The Unfinished Statement

Rain fell steadily in the Walmart parking lot as my friend and I pulled into a space in lane 4. We were grocery shopping for 25 families from our church's angel tree list, something we have done now for four years with money set aside by our church deacons.

In the first year, our dietitian friend who oversees meals for a nursing home said she believed the food would cost $1000.  We intended to spend only $700. To compare prices, we started at Sam's, chased over to Kroger's, breezed through Walmart, and finished up at Aldi's. All this took a few hours. Even then we didn't finish in a day. But we did feed 22 families for $750.

This year is our fourth year to grocery shop for angel families. No longer rookies, last week on Tuesday morning we drove directly to Walmart where we stacked 25 cans of green beans and 25 cans of corn into our carts, checked the price of sweet potatoes and spiral hams, then selected bags of Cuties.  Our next stop: Aldi's for 25 three pound bags of sweet potatoes and 25 cans of pineapple chunks.

After the second weekend in December hams go on sale with a limit of two per customer.  Last year we took liberties with the limit.  Nancy bought two hams, then Russell, then Herb, then Nancy, then Russell.  We were stretching the standard of obedience to feed the disadvantaged, while getting a steady work out between parked cars and the meat department. This year Meijer's waived the limit, bulk packaging hams for us.

Since not all our families can appreciate pork, we purchase turkey as needed.  Sensitivity to diverse religious preferences is a new discipline for us. And a good one.  Love, after all, isn't about pork or turkey.

However, all this creative shopping isn't the whole story.

As we were leaving Walmart, an exit clerk reviewed our receipt tape and counted each can and bag in our two carts.  The woman wore a scowl as if she had a headache.  Stress seemed to radiate from her.  Her every move seemed fatigued.  Counting was an effort.

Marking the receipt with an initial, the woman said, "I'm glad there are churches."

We looked at her.  The statement seemed unfinished.

"I mean churches do good things.  But nobody goes (to church)."

Later at Aldi's a cheerful check out clerk glanced at our bags.  "How many do you have?"  Our answer,   "Twenty-five," was sufficient.  Nothing unusual about 25 bags of sweet potatoes.

Think about it:  Two women checking us out; one with burdens unknown to us who hoped for goodness and charity but didn't think many people intentionally tried it; the other apparently unscarred by misfortune who happily acknowledged our ordinary shopping mission.  This is what people do: pull names off angel trees and go shopping.

These people are our community, their lives mixing with ours, our choices affecting theirs:  Our privileges sometimes achieved on the backs of others;  Our charity the necessary act in an unkind, selfish world.  Our well being is formed from intentional acts of love, even when we do not exactly know people.

Peace and joy result from receiving and giving love.  The Walmart clerk checking our cart wasn't referencing a theological issue; she was hoping for more.

Christmas 2016

Don't Write Me In

Please don't write me in!  I am totally unfit for the office of president of anything, even though I demonstrated grace and leadership as president of my college living organization before I was twenty-one, an unsought privilege deferred to me because I said "yes" when others said "no way!" 

My carpet of disqualifying baggage would have never survived oppositional scrutiny.  My private self must generally remain PRIVATE, my public self, public as in friendly, socially conscious, caring, restrained, one motto being "do no harm," another being "if you must, do it mercifully."

My early history might generate initial empathy:  poverty stricken father builds successful company in San Francisco; my mother dies in United Airlines crash when I'm thirteen; mentors guide me through respected private university.  A middle class upbringing where I'm required to do chores and earn money.  

From there it's all downhill, nothing remarkable and much of it suspicious.

I opposed the Vietnam war even though, because my husband was an Air Force officer, we bought groceries with his government paycheck and lived in free housing on a SAC base, B52's flying overhead day and night, the very same B-52s outfitted for dropping napalm on villages..., the very same villages appearing on CBS news at 6 with screaming children and women running from flames.

And that was the extent of my political activism -- grumbling at the news and voting for candidates who usually lost elections.  

My understanding of the economy is limited to how far I can stretch a monthly budget.   My trade policies revolve around what's on the supermarket shelves and how much cash is in our bank account.  I've paid off a mortgage three times, borrowing to send children to college and maintain an ordinary house in middle America.

