Wasting Precious Time
When I sobered up after nineteen years of serious alcoholic drinking, the first coherent thought I remember having is: “What a waste of valuable time.” What I meant by that lament was simple–though I had lots of ideas about literature, I had not been able to write any articles or books to progress my career as a professor of English at a major Midwestern university. Gradually, the mental fog lifted and I began putting words onto paper and have been doing that ever since. That was forty-three years ago and I’m now beginning to live out my eighties as a retired professor who still has lots of ideas about literature. Now I also have ideas about a lot more, e.g., white supremacy in all its guises, the world of dance both classical and modern, politics, the world outside my windows, memories of my life in the past, and how I practice my beliefs in God and Jesus.
In 2015, when I learned that my aorta had closed in upon itself to a dangerous degree and surgery was required, I underwent a valve replacement and now happily carry around in my chest the membrane from some generous cow. A remarkable recovery led me to define what had happened as a “heart event,” suggesting something that occurred but came to an end. In the past year, however, events and tests and words from my excellent cardiologist have changed the word I need to use and inhabit from “event” to “condition.” Conditions are on-going and inconclusive, and they require attention and at times adjustments. So my heart condition will accompany me for the remainder of my days on this earth; I have a “new normal” that is affecting me in surprising ways, some of which hinge on my ideas about time.
Though I have learned to write more than I could when drunk every night, I still do not write as often or deeply as I would like. Recently, I decided I probably didn’t need to undertake more book-length projects. With encouragement from family and friends, I hired someone to design a web site for me that included a “blog.” Though periodically I promise myself to write a new blog more often, I tend to drift back into extended periods of silence. But this heart condition reality is pushing me onto new ground. My newest resolution was to write a new blog at least once a month, but my mind teems with many more subjects than the twelve that decision would create. The other day, as I was thinking again about ways I am experiencing mortality, a phrase came to me complete and clear: “You are wasting precious time.” So, all these years after I began to rediscover myself and felt I was wasting “valuable” time, I have come to view that time I’m wasting as “precious.” The difference surely comes from my recognition that I am living on what I consider to be “gift time,” and that, given that miraculous fact, I must behave differently. I want to stop pretending that I can begin to write more of what rushes around in my brain next year or next month or even next week. I want to order my thoughts and feelings and send them out to the admittedly tiny group of faithful friends who read my blog. Of course I love it when one of them writes me something after reading the latest entry, even if it’s to urge me to correct some misspelled word or smooth out an infelicitous phrase. But I want to write these little pieces to feel like a me that I have stifled too often and for too long.
The time before me is precious because it can no longer be taken for granted.
Happy Birthday, Jesus
Every year, I set up a crèche in my living room, an act that gives me tremendous pleasure. Creches are supposed to focus on the manger scene with Mary and Joseph looking down on a crib housing the baby Jesus. These little collections may include the three Magi with flashy gifts; some have an ox and ass or cow. My crèche bears no resemblance to that pattern. Rather it mirrors a beautiful poem by John Milton, “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.” This poem devotes only four or five short stanzas to the actual birth while the majority of this extended poem is about the effects of that moment on the world in which it occurred and on the world in which Milton lived.
That’s how it is with my little thatched house. Tucked away in the back are tiny terra cotta figures of Mary, Joseph, one cow, one ox, and a very tiny crib with an infinitesimal babe in it. I found these little figures decades ago in a shop in Paris near St. Sulpice church. My crèche tells a story about how a few people and scads of animals and birds have come to stand in amazement as they realize what the tableau inside the manger is going to mean. Some of my figures are expensive, e.g., two magical old women made in Germany, a tiny sterling silver rabbit, a stately bronze stag with a wide rack of delicately carved horns. Most of my visitors, however, are delightful ornaments contributed by friends or found by me over a span of about 40 years: a fluffy yellow camel bought at a fund-raiser for some worthy cause; a wooden white and black cow resting on her feet; a very pink china pig that was part of a friend’s own childhood collection; a white wooden cat who has lost his two stick arms but who still wants to be present at this strange moment in human history; a bright tiny china puffin from Iceland; literally scores of cows, chickens, kitties, turtles, horses, owls, cardinals, and pigs. The oldest piece is a faded orange pre-plastic camel that was part of my first crèche given me by my mother when I was four and set up every year on a shelf in our living room where I could sit and move the various pieces around as long as I wanted to do so.
Children who come to my house are fascinated by this set up. Two little girls next door used to ask me around Thanksgiving “When are you going to set up your house?” When they were too little to see the high bookcase ledge, I’d let them stand on a chair so they could see all the little animals. Adults who look at my menagerie respond along a wide continuum: some “get it” about what I’m doing with the whole jumbled assortment; others wonder about the seriousness of my Christian observance; and some see how delighted I am so they indulge me by looking for or even bringing new additions.
What am I doing? Certainly the birth of Jesus of Nazareth came to have a tremendous impact on the world around him and on the future of western thought and worship. My amassed and expanding motley crew attests to my firm belief that humans are not the center of the universe; we merely inhabit and share it with the rest of creation. St. Francis of Assisi understood this, even learning to speak with the animals and birds in the woods around him. Many philosophers and aestheticians believe that at some stage of evolution, all species could comprehend one another. I believe we lost more than we gained by coming to separate ourselves from the rest of sentient beings, so I bring more and more silly and beautiful animals to my manger. The December after the election of Pope Francis, I felt hopeful enough to add a beautifully carved wooden figure of his particular saint. My delicately carved wooden figure stands tall and has a tiny white dove perched on one finger of his left hand. He fits right in with my bunnies and chicks and camels and pigs.
So happy birthday to the baby who grew into a kind and wise man who encouraged us to see God in every living being we met, whether that being had two legs or four or just gills or wings.
