Ninafika (I arrive)

It is hard to get on the internet, so I hope you’ll forgive me for taking so long.

First and foremost - I’m here and my stuff is here. Beyond that, there’s little more I can ask for. I’m still a little tired. Jet lag will do that to you. At 12 am Tuesday, the sun was coming up as we were going down into Amsterdam. Of course, it was almost six am there. There is something wrong with having another day begin when the last one has not yet ended. So I roamed the Amsterdam airport groggily until I met up with Gloria, a fellow traveler to Dar Es Salaam and onward to Mumba, whose children work as missionaries there and were provided us transportation.

If I am to file one grievance against the airport in Amsterdam, it is that they took away two unopened bottles of Dr Pepper as we were checked through security to board our plane. I purchased them legitimately at DTW, and I will not forget the offense. Dr Pepper poses no threat to air security.

Nevertheless we arrived (almost) on time in Dar Es Salaam where Mike and Lynn Caraway met us with Luka, a three year old they’ve taken under wing from their orphan ministry. His mother abandoned him in the woods as an infant, and after the family found him and returned him she abandoned him again. He was found and brought to an orphanage in Sumbawanga as little more than a skeleton. The Caraways usually take in a handful of orphans to nurse back to health, and they've temporarily adopted him (you cannot officially adopt a Tanzanian unless you are a Tanzanian) while they search for a home for him.

We stayed two nights there with a day in between to run errands and change money in the big city ($500 USD bought me 569,000 Tanzanian shillings.) We spent an afternoon at a pool/hotel on the Indian Ocean and had dinner at Subway, the only chain restaurant with any presence in Tanzania.

Yesterday, we drove across the country to Mbeya where we’re currently staying until we go onto Mumba tomorrow or Sunday. That’s where I’ll live until November. The main highway runs from Dar Es Salaam through Zambia, and it goes right through Mikumi National Park. Just beyond the entrance, we saw the aftermath of an awful accident that took place the night before. A semi truck sat in the middle of the road, still smoldering, and a passenger bus had careened off the side of the road into the trees. It looked as though it might have rolled over. There were probably lots of casualties.

Further down the road, the highway along a cliff up a mountain. Lynn told me that vehicles often break through the barriers on the side of the road and plunge over the cliff. It’s no wonder, as it’s a two-lane highway and people often pass precariously, usually at high speeds. Just as we neared the top, we saw a group of people gathered at the edge of the road and skid marks attesting to yet another tragedy.

Beyond the mountains is Iringa, one of the bigger cities beyond Dar Es Salaam. We stopped here for some lunch with some missionary friends of the Caraways. Less than two minutes on the road (a dirt drive that leads back to the main highway) we lost a tire. Mike and I changed it. I got dirty in the African sun, and it felt like I had arrived. We drove the rest of the way to Mbeya without a spare tire, and much of that leg was at night. Driving at night, as you might guess, is not a favorable option. Mike reinforced this point of few. In Tanzania, you needn’t worry about bandits harming you to take your stuff. “They’ll steal your stuff,” Mike said, “But they won’t hurt you.” The same cannot be said for Kenya where, as I understand it, the punishment for robbery is the same as the punishment for murder. There’s little incentive there to leave people alive after you’ve robbed them.

Still, we made it to Mbeya where we’re eating and resting well and staying safe. This morning we had pancakes and this afternoon I got a haircut (from an Indian barber – he did a good job, Mom) for 4,000 shillings, or $4. So for now, the culture shock has been minimal. Pancakes help that, along with fatigue. Tomorrow we’ll spend another day here and depart on Sunday for Mumba, which is another 6-8 hours beyond here, depending on road conditions.

Thanks for your prayers. Pictures tomorrow. Maybe.

jim

My Call, My Answer

(More self-plagiarism. I'm seeing a pattern here. Maybe you should just read the other blog.)

I’m going to write about myself. And I really want to sit here and tell you that I’d rather not write about myself, and that I don’t usually indulge in myself all that much in my writing, but that would be a lie. I love to write about myself. You should read my diary - it’s all about me. Actually, you shouldn’t read my diary. Please don’t, it would be terribly embarrassing for me. But I can’t exactly sit here and tell you about what has been happening in your life for the last few months, can I? I have to tell you about my own, and why I’m going back to Tanzania and how this all came about in my life.

