2nd Visit: May 23rd, 2008 Day 19

Today was a GREAT visit. While it still is a bummer to be stuck in jail, Stan was much better. We had a good visit for over two hours and laughed a lot as we talked about what life is like inside cell-block C. Stan writes letters with a BIC pen with the hard plastic barrel removed. It's tough to write with what's left which is a floppy thin plastic ink-tube. So he has to roll-up pieces of paper to make a new barrel so as to be able to write to you all.

They needed to do some kind of maintenance in the pod a couple days ago and they all got to go outside for about an hour. Stan LOVED being in the sunshine. All of the light that he lives in now is sodium vapor (nasty orange light) and fluorescent (turns deep green under daylight film) so an hour in the sun was awesome and lifted his spirits. Stan got some weird looks from some of the other prisoners as he started to do sprints in the yard while the rest of them walked around in a daze. He actually fell down, sliding on the asphalt and skinned his knee up, which greatly entertained the rest of them. He showed me the scab which is already healing; he was not seriously hurt. He also started working out with a couple of the guys by lifting their body weight in between the bunks in each cell. There are pushups and sit-ups as well.

Another thing that has improved his outlook was the delivery of a radio from his first commissary box. He is now listening to jazz at night and NPR news during the day. He knew about the cost of gas and of the situation in Myanmar and in China. He explained to me that there is a constant level of noise in jail and it's often very loud. Being able to listen to music has enabled him to close out all other noise and this has had a profound impact on his peace at times. The radio is a great thing!

At night when they turn the lights off, they only go down 50% in intensity. Stan has learned to wrap a T-shirt around his head to block out that light and get some Z's. He's been reading books very fast. One author he mentioned that he likes is a Christian guy named Max Lucado. He's read two of his books so far and is encouraged by what he has to say.

My overall sense is that Stan is settling in for the long haul. I think his horizon is shrinking and that he is mentally steeling himself for what lays ahead in the coming years. Stan is a super intelligent guy and you can converse with him at a very high level. He has tons of time to think about things in there, and so I would encourage you to write heavy when you write to him. What I mean is that he probably doesn't want to talk about the weather. He needs some meat to chew on as the educational mean of the other guys in his pod is probably no where near his IQ level. We need to feed him with good conversation, concepts, and encouragement.

After speaking with Dan the other day, I spoke with Stan about filling out his visitation list tonight. His visiting time is Saturday evenings at 6pm EST, but as of today there is no one on his list. He promised me today at 5pm that he would fill this out and put four people on it. He was touched that "Ronnie" had tried to see him without success. I think he's ready to see some others now... so we'll see what happens.

We prayed the "Our Father" together again a the end of our time together, which always seems appropriate for a Methodist and a Catholic trying to find God's will, respectively. Please pray for Stan, that he might not be discouraged and lose hope on his journey. He will feel better if we stick by him through our letters and prayers. We must show him God's mercy and forgiveness in our contact with him; we must be the face of Christ for him until he can see through us to God Himself.

1st Visit: May 16, 2008 Day 12

My first visit found Stan in a sort of shell-shock. He'd been in jail for the prior 12 days, and had been sleeping on a thin permacell matt on the concrete floor outside the restroom. He complained of soreness of his shoulders and knees from being on such a hard flat surface. One of the other inmates had shown him how to make a pillow from a towel wrapped around a hardcover book so as to get his head off the ground. He described his headspace at the time as feeling "confused and abandoned." He shared these feelings freely with me, and was moved to tears often. It seemed crazy that this was the same guy that we shared a great afternoon with on the porch of his lovely home just a month prior. To see Stan visibly upset was incongruous to the person I knew who was always laughing and making light of every situation. Rather than having a conversation standing in his kitchen with him sipping herbal tea, we were separated by bulletproof glass lined with steel wire and were speaking through a telephone bolted to a steel countertop. Talk about weird...

One of the saddest things that he told me was about mail call. They often rouse his pod at 4:30am to do mail call. He shared with me that he hates when they call his name out. He's afraid that someone will hear his name and know what he'd plead guilty to. With tears streaming down his face, he told me he was ashamed of hearing his own name. This was a tough thing to share with Dan, his brother. Stan was at a low point that day and had been effectively alone for 12 days away from family and friends. I asked him why I was the only person who had been to see him other than his lawyer, and he'd not put put his 4 names down on the visitation list. I asked him why, and he replied that he didn't want anyone to see him like that (in jail). I begged him to reconsider this and he said he'd think about it.

The last thing he described was the slit windows in the jail. They are thin windows common to jails and prisons; they are vertical-- about 4" wide and maybe 3' tall. The exterior side of the window has frosted plexiglass so you can't see outside, other than to see if it's night or day. But one window in his pod has a broken piece on the bottom of it, and if you sit at a certain angle and smash your face up against the window, you can see a tiny slice of the outside world. Sadly for Stan, that only window outside looks directly at the college where he used to work. It's a beautiful campus filled with mature trees, formal grounds, and older brick buildings. As Stan lay on the floor night after night, he was less than a mile from his comfortable craftsman styled home. It must be a lot to try to take in...

Our visit ended with us praying the "Our Father" together. The last thing Stan asked me is to get people to write him. Please contact me directly for his address, and I'll be happy to send it to you. Deacon Pat