Every Night on Eleanor Avenue

Doodle Series

Official report of the ending of the previous week

My increasingly settled and domestic immersion into the Texan Republic has made me remiss in my consistent posting to the Churchmanistani base. It is hard to prioritize gathering intelligence while building a life as a new young teacher convincing enough to allow the Texan authorities to extend my diplomatic papers. Below is my official post from the ending of the previous week.

Last weekend I:

Saw the most recent Harry Potter movie with Emily and some pals from the teaching institute. Perhaps I should read the books before passing judgment, but I'm instantly suspect of any movie that the Vatican approves of. Though, the Pope hated the Da Vinci Code, so maybe he does have some taste. We followed the movie with hot wings, which I have not found an official Catholic opinion on so you'll have to judge for yourself.

Played Frisbee Golf. While trying to find the beautiful course hidden behind a middle school, Emily and I tramped through an adjacent park. In that adjacent park populated by men riding very small bicycles like urban clowns, my besandaled foot was covered in fire ants and is currently covered in unbearably itchy welts.

Bought a new car.



Car dealerships now are set up sort of like a casino; they do everything they can to keep you there for as long as possible. The most disconcerting thing my dealer did was talk to me for about a minute and then rush off for five minutes to "answer a question." Luckily, I had my "smart phone" to entertain me. While the dealer disappeared, I would double check different ratings and prices on my car. I would use my calculator on the latest offer to make sure it made sense to me. When I still had time to kill after doing that, I played video games, rather than sit there and get impatient. The entire ordeal took around five hours, and I ended up with about the car at about the price that I wanted so I feel like I came away about as unscathed as I could expect considering my absolute lack of experience.

Played Ultimate Frisbee. This Sunday was only in the low 90s instead of the 100s, so I probably only drank half a gallon of water. Afterward, one of the players invited us to join him at his favorite restaurant. The dinner was incredible, home-made Pakistani food, which was in the family of (though definitely different from) my Indian food excursions. The evening was full of good conversation and way too much food.

High School English

As part of my teaching institute, I observed a high school English class. It was a three and a half hour class, and about ninety percent of the period consisted of the students writing. This did not leave me much to observe, so I answered the given prompts along with the students to pass the time. You might note that I don’t always answer the prompt completely, which would undoubtedly hurt my grade had I turned them in, but the prompts were timed, and it seems inauthentic to revise them too heavily here. For some reason, I also chose to answer the first few prompts in second person, which I guess seemed more journalistic or something at the time.

Prompt 1: Give your basic information = name, age, where and when born, physical description.

David Churchman, twenty-three years old, was born in Arlington, VA, a close suburb of Washington, D.C. on July, 31, 1985, a warm summer Wednesday. Today, he rises an average of five feet, nine inches off of the ground and sports an unruly beard and shaggy mop-top. His feet are disproportionately short and wide, though his toes are generally handsome in length and relative size. His physique is far from similar to Brad Pitt’s, but he likes to think he would give Cary Grant a run for his money in his hey-day. The back of his hand shows evidence of being used as a notepad, though probably not today. His hands also show evidence of recently peeled or healed blisters, possibly indicating some past physical labor.

Prompt 2: What are your likes and dislikes? Be specific. Give solid, reasonable explanations for each.

David loves a breeze on a hot day. He loves the relief it provides when you’re working a little too hard. He loves the way it tussles your hair a little like a swimsuit model on a beach photo-shoot. He loves the chaos of people chasing after lost hats, dollar bills or newspapers. He even loves the little grit that it sometimes blows into your eyes so that maybe you have to turn away for a moment. More than that, he loves sitting in the shade of a gnarly old tree with a breeze blowing the speckles of sunlight poking through the branches occasionally across his face.

David remembers one time when he was twelve and he was sitting on the large branch on the tree in the front yard where the family had the swing drilled into its thick underbelly. This was several years before the family had returned from a vacation to discover that a storm had twisted this massive branch that stuck out at a perfect ninety degree angle so that men had to come to saw away hundred of pounds of firewood. David loved sitting on top of that branch with a book in his hand, ostensibly to read, but mostly he would look around at the squirrels playing below him or the neighbors walking their blissed-out dogs around the block. With its coarse bark, the tree was not very comfortable to sit in, but the idea of sitting in the tree kept him up there for hours. He must have looked serene because a man came by and asked to take a few pictures, as he was a photographer and wanted to submit a picture of him to the County Fair.

David wonders how well this man did at the County Fair; if he ended up using any of those pictures of the boy in the tree with a book. He wonders if people saw that picture and decided to sit in a tree only to discover that it is not as comfortable or serene as the boy made it look, but decided to stay in the tree for a while because they liked the idea of sitting in a tree with a book. He wonders if they also stopped to stare up into the branches, marveling at the complex shapes and faces that were constantly shifting and changing in the patterns of branches and leaves while a breeze cut through the warm air.