My church has held a missionary conference for as long as I can remember. They still do. Once a year, a few missionaries from across the world would come back home and put up a booth in the foyer behind the sanctuary, and stick it with all kinds of pictures and souvenirs for the church members to browse through and gawk at. They’d put out post cards with their pictures and the name of their country and a verse on them. I would hoard them, stick them in the pages of my Bible.

Speaking from the perspective of a sleepy kid who struggled not to nap in church and drew pictures of spaceships during the hymns, I always found the missionary conference to be the most interesting two weeks of the year. You got to hear people talk about interesting stuff. They talked about faraway places and showed videos of African choirs and pictures of dudes in canoes and people making porridge over open fires and stuff. Whatever anecdote they might have told at the beginning was probably enough to satisfy me for the rest of the service. It was interesting.

Even as a child, it energized me. The African missionaries especially. Nothing in the world was as exotically different and shocking as Africa. The people were darker, their houses were smaller, their food was stranger, their animals were bigger, their jungles were darker, their skies were bluer, their mountains were taller, their roads were bumpier, their choirs were louder. Africa was fantastic and unreal, and I had to see it someday.

But then I grew up.

Ever kid has a similar top-five for vocational pursuits. Somewhere in there you’ll see astronaut, professional athlete, fireman, race car driver, and/or ninja. And inevitably they fade away and get replaced by far more realistic, lucrative, and boring jobs like lawyer, doctor, teacher, engineer, architect. Though, honestly, if we could all be ninjas, we’d all be ninjas. And the world would be a lot safer. But that’s beside the point. In my top five may at one point have been Missionary, that’s how much I was into it. But it faded away, too.

And I went through high school and college, and knew that I’d never be an astronaut or a quarterback or a ninja (not in any full-time capacity with benefits, anyway), but I never could figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up. Through all of the confusion and career conundrums, though, there was a constant of involvement in ministry. I stayed involved on campus or in youth group, I served on staff at Grace Adventures for three years, and in 2005 I got to go to Africa. This wasn’t the fulfillment of my lifelong dreams. In fact, in retrospect it seems like it all came about in such an unplanned, sudden spiral of events that one day I found myself sitting on an airplane with my (then) future brother-in-law and another kid from Muskegon, asking where it was that I was going and if I had remembered to pack enough soap. The soap, as it turned out, was irrelevant, because they lost our luggage and I had to buy some there anyway. When I got my stuff ten days later, I was already thoroughly attached to the African soap, as well as the boxers I’d bought at Woolworth’s and the secondhand clothes I’d haggled for in the markets.

Anyway. When things arise in such an abrupt, unexpected manner as the trip to Tanzania did, without my planning or consent or selfish ambition to get in the way, it seems as though there are other forces at work in your life and in the world. One night as we sat around a campfire, celebrating the Fourth of July in true African style with rice pudding and “barbecue” (its true identity escapes me now), all of the things about Africa I’d thought as a kid came rushing back to me, unhindered and unflavored by my grown-up impressions and exposure to academia and the media. And suddenly Africa again became the mysterious place that I loved and had only then started to experience. And I decided it might not be so bad to come back again someday.

One day, Grand Valley State University decided they’d had enough of me and my money and that my credits were satisfactory enough for them to spit me out with a degree and tons of debt. I didn’t have a career path in plan, but I had enough ideas to survive on for a while. I did an internship with Relevant Magazine in their editorial department. When I got home, I searched for and found a job with a small business magazine in Grand Rapids. And always, I thought, before I really get going, I’m going back to Africa, at least for a while. Almost always, I targeted this fall, 2008, as a time to go. And when Barb Sherman called me last fall and asked if I wanted to go back, I knew that I would be on my way soon enough.

I got laid off at my job just before Christmas. Those circumstances are strange and they warrant a whole different conversation, but it suffices to say that it freed me up to pursue other opportunities, none of which panned out because there was something else more significant in my future, and I still had an open offer from Steve and Barb Sherman.

