Hater?

There's a man in Connecticut who thinks there's something wrong with me. I wonder if he's right.

This guy took issue with my use of the word "hate." He argued that there is nothing in the world we should hate; that hatred is just a choice to invest in negative energy instead of positive. I promised to think about it; I have, and I still disagree. But maybe I have to, because there are so many things I do hate. 

I hate terrorism. I've hated it since October 1982, when I was in Germany as part of the semi-annual ReForGer exercise we did to show the Soviets how quickly we could put boots on the ground in Europe. Back then, terrorists weren't Muslim extremists, they were mostly communist groups like the Red Army Faction. That was the group that killed a young soldier in Munich; a woman promised him sex and lured him into an alley, where they cut his throat. They killed him for his ID card, which they used to try to get a bomb onto an air base. I didn't know him, but I saw him at his worst, laying there in the garbage and blood with his fly open.

I did know Marilyn Gabbard; I met her shooting pool when she was a Specialist and I was an Officer Candidate. We crossed paths a lot on the way up, and when I had my battalion, she was Command Sergeant Major in a sister battalion. I knew CW4 Smith. I remember when he lost the engine on his Huey with some general on board and auto-gyroed it into a wheat field from 1,300 feet and everyone walked away. Or so the story goes; I heard it a dozen times over beers at the Officer's Club. They both were killed in Iraq; ironically I have a memory of being at a Dining In with SGM Gabbard when we raised our glasses to fallen comrades, not long before she shipped out. I'm not so sure we weren't toasting Smitty, but it could have been any of a handful of other Iowa troops we all knew.

And I hate drugs. I hate the way they wreck lives; I hate the stupid things people do because of them. Maybe that's because of the man who traded his 16-year-old daughter for meth. Maybe it's the young lady who was stripping and hooking to pay for her habit -- her gimmick was using her uniform. Maybe it's the guy who took his M113 through a bivouac area without a ground guide during Wounded Warrior III at Fort Hunter-Ligget, California (they shot MASH there, did you know that?) and crushed a soldier in his sleeping bag. Maybe it's the cook I found in Holland, passed out in his own puke in the dumpster he'd hidden in to shoot up.

I hate what the world thinks about sex. I hate it when I'm packing up the personal effects of a suicide and find gay pornography, which by law I'm supposed to send back to his mother (I didn't). I hate it when I have to court-martial a combat vet who exposed himself to grade-school girls. I hate it when an officer degrades the uniform by coming home from Iraq, where there aren't a lot of blonde women to be had, with $10,000 she earned on her back.

None of those things were great personal tragedies; the people were colleagues, not friends, and the responsibilities were professional. But each of these events, and others like them, put another nick in the lens through which I look at life, so that now the world I see is significantly less beautiful than the one a lot of people live in.

What those events did was prove to me, one data point at a time, that while life where I live is mostly sunshine, there is darkness out there. This world has some negative energy too. The old word for it was evil; these days we call it dysfunction or sickness or an alternative lifestyle.

It's the evil that I hate. The question is, do I also hate people? Do I hate terrorists? Do I hate drug dealers? Do I hate pimps and pornographers? I hope not; I don't want to. I can honestly say I've never hated anyone I've met face-to-face. But I never met Saddam Hussein or Osama Bin Laden, so I guess I don't really know.

There's one being I know I hate: The Father of Lies. He's the one who did all of it. He's the one who makes people think these are good ideas. And he's the one who convinces people that there's nothing to hate.

All this hatred . . . does it mean I'm evil too? If I let the hatred dominate, it might. But everything I hate is because of something I love even more strongly. Ultimately, I'm a lover, not a hater. At least, that's what I want to be.

I read this morning that these three remain: Faith, hope and love, and the greatest of these is love. The love will be there when the hatred is gone. That's as good a definition of heaven as I need today.

Writing

[Biographical note: I worked my way through college as a journalist, earned a BA in English, and assumed at that point I would always earn my living by writing. Somewhere along the way the need to feed a family pushed me onto another path, and I discovered skills that proved more valuable in the marketplace. But . . .]

Sometimes I hate being a writer. Often I deny that I am one.

But denying the truth doesn't make it go away, and the truth is, I can't not write. Even when I'm disgusted with it, even when no one reads it or even has a chance to read it, I write.

