© 2019 Mary T. O'connor All Rights Reserved

Mary T. O’Connor

APRON

A Thesis

Presented to

The Graduate Faculty of The University of Akron

In Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree

Master of Fine Arts

Mary T. O’Connor

August, 2019 AKRON

APRON

Mary T. O’Connor

Thesis

Approved: Accepted:

______David Patrick Giffels Dr. Maria Zanetta Advisor Department Chair

______Mary Biddinger Dr. Linda Subich Faculty Reader Interim Dean of the College

______Catherine Wing Dr. Chand Midha Faculty Reader Dean of the Graduate School

______Date

ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The generosity of Duane and Lisa Crabbs, for making the decision.

The encouragement, support and bravery of David Patrick Giffels, who once pulled a staple straight out of my thumbnail.

iii TABLE OF CONTENTS

THE HOLY SEE: LETTER ONE ………………………...... ……1

FREE ROSE LIGHT……………………………………...... …….8

THE CROSSING …………………………………………...... ….48

ENCOUNTERS WITH JOAN …………………………...... ……...57

IT’S MY MISFORTUNE, MR. STOPPARD …………...... ……….62

JOURNEY TO AUTHENTIKOS ………………………...... ………72

GRASSY KNOLL: “DIS KROON OH MET TREE AHH” ...... ……78

II.

THE HOLY SEE: LETTER TWO ……...... ……………………….…88

CREATION GROANS ……………………...... ……………………..95

A BED IN SHEOL ………………………………...... ………….…..108

THE ARC OF COOL …………………………...... ………...………124

AKRON BLUES: WHITE PICKET FENCE ……...... ………..……140

AKRON BLUES: PATRICK ARMOUR ……………...... …………160

COAST OF TYRE …………………………………...... ……………183

ERIC HARMON: LIGHT GLASS BLOCK …………...... …….……193

RADIANT ……………………………………………...... …………..217

iv III.

THE HOLY SEE: LETTER THREE ……………………...... …230

NO SMALL PARTS …………………………………...... ……245

PLAYING WITH MATCHES ………………….…...... ……263

MARGINS …………………………………………...... ………288

v THE HOLY SEE

ONE

Archbishop Christophe Pierre Apostolic Nuncio Apostolic Nunciature to the United States Diplomatic Mission of the Holy See 3339 Massachusetts Avenue, Northwest Washington, DC June 8, 2016

“The Cuyahoga River sculpts a curving gracious break in the hills enclosing Akron, Ohio. Green ridges crown the edges. The city is an airy citadel, a shallow dish in open hands. One can enter the city by the arched ferocity of expressways, seeing nothing. Or one can cross into downtown on the Y Bridge, floating in space over the river valley into Akron, exalted place.”

Your Excellency,

What follows this less formal letter is the formal opening appeal for consideration of sainthood. I hope you will excuse my initial personal note, but given the unusual nature of the candidate, I thought an introduction would be welcome.

Though I am incapable of rendering a scholarly or theological argument for the case to follow, I also believe that such an approach would not be appropriate. The subject candidate is common and accessible to all at all times. It is the ultimate inclusive designation of sacredness, the very ground of our being.

It is not my intention or position to judge or grade the spiritual condition of the Roman Catholic Church. But as one who left the church as a teenager, I have since been transformed by mystic tradition of our faith. I undertake this campaign in gratitude for that saving grace. What follows is a document of hope and possibility for the holy, catholic and apostolic church; that the incontrovertible decline in the church as we experience it now might be reversed.

It is that sincerity that guides my actions in writing to you, Excellency.

Thank you for reading this letter.

Mary Therese O’Connor Akron, Ohio 1 FIRST LETTER OF APPEAL: In the cause for public good; Petition on behalf of the

City of Akron for consideration of sainthood.

Petitioner presents as a given the inherent sanctity of the entirety of creation.

To that understanding, Petitioner further states that if the sanctity of the universe is an accepted act of faith, such faith implies that future discoveries describing said universe as expanding must also include such increase as sanctified material.

As The Congregation for the Causes of Saints recognizes persons who manifest extraordinary virtues and who have, by their faith and actions, been endowed with a capacity of inexplicable grace, manifesting in tangible form, as miracle(s), Petitioner respectfully submits that this same consideration be extended to “place”. The Vatican has recognized the apparition of The Blessed Virgin Mary in situ, in place, thus effectively deeming such select places as holy.

In respectfully requesting consideration of the Petition, it is recognized that Akron is, in fact, no more sacred or worthy of designation of sainthood as any other humanly known or as-yet-unknown physical realm; however, as Petitioner shall describe, candidate Akron has manifested in abundance the qualities here to date recognized only in persons.

The fundamental Catholic belief in the sacredness of life by virtue of its God-created existence extends therefor to all life. As such, Akron, as representative of all life can be interpreted as “Servant of God”, the first esteemed title granted by the church in the canonization process.

2 A description of the Ordinary Inexplicable Divinity within the Geographic

Designation of the City of Akron, State of Ohio, United States: The Swell of the

Laurentian Watershed

The River: The Cuyahoga River is 80 miles long, but the source and the mouth are only 30 miles apart.

How can it be that the Cuyahoga River is eighty miles long but from the spring source to where it flows into Lake Erie is only 30 miles apart? The riddle of the river’s course is gentle, subtle and geographically meek.

The river is shaped like a child’s drawing of a smile. From its headwaters, it flows south, but meeting the gradual rise of the Laurentian Watershed, diverts in a steady westward curve until the path of least resistance takes it north, to Lake Erie.

The Laurentian Watershed is a deceptively subtle land mass running east-west across Ohio. It is too gradual to perceive when looking at a contemporary map, and indictable if traveling by car along one of the roads traversing the crest.

Time spent with a topographic map of the Western Reserve will bring the contour of the Laurentian Watershed forward. There is the curious gentle turn of the Cuyahoga

River, probably the strongest clue. Gradually the eyes take other information from the flat surface and translates the early roads, points of human habitation and rivers into a third dimension, rising up.

There is the phenomenon of Summit Lake for another clue. The lake and the city of Akron lay atop the modest plain of the watershed. Water flowing out of Summit Lake at its northern end flows to the Cuyahoga, through the Great Lakes to the Gulf of the St.

Lawrence and the North Atlantic Ocean. Water flowing out from its southern end joins

3 the Tuscarawas, bound for the Ohio River, the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico. What that means is that Summit Lake is the wellspring of a long, serpentine, leisurely continental divide.

Summit Lake is an alluvial glacier-formed body in the middle of Akron. It gives no indication that it lays at an elevation of any stature. Across the long eastern flank, between the old houses and the Akron Municipal Housing Authority (henceforth referred to as “AMHA”) Summit Lake Apartments, marshes still proliferate. Boggy stretches of impenetrable thicket blow the cool air of decay and buggy gloom onto the flanking recreational towpath trail.

The other deceptive aspect of Summit Lake’s relative height is the long wooded ridge running the length of the western side of the lake in the Kenmore neighborhood.

The crest of the ridge is part of the shortest path between the southern end of the navigable Cuyahoga River and the northernmost navigable Tuscarawas. The eight mile portage was well-defined by indigenous travelers by the time it was incorporated into

United States history as a treaty border between the advancing young republic and the people it needed to push west. Though it only lasted for fifteen years, the 1985 Treaty of

Fort Macintosh made the ridge along Summit Lake the western border of the United

States.

***

The Stone: Sandstone is one of the most common types of sedimentary rock. It is still found in abundant consistency, thanks to the vanished sea that existed for millions of years, growing and shrinking and layering sand in a ribbon across the middle of the North

4 American continent. Berea sandstone is the name for the local manifestation. It has a ubiquitous presence as rectangular dressed blocks in the older buildings of Akron, Ohio.

The voluptuous terrain throughout Akron made the consistent, fine-grained bedrock stone relatively easy to extract, and active quarries dotted the region in the formative years of Akron, including a quarry at the heart of the growing city, on Main

Street. The legacy of the tire industry and coal burning domestic furnaces rendered the

Berea sandstone buildings black. The recovery in Postindustrial Akron has included restoring the stone. Though it naturally slowly darkens once exposed to air, the stone glows a buttery warmth after a cleaning. In sunlight, it bounces and absorbs light, reflecting the dark and light strains of its base composition, minute grains of sand.

The stone shows up all over. The Front Porch Café is a freestanding building one parking lot south of the corner of Grant and East South Street in Akron, Ohio. Until not long ago, there were access ramps at this corner, for the adjacent expressway. The access ways attracted commuters destined for the University of Akron, downtown or the correctional facilities just south of the Café. A hungry motorist getting off the expressway here would be more likely to choose the drive-through-service-only

McDonald’s than the café, for the speed, convenience and comfort of predictability. If such a motorist were to take the time to look around at the intersection, they would see a wash of urban economy; a gas station on one corner, the boarded up Greyhound station on another, Dollar General a third. On the last corner, a neglected chain-link fence encloses the perpetual emptiness of the Airgas employee parking lot and two old splintery highway-sized billboard structures.

5 After the four access ramps were peeled away, regraded and seeded, McDonald’s and Airgas closed up, joining the other departed businesses along South Street. It was another chapter in accommodation for an old neighborhood accustomed to hardship.

Without the in and out of the expressway access, the traffic light on the corner was removed, downgraded to the steady beat of a caution signal, then to a four-way stop sign.

But if the expressway now is only background hum, there is another rhythm on the corner that keeps going. It’s the rhythm of the feet of the people staying around here, walking on the sidewalks, up the wooden stairs to the second floor of the café building, onto the bus that runs on Grant Street. People waiting for the bus visit on the benches in front of the café. If it’s cold, they are welcomed inside to a warm seat with coffee, served in a ceramic mug for a dollar, or maybe what is loose in the pocket.

Behind the café, the empty Airgas building holds one corner of another pale intersection. Across the street, the decommissioned drive thru McDonald’s has a brown fortress anonymity, a hunkered down island circled by service lanes. On the side of the building on the third corner, “F. Cunningham & Sons” carpet store has been shut down tight for a long time, though cars are always parked on the sidewalk in front. Above this single story blond brick building, another giant billboard faces the expressway. On its giant flipside, for the benefit of the neighborhood, the message reads:

“WE BUY UGLY HOUSES. COM 800-44-BUYER”

The last of the four corners would seem to have the least to offer. The first impression shows nothing but a concrete base topped by a thick metal plate, for something never installed. Behind a stretch of grass is the fenced-in backside of the

Summit County Jail.

6 It’s a place that reflects in miniature the subtlety of the Laurentian Divide. There is a low rise, a gentle, barely noticeable swell. There is a bald spot in the grass. There, the exposed Berea Sandstone bedrock curves down at the cap of the rise. The surface is dark, deeply raked with scratches, a glacial finish. It marks the southern terminus of the last glacier, the Hiram Ice Sheet. Once noticed, one is drawn to touch the manifestation of contained antiquity. Is it the proximity of the expressway that accounts for the energy, that warmth, the tiny hint of vibration? Or is it just the desire for connection to something that has endured, that will outlast us, despite our constant efforts to have it be otherwise?

7 FREE ROSE LIGHT

Akron saved my life three times.

The first two happened before I ever crossed Main and Market.

Ritual is a construct, a framework for meaning. There is first the beckoning; the invitation to come to Akron had nothing to do with its formidable past in my personal life.

The first time I came to Akron on a sunny Saturday in June 2011, I came to see a close friend, someone I met in the Republic of Macedonia. Anne Schillig was one of the youngest

Peace Corps volunteers in our group, and I was one of the oldest. Over the course of the twenty seven months in the fledgling Vermont-sized Slavic country, we laughed our way beyond comrades to deep friendship. We returned to the USA the same weekend, me with one suitcase, Anne a hilarity of luggage and a loud Macedonian cat named Daphne. She returned to Akron, I to New York City. We were ready to come home, and home was a country that had just elected Barack Obama.

In every outpost of the Federal government, there are three framed headshots; The

President of the United States, the Vice-President of the United States, and the head of whatever agency / department the outpost represents. The day I left the Peace Corps office for the last time, I had enough of looking at the now-really-lame-duck grinning heads along the staircase wall of the Peace Corps office. I hid the portraits of Bush and Cheney in the conference room. This tepid act of resistance was undercut by the signed note I left detailing their location - it was the Peace Corps, after all, not the Hostility Corps. Plus I felt a debt of

8 gratitude; under their administration I fulfilled a childhood dream of being a Peace Corps volunteer.

The Peace Corps staff warns volunteers that no one at home will be interested in our stories after about five minutes. For at least a few years, sharing barstools and memories with former colleagues is common and necessary. While visiting my sister Kate in Cleveland, I rented a car to go see Anne in Akron. It had been six months since we parted ways at the airport in Skopje, and I was looking forward to time together in her home setting.

Akron smacked me right away. As I came over the hills and valleys into a bowl of green, glancing at a big lake to the right with downtown ahead, I realized I had never actually been to Akron. How was it possible that I never came here, despite growing up on the east side of Cleveland, thirty miles away?

How was it possible that the two greatest non-family influences on my life, Sam and sobriety, these colossal impacts stamped “Made in Akron”, and I never had the curiosity to come and see the place?

Arriving that first time was the inversion of expectation. I was only going to see my friend. Somehow it had never occurred to me to go; I didn’t think of it as a place, I only felt it as a power.

Though I was in a car hurling through physical space at 65 miles an hour, the experience of arrival was somehow slowed down, a flutter in normal perception, a sensation I recognized, something to pay attention to, something entirely mystical. That moment was the grounding in concrete reality of something that had been, up to that moment, a completely ethereal connection to Akron, Ohio.

9 Anne lived a big old typical Akron rental house on the amusingly named Howard

Street. Her landmark was the Harley Davidson dealership was on the closest corner. A huge contingent of gleaming bikes made it impossible to miss. The street looked a little sketchy to me. The dealership didn’t really help that image, but I remember from a friend who lived close to the New York Hell’s Angels headquarters on East 2nd Street that he said it was the safest place in Alphabet City. Since getting off the expressway in Akron, I had already noticed a lot of bikers on the city streets. Motorcycles seemed to be the dominant vehicle.

Anne was living in that post-college-but-still-like- college style with two friends, single women ready not to be single any more. She had cultivated a fantastic garden in the side yard. She came from farmers, it was normal to her. I loved vegetables, but I lived in New York. I bought them. Walking across the grass with a basket in a city to harvest spinach was astonishing to me. This was Akron, Howard Street, Harleys and rows of crops in a side yard. Our day together was reminiscent of life in the Peace

Corps. Most of our time in Macedonia was spent hanging around, just being with

Macedonians. In a country short on money, just visiting was their treasure; homegrown, homemade food, homemade wine and ubiquitous Turkish coffee was their gift, their currency.

That is just what we did that Saturday. Sitting outside, we ate a great lunch, from scratch, of spinach pie – including her homemade cheese, the backyard grown spinach, garlic and tomatoes.

At one point, I asked “The Harley place. Probably makes it safer, more active?

But what’s up with all the other motorcycles all over town?”

“Oh! This is Founders’ Weekend. Sober bikers come from everywhere. It’s the anniversary of Alcoholics Anonymous. They have a big parade on Sunday morning.”

Again, the feeling I had in the car enveloped me, one of an immediate grounding to place. I arrived in Akron during the celebration of the program that saved my life. I took this in while resisting what it could mean. I just noticed and stayed in the day.

***

The first Akron save happened when I was eleven. Going to spend two weeks at a Catholic summer camp was not my idea, but another situation of bafflement that I accepted without question. I would discover plenty of reasons for me to love camp.

Fundamentally, it was time away from Cleveland, it was outdoors, and if we weren’t singing, we were swimming.

Before the first day was over, I also discovered a reason to pretend camp meant nothing to me. I fell in love. Just like that, on first sight, the full case. Embarrassing only in that it is such a cliché. Preadolescent girls falling in love with their camp counselor is a thing, and probably supports a whole section of pornography, an assertion I have no desire to verify. I encountered Sheila Mary “Sam” Murphy as the most compelling person I had ever seen. I felt something. It was beyond crush, it was the love that dare not speak its name. I could not help it, I was just swept away. Unaccustomed to feeling anything, all I knew is that it had to be mine alone. As long as I told no one, as long as no one knew, it could not be taken away from me.

At seventeen, Sam was a wild child. It was hard to imagine that this androgynous imp might have a home other than in a tree. She had a compact lithe body that defied gravity, like a human spider. There seemed to be nothing normal about her whatsoever, a

11 whirl of chaotic charm playing her coronet while climbing a tree. She carried an innocent defiance of the adult world while venerating nature and the divine spirit behind it. She inspired a kind of greatness and awe to those under her influence.

Just to see her in the world was enough for me. It gave me hope. Hope that even if a year passed, I would see her again. I would figure out how she would see me. I was determined that she would notice me.

I did not know anything about her outside of the confines of that camp except that she was from Akron, as most of the rest of camp seemed to be. This Akron was fused to the feeling, to the love. The year I saw her, Sam had just graduated from St. Vincent

High School. 1966 was a time of tremendous upheaval in the Catholic Church. Sam’s personality and talents were emblematic of the surge of new energy in and outside of the rituals of Catholicism. While she played the coronet in the marching band, she also played the guitar in the new folk Mass worship at St. V on Sunday.

Her intelligence and verbal agility was continuously undercut by an equal prankster instance on farting, burping and otherwise causing discomfort or laughter in the midst of a serious moment. She could never resist sticking a pin in pretension of any kind. The summer after I saw her, she entered the Akron Dominican order as a postulate.

Before the year was over, it was clear that things were not working out.

The contradiction of Sam was her status as an outsider and by her faith, an uncorrupted channel to God, a kind of direct current by campfire. The only time she seemed to be still was while teaching a song as she played it on a guitar. At such moments, her deep brown eyes would manage to connect with each person in the circle.

12 The sixties and Catholicism gave an outlier like Sam reason for hope. It was a season to believe that real change was coming out of Rome. The sixties saw the unfolding of the bottoms-up Civil Rights, Feminist and Gay Rights Movements.

However, it was the hierarchy of the Mother church that conducted the dramatic revolution. Unlike the other burgeoning movements roiling the country, the tremendous change agent of the Vatican II came from the very top. In the case of the Catholic

Church, It was not the populous taking to the streets, it was the Pope.

In the United States, it was marked by the instant astonishment represented in the simplicity of a 180 degree turn of a man in a robe. On the first Sunday of Advent, 1964,

Catholics in Akron, throughout the United States came to Mass to see the priest facing them and speaking English. That 180 degree pivot represents a turning point that changed everything in the relationship of the people to the church. Before that turn, the connection and understanding of the church they were born into had not changed for four hundred years. Most people accepted that it was always that way.

And the notion of change, of the potential of the faithful having some say was a natural in a place as free as camp. Daily morning Mass was on the schedule. During the high-spirited explosion of singing during the Mass, one or two campers might faint and fall to the concrete floor of the rec hall. The spirit was a’moving for sure in the room, but the fainting was borne of plain old hunger. Mass came before breakfast. At camp in that era of promise, Mass willingly came before everything.

I was leaving that first year without being seen by Sam, but I somehow felt seen, or believed that I could be seen, that there was someone in the world who had made something available to me. Though I could not name it, share it or wear it, I was forever

changed by the vague encounter with Sam. It was the purity of a thing that had nothing to do with the painted over shame of the normal world view of my family.

I left camp with a new hope in the future. The hope that next year I would see her again. And I had fifty weeks to figure out how she would notice me.

***

Fifty weeks of private anticipation about camp managed to crawl past, and on the way to camp in a packed station wagon, my friend’s mother was lost, trying to work south towards a crossroads dot on the road map called Bath. I could have told her how exactly how to get there. I traced it countless times with my finger on the complimentary

Sohio roadmap in our glove compartment. The route was all surface roads then, and it took forever to get to the dot on the map. That dot represented my obsession. It was the last turn, right before camp, a mile and a half of Ira Road. It’s a straight, gentle downhill course. The left hand side was marked by manicured grass and the continuous white rail fencing of the Firestone fox hunt grounds. On the right, fields and farm buildings until

Ira Road ends at the rust red painted gate of Camp Christopher. The stop sign is the final pause before the curtain parts and body and soul enter the eternal.

The mind cannot enter, but struggles anyway to get it, to name it. And we are a people of the mind. So the question rolls on, what is this thing, so strong? If we were

Druids instead of Roman Catholics, we wouldn’t care about words, about naming it.

Instead, we have made trees our servants, and take up countless of their number to lay claim to creation, to find means of measuring the immeasurable, in words on paper.

In the course of the year before the station wagon passed through the gate, I had figured out how to get Sam to notice me. I discovered that I could be funny. I had a

14 knack for comedy. While my girlfriends were recreating themselves to attract boys, I was making them all laugh. I found a way to stand out, to stand apart.

Passing through that gate at last, it was for me going from the wings onto the stage. It was a debut of sorts, an opening night for an audience of one. It was a place of suspension of disbelief, camp. No one knew or cared about the rest of your life while you were on those grounds, inside a notch of hills in a fertile Ohio valley.

The calculation was assisted by fortune. Sam was my counselor that year. The rest of camp was background to the main goal, to my not-so-innocent effort to capture

Sam. Within the first twenty four hours, on a hike, I scored a success. I made her laugh.

Not only that, out of earshot I saw her reenact the moment to someone else. The plan worked. The confidence of that moment was the charm to fully step into the space of someone I could seem to be. I made the deception seem natural.

The earth sparked as I ran through those days at camp. I was visible while invisible. The world seemed to curve away from this place of power, this confluence of soul energy disguised as modest red cabins and pathways through nature. The hot asphalt driveway to the mess hall exuded a sugar sweet air of spilled Kool Aid before it mingled with the cleaning compound, bonding in a distinct L’aire du Campe. Every once in a while in the years since, smelling that particular mix, it all comes back in full color, and I am there, singing with abandon in a pocket of time eternal, next to Sam.

Camp was the perfect setting for such aspirational fervor. Amidst the constant swimming and singing and strumming of guitars, there was an innocent current of sexuality throughout the reverberant echo of the enclosing hill. The perpetual swim damp subtlety of female ardor had me in a constant swoon.

It was confusing, it was brilliant, and it was private. I believed if anyone knew of its tiny light, they would blow it out. I never let on how much it meant, for fear it would disappear, be taken away without a word. That was what I knew about love.

My secret obsession with Sam, my constant nonchalant awareness of where she was in the world was really not much different than my friends’ open worship of various

Beatles, Monkees or Kurt Russell. It was a one sided fantasy. But unlike their unrequited love, Sam wrote back to me.

The year I got a job at camp as a life guard and swim instructor was the first year

Sam was gone. After what seemed forever to most people, Sam was no longer a part of camp. There was autumnal reality to that summer. It was time for me to let go as well, my heart half gone already.

I was in love with her, as I had been from that first moment. In the particular confusion of my endless journey to adulthood, knowing she was in the world was vital to me. We had enough glue through letters to withstand the departure of the place that connected us in the first place. Our distant link would have dissolved as well, but for my insistence as a correspondent. We were never personal in any emotional sense, but in our letters there was a kind of erudition that must have kept it interesting enough to sustain the meager base and fifteen years of physical separation.

I wrote to her when I was in a crisis. Like the love I had for her, I endured the bewildering emotional territory of my own story alone. I was unaware and unable to ask for help. All I knew was to keep collecting good external indications of success, the good grades, the ambitious choices, working harder to compensate for drinking too much.

I did not know what was wrong. It would take me decades to understand, but in the meantime, I had Sam. Those letters to Sam kept me going when everything hung on a very slender thread. Somehow writing funny letters to her about a false version of my life worked to release me from the black depth of despair. Putting the letter in the mail, more so than receiving her equally chipper response, saved my life on more than one occasion.

For years, that was the lifeline to a functional emotional balance. I used that rope until a particular morning on my rooftop in New York City at thirty years old. It was an unusually sunny day in November and I was writing another upbeat letter to Sam in the midst of personal chaos, I recognized an emotion in me. I was … afraid.

Fear, like a billion other emotions, was not ever in my playlist. But there it was, right there on the tar beach rooftop with me. Instead of ignoring it, I told Sam everything that was really going on, everything. There was no turning back. I told her I had been in love with her from the first minute I saw her and still was. For twenty six years. In fact, as pathetic as it sounded, I told her part of the reason I moved to New York was figuring that everyone at some point comes to New York and I would see her again.

I mailed the letter, not sure if she would ever write back, but something was released in that honesty. I could survive on my own. She had gotten me that far, had saved my life when I had no resources to draw on other than her memory. I could let her go and keep living.

But she did write back.

Much to my astonishment, within five years of the rooftop letter, we were actually friends. We both had met someone. She and her partner Barb came to New York several

17 times, staying with us in the office/guest room Cherry and I had directly below our studio apartment.

Sam was never one to take care of herself when young, almost as though she was at war with her body. She smoked and drank with abandon tempered only by her partner’s attempts to curb the behavior.

But it was not a chimera that I had loved. She was deeply committed to helping people. Sam, now Dr. Murphy, was a psychiatrist distinguished by compassion and a capacity to listen deeply. Her defiantly outsider status was a magnet to the marginalized. She was a counselor at Indian River Correctional, a facility for juvenile male felons.

The two of us had a kind of tough guy way, an “aw, g’wan, who needs ya” relationship.

We knew it wasn’t how we felt, but it was just too much to express. On their visits with us in

New York, simply being four gay women free in the world seemed miraculous enough, given where we sprang from. It was enough to fill our time with joy.

But I worried about her. There was a kind of toxicity to her body, a shroud of poison that bit by bit took her from a world that longed for the spirit she had been. I found it hard to understand how someone so good with other’s problems could be so neglectful of her own condition.

***

If tragedy plus time makes comedy, in my experience, tragedy plus time - plus mystery makes ritual.

My bicycle is an instrument of ritual. It is the vehicle for reclamation of my history in

Northeast Ohio. It was not intentional at first, but became intentional in the power of the experience of how it has expunged the ghosts and nostalgia of past places. Having hurled my

way into Akron in a rental car, a bicycle allowed for my perambulation at twelve miles an hour, a speed more appropriate to memory, to stopping at any shiny object on the path.

Spinning around Akron was an unintentional parade of ritual. It was all glorious to me.

One day, I was negotiating the path from one side of the railroad lines and freeway to the other, a journey requiring the attention of all faculties. The rail lines preceded the layout of most roads and buildings in South Akron, then the expressway overlaid and obliterated many of those roads and buildings. Simple physics of freeway design had created profound danger in the zone of the South Main Street I-77 interchange. The slashing, banked-for-speed off-ramps pierced the older street grid at odd angles, creating deathly unexpected intersections for the few pedestrians and cyclists attempting to cross the path of vehicles surfing in at 60 miles an hour.

The attention required in this zone is why I had never noticed the Akron Brewing Company.

On a lovely spring day, while stopping to ensure a safe margin of crossing time at this freeway nightmare I felt a curious sensation – a kind of space heater red warmth at my back. I turned, and faced the dazzlement of a “will-you-please-notice-me” red brick building. She sparkled.

I crossed to the relative safety of the island buffering the exit ramp. The crescent shaped island is the largest in an engineered archipelago of banked landfills to alert freeway drivers of immediate entry to the city grid. I stood at the widest part of the crescent, populated otherwise by two dwarf apple trees in full bloom. In the direct rays of the setting sun, the horizontal light ricocheted off the red brick building and on to the delicate white blossoms.

They shook slightly, as though the light itself threatened to shorten their fragile brevity on the strange island. In the oblivious rush of cars, my bicycle, the trees and I shared the momentous bath of rose light. The petals were glowing with free rose light.

An astonishment of witness. These encounters are the authentic God of noticing.

Such moments shift everything slightly, so the world itself is not the same, it becomes less frightening. “Take off your shoes. This is holy ground.” 1

There are common hallmarks of action that are characteristic of every ritual. But the underlying reasons and motivation for participation in ritual sprawl in countless manifestations.

Creating my own rituals served as counterweight to those rituals etched in me over which I had no control. I enjoyed the formula of ritual and the understanding that it was all performance, all artifice. The potential of ritual as a change agent comes through the artifice, through sudden transformation carried by a formulaic action.

***

When I was invited by friends to Camp Christopher for an overnight visit during the last week of summer, a week devoted to former counselors and employees, I said yes to the invitation. It was an opportunity to return to a place of such unutterable longing, but with a different purpose, a new context.

It called out for ritual.

Then there is the script. When the ritual is a road trip, a journey, a pilgrimage, next comes the map to chart the path. The trip to Camp Christopher this time was remarkably clean. Essentially it involved one left turn. I was awed by the simplicity. I can ride straight down my street directly to the towpath.

The Ohio & Erie Towpath trail is a success of imagination, collaboration and brilliant simple design. The brief thirty years of commercial freight by canal was over by the Civil War, and the canal system degenerated from a connector to a local transport

1 Bible, King James Version, Exodus, 3:5. 20

system until it was completely abandoned after the flood of 1913. Today, at all points along its renovated eighty five mile course, from the northern terminus in Cleveland to the southern point in New Philadelphia, people stroll on the mule path. Though the towline between mules and barges is gone, the path throughout its course runs along water. The water is present in various forms; the confined remnants of the canal, the free flow of the two rivers that fed the canal, in swamps, and in the burst of the wide open space over Summit Lake. It is an expressway of joy for walkers and cyclists. It is an artery of pilgrimage.

The simplicity of the one left turn. I get on the towpath going north Cleveland, get off the towpath with a left turn onto Ira Road and follow Ira to its end, directly at the entrance to

Camp Christopher. It was a glorious prospect, sixteen miles with one turn.

Drawn by the enigma of travelling there under my own power on a route more tree than car, more flow than stoplight, and by myself was more than enough to overcome the apprehension of visiting a place that once had such power in my life. It was a reclamation of some sort. It was in some ways inevitable that I would go there at some point from Akron, but it was the invitation that gave it a purpose other than nostalgia.

It is necessary to pack a bag for this ritual. In my case, the preparation was simple. The necessaries were few; bathing suit, toothbrush, phone, money, and house key.

Setting forth, I gave myself plenty of time on the twenty mile journey to stop as I wished. Ira Road winds across and through the Cuyahoga Valley like a stream, its curves and angles defined by geography, and indigenous people creating paths of least resistance.

Geometry claims Ira, defining the fields of white settlers with paper deeds of private ownership.

It is possible that those passing through in cars might be oblivious to its charms, but at the very least, the character of the road requires a slower speed and a brake-ready foot. Staunched throughout its length with outcroppings of human and geologic history, at some point even the most oblivious teenager today might ask a question about the area known as the township of Bath, Summit County, Ohio. They might switch out of music mode to ask

“Is this where LeBron lives?”

Ira Road is one of only five places in the 22.4 mile Summit County section where the towpath trail is interrupted by a vehicular roadway in Summit County. The many times I crossed Ira in the three years I had lived in Akron, I always looked to the left as if

I could somehow see five miles down the road to the entrance to camp. This time I simply turned left.

After the dreamy lassitude of the flat towpath trail, the climb out of the Cuyahoga river valley begins in a series of furtive turns and twists. But the effort pays off in a burst of open sky and flat terrain – the vision of a fertile place, an idealized children’s book landscape of the perfect farm. The road still seems to respond to an invisible geography, taking bends and curves that respond to lost obstacles. Hills ranged around this pocket valley in a wreath of raggedy green. After the staccato bursts of steep climbs, the open wash of plowed fields drew me effortlessly in flow.

An old cemetery marks the unlikely corner of Ira and Ira; the road takes a 90 degree turn, keeping its identity on the perpendicular. One is forced to stop to make the turn. It was a perfect spot to pause before the last few miles to camp. Though I was curious about what the cemetery could tell me, I was more immersed in my own history

22 as I meandered through the old headstones. As I meditated my way around the graves, I was delighted by the density of history at this terminus of Ira. Here and ahead of me was a new layer, a new way to reclaim the past, to make it new. I had the agency to enter my past unbound by my past.

I leaned against a monument directly centered on the road ahead and scanned the valley. Not far off was Hale Homestead, a destination that was annually dangled before us in grade school as a field trip if we behaved. The photographs were intriguing, bonneted women and suspendered men engaged in farm tasks. We never met the standard for conduct to get there. I was so close now, I felt like I could reach my hand directly from my fifth grade desk and touch the butter churn. I laughed at the memory, at the strange power in my body.

Directly in front of me, Ira disappeared in an arc of trees across a landscape of topsoil so densely fertile, it smoked, rippling waves of heat-distorted air in rhythms of the late August cicadas. Draining my water bottle, I got back on the bicycle, the last few miles of the pilgrimage on the artery of emotional memory.

In the last section of the approach, I kept my eyes ahead as much as possible.

What had been fields and farms had of course blossomed into theatrically named subdivisions. The Firestone fox grounds on the right were still bordered by the white fences, still projecting an air of first estate nobility, for whatever new purpose they now enclosed.

I crossed into the terrain of a past that no longer gripped me, confused me, and motivated me to stand out. Only a slight crunch of gravel under my wheels heralded the

23 triumph. Sun still blazing at five pm, I parked and headed directly for the lake. I needed a swim.

On the beach, a cluster of white heads and the whirring sound of a blender.

Some people, many, I knew. Many, most, seemed to know me and knew that I arrived by bicycle. Most, all, it seemed, joined in discussing who would take me home in their car.

I wondered how bad I looked to them and asked where I could change for a swim.

Betty, while offering me a daiquiri from the latest blender batch, said

“Use Cabin Four – it’s where our stuff is.”

I was already uncomfortable.

In Cabin 4, I saw that I had woefully under packed for an overnight. This was camp – plastic covered foam mattresses on bunks. I had brought not so much as a hand towel. Already I needed to ask for something, already a reason to feel bad.

They were still talking about my transport when I got back to the beach, Betty offering to do so before dark today as she whipped up more cocktails in the blender. I wondered if she forgot she invited me to stay the night.

I was invited to play a round of Corn Hole.

“How bout after my swim?” seemed a normal response, and thus accepted. I wondered if I had heat stroke, I felt so disconnected.

I stood about for a moment, not really able to enter any of the conversations. It seemed they were enjoying their own rituals of camp as adults. Away from home on safe grounds, it was after five and the bar was open. These are people I would talk to, happily, but they were in another rhythm, not one I could find entry to. I was having a hard time hearing, understanding what anyone is even talking about.

24 Attempting to appear casual, I take a red licorice rope out of a container, something to do.

Oh, help yourself” said a voice at the table, someone I do not know – and have no idea if she was being satirical, but it’s too late to put it back in the container. Its red plastic texture and taste feel just right for my diminishing sense of presence. A suffocating wave threatens me, high and black. A swim will fix me up.

I dive into that particular green of Northeast Ohio fresh water, and open my eyes to its cool swish, turn over under the surface to look through to the blue sky. I love to swim, and will do so in just about anything. As an adult, I an allergy to fresh water, or maybe to the things that prosper in fresh water. I decide that having a runny nose and weepy eyes might be just fine, and dive down with my eyes open.

It was lovely and fine as I swam across to the giant willow trees that were long gone, swam to the memory of their sturdy overhanging limbs no longer shading the lake.

There was one massive trunk that sloped at the right angle to climb up and along to the rope swing that Sam, myself and others of a certain kind of bravado would swing from, summersaulting in air and down through the surface of the lake.

It was ok that the trees were gone. I live in the present now. The lake, the layered water, warm on top, degreeing cool as I dive down deep, restored the strain of the hot ride. The water was the same.

I turned back to the beach.

The white heads were tiny against what made me gasp. The view beyond that group had not changed at all in the forty years since I last swam in the lake. The red buildings crouched tiny against the stone ledges rising behind them. The tops of the trees

at the tops of those ledges towered over me, a dot out in the lake. It was lovely and clarifying. That was the feeling I wanted, not to try to make a new memory.

I came out of the water renewed on every level. I lay on the dock in the sun to dry as the conversation in the shade was a sweet incomprehensible buzz. The metal dock made those same chirpy friction sounds. I fought the desire to sleep, just hovering in the dreamy nothing of warmth and panting breath.

After my skin was dry, I rose, walked to cabin four, dressed, and went straight to my bicycle without saying a word to anyone. I would explain later and they would understand. I would just say it was too much for me. They all knew what camp had been once, but they found a different way to keep it. For me, I wanted it as I knew it then. I had an adult friend named Sam, but I wanted to keep the child one too. And the great thing for me was that I could manage it. I had ridden twenty miles for a swim. I flew up Ira Road in a time machine. The ride back was the real journey that day; free from the need of any preserving ritual, hair wet, my own agency, and no stops to home.

BIG IDEA

In the lifestyle spectrum, my oldest friend Peggy O’Neill lands close to the extreme end of “New Age Thinker”, but with a canny business sense. I have a spectator’s awe of her enlightened-get-rich-quick enterprises. Her goods and services are cutting edge, life-enhancing and money-making.

By far, my favorite Peggy product launch was the V.I.B.E. Machine. She gave me a free treatment, a half hour in a room sitting in the presence of something that might have been designed by Dr.Frankenstein, had his research continued. The vibe machine

(by dint of my personal encounter, I think the familiarity of the lower case is permissible) resembled R2D2 in size and presentation, animated by standard household electrical current. I assumed a position of neutrality to the neon colors and snaky electrical lightning bolts in the sealed glass globes. The machine sent forth pulsing wavelengths designed to raise physical, emotional, mental and spiritual vibrations, thereby improving the vibrations of the body’s cells. Emerging from the session, I listened politely to

Peggy’s invitation to consider a leasing arrangement for my own machine and franchise service. But my intimate session did not vibrate me sufficiently for a second date.

However, I may have underestimated the power of the vibe machine. After I said goodbye to Peggy, I was broadsided by a sobering wavelength of an unwelcome epiphany: I was just like Peggy, trying to sell stuff no one wanted, needed or asked for.

I was the non-profit arm of Peggy’s wacky capitalism.

The strange aspect of this syndrome, this brilliant idea blind spot is that the new

BIG IDEA is so big it squashes the memory of the last idea of that magnitude. My record of failures never comes up - It’s always feels like the first time. Obviously in making that statement I am aware of the blind spot, but not while in the thrall of the new

BIG IDEA.

In my imagination, I pull the idea to its full concrete expression. I am caught up and consumed in the beauty of the particulars. Sometimes the idea has that “chance of a lifetime” urgency, or promises to benefit a worthy cause, or at the very least – providing an interesting experience. After I feel the presentation is ready, I send it to a curated group. And I await the sound of bells ringing. Every time I am stunned at the complete lack of interest. The bell never rings.

Admittedly, as my writing style is the verbal equivalent of bobsledding, the language of the pitch might be an additional challenge to the audience. Breathless, excited, I aim to both capture interest and describe the idea within the first paragraph.

The prose is a direct entry into three dimensional space. But even the first step looks risky from the threshold I offer. After one or two of those appeals, my target audience might enjoy the latest outburst of my sincerity, but their grip on the handrail is firm and the feet are planted. They move not one step closer to my Big Idea.

My most recent, and hopefully last, dramatic misread of the marketplace unspooled in the spring of 2013. After trying unsuccessfully to connect my architectural practice to a project with social merit in New York, I broadened the search through contacting friends around the country. A close friend wanted me to see what her church

was up to, and invited me to the 15th Anniversary of South Street Ministries in Akron. A religious institution was not what I had in mind, particularly a Christian one, but if nothing came of it, spending time with my friend Anne Schillig was enough for me. I accepted her invitation for the weekend celebration.

By Saturday morning, I was convinced the ministry was living out what often is only preached. They had been given an old brick building on a tired commercial street near the county jail and the now-shuttered Greyhound Bus station. In its previous life, the neglected structure thrived as the Croatian American Club. It now served as the operational base of the ministry, a grass roots, and knuckle hard walk of faith. They needed an architect, I wanted a project. No one in Akron asked me to take this on, but I knew it was right. Deciding to move to a new place on the strength of a weekend might raise an eyebrow, but I just knew. To others, it was impulsive, to me – intuitive.

By this time, my friends and family in New York had gotten used the revolving door of my farewell-and-then-return parties around my junkets in exotic locales.

However, this move was not like the others. This was not, for instance, renovating a zoo in the Republic of Macedonia, or designing a theater in the Philippines.

This was decidedly different.

This was an evangelical storefront church in Akron, Ohio.

In Akron, I had found something that a lot of people in New York talked about constantly as though it was an impossible dream. Among the circles of colleagues and friendish types in Manhattan, the language of complaint had become so common, no one noticed. There was a constant whine of how New York had changed, and not for the better. At times I would disrupt the litany by pointing out that it was we who had

changed – we got old. Who said we got to decide what New York was supposed to be?

Lest I loop into a litany of complaint myself, my personal approach to dismaying conditions is to take action.

I got the BIG IDEA.

I had a perfectly fine life before I came to Akron. That was the funny thing about it. By any quality of life indicator, I would have been right at the top. The only way I could explain leaving was to say that it just did not feel like the life I was meant to live anymore. Once I made the decision to come to Akron, the whole house of cards that my

New York life had become collapsed. Within four days after I came back from that weekend, I had a tenant for my apartment, all my stuff was in storage, and I was camping in a friend’s apartment on West 30th Street.

“Two years”, I told everyone. “It will take me two years and I will be back.”

I had grown accustomed to the ease of leaving New York for bursts of work in other countries, but this time I was heading in the opposite direction. Westward, over the

Hudson River on the George Washington Bridge, to Ohio, a place I could not leave fast enough growing up.

After living in the third floor apartment of a big old house in the Akron’s classic leftie neighborhood, it dawned on me. So much of what people complained about in

New York could be solved by moving to Akron! There was a cicada-like moaning desire for personal gardens, bigger living spaces, more time, less noise, slower pace, lower cost of living, and over again. Achieving these qualities was not only possible off the island - it was fun! I targeted my letter to those who I thought were looking for a change.

“Imagine: a newspaper waiting on the front porch to accompany the coffee

you savor without the tyranny of the clock; windows you can fling open for hours

without the accumulation of black gritty detritus; city views backed by big green

trees, not just squared off in a park, but everywhere!”

The letter went on to describe the unique cultural aspects of Akron, and a few additional discoveries I had not expected, that had only come through living in another culture. Though New York has a bit of the whole world within its borders, everyone hangs out with the closest sliver of themselves. Time is so precious that leisure time is spent with an intense distillation of people just like you. So though everyone talks about all the cultures represented in a subway car, no one is actually talking to one another in that underground mini United Nations. Everyone just wants a little peace and solitude – or they are with their people via devices.

In Akron I already had friendships with people outside my narrow demographic.

My daily life with filled with real, lived, slowed down diversity.

I waited for follow-up questions that did not follow. What meager responses I received from the group of three dozen or so did not include any suggestion of interest. I thought I was a trusted voice. I mean, it was not as though I had to leave Manhattan, I chose to commit to a place that seemed to me could use a boost. Inadvertently, I had discovered all the great stuff people claimed they longed for.

What I did not know was that the enthusiasm of my letter was tainted by a rumor.

In working for a Christian organization, my zeal was seen as evidence of a conversion. I had joined a cult. My decision to move was therefore easy to dismiss; it erased the vague threat of my decision. This rumor flowed through the network several times, in various

31 iterations. In another round of falsehood, a very close friend called me, upset. He got the news about my becoming a Scientologist from another good friend, and mostly seemed upset that he was not the one I had told first.

The nonsense of my sudden conversion was funny but disturbing. What happened to my friends? I thought of us as sympathetic to the marginalized. What happened to the gay kids we were, kids who ran to New York because it was the only place we could live? Where was the tolerance now?

Since that last marketing fiasco, I finally do remember the previous example of my impulse to save the world. Any dazzling new big idea gets a quieter launch. I take a pause after the brilliant notion before sending it into the world.

It is not that I have not seen the successful realization of an original idea. But the successes get folded into the overall stream of life. The successes accrue a wider ownership. The big flops we remember more vividly, because they are stuck on the banks of life, never having made it into the stream. They fade, are forgotten, except by the person attached to the failure. For those of us who know what it is to give everything to something no one wanted, they live on. In the world of ideas, for the creator spinning a big dream into something real, even if only to themselves and the kitchen table, the dream lives as imagined. They are still our children.

In my archives of these idea children, there is one that goes beyond big idea, into its own category of GRAND UNIFYING CONCEPT. I don’t mourn its failure to launch, but I am still astonished that no one else recognized its merit. This flop of vivid memory, stuck on the bank of the Lepinica River in central Serbia, is the fabulous flop, vivid in my memory as “The Uncle Dan Tour of Yugoslavia.”

32 The idea for the tour was painstakingly developed in the middle of my two year service as a Peace Corps volunteer in Krucevo, a mountain town in the Republic of

Macedonia. I had a job in city hall, encouraging my colleagues to create local economic development projects. Cheerleading out-of-the-box thinking was the ideal job for me. I was so far out of the box in that setting that I was not a threat to the locals, but more of a curious novelty.

There was considerable outside government funding coming into the country supporting such grass roots efforts. But Macedonians are not comfortable with individual initiative, they are collective people, accustomed to a top down system. The long- oppressed Southern Slav’s box was fashioned by a history of domination for 1.5 millennia, minus a few decades here and there.

I loved it. I loved everything about that life, minus a few weeks here and there.

The most promising sector for Macedonian economic development lay in the potential of Rural Tourism. In town halls all over the country, stacks of flip chart paper outlined the steps to encourage this brand of travel. It was a stretch to imagine people with enough extra money choosing the tiny landlocked republic for a vacation. And very few people within the new republics created in the collapse of Yugoslavia had the capacity to take vacations. If they did, Macedonia, the domain of peasant farmers, would not be their choice for leisure time, either.

The potential for this market was clear. Macedonia, the size of Vermont, photographed its ancient allure well. The voracious travel industry loved “off the grid” discoveries. But the practical steps to get there were still just multicolored marker comments on flip chart paper stored atop filing cabinets. .

33 Long before the general interest type vacationer could be remotely happy for a week’s worth of rural tourism, the intrepid traveler had to touch down. The country was broke, still recovering from the profound negative impacts of the breakup of Yugoslavia and the Balkan Conflict. The infrastructure was exhausted.

Macedonia had the distinction among the former republics of the only peaceful withdrawal of the national army. It also had the distinction of being the poorest, without valuable natural resources or viable industries, which, one could argue, accounts for the lack of interest by the retreating army.

However, Macedonia can boast of another, much greater achievement in the way of peace over violence. When the NATO air campaign was launched in March 1999 against Serbia, refugees from Kosovo began to enter Macedonia. Within nine weeks,

344,500 people had sought safety in Macedonia2, a country of two million people already under stress.

That translates into absorbing an additional 17.5% of their population. The equivalent numbers for the United States in the fall of 2018 would be as though a caravan of 5,687,500 Central American refugees successfully crossed into Texas between

Halloween and New Year’s Eve.

By 2007, there was tremendous tension all over the country between groups with identities that were difficult to keep straight for those outside the culture of the region.

Fundamentally, it was as though there were only two families in Macedonia; the ethnic

Macedonian Christians and the Albanian Moslems, both with long histories in the same rocky chunk of Southeast Europe, both to me often undistinguishable visually.

2 Donev, Donco, Refugee Crisis in Macedonia during the Kosovo Conflict in 1999, Croatian Medical Journal, 2002; 43:184-189. 34 Touch one member of the family, and you really touched them all. Any member of one family/tribe knew or knew of the entire tribe and avoided knowing anyone or anything about the other family/tribe. The family was the essential unit of identity in

Macedonia.

That was the spark for me – new ideas in the fragile zone between the two cultures needed to work from that common cross-cultural understanding of the family.

I started to string together the experience and understanding of the culture with that in mind. It was within that understanding that I had the BIG IDEA - a project that would be a grand unifier of all the available positives, the assets of the country that my Macedonian counterparts outlined on all the flip charts. And it was all about family, my family. The proposal was modest, but could be easily duplicated: The Uncle Dan Tour of Yugoslavia.

The idea was a way for me to stay ahead of the numbing feeling that came of far too much small talk in hot rooms with an excess of people, crocheted doilies, and teeth- rattling sweets. The mental paralysis was vibrated by cups of the granular irresistible sweet sludge of too many Turkish coffees. No one really cared if I participated, but they loved having me in the room with them. This was the job, really – just being present, bearing witness, listening. And I was good at it – or good at looking interested while my head was bouncing around in a caffeine and sugar induced fantasy world.

The Uncle Dan Tour took shape in those hot rooms in my town in Krucevo. It struck me that I was living in a community of continuity, a place worn and polished by generations of people who never left home. I sat in homes owned by the same family for over three hundred years while my peripatetic Irish Potato Famine genetics struggled to just be still. I was of a people that kept moving. My own fifty years of life were cut in

35 that same pattern, movement and curiosity. The tour would combine the best of two divergent migration patterns; the go-go American and the home-loving Slav.

Though I cannot say for certain, it is likely that I had traveled to more places in that first year in Macedonia than anyone in my town would in their lifetime. I had all the parts I needed to make the tour come alive. Now I just had to assemble the parts.

***

The First Part: Before coming to Macedonia, the closest association in my past with the former Yugoslavia was the summer I worked in a screw factory3 in the flats of

Cleveland. Most of the employees lived close to Ferry Cap and Set Screw, and nearly all were high school educated first generation Southern Slavs. I was definitely the exception; summer worker, college kid, female – and related to ‘management’. My

Uncle Dan was the Vice President of Marketing.

The factory was a rite of passage among the 29 cousins willing to take the risk and challenge of making it through the entire summer. One of my brothers had done it, but he was upstairs, with the white collars. I wanted to be on the floor, wearing overalls, in another culture as something more than a tourist, but with a clear exit visa after Labor

Day.

As a Quality Control Inspector, I wore a canvas carpenter’s apron with precision measuring instruments in the pockets. The calipers and templates were elegant and precise in function, form and name. One day I realized I mastered their use, fluidly reaching in the right pocket, adjusting the ratchet with one hand while reaching for a random screw in the pan with the other hand.

3 We in the industry refer to them as “fasteners”, not screws. 36 At the start of the achingly-slow-to-arrive thirty minute lunch break, I put the belt my locker, removed my brown lunch bag and went outside. Five years before, the

Cuyahoga River, the spine of all the industry around me, caught fire for the last time.

The air quality since then had improved to the point where going outside was possible, though I was the only person who did so.

There was something so deep, resonant and mysterious in that space below downtown Cleveland. The industrial Flats sprang from a level plateau folded in the valley at the terminus of the Cuyahoga River. Just beyond where I sat, the river flows into the wide open space of Lake Erie, but I looked out on a fantastic visual collision of angles, curves and movement, rendered in a basic color palette of brick, rust and mud brown accompanied by low rhythmic percussion, hiss of pressured steam and vibration of power. Now and then my new friend in the grinding department joined me, prompting a lot of razzing about romance, particularly after he broke a grinding wheel while I was measuring one of his screws.

Part of my tolerance for what was a very long day in a hot, sweaty noisy place was knowing it had an end date. It would be my last summer in the city I could not wait to leave, and I was spending it in its very heart. That land had been the place of vital human life long before its official founding, marked rather poetically as the moment

Moses Cleveland stepped from a boat onto land not far from where I ate my lunch.

Outside, perched on the loading dock in my costume, I waved to my Uncle Dan as he drove away in a car with other white collars to Jim’s Steakhouse or Cap’n Franks for lunch. That was our only contact at work, the friendly distant wave acknowledging relation, respecting caste.

37 From the age of seven, the Sisters of Notre Dame indoctrinated us in the evils of

Godless communism behind the Iron Curtain stretching across Eastern Europe. It fascinated me that my Uncle Dan often went behind that heavy curtain, to Yugoslavia, on business. It was mystifying to me that this could work, a commercial agreement between a capitalist and communist economy, currency and mindset.

But I was too young, shy and inarticulate to ask my uncle about Yugoslavia. He took a lot of pictures, and had at least three carousels of slides marked “Yugoslavia” that only elicited groans when he wanted to show them at the family Thanksgiving slide shows. He might make it through a few of them, but was defeated by the intoxicated mockery of the rest of the adults, in ethnic slurs common to my East Side Irish family.

Aside from his own nine children, he was the patriarch of the whole raft of first cousins, particularly my fatherless family. He fit the role well, a grand size physically, cut like Uncle Rich Pennybags, the Monopoly guy. He was one for the grand gesture, my

Uncle Dan, and very generous. Everything he did and had was the best and the biggest, top notch, including his blow-top temper. Twice as a child I had incurred his wrath, blasted out of my shoes by the eruption. The explosions were brief, but frightening.

The second of the two happened while my mother and I were guests at their rented summer cottage on Middle Bass Island in Lake Erie. My cousin Jane and I were caught smoking a joint in the shadow of the tall obelisk dedicated to Oliver Hazard Perry, a naval hero from the War of 1812. We were escorted back home and handed over to my

Uncle’s custody while he was eating an ice cream cone on the screened porch. He was so red hot mad, the cowering deputy quickly retreated, his shaking hand clutching the

physical evidence of our infraction as my uncle’s ice cream melted right out of the cone.

But by the time his explosion was over, he was eating the empty cone and laughing.

The Second Part: After I punched my time card for the last time that summer I moved to Montreal to start school at McGill University. My Uncle Dan had a new client in Quebec, and took me out to dinner a few times that year. I was grateful for those

Montreal dinners for many reasons. I dressed up and enjoyed food far beyond my means.

I knew I was safe, that I would drink a sensible amount of wine, and wake up knowing where I had been the night before. But the best thing was the time alone with my uncle.

I asked him about Yugoslavia. No one in the extended family at home was interested in his working life, in fact, they teased him about the hunting trips and his

‘bohunk’4 travel junkets. I always wanted to know about those trips. Anything that involved a suitcase fascinated me as a kid.

His client was a state-owned car manufacturer, Zastava. Just that previous summer, I spent my days measuring screws shipped out daily to the “big four” auto companies in Detroit. It never occurred to me that some of those screws were destined for communist cars.

I listened as he rhapsodized on the social aspects of those trips, though I really wanted to know how the two systems came together in the exchange of goods. But from his description, the business was secondary to the relationships. The factory was huge, much bigger than Detroit. Before and after business was conducted, there would be

4 From four different online dictionaries (Miriam Webster, Collins, Dictionary.com and Urban Dictionary) a term derived from Bohemian /Hungarian, indicating a person of east or central European origin, generally a laborer. The four dictionaries accord the term with varying degrees of derogation, but in the case of my family, there is no doubt of its use as dismissive. 39

tremendous feasting. The Yugoslavian white shirts escorted my uncle through the

Serbian countryside, stopping for hours for lunch. He fell in love with the countryside, the people, the way of life. They were intense, generous, feisty and fun. So like him, I thought, so like my Uncle Dan.

The Third Part: From my mountain town, the trip to Belgrade took the three buses and a train, but I was drawn to a one time only opportunity to attend the first anniversary celebration of Alcoholics Anonymous in Serbia. It was long and arduous, typical of former Yugoslavian public systems; crowded, late, grouchy, uncomfortable.

Peace Corps encourages creation of projects outside of our official jobs, and this trip was aligned with one of my personal goals. Macedonia had no language for certain problems, so alcoholism, domestic violence and unwanted children simply did not exist.

I went to the convention hoping to return with resources to start an AA meeting in

Macedonia.

The trip to the Belgrade convention was worth every minute of effort to get there.

The hotel for the gathering was as close as one could get to a 1950’s Muscovite Cold War accommodation. It was big, run down, grandly overstaffed with surly Serbs in vintage uniforms. The feeling in the dining room was like being on an ocean liner that entered an enormous whirlpool of captured time. All the silverware and ceramics flourished the

Cyrillic scripted hotel name. Pressed starched linen tablecloths and napkins, so old they went limp to the touch, covered rolling carts with squeaking wheels and serving dishes, towel-draped arms carrying an excess of plates for the simplest of orders, all over a field of threadspent paisley patterned carpet. And everything was conducted without the slightest irony.

Belgrade had a toughness about it that attracted me. I knew I could never really understand the complexities of the recent Balkan War, and tried to just listen to my hosts, and absorb the experiences. The Serbs I met were smart, quick and newly sober. They loved to smoke and talk. As I was bound in the understanding of the surrender on a personal level through AA, and had made the effort to come to their city, they trusted me.

