Peace be with you

On December 14, 2012, a young man walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, shot 20 children, all under the age of 7, six school staff members and himself, after he shot his mother at her home. 

Where was God?


Last night, I was up until 1:00 a.m. listening to "Hanukkah Lights," a series of fantastic, newly commissioned Hanukkah stories on NPR.  I've been talking about Hanukkah more with my Jewish friends this year than I ever have before.  A few days ago, Aunt Norma posted on her Facebook page a video of a flash mob singing Christmas carols in a mall.  A lot like the video of a flash mob singing the Hallelujah chorus that made the rounds last year, this medley wasn't executed with quite as much technical flair as the Hallelujah chorus was, but I liked it better because they were songs that everybody knew, so there was a lot more audience participation. But someone commented that they wondered if the same enthusiastic audience response would have happened, had someone standing at Orange Julius in the food court "suddenly started singing The Dreidl Song or if an imam started singing from the mezzanine?"

Well first of all, an imam calling people to prayer is not equivalent to singing Christmas carols in the mall, not at all, but I take the point. 

Within a few days of that posted question, the country was called to prayer by an imam, a very young boy, singing verses from the Quran.

I don't think of myself as Christian, not having been brought up in any church, not looking to Christian tradition to tell me where I stand with God. But I supposed I absorbed a WASP-ishness--in the sense of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant--by default, mostly at school and in playing with my friends who belonged to churches. I sang in "Christmas" concerts when I was in elementary school, not  "Holiday" concerts. We had Easter break and Spring break. I was always jealous when the Catholic kids in my class got the morning of Good Friday off school and came back after lunch with ash smudges on their foreheads. I went to stake parties with my Mormon friends and did everything wrong--I wore makeup to the dance and asked for a Coke at the refreshment stand. I was a religious embarrassment at nearly every house of worship in town.

I have eaten my share of latkes and sung The Dreidl Song at friends' holiday parties, but neither do I feel connected to Hanukkah or Judaism in a way that I might use to define myself.  My memories and traditions aren't Jewish.  They are more influenced by the great American consumerism that I grew up with in the 1970s.  I admit, I don't know any Hannukah songs besides The Dreidl Song, but I am willing to learn any holiday music out there and sing the alto parts with gusto, especially if plied with more latkes and other traditional home cooking. I like music, I like learning about other cultures, I love a little nosh . . . What could there possibly be to object to?

Talking with my Jewish friends and listening to stories about Hanukkah got me thinking about the best holiday concert I ever saw and specifically why it was so much better than any other holiday offering I'd seen.  For a while, the community orchestra in Casper, Wyoming, was conducted by Jonathan Shames, who happens to be Jewish.  For his first holiday concert in Casper, he invited his dad, an accomplished cantor in demand at many synagogues up and down the east coast, to come to Wyoming from New York City, sing some Jewish holiday music and tell us a bit about Hanukkah. The Casper Civic Chorale was performing Christmas music with the orchestra, and the stage in the John F. Welsh auditorium was packed with orchestra and chorus members. The piano had to be placed on a platform on the main floor, and Maestro Shames conducted from the audience. So it seemed a little strange that there was a large, though beautiful, menorah front and center in that very crowded space.

Once the chorale finished their numbers, Maestro Shames introduced his dad.  Out from the wings walked this sturdy little man just as merry as he could be, with a big smile, ruddy cheeks, waving broadly to the audience as the stage lights flashed off of his glasses.  I have always wanted a bubbe, a Jewish grandma, but I didn't until that moment realize that I also need a zaide, a Jewish grandpa.  Oh, what a lovely and loveable man!  Together, Mr. Shames and the orchestra performed some traditional Jewish songs, and then he began to tell us about Hanukkah and the tradition of the menorah. 

On December 16, 2012, most of Newtown, Connecticut, many neighboring communities, officials, and even President Obama, gathered for a memorial for those who died in the attack. Leaders of every faith in Newtown spoke and offered prayers.  When it was his turn, Rabbi Shaul Praver stepped forward and said that he would sing the Hebrew memorial prayer. He took a moment to prepare. He seemed to draw from a well inside himself, reluctantly tapping into an emotion that he knew not only in his heart but in his genetic code.  He drew a gathering breath, as though listening for the right moment to add his voice to a song already in progress and never ending. Then he began to sing.  It was a wail. I was startled, both at the beauty of this grief and also that I understood what he sang. I don't speak Hebrew, nor have I suffered a loss comparable to what those people suffered, but I understood what he sang in my bones. I heard it clearer than if I'd comprehended the words. The purest anguish. An elemental, core lament, the cry of generations of parents grieving for massacred children.

