Red-shoed Zebras at the Tea Party

Anderson Cooper asked NY’s new Republican candidate for governor, Carl Paladino, whether he’d allow abortions for victims of rape and incest. “No, Paladino said, “They have adoptions available for them.”

Paladino joins a Mount Rushmore of craziness: Ken Buck, Rand Paul, and the Sarah Palin wannabes: Sharron Angle and Chris O’Donnell, all of whom seem utterly lacking in imagination, and capable of valuing creativity only as it is manifest biologically.

So, let’s add a little creativity. Let’s have a little imaginative play here: Candidate Paladino becomes susceptible to an unwanted pregnancy; now, suddenly, he may have to put his big business dealings, his speaking engagements, his work on hold while he lies in bed for several months. (We’ll give him a complicated pregnancy as a result of rape.) Because of PTSD – a common enough result of assault -- he drinks more than he should and the fetus is compromised, not that he even knew he was carrying at the time. He’ll deliver a special needs child, not easily adopted. Also, just to let him experience a few more of the difficulties and get the full effect: because of his age, the pregnancy may be life-threatening. As it happens, he won’t die, but he’ll have a long recovery. Does his stance change? And how soon?

Sharron Angle tells him God has a plan and gets rid of the Department of Education. Chris O’Donnell tells him to put his man pants back on and sends him flowers, against Karl Rove’s advice. Ken Buck tells him to Buck Up. Rand Paul suggests he keep the baby and homeschool it. This will take more time away from the construction business and cut down on those offensive emails. The good news is that Paul thinks that home schools should not be regulated by government, so the baby need not be educated at all, and maybe can be put to work eventually picking up scrap around construction sites.

After all that, Paladino might have a better sense of what women are asked to sacrifice when others control their creativity. The others don’t get it unless it happens to them.

I have dreams of broadcasting myself into those heated congressional debates – say like Bart Stupak’s silliness on the Health Care Bill, and then, when his obstructionism is finally overcome, when even less imaginative members are yelling “Baby Murderer” at him – Say right in the midst of that, like God manifest on the ceiling, I show up howling “I don’t tell ya’ll what to do with ya’lls wieners when ya’ll are at home, so don’t you tell me what to do with my insides!” And there I’d be, a mad cow, a howling post-menopausal lone voice, looking nothing like the conventional God and readily dismissible.

So perhaps the broadcasting into chambers might not work.

Instead, if Christine O’Donnell wins, she will be happy to tell them what not to do with their wieners – and what women can’t do with their own bodies – either for pleasure or for sense.

What I wish for now is more empathy. Empathy requires imagination. Empathy requires a creative leap of faith. Empathy is what we know when we are, for a moment, godlike in our ability to understand how someone else might feel. To develop empathy, we need more than mere life. We need nurturance, we need love, we need security, we need faith. We need experience or education. We need free time, we need play, we need the right to move as we will. Ensuring that for one another requires a lot of caregiving, the kind of caregiving the radical right assumes someone else – probably a mother, if anyone – will supply.

Christiane Northrup, an OB-GYN and writer, explained that she realized she could have two children and write a book, or she could have three children. She has two children and a number of wonderful books. It’s not just the nine months in the womb; it’s the ongoing work and responsibility-- which most women accept and want. But they should be able to parent in their own time and on their own terms.

I’m amazed at how much this onslaught on women’s rights seems to strangle me, and oddly, silence me. In the short term, I can’t figure out what to say in a note to my mother, much less how to finish the poem I've been playing with; in the long haul, I feel this burden in my heart has kept me too sad for years. I can howl, I can rant, but the quiet creative speaking voice that has balance, depth, and vision and the occasional serendipitous rhythm, alliteration, and shine is stilled under the clutching at my gut that doubles me over and makes me cry.

Despair, self-loathing, stress, also prevent that flow of juice that rises to the top in happiness and lets us play in the world.

So, too, is creativity stifled by poverty, hunger, homelessness, and madness: all likely to be increased by the exclusionary politics supported by the current unsilent right. Without Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, health care and “social justice,” without these things, we may see that art, joy, hope will be – again – aristocratic privileges.

