Outward bound

Family & Friends,
Ernest Hemingway said that you have to get some distance from places or events in order to write about them. He wrote this describing a time when he was sitting in a café with a glass of wine, a tablet, and pen on a rainy day in Paris while writing about Michigan. Well, I’m sitting in the café area of a Borders Books & Music in Bridgewater, NJ with a cup of cappuccino and my laptop (which is about as far as the comparison with Hemingway goes) starting my recollections of my Gospel Pilgrimage of Storytelling so far…

June 10, 2007

After the service of worship at Holiday United Church of Christ, I invited the congregation to meet me in the parking lot to do a “tobacco blessing”. This involved walking around my car and throwing pipe tobacco around it, on it, and up into the wheel wells. It is a way to say “Thanks” mainly as well as ask for safe journey on the road and something I learned from “Koda” (“Beloved Friend”) Garrett Wilson who is a full-blooded “Dakota” Sioux and an active member of the UCC’s Council of American Ministries. “Thanksgiving” is certainly an important part of my pilgrimage – not only to share the Gospel (Good News) of Jesus Christ and to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of The United Church of Christ at the 26th General Synod, but to celebrate and thank the angels in my life that God has sent into my life. Hopefully, I will be setting a good example for you, dear reader, to consider your own such pilgrimage.

Following this, my wife Daphni & I had lunch together, then I set off on this Gospel Pilgrimage of Storytelling. My first stop was to visit my Uncle Glen, his son John, his daughter Glenda & her husband Norman (whom I joined in marriage a few years ago). Uncle Glen & my Aunt Mary, who has since passed on, lived in Iowa where they ran a youth horse camp with John, Glenda, and younger son Bill (who’s still in IA).



I stayed with Glenda & Norm in their home near Inverness. Glenda is an artist and a retired teacher (when I confused Okeefenokee with Okechobee, she gave me a tour book of Florida and told me in no uncertain terms that I better learn about my home state!). Norm was a transplant to Montana from New Jersey and I found out that Montana is still a wild place with places some white folk shouldn’t go without expecting a fight and New Jersey had characters just as wild (it so happened “The Sopranos” finale was on that night, which we watched and what a disappointment – “We was robbed”). The next morning over a cup of coffee, Norm had more stories to tell about the career he had working in an aluminum plant in Montana. 20 years working there allowed him to learn all aspects of the process of making aluminum and he told all kinds of stories about the work and the people. Glenda pointed out Norm was telling more stories than ‘the storyteller’ (me)! This was a wonderful opportunity to get to know them better.