I don’t remember ever making a decision to go. I remember realizing one day that I was already planning to do this and simply had yet to tell the Shermans and my parents, and I guess myself, about it.

I am not qualified to be a missionary. And I don’t know for sure that that’s what God has blocked off for my entire future. But I know that this was something I had to do now. And I know that though God does not always call the qualified, he does qualify the called.

A startlingly brief, inaccurate, uninformed summary of Tanzania that should be taken with a grain of salt

(Note: I decided to plagiarize myself and post this to this blog too. For the most part, I'll try to add posts from my Tanzania trip blog to this one.)

I feel a little bit like a seventh-grader about to give a class presentation. You see, I want to tell you lots of interesting things about Tanzania because you probably haven’t been there, and you probably don’t know much about it. The majority of people can't point Tanzania out on a map. So if you can't, either, you're normal. So, let me begin:

Here’s some boring but essential stuff that you and I will both soon forget: Tanzania is in Africa, on the east coast. If you were to hold Africa like an ice cream cone, it would be at that webby part of your hand between your thumb and index finger. It’s the 34^th largest country in the world, about twice the size of California. For your convenience, I’ve included a map with a gigantic yellow arrow:

Tanzania is like Michigan, where I live, in that it’s surrounded by some Great Lakes – Lake Malawi, Lake Tanganyika, and Lake Victoria. That’s probably where the kinship ends, though. Michigan does not have Tanzania’s mountains, nor its rainforests, nor its terrifyingly poisonous snakes, nor its man-eating lions, nor its tribal diversity. We do however have black bears and multiple peninsulas. Tanzania has no peninsulas and no black bears. Edge: Michigan.

The highest point in Africa is found atop Mount Kilimanjaro (If all goes well, I’ll stand there in October) and the lowest point on the continent is found at the bottom of Lake Tanganyika (If all goes well, I won’t stand there, ever), both of which are in Tanzania. Also found in Tanzania: The Serengeti plain, Zanzibar and the spice islands, Gombe National Park (where Jane Goodall spent lots of time writing down fascinating things about Chimpanzees) and Olduvai Gorge, where scientists say mankind was born, though I can’t confirm that because I wasn’t there when it happened. You’ve probably heard a little bit about all those things, just maybe not that they’re in Tanzania.

Also fascinating: Tanzania grows lots and lots of bananas. They’re a staple there, because they provide great nutrition and require relatively little work. A well-maintained banana grove will produce for 30+ years. Bananas need good rain and high temperatures, and Tanzania has both. Africa grows 35% of the world’s bananas, and the average African eats 550 pounds a year. So says a National Geographic book about Tanzania.

There's a lot more to be said, but I believe I promised a startlingly brief, inaccurate, and uninformed summary, and I'd hate to disappoint you.

I leave twenty-seven days from today. Then I'll have much much more to write.

Keep reading.

Jim

Pictures from 2005:

A most excellent new blog

I am going to Tanzania. I made the decision a while ago. I don't remember when, exactly, but it was warm out and I was walking to the library and it just kinda felt like I had already chosen to do this. I didn't feel like I had made a choice, I felt like I realized I had already made it. That's how you make decisions like this, I guess.

In August, I'll be leaving for three months. I'll miss the World Series, the election and all the hoopla surrounding it, Mom, bro, and sis's birthday, hamburgers, and most of the pretty fall season.

I already bought my plane ticket, you can't stop me.

I started a new blog about it: http://jimandafrica.blogspot.com. I'd be honored if you'd check it out - I explain what I'm doing and stuff, it will be worth your while. And, I'll try to keep it updated when I'm in Tanzania, too.

Until then, this blog will keep going at the same breakneck pace of 2-3 posts per month. Once I get there, though, everything I'll have to say will probably be more appropriately posted there.

One love.