Well, perhaps creativity will out in small and sneaky ways: We’ll add to the repertoire of blues, I’ll rant more poetically, and somewhere, someone who might’ve astonished multitudes will thrill his children with his compositions for washtubs and spoons.

And so, I’m drawn right now to the manic joy of HOBBY LOBBY shopping – all those rows of offbeat Christmas tree decorations in amongst much, much, much conventional art. But the display of zebras in purple vests and red shoes, or toads in pink boas with corkscrew bottoms instead of legs, or giant pink platform shoes in spangled multi-colored glory gives me hope we’ll creep past the structure of lockstep. I notice a plastic peace sign with a flag background. I probably wore one myself in protest against the Vietnam War. Four ornaments up from the peace sign, past the fur-rimmed mug, and just to the right of the plastic TV dinner ornament (turkey and mac’n’cheese, miniaturized) gleams a bright Tomato Soup can with bands of glitter around its top and bottom. Shades of Andy Warhol! Warhol and the Vietnam War protesters have entered the Bible Belt mainstream. Sanitized and glamorized, but here they are.

I’m reminded of this summer’s visit to the Grassroots Art Center in Lucas, KS, where, among M.T. Liggett’s political art, Kenneth W. Starr is memorialized as a round-bellied metal fantasy "cigar detective," and where Mri-Pilar has reimaged Barbie, overturning every expectation for Barbie’s clothes, roles, and point of view. Such art reminds us viscerally that not everyone sees the world the same way. Thank God.

And imagination is at play: What if a zebra wore shoes?

What if Barbie became a new age goddess with tentacles coming out of her head? (Think squid, not Medusa.) What if Carl Paladino got pregnant? What if women had choices? What if every child was loved and nurtured and, even, intended? What if we thought less about mass producing ourselves and considered every woman and every child an individual work of art? (And, do I need to say what the government’s policies about education and health would be under those circumstances?) Out of such a world might come something better than Eden -- a knowing, an undeceived, and a clear-eyed Eve, and a hell of a lot of good art.

So, perhaps there is still hope, if Hobby Lobby can stock this slightly subversive stuff, admittedly intended for a Christmas tree, and purchased as hymns play in the background. It is still possible to decorate the backyard shrine to Kwan Yin or some other Goddess with fashion trendy zebras or spangled TV dinners. No one is preventing that yet. And with Kenneth Starr as a green-gold critter and the Barbies as everything: Dino-Barbie, Masked Barbie, Eve-Barbie, Anti-Barbie Barbie, perhaps we can slide right past the neurotic regimentation of the reactionary culture warriors, divert their attention with home decorations or wild yard art and march off into a more hopeful future while they are still mazed and dazed and spending money on glorious consumerism, little zebras in red court shoes marching in line across their mantles, buttressed by luminescent tomato soup cans at either end.

Plains State

"The beauty of the plains is like that of an icon; it does not give an inch to sentiment or romance."

". . . what seems stern and almost empty is merely open, a door into some simple and holy state."

The quotations are from Kathleen Norris's DAKOTA; I took the pictures between Cassoday, KS and Cottonwood Falls, KS.





Oh, yeah. We were off to the family reunion. It was windy, as you can tell from the bent over grasses and flowers in these pictures.



The wind and the grand view seem to peel away whatever isn't very important. It's a natural meditation, costing nothing and requiring neither yoga posture nor mantra; the wind would blow me over if I tried a warrior stance, and I 'd have to OM pretty loud to hear myself. The wind is the mantra of the plains; anything else would be lost in this space.

More from Lucas: Grassroots Art Center

I didn't know that Kenneth Starr was a green-eyed, orange-gold half-insect/half-mammal until I saw M. T. Liggett's sculpture at the Grassroots Art Center in Lucas, Kansas. And when I did, first I laughed, and then I thought, "Of course!" Here I had been dully classifying him in the more generic categories of Time and Money Wasters or People Never to Invite to Dinner. He still goes into the same broad classifications, but now "Kenneth W. Starr" is irrevocably and comically linked to this shiny fantasy.