I write to think. Something can be a jumbled mess in my mind, but if I write it, thoughts flow, connections become apparent, logic asserts itself and, in the end, there is a conclusion. Sometimes I advance through the day in a kind of solo social media experience, wherein I'm constantly adding comments and updating my status as a way of clarifying these new ideas that keeping boiling out of my brain (picture the centipedes coming out of the old tree trunk in the movie version of Fellowship of the Ring).

And most days I churn out pages of business writing. That's the art at its most workmanlike, leading out words like draft animals to be put in harness in e-mails, memos and reports that attempt, as mundane as they may be, to be true to the capacity of the English language not just to communicate but to stimulate. It's like singing opera in a honky-tonk.

But in addition to those functional uses for writing, I have this need to sculpt words. I'm long past the days when I got paid to write -- in fact, my current career field values writing only if it is terse and unambiguous. But that doesn't stop me from sneaking away now and then to romp through the playground of language like a schoolboy playing hooky. Words have meaning. Years ago in my Infantry Officer Advanced Course one of my Tacs was fond of saying "Use precise terms precisely;" in that world, where decisions are made on the fly and sometimes under fire, the job of words is to transmit information efficiently and accurately. But words can do much more than that; in addition to their Webster definitions, they are nuanced, and they have shapes and sounds that combine to evoke for me colors and flavors and textures and tones. Writing can be like cooking and painting and singing all at the same time.

That's why I often return to authors whose stories I find ordinary (Neal Stephenson and James Lee Burke come to mind) but who regularly craft sentences and paragraphs that are so exceptional that reading becomes the mental equivalent of fine dining. 

And it's also why, without encouragement or affirmation, I continue to write. True, some of my writing escapes in the form of the occasional blog, and a few of those are well-received. However, most of what I write never matures enough to be released into the wild. That majority is, I think, what makes me truly a writer, because it exists only to give expression to the impulsive/compulsive something in my heart that demands a voice.

If I were a professional writer, some of that work would eventually be scrubbed and fashionably dressed and then sent out with a polished resume to look for a job. It is the curse of my success in other fields that there isn't enough time.

But I write anyway. I write, and I get frustrated because I start but don't finish. I write, and then file what I've written because it is poor work done with the dregs of my energy and creativity. I write and become depressed because this is what I love but there's so little time for it, and so little progress. It seems futile, my own rolling of the stone uphill. 

So, just like the day I stopped being paid for it, I decided again this summer to quit writing -- like a smoker, I've quit frequently over the years. But even so, last week I finished another chapter in The Great American Novel, and I also drafted the outline of another speech. And today there's this blog, more expository than beautiful but still, for all its unimportance, an outlet.

That's how, even though the world sees me as something else, I know I'm a writer.

The third option

As I was playing a computer game last night, I wondered, how many game writers are older than 30? I wondered that because all the plot lines wallowed dramatically in either ecstatic delight or tragic despair. There was no third option.

I connected that to the age of the writers because one thing you realize as you age is that very little of life consists of the two extremes. Usually you experience something in the middle that's more mundane. For example:

Relationships. The young writer would have us believe that all love affairs either A. end tragically through death, kidnapping, serial unfaithfulness or because your lover is secretly a sleeper agent of a foreign government who cares only about your total subjugation (or alternately an incubus, succubus or maybe just a bus driver with amnesia and a wife and 12 kids in Toledo) or, B. are a never-ending magic carpet ride of fireworks and love-drunk, euphoric perfection in which you and your soul-mate, completely in sync on all things, romp through life (which always looks like a meadow filled with daisies) hand in hand. The third option: You meet the love of your life, get married, realize that true love hasn't eliminated stinky laundry or dirty dishes, find out that when your spouse gets up three times during the night with a puking kid she looks like death warmed over and has an attitude to match, learn that for a while kids and jobs and housework are going to take your partner's complete attention, and then discover when the nest is empty that this person who weathered the storms and moved the mountains with you is not only extremely competent but also funny, intelligent, attractive and all in all a great life partner.

Conflict. When faced with an adversary, the typical game writer works with only two options: A. Kill it, or B. run awaaaaay! They never explore the third option, which starts with you holding up your hand and saying, "Dude, what's the big problem?" and ends with a benefit waffle breakfast raising funds to get his unjustly-accused son a better lawyer and help with his drug addiction.

