Dallas Diarist: Three Days on the Advent of the Son of Man Anniversary Tour Bus
Exile in Humanville
The First Sunday of Advent
9:30 a.m.
The Sunday sermon was cooked but not quite cooled and set when I got up. So I sat down to scribble some notes that I could then, hopefully, set aside when the time came. There were some odds and ends to attend to before worship properly started—I tried and failed to buy a jelly donut in payment of a lost Packers-Vikings wager from a few weeks ago, we had a pledge matching challenge to announce, I had a chasuble of our late bishop, very graciously given to me by his widow, to bless along with a new lectionary book—and by the time I stood up to preach, all the jottings were gone from my memory and I was starting over.
The Gospel for that Sunday is from the “Little Apocalypse” of Mark. It’s not one I especially love reading or preaching. I cherish the end-times readings and I try more and more to preach Advent in terms not just of the Nativity of Our Lord but of his return in glory. But this one has always left me at a bit of a loss. The fig tree’s lesson is not one I’ve figured out how to learn for myself, let alone convey to others (as my old sermon manuscripts regrettably confirm). I don’t know interpreting the signs of the times from looking for omens, and I frankly don’t want to do either. This time, though, I was hearing something different in Jesus’s repeated injunction to “keep awake.” Too much sleep was a vice in the ancient and medieval worlds, but we pretty clearly suffer from the opposite temptation: too much wakefulness, too much attentiveness to too many stimuli, too little ease of taking our promised and needed rest. I try to be sparing with “takes” in my preaching, but I couldn’t resist speculating that one cause of our apparently increasing cultural derangement is simple lack of sleep. So being alert and keeping awake has to mean something other than checking our literal alerts and refraining from literal sleep. To be properly attentive—to be observant of what matters, to be attuned to the coming of God’s kingdom—requires turning off the alerts and getting more sleep.
That was the idea, anyway, and while I fumbled my attempt at a good-newsy conclusion, I think that part stuck. I’m a bad example in this, which is not surprising. A preacher who preaches only the things he or she is good at would be a bore or a terror. But I do think Nietzsche was on to something when he inverted one of Christ’s sayings: that human life is not rightly lost in order to be saved, but saved in order to be expended. You’re not going to achieve either perfect health or perfect self-immolation, so you have to choose how and when you’re going to give something of yourself up. Where I differ from Nietzsche, in principle if not always in practice, is that this self-giving ought to be done for the sake of the neighbor, or more precisely, Christ incarnate in the neighbor, whoever that happens to be in a given moment of decision.
7 p.m.
That wasn’t my plan for this particular Sunday, however. It was a long church day, with an adult forum on welcome and inclusion and an organizational get-together for a new young adult group, but after it was done, the day was going to be for diversions. A friend from Deep Springs was visiting and we made a buttermilk pie. We desultorily followed the Eagles versus the 49ers. I stuffed some chicken breasts with Boursin and lemon juice and made some sauce out of the cranberries that Costco sold me in such alluringly cheap massive bags. By the time it was all done, my friend and I had about five minutes to eat before we had to leave for the semi-hourly DART train that took us down to the Majestic Theater. We crossed Greenville Avenue and the Red Line tracks at a dead sprint, arriving just as the doors opened because life is short and dads love to run for trains.
We were in a rush to see Liz Phair, who was in town for her Exile in Guyville 30th Anniversary Tour. We were fans from those early days, and while I’m no stranger to nostalgia-driven acts, this might have been the first time I’d gone to a nostalgia show for something that came out during my own youth. I really did love that first album and, while I also love being reminded that it was once 1993 and I was once fourteen years old, the music itself has more than held up on its own terms. The chording still sounds great and the lyrics haven’t lost any of their bite, even after thirty years of escalating frankness and self-exposure in popular music. It took considerable chutzpah for an unknown artist to make a debut album that has eighteen tracks and explicitly references, in its title, a monument of classic rock that also has eighteen tracks. I’m sure I bought the album back then because critics, marketers, or both characterized it as a “song for song response” to the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. (1972), which was my favorite album. The parallels were, in fact, more meticulous and deliberate than I ever realized. But that actually ended up both overselling the similarities and underselling Phair’s originality and accomplishment.1 When I listen to them side by side, I mostly hear a shared mood of claustrophobia and even desperation.2 The Rolling Stones were at their commercial and artistic peak, with financial, personal, and chemical problems all starting to exert their parabolic gravity. Liz Phair was insanely talented and ambitious, but with no obvious trajectory upward. The Stones were hiding out from UK taxation in southern France, Liz Phair was circulating demos in Wicker Park. But exile is, as a friend of mine likes to put it, not so much a “geographical position” as a “spiritual disposition,” and you can hear it loud and clear in both.
