Graduation

There's a Bruce Springsteen lyric I can't get out of my head, from his song "Atlantic City:"

“Everything dies baby that's a fact
But everything that dies maybe some day comes back...”

So yesterday was graduation and, in spite of the head of security "Jeffrey" trying to ruin the event--see the man is in over his head; he hates programs that benefit the men, he hates the inmates, he especially hates inmates getting an education--graduation was emotional and wonderful. My man-child friend "Moose" delivered his graduation speech flawlessly. Over and over he would look at the audience and say "believe" and the crowd, about 100 visitors there to see their sons and fathers and brothers earn degrees or certificates began to clap and join in a rhythmic sound of joy--as Moose told his story, the story of getting a college degree while behind bars. And he thanked me and told me I inspired him. Funny, no one in my life ever said I was an inspiration. No one claimed I gave them hope or faith or belief. And yet in here, I play that role. In here, I am father figure to dozens of these young college men who fight the odds and overcome.

The President Emeritus of the college spoke eloquently about the need for college inside a prison--he said, that's what it is, a prison. It's not a correctional center, it's a prison and they try and break you and kill your hope and your dreams. "Don't let them," he urged.

Joy. What a lovely word. We have a literature professor by the name of "Joy." She brought her husband to our graduation yesterday and she marched in the procession. The men, they remember. They remember that in the last British lit class Joy told us, "I pray for each of you by name each night." Joy prays for us. These men don't forget; they know that for the dozens of "Jeffreys" who rely on this place for a living, who see only the worst, there is “Joy” whose prayers are stronger than any negativity from a thousand.

What does school mean to these men? It means everything. It means pride and hope and belief. It means you can overcome the felony conviction. You can leave here and succeed.

They cut visit short yesterday after the ceremony--just another in the "security" measures these people apply to remind you none of us matter. But there's "Joy" who keeps us in her prayers.

Bruce’s lyric goes through my mind. Everything maybe someday comes back. "Atlantic City" is one of those sad, soulful ballads I just love which tear at my conscience; and it reminds me there is always hope.

Graduation--I wrote Moose's speech. I wanted these young men to know that there is life after this. I needed to remind myself of that.

I read a story recently where an American missionary in India was talking to an elderly village elder. "I feel sorry for you Americans," the elderly man said. "You have so much, you forget you need God."
Prison reminds you of your need; and Joy, she reminds us that we can overcome.

"Everything dies baby that's a fact"; marriage, relationships, jobs, even sometimes freedom.
"But everything that dies someday maybe comes back." That was my message in the graduation speech; and the best part of it was, after hearing Moose, after seeing the guys and their families and the folks from the college, I believe it. Believe--God that is a great word, a word that can overcome even all this.

Time

Two college guys getting ready to leave. Every week one of the remaining IT guys packs up; it’s been like that all year. We’re down to the last five; five guys all finishing their last few days, or weeks, in here; guys finishing their time. Time. What is it? In here, it’s a whole lot … and it’s nothing.

“Seen a man standin over a dead dog lyin by the highway in a ditch. He’s lookin down kinda puzzled pokin that dog with a stick. Got his car door flung open he’s standin out on Highway 3. Like if he stood there long enough that dog get up and run. Struck me kinda funny seem kinda funny sir to me. At the end of every hard earned day people find some reason to believe.”

Bruce understands time. Guy’s looking at his dog, thinking he’ll just jump up and go. But he won’t. The time is gone. Time, “a system of measuring duration.” In here, time is everything … and nothing. 

My friend DC has been locked up for forty-two years, let me write that again: 42. 1972 he was arrested and convicted of armed robbery within weeks of the Olympic boxing trials. Nineteen years old and the world waiting to see him in the ring. It didn’t start out as forty-two, the court gave him twelve. Back then you earned 30 for 30; twelve was a max of six. At four, DC made parole, everybody made parole. The weekend before his release there was payback and dead convicts. DC was in solitary facing death or life behind bars … and time moved on.

Mikey, the middle class white kid and so damn smart for fifteen. He stabs a neighbor kid to death and at fifteen he escapes capital murder for a first-degree plea. “Do 25 on 50.” Fifteen years old, what do you know about how long twenty-five years is? Now, he’s 36 and he’s spent more time behind bars than outside. “Under four,” he said a few weeks ago.

You hear years thrown around with almost hushed reverence: 25, 20, 15, 8, 6. On and on time goes. Six years; six years since my arrest. What is it? Divorce; longing; guilt; redemption. There were missed graduations, birthdays, weddings. Tears shed; smiles of nostalgia. “Time heals all wounds,” bullshit. “Time waits for no one,” true. “Time is what you make of it,” thank God!