Death and the Thrift Store

Thrift stores are wonderful, marvelous, awful places. For the most part, they stay the same no matter what store you’re in, in what part of the country, whoever the owner is. They all bear the same smell. If we combined every basement into one giant super-awesome basement, that would be the smell you get in a thrift store. Incidentally, that exact scenario would also produce an ideal thrift store. They all have the same disheveled and disorganized batch of knick-knacks, the same semi-organized selection of clothes too old to be fashionable but too new to be retro-cool, the same unacceptably dingy furniture, the same graveyard of a library. Somehow, though, they all manage to have different prices, ranging from the ridiculous bargain to the questionable cheat. I marvel at how I can buy a t-shirt at one store for 99 cents and go across the street and find someone charging $3.99. Charging $3.99 for a used t-shirt makes only slightly more sense than charging, well, anything for used underpants.

I spent yesterday afternoon searching for a pair of broken-in cleats for softball. I found them, but only after visiting three or four thrift stores. They were tacky, off-white, a size too big, perfect. I also picked up a golf bag, a few decades older than me but younger than my current model. A clear upgrade at two dollars. It’s unfortunate that such charitable places should remind me of death.

First of all, their business model makes them essentially the scavengers of the retail world. People give them stuff for free, they sell it at pure profit after the cost of business. They’re vultures. But they’re charitable vultures. As best I can tell, thrift stores were birthed mostly by charities (In the UK, they call them Charity Shops) and churches looking to raise funds and help transfer goods from one basement to another. In this way (and many others) the thrift shop is vastly superior to the pawn shop. Don’t ever, ever buy anything at a pawn shop unless you have to. I shudder to think of a situation when you would have to buy something at a pawn shop. (You don’t need that copy of R.E.M.’s Monster.)

Secondly, it becomes painfully clear after visiting several thrift stores that things go there to die. Everything that is there is there to die. When people find things they don’t need anymore, can’t fit anymore, or can’t turn on anymore, the obvious solution is to give it to charity. And, generally, it’s stuff that they tell themselves could be someone else’s treasure. Surely, they tell themselves, someone else will find use for these faded, bleach-stained personalized, towels.

Thrift stores are the burial grounds for sports gone by. Nowhere else can you find as great a collection of badminton rackets, rollerblades, or holey water socks used for avoiding sea urchins or, in Lake Michigan, hypodermic needles washed up from Milwaukee or Chicago. I’ve noticed there are also lots of bowling ball bags, but few bowling balls.

Every fad diet book there ever was or will be ends up in a thrift store. Usually, there’s also a pretty good selection of inspirational literature that outlived its inspiration. And lots of books by Danielle Steele. But the book section, for whatever faults I might give it, is usually the best part of the entire store, unless you’re not into books. (Then, I suggest you check out all of the dated vinyl records and amuse yourself with their silly covers.) I cannot leave the book section without buying something. Someday, I really will read that Lee Iacocca biography.

T-shirts come here to die. The shirts they throw at minor league sporting events, the ones people toss small children out of the way to get at, always end up on the racks at Goodwill. For $3.99, of course. Yesterday, I saw a college student bolt into a store, rifle determinedly through each rack of t-shirts (mixed in with the scandalously small beach-guy tank-tops and old football practice jerseys) and immediately bolt out toward the next store. These are the people who get all the good ones. They leave the tasteless ones, like one I saw: It said, “What happened to my booger?” and there was a giant green blob next to the question mark. This shirt came in an adult size, that’s what concerns me. Nevermind the impossibility and utter ridiculousness of putting such a shirt together to find a booger in a timely fashion, or the size of the “booger.” I’m going to guess this was given as a gift to some embarrassed person who brought it immediately to the thrift store without ever saying thank you (or good bye) to the well-meaning wacky aunt who gave it. You can put whatever goofball t-shirt you want on a baby, and it will be silly or cute, but this shirt has no business being worn by anyone over the age of, say, three.

Say you find a t-shirt you might want. Say you’re lucky enough to find it in your size. And, the neck isn’t stretched out after years spent waiting on a hanger or suspending hyperactive children from some poor father’s collar. There’s still the likelihood that somewhere on it, most likely in a place you won’t notice until you’ve purchased it, there’s a stain of chocolate ice cream or something worse.