They were only eight years removed from the end of the war, a war where Serbia was vilified for its aggression under a cadre of heinous leaders. The war ended for them in the NATO bombing of their city, a campaign that killed 500 civilians. There was deep residual pain between the country they had been and the small, struggling republic they were now.

Aside from the primary purpose of the first anniversary of ‘the program’ (the typical way to refer to Alcoholics Anonymous in the public sphere) the hundred or so people held out a hope for recovery for these new republics formed after the collapse of

Yugoslavia. Through a mutual need of recovery from alcohol addiction, a group of brave desperate people had started to help each other; Croats, Bosniaks, Slovenians,

Montenegrins – coming to Belgrade, of all places, to sit down with Serbs. People torn apart from each other in hatred and violence were in the same room helping each other through the bond of personal recovery.

We met the week before Christmas. On the last day, I looked out the bay window of my room, on a high floor of the hotel. It was the birds’ eye panorama of the past few day’s excursions outside of the meetings in the hotel. I could see where we, as a group, headed out for a first meal, as awkward as college freshmen traveling in a lump the first weekend of campus life. As the snow drifted down, I imagined my solitary footsteps

tracing around the stern gothic modern style government buildings formally arrayed in the park directly across from the hotel.

I followed our trail past the forbidding chill of those buildings and into the twisting narrow streets and twinkling warmth of the lights of the coffeehouses and restaurants, these now precious spaces of the long conversations.

The city was tough. Slavic peoples don’t give away a smile. I had been allowed in. I stood in the window, weighing the options of staying a few days more at the invitation of someone a few floors below me. We had gone beyond flirting and if I accepted the invitation, we knew what that meant. My other option was walking in the snow to the bus station for the midnight departure, two days before Christmas, hoping to arrive back in my village before Christmas was over.

I stared out the snow drifting around charmless government buildings framing the warmth of the now familiar twinkling old commercial district behind them, trying to make a decision. Belgrade in that stare became so intimate, so deeply familiar. I suddenly felt like I was sitting on a ledge outside the Terminal Tower, looking over the downtown Cleveland and into the Industrial Flats. It looked and felt just like my childhood hometown, my Cleveland. I took the midnight bus.

***

Line Assembly of parts: I sat in the remnants of my Uncle Dan’s beloved

Yugoslavia thirty four years later, in the shared office of the local economic development department in the Krusevo City Hall. Since “working” in the civil service in Macedonia meant simply showing up for work that had not yet been invented, I had a lot of time to devote to this idea.

I had a pool of twenty nine very adult cousins, their children, potentially their grandchildren - all with strong connections to my uncle. He was the alpha man, the Irish

Godfather. We all had stories.

We were a close family. We enjoyed holidays and parties, weddings and even the funerals together. We looked for reasons to gather. This tour would be a natural extension of the family gathering, of the fun we experienced in Cleveland living rooms.

It was a customized, relatively inexpensive, European excursion, a unique travel story to share with other people back home. The journey through time and space would celebrate the memory of our Uncle Dan and provide a money producing model for rural tourism.

I created a promotional letter crafted in collaboration with my City Hall colleagues, and in consultation the network of potential stakeholders; bus companies, monasteries and homestay villages. I connected with my sober Serb group for the

Belgrade phase of the trip. I had a map on the wall with pushpins of the stops and overnight stays. The map itself became a subject of great interest to town citizens passing through the office.

The itinerary was straightforward and simple. The tour director and I would meet my family after their flight to Thessaloniki, followed by a day in the Greek city before the start of the bus tour. After crossing from Greece to Macedonia, the group would enjoy a four day wander through the beguiling countryside of Macedonia and Serbia in the comfort of a hopefully new-ish 15 person van. Stopping to take in noteworthy features along the way, the sleeping accommodations would be the clean simple, hospitable, modest-but historical monasteries common throughout Macedonia.

Meals would be in family settings, grown and prepared by local hosts. Amazing farmers, Macedonians naturally produce farm to table fare. Accompanied by homemade wines and spirits, the live Balkan music would have everyone on their feet doing the Oro, a simple trance-inducing circle dance that often went on for hours. All the while enjoying the extraordinary hospitality of the Balkan people, who would reap the financial benefits from what was a simple extension of their natural way of living.

The climax of the trip would be the tour of Zastava Motors, with a day of shopping and sightseeing in Belgrade and dinner in a barge restaurant on the Danube.

I drew a sketch of the bus, imagining different seating arrangements of the cousins. I wondered if I might need two vans. The mention of the word “Danube” at the end of the pitch seemed to attach the tour to Austro-Hungarian majesty, rather than the other glaring element I feared would bury the trip in ridicule: the Yugo.

The Ghost in the Machine: The Yugo was everywhere in Macedonia. It was produced in the Zastava factory in Serbia, the very place to which our Uncle Dan sold screws. Based on the Fiat 127, it was basic and inexpensive. The first one rolled off the line on the 45th anniversary of the founding of Yugoslavia to the cheering owner/workers of the factory. It gave simple people the opportunity to own cars.

My host family had a Yugo. Like most Macedonians, my host ‘father’ Meto, kept that thing going by sheer ingenuity. He took out all but the driver’s seat for use as a

truck. On my visits home, my ‘mother’ Nabila and I could distinguish it from the other aging Yugos by its distinct roar as he came over the hill outside the village. I rode on a crate, clutching to whatever remnant of structure was available on the frame. Meto turned off the car going downhill, to save gas. Many people adapted their Yugos to other uses if they were able to get a better car. Yugos became table saws and powered home distilleries.

All that would have been fine. The one size fits all generic charm of the Yugo would have been interesting to my American cousins. As consumers, we are accustomed to choice. In Yugoslavic socialism, choice was frivolous, frowned upon. With the Yugo, you got a two door hatchback in red, white or black. To see the continuous tinkering extending the life of this modest instrument of freedom to the average family would have generated admiration, I speculated.

Except it was the Yugo.

Marshall Bricklin was an American businessman who also miscalculated the market, albeit on a larger stage than mine. He had his BIG IDEA on a very BIG SCALE.

Through an elaborate set of agreements, he brought the Yugo to the United States in

August 1985 and sold them for $3,995. It was the cheapest new car on the market.

The screws my uncle brought to Yugoslavia were coming back to the United

States in the Yugo.

Americans went wild for the Yugo. People stood in lines for hours to test drive them. Every car brought into the country was sold before it even arrived. Major networks camped outside dealerships. The first six months of their United States residency, they were a phenomenal hit.

But it was the Yugo.

It was the Yugo in the go-go eighties, the Reagan-inspired open season for obsessive brand name consumerism and the triumph of the American way. A modest little car produced under socialism became an easy target of ridicule. Even the name was funny, the Yugo.

The meteoric rise in its popular appeal was outpaced by the speed to the bottom of popular derision. The generic basics of the car included generic flaws. Whether the car really was the worst car ever made, as it came to be known, it was the perfect car to kick, and not just the tires.

It became a national joke, the fodder of late night comedians for months.

The Yugo.

I had concerns. I pictured my cousins’ cultural insensitivity about the ubiquitous

Macedonian Yugo population. I feared they would point, laugh, and get going on the hundreds of Yugo jokes. But these and other concerns about The Uncle Dan Tour of

Yugoslavia did not materialize. The concerns I had leaped over the concerns I should have had.

Not one person, including my own brothers and sisters, responded in any way whatsoever to the tour brochure. In the silent thump of nothing, I recognized my spectacular failure of consideration. I failed to see that my extended family group, who resisted looking at slides of Yugoslavia might dismiss the opportunity to be in

Yugoslavia.

I failed to wonder whether that same group, lumped together for holidays and weddings, might not choose to travel together.

Aside from the time and expense of the undertaking, I failed to recognize that most people prefer comfort and certainty in their precious leisure hours.

These concerns have never been my concerns.

The upside of the failure was its value as a tool for my Macedonian counterparts.

It felt enough like a real project to be a taken for a planning exercise, like a fire drill, until the real thing came to be.

My failure was to envision my family experiencing what happened to me; my anxiety overturned to joy through surrendering control I did not even recognize - and accepting the astonishing hospitality of the Macedonian culture.

The very last Yugo rolled off the assembly line of the 11 million square foot

Zastava factory on November 11, 2008. The timing was such that the tour, had it happened, could have coincided with that moment.

I imagined the Uncle Dan Tour that might have been, all of us there at the Zastava

Factory, at the end of a full week together, lined up in the rain with umbrellas, facing the last car emerging from the giant works outside Belgrade. I was dressing up my singular loneliness again, as memories of the snow outside my Belgrade hotel window drifted back to me. I went from the window of that memory to the factory in the rain. I was alone under the umbrella, watching the end of something we could never allow ourselves to feel when it happened to us in Ohio.

THE CROSSING

“October 5, 1998

Dear Captain Nyquist,

My girlfriend and I love looking at the stars. We had really been looking forward to gazing up at the night sky over the mid-Atlantic. It was very disappointing to realize that the ship lights are on all night long.

So I write from our lovely accommodation in Room 329 to ask a favor. Would it be possible to dim the lights for a half hour while we make the crossing? This is probably the only time in our lives we will have such an opportunity.

Sincerely yours,

Mary T. O’Connor Room 329 Norwegian Sun

PS – I understand that you are also an engineer, and were part of the design team for “our” ship. I am an architect, and curious about the design. From the diagrams, I can see that the draft is very shallow, challenging my understanding of its vertical stability. What prevents it from tipping over? A Massed Tuned Damper, perhaps?”

“I don’t know, Cherry, this letter sounds very comey-onney to me.” I garbled, licking the envelope closed as I stood up from the dressing table in our stateroom.

“Well, that might not be a bad thing.”

Two days into the 21-day cruise, we both had a preteen crush on the captain, a strong-jawed, blonde Norwegian. With posture as crisp and correct as his white dress uniform, he extended his hand in a fresh welcome every ten seconds during the “Meet the

Captain” cocktail event the first night on board the Norwegian Sun. Though he was perfect for the part, he also seemed to have an idea how ridiculous the whole thing was, or so I liked to imagine.

We were on this unlikely voyage only because the ruble had fallen like a brick right through the already stressed Russian social fabric.

Cherry and I were born in the mid 1950’s, imprinted from birth by the Cold War.

We shared a lifelong fascination with everything about the Soviet Union. One day, out of the clear blue nowhere, Cherry became the beneficiary of an unsolicited grant to do whatever she wanted to “advance her artistic life.” Having failed to get to the USSR before it was declared into non-existence, the unexpected windfall was directed to a close encounter with Russia. By the fall of 1998, we had visas, passports, documents, rubles, tickets, maps, black trench coats, everything in order. We were giddy with excitement, calling out “To Moscow, to Moscow!” in the manner of the three sisters in the eponymous Chekhov play.

However, it was becoming increasingly obvious that it was not the time for a thirty-day wander across the steppes. The former Soviet Union in the fall of 1998 was collapsing badly. Foreign visitors were walking targets for ransom. When the State

Department issued a strong request to cancel non-essential travel, we did so. Then, in a lovely bit of theatrical timing, the phone rang.

An older married couple with a niche travel business, “Theater at Sea”, called

Cherry in the midst of our Moscowless gloom. Leslie Uggams cancelled at the last minute, and they were scrambling to find a performer to fill her spot. They explained that

Cherry had only one obligation during the 21-day-Venice-to-Miami-all-expenses-paid- including-first-class-air-fare-for-two booking; one thirty minute performance of anything she wanted to do to entertain the theatre-loving passengers.

Pivoting from Russia onto a luxury ship was a dizzying prospect. Ships to us meant tuna sandwiches on the ferry from Orient Point, Long Island to New London,

Connecticut. We had no interest in the offering, and a fair amount of judgment about such moving displays of leftover imperial colonialism. Our psychological bags were packed with sturdy Slavic plain wool garments, not pastel linens.

Still, it was free and fit right into the space we had made for the Russia trip.

Our usual answer to black tie was black tie, more the mannish sort. However for the cruise, we had a dazzling array of borrowed formal dresses and accessories from a playwright friend. She had the habit, a coping mechanism, really, of buying gowns she had no need for. We struck Kate Hepburnesque appearances on the starboard rail.

Our stateroom, if one included the private balcony, was larger than our apartment.

I was shocked how easily we adjusted to the cruising lifestyle. My expectation was for an experience that fit somewhere between summer camp, Las Vegas and

Disneyland, mixed with a militaristic flavor, a kind of regimented excess - all of it in the company of loutish filthy rich commercial real estate titans.

However, it was the near opposite of that vision. We did exactly what we wanted, and no one bothered us. I was up every morning at six, “Stretching with Colin”

on the Upper Deck. We did not go mad at the abundance of good food and drink available at all times of the day or night, nor did we take up gambling. Smoking now and then, but even that was more of a throwback to the cinematic memory of ocean travel, of enjoying a Dunhill Red in a silk dresses.

The captain answered my letter. The envelope arrived under our door with the daily Ship Newspaper.

“I would be happy to honor your wish to see the stars over the Atlantic. Please be my guests at the Captain’s Table for dinner tonight. To answer your interesting question,

I can show you the construction drawings of the ship. As you know, I was one of the engineers. “

The Captain’s Table! We were in the company of New York theater luminaries5, but an invitation the Captain’s Table felt like a real social coup!

5 So, dear reader, my strategy worked. I decided that a reference to as-yet-unnamed famous people would be sufficient inducement to divert the reader’s attention. Indeed, it was quite a roster of accomplished players on that ship. But this story is already twenty years old, and these notables were on the far side of their careers. You may be tempted to stop reading this now unless you are over 65 or a theater fan, because you will not recognize one name. However, if you feel tricked into this footnote, I would still recommend that you google any one of the following people. Living with them in a temporary floating village was an education and a privilege. The company: Patricia Neal, Kitty Carlisle Hart, Anne Jackson, Eli Wallach, Jean Stapleton, Zoe Caldwell and her husband, the esteemed producer Robert Whitehead. Among the string of memorable occasions was one of the many dinners with Patricia Neal. At one point, she was in a kind of reverie about her lover, Gary Cooper. In her natural voice that dripped with sex anyway, she sort of growled as she said “mmmmm, but Cary Cooper mmm” as she licked two fingers in a manner that almost made me drop the gravy boat on the white linen. The other treasure for me was walking slowly with Robert Whitehead while talking about his legendary production of Carson McCullers “Member of the Wedding.” Between his terrible back trouble and the Moroccan desert terrain, the conversation was more of a meditation through time. With the Atlas Mountains as a backdrop, he told me about finding Ethel Waters in a cold water flat in Detroit, and urging her to come back to New York for the part of Bernice, the major role, a domestic servant. She had rejected the script because “there was no God in it.” The only performing she was doing anymore was praise music in church. She may not have seen God in the script, but the whole of Carson McCullers work is drenched in God. Robert suggested that her character, Bernice, could sing a spiritual. The addition of “My Eyes are on the Sparrow” brought Ethel Waters back to New York, and now to the world forever through the movie version of “Member of the Wedding.” Robert said the movie was nothing compared to the play. I told him that for everyone who never saw the original production, the movie is beyond brilliant. It changed me. 51

Captain Nyquist projected a Marvel Comics perfection. By all appearances happily married with two young children, Cherry and I were a kind of nautical novelty for the otherwise predictable passenger roster. Other than the Swedish newlywed couple, and a smattering of grandchildren, we were the youngest passengers. In our late thirties, tall and slim in the borrowed formal ware, we animated the projected romance of nostalgic ocean travel posters. We happily took on the role of the Captain’s arm candy.

The innocence confounded the inevitable poolside deck chair gossip and shipboard scorekeeping. Aside from a genuine interest in his nautical experience, the Captain was fun.

At least it was all fine and innocent until Norwegian Day, which took place in the mid-Atlantic, the day of the night of our stargazing appointment with the Captain.

Everything was themed around Norway, and cranked up several degrees from the usual excess of service. There was the giant ice sculpture, food carved in animal and flower shapes, and around all of that, starting at 11 a.m., a circulating moat of ice water dotted with shot glasses of Aquavit.

I had been attending the “friends of Bill” meetings daily, with three elderly gentlemen in comfy swivel lounge chairs. I was having a rough time in my trudge toward sobriety, and before we left New York, the possibility of a slip on the cruise was frightening. I clenched my way through our preparations. I had nightmares of the ship as one big floating bottle with all of us inside. There was my Mr. Hyde self, the self I never remembered being, the self my friends called “Meg”. I was guzzling down the last of the giant bottle, tossing it overboard with the whole ship inside before snarling myself over

I thanked him. We stopped talking after that, no need. Ahead of us, the light was fading on the Atlas Mountains in tune with the heat of the day and the diminishing sounds from the souk behind us. 52

the rail as well, hitching up the evening gown as I went. Fortunately, these spectral horrors all but disappeared as we stood along the rail, watching the diminishing outline of

Venice at sunset.

But in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, we were celebrating Norwegian Day.

Cherry plucked out a couple of the bobbing shotglasses before lunch. Remembering my own reaction to Aquavit, a powerful Nordic distilled spirit, I asked, “And how did that go down?”

She thought a minute. “Like I could walk on water.”

We had dinner that night in one of the restaurants with Patricia “Pat” Neal. She enjoyed a cocktail, and Cherry also had a few drinks. Between the two of these strong, big, old Tennessee pioneer stock women, they could really put down some firewater.

They finished a bottle of wine, and ordered a second.

It was, of course, a formal night. The evening’s entertainment was Norwegian dances followed by a quiz show with a celebrity panel. Cherry, when asked to participate, convinced the Entertainment Director to use me instead. I escorted the somewhat wobbly Cherry and Pat into the “theater”, composed of more swivel lounge chairs and cabaret tables sized for drinks. The dancers were hopping around on the stage in traditional Norwegian dress, the wooden shoes rappety tap tap, pigtails a-flying. The captain beckoned us, two empty swivels and a table with an ice bucket ready. He immediately poured the aquavit.

I declined politely.

“Oh, but you must.”

The Captain said I must! OK! All bets were off, I knew that much. I had a second shot, thinking that I could do the quiz show just fine if I put a temporary halt on any more.

With Kitty Carlisle Hart, who for probably a decade was part of an elegant and witty group on a quiz show called “To Tell the Truth” in the audience, the pressure to rise to a standard of the classic era of quiz show wit was high. No one expects the “the toast of Broadway Cherry Jones’s architect partner to be funny. I used that to my advantage. I completely floored the house, had them howling, at my mercy, in palm of my hand. With a deadpan sincerity, I lobbed the answers with a knife-edge brilliance. Even as I did so, I was thinking about the drinks waiting for me at the table once the show was over.

After a few more rounds at the table, we went to the Captain’s quarters to wait for the stargazing moment. There was champagne. The last thing I remember is being on the highest deck, Captain with the walkie talkie ordering the lights out, as I tilted back my head to look up. The last moment before the blackout, I am raising my head to the stars and then, my personal lights out.

I “woke up” around noon. The gown on, the contacts in, the shoes off, on the top of the bed that Cherry was not in. She had been up all night, most of it spent in the bathroom. This all might have been ok, except this was the day of her half hour performance, a reading from Charles Dicken’s experience of crossing the Atlantic on the first Cunard passenger ship. She had a sound check at one p.m., but there was no way she was going to make it. I got it together and went to ask the officious Entertainment

Director for another time for her test, practicing speaking aloud as I head-pounded my way to the theater lounge.

As the afternoon grinded on, it was clear that Cherry was not getting closer to her performing self. We called the ship doctor. He gave her a big old shot of something in the posterior region, and the needle was barely out of her flesh before she was O-U-T.

Every morning, we had grown accustomed to the chipper Viking Sun theme song followed by daily announcements. It was another part of the lulling comfort of routine ship procedures. But that afternoon, the intercom crackled on in the middle of the afternoon.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we regret to inform you that this evening’s entertainment is cancelled due to sickness of the performer.”

Somehow, the Captain missed that announcement. He was the only person in the theater at 8 p.m., waiting for the show to start. The rest of the disappointed passengers would have been happy to believe that Miss Jones had been seasick, but when approached the next day with condolences as we hobbled along the promenade deck,

Cherry bravely ignored shipboard politesse. Shoulders back, head high, she admitted to being too drunk to perform. Such honesty in the cultivated and exclusive fantasy world of luxury travel has no berth.

What might have been total humiliation was averted after we parked ourselves in the office of the Entertainment Director. Cherry, on bended knee, pleaded for rescheduling. The starched rigidity yielded at last. In a chasm of silence, he studied his clipboard schedule and found a half hour for her performance.

But in those last few days, shipboard society downgraded our status. Our initial freewheeling glamour shifted to a psychic contagion. We were overlooked, invisible.

I had already done that to myself anyway. By this point as a drinker, after the physical effects of hangover were gone, the spiritual ones stretched on, worsening with time. I wanted to throw on a garment of shame and hide out in steerage.

In my overblown sense of shame, I thought about my great grandmother Liza

O’Malley’s Atlantic crossing. At sixteen, she came alone in steerage from Ireland to

Boston. In the darkness of my continued failure to stop drinking, I reached for anything to help beat away the demons. I thought about how frightened she must have been, a child, alone, leaving the known world for a promise of a better one. I imagined her quietly coming up to the open deck in the darkness of mid-ocean, tilting her head to look at the stars, holding my hand as I turned up before the blackout.

ENCOUNTERS WITH JOAN

Looking forward to the release of Joan Didion’s new book South and West: From a Notebook, I thought about this writer’s steady presence in my life since I first read

Slouching Towards Bethlehem at the transition between college and the unknown after. I could see in the string of moments her influence on who I have become. In the backward glance, the sting of the person I used to be is gone, replaced with a gift I had never noticed receiving.

***

Joan Didion was no longer living in New York City by the time I arrived in 1978, eight months after graduating from college. Like other ambitious well-educated young women with vague literary aspirations flocking to New York then, I was self-sculpted in the image of her characters and her persona laid out in two novels and scores of essays.

Published ten years earlier, Slouching Towards Bethlehem held great sway in my coterie of “new faces”. She was our personal smart Holly Golightly, just across the park.

That figure (gaunt) that face (beautiful) those sunglasses (huge) that brain (brilliant). I was none of those things in my twenties, or ever - though eventually, I did become thin.

I loved her because, as if by some impossible magic, her words carved out the essential spirit of physical places. She illuminated places as I felt about places. She was that writer that told me I was not alone. For as long as I was conscious, I suffered from a

crippling attachment to place. I had a nostalgia for an unlived memory that she could describe perfectly. Her work described how it felt to be me most of the time.

My list of impossible places grew, but my capacity to endure the pain of being in those places did not. While I had no language for my contorted relationship to place, I found more writers who could capture the peculiarities of exile; VS Naipaul, Joseph

Conrad, Nabokov, and always – Didion. She became an old friend, even as I tired of what seemed to be her precious world weariness. She was tough to revisit as my particular despair deepened and ossified. I did not want her to pester me anymore with her brittle brilliance, her painful light illuminating my inoperable, mysterious paralysis.

I stopped reading her fiction, populated as it seemed by the perpetual self- absorbed gloom of thin white women. But I read every nonfiction essay I came across. I kept her as a kind of private reserve over the years. Even as I resented it, her work was one of the things that relieved an unrecognized loneliness.

Then one night in December of 2002, I saw her across the room at the opening night party for Imaginary Friends, a play with music by Nora Ephron. My girlfriend was playing Mary McCarthy in what was to be the short-lived Broadway production. It was a great play, but New York audiences just did not respond. It was as if they would not give over to Nora Ephron as a playwright and musical creator in a Broadway turf war.

But, as Joan would say, that is another story. The opening night party was a lot of fun, attended by a ton of celebrities – but of all the famous people, I only wanted to meet Joan

Didion and her husband John Gregory Dunne, who occupied about an inch of space behind their table, so tiny together, seeming far too small for such familiar names. They were set apart from the party, protected in a corner, watching.

Dominick Donne brought me over to meet them. Turns out they had been interested in me. Well, not me, but in my proximity to Cherry. They knew Mary

McCarthy, she had been their editor early in their careers. I gladly offered to introduce them, ushering them protectively towards our table, through the crowd of notables fluttering around the two leading ladies of the evening.

Nora Ephron’s play grew from the famous lawsuit brought by Lillian Hellman against Mary McCarthy. Lillian pursued Mary to the bitter end of the terrible case. Ms.

Hellmann sought damages from Mary McCarthy’s comment during an interview on the

Dick Cavett show. She had named some writers that she deemed untrustworthy, Lillian

Hellmann among them. Cavett asked her “What is dishonest about Lillian Hellmann?”

“Everything. Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and” and ‘the’.”

On the way over to meet Cherry, their demeanor brightened – they took on a childlike innocence, like kids approaching a Santa Claus they still believed in. It was as though their suspension of disbelief was SO high that Mary McCarthy was actually sitting at the table. It was genuine and so guileless – and adorable. They were stage- struck. Plus they looked and behaved like two people who were completely devoted to each other. They looked like the couple atop a wedding cake.

Two years later, Joan Didion and I experienced sudden tremendous loss at the same time. We were in the same desolate territory at the same time. Her response was to stick around and write The Year of Magical Thinking. My response was to flee. I joined the Peace Corps.

Unlike the first time her writing spoke to me, this time we really were in the same territory together. I cleaved to it, and believed it was one of the few things that kept my

head above water.

Before I left the country, I went to a book signing. I stood in the long, heart- pounding line, and thought about what to say to her.

“Your book saved my life.”

“Your book is a lifesaver. It’s the only thing that kept my head above water.”

“I am leaving the country for two years and three months and Magical Thinking is the only book in my backpack.”

Isai nothing but a whisper of a thank you when she handed back my book and looked me in the eyes during the brevity of the exchange. In leaving New York, I gave a lot of things away, including, as it turned out - the signed copy, to a friend who seemed to need it more than I did at the time.

While I was in the Peace Corps, I found the words to write to her. I do not remember how I got her address, but it was as simple, tiny and elegant as she is. “Joan

Didion 63 Madison Avenue New York NY 10003”, something like that.

One day the postman in my hilltop town in the Republic of Macedonia delivered a card back from her. Written in a fine ink, the hand, the line of it, and the message; unquestionably Didion. She expressed gratitude for being “useful” in my journey through grief. I have that card somewhere safe. I have moved a lot since then, and every time I find that card, I move it to a different book. I like to be surprised by its movements, remembering that I was in motion the day I received it. I mover her card around because it reminds me of the irony of receiving it that day. The postman caught me on the street the day I was leaving town. Her words came to me before I boarded the bus to a city on the Albanian border, to direct a play I wrote.

Though my first response to loss had been to flee, I eventually I stuck around and wrote about it.

In the years since then, I said “goodbye to all that”, as Joan Didion immortalized in the essay of the same name about moving out of New York City. Those of us departing after her defining version have tried, and mostly failed, to say it another, new way. One day I calmly recognized that after 36 years, New York was no longer my home. I could let it go. But the bigger part of that recognition of good bye was the accompanying recognition that what I felt my whole life, that crippling nostalgia around place, a nostalgia she describes so well – was a fiction. It felt real, paralyzing, but for me it was the opposite of paralyzing. That longing kept me moving. I was a geography hustler.

After a lot of work on other demons, the gnawing constancy of territory so well described by Didion in “Goodbye to All That” simply went away. Though it is “entirely possible to stay too long at the fair”, it is also possible that one day we can laugh at lingering at the tawdry old fair too long. I am dazzled daily by the freedom from lingering too long. I am at home in the world, connected to everything.

I grew up.

Thank you Joan.

IT’S MY MISFORTUNE, MR. STOPPARD

“Helen Mirren, Helen Mirren, Helen Mirren - I am sick of hearing about Helen

Mirren.”

For what seemed like an eternity, my partner Cherry Jones had been talking about the witty and delightful Thursday nights at Café Un, Deux, Trois. Cherry was the lead in the justly celebrated Lincoln Center Theater production of “The Heiress.” It opened on a freezing sleety night in March of 1995 to universal critical acclaim. No stranger to the

Great White Way, The Heiress catapulted Cherry into genuine theatrical stardom. She was the overnight sensation in a category that had become extinct in New York; “leading lady of the Broadway stage”. In the fustian tradition of the greats, Cherry was the knighted successor to the likes of Catherine Cornell, Eva LaGalliene, Helen Hayes and

Julie Harris.

“Well, I think you need to meet her – then you will understand. Why don’t you come with me to Actor’s Night Out?

There are plenty of rites and traditions associated with old Broadway, but going out with other actors after a show was not among them. Most working New York actors took their curtain call and enjoyed quitting time away from bars around Times Square.

Post-curtain pub life with other actors was just not part of the culture. That is, until Helen

Mirren came to town. She was part of the British Invasion that Broadway season, a

phenomenon that had been growing over a number of years, much to the disgruntlement of domestic thespians.

Helen Mirren was the marquee headliner in a period piece, “A Month in The

Country” by Ivan Turgenev. In this, her first appearance on Broadway, she initiated some firsts of her own. The rumor on the Rialto was that Helen Mirren was recreating a fixture of London theatrical life, the actor’s night out. Attended first by the lively British diaspora, momentum built among the normally homebound American actors.

“A Month in the Country” opened just in time for Tony Award consideration.

Both Cherry and Helen were nominated in the Best Actress category. In the heady month between nominations and ceremony, a handwritten, hand-delivered note of congratulations from Ms. Mirren arrived in Cherry’s dressing room.

Just before all this, Cherry and I became neophyte fans of Ms. Not-yet-a-Dame

Mirren through the British series “Prime Suspect.” We were engulfed by her character,

Police Inspector Jane Tennyson. But our mutual appreciation of a strong older female character in a man’s world became less mutual when Cherry started chumming up with the actress playing that character. Words like crush, infatuation, smitten, awe, Cupid’s arrow, appropriately underscore Cherry’s breathless bright-eyed retelling of Helen’s hosting charm.

Somewhere in all the air kissing crush of events that spring, there was a Tony

Award cocktail party that included spouses. Helen Mirren was there. I saw her at a distance, looking self-conscious and out of place, as though she had wandered into the wrong room at a funeral parlor. Reserved and conservatively dressed, one might have taken her for a pleasant, slightly dowdy British suburban matron. But as we came into

her range, that impression was annihilated by a wave of overwhelming physical charisma, an irresistible current of pure transcendent sex appeal. Cherry was right, I just had to meet her, and yes, I will come to the next Actor’s Night Out.

The night I was to make my debut at the Mirren-inspired gathering at Café Un,

Deux, Trois, I had a design meeting beforehand. The party did not start until around ten thirty, giving me plenty of time for the client meeting and a return home to polish up. It was a beautiful spring night. With my drawings rolled and strapped to the bike rack on my back wheel, I sailed up Tenth Avenue to the Upper West Side, the whole city seeming to delight in the breeze ruffling through the open spaces.

There was no obvious downside to the overnight sensation of The Heiress. Most of the fluff of it was fun. Well, all of it was fun, but there were some unspoken conventions and rules that came along with that success. Though it seemed to the general public that Cherry arrived from nowhere, she had been working consistently as an actor for fifteen years. She just had not done any television or movie work. Cherry was a theater actor, the insider’s inside favorite, with membership in a rare unacknowledged society: theatre actors living in New York without side work.

Cherry had an open-faced, blue-eyed wonder about her. When slightly nervous, her Tennessee accent and country aphorisms increase the impression of a down home naiveté. Her personal charm was enhanced by the natural, somewhat Spartan lifestyle.

Our studio apartment was the size of a one car garage and we went everywhere by bicycle. She conveyed a guileless nature that made for a good interview.

The Heiress was an exquisite production that spoke to everyone. It reminded older people of what theater used to be. New York City high school students LOVED it.

One of my great pleasures before going backstage to meet Cherry after the show was waiting in the lobby for the curtain call. After the applause, the audience came out happy, talking about what they just saw with animated delight to people around them who were no longer strangers. Cherry’s performance as the plain unloved Catherine

Sloper was so convincing and consistent, it tapped the heart of the entire audience, night after night.

The downside of that magic gives people the sense that they know the person on stage. I became a handy entrée to the source. I was getting calls for architectural projects that were designs for doors only – ones opening to Cherry. I caught on after a while.

I was riding up Tenth Avenue to see Debbie Hautzig, a new client courtesy of The

Heiress, but her story and her project were legitimate. She and Cherry were freshmen at

Carnegie Mellon University when they met in LaGuardia Airport after their flight back to

Pittsburgh was cancelled, and rescheduled for the following day. Cherry was stranded, and Debbie invited her to her parents’ Upper West Side apartment for the night. The next morning, Debbie gave Cherry the grand tour of the New York she loved since childhood.

Both of them never forgot the special day, but they never saw each other again until

Debbie sat in the audience of The Heiress.

Their reunion coincided with Debbie’s pursuit of a new kitchen, office and bathroom. Our work grew to something more, to friendship. Every construction project in Manhattan is probably ten times harder than anywhere else, so having decent, smart and good-humored clients is a tremendous benefit when things go sideways. And Debbie appreciated the absurd downsides along with the parts that went well.

The timing of my architectural education put me in a narrow band of practitioners who used computers but could still draw with pencils in the classic tradition. Taking pencil drawn originals anywhere the printers was a bad idea, but I was working to the very last minute, and had no time to detour to the blueprint shop.

The architectural process is scary to most people. It is all about change. Then it’s all about money, dust, dirt, mistakes, delays, more money, big men in boots, doubt. It gets worse as it goes along. Debbie and I were still in the sweet spot before demolition. I showed her the new ideas, she was happy, and signed off on the designs. I took time to explain what would happen next in the process. Then we got on with the business of gossiping on the couch.

Debbie had a fantastic violet couch that tended to envelop the sitter. In those days, I almost never sat in a comfortable place – I was either at the drafting table, in motion or horizontal. It was a rare day that I sat on any couch for any reason. But

Debbie is a smart, funny, sane recluse. She excels at couch. Her furnishings provide an oasis of casual therapeutic sanity. She lavished attention on her writing, her family - and me. And I admit, during this era of learning the conventions and unwritten rules of sudden fame, the umbra of Cherry’s spotlight could be chilly. Debbie discovered me in that shadow space. I was her balance to hours of the solitary writing time. We were a party of two in her attention to details of extraordinary hospitality and manners.

I promised Debbie I would send her the blueprints the next day, and carefully rolled up the originals. I normally used a bright canary yellow plastic tube with a shoulder strap for drawings, but had left it at a jobsite.

That yellow tube provided many an entrée to curbside Romeos. At countless

Manhattan intersections wearing that thing slung across my back, I could predict the greeting as the window rolled down; “Hey, whacha packin’ in there – bow and arrows?

Cue stick? Shotgun?”

Without that handy quiver, I rolled the drawings around a cardboard tube, securing them with a couple rubber bands. Mylar was the standard medium for hand drawings. It never ripped, handled multiple erasures, and had a satisfying texture to draw a pencil across. Mylar had heft, muscle, and sounded like a thunderstorm when shaken on one edge.

I was in a great mood, caught up with work and feeling free on a beautiful May night flying down Ninth Avenue to drop off my stuff, change clothes and go back to

Midtown and the cocktail-drinking actors. Ninth Avenue has timed traffic lights, and if you hit it right on a bike at night, it can mean no stops at all, just sailing downtown, through block after block in a gentle downward slope. Heaven.

When I got to home to Horatio Street, the tube was gone. I froze - the absent drawings were the expression of more than two weeks of dedicated work. I immediately headed back up Ninth Avenue, against the traffic, to find them.

Going against one way traffic at night on a bicycle in Manhattan while looking for something on the street is a terrible idea. It is stupid and dangerous. But I did not want to lose any time looping around the legal way. Perhaps they were only a few blocks up the road? Besides, I had been riding a bicycle in New York City forever by then. I had highly evolved peripheral vision, worthy of a clap on the shoulder from Charles Darwin himself.

After navigating nearly three quarters of the way against the stream, I saw something in the smack dab middle of the street, right in front of Lincoln Center. I held my breath in hope. Mylar can take a lot of abuse, so even if, as I could see through the whizzing southbound traffic, the tube was flattened, it would still be ok, easily salvaged.

When the lights turned red, I made my way to the object. It was the tube alright.

But it was only the tube. The drawings were gone. Half compressed, bent and flecked with auto detritus, the battered cardboard tube resembled a detached piece of a vehicle undercarriage. I picked it up, hoping the sad divining rod might lead me somewhere. I searched the area, looking in the scrawny street trees, thinking the drawings might be tangled in the branches among the countless plastic bags caught and rattling, but found not a trace.

I felt ashen and numb. In a kind of grief blackout, I rode my bicycle down to the café on 43rd Street, locked it with the heavy chain and lock combo, stumbled through the hug with Jose, the maître d, and into the dreamscape of the ebullient actors at Café Un,

Deux, Trois. I do not remember finding Cherry or talking to any friends. It seemed I woke from sleep to find myself at an isolated table across from two playwrights. One,

Jon Robin Baitz, was a good friend. Robbie was talking to: Tom Stoppard. Stop. Hard, suddenly fully awake. In a normal mental state, my heart would have been pounding to be in such close proximity to this brilliant man. I had seen his most recent play

“Arcadia”, and loved it. It was a great critical success in a limited run earlier in the season, and was among the nominees for best play.

I was fortunate to have my college years coincide with his wider success and presence beyond the London stage. His plays directly entered my being, no matter the

level of the particular production. I felt like I had an immediate relationship to his work, as though they had been written just for me.

I am sitting with Tom Stoppard and Robbie Baitz in a restaurant. I come to as we are already talking. I present well in such situations precisely because I am not in show business. I have the nonthreatening anonymity of being an architect who designs theaters, now with the added bump of being a partner of a respected New York theater actor in a big fat hit.

At that moment of our conversation, I am so drained that I have no space to be star struck. I tell the attentive men my tale of woe.

“I lost my originals. There were things on those sheets that were brand new and I don’t have copies of them. It will take me weeks to restore what I lost.”

Being men of letters, they are respectful and empathetic.

Tom Stoppard strikes a pose. He assumes a posture that would be bad acting of a playwright thinking, except he was a playwright, thinking. His eyes squint and he has his fingers held to his normally-plushy-but-now-pursed lips.

He speaks.

“But that is only Act One. Ten years later, you are riding your bicycle down the street and you look up. Can it be? There stands the building. Your design on the lost drawings has been built.”

Robbie and I just give space to this delightful turn.

My loss became a treasure. Tom Stoppard gave me a gift of his imagination.

And in his instant story line, my little lost project took the badge of urban legend. He

spun my modest apartment renovation into an entire building, a skyscraper no less. I felt no need to adjust his image of the humble reality of the project.

There may have been more conversation between the three of us, but it is so eclipsed by Stoppard’s ten second play I don’t remember. We were one small corner of a room buzzing with the Broadway community on the brink of its big award night and benign suspense of who in the room will win the big prize. Everyone around us excited and happy to be part of an evening created by, for, and about themselves. Everyone was smoking. Everyone was dropping bon mots and scanning the room. Well, of course not everyone was doing all these things. But indoor cigarettes enhanced the laughter and glamour, as did the tuxedoed waiters weaving through it all, gliding with a bygone sophistication. The entire room was a part of the story, under the meticulous management of Jose and the irresistible siren song of Helen of Mirren.

The festive giddiness of the Actors’ Night Out deflated almost immediately after the Tony Awards. Helen Mirren swept the energy of the café society away with her departure. She was the light at the center, and without her, the Americans returned to their native habits. The blip of awards season gave way to the exalted Broadway routine of eight shows a week.

Though it was no great surprise, Cherry’s win in the best performance category still felt like a victory for the underdog. Her success made people happy. It was that kind of performance in that kind of production, something precious and brief, touching people’s hearts in ways they did not expect. Audiences came out of the theater invested, included and owning the story on stage.

***

Nine years later, I had the opportunity to see Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers.

It opened two months after my mother died peacefully in the tiny apartment

Cherry and I used as an office/guest room directly below our equally tiny apartment.

It opened a week after Cherry moved out of that apartment, our home of eighteen years together. In the span of one day, as I walked the streets, she packed up what she wanted and was gone.

She left the tickets to the opening night of Jumpers on the counter.

As a self-diagnosis of my behavior at the time, I was suffering from extreme temporary bipolar disorder. Manic highs turning to bleak depression and back again with little between the two. Jumpers spoke to me, and only me, that night. It was not a play, it was a life preserver.

I saw it again, and a third time.

Unlike Tom Stoppard’s imagined play, I will never ride a bicycle past a new building and recognize it as the one I lost when my originals fell somewhere on Ninth

Avenue. The drawings he imagined never existed.

It’s possible I might find myself watching a new Stoppard play and recognize the plot he spun so easily that night in the restaurant. I could see the imaginary building on stage. But the loss of those originals was my small misfortune, Mr. Stoppard, and I get to tell it, and this is its stage.

JOURNEY TO AUTHENTIKOS

Proposal: The most appropriate expression for the following reflection is live speech, preferably by a chorus of three. Or were I to be even more grandiose, one speaking voice and a large anonymous choir singing sotto voce in the background, on a series of risers, wearing diaphanous robes, a wind machine, smoke machine and fifty light cues. Should such a production be cost-prohibitive, one human, script in hand, and one listener would suffice. The point is to convey the experience of building actual stages and the emotional tremors that “stage/performance” engenders for most of us human beings.

This dialogue is a narrative on the theme of authenticity vs performance.

***

“I am an Architect. Theater design is my specialty. The need to perform correctly has a unique application as expressed in my creative life. My role is to provide the best circumstance for all involved in the transformative magic of theater; actor, director, writer, design team, production staff and audience. I designed and often managed the construction of the dream factory. Performing correctly was essential.

I see this work now from a completely different perspective. I am dismantling the stage. This is not a violent act, but one of recognition that I was the performer all along. I live now on the other side of that protection, the background persona, a disguise

for safety. I gave myself completely to the passion of that work, of making places for others to tell their stories while making sure to keep my own buried under the stage.

Today, there is no disconnect between the stage and the ground of my existence.

The costumes, the makeup and the props are all gone. The treasure box I buried under the stage is busted open. The freedom is astonishing to me.

I am no poet. I hope to create the “frozen music” of place. Not any place, but the physicality of the stage, performance orbs, platforms for the ephemeral. It is my job to make the stage for all of us, for everyone, by casting a neutral armature for grace to speak.

The single most important point in a theater building is center stage. Place that lynchpin first and the rest of the functions array around that place, as drones to queen.

Center stage is the concrete absolute of the alchemy between the performed and the authentic. It offers the transformative spring of mutation between the performance and the essential essence of the naked, the shock of the deeper real. It is a thin point, an entry to the mystical.

Center stage is the sacred spot of our dreams, the heart-stopping locus of exposure. It is the jolt of recognition of the self as performer – because all the self wants to do at center stage is flee to the wings or heap on a persona of otherness, anything to escape the scalding chest blow of blazing lights. It is the place that makes us forget about shopping.

Bay Street - Beginning

The first time you get your chance, you have no idea what you are doing, but if it is what you were meant for, it happens in spite of that. So it was with the first theater I designed, which coincidentally was the first anything I designed, the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, Long Island. Performing as an architect, sweating as a terrified fraud.

I was alone in the building one night when I heard voices. It was still a construction site, but the stage and audience riser platforms were roughed in place. The audience surrounded the stage in a three – quarter arrangement, and without the seats, there was a breathtaking purity about the three dimensional version of the two dimensional drawing. It had become a theater, or enough of a one to warrant a ghost light, the single standing lamp with bare bulb that lives at center stage when the theater is dark.

An upright older woman with a hairdo stood at center stage, framed in silhouette by the ghost light behind her, exclaimed with great gusto in a Texas accent.

“Whaah, it’s just like EPIDAURUS”.

I identified myself and asked if I could help her. Her pleasure at meeting the architect prompted a burst of new enthusiasm. She threw out her hand and introduced herself.

“I am Elaine Steinbeck and this is my friend Edward.”

She carried on for a while in her tributes, but I stood mute, more dazzled by her style and accent than the heaps of praise in my direction.

We had to be done before the opening of the first play, Men’s Lives, an original work commissioned by the theater. The tension in the building as the construction crew dwindled and the theater staff increased was heightened by the subject of the first play. It was an emotional local story. Based on the book by Peter Matheson, Joe Pintauro’s script illuminated the personal impact of Long Island’s dying fishing industry.

I ricocheted my way around the building as others took over, reluctant to let go of what I had already finished. Every seat was filled the night of the first preview. Extreme sleep deprivation heightened my unfounded fear that the audience risers would collapse.

(They did not.) There was a moment from that first night that continues to speak to me.

The set was a beach, the stage covered in sand. At one point, the illusion of a shack was created in the simple gesture of a broom clearing a dinner’s plate size worth of driftwood flooring. Layers of time were gently exposed in the illumination of the spotlight. I wanted to know what was underneath, I still do.

She, of the Texas accent, became a great benefactor to Bay Street. She was the wife of John Steinbeck. He, of her friend, Edward? The playwright Edward Albee.

Before she mentioned it, I had never heard of Epidaurus.

I took the bus to Epidaurus during my service in the Peace Corps in the Republic of Macedonia, just above Greece’s northern border.

Unlike most of the well-known ancient amphitheaters, the Romans did not alter

Epidaurus to meet their standards for theater design. It was a major attraction for the

Greek and Roman culture, a place of restoration of mind, body, and spirit. It continued in use even after the Goths swooped down in 395 AD and destroyed much of it, until

earthquakes in the mid 500’s led to its complete abandonment. Nature reclaimed it and all traces of it vanished over time.

In the 1880’s, antiquity-mad British scholars assessed from ancient literature the location of Epidaurus. Excavations began in 1881 and continue to the present. Aside from its magnificent siting, size, and proportion, it is revered for its perfect acoustics. I was the first and only person in the open embrace of the amphitheater at dawn. I looked at the stone at center stage.

It is said that a pebble or a pin dropped on that spot is audible in the top row of the theater, 90’ away from where I stood.

Alone at center stage, I could not know this to be true. Waiting for others to arrive that morning in Greece, I had a vague sense of my constant apartness, of myself as provider of magic space but one not allowed to enter. The marvelous journey had gotten me here. I had set out alone, but maybe that part of the odyssey was over.

“Join in”, that was my pin drop message from Epidaurus, whispered in my ear as I stood in the fullness of its place.

“To be or not to be” is what the tourists shouted.

(Stage direction: Speaker to add additional translations of this line, rendered in stentorian tones.)

As the morning progressed, I heard Hamlet’s conundrum in many languages while moving through the bowl of it.

I passed a handful of pebbles to a group of Danes. I asked for a moment of silence as I ran to the top row. One by one, plink, plink, plink against the stone.

Odysseus, journey bound, determined to become the hero of my own life. Determined to

abandon the fascination of the no longer, to let go of the railroad tracks, the station that has mysteriously disappeared.

Plink, plink, plink – stone on stone, sounds across antiquity to right now.

Macedonia – The Middle

While in the Peace Corps, I wrote a play. The Culture Director in another part of the country heard about it. He offered to produce it, in fulfillment of the government’s effort to create “culturally neutral events.” Simply by its virtue as an English language composition, it qualified. His city, Struga, was half Macedonian, half Albanian – with few to no mechanisms for bringing the two cultures in the same room. The relationship between the two groups was very strained and at times explosive.

It’s very Peace Corps, that “let’s put on a show in the barn” sort of improvisation.

Especially on a summer weekend in a town on Lake Ohrid and the promise of a party afterward. It required no lengthy preparation, and it was in English. The play had nothing to do with Macedonia – but there was a scene that that had a sort of Greek chorus - twenty women, sewing, talking and waiting together. At the end of the scene, they sing a sea shanty. A Peace Corps volunteer in the town, Donna, taught Adult women’s English classes; one with Macedonians, and one for Albanians. I gave her the scene and both groups practiced the English lines for weeks in their separate classes.

So July comes and in that mysterious way, we managed to get lights, sound, music stands and a suggestion of costumes. My play was terrible – but the occasion a great success. We made something happen – a beginning, middle and end – In two days. The

power of just showing up. Locals and Peace Corps volunteers came together to make something out of – if not quite nothing, very little.

Well, everyone is nervous as the theater aka House of Culture starts filling up. And that is when it starts. The families of the English class students, show up dressed, with their kids, grandparents, neighbors – Albanians and Macedonians in the same room. It was a neutral zone for a night. The women spoke their lines, one after the other and the scene ended with a song – not the sea ballad, but something we all knew and could teach in a day – they sang “Seasons of Love” from Rent.

There was the reception afterwards, with refreshments. Nothing was said then about what happened in those few moments in the house of culture on A July night…. It was too close, too fresh, too fragile and precious. But the energy and mechanics of composing, making something up, creating a space for a suspension of normal life – a moment of – art – a point of connection in space for all three cultures that was for a few breaths – went beyond culture.

The Philippines – Third Act

On the island of Mindoro in the Philippines I designed and supervised the construction of a theater and an arts building. Between the shore of the South China Sea and the foot of a mountain, there is a narrow strip of land crowded with human activity.

Sea, beach, road, chunk of space for living, mountain.

I lived in a hut on the mountainside while doing this work for the Stairway

Foundation, an organization dedicated to children’s rights, specifically focused on sexual abuse. I arrived at the same time as the new group of boys from Manila arrived. I did not

know their back stories, but they were all victims in some way, and here we were together, strange refugees in a new place. Drama therapy was one of the tools used in healing the damage they had suffered. I decided that the stage I would make for them would be something any professional company could work on – those boys, everyone, deserves that kind of space. Finding center stage in a thicket of growth is a little trickier than in an empty warehouse. Though I did not know what I was doing, I was not afraid. I already saw it, I already knew it would happen. And in five months it was ready.

I was in the Christmas play with the boys. Six months after we arrived as blinking strangers in a strange land, we were now an unlikely company. Bound by our informal daily contact, our days usually included beach time, swimming together in the South China

Sea. In the backstage language of performance jitters, we joked around as we helped each other get ready. We waited in the wings, we got through it all and stood together, held sweaty hands in a line and bowed to the rippling, ear-fluttering tingling astonishment of applause.

Thank you.”

Exit.

GRASSY KNOLL: “DIS KROON OH MET TREE AHH”

The bicycle is my navigational instrument. It is how I instinctively measure time and distance. With my home as the center point, the circumference of daily life is the reasonable distance for a bicycle commute. My bicycling circumference runs counter to measuring the age of trees; in my case, a passing year removes a ring, shrinking the diameter of commuting range. These are the limitations I can accept and maintain a full life. Prior to taking a class at Kent State University in the fall of 2017, I had only been to

Kent, Ohio once in the five years since moving to Akron. That time was in a car with others, for an arranged presentation at the School of Architecture. We went in the hopes of partnering with a design studio for a project in Summit Lake.

I did not speak of past associations on the way to our meeting. I did not share that

Kent State and May 4th are synonymous, interchangeable sounds, two as one same emotion. I had not been to the campus since April of 1970. My Kent was a stored set of black and white images from May 4th, 1970.

When we came to a stop in the parking lot, I was surprised by the bounce and color of the students moving around outside the car windows. The view I expected was in the grey tones of my version of Kent. Somewhere close by were the commons and the grassy knoll, but we had other business that day. And my personal work was just to register the difference between the black and white images with the bounce and color of the kids in front of me. No one but me was thinking about the events of forty three

years prior. I knew that time had passed, but it still came as a surprise, the contemporary world on that campus. It was me that was stuck in time, me with the dischronometria, not

Kent State University.

***

I was fourteen when my brother Jim was a graduate student at Kent State in 1970.

My mother, myself and occasionally my older teenage sisters regularly traveled to Kent to see him in plays. He was also was a dorm counselor. His suite in McDowell Tower was decorated with beaded room dividers, candles, a prop skull from a production of

Hamlet, incense and what I coveted most – bookshelves made from bricks and boards.

He did and was everything I wanted to be, and knew I could not – he was a man, he had a beard. He was a conscientious objector, which meant that, unlike my oldest brother Tom, he was exempt from active military. His 1-0 status meant he would do some kind of service, but was not going to Vietnam.

Aside from my smoldering nameless jealousy of his natural born privilege, I had other reasons to feel critical of Jim. The long list of righteous resentment included his

Sunday trips back from Kent to our house for dinner. He would bring along unannounced guests, dressed, as Jim was also, in the baggy shaggy costumes of protest and love. Their place at the table came with their superior moral positions. Jim and his friends acted as though unexpected free meals were their right for enlightening the rest of us. I thought they were ungrateful jerks. It irked me that they took advantage of our mother’s kindness and hospitality. What was the point of higher education if it included such gross insensitivity?

Kent was a greater distance from Cleveland Heights in those days. The trips to

Jim’s plays were major undertakings. We took snacks in the car. There were more snowstorms, fewer highways, and more hills.

There is a lot of paraphernalia associated with hippy culture, and it carries a certain romance and longing. There were so many kids in that strata of the postwar baby boom, they really did rule the world. They still do. But the turnover from the sixties to the seventies was very dark most of the time. In my family, as Christmas of 1969 crawled forward, our brother Tom was preparing for his tour of duty in Vietnam, and unbeknownst to us, our weepy sister Kate was on the verge of a complete schizophrenic break.

Jim and I were paired to distribute the traditional Christmas gift bottles of Blue

Nun wine to family and friends. It was our widowed mother’s expression of gratitude to those who came along side us after our father’s sudden death in 1963. Jim drove a tiny green Austin Healey Sprite. Fun, but less so on a Cleveland December day along on the

Shoreway at 70 miles per hour. I was the jumper. On our way to our Uncle Ed’s office at The Plain Dealer, Jim was smoking a joint. I had been with him before in that tiny car with marijuana smoke, but this time he wordlessly passed it to me. I got high for the first time, and was disoriented in the Plain Dealer building, looking for my uncle. It was loud in there, and I was loud. Loud and utterly lost. People assisted that forlorn asexual fourteen year old, clutching, sweating and twisting the neck of a Christmas wrapped bottle of wine.

Other than the unspoken disappearance of our father, my family was not so different than others in our community of East Side Irish Catholics. Lots of kids, probably too many, generally well-educated, bit on the wild side, alcoholic middle class

Midwesterners. We manifested the best and worst of the post war American dream and the nightmare it was becoming. By January 1970, the World War Two GI Bill, the generator and roadmap of upward mobility did not make any sense any more. The binding, the glue, the paper, the directions had just disintegrated. The white middle class was beginning to see that maybe the plan they thought was a guarantee did not, in fact, exist.

The no-plan reality was not news to minority communities; Blacks, gays, migrant workers radicalized for real. But for the noisy bulge of white college students opposing the war, protesting started as a party posing as a revolution. It was fueled by their perplexed parent’s wallets, the bell jar of college life, drugs, sex, music - and the genuine threat of dying in a distant civil war.

It was as though the good vibrations of peace, love and non-violence had run out.

In August of 1969, there was Woodstock, by December, Altamont. January 1970 lies halfway between the Manson Family murders in August and Jackson State and Kent

State killings in May.

My family accommodated trauma. We lived in a state of shock since the Sunday morning seven years prior, the day that our father died. They carried him out in a bedspread after he died from an assault the night before while drinking in a neighborhood of ill-repute. We just hung on and did our best through a flat frozen emotional landscape.

My passage through that landscape was to sprint, to keep moving away from the places of pain. I did not understand that this technique only served to bring those places along wherever I went. The places went from actual geographic realities to internal

dusty, neglected rooms. For decades I was an absentee landlord of a slum-filled soul. I carried so many places there was no space for anything new to enter. Drawn to architecture, I became good at making places for others to dwell, but not for myself.

On May 5th, 1970, Jim brought home rifle casings from Kent that one of the kids in his dorm gave him. Shortly after that, the FBI came and confiscated them. He got in his Sprite and went to California. That was the end of Kent for all of us.

Forty five years later, I am a graduate student, standing on the Kent main campus with a free hour before my first class. There was no reason not to find the grassy knoll.

“The rally was held on the Commons, a grassy knoll in the center of campus traditionally used as a gathering place for rallies or protests.”6

A grassy knoll is not a place suggesting a lovely spot for a picnic. It is not a neutral place description for my generation. A Grassy knoll is the assassination of a youthful president, it is the violent death of four students at Kent State University. It is the end of innocence still posing as innocence.

There was a sign “May 4 Memorial” with a simple arrow. But I was not prepared to come upon it so quickly. It was way too close, suddenly just there, without any of my customary rites of preparation. I had no time to arm myself for something so distant in time being so close in space.

