Pastor's Pal

Piggie Soared: The Swine Flew-Conclusion

   Once, I loved a pig.

   I was a boy.

   He was a pig.

   I called him Ham.

   He hated the name but never told me. He wanted to fly. He wanted to be called Charles Randolph Pig. He wanted to embrace his inner pig, to oink at the storm, his snout in the air, his belly high in the sky above the sty.

   He was the greatest of the pigs.

   We found the plane but not the pig, later. The burned out hulk of the plane nestled in a fire rut in woods near Pig's End, where C.R. and Melvin Turnips used to bomb silver Airstreams with home-made stink torpedos, believing they were doing God's work to hold back the evils of Demon Rum.

   Of course, they were completely wrong. I suspected all along they knew they were wrong, at least C. R. knew, I think, and just went along because he so wanted to soar.

   I suppose he took a little bit of his own with every bomb he dropped. He knew the predilection of Southern tourists for Virginia baked ham, for the loutish BLT, the more than occasional pork rib barbecue.

   C. R. never excused the Hawaiians their luaus.

   "To be eaten is one thing," he would roar.

   "To be spitted," he spat. "How would you like to be spitted?"

   I am a Vegan because of him.

   I hope I never meet a talking carrot.

   We found the plane but not the pig. I harbored some hope.

   "He was mostly grease, you know," Melvin dashed my hopes. "He probably sizzled awhile and then just exploded."

   I could not bear the thought.

   "I'da thought we'da found some snout or tail or a bit of hoof," he rattled on. "Those are hard to burn."

   "Stop!" I cried.

   "Usually, they have ta grind them things up at the renders, to put 'em in the cheap franks they sell the poor folks," Melvin continued, absently.

   "Stop," I cried again.

   "I've et amany of 'em, myself, when times was hard," he lamented.

   "Stop," I demanded.

   "Never hurt me none."

   "Are you finished?"

   "Just about."

   "Thank God."

   "I did get the stomach miseries, oncet, but thet was on some past their expiration date. I shoulda known better. "Twas my fault, my fault and not the packer."

   "One more word, Melvin, one more word on this subject..."

   "I'm just sayin', he probably burnt up on impact, but it seems we'da found some hoof."

   "That's it. No more."

   "I'm done."

   We never found anything, not hide or hoof, not snout or goggle. No, there was no parachute in the cockpit, none, none at all, but he was a resilient pig, capable of survival under difficult circumstances.

   He might have made it.

   My father, the agnostic, saw him. He took up the collar that day.

   I offer his changed life as proof the Pig flew.

   Max Zapruder's grandson was vacationing nearby during C. R.'s brief solo. Like all the Zapruder's he kept a camera with him.

   "You never know," he told me.

   Young Maxwell, III, had a clear image, not grainy or strained, of Charles Randolph Pig, unflinchingly piloting a bi-plane, undeniably solo. C. R., my gentle Ham, tilted the plane toward the camera, as though he knew there would be questions. He showed the camera the empty backseat.

   He was alone, my Ham, at the end.

   He left no grassy knoll.

   I miss him still.

   You must do good now.

   There are no excuses any more.

   The Pig flew.

   The Pig is gone.

   Long live the Pig.

  

  

  

Piggie Soared: The Swine Flew-Chapter Six

   Once, I loved a pig.

   I was a boy.

    He was a pig.

    We lived on a farm. He loved his sty. I slept inside.

   I called him Ham, from the Bible.

   He wanted to fly. He said it would free all the people who were waiting on that one thing, for a pig to fly, before they would go to church or get married or do the right thing.

   "What about the round two-it people?" I asked, hoping to dissuade him.

   "The Who?" he replied.

   "No, not them, that's an old rock group. I mean the round people who are always looking for a two-it."

   "You have lost your mind," he snapped.

   "And at such a young age," he finished.