When it came time to light the candles, Mr. Shames the elder turned to his son, whom everybody in town knew as "Maestro" or "Dr. Shames." "Jonathan," he said, "Will you light the candle?"  We held our breath as Jonathan lit the match and held the tiny flame to the wick. As the candle started to glow, I think lots of us were a bit surprised to feel renewed faith in the continuation of life that the candle represented. We were touched by the familiar intimacy of that moment between father and son.  All of us in the mostly Christian audience found ourselves bound in that moment, unified in a common family. Our throats thickened and our eyes sparkled with tears as we recognized the significance of this ceremony, even if we weren't versed in Jewish tradition. Something greater than any differences moved us, amplified the sacred already present in each spirit and made us more humble and more beautiful than we'd been a moment before.  It showed us our potential for true grace and gave us a glimpse of the possibility of peace among nations. 

A young boy, not much older than the children who were killed, Muadh Bhavnagarwala, stepped forward to sing some verses from the Quran. When he finished, Jason Graves, a representative of the Al Hedaya Islamic Center, tearfully prayed.  He said, "It is in such times of almost unbearable loss that we seek comfort with our Creator and that artificial divisions of faith fall away to reveal a nation of mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, all united in a desire to bring healing and renewed hope."

And when we could breathe again, we had a sing-along of Christmas songs that everybody knows, led with great joy and enthusiasm by Cantor Shames. Then it was over. We left the concert hall, hearts overflowing with the meaning of the Christmas season illustrated so beautifully for us by a Jewish man and his son.

                Shalom           As-salamu alaykum             Peace

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Things Found

 

Queenie at the dig site



My dog, Queenie, is one of the greatest scientists in the world. It’s not surprising that you don’t know about her, given how little press truly great scientists receive.  She is an archaeologist. Excavation is her passion.  I’ve participated on other digs, and they turned out to be nothing but a lot of dirt and heat and dehydration and pretty irresponsible speculation. Anybody would want the fossil they found to be part of the largest Tyranosaurus Rex ever to walk the earth or evidence of a heretofore unknown civilization. It's only natural. But what’s the likelihood?  And does one fossilized fragment buried 20 feet deep in the lithified sediment of a Pleistocene river really warrant hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding to  go in with everything from a backhoe to a toothbrush and dig a big hole in a fragile habitat to get at whatever prehistoric fragments might be left? I’m not so sure. Especially when the prehistoric fragments turn out to be 100-year-old antelope teeth. Hardly a significant find. I'm all for scientific discovery, but just because one can doesn't mean one should. And "because it's there" isn't enough justification either, not in this economy. Food for thought, is all I'm sayin'.

Detail of dig site and spoil heap.

Anyway, Queenie and I were out in the backyard the other day.  I was cleaning up the space where our very decrepit garden shed used to be, raking up bits of shingling, rusted nails, pieces of arsenic-treated wood, cardboard, other detritus.  Queenie was working at her latest dig site under the back fence. She works on it a little bit every day, rain or shine.  As I straightened up from trying to gather yet more rapidly disintegrating black plastic ground cover, I noticed something bright red in Queenie’s spoil-heap (which is archaeological lingo for “pile of dug-up dirt.”)  I reached down to pick it up, thinking to save her the effort of mapping, tagging and cataloguing this thing that was probably just another piece of trash--a piece of unidentifiable plastic or yet another wadded up pop can--but it turned out to be an actual artifact!  I can tell it is a real, live artifact because this is what it looks like. 

This is, without a doubt, a fire engine.  (AA battery provided for perspective.)

Note the inscription. This fire engine is from Denver, a fascinating discovery, because it indicates one of two possibilities:  Either trade with regions east of the Rocky Mountains 30 years ago was more common than we had previously realized, or my dog has succeeded in digging all the way from the Puget Sound area right through to the Colorado front range, an achievement of great import to both physical and social sciences, I think you'll agree.

