About Joe
Scott Fina
After joining almost 200 other people in memorializing and saying goodbye to Joe Bradley on June 14th, I decided to put aside the essay I had originally prepared for the CPF Newsletter, and write a piece that speaks more directly from my heart.
Joe and Mary Ellen were among a group of peace activists who drove into North Philadelphia to help my wife Barbara and me, parent our three triplet sons from their infancy through their first three years of life. Barbara and I and the boys then moved to California, a few blocks from Barbara’s mother. We made this move with deeply mixed feelings, because of whom we were leaving behind.
There is the saying that “distance makes the heart grow fonder.” I think it’s inaccurate. I think it should be: “distance makes the heart ache greater.” The 3,000 miles in distance from our faith community in Philadelphia has been especially painful for us with the passing of several of the people who helped us raise our babies. I have come to believe that the heart is the only organ in the human body that can grow when it’s broken.
I was deeply moved to see the faces of the people who were joined virtually by technology and spiritually by love, in celebrating Joe’s life. Many were faces of people I know. Many were faces of people I have heard about. So many were faces of people who are older than me and whom I admire and look up to. Joe of course, fits into that category. Joe was my senior by 20 years, and I saw him not only as a friend, but also a mentor.
The ceremony for Joe was beautiful and moving in many ways. But I confess, it was a very mundane aspect of Joe’s life brought out during the ceremony, which stirred a memory for me and has been on my mind now that Joe is gone: golf.
Yes golf, which I have never played, unless you want to count miniature golf. And now golf has made me think about trees.
Yes, trees. Trees on a golf course—and one huge elm tree that covered the front yard of a home that I once owned in Havertown, a western suburb of Philadelphia.
I remember when Joe told me that he liked playing golf. I was surprised, and initially judged him for it. For me, golf is a “gentleman’s (or gentlewoman’s) game.” I (errantly and unfairly) think of it as a game played by CEOs who make deals on the “back nine” that enrichen their companies while callously trampling upon the poor. Growing up, I hardly considered golf a sport: hitting a little ball
around an oversized yard while everybody watching you, tries to be quiet? (Sorry for the machoism here, but it serves my argument.)
I remember wondering why Joe--a crusty, social justice maverick who grew up in Orange, New Jersey-
-would play golf? I tried to imagine him walking out of his house in South Philly wearing a plaid cap, carrying a bag of clubs with silly little socks covering the ends of them, and calling back to Mary Ellen: “Ta ta Dear! I’m on my way to play 18 holes.”
This was too dissonant for me.
Then I learned that Joe had lost his father at a young age, and that his father was a golf pro. I too grew up in North Jersey and lost my father when I was young (17). My Dad was a cop, and I became a cop. I suddenly understood the golf thing about Joe.
Now for the tree part of the story. Hearing again how Joe liked golf at the memorial service, and thinking about the community who was there for it, reminded about the elm tree. (I’m hoping the readers will stay with me on this—I know my essay is getting stranger.)
I never liked my house in Havertown, but I loved the old elm tree in the front yard. Its trunk was huge. It provided an immense, cooling umbrella against the hot summer sun, and made me feel like I lived in a forest. The tree had miraculously survived the Dutch Elm disease that had killed every other elm tree in the neighborhood, years before I moved in. But there was something else unusual about the tree. I noticed it the first spring I lived there.
The elm tree attracted squirrels when it began to leaf in late April and early May. The squirrels, which appeared in groups as large as a dozen or more at a time, ferociously attacked the tree’s new growth, ripping off the ends of the branches, chewing on the stems briefly, then discarding the branches and ripping off more of them to again briefly chew on the stems. They would do this all day. At times, it felt like it was raining “leaflets” which piled up on the yard in quantities filling large garbage bags.
This infuriated me. I resented having to clean up after the squirrels. But I was mostly upset because I believed the squirrels were hurting the tree. The spring sap was like a narcotic that the squirrels found irresistible. So I took action. I started my own “War on Drugs.”
I screamed at the squirrels. I tried to harass them with water from a hose. I threw tennis balls and then stones at them. None of this bothered the squirrels, although it did bother the neighbors.
Then I got smarter, and decided to use “a carrot instead of a stick.” I purchased a Havahart trap and used a ladder to position and secure it on a lower branch of the elm tree. By trial and error, I discovered a bait that was more alluring to the squirrels than the early spring sap of the tree. It was chunky peanut butter on a Ritz cracker. And thus commenced the squirrel removal operation on Ivy Rock Lane in Havertown.
I started catching lots of squirrels and releasing them in other parts of Havertown. I learned, however, that squirrels could find their way home even if they were relocated over a mile away.
So I became more strategic about where I released the squirrels. I was commuting by car to work in downtown Philadelphia at the time. The Karakung (Cobbs Creek) golf course was a short detour off
my way to work in the morning and was located several miles away from my home. This struck me as an ideal spot to release my squirrels. First, it was humane. What squirrel wouldn’t want to live in a lovely, upscale setting with so many beautiful trees?
The golf course also provided a way for me to get back at corporate America. I was releasing a few dozen squirrels on the golf course annually. I envisioned that they would multiple and become pests, and get in the way of those capitalist golfers when they were making “chips” and putts. Maybe the squirrels would start running off with some golf balls!
This went on for several years. It had earned me a reputation in the neighborhood (among the residents and I imagine, also the local squirrels). Then one winter we had freezing rain in Havertown. The old elm tree froze over and its giant trunk literally split apart from the weight of its branches. It was a tragedy. One of the local newspapers put a picture of the downed tree on its front page.
Sadly, I came to realize that the squirrels had not been hurting the tree, but protecting it. They were thinning the tree every year. Their addiction to the early spring sap was a mechanism that assured the growth of the tree’s umbrella would not get so great as to over burden it. I had lacked the wisdom to work with nature, and not try to impede it. My aggressive attempt to gain control of things had become my downfall—and literally, the tree’s.
And now (believe it or not) I come back to something special I saw in Joe and have seen in other people of the faith and justice community I have been blessed to be a part of—including those who have passed away.
While Joe was a dedicated activist, he was also a gracious one. I think this graciousness enabled Joe to put aside self-righteousness and ego in his zeal for peace and justice. I saw no need in him for control, nor did I see him demonize those whose positions he deeply opposed and criticized.
Graciousness provided room in Joe’s heart for wisdom to grow: a wisdom to see that peace and justice are inevitable ends of humanity--but the course which humanity must take to reach them is nonlinear and long-coming. Humanity’s journey on that course can’t be forced or directed, but only encouraged, nurtured, sacrificed for, and witnessed to.
Surely this is what Martin Luther King, Jr. meant when he paraphrased part of a homily by the 19th Century abolitionist minister, Theodore Parker, with these words: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Scott Fina and family are CPF West