Money. In computer games, there are only two levels of income: A. below poverty level, requiring your children to beg and you to sell your plasma and grocery-shop in the dumpster behind the Chinese restaurant or B. astronomical, funding multiple homes, a zeppelin, your successful research into immortality, and your secret life as a super-hero. Unfortunately, most of us live with the third option, which is a progression from "barely enough" through "enough" to "enough to save for retirement."

Of course, the third option doesn't make for great game play. Questgiver: "Well, I was hoping to marry young Bonnie Rae Belle but raiding orcs took her away to cook and eat her, so while I wait for someone new to come along, I'm trying to save a little money. Maybe you could help by hauling my harvest to market." Quest objective: Drive the wagon-load of pumpkins into town. Quest reward: Three dollars and forty cents, everything the Questgiver had in his pocket, plus an offer of more freighting work the next time you pass through.

So you can see why those writers write the way they do -- because that's what young gamers find engaging. If they were writing for me it would be different. A hero my age would figure, hey, a quiet wagon ride wouldn't be so bad, it's a nice day and the leaves are starting to turn, and I can always grab a cup of coffee and some pie when I'm in town. Fighting orcs is a lot of work, plus afterward you have to pay the doctor and clean your weapons, and by the time I got Bonnie Rae back she'd probably have a few bites taken out of her and wouldn't be quite the prize she used to be. And three bucks is three bucks, after all. Plus it gets me home in time for the news.

The problem with only two options, though, is that after operating for a while at the polar extremes of dramatic possibility, everything gets boring. Pretty soon all the distressed damsels start to blur together, killing monsters, even when they come in waves, is just another boring chore, and the imminent destruction of the kingdom occurs with such regularity that you just put "Save kingdom" in your planner for Wednesday afternoons.

You want real drama? Try de-conflicting the holidays with two different families demanding your attendance on Christmas Eve. Try figuring out how to watch Jimmie's AAU game, pick Jennie up from dance class, get enough groceries to put a reasonable dinner on the table, and do it all without leaving work early. In real life, there's not only a third option, there's an infinite pallet of possibilities and hazards, most of which are impervious to even your most potent fire spell.

Maybe that's the attraction of computer games; compared to our real lives, clearing the skeletons out of the citadel seems comfortably easy, low-stress even. Someday, when these writers approach 50, maybe some of that will show up in computer games. Maybe we'll get to ram drivers who steal our parking spots, and toss snotty DMV clerks down the steps.

No, that's probably not a good idea. It's probably better to play the games as they are, and think a little bit about all the ways that worldly problem solving reflects our unwillingness to rely on the One who controls it all. And while we're at it, to reflect on why we think we need so much drama for things to be interesting. After all, our own lives are the greatest drama ever written; there's a cataclysmic supernatural battle going on over our souls, and we're tasked every day to fight and defend and rescue. If we signed up for more of that, maybe we'd have less of an appetite for virtual drama.

Old boots

A lot of ordinary things really aren't. Know how I know? Combat boots.

In a piece of fiction I once described something as "ordinary as an old boot." I thought of that recently when a picture of me showed up briefly on a National Guard website. It was a black-and-white snapshot taken at Grafenwohr, (West, at the time) Germany during one of my several REFORGERs, and what caught my eye was the combat boots I had on. They were the old style, the pair issued to me in 1980 in Basic Training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. Back then, the uniform was olive drab, not camouflage, and the boots were black.

What surprised me was that I instantly remembered every detail of those old boots. They were still black the day I threw them away, but only through a soldier's discipline. The leather was soft, but badly scuffed and cut. Most of the paint was worn off the eyelets, so they showed brass instead of black. The soles were faded to gray and worn smooth. Just an old pair of boots -- there have to be thousands just like them in attics across this country.

I remember clearly the first day I wore those boots. Our drill sergeant used a garden hose to fill them with water; his theory was that by marching them dry we would break them in in one day. As things turned out, I would march them dry frequently that summer, as we trained in the rain and in rivers and squelched down mud-puddled trails.

Dig around the tongues of those boots and you might find grass seeds from Korea, bug parts from Panama, pastry frosting from Belgium and dust from maybe 30 states. I wore them for about 15 years, in rotation with a couple of newer pairs. Me and those boots did most of the things soldiers can do. A lot of them I'm proud of, but some things, not so much. Some I still can't talk about; some I just won't.

