O, Brother Benedict, Where Art Thou?

This month’s Vanity Fair magazine ran an article on a Trappist monastery recently built in the Czech Republic. The abbey was designed by the same architect who conceived Calvin Klein’s flagship store in Manhattan as well as various projects for Martha Stewart. Now I really do think that Trappist monks who take a vow of silence and who work very hard at making jams, honey and wine should not be denied beauty in their surroundings, after all, “God is in the details.” Muslims are required to pray five times daily, but monks who follow the Rule of Saint Benedict must pray seven times including Matins conducted at an ungodly hour in the middle of the night. I would think that an ugly environment might be more distracting to prayerful concentration than a beautiful one.

 

As I looked at the photographs in Vanity Fair I had to agree that the Czech cloister is indeed beautiful. Built in a minimalist style for which the architect is apparently known, the simplicity of design in fact, mirrors the simplicity of the lives of Trappist monks, a cloistered Cistercian order. The Cistercians were founded in the 12th century by Saint Bernard of Clairveaux who became the Abbot of the monastery of Citeaux and bade his monks return to the austere Rule of Benedict as an alternative (some would say reform) to the worldliness of the Cluniacs. My oldest brother’s name is Bernard (we call him Ben) and I have teased him on occasion by citing his patron namesake, Saint Bernard who, while giving his monks a rationale for banning female visitors to the monastery said (and I write this from memory so it may not be verbatim, but it’s pretty darn close), “It is easier for a monk to resurrect the dead than to resist temptation in the presence of a woman. If I do not believe you can do the former, how could I believe you could do the latter?”

 

Anyway, just within a few past entries of this blog  I myself celebrated the beauty of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, so I certainly would not deny the monks their chic abbey. But then, the author of the article reported that the Abbot of the new Czech monastery had meetings with Calvin Klein to discuss the robes that would be worn by the monks. Designed by Klein, the robes were to be fashioned from wool woven from the oldest loom in Lyon and “embellished with ancient gold thread found in Milan.” But then, evidently, the Abbot said something to piss Calvin off so the robes were never made and Calvin presumably flew back to his flagship cloister on Madison Avenue.  I couldn’t help but think of the photographs I’ve seen of Pope Benedict XVI wearing Prada shoes and Gucci sunglasses. The Pope’s designer wear was justified by Vatican spokesmen who declared that the papal haute couture were gifts. I remembered the Gospel story of the woman whose use of expensive perfumed oil to anoint Jesus’ feet was followed by objections voiced by the disciples who asked, “Could this oil not have been sold and the money given to the poor?” Jesus replied, “The poor you will have with you always. I will be with you for only a little while longer.” Wouldn’t it be possible for the Vatican to enroll in eBay and auction the Pope’s designer accoutrements for more justice serving causes? Wouldn’t the Pope appear more like an appropriate successor to the Petrine inheritance if he wore Teva sandals instead of Prada slippers? But then, he will not be with us always.

 

How ironic it is that the former Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger took the name of the Saint who authored The Rule, the 6th century manual for daily monastic life that has served as the guide for ascetic and cloistered religious brothers and sisters for fifteen centuries (and still does). The Rule treats everything from the requirements for prayer and service to the amount of beer each monk is allotted at meals. I have often been asked in the past if I had ever considered the religious life of the nun. I knew at a very young age that such a life was not for me. I had no desire to live in community with women even in a secular setting as teacher or nurse. I figured whatever a secular nun could do I could do without taking vows (not to mention those things I could do that they could not). And a cloistered, contemplative life was also not an option. A brief perusal of just a few of the rules of Benedict makes it abundantly clear why I would have been ill-suited to convent life.

 

To deny oneself.

To chastise the body.

Not to seek after pleasure.

Not to be given to wine.

Not to be a murmurer.

Not to love much speaking

Not to love much boisterous laughter.

To obey without delay.

 

This last, most assuredly, the deal breaker.

As a child I flunked Lent and could not keep the three hour silence of Good Friday.

Sitting on my grandfather’s porch one Good Friday afternoon, my little pious self attempted to observe The Silence from noon until three when Tommy the mailman walked by. He said, “Hi!” and then passed. I had two choices, shout to Tommy’s back and fail yet again at expressing my love for the crucified Jesus, or not respond and risk hurting Tommy’s feelings. I raised my little voice and chose the human relationship over the divine one. To take a vow of silence for a lifetime was simply out of the question.

