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.

Room in the Inn, Upstairs, Downstairs

The back door to the church fellowship hall swung open.  In walked two thin men with backpacks slung over their shoulders.  Both men had unshaven faces and deep set eyes under black eyebrows.  "Merry Christmas!" said the taller of the two.  They moved confidently across the room to cots set up behind a line of tables.

The door swung open again. A ragged line of people entered. An older couple, husband and wife, holding hands; a tall, thin, handsome man with a copper beard and a worn, gentle appearance; a thin blonde man with deep set eyes; a sturdy, young, cocoa-skinned man named Lawson; young James B and his girlfriend Kara with her dark, nervous eyes; thin Veronica; stocky Elvis -- their names taking shape on name tags, their cot ownerships lining up, the men behind the line of tables, the women behind screens.  The husband wheeled in his wife's oxygen tank and placed it beside her cot. Twelve guests this night, on Christmas Eve.

From the kitchen hints of turkey and gravy drifted into the hall where guests poured coffee and sifted through toiletries and books.  Tables were set for dinner, poinsettias in the center, fruit salad at each place setting.  A buffet line formed.  "Let's eat while the food is hot.  Lawson, will you please say the blessing."

From upstairs a brass quintet's harmonies floated down, waves of crescendoing sound with each opening of sanctuary doors. Church members dressed in suits and dresses drifted in and out.  The setting could have been any church meal with the familiar pulse of conversation and forks clicking on plates, but not quite, because the guests at the tables were strangers to one another, thrown together because they were homeless.  

Throughout the winter months, on every Thursday night, The Presbyterian Church of Bowling Green hosts a winter shelter program called Room in the Inn.  In the church fellowship hall volunteers set up cots with blankets, sheets, and pillows; cook dinner and breakfast; and serve twelve guests.  From 6pm to 6am, as many as fifteen volunteers alternate through five shifts; one of those shifts is the innkeeper shift when two church members sleep on cots over night.  It's the least popular shift, beginning at 9pm and ending at 5am, "sleep" a convenient but  inaccurate description for the shift.

Because Christmas Eve fell on Thursday this year, while homeless guests settled in downstairs, Presbyterians upstairs carried on with the annual Christmas Eve schedule, two worship services, choir practice, children's performances, traditional pageantry and music.

Upstairs was Allelujah, Oh Come All Ye Faithful, Oh Little Town of Bethlehem; Downstairs a hot meal, coffee, extra blankets, antacids, fitful rest.

I was there in both places, upstairs and downstairs.  I set up cots, served food, ate with the guests.  I listened to their stories.

We've been married 39 years. My wife has spells.  She needs her oxygen.  

We met at a laundromat. 

He was an Afghanistan. He enlisted after high school.  He had nowhere else to go. His mother abandoned him when he was thirteen.  

One day she didn't pick me up from school.  

I kept driving without a license.  Finally, I was arrested and lost my license.  I'm trying to get back my license.

I've got some work tomorrow.

We lived behind a bush until Trevor found us.

I've got kids in Tennessee.

I've got this cough.  Acid reflux.

Upstairs I dressed in my choir robe, sang anthems, savored the music, absorbed the pastor's message about the power of hope and love in a disturbing and swirling world of vicious rhetoric, murder, war, intolerance, and carelessness.  As the sanctuary darkened, we lit candles and sang Silent Night.  The lights came up.  We burst into Joy to the World. The brass quintet played Jingle Bells.  We embraced friends.  

Downstairs in the fellowship hall, when the lights dimmed, tired guests prepared for sleep.

At eleven o'clock I pulled on a sweatshirt, plumped up my pillows on a cot near the lobby exit and lay down to play online Scrabble on my iPad.  The other innkeeper, David, pulled off his shirt and shoes, placed a camp mattress on his cot just outside the hall near the lobby exit, and curled up in a red fleece blanket and drifted off to sleep, his breathing heavy and slow.

