Cheap Grace

“Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves.”

--- Dietrich Bonhoeffer ---

After I asked my congressman to defend, not defund, Planned Parenthood, I got a letter explaining that he couldn’t support Planned Parenthood because he believed in the “sanctity of life.”

I want to tell him that I wish he’d celebrate his reverence for life by supporting an organization that provides cancer screenings and basic health services for the poor of both sexes, even if it provides abortion services, but I already told him that.

The fight over Planned Parenthood pits the health and life expectancy of the poor against the “rights” of embryos. No surprise, Republicans will gladly sacrifice real people for potential ones.

However sincere and thoughtful any individual’s opposition to abortion may be, as a strategy and policy of the Republican Party, the anti-abortion stance is hypocritical, cynical, and sloppy.

But it gets the base riled UP, y’know?

I wonder how anyone can feel comfortable forcing a woman to become a mother whether she will or not. I’m guessing sometimes it’s just ignorance.

Just so, I gave my best parenting advice to long-suffering friends with children before I had any of my own. Now I bless anyone in charge of the crying baby, the hyper toddler running everywhere and touching everything, or the hysterical three-year-old in the checkout line. And I keep my mouth shut. Practical reality so confounds theory.

There’s the Republican Party’s failure of empathy too.

It’s hard walking in another’s shoes, and sometimes truly impossible. Short of being a woman in need of an abortion, I’d suggest every Republican in Congress spend a few days at a daycare – as the only adult for twelve three-year-olds. Then, he should think about doing this 24/7 on too little money. (Conservative political pundits need to spend at least two weeks there.)

And then there’s the Republican denial of reality.

It’s not only voodoo economics. Republicans seem to believe in a romantic adolescent mythology about America and Americans – every man his own Prometheus, and every woman . . . (well, I guess the women will need to be prom queens, something suitably appealing to all those Promethei, and capable of hosting Uber-Babies.)

Every Republican effort seems geared to protect zygotes and blastocysts that might someday be exceptional humans: newborns who can pull themselves up by their bootstraps before they can walk, teeny tots who are only made stronger by the obstacles they’ve overcome – the poverty, hunger, homelessness, the insecurity, the lack of nurturance or health care –as if there were any such babies or any such tots—in this Ayn Randian Republican world where 98% of us apparently are worthless, feckless, shiftless, and no-count -- as if circumstances don’t affect us all, and we weren’t, every one of us, shaped and shaping, interdependent and co-responsible.

So perhaps it’s just that Republicans really don’t like most of us: too old, too needy, too poor, too contrary, too difficult; and it’s only unformed potential life that they can really love.

But then, as soon as potential becomes real, the babies become just more poopy-diapered mewling brats, spotty rebellious adolescents, feminists and Welfare Queens, or other undesirables, and the body politic need not make an effort.

Speaker Boehner cries easily, which seems right for this slushily sentimental defense of the “sanctity of life.” This is cheap grace. Defending anti-abortion policies is free; it costs nothing; it allows Republicans to defund any program associated, however slightly, with choice. Republicans have no skin in the game, just a misty-eyed devotion to rich people, big corporations, and cute, cuddly, future flag-wavers.

This is the claim of sanctity without the dirt work of ethical behavior.

Let’s spend some of our concern on the rest of us here, even the pimply-faced multi-pierced teenager, the opinionated and delusional elderly, the difficult, the disabled, and the despairing.

Let’s bleed off that sanctimonious sentimentality, so that we might have an earnest, good faith discussion about how to feed the million children in America who go to bed hungry, how to house the nearly two million homeless, how to create jobs for fourteen million Americans looking for work.

Not just tea and biscuits

It’s as if two Koch underlings and Karl Rove were to smash in your door, break your china, threaten your old parents, steal your children’s books, lock the kids in the bathroom, and kick your dog on the way out. And, if they brought Newt Gingrich with them, he’d’ve tried to chat up your college-age niece.