 

My little girlfriends and I would suffer from attacks of “Church giggles” that left us shaking in our pews. One of us would point to something in church that she just knew the other would find hysterical (like an old woman's funny hat), or we’d make a funny face and it would be all over for us. As soon as any of us made that guttural throat sound that is sometimes emitted in the attempt to stifle a laugh, we were goners and would suffer the disapproving sneers of praying adults and the “tsk, tsks,” of other more restrained little girls who considered their quiet piety to be a mark of their superiority and of God’s greater love for them.

 

I awaken more mornings than I care to admit at 5:00 or 5:30 and my mind begins to race so that I cannot quiet it enough to even fall back to sleep. To attempt to quiet it enough for seven hours of daily prayer would be torturous indeed. This is the reason why I have been so prolific in this little journal of mine. I awaken and write. There is little else one can do at this hour that does not risk awakening neighbors adjacent to my own walls.

 

The contemplative life of the cloistered nun would have been as contrary to my personality as Maria Von Trapp’s. I could well imagine my own Mother Superior and seasoned nuns singing about me in the courtyard of the convent:

 

“She climbs a tree and scrapes her knee,

Her dress has got a tear.

She waltzes on her way to Mass,

And whistles on the stair.

And underneath her whimper

She has curlers in her hair.

I’ve even heard her singing in the Abbey!”

(which in my case, no doubt, would have been “Subterranean Homesick Blues”).

 

No, I could not have adapted to such a life.

Though I might have tried for a little while, had the habits been designed by Vera Wang.

A Home in the World

Recently, I read an article on the life of Walter Benjamin, a German intellectual who fled Germany for France and was interned in a concentration camp for “boches,” along with Hannah Arendt, Heinrich Mann and others. They were subsequently released and many fled Europe. But Benjamin refused to consider that he would never return to Paris, his beloved adopted city. In 1940 Hitler’s army entered Paris and the Franco-German Armistice was signed. One of the articles required the French government to “surrender on demand” anyone the Third Reich wanted extradited to Germany.  Benjamin and others attempted to flee France towards Spain by crossing the Pyrenees. The elder Benjamin, often out of breath and tiring, made it to the Spanish border with other exiles only to be told that their transit visas which would have taken them from Spain to neutral Portugal, had been canceled. They would be escorted back to France, which would mean certain extradition to Germany. Rather than live in a world where there was no hope for him to return to Paris, where he would experience further humiliation and loss, he swallowed some of the morphine tablets he brought with him and died the following morning. Had he and the other refugees attempted to cross the border one day earlier or one day later- the embargo on transit visas lasted only one day- they would have crossed safely.

 

As I read the article, I came across this paragraph:

 

“…the intellectual advantage of not being at home in the world [were] offset by the subterfuge and pretence to which the pariah must have recourse…for behind the compliant and optimistic façade of the grateful migrant is a constant struggle with despair of themselves- since deep down they do not believe that their misfortune is a result of political events outside their control, but the result of some mysterious shortcoming in themselves, a defect in their personalities, an inability to maintain the social appearances to which they have so long been accustomed...[I] have never accepted the idea that the present is simply a site of eternal return for all that has gone before, or that the possibility of renewal lies [only] in meditating on a dismembered past.”  Michael D. Jackson

 

I suppose this paragraph was stunning to me because of the image it created “of not being at home in the world.” All of us have experienced this at one time or another; those moments when our personalities or our perceptions seem so unique that we can find no place for them to “fit.” We walk around in the world as if separated from our very selves.  Our actions and thoughts seem so unlike all else we see about us that even we feel as if we watch them apart; moments in which we experience ourselves as so misunderstood that we want to shout with Bob Dylan’s Thin Man, “Oh my God, am I here all alone?”

