Across continents, white, red and black, we are family

Irony seldom disappoints me. Often, it delights me.

I'm just back from a recent trip to see my daughter Brenda, her husband Idal, granddaughter Lela, 6, and our grandson Gabriel, who is closing in on his first year on this planet.

Our grandson's full name seems a perfect segue for this post: Gabriel Idal Mims Tchoundjo.

-- "Gabriel," in Hebrew, translates to "God is my strength," or alternatively "man of God." As an archangel, he appears whenever something big, indeed history-making, is about to occur: Daniel's prophecies of the future, including the End Times; announcing John the Baptist's unexpected coming, and then Mary's coming role as mother of the Messiah; he also is to trumpet in the End of Days, according to St. John's Revelation.

-- "Idal" reflects the given name of our grandson's father. It is a name that appears, in various forms, throughout both African and European cultures, often meaning "noble."

-- "Mims." That was a blessing from my son-in-law and daughter, a way for our family name to live on in the next generational bloodline. The family name goes back to the the Middle Ages, perhaps starting with a folks operating a ferry over the then-significant Mims River in the vicinity of modern-day Wales (Mymms), though DNA and genealogical records show more instances of the name in Ireland, as well as Middlesex, England (Mimms). In America, the name embraced lineages of the Cherokee, too.

-- "Tchoundjo." The family name of my son-in-law, whose origins go back to west-central Africa and the Republic of Cameroon. The history of his people is hundreds if not thousands of years older than the United States, and today they are united by their shared French and Bamileke languages.

West-central Africa generally was the origin point for the slave trade, though most of America's African slaves came from the Ghana-Senegal regions. Still, in the 1700s, some coastal peoples in Cameroon were abducted, by other tribes or white-led raiders, and sold to slavers headed to the Deep South. In other words, it is possible that some of my southern forebearers may have worked their plantations and farms with African labor bought on the auction blocks of Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia.

Most Mimses fought for the South, but there are about 30 who donned blue uniforms -- a few of them whites from the Northern states, but more than two dozen of them African slaves who had escaped, or in rare instances been freed by their "masters." Recruited by the U.S. Colored Troops Divisions, they shed their blood for freedom under the only surname they had ever known, Mims.

The circle has closed with a union of love and bloodlines that stretches across continents, time and space, in the smiling, laughing form of a child named Gabriel.

One day during our trip, our rainbow family visited Harpers Ferry, where in 1859 abolitionist John Brown and his band tried to seize the armory with the goal of arming a slave rebellion. He failed, his followers either slain or imprisoned, and he was hung. But his act arguably accelerated the ultimate break between North and South, eventually leading to the end of slavery in America -- and the beginning of the long, tortuous path toward racial equality.

Somehow, it seemed very right to share that visit with my son-in-law, especially. A young man I have become so proud of in the short time I have known him. He is a brilliant medical professional, a newly sworn-in 1st Lieutenant in the U.S. Army Reserves, a man of integrity and faith, patience and compassion. All those things, and more -- a loving husband and gentle, yet firm father.

We are Family.

The times we live in: Where even the cops say arm yourself for that walk to work

Our police chief in Salt Lake City of late has been boasting about how crime is down in the city's downtown core, i.e., the environs of the homeless shelters and free clinics.

Or, perhaps it is simply that people who used to report crimes -- folks you a couple years ago moved into new condos erected as the formerly depressed area of rail yards was "gentrified," got tired of the futility of calling in drug deals, bum fights, drunks urinating and defecating on the sidewalks, etc.

I work in the middle of the worst of this area. Every morning before dark, I ride the train downtown and get off one block from the shelters and the scene of weekly stabbings and strong-arm robberies committed by that criminal element that thrives within any large homeless community.

Like wraiths, there are always a couple of shadowy forms peering out from the parking lots, alleys and not-yet-open business entry ways.

During the daylight hours, the danger is likely less, but you cannot walk half a block without being accosted by beggars with stories of woe, and the hungry, wan look of meth or crack addicts in bloodshot eyes.

Twice, by different police officers I've dealt with as a breaking news reporter, I've been strongly advised to get a concealed/carry permit and carry a locked and loaded firearm.

Having once been confronted in the predawn dark by a couple street men, one circling behind me while the other attempted to cut me off from the front, I took the advice.

On the cited occasion, I was somewhat younger and lucky enough to find a piece of scrap rebar in a vacant lot that convinced the two to walk away.

