Audit ramblings

So, those of you who are aware know that wife and I have begun to transition ourselves out of full-time ministry. Right now, we volunteer with Beta and are beginning to groom our students to take the reigns of the community full-time.

Because part of the process included (or perhaps was induced by) the disembowelment of our finances, I scrambled to find work. Place after place rejected me outright (the graduate school thing scares people out of their minds, apparently), until I landed in a Hampton Inn here last fall. Younger, naive, hyper-idealistic, stupid Brent (feel free to select your preferred adjective) would have looked at this situation and screamed.

You see, I was raised with the notion that I am a child of promise, that I was destined to be somebody of note. Often the refrain would come from others, and I believed that God had some kind of special plan for my life. So when realistic Brent is doing laundry because the guy working the previous shift decided to camp out on his laptop and quite seriously do next to nothing, the internal squabble rages anew between “Why the [expletive] are you folding towels?!” and “Um…so I can help support my family, moron.”

The only reason you’re seeing this published at some point in the five o’clock hour is because I’m winding down my overnight shift. Wife doesn’t like it when I’m not in bed when she’s in bed. She says she can’t sleep well when I’m not there. I wish I could say the same, but, when it comes down to it, I prefer waking up at 3 AM because she decided to burrito herself and leave me with the corner of a sheet. We read to know we’re not alone; obviously we get married under similar pretenses. Turns out, I love my job. It doesn’t pay well, but I am insured; the hours aren’t that great but I was fortunate to find a job in a down climate; be trained by one of the best managers I’ve had; work under a great boss and great second-in-command and generally be surrounded by good people I enjoy calling colleagues, that is, if colleagues is kosher in the grey-collar hospitality sector.

As an added bonus, as I wrestled with this thought folding towels and muttering under my breath about the aforementioned chump who left me with three commercial-grade loads of towels to wash, dry and fold, this job has taught me much about leadership and humility, far more than I ever learned in Bible college, my internship in Tallahassee or in ministry on my own. I fundamentally and skeptical of leadership classes and gurus and have been for some time. During my time at the gulag, I was inundated with tripe from John Maxwell and his array of Cosby sweaters, and even then it made no sense: how can someone teach leadership, when what they do, in essence, is create a market that needs guidance? Hence, John Maxwell is full of crap. You don’t teach leaders in some macro-economic model, you create acolytes, followers.

And followers there are a-plenty in the church world. It bothered me so much that I ended up walking away from church life and developing a personal philosophy of ministry that emphasized people over process, even if it means person, as in, there aren’t enough people here to call them people. Working in a hotel, though, has only reinforced my initial notions of investing in people over fitting them into programs. We have regulars here, they’re miles from loved ones and home. I know more than a few of them by name, and over time, they’ve opened up a little; not too much, but enough to let you know that they’re glad for a friendly face.

I never liked airports for the simple fact that I would see so many people that I would never see again. Each person had a story, loved ones, homes, lives and we were all penned into this stale government-controlled holding bay, waiting for a flight to take us back to a context. Hotel life really isn’t that different, but being on this end of it, I want to share in that person’s story, even if it’s a check-in or getting them a bottle of water. I’m not interested in proselytizing, most people here didn’t even know what I did before I donned the business casual garb. I just want to be helpful.

Not too long ago, I wrote about divine calling and how I don’t exactly believe in full-time vocational ministry anymore. Perhaps there are those out there who look at my situation now and say that I was never supposed to be in ministry in the first place. Perhaps others who think I’ve put my tail between my legs and slunk away from the scene. And to both of you I would gladly extend both middle fingers, because you would both be insulting and wrong. That child of promise stuff may well still be valid, but I guarantee you it won’t be in the way you think it will come to pass. Primarily because it’s not how I thought it would come to pass, and even more obviously because that’s not how God works in the least. And I’m still alive, though there are those who would rather that I weren’t, particularly those who were more than delighted to join in on slapping me on the disavowed list. Just saying.

But hey, I could be bitter, but why? I have been well taken care of, though it hasn’t always felt like a down comforter or a cold drink on a hot day. I have a wife who loves me, a job that, though is tedious at times, I find rewarding, our finances are stable (mostly) and I’m going to school to pursue my education and work toward long-term goals: teaching, investing in students, continuing to challenge convention and fight for truth and justice in the Christian world. Because once I have my Ph.D., I can start writing books and hosting seminars and creating a niche market only I can satisfy. And then you will have to listen to me…and put up with my God-awful sweater collection.

Hotel theology, Gideons notwithstanding. Who knew?

And I’m back!

So I went on the high-anus again.

As soon as Thanksgiving hit, my world went haywire and didn’t come back to any semblance of reality until, um, now? And even then, not really. I caught the nuclear flu one day into our trip to Missouri for Christmas, was knocked out for three days, two recovery days and then home, only to pick up a nuclear cold bug one day into being home, making my voice virtually inoperable for four days, and have now spent the past three days in drain mode, which means hacking up disgustingness from my lungs and feeling like my ears had a bowl of Rice Krispies dumped in them.