   "No, really, think about it. Do you think all the people of all the nations of all the world will suddenly beat their swords into plowshares just because you solo? What about the put-it-offers, the manyawners, the round two-its, the never do today what will wait till tomorrowers?"

   "They should get their own pig," he answered.

   "You mock me," I whined.

   "I offer no defense of the lazy, the lackadaisical, the inept, the unapt, the folderols, the fool's golders," he replied, rather airily, I thought.

   "I step out to answer my calling," he finished.

   "Yes, but you will smolder instead on the embers of your ambition," I cried.

   "Then bring some honey to the fire and cure old Ham," he sniffed.

   "You bet your bacon, I will,"  I answered, feeling deflated, all the same.

   The next day, Ham flew.

   I accompanied him to the meadow airstrip. I, yes, I admit it.

   I wore my red plus-fours, with the blue Eton Jacket and the red tie he liked so much. My shoes were burnished brown leather.

   I combed my hair straight back. I put a heavy lotion on it to hold the cow-lick's spot on.

   I helped him into his leather jacket and cap. I, and I alone, wrapped his red scarf twice around his fat neck and knotted it against the wind.

   I, his friend, set goggles to his snout. I boosted him into the cockpit.

   I had thought to bring the two phone books he would need to sit on, so he could see over the instrument panel. I plopped them down, with the bound spines set forward for stability during takeoff.

     I set Ham on them. I belted him into his seat. I pulled his ingenius Piggie Flying Gloves tight over cloven front hooves.

   I did it all.

   If you regret what happened that day, if you rue the dramatic changes in Man since that time, blame me. Ham bent to his task, filled up his flask and drained it dry.

   I spun the propeller until it caught. I snatched away box and blocks to make his path easy. He waved. I saluted, tearfully. He smiled that wry, crooked grin of his.

   Then, he was gone.

   I alone must bear the blame.

   You should know the last thing he told me.

   "I never liked the name Ham," he confessed, as I belted him into the plane.

   "Really?"

   "I considered it my slave name," he told me.

   "Really."

   "I longed for another name," he said.

   "And that is?"

   "Charles."

   "Charles?"

   "Charles."

   "Short for Charlemagne. You know how I feel about Charlemagne."

   "Yes. I suppose I do."

   "Well?"

   "You are free to choose your own name."

   "It would have been kind of you to tell me your feelings years ago," I added.

   "Sorry. I thought to bring it up a few times."

   "A bit late for that information," I told him. "You can have the name you choose, of course."

   "Charles, then."

   "Very well. Charles." my reply was icy.

   I had him belted in by then and thought to go. We had an awkward moment, Charles Ham and I, there at the worst instant, the final moment.

   "I should have liked a middle name, too, you know," he added.

   "The devil you say," I retorted.

   "Quite," Charles would not look at me through his goggles. He studied the panel as he spoke.

   "And that would be?"

   "Randolph."

   "Randolph."

   "Yes. Charles Randolph."

   "Just so. Charles Randolph Pig," I sniffed, my feelings hurt.

   "A bit stuffy, don't you think?" I added, to sting him.

   "I should think the surname Pig lightens the mood a bit," he told me.

   "You still want the name Pig?" I sneered.

  "I will not deny my Pig-ness."

   "It is why I fly," he finished.

   "Charles Randolph Pig," I fumed.

   "It is a good name for a flier," he said.

   I stepped down and spun the prop on his command.

   He was gone, then, just after I spun the propeller for him, moved the box and the blocks. Charles Randolph Pig, the first of the great Porcine Aviators, gone, off to free the souls of Man and Pig.

   Let C.R. Pig have the praise.

   I will take the blame, if blame there is to be.

Piggie Soared: The Swine Flew-Chapter Five

   I loved a pig once.

   I was a boy. He was a pig.

   We lived on a farm.

   I called him Ham.

   Ham loved to fly.

