It’s the summer of 1971. We now live in Crawfordsville, Indiana, in a very old house on Water Street, built almost a century earlier. Up to this point, we’ve only ever lived in post-war suburban shoebox houses, so it’s a new experience.
There’s a spacious covered porch; a sitting room opposite the living room; a study, repurposed as a TV room; a foyer at the top of the stairs, preceding the bedrooms; and an ancient, claustrophobic basement filled with all manner of imaginary threats and perils. The garage is standalone, with a loft that becomes my Comic Book Room. And there’s an alley out back. I’ve only ever seen an alley once before, behind my grandparents’ home in Columbus.
Both the house and the town it sits in rapidly become magical places to me, but we’ll leave that for another time. Our subject at the moment is a visitor who sweeps into town, into our church and our home – a friend of my dad’s with the unlikely name of Jep.
To this day, almost half a century on, I don’t know how my dad and Jep came to be friends.1 [As I write this, I am texting my dad – who turns 81 today – to learn how he and Jep met.] My dad has innumerable friends, evenly distributed across every city and state in the whole damn country: there has never been a more well-liked man in the Brotherhood. Where they all came from is anybody’s guess, but I’m sure it’s much to do with my dad’s unflinching congeniality.
But how- and whenever Jep and Dad became friends, I have to say that Jep was very unlike all his other friends. Where they were generally pompous, Jep exuded humility; where they dominated conversation, Jep was a listener; where they radiated self-importance, Jep actively took interest in those around him.
Jep was about my dad’s age, with a neatly-trimmed black goatee and an easy smile that mirrored my dad’s. He likewise mirrored my dad’s humor, laughing easily and at the most trivial provocation. I was never at ease around my dad’s friends and colleagues, most of whom I found intimidating, but I took an instant liking to Jep.
Why was Jep visiting? He was a magician, and he was there to put on a magic show at our new church.
I’ve never seen a magic show in church2 [Months ago, I mentioned Jep to my ex, Trey’s and Josie’s mom – and she said Jep matched the description of a magician who’d performed at her church in the early Seventies.], and haven’t since. It was captivating; I was spellbound, which I suppose is the point, and was disappointed when the show ended.3
[Jep’s signature trick was to put a pack of razor blades – thin steel plates shaped like movie tickets that men’s razors used to require – into his mouth, along with a ball of thread, and then slowly pull out a chain of threaded-together razor blades back out. It was the ultimate exemplar of Don’t Try This At Home.]
From that moment on, I wanted to be a magician. The next few Christmases and birthdays, magic paraphernalia topped my gift lists. I bought some decks of cards with my allowance and checked out a book on card tricks at the town library. I practiced and practiced.
I sucked.
Two years later, Jep returned, once again visiting our home – a different home, this time; we’d moved out of the house on Water Street to a more modern home beyond the town, out on a country road. I showed Jep my tricks. He was both encouraging (Wow, you’ve really gone all out!) and honest (maybe magic isn’t your destiny).
At age 11, I’d never been confronted with such openness from an adult. Jep was speaking to me friend-to-friend. This, more than anything else about him, stuck with me.
And here’s what he did next. I had borrowed a guitar from a friend at church and had been pushing myself to learn new chords and picking styles. I had to be even worse at this than I was at magic, but Jep sat down next to me as I struggled through a song or two.
He had to have seen in me what I saw in myself: a need to make it work, an unspoken realization that there was music in me and it needed a path. He praised my dogged presentation and encouraged me, strongly, to keep at it.
I did. And I enjoyed four wonderful decades as a rock musician as a result.
Jep and I were not in touch for many of those years. As far as I know, he and my dad lost touch as well. But I reconnected with him on Facebook when we all started living online, and we became friends again. And I learned many things I’d never known before.
Jep is Dr. Jep, for one thing, a professor at Ohio State University, teaching anatomy (or he was until he retired). Jep is a storyteller as well as a musician, and that, too, was news. And he’s an author, like myself: I’ve read his book The Joy Factor, and have seen his 10 Things Parents Should Know About Drug and Alcohol Abuse on Amazon. And half a century later, he’s as elegant (yet unassuming) in appearance as ever, though his goatee is now white.
We’ve shared together in many group discussions on social media and had some Skype contact. And I came to realize that he, more than anyone else from the Evangelical universe that produced me, reflects my own worldview; born of the church, yet eventually a spiritual rationalist of decidedly humanist sentiment.
I recently dedicated my book Who We Were, and Who We Are, and Who We Can Become to Jep.
Why is he telling us this?
I’m telling you this because it’s important to me, as a matter of principle, to balance my larger story of Growing Up Evangelical out, serving up the best of it alongside the worst. Jep was the best of it; the first adult beyond my family to treat me like a person, rather than like a child; the first to make a real difference in my life, not through what he did, but through who he was.
I’m pleased and privileged that he and I are friends, all these years later.4
[My dad responded to my text. It turns out Jep and his wife Joyce and their daughters met my family while my dad was still a pastor in Lexington, and I had simply never come across Jep in those days. Per Dad, Jep then did research at the University of Kentucky Medical Center, something to do with hematology.]
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