Pastor Chaffin

Pastor Chaffin with my brother Phil and two other boys
 about 40 years ago on a winter hike near Douglas, WY.
(I was behind the camera).

My high school years in the mid-1970’s were difficult for me.  I was an under-sized California teenager with long hair transplanted to a small Wyoming high school full of rancher’s kids.  This was before the oil and coal boom.  Outside of a single consistent friend at high school and a couple of teachers, one other man played a vital role in getting me through those years: Robert Chaffin.  Or, as I always called him, Pastor Chaffin.

It takes a special kind of man to be a pastor in a town the size of Douglas, Wyoming.  Pastor Chaffin worked in construction all week long, often out of town.  Yet, he still made time to visit the sick and elderly of our congregation, take the boys group camping, and preach a sermon both Sunday morning and Sunday night.  His sermons were simple and direct.  Pastor Chaffin was not one given to elaborate theology or dramatic speaking.  He let his well-worn Bible do most of the talking.

My brother and I were often the only boys our age in church during those years from 1973-1977.  Since it was just Mom looking after us, Pastor Chaffin took us under his wing.  In addition to the many camping activities (which also attracted a few other boys from town), he and his adult son Dan took us deer and antelope hunting.  Pastor Chaffin would put us to work doing chores around their place so we could earn a few dollars.  Not that he could have had much to spare.  In all the time I spent with him at church, at his home, out in the Wyoming wilderness, I never heard him say an unkind word about anyone.  And he had the opportunity.  Pastors see and hear a lot.  He bore it with magnificent patience.

Pastor Chaffin with one
 of 21 great-grandchildren

I lost track of Pastor Chaffin when I moved back to California.  For decades, I had nothing but those fond memories.  But, through the wonders of the internet and the postal service, I was able to reconnect with him a couple of years ago.  He was living in an assisted care home and volunteers from a local church would write out letters that he dictated.  I was able to send him some pictures and just say thanks.  His response was warm and generous and, as always, gave credit to the Savior he loves so much for any good that was done.

He was a gentle shepherd for the four years he was my pastor.  From the letter that came with this picture, it was true the other 70 or so years of his adult life.  Heaven has welcomed a good and faithful servant.  Reverend Robert Glenn Chaffin, February 7, 1921-November 23, 2015.

Monopoly, Munchies and Mayhem

Ah, summer.  When I was 9 or 10, summer was a time of simple pleasures which didn't get complicated until a few years later.  School was out, daylight hours seemed unending, and I could spend the night at a friend’s house.  During the school year, sleepovers weren’t possible.  There was homework and chores and ‘school the next day’ and Saturday baths for Sunday church.  Adult reasoning never resonated with me.  It just translated into ‘NO’.  Homework more important than a sleepover?  Really?  

So, while we contented ourselves with scattered Saturday or Sunday afternoon visits during the school year, as June approached, my friends and I would start scheming.  Most of my sleepover time was spent at best buddy Darwin’s house.  There were two events we spent weeks planning:  The annual church trip to Disneyland in February and sleepovers at his house in the summer.  He spent the night at my house a few times, too.  But I remember best a Friday night at his house.

The key ingredients to our sleepover festivities were food and games.  The 1960’s were a golden era of board games and snacks, before television swallowed up family game time and health cultists labeled ‘junk food’ as the great evil of the 20th century.  Darwin and I had solemnly committed to not only convincing our parents that a rare reprieve from eating what was good for us would do no lasting harm, but getting them to fund our feast as well.

Mom dropped me off early that Friday evening.  Sometime after dinner we headed out to our enclave.  Darwin’s dad had set up their massive family tent in the front yard for us to camp out in, probably to keep the noise out of the house.  For us, it meant more floor space than Darwin’s laundry closet bedroom and independence.  After we pooled our resources, the menu looked something like this:

Taco Flavor Doritos

Cinnamon Pop Tarts

Hires Root Beer

Pringles potato chips.

Chips Ahoy cookies

Nesbitt’s Orange Soda

We had two simple objectives for an enjoyable evening: to consume all of our treats before morning and to play games until sunup.  Some of our choices for games were Aggravation, Sorry, Life and Monopoly.  We may have played some of the other games, but Monopoly was our perennial favorite and a sleepover meant enough time to enjoy it fully.

With only two people playing Monopoly, it can take many hours to play out to the bitter end where one person finally runs out of money.  There are a number of strategies for prolonging the agony: mortgaging property to pay debt; selling properties to pay debt; swapping properties to pay debt; staying in jail to avoid landing on another high-rent property.  