   He started his aviation career in a two seater bi-plane with our local daredevil and retired postal clerk, the (nearly) blind back country bachelor Melvin Turnips. Melvin hated the demon alchohol. He believed Prohibition had not been repealed. He took Ham off flying, dive bombing moonshine stills in the woods around our small rural town, Pig's End, in the Northeastern United States.

   They were not stills, of course, since this was in the 1980's. Nearsighted Melvin used Ham to bomb silver Air Stream trailers.

   Melvin was sincere. He was just sincerely wrong.

   "Virtue," Melvin would cry as they swooped down on unprepared retirees, vacationing in our woods to inspect the foliage, which, as was the custom, turned a riotous variety of colors each autumn.

   "Virtue!" cried Melvin.

   "Bombs away!" Ham answered, flinging the home made stink bombs.

   "Was that a pig?" the distressed victims asked.

   "I think it was a pig," came the answer.

   "What does a pig have against us?"

   "Well, what is a pig doing in an airplane in the first place?"

   Piggie soared. The swine flew.

   All this had to stop. We depended on the tourist trade in Pig's End. Processions of soiled Air-Streams, their roofs dented by the dive bombing daredevils, limped into the car wash in Pig's End on their way out of the region. The stink would wash off. The terror would remain.l

   "Something has to be done about that pig," the tourists would tell us.

   "My wife wants to go back to Texas today," another said. "We eat pulled pork in Texas."

   "Someone should pull that pork out of that plane," he finished. "And finish with him."

   I could not deny it was Ham. No other pigs in the region had shown any inclinations to fly, let alone drop sty packaged stink bombs on big-haired women from the Southwest. There was the Packer's pig, Penny, who thought she wanted to go to Yale Law, but she insisted on taking the train back and forth to school.

   She never passed the bar, anyway, and had to settle on a career in broadcast journalism.

   I never thought she had the face for it but those make up artists can do special things. She looked like Katie Couric in her wig, before Katie lost all the weight on Jenny Craig.

   Regardless, I had to ground Ham.

   "You have to ground Ham," the mayor told me. The whole town backed him up on this one.

   Ham must come to ground.

  

Piggie Soared: The Swine Flew-Chapter Four

   I loved a pig once.

   His name was Ham.

   I was a boy.

   He was a pig.

   We had a farm, that being where pigs were happiest.

   Except for my pig.

   Ham was most at home in the air. He flew in an open cockpit biplane.

   "I love the feel of wind in my snout," he often confessed.

   "This from a fellow who roots about in mud," I countered.

   I hated his flying. He was dangerous, to others and to himself.

   No matter. Ham would soar.

   "Perfect faith is necessary for a pig to fly," Ham said, one day, not long before his ill-fated solo journey. 

   "Perfect faith?" I interrupted him.

   "Indeed," Ham assured me. "Perfect faith appears when man (or pig) as subject becomes the object of divine action, the recipient of the miracle, participant with God. Faith is useless by itself, to be sure, but when something so preposterous as to be impossible presents itself, undoubtedly, perfect faith ensues."

   "Huh?" I wondered.

    I never really understood Ham's theology.

   "Faith itself is empty," Ham explained patiently. "To be real, faith has to be faithful to Someone other than Whom no Greater may be posited. Therefore, faith, to be faith, must have an Object of which it may be said the faithful person (or pig) is subject."

   "Huh?" I repeated, to maintain my consistency.

   "Perfect faith requires God come looking for you," Ham said. "Then you embrace God and faith becomes actual."

   Ham was a deep thinking Pig. I believe he learned much in the sweat lodges of the  Chippewa, where he liked to go.

   He would sit in the lodges, painted, panting,  with all the other Braves.

   "I am sweating like a pig," one of his friends would say and then poke Ham, who never perspired at all, having no sweat glands.

   They would all enjoy a good laugh.

   Ham started his flying as co-pilot. He had flown only in the back seat of an old biplane, piloted by our local raconteur, Melvin Turnips, former barnstormer and  retired postal clerk.

  Melvin started taking Ham on short skips around Beery Lake, looking for moonshiners to dive bomb. Melvin was Temperance.

