Front Porch Tales Read online

  Then we became pregnant with our second child. A friend told us that second pregnancies weren’t nearly as exciting as first pregnancies. We thought she was terrible for saying that, but after a while we noticed she was right. When our first pregnancy test came up positive, I called a hundred of my closest friends. When our second pregnancy test turned pink, I called my therapist.

  Then our second son, Sam, was born. At this writing he is three months old. When our first son was three months old, we added a room to house his photograph collection. After three months, son number two has one of those goofy hospital pictures, which looks suspiciously like the goofy hospital picture of our first son, which makes me think it really isn’t him. Somewhere there’s a factory cranking out a dozen different goofy baby pictures, and the nurse just hands you one that resembles your kid.

  Then there’s the matter of clothing. First children have a wardrobe that would put Elizabeth Taylor to shame; second children take after Jed Clampett. You even catch yourself treating the children differently. First babies you treat like porcelain, second babies like Tupperware. Once heard Bruce Lansky say that when his first child dropped his pacifier, they boiled it for ten minutes. When his second child dropped her pacifier, they told the dog to fetch.

  Even our friends treat our second child differently. When our first son was born, thirty-five people came to visit us in the hospital. When child number two was born, we got one visitor, but it was a mistake. Turns out she was looking for the folks in the next room over who were having their first child.

  I myself am a fourth child. Took my dad eighteen years to learn my name. Grew up thinking my name was “Glenn…I mean, Doug…I mean, David…I mean, Phil….” But I don’t mind being a fourth child. Truth is, I kind of like it. Gave my parents the chance to test their theories on my brothers and sister. I like to think of them as rough drafts.

  Lots of stories in the Bible about siblings. In the Old Testament, the firstborn son inherited the whole shebang. In the New Testament, the story changes. The Gospel of Luke tells of a certain man who had two sons. Turns out it was the second who got the fatted calf. Probably to make up for the hand-me-downs.

  One thing I’ve noticed. When I pray for my children at night, my affection for each is the same. I suspect that’s how God must feel too. For him, every child is a firstborn. As the old song says, “Jesus loves the little children….” Even the second ones.

  Presents and Presence

  When Joan and I were expecting our first child, we received the usual warnings regarding lack of sleep, dirty diapers, and temper tantrums. Still, we looked forward to being parents. That’s because no one told us about birthday parties.

  When our oldest son neared age three, we mistakenly asked him what he wanted for his birthday. At first, all he wanted was a tricycle. We thought that was cute, so we made a big deal out of it. Thus encouraged, he asked for the entire toy department at Wal-Mart. A friend of ours with four kids laughed when we told her about this. She said our first mistake was telling him he had a birthday.

  One of my friends has a daughter a few months older than our son, which is the worst possible thing that could have happened because they give great parties for their child, which gets ours pumped up for his. When their daughter turned three, they actually rented a pony for her birthday party. The rest of us were livid, because now we would have to hire a pony for our kids. Thank God, the pony went nuts and bucked a kid off, so my son doesn’t want anything to do with ponies. I guess it’s true that all things work together for good for those who love the Lord.

  Then there’s always the little matter of whom to invite to your children’s birthday parties. We invite a lot of people, for two reasons. First, the more stuff our kids get from other people, the less we have to buy. Second, a lot of people have made us mad, and this is a good way to pay them back. Like our “friend” who faked a Mexican accent and said, “Sorry, no speaka English,” when we were calling around looking for a babysitter.

  I know a guy who’s a Jehovah’s Witness. They don’t celebrate birthday parties. When I asked him why, he said it’s because the only birthday party in the Bible cost John the Baptist his head. And here I am moaning that my son’s birthday cost me an arm and a leg.

  One birthday our oldest boy got so many toys he sat in the living room and cried. All those options overwhelmed him. I know how he felt. I feel that way whenever The Andy Griffith Show and Murder, She Wrote are on at the same time.

  When I was growing up, I never had a big birthday party. There were five children in my family, and Mom and Dad couldn’t afford the extravagance. Mom tried to make things special by letting the birthday child decide what we’d have for dinner. We thought that was a treat! Now my wife and I are so tired of deciding what to have for supper, we’d eat monkey tongues if someone showed up to cook them.

  You probably won’t like my saying this, but I’ve noticed a correlation between the size of birthday parties and parental employment. If both parents work, a kid can pretty well count on having a big party. I think parents do that to make up for being gone so much. Call me crazy, but I believe children need our presence more than they need our presents.

  I’ve forgotten almost every present my parents ever gave me. But I’ll never forget that when I turned twelve my dad took me canoeing for an entire day. So there are presents and there is presence. Blessed are those parents who learn the finer gift early on.

  My Cup Runneth Over, and So Does My Toilet

  My sons buy me cards every year at Father’s Day. I pay for them, but it’s the thought that counts. One year, my card had a star on it. It was actually a bar mitzvah card, but my two-year-old likes stars, so that’s the card I got to open at the breakfast table.

