(orig published Wednesday, April 7, 2010)
My wife Adrienne is good at making plans. I am not. This has worked out well for both of us, mostly. I spent most of 1979 transitioning from 14 to 15 years old. While I was going everywhere on my bicycle and learning how to shave with a razor, she was creating her life plan: Have children when young, then go back to school and get advanced degrees, ending up teaching college as a tenured professor. By 2006, the children were living independent lives and she had her Master's Degree. It was time. After much searching, she was accepted into the new Gerontology PhD program at Miami University, my alma mater.
Now was the hard part. Miami University was nearly a thousand miles away from our home in Shoreham, Vermont. And Adrienne had certain conditions she wanted fulfilled before starting the last leg of her journey: to not have to work full-time while studying, to live near her school, not be a long-distance learner, and to have me with her. These were big, scary conditions but I had always had complete faith in her. When she told me she wanted me to come with her, I said, "Sure."
We sold our home, left our jobs, our friends, and New England behind to go west. After several days of driving, we arrived at our new home - a cute little house we had bought on Jacqueline Drive, in Oxford, just in time for the Fourth of July, 2006.
One of the things I wanted to find in southwest Ohio was my friend Steve, curious to see how the years had changed us both. His family had moved to Norwalk, settling in the house across the street from mine during our seventh grade year. Neighbors first, then freshman roommates at Miami. Originally from Cincinnati, he had always planned to return to the Queen City, and had done exactly that — settling into a beautiful suburban home with his lovely wife, two great kids, and around a dozen cats. Because I had lost touch, I didn't know any of this. When my parents told me that his mother had died, I took a chance and dialed their old number. His dad answered and, after offering my condolences, asked him for Steve's new contact information.
Getting together felt like no time had passed at all. We were older, married, respectable adults — and within ten minutes we were seventeen again, talking in the shorthand that only survives in friendships that go all the way back to bicycle riding and searching record bins.
To celebrate our return to Southwestern Ohio, Steve got us tickets to see The Blind Boys of Alabama at the Tall Stacks Festival on Cincinnati's riverfront. They were a long-standing gospel group that had been singing together since before World War II. They had performed all over the world with many gospel and secular artists like Ben Harper, Susan Tedeschi and Lou Reed. HBO used their version of Tom Waits’ song "Way Down in the Hole" as the theme song to The Wire for the first two seasons. Already a fan, I had no idea what was coming.
For men in their 80s, these guys rocked with fire and fury that belied their age. Their harsh, nails-on-a-chalkboard voices combined into ethereal, otherworldly harmonies peppered with moans and wails and shouts of joy that felt less like music and more like direct communication with whatever comes next. We were all on our feet, clapping and moving in our separate dances. During a fevered moment of the show, Jimmy Carter, 83 years old, ran into the audience (of course, led by his guides). Standing on a chair above the crushing throng, he praised God for bringing him to Cincinnati to spread the good news.
I heard him say, as if he were speaking directly to me:
Once God opens a door for you, nothing in the universe can stop you from going through it.
And there he was, proof that what many people would consider a disability was actually a tool for a greater purpose. It was a life changing moment.
Four years later, at the McCullough-Hyde Memorial Hospital in Oxford, I was preparing for my 7th IVIG treatment. My world had shrunk to the confines of a hospital bed in day surgery, my home for the next eight hours. While being wheeled into my room, I pleaded with the nurses to not send me home. Despite what I had been told, I knew I wasn't getting better.
A group of nurses entered my room and asked if they could pray with me. Surrounding my paralyzed body, holding my nerveless hands, they looked exactly like angels. Being paralyzed does weird things to your brain.
I thought of Jimmy Carter, standing on that chair out there in Cincinnati, fearlessly praising God, his blindness not a handicap or detriment but a visible symbol of the power of grace.
I was given a taste of grace that day. Candy, one of the nurses, reminded me that life is a journey with twists and turns and this was just a bump on my journey. It wouldn't last forever. That night, our pastor came to visit. As he left, he told us to remember the words, "Right Now." As in, "right now is a good moment," or maybe "I can't do this right now."
That phrase became a lifeline. Every call, every piece of scripture, every "I'm praying for you" was another version of the same gift: right now, I am not alone.
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