   He was also a bit dotty.

   Melvin believed Prohibition was still the law of the land. He believed Elliot Ness appeared to him at night, speaking in his best Robert Stack staccato, fingering his snap-brim fedora while he glared at evil doers just off camera.

   "I am an Untouchable," Melvin would suddenly shout, sometimes during the  rectors good Episcopalian sermons on the third Sunday service, that being the only Sunday the rector came through Pig's End on his route to May's Bank.

   Apparently, everyone agreed with this assessment. Melvin lived alone.

   "I liked for Ham to fly with me," Melvin remembered, after we lost Ham and the bi-plane. "He had good eyes for a pig. He could spot a moonshiner a mile away."

   Melvin himself was as near sighted as he was thin and bald. God had wasted little flesh and no muscle on Melvin.

   Melvin wore thick glasses on his long, hooked nose. His beak hung virtually uninterrupted toward his feet, his nose being so long and his chin so recessed. Without those glasses, Melvin's nose would have had no purpose but to shade his huge feet.

   Melvin wore checkered, flannel shirts. He pulled his corduroy pants impossibly high, chested above his belly button and held there by a thick, black belt jerked just beyond the last hole the manufacturer recommended into one Melvin made with an ice-pick, by himself. He had his pants so high you could see the top of his white socks jut out above his hard-laced, brown work boots.

   "Yep," Melvin said again, wistfully, leaning his chair back on two legs, his chipped white coffee mug turned sideways in one big hand, his other giant paw pushing huge, rimless spectacles back up on his beak. "That Ham could spot them moonshiners."

   Of course, there were no more moonshiners in the 1980's. Liquor was legal, plentiful and rather cheap, if you were not picky.

   Melvin and Ham actually torpedoed silver Air-Stream trailers with stink bombs from about a hundred feet in the air.

   This resulted in lots of complaints, as well as a marked reduction in local tourism. Nothing ever came of the complaints because no authority could be roused to investigate reports of a dive-bombing pig in goggles and a leather jacket, in a bi-plane piloted by what appeared to be a myopic pterodactyl,  these being the days before terrorism poisoned the whole trough.

   Melvin and Ham went their stink bombing way. No Air-Stream was safe on their watch. This went on for years, until one day, Ham announced to me he would have to solo.

   "The pig has ridden," he intoned. "The pig has bombed."

   I winced. He knew I hated for him to speak of himself in the third person, "the pig," as though he were a mere abstraction. He had issues about being the largest of his small litter. He lived all his life with the guilt of squashing two of his siblings before he gained his equilibrium. He was so wide at the pelvis the farmer mistook him for a sow for most of his early life. He doubted his masculinity, I thought, because of this.

   Hence, "the pig." He got one of those two hundred mile stares when he became "the pig." He would gaze over your shoulder while speaking to you, as though looking for an approaching cloud, sure to be a storm, and only he to sound the alarm.

   "Now," he finished, "one thing is left undone; the pig must fly."

   "Duty demands it."

  

Piggie Soared: The Swine Flew-Chapter Three

   Once, I loved a pig.

   I was a boy. He was a pig.

   I called him Ham, after Noah's son, in the Bible.

   We had a farm.

   The farm was enough for me, enough then, though I cannot go to it now.

    Not for the pig.

   The pig would fly. The world might end but the pig would fly.

   I remember him, the last time I saw him, wearing his little goggles, his leather jacket tight around the shoulders (he had big shoulders from days of working out in the barn; he loved the lat pull and the military press; I never knew why; he said it made him look "buff;" Ham hated the word "cut") and that silly flying scarf around his throat, three sizes too long for him.

   He was not a tall pig.

   The pig would fly.

   "If I soar, it opens up a new world of possibilities," he told me.

   "Do you know how many people are waiting, just waiting, on something great in their life?" he went on anxiously. "They are just waiting for freedom. They await the day the pig flies."

