Father's Day and the Summer Solstice

Today we have a variety of holidays to celebrate. People who have good relationships with their fathers, or people who have children, may be celebrating Father's Day. Others may be observing the Summer Solstice, in any variety of ways. Some of us will go to church, as we normally do.

I will be preaching, but at this moment, my sermon doesn't mention Father's Day.  The Gospel for today is  Matthew 10: 24-39, the text about Jesus coming to bring not peace, but a sword, to divide families.  So I'm taking a long view of all the summer liberation holidays:  from June 6 to Juneteenth to July 4.  Once I've finished the revisions, I'll give a link to the sermon which I always post on my theology blog.

Because it's Father's Day, my social media feeds will be full of people talking about their fathers.  I do feel lucky to have gotten the father that I did.  The older I get, the more impressed I am with how well he did as a father.  My dad was born in 1937, so again, I'm lucky that my father learned to adapt to the world his daughters were born into, a world with more opportunity for women, while at the same time, not fully liberated.

I think about my own generation, so full of absent fathers and abusive fathers. So many of us experienced divorce done badly, oh so badly, in the 1970's. I was lucky that my own father was different.

In fact, my father seemed more like the fathers we see these days. He could pack our lunches and brush our hair into acceptable ponytails and teach us how to be long-distance runners. He helped us with science fair projects and took the family on camping trips and in general, he was very involved in our lives. I haven't met many other people of my generation who were as lucky.

I'm glad that we've become a society of people, at least some of us have, who can be our best parents to children, whether we're fathers, mothers, or part of the village raising the children. We still have a long way to go before our culture is where I'd like us to be in terms of work/family balance. But that's a topic for a different blog post.

Today is also the summer solstice, the official start of summer.  Many of us live in places where summer weather comes early and never leaves.  But even in those places, like South Florida, the light does change.  In the northern hemisphere, we have the most amount of daylight today.  We won't really notice a difference tomorrow.  But by late August, we'll have darkness earlier.  Last night I got up briefly at 9:30 p.m. (after falling asleep at 8 p.m. with the sun yet to fully set) and noticed that we still had that not-dark, bluish twilight.  We won't have that for much longer.

We're at the midpoint of the year and in many ways, the midpoint of summer.  This might be a day when we want to think about our trajectory--are we on track for the year?  Or maybe we want to celebrate nurturing of all sorts.  Maybe it's a good day for self-care.

For me, it's time to turn my attention back to sermon revising.  One of the treats of summer is that I can also get a walk in before it's time to head across the mountain to preach and preside at Faith Lutheran in Bristol, Tennessee.

Atlanta and Me

Atlanta is famous for its horrible traffic, and yesterday's traffic was horrible, just as we expected.  The worst part was some side streets which had cars parked on either side of the street, a 2 way street, which barely left room for one car to drive through.  Yikes!

Happily, we made it through and got to the hotel in Midtown Atlanta.  The car is parked in a garage, and we will not be moving it until we leave.  Last night, we walked down to South City Kitchen for dinner--what amazingly good food, drinks, and service!

As we walked back, I looked at the huge skyscrapers and thought about my connection to this city.  My earliest memories are of Atlanta and theatre.  In 1972 or so, we came to Atlanta to see Godspell, a life changing event even when I was 7--that play shaped my theology and that trip to Atlanta made me see big cities as thrilling, not scary.  In 1978, when I was 13, we came to Atlanta to see A Chorus Line and to shop for some Scandinavian furniture to go with what my mom and dad had bought when they were stationed overseas in France in the 60's.

We lived in Montgomery, Alabama, and when we would drive to see my grandparents in South Carolina, Atlanta was an unmissable landmark with buildings bigger than any in any other Southern city, a statement no longer true.  Later, in my undergraduate years, I would go to Atlanta or drive through Atlanta periodically.  I loved Atlanta and my Georgia Tech friends so much that I thought about going to grad school in Atlanta.  But instead, I went to the University of South Carolina, a choice I don't regret.

I remember coming to Atlanta in 1997 to see an exhibit at the High Museum, the first time I ever saw Pre-Raphaelite paintings, the real ones, not pictures of them in books--amazing.  I left and bought my first set of paints and brushes from Pearl, a local-ish art supply place (only later did I realize it was a chain when I moved to South Florida).

My fondest memories are of Charis Books, a feminist bookstore that is still in business, a happy surprise.  But I will not be going there today--the wedding week-end logistics don't allow for many other activities, but that's O.K.  It's good to see relatives we don't get to see often, and good to have a happy occasion to bring us together.  I am aware that in future years, it will be more likely to be a funeral that draws us near.

But let me not think about that today.  Let me marvel in this city, which 1980's Kristin would not recognize.  That girl could make her way through the city in her 1974 Monte Carlo without breaking a sweat.  I remind myself that she was younger and more foolhardy, and the city wasn't as crowded then as it is now.  Let me enjoy this time out of time, an experience that has always been quintessential Atlanta for me.

Fragments--So Fragmented that I'm Posting Late

I am still watching the weather, still wondering if we'll have church tomorrow.  The radar showed snow falling in Bristol this morning, with possible accumulations of 3 inches.  If the snow stops in the early afternoon and the sun comes out, warming the temps to above freezing, will it all melt off the parking lot in time?  I will stay tuned--and keep working on my sermon.

With my fragmented attention, let me capture a few bits from the week that I don't want to lose:

--I've had really good classes this week, with students paying attention and participating.  Hurrah!

--In my English 102 classes, I've been using Carolyn Forche's "The Colonel."  I often use it as a way of talking about whether a piece is a poem, a journal entry, a very short story, or something else.  I did that this week.  But I also talked about Forche's time as a human rights adviser for the U.N., and the situation in El Salvador when she was there in the late '70's.  I have concluded by making connections to Venezuela.

--It is strange how events have changed since I taught this poem in the fall.  Now we have invaded Venezuela.  In some ways, it's not a surprise.  After all, the U.S. has inserted itself in many a country, especially in Latin America.  But this time, the surprise is that the U.S. has been very covert in the past.  Not this time.

