Between us
DESIGN PICS
Half-a-lung ... backward H
By Walter Wangerin Jr.
ard upon the heels of my most recent column in this magazine (December, page 30) comes this, which wants to start: On the other hand ....
I have, as I wrote in December, begun to take a happy satisfaction in the ease with which healthy people move, walk, run.
They can stand up and sing hymns—both at the same time. I sit to sing, or else I stand in silence and listen to my wife Thanne singing beside me.
Wangerin, an author of many novels and books of essays, is an ELCA pastor and senior research professor at Valparaiso [Ind.] University (
walterwangerinjr.org). His “Between us” col- umn appears quarterly in The Lutheran.
The healthy can say, “Oops, I
forgot my watch upstairs,” then skitter upstairs for the thing they forgot. I wait until there are four or five reasons to climb the stairs or it isn’t worth the hard puffings and the harder huffings with which I pay my way up and down again. Healthy folk can pass a full hour without coughing. Happy satisfaction in the face of such disabilities? Yes. Truly.
Most of December’s column explained how vicarious experiences are more than enough for my life of limitations, and much more than a merely balanced “compensation.” Nor is my delight in another’s sweet, swinging motion a stepping-stone to the acceptance of my straitened condition. No, it’s a fresh Walt that I am. This is a different way of being with its own standards and its own fulfillments.
30 The Lutheran •
www.thelutheran.org
On the other hand I still have my bike. I can’t bring myself to part with my touring bicycle.
For nearly 10 years I hosted a radio program: a half-hour, weekly, nationwide broadcast. I told stories. On air, speaking before and after and around these stories, I used no script. I kept a conversational tone, as if there was just one other person with me in the sound booth or I was in someone’s kitchen, sharing a cup of coffee.
The program was called Lutheran
Vespers. An outgrown name since it had little to do with evenings and was not confined to any particular denomination. The context of our relationships—the host with his listener—was not to be limited by some external institution. They were 10 good years, but my gentle listeners lacked faces. I wanted to meet and see those faces.
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