O Western Wind,

When wilt thou blow

That the long rain down can rain?

Christ, that my love were in my arms

And I in my bed again.

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I’ve no idea where that poem came from. A friend dictated it to me, and I can’t find the source. I’ve not forgotten those words, so fervent a call for a return of lost love, and a reminder that winds mark our days.

As I write today, winds have been howling over the oceans and threatening Florida and the Carolinas with devastating fury. If we were living in the ancient world, we’d know the gods were punishing us for our sins and we’d be searching our souls for what we’d done to deserve the torrents to come. We are, however, smarter now, and we don’t give supernatural meaning to everything that happens. Thank you, Science.

Still, powerful winds have blasted our continent, and we are forced to attend to their gusts. Storms can turn over everything. They remind us we are vulnerable to killing forces, nasty gales of an angry climate. We are weak in the face of a torrent out of control, and no match for such horrific energy. I’m not one to pretend there’s nothing to worry about. Those winds bring suffering.

Wind has long stood for change, a reminder that all things evolve, even me. I must get older and lose youthful exuberance, and so must you. Dreadful storms of war can come. A peaceful town can be hit by bombs, just as an innocent garden can be swept bare by gales. Interruptions by unwelcome change can be unpleasant, even horrendous, and the wind symbolizes all that comes despite our dreams of peace.

I have a safe place here, so I’m viewing the winds outside today with no rancor. In fact, restoration can happen on a windy day — maybe our thinking is inspired, or our dreams awakened, or our decisions enlightened with clarity. A storm ‘clears the air,’ we like to say, inviting the new and beautiful. It’s time to credit a windy day with praise.

Our town stands surrounded by desert, where the wind loves to rule, so I submit and accept. I’ll walk in the gusts and let it muss my gray hair, amused by the complaints of the busy people who dash into a calm room straightening their coats and smoothing their hair. Not me. This blast is a way to enjoy a natural moment I can’t control. My opportunities to revel in a natural setting are few: I can’t hike or bicycle or swim anymore. So the wind is my ocean, my forest.

Even with miseries from storms, this morning I can let myself think about fictional storms, like the tempest in Shakespeare bringing survivors to frolic on an island, or the whirlwind that brought God’s presence into the Hebrew mind. In addition, storms are exciting settings for struggles against the elements that are riveting in books and movies, like The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger, about Hurricane Grace and a nor’easter. Such upheavals in nature set creative imaginations on fire.

For prophets and poets, a cyclone can bring visions, like the chariots of fire that appeared across the heavens bringing promise. I like that biblical symbolism, so powerful and loud. While our tornadoes destroy with noise and fury, these amazing chariots come with an assurance that we can overcome (a phrase I love) and survive.

A gentle wind called spirit, which mystics have known as the source of our insights and energy, is altogether different, a spirit from the natural world bringing us closer to the infinite. Some seekers pray with an intake of breath because it contains the power of the Divine they seek. Wind of that kind contains holiness.

Anne Lamott, in her new book Somehow, tells of being hurt by an undeserved insult, like being blasted by a storm. After much soul-searching, she finds within herself “the still point of the turning world,” as TS Eliot called it. After a time, she saw that “the thatched roof of me had blown off,” and, “There I was, on a small plot of land inside . . . breathing . . ..” I like to think that in a bad storm we can find a ‘still point’ within us.

Winnie the Pooh loves a blustery day, and we see in those whimsical illustrations a furry bear and a little boy holding an umbrella as the wind pulls them off their feet. A wise Gopher advises them to leave the Hundred Acre Wood because it’s a Windsday, he says. Instead, Winnie the Pooh goes about wishing everyone a “Happy Windsday!” and proceeds to live his life protected by an umbrella.

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Happy Windsday!

Archy, the cockroach, spends his time in a newspaper office and uses a typewriter after hours to comment on life. He’s unable to work the desktop computer, but he’s quite adroit with typewriter keys. I’ve had to add capital letters to his message, but he has his own opinions. He can readily spot an arrogant candidate up for election. Here’s his latest, written for the news reporter to read in the morning:

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— A lightning bug got in here the other night, a regular hick from the real country he was, awful proud of himself.

— You city insects may think you are some Punkins, but I don’t see any of you flashing in the dark like we do in the country, he said.

— All right, go to it, says I. Mehitabel, the cat, that green spider who lives in your locker and a friendly rat all gathered around him and urged him on. He lightened and lightened and lightened.

— You don’t see anything like this in town often, he says.

— Go to it, we told him. We nicknamed him Broadway, which pleased him.

— This is the life, he said. All I need is a harbor under me to be a Statue of Liberty.

When he wore himself out, Mehitabel, the cat, ate him.

— Archy*

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Archy sees egotism and names it. He knows a prideful braggart for what he is and warns against candidates who feel superior — who consider themselves special and like to brag. Self-important lightning bugs get gobbled up, he teaches.

We find this lesson in children’s stories, in fables from ancient literature, and in sacred texts. It seems we need to hear it over and over because we forget our lessons. Usually we’re unaware that we’re showing off as we pretend we’re modest, but there can be an Archy watching behind the scenes — a wise teacher who reminds us that we’re human and need a lesson in humility, like Jiminy Cricket, who pointed out to Pinocchio that he was untruthful.

The role of teacher is sacred. They come in all sizes, as Jiminy and Archy demonstrate. They can be wizened old grandparents, sitting with pipe in the corner of the room, or a vivacious auntie like Auntie Mame, who took a tidy, obedient boy and gave him a lesson in how to have fun and understand dishonesty in wealthy neighbors. At any rate, we need someone who tells us the truth, and helps us when we need redirecting. I had a wonderful seventh-grade teacher, Miss Miller, who stopped by my desk as I was writing and turned the paper so I could manage to write easily with my left hand. Her silent lesson changed my life.

Failure is a great teacher. I failed at a first marriage. I failed at a profession I coveted. I failed as a driver, twice. Once the ego gets smacked upside the head, we learn. And there’s so much to learn in the time we have. After failure, I’m a better driver and much wiser about my talents, and even, I hope, a better partner.

Roz Chat’s memoir Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? recreates her struggles to care for aged parents, both of whom were proud of their accomplishments. Mom was a school administrator, Dad an academic scholar. In old age they became difficult and demanding. As their only child, Chat had to cope with their enormous needs. She doesn’t minimize how hard it is to deal with self-important lightning bugs. Her story and cartoons are poignant but also funny, making the book a masterpiece of literature, in my view.

Great comedy is made of self-important characters who need the wisdom of teachers to set them straight. I’ve found some glorious ones on TV over the years. Frasier Crane is a self-important psychologist who would rather speak of his own issues than listen to people with problems; Frasier had a wise teacher in his father. Archie Bunker berates his wife because she can’t see life as he does. His children try to teach him, and their efforts are funny but never successful.

We have many smart-ass lightning bugs living among us now. We’ve seen them trying for the power to rule the world. For those who attempt to be the Statue of Liberty, exposure and humiliation are ahead, as Archy knows. When powerful people believe themselves to be superior, it seems life has a message for them — a fall from grace, a wound of failure. Like the emperor who wore no clothes in the parade, it’s dangerous to believe the praise. Those who do are liable to find themselves naked in front of reality, embarrassed and foolish.

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* from Archy and Mehitabel by Don Marquis, 1916

Who would have thought that Dewey, Arizona would enrich my life? To my friends in San Diego, a move from the blue Pacific, from civilization, was unthinkable. They assumed San Diego was paradise, but for me paradise didn’t matter anymore. I had to see a new landscape. I had to see Arizona.

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In Dewey I found change, and I needed change. The urge to move away from the familiar landscape where I’d taught and divorced and raised children was in my thoughts every moment. I wanted to run away from all that didn’t matter much anymore — a lackluster job, a familiar routine, the furniture of everyday. I ran to stay alive.

On my last days in San Diego classrooms, my Hispanic students understood my need for change and encouraged me to leave. I imagine they knew what it was to trek away from home. They presented me with a poster that read, “Make like a banana and split!” That encouragement softened my sorrows at leaving them. I still miss Pauline and Lillian and see them in memory all these years later.

It's like a rebirth to have to make a home in a new land. As a single woman I had to find my way on new streets, locate new services, endure shocking weather. On one memorable day I set off on a snow-covered street and noticed no other cars on the road as the flakes fell around me. Wouldn’t it dry up in a minute? I barely made it home, and when I did I couldn’t manage the driveway because of snow and ice on the hazardous incline.

The good will of neighbors saved me. They never laughed at me, but they smiled a lot. They were Midwesterners relocated to the Arizona sunshine to play golf and enjoy retirement, while I was a California native who’d never been in snow. This is what I’d wanted, and I met pronghorns, enormous clouds, silence, and people who loved rodeo.

Besides San Diego I’ve lived in Claremont, in Berkeley, and San Gabriel, where I grew up. None of these California towns had snow, but they had colleges, safe streets and even a historic Mission. They had palms and eucalyptus, orange trees and pink bougainvilleas — sweet for growing up, but I needed a new landscape even though I had no idea what living in Arizona really meant. Somehow, a contrasting land offered the bracing air of expansion for me.

Before Dewey I’d moved to Berkeley, where the vibrations were of protest, competition and wild individualism. The first day I arrived I fell over the cane of a blind man, landing flat in the crosswalk. Falling seems to be my way of coping with a confusing setting. I stumble, drop down, and see the view from below — if I’m not injured and need to be carried away. Since that day, I’ve been rescued from falls by friends here in Arizona more than once, lifted and cheered by hearty strength that saves me.

Living as a stranger in a strange land is perilous, inspiring, and scary. From the incidents above you know I don’t do it well. But new landscapes have opened and revitalized my soul. After Dewey I remarried and moved to Prescott, where I found Thumb Butte, a cozy library and the courthouse plaza. The local paper was as new to me as a monsoon.

Kathleen Norris’s experience in the Dakotas, where she chose to go in retreat, is the subject of her memoir Dakota: A Spiritual Geography. She writes, “The region requires that you wrestle with it before it becomes a blessing . . ..” Thinking at first that the landscape was barren, she found there a place that became beautiful in its emptiness, offering solitude and room to grow. That’s my experience too, a place that was at first bewildering became essential.

I’m aware that being forced to move away from a familiar landscape can also be punishing. Some immigrants must choose to walk away from family and home so they can survive. Their migration can break their hearts, and their estrangement can destroy confidence and stability. Their difficult choices are made out of necessity; mine have been out of a need for restoration, and I recognize the privilege in my free choice.

I was a muttering child, a bad sport when new family plans disturbed my day. My mother would confront me with her usual maxim, “Brighten the corner where you are!” I think she knew it annoyed me. I would never use those words today, but I did have to learn to enjoy my new corner of the world — Dewey, a landscape of quiet ranch land and a farm that sold homemade coffee ice cream.

My parents taught me values that would make Benjamin Franklin proud. They paid their taxes, voted, and saved for a rainy day. They were hardworking. They sacrificed leisure to get things done. Because I follow their teachings, I’m honest, trustworthy, frugal, and tidy.

Even though I’m heir to those American values — brought to our shores by sober Puritans — I’m more appreciative of other ways of being as I creep into old age. I can appreciate Americans who are different from me. Indeed, I like to be around people who color outside the lines, who change the narrative, who shock and criticize us.

Perhaps I enjoy those people because I can’t break any rules. I’ve rarely stepped over the line, or smoked pot, or driven too fast, or failed to appear when called. Back in the past, when couples at a summer party stripped and jumped naked into a swimming pool, I stood by, unable to unzip.

That’s who I am, the character who watches; the designated driver; the prude who doesn’t get in on the fun. It’s easy to blame my restraint on my parents with their noble principles, but at this advanced age I must take ownership of who I am. I enjoy writing about myself as I get to know me — the careful one, the map-reader, the observer.

Age has taught me to seek out people different from me, those who awaken me from conformity, those who inspire me and keep me from boredom. They are the laughter in our quiet, the excitement in the flat days, the spark in the bland air. In literature they are conniving servants, funny criminals, wise wanderers, models of mischief. Like Mary Poppins, they come into our lives bringing magic.

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If we’re lucky, we’ve some friends like Poppins, ready to lift our spirits. At just the right time, they come with flowers, chocolate, or dumb jokes. When I was hospitalized, Mary Poppins came with toffee and a book. Wearing her wooly cap, she walked (or descended) into the room with light and sweets. In another form, a Poppins friend came lumbering in with jokes. He made the overworked staff look up and smile.

While I’m part of the tradition of the Puritans,whose values have made us a decent, successful, prosperous country, the Poppins people represent another sort of American — the entertainer, the giver, the adventurer who jumps naked into any water that beckons. We’d still be wearing gray, burning witches and preaching for hours if it weren’t for this other, more creative, part of our culture. I’m a fan of Dave Barry, a funny writer who shakes our complacency with humor. He defines a sense of humor as “a measurement of the extent to which we realize that we are trapped in a world almost totally devoid of reason. Laughter is how we express the anxiety we feel at this knowledge.”

Critics, like Barry, make fun of us. We need their critiques. I’m thinking of the satirists, like the one who mocked our Cold War with Doctor Strangelove, and the television hosts who make fun of our politicians. Jon Stewart is a master. Their satire serves us.

Another American spirit that awakens me has come to us through our borders, back when immigration was possible for many. We’ve been blessed by them. They’ve brought us gifts of nourishment and ease in the world, their music, their energy and enormous talents. They make movies; write wonderful books, cook new foods, teach our kids and lift our heavy loads. We would be poorer without their strength and infusion of color.

As I write this morning, I’d no idea that my thoughts would take me to a political place, but I see they have. Because I enjoy our diversity, I support efforts to make immigration easier, and hope we can resolve the arguments and calm the rancor. It’s not just that we need the infusion of other cultures, which we do to thrive, but we have to offer sanctuary to suffering. Turning our backs on those at our gates is a rejection of all I know of compassion and goodness.

My parents came here as immigrants from privation and adjusted to a new language, a new climate, and some resistance. But they were so grateful to be free to farm and go to school that they became obedient, model citizens. I have complete faith in those who clamor now for admission. They will enrich us, teach us what we need to learn, and we’ll be renewed.

I’d be gloomy, quiet, and orderly without the inspiration and beauty of the newcomers, the Poppins people, and those prickly satirists. I’d be eating boring food, watching boring television, and living in Massachusetts.

I have a friend called Joy, and I like to imagine that her parents were so overjoyed at her birth that they chose to call her that. The name vibrates with such lovely happiness.

Joy is a word for those moments that send us beyond time, above the present, into another place.

I suppose alcohol and drugs are ways to find a joyful feeling. And yet we can’t go there; we can’t go into hysterical oblivion to avoid our real lives. We have to live here and now, without drugs. Joy is there, I think, waiting like a friend, a mysterious friend.

Because I can get crabby, sometimes I find myself annoyed with spiritual folks who can go beyond the present to experience joy in a kind of transcendence. I’m not one who can go there. I’m stuck here with my everyday stuff. When the present is boring or uncomfortable, here we are, charged with waiting, searching for that joy in the place we find ourselves — in the Arizona landscape, in moments of amazing surprise, or in the presence of people who lift our spirits.

The present is the place we live, and sometimes it’s hard to find joy in it, to appreciate mundane things, let alone find joy in them. The talented playwright Thorton Wilder put words to that enjoyment in his play Our Town, when Emily, a young woman who has just died, expresses how much she misses everyday stuff:

‍Wait! One more look. Good-by, Good-by, world. Good-by, Grover’s Corners. Mama and Papa. Good-bye to clocks ticking. And Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths. And sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.

I think learning to appreciate that reality is a path toward joy.

My mother wanted me to appreciate my American life and how lucky I was to be born here. She could get annoyed at me for ‘taking things for granted,’ as she called it. She’d been an immigrant child and wanted me to appreciate our home, a chance to go to school, and food. She’d had none of that. I can hear her saying, “You must clean your plate! Think of the starving children who don’t have enough to eat.” I learned from her that real life can be a gift.

My parents feared scarcity, and I’ve not known that fear. But I know fearful people. I sense in them an absence of joy, a watchfulness that invades the spirit. I’m old enough to remember the scare over nuclear war when people were so fearful they built shelters in their yards, moved far away to Australia, or made us hide under desks at the sound of a siren. We sang about joy in church, but we weren’t joyful.

The truth is that it’s impossible to prepare for all things that might happen. I like the story of the parents who went out, leaving their boisterous children alone with admonitions not to touch the stove, not to allow neighbor children to play in the house, not to open the chemistry set, and not to leave the yard. Then they returned home to find that they’d forgot to mention that the kids shouldn’t eat the daisies on the dining room table. (That’s from Jean Kerr’s book Please Don’t Eat the Daisies.)

We can’t cover all the bases. Too much careful preparation can turn into anxiety, where joy can’t emerge. For some, worry is such a constant that it’s called “free-floating anxiety,” and it brings us to our knees in panic and fears we don’t even understand. Experts have noted that anxiety is a trap in which we are caught, held from freedom to be fully alive.

Of course it makes sense to prepare for difficult times, provided we look up and grin. I wrote recently of the grasshopper who knew how to enjoy life, but now it’s time to write of the little ant who stored provisions, preparing for a lean winter. She missed living in the present, but when winter came she not only had a store of grain, but time to enjoy music, friends and family as well. (I made that ending up.) Emily’s words again:

‍Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? – every, every minute?