This was originally going to be my inaugural sailerb post, but I never got around to it; with the recent news that the Paramount in Grafton closed its doors, I decided to give it another go. Here goes.

In recent years, I have fallen in love with the blues. Early, crusty, pre-war blues up to Buddy Guy and some of those other 60s bluesmasters not named BB King. So when I finally got around to Son House, and discovered that he (amongst others) had recorded in Grafton, Wisconsin (!), it became a mild hajj of sorts to get down to the land of Oz to see the site and see what’s left.

[Naturally, I was about 10-12 years too late. Or 70.]

So, with friend and soon-to-be-wedlocked friend Andy as co-pilot, we set out for Grafton last fall. After doing some brief prep and research courtesy the online presences of the Grafton Blues Association and Alex van der Tuuk’s paramountshome.org, I figured the burg would be a little nexus of blues history. After all, that’s how it was played up. Surely they would not be lying!

Aside from a small, easily ignored revitalization of its downtown and the addition of some blue notes on their lamp-post banners, Grafton has done next to nothing to honor a rich, unexpected heritage of some of the most important and influential artists of the 20th Century. It seems like no one in the town really cares.

So we went to an antique shop near the revitalization, and aside from having a rack of blues CDs (we ended up feasting on that), it seemed a lot like your garden variety Wisconsin antique shop. Not that we were expecting ot find a trove of Paramount 78s or anything (most of those, according to urban legend, were snatched up in the early 90s, found in an abandoned warehouse, became target practice in Port Washington or dumped into the Milwaukee River), but what we found was a town quickly morphing into suburbia (as the land of Oz has rapidly become, particularly Cedarburg and Grafton) from being a sleepy-eyed river town that the railroads forgot then the interstate remembered.

Then we went in search of the Wisconsin Chair Factory site, the hallowed ground where blues men and women recorded some of the earliest mass production blues records in America. What we found (by accident), was a plaque at the corner of a road and a bridge over the Milwaukee, a concrete foundation and some old bricks. The area had become a neighborhood in the 70s (the factory itself, which spanned the river, had burned much earlier), and one property’s boundary quite literally met the brick and mortar.

Such is how history is forgotten.

I recently read of a dispute in Virginia between Civil War battlefield preservationists and Wal-Mart, which wanted to drop a new store a mile or so from the site. To be fair, most of the war was fought in Virginia, most of her soil has Union and Confederate blood in her sediment. If we were to preserve history, we would probably still be in thatched huts in a still-barbarian Europe, dying from the plague and speaking in unknown tongues without the utterance or enabling of spirit. Naturally, there’s a tug-of-war between the preservation of history and the inevitability of progress. The Muslim stewards of the Temple Mount are allegedly busy destroying relics of ancient Israel, peasants in Egypt burned much of what we know as the Nag Hammadi library papyri to keep warm at night. Ebbets Field was blown up to make way for government housing. The Met Center was blown up to expand the drab Mall of America; when those plans were scrapped, it became the site of an Ikea. (And Norm Green still sucks.) When my grandmother died almost three years ago, it wasn’t long after she was put in the ground that her lifetime of obsessive hoarding began to make its way to the curb. What is made is to be unmade, what is created ends up destroyed. Whomever is born is doomed to die.

And the Wisconsin Chair Factory is–in quintessentially Midwestern fashion, a cultural relic from a pragmatic, pioneer past–a retaining wall for some yuppie’s waterfront property.

Heritage has a strange, Darwinian way about it.

So we set out to spend a day in Wisconsin’s unlikely capital for the blues. What we got was about two hours’ worth of actual time exploring. The Grafton Public Library had nothing, not even the walking tour material touted on van der Tuuk’s website. And the restaurant conceived in a brief fad of music appreciation, Paramount, didn’t open until 5 PM. When we went in to see a menu, they looked at us like we were crazy. That, and the joint didn’t even resemble a blues-inspired haunt, save for an old phonograph player and, yes, a handful of Paramount 78s. It was high-brow, upscale, more jazz lounge than juke joint. They opened a restaurant trying to honor the blues, and had no idea how to pull it off. The hours on the door said they were open all day, and did not actually open until the evening.

So, when the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel’s dining blog reported that Paramount had shut its doors for good, I nodded to myself and accepted it. They said they fell prey to the economy. In reality, they serve as a metaphor for a community without a sense of temporal, spatial or historical place. People live there when they don’t commute into Milwaukee or head north to a family cabin for the weekend. Strangers who wander a little too far from the interstate get looks from the locals. After all, there is nothing to see here.

One gets the feeling that blues folk 70+ years ago could identify all too well.