I wish I still had those boots. They were a floppy, beat-up, sweat-stained scrapbook full of memories. That cut on the left toe? Busting brush with a machete is harder than it looks. The chip out of the boot heel? The rope was shorter than the cliff. The missing corners on both tongues? Field-expedient rifle-cleaning patches. The dark smear along the side of the sole? Don't ask.  

Those boots, in my memory anyway, capture the essence of my career. A lot of it was just training, but some of it wasn't. A few times I was aware of being involved in something significant, but most of the time it was just more duty in another obscure corner of useless geography. Some of the ops did what we planned them for, some didn't. At any one point, it didn't seem like much, but put it all together 25 years later and it spans Grenada and the Cold War and Panama and Somalia and both Gulf Wars. It's kind of impressive, even though I shouldn't be the one saying so.

I think our lives are like that; I'm not sure there's such a thing as an ordinary life. The locations might be just plain vanilla and the days might seem pretty mundane, but live enough of them and look what happens. Look at all those students taught or cars fixed or books read, look at what the kids grew up to be, look at the things you know and the places you've been and the wonders you've seen and the lives you've changed.

My grandpa was a farmer, retired for most of my memory. He was about as ordinary a man as you'd find, which means not very. He was a locally-renowned baseball pitcher who snuck off the farm to play on Sundays, a young hellion who drove way too fast. He was famous for his strength -- they said he could grab a bull by the horns and back it up. He plowed his fields with horses, and then tractors; he told of the day it rained frogs and fish; he remembered the first car ever bought in the county. Grandpa loved God, and he loved singing hymns. Even at the very end when he couldn't see or stand or even hold his head up, he still sang. I only realized when it was too late that he was one of the most fascinating people I knew.

It makes me think I should spend more time appreciating my life and less time wishing it was different. It makes me wish I had the trust of King David, who thanked God in Psalm 16 by writing, "The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; surely I have a delightful inheritance." It makes me hope my kids will be smarter about it than I was.

The odds of that seem pretty good.

Respect - The Lesson of the Flags

Why does it seem that the most respected people don't care if they are, while others crave respect?

Respect is a complicated thing to get, in both the blonde and Rodney Dangerfield senses of the term. But earning it is critical personally and professionally.

These ruminations started this weekend when I was on a college campus and noticed that, while the US and state flags were at half-mast in honor of a fallen soldier, the Canadian flag was still flying high. I was taught that, on American soil, nothing flies higher than Old Glory.

Now, it's possible that Canada has claimed some sort of ambassadorial presence on campus, in which case it seems appropriate that the flags were flying in front of the cafeteria. But more likely someone made a mistake. Either way, it could be seen as disrespectful.

In younger years my response would have been immediate and hotblooded and, therefore, probably un-helpful. Instead, I found myself engaged only on an intellectual level. In other words, I didn't care an awful lot.

I didn't care because it felt to me something like a grown man letting his little brother sit in the driver's seat. I mean, does anyone think for a minute that the relative heights of our flags somehow meant we couldn't beat up Canada if we wanted to? It seemed like the kind of gentle indulgence the strong can afford.

But even though fear is a form of respect, it's not really respect if people act deferential just because you're bigger. Respect has more to do with agreement with or admiration for your values and actions. Every time some jobless teen-aged punk with his pants around his thighs and his hat on cockeyed gets in someone's face and says, "Don't dis me," I think, "Why, because you've done so much to earn our respect?" Fact is, I do dis him, because being tough isn't all there is to it.

So it's possible that the position of the flags was intended as disrespect. Even so, it's hard to see how that would improve if I got on my high horse and started firing off nasty-grams to everyone on campus with a public e-mail address. Being prickly doesn't seem like the right strategy to gain respect.

Besides, the flag itself is important only as a symbol. I put in a career in uniform based in part on the idea that people, even if they think differently than I do, should be free to express themselves in any legal way. To me, the fact that you can pour red paint on a flag in this country without the police playing the Symphony of the Batons on your head is all the proof you need that we are indeed the land of the free. In that context a paint-covered flag becomes a symbol of our tolerance and long-suffering. At half mast, beneath the Canadian flag, it seemed to me to be symbolic of our gentlemanly ability to not stand on our rights when it isn't important to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

To the extent we in our superior strength can continue to exhibit those traits of long-suffering, tolerance and chivalry, we will hold the respect of the world. If we start to default on our loans, throw our trash in other peoples' back yards, and beat up other countries for their lunch money, we won't.