Of course, the other day when I went, I did find a t-shirt that seemed like a good idea at the time. I made my way to the line, waited forever, and promptly made my purchase. And this is where the thrift store shines best: The clerk asked me if I had a college ID. I am not a college student, but I do have an ID. I flashed my credentials, and was offered a college discount. A college discount? By Jove! I can save an additional 15% on my purchases. Thrift stores are wonderful, terrific, marvelous, awful places.

Also, there are lots of crutches. Lots and lots of crutches.

Lawn Care

Dad killed our lawn.

For as long as I can remember, we've had an awful front yard. Not by our own doing, mind you, I prefer to blame mother nature and the people who lived here before us. They conspired to impede any efforts on our part at having a front yard with any aesthetic appeal. Certainly, we are not to blame for its ugliness.

Usually, when I need to give someone directions to our house, I can tell them to find the house on the west side of the street with the patchwork quilt of a lawn. (And now, I just tell people to look for house that looks like it used to have a front yard.) Everyone else on our block seems to invest a lot of time, effort, personal pride, and fertilizer in their grass. Not so for us. When it needs mowing, we mow. When it needs sprinkling, we sprinkle. Nothing more, nothing less. For the most part, our efforts have sufficed at maintaining a pretty, dull sheen for the several different types of grass, moss, dandelion, fungus, and decomposing political signage that sit in front of our house. There might be a bicycle in there, too, somewhere. (Actually, probably no bicycles.)

Occasionally, and only at his personal convenience, dad has attacked the patchwork with herbicide or fungicide or weedicide or some such -cide that is supposed to kill bad things. Like zit-cream for grass. It has never worked.

For a long time, I silently appreciated my dad for not wasting his time with the vanity of lawn care. People put way too much into their lawns. In some places, like Arizona, they tap dry already-thirsty aquifers to keep lush, green lawns where they have no business keeping lush, green lawns. It's not because I'm an environmentalist. It's because it's stupid. You don't need grass. In the Great Lakes region, we can get away with this. We have lots of water. If you don't have water, you don't need to have grass. Keep a zen garden. Some nice rocks, a cactus, that sort of thing. But not a lawn. Besides, a zen garden is a lot less work. Rake the sand, keep the rocks happy, done.

People work too hard just to have nice grass. It's going to be there if you don't let it die. Mowing and sprinkling is good enough, and if you ask me, just mowing is enough (That's the bare minimum to keep your family in the "normal middle-class suburbanite" category and out of the "Probably sends their kids to school in burlap sacks and feeds/underfeeds a vast army of rescued pets until the city steps in" category.) What lies between our home and the street has always been a socially acceptable, pleasantly diverse ecosystem. Sure, we could have a lush, green lawn that blends smoothly with the rest of suburbia. But at what cost? Are we that shallow, that our dignity and self-worth is vested in how our grass looks? We're defying convention, we're sticking it to The Man with our bare-minimum effort front lawn.

Which is why killing it all makes perfect sense. As anyone who has ever tried to extend the life of a doomed-from-the-start ramshackle project (i.e., less-than-amateur efforts at baking a pie, drawing a picture, building a galactic castle with legos, cross-stitching the Detroit Lions logo) can tell you, it makes a whole lot more sense just to start over.

And that is why dad killed the lawn. He killed everything, attacked it with the everything-cide, laid waste to it, nuked it. And everything died - the weeds, the crabgrass, the grass, and almost, I suspect, the maple tree too. A few days later, when the poison had done its job and run off into the sewer or into the neighbors garden or dissipated or something, he threw grass seed all over it.

And that is where we stand today. We're all crossing our fingers, hoping the lawn comes in nice and pretty. If it doesn't, at least we didn't have to deal with the dandelions this year.

(Edit: I was wondering how big the collective lawn of the United States is. If I had to guess, I'd say it's probably bigger than Vermont or something like that. If, for some silly reason you know the answer to this or if you know how to get it, I'd like to know, for no other reason than that it's a very strange thing to know.)

Dude tries to cash $360,000,000,000 check

Here's a link for you to check out: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/050108dnmetbillion.b623795f.html

Thank you, internet, because despite all of your flaws, you help spread news of stupidity with great speed.