My foreign and domestic policies might be considered naive and intentionally "global."  I hosted Cambodian refugees and exchange students.  I supported clean water projects in Guatemala, framed Habitat for Humanity houses, and helped shelter homeless people.  

I am an educator, a member of NEA, not the NRA.  I once marched in the state capitol for improved teacher salaries and rejoiced when the recommendations of the Pritchard committee were approved by the legislature, expensive measures that required equity in district funding, lower class sizes, facilities improvements, and, yes, increased teacher pay.  

As parent and grandparent, I cannot use my children to promote my causes, or ME.

As a Presbyterian, I am part of a statistical minority, representing less than 1% of the population self-identifying as a member of Presbyterian USA, a progressive Christian denomination.  My life experience is seated in faith in God and the practice of Christian service and worship, quietly without apology or question.  Loving others yields civilized cooperation.  Forgiveness and forbearance brings peace and honor.  

Flawed to the core, I am vulnerable to criticism by my dearest people. When upset, I hurl magazines and other things I won't confess.  I once backed into a tree when I lost my temper after  stomping off and forgetting to disengage the car from reverse.    Except for occasional fits, I am notably boring, more like Carol Burnett material than SNL.  

When physically stressed,  my body shuts down. Sometimes I pass out.  One moment, wobble legged, ten minutes later, joking and upright.

Oops, almost forgot, I am a woman.  It's not my fault, but there it is.  I am touchy about this fact.  Can't stand to be patronized.  I expect respect.  I have boundaries.  

My hypocrisies stem from a concerted effort to praise my Lord, usually tell the truth, live in peace, honor my financial obligations, and sleep well at night.  

And so I am speaking out.  Do NOT write me in on the ballot.  I am completely unqualified for public office.

Even the Children Behaved

On July 20, 2016, the Republican National Convention entered its second day.  Ted Cruz took the podium and told listeners they should "vote their conscience."  A friend escorted his wife Heidi from the convention hall when the delegate mood and chants reached a fevered pitch.  

Now history, with recorded delegate chants of "Hang Hillary" and characterizations of American disfunction, the Republican National Convention invites (perchance incites) comparative review.

On July 22 in a critical commentary of Donald Trump's "rhetorical infamy" and unpatriotic convention speech, John Podhoretz objected to Trump's portrayal of American life:  The America Donald Trump portrayed is a horrible place, awash in barbarity, crime, disorder, decay, deceit, rigging, cheating, exploitation. It is very nearly beyond salvation, in such dire straits that a man who was having a wonderful time in business felt called upon to serve as "your voice" because "only I can fix it" the problem.*

On July 20, 2016, Southwest Airlines experienced a 24 hour nationwide system outage that stretched and staggered for five days. While allusions to lynching and direct assertions of violence reverberated in Cleveland's Quicken Loans Arena, disappointed and anxious passengers waited patiently in line at Southwest Airlines check in counters and gates for information regarding the status of their flights.  

This comparison between the moods and attitudes at the overheated GOP convention and Nashville airport's Southwest passenger service counters and gates provides instructive insight into the reactions of normal people living in real time, under duress, confused and frustrated, but still managing to restrain themselves from shouting, chanting insults, making unreasonable demands, or misrepresenting circumstances -- not that some people didn't get angry or faint or fuss. Online you can find complaints -- but for the most part, I can testify to patience, honesty, humor, and forbearance.

On July 20 my husband and I arrived at the Nashville airport two hours prior to our 3:25 Southwest flight to Denver. The passenger check in lines snaked ominously into the lobby area.  At first the line moved normally but then suddenly stopped.  The kiosk computers went blank.  The customer service reps' faces took on that expression one gets when you've expected sugar but got salt instead.  My watch read 1:51.  

