts back in the hills) and it is easy to see the similarities between Cabo and Santiago’s village. Even the sand fits the bill. In the opening pages, Hemingway says, “…they went down the trail to the skiff, feeling the pebbled sand under their feet.” The sand in Cabo is very course and pebbly. It’s finer than gravel, but nothing like the fine sand of West Michigan or the beaches I’ve walked on Florida’s gulf coast.

  It is easy to imagine, countless skiffs lined the water’s edge just above the line where waves at high tide broke and lapped up the steep sand. In fact, it was only in the past few decades that the low skyline of these hills began to show hotels and resorts. These changes forced the villagers to make a choice between the old ways of their fathers and grandfathers and the new ways of billion-dollar corporations. For thousands of locals it was a simple question: Would you rather catch fish for strangers you will never see or serve fish to an endless stream of tourists you will never see again. And like that, the fishing boats that had sustained this forgotten place for centuries gave way to jet-skis, parasails, and glass-bottom boats.

Still wearing the loose-fitting shirts, pants, and hats as they have for generations, the sons and grandsons of fishermen now walk the beaches selling hand-woven blankets in the heat, silver bracelets for the ladies, and sombreros for the men. The tourists look on from the resort pools and wonder how they can stand there all day in hopes of making a sale to them, but they do this as faithfully as their forebears went out to sea for the catch of the day.

  So the first reason this book came to mind was the sights around me and the constant chatter of Hispanic dialogue one hears at every turn in Los Cabos. The other reason is much more personal.

As I said in the opening line of this post The old man has gone 84 days without a catch. On the 85th day, he goes far out, further than ever before and he catches the fish of his prayers. Turns out to be an 18' Marlin and the main part of the story—the kinesthetic part I spoke of—is about his struggle to catch this great fish. As we prepare to head back to Michigan from this wonderful Mexican getaway, I sense that the 85th day is at hand, and I pray for a different ending if it is God’s will.

[This is an actual photograph of Earnest Hemingway in 1935 after a marlin he caught had been eaten by sharks on the way back into port. Fifteen years later, the experience prompted his best-known work.]

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