   I demurred, suggesting it was no more than a figure of speech.

   He would have none of it.

   "Your own father," he told me, "always tells your mother he will go to church with her when the pig flies."

   "You mean..." I started, and Ham interrupted me.

   "I will make him an Episcopalian," Ham shouted.

   "But, Ham..." I started.

   "But me no Ham buts," the pig insisted. "I will fly and he will kneel. I will make a High Church Episcopalian of him, or see him a liar."

   "Ham, please," I blurted.

   "Please me no hams. There's to be one  cure for this desire of mine. I have a dream, one unlike any other pig," he shouted.

   "All we see or seem is but a dream within a dream," I quoted.

   "Stay on the ground with me," I begged.

   "Hah. Now we see who is the true boar," he answered.

   "Please," I plead. "You have no thumbs. Your hooves are cloven."

   "No matter," he snorted, "I devised a flying glove for pigs. With a little adaptation, yon bossy cow may yet jump o'er the moon, as the ancients used to wish."

   "You have lost your piggy mind," I surrendered.

   "Good. Join my lunacy. One thing I need from you, boy."

   "Oh, and what might that be, O Lord of the Skies?" I asked.

   "When I mount the cockpit," he told me.

   "Yes?"

   "Spin the propeller," he said.

   "You will need a box to stand on," he finished.

   "Anything else?"

   "Please deign to help me into the cockpit as well," Ham told me.

   "And then?"

   "Spin the prop until it catches."

   "How will I know when it is enough?"

   "I will give you a hoof's up."

   "And then?"

   "Run."

   "And then?"

   "A snappy salute would be nice, as I taxi to take-off," he said.

   "When pigs fly," I told him, unthinking.

   "Soon enough," he grunted back, and then, wistfully, "One pig at a time."

   "Oh, please," I whined.

   "No pig left behind," he grunted and was off to the barn.

   "I must finish my flight plan," he said.

   And we were done, his fate sealed, mine no better.

   I loved a pig once.

  

Piggie Soared: Chapter Two (The Day the Swine Flew: Director's Cut)

   Once, I loved a pig.

   I was a boy. We had a farm. He was a pig.

   I called him Ham, from the Bible.

   We walked in the fields of the farm in the cool of they day. He had an odd, trotting motion to his walk and often complained about the pace as my legs grew longer.

   "I am carrying a belly here," Ham would huff.

   "Better watch that belly," I would chide him. "Jimmy Dean will be after you."

   "That man!" Ham snorted and pouted for awhile.

   But he always walked more briskly then. He looked back over his right haunch, as though watching for an angular Texan in a straw hat.

   My sardonic humor, more acerbic with the passing years, was the cause of many of our rows. Ham could turn surly as well.

   He would say. I would jibe. He would offer in reposte. I would draw pork blood in reply.

   He would lapse into Latin thinking to leave them me in his curly-tailed wake.

   "Ejectum littore, egenum Excepi," Ham grunted one day.

   "Ouch," I replied, and then, "Et regni demens  in parte locavi."

   Smug, I waited but not long.

   "Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor," He grunted.

   I should have known.

   A boy like me could never beat Ham at pig Latin.

   Tell me you saw that one coming.

  

  

Piggie Soared: The Day the Swine Flew-(Director's Cut)

   I loved a pig once.

   We had a farm.

   I was just a boy.

   He was a pig.

   I called him Ham.

   I had a duck called Shem and a bull, much later, named Japheth.

   So, it seemed natural to call him Ham.

   We sat together, Ham and I, on cool autumn afternoons. We had long talks.

   "Perfect wisdom," he once said, and I always remembered, "is deep truth expressed in brilliant simplicity. The rationale must be present but not predominant, since logic, without content of its own, leaches force from its premises. To be a good thinker, one must first be a good pig, or person, full of beauty. Even one's wrath must be gentle and have a cleansing purpose, like Jesus in the Temple."