This is why Queenie is one of the world’s best scientists.  She gets results.  None of this finding a teeny little rock that could be a bone, and if it is a bone, it might be a carved flute or it could be a hominid metatarsal. “Finds” like that happen, scholarly papers get written up with a lot of speculation and a lot of money gets flung out into the desert and never heard from again and then Spielberg makes a movie about it.  Crazy nutso.  When my dog digs something up, you damn well know what it is. 

 Also, she always comes in under budget.

Moving on.  My next found object is one of my favorite rocks. 

Don’t quote me on this because I was a geology major for only 3 semesters, but my best guess is that this is a pegmatite consisting of K-feldspar, amphibole and mica. Along the seam where the mica and amphibole (black rock) meet, there used to be garnets, but they fell off long ago. I’ve used this rock pretty hard.

I really shouldn’t have to explain why I say “one of” my favorite rocks, but if you need help understanding, read Byrd Baylor’s fine, fine book, Everybody Needs a Rock.  (by Byrd Baylor. Illustrated by Peter Parnall. (Atheneum, 1974.) Read it today, especially if you didn’t even know you needed a rock.  It starts like this, but you’ll have to get a copy to find out the rules.  Here goes:

Everybody Needs a Rock

Everybody needs a rock.
I'm sorry for kids who don't have a rock for a friend.
I'm sorry for kids who only have tricycles bicycles horses elephants goldfish three-room playhouses fire engines wind-up dragons and things like that - if they don't have a rock for a friend.

That's why I'm giving them my own ten rules for finding a rock...
Not just any rock.
I mean a special rock that you find yourself and keep as long as you can - maybe forever.

If somebody says, "What's so special about that rock?"
Don't even tell them.
I don't.

Nobody is supposed to know what's special about another person's rock.

All Right.
Here are the rules: 

I’ve always loved rocks and brought home buckets of them when our family took drives up into the Poudre Canyon when I was a kid.  But this rock found me.  I was 7 years old, riding my bike on a dirt trail in the field beyond our house.  I noticed a black thing sticking up in the middle of the trail and decided to see if I could run over it.  I hit the black thing, my tire jammed, I flew over the handlebars, landed hard and lay there,  winded and furious.  When I could breathe again, I got up, stumped over, and kicked the black thing as hard as I could. It turned out to be a rock, not a piece of cloth or plastic.  I have never been so angry at a rock in all my life.  That rock had to be mine.  The next day, I went back, took a stick and dug and dug and dug all around the black part until I could see that it was attached to a bigger, pale part. I’d never seen a rock like that before, so it had to be special. When I finally pried it out of the ground and brushed it off, the mica sparkled in the sunshine, the garnets flashed, the feldspar looked strong like marble and fragile at the same time with its pink blush. The black of the amphibole didn't look flat, like asphalt or construction paper, and it wasn't shiny like patent leather.  It was deep like a cave entrance or walking in the dark at night.  A mysterious space.  I fell in love right away and have kept this rock with me ever since, which is a goodly number of years now.  We belong together.   

Really, if you don’t have your own rock, you need to think about getting one as soon as possible.  Everybody Needs a Rock.

 

The last found object I want to tell you about here is . . . well, for lack of a better word . . . my mojo.  It’s been missing for years, and I’ve been floundering without it. Depression runs in my family and I've got it bad. An "episode" can last literally years and doesn't require a triggering event to come on.  It seeps in like fog and immobilizes me.  Living through those days is like trying to walk through the darkness of that amphibole.   When I struggle to move, I stumble around, usually in the wrong direction, and a lot of pain and destruction and more depression happen as a result. Most frustrating of all is that so many days go by, my face numb from standing with it pressed into the corner. 

Example of fog-stalled project:  Flannel jammies that should have been a weekend project took a year and a half to finish.

But something happened this past summer. The mojo came back with the light. Or something like that.  It's impossible to explain if you've never been there, and I couldn't tell you what made the difference, but I'm better.  

 

Things look brighter.  I feel hopeful again.  It’s good to have the mojo back.