 

I have been known to defy others’ expectations of me and know the somewhat perverse pleasure it brings; the response it evokes. "Yeah, I study religion, but not for the reason you think!"  Sometimes I drink, sometimes I cuss. I am not bound by society’s repressive rules regarding sexuality. I dress like a freak in my basement clothes and cowboy boots and people stare. I got my first tattoo at an age when most women are beginning to settle cozily into the ordinary. I am irreverent and gleefully boisterous and laugh (and sing) out loud in public. I shock in the classroom just to get a response, to shake up, to stir something in young minds often already numbed by powerful cultural shaping. And sometimes because of that, they come to me in their moments of “not being at home in the world.” Perhaps they recognize in me the pariah in themselves. Or perhaps simply a place where they know they will be embraced in the midst of their defiant difference.

 

There are both poignant and painful moments when alienation seems to characterize our existence and yet, the longing is to belong, not by conforming to societal expectations but despite our nonconformity; and perhaps even because of it. The longing to belong is not of the type that insists that everyone “likes me,” nor is it even a need for a particular kind of acceptance or (heaven forbid), approval. It is rather, and simply, the human need for recognition of self and of our expression of that self. For many the challenge and the task is to walk the tension wire that exists between a life lived as one of the defiantly different and/or the life of the pariah. Most often what is sought is not an entire “home,” but simply a place in the heart of another person where it is safe simply to be.

 

The heart of my best friend has provided that place and has been in my life, the single most important balancing pole on the wire that exists between accepting myself as a unique character and despairing of myself as the pariah. She is always the sanctuary to which I go where I know I will not be alone; where I always belong. There is no one on this planet who knows me as well, or loves me as well as she. She knows my secrets and my outrageous acts. She knows me better than I know myself. She knows my goodness and my cruelty; my vice and my virtue; my sins and my acts of heroism. And she loves me both in spite of them and because of them. She has been my champion and the one who will not allow me to get away with excuses or denials or self-destruction. She has never accepted for me “the idea that the present is simply a site of eternal return for all that has gone before, or that the possibility of renewal lies [only] in meditating on a dismembered past.”  We have walked with each other and held each other’s hand through the most painful moments of our lives, and the most joyous. We have feared for each other and rejoiced for each other. We have laughed and cried until the tears come no more. We have crossed the ocean and the Seine together; we have crossed the passages of womanhood together. And we have created for each other a place in the heart of another person that is as a home; a place where it is safe simply to be.

 

The Twenty Commandments of Dating

And the woman sojourned forth unto the mountain top and came upon a burning gardenia bush that was not consumed by the fire. And a voice cried out from the gardenia and sayeth unto her, “Take off thy Jimmy Choo three-inch strappy spiked sandals, for the ground upon which you stand is holy. And Lo! I bring thee tidings of great joy (the Voice mixed Her myth-a-phors) for unto thee I giveth the Law. No longer shall thee stumble in the presence of those who would tarry forth with thee into the Shadow of the Valley of Dating. Heed my Law before thou goest forth. And it shall free thee from the attention of idiots and scoundrels. And it shall bring you peace.”

 

And the woman sayeth unto the Gardenia Voice, “But they shall not listen. The women date all manner of men who do them dishonor. Whom shall I say sent me?”

 

And the Gardenia Voice sayeth, “Tell them ‘She Who Is’ sent thee.”

 

And the woman knelt and made an offering. She lit a Carolina Herrera scented candle, placed her Fendi bag on the altar of the Gardenia Voice and made of it a burnt offering.

She inscribed the Commandments on her Kate Spade papers and descended the mountain and went back from whence she came. And all the women gathered around to hear of the Law given to her that day from the Voice of the Gardenia.

 

The Twenty Commandments of Dating

 

I.  Thou shalt not cooketh for a man unless (or until) thou already loveth him.

 

II.  Thou shalt not goeth forth on any “pity dates.”

 

III.  Thou shalt not date a man who owneth a Recliner.

 

IV. Thou shalt not date a man who asketh thee to have a drink and then sayeth, “Your place or mine?”

 

V. Thou shalt not date a man whose gold chains setteth off the airport alarms.

 

VI.  Thou shalt not date a man who cringeth at the mention of the word “feminist.”

 

VII.  Thou shalt not date a man who telleth thee how to drive.

 

VIII.  Thou shalt not date a man who weareth a pink Izod shirt with blue and white Seersucker pants.

 

IX.  Thou shalt not goeth forth with a man who walketh on his knuckles.

 

X.  Thou shalt not date a man who loveth George Bush.

 

XI.  Thou shalt not date a man who cannot sayeth, “I’m sorry.”

 

XII. Thou shalt not date a man who thinketh that baseball is boring.

 

XIII.  Thou shalt not place thyself in the company of a man who thinketh the Dalai Lama is the President of Budapest.

 

XIV.  Thou shalt not date a man who heareth “the Voices” in his head.

 

XV.  Thou shalt not date a man who driveth a truck bigger than thy living room.

 

XVI. Thou shalt not goeth forth with a man who calleth his mother, “Mommy.”

 

XVII. Thou shalt not giveth thy phone number to a man who whistles at thee on the street and sayeth, “Oooooo, Baby, Baby.”