It's good to remember that, be they flag or cross or corporate logo, whatever meaning our symbols have is derived from the actions we take in their name. That means that even in demanding respect we can diminish it. In that context we do well to think about our own names as symbols of our own personal brands. Do they garner respect? If not, why not? The answer has nothing to do with rank or wealth or power.

It's not unlike what Margaret Thatcher said about being a lady: If you have to tell people you're one, you aren't. In the same way, if you have to demand respect you don't have it. And you're not going to get it by flexing muscles or legalities. You get it by taking the high road, by behaving decently and honorably.

Hmmm . . . I'm beginning to see the problem As with so many other things, could it be we want the payout without putting in the work? Maybe we think people should respect us just because we're us, not because we've done anything in particular to earn it. That's true in a spiritual sense: We all have value derived from being made in the image of God, so we all deserve respectful treatment. But that general respect we extend to fellow humans as basic courtesy is different than being respected for the individuals we have become.

With all that said, I do think the things the Stars and Stripes stand for are worthy of respect, and I think for the most part our flag is respected around the world. And that's exactly why I'm willing to let this slight go by uncontested, whether it was an ignorant mistake or intentional raspberry. Because magnanimity is far more respect-worthy than virtuous self-righteousness.

Taxes

Guys, I hate to say it, but we need to pay taxes. And I think we need to pay more.
Call the medics for all those members of my Republican party who are currently coughing up a lung. And please don't think I've fallen under the sway of the evil liberals.
First off, none of the liberals I know are evil. But even if they were actually evil instead of just wrong, I'd be with them, at least partly, on taxes.
Maybe it's because around here we mostly pay as we go, but it seems like a pretty simple equation: Money in must be greater than or equal to money out or you pile up debt.
I know, a lot of America believes that money in only needs to be equal to the minimum monthly credit card payment, and even then you can always go to one of those debt consolidation places if things get too bad. But let's make believe for a minute here that the idea is to balance the checkbook, not just pile up stuff.
So anyway, if you have too much debt, you can't borrow anymore. And if you wait too long to pay your debt, the Sheriff comes and tells you your creditors get your stuff.
That's basically where we find ourselves as a nation. Too much debt, we can't pay it, and we're getting close to the point where China is going to want New Jersey.
OK, bad example. No one's going to complain if we lose New Jersey. But what if it was something we cared about, like the Mall of America?
I've been in debt, I'm currently not. I know what it took to get out of debt; I know what it takes now to stay debt-free. And I don't get how we can simply repeat "No taxes. No taxes" while we reel ever closer to the abyss.
Any person with reasonable math skills and a little rudimentary knowledge of our national budget knows that the only way we're going to get on top of this is with a combination of new taxes and spending cuts. Neither on its own is going to get us there.
OK, medics, haul out the defibrillator, because I'm about to cause more trauma to the GOP faithful: I'm inclined not to vote for any candidate who signs the Tea Party pledge. Not that I don't have some sympathy for their cause. It's just that their pledge is so rigid; it doesn't allow for changing circumstances. I think it's out of touch with reality because it allows only one option for four years of unknowns. And a candidate who signs it is either just as out of touch, or is a cynical manipulator doing what needs to be done to get votes. Either way, that's not my guy, or gal, as the case may be.
I'm looking for the one who says, "Look, I'm going to do what I can to keep a lid on taxes, but we're going to need more money if we want to keep a strong defense and keep Social Security intact." That's the only reasonable answer there is.
And I'm OK with that; in fact, I'm OK with paying more. They say the per capita share of our national debt is $2k each - I'd write that check today if a responsible government asked me to.
Until we Republicans are willing to say, "Hey, go ahead, cut the defense budget, and here's a couple more things we're willing to do without," then our choices are limited: more debt, or more taxes.
So I have a simple request for my party: Try an actual dialogue. Negotiate. Give and take. Work something out. We did it with the Koreans and the Russians and the Taliban. Surely we can do it with fellow Americans.

Truth

Nothing is as hard to hunt down as the truth. Like the elusive South Dakota jackalope, it's impossible to spot in the wild, and the ones people try to sell you are fakes, cobbled together from bits and pieces of reality.

When you want the truth about something, where do you look?

Where is the truth regarding government and public employee unions? One side says the unions are milking the states dry; the other says union members are underpaid. And both sides are convinced, or at least want us to be, that the very future of the Republic depends on what happens in Wisconsin. I'm disturbed that we left the future of the Republic laying around where Packer fans could get their hands on it, but no one else seems alarmed so it's probably OK.