Sort of like the real world.

As the night wore on, the combination of sugar, starch, artificial colors and sleep deprivation began to have their effect.  Everything became funny.  Who won or lost the game didn’t matter as much as making it last as long as possible.  We could have easily passed for intoxicated.  Which we were, on life.  We were doing what we wanted for as long as we wanted and no-one was telling us to stop or be quiet or trying to take our hoard of treats away.  Every hour we would switch to a new entrée - a bag of chips, another package of Pop Tarts, some cookies.  

Sometime in the early hours of the morning, before dawn but well after midnight, the last dollar was drained out of one of our Monopoly accounts.  There was no way to pay the rent — no loans, no property, nothing.  All was gone.  Impulsively, one of us threw some Monopoly money in the air.  Then, the two of us just went berserk.  The player tokens, chance cards, houses and hotels, the rest of the money went flying into the air and all over the tent.  We laughed hysterically as we continued to fling stuff everywhere.  For a few minutes, the inside of the tent resembled a well-shaken snow globe.  Eventually, our hilarity subsided enough so we could begin the recovery effort.

We spent a good half hour scrounging around the tent on our Monopoly search and rescue.  To our sleep-deprived brains, even cleaning up our own mess was fun.  We crawled over un-used sleeping bags, scrounged through empty snack food containers to re-assemble the game.  Finally, we went outside the tent as the sky grew lighter in the east.  We felt triumphant.  We had conquered sleep.  There was nothing left to do but roll up sleeping bags and pack the remains of our stuff back into the house.  We managed to find a few more Monopoly pieces as we emptied the tent.

We crept through the solemn quiet of the house.  Darwin’s stuff went back into his room, mine into a tidy stack in the living room.  To our delight, we were perched happily on the living room couch when Darwin’s mom came out to fix breakfast.  

“Are you boys hungry?”

I looked at Darwin and he at me.  We both groaned and shook our heads.  The exotic binge of the past several hours churned heavily in our guts.  So, we sat on the couch while the rest of the family ate breakfast.  Saturday morning cartoons played hypnotically on the flickering black and white screen of the television.  

And that is where they found us after breakfast: half leaning against each other, heads flung back, mouths hanging open, eyes sealed shut, snoring deeply, the contented victims of our marathon junk food Monopoly fest.

MONOPOLY: Source of my first and best lessons in economics and finance.

A Year For Friendship

As the high school literature tutor for the daughter we have in ninth grade, I toured through selections of Aristotle's ETHICS this past week, including his thoughts on friendship.  Some snippets from Book 8:

"… without friends no one would choose to live, even though he possessed every other good."  

"Perfect friendship is the friendship of people who are good and alike in virtue; 

                for they are alike in wishing each other's good…"

"Those who wish the good of their friends for their friends' sake are in the truest sense friends."

"Friendships of this kind are likely to be rare; for such people are few."

(Aristotle: On Man In The Universe, Classics Club edition, Louse Ropes Loomis, editor).

As I pondered my New Year -- what to prioritize, what to jettison -- Aristotle brought friendship into focus.  Specifically, I began to think of those handful of people who are virtuous, who wish my good simply for my sake, who are true friends, who are gifts to my life that make it worth living:

"My friends have come to me unsought.  The great God gave them to me."   

ESSAY VI Friendship - Ralph Waldo Emerson  (http://www.emersoncentral.com/friendship.htm)

The question that came foremost was: Have I reciprocated?  Am I the friend that others value for the good I wish them and the love I give without reserve?  Do others see me as a gift?  Or, am I the weaker brother in constant need of stronger companions?   

No, this is not me trolling for reassurance, rather it is simply the expression of the desire I have this year to renew in myself that virtue I see in my dearest friends, so well explained in these words by the one who lived them best:

"Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends."  

(Jesus, shortly before his crucifixion.  John chapter 15, verse 13, New International Version)

March Madness

Nearly every March for a decade or more, I indulge in a sports activity with a long-time friend.  Like the NCAA tournament, it does include a ball, but our game uses one of the 12 to 16-pound variety with finger holes in it.  We go bowling.  Alex and I have known each other since he was fourteen.  He turned 37 this year, but the Alex I know is essentially unchanged from what I suspect he was like at eight or ten.  He has simple thoughts, simple interests.  I don't know what his malady is, other than he seems to have been blessed with a dip in the fountain of Eternal Youth.  Alex is physically growing older, but he will never grow up.  Alex is one of the most cheerful people I know.

