Lewis – Page 4 – Sage Telling Your Story

July 31, 2015February 26, 2019

Scarves: A Scarfy Story, by Lewis J. Thompson, III

It was a night much like any other for the watchman at Glasgow’s Dock Number Three, Lewis James MacScarvey, as he made his rounds. The only sounds were that of the water sloshing against the piles and an occasion distant fog horn or well-sotted human being noisily making his way home after closing time.

It was his habit to pace to-and-fro in front of a streetlamp and park bench where said humans were prone to sleep and dispose of their spent bottles in the nearby trash receptacle in hopes of averting a disturbance. When he turned to the north he could see about 100 meters away another bench with trash receptacle and lamplight nearly identical to his. Only there was no one patrolling that space so he liked to occasionally cast his eye in that direction to make sure there was no mischief-making going on.

On this particular night, at about 1:30 in the morning, he thought he saw a figure standing near the water. It appeared to be a woman, perhaps wearing a red full-length coat and something on her head. He had made several turnings on his well-worn loop and each time checked to see if the person was still there.

After about 15 minutes or so, he turned and noticed that the figure had vanished. Curious, he rushed down to see if there was a problem. When he arrived at the spot where the woman had been standing, he saw only a pair of earrings carefully placed on the seat of the bench and, when he looked into the water, a red scarf floating on the surface. Not even a ripple disturbed the water’s calm. Using his nightstick, he was able, with some effort, to retrieve the scarf. Embroidered on one corner were initials. He could barely make them out in the dim light–“LJM”. They were his initials. He backed away from the edge of the water until his legs collided with the bench, whereupon he sat down hard.

Although he never learned the identity of the mysterious lonely woman he saw that night–no body was ever found–he could not bring himself to reveal to the police even the existence of the scarf. He kept it for himself and every night before he went on-duty, he would tie the scarf around his neck, hoping against hope that the rightful owner would some night come looking for it.

About the Author

I came to the beautiful state of Colorado out of my native Kansas by way of Michigan, the state where I married and I came to the beautiful state of Colorado out of my native Kansas by way of Michigan, the state where I married and had two children while working as an engineer for the Ford Motor Company. I was married to a wonderful woman for 26 happy years and suddenly realized that life was passing me by. I figured that I should make a change, as our offspring were basically on their own and I wasn’t getting any younger. Luckily, a very attractive and personable man just happened to be crossing my path at that time, so the change-over was both fortuitous and smooth. Soon after, I retired and we moved to Denver, my husband’s home town. He passed away after 13 blissful years together in October of 2012. I am left to find a new path to fulfillment. One possibility is through writing. Thank goodness, the SAGE Creative Writing Group was there to light the way.

July 27, 2015February 26, 2019

What Makes Homophobes Tick? by Lewis Thompson

The easy answer to this query would be that “homophobe” means “a person with an irrational or obsessive fear of homosexuals”, according to Wikipedia. But it would be important to dig a little beneath the surface to examine not only where the “irrational or obsessive fear” arises from but also why it seems to persist over many years.

Any American born in the last century almost certainly spent their formative years being inculcated with certain “inalienable truths”. Among these were–

* To be white is better than to be a person of color;

* To be male is better than to be female;

* To be a female is better than to be a male who wants to become a female (if a female wants to become a male, well, who can blame them?);

* To be rich is better than to be poor;

* To be rich and a crook is also better than being poor;

* To be a Christian is better than to be a non-Christian;

* To be a non-Christian is better than to be an atheist;

* To be an atheist is better than being a homosexual because, at least usually, you’re not an embarrassment to your relatives;

* To be conservative is better than being liberal (because all of the Founding Fathers were conservative, otherwise, they would never have written the Second Amendment);

* To be black, female, liberal, a non-believer, and gay is the worst thing that can possibly happen to a person and they surely should be imprisoned at birth and executed as soon as their politics, non-believer status, and sexual orientation become manifest.

So, we can readily comprehend that homophobia is the natural outgrowth of a society based upon gender, race, religious and countless other biases. It is endemic, almost akin to fluoridated water, which, as we all know, was responsible for the rise of the John Birch Society.

