Capers With Carroll

(We interrupt the previously scheduled episode recapping my 1972 Coming-of-Age Jaunt through Europe, to interject this Thanksgiving message.)

I am thankful, three weeks before my 73rd birthday, that most of my deadlines these days are self-imposed and freely adjusted. Had I been able to maintain my original plan, this week would have had readers with me in Jerusalem, where I celebrated my 1972 Thanksgiving meal with a jar of peanut butter and the loaf of bread I hoped to stretch for a few more days. Instead, the recap falls short by six weeks and eleven nations. I was still in England, and still thinking I would spend most of my sojourn in France. I anticipated upgrading my high school French and working on my novel. I certainly had no inkling of getting as far as Israel. I had, however, just committed to visiting a new friend in Switzerland.

I give thanks for my God-bestowed but only-recently-acknowledged ADHD. Even as—at this stage in life—unfinished projects challenge me in space and time, the fascinating twists and turns of my distractibility refuse to let me become bored. I am rich in both hobbies and relationships. All by itself, my whimsey in spiders has brought me friendly correspondents on six of the seven continents. My early teaching career allowed me to teach groups of junior high students, and in some cases, my later career brought me their children and grandchildren. Members of each group now show-up richly on my FB friends list. As God supplied me with diverse teaching venues, I once had a class of Cacua-speaking adults from the remote jungles of Colombia. They needed the basics of government and economics to help them pass their (Spanish-language) primary-school equivalency exams. We taught the class tri-lingually. Later, in China, I had three weeks with high school and college students who hoped to improve their English. Over the years, God gave me experiences with both public and Christian school students in California. In the middle, for a decade, I taught a tightly-knit cadre of students in Colombia. Some of those children I had the privilege of shepherding from fifth grade through twelfth, and I’m able to correspond with them now as adults. For all this I am thankful.

I am thankful for the families God has given me, both the family of my birth, and the family I began 50 years ago (next July) by marrying Vicki. In July, I camped with the cousins among whom I grew up. We who could remember our wonderful grandparents and great-grandmother could now see each other’s grandchildren. This week, Vicki and I have three of our five children, with their spouses, and seven of our fourteen grandchildren. My step-counter tells me that in the five days since the grandkids arrived, my daily walking stats double over the average from the previous six weeks. Few gratifications in life can match watching grandchildren grow and their parents negotiating the challenges. The oldest two boys have their voices changing. The younger ones still want to cuddle with Papa and have stories read. I also thank God for the amazing technology that allows me to teleport to Brazil to help homeschool my grandsons there, and then zoom over to England to keep current on the antics of my British grands.

My life puts flesh to the end-time description given by God to Daniel, “Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall increase.” (Dan. 12:4, ESV). Living now, two-and-a-half millennia after God instructed Daniel to “shut up the words and seal the book, until the time of the end,” I am grateful to have a storehouse of ‘to-and-fro’ memories from visits to twenty-some countries. I also carry more information through my pocket phone than Ben Franklin or Thomas Jefferson could access had they owned every book then in print. I am thankful for capabilities unavailable to any previous generation. I am also grateful for the Scriptures that provide a solid place to stand as floodwaters shift the sand from all around us.

As a child born just at the end of two World Wars, I have lived through a Cold War and times of increasingly dangerous proxy wars. I am thankful that both I and my children have been spared the call to arms. Amidst ‘wars and rumors of war,’ I am thankful that, in my call to overseas service, I could carry literacy rather than kill-or-be-killed armaments. I could spread the Word of Life rather than the Kiss of Death. I am thankful to be living in a pocket of peace, the likes of which so many in our world are unable to enjoy. I am not facing a winter without heating, nor the threat of incoming missiles. I have done nothing to deserve these blessings that I enjoy, just as many of the people without them have done nothing to deserve their absence. Even in Colombia, which was struggling with a civil war within our earshot, I could say, as did David, “In peace I will lie down and sleep, for you alone, LORD, make me dwell in safety.” (Psalm 4:8). For this I am thankful.