In your indignation, explaining to your neighbors, you’d discover they’d bought the official version: that your toothless 13 year-old Sheltie had threatened to savage your interloper “guests” who’d come to check up on your anti-American activities.

And, however much you protest, the Koch brothers have been running TV ads in the area and your whole community believes you responsible for the radicalization of Muslim youth. Even your best friends, who know you’ve been Episcopalian all your life, hate to get involved; the Kochs have promised to buy their mineral rights for a pretty penny.

We live in the land of Bad Faith – and it smells as bad as three day dead opossum. I know about the opossum, because my dog and I walk by it every day.

Bad Faith makes possible the current uncivil discourse, and enables the right-wing war on reason, women, scholars, children, old people, workers, and the lower 98% of the economic spectrum.

Bad Faith is as pervasive as McDonalds and even worse as a diet.

We need something like the graphic on the backs of food packages to moderate our intake of the stuff and improve the health of the nation. (Michelle Obama has her crusade and, for a moment, I have mine.)

Serving size would be in minutes; calories would be BFUs (Bad Faith Units) and listed below in bold face would be all the unhealthy ingredients: Lying, Cheating, Bullying, Fearmongering, and perhaps some of the –usually—lesser incivilities: weaseling, sniveling, no-apology apology, and the subcategories of Bullying: ambush interviewing, attempts to intimidate, refusal to listen, constant interruption, name-calling, shouting, misinterpretation, misdirection, and so on.

If there were mistakenly anything in the BFU-ridden portion being offered, anything that fostered civil discourse or consensus building, anything like honesty, integrity, flexibility, sense, any of that life-sustaining stuff, the proteins and complex carbohydrates that might build a healthier body politic, or anything like a vitamin or antioxidant, then that too could have its place.

But mostly I’m concerned about those BFUs.

I remember all those Sci-Fi novels that depended on going back in time and making one historical change, creating alternate realities, all those earths a minute or a second or a fraction of a second apart, circling the same sun, every one different in greater or lesser degree. In some, Columbus is eaten by a shark before he leaves European waters, in some the American Revolution fails, or the South successfully secedes, or Gore wins – oh! Didn’t that happen here? You get the picture. Lately it feels like all of those different realities sent ambassadors here and they’ve collectively joined the Tea Party (except for the Gore as President ones, of course).

So suddenly we all share this one particular world, one reality, and it’s important to use the facts here, the real facts, the observable facts, the facts of reputable unbiased sources, rather than factoids, spin, innuendo, psychological defense mechanisms (projection, denial), or Big Fat Lies. BFLs are just full of BFUs.

You’ll see I’m picking on the right wing here. It seems warranted. Despite Jon Stewart’s call for civility on both sides – and I want that too – the assumption that both left and right are equally to blame for the current unhealthy mass consumption of BFUs needs challenging. To conflate the two sides as if everyone is equally guilty is to tar every political argument, every position, and every bias—whether arbitrary or well-reasoned – with the same brush. This universal blaming flattens the whole landscape, assigning us all the most cynical intentions and the vilest behaviors. It treats discernment like prejudice.

On the internet, it is true, there’s oodles of vitriol on either side – or every side for that matter, every minute, second, fraction of a second along the arc of differing opinion, but I want to discuss what shows up on the big screens, not in a little blog (like mine) with fewer than a dozen followers.

I want to talk about purveying tons and tons of bad faith discourse into the marketplace. So I am talking about the spin on the right, as right now it’s the McDonalds of BFUs.

And the right has the BIG LIE on their side: According to a recent Public Policy Polling survey, 51% of Republicans voting in primaries think their President is not a citizen; 40% of an Iowan Focus Group of Republicans told Frank Luntz that the President is Muslim. There is nothing on the loopiest part of the left like this, nothing of this magnitude.