About the Author

July 20, 2015February 26, 2019

Gifts from Afar by Lewis J. Thompson, III

or, so goes my story–

Gifts from a Farm

I did not grow up on a farm. It wouldn’t have suited me at all, despite the fact that my dad grew up on a farm and made his living as a farm loan manager and rural appraiser and my mother grew up with chickens and a couple of cows in a rural small town. No, farm boys have to get up very early to do chores, drink raw milk, shovel really nasty stuff, and work on dirty machinery. Besides, farm work is dangerous. Believe me, I know.

One of my mother’s three brothers had a farm near the teeny, tiny town of McCune in far southeastern Kansas. A couple times a year, we would make the two-hundred-mile journey by car to pay a visit. One of my cousins was a boy close to my age. The other male child, Richard, was eight years older than I. He had contracted spinal meningitis when he was about ten years old and nearly died. It left him mentally disabled, though physically OK. He dropped out of school at about age 14 and later got work as a farm and ranch hand. The only time I can recall that he stayed overnight at our house in Hutchinson was when he was on his way to Wyoming or Montana to work on a ranch. He was about 20 and I was 12.

I recall my mother being upset because she had learned from her brother or sister-in-law that Richard was in the habit of sleeping “in the altogether”, which seems an odd expression for sleeping in nothing at all. I remember being somewhat titillated by the thought of lying next to a naked boy, cousin or not. To my disappointment, I soon found out that he would be sleeping on an Army cot at the foot of my bed.

On one of our visits to the farm, I and a couple of my cousins went on an egg-collecting excursion to the hay loft above the shed where machinery were stored and the corn was husked. This required that one go up a ladder and through a hole in the floor of the loft that measured about 2 feet by 2 feet. Bales of hay were stacked to within a foot or so of the opening on three sides. This made getting down from the loft more than a little tricky. Although I prided myself on being a pretty good climber and not especially afraid of heights, I found my attempt to make the transition gracefully woefully lacking. I slipped and soon was falling feet-first, arms straight up in the air through the opening toward the hard floor 12′ below. As luck would have it, a horizontal wooden beam crossed the space directly below the opening in such a way that my body missed it but my out-stretched fingers were perfectly positioned to reflexively close on it as I passed by. There I dangled, feet swinging two feet above the ground. Lucky me!

Luck did not seem to play such an active role in the life of Bobby, the cousin just a few months younger than I, especially when it came to fire and modes of transportation. When Bobby was old enough to own a car, he had been using gasoline to clean off his engine. When he finished, he started the engine. There was a back-fire through the carburetor that set the engine on fire. Much damage was done.

Not too long after that, he and my uncle were burning stubble in a field. Bobby accidentally splashed gasoline on his legs. His pants caught fire and he was badly burned. The final calamity came when we were both about 16. He had been riding his motorcycle when a driver ran a stop sign and he hit her broadside. His head hit the car’s roof where the pillar behind the driver’s door joins it. He died instantly. We drove down for the funeral. I had taken a suit from my closet to wear for the occasion. When we arrived at the chapel, I discovered that there were no pants hanging under the jacket. I had to remain in the car during the service. It was one of the worst goofs of my life.

My point in writing all this, I guess, is to provide an opportunity to thank all those Americans who till the soil, shovel the dung, shoe the horses, milk the cows, and get up at dawn every day so that I have what I need to survive. It troubles me to think that the days of the family farm are rapidly fading away but along with them the great risk those families took each and every day–truly a gift to all of us from a farm.

About the Author

July 13, 2015February 26, 2019

House Cleaning by Lewis

I have been doing housework since I was no more than eight years old. I remember this very specifically because the summer of my eighth year I contracted ringworm of the scalp. It was the summer that my nuclear family—granddad, dad, mom and me—drove Granddad’s 1952 Packard sedan to New England and Washington, DC. We hadn’t been home one week when my scalp started to scale and itch. We had a pet cat, which had every reason to hate me but, when checked, it showed no sign of the skin disease. I might have picked it up in the Big Apple but my favorite theory is that I got it from putting the nozzle of the vacuum cleaner up to my cheek and making funny faces at myself.

