Fiasco and Failure

Maybe greatness could have occurred….what happens when greatness does not occur? What happens, in fact, when fumble leads to error, leads to mishap, and before you know it, you have left the realm of ordinary mistake and chaos, and you have entered into the more ethereal, specialized realm of fiasco…what takes our ordinary lives that extra distance into fiasco?” —Ira Glass

Awhile back I had some extra dogs on my farm, most of them not my own. There was Sheba, seventy pounds of curly white poodle hair and cat hatred. She was technically a Golden Doodle, but the easy-going Golden Retriever genes never featured heavily in her character. Sheba was looking for love and feeling particularly angsty.

Copper was a stately, purebred Golden Retriever stud dog, and as Sheba’s longtime companion and Significant Other, he had zero illusions about whose job it was to look after her. Also, he was influenced by Sheba’s perspective on cats.

Capri, on the other hand, was about eight pounds of curls and Super Ball bounce. Not yet a year old, I had agreed to try to sell her for someone else, and I thought I could get a premium if I did some basic obedience training first, including starting house training. So, I gave her a bath, trimmed her curly hair so we could make eye contact, and started bringing her into the house for a couple hours at a time. (We are not house-dog people; this was an economic decision, made with some domestic dispute.) The best dogs are those who like you back, and it soon became apparent Capri liked me back; she found me interesting and was thus easily trained.

I taught her to come and sit within a day and also began working on teaching her to stand on her hind legs on command, which she could do effortlessly. If I got up, she got up. If I sat down, she slept at my feet or jumped into my lap. If I drove my pickup around the farm, she came streaking after. I began to enjoy this little scrap of a dog and to think maybe I should buy her myself. Possibly, it had something to do with the fact that she seemed to think I was worth following around. Pastors can be insecure like that.

Rachel was another miniature poodle, brown, about eight months old, and the only dog in this list who actually belonged to me. She had been boarding with Sheba and Copper for months, playing in the same yard, sleeping in the same shelter, eating and drinking from the same bowls. She was part of their family, even if she was a bit of a third wheel. I bought her because she was cute, and because I thought it might be fun to raise a litter of miniature poodles from her. I named her Rachel, invoking future offspring as numerous as the sand of the seashore…

Last in this cast of characters is Smokey, a sleek gray barn cat we raised from a kitten. He was friendly and interested in his people, never ran away or had kittens, and followed me around the farm like a dog. At times he would chase the Polaris at a full gallop, then climb a fence post to watch me change irrigation in the pastures. He was almost the perfect cat, big and sleek, friendly yet dignified. He was a decent mouser as well. What more could one ask for in a cat?

So it was that on a day not long ago, Sheba, Rachel, and Capri were all at my house. It was decided that Copper should come for the night as well since he was alone in his kennel, his people being gone for a few days. As mentioned already, it was the time of year that Sheba was looking for love, and she would need to be kept away from Copper. That night, I placed Sheba and Rachel into the kennel together as I had done every night for the past couple of weeks, and then brought Copper over to spend the night in the yard. He shot straight to the kennel and began pacing in circles, whining, scratching, biting the wire, furious to find a way inside. I wasn’t worried. There was no way for him to get in, or Sheba to get out. When I went to bed he was still pacing, whining and agitated. What could possibly go wrong?

The next morning my wife said, “I think Rachel is dead.”

“No way,” I said. “That's impossible. She was in the kennel all night.”

“Yes, and she looks dead. Sheba probably killed her.”

I refused to believe this. Sheba basically raised Rachel.

“Go look,” My wife instructed.

I went, I saw, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Sheba, the seventy-pound golden doodle, had apparently killed the twelve-pound miniature poodle in the dark of night. There was blood on the floor, on the walls, and her curly, white coat was stained red from her face to her shoulders. This, after having lived and slept and eaten together for months. Apparently, the frustration of Copper pacing and whining relentlessly outside the kennel all night, had snapped something in her hormonal doggy brain, and she murdered poor Rachel. I could not believe this. I was horrified and angry. I texted a picture of the carnage to my sister, and we immediately abandoned decades of hard-won maturity and began bickering about who was to blame for this mess. I know; I’m embarrassed. We sorted it out by the end of the day.

I took Copper home. He was just going to have to be lonely. I no longer cared about his psychological well-being, although he could hardly be held responsible for the crime. I collected the murder victim, casting dark looks in Sheba’s direction, who slunk behind the house while I carried the corpse across the lane to add it to the pet graveyard under the big English oak tree. So much for descendants as the sand of the seashore.