The Big Lie is supported and abetted by unwilling adherents to the truth, so John Boehner is willing to take the President’s and the State of Hawaii’s word that the President is a citizen, but is unwilling to defend the President against any birther: “it's not my job to tell the American people what to think.”

He says this with a straight face, as if delusion and fact are all the same, as if he has no obligation as an elected official to try to clear the air and steer us toward some greater good, and as if he doesn’t try to influence public opinion daily. (Easy cheesy BFU, anyone?)

Bill O’Reilly tries to weasel out of any responsibility, his own or corporate, for fostering the delusion, by saying no sane person would believe it, and why are we devoting so much time to it, as if it hadn’t been nourished and cherished by Fox viewers and pundits alike.

Other Fox lies help maintain the big one, so Huckabee lies about President Obama growing up in Kenya and mistrusting the British as a result of the Mau Mau Revolution. When found out, Huckabee offers a sliver of weaseling, nothing old-fashioned like a protein apology. Instead it’s a “slip of the tongue,” something more like an oops at the table, nothing you can get your teeth into, nothing approaching the sincere and thorough retraction such an occasion demands.

Even after the almost-not-an-apology apology, Huckabee says Obama is not a typical American, as if it doesn’t matter about his actual birth here, because Huckabee can support the underlying notion cherished by the right that Obama is not like us, not really President, not really American. In short, the Big Lie.

Besides lying, we have cheating; James O’Keefe and Andrew Breitbart are here on the American menu with Mega BFUs. All it takes is hours and hours of filming, funky costumes from the Goodwill, misrepresentation, a total disregard for a larger context, and extremely selective editing to create what is essentially another BIG LIE – That Acorn, Shirley Sherrod, and NPR are un-American and deserve the axe.

This is reality TV that has no reality; this is anti-journalism, when a single remark out of context slanders every integrity. Long-term good is undermined; people of character and projects of merit fall; and all that Astroturf outrage is bad for our hearts – misled viewers' and victims' alike.

Then we have spin, innuendo, twist, what have you. We’re used to spin. As long as we know it’s a sales spiel, we generally can ignore the craziness of advertising, where dirt, romantically impelled, chases the latest Swiffer product, and angels fall out of the sky tossing their halos away because of the newest men’s cologne.

But sometimes it doesn’t look like straightforward advertising. There’s the spin at Fox News, starting with its being “fair and balanced,” although Rupert Murdock gave $1 million to The Republican Governors Association, and we see no Democratic hopefuls, but plenty of Republican legislative and Presidential hopefuls hanging out as paid employees, current and past.

And we have the Koch brothers, founders of Americans for Prosperity, funders of the Tea Party, whose advertising looks as if it comes from and is about middle class folks, even while policies it promotes – as we can see in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio, for instance—not only strip workers of their rights and reduce their pay and benefits while shifting state monies to tax incentives for businesses, but also push laws that will make it easier for corporate cronies to buy state assets without competitive bidding or take over municipalities declared to be in fiscal trouble by a Republican governor.

As it is, “Americans For Prosperity” needs a better name; “Increased Prosperity for Billionaires” would do, and would reduce the BFU count, but would probably not sell as well.

Spin seems to be the High Fructose Corn Syrup in those BFUs – so persistent that our local paper ran an AP article entitled “Dems Hope to Taint Romney with Health Law Praise.” Of course the article starts with a comment about President Obama being quick to praise Romney, but this is a centrist President who has long aspired to being bipartisan and unifying the country. As he’s recently mentioned, he’s also open to states creating their own health care law if it provides similar care to the federal law. So why should we assume that he isn’t 1) sincere and 2) trying to demonstrate his centrism?

We’re persuaded not to trust him, because the rest of the article shows pundits weighing in on this praise as a strategy, Huckabee’s response, Romney’s attempt to distance himself. It’s as if the very air is so greasy with the BFUs we’ve been taking in that it’s impossible to believe, sometimes, in a healthy raw vegetable or a simple piece of fruit.