In any event, that was only the beginning of a series of odd associations with house cleaning in my early life. My parents were lower middle class folk who rarely could afford to pay a cleaning person but my mother hated—that’s H-A-T-E-D—housework—so, when she was working, it was necessary to pay someone to clean our house. One day, according to my mother, she found a black cleaning woman asleep on her bed. That was the last time she ever paid anyone to do housework and, as far I know, the last time she ever spoke kindly of a black person. No, from then on, if house cleaning needed to be done and I was around, I did it (or, so it seems, looking back across so many foggy years).

Luckily for me, I kind of liked doing housework. (Please note the past tense!) I put cleanliness and order above godliness and I was the only person I trusted to do the job right. When I started working at the public library at the age of 15, my favorite job was to “read the shelves” on Saturday mornings. That meant putting hundreds of fiction books in alphabetical order by author and title and a similar number of non-fiction books in Dewey Decimal System order. I could do it faster and more accurately than anyone else on the staff though they seemed only upset that I lay on the floor to read the bottom shelf.

My second-favorite job was working the basement stacks. Down there was a large “squirrel cage” that housed back issues of periodicals, including National Geographic. Growing up in the 1950’s meant that there were a number of native peoples in the world who were accustomed to wearing little other than a loin cloth and, sometimes, some body paint or other ornamentation. The only magazine store in my home town was a great source of comic books and Christian literature but most definitely lacking in anything that would appeal to the prurient interest of a nascent adolescent. National Geographic filled the gap nicely, especially articles on the golden, stocky tribes of the Amazon River basin.

In my senior year of college, I took a job cleaning house for a retired professor and his wife. He was wheelchair bound and she was his primary caregiver. Their house was a two-story colonial with a half-finished basement. The finished half was the professor’s office and the unfinished half a place to store books, magazines, and other paraphernalia. My job was to clean only his office every other week, which only took two hours. I think they paid me $2.50 an hour but that would pay for soda, movies, and cigarettes for the month. Soon I discovered that the professor was a collector of National Geographics. Suddenly, my job satisfaction improved by leaps-and-bounds.

I now no longer do house cleaning—for myself or anyone. The thrill has gone. I still get a kick, however, out of watching the houseboy in La Cage aux Folles as he combines his flouncing with his feather dusting.

About the Author

July 2, 2015February 26, 2019

Spirituality by Lewis J. Thompson, III

Ask ten people how they would define “spirituality” and you will likely get eleven different answers–and they would all be correct. I feel spiritual when I see a colorful sunset or listen to the main theme from On Golden Pond. I also feel spiritual when I lie down after a busy day or hear a great sermon on Sunday morning or taste a particularly good chocolate ice cream sundae. All of these experiences are even more spiritual when I share them with someone for whom I care deeply.

I would say that beauty possesses its very own spirit, as does companionship. Put the two together and nirvana can happen. Standing on the rim of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison with a loved one is spiritual to me. Meditating on my bedroom floor alone, not so much. Sharing our stories around this table is spiritual. Having lunch together? Fun, but not spiritual (although a hearty belch after a couple of beers can come pretty close). There are TV commercials that are spiritual to me but they are rare–ones for the benefit of disabled veterans or destitute children come to mind. Open displays of piety turn me off. Nothing is less spiritual to me than a politician justifying his or her vote to deny assistance to someone in dire need on the grounds of religion. Bigotry and prejudice do not dress up well in vestments.

Recently, I volunteered with the AmeriCorps’ Reading Partners’ program to tutor an elementary school child in reading. Last Tuesday was my first session with 8-year-old Eduardo. In getting acquainted with each other’s stories, there came a moment when we both felt a strong connection. We “high fived” in a spontaneous gesture of friendship. My eyes began to tear up, as they often do at such times, but I wasn’t particularly embarrassed. If he noticed, I couldn’t tell nor did I particularly care. I have come to realize that most of my spiritual moments happen when there are people I love around me. I think it’s more than a coincidence.

