YorkFest 2019- First Place Nonfiction

YorkFest Literary Arts Competition- 2019
1st Place Nonfiction
Asahel Church

Resolution

I am married to an older woman. And while there’s a certain prestige that comes with this, one disadvantage is that there’s always a chance that your wife’s biological clock will quickly outpace your own clock for unencumbered, two income, pre-rugrat fun. But I love my wife and I did want kids. So it was just a matter of time.

Getting pregnant was disappointingly easy. I remember that night clearly- I had been doing some some soul searching lately and so I cuddled up to my wife and said- “I want you to have the desires of your heart. So I think I might be ready…” And just like that, she was pregnant.                                                                       

Pregnancy was great. What I mean is, my wife, Laura, was a great at it. Calm, healthy, glowing, pumpkinesque... And while delivery was not so great, when our daughter was born after two days of labor, I really couldn’t believe how lucky I was. She stared at us with deep thoughtful eyes that turned out to be blue- just like mine.

            Parenthood brought with it some positive changes. It inspired me to stop complaining and get a new job. It brought me to York, PA, a fabulous place to raise a family.  But as the daily grind set in, I was pretty miserable. I was in that pathetic stage of early fatherhood where your cute kid is deep down basically competition for attention from your lover.

            We tried to be hip parents- trucking our infant into bars and packing her along on wilderness trips. We told our friends, “Parenthood doesn’t have to change your life! Look at us!” But everything was different. And harder. And took longer. The truth is, I became resentful and lost sight of the precious gift I had received.

In the fall of our daughter’s second year of life, we joined my extended family for a weekend up at French Creek State Park. Our daughter was running a fever on Friday as we arrived- and we didn’t have a reliable thermometer. To make things worse, we had recently heard a story of a family who fatally overdosed their infant on Tylenol. So we were using it sparingly and hoped she would feel better. We were complete rookies. Of course, the hard work fell to Laura, who spent a lot of extra time up at the cabin trying to make sure our daughter was getting lots of sleep and nursing as much as possible. I was alternately glum and oblivious.

Saturday afternoon we were all hanging out at the main camp building. I was playing ping-pong inside and Laura was rocking our daughter, her fever higher than ever, in a hammock on the porch. Suddenly our daughter began to jerk wildly. In panic, Laura shrieked and stood up. She nearly threw our daughter into the hands of my brother, a neurosurgeon resident who happened to be standing nearby. My mother was yelling at him, “Do something! Do something!” Of course there wasn’t anything to do at that moment but hold that tiny little girl gently and wait for the seizure to pass. As I sprinted out the door and on to the porch I saw a small bubble appear at the corner of her mouth- and then she was still. She didn’t seem to be breathing.

Tears streamed down my face and all I could think of was how poorly I had loved her, how profoundly I had failed to value my own child.

Someone ran for a wet towel while someone else stripped her down to a diaper. Of course, she was far too hot. She lay comatose, but she was alive. We waited for the ambulance, and then the long drive to Reading Hospital, x-rays to check for infection, and ultimately the wonderful news. She was fine. Nothing that the right dose of Tylenol couldn’t have probably prevented. 

The upside of your child having a febrile seizure is that the long term outcome is relatively benign while the event itself is an incredibly effective wake up call to being a much better parent.

Since that day I have often thought of others, who have suffered loss. To anyone who is childless and infertile, to the heartbroken parents who have lost a son or daughter, I am sorry. How could I hold something so precious to be so inconvenient? Somewhere in the panic of it all, a resolution had grown in my heart. I wasn’t going to be the same. I was going to love our daughter, Jericho Faye Church, just as much as I possibly could.

Hear my oral telling of this story at StorySlam.

"On Weight" YorkFest 2018

YorkFest 2018 Adult Literary Contest
Asahel Church
1st Place Non-Fiction


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On Weight

Perhaps we were all born to fly. But gravity and mass make for a formidable opponent. And the negative connotations of the word ‘weight’ surprise me. It conjures thoughts of excess and disability, Twinkies and electric scooters. There’s also the seriousness that the word weight conveys. It literally sits heavy on your tongue.

