Heart Awakening

An account of 2020’s Covid19 World Attack

/ Norman Eric Peterson / Leave a comment

It was getting dicey and worrisome for everyone. The quarantine was working somewhat, but the death toll was still climbing everywhere. The news-room personalities were beginning to visibly sweat, and it wasn’t the stage lighting. Cameras were fixed and it was obvious there was only one camera and no director for various shots and video inserts. Just one camera, and no one behind it. The ‘personality’ with a rumpled suit was reading off paper in front of him (no prompter) and the weather didn’t have any green-screen and the prognostication was very vague.

Grocery stores had empty shelves, but that was all right because the parking lots were empty too. Gasoline was down to 75 cents but no one was buying except medical and military. Pleasant driving if you wanted to risk it. Roadblocks and interstate driving enforced with the national guard. No one moved unless you have paperwork displayed on the plates, fore and aft. The bridges were secured.

The phones still worked and the power was pretty good. Amazingly, there were still areas where the fiber carried the internet but the load on that pipeline was enormous. Many reliable and local updates on where latest food and scavengers were moving and advice on security measures. Very little panic. Neighborhoods and townships were unifying and assistance grew within them.

Medical triage and field medic people were in big demand and local connections worked pretty well. After the alerts where the looters were predicted, these honorable people were available to friend and foe alike. The locals began to see something they had not seen before. Compassion and a love for their fellow man, almost impossible to understand. When asked about this, the the medics and doctors would smile and reply with an understandable Gospel. Before it all, the immediate response to a faith message was “great, they’re going to tell me how I can be just like them if only I follow the rules” Now there was serious response to the joy found in listening to the Lord.

There was dialogue and questions. Then we began to reveal how much we thought and felt about this similar ‘bad’ behavior in ourselves. Certainly we were not saints but somehow happy and …well, free. No rules given, just paying attention to the hunger for human contact everyone was experiencing.

The somewhat simple explanation from these medical volunteers was easily understood. Many times there was a demand to have them visit again if possible. It was was new. There were no suits and ties, endorsement of connections. No tracts or phony glad handing. Real missionaries. The calmness and strength of these volunteers was what everyone needed. The usual isolation and fear of each other was being replaced with community and trust. After a short while, safe housing was set up for the desperate roaming families and civilization started to come back to stay. There was no doubt that Jesus had done a miracle and there was great hope and strength spreading throughout the land.

Norm Peterson and Jack Gator

Quotes That Allow Me to Write The Truth

/ Norman Eric Peterson / Leave a comment

I think good preachers should be like bad kids. They ought to be naughty enough to tiptoe up on dozing congregations, steal their bottles of religion pills, and morality pills, and flush them all down the drain. The church, by and large, has drugged itself into thinking that proper human behavior is the key to its relationship to God. What preachers need to do is force it to go cold turkey with nothing but the word of the cross—and then be brave enough to stick around while it goes through the inevitable withdrawal symptoms. … Robert Farrar Capon (1925-2013),

Genuine controversy, fair cut and thrust before a common audience, has become in our special epoch very rare. For the sincere conversationalist is above all things a good listener. The really burning enthusiast never interrupts; he listens to the enemy’s arguments as eagerly as a spy would listen to the enemy’s arrangements. If you attempt an actual argument with a modern paper of opposite politics, you will find that no medium is admitted between violence and evasion. You will have no answer except slandering or silence. …G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936), 

Was there a moment known only to God, when all the stars held their breath, when the galaxies paused in their dance for a fraction of a second, and the Word, who had called it all into being, went with all his love into the womb of a young girl, and the universe started to breathe again, and the ancient harmonies resumed their song, and the angels clapped for joy?

…Madeleine L’Engle (1918-2007)

O be calm and quiet all by yourself is hardly the same as sleeping. In fact, it means being fully awake and following with close attention every move going on inside you. It involves a self-discipline where the urge to get up and go is recognized as a temptation to look elsewhere for what is really close at hand. It is the freedom to stroll in your own yard, to rake up the leaves and clear the paths so you can easily find your way.