At 2:14, we were still standing at the same spot where we'd been 23 minutes prior.  Passengers mostly stood quietly waiting for information or movement.  A woman behind me fussed to a stranger who kindly gave her a polite ear without agreement.  A man going to China with seven bags apologized for his stack of bags.  An athletic black man in expensive shoes asserted loudly to no one in particular that he had to be in Tampa that night.  People quietly moved a few inches away from him. No one assured him, no one put him down, no one joined him in a group howl.

A diminutive customer service supervisor stood up on the steel baggage shelf. "Everyone listen! We are experiencing a nationwide system shutdown. We cannot check you in electronically."  No one shouted, cried, or protested.  

The supervisor then began sorting groups.  "If you are going to Houston or Tampa and have a boarding pass, please move over to that wall."  Passengers politely moved aside to allow that group to exit to the wall.  "If you have a boarding pass and need to check bags, move to this side so we can process your bags."  The man going to China grabbed four of his seven bags.  We stood guard over his other bags.  

"Don't worry about missing your flight.  No planes are flying.  All Southwest flights are grounded until the system comes back online."

After a few minutes, a customer service agent spotted in my husband's shirt pocket our bar coded security passes which looked like boarding passes.  "Sir! Do you have a boarding pass?"  The agent insisted that we check our bags and move to security and get our boarding passes at our gate.  So we moved forward as one of the privileged number released to security and flight gates.

At the baggage counter the agent looked at Herb.  "Are you okay, Sir?"  Herb looked pale and disconnected.  At pre-check the TSA agent asked, "Are you okay, Sir?"  We moved steadily forward through Security and toward a bench.  

I thought, We should leave NOW!  But Herb said, "We should find our gate."  However, we and others couldn't locate our flight gate numbers. The electronic boards were scrambled.

Suddenly the intercom came alive.  "Listen to announcements carefully.  If you hear your destination, proceed directly to your gate to board!"  

Joining the confused hoards, I trolled the concourse for our gate while Herb rested.  Joining a long line at gate 7, I saw two men dressed in black standing outside the queue.  As people left the line, the men in black would ask them what they had learned.  "No one knows anything. They say, 'We don't know.  I'm sorry.' "  I was lucky, the Southwest rep knew our gate number: 25.  "Get your boarding pass there."  

The two men in black sipped cold cups of beer.  "What did you learn?"

"Gate number."

 These two had smartly decided not to wait in line but to interview people as they left the line and assess the situation based on people's answers.  Smiling and jostling his companion, I heard one say to the other," "See?!  Come on. Let's go get another beer."  

We did finally find our gate.  Our boarded flight was parked at the jetway. An agent handed a paper to a trainee who wrote our names on a blank paper boarding pass.  His hand froze above the second line.  "What do I write here?"  

The supervisor next to him glanced at him but was busy trying to fill out a paper manifest while  answering a young woman about her baggage.

"Can I get my bags back?  I want to leave."  

The customer reps looked helplessly at her.  "Ma'am, it will take hours to locate your bags.  It's best to leave them. You can pick them up at your destination when you rebook your flight."

"I don't need to go now. I just want to leave."

And that is exactly what the woman did, leave her bags and walk out, which is approximately what happened to us: our bags flew without us while we used Uber to escape the airport.   We rebooked when the system came online two days later and finally regained possession of our bags at midnight in Denver four days later.

Throughout the situation, Southwest employees were polite, always sorry.   Customers, albeit frustrated and stressed, shared tables, made jokes, offered advice.  It was as if we had arrived within a shared surreality where people wished to reassure one another, where patience was our oxygen and resignation our energy.  

"Here, share this table with me," said a man at the wine bar."

"Does anyone know how to write a manifest?" asked the gate clerk.

"Did you understand that announcement?" Was it Kansas City?"

Southwest CEO Gary Kelly on October 21 said the airline's priority was to get the system back up and to restore service.  "We're worried about the financial impact of this, but what is far more concerning is the inconvenience we caused our customers."

We received a generous rebooking discount and 50% off our next two bookings.  Not exactly what I'd call rigging, exploitation, or deceit.

Later, when I read the news about the GOP convention, I was struck by its anger, the voice of fear.  Where has this come from? I thought.  I had just left an airport crawling with disappointed people, families postponing vacations, business people missing conferences, individuals missing weddings and funerals.  Adults didn't shout or curse, insist or demand.  They regrouped, adjusted, rebooked.  Even the children behaved.