In the first glance, I did not recognize what I was seeing, because the commons is a soccer field. But the terrain seemed right from my memory of the black and white photos. Then I saw, down on the field, the iconic victory bell, where students had buried the Constitution three days before the shootings.

The grassy knoll is more of a grassy knoll bowl, 360 degrees of slope enclosing

6 May 4 Walking Tour documentary at may4.kent.edu 84

the commons. Around the bowl, a series of signs provide a walking tour. The signs are well done, and it is easy to follow the progression of events. The photographs and text directly correspond to the view they face. Students steadily crossing at all angles through the large open space were quiet, looking at their cell phones. The dominant sound is wind through the oak trees.

I follow the numbered signs in their circular passage around the commons. These stations are elevated above the commons area, so the viewer’s experience is looking down into the bowl at the soccer chalk lines and victory bell. There is a subdued logic and care about the experience. Weatherproof boxes dispense brochures explaining the events with respect, clarity and good graphics. Despite my personal connections, it is otherwise all just history. I am looking at the Battle of Hastings, staring into the ruins of the Roman Forum.

I am running out of time, and need to find the Don Drumm sculpture. I know it’s here somewhere, though I am not sure what exactly it looks like. Don’s metal sculptures and street furniture are easily recognizable throughout Akron. For over fifty years, his artistic practice and influence has steadily grown. He and his wife Lisa kept expanding from the initial studio into a large an artists’ colony near the University of Akron.

Passing through for the cluster of buildings first time, one might think they took a left turn into the middle of a rainbow in Mexico City. All the houses, fences, and pergolas are bright solid colors. Flowers abound.

One day, Don came into the Front Porch Café, the not for profit restaurant created by South Street Ministries to advance their mission “Unlikely partners taking shared risks to improve our community for Christ’s sake.” I have been working with the organization

for four years as their architect in the very slow process of renovating the whole building.

Slow because South Street Ministries is a small organization in an older neighborhood with lots of needs and limited resources. Don found the café to his liking, and comes to our dysfunctional dining experience in South Akron every day for lunch. He sits at the same table, sketching his ideas on a paper placemat. I always join him if I am around.

We have a lot in common, and never lack for conversation. We had talked about the sculpture one day. Kent asked him to repair the work after the shooting. He said no.

I finally see it behind Taylor Hall. It’s a tall abstract Kor-ten steel tower, suggestive of a loose airy stack of open books. The lower parts of the sculpture are covered in chalked graffiti – mostly messages of peace. The chalk feels right, a material of the present day, lasting only until the next rainfall.

I am not in the past as I stand within inches of the sculpture. I am looking through a bullet hole. It is a perfect circle, a void in what is probably ¼” solid sheet cold- rolled steel. I do not know much about weaponry, but I know about steel. If the bullet could do that to steel, what chance did anyone have against such power? How was it that only 13 students were shot in the 65 rounds that fired in 13 seconds? How many of the trees I hear around me have closed around bullets? Or did the FBI come and extricate all of them, leaving today a tiny scar grown over? In that view of the bullet’s passage, I am at last there. I feel the terror and destruction of those 13 seconds. These were kids facing kids. My own brother was twenty two. I am looking through a marble sized hole in a living surviving victim, a sculpture made by a man I had lunch with not three hours earlier. A man who, at eighty three continues to ask the questions, who holds a sandwich in hands blackened by the graphite of his expression of life.

It takes me less than three and a half minutes to walk to the classroom.

Emily drives us on an alternate route home to Akron after class, slower than the bland expediency of the expressway. It reminds me of that old way we would go to Kent; the hills, houses, farm stands and old commercial strips softly illuminated in the particular beautiful forgiving light of late summer in Ohio.

There is a peace in the recognition of my obligation in the trip to Kent. This time, it was so gentle, the reminder. It’s not the places that hold the pain. I forgive my old stony cold heart, I forgive my brother. How many reminders do I need to convert the pain of loss into the grace of compassion? It is not in those historic places of pain – the way out is the connection we have with the living. It’s the time we take to sit down with the old man with the blackened fingers, sketching ideas on a paper placemat.

THE HOLY SEE

TWO

Archbishop Christophe Pierre Apostolic Nuncio Apostolic Nunciature to the United States Diplomatic Mission of the Holy See 3339 Massachusetts Avenue, Northwest Washington, DC June 8, 2017

The Cuyahoga River sculpts a curving gracious break in the hills enclosing the city. Green ridges crown the edges. Akron is an airy citadel held in open hands.

The Y Bridge connects downtown Akron with the North Side neighborhood. The span crosses over the Little Cuyahoga River. St. Thomas Hospital sits atop the crest on the North Side. The bridge carries cars, mostly, but a sidewalk and bike lane allow the slower traveler a vertiginous view of the valley below. Starting across, the pedestrian feels the curious sensation of lift. Those fortunate few float away from solid ground, air under the feet. Looking down from the middle of the span the extreme depth comes as a shock of daily astonishment. After a moment, the eye adjusts to this avian perspective. Perched safely above the roofs of the quaint tidy street plan of Cascade Village, time, sound and space are slightly unhinged. Though the river is white as it runs over rocks below, from the height of the bridge, there is no sound to go with that picture; instead it is the individual rush tempo of each car passing. Akron, exalted place.”

SECOND LETTER OF APPEAL: In the cause for public good; Petition on behalf of the

City of Akron for consideration of sainthood.

Petitioner presents as a given the inherent sanctity of the human person. The sanctity of the human person, being manifest in actions, therefore interacts within a set of particulars; place and time, as vessels and observance loci of the divine.

The Congregation for the Causes of Saints confers sainthood on such persons who present extraordinary virtues and miraculous manifestations of God; who have, by their faith and actions, been endowed with a capacity of inexplicable grace, manifesting in tangible form, as miracle(s).

Petitioner proposes to illustrate results of the combined energy of two joined in mutual intention. This letter describes the power of a courageous decision between partners, how the decision for obedience to a calling ruffles the common understanding of what is possible.

Petitioner further proposes that such obedience, such service happens in a particular place at a particular time. In this case, the interactions of two people occurred in Akron,

Ohio and such time (1935-1995) as shall further indicate the inextricable nature of holy persons and the particular circumstances of their human life.

Petitioner cites the act of Transubstantiation at The Last Supper; fusion of place, time action in the raising of bread and water by Jesus Christ in a room with others, thus empowering transformation of these others with such transformed elements.

That essential miracle includes, by extension the fields, rivers, grains and the seasons required to produce such elements, the entirety of every particle of it all is sanctified.

Petitioner offers two such partnerships; the first example was critical to the creation of the world-wide phenomenon of twelve step recovery. The second example is still unfolding in a neighborhood few would notice.

A description of Inexplicable Divinity within the Geographic Designation of the City of Akron, State of Ohio, United States: The Rooms: How a courageous decision between two people can change the world.

In 1935, St. Thomas Hospital in Akron, Ohio had a chronic shortage of available beds for patients. For some two decades prior, Akron, Ohio in general experienced a shortage of beds. The boom years of the rubber industry brought massive numbers of men out of the mines of West Virginia to the rubber factories of Akron. The demand for housing far exceeded the existing capacity, so the families of the men stayed in back in the hill towns while the men shared shifts in the factory and beds of rooming houses in

South Akron.

In 1935, though the number of factories had declined since the peak production years of the decade between 1910 and 1920, there were still 132 rubber companies in

Akron. The boom years were over, and throughout the thirties, the sheer numbers of semiskilled labor in a one-industry town found its power in long, at times violent efforts to form an effective international union.

It was the Great Depression; a decade of vast shortages of material needs and a profusion of zeal to offset the desperation of those needs. In Akron, such zeal added to the increasing numbers of white Evangelicals responding to the simple redemptive messages of Baptist preacher Dallas F. Billington. He created one of the first industrial scale churches in America, the Akron Baptist Temple. The outsized serious man of compassion was also blessed with a keen sense of marketing, recognizing the potential of radio to reach beyond the local troubled souls of Akron’s blue collars.

The passion of working men finding a new power of their own was one answer to the worldwide spiritual malaise of the 1930s. Another could always be found in the 90

stretch of taverns and hotels lining the route between the Summit Lake neighborhood and

Firestone Rubber along South Main Street.

The Admitting Office of St. Thomas Hospital in the mid 1930’s reflected the emotions of the city it served. With a waiting list for beds, doctors came to the office themselves to appeal for spots for their patients. The Admitting Administrator, Sister

Ignatia, knew the disposition of every bed in the hospital. Frail and slight, she had a wealth of qualities suited to assuage the egos of doctors accustomed to having their demands met. Her personal charm, wit and compassion for suffering kept things light as she conducted the game of musical beds.

Before Dr. Robert H. Smith came into her office in August 1939, Sister Ignatia had found ways on her own to shelter those suffering from the effects of chronic alcoholism. In this, she was acting in defiance of not just her own hospital, but hospitals generally. Unless an active alcoholic had a medical condition requiring treatment, hospitals had no means of accommodating such patients. They were to be avoided because their problems were not medically treatable, they often exhibited violent behavior and frequently were unable to pay their hospital bills.

When she could, Sister Ignatia would find some spot for a drunk to have at least a few hours of sleep in a corridor or closet of St. Thomas. Frequently, however, her unorthodox admittees caused trouble. Though they might be sincere when promising her they would be quiet, a drunk with extreme withdrawal symptoms could be out of control.

Just before Dr. Smith came to her office, a man she admitted to the general medical services ward kept the Night Supervisor up all night.

By the time the doctor approached Sister Ignatia, an as-yet-unnamed movement was keeping some alcoholics sober. Since they first met in Akron three years earlier, the doctor and his partner Bill Wilson thought they had a solution for the incurable dipsomaniac. They knew from their own experience it was possible to stop drinking. The two men stayed sober by talking to each other. Before this simple solution had a chance with an active alcoholic, a candidate for the cure needed to be clear of the immediate effects of alcohol poisoning. Then needed a safe place to dry out.

Dr. Bob came to her frustrated and discouraged. It was a tough year for their new idea. He could not persuade Akron City Hospital to reconsider admitting alcoholics, despite his promises to supervise them. In New York, his partner Bill was suffering from another bout of manic depression. Though the two men knew they had something to offer, they also recognized the need for something they could not offer – medical care for the alcoholic. They just needed a bed.

Many of the Akron men who were now sober as a result of the three year experiment in fellowship told the Doctor Smith about Sister Ignatia. When they had been laid low by their alcoholic obsession, they remembered St. Thomas as a haven, thanks to her kindness in tending their shattered nerves.

The tall discouraged doctor and the frail sister talked for a long time that day.

They discovered they had far more in common than it might appear. They knew something essential that was not recognized in medicine or cultural norms. Though its symptoms were aggressively physical, they shared the unique idea that alcoholism was a spiritual malady.

In the office that day, their individual experience of hopelessness gave them the visceral understanding of the cure for a condition of hopelessness. Whether they actually spoke of their experiences - for the doctor, alcoholism and for the nun, nervous breakdown- each knew viscerally that only through surrender to a powerful, vital life force, a god of one’s own understanding – could a shattered human being be restored.

With the doctor’s assurances that he would be no trouble, she agreed to take his patient. After the night passed without incident, the doctor came down to see her, asking if the patient could be moved to a private room. There would be visitors coming to see him, and privacy for their conversation was vitally important.

Despite the bed shortage, she told him she would do what she could. There were no private rooms, but after she determined that a bed could fit through the door of the flower-arranging room, she had the patient moved there.

With that first mutually supported alcoholic patient in 1939 until he died in 1950,

Dr. Bob treated 4,800 patients. St. Thomas Hospital in Akron, Ohio became the first hospital to officially adopt a permanent policy that recognized the rights of alcoholics to receive hospital treatment.

After establishing the ward at St. Thomas Hospital in Akron, Sister Ignatia was reassigned by her Order, The Sisters of Charity of St. Augustine, to an expanding hospital in Cleveland. The hospital wanted to open the first specifically designed facility for treating alcoholics in a Catholic hospital. Based on her experiment with Dr. Bob at St.

Thomas, she drew a sketch of how the ward should function. She ran the Rosary Hall

Solarium at St. Vincent Charity Hospital in Cleveland, Ohio, until her always frail physical condition led to her retirement in 1966.

As Bill Wilson wrote in her memory,

“Never before or since those early Akron days have we witnessed a more perfect synthesis of all these healing forces. Dr. Bob exemplified both medicine and AA; Sister Ignatia and the Sisters of Charity of Saint Augustine also practiced applied medicine; and their practice was supremely well animated by the wonderful spirit of their Community. A more perfect blending of Grace and talent cannot be imagined.”7

7 Wilson, Bill, “In Memory of Sister Ignatia”, AA Grapevine, New York, NY, August 1966. 94

CREATION GROANS

In the large open space of the Front Porch Café on Grant Street in Akron, Ohio, it was breakfast as usual. Eggs, bacon and ham sizzled on the grille. Customers spread out among the sixteen tables, arms propped on the blue and white checked plastic covers. A young intern carried a carafe of hot coffee, refilling ceramic mugs. Regulars might have noticed that Joe Tucker, the executive director, was not parked at his spot, the back corner table, just outside the tiny office. Nor was Thomas the chef flipping eggs at the grille. The building manager Eric Harmon was not around. Amber Cullen,

Communications Director, who on most mornings disappeared behind her laptop in the middle table on the south wall, really had disappeared that morning. Gary, the assistant chef, was the only staff member in the room. Everyone else working in the café that morning was a volunteer.

The staff was in the back room.

That there was a back room to be in was a monumental achievement for the organization, a small urban Christian ministry. Throughout the seven years preceding their assembly in the renovated space that day, the back room had been a neglected nuisance. The roof leaked and rusted out the piles of donated bulky industrial kitchen equipment. Co-founder Duane Crabbs was open to all kinds of ideas of what the place could be, and the back room contained a history of his unrealized visions.

There was nothing outwardly unusual about the group gathered in the back room drinking coffee and catching up. That ordinariness is what made it so extraordinary.

Such casual normalcy was a major milestone, a stark indication of growth; they were more than a one-room shop. For the seven years South Street Ministries owned the building, the front room was the whole show.

The front room of the building was the café – and everything else. It operated like a log cabin – dining room, town hall, drop-in center, office and meeting space, performance hall, party center, message board, and twelve-step recovery room. With the renovation of the back room and the second floor, they tripled their operating space.

Now they had to figure out what to do with it.

The only thing that was the same about the back room was its name. By function, it was now a community health clinic run by Faithful Servants, a Christian based healthcare organization founded by Doctors Susan and Mark Meyers. Years before, they heard a doctor tell his story of moving to rural Mississippi to serve the poor alongside

John Perkins, the same man that had so deeply influenced Duane Crabbs’ decisions. The clinic is a flexible space, and by all appearances that morning, it was a place of assembly for exactly the purpose of their gathering – planning the future.

Two South Street board members and three invited guests, myself among that trio, stood together, awaiting the start of three days of strategic planning. Donovan

Harris, Eric Nelson and myself had been included as invested friends of South Street.

My official role as Architect was almost complete, but my relationship with South Street was beyond a bound set of construction documents.

The two women conducting the seminar arranged the typical tools for such sessions; the white board, flip charts, thousands of colored markers and a vast assortment of sticky notes. Their personal equipment was minimal; a palm sized device containing the Power Point presentation and enormous personalized plastic vessels of colored and presumably healthy water. They were facilitators trained in a procedure intimidatingly titled “StratOps”.

Conspicuously absent in the mix was co-founder Duane Crabbs. By loose mutual agreement with the Executive Director Joe Tucker, Duane would participate as called in.

Duane’s wife and co-founder Lisa was in the room. Though she had no responsibility that morning beyond her presence, she was busy around the refreshment table. Her lifetime habits meant making sure there was enough of everything to eat and drink before the meeting started.

Duane and Lisa Crabbs are the grace and glue of the ministry; he, the fluid energetic grace to her steady, enduring glue. The light shines on Duane but shadow or sun, rain or sleet, it is Lisa who holds the whole thing together. Twenty years had passed since they started the ministry after moving into the Summit Lake neighborhood. Without a plan or training, they operated on abundant faith and sometimes less abundant hope. It was a commitment to fidelity; they responded to the call of the heart for service through the example of Jesus.

In the twenty years since they started South Street Ministries, the organization had evolved into a more formal structure. The concrete chunk of a twenty-year anniversary presented the space and opportunity to recognize the need for future planning. It was a

good moment for standing still in the new space of the clinic and taking notes for the next phase.

To the world around the Café, South Street Ministries and Duane Crabbs were synonymous. However, functionally and fundamentally the ministry had moved away from the charismatic singularity of Duane. Even those in the community did not know that for over five years Duane had no official role or authority over decisions made by the ministry he founded.

For any organization, moving beyond the identity of the founder is a difficult journey. A future at South Street without the everyday charisma of Duane and Lisa was not a vision for most to entertain. For the stability of the ministry, Joe and the board decided there was no reason to delay that inevitability.

The hiring of outside strategic planning consultants often constitutes a warning flag, a sign of trouble akin to marriage counseling for corporations. However, South

Street ran in continuous laps of crisis management, so a kind of chaos was normal for everyone present. Moreover, the “outside consultants” in this situation were more like family.

If anything, the organization had never been more stable. There was no confusion about the mission, no crisis in leadership, no subterfuge in the ranks. They were in the enviable situation of a focused pause after the completion of impressive benchmarks for a ministry of their size. It was less breakdown, than breakthrough. It was a time to glance back and then forward together, a luxury unknown in their day-to-day operation, their triage-style life.

It was Thomas, the café manager, who pointed out something no one else in the room even noticed.

“Look, we’re all in here, and the café is working fine without us.”

Though that level of daily functionality had been common for quite a while, being together in the back room let us all take it in with some detachment.

***

We settled into the prepared half circle of chairs. The last active use of the back room space had been as the bar of the Croatian American Club. It was the only part of the building in use by the time the Croatians closed it down in 2005. Now, the only remnant of those days was something I loved including on my tours of the building.

Inside the enormous wooden walk-in cooler, the plaster walls were frescoed with its working man’s past: in black letters, the words “Pabst” “Iron City” “Schlitz” were preserved in the damp chill. Before the renovation, JT Buck, a musician who grew up in the neighborhood, knew the exact spot of his father’s bar stool. Pointing to the debris- strewn concrete floor, the curved footprint of the bar was still visible.

“Right there, every afternoon,” JT said as he moved his finger energetically towards the floor, “that was his spot.”

The arrangement of folding chairs curved over neutral mixed grey carpet tiles.

Glass block had replaced the plywood and broken window frames. Fresh, simple, clean, new, and reassuringly anonymous, the back room clinic completely eradicated the perpetual dinge of its prior lives.

When one of the two StratOps facilitators, Noelle Beck, wanted to start a youth center in Kenmore, Duane and Lisa guided her early steps, and continued to provide

emotional support for Noelle and her husband Tim. She is the founder/director of First

Glance, a thriving youth organization in the Kenmore neighborhood of Akron. Bonded in their Evangelical Christian faith, Noelle and Duane diverged completely in their sense of organizational life. Noelle managed the complex and ever-expanding outreach from a string of commercial buildings on Kenmore Boulevard with disarming ease and inscrutable calm. StratOps Facilitator is her latest credential in Noelle’s prodigious capacity as a leader and planner.

After starting with prayer, Noelle and her partner Alicia asked us to introduce ourselves and identify our positions. It’s an open secret at South Street that no one is actually qualified for his or her the job. If the decision to hire any one of them relied on paper credentials, the room would be empty. However, in the grounding of faith and the instincts of Duane, it had worked in that manner for twenty years. The sturdy alchemy of the mission statement was obvious by the mix of those in the room: “Unlikely partners taking shared risks to improve our community for Christ’s sake.” In the recognition of their mutual brokenness, South Street contained the same power as the twelve step recovery meetings they hosted. Any wreckage of personal past was not a source of shame, but of strength.

Duane lacked both a degree from a conventional divinity school and ordination by any established religion. However, his intelligence and conviction with people endowed him with an authority. His capacity to recognize and empower potential in those whom the world had dismissed was the Human Resources philosophy of South Street, expressed in a shortened version of the mission statement: “Unlikely partners for Chrissss’sake!”

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They did the best they could at the job they had, and it just kept working out. At the Front Porch Café, the primary offering was love, so if efficiency and consistency suffered as a result, no one really seemed to mind.

“Hey, I’m Bobby, and I run the After School Program and summer camp.”

If asked to identify “Youth Director” from a lineup of twenty random people,

Bobby Irwin might be the least likely pick. Bob is a big guy, a really big guy. Red scraggly beard under a baldhead, tattoos, and a missing front tooth, fear would be a reasonable reaction if he came your way. But he moves with at an even steady country boy rhythm, and operates from steadfast fidelity to his faith. Bobby knows what it is like to struggle, because at 36 everything for him has been a struggle. He shifts his feet and controls a stutter when nervous. He understands intimately what hell kids can go through, because he grew up on the same streets they did. He is solid. He loves kids who can be very hard to love, and he does it without ceremony every day.

Next to and engaged to Bobby, Erin Woodson started, like everyone else, as a volunteer. She navigated the mechanics of the first big signature fundraiser, Rails N

Trails, successfully. She has a Master of Social Work degree, but her position is

Development Director.

Chef Thomas Jones had never worked in a kitchen before he started as assistant chef in the café. Communications Director Amber Cullen, after serving with Mission

Year after college, was in her first paid fulltime job with South Street. She came up with her own job title.

Job Placement director Toni Code worked at more jobs in her lifetime than everyone put together in the room that day. Her credentials were direct experience, quick

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feet, and a passion and lived understanding for her clients and the street-smart intolerance of the con.

Joe Tucker has been the Executive Director for over three years, but until very recently derived most of his income as a math instructor.

Lisa Crabbs and Eric Harmon sat next to each other, as they often did at staff meetings. They appreciated the humor in situations unseen by others. Today, the space between their chairs was the seam, the margin between past and future. The foundational years were over. South Street grew by staying in the often-uncomfortable place of the margin, of the uncertainty of “next”. Lisa was that, the foundational years, the past.

Thirty-six year old Eric represented the more classifiable future. He was recently ordained as an Anglican priest after completing a Masters of Divinity degree at Walsh

College.

Eric introduced himself simply as the Building and Construction Project Manager and Reentry Program coordinator.

Lisa’s self-identification was by far the shortest of all.

“I do some admin work for the staff “

A mastery of understatement, after a brief pause came the burst of laughter.

Lisa’s succinct distillation of her role conveyed the steady power behind her impulsive dreamer husband, Duane.

The introductions conveyed something about the nature of the ministry and

Duane’s empowerment. Everyone at South Street started as a volunteer, learning through the daily experience of the job, whether it was flipping a burger, driving a van of children to a program, tutoring after-school, coaching football, or writing newsletters.

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The ministry had the idiosyncratic qualities of a family business mixed with the careening operational structure of a support group, maintained by a reliance on God to get through the messy mystery of serving the people who came their way. They did not keep score and there was no membership list. In the twenty years of its existence, there was never a problem or issue larger than one they could solve themselves.

In the suspended space between the formal strategic plan and the platform of the twenty-year history, there was a definite culture shift. The prior narrative was immeasurable and improvisational. It had the rhythm and suspense of a juggler adding more objects to the spinning collection already airborne. Sometimes it seemed to prosper in spite of itself and the obstacles of Duane’s quixotic leadership. That energy had transformed as the building transformed. Now the building met the standards of occupancy. The ministry’s future, its spiritual energetic transformation was not as easy to read as the building.

The StratOps workshop employed a set of tools and techniques well established in

American corporate culture. Noelle Beck had an ease with the language. She was relaxed as she led the group. Given her personal history and understanding of South

Street, the group was equally relaxed.

Introductions complete and overall schedule for the next three days described, it was time to understand the history, the “where we have come from” narrative. Duane was the voice; he would have been the person to tell that story. However, he was not there, Lisa was.

It was never her inclination to speak in public about what she and Duane had brought forth. Nor was it her nature to be reflective. She was the practical half of the

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marriage, of the partnership. She is a master of constancy. Throughout their original urban adventure, her attention to the detail and capacity to keep things afloat seemed effortless. Lisa was an artist of anonymous management. However, it would be a mistake to interpret her public meekness as an indication of a Christian wife sublimating herself to the husband. She simply aimed her voice where it would be most effective.

Though her influence and power was in the background, it was always there, thoughtful, without flourish or intellectualizing a situation. However, Lisa operated on a kind of contradiction also; the paradox of faith opposite her practical management – an absolute trust in God’s hand in all things.

Her mind is sharp and clear as a sheet in a ledger book, but now she was laying out an original composition. This was a story everyone in the room thought they already knew. Without the purpose-driven message of her pastor husband, Lisa was about to share a new history of the ministry’s early years and growth.

“We just did the next thing. Everything happened in our house for … years. And in the whole house. After school, tutoring was in the basement. Duane‘s parents were our first volunteers. They helped us through so many things.

She paused.

We needed them. They, well, like everyone else, thought we were making a mistake moving to South Street. But they didn’t talk about it, they were there for us, right there. It was hard to take all the negativity, we felt so alone. Everyone told us it was a terrible idea. “What about your kids?

We just got started. We had a weekly Bible Study in the living room. That went on every Wednesday for years. The Murrays were starting Catholic Worker on Princeton Street then – they came to the Bible Study. Their son Liam was one of the people who started Bike shop.

On Sunday morning, we had church in the living room. During the day, the kids, our kids, would be in school there, in the living room. I was teaching them but there were always other kids too, always. Years of kids – in the basement with more volunteers as tutors. We started to partner with Lincoln School to have kids come directly from there to our house.”

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Lisa paused. In her understated, practical, deadpan, with everyone in the palm of her hand.

“Sometimes I thought Lincoln School sent their worst kids to our house for tutoring.

“It seemed that the worse the neighborhood got, the more we … grew. We would try a lot of different things, whatever seemed like it might help someone. Our yard was open, and with our four kids, it was the center of a lot of games. Anyone could cross from Bachtel through to our yard. But the neighborhood kids knew they could play there safely. A lot of times it was hard to tell if they were playing or fighting. We put in the basketball court in front of the house. There was always a swing set in the back for the little kids. . Our kids had a lot of friends; there were so many kids around, flowing all over the place.

There were so many different people, so many, who helped us, came alongside us. Our mailman, right after we moved in, helped with carpentry and joined the Bible study. Duane’s Cuyahoga Falls firemen friends built the stairways to the apartment over the garage. That became the Upper Room. We moved the tutoring and After School program into the Upper Room, and that allowed those programs to grow.

“Bike shop really got going, out of our garage twice a week in the summer. People would try different things, the gardening program was one that grew.

“I was home all the time when the kids were growing up. With Duane’s work and his ministry in the neighborhood, it was like we were in two separate worlds in those years. He would be out in the neighborhood at night. The phone could ring in the middle of the night, someone needing help.

There were nights I would be making coffee at three in the morning for a friend in crisis sitting at our kitchen table. I just made sure we always had enough to include someone who might show up.

“Our kids were my big worry before we moved there, but they were fine. They had lots of friends, and we included their friends in our life, in the house. Our kids experienced the sadness and pain of things happening to their neighborhood friends. So many of their friends moved away suddenly, without any word. We had to explain why their friends left without saying goodbye.

“A lot of times, most of the time for years, we had someone staying with us, on the living room couch or out on the porch. They were uncles to our kids. Derek Foster and Patrick Armour. Patrick was with us for a long time. And all that time I was doing the bookkeeping, too. From that same desk, the desk in the den.

“We just prayed about whatever was a worry. And the doors just kept opening. A lot of times I was juggling the money we had, spreading it out to keep things running. 105

We prayed. And then something would happen, the money would … come in and we kept going. We just took the next step that God was leading us to.”

There was a silence after Lisa finished a long mutual silence. Even those who knew the story heard a new story, because Lisa had never told it before. She told the story from the center; from the place that for twenty years, people knew they could come and knock and be heard.

The silence, stillness was another reminder that as we sat in the chairs, we also gathered at an intersection. There would be pauses in the next three days, but something beyond the flip-chartable steps and action plans hung in the space. It was Lisa, the unrehearsed beauty of her story, her fidelity and truth.

***

Noelle and Alicia introduced the next activity, the “Visioning” section. What next? The language around this huge crossroads was a kind of familiar corporate speak.

It allowed for a swerve away from what none of us wanted to face yet. The group found a way to talk about the future by the mutual recognition that the DNA of South Street

Ministries was Duane Crabbs. That felt like a home base, a comforting solid. It kept the unspoken future at bay for a few more hours of charts and graphs.

Duane came in the late afternoon. He had been in a depression for a few months by then. It happened from time to time with him. His gloom contrasted with the bouncy reassurance of StratOps. The light that normally shone out on the world had been draped in felt. Duane was present, but it was hard to tell where he was, really. The conversation wreathed around him, about him. He seemed a wisp of himself, but he was with people who knew and loved all of him, the whole of him. There was no pressure for him to be anything other than what he was in that moment.

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The facilitators brought up the next section of the plan. They were poised with their markers to write a list below the heading “Risks to the Ministry”. They asked for potential risks.

“Loss of founder identity”, someone offered.

It was time. We all needed to take that in.

Sometime, Duane would not preach on Sunday. Lisa would not make sure that the necessary details happened, or add the unnecessary touches of daily hospitality that graced the café. They would simply not be there. Duane and Lisa had already past their original commitment of twenty years. Their lives were here, they were not going anywhere. But the day would come when Duane and Lisa would never walk through the door of the café again. South Street had to prepare for that idea - the permanent absence of the singularity of Duane and Lisa Crabbs.

We moved on to the conventions of planning. Lists drawn up, options, and outcomes discussed and pie-charted, the white flip chart paper arranged around the room as we completed a new task. We took snack and lunch breaks, laughed, enjoyed the loose captive comradery of our time together. It felt like jury duty with friends and family. By the end of the time, Noelle and Alicia had good words for us, taking down the sheets that lined the entire room and several of the space dividers of the health clinic.

Eventually they would put together the results in a bound copy. Eventually it would sit on a shelf in the tiny office off the café.

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A BED IN SHEOL

Sheol is the Old Testament Hebrew word for the unseen world of the dead where departed spirits go. It was a place of stillness and darkness, but without judgment of moral character. All the dead, righteous and wicked alike, become shades, without personality or strength. Sheol is the great equalizer.

The Sunday before Thanksgiving, 2017 at 2 pm, Duane and Lisa Crabbs were in their bedroom, dressing for a family outing. Waiting downstairs were their two sons. After protesting about the timing of the annual family photograph session, Josh and Jonathan were the only ones ready on time. Their oldest, Joshua, was particularly annoyed. “Who schedules a picture in the middle of Sunday afternoon football? Can’t we just take it in the backyard?” He and his wife Alli were in their final days in the United States. After a month visit and the birth of their newborn son, they were returning to their life as missionaries in the Dominican Republic as a family of three. The now three generational Crabbs family numbered twelve, and that Sunday was the only time that worked for an outdoor photograph. The plan was to gather at their parent’s house, the home they all grew up in, to caravan to the Cleveland Art Museum. Duane and Lisa heard their two sons laughing about the shirts. They ridiculed each other about who looked worse in the identical shirts they wore, also sported in miniature on Josh’s baby son. The shirts were a kind of joke tradition that had developed over the years around getting their picture taken. In the spotless stair hallway, the walls were covered with a cascading series of formal studio portraits, a study in smiles, bad haircuts, tradition and love. The staircase documented the family over the twenty seven years since birth of their first child, Joshua. Duane sat on the bed, trying to rise above the pain in his stomach. Maybe Jonathan’s burrito from Skeets was a bad idea. The discomfort was impossible to ignore.

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When he told Lisa he thought he had the flu, she accused him of trying to get out of the plan. She was getting ready in their bathroom, and was fed up with the complaints of her men. “How could you get a flu that fast? You were fine a minute ago downstairs. You are worse than the boys. What game is it you want to watch instead of being with your family?” He had already put in a full day, up since four a.m. as usual. He habitually rose early, went downstairs, made a thermos of coffee and sat down amidst several neat stacks of books assembled around his reading chair. That morning he had written and delivered the message at the Front Porch Fellowship, the church ministry that he and Lisa founded twenty years prior.

Now, as he tried to overcome the nausea, he heard his boys enjoying their rare time together. It was always great, having the entire family back in the house. It had been over a year since they had been together, for Hannah’s wedding. Now there were two new members, Duane and Lisa’s first two infant grandsons. The boys called up, impatient, but it was just the family language of routine one-upmanship. It was safe and familiar, a day given over to joy. The bond between the four children was deep and close, forged by the unusual choices their parents made, by their own individual decisions as they matured, and the unaccountable conditions that create healthy young adults.

Lisa had been looking forward to this day. She had always been the one to insist on a family portrait, but their daughter Hannah had taken charge this time. The simplicity of the day was a welcome change in a long season of loss. The family had just buried her brother’s wife. One of their closest friends, Mike Marshall, was recently found on his boat, dead, alone, after a massive coronary.

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Coming out of the bathroom, she realized that Duane was in trouble. His face was grey and glistening with sweat. Her husband was having a heart attack. In the first wave of shock and panic, she screamed for Joshua and ran downstairs.

Duane, clutching the edge of the bed, shouted back that he was ok. He already ruled out heart attack. He had no chest pain and his breath was steady. But his years as a firefighter and EMS technician told him he was not ok. He recognized the more subtle symptoms that signaled some kind of cardiac trouble.

As the boys tried to understand their frantic mother, Duane came down the stairs.

Calm and clear, he calculated that it would be faster to simply drive to Akron General than wait for the ambulance. If he called 911 as he drove there, the medics would be waiting for him. He started out to the car, calling for Josh to bring the car keys and come with him.

Despite the fact that every single person around him was a licensed driver except the 2 infant grandsons, Duane’s intention was to drive himself. Josh had not lived in

Akron for over ten years, and all the current work the expressway had closed off roads

Josh might remember. In a non-emergency, their house was only a nine minute drive to

Akron General. That Sunday, he knew he could get there in under five minutes, easy.

He was steadily reassessing the best and fastest response to the conditions. Such alertness to the environment in threatening conditions was where Duane excelled. But this time he was both the victim and the emergency crew.

In the few beats between his dad asking for the car keys and finding them, Josh ran out the back door to see his dad face down on the lawn. It was his turn to scream.

Duane rose up, claiming he was resting. But he did not remember lying down.

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Meanwhile, Lisa was insisting that they absolutely must use the landline to call 911.

Everyone was trying, doing their best to appear and stay calm. Duane, from his involuntary seated view, knew what was happening. He had been in this scene many times, though not in this role. His family was starting to panic.

“Josh, you are going to drive. I will tell you how to get there, son.”

Exactly one week before, the twelve of them had converged for a celebration of

Duane and Lisa’s twenty year commitment to serving the neighborhood. The whole family stood among old and new friends in the eclectic community known as the Front

Porch Fellowship at the Sunday service. Miller Avenue Church was filled with old and new friends to celebrate the occasion. Duane and Lisa had spent the past year resisting elaborate plans to honor the twentieth anniversary of South Street Ministries. They found it perplexing that anyone close to them would suggest anything other than this – a simple worship celebration in the open broad community followed by a meal and fellowship.

The family’s journey over those twenty years is studded with characteristic Duane decisions and motivations, perplexing or inspiring to those on the sidelines. Motivated by his desire to engage in his emerging brand of urban ministry full-time, he quit his job as a firefighter with less than one year before he was eligible to receive his pension.

Whether defiant, foolhardy, for Duane it was a statement of conviction, of the purity of his intent.

The decision to leave his career came out of the gnawing recognition that he was not performing at his best. Something had to change. They had been living in the

Summit Lake neighborhood for four years. He had been building an understanding of the place, getting to know the nerve centers of the surrounding streets, but was often so tired

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from work and family that, despite his prodigious energy, he was irritable, feeling like he was letting everyone down. He was thirty eight years old, with a wife and four children.

It was 1999. Lisa, the practical one, supported Duane’s interpretation of God’s call on their lives. By now, she had experienced many times over seeing God open doors when we they were willing to follow him, even into unlikely places and situations.

After the ten week vacation and sick leave pay, the family of six would pass into a new phase of living – one that did not include a known source of income.

In many ways, what was a naturally good fit as a firefighter was not always as successful in matters less urgent than emergency response. Much of who Duane Crabbs became as an influential local leader sprang from his personality bonded to the distinct qualities that make a good firefighter – a public servant willing to face the possibility of injury or death on a daily basis.

A firehouse needs to know that a new guy is a good firefighter, something that cannot be determined until one of those situations arises on a call. Once the squad knows the new guy has what it takes, unspoken entry is granted to the brotherhood of relentless ridicule.

When he started his firefighting career in Cuyahoga Falls in 1986, the newbie, the balding guy with the funny name was deemed ok. He was a good firefighter. Plus

Crabbs had a lot of distinct quirks to joke about. He was always reading, didn’t play cards, and had funny ideas.

When it counted, it did not take long to realize that Duane was the real thing in a crisis. He had what it took, calm and steady, brave and committed to saving lives and

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protecting his fellow firefighters. Duane had this strange innocence about him, but he could take the ample joking around, the currency of firehouse culture.

Still, he learned over time that it was best to keep certain facts of his domestic life and growing interest in ministry to the inner city on the down low.

The very qualities that made him a good firefighter might be the opposite of what one seeks in a spiritual counselor. Duane’s off-shift profile was extreme to his firefighting brotherhood. While he got the nod as a good firefighter, he was different.

He held opinions that were not within the informal recognition of belonging.

Firehouse culture thrives on humor to undercut the inherent danger of the job.

Duane suffered through his fair share for being an idealistic do-gooder. While firefighters are typically churchgoing and family-oriented, there is a certain fatalistic humor that comes along with the work. Duane had the competitive alpha type attitude, but also did not act the tough guy when it came to his Christianity, or his feelings about discrimination.

When he became a Cuyahoga Falls firefighter in 1986, the force was 100% white.

It bothered him that there was not one full time African American employee in the city administration, and he did not hesitate to speak out on the issue. Added to his other distinctions, it was another source of fuel for the continuous firehouse badinage. By

1989, though the department had been integrated with the first three black firefighters,

Duane was drawn to work in the place that he had found his ministry.

He wanted to work in the City of Akron. The contradiction of living in Akron, worshipping in Summit Lake and then turning away from all that to work outside the city

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was getting to him. He felt like he was facing the wrong direction, not acting on Gad’s call to serve the inner city.

It would mean that he would be starting all over again, as though the four years in the Falls had never happened. He knew it would mean submitting to testing by another firehouse, getting the worst cleaning jobs in the station, and accepting a new chain of command that would include African American leadership. He knew it would be more dangerous and more work for less pay - a reduction of one third of his current salary.

Lisa, always more cautious in decision-making, had concerns about the salary reduction, but otherwise supported Duane’s idea. The couple had chosen to live in a mixed race neighborhood in Akron. Despite her worries about the reduced household income, her views about money were tempered by growing up in a family that made the best of lean finances, and remained close and supportive throughout it all. She was resourceful. Beyond that, it was a simple matter of faith with Lisa. If this is what God was calling Duane to do, then he needed to listen and follow as far as it would take him.

Duane took the first step towards the Akron Fire Department by taking the written test in 1990. He began to tell the guys at work his plans, bragging that Akron was the far more manly option. His colleagues seized on this delicious opportunity to ridicule what they saw as a stupid move. It added to the abundant material they had to tease “Buster”, one of Duane’s many firehouse handles, after the Olympic gold medalist movie star

Buster Crabbe. Nicknames were abundant in the house, and Buster suited Duane particularly well. He was a buster alright.

But a month later, when Duane got the test results, instead of his expectation to be in the top 20%, he had failed the test. There was a section on firefighter personality to

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which he had not given much consideration, thinking it was subjective and therefore not graded. It included the statement “I would rather read a book than be in a crowded room full of people.” Asked to answer honestly, he agreed. It was the wrong answer and the source of his failing mark.

The guys teased him mercilessly for failing to have a firefighter’s personality.

“Buster, you did not have to take a test! We could have told them you don’t fit in!”

He found it hard to accept Lisa’s suggestion that perhaps it was not God’s will.

But there was nothing to be done but wait the two years and take the test again to find out what God had in mind. In his disappointment, he decided that the next time he would simply lie and give every aggressive alpha male stereotypical answer.

Fortunately for Duane’s planned tweaking of God’s will, the personality survey was dropped from the exam when he took it for the second time, two years later in 1992.

His score was in the top 5 %. He advanced to the next level.

Though Duane’s firefighter personality included choosing to read a book over being in a crowded room, he had plenty of alpha male in him. He looked forward to the next test, physical agility. One part of the test involved crawling through a maze in full gear, including the self-contained breathing apparatus known as SCBA. For this test, the face mask is completely blacked out, to simulate zero visibility situations. Duane had helped run this test, and felt very confident on the testing day. Fire Chief Alexander came by to watch. Duane volunteered to go first. Claiming he would set the fastest time ever recorded, the chief flatly responded

“How bout you just pass the test.”

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Boasting, betting and challenging are common among firefighters, but it is always behavior, action more than any spoken claim that counts in the squad. Sightless, oxygen mask on his face and full turnout gear, Duane crawled through the maze in 3 minutes 27 seconds, the fastest time ever posted. He passed the physical exam.

***

On the day of his heart attack, Duane talked until they put the oxygen mask on his face. All the way to the hospital as Josh drove, he talked, guiding Josh along the fastest route. He called 911. He called the hospital emergency room, utterly calm, describing his own symptoms. By the time they arrived, hospital staff was outside, waiting with a stretcher. Duane cooperated with the medics’ instructions, falling into his custom of connecting with others, reaching out, keeping it easy, talking and smiling his way onto the stretcher.

He kept smiling. Before he disappeared behind the emergency room double doors, he waved to Lisa.

***

Passing the physical exam for the Akron Fire Department brought Duane to the next challenge, the psychological test. Duane’s results were problematic, and he was asked to take the test again, making sure to consider the questions and answer honestly.

Again the results were red flagged. He was asked to come in for an interview with a psychologist. After probing Duane’s beliefs for a half hour, the therapist stopped.

“Only an angel could score as you have – could you really be that idealistic?”

Duane laughed, said she should talk to his wife or the guys he worked with

about that. But he readily admitted that he was idealistic.

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“I am trying to come to Akron for 1/3rd less money, and twice the work because

I believe that God wants me to work in the city.”

In the silence that followed, Duane was aware that the woman before him held his future in the long empty pause. He thought it best to say no more. He prayed into the long pause. The psychologist broke the mood with a chuckle, saying she was recommending him for the job.

The next and final test in the process was the medical exam. It is administered only to otherwise-approved candidates. Duane sat in the waiting room of the Morley

Health Center, waiting for his name to be called. This was all that stood between him and taking the oath. But he waited, knowing that he was about to take a test that he could not pass. The vision test. The threshold was a minimum 20/60 vision. Duane’s uncorrected vision was 20/200. It was a reality he chose to ignore in his quest. His clear conviction of his destiny, his sincere faith that God wanted him to be in the city had carried him this far.

Akron’s standard physical was more rigorous than Cuyahoga Falls, and based on the Los Angeles County Fire Department’s 1972 standard. However, the vision threshold in the past twenty years had been revised in many departments since the refinement and use of contact lenses. The lenses changed everything regarding firefighter safety. Prior to lenses, even the best candidates without that minimum unassisted visual acuity could not be firefighters. Eyeglasses cannot be worn under the SCBA face mask. The ear stems prevent the mask from a complete seal, allowing toxic smoke to enter the mask, jeopardizing the firefighter’s safety and threating the success of the mission. Contact lenses obviated the handicap. But Akron still used the 1972 standard.

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The nurse brought him to the exam room and excused herself for a moment when the phone rang. Duane seized on the opportunity and memorized enough of the lines of the chart to pass. He took the opportunity as his good fortune, God providing him a space to move forward.

The nurse noted his visual acuity at 20/40, a pass. As she applied the blood pressure cuff, Duane was struggling with growing remorse for cheating. The blood pressure reading prompted the nurse to ask him if he had blood pressure problems in the past.

“Never” he answered, honestly.

Saying it was too high to meet the standard, the nurse prepared the cuff for a second reading as Duane explained that the blood pressure was not a problem, but that he was a Christian and he had just cheated on the eye exam. She readministered both tests.

Blood pressure, pass. Visual acuity, fail.

The rejection letter he received the following week concluded with a slender possibility for Duane’s persistent uncorrected vision and a conduit for his God-inspired inner vision: “If you have any questions or wish to contest this decision, you must contact the office of the Civil Service Commission in writing within five days.”

Duane wrote immediately to the personnel director of the city of Akron, Richard

Pamley, indicating his intention to contest, sending it the same day, certified mail. He had a new idea.

Akron had not made an upgrades or changes in its physical in the twenty years since the LA County standards had been adopted. Many departments, including the

Cuyahoga Falls Fire Department incorporated corrective contact lenses into

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consideration. Even the most recent standard issued by the National Fire Protection

Association allowed firefighters to wear contact lenses under their face masks. He felt he had the basis for a solid case. As he waited for his hearing, he kept researching and preparing. He had hope - until he found out how the hearing is conducted.

The Civil Service hearing is composed of three panelists appointed by the Mayor.

They make their ruling in private and issue the result in writing. Rarely do they overturn in favor of the petitioner and against the City’s original decision. The petitioner cannot present the case unless represented by a lawyer.

Duane could not afford an attorney. But he took up his own defense with customary zeal.

Duane and Lisa had befriended the elderly widow in the house behind theirs on

Stadelman Street. She was the mother of Akron Fire Captain Richard Hoover. He and

Duane had often talked over the fence when Richard cut his mother’s grass. Richard encouraged Duane in his campaign, telling him to investigate the records of past hearings.

Duane’s subsequent investigation of the records revealed that in the 1990 alone, the vision standard had been protested forty times and upheld. Checking back to 1988, it was protested sixty times. Though it was a discouraging history, Duane continued to polish his presentation. As long as he still had a chance, he was determined to put every effort into the campaign.

Duane’s backyard buddy Captain Roger Hoover phoned one day. He had some exciting news for Duane. He overheard several of the assistant chiefs discussing the newly enacted Americans with Disabilities Act. Though not yet adopted into general

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public codes yet, the legislation was legally mandated for government entities. The new law dictated that if a person is denied a job based on a physical disability, the burden of proof falls on the employer to show that the disability makes the employee unfit for the job. The chiefs expressed concern that the new law would open the city to lawsuits.

Hoover thought Duane’s complaint fell into that category. Roger encouraged

Duane to contact the city, the fire department, anyone who might be influential in the application of the new Federal statute. Now Duane had a second course of action.

Hoover advised Duane to continue work on his presentation as the hearing date approached.

Within days of the hearing, Duane received a phone call from the personnel director of the City of Akron, Richard Pamley. He asked Duane if he would provide some details about his complaint over the phone. Duane had no reluctance to respond. In fact, he welcomed the opportunity to present his case early, before the hearing date.

Comfortable with the spontaneous opportunity, he was a firefighter blessed by a love and a skill for persuasive speech. And all the work he had done allowed him to speak to the authority at the other end of the line with his own calm authority.

By the time he cited the new ADA legislation, Pamley interrupted, asking if

Duane would be willing to bring the information to his office. Duane could not have been more eager for such an opportunity – an opportunity he was barred from doing at the actual hearing. He was confident now that a direct presentation of his work would be persuasive. At the very least, it could not hurt the case and would be good practice for any future opportunity.

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Duane brought his research and verbal dexterity to Pamley’s office. Though there was no decision that day, the hearing was cancelled. Several weeks passed without a response.

When Duane opened the slim envelope with the City of Akron logo and return address, the one page letter declared that the vision standard for Akron Firefighters had been updated and he was therefore reinstated to the eligibility list for the Akron Fire

Department as a firefighter/medic.

Duane Crabbs was sworn in as an Akron Firefighter/Medic in the fall of 1992.

His internal God-inspired vision for himself was realized through the acceptance of his previously unacceptable physical vision.

Duane’s first fire station in Akron was Station 6. He was the new guy again, the low man, but between his experience and attitude, it was an easy fit. Firefighters place a great significance around a firefighter’s first fire. Duane’s first Akron fire came in the early hours of New Year’s Day, 1993. Around the corner from what would, four years later become the Crabbs family home, 975 Marion Place was burning.

The Christmas tree caught fire. The tree was next to the stairway, which acted as a natural conductor while blocking access to the second floor. The grandmother was in bed on the second floor. She had suffered a recent fall and could not walk. Though there had been repeated attempts to reach her, by the daughter and two men living next door, they could not get past the heat.

By the time Duane and the men from Station 6 arrived on the scene, it was beyond control. There was nothing anyone could do to save the woman on the second

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floor. EMS treated the two neighbors on the scene. The daughter was taken to the hospital for the burns on her arms and face sustained trying to reach her mother.

The January 1 fatality was a tragic start for a hard year in the neighborhood. That year, Summit Lake would suffer from more house fires with over $25,000 damage than any of the prior twenty years.

It was also a harbinger for Duane’s future as a pastor, as he would discover two years later in a neighborhood bar at four in the morning.

***

The Crabbs family waited for results of the emergency surgery. The immediate need was to expand the capacity of Duane’s left descending artery. The doctor explained that the insertion of a stent would temporarily improve the circulation.

He had suffered from the classic widow maker – one hundred percent blockage in the Left Descending Artery, with extensive blockage in three other critical heart vessels.

Without treatment, death follows in a few minutes to a few hours.

Finally, they were called into a smaller private waiting room. Lisa froze when the woman who came in introduced herself as a social worker. To her, it meant one thing only. Her husband was dead.

She could not quite take in the words she spoke. Her husband was alert. The surgery went well. They could all go see him briefly. She had run out of feelings. She stood a distance from Duane, her sense of shock turning to something that surprised her – she was angry.

Hannah, Josh and Jonathan brought Lisa home from the hospital after they left the hospital. It was as good as it could be. The surgery went well. Duane was conscious and

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himself as he hugged them all. It was the first time in his life he was in a hospital overnight.

Though they were all tired and still wearing the identical shirts, Lisa was full of adrenaline. She came in the house and started throwing out every unhealthy thing she could find. Any snack food, anything past an expiration date, all the other things Duane kept around – his vape and cigars – out. As she whipped through the house, cleaning and tossing, she was looking ahead. She was past hoping Duane would survive, in her mind he was already on his way home. Unless there was a plan, the whole community might consider themselves part of his recovery. It was for her to be the gatekeeper for her husband’s survival and reincarnation. She wasn’t angry anymore, she was determined.

She was ready.

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THE ARC OF COOL

In the 1974-75 school year, Duane was failing ninth grade for the second time.

The typical hormonal storm of American male adolescence was accompanied by particular forces that turned the sunny child into a brooding alien passing through the house. Additional fireworks were ignited by his undiagnosed learning challenges, oldest son entitlement, and coming of age in the rubble end of the sixties. All of it together conspired against the stable family environment that surrounded him.

He cut school one day, got high, and bored by the afternoon, went over to Jones

Junior High school. He hung around outside, waiting for his friends so he could brag and impress them with his rebel freedom.

As he shuffled home alone afterwards, high on yellow jackets and weed, his mother, a teacher at Grandview Heights High School was also headed towards the family home in Upper Arlington, a prosperous suburb of Columbus, Ohio. She spotted her son, pulled to the curb and asked him to get in the car. He was happy for the ride, but in no mood for conversation.

“How was school?”

“Ok”, Duane mumbled.

This was too much for Julie Crabbs. After teaching others’ children all day, she was tired. Her oldest son was at risk. Though separated by less than a yard in the front seat of her car, they had never been farther apart. She was used to the silence, the sullen

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posture, the averted gaze, but his lie at that moment crossed a line. She could no longer act like it might change, no longer put a good face on the deep worsening pain in her heart.

She pulled over and stopped the car.

The guidance teacher at Jones Junior High had called her. Duane was truant.

This would mean another suspension – for the sixth time. He was at risk for failing ninth grade – again. And as he sat there, she knew he was high on something. There was nothing in the slumped figure that seemed to suggest her energetic optimistic boy. He had become a stranger to her.

The sight of her disheveled unresponsive son, after a day spent with other parents’ sullen children was more than she could take.

“What are we going to do with you? Why are you destroying your life? You are so smart. You have so much going for you. Why? Why are you doing this?”

Duane hung his head in silence, waiting for it to be over. He knew he was a bad kid, and as her tears joined the anger and questions, he wished his mother would just hit him. It would be faster than this. More often, she went silent, letting her husband take on the mystifying changes in the sudden strange boy in the family. With a new manifestation of his delinquency, this was an uncharacteristic burst of anger...

She waited in the silence for her oldest son to respond. This was something new.

She was simply waiting, and in the long silence, her anxious distressed breathing calmed.

Duane did not expect this. The gap between them seemed to stretch in the heavy pause.

Finally, his mother did another thing he did not expect, that got his attention. She was

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calm. As she started to speak, there was no anger in her voice. Duane felt her voice more than heard it.

“If you could only see yourself now, how bad you look. Look at me. If I had a camera, you would be shocked. Where is my joyful, fun-loving son? Duane, look at me.”

He turned in her direction for a few seconds. It was too painful. Her calm honesty and grief broke his callous skin. He could not handle the feelings arising in him, so he said nothing. He could not look in her eyes because she looked as lost as he felt. He never forgot that moment in the car, because she held the mirror.

“I saw I was breaking her heart.”

There came another space of filled silence that Duane would never forget. It was the powerful unknown of that silence, a bookmark in the beginning of the reversal of

Duane’s corrosive disregard of his effect on others.

His mother had shifted the terrain of their familiar standoff. Her helpless desperation had been transformed to a language that could reach her son. The usual tension between the two of them lost its power, allowing something new to enter the space around them. Duane was pained in a way that he could not name or recognize but that he could not avoid, could not dismiss. But if he could not name it, he would not forget it. For the first time, he felt true remorse.

As an adult, he would describe that moment in the car as pivotal.

“I knew I was breaking her heart while she kept on loving me. I knew she spoke through pain from love. Her hurt could not be redemptive unless there were another broken heart to receive it, to respond, to care. In Luke 2, verse 35, Mary, the Mother of Jesus receives a prescient caution about her future suffering as the mother of her son’s public torture. “Yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also, that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed”.

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He had no capacity to respond to what he was feeling.

“What are we going to do with you?”

Her voice had switched to a hard resolve.

“I dunno.”

Duane mumbled, barely audible. They were back on the familiar territory of icy distant regard as she started the car.

“Well we can’t keep going down this path,” she said, as they both stared in silence at the road before them.

His mother’s last word in the car was fortunately prophetic. This was the last time he would cut school His last day at school was an unexcused absence. He would go back to Jones Junior High School.

***

By 1975, Lisa Conti was used to earning her own money. That was normal in her working class Italian culture of North Hill in Akron. They worked hard. As the oldest girl, she helped her mother on a daily basis. There was a regularity to the traditions of

North Hill. Every Thursday, Lisa cut loaf after loaf of bread, filling all the baskets for the weekly dinner at the Italian Center.

However, her job at JC Penney in 1975 was out of the ordinary for a North Hill girl. She was on the Junior Board and Teen Style Council at the store in the Chapel Hill

Mall. The elite for this high status job needed to have a minimum grade point average and a stylish flair. In addition to acting as promotional agents for store events, the council members modelled seasonal merchandise. Lisa was often featured in the Bridal show. Her petite stature, dark hair and light cream complexion were well suited for

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bridal, and her personality was remarkably consistent and dependable - she was never late.

Families just like theirs surrounded the Conti family home. Most of the Italian

Americans of St. Anthony’s Parish arrived in the United States at the same time, in the

1920’s, from the same area in Sicily. The community was bound together beyond the shared ethnicity through the traditions of Sunday church and the ceremonies of the social halls. Immigrant grandparents lived in the houses of their children, who came of age in

World War 2. When the men came back from the war, they worked in the factories. The moms stayed home. They steadily paid for their houses and raised their families.