My relationship with weight has been mixed. I come from a family of small people. Throughout my adolescence and early adulthood I was too skinny. I used to sleep under a large heap of blankets, the steady pressure from above keeping me safe and warm in our drafty attic. Much later in college, sailing on blustery fall and spring afternoons through the daunting Lake Michigan chop, I was always twice as cold and twice as bundled up. But I was small for a reason. Small crew made for fast sailing and quick action in tight spaces. I bailed water from the bottom of the boat furiously, fighting weight.

Miracles have always surrounded the successful defiance of weight. The Egyptian pyramids, wonder bras, and airplanes. In the early 1700s, Connecticut colonists traveled for miles to observe a “floating rock” –a several ton boulder that inexplicably moved up the slope of an embankment. I used to dream, re-occurringly, that I could fly. Or float, to be more accurate. The dream seemed to be a combination of a childhood aspiration for piloting, and the deep impression that a particular “Diving Tony” left on me. He was a 2 inch plastic replica of Kellogg’s Tony the Tiger mascot that due to some unknown physical (or metaphysical?) property would dive to the bottom of a recycled two liter coke bottle when it was squeezed. That squeezing action, combined with my desire to fly morphed into a vivid dream that by squeezing the right muscles in my body, my rear end as I remember, I could float up above the houses much the same way that Tony dove to the bottom of the coke bottle. Weightlessness- that was what I dreamed about. And it became so real that I more than once found myself testing out my new found ability after waking.

Excess weight. Underweight. Dead weight. Large boxes that tempt you to over pack. Large suitcases frantically re-configured at airports.

My friend Bryan bought a wood laminate boat last year. We joke that the work involved in keeping up with it is worth it in exchange for the misty looks and nostalgic complements of observers. We’re not likely to win a lot of regattas with the old lady, but she is beautiful. It sits heavy on its trailer and in a light breeze displaces the water sluggishly, the boom and slack lines tangling and bumping into our heads as we crouch inboard trying to keep the boat flat. But in a breeze, on the edge of a summer Chesapeake storm or in a blow after, when the sky clears and the clouds are puffy, the dinghy lifts up out of the water and fairly skims. Bryan clips in to the harness and we hike out hard, abs and hamstrings screaming and souls thrumming. Then we fly.

"Racists Like Me" The Phoenix, EMU 2017-2018

As a graduate student at Eastern Mennonite University I was happy to be the winner of their flash-fiction contest and included in the 2017-2018 edition of The Phoenix.

https://issuu.com/easternmennoniteuniversity/docs/phoenix

Camping

Camping
by Asahel D. Church
2nd Place- 2017 Yorkfest Adult Literary Awards

I checked off each item on Dad’s “Ultimate Camping List” as he arranged our gear in the back of the Suburban. Matches, check. Sleeping bags, check. Bug spray, check. Hotdogs for dinner, check… Waving goodbye to Mom, I had the strangest feeling as the sound of silence engulfed me. With my father, it’s slim pickings when it comes to conversation.  Maybe that’s partly because I am hardly sure of what to say. I’ve got a million thoughts running around in my head, but I can’t seem to sort them out.

By the time we reached the campground, dusk was coming on, so we hurriedly unpacked the car and set up. “Where should we put the tent?” asked Dad. “This spot looks good. What do you think?”  I really couldn’t tell if one spot was any better than the other. But the grass did look a bit softer off to the left. I liked the way it seemed untouched. We put the tent down right where Dad suggested. I looked for extra tent stakes, left by careless campers before us. Dad had a rule; never leave a campground without an extra stake or two.