--Will Marco Rubio be the next Kissinger?  Hmm.  I'm listening to interviews (here and here) with Dexter Filkins, a writer for The New Yorker, who has just written a piece on Rubio.  Fascinating--and I'm so glad that I don't have political ambitions in this day and age.

Christmas Pageants, Modern and Medieval

Yesterday's sermon about Joseph had a bit of pondering about Christmas pageants.  I began by thinking about the traditional Christmas pageant, where the starring role is Mary, while the rambunctious boys get cast as farm animals.  Yesterday's sermon was about Joseph, the part of the story that we rarely see in Christmas pageants:  Joseph who has one future mapped out, only to find out that his betrothed is pregnant with someone else's baby.

No, not pageant material--as I wrote in the sermon:  "it would make me deeply uncomfortable to see elementary school kids acting out today’s Gospel. But as an adult, I find this part of the Nativity story may have more to say to us in our non-Christmas lives than the rest of the incarnation story."

Here's what I posted on Facebook:  "If you are feeling a bit like Joseph, feeling like you had solid plans that have dissolved into a huge mess, perhaps my sermon that I preached this morning at Faith Lutheran Church (in Bristol, TN) would have meaning for you."

You can find the recording of my sermon here on my YouTube channel.  You can read along here and count the times I go off-script.

As I was preaching, I was thinking of a poem that I wrote, about being part of the angel choir and not realizing how much more powerful an angel would be than Mary.  I wrote it a long time ago, and my theology around Mary has changed.  I now see her as much more powerful.  But still, I wanted to revisit the poem, and I'm happy that my blog makes it much easier than digging through computer files, trying to remember the name of the poem.

It was first published in The South Carolina Review, and then I included it in my first chapbook, Whistling Past the Graveyard.  It does make me wonder if people even have Christmas pageants anymore.  My church has not in the time that I've been there, although they once did.  We just don't have enough children to do a pageant.

If we had a pageant, I'd try to make it different than the ones I was part of as a child.  I'm not sure how I would do that, so I'm glad I haven't been forced to come up with a plan.  But I wouldn't want today's children to have the experience I had and try to capture in this poem:

Medieval Christmas Pageants


The Sunday School pageant director embraced
the medieval ideals. Mary would have dark
hair and a pure soul. Joseph, a mousy
man who knew how to fade into the background.
Every angel must be haloed with golden
hair, and I, the greatest girl, the head
angel, standing shoulders above the others.

It could have been worse. Ugly and unruly
children had to slide into the heads and tails
of other creatures, subdued by the weight
of their costumes, while I got to lead
the processional. But I, unworldly foolish,
longed to be Mary. I cursed
my blond hair, my Slavic looks which damned
me to the realm of the angels.

I didn’t see Mary’s role for what it was: bit
player, vessel for the holy, keeper of the cosmic.
I didn’t understand the power of my position.
I could have led an angel uprising, although the history
of angel uprisings suggests that though whole new
worlds emerge, so do new tortures with the triumph.
I could have imparted messages of God’s plan,
spoiled all the surprises. I could just appear,
scaring mere mortals into submission.

Instead, I smoldered, smarting
at the indignities of mother-made wings
and long robes to ruin my long legged run.
I internalized the message of the culture
which didn’t offer starring roles for girls,
no head angel power for us.
Instead, the slender, the meek, the submissive
girl got the prize, the spotlight focused
on her kneeling knees, her bowed head.
I tried not to sing too loudly, to shrink
my Teutonic bones into the Mary model.

Peace in Our Time: Hopes and Hesitations

When I was young, my imagination was consumed with the idea of being held hostage or being kidnapped.  I blame the Symbionese Liberation Army, the ones who kidnapped Patty Hearst in 1974, when I was 8 years old.  The hostages held in the embassy in Tehran (from 1979 until 1981) also held a large amount of my attention.

Yesterday as I drove down the mountain to Spartanburg, I heard the special BBC coverage of the release of the 20 Israeli hostages still living, the ones held in Gaza for over 2 years.  I have not spent the last 2 years consumed by worry about those hostages.  I have tried not to spend time imagining what they're going through--the bit that I did know made me sure that it's been a brutalizing experience, and I don't want terrorists inhabiting my brain in that way.

When I was 8, I had no idea what Patty Hearst was going through.  I worried about being snatched away from my family, and this was a time before that fear was widespread.  Later, with the hostages in Iran, I wondered more about logistics than the possible abuses.  Did they live at the embassy?  Did they have books to read?  As a young woman, I wondered about the other women:  did they have enough tampons?  I also wondered who was doing the cooking and cleaning.  And of course, as the days turned into months and years, I wondered how this would all end.

Yesterday as I listened to the BBC coverage, I thought about how hard it will be for these former hostages to be reintegrated into Israeli society.  Of course I hope that it won't be.  Some people are better at turning ghastly experiences into forces for good in the world.  But many more people don't have those coping skills.

Later in the day my spouse texted me:  "Peace treaty signed!"  As we relaxed on the deck in the late afternoon, we talked about our hopes and hesitations.  As I said in previous posts, we've been alive for a long time now, and we've seen past presidents create peace treaties or peace frameworks, only to have them crumble into pieces in a very short time.

But we both agreed that it was wonderful to feel hopeful, even if it's a guarded hope.  I will say that if this peace is still holding in a year, I'd be willing to say that various folks deserve the Nobel Peace Prize.

The Feast Day of Oscar Romero

Oscar Romero is now officially a saint, and today is his feast day.  On this day in 1980, he was killed, a martyr for the faith.  When I made this collage card years ago, I couldn't believe that he'd ever be canonized:

Many scholars believe that he was chosen to be Archbishop precisely because he was expected not to make trouble. All that changed when one of his good friends, an activist Jesuit priest, was assassinated by one of the death squads roaming the country. Romero became increasingly political, increasingly concerned about the poor who were being oppressed by the tiny minority of rich people in the country. He called for reform. He called on the police and the soldiers to stop killing their brethren. And for his vision, he was killed as he consecrated the bread for Mass.

