Author: Henry O. Arnold

I love a good fire and will use any excuse to build one. If the chimney in our house was not so old, we would have a “live” fire. As it is, we put in gas logs, so we get the flame and the heat, but not the snap, crackle, and pop of incinerating logs. The one consolation is that the hearth is open, and flame and heat are not trapped inside “the abomination of an air-tight stove.” Nathaniel Hawthorne’s words, not mine, expressed in his essay “The Old Manse” written in 1842. It seemed that the modern technology of the day dealt a crushing blow to old Nat’s inner peace and spurred a gloomier vision of the future. “I never shall be reconciled to this enormity. Truly may it be said that the world looks darker for it. In one way or another, here and there, and all around us, the inventions of mankind are fast blotting the picturesque, the poetic, and the beautiful, out of human life.” However his aversion to modern amenities, such technological advances did not prevent him from installing three of these “abominations” in his home in Concord. No doubt at the behest of his wife. For every generation there are those who point the bony finger of judgment on many things that might bring about our ruin: air-conditioning, space travel (when we landed on the moon in 1969 my great grandfather said, “If the Lord wanted us to travel to the moon, he’d a put stairs up there.”), television, comic books, social media, and oh my, Tik Tok. Has your brain dissolved into a puddle of slime at these potential hazards to society? Then there was/is the novel which has caused fear and trembling among civilizations. Thomas Jefferson was alarmed by what the reading of novels might do to impressionable minds. In a letter dated March 14, 1818, he stated, “A great obstacle to good education is the inordinate passion prevalent for novels…when this poison infects the mind, it destroys its tone and revolts it against wholesome reading.” I guess if you wrote the Declaration of Independence you are entitled to have an opinion about the modern novel of his day as “this mass of trash.” I wonder if our third president had lived long enough to read Nathaniel Hawthrone’s romance novels might he have had a different opinion? Still, President Jefferson did read Shakespeare and regularly attend the theatre. He wasn’t a complete wastrel with his leisure time. I like reading a good novel. I’ve written a few myself. Whiling away the clock with a novel can be a worthy investment of time and treasure. Much better than doomscrolling. Having your imagination carried along by an author’s story, one sentence at a time, can be a pleasant experience quietening the noise of everyday life. We owe ourselves those tranquil moments and imaginary flights that only good stories provide us.

Back in the day when Kay and I and our girls spent time in La La Land so I could chase the Hollywood dream, many times after a failed audition, my agent said I didn’t get the part because “I had no marquee value,” i.e., no one would buy a ticket to this movie because I was in it. It wasn’t like I was auditioning for the lead. Most of the time it was for “Man behind the counter,” no “marquee value” required. I believe it was my agent’s way of saying my audition sucked. After three years of giving it my best shot, we returned home, my tail tucked between my legs. When I started writing novels and shopping them to potential agents and publishers I was given a similar message, “We loved your novel, but you have no platform,” i.e., no marquee value. “Get a website,” they advised. “Write a newsletter, start a podcast, build a presence on social media. You need to create visibility.” Maybe it was the publisher’s way of saying my novel sucked. Tom Peters, co-author of “In Search of Excellence,” wrote an essay in 1997 in which he coined the phrase “personal branding.” “We are the CEO’s of our own companies: Me Inc.” If I was to have any chance of advancing my writing and acting endeavors, then I had to shape my world into my own branded image. This was disheartening, but I jumped in deep and signed up for many of the social media outlets, feeding the insatiable appetite of these platforms with content, all of which felt vain, hollow, and precarious. It reminded me of Jesus’ words, “So what if you gain the world and lose your soul?” Our world is a “Me” world propelled by the twin motivators ambition and anxiety. Ambition and anxiety could become the new AA society: “Hi, I’m Henry, and I am my own brand.” The world is more individualistic and competitive. If we have the right work ethic, we are deluded into believing we are self-made. And for many in our culture, we falsely assume there is a spiritual component to this way of thinking which adds more justification to our cult of me. We become hamsters on the wheel running ever faster to keep the platform of me from crumbling beneath us. If you are reading this Conversation, then you got drawn into the vortex of me. Sorry about that. I am as much a participant in that world as I am a critic of it. Work is a good thing. Work that satisfies the soul while enhancing the world around us is the best thing. Life is fleeting. My collection of birthdays is a constant reminder of that reality. We are created to serve one another, not a self-serving, rugged individualism philosophy. One is outwardly focused. The other is isolationist. One flourishes. The other dies on the vine.