© January 25, 2015

About the Author

June 17, 2015February 26, 2019

Getting Caught, by Lewis

As a boy, I was not afraid of heights. By the age of four, I was jumping off the roof of the garage. I could climb almost anything. My mother—never too watchful—soon learned to find me not by looking “around” but by looking “up”.

Our house was a one-story bungalow. Next door lived an elderly widow whose house towered over ours. One day, I was playing outside, between our houses, and I heard a strange and frightening cry from an upstairs window. I could see her face. She appeared to be talking to me. She hadn’t done that before. What did she want, if anything? How could I help? She appeared OK to me. I walked away. She scared me. I had never known my grandmothers.

Soon, I learned, to my horror, that she had been doing laundry and caught her hand in the rollers of her Maytag dryer. I wasn’t punished; she was the one who “got caught”. But I sure learned something about the hazards of daily living and the need to be more responsive.

Around that time—the years have grown somewhat fungible with their passage—I noticed that a very long ladder had been placed against the side of her house. It reached all the way from the ground to her roof at the exact location of her brick chimney, from which, I was certain, an excellent panorama of our entire neighborhood could be enjoyed.

The opportunity was a prime example of what in the liability law profession is known as an “attractive nuisance”—especially for a boy who loves to climb.

So, I climbed, hand-over-hand, to the rain gutter 25 feet or so above the sidewalk upon which rested the ladder. The roof was fairly steep but negotiable, so I soon found myself perched on top of her chimney thoroughly enjoying the spectacular view.

Before long, my reverie was shattered by my mother’s voice somewhat exasperatedly calling out my name in a context that suggested some kind of a response was in order. She clearly did not see me. I waited until I thought she might have the police out looking for me.

“Up here, Mom,” I said, hoping-against-hope that she would be impressed.

“Lewis, you get down here this instant!”

Mother had made similar demands in the past but I was pretty sure this time she didn’t mean to be taken literally.

Anyone who climbs at all knows that climbing down is far scarier and more risky than climbing up, if for no other reason than you’re looking at hard objects rather than clouds and the sky. Nevertheless, I managed to make it safely down to the ground without so much as a scratch. I imagined my mother rushing over to me, sweeping me up in her grateful arms and showering my cheeks with kisses, as I’m sure I had seen done in Lassie Come Home. Instead, I got a firm thumb and forefinger on either side of my right ear lobe and a brusque shepherding through our side door and into the kitchen, where my mother posed to me the type of question designed to instill shame and guilt in the heart of a 4-year-old, naïve, novitiate Christian.

“What would you do if you had a little boy who pulled a stunt like that?”

Now, I immediately recognized her query as a “trick question”, the answer to which might very well seal my fate. Rejecting rejoinders such as “give him a spanking”, “ground him”, or “send him to bed without his dinner”, I happened upon a response that might just turn a lemon into lemonade.

“I guess I would simply ask God to watch out for him”.

I never knew whether she actually did make such an appeal. I just knew that I had had a very close brush with disaster. I also learned that religion can easily be used to manipulate.

About the Author

June 5, 2015February 26, 2019

House Cleaning, by Lewis

I
have been doing housework since I was no more than eight years old. I remember this very specifically because the
summer of my eighth year I contracted ringworm of the scalp. It was the summer that my nuclear
family—granddad, dad, mom and me—drove Granddad’s 1952 Packard sedan to New
England and Washington, DC. We hadn’t
been home one week when my scalp started to scale and itch. We had a pet cat, which had every reason to hate
me but, when checked, it showed no sign of the skin disease. I might have picked it up in the Big Apple
but my favorite theory is that I got it from putting the nozzle of the vacuum
cleaner up to my cheek and making funny faces at myself.

In
any event, that was only the beginning of a series of odd associations with
house cleaning in my early life. My
parents were lower middle class folk who rarely could afford to pay a cleaning
person but my mother hated—that’s H-A-T-E-D—housework—so, when she was working,
it was necessary to pay someone to clean our house. One day, according to my mother, she found a
black cleaning woman asleep on her bed.
That was the last time she ever paid anyone to do housework and, as far
I know, the last time she ever spoke kindly of a black person. No, from then on, if house cleaning needed to
be done and I was around, I did it (or, so it seems, looking back across so
many foggy years).