  We went over to my father’s house that afternoon. Most everyone in the family was there because in my family, if you don’t show up, you become the topic of conversation. My second cousin wasn’t there, so we talked about him. He’s a fairly young man but is retired because he’s filthy rich. We were glad he wasn’t there, since we’ve been wanting to talk about him for a long time.

  None of us like him because he’s not only rich, he’s happy. We come from a long line of poor people who’ve been able to endure poverty by believing that rich people are unhappy so a person is better off poor. But my cousin has gone and shattered that myth. He is rich and happy, which makes the rest of us miserable.

  We talked about his house. He is married and has no children, but his home has five bathrooms. My grandpa was betting the toilet paper bill alone would break him. I can’t imagine having five bathrooms. Our house has one and a half bathrooms, and just keeping those going can be burdensome.

  Like the week after Father’s Day, when my wife walked into the bathroom and noticed the carpet was damp, and I told her not to worry because it was just humidity. But the next day, the water was squishing up in between our toes. It was less like humidity and more like an underground spring.

  Then I noticed that whenever we flushed, water ran down the back of the tank. I’d never worked on toilets before, but I thought it would build my character, which is what people say when they’re too cheap to call a plumber. I worked on it for a few hours before stopping to take a nap. Which is when my wife called a plumber who came and fixed it in five minutes in exchange for the title to our house.

  The only comfort I took in all of this was knowing that my cousin has five toilets to take care of, which I think is God’s way of teaching him that wealth has its disadvantages.

  Wealth does have its disadvantages. Not that I would know this personally, but I suspect when you’re rich you’re always wondering why people invite you to parties. Do they like you, or do they like your money? I never wonder why people invite me to parties. It’s because they like my wife.

  There’s a story in the New Testament about a rich man. One day, he asked Jesus what it took to inherit eternal life. Jesus told him to keep the commandments, and when the rich man said he’d done tha
t, Jesus told him to sell all he had and give the money to the poor. And the guy stood around waiting for the punch line. Except Jesus wasn’t kidding. The Bible says the man walked away sad, for he was very rich. Personally, I don’t think he was rich. I think he was the poorest of the poor.

  Let’s talk about rich. Every year at Father’s Day, I get bar mitzvah cards. I love my wife, and she loves me. Got so many friends our house can’t hold them, an icebox full of food, and two toilets. How’s that for wealth?

  My toilet may runneth over, but so does my cup.

  Guys

  When I was six years old, my parents gave me a rifle for Christmas. It was a pop gun, which they considered harmless, which is why they bought it for me. What they hadn’t counted on was a boy’s capacity to turn even the most innocuous object into an instrument of violence. While it was true that the gun couldn’t fire a bullet, it did make one heck of a club, which I learned while engaging my brother in hand-to-hand combat.

  Shortly after that, my mother grew concerned about war toys and wouldn’t buy us any more guns. That was fine with us, since by then we had discovered football. Mr. Smitherman was my football coach. I don’t remember much about him, except that he was always yelling at us to kill the other team. That was on Saturdays. On Sundays he taught Sunday school, mostly stuff from the Old Testament about God smiting people.

  All of this was done, of course, to prepare us guys for the “real” world, which would chew us up and spit us out if we weren’t tough. What it actually did was turn us into insensitive brutes whose idea of entertainment was making body noises with our armpits.

  Then it came time for us to date, and we had to be sensitive, which to us meant not laughing out loud at Barry Manilow songs.

  Then we went away to college and began bathing regularly, which helped us persuade delicate young ladies to become our brides. So we got married and went back to being slobs.

  But then we had children. And one Saturday morning, our wives woke up, gave us the these-are-your-kids-too look and said, “I’m going out today, so you’ll need to watch the kids.” Which meant we had to be—arrggh! I hate this word—nurturing.

  Yes, that’s right, we had to be nurturing, which meant we had to sing nursery songs to our children. This is harder than it sounds. Mothers can do this because they have a nursery song gene. Even though we guys are at a disadvantage in this department, I was pleased to see my sons respond favorably to Conway Twitty. Then the unthinkable happened. My wife wanted to start working outside the home every afternoon. And she wanted me to stay home with the kids. This was not in our marriage contract, but I couldn’t get out of it because the alternative would have meant working.

  So now I stay home almost every afternoon with my sons. At first, I found it embarrassing when I had to explain to another guy that I couldn’t do something because I had to watch my sons. So I’d say things like “Can’t meet you then; my boys and I are going to work on the car that afternoon.” So what if it was a Lego car?

  Then the oddest thing happened: I caught myself enjoying it. When I realized this, I was holding Sam on my lap, and he smiled his ten-week smile at me, and I thought how that beat any moment I’d ever spent on the golf course.

  I knew if I grew in the Christian faith this would happen—that one day tenderness would win out. Some of the guys don’t understand this, but I don’t much care. I still don’t tell them I have to watch my sons. Now I tell them I get to, as if it’s a special treat. And it is.

  Family Life and Other Reasons Jesus Never Married

  Several years ago, my aunts made their annual spring visit to my folks’ house. We were sitting on the front porch when they mentioned how nice it would be to have a family reunion before my grandmother went to glory. I looked at Dad. I could tell he wasn’t wild about the idea because he was sticking his finger down his throat and making a gagging sound. But they applied a little sisterly pressure, and within a week invitations were speeding to the hinterlands.