(A conversation, just now, with my Brazilian son-in-law reminds me how thankful I am to be familiar with the tastes of both the peaches, apricots, and plums that won’t grow in the tropics, and the tree-ripened mangoes, papayas, and bananas that only show up in North American grocery stores with a pittance of their sweetness and flavor. I have tasted avocadoes, sweet and creamy as only the tropics can produce them, but have temperate-zone persimmons in the back yard as I write this.)

I am thankful that though riches and fame were never high on my list of ambitions, God’s plan for my life has delivered for me a modest level of each. I enjoy a nice house, a satisfactory pension, and a yard big enough to entertain my horticultural curiosities. Although—as late as 2016—I entertained no ambition to run for elective office, in 2018, I finished ahead of the Libertarian in my race for Congress, and in 2020, an amazing 42,015 voters marked their presidential ballots for me. I am thankful for each one of you. That total exceeds even the popular votes for George Washington (39,624 in 1788-89, and 28,300 in 1792) and for John Adams (35,726 in 1796). I am thankful that both Washington and Adams performed so well in the strenuous times with which they were faced—as have generations of patriots since—and that my family and I can enjoy the benefits thereof. I pray that those benefits will continue.

Even as God blessed me in ways I never sought, He has also gratified the desires I did entertain. I wanted to leave the world a better place for my having been here. Now, I can look at five grown children who are each contributing to the betterment of mankind. I can look at three generations of students whose lives I have touched. I can see riders lined up to utilize a bus system for which God put me in the right place at the right time to help get started. I can look back at teenagers I encouraged in the 1980s—coming from the pre-literate, indigenous peoples of Colombia—students who went on to graduate from prestigious universities, and who now supervise educational systems they have built from the ground up, on land to which their people now hold legal title. I hear of hundreds now worshipping Jesus among people-groups that had none fourty or fifty years ago. Oh, the marvels I have witnessed! Thank you, LORD!

On this Thanksgiving Day, 2022, I pray that each of my readers will enjoy a time of family and good food. I pray for God’s peace among those, worldwide, who currently feel the weight of man’s free will, expressed as it so often is, as man’s inhumanity to man. Come quickly, Lord Jesus.

I took this picture during a school lockdown in 1994.  In Colombia, unidentified soldiers had stepped out of the jungle within a mile of the school, so we locked down until we could be sure for whom those soldiers fought.  My junior high students sat for two hours before the all-clear, joking nervously and missing lunch.  But we were in a war zone.  There, one understands—at least intellectually—that violence is a possibility.

In California, I once locked down with 4th graders while a funnel cloud just missed us.  Before terrified ten-year-olds, the teacher must be strong, even casual about the situation, and compartmentalized.  But now, even during our school’s annual lockdown drill, I have to stop and consciously gain control over the catch in my voice.

So it is good that I first saw news of the Sandy Hook shooting while I was alone in my classroom during lunch.  As a teacher, a parent, and a grandparent, I cried.  Then I compartmentalized, taught my afternoon classes, and went home to let my four and six-year old grandsons present me with an early-birthday batch of raisin cookies.  Today, I will celebrate that 63rd birthday with a museum trip, and intellectualize.

The violence is common enough—even in elementary schools and movie theaters—that we have rituals for dealing with it. 

One group of us divides into Pro-Gun and Anti-Gun factions.  That is a debate we ought to have, though probably less driven by the most immediate atrocity.  Prudence and self-defense may require that some citizens keep guns, but from scripture I draw the principle that trust in weapons is misplaced (Isaiah 31:1 and 2:7), and the glorification of weapons is idolatry.   I waver over where to draw the legal lines on guns, but as a nation we trust and glorify them,.  For trusting and glorifying, the lines should be at zero.

Another group points to lack of mental health, to the breakdown of the family, to a culture of violent video games, and to hopeless poverty.  Yes, yes, yes, and yes.  Every year I see students who are in need of better help than the schools are equipped to handle.  I see boys—especially—trying to understand manhood when they have no fathers with whom to relate.  This very week, I had several boys excited to show me videos that glorified lone attackers who vanquished large armies.  I also just heard the verdict on a shooting a few years ago in the park around the corner from where I live.  A lone gunman sprayed bullets into a pick-up soccer game, wounding one player.  Charged with 10 counts of attempted murder, he received 500-years-to-life.  The shooter was 16.  Fatherless.  Without a DREAM Act, he was also a boy without a country, and no hope of ever belonging anywhere.  Except to a street gang.