Now, a last resort would be a legally obtained and licensed handgun. I pray I never have to pull it out, let alone fire it in a desperate, last ditch defense of myself, my family or an innocent stranger.

But this is the world we live in, and as my police acquaintances told me, going unprotected into such areas as where I work, and at the time of day I work, is to go naked into a den of hyenas.

So, today was another morning in the Zoo, the Asylum, or some circle of Hades, whatever you call these occasionally very mean streets. The shadowy forms flitted into and out of the dim street lamp lights, and away.

On the train platform where I daily get off to walk the couple blocks to the office, someone had abandoned a shelter blanket in one place, and a pair of underwear a few feet away. On other days, I've walked by huddled forms, their ragged faces brielfy lit by the glow of their crack pipes.

And, in front of the Tribune's main entrance was an abandoned syringe, the needle gone. I carefully picked up the syringe tube and tossed it in the garbage.

After all, little kids walk that sidewalk later in the day on the way to a nearby children's museum and school children by the busloads visit the planetarium across the street. 

Still, it seems an almost futile effort, like trying to dig through a mountain of sludge with a teaspoon.

The economy, and lack of jobs -- at least ones that can support a family or pay a mortgage; drug addiction; mental illness ignored by underfunding of needed treatment programs; and the human predators who thrive within a desperate, often hopeless community . . . all are contributors to the sickness.

All those things, and at the heart of it all, of our existence as human beings, the hopelessness of spirits broken by life, and however to define it, yes, sin.

And so, here's the bitter irony. On one hand, I am a Christian who gives tithes and offerings toward various outreach programs to the homeless and others suffering on the fringe of society.
And on the other hand, I live in a world where just going to my job means facing the possibility of a life-threatening encounter -- and, in the most extreme of circumstances, one where it becomes -- as it has for others, too often -- a decision to take a life to keep your own.

Obama's foreign policy . . . of denial and misdirection

So, our President's foreign policy (is there one?) gets slapped around like a trollup in Kiev, and in addition to anemic "sanctions" and brave words, his response to Russia's expansion into Ukraine is to dismiss them as a weak "regional" power? 

A regional power still with enough nukes to turn America into a glass desert, and one devoting more and more of its resources to modernizing and building its military; a regional power that is actively thwarting peace efforts in the Middle East.

No wonder, then, that as I watched this president, for whom I once voted, give Putin the raspberry in his news conference Wednesday, I thought of the crazy Emperor Caligula.

He took an army to the English Channel to invade Britain, only to declare victory and telling the troops to collect sea shells as their spoils of war.

I would have a lot more respect if The President just said, "Hey, our military is exhausted by war, and public won't support any new adventures, and frankly, we just don't much care about Ukraine."

What's in a name? Consider rock bands Led Zeppelin, Rolling Stones . . . and Electric Prunes?

In 1967, I was 14 and had just gotten a "portable" stereo system for Christmas (a 50-pound suitcase thing with a flip out turntable for LPs, and speakers that detached from the sides).

Along with "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and every Steppenwolf album that came out, I bought the first (and arguably only "real") Electric Prunes album.

EP was a an experimental "psychedelic" band, and their song "I had too much to Dream (Last Night)" ended at No. 11 on the top 40, despite the band's laughable  name.

EP kind of disappeared in the U.S. after than, going through a lot of attrition and wild creative swings before disbanding about '69. There is a current EP, reformed from geezers who comprised one of the last rosters of the band -- none of them original members -- that "reunited" in '99 and began touring Europe (they were big in Sweden).

But for about two weeks in '67, after an American Bandstand appearance, the original EP was considered groundbreaking in the so-called "acid rock" movement.

But come on, Electric Prunes? (What? They give you static regularity?) Not quite the literary props of Steppenwolf, or the poetic quality of Rolling Stones,  cool imagery of Led Zeppelin or the dark metaphor of Black Sabbath. The other bands went on to greatness on a path that followed, and eventually overtook/succeeded the Beatles. 

So, time travel with me a bit. It's a hot eastern Washington summer afternoon, humid, the windows of a 14-year-old kid's upstairs bedroom open to a limp, ineffective breeze.

You lie on the linoleum floor, sweating, stripped down to an old pair of cutoffs, forgetting for a moment that the longer you try to grow your hair and bushier and curlier it gets, a sort of celtic version of an afro.

The needle drops into the groove, a bit of static erupts from the speakers, one inches from each ear, and this is what you hear.

Exoplanets: New places to dwell, or do we have neighbors out there?