I’m staring at one right now before I begin typing the words you are reading…a blank page. Whatever the medium, all artists stare into the shadowy starting point of creation. Self-doubt and the feeling of inadequacy arise as you await the spark. I would love to know what might have gone through God’s imagination while hovering over the deep pondering what was about to happen. In the liberty of eternity, time was not a factor, so God’s hovering and ultimate creativity was infinite. Ex nihilo is Latin for “out of nothing came something.” Once God finished hovering creation began with the beautiful and mysterious spoken words “let there be,” and as creation came into being, was finished with “…and there was.” This little planet was the original blank page awaiting descriptive language, the first empty canvas awaiting paint, the first music score awaiting notes, the first lump of clay awaiting form and symmetry, the first static dance awaiting fluid motion. All works of art are built on the sublime principal of “let there be...and there was.” In Scripture it states that we are God’s “workmanship.” The original Greek is poiema, from which we derive the word “poem.” While I may be a “work of art” created in the image of God, so I, like God, desire to create something unique and original, but unlike God, I am a jumble of insecurities and full of self-doubt. My soul is like the opaque, boisterous waters of pre-creation. I want to create something sublimely original, but my conflicting emotions and thoughts often fizzle the creative spark. I am sabotaged by my ego. It is why I wish to imagine, without sacrilege, God hovering over me as I begin a creative work. That image brings calm to my heart and a creative flow is possible. Perhaps then every act of creation is just creating on top of the original “let there be…and there was.” Perhaps there is no such thing as a blank page, an empty canvass, a vacant score. Ever since God’s hovering turned into acts of creation a whole repertoire of creative expression has flourished that informs my blank page before I write the first word, yea verily, before I have my first creative impulse to tell a story. While every creative act emerges in its own right bearing the image of its creator, no matter how flawed the creator or the creation, we artists build on what was created before us heightening the mystery of all acts of creativity.

When we last left our terrified hero I was dreading the inevitable return to our gas station and the maniac that awaited us behind the bay doors. The fateful day arrived, but thank God, the bay doors were closed when we pulled beside the pumping island. A kid’s curiosity got the best of me and I climbed into the back seat, rolled down the window and stuck my body halfway outside. I wouldn’t venture out of the car. I wasn’t that daring. The other-worldly sounds behind the closed bay doors upped my fear: pounding hammer blows, rattling metal, loud gusts of pressurized air, revved engines, and over-modulated human voices. The monster must be ripping off his iron chains readying an escape. Then the mechanical door began to rise on one of the service bays and out stepped an unrecognizable life form. Not the spiffy attendant with his crisp uniform and ready smile, but a creature dressed in ragged, grease-stained coveralls, hair disheveled, oily streaks across his face and arms, strange tools in his hands—scabby hands with busted, swollen knuckles—a liquid brown substance oozing from one side of his bulging mouth, and bloodshot eyes that bore holes straight through me. My blood froze at the sight of this modern-day Gadarene Demoniac. Where was Jesus when you needed him? After this, I began to notice “Maniac on Duty” signs at nearly every service station we drove by. The world was filled with “The Walking Dead” before there ever was “The Walking Dead.” Whenever we pulled into a station advertising their “Maniac,” I locked the doors and dropped to the floor board. When my parent’s asked for an explanation of my curious behavior, I pointed to the dreaded sign above the bay doors and asked, “There’s a maniac in there.” Once the different words were written out and definitions explained, my world was restored. While this particular linguistic puzzle was resolved, the misreading of signs, yea verily, the garbling all things literary, continued to be a problem. There was the humiliation of the first-round eliminations from grade-school Spelling Bees and the writing assignments returned with a fury of red ink scrawled over my papers by an aggravated teacher and long, hot summer schools. It wasn’t until my early twenty’s when we discovered my youngest brother was similarly cursed. The expert diagnosis was that we had dyslexia. All this time I thought I was “slow of mind and tongue.” It did not bode well for a duel vocation with a heavy emphasis on language. While there is no magic pill to unravel the wiring in my brain, my imagination was never imprisoned by my reversals of words and jumbled sentences. Who knew a “maniac on duty” would launch a career?