Yet, curiously, the shooters in mass killings like that at Sandy Hook or in Aurora have been mostly white, middle class, and American born; as have been their victims.  The other kind of shootings, kids killed one or two at a time as some gang initiate tries to prove his mettle, probably claim more victims in total, but make fewer headlines.  The spontaneous monument in the photograph below sprang up after three boys were attacked in a yard across the street from where I pick up kids for Sunday school.  One seventeen-year-old died.  He had been a friend of the kids I pick up.  The young shooter, who received a life sentence, was a recent alumnus of the school where I teach.  Easy guns.  Video games that glorify the lone shooter.  Hopelessness and lack of belonging.  Spiritual deadness.  Isolated, one from this list does not create shooters, but together, they will.

So to cope with this, we compartmentalize.  We intellectualize.  We blame-shift.  We look the other way that our drones are killing children in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  We try and hide the fact that, each year, a million American children are denied even a day of birth.  We flee from the knowledge that the stores we frequent support firetrap-sweatshops in Asia or Latin America, and that the chocolate we eat was harvested by child slaves in Africa.  We have met the evil, and it is us.

Psychically we cannot carry these burdens, individually, or as a people.  It is too heavy.  We try to imagine ourselves standing in the way of all this, correcting it, or even absolving ourselves of our complicity in any of this, and we can’t.  It is too overwhelming. 

But it is not too heavy for God.

And God hears our cries.

I am driven this morning to read Daniel 9:4-19, and to use his prayer as my model.

4 I prayed to the Lord my God and confessed and said, “Alas, O Lord, the great and awesome God, who keeps His covenant and lovingkindness for those who love Him and keep His commandments, 5 we have sinned, committed iniquity, acted wickedly and rebelled, even turning aside from Your commandments and ordinances. 6 Moreover, we have not listened to Your servants the prophets, who spoke in Your name to our kings, our princes, our fathers and all the people of the land.

7 “Righteousness belongs to You, O Lord, but to us open shame, as it is this day—to the men of Judah, the inhabitants of Jerusalem and all Israel, those who are nearby and those who are far away in all the countries to which You have driven them, because of their unfaithful deeds which they have committed against You. 8 Open shame belongs to us, O Lord, to our kings, our princes and our fathers, because we have sinned against You. 9 To the Lord our God belong compassion and forgiveness, for we have rebelled against Him; 10 nor have we obeyed the voice of the Lord our God, to walk in His teachings which He set before us through His servants the prophets. 11 Indeed all Israel has transgressed Your law and turned aside, not obeying Your voice; so the curse has been poured out on us, along with the oath which is written in the law of Moses the servant of God, for we have sinned against Him. 12 Thus He has confirmed His words which He had spoken against us and against our rulers who ruled us, to bring on us great calamity; for under the whole heaven there has not been done anything like what was done to Jerusalem. 13 As it is written in the law of Moses, all this calamity has come on us; yet we have not sought the favor of the Lord our God by turning from our iniquity and giving attention to Your truth. 14 Therefore the Lord has kept the calamity in store and brought it on us; for the Lord our God is righteous with respect to all His deeds which He has done, but we have not obeyed His voice.

15 “And now, O Lord our God, who have brought Your people out of the land of Egypt with a mighty hand and have made a name for Yourself, as it is this day—we have sinned, we have been wicked. 16 O Lord, in accordance with all Your righteous acts, let now Your anger and Your wrath turn away from Your city Jerusalem, Your holy mountain; for because of our sins and the iniquities of our fathers, Jerusalem and Your people have become a reproach to all those around us. 17 So now, our God, listen to the prayer of Your servant and to his supplications, and for Your sake, O Lord, let Your face shine on Your desolate sanctuary. 18 O my God, incline Your ear and hear! Open Your eyes and see our desolations and the city which is called by Your name; for we are not presenting our supplications before You on account of any merits of our own, but on account of Your great compassion. 19 O Lord, hear! O Lord, forgive! O Lord, listen and take action! For Your own sake, O my God, do not delay, because Your city and Your people are called by Your name.”

