Rainey Blogs on Some Days

Today I ordered my coffee at the Starbucks at 78th and Lexington on my lunch hour from training a new seasonal package helper. It's expensive on the Upper East Side , so each day I'm bringing my lunch, which I eat along with a coffee at Starbucks while I sit and look out the window at the people passing by. Today no seats were available in the store when I ordered—which I'm finding is quite common in Manhattan--but as I walked toward the rear of the store not knowing what to do, a woman with a baby in a stroller got up and left. We made eye contact and smiled, a mutual understanding of my good fortune of being at the right place at the right time. I went right over and took the seat, a nice leather bench against the wall. A job interview was in progress on my right—a twenty-something professional Jamaican man was being interviewed by a twenty-something American woman. He looks like a young Forest Whitaker , whom I had recently seen in the movie The Last King of Scotland . I

Today I'm eating lunch out again since Marcia gave me $25 yesterday and told me to start doing it. It's hard to bring your lunch when the temperature is only in the 20s and your lunch sits in a vehicle all morning, leaving it nice and chilled by the time you eat it. So today I get to splurge on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Yesterday I ate at a Subway. Today I am at the Elim Cafe located on Lexington Avenue between 64th and 65th streets. The temperature has been freezing cold this week, and the problem with both restaurants is that each has small seating areas near the front door. On both days, I've been getting blasted with arctic air each time someone comes in or leaves. This is made worse by the way New Yorkers come in and out of a restaurant, acting as if they are all somebody . ( I know, some of them are.) You can see this in the way they fling the doors wide open and strut in, as if every one of them is Brad Pitt or Angeline Jolie. It would be nice if people wou

On Wednesday, I sat down next to a woman in the Starbucks at 78 th and Lexington facing the window looking out. The Manhattan Starbucks are all so crowded that you have to sit next to someone. I took the one seat that was left at the window, grateful to get a seat because earlier in the week I had spent one lunch period squatting down leaning against a wall in another Starbucks, waiting for a seat while my feet fell asleep and tingled like crazy. The woman was feverishly journaling in a notebook, exactly the thing I had also intended to do during my lunch hour there too. I journal on a black steno pad that I carry around with me most of the time. I was wearing UPS browns, taking a break from training a new helper on how to deliver packages. Since it is New York, no one seemed to think it strange that a UPS guy was journaling on his steno pad. I can't remember ever seeing a man journaling anywhere , let alone a man wearing a UPS uniform as I was. But everyone just pretty much leav

Leonia AYSO Region 1089 U-10 Girls Action at Sylvan Park: Royal Kicks Advance Ball Against the Golden Goals While Ref Looks On Here is a great picture of three members of the Royal Kicks, our Leonia AYSO U-10 girls team that I coach, advancing the ball up the field while former Mayor of Leonia, Judah Zeigler, looks on while refereeing. Well, he was kinda looking on.

Q: Mrs. Mangini , are you surprised by your husband 's success as a head coach in the NFL with the Jets but his lack of success last year with the Browns? A: Honestly, I'm not here to talk about the past. It's a new year, and I'm totally focused on this year. Q: Sounds familiar. Does the way Coach Belichick of the Patriots treats your husband make you want to go out and kick his wife in the shins? A: Well, Mrs. B and I are two competitors who really want to be successful, and sometimes maybe the competitiveness used to create some tension between us. But I really try to focus on what I can control, and I cannot control Mrs. B. Besides, her and Coach are now divorced, so I guess we've got one of those "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" things going on. Q: What's the best thing about being married to a football coach? A: Well, football is a lot like life, and so Eric and I talk a lot about the Browns core values and we've incorporated a lot of tho

I painted the basement electrical room today.  It always feels good for a Midwesterner like me to complete some sort of home repair activity successfully.  Here in North Jersey , it's not all that important to fix things yourself.  In fact, out here in the East it is more impressive to have someone else do the work for you.  But where I come from it is shameful to have to hire someone to do your home repair or mow your yard.  So for me, there is often a battle between the old Midwesterner and the new Northeasterner in me.  There are other battles between these two diverse dispositions inside of me.  The Midwesterner in me desires food in bulk, which means all-you-can-eat buffets and smorgasbords are the preferred eating establishments.  The quality is not nearly as important as the quantity.  Why not have a taco appetizer along with some fried okra from the food bar while waiting for the sirloin steak to come with the baked potato dripping with butter and sour cream?  And after th

