Lessons From Art

In Remembrance of my father-in-law, Arthur F. Field III

In his book, Bread for the Journey, Henri Knouen described death like this:

“Dying is a gradual diminishing and final vanishing over the horizon of life. When we watch a sailboat moving toward the horizon, it becomes smaller and smaller until we can no longer see it. But we must trust that someone is standing on a faraway shore seeing that same sailboat become larger and larger until it reaches its new harbor.

“Death is a painful loss. When we return to our homes after a burial, our hearts are in grief. But when we think about the One standing at the other shore eagerly waiting to welcome our beloved friend into a new home, a smile can break through our tears.”

It’s a beautiful picture, isn’t it? But doesn’t it seem more likely that Art is standing up near the bow, a little anxious to get where he’s going, his glasses clenched in his teeth, reading a long list of items he’s prepared to ask God about?

“Why do professional athletes makes so much money?”
“Are tax abatements really necessary?”
Perhaps even, “Why am I here so soon?”

On the shore, God is standing there delivering a pep talk to the angels surrounding him, trying to boost morale for the discussion (arguments) to come.

Here was a man who is best described as a contradiction: A conservative democrat. A sober Irishman. An accountant who often failed to keep tabs. He was a good father, but he excelled at being Grandpa. He loved this city and the people who make it what it is, but he had no use at all for the professional sports that have come to define it.

He was a man with great faith and conviction who loved to argue, but wouldn’t begrudge you for not agreeing. In fact, he seemed to prefer to be around people who didn’t agree, because the arguing was so much more enjoyable.

He loved to tell off-color jokes to the very people who were the subject of the joke. If the joke started “a rabbi, a priest and a prostitute walked into a bar,” Art’s preference would be to pull together a rabbi, a priest and a prostitute to tell it to. His little lesson in humility, I think. He spread most of these jokes via the fax machine. A couple months ago he pulled me aside and said, “Next year, I’m getting email.” If he’d known how many jokes were sent via email, he would have signed up years ago.

It comes as no surprise to those who knew him that Art loved parties. He loved them for the people and the camaraderie. He hated to leave and, more often than not, he and Charmaine were the final couple on the dance floor and the last out the door.

When the disciples asked Jesus which commandment was most important, he replied, “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. A second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.” This was the first lesson of Art’s life and he worked to bring this commandment to life.

If you were doing okay, he fully expected you to keep on pulling your weight. More than once, he wrote car loans for the kids and had the payoff calculated to the penny – and intended that every penny was paid back. But if you were down on your luck, or you needed help, or you were looking for someone to support your cause, or you needed to renovate a church after a fire, there were few people more willing to lend a hand or more generous than Art.

He kept meticulous records. Charmaine, standing amidst stacks of National Geographic magazines going back to the 60’s might say a bit too meticulous. I remember the Christmas holiday that he was showing off his tax return… from 1953. But when it came to helping someone, Art mysteriously forgot to keep track. And he often did these things for people he either hardly knew or didn’t know at all. He would rent you a house but rarely collect the rent. He made loans that went unpaid. I don’t know how many returns he filed without ever collecting payment for preparing them. And he didn’t want anything in return. It was his nature to pay things forward, and he did it readily and willingly.

The evidence of his generous nature continues to come back to us in unexpected ways. A few months ago, I met a man who had worked with Art almost thirty years ago and hadn’t seen him in some time. When he found out he was my father-in-law, he spent the next half an hour recounting the things Art had done for him all those years ago.

We all know that change can be difficult. When cancer arrived on Art’s doorstep fourteen years ago it came as a wake up call; he woke up. I’ve witnessed dramatic changes in the man I met twelve years ago. I believe he saw in his cancer a chance to remake himself in the image he wanted to become. A second chance, of sorts, to hold life a little closer, to hold his grandkids a little longer, to hold Charmaine a little tighter.

And through it all, the radiation, the surgeries, the toll it took on him, he never complained. In fact, the first and only time I ever heard him utter a complaint was just a few months ago, when the pain had him incapacitated. He was a man’s man. He was a fighter. He, indeed, fought the good fight. And while in the end he lost his battle with this life, he won the greater reward and goes on before us to light the way.  

When someone has been battling cancer for fourteen years, it may sound a little silly to say that we were all taken by surprise by Art’s sudden decline earlier this year. But that’s exactly what happened. It seemed as if one day he was trying to break my hand with his handshake and the next he was in intensive care. We were unprepared and honestly, things didn’t look so good. It was at this moment that God revealed the last piece of his plan for Art and taught us the final lesson of his life.

His recovery and reprieve was a blessing of the highest magnitude and we all took full advantage of it. Charlie, his 18th grandchild was born. There was time to visit, time to talk. And the lesson is this: if you have something to say, say it. If you have something to do, do it. Don’t wait. Don’t waste a single minute in unnecessary anger or pointless self-pity. Live the life that God has given you, because second chances don’t come around very often.

