Who's Your Daddy

Once or twice every year, I rent a car for pleasure.  This last January, it was a huge Chevy Tahoe, which I used to blast my way through the snow that paralyzed the MidAtlantic for a few days.

The itch has been going again recently, that desire to try something different, to do the Obvious Midlife Crisis thing and rent something radically different from our trusty and perfectly practical Hondas for a few days.

It being the weekend of Father's Day, I settled in on a Beemer, a BMW 840i Coupe with XDrive.  It's a handsomely sleek broad-shouldered thing, the sort of vehicle one would expect to be driven by a gym-sculpted CryptoBro or the trust-fund offspring of an oligarch.  

A small church pastor behind the wheel?  It's a little anomalous, I'll admit. 

It's sleek and shiny, with fat tires and a modified exhaust that snorts and burbles in unabashedly juvenile ways.  More notably, the exhaust uncorks more power from BMW's excellent B58 three litre inline six, which sings in a rich pure tenor whenever you press the go pedal.  The part of me that's still twelve finds it delightful.

It is also, apparently, a provocation.

In my history of car rentals, there's a certain type of car...Camaros, Mustangs, and Dodge Challengers...that stirs a response in other vehicles of that species.  These are the cars with big potent engines, free-breathing vee-eights with burbling, snorting exhausts, the kinds of cars I drew in my notebook in math class when I was a sophomore in high school.

Muscle cars, in other words, the cars that flex and grunt and announce to the world on a Saturday night:  "I am stronger than you."  Get two of them together, it's like a pair of bull-elks in rut.  The strong instinct is to bellow and to butt heads.

To them, a glistening and modded BMW eight series is like dark red blood in the water.  

I can't remember a vehicle I've driven that has stirred more aggression responses.  The Escalade that kept roaring past me.  The Mustang GT that pulled in front and made several futile attempts to induce me to race.  The lowered and cat-backed eight year old Lexus that snarled past, the driver shouting "GOGOGOGOGO!"  The Dodge Charger that, passing me, just revved and revved and revved.  

It is, I suppose, just a facet of driving a big Beemer.  It's not just that it says, "I am stronger than you," but also that it whispers to the lesser muscle car owner: "And I am wealthier than you."  I'm not just displaying that I'm loud and fast.  I'm loud and fast and rich, which would make me the most annoying person on the road.

Not that I'm driving the car that way.  I'm using my turn signals (BMWs do have them).  I'm letting people merge in front of me, and generally not living into the stereotype.  I am, during the rental...er..."driving vigorously."  I may have been listening to Rammstein a little more than usual.  But never cutting people off, or tailgating.

Why do we enjoy power?  Is it from the desire to dominate or control, to prove oneself superior to others?

Or is it for the pleasure of competence and a finely made machine, of the sound and feel of a well tuned engine and the sweetness of a Southern summer Sunday night?

Father Timex

It's been just under two years since Dad passed away, and I'm still wearing his old Timex.

I took it off his cool lifeless wrist on the day that he died, and put it on my own.  It's told the time with reasonable accuracy ever since.  A simple mechanical watch serves many purposes.  Telling the time, of course, but other purposes that have value in our digital age.  It reduces the number of times per day I feel compelled to look at my magic devil box, which is a blessing.  It ticks audibly, as the mechanism physically marks away the seconds remaining in my own mortal coil.  This feels real and tangible, an analog actuality in a vaporware age.  It does one thing well, without distraction.  These are good things.  

That's not to say there aren't challenges with an old watch.

The watch will need a new battery soon, as the Timex IndiGlow (tm) feature for nighttime timekeeping has started to dim.  It's started slowing down a little bit, requiring readjustment through the little twisty knob on the side.  Again, a new battery is all that's needed. 

The primary fail-point, though, has been the band.  It's a simple leather thing, faded and worn.  The watch lug loops have given way multiple times, the leather yielding to entropy, the machine-stitching well past its functional lifespan.  I've been tempted, each time, to replace the band.  

I mean, it's a band.  Just a strip of cheap hide.  It's not expensive.