A little over a week ago, some guy in Dallas, Charles Ray Fuller, tried to cash a check for $360 billion. He said his girlfriend's mother gave him the check to help him start a record business. Now, I don't question the possibility that such an exchange might have occurred:

"What's that Charlie? You want money to start a record business? Why of course I'd love to help my daughter's good-for-nothing boyfriend start a record business! Okay, lemme just get out my checkbook. How much do you need? $50,000? Wha-? How does A Billion sound? How about $360 billion? Here ya go."

Maybe Charles missed the sarcasm.

Something, though, tells me Charles is a sensible man, and he would have done fairly well with his business had the bank actually handed over the $360 bill.

Just so you know, $360 billion would make him...
-Roughly six times richer than the world's richest man, presently Warren Buffet (worth $62 bill.) [Forbes]
-The country with the 31st largest GDP in the world, were he a country. [CIA world factbook]
-Richer than the combined GDP of the lowest 95 countries in the world. [Factbook]
-The owner of the fifth most valuable company in the world (Not bad for a startup record business.) [NY Times]

If Charles wasn't blindly trusting his girlfriend's mother and made that part up, and if he indeed wrote the check himself, why not try a much more reasonable $360 million?

My politics (as though you cared.) Part Two

This is part two of three (or more?) pieces I’m writing about what I believe and how I came to believe it.

At the time of the 2000 election, I was still pretty decidedly Republican for life. Though I can’t remember being aware of the intricacies of the nomination process, I knew I was on the side of George W. Bush before he was the official Republican choice, what with him being a straight-shootin’ baseball-lovin’ Texas Governor and all. And I, being a straight-shootin' baseball-lovin' Texas gov- er, straight-shootin' baseball lover, it was a natural choice. I had then, and still have, a pretty politically incorrect disposition, and George W. Bush was my hope at having a President with a spine that wouldn’t take any Democratic guff.

On the other side of the ticket was Al Gore, in his pre-hipster-hero-hysteria days, his pre-Nobel Peace Prize days, his pre-Oscar days. My knowledge of him at that point was that he loved planet earth, snuggled up to the tree-huggers, and threatened industry (also that he was just one more Clinton-impeachment away from becoming President). This was partly influenced by the overabundance of Rush Limbaugh in my childhood soundtrack courtesy of my parents’ radio. Lest I layer the cynicism too thickly, I have to tell you that I still don’t much trust the man, and I’m still not convinced New York City will be underwater in 30 years, that the ice caps will melt, that if they do melt it will be in part due to my Ford Escort, and that having New York City underwater would be an altogether bad thing. Then again, I haven’t seen An Inconvenient Truth yet, either, which I know would inevitably sway me to become the Greenpeace-donatin’ Prius-drivin’ tree-hugger I’m destined to be.

Where was I? Oh yes, the 2000 election. Of course, you know, George W. Bush won. The electoral vote. Not the popular vote. This is nothing new in American elections (it happened three times before this). There are annual bills to change the electoral college. (I think it would be a grave mistake – the electoral college is a convenient way for people to cover regrettable political choices. Case in point: I voted to re-elect Bush in 2004, but I get to hide behind to cover of living in a Blue state. This, at the small cost of being disenfranchised every four years.) Bush’s victory cleared Gore to spend his time fighting his war against global warming and win Oscars and Nobel prizes and stuff. It cleared his supporters to spend the next few years sulking over how Bush stole the election.

September 11, 2001 – I’m sitting in Mechanical Drawing class, trying to draw a sprocket or something on graph paper. The DJ on the radio (Mix 96), somewhat shocked and confused, tells us a jetliner hit the World Trade Center. He didn't know any details yet. I like to think we were the first in the school to know. We turn on the TV, and no one draws anything for the rest of the hour. No one in the school gets anything done for the rest of the day. We pray in band. They send a note home. They tell us we’ll remember where we were that day for the rest of our lives.

Foreign policy changed. Everyone’s did, including my own. The president said we were going to get the people who knocked down the buildings, and I couldn’t wait to see some bombs drop. We went to Afghanistan, I went to college.