…Henri J. M. Nouwen (1932-1996)

 Here is my examination at the beginning of Advent, at the beginning of a new year. Lack of charity, criticism of superiors, of neighbors, of friends and enemies. Idle talk, impatience, lack of self-control and mortification towards self, and of love towards others. Pride and presumption. (It is good to have visitors – one’s faults stand out in the company of others.) Self-will, desire not to be corrected, to have one’s own way. The desire in turn to correct others, impatience in thought and speech.The remedy is recollection and silence Dorothy Day (1897-1980),

Everything is made to center upon the initial act of “accepting” Christ (a term, incidentally, which is not found in the Bible) and we are not expected thereafter to crave any further revelation of God to our souls. We have been snared in the coils of a spurious logic which insists that if we have found Him we need no more seek Him. This is set before us as the last word in orthodoxy, and it is taken for granted that no Bible-taught Christian ever believed otherwise.. A. W. Tozer (1879-1963)

It must be admitted that a few clergymen glory in the contrast between their status and that of ordinary Christians. They accept obeisance as a natural right; they monopolize public praying; they learn how to keep themselves in the limelight. There is something about the pastoral office which makes the temptation to egocentricity especially powerful. This is partly because the successful preacher is regularly praised to his face. His mood seems a far cry from that of Christ when He girded Himself with a towel and washed the feet of His followers.

… Elton Trueblood (1900-1994)

Emotion and Worship

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We’ve all heard it before in some context; “ you’re so emotional!” My response now to that is

asking, What is wrong with that? We are reluctant to endorse or engage with emotion in many situations. Many psychobabble voices tell us to calm down, damp down our emotions and be calm and ‘clear headed’ I am not sure that is appropriate. I get emotional reading a book or listening to Beethoven’s beauty. Weeping with pleasure and letting my emotions release it.

I have recently been trained in helping people to engage with emotions presented by ‘performance’ in worship music. Live performance, seen on a screen. It’s the same way we watch and listen without knowing we do so. Our eyes are drawn to different things as we move through our lives. We watch and are engaged with our surroundings. Constantly scanning the roads for dangers or beauty. Looking at the dash gauges. We don’t just stare straight ahead, we move our heads and eyes to see the world passing by us.

I have been taught that those are the natural movements and as an example: When zooming in on a singer ( it’s called pushing in) we don’t do it fast. Unnatural, it causes a distraction. We change focus as we look near or far and that is controlled as well. We open or close our iris according to dim or bright reflections or light. That’s called shading. The excitement in video production is different angles and being shown changes and solos we miss if looking elsewhere.

There are also many facets to production that are not noticed but essential. Lighting with movement, color, focus and the use of ‘haze’ to show light beams which catch our eye and help us focus where the light is showing us. Sound, very important and very technical for music and speech. To hear everything clearly, the spectrum of frequencies and to not overpower but to enhance experiences. If the sound feedback happens with a loud hum or a singer overpowers other singers, the room full of people instinctively swivel their heads to the place they know this control is. It’s called a sound booth solo and sound booths are called ‘front of house’ (more media lingo)

It’s an art and if well done, not noticeable if done well, to a person watching or in the room during a live production. Movies are complex and a good example of these things too. You don’t even notice the technical camera work and perfect sound and dialogue that conveys a story. The story engages you and emotions below the surface, sometimes with excitement or tears.

What is our story? The real stuff, the romance between us and Christ. God the Father lifts His eternal baton, Jesus intercedes for our failures and the Holy Spirit whispers songs of Faith and love to us.

Emotion is a gift from God. I can only imagine Biblical descriptions that movies try to capture. The parting of the Red sea, burning bushes and the sea of glass mingled with fire. Do those things stir you? I have heard about production, “oh that’s done to get you emotional” Of course not. As the song says, I can only imagine being there and seeing these things. Ask Him when you show up at those Gates of Heaven. I believe He will be delighted to take you there and be one of those in the Cloud of Witness’. I will ask to help with the run through in the Holy Production for you if I get there first. You will be an operator and we can work together with a lot of help from the Producer and Director. Eternal Productions bring you the reality of all life.

It’s Pretty good. Norm and Jack

Healing from Prayer

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There it was, a calling. A nudge of confirmation. A recent column describes the onset of this calling., it began in Sunday School in Minneapolis. I was 10 or so and the Sunday school was held in a tall building downtown. It retrospect it looked like training building for firemen.