Years are handed down arbitrarily as though in some mystical calculus this precise number of years, this time, adequately punishes. How many years, how much time is a life worth? How many years equals $2 million? I don’t know the answer. But, I know time doesn’t serve anyone well as a punishment. I asked Mikey one day if he thought his victim’s family has had their pain lessened any by him being in here 21 years. “I don’t think so,” was all he could say.

There was a time during this six years when I thought this time – so arbitrary, so long – was meant to kill me, to break me and leave me with nothing. And then, miraculously, I came to understand time is in His hands. It was no longer a sentence but an opportunity. And my friend DC? “I’m a better man now than I was back then,” he told me. I believe him.

Time wears men down in here. Even short runs – two or three year bits – break men. Life outside moves on and if you dwell on it, it’ll destroy you. Maybe, just maybe that’s where the punishment comes in. One day or ten, if you dwell on the time and thieving nature of it you will succumb. So, you look beyond the years, you look to the future, to life. You look, you hope, you live. Even in here, you live.

Guys prepare to leave. They get quiet; they stay to themselves; they run through all the “what-ifs” – what if I can’t make it out there? But the time comes and they go.

I don’t know how much time a crime is worth. In my former life I thought I knew it all. Now, I have more questions than answers. Like the “Hamburglar” he leaves tomorrow. Eleven years for sexually assaulting a little girl. Has eleven years “cleansed him,” made him realize his sexual proclivities are twisted? I don’t think so. He’s returning to his mother’s home convinced he is the victim. Has eleven years made the neighbors forget what happened? Time has changed nothing, and that is the cruel truth when we rely on time; it has no feeling, no emotion, it just is. 

“Lord won’t you tell us tell us what it means

So at the end of every hard-earned day people 

find some reason to believe.”

Time moves on. New guys show up; old guys go home. People’s lives move on; nothing stays static. You can drift through life – inside or outside – or you can find the reason you’re where you are at that moment. Time is nothing but a measurement. Life is so much more than time. And maybe, just maybe that’s what I needed to learn to begin again. Forty-two years or forty-two days, time is what you do with it.

The Day the Music Would Die …

Backstory:  It’s the winter of 1977, just between Thanksgiving and Christmas. I’m home from my first semester at college. There’s a benefit concert over in the chapel at Vassar College which is less than five miles from my home. Ah, Vassar College. Recently (in ’77), made coeducational, most of the women dreamed of being the next Gloria Steinman or Betty Friedan. The guys who chose to attend Vassar in those early years were way too artsy and sexually ambiguous for college girls, even Vassar girls, so picking them up was as easy as shooting ducks in a barrel. All you had to do was mention Joan Baez or Judy Collins, be pro-ERA and abortion and you were in. We loved going to Vassar.
           
There’s a benefit for some cause and Don McLean and Harry Chapin were playing; each a solo, acoustic act; each with a few hits already. Chapin wrote and sang the soulful ballad of a father looking back on not being there for his son in “Cats in the Cradle,” and “Taxi.” But, it was Don McLean we were going to see. He had a beautiful ballad about Vincent Van Gough that I found myself humming as I ran on those fall college days:

                        “Starry Starry night

                        picture palate blues and greys
                        look out on a summer’s day
                        with eyes to dark to see …”

It was McLean’s other song, his ten to fifteen minute FM dirge about the death of Buddy Holly that we all wanted to hear and sing along to. We were all young and brash, too brash really. We were middle class kids whose fathers all worked for IBM. We were all in college and had the world waiting on us. We knew nothing of war, disease, or distress. We had all the answers. Problem was, we knew none of the questions. There we were listening to a guy not much older than us tell us about dreams dying:

“A long, long time ago

                         I can still remember how that music used to
                         make me smile.
                        And I knew if I had the chance
                        That I could make those people dance
                        And maybe they’d be happy for awhile
                       
                        But February made me shiver
                       With every paper I delivered
                       Bad news on the doorstep
                       I couldn’t take one more step
           
                       I can’t remember if I cried
                      When I read about his widowed bride
                      But something touched me deep inside
                     The day the music would die …”

And we sang “American Pie” and we thought we knew everything he was talking about. And you know what? We didn’t have a clue …

Fast forward to the present.  It’s Thanksgiving, my sixth one behind bars. I listen to a lot of old music. No offense to “artists” today, but music is all over-commercialized, over-dubbed, and recorded. You want music that matters; you turn to Dylan, the Dead, the Allman Brothers, and Bob Marley. Hell, I sit around now wearing out a Jimmy Buffet compilation and the guys look at me like I’m listening to big band swing music (check that, they don’t know what the big band era was and “swing” music gets a glazed over stare). Still, they gather around me for lyrical pearls of wisdom.