  The reunion was held a few months later. We had more than a hundred people there, including my grandmother, who was so close to meeting her Maker that some of my family were telling her what they wanted when she died.

  Everybody was saying how nice it was that she got to see all the family before she passed. But I’m not so sure it was all that great a comfort. You see, my grandmother was a dignified lady. Lived a good deal of her life in England. Afternoon-tea-with-pinky-finger-out kind of lady. So I don’t think she was particularly soothed when my third cousins played “Dueling Banjos” on their armpits.

  My second cousin was a school superintendent before he retired. He’s kind of the family hero. Everybody has a lot of respect for him. A very thoughtful man, filled with wisdom and sound judgment, which he demonstrated by staying home.

  I have another cousin who has a doctorate. He lives in Chicago and does research for a university. He goes to South America a lot, but I’m not sure why. Truthfully, I don’t think he’s a real doctor because when I asked him to play golf he didn’t know how.

  My godfather was there. He’s the richest person in our family and also an atheist, which I didn’t think godparents were allowed to be. Funny thing is, none of us knows how he got his money. One of my relatives thinks he sells drugs. Someone else mentioned that he sells insurance, though that’s hardly an improvement.

  Then there’s my grandfather. He’s not on my dad’s side of the family, but since he lives nearby, he came just the same. He was originally from Belgium but sailed to America when he was a boy. When he was a young man, he dated Gene Hackman’s mother, which means Gene Hackman could have been my father if Grandpa had married her. That means I’d have ended up in Hollywood kissing starlets, which would have cost me my job as a Quaker pastor and gotten me in trouble with my wife. So I guess it all worked out for the best.

  I don’t know if Jesus ever attended a family reunion. The Bible mentions that he once went to a wedding. His mother was there, too, so it was probably a family affair. They ran out of drinks halfway through the reception, so Jesus took some water and turned it into wine. Except in the Baptist Bible, where he turned it into grape juice.

  Jesus said some confusing things about family life. On the one hand, he told us to love one another. But another time, at least according to Luke, Jesus said no one could be his disciple unless he hated his family. Perhaps that was Jesus’ way of saying that we’re to put him before everyone else. Or maybe he had just heard his third cousin play “Dueling Banjos” with his armpit and he meant it literally.

  Who knows what Jesus meant by that? I do know this, though. The more I work on loving Jesus, the easier it becomes to love my family. Maybe it’s really a matter of putting first things first. When we love the way of Jesus first, we’re then sufficiently equipped to love our families. Even third cousins with talent galore.

  Confessions

  I grew up Roman Catholic at Saint Mary’s Church in Danville. Father McLaughlin was the first pastor I remember. He was hard of hearing, so when we confessed our sins, we had to shout them out loud for the good father to hear. It was in this way that I was introduced to human depravity—sitting in the back pew overhearing admissions of sin and vice.

  My first confession took place when I was seven years old. I couldn’t think of anything to confess, ignorance of personal sin and shortcoming being one of my youthful peculiarities. Not wanting to disappoint Father McLaughlin, who seemed so eager to confer forgiveness, I made up sins to confess. The first week I confessed to calling my sister a dirty name, though I really hadn’t, for to have done so would have assured my slow and painful death. The next week I confessed to disobeying my parents, which again was absurd, for disobedience was simply not allowed in our home. By the third week, it occurred to me that I could truthfully confess to lying, and I went to confession pleased that I would finally know the exquisite pleasure of authentic sin confessed.

  Father McLaughlin listened to my admission of sin and assigned a penance: three
“Our Fathers”; three “Hail Marys”; then go to the person to whom I had lied, admit my untruth, and ask for forgiveness. The first two were easy, but since he was the one to whom I had lied, the third piece was a bit tricky. I wasn’t sure what the penalty was for lying to a priest, but I knew it had to be stiff. Would I have to go to the Pope’s office? I had seen the Pope’s picture hanging in our church, and he looked like a school principal, stern and forbidding. It was this dilemma that first turned my eyes toward the Quakers, a people in our town known for their tendency to go easy on spiritual renegades like myself.

  My record of confession did not improve when I became a Quaker and was gladdened to learn that public admission of sin was neither expected nor desired. Occasionally an evangelist would visit and describe his life of sin before he met the Lord. We Quakers would grow alarmed, thinking he might invite us to reciprocate. Sin was not something to be confessed, it was something to keep hidden. Why spend a lifetime building a reputation of virtue, only to shoot yourself in the foot with public confession?

  This is why I was so startled when a Quaker woman actually rose during our meeting for worship and confessed her sin. She admitted to all types of sordid activity and invited us to pray for her, which we did. Afterward, she appeared refreshed, her public confession a shower for her soul. The rest of us left worship weighed down, as if the tax of her sin were charged to us. This was our fault, not hers, since we were reluctant to let her sin sink in the sea of God’s forgetfulness. Instead we kept it afloat by thinking on it time and again. I yearned for my Catholic days when sin confessed was sin forgotten—and forgiven.