The main church was across the parking lot and it held a lot of people and quite a few of them were Shriner’s. Grandpa was a high ranking one and he drove us every Sunday. 23rd degree something. The School teacher made sure we memorized a prayer and I still remember most of it. I was not overly enthused about the whole deal, but I went along. When the teacher passed the offering plate, I would produce my offering and say “I want this to go deep!” Palming quarters as I reached in. Candy money at the store right across the street from School. Perfect store placement. The first fast food outfit I know of.

That short prayer was one that I uttered a few times through my life as though it was a collection of words that would connect the dots I can not. Change things from the magic of words. Akin the the under ones breath muttering from a nursery rhyme that comforts. There is a movie that illustrates a man that does this under decisions of stress.

“Jesus Christ show me today how to walk in every way.” I haven’t used it in a long time and I have some of it askew, but that was as I remember. It was important and seemed like the ham radio I was involved in as a basic ‘call sign’ The two letters C and Q. Seek You.

Much better than a physical comforting like drugs or sitting on Santa’s lap as the line at the department store allowed you to be next. He doesn’t heal, he just helps sell stuff.

Impossible. Imprinted as truth to a young child who believed seeking finds. Something or someone. I remember contacting a Russian during the cold war when the only currency was Duck and cover in grade school. I was a very different child and difference scares people. Some people except other different ones. Those sorts of things worked for me.

I muttered the phrase once when it made a life altering experience. I was addicted to heroin and did not want to be but it was so pleasant took physical and mental pain away. Completely. Ask a former addict or a counselor to verify this. I said it when I was alone with my line on glass and a hundred dollar bill rolled up to snort it with. I then heard five audible words that quoted scripture out of Deuteronomy. A. “Live or death, choose now” I chose life. It was over instantly. I bagged up the heroin and gave it back to my friend that introduced me to it. No withdrawal either. (This event is also in the Motorcycle Pilgrimage series.)

Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so. A. Deuteronomy 30:19. It’s pretty good.

Norm Peterson or Jack Gator. Take your pick, the book or the Author. All true stuff.

Conduit Redux

/ Norman Eric Peterson / Leave a comment

It began in my childhood. A realization that there was something that delighted and puzzled. While playing on my sisters piano I began to tear up over the slow melody of the moonlight Sonata. Soon, after walking home alone, from grade school, the song was more important than lunch with Casey Jones and Roundhouse Rodney on the TV. It made the school go away. All of it. The forbidden room of his sisters was his at noon and life began anew. Sis’ lunch was at Junior high school and there was no chance of her discovering the invasion. After all, I was born exactly two months after D-Day and understood invasion. I never heard her play on that upright when I was home. She probably waited until I was not there.

A knowing of music is where it began and I still work in that genre. Hearing a song being played or sung for the first time and hearing it afterwards, sometimes audibly like a very soft echo. Recordings, live or remembered have the same effect. Usually the first two measures or so. I even hear the silly song that our new washing machine makes to tell us it is done till it fades!

It then began to occur in a way that an old friend, Judy Larsen, called it the “Twink” or being ‘on all the time’ I see what way the music is trending and also know which notes would fit in to enhance enjoyment and anyone playing or listening to the extra notes. I recently found a CD I was on, recorded in 1979 at the Grizzly Den in Osceola. It was a country swing band, Dandelion Wine. A lot of jazzy stuff and fiddle tunes that I used to play in contests. A few mistakes here and there, but it was pretty good. I also played fiddle with Dave Dudley, a local CW artist with his own bar, Dudley vile, during those times. I also began to want applause on the faces of the audience waltzing past the stage.

My family now is put off by some of the songs like ‘Gotta get drunk’ and ‘ Swinging doors and a jukebox, my new home has a flashing neon sign’ It paid the bills with double bookings that can still see be seen as faint penciled gig dates on the kitchen cabinet door frames that had the old black wall phone nearby. (Soft wood, #2 pencils.) that was before post it notes had been invented. (Early Eighties}

Sometimes it was rhythm changes too. I was known by the square dance band , Duck for the Oyster, as the ‘rhythm monster'(enjoyed often by the band.) Signature and talented music readers can either have fun with it or get puzzled and irritated. Sometimes sung words in syncopation with the written ones. It works. Because I had poor vision and couldn’t read the sheet music in front of me.