Lucas is full of playful art, by turns bizarre, grotesque, sentimental, painstaking, and just silly:

Bad puns: "American Fork Art" in the grassy space next door:





And the "Garden of Eatin" exhibited at the Deeble house:

Back inside the center, art from stuff found at Westlake Park by John Woods:




Carrie Nation on Roller Skates:

And lots of metal whimsy: John Scott's piece shows that, artistically at least, sometimes a fish can need a bicycle.

I love Jim Dickerson's flat metallic dog and the Gold Big Head on Wheels next to -- can that be asparagus? If so, I didn't notice it there, and I'm probably just making up the asparagus. But it wouldn't seem out of place.

Bob Mix's King of the Lawnmower (again, my title, not the artist's):



Inez Marshall's carved limestone pieces:

The motorcycle wheel is meticulously detailed:

Herman Divers's soda can tab creations:

The hat looks wearable.

Mri-Pilar's re-interpretations of the Barbie:

The "Rebarbs," as they are called, are so plentiful that they have taken over most of the Deeble house. There's so much to take in we didn't even make it to Eric Abraham's Flying Pig Studio and Gallery or The Worlds Largest Things Travelling Roadside Attraction and Museum ("the world's largest collection of the world's smallest versions of the world's largest things").

We were already exhilarated enough. Coming back to the Grassroots Art Center from the Deeble house, my father was moved to wrap a soda can around his foot and click at every step. He learned how to do that eighty some years ago. "The whole town will be talking about you," the tour guide told him, which just goes to show that even in the midst of all the splendor of Lucas, familiarity breeds boredom.

More pictures from the exhibit in Lucas (including a somewhat better picture of Kenneth W. Starr): http://www.kansastravel.org/grassrootsart1.htm

More about grassroots artists: http://www.grassrootsart.net/menu_Art.html

More on the "Rebarbs" and the "Garden of Isis" from Mri-Pilar:

http://rebarb.blogspot.com/

http://www.kansastravel.org/isis.htm

S. P. Dinsmoor and the Garden of Eden

“ . . . when I was building [the Garden of Eden] they accused me of being bughouse on religion. I am bughouse good and proper, but not on religion, perpetual motion, or any other fool thing that I cannot find out one thing about.” From Pictorial History of The Cabin Home in Garden of Eden by S. P. Dinsmoor

The Garden of Eden in Lucas, Kansas is full of quirky goodness. I first toured it more than thirty-five years ago, and have remembered and talked about it since, so it seemed like a good idea for me, my son,and my parents to take a road trip. I even took my camera – which hasn’t been used in several years. (We are not a memorializing family – a few photos, no scrapbooking, so if the collecting of 30 odd years worth of plastic butter tubs doesn’t count, we are not very outwardly nostalgic.) So the photos are just so-so, but the trip was a treat.

This is Lucas, a small Kansas town, 40 miles west of Salina, and another 15 miles north and west around Lake Wilson.





Samuel P. Dinsmoor, a civil war veteran, a former teacher and farmer, built an eleven room cabin there, after he retired. The logs are made of limestone.



No two windows or doors are the same size, and a lot of the interior woodwork is Dinsmoor’s:





After he finished the house, he created a sculpture garden around it.




Here’s Eden, Eve with an apple and the serpent leaning over her, Adam stepping on the snake he’s holding. The little head over the N in the sign is the devil. Some of the trees you see are made of concrete; some are live.



On the platform below, Abel dies, while his wife grieves and an angel – with an eye of God above her -- watches and points. At the corner, Cain’s wife, with suitcase, is escaping.




In the far right in the next picture, Cain – who you really can’t see well –sorry!—carries a hoe and a dead possum for lunch.

In the middle of the picture, under the American flag with a turkey – Dinsmoor agreed with Franklin that the turkey should be the national bird --a “trust” has its tentacles into everything. Think Monopoly or corporate conglomerate. According to Dinsmoor, “the flag protects capital today better than it does humanity.” At any rate, one of its claws reaches into a soldier’s backpack, another grabs a kid, another holds bonds and another a sack of interest. One tentacle wraps around a woman who is chasing a soldier. The soldier is aiming at an Indian—not in the picture -- in the next tree. The Indian is shooting at a dog who is after a fox, who is stalking a bird eating a worm eating a leaf. As for his depiction of the world, Dinsmoor says “If it is not right I am to blame, but if the Garden of Eden is not right Moses is to blame. He wrote it up and I built it.”