When Paul wrote his second letter to the congregation at Corinth, he addressed several issues they were facing and provided a doctrinal basis for dealing with them. Most notably for us, he reveals his faith that Jesus’ passion and resurrection are the pattern for all Christian life, which provides us great comfort:

2 Cor: 4

“So death is at work in us, but life in you.
Since, then, we have the same spirit of faith,
according to what is written, I believed, therefore I spoke,
we too believe and therefore speak, 
knowing that the one who raised the Lord Jesus
will raise us also with Jesus
and place us with you in his presence.”

So as Art sails off to the next destination on his journey, he leaves in his wake a wife who loved him unconditionally, his children and grandchildren, his extended family and friends. And now we stand here as picture-perfect contradictions of our own. We are miserable for our own loss and will miss him dearly, yet our hearts are full of joy for what lies ahead for Grandpa, for Dad, for Art.

Daring Greatly: Rare Bird at 10 Years

In a few days, we’ll be celebrating the 10th anniversary of starting Rare Bird. I woke up this morning with the words of Teddy Roosevelt on my mind, which I first encountered years ago in “The Norman Shield,” the pledge training manual of Sigma Chi.

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”

President Theodore Roosevelt
“Citizenship in a Republic,”
Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910

I’m not certain if “daring greatly” is entirely fitting, but I believe that we have experienced the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and we are spending ourselves in a worthy cause. It’s been a lot of fun and I’m looking forward to the next ten!

Why I Ride

I don’t get out often enough, but every time I climb on my bike, my mind is cleared and my soul refreshed. The best thing is, you don’t have to go far to find a decent trail. Within a couple miles from my house, I can access a trail right here in Marion county that never fails to deliver. The normal access is up on 96th Street near Hazel Dell Parkway. The trail extends south from there along the river, crosses under I-465 and continues on a long(ish) winding loop through a field of wild flowers and along the banks of both the White River and a small tributary.

I access the trail on the south end by crossing over River Road, winding back on an old access road and carrying my bike across a log that has fallen over the creek. The round trip from my house, through the trail and back is about 16 miles. I can’t imagine ever wanting to ride among the exhaust and cars of the street when there are winding trails through the woods available…

Fixing my iPhone syncing & lag problems

I love my iPhone and have found the transition to the 2.0 software to be basically painless. I was also very much looking forward to updating from the “cloud” provided by MobileMe, essentially ensuring that everything would be up-to-date without having to physically attach the iPhone to my Mac. Problems arose almost immediately: I began experiencing huge (10-15 second) delays when making selections on the iPhone, trying to access applications or even make a simple phone call. I tracked down the issue and fixed it, and you can too. Here’s how.

My problem was related to my contacts. After years in business, I have nearly 5,000 contacts in Address Book, but with version 1.0, I only synced “active” records to the phone. I simply created a group called iPhone and put everyone in the group that I wanted to have on the phone. Simple and effective. When I upgraded the phone software and turned on cloud syncing with MobileMe, however, I experienced an odd problem. MobileMe seemed to only want to sync *all* of my contacts, not just a specified group. After allowing this to happen, the delays and buggy performance began on my iPhone.

For me, I spend a lot of time out of the office. I’m rarely (but occasionally) adding new contacts via the iPhone, but I’m frequently adding new calendar events on both the phone and the computer. The events have to stay updated all the time so the office knows where I am and what’s going on, but the contacts can be synced manually (by physically connecting to the computer.)
(Note: I attribute the fact that it took a few days to fix this problem as user error. I simply wasn’t looking hard enough to find a fix.) Anyway, digging into the preferences, iTunes mentioned that I could control the push options on the iPhone. The problem was that calendars and contacts seemed to share the same preferences. If I wanted to push calendars (which I definitely did) I had to push contacts (which I was willing to live without.)

On your iPhone, choose Settings > Fetch New Data > Advanced > username@mac.com

You’ll see that Calendars & Contacts are grouped together here and share the same option, whether it’s Push or Fetch. Bummer.

But I eventually found a different location that offered what I was looking for:

On your iPhone, choose Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > username@mac.com >

This opens a MobileMe account info screen which provides the ability to individually control behaviors for Mail, Contacts, Calendars, and Bookmarks. In these settings, I turned Calendars on and left the others off. This allows my calendar to *always* sync automatically through the cloud but I can manually control Contacts.

So, back in iTunes, on the Info tab, I have the ability to “Sync Address Book contacts” and choose which selected groups to sync. Now the calendar is always right, the right contacts are on the phone and the complete Address Book is backed up on all my computers (and MobileMe), and the laggy performance on the iPhone is gone. Problem solved!