...new hair!

//FAMILY OF THE YEAR "HERO"// I think I've been searching for the ambiance of this song for all my life. The melody just fills me up.

Well, so much for blogging everyday! Just overwhelmed the past two weeks with some crazy crap, like finals and AP exams and grad parties and band and newspaper and blahhhhhhhhhh. I've finally been realizing how much so many of my high school friends mean to me, and how much I'm going to miss a lot of them. I've tried to stay un-emotional, but, you know, it's inevitable. But, in the mean time, I am so ready to leave and experience new things and new people. It's a weird feeling.


...Christianity is so hard. The entire world needs you to serve it, and cares nothing about your relationship with the Lord and what you need to do for the Lord. I hate it sometimes! I want to give up! I think this is when you realize that you're experiencing Christ's promises, even the ones of which He promised the world would hate you. And they would compare you to the standard of perfection of which Jesus was, but of which humans can never hope to achieve. Endure, good people, endure.

By the way, pro tip: please never judge anyone's spirituality based on their behavior. It's hard, it can seriously suck, but as a servant of Christ, leave the judgment to Christ. Your faith in Christ Jesus justifies you, as said in Romans, and not your behavior. If you hurt someone, make sure you're apologizing and learning from your mistakes. If you rebuke, do so in kindness, and not in anger...

"So when the devil throws your sins in your face and tells you that you deserve death and hell, tell him this: I admit that I deserve death and hell, but what of it? For I know One who suffered and made satisfaction on my behalf. His name is Jesus Christ, Son of God, and where He is, there I will be also!"

um, another thing i've been writing. dang, i haven't written in such a long time. i don't know where this will go. i hope you will read it.
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It’s been about ten years since I’ve retired from Delta; the anniversary comes around every May, cause they send me something wacky and useless, like a commemorative, tortoiseshell inkwell pen that never actually works, in the mail every year right about this time. My wife and I traveled the world post-Delta for about four years before I broke my knee, and so we went home to New York where I confined myself to my self-pity for six months, watching the world come and go while I cried silently at my irrevocably aging body.

            I gulped coffee; I gulped whiskey.

            My wife died. The kids came around to say goodbye, but then they left. As they wrapped up and hopped onto their flights a week after the funeral, I sat down on the threadbare coverlet of the bed I had shared with my wife for thirty-five years and covered my face in my hands and wept. I stared out into the blank, answerless face of the moon, its silvery glow shining above the skyline and into the window, and I whispered to her from where I sat, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

I stayed awake the whole night and promised my wife and I that I would pick myself back up and find meaning again.            

These days, I pour drinks at a 24-hour, hole-in-the-wall bar down a few blocks from where I live. I’ve met some strange people, and they always make the best conversation, but they all seem to somehow wrap themselves up at around midnight to go quietly hiccup their way home. Few late-nighters and even fewer fights.

So when Phil, whose beard has inched its way down his chin for two consecutive years, slams his last shot glass down and quietly exits, I wipe down the counter and head to the back where I usually watch pirated movies on the desktop computer in the office until sunrise. Then Mark comes in and says, “Hey, Teddy, how was last night?” before I smile, say good, and then grab my coat and walk the two blocks back home to where I will nap for a few hours. It’s a slow, pleasant life.

 However, for the past two days, a lady has consistently showed up at three o’ clock in the morning to ask for a bourbon and coke. She will sit at the bar, typing away at a laptop computer, very serious, sometimes even moody, as she sips on her drink and then leaves an hour later. She always looks like she came directly from her office job, with her very tight suit and skirt, tie loosened, her long, black hair wavy from being in a bun all day. I can tell something is troubling her, but I only know that because she is stonily silent and nothing else. She never cries, she never speaks (except, “Bourbon and coke, sir, thank you,” every night, in that high-pitched voice, like it was recorded on tape).

I’ve wanted to emerge from the back office to try and make conversation with her, but her stoicism intimidates me. When I look at her, her life story charges through my imagination; I imagine her growing up in Northern California, graduating from Columbia, and now journaling for the Times while intentionally avoiding boyfriends and husbands and male attention. When we were sons in the 1960’s looking for the best honeys to marry, the prettiest girls were always too busy with accounting/journalism/nursing school to love a battle-worn kid from Wellington, Texas scarred by terrifying scenes of bullets through skulls and friends painfully dying in the jungles. My wife was a nurse during the war. She understood.  

“Bourbon and coke, sir, thank you.”

“May I ask you your name, madam?”

She looked up at me from her laptop computer, her brown eyes very wide. “Essie. Short for Esther.” Her face didn’t soften a bit.