The primary lights in the hall and lobby were off, but not the emergency lights and not the Christmas tree lights.  The ice maker in the kitchen burbled.  One of the men sat on the edge of his cot and tried to squelch his fierce coughing, a garbage can beside him to catch his phlegm.  Although a doctor had visited with him the previous week, the man, resigned to his condition, had resisted treatment.  "Does he have lung cancer? TB?"  I worried.  The boyfriend and girlfriend whispered and paced restlessly, in and out from the hall to the lobby and back again, passing where David slept and then where I lay, until her need to sleep overcame his reluctance to leave her.  I checked the time. 1:30.  A man cried out in a dream.  A woman left to use the bathroom.  Snoring and labored breathing.  Hacking.  More outcries.  

My brain refused to relax. I covered my head with a shirt, hugged my extra pillow, the one from home, and practiced mindlessness. I added a coat to my blanket.  I shivered. At 3am thunder growled, lightening flashed, rain pelted the patio and street and spattered the windows.  At 4am I heard the rustling of coffee filters, the pouring of water into the coffee maker, the clink of cups, the rhythmic drip of coffee, a smoker's morning cough. Two men stood quietly with cups in their hands and watched the coffee maker. 

Outside the rain continued, street lights shimmering on dark, wet streets.  

I rose and joined David and the early risers.  The coffee moistened my throat, its warmth spreading to my belly.  I held the warm cup against my cheek.

At 4:15 the breakfast shift volunteers, Cathey and Wes, arrived.  Slowly people awakened.  Rain flooded the streets.  Wes and I stirred scrambled eggs in iron skillets. Cathey flipped pancakes. We warmed the precooked bacon, poured orange juice, set out milk. 

"Do you have tongs for the bacon, Ma'am?" asked the young Army veteran.

"It'll be a hard day with this rain.  The library will be closed, and the mall," lamented one man.

"The buses won't be running."  

"I've been wet before."

At 6am the guests would be escorted to a morning shelter nearby.

My husband arrived to help clean up.  I drove home, took a hot shower, and fell into our bed, with its Sterns and Foster mattress, down comforter and 600 count percale sheets.  I slept until noon. When I woke up and looked out our den's French doors, it was still raining.

It was Christmas Day.

If You're Not Paranoid, You're Crazy

Let's play "What if?"

What if the ATMs stopped working?  What if the NSA was interested in my phone calls to the church?  What if ISIS terrorists succeeded in cutting off traffic between Chicago and Atlanta?  What if the sweet muslim lady who works out with me at the gym suddenly blew us all up?  

What if you were pulling weeds at dusk and a helicopter whumped-whumped just overhead and you found yourself bathed in a searchlight?

I try to remain calm, to keep things in perspective,

ATMs regularly run out of money over the weekend.  I remember when ATMs didn't exist.  It's not a big deal.  I don't believe the NSA will ever be interested in any of my phone calls or emails unless an NSA employee wishes to volunteer to serve a night at a winter shelter or wants to write a boring novel about my family or friends.  As to cutting off traffic on I-65, the Kentucky and Tennessee Transportation Authorities have succeeded in truncating travel with legitimate construction delays and highway closures, without any help from ISIS.  I wouldn't mess with the sweet lady at the gym -- no way!  She's as sharp as a tack, wise and wily about people, listens to all manner of nonsense flying off the tongues of gals as they perspire through their routines, then sweetly says the equivalent of "Every day is a blessing. We are so fortunate to be here working out, to have each other."  

As to the helicopter and why it would spotlight a woman pulling weeds at dusk, you might theorize about the possibility of a nearby helicopter training school.  That sounds reasonable.  You'd be wrong, but you'd be trying to keep things in perspective.

.....

My daughter Jenny lives in Franklin, Tennessee, home to ordinary people like themselves and also some music celebrities who live nearby.  The eight lanes of I-65 run north and south just fifteen minutes from Jenny's quiet cul-de-sac.  The surrounding streets carry only light local traffic.  It's safe to jog, walk dogs, and ride bikes.

