Category Archives: Stories – From Life & Elsewhere

Friends Music Camp Stories #3: The Voice of God

I haven’t always been a flop at dancing. A few years later I learned to do the Twist pretty well; girls liked that. But that future achievement was no help in 1958.  Even today, the bop remains a total mystery to me; I can’t even fake it decently. In fact, I sometimes imagine facing a solemn-faced judge, looking down from the bench, banging his gavel and declaring, “The defendant, Mr. Fager, having been found guilty, has a choice for his sentence: he must do the bop, right here and now, or face the firing squad.”

And in that nightmare scenario, I’d have to reply, “Your honor, may I have a last cigarette and that blindfold?” (And I hate smoking. But at least I know how.)

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Camp stories – 2018: One: “Talking With The Trees”

But there was more to see in these trees on Bert’s farm than the fiery palette of the maples. Bert took us on a tour past his barn, down a path through a copse of these trees, beneath which the ground was crowded with seedlings and saplings, still green and fluttering in the morning breeze. The path led us to his large woodlot, in which tall pines stood in rows.

There we stopped, and Bert invited us to contemplate the two scenes we now confronted. On one side were the native trees, especially the maples, huddling together at random. But really, Bert explained, if we could only see the world from their perspective, we’d know the air of vivid autumn exuberance was an illusion; in fact, they were all caught up in a desperate struggle: each tree was stretching for the sky, competing with all the rest to take in enough sunlight to make its food to get through the coming long, cold winter.

This was not a friendly contest, but life or death, all against all. And below, the riot of green around our feet was even more deceptive: among the slim saplings and winsomely tiny seedlings, almost all, he told us, were certainly doomed. They would be crowded out by others, with the bigger trunks and branches blocking access to direct sun. At night, deer and other animals would chew up the tender shoots

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A Hospice for Hope: Another Quaker Holiday Story

“This place always gives me the creeps, ” she told her sister. Allyson was sitting safe at home in Cincinnati, more than a thousand miles away.

“Why?” Asked Allyson. “Because it’s full of dying people?”

“Maybe partly,” Lexie said, “but I think it’s more the way they kinda package the whole thing here, like everybody’s getting ready for a birthday party. I mean–

A woman’s voice interrupted. “Can you help me?” It sounded weak, but piercing. “Can you help me?” Again.

Lexie slowed and glanced to her right. In a lounge doorway a woman sat in a wheelchair. Her hair was tousled, her hands outstretched, reaching toward Lexie.

“I, uh — I” Lexie started, then noticed that the woman’s gaze was fixed somewhere behind her, and her eyes seemed unfocused. The image came to Lexie of someone caught in a swirling river at floodtide, about to be swept away.

Lexie swayed uncertainly. Both her hands were full. She heard Allyson saying, distantly, “Are you there?” as if the call had dropped, which it often did. And looking closer, she saw the woman was strapped into the chair, with what looked like a seat belt.

Lexie thought, I bet she’s from the Memory Unit at the other end, and she was parked here while the attendant is outside smoking. She probably doesn’t remember how to unbuckle the belt.

The woman repeated her call, “Can you help me?” and Lexie snapped back to her own reality. “Sorry,” she told the woman, and started walking again. “I’m here,” she said into the phone. “Just got derailed for a minute.”

Lexie was headed for the second last room in the long hallway. Each door she passed had someone’s last name in block black letters on a card in a slot, and she knew most of them by now: Callahan, Bradley, Washington–

— No. Washington’s slot was now empty. Washington — Lexie didn’t know if it was he or she — was dead.

“Looks like another one bit the dust,” she told Allyson.

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Cultural Appropriation: the Sad Case of AFSC

In this issue, forty years of observation, research and writing on AFSC is compiled and summarized. The thesis drawn from this compilation is that it is theology – or whatever is behind that term — which makes Quakerism real, and this difficult-to-pin-down “quotidian” (aka, real Quakerism’s everyday community and spiritual life) is what animates Quaker witness and service; and that without it, the service is fatally compromised..
Further, that AFSC, in cutting loose from the RSOF, in all its messy “quotidian” (yet through which somehow the Spirit seems to work; after all, it birthed AFSC) has undermined the most precious aspect of its brand: its authenticity. Marketing experts agree that without that, a brand is like a cut flower, the roots severed. You can put the stems in a vase, change the water & add Floralife, but the blossoms are still mortally wounded, and will eventually wither or stiffen, fade and crumble.

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