One time I thought I had been scheduled to play violin/fiddle with a duet and got up on the stage with them and began to do so. They were a solid duet and they kept looking back at me with puzzlement. I was blocked from engaging with them and so quickly withdrew from the stage. I muttered about my fiddle having issues to keep them at ease. It was OK with me, I didn’t know their set list either.

My improvised music additions led to unexpected events. I was asked by Jerry Garcia to join his group in California, The Grateful Dead, after a jam session in Minneapolis. Why? “Because I liked what you added!” was the reply. I was flattered as there were a dozen guitarists in a circle playing at the same time. All eager to show their talent to the famous musician. I said “thank you but I can’t do that.” California meant meant death from drugs. That band is all dead now. Grateful? Not sure about that. Read about it in Motorcycle pilgrimage 5 and 40 acres of musicians.

Lately there have been other downloads of words that come to me that are not musical. They are answers to prayer requests or just visions of events in words that come unbidden. They just come. Uppermost and undeniable. Often in prayer for some situation for someone I just met or has asked me for prayer. Things uttered that can’t be made up. Situations that arrive fully formed and often, I am reluctant to utter them. Is this just me thinking or is it You Lord? This can be a problem. Discerning our own opinions or thoughts.

There is an opportunity for me to speak these words from the Spirit to someone else. I realize that Wisdom has come with these words at times. Not to speak them would hinder the person being prayed for. Often it is fear leading to my hesitancy to tell of the difficulties that follow the vision. Being a conduit at times can be shocking and my thoughts can get in the way. Mistaking my own wounds for healing others wounds. Jesus is so kind and won’t let me go when it is important to him. I refuse with a shrug and His gentle insistence keeps my attention until I do His will. I tell people sometimes He is the most kind and wise nag I have ever met.

A story I just read was about a Jesuit priest in his middle nighties that got off of a train and saw a very beautiful woman coming towards him with a policeman next to her. She said “It’s him, He’s the one!” The priest sad he was so flattered that he pleaded guilty and spent a month in jail. (De Mello)

The wisdom of the old desert fathers has also helped a lot. Words are just words and silence can be a very good choice. Listening is required of us. Quieting response to people speaking and simply listening to them and the Spirit then conveys understanding. , It’s pretty good. Norm Peterson and Jack Gator

Featured

Name of Middle Names

/ Norman Eric Peterson / Leave a comment

A repeat of a dream for several nights. Different places, different people, same impressive sign of the times. Suddenly an impossible thing happened throughout the world. Every man, woman and child had their middle names changed.

On birth certificates, passports, licenses of all sorts. Every thing that is our ID was changed overnight and all the middle names were the same! All men, women and children. Impossible. What government Be responsible for this? My middle name changed in everything in my wallet, safety deposit box,bank and card account! You too? does this mean to us as an impossible event and what are we to do now? All humankind were now ‘relatives’ as we usually are given a middle name for someone in our family line. Thousands of years ago this became ‘set in familial stone’ One time a man deaf named his son by the simple name of ‘John’ while his family was aghast over tradition violated.

The dream I had twice in a row was similar in chaos. As in most dreams, the moving about in unfamiliar houses and cities was a given and easily forgotten in the fog of early rising. Not the middle name though. It stuck in my memory till this was written. Must be written was the inevitable.

I liked my new middle name because it was familiar and powerful. I never grasp the equality of the name. It’s not done. The respect for the original owner of that name was embarrassing if wasn’t for the fact that everyone had it too. The dream meant a new thing was happening.

The dream name is found in several songs that I sang and played. My family knows the name and who it belongs to. Of course, the new middle names are the first name of the real owner who actually was the first person to have it. It is the name above all names and is the first and last of a name for our creator, lover and written on the galaxies and all stars visible and imagined.

The name in the dream was Yahweh. Pretentious to an embarrassing degree, but there it was in my dream. What did it mean? What does it mean? It means family and a precious thought of unity and beauty imagined, only in my dreams to show me something. A time when all mankind will be united to the same family with another new name written on stone, a white stone for all eternity.