That’s the question I raise for the world this morning, as I sit here wrapped in a sweatshirt against the wind and missing my friend who is sick. I’m kept from fears today by the warmth of this sweatshirt, the light of my lamp, the coffee at hand — and Wilder’s beautiful words, reminding me that the present is enough.

After a long, quiet sit in his lawn chair, Larry Walters hooked forty-five helium balloons to that old chair and took off, with a CB radio, a six-pack of beer, some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and a BB gun to pop the balloons as necessary. Instead of going just a couple of hundred feet over his neighborhood, he shot up 11,000 feet, right through the approach corridor of the Los Angeles airport. When asked why he did it, he said, “You can’t just sit there.” When asked if he was scared, he answered, “Wonderfully so.” When asked if he would do it again, he said, “Nope.”

Now there’s a cure for depression that seemed to work.

I’ve been thinking about our need to relieve despair now that my age seems to bring on such feelings. For Judith Viorst, our melancholy begins with change and aging, and in her book Necessary Losses she dives into the meaning of loss in that process. She begins,

This morning I was seventeen,

I’ve barely begun the beguine and it’s

Good-night ladies

Already.

Why do I seem to remember Pearl Harbor?

Surely I must be too young . . .

Why can’t I take barefoot walks in the park

Without giving my kidneys a chill?

Her thoughtful and amusing account of aging reminds us that we’re not just older, we’re faced with innumerable serious losses — and I think that’s part of the reason for depression.

Churchill called despair the ‘black dog,’ a metaphor for an inescapable, hunted feeling. William Styron’s study of the agony of his clinical depression is called Darkness Visible, a perfect title. (He was eventually treated with antidepressants.) I think black and darkness are fitting descriptions, but for me, absence defines the suffering of depression — a sense that happiness and joy are gone. We haven’t been promised a rose garden, as the song goes, but when we meet the black dog it shocks our spirit. We expected those roses and found bad health, dreadful world events, and an empty chair.

The process of emerging from the dark storm clouds is overwhelming. So we search for a way to avoid our depression. One solution is buying a new car, a friend told me. He knew of a guy who got contact lenses, shaved his chest, put on a gold chain, and bought a Porsche. That seems as crazy to me as ascending into the clouds in a lawn chair.

Some have turned to the solace of nature, or to music, or they’ve moved away from the familiar to a new place, hoping that change is the answer, like Larry Walters and his adventure into the clouds. The Psalmists called out to God for help when overcome by despair. Religious answers seem to work for many. Instead, I look for words that tell me what I need to hear, that the suffering can be understood and named, or that it will subside. I want to read or hear words that explain, define and reveal what it means to be lost in sadness, and I hope for some answers, or understanding. Words, my balloons, matter.

I’ve turned to poetry and prayers to find solace and the energy to accept what I must, and I collect the words in a notebook. (That’s what we old English teachers do.) Several of my balloons, I’ve noticed, have to do with accepting death.

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In the dark of the moon

In flying snow

In the dead of winter

War spreading

Families dying

The world in danger

I walk the rocky hillside

Sowing clover. — Wendell Berry

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O Lord, protect me all the day long

Until the shadows lengthen, the evening comes

And the busy world is hushed . . . — An Anglican prayer

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In the midst of winter I finally learned there was

in me an invincible summer. — Albert Camus

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Writing makes sorrow endurable, evil intelligible,

justice discernible, and love possible. — Roger Rosenblatt

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I am of a nature to grow old

There’s no way to escape growing old.

I am of a nature to have ill health

There is no way to escape ill health.

I am of a nature to die

There is no way to escape death. — Buddhist scripture

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When it’s over, I want to say all my life

I was a bride married to amazement.

I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder if I have

made of my life something particular, and real.

I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world. — Mary Oliver

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As to Larry and his balloons, I read his story in All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten by Robert Fulgum. I choose to believe it’s true.

I have an Austrian background, and I’m proud of my connections to Vienna, classical music and the Habsburg Empire. After all, in past eras Austrians held power over Europe and had a place in history. They’ve produced intellectual giants like Freud and artists like Gustav Klimt — even Maria von Trapp and a setting for The Sound of Music. This ancestry lends dignity to my view of myself. I wish it mattered, but it doesn’t. It’s like having a child’s sticker on my brow — a dopey emoji.

Here’s a favorite illustration of Viennese rulers and the folly of pride: When Crown Prince Rudolph took his own life, the ceremony of burial included a procession of family to the door of the church. With a golden staff the Lord Chamberlain knocked.

“Who is it?” a friar asked.

“His most Serene Imperial Royal Highness,

the Crown Prince Rudolf of Habsburg.”

“We know him not.” The door remained

closed. Again, the golden staff knocked.

“Who is it?”

“Your brother Rudolf, a poor sinner.” The door opened.

Another famous Austrian is Adolph Hitler, and that progenitor brings me to my senses. A sinner, indeed. It seems we Austrians are short on humility, and it’s been a lesson I had to learn. For example, I was given the gift of height, and that’s a ticket to respect. I got a free ride from the students I taught and the people in my church because I look rather imposing, dominating the room. Before they knew me well, they assumed I had special talents. I’ve been seen as strong, even wise, when I was as fumbling as the next person.

For silly reasons, we endow tall people with strength and intelligence beyond that of lowly short people. One study has shown that male graduates who were six feet and over command higher starting salaries than those under six feet. It seems that taller candidates win elections over shorter ones. I’ve read that when Jimmy Carter had to debate the taller Gerald Ford, Carter insisted their lecterns be placed far enough apart that they would never been seen together in the same frame.

We find our dignity and respect in many places. Some people are convinced they’ve lived past lives, back in times when they were exceptional, before they were born into our present. They will sometimes assume connections to royalty or heroic figures. I met a restaurant server who claimed to have been Cleopatra in her past, and a chiropractor convinced he was a Scottish warrior in a former life.

It’s fun and even comforting to think of ourselves as special. People of strong self-image like me and Barbra Streisand publish entire books about their lives. Hers is much longer than mine. Confidence like that is important, unless it overtakes a true self-image and becomes arrogance. I think of the comic television characters in The Office or the grasshopper who felt he was so agile and lively he could outlast an ant who humbly toiled and saved. The grasshopper learned a lesson.

On the other hand, it’s sometimes a challenge to feel important or commendable, as illustrated in Martin Bell’s The Way of the Wolf. When the humble Barrington Bunny searches the forest for assurance that he’s worthy, the Silver Wolf appears and reminds him that he’s all he needs to be, furry and warm. That news leads the bunny to offer his warmth to a freezing mouse whom he saves with his warm body: There was no sound except that of the howling wind, and no one anywhere in the forest noticed the great silver wolf who came to stand beside that brown lop-eared carcass.

We often stumble into a feeling of unworthiness much as we want to be special — like Austrian nobility singing The Sound of Music — when we really need support from a friend. I think the silver wolf is that friend who shows up, stands beside us, murmurs support.

Now that I’m ancient, I have to take my cane for security when I’m in new territory. My cane sends a message: “Old lady coming. Look out!” That’s a form of attention I hadn’t anticipated when I stood tall over my students. Aging has taken me on a journey to a better understanding of myself and, I hope, taught me some humility. I look back now on assumptions that gave me confidence, and find a bit of the grasshopper in that tall, busy, productive woman.

Depending on my Viennese ancestry is not the way of the humble bunny, I’m afraid. Nobility and kindness come with humility and self-awareness, not great lineage or height. We need a perceptive Silver Wolf to remind us that who we are is enough.

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Some call it “sevening” — taking a day of rest on the seventh day of the week. It’s a time, I’ve learned, to be in quiet and ponder whatever appears in our consciousness. I think sevening is different from meditating; it’s more like a time of respite from all that reality presents. It doesn’t require discipline, just calm and rest.

I know that resting is a privilege and many have no chance to enjoy it, no place to be alone, no opportunity to savor, and still I advocate for it. The practice of taking a special time to rest has been part of the human story for eons. I wish all peoples could take a sevening, especially refugees on their way to the border, caregivers exhausted from their tasks, homeless people looking for a place to sleep, and the pickers digging in junk for sustenance — the too-many lost and tired to list here.

In the Jewish and Christian traditions Sabbath rest is a necessary time to remember who we are and want to be, to think about God. “Be still and know . . ..” For some, it’s a time to dream or hope, envision a reality beyond the present. Contemplatives seem to treasure the time alone as nourishment for their spirits. Reward comes with a stopping of movement in favor of stillness.

Many numbers and symbols connect with sevening. The number seven has been part of sacred traditions for centuries. Saints write that seven is an unfinished spiral, though that notion mystifies me. In medieval alchemy seven is the gateway between earth and heaven — another mystery. Some consider seven to be the number of reincarnation, of renewal. Much of this I don’t understand, but find intriguing.

I was introduced to Sabbath rest in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books about her life on the prairie. On Sundays the children of the family were made to clean up, go to church, and then sit quietly for the rest of the day! As a fourth-grader I was shocked by such a thing — and I’ve not forgotten it. Back then I thought it a dumb idea, of course, but now I wonder whether it was such a dumb idea for the frontier mother who didn’t have to cook that day, or mind the animals, or sew and clean. On the Sabbath the father didn’t have to plow, harvest or build. Sevening had merit for tired bones.

Those Ingalls children on the prairie had to learn stillness, letting it interrupt their daily lives of chores and play. I think their enforced quiet would have been the beginning of an inner life for them. It was the same for me, a gregarious, noisy child. I needed to learn to be alone and at rest. We didn’t rest in our family. It was important to be productive, to work and earn. It took measles, chicken pox and asthma to teach me to pause, rest and read.

Over time I became a constant reader who coveted time alone. We had a porch swing that was perfect for staring out at the world and reading. I loved being there and was often scolded for my lack of busyness — for not practicing the piano or helping in the kitchen. Stolen times of quiet were essential, and I think my first experiences of sevening.

We need a chance to enter another place, to drift away, to leave obligations and sit apart — inhaling new breath, viewing new sparks, hearing new sounds. For some, rituals like the Passover table, church worship and quiet retreats can provide that essential rest. These rituals offer a time to turn from experience and move our thoughts beyond work and duty, into a place separate from understanding, from the daily, from the usual furniture of existence.

Many in Prescott take their sevenings outdoors, meandering or hiking, enjoying the silence of wooded places. I don’t seek the quiet of the natural world. For me, respite comes in empty interiors — a library, a church or a studio. I can wander into a deserted public place or silent theater and feel restored. Those settings bring me back to myself, alive to the present and somehow renewed.

I’ve a friend who’s lately been taken with haiku poetry, and that led her to a book of Japanese drawings and paintings. In these prints human life and activity take place only at the edges of the pictures, leaving wide spaces empty of motion — a stillness of clouds, mountains and water. These beautiful pictures remind me that our reality is a mix of the known and unknown, of music and silence, of color and emptiness, work and rest. To be in both places is where we live.

In pale moonlight

The wisteria’s scent

Comes from far away.

— Y. Bosun

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The worst bed I’ve ever slept in was in Dolores, Colorado. It was part of our accommodation in a bed-and-breakfast there. The setting was a remote ranch, a place where horses grazed in green pastures and a lovely pond shimmered in the distance. We parked our car in silence, aware of space and quiet and tall trees at the edge of a meadow.

We found this humble hostel at the end of a deserted road and were pleased to be in a western movie. However, when we were shown our room, we spied the bed — a tired-looking thing that seemed to contain remnants of other visitors who’d lain there. It was a creepy moment. This was a serious problem, but seemed our only choice.

As my husband and I gazed upon this miserable pallet with its plastic cover over a tired mattress, our hostess walked in the room. She didn’t apologize; she stood at the end of the bed looking pleased and generous and rather saintly. There was something in her eyes that stopped me from saying anything, and I couldn’t complain to her about the awful bed.

We took this trip years ago, but the ranch, the bed and the hostess have stayed in my memory. I clearly remember the next morning. We’d accepted the inevitable and survived the night without incident, but did not sleep well. Brenda, the hostess/innkeeper, prepared our breakfast, but I barely noticed the food — a first for me. Instead, I was riveted by Brenda herself.

A young mother with three children and an infant, Brenda had a presence that you seldom encounter. This young woman’s face mesmerized me. She radiated a spiritual beauty. It belonged in a frame with a halo and felt out of place in a humble ranch setting. Or maybe that’s where such saints are found.

I instantly recognized a special person in this young woman. She seemed to embody goodness, a virtuous, spiritual, authentic blessedness. I do not often spill over with effusive praise, but this encounter left me needing words of admiration. Someone should paint this woman’s portrait, I thought, though it would not be possible to capture that glow, that perfection, unless the artist was gifted. This was more than beauty; it was saintliness.

Some people speak of the angels that guard them, keeping watch, keeping them safe. Do those angels have form? Physicality? I’m told that they don’t. Believers see them as supernatural beings with gentleness and protectiveness. They don’t stir oatmeal at a ranch stove. Brenda was her own sort of angel. She appeared in a kitchen offering her goodness to a family — and food to her itinerant guests.

Was my enchantment from that restless sleep? Was it morning hunger? I don’t think so. I was bushwhacked by a presence. My husband made no comment about breakfast or Brenda. I don’t remember what happened next, but I imagine we paid our bill and returned to our car and our trip with mixed thoughts of Brenda and the bed.

I wish I knew whatever happened to Brenda and her family, but I don’t. I must be content with a bright memory. If I’d asked her where she learned to be so beautiful a soul — and I couldn’t put into words what I saw — she would have stared at me in disbelief. All she actually did was put down her spoon and see me, listen to my words in the chaos of that kitchen. She made everything right with her presence.

I have to conclude that there are people in the world who really do seem to radiate a kind of glory. They make the moment shimmer like the sunlight on the pond in the meadow. They transform the place where they stand. They bring the calm of healing. Today I think of a local friend, Karen, a person like that. She’s been badly injured in an accident, but she sits in her hospital bed radiating benevolence. She’s not a martyr, despite terrible wounds; she’s a healer in her suffering. Because I know Karen, I’ve confidence that around the corner might be another saint.

Above my monitor here in my study are photographs of my family: my father’s six sisters and my mother’s handsome siblings, all of them survivors — people who’ve known poverty, bad luck, desertions and losses. Some are more saintly than others, but most are regular folk, keeping on with life. They make up my heritage, my story, and I’m proud of them. Saintliness appears in them at times — and in me, I suppose, and I’m grateful, but when a beautiful saint fixes your breakfast in Colorado, you’ve been touched by something beyond ordinary goodness.

Moral of this story: It’s more important to be in the presence of an exceptional person than have a perfect bed for the night.

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I’ve been watching The Crown on Netflix since that story of British royalty first appeared — from Victoria to Diana, a dreamy soap opera designed to entertain viewers like me with tales of wealth and scandal. I love those accounts of romances and castles, and I marvel at the trappings of riches. I know the scenes of beauty and ballrooms are contrived, but I still watch the stories and read the absurd newsfeeds about the latest gala, just as if it mattered.

I suppose turning to those royal narratives allows me to ignore news of cruel war, suffering children, and horrific climate events. Television provides an escape, and I’m grateful for the shows that keep me watching, though I can’t defend my looking away from situations in the world that are all too real.

Royal lives have mattered to people forever, and I’ve been pondering the reasons for our fascination. How can it be that people think royals are endowed with special qualities? Why do we rush to buy Spare, a bestselling memoir by a British prince? How can the Japanese have worshiped their human emperor? I can’t fathom such a thing or understand, but if you can watch televised football, I can watch The Crown.

We have no royalty here in America, no king who’s been trained from birth to model our values. The fact that the British support a royal family is amazing, but even we Americans find it fun to adore, even emulate, some people as if they’re better than the rest of us. We’ve worshiped sports heroes, movie stars and the King of Rock’n’Roll. Like children, we choose to endow teachers, generals, and preachers with heroic attributes. Worshiping any showy figure like Taylor Swift or Tom Brady — not to mention Princess Diana — is foolish, of course, and it’s childish to expect elected leaders to be heroes who can fix everything.

I think we’ll always long for a ruler. We hope for a person above us who stands for love over hate, peace over war, forgiveness over revenge. Such a fictional leader uses selfless judgment, negotiates with the opposition, inspires worthy projects to improve lives, and exerts power for the good. He or she is not real, of course, but an imaginary figure we find in religions or in movies with superheroes who can fly over our cities and save us from danger.

The real danger is that we might give in to our need for a superhuman leader. Our longing could lead to the election of a politician who promises the impossible despite the limits of his skills, his lack of wisdom or commitment to the welfare of the people. I think our wishful, magical thinking could lead us to choose the stupid over the wise, the colorful over the dignified, the noisy over the sensible.

When we look over the history of kings, the story is not pretty. The Caesars were cruel; the Czars were violent; the Plantagenets were foolish and lazy; the Hapsburgs were oppressive; the Hohenzollerns were tyrants; the Médicis were wicked. (That was fun to write.) It looks like royalty have mostly used their power to benefit themselves. No surprise there, we know that power corrupts.

We Americans are smug about corrupt kings because in the early days of our republic we knew better than to choose a king. Instead we devised a system to check too much power in any part of government, keeping our leaders within bounds. And we’ve codified those ideals in our Constitution. I’d like to say those laws have protected us from unscrupulous leadership.

They have not. We’ve not always been able to avoid unqualified leaders who surround themselves with people who can manipulate the media and stay in power. Such autocrats can be successful if there are not enough brave people who will oppose dangerous rhetoric and distorted truth.

