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The Blood of Racists in My Veins

Peg — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 21:40:36 +0000

Her name was Rosie. She came several days a week to clean house and take care of my sister and me. She told me if I ate sugar right out of the sugar bowl that worms would grow in my tummy, which I did not believe but still fretted over most of my childhood. She liked my sister better than she liked me, but then, who wouldn’t?

She was, in the language of the day, “the colored help.”

My family was not wealthy. We were barely middle class, living in one of those plain boxes with a chain-link fence on a block of identical plain boxes that went up all over the country in the post-World War II boom. If we were barely middle class, I can only imagine where Rosie fit in the socio-economic hierarchy of the middle 1950s.

A half-dozen years later, Rosie no longer came. Instead, once a week we got in the station wagon about 6 p.m. and took my father’s clean work shirts, rolled into damp, tight balls, to a woman who did the ironing for my mother. She lived in a dingy house at the top of a flight of rickety stairs in a neighborhood we called, using the language of the day, “colored town.” That was polite language, a step up from the language my father used.

Around that time across the South, all hell broke loose. Police used fire hoses to beat back people on the streets of my hometown, people who wanted something called “civil rights.” Little girls died in a church bombing. My friends and I couldn’t ride the bus into downtown for a movie and a fountain soda at the five-and-dime on a summer afternoon any more because of something called “sit-ins.” My father sneered over other language, like “freedom riders” and “outside agitators.”

I was a witness, if a young and confused witness. I know what happened and I was part of it, if reading the news and moving from confusion to outrage can count as some small part of the change that was at long last happening. I tell it now because the blood of racists runs in my veins and because I know what turmoil had to take place to get us to this still imperfect place where we are today.

This afternoon, I read a column by civil rights activist Myrlie Evers-Williams in which she said, “When we speak, if only in a whisper, momentous things can happen.” I would add that when we don’t speak, as loudly and as clearly as we dare, momentous things can be lost.

Maybe it isn’t enough for people to tell the stories of courage and righteousness. Maybe those of us who remember the small minds of injustice and cowardice and hate need to speak, too.

This is part of the legacy I bear: The blood of racists runs in my veins.

Illustration by DigitalArt via www.freedigitalphotos.net

The Incredible Shrinking Life

Peg — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 00:48:32 +0000

(This blog post is rated PG-Geezer. If you’re under 55, come back next week.)

First, Aunt Nancy sold the big house she and her husband had lived in. Keeping it was too expensive and too much work. So she sold a lot of stuff and gave away a lot of stuff and compressed the essentials of her life — a console TV, a cabinet sewing machine, a sprawling sofa, a mega recliner — into a one-bedroom apartment in a senior citizens community. The apartment bulged at the seams with oversized furnishings.

A decade or so later, Aunt Nancy broke her shoulder and her wrist and everyone realized it was time for her to pare down her life again. Her mind was sharp, but arthritis and diabetes and obesity had taken their toll. She moved into a nursing home.

She told us how to dispose of everything, and we did. She knew the move was permanent.

But even knowing it was permanent, she shielded a part of her soul from the truth that her world had shrunk forevermore to those four green walls, that bed with buttons to raise her head or lower her feet, that tiny built-in closet full of pull-on knit pants (no buttons, no zippers) and pull-over knit tops (no buttons, no zippers).

One day, six months or so after she moved into the nursing home, Aunt Nancy asked me about three pleated skirts that had been in her closet before the move. When I told her they had been donated to a charity, she was so disappointed. They were like new. She might wear them someday. Someday, when she got through this rough patch.

This particular rough patch, of course, was not one she would be getting through. She would never again wear panty hose or dress-up shoes or pleated skirts that made her think of earlier years, better times. This further shrinking of her life was the beginning of the 10-year decline that would eventually end in her death. But for quite a while, no matter how clear her thinking, Aunt Nancy kept a lady-like hold on the notion that she would one day sashay back out into the world in one of those pleated skirts and a pair of two-toned pumps, not too high, just enough to give her calves a little boost.

I look at the ways my life is shrinking and wonder if I have begun the long decline that will end wherever it ends for me.