But like everything that matters, the watch isn't just about function.  It rested on my father's wrist for decades, and the band...being organic and slightly permeable...carries with it more of him than the metal watchbody itself.  It's stained and suffused with his sweat.  Some of his DNA, no doubt, is sequestered away in the folds and cracks of that old leather, as surely as it is in my own flesh.

Letting go of the band, or so my utterly illogical sentimentality dictates, is letting of a substantial portion of that intimate reminder of him.  So what to do, when that band fails?  

Given that my leatherworking skills are non-existent, I've taken the easy route, applying a classic Dad-fix to that memento of my own father: epoxy.  Just glue it back together.  It works, right up until it doesn't.

Last week, my most recent repair failed, and the watch fell from my wrist.  Undamaged, thankfully, but the whole leather lug-loop was gone.  There was nothing left to glue, nothing left to wrap around the bar of the lug.  This, I thought ruefully, might finally be the end of the band.  I let it set for a little bit, as I mulled my options.

A fierce sentimentality can be the mother of ingenuity, and time for reflection stirred a thought.  

The band was two stitched pieces of leather, and were I to carefully slice them apart and trim away one half, I could construct a new lug-loop.  Simply slice, apply epoxy, and boom.  It'd be back on my wrist.  Why not?  If it failed, I'd just sigh and get a new band.  If it succeeded, I'd still have that soft worn remembrance snug wrapped around my arm.

So I sliced it carefully, opening up the seams of the leather.  I whittled about the edges with the blade, and then...with vise and glue and time...remade what had failed.

This Father's Day, that old Timex still rests on my wrist.

Being a Pastor and a Father

This morning, my Father's Day began the way it pretty much always does.  I woke at a tick before seven am, the last few tweaks to the sermon humming and nudging in my brain.   My wife woke too, and gathered herself up to go rouse the boys.

Father's Day without breakfast in bed, you see, would be a disappointment.  Not so much for me, but for the guys.  So for the better part of a half-hour, I lay in bed, awake, waiting as the breakfast gradually assembled itself.

Then, in came the boys with the coffee and the cinnamon rolls and the vegetarian pseudo-sausage.  Mmm, pseudo-sausage.   I read the card pulled together by the little guy.  The big guy asked if he could hang out and eat cinnamon rolls with me...so of course I said yes.   My 13 year old wants to hang with his dad?   I'll take every moment of that I can get.

We hung and talked and ate for about 10 minutes, and then I scrambled to get ready and out the door and off to a 9:00 AM Contemplative Worship.

Father's Day is always a work day, if you're a pastor.

That, I think, is emblematic of one of the challenges facing any male with offspring who is called to serve a community of Jesus people.   The demands of community and call frequently stand in between you and your kids.   Almost all of the pastors I know are in a state of constant motion, leaping from a meeting to a visitation to a funeral to a counseling session.   We too often live the lives we tell our congregants not to live, out of balance and shimmering with the stress of being reactive to a thousand demands.

For kids of pastor-dads, this can often mean that dad is distant, disengaged, and distracted by the community that consumes them.   Given the male propensity to get completely focused on the task directly in front of them, the relationship between fathers and their Pii-Kay progeny can often be defined by distance, a distance magnified emotionally by the need for those younglings to perform and be Model Jesus Children in the display window of the pastor's smoke-and-mirrors-perfect family life.

It's an unworkable John Edwards-esque balance, being both "married to the church" and having kids with another woman.  But to be effectively a father and a Christian, it means having the courage to stand in the balance.  If you are going to serve the church, there are things that you just are gonna have to miss, just like I missed my sons' swim team time trials this Saturday because I was at a training retreat.   Or how I bowed out of an event to which I'd been invited by a church member, because I had a family gathering to which I had committed.  To be wise and in balance, things must give on both sides.  The most important thing that has to give is your pride, as you delude yourself into believing that 1) you can do it all and 2) you need to do it all.

Being a good father and a good pastor simultaneously means having the confidence to stand firm in both your calling to teach and proclaim and your calling to be present and aware of lives of your children.