In the BFU world, the President can never be sincere; the pundits will always be cynical; Fox will continue to pounce, and Republican hopefuls – afraid to stand up to the loonies in their base – will continue to move as far away as they can from anything Obama.

Where’s the proof that the President himself is attempting to “taint” Romney? I hope he has the country’s and the people’s good at heart.

Don’t we all hope this? Or at least those of us who’re not still pouting and sulking with Limbaugh and wishing this President fails, or those who hover on the delusional with Glenn Beck, who is pretty sure Obama is a socialist/racist/communist/Satan worshiper.

The BFUs pile up. Name-calling can be bad for you. (It depends on the name: “Satan Worshipper” tends to raise blood pressure and cause heart palpitations. “Not an American” also has a lot of BFUs. “Asshole,” on the other hand, does not make you ineligible from office, and, as used back and forth between warring political points of view, is almost friendly in comparison.)

Don’t almost all of us want government that works? Good government takes an informed citizenry, honest give and take among various parties, actual civil discourse. So when Bill O’Reilly, interviewing the President, serves up every obstacle to healthy conversation, we have a big plate of BFUs, heart clogging and mind clouding.

Not only did he interrupt the President 42 times, not allowing him to make a point, O’Reilly added uglification—like those extra bacon bits on that loaded potato. “People hate you,” he tells the President. I wouldn’t let a second-grader say anything that mean-spirited.

It’s not that the President was discomposed by this, and it’s not like O’Reilly doesn’t have his own detractors, including some birthers he’s offended who think he’s a leftist shill, it’s just O’Reilly’s absolute refusal to have a legitimate conversation is unhealthy for all of us.

If we can’t have actual give and take, if we can’t have honest interaction, we will never get to the real work of the country and we may as well eat that whole box of doughnuts in despair.

Or better, we need to know what we’re taking in – and do our best to go around it, and maybe warn others of the BFU count. (I need a reliable measurement for the relative BFU value of all these unhealthy practices. Then I could put it on a super-nifty chart. I envy Rachel Maddow, who loves real facts, and has measurable stuff to put in her charts.)

Meanwhile, if you have a big old slab of O’Reilly, followed by some flaming Limbaugh, you gotta know that no Pepto-Tums-Alka-Seltzer cocktail is ever going to fix it.

And if you’re drinking in all that Koch product, and following along as the corporations tell you what to do, you won’t notice until it’s too late that your pockets have been picked, your benefits stolen, and you’re not only sick, but too poor to get medical attention.

Woman's Tongue

I spend more time than I want to in waiting rooms. And while I’m there, when I find myself without the book I meant to bring, I peruse a couple of Arkansas magazines, generally well written and well intended, full of the sweets of the South: pictures of local Homecoming Dances, cheerleaders, charity events, makeovers, home interiors, gardens; articles on couples and families, profiles of a local celebrity (always including a discussion of church activities and family life); inspirational essays; instructions for Your Creative Project – decoupaging the cover of Your Bible Study Notebook or stenciling nursery rhymes on the walls of your baby’s nursery.

Sometimes I see a photo of one or the other of my more civic-minded friends; sometimes I like looking at an interior I’ll never be able to afford.

One magazine in particular has “Women” in the title, and apparently has the intent of appealing to the whole gender, but I think of this magazine as Southern Affluent Conservative Certain-kind-of-Christian Mothers and Wives. So, recently, reading the marriage counseling, and being told, based on St. Paul, that women primarily want to be loved, and men primarily want to be respected, my heart sank.

Here I am again – outcast and reprobate. I must not be a real woman; I just don’t fit that ruffled pink suit with 4 inch black heels idea of the feminine. It’s not my color, and it’s not my style. More than that, I like to believe I’m a little more complicated than the marriage counselor thinks, and that I actually do require a lot of other things in my life including a full measure of respect, intelligent conversation, and a sporting chance at the TV remote.

Oh yeah, I’m also not so conformable anymore.