As a companion flyer in the seat across from us, four days later said as we waited an hour on the Tarmac for our continually delayed flight to finally depart for Denver, "Isn't this wonderful that you and I have had this chance to chat?!"

______

Donald Trump's GOP convention speech was a 'deeply unpatriotic act'. Commentary by John Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary magazine, a columnist for the New York Post and a contributing editor for the Weekly Standard. Friday, 22 Jul 2016 | 11:18 AM ET.  CNBC.

The Bench

Cheekwood Botanical Gardens covers 55 acres on the edge of western Nashville.  In April tulips wind along paths and quilt the landscape; spring flowers lay balanced amid rock walls, sculpture, and specimen trees.  A waterfall winds its way toward ponds.  Spreading Lawns meander between woods, and  benches for weary or meditating visitors sit along pathways and under spreading branches. 

Last week on Thursday with my easel and art supplies in a yellow backpack, I walked down a winding sidewalk to a lawn overlooking tulip beds.  While my artist companions chose their views, set up easels, and sketched, I circled the area hesitantly until I was drawn to a viewpoint with a bench, a line of pink tulips and white narcissus, and a twisting tree trunk with octopi branches.  

An electric excitement overtook me as I rushed to render the shapes and colors in front of me.  Clouds threatened rain.  Sunshine traded with shade.  At times I held an umbrella over my painting, soft rain drizzling on my head and shoulders.  All the week's anxious headlines and the layer of responsibilities in my life evaporated as the distant woods, the flowering bulbs, the flames of shrubs, and the graceful branches of a crab apple shading a bench flowed onto the canvas.   

Amateur that I am, I am still enthralled by the creative relationship of scene to brushes and tubes of paint in my hand, much like falling in love over and over.  

What if on that day at Cheekwood while I was spreading pink pigment for rose colored tulips, I was also aware of a frightening deterioration of conscience and humane civilization?  How would you react to my description if outside the entrance to the gardens, a pogrom had begun with the registration of all people whose heritage extended to Muslim grandparents? Or every dark skinned, Hispanic or Near Eastern looking person was stopped at check points and asked for proof of citizenship? Or informants were paid by Homeland Security agents to report any suspicious acting neighbor?

It is a far fetched scenario, I admit.  But just for the moment, suspend skepticism, imagine the contrast of plein air artistry vs. hedonistic governance.  The one scene is full of joy and freedom; the other ripe with fear and insecurity.

During the liberation of Paris by the Allies in August of 1944, while he listened to gunshots in nearby streets, Picasso, who had waited out the Occupation of Paris in his Left Bank studio, painted a "joyously liberating work, The Triumph of Pan,"  described by Ronald C. Rosbottom in  When Paris Went Dark:  "It depicts a Dionysian festival, one that might celebrate the joy of freedom from want and fear.  The work is small and done in watercolor and gouache, but its exuberance belies all the somber work that had preceded it during Picasso's volitional exile in Paris during the war years (331)."

It goes without saying: I'm no Picasso.  I am also not confined to my studio while Nazi thugs and excited ad hoc soldiers of the Resistance engage in a patchwork of violence in surrounding streets.  However, for months I have suffered the thoughtless and dangerous rhetoric of our politicians, a thuggery of words, prevarications designed to dupe memory and excite resentments, to prey on ignorance and fear.  

If I were to paint my feelings after reading or watching the news, the result would be abstract and confusing, unresolved, like a recent near-satire I did on the American flag on a barn in a restless, disordered field.  I find in that painting I want the flag to be worn, untended; the barn ramshackle; the mountains oddly purple and orange; the trees and shrubs overgrown and scrubby.  I want the lines of the barn to be incongruent, even broken, but the furrows racing, out of control, toward the barn.  The painting puzzles my teacher:  "You work has been disquiet lately.  I don't see much peace in it."  