I was alive when he was martyred, but I didn't hear or read about it.  I remember reading about some of the more famous murders, particularly of the nuns, and wondering why people would murder nuns or missionaries who were there to help--I had yet to learn of the horrors of colonialism throughout history.

In my first year of college, I was asked to be part of a service that honored the martyrdom of Romero, and this event was likely how I heard of him first.  Or maybe it was earlier that semester when our campus pastor took a group of us to Jubilee Partners.

Jubilee Partners was a group formed by the same people that created Koinonia, the farm in Americus Georgia that most people know because they also created Habitat for Humanity--but they were so much more, in their witness of how Christian love could play out in real practice in one of the most segregated and poor parts of the U.S. south.  In the early years of Jubilee Partners, when I went there, the group helped people from Central America get to Canada, where they could get asylum in the 1980's, when they couldn't get asylum in the U.S.

My consciousness was formed by these encounters and by other encounters I had throughout the 80's.  I met many people in the country illegally, and I heard about the horrors that brought them here.  Then, as now, I couldn't imagine why we wouldn't let these people stay.

Many of us may think that those civil wars are over, but many countries in Central America are still being torn apart by violence.  The words of Romero decades ago are sadly still relevant today:  "Brothers, you came from our own people. You are killing your own brothers. Any human order to kill must be subordinate to the law of God, which says, 'Thou shalt not kill'. No soldier is obliged to obey an order contrary to the law of God. No one has to obey an immoral law. It is high time you obeyed your consciences rather than sinful orders. The church cannot remain silent before such an abomination. ...In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose cry rises to heaven more loudly each day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you: stop the repression."

But his teachings go beyond just a call for an end to killing.  His messages to the wider church are still powerful:  "A church that doesn't provoke any crises, a gospel that doesn't unsettle, a word of God that doesn't get under anyone’s skin, a word of God that doesn't touch the real sin of the society in which it is being proclaimed — ​what gospel is that?"

And even those of us who are not part of a faith tradition can find wisdom in his teachings:  "Each time we look upon the poor, on the farmworkers who harvest the coffee, the sugarcane, or the cotton... remember, there is the face of Christ."

If we treated everyone we met as if that person was God incarnate, what a different world we would have!

But for those of us who are tired from the work of this weary world, here's a message of hope and a reminder of the long view.  This prayer, while not written by him (it was written by late Bishop Ken Untener of Saginaw, drafted for a homily by Cardinal John Dearden, and misattributed to Romero), is often called the Romero prayer:  "We are workers, not master builders, ministers, not messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own." 

On this day that honors a man who was not always honored, let us take heart from his words and from his example.  Let us also remember that he was not always this force for good in the world; indeed, he was chosen to be Archbishop because the upper management of the church thought he would keep his nose stuck in a book and out of politics. 

In these days that feel increasingly more perilous, let us recommit ourselves to the type of love that Romero called us to show:  "Let us not tire of preaching love; it is the force that will overcome the world."

Watching "Little House on the Prairie" at 3 a.m.

It's been a long several days in our household.  My spouse goes in for a colonoscopy this morning, and instead of just having a 24 hour getting ready process, it has stretched over 3 days, with increasing food restrictions and increasingly effective laxatives.  He got up at 2 for the last dose of prep liquid, and I had trouble falling back asleep, so I got up too.

He was watching an episode of Little House on the Prairie, so I made some tea and joined him.  For over a year, I've been noticing that if that show is on, it sucks me right in.  One time I was at a car repair place, the only one in the waiting room, and the show was on.  It was an episode about a blizzard and people who needed to be rescued out there on that prairie and fear of dwindling resources.  The car passed its safety inspection, and I was tempted to stay, just to see how it ended.

Of course, I knew how it ended.  One of the appeals of the show is that there is always a happy ending.  It was made back in the 70's, made to be a family show, and the people who made it took their task seriously.  At the time, I remember being miffed (as a child viewer, mind you) that the TV show created new plot lines that weren't in the book.  As an adult, I am in awe of how they stayed true to the spirit of the books--and in fact, elevated the themes and spirit.

Little House on the Prairie is one of the rare TV shows that came into being because of the reading habits of girls.   I did some "researching" to see if I was remembering correctly.  Sure enough, various entertainment executives noticed their daughters reading the books over and over again, moms reading the books too, and they took note.  The fact that family members read the books may have helped the creators stay true to the books.

I say creators, but in my reading this morning, I discovered how deeply Michael Landon was involved in the creation of the series, down to researching every day life during the time period for pioneers.  There's a reason why the show looks so authentic.

I suspect the interpersonal relationships are not realistic depictions of life on the frontier.  The care and compassion, particularly for children, are much more 1970's than 1870's.  For that matter, the level of care and compassion for all the characters is much more 1970's than 2020's.

I feel this aching sadness for the society I thought we were building in the 1970's based on this TV show.  I also laugh at myself, since other TV shows of the same time period, shows not made for the whole family, show we were headed towards something different.  And here we are, in the 2020's, in a society that's different yet again.

Abandoned Lines and Poetry Puttering

I woke up this morning thinking that I should write a poem.  I remembered having some ideas for a poem.  I didn't remember what they were.  I decided to look through my abandoned lines document (which I wrote about in this blog post) and see if anything inspired me.

Once I got set up, I decided to go through old rough drafts and cut and paste lines into the abandoned lines document.  I have wondered if I should do this process, this cutting and pasting, as I write, but so far I haven't.

I don't really go through old rough drafts that often.  I was surprised to find some polished poems hiding in that rough draft file.  I started a new file so that I don't have to dig through the rough draft file each time I want to polish a poem.  I fought off the why should I even bother blues--and I put that line in the abandoned lines document.

