Catching Fog

We’ve had problems with the alarm system at our church for a very long time and recently we finally got it back in working order. It brought to mind an odd incident from the past. About five years ago I purchased a philodendron for my office at the Quartz Hill School of Theology, which is a ministry of Quartz Hill Community Church. It was supposed to replace the plant that had died the previous summer when I was gone for a couple of weeks and I forgot to tell anyone to water it. The sudden motivation to purchase the philodendron came when I learned I would be interviewed by a local reporter about my book, The Bible’s Most Fascinating People, which had just been released. I decided a plant in that pot of dry dirt would look better than a handful of scraggly brown stalks.

The plant was healthy the day of the interview, though I did note that one of the leaves had fallen off and was lying on my desk. It seemed a perfectly healthy leaf but things happen. I picked it up and tossed it away.

The interview was on Tuesday. Thursday night, when I came in to teach class, I noticed a whole limb had fallen from the plant and was lying in the trash can next to my desk. Again, I thought that was a bit odd. But on Wednesday we have youth group. My office is in the church, whose facilities the School of Theology makes use of. So, I thought perhaps one of the teenagers, for whatever reason, had perhaps knocked a branch off.

Saturday, when I taught Hebrew, I saw a few other leaves off but simply tried not to think about it. Monday night, when I taught class, there were an enormous number of leaves missing. At that point I became convinced that it was my youngest daughter, who, for reasons known only to her, had perhaps gone wild with the plant and plucked leaves off of it. I even saw a pair of needle nosed pliers on my desk, taken from a drawer, and thought for sure that was the implement of my poor plant’s dismemberment.

But when I went to church the next Sunday morning, the plant was now only a shadow of its former self: a couple of branches and a handful of leaves. But my daughter had not been there to do anything: she had thrown up that morning and had not come to church since she was sick. And yet here my poor plant was nearly destroyed. Perhaps it was those inconsiderate teens from the youth group. Why would they do that to my plant?

Sunday night, I returned for our small group study. When I went into my office, I discovered my plant was now entirely gone: just roots. Every last branch, every last leaf had been plucked from it. On top of that, the wireless access point that had been sitting next to the plant had been knocked over. Very curious.

I carried the empty pot into the foyer and showed the few people there my now non-existent plant. “Who would do something like this?” I wondered.

“It looks like something that an animal might do,” suggested Kathy, our pianist, poking at one of the nubs barely visible in the dirt. Look, you can see chew marks.”

I looked. She was right.

“The squirrel!” I announced.

People in the foyer stared at me, not quite as if they believed I had lost my mind, since they’d known me for years and my oddness was something they’d grown accustomed to. More it was a look of, well, confirmation—as in, “ah, once again he demonstrates for us just how peculiar he is.”

But then I explained, reminding them of the then recent past. We had, over a period of about a month, suffered from the alarm system in the church going off repeatedly for no apparent reason. I would receive a call from the alarm company, tell them to shut off the racket, and then I would drive over to the church to see what was wrong. Every time, I would find the building secure: all the doors closed, windows closed and intact, and no evidence that anything was out of the ordinary. This happened two or three times a week and we simply could not figure out what was wrong. The alarm company had been unable to find anything amiss with the system.

Then, one Saturday afternoon when I arrived to teach a Hebrew class, I walked back to the library to set up the room for the students, and just as I reached the door, I saw two shiny black eyes staring at me from the middle of the carpet: they belonged to a squirrel. Startled, it stared at me, then flicked its tail, and scurried toward one of the book shelves. Recovering from my surprise, I walked into the room, at which point the beast scurried past me and darted down the hallway. I turned to follow, but when I looked down the hall it was nowhere to be seen.

So, the mystery of the random alarms was solved. And since we were unable to figure out how it was getting into the building, we began, after that point, to always set the alarm in such a way that the interior motion sensors were shut off. My discovery of a squirrel in the building had also explained a puzzling incident over the summer when we came into the church and found biscuits scattered all over the kitchen floor: someone had left a bag of them on the counter-top one Sunday and we found the mess when we arrived for Wednesday Prayer Meeting. Now it seemed probable that the squirrel was behind that dishevelment.