Lisa’s father worked at the Ford plant on the west side of Cleveland. Sunday afternoon the whole family had dinner out of her mother’s kitchen. In their cohesion around the institutions of North Hill, the Italian septuagenarians and octogenarians were still very active. Everything in Lisa’s life revolved around the fullness of that life.

The kitchen table was the heart of the house. Money was often tight. The Contis used the financial plan of a traditional North Hill Italian family. Her parents managed the budget by envelope. They would move cash between the envelopes, trying to keep the debts balanced. There were envelopes for the mortgage, food, the car, church, and clothing. Lisa had the patience to work the envelopes with her parents. She was usually the one to count and roll coins for bologna and bread at Lawson’s.

Lisa at nineteen was participating in the weddings of her cousins and friends.

Soon, she would be walking down the aisle with her high school boyfriend, the only serious relationship she had known. There was nothing in her background or circumstance that would give her any doubt about her white picket fence future.

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***

After Duane’s mother picked him up walking home with his sixth suspension from Jones Junior High School, she and Duane’s father Richard talked about what was possible for their son at this point. Julia and Richard were not going to repeat the same pattern of his six earlier suspensions, where Duane was on his own alone. They suspected that watching too much TV was the least offensive of his behavior on those suspension days.

Their only solace in the ongoing deterioration of their relationship with their eldest child was knowing that they were not alone. Not only had they been witnesses to the countercultural wave in America over the past ten years, but most of their friends were experiencing the same kinds of problems with their once happy children as they moved into adolescence.

Duane and his fellow fifteen year olds were the tip-tail end of the Post War Baby

Boom. Duane stood a better chance than his wild friends, because he was the oldest in a family with young parents. The friends who were youngest in their families often had far less supervision. Those were the kids with the party houses. Their parents were worn out, had thrown in the towel on trying to compete with the influences outside the family home.

Fortunately for Duane, his parents did not stop trying to figure out how to help their son. Fortunate also that Duane had not gotten into serious legal trouble yet. His parents were well respected, they lived in a respectable suburb, he was white and he was very good at not getting caught.

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His escapades covered the range of bad behavior –sex, drugs, stealing, break-ins, property damage, and arson. There were nights he did not come home at all.

In 1975, there were more choices for youth who could not conform to the conventional path – at least for kids of Duane’s demographic profile. There were alternates to traditional learning environments emerging across the country addressing

Duane’s learning challenges. Though he would not be diagnosed until adulthood, Duane had Attention Deficit Disorder. He was a tactile learner, needing contact and motion to take in the world around him.

Richard and Julie did not delay in researching the options, and by the end of that day, had narrowed it down to two options. Duane was included in the conversation on his future. One option was a disciplined boys’ boarding school, an experimental combination of the Outward Bound survival experience and a traditional military school.

The other option was a new program for troubled adolescents through Harding

Mental Hospital, only thirty miles away from home. Duane was not interested in leaving his turf or in anything challenging. He was not sure he needed psychiatric help, but he begged his parents to choose the second alternative.

The three of them drove to Harding the next day. The new facility was behind

Harding Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. Nondescript and anonymous, it was a collection of low-rise brick buildings at the back of the property. A line of trees in front and behind the complex gave it a campus feel.

They met with the admitting psychiatrist who listened as Duane’s parents talked to each other about what went wrong, blaming themselves, blaming each other, confused.

Duane would speak only when directly asked a question, and as briefly as he could.

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During the tour, they entered the main youth facility where the approximately fifty resident high school aged youth lived. Duane wondered if he would be left there that day.

The previous day’s humiliation in the car with his mother had sufficiently faded for Duane to return to his now customary state. His still considerable charm and competitive drive were looking to find the best outcome to enhance his prestige and cool.

“I noticed a very cute girl who was checking him out. Some of the guys actually looked pretty normal.”

Duane, his parents and an escort walked to a small newer-looking building. It had an easy, open feel, nestled against the trees at the back of the hospital. The cottage was the heart of the program that had attracted Richard and Julie’s attention. The counselor also thought it could be appropriate for someone with Duane’s behavior and circumstances.

In its infancy at Harding, the Adolescent Day Treatment Program allowed those with less severe psychological problems to participate in the hospital therapeutic conditions as commuters. They would come to the program from Monday to Friday, 8 –

5, but return home for continuity of the rhythms of “normal” life. The family sat down with the program therapist and a caseworker to discuss the custom details for Duane.

The adults agreed that Duane would be committed to the ADT program. For everyone concerned, it seemed to offer the best possibility for the troubled fifteen year old. The hospital staff anticipated a good working relationship with the invested parents.

Duane was young, and his behavior problems were a relatively recent development.

Duane and his parents were happy that he would be living at home, though for different

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reasons. Duane could still see his friends; Mom and Dad could keep the family intact.

There was hope so soon after the despair of the previous day.

For Richard and Julie, the daily forty-five minute trip to and from the hospital was nothing more than an added part of their daily life. They were taking an action, a step away from the helplessness and fear of seeing the son they loved slipping out of control.

Though he said nothing, and could not have articulated his feelings that day, he remembers it well.

There was some kind of relief in getting a break. Despite my past behavior, I was reminded of their relentless love. They were not going to let me crash and burn.”

The new program at Harding Hospital gave a special status to the small group of commuting juveniles within the resident population. Aside from the capacity to stay in their homes, the five participants in the fledgling Adolescent Day Treatment Program had more privileges, such as field trips.

Duane was representative of this more capable patient profile, and he took advantage of the status to gain position and power. All the patients had school together.

Grouped this way, there was a clear tier structure, with the five commuters as the high achievers. This helped the formerly delinquent Duane. He found that school was easy.

He was no longer in danger of repeating ninth grade for a second time.

The movie One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest was one of the outings for the five commuters. Duane identified with the hero R.P. McMurphy. He felt the same thirst for life that he saw in the cool rebel hero on screen. Interred against his will in the mental hospital, McMurphy’s rage against the broken institutions with power over him gave

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Duane a new model. Along with the spirit captured in Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the

USA, he saw himself as an anti-hero.

Duane found that he could use his charm and smarts to stay within the program while breaking as many rules and honor code pledges as he could get away with. As he did on the outside, he managed to avoid being caught when his impulses took over. On one occasion, he and another patient in the day program slipped away for sex in a stationary boxcar on a siding in the woods.

Aside from his adolescent extracurriculars, there was also the actual daily schedule and routine of the program. Duane remembers that everything at Harding was some kind of therapy.

“Group volleyball it was sport therapy. Drawing was art therapy. Talking more than one on one was group therapy. Through all of that, I was aware that something was shifting in me. I found out I could make different choices. I also could see that there were other kids with much worse problems than me” Duane listened to the stories of abuse and trauma the other patients experienced.

Things he had never imagined, victimization outside of his experience. Some of the others were taking prescription psychotropic medications. The girl who used sex as a bargaining tool was dosed with Thorazine. She had a vacant stare behind the half-closed eyelids, a wheezing heavy breath and a shuffling step.

“On the informal ranking among the residents, she was at the bottom. I pitied her. I realized I had made my own problems, had created the situation myself. So I could do something about it, I had the capacity to change. I did not know what that meant, but I knew it was different from some, from most of the others around me. They could not see that in me. I acted like one of them, but I knew that I did not really belong at Harding.”

On one hand, Duane was appreciative of what Harding offered him – a respite from a path of self-damage, a step away from the escalating tyranny of being the coolest and baddest of his clan. On the other hand, he still carried on line a mini version of his celluloid

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heroes. He was Harding Hospital’s own Cuckoo’s Nest hero, a teenage R.P. McMurphy, with his own collection of devoted crazies.

However, if the other patients did not see Duane as any different as they were, the staff did.

Bill Webb was a social worker on staff at Harding during Duane’s tenure. He was not Duane’s counselor, so his challenge caught Duane off guard. Generally, growing up as the child of a pastor and a teacher, Duane was accustomed to looking interested while tuning out a lecture. He was not prepared, had no defense lined up against Bill’s message. Bill’s was a message from an unexpected source, delivered in a manner that aligned with Duane’s vulnerability. Bill was blunt and direct in calling out Duane’s cavalier attitude.

“He mercilessly pulled back the curtains behind my so cool act. He called me a punk for half-stepping through life and thinking I was something for getting over on my parents and peers with my self-serving antics. He warned me it was only my life that I was screwing up. He made it clear that in a very short time I would be an adult and I, not my parents, would be saddled with the consequences of my foolish decisions. For some reason that straight talk from Bill really woke me up. I knew he was right. The way I was living life was full of shit. Tough love worked on me this time.”

Awakened though he was to the idea of life beyond his current age and situation,

Duane did not yet see a way to move forward. As represented through his parents, religious belief had no interest for him. He started reading Siddhartha as the new awareness unfolded. Herman Hesse presented another possibility. The hero was a seeker, journeying beyond his comfortable surroundings to find the meaning of life.

How like himself, Duane thought, attracted to the exotic elements of the novel.

He identified with Siddhartha’s pursuit of truth. At one point, the book talked about God speaking through nature. Duane walked around the hospital grounds and climbed down

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the gulley to sit by the stream. He arranged himself in a receiving stance and tried to meditate.

“I listened really hard to the babbling brook for quite some time. I thought God might be speaking to me but after a while, I realized it just babbled. So much for nature speaking an audible message to me. I climbed back up the creek bank and went to group therapy.”

Six months after he first entered the enclave of cottages at the back Harding

Hospital, Duane graduated from ninth grade and from the program. The prospect of going to Upper Arlington High School in the fall made him nervous. For the first time in his life, he was seeing beyond the satisfactions of the moment. He had always been successful at self-creation by the power of his personality. Now everything was different.

He did not realize that he was starting to process adult thoughts, ideas, decisions, but he clearly recognized things about himself that began to take physical shape. His active explosive mental processes characteristic of his undiagnosed ADHD were being supplanted by the therapeutic daily messages and practices of the previous six months.

He was not confident that he could withstand the pressure of his previous identity.

He feared slipping back to the “bad boy”.

Fortunately, there was an alternative for Duane. By the time Duane and his parents searched for an alternate academic environment in the summer of 1976, free schools were a common parallel in conventional high schools. The Linwood

Alternative High School was only two years old, but the teaching model was generating tremendous support and interest.

The odds against his admission were high. There was a waiting list for the 160 filled spaces. Duane was not even eligible, since his family was not in the Worthington

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school district. Harding Hospital, however, was in that school system. Whatever combination of intense desire and determination from Duane’s vast reserve of coiled energy, parental efforts, luck, sympathy, his file landing on the right desk at the right minute, or prayer – the recipe of all those possibilities got Duane into Linworth.

Nearly forty years after he graduated from Linwood Alternative High School,

Duane ran up upstairs from his kitchen, returning in seconds with the Linwood yearbook in hand. It is a well-worn paperbound volume.

He treated the volume with great care, placing it down on the kitchen table and opening the slender paperback yearbook with a slight tremble in his slim fingers. As he turned the pages carefully, his energy, excitement and sense of discovery were fresh. His excited face conveyed the fundamental vitality of the experience.

Linworth was the perfect crucible for independent, creative alternative learners like Duane. It was an enlightened educational experiment birthed by a group of

Worthington teachers in 1973. The concept of “open classrooms” and self-determined curriculum had been operating in other parts of the country for over five years.

“I was apprehensive about being the new kid - and from a mental hospital, but I found out soon enough that most of the students were new to the concept and to each other. No one was that concerned with where anybody came from. There was too much that was new to rely on old social norms. Everyone at Linwood was pushing boundaries, learning how to negotiate in the radical operating system.”

He found the school to be an offbeat kind of place.

“There was a great diversity among the teachers and students. Often it was hard to tell the difference between the two. It was casual. We hung out in overstuffed chairs in the hallways. Each room had a nickname. Art, graffiti, and bright colors lined the walls. There was no authority monitoring behavior. We had sole and full responsibility for ourselves and our own learning.”

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Duane was an eager student. He thrived in the expansive atmosphere.

Independent thinking was honored and encouraged. Students and teachers shared the full responsibility for running the school. It was a living laboratory of community governance.

“Town Hall meetings were my first real experience in the fun and messiness of governance. A moderator was chosen for the meeting and then it started. Each year we had no rules or structure other than what was required by the state of Ohio. All 160 students and seven teachers were present. It was one person, one vote. We decided class schedules. We were responsible for the cleaning of the school-no custodian. We proposed courses of study and determined classroom content and grading. We determined punishments for misbehavior and we were often harder on ourselves than the school system required. Two unexcused absences was an automatic failure.”

The atmosphere of Linwood exposed Duane to ideas beyond the confines of suburban Ohio. He was open to different philosophical ideas, to other philosophies of life. He was still getting high, but not with the destructive habitual pattern of his younger self. He would characterize his use of substances as part of his research.

The coming of age rituals described in Carlos Castaneda’s books fascinated him.

He was drawn to the descriptions of the Yaqui Warrior Way of Don Juan. Aside from his brief attempts to find God in the babbling brook at Harding, it was the first time he was confronted by an alternate sense of divinity. He was drawn to the idea that there was some greater truth to be discovered in the mystery of life. He thought that native culture always has a way of living out those truths that was much more attractive than his own traditions.

He was questioning his native Christianity. He had not chosen this system. He had just taken it for granted. He had recognized that he could make choices through the

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experience at Harding. At Linwood, he was thriving in an environment of choice. Now his options were not only behavioral, they were intellectual, psychological, and spiritual.

Exposed to alternate interpretations, he thought that indigenous cultures offered a way of being in the world, were a complete system for life. This was different from his sense of modern Christianity. Duane thought of Christianity as a system of beliefs that were mental, that did not operate on the physical plane, were not a design for living.

Duane started reading books written by or about Frederick S. Perls, the founder of Gestalt Therapy. “Fritz” had a straight, confrontational style that appealed to Duane.

Given his own temperament, the direct engagement seemed to offer real transformation.

He got involved with Young Life in Worthington, partially to avoid the draw into old habits. The Young Life movement gathers school aged youth, from middle school through college, in programming and activities that are age appropriate while “allowing them to take a good look at the Savior, Jesus Christ.”

Duane was attracted to the group because the leaders had great personalities and made it fun. The weekly meetings were held in a different teen member’s house, like a rotating club. There could be as many as 60 to 70 teens in the living room. The meetings were held to one hour, during which there would be a stunt or game to establish an upbeat mood. Someone would have a guitar, and everyone would join in singing contemporary

Christian songs. A leader not much older than the gathered teens then gave a brief talk about life or Jesus, or both. The meetings closed with prayer.

Beyond the basements and living rooms of Christian moms and dads, Young Life participants have the opportunity to engage with their faith and each other through Young

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Life camps. Starting with the purchase of several Colorado ranches in the 1940s, the organization today has 33 properties providing a Christian camping experience.

In 1977, between his junior and senior year of high school, Duane went to a

Young Life Camp on Lake Saranac, New York. After a day of top flight recreational sports including para-sailing, tubing, skiing, and ziplining, the camp would all gather in the Main Lodge to hear another message from the guest speaker for that week. Over the six nights, the words were building to the outcome of campers giving themselves to Jesus on the last night.

The speaker for Duane’s week was Reid Carpenter. Duane was aloft with the energy and power of the place and the message. So much so that he knew after the second night that he was ready.

“I knew that in committing to Jesus, I was giving up the control of my life as I had known it. It would be that final break between me and the friends and fun of just hanging out. It was the letting go of control, the idea of the leap of faith into … what? I felt God speaking directly into my struggle. My old life was over. God was real. I asked him into my heart at that moment.”

Lisa’s moment of transformation came while she was on a Catholic “Search” retreat at Camp Christopher. With her straightforward pragmatism, she can simplify the most mysterious of events.

“I found Christ, and that made all the difference.”

She accepted the gift of faith that had been restored to her without a need to question the validity of its source. No one in her world could talk to her about what happened there. That it happened was enough.

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AKRON BLUES: WHITE PICKET FENCE

In 1988, four years into their marriage, Duane and Lisa had two children, Joshua and Bethany. They were looking for a house that suited the family they were as well as the family they hoped to become. Important to both of them was being close to their church, The Akron Alliance Fellowship. Otherwise, Duane did not have much concern or yardstick for comparing one house against another. Lisa had the keen eye for the potential and suitability of the houses available within their budget. And there were plenty of houses available in the West Akron neighborhood, an area composed of neat single family homes built in the 1920s. The sellers tended to be older couples, whose children had their own families. The newer owners were like them, young families with small children.

1534 Stadelman Street was a solid brick bungalow with a nice yard. It was two miles from their church. There were lots of children on the street, potential playmates for four year old Joshua and two year old Bethany. Lisa thought the house was perfect.

In the midst of an otherwise sober situation, Duane and Lisa had the capacity to step back and recognize irony, appreciate the humor, and then return to the issue and solve it with a bit more detachment. It was a habit borne early in their relationship, and it served them well throughout their marriage. Once they saw the humor in a serious moment, they both were quick to laugh. It was a simple thing, appreciating the quirks

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while trying to do the right thing. Their new house was a good example; they consciously chose their house for its proximity to the church they found by accident.

***

Duane and Lisa returned to Akron from their Niagara Falls honeymoon in January

1985. They dedicated Sunday mornings to church shopping. The hunt was suspended on

Sunday, January 20 by the coldest day on record in Akron. The temperature all day was between 10 and twenty below zero and fell to -24 that night. As their search resumed, they looped around Akron that winter without success. They slogged through the slush of March, discouraged. Nothing seemed right. They wanted a church that was somewhere between Catholic and Evangelical. It seemed like a wide enough net, but not one they visited left them feeling they wanted to return

The last Sunday in March, they saw the sign “Akron Alliance Fellowship” in front of a big Victorian mansion on Diagonal Road. It had a familiar, comfortable look for Duane. He told Lisa it was just like the church at Ohio State University. The campus church had been a spiritual home for him, a fraternity of theology and guitars. Pulling into the filled parking lot, Duane told Lisa it would be full of Christians like themselves, seeking to make a real difference in the world. He thought the church was affiliated with the University of Akron. Before they walked through the door the first time, they were expecting a young, enthusiastic college church crowd.

They were greeted immediately and escorted to the entry of the sanctuary, the living room of the old house. The room was full, and the usher brought them to the front row, where those already seated smiled and made room for them. Unable to really look

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at each other, they both felt self-conscious and uncomfortable. There was no choice but to endure the discomfort by behaving as though they intended to be there. As far as they could tell, they were the only white people in the room. It was a black church.

The heightened awareness of themselves as different, as the minority, sharpened the experience. Pastor Gus Brown seemed to be delivering his message directly to them.

With nothing but three feet of air separating them from his words, they tried to appear relaxed while having no option other than complete attentiveness.

“Bloom where you are planted. If you aren’t planted somewhere, you will never grow. There is no such thing as the perfect church. If you are trying to find the perfect church, you are wasting your time.”

Welcomed afterwards with smiles, warmth and invitations to return, they did.

It was the first and last time they ever felt uncomfortable in a black church.

They were checking off the boxes in the traditional American white middle class family journey. After renting for four years, they had bought their first home. They were raising two children, with the hope of more children. The household stayed afloat on one salary. Lisa was a stay at home mom. In addition to the modest home, they had two cars in the driveway. They had enough of what they needed and a prospect of upward mobility accorded their historic expectation.

Though they seemed representative of a typical family in their particular demographic group, Duane and Lisa were already outside the reality of their Christian white culture. Despite the efforts of the New Religious Right to reestablish the

“traditional family”, only seventeen percent of households in the 1980 census were composed of a wage-earning father and a stay at home mother. At a moment when their

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fellow white Christian conservatives enjoyed tremendous political, cultural and economic influence in the country, they chose to worship in an African American church.

Throughout the 1970’s, conservative Protestant culture had been gaining strength and sophistication in its messaging. In 1979, Jerry Falwell founded The Moral Majority and became the voice and face of the movement. The movement was primed for a position of influence with the election of President Ronald Reagan in 1980. The Moral

Majority. The movement stepped with him into the national spotlight as an undeniable political force, a formidable, united, political body.

Ronald Reagan’s bootstrap philosophy also included a revolution of economic deregulation. Many stable service professions could no longer assume the assurance of employment security; but Duane, a Cuyahoga Falls firefighter since 1986, had a package of benefits and guaranteed pension and health coverage for himself and his family. The chances of losing his profession by some external force were small to nonexistent.

Firefighting unfortunately would always have a market. It would never become an obsolete job category.

Duane’s firefighter schedule of a twenty-four hour shift “three on, three off” made

Lisa a single mom for a full day, three times a week. In the three days Lisa was alone with the kids, she navigated the family life with the competence she had learned as a child at her parents’ kitchen table. It was second nature for her to connect the family resources with the expenses, meeting the most urgent needs and giving enough to everything else – and still come up with something to “put away”. She maintained a balance sheet in her mind, adjusting it like water flowing till it reached temporary equilibrium.

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The ease of a conservative family accounting system lifted the worry about finances enough to give a joy to the results of her system. The quality of making something out of a lot of nothing was also true of her capacity and quiet competence in emotional situations. The outward calm and attention fronted an internal process of filing the assets and deficits of any set of conditions, be it physical, emotional or financial.

It was how she grew up and how she was made, and therefore not remarkable to her. The resilience of her character had served her through the grief of the divorce of her brief first marriage. Her faith had been restored and she fully embraced the life and love of the family she and Duane were creating together. In the world beyond the family, she had a sort of trust, a willingness to engage, but a more cautious instrument, the gut.

The minor hardships of slim resources and one car were minor to her. At the times when they operated on one car, she made riding the bus a special event. It was fun.

She and the kids could point at things together out the windows, and count all the red cars going by. They enjoyed themselves, talking and learning about the world around them with the other passengers.

She took joy in what for others might be a source of embarrassment. Her children wore clean second hand clothes. The toys they played with were often pre- owned. Many of the toys had been hers and Duane’s. The worn alphabet blocks in their original box were well preserved, solid and depicted things nearly obsolete in 1990; darning needles, telephones, typewriters.

It was a white picket fence time for the family. Their lives moved along with a kind of ease that a white middle class couple could hope for, the best of an intact

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American dream for a young family of their class, race and religious beliefs. The only thing that indicated they might be on a different trajectory was their decision to live and worship in a predominantly black environment.

The family loved the fellowship, the spirit and generosity of Akron Alliance. It was the base of their social and religious life. Aside from the Sunday morning worship together, they grew individually through visiting speakers, Bible study groups and classes.

Akron Alliance was predominantly a middle class church, its members in economic circumstances similar to the Crabbs family. Occasionally others with greater challenges came to the church, but Duane noticed that they did not always keep coming back. He and Lisa made a special effort to reach out to Harriet after she came the first time.

Harriet Johnson Harriet was a single mother. In an effort to escape her abusive boyfriend and father of her two children, she got on a bus with her children in Atlanta and got off in Akron. Without a plan, resources or family in Akron, the family stayed at the

Haven of Rest. As they became stabilized with housing, Harriet accepted Jesus and

Elaine Brown’s invitation to worship at Akron Alliance Church. Duane and Lisa got to know Harriet in the church nursery. Their children were the same age and had become friends.

Harriet lived in AMHA housing at Wilbeth and Arlington. Duane and Lisa often drove the family home after church. They were happy to do what they could for her, finding an extra car seat or diapers, sometimes stopping at the grocery store for her. It was an easy extension of their own lives, and they were happy to help out.

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Harriet hurried over to Duane one Sunday, happy and excited.

“Duane, Duane, guess what? I’ve been praying and asking God what I could do to repay you and Miss Lisa for all the kindness you have shown me.”

“Awhh, Harriet, you don’t have to do anything to repay us.”

“No, I’ve been praying on it – The Lord, he told me to take Joshua and Bethany to my house for a night so you and Miss Lisa can go out and spend the whole night together and not worry about your kids. You and Miss Lisa can have a romantic evening to yourselves!”

Duane, unsure of what to say, lied, a typical white lie religious folk use for each other.

“We’ll pray about that.”

As he went to find Lisa, he knew that this would never happen. Their children had never spent the night anywhere but in their own home. Lisa said nothing and revealed nothing in response to Duane’s report of Harriet’s offer.

When they did discuss it later, it was not Harriet that was the problem, nor was it the children – they all got along well, and though Harriet was younger than they were, they trusted her, experienced her as a caring and devoted mother. It was where she lived that worried them. She lived in the projects. There could be problems outside of

Harriet’s control; crime, drugs, promiscuity, violence. How could they willingly subject their children to an environment that could endanger them? It was too much to ask, too much to consider for their innocent children.

They discussed other ways it might work. Could they ask her to bring her children to their house for the night? No. That would reject the gift she offered, her

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home and hospitality. Even that, the best alternative they came up with, was just wrong.

They kept talking and listening, hoping for something that could cover their worries and

Harriet’s desire to give back to them.

As they tried to come up with a way to spare Harriet’s feelings, Duane could not sleep. Despite whatever might happen as a firefighter, his capacity to sleep was rarely interrupted. As he lay awake worrying about exposing his children to potential harm, he realized something. Thousands of Akron’s children, God’s children, were exposed to these things every night. But he had never lost a night’s sleep over the problem – it was only until it became personal that it bothered him.

They realized by trying to manipulate the gift to cover their concerns reflected a lack of trust; not of Harriet, but of God, a god they claimed to trust. If this had come to them through their own actions in fostering a friendship with Harriet, they had to come to peace that Joshua and Bethany were in God’s protection at all times, whether they were in the projects or their bedrooms at home.

After the successful conclusion of the overnight, Duane and Lisa viscerally absorbed a new understanding of familiar words. The Christian middle class comfort of

“It is better to give than to receive” was turned inside out. Their prior relationship with

Harriet, where they had the control to be the givers and Harriet was delegated to be a receiver only was not God’s vision. And if it was true that is more blessed to give than to receive, why do white Christian middle class people reserve the right to the giving side of the equation?

Their relationship with Harriet changed. It was transformed instantly upon the reverse exchange of the commerce of giving between them. Faith had legs, it had

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muscle. The three of them were peers, their eyes meeting each other in level and mutual, reflected love.

Their experience of the ordinary currency of love were grounded examples of a branch of Christian social action growing within Evangelical church. Black and white leaders were participating in a renewal of incarnational ministry in cities across America.

“A character is what he does”.

Duane wanted more of that kind of Christianity. Through a talk by Cliff Lazer at

Akron Alliance, he was introduced to the work of John Perkins in Mississippi. John

Perkins book And Justice for All had convinced Cliff to overcome a nature so shy he fainted before he started speaking that night. But as he spoke through his nervous awkward voice, Duane heard the imperative message of the need to build bridges between people of different nationalities and races.

Six months later, Duane and Lisa heard John M. Perkins speak at The House of the Lord, a large flourishing Black Evangelistic church under the leadership of its founder, Bishop Joseph M. Johnson. Dr. Perkins gave a powerful personal testimony of redemption through the power of radical forgiveness. In 1960, Perkins felt God’s call to go back to Mississippi. He and his wife Vera left the comfort of the life they made together in Southern California. Perkins was born and raised in Mendenhall, Mississippi.

He left for good in 1947, after his World War II veteran brother was shot by police and died on the way to the distant hospital that treated black people.

In the nearly thirty years they had been back in Mississippi, Perkins developed a philosophy of Evangelical Christian practice that asked for more than being born again.

Pernicious racism underlined everything, and he saw how it blacks and whites in

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bondage. An activist, holistic approach was necessary for love and forgiveness to replace hatred and fear. He stressed the ‘three Rs” – relocation, redistribution and reconciliation.

Duane added John Perkins’ books to the stacks that grew around his reading chair.

Perkins’ ideas came to Duane as he was starting to drift from Akron Alliance Fellowship.

He found himself more and more outside the prevailing views of the congregation. It seemed too comfortable to him, unwilling to open to new ideas as he was experiencing them.

Duane did some of his best thinking and communicating in his car. He was driving a sturdy beige Pontiac at the time. His grandmother handed gave him the keys when it was no longer safe for her to drive. Though it was old, it was reliable. It only had

30,000 miles on it and a history free of small sticky children. Vance Brown, his brother comrade in Christian out-of-the-box thinking, could not afford to get his patched up hooptie fixed. He and his wife Cindy had three girls, and lacked the resources of Duane’s family support. Vance would lose his job if he could not get to work.

Duane applied logic to the situation.

“Kingdom math means freely we have received, freely we should give. Lisa and I have two cars. Vance and Cindy had none. I gave them mine, and we each had one.”

Promising to sign it over the next day, he went home glowing from the exhilaration of spontaneous blessing that comes of giving over receiving.

Sharing his joy with Lisa did not engender joy in return. This was not something she could find a way of accommodating. It was not just the inconvenience of going back to sharing a car. While she enjoyed the convenience, and controlling the 36 square foot

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area that was her car interior, what she could not take in one more time was her husband’s expectation that she would be happy about such news.

It was his acting alone on a matter of such impact on their family.

She simply stared at him, her face not moving, her face not angry, but set, and set firmly. It was the closest Lisa would ever get to hostility, a face hard for a stranger to interpret, but immediately obvious to those close to her. Her face telegraphed “Really?”

It was not the reaction he expected.

“It’s what God would have us do.”

Lisa was calm. She had her own unceremonious logic.

“Duane, do you think that it might have helped to consult with me before making a decision, like giving our car away? It may be what God wants US to do, but what I don’t like is every time God leads you to do something for others, it’s at the expense of your family.

Duane still wasn’t getting it.

“You get to be with Vance and Cindy and be all spiritual and experience the good feeling of giving away our car. Then tomorrow when you go to work at the Fire Dept. for your 24 hour shift, the kids and I will be stuck at home by ourselves. I won’t be able to visit my Mom, do shopping or if anything happens I am stuck till you get home the next day.”

Duane was on the defense, and looking for a solution. He held back from suggesting she could take him to work, recognizing it would mean that the whole family would have to go far earlier in the morning than they would chose to.

“I can take the bus to work,” Duane offered.

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“Fine.” That simply, without the sympathy he anticipated, his offer was accepted.

Already outliers from the expected middle class sense of sequence, this taking the bus was to cause deep confusion and misunderstanding for Duane’s firefighting brothers.

Duane had to board a bus with his full turnout gear, his helmet and personal equipment as well as a number of books he always brought to a shift. As a junior member of the house, he could never leave his gear at the house, because there was always the chance he would be needed at a different house that was short a man. The idea of one of their own reduced to carrying the equipment on a public bus was not just strange or wrong, it was humiliating, shameful to the guys.

Most of the firefighters had second jobs, and many of their wives also worked.

They had goals that included bigger houses, better cars, boats, vacation houses. Duane’s path was incomprehensible to his colleagues. It was as though he deliberately chose downward mobility. Firehouse humor found his ministry and convictions easy targets, and he took the jibes well. But somehow the bus thing was beyond joking. It made them really uncomfortable.

The consequences of the three r’s might be something to remember in advance the next time.

***

On his days off, Duane was a full on domestic Dad. His firefighter schedule gave him a capacity for quick and deep sleep, and a capacity to function well despite such erratic slumber. He participated in things with his children that were different than a Dad on a more conventional schedule. He engaged happily as a homemaker, in a freewheeling style.

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He had no problem disciplining his children if necessary, but it was rarely necessary. Their house tended to be the toddler social hub, even though the house lacked an available television. As a part-time domestic Dad, Duane’s natural charm and openness to people made the Crabbs domain safe and desirable. For as long as Josh and

Bethany could remember, that was the situation. They always shared their Dad’s attention with a lot of people.

Duane and the kids spent lots of time outside on his days off. Duane and the kids went to the Perkins Pool as soon as it opened for the season in June. It was close by, and

Duane was happy to take whatever other children were allowed to go- and could swim.

One of only two outdoor pools in Akron, Perkins was crowded, wild and fun. Josh and

Bethany learned to swim there. Often they were the only white people in the pool.

Duane was as active as the rest of the crowd, drawing a line of kids waiting for a toss in the air from his strong arms. He encouraged the nervous first time jumpers off the sides into the safety of his catch. They invented games and more games, filling the day to the exhaustion of drying out on the warm concrete deck inside the chain link fence of the chaotic urban oasis.

They were not at the pool on June 16, 1990, the day lifeguard Rocco Yeargin was assaulted, suffering a concussion and skull fracture. Yeargin was pushed into the pool after he entered a fight around a lifeguard stand. The situation around what started with five or six youths taunting the female lifeguard in her chair, spun quickly out of control.

When Yeargin came to her defense, he was knocked into the pool. Attempting to get out, he was kicked back and fell on the pavement, unconscious. He was kicked again, in the head.

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Steel plates and fourteen stitches bound his head wounds during his five days At

Akron City Hospital. The incident, shocking to some, was not a surprise to others. The park had become a place where activities other than recreational had become commonplace. With the Perkins Recreation Center straddling the 3rd and 4th Ward, responsibility for its maintenance and supervision was compromised.

Councilman Michael Williams and Marco Somerville reacted immediately. With over 150 people in the pool at the time, not a single witness was willing to speak. The pool was drained, the hoops on the backboards were removed and programming in the rec center suspended. Until the perpetrators came forward, or the community was willing to expose them, the gates would remain locked to all; the neighborhood’s greatest summer amenity, including the free lunch program for sixty children would stay shut down.

The response of the two black Council representatives was a stand against the

‘no-snitch’ rule of street law. But the pool incident was a frightening echo of the Central

Park Jogger case. The trial of the five young men convicted of the deadly sexual assault of a loan female runner was underway in New York at the time. Based on their confessions, the five teenagers were sentenced to the maximum sentences their young ages 14-16, permitted.

‘Wilding’ a term of dubious provenance arising from the media coverage of the case, became more or less synonymous with the image of more than four black male teens on their feet in the street wearing sweats and caps.8

8 The five defendants’ had served their sentences by the time DNA evidence confirmed the confession of an incarcerated rapist and murderer to the crime in 2001. The convictions of the five were vacated by the New York Supreme Court on December 19, 2002. All five were removed from New York State’s Sex Offender Registry. 153

But the Councilmen took a stand that demanded a standard of behavior in a neighborhood of families. It was also a stand for a standard of behavior that would not be tolerated in more affluent settings. The pool and recreation center was a vital resource in the summer vacation for an entire part of West Akron. The lockdown was a serious blow to the majority of families who counted it as a refuge, a place to see friends, a getaway.

The shutdown was a hopeful measure, instituted to reverse a growing presence of people around the rec center with a purpose other than recreation. Marco and Mike had to persuade the community that violating the code against snitching was in their best interest.

Duane saw an opportunity for Akron Alliance, an easy natural move from his perspective. The church had recently opened the new wing, a big open space for worship and family programming. Duane and many of the members had participated directly in the construction. Though it had been long and at times divisive, now that it was complete, he and the other volunteer builders felt a sense of ownership and investment in the future of the space. Using it for the lunch program would address at least two issues directly; assuring the continuity of a service for local families, and getting the Alliance into the neighborhood they came to every Sunday to worship.

He could sell this one easily. They now had a facility that would work perfectly for the situation. Using the hall was only temporary, until the rec center was back in operation. It was a focused, single purpose mission, helping local innocent families caught short. Other than a few volunteers and the use of the space, it would cost nothing

The Ken Burns documentary “The Central Park Five” premiered at Cannes in 2012 may have spurred the settlement of the lawsuit brought by three of the five against the city of New York in 2003. After over ten years, a settlement was reached for $41 million dollars for all five, an amount equivalent to one million dollars for each year they spent in prison for a crime they did not commit. 154

but garner blessings for everyone involved. He could not think of any objections to the idea as he called for a meeting of the church elders to present the program.

Duane’s earlier attempts to bring the Fellowship closer to the neighborhood had not gone as he hoped. He and Vance Brown had a partnership, pushing actions that were less comfortable to the average member. They had similar energy and zeal for doing

God’s work however it manifested. For a time, they picked up children in the projects to attend church on Sunday evenings. The church was uncomfortable with the behavior of the kids, and asked Duane and Vance to stop bringing them. The church members said that their own children, having to put up with bad behavior at school, needed a place that was serene. Without the purpose of bringing the ‘bad boys’, Ron and Duane stopped coming on Sunday nights.

“Watcha gonna do when they come for you?” 9

Duane could not forget or leave behind the ‘bad boys’. He had been just like them. He knew the razor’s edge between the pose of notorious and the love that does not quit trying to reach the bad boy. Those boys haunted him.

But Duane felt sure that the temporary lunch program would be different. It would be a perfect way to launch the new Life Center building the church had built, a demonstration of their commitment to the community outside their walls. Explaining the situation to the members, he was met with indifference and deflection.

--“The building is new. Would the insurance cover any damage?”

--“Have we written the guidelines for its use yet?”

9 Lewis, Ian, Inner Circle, “Bad Boys”, One Way, 1987. 155

--“Who would be there to supervise? Who is responsible? What about our stewardship?”

--“What about our by-laws? Can we do legally do that?”

Fortunately the situation at the rec center was resolved and the pool opened in less than a week. Rocco was back at work the day it reopened, but not all the lifeguards returned to Perkins Pool in June 1990. They too felt it was time to leave West Akron.

Duane had experienced enough disappointment. He needed to move away from

Akron Alliance Fellowship. He wasn’t leaving West Akron, but he was beginning to feel

God’s calling to go deeper into the places where others fled if they were able, to where there was a growing menace of people coming to the urban neighborhoods for reasons other than coming home at the end of the day

Duane’s spiritual turmoil at the time was his alone. The family on Stadelman was stable and thriving. They were surrounded and supported by friends and family. Lisa’s major concern at the time was for their oldest, their son Joshua. He was not quite meeting the learning goals for his age. She was reaching out for help. The home school movement had become a viable and popular alternative, bolstered by the growth and economic power of white Evangelicals. Already a stay at home mom, this seemed a potential solution for Joshua’s kindergarten frustrations.

Duane had his own growing frustrations. He found solidarity in his discomfort over a weekend at a Chicago Airport hotel in the fall of 1989. He drove, bringing Vance

Brown and Ron Smith to meet with 189 other Christian seekers. Influenced by John

Perkins, they shared the passion to find ways of ‘bringing God’s grace to the inner city’.

The airport weekend turned out to be the first gathering of the Christian Community

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Development Organization.10 Duane brought home lots of ideas that were too fresh for pamphlets.

But he also brought the guiding material to start an organization. After hearing

Alan Doeswald from ESA-Love Inc. speak in Chicago, Duane envisioned an Akron chapter. Love, Inc. brings area churches together for a united ‘skills bank’ to assist communities of need. Launching such a network found the right person in Duane

Crabbs. In his efforts to start Love, Inc. in Akron, he went to over 150 churches, all denominations, all over. He looked for ways to enlarge his message. He joined the Akron

Area Association of American Baptist Churches (AAA-ABC), chairing the Social

Concerns Committee. His natural energy, charisma and commitment to racial reconciliation attracted attention. People listened to him. Love, Inc. was incorporated with eight participating churches in 1991. Duane was the volunteer president and Celina

Flunoy was the single employee as Executive Program Director. It provided Duane with an institutional legitimacy to expand into the more visionary ideas he hoped to create.

Lisa knew that restlessness was part of the man she married, the man she loved.

She did not doubt his love for her, but she hoped that Love, Inc. would be the answer to his search. Sometimes she just wanted to ask him “Why can’t you just be content with what you have, with what we have?”

***

Duane’s increasing commitments in the faith world did not bring contentment, but only highlighted what he perceived as the split in his life. It was a contradiction he felt

10 The first gathering in an airport hotel of 189 people grew to over 5,000 by the convention in 2017, held in the Renaissance Center in Detroit, Michigan. 157

internally and recognized as a handicap in building relationships with the African

American community. It was a clear disconnect between his work environment and neighborhood life.

Firehouse relationships grow from a variation of battlefield testing; the chasm between sudden danger and stretches of boredom require characteristics that are unnecessary in most urban occupations. It’s a too-close and-too-long-in-the-house energy, lubricated with taunts and slurs that stay in the house. The discovery of a new perceived weakness in a guy offers a new opportunity for teasing.

In 1990, the Cuyahoga Falls Fire Department was 100% white male culture. The entire Cuyahoga Falls municipal structure was white until the year before, when the first

African American employee was hired. Duane could not afford to wait for the fire department to reflect the greater society’s complexion and philosophy. He wanted to move in a direction that brought a balance to his whole world view and religious faith.

He wanted to work in Akron.

The Akron Fire Department was forced to start hiring African American candidates in June 1973. As would be the case for the inclusion of women in fire and safety forces across the country, the fight for African Americans was the result of a court order. In May 1973, the Akron chapter of the NAACP brought a class action lawsuit against the city, police and fire departments for discrimination in hiring and promotion.

The 51 candidates on the eligibility list to become firemen were white. The 323-man force was white. The NAACP’s fundamental contention was that fire and police departments should have representation equal the general population, 17.5% of which was black.

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A freeze was imposed preventing the activation of eight new white trainees until a ruling, was issued. In less than a month from the filing of the suit, Federal Judge

Thomas D. Lambros issued his decision, mandating the Fire Department to hire eight black trainees within 30 days. Time-based mandates were one of the problematic aspects of court-ordered desegregation processes, but time was often the solution to the tension of such decisions as well.

Charles Gladman was one of the original eight black trainees. One of the original eight black trainees, Charles Gladman, had been promoted from District Chef to Deputy

Chief, in charge of the Fire Training Academy, Emergency Medical Services and Fire

Prevention. Five years later, on April 11, 1997, Mayor Don Plusquellic appointed Chief

Gladman Akron’s 15th Fire Chief.

He wanted to apply to the Akron Fire Department. This was not an upward or even a lateral career move. It meant a pay cut, more and more challenging work, starting again as a rookie and working in a predominantly African American firehouse. Duane’s visions presented initially as an obstacle in the steadiness and safety of family routine.

Duane had stopped his former habit of spontaneous solo decision-making, and Duane and

Lisa were finding ways to work through the differences in their personalities. Lisa needed time to work through the practical applications of Duane’s response to God’s call.

Such trumpeting trembled the fabric of the known world.

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AKRON BLUES: PATRICK ARMOUR

Duane was looking for clues. There had to be organizations and people offering entrée into the places he was praying himself into, other ways of advancing his understanding of the city he sought to ‘bring God’s grace to’. He recognized his need for a guide, a mentor, someone already doing the work he wanted to do.”

He was not sure what that meant, or looked like, but he knew it didn’t look like church. Participation in Community Friends, in the middle of a tough neighborhood, was still not close enough. There was a gap between himself and the street of need. As a middle class white guy, it could not close the gap without the right help. He needed a key to enter that world. He didn’t know what the key looked like or where to find it, but trusted his desire to find God’s direction for his passion.

Duane’s first exposure to Patrick Armour was through the Akron Beacon Journal.

The paper ran a series of articles in 1990 about Patrick’s effective approach to what seemed intractable crime and drug problems in the Edgewood housing project. Patrick created an organization willing to step in the void. Fathers and Friends was local, black and male – men committed to promoting safety. It was innovative, it was making a difference.

Duane’s second contact was again through the Beacon. In 1991, the paper ran a story about Fathers and Friends new center for youth. Duane felt Patrick’s personality in his blunt and direct voice in the article.

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“Kids want love.”

Anxious to move forward in his urban ministry, Duane did not need a third message. He found Patrick’s address in the phone book and got in his car.

Patrick Armour was sitting on his front porch steps at 272 Springdale the day

Duane drove over. He was spending more time thinking about money. He needed steady income, at least for a year or so, to keep the doors of the youth center open. Patrick saw a real hooptie slowing down, stopping and a white guy, grinning, bounce out of the car, headed his way. Patrick didn’t move.

***

Twenty two years later, through the dark of a Saturday night in November,

Patrick was driving home to Tulsa, Oklahoma after visiting his daughter in New York

City. Around four am, he called Duane when he realized that he would be passing through Akron in a couple hours. Duane was already awake, and told Patrick to meet him at the café. Patrick had not seen the building yet.

The café was closed, but Duane brought coffee, rolls and me to greet his old friend. Patrick was waiting for us in the parking lot. It was still dark and stingingly cold, breath clouding our faces as we introduced ourselves and Duane fumbled for the keys to the side door.

We shook hands. Patrick was sixty two. His hand could have taken four of mine and still wrapped around to meet itself. It seemed I could have fit three of my selves inside Patrick and still had space to do jumping jacks. Out there in the merciless wind of the empty parking lot, he was like an icebreaker. I wanted to crawl into his wake as we made our way through the gloom to the building.

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***

Edgewood Homes was a 173 unit public housing complex, the second oldest in

Akron. It was one of three similar projects built in the 1940s to accommodate the massive housing shortage for rubber workers. A series of tidy two story brick townhouse type buildings, it was carved out of a neighborhood of single family houses, a mile and a half from the center of downtown Akron.

The population of Edgewood was 100% white until 1959, the year the Akron

Metropolitan Housing Authority (AMHA) moved the first black family to Edgewood.

Akron’s total black population, 5% in 1940, had grown to 13% by 1960. At Edgewood in 1968, white tenants had shrunk to between five and ten percent. Though the population shift had been swift, Edgewood at the time was a healthy strong community of black working class families.

Many of those families had moved to Edgewood after the Grant-Washington neighborhood had been urban-renewaled right out of existence. There was absolutely no suggestion that anyone had ever hung out laundry in the landscape rescrubbed as the

“Industrial Parkway”.

Patrick Armour grew up in the Grant Washington neighborhood in a stable exemplary family. Though his mother had abandoned the family, his father, Johnny

Armour was a man that everyone looked up to. He had been an outstanding baseball player on several National Negro League teams. He attracted great local attention as pitcher for the Akron Blues. Johnny Armour kept his family of six children together, clothed and loved, working at Firestone where he became the first African American shop steward.

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The “race riot” of July 1968 in Akron played out close to the Edgewood Project.

The center of the disturbance was along Wooster Avenue. While not as extreme as what happened in Cleveland a week later, there was tension in growing spontaneous crowds on the night of July 16. Police broke up a fight between groups of black youth from the north and west side of Akron. By early morning Wednesday, there were broken windows, rocks thrown, more police, teargas and arrests. National Guard troops were called, a curfew established. For six days, the pent-up tension and frustration on all sides manifested in confrontations with law enforcement, firebombing of some businesses and hundreds of arrests.11

Less than two weeks later, seven people died during an armed confrontation between Cleveland Police and the Black Nationalists of New Libya. According to several interviews before and after his arrest, leader of the Nationalists, Fred “Ahmed”

Evans was looking for a way to back out of the escalating tension without losing face.

He wanted out, claiming that he had been in Akron just days earlier when police “had come in and ripped people’s hair and beat the shit out of them.”12

The findings of the Akron Commission on Civil Disorders convened after the disturbances found no evidence of pre-planned actions, but described the conditions that accounted for the protests. The Commission described Akron as a moderate place, without the extremes of other cities convulsed by violence following the death of Martin

Luther King, Jr. in April of that same year. Akron had wealth and poverty, but it

11 Akron Commission on Civil Disorders assessment, April 16, 1969. 12 Robenalt, James, Ballots and Bullets, Black Power Politics and Urban Guerrilla Warfare in 1968 Cleveland, Lawrence Hill Books, 2018., p. 242.

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balanced around a working population. There was economic stability with low unemployment and responsible leadership, but lacking daring and imagination.

The same lack of extremes could describe race relations in Akron; indifference and apathy, but not extreme hostility or hate. If this only seemed true to the majority white culture, it was in part due to the relatively low, but steadily increasing percentage of black citizens; over the decade of the 1960s it grew from 13% to 17.5% in 1970. But the discrimination and prejudicial atmosphere was the same, if only experienced by the relatively smaller number in comparison with Cleveland, 38% African American in 1970.

One side of Edgewood ran along Wooster Avenue, the main site of confrontation.

Fear for the safety of the remaining white people living and working in Edgewood led to the Housing Authority’s decision to remove the all the white tenants and staff during the unrest. After the riot, The Housing Authority’s response was to move all the white people –resident families and employees - out of Edgewood.13

In the decades that followed, regulations governing Federal Welfare and housing programs gradually changed the population from working families to single women with dependent children. The cost of those policies became obvious in housing projects across the country. Edgewood was no exception. The design of the project itself enhanced the trend to criminal activity. The complex was designed for a different era. The layout of the buildings, with parking on the edges and pedestrian walks within, hampered law enforcement. Cars could not enter the middle of Edgewood, leaving perpetrators unhindered and victims unreachable quickly. There were too many blind spots. Some

13 Akron Beacon Journal, Wednesday, April 9, 1980 Text of Housing Ruling in Akron School Suit” 164

buildings were taken down to allow cars to drive through, but crime persisted, worsened as new more powerful, cheaper drugs came to Akron.

By 1990, the problems at Edgewood were out of control. Marco Somerville represented the complex as City Council Representative for Ward 3. Almost thirty years later, sitting in the Front Porch Café, his voice and face reflect the pain of a particular memory from those days.

“It was a dangerous environment day or night. Lots of drug dealing, shootings.

There were two children trapped inside an apartment. Their mothers were dead, killed after witnessing a drug deal. The kids were there, little kids – who got hungry. There were their little bloody handprints on the refrigerator.”

Patrick Armour had an idea for Edgewood. Fathers and Friends would operate directly from of the heart of the wound. The problem needed a disaster relief team, moving into the project and establishing a 24 hour a day volunteer street ministry.

Patrick took the argument for his organization to the head of AMHA, Paul

Messenger. Patrick had a talent for bringing together people who would not otherwise be in the same room. He was a power broker, with the capacity to understand and work with different agents of power in different cultures. He could see through to a vision and could gather the pieces to realize a vision.

The conditions in Edgewood were terrible, but the scale of the problem was not so overwhelming that the parties involved could not interact under the right circumstances if the right leader took a step into it. As an outsider with an outsize presence, Patrick, as willing to commit to bringing people together and to creating a presence of care.

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He was aware of his capabilities and how to apply them to the desired outcome.

With his commanding physical stature, it was as though he could see over everyone’s heads to the horizon, to the promise of the goal. His particular genius saw the whole array of factors and players in a situation. That vision was expressed in a logic and language challenging to traditional means and methods. It was not at all the expected approach of the board room. In seeing several moves ahead of everyone else, he was willing to shoulder the risks before others could even see the risk.

Paul Messenger saw in Patrick a partner. It was a brave and unusual step for the leader of the Housing Authority to take. It would be a delicate balance between Patrick’s citizen-empowered group and traditional law enforcement. But for Edgewood, something fresh and bold was needed. Fathers and Friends was specifically dedicated to making a change in that particular place at that time. Paul and Patrick came to an agreement, and Paul donated the apartment and $3,000 for operating costs.

The custom made organization focused on changing the conditions at Edgewood through the people living there – and through the people using the collection of low-rise buildings as a drug store. He proposed a different presence of men on the streets,

“Men walking the streets, not as policemen, do-gooders or missionaries, but street niggers - men who understand the problems of the place because they were are of the place. “

On May 3, 1990, the initiative for Patrick’s “24 hour a day” patrol was announced. The group of volunteers would operate out of a Command Center based in the donated apartment at 720 Warner Court. Patrick described their plan at the press conference.

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“We are not here to drive out the drug dealers. We are here to protect the women and children. Eventually, the drug dealers will leave on their own.”

Ernest Thomas, “ET” was in the first group of Patrick’s patrol. 14 of his 44 years was spent inside prison. From the minute he joined in, he was all in. He stayed at the

Command Center apartment. He understood the predatory world operating at will in

Edgewood. ET asked his friend Peter Pruitt joined the ranks. Under Patrick’s agile leadership and street patter, they did not tell the dealers to stop dealing, but to do it elsewhere. If they did not know the dealers personally, they knew their brothers, fathers, a cousin, or an uncle. It was personal. Their presence and techniques started to make a difference that summer. They were recognized, praised, successful.

Fathers and Friends was going beyond its immediate goal of protecting the women and children of Edgewood. It eased out the drug dealers. Patrick and his men were seen as heroes, urban knights of honor. During their tenure in the unit at 720 Warner

Court, ET found jobs for 47 unemployed people, intervened on behalf of 18 people in legal trouble, and got 23 drug or alcohol abusers into treatment.

But the praise and recognition of success brings new problems if experienced for the first time as an adult with a history of the opposite sort. It can be frightening in its unprecedented quality, something never experienced. It’s a stress without a name, and without help navigating that stress, difficult to cope with.

Suddenly, the very thing that the system has been urging you to aspire to throughout a lifetime of trouble, the very thing meant to be the key to a better life, becomes a mystifying threat. No one prepared ET for that feeling. How could this

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thing, success – feel so …. bad? No one thought to give someone with ET’s background a warning about being congratulated for being himself.

Meanwhile, as an independent agency, Fathers and Friends was not covered by

AMHA’s Liability insurance, exposing AMHA to financial loss if they were sued as a result of Fathers and Friends activities. The board of directors of AMHA terminated the contract in the late afternoon of August 22, 1990.

Ironically, ET got into trouble the very night AMHA ended the relationship with

Fathers and Friends. He got drunk and aggressive. Stopped in his car by police, a gun was found in his car. He was arrested.

Fathers and Friends moved out of 720 Court a week later. By the end of August they took space in Mount Haven Baptist Church at 545 Noble Avenue. Patrick was determined to keep the organization going.

As a result of the changes in Edgewood, the Department of Housing and Urban

Development awarded AMHA a $436,300 grant to create alternatives to the drug culture within public housing. The solutions proposed in the application were ideas that were already working thanks to the innovations of Fathers and Friends.

The Beacon Journal asked Patrick for his response.

“Paul Messenger and AMHA deserve this grant. They took a chance on us and we knew it. At the same time, I’d like to say that we need people from the grass roots involved. Without that involvement, you’ve got another canned-soup, bureaucratic program. We can be some help. We need another chance.”

***

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Twenty two years later, Patrick and I stand in the dark space of the café while

Duane goes to find the light switch. It’s cold inside, but warm enough for the catfish.

Water gurgles and drips through the hydroponic system running along the walls of the café, keeping the fish and a hopeless crop of teeny brave greens alive.

Duane set up a table with the coffee and sweet rolls and we sat down in our coats and hats. Duane laughs as he asks Patrick to describe the day they first met. I get the sense that this is a routine they enjoy. Patrick settles down, takes his time.

Speaking deliberately, calmly, he paints the opening scene of their lifelong friendship with a comic’s confidence in his delivery. The timing and rhythm have me and Duane laughing before he even starts in. It’s the lack of emotion, the deadpan face on the big frame. It’s the love of story as a basic value in black culture.

“I am sitting on my porch steps. Hooptie car pulls up in front of my house. This hopped-up white guy gets out of his car and comes sauntering towards me, big smile. He sticks out his hand, introduces himself, says he had been following me in the paper and he thinks we are going to work together.

“He could be crazy, undercover cop, or I don’t know. Comes right up to me with his hand out, grinning.”

*** Duane and Patrick talked a long time that day on the steps. Duane knew he needed Patrick, and did not hesitate to make it plain. Through Patrick, he could understood the differences between his own world and the world of his calling.

Beyond Duane’s one-sided impression of Patrick from the paper was a whole

Patrick world of relationships and enterprises. He was a culture broker. Patrick maintained a wide network of friends and associates to make things happen. Duane

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didn’t really fit anywhere into his operating system, but that was also the strength of his operating system; a little bit of everything, everywhere.

They sat on the steps together long enough to know enough. Patrick’s intuition and style recognized the worth in Duane’s passionate sincerity. This white man might be sincere in his desire to really know what it was like out there, this white man was not a conventional kind of Christian. It was a risk for both of them to walk together.

Patrick had relationships with all kinds of different people, businesses and opportunities. His creativity could weave events together that garnered publicity, accolades and people. Often the compensation took forms other than money.

He relied on his relationships to support the work of Fathers and Friends. But making the monthly note required some agility. The enormous single story building at

1045 Wooster Avenue was full of activity, but despite the steady increase in visibility, events and organizations affiliated with the center, the bills still accumulated.

Marco Sommerville remembers Patrick calling about needing a little temporary financial help. Marco’s funeral business was young at the time, and he could not spare the cash.

“How about chairs? Do you need them? I have 1,500.”

Patrick brought the truck to Sommerville Funeral Home in the middle of the night. They were nice chairs, Marco gave Patrick $3 a chair. He still has some of those chairs twenty years later.