“I woke up this morning to an empty sky.” (Bruce Springsteen, “ Empty Sky ,” The Rising ) As we neared the ninth anniversary of 9/11 this week, I pulled out Bruce Springsteen’s tribute album to 9/11, The Rising. In “Empty Sky,” he perfectly captured the sense of direction the twin towers gave us here in Northern New Jersey and New York. On a clear day, you could see the towers from twenty miles or so away, and for those living in the metropolitan area the towers marked our proximity to home. Whether we were coming up the Turnpike from a short trip to the Shore, or returning from spending the holidays in Illinois, the first sight of the towers meant we were almost home. Still, to this day, I look for those towers when I see the New York skyline, but the sky is still empty where they used to be, and we all know how that happened. We have picture of my Mom, Marcia, Alyssa, and me sitting at a window inside the South Tower observation deck on the 107th floor, looking back waving. Behind

Saturday was the first day of vacation for me, and so I awoke to come downstairs. Marcia made coffee today, which is one of the most wonderful things she does for me. When I hear her hit the coffee filter against the wall from inside the Shop Rite paper-inside-plastic garbage bag to loosen the used grounds from the day before, I know she is giving me a gift and I feel loved. She was then off to run with her friend Nancy, so I got up at 6:30 a.m. on a Saturday morning to an already-made pot of coffee and a quiet house. Saturdays have a special stillness to them for me that makes getting up early desirable. The house is quiet with just a few birds sing-songing each other outside in the neighborhood and an occasional car driving by can be heard through the open windows. No one revs up a lawn mower at this early hour. It's as if we are a Jewish neighborhood on this Shabbat  morning. Today I read the Mary and Martha passage in Luke 10:38-42 this morning on my journey through  A Harmo

When I was growing up, there were only two bald-headed men in the world: Yul Brynner and Telly Savalas . It was so rare in those days. But now, it seems like every man is bald, shaving and shining their heads. Even Yul and Telly wouldn’t stoop to having grungy-looking facial hair, but now every man seems to want a little facial hair to complement their golden domes too. This is terrible! I have always done the opposite--keep off the facial hair but keep the turf on top. Still do, even now in middle age. But it would figure that I have to be the one to reach middle age WITH HAIR in a time when it is NOT POPULAR.  Who would have known “bald is beautiful” would take over the world just when I should have an advantage. To be honest, I didn’t even try that hard to keep my hair. I used the cheapest shampoo--usually the 99-cent Suave (with a coupon)--and never used conditioner. I wore a baseball cap whenever I wanted (even though I wasn't covering a bald spot), an act that is universall

The sun just ducked behind the tall oak tree that signals its final descent toward the west on this Memorial Day weekend Sunday. The pool here in Leonia opened to nearly ninety-degree heat. The children are yelling and splashing in the pool behind me. My chair back is toward them as I face the sun and trees whose leaves shimmer and glisten in the summer breeze that has come early early to Northern New Jersey. Summer has a gentle beauty and pace that brings the soul to life if you let it. The rest of the year life's pace is relentless, but these two scantily clad months of untucked shirts and flip flops refreshes us weary ones from winter's discontent. Summer is the season that belongs to youth, who haven't a care in the world while the pool is open and the schools are closed. At least on the way home from work, adults can roll down the car windows, turn up their stereos, and remember their careless summers of days gone by. The heat that arrived in May has stayed and the su

An odd couple sat on the boardwalk behind the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland looking out over Lake Erie . An older white man with a white beard who looked like he could start fiddling “The Devil Went Down to Georgia ” at any moment was sitting on the top step. He was with a black woman who had a bicycle with a boom box mounted on the handlebars. The boom box was playing “Keep on a rockin’ me baby” by the Steve Miller Band. After Alyssa and I had left the Rock N’ Roll Hall of Fame, we had walked around behind the Hall toward the boardwalk next to Lake Erie, but as we got closer to the couple I got a better look at the woman and decided she was actually a man in some kind of spandex outfit. His bicycle had been modified with Harley-like upright handlebars and a place for mounting the boom box. Charlie Daniels and spandex Harley boom-box bicycle man rode off together on their bicycles toward downtown Cleveland . I would image they will return tomorrow, and each beautiful summer

One of the great things about living near New York is getting to see famous people when you go to the City. Our friends Billieanne and Jason saw Alec Baldwin at a deli near their hotel in Manhattan when they were visiting during this past winter. My brother-in-law saw Dennis Rodman at a bar in the City a couple of years ago. For some reason, I keep seeing Jesus. After seeing Jesus walking his dog in Greenwich Village  four years ago after we had attended a play for our anniversary, I would have never thought in a million years we would see him again. But it happened, on our anniversary, again. We’d picked no particular restaurant for dinner, so we walked around from restaurant to restaurant looking at menus. The restaurants in Chelsea were packed on this warm Thursday summer evening.  Everyone was young and beautiful and looked like they had money. I know this is not really possible, but it seemed that way. I didn’t want to be around that oppressive kind of environment—one where