On International Women’s Day (Happy Belated March 8th), as I went through the cash register line at Krogers, the cashier and I talked a little about coupons and such – nothing mean-spirited, nothing personal, nothing offensive in the least to anyone was discussed, but apparently, the cashier felt she’d said too much. “Oh,” she said “I just need to bridle my tongue.” I’ve heard any number of Southern women say this to me. And, none of them in circumstances that I thought required silence. I asked my husband whether men ever tell each other such a thing. If so, they’ve never said so to him. I guess this is something taught from the Southern pulpit that discourages women’s voice, something along the lines of “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything,” but with that scary church tang that promises judgment, hell, and other retributions.

I just feel squashed by that women’s magazine – however well-intended it is. I’m hankering for something more: some place where women can give voice to their depths and create larger spaces for themselves, maybe interspersed with articles about 17th century Chinese ceramics, the Baha’i in Arkansas, the life cycle of the Moss Mantid, or some thoughtful observation that moves us beyond the conventional. And where, sometimes, we risk saying something “not nice” and refuse to bridle our tongues. It’s like we’ve got a brand new HD flat screen that only shows black and white movies. Bring on the color! Let’s try the 3-D glasses!

I used to think we had a space already cleared and open for all those new voices, but we seem to have created a big political stage so we can hear the leading female performances of . . . wait for it . . . Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann, who fritter away the power of women in incoherence and inadequacy. Too many other women must be bridling their tongues.

So, Happy Women’s History Month!

Here are a few other voices:

Gloria Steinem recently to Bill Maher:“For Republicans, life begins at conception and ends at birth.”

English Proverb: A woman's strength is in her tongue.

Hillary Clinton on March 8th: "Women and girls drive economies. They build peace and prosperity. Investing in women and girls means investing in global economic progress, political stability and greater prosperity for everyone the world over. So let us mark this day by finding ways to ensure women and girls access to education, healthcare, jobs, and credit, and to protect their right to live free from violence."


Ann Jones in Why Peace is the Business of Men (but shouldn’t be) about the absence of women in peace negotiations although many folk give lip service to the value women might have in them.
http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/01/women-peacemakers-un-resolution-1325


And here, off the beaten path: a documentary about women called Heart to Lead from a group called Imagine the good. http://www.imaginethegood.com/

In the first thirty seconds of Heart to Lead, Rama Vernon chants, connecting earth to sky with an OM bigger than you’ve ever heard. (The trailer for Heart to Lead doesn’t do that first scene justice; in the trailer her voice is just background sound, without the amplitude it has in the film.)

This is a woman creating sacred space through her voice. Need I mention she’s not bridling her tongue?

Reincarnation (a fiction)

At a potluck bonfire women's gathering, a nearly final draft of this floated out of my pile of discardables, ready to flame. Here's the slightly more finished version of what is a short-short story with a lot of ranting included.

What I hate most about this body – besides the fact that it’s just generally female – is the way women age. After carrying the weight of four children, too many fast-food meals, too many family crises, too much caring for everyone else, your bladder and colon and associated other parts move around inside like a snake with a fish, and you discover that no, you cannot wait until you get through the checkout line, you must go NOW—apologizing to the other shoppers, throwing over your shoulder a request to keep your place in line, only to nearly wet yourself anyway, because as soon as you get into the cubicle your body is like Pavlov’s dog and starts leaking as you are trying to rip down your elastic-waisted 3X trousers, seat yourself, and avert disaster.

Not that most folks would notice anyway. As an old fat woman, you tend to fade into the background, unless you dye your hair blue, tattoo dolphins up and down your arms, and wear a thong to Walmart. Then you are despised, secretly or not so secretly, and your picture shows up in “Funny scenes at Walmart” and is emailed to half the world.