That done, I retired to my office to sip coffee and process the disaster. There was much to ponder, but scarcely had I settled into my chair when a small, frantic, grey blur shot through the flower bed outside my office window, leading by mere inches a large, white, curly blur. Sheba, who is as I said, composed primarily of curly white hair and cat hatred on a good day, was still out of sorts, and Smokey had strayed within range.

There are three 90-degree right-hand turns to get from my office to the back yard, and I spun through all three corners in my socks, not unlike a stunt driver drifting a race car, sound effects and all. Bellowing Sheba’s name, I scattered small children and women the hallway, and tore up rocks and shrubbery in the flowerbed. I arrived in the back yard to see that Smokey had not, in fact, made it to the hornbeam trees in time. The tangled mass of dog and cat was just coming to a rolling stop from the momentum of the chase as I bore down on them, shouting an inarticulate, unseemly, and entirely futile demonstration of wrath and protest. Sheba did some quick calculations and departed posthaste for back pasture. Smokey gave a despairing wail and also departed, though his departure was of a different, more permanent sort. It couldn’t have lasted more than ten seconds. I chased Sheba until she ducked under the pasture fence, then limped back to the house.

Back in my office, I flopped in my chair and peeled my socks off, both of which had holes torn in the bottoms. But, again, scarcely had I settled in when I was interrupted. This time, my phone dinged. We’re having some problems in the barn, it said. This was potentially a repair worth a month’s wages. I found fresh socks and hurried out to investigate. It had been quite a day, but at least Capri still thinks I’m worth following around. She nearly beats me to the barn. After a quick investigation, I headed up to the shop to grab a few tools.

When I reached the shop, my phone rang again. “You ran over the little dog when you left for the shop.”

No way! Capri?

“I’m sorry. Randy is bringing her up in the farm truck right now.”

And just like that, Capri went where Rachel and Smokey had gone. No blood or mutilation, she just looked asleep, but I pressed my hand on her warm side and felt her crushed ribs grate under the light pressure. Sorry, girl. I didn’t mean to.

Three pets in one day. I wasn’t able to get the barn issue fixed either, not that day. And fate had one last treat in store for me. A Men and Boys event at the school kept me from spending the evening curled up in the fetal position under my bed as I was inclined. At the school, poor Jordan asked me to help him with something on his new phone, his first phone, just three days old. So, in a final salute to my day of disasters, I dropped it on the floor and spiderwebbed the screen.

Some days will go that extra distance beyond mere ordinary chaos and disaster into the more ethereal, specialized realm of fiasco. And sometimes it’s not a day, or a week, but whole years and eras of one’s life that get overrun with fiascos, dark, soul-crushing fiascos of faith, or relationships, or health that make a few lost pets seem trivial, fiascos that prove to be far bigger and meaner than our dogged Sisyphean attempts to overcome.

Is there some kind of method to the madness of life, or is it just God deciding to shake things up a bit? Does God just twist a man’s dial to “fiasco” at times, out of sheer boredom? As Reb Tevye mused, “Sometimes I think, when it gets too quiet up there, You say to Yourself, ‘What kind of mischief can I play on My friend Tevye?’" I know how Tevye feels. I imagine Job did too.

But there is a difference between fiasco and failure. To have a fiasco—even a years-long fiasco—is to have a story to tell, maybe even some hard-won wisdom to share; to be a fiasco, to have failed when it mattered—past tense, irrevocable failure—that is terrifying. Job had a series of bizarre misfortunes that moved the needle deep into fiasco territory, but somehow, against all odds, he didn’t end as one himself. He said things about God that weren’t very nice, but he ultimately came through the fiasco intact. He kept the fiasco “out there,” and inside, where it mattered, he locked onto one or two landmarks and held on for dear life.

Perhaps having a fiasco from time to time pulls us back from waltzing off the cliffs of our own successes. Could it be that those fiascos, properly metabolized, will root us in humility and help dispel the myth of invincibility which dies so hard, and destroys so much until it does? I don’t believe God is the author of chaos, but I can imagine He sometimes lets us go enough to sober us up, to remind us that, but for the power and promise of Easter, fiasco and failure is all there ever would be.

RIP

Rachel, Smokey, Capri, Jordan’s Phone, and the Myth of Invincibility.