The door on room 310 in Good Samaritan Hospital has a faded, metal nameplate that says, “Illinois Knitting Company” that seems out of place on the freshly painted, clean door. Illinois Knitting must have donated money to the hospital back in the 1960s. I doubt if the company exists anymore. Pretty soon, this hospital will not be here either, slated for demolition when the new version of Good Sam is built on Veteran’s Memorial Drive on the west side of town. The town is sprawling that way in the name of progress (and toward Wal-Mart and Lowe’s, the new center of town) as the old downtown and surrounding neighborhoods slowly empty out. I have come to see my grandfather, but he is not in the room. The Information Desk had him still occupying this room, but it appears that he is gone. Since he is 90, I am not certain what this means, whether he is gone to be with the Lord or just gone to the nursing home. The other day when Marcia and the girls and I visited him, we finished the visit

I visited my Grandpa Rainey—my dad’s father—in the hospital the other day and he asked me if I like coffee. “Yes, the first thing I do when I get up in the morning is to go start the coffee,” I told him. “That’s how I knew she wasn’t going to make it,” he had told me in March when I was home for my Grandma Rainey’s funeral. “She stopped drinking coffee.” If there is any metaphor for life that both sides of my family shared, it is coffee. As long as we are drinking coffee, we are alive. We have a reason to get up in the morning, to brew a pot, to hear the coffee moan and travail until the dripping stops and the coffee pots rests, her work done for another day. We pour a cup, put in our cream and sugar, grab a Bible or newspaper, and come alive for a new day. We start the day this way during the deep chill of a winter morning or on dewy spring days just after dawn. When we drink coffee, we are alive. When I was growing up, I was not as close to my dad’s family because my parents divor

On a Thursday some time ago, I grabbed a pair of pants off of a hanger in my closet to put on and realized they weren’t mine or Marcia’s. (We share a closet.)  For some reason, it disturbed me more than I thought it would. To have someone else's pants in your closet and not know why? Marcia was already at work and I was not really sure how it happened. They were huge; the waist was size 36. I am a 33. They were nice pants--actually three pairs. But to have someone else's pants in your closet? I felt violated. And then I realized the dry cleaners must have made a mistake. And then I figured that someone else must have some of my pants, even though I wasn't sure that I was missing any pants. That thought bothered me too. I did know that not all of my pants were in our closet. I also knew Marcia recently dropped some clothes off at the dry cleaners and they wouldn't have been finished yet. Or maybe Marcia threw out some of my clothes because they were no longer nice enough

"The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation." Henry David Thoreau After watching Dead Poets Society over the weekend and hearing Thoreau's quote, I cannot get it out of my head. The weight of its truthfulness is bearing down on me. I think I am living a life of quiet desperation, the grand ambitions of youth replaced by "the resignation that living brings" to quote Jackson Browne's " Before the Deluge ." I think resignation and desperation go hand-in-hand. Desperation is the feeling. Resignation is one of its sources. Maybe most us reach that place where we resign ourselves to making a living because our families need us to do that. We step aside and let the next generation have their shot at life. "Happily ever after fails, we've been poisoned by these fairy tales" (Don Henley,  End of the Innocence ). Life never delivers what it promises, and this hollow ringing sound of resignation is even found among the famous and the su

“Jewish law prefers that Jews pray communally rather than privately.” Joseph Telushkin, “Minyan,” in  Jewish Literacy , 719. I’ve been thinking about this notion for a few days after I read it because I get the impression that most of the Christians I know pray individually and about their own self interests more than anything else. I know this is true of me. But Telushkin, reiterating the teachings of the rabbis in connecting Jewish prayer to the concept of  minyan , where the minimum number of males required to conduct a worship service or say certain prayers is ten, says that public prayer prevents such personal expressions of self-interest. He says:  " . . . the rabbis apparently felt that public prayers are more apt to be offered for that which benefits the entire community, whereas individuals often pray for that which benefits only themselves, even if it be at the expense of someone else" (719). In Evangelical or Pentecostal services that I've attended, at some