Neither Exile nor Phair’s excellent follow-up Whip-Smart sold very well, and as she courted commercial success to match her critical enthusiasm in later albums, she ended up making a lot of forgettable music. She got a bad shake in some ways, apparently had some dependency issues, and developed a reputation for stage fright and unreliability as a live performer. But that first album survived, and on Sunday night she played it straight through to an adoring crowd. “Nineteen-ninety three” was more or less her first word to the audience, and I almost bellowed “I WAS ALIVE THEN.” I’d have shown up for the nostalgia alone; in an odd way, I probably owed her that, after rewarding her with the sum total of one CD purchase in 1993 for years of enjoyment. A competent, by-the-book run-through of the songs would have been good enough, and even seeing a stumbling shadow would have been, I suppose, an experience worth having and gently declining to speak of later. But, as my friend conjectured, Phair had chosen to trade on the enduring love and lost youth of her fans fairly and honestly, by giving us a legitimately great show. Maybe all those years of sparse performing built up a reservoir to be drawn on at just the right time. The band was tight, and the arrangements deviated from faithfulness in rare and modest but consistently interesting ways.3 The rockers went harder but the muted, enigmatic songs really shone. It’s just one great song after another, really. There are a few that seem to call one for one more verse, but there are no duds. “He’s just a hero, in a long line of heroes / looking for action at a price he can pay / They say he’s famous, but no one can prove it / Make him an offer just to see what he’ll say.” Never gets old. Unlike the guy in that song, and unlike us. They ended the main set with the album’s last song, a beautiful and frantic performance of “Strange Loop” that pushed the structure of the song harder, building, then dropping, then building again, and finally dropping off as Phair ended the song alone with her acoustic guitar on the last few chords. Dads love a long instrumental coda.
At one point, Phair mused about whether tour buses were subject to maritime law. Musicians on tour seem to act like it, she said. It’s a question a road warrior musician would have long ago asked and answered. Those musicians do great shows, it can’t be denied. B.B. King (RIP) strolling out in a spangled tuxedo, tearing into “Let the Good Times Roll” for the ten-thousandth time in his career; Willie Nelson juking into “Whiskey River” as the Texas flag drops across the stage; Bruce pulling out the hangdog harmonica for “Thunder Road.” Doing the same set with the same patter and leaving people with exactly what they came to hear. Mick Jagger seems to get a brief on local color and plugs it into the same break in each concert, along with a photo of an early band visit to whatever city they’re in. Even the surprises are, so to say, expected. I EAT AT WHATABURGER TOO MICK! I WAS ALIVE IN 1963!
But our Gen-X nostalgia is better than most. Or at least our nostalgia act was aiming a little higher and nailing the mark. Mile after mile on the lawless bus, year after year in anarchic memory’s rear-view, circuit after circuit of the Rainbo Club and the Metro where there’s live music and friendly bartenders who may or may not give you a line you’ll end up singing decades later: where does the time go? Or what was it doing here while we left? We’d turned too early and approached the theater by the rear entrance, where the melancholy tour vehicles sat waiting to be refilled at the show’s end. Time was, we’d probably have stopped back around to scent the freedom of the touring seas, to try to chat with a guitar tech or a band member ready to break free for the night. But the possibility didn’t even come up on our brisk walk and long wait for the semi-hourly train. It was late when we got home and we smelled like the DART (wet upholstery with undertones of ditch weed and tobacco) but there was pie waiting for us.
Monday After the First Sunday of Advent
7 a.m.
A new Grifts of the Holy Spirit arrived just in time for Advent. This time it’s about nativity sets. I’ve seen the figurines but I did not know that they came with names and back stories. Tony writes very movingly about how his five-year-old daughter grapples onto the names and elaborates the stories, to which more are added each year:
The manger is empty right now, but every polymer resin human being there on my shelf has a name and a story and is critically important to the story, just as critically important as every other polymer resin human being next to it. And that’s what my daughter learns and thinks about while she waits for the child to appear in the manger.