Last month’s Capers tribute to the DC-3 became part of a conversation, both here and on Facebook, that included several of my former students and a couple of students who graduated from Lomalinda before my time.

Garth Harms obtained this picture from photographer Jeff Evans, who spent a couple of months in Colombia just before I got there. That dates the picture to late ’83 or early ’84.



Photo by Jeff Evans


It’s authentic, right down to the left-wheel and rear-wheel ruts where the plane pivoted to put its passenger door facing the covered waiting area. The entire community was here to receive my family when we stepped off the plane the first time, and in turn, we joined the crowd for countless welcomings and goodbyes. Departures had a ritual: after final hugs, the doors closed but the waving continued. Then the engines would rev (first one side, then the other) and well wishers would jump on motor cycles for a race to the last hill at the end of the runway, for final salutes as the gooney bird lifted off. This airplane was central to so many emotional moments that just looking at the picture—all these years later—touches a nerve.

One educational advantage that students in Lomalinda enjoyed was an unusual opportunity for work experience during high school. Kirk Garreans tells me he had the privilege of working alongside the DC-3 crew. Through his connections, he also came up with the fact that DC-3s continue to be active in the relief efforts in Haiti. Ponder that a moment: the youngest DC-3s are 65 years old, and still play a role in work-a-day aviation. Amazing.

Kirk also traced “our” DC-3 to its current owners, Dynamic Aviation, of Bridgewater, Virginia. The firm supplies “special-mission aviation solutions,” with over 150 aircraft doing commercial charter, fire management, sterile insect application, airborne data acquisition and other tasks. Before writing my first post, I was 90% certain I’d found the airplane, but Kirk’s information locked it. Dynamic Aviation restored the craft (N47E) to its original, 1943, Air Force paint job and insignia, and renamed it “Miss Virginia.” Here it is:



Finally, Kirk reported that Miss Virginia was part of the twenty-six plane, 75th Anniversary Fly-In to Oshkosh. Several nice videos are posted on You-Tube. Here is one:



A tip of the wings to all who participated in this conversation.

(My earlier post is here.)

(May 30, 1992-Aug 8, 2009)

In the final minutes of his life, driving a car that had been stolen at gun-point just eleven hours earlier, Oscar raced ahead of a pursuing police officer. Running through a stop sign at perhaps 90 mph, he collided with a family of seven in a pickup, sending both vehicles flying into an orange orchard. All five children in the pickup died, as did Oscar and two friends riding with him in the stolen car. Oscar was 17. I had not seen him in two years. For that last meeting, I’d waited in a visiting room at juvenile hall while officers marshaled in a line of hardened teens. Oscar was polite and friendly, but kept his emotions well guarded. At the end he thanked me for coming and took his place in line to march out. I cared about Oscar, had long feared that it might end as it did, and hoped fervently that it wouldn’t. I cannot make excuses for Oscar: what he did is inexcusable. At best I can offer his story.

I took this smiling picture of Oscar eight years ago, on the day I met him. As a third grade teacher, I decided I wanted to meet every student in my class before the first day of school. I called him on the telephone and invited myself to his home. We had a good time. I met his two older brothers, two younger brothers, two younger sisters, mother, and the mother’s boyfriend. Oscar was a handsome kid, but I recognized that, even as a nine-year old, life had not been easy for Oscar, nor would he be easy to have in class. Walking back to my car, I stopped to talk to a student I’d taught the previous year. He told me that Oscar had stolen his bicycle, and after the police returned it, Oscar stole it again.