Back in the day when gas stations were service stations, when the attendants wore uniforms with caps and bow ties ambling out of their small office with a smile and a congenial greeting, you were confident you and your automobile were in good hands. If the employee was above average, he might even remember the names of the patrons. After inserting the nozzle into the tank and turning on the gas flow the pleasant associate would ask, “Check that oil for you, Mr. Arnold?” Soon there will be no one alive who will remember having been asked that question. Most service stations, ours included, had one or two service bays with mechanical doors that opened and closed automatically. Oh, the wonder as I watched the doors rise into the ceiling without human effort as if Ali Baba had spoken the magic, “Open Sesame.” Once the vehicle was inside the bay, the door would lower back to the ground concealing all the mysteries inside its asylum. Yes, asylum, for my nascent literary skills and my vivid imagination were not in sync with reality. When it came to developing an aptitude to identify letters, recognizing written vocabulary, and understanding how a succession of words created a meaningful sentence, I was easily stumped. On the outside wall above the bay doors of our service station was a sign that perplexed my innocent mind: “Mechanic On Duty.” I understood the second and third words, but the first word remained a mystery until I unscrambled the jumble of letters and settled on “maniac.” Still the meaning of the word eluded me. I needed clarity, so to the parents I did go. They were not curious as to how I came to inquire after such a unique word. The answer came with a Bible reference, our source for many of life’s complex questions. The story was “The Gadarene Demoniac.” My ear caught the rhyming association of maniac/demoniac and my imagination filled in the rest. In short, a demon-possessed man lived in a cave, howled night and day terrorizing the locals, tore apart the chains and irons used to subdue him, and was named “Legion,” meaning that inside this poor man lodged an overcrowded, devilish household. But good news…Jesus healed him. Now I knew all things; our service station had a resident demon-possessed man, but at least our service station was thoughtful enough to put up a warning sign. Fear and trembling struck my heart. The service station was unavoidable, and the next time we needed a fill-up, what would I find just inside those bay doors? (To be continued)

What worlds might be created from disturbed places? Our lives can easily crack apart, a surprise fissure in life can cut right into our well-constructed plans. Most of the time such an interruption is not pleasant. Disruption is rarely welcomed. From a child screaming on an airplane, to local natural disasters, to global upheavals, to getting the call from your doctor saying, “It’s cancer.” The Latin word ruderalis is where we get our modern word “rubble.” The ruderal plant grows in the disturbed areas, the waste ground, between the broken stone and rotting wood, even in the rubbish and refuse tossed out and forgotten. It does not require a trained botanist to spot life growing out of the waste places, an ecosystem disturbed and disrupted by man or nature. The gardener creates this marvel when she turns over the soil. We can spot the ruderal plant life in the fallow field and along the roadside. We humans do not like any “disturbance in the force” of our personal lives. We want control; no surprises and minimized the risks. The need to “be prepared” like the good Boy and Girl Scout is strong within us. However, if you have lived on the planet long enough, then you know life rarely cooperates with our well-made designs. With a quick pivot, we do all we can to escape life’s dangers. To avert disaster we keep to our safe routines: take those vitamins, say those prayers, mumble those mantras, do those good deeds to balance out the moral scales, but a fixed way of living makes the soul sluggish. It is deceptive to believe we can create a thriving life by recurring behaviors. By banal repetition we become the poorly created characters of our own stories, those characters who never change. When characters in a story fail to develop, the story collapses, it bores and quickly discarded. Self-protection, never taking those leaps of faith for fear of what such disruptions might ensue, will never offer the opportunities to discover the ruderal life that can spring up when our ridged routines become broken and disturbed. A ruderal disruption springing out of the darker moments of life’s unexpected events only deepens the wonderful mystery of who we are as created beings in God’s image and who we might become. When we begin to understand that these moments of turmoil to the ecosystem of our soul can be a gift, then the story of our life is more meaningful and our living example to those around us becomes a gift.

