I’ll turn 50 next month, and I’m giving myself a gift. Actually, I’ve been working on this gift since early May, and I’m hoping that by the time I actually cross the Great 50 Divide, I’ll have a good sense of what the gift looks and acts like.

The gift is authenticity.

At this point in my life, I feel confident enough about my place in the universe that I don’t feel the need to impress, to protect, to defend, to spout the party line. No longer do I want to play games, trying to seem better at this or that than I really am, whether it’s an issue of occupational competence or spiritual vitality or intellectual knowledge. It’s not like I’ve been a big fake, a phony, a political games-player. Over the years I’ve been pretty open and honest. And yet, streaks of embedded inauthenticity run through my daily life, which I’ve discovered (with dismay) during the past few months as I’ve been trying to excise falsity from my deeply-ingrained habits and tendencies.

I want to grow in being honest, transparent, vulnerable, genuine, open. I don’t want to tell people what they want to hear, or what they expect to hear from me as a denominational suit. I don’t want to only voice sentiments that are safe, whether at work or church or in general relationships. I don’t want to play the part of an all-knowing, all-spiritual church elder, when my knowledge and spirituality fall way below allness. I want to stop playing Christian one-upmanship games, end the reign of pretense in so many nooks and crannies of my Christian character, and slay the remaining dragons of insecurity which give rise to self-justification, defensiveness, and excuses. I want to have no inhibitions about saying, “Wow, I really goofed that one up,” or “I was wrong, and you were right.”

Authenticity doesn’t require that I turn into a blunt jerk who dumps critical crap on people and says things like, “You know, you’ve got really ugly ears. Hey, I’m just trying to be honest.” There is still a matter of appropriateness and discretion. But you get the idea. Writing regularly in this blog is actually very good practice in being authentic.

So that’s my birthday present to myself. I’m working on it every day, trying to flesh out what it means, though I keep encountering bastions where genuineness remains locked out. But that’s where I’m headed. And so far, I’ve found it quite liberating.

Last night I dreamed about a master vampire who was tolerating my presence, but from whom I needed to escape. However, it’s not easy escaping from vampires. After all, they can fly.

I’ve always liked vampire lore, and enjoy watching vampire movies just to get the different take people have on them (where they came from, how they act, etc.). I remember the first vampire movie I saw, back when we lived in Pennslyvania, which put it somewhere in grades 4-7. That movie was set in the Old West, and the vampire was ultimately killed by a silver bullet. I’m sure it was a cheesy movie, which is why I’ve not heard of it since. But I found it interesting.

Later, there was the TV show “Night Stalker,” which I really liked. More recently there was “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Angel,” two shows that Pam and I watched with great devotion. And many vampire movies have come out in recent years, including one I saw (most of) on a recent Saturday morning, a really really bad vampire movie staring Jon Bon Jovi as the slayer.

So it’s not strange that a vampire should show up in my dreams. In this particular dream, the vampire was distracted upon discovering a barn filled with victims, and that’s when I chose to make my getaway, with the help of someone with a boat. This person, in arranging my getaway, broke into a lengthy Broadway-style song and dance which was quite spectacular. The choreography was superb, and I awoke with the tune and words (they rhymed, too) still in my head.

This part of the dream, no doubt, relates to having watched the musical “Rent” that night. I’d been looking forward to seeing this movie for a long time. However, though it had some very good moments, I was disappointed. Beyond the opening song, nothing struck me as worth listening to a second time (unlike the wonderful “High School Musical”). Plus, there were two homosexual couples and only one heterosexual couple, and I wasn’t all that crazy about that.

Frankly, I think the song my subconscious mind dreamed up was as good as anything in the movie. And I tell people I’m not any good at writing songs!

Got back late this afternoon from a few days of vacation up in Pentwater, Mich., where Pam’s Dad has a beautiful cabin (four bedrooms! decks galore!) along Lake Michigan. We hadn’t been there in we’re not sure how many years, and that’s a shame, because the place is fabulous. I must have walked 50 yards into the lake without the water reaching my neck.

Pam and I read. And read. And read. I made major dents in four books, but didn’t finish any of them: Jim Wallis’s God’s Politics, Ann Lamott’s Plan B, Don Miller’s Searching for God Knows What, and Robert Parker’s Back Story, which I took by mistake, having forgotten that I read it a few years ago. But I’m now two-thirds of the way through it again.

On Thursday night, we attended Pentwater’s weekly band concert in the park. It’s not really a concert. People who play band instruments show up (or not) and arrange themselves on chairs under the covered gazebo. There doesn’t seem to be a director. After each song, they pause for a minute or so, then the drummer signals the next song, and off they go. An hour of that. Not the best band-playing you’ve ever heard, but quite enjoyable. But the music isn’t what interested me most. It was the overall atmosphere.

Hundreds of people gathered, carrying their bag-chairs and lawn chairs and blankets, and dogs, and scattered on the lawn surrounding the gazebo. I had been told this was one of the last remaining pieces of Americana, a quaint tradition that brought the whole community together. And that’s pretty much what it was.