Like our adoration of the royals, we can give in to manipulation. I’ve watched us admire the politician who assumes the posture of a king, speaks with the loudest voice and triggers our love for glittery settings. He can persuade us by appealing to our love for splendor with his handsome wife and son, his flashy home and famous friends. We’ve imagined him to be exceptional, to embody our vision of a royal leader.

But the flash isn’t real. His golden castle and promises are grotesque stories that feed our love of the magical, and magical thinking is dangerous. It’s as if we put our hopes into a basket and hand them over to the tallest, the loudest, the richest among us, and then turn away to watch the British royal family on television.

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John and I drove toward home from Doctor Caccavale’s office, the Arizona sun of late February glaring in our eyes. Leukemia had made my husband’s pale complexion transparent, but he chose to do the driving. I squinted at the San Francisco Peaks in the distance, noticing a sunlit dusting of snow on the two points.

The doctor told us that John had only a short time left.

“I can’t imagine what you must be feeling,” I said. The rattling of our old Chrysler annoyed me; the car should have respected the gravity of the news we’d been given.

“I’m not surprised, just stunned, I guess,” John said. “I’ve had a year to get used to this, and it begins to become sort of ... real. It doesn’t scare me most of the time.” We didn’t speak for a while, and the car clattered along. “Caccavale said it would be painless if it’s a hemorrhage,” he added, his blue eyes hidden behind his aviator sunglasses.

“I know. I think we should get Hospice right away.”

“Yeah, but I get to interview them.” John’s deep voice sounded firm now. “Can’t stand those bleeding-heart types. Better get this car checked.”

When we arrived home, I followed my husband up the stairs from the garage, aware of the effort for him. His khaki pants hung loosely from his belt, and I noticed the heavy cords at the back of his neck.

Later, sitting on the couch in front of the muted television, John frowned at the tumbler of green vegetable juice in his hand, a celery-smelling concoction developed by a scientist at Yale. While the Gulf War sparked and streaked across the screen, my husband drank part of the mixture, then headed for the bathroom, where he vomited the formula. He went to bed and seemed to have lost all energy. I called Hospice, and they reached Charlotte, a neighborhood Hospice volunteer and member of our church, who came immediately.

Arrangements were made for a protracted confinement, but in three days Charlotte awakened me from a nap. “He’s going,” she said. His breathing slowed, and he stared upward as if trying to see something. Then I felt he’d gone, even before he moved slightly and sighed into a gentle death.

I seldom felt loneliness after John’s death. Maybe it was the attentive church members, or the restoring landscape of Arizona’s north country, its mountains, multicolored canyons and electrical storms. I had his photographs, too, on our walls — as if he’d left them as messages for me, the sporting events, the faces, his visions of experience. We especially delighted in one of a very young Elvis Presley taken at an early concert.

I had been serving as minister of a small Dewey church for four years by that time, and I ended my ministry a year after John’s death. By then, the members of our little church had changed me. They had undermined my snobbery, cleared my theological head, and listened to me. I wish I’d done a better job as their minister. If I had another chance, I hope I’d give up my biases — against annoying talkers, conservative believers, self-righteous ideologues — that emerged in me during my ministry. I like to think that next time I’d have more courage to challenge the bigotry against clerical women that I’d experienced in Yavapai County.

My choice to leave my life as a high-school teacher and go to Berkeley to prepare for ministry astounds me. That I sought to offer leadership in a Christian church is an example of how we stumble into things and then figure out later what got us there. I do know I had a need to enter into holy places and learn about the religious spirit. After five years in ministry, I have a new understanding of how difficult leadership is and how many times our bumbling is the best we can offer. I’ve a bit of empathy for George W. Bush, who made awful choices that must, I hope, cause him to shudder.

John had been an enthusiastic member of our little church. He supported our efforts to help at the junior high nearby. He played the grandmother in our melodrama for Habitat for Humanity. I’ll not forget him in his old-lady costume, rocking in a chair and forgetting his lines. He cheered on our Crop Walk around Prescott too, and he helped with the cleanup on the highway.

At his memorial service, church members mourned alongside me, and their presence was enormously comforting. Being with them dissipated my grief, transforming the water of my days into the wine of recovery.

I stumbled and caught myself before I could fall. Not bad for a middle-aged walker in a desert landscape on an icy March morning. The rocky path wound through a ranchland of brown hills and tottering fences. The only signs of civilization were a nearby golf course, a small church, and some tulips growing in rocky yards.

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I trudged the Old Chisholm Trail (its real name) wearing a heavy red jacket and my husband’s blue knitted cap with ‘California Bears’ on the front. The cold air whipped my cheeks. This desert was the proper setting for a woman minister — unusual in those days. We women ministers forged modern tools, cleared old brush, spoke new truths. I felt strong and capable in this bracing landscape, a lone western pioneer.

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I was living a new life as a Christian minister in northern Arizona high country at a unique church made of wood and stone. Sacred light shone through faceted glass high in the sanctuary walls, creating patterns on us that changed with the movement of clouds. No Christian icons adorned the church walls except for a brass cross on the gray stone. The place suited me.

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I’d left a lovely city with beaches, boats and flowers, a place where I’d been a single mother, a high-school teacher, and an actor in local theatre. Something had driven me from San Diego into a religious profession. I had no family religious tradition or spiritual visions. I was an ordinary soul with a need to meet God, so I walked away from California and came to a small Arizona church. With a seminary education in my pocket, a degree in literature, a tour of raising children and high-school teaching experience, I felt qualified.

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My morning walk helped me clarify, and I liked to think I stumbled toward insights on my lone journey. It’s easy to muse in Arizona high country. The air, the clouds, the circling hawks and desert emptiness teach you to observe. The skies had a pristine clarity, and the distant Bradshaw Mountains seemed bastions of integrity. There was something newly born about this setting, as if I was the first to touch down. 

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This windy path was where I could confess my truth: I was not a traditional believer. I couldn’t and wouldn’t teach a strict orthodox Christianity using the Bible to proclaim Jesus as savior of the world, the only way to God.

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Silence. My feet touched the pavement, but they made no sound. No cars sped by, as if Arizona hadn’t come to accept the wheel yet.

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My commitment to ministry had come out of a sense that the Christian Church was on to something, and I’d set myself on a path to understand its mysteries, hoping to meet God in some way. Maybe I was inspired by the revered vocation, the robes of clerical authority. Or maybe I chose ministry to put myself in the presence of bighearted church people like Earle Dunning, a born-again fellow who seemed to live in his pickup truck. The man had soul, you could say, eyes that offer his heart.

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I didn’t belong here in Arizona among the faithful. What had I done?

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A roadrunner darted in front of me with a young snake in its beak. I stopped. Danger. The pronghorns, grazing on the open desert, looked up to stare at my pilgrim’s progress. I wanted to sit down and watch the animals, stop the momentum, but I walked on. The pronghorns went back to their grazing. The roadrunner hid somewhere with her meal.

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Stones, pampas grass and cacti were the shrubs of choice in front of the homes in this district, but a few gardeners had planted tulips. The tulip people came from verdant eastern places. They brought in fresh soil and grew tulips to transform our wilderness into Eden. I wasn’t sure what to make of their effort. Did I want the desert to look like a watered place? Even so, I identified with the tulip, a transplant. Like a proud tulip, I stood up in imposing costumes pretending I belonged.

My fitness walks sustained me for another five years while I spun thoughts about the mysteries of religion and marveled at Arizona high country, where tulips appeared in the desert, and nobility drove a pickup truck. But I continued to doubt the comfortable beliefs of churchgoers, till the stones in my path became boulders. I couldn’t see over them to make my way.

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I could no more identify with the Christians around me than I could identify with the pronghorns, and so I walked away from ministry, aware I was leaving behind spiritual revelations from untamed earth, beautiful faceted glass, and a host of faithful people.

She belonged in Washington DC, where she’d set right all the wrongs in the US government, but in our little church she created tempests. At a Church Council meeting one morning Diane stormed in like Carrie Nation let loose in a pub.

The only indication that trouble might erupt that day was the spring wind, making my nose itch, moving new leaves, sighing a warning. Inside the church, nine council members chatted amiably around a square of tables arranged at the far end of the sanctuary. To me, their minister, with their gray heads and benign faces, they looked like a gathering of grandparents. Smells of decaf and warm muffins, touched with a whiff of cleanliness, emanated from the small kitchen. I felt confident the meeting would proceed as usual.

Just as we quieted to begin discussions, Diane appeared in the doorway, startling us. A short, middle-aged woman — not a member of the council — she took three steps into the room and stood behind Pat, our choir representative. Though she wore a pink sweatshirt with a sequined pansy pattern on the front, she burst in like a courier from a war zone.

“I would like to address the Council,” she declared. Her eyes blazed behind shining eyeglasses. “You need to hear what’s gone off the rails around here. I’ve got a list of problems that can’t wait!” Hugging a clipboard to her flowery pink breast, she added, “The Council must get to these matters before our church falls apart!”

When Diane stopped for a breath, the silence left me worried — about the collapse of civility, I suppose. Would we descend into shouting?

“If this Council wants to manage a real church,” she resumed, “then you’d better see to it that enough people are on hand early on Sundays, that the heater is working, and we get some competent person on the sound system! Who knows when the toilets will back up?”

The toilets?

At the request of the moderator, I began an opening prayer, hoping to dissipate the tension. Diane bowed her head. A good sign. “Be with us this morning, O God,” I began, “as we think about the work of this church and try to respond to the needs around us ….”

As soon as I said the Amen, Jack, our chairperson, faced our sequined visitor. “We are not going to discuss your complaints now, Diane. I think you’d better leave.” And peace returned to our sanctuary.

Some months later, when Diane was elected chairperson of the congregation, the first thing she asked me was “How much power will I have?” I told her that if they could find the money, she could make changes. I don’t know whether she clapped her hands like a leprechaun at the sight of a pot of gold, but I know she’d been waiting for this opportunity to assert herself in matters usually dominated by men.

I supported Diane’s leadership, and she and I attended area meetings, where she often felt the need to give an impromptu speech. The more she stood for her principles, the more I admired her. On one of our trips to a meeting, she told me some of her history. She’d married as a teen and left home before finishing high school. After she raised her two children, she attended night school, got a diploma, and took training to become a public-health worker.

Diane campaigned to expand our church building, with a larger kitchen, a new minister’s office, and a choir room. She unleashed energy we didn’t know we had, and members added their expertise to the projects. With the addition of a hand-tooled oak bookcase, we now had a church library. We replaced conventional wall decorations with brightly stitched banners. The plastic inserts in the walls of the entry were transformed into artistic glass designs of purple grapes and golden stalks of wheat.

However, as in many clubs, sports teams and legislatures, the person who has the most ambitious, innovative ideas is disliked. The harder Diane worked, and the more beautiful the surroundings became, the more people complained. They didn’t like a progressive woman taking charge.

I regretted my helplessness to change the way people felt, and I publicly applauded Diane’s changes. Then, just when I thought the negativity was going away, our controversial change-agent took to wearing a hat to church on Sunday mornings! She’d crowned herself in a straw creation blooming with flowers and ribbons as she sat surrounded by the transformations powered by her passion.

Unlike Jesus, who chose to walk away from a hostile community, our proud Carrie Nation stayed on and remained a member of our new, beautiful church, attending every Sunday morning — in a hat.

I heard no words from God urging me forward that day as we drove upward into Arizona canyonlands. I was on my way to meet a congregation of Christians in need of a minister — a woman cleric, as out of place in the Wild West as Snow White in a fluffy gown. No still, small voice told me I was qualified. No holy utterance from thunder, either. It was a clear winter afternoon.

My husband John drove the white rental Buick while I focused on the view. Bold, confident clouds observed our car. In the distance loomed high mesas, eerie, empty. On the hillsides six-foot saguaros waved us on.

The road leveled into ranch country, and I was enchanted by the Arizona high-desert scene. It took me into childhood and western movies — cattle smells and dirt roads leading to weathered homesteads. This was a frontier setting far from urban San Diego, where I’d been a teacher before heading off to Berkeley to study religion. The idea of a Congregational Church here seemed ludicrous. What had I done?

“Can’t believe you’d consider coming here,” John said. Aviator sunglasses made him look like a CIA operative as he gazed around taking the measure of this vacant landscape.

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“You wanted to see this too,” I said. “Maybe it’ll be wonderful.”

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“I doubt it. Look around you.”

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Open, flat country unfurled as our car moved in the silence. A long row of mismatched fence-posts leaned drunkenly along the road. Horses Boarded, a sign read.

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“Boarded horses,” I muttered.

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“Bored horses, did you say?”

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“Just drive.”

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“We must be getting closer,” I said, and sneezed.

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“I see you notice the smell. I’d say that’s horseshit.”

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“I like it, reminds me of the movies.”

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“No cars. No civilization. Just horseshit.”

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John coughed, as if choked by desert dust.

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“Let’s check out the church first,” I said, wondering if I’d actually find church-goers here in a settlement called Dewey. The vista outside my window looked more suited to gunfights.

We passed an indication of human life — Olsen’s Feed Store, surrounded by pick-ups like horses at a trough. I’d never seen a feed store before. Where were we?

I tried to seem at ease and said, “The letter said four o’clock. We’ve time to see the church before we meet our hosts.”

My imagination had created a modest country church with a creaky wood floor and a steeple—a church in the wildwood, a symbol of kindness in a frontier outpost. It would have a minister’s office with a view of the distant mountains touched with those marvelous clouds. You could meet God in this country, or not. Snow White wasn’t sure of anything that day.

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“They mentioned a country club,” I said.

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“Would golfers be living around here?”

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“Golfers live everywhere.”

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A flutter of color from an American flag appeared behind some juniper trees. “Stop! I see a flag. Turn at that post office.”

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“A flag. A flag. God bless America.” He pulled over. “Go see if the federal government knows where we are.”

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Hugging myself in the January cold, I hurried to the modest building next to a trailer with a scrawled sign, “Videos for Rent.” A large woman in the two-room office told me to watch for Young’s Farm up the road. The church ought to be on our left, a mile beyond Young’s barn.

We drove on past the Blue Hills Market, a humble store with a fuel pump standing sentry in the gravel lot. A fat man leaned against the structure, his Stetson pulled down over his eyes and a pistol in his belt.

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“Something about this place I like,” John said.

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“Okay. Okay.”

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Young’s Farm, an acreage dotted with two willow trees, looked as unreal as everything else. The low farm buildings stood far away in the distance. Were kindly churchgoers living there? Where was this Buick taking me?

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“I think I see the church up ahead,” I said, and we turned left into a neighborhood of desert homes. “Or I think it’s a church. It has a pyramid on top!”

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This was not the village church I’d pictured. The bold structure of wood and stone had a pointed roof topped by a splash of colored glass. I got an impression of originality and spare beauty. We’d come to a unique place where the congregation had called a woman.

When we don’t know what’s ahead on a rural road, we go forward into strange territory, letting it reveal its secrets — at least I did. A Spirit I hoped to find was waiting, and at some level I knew it would be there.

A true story.

Serious clouds hung in the skies overlooking the desert settlement below. The only sounds to disturb the silence were calls from raptors flying high above the expanse of cactus and brush.

Nestled there, a small town seemed to be waiting. Barely a spot on the map, the place had only a post office, a Safeway, and a Sprouts Reitz store. A road, lonely and narrow, was adequate for the occasional pickup driving by.

Two tall young men decided to make that town their home. They would bring their creative spirits from the big city into that little community.

“Their little library needs a director,” said the tall curly-headed man. “I’d like to make it my project.”

“You do that and I’ll find us a church,” said his partner.

The library in the town was a converted house with a collection of books packed into its small rooms. A dusty computer sat on a table, and the floors creaked at every step. The tall affable fellow was hired, and he had a special talent for attracting elderly ladies to the library. Patrons learned to use the computer. Children were welcomed with treats, and the new librarian enjoyed conversation with any lonely visitor in need of company.

A church could be seen from the highway with its pointed roof like a beacon of hope in the high desert. “That looks like a place where we’d be welcome,” said the other tall newcomer, a handsome man with a smooth tan and shy smile. He liked churches even though it had been in churches that he’d known rejection. “I hear they have a lady minister. That must mean they’re progressive.”

“You can’t count on that,” said the librarian.

“I refuse to make judgments before we go inside,” said the hopeful one. “I could create music there.” He was a musician with enormous talent. He’d led choirs, played instruments, and made music a centerpiece of his life — along with design and art. Every year he created an exceptional decorated Christmas tree to delight their friends.

“Okay,” said the librarian. “We’ll give it a try.” The two men stood wondering if they’d be welcome. “We’ll think of the good ladies at the library. Some of them belong to the church.”

“Church people have to be nice,” said the musician. “I’m going to trust in the Lord.” So in they went, the librarian and artist, side by side, ready to meet new friends and hoping for acceptance in this unusual church.

The men enjoyed their visit and especially the charming minister, a blond woman in high heels and a clerical robe. She laughed; she told good stories, and she welcomed them warmly.

But inside the church, all was not perfect. Some church people wanted only members who were just like them. They wanted a church of white people who played golf, and a few turned away from these tall, handsome visitors who loved each other.

So the young men left that church and concentrated on their desert home with friendly neighbors. After a while they felt they needed something more. It’s awfully quiet around here, they thought. They wanted a child whom they could raise and love. In time, the adoption people awarded them a toddler named Matthew.

Their lives changed! They had a child’s room to furnish, new foods to buy, clothes and toys to find. It was an adventure! Matthew was a challenge, but these enterprising men learned to become parents before anything else in their lives. They learned to deal with schools, with playmates, with a growing boy who had a lively personality and tons of energy.