Remembering the squirrel had solved the new mystery of my slowly vanishing plant: apparently the bushy-tailed creature finds philodendrons tasty. Though given the number of leaves and branches that were just scattered about rather than consumed, perhaps the squirrel merely has a personal grudge against them.

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Jamaican Blue Mountain Coffee is a classification of coffee grown in the Blue Mountains on the island of Jamaica. It is a very mild coffee which lacks the bitter aftertaste one endures with most brews. The Blue Mountains of Jamaica are located between Kingston to the south and Port Maria to the north. Rising to 7500 feet, they are some of the highest mountains in the Caribbean. The climate of the region is cool and misty. It rains a lot. The soil is rich with excellent drainage. Nearly perfect conditions for growing coffee.

The Coffee Industry Regulation Act of Jamaica specifies what coffee may use the label Blue Mountain. Generally speaking, coffee harvested from the Jamaican parishes of Saint Andrew, Saint Thomas, Portland and Saint Mary may be called Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee if it is grown at elevations between 3,000 and 5,500 feet. Thus, there is only a very small amount of Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee in the world.

It is not a kind of coffee I drink very often. In fact, years–even decades–will pass before I imbibe.

And there is a very simple reason for my general estrangement from the best coffee I’ve ever drunk: given its rarity, it is incredibly expensive. It goes for anywhere between thirty and forty dollars per pound. Ouch! On the amount of money that I have to spend each month, the cheap store brand that sells for around a dollar or two a pound will be just fine, thank you very much.

When Lancaster experienced record low temperatures a few years ago, the pipes in our church building froze. This was not a good thing. When they finally thawed out, just as our morning worship service was about to start, we discovered that a pipe above the hallway outside one of the restrooms was leaking. We quickly shut off all the water to the building.

My task on the next Saturday morning was to repair that pipe. Or at least try. My motivation: that way we would have water in the building on Sunday morning—meaning that we would be able to make coffee. The cheap dollar a pound variety, of course. My church is not exactly flush with cash, either.

I had brought my tools for working with pipes with me when I arrived around ten in the morning: a butane torch, solder, flux, a jigsaw with a metal cutting blade, a hacksaw, and an extension cord. I met our pastor, Don Patterson and we got to work on trying to fix the problem. I got the ladder from the shed and then climbed into the attic where I could see two obvious holes in the copper.

So, we drove to Lowes and picked up a couple of clamps—metal clamshells with a rubber section that can be put over a leak in a pipe, then bolted shut. There were already five such clamps on that length of pipe, so this wasn’t the first time such a fix had been made up there. So I attached the two clamps we’d gotten and Don turned on the water. I immediately saw three smaller leaks I had missed before. He turned the water off.

Then we made another trip to Lowes, to get more clamps. Four of them. I used them all and found out about two more leaks left after we turned the water on again. Lowes had no clamps left, so we traveled to Home Depot. We found two there. I attached them. Don turned the water on. Still more leaks appeared.

Don went to a hardware store in Quartz Hill and found three clamps; however, only one of them was the right size. That left one unclamped leak. So we drove to two other hardware stores. No clamps in either place. All sold out. But we did find some epoxy stuff that was supposed to fix leaks.

I tried that. It didn’t work.

So what to do? I had two ¾ inch clamps which didn’t fit the ½ inch pipe. But, by folding some extra rubber strips, I managed to jury-rig one of the clamps and actually made it work.

Don turned the water back on. No more leaks! At last! I looked at my watch. It was 4:45 PM. All done. Well—except for making an unplanned repair to the ceiling in one of the classrooms. I had earlier slipped and plunged my knee through it. Thankfully I did not fall through the ceiling and land on the floor—although that would have made for a much funnier story.

Sunday morning before Sunday School, I learned that Don had told everyone about my fix-it job the day before. He had blabbed it from the pulpit during announcements at the first service and told everyone that they should bow before me in thanks. As I was making coffee in the kitchen, I commented to someone that my real reason for fixing the pipe had just been so I could drink coffee.

“Tell me,” said our music leader, “what’s your favorite kind of coffee.”