As the band played, most people listened approvingly as little girls jump-danced in front. Moms and daughters entwined fingers and swayed to the music. Fathers propped young’ns atop their shoulders. They swayed, too. Meanwhile, townspeople flitted around, saying hello and getting caught up and, no doubt, remarking about the price of gasoline.

One tall, lanky girl with braces and a blue cap dropped to the grass in front of our bag-chairs and said, “Can I pet your dog?” She was talking about Sylvia, Jim and Ann’s tan Labrador Retriever. “Sure you can.” She caressed Sylvia for a bit, then moved on to other people’s dogs. By the end of the hour, I’m sure she had spent some time with every dog there. And we’re talking quite a few dogs. No pit bulls or otherwise mean-looking dogs. These were Labs and cockers and my favorite, a shepherd-husky mix, just a pup, whose fur seemed as soft as cotton. Gobs of people stopped to pet that dog.

Pentwater is a small resort town along the lake. The highway goes down the main street, which hosts numerous gift shops, two ice cream shops, and no small amount of realty companies, which no doubt make big commissions on each sale, because Pentwater property ain’t cheap. Lots of summer homes here. That’s what Jim and Ann’s place is, basically. They can’t even get to it during most of the winter, with all the steep hills amidst the lakeside forest. The rest of the year, they live in Fort Wayne.

Pentwater doesn’t allow any chain restaurants or stores. No McDonalds, no Walgreens, no DQ. There were chain banks (like the Huntington Bank) and chain churches (United Methodist, Lutheran, etc.), but all of the stores were homegrown, home-owned. Nice. There was no convenient place to erect a Wal-Mart.

I would enjoy living in Pentwater just for those Thursday night concerts. Quaint, traditional, family-friendly. A place of community. People of all ages gathering together every week. Bring the children. Lingering Americana, indeed.

I loved the atmosphere. But toward the end, I noticed something significant. There were no blacks, no hispanics, no Asians. Just Caucasians. Middle, upper-middle, and upper-class Caucasians. A very homogenous group.

This caused some reflection on my part. How would the presence of blacks and hispanics and Asians change the atmosphere? Would it necessitate different styles of music? Would the use of other languages harm the sense of cohesiveness which made the event so charming? What about just adding some working class people, or downright poor people? Would it kill the event? Would disparate people not care to come together?

Can an event popularized by such a non-diverse group, both racially and economically, be considered true Americana? What is Americana, anyway? Why am I using a word when I don’t really know what it means?

Those are some of the things I reflected on. Not in any kind of a judgmental way. I just noticed the makeup of the crowd, thought about it some, and still thoroughly approved. Afterwards we got ice cream at the House of Flavors and called it a night. They had a doggie cup of vanilla for free. Ann says Sylvia looks forward to that every week.

On the outskirts of Huntington this morning, I passed a hitchhiker. He was probably around 50, with a thick gray beard, and he seemed harmless. There I was, driving a pickup truck with an empty seat beside me, just a couple of miles from work. And yet, I drove right on by…feeling terribly guilty as I did. Guilty, but conflicted. I still recall from probably 25 years ago a Reader’s Digest article about a guy out west who picked up a nice-looking hitchhiker who went postal on him with a hunting knife. It was a very vivid article. You just never know.

So what would Jesus do? Would he drive by on the other side of the road? Was Graybeard, plodding down the road on a hot morning, an angel in disguise? The biggest part of me says people simply shouldn’t be hitchhiking, and that picking up a stranger isn’t much different from taking a stroll at midnight on East Pontiac Street. But nevertheless, every time I pass a hitchhiker, and I’m by myself, I feel a twinge of guilt as I pass by, trying to read the person’s face without making eye contact.

Here are photos of the world’s most dangerous road. It’s located in Bolivia, and it’s a very lengthy sucker. This linked page contains a bunch of photos. Imagine driving on that thing!

When we lived in Arizona, a friend and I joined my dad and another schoolteacher, Mr. O’Bannon, in a Jeep trip into the Mojave mountains. Old mines were located in the mountains, and very crude roads led to them. At one point, we traveled a narrow section of road with a ravine on the right side of the Jeep. We three passengers hung on the outside of the Jeep, on the left against the rocky hillside, trying to add some weight to hold the Jeep down.

We also ventured into an old mine. We got in a ways, it was very dark, and we came to an ominously dark shaft in the middle of the tunnel–basically, just a hole spanning much of the tunnel’s width. We skirted around it carefully, hugging the wall, ever cognizant of the fact that a misstep or an unexpected rattlesnake could send us plummeting downward.

I remember thinking that it was neat that Dad let me, a junior higher, his first-born, join the adults in creeping around that shaft. He didn’t say, “Steve, you wait here. Don’t go any further.” No, he let me come. Maybe that was a bit stupid of him, I don’t know. But to me, at that age, it was neat. Like he trusted me to take care of myself. I also remember being scared out of my gourd as I hugged the wall, stepping sideways and wondering just how deep that dark, dark shaft went. Scared, but exhilarated.

I suspect we never told Mom about any of this.