The truth is, I look in the mirror and I don’t know myself. I’m not sure this face has ever seemed to belong to me. I expect someone else to be looking back. I seem to remember having long, strong legs, and muscles controlling my inner organs, and a sexual body and energy. But I’m not really sure it was this body I remember. Of course, I do remember being younger in this body too, and being heard and seen and, even, admired. Some days I miss it.

Not that I was always thrilled about the attention I got as a woman, and I never looked like Barbie! – But that lout on the street who didn’t have a passing acquaintance with a toothbrush always seemed to think I made myself up just for him. As if! Somedays I’d like to have a thunderbolt or two to hurl at the worst sorts – the leerer, the groper, the pompous ass who calls me “little lady,” the boss who cannot understand that a child in the hospital trumps the report he doesn’t really need. But old women appreciate all that women do and mean and know and are.

I‘ve been thinking there has to be more, that this sometimes vague and sometimes piercing dissatisfaction means I am missing something crucial. I want to change my job or sell my house. I feel like I deserve a ticker tape parade—or at least a little more respect: Haven’t I done well? I vote in every election, I pay my taxes, I park within the lines, I recycle. I raised four good kids. They are not heroes or movie goddesses or sports stars, but they’re good people. Shouldn’t I get a celebration? I should have front row seats at the Olympic Games . . . and pass out the medals in my best old lady dress from J C Penney’s.

“You know," Lydia says to me – Lydia is my best friend – “Somedays I just want to run away."

“Where would you go?” I ask her, sitting at her breakfast table, having another cup of coffee.

“Pooh, anywhere . . . Paris, for the art and the quality of light.”

“Greece,” I tell her, “I want to see the glory that was Greece,” but I’d be happy just to get to Kansas City, or Little Rock.

Lydia jumps up. “No, Hercules!” She yells at her grandson’s puppy who is doing something secretive behind the couch. “Oh, Crap!”

I chase Hercules to keep him from hiding under the bed and take him outside, thinking about all the dog poop I’ve scooped, the cat boxes I’ve cleaned, the gerbils I’ve buried, and the goldfish I have flushed. I remember the baby squirrel we bottle fed, and I see the bags and boxes of birdseed and kibble and fish food I’ve measured, scooped, sprinkled, and poured.

It’s mostly women who get the food, the filth, the general job of keeping the world clean and fed. Maybe I should’ve won a car and a Senate seat for the 10,000th mess I cleaned up. Id’ve been sworn into some august body with a doggy bag in one hand and a bottle of Pinesol in the other. What I feel is about power too. And powerlessness.

A gesture crackles through me and goes nowhere. I plop down on the couch – not too close to the smell. “Do CEOs on Wall Street ever have to change diapers?” I ask Lydia, and she just laughs.

“Only the ones who go through labor!”

I remember labor. “You know,” I say, “I think it would’ve been easier to push the twins out the top of my head, instead of having them the regular way.” – And as soon as I say this, I know it is true and revelatory and I’m telling myself what I need to know. Oh My God!

That’s when I figure it out. I was Zeus, I was Zeus, I was Zeus. Once. A long time ago, but Once.

Being an old fat woman has been such a humbling experience. Being a woman at all is a revelation. And, truly I am grateful. But I miss so much. No one brings me fatted calves. No gymnasts and dancers compete for me. Nobody prays to me, because nobody worships Zeus anymore.

So I send out a petition to the farthest stars, to whatever or whoever must have been here before Cronos, before Inanna, before Ea, before the galaxy of this world and this sky, “I promise: no more swans, no more bulls, no more showers of gold, none of that demeaning crap. No more zapping everyone like a nervous security guard with a taser.” And deep in my heart, I say to myself, “Oh please, just please, just please. . . “

But Jesus has such a stranglehold – on this part of the country at least – I don’t think I’ll ever get my power back.