Luckily
for me, I kind of liked doing housework. (Please note the past tense!) I put cleanliness and order above godliness
and I was the only person I trusted to do the job right. When I started working at the public library
at the age of 15, my favorite job was to “read the shelves” on Saturday
mornings. That meant putting hundreds of
fiction books in alphabetical order by author and title and a similar number of
non-fiction books in Dewey Decimal System order. I could do it faster and more accurately than
anyone else on the staff though they seemed only upset that I lay on the floor
to read the bottom shelf.

My
second-favorite job was working the basement stacks. Down there was a large “squirrel cage” that
housed back issues of periodicals, including National Geographic. Growing
up in the 1950’s meant that there were a number of native peoples in the world
who were accustomed to wearing little other than a loin cloth and, sometimes,
some body paint or other ornamentation.
The only magazine store in my home town was a great source of comic
books and Christian literature but most definitely lacking in anything that
would appeal to the prurient interest of a nascent adolescent. National
Geographic filled the gap nicely, especially articles on the golden, stocky
tribes of the Amazon River basin.

In
my senior year of college, I took a job cleaning house for a retired professor
and his wife. He was wheelchair bound
and she was his primary caregiver. Their
house was a two-story colonial with a half-finished basement. The finished half was the professor’s office
and the unfinished half a place to store books, magazines, and other
paraphernalia. My job was to clean only
his office every other week, which only took two hours. I think they paid me $2.50 an hour but that
would pay for soda, movies, and cigarettes for the month. Soon I discovered that the professor was a
collector of National Geographics. Suddenly, my job satisfaction improved by
leaps-and-bounds.

I
now no longer do house cleaning—for myself or anyone. The thrill has gone. I still get a kick, however, out of watching
the houseboy in La Cage aux Folles as
he combines his flouncing with his feather dusting.

© 1 April 2013

About
the Author

May 18, 2015February 26, 2019

One Summer Afternoon by Lewis

When I was a child, my parents didn’t take a “family vacation” some summers. Instead, they sent me off to summer camp, which was enough vacation for them, I guess. On one such occasion, they sent me off for an interminable ten days to a YMCA camp called “Camp Wood”. I was about nine years old and an only child. I was introverted and a non-swimmer. For me, swimming was, to quote Bill Cosby, “staying alive in the water”. I had allergies and my sinuses were constantly inflamed. If chlorinated water got up my nose, it felt like someone had set my snot on fire. Therefore, if I was in water more than four feet deep, out came my nose plugs. It was swimming that kept me from getting beyond a “Star” rank in Boy Scouts.

When I got to Camp Wood, I soon discovered that it was organized a little like a country club. The lake had two beaches–the shallow one with the kiddy swings for the non-swimmers and the cool beach with the deeper water and the water slide for the swimmers. I was a few years older than almost all the kids on the kiddy beach and was going to make myself absolutely miserable unless I could graduate to the older boys’ beach. To do that meant that I would have to swim from the edge of the kiddy beach out to a floating dock about 50 yards out into the lake. From where I stood on the edge of the water at the kiddy beach, the dock looked to me to be only one or two strokes closer than hell itself. Not only that, but there would be kids and adults nearby watching me. Who knows if they were rooting for me to make it or were hoping to see something their parents would be most interested hearing about?

There was a lifeguard standing on the dock. He looked to me to be a young man of about 17. I’m not very good at judging these things, as I never had an older brother or even a male relative under 21. I suspect that it was only the prospect of that young man coming to my rescue that gave me the courage needed to attempt to swim toward the raft.

I would give anything to see a home movie of my valiant effort to look graceful while flailing all four skinny limbs in a desperate attempt to keep from consuming too much of the lake. By the time I reached the dock, I was totally exhausted, a fact that I’m sure was obvious to the young man looking worriedly down at me. Nevertheless, one got no credit for merely reaching the dock. No. One had to swim back to the shore from whence I had come.