I had a special reason to spend time with Oscar. During the previous year, I had been asking God for one troubled boy I could come alongside and try to point in a more positive direction. I had read that when the Department of Corrections wants to predict how many prison beds will be needed down the line, they look at how many third grade boys are reading below grade-level today. Each year, I could look around my third grade classroom and see eight or ten boys reading below grade-level, some of them quite far below. At that time, 93% of all incarcerated adults were males, most of them still comparatively young. I’d read that 95% of them had no positive relationship with a father-figure, nor had ever had one. I could look around my classroom and see five or six boys in that situation. I attended a presentation on how to pick an individual to pour your life into, and came away with three principles: a) pick someone who is open, b) pick someone well-known in the community [whether famous or infamous], and then, c) wait for God’s supernatural confirmation.

For a year, I had watched and prayed. I spent extra time with a couple of boys, and then met Oscar. He was open. He was “the worst boy in the whole class” and next-younger brother to “the worst boy in the whole school.” After school hours, Oscar and I began meeting for a session that doubled as one-on-one reading lesson and Bible study. My principal approved as long as I took it off-campus. I began to see the kind of coincidences that point to supernatural confirmation.

Early on, I began to focus our Bible study on the problem of anger. Oscar had many reasons to be angry. Anger is the human response when something has not been fair, and life was never fair to Oscar. But anger did not serve Oscar well. When life has been unfair, anger is often Satan’s way to take away whatever we have left. Often, it even destroys what good things others have.

In my first lesson with Oscar, I had him memorize James 1:19, “Be quick to hear, slow to speak, and slow to get angry.” Soon after, Oscar came in from a recess, explosive over something that had happened on the playground. I got down at his eye-level, took him by the shoulders, and asked, “What does James 1:19 say?” He thought a few seconds. Then I watched all the anger drain out of his face. He smiled sheepishly at me and recited it, “Be quick to hear, slow to speak, and slow to get angry.” Fully relaxed, he was able to enter the classroom and go to work. It is my favorite memory of Oscar.

After a couple of months, the next-older brother joined our Bible study. Then, when the family moved to another neighborhood and Oscar no longer attended my school, I began picking the boys up twice a week for Sunday school and my church’s children’s program. The boys and I took an occasional hike, or some other field trip, I attended Oscar’s basketball games at the youth center, and I have an old wood pile in my back yard that Oscar worked with me to stack.

We continued to work on anger.

When Oscar had been about five, both parents went to prison for a year and the four boys went to live with an uncle in another state. That was the year we expect students to learn the basics of reading. Oscar didn’t.

When the boys returned to their mother, she told them that their father was in prison in Mexico, and they would never see him again. I do not know the truth, but in retrospect, I wonder if Oscar suspected at the time that he was being lied to by someone he loved.

One boyfriend came for a while and then left. Another came to stay. The family grew to eight siblings. When she was sober, or when I visited, Oscar’s mother was attentive and loving. Only the kids witnessed her other side. I have a file with some of the worksheets we did. Here, in his own 4^th grade handwriting is a description of a situation he knew well:

Oscar also had to struggle with being the younger brother of “the worst boy in the whole school.” Oscar both idolized his brother and resented the lopsided share of attention that the brother’s behavior garnered. A week before Oscar died, the brother called about something else, and then ended the conversation with, “If you see Oscar, tell him to come home. He’s still trying to be like I was.”

Just after Oscar’s eleventh birthday, this older-brother/sibling-rival/best-friend/idol went into juvenile hall for violence within the home. They never lived together again. About that same time, a boy standing on the corner two doors from their house was killed in a drive-by shooting. On the way home from church, Oscar pointed out the front yard where a friend’s uncle had been killed. After Oscar’s death, a newspaper quoted a police officer remarking about the teenager’s “callous disregard for human life.” It’s true. But callouses form to protect a tender place from frequent injury.

When Oscar was twelve, his mother moved the family to Los Angeles, both to get away from an abusive boyfriend and to give Oscar a fresh start at another school. Six months later, she returned to Visalia. Unable to afford a place of her own, she moved the family into the home of a friend. Even with one brother from each family locked away, it was two mothers and thirteen kids in a three-bedroom house, in the same bad neighborhood. Oscar started spending days at a time with his buddies. If he was home, he’d smile and greet me when I came to pick up his younger siblings for Sunday school, but he’d lost interest in going himself.