I admitted my fondness for Jamaican Blue Mountain.

“Then I’m going to go get you some.”

I warned him that it was very expensive, but he was not to be deterred.

Therefore, I was soon able to renew my acquaintance with the best coffee on the planet. A broken water pipe and a long day of volunteer work had turned out to be an unexpected blessing after all.

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In many respects, living with and caring for a mentally ill person is like living with any chronically ill individual. The condition does not change much from day to day, and they require constant attention.

Some chronically ill individuals are bedridden. Extra effort is required to ensure they take their prescribed medications. Some need help with even the most basic activities: bathing, feeding, brushing of teeth—even going to the bathroom.

A friend of mine was a live-in caregiver for a bedridden woman who was very old; when he first started working with her, she could get around with a walker. Soon, she became confined to a wheelchair, though she could move it herself. But as the years went by, she became increasingly immobile, while the other things she could do for herself became ever less.

Until the end, she was able to feed herself, but my friend became responsible for making sure she could get to the toilet, could get from her chair into her bed, and even to bathe.

For a few years, he was able to take her with him to baseball games—she was a big fan of the Dodgers—and to a few other events, such as weekly church services. But eventually, she could no longer go anywhere. By then, because of her condition, he could leave the apartment for only very limited periods of time. Occasionally he could get a day away—but only when he could get a substitute care worker to take his place. Otherwise, he was limited to brief trips to do the grocery shopping or the running of a few errands—and never for much more than an hour.

Other people with chronic illness merely need to be watched and sometimes directed; or given extra aid now and again: perhaps picking them up and taking them to weekly physical therapy sessions or other appointments, reminding them to take their medications, and checking to make sure they are eating properly.

My youngest daughter, a teenager, is now on an antipsychotic medication. She is not bedridden. She can visit friends, do occasional sleepovers with them, or have them come and stay with her overnight. This is an improvement on where she was two years ago. Then, she could not be left alone at all; in fact, it was hard to even go to sleep at night because of her tendency to sneak out of the house. In contrast to my friend’s elderly patient who steadily declined, my daughter’s condition has improved and continues an upward path. Her psychiatrist is pleased with her progress.

My daughter now sleeps through the night and no longer tries to sneak out or run away. But she really cannot take care of herself; and because of her emotional volatility—much better and less extreme than it used to be thanks to the medication—we still cannot leave her alone for more than two or three hours at a time. Sometimes she is stable and patient and clear thinking and all is well; other times she explodes in an extended rage over the most minor of inconveniences, such as misplacing her iPod or simply being asked to take an empty glass back to the kitchen. She is not always very good about distinguishing between fantasy and reality. She’ll start perseverating on a topic, making up scenarios and events that never occurred in her attempt to explain her situation or emotional state. She’ll invent memories of incidents that never occurred. She is quick to assume that a missing item has been stolen and to assume that those around her are purposely trying to make her miserable.

Thankfully she is no longer violent. Since being placed on her current medication she no longer breaks out windows or punches or kicks holes in the wall; she no longer hits me or kicks me or bites me. However she is periodically verbally abusive, prone to cursing, and prone to fits of raging and yelling. These verbally violent outbursts, with an occasional slammed door sometimes arise from no discernible outward cause. Her reactions are beyond anything a normal adolescent would experience; given that she has two older sisters, we well know how teenagers can be. How my youngest daughter behaves is something else altogether.

She cannot go to school because she cannot cope with the social interaction. She is incapable of distinguishing between a genuine friend and those who wish to exploit and harm her. She has no ability to properly judge character and tends to believe whatever someone tells her. Her anxiety in a normal classroom escalates to the point she cannot function. Therefore, she must be on independent study at home. She gets work from her high school each week, relies on me to help her, and then goes to the school only once a week to take tests.

Living with a mentally ill person is stressful and exhausting. It is rare that we get any break from it. Our hope is that the improvements we are continuing to see, and the ever longer periods of normal behavior, will continue as she matures, as she maintains her therapy and psychiatric treatment, and as the medications do their work. It is likely, however, that she will have to take these medications for the rest of her life, much as a diabetic is forever dependent upon insulin injections.

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