Sometimes events and images convene in a way that is meant to tell you something about life. It works that way if you are willing to listen. To hear. And hopefully, to understand.

Sunday while flying back from Tampa to Chicago, I sat in the middle seat of an airplane next to a man who slept most of the way, but fitfully. When we approached our destination and some turbulence began, he was visibly anxious and uncomfortable.

I waited through the landing, then turned to him and said, “You don’t like that stuff, huh?”

He smiled a quick smile and replied, “Well, I used to jump out of airplanes so it shouldn’t scare me. But it still does.”

It turns out the young man served in the Airborne in Iraq. “I was a camera guy,” he informed me. “It was my job to take pictures of what we were doing. Our unit.”

He told me that it was a difficult job. “I saw things people don’t want to see,” he said. “Like, I was taking a picture of a kid riding his bike and he just got blown up. Right there. But the military didn’t want to share that photo. There was an election going on and they wanted the news to be good.”

I asked him how he got involved as a photographer. “I spent three months training in photography and three months learning journalism,” he said. “Then they sent me over to Iraq.”

Did he expect to use his photography in civilian life? “I don’t think civilian life will take me,” he responded. “I got too many issues.”

On our way together through the airport I handed him my business card and offered to talk with him some. In turn, he pulled out an identification card that he called the Silver Ticket. “It takes twenty years of service to get this,” he told me. “I started when I was 18. Now I’m 41,” he said, and smiled that quick smile of his. The smile that says a lot, and yet seems to say nothing at the same time.

He still looks a young man. Yet he is now a man for the ages, and told me that he’d collect a certain amount of money for his time and service to his nation. Beyond that, his plans were flexible.

My encounter with that soldier came back into mind when I clicked on a link to an NPR story about the work of military photographer David Gilkey, whose compelling photos give us a small window to the world in which so many of our active duty soldiers live and work and sometimes, die.

“I consider myself lucky,” the soldier from the plane told me as we stepped off the moving belt in the terminal. Lucky indeed.

(Photograph from NPR feature on photographer David Gilkey)

Today is the day my father’s house is sold. It took several months to transition sort through the furniture and make decisions about belongings. There were no great surprises. No First Edition copies of To Kill a Mockingbird or anything dramatic like that.

In fact, the books I cleared out yesterday were Encyclopedia Brittanica volumes used to hold down insulation in the crawlspace. I remember those books from trying to make sense of them as kids. They were the Internet of an earlier age. Ostensibly they held a little bit of everything you might want to know from A to Z.

It was always a test to figure out how you could say what you found in those books without copying the exact same language. Never mind the fact that any translation would be less scholarly and likely less factual than the work of those who wrote and proofed the book. “You shall not plagiarize” is the rule of all students, writers and journalists.

Now we live in a world where virtually everything we consume in terms of information is shared and likely plagiarized in some form from some other content. Real journalists puke at this notion. Real photographers too. But that’s how the world has evolved.

Which is also proof that the world does not always evolve in the direction of what we like to call progress. It also happily regresses at times.

I think about these things because before my father lost his ability to speak due to a stroke 15 years ago, he was an iconoclastic thinker. Even after his stroke, he would work hard drawing diagrams and symbols to communicate abstract concepts. These were often designed to challenge our perceptions about some past or current event. This could be frustrating as hell to discern. Yet he would not give up. He was an iconoclast to his dying day.

There is a certain pragmatism to being an iconoclast. This fact frustrates  people who thrive on a conservative mode of practical thinking. There are many people who prefer to speak in plain language, and act the same. None other than William F. Buckley once stated, “The more complicated and powerful the job, the more rudimentary the preparation for it.”

Well, William F. Buckley was right about some things, and wrong about others.

For example, the person we know as Jesus Christ taught using parables. That’s an indirect way of speaking truth. Yet it was his goal engage people in thinking about spiritual concepts by giving them familiar examples to which they could relate. This might seem like an unnecessary step for the Son of God to speak the truth. Yet it was true that metaphor helped make the Kingdom of God much simpler to understand.

But Jesus met resistance to his methods even among his closest advisors. His own disciples complained about the complications of his parables, and he rebuked them. The following excerpt from the Book of Matthew shows Jesus explaining that it was literalism by the priests that was actually causing so much confusion among the faithful. Jesus rebuked these teachers, then added an explanation:

¹³ He replied, “Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be pulled up by the roots. ¹⁴ Leave them; they are blind guides.^[d] If the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit.”

¹⁵ Peter said, “Explain the parable to us.”

¹⁶ “Are you still so dull?” Jesus asked them. ¹⁷ “Don’t you see that whatever enters the mouth goes into the stomach and then out of the body? ¹⁸ But the things that come out of a person’s mouth come from the heart, and these defile them. ¹⁹ For out of the heart come evil thoughts—murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. ²⁰ These are what defile a person; but eating with unwashed hands does not defile them.”

Let’s be clear. My father was not a religious man toward the end of his life. He would not likely have quoted Jesus to make the same point. In fact, at one point late in life, my father was asked why he’d attended church all those years. He just shook his head and said “Pooooh,” which was his post-stroke word for anything that was no longer useful. But he did like singing in the choir. He was an iconoclast.

There was a garden in my father’s back yard with a set of apple trees and one peach tree. The apple trees were hardy, but the peach tree grew dry and frail. During a storm one of the main trunks broke off and leaned to the ground. I was headed from my house with a saw to cut the limb off and arrived to find that my father had already tied ropes around the bent over branch. He did this even though he had use of only one arm. When I arrived, the peach tree looked like a traction patient. He’d grown up on a farm and knew the peaches might still grow if the tree were given a chance.

Indeed, the branch continued to bear fruit. My father then harvested peaches when they were ripe. Then when fall came, he instructed me to saw off the bent branch.

That peach tree stands in his backyard to this day, more than 10 years after the branch broke off. His seemingly impractical solution is a metaphor for how the man also dealt with the effects of his stroke all those years. He did grow angry now and then (the storm) but he also developed practical ways to get along in life. Our arguments were often like broken branches. yet when the harvest season came, he still offered me peaches of wisdom.

That is proof to me that peach tree possibilities are never to be underestimated. My father was neither liberal or conservative. But for better or worse at times, he was always determined to make us think about solutions. That’s what iconoclasts do.