Dinsmoor gives us his ideal version too -- on the far side of the garden gate we have Liberty spearing the trusts while a man and woman with the ballot are sawing off the limbs.



On the back of the lot – opposite Adam and Eve, Labor is crucified, surrounded by accusers: a doctor, a lawyer, a preacher, and a banker.



Several of the accusers remain unfinished. And, as Dinsmoor died in 1932, he won’t be finishing them anytime soon, although he still contributes to the garden. The price of admission gets you entrance into his mausoleum, where he is mouldering in a concrete casket. No pictures are allowed inside, but here is the outside, a step pyramid, just beyond the pyramid of flowerbeds.




Here’s a closer view of the entrance to the mausoleum—with the concrete flag in front. Dinsmoor attached a number of concrete flags to his sculptures and argued that they wear better than cloth and the government might follow suit. These flags are atop ball bearings, so they can move in the wind (supposedly), but the flag in this picture was removed from the top of the mausoleum, because it might have been hazardous, had it fallen. It’s adorned with the turkey, like other flags in the garden.



For those who’d like to see some better pictures than mine, here’s one website, although there are others too:

http://www.garden-of-eden-lucas-kansas.com

As if Dinsmoor were contagious, Florence Deeble, a neighbor in Lucas, felt impelled to follow his lead by creating a concrete miniature Mt. Rushmore (with other scenes) in her backyard.



I understand her impulse. Visiting the Garden of Eden, I want to go build my own mud sculptures in my backyard, or become an expert on fungi, or dive for treasures in the South Pacific, or in some other way express myself and tap into that great flow of creativity that keeps us buoyant here on earth. Amy says go for the sculptures. She wants to build monuments in her backyard too. I have no chosen subject yet, as mine will look like a blob whatever I intend, but since Amy can really sculpt, she'll have to think about it.

Dinsmoor wanted to bury his first wife in the mausoleum in his yard, but when the city fathers refused him and made him place her in the cemetery, he dug her up in the middle of the night, brought her home, encased her in concrete in the mausoleum and there she is forever after. Or so the story goes. Legends are made of less than this.

At 81, Dinsmoor married his second wife. She was 20 and together they had two children. His son is the youngest surviving child of a Civil War Veteran.

The devil is in the details, and in this place, that's a literal statement too. While God is everywhere represented by All-Seeing Eyes and pointing hands, Dinsmoor bemoans that "these are the only things that I know of that we have to represent Deity. The heathen beat us on ideals. They have got more of a variety and better lookers." But he has no such trouble with the Devil. Dinsmoor got electricity to his property early and lit up his sculptures, so people on the passing trains could view his property at night. While there are bulbs in various spots in the garden -- a snake's mouth, I think, for one -- the devil is lit from within. And I imagine some one-time passenger in the 1920's, maybe a flapper, maybe a farmer, traveling by and being astonished at the phantasm arising out the window, a light on a hill, a beacon on the prairie.

I Had A Dream

I want to break a big fat water balloon over Glenn Beck’s head, not just in anger or frustration, but to wash away all the loopiness, all the anxiety. I want to freshen him up before his big TV event, so he’ll be bright and clean to sell gold to the minions.

I want the Goddess to break through. Beck wants to channel the Spirit, so I say Yea! May you hear and not just react away from what Sophia, Wisdom, is telling you. May She break through!

Whatever She says, may it break like dawn over the assembled hordes, converting two self-centered billionaires to the ideal of social justice – the REAL kind, not the fabrication of repressive regimes – and calm the fears of the rest of the crowd, breaking their stereotypes and their conventional wisdoms, so they smile and say to one another (perhaps repeating Beck, perhaps not), “If our great-great grandchildren are biracial, Spanish-speaking Democratic Muslims, it will be all right. They will carry our DNA, and our hope for greatness, and fond memories of our children and grandchildren if we only care enough to be hospitable to the stranger as if he were Christ come again.”

And so, as in a great story retold by Kathleen Norris, may we say with the monk, weary of the visitors to the monastery, and seeing yet another traveler approaching, “ Oh Jesus Christ, is it you again?”