 

XVIII. Thou shalt cease to date a man who is jealous of thy love for thy students or thy children.

 

XIX.  Thou shalt not date a man who is a bad loser and who pouteth when thy woop his butt at pool.

 

XX.  And thou shalt not date a man who complaineth about Bob Dylan’s voice.

Candy Store

Barrel upon barrel of color and texture,

Promise of sweet satisfaction.

Surprising tug on childhood memory.

Cream-centered caramels my father

would offer for love, in place of a kiss.

Canada Mints, pink and white,

Basic to my grandmother's table as milk and bread.

Hershey Miniatures my brothers

would find in their lunch boxes, but were withheld from me.

 

I close my eyes and remember the feel of them on the tongue,

Molasses Mary Janes wrapped in yellow and red.

Squirrel Nut Zippers, a name that is still a mystery.

Cherry Red Tootsie Pops, sacrificed occasionally for

the tart experience of lime and green.

Necco Wafer attempts to find someone, anyone,

To take the black, licorice circles off my hands.

 

Sour Balls and Jawbreakers, made dangerous

by maternal warnings against choking;

Eaten carefully, lest they cause

an early descent to the grave.

Bazooka Bubble Gum wrappers;

comic strips, never understood.

A shrug of the shoulders and a pop

of the pink, sugar-coated square into the mouth.

 

I watch as she stands before the barrels

And with careful deliberation, makes her selections.

Which of these lovely, seductive confections form

the sweet memories of her past?

More modern renditions of forbidden fruit,

Gummi Bears and Worms,

Ingenious Blow Pops and

Princess Leia Pez Dispensers.

I wonder as she spies the Sour Balls and Jawbreakers

Does she think them dangerous

because of my warnings of choking

and an early descent to the grave?

 

I indulge in these side-long glances of her,

when she is unaware; awestruck by the paradox of her being.

Sweetness and tenderness, strength and confidence, at once.

Beautiful girl who is no longer a girl.

It hurts to look at you.

Love so fierce, I know the heart of Mother Bear.

 

I am shaken from my reverie.

The call of the candy barrel rouses me.

I prolong the decadent joy of choice;

Bits-O-Honey and Butterscotch,

Red and white swirls of peppermint,

holding the promise of my sneeze.

Tangy taffies; menacing tugs on the

silver in my mouth.

I unwrap a cream-centered caramel

and return to the memory of my father. 

And feel his kiss.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

In an alumnae publication, I read this week that Tom Chappell, founder of Tom’s of Maine, has endowed a professor’s chair at Harvard Divinity School. Chappell received a Masters in Theological Studies from HDS in 1991, the year I entered my MDiv program. The Chair is to be named The Richard Reinhold Niebuhr Professorship of Divinity and will focus on values and ethics. Richard R. Niebuhr is a member of perhaps the most distinguished theological family in America. His father was H. Richard Niebuhr and his uncle, Reinhold Niebuhr. But despite or perhaps in spite of this heritage of intellectual giants, Richard distinguished himself apart.

I celebrate this endowment by Tom Chappell because I celebrate the life of Richard Niebuhr, my teacher.

 

Elisabeth Schussler-Fiorenza gave me the tools to deconstruct patriarchal religion; she encouraged a strategy for biblical interpretation based on liberation; she provided me with scholarly content that greatly informs my own teaching and course material; she was my advisor, my mentor and my model.

 

Ralph Potter introduced me to Aristotle and encouraged my reflection and writing on forgiveness and Christian social ethics.

 

Elizabeth Spellman gave me the opportunity to study and ask the questions of suffering.

 

Francis Fiorenza filled the void in my understanding of Catholic theology.

 

Carter Heyward expanded my understanding of Christology.