What's the truth about Halliburton - evil corporate money-grubbers or courageous humanitarians? Depends if Dick Cheney is actually as wicked/wonderful as your party portrays him. Can health care reform work? Are Libyans capable of democracy? Will the iPad 2 make me happier?

The truth is hard, because it seems so subjective. I see tan, my wife says taupe. But next time it's not taupe, it's ecru. Or, in the case of hosiery, nude, which is a color you'd think guys would recognize immediately and women would disapprove of. You can measure all of them with a computer and place them precisely in the color space, but that means we're reduced to taking a computer's word for it. That's only slightly better than believing our spouses.

More than that, sometimes the truth seems unknowable. Yeah, FatSecret says an apple has 71 calories, but some apples are bigger, but then sometimes I don't eat as close to the core, so . . . .  And did I really burn 450 calories on that run? I'm in pretty good shape, and that distance should be easier for me than some fat guy who's been on the Lazyboy workout plan for the last decade, so when they say it should burn X, which of us are they talking about? In the end, did I have a calorie deficit or surplus yesterday? How do I really know?

Yet some people seem to know. Rush Limbaugh is pretty confident he does; so is Charlie Sheen. How do those people know? How could celebrities tweet the "truth" about Bahrain when reporters couldn't get into the country? How can Westboro Baptist Church know without doubt what God is doing?

Most of the time, except for a few things that are absolute, I'm not confident I know what the truth really is. But I am confident that there is objective, unequivocal truth. I'm not supposed to be. I'm supposed to believe we're all free to find our own truth; I'm supposed to tolerate whatever nonsense anyone else wants to put out there.

Well, folks, here's a tip: Denying the truth doesn't change it. He can say Obama isn't an American citizen, she can believe chupacabras are killing motorists in Texas, you can claim the Masons control a secret world government, I can call cookies health food. I can say it, swear to it, and believe it to my dying day but that will not change the truth, no matter how many people I point to who claim to have lost 45 pounds and cured their diabetes with an all-Keeblers diet.

The truth is out there. I believe Jesus when he said he is the way, the truth and the life; a lot of people don't. That just proves that relativism doesn't work: if we believe mutually-exclusive things then we can't both have found the truth. Alternate reality was cool on The Matrix, but life doesn't work that way.

I guess I'm suggesting that we should all be seekers for truth. Instead of thoughtlessly re-tweeting or forwarding the chain e-mails or propagating any of the propaganda that pollutes our conversational space, let's take the time to be informed of the facts and to examine the data. And then let's discuss. I promise to listen before I decide; I hope you'll do the same.

Doors

[Disclaimer for brother Eric, on the off chance he might actually check this out: This is not about a classic rock band, or any Jim Morrison conspiracy theories.]

I photograph doors. Proportionately, a lot of them.

This quirk became evident recently, when I spent part of a sick day flipping through electronic photo files. I noticed that in almost all my folders, be they of Europe or Texas or family or even just downtown, tucked between snaps of the beefeaters and Lady Di's fountain would be an image of some random door or gate. Since I rarely take the time to label things, I have only the foggiest recollection of where these doors are, but I still find them compelling. 

I wonder why. I'd like to say it reveals something deep and significant, like maybe that I embrace change, or I'm always ready to pass on to that next stage in life. I suspect the truth to be something less positive (nosiness?).

There's a certain sense of mystery to doors. An unfamiliar door shields unknown things, possibly treasures, maybe horrors, maybe something interesting, probably just the mundane detritus of a life not much different than mine. But until the door is opened, it could be anything, and sometimes its fun to imagine what it might be. I felt this very strongly outside a residential gate in Lucerne, for instance; for some reason it seemed that those who lived there must be fascinating people doing fascinating things, and I wanted to meet them. Another time, I considered for a long time a worn door to an interior room in an old Spanish mission and imagined a selfless Jesuit on his knees or maybe a Native American child being punished for his waywardness. These are the entrances pictured here.

The mystery is enhanced by the interesting appearance of the doors I photograph. Many are rustic, some are ornate, but all are, to me anyway, aesthetically interesting. There is artistry here; some craftsman steeped in the lore of fine door-making wrought this. Surely a door so out of the ordinary must conceal extraordinary things! They suggest to me hippie communes, Tolkein-esque villages, Japanese tea gardens, Monte Cassino in an old war movie starring John Wayne back when he was still lean.