And what comes out from Glenn Beck may not be the words, but just a gladness that cannot be misunderstood – at least not for another decade – and then only playfully by future generations who’ll say “That poor fool, if God can come and claim him, even him, if She can embrace him in love, we are all children of God . . . Let us open our hearts and feast.”

And I see Pam’s blog as the new Book of Revelation as I chronicle the working of the Spirit, breaking like an infinite balloon of fresh and compelling joy over the earth.

This is the next lesson: Beyond love, joy.

A little rant and a little Kathleen Norris

Looking to verify the subtitle of Kathleen Norris’s Dakota a couple of weeks ago, I ran into a quotation from that book – picked up several years ago in O magazine and attached to various other Quotation websites as well:

“Disconnecting from change does not recapture the past. It loses the future.”

While Norris is talking about how Dakota residents responded to the farm crisis of the 80’s, what she observes – blaming the victims, conspiracy theories, willful intellectual blindness, increasing xenophobia as former neighbors and friends become dangerous “outsiders,” and a desire to retreat to some idyllic past –seems particularly apt in the current political climate.

Some of us want to “take the country back,” which looks like the way to “disconnect from change.”

Whenever I hear anyone wanting to take the country back, I always want to ask “from whom?” and “for whom”? For the sake of some heretofore invisible majority that didn’t vote in the last election? From me and people like me? (If so, I’m not giving up that easily!)

The recent concern about immigration looks like an attempt to “take the country back.” Immigration is a real issue, but it suddenly exercises people who are not affected by it, are nowhere near our borders, and know not one single illegal immigrant. The dangerous outsiders: illegal aliens, Muslims wanting a community center several blocks from ground zero, terrorist babies, Kenyans pretending to be Hawaiians, or other more fantastical political conspirators, are everywhere. Fortunately, the UFOs seem to be off visiting some other planet, but there’s plenty of paranoia to go around.

Sometimes “taking the country back” seems to mean retreating into the past. (Hence the nifty quotation from Norris.) How far back do we go? 20 years? 50 years? 250 years? It’s as if Eden is only around the corner, either just back in the recapturable past, or in an alternate historical universe where changing the single element will turn this hell into Heaven . . . if we could deport all the aliens . . . repeal every recent piece of legislation . . . or reincarnate Ronald Reagan, as long as he does not come back as an “anchor baby.”

Since even most of the obtuse seem to have a prickly awareness that it’s not good form to want to enslave another race of people, however nice it might be for some of us, we don’t publicly fantasize too much about the antebellum South, but the American Revolution and the founding fathers seem to be resurgent in our mythologizing. With much flag waving, the Constitution is invoked – with very little analysis – and the founding fathers are dragged by their dead hair into the 21st century and show up as simple-minded shills for some politician’s argument or TV ad.

Such easy patriotism turns America into a cardboard parody of itself, as if we can only love the Barbie version, not the difficult, imperfect, complex, infinitely more interesting and valuable reality.

However wonderful the creation of America, it was not Eden that was created here. However brilliant, the founding fathers need not be our holy icons – or our advertising icons either. They were not saints. They were not perfect. They owned slaves. They completely missed the boat on women’s suffrage, and they didn’t know how to tweet.

So I am not rallying around with teabags hanging from my hat.

And today when I find the current political discourse too shrill, acrimonious, and divisive, all creative thought and tolerance squashed, all political choices reduced to fight or flight, I keep re-reading Dakota, finding some peace with Kathleen Norris among the Benedictines on the prairie. I recommend it for anyone wanting a poet’s take on the spiritual life, or a reprieve from the national loopiness that seems to have seized us.

Vegetation and Metaphor

The volunteer cantaloupes growing in the compost heap have ripened and fallen off the vine. I rescued them in time, but the pumpkins – also a compost bin surprise – have been attacked by something invasive that turns them to mush before they are fully orange. Ugh. I am not crazy about bugs, worms, funguses, and the general process of decomposition, although it makes some good dirt.

The pears are ripe – more or less. We have two pear trees, and I have been harvesting the one with the earlier crop. I can only get to the lowest seven feet or so of the tree and there’s lots more fruit above me. There’s plenty of windfall on the ground too, in various stages of decay. Pears collapse into slime underfoot, and two more drop as I move around the tree. And I notice the smell. Our dog, gone two years now, used to roll in the stuff and return to the house, fur sticky and matted, on an aromatic wave of rotten fruit.