When we last left our heroes, terrorized by the sharp blast of the teacher’s whistle, Raymond and I were summoned before the judge and, in our case, the executioners. The teacher chose the firing squad as our punishment. She ordered us down to the lower level and stood us against the retaining wall. Then she scratched a jagged line in the snow with her rubber-booted foot and told all those who had suffered under our assault to assemble behind it. In her rush to judgment, she did not specify the real targets of our revenge, and consequently, more kids confessed to being victims than was the actual number. Mob mentality starts at an early age. The teacher announced that upon her whistle, the mob was free to rain down snowball vengeance. Surely she had seen too many movies with tin-pot dictators using such tactics to dispatch their enemies. While the kids dug their hands into the snow and began shaping the white powder into a small cannonballs, I was praying for a Russian bomb to fall from the sky. Raymond had a different idea. “We don’t have to take this,” he said, his face calm and smiling. If he was planning on running then his swiftness could outrun the velocity of any snowball. If Raymond’s blood cells failed to kick in, my only hope was to get caught up in his draft as I followed behind him. But this was not his course of action. “We’re fighting back.” Raymond did not ask for my opinion. We were blood brothers, and his call was my call. Fight back no matter the odds. Before the teacher blew her whistle, Raymond and I started scooping up snow, compressing the powder in our hands, and firing at will. We rushed our executioners like Newman and Redford at the end of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” I never felt more alive facing the bullies, the mob, and yes, the teacher. When Raymond and I mixed our blood I was not thinking about Civil Rights or unity of the races. MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech was still two years off. I just wanted to be fast like Raymond, and should science and biology be in my favor, Raymond’s DNA flowing into my veins would give me Mercury’s winged feet. It was not to be. Raymond Brown gave me more than an infusion of his precious blood. That day on the playground his true character stood for something, but more than that, he did not stand still. In the face of superior odds, he dashed forward braving the onslaught. Until that day, all my enemies were imaginary, played in childish games of battle. That day my foes were real and Raymond inspired my heart with courage. I followed him and I was proud to do so.

I have written about my childhood friend, Raymond Brown, in an earlier “Conversation” this year when we became friends and then blood-brothers while attending Fairview Elementary in Indiana. There is more to this friendship worthy of telling. Not only was Raymond good-humored but also possessed the natural ability to run like an Olympian sprinter. Coaches organized races during P.E., and even in competitions with upper classmates, several of whom picked on us regularly, Raymond would leave them all in the dust. Sometimes Raymond allowed the other competitors a head start just to make it interesting…for him. I distinctly remember his laughter as he blew by us with such ease as if he had a personal tailwind. I wanted to be fast like Raymond, and had hoped our blood exchange would miraculously increase my racing prowess, but it did not provide the desired effect. Our heavy-duty school desks were fashioned of wood and metal, and we were told by school officials, sturdy enough to withstand a nuclear blast. I guess that information was meant to bring comfort. We practiced scrambling under our desks in preparation for that moment when the big bad Russians would arrive to blow our house down. Raymond just laughed during our nuclear obliteration rehearsals. He had no intention of crawling under his desk if a bomb were fixed upon Fairview Elementary. With his speed, he could out run any blast wave. How could I argue? First “Raymond” lessons learned: 1) don’t believe everything the powers-that-be tell you, and 2) laugh in the face of death. The playground at Fairview Elementary had upper and lower levels separated by a rock retaining wall. On the upper level were the traditional swing sets, merry-go-rounds, and jungle-gyms. The lower level was an open area for organized games like baseball and capture-the-flag, and in winter when the ground was covered in snow, supervised snowball fights. Snowball fights were only allowed on the lower level, and it was against the rules to throw snowballs from the upper level onto those playing in the lower level. Among our contemporaries, Raymond and I had our social, cultural, and anthropological critics—he being Black and me with my foreign, southern accent—so when we happened to spy some of our school nemeses playing in the snow on the lower level, we seized the moment and rained down some snowball retribution on the bullies from our higher-ground advantage. The victims of our attack did not need to report the incident. A classroom teacher was an eyewitness, and when she blew an angry blast from her whistle, all the children on the playground froze as if the White Witch from Narnia had materialized. (To be continued)