According to a Slate.com article, prospects for finding intelligent life other than our own (?) has gotten markedly better . . . or at least, we have a lot more places other than Earth to screw up once we figure out how to travel through intersteller space.

I don't know. But I'll bet that some day, when we meet the denizens of some of these new worlds, we are going to feel pretty silly (i.e. ashamed) about how we've treated our planet, and each other.

I'll wager a galactic credit or two that we get blackballed from the Galactic Lodge.

For a Christian, this all presents something of a conundrum. I think back to when I read C.S. Lewis' space trilogy, in which he suggests Earth is a planet in rebellion and other abodes of intelligent life didn't mess up their Garden of Eden-esque debuts.

 Whatever. Our view of ourselves and our petty concerns should be getting markedly smaller, though . . . even as our perceptions of God and the Universe explode into something truly eternal and humbling individually, and as a species.

Some of the findings Slate.com reports the Kepler space telescope has made of late includes confirmation of an additional 700-plus "exoplanets" orbiting 300 other stars.

Of those, 95 percent are smaller than Neptune and 100 are about the same size as our Earth. . . and four of those planets reside in their stars' "habitable zones,"in other words, they are in the right range to sustain liquid water, perhaps oxygen-rich atmospheres and conditions we humans might find familiar.

What may have arisen in those places? People, like us? Beings sentient, but dramatically different in shape? Angels? Demons?

Or, just new places for us to dwell?

Alzheimer's: For loved ones, it's not 'misery loves company,' it's need for compassion

While recently commiserating with a colleague who also was lamenting, and enduring the long death of Alzheimer's in a loved one, I remembered the old idiom, "Misery loves company."

The concept has been around as long as human suffering, though it usually is credited to the 16th century play "Doctor Faustus."

Mephistropheles tries to discourage Fautus from visiting hell (which he ignores), by reciting the Latin phrase, "Solamen miseris socios habuisse doloris." 

(Literally, that translates "to the unhappy it is a comfort to have had company in misery." But typically, we humans have truncated that over the centuries to "misery loves company."

But, as I admittedly love to do, I digress.

In the referenced conversation above, it is NOT comfort taken from the pain of others . . . but understanding of those others, a selfish desire for compassion and, yes, affirmation. . . .

. . . To not only receive those emotional drinks of cool water in a desert wilderness of Alzheimer's hell, but to offer them as well.

We need each other. No one should walk alone through the sloughs of despair.

Russian Winter Games: Reasons to whine, or are we just pampered Americans?

OK, speaking of the Russian Winter Games accommodations, I'd whine, too . . .

If there was no water (or what there was was dirty).

If the toilet's plumbing didn't work.

If I had no privacy to do the doodoo (even if there was toilet paper), because the stall walls were removed for "security" reasons.

If my room was wired for video and sound by the Russian security folks.

That said, these things we take for granted in the U.S. -- clean water, privacy to poo, being (somewhat) free of prying eyes and ears, etc. -- are exceptions on most of the rest of the world. 

Maybe we are, in retrospect, pampered Americans, after all?

Click on this link, read and consider.

Super Bowl: Don't forget, Seahawks, it all began with Jim Zorn and Steve Largent

It was sweet.

Surrounded by Broncos fans, proudly displaying their orange jerseys at an after-church Super Bowl party, the long-awaited breakthrough for this Seahawks fan came true.

I kept my cheering subdued. But my smile was big.

I had to wait until I was 60 years old to see this -- a long way removed from a summer back in 1976, on the campus of my alma mater, Eastern Washington University, when the NFL's newest expansion team arrived for its inaugural training camp.


Jack Patera was the first coach, a big, profane and somewhat arrogant man who presided over a bunch of pros past their prime and second-tier rookies. But there were a couple players who stood out right away, both for their enthusiasm and skills . . . and quiet faith.

Jim Zorn, who had briefly been on the Dallas Cowboys roster the season before as an undrafted free agent,  was (is) an unapologetic, born again Christian, and his favorite target, Steve Largent, also was a believer. Along with other Christians on the team, they held prayer meetings and Bible studies together -- but there was no preaching or grandstanding, as some later would accuse Tim Tebow of doing (fairly, or not).

Zorn was outgoing, positive, and a scrambler who could zip a left-handed bullet off a rollout like no one I had ever seen then, or since. He ran the Seattle backfield for seven seasons before his star declined, but he never seemed to let it get him down.

I interviewed him again a few years ago, while he was an assistant coach at a small college (later, he would coach quarterbacks for Seattle, briefly, and make a bid as head coach for the ill-fated Redskins).