The South, I think, is hot and smelly. This is my Northern prejudice, of course. I still have a bit after twentysome years in the South. When we first moved here, after five years in North Dakota, I noticed the dead armadillos, the carports, the big hair, and a frequent odor which I assumed was the Decay of the South. It made sense to me – plants grew in such profusion and the arc of their growth seemed so accelerated. One moment it was spring and almost instantly after, it seemed, we had overheated summer, early harvest, and the swift movement from ripe to rotten. I later discovered it was a local paper mill I was smelling. Arkansas, after all, is not really the Deep South.

Still, a lush, semi-tropical area – smells included – is the perfect garden for the literature of southern decadence: earthy, sultry, florid, and overripe. I imagine Faulkner, drunk on magnolia and swamp water, springing indigenous from the Mississippi ground. A heavy vapor by the crape myrtles coalesces into Tennessee Williams, complaining about the heat. Arkansas produces something a little different: not so much decaying aristocracy, a lot more redneck eccentricity.

Geography defines us. Having grown up a Midwesterner, I still feel a bit of an alien here, although I like living where I am. We have roots and fruits here – literally (apple, pear, pecan, cherry, blackberry) and metaphorically. Our son is Southern. This is his landscape.

It is not exactly mine. Kathleen Norris writes about the high plains of South Dakota as her spiritual landscape. I understand that. It resonates for me. It’s no wonder I’m more abstract and monochromatic. My spiritual homeland is still Kansas, and even though I grew up in a city, it’s my grandparents’ farm that feels like my real center of geographical gravity. This may work better in metaphor than in reality, I tell myself. I don’t live there; my grandparents are both dead now, and the land has been sold to strangers.

But that is my aboriginal landscape: the native tallgrass prairie of the Flint Hills. Because the soil is rocky, there’s more ranching than farming. I can remember standing behind my grandparents’ barn where, like many places in the Flint Hills, the view goes on for miles, with only the occasional line of scrubby trees indicating where the water washes into rills after rain. There is nothing but moving grass and moving air. I am held up and belled out by prairie wind. At twelve, behind that very barn, looking out on prairie, I had a vision of eternity. I could not hold it; it seemed something like a moving mathematical architecture, as if a galaxy might be a cathedral, and akin to perfect perpetual motion. But obviously I can’t reconstruct it. It was as if I’d understood, in a flash, quantum physics, but had no vocabulary to keep that understanding.

So there’s my spiritual anchor, for what it’s worth. I’m a girl of the arid plains, but when I come in from my hot Arkansas backyard, sweating, with bags full of pears, I smell like the South.

Women Don't Buy Corvettes

Actually, some of them do. But it’s not the usual thing for women in middle age – or I don’t hang out with the right women. Those women and I seem to be infected with the same need for motion that sends men out for sports cars. We contemplate running away from home; we consider selling our houses, we may have left spouses, or seen one zoom off in that red Corvette to some trophy wife or alternate lifestyle. We feel impelled to give away all our treasures, or start a new collection. We drop a group of friends and look for new ones. But we don’t seem to buy Corvettes.

My friend Amy and I fantasize about owning a loft in NYC, just to be there three months a year. Now that would be a change from SUV suburbia in the Bible Belt. “Selling New York” on HGTV has much to answer for: When the realtor shows the view – all skyscraper and sky – from some downtown condo window (costing only millions more than will ever be in my bank account) – I suddenly feel I need that place, that life, that movement, that noise, that trendy urban scene. I would look as out of place as a hippo in a birdbath, but this reality matters nothing to my impulse. The inner me – the one who is younger, thinner, richer, and still has every option open – now wants that condo, despite years of choosing not to take the train into Chicago when visiting the Illinois in-laws only an hour downstate. Even Amy, who paints as well as writes, and who used to dream of a retreat in Taos or Santa Fe, has this new need to change something –even if it’s just to change one fantasy location for another.