I Come From Alabama…
Most of my life, I’ve felt some degree of embarrassment or shame when I’ve said those words. That shame is framed by a series of horrible images from my long life living in Alabama or reading or watching about it once I left: Governor “Big Jim” Folsom plastered on the cover of Time magazine, passed out drunk on the capitol steps in Montgomery; groups of black men dressed in gray and black striped uniforms and attached to each other by strong ropes or chains as they worked along highways picking up debris; white guards on very large horses and holding very large rifles ready to fire at any of those chained black men; Governor George Wallace standing defiantly (legs spread, arms akimbo) in front of a building on the University of Alabama campus declaring that no “colored people” would attend; the main street of that campus lined two or three deep with angry white laborers from the Tuscaloosa paper mill and rubber plant holding bricks/bats/boards as Arthurene Lucy was driven to class by our new white Dean of Women who was a “Yankee” from Michigan; black parents and children trying to escape many police dogs who had been told to “sic ’em” by their white handlers in uniform; black people being fire-hosed into streets or against brick walls or onto park grass by police led by Chief Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor; streets of Birmingham deserted and department stores closed because a “Negro” had been elected mayor and all white people who could have fled to suburbs some of which were being created to house such people.
So when the child molester running for the U.S. Senate to replace Jeff Sessions was accused of sexual abuse of very young girls and women, I once again felt embarrassed and ashamed. Knowing absolutely nothing about Doug Jones, I knew well enough that his opponent would win because too many Alabamians connect Democrats with all manner of dangerous and even supernaturally evil beings. My college roommate who has returned to Huntsville to be closer to her family told me she might have to move is the abusive man won–something we both predicted. But we were, thankfully, wrong. Doug Jones won because a lot of people worked long and hard talking about his positive qualities and his opponent’s unspeakable qualities. And Tuesday, December 12th, in his cogent and heartening acceptance speech, Mr. Jones told the significant truth that he could not have won without the huge turn-out by black voters in the state. He also said in a later interview that his successful prosecution of the two men who boasted to friends of helping bomb a church and kill four precious little girls was “the best work I’ve done.”
It turns out that Doug Jones isn’t just a fellow Alabamian, but he grew up in Fairfield, a near suburb of Birmingham and home to TCI (Tennessee Coal and Iron Company), the southern steel mill run by U.S. Steel in Pittsburgh. I grew up in that same Fairfield, a generation before him, so we share all sorts of local souvenirs. What his election has done for me that is a gift of the greatest magnitude is this: Watching him speak in a municipal building in Birmingham, with a young black woman and an old black man right behind him, both laughing and crying in equal measure has given me a new image to set beside all the frozen ones I began this blog by listing. This moment of transformation can’t erase or even replace all the sickening memories, but it can sit beside them, nudging them ever so slightly to the periphery of my vision.
Acting With Impunity
When we accuse someone of “acting with impunity,” we mean that person is exempt from any punishment or harm that might follow from his or her action. Our daily news is rifled with examples of individuals who have long thought they qualified for this label, beginning with the president. I’ve been thinking hard about how some of the men now being accused of behaving in sexually inappropriate ways toward women have wound up believing they warrant this impunity. Lots of words are being written about the power imbalances that often exist in work environments, making it easy for abusers to impel their victims to stay silent since professional careers are often in the picture. Almost every day, some social medium lets us hear another woman tell us her silence stems from not wanting to lose her job or a chance to progress in her chosen field.
Surely this inequity is part of the dilemma facing many women and I don’t want to minimize how destructive it has been and can be. But my focus has turned to the men who say and do the things that necessitate some woman’s keeping silent and being haunted. I ask myself “how can he do this sort of thing?” when often the “he” is someone who has contributed positively in other arenas outside daily contact with the women in his world. I’m thinking now, not of the president or Roy Moore, but of people like Charlie Rose or Al Franken or John Conyers. The word that keeps coming to me is EMPATHY.
My trusty unabridged Webster’s dictionary tells me empathy means “the projection of one’s own personality into the personality of another in order to understand him [sic] better.” My own version of this is “taking time to think what X might feel like to someone other than me.” Again, our current world is full of glaring examples of people lacking empathy, again beginning with the president. And I flash to the incredibly tone-deaf Dove soap ad or to men who accuse women of not having a sense of humor when we object to being demeaned by word or deed or how a black mother feels when her son is shot by some flustered policeman. If I do not imagine how you might feel about a given situation, then I feel no compulsion to alter that situation. Think back to the debate in the South Carolina legislature over whether to remove the confederate flag from the capitol grounds. White legislators who insisted it was part of their “history” obviously were not thinking for a second of how passing by that flag might feel to one of their black colleagues. Then think back to what U.S. Senator Lindsay Graham said on national television when asked his position on the matter. Paraphrasing, he said “George–the name of a black legislator at the time–tells me–Graham and ‘George’ are friends of many years, it seems–that it is very hard for him to go to work every morning because he has to walk under the flag that reminds him of slavery days when people like him were in chains. He says it hurts his heart. Well, if it hurts George’s heart, it hurts my heart so I am changing my position on the matter. We need to take the flag down and put it in a museum where it becomes part of history.” That statement tells me Lindsay Graham was experiencing powerful empathy, so he could no longer “act with impunity.”
So my challenge these days is to take a breath before labeling someone’s views beyond the pale. Rather, I want to listen to people whose views on a wide panoply of topics differ from mine. Ideally, they will return the favor so that they no longer ascribe terrible categories and labels to me and my values. The goal of this listening is not to agree with each other but merely to acknowledge that we inhabit different skin and cannot know the full story of what has brought us to our present positions.