Last week I passed through the gates of Cheekwood and left with a painting energized with joy and love, about a place where peace expresses itself in shapes and values simply because the subject exists no matter what goes on outside the gates or what inner disturbance lies within oneself.  

While I was painting, during a sunny spell, two women strolled by -- a sweet faced, white haired woman with the shuffling gate of Alzheimer's and her younger duplicate, a brunette, fiftyish,with a patient and gentle pace.  They were holding hands, these two women, one who would not recall the event, the other left with the indelible sweetness of their walk through the garden, presumably mother and daughter, finding a liberating moment together, even though most surely the Mother's affliction restricts them and distresses those who desire more hope than the Mother's condition promises.

Yesterday a friend asked about my painting.  I hesitated, stymied. "I'm not sure I can talk about it," I thought.  "It's a Bench," I could have said.  "Too complicated" seemed inaccurate and maybe unkind for polite chat.

But here I am, finally and quite spontaneously, able to say, not what the painting actually is, but what it represents and how important it is to be able to react with joy and love, in intermittent rain, with a paint brush in one hand and an umbrella in the other, to insert shadows and light from imagination, to color the moment -- much like the daughter and mother in spite of their circumstances and the weather -- even though afterwards a current of social unrest can be switched on with a power button.  

________

Rosbottom, Ronald C. When Paris Went Dark, The City of Light Under German Occupation 1940-1944.  New York:  Little, Brown and Company, 2004.

"The artist produces for the liberation of his soul. It is his nature to create as it is the nature of water to run down the hill."  W. Somerset Maugham

Still with Us

The photo messaged to me answered more than one worrisome question.   Two men in wheelchairs sat in sunshine on a deck, one listening to the other.  The one I was interested in was my oldest brother, Gary, a handsome man with gray hair and a neat beard.  His face, intent on the man talking with him, held a familiar intensity from a rehearsed life of listening from a psychologist's chair.

What exactly Gary gleaned from the conversation with his companion isn't known.  You see, Gary, who has Multiple Sclerosis, suffered a series of strokes before Christmas.  He has slowly been working his way back from a fog of scrambled language and cognition.  To see him trying to understand his companion told me he was still with us and not giving into whatever he thinks has happened to him, "This disease of mine takes away my body, in pieces."

Still with us.  

His formerly exquisite mind tries to recall details about relatives.  He wants to hear about them.  The curiosity is there, the memory not.  He wants things, but can't remember how many times he's asked for them.  He is grateful for his caretakers and cooperative with customary good manners, but resistant to intrusive management.  

Still with us.

Gary has always set the stage for us.  The oldest of us, he was, by virtue of birth order, the first to read, the first to go careening on his bike down neighborhood streets, the first to climb trees, the first to win an art award in school, the first to have permission to use Dad's tools.  The rest of us followed his example even to the point of overstepping ourselves by falling out of trees and scraping our knees in bike accidents.  Gary was the first to marry, the first to have a child, the first to obtain a college degree, the first to have a profession.

And he was the first to be diagnosed with a chronic disorder: multiple sclerosis, an unforgiving immune disorder, usually progressive, that causes paralysis and fatigue.  He fought the disease tooth and nail for years, stumbling but upright with a staff to steady himself, finding employment that didn't require standing, using his keen analytical mind to continue in his profession within his physical limitations.  

Even as a youth, Gary didn't easily cave in.  Our dad and he would go head to head, both determined to win -- excellent training for a psychologist manipulating recalcitrant clients and for a semi-paralyzed man determined to support himself, drive a car, bathe himself, cook his own meals, and wash his own clothes.

And now this: strokes, hospitalization, and residential care.  Although he has trouble sitting upright and mixes up words, he works to improve.  "Don't go, let's talk more," he says when I call.  Each time he repeats himself he edits himself, in a loop of repetition, caught at "I want a phone, I want a phone" until distracted toward memories of yesteryear and his family.

Still with us.  Here in the photo is our Gary, dressed in navy slacks and a long sleeved polo shirt, his inert legs stretched out, numb feet in shoes that never get scuffed from walking, arms resting in his lap, his kind face clearly engaged with his companion's story.

Still here leading the way, as determined as ever.