As I was cutting and pasting, I remembered the poem I had planned to write.  Back in early August, we had a professional development day, and one of our options was a stop the bleed workshop, where we learned how to tie a tourniquet and/or bandage a wound.  I thought back to my Girl Scout days where we learned how to tie a tourniquet using only our bandannas and sticks found in the yard--while being severely cautioned that this technique was a last ditch effort only because it would lead to a lost limb.  One of my colleagues remembers being taught to cauterize a wound with a lighter--not a technique recommended by the workshop leaders. Ah, the joys of growing up in the 70's!

I'm still puzzling over the possibilities of that poem.  But here's an unexpected joy.  As I was sorting, cutting, pasting, writing, I came up with a new poem, about living in seminary housing, seeing people cross the parking lot, hearing singing through the walls at night.  It's not finished, but I have enough that I'll remember what I was doing when I come back to it.

I'm getting a lot of writing done these days, but I have to be intentional to get poetry writing done.  I'd like to do more poetry writing.  It's good to remember that puttering can lead to poems.

Kissinger's Death and Carter's (Rosalynne's)

Henry Kissinger has died, and it's the kind of death where I would have thought, wait, he's still alive???!!!!  But I had heard a news story not too long ago about his involvement in something, even though he's 100 years old, and he had begun to seem like a vampire to me, this foreign policy vampire who will be around sucking the blood out of social justice movements long after we're all gone.

I thought about not writing much more than that paragraph, but I've seen some evocative writing by others, and I want to record a few thoughts.  The first bit I read was from this piece by the editors of The Washington Post:  "Indeed, Mr. Kissinger’s heyday was a time when the secretary of state could strike grand bargains that seem elusive to U.S. leaders today. Such a time seems long distant."

But I'm old enough to remember the news stories from the 80's and 90's that bemoaned late century politics and how political actors were a faint shadow of the powerful figures who navigated World War II.  Even then, I wondered how we would remember the Henry Kissengers and the Ronald Reagans.  And now, I wonder how the future will respond to our current time, 2023, our curdled politics, particularly in the U.S. House of Representatives where so many seem to have decided not to accomplish a single damn thing.

My view of Kissinger was shaped by events in Latin America during my college years.  I was astonished by U.S. foreign policy that seemed to care not a whit for the humans on the ground.  I still am, but I am less judgmental about situations that seem to have no good ending and humans who have to decide how to navigate that.

Maybe Kissinger was similarly conflicted, but most stories about him don't show him caring about human rights if it meant that his geopolitical goals could be met.  This article in Rolling Stone was quite explicit, but sadly, I can no longer quote it because it seems now to be behind a paywall when it wasn't at 4:30 when I first read it this morning.  But I can summarize:  if you count up all the bodies in Cambodia, in Vietnam, in Laos, in Chile, in Argentina, in Pakistan, in the USSR, in India, on and on I could go, it's clear that his geopolitical goals left millions dead.

It's an interesting juxtaposition, Kissinger's death and Rosalynne Carter's (and I assume that her spouse Jimmy will not be far behind her).  It's interesting to compare the news stories, the retrospectives,  people born at roughly the same time, experiencing the same world events, reacting in such very different ways.

I know how I prefer to be remembered when I die.

Report from the Sickroom: Good Books, Old TV

My blogging has fallen off because this week, I've gotten up from my sickbed, done a bit, gone back to my sickbed, and on some evenings, attended my seminary classes by way of Zoom.  I am feeling better, but still not back to "normal"; I haven't walked this week because I'm trying to conserve my strength.  Let me collect a few observations while I have a chance.

--I'm remembering last week at the Fletcher, NC post office, where I stood in line and heard cheeping.  Come to find out, a shipment of baby chicks had just arrived.  While I waited, the man who ordered the chicks showed up, not realizing they had arrived.  The woman behind the desk recognized him and told him.  He said, "Let me go rearrange the back of my truck.  I'll be right back."

--I love that I'm living in a place where people at the post office recognize each other and would have called, to save the chicks, if the farmer hadn't arrived.

--It's been the week of the Mountain Fair, like a state fair, but for the counties of western North Carolina.  We've been isolating, so we haven't gone.  Apparently, more people want baby chickens during Fair week, Fair week and Easter.  The man in line ahead of me said that if it's Fair week, we'll be getting more rain.  I did not say, "How can we possibly get more rain?  My trees are growing moss."

--When I went to get more COVID test kits at a less busy county library, I picked up Rebecca Makkai's latest, I Have Some Questions for You.  It was riveting.  I am always thrilled when I find a book that holds my attention the way that one did.  Hurrah!  I can still lose myself in a good book!

--Yesterday I went to the Fletcher branch to pick up Marge Piercy's Braided Lives.  They had a copy of T.C. Boyle's latest, Blue Skies, which is also compelling.  I've really enjoyed going out on the back deck and taking a reading-for-pleasure break.

--We have also been watching a lot of T.V.  I say we, but my spouse has more tolerance for hours of the same show than I do.  Yesterday, it was a Laverne and Shirley channel, free content on one of the antenna channels that airs endless content from a different age.  In season 2, Laverne has a pregnancy scare.  So that would have been in late 1976 or winter of 1977, aired at 8:30, and I would have been watching as an 11 year old.  I have no memory of that episode.  Was it pulled before it aired?  Did I just not understand what I was watching?  But I would have understood--the characters are not married and being pregnant would be a disaster.  Even in the days of easier access to abortion, I would have understood an unwanted pregnancy as a disaster.

--As I watched the shots behind the closing credits, I wondered if future generations would see the snowy scenes and yearn for them.  Or maybe they'd say, "Those were the days!  Two women could get jobs in a factory and support themselves and even have a cute little basement apartment all to themselves."

Pivoting to Past Times

This morning, news of 2 deaths took me back to specific times in my life:  Bob Barker and Maureen Seaton.  I was surprised, in some ways, to learn that Bob Barker had been alive these many years, and saddened to realize how relatively young Maureen Seaton was when she died, in her mid-70's.  At this point, if there's a cause of death, I haven't found it.