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Buoyancy

So, the Fall catalogues are coming out, and I let the teeny-tiny, little-girl princess in my heart flip through the pages while I wait for my tea water to boil.  I thumb past the shirt dresses, the cashmere two-piece sets, the trendy A-line skirts and flannel tunics with barely a glance.  These clothes mean nothing to me. I like the styles, but no way  am I going to pay $70 for a flannel shirt or $100 for a linen tunic.  I lick my thumb and chuckle in superiority as I turn the glossy pages of these catalogues featuring pictures of beautiful, healthy-looking women who look nothing like me, though we’re both classified by the fashion houses as “Plus Size.” Actually, the women in the catalogues qualify as “Plus Size.” The only significance I have to houses of fashion is as a grotesque, a cautionary tale, certainly not as a woman, not as a consumer of fashion, not even as a person. 

I turn one more page and it hits me. I heave my annual Fall Sigh. 

Boots.

These are “full-figure” models, and yet not one of them is over a size 10, maybe 12.  Need I say, I am not a size 10 or a 12?  Not even a 14 or a 16.  But it's not their bust size, their waists, their hips or their thigh measurements that deflate me. It's their calves that make me long for that which will never be.  I stare wistfully at the boots. I can almost smell the fresh, clean, new leather, and I imagine how it would feel to have an extra 2 inches of solid heel to look down from without wobbling.  Knee-high boots are popular this season--they usually are in Fall catalogues--and in nearly every picture, the model is wearing a pair of knee-high boots. In the pictures where she's not wearing boots, she's wearing leopard-print stilettos. I got over those a long time ago, but the teeny-tiny, little-girl princess in my heart still goes all dreamy-eyed over those boots.  Tan rough-outs with a 1-1/2 inch square heel.  Smooth, dark chestnut calf skin with a 2-inch stack heel.  Or the ultimate: flat-soled hunters, forest floor brown, in soft, pliable deer skin that laces up and ties at the back.  Another sigh. 

I have to tell that little girl no again this season and, indeed, every time the fall boot season rolls around because the reality is, I will never wear knee-high boots. Not even mid-calf boots. High-top sneakers are about as much as I can manage.  You see, I am what a drunken friend quite generously called “voltuptupous.”  Nah, let's tell it like it is.  I’m heavy-set. I'm a big girl. I’m fat.  I am very likely to start a grease fire at the crematorium upon my demise. I am a member of what another friend calls the “Junk-in-the-Trunk Sisterhood,” but even if I weren't, I couldn't wear those boots because, even if I lost weight to dangerously low poundage, unless I had muscle mass actually shaved off my calf muscles in a ghastly surgical procedure to decrease the diameter of my legs, I would never be able to fit into those boots.  My legs have very little taper from hip to ankle, even without the overlying layer of fat.  They are giant sequoia legs. I will never be able to carry off one of my favorite ensembles of all time—boot cut jeans with real cowboy boots, a chambray shirt and a denim or canvas jacket.  

As the teeny-tiny princess settles down into yet another disappointed slump, I try to figure out what to tell her because I want her to feel good.  When she's not happy, I'm not happy, and not being happy is not good for my waistline, which is a problem for reasons more important than fashion.  I want her to know that she's all right just the way she is, that I wouldn't have her be any other way because there is no one else exactly like her and all that other hoohah.  She doesn't fall for it.  She's heard that speech several times before, after all. The tea water boils, I pour it over my chamomile and go back to my desk to do those adult things I spend so much time on like wage earning, paying bills, making appointments, playing computer solitaire, etc. I can still hear the princess kicking around behind a file cabinet in my mind, throwing her tiara up against the wall, whacking my mental inbox with her royal scepter that, it turns out, is not a magic wand after all.  She's not a brat; she’s just frustrated. Understandably so, but it's my job to teach her a better way to deal with it than maintaining a Rapunzelesque loneliness, trapped in my mind, held hostage by an unachievable vision of prettiness. 

The other morning, I think I hit upon the answer.  It has been a searingly hot summer, and I've been getting up before 6:00 a.m. to take the dogs out for a walk in the fresh of the morning.  It's still, quiet, cool and the air is calm.  My mind surrenders to the zen of dog walking—I must focus on the dogs, and all my senses are taken up in maintaining our safe forward progress.  But I find the clean smells of morning sage and freshly watered grass, a crushed aspen branch, desert dust and the scent of dry pine on the breeze come through to me on top of the diligence with which I attend to crosswalks and poop patrol.  The rhythm of my footsteps, breathing, heartbeat, the pattern of stop and wait for the dogs to smell the place a jack rabbit was moments before and then move on again, all calm me and allow my mind to expand in ways that 90 minutes on a treadmill just doesn't accommodate.  It's as though my body and mind have made a deal: Keep the body busy and the mind can get some major work done.