Over time, the jolly librarian hired more help to manage his new larger library. He was adored by the patrons, especially the elderly ladies who continued to crowd the stacks. He expanded programs to meet the needs of the growing town, and he gave talks to clubs in the area, encouraging everyone to read.

The handsome musician joined another church down the street and offered his musical talent to a supportive staff and congregation, and the minister’s wife took a special interest in Matthew. The church members appreciated their new bell choir, and accepted their exceptional leader with enthusiasm.

Matthew grew tall and good-looking. He learned to drive. He acquired a girlfriend and made his own way. Not a church person, a library patron, or an artist, he was Matthew, determined to stay connected to “The Dads” and create a life he chose.

As I look at the three of them today, I marvel at their amazing survival in a desert landscape that expanded with them — a credit to the town, its people, and the miracle of love.

I sat in her apartment watching a white-haired woman losing the will to live. I felt baffled and inadequate. As an experienced clergywoman, I wasn’t usually so lost. I’d been witness to several deaths. When you’re gray-haired and hold a degree in religion, you think you’re an expert on dying, but I was in new territory here.

For two weeks my dear friend, at 91, had been haunted by fear and regret—she called them her demons—and she wanted to die. In the twelve years I’d known her she’d been a wise and talented person who seemed to have made peace with the past, but she hadn’t. Some awful memory I knew nothing about had stepped into her mind to haunt her with uncontrollable images. Her fears had led to a refusal to eat, loss of weight and sleeplessness. Before this, she’d step outside into the dark every night and sniff the air, address the stars. Now she couldn’t turn off the light; she kept the radio going until morning. I watched her with my hands bound and my spirit frantic.

This tormented woman, a former choir director, lived in a tiny apartment in the lower level of a home in Arizona where the fall season was beginning to break into our hot summer. Her rocky yard bloomed with sprouts of purple iris, and the patio had two apple trees shading two green chairs. That shade was where we’d have our talks, discussing matters like Garrison Keillor’s Unitarian jokes or the disappointing leadership of George Bush. Beyond the patio was a canyon alive with cottontails, rattlers and songbirds rustling and singing. The San Francisco Peaks loomed in the distance. None of the surroundings mattered anymore. She wouldn’t go outdoors.

The only comfort I could offer in this crisis, clerical or otherwise, was to tell my friend she was a good person and remind her how she’d laughed at my cynical remarks and supported my passion for writing. She’d listened to my stories about teaching and the wonders of Prescott College, I told her. Her attention mattered when I’d needed to be heard, and her choir had been central to my life. But my words didn’t help. The black dog howled in her dreams.

While I waited for the inevitable, my life at home was chaotic. I stumbled over remembering my phone number, forgot the day and time, drove erratically, lost lists, couldn’t manage a voicemail, and — most alarming to my husband — sprayed coffee on the kitchen ceiling as I fought with a cappuccino machine. My cool ministerial persona was gone. All the while I continued to write in bursts of creative energy. What’s that about?

The patient wouldn’t leave her apartment, and we of her musical coterie took turns standing watch. I was in control of visits, the admired saint, and when my decisions were questioned I felt annoyed beyond anything normal. Alison wouldn’t accept the visitor list I created. She wanted to come to the apartment before her turn. She wanted to see the results of blood work and suggested special meds. How dare she question? Couldn’t she see I was in command? The only time I remember anger like that I felt for Alison’s disobedience was when I’d done battle with my teen daughter, who wouldn’t follow the rules.

The soprano, Connie, was the perfect visitor — modest, soft-spoken, small — as she sat bedside with her knitting. Her presence seemed necessary but at the same time was reserved. I wanted to be like that, angelic. When I was there at the apartment, I felt huge, clumsy, loud, unlike the gentle Diane (also small) and smiling Margie (lithe and pretty). I tried to be the compassionate one, a minister, for God’s sake, a model to everyone. Instead, I barged into the room with my lists.

I was invited to be at my friend’s hospice evaluation, and liked being chief witness at the bedside. I had to remind myself that I wasn’t special or her favorite, but had been asked because of my clerical title. The hospice doctor sighed and left, saying he found no terminal disease. It pained me to see the patient’s disappointment with that diagnosis, the frustration of unexplained suffering. I felt I’d failed in some way.

While weeds took over the patio, the iris turned brown and apples dropped unnoticed, I stood a hapless witness to the descent of demons on what I’d known as a contented mind. Under me, the planet wobbled, tilted and careened as I tried to find footing on unstable ground.

Until one day when the patient sat up and asked for lentil soup.

Since elementary school I’ve disliked having to do logical problems. Math? I’d rather sing. Let me dress up and playact. Tell me stories. I still prefer the artistic way of thinking over the scientific and technological. Contributions of artists to the welfare of society are enormous, and studies support the value of art to our identity and well-being.

Without creative energy to bless us we are left with the dull flatness of rational thinking. Indeed, our computers and all those research papers can be dangerous without the ethical guidance of philosophy and the truth of art. The killing fields of Ukraine are the result of brilliant scientific research. That’s evidence enough.

The cool actor Jeff Bridges agrees. In a recent interview, after he recovered from Covid (thank you, science!), he said he thinks all of Hollywood should unite in bringing joy to America through art. “We should all work together to make something beautiful.”

Artists are rare, inspired creatures who seem tuned in to some special wisdom. Could they even describe it? What must Jorn Utzon think when he looks at that magnificent Sydney Opera House he designed? It sits on the water’s edge like a giant sailing ship. And what must it be like to sing a solo in the Brahms Requiem? Where the artists’ inspiration comes from I don’t know, but the result is transforming.

I’ve learned that artistic creations can move an individual into what poets call recognition. Creations in words, color, movement, and sound can change us, bring us to see, to a new awareness. If we are content only with rational facts, we lose the truth revealed beyond flat explanations.

For me recognition comes at the end of Death of a Salesman, when Linda, weeping over Willy’s death, says “Attention must be paid.” How powerful for us to witness! I’m stunned by these moments in the theatre, an art form that I value above all others.

I don't say he's a great man. Willie Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall in his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.

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When I first saw the drama The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie I recognized that dark power a teacher can exert, and it left a mark on my soul. Even scientists have written that the original work of an artist brings forth valuable insight, bitter and sweet, good and bad, maybe God and eternity too. Those insights, I think, enrich us as much as the revelations from a laboratory or knowledge from facts revealed in serious study.

It’s well understood that art therapy is a healing tool, as explained in the article “Singing in a Choir Helps your Heart,” a study reported in Frontiers of Psychology. I’d add that the arts help us raise civilized children. In my teaching I’ve seen beautiful poetry bring teen students to recognize their feelings and realize they are not alone.

Don’t get me started on the trend to take the arts out of our schools to save money. That decision is the height of bad judgment. Studies at the University of Arkansas show that the arts in schools improve critical thinking, tolerance, and historical empathy. Most alarming, I’ve read that there’s a move on in colleges to include a warning before exposing students to the masterpieces of literature for fear the power of inspired writing will trigger psychological problems. Some say that the horrors of war, the deceptions of lovers, the stupidities of youth, the cruelties of racism are too much for young minds. I say bring it on, challenge students with the truth.

Artists seem to be wanderers. I’m drawing on studies at UC Santa Barbara and a paper presented to the Society for Neuroscience when I say that the wandering mind can find ways to play and design and hear and see what escapes logical thinkers. I’ve a cool friend who loses her keys and glasses regularly, but as she wanders the light comes and a poem emerges. We need more wanderers.

Creative artists capture our spirit here in northern Arizona. They reveal our world: a landscape of spectacular deserts, skies of mammoth clouds, a world of pines and little lakes, expanses of Native sites, canyons and volcanos. Western artists tell our stories, in native pottery, memoirs like Half Broke Horses, the humor of cowboys like Baxter Black, and the work of muralists. Our dark side is apparent too, in film and story: accounts of crude westerners who exploited the land and indigenous people.

In Gretchen Reynolds’ studies for The New York Times she writes that participation in creative art alters our genes and makes us truly happy. So it’s time to pick up the clay, turn on the music, grab the paintbrush, and get busy!

Dear Gramma: You are really nice to send me the red truck. It goes fast and crashes really wham. I love you Gramma. You sure know your trucks.

There is magic in thank-you notes like that one, a magic that spreads love and kindness in ways we can’t imagine. I’m talking about making people happy who are in need of a boost of good will — and that’s everyone.

I wrote a thank-you note recently to the rehab hospital where I was obliged to stay for three weeks. The help I got in that confinement was enormous and I had to thank two therapists who gave me comfort and hope.

I’m not sure why, but I think gestures of thanks seem to make more of a difference when written down. It may be because the writing can be saved and revisited, a reminder that once we responded to need, or gave a present, or felt grateful for help. We can hold that note in our hands, preserve it with a magnet on the refrigerator, or put it on the bulletin board in the office. I’ve seen them on the walls of car-repair shops and in doctors’ offices — and they stand on my desk at home.

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Here are some examples of notes that have mattered enormously to me and others:

• I received a note from someone who was a guest at the birthday party I gave for myself. What a surprise to find that note in the mail!

• My husband and I received a written thank-you for a dinner we cooked for someone. We still remember it, and that was 13 years ago.

• I was thanked for designing a church worship service for a woman who was baffled by the task. She wrote such lovely things about my help.

• From my little niece: “Thank you for the ring game and the coloring book. I like them both, even though I do like the ring game.”

• After my book was published I got notes like this: “I’m a 33-year-old pastor, a bisexual woman, serving in my first call … I loved reading about your reflections on ministry life … like you, I saw the beauty … of community … I just wanted to say thank you for your book.”

• A person I barely know stopped me as I was doing my fitness walk to tell me that her daughter wrote a thank-you note to a surgeon “for saving my mother’s life.” Then the surgeon wrote back! This mother, whom I don’t even know, was so touched that she had to stop me and tell me about it.

• My late friend Janer Eldridge was so moved by the Master Chorale’s Brahms Requiem that she wrote a note of thanks to Dennis Houser, the conductor. He read it aloud to the Chorale, weeping.

• The disaster of September 11 inspired some beautiful thank-you notes from firefighters to those who fed them during their ordeal.

• To the newspaper that provided for a child to go to camp, the child wrote: “Dear Editor, When I think about camp, I think about when we swam …. We saw a river and we went in it. We told stories and I was in one. Then after that we ate marshmallows, then we went to the cabin. My worries were gone.”

• Here’s one from Mark Twain to his minister after his daughter died: “[I’ve learned] how you came all the way down twice from your summer refuge on your merciful errands to bring the peace and comfort of your beloved presence, first to that poor child and again to the broken heart of her poor, desolate mother ….”

• George HW Bush wrote many thank-you notes. Here’s one he wrote to Goldie Hawn: “Dear Goldie: Am I enchanted? You bet. Thanks for giving me such a relaxed good time at dinner . . .. You were a fantastic dinner partner. You made me feel welcome and totally at ease. I didn’t even have to unveil my 12-point plan for dealing with Gorbachev. Thanks for being so darn nice!”

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I borrowed some of those notes from my sister’s book The Art of Thank You. I thank her.

‍“My worries were gone ….” I like to think written gestures of thanks make a difference even in the grand scheme of things. It might be that a tiny act of grace resonates through time and space, changing loss and fear into hope and joy.

“Human beings have an infinite capacity to ignore things that are inconvenient.” — Jan Karski

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I unlocked the door of my classroom, entered the generous space, and put on my glasses. Over my shoulders I wore a dark-blue sweater with fat buttons. As I remember that long-ago day, golden light shone from windows along the east wall, and an Audubon bird print, captioned with a phrase from Whitman, “I sing myself,” greeted me from the bulletin board.

Outside, California’s sunny skies seemed a utopian vision, perfection designed by a happy god. The chaos of the Seventies was muffled by birdsong, and spring breezes scattered the particulates in the Los Angeles basin. Birds entered my consciousness a lot that week, and for some reason bird images crowd my memories now. I write about the past with sounds of birdcalls and whispers of flight in my ear.

Cheerful students crowded in the door behind me, oblivious to the uproar in the  streets, where other young people marched for civil rights and in protest of the Vietnam War. My students were not part of that impassioned cohort. Here, safely indoors, the girls wore bright red lipstick and the boys sported buzz cuts. They carried their literature books and sat in assigned seats.

These young teens of prosperous white America were a special group. They’d been segregated from less advantaged students — even though new equality legislation had been passed — and they exuded a sense of entitlement. They seemed incapable of protesting injustice or war, let alone incubating such thoughts themselves.

I walked to my desk and pointed to a picture on the bulletin board of an armored medieval knight. “Can you turn your thoughts to the Middle Ages this morning? Just look at this knight for inspiration.” I tried to sound like my mentor, Mrs. Miller, a wise and tough teacher, a hawk, scrutinizing and confident.

“If you ask me,” Claudia said softly, regarding the knight, “he was awfully short.”

I turned to the record player beside the lectern and we listened to Alexander Scourby reciting lines from The Canterbury Tales, stories told by a motley procession of pilgrims progressing through medieval England. Those scrappy pilgrims were not like the tidy group of white Americans in front of me. My students looked alike, as if they’d been hatched from the same clutch.

Some weeks later I sat in a café with Maxine, another teacher, enjoying an afternoon away from end-of-year tempests at the high school. Like my oblivious students, we’d sequestered ourselves in a bookstore, a place we thought had a British pub look — dim lights, lots of wood, quiet. Max and I sat apart from noisy reality that day, distancing from a world of racial turmoil and the horrors of war. We could have been two aristocrats oblivious to the armies at the gates while songbirds twittered.

My slender, fashionably dressed companion never took a false step in those high heels of hers. I gathered teaching ideas from her like a hungry sparrow pecking at the crumbs she dropped on my plate.

“I overheard Brad call me Bird Legs!” I said. “I think he meant me to hear. He said it just as he was leaving the classroom. I should have ….”

“Bird Legs? I’d have the twerp drawn and quartered.” Max blew on her black coffee and smiled. “Bet he didn’t like the grade you gave him. We can’t pamper those athletes.”

“Too late for executions,” I sighed, fingering the copy of Sophie’s Choice I’d purchased. “Brad’s probably at UCLA now, signing football contracts. Besides, he’s right. I do have bird legs.”

“No you don’t. Birds don’t have knees.”

Looking back at classroom and bookstore, I wish I’d been more courageous and taught America’s bitter history along with tales of medieval wanderers. I wish I’d combined an approach to literature with accounts of present battles for justice and lynchings I knew to be real, and, inspired by Whitman, been more true to myself. Hiding behind my well-dressed colleague is not a memory I’m proud of.

What would have happened if I’d chosen to teach the truth about antiwar movements and struggles for civil rights? What would I do in education today, where critics confront school boards, advocating for sanitizing the curriculum? They hope to expunge material about racial injustice and accounts of the American story, which is complex and violent. Despite my timid response in the past, my hope is that I’d have the courage to confront those critics who must not succeed in censoring material that is truthful and vibrant.

Whether or not we are mothers, we all have mothers. Some have been great, some not so great, and some downright awful: think Medea. Some classic mothers serve as witnesses to suffering: think Angela’s Ashes.

I’m forever looking for books that clarify and illuminate what it is to live in families. I’ve collected some good reading about mothers and family life. Many of these books are entertaining and insightful. (I prefer books that don’t hammer me with too much advice.)

Erma Bombeck wrote a series of essays called Motherhood: the Second Oldest Profession. She makes mocking comments on pieties about the selfless mothers we women are supposed to be. She knows we need to accept who we are as mothers, and when we fail we are in good company. In fact, the company of the human race.

Bill Bryson had a rather un-present mother. You know the type: distracted, forgetful, more interested in thinking deep thoughts than keeping track. Bryson wrote The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid about growing up in the ‘50s, and several scenes feature his mother. I remember one in which she insisted on continually serving him cottage cheese, a dish he hated.

Bailey White is a favorite of mine. In her book Mama Makes Up Her Mind and Other Dangers of Southern Living she gives us little  moments of her life in Georgia when she was an unmarried schoolteacher living with an eccentric mother who thought nothing of putting house guests in a Murphy bed that folded into the wall without warning.

Nora Ephron was a screenwriter, journalist and comic genius. Her recent death was a shock to everyone who enjoyed her movies. Her piece on her mother in I Feel Bad About my Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman is wonderful. It’s writers like Ephron who wake us up to our selfishness when she admits her own.

In Judith Viorst’s little book Love and Guilt and the Meaning of Life she gives us  some insights into motherhood and guilt that are perfect: “It is all right to leave your sick child with a sitter to go to a PTA meeting or to a save-the-whale meeting or to the drugstore to buy a heating pad. It is not all right to leave your sick child to go to a movie or out to lunch with friends or to the drugstore to buy eyeliner.”

Guilt, I think, is one of the gifts my mother gave me. I’m not criticizing, mind you, I’m just saying. Why is it that when we feel guilty we often hear our mother’s voice or see her watching from behind a tree?

The play Driving Miss Daisy takes us in its gentle way to new insights about bigotry, even in sweet mothers. Miss Daisy spoke politely and softly, but she permitted her black chauffeur — her only real friend — to remain subservient to her because she lived by absurd, artificial conventions.

We understand Miss Daisy because we are like her. We carry our biases with us and pass them on to children. That’s one of the dark sides of motherhood. To be better than Miss Daisy is to be fully aware and critical of our culture where it is limited and cruel — a moral challenge of the highest order, I think.