Bob Barker seemed old when I was first aware of him, lazy summer days watching The Price Is Right, with my mom and sister.  We loved this game show, and I'm not sure why.  Looking back from a distance, the prizes seem less than fabulous, unless one won one of the showcases at the end.  I remember one babysitter pointing out that the contestant was lucky to have won extra cash because she'd need it to pay the taxes on the prize package.

Still, we tuned in, almost every morning, unless we had swim lessons.  And the show went on--and on and on--long after we quit watching, long after Bob Barker stopped hosting it.  Reading the news coverage, Barker seemed like a good human.  I'm glad he lived so long.

Maureen Seaton also seemed like a good person, but unlike many of my peers, I was not her student.  I was an adjunct at the University of Miami where she taught, but our paths rarely crossed.  Once I went to a reading where she and Denise Duhamel read from their new work.  I bought Little Ice Age, which had just been released.  Seaton signed it, and told me how much she appreciated the fact that I bought her book in the hardback edition.

I looked up the publication history--that reading must have been in 2001 or 2002.  Wow.  It seems a lifetime ago, and in so many ways, it's just as distant a time as my suburban childhood watching The Price is Right.  I went to poetry readings so often that many faces started to seem familiar.  I had dreams of my own book with a spine, and when my first chapbook was accepted in 2003 for publication in 2004, it seemed a tantalizing possibility.

It's also a time before I got a job in the for-profit education sector.  That job at the Art Institute of Ft. Lauderdale was good in so many ways, but disastrous in others (being part of that industry as it spiraled down).  It was a time between disastrous hurricanes, the one that hadn't affected me personally (Andrew in 1992) and the ones that wrecked me in so many ways (Katrina in 2005, Wilma in 2005, and Irma in 2017).

With each death, the gloomy part of my brain says, "Well, so this is how it is now.  More death than emergence."  But let me pivot from gloominess.  Let me be grateful for the time that we have had.  Let me savor what is left.

Seeing "Smokey and the Bandit" for the First Time

Last night, my spouse was scrolling through the endless possibilities of stuff to watch; we have a Roku stick and no streaming services except for Amazon Prime, and still the possibilities can be overwhelming.  He clicked on Smokey and the Bandit.  I realized I had never seen it and had never really wanted to see it.  Still, it seemed as good as any other choice, so we settled in.

The film inspired odd nostalgia in me--odd in some ways, because I hadn't seen the film.  But still, it is so much a period piece of the late 70's and with a bit of Southeast U.S. thrown in.  Ah, the 70's, when you couldn't get Coors beer east of the Mississippi River.  There are street scenes that capture the pay phones that once dotted every intersection.  There are scuzzy diners and kids doing activities (football and band) on a field.  The cast was more racially mixed than I expected--hey, a black sheriff, who seems like the more rational law enforcement dude than the crazed sheriff that chases Bandit across state lines.  And that Trans-Am--I remember how much kids in the 70's longed to grow up and have one of those cars.  And CB radios!  I'm surprised by how much of that lingo I remember, particularly because our family didn't have a CB radio.

I didn't expect to like Sally Field so much in this movie:  a runaway bride!  She's adorable and spunky and vulnerable and invincible.  She has agency, which I worried she might not.

It is interesting to think about this depiction of law enforcement, along with other shows of the 70's.  The Dukes of Hazzard comes to mind--shows where the law breakers are much more appealing than the deranged law enforcement folks.  It's hard not to think about our current day and wonder how much these types of shows might have played a part in forming the current muddle we seem to be in, where people can attack the Capitol in Washington D.C., and a huge part of the nation sees them as heroes.

Of course, I've read history and lots of literature, and I realize the appealing outlaw figure has always been with us, and in the U.S. more so than other countries.  

Last night, for the most part, I was able to just enjoy a film for what it is, with all of its overacting and strange plotline and car wreck after car wreck.  Today, I'll get in our sensible car and drive across the mountains keeping mostly to the speed limit, delivering a sermon about how a Canaanite woman schools Jesus in the narrow vision of his mission.  It's a different kind of spunkiness, a different woman with agency, but vital for our time.

Of Sex Pistols and Weather Systems

--As I begin this blog post, I'm waiting for the 5 a.m. update from the National Hurricane Center.  Will the remnants of Pacific hurricane Agatha reassemble into Atlantic Alex or just stay a messy blob?  It is June 1--the start of hurricane season.  I am happy not to be a South Florida homeowner.

--I am traveling a lot this summer, so hurricane season will offer a different set of anxieties.  They are lesser anxieties, but they are still there.

--My other set of anxieties:  am I navigating the state of Florida's unemployment system properly?  Yesterday I made it further than I ever have before.  Will it translate into money?  Stay tuned . . .

--Part of what I have to do to get my unemployment check is to apply for jobs, five applications per week. Yesterday I applied for all five in one afternoon. My spouse asked what would happen if I got an offer, but we are a long way from that.

 --We watched half of the Hulu series Pistol last night. It was oddly compelling even though I know where this story is headed. I suspect we have seen the most joyful part of the story, where people are just learning how to commandeer their instruments, and they are full of hopes and dreams.  Later they will become the Sex Pistols, and it's all just downhill from there.

 --I love seeing the pop culture references of the 70s, even though I was a child at the time of the events of this show. It's interesting to see all of those communities swirling around each other. If I was more in tune with my own time, would I see lots of different communities in the pop culture landscape or is it far more homogenized these days? I feel like it's more homogenized, but then again I don't get out a whole lot.

--There have been several times in the past two weeks where I have felt like my hair look like the David Bowie hair of the mid-1970s. Back in the day, I would not have been able to get my hair to look like that on purpose. Who knew that the secret to fashionable hair designs was to use one’s non-dominant hand and a blow dryer to style one’s hair?

 --Time to get ready for my appointment with the hand physical therapist. Some weeks I've become a prematurely old person, only leaving the house for doctors appointments. But I know busier days are coming, and there's still lots of packing to do. Time to start making some progress while keeping an eye on the weather systems.