It was too late to make a campfire dinner, so we ate burgers at a small restaurant just outside the state park. Eating out is a luxury in my family. I wondered where Dad was getting the money. “Eh, we’ll put it on the plastic. I’ll just have to explain to your mother later,” Dad said with a grin. I guiltily ordered the Double Cheeseburger Deluxe and Dad didn’t seem to mind. On those rare occasions at home when Mom couldn’t bring herself to do any cooking we go to Taco Bell. 89 cent tacos and one large drink. Mom brings small cups from home for the kids. It’s embarrassing.

Back at the site, Dad got the lantern started and began to read his Bible aloud. I felt the nip of night air on my nose and watched as the moths gathered, burning themselves on the hot glass while the Scripture filtered down through my consciousness. Tomorrow night we would build a great big fire, and cook hotdogs and roast marshmallows. I don’t like marshmallows actually, but the real fun is in cooking them. Too far from the flame and they stay cold; too close and they burst into flames. Kind of like moths, I thought.

We walked in darkness to the washhouse. The air was now cold and the stars were gaining strength. Once my eyes adjusted, I could see everything: the stirring in the woods, the Milky Way glowing across the sky, the uneven rocks beneath our feet.

            The next morning I woke up alone, my face sweaty against the sleeping bag. The campsite was deathly still except for the occasional drone of a cicada. The dew was already burning off under the sun. Dad wasn’t in sight. Maybe he’d gone for a walk, or to read, or to hunt mushrooms, or take a shower.

My father is the pastor of the “little white church on the corner.”  That’s what the neighbors call it at least. But it’s not really small at all. Every summer, there’s a VBS (that’s Vacation Bible School) during the week before the fourth of July. Last year a neighborhood kid’s father accused me of ripping his son’s shirt during a relay race. That was the only time I remember Dad raising his voice at me. “I know my son and I know he can have a temper,” Dad huffed. That hurt. Maybe that’s why it sticks out so much in my mind. Dad was stuck in one of those father-but-pastor moments, and I was right there in the middle.

 Dad isn’t always the pastor; sometimes he does other normal things. One time he let me play soccer with the big kids. Dad was the coach—he wore white shorts and oil-stained hand-me-down golf shirts. During the scrimmage I got the ball in a breakaway. I sprinted towards the goal and poked the ball with my toe. It rolled in slow motion past Joel Johnson, the tallest kid on the team. I was so happy when everyone cheered. Actually, now that I think about it, they might have let me score. I was really young then.

Dad suddenly appeared in front of me, whistling. His face was bright and covered with a healthy dose of white scruff. He had been at the washhouse, but of course he didn’t shave. We cooked breakfast on the camp stove. “What do you want to do?” Dad asked, as if it really was a question. We went on a hike, hunting for mushrooms.

There’s always mushrooms on these trips. “Ah-ah!” Dad exclaims when he identifies one, pronouncing the scientific name loudly. There’s the Amanita, the Agaricus, the Cortinarius…. I try hard to help with the hunting, but mostly find what Dad called LBM’s -little brown mushrooms. “Ooo- yeahhh,” Dad says, poking at the fungi with his shoe, “Some sort of Conocybe…” By lunch there was half a dozen mushroom caps, face down on white paper lining the picnic bench. The spores drop overnight leaving a pattern on the paper. Each mushroom has a unique mark.

The afternoon was hot and Dad suggested that we go swimming at the pool on the other side of the park. I felt bad because I knew how expensive it was but Dad insisted. I got into the water slowly, and then let myself drift down to the bottom. You have to let the air out of your lungs or you won’t sink. It’s sort of odd. The simple act of breathing suddenly becomes all you can think about. I had to keep coming up for air.

In the shallow end, kids were playing catch with a foam ball. Dad swam out ahead. He likes the water when it is very cold. I feel like going to the pool with friends makes the cold water feel ok because you run around. The pool was full of people that day but nobody I knew of course. Dad wasn’t really other people.