I met Alex when he showed up at a youth function at the church I was attending.  I was one of the adult volunteers.  That night, Alex was eager to demonstrate his knack for shooting a basketball from half-court.  Alex did not then or now have the coordination to play competitive basketball, but he had the unique ability to lob in half-court shots more often than anyone else I knew.  Alex and his mother began faithfully attending church.  I would often give him a ride to youth functions where Alex would make time for us to try half-court shots.  For a few years, his life was a simple routine of school and church.  Somewhere along the way, I found out when his birthday was and that bowling was his favorite past-time.  With my brilliant grasp of the obvious, I decided to take Alex bowling for his birthday one year.  Before I met him, Alex bowled regularly and would rack up close to 200 points a game the first few times we went.  My scores were less noteworthy.

A couple of years after he graduated from high school -- although I am not sure what his graduation meant, exactly -- we moved to another town and began attending another church.  Rather than let distance be an obstacle, Alex would call every so often to check up on me and tell me how people we both knew were doing.  He would also tell me about his struggles at work.  There are many programs for limited-ability adults to gain employment, but the complexities of pleasing managers and coworkers often stumped Alex who didn't understand why people weren't always nice.  Over the years, a pattern developed.  I might not hear from Alex for months, or even all year.  But without fail, sometime in the middle of February, the call would come.  Alex would never ask me directly to do anything, but he would always let me know his special day was coming up.  

And so began our March tradition.  Bowling once a year does not develop any appreciable skill.  Over the years his lack of practice has brought him back down to my level where we consider breaking 100 an achievement.  But, it isn't really about the bowling.  The bowling is just a way for Alex and I to hang out together, for me to be reminded of how important it is to be a consistent friend.  When next March rolls around, and sports fans are watching college basketball, I will be looking forward to another day of camaraderie at the bowling alley with Alex.

Those 2 Boys

Remembering a fallen father.

Up at the end of our street lived the two Ellinger boys with their parents.  Their dad was in a tank battalion in the Marine Corps.  He served and died in Viet Nam.  I don’t remember meeting their dad and have little recollection of their mother.  I do remember the boys.  Mike was about a year younger than I, but like almost every boy near my age, he was bigger than me.  His younger brother Tim was about my brother Philip’s age.  Somewhere along the way, perhaps in the park laundry room, Mom and Mrs. Ellinger struck up a friendship that continues to this day.  Each would occasionally watch the other’s children and of course when birthdays rolled around invitations to simple celebrations were extended.  So, we would spend time with the Ellinger boys.  This was not my idea of fun.  As a kid, you have two kinds of acquaintances: those you choose, and those that are chosen for you.  Now, I wouldn’t say that Mike and Tim were bad characters.  In fact, as far as I know, they turned out all right.  It was just that when I knew them, especially Mike, they were the kind of boys that most parents marvel at due to their seemingly boundless energy matched by an equal propensity for mischief and squabbling.  Tim also had an annoying habit of leaving tooth marks in the rims of Mom’s Tupperware tumblers because he liked to gnaw on them.  In honest retrospect, they were the normal boys.  I was the one on the low end of the curve when it came to seeking adventure.  Other than feeling overwhelmed by their boisterous company, the only other experience I specifically remember involved a tandem bike ride on a non-tandem bike.  It was an adult bike that I assume belonged to the Ellingers.  It had some kind of flat rack on the back that I was sitting on while Mike was on the real seat peddling.  I had my feet perched precariously on the nuts that held the rear wheel on and was hanging on desperately to the rack.  In the trailer park, there were ‘speed bumps’ to keep cars from going too fast.  These were effective for bicycles as well.  We hit one of the bumps and the impact was enough to cause my foot to bounce up and then catch in between the frame and the spokes of the still-turning rear wheel.  The curious sensation of my skin being rubbed off my inner ankle quickly became painful and I howled for Mike to stop.  Somehow, we got my foot out from between the wheel and the frame and I hobbled home.  The large abrasion healed in time…  

What it meant for the Ellinger boys when their Dad didn't come home in 1968 became a little more real for me over 30 years later.  I visited Washington, DC with my own family and we stopped at the Vietnam Memorial - The Wall.  I found Franklin M Ellinger etched in the dark granite and thought about two red-headed, freckle-faced boys, now grown men, and wondered…