Recent Historical Moments

In later years, when I look back on these blog posts, will I wonder why I didn't include some of the more compelling political developments? I'm thinking of the confirmation of the first African American female Supreme Court Justice, the leaked Alito document that seemed to say that Roe will be overturned momentarily, the baby formula shortage, and so on.

In part I didn't comment because I was blogging less because of my broken wrist. In part, especially when it comes to Roe, I am just tired and despairing.  There's a larger issue, an anti-female mood that seems to be percolating under all of society, and I don't know what to do with that.

Well I do know variety of options. One might leave the country. One might rededicate oneself to politics. One might move to a place where the land can support more food options (vegetable gardens, chickens, goats, etc.), where one might hunker down and wait out whatever this is that is upon us. One might think about more extreme options.

I hasten to say I am not thinking about more extreme options, although some might think that going to seminary is an extreme option, especially at my age and my gender. I understand the appeal of violence, but everything that I have seen, read, and understood leads me to believe that nonviolence is the better option, and right now, it is still an option.

Many people are looking back at historical hinge moments to try to explain our own moment. I want to believe that what we are seeing, this backlash against all the various progressive movements of the last 100 years, is a last gasp of desperate people, people who will die off if we just wait long enough.

However, I know the opposite might be true. I am old enough to remember a time in the 1970's, when women in Iran, in Afghanistan, had careers, when the country seemed to be on a path to modernization. How quickly things can change.

Let me remind myself that things can also change quickly in directions that aren't as scary. I am also old enough to remember a time when Nelson Mandela was in prison, and we all expected he would die there. Instead he was released and went on to be elected president of South Africa, the nation that imprisoned him.

I trust that we will figure out the baby formula shortage in short order. That problem seems much more easily fixed than some of our others. I will train myself to look for progress where I can find it; be confirmation of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson is one of those markers. I will remind myself that even in the darkest hours, we can see evidence of goodness, if we keep our eyes open.

Field Notes

When I was a child, one of my favorite books was Harriet the Spy. I would have had the book with the  cover that looked like this one I found in a Wikipedia article: 

I saw Harriet both as inspiration and cautionary tale.  I wanted to keep a notebook of observations, the way that she did, but the 1970's suburbs of Montgomery, Alabama did not lend themselves to the same kind of field notes that Harriet kept in the city of New York.  I didn't want to make notes about my classmates; even as I read about Harriet's exploits, I knew that nothing good would come of writing snarky and mean comments about one's classmates.

Still, there's something compelling about the process of keeping a field journal of sorts.  Years ago, one of my friends had a teenage girl who took her old canoe out on one of the tiny lakes that is part lake, part drainage area.  Every day, she sat in her canoe and made notes about the birds she saw, about the plants that grew, about the water quality.  Here, too, I wanted to follow her example, but I didn't have a lake or a canoe.

Yesterday, I sat down to make sense of an assignment for my Spiritual Formation for Ministry seminary class.  A large part of this class trains us to be neutral observers, which is not as easy as it might sound.  We observe without judging, without making suggestions, without imposing meaning.  And you might ask, like my spouse did, why it's important for ministry, and I would have trouble explaining, but some part of me understands, even as I can't put it into words.

In a non-pandemic world, we would be given a social service type agency and observe them at work.  Because we're taking the course online during a pandemic, our task is to go to any setting that's easy for us and make observations.  We are to do this several different times and to use one of the approaches in the resources for this module. We could approach the task from a quantitative angle:  counting and categorizing.  We could map the location--seating charts or traditional maps.  We could listen to conversations.  We could do something more prayerful and/or meditative:  lectio vicinitas.   

I decided to use this opportunity to get out of the condo and take a walk around the Arts Park across the street.  So yesterday at 1:43 p.m., I took my small, red notebook and walked the perimeter of the park.  It was Valentine's Day, so I saw couples having a picnic in the middle of the day.  I saw teenagers sequestered beneath some playground equipment.  I saw kids on bikes, and I saw more stuffed animals than I expected, fewer real animals.

It was fun to take notes in my notebook, although the making meaning part of my brain kept trying to interpret:  why so many police?  Why so many teenagers on a school day?  Where were the birds?  Why so much traffic on Highway 1 which circles the park?    What would the founder of the city think about all these tall condo buildings that now ring the park that has a dedication to him?

The creative writing part of my brain wanted to make poems and stories.  The good girl part of my brain wondered if anyone wondered what this middle-aged white woman was doing as she walked the park and took notes.

I thought of Harriet the Spy and all the characters, both fictional and real, who have spent so much time keeping a field journal.  When I was a child, reading about those characters, it seemed so easy.  In a way, it is.  In other ways, it is not.

Collegial Chaos and the Ways that 1970's TV Schooled Us

I was sad to hear of the death of Ed Asner a few days ago.  But it's a sadness mixed with gratitude for his long life and his fine acting.  I was first aware of him as Lou Grant, the boss of Mary Tyler Moore.  But I also loved his spin off show, where he's part of a newspaper outfit.  Many of my contemporaries wanted to be journalists because of Woodward and Bernstein, but I may have first felt that spark of longing when I watched both The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Lou Grant.  This article gives a wonderful tribute to Ed Asner and the character of Lou Grant that he created and the world of newspaper journalism.

I did not follow Lou Grant into the news business, but instead the college world, which bears some resemblance to those 1970's workplaces.  We've been wrestling with a different kind of work issue each day this week:  mi fi hotspot out, elevator buttons not lighting up, mail gone to a different floor while graduation regalia needs to be returned to a different campus, getting our new LMS less than a week before classes start for Fall 2021 quarter, on and on I could go.  I've been thinking of the great TV shows of my youth that were set in a work place and how we don't see that much these days; work is tangential in most weekly TV shows.  The work place TV shows of my youth prepared me for collegial chaos.