*** We are sitting at one of the smaller round tables in the café. Though I’m taking notes, I have to remind myself to do so, because it’s hard to take my eyes off Patrick as he speaks. He speaks a poetry, mixing past, present and future in a floating association of

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big and small concept thoughts, memories and feelings. It’s unique, familiar and utterly strange.

He mixes me into it all as the architect of the building we are sitting in and as the writer he sees me becoming. His words make the pen in my left hand vibrate. Duane’s tape recorder picks up what my notes would never capture; the brilliant cadence of

Patrick’s mind tracing a partnership of mutuality.

“Why are we doing this? It’s a natural question…. It opens minds and hearts. Of the intelligent and the most wounded. I am here to help. That is the architectural piece of it. You are here to take that language of construction and develop it into a verbal/visual process of the everyday walk and hands on ministry and all.

“At the time, Duane was struggling to become an Akron fire fighter Paramedic firefighter by day and by night he wants to be out with the brothers.

“Duane introduced me to his Mom and Dad, brought Wanda and me into his home life. Rich, his father, was a kind, quiet man, told me about what he had done in

Akron, Cleveland. Impressive. During civil rights time, a major force for good and change. Then it made sense on the how and why of Duane. His parents became mentors for me and Wanda. Rich asked me to mentor Duane, to watch out for him…”

Patrick paused, tears in his eyes

Duane, quietly, “They were a little worried about me”

Patrick….chokes up, not just a throat-clearing thing, he chokes up and has to stop.

After a minute they both laugh, switching to another memory, a time Duane was excited about a building, and brought Patrick to see it.

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Patrick turns to me with the deadpan stare. I am laughing with Duane in the pause he takes before speaking.

“Trees. There were trees growing through the roof. It had some connection to

Firestone. I thought it was a bad idea. We were doing ministry, I wanted to tear down the ministry, and find the connections. History, so much more than ‘let’s do some ministry.’

I wanted to ask what Patrick thought of Duane having a building now. Instead of trees growing through the roof, there were catfish swimming around us in murky waters of coffin-sized Plexiglas boxes. As the Architect, there were times I wanted to tear down the building and start from scratch.

*** Patrick introduced Duane to bar life first through the VFW Post within walking distance of Duane and Lisa’s house. Bringing his new sidekick through the tavern door with him was a necessary part of their time together. Bars and clubs were essential meeting places for Patrick’s operational style.

From the neighborhood bar, they started to go to other spots on Patrick’s map.

Late one afternoon in the beginning of their relationship, Patrick and Duane parked next to a nondescript building in South Akron. It was a social club, and that afternoon was to be Duane’s baptism in serious barstool ministry. Aside from a brief period of typical college bar drinking as an Ohio State freshman, Duane had no experience or understanding of bar culture, though he knew what it was to get messed up. In his early teen years, Duane was the ringleader who could charm adults to buy alcohol. The woods of his Upper Arlington neighborhood was his bar.

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Patrick rang a buzzer, and the bouncer greeted Patrick warmly. Patrick’s stature was so big, the guy didn’t notice Duane at first, but stopped him with a look when he did.

“It’s ok, he is with me.”

They walked towards the bar as Duane’s eyes adjusted to the darkness of the club.

Of the dozen or so patrons in the place, Duane’s awkwardness was heightened. He was the only white person. As Duane pulled up a stool, one of the guys shooting pool called

Patrick over.

“Grab a seat, Duane, I will be with you in a minute.”

Whatever cover he might have had coming in with Patrick evaporated when

Duane sat alone at the bar. Though he wanted to be a pastor of souls, he looked like a cop. His cool firefighter self was starting to sweat. This discomfort was not a part of his evangelical crusade he anticipated. He ran hot to Patrick’s cool. He tried to keep his coiled energy neutral, to keep the gaze of his wild sloping eyes level.

He aimed for the nonchalance of a regular customer when the bartender asked what he wanted. He paid for a beer. He left the change on the counter. The beer gave him something to hang on to. A few seats from him, a young brother started talking to him. He turned his controlled steady gaze towards the young man, listening. The young brother was telling Duane in very graphic terms about his sexual exploits over the past few nights.

Duane could hear Patrick’s voice somewhere behind him as he kept his focus on his drinking companion at the bar. The monologue was steadily unfolding into what seemed like impossible achievements, but Duane did not react. He just looked and listened to a sprawl of smoking wreckage. Panic fluttered at the edges of his eyes. He

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sensed this might be some test of will, and he felt violated and trapped. His beer was getting low and he told himself he would not order a second.

This was outside his realm. He wanted out. Patrick’s voice and laughter seemed a mockery of his distress. Duane felt a pressing aloneness in this room of men.

He also determined that if it was a test, he would endure. There was nothing he could say in response to the man’s enjoyment of Duane’s discomfort, so Duane just tried to seem cool.

When the brother got up to use the bathroom, Duane rose in an act of manufactured ease and wandered over to Patrick at pool table, enjoying the company of friends and a game. Duane flagged him aside.

“What’s up?”

“I am uncomfortable” Duane hissed.

“Good”

“No, I am really uncomfortable”

“I heard you and I said good.”

“Noooo.” Duane was trying to get his point across. “No, it’s like, time-to-leave uncomfortable.”

“Duane, if you walk out of this bar right now, everyone in the place will be able to smell the fear on you. “

“But—“

“Lean into it” Patrick growled and turned from Duane.

Duane thought of walking out, but did not want to be seen as fearful. He sat back down, now more angry than fearful. The young man came back and with the complex

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swirl of information and emotion in his body, he just sat there and listened. After a few minutes, his companion moved on to another conversation. Duane’s was grateful for his barstool as the adrenaline drained away. He swirled the remaining beer in his glass thoughtlessly, without the prior tension of calculating every move. He let go. This was not all about him. There are worse things than discomfort. Lean into it.

The barman nodded to Duane’s empty glass. Duane considered a second beer as he met the eyes of the barkeep.

After about ten minutes Patrick came up and slapped his huge hand on Duane’s shoulder and smiled.

“You did good.”

Angry, Duane wanted to know if it had been some kind of hazing.

“Well let me ask you a question first. Why do you think people come here?”

“To get drunk”, Duane said as he tried in some way to urge the mountain of

Patrick towards the door.

“Wrong. If they want to get drunk the same amount of alcohol is half the price at the corner store. They are not paying double just to get drunk. O.K. so why are they here? Look around. CO NEC TION. You see that bartender? He hears more sins confessed in any one night than a priest does in a month. Except he ain’t offering them wine for absolution. He’s giving them something to help them cope with their pain - but it won’t take away their sins. Could be before the night’s over they commit a few more. And you felt uncomfortable walking in this place? How do you think they feel walking into your churches? So no, this is not a hazing. It’s just an exposure. If you really want to be a good shepherd, you are going to have to give up the home court advantage and go find some lost sheep.”

For Patrick, his physical stature was intrinsically part of his power. He knew it and he used it. He rarely needed to do anything more than stand firm to achieve dominance. Duane felt the strength of Patrick emanating from the stillness in his body.

There would be absolutely nothing to move him until he was ready. Patrick’s experience,

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pain, brilliance and leadership were in the world because he knew what his skin on his massive frame could do, because his eyes were higher and could see more and farther than anyone else in his world.

So when he even leaned down to his friend Duane the next moment, it was an enfolding, a gesture of humility and a profound signal to the room that this crazy hopped up honky was someone. He slowly inclined his head to Duane’s ear.

“Look around. Connection. They come for nourishment, for fellowship. Why do you think I brought you here? These are the people. If you are uncomfortable, lean into it.”

Patrick touched his shoulder. They walked out the door, sun still shining, two men.

***

“It’s what you do with your personhood. Imparting humanity. The reality of “no matter who you are or what you are, you are important to the world.”

“South Street is Duane and Lisa. Because that is what it was before they got here.

They moved to it. When others moving up and out, they moved in. Quit the day job.

Moved to it. Duane left the hero job. South Street was a gathering place in this community. Middlebury has their story. Do they have a Duane and Lisa? Go back to the beginning…..go back to the beginning. The story is what it is.

“In America we want everything to be instant, a stick-on or punch the key.

“But my impression of Duane is that what makes him different not only as a guy, a white guy, minister, part of all that, not young but not old, part of that – part of many things … the makeup of him, what makes him unique. I recognized it then, over 20

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years ago. In these times, his essence and operational style – makes him – as some folks would say always late but always on time – is conflicting…..because that is the challenge in our relationships –to be so familiar with something but also to not know why it is so familiar…… maintain the alive spirit – and the enigma – always new, full of contradictions. The spirit of South Street Ministries, the program, the ministries, the personality of the place – is who he is, who Duane and Lisa are – it is not fake, it is not program that is developed out of some think tank or some great idea – it comes out of people who are committed. It is verbal and non-verbal.

“And that conversation is very different from what we are hearing from the political or religious arena, how the church sees the mission of the church. How is it that the Vatican, for as long as they have been doing stuff they have been doing – how is it that this new Pope, Francis – who is basically doing what Duane has been doing – can seem so weird? But so right? Why is that?”

I had guys change on me. Duane never did. Never did. He stayed. Made that choice. Trust them, Duane and Lisa, anywhere, with anybody. People only as good as their own personal interests.”

***

There was no curriculum for the internship with Patrick. Duane was the only student working the streets with Patrick for a while, but they were rarely alone. From those late night walks in South Akron, Patrick revealed the law of the street. Duane could accommodate the uncomfortable. It never was or would be his world, but it was a world he wanted to understand, that he knew he needed to know and be known by.

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He learned to turn his head at the right time as exchanges were made. He had nothing but his clothes and his prayers on him. No money, no need for whatever was being sold. He carried the contradiction of running with Akron street code and returning home to his sleeping family. As a firefighter he had seen suffering, but that pain was within a system he knew, that allowed him to be an agent of protection and immediacy, to relieve the pain of the suffering. This was a much deeper and vague suffering.

This was the incarnation of his calling to serve the urban poor. There was no other way and no turning back from slowly walking with Patrick down the middle of

Long Street at 2 am, preventing the car behind them from turning onto Princeton. It was sitting on the top of the steps of the Lincoln School at 3 A.M., not moving as a silent figure approached him steadily, this was the way into his ministry for a new suffering.

With Patrick, he learned the language. His body absorbed the law of the streets – hard lessons fortified him for the day to day and night to night reality of the suffering of the urban poor.

This was the upturning of the logic of firefighting. This was fires burning everywhere and there was little he could do but watch. Or at times not watch, at times turn his head and detach. By his presence, there was complicity. By his presence, there would be suspicion. But with Patrick, he had the pass.

Perhaps he trusted Patrick too much, but it was not a debate he could afford to explore at the time. Duane knew Patrick had enemies, and a reputation for crazy. He was grandiose and could strike out physically when he felt it was necessary. But despite his size and measured pace, he could be fast. The rings on right hand could land so fast no

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one even saw it happen. Duane had to weigh complicity by his presence with the exposure he knew he needed.

He could run to the pain as a firefighter. He was struck by how something as unpredictable as the work as a first responder in emergencies experience could now seem so logical and traditional in comparison to the nocturnal work with Patrick. But he brought the compassion of the firefighter; the open heart soul could take on a new suffering and compassion of another culture, one with its own logic.

He had to trust Patrick. The shifting education on deep Akron nights brought the line of complicity too close at times. There were threatening moments with Patrick, but

Duane’s only choice in the dangerous moments was nothing less than total reliance on his mentor. And like all of his years with Patrick as his most important teacher, Duane never saw any fear in Patrick.

Though they never returned to that first Social Club, Duane’s tutelage in bar ministry was ongoing. Along South Main Street in the 1990’s, there were still thirty nightclubs, bars, taverns, grilles, nightclubs, and strip clubs. Ted’s Bar was one place that was easy, where they could both just be.

Patrick had a friend in mind for Duane, Claudia Palmer, the owner manager of

The Main Event Bar. Like Patrick, she oversaw a raft of enterprises. She was born smart and poor, one of four children, living in two rooms with her parents in the barrack housing on the east shore flats of Summit Lake. The temporary Quonset colony had drifted into permanence after the wartime rubber workers moved on. She grew up navigating the system through the combination of her fierce intelligence, adaptability, and the power of West Virginia hills running in her blood. Claudia started working in

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South Main street bars when there were three shifts at Firestone. At fourteen she was a prep cook in the morning, getting breakfast setup for workers coming off third shift.

When Patrick brought him to the corner of West Crosier and South Main Street,

Duane was not particularly impressed. That part of South Main Street had fallen on hard times. Two old brick buildings shared a party wall and a parking lot. The first was a strip club. Patrick and Duane walked inside the other. Claudia Palmer was tending bar.

To Duane, it was nothing more than a dive.

***

“I have had guys change on me. Duane never did. Never did. He stayed. Made that choice. Trust Duane and Lisa anywhere, with anybody. People only as good as their own personal interests.

“Do what you do with your personhood. Imparting humanity. The reality of “no matter who you are or what you are, you are important to the world. THAT is leadership

AGILITY. Chew gum and walk. It is what he does. People who spend all the time in the spiritual world do not know how to do that. They end up doing a lot of stuff that is a cover up. Leadership agility – on the football field, like ballet. Leadership – Mother

Theresa while the other nuns behind the wall. Agility.

South Street is Duane and Lisa. Because that is what it was before they got here.

They moved to it. When others moving up and out, they moved in. He quit the job, moved to it. Duane left the hero job.

South Street, their home, was a gathering place in this community. Middlebury has their story. Do they have a Duane and Lisa?

Go back to the beginning…..go back to the beginning. The story is what it is.”

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The sun is well up by now, and it’s time for us to think about getting up from the table. This was a familiar routine for the two old friends. Patrick and Wanda had moved to Tulsa after Wanda became the Oklahoma State Director of Rhythmic Gymnastics in

1994. Patrick never really felt at home in Tulsa. He would return for this and that project that he and Duane engineered, often staying with the Crabbs family for months at a time.

In all the years since they moved, Patrick and Duane had maintained a working friendship. Looking back on those times, Lisa would say she was relieved when Patrick would go back home to Tulsa.

“He was such a big presence and edgy, what they were doing together. I was not involved. But there were no red flags with Patrick, I had a high level of trust. My kids loved him.”

Our tour of the building was very short. Patrick seemed tired, and it was past time for him to get on the road. The two men, bonded as brothers after twenty two years of very freelance street ministry, would visit on the phone for hours until the next time they saw each other.

Another good bye was just part of their rhythm.

It had been a long way from the front porch to The Front Porch.

It would be the last time they ever saw each other. Patrick died seven months later in Tulsa. Patrick and Duane’s partnership was enduring and deep. If it never materialized as Duane envisioned, he always believed that the two men would work together one day.

The loss Duane felt after Patrick as a mentor, confident, friend and brother was devastating. Regardless of his personal disappointment, he and Patrick maintained a

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relationship for the rest of Patrick’s life. Duane always considered him his mentor and the closest he had come to a partner. They had long phone conversations after Patrick’s visits to Akron became only a stopping place on the road between his daughter in New

York City and Wanda in Tulsa.

Duane and Patrick had a kind of three legged partnership.

Duane never found the partner he had originally hoped for in Patrick. But in

2016, Donovan Harris came into the café for the first time. A four legged partnership had begun.

NOTE TO READER: There will be a follow-up chapter about the relationship between Duane and Donovan. At the request of Eric Harmon, a prison chaplain at Mansfield correctional, Duane and Donovan start a Bible study group. Their story will be told through the specifics of that event. Being written now, June 24, 2019.

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THE COAST OF TYRE

In June of 1991, Lisa was pregnant. The whole pregnancy was difficult, and by the start of the third trimester, her doctor ordered complete bedrest. Duane’s mother took care of Joshua and Bethany on the three days Duane was working. On the days their father was home, it was an entirely different household for the kids. Dinner with Dad was a big shift from Lisa’s organized, focused singularity in the kitchen. It was more of a game, all hands on, Duane wrapping the kids in oversized aprons and putting them on stepstools to help him. It was a cross between firehouse chow time and camping culinary adventure. Duane, Joshua and Bethany managed to use a lot of dishes to make a batch of instant au gratin potatoes. The fun of the time helped offset the strange food and the even stranger fact that their mother was present, but not there.

During the time Lisa was on bedrest, Duane continued to take the children to

Community Friends on Lake Street in Summit Lake. One Sunday, a small boy came into church alone. Duane invited the unusual guest to sit with him and his two children. The eight year old blonde boy, Scotty, could see the church through the windows of his house directly across the street, and he just crossed the street and came in. Scotty lived closer to the church than anyone inside the Sanctuary, including the pastor.

This was the typical condition of urban churches by the latter part of the 20th

Century, whether they were black or white. The size of the parking lots grew as the

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congregation dispersed to the suburbs, returning only on Sundays. There was an acknowledgment of this unfortunate condition, but it had happened gradually to the point where there was no denying it – churches were cut off from the neighborhoods they had been once been the center of. Community Friends was mostly black, mostly middle class. The appearance of Scotty that Sunday had import beyond the occasional local who was drawn in by the coffee and doughnuts over the Good News.

He was drawn to Duane. Beyond the white skin, Duane was a natural magnet for children. Duane immediately got on eye level of any child. Though the sudden appearance of his adult elfin gleeful face might have been startling, within seconds all resistance would melt. He had the magic to bypass all stops and go straight for that part of a child most essential. A two minute encounter with Duane could provide the care and love that trailed years into the future. The physical grace and strength of a working man was balanced by the compassion of his soul and the trained instincts of his profession. There was nothing that kept him from the immediacy of a child. His radar could sense the timorous beating heart of the child disappearing behind a grandmother’s legs. Within four minutes, lifted airborne by Duane’s upstretched arms, they were weightless and laughing.

Rather than go to the back of the church with the Crabbs kids and other children during the service, Scotty snuggled next to Duane and fall asleep under his arm. Duane and his children walked him home and met his mother, Brenda. As Scotty became a regular, Duane found out a bit more about his home life. There were plenty of men who came and went from the house, but after they were in the back bedroom for a while with

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his mom, they were gone again. Duane could never convince Scotty to join the other children, he just wanted to stay with Duane.

Despite the difficult pregnancy, Hannah was a perfect healthy baby. After months of confinement, Lisa was happy to be back in the world, to show off the newborn girl to the gushing enthusiasm of the whole congregation the first Sunday she was back at church. Scotty sat on the other side of Duane, and elbowed him, pulled to whisper in his ear.

“Who’s that, Mr. Crabbs? Is that your old lady?” he asked.

Duane chuckled.

“I don’t think she would appreciate that, Scotty but yes, Lisa is my wife.”

“What’s a wife?”

Duane laughed again, thinking that Scotty might be teasing out of some jealousy.

“C’mon Scotty.”

“What’s a wife?”

Scotty was seriously asking the question. Neither the word nor the concept was in his experience. Men and women came and went from the house he and his mother stayed in. It was the restless moving tribe of the addicted who, like his mother, were seldom without the need to find the next draw of relief on the pipe.

On the way home, Lisa listened to her husband spinning his thoughts, just happy to be in the car with their newborn, looking at the world outside the windows.

“How is a kid like Scotty going to make it? I mean, how are any of these kids going to make it?

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It was normal for Duane to work things out behind the wheel. He mused and thrashed that morning that the couple hours a week in church would barely touch the surface of need. How he was struck by the difference between the message in the gospel inside that church and the reality of the crack cocaine across the street, and the impossibility of bringing the two together the way he was doing it. If they were to live the calling to follow Jesus, it meant living it every day.

He felt it immediately, it was the next stage of the mutual contract, their incarnate journey with the poor. It meant they had to live in the neighborhood they claimed to care about.

“That’s it! We are supposed to move into this neighborhood! It’s what God wants!” Duane, swept up in his idea for their next step, was surprised by Lisa’s silence.

He looked over to see the trail of tears down his wife’s face. His elation vanished as he realized he had again overwhelmed Lisa with the inconvenient extravagance of his unprovoked ambition for others over the needs of his family. It was not a new problem, merely the replay of their pattern – at a particularly vulnerable moment for Lisa. His idea for tampering his impulsive brainstorm was to ask Lisa if she would at least pray about moving into the neighborhood.

Silent no more, her emotions burst is a bawling response’

“Yeah, I’ll pray – I’ll pray we never move into this damn neighborhood.”

Already outliers from expected middle class ambitions in all their circles as well as their families’ sense of sequence, the very consideration of such a thing would enhance the loneliness of their choices. Duane and Lisa did not “fit in” – not within their work environments, not their home school group, and not within the church. Their faith in the

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calling of living out their faith sustained them as a couple against the prevailing questioning and subtle humiliation from each of these sources. As each decision brought them deeper into an incarnation of their faith, they could find a way to remain in, if always marginalized.

In the three years after Duane’s Summit Lake Epiphany, the subject of moving did not move. Duane’s excitement about the idea only strengthened Lisa’s resistance.

She kept her defenses solid, all too aware of his charming, compelling, persuasive will.

The idea did not advance one inch since the day it burst forth.

Fortunately for their marriage, it was an issue over there, and in front of them was the fullness of family life. If they kept their conversations to the matters of the day, all was well. They were busy years. Lisa was homeschooling, Duane was working and continually seeking greater connection to ministry. They had their fourth child,

Jonathan.

They continued to worship in Summit Lake. Lisa knew that often after a shift,

Duane would drive to the neighborhood at night alone or with Patrick, and they worshipped in Summit Lake. Working, going to church there was fine with Lisa, but living there? No. She did not change her answer whenever Duane brought it up.

Eventually, worn down by the persistence of it all, she decided, as a wife, that she could follow her husband’s vision, and said she agreed. She was resigned to it.

But it was Duane’s turn to say no. He told Lisa it would not happen unless and until she owned it. This was unexpected. It always felt so pushy. That is what she was used to through the three years. Suddenly it was something else. He gave her the power.

“Until you feel 100% that it is right, it is not happening.”

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With that, he stopped talking about it. He did not bring it up again. This new ground allowed her to relax, to pray with a new an unguarded openness. The wall she built around her heart to the idea fell away. She could release the idea of the white picket fence. It was a fantasy, that idea, just somebody else’s sense of what life should be for her and her family.

Lisa’s description of her unusual decision is brief and direct.

“I just knew, like I was freed from something that had been a weight to me. My heart said yes, this is right for us at this time. This is what Jesus is calling us to do as a family.”

***

The house was not on the market. The house was not even visible from the street, despite the leafless trees. From where they stood at the foot of the driveway they could see the rooftop if they swiveled their heads a bit. Duane and Lisa had seen the house from the outside earlier on a tip from Miss Julie, one of the mothers in their home school group. Its command of the landscape was obscured by angle of the hill and the tall weed trees of neglect. Fresh inches of snow softened the harshness of the steep impossible unpaved driveway. On either side of the driveway, the forest of scrawny urban Ailanthus trees rose, forming a kind of archway that could seem almost welcoming.

Duane and Lisa stood with their four children on the sidewalk looking up, waiting for the arrival of friends and Gloria, who in her mysterious ways had secured the key. There was no address at the driveway apron. The overgrown driveway was easy to

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miss, and there was nothing indicating the address, but the family of six standing together on East South Street, not at a bus stop, just upright in the cold, was impossible not to notice.

Joshua, their oldest child, loved the place instantly – it reeked of adventure. The steep driveway, perilous to an adult driver, was magic to him. It was a sledding hill to

Josh. Above the uphill passage, Duane and Lisa knew that the obscuring dense trees yielded to a space of light – and the house broke free, a solid presence commanding a broad view framed by an establishing line of Interstate 76-77 in the foreground and downtown Akron floating above the freeway’s constant low hum.

It was the day after Christmas, 1995.

The house was condemned. The windows were boarded up, posted with notices from the health department that it would be torn down in two weeks. But from the outside, Lisa thought the generous foursquare had potential beyond its current scars and hardships. It was big, for one thing. They were a family of six now.

They had only been looking for a home for a few months, but it had been nearly four years since Duane had introduced the idea of moving to Summit Lake. Over that time, Duane often cruised the streets of South Akron after his twenty four hour shift at the firehouse, seeing a life of greater purpose possible by living there.

The first Summit Lake house they toured was something Duane thought could be perfect – it was a fortress. The home of convicted drug dealer James Dillehay, it had lots of security and special features. However, it also had a shared a driveway with the house next door, where James Dillehay’s brother lived.

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The police held a conversational museum of confiscated bounty from drug busts in the nineties. Cars and boats filled the inventory along the more conventional array of firearms and scads of ammunition. Because houses could readily be hauled to storage, which happened to be the original Firestone factory on Sweitzer Avenue, two plainclothes detectives accompanied Duane and Lisa through the property. Dillehay’s brother’s watched the tour from the other side of the property line. The house boasted an elaborate camera security system, no windows starting 8’ below the ground level, reinforced steel entry doors and a gigantic master bedroom with a water bed.

However, Lisa’s list of house minimums included bedrooms for the children, which the vast master bedroom suite had devoured. Beyond all other considerations, this obvious impracticality eliminated the house before there was need to ponder the potential advantages – or the potential wrath of the neighbor. To Duane’s relief, as they left the property, Lisa was oblivious to the fraternal daggers of contempt in their direction. Duane acknowledged the flat unbroken mean mugging in their direction, grateful the plainclothes lawmen assured a quick exit without incident.

There was no lack of available properties in this part of town in the nineties.

However, two-thirds of the houses were now rental property. The population of the

Summit Lake neighborhood had been declining since the 1960’s, but in the 1980’s, the pace quickened in a steady downfall as the economic power and city resources drained towards away, and drugs trafficking flowed in.

The anchor of the neighborhood, Lincoln Elementary School, saw its student body go from ##### in #### to #### the year the Crabbs family was bucking the trend and moving in.

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The few other houses they had seen since the fortress all had at least one big major no. The backyard was too small, the houses were too close together, or the basement was a pond. Her discerning eye was not an indication of resistance to the neighborhood itself. Over the years of participating in the church life and ministry in

South Akron, and praying for the understanding and participation in her husband’s vision to move to the inner city, she was sincere in the search. It was simply that the houses thus far did not meet the needs she saw for her family. Lisa was by nature and upbringing practical and traditional. The reality that they were forging new traditions in their marriage did not phase or alter her approach to decisions. Once she was convinced of an action, she brought an unjaundiced common sense view to counter Duane’s buoyant immediacy.

By the time they toured the inside of the house with their children and two foundational supporters of their ministry, Dave Baker and Paul Tell, Lisa knew they had found their home. The sense of its potential from the outside view was reinforced by the interior plan, the arrangement and flow of the rooms. Her consistent filter was the needs of her family first, second was the potential for their unfolding ministry. The house had so much to offer in both categories. There was a big backyard. The garage included an apartment above it. There were four big bedrooms upstairs and an airy attic for a fifth bedroom, playroom or office. There was the potential for each child to eventually have a room of their own. The downstairs, with work, could be a generous open flowing space, plenty of room for home schooling and the outreach to the neighborhood Duane and Lisa envisioned.

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Baby Jonathan and four year old Hannah stayed in the arms of adults that day.

Josh and Bethany made a game of picking their own bedrooms on the second floor, gleefully blind to the clutter and debris. Their instant embrace of ownership shaped the expression of a unique family on their uncharted journey of love.

Reinforced by the assurances of their friends of its structural merits and their commitment to pursue the title and renovation, Duane and Lisa came to the decision in mutual excitement. Lisa’s vision was the potential of the bricks and mortar of their future. Duane’s vision was the potential of souls to be saved through the container of the house. They found a home base for the journey inward, a commitment to follow the message of Jesus Christ or their mutual commitment to live as they were called by their faith in Jesus.

Before the group left the house, they stood together in the remains of the kitchen.

It was the moment to pray into the hopes and fears of living out God’s calling to “seek the welfare of the city”.

It was the day after Christmas, 1995.

NOTE TO READER: There will be an additional family story from Christmas 2005 to finish this section. I am writing it now. June 24, 2019

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ERIC HARMON: LIGHT GLASS BLOCK

There it was, Light. Predawn, distorted, and cold through glass block, it was still a good sign to Eric as he pulled into the parking lot of the Front Porch Café. It meant Larvett was inside, setting up the kitchen for breakfast customers. Eric had another new idea for attracting more business for the café, and hoped Larvett was in a mood to hear it.

The new idea had just occurred to him while he was sitting in his car, in line at the café’s competitor, McDonald’s. More fortress than golden arch, this Mickey D’s was between the café and the access ramps to the expressway. The place netted all the suburban commuters looking for a quick bite before work. Further adding to his irritation, this McDonald’s was drive through only. The walking poor, most of the neighborhood, was shut off from service.

Parking at the far end of the Front Porch Café lot, he crumpled up the paper from the sausage and biscuit, stuffed it into the pocket of his hoodie, and he grabbed one of the eight coffee mugs he forgot to bring into the house last night, again. As he crossed the parking lot in the Akron winter gloom, he heard distorted contemporary gospel music was blasting straight through the walls of the café, another good sign for Eric and his big idea. Larvett only played music when he was in a good mood. Eric pulled out the giant ring of keys as approached the steel front doors. He knew pounding on the door was useless with the praise music at full volume.

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“Larvett, turn down the music, man, I gotta talk to you”.

Eric’s official job at South Street Ministries was Building Construction Manager, but there was no discrimination about what landed on his table. All five staff overlapped in the evolving space of the ministry. The Front Porch Café was their field of operations, welcoming in the surrounding neighborhood.

Eric had no prior construction experience. Characteristic of Duane Crabbs’ enigmatic

‘hunch and a prayer’ leadership, Duane trusted Eric with getting the donated building into habitable shape. Eric was the guy to take the “church without walls” into whatever it would become now that it had walls.

“The first miracle in the Front Porch Café was that it did not collapse while I was trying to save it” Eric loved to say, typically punctuating the joke with his loud distinct laugh, something between a cackle and a guffaw. He had no vanity about sharing his ineptitude in the construction trades, how his incompetence was continually upstaged and saved by God.

There was a wide margin for mistakes at South Street. Duane was fond of saying that the ministry was “faulty but not false”. His messages about the walk of faith being a collaboration with God was reckless to many, but Duane and Lisa led by example, and made the unconventional seem normal. Lisa and Duane were a conventional middle class American

Christian couple, but the life they were creating was outside the curve of their demographic profile. They chose a path of poverty that did not include a recognizable safety net. The building gave them a larger platform for the expression of a faith walk, and that faith permeated everything. Of the five employees, only two – Lisa as the administrator and Larvett, as the chef, had any claim to work experience in the jobs they held.

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Twenty nine years old, Eric was a big solid guy, with a bit of plush extra under his perpetual hoodie and jeans. The kind of guy one would choose to hide behind if a threat came forward. His bright red hair was thinning on the top, but awesome on his chin, a shiny copper beard framing the smile that revealed perfect straight white teeth. He was quick with the signature duck call of a laugh, and it was loudest and most frequent at his own expense. In the early days, he was one of the burly trio of benevolent bouncers for those stepping beyond the tolerance threshold of behavior inside the café. It was a pretty high bar in a situation without any real rules. How can there be rules in a place that declared itself a domain of “unlikely partners taking shared risks”. The loose flavor of the day-to-day operations was formed from the leadership and charisma of Duane Crabbs. It was born of his sauntering walk of unconventional, enchanted trust, his firefighter emergency responder personality. Masculine energy bounced around the café, oblivious to the incongruous insistent gesture of Lisa’s touch - a vase of seasonally appropriate plastic flowers on every table.

Eric smoothed out the McDonalds’ wrapper on a plastic checkered tablecloth and called out again

“Larvett! The music! I got an idea.”

Larvett, in no rush, turned down the music as Eric waved the McDonald’s wrapper at him.

“You went to McDonald’s? I am not talking to you”

“No, man, listen – we make a healthy breakfast wrap, have our own drive through, better and cheaper than them!”

Larvett drew himself up, head lifted, mouth puckered, wearing the face of chef-street smart imperial inscrutability, another good sign from this mercurial man. Larvett was

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interested to the point that he dropped the opportunity to give Eric a hard time about going to

McDonald’s. Eric let it go for now.

Eric had been working for South Street Ministries for three years.

Still in its infancy, the café was cultural mash-up; some Evangelical storefront worship on Sunday, fundamental Akron AA recovery space during the week, and a diner that still felt like a beer joint. Overlaid on that mix was an ambitious murky new age quality, thanks to the constant gurgle and drip of a decidedly garage style hydroponic system along the perimeter of the dining space. The happenstance of all of that stamped it M.E.N. at work. Carol Murphy, a self-described atheist who called Duane Crabbs her pastor, referred to the place as “Jesus’ frat house.”

Eric Harmon arrived in the typical fashion for South Street, a ramble, tumble and fall into grace. Serving in the Ohio National Guard’s 135th Military Police Company in 2003, he was among the first wave of American military entering Baghdad after the collapse of the Iraqi forces. Though two members of his unit died in a mortar attack, he does not blame anyone but himself for his later troubles. He never romanticized or exaggerated what happened there, and had little tolerance for those who did.

“Most of the time, we were not doing much more than hanging around.”

He came back to Akron in January 2004, but it would take much longer to find his way home. He had grown up in a family; that identified themselves as Christian, but did not go to church. His parent’s divorce was long and difficult for him and his brother and sister. His grandmother was a devout believer. If only for her sake, Eric’s mother took her three children to Akron Bible Temple for the church youth group. After Eric came back to the United States, that connection to faith and any sense of purpose in life were gone. He was putting on a show,

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going through the motions of finishing a college degree while his real homework was gambling, drinking, drugs and women. He got away with lying and lies and then lied some more. He lied through his beautiful smiling white teeth.

Close to finishing his degree, he left University of Akron, signing up for Officer’s

Candidate School. He hoped things might change for him at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, but all his new vices came with him and grew. He was a messed up, big guy and he made a big messed up situation. He spent all his money and more that he didn’t have, married an exotic dancer on a whim and robbed a gas station to buy her a ring.

He was in no hurry as he drove away. When the police stopped him less than a mile from the crime scene, he said nothing and offered no resistance. The evidence was in the passenger seat. He had not bothered to move the stolen cash, his mask or the hunting knife he laid on the counter when he asked the young woman at the register for the money. He was cuffed out in Oklahoma, 1,200 miles from home on April 5th, 2007. It was his 25th birthday.

After pleading guilty to robbery with a weapons charge, a second degree felony in

Oklahoma, he was sentenced to two years in Lawton Correctional Center. On his way to prison, Eric realized he had felt nothing for so long, he did not recognize at first what he was feeling. He was afraid. Unable to block the fear, and cried for the first time.

Recognizing that no one got him there, he did not expect any favors from anyone.

Eric knew enough to know his thinking was messed up. Solitary confinement reduced him to time and space with nothing but a life of the mind. Without anything to sustain a future, he tried to think of a time when things were different, to recollect a happy moment. Memories of his time with the Akron Baptist Youth Group came to him. It was a place he remembered as free – and maybe that is what happiness looks like. He kept

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having flashes of memory of that time. With nothing but his aloneness, he waited for something more, maybe guidance, instruction from the memories as they became available to him. He began to think of his childhood exposure to Christian behavior as training for his present condition.

It was the beginning of something new for Eric. Unencumbered with responsibilities, he moved with the desire for something different to fill the time.

Struggling with letting go of doing things his way, he paid attention to the messages from

AA meetings, seeing himself not as an alcoholic, but definitely an addict – to lying. He took things a day at a time. He got better, he felt better. As his release date was coming, with still eight months to serve, he was afraid that he was having just a jailhouse conversion.

“So one day, I had this idea. Why not give God ALL of me, I mean one hundred percent of me for just one full day, just for today?”

One day turned to a string of days.

He stayed straight and used the tools available during his time inside. After a while, reading his Bible and learning how to exist in prison, he felt something more than the memory of happy. He was happy.

He saw his incarceration for the gift that it was – something that demanded that he stop.

He felt freer than he ever had. The lying was done, over, gone. This now, this moment, this ground, this concrete, this - here felt so new, so promising. He had a chance to start over.

He laughed at the irony of incarcerated freedom.

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Eric was granted an unsolicited early release date. His sentence was reduced to fourteen months. But this prospect only added to his unexpected growing fear around getting out of prison, a ballooning dread far larger than the fear he experienced coming into prison.

He had a way of seeing that looked around the next corner, and the view was catastrophic. He knew the statistics on recidivism – high, over 70% - just as he knew about the weakness of jailhouse conversions once out in the world. His Bible-based connection to Jesus could vanish on first temptation. In the weeks before he got out of Lawton, he fasted and prayed and worried.

Also worrying about his release was his grandmother in Ohio. Outside of family, she had no one to talk to about her troubled grandson. Her church was very conservative, and she feared the judgment and corrosive gossip if people knew that Eric committed armed robbery.

The one friend she confided in invited her to a prayer service. Duane Crabbs was the pastor that night. After his introduction included a mention of his weekly Bible study at the county jail, she could not wait to talk to him. He would understand that her grandson was not evil. After the service, she quietly managed to tell him about Eric. He said a prayer with her aloud on the spot. She never forgot the gift of understanding he so freely and lovingly gave her, without a shred of hesitation or judgment.

After fourteen months in prison, Eric returned to Akron. Within the first week, he went to the Wednesday night worship service at his childhood church, Akron Bible Temple. He saw a lot of people he remembered. Hank Richards, a tall, lanky, older gentlemen with the fire-and- brimstone type of Christianity particular to Akron Bible Temple, invited him to his Kingdom

Builders brunch on Saturday. His old friend Matt Simpson offered to pick him up for church on Sunday.

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He was surprised on Sunday when Matt pulled into the same parking lot he had been in the day before. In Akron less than one week, he was back inside the old shambly brick building a second time The atmosphere inside seemed more like a party than church, but everyone looked happy to be there. He just tried to stick with Matt, to blend into the background as much as his stature would allow.

He thought the pastor, a balding energetic man named Duane, seemed kind of crazy, but

“he had the whiff of Jesus on him.”

He thought this was a church that might work for him. It was as raw as he felt.

When Matt offered him a place in his house in South Akron he shared with two other guys, Eric did not hesitate. Within his first week in Akron, a place he could worship and a place to live had found him.

He carried four years’ probation and the employment stigma of a felony. There were few options available to him for work. He was hired by a collections agency, and spent the day on the phone chasing debt, then driving to collect. It was ok for a while, and he was effective and resourceful with many of the calls. He did not have any problem collecting on those who he felt could pay up. With others, with people who he sensed were honest but burdened by poverty, bad luck or bad decisions, he some discrepancy to forgive debt. But never enough for all the cases he wanted to. After a few months, the phone meant nothing bud dread to him. On the repeat calls, he would develop feelings for the clients. There was one Mexican family he had gotten too close to for his line of work, and had been delaying making the last call. His boss said he had to close the case by the end of the day. He wanted to get out of his job, the weight of it all was too much, but so recently out of prison, there was nothing else out there.

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Feeling desperate, frightened in a new way, knowing he needed help but unable to figure it out how to get it, Eric wanted to go see Duane on his lunch break. He resisted, not wanting Duane to feel any pressure to act on his behalf. He quit anyway, and started volunteering at First Glance, a youth organization in Kenmore. Duane found out about Eric’s situation and called him.

“Eric, can you tell me how much you would need to live for one month?”

Such a practical answer was not what Eric expected, and came as a kind of whack in the head of his terrible thoughts. Before the robbery, his rank and experience gave him a large salary. He made and spent a lot of money. As fast as it came in was as fast as it went out.

Now, here was Duane offering a creative and immediate solution, and he really had no idea about how much he really needed.

“Maybe like $750?”

Duane offered to hire Eric for one month and take it from there.

At that point, even a month of an extra small paycheck was a stretch for South Street.

But Lisa managed to put it together. This arrangement continued for a second and third month.

When Duane asked Eric to think about how much he would need for a year, he gave it more time. He was starting to believe he could really make a new life in Akron.

“$26,000”.

This was not an amount the shoestring ministry could afford. Only Lisa and Joe Tucker received paychecks, as part time administrators. Duane did not draw any salary from the ministry. Duane had a natural confidence in high wire crossings. That confidence was bolstered by the simultaneous paradox of continuous feet-on-ground life he and Lisa made

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together in Summit Lake. Without any clear idea of how this could be done, he and Eric prayed over it, and wished each other a merry Christmas.

Duane got a phone call Christmas Eve from a city official, asking him to come to the courthouse. This was someone Duane had gotten to know in escorting people through the court system. The official wanted to remain anonymous, and explained that it had been a good year.

A great admirer of Duane’s work, the official was giving him a contribution, and his signature was required. As a government employee, a document was necessary stating that the donation was freely given, that there no reciprocity of favor as a result of such exchange of charitable personal donation.

Whenever Duane was given money, his custom was to accept with gratitude, regardless of what was offered. He simply put any check into a pocket without looking at the amount.

Later, he and Lisa would look at it together. Lisa opened it as they stood in the kitchen of their home. The check was for $25,000. They could give Eric a job for a full year. Four years later, the renovation of the building was far from complete, but the lights were on in the café, and Eric was getting paid and paying back.

***

The staff and volunteers did everything in the café space. In its prior life, it was an ethnic banquet hall, and still clearly bore the hallmarks of the genre. Seen from the outside, the plain brick building on a street once filled with similar workaday structures did not indicate the surprise of the interior. The features of the banquet hall were immediate and intact once inside the solid metal door – a stage, fluted metal columns up the center of an otherwise open space and pressed tin ceiling. The inviting warmth of the space was the signature feature by

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necessity and purpose. The necessity part was the lack of suitability of the rest of the building, and the design part was the reflection of Duane and Lisa’s partnership, a combination of confessional and kitchen table.

But tucked throughout the building, there were the hideaways. In the back room, a one story addition to the original structure, hodge-podge piles of donations grew over what had been a barroom and banquet service kitchen. Small paths ran through the jumble of second hand equipment, bicycles and clothing, opening onto small clearings with two or three chairs.

They served as impromptu counseling campsites, handmade confessional booths hacked out of the donation wilderness. For some reason even he could not explain, Chaplain Lin Barnett loved counseling in those urban caves.

The second floor was divided into fourteen small chambers. In its last legal use, the upstairs had been a men’s rooming house. All the copper plumbing was long gone, but it was otherwise intact. It had a spook house feel to it, accentuated by the skinny tall corridor running straight down the center of the building. The finish on all the plaster walls, doors and windows curled in licks of dried oil paint. Much of the plaster ceiling was on the plank wooden floor, crunching under pressure of foot traffic. When the ministry took over the building, it became the not-so-legal residence for Freddie Jones. Among his other odd jobs, he was night security.

Freddie loved it up there. He wired up some temporary lighting. Nobody bothered him, and for the most part he followed the one rule – no cigarettes or alcohol inside the building.

Going in the basement was not for the nervous. The stairway was dark and webby, with a distinct musty musk aroma. Just looking down was enough to discourage most tourists.

Down there was the ultimate masculine refuge. Chef Larvett, his assistant Thomas, Joe Heindel the carpenter, Freddie and Eric had carved out lounge space. The ceiling was too low for any

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legal human occupancy, but the low height supported low slung slouching. The circle of discarded lumpy couches around a coffee table received a speck of natural illumination from the meager light coming through the dirty frosted, wired glass of a window well facing the parking lot. The only décor was a ceramic toilet and the odd empty snack bag or Arizona iced tea bottle. Joe Heindel rigged up a semi-private shower for Freddie. The basement was otherwise filled with objects of unknown provenance plus the belongings of temporarily homeless friends, accented by crates of mysterious industrial spindles, it had the feel of a deliberately staged firetrap.

All the men working at South Street had the love of Jesus in common. And, other than

Duane and the two Joes, all the men had incarceration in common. And other than Duane, all the men had bachelorhood in common. The basement was their lair of freedom, an impromptu clubhouse refuge from the unpredictable traffic of the café, the perfect break room, a frat house for Jesus. Eric, by massive key ring and by natural touch, was the undeclared leader of the cohort. If Duane was not around, Eric was the next guy to solve a problem.

Eric’s first and ultimately successful building challenge in the fall of 2010 was a total roof replacement. The original flat, commercial style roof was rotten. A donor provided the funding to replace it. In what would be the wettest September in memory, Eric sweated his way through the installation. He stayed several nights with Freddie on the second floor, under the stars and exposed ribs of the new hip style roof. The two men managed to keep most of the water out with big plastic sheets covering the openings.

That summer before the new roof, the café had a parking lot kitchen, with Freddie manning two grills. The complete exposure of the operation made for some unique street theater on Grant Street. The customer base already supported the work of the ministry, so the

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sight of Freddie flailing about the kettle barbeques as friends arrived in the parking lot was a preview of the South Street experience.

After the launch of the inside café, Eric was looking forward to having more time for the ministry part of the job. He was no more suited to this work than he had been to managing construction. But everything about South Street was a walk of faith, right down to the bacon and eggs.

When he first returned to Akron, in the months before South Street, Eric kept his connections to the church he knew from childhood, Akron Bible Temple. He was willing to do anything to keep his faith strong. He participated on a few night missions. It was a practice common to evangelical urban ministry. Talking Jesus in gay bars and strip clubs didn’t make sense to him, but he had been willing to try, to be part of the team. But not only did it not work, he felt like a fraud, acting friendly to someone who interpreted his beautiful smile as something else entirely.

But mission work was completely different at the café. Opportunities kept walking freely through the front door. Duane’s idea was for a place that landed between the bar stool and the church pew. He wanted a neutral space, a third space that was not at all about prosthelitizing. He described a place of true equity, of deep listening, of conversations across the barriers.

Eric’s efforts to cultivate deeper friendships had not gone too well. Eric could be patient. He tried to apply his love of fishing to his work. He could stand in a stream and cast a line for hours, not particularly concerned about catching a fish or not. He thought about how he could pray as he ambled around in the woods, looking for edible mushrooms, but totally

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content if he came up empty. But as his efforts seemed to go nowhere with the Akron street congregation, his desire to land someone in the Jesus column grew.

Eric’s work in linking jobs for people wanting work was slow, but at least, so far, 100% successful. Of the four people he placed in jobs the previous year, all were still working. For those new hires, reliable transportation was a perpetual challenge. Entry level jobs in manufacturing and assembly were far from the old urban neighborhoods where his placements lived. Keeping the guys employed often meant Eric was the chauffer. It sometimes meant he made the 5:30 wakeup call on the way to pick a guy up. He stayed easy with it, even if it meant three wakeup calls on the way and waiting in the driveway.

“That’s my job. That is what Jesus would do.”

The day to day work of the building never stopped. Between the maintenance demands of an old building, there was the emotional triage coming in off the street. The café was a new entry in the mash-up of social and religious outcroppings in the neighborhood. The locals were testing out more than the menu of the place, they were sampling the staff as well. Most of

Eric’s early part time hires ripped off the café or just stopped coming in for work. Interest in the spiritual offerings of the café tended to flame high and die fast.

The walking-distance patrons were testing its limits, tolerance, and manipulative potential. When the café first opened to the public, it was impossible to get any sense of what was inside. Glass block and brick filled in what had been large storefront glazing, and the single leaf front door was solid metal with a dent-dappled finish. Walk-in traffic expressed needs way beyond coffee and eggs, and the café did its best to meet each person where they stood.

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Duane Crabbs led by example, engaging each person coming in with equal dignity, real questions and conversation. He made a quick study between the genuine and the hustle. The slope and clarity of his almond eyes concentrated the intensity of even the most casual of his gazes. With energy boiling out of him most of the time, he could still come to a flat stop and receive. The man could listen. It was authentic when his listening led him to ask the person if he could say a prayer.

Eric and the other guys watched Duane dive into all kinds of broken. They saw him also with the less obvious broken, those in business suits. Out of earshot, they would watch as

Duane’s comforting hand reached slowly to meet the subtle drop in the shoulder as the person felt safe enough to just let go of the façade.

With a tremendous energy driving his dedication, Duane’s first responder experience and personality took his tremendous energy directly to the person or place of greatest need. He had a capacity for seeing through the defenses, and the heart to protect the subsequent exposed vulnerability.

Eric and the guys saw and experienced the equally powerful fury of his indignation, righteous or otherwise. If someone was gaming him, taking him for a fool, Duane could flare.

With lightning-strike speed, Duane was instantly in the face of the offender, nose-to-nose, finger jabbing the guy, an intense, fierce reproach tightly hammering against the shocked face of the offender, body leaning away from Duane’s frontal attack. Quickly ignited, quickly quenched, unforgettable to the subject and the witnesses.

The triage atmosphere, scarcity of resources and youth of his male apostolic staff created a kind of duct tape solution to building and personal problems. It manifested in

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countless ways, and made for a kind of freefall creativity sensitive to the next crisis. The church without walls was figuring out how to live inside the walls.

In the heady atmosphere of crisis management, a solution that is “good enough” often becomes permanent. The food service took up a corner of the room. An odd assembly of office module fabric dividers and residential wooden cabinetry separated the cooking space from the dining area. The cooking zone had too much space in the middle, a dead zone for work, a collision zone for workers. The cooking equipment, two plug-in grills, a roaster and two microwaves, had no exhaust feature. Grease and smoke dissipated as it could, everywhere in the room. It gradually darkened all the surfaces beyond the reach of mops and sponges.

The sticky blackness settled on the colored plastic glass of the new Home Depot tiffany style pendent chandeliers. In a kind of reverse tribute to Akron’s industrial past, the grime darkened the ceiling so steadily that no one really noticed as the room got progressively gloomier.

The place definitely had something going on. It had a bounce and an energy, a heart and spirit that attracted return business. People liked the no-frills basics, the ceramic mugs of strong coffee. It was honest, authentic, and despite the difficulties, they laughed a lot in there.

Its many defenders and fans forgave the deficiencies as proof of the focus on the mission.

Before the building was given to them, South Street Ministries held Sunday church in the Summit Lake Community Center. The migration of Sunday worship from the community center did not change the service, but the congregation expanded. Brian Kunkler at The Chapel on the University of Akron campus was a friend of Duane’s. To young Christians struggling with the conservatism of the Chapel, Brian suggested South Street.

Single women came in greater numbers. They came despite the temporary/permanent condition of the Ladies Room. One of the two stalls had a shower curtain for walls and a door.

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The sinks dispensed cold water and the old mirror reflected something vague and sepia-toned.

Though the whole place was a little uncomfortable and strange, it was safe. It was routinely cleaned. Lisa, with her constancy and calm insistence about certain things in the café. There were the flowers on the tables, changed to reflect the season or holiday.

Whatever crazy new thing came out of Duane and the guys, there was still the tenderness of the vase. That one aspect of unnecessary tenderness held volumes of mystery.

The message of love had concrete reality in Lisa’s practical habits of care and homemaking.

Her message was spiritually magnified on the tables. The tiny gesture of respect represented in the twisted paper autumn leaves in white vases had an electric current of connection to her culture, to her big Italian family around the kitchen table, generation after generation.

The Sunday service took on a character of a Christian dating service, a precursor to

Christian Mingle, in real time and space.

The Front Porch bachelors had something new to talk about in the basement.

Anne Schillig came back to Akron from Peace Corps service and was introduced to

South Street through her good friend, Hillary Stewart. Eric first saw her on a volunteer paint crew for First Glance. He knew he had to ask her out before any of the other guys realized how great she was.

On their first date, he told her how he got to South Street. He told her everything about his recent past. “I have a lying addiction and I have to be 100% truthful.” She needed and deserved to know and make a decision about him. They had a second date. And then a third date.

They were one of several couples created through the Front Porch Café’s early days.

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On Christmas day, 2010, two vans were idling in the basketball court in the predawn darkness of the Crabbs family front yard. Duane and Lisa stood in a circle with a large eclectic group of South Streeters, including Eric and Anne, praying for safety on the thirty-hour journey to the city of Juarez, just across the border from El Paso, Texas. Their son Joshua was working for Casas por Cristo, an organization that paired American mission groups with a local pastor to build a house for a specific family. After the five day build, the group planned to celebrate New Year’s Eve in Austin on the way home. As they honked their way down the challenging steep gravel driveway, Eric gripped the wheel and tried concentrate, tried not to think about his plan.

Everyone except Anne was aware of Eric’s intention to propose to Anne during the trip.

Though there was some switching of occupants at the rest stops on the way, Eric and Anne never rode in the same van. The planning for that moment gave the long drive a purpose. It was a group project they built together as they built the three room house in Juarez.

After the five day build and discomfort of the basics of sleeping and showering, Anne was not in the mood for a fancy New Year’s Eve. The stop in Austin added a few more hours to the stultifying diagonal drive across the continent. Bethany was trying to talk her into the spirit, suggesting they go for a manicure in Austin. Part of the diversion was instructing Anne on the sly to just do whatever Bethany wanted.

“Keep Bethany occupied away from her boyfriend Matt. Just do whatever she wants when we are in Austin.”

Anne joined in, for the sake of the whole group thing and for whatever Matt had in mind for Bethany, and the two women traded the work boots for heels, the bandanas for

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spangles. It was a beautiful Texas night, and they enjoyed turning some heads as they strolled towards the Riverwalk to find their friends.

The rest of the group was waiting for them, each person with a candle and a message for

Anne. Though she saw that her job was a rouse, she was not sure what was going on. Eric had not eaten any lunch at the barbeque place, a thing he had been looking forward to. She thought he was getting sick because he forgot and brushed his teeth with tap water.

Meanwhile, as the end of 2010 was counting down, Eric was sweating as he paced around the preset candles in the front of the Alamo, waiting for Anne to appear. He was nervous.

“What if she hesitates, what if she says no? What was taking them so long? Does she know already? Am I ready? Is this a big mistake?”

Eric was prone to the negative, saw all the perils of this big dumb idea. At last he could hear them coming, hear Anne’s distinctive throaty deep voice. He went down on a knee.

“Yes.”

As his own fortunes and prospects were turning for the better in Akron, Eric wanted to return the trust Duane shown in him. It was not just the job, it was an entire community, and now the potential for a life, a family, with Anne.

***

Six months after Anne and Eric bought and moved into a beautiful, big, old Victorian house in Highland Square, Eric was stressed in a bundle of new ways, but work was the main source of worry. Eric, in trying to be like Jesus, feared he was merely hustling Jesus. His

Duane-inspired trust in others had not gone well. Too much faith and failure gripped him in

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flop sweat. He gave people the benefit of the chance again and again. He suspected that the word on the street was that he was a patsy.

Eric, like all the men working in the café, had been on the game themselves. They knew how to recognize a street hustle, of dealing. The café had low to no tolerance for crap.

This was basic house policy, clearly established by Duane’s approach. Witnessing Duane’s reaction to being taken for a sucker was an unforgettable display of fury. At the same time,

Duane would never run of chances for someone, as long as they were honest.

But Duane was not someone with a checklist. He did not pressure anyone into a system of recognizable goals. There was no minimum standard in the work of urban ministry.

Eric knew this, knew that Duane was not judging his performance. He reminded himself that anything he did could be a reflection of Jesus, providing a clean bathroom was a reflection of

Jesus. But despite what he told himself, he wanted a win, he needed a conversion. He worked in a place that lived the rules of street hustle, and if he had to hustle Jesus, he would.

Eric knew when someone was gaming him from his own experience. He thought if he could recognize and nail the lie early enough, he could save that person from the path that his own lies had taken him. Eric recognized his real downfall was the addiction to lying. The lies, more than any other part of his descent, got him to prison. He understood the thrill of the lie.

Of the women who made the café a regular stop, Chantel stood out from the rest in the quiet deliberate way she carried herself. She was not in a rush, ever. Eric was trying to strike the right balance with the demands of some of the women, but he kept his eye on Chantel. A tall striking black woman around her early thirties, she became a regular at the café. She lived a short walk from the café, in an apartment in an old house across from the Main Postal facility on Grant Street.

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Eric felt bad because there was no one at the café to work with the women.

Chantel was smart, interesting. They were curious about each other, and he hoped if they kept taking slow steps of trust together, maybe there was a chance for something deeper.

As they got to know each other, Chantel told Eric she maintained a meth habit, that there was an older steady man in her life, and, when she needed extra money, had a list of other men she called for dates. She was powerful, with a strong sexual current that had a dissembling effect on men. Eric was not immune to the charm, but he turned their growing relationship to things that other men did not see – her intelligence.