Yahweh, the beautiful, wonderful, lover of our souls, gave the dream to me not to call us all gods or think we were. It was the dream of a sign and wonder that God Himself was approaching. The time when old men will have visions. Young men will have dreams. I just got the dream as a gift. It’s pretty good. Jack Gator writing for Norm

Atomic Child

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It was 80 years ago when the City of Hiroshima was destroyed. It was exactly my first birthday. August 6th 1945. I just saw a friend holding his one year old child Sunday and him toddling off after he reached for my hand. D day was exactly two months before I was born, June 6th 1944. Those things got me to thinking about my life and betrayal by the world. It led to war and destruction and the loss of millions of lives. Lust and greed fueling it.

As many of us, I was betrayed. My best friend in the Navy did so. My first love and fiance left me secretly. The girl I was in love with when I lived on the West Bank had a sexual liaison while we were staying with my father in California. Dad was betrayed by my mother. When my girl visited an ‘old friend’ while we were at my Dad’s, she slept with that friend. My dad’s response when she returned late that night was: “they all do that” It got to be normal life for me.

I grew wary and found it impossible to get involved with anyone, especially women. I never knew why really, as many of us do, we just think these sorts of things are normal life. There are details of my life about these things that I do not reveal, they are too personal and harsh. Even for this writing to the public and my family. Just like the world’s history. I will some day.

Then today, while I was reading about WWII and all of these thoughts were prancing about in my mind, The sun came through the building storm clouds. It shone right on my face as I sat in the living room with a history book in my lap. I heard: “ I was betrayed by my friend too, and I know exactly what you have been through” Comforted and even cradled I was overwhelmed. “I will never betray nor forsake you” Words from the creator of everything.

The last time I was betrayed was the newspaper Editor that printed these sorts of things I write. Too much Jesus and we will have to let you go he said. I am comforted and affirmed now when I remember my response: “Will you then allow me a final column to tell my readers I can’t write a column every week, that it’s a burden”? It was printed and I did not betray him and the owner of the paper. It was a lie of course, but it seemed like the decent thing to do. After all, they would not print the truth of the matter.

The friend that sold me out for his addiction in the navy converted to faith in our savior Jesus shortly after I visited him on his dead bed in Maryland. I was permitted to see him pass into Eternity on the exact time he died thousands of miles away. He told me as he disappeared , “It’s better than you said!” It was a turning point in my life to say the least of it. His wife was comforted as I spoke with her later that day.

There is no room to prevaricate about the state of the world now, it is filled with anger and betrayal and is not surprising to me. The words I heard when that glow of the Son warmed my face this morning are timeless and eternal truth. I am loved and held forever. Norm Peterson “the Gator”

Discovering Friends

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It would seem like a natural event. Developing a friendship with someone that attracts your attention. Usual things. “It is not a reward for our discriminating and good taste” A. As usual, these things occur as a chosen event.

Examining friends of my past, I wonder about these things. What was it about Bruce for example that brought us together? Being the only veterans at an after hours beer joint?

It seemed so at the beginning when I offered him a shabby room to ‘crash’ where I lived in the other shabby room. A run down neighborhood on the wrong side of the tracks. A dump really. Bruce drove a really nice Austin Healy and I had my grandfathers old Buick. Ah yes, it was that both of us played guitar! You would think so, I did.

We both had things to teach one another and that was not obvious to either of us. It seems to me he had more to teach me but that isn’t the point at all. Neither of us had a clue about what to do with our lives and how to do it. Wine, women and song had been tried and found wanting.

Laughing a lot with the ‘Park Lanes” he smuggled in from Viet Nam in his stereo. We played music and found jobs with a third rate mobster that knew we had nothing to loose and had made our bones in the military. He spent six months at China Beach recovering from a near miss and I spent six months at hard labor paying for another near miss in Spain. Blown out of the military and we were brothers almost instantly. “you too! I thought I was the only one” B.

We traded the two cars for motorcycles and headed out on the highway, lookin’ for adventure. The song by Steppenwolf fit perfectly. We indeed, were born to be wild. We listened to that record along with Cream and other early metal music. Those songs were the ones that Bruce played while he drove through the ‘viles’ in Vietnam. Top volume on a loudspeaker on the roof of his 6×6. He would stop and show movies as part of the Psyops program while I was across the world in a top secret room getting messages from the CNO about our little war.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Big guns and missiles, or automatic weapons and people that were the unfriendly kind. Take your pick, no choice really.