I turn 60 this year. My finances are unreliable and retirement looms. So I look at my car and I’m grateful its life-expectancy is nearly as long as my own. Other things give me more concern. My computer has been with me for seven years, my Nikes for six, my heavy winter coat that just popped a snap has also been around half-a-decade or more. That’s like 40 in coat years — not really old, but beginning to look a little tired and fashion-challenged.

Sixty may be the new 45, but even so I feel a shrinking of my potential to reinvent or reinvigorate. I wonder if someone has already begun to roll up my sidewalk – the sidewalk that could lead anywhere — leaving me stranded here in my incredible shrinking life, the only one who still believes that the best truly is yet to be.

Where are the prophets?

Peg — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 21:02:25 +0000

Who is our prophet today?

Who is leading us out of this wilderness in which we find ourselves today? Who is pointing the way to a promised land that seems at least as far away today as it was 40 years ago?

When I was growing into young adulthood in the 1960s, the world was a frightening and dangerous place. A place of war and violence in the streets and hatred based on fear of the unknown and the different. In other words, it was a lot like today. The biggest difference may have been that we had prophets who were pointing the way out of the wilderness.

We had Bob Dylan, who sang to us about a different way to live in that dangerous world. We had Bobby Kennedy, who vowed to help us build a different kind of world.

And, of course, we had Martin Luther King, Jr., who reminded us that God had a different plan from the plan we were living out.

On this day of celebrating the life and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., I scroll down my Facebook news feed, read the messages King left us and I teeter between hope and despair. Hope because he spoke with the authority and the authenticity of one who had inded been to the mountaintop, had seen the promised land. And if it was true then, if there was a promised land then, surely there must still be one today.

And despair, because in these 40-plus years since his death, so much of the progress we had made seems to be eroding. It is eroding at least in part, I believe, because the voices that dominate today’s conversation are the voices of self-interest and antagonism and sarcasm.

Where are the voices of hope and reconciliation? Where are the voices that lift us out of our small lives and onto the mountaintop? Who is urging us to act with courage, to live from that place inside us where we are kinder and braver and more compassionate than our fear or complacency or pettiness? In 50 years, who will we remember as the voice we followed out of this wilderness?

Are we without prophets today? Or do we choose not to listen when they speak?

Say what, Karl Marx?

admin — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 21:27:43 +0000

What did Karl Marx know that we need to learn?

Who were the 100 most influential people in history? Astrophysicist Michael H. Hart gave the world his list in a 1987 book, The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History.

It’s an interesting read of short essays, beginning with Hart’s number one choice, Muhammad, and ending with Leonardo da Vinci, who came in as an honorable mention/near miss. (Remember, this book pre-dates Dan Brown.) Jesus came in #3 on Hart’s list and people I’m ashamed to admit I don’t even recognize fell into the bottom 50. People like Ashoka (#52), Mani (#83) and Niels Bohr (#100).

Of course, Hart might make changes in his list based on the 25 years since his book was published. Steve Jobs, anybody?

In 11th place is Karl Marx, who developed economic theories that became the basis for Communism. Of course, Communism has taken quite a hit since 1987. But at the time the book was written, Communism seemed to have carved out a permanent place in the world economy.

Still, Hart made the point that not all of Marx’s predictions proved to be true; he zeroed in on two. Marx apparently predicted that in capitalist economies:

working people would become progressively poorer as time went on;
the middle class would be eliminated, with only a few rising into the capitalist class.

Hart wrote, in 1987, that neither of these predictions about capitalism had proven to be accurate. In 2012, I can only say, “Wow.”

Maybe it’s time to read Das Kapital again, if only to find out what we might be up against as capitalism lurches into at least two of the very pitfalls Karl Marx predicted a century and a half ago.

Diminuendo

Peg — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 02:36:17 +0000

Musicians use a lovely Italian word for a gradual decrease in loudness: diminuendo. The very sound of the word makes me smile.

Tomorrow afternoon, about 4 p.m. on Christmas Eve, the diminuendo begins. One by one, cars head for home. A parking space empties. Then another and another. A storefront goes dark, a mall, a grocery store. Red kettles are spirited away. A dwindling stream of headlights melt into the dark.

No matter how many gifts I wrap, no matter how many cookies I bake, no matter how burnt out I get listening to Jingle Bell Rock, that moment comes when nothing is left but the hush of the silent night.

That is the moment I wait for, my favorite moment of the season, when I can believe that for this one night, all is truly calm and bright.

