GOING HOME AGAIN ...

York Native Wants To Go Home Again.
Published in the York Dispatch when I was there

“Where are you from?” is a question every Californian learns to answer early on, and for good reason. Most of us are from "someplace else.” For 40 years I have said, “Oh, I am from York, a small town in Southeastern Pennsylvania, about 90 miles from Philadelphia.”

Three possible replies to my saying, "Where I am from have been." They are:
• “Oh?” That indicates a willingness to move onto the next subject.
• “Oh I know York.” That’s what I call a “nodding acquaintance” or "salesman’s” relay that translates to: “I traveled Through York one day in my life and I 'know' it well!”
• But the response I love is, “Oh, really. I come from a small town, too.” That response has led to conversations that have formed lifelong relationships.

York! The stories of my youth; the mythologies of my life are wrapped in a little town in Pennsylvania. As I sit here in my home in the Los Angeles area those years, those experiences there seem so rich and they have are the reason I have plan a trip back for the first since York Corp. moved us there when I was 1 ½ years old.

My first memory in life is of the Yorktowne Hotel. We lived there for three months before we moved into a house on Pinehurst Road and later into another on Eastern Boulevard in Yorkshire.

And in third grade I met Lewin Richmond Lutz, III of whom I say, “I still know a friend I met in third grade.”

To be able to say that is, for me, at the heart of what community is about. I remember an old Pennsylvania Dutch saying, true or not, “it takes seven generation to know a Dutchman but once you know him, you know him for life.”

As my trip gets closer, I am reminiscing. I remember my first date at the Strand with a girl whose name is now lost. I still have the newspaper as from the movie. In my mind’s eye, I see Yorkshire Elementary School, a two room schoolhouse.

I want to walk over the hills around Yorkshire. I want to eat at the Yorktowne and remember the many times my family did. I want to worship in the churches I grew up in. I want to...

I am, am however, not naive. The world around me in my new home here in Los Angeles has changed. It changes each day. And in my research on “going home again," I thought I saw an Army tank on the streets of York!

Could that have actually been the city of my memory? Are “big city” issues like race, homelessness and segregation that we struggle with here reflected in the town of my youth?

Did urban sprawl steal the farmlands and cornfields I wandered through? Is it still safe to walk around downtown York at night? Does the Cordorus Creek still look polluted and smell 40 years later? Does my best friend from third grade really have grandkids?

I do not know what it will be like when I am actually there. I do not know if you can “go home again.” All I know is that I want it a town called York of which David Rush writes, this place “can offer the very best of what American can offer." That is the place I remember.

Freedom of Speech?

A reporter said recently, I felt dirty writing about it. I feel the same. And I don’t know how to get that feeling out of my system. It is odd how it brought together my hometown, my faith and my life.

York, Pennsylvania is scattered throughout my writings; probably all writers invoke the places they grew up; "beginning places" are part of your DNA. To keep in touch I take to reading the online version of the York Dispatch … ever so often a name or place has a unique meaning.

In March of last year I read an OB for a soldier killed in a war I deeply believe is wrong. There was a picture of a 20 year old boy, “killed in a non combat-related vehicle accident in Anbar Province.” Lance Cpl. Matthew A. Snyder. I played with “Snyders” when I was a kid.

The paper said he was a good Catholic boy; his aunt: "He was a wonderful son, and we're very proud of him and he served our country well.” I could not look at his picture without remembering the friends I’ve lost in other wars and thinking again, "what a waste."

Then yesterday in the on line Huffington Post I found a John Ridley column which began, “God Hates Fags? – NOT ANY MORE -- the Fred Phelps (of the) "God Hates Fags” family of the loving Christian Church (sic) in Topeka Kansas (has) finally being sued for protesting a soldier's funeral and a jury awarded the plaintiff $11 million for invasion of privacy and emotional distress.”

Who sued Phelps? The plaintiff was Matthew Snyder’s father who lives down the street from my third grade friend Richmond, in York. “The goofy jury threw a fit at God," Phelps said -- an eleven million dollar fit!