At one point, as my writer friend-colleague and I were trying to solve an issue at school, she suggested that our conversation would make brilliant dialogue for a TV show, like The West Wing, only set in a shrinking school.  I said, "Like The Chair, only it's a realistic look at a campus."  She later created this post on Facebook:

"Have you seen The Chair? Is that us now?"

"You know I have an ongoing Netflix trailer in my head of everything that happens on a daily basis."

"Maybe we could be the other end of the spectrum in Netflix shows. Like here's this Ivy League school and its quirky English department and ALL THE WAY OVER HERE is our little gritty-mostly female-70s-style workplace situation comedy about a tiny struggling college with no internet and a variety of other issues."

"Would part of this trailer be me curled up in front of your desk?"

"Probably."

To which I replied, 

"It's like Barney Miller meets WKRP in Cincinnati meets Taxi--but with better cake and less groovy music and a mostly female staff which means no sexualizing of the one lone woman. As workplaces go, it could be worse . . ."

It was the kind of week where we learned that the mi fi hot spot at the Gainesville campus and at our Hollywood campus were registered to the same phone number, so when they used theirs, ours went out, and vice versa.  I don't know enough about wi fi hot spots to understand that, but at this point in our campus tech crisis, I wasn't surprised.

I also wasn't surprised that the people on our campus reacted with grace and the determination to create a work around so that our students' progress can continue.  The TV shows of my youth schooled us in how to do just that.

Across Decades, A Woman Weeping for Afghanistan

I spent much of yesterday returning to a state of tears over Afghanistan, while at the same time marveling over how many decades I've spent feeling weepy because of what's happening in Afghanistan.  My first memory of knowing about Afghanistan as a country was the Soviet invasion in 1979 and the boycott of the Moscow Olympics, which made my teenage self both angry and weepy.

As I prepared for my wedding in 1988, Afghanistan was in the news because the Soviets were pulling out.  I joked that we should have gotten married earlier because peace seemed to be breaking out in the most unlikely places in that summer of 1988.

Ah, the foolish optimism of youth.  I was astonished that Afghanistan seemed to fall back into the middle ages once the Soviets left.  The 1990s brought all sorts of misery to Afghanistan, particularly to females.  It was shocking to me that a country could go backwards that way, in terms of women's rights.  I thought about Margaret Atwood's claim that anything that was in The Handmaid's Tale was something that was actually happening in the world as she wrote the book in the early 1980's, and I felt a shiver along with my weeping.

For the past twenty (20!!!) years, many events in Afghanistan could provoke weeping, but I held out hope that the U.S. presence in the country helped stabilize it.  I predict that events in the coming weeks will solidify that claim, as the U.S. leaves, and once again, the country will head to a place that's very unhealthy for females.

As I listened to coverage of yesterday's events in Afghanistan, I thought of the scene in The Princess Bride about the classic blunder of getting involved in a land war in Asia.  When I first saw that movie in 1991 or so, I heard the line and thought about Vietnam.  Afghanistan has been another part of Asia that has a long (very long!) history of being very challenging to invaders, from Alexander on to the U.S., century upon century of sorrow.

Not for the first time, I wondered why anyone would want to have the U.S. as an ally.  I thought of our history of abandoning those who tried to help us.  Some of my earliest political memories are those of the exit from Saigon, those images of people clinging to helicopters and trying to push their way to a safe exit.  As the news from Afghanistan has gotten progressively worse as the U.S. leaves, I've thought of the South Vietnamese, of the Kurds, of all of those types of people in Afghanistan who have tried to help the U.S. and will now be in great peril.  And I've thought of the females, who are also in great peril, solely because of their gender. 

My life has shown me the folly of trying to save everyone.  My life reminds me again and again that I can't even keep my closest loved ones safe, so why should I think that I can somehow protect the vulnerable in other countries?  Why should I think that I can save those who didn't win the lottery of being born into a safe body, a safe country, a safe situation?  

Why do I believe in safety at all?

As I waited for the AT&T person to finish making my phone line communicate with the outside, I ended my day by reading Patricia Smith's brilliant and terrifying Blood Dazzler, a good reminder of all the aspects of life that threaten us:  hurricanes and poverty and bad information and poverty and learned helplessness and poverty and forced helplessness.  I loved this cycle of poems that revolve around Hurricane Katrina, and each subsequent reading only increases my appreciation of the work.

I wondered about my own ruminations throughout the day and wondered if I could create some sort of poem cycle that connects Afghanistan and the health of a nation and the personal health choices that lead to ruin.  Or maybe I want a simpler poem, a poem about a woman hearing about the dire circumstances of Afghanistan's women and children, a woman sobbing in the car as she goes to pick up her books on hold at the public library, a woman who has spent her day at work trying to make the educational path easier for college students.  Let my brain ruminate on that a bit before I attempt to catch it on paper.

This morning, I came across this magnificent blog post, where Dr. Wil Gafney makes connections between Afghanistan and the ancient prophets of the Hebrew Bible.  Her work always makes important connections, so I wasn't surprised to find her continuing to do so.  I am grateful for a solid spiritual dimension to my reading about Afghanistan this morning.  

I am grateful to know that I am not alone in weeping.

Of Time and the Guitar God

I was shocked and saddened to hear of the death of Eddie Van Halen.  He didn't seem that much older than I am, and he wasn't.  I'm 55, and he was 65.

I confess that I felt a bit of shock and sadness primarily because he seems young to me.  It's not like the other death of yesterday, Johnny Nash, who wrote "I Can See Clearly Now," dead at 80.

I had some Van Halen albums, but I didn't listen to them often, and I don't still have them.  I have fond memories of the song "Jump."  In college, a group of us went to a rollerskating rink in Newberry, South Carolina.  At that point, my boyfriend who would become my husband wasn't my boyfriend yet, and I was awed at his ability to jump while wearing clunky skates.

The young are easily impressed.

I was not one of those people who could argue which rock god played the greatest guitar.  As an English major, I could argue about lyrics for hours.