The truth is that mothering is really hard.

An Arizona woman, Nancy Mairs, is a radical Catholic who with her husband raised not only their two children, but also took in lost children over those years. Her book Ordinary Time: Cycles in Marriage, Faith and Renewal is one of my treasures.

Of late political conservatives have raised a terrific hue and cry about ‘family values.’ These words are general to the point of stupidity. After all, the followers of Charles Manson identified themselves as a family. In an ideal world, Daddy hasn’t lost his job at the copper mine, and Mummy has never attempted suicide. Dick hasn’t just come out of the closet, Jane isn’t scheduled to have an abortion in the morning, baby Sally wasn’t born with cerebral palsy, and certainly a scrawny kid from a nearby detention center — no relation at all, not even a member of the same race — hasn’t recently moved into the spare room and started classes at Dick and Jane’s high school.

Mairs adds that those of us who want a genuinely new world order — equitable, inclusive, tolerant, pacific, filled with jokes and festivals — must develop our ideas about family in the light of a new family order. What’s at stake here is not the world as we know it, she says, but the world. Period.

After the divorce, I had to move with the children away from our grand hilltop home with its pool, its tower, and its memories. I bought a house for us down on Jackdaw Street with money from the divorce settlement. My new home pleased me. It was still in San Diego, in an older district where I had a teaching job and we had friends.

We moved to a tattered old house on a street with sidewalks, tall trees, and a church across the way. I’d always loved churches; I could walk to the Mission Hills shops, and nearby houses looked as if they’d been there forever with their dark porches and wide front steps. The neighborhood made me feel settled in a reality I could understand, an ordinary place.

My husband needed to move away from the hilltop too. He had to live differently, be more authentic. He settled in a lovely beach town north of San Diego and established himself as manager of a small hotel there. I sensed a relief in him and knew he was happy in his new situation.

My Jackdaw house was where I could be authentic too. As I stood in the doorway I felt excited by the empty rooms with their traditional look. I could build a life here, supported by the two venerable avocado trees in the backyard. The house had a large kitchen, dirty carpets, a noisy staircase and a spot for Daisy, our spaniel. My furniture would fit, even my upright piano.

I found generous support from my friends who gathered to help me move in. That afternoon was a gleeful occasion, even celebratory. I was surrounded by fellow parents from our children’s school who rallied to help with the heavy lifting.

“A rite of passage,” Ingrid proclaimed to no one in particular as she lugged a heavy load of clothing up the stairs.

“The end of an era,” William added, carrying the heavy coffee table into the living room.

My son Billy, in his leather vest, watched the activity, hoping for a role in the moving project. I grabbed his arm, “Hey kid! Could you find a step-stool and hang the bird feeder outside the kitchen window?” He took the feeder, pleased to be asked to do a real job.

“You’re looking good, Elaine,” Susan called from the laundry room. “What’s that old joke about losing two hundred pounds with a divorce? You look less dowdy, I guess, less unraveled.”

“I feel quite raveled, in fact. And I’ve never been dowdy!”

After an hour of arranging and unpacking, I sat with my friends and watched Iris polish my oak coffee table, a heavy relic I cherished. Her hair tied back with a kerchief, Iris revived my table as if she were making all things new, polishing with a gravity befitting the start of an unchartered life.

“Watching Iris work on that table will be my most treasured memory of this day,” I announced. “But we need to stop a moment and let Pat play the piano. I want to hear the ‘Hokey Pokey.’ It’s become my theme song.”

“One little divorce and you’ve become a tyrant,” Pat said and went to the piano. We sang:

I put my left hand in; I put my left hand out,
I put my left hand in and turn myself about.

The music died away; we ate a picnic supper; and the work-party ended with the departure of my tired friends.

Now, in my own home, the days and nights would be mine. Everything would proceed according to the needs of two grade-school children, a compliant spaniel, and a schoolteacher mother on her own. I knew I was lucky to have a place suited to us when there were many single mothers not so fortunate.

While Billy and my daughter Mia entertained themselves outside, scribbling on the sidewalk with colored chalks, I slipped out the back door to take a walk around the block. Daisy joined me unleashed that evening. The quiet of Jackdaw Street did not require leashes.

When Daisy and I turned the corner on our return — and my new house came into view — it looked like a welcoming granny whose embrace I could feel. “Daisy, we’ve done a good thing here. We’ve come down from the hill to Jackdaw Street, named after a bird.” I went on, lecturing to my dog, “There’s plenty of symbolism in that name: freedom, flight, nesting. This place will be my birdhouse.”

Daisy understood. I blew my nose and imagined contentment and avocados in this new setting, all my own.

I got out of the car in an unfamiliar part of town, a shabby area. A gust of wind pushed on me, telling me to get back inside. Instead I headed for the door of the bar carrying three-year-old Mia. I took five-year-old Billy by the hand, determined to remind my husband he’d promised to watch the children while I went to my meeting at the preschool. Looking back now, I know the children were my necessary shields from a truth that awaited me inside the bar.

Allen would be enjoying himself over a martini. He’d be with his friends, perhaps singing along to the folk ballads, a 38-year-old fake surfer. With no regrets for spoiling his fun, I stepped inside with the children.

It was too dark to see anything at first, but I could hear recorded music — a woman singing “Killing Me Softly.” When couples on the dance floor emerged from the blackness, I saw men holding each other close. The children tensed. I wanted to run away, but the children were clinging to me, keeping me in place — a tall mommy with a little girl in her arms and a small boy at her side, like refugees just off the boat.

Allen was at the bar with his back to us, his large bulk dominating the room. He sat slumped in a Hawaiian shirt, a bloom of cheerful color that made him look like an overweight tourist to the islands. The array of bottles reflected in a mirror behind the bar seemed welcoming as we approached, Billy’s hand sweaty in mine. I could smell a sweet deodorant odor.

The bartender, a smiling, curly-headed man in a tank top, stepped back, watching me. The sight galvanized my fury at Allen’s failing to come home and the bar’s revelations. But mostly I hated myself for being stupid, a child mother holding her toy children.

Addressing Allen’s flowered back, I spoke loudly enough to clash with the music, “Did you forget your promise to babysit tonight?”

My husband turned around and stared. He stabbed out his cigarette, grabbed Billy, and walked out into the evening. I followed and watched him approach his car — a chocolate-colored convertible at the curb — put Billy inside, and drive away. For all I knew, they were off to Honolulu.

Mia and I followed in our station wagon, heading toward home, our pretentious place resting on a perch overlooking the Pacific like a watchful seabird.

Inside, we could hear Julie Andrews singing, “The hills are alive with the sound of music,” coming from the television in the family room where Billy sat alone, watching the screen.

At the kitchen doorway, I was held back by the sight of a furious Allen standing at the sink unnaturally still. He’d stolen my rage for himself. Every detail of the kitchen pulsed: the painted dancers on my Austrian wall plates, the copper trivet on the counter, the carrot mural on the cupboard doors. The room was a frenzied gallery of malice.

Allen reached for the electric coffee-pot on the side counter, jerked it from the wall plug and raised it above his head. He was about to throw the pot of boiling coffee at me. I couldn’t move.

Suddenly, the lid from the carafe crashed to the floor and the steaming brown liquid poured down Allen’s gaily colored back. Every drop fell in slow motion, a languid stream, scalding him in a hideous punishment for this night’s humiliations.

Allen dropped to one knee, heaving for air like a man at the end of a race. I watched him hold the counter and lift himself to his feet. The overhead lighting glared; the coffee smelled; Allen moaned.

Mia and Billy appeared beside me. I touched their heads. “Daddy's hurt himself. It’s okay. I need to clean up here. You stay out of the kitchen for now.” Neither child protested. They returned to Julie Andrews, the Austrian hills, and “a song they have sung for a thousand years.”

Allen never saw a doctor for his burns, but they healed and he acted as if nothing had happened. I didn’t take the action you’d want your heroine to take — initiate a divorce and make my way as a brave single mother. Instead, I waited for somebody to step up and fix my life.

My anguish, however, led me to a therapist, where I talked about Allen and me and God, all of it. I read about women who run with wolves, women who love too much, women called codependent. Over time, I looked at the figure in my mirror and put on eyeglasses. “You mean I could proceed on my own?” She nods and starts to cry.

I divorced, took the children and left the aerie on the coast for a home I chose, where I could see anything coming from a long way off. I felt as free as if I’d been trapped in a cathode tube for 20 years and then released into full-color, hi-tech, wide-screen reality.

Standing in the doorway of my college dorm room, Diana looked like a visiting angel.

“Can I rest here a minute?” she asked, pale and smiling.

“Of course!” I said, and turned from my typewriter on the table my father had built, fitting it across from my tidy bed. An orderly setting.

“I’m not feeling well,” Diana said, moving to sit on the bed. “I’m washed out. I occasionally have these spells. You are so kind.” I’d never been called “kind” before and felt I’d been addressed by a saint. “This is … the result of my polio …. If I could lie down.”

Polio! Our neighbor boy had been a victim of polio. We kids could hear his cries from our backyard. Those sounds made such an impact on my soul they stole my good sense. “How long since you’ve, recovered?”

“Since high school. I was stuck in bed for a year.” She smiled. “I found that memorizing Shakespeare helped.”

Shakespeare! I loved all things literary. I was eighteen. It was the Fifties.

The stately gates at the entrance to the campus kept us removed from the realities of postwar America, and we frolicked in a California college wearing white gloves and frothy gowns, far from that other America, where other young people were fighting a real war in Korea.

Diana and I shared a larger room the next year. I turned in my assignments on time while she let hers languish in heaps on her desk. I made excuses for Diana. I helped her walk when she needed my strength. I tidied her room and carried her laundry. She responded with flattery and spiritual truths I’ve since forgotten.

The brilliant images in Diana’s conversation became mine. I find them now scattered through my writing and language like rosary beads. When I try to recreate our conversations, they turn into comedy, but I can’t laugh, not after a last meal with Diana’s family that sucked the enchantment from everything.

“Mother is so controlling,” Diana told me one day while she brushed her hair “She’s coming out here again in that ridiculous Cadillac to check on me. I can’t tell you what a strain it is to see her. Unfortunately I need the meds she’ll bring me. Thank God Daddy’s a doctor.

“That’s an irony,” she said, smiling.

Diana smiled a lot. I turned to it like a pansy to the sun.

We talked often of our graduation, when we’d have to separate. Diana made the June event sound tragic, and I dreaded it too. Worst of all, Diana told me she’d be going to a nursing home after graduation. A nursing home! Evidently the paralysis had advanced without my noticing. I thought about saying, “I’ll take care of you! I’ll teach and support you,” but I didn’t. I wanted my upcoming marriage and those long-awaited sexual encounters. Did I mention this was the Fifties?

At my last supper in Diana’s home in the Los Angeles Hills, I sat with her family in a formal dining room. I told them I was sorry Diana would not be able to live at home any more. “I hope I can visit her in the nursing home if it’s in this area.”

“Elaine,” her father said, “Diana’s not leaving here for a nursing home. I don’t know what she’s told you, but she’ll be fine.”

I looked at Diana for an explanation. She met my eyes as if to say, “It’s all right. Forget it.” He added, “Diana’s polio has not left her needing more care.”

‍I don’t know what she’s told you. I stood and left a table laden with tempting food and drove away in Mother’s car back to my home on the flatland, crying all the way.

In the days that followed, we graduated into separate realms. Diana didn’t seem concerned about the incident. She wrote a poem for me when I married.

I became cynical. I snapped at imperfections everywhere. Behind new defenses — gates as high as those of our college — sarcastic bullets flew from me. I don’t like to think of what that scorn may have done to my students when I began to teach.

Diana married the son of the president of an eastern university. When her first child was about to be born, she called and asked me to be with her through the birth. Unable to deny her, I hurried to her side. The baby boy born that night is the man who contacted me these many years later to tell me that post-polio syndrome had claimed her life.

Darkness and light suffuse my memories of my Diana days. I hope they’ve turned from hurt into wisdom as I revisit events that formed my character with such power.

The sunny yard, shaded by a single orange tree, is dotted with a path of triangular stepping stones. My open sandals slap a noisy approach to the front door. I hear Judy call, “It's open!,” and let myself into her house, just as I used to when we were kids and she lived around the corner on Deerfield Avenue.

It’s a comfort to be back. I’ve come away from my children and husband to this respectable suburban home to meet a friend from childhood. Our lives have taken different turns: mine into the adoption of two children; Judy’s into a domestic world centered around her two sons.

She meets me in the front room wearing a violet-colored dress, her short brown hair in familiar curls around her face. She has straight bangs, as always, creating a line above the parenthesis of curls. She looks like the ten-year-old I remember.

“So good to see you again, Elaine!” Judy says, her appraisal of me as thorough as mine of her. “You’ve got long hair now. You look really, uh – modern.” She makes no effort to embrace, and I feel I’m in the company of a matron.

“Modern? Not a bit,” I assure her. “Under this sundress beats the heart of a librarian . . .. “Oh, this is such a nice cozy room — reminds me of your folks’ house.”

The curtained living room feels out of another era, as if there might be a pump at the kitchen sink. I settle into a chair and look around at Judy’s efforts at country décor, a maple sideboard, three pieces of upholstered furniture and a pillow with a rooster design.

“Thanks!” Judy says. “I hear you’ve two children. Aren’t they fun?” Her words sing with a lilt we used in high school. Fun is not a word I’d choose, but I don’t interrupt her song. “I’m so glad we had this second one last year. Our first, Aaron, is growing up. Let’s have tea!”

Judy sounds like a happy housewife. So far my try at motherhood has left me feeling despair. I wish I was this happy mother, insulated from chaos by a respectable dress, quaint home, and sleeping child.

My hostess disappears into the kitchen while I move to the sofa. This scratchy couch feels like Grandma’s — made to last a thousand years.

After we’ve arranged the tea service, Judy looks across the table at me, her face motherly. “Tell me what adoption involves, Elaine. I really can’t imagine it. We had the children naturally, of course.”

“Oh. Well. I couldn’t get pregnant.” My voice is soft. “So, we’ve adopted hard-to-place babies, mixed race.” Why do I find those words difficult to summon? I’ve forgotten my story. I’ve no idea why I’m here. “That’s about it.” I move in my seat, pulling at my skirt. “Oh. Mixed race.”

What do I say to that? Sounds like we’ve adopted barbarians. Crossing my ankles, I look away from Judy, wishing I could pull back those heavy draperies and smell the yard and the orange tree.

I clear my throat. “Do you get lonely sometimes, being at home most days?” I try to raise my voice to sound normal. “Staying home now, I find it a bit hard to feel a part of things. There’s so much going on, so much change in the world. I wish I could –”

“Oh no!” Judy interrupts. “I try to stay away from the mess in the world. I don’t read the papers, global warming, campaigns, all that. Here’s where I want to be.” I notice her polished nails. How does she manage those nails? I’d been biting my nails for years.

I’m face-to-face with my opposite number. For every ambiguous confusion I feel, Judy has a blissful certainty. She chatters on, “My life is my children and my husband. I’ve found church and handwork help fill the time.” She raises her teacup and takes a sip.

I take a gulp of tea too, mirroring my counterpart. “Yes. Sounds nice,” I murmur, sensing my tiny voice. The bland cookie tastes like sawdust.

“George is thinking of getting a boat!” she bursts out, reaching for a cookie. “You seem so quiet today, Elaine. I can barely hear you.”

Judy laughs, for reasons I can’t comprehend, and stands. Then I watch my cheerful, violet-adorned hostess take a bottle from the sideboard and pour a dollop into her cup. “Do you want a touch of brandy in your tea, Elaine? Or bourbon? I sometimes like to indulge in the afternoons.”

Soon I retrace my steps on the lawn-stones and begin the long drive back to my home on a hot, bright day. Right now I’d prefer the wintry wind and rain of some offshore island in turbulent northwestern seas. This is a landscape for children.

To get wisdom is better than gold;

To choose understanding is better than silver.

Pride goes before destruction,

And a haughty spirit before a fall.

‍

I lifted those words from Proverbs in the Bible, and I heard them first in church. I know churches don’t provide perfect wisdom, but some passages in Proverbs teach simple truths that glow in repetition.

I’ve needed a place where decent people gather since I was a teenager, and the church was that place. It was the church that held my hand, signed necessary papers, and ordained me on a May afternoon with a party. It was also a place where I learned ancient wisdom from sacred literature like Proverbs. As I look around now, I think we need more wisdom in the world. “To get wisdom,” says the writer of Proverbs, “is better than gold.”

The heart of that wisdom in Proverbs is in the warning about pride: “A haughty spirit goes before a fall.” I envision that ‘fall’ as collapse, failure. Our pride will take us there because we humans love to feel important — to seem special — and we drive ourselves toward that fall. For example, we white folk treasure our status with a “haughty spirit,” and that pride has brought suffering to untold numbers of people. I can only hope that we heal that divide before our fall.

My own haughty pride blossoms everywhere in such things as my love of praise, my longing for first place and an appreciative audience. The grace of humility is smothered by such entitled pride.

Shakespeare centered some of his tragedies, and his histories, on that lesson from Proverbs. His King Lear died estranged from his daughter because he was too full of pride to know how much she loved him. “I am a very foolish, fond old man,” he realizes. In Shelley’s poem the statue of the haughty Ozymandias, King of Kings, is only “two vast and trunkless legs of stone” standing in the desert, an abandoned relic of a haughty king.