Meanwhile, his mother began a downward spiral: alcohol, days spent at the casinos, a string of boyfriends. On the day I saw a black eye on the younger brother and knew I had to report her to CPS, someone else beat me to it. CPS discovered old warrants. She was arrested, sent to prison, and then deported. I believe Oscar saw her just once again (by running away from a guardian and trying to adjust to life in a country he had never before visited), but he never again saw any of his five younger siblings, nor his oldest brother.

After years of working with young people of all ages, I know that children under ten or eleven tend to be flexible enough to move and adjust. Older teens often have the maturity to do so. Children in their early teens seem to be the most vulnerable. They are so wrapped up in their peer groups that uprooting them can send even the most secure into a tailspin. Oscar never had the chance to start from that kind of height. He ran away from the foster home, and hid with his buddies. For Oscar, it was the closest he could get to creating a “home.” As near as I can reconstruct, he spent most of that first year out of school, even though he was already so far behind. When authorities found him, they put him in juvenile hall. Whenever they tried placing him outside its walls, he went looking for either his buddies or his mother.

For these last few years, I had to try and follow Oscar from his occasional visits to MySpace. He used the screen name “Killer.” He listed his emotion as “Angry.” The last time I saw Oscar, he told me the main thing he wanted in life was to eat his mother’s cooking.

If life was fair, every boy could eat his mother’s cooking. He would live securely with two parents who loved him and would learn to read well (and read first in the language he spoke at home). If life was fair, no boy would be locked up for trying to find home. But certainly, if life was fair, Oscar’s pain and confusion would not have brought such pain and confusion to three other families, and to their entire community. As father to my own five children, I think especially of the Salazar family, who seem from newspaper accounts to have had everything that Oscar didn’t, and were raising their kids just as Oscar could only have dreamed of. The newspaper quotes an aunt as saying, “We’re trying to be as strong as our Christian faith allows us to be.”

As a Christian myself, I acknowledge that Christians have a special problem here that materialists do not have. In dog-eat-dog “survival of the fittest,” there is no expectation of fairness. If we are just the sum of our charged particles, the collapse of a family or the collision of two cars should carry no deeper moral questions than the collapse of a star or the collision of two asteroids. Indeed, the death of a youth who had so few of the skills or aptitudes for gaining adult success might be viewed as simply “natural selection.” The fact that mankind longs for fairness and responds angrily to its absence is, by itself, evidence that we are made in the image of a moral, fairness-seeking God. But for Christians, the challenge is to answer how a moral God could allow such unfair things to happen.

I do believe God wants fairness. However, “fairness” requires moral choices, which in turn require a standard that can be either obeyed or disobeyed. We are not simply charged particles moving always in the right direction, held in line by the narrow confines of inescapable obedience. We stumble. We drift. We rebel. We take that which we know is not ours. We sin and are sinned against. We come into life victims (some more than others) of a tide of sin that surrounds us. Then as perpetrators, we propagate and perpetuate that tide so that it washes against both those we love and those we don’t even know.

On discussion boards after the crash, I saw comments thanking God that scum like Oscar got what they deserved in the crash. I saw mention of someone's hope that Oscar had gone straight to Hell. I also saw racist pronouncements about the occupants of both vehicles, and their ethnic disregard for seat-belt laws. I lump each of these attitudes into the same category as the sin that entangled Oscar.

One who truly understands Hell cannot wish it on anyone. Hell was never created as a place for human souls. It was created as a prison for Satan and his demons, a place of never-ending loneliness, pain, and regret. It is God’s desire that every human soul spend eternity with Him, in Heaven. But God honors the decisions of individuals. When someone chooses to walk away from God, Hell is the farthest away from God one can get.

I have reason to hope that Oscar isn’t there. On the first Sunday of June, 2002, I heard Oscar say a simple prayer. He asked God to forgive him his sins, and come into his life. Someone once approached a famous evangelist and said, “I saw one of your converts last night, drunk and in the gutter.” The evangelist replied, “Yes, it must have been one of mine. It couldn’t have been one of God’s.” Maybe Oscar was only one of my converts, and never one of God’s. But I have hope.