I was visiting Jenny's family on a Thursday. In her yard and the fields beyond, trees were just turning yellow and orange.  Autumn's chill had inspired us to light gas logs.  After visiting around the fire and enjoying the waning light glowing through the living room windows, we decided to go out for sushi.  

Jenny, her son, and her daughter waited for me in the car, while I put on my shoes.  As I closed the back door, I locked it, out of habit, a habit necessary at my house -- not at hers. I didn't realize I'd locked it until I walked through the garage to the car.  Did I just lock that door?

"Jenny, do you have a key to the house?"

"No.  We use the garage door opener."  She raised her eyes in alarm.  "Mom! You didn't lock the door, did you?"

"I'm afraid I did."

Lauren and Sam popped out of the car.  "Daddy may have put a key in the garage, Mom."  They have the optimism of teenagers.  In the meantime, Jenny called her husband, who was driving somewhere between Iowa and Oklahoma on business.  "Jim, do we have a hideout key?"

Her face clouded.  No hideout key.  The kids returned empty handed.  They next looked for an open window.  Jenny followed, iPhone to her ear, giving a running account to Jim, the only family member with a key.  

When Sam discovered an unlocked kitchen window, I bent over to pull some tiny weeds in a path.  I needed to be useful and silent, nearby but out of the way during the window prying operation.

Whump, whump, Whump!   

A helicopter suddenly hovered above me. Its spotlight slithered along the path toward me, scanned the shrubbery, and stopped on Lauren, her body halfway through the kitchen window.  The helicopter angled up and away, its thumping motor fading, circling, then nearing, its searchlight bounding over treetops.  And then It was immediately above me.  I found myself in a circle of blinding light.  Lauren had disappeared into the house, unlocked the door, and emerged from the garage.  

Under helicopter surveillance, we jumped into the car and took off, our imaginations running wild.  

"They were narcs!"  

"Traffic helicopter from I-65."

"Police surveillance."

"Body snatchers!'

"Silver Alert!"

"The Neighborhood Watch!"

"Voyeur!"

"FBI!"

"NSA!"

'Immigration!"

"Donald Trump!

"Ted Cruz!"

"Sam, don't text!  We're under suspicion!"

"Mom, slow down.  You'll attract attention!"

And so it went.  

That evening during the Chicken Red Curry and the Dragon Rolls--"Check for listening devices hidden in the food."  The next morning over coffee--"Check the Kuerig for NSA's fingerprints!"  At dinner parties--"The weirdest thing happened..."

Until one day Jenny was telling a neighbor, "You wouldn't believe...the other night."

"Oh, that was Aldridge.  He does that.  He has a helicopter. He lives two doors down from you."

Neighborhood Watch?  No, just out for a spin on a Thursday night.

If he had known us, we could have laughed it off.  "He's just messing with us."  But we didn't know him and he didn't know us, which complicates the scenario.  

Voyeuristic prank?  Honest surveillance?  Comic relief?  Determined vigilante?  Neighborly hello?

We would like to keep events in perspective.  Lauren succeeded in unlocking the door.  We made a clean getaway.  Indeed, that hovering helicopter shifted the focus away from my locking the door.  Still, we can't quite let go of wondering "What if..?"

It's the not knowing that keeps the story alive, not quite at the Twitter level, but almost.

"Anyone not paranoid in this world must be crazy. . . . Speaking of paranoia, it's true that I do not know exactly who my enemies are. But that of course is exactly why I'm paranoid.” 

― Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast.

.....

"If You're Not Paranoid, You're Crazy."  from the title of a feature article by Walter Kim from The Atlantic, November 2015.  

 

Aunt Meryl

Aunt Meryl was not my favorite aunt.  Sometimes she was my least favorite aunt. However, Meryl Richardson has silently been with me all of my life in my neurons and my facial structure.

"Ha!" Exclaimed my older brother once.  "You look just like Aunt Meryl."  And yes, he's correct.  No matter how much I wish I looked more like my mother or her sisters, my father's oldest sister Meryl is definitely implanted in my genes.  