 

But Richard Niebuhr fed my soul.

He was the teacher I loved.

He was intrigued by the same “big ideas” that intrigue me; the dignity and value of human life; virtue and nobility; good and evil; the nature of beauty and the questions of ethics.

In his class, we read beautiful books; Moby Dick and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee, Biographia Literaria by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Nature of True Virtue by Jonathan Edwards, The Critique of Practical Reason by Immanuel Kant.

 

In his class we were exposed not only to the ideas he loved to explore, but to the man himself. His intellectual honesty in the classroom became so intimate at times, that those of us who were privileged to be witness to it, often felt that he left himself too vulnerable; that he bared his mind and soul on the carpet for all to see. In his class my imagination soared, my intellect was stretched, my humanity was touched.

 

In one of the courses I took with him, I had the opportunity to be a part of his weekly class discussion group, which immediately followed his one hour lecture. That semester these were the only classes I had on that day. I commuted from Northern Rhode Island to Cambridge and utilized four modes of transportation; I’d drive my car to the nearest MBTA train station, ride the train for an hour to Boston, get on the subway at South Station and ride underground and across the Charles to Harvard Square and then walk the rest of the way to the Divinity School. Total time, one way, was approximately two hours. On those days when Richard’s class met I’d commute a total of four hours for two hours of class. In the last year of my program (’93-’94) Boston broke their 100 year-old record for snowfall with 96 inches in one season. One week, when a particularly nasty storm was predicted, I suggested to my son that perhaps I could crash in his dorm for the night (he was a freshman at Harvard that year and lived on the perimeter of Harvard Yard). In the end, I stayed with a classmate (no doubt to my son’s unexpressed relief), but so unwilling was I to miss one of Richard’s classes, that I would have been willing to camp out in a freshmen dorm. Instead, I trudged through the snow in Porter Square to make it to class on time.

 

Richard’s intellectual integrity was matched by his unfailing generosity in the classroom. He honored every student comment, every contribution and every thought.  One day when we were discussing Coleridge’s ideas on the primary and secondary imagination and the task of the poet, I raised my hand and asked a question. Richard paused, looked at me pointedly and said, “What a good question.” He shifted his weight from foot to foot and said, “That’s such a good question.” Yet again, he stroked his chin thoughtfully, “What…a…wonderful…question. I’ll have to think about that.” And in that moment, he made me feel as if I was the most intelligent person in the room, simply by asking a question. On the way out of class that day, fellow students actually slapped me on the back and said, “Wow. Way to go,” the academic equivalent of a pat on the backside on the football field.  

 

In a paper I wrote on Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, his concluding comments included the statement that I had a “perspicacious mind.” I ran to my dictionary. I was grateful for this much needed affirmation and I treasure the remark. 

 

When it came time to choose my faculty reader for my MDiv Senior paper I did not hesitate to request Richard Niebuhr. I highlight the word “request” here. Students must ask a professor to be their reader, but the professor has the right to approve or deny the request. When Richard agreed to be my reader for the year, I was overjoyed and terrified at once. When we met in his overstuffed and rather dark office to discuss my paper, he’d ask if I’d mind if he smoked his pipe. I never did. He asked difficult questions, he demanded clarification; he expressed concern over this paragraph or that.  One day after meeting with Richard, I also met with the ThD candidate who served as my second reader. I related to Cynthia (with some exasperation) how tireless he was in pushing my thinking and my writing and complained a little about his demand for perfection. Cynthia said, “And I suspect that’s exactly why you asked for him.” And she was right.

 

Richard Niebuhr is the only professor to whom I have written in the years following graduation. Six years ago, following his retirement, I sent him a rather long email through which I shared the experience of having been his student. I placed myself in context, told him what courses I’d taken with him and that he had been my reader but followed all that by telling him that whether he remembered me or not was irrelevant. Let me be a faceless student, but let me share with him what he and his classroom had meant to me. I received no response for over a week and thought that perhaps he was away, or feared that he was ill. Then his response arrived. In his reply, he apologized for having waited so long, but admitted that he waited because he could not think how to respond to “your impulse to write with such generosity of spirit and magnanimity of heart.”  It was so like him. There I was sitting at my computer, reading his email, my intention only to have recognized him as teacher, scholar and gentleman and he, in his fashion, was giving honor to me. Ever true to his nature.