Largent went on to be a Hall of Fame receiver. He and Zorn would be the first two inductees to Seattle's "Ring of Honor."

For that first season and the next two, I worked with and for the Seahawks as a stringer. I'd do feature articles on players for small dailies who could not afford sending staff of their own. After each practice, I would gather injury reports and quotes on standouts, etc., from Patera and his assistants and call them in to the PR department.

For a 21-year-old small town weekly newspaper editor, the money was good -- and the experience gave me a taste of what I would experience a few years later as an AP sportswriter.

That first season, 2-12 for the 'Hawks, was a tough one. A lot of routs, some spells showing the future brilliance of the Zorn-to-Largent connection.
So, this past Sunday, I'll bet Zorn was smiling. A fellow believer, Russell Wilson, was holding the Lombardi Trophy.

It took nearly 40 years for the dream to come true, but Jim had to be happy for the team where a kid from Cal Poly-Pomona, initially dismissed by the sports experts of his time, became an NFL star.

What both of these quarterback will share, long after the Super Bowl memories fade, will be their faith and humility.

Those qualities are eternal.

On a melancholy day, Jupiter provides perspective -- and a cure for the blues

Some days, you just feel like you flop out of bed in the predawn darkness only to painfully crawl into the day.

It's "Hump Day." That mid-week marker of futility that reminds you that Life has settled into a routine of work that, thank God, pays the bills, but has long since ceased to challenge.

There was a time when in-depth reporting, well-crafted writing and meaning imbued your job -- but with the decline of the long-form narrative in newspapers in favor of the quick-hit, short digital briefs posted to the Web, those days are pretty much gone.

And, occasionally, on days like this one, you mourn the meaningful past and lament the shadow your journalistic career has become.

You reach out, freelancing editing and writing. For a while, that works. An up-and-coming media company gives you three years of steady work; it's fun and it pays well.

But success leads to larger staff. The need for freelancers disappears with more full-timers on board. Progress for them; back to the drawing board for you.

And on this morning, trudging through the dark and cold and snow to the train, you realize that THIS has become the "now." And, it sucks.

Yes, you have a job when many do not. Gratitude is expressed to the heavens. And yet . . . melancholy.

Suddenly, the mist puffing from his scarf-wrapped mouth, a fellow smiles and asks: "Do you know what that star is, just to the right of the moon?"

You look up. The moon is nearly full. Next to it is a sparkling, aqua-to-bluish light twinkling. It is cold, distance and . . . amazing.

"Actually, that's not a start at all," the man continues. He points to the light. "That's Jupiter!"

He continues, his enthusiasm infectious. Jupiter has 40 moons, and counting. Jupiter has two and a half times the mass of all the other planets of the solar system, combined. 

 

Jupiter is . . . huge. You could fit, roughly, 1,400 Earths within the gas giant's mass.

"You can tell I'm an astronomy buff," he finally says.

I look up and smile. The moon is a shimmering silver orb, Jupiter hanging off its shoulder like a cosmic broach.

No only are we on this planet not at the center of the Universe, but our lives are both infinitesimally small and uniquely precious and fragile, all at the same time.

Perspective.

Life.

Not so bad, after all.

An old cassette tape discovered, a father's musical legacy saved

When my dad was 57 (roughly my age now, plus a few years), he was at the peak of his musical abilities, playing his plectrum, four-string long-neck banjo is ways the likes of Eddie Peabody and a few others of the greats in this form applauded.

Dad was so good that he was repeatedly turning down professional gigs. As a preacher, he believed at the time that he should limit is playing to the "Lord's venues." Playing for the "world" would almost be akin to intentional backsliding, a sin. So, he smiled, treasured the compliments of the pros, and pastored small churches in small towns throughout the Northwest.

Today, almost 92 and slowly losing his sight and musical memory, he struggles to play a few songs on a banjo-tuned ukelele.

He told me a few weeks back that he wished he could hear how he used to play. Well, in the mail last week came a package from an uncle with some documents we needed for our POA roles, and wrapped in plastic was an old cassette tape.

On it, 60 minutes of my Dad playing his old gold-plated, pear-inlaid Gibson, one song after another, including original arrangements and medleys of decidedly old but classic secular hits.

From 1979, he navigated through complicated notes, chords, runs and riffs that reminded me just how good he was.

I was able to transfer the cassette's contents and burn some CDs for him and my kids.

Already, I have a happy new year.

Click here to listen to a sampler of my Dad, one of the best banjo artists, ever.