If she had been college educated, Meryl might have been an English teacher, or maybe a professor of  art or music.   As it was, she became a pianist in a band, a writer, and a well known landscape artist from Santa Clara County, south of San Francisco.

Childless, Meryl doted on my cousin Linda, who was admittedly adorable and sweeter than I ever wished to be.  I was the niece who wore my brother's jeans and climbed trees and didn't like my hair combed.  But I was also the niece who spent winter weekends and summer weeks with my aunt when my mother was ill, which was often the situation until I was ten.

I remember these visits with my aunt like vinegar and sugar.  Diane, brush your hair. Delicious apricot pies. Why don't you wear a dress?  Lavender scented bubbles in the bath tub.  Sit up straight.  Scrabble games. Don't be rude.  Art lessons.  Where have you been!?  Music jam sessions. Hush!  Camping trips in Yosemite. 

Memories of the annoying nighttime rhythmic tick rock of the mantle clock and my uncle's snoring mingle with the daytime delight of painting beside my aunt on her tiny back porch.  My Uncle Wayne and Aunt Meryl took weekend excursions to places where she would paint plein aire in watercolor. Later when she would render her watercolor sketches in oils, I watched --fascinated.  I imagine these were some times when she said, Hush!  But more often than not, she would set up an area for me with a large sketch pad and some paint.

"Draw with a paint brush," she'd say.  "Paint whatever you like."  She never criticized my immature paintings.  Instead, she taught me how colors mix, about perspective and composition -- patiently, kindly.

She was always her best self when painting or playing the piano.  Her nervousness, her obsessive worries about propriety,  her perfectionism, these issues simply disappeared when she was occupied with her talents.  

She lived a long life, outliving two husbands. In her later years I  admired her zest for living.  I think she had a good time in her later years:  traveling, playing the piano for a swing band, playing bridge, and painting small scenes and flowers.  When I last visited her in her senior care home, she determined that we were served lunch in a grand manner with warm hospitality.  Her hand painted notecards were on display in the lobby, purchasable for a nominal price.  I'm told that when she became bedridden, she practiced her music on the bed sheet, her fingers moving through trills and chords.

You never really know someone, but when you can feel someone's presence in your own nuerons, you have to be grateful. Or else, what would you be saying about yourself?!

Picking Up the Pieces

This post is a parable.

Last month while Herb was constructing a gravel pathway he dumped some of the gravel in the grass.  Grass will grow in gravel, here and there where seeds find a grip between pieces of gravel, but such a result doesn't match our standards for a lawn. After all, we contract with Trugreen to achieve a green, virtually weed-less expanse of fescue.  Gravel is for paths, not for lawns.

I felt a stab of frustration.  I wanted to say, "Why didn't you lay down a tarp?", or worse....   Somebody was going to have to pick up that gravel.   Herb saw I was looking at the spread of gravel under the truck's tailgate.  "I'll take care of it," he said. And then he walked to the house to clean up.

 He had been working for hours in the heat.  And the path looked great.  The sun was dropping beyond the tree tops.  It was time to make supper.  Droplets of perspiration dampened my t-shirt.

But again, somebody was going to have to pick out the gravel.

I sat down in the grass and began scratching out each nugget of gravel.  At first it wasn't easy.  I was resentful.  How could he have been so careless?  And then piece by piece my unaffectionate, accusing attitude lifted, until I began to feel pride in what we could accomplish together.  I was the clean up crew.  My fingers aren't arthritic; I'm limber enough to crawl on the ground; a scrub brush would clear the dirt from under my nails.   It took an hour.  I filled a large bucket and then dumped the gravel onto the path. In the end my spirit was light.

This is what healing is like, my friends.  It doesn't attack, or blame, or gossip.  It isn't resentful. And it isn't accomplished with systems of governance.  It is accomplished one by one, individually,  by taking responsibility for our own emotions and thoughts and by serving one another, with our fingers, piece by piece, if it must be.

 Philippians 2:3 ESV
Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves.

2 Corinthians 13:11 ESV
Finally, brothers, rejoice. Aim for restoration, comfort one another, agree with one another, live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you.