The Iraq war is hard to write about. There’s not a lot that I can say that hasn’t already been said. We’ve all thought about it. We've been inundated with news reports about it. Since its start, we’ve been divided over it. We all have an opinion about it. When it began, I was behind it. Even now, the last place I want to be is at an anti-war protest. But it’s my generation that is fighting it, shrinking because of it. And we all hoped it would be over by now.

History, I think, will be a far better judge of the war than a business-minded media and college students with picket signs or graffiti artists with stencils. The same should be said of George W. Bush’s presidency. History, I think, will be a gentler critic than Bush’s harshest detractors, but certainly more harsh than his most adoring and tenacious supporters who ignore a ballooning government, a tanking economy, and an arduous, divisive, seemingly endless war. Where I had once been a part of the adoring and tenacious group, I have in the past few years ceased to consider myself a member.

To be continued…

(I told you part two was coming didn't I? Part three is on the way, I swear.)

My politics (as though you cared.) Part One

Maybe my biggest issue with being a grown-up is finding myself caring about grown-up type things. For example, since when did I care about the economy? I find myself watching the stock market, even though I don't have any investments; I read the business page of the paper, even though I'm just a pizza guy. The world's problems have become my own. I do grown-up things, read grown-up books, have grown-up conversations (a real grown-up might disagree if they listened my brother and me). My PS2 is gathering dust right now.

And entwined in all of this is some real personal stake in politics. That's nothing new, actually. But my political tastes have evolved considerably since I was a kid.

I remember the presidential election of 1988. Is that normal? It's one of my oldest memories, somehow being aware that George Bush and Michael Dukakis were trying to become president. There's very little I remember prior to this, apart from standing in a wading pool in my backyard, blowing bubbles, and other random things that you probably don't really care about. I remember seeing Michael Dukakis on television in a tank which, since I had little awareness of the electoral process, gave me a really warped view of how one becomes president. I was young and, being a wise four-year-old, didn't choose a side, though I'm pretty sure in some Freudian repressed-fear way, Dukakis in a tank gave me the impression that the Democrats were the aggressors. (Turns out, this is a famous and historical PR blunder.) So in a way, you can blame him for the fact I still vote Republican today.

My parents were (and still are) Republicans. Not upper-crust country-club fundraiser Republicans, but conservative lower-middle-class worked-for-their-money-and-want-to-keep-it Reagan Republicans. When George H.W. Bush got elected, mom and dad were happy, and I was happy.

I remember with more clarity the 1992 election, when George Bush ran against Bill Clinton. I was eight years old and thoroughly aware of Mom and Pop's political bent. I remember asking the Janitor who he voted for, and I remember that George Bush, if nothing else, carried the popular vote at North Godwin elementary school. Clinton won and launched me into eight years of siding with my parents against Clinton's debaucherous crusade of evil.

We had a Dole/Kemp sign in our yard in 1996. I guess it was fitting that our country should be run not by the guy who went on to shill for Viagra, but the guy who had the fortitude to get it on with a 23 year-old intern.

We took a car ride once, and I asked my parents if anyone at our church was a democrat. I guess this was my early litmus test of whether or not Democrats could be good people. Dad gave me a name, and I asked him why that person was a democrat. Dad, ever sarcastic, told me, ever naive, that someone had put a gun to their head. I get it now, that it should be fairly obvious that political alliances are a matter of personal preference, but when you're a kid and you already think Democrats win elections with M-1 Abrams Tanks, this is all the confirmation you need that the GOP are the world's only good-natured freedom-fighters.

I took the conservative point of view in class, too, piping up with my worldview in discussions. I pity any teacher that decides to take on a class of third-graders in a political discussion, because they're all just repping their parent's point of view. I considered myself particularly well-informed, and went to bat for the Right side of things. For the most part, I'm pretty sure I held my own. I was a proud, outspoken conservative all through my elementary, middle school, and high school education. I even joined the college Republicans during my freshman year at WMU, but I didn't attend any of their stuff. I wouldn't have fit in, anyway. Had to join something, I guess. They kept sending me annoying email updates long after I decided they weren't my crowd.