Merry Christmas.

My Best Ever Christmas Present

Peg — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 22:47:31 +0000

Christmas, 1995.

Christmas had not been merry for two or three years. I wanted to do something different. I wanted it to mean something again.

My small family decided to adopt another small family for the holidays through one of the social service agencies in town. They give you names and ages and a wish list from people whose Christmas won’t be merry without a little help. People, hopefully, with little kids who will be fun to buy for and fun to imagine on Christmas morning.

This year, our family was one little old lady.

Her needs were minimal. All she really, really wanted was to cook a nice holiday meal for her extended family. Turkey or ham, some pies, maybe two kinds of potatoes, the mashed ones and the sweet ones. Soft yeast rolls and butter. Real butter maybe. She wanted to set it up on card tables in her little house, which was neat and sparsely furnished. The social service agency mentioned that grocery store gift cards give people the dignity of shopping for themselves. So that’s what we did.

No cute little toddler-sized winter coats, no teddy bears or computer games. No Santa wrapping paper, no big bows, no imagining on Christmas morning that the children in our little adopted family are wide-eyed and squealing over Santa’s visit.

Just one little old lady and a gift card from the grocery store for a couple hundred dollars.

We delivered the gift card about a week before Christmas. We probably gave her a few wrapped presents as well, house slippers maybe, or a soft cardigan. She was a dignified lady and thanked us politely and we left the house with nothing but the satisfaction of knowing that we’d done a good deed.

The door had barely closed behind us. We were barely off the front stoop when we heard it. Behind that closed door, an unrestrained shout from the dignified little old lady. “Praise the Lord!”

I cried all the way home. I cry everytime I think of it. And that, for the friend who asked earlier today, was the very best Christmas present I ever had.

Cheers!

Peg — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 18:55:53 +0000

"Cheers" regulars Cliff and Norm

Sometimes you want to go
Where everybody knows your name,
and they’re always glad you came.

The theme song for the 1980s TV series Cheers pops into my head a lot. It was a show about a neighborhood bar, the kind of place where regulars walk in and their usual drink shows up at their favorite barstool before they can even get seated.

Bars like that are still out there, I’m sure. It’s the kind of place my parents hung out when I was a kid. I spent a lot of Saturday nights playing dominoes while they drank beer and I really don’t much care to be a regular there any more.

In fact, I’ve spent a good bit of my adult life resisting being a regular anywhere.

But there I was, this morning, sitting in my regular spot in a most unlikely place, surrounded by a lot of most unlikely people, many of whom do, in fact, know my name.

You wanna be where you can see,
our troubles are all the same
You wanna be where everybody knows
Your name.

A year ago today, I had never set foot in the place. But a week before Christmas, I slipped in at the last possible minute, grabbed an end seat in the back, easy for a quick getaway. After the small gospel choir with the big sound got everyone’s heart pumping — even mine — someone up front asked first and second time visitors to stand and give their names so they could be properly greeted. I did not stand up.

The details that got me from that moment in time to this don’t matter much. What does matter is that this morning, one year later, there I sat in my regular spot. Even before the small gospel choir marched its big sound down the aisle, I had talked with at least a dozen people about our lives and all the ways and places our humanity intersects.

What does matter is that something in the spirit of the people who gather in that place made it impossible for me to stay away. It’s a spirit that welcomes all of us, with our baggage and our doubts and our differences and our ways that haven’t always been a natural fit with stained glass and hymnals.

You wanna go where people know,
people are all the same,
You wanna go where everybody knows
your name.

Here in the South, some folks call churches the poor man’s country club. Still, comparing mine to a neighborhood bar may seem a little extreme. But I believe a lot of folks at Caldwell Presbyterian would like the idea that somebody thinks their church is the kind of place where people might just shout “Cheers!” when you come in the door.

Right after they call you by name, of course.

A Million Miles from Christmas

Peg — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 18:06:13 +0000

Here we are, nearly the middle of December, and a million miles from Christmas.

The ways we relate to this holiday are anything but holy. It is a retail orgy. It is precious videos and music over-exposed into meaninglessness and a distinct lack of comfort or joy.