This is lovely and true and makes you think. Then, well, I saw my words about the Last Judgment in Matthew 25, last week’s Gospel, quoted back to me (with attribution, so there’s no wriggling out of it, for me, personally). And there was interpretation:
It is telling that at the final judgment, the King of the Universe doesn't say “you did a good thing for a poor person, and so, now, for purposes of this final judgment I am about to make, I will treat you as though you did the same thing to me.” That is how I have tended to approach this passage in the past, and I don't think I'm alone in that. But Dueholm is digging into something very real here…. The multitudes in the story hoped to serve the King with their lives, and learned, when finally faced with Him directly, that they had either already done it or had already lost the plot completely, and that, instead of finding the King-lookin’ guy and doing whatever he said, instead of finding the “right person” to serve or take care of or welcome, they had already responded to the people placed directly in front of them, and that was what mattered.
It’s nice to have one’s words quoted and rather moving to have them worked out and applied. But it’s all just preparation for the random prompts of life’s performance. Thus…
9:30 a.m.
I got a call from a friend, a deacon in the Chicago area, who works with a migrant and refugee advocacy group. A family was traveling from Chicago to Houston for an asylum hearing and had gotten delayed in the Memphis bus station. They would miss their connection in Dallas and might need a new ticket and some basic hospitality while they waited. Two young parents, two little kids, no English. She asked if I could help. This was not part of my plan for the day, or any day, because I do not organize my life around do-gooding to even the smallest degree. I excel at encountering the world’s ills at a philosophical remove, drawing as needed on long-ago experiences of working on the gritty edges. I contacted a colleague who speaks Spanish for real (I can own those chumps on the Duolingo Amethyst league but this would be different) and we planned to meet their bus, which was due to arrive between 5 and 6 p.m.
4:15 p.m.
The bus was not going to arrive between 5 and 6 p.m. I was told it would be around 8 p.m. The Greyhound website knew nothing of this bus either way but we proceed on trust in this business.
8 p.m.
You are not allowed into the bus station, even the cordoned-off kiosk area, if you don’t have a ticket and we didn’t have tickets. So we watched the waiting room through the window and played literal telephone through our Chicago contact to find the family. They appeared and we took them to McDonald’s down the street. The chicken nuggets, the three-year-old said, would make her fuerte.
The good news was that a midnight bus would get them in to Houston in plenty of time for the hearing, and a local contact would be there waiting to take them to breakfast and get them to court. The bad news was that their ticket was not transferrable and the bus was sold out anyway. The next departure wasn’t until 4:45 a.m., which left no margin for error at the Houston end. And one problem with transportation at the margins is that there is a lot of error. Could they possibly get on the earlier bus as standby passengers? Well, we were told, that would depend on the driver. And they couldn’t stay in the waiting room for more than four hours before their scheduled departure.
We bought the 4:45 a.m. tickets. The first person in Houston had to work and couldn’t meet the new bus but someone else had been found. We all bundled into my car and stopped at church to stay warm and let them get washed up after a night and a day on Greyhound. Perhaps someone would be able to drive them to Houston overnight. No one was able to drive them to Houston overnight. I thought about it, I really did, but I did not trust myself, the hour, or those lonely hostile miles between Dallas and Houston. We decided to try to wheedle onto the 12 a.m. bus just in case.
Tuesday after the First Sunday of Advent
12:01 a.m.
The bus was running late for its 12:01 departure but people queued well ahead of time anyway. There was going to be a lot of hurt on that bus. A lot of dilated pupils. Also a lot of dogs, which I did not remember from my own time riding intercity buses. Everyone is fully within or preparing themselves for maritime law. But it’s just one more stop on a long journey for this family. Maybe it would happen and maybe it would not. I don’t know whether I was more struck by their stoicism or their immediate and unreserved trust in two strangers in a strange place. One imagines that many, many things had and had not happened over miles and miles between here and Chicago and the Darien Gap. We prayed for them in English and then in Spanish. The family stayed inside the terminal while we waited in line to see if there were any open seats after all the tickets were scanned. We could see and hear the driver as she dealt with each rider ahead of us. She gave an impression of severe businesslikeness. We were not optimistic. But she said without hesitation that if there was room, they could get on. Eventually it was established that there was room for them, though not all together and she had to get creative with the reserve seats in front. There was even a spot for a guy with a little dog and an agitated affect who had bought a ticket for 12:01 a.m. on the previous day. We thanked her profusely. We embraced all around and they climbed aboard. The bus pulled out only thirty-odd minutes behind schedule.