I keep a three ring binder full of song lyrics, close to one hundred and fifty songs. I use lyrics daily; like trying to explain poetry to guys in the creative writing class, I pull out the Beatles’ “Let it Be” –
           
           “When I find myself in times of trouble
            Mother Mary comes to me
            Speaking words of wisdom
            Let it be.

And in my hour of darkness

            She is standing right in front of me
            Speaking words of wisdom
            Let it be.”

I don’t know what Lennon and McCartney had in mind when they wrote that, I just know as I read the words guys who never heard that haunting piano accompany Paul nodded and said, “he’s talking about peace, and patience, and mercy.”

The music. There are a thousand lines that remind me of her, of us. “Time in a Bottle,” sung at our wedding; dancing on our deck as I whispered “Tupelo Honey,” in her ear. There’s holding both our sons mere seconds after they entered the world and quietly singing “Forever Young” as if with those words I was armoring them for adulthood. Funny, but I can’t watch “Parenthood” on TV because they use “Forever Young” as their opening music.

It was the music, the lyrics that kept me going so many times in here. I don’t know how many nights I wondered, “can I get through this?” and a song would come to me. I couldn’t shake Springsteen’s “Reason to Believe” when I doubted my God, my hope, and my faith:

“Lord won’t you tell us tell us what does it mean

            So at the end of every hard earned day people
            Find some reason to believe …”

When I’d try and find it again it was Seger and “Running Against the Wind,” and Marley’s “Redemption Song” and “No Woman No Cry” that helped me click the laps off and find my balance.

Music. I talk music daily with Saleem and DC (old Motown stuff like Wilson Pickett and James Brown; the Supremes, Marvin Gaye), and Craig and Omar (the 70’s and 80’s before disco and rap and techno and syrupy pop sung by Barbie wanna-bes). It was during one of those conversations when a buddy said he couldn’t make it and reach his dreams outside. I looked at him and just hit him with Springsteen’s “Atlantic City” –

            “Well everything dies baby that’s a fact
            But everything that dies some day comes back …”

He looked at me for the longest time and then said, “you’re saying I died in here, but I can get it all back?” “Something like that,” I replied and I watched him roll those words around in his head and find that glimmer of self-confidence and hope he needed to try and get clear of this place.

Sounds stupid, right? Until you remember how Scottish soldiers carried their dead king off the battlefield singing the Psalter “God Our Help in Ages Past,” or churches for centuries beginning Advent Season with “Come Thou Long Expected Jesus, Come to Set Thy People Free …”

Freedom. I tried to count all the references in the Bible to God freeing “the prisoners.” The captive, you see, are in God’s loving arms. The music frees the captive’s soul.

            And I keep thinking about Don McLean. He thought the music died:
            “And the three men I admired most
            The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost
            They caught the last train for the coast
            The day the music would die.”

The music didn’t die. It was always there, always with words giving meaning to the confusion that too often is our life. So the guys come around all the time and ask questions – I get bombarded with questions – and I try and give straight answers. Somehow, to make my point, to close the case, I hit them with a lyric. And a light goes off, and they get it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about music during this Thanksgiving season. I’ve learned a lot in here, and there are blessings even in difficulties. The music keeps playing and I keep going.

            “Well it’s all right, even if they say you’re wrong

            Well it’s all right, sometimes you gotta be strong
            Well it’s all right, as long as you got somewhere to lay
            Well it’s all right, every day is Judgment day”
            “Well it’s all right, even when push comes to shove
            Well it’s all right, if you got someone to love
            Well it’s all right, everything will work out fine
            Well it’s all right, we’re going to the end of the line”
            “Well it’s all right, even if you’re old and grey
            Well it’s all right, you still got something to say
            Well it’s all right, remember to live and let live
            Well it’s all right, the best you can do is forgive.”

I think the Traveling Wilburys had it right. 1977, Vassar College, and I heard that the music died. Thirty-six years later with failures and disappointments a mile high and I feel more hopeful. And, the music still lives; the words still give meaning even in here.

            “Yes my guard stood hard when abstract threats

            To noble to neglect
            Deceived me into thinking
            I had something to protect
            Good and bad, I define these terms
            Quite clear, no doubt somehow
            Ahh, but I was so much older then
            I’m younger than that now.”

