Ugly Juice & Summer Sausage Sandwiches – The Story of My Story, an Introduction

Stories are the things life is made of. Tying together moments and elements that go unnoticed in the day to day, stories teach us to understand ourselves, identify what we value, and capture the wisdom of the past to guide us into our future. What’s more, stories take us to places and introduce us to people we otherwise have no way of doing so on our own. They allow us to use our imagination to experiment and test ideas learning as we go. Nevertheless, a story is nothing without its author. To truly understand a story, one must understand the context from which the author writes.

This post is the story of how I developed a passion for stories, hearing and telling them, why I started this blog, Hicks, Hoodlums, & Highrises, and my high-level introduction to you as the blog’s author. So, without further ado, so begins the first story of many.

Now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story no one on earth has ever read, which goes on forever; in which every chapter is better than the one before.
– C.S. Lewis

Grandpa came in with his ultimate lunch special, sandwich sized Maplewood Meats’ German summer sausage on rye bread with margarine served with ugly juice a.k.a. grapefruit juice. My grandfather named it this way because of the way it made your face look when you drank it. I sat there in anticipation of the best part of such occasions, storytelling.

On this particular day, he told me of his days in the Catholic school, back when the nuns still had the power to smack kids who got out of line. In this story, he and a handful of others had gotten in just the kind of trouble that would warrant such discipline. I don’t know what was worse, the discipline itself, or that such punishment was often not meted out immediately raising the anxiety level of those awaiting their sentence with every passing minute.

However, in this case, it was just that delay that allowed my grandfather to cunningly beat fate. He sharpened all his pencils to a fine, pointy, tip, and then placed them in his front shirt pocket with the points up. After class as the nun doled out punishments to the line of students, she decided to skip grandpa today for fear of injuring her hand on the wisely placed pencils. 

I giggled in astonishment of my grandfather’s cleverness. While as an adult I may not look with the same awe at sharp pencils, such stories were a nearly everyday occurrence as my grandfather looked after me. Besides battling nuns, my grandfather loved science, nature, and God. He would take pictures of the full moon so he could show me the man in it, take me for walks around the 120-acre farm teaching me about many of things on it, and of loving God and family unconditionally.

But one thing did not change as I became an adult, I will never forget looking up at my grandfather and hoping one day I would have such exciting stories and wonders to share. A few decades later…this blog is those stories and so much more.  If only I had known the journey I would embark on.

Raised at what I like to call, “the beginning of nowhere” (as the middle of nowhere is just past my house), both of my parents just barely graduated high school with neither so much as having a passport and barely having crossed the Wisconsin state border. We were definitely on the poorer end of the scale and unashamedly “hicks” as some might say. I was essentially a nobody from nowhere, and quite frankly, I was perfectly ok with that.

While money may have been short, I was blessed with two great riches, I was poor in the country and in the country is where I met God. For what my parents may have lacked in academics they made up for in ingenuity. By the time I was 12, I had grown and preserved, my own food; everything from gardening to raising animals, canning to butchering, even shooting my first deer. I had literally put the roof over my head and more including concrete work, drywall, electrical, plumbing and the list goes on. My dad was self-taught and to this day can fix just about anything. My siblings and I became his construction crew, building what we could not afford to buy, gaining the strength and self-confidence that came with the experience.

Yet, the country is so much more than just the above. There is something about being “country” that gets into your soul. Perhaps it is the connection of one’s bare feet to the ground, or learning and living out concepts such as, “make hay while the sun is shining.” For all the confidence gained from self-reliance the country gives one, that same wild nature humbles one by showing daily just how fragile we humans are in the grand scheme of things. When you farm you become innately familiar with the forces, laws, and rhythms of nature and, for me, nature’s God.

My earliest memories are of meeting God, whether it be feeling His presence as the wind rushed over my body and through my hair with my little bare feet in the prickly brush of our hayfield, in the awe of watching the lightening dance in a storm, or watching the miracle of life such as the moment the beak of a new chick first breaks through its shell, when a seed first sprouts, or nursing a new born calf.

No one had to teach me to believe in God or introduce me to who He is, as the Psalmist said, “The heavens declare the glory of God…” (Psalm 19:1 KJV). By the time anyone was going to try to convince me otherwise, He and I were already on a first name basis.

The day before my 3^rd birthday, my mother came to know God beyond the text as she engaged God in the cataclysmic, tangible, miraculous infilling of the Holy Spirit.  By the time I was 7, I had done so as well. To know there is a God is undeniable, to know God personally is the reason I breathe.

Obviously, my pursuit of God did not stop there. Fiercely independent and ridiculously analytical from the day I was born (per the eye witness testimony of my mother), when it came to God (or quite frankly anything else for that matter), only the raw, unadulterated truth would suffice…and I was willing to pay the price for it.

Throughout grade school and high school, my beliefs were different from those around me. I didn’t fit the religious model, and thus the culture, of my hometown. Of course, given my upbringing in the beginning of nowhere, my hometown was small, very small. To be different in a small town, is to be an outcast. I was teased relentlessly even to the point of being beat up on occasion. My mom offered me to use her as an excuse. That was not sufficient, I asked for scriptures, she gave them. I determined a friend who would reject me for the clothes I wore or for honoring God, was no friend at all. Consequently, I had next to no friends, but…I was a friend of God.

Perhaps that it was those long walks alone across the school playground where I first became an “Irvi” – Hebrew for “one that traverses or crosses over,” or to put it in more modern terms, a nomad. A pariah in my own land, I wandered, not lost but seeking to know God with an insatiable curiosity to understand the world He created and my place in it.

In the decades since, my pursuit of God has taken me from the countryside with the “hicks” to the big city where I found comradery amongst a courageous group of sanctified “hoodlums.” While, simultaneously, after being the first in my family to graduate university, I now often find myself 20, 30 even 70 floors up “highrises” advising executives of fortune 500 companies on business strategy on a journey that has crisscrossed the globe. This blog is the stories of how I found myself living between hicks, hoodlums, and highrises, but it is more than just my story. It is the stories of the people I met along the way, the adventures of this thing we call, “living by faith,” and the revelations I received.

My grandfather died five days before my 10^th birthday in what was probably the single most devastating day of my life. He will never hear my stories, at least not on this side of eternity. So, I share them here with you in hopes you will be encouraged, perhaps entertained, and are able to glean some value from the learnings that I and, many in my life, traveled the hard way to learn. Most of all, I hope that you are able to join with me as fellow Ivrim (plural for Ivri) as we wander in pursuit of our wonderful creator.