Dragonfly by Jax Hill 

"He told me a story, to show what he meant.”

Young J. Clayton Berger had been raised in a nice middle-class home with a dad who was a nice mid-level manager at a K-Mart store. Dad had doted on his boy and made sure Clay got a job at the store when he was just 16. While to Dad this seemed like a great gift for a teenager — a way to make his own money to buy his own clothes and car — to Clay it seemed like a huge humiliation. If any friends from school happened to dash into the K-Mart to buy big boxes of candy to smuggle into the cinema, who did they see setting up the Blue Light Special but their schoolmate Clay?!

Already saddled with the reputation as K-Mart boy, Clay had to struggle to keep up appearances. He refused to buy the reasonably-priced clothes at K-Mart, but couldn’t afford to buy the more expensive designer ones he wanted, so he took the bus to the other end of town to shop at thrift stores where he wouldn’t run into anyone. Usually he could find something trendy and not too used. One day he found exactly what he wanted, the height of cool at the time, pipe-stem jeans. They were straight-leg, wide-leg jeans all the guys were wearing. He bought them at the thrift store, had them cleaned, and wore them to the next school dance. He knew he would be the coolest one there!

His passion at the time was acting — singing, dancing, performing — and he felt he was very good at it. So of course, when he arrived at the dance in his new finery, he went out of his way to get everyone’s attention. He put himself front and center on the dance floor, he stood on stage and lip-synched several of the songs the d.j. was playing (these were the days before karaoke). He had a ball showing off and shaking his groove thing in his new jeans.

And at first he was thrilled that people were overly exuberant in commenting on his new jeans; in fact, some of them seemed on the verge of hysteria about them. Finally, one of his friends let him in on the joke: they were women’s jeans! He rushed to the restroom, whipped of the pants, looked at the label, and sure enough: there was the leather patch embossed with the cowboy hat and lasso: Lady Wranglers.

As he told the story, Ernie did not laugh, but looked him straight in the eye. “What’d you do?”

“What could I do?” J. Clayton Berger, 20 years later, groaned. “I stayed in the bathroom until the dance ended and everyone was gone. Then I walked home in my lady pants.”

This, and many other embarrassments associated with having a father who worked at K-Mart and being forced into a job at K-Mart himself, and living in a subdivision and never being able to afford a car until college, had crystallized in J. Clayton’s mind the plan to give his own children far more then he’d ever had. None of his children would be working at K-Mart or buying their clothes in a thrift store. All of his children would receive cars for their 16^th birthday. And they would have a dad who was a lawyer and a money-maker. He managed to come back from the embarrassment of wearing lady jeans and continued to pursue his acting in high school and college but he got serious about law school, gave up the stage, and had pursued his deeper goal of making money and giving his kids everything they wanted.

“But here’s the hell of it,” he said, rueful. “They don’t know any different. They’ll never understand what a gift I’m giving them.”

Vinnie, who’d been letting Ernie tell the story, stood up now.

“We told him, any risk you take for love means the kingdom of God is here. You love our kids, you’re sacrificing for them. But he told us ... He said the hardest thing he gave up, to become a lawyer, was the stage. Every now and then, not often, because he’s too busy to have daydreams and he doesn’t believe in second thoughts, but every now and then ... he feels like his heart is breaking because he wonders if he could have made it. I wouldn’t even have to be a movie star or a stage great — I just wonder if I could have been a local celebrity in a community theater, or a guy in the chorus at the opera house, that’s what he told us.”

Torstein, sitting near me, sighed. “Unfulfilled dreams,” he said. “Dreams deferred.”

“But what can you tell a guy like this?” Ernie asked. “He can’t quit his job and look for work as an actor. So we told him again what we were telling everyone: love is the answer to your secret longing. You just have to figure out how love is the answer in this case.”

He reached into his backpack, then, and pulled out a battered ToughBook laptop computer, which he seemed to be booting up. He handed it to Torstein and said, “Here, you can see J. Clayton Berger now.”

Because I was close to Torstein in the crowd, I could look over his shoulder. The internet browser was open to a You Tube video, and the little recording was of one of the Dunker dramas, the crazy outdoor sketches they did when they were preparing to blitz a new community. I could tell Ernie and Vinnie, and an older guy in a bright green t-shirt whose dramatic flair outshined both of theirs.

“He joined us!” Vinnie said, laughing, calling it out so everyone in the crowd could hear. “And he was right, he is a great actor.”

“He doesn’t go with us all the time, but he’s been meeting up with different teams on the weekends or evenings and doing the dramas with them — he’s awesome. And he’s loving it. He brought his kids a few times on the weekends — they’re amazed. They can’t believe it’s their dad ... They go to some mega-church, and the kids are begging him to get on the drama team there.”

Torstein was laughing. “That’s terrific. That’s a start, see, look at him, filled with joy. Tell me more.”

Every team had a Shayla, or a J. Clayton Berger to tell us about.

Somehow, this message just reached out and grabbed some people. And they were transformed by it.

Not everyone, of course. Some of the Dunkers told about being laughed at, spit on, roughed up. They’d all been called freaks, losers, and worse. They didn’t seem to mind — I guess they’d been used to it when they worked for Duncan. They seemed to value the joy of the few people who did respond to their message far above whatever they’d suffered. It was pretty impressive, to tell you the truth. I remembered thinking how brave they were just to stand up and shout their message ... something about coming into contact with a Duncan, or a Torstein, it seemed to empower people to forget themselves, and their dignity ... yet I didn’t feel like I was there yet.

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