Growing up in Southern Illinois , I had never met a vegetarian. We were meat lovers. We felt like we were supporting local industry when we indulged eggs, ground beef, brisket, steaks, or pork chops since many people who lived in our area were farmers. We never talked about cholesterol either. But one night in college, it all changed. Marcia, my wife, had painstakingly worked on dinner for Mark and Victoria, a couple on our small Bible College campus in Springfield , Missouri that we had met on campus. Mark grew up in a missionary family and was a Missions major, so we figured that missionaries-in-training would eat anything. Marcia brought out one of her specialties: gorgeous lumps of ground beef wrapped with a strip of bacon. We called them "Bacon Wraps" and we thought they were beautiful. We later learned after moving out East that wraps were actually an uppity kind of sandwich that was supposed to be healthy, but being from a small Midwestern town we had never seen

I feel so retro sitting in the Newark Airport waiting to board a flight to Louisville to meet Marcia and the girls. People playing with electronic gadgets and listening to music or podcasts all around me. I almost brought my CD player, but that also would have seemed old fashioned, so 1990s, carrying around a Sony Walkman in these iPod days. But I could have listened to NPR this morning if I had it. Something else to mention--I'm writing on a steno pad! Who writes on a steno pad in this day and age? I should have a laptop computer, but I'm using a steno pad with a ball point pen, just like George Washington probably did when he wrote. This is so embarrassing. People sometimes look at me funny when I do this. "What's he doing?" they probably say to themselves. "I'll bet he's writing a letter to his mother." Or they think, "Why is that guy taking notes on paper in an airline terminal? I wonder if he's a terrorist, taking notes on how

In a close vote, the United Pentecostal Church (UPC) adopted the cardinal as the denominational bird over the flamingo during its annual conference in Richmond , Virginia . While many important issues were discussed at the conference, including revising its doctrinal statement to adopt footwashing as an ordinance of the church and to establish a formal position on homosexuality, the bird debate seemed to awaken a sleeping Greater Richmond Convention Center filled with UPC pastors from around the country. Debate centered around whether the flamingo , which stands on one leg, or the cardinal , with its bright, red plumaged males and its drab, brown feathered females, most closely reflected the values of the denomination. Observers said the comments of the Reverend Larry Guenther of Cedar Rapids , Iowa , characterized the sentiments of the majority who voted in favor of the redbird. Folks, look around the room here. Look at our men, our ministers, with their mousses and hair oils and br

I walked my dog today. His name is Rover. I know, it is an ordinary dog name, but I wanted something traditional for him. I mean, he is a dog, so why give him some avant-garde name for goodness’ sake? He is a Yorkshire terrier. I do not even know what that is . At least that is what I tell people. I have a dog leash that I bought at the Duquoin State Fair in 1975 and I found it in the attic last year. I guess I did not want to go around with a Bergen Record newspaper bag to pick up Rover’s poop—and a New York Times bag would have been a little hoity toity for me—so an invisible Yorkshire terrier on a stiff, fake dog leash seemed right, and there are no ordinances in Leonia requiring us to pick up invisible dog poop. As I was out walking Rover this morning, I saw one of the softball moms who lives two blocks away. She told me he was a cute dog, but then her dog got a little aggressive with Rover and I had to pull Rover back and tell her to have a nice day. We walked by the home sale

With so much snow on the ground, my thoughts turn to summer sometimes. The fountain at the pond in the park where I do chin-ups in Mahwah , New Jersey constantly roars in the summer. It reminds me of the roar of the spillway dam overflow at Rend Lake in Southern Illinois where my grandfather used to take me to catch shad for bait and then fish a little farther down the river. We mostly fished in quiet waters where he could talk, but closer to the spillway the roar kept conversation at a minimum. My grandpa was a storyteller, but he could not tell stories above the roar of the spillway. Fishing by a waterfall is not able to support conversation. Fishing requires you to keep some distance from the next fisherman anyway and requires personal space to cast the line, to listen, to watch the movements of the line. This is at odds with storytelling, which requires intimacy. My grandpa loved to tell stories, so we mostly fished in the quiet of lakes or creeks. He could tell about the charac

Kurt Warner retired last week—we think, unless he pulls a Brett Favre on us—and I thought back a year ago to how happy I was to see him successful again after several years of struggling to regain the greatness he had shown with the Rams. Last January, before the Cardinals played in the NFC championship, I jotted a few notes about what I remembered of the amazing run Warner had with the Rams in 2000 when my Mom was still alive for what would be her last January. They beat Tampa Bay 11-6 that year. My Mom, who had never been interested in sports and thought it more of a worldly distraction, had gotten interested in football because of Warner, who was a Pentecostal Christian like we were. We had talked about it a few times during the football season as Warner and the Rams were taking the Midwest by storm. She really liked him, the Christian who went from bagging groceries to leading the “Greatest Show on Turf.” So after the Rams’ NFC championship victory, I called to talk to her about