Haughty prideful spirits are evident in folks like Donald Trump, who buys part of a beautiful seacoast of Scotland over the protests of the people who live there, and plans his golf course, putting his own desires ahead of decency. “A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches,” seems an appropriate reminder for him.

I’m troubled, too, by haughty preachers inour churches, where I once stood in a pulpit.  Some self-promoting preachers have enough pride to fill all the wasted deserts with broken statues. They don’t speak words of humility Jesus might have spoken, but, to quote Proverbs, they speak “the way of fools.”

Do our churches move us toward humility? I can’t say, but when people gather and call upon God I think a spiritual presence can be awakened, and a holy presence could provide the energy needed for a renewal of kindness. For dedicated people, there’s a lot of good work to do: speaking truth to power, resisting religion in our schools, standing for fairness to people of all sexual orientations, and speaking up for our planet. Such a moral center “is better than silver.”

Of course there are wise, golden leaders among us still. I encounter them everywhere. They are teaching and writing and singing the truth. I find humility and wisdom in teachers like Jon Mecham, in novelists like Louise Penny, and in essayists like Sarah Vowell, a funny truth-seeker. I learn wisdom from them and others, and from sacred literature, too. As a writer I can’t do better than, “A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold.”

If you’ve known humble people, you don’t forget them. They never threaten you, or want what you have — your good looks, your snazzy car. They let you go first. They speak words of praise to lift your spirits. They take you seriously and respect your ideas. They admit their mistakes. I love the scene in Downton Abbey when as the Countess Maggie Smith  stepped aside and allowed a servant to take first prize at the flower show. An unforgettable moment of humility for a haughty woman.

To you who are trying to be humble, I wish I could offer rewards: an afterlife in the bosom of Abraham, a star in your heavenly crown, a journey to God when the Rapture comes. But I can’t offer those prizes. I don’t believe in those religious rewards. I can offer, though, two other compensations for the humble spirit: growth of the soul toward serenity, and a life well lived.

I am the daughter of immigrant parents who came to America in the early part of the Twentieth Century. My mother was brought here at age five from Austria, a German-speaking country where her father, a garrulous, gentle soul, had failed in his efforts to start his own businesses.

My father was brought here as a child of six from Russia by German parents who’d been farming Russian land in a program to build up the economy. They came to America to escape the rise of warring Russian factions that threatened the lives of peasants like themselves.

Both families came with no English and little money.

They came through American ports without the sort of barriers we see today for immigrants — no armed Border Patrol, no cages, no waits in the heat, no rejection for their lack of status. As white Europeans they were allowed to come to America legally. Later their parents became naturalized citizens as soon as they learned how to master the rules.

Both families eventually found their way to California. As a young woman, Mother wrote a column for The Los Angeles Times about her life. I treasure her poem about her father, my Grandpa, which she wrote at age 18. It was published in her column “By the Way:”

‍

‍I shall always remember

My father coming home

From work

On bitter, cold nights,

After a long ride

On his bicycle.

And the way

He used to put newspapers

Under his coat

As a shield

Against the wind

And cold . . .

‍

My father’s family was deserted by their father. He abandoned them in favor of life in San Francisco with his musician friends. His six daughters and wife were then in the hands of my father, the only son. After my parents married the sisters lived with us, or were farmed out. I recall our small house in a Los Angeles suburb that teemed with women who laughed a lot, sang a lot, and sometimes conversed in German. Despite my father’s huge responsibilities, I knew him to be handsome, fun, and generous.

My parents met and married in Los Angeles, and after my sister and I were born we moved to a town outside the city that was quiet and beautiful, dotted with orange trees. We were never marked as unworthy immigrants by the neighbors, even though the war in Europe raged in those years. Germans were our enemies, and our neighborhood play often included contests with toy guns to kill the Germans. We thought of ourselves as Americans ready to defend our country as we made fun of Hitler with his odd mustache.

Our home had a European flavor. The dining room was decorated with little paintings of German scenes and people in Austrian peasant dress. We were taught from a book of folk tales with pictures of children from European countries — and we recognized the names Mozart and Bach. We heard the German language spoken, though were not taught to speak it. We sang German songs like “Ach du Lieber Augustin” and the lullaby “Guten Abend-Gute Nacht.” I remember the mysterious vegetarian food at a family camp with other German immigrant families. Looking back, I’d characterize that German group as communal and earthy. They sang a lot too.

I sensed a sadness in my father about the War in Europe and was reminded of it again in the recent documentary on PBS, The US and the Holocaust. We viewers witnessed the Nazis attack and murder Jewish men, women and children, exterminating millions. My father never seemed to sympathize with the Germans, but he didn’t condemn them either. I knew enough to be silent on the subject and never asked about the concentration camps and the murders. What would he say?

Mother had a wartime sorrow too. Her older sister, Louise, was left behind in Austria when the family immigrated. Louise was caught in the Austrian bombing devastation, and I remember sending CARE packages to her during that time, a humanitarian arrangement that allowed us to help even though Louise was in a German sector.

My grandparents also maintained silence about a war in which their homeland had become the very definition of evil. I can only imagine what they must have thought as we kids stormed the empty lots with our toy weapons, chasing Germans. They didn’t condemn our play or explain the war to us. Instead, we sang “O Tannenbaum” and “Stille Nacht” as we celebrated Christmas, and Grandma’s pet parrot spoke with a German accent.

As I look at the suffering of immigrants now, killed as they try to walk through the deserts, shunned as second-class persons, and threatened with the loss of their DACA status, I’m aware that the opportunities and good will my family found here no longer defines America.

Today, sitting in sunshine beside our swimming pool, I think I look like Joan Baez, with my long straight dark hair and wise face. That pleases me, to look like a famous singer who represents moral passion. It was the Seventies.

Patty, Ingrid and Barb — virtually nude in bikinis — sunbathe with me and watch the children play. I adjust my sunglasses and gaze at the empty flower pots lining the fence around the pool.

My four-year-old daughter Mia sits with me, clinging to my leg. Her warm body seems menacing, like she might bite me. I’m not sure why I let that fantastic notion take hold, but I often feel little Mia is a menace. She needs my attention every minute, pulling at me with a neediness that seems a threat.

“Tyler ran away again,” Patty announces, clapping a torn straw hat on her blond head. “Yesterday it took me 45 minutes to find that kid. Sometimes I think he’s smarter than I am.”

“Teach him to read,” I suggest. “God knows you’ve got enough books. He’s nearly four. He can do it.” Patty loved books. They fell from her tote bag, cluttered her car, lay open and spattered on her kitchen counter. She also had a brawny, well read husband who inspired my fantasies.

Patty doesn’t look like a mommy. Her thin, athletic frame is more suited to cross-country running. I’m the one who looks like a mother: tall, full-breasted, a classic matron in a modest one-piece bathing suit. The Fates, however, have not willed me the pregnancy I’ve dreamed of. The three goddesses have instead blessed skinny Patty, who has three boys.

Five years ago I gave up teaching at the high school to be a mother of an adopted infant. Babies were easily available to adopt in those days, and we thought they could be molded into our version of perfect children.

Perhaps the changes we’d brought about in the Sixties made us think we could influence, even create, human beings. After all, we’d burned away entrenched values in the same way the sun burned away the water on our skin. We’d undermined the established culture by confronting restrictive laws, protesting policies of discrimination and war. We could do anything. Except I couldn’t.

I’d assumed I’d be as good at parenting as I’d been at teaching. How hard could it be? Very hard, I learned. Our son now went  to kindergarten, but I spent every day at home with a daughter who resisted direction and scowled at the world. I thought of the self-portrait she’d drawn in preschool — an outline of a head scrawled in yellow with no mouth, like a face on an aboriginal cave painting. I wished I’d run off with the basketball coach. He’d made a tempting offer.

Barb sits up and faces me, smiling under her floppy hat. “Elaine, look at Mia. She’s beautiful! She’ll be swimming and taking that slide in a week. If she grows up to marry my Tyler, they’ll start a new race.”

“If any place can help Mia find herself, it’s our preschool,” Ingrid says as she moves to the edge of the pool to be closer to her son. She sits and dangles her feet, rippling the ice-blue surface.

School? You think she’ll be fine if she adjusts to preschool? Who are you people? She’s a barbarian! There’s something wrong with Mia! Can’t they see it?

In time the sun casts the long shadows of late afternoon, and the three bikinied mothers call to their children, “Five more minutes!,” gathering their towels and totes. When they start their journey down the drive to their cars, they look like sleek princesses of a naked tribe. Soon there’ll be nothing left but dark footprints.

Patty stops on her way and stoops to poke at the dirt strip on the edge of the asphalt. She calls to me, “I’ll bring you some pansies next week. You need something here.”

I don’t want pansies. I want my daughter to validate my mothering and make me happy.

Over time, Patty planted the pansies and they flourished. Within the year red bougainvillea draped the fence, and pink-and-white impatiens enhanced the flowerpots around the pool. Mia mastered the pool slide, as predicted, and her every crisis shook my world, but we survived together.

Supported by Patty, Barb and Ingrid I moved out of my despair like a mermaid emerging from a pool. I can’t report that I started singing like Joan Baez, but I can say I started to speak my truth. After cutting my long hair and exchanging the dark glasses of a sunbather for the clarity of bifocals, I divorced my husband, went back to the classroom and took the children with me to make a life in a small house across the street from a church.

We had few flowers, and no pools, but we did have a healthy avocado tree, and we ate the green fruit year-round.

A cow?  You bought a cow?” I’m not surprised. My sister had left civilization for the simple life on a Michigan farm.

“She’s got that gloomy look — has a white triangle on her face,” Connie says. “I do the milking every morning.”

“I can’t imagine it.” My conventional kitchen looks tidy and shiny. Outside the window, a solitary black cat roams our green lawn. Not a cow in sight.

By the time I hang up the phone I feel as tired as if I’d been milking that cow myself. Connie not only has a cow; she has four children. Four babies! She’d gone back to the earth like so many others, and she raises her brood on a farm. She’s two years younger than I am and has given birth four times, while I teach at a high school in suburbia.

I’d played with dolls when we were young. Connie was more interested in climbing onto the roof of our house to frighten our mother. She wore toy guns in holsters and played cowboy. If I were the one with children, we wouldn’t live on a farm. We’d live near a library and a park. We’d have pets and I’d read to my children every evening.

Kurt, my husband in silky shirt and long sideburns, comes into the kitchen and we stand together preparing our breakfast, two tall figures, a flamboyant young man smoking a cigarette and a prim schoolteacher holding her favorite porcelain cup, a wedding gift. She gazes outside at the black cat tiptoeing through the dewy grass shaking the droplets off her paws before each step, a dark shadow in a green world.

“Connie’s bought a cow.”

“Oh.” Kurt takes a drag on his cigarette. I can’t be sure how he feels. Kurt and I have been married for ten years and have been estranged for some time.

I’d rejected the boring men I dated and chosen him, a man of adventure and excitement. That’s what you do when you’re twenty-one — you choose adventure and excitement. What would another man look like in this kitchen? Sighing a dramatic sigh, I take a sip of tea from the pretty cup.

While buttering two pieces of toast I think of Connie’s butter-producing cow — barns, livestock, the smell of soil. I offer Kurt the bread. “Want one?” He shakes his head, and I turn to face the window again. The cat has disappeared.

Kurt lights another cigarette and snaps the lid of his Zippo lighter. The sound has the crack of the last word, a steely pop. Case closed. Then the screen door slams as he leaves with his coffee mug and heads for work. “Take it easy.” Maybe Kurt would be home for dinner or maybe not. I don’t know where he goes in the evenings.

It doesn’t occur to me to leave my marriage. In my universe, women don’t divorce unless they’ve been attacked or deserted. The solution to my despair is a pregnancy and babies. I believed that children would bring more warmth and love to our relationship.

I’d chosen an expensive specialist to find reasons for my infertility. I trusted that Dr. Brighton could find what was wrong even though he’d started me on pills that left me weepy. He’d tried painful procedures too, like injections with a long needle to cauterize the cervix, and other methods I’ve chosen to forget.

I rinse my cup and make my way along the path through the grass to the carport. No cat. No glance from her yellow eyes. When I open the door of the car and raise my foot to get in, I’m amused to see my blue terry slippers instead of teaching shoes. I’m not surprised; slippers keep me in a soft retreat from fertility doctors and Kurt’s neglect.

In the days that followed, I left teaching and we adopted  two infants. Nothing changed in our marriage, but at the same time an evolution of new ideas about women’s lives emerged in American culture. I found women friends who encouraged thoughtful scrutiny of where we’d found ourselves. We sat and talked until I could risk the truth about my marriage. Those times with friends nurtured and embraced me. I began a process leading to courage to remove my slippers and leave the kitchen for a green world outdoors.

To be continued next month.

Dressed in black, unadorned by jewelry, the lean woman stands in front of the class like an exclamation point, a dark stroke in this bland room. We students sit and face her — ten women who’ve come here to the Mendocino Writing Conference eager to learn about nonfiction from an author we admire, Eleanor Cooney.

The first thing we notice is our instructor’s long brown hair, straight, sleek and youthful. I find it inappropriate, as if she’s posing as a girl instead of a mature, wise writer. Authors, it seems to me, wear glasses, have short haircuts. Cooney looks exotic. Her two-foot mane swings from side to side while she talks, as if her switch of hair propels energy. It’s her shield and muse, moving around her face, covering and animating. The dizzying, hypnotic effect unnerves me.

We student observers don’t look like Eleanor Cooney. We’re short-haired women shielded by colorful sweatshirts and parkas, adorned by earrings and wedding bands. Gathered in an expensive writers workshop on a foggy, ocean-smelling August morning on the California coast, we’re amateurs who hope to publish our articles and essays some day. I hope we’ll get to know each other, become a troupe of writers telling our stories with clever literary techniques. I expect Cooney will supply handouts, tips on the construction of nonfiction, especially notes on the wonders of memoir.

The room is too quiet for friendly talk.Our attention is fixed on the front of the  class. How this awesome woman can be a teacher surprises me. She looks like a long-nosed Amazon, a warrior-woman who doesn’t live indoors, certainly not in a classroom. I imagine she wants to be alone, staring out at the infinite Pacific Ocean. I don’t have anything like that solitary Cooney temperament. I don’t know if I’m brave enough. But I know I want to learn what she has to tell me. We listen wide-eyed, fearful, like captives held at gunpoint.

Instead of lecturing, Cooney takes our manuscripts, sent in ahead of time, and reads parts of them aloud, with no preamble or criticism. She’s chosen only the parts in the essays she likes, and we’re riveted by her voice, that swinging hair, our words read in that musical way. We get what she’s emphasizing: how honesty is everything. She has no need to condemn the sloppy stuff. She explains how the truth of our feelings and experience is what we must use to touch people who choose to read what we write. Nothing else matters, she says, and bends over the desk, retreating for a moment behind her hair until she pulls the brown partition back and looks at us again.

Cooney explains her process of writing her memoir, Death in Slow Motion, an account of the death of her mother from Alzheimer’s disease. She tells how she stripped the story of everything pretty. “Alarming,” our deep-voiced leader says. “I like alarming, disturbing, irreverent writing.” The words describe Cooney herself, disturbing and alarming. She makes me feel shallow and frivolous. I wish I’d worn plain clothing, understated, so I could take on this rich, exciting idea: wear the truth and nothing else. I wish I had the courage to let my hair grow long.

Gazing into the distance, Cooney smooths her hair with her right hand as if to polish her speech. I look away too, alarmed by the invitation — to be like her. She has a Bronte look, I think. She belongs on a horse, waving a sword. In a sense she’s used a sword — herself — to cut through civilized manners that get in the way of truth-telling. The morning haze, a Pacific fog, blurs the room, thank God, so I don’t have to confront what this teacher represents.

What would happen if we became disturbing and irreverent, and wrote as Eleanor teaches? What if we contrived strands of words that grew powerful, swinging dark and wide? The thought stuns me. I’ve never considered letting the irreverent come into my writing. Could I dig into the dark places? The guilt I’ve felt for my own inadequacies? The hopelessness I felt as a mother? The despair of a failed marriage?

I have to glance away from this teacher whose black form challenges and frightens me. She might conjure and change the reality I’ve created, a safe place where I can be the polite, smiling lady I present to the world. Could I abandon that persona in my writing, and tell the truth?

The sea outside our window churns and murmurs, a backdrop for the unease that moves through the room as each of us feels tempted by a sorceress.

“Drive by Wilson School,” I said. “Could it still be there?” 

“Remember Mrs. Suprenand, the principal?” asked my sister Connie. “We called her Superman and thought we were so clever.”

At the wheel of our rented car, Connie turned onto familiar residential streets and we peered out at our old neighborhood. Wilson School looked much the same, small and neglected.

We’d decided to take a roots trip, two grandmothers on a journey to see the house and street where we’d grown up. Having driven from the airport through Los Angeles on a warm spring afternoon, we arrived in San Gabriel, our California mission town. It would be a treat to revisit our childhood home, I thought, not realizing it would also surprise me.

“Superman is probably dead,” I said. “Makes me feel old. But I bet Billy is still alive somewhere. He was the cutest boy in school.”

“I don’t remember thinking he was cute,” my sensible sister said. “I do remember Mrs. Maple in her bathrobe. She never wore anything else.”

The neighborhood looked as tranquil as we remembered, a California postcard. Our ranch-style house was different from the other homes on the block. It had a long front porch with a row of posts along its length. When we lived there my father had put a wagon wheel against one of the posts. Very pioneer. Very Western. I’d imagine myself a cowgirl on that porch, gazing out at ranchland, the sounds of bawling cattle in the background. 