I recently discovered that someone I met in an online writing group did move to NY. Her name popped up in facebook as someone I might want to befriend, and on her page is her location: NY, NY. I don’t think she looks at facebook much; I haven’t heard anything back, but I know she probably left behind her adult children and new grandbaby (well, new when I knew her five years ago) in South Carolina or Kentucky, or wherever she used to be, someplace Southern, someplace not all that far from Arkansas – especially culturally. A little more googling and digging and I ran into an online interview she did with Gregory Maguire, and I saw that she is a member of a NYC writing group. She acted on that urge to move and is living her fantasy life, or so I gather. I don’t know if it has met her every expectation, but I am impressed.

I think about all this while picking the penultimate batch of blackberries in the rain in my backyard. Maybe the restlessness comes from knowing our established routines so well; we’ve been plotting our paths for years. Because we each move along a given trajectory for so long, drastic change, change that we fantasize about, would require something extraordinary in escape velocity. Catastrophes or miracles might move us, though sometimes the depth of the rut is scary enough to catapult someone out. Most of us don’t figure that the Corvette alone would do anything much, aware of the web of home and relationship that roots us here. And some of us buy the minivan instead of the Corvette (to haul the grandkids around), or remodel the house instead of buying the bachelor pad out of town (to accommodate an older parent’s moving in), having grown attuned to the needs of the family’s generations.

This is not New York, although it has its own joys. The blackberries are almost done for the season, but the pears – a larger than normal crop – have yet to ripen. My movement towards the new is liable to be slower, less pronounced, a subtle shift of microdegrees in my course rather than the about face or the right turn. Next year I’m putting in blueberries, and when my husband and I get my car paid off, maybe I’ll get a hybrid.

Little Disappointments

I enjoy crossword puzzles, although I haven't been doing them lately, but I couldn't resist the one in the paper labeled "Drill, Baby, Drill." I thought it might be a political satire in crossword form, and I was encouraged by the first answer I wrote in: "bias." I had visions of Sarah Palin and BP showing up between the crosshatches. I worked away, hoping for the punch line, only to discover that the puzzle's theme was actually dentists and puns dentistical: "brushing bride" and "moment of tooth."

Speaking of the Palin crowd, I heard the reporting on Sharron Angle's response to an interviewer who asked her whether abortion was ever okay. Her reply was no. The interviewer then asked about cases of incest and rape, and Angle's response was one of those God Trump Cards that shuts down any further discussion. She said: You know, I'm a Christian, and I believe that God has a plan and a purpose for each one of our lives and that he can intercede in all kinds of situations and we need to have a little faith in many things.

Angle has taken a lot of flack about this, perhaps rightly so, with most folks jumping to the conclusion that Angle believes rape and incest are God's plan. I don't think she meant to go there, although her politics in action might boil down to the same thing as if she did, but I was reminded how placidly we can see a difficult destiny for someone else as God's plan. And how infuriating it is, if you're the one suffering, to be fobbed off that way. It is not easy to see our misfortunes as blessings -- or to be told to do so by someone more or less well-meaning. I'm not arguing that we don't learn through difficult situations, but sometimes suffering is just suffering, and the "God will take care of it" answer is just not answer enough.

Even if it were the only answer, most of us would need some sympathetic validation of the unfairness of our situation, some tea and cookies, or an understanding friend.

So, take Jonah. When God tells him to go to Nineveh, he goes the other direction. As a child in Vacation Bible School, I believed that Jonah brought his own fate on himself -- being swallowed by a whale and having to do what God told him to do after all. Why wasn't Jonah being good and doing what he was told? (I was an obedient child.)

Now, I have a lot more sympathy for Jonah. I may yet die in my own big fish. Certainly, I hope not to have to go to the modern equivalent of Nineveh or somewhere worse. And if Sharron Angle tells me that is my fate, she better look like she's at least sorry about it.

Snippets overheard while I waited to get my hair cut:



From the woman who looked to be around 90 and kept her eyes mostly closed: "I'm not asleep. I'm talking in my sleep."



Two hairdressers:

"I have got to take these teeth out."

"Will you have to go home?"

"Nah. It's just the bottom ones."



Woman being combed out:

"I got me a lawyer on my second divorce." From what I could tell, she was regretting losing the freezer, refrigerator, and piano in the first divorce.