Prompt 3: Give 3 things that you stand for or believe in. Why? How do you show this? Give solid, reasonable explanations for each. (*Ambassador’s note: while simple for a high school student, this prompt pained me the most to even attempt. I don’t think what I came up with are necessarily the three most important things I believe in, but they will have to do for now.*)

I believe that a strong education is a fundamental human right, and it is absolutely necessary for a just society to progress that its entire population receive one. I believe in the power of compassion, forgiveness and the benefit of the doubt, and the inefficacy of conflict or competition as problem solving strategies. I believe in the power and necessity of humor, and that without it there could be no beauty or art (which I believe are also essential to the human experience.)

Prompt 4: What 3 past influences (events or people) have shaped you into the person you are today? Give specifics.

That Old Time Religion:

My family went to church at least every Sunday. Various members of our family and I at different times were ushers, acolytes, choristers, organists, hand-bell ringers, church bell ringers, lay Eucharistic ministers, lesson readers, presidents of the vestry, leaders and attendees of church school, pancake flippers on Shrove Tuesday, dish-washers at youth group spaghetti dinners, and I believe we hit every member of the Nativity in plays: Gabriel, shepherds, sheep, donkeys, angels, Joseph, Mary, and of course baby-Jesus. I think we did everything in the church at least once except for blessing the sacrament, though my maternal grandfather certainly did that a few times as a Lutheran minister, as well as baptizing me shortly before he died. I’ve been working at an Episcopalian summer camp for eight summers, ostensibly teaching campers how to live well as Christians. My ideology and morality have been hugely if not entirely shaped by my numerous encounters with the church, the Bible, and Jesus’ teachings.

Now, I tell evangelists (and get maybe a little too much pleasure in doing so) that I’m 99% Christian. That other 1% of Jesus’ teachings where it’s important to believe He is the Son of God (or that there is a God to be a Son of) and that He was resurrected from a brutal murder is just not that important to me, and I don’t especially believe it would be that important to any hypothetical deity what I believed compared with the way I live my life and treat other people and the world I live in.

Other People:

It seems too obvious and probably some form of Freudian therapy to mention my parents as an influence on “who I am today.” I will refrain from expanding the hows and whys, as my mother is my only faithful reader. Perhaps she’ll explain it on her blog. For that matter, there are innumerable friends, family, teachers, and random passerby that have profoundly influenced every aspect of my self, but to try to pinpoint every piece of my personality and ideology to various people is fairly tedious.

An Event:

I am hard pressed to think of a single event that measurably changed my fundamental character or personality, but what pops into my head is a moment I had with Joe Cavanaugh. He was a cheerful, severely mentally handicapped boy in my third-grade class who died towards the end of the school year. I don’t remember any sort of deterioration in his health, or even the conversation where I was told that he had died. I do remember going out to dinner one night, probably to Black Eyed Pea’s, and either on the way there or on the way back going to view Joe’s body.

I didn’t realize where we were going or what we were doing until I was standing in front of the dimly-lit room full of somber looking adults with a coffin sitting on the far side. I walked through the gray and black suits, acutely aware of my ratty t-shirt, shorts, and beat-up sneakers that are the uniform of any eight-year-old boy. In my memory, it seems like I walked straight up to the coffin without talking to anyone, stepped up on something, looked down on a face that looked nothing like Joe without his glasses or his open-mouthed smile, thought I should probably say a prayer or at least a good-bye, and then walked straight out again. I also can’t remember my family being there with me; as if they had dropped me off at the curb like at soccer practice.

Though a lonely memory, this isn’t the event that comes to mind as particularly shaping me. Much more vividly, I remember being one of Joe’s student helpers that pushed his wheelchair when he needed to go somewhere. I remember being alone in the cavernous hallway with Joe and another boy with me, who I think may have been Kevin Reiley. I ran down the hall with Joe, occasionally catching a ride on the back of his chair like I still do with carts at the grocery store. An ancient administrator named Mrs. Carmichael with steely talons that came up behind you during lunch and clutched your shoulder with an iron grip came behind us while we were making a sharp turn, yelled at us in dismay, and sent us back to class while she took care of Joe.

I don’t remember any punishment or lecture, but I distinctly remember the sense of guilt that I had abused my responsibility and power over someone so helpless. It may have been the first time I moved past the inherent psychopathy of childhood and felt anything akin to guilt or remorse.

A memory I group with this is a Christmas around the same time. My younger Churchmanistani sister had gotten a three foot tall stuffed, pink Power Ranger. I had some reason to be upset with my older sister so I grabbed the Power Ranger by the ankles and whacked my sis' square in the face with the dense, foam-filled vigilante. My older sister's prompt tears filled me with immediate guilt. Up until that point I had seen her as completely omnipotent over me until suddenly I was in a position of power over her, and I had completely abused it - inflicting an act of violence far more cruel than she had ever enacted in her older-sisterly teasing.

Perhaps it goes back to my Christian upbringing that my most shaping childhood memories are moments of extreme guilt...