I felt conscious of changes in me since we’d lived here. I’d gone from barefoot youngster to high-school teacher to minister in Arizona. Connie had raised five children on a farm in Michigan. Our ranch house, though, stood unchanged, except the wagon wheel was gone.  

In the center of our front yard, the oak tree my father had planted on my tenth birthday stands like a monument, its thick trunk and branches reaching higher than the orange trees on the block. I imagined the oak to be a symbol of my own sturdy self. Like me, the tree was still standing, healthy and real. How satisfying!

My sister and I walked up the driveway, past the oak tree, and knocked on the front door. I knew what the inside of our house would be like. I’ve no idea what my sister was imagining, her face poised as always. I’d find our bedroom with the window to the backyard and the tiny bathroom the four of us shared. I could already hear Mother’s voice and smell my father’s pipe.

The current owner, a woman wearing a painter’s smock, invited us in. We told her how our parents had built the house on a street carved from an orchard where acres of citrus trees stretched for miles. Back then, there were no freeways, or sidewalks, or shopping malls. During the Korean War Toby, a neighbor boy, enlisted and was killed. She listened politely to our stories.

The interior of our ranch house looked all wrong! The shelves around the dining-room window-niche no longer held German beer mugs. The living-room fireplace should face two green wing-chairs. The screened-in porch used to have a cement floor where Connie learned to roller-skate; now it was carpeted and looked like a TV room. How could the owner live like this? There were no smells of Prince Albert tobacco. My mother wasn’t standing in the white kitchen. My mother was dead. 

I knew how foolish it was to expect our things to be in these rooms, and I tried to keep from making absurd comments, but until I’d walked in, I was connected to my early life by tangible imagesm like the backyard incinerator where I’d burned trash, or the mangle that squeezed the wet clothes in the laundry. Now, the emblems of my past had been erased; only an oak tree remained. 

My sister seemed as serene as always, a model of well-groomed composure. Speaking in a low voice, she talked with the owner, who told us she was an artist, and we admired her still-life paintings of flowers and old clocks. I could understand why she wanted to capture a scene and make it stay unmoving forever. I wanted things to be fixed too. People talk about “moving on,” as if they could leave behind their stories. That sounds like death to me.  

Connie and I said goodbye to the artist and walked out to the car. Before we drove off, I stared at the oak tree and remembered my father on the day he’d planted it, working the shovel and talking about how the skinny sapling would grow with me. The vision centered my spirit, quieted my heart and rooted me in gratitude for a good sister and a home preserved in good memories.

‍

‍When I read recently of the new production of The Merchant of Venice starring a black actor, John Douglas Thompson, as Shylock, I wondered what an actor of color would bring to that role, a Jewish character who schemes of revenge. A memory of my efforts to teach Shakespeare in the Sixties came back.

I see myself in front of a group of teen students holding copies of Shakespeare’s Merchant — a stack of small, tattered paperbacks. Tall windows, bright with sunlight, make this a pleasant setting, and the atmosphere is friendly.

‍

When I taught, our literature curriculum favored only privileged European voices, as Christine Torres points out in Education Weekly. I was trained in the tradition of English literature as the foundation of all things cultural — never mind the Latino and Asian heritages of some of the California teenagers in the room — and I felt the students needed Shakespeare’s Merchant as part of their education.

Me: This is The Merchant of Venice, a play by Shakespeare. (I distribute copies of the play to the students.)

‍

Brian: I’ve heard of it.

‍

Olivia: Is that clock right?

‍

Me: Turn to the first scene. I’d like you to read parts. I know the language is unfamiliar, but let’s try. I’ll explain words that are difficult to understand. This is a comedy, but nothing like the comedy you’re used to.

‍

John: (raises hand) I’ll read.

‍

Me: Do you want to be Shylock? It’s the pivotal role.

‍

John: Yes! Is he the Merchant?

‍

Me: Not exactly. You’ll see.

‍

Olivia: Will there be a test on this?

‍

Me: No. You don’t need to worry. Just try to follow along. Ask questions if you get lost. 

‍

Brian: I’m always lost.

‍

John: Are there knives in this? Oh, I forgot, it’s a comedy. Probably no knives.

‍

Olivia: You’re going to make us write an essay; I can feel it in my bones.

‍

Me: Can you wait and see?

‍

Brian: I need to close the blinds. I can’t see the page. (He goes to windows and tilts the blinds, then stands and plays with the cords and stares outside.) Someone’s going home early.

‍

Me: Brian, please sit down. I want to get to scene two. (Brian meanders to his seat.)

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Brian: Why do we always have to study Shakespeare? Why can’t we read Gilligan’s Island?

‍

John: I can’t find my part. The Shylock guy isn’t even in this.

‍

‍

Me: Just wait, John. Wait till you meet Shylock; he’s intrigued people since the 16century.

‍

John: If you say so. (sighs) That name ‘Shylock’ sounds bad. Are you sure it’s the best part?

‍

Me: Let’s try the next scene, with Portia and her suitors.

‍

Olivia: What’s a suitor?

‍

John: At least I know that much. It’s a guy who wants to marry her.

‍

Brian: Venice must’ve had rich people. A servant for Lady Portia, and all those suitors.

‍

Me: Yes. Shakespeare wrote this in 16th-century England, when wealth was in the hands of the few, and the rich had servants. Now comes the Shylock scene.

Brian: It says he’s a Jew! What’s that about? I thought they were Italians.

‍

Olivia: I know about the Jews. Venice is a Christian country, and they didn’t like Jews back then.

‍

Me: I have to mention that Venice is a city in Italy, not a country — but you’ve got it right, Olivia, about prejudice against Jews. In Venice, and throughout much of Europe at the time, Jews were not of the dominant Christian religion and were outcasts. Shakespeare is not kind to Shylock, you’ll notice.

‍

John: We have a neighbor who’s a Jew. I think he’s a banker.

Olivia: Yes! In those days, they wouldn’t let Jews be anything but bankers, and people hated them. I read it in Ivanhoe.

‍

Me: This play is about a Jew who takes on the Christians with anger and wit.

‍

Olivia: I see an essay coming.

‍

Brian: Where’s the comedy? I can be the clown.

‍

Me: This comedy doesn’t have clowns. It ends happily, so it’s considered a comedy. Brian, you’re the Merchant, Antonio, the handsome suitor! Give this a chance. See what you think.

‍

John: I think this is pretty good, even without knives — but Gilligan’s Island would be more fun.

‍

I realize now that my teaching life was biased and sheltered; it even has the atmosphere of innocence. I wonder whether Shylock is even studied in Prescott schools. The struggles teachers face today, like school shootings, smartphones with Tik Tok feeds, and abysmal salaries, leave teachers so burdened that it must be hard to teach what is beautiful and important — like Shakespeare, and Shylock.

‍

On a clear desert morning Ethel Godfrey appears in the doorway of my church office holding a stout broom. “I removed the cartoons from the bulletin board in the entry,” she says without a greeting.

‍

Do I hear her correctly? She’s taken down my religious cartoons in a cleaning fit? I’m her minister, her spiritual leader, and she’s eliminated my cartoons?

‍

She has me, and she knows it. I can’t really defend my tattered collection of cartoons claiming they’re necessary to my sanity. I stare at her and her broom thinking how much I treasure those drawings — like the one of Moses leading the Hebrew people through the Red Sea after stopping to let a family of ducks pass through. Ethel doesn’t approve of making fun of Moses. Ethel doesn’t approve of fun, period.

‍

Religious cartoons cheer me with their parodies of harried ministers, dotty church ladies, confused parishioners. They offset my feeling that I’ve been forgotten here in ranch country beyond the beyond. They resonate with the wit of clever people out in the urban world.

‍

“Oh?” I say, “I’d been collecting those religious cartoons for a long time.”

‍

“The entry looks better now without those tattered scraps. They’re really not appropriate for a church.”

‍

Ethel did not heed my sermon on joy last Sunday. I’ve not waved a magic wand and created the community I’d imagined where joyful people work together to respond to social injustice and support each other.

‍

Our real church is more complicated. We have a mixture of older folk who’ve come to Arizona for the climate and the golf. They’ve brought with them all sorts of religious perspectives, the majority from Midwestern towns where stern Lutherans prevail, as we know from the stories of Lake Wobegon. Our members have to compromise to create a successful mixed community, but they’ve managed heroically. They are an openhearted, friendly group. My freedom to preach as I choose is rarely questioned, and I’ve been accepted — a woman and a progressive — by most of the members.

‍

Ethel and her husband are the holdouts. I hear her begin an earnest sweeping, as she attacks the invisible dust and dirt of a spotless kitchen. Give back kindness, I tell myself, and follow the servant of the Lord into the kitchen to refill my coffee mug. Ignoring me, Ethel kneels down and scrubs at a spot only she can see.

‍

“I liked to think the cartoons livened up the atmosphere,” I say. “That one about the chicken and the lemmings ….” Ethel isn’t listening. She stands and takes a mop from the cupboard.

‍

“Did you save the cartoons for me?” I ask. 

‍

“No. They’re in the dumpster,” she says, as I knew she would.

‍

“Isn’t anyone else coming to help you this morning? Muriel was saying —”

‍

“I don’t need help,” she interrupts, her back to me.

‍

I open the refrigerator and find a bag of Oreo cookies. “I appreciate your support of the new building project,” I say, fussing with the package. “This’ll be a much better kitchen in a few months.”

‍

“Guess so, Pastor. I hope people keep their pledges, that’s all I can say.”

‍

“I do too,” I answer, studying my Oreo cookie and finding a metaphor for Ethel’s thinking in my black-and-white treat.

‍

Mug and cookies in my hand, I leave the mopping Ethel and return to my office where I swivel side to side in my desk chair, gazing out at the desert. Ethel and Jim, I muse, could be the farm couple in the painting American Gothic, glowering at us with their pitchforks raised. I have to admit that I stand facing the Godfreys with a sour face too, holding — what? A Jesus cartoon?

‍

Did the Godfreys come here to teach me something? If I’ve learned anything from Ethel and Jim, it’s how little we have in common. Unlike me, they live like pioneers. They work year-round in their garden; they deny themselves television and sweets; they repair broken things with competence and skill.

‍

I hear rattling. Ethel must be leaving. I can see her in the graveled parking lot. She looks like me — short dark hair and glasses — though she wears denim pants and a printed work shirt. She gets into her white pickup and backs around to swing the truck onto the road.

‍

As she drives away, I think of how much she and her husband contribute to our church life. Often they give me their Social Security check to help out a needy family. They repair the church building and tidy the grounds at their expense. Ethel sings a lovely alto in the choir.

‍

Sighing, I know I’ll never get the Godfreys to follow me like lemmings. They are the ducks, and I’ll have to stand aside in this desert sea and let them take any path they choose.

‍

When my eightieth birthday arrived, I hosted a tea party to mark the occasion, a party catered with fancy foods, tables set with flowers, and friends managing china cups and saucers. My cousin flew here from Austria to video the event and polish old silver. I must have needed a ceremony, with people speaking in mannerly voices and wearing nice clothes. A tea party also suited a view of my future filled with gracious living, chamber music and philosophical discussion. Picture me as dame Elaine in gown and pearls.

‍

Of course, that future was just a fantasy I’ve put away with the silver and china. I’ll soon be giving away those treasures. Maybe my truly gracious days are up ahead, when I’ll be content to listen instead of sing, read instead of teach, and stroll instead of hurry. I’ll accept the hard facts: I’ll never move back to California to live in a home I’ve designed. I won’t travel far to take an expensive hotel room in a city that has great theatre and concerts. I can’t audition for the role of Eleanor of Aquitaine at the Center for the Arts. Those dreams disappear like dancers leaving the stage, and I practice acceptance.

‍

I like to write about the journey that is my life. I’ve even written a book about my experiences as mother, minister, teacher and wife. Putting those words on the page explains myself to me. I hope that by the age of eighty I’m well acquainted with me — or am I? I’m not so sure. Do we ever really know ourselves, except by way of how others respond to us? I’ve a friend who looks a little worried when I approach, as if I’m going to bite her. Another called me austere. My children see me as a remote figure who writes, can’t cook very well, and doesn’t know how to use a smartphone. My students treat me as an informed expert, learned and funny. I like that one. Austere? Really?

‍

I have no idea how to dress this new eighty-year-old body, this expanded width and overgrown top. (You don’t want to know about my lingerie; it’s a sad story.) I’d like to wear clothes that proclaim my inner growth, maybe flowing robes and dangling earrings. I’d like my hair to be long and lustrous, the locks of an aging spiritual soul. Instead, I’m short-haired, clothed in turtleneck tops and roomy pants as I write in a cluttered study.

‍

I must now confront losses that come constantly. They are bitter. They comb your tangles and set you straight. Grieving the loss of friends, family, and pets takes a lot of time and sends us into sorrows. We lose our looks too, and the brain goes funny with hearing, vision and memory losses. Acceptance of these realities is the most challenging discipline I face. Don’t tell me I’m only as old as I feel. I feel about eighty. Within this reality, the poet Sara Teasdale expresses my hopes as a writer:

I shall take my scattered selves and make them one,

Fusing them into a polished crystal ball

Where I can see the moon and the flashing sun.

‍

I’ve seen some character improvement in me as I age. I think I can say I’ve sloughed off my former accommodating self and replaced her with someone I like better, a more outspoken, candid person. I can write my truth, and when folks turn away I’m learning to accept rejection. I wish I’d learned it sooner.  You’ll be wanting my counsel after eighty years of living. I’m now an official sage, a crone with profound thoughts to impart. Teasdale implies that as we age we grow wise:

‍

I shall sit like a sibyl, hour after hour intent,

Watching the future come and the present go.

‍

So my advice is this: you have to figure it out for yourself. That is, even though we learn a bit from others, mostly we learn by making mistakes. I know that the sum of those mistakes has created whatever wisdom I’ve acquired. I’m still learning, of course — from my patient husband, and from my friends who listen as I process my life over a mug of tea or glass of spirits.

‍

The poet Linda Gregg writes of a world “Near the Border Between This Country and the Next One,” a place I find myself these days:

Each evening I walk for an hour, paying

Attention to real things . . .

An ant carrying the wing

Of a butterfly like a flag in the wind.

Those ‘real things’ are what

matter, of course.

‍

Mom! The adoption searcher just called. They’ve found my birth family!” My daughter’s voice over the phone from Oregon sounded thick with urgency. “I couldn’t even talk to the lady,” she went on. “I started crying ... I can’t believe it!”

‍

“That’s wonderful,” I said, meaning it.

‍

We’d been searching for Mia’s birth family for ten years and had never broken through the barriers of secrecy. I’d spent over four thousand dollars paying the expenses of detectives, internet geniuses and outright scammers. Then one day Mia’s aching stomach made her angry about not knowing her health history. She and her two daughters had a right to know. She went to a website and paid for another searcher she’d learned of on a television show — Montel I think it was called.

‍

“They live in Oklahoma on the Comanche Reservation,” Mia went on, and I could hear her fighting tears. “I guess I’m a real Indian …. My other mother works in a smoke shop. Isn’t that funny?”

‍

“Doesn’t matter. It’s just wonderful … smoke shop?”

‍

“I think the searcher must’ve called everyone on the reservation. I’m so scared ... wish you were here.” She started to cry. I could picture my daughter on her back patio in Oregon, a green lawn and vegetable garden extending out from the small cement pad. She’d be holding her cell phone, a cigarette in the other hand, tears streaming.

‍

“I’ve never been to Oklahoma,” I said. “I picture tornados …. Comanches are plains Indians, I think, and they’re expert riders. You’ve always loved horses.”

‍

“All I can think of is Dancing With Wolves,” she said, her voice in a higher register. “Mom, she’s almost got my name — Maya. I wonder if I could join the tribe. I mainly want to know where I came from — to see it and learn about it. I think they’ve a college there — maybe my kids could go. I’m so excited. Sometimes I forget to breathe.”

‍

“It would be fun to give your kids Indian names.”

‍

“Yeah,” she said, coughing. “I think I’d call my Sara, ‘Runs With No Shoes’”

‍

I turned to look outdoors at the wind-tossed flowers on our deck. Though I lived in northern Arizona, those few pansies and petunias evoked the colors of California I’d always miss. Perhaps my daughter’s spirit craved an Oklahoma landscape in the same way I yearned for California.

‍

You might wonder why I’d tried so hard to assist on this search for my daughter’s birth mother. Mia had been a cranky, sullen youngster who fought with her brother and the neighbor children. I worried that she suffered abandonment issues. Then my wild child became an angry teen, and I’d become convinced that Mia needed connection to her heritage for both of us to find peace.

‍

“Mom,” Mia said, “It’s so great not to be lost any more. Did you know I’m related to Jim Thorpe? I looked him up on the internet. Cool.”

‍

“I’ve been waiting so long for you to claim your Indian heritage,” I said. “I’m excited too.” I wondered who Jim Thorpe could be — a hero of some sort?

‍

“I know,” she said. “You kept putting Indian stuff around and trying to get me interested. Now I’m really interested. Maya says I have two brothers. Oh Mom, two brothers! Maybe they look like me.” Mia paused as if absorbing a universe of images.

‍

“Son-au-uuat,” Mia said. “That’s my birth grandmother’s name. I’m going to find out what it means.”