I thought about that aspect of myself last night.  Instead of watching T.V., we had satellite radio on and tuned to one of those stations that plays the music of our middle and high school years, late 70's and early 80's classic rock.  I went to bed, read for a bit, and then turned out the light.  "Come Sail Away" by Styx was on.  I thought about a sleepover I had with my best friend in middle school, how we listened to the radio in the dark and talked about what the last part of the song meant.  We talked about what we would do if aliens appeared and invited us to come sail away.

It took me awhile to drift off to sleep, and I lay there thinking about how familiar it felt to be cozy in bed, listening to music chosen by someone else.  Was I back in my dorm room?  I thought about how familiar it seems to be listening to someone else's radio station.  Was I back in my childhood house, listening to the radio that my mom listened to?  

For a strange moment, I felt like I was a disembodied consciousness, that I could sense the artificiality of time as a linear construct.

Storm Watching

This is not the hurricane I expected.  This is not the storm I dreaded.  Perhaps I see a larger life lesson here.

Rain patters against the windows.  When I heard that patter before dawn, I wasn't sure if it was rain or some other creature making its way in the world.  I was expecting the kind of rain band we got 24 hours ago, where the rain came in a blinding wave.

I almost cancelled my appointment with my spiritual director on Friday because I thought a tropical storm would be on top of us.  By Thursday, I could tell that I had a good chance of being able to make it to that appointment and back before the winds came and made driving difficult.  I pulled into the driveway about the time the 5 p.m. update from the National Hurricane Center let us know that we were under a hurricane watch.  My spouse was taking down the wind chimes, but we decided not to do major preparations for 12 hours, once we saw what the Saturday 5 a.m. update told us. 

By Saturday morning, we decided to wait until the 11 a.m. update to decide on whether or not to shutter the windows and pull the yard furniture inside.  My spouse put away the smaller items that could be airborne if the forecast winds/wind gusts arrived.  I started the pizza dough to get ready for the rainy afternoon ahead.

Instead, the sun came out.  I monitored the storm just to be sure we weren't surprised.  In the past 3 decades, I've seen more than one storm seem like a non-event in the morning, only to come crashing ashore as a category 4 or 5 storm by the 5 p.m. advisory.

We had pizza and wine.  I took a nap.  We listened to various versions of songs by Pentatonix.  My spouse took a nap.  I read all the 5 p.m. updates from the National Hurricane Center.  I did some writing and reading.  My spouse moved from Pentatonix to the Violent Femmes, and we discovered some great new versions of our favorite songs--and that the band is back together!  I've spent time this morning enjoying this concert.

As the sun was setting, for one moment, there was a break in the clouds, an amazing, glowing red hole to the west.  I grabbed the camera, but I was too late.  I did catch this shot, however:

And here's another common storm image, tropical winds blowing through the palm trees:

Because we had taken naps, we had a later bedtime than usual.  I finished reading Timothy Ware's The Orthodox Church, a history of various types of Orthodox Christianity, the next book for my spiritual direction certificate program.  I also made some progress on David Hamp's Sunny Days: The Children's Television Revolution That Changed America.  I am thoroughly enjoying that one--it's a great look back at iconic PBS shows for children, shows that I watched as they premiered, long ago when I was very young, before my sister was born.  I arrived at school already knowing how to read, which made my teacher dismayed, so I tried not to let her know how much I already knew.

This memory of elementary school, too, seems to explain a larger life lesson, but it's more than I want to deal with in this blog post.  

This morning, I've been baking, making the house smell like a distant December.  

I made this Facebook post:  "Yes it is August 2, and I am creating bread that has more in common with Christmas traditions than sourdough. And yes, I still have pizza dough in the fridge after making pizza yesterday. I am being profligate with my yeast! Or maybe extravagant is the the more accurate word."

So it seems that today will be the rainy day this week-end.  I was prepared to stay in all week-end, so that's fine.  There's more reading to do:  the Sealey Challenge!  One book of poems each day of August.  I have plenty of books to choose from.

Forty Years a Hostage

Today is the anniversary of the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Iran in 1979.  My family was with another family for a week-end get away at the Outer Banks, and it was one of the few times we had the TV on. My dad saw the coverage and shook his head. He said, "This doesn't look good."

It would be worse than we realized. Everyone in that house that day, the grown ups like my parents, the high school kids (me), and the little ones--we all thought that it would be quickly settled. It must be a mistake, right? Crazy school kids taking over an embassy who would soon come to their senses--now, of course, we know it was nothing like that.

In later years, as I've worked in a variety of places with a vast assortment of people, I've returned to the thought of those hostages, taken and held in their place of work. I can't imagine spending over a year in captivity with most of my colleagues. I'm lucky in that I like most of them well enough to spend a working day with them. But to be cooped up with them day in and day out?

I think of what I keep in my desk; I do keep stocks of items that might be important in an emergency: dental floss, tampons, other toiletries, a bit of cash, water, oatmeal, pens, office supplies of all sorts. Still, after a month or two, I'd run out.   And if I was held for any amount of time at all, I'm sure I'd rue the other items that never made it to my office.  And those hostages would be held for over a year.

Those hostages haunt me--did they have any sense of what was going to happen? Did they know they were in danger but stayed in their diplomatic post regardless? 

I think of those students.  It was just supposed to be a sit-in, that day at the embassy.  How on earth did those students manage to take an embassy--and hold it for so long?  Did they wake up periodically saying, "How on earth will we get out of this?"  Did they fear it would end badly?

  

I know that many released hostages have troubles after being released. I remember at national youth assemblies of my high school years where one or more of the Iranian hostages would come to talk to us--but they often glossed over the troubles with adjusting.

And here we are, forty years later.  The relationship between Iran and the U.S. was changed forever on that day.  It would have been changed by some turn of events, regardless--but how unlikely it seems, both then and now, that it would be a protest turned into a hostage situation that would be a catlyst for so much geopolitical change.

In so many ways, that event still holds us hostage.