Bad Johnny!

Image © by Brian E. Faulkner

I tell my grandchildren lots of stories, many made up on the fly. Two neighbors from my childhood appear occasionally in these bedtime tales, probably because they were so different (and so memorable) to a young New England boy who pretty much grew up with people cut from the same 1950s Irish-English cloth.

Stella and Joe were Sicilian and direct from the Old Country. We lived side by side on an ordinary street in an ordinary Massachusetts town. Stella loomed large to my brothers and me. She was buxom and booming. At full throttle her voice could be heard up and down the block, and she wasn't shy about using it. Joe was her opposite: around five feet tall and sinewy thin, He walked in a stoop--almost laboriously--and never had much to say beyond a dismissive wave.

They lived on the middle floor of a triple-decker smack beside our driveway, which meant that when Stella got mad at Joe and Joe got made at Stella, it was hard to miss what they had to say.  We could hear their quarrels (at least Stella's part in the quarrel) even when the windows were closed on that side of our house. 

Joe and Stella mostly stayed to themselves, unless one of us worked up some kind of mischief and became targets of a well-stocked inventory of American scold words mixed in with her Italian.  Joe mostly mumbled under his breath, gestured with his hands and fingered his twirly mustache in a way that clearly signaled that we dare not ever again chase a ball or a pet past the courses of brown twine that separated his vegetable garden from the rest of the world. I leave Joe to another story, however. This is about Stella.

And Johnny.

Stella's kitchen is where we saw her most,  She spent a good deal of time there, sometimes concocting aromatic red sauces prepared from tomatoes grown by Joe in his garden, and nothing could get your juices flowing faster than imagining a forkful of pasta loaded with Stella's homemade sauce that our mom had saved over 'til winter. But this was summer, the one week of maddening hot days that would lay over temperate New England like a wet cloth during August.  So Stella kept her kitchen window flung open, because that was about the only air-conditioning most of us had back then. We could hear her running water, clanking pots and scolding the green and yellow parakeet she kept for company while Joe worked his garden on the other side of the triple-decker.  

"Bad Johnny!" she would shout, "No bite!"  And when the bird cracked seeds and tossed husks on the floor, it was, "No seed! Johnny -- no seed!" (Note here that I decline to write the way she spoke.  It sounded something like "BAD-uh Johnny!  No BITE-uh!"  You had to have been there.)

One day Stella left the cage door open and Johnny made his escape.  The way I tell it to my grandchildren he circles the kitchen twice before flitting out the open window and across our driveway to the biggest tree in the yard, only to vanish in perfect camouflage. Stella apparently had seen this happen only out of the corner of her eye, because she was late to the party.  By the time she reached the window, the bird was nowhere in sight.

"Johnny! Johnny!" she wailed, hanging an ample portion of her considerable self outside the window while gesturing toward the sky with flapping arms and an anguished look on her face.  "Bad bird!" she wailed into the still summer air.  "Come back, Johnny, come back!"  To us kids watching from below this was mighty tasty amusement, but to Stella, Johnny's sudden freedom clearly ranked somewhere between a very bad dream and the end of her world.

Johnny eventually did come back.  In my story, he flies in the window, returns to his cage and is chirping contentedly on his swing before she even notices him.  Then the cage door gets latched, the window gets closed and the story comes to a happy end.

Scripture tells us that life can contain more anguish than good and that being a Christian does not protect us from either vanishing parakeets or full-out tragedy. There is no divine shield against hard times, and in a paradoxical sort of way that can be comforting. 

Romans 8:28 assures us that "All things work together for good for those that love God and are called to his purpose."  It actually says "We know that all things work together for good ... ".  We know bad stuff could be around the corner -- or is happening now, but we are confident that the Lord will see us through it.

Abandoning one's self in favor of God's purposes (whatever they may be) and then trusting him for the results -- giving yourself over to the Lord's way instead of your own,tests our will and allows us to weave our faith into the tapestry of everyday life without demanding immediate relief from adversity.  

So the next time you find yourself wailing out the window because your bird has flown – or something far, far worse has befallen you, consider what we know: that “All things work together for good for those that love God and are called to his purpose." 

It's a conundrum almost impossible to grasp until you’ve been there, but as you apply this truth to your own experience, you will get it in time and come to know with deep, abiding certainty that God is with you as much -- or more -- in your storms as your good times. 

9-29-16

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