To be continued [mostly because I know I've pretty much reached the limit of as much as I would want to read in one sitting if I were you.]

(Editor's note: This is only part one. Come back later to see if Jim is headed for a gutter-to-the-pew political conversion. Does his cynicism point to a resentment for his political upbringings? No. The answer is no. I'll explain in a few days.)

panhandling 2

This happened the night after I wrote my last blog, the one about panhandling.

When I stepped out of the pool hall, it was cold. Winter had stretched its bony fingers longer into March than usual and the ground was still covered with ice, and the streets were lined with dirty snow. A man stood just outside the entrance, where the smokers would stand if they weren’t allowed to practice indoors, but the man was not smoking. He was waiting for the comers and goers to see him, waiting to ask them for a little financial help.

I walked by him, didn’t look at him. If you look, you have to talk. If you talk, you have to give. There are rules.

He was a panhandler, and lately I had been thinking about people just like him, how homeless or not-so-homeless people like him are simply in pursuit of a bit of alcohol on the dime of some naïve patron. I didn’t like the rules. It’s simpler to walk by, to not listen, to not look. But he didn’t care about the rules.

“Hey, mannnn,” he said, “Please help me out. Help me out, mannn.” I tried not to stop, but failed. I turned and looked at him. He was thin with big eyes, had patches of hair across his chin, little islands of beard, and was huddled over himself, shrunk down to hold his heat better. He sounded desperate, as one who had long given up on saving face.

“What’s up?”
“I just need some money to get some groceries, anything, man. I haven’t eaten in days. I don’t wanna end up in the hospital again, man.”
I tried to gauge his honesty. I thought about him, and I thought about me. He sounded genuine. I thought about the cash in my wallet. His voice was humble, he sounded like he really cared. He might have been telling the truth.

“You were in the hospital?” I asked him.
“Yeah, for three days. Last month.”

I have never felt as wealthy as I did that moment. And feeling wealthy didn’t feel good. I thought about how unbelievable it was that anyone in Grand Rapids would go without a meal. I cannot remember ever missing a meal for lack of access. And I, at 24, was now the provider. This man was rail thin begging a kid half his age for some coin to buy groceries.

Part of me still knew, still thought he was lying. I wanted to help him, but I didn’t want to give him beer money. I thought about walking to the grocery store with him. I thought about giving him a ride. But I was alone, and that’s how stupid but well-meaning people get hurt and disappear and get found in a park somewhere when the snow melts.

“Man, I want to help you. It’s just that,” and now I can’t believe I said this, “Sometimes, people don’t use the money one what they say they will. Sometimes people use it for alcohol.” I spoke what was on my mind, trying to be honest, trying to tell him I was onto him, trying to guilt-trip him, too.
“I’m not going to buy alcohol. I just need some food.”

I had started the dialogue with him, and in some ways I felt the burden to teach him a lesson, to inspire him or something. I wanted to tell him flat out, “You can have a dollar, but don’t use it for booze.” I didn’t say it.

He never got hostile with me. I don’t think he was a hostile person, just someone in need. Still, I thought about myself, alone with this desperate stranger who could be all kinds of dangerous. As much as I wanted to help him and ensure that I wasn’t just buying him booze, there was just no way I was going to accomplish that right then.

“I’ll pay you back,” he said. I thought about how ridiculous that would be. Me, tracking down the poor guy for a dollar.
“No,” I told him, and I thought of a solution. “Hey, I’ll help you out, but this is what you have to do – just pay it forward, man. Help someone else out. Okay?” It sounds more righteous than it really was.
He nodded, and I pulled out my wallet and opened it toward me so he wouldn’t see how much I really had. I gave him a dollar.

I walked away and thought about all of it again. I had wanted so badly to call this guy out, like I was empowered to help him kick his alleged habit right then and there. All he needs is some truth, right? But here’s the thing: No one likes addiction. If anything, the guilt-trip does vastly more damage than good for people in his state. If he really was an alcoholic, someone at their real rock bottom without income, shelter, or food, what could I have accomplished? I can imagine walking away, and the poor, desperate guy just feeling worse about himself. That would really pull him out of the mire.