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That night we made a great big campfire. The light from the flames made a cozy circle. When we got too hot, we could run off into the cool darkness. Dad showed me how to draw words and pictures in the air with a stick that had a coal on its end. He stood far away from the fire, out by the edge of the campsite. I tried to guess what Dad was writing, but I had no idea. “My turn, my turn!” I insisted. I made figure eights over and over again. Later, we stopped putting wood on the fire and let it die down. It was getting late. We walked to the washhouse to brush our teeth. My feet were heavy on the gravel path. I don’t remember falling asleep.

Suddenly I was awake. Dad was whispering for me to look out the front of the tent. “Psss! Look! We have a visitor!” he whispered. A set of beady eyes shot back at us, caught in the beam of Dad’s flashlight. There were other eyes in the woods too. “What’s that noise?” I asked nervously. There was a thump, and then the occasional sound of crinkled plastic and another thump as the cooler lid opened and shut. I thought it was best that we just stay in the tent, and Dad didn’t get up. He knew there wasn’t much of a point—it was pretty much over.

The raccoons had eaten most of our breakfast. A trail of half eaten hotdogs disappeared into the woods. It was alright, since we were headed home anyway, but Mom would be annoyed with the waste. I helped pack up the campsite. In the process we found four extra tent stakes which was more than a little bit lucky. So we had done pretty well this time.

As we finished packing up, I thought about having to start school again. Being homeschooled, there isn’t even the anticipation of a new teacher or seeing friends. I would daydream over my math lesson all morning, and Mom would yell and threaten to send me to public school. That was a completely idle threat.

I was looking forward to getting home. It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy the camping trip. I just wondered why I felt so familiar but strange at the same time.

“How did you sleep last night?” Dad asked cheerfully.

“Pretty good,” I mumbled.

“After the raccoons went away I heard a much larger animal moving around in the

bushes.”

“Really? Well, maybe it was a bear,” I said. I was hopeful that I might have a

good story to boast to my brothers about.

“I’ve heard that there are some small black bears around this area.”

I wondered about bears in the woods. I wondered what I would be when I grow up. Most of all I felt this undying need to thank Dad for taking me camping but I just didn’t know how. In my family, love is always understated. 

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The ride home was long and silent. The white stripes flashing and the drone of the old Silverado. It was just me and my dad. Everything felt fine.

To Jericho

She who is brave, curious and kind
Uncommon traits for a girl just turned five
Blessed to be your Papa if only on loan
Praying that you'll know the Father
And call him your own
So whether climbing or diving
Singing or rhyming
The very purpose of your life-
his own glory-
Will be your reward.

Poem Update: Poem Included in Versify E-Book

Stacia Fleegal continues to advocate for York County poetry with her work for YDR and the Versify blog. Here's an e-book she created to showcase the "poems of the month" for 2013-2014. My poem, The Summer Without the Fence, is included under November. Thanks Stacia! Follow her @ShapeShifter43 and @VersifyYDR

Martin's Dream May Not Be Yours

I may not have the right to preach

As I may not have the ability to sing gospel

Or the relationship to call him Martin

(No rare meeting, no kin, no skin)

But that which we do have in common is strong,

For I am

In his words

A transformed conformist

Which is, by the way, a direct reference to Romans 12:2

A point easily forgotten by those sharing his passion but not his power

This much I know and claim-

Because we are brothers, bound by two common threads

The former now always taking precedence

Ignoring the latter such that any creed or crusade becomes his-

And I too am all too prone to put words in the mouths of the sleeping

It's an every day struggle (some call it jihad) 

To reconcile the heart and the head.

My saving grace, and Martin's too?

My man's not dead.

Poetry

Home Improvement

An army of lawn tractors
standing at attention
under garish parking lot lights
silently plot their escape.

The Empty Pool

The water sits heavy in the pool
The thick air pressing its weight downward
The liquid glass pushing back to meet it.
Soon, all the ripples are gone.
Any trace lost
Of the nymphs and dragons that once played here.

3/23 Poetry Wednesday- It's never too late!

The lamb, caught in the thicket

There is nothing about it that is
Fair
Simple
Or right
(But I'd rather be dead
Then the arbiter of this life).


Nothing Gold Can Stay

by Robert Frost


Nature's first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf's a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.