                                                        Bob Dylan, “My Back Pages”

Atlantic City

“Well they killed the chicken man in Philly last night

            And the DA can’t get no relief …”

            

So begins Bruce Springsteen’s soulful acoustic ballad “Atlantic City.” I’ve been thinking about that song a good bit the last few weeks. It’s a song about a guy who has to do a favor for a friend. He knows the favor will cost him… probably with his life. The singer is on the wrong side of the law. And, like most ballads, there’s trouble coming. He knows it’ll cost him his life. Still he has to do what he has to do. Then, the refrain:

            “Everything dies baby that’s a fact

            But everything that dies someday comes back

            Put your make up on

            Fix your hair real pretty

            And meet me tonight in Atlantic City”

            

I can’t get Springsteen’s lyric out of my mind. “Everything dies.” It’s the message of Ecclesiastes and the Book of Lamentations in the Old Testament. Everything dies. Nothing survives. It all ends. And. As I recently read, “nothing dies pretty: reputation, marriage, dreams.” Springsteen’s protagonist begins as a realist. He knows the score. He has a job to do and it can’t be avoided. And there’s a cost to what he’s doing; a dear cost; a cost so great that as you listen you hope he won’t do the “favor;” he’ll choose the other way. “Everything dies baby that’s a fact.”

            

But, I can’t mouth that first line without the second. “But everything that dies someday comes back.” And, I can’t help thinking Springsteen’s telling me something. There’s a season to mourn, but that season will roll forward. Like the tide coming in and going out, everything dies, but everything someday comes back.

            

I’ve been thinking about that a lot – the dying and coming back part – as I watch lives go on around me in here and outside. It’s a recurrent theme in literature, which means in life as well. The most critically acclaimed show on TV right now is “Breaking Bad.” The premise is simple enough. A high school chemistry teacher faces the news he has cancer. From the outside, all looks well in his life. It isn’t, his marriage – like his health – is failing. So he makes a deal with the devil. He needs to make sure his family is provided for, needs to make sure his family survives. He begins manufacturing crystal meth. And, the money pours in. What does he do? He lies repeatedly to his wife to cover up his wrong doing.

            

Here’s the funny thing: audiences pull for him. You know what he’s doing is wrong. And, you know that crossing the ethical line, the line that keeps you doing what’s right even when no one’s watching, can’t be uncrossed. And, you know that one ethical lapse makes the next one easier. Walter White, the protagonist anti-hero of “Breaking Bad” survives his cancer; but the cancer of selling his soul, corrupting the man he is, eats away at him worse than the disease ever could. We watch and we pull for him; we hope he finds his way out because we know what the story writers already know: we are all capable of crossing the line.

           

 “Everything dies baby that’s a fact, but everything that dies someday comes back.” Walter’s life dies in many ways. His marriage survives – his wife becomes a partner in his business venture. She devises the lies to hide the money, to keep their friends and family from learning the truth. But, she betrays him in so many ways. And the security, the future, that Walter sought when he made his deal with the devil can’t exist with drug manufacturing, and drug gangs, and killing. He can’t stay in and he can’t get out.

           

 Most of the guys in here watch “Breaking Bad” because they understand the drug culture. They understand the tweaked out junkies, and the guns, and the wrecked lives. I watch it because of the disintegration and transformation of Walter. I watch because I know what Walter is dealing with.

            

Atlantic City. I spent dozens of nights in Atlantic City. We’d go every month or so with friends, three and four couples. There’d be suites, and concerts, and spa treatments and shopping for our wives. Dinners were with wine and sixty dollar glasses of scotch. There’d be five hundred dollar crap tables, and cohiba cigars. We were living a fantasy life. In the back of my mind I always said I’d quit. But how? That’s the dilemma.

            

So one night we’re in our suite and the full wall length windows show off the lights up and down the boardwalk. You can see the white tops of waves crashing into the shore. She senses something isn’t right. “Tell me what’s wrong,” she says. And for an ever so brief moment I consider telling her. It flashes through my mind. I want to tell her. I want to leave the country and buy a small beach bar in the Caribbean and read and run and live with my soul intact. “I love you,” I tell her. “I always have; I always will.” I explain I’m stressed out at work. We dress and go to a late dinner with our friends. Two months later I’m arrested. “I haven’t loved you for years,” she says. “Everything dies baby that’s a fact …”

            

The “Boss” sings his soulful refrain and you know it won’t end well for his anti-hero. The funny thing is, you hope it does. “Everything that dies some day comes back.” Springsteen knew dying is just part of living. And living goes on. There is a tomorrow. There will be a second act.

            

So “Miko-bones” – a new reader: remember prison in many ways is a state of mind. Focus on the future. It’ll be different, but there will be a future. Springsteen was right:

            “Everything dies baby that’s a fact

            But everything that dies some day comes back.”