 

So, thank you Tom Chappell for ensuring that this famous man’s humane and scholarly legacy will live on. And thank you Richard Niebuhr for being that man.

The Feast Day of the Guardian Angels

Once upon a time there was a baby girl born on the Feast Day of the Guardian Angels. She had hair as white as snow and eyes like blueberries (her father told her so). And after she was born she was taken to her father.  He already had two little boys and even though he loved her right away, he wasn’t quite sure what to do with a little girl. Then they whisked her away to the nursery. Her father waited and waited to see his wife emerge from the delivery room, but he saw nothing but doctors and nurses running in and out. Finally, he stopped one of the doctors and asked if there was something wrong. The doctor said that the new father should not hold out very much hope for his wife’s surviving the birth. The placenta was attached to the lining of her uterus and would not expel. She was experiencing excessive bleeding and was in danger of toxic shock from the placenta. 

 

Inside the delivery room, the mother was surrounded by nurses who began to pray. The mother feared death, but not for herself. She feared leaving her husband alone with three small children and a new baby among them. So she prayed to the woman she thought might have the power to help her. She called upon Mary, the mother of Jesus and promised her that if she survived, her daughter would love her. She dedicated her daughter to Mary and vowed that a small piece of her daughter’s heart would always belong to her and her son, and that her daughter would teach people about him and his way of peace. And then, the mother prayed what might have been her final Act of Contrition, a petition for the forgiveness of her sins. After repeated attempts to reach a surgeon, one was finally contacted. He rushed to the hospital and extracted the placenta surgically. The new mother survived. Throughout the hospital the news spread that a new mother had almost died that night.

 

And the baby girl grew into a child. And she loved Church more than anything. She loved the smell of Church; the light; the music; the mystery. She loved the saints; St. Agatha, St. Joan and St. Anne. One night, when she was seven years old her mother took her to Sunday Benediction and she sat very close to the altar and was swept away by the beauty of Church on a cold New England winter’s night. The candles, the music and the magic enthralled her. She was hypnotized by the priest’s gold and red vestments as they swirled around the altar spreading the smoke of incense. Round and round the altar he moved. And the little girl thought to herself, “He is dancing with God. I want to do that. I want to dance with God.” And the mother watched the little girl and nurtured her love for Church and God.

 

Throughout her young life the little girl heard of the night of her birth and how her mother almost died. She was glad that her mother hadn’t died. That would have been too heavy to carry. It would have hurt too much. And her brothers might have been mad.

But she wasn’t told about the promise.

 

It wasn’t until the girl was a woman of 34 that her mother told her the rest of the story; of the prayer and vow she had made to Mary on that night; the Feast Day of the Guardian Angels.

And the woman is a teacher.

She does not swirl around an altar, but in a classroom.

And yet, she dances…

It Balances on Your Head

…just like a mattress balances on a bottle of wine.

  Your brand new leopard-skin pillbox hat.

          Bob Dylan, Brand New Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat

 

Just a few things I’ve tried to balance in my head the last coupla days….

Like a mattress balances on a bottle of wine.

 

by the way… Bob Dylan has some of the most nonsensical lyrics in music. And yet, when I hear them I actually think I might know what they mean. Must be because we were lovers in many past lives and we know each other so well. O for cripessake, allow me my harmless little fantasies, please.

*Every day Starbucks stores all over the country remove the morning pastries, wrap them up and donate them to local food shelters. Baked goods or stem cells: the options are the same, to throw them away, or put them to good use where they can help people who need them.

George W. Bush: Take a freakin’ lesson.

 

*A few weeks ago I watched the All-Star Baseball Game. I might have missed something, but was the Roberto Clemente Award actually given to, uh…Roberto Clemente??

I’m not lazy. I’ve done web searches. I’ve checked mlb.com, the NY Times. I've asked men at Starbucks and cannot find the answer anywhere. If Clemente was posthumously awarded the humanitarian prize named for him, does that mean there is NO ONE playing Major League Baseball today who is deserving of it? And isn’t it a little like awarding the Nobel Prize to Alfred Nobel? The Edgar Prize to Edgar Allen Poe?