I extended a hand, tingling from the encroaching Parkinson’s, and shook her soft, young hand. “Teddy.” I turned around to quickly shake together her drink and pour it into a glass.

“Thank you.” She gulped half of it when she took the glass from my hand, then practically slammed it onto the counter and furiously ran her fingers across the keyboard of her computer while the wrinkle between her brows deepened.

“Can I ask you something, dear?”

She looked up.

“What is bothering you?”

“Nothing,” she said much too quickly, then slapped her hand over her mouth, as if shocked by what had just come out of her mouth. The tears then began falling thick and fast. Her shoulders shook with her efforts to collect herself, but she turned away from me, bending over, sobbing uncontrollably.

“No, no, stop!” she angrily scolded herself, and my heart broke at the sight of someone so young suppressing something so vital to human existence as emotion.

“Essie,” I groaned as I tried my hardest to run around the counter, my knee protesting. “Essie, dear, please.”

“I’m sorry,” she murmured, rubbing her hands over her tear-stained cheeks, “I don’t mean to act this way.”

“Can I tell you something?” I asked. She nodded feebly. I sat down.

Wellington, Texas was really a very small town. There was one church, and it was Baptist, so I guess that meant that everyone in town was a Baptist; and I suppose when the oil company that owned the town brought in the new pastor, a Pentecostal minister from British Columbia, everyone in town became Pentecostal. The kids could hope to become like their cattle rancher daddys or head off to college, then come back to teach high school physics or run for mayor. Not until the war did us kids leave the plains.

My friend Aaron and I had recently graduated from high school the summer of 1965, and we had been chasing his dad’s cattle one afternoon with the truck when Aida Palmer came running after us over the hill, looking distraught and waving a yellowy letter in her hand. “Hey, man, stop the truck,” I yelled over Aaron’s maniacal laughter, and so we had come to a screeching halt right in front of her before she ran up to the open window and handed the letter to me. Her lips were very tight. She had already lost a lot of weight after birthing a stillborn that had kept her from graduating with us.

Both Aaron and I saw the return address, and suddenly I could feel the world come to a screeching halt in a second; the blood drained from my face, and my windpipe sealed shut.

“Do you want me to open it?” Aaron whispered after what seemed like a year of painful silence, and so I clenched the letter in my hand and ripped it open. I already knew what it demanded of me before I even read it.

“I knew it,” Aida murmured, her voice shaking as I skimmed over the letter’s contents. “I just knew it!” She began to cry, her sobs growing hysterical, so I had to yank open the door and climb out to wrap my arms around her small, skinny body while she shook, gasping for air. Aaron was silent.

“Shhh,” I whispered into her flaxen hair, and it was a while, the brazen sun setting, before I went home to tell my parents and my sister that I was to report to boot camp in two weeks.

“Move! Please move, please!”

“Get him outta here!”
            “Private, you need to leave!”

“Okay, goddammit!” I had bellowed, tears streaming down my face, and I charged out of the medical tent into the pouring rain. The helicopters were descending only a hundred feet away, so I could feel the torrent of wind and water on my bloodstained face as I screamed and screamed and screamed into the starless, moonless night. A bullet had wedged its way into my arm a couple of hours ago during the air raid, and I could feel the wound throbbing with painful thumps, but I couldn’t think about it, I couldn’t bring myself to understand or feel or speak. I just screamed.

All around me, medics scooped up wounded soldiers from helicopters onto stretchers and ran them into the tents. I stood in the middle of all the chaos until a herd of medics knocked me off my feet, and so I curled up into a ball in the puddles as the rain pelted my already-soaked uniform. The mud was in my mouth; I didn’t spit it out. Aaron was dying.

“Boy, what are you doing down there?”

I didn’t respond.

“Boy! Someone, get this guy outta here and into a tent!” I could feel him wrap his thick fingers beneath my armpits and heave me through the mud and into the tent I had just exited. Time crawled with cruel reluctance.

“Who is this guy? He was just in here!”

“I don’t give a fuck!”

“Sir—“

“I DON’T GIVE A FUCK! PUT HIM ON THE BED!”

I was heaved onto the bed. I refused to succumb to unconsciousness, so all through the night, screams of the amputees and groans of the dying haunted me as I lay paralyzed with fear in the far corner. I could only think about Aaron.

The sun had only just risen when a pair of exhausted medics finally turned to me. One snapped his fingers in my face. “Hey, hello? What’s wrong with you?”

I bit my lip to keep from sobbing. “Do you know Aaron Johns,” I murmured. “Aaron Johns! Please tell me…”

“I—I don’t know—“
            “Fuck! Aaron Johns! He has blonde curly hair!”

