Notes in November 8

Rock of Ages

Original Post: Monday, April 19, 2010

The Humanist view of life is progressive and optimistic, 

in awe of human potential, 
living without fear of judgment and death, 

finding enough purpose and meaning in life, 
love and leaving a good legacy. 

Polly Toynbee

Before I go into my brief but eventful military career and the two pivotal years that followed high school, I’d like to back-pedal a bit. If the child is father of the man, I skipped a few critical turns around the block that need to be retraced.

For people who now know me well, there is a shocker in my high school yearbook write-up and a few inaccuracies. I’ll address the shocker first, which has two parts. “He is also active in his church choir and the Y.M.C.A.”

I never sang in my church choir—I think my girlfriend at the time, who was a writer on the yearbook committee, made this up. It could have been a ploy to make me more palatable to her family should things ever get serious between us, and my only recollection of the Y.M.C.A. is spending winter Saturdays swimming nude with my friends in its indoor pool.

As a boy, I had been an acolyte, which is the Lutheran version of a Roman Catholic altar boy, but without the threat of clerical sexual abuse. My parents forced their children out of bed on Sunday mornings and sent us to Grace Lutheran Church. They, themselves, never went, but just about every relative I ever met in Bethlehem was a member of the congregation.

I decided to make the most of the opportunity and impress them by joining the minister each Sunday center stage. I was genuinely drawn by the organ music and by the shards of color radiating from the tall stained glass windows—sounds and colors that, sieved from faith, are Christianity’s greatest gifts. If I also had to help serve up the body and blood of Christ, well, that was part of the job.

From cherub to chaplain was not a great leap. I was a member of Hi-Y in my junior and senior years. Liberty Hi-Y was an organization devoted to “Clean Speech, Clean Scholarship, Clean Living, and Clean Sportsmanship.” It was the only time in my life that I ran around with the wrong crowd.

Most of my fellow Hi-Y Christians were jocks, including my cousin whose succinct yearbook entry lists Football 2, 4; Track, 2, 3; swimming club 2, and Hi-Y 3, 4. Few of them could read a sentence without stumbling across the first three words, so it fell to me to read the bible passage at the beginning of each meeting. It was grand: I had a captive audience, a solemn setting, and the opportunity to declaim the dramatic cadences of the King James Version of the Bible. As I came to realize that it was more honorable to be a heathen than a hypocrite, I retired from my shaky vocation as chaplain. It was some time in my senior year, apparently too late to be exorcised from the yearbook.

Joining the club with the exotic and unpronounceable name “Chemphybiogens” was also a mistake; I quit as soon as I realized it wasn’t a cult.

It is true that I was a member of the Spanish Club. I studied Spanish throughout high school, mostly because I didn’t want to learn German and because I didn’t like the people who were taking French. It was rudimentary Spanish, and I remember always getting startled when Mrs. Baker, the teacher, would say the Spanish word for flowers, flores, thinking she was calling on me. 

Because I was in Spanish Club and the Hi-Y chaplain, when the first Puerto Rican boy arrived at Liberty, it was only natural that he be assigned to me. I took my responsibility very seriously, so seriously that I even took Orlando—his name is Orlando Diaz—to a football game—one of the few times I entered gladiatorial territory. Our friendship was brief, but significant, as you will see if you stick with me as this journal unfolds.

The mineralogist business is also true. I had a long-standing fascination with metamorphic, igneous and sedimentary rocks. Rocks give the appearance of being among the most permanent, immutable forms of matter, but in fact they can change from one form to another. Although it is on a more massive timeline, move and change they do, as fickle in their way as weather forecasts or human health.

My room in the attic of Geopp Street was filled with rocks; there were piles of malachite, rose and smoky quartz, obsidian, sandstone, amethyst, and copper pyrite. I collected crystals and geodes, iron ore and slate, slag from the steel mills, coal and shale. I’m not sure how it began, but by my early teens I had amassed a veritable quarry of minerals. One of my most beloved possessions was a rock hammer, a gift from my oldest sister, later stolen.

On the few occasions that my mother ventured up the attic stairs into my room—my father never did-- she would shake her head and ask me why I didn’t collect stamps or baseball cards, or something softer, like girls, I imagined.

One of the only places in the Lehigh Valley to see and buy rocks was the shop at Lost River Caverns in my beloved Hellertown. I was there so often that I came to call the owners by their first names, and it was not long before I was offered a job as a guide. It was a great job: I mostly moseyed around the tables awaiting the transmutation of rocks until people came in to see the cave.

At first, I followed instructions and took the groups through the four or five chambers of the cave, pointing out stalagmites and stalactites, columns and flowstones. I gave them a spiel about how the cave was discovered in 1883 and how more than 80 wedding were performed in the underground chapel (I never saw one). I soon started challenging myself to invent new stories and new descriptions of the formations, a totally original version every time I took a group through the cave.

My imaginative talent came to my rescue when on one tour, the sump pump that kept the “lost river” from flooding the cave failed while I was deep in the cave making up stories. On the way back I found that the passage that lead to the cave entrance was rapidly filling with water. I told my group that they should take off their shoes and roll up their trousers to experience what cave exploring “in the old days’ was like. They gleefully followed instructions, we waded through the flooding chamber and we got out just before the chamber became impassable.

I carted my favorite rocks around for years until they transmuted into something else and disappeared. My adventures in reading, writing, acting, painting and photography—but not my faith—were resurrected on many occasions over the next decades of my life.