It is easy for someone to compare themselves with Oscar, and say, “At least I never stole cars or killed innocent kids,” but no one gets into Heaven by comparison with others. Heaven is perfect and the standard for admittance is perfection. Even the best of us misses perfection by a great margin. As a Christian, the good news is that Jesus offers to pay the full price for all of my sins, and in return, to credit me with His perfection. The only requirement is that I must accept the gift in faith. Of course, once I’ve been relieved of my load, I can’t begrudge Christ for relieving anyone else of theirs. For many of us, that is the hardest part: We continue to clamor for fairness, even when God wants to trump fairness with mercy and grace.

To be sure, Christ desires changes in the lives of His followers. I saw disappointingly little change in Oscar. Two passages in I Corinthians (3:10-15 & 11:27-32) seem to teach that when God’s patience runs out with believers who continue in gross sin, He finds it necessary to end their earthly lives prematurely. They arrive in Heaven, but without any of the rewards other believers will receive.

No one can see the heart of another, but I hope to see Oscar in Heaven. It will be the home that on earth eluded him.

“(God) will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away." (Rev. 21:4)

I know nothing about the two teens riding with Oscar, but I do expect to see the Salazar children in Heaven. At the end of the Book of Job, when God restored Job to double of everything he had owned before Satan took it from him, the one total matched but not doubled was Job’s 10 children. The implication is that these ten later children were not to replace the first ten—children cannot be replaced—but came in addition to the ten who would be waiting for Job in Heaven when he arrived. I pray that God blesses the Salazars accordingly. I also pray that they will find a way to forgive Oscar, on this side of Heaven, not for Oscar’s sake, or mine, but for their own. Anger rarely serves any of us well. Instead, it is only Satan’s way to take away what we have left.

In the month since Oscar's death, I've wondered what else might have been done. I gave him my best shot and folks at my church went over-and-above to minister to him. The public schools did the best they could, as did the foster community and the juvenile justice system. At the mortuary I met some of the young men Oscar hung with. In their own way, they tried. My theology tells me that no one is ever beyond God's reach, or the ability to change, but that ultimately each person is responsible for their own decisions. The Bible also explains that a parent's poor decisions wreck consequences to the fourth generation (Exodus 34:7, etc.). There's more here than I can sort out in a month. I will leave it at this: I cared about Oscar, and I mourn his death. Right now it hurts. But I have already found someone else I will love in the name of Christ. I invite you to go and do likewise.

* * * * * * * *

Some of the themes I touched on in this eulogy come up in a novel that I still have a lot of work to complete, maybe two or three years worth. For anyone who is interested in hearing about that novel when it is finally available, I have a Kontactr button in the left hand margin of this page. Please leave your name. I will treat it with care.

Lately I've run into enough former students to remind myself I’ve been teaching for 38 years (counting back to my first volunteer assignments while still at UCLA). I reckon some 2000 students have passed through my classes, some of whom are now well entrenched in middle age. I always enjoy seeing or hearing from them.

I'd already been thinking of a blog series on some of those former students when one showed up today to dance for an assembly. Rene Jaramillo began competitive pow wow dancing several years before he showed up in '77 for some junior high history. Native American dancing is still his passion, one he shares with his wife and daughter. Between getting my current class seated and the beginning of the performance, Rene and I had a moment to renew our acquaintance and ask about mutual friends.

I was kicking myself for not bringing my camera, when I remembered a function on my cell phone that I haven’t even played with after a year of carrying it around. In the low light, Rene’s fast dancing gets totally lost, but the stills are recognizable, if not quite satisfactory.



As I begin this occasional series on former students, Rene represents my 7th grade World History class of ’77-’78, and the 8th grade U.S. History class of ’78-’79, my first full time job. We also enjoyed some great recess basketball. Rene currently works at a Sports Chalet and has danced for audiences across the U.S. and Europe. Next time, I’ll try and have a camera that can catch the action.