“Sir, there are a lot of—“

The other medic, a woman, frowned and put her finger beneath my chin. “Your face is covered in blood,” she said with a gentle finality, and I gulped at her touch. I had never seen anything so beautiful destroyed by fatigue and terror in my life. “Were you shot?” she asked.

“I—yes...”
            “Where?”

“There’s a bullet in my arm,” I said, wincing, and before I could say anything else, she had already stabbed a needle into the swollen muscle. They cut my sleeve around the scabbed wound, now oozing green and white pus, and I groaned breathlessly as they dug something into my arm and fished around for the bullet. I sobbed for my dead friend.

“Go ahead,” the woman said to the other man, and she pulled up a stool and slowly wrapped gauze around my bicep. Her eyes were wide and red; her cheeks were sunken. “It will take a couple of hours before we’ll allow you to leave,” she said, ripping the gauze and fastening it into a solid wad.

“You’ve seen the worst,” I said, and she made eye contact with me. She was beautiful. Aaron was dead.

“We all have,” she said through tight lips, and she looked down to the ground very quickly, clenching and unclenching her teeth. “I’ve wondered ever since the first day…what God allows this?” she said, and finally let go of my arm, wiping the tears that had oozed out of her eyes. “God, I don’t know if I can take much more of this.”

I was silent. There was nothing I could say.

“What’s your name?”

“Edward. Teddy, really. Teddy Sturgess.”

She nodded, but didn’t say anything for a while. After swallowing hard, she stared at my filthy boot as she said, “Aaron Johns died at three a.m. He was identified at four-thirty by his commanding officer. I’m so sorry.”

“How many times do you say something like that a day?”

“I don’t know,” she sobbed, clenching the blanket on the bed, trying to collect herself. I didn’t know how many more times my heart could break.

“May I ask you your name, madam?”

She looked up from her wrung hands, her brown eyes shaking, her face drained of color.

“Emmie. Short for Emilia.”

 “I’ll tell you something, Emmie. I’m sorry too.”

last january, i went through some really tough stuff. last january, i really learned about the universality of suffering, and how humans are prone to feeling completely alone in their times of pain-- but that there's a Suffering Servant who knows your pain intimately. if that pain just sits there, it becomes useless. if that pain is used, it can glorify.

levi the poet's words really helped me through last january.

 

"We looked down on him, thought he was scum. But the fact is, it was our pains that he carried- our disfigurements, all the things wrong with us. We thought he brought it on himself, that God was punishing him for his own failures. But it was our sins that did that to him...that ripped and tore and crushed him...Through his bruises we get healed."

paul newman. what a timelessly cool dude. cheers to you and your 50-year marriage of which i fangirl over consistently. //LOU TETI "WINTER"// soundcloud is one amazing place! you can find great new music just by scrolling through the pages!

hello, internet. it's going to be a rough two weeks. there are so many things happening all at once, and the sad part is you have to pick and choose what deserves your attention. this is where growing up comes into play, i suppose. as for now, i think i'm ready to get a 5 on my art history exam, and about a 2 on my physics exam. and as for now, i really cannot wait to meet and make friends with all the people in the grand challenges program at georgia tech. i love meeting them on facebook, but i want to meet them in real life!

rain rain rain rain here in georgia...when will it finally become warm?

i'm also very flattered by the surge in pageviews i've been getting the past few days. they may be just random people clicking through the web, but it makes me feel better nonetheless. ^_^

movie still from "no country for old men." i've been sharing it all over the internet since yesterday, because it was the first really excellent movie i've seen in a long time. everything else nowadays seems so predictable and stupid. i highly recommend this film.

//the neighbourhood "sweater weather"// catchy song they started playing on the radio last week.

the weekend's been pretty good. on saturday morning, my mom, my friend emma, and me woke up early to do the cobb hobbler at 7:30 in the morning to do service hours for nhs. i laugh, because this is what service hours has come to in the last few weeks of our high school careers.  then, me and my mom went to get stationary so we could make graduation announcements, and i learned that my family is going to be heading to hong kong for a month over the summer. how lucky am i? "praise Him, from whom all blessings flow..."

then i went to work (very long night at le restaurant, but i got to see my boss/friend, nick, who is just one awesome, hilarious, loving guy) and came home and watched "no country for old men" with my parents. today, my dad took some pictures of me for graduation announcements, and then i studied. all day. art history. exam tuesday. see you on the other side.

i'm taking a "study break" (i take long study breaks. sometimes i don't go back to the studying, haha) right now. hashing out my events for the day really puts into perspective what blessings have been showered upon me, even though in no way have i done anything to deserve them. my next step is to serve others with what i've been given. praise be to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Quality Friday night; I knew I had a lot of things to do, but what I thought would be chores ended up becoming one heckuva good night. So, right after school, I practiced our pieces with the flute choir before heading home to change and then skip on over to church for the benefit concert.