As for the birth that launched us into this Celebration Gone Wild, we are separated from it not only by centuries, but by beliefs so tattered and divisive that those of us who claim to remember the reason for the season face off. We are the battleground and the birth itself has become the victim of the stiff-necked certainty that divides us.

So what is there left to say about this holy day that we have stripped of meaning and left at the entrance to the mall, battered and unrecognizable?

Last year, I attended The Birth, a play based on the writings of theologian Frederick Buechner, one of the deepest and most profound writers on Christianity from the last half-century. Buechner likes to challenge us to shift perspective, to step into the story of our tired old beliefs and imagine being touched by the workings of a God too mysterious and magnificent for us to fully comprehend. A God who sends his message of hope and love in the form of a baby – a helpless baby born poor and homeless, already rejected by people just like us.

Sitting in the darkened theater that was as Spartan as any manger, I fell into the mystery and the mysticism of that birth, that simple birth whose echo should have long since faded. And somehow, has not.

(More about The Birth, which invites us again this year to step away from the holidays and into the holy days.)

Cookie Dough Zen

Peg — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 18:21:48 +0000

Living in the moment with ginger cookies

I work with my brain. As Adrian Monk says, it’s a gift and a curse. It makes the perceived world in my mind seem fascinating, while the real world comes at me diluted, a gray blur.

Yesterday, I baked three batches of Christmas cookies. It’s a ritual I love. Creaming butter and sugar in the mixer, watching it become pale and smooth. Adding egg and vanilla extract, maybe orange zest, inhaling the aroma of something coming to life in a deep metal bowl. Then the blend of flour and spices that make each batch unique — ginger, nutmeg, cardamom, maybe finely chopped hazelnuts to change both the flavor and the feel on my tongue.

First up yesterday: ginger cookies. After the mixing, I sat at the table scooping out heaping teaspoons of chilled molasses-dark dough, rolling it into perfect balls, dipping each one in sugar and lining them up on shiny cookie sheets. As I did, I had one of those moments that my brain usually keeps me too preoccupied to notice: a moment of being perfectly present with what was before me. I was hyper aware of my hands, slightly sticky with dough and gritty with sugar, the evocative theme from To Kill a Mockingbird playing on WDAV, late-morning sunshine soft on the walls and table-top.

Everything was perfect and I was there for it.

The first few times that kind of hyper awareness happened to me, the experience was so intense I was actually terrified. I wasn’t sure I could stand life lived so vividly. Because most of the time, my brain is filtering the world, pushing my senses out of the way so I can think. About what I just said to somebody, what somebody said back to me, what time I have to be somewhere, how long it’s going to take me to revise the last thing I wrote.

None of that’s bad. I’m grateful my gifts lean in a direction that allows me to work with my mind. love being a writer.

But living through my brain instead of my senses can dim the colors and the smells and the textures and the sounds of life. Too much of the time, I live life through a glass, darkly, forgetting that as valuable as my mind is, the world waits for me to engage, even when it’s so intense that it is terrifying.

Being Thankful when Life is Hard

Peg — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 15:59:27 +0000

Being grateful for what I have is easy. Pecan pie and Miss Bailey and sunshine out the windows and my favorite shoes that are not only comfortable but look good, too.

What can be hard is being grateful for what I don’t have. Not the stuff I don’t have like sickness and hunger and homelessness – it’s pretty to be grateful that I’m missing those things.

What’s hard is being grateful for what I don’t have when I think it’s something I should have, something I think I need to make life perfect, something I expected would come my way.

I spoke with a friend yesterday who had surgery about a month ago. She worried, before surgery, about how she would cope. She wouldn’t be able to go up and down the stairs to her bedroom. She wouldn’t be able to get her own breakfast or dress herself. And this was all going to happen over Thanksgiving, which would mean she wouldn’t be with her daughters in other states or her granddaughter or her brother.

What she has had, in the midst of this ocean of need, is the humility to accept the help of dozens of friends, the kind of friends who are willing to help you when you’re helpless. What she has had is an awareness of how much she is loved and what really matters and that each person who has helped her has been the hands of God, providing everything she needs in life. What she has been given is a hard circumstance that became not something to endure, but a time of spiritual growth.

So on this day of giving thanks, and every single day if I am paying attention to the way God works, I will be grateful for what I don’t have and think I want. Because I can be sure that there are more gifts in my lack than I will ever find in my abundance.