And then there's the functional nature of doors: They are, alternately, barriers or protection. They keep us safe from things like ax murderers and siding salesmen. They can also bar us from entry, an annoying trait I associate with the faculty door at the Rowenhorst Student Center where I work out; it's just across the street but often locked, necessitating a hike of a block or more to get to a public entrance.

An unlocked door, on the other hand, is permission. It is access granted, an invitation, inclusion. Where a locked door is a limitation, an unlocked door represents possibility, even opportunity. That's why I choose to believe that the doors I photograph are all unlocked, and why I never check - I suspect very few of them actually are. Probably they lock them when they see me coming.

If I did open one of these doors, what would I hope to find on the other side? What wondrous thing, what amazing experience, what wise person or beautiful sight or decadent treat would live up to the promise of the door? To speculate about such things is to think about who I am, why I believe I'm here, and what holes are still empty in my life. It's kind of scary, and potentially discouraging -- what if, after all that soul-searching, I discover that my fondest dream, the wonder I hope lies on the other side, is an all-meat pizza, a micro-brew, and the Twins beating the White Sox on a big-screen TV? 

It makes me think about my own doors, physical and spiritual. Too often, I fear, I have them tightly locked, a means of keeping my self to myself. I want my family and friends see my doors as invitations to something we will share, but do they? Do they see opportunity and the promise of memorable things, or are they too accustomed disappointment and a long trudge around to the public entrance?

Mental meanderings such as this are why it's amazing I'm still married -- this is the point where Dawn's eyes are usually glazed and she's struggling to find a polite response. Dad would say a door is just a door, you need one to keep the snow and neighbors from blowing in, that's all. I have rightfully been accused of thinking too much.

A vibrant thought life can be a handicap, especially in Northwest Iowa, where Dutchmen, farmers and Republicans tend to dominate -- pragmatic groups all, who don't normally put a high value on deep thinking. But I think if we take time to wonder, and wander, about the world, we find ourselves continually encountering the One who made it. That's a good enough reason for me.

Enough

I've been thinking a lot lately about the idea of "enough." Actually, I've been thinking about this off and on for years, ever since we paid off the house and everyone immediately assumed we'd turn around and buy a bigger one. We looked - having friends in real estate is like having family members who sell financial instruments, they're always pitching something - but we found we didn't want any of those big houses. So now, years later, we're still blissfully unaware of how miserable we are in our little house.

The funny thing is, a lot of folks think it's because we don't have enough money. We just think this is enough house for two people. And we're left with this shameful problem of money in the bank, and a lot of well-intentioned advisors telling us that we need some debt. Because paying taxes is bad but paying Citibank is good? At least I get something for my taxes.

The same thing happens with cars (I guess a half-ton pickup should embarass me enough that I'll eagerly take on another three years of payments just to avoid the death blow to my image) and vacations. And a huge industry has sprung up just to address the sensitivity men have about the size of their TV sets.

And how about food? If an eight-ounce steak is good, a 10-ounce steak is better, and best of all is that two-pound monster you get for free if you can finish it all. The best restaurants are buffets, right? European friends say only in America is the quality of a meal judged by it's quantity. No such thing as eating enough; all our best celebrations involve food comas.

The truth is, I guess, that for most of us enough isn't. We need more . . . than we have now, than the other guy has, whatever. After all, isn't that what Nelson Rockefeller is supposed to have said when asked how much money is enough - just a little bit more?

It's an important question, because until we have enough, everything we get goes to feeding our own insatiable need. There's more than enough wealth in this country to end poverty, stamp out hunger, fix education, put people back to work. There are so many digits to the left of the decimal point of our collective worth that we can't really comprehend it, yet each individual one of us still thinks we don't have enough. So all that money goes up in interest-payment smoke, or gets locked into the IRA.

At least, though, we're all a lot happier. Oh, you're not?

Then let me suggest that you think a little bit about enough. Because there's a lot of happiness, in a weird sort of way, in giving away 15% of what you earn and then finding out you managed to save even more than that. In backing your bought-for-cash truck out of your paid-for garage and realizing you haven't paid a dime of interest to anyone in over a decade. In helping three families get into homes because your credit is not only golden, it's completely unencumbered.

There is such a thing as enough. And figuring out what it is is half the fun.