Dog is Love . . . And Peace on Earth

I am a god to my dog. I don’t know who said this first and, of course, upon closer examination, the analogy breaks like a pound puppy’s heart, but it says something about how most creatures deify power greater than their own. So I’m about halfway up Mt. Olympus with most of the other dog owners – not all, alas! – and from here I can see a number of fantasies, idols, ideologies, shibboleths, and inevitabilities: Justin Bieber, Trickle Down Economics, Your Own Home, Sarah Palin, Death, and What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger, milling around above me, looking like unchallengeable absolutes to their believers. Even though I ‘m not at the heights, I find being a godlet of any sort frustrating. Communication with my devotee is so hard.

Our dog is new to us, but is not a young dog. She’s a sweet, older greyhound. She likes to run. Since our fence is in holes and hasn’t yet been repaired, she’s a four-mile a day walked dog.

I’d like to be able to share the rules with her, to tell her that she can have the freedom of the yard, if she doesn’t go through the holes, doesn’t kill other animals – or even scare the life out of them – and doesn’t dig.

She hasn’t got this yet, but she likes the rules she knows and tries to follow them. When she doesn’t and knows she hasn’t, she punishes herself more than I would punish her. And I’d like to tell her that very few of the rules are deal-breakers. So, when she doesn’t greet me at the door, and is cowering on her bed in the other room, I want to say “Look, if you’re doing scientific investigation, or you’re planning to create an artistic masterpiece out of this, that’s okay, but otherwise, just stay out of the trash.”

When she has been especially lonely or needy in our absence, she’s brought special tokens to the altar of the living room floor – a gardening glove, a running shoe, anything we’ve used or touched that is ours, not hers. Normally she leaves all our things in pristine condition, or at least as pristine as a gardening glove or a well-used shoe ordinarily is. This dog has not tended to be much of a chewer –well, a pair of underwear once, when she was compelled by something extraordinary in doggy dismay or despair. She hasn’t done that since. Either she knows better now, or they weren’t all that tasty. Forbidden fruit is more appealing on the tree, not so much after it has fallen to hand.

Mostly, I want her to get along with the cats.

Actually, peace negotiations are looking up. The dog has stopped trying to run her way out of the mesh crate we hold her in for these encounters and generally sits placidly, unless she has a brilliant notion to show the cats just how friendly she can be – which terrifies them all over again.

Their first encounters were unfortunate. In the first meeting the dog ran up to me while I was holding a cat: Much yowling and clawing from the cat; a lot of bouncing and trying to see what I’ve got from the dog. In the second encounter, the dog got into the garage, where the cats have been sulking – and living – since the dog’s arrival. The cats ran, the dog chased, the little god of the household chased the dog. The cats found protected places from which to hiss and threaten; the dog barked and bounced. I scolded; I begged; I threatened; I dragged the dog out.

I understand the cats’ issues: The dog has invaded the cat’s territory. The dog is big, and she’s a sighthound and a chaser. She has all the instincts that tell her to run after the smaller running thing and to catch. And, when I tell the cats it will all be all right, I am sure they are thinking, “Easy for you to say. It’s not YOUR life!”

But really I think (and hope) the dog wants to be friends. She has lived amicably with cats before.

The cats work from the worst of their fears. And I am sure that if they acknowledged any of us in the household as gods, they’d be praying for lightning to strike the dog dead, for her crate to be leveled to dust, for their sacred right to this property to be upheld. I think cats are agnostics anyway, tending not to look to anything superior to themselves. Certainly I have never been a deity to them; when relations are shaky between us, the cats have never believed it was their fault, but simply my insensitivity, tactlessness, or ignorance. Still, if they have faith in some Goddess of the Wild, Protector of Cats, I am guessing that their faith is being shaken.

Right now one cat is in the garage; one is hiding under the bed. The dog, bless her sweet heart, may have figured out another part of the rules – she is snoozing calmly in the living room, having been let out of her crate. She is not trying to dig the cat out from under the bed. Perhaps she simply hasn’t noticed.

At least on this little scale, this dog’s god thinks respecting other creatures and living in peace is a good place to start.

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.