   "Jews are good people," he winked at me. "They will not eat pork, you know."

   I gasped. Ham was Lutheran, or so I had thought.

   Missouri Synod.

   He laughed, then, more at my reaction than at his own bon mot.

   I remember the day he told me about his speech impediment.

   "I cannot oink," he said, sadly.

   "At least, not like the other pigs."

   "I don't think the other pigs can even understand what I oink," he added.

   "It has been a lonely life," he finished.

   His voice trailed off in a whisper.

   We spoke no more for awhile.

   It was enough to sit, hoof in hand. I stroked the dry space behind his left ear. No lotion ever soothed that spot but he purred like a cat when I stroked him down from ear to knobby head, tickling the dry spot.

   One piggy leg would invariably convulse with quaking.

   Summer faded and cold winds poked through fluffy clouds, shredding them, as I told him, "like Greenspan's belief in Free Market integrity."

   Ham grunted and trotted over to his trough.

   He had lost a lot in the recession. I had urged him to convert to T-Bills in the spring, but he scoffed,leading to our most serious rift.

   "The market is due a correction," Ham said, after he lost twenty per-cent. "I can ride this one out."

   At thirty-five per cent he gave up and went to capital conservation. I could not talk to him about it. His pride was hurt as much as his purse.

   "And they call me a pig," he sneered, and tromped the financial section into the old straw at the end of his sty.

   He wanted me to believe he was angry.

   He always did that when he wanted to change the subject.

   He was hurt, deeply hurt. It was Ham, you see, who put me into pork-bellies in the seventies, securing my fortune, assuring my sinecure at Wharton.

   Now, the pupil outshone the mentor.

   I could tell it hurt him.

TO BE CONTINUED...

  

All Hallow's Eve-Prayer Guide for October 31 2009

   This is not Halloween.

   Well, sort of not, that is.

   This is All Hallow's Eve, the night before All Saints Day.

   Do not dial out, my non-liturgical friend.

   As sure as the Anglicans are getting back with Rome (Henry VIII being done for all time), there are saints in Heaven and living amongst. Talk about your close encounters of the third kind.

   The presence of God's set-aside people mean there is no reason to be overly fearful of the things that go bump in the night. God loves the saints.

   Pray for people who love God today, with rememberance and thanks for all good things.

These United States of America-Prayer Guide for October 30, 2009

    Let me explain something about our national discussion.

    It is not new, not even to us.

    Since the former British colonies wrested a certain measure of freedom from the (sometimes) maniacal grasp of George III, we have argued about these twin ideas: justice and community, set over against liberty and the individual.

   A few times the just community, the Shining City set on a Hill, had to decide to give liberty to individuals and so changed the course of the whole; suffrage  to women, education to children, emancipation to slaves, civil rights to all citizens.

   We still argue about the two today. Every individual wants liberty until some other fellow's liberty imposes on him at the intersection of Elm and Main. Then he wants the kind of justice meted out by the community instead of handed down from a mailed fist.

   Other nations don't understand how it is in these United States of America we can fight City Hall. It is done over and again.

   Pray for America today.

  

President Obama and the Obama Family-Prayer Guide for October 29, 2009

   I do not want the job. Sometimes I would take the job to keep someone else from getting it but then reality dawns and I know I do not want the job.

   President of these United States. Not exactly an easy job in better times it is a crater today, don't you think?

   The Founding Fathers wanted a strong legislative branch and an impartial judiciary. They wanted an executive, but just barely, and had mostly had enough of dictatorial executive-types, who held the kingdom in suspense and the colonies in thrall.

   PODUS has, thus far, been as strong as the man who held the job, give or take Bob Woodward and Helen Thomas. If FDR had lived in the days of television, America would probably never have had a four term presidency in a wheel chair.

   I don't want the job.

   Pray for the safety of our president today. Pray for his wife and daughters, please. They swim in the big goldfish bowl with President Obama.

   If you pray for President Obama today, you will pray for America when you do.