He asked her to come to Sunday worship. She came, and came back. She told Eric she wanted to help young girls stay out of trouble, so he invited her to a workshop. The workshop was not about helping girls, but Eric thought it could speak to Chantel. Sponsored by RAHAB, a Christian ministry dedicated to the needs of prostituted women in Akron, it was about recognizing the signs of sex trafficking. As the presenter was talking about the ways young girls are targeted and groomed, Chantel left the room. Eric waited a while before he left to find her. She was out in the parking lot, crying. Chantel had never come near anything close to the vulnerability of crying in front of Eric.

“That was me. I want out. I don’t want the life anymore.”

Eric wasted no time.

He talked to the women at RAHAB, to get their advice on what would be the best situation for Chantel, given her functional twenty years of drugs and prostitution. Chantel would need a six month residency program. Over the next week, she stayed in the café through the day, and as he was able, Eric sat with her, both of them with their laptops open, looking for a bed in a Christian-based facility on short notice. He found a suitable, small

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residency program for women with a range of recovery issues two hours southwest of Akron.

The six months away meant she would need to give up her apartment. She agreed to go.

The plans were all in place after about a week, including the financing. Eric took her shopping to buy the bedding, towels, robe and other things on the list sent by the program. At the same time, Eric started to feel uneasy. He suspected Chantel was using, though she denied it. On the weekend before her departure, a few volunteers helped Eric and Chantel finish up the last of the packing of her belongings. All she had left to do was finish up her own packing for the residency. After she left, all her bagged and boxed belongings would go to a storage locker.

He called her from his car, not far from her apartment, around nine p.m.

She said she was home, in for the night.

When his knock on the door went unanswered, he headed down the street to the

Narcotics Anonymous meeting at Community of Christ, the building to the south, next to the

Front Porch Café. He spotted her in a group of people in the parking lot. Simultaneous with the recovery meeting inside, there was often a meeting of sorts outside of the anti-recovery group.

Chantel was with her older gentleman, scoring drugs.

Eric took her home after the transaction. What little he said focused on the lie to him, not her behavior. She said again she was ready to go, this is what she wanted, and there were just things she had to do for the last time. She would be ready for him at ten o’clock the next day.

Eric needed help in trying to sort through what he had set up, and called a sober female friend in a state of anxious despair.

“I just want to have a success”.

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The two hour ride south through Ohio countryside was a neutral buffer between Grant

Street life and what was next. Unlike the facilities in Akron, with the potential of easy connections immediately outside the door, this place was in the middle of flat corn country,

Nowheresville.

The place was completely inconspicuous, tucked behind a modest, country modern

Protestant church. It gave no indication that fifteen women called it home. The pair from

Akron standing in the foyer was a different demographic from the others they could see past the admitting desk. Eric was a man, and Chantel was black. Everyone else in the place was female and white. Chantel was committing to six months with strangers in what seemed to be an adult

Christian sleepover, seeking recovery from manicure addictions. The initial intake went smoothly enough, a pleasant, polite welcome in a smiling southern inflection. The last thing to go for Chantel was her cell phone. That was harder than anything else, so Eric let her have one more conversation, outside, before it went into a box.

She was outside long enough for Eric to be embarrassed and uncomfortable.

The phone surrendered, Chantel was officially at Day one on the path of Christian addiction treatment. Eric was tired, felt he had done all he could, and handed the thing over to

Christ. As he got back in his car, he felt exhausted in ways he never knew he could be exhausted.

“Is this how it feels to be used up by Jesus?”

Trying to stay alert, he reverted to his negative tendencies, suspecting his desire for a success clouded his capacity to see clearly. Chantel was not really committed to getting sober, but he pushed it anyway.

Chantel found her way back to Akron the next day.

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Eric was not really surprised. He realized he had operated way outside of his experience or understanding. He engineered a solution for his benefit, and Chantel had done the same. She took advantage of his eagerness to take care of her loose ends, cutting old ties for a restart.

The moment in the RAHAB workshop was real, he knew that. But when and if it would amount to a change for her was none of his business. They had both used each other to get what they needed.

“I realized that in this line of work, there is a lot of gaming going on, and it is always going to be a gamble. But we are playing with God’s chips, not ours. It’s not our decision, getting out of the game. It’s not second or third chances here, it’s staying in, staying on, staying with.” Eric acknowledged after Chantel that he was not the guy to help the women coming to South Street. Even when there was no physical attraction, the sexuality was hard to get around. Despite the mutual curiosity and steps they took together, he and

Chantel had too much background to overcome. He, by making a conscious effort to avoid sexualizing their relationship and Chantel, suspicious that all his goodness might be just another hungry man’s disguise.

He realized if he was to be of any spiritual use in the café, he had to stick with men.

And there were always the men; walking out of Summit County Jail around the corner, the café was often their first stopping place. After the basics of a phone, coffee, the bathroom, some of the guys needed more. There were the men he gave a mop and bucket to wash down the floor after the café closed. As the mop swung back and forth calmly, methodically, the man holding it, looking down, might need to just talk. Eric listened.

***

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Larvett was not one to be pushed, and he had nothing to say about Eric’s new business idea of starting a drive through service to compete with McDonald’s. But they were like brothers, and Eric could tell that Larvett was intrigued. He was a thoughtful guy with big chef dreams, and Eric knew that as he put together the typical bacon and egg orders that morning, he was building a recipe for a signature South Street breakfast wrap.

Eric drew up a simple promotional hand held sign intended for the drivers of cars waiting at the light after coming up the exit ramp off I-77 between the café building and the

McDonald’s. He was going to test out an idea for another little job he could ask of someone who needed lunch.

Everyone who sat down to eat was treated with the same hospitality. But if a client could not pay and was capable, he liked to have a task to give them. The café needed business, and right outside was the potential for expansion.

He went out to give it a try. Though there was someone with a sign on the northbound exit over the bridge, there was no one on their side of the bridge, the southbound exit. He hunched up a bit in his hoodie, head covered, held the sign at chest level and smiled. Right away, a car slowed as the driver’s window lowered.

“Hey, you a veteran?”

Eric nodded yes.

“You don’t have to do that, man. They got stuff for you at the VA! Everything you need! Check it out!”

Eric did not have a chance to reply. The guy drove off without reading his sign.

“I am fine! How are You? Are YOU hungry? Good food close by at the Front Porch Café!

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RADIANT

After three years as the Architect and cheerleader, I thought my job was complete. I was tired, and entered the café at closing time with my painting clothes and a small heap of resentment for having offered to paint the stage walls. I forgot what happens after the success of a building project. I had forgotten that despite the nods of comprehension, most people cannot see three dimensionally what is proposed on two dimensional architectural drawings.

Despite the fact that the café was making more money every day after the reopening than any day prior to, there was a gloomy feeling in the room. The long wait was over. Thomas, the chef, could hardly look at me. We had worked well together for so long, planning his first kitchen, and there was no joy in the man.

“Hey, Thomas, have you named her yet?”

I was referring to the stove, a brand new Radiant; six burner, flat grille double oven, a real beauty. The old kitchen had no stove. But Thomas just shrugged. Even the oven seemed forlorn. Fundamentally, I had forgotten the unexpected emotions of those most directly affected by the new thing. There can be a deep depression that arises, the longing for what was. The past becomes mythic. The desire to return to what exists only in memory but had so recently been physical is confusing and painful. Everyone has an opinion and feels no restraint on sharing it with you. In fact, people often feel free to make judgments that they would never consider if commenting on one of your children. I was caught off-guard by the fearful reaction to the gleaming simple efficiency of the new commercial grade kitchen of the Front Porch Café in South Akron, Ohio. Everyone seemed scared.

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I changed into my painting clothes. The café was closed and the staff was cleaning up. As

I waited for my co-volunteer painter Erin Woodson to arrive, I remembered: Mission

Accomplished Fatigue: A singular condition that follows the successful completion of a protracted construction project. Often undiagnosed, its common manifestations include depression, lassitude and fatalism. It is a condition best described in the Jerry Lieber Mike

Stoller song “Is that all there is” particularly as rendered by Peggy Lee in her 1969 recording.

It is comparable to post-partum depression in its singularity of cause.

I did not recognize the symptoms because I no longer suffered from continuous loop of my own form of spatial nostalgia. After a lifetime in its grip, it was the instant decision to move to

Akron that had been the start of its final round in my chemistry. It was only by the recognition of its absence that I come now to understand the power of its hold over me. By now, three and half years after moving to Akron, I recognized I was free of it.

My obsession with decay and the intense attachment to lost places may be typical of those who suffer from the impact of unexplained sudden loss as children. But I am still too close to a lifetime of living this and am hesitant to examine it, as though doing so would snatch it away.

It’s a newly fallen giant tree, with the exposed circle of earth and roots still dripping sap.

Squirrels and birds fall to the earth in the absence of its branches, and neighboring trees take in the energy and spirit of their stricken companion, the downed tree. I can only whisper as we tiptoe towards such silent power now stilled.

The ceaseless longing for gone or dying places were some substitute, some shape for the barbed chains on my physical heart. I could barely move at times when in places that connected with incomprehensible feelings of sadness. There were so many of them, so many swerves needed

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to avoid them. Architecture became a focus to avoid the obsession with decay, with past places. I loved change because it could seem to obliterate the sadness of past structures.

As Gary hypnotically moved the mop across the floor, I just listened to his unexpected pained confusion. My paint clothes were not so different than my architect clothes, really, but the body in the clothes was no longer the cheerleader of the past three years. Simple listening was all that was needed, not my previous rousing assurances of eventual success. We had done it. It was time for presence.

It had taken twice as long and twice as much effort to renovate only half the space of their building. The Summit County Building Department gave us a special, not-so-flattering name.

The old building had a lot of issues as did its owner. Yes, we were special. While the structure itself was unremarkable, its lack of great bones was offset by a rich history and association for a lot of people.

The café is an extension of South Street Ministries. Staffed by ex-offenders, it also serves as one of the informal living rooms for its neighborhood in South Akron. After hours, the space hosts meetings of 12 step recovery groups, reentry programs, an international dinner and occasional theatricals. I kept listening; Gary and his mop, David and the dishes, Thomas and the stove, all the while my painting time was dwindling. We had to finish up before the women’s AA meeting at five o’clock, but nothing was more important than what was happening between us.

My association with the building started during their first summer of operation, the outdoor kitchen phase. It was a powerful experience in alternate dining.

My sister Katie, my friend Annette and I pulled into the parking lot of the café on a Friday morning in midsummer July 2011. In the relative safety of the parked car, we watched

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Freddie, wild-haired and smoking, standing at the also smoking grille. That was enough adventure already for my companions, but we had come this far and were expected inside.

My best friend from the Peace Corps, Anne Schillig, was getting married that weekend in

Akron. On the morning before the wedding, the three of us drove from Cleveland for breakfast and a tour of her fiancé’s urban restoration work. I bolstered the courage of my companions while knowing that Annette was already composing the story for the benefit of our friends back in New York. We opened the doors and stepped out.

Anne and I had served together in the Republic of Macedonia in 2006-2008. She was one of the youngest in our group of volunteers, and I was one of the oldest. In a group of 48 who shipped out together, we connected from the start. Though living only 71 miles apart in the

Vermont-sized Republic of Macedonia, geography and culture meant a six hour, two bus trip.

When making plans to visit, it was for at least a weekend and usually involved a crowd. Such junkets included the celebration of Anne’s 25th birthday weekend, marked by a genuine life- threatening ride in a truck driven by a ten year old under the guidance of a load of drunks. The shared near-death experience galvanized her milestone birthday and our friendship.

Though Akron had already saved my life two times, this was only my second visit there.

My sister was driving. The first visit, I could only glance around at the gentleness surrounding

Akron. It was a geography similar to Pittsburgh or Rome, but more intimate. There was a feeling of enclosure, of an embrace. I got a better look at the amazing lake you passed on the freeway, a real lake, in the middle of the city.

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Freddie’s white hair seemed to stand on end as we approached. He waved his spatula as though trying to dismiss the vision of three additional customers. As the ambassador to the dubious twosome behind me, I was all the more exuberant as we pierced the gauntlet of smoke and fire from the grille and from Freddie.

The breakfast was a triumph of performance art over dining, a rhythm of eggs and toast arriving every ten minutes or so. But another gift from the Peace Corps was letting go of the schedule. I was already attuned. Akron had produced a sound I recognized somewhere in the fluency of my language of space. The divining rod of my own body indicated treasure in the soil. I paid attention. During the endless breakfast, Eric, to be married the next day, passed us to the care of Tom Fuller for the tour.

Tom showed us the building first. In what had been a single-room occupancy residence, Joe Heindel had claimed a room for his luthier shop. Despite my suspicions that he is often interrupted by the curious, you would think the guy had nothing else to do but show his beautiful handcrafted stringed instruments. He remembers our visit well.

“My wife just called me before you came in. She told me she was pregnant. I saw you right after I found out we were having our first child, our Frankie.”

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Tom’s next stop was Duane and Lisa Crabbs’ house. Tom explained that they had moved to the neighborhood of South Akron based on a calling to serve the inner city. For the fifteen years since starting South Street Ministries, they had raised their children and the organization from the house, a solid foursquare farmhouse. We stood in the driveway – I do not remember why we did not meet them, because I was already drawn in to something else. Aside from the initial unease when one first encounters what seems like a ‘bad area’, I was aware of an energy coming through my feet. The house was no different than the houses around it, aside from the half-court basketball court immediately to the front of the house and the dominance of its siting atop the highest hill in the area. There was the steady hum of the nearby freeway, the one that sliced through

Akron, dividing it north south. As I stood in that driveway, looking at that house, voices blurred and faded for a moment, and something connected me to the ground, as though my feet had sprouted roots.

Where the veil between the known and unknown is lifted for a moment, we get a brief look at the other side. This is a phenomenon understood in native and Celtic traditions, spirituality of place, of the physical mystic potential of spatial encounter. We think of such places as somewhere in the wilderness, the desert, and the woods. They can happen anywhere. They happen on boiling days in July, standing in a driveway of an old foursquare farmhouse on a hill on a mysterious morning of elliptical sightseeing in

Akron.

There was that tug on the sleeve, the roots shooting into the earth from my feet.

The deepest part of the earth held them, as though I could sway in a full arc around them, like the Tinman in the “Wizard of Oz’ - and stay upright, firm and fast. I only noticed it,

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mysterious in coming, mysterious in going. The voices of my sister Kate, Annette and our guide Tom Fuller, came back into comprehension. No one else in the group seemed affected. So I just stayed quiet, got back in the car, reasonably assured that I was outwardly the same to everyone.

The hills of Akron are a string of such places, edgy urban thin spots.

This spiritual bookmark was placed in the middle of my engaged life.

Already overwhelmed by the driveway moment, as we drove through downtown, we passed the Mayflower Hotel. This spot is the spring of Alcoholics Anonymous and the worldwide 12 step recovery movement. I was astonished at its living presence on

Main Street. Though it had seen better days, Art Deco details above the rough ground floor presence gave it a handsome brow. I nodded in its direction, and give a brief benediction of gratitude and acknowledgment for the second instance of Akron saving my life.

The wedding weekend shook the globe of my recreated Manhattan. I was working with good clients, sharing office space in Hell’s Kitchen with architect friends, teaching Portfolio Design at Parsons and swimming every day. I had great friends and a relationship with a wonderful person. How many earmarks of success did I need? Why did I have the persistent restless notion that it was not my life anymore, not the one I was meant to be living?

My restlessness focused on finding a project of worth. I started casting around for something that aligned with my professed social values. It proved to be impossible in New

York. I couldn’t afford to work for next to nothing- and even if I could have managed to be

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more engaged with frisky social entrepreneurs, there was still the ten others who could both afford to and were there ahead of me.

My girlfriend Annette was supportive of my intentions, giving me a very long leash in saying “Just give me the address where to send the peanut butter.”

I wrote to my newly married Peace Corps pal, Anne, to ask her if she knew anything about the Catholic Worker houses in Akron. She did not know much, but she invited me to the 15th

Anniversary celebration of South Street Ministries.

“Come see what we are up to.” she wrote.

“But they are faith-based!” I immediately thought in horror, as though it were a contagious disease. Then I remembered that I had a spiritual life. I remembered the Wedding weekend, the rooted moment in the driveway. Those South Street Ministry people seemed to be living the work I claimed to be interested in, not just talking about it. I made plans to come to the anniversary in March.

The weekend of the South Street anniversary, Anne and Eric hosted me in their newlywed home – an apartment over a garage in Kenmore. Charmed already by this nuptial nest, it lay in close proximity to a LAKE within the city limits. Summit Lake, by geography, age, size and history, would be expected to be the heart of the surrounding neighborhoods, but it acts as a barrier instead. It is the line between two distinct neighborhoods; Summit Lake to the east,

Kenmore to the west. Anne added the further distinction by referring to Summit Lake as the crack side, Kenmore as the meth side.

Verifying her description, the property on the uphill edge of the street had been destroyed in a meth lab explosion four months prior. The house was locally known as “The Alamo” for its volatile activity, its anomalous Spanish flat roof style, and its defensive perch high on the

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natural ridge running the length of the West side of the lake. Walking up the steep drive to the scorched but standing stucco remnant of the house, the acrid mix of mold and melted plastic clung to the place. The view in front of the intriguing ruin was captivating – in front of the backdrop of the remains of South Akron industry, there was this body of water. I was completely enthralled by this natural feature. A reasonable swimmer could cross it five minutes. But it was developed and abused in such a way that its notoriety carried the negative associations of intractable pollution, crime and suicide. No one I talked to seemed half as excited as I was about Summit Lake.

Among other activities around the anniversary, I was graciously invited to attend a meeting of the Board of South Street Ministries. Chatting with Noelle Beck beforehand, we discovered a mutual love of bicycles. I prefer the word bikes to cycling – cycling to me conjures up spandex and equipment. I have never owned a car and bikes have always been my mode. I know that the word bike and biker has been claimed by others, but I persist. Theft took so many of my wheels over the years, that if I called them bikes I got less attached. Bike is something you just jump onto, not get dressed for. Lost in that distinction with Noelle, more of a cyclist, she suddenly said “You know you can ride a bicycle from Akron to Cleveland on a continuous path.”

That was it. That was the keystone moment. The keystone is the central, top stone in any arch. Until the keystone is in place, the two reaching arms of an arch cannot stand unsupported. When the keystone is placed, it locks the arch and all the weight and anything passing on top of the arch is conducted safely down.

The flow of weight becomes liquid, as light as a raindrop down a wall, seeking to return to earth. For me with that bit of news, I experienced an instant physical change. On some level, I

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heard a noise, the grit of stone against stone as the chiseled last bit slid into place between the two sides and the weight of stone became liquid.

I have never made a true arch as an Architect. There are more efficient ways to carry load across an opening today– the strength of industrially produced or enhanced materials far precludes any thought of using the revolutionary Roman building technique now. So while as human beings, we love arches and they continue to appear in our buildings, they are but a child’s rendering of the form – a crude crayon version we applaud and cherish, but is only a line, with no depth. It is a shadow in our human shared psyche - that bold liberating engineering, the Roman curve that changed the world forever.

My life moments are remembered as architecture. The epiphanies take shape as space – often accompanied by sound. It snaps my attention to the present moment in a realignment of everything in my body. The keystone was simultaneous with the decision to move to Akron.

After the assembly of my own reaching arms upward, heavy, that last central stone found its place in a silent slip of stone dust and the arch was complete. The span was made from there -

New York City, to here – Akron, Ohio.

I had grown up only thirty miles from where we sat. Thirty miles I now learned I could ride back to directly. The arch epiphany exploded my sense of pilgrimage. My perpetual yearning to walk the fourth branch of the medieval Camino de Santiago vanished in the sudden understanding that any path is a pilgrimage, that all roads are sacred.

Still blinking and stiff from the impact of Noelle’s offhand remark, voices and people in the room came back into focus. No one at the table noticed I had disappeared and been reconstituted as they spoke. I found out later that these moments I experienced throughout my life are encounters with the mystical, the mystery. It is a kind of spiritual seizure, in which

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everything immediate disappears. I blinked my way back to the present moment as the meeting was about to start. I sat quietly as the meeting opened with a prayer. This was the first time in my life I had ever experienced a business meeting that opened with a prayer. Not that I needed a prayer, having just gotten a direct call.

South Street Ministries was at a point in their story I understood well. Fifteen years is a benchmark for not for profit organizations. They either grow or fade at that point. Working as an architect for artistic institutions at similar points, I recognized that I could be of service to my Akron hosts. By the meeting’s conclusion, my decision was made.

I moved to Akron.

***

We had very little time for our stage painting session. Erin would start cutting in, I would roll after moving or covering the miscellanea that had landed here through the renovation. If you have ever been to an Ethnic social club or hall, you can imagine the look and feel of the room. The stage was perfect for the hall’s original purpose of Croatian family celebrations. It is easy to imagine a band on stage for weddings, baptisms, first communions, anniversaries.

But for a host of reasons it does not invite contemporary performance or churchly use.

Preaching, lectures, poetry and play readings, music – all happen in the space in front of the stage. I moved all the informal stuff, the piano that never gets played, the droopily angled- fringed-eagled-dusty American flag to the center of the stage and covered them, becoming progressively downcast at the condition of the existing walls. They needed more than a coat of paint. Fetching spackle from our house was take 16 minutes round trip. We had barely enough time anyway before the AA meeting. Something else would have to work.

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I took off my shoes and stood on the piano bench. I realized that one coat of the pale blue paint over the existing beige gave the effect of clouds. From the distance the walls would be seen, the suggestion of faux sky would detract sufficiently from the cracks and dings. It was a stage after all. A bit of innocuous scenic detail could not offend anyone.

Erin had finished most of the cutting in before she left. Thinking I might be able to finish up completely, I asked the chair of the AA meeting if I could keep working. Reassuring her that it was quiet work, I also told her I was in recovery, and it would be nice to just listen as I finished painting.

When the meeting was over, I joined in for the closing circle and prayer, thanked them, and went back to painting.

The recovery meetings had just returned to the café after a three month absence during the renovation. From around the corner of the stage, I heard a woman tell the others about the new bathroom.

“Yeah, nice mirror, too”, someone else added. For a moment I thought of stepping out and introducing myself as the architect.

Instead I keep the steady, quiet rhythm of the roller, suggesting clouds on the walls of the café stage.

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THE HOLY SEE

THREE

Archbishop Christophe Pierre Apostolic Nuncio Apostolic Nunciature to the United States Diplomatic Mission of the Holy See 3339 Massachusetts Avenue, Northwest Washington, DC September 23, 2017

“The city is ringed in green ridges breeched by the gentle Cuyahoga Valley winding against and below the street level. In a sense, Akron is an open citadel – one enters the downtown by bridge – over the river or the arched ferocity of expressways. Akron, exalted place.”

THIRD LETTER OF APPEAL: In the cause for public good; Petition on behalf of the

City of Akron for consideration of sainthood.

As explained in the prior appeals, the petitioner understands that the nature of this submission is highly irregular. Until this moment, only human persons have been designated saints within the Roman Catholic Church.

Based on the material submitted in the FIRST AND SECOND LETTER, Petitioner submits evidence of a third, and direct personal instance of divine intervention.

This THIRD LETTER closes the evidentiary presentation in this case.

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Petitioner, in advance of citing the potential controversy around the miracle detailed within this letter, relies on the benevolence of Pope Francis. His apostolic exhortation

Amoris Laetitia,14 he writes that Jesus expects us to enter into the reality of peoples\’s lives; accompanying them as we can, helping to form their consciences.” Petitioner further recognizes the present difficulties of the Church specific to criminal activity among the ordained religious hierarchy. Petitioner takes no position on that or any other issue, referring again to the spoken words of the Pontiff, his Holiness Pope Francis,

“Who am I to judge?”

Petitioner asks only that the Congregation consider the case for geographic place to be recognized as holy, as worthy of designation reserved to date for only human beings.

The Congregation is aware of the consistent thread of the ‘divinity of place’ in the mystical tradition. Since the 2nd Century CE (Anno Domini), in the records of first century Christianity, in the writings of the second century Desert Fathers and Mothers, in the Celtic tradition and throughout two millennia, the spirituality of place has been a consistent school of thought. The Petitioner is not a theologian, and would not burden the Congregation with personal interpretations of the Mystical Traditions. Nor would the

Petitioner expect the Congregation to be swayed by the growing popularity within sectors of the Catholic faithful to practices influenced by such traditions, or by the exhortations of Pope Francis in his Encyclical Laudato Si. Petitioner would instead ask the

Congregation to refer to the body of referential support for this theology, found in the addendum to this letter.

14 Petitioner regrets that this Letter of Appeal is not written in Latin, but as a student in the first year of the Post-Vatican II Catholic School education, Latin as a mandatory subject was removed from the curriculum. Please forgive the use of the vernacular. It does not indicate a lack of formal intention for the Petition.

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The Documented Miracle from the Coalition of Inexplicable Divinity within the Geographic Designation of the City of Akron, State of Ohio, United States

The description of the events outlined below occurred between June 6, 2013 and

October 2014. Witnesses are available to verify every detail of the material. Several of the events outlined herein were open to the public. That said, the Petitioner humbly submits that this is a personal account of Petitioner’s experience. In this case, Petitioner did not anticipate, look for, or was at all expecting the series of events leading to the pivotal event, in the particular place known as Akron, Ohio.

***

“I just don’t think homosexuality is in God’s Plan”.

Pastor Duane Crabbs made this pronouncement as he attempted to stand out of the compressed, sagging lounge chair on the raised platform at the back of Angel Falls

Coffee Shop in Highland Square, Akron Ohio on Thursday June 6, 2013.

For the previous four months, we met weekly for conversation at the popular coffee shop. We were working on a book project about the history of South Street

Ministries, the organization he founded in partnership with his wife, Lisa.

I aimed for nonchalance as we worked our way vertical from the low slung upholstery. There was no way around the simple declaration. I knew we had differing views on the subject, but his blunt statement about homosexuality, about me, to me - silenced me. I shifted to a neutral stance, my normal defense mechanism to dismissive statements.

Typical of Duane, a man who lives in the present moment, he had already started talking to the two people clutching open laptops poised to occupy the seats we had just vacated. Thus freed from responding, I was simultaneously shutting down. Duane had

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exposed the limits to which I could trust him, and self-protection had begun. My demeanor betrayed nothing of the internal process of backing away slowly, shutting the door on the friendship. He was becoming a fixed thing now, an object in my diminishing gaze. I had not set a trap for him, he found it on his own. He was a homophobe.

Those who occupy minority status, in this case my minority, homosexuals, means always contending with the assumptions of the majority. Any kind of minority will be outside the common standards of the majority. Therefore the minority has the gift of seeing and understanding those assumptions that the majority cannot. The majority is reinforced in its view of the world because those values are the common qualities of the crowd. This leads to a more adaptive capacity in the minority; multi-lingual, they understand the nuance of the majority class, but communicate with each other in the minority patois.

This natural imbalance, this reality, has no intrinsic moral value. However, human history continuously trends towards suspicion and control of the majority over the minority. It is not the work of this Petition to speculate in such matters, merely to give the background for the protective reaction of my threatened minority.

Duane’s pronouncement about God’s plan not including homosexuals came at a moment in my personal evolution which allowed for more options as a response. While my first inclination was to shut the door on any deeper potential for our relationship, I stopped the door as it was closing. I held it, paused, gave space for something else to happen.

I recognized that Duane was the one struggling with something here, not me. My only legitimate reaction to his statement was disappointment – nothing in my legal or

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personal life was remotely threatened by his words. Though in his theology he had essentially just banished me from belonging and made me other, I knew him too well to dismiss him as a homophobe, a word that is itself harsh and dismissive. He was not my enemy.

This was my opportunity to respond with love. The personal historic plan of action, removing my heart from the relationship, would be cowardly and lazy. I understood by now that I was not in Akron to build buildings. My work was bridges.

Indignation was a righteous fiction – and the boring expected option compared to the potential for truth and growth.

I took a different course with Duane. He was the one troubled by his indictment, not me. I offered myself to him. I made it clear that whatever assistance I could render in his struggle, I was available. There was no hesitation in this trust, because I knew that he was devoted to those on the margins. I recognized that he, as an Evangelical

Christian, had the potential to help others on both sides of the issue. He had created an environment of safety, a place that was genuine in welcoming all – and in particular those who were otherwise dismissed. If I could be his companion to widen the embrace of the broken souls that find their way to South Street Ministries, what greater service could I render?

Duane is a man true to his own history while continually building relationships with struggling people. He responds to needs as they arise, willing to bear the discomfort and sorrow of the needy and math the level of pain with his compassion and exposure.

Prior to his pastoral work, he was an urban firefighter and paramedic. There is no space for discrimination in emergency response. As a pastor, he operates on that same

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response reflex – triage - the first focus is given to the highest and most immediate need.

He moves forward not by the exterior picture, but is drawn by the heat of the beating, bleeding sacred heart of any person. He moves aside the obstacles of issues or barriers to stand with the individual.

In the early 1980s, when the mechanism for transmission of the mysterious disease of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) was still unknown, becoming infected was a death sentence. As a paramedic in Cleveland at that time, Duane cared for many early AIDS patients. As a first line responder, Duane would routinely handle people suffering from the opportunistic diseases preying on the bodies of people with collapsed immune systems. Many health care professionals routinely refused to touch such patients, fearing any exposure to what was a mysterious plague.

Gloves were not mandatory at the time. Emergency responses can be chaotic and unpredictable. Duane often incurred accidental needle punctures. In 1984, scientists discovered that bodily fluid was the source of transmission, and created a blood test for

HIV. Duane tested negative for the virus – he was not infected with AIDS.

Duane was not a patronizing Christian around gay people, the type who ‘love the sinner, hate the sin.’ I recognize that kind of arm’s length outward kind shaming, and am fine about being a token, hoping it can be a start to something better. I move forward in the belief that familiarity alters the character of their posed display of tolerance into something deeper – for both sides. With Duane, I had already chosen silence a few times when I could have taken the opportunity to point out that there is no such thing as “a gay lifestyle”

I couldn’t walk away. We had a strong net of connection by this point.

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First, we were solid. We were friends. We loved each other.

Second, we were working on a book together, the South Street story.

Third, he was “my client.” He and his wife Lisa had created South Street

Ministries sixteen years earlier from the house they moved into with their four children.

They deliberately chose to live in the second highest crime neighborhood, a place few people with means to choose would ever pick. Steadily the ministry grew from their house to the point where they had been given a building. I met them on a weekend visit to Akron. I was an architect looking for a project that reflected my social conscience.

Their free building needed an architect. They did not ask me, but I decided they needed me. In a reversal of the normal practice, I picked them as my client. I just knew it was what I was meant to do. I moved to Akron from New York City on the strength of a weekend visit.

Fourth, we had entertained an audience at the Akron Art Museum with our unlikely partnership. The museum invited Duane to participate in an experiment they called Slide Jam. We were the last presenters in what turned out to be a much longer event that the format is designed to be. But we got the attention of the weary audience in our representation of two very different worlds together on the stage and in life. Duane and I had the theatrical tension of contradiction, the suspense of opposites and a powerful message. We could laugh together about the stereotype of our story as the common grist of daytime talk shows: “The story of the New York lesbian architect and the storefront evangelical pastor finding common ground, in Akron, Ohio.”

Fifth, Duane and I were the Akron representatives on the Spiritual Committee for the Gay Games. Every month for the nine months leading up to the events of August

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2014, we drove to the Gay and Lesbian Center in Cleveland to meet with participating, supportive clergy. I was designing the spiritual space for the Gay games Olympic

Village. At those meetings, Duane never exhibited any of the common traits of a straight man in a room of gay men. He was completely himself, neither threatened nor flattered by the ordinary attention of men who also happened to be homosexual.

Sixth, Duane is an essential character in this Petition for the Consideration of the

Beatification of Akron.

Any one of those first five truths was enough for me to choose a loving response over a protective reaction. But beyond those existing conditions, the most compelling force keeping me open despite Duane’s offhand dismissive remark was as yet unknown to me. Had I known where it would lead, I never would have agreed. I gave not knowing that I was orchestrating the conditions for the third time Akron would save my life.

No, I decided to be his ambassador to my culture because I thought I owed it to him as a friend and because I thought I was in control.

In the offering of myself and my experience to Duane, I was unwittingly choosing a path that would perch me – and send me - over an abyss. On June 6, 2013 I had no idea

I needed any more enlightenment about myself. I thought I had already cast off any old dark thing that kept me from a good life. In the similar way of transformational experiences, I did not see this coming. I thought I was transformed.

But I was mistaken.

Our relationship stayed as easy as it had been, and we were never formal in discussing homosexuality. We never consulted the “clobber passages” in the Bible. There was no focus group. There remained plenty of small points we saw differently about the God/homosexuality

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question, but if anything our appreciation of each other and trust through those differences only grew deeper.

In the fall of 2013, Duane asked me to share my story after he gave the Sunday message at South Street. Up to this point, he had never expressed a public position on the divisive issues of abortion and homosexuality. He resisted being in someone else’s category. But he was prepared to address one of the two “Third Rail” issues. When he asked if I would be willing to say something about my experience, I simply said yes. I trust the heart of this unusual man.

Besides, I thought I was steering the ship, so it was a pleasure to be of service. I had not the slightest suspicion of what was ahead.

The Front Porch Café was church in a more formal sense on Sunday. The renovation was moving slowly, as the modest fundraising efforts took shape. Up to this point all I had designed was the handicapped entry ramp at the side parking lot and the new front entry door. “Everybody deserves good design” had become my operating philosophy, but building that philosophy was another matter. It was a poor church, and the money for the renovation came slowly. South Street Ministries did not pass a basket or appeal for contributions from those who came to church.

But even the two small changes made a big impact. The handicapped ramp just made it easier for a lot of people to come in. The clear glass storefront entry door with a customized teak wood handle replaced a blank solid steel door. The new door gave a completely different feeling to entering the building. Just the simplicity of the human hand touching wood, the free light passing into the interior was uplifting. It graced the act of entry, and changed people’s posture from defensive to the expectation of welcome.

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During the week, the building was a café, but midday Sunday, it was church. It was one big room with a stage at one end, giving hints of its earlier purpose. Fifty years prior, when the street pulsed with shops and markets, it was the Croatian American Club.

The stage and open space hosted the weddings, confirmations, and baptisms for the immigrant community.

At first, I came to church in a professional sense, to understand the needs of the place, to translate their hopes to the concrete reality of the physical building. Sitting through the evangelical Jesus-focused messages, I was introduced to the beauty, lyricism and poetry of the

Bible, that book that Catholics don’t read. I found I was strangely receptive to what was happening in that room. I liked being among people who interpreted things differently than I did. We were all focused in the same direction. I let go of being the smartest person in the room and listened. There was something going on in that modest brick two story in a neighborhood that had seen better days.

For the benefit of this Petition, I provide the Congregation with the common format for worship at South Street Ministries. Starting twenty minutes after the designated time is routine. Unprogrammed socializing and milling about is normal. The café setup encourages such interaction. At a certain point, Toni and Cynethia step up to the front to lead singing with the accompanying recorded music, generally confined to the same three upbeat contemporary Christian Gospel songs. This is followed by “Open

Worship”, a time when people can share something of their joys or sorrows with all. The assembly is witness and participant in these shares, and joins in prayers for the person so sharing. Duane will then preach and sometimes there is communion.

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It can be very lively in the room. The building is in a transitional area, close to an off ramp of the highway, two local correctional facilities, the county jail, the Plasma

Center, many halfway and rooming houses and the University of Akron campus. Lots of people who would not feel comfortable in other churches come to South Street.

Duane as a pastor never takes advantage of the emotions displayed in church. It is just a very mixed group and many things could, and do happen. While not straying from its evangelical nature, it was spontaneous, real, and emotional – but with the leadership of Duane, never manipulative of the vulnerability so often present on a Sunday at South Street.

The regularity of the service, the coffee, the giant bag of donated bread and muffins Joe Heindel picks up every Sunday, and the genuine, real, nonjudgmental nature of the place drew people from all social and religious groups in Akron and beyond.

Duane is an incredible presence on his feet, starting with his prepared message and going where it takes him. Attending had given me a new lens for my own beliefs. I found myself capable of participating fully while grounded and growing in a different theology

– a growing understanding and appreciation for the mystic tradition within the Roman

Catholic Church.

His message that particular Sunday began with statistics. Numbers and percentages around all kinds of sexual crime and misbehavior were brought forth. It was dry and rambling, his point unclear. After what seemed a phone book’s worth of basic terrible numbers about pornography, sex trafficking, prostitution, child sexual abuse and predatory acts, he stopped.

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“And Christian Evangelicals raised thirty nine million dollars to support

Proposition 815 in California. What could that same money have done if we

had applied it to any of those other issues? It just was not that important.

The world has moved on.”

Duane beckoned me and Ben to come forward. I felt comfortable, relaxed and confident. Ben is a tall slim young man. He has a beautiful big smile that turns his eyes into arches that seem to reach to the smile below. We sat together on the lip of the stage during Duane’s introduction. I knew these people, they knew me. I had my well- adjusted persona firmly in place. Ben identifies as homosexual, but has decided, based on his religious beliefs, to live a celibate life. He too, presented a comfortable, happy demeanor with his decision.

I had an upbeat, sincere but formulaic message about a journey of self-acceptance growing into pride and a good life. I wanted them to feel as comfortable as I was.

“The thing you should know is that homosexuality is not a choice. Why would anyone take the path that includes alienation from your family, contempt and physical danger? Not me! I tried to be straight for a long time. But it was not right for me and I made lousy choices because it wasn’t true for who I really was. Once I accepted myself, I could finally grow. As I said, not a choice, this is natural for about 10-15% of human beings. God made us this way, so how could it be wrong? It would be wrong not to live into this mysterious gift of God’s intention.”

As Ben and I spoke, there were some people who got up and left. However, comings and goings were common at South Street. People took smoking breaks. I once

15 Proposition 8 was a California Ballot Proposition and state constitutional amendment passed in November 2008. The measure countermanded the intention of the State Supreme Court’s ruling legalizing same-sex marriage. After lengthy subsequent suits, Prop 8 was effectively declared unconstitutional by the Federal Ninth Circuit Court on June 28, 2013, allowing Governor Jerry Brown to order the resumption of same-sex marriages in the State of California. 241

saw Mark White get up and leave and come back to his seat carrying a large box of pizza.

I tried not to assume anything. Aside from that, it seemed to me that the room progressively settled and quieted as we spoke.

Complete silence. Uncomfortable silence. Long.

Duane invited questions.

Kim Jones raised her hand.

“Mary, you said something about shame. What did you mean?”

I was momentarily thrilled. I had the perfect example for Kim’s question about shame, and did not stop to think of where I was going. Something very big had just happened in my life, and it fit her question perfectly. I was so happy to have an answer, to be ‘helpful’, to be that hyperactive child again, third grade, third row, last seat, arm shooting straight up, straining the seams of my plaid uniform trying to get the attention of

Sister Claudette.

My friend Eric was standing in the back of the room. I stepped closer to everyone.

“Well, everyone here knows Eric, that tall guy back there with the awesome beard, right? And you all know that he and Anne recently had their first baby. I can tell you something about shame. Now, I grew up Catholic. We all had a lot of shame heaped our way. We all had what were called ‘impure thoughts’, turning our souls from white to some shade of grey. But my stuff was a little different. I just accepted that I was a bad person. Those were the messages I got from my church. I was in a state of sin, outcast, could not take the sacrament of Communion - for being who I was.

It got better when I found out I was not alone, that I was not the only person who ever lived who had those feelings. My life definitely got better. “But - My whole life I was always careful. I went out of my way to be as perfect as possible around children – even or maybe especially my sister’s and brother’s children. I was just that way, I never really questioned why. But it meant I never got genuinely close to my nieces and nephews and my friend’s kids - because I was never truly myself, I was too busy looking good. But those kids all had a great time. I was the definitely fun aunt.

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Anne and Eric bought a big old house in Highland Square and before they moved in they asked me to consider being their third floor tenant. I had decided to move to Akron from New York, to work with South Street, so I said yes without hesitation. It is a fabulous place, right, I know a lot of you have been over? I love that space! It has a great view of downtown in the winter when the trees are bare. Everything was going great. We are very close friends, and we had no issues as tenant/landlord. We painted the house together that summer, caulked all the windows, and shared just about everything.

But when Anne and Eric got pregnant, I started planning to move out. I had a book to write, architecture work to do, how could I do that with a baby crying? I found another place to live without telling them. I was going to move. However, I knew there was something not right about what I was doing. It felt like an old pattern. On some level I knew I was running away from something. So I called someone to talk it through. But I chose the one person I thought most likely to agree with me, who would back up my decision to move out. I called Anne’s mother. Meanwhile I still had not said anything to Anne or Eric and was getting ready to pack up.

Sue, Anne’s mother, took a pause after I asked her opinion. She said “Why would you do a thing like that?” It was the question, but more so the tone of her voice that took me by surprise. She sounded... bewildered, heartbroken that I would be cutting myself from the opportunity to share in family. I had expected confirmation, and instead I got … something else. In that something else, I finally got it. Just like that I understood what all that careful behavior around children was really all about. I felt I had to leave, to slip out the door in the middle of the night without telling. I had to do that before I got attached to that baby and they would ask me to leave because they found out I was a filthy, child-molesting lesbian.”

I was suddenly silent, stilled, frozen over what I had just said. Those feelings were true, but to hear myself say it aloud gave me a long hall of mirrors picture of my whole life in a single flash. In the shock wave that followed, I stood in expectation of a stoning. I felt I could be eliminated, destroyed, stomped out by the mob. But the feeling of danger, the vacuum was confined; it endured only long enough for me to adjust to a new fresh-eyed view. It was a view from the end of something, a perspective possible when we dare to turn around and see the past in a completely new light. One might look back and have sudden horrifying remorse over something misinterpreted. Or quite the

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opposite. For me, it proved to be liberating. All those years, bound by a myth not of my own creation, suddenly gone.

And if the opportunity comes up to share the concrete immediacy of such discoveries, to announce the naked shame, something opposite is simultaneously born.

The intensity of that bonding moment is so powerful it never comes undone. That is what happened to us in the room, in that place, on that day. I had no idea the bargain with God for liberation involved a public confession. There was not one person in that room who did not identify with my shame. It may not have been their shame, but it spoke to their own terrible burden. The burden of institutionalized or generational – or both - shame of a deep intractable shade. Shame of poverty, skin color, incarceration, abuse, addiction, wealth, persecution. As Duane said, the world had moved on. So could we. There was nothing further to be said that day.

Petitioner, in describing the circumstances of inexplicable divinity, concludes the formal

Third Letter of the Petition for the case of Akron’s sainthood. As stated in the FIRST and

SECOND LETTER(s), dated respectively October 8, 2016, and May 2017, the humble nature of the place of these occurrences aligns with the holy places of deepest association in the history of Christianity. The material following is submitted as additional supporting documentation of impartiality of witness supporting the designation.

Petitioner respectfully awaits further word from the Congregation for the Causes of

Saints.

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NO SMALL PARTS

University of Akron, Akron Ohio, December 2015

It was just an 8 ½ x 11 black and white flyer, “AUDITION” taking up half the sheet, pinned up all over campus. There were a few reasons I decided to respond to the lure of the invitation. I missed theatrical people. There was minimal rehearsal. It was an all-woman thing.

The most intriguing aspect, however, was the venue for the production; E.J. Thomas Hall. The home of the Akron Symphony Orchestra, it seats 2,955 people. I could not imagine how the intimacy of The Vagina Monologues could work on a stage the size of a tennis court, projecting into that vast audience. Intrigued by the challenge, I called the number and showed up for an audition.

The Vagina Monologues had its premiere in the basement of the Cornelia Street Café in

Greenwich Village exactly twenty years prior. It was curated, assembled, written and performed in its debut by Eve Ensler, based on conversations and interviews she conducted with over 200 women. The shock of its title and the power of the monologues made it an instant hit. In its stark simplicity, the play presents a succession of personal stories radiating from the physical plexus of the most basic element of female identity. The simple format of the piece, the variety of experience in the stories, and the deep emotional impact on an audience had lasting power, long after the initial shock value of the play’s title.

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I was offered two very small bits, introductions to the actual monologues. In comfort to such humiliations comes the saying “There are no small parts, only small actors.” But I was not so sure I wanted to stay with it. My interest had diminished, worn off by the imagined reality of two performances in the vast cavern of E.J. Thomas Hall in the middle of February.

Would anyone come? It was a glum and chilly choice for Valentine’s Day weekend. I was tempted to bow out, thinking they would not miss me for such a slight presence in the piece.

I recognized it was my bruised ego doing the thinking here. The entire commitment was only one weekend. Come what may, I said yes.

The first and only rehearsal was at E.J. Thomas. The Vagina Monologues was an annual campus event, attracting a core group of participants. I was definitely the outlier in the cast. But the slight discomfort of otherness had become normal. By the time I stood watching women greet each other with joyful hugs, I was midway in the first year of a graduate writing program. It had been thirty years since I was last a student. By this point, I was accustomed to and enjoyed the culture shock of moving through a state college campus environment.

I had learned by now to relax in the frequent discomfort of being unintentionally ignored. I entered in anyway. The invisibility is balanced by the idea of a scrubbed identity, a sense of having no past at all.

This status gives a rare chance to truly see how one is perceived merely by physical presence. In my case, the physical presentation is old. Being over sixty in the youthful ambiance of a state university, I was overlooked. Human beings generalize – it is a simple primal survival instinct. At my age in a college setting, my colleague students unconsciously position me in the non-threatening and dismissed category “old”. Its fine, I am old. The

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advantage in this particular setting is that old often means Professor old, therefore usually accorded a degree of respectful dismissal.

The basic procedure of theatrical undertakings were in place at the first reading. The stage manager with a clip board, the director, the tech guy, the actors talking and drinking coffee. There is an inherent drama about performance space. There we all were, in the heart of it, on the stage. On the other side of the fire curtain, there was the cold, dark vastness of empty seats in the house. We were warm in the work lights, surrounded by the wings, the flys, and the familiar dusty hot smell of anticipation.

Being new to a familiar troupe gave me the opportunity to ask a lot of questions.

Everyone else knew the routine. This was the eighth annual staging of the Monologues, and some of the cast had been in all previous productions. The mood was jubilant. This year’s production was not meant to be, but they made it happen. The Multi-Cultural Studies

Department sponsored the event, but the entire department was eliminated in a massive fiat at the start of the academic year by the new President of the University. The professor who conceived and directed the piece every year lost her job. But she came back to shepherd the

Vagina Monologues on her own time once more.

The technical director outlined the format for the event. All my assumptions and doubts were lifted by his words. Everyone – actors, technician and audience, were arranged on the tennis court-sized stage. The performance area was a 5” raised platform, ringed on the three sides with cabaret table seating. Behind the tables and loose café chairs, three rows of riser platforms held conventional seating. The intimacy of this arrangement would be heightened by its fragility on the concert stage, a small flame below the vast dark fly space above our heads.

All of us gathered on the concert stage would be separated from the cavernous and darkened

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house by the fire curtain, a thick solid wall that descends from the fly space in conformance with fire prevention codes.

E.J. Thomas is a professional venue. The technical director and the entire back of house staff are members of Local 48 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Employees.

Based on my close contact with ‘union houses’, the stagehands take their work very seriously, on a standard that seems a throwback to medieval pride in guild membership. We were in good hands.

The simple and seductive arrangement was enhanced by tea lights on the tables. The chairs were dressed in fabric covers favored by caterers at backyard weddings. Behind the performance area, mounted on the fire curtain in big red cut out letters “VAGINA

MONOLOGUES” – in the gap between the two words, a red satin pillow one could possibly mistake for a flower, but given its position, definitely a fabric vagina. Stagehands and the cast were warming up with a calm sense of familiarity. I was neither accepted nor rejected, so started to introduce myself to a continuing ripple of welcome and cascade of names.

It was a dire time for University of Akron. The previous week there was a no- confidence vote against the president 50 – 2. His dramatic steps to redirect the mission of the school had been a constant battle since September. The programming for E.J. Thomas had been drastically altered, effectively dimming the lights and shutting down the operation as a legitimate venue for booking traveling performance events. Often the Union members came to work - without any work to do.

But exterior distractions evaporated once we started working. The women were relaxed and committed. We were a diverse body and our voices reflected that.

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Immediately after rehearsal, I was approached by the woman speaking I Was There In the Room, one of the two monologues I was introducing.

She looked distressed.

“I hope you don’t mind – well, I was wondering if you would switch with me?? I would rather do the introduction, and if ---“

What she thought of as an imposition, a favor, was exactly what I was hoping for.

I Was There In the Room is the one monologue I would have chosen to perform. The speaker describes childbirth from the perspective of being in the room, of assisting and being present for the birth of a baby. Within the space of her question and my answer, I knew I could embody the spirit of witnessing childbirth, though I never had and, probably never would. My deep desire to be there-in the room was more than enough.

“Yes, I would be glad to switch with you.”

I knew that I would spend the next day before the first performance getting as much of it under my belt as I could. Our one and only rehearsal over, we were reminded to come to the stage door an hour before the performance. We could wear whatever we wanted, as long as it was black and/or red.

Over the next twenty four hours, I honored the piece by memorizing it, by becoming it.

I rehearsed it at home over and over, putting my imagination into an experience I would never know.

As I repeated the monologue facing no one, alone in my bedroom, I prepared myself for the possibility of an empty audience that weekend. The forecast for Valentine’s Day weekend

2016 were dismal. The repeated loop of gloom was subzero temperatures, high gusting winds

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and heavy snowsqualls. It looked to be far better conditions for romance at home than attending a political polemic guilt-inducing play.

Each of the participants got four complimentary tickets, and after I had my monologue down, I decided to invite people. It was hard to imagine the choice of slicing through driving winds for what had by now become far less shocking territory than it once was. Vaginas still spoke into the cultural conversation, but we all kind of knew what they had to say. Or so we thought in February 2016, before a national election that would expose that assumption.

Unsure initially of what it would be, I had not told anyone that I was in a production of

The Vagina Monologues at The University of Akron. I also had said nothing to my fellow actors that I had a personal history with the playwright Eve Ensler.

The Smog of Smug – Los Angeles, September 1996

There was a brief time in Los Angeles when my ex-partner Cherry Jones and I were the new fun lesbian couple in town. Cherry had a tremendous success with a Broadway play that garnered her, and by association me, automatic membership into the famous club. That is how it happens. The gate simply swings open and you are in, rubbing shoulders with famous people who act like they always knew you. It is seductive and fun.

I had experienced a variation on my own merits after designing a theater in Sag Harbor five years prior to the Los Angeles tenure. The project had the support of a dizzying list of accomplished writers and actors. We hit the cultural and economic landscape at an optimal moment, it had just enough of that against all odds spice, and it all happened in an old, beautiful, historic town on the east coast of Long Island. It was my first project and it launched my career as an architect.

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Cherry was committed to a three month run in Los Angeles at the Mark Taper Forum in the play that launched her into a new category of genuine theatrical stardom. I came to visit frequently. The Los Angeles lesbian scene in the mid-nineties was a different universe from our New York life. Los Angeles felt like a curated exhibition of the new lesbian. Everything about it felt calculated and false to us. It was as though we had won tickets in a Sapphic lottery, except we were coming in on a Greyhound bus from Bismarck, North Dakota. Bits of straw clung to our frumpy clothes. Our newly minted membership in the famous club included entrée to the lesbian power elite also, and it was simply assumed that we wanted a seat at the table.

That coveted table included producers and agents, mostly, powerful women behind the cameras. Open Hollywood lesbians working in front of the camera in 1996 were non-existent.

Ellen Degeneres in 1997 became the first open lesbian actress to play an open lesbian character on television. The table also included Eve Ensler. Cherry and I met Eve at a party. Like everyone else, she was thin and clad in black. The second encounter was one endless brunch with Eve at the center of the table and arrayed on both sides, disciples. Cherry and I were in the middle on the opposite side, the witnesses to this familiar tableau. Eve was a fellow guest at a baby shower for a lesbian couple expecting twins. Hollywood churns success. This couple had the mojo of impending motherhood which tended to blur the reality of their lack of success in other areas. They had a special pass, having raised their impending motherhood to a political issue. They knew how to work it. I think they took entitlement lessons at Skull &

Bones Dining Club at Yale.

The focal point of the shower was a craft project focused on creating a statement of something vaguely spiritual. Crafts at showers are normal fare now, but in the mid-nineties it

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was novel. There was something untrustworthy about the whole thing – it just felt false. All that black million dollar clothing on a herd of minx.

Cherry and I just didn’t get it, were not interested in identity politics. The charm of our presence quickly wore off with the swanky Hollywood lesbian A-listers. We were dowdy and old-fashioned and impervious to cool. We felt outside issues, content to operate in a world of our own making. It was easy to step away from this Hollywood striving elitism, but I see now it was one indication of a lack of empathy for women in general. The engaging aspects of our carefree urban life were also our traps. We kind of floated above it all. We had a stunningly modest design for living, played out in a 323 square feet apartment and covering the town by bicycle. But the humble manner, our sort of model lesbian couple was in some ways a front.

You don’t see what you don’t want to see. And we both had a dose of self-made superiority and judgment that created a frosty zone of protection from other women.

We were smug.

New York City, Helen Hayes Theater, 1996

Eve asked Cherry to participate in a reading of her play Necessary Targets. Based on the experience of women during the war in Bosnia, the event was a benefit for Bosnian women brutalized in rape camps during the conflict. At the risk of my going to that “special place in hell for women who do not support women”16, the play itself was mediocre, but the subject vital, urgent. Even as the reading was happening, systematic degradation, genocide and rape continued in Bosnia. Eve went to Bosnia twice; in 1994, she interviewed the refugee women, and returned in 1995 to interview women who worked with the victims.

16 The words of Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign rally in New Hampshire Saturday February 6, 2016. She was Secretary of State in Hillary’s husband, Bill’s cabinet. 252

The plan was passionate, filled with good intention, urgency and earnest intensity. The reading also quivered with another kind of excitement; it had theatrical buzz. It was a hot ticket.

A hot ticket and a feel good event. It was an event disguised as a reading. The stage was more boxing ring than neutral space, populated with acting heavyweights Meryl Streep, Angelica

Huston and the New York insider’s favorite, Cherry Jones.

It was a highly skilled slugfest up there. Meryl Streep did not work in live theater.

But if she was a cocoon in rehearsal, she emerged with a tremendous wing span, spread her color and flew in the performance. Cherry and Angelica, to their credit, simply backed off when Meryl turned on all acting cylinders. It was a great deal of fun for the audience – and though no winner in that race was declared, it was hands down Meryl’s night.

The “rumor on the Rialto” theater gossip the next day was about the actors. Those present tell stories about the actors strutting their stuff, nothing about the play, or the plight of the Bosnian women.

Republic of Macedonia: International Women’s Day March 8, 2007

One night, alone in the dark of a familiar work site in Manhattan, I was crossing a room quickly to reach the electrical box. I fell straight down into an unanticipated new opening in the floor.

That got my attention.

Fortunately, I was caught by a tangle of obsolete wiring. I pulled the lower two-thirds of me back up and crawled on all fours in the darkness slowly back to the door. I was not making good decisions.

In the territory of profound loss, the old moral compass spins like a cheap fan. Good choices and terrible ones have equal weight. Hopefully, grace, good luck, higher power,

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Guardian Angel – something- steers the shoulders ever so lightly away from the edge. For the last year of my Mother’s life, Cherry and I took care of her. She lived in my office, a studio apartment just like ours, directly below us. In the same state of peace as her life in Manhattan had been, she died there, at 4 a.m. as my brother held one hand and I the other, the world around us silent and blizzard white. Six weeks later, with equal finality, Cherry and I broke up.

In the extreme places is where we find out who we really are. It was quite a view once my eyes adjusted to the darkness. There is all the stuff, scattered all over. At the bottom of my well, among the unexpected detritus that I cannot forget was my unrecognized personal misogyny. I thought I had outgrown the vengeful, jealous anger of being born female. I had merely turned it towards other women.

I was not making good decisions in my work life, taking on too many projects based on emotional connections. As a licensed Architect, mistakes have expensive, time consuming or dangerous consequences.

Wringing my hands after the tsunami in Thailand, I wanted to stop wringing my hands and start using them. Then I fell through the floor.