It's so quiet at this hour, but I find that when I tune in to the sounds around me, it's the wind in the pines on the mountain miles away that I hear.  But this morning as I walk with my small terrier—trying out his harness for the first time, which I am pleased to see that he regards as a super-hero outfit rather than a straight jacket—I hear above me a huge exhaling sound.  Bigger than any animal I've ever heard except a whale, and there aren't too many whales in the high-desert sky.  Not in Wyoming, at least.  I hear it again. I look up and about a quarter-mile above me, there's a gorgeous, rainbow-striped hot air balloon making the most of the rare quiet skies to go sailing above town.  The sound I heard was the pilot opening the flame to keep the balloon aloft.  He did three short bursts and one long one.  I waved and waved, and they waved back.  My dogs didn't care, but it was magical to me. You have to understand just how crystalline a high-desert sky is. How clear it is and how very vibrant those colors—primary red and yellow, blue and orange—were against that startlingly deep blue. 

I walked on, thinking I'd heard that breathing pattern before, the way the pilot opened the flame to keep the balloon aloft.  It's the way whales breathe when they're preparing to dive. They take three short breaths signified by three short, fast exhales, then one big breath in, and then they dive. I was struck by the possibility that these two creations on Earth—one a construction of human whimsy and the other miraculous beyond human imagination—might share a life process in common. Both rely on buoyancy to survive. And they breathe the same way.

That is what I will teach my princess about.  Buoyancy.  How to navigate the depths of her life and trust herself to know when she needs to come up for air.  How to rise above to find a new perspective and see that things that seem insurmountable to us at ground level maybe aren't so significant from a different point of view.

I will teach her that levity, mirth, humor, call it what you want, will get her through even when she's tired and feeling deflated, and that boosting someone else up--helping someone stay afloat through a storm--is just about the best gift a person can give and receive.

Buoyancy of heart and spirit. How to float and how to fly. What could be more magical?  Better than boots any day.  Always beautiful and always, always in fashion.  

Blackberry Hell

There are people sleeping in the greenbelt behind my house. About 20 feet beyond the fence, under the blackberry brambles.  They try to hide that they've been there and try even harder to hide that they'll be back, but this afternoon as I was cutting the brambles away from the cedarwood privacy fence, I saw the crushed undergrowth and moss where they'd bedded down, the flattened cardboard beer cases pulled from neighborhood recycling bins, used as ground cover to sleep on and sometimes as blankets, the plastic grocery bags of food bank bread and Spam, clothing and soap partially hidden in the Scot's broom.

I've seen this coming for a while, actually. Each morning, my dog and I walk up the street, turn down a narrow, overgrown track and hike up a short, steep rise to come out on the Interurban Trail, an asphalt path that runs along the old railroad right of way.  It's designated as “public multiple use” land, but I think the city planners had mostly bicyclists and dog walkers in mind when they okayed the trail, because there aren't any structures like three-sided sheep sheds where people can bed down and wait out a rainy night relatively dry and safe.  But people are sleeping under the Douglas firs and hemlocks,  in the rhododendron hells and blackberry thickets up there, too. There are more permanent dwelling sites along the trail. I've seen sleeping bags and food weighted down with rocks, clothes left drying on low branches.  There are T-shirts and blue jeans too small to be adult clothing. There are used and unused diapers.  I've also seen people whiz by on $2000 bicycles, wearing another $2000 worth of fancy gear, carried away in their Tour de France fantasies,  never noticing the battered old pup tent partially hidden under fallen alder branches.

I'm not talking about little green elven people. No, they're mostly a brownish color, weather-beaten, haggard and the color of the forest floor they've been sleeping on. The color we would all be if we'd been sleeping outside and hadn't bathed in reliable memory.