 

*The other day I was doing a short introduction to feminist theory in my class and presented the feminist observation that for most of recorded history society has been organized as patriarchal. A young man raised his hand and said, "Well, there have been societies led by women."  First, I pointed out the distinctions between matrilineal, matrifocal, and matriarchal and then said, "And those are the exceptions aren't they? There's a reason why we call examples like that exceptions. If this entire room represented the history of the social and political organization of the human race and we wanted to allow for a representation of societies that were matriarchal that space would take up this much room on the wall [and I took my chalk and drew a tiny little dot] and the rest of the wall, would represent patriarchy."

Sometimes you don’t need a whole picture to paint a thousand words.

Sometimes all you need is a chalk mark on a cinder block on a sea green wall.

 

*Tuesday evening I had dinner with a friend. We ate at a restaurant that advertises $5 martinis during Happy Hour. I ordered a Dirty Martini (straight up, extra olives please) and when it was time to pay for the drink the waitress told me it was $8. I mentioned the Happy Hour special and she told me that martinis are $5 only if you drink them at the bar. What? It costs THREE dollars for you to walk the damn martini from the bar to the table? Tell you what, I’ll carry my own dinner from the kitchen to the table and you can knock four bucks off my bill.

 

*The next time a straight person tries to convince you that homosexual orientation is a choice, ask them to wake up tomorrow morning and “become gay.”

 

*I wonder what would happen if a foreign military invaded and occupied the United States, erected barricades around its cities, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, DC or Charleston, SC and did not allow its citizens to enter them. But they did so, they said, with all good intention; the U.S. government is unjust they said, in need of reform. It has a corrupt leadership. I wonder what the response from Americans would be. Surely there would be those who, most affected by this government’s small tyrannies would welcome the change; who might hope that this new regime would bring an end to their poverty or suffering. But there would be others who would fight the occupation to their last breath. And we would not call them insurgents. We would call them patriots.

Sometimes the other person’s shoes are very uncomfortable indeed.

 

*This past Sunday as I spoke to my 88 year-old mother, she was voicing a small complaint when suddenly she stopped and gleefully and child-like she exclaimed, “Oh! Louise! I have to tell you!”

And she proceeded to tell me that a few weeks ago during a wind storm, a cactus plant, which has not had flowers in the nine years she has owned it, was perched on a table on her outside porch and fell to the floor. The pot broke; the cactus lost some sections of leaf. She walked to the store, bought a new pot and transplanted the cactus. Last week there appeared on the cactus at least twenty pink blooms with many more buds emerging.

Sometimes when we fall down, we come up better!

(But this doesn’t mean it’s the reason we fell down to begin with. There’s a difference between a consequence and a reason…. Ok, here I go again).

 

*I worked with a woman at Starbucks a few months ago who had a particularly bumbling morning. She kept dropping things and spilling things. At one point she exclaimed, "I'm having such a bad day! God must be mad at me." God, save me from a god who gets mad at me and determines that my punishment should consist of my spilling Mocha Frappuccino all over the floor.

 

*And why is it that when something bad happens to us, it's all our fault, but when something good happens to us it's a gift from God?

Look, either He [sic] gets the credit and the blame or neither.

 

*I watched three seagulls play in the sky yesterday. They flew in a spiraling pattern, one taking the lead and then another. It was a leisurely gliding on the currents not a frenzied, frantic flight. They circled and circled in constant synchronicity. And as they circled and spiraled they also advanced in height and distance. I watched them in this dance until they were out of sight. I wonder, why didn’t they just fly in a straight line towards wherever it was they were heading? But no, the spiraldance went on and on. Now if anyone reading this is a biologist or knows the scientific reason or cause for their pattern, please don’t write to me or comment below. My query was a rhetorical one. I don’t want an answer. Do not suspend my belief or destroy my wishful illusion. I want to believe that they were playing; this little trinity in which I took so much delight…

 

*On the first day of class, I sometimes offer my students a few questions to share that are hopefully non-threatening. They don’t have to stick their academic necks out to comment on a reading or the course content, but hopefully they will hear the sound of their voice in my classroom and it won’t seem such a frightening thing later. One of the questions I sometimes ask is, “If you could live inside someone’s mind for 24 hours, whose would it be?”

A student once wrote, “Professor Doire’s…but only for an hour.”

Some of us, Lester, just don’t have a choice.