My columns ‘motorcycle pilgrimage’ have the details but what is more amazing is the arranged coincidences that enabled Bruce and I to meet and listen to one another.

We had adventure, whatever came and that was at the same time that Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper acted in Easy Rider. 1968. Bikes with kick starters and sleeping bags. Our guitars strapped on ‘sissy bars’. Not custom choppers like the movie, just an old Enfield and a BMW.

Death threats, lost highways off of route 66, Angels appearing and a Senator in the desert. Adventure we went on willingly, not the adventures we had in the military. We were in control and that is another great illusion of life.As music itself touches us in the deep parts, timeless music that goes beyond the spoken word or even the words of a song, the arrangement of the eternal music draws us closer to life.

All of our lives are parts in the everlasting orchestra and the conductor has set us for His pleasure in the first chair. Chosen by Him.

Bruce was and is my closest friend. And still is as time streams by so fast. He died years ago and I did not even know he was ill. That happens a lot to me. There is so much I do not know about these things. Why am I the survivor? It would seem many wondrous things have since come about, and I write about the blessings and struggles of life that we all know.

The conductor and author of the grand symphony has the score and we watch and pray as he once again, raises His baton and puts life before us. We indeed, are His instruments of the beauty we get a view of now and then. The love and hatred, losses and treasures. Pain and health all allowed and known on that narrow, beautiful road we all walk. It’s pretty good. Norm

A.& B. C.S. Lewis The problem of Pain

Bruce and his wife Cindy with me at their home in Minneapolis

Dream Connection

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How do you teach a method of connection? What do we connect with? Or who do we connect with? The biggest question for me what is connection? The topic just ‘happened’ to come up in one of the myriad books that I leave around the house. You know, or are, one of those people that read when eating, before sleeping, when waiting for those two things. Skimming, flipping through chapters, some of the pages dog-eared in a good place to start again.

So, the topic of connection was in one of those scattered piles throughout the house and it stopped a thought train with screeching brakes and a trail of sparks on the tracks of otherwise placid reading. Connection. Why would I want to connect with someone I have never seen, but just read about? A connection in a dream about Hemingway I just had? Why try to connect with a great author that has left the world decades ago? There is a way to connect with him by reading his writing and taking notes. Was the dream a connection with my memory, one which I have been missing or ignoring for decades? The dream seemed to be from my best friend who told me important things.

It was a vivid dream. I was in the big city and drove by a splendid home that triggered a memory of connection. I went up the sidewalk to the familiar home and was welcomed in by several people that knew me. The memory of living across the street and being mentored by Hemingway when I was a boy flooded in. The books from the fabulous library loaned, hours sitting with ‘Papa’ and being told, someday I would be writing truth with skill to make images with words. Stories of adventure. The dream ended with one of the daughters telling me it was so good to see him again and would I like to stay for a while?

There was a loud noise that sounded like explosions and I was awoken suddenly with a strong wish to remember the dream by writing it down. At four in the morning. (The sound sounded like the summer people having fun blowing things up.) It was only the family dog.

It seemed the dream was a message from my self. Deep in rem sleep, dredging up ‘connections’ that surfaced as reality sleeping dormant. Or was the dream a connection with someone else that had spoken it? I write about life, but to develop a story like this one was ego and wish palpable. Still remembering the dream knew what the connection was and with who.

It was encouragement and confirmation from the greatest authors ever known. “Keep writing, stay steady and tell the truth . Don’t try and make your writing original, write the truth and and write the story as best you can and originality will come forth.” Indeed, the question of ‘what is truth’ was asked centuries ago and the answer was silence. The truth of that life was obvious and the words written about that life still capture and hold us. When truth is revealed, it is a beauty sought.

Sometimes only five words can take your breath away and be remembered forever. Connection. As coming awake again from the dream of life. The reason, the hope, the answer to so many questions. The book that can be read again and again that speaks and shakes our inner man with it’s truth. A book worth dreams awake or asleep. Dreams of destiny and worth.