When I got home an hour later, after dropping off my colleague, I was buzzing too much to go right to bed. The pie was all gone and I smelled like the DART again. I don’t think I’ll ever be anything but a stranger in that edge of the city, a guy from somewhere else in a collar that faintly embarrasses himself and everyone else and who has a safer, cleaner, more comfortable place to retreat to when the do-gooding has been done or simply gets too hard. I can and do harden my heart a hundred times a day, but now and then things just come up and you have to say yes or no. I don’t know anything about the end of the world except what you see in a moment like that, when you have to run for that trillion-wheeled tour bus which is always leaving and never arriving, but just rolling its way through time and obeying no law but its own. It seems wrong that people should have to go like this, from pillar to post, depending on whoever answers a text in a moment of spiritual availability. It is written that Jesus is on that bus, somewhere. They say he’s famous, but no one can prove it. It should be better. It isn’t better. You can always pray.
9:30 a.m.
I was trying to explain what happened the night before to my wife and turned back to Tony’s essay about Nativity sets and the end of the world:
The climax of Matthew’s nativity story is is not the heavenly chorus celebrating the birth, but rather an angel appearing before that birth and speaking to Joseph, who has just learned that Mary has become pregnant apparently out of wedlock, and that her reputation is basically going to be destroyed, and his will be too if he moved forward with his plans to marry her. It's a damn shame that they can't get married now, but she didn’t work for it. She did something wrong. It was her personal choice. She is responsible for her own problems. It’s just not realistic.
The first words of the angel to Joseph are “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary your wife into your home”. Again, the series of Advent readings in the lectionary is “world's ending this is important”, “world's ending this is important”, “world's ending this is important”, and then “do not be afraid to take the scared girl into your home”. That's what you get instead of an inn
That’s the moment where I stopped reading it out loud because I was too choked up. Anyway, read the whole thing if you didn’t before. Later on, I heard that the hearing went well and the case was transferred to Chicago so midnight runs to Houston to be examined by a judge would, at least, not be necessary again.
If there’s such a thing as nostalgia for the future, Advent is where we experience it. It’s profoundly embarrassing, in a way, all these oracles and stories of terrible disproportion between a moment in time and the yearning for eternal redemption. “O that you would tear the heavens and come down,” like that time you stooped down in the earth and scooped the mud and made us with your own hands. Remember that? We were alive then! Don’t leave us here. Just keep playing. It’s understandable, and not even all bad, that we humans are easily cajoled into saying “here’s my little heap of good deeds” in front of a God who is both infinitely majestic and infinitely suffering. Or that we can be persuaded to scan the horizon for heaven’s weather with the hope of dancing through the raindrops of tribulation. How touching, then, how nearly kitschy, to think that God chose to join us in our mortal frame, eat our food, walk our roads, hear our little songs with our own little ears. If he makes it back this way, you’d hate to miss it.
Click here to make a contribution to Illinois Community for Detained Immigrants, which helped and supported this family (and many others) on their journey. Click here to volunteer or contribute to Dallas Responds, a migrant welcoming ministry of Oak Lawn United Methodist Church. And please support decent and humane policies for refugees, economic migrants, and asylum seekers.
For fans of either album (or both), the linked interview lays out the parallels, obvious and obscure. If you heard “6’1” and “Help Me Mary” as “Rocks Off” and “Rip This Joint” as seen by a woman unfortunate enough to be in the way of the kinds of the guys who would sing them (with the same dynamic shift between the tracks to boot), or “F**k and Run” as the other side of “Happy”, you apparently heard exactly what Phair intended. And a few of Phair’s songs are just clearly superior to their alternate number on Main St. “Soap Star Joe” echoes the acoustic guitar and harmonica on “Sweet Virginia” but is a much better song. “Shatter” is one of the best songs on the album and is a lot better than “I Just Want to See His Face.” And “Strange Loop” cops something of the guitar sound of “Soul Survivor” but holds up a lot better to repeated listening.
Counterpoint: Here is old footage of Phair singing a medley of “Divorce Song” and “Emotional Rescue,” which is a pretty hardcore Stones-fan choice.
Leonard Cohen’s post-bankruptcy tours were a lot like this, too. The musicians were first-rate and the arrangements and performances often ended up outclassing the original recordings. He provided a lot of value for the nostalgia dollar!
For another discussion: I came to Liz Phair through Exile—with no knowledge at all of The Rolling Stones album (I'll admit to only having ever gotten into a few of their songs), only that the name referred to their own Exile. It was a crucial album for me and a lot of other women of my generation, and I was always heartened to find that a new friend and I could belt out the whole thing together. Hugely cathartic. (After that, "Cinco de Mayo" may have been the point after which my enthusiasm began to wane—and the shock of later Phair output was one I remember being hard to deal with.)