Friends in Christ,
Weather and work responsibilities permitting, I plan on heading to Owatonna, Minnesota the first weekend in March for the “Owatonna Hometown Sampler.” Brother Dan (not the Broadway kid’s dad, but music and stages are occasionally a theme in this family, too) lives there with his lovely family, and for most of the past dozen or so years, it has become a bit of a tradition for me to blast down there and spend the weekend. Most people go somewhere way south for Spring Break. I go a little south. But hey, it’s usually like, 3 degrees warmer there than here.
A high school English teacher and coach by vocation, Dan also occasionally sings and plays guitar for various events in a “hobby” band made up of several of his friends and colleagues; one of those events is an annual fundraiser for the Steele County Food Shelf, the aforementioned “Hometown Sampler.”
Dan’s band is one of four musical ensembles that typically performs a half-hour set during the weekend’s four or five two-hour concerts. There is never a charge to attend the concerts, but it is expected that concert-goers give generously in the free-will offering basket at the back, as well as an actual hat that is passed during the intermission. If my memory serves me, last year they took in somewhere in the neighborhood of 25-30 thousand dollars for the weekend. It’s a very fun and happy event, especially when my brother and I get to play a game called, “I’m Phil, not Dan,” given that he and I tend to often get mistaken for each other when we are together (I am three years older, so that’s always a boost to my ego).
Sadly, though, a pall of grief will be hanging over the festivities that weekend, especially for my brother and his band. As of this writing, band member Dave Schroeder, a retired Owatonna policeman and a connoisseur of excellent beer, is dying of an aggressive and invasive brain tumor. Only a few years older than I, Dave was just diagnosed with this bad news sometime early last summer (“terminal”), and it was already too late to operate by then. He basically had two options: extend his life by a few months by taking some sessions of treatment, or let the disease run its course. He chose the treatment option, and it helped; but death is bearing down on him now. He may or may not make it to this year’s Sampler; time will tell. He has been in Hospice care for the last several weeks.
My goodness, the last time I saw him, he was sitting at “Torey’s,” a local Owatonna bar and grill, celebrating their 2018 Sampler opening performance by mowing through a plate of barbeque wings like there was no tomorrow. Soon, there literally won’t be a tomorrow for Dave; at least in this life. I didn’t know Dave all that well, but I am really going to miss him. And so will many others.
Dave, like all the members of my brother’s band, has always warmly and enthusiastically welcomed me when I’ve come down and has always treated me as just “one of the band,” which has meant a lot to me through the years. Dave is a bit of a quirky duck in many ways, and while he was a very talented multi-instrumentalist and integral to the band’s sound, his singing often posed a bit of dilemma for Dan and the rest of the band, given some pitch issues and a somewhat limited vocal range. Usually, during the Sampler performances, there was one “Dave song” that tended to work fairly well with Dave’s voice. I once watched a documentary on the Beatles and the Beatles’ manager, George Martin, shared that Paul McCartney would always try to write a song for each Beatles’ album that the singing-challenged Ringo Starr could Rock band The Allan Parsons Project has this beautiful song on an album from back in the early 1980’s entitled, “Old and Wise,” a haunting, poetic and evocative piece about the “approaching shadows” and “final curtain” of death that will come one day to all of us, and the kinds of things that will be running through our hearts and minds as we ponder the mystery of the end of our earthly existence and the lives that have touched us along the way.
My favorite line in the song is from the chorus and it goes as such: “And someday, in the mist of time, when they ask me if I knew you, I’d smile and say you were a friend of mine.” When my brother texted me last summer and informed me of his buddy Dave’s bad news, one of the first things to pop into my head was, “Oh no, he is my friend, too.”
A couple weeks before this past Thanksgiving, my brother and most of his band steeled their nerves and went over to Dave’s house and “jammed” with him—my brother on guitar and the rest of the group singing. The video of the visit was posted and shared on Facebook, so I was able to take a peek at it. Exquisite. Dave was having a pretty good day that day, sprawled out on what appeared to be a hospital-type bed there in the living room, but sitting up enough to join them in singing (nobody seemed too worried about Dave’s inconsistent vocal pitch, I must add; love tends to supplant everything else in these kinds of grace-splashed moments). It was a sweetly beautiful scene--an elegiac song for the dying, I suppose, but even moreso a triumphant song celebrating life and all things good, especially music.
Thank you for letting me introduce you to my friend Dave this month. The long, dark days this time of year often give us pause for the un-rushed pondering of melancholy moments like these, don’t they? And for the most part we do well to welcome them and honor them; usually the scariest of monsters (like our fear of death) lose at least some of their power over us when we turn and face them instead of running for the hills. Thankfully, the church reminds us (this is still the luminous season of Epiphany after all) that there is always, always light shining in the darkness, a light no darkness will ever overcome (John 1).
People of God, this is a precarious, perilous, and sometimes peculiar life to be sure, but according to Rev. John Ames, the Congregational minister in Gilead, my favorite novel of all time, “There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.” Keep singing, Dave, as the approaching shadows descend upon you and your family much sooner than you had planned, and as the final curtain is about to drop upon your weary eyes. The Lord of Light is with you. And until we meet again, I will smile and say you were a friend of mine.