I needed a change. I joined the Peace Corps, serving as a volunteer a nine hour bus ride from Bosnia. I was living within what had been Yugoslavia. The plight of the women in the

Eve Ensler play resulted from the violent breakup of that socialist country.

I had been in my town for three months preceding International Women’s Day. What gets a minor nod in the USA is a major event in many countries. March 8th events honoring women range in character around the world and reflect the national culture. With all my female colleagues in the local city government, dressed in our best, we walked in an informal parade to a local restaurant for lunch. We spent the entire afternoon together, endlessly

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dancing the Oro, watching others dancing the oro, eating, drinking, smoking, while dancing the oro.

A friend and fellow Peace Corps volunteer organized a private reading of The Vagina

Monologues. It was private because both the Peace Corps and the climate of Macedonia would have shut us down if they had known. Kate invited female volunteers for a weekend.

Such travel was common for volunteers – travel from one place to another could devour time, so generally visits included at least one night, usually two. We were to meet at the apartment of a volunteer in a central location. The new republic of Macedonia, a Vermont-sized oval shaped dominion, has a total population of two million. It’s a big family – everyone knows each other. That is, the 75% ethnic Macedonians know each other and the 25% ethnic

Albanians know each other.

About half of the Peace Corps volunteers in our group were English teachers. The women who came to the event brought some of their adult female students. The brilliance of

Kate’s plan was that it brought Albanian and Macedonian women together in a non-political, non-family setting. They could leave their ethnicity at the door and be women together. These opportunities simply did not exist otherwise.

We cooked together the morning of the reading, for the dinner that would follow the reading. Kate had distributed the monologues and we traded roles as seemed better for the whole piece. We were a group of 30 or so, a mix of ages from three cultures. The size of the living room made for a tight group around the little stool at the center of the half circle. The performers waited in the adjacent room, scripts in hand. I tied a red scarf around my head for the elderly woman monologue. The Albanian and Macedonian woman participated, reading a few lines in English they had practiced in their classes with the volunteers. The living room

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theatricality, the frank material, the joining of cultures, the easy camaraderie of women within the clandestine event, the magic happened. Those of us who thought we knew the play found oceans of new meaning. There was an attentiveness and a stillness in the space of it all – the collective energy of saving the sensation that was so fleetingly generated. Kate had created a safe space, a place for a permanent memory. I told her then and I maintain it now – it was one of the most powerful moments of transformative theater I had ever experienced.

After the reading, we set out the feast. While everyone else was eating, I found myself on the balcony with a nervous, chain smoking Albanian woman who spoke perfect English.

She was terribly distressed about something, and I listened, chain-smoking along with her.

I immediately felt a bond with her, despite our substantial differences in age, culture, experience and religion. Azah was wrestling with a personal matter and how it would affect her family if she were to be honest with them. She was the oldest in her family of four girls.

Albanians tend to have big families, and if there is no male in the lineage, the oldest girl is accepted as the man. She becomes the patriarch of the next generation, not her husband, should she marry. Azah was racked with pain as she considered that she might have to leave the country. She loved her family, but could not see how she could stay within the traditions it would require her to follow. I sensed she was gay, but did not ask, in respect of her situation.

Within this small country and that culture at the time, she could be in physical danger with such a rumor. We just held the space together in love. It was just one of those rare moments when two strangers come together long enough to be intimate in the truest way.

That early spring weekend is also marked by the realization that I was in love with someone who was in love with me, though again, nothing yet had been spoken. We were in that sensuous moment where there is a nimbus of joy and pleasure around the two so engaged.

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The time when an ordinary trip through the outdoor market on a warm Saturday morning takes you through the looking glass into a world where every object is electric with promise.

EJ Thomas Hall February 13, 2016

Fortunately for our stalwart band of black and red draped feminists, despite the discouraging predicted combination of strong wind, low temperature and snow, we only got the snow. People came. We mingled with the audience before the performance.

I had invited my housemate Cheryl. She is fifty five and had never heard of The Vagina

Monologues. Cheryl was recovering from her life in Cleveland, doing well with a new start in

Akron. She smiled and giggled with her hand over her mouth, teeth not in, self-conscious saying the v-word.

The Vagina Monologues is remarkably sturdy. The piece continues to be relevant because we have to keep working on the staggering inequities of the power imbalance on so many levels between men and women. 2016 was the twentieth anniversary of the play. When it debuted in New York, Christopher Isherwood of the New York Times called it "probably the most important piece of political theater of the last decade."17 This annual production, sponsored by a department that had been deemed unimportant by The University of Akron, had a following, a vitality. It was well-publicized and nearly sold out. The proceeds of the two day event went to the Rape Crisis Center. In the brief time of our work together, I had been folded into the mix, was no less a part for my recent association. We were ready.

17 "The Culture Project and Plays That Make a Difference". The New York Times. 3 September 2006. Retrieved 9 March 2016. 257

On the radio between the rehearsal and the show that Friday, I heard a piece on NPR about a suicide bombing that happened a few days ago in a refugee camp in Nigeria. A refugee camp that was home to 50,000 people fleeing the terror of Boko Haram. Two of the three girls detonated their vests, while a third took off the vest as soon as she got out of sight of her captors. Her father lived in this camp. It is believed that Boko Haram is holding hundreds of girls and children. Children and girls are better for suicide bombings because they do not arouse suspicion under the loose garments covering the vests. I couldn’t stop wondering,

“How they can carry the weight of explosives strapped onto their thin frames?”

The facts such as they are so horrible. I just happened to hear this story on the radio.

There 50,000 in one refugee camp in one place in Nigeria. How many more stories are there and what am I doing about that.

But that story is exactly why The Vagina Monologues is important. It’s a celebration, a mourning, a reminder of our obligation as women is to help other women. We perform The

Vagina Monologues to lift the cloud of shame we share as women.

Shame. In my litany of shame, I was threatened with a gun in my home by a stranger intent on rape. By a fortunate arrangement of circumstances, he did not succeed. I came away shaken, with bruises on my neck, but intact. I tell you this now because there is a detail in this story I lied about for years. In fact, until right now. When asked one particular question, I simply lied.

So here and now, the truthful answer.

“No. I did not report this to the police. “

I told myself I just wanted to put it behind me. I didn’t think it would do any good anyway. I was fine.

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The incident was stored away with all the rest of the stuff that did not quite have a name or identity.

The tech director gave us our ten minute call. We exited the stage together, stepping off the concert stage into the house, a chill sea of empty seats stretching up and away in the dim light. In our winter coats, silent, listening, we paced or sat along the first two rows as the audience grew calm.

After the introduction to my piece, I cultivated a moment of silence to gather in the audience as I slowly put the script down, walked closer to them, and spoke. “I was there when her vagina opened.”

I knew I had the audience. I looked people in the eye as I spoke the poem, making

Eve’s experience and words my own. I made it my own, and it became my own, that was the power that day. Three months later, I was in the room, counting my niece Nell through the last contractions, my hands on her knees with my sister Julie, as she gave birth to her son Calvin.

It did become my story. Though I was aware by now of the power of telling stories, it really never occurred to me to tell my own. I accommodated whatever happened to me, using some sort of sanitizing emotional filing system with a foolproof lock and key.

But the stage is a place of shared truth. Even so, it is rare, such moments. But when they happen, the whole room holds its breath. Every once in a while, a group of people in the dark are drawn into a story not of their own experience, that becomes a part of who they are, and the world is changed.

I was there in my room. He Was There in the Room. With a gun. This is my story.

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Avery Fischer Hall May 4, 1980 - The day of the Horowitz Concert, A Monologue

“Twenty-four and dressed to the nines, I walked out of my building on a beautiful

Sunday morning in May. I was meeting my brothers for lunch, then going to a Vladimir

Horowitz concert with my best friend, tickets for which meant I had stood in line for hours before the box office opened. Horowitz rarely performed by that time, and there was that very real possibility that any public performance could be his last.

My heels, staccato on the sidewalk, brisk, happy sound, until, realizing I forgot something, I turned back. My super and his family were sitting on the planter outside the building.

“What did you forget today, Mary?”

I laughed as I entered the building with a man coming in behind me. As I opened the door of my apartment, there he was, tight against me, sharp pressure in my ribs, closing the door behind him. “I have a gun.”

There is a man, with a gun, alone with me in my apartment. He is there, in my room. I am perhaps already not there.

It’s a small studio, the bed straight across from the front door, and in the time it takes to say this, he is on top of me on the bed.

I was wearing a black dress, about knee length, full skirted, with a white formal jacket over it. Stockings, and the shoes. This now horizontal outfit is crushed by a black man in his early twenties, wearing a cap, scar on his cheek, hand over my mouth.

I say he is black because he happened to be black. He was one particular person, not an entire race or gender.

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I am trying to stay calm as the adrenaline bounces through my body. I am talking, the hand gone from my mouth. Rather I am maybe whimpering, pleading quietly, at this point. I am pinned but my hands are free. His one arm across my chest and the other working the dress up, stockings down. As this torrent of sounds comes out of me, I have the presence of mind to pat down his jacket pockets. No gun. The man does not have a gun.

I don’t stop talking the entire time he is there, in my room. Nor do I stop thinking.

He has no gun.

The man goes down on me. There he is, suddenly, vulnerable between my legs.

There is a rock. On my desk. At the foot of bed. In arm’s reach. ‘Take the rock, Mary, smash it on the top of his head. No, no, can’t do that. I raise my high heeled foot as still the torrent of words keeps flowing out of me,

My foot on his shoulder, I push his face away from my vag-….. my, me vagina.

Stumbles, springs back, mad, pulls me by lapels, mad man flings me. Against the wall now, he’s pressing, I am talking thinking, talking, resistance not the answer here.

Then at once -he has no gun. He is not going to kill me, he only wants to rape me.

I am instantly calm and steel cold mad. I am late. I DID NOT CARE.

“Hurry up already, go ahead”.

He looks at my face.

“The bed” he says with a gesture of his head.

“No. You want it, you have to take it right here.”

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I stopped talking. I knew the tables had turned. I could feel the power shift. I was in control.

The phone rang. He was done, it was over, he left.

My family. waiting for me.

“On my way, sorry“

I cleaned myself up, got the smudges off the lapels, and hoped the red marks on my neck were not too obvious.

I said nothing at all to my brothers. I shoved it over there. I mean, nothing really happened.

My friend came back to the apartment with me. I was afraid of the mess, afraid his cap was still there. It was not.

The story was over, but not. What should have been a kind of triumph instead became another shame story. Because I lied. I told people I reported it to the police.

I never did. Because nothing really happened, because I did not want to sit there in Precinct Ten, because a lot worse happened, because I was ok, because because because they would not take the time to try to catch him anyway.”

There was always for me, that critical moment when I flipped the power.

I am not the same woman I was. Or maybe I am the woman I never was. Instead of hovering around and above it now, I live in the mess of it, albeit the part of the world where half my day is not devoted to fetching water. I have the amazing good fortune to be an

American woman of sixty three years with no health problems.

Thank you, Eve Ensler. Sorry it took so long to get it.”

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PLAYING WITH MATCHES

Why did it take me fifty years and a friendship with Duane Crabbs to realize I wanted to be a fireman? By the time I bought a pair of firefighter’s boots in my forties, I should have recognized something was unusual about this choice of footwear, but I am a very slow learner in the emotions department. The only tutor for this learning disability is moving towards the heat until I have to strip off all the protection.

My old pattern was to wait till the fire was out, then sift through the ashes for clues. I collected tokens that approximated emotions. I am good at collecting shards, broken bits, remains; things best found in solitary sweeps. Among this collection of objects is a round penny-sized white ceramic bathroom tile from the World Trade Center.

A hefty chunk of mortar clings to the back of the tile, a revealing detail of its history.

The mortar is a thickset installation, which would have been specified in the sixties, more traditional and union contract acceptable, before the current popularity and economy of cement backer boards and thin set systems.

After the towers collapsed, the all-to-brief rescue phase was followed by recovery, a continuous search for remains within the relentless clean up. Dump trucks cycled between the site and the open trash barges tied up at a pier close to our home.

Cherry and I walked every day we could, late in the light of day, to the cyclone fence barricade facing the transfer site. It was a ritual, something to help break down the immensity of the impossible darkness into smaller sizes, to a human scale. We watched

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load after load of the anonymous grey tangle of pulverized life efficiently dumped into the equally anonymous grey barges.

The operation did not cease for nine months, until the site was absolutely spotless.

In May, the barges stopped ferrying the remains across the Hudson River. The boundary fence removed. I was alone the day I strode the grounds of the former transfer point. In the mudcaked truck-flattened debris, a tiny glint of spring sun on a hint of reflective surface caught my eye. I dug out and pocketed the small chunk. Cleaning it later, there it was, a piece of the original, completely intact in its tiny round, white footprint.

I denied myself any personal claim on trauma around the events of September 11.

My job was to be steady and rational, composed and available, to take care of my mother, to clean, to be calm and available. Grief was not on the list for me. I could peek through the fence, witness the grief of the firefighter families – that was far enough away to feel safe that no one would yank me from the view, would recognize that I was not worthy of their pain. I could be a quiet mourner, a scarf tied on my head, a plain raincoat, or maybe a mantilla, like Jackie Kennedy, standing in the back. No entry allowed for my kind.

Anyone who has grown up under the cloud of inherited and mysterious shame knows what I am talking about. Experiences and feelings are stored in separate vaults, for self-protection. The great surprise comes when the whole damn Fort Knox we have made constructed gets blown to smithereens. Then all those isolated monsters have a chance to talk to each other as they limp around in the open air. Meet some of my monsters, talking.

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New York City – January 2018

My nephew Eddie stirred it all up. We were alone in the kitchen when he told me he passed the firefighter’s exam, the entry point for becoming a New York City firefighter.

Edward James O’Connor is 27 years old, a big strong steady good guy. He projects physical ease and almost languorous confidence from his 6’-5” frame. It is easier to imagine him as a firefighter than in his current occupation. In the four years since graduating from the State University of New York at Binghamton, he has been a computer programmer, getting consumers to buy the stuff that runs along the right margin of social media sites.

He is not one to brag or give away much at all about his private life. There in the kitchen, before a family dinner, this was an Eddie I had not seen in a long time. He had that child face on. In his spontaneous excitement, I saw the boy with the red plastic helmet, me next to him in the closet, dousing the flames around his toys for the tenth time that day. There was no reason for me to be anything other than happy with him.

However, his news came as I was gathering material about firefighter culture in

Akron, Ohio. The research was background for the central focus of this essay collection, the story of an emergency responder, Duane Crabbs, who felt a call to urban street ministry. Duane’s effectiveness as a pastor is powerfully shaped by his experience as a fireman. As I spent time reading the records at Akron Fire Department headquarters, not only the data and statistics were interesting to me – I just liked being in the atmosphere of the department.

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Long threads from disparate moments in my life were coming together. It was as though these moments had been waiting, suspended inside a vessel filling with water very slowly. Eventually, threatening to overflow, the water in the vessel began swirling the suspended threads in a spiral pattern. It was slow and quiet, but eventually the energy from the swirling water created a rope sturdy enough to carry me out of the darkness of my unrecognized shame. I had to decide if that rope was a threat or a passage to freedom. I had to trust my equipment.

Madison, Ohio - 1962

Is there a child who does not at some point play with matches? From 1975 and

1995, the second and third most common cause of domestic fires in Akron was children playing with matches.

Bruce Mitchell and I were inseparable friends the summer we were both seven, in

1962. We had the same kind of energy, curiosity, and sneakiness. We stole loose change, his father’s poker chips and naked lady playing cards. We took walks on the beach far beyond where our families thought possible - until we described our destination point. Bruce and I knew we could not get lost, as long as we stuck to the shoreline of

Lake Erie. Given the average size of Catholic families in my generation, no one noticed we disappeared, often for hours. It was just another summer day on the beach at a time when the greatest threat to our safety was a Soviet atomic bomb targeted on Madison,

Ohio.

One of our recurring pleasures was setting small fires in the fields. For this, we needed a steady supply of matches. Fortunately, almost all adults smoke and drank a lot,

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more than enough not to notice missing packs of matches that were as common as sugar packets are now.

Despite the escalating scale of our fire events, no one ever caught us in the act.

Graduating from mere leaves and sticks, we would create scenes – small villages made of debris or cereal boxes, whatever we could collect without suspicion. Card houses were a staple in the retinue, the wax-covered images spooling drips before wrinkling dark immolation.

The great divide of summer’s end closed our chapter as successful miniature arsonists.

The following January, my father was the victim of a brutal assault. I did not know the basic facts at the time, but years later learned that he crawled, bleeding, into a bar at the corner of 105th and Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio. An ambulance came, took him to a hospital. He told the police “two Negroes” attacked him and refused treatment or to file a report. He took a cab home and died of internal bleeding, in bed, the following night.

Nothing, that is what I was told at the time.

Never, that is how often I asked about what happened to him.

Ten times less than nothing, that is what I knew about my father. It was as though he never existed. His name was removed. Never spoken aloud, at least in my presence.

“Daddy” was a word taken away from a man whose footprints vanished. The sacrament of purposeful forgetting was part of our Catholicism, a daily rite, reinforced by the five paper lunch bags lined up with our names on them every morning, our mother already gone to daily Mass before we woke up for school.

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President Kennedy’s assassination was that same year, 1963. My family had the advantage of knowing you can carry on while numb. We knew how to live without feeling. When the President was assassinated, everything became shrouded, a frozen enactment of life, to the beat of that caisson over and over as the world watched the four day attempt at meaning through ritual. He was the same age as my father, 46. They were both Catholic Irish Americans, veterans, fathers. Caroline and I were close in age.

I did not recognize those similarities, but somehow they filled a back corner space in me.

Her father was a hero, but there was no thought or language for mine.18

The Ear Inn, Soho, New York City – 1979

My brother was a bartender at the Ear Inn on Spring Street. The level of inebriation of my last visit determined the time gap between the next one. It was not a formula exactly, more like an erosion of the bad memory into something acceptable enough to convince me that I could manage it safely this time.

The bar was a fifteen-minute walk from my apartment. From the front door of my building on Horatio Street to the door of the bar was a compass walk due south, with just

18 Decades later I found out why. My father disappeared because he was the victim of the story he became, the story people told about him. The early investigation into homicide revealed that he had been at a party before he crawled into the bar, wounded. The host was a flamboyant college professor, a “known homosexual”. In attendance were, presumably among others, though that is unknown to me, at least three young men under eighteen. After being held for questioning, three young men were released. The professor was convicted to three years at Lima State Hospital for the Criminally Insane on sodomy charges. There was no further investigation on my father’s homicide. Thirty five years later, I asked my lifelong friend Peggy O’Neill what she knew, what she was told about what happened. “Your Dad was reading the paper at home when his gay lover came in and shot him.” After a beat, I had the distance, capacity, composure and compassion to have a response to this information. “This is what you thought happened to him – in his own house? In my house? That is what you thought happened and then – nothing, not one thing was done about it? That’s what he deserved? That is what … we …deserved?” I also recognize I have relegated my father to a footnote. We progress. He is on the page. 268

a slight right hook at the end towards the red neon glow of “EAR” on the façade of the building. The streets were empty at night that far west and south. The area was dominated by service businesses for finance and law firms. The bulky monochrome of greys and sandstones surrounded the classic red Ear Inn sign and the double lantern of the

Trade Center towers just to the south framed the romantic perfection of the place. I was young, single, and living where I belonged. The walk down to the bar held that fullness of that potential. It remains one of the unsullied treasures of memory. Everyone who lives in New York, whether for a weekend or a lifetime, gets at least one rush of singular urban bliss. New York bestows that kind of generosity, a gift of ownership of any piece your heart claims.

The Ear Inn building itself was old, built as a house in 1770 for James Brown, an

African aide to George Washington during the Revolutionary War. But that history was easy to overlook, because the façade lined up just like all the other buildings in

Manhattan, smack along the sidewalk line and straight up. Manhattan buildings form a whole pattern, set to the pace of “hurry-it-up.” To appreciate a building as old as the Ear

Inn, or any building, you had to stop and really look at it. That kind a kind of time no one gives away easy.

The bar was another way to visit with my brother. I liked seeing him in that role, him with the cloth, me on the short end of the outside curve of the warm old wood bar, able to look out the window and whole stretch of drinkers lined up, the small dining area at the rear. Like most of my bar history, nights at the Ear Inn have a beginning, but do not ask me what happened to the middle or the end.

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On one such night, from my short side view, I watched two guys just a few seats down on the long side of the bar. They were oblivious to their surroundings, drinking, smoking and talking with an intensity matched by their head-turning handsomeness.

By the time I knew they were firemen, they were buying me drinks. I cannot recall how the exit happened exactly, but we left together. We left knowing that that sex was the next stop. That threesomes could be satisfying for all three participants was a popular myth in the culture at the time. That I could will myself to be heterosexual was a personal myth at the time.

Inevitably, someone in the trio ends is more the observer, and in this case, it was me. Its fuzzy, that bit between the bar and the loft bed. The return of clear memory is watching two handsome/straight firefighters make love. It did not bother me at all that I was there to make it legitimate. There are far worse ways of coming to than witnessing intimacy between two male centerfolds from the firefighter’s calendar. We had coffee and cigarettes afterward around the small round kitchen table in a fifth floor walkup at dawn.

They told me what company they were with, and I never forgot that. Their names were lost to me. I could not remember which of the two lived in that walkup, or where in the village it was.

The constriction of space in Manhattan and the size of fire trucks brings a lot of interaction between street life and local firehouses. The bay doors are always open, the gleaming trucks poised for action. I always had an eye out for those two. Though their house, Engine 24, Ladder 5 was close to home and I passed by often, I never saw them again.

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Gods in the Grocery Store – New York City - 1984

When the fire engine was idling in front of the grocery store, my pursuit of food was secondary. The firemen were grocery shopping inside. I never spoke to them, but took more interest in shelved items near them. There was never just one firefighter, always at least three – and they never split up, they never rushed. Unless you are a mother with a load of unhappy kids, food shopping in New York is a meditative exercise.

It is a mutually respected opportunity for solitude. Nobody fussed over the firefighters, just like New Yorkers ignore celebrities. They in turn, kept to themselves, neither hostile, nor friendly.

But it is impossible not to at least notice them. First, the engine-or-ladder truck was right in front of the store. Inside, men in fire pants and suspenders over t-shirt tops did a kind of shuffle shuffle scuff move in their boots through the aisles. If that was not enough the get a second glance from preoccupied shoppers, there were the men themselves. The senior guys stayed in the truck, and the probies and junior guys did the shopping. Gods in the grocery store, picking up the makings of meat loaf.

These encounters were most common when I lived in Bed-Sty as an architecture student at Pratt Institute. The C-Town store was the only grocery for a very long stretch of Myrtle Avenue, in the early eighties. Ladder 102 and Engine 230 were close by, so this was their home grocery. C-Town was strong in cans, weak in vegetables. Shopping carts had wonky wheels, and the narrow aisles made for some awkward personal space, like an adolescent dance. Shuffle, shuffle, their boots on the vinyl tile, winter or summer.

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I was a temporary resident of Bed-Sty, a three-year tenure while in school. The cool detachment between citizens and firefighters in the cramped C-Town in Bed-Sty may have indicated a more complex relationship between the fire department and the neighborhood. The Pratt Institute neighborhood was African American, streets lined with beautiful older row houses and clusters of tall urban renewal apartment buildings. It was stable, with high black home ownership. While walking alone at night was something to avoid in that era, this was not the South Bronx. Over there, firefighters in the early eighties often needed police escorts as they responded to staggering numbers of alarms daily in the scores of vacant apartment buildings. Focusing on the emergency at hand, they needed protection from bricks thrown at them from adjacent windowless shells of buildings.

To support myself while in school. I worked two or three nights a week as a legal proofreader in a white shoe Park Avenue law firm, the graveyard shift. I left work for school in the morning just as the day people arrived. The firm I worked represented two female firefighters suing the New York Fire Department for discrimination. In endless iterations every night for months, I read aloud the revised drafts to a partner who moved a finger and pencil over the new printed copy.

Legal proofreading is the tedious pursuit of typos, consistent punctuation, proper

Latin terms and correct case citations. The team works to verify that all edits have been successfully transferred to the new document. With lengthy documents and cases there are certain phrases that repeat. I always chose to be the reader, because there is greater latitude of attention. I could successfully read aloud and have my mind wander.

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The firefighter case had a much richer vocabulary than the normal fare of corporate acquisitions. There are words that I still remember from the case. There was a husky lyricism that set in by three in the morning in the language and repetition of

“collapse zone, halligan, Mattydale lay, spud bar, radiant extension, Stoichiometric

Mixture”.

“That’s s-t-o-i-c-h-i-o-m-e-t-r-i-c mixture”, I would say to my partner.

As a universal principle, we were instructed to change every reference to fireman to firefighter.

Other than the sound and idea of the vocabulary, I took no interest in the deeper implications of two women trying to find room in the ultimate men’s club. I had my own issues with boys and territory in my pursuit of an architecture career.

Sparks – Connelly Theater, East 4th Street, New York - 1997

I am a theater architect. At some point, I know the firefighters will show up. Not just the official inspection required by the Building Department, but the guys from the local house. They may not even have the authority, but who is going to deny them entry?

They come just before the official opening, by street instinct, to understand how they would need to work, should there be a fire. How hard will it be to snake a 4” line into the green room? What might they expect to be in front of the emergency valve on a normal operating day?

There is a reason why shouting “FIRE!” in a crowded theater is beyond the boundaries of free speech. From the Gilded Age of the 1880s to the end of the roaring twenties, theater fires were frequent and deadly, because theaters were plentiful,

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dangerous and, filled with common people. All too often owner landlords were less than honorable; and that is a New York real estate tradition persisting to this day.

In the last few days before the opening of a theater I designed on East 4th Street, I was pacing around as the welders were finishing the seating riser framework. They were behind schedule. With technical rehearsals for the opening production already delayed, there was no room to postpone the opening night and gala premier of the new theater.

I was useless to do much except pace around the tanks and sparks, fretting and sweating and talking to Frank, the general contractor. He had already inhaled an entire box of rugelach during my rare display of tight ferocity at his delay. Though he was a huge guy, I had never before seen him eat anything. He had brought cookies to placate me, but his anxious devouring of the gift indicated that I made my point.

The welders were just finishing the frames when I smelled something new in the theater. I was used to the acrid smell of the welder’s arc in the room, but this was different. This was smoke.

Yelling to Frank, I grabbed a fire extinguisher and kept yelling as I searched for the source of the smoke. In a corner of the room, a spark had ignited some debris.

Frank and I extinguished the small smoldering clump. My adrenaline soaring, I swept up the debris and kept going, trying to get the welders finished and out of the building.

The next day another crew was scheduled to assemble the metal framework to create the audience seating plan.

Frank and I were the last to leave. As we were locking up, I smelled smoke again.

The same corner was smoking but there was nothing visible. The building was a 120- year-old former orphan asylum, with wood floors and joists deeply imbued with decades

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of lacquer. An errant spark from the first fire had gone into the floorboards. Once again, yelling and running – enormous Frank stayed there while I ran to the basement. After smothering the area with the dry powder spray, I came back up. After Frank left, I stayed in the corner for three hours flanked by two fire extinguishers and a thumping heart my company. This time the fire stayed out.

Patriot Protest Swim – Manhattan - 1998

On July 4, 1998, my girlfriend Cherry her sister Susan and I were in a group of clandestine swimmers chugging out of Pier 62 on a retired NY Fire Department fireboat.

An unauthorized action to bring attention to recreational potential in the abundant waters of New York City, we flung ourselves into the harbor under the gaze of Lady Liberty. A police boat hovered nearby, but no one intervened.

After the self-proclaimed “guerilla activist urban swim” off the fireboat, I started working with the man who organized the event, an underwater welder by trade. Adam

Brown looked like the child of a bulldog and a fireplug. He had a vision of creating a public swimming beach off Governor’s Island in New York harbor.

It caught my imagination and we engaged in a long, steady campaign to build support for the idea. He had a degree of mystery about himself, and often went out of town on jobs. I suspected he did espionage work, a suggestion to which he would offer only a slow upward curve of his lips.

Not that he needed any more stories than he already had to share. As we continued to push forward the “Governor’s Island Cove Beach” project, we spent a lot of time in the waiting room of local officials and city council hearings. I would ask him for

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stories from his dives. After a while, he would just ask me to pick a location – he had been under rivers and bays all over the east coast, at all times of the year.

Through his marine engineering connections and my design and construction background, we produced a compelling, professional presentation. As a pair of lobbyists, we worked well together, a kind of contemporary live version of Popeye and

Olive Oil. We had the ears and interested affirming nods of scads of elected officials.

We were encouraged by the expanding mailing list. The project started to have a life of its own as more professionals added their expertise.

We were prophets, canaries, visionaries. We dreamed a place that would eventually happen. It was an ambitious, expensive undertaking pitched at the wrong era, the end of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s tenure. There was no energy for bold initiatives.

The island was still held by the federal government since the Coast Guard moved the remaining few departments to Rhode Island.

But we enjoyed ourselves, talking about the ideas, it was fun.

One day I admired a painting in his apartment, a rich abstract swirl and dash of many hues of red. His artist father painted it. Adam had never mentioned his father, or that he was an artist. This was not an easy story for Adam to tell.

“He really isn’t an artist now, he is a painter. A scenic painter for theater and TV set designs. He lost all his work in a fire just as he was going to have the exhibit that would have launched his career. He kept painting later, but he was never the same after that. That was his one shot.”

Adam’s father, Herbert J. Brown lost his life’s work, over 900 paintings. But that was not all that was lost in the October 17, 1966 fire. Twelve firefighters lost their lives. It was the greatest loss of New York City firefighters in history.

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Adam and his family lived in a loft apartment that shared a wall with the pharmacy next door. Adam and his sister were asleep when his mother smelled the smoke, called the fire department. She could see the smoke pouring out of the single story ground floor of their building, in the courtyard space between their building and the pharmacy. Recognizing that it was their own building burning, she and Adam’s father grabbed their sleeping children and ran out of the building.

Though there was clearly a fire in progress, it was hard find, complicated by the interconnections between several buildings fronting different streets. Tracking the source and spread were challenging. A group of firefighters entered the pharmacy adjacent to the fire, dragging equipment and hoses with them. Below, a bearing wall in the basement had been removed illegally. The floor collapsed. The twelve firefighters were caught and buried. It took fourteen hours to retrieve their bodies.

***

Shark stories filled the newspapers at the end of the summer 2001. It was one of those seasons where sharks popped up in unusual places. In a slow news cycle, a variation on anything shark provides a good headline. For swimmers about to dive through the opaque surface of the Hudson River on lower Manhattan, the fear was primal but not of the Hollywood blockbuster sort. I was bobbing along with about fifty other people assembled at the end of a wooden pier, preparing for a mile swim in the brackish water, We were more concerned with marine biology of the minute sort - bacteria, microbes, clostridium, general fermenting effluent.

It was an outlandish phenomenon, swimming for recreation in the Hudson River.

For one thing, once in, you cannot get out. Where the river brushes against Manhattan,

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there is a solid wall of bulkheads and piers. Whether the tide was high or low, you needed something inserted into the water – a ladder or a ramp of some sort, to get out.

Otherwise, you end up in a drawer with a toe tag somewhere in south Jersey.

For another thing, though I had been swimming the river for two years by this point without succumbing to any exotic diseases, it was definitely dirty. But so was the city itself. The river had a kind of grit to it, just like the streets it surrounded. As you swam, you accumulated a slightly oily sandpaper finish. The faces of fellow swimmers emerging at the finish looked like a child had given everyone a dark goatee.

Despite those conditions, the water had a sweet cool magic. It was impossible to predict what the combination of tide and current would produce. At times, the two slipping past each other in a seamless flow carried the body without the least effort. The opposite extreme meant seeing the same chunk of Manhattan shoreline again and again, a struggle for every yard. You hoped for slack tide, so the surface had the feel of a still point over the layered silky dark green below.

Beyond the field of water, the city seemed to watch us. It was remarkably quiet out there. The quiet detachment of that transit from uptown to downtown in water just outside the envelope of Manhattan bestowed a primal power, a unique gift. It was as removed as one could be while still in the city. The grit was the souvenir.

We were almost sixty strong that day. The swims were gaining publicity and participants. I did the swims for the fun of it, and avoided swimmers with the triathlon competitive characteristics. I met David on an earlier swim. We had an easy connection, though neither of us ever took the initiative to move beyond our mutual attraction to a novelty sport. We were the same age and swam at the same speed,

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climbing out tired and awkward from whatever rigged up system we were offered that day. He was a firefighter on the upper west side. We shared a kind of nonchalance in our preparation as others slathered on this and that product and behaved as though it were the Olympics. We had met at the first event, the ‘guerilla swim’ on the Fourth of July,

1998.

On August 15, 2001, the mile swim took us from Pier 62 to the North Cove Park in Battery Park City. The instructions of what to look for as the exit point were easy – we were exiting the water at the feet of the World Trade Center.

The towers were just to our left. There was a lot of turbulence as we swam into the North Cove towards the finish spot. The turbulence we felt was partially the result of the air conditioning system at the World Trade Center. Designed in the 1960’s, the buildings incorporated highly imaginative engineering systems. Huge intake pipes pulled in cold river water to cool the massive air conditioning chillers needed for over 200 floors at an acre of space each. It was brilliant, but on the downside, that same water went back into the river hot. What we experienced as turbulence for our swim was an inconvenience compared to what a constant hot water dump did to the river ecology.

David was struggling with the rope ladder at the end of the mile swim. We finished together, and I was directly behind him. There was a lot of turbulence in the cove, and the ladder was weaving back and forth. Hauling your body out of the water and up three feet of air to a dock after a mile swim is hard enough, but this looked like a rodeo challenge, and he was not happy. There was nothing graceful about it. By the time our arms were on the deck, we both got hauled up to reduce the bottleneck of swimmers treading water fiercely below, waiting to exit. It was the last time I saw him. Within the

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month before the towers came down, he retired as a New York City firefighter. He raced downtown to help as soon as the first plane went in. He did not come out alive.

***

It had only been three months since the towers collapsed. Wide emotional margins were necessary, and the ordinary more precious and urgent. Cherry and I had celebrated thirteen Christmases by 2001. We developed a Christmas tradition of our own. Like every other family that year, our traditions offered a mix of hope and dread in

2001.

Because our kitchen was the size of a closet, and neither of us were bakers anyway, our custom was to buy fresh, excellent bakery cookies and expensive chocolate, wrapping them in beautiful tissue and unusual ribbons. Before dusk on every Christmas

Eve, we left the apartment with nothing except the bundles, money and toothbrushes. We wandered the streets for five to six hours with no particular goal in mind, passing out the cookies as we went along, eventually arriving at the restaurant at the appointed time of our reservation. We always invited a friend who was otherwise alone as our guest. As it was in most years, Tom, my soulmate since high school, was with us that year. After dinner, we walked to Grand Central Terminal and took the 12:20 a.m. Metro North train to Spuyten Duyvil, the Bronx. We slipped into my brother’s apartment. As usual, he was waiting up for us, assembling some toy quietly, his wife and kids asleep. We would visit and help, Cherry and Jim having scotch, neat and me with warm milk and honey.

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And the next morning, as they always did, Eddie and Phoebe woke us up with the news.

“Santa came.”

Cherry and I were doing ok as we walked the streets on Christmas Eve 2001. But the past few months brought a tension we had never experienced in our relationship. It helped to know that we were not alone in our struggles as a couple. It was necessary for everyone to overlook and accommodate a lot, to accept the range of reactions to the attacks and their aftermath. Cherry was outspoken and strident, devouring the New York

Times. She bought a copy of the Koran, and developed opinions she shared without hesitation. I withdrew, was stony, keeping everything at a distance, including Cherry.

The firefighters seemed to be handling it the best. They continued to take care of us; accepting endless offerings graciously, being patient as we leaned against their cars, got in the way and generally slowed down their day. The firehouse was a place for the city to mourn, to look at the pictures after the rest of the flyers of the missing were collected off all the light posts.

It occurred to me sometime earlier in the holiday season that my mother was my age, 46, when my father died and she became a widow with five children. There were so many families facing Christmas with missing parts. I thought about the firefighter’s families, facing their first Christmas without their fathers. Did it matter that their fathers were heroes, and that mine never existed? Would that bring any warmth into a season forever altered?

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As we walked on Christmas Eve, I commented that the families of those lost would never have Christmas again. Cherry disagreed, saying it would be far worse when they all went back to school, and all the attention was over.

Though I had a heart of stone, it was the flinty sort, and capable of sparking when struck. My customary silence at her dramatic opinion was seismically interrupted.

“I am telling you it will never be the same.”

I scared myself with the intensity of my outburst.

We were not accustomed to differences between us, and both would choose to skip to the part where it was easy again, where we were two kids together. We were good at getting to the fun parts, and that day was no exception. Much to our surprise and delight, the gift store in the basement of the United Nations was open. We bought scads of scarves and t-shirts as gifts. The UN post office offered free postcards, stamps and a special cancellation. In a euphoric spell, we stood and wrote postcards to every person with an address we remembered, including ourselves.

In observance of custom and practical need, after Christmas morning in the

Bronx, we came home and slept. But there was a new finish to Christmas that year. .

Cherry and I volunteered for the understaffed shifts at St. Paul’s Chapel on

Christmas day and New Year’s Eve. Though it was across the street from the World

Trade Center, St. Paul’s was not physically damaged by the collapse. The only impact was that particular grey dust shroud over everything.

The church offered their neighbor a place of refuge. With the debris removal on a ceaseless cycle until the job was complete, the chapel also operated on a continuous

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basis. Shifts were twelve hours long for the volunteers in the chapel and the crews outside. St. Paul’s maintained an atmosphere opposite to the hell of the pile.

While still clearly a place of worship, the oldest church in Manhattan had transformed into an emotional triage center. Twenty four hours of every day, psychologists, social workers, spiritual counselors and a range of therapy traditions were on hand. There was a palpable silence about the place, a silence heightened oddly by the harpist playing in one corner. The laying on of hands by massage therapists the most profound language. More than teddy bears, peace doves, food or music, it was the communion of massage oil and hot coffee at St. Paul’s.

The twelve-hour shift for general volunteers meant tucking and retucking blankets in cots, rearranging teddy bears, accepting food donations, cleaning, moving stuff around and making more space on the fences outside for new peace birds, pictures, cards and balloons offered by those coming down for the pilgrimage to Ground Zero.

Volunteers did not engage with those coming in from the pile. Initiating a conversation was up to them, these brothers, fathers, uncles, friends, volunteers of the fallen. The prevailing silence was marked by the familiar shuffling rhythm of heavy boot down the aisle. They tended to keep to themselves, grabbing a short nap, not in the cots in the choir loft, but just in a pew, coats and boots on.

While moving a box of facemasks into a designated pew, I read a plaque mounted on the seat back: “George Washington worshipped from this pew prior to his inauguration on April 30, 1789.”

It occurred to me that the war being fought in our name in Afghanistan seemed as distant as George Washington’s presence in the pew I stood in. Our wars were far away

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against an enemy we had not been aware of before September, and trying to understand why they hated us was not allowed. We were protected still, as Americans. Numb, safe and busy with shopping.

The following week, on New Year’s Eve, Cherry and I were back at St. Paul’s. A rumor made its way down to the idling volunteers on shift.

“They found someone. A firefighter.”

I needed some air. Normally, we came and left through the front doors, facing

Broadway. Tall iron gates separated the stone church from the sidewalk, and visitors thronged around the gates, attaching peace birds, cards, stuffed animals pictures and prayer cards. Last week I found quieter air, through the kitchen to the back door, which opened to the church graveyard.

Stepping down off the threshold from the kitchen, the sharp cold paired with the intense darkness was disorienting. It was an intensity of the contrast, the immediacy of the impact.

It is never dark in Manhattan, but in that patch of cemetery, it was thick with midnight. Sound, too, was midnight, the strong steady thrum of the mechanical systems from a forest of skyscrapers. After a few minutes, just at eye level, the profile of the gravestones formed a kind of skyline of their own, the miniature relief made visible by the work lights at the Trade Center site. But it was what was above the headstones that the eye wanted to travel. Highlighted against that backdrop, this was a space of trees.

Bare branches of tough city trees filled the frame between the ground and sky. Though it was midnight in January, the tips reached for the light that would come with dawn. The

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life in those trees became transparent against the layers of grey darkness within the now sterile shock zone of human calamity.

It was such an ordinary thing. It was such a miracle.

We walked out of the chapel at 8 a.m. The sky was dawn colors turning to robin’s egg blue. Just up the street, red, white and blue bunting looped across the façade of City Hall. It was Inauguration Day.

New Year’s Eve night, they did find someone, a firefighter. As Michael

Bloomberg took the oath as the 108th Mayor of New York City that morning, Michael

D’Auria’s remains were placed in a body bag, strapped to a stretcher, covered end to end in an American flag, and carried out of the pit. He was twenty-five, a rookie from

Engine 40. He had served for eleven weeks before he died on September 11, 2001.

The Stranger – Pier 62 – February 2004

Adam Brown and I kept promoting the cove beach project. Governor’s Island started to have some energy after the federal government sold a big chunk of it to the City and State of New York for $1. Among the kit of our presentation package, we had a 4’ x

3’board with a dramatic perspective drawing of the cove beach, with lower Manhattan as the backdrop. After the towers were gone, we had to decide what to do about them in the drawing. Would it be the red ribbon or the eraser? Adam favored the ribbon, but I thought we needed to take them out. It was another ritual in a series of still ongoing motions of grief, disguising the crayon-sized profiles of the twin towers to look like the sky colors around them.

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At one point at a dinner party at Mayor Bloomberg’s house, Cherry gushed to the Mayor about my cove beach project, urging me forward. For ten minutes over dessert and coffee, I had the attention of the Mayor and his guests, spinning a Central Park sized vision of leisure in an era preoccupied by security.

Adam would disappear for a month or two, and without him, the boards and proposals languished in a corner of my office. Three years after we stopped working on the beach, Adam made good on a promise. He took me for a dive in the Hudson River.

In February 2004, Adam suited me up on that same retired fireboat of our

Independence Day Guerilla Swim. Winched up and over the surface of the water in a suit with one of those fishbowl diving helmets, all my oxygen came directly into the suit from what looked like a vacuum cleaner hose. I could not see a thing as the feel of cold water pressed the suit against me. There was a light on the helmet, but it only illuminated 6” of swishing grit. We could talk to each other, but I could not stop laughing. It was out of control until tears streamed down my caged head.

The swishing grit was the last thing I saw before being winched back up.

Through the copper grid in front of the facemask, I could see my partner Cherry on the wharf in a blue coat with a friend of ours. They were not there when I went under. I was not sure if what I was seeing was real or not. Not because of the laughter, or the disorientation of the whole experience, but because the woman I saw there looked like a stranger. Within a month, that is what she became – a stranger.

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Akron, Ohio May 2018

My nephew Ed is on the list of accepted candidates for the New York City Fire

Department and expects to be called as a rookie within two years.

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MARGINS

In early spring of 2016, buildings all along South Main and Broadway were reduced to pyramids of red brick, demolished in preparation for the reconfiguration of access roads to the freeway interchange. Stephanie Leonardi, who everyone close to her called Leo, wanted to take pictures before it was all gone. She rode around in her black pickup truck with the purple hubcaps, inviting Summit Lake kids to join in. Her young friends posed in front of the red rubble, and Leo took some pictures. No real reason, just because it was happening. Just because it was fun. Just because it was something to do.

Just because it was Leo.

Months later, when asked to represent South Akron at the Big Love Festival, Leo thought of the picture of kids and bricks. She enlarged it to 5’ by 7’ and hung it vertically along the back wall of her designated stall on the third floor of the Summit Art Space. In front of the picture she arranged a pile of loose bricks. That was all. No handouts or printed material. Just the picture and the bricks.

The South Akron stall had great placement. It was right across from the entry door on the third floor. After walking up two flights of stairs, it was the first thing you saw stepping into the open space. The picture had the power spot and made the most of it.

The photograph conveyed something that was instantly recognizable – it was real.

The viewer and the kids met each other in the space between. It had a quality that reminds people that most of what they see is contrived. It was simply the world of those

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children at that moment. It directly conveyed a beauty, a kind of ordinary redemptive presence.

There was a joy and a hope in it too. It was all there, and made for the unforgettable surprise instant that art bestows on the unsuspecting viewer. There, in the still point of the margins of the marginalized, kids just being themselves. Her impulse to document the changes along the eastern boundary of the Summit Lake neighborhood captured something about the soul of the whole neighborhood. The picture captured a kind of physical wrenching change in the jagged bricks behind the children. But there was so much latent change in the image. Things were certainly going to change, for the artist, for Leo – and maybe, who knows, the kids in the picture and, who knows, South

Akron itself.

By the spring of 2017, the Summit Lake neighborhood was clamped tight on its edges. Big money pressed against the margins of the old community, big money was making noise. Civic projects of contrasting aspirational goals stirred up the east and west sides. The opposing compass points were expressive of the projects themselves, polar opposites, and a distorted mirror of the extremes of the human experience. The fifty block old neighborhood was the unwitting host of a fringe population, outsiders reshaping both flanks.

On the west, it was all about the highest aspirations, while the other addressed the lowliest necessity. Along the western edge, defined by the shoreline of Summit Lake, the money and attention was all about art; on the eastern side, defined by the active rail lines, was all about better disposal of human effluent. As per mandate by the Environmental

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Protection Agency, work continued on getting Akron’s no-kidding-for-real-literal shit out of the Cuyahoga River.

***

For a season in the American grand-bazaar-of-the-marketing-of-all-things, the term ‘liminal space’ whipped around the corridors of branding experts and then fell out of fashion. It was a trendy way of describing risk-takers, edge-walkers, marginalized populations, just things that did not fit. Overused, the term itself was then cast to the margins.

There was a lot of talk about liminal spaces. Limnology as a scientific pursuit is the study of edge communities, the unique qualities of environments that thrive at the meeting line of two distinct systems. In the spring of 2017 in Summit Lake, there was a liminal rhythm, a continuous wave of change from the edges that could not be tuned out.

On the Eastern Front, for two years prior to the spring of 2017, the landscape of

South Main and Broadway endured constant pummeling and shoving. The reconfiguration of ramps and access to the freeway, billed as a “new entrance to

Downtown Akron” had removed nearly all the remnants of a half mile chunk of the commercial and industrial life and history of South Main and Broadway. All the trees on

South Main were marked with a neon X one day, and not long after, surgically removed in the course of one night, consigned to mulch, not a chip, leaf, or twig left on the devil strip. The only indication of their existence the day before was a series of rhythmic shallow holes and a host of birds circling overhead.

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A new set of operators came to the scrubbed surface in the spring. This crew folded into the blanched landscape to install new massive sewage lines for the enthusiastically titled “Akron Waterways Renewed!” The work on Main and Broadway was one small link in an enormous and necessary project. It added to the already beleaguered bottleneck of local and commuter car traffic just trying to get from A to B.

The work brought a whole new set of unrecognizable manufactured items to the muddy landscape along the railroad tracks. The barren ground was dotted with a mysterious array of enormous concrete piping, complex gauges, and continuously humming machinery devoted to the new storm water sewage treatment system for the

City of Akron.

Navigating that section by car became extremely challenging. Giant heaps of earth and earthmovers dominated and determined the flow of traffic. Running the gauntlet of orange cones outlining one lane of the reduced road along a sizable stretch of

South Main Street was a steel-nerved, white knuckle driving experience. The shape of the lane could change on a daily basis, as though the gods were playing chess with traffic cones. To make matters worse, the streetlights were gone. It had the eerie feeling of entering a funhouse, or approaching the edge of a cliff, or the end of the known world.

It became almost impossible to tell visitors how to get to the neighborhood.

There simply was no way in without going downtown and doubling back.

“How do you know when your neighborhood doesn’t matter?”

“When you cannot get to it.”

Meanwhile, on the western side of the neighborhood, two organizations arranged themselves around the scuffled shoreline of Summit Lake. With the lofty goals of

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creating art and building community, representatives of two distinct Knight Foundation grant initiatives called on the community to join in the process. In contrast with the concrete reality of the work on the opposite margin, the goals on the Summit Lake Shore had no defined outcomes. “The League of Creative Interventionists” and “Reimagining

Civic Commons” shared a lot of similar qualities beyond their ambiguous confusing names. It had something to do with a path to change perceptions about community, art and local input. There was money behind the language and marketing trying to draw in

Summit Lake residents. The local population was suspicious of what they saw as municipal bait and switch operations, of new language for same old downtown carnival barkers. In meetings at the Summit Lake Community Center, Dan Rice effused the potential of the Knight-funded “Civic Commons” project before donning an apron to serve dinner after the meetings, his enthusiasm unflagging despite the wary distance of those who showed up.

“Why should we trust you?” said Darrell from the back of the room, hands in the pockets of his blue quilted jacket.

“We are going to try some things together”, Dan said. Rice, as the President of the Ohio & Erie Canalway Coalition for over twenty five years, had miles of experience in fielding public forums and the stirred emotions that accompany change.

“Everything we do will be with you, what you want to see here on your lakefront.

And it’s all an experiment, temporary – we will try things, and if it’s not right, we will try something else – but the will be your ideas – so spread the word to your neighbors. This is your project.”

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The work on both sides of the neighborhood was all about flow. Though the neighborhood is less than two miles from the benchmark intersection of downtown,

Market and Main Streets, it is confined and isolated by its hard, defining edges; a lake, a freeway, and a rail line. The attention at the edges was an intervention for a community aging steadily in a kind of benign spiral of diminishing energy, the pulse slowing, the sag and fade of geography in hospice care. The spring 2017 edge energy vibrated the skin of the neighborhood. How that will affect the body within those altered edges is unknown.

The work and attention was met with skepticism in front porch conversations; it was all a part of the master plan to create a new Summit Lake that did not include them.

This neighborhood wears the weight of failed hopes and present pain. Having a dream of something different is not free, it comes at the cost of more disappointment.

This was a place grown so accustomed to neglect, the barometer for what services should be expected was broken. Cars parked with impunity on the sidewalk in front of the

XXecutive Gentlemen’s Club on South Main, active construction zones lacked protective fencing, and trying to cross the broad area of highway and sewer work on the east side was dangerous and discouraging. All the grade crossings of the rail line were eliminated in the expressway project, requiring a pedestrian to walk an extra half mile at least, along disjointed spaces right next to car traffic. The cars frightened the walking people and the walking people frightened the drivers of the cars.

Ironically, though the neighborhood was cut off from the city surrounding it,

Summit Lake had an express connection with the world beyond the city. Access to the freeway system allows vehicles a quick hit, in and out of the neighborhood from and to all four directions. This drive-through capacity had disastrous consequences when crack

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hit the Midwest in the late eighties. Summit Lake was old and modest at the beginning of the crack epidemic, but stable. It had no defense against its geography and the tide of cheap, available drugs flowing in and out. By the start of the nineties, the neighborhood had the second highest crime rate in Akron.

As alienating as the work on the east side was, the west side Summit Lake promoters were begging people to join in. They spoke of a future of increased foot and bike traffic, enthusiastically touted the west side as a porous edge. Dan Rice, the

Canalway frontman for over two decades, touted the Erie Canal towpath, a continuous 31 mile bikeway from Cleveland through Akron, as the conduit to reimagine Summit Lake, for the benefit of its residents.

It was hard to reconcile the effect, impact and message of the two edges. On the

Summit Lake west side, where the work was still in the future, the vision was enthusiastic and rosy while the process, something about art, was vague and experimental. The work along the east side, grinding steadily along, was a reminder of how little the community mattered in the big vision.

Both undertakings aim at a better future for the Greater Akron community. Both constitute a level of attention and interest around an area slowly drifting downward for decades without much attention from the previous City administration.

In the Summit Lake neighborhood, the largest active organization, since the closing of Lincoln Elementary School, bigger than any commercial enterprise or church in the neighborhood, is a faith-based service provider, The Open M Neighborhood

Center. This ministry offers a variety of services for a neighborhood steadily

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depopulating. The neighborhood suffered not from a lack of free giveaways. It suffered from too many giveaways and too few people.

***

In 2017, one hundred years after its period of highest density, a trickle of people with choices of where to live bought houses and moved into Summit Lake. This group is at least a temporary staunch to the abandonment, the “one day here, next day gone” commonality of tenants subsisting on program money. Home ownership in the 58 blocks of Summit Lake has declined from 32% at the 2010 census to 21% in 2018. There has been no new construction since 2004.

The people who own houses in the neighborhood prior to the oncoming trickle of choosers are long-term residents devoted to the place or people who cannot afford to sell and move, people without good options. Shirley Finney, Sister Catherine Walsh and

Duane and Lisa Crabbs made the choice of living in Summit Lake twenty years ago. For

Duane and Lisa, it was a radical and, to many, reckless move for a white middle class couple with four children. The fact that there were plenty of families living there already did not seem to matter at the time. In the two decades since they moved in, the population is smaller, the crime reduced. Perceptions have evolved. Choosing to buy and live in the area today might be odd, but not crazy.

When people start choosing, those already in the place take notice. The people who choose to buy and live in a place with falling resale value are the outliers, dreamers, the liminal types. Generally speaking, there are three groups of such people; missionaries, artists and gay men. These three groups make a place palatable and

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attractive to next wave – of their own kind at first, then to others who have little understanding of what the now desirable zip code had been.

In the case of Summit Lake, the choosers were urban Christian missionaries.

Duane and Lisa’s South Street Ministries and Sister Catherine’s Akron Catholic Worker were both founded and established in the houses they renovated 1995, back when Bachtel

Street was Cracktel Street and there were three fires a week on average. It was the second highest crime neighborhood in the city.

For twenty years, Duane and Lisa and Sister Catherine at Catholic Worker were living as they always had, in hospitality, in responding to the knock on the door, the ring of the phone at all hours of the day. By 2017, those two groups of residents, these change agents, had the simple fidelity to keep being good neighbors. They inspired much admiration, but little imitation.

Instead, it took twenty years, a full generation’s passing, before Duane and Lisa’s example inspired a follower to stake their purpose, money and self in Summit Lake. The follower in this case was a missionary and an artist – Leo.

Stephanie Leonardi found her house in the first block of Long Street, just above the public housing along the eastern shore of Summit Lake. Summit Lake Apartments is a collection of brick townhouses, 239 units, built and managed by AMHA, the Akron

Metropolitan Housing Authority. The tidy low scale buildings stand on land associated in the living memory with the pleasures and romance of a simpler time. The buildings stand where Summit Beach Park flourished. It evokes a high level of Akron nostalgia among those over seventy. The adjacent Summit Lake Community Center claims the distinction of being the first place LeBron James played organized basketball.

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But in 2017, the old neighborhood was due for some new memories.

Leo had the personal qualities and creative energy to attract a curious crowd, and she invited the curious to join her. She was inspired by Duane, and he saw in Leo a version of himself. They had a fire in the bones for the suffering of those around them, and they were not afraid to enter that suffering. Leo had a rare combination of the true believer and the freedom of a true artist. She saw her religious faith as the fuel for her expression of art, and saw her artistic work as connection with others to the healing faith she found in Christ.

Leo was a beloved art teacher in the Akron Public School system. She was among the loose migration of younger members of South Street looking for something they could not quite articulate from their larger Christian churches. During the summer vacation of 2012, she volunteered in the neighborhood programs for children, and became a regular at Sunday Service. Cautiously at first, she started to open up to the unusual Jesus-loving community that accepted her as she saw herself.

In late January of 2013, Leo was dragging through a persistent virus that drained her vitality. The energetic woman who had completed her first marathon in Akron that fall was diving for the couch in the teacher’s lounge daily. The infection worsened, ballooning throughout her entire system. She was in the fight of her life while completely inert, her body placed in a in an induced comaa as septicemia raged within.

The bewilderment of a young, healthy, beautiful woman suddenly rendered still as death itself drew a constant bedside presence and prayer. After her recovery, she was not the same art teacher she had been. The work she loved seemed strange now, classroom walls too close. She suspected the school building itself had made her sick.