As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII

by William Shakespeare

Lord Amiens, a musician, sings before Duke Senior's company
Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
Thou art not so unkind
As man's ingratitude;
Thy tooth is not so keen,
Because thou art not seen,
Although thy breath be rude.
Heigh-ho! sing, heigh-ho! unto the green holly:
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly:
Then, heigh-ho, the holly!
This life is most jolly.

Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky,
That does not bite so nigh
As benefits forgot:
Though thou the waters warp,
Thy sting is not so sharp
As friend remembered not.
Heigh ho! Sing...

Poetry Wednesday

By A. Church

Now that I see you
(In a round about way)
Tell me your secrets
And who you will be

---

Wallow in this muddy way
For He will do it
Pigs and pigeons
Find surprising cleanliness
By rolling in the dirt.

---

Frederick Douglass

by Robert Hayden

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful

and terrible thing, needful to man as air,   

usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,   

when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,   

reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more   

than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:   

this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro   

beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world   

where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,   

this man, superb in love and logic, this man   

shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues' rhetoric,   

not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,

but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives   

fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.

Poetry Wednesday

One of the wonderful things about being a teacher is that you are paid, in part, to learn. Much of this learning comes via discovery and exploration during lesson planning. I bring you then poetry Wednesday, the result of a rabbit trail adventure for the benefit of my 6th and 7th grade English students:
The first poem, by Galway Kinnell, is really one of the more incredible poems I have read in a while. "William Goode," by Edgar Lee Masters, expresses what I have felt in various ways for some time now. Yet Grace paints strangely linear lines among the zig-zags of our striving. Finally, "After making love we hear footsteps" surely will resonate with any new (or old) parents. 

First Song

 by Galway Kinnell

Then it was dusk in Illinois, the small boy
After an afternoon of carting dung
Hung on the rail fence, a sapped thing
Weary to crying. Dark was growing tall
And he began to hear the pond frogs all
Calling on his ear with what seemed their joy.

Soon their sound was pleasant for a boy
Listening in the smoky dusk and the nightfall
Of Illinois, and from the fields two small
Boys came bearing cornstalk violins
And they rubbed the cornstalk bows with resins
And the three sat there scraping of their joy.

It was now fine music the frogs and the boys
Did in the towering Illinois twilight make
And into dark in spite of a shoulder's ache
A boy's hunched body loved out of a stalk
The first song of his happiness, and the song woke
His heart to the darkness and into the sadness of joy.

Hear the poet read his poem http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2003/08/15

A masterful song by Andrew Bird using Kinnell's words:

 

 

 

 

William Goode

by Edgar Lee Masters

To all in the village I seemed, no doubt,

To go this way and that way, aimlessly.

But here by the river you can see at twilight

The soft-winged bats fly zig-zag here and there --

They must fly so to catch their food.

And if you have ever lost your way at night,

In the deep wood near Miller's Ford,

And dodged this way and now that,

Wherever the light of the Milky Way shone through,

Trying to find the path,

You should understand I sought the way

With earnest zeal, and all my wanderings
Were wanderings in the quest.

   

After making love we hear footsteps

by Galway Kinnell

For I can snore like a bullhorn

or play loud music

or sit up talking with any reasonably sober Irishman

and Fergus will only sink deeper

into his dreamless sleep, which goes by all in one flash,

but let there be that heavy breathing

or a stifled come-cry anywhere in the house

and he will wrench himself awake

and make for it on the run—as now, we lie together,

after making love, quiet, touching along the length of our bodies,

familiar touch of the long-married,

and he appears—in his baseball pajamas, it happens,

the neck opening so small he has to screw them on—

and flops down between us and hugs us and snuggles himself to sleep,

his face gleaming with satisfaction at being this very child.

In the half darkness we look at each other

and smile

and touch arms across this little, startlingly muscled body—

this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making,
sleeper only the mortal sounds can sing awake,
this blessing love gives again into our arms.