One can find countless quotes on what it means to become a man from the humorous and profane to the solemn and profound. Part of what it must mean is the gradual reduction of rash choices and putting as much distance as possible between each one. St. Paul said it best, “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.” Transitioning from “childish” mode to “manhood” mode is not the simple flip of a switch. There is no magic age that awards one a frameable “Manhood Achievement” certificate. Drive a car at sixteen; vote and join the military at eighteen; legally smoke and drink at twenty-one; get an education, secure employment, and eventually find a mate. No milestone assures manhood. Too often young men idolize podcasters, billionaires, and celebrities hoping by emulation a masculine affirmation is found that they lack in themselves. Add the mix-messages from damaged familial influences, the current societal behaviors, squirrely politics, and faulty religion, all can contribute to a young man appearing like an oil portrait: visually attractive on the outside but bewildered and lost on the inside. My long slog to manhood resembles the character of Pilgrim in John Bunyan’s “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” Many foolish choices and wrong turns landed me in dark places with no sense of direction. I needed rescue, and as I look back on that phase in my life, I didn’t even recognize my need for rescue. My father did. I believe rescuing came so natural to him that he was not even aware when he activated the impulse. He would only articulate how he came by such an ingrained virtue of his soul as God-implanted. I was fortunate to have a godly father who loved me and held out his hands to grasp me. While it took some years to rescue me from the “slough of despond,” he never let go, and so began the painful molting of my childish ways into becoming a man. Until his death, Dad and I did so many creative things together: stage plays, audio recordings, film. He even directed two of my original plays premiering each one at Lipscomb University. I will never grow tired of hearing people say after seeing me perform, “You are so much like your Dad,” or “I saw Buddy up there tonight.” I hope I am like my dad in most respects. I hope they see “Buddy” on and off the stage. I know in the case of my father, I agree with Solomon who wrote in Proverbs 17:6 that “…the glory of sons is their fathers.”

When we last left our hero, the vehicle roaring up behind me turned out to be a tractor. The farmer came to a stop beside me. Not bothering to dismount or turn off the engine, he leaned over and spat a wad of tobacco chew onto the road in order to make room in his mouth to ask his one-word question, “Problems?” My speech muted for lack of breath, I shook my head, so he put the tractor in gear and eased on down the road. No inquiry of possible injury. No offer to help or to call anyone. I’m sure he thought this damn-fool bicyclist could sort this out. I was thrilled to be able to wiggle my toes and rotate my ankles. When I gently bounced my thighs and calves, hope sprung into my heart. I did not try to get up until the farmer turned into a field. If I was unable to walk, I did not want him to witness any more of my humiliation. I took a deep breath and rolled onto my knees, then slowly eased my way into a standing position. Being vertical was a success but taking those first few steps was a true victory. I gathered up the seat and the bike: the bolt that ran through the seat attaching to the metal rod had indeed snapped. So much for the claim of strength and durability of titanium metal. However, this catastrophe would have been averted had I had my hands on the handlebars. But no, I had to be the hot dog. “Where have you been?” Kay asked when I stumbled into the house. “We needed to leave for Whitland Avenue.” When I explained my delay, she gave me a skeptic’s squint, so I dropped my pants and bent over. And low, a great moon rose before her, and what to her wondering eyes should appear but the skid marks of tire tracks running through the center of my buttocks and the bright red abrasions on each cheek from bouncing along on the road like a skipping stone. Her reaction was a stuck record of “Oh my. Oh my. Oh my.” Pants down, I noticed my underwear looked as if it had been put through a shredder, but the material of my bike pants was completely unscathed. Oh, the miracle of synthetic fibers. My one hundred percent cotton whitie-tighties never had a chance. “Spandex, I’m available as your on-camera spokesman.” I continued to ride for several more years. You fall off a horse, even a two-wheeled, mechanical one, you get back on. But for weeks afterwards, when riding by the location of my ill-fated accident, the sphincter muscles would tighten, my legs would flinch, but my hands remained firmly on the handlebars. Yes, he can be taught. Of course, this incident has provided my dear wife the opportunity for me tell the tale over and over to new audiences. Whenever two or three are gathered together, I get the playful…