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Through the slow physical, emotional and spiritual recovery, she felt a continuing pull to grow with South Street’s ministerial outreach in Summit Lake. Through her perplexing navigation of trauma, Duane and Lisa were close by and available. Though the couple became a tremendous source for her, a jumble of parent, peer, friend, co- laboror and believers, Duane and Lisa were at a different place in life. For as much as they shared in the passion of living out the Word, Leo often felt lonely after leaving their company, riding alone in the black pickup with the purple hubcaps the few blocks to the

Long Street House, the home she shared with four other women.

SHe had been the first to move into what started with the ideals of intentional communal living had been lost. How had it gotten so complicated and painful? Did it only seem the whole house was against her?

The joyful start of experiment was mired in the real meat and potatoes of in the daily stuff of community living. It was as though the Long Street House suffered from domestic multiple personality disorder, and Leo was but one strand of the malady; she operated without a framework, an improviser, mixing up what was available to come up with something new. She made it look easy, fun and exciting. There was an undeniable power and attraction to Leo that made everyone want to jump in first, ask later.

Her unadorned natural Mediterranean classic beauty was framed by baggy sport clothes. It wasn’t calculated, her charm, rather it was the self-made personality of someone who had to make their own way emotionally at too early an age. There was a wildness in her, a Peter Pan quality. It was a quality that while immensely attractive, could burn too fast, with new friends deciding it was all more adventure than they really wanted after all.

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***

Leo passed the house with the for sale sign in front many times before she called.

This might be the way to a restart in the same place, a way to keep all the connections with the people, the neighborhood she had come to love in the two years of shared life in

Summit Lake. The house could be a way to practice her spiritual fidelity and art without the intricate negotiations of a group household.

Buying it was a huge step, a major investment for her. It was a family house, now for a family of one. She was frightened of the commitment, but not shy about asking for help. Her group of practical and spiritual mentors, supported her through the process of ownership. The house itself was worth it, a gem. It had been exceptionally well cared for, continuously occupied by only three owners in the century of its existence.

Everything worked. She did not have to do anything except load up the truck, ride down the street and move in.

Her big trampoline was installed in the backyard, the basketball hoop out in the street in front of her house, a place where anyone felt welcome to sit and swing on the front porch swing. Local residents leery of Christian judgment did not avoid her house - it was home base.

The bread and butter of South Street’s light touch evangelism are community meetings. Leo’s move coincided with the start of a round of such meetings for the

Knight Foundation’s new art projects for Summit Lake. She joined in with the sparse group of activists, locals willing to give time to listen to yet another set of presenters with ideas for the neighborhood.

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Duane had been one of the founders of the host of these meetings, the Summit

Lake Neighborhood Association. Other attendees to the Knight sponsored community meetings that spring were mostly long term resident activists, suspicious and accustomed to variations on this routine many times before. At the Summit Lake Community Center, the trail of past failed promises was on the table along with the pizza. The format was familiar, enthusiastic smiling, suited white men with power point presentation, markers and white board.

For the residents who came to the meetings, it was hard at first to understand who was who in the mix of these outsiders talking about art. It all sounded polished and it looked snazzy. But it was hard to keep things straight between the two Knight funded initiatives. The name of the organizations alone - The League of Creative Interventionists and Reimagining Civic Commons - were hard to retain.

Community created art and placemaking are not new, but they were new to

Summit Lake. Both the organizations vying for the attention of local participation spoke in the language of experimentation, of testing out ideas. Both were based outside Akron, and both clamored for space and attention. They both needed local buy-in for the success of the public art projects. They needed a trusted local leader to encourage the rest of the neighborhood to come along, to address the doubt. They needed Leo.

If you get Leo on board when it comes to art stuff, you will get the neighborhood.

She knew something about public art. She made it all the time.

The year before, there was a home grown burst of art that sprouted right out of the neighborhood. After the two years in the Long Street House, Leo was fully engaged in the lives of the neighborhood kids. She was bringing children into stuff that she had

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always loved doing as a kid – sports and making art. This was instinctive for her. She was a natural. It was easy to spot her bright pictographs over the windows of the Front

Porch Café and popping up in other places in town.

The summer before the outside grant projects parked on Summit Lake, Leo imagined a big colorful mural in the intersection of Edison and West Long. It was a tricky corner, a three-way stop with four streets. It was part of a public bus route.

Diagonally across the street from each other were two attractions for local children – the

Lets’ Grow Akron Children’s garden and the playground of Miller Church. Leo saw the mural as a community crosswalk, as a way to mix safety and art.

Her method of engaging the public was to sit at the picnic table on the grounds of

Miller Avenue Church every Saturday through the summer of 2016. I was there most of those Saturdays. I made a big computer plan drawing of the intersection, and we had crayons, paper, crayons, and markers for people to dream up ideas for the mural.

Some of our target participants came over after the Saturday lunch inside the church. If they had not eaten their lunch inside, we asked them over to eat and chat. We called out to whoever passed by to come over and sketch ideas on copies of the site plan for the mural. She knew almost everybody by name. Not everyone was interested or knew what we were talking about, but most everyone liked hanging out with Leo.

The painting of the mural party was open to all. The day began at sunrise, blocking all the streets and blasting the intersection with the power washer. It was a

Sunday. Duane called the painting party to be the church service for the day. Within the familiar outline of a block party, there was the totally unfamiliar imperative to transfer the final design to the intersection, 1,000 square feet of eight different colors.

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Throughout the day there was continuous music, food, side games, a twirling water sprinkler shrieking with joyful kids. The Akron rock stacker added a meditative touch back from the center of the action. A basketball hoop stayed busy on another arm of the blocked intersection.

By six o’clock, it was done. Everyone who participated signed the work on the corner where the street met the curb cut. The drone that had been buzzing around most of the day took the group photo, a tight happy bunch around the signatures. Something had been made that was owned by the whole group. The signatures were there, ownership proved by inclusion in the happy tag.

So where art was concerned, if Leo bought into the merits of these foreign dream- spinners, others would follow. She was unsure herself, at first, of the intentions of the new arrivals. They were operating out of a payroll and a program. Their work came from a motivation that was different, but she was willing to hope, to join in.

***

On its own merits, the Summit Lake neighborhood has an organic beauty, a graceful air. There is a patina of age in the craftsmanship of hundred year old houses that alternate with the empty lots. Proportion, scale and detailing in the porches and size of the houses bespeak of an era of larger families, and summer heat endured by staying in the shade of the front porch. Abundant still, that grace, if through a filter of broken bicycles, odd household and industrial debris, and clumsy wooden wheelchair ramps snaking over a once broad set of entry steps.

But prior to 2014, there was nothing that anyone would describe as deliberate public art. Beyond street markers and stop signs, there were the modest and basic

302 signage for the corner stores and bars. Any graphic marketing artistry was directed to the cars passing by, in the form of illuminated billboards high in the air. The neighborhood, with a slow pedestrian view, got the view of the giant foot for such messages, bolted on concrete in weedy empty parking lots.

Graphics and color at the eye level of residents tended to be in motion, on the sides of buses. The Akron Transit Bus Garage is on one edge of the neighborhood, in what had once been the streetcar barn. There is a steady parade of homeward bound buses at certain times of day, telegraphing color and code. “Need a Lawyer?” or

“INJURED?!” accompany larger than life pictures of wheelchair-bound victims. Huge tags and multi-color graffiti adorn the sides of containers rolling through the neighborhood, on freight trains not stopping in Akron.

Along with the question “What is public art?” there is the question that follows –

“Who gets to make the art?”

And who gets to make the decision about who makes the art? Are artists from bigger places with more commissions and experience a better choice than a local artist?

With the engineering work involved in the transformation of the west side, no one would challenge the wisdom of outside consultants being hired. It was a massive coordination effort, in addition to the work itself. Two infrastructure such projects intersected along Old Main Street. Prior work for the new configuration of ramps and access to the highway, billed as a “new entrance to Downtown Akron” had removed nearly all the remnants of the commercial history of South Main and Broadway. The new sewer work exposed the old brick lined manholes as the new massive concrete pipes were installed for “Akron Waterways Renewed!”

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That outside consultants would be hired for making the new sewer project is not a matter for debate. The main feature of “Akron Waterways Renewed!” is the creation of a one mile long tunnel, thirty feet in diameter, running diagonally under downtown

Akron. Not many people are capable of creating a gigantic tunnel under a working city.

But when it comes to matters more subtle than engineering, then what? When questions of expertise are outside of measurable standards, what is the criteria for decision-making? Who is the expert about the unquantifiable, who sets the standard for neighborhood beauty and meaning?

Real art can be scary, because it reaches inside in a way that is unexpected. It shakes us up. That is the whole point. So rather than actual art, most publicly funded works tend to be more palatable than challenging. There is nothing wrong with this, but it isn’t art. The current mission statement of the National Endowment for the Arts reads:

“The National Endowment for the Arts is an independent federal agency that funds, promotes, and strengthens the creative capacity of our communities by providing all Americans with diverse opportunities for arts participation.”

This mission statement has led to work that seeks to engage communities. This more careful treading into the subjective arena grew from a series of fantastic controversies. In the late 1980’s, the most famous and divisive controversy arose from the work of visual artists, specifically photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres

Serrano. The pictures, homoerotic large format pictures from Mapplethorpe and a crucifix in a jar of urine from Serrano, were a bonanza for moral conservatives to illustrate why the National Endowment for the Arts should be completely eliminated.

Public sculpture has a different impact than visual art. Sculpture is a three dimensional medium, with interaction between the object and the audience. In 1979, the

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Art in Architecture program selected Richard Serra to design a work for the plaza fronting a new federal building in downtown Manhattan. Serra acknowledged that the point of the sculpture he created for the plaza was to emphasize the dehumanizing aspect of government office work.

It was an enormous rusting angled wall of steel, nearly as long as half a football field effectively bisecting the open space. Ten feet high, it tilted and loomed over everyone making their way to the front door of the federal building like a giant red ocean wave. The federal employees who worked in the building hated the thing. The controversy this work ignited eventually resulted in the middle-of-the-night removal of

Tilted Arc, after eight years of menacing presence on the otherwise empty plaza. It was a very long legal battle because the two sides cut across a variety of sensibilities far wider than the relatively confined world of art criticism focused on difficult contemporary work such as Serra’s.

In the case of Tilted Arc, ordinary people revolted, and they ultimately prevailed.

After the offending sculpture was extracted, the plaza was outfitted with cozy, curved benches, planters and simple amenities more favorable to a thirty minute lunch break.

The plaza at the Federal Building was transformed by the people most affected by the sculpture – they demanded something other than what they were given. They wanted to participate in the decision of what public art was.

The National Endowment for the Arts, if it was to survive, had to broaden its mission. The funding and the function moved towards more inclusivity of community in the process. Art, in this new understanding, would come off the wall and down from the

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plinth. Art, by the Endowment’s standards and funding, become more user-friendly, hands-on, group over individual process.

That shift ushered in our current preference for comfort over provocation.

Ironically the safer impulse for publicly funded art trended towards communist ideals of

“people’s art”. The NEA mission seeking to “fund, promote, and strengthen the creative capacity of our communities by providing all Americans with diverse opportunities for arts participation”, dovetailed with efforts to renovate abandoned urban spaces. The new mission statement has led to the creation of a new field for renewal of derelict public space: Placemaking. The word, the idea, the concept has become an international movement, a college degree.

It hit the Shore of Summit Lake in the spring of 2017.

The two grant-funded organizations focused on Summit Lake operated out of the placemaking mindset. The artists from Seattle with the impossible name (“The League of

Creative Interventionists”, henceforth referred to as ‘The League’) specialize in “events creation” such as elaborately orchestrated community meals and installations in neglected spaces. These gatherings photograph very well, and live after their theatrical moment in the websites of the artists and foundations. Participants leave with a souvenir of the event that they helped to create. The events are momentary groundings in community, a reminder of other possibilities, in a place that for whatever reason, had become stale, taken for granted or simply unseen altogether.

The other group, with the equally difficult to remember name (“Reimagining the

Civic Commons”, henceforth, referred to as ‘CC’, as in a stripped down tribute to the

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‘CCC” of the 1930’s) tried out stuff to create a sense of fun; a brobdignanian foam marble rolling in downtown Akron and loose folding beach chairs on Main Street.

***

As the discussions about placemaking and public art started up at the community center, just beyond the immediate neighborhood there is a quintessential piece of public art from another era. It was a powerful symbol of what it represented; complete domination over the day to day lives of the people living in Summit Lake.

It lives quietly beyond the giant red neon sign etched against the sky, visible day and night above Firestone’s Plant 1, the single word “FIRESTONE” The illuminated word is an iconic entity, a beacon of the past. It is a landmark and a benchmark for orientation in South Akron, but really, the sign is art. It is not selling anything other than a cultural connection to memory. Every night without fail, it lights up the skyline of

South Akron. But it has been forty years since the last commercial tile came off the assembly line. The sign is a beacon almost entirely devoid of content. The building it stands upon, itself looming over the landscape in the signature Firestone yellow buff brick, is nearly empty, its front door handles connected by spider webs. One type of high end racing tire is produced within the enormous building. The sign conveys a message that is disjointed from reality. Art.

The former manufacturing grounds of the Firestone campus are off limits to the public, but one can wander in the open, modern areas of the campus to the south of the sign and find the bronzed figure of Harvey Firestone himself, gazing over this sign and the entirety of his former empire. Restored and ignored, the statue is devoid of contemporary connection, compelling, mysterious and powerful.

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By the summer of 2017, the neighborhood that had served up the labor for the factory, would again come into a strange communion with its former boss. Despite the size of the Bridgestone/Firestone campus today, the living memory of its dominance is slight in the neighborhood now. Older residents are few. Shirley, 85, lives in the house she grew up in on Paris Street. She worked at the Firestone bank at the corner of Miller and South Main for over fifty years. Her deceased husband was a painter at the plant.

“Not the regular kind of painting. He went up and down – elevator shafts. Now and then, Frank would repaint F I R E S T O N E on the side of the smokestacks.

That was Frank’s job.”

But, from the perspective of art, urban archeology, and history, the neighborhood and the factory still have a lot of things to work out. In the summer of

2017, it would manifest in a strange way. It rose through questions of legitimacy; why are artists from outside Akron being given money and opportunity to make art about

Akron? That question linked the community art process in the neighborhood with the statue gazing in frozen perpetuity at the evolving life of Summit Lake.

***

While all the Akron rubber companies in Akron prospered from defense work in

World War II, the postwar era gave Firestone Tire and Rubber Company an additional reason to celebrate. Five years after Allied forces declared victory, the company would mark fifty years since its founding by founder Harvey Samuel Firestone. His five sons had plenty of cash to properly commemorate the monumental success of their father and his company. For a suitable memorial to the self-made titan, they could afford to

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hire the best money could buy.

This was a private, corporate decision, but with an overriding concern for public perception. There was no public agency with a voice in the process, but the sons intended to s create a work for the public and for the expanding horizon of Firestone’s future prosperity. The unveiling of the commissioned statue was scheduled as part of the fiftieth anniversary of the company. The half century mark celebration included indoor and outdoor exhibitions, picnics, international visitors and two circuses.

The three men commissioned for creating the memorial were famous and well respected. The designer was a New York architect, Eric Gugler. Franklin Delano

Roosevelt had hired him to redesign the West Wing of the White house. He in turn recommended James Earle Fraser for the statue and Donald DeLue for additional stone sculptures completing the memorial ensemble. They worked in the classical repertoire associated with the refinement of the Greek and Roman revival style common to

Washington DC and filtered through every state and town’s design for evocation of authority and legitimacy.

The Beacon Journal predicted it would “give Akron a new center of cultural beauty”. The statue of Firestone would be the crown, the centerpiece of the memorial assembly and of the twenty five acre site sloping downward from the intended site of the statue.

This is placemaking along the lines of Louis XIV, the Sun King. All of South

Akron and the Firestone factory lay below the circular design of the monument. By the time of the event on August 3, 1950, the attention on the unveiling was high. Firestone executives from ten countries, local dignitaries, religious leaders, Life Magazine,

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employees and the curious all gathered as the five sons of the founder stood below the veiled grey bulk, sitting on a solid granite plinth, 10,000 necks craning upward. Before the multitude, the Metropolitan Opera soprano Eleanor Steber led the Firestone chorus in “Oh God Our Hope in Ages Past, Our Hope for Years to Come” as the five Firestone brothers pulled the cord to reveal the statue for the first time.

The sculptor, James Earle Fraser, was not among the celebrants. Nor was the bronze statue. Though Fraser was close to the end of his life, he continuously took on new commissions. To this day, he has more public sculptures in the capital than any other artist. His bronze portraiture of major national leaders and heroes are draped over

Washington, DC.

But this commission was difficult for Fraser, and he was late on the deadline.

For over seventy years, he produced vivid moving depictions of national figures and heroes – his Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, and Theodore Roosevelt grace the front of classical Greek American temples of art and government. There is a passion, sensuality and emotion in his work that continues to demand attention from the viewer. He designed the buffalo nickel. But his most famous work was also his first, at seventeen. In 1918, he created “The End of the Trail”, a bronze depiction of a Native

American man, slumped in exhaustion over his horse, carrying a spear. It touched something in the popular psyche and was reproduced in hundreds of versions. Nothing he ever did after in his life transcended his first work. It lives on, in countless iterations available on the internet.

And for whatever reason, Harvey was hard for Fraser to complete on schedule.

He kept promising, but it was not finished in time for the unveiling.

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The figure received to great acclaim that day was the white plaster model covered with a concoction he recommended, giving it a bronze appearance. No one knew of the stand-in except the one very nervous project manager. But the crowd was predisposed for acceptance. The rouse was successful. The switch was made later, under a scaffold covered in cloth and an explanation about fixing the patina satisfying the unsuspecting community.

Even in 1950, the statue was expressive of a glorious myth about the past. The seated Firestone resembles a cross between the seated Abraham Lincoln of his eponymous D.C. memorial and the seated St. Peter in his eponymous basilica in Rome.

The entire composition would be more spiritually expressive of the founding era of the company in 1910 than to anything relevant to the art of midcentury America. Classical references and realism were completely in the rear view mirror of the pepped up art world in Post War America. Paris was out, Rome was out, New York was the center of the explosion of abstraction feeding all expression of art, literature, music, and dance and filtering through pop culture via Madison Avenue.

Memorials telegraph the values of the moment they are created more so than the subject memorialized. Perhaps some people in the crowd of 10,000 knew the statue was a fake in ways far deeper than the shoe polish bronze. There were changes in the industry already that would signal the end of Akron’s dominance in keeping the world moving across the continents of the world. Harvey Firestone, gazing benignly from the armchair at his mile of empire in South Akron, was looking at the past, not the future.

Seeing the memorial today, it is as its architect Eric Gugler boasted at the dedication “the elements composing it are of rare beauty and dignity.” The original

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scotch pines have been replaced by three thornless honey locust trees, which have grown protectively around the assembly. A contemporary “carpet” of alternating grass and concrete squares connect it to the Bridgestone Research Building, completed in 2012.

But the current attempt to connect it to its setting, which also includes handsome new but uninviting black stone benches, only increases its message of distance. It feels set apart, detached and uncomfortably graceful.

The gaze of the titan has enough ambiguity to suit a range of interpretations. His left foot extends over the granite plinth, as though to launch him into a new big idea. It is possible to reach up an arm and touch the foot of the man who stomped over the landscape. But unlike Fraser’s perhaps unconscious model for the statue, Arnolfo di

Cambio’s St. Peter Enthroned, in the Basilica of St. Peter in Rome, there is no sign of wear at Harvey’s toe, the one point of connection. The urge to do so is dampened by some kind of hesitancy, the feeling that one is being watched. He is frozen in an idealized state, the veneer of what the culture wanted to believe about painless progress.

American culture is still in thrall of the self-made man, the bootstrap success stories, but we also want the back stories that characterize most of us. American culture is moving towards the legitimization of the stories of people around the dominant line, the Caucasian male Christian version.

In the summer of 2017, the need for embracing the truth of our story became frighteningly clear. It became clear through the representations of white Confederate hero men bronzed in public squares in cities and towns throughout the south. What had become street furniture began trembling with pent-up resentment. Really taking in what the statues were telling us, it was impossible not to recognize that the statues held

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different messages for black and white Americans. These were statues honoring men who were defending the right of some people to own other people. Art became a passionate focus for reexamining who we are and who we aspire to be. 19 That they had to go was clear. But the opportunity for a broader discussion about culture, about our shared public spaces, did not happen. In the intense discomfort, escalating to fear and violence,20 most of the statues were removed at night, as quickly as a ton of bronze on a

10’ granite base can be taken out of sight.

Though Harvey’s bronze likeness is dressed in period clothing, he has just cast off a classical robe of some sort, indicating, perhaps his personal rejection of the elevated status he so obviously deserves. Perhaps the discarded robe is meant to signal his identification with the common man, with his workers, with the world extending beyond the reach of Firestone Rubber.

Behind the statue, there is a half circle enclosing bench with the work of the third artist, Donald DeLue. This completes the circular design of the composition. These bas relief figures eternally languish in classical repose. Ostensibly meant to represent virtues, the figures could be a frieze above a gay bar. They read today like a joke on Harvey.

19 The statue controversy extended beyond its original outrage around the Confederate figures. The sculptor of the Harvey statue, James Earl Fraser, had created a striking bronze composition of Theodore Roosevelt astride a horse flanked by two walking companions. It towers on the stairs leading to the entry doors of the Natural History Museum in New York. Theodore is ecstatic, towering above the massive horse beneath him and the two companions, a black man and a Native American.

20 After the Charlottesville, North Carolina City Council voted to remove the statue of Robert E. Lee and rename the eponymous park “Emancipation Park” opponents of the removal started demonstrating. The tension escalated when counter-demonstrations supporting the removal began. A man opposing the removal drove his car straight into those supporting the removal, killing Heather Heyer and injuring 28 people. 313

Behind his benevolent backside, there is a party going on! Donald DeLue was an outspoken critic of abstract and modern art. Highly successful in his lifetime, his work is identified by highly stylistic articulated musculature. The forms are idealized, almost cartoonlike exaggerations of human form. The granite figures in the semicircular frieze seem to be at a bathhouse, carrying on a different sort of commerce than Firestone had in mind. They are approachable and intimate. These figures are on our level, our size – if we were to devote four hours a day at the gym. They want to be touched. At some unknown point during Akron’s nadir, they were vandalized, the fingers, toes and noses broken off. In the underground pre-Stonewall world of homosexual socializing, this frieze might have been a safe, discrete spot for meeting friends. That is how things were in the fifties and sixties.

Bronze Harvey watched the steady diminishment of his creation. In 2012, his view the empire he built was obscured by the construction of the Bridgestone Americas

Technical Center. Firestone exists today as one part of a Japanese corporation with its headquarters in Tokyo, Japan.

In the summer of 2017, however, a new artistic movement had grown around the far edge of his former empire. Could his ambiguous gaze see through the Bridgestone obstacle, there on the lowest point of his gaze, on the shore of Summit Lake, that the former Firestone Pump House was coming alive?

***

The Pump House was designed in the Neo Renaissance Revival style. It is crisp, balanced, proportionately pleasing from any perspective. The exterior is brick, yellow buff color, the Firestone standard finish. The hip roof was originally finished in red tile.

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Deep overhanging eaves dramatize the shadow effect, further enlivened by the articulated, carved wood rafter tails.

. The Pump House is an elegant reminder of Summit Lake’s leisure days and the only public building still existing from that time on the eastern shore. It was built in

1916. Its looks today like a small Italian palazzo was gently deposited on the shore of

Summit Lake while no one was paying attention.

However, its exterior grace and refinement contradict its historic purpose. The interior tells a different story. For sixty years, twenty four hours a day, it sucked water from Summit Lake. The water was piped underground to the plants for various non- potable purposes. Among the massive valves, joints, dials, connectors, nipples, pressure relief gauges still on site, there is evidence of screening at the gaping intake basin, to prevent the fish, turtles, plants and other incidentals from entering the system. Above the works is the apartment of the pump house manager. After the building was decommissioned in 1978, he and his wife continued to live in the building. After he died, his widow lived there until she died in 1997.

The city ended up with the property. It languished for about a decade. In 2010,

Lets Grow Akron took occupancy of the fenced-in grounds around the facility for their demonstration gardens, greenhouse and chicken coops. Akron artist Mark Soppeland curated a group of students in creating “The Unexpected Aquarium” for the pump house.

Bright Disneyesque undersea scenes replaced the plain plywood window protectors. An undulating band of color drew the eye upward to the second floor of the building that had lost its purpose.

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Into this tilled soil, the Seattle-based artist Hunter Franks saw an opportunity.

The founder of the League of Creative Interventionists, he had successfully executed his first Knight Foundation grant in Akron, and saw the tremendous potential in the Summit

Lake neighborhood. He was not alone in this recognition. Reimaging the Civic

Commons was focused on elevating a 2.5 mile section of the canal towpath trail from downtown Akron to the Summit Lake Community Center - the pump house was just south of the community center. There would be ripple effects. There would be attention, publicity, money. Hunter pitched another grant submission with the Knight

Foundation, entitled “The Summit Lake Arts & Culture Project.”

Hunter Franks and the League had created community-enhancing projects all over the country. They had already proven their capacity in Akron. Their first grant, awarded in 2015 entitled 500 Plates, was just that: a sit-down dinner for 500 self-invited folks on the Innerbelt. Focusing on drawing people from all the neighborhoods of Akron, the meal was intended to connect and promote conversation about the future of the soon to be decommissioned highway they gathered upon.

The League was awarded the second grant of $125,000 for their as-yet- undesignated opportunity to focus on the Summit Lake neighborhood, with the plan of rehabilitating an existing property into a community center for arts & culture.

Meanwhile, in an obvious irony, the only public building on the entire circumference of the Summit Lake shore happened to be the lively Summit Lake … Community Center.

In reaching directly into a long neglected neighborhood, the League nudged its way into a location that needed attention. It success in getting money through the arts

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establishment illuminates the question of imported vs local artists. What is the story and who gets to tell it?

Based in Seattle, it was impractical for Hunter and his partner Anne Coivu to have the on-the-ground presence to build the community that is the foundation of their art.

They had identified the locale – the pump house. The project became “The Pump House

Center for Arts & Culture”. Now, they needed a local. The Knight Grant budget included the hiring of a local project manager.

The League asked Leo to be the Project Manager for the Pump House project.

They also hired a local architectural firm to produce plans for the renovation of the first and second floor of the pump house. Through the winter and spring, they consulted with

Leo on the programming planned for the summer.

Leo was accustomed to operating with slim resources. It took some time for her to realize that she was indeed in a new league. Hunter Franks encouraged her to think big about the programming, and to buy the materials to enhance the ideas. “Build Corps’ became the employment program for teens for the summer. Power tools, t-shirts, stickers, publicity and salaries were prepared. The kids were identified and hired.

The summer season for the Pump House started with a party and demonstration by Build Corps. In coordination with Reimagining the Civic Commons, it was a great success, a mingling of lots of Akron subcultures. Locals and outsiders wandered on the grounds of the pump house, admiring the views of the lake, and getting tours of the Lets

Grow Akron agriculture. They peeked inside the building at the great network of outsized plumbing. Lots of people came by bicycle on the tow path – people who otherwise might turn around at the section that included Summit Lake and the projects

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fronting a neighborhood that was perceived as dangerous. The day had vitality and pep and promise.

Two weeks later all the power tools were stolen from the pump house. Somebody snitched to Leo and, as she suspected it was an inside job, a trust violation. She felt betrayed by the kids she thought were friends. She asked for guidance from Duane. First they approached the families directly. No results. Though snitching is a major violation of street law, Duane called the police. This is community, too – a kind of hard grinding out of a clash of cultures, new money in an old place, good intentions and street hustle, different goals, different laws trying to operate in the same landscape.

The neighborhood paid attention. After a tense aftermath of court appearances and community service, the neighborhood saw that Leo, as Duane had done before her, was going to stay with it, keep walking through the stuff together. The tools never were retrieved or replaced. But Build Corps made benches, signs, tables and chairs by hand – and heavy so nothing would move from where it was planted. It worked.

Over the course of the summer, there was an increasing tension between the artists in Seattle and the project manager in Akron. Misunderstandings and lack of clarity in the goals of the project began to wear on the team. As part of the grant, the

League hosted it’s out of town members for a weekend to show off the “Pump House

Center for Arts & Culture”. They stayed in a downtown hotel. There were meetings with locals about the future of the pump house. Between the meals and field trips, the out of town disciples of creative interventions brainstormed for ideas for an action.

Together with the local Build Corps teens, the visitors made a temporary “front porch” on an empty lot next to the Pump House. Though no one wanted to say it out

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loud, the day felt forced and uncomfortable. The discomfort was reflected in the result.

Brightly painted tires were filled with instant flowers clustered around a plywood platform, a rickety railing and rough uninviting bench. It looked and felt alien, too quick and too hip. It was obvious in the actual created thing that was made. It was more about the League than anything the neighborhood would find interesting. Everyone had a front porch already. It sat on the ground across from the pump house. The group of local teens and out of town creatives gathered around the porch for the pictures, and everyone went home.

Before Hunter and Anne landed back on the West Coast, the porch was all messed up. When you invite community participation, some guests are going to be rowdy. In this instance of neighborhood vandalism, no action was taken to find the perpetrators. It could have been any number of people reacting to the “intervention” by the League of

Creative Interventionists.

In frustration and ready to quit the job, Leo asked her local collaborators to help her through a conference call with Hunter-n-Anne. She hoped the witnesses would help get her points across, problems she had tried to talk through with the team for weeks. She was willing to lead the last community project, a photo course for local teens that would culminate with an exhibit in the fall. She was not willing to manage Hunter-n-Anne’s idea for the balance of the grant money, $40,000. The artists wanted to stage a community meal to coincide with

Reimagining the Civic Common’s unveiling of the new landscaping features at the Summit

Lake Community Center. Leo thought the money, a huge amount for a community like

Summit Lake, should go towards renovation of the Pump House – or turned back to the Knight

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Foundation. She based her feeling on material from the artists’ stated mission: “to transform and activate the building into an active art, event, and performance space.”

While the group around the table waited for Seattle to call, Eric Nelson, the Head of the

SWAG Program, led a prayer for his sister in community, Leo and for the greater good, whatever God had in mind.21 Change is measured over a longer time than anyone would like, that motives are different but intentions can unite, that respect and listening is a better servant than alienation.

Everyone at the table but Leo was experienced in such situations, and knew they had no influence in how the money was spent at this point in the process. They were there to support

Leo – and her initial journey into an understanding of how things worked. Without much need to say it, her advisors knew that change is measured over a longer time than anyone would like.

Motives are different but intentions can unite. They demonstrated to her that respect and listening is a better servant than alienation. The conversation, if nothing else, let Hunter-n-

Anne know that Leo had friends ready to come to her defense.

By the end of the call, there was agreement that Leo would lead the photo project but they would find someone else to manage the last supper, the sopping up of the end of the grant gravy.

The opening of the Leo-led photo project was two days before the 200 plate dinner.

Local photographer artist Shane Wynn’s large format pictures of Summit Lake residents lined the towpath from the community center to the pump house. It was a beautiful evening on

21 I was present along with Veronica Sims, Council at Large of the Akron City Council, Eric Nelson, head of the SWAG program, Grace Hudson, a long standing neighborhood activist, and Lisa Nunn, Director of Let’s Grow Akron. 320

Summit Lake. On the grounds of the pump house, there was live music, flavored water and copies of the hard bound book of the students’ work. Hunter and Leo made brief remarks.

There were tons of kids, teens, and Summit Lake locals. Almost everyone walked to get there.

The teens forgot they had to be cool. They ran around signing their names on the pages with their work.

Even the power tool thieves were there, working the lemonade dispenser, part of the community. Whatever tension it took to get to that point, it was not remotely in evidence. It was a light and seemingly effortless evening. It cost a lot to get there, but something had It was community. It was real– it was art.

By this time, Hunter-and Anne had started to work on the third Knight Foundation grant, $214,000 to create a pop-up forest on the now decommissioned and partially demolished Innerbelt. Their involvement with the Pump House was over.

As Duane and Lisa walked along Summit Lake on the towpath towards home after the event, they were happy. This event in particular made them realize that good things were happening, and their only involvement was showing up to celebrate.

This was not the same place they had moved to twenty years before with big ideas. They stopped to take it the view of the new shoreline created through the Civic

Commons project. It was a sandy beach, with bordered by huge boulders and dotted with benches in the margin between the grass and the lake. They watched people doing just what they were doing, enjoying a beautiful night in a beautiful place within a walk’s distance from home.

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OLD SOUTH MAIN STREET

A place called Main Street implies something at the center of it all. It is an

American cultural touchstone. A road designated as Main Street is grounded in our evolved sense of place. There is a certain kind of safety that stubbornly persists in that concept, a generally available vision of a shared idea.

Places that have grown beyond the small town evocation of a Main Street are often renamed in attempts to infuse new life into dormant zones. Such arteries are often named after civic leaders or catchy urban planning buzzwords. They might be called

“Market Place”, and converted to serpentine pedestrian-only zones.

By 2017, the historic spine in the central downtown section of Akron’s Main

Street displayed its history and its promise in a comprehensible mile’s worth of contradiction. Blank old commercial storefronts vied with large planned projects based on historic assets. Clunky whimsical street furniture sprouted on sidewalks carrying sparse pedestrian traffic. A snippet of Main Street was ceremoniously designated

LeBron James Way. Fortunately, the street never suffered the indignity of transformation to a pedestrian only thoroughfare. That popular well-intentioned approach to enliven downtowns generally only accelerated their commercial demise. In Akron, though the storefronts may be empty, their story is very much alive in the quantity of old buildings still standing. There is a pulse that offers a promise of new life. It deserves to be called

Main Street.

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The particulars of this story, however, are located further along this artery.

Main Street takes on a boulevard grandeur while passing south through the monolithic brick complex of buildings that had been the B F Goodrich Company. But it unceremoniously and abruptly concludes at a complex of condominiums that aggressively turn their back to the street. A sharp left followed by a sharp right brings the motorist back to South Main, where any sense of motor car grandeur is now stripped away. After that sharp left, a driver’s inclination is to step on the gas, to accelerate through this section.

The next mile of South Main Street is a one way artery, headed out of town.

This is the South Main Street for the physical grounding point of this story. This is the eastern edge of the Summit Lake neighborhood, the 58 blocks of Duane’s ministry of presence. In a curious paradox that he will acknowledge, one of his early great successes in neighborhood organizing may have been a major unanticipated factor in

South Main’s current destruction.

A one-way street in a smaller city is created for the benefit of those who daily come in and out of that city. A one-way street is antithetical to a Main Street, to the pulse of commerce and activity. A one-way street is not what Walt Disney had in mind when he recreated Main Street USA as the gateway for the Magic Kingdom. A one-way street is made for speed and ease from here to there.

This one-way chunk of South Main Street is a mile long. It had been the interface between the factories and the working class neighborhood those factories sustained. The commercial life of the street evolved into a mash-up of consumer and light industrial support businesses, and a lot of bars. Transitional more than destination,

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it was the linking route between two defining Akron institutions, the Goodrich and the

Firestone factories. At the southern end of this stretch, Main Street bridges the railroad tracks and enters Firestone territory.

But as of January 2017, nearly all of what had existed on that stretch was completely gone. Not only the buildings, but not a bush, tree or streetlamp dotted the landscape. There was nothing to soften the blunt force trauma operating daily on the street. The final stroke for the evolutionary disappearance of this part of South Main, for the eradication of everything including the natural terrain, was the redesign of access to

Interstate 76. Billed as the new gateway to downtown, dangerous exit and access ramps were pulverized into dirt in favor of an acre-devouring roundabout, sized for automobiles decelerating from 65 to thirty miles an hour.

Even for those living in the neighborhood, without any of the old landmarks, it was hard to find the functioning intersecting streets. Everything was bald and flat, interrupted here and there with colossal heaps of dirt.

***

Through the twenty years Duane Crabbs had worked his way into the neighborhood through the street. In his early years, he walked. At any time of day or night, the rhythm of his feet brought him into the life and people of the neighborhood.

His sensitivity was tuned to people. The sincerity, desire and capacity to connect stayed with him through the years. He remained the optimist because he stayed in the present moment. The firefighter moves into the heat, responds to the need at hand. Despite tragedies and losses he guided people through, there was always the hope of being in a

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place to step in before the fire. His question was not “What would Jesus do” but “What would Jesus do if he were Duane Crabbs?”

That question gave an allowance for the range of his personality – including the unforgettable fury to those on the receiving end. Heat seeks heat, and Duane’s anger when provoked had a searing immediacy. Grown men cried. That volatility was on call during his education in the working system of ‘street’. It was his grounding education into the lives of a segment of his community. In the early years of his ministry, after nights of his walking street presence, he would end up after hours at The Main Event, a bar at the corner of Crozier and Main. His friend Claudia was the owner and bar maid there, back when bars still had bar maids.

As had become customary on the nights Duane was present, Claudia would grab the remote control and turn off the juke box. To the protesting of the dancers, Claudia would call out “Hey, everyone shut the fuck up. The preacher is leaving and I want him to pray for this goddamned place.”

In the confused silence, the attention would turn to Duane, some hats would be removed, some heads would bow, and some bikers’ dew-rags would come off.

In the early days in neighborhood bars, it was difficult for Duane to honestly ask

God’s blessing on the place and the people, but Claudia might remind him, interrupting the silence, “Come on, you know we don’t got all night.”

One slow late night at the Main Event, Claudia asked Duane for prayer – for herself. She told Duane that Ever since her mother died in a fire, she had a weight on her heart. She didn’t do enough, try hard enough, to save her mother from the fire. As

Claudia explained the circumstances of the New Year’s Eve fire that killed her mother

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and burned down the house, Duane realized he knew what she was describing. He was there. It was his first fire with the Akron Fire Department. He was able to tell her that there was nothing she could have done to save her mother.

He got better at bar ministry as time went on. Whatever discomfort he had experienced was gone as he saw the bar as a place that provided comfort and acceptance for people with no questions asked.

One Sunday, the Main Event hosted a fundraiser to support Duane’s ministry.

After the bar closed the night of the fundraiser, a sewer line broke under Crozier

Street. It undermined and structurally ruptured the length of the south basement wall.

The bar never reopened. It was torn down, the only evidence of its existence is the scars of the shared wall with Old Glory Days, a strip club.

***

That a fundraiser for his ministry was the last event in a corner bar on South

Main Street is a story that could never happen at South Street Ministries today, would not be on the planning flipchart paper at StratOps, but it had everything to do with the ministry’s chemistry and genetics.

In 2017, though Duane was more often cruising the neighborhood in his car, he never bypassed the opportunity to connect with friends and strangers. His years as an

EMS driver and a paramedic endowed his driving with a fluid character, just inside the edge of lawful behavior. His yardstick when they moved into Summit Lake was an inventory of public places of connection. Other than the corner stores and drive- throughs, there were 14 bars and 14 churches.

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In 2017, The Main Event was not the only corner bar that was now a grassy open space. In fact all the regular bars were gone. There were only two strip nightclubs on

Main Street. The other barometer was unchanged – there were still fourteen churches, an

Islamic mosque and a Buddhist temple in Summit Lake. Duane’s aim had been to bring the church pew and the bar stool closer. Twenty years later, it seemed the barstools were gone. Duane appreciated the humor and the pathos of such a thing. He would also point out that the church pews tended to be dusty from lack of use.

At the corner of Miller Avenue, South Main smacks directly into the curve of the rail bed. This location is the southeast corner edge of the 58 block Summit Lake neighborhood. In a schizophrenic response to the obstacle, the road splits in two, with the left called South Main and the right, Old South Main. Nearly all vehicular traffic takes the left fork. It bridges over the tracks at a pleasant angle, and becomes a comprehensible two way street as it enters Firestone territory.

The right fork is an entry to the twilight zone. Old South Main curves to the west, paralleling the railroad tracks. The curve introduces a kind of forced perspective. In its compressive arc, the view exposes stationary freight cars sitting on tracks. A weedy hill behind them is topped with the looming powerful presence of the Firestone plant. In the absence of vehicular traffic on the wide road, the scale and age of the buildings holding the curve add to the disorienting cultural nostalgia. It shimmers on the threshold of the hallucinatory. For a second the sounds, smell and feel of Akron’s industrial muscle are available to the open mind.

The tangible detritus of the fleeting cultural past remains intact inside the triangular brick two story building in the center of the curve. “Parassons Barbeque

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Restaurant” is faintly visible in pealing painted letters above the six uniform boarded-up storefronts.

***

On Friday, March 4th, four men associated with South Street were inside with flashlights, picking their way carefully through the debris. The building was owned by the City of Akron, one of many the city wanted off its rolls. South Street was interested in its potential as a neighborhood hub. The tour thus far was discouraging. The four men had already inspected the basement and ground floor stores without Duane. He was late, but their own experience with him, they knew he might be diverted by a spontaneous need. But he would, as he always did, show up. The second floor did not alter their negative impression. When he bounded up the stairs to join them, it was the old Duane, the guy who saw opportunities in the worst thing. The spark was back. His depression had lifted. The second floor was a time capsule. A maze of doors topped with transoms opening to vignettes of life interrupted, it was a messy tribute to male single occupancy hotel. A perfect distillation of sudden mysterious abandonment, it had the compelling quality of Chernobyl photographs. Renovation would seem to be beyond anyone’s powers, but Duane saw it alive. He pointed out the great views and imagined artists living there, among local grown small businesses below.

Duane asked the guys if it was ok that they pray together. Most of the men were accustomed to such a request. Among them was the grandson of Dallas Billington, founder of one of the country’s first mega-churches, the Akron Baptist Temple. When there was no objection, he asked Eric to lead them. They removed their caps. Fred

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Wheat, from City Planning, did the same, standing with the five others in a loose circle in the dingy hallway. Eric offered a general all-purpose sort of prayer followed by a minute of silence. What each of the six could have been praying for remained in their hearts.

For Fred Wheat, in all his years of giving such tours, this was a first. He found it refreshing.

Whether his ministry and the local triumph of churches over bars bears any relation to the drop in violent crime in Summit Lake is a matter of speculation. The reduction in crime corresponds to a reduction in population. The reduction in population resulted from unnatural forces; the crack epidemic, the housing mortgage crisis, and the policies of Mayor Don Plusquellic administration.

The neighborhood is a safer, quieter place than it was twenty years ago. Its population is mixed racially, kids play in the streets, and there are more gardens and trees, fewer houses. Duane’s consistent motivating energy is to do what Jesus would do.

He lived the principles reconciliation, relocation and redistribution.22

Prayer is not measurable, grace cannot be weighed. In 2000, after two

Palestinian store owners were killed within six months during robberies, Duane organized a mixed group of neighborhood men in prayer vigils to end the violence and calm the racial tension. There were no more shootings, no more store owners wounded or killed.

A more measurable point would be the number of times over those years that

Duane and Lisa hosted friends on their living room couch for months, guys who became

22 The three basic principles of the Christian Community Development Association, founded by John Perkins and Wayne Gordon. Duane was present at the first gathering of the organization in Chicago in 1989. The vision of its founders was based on three ideas: reconciliation, relocation and redistribution. 329

extra uncles for the Crabbs kids. There is a number for how many times did one of the kids shooting hoops in their front yard call out “Mr. Crabbs, watch this!” There could be an inventory of the number of bicycles repaired by kids over the twenty years of Bike

Shop. Countable are the number of five year olds he lifted over his head and tossed up in the air. Countable too, are the number of people who walked away for good, and those who came back, and back again. For twenty years, this was the fidelity of Duane and

Lisa. They were available.

By the spring of 2017 there were at least a dozen new “Duane n Lisas” in the neighborhood, taking up the call to incarnational Christian practice that has become more identifiable as a movement. This next generation of “New Monastic” Christians has more to offer their concerned loved ones than the urging in Mark 10:21 – “come, take up the cross, and follow me.” There are shelves of books that detail what Duane and Lisa have lived.

Among the practitioner writers is Shane Claiborne, the founder of The Simple

Way. A charismatic southerner of prodigious energy and imagination, he has been a tremendous influence in the movement. His greatest contribution may be a mojo long absent from white Christianity – he is cool.

Terri Johnson, an Akron woman inspired by Shane Claiborne, was looking for a way she could better live her Christian faith. Duane was suggested. After some time in worship with South Street, she purchased a house to allow others the incarnational life.

She committed to providing the shelter for those doing what she, in her fulltime career, could not.

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Artist Stephanie Leonardi has a passion for kids and Jesus. She left her job as an art teacher in the Akron Public School system to come live in the house Terri bought.

She was the first resident of what came to be identified by the kids as Leo’s House. She wanted to just get to know the neighborhood before doing much of anything, trusting that cashing out her teacher’s pension would last long enough until she did. Soon after Terri and a gang of South Street regulars repainted the second floor, a freshly married couple intent on a missional life took the third floor. Whatever doubts neighbors on Long Street had about the churchy types moving in didn’t last long. Leo had brought her trampoline with her.

With Duane and Lisa to check in with, Leo figured it out as she went along.

She had a willingness to enter fully into the lives of her neighbors. As she cruised along on her motorbike or truck, choruses of kids shouted out her name. Creating participatory projects as neighborhood events, she brought hope and visibility to the participants and to the neighborhood. She had the spontaneous spirit that matched the lives of people in poverty and drove others crazy. She is fun, and like Duane, makes people around her feel special.

In March of 2017 Leo sensed it was time for a change. She wanted to commit to the neighborhood she loved by buying a house in Summit Lake. She saw one for sale closer to the lake and asked Dave Baker to take a look. Dave has a construction business and is a wizard of engineering. As one of the very first people to support their vision, Dave bought and personally renovated Duane and Lisa’s house as a gift. He met

Leo in the driveway before going in to check the building.

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It had been twenty years since he stood with the Crabbs family in the driveway of

130 West South Street to stop for prayer before their first look at the interior of the condemned house. Time and again over the two decades, Dave showed up with his ingenious energy to get the job done for friends at South Street. Leo and Dave stood together and prayed aloud in the driveway before they entered the house. It did not take long for him to recognize that it was a gem.

“It’s a very good house” Dave Baker whispered during the survey.

The basement was plain vanilla, functional and exposed. It was dry, odor free, with only a slight moisture in the masonry at the corners. The floor joists were full dimension timber 2 x 8. The electrics and plumbing were up to date. Everything was accessible, the copper lines running straight and true. The rest of the house was equally cared for. There was one minor leak over the rear entry door, an easy fix. The original woodwork was in splendid shape, in a pleasing diluted Craftsman style. From the second floor windows, you could see Summit Lake.

“It’s a very, very, good house,” Dave pronounced simply, back in the sunny bite of March wind sweeping up from Summit Lake. Dave was happy, he looked great and was very much himself as he gave his clear generous assessment to Leo. You would not know that he was very seriously ill with cancer. He had been given a window of how much time he could expect to live, and he was a man who would live fully to the very last breath. He was three days from his 80th birthday - “March Forth”, he was fond of saying, waving a fist in the air. In his working man clothes in front of his truck, he looked like he could, at any minute, perform one of his legendary climbs up to the roof to fix that one spot that needed attention.

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Fortunately with Leo’s house, Dave’s involvement needed go no further than the driveway diagnosis. He got in his truck, and with a wave and a thumb’s up he was off, back home to make lunch for his wife Marlene. She was ill. Dave was determined to outlive her because he was afraid. Not over his approaching death, but his fears for her.

Who would care for her after he died? He could not bear the idea of his Marlene facing life alone in declining health after sixty years of marriage together.

Duane and Lisa’s decision to move to the neighborhood and the condition of the house they chose were staggeringly challenging to the status quo. By contrast, Leo’s decision to move forward on home ownership in Summit Lake was a far simpler proposition by 2017.

For what Lisa left out of the history on the morning of StratOps was her long discernment before agreeing to move the neighborhood. Three years passed from the time Duane had brought the idea to the family. Lisa cannot explain it, but one day she just knew. Her heart was opened to the idea, and whatever doubts she had at the time stayed in her heart. Their decision prompted hostility from church friends. Family told them they were putting their children at risk for the sake of their idea of following Jesus.

They were misunderstood, marginalized and criticized – but committed to the courageous decision as partners. Though the decision to move to the neighborhood got the attention, most of the media coverage was a misrepresentation of the truth. The decision came of two people working out differences in the mutual bond of fidelity. Duane and

Lisa chose obedience over comfort.

Twenty years later, Lisa realized that her greatest fear turned out to be her greatest gift. Her fear was for her children. Today, by any measure they are exemplary young

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adults. All four are working in service. Three out of the four live in Akron. As Lisa continues to do “some admin work” for South Street Ministries from home, she has a new companion in the living room. Three days a week she cares of their first grandchild,

Elliott, born on Thanksgiving weekend, 2016.

For Stephanie considering the commitment to the $25,000 house, there would still be some people who might think such a purchase dangerous and foolhardy. But not everyone. Neckties were turning in the direction of the charismatic body of water a hundred yards from her future front door.

Summit Lake was hot.

Not hot in the sense it had once been, actually hot; so hot with chemicals and waste heat from the Firestone Pump House that it would not freeze in winter. No, it was civic and real estate hot. It was white-people-starting-to-kayak in it hot. It was Ohio-

Fish-and-Game-declaring-that- the-fish-in-Summit-Lake were safe to eat hot.

Twenty years before, Summit Lake wore a shroud of physical and psychic dimension. The last full environmental analysis of the lake was done in 1978. The three second view while passing on the interstate was lovely, but it was otherwise all but invisible as a resource. The foliage and weeds around the lake were so thick at the edges, it was invisible to those living on the eastern side of the lake.

***

The river is shaped like a child’s drawing of a smile.

How do things change, through what source does transformation emerge? Maybe it’s a shift of light, drawing attention to something not seen before. Maybe it’s the bravery of one voice becoming a chorus that does it. Maybe it is someone, not knowing

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any better, who wanders in and asks why that big guy forgot to put his clothes on that day. Maybe it’s just a matter of time that brings the conditions for change.

Something that was unremarkable gets noticed. Called out, the invisible thing is finally seen and is no longer acceptable.

With the Cuyahoga River, the cost of doing business meant the river got dirty.

The current kept flowing, if sluggishly, so the lake got dirty. When the river caught fire on June 22, 1969, it was unremarkable. The fire was only newsworthy because the flames damaged two bridges. Even at that, the story warranted a few unattributed paragraphs in the back section of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Burning debris on the surface was common.

Like my older brothers and sisters, I learned to swim in Lake Erie. There were days when the beach was one massive sheet of dead fish, days of intense green seaweed, and days where the shoreline was scored with thick black goo from one of those long freighters on the horizon traveling The St. Lawrence Seaway. We just moved it aside to clear a path to the open water past the effluent. There plenty of other days in the mix.

When the lake was “fun rough” we’d bounce and roll around the edges, bathing suits sagging, full of small stones. Other days, the water was flat blue calm, glass clear, giving over to a whole new set of underwater games. That was the lake we knew and loved.

We lost our connection to the lake in 1963. After the sudden death of our father, it seemed best to sell the little summer cottage in Madison, Ohio. Our personal loss came five years before the claim “Lake Erie is dead” gained popularity. Then the river caught fire.

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With that fire, the time had come that such things could no longer be considered the cost of doing business. The environmental movement took shape around the burning river. Perhaps the contradiction of fire feeding on water grated against a shared primal spirit, something so against the natural flow it could no longer be ignored. Collectively, we had to take action.

I was fifteen on the first Earth Day March in Cleveland, the spring after the river caught fire. It’s possible I would not remember the march were it not for my cousin’s friend. She stole a gas station attendant’s belt clip change dispenser. It was full of coins and she wore it like a trophy the rest of the march. Lacking the courage to stand up to that kind of cool, I felt bad. I didn’t have any means to describe the taint of complicity, sadness and shame. The day just took a dark turn. I felt it through my hands holding up the poster board protest sign. It was another incomprehensible moment heaped onto the unrecognized urgency of getting away from the place I was born. Leaving seemed the only way for me to change what was unseen and invisible in my personal story, a fenced off forbidden void of the erased father.

***

Forty five years later, I was back in the Cuyahoga River valley. At the invitation of Cleveland artist Kathy Skerritt, I stood in a small circle of people beside a calm green lake, the headwaters of the Cuyahoga River. We listened as Sharon Day described the purpose of the next four days.

“We carry the river from the headwaters, where it is pure and clean to

where the river flows into Lake Erie, to remind her of what she was at the

beginning.”

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It was that that simple and that profound.

Sharon is a water walker and Ojibwa elder. She led us with a boundless trust. In the quiet steady flow, she exposed a space of awe and gratitude that billowed in the motion itself. We were in the flow of conscious immediacy through the continuous act of carrying the river in a copper vessel. We sang to, prayed for and gave thanks to the water over the eighty mile walking meditation.

The silences within the day’s walking got longer. The laughter, in the evenings over food together, grew deeper. By the third day, the world around us became part of the experience. Everything had a voice. Even the mailboxes lined along a suburban street to greet us were singing.

On the afternoon of the fourth day, we passed through the last part of the river’s course before she meets the lake. This is the industrial valley of Cleveland. The river is constricted in a deep channel and encased in the harsh beauty of steel. We moved through that bright angularity of submission still in a song, a dissonant cadence with its own surprising beauty. Everything belonged.

We were joined by waiting others as we got closer to the lake. It started raining.

We crossed through territory indifferent to walkers, over rail lines, through the tunneled freeway underpass, at last on Whiskey Island, flowing parallel now with the still invisible great lake just to our left. Picking up speed as the rain grew heavier, we moved steadily, silently, towards the strategic port of entry, the mouth of the Cuyahoga River.

At the brink of land giving over to water, a group of native musicians stood waiting in the rain. We had arrived at the transition point of the river. Immediately before us, the river flowed left, north, squarely through steel-sheeted ribs. We turned

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sharply with it, drawn faster by the intensity of the river, the rain, the wind and the drumming. The perspective snapped open wide to the lake and sky. The pier stretched thin in the tension between the land and the Coast Guard Station. Our passage narrowing even as we moved into the expansion of water and sky.

The journey was over. At the terminal point, the transformation seemed instant to me. Suddenly we were powerless raggedy group in a raggedy circle, a tiny dot. The June chilled wind off the lake snatched at everything; voices, drums, clothes and smudge pot smoke, pulling, scrubbing our faces. We were standing at the lowest point of land in

Northeast Ohio, where the Cuyahoga River moves into Lake Erie, all vulnerable and naked beneath a nuanced grey of enormous expanse.

Above and behind us, the ineffective jabs of jackknife bridges and brick stacks reached up under the equally ineffective stands of downtown towers. Nothing human beings had shoved in the soil could compare to the confluence of these bodies of water and that sky. The folly of believing that we controlled nature was inescapable.

Sharon gave Kathy the honor of tipping the copper vessel of the river into the river, the reminder of who she was when she started.

It is as simple as it is profound.

Furious reversals of wind snuffed the candles held behind cupped hands and hunched backs. The Coast Guard Station offered no protection. Standing near the compact mass of the building, what had always seemed gossamer from a distance was ordinary and modest. At last, the Coast Guard Station had found me. As a child, I always looked forward to a fleeting glance as we sped along the Lakeshore Freeway on the occasional trips to the west side of Cleveland to see relatives. They were only

338 glimpses, but enough to feel the obsolete grandeur in the lines of it, the whiteness of it, facing the lake with all its ghostly, remote, inaccessible charm.

There was no sound save our feeble voices and the wind that scattered the sound in a weak bandwidth of fractured poetry. Had the lake erupted in one of her famous sudden squalls, we would have all been swept away. The Riverwalkers, the Native

American musicians, the urban families fishing that day, the ground-in bait. Anything else loose had already been taken.

But we were deeply rooted in the world of our creation. We had gained something together in these days with Sharon and the river, a something mutually felt. It was right there with us, in that thin space, that slice between water, land and sky. Right there, in nature’s eyeblink, the river shook the blanket of our attempts to colonize her wildness.

How foolish it suddenly was, the idea that we killed Lake Erie.

Before then I thought I believed in resurrection. But in the moments together on the pier I knew it as real, without any attachment to human efforts. Resurrection’s indifference is its grace. That simple and that profound.

Camille gasped. On the other side of the circle, facing the lake, her face filled with awe. Her face glowed with awe in the surprised delight of a fish jumping in the air above Lake Erie.

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