Tonight was the Breaking the Shackles benefit concert, of which was completely student-run and student-led, gathering funds to donate to International Justice Mission, Youth Spark, and Wellspring Living to finally bring an end to modern day slavery once and for all. The concert was a ton of fun too; the very famous Ryan Steffes and some of his friends did pre-show music, but I only stuck around to hear Brett Younker and his band play before I had to leave. Nevertheless, it was awesome worship. Jumpin', laughin', screamin'.

Then, I had to leave early for the Tri-M recital. I changed again into a striped dress Paige loaned me so that all of us in the flute choir matched stripy dresses. Pretty cool. We're the best little sisterhood. While I was there, I came to realize how much amazing talent we have at our school; the people who played were pure geniuses, and not only that, but we as students put together our performances all by ourselves. Soloists, choirs, ensembles...the concert hall was beautiful. Everything a professional recital could ask for, really.

One of the most remarkable soloists of the night was my friend Harry. I had completely forgotten that he began playing piano maybe only two years ago... So he steps up, sits down, and plays a hauntingly sweet song that was not only beautiful, but fully expressive, completely expressive, as if he had endured some monumental pain and could only tell us in a way of which he desired to spare us. I was in tears by the end of it. I'm not sure if he felt that way, or saw his work in that way, cause I'm sure he left feeling very critical of himself, but it moved me. So many great performances tonight.

Then we got our Tri-M cords (pink!) as seniors, and got applauded and congratulated and all that.

Then we went out after the recital for dinner. Lots of fun. I will certainly miss these people.

movie still from "before sunrise," possibly one of my favorite movies. // music by phoenix "entertainment". their new album is awesome!! go listen to it on spotify right now!!

nice day at school today. preparing for ap exams and all that, even though i just can't seem to get motivated to study physics while i'm at home. it's such a drag, and it sucks. i'm glad i still get to see all my friends for this last month. it's too soon that we're gonna part ways.

today, i got to see my friend kameron while i stayed after school to work on the senior issue of the newpaper. he and i met in september, when i started to stay late for the newspaper, and he would come around the rooms and eat dinner before he went to go clean the school. we started talking, and he's given me the best advice on college, life, relationships, the Faith, and beyond. he's an aspiring artist, and he married his childhood sweetheart, and today was his last day before he moves on to his new job. it's possibly the last day i get to see him, but i hope not.

i will surely pray for him, and all my friends as we move on to college and life. one of my biggest fears is to see my friends at georgia tech and everywhere else, who are hardworking and steadfast and motivated, get pulled into the wrong direction while at college, and i won't be able to do a thing about it. what can you do but pray? pray so so so so hard?

"Come, Lord Jesus."

this morning, i wrote a short letter to mr. watkins, who is retiring after 31 years as lassiter's band director. he put our school on the map in 1998, and the rest is history. not only that, but for these four years, he gave me a confidence i wouldn't have otherwise had without the marching band program. one day, i wasn't feeling all too great, and apparently it showed on my face. even though we had rehearsal, he pulled me aside into his office and we talked for about an hour. i really felt special to him. true leaders do that. as arrogant as we all know he can get sometimes, he does know what he's doing. i will miss him.

CHACLACAYO, PERU. PHOTO BY AUSTIN SMITH. AN INCREDIBLE MISSION TRIP TO SERVE AN INCREDIBLE GOD.

//ACTIVE CHILD: EVENING CEREMONY//
I SERIOUSLY LOVE THIS GUY AND WHAT HE DOES WITH MUSIC. SO BEAUTIFUL.


greetings internet! i didn't post yesterday because i was busy all evening! which is a very good thing, i suppose. last night was the symphony concert, where we played music from "les mis", "chicago", "rocky" and "e.t." and i had a piccolo solo! all in all, a really good concert, actually. before, we went out to eat, and when i was in the backseat of the car, i poked my head out the window and was just kind of was amazed as we drove to zaxby's.

i dunno why, but i think that only maybe two years ago, we were sixteen year olds with no freedom, and now, we're adults driving cars and going out by ourselves. we're growing beards. we're going to college. pretty soon, you'll see the people on facebook getting engaged and life continues on. it's impossible to stop. i just wish we could be forever young, while still experiencing all that life has to offer. haha, i suppose doesn't everyone wish that?