Pastor Phil
(As posted in February 2019 Newsletter)
Weather and work responsibilities permitting, I plan on heading to Owatonna, Minnesota the first weekend in March for the “Owatonna Hometown Sampler.” Brother Dan (not the Broadway kid’s dad, but music and stages are occasionally a theme in this family, too) lives there with his lovely family, and for most of the past dozen or so years, it has become a bit of a tradition for me to blast down there and spend the weekend. Most people go somewhere way south for Spring Break. I go a little south. But hey, it’s usually like, 3 degrees warmer there than here.
A high school English teacher and coach by vocation, Dan also occasionally sings and plays guitar for various events in a “hobby” band made up of several of his friends and colleagues; one of those events is an annual fundraiser for the Steele County Food Shelf, the aforementioned “Hometown Sampler.”
Dan’s band is one of four musical ensembles that typically performs a half-hour set during the weekend’s four or five two-hour concerts. There is never a charge to attend the concerts, but it is expected that concert-goers give generously in the free-will offering basket at the back, as well as an actual hat that is passed during the intermission. If my memory serves me, last year they took in somewhere in the neighborhood of 25-30 thousand dollars for the weekend. It’s a very fun and happy event, especially when my brother and I get to play a game called, “I’m Phil, not Dan,” given that he and I tend to often get mistaken for each other when we are together (I am three years older, so that’s always a boost to my ego).
Sadly, though, a pall of grief will be hanging over the festivities that weekend, especially for my brother and his band. As of this writing, band member Dave Schroeder, a retired Owatonna policeman and a connoisseur of excellent beer, is dying of an aggressive and invasive brain tumor. Only a few years older than I, Dave was just diagnosed with this bad news sometime early last summer (“terminal”), and it was already too late to operate by then. He basically had two options: extend his life by a few months by taking some sessions of treatment, or let the disease run its course. He chose the treatment option, and it helped; but death is bearing down on him now. He may or may not make it to this year’s Sampler; time will tell. He has been in Hospice care for the last several weeks.
My goodness, the last time I saw him, he was sitting at “Torey’s,” a local Owatonna bar and grill, celebrating their 2018 Sampler opening performance by mowing through a plate of barbeque wings like there was no tomorrow. Soon, there literally won’t be a tomorrow for Dave; at least in this life. I didn’t know Dave all that well, but I am really going to miss him. And so will many others.
Dave, like all the members of my brother’s band, has always warmly and enthusiastically welcomed me when I’ve come down and has always treated me as just “one of the band,” which has meant a lot to me through the years. Dave is a bit of a quirky duck in many ways, and while he was a very talented multi-instrumentalist and integral to the band’s sound, his singing often posed a bit of dilemma for Dan and the rest of the band, given some pitch issues and a somewhat limited vocal range. Usually, during the Sampler performances, there was one “Dave song” that tended to work fairly well with Dave’s voice. I once watched a documentary on the Beatles and the Beatles’ manager, George Martin, shared that Paul McCartney would always try to write a song for each Beatles’ album that the singing-challenged Ringo Starr could Rock band The Allan Parsons Project has this beautiful song on an album from back in the early 1980’s entitled, “Old and Wise,” a haunting, poetic and evocative piece about the “approaching shadows” and “final curtain” of death that will come one day to all of us, and the kinds of things that will be running through our hearts and minds as we ponder the mystery of the end of our earthly existence and the lives that have touched us along the way.
My favorite line in the song is from the chorus and it goes as such: “And someday, in the mist of time, when they ask me if I knew you, I’d smile and say you were a friend of mine.” When my brother texted me last summer and informed me of his buddy Dave’s bad news, one of the first things to pop into my head was, “Oh no, he is my friend, too.”
A couple weeks before this past Thanksgiving, my brother and most of his band steeled their nerves and went over to Dave’s house and “jammed” with him—my brother on guitar and the rest of the group singing. The video of the visit was posted and shared on Facebook, so I was able to take a peek at it. Exquisite. Dave was having a pretty good day that day, sprawled out on what appeared to be a hospital-type bed there in the living room, but sitting up enough to join them in singing (nobody seemed too worried about Dave’s inconsistent vocal pitch, I must add; love tends to supplant everything else in these kinds of grace-splashed moments). It was a sweetly beautiful scene--an elegiac song for the dying, I suppose, but even moreso a triumphant song celebrating life and all things good, especially music.
Thank you for letting me introduce you to my friend Dave this month. The long, dark days this time of year often give us pause for the un-rushed pondering of melancholy moments like these, don’t they? And for the most part we do well to welcome them and honor them; usually the scariest of monsters (like our fear of death) lose at least some of their power over us when we turn and face them instead of running for the hills. Thankfully, the church reminds us (this is still the luminous season of Epiphany after all) that there is always, always light shining in the darkness, a light no darkness will ever overcome (John 1).
People of God, this is a precarious, perilous, and sometimes peculiar life to be sure, but according to Rev. John Ames, the Congregational minister in Gilead, my favorite novel of all time, “There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.” Keep singing, Dave, as the approaching shadows descend upon you and your family much sooner than you had planned, and as the final curtain is about to drop upon your weary eyes. The Lord of Light is with you. And until we meet again, I will smile and say you were a friend of mine.
Pastor Phil
(As posted in February 2019 Newsletter)