I was stopped on the sidewalk soon after this column was printed and directly asked; “did you ever live in Spain where Earnest lived?” I answered yes and he furrowed his brow and walked away. I did not mention that when I lived in Spain I was in prison for six months for evading a murderer and running from the military police. It affirmed the column’s legitimacy for that man. It was fun to tell that truth, I left off the prison detail.

As Johnny Cash said: “Sooner or later, everyone comes back to Jesus. The Bible, It’s pretty good.

Norm Peterson

A Door Gunner and the Old Fiddler

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It was a beautiful drive, one I take often to a small church about 8 miles north. On Fridays that old Lutheran church gives away bread from a bakery 80 miles south. Every Friday for years they have done so. I pick up as many bags as they will give me as I give away most of to a local secondhand store about 7 miles to the East. Caring Hearts. I like to drive those rural roads.

Today, I drove past a place of good memories, on a lake called Wood and glanced at the places on the road before the lake that I like to look at. Old abandoned houses that used to be pretty swell and houses that have acres of metal junk around them. Wind-rowers, hay loaders, antique bulldozers. Tons of steel, waiting for nothing, akin to tossing old scrap lumber out to be burned out in the field thing. How that stuff got out there and what the price of steel is going for occurs to me. Reminds me of an old forest that is past it’s prime and the mess that is too. Wood lying about is a lot easier to look at.

I drove past wood Lake (we have a lot of nice ones nearby) and remembered an old friend that was a veteran like me. He had it rougher and served on Helicopters shooting people out of the door with a belt fed machine gun. A .50 or .30 caliber. Don’t remember him mentioning that. A war in Vietnam that no one wanted, a war I was drafted into as I was in basic training for the Navy! I just missed that meat grinder. A returning veteran was hated by many Jane Fonda fans. Danny Carlson was this veteran’s name. He was friendly to me and our stories were good to share with one another.

Danny knew I was a country western fiddler on the local bar circuit and he wanted to have some fun and put on a fiddle contest at his lake shore home. OK, I got hold of another fiddler, Bill Hinkley, and we set it up with a stage overlooking the lake and advertising it at the local watering holes. We even took out an add in the newspaper. This was a big deal for towns under 2000.

We got a half dozen fiddlers to show up for the chance for the 1st place prize and the beer kegs would set the stage for some good fun. Bill and I started out demonstrating what fiddling was with Bill’s wife Judy on guitar. Then we started the contest. Bill, I and Judy (official judges) got to sit right up front on the beautiful manicured grass which sloped gently down to the lake. Quite a few people showed up.

Good acoustics too from the water. Near the end, an older fiddle player showed up. He was at least as old as I am now and needed a bow. We got him one and he started sawing away. His tone was off and the speed wasn’t there, but the Bill and I and Judy looked at one another with a nod. This was the stuff of legends. We knew what this man had been and in our ears, still was. Bad bow, arthritic hands, bent over and knowing it was the best he could do. We gave him the 1st place without a doubt. Bill and I were thinking that we can even play at this man’s age we would be blessed to fiddle as well as he was. Uncle Zeke was his name and where he was from and were he went is still a mystery.

“The struggles and events of his life are just the cover and chapter page of the book of his life. The book no one on earth can read is the real story and every chapter is better than the last” 1.

Dan a short time afterwards, died across the road from his lake home in his trucking outfits office from carbon monoxide gas. In his sleep. My wife, Julie almost died from the same danger from a bad propane furnace way out west when she was camp counselor before I met her.

So Every time I drive past Danny’s old lake home I think of these things and ask Jesus, why? Why take Dan and spare my wife with only a bad headache and some temporary cognitive loss’? We will never know until I read that book of real stories that I can’t read now.

Somehow, in some way I find that answer adequate. I still ask why these things happen and am getting better and waiting for the answer I already know. Ask me sometime and I will let you in on what He says to me. Usually stop, look and listen. I am so glad Julie survived that carbon Monoxide and we have this incredible life together. Thank you Lord!

Somehow I know there will be that book about Danny I can read and I will read it with him. I will share those books with my old Navy buddy that will hand me his book as he reads mine. It’s pretty good. I like reading really good books.

Norm Peterson. (aka Jack Gator)

1. G.K. Chesterton “the apostle of common sense”