Year 20

For the record, I went to an explicitly Christan school. Ergo; that beverage that I'm so proudly displaying in my hand is actually just your regular every day soda as I was only twenty at the time. You have to understand that for us easy going Christian folk drinking a soda on the beach is probably like snorting cocaine off a bathroom floor for a student from the UC system. And, now whenever I tell people that I went to college in Santa Barbara and they assume that I meant UCSB I just nod my head and then say something like gnarly, and talk about the awesome break you get just north of Ventura. Then I try and reach up to push back my golden locks of long hair only to discover that I don't have that hair anymore and then I weep for a solid ten minutes.

That year could be split up neatly into three segments.

Segment one. I lived in the dorm at the bottom of campus that was referred to as "the dungeon." Believe it or not it wasn't the most highly sought after dorm on our campus. It seemed like everyone in our class was off gallivanting around in various foreign countries for off campus programs while we wasted away in our dark small dorm room. The major highlight was this poster,
Unfortunately, the joke fell flat.....(pause for joke and laughter to subside) as I wasn't a beer drinker and didn't really dance at that point in time. The thing that I remember most clearly from that year was our nightly forays to Burger King. Every single night we'd eat in the Dining Commons, picking at swaths of spaghetti and dry bread, or just plain running from the smell of thresher shark and hopping in Steve's car to drive down to the local BK. The best part of that year (maybe this happened the prior year but let's not acknowledge that) was climbing into the car and smelling the rat that had died somewhere in the motor. Nothing like the fresh smell of decay to get you excited about eating a cheap burger. We also listened to classic songs like Jay Z "Big Pimpin," which will not be replayed below as it is tremendously inappropriate.

Realizing that our collegiate lives were fast slipping away we applied to off campus programs as well. Steve wound up going to Gordon, leaving Santa Barbara for Boston around January. I believe he froze to death. Meanwhile, I spent three months in San Francisco that are etched indelibly upon my memory. I worked as a hospital chaplain at San Francisco General Hospital, which I detailed in an essay elsewhere. The long and the short of this year was that I lived in a house with 17 girls and only 2 other guys. As a result you occasionally get talked into ideas like hair curling night, which you might not have acceded to otherwise though it winds up being good prep for your childcare experiences in the future.


On the bright side you also end up with photos like this, which go down in your personal pantheon of coolest photos of you ever taken. Even though you had to pay other people to be in them with you in order to make you look cool.


That year, you had to walk into patients room at the tender age of twenty and ask if I could help them. Strangely, some of these people opened up and shared big portions of their lives with me. Others did not open up and some even yelled at me railing against the Christian faith. I'd like to say they were good times, but they were not. However, it was an amazing time of learning about the world in general, spirituality, sexuality, race and class difference, the whole thing.
This is a fair picture of what your group four chaplains probably appeared like on a day to day basis to patients in the hospital.


When you're not looking entirely angelic you're kicking it with Catholic nuns in upscale SF neighborhoods.


That year you listened to this song and it seemed right.
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One of my favorite patients in that hospital, an older man named Gordon went from recovering quite well from hip surgery to almost certain death in the ICU. I cannot really explain what it was like to be in a place of so much hopelessness every day, but I can say that if given the choice I would return to that hospital and bear those burdens all over again.

Special credit goes this year to my friend Sarah, who even if she'd done nothing else introduced me to my wife, who managed to listen to all of the turmoil that year brought out in me with grace.

I remember long cold white hallways. I remember shadowing another chaplain on my very first day in the hospital, arriving at the door to discover the patient had died and seeing only his grieving family. I remember that someone was carrying a red helium balloon that said, "Get well soon."

Naturally, once I'd achieved the ripe old drinking age of 21 that summer I decided to spend the summer bar hopping. Basically I can think of no better way to clear your mind of homelessness and sadness than by the overwhelming taste of cheap shots. I will forever be remembered by a friend back home for drinking beer off the table in an attempt to save every last drop on a particularly long night. I don't even like beer.

Here's the thing. I'm almost thirty now, and I've come to the conclusion that I hate bars. I don't hate bars because they no longer card me and occasionally ask me if I'm someone in my party's dad. I hate bars because they are loud. I suppose that as I've aged I've found people's conversations to generally be more interesting when I can hear them. Granted as S and I age we'll probably be shouting to each other from a foot away, but I prefer to save that for my forties. The exception is if you're with exceptionally boring people in which case plant yourself by the bar and let the people around you shout away while you lament you regret your decision to have even left the house. The thing is, it's never a bad idea to just stay in.

Bars, and this is coming from my old age, are only acceptable in two ways.
1)If they are reasonably quiet/have an outdoor area where you can talk with your friends. It is okay to frequent these places and actually talk to the people who you came with.

2) Dancing. I went to a school that didn't allow dancing until 1997 or something. As we all know dancing was invented by the devil circa 1500 to tempt men into sin. However, dancing is fun and good aerobic activity. And it says in the Bible that Jesus turned water into wine, which, (bringing it full circle) certainly helped the wedding guests have a better time breaking it down later in the evening. Theology lesson complete.

You remember the woman who had no legs from your first visit alone. You remember trying to imagine what it would be like to struggle as she did to do the basic things. You remember how happy she seemed in that slightly over warm room talking about the things she was going to do when she left.

You remember Ernest asking you about the book of Job pronouncing it phonetically. You do not know but hope that he found some solace in those pages. You hope that he left the hospital and made it into a shelter. You hope so many things.

You remember standing at the foot of his bed and listening to the dull beep of the respirator. His head was propped up on pillows and his purple veined legs were puffed up from pooled blood. The two of you stood on either side of the bed and held his hands. You remembered the day that he told you both that you reminded him of his children, estranged and now absent. His hands were bigger than yours, and slightly moist. You remember how thin his grip was that final day as you looked down at his face beneath the respirator. You prayed. Then, the two of you left the room and you cried in that white sterile hallway because you knew he was going to die and that you could do nothing about it.

Elegy for a silk tree

You press your hands into the hard blond wood of the table to stand. You ask your father if he wants another beer. He sits, half-dazed, half-expectant, his eyelids almost closed as if the tenebrous afternoon light is pressing them down, the beer now held between his legs like an impressive genitalia. “Sure,” he says, and you walk across the rows of terra cotta tile to open the fridge, to stand in the light, and find two more beers. They are cold, rimmed with beads of water from the fresh ice that lines the bottom of your parent’s new fridge. You cross the room again and place them on the table between the two of you. Then you sit, and talk about the weather while the shadow of old trees lengthen, and the beers go from full to empty.