I’m sure the lifeguard offered me his hand. But I was too embarrassed and determined to pass the test, so I turned back toward shore hoping against hope that I would find the strength somehow to make it all the way. Well, I only made it a few yards before I started to flounder. The lifeguard was on me in a couple of seconds, lifting me up and putting me under his arm to sweep me back to the safety of the dock.

“This must be what it feels like to be Sleeping Beauty,” I thought. No, not really. But it did feel pretty sweet, though humiliating.

None of the other campers ever mentioned my fiasco, nor did I ever tell my parents about it. Camp ended on a much higher note, when I placed first in the broad jump in the track meet on the last morning of camp. Somehow, solid ground just seems to suit me better.

About the Author

May 5, 2015February 26, 2019

Bumper Stickers by Lewis

My favorite bumper sticker has long been that classic example that combines humor, existentialism, and a zinger, all in one–“If you can read this, you are following too close.”

I thought I would try to come up with a list of “The 10 Bumper Stickers I Would Like to See but Haven’t”. Here they are, in no particular order:

* I thought World War II was fought so that I wouldn’t have to eat sushi.

* Police are no more racist than the rest of us but they have a license to kill.

* Have you noticed that when a Texan says “Bible” it sounds like “Babel”?

* Boxer shorts must have been invented by a woman.

* Phones seem to be getting smarter while people are getting stupider.

* I wish the Tea Party would “bag it”.

* Over the Hillary and “Into the Woods” to Elizabeth’s house I go.

* If gays are only 2% of the population, we must possess 98% of the “fabulous”.

* If climate change is not a threat because “God is still up there”, isn’t that what Noah thought?

* And, finally, Your two-year-old knows where your gun is hidden and he’s after it.

About the Author

March 30, 2015February 26, 2019

Believe It or Not, This Really Happened to Me by Lewis

In 1954, when I was eight years old, my family embarked upon the most ambitious vacation of my childhood. All four of us piled into my granddad’s 1952 Packard and headed northeast to Washington, DC; Lynn, Massachusetts; New London, Connecticut; and New York City. The sights and delights of that trip will perhaps be the subject of another day but today I begin my story with what happened a few days after we arrived back home that summer.

What began as a persistent itch at the back of my scalp that kept spreading turned out to be ringworm. I had not even heard of the condition and as soon as I did I had to wonder–as did my family and doctors–how I ever came to be exposed to a condition caused by a fungus that is usually spread through skin-to-skin contact with an infected animal, often a cat (we had none), or another human (I was an only child and was not a wrestler). I remember thinking that I might have “self-infected” in a sense by putting the end of the vacuum cleaner nozzle against my cheek but was told by the doctor that that was unlikely.

The early 1950’s were the days when medical science was just discovering the many ways in which x-rays might be used therapeutically. I went in for a few x-ray treatments on my scalp, which I learned much later had increased my risk of having cancer of the thyroid years down the road. (It was x-ray treatments for an ear infection which eventually took the life of Roger Ebert from thyroid cancer.)

When the x-rays didn’t do the job, we moved into the next “therapy”–an ointment which had to be applied directly to the skin. This meant that I had to sit in front of my mother for five or so minutes every day while she pulled out every hair from a 2″ diameter circle of my scalp with a pair of tweezers. Until water boarding was invented, this was the most effective method of extracting information from an enemy. It was a lot to ask of any mother, even mine. But we made it through.

The worst part of this entire ordeal was yet to come, however. That fall, I entered the Third Grade at Morgan Elementary School in Hutchinson, Kansas. Because the salve used to treat the ringworm could dry out if unprotected, I was required to wear a scalp cap made from one of my mother’s old nylon stockings over the top of my head to school. To make matters worse, I learned that the x-rays had killed the hair follicles, which meant that it would never grow back. Now I suspect that most–if not all–of us can recall the social pressures that every Third Grade student is under to “fit in”. I already was trying to cope with eyes that did not coordinate and now I felt that I must look odd both coming and going. It had been, up until then, the worst year of my short life and, looking back, I would have to say, it still is. The only good thing is that, after 60 years, the hair on the rest of my scalp has also decided to bail out, making the look more uniform.