One morning, my dog and I happened upon two happy families harvesting blackberries on a slope that rises from a section of the trail.  The clean, well-fed, well-clothed children ate berries as fast as they could, their hands and mouths stained a deep, blackish red. Their parents chatted and swapped pictures on cell phones as the children gorged themselves. Their REI strollers were full of buckets and bags of sweet, ripe berries.  This was a social gathering of my suburban neighbors.  One little boy offered to share his harvest with me, but I said no, thanks, they were all for him.  The thing is, I don't know what pesticides and herbicides the city sprays along this public use land to keep the weeds back.  Besides, the prior afternoon in the very same spot at the top of the hill, between the brambles and more privacy fence separating the adjacent homeowners from those making the most of public multiple use, I saw a girl—I'm doing my best not to speculate about her age—tricking with first one guy as my dog and I walked down the trail, and a different guy as we came back.  Her knees below her miniskirt were stained a deep, blackish red.

Early in the morning, I've seen the earth-colored people rise from the brambles like cautious deer, keeping low and still, wary, watching carefully until they know whether or not you mean them harm.  Not all of them traffic, but there are too many vacant stares, too many needle tracks on arms, too many syringes, broken glass vials, used condoms and spent amyl nitrate cartridges scattered amongst the piles of moldy dog poop at the edges of the trail for it to be strictly innocent public multiple use.  There's a ring of downed logs in a space under the trees by the power station where teenagers like to sit and smoke. I passed by once, and there were three bodies lying face up on the grass just outside the ring, two of them with arms and legs splayed onto the trail.  They were breathing and their eyes moved, but they didn't flinch as my dog sniffed and nuzzled at them. As I checked for pulses and breathing, their arms floated up from the ground trying to brush me away, but without minds conscious and coordinated enough to direct purposeful motion.  This went beyond a simple marijuana high.  Not one of them was over 14 years of age.  An adult voice spoke from just beyond the circle of log seats under the trees.  “They're all right,” he said. “I'm watching them.” 

I'm ashamed to say, I was so angry and frightened that I just grabbed them by their skinny little floating arms, hauled them clear of the trail onto the grass and left them there at the mercy of their pusher. I walked away and did nothing.

In the book Breaking Through Concrete: Building an Urban Farm Revival, co-author Edwin Marty likens Himalayan blackberries in the Seattle area to kudzu in the south. Both introduced, invasive, aggressive species, they are resistant to most forms of herbicides and thrive in the poorest of soil and climate conditions.  They spread fast, resist disease and, therefore, harbor diseases that decimate the native species.  They grow in the tiniest crack in the pavement and can engulf a house in less than a year if equally aggressive measures aren't taken to combat them.  You have to poison the plant, then chop away the dead foliage, then poison the stump, then poison the ground so it won't come back. That's what it takes to kill these plants  Both have carved out a niche for themselves by dominating the native species. Poverty's like that too, taking root in distressed areas, vanquishing one household at a time, bringing disease with it, easily resisting known methods of defense, aided and abetted by public multiple use.

There are other species living in the brambles.  Coyotes live in the greenbelt that runs behind my house and adjoins the trail.  Raccoons, possum, squirrels, innumerable Norwegian rats and mice. And, of course, the birds.  There are lots of tiny, colorful migrating birds, a few hummingbirds, but mostly we have Stellar jays, starlings, crows, pigeons, gulls—the usual scavengers. We had a family of California quail before somebody bought the lot at the top of the hill, spent a raucous summer building a house on it and the quail moved away. We've had the occasional bear coming looking for grubs and berries, though they're usually destroyed by 18-wheelers as they try to cross Interstate 5 in the dim predawn light.  

It's been a particularly dry summer, and the fire department has come three times to put out fires gobbling up dry weeds in the greenbelt.  Each time, it was blamed on kids and firecrackers, but while that's possible, I don't believe it. The coyotes didn't set the fires either.

As I worked chopping brambles, I realized our privacy fence badly needs to be replaced.  The posts are rotten and wobbly, the rails are soft and won't hold a nail, and the slats have decayed to pointlessness.  We're making ends meet, but the economy is tough, and we don't have money to spend rebuilding the fence.  As I cut back the brambles, I realized the only thing holding the fence up was the blackberries and that there were dead leaves and cobwebs in my hair. Flies swarmed around my legs where bramble thorns had torn my skin and made it bleed. And my arms were brown from fighting the brambles in the dirt.