I’ve had my own experiences with the Rev. Phelps; two of them. One at church, and a more vivid one at an annual Pride Parade in West Hollywood at which I had been coxed from sidewalk viewing and into the parade by friends from church. It was exhilarating, waving to thousands of people until we came to that large intersection at Beverly and Santa Monica Boulevards.

There our little band of gay Christians, lead by an acolyte carrying his church’s golden cross, paused because of the parade's movement and encountered Phelps' "God Hates Fag" signs, drums and all. When his group saw the cross, it drove them into a frenzy. The commotion so mesmerized me that as the group moved, I stood there watching as they spewed out curse words.

In that moment I lost touch with the larger theatre around me. I don't know why I raise my hand and made the sign of the cross over them. But when I did several hundred people in 15 levels of bleachers behind me stood up, roared and applauded this guy standing alone in the middle of street, doing something he’d done before.

“What happened?” said my friends after I ran and caught up, “You’re blushing.” All I remember asking was, “Who ARE those people.” “Some Christians from Kansas.”

Christians! How could they be Christians? Why did their disfigured, hateful existence lead them to yell and scream at the symbol that has been at the center of my life; how can they bring their sick, distorted lives to a funeral of a grieving family whose son fought and died for his country.

Research reveals their aborted theology says that: God hates America and American soldiers because this county has a permissive attitude toward gay persons. And all of that precedes from a literal reading of the Biblical book of Leviticus.

The Huffington Post author suggests that there is little difference between Phelps and the so-called “mainstream,” right wing speakers at last month's Values Voters Conference at which all the Republican candidates for President appeared or Ann Coulter or Peter Pace or Jerry Falwell ... the list goes on and on.

That “list” would like to set themselves above the Phelps of the world; it is reported that other fundamentalist Christians in Topeka turn their heads away when someone mentions his name … but they all quote the same bible verses and preach the same gospel of intolerance making gay persons, as William Sloan Coffin says, the “last respectable minority to hate.”

As I grow older I begin to feel things changing. I think they are because I am. Stories abound about tolerance emerging from Utah, Kansas City, Nebraska, all of this in spite of red state labels, anti-gay marriage amendments, and a dying breed of sick Christian preachers. Even the consternation within my own Episcopal denomination speaks to a better future.

I guess that sense of change found its roots in the Susquehanna River bottom country; in cathedral sermons; in twenty year olds like Matthew Snyder who fight and died for a cause he believed in and for a county, that despite it aches and pains, grows toward acceptance and tolerance. And that washes away the dirt.
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Psalm 20:1-2
1 May the Lord answer you in the day of trouble, *
the Name of the God of Jacob defend you;
2 Send you help from his holy place *
and strengthen you out of Zion;

SOMEONE SAID: So ... who is this Yard[D]og?

One early evening a much younger "version" of Yard[D]og busied himself with building dirt roads for toy trucks under a huge Forsythia bush at his parents home in rural Pennsylvania when his grandmother called from the back porch: "Fire Flies out; time to come in."

"Nope!" said the six-year-old as he continued a variety of child-like construction tasks. In response to a seemingly intransigence attitude my usually warm and stately “Grammy” called across the backyard, "Sometimes you're just a yarddog!"

And so "Yarddog" was born right there in his backyard with his imagination and awe along with mud, grass stains and the yellow pollen from those Forsythia bushes.

Since then he has devoted his time to teaching, theatre, writing and non-profits that have assisted the homeless and his own business that seeks to help non-profits become all they can be.

Some time ago he added the two grammatical symbols “[ ]” around a capital “D” in Yarddog giving birth to Yard[D]og. In doing so he seeks to reclaim some of the uniqueness that a six-year-old finds in the wonder of toy trucks and tunnels in the rich York County earth and add to that the faces and lives of those he has since met along the way.

For more information on Yard[D]og he maybe reached HERE.