‍

I don’t know if that name translates or if I could pronounce it. For me, the word resounds with unfamiliar, untold stories of older cultures, of deep urges for identity. I do know that with a living birth mother and family, Mia could fill the “hole in her heart,” as some have phrased the feeling of not knowing their origins. She’d said she felt lost, and I know how sad and frightening that must feel. I used to have dreams of being lost, unable to find my way home.

‍

I’ve read that our children are not ours to own, but are like arrows we send out from us. That image fits my Native American daughter well. A month after that first telephone call, Mia packed her car and drove from her Oregon home with her husband and daughters, on their way to meet her Comanche family and her two half-brothers. She sailed — as if shot from a taut bow — to Oklahoma, and came back with a calmer stomach and a landscape as firmly fixed in her heart as California is in mine.

On my last day as minister at a little church in northern Arizona, I felt sadness and regret about leaving the people who served tea, arranged altar flowers, held my hands with a cool touch, made me laugh. The women.

I was a female cleric intent on proving herself as good as any male pastor, and as I found my way in that church setting I made assumptions at first about the women in their aprons. I viewed them as children to be cajoled and preached at. After all, I was standing in a pulpit where only men had gone before; God forbid I should be seen in an apron.

I wore my robes with pride and let myself envision new directions for the church. One Sunday morning, at the end of the service, I announced from the pulpit, “I’ve planned a spirituality retreat!” Our volunteer musician, Marjorie, played an emphatic chord on the organ as if I’d proclaimed the Second Coming of Christ. “We’ll share our thoughts and feelings in a cabin tucked in the Prescott mountains,” I added.

I hadn’t taken into consideration that the congregation was made up of people who’d gone to war, worked on farms or labored in tough jobs. Their idea of a fun retreat didn’t include two days in a cabin with their minister. Creeping into my consciousness, too, was the suspicion that I’d devised a project based on a slippery concept, spirituality, an abstraction I barely understood.

The next Sunday Ardith and Sarah, best friends, signed the list, and so did Millie and Curtis, a couple new to the church. My husband John chose to go too. Marjorie, our creative organist, said she wanted to find spiritual healing for an incurable golf swing and added her name. Not the response I’d hoped for, but enough to pay the fee at the camp.

Two weeks later, a van carrying nine retreatants left for our spirituality retreat. No sign of aprons. Instead, we wore sweatshirts and bluejeans — except for Marjorie, a thin blond in shorts. As we headed out Copper Basin Road, a pickup sped past, a shotgun visible in the back window and a German Shepherd pacing in the truck bed. Marjorie muttered, “Made out your wills?”

After settling into our spacious cabin, I gave everyone a blue notebook and asked them to write about the question, What gives you courage? We continued through the afternoon, reading our notes aloud and eating snacks. We talked of neighborhoods we’d lived in, people we’d admired, our love for Arizona.

“Look at those balloons!” Marjorie said suddenly, pointing at the window. We followed her outdoors to get a better view of three hot-air balloons over the tops of the pines. I gazed at the joyful sight and felt wistful, aware I’d not moved our conversation to spiritual depths. Then an eerie sound startled me, a birdcall. “That’s the daddy quail,” Marjorie said, “trying to attract predators away from the nest. He’s saying, ‘No one is home. No one is home.’” It was oddly comforting.

The next morning, I asked the group to tell stories about their religious backgrounds.  My husband spoke of his childhood as a minister’s son and the hypocrisies he’d seen in churches. Curtis confessed to enforced Bible readings he endured as a youngster.

“Sounds tough,” Marjorie said. “We had to read the Bible aloud at home every night, but I remember it as funny, especially when my sister said ‘Jesus spit.’”

Six weeks later, I stand in the back of the church taking a moment to marshal the strength I’ll need before the memorial service begins. Someone has put fall leaves and a drawing of a quail on the altar. Beams of light, shining through the faceted glass in the high windows, don’t lighten the somber mood. Murmurs of women — perhaps wearing aprons — come from the kitchen, where they prepare sweet food for a reception. I don’t remember music.

Marjorie isn’t with us. She’d caught a chest cold while registering junior-high students before the opening of school. Within days, she’d collapsed with pneumonia and died. We’re here in church to remember her with our words and prayers.

After the service, I join family at Marjorie’s home, where her husband sits looking outside at the quail, who seem to say No one is home. No one. The smell of blooming honeysuckle, Marjorie’s lure to butterflies, drifts in through an open window.

What gives me courage? Memories of the laughter and music of a blond organist in shorts.

Footsteps outside. No member of the congregation came on Mondays to disturb meat the church. I had no secretary. Our choir director didn’t come this early to interrupt my quiet with complaints. I was the lone staff at the church, a woman minister in rural Arizona, 1990.

A knock. This must be a stranger or he’d have a key. I got up to answer the locked door. I wanted to open our doors and welcome whoever was there, but I had to use caution.

I opened the heavy door to a small man in grimy clothes who looked like a weathered character in a western movie. He stood in the parking lot a few feet from the doorway.  “Where’s the preacher? I got these troubles . . . need money.”

“I’m the minister here,” I said, feeling pleased to help out a man of the Wild West. “I can give you some ….”

“You ain’t no minister! I wanna see the real minister!” he shouted as if confronted by the evil eye. “You’re a woman, for Christ’s sake!”

I tried to look clerical. “Well, yes, but I’m the minister of this church, and ….”

“I know why this church is going to hell, lady. It’s because of people like you! You ain’t even got a Bible!”

I had no answer for that, and the tired visitor backed away, distancing himself from a sorceress.

There it was again: a woman minister perceived as a menace to everything normal and reliable. Why was I in ministry, where many felt I didn’t belong? I loved devotional music, the study of ethics, and the idea of creating absorbing sermons from a close reading of sacred literature. People who seemed to have a spiritual center appealed tome, and I wanted to learn how they got that way.

My questions multiplied like our desert rabbits: where could I find the courage to stand up to criticism? Did I have the benign qualities of a minister? I’m a tall, schoolteacher type, with brown eyes behind glasses. Could I summon enough faith to lean on the grace of God when my credibility was being challenged?

As an 18-year-old in college I’d hurried on Sunday mornings to a chapel service held in an ancient Romanesque building. The chaplain preached about the ethical life informed by Christian ideas. I sat captivated. Often I’d provide flowers for the altar, picking them from a small garden behind our dormitory. That’s what I knew to be my role, to serve without anyone’s notice. God forbid I should speak up in a church.

I left that girl back in the chapel, and years later, after I divorced, I decided to leave high-school teaching and go to Berkeley to study religion. I’d miss my students, but giving up teaching, now dominated by effort to raise test scores, was an easy decision. The hard part was telling John, the gentlemanly fellow who’d been living with me for the last year.

I was leaving to go to graduate school, I told him. We’d finished dinner. He put down a wine bottle and butter dish with an unnecessary clatter. “Women ministers aren’t normal. I mean, they seem like .. ..”

Aren’t normal? “Don’t worry. I’ve never been one to knock over icons,” I said, offended by the noise John made with the clean-up. “Besides, I’ll probably hate it and miss you terribly.”

Knowing I wouldn’t hate leaving him or hate my new direction, I turned to open the dishwasher and noticed the bird-feeder outside the window. Illuminated by kitchen light, it moved in the night breeze, a tiny tray waiting for songbirds. An image of anticipation I’ve never forgotten.

After I was ordained, I served as assistant to a dignified minister. In that subordinate role I chose to wear a cheerful child’s rosary —the ideal accessory on a clerical robe, announcing holy, feminine, fun — instead of appearing like a pompous bishop bent on keeping you in your place. Finally, the time came when I knew I’d have to open a new door and take charge of a congregation, testing my capacities to represent comfort and hope as a real minister.

I twirled my rosary like a stripper (speaking metaphorically), and searched for a church that would accept a woman as leader, a place that offered little money and few benefits, so obscure that men would turn it down.

Arizona responded, and I found myself sitting in a quiet church office beneath skies where hawks circled and rabbits crept out from behind the rocks after the raptors moved away. When challenged by the fearful or the inflexible, I remembered, “You’re a woman for Christ’s sake.”

Hail, Mary.

I waited in the windowless exam room for the medical specialist, an expert in pulmonary matters. I wasn’t sick, but I needed advice on lung problems because I’d had some shortness of breath. Such worries erupt as I get older.

The room seemed to become smaller as I waited. I tried to stay calm and practice breathing slowly. I’d brought The Week magazine to browse during what I knew would be a long wait; nothing like news of a pandemic to quiet one’s fears. My watch recorded the sluggish passing of time, as if the colorless room cut me off from the rotation of the earth.

Eventually the doctor walked into the room in a white coat carrying a large folder. He was younger than me, a slight man who seemed uncomfortable. He muttered something unintelligible and sat on a tall stool facing a high desk. He opened the folder and paged through the material, as if he preferred to deal with his papers rather than a woman with lungs.

“I have some questions about …,” I began, hoping to gain his attention.

“I can’t answer questions until I’ve read this material.” He turned the pages. “I’ll need to order some tests.”

“But… can you tell if I have a lung problem? What’s going on?” Did shortness of breath signify a serious illness? Did I have cancer? Should I get my affairs in order? Was he listening?

“I can’t tell you anything until I see the results of the tests,” he said. “Barbara will make the arrangements with the hospital.”

He slid off the stool, gathered his papers and left the room in a twirl of white.

Tests? What tests? Hospital? Still seated in my chair, I waited for Barbara to appear and answer my questions. Was Barbara on her way? Not a stir outside the door.

I took out my pocket calendar, turning the pages with my thumb. Calendars remind me that I have a life. They comfort me. December. The End. Another year gone.

I went to the door to check if Barbara was on her way. The hallway was empty. The doctor had disappeared. Baffled, I felt abandoned. Where was Barbara?

Bravely, I walked down the corridor, the calendar clutched to my breast, and found a person who directed me to Barbara. There, sitting behind her desk, was a human being wearing glasses and gazing into a monitor.

Feeling foolish for having waited so long, I introduced myself and asked Barbara about the tests. Would they involve needles into the lungs? Radiation?

“I can’t answer your questions. You’ll see the doctor after the tests,” she said as she typed.

Still fearful, I went home and decided to write my own fantasy appointment with a sensitive, caring physician — one like Marcus Welby, MD, a television doctor, played years ago by the affable Robert Young. I let my imagination invent an imaginary world where a kind Dr. Welby had time to talk with me.

As Dr. Welby enters the exam room, he places a folder on a desk and introduces himself. Seated next to me on a low chair, he asks me to explain what’s going on with my breathing. Have I tried an inhaler? he asks with a smile. I shake my head.

After listening to my lungs, he tests my breathing with an instrument he has on the counter. He checks my fingernails for signs of stress.

“This doesn’t sound troublesome,” he says. “I’ve read some of your reports. I see you’re experiencing tiredness, lack of energy. It’s probably related to your breathing problem.”

“Yes. I’m quite fatigued. Is that serious? Are there ways to help?”

“You seem in good health. (I grin, proud of myself.) I’ll need to examine your history more thoroughly in these reports before I can be sure about what’s going on.”

“What happens after that?”

“Your shortness of breath could be caused by a number of things.” He outlines various possibilities and we discuss options. “I can order a scan and perhaps a sleep test,” he adds.

I frown — maybe glower. “You’ll notice in those reports that I had a biopsy of a growth on my lung twelve years ago. It was found to be benign. I’m not keen on tests.”

“Would you want another biopsy to check it out?”

“I don’t think so. If it’s cancer, I’ll probably refuse treatment at this age. What do you think?”

“I’d go with your decision. My clerk, Barbara, will set up one test that would help me get a better picture. Is that okay?”

I agree, and the doctor leaves after giving directions to Barbara’s desk.

‍Walkers and joggers emerge onto the walkways of my neighborhood in the early morning, turning the silent district into a hive of motion. Our enclave of shade trees, tall pines and waving cholla bustles with the primary colors of my fellow exercisers wearing colorful outfits and headbands.

These fitness folk are thinner than I am and a good deal faster. I differ from their urgent plunge into the morning because I have a different way of starting the day. On my walks, I look down at the path instead of up and ahead, perhaps because I’m a tall woman who is used to stumbling on rocks and sticks and minor hillocks. I take time to check out the roads and sidewalks so I won’t twist an ankle. You could call me a down-looker, as opposed to the other half of humanity, the up-lookers.

I like to watch every step and note every item, weed, and trinket left on the byways. The advantages are huge. I notice the tiny things —the wild violets growing insanely between the cracks in the tarmac, the scuttling lizard, the colors of pebbles, the mysterious droppings of animals. I’ll resist waxing romantic here about the variegated leaves of fall and the memories they evoke, but they are wonderful.

Maybe I don’t care about what’s ahead in the distant landscape, and that says something about my character. Either I’m a citizen of the universe, attuned to the unseen realities, the music of the spheres, or I’m afraid I’ll get lost if I look up. My attention to the inner life and the narrow path tell you I’m a book-lover with philosophical friends.

Even the snowy winter streets are intriguing, and I walk carefully in the cold, glad to be wearing my warm boots. This is a new kind of pleasure. The frosty black-and-white world evokes a kinship with the Arctic, with the high Sierra, with the freezing dangers wild creatures must endure in winter. These sensations are new to me; I’m from California, where one sweater was enough against the temperate outdoor world. Now I’m exposed to actual weather, and I feel the excitement of a new season.

On my reflective days I like to think I can see the whole world, maybe the infinite too, by looking down on my walks. William Blake agrees:

To see the world in a grain of sand,

And heaven in a wildflower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,

And eternity in an hour.

While I scrutinize the earth, I can ignore the larger, more frightful, threats to my safety, like global warming, drought, and surging Covid cases here. I’m too busy looking down at the small things to worry about those catastrophic dangers. My down-looking is a respite from the terrors of guns and the miseries of the homeless. I can see only the present displayed at my feet. Isn’t that what the wise gurus teach us, to live in the moment?

I’m not a dreamy romantic. The lower world is not all beautiful. Discouraging evidence is in the sorry litter. Careless folk discard wrappers and cans in the gutters. Weary moms drop dirty diapers. I see vomit and condoms, too. Once I saw a colored chalk message: “Bring our troops home!” scrawled in pastel letters. It seems the torn shoes of the mumbling man sitting on a curb are all we need to know.

Occasionally I find names carved on the path, some with old dates: “Suzy loves Brad, 1961.”My mind goes back to 1961, when I was a beginning teacher. I can feel my anxiety, see the faces of a pretty cheerleader with brown eyes and the chubby kid who got tangled in the blind cord sat the window.

I know I miss a lot, looking down — the sky at different times of day, the sense of where I’m heading and even where I am. I may miss an appealing garden, walking as I do with my head down, and I don’t see people’s faces before I see their feet. Yet, once I discovered a perfectly good drinking glass, and another time I found a sapphire ring. I probably missed a passing parade.

You’ll agree we can’t change certain basic things about ourselves. I’ll probably choose to poke around at the shells on the beach and miss the sweeping waves for the rest of my life. I’ve stopped trying so hard to work at things that don’t fit me.

And I’ve stopped paying attention to my mother’s voice: “Look up! Watch where you’re going!”

My parents made a decision that our family would take no more long vacation car-trips, especially with a child who stands behind the driver of the car and asks questions throughout the entire trip: “When are we going to get there?” “Will I like that place?” “Tell me if they have bears!”

That was me. I enjoyed narrating the trip for my sister and parents. I asked important questions. Back before seat belts it was normal for a child like me to stand in front of the back seat, my head next to my father’s in the driver’s seat, and make sure everything went as planned. I had the best view, and I liked being so near my father. “What’s in that truck?” “Why is California so long?”

From my vantage point next to my father I could spot the best restaurants. I could read the Burma-Shave signs aloud. I could point out the horses and cows we passed. My father taught me to recognize crops, too. He’d been a picker as a boy, so I could pronounce the names of the vegetables growing in the fields we passed — broccoli, onions —and even the different nut trees of the California heartland. I commented on everything, and made suggestions: “They have alligators there! Let’s stop!” Frequently I’d see cars abandoned beside the highway with steaming radiators or broken tires. They needed to be mentioned. People were in distress!

After the trip to Yosemite National Park I was never again taken on a long ride into the beauties of nature, never again taken on a California driving adventure. Sadly, we would no longer motor north through central California fields, the view enhanced by my narration. Making excuses, my parents told me they were the kind of people who tired easily when traveling with me and my sister for a long time in the car, as if they had a character flaw. Not till much later did I appreciate their kindness in not mentioning their exasperated weariness with my constant narration.

Languishing at home, I had few chances to narrate anything exciting. At our house, in our humdrum life in a California suburb, we had no drama —no rusty, broken cars, no murders, no screaming ladies. I had to depend on scary movies for excitement.

My friends would hop in the family car and go long distances to see cousins and grandmas. My parents wouldn’t consider it. They had long ago given up driving us to visit Dad’s six sisters or my grandmother, who had a parrot in the backyard — a parrot that talked to Grandma! By careful listening I found out that some of our relatives begged my father for money. Others got on my mother’s nerves. Mother could be judgmental like that; she had enough to worry about, she said, without all the complaints of relatives. So after those early trips we never ventured long distances away from home in a car.

I had an aunt who was a lounge singer. She was a fun relative, and she knew Peggy Lee! I loved to visit her before the crackdown. She lived in a rowhouse in San Francisco with a husband who played the trumpet. The trumpet! He looked so marvelous with that trumpet, as if he could be in the movies. But San Francisco was a long way from where we lived in southern California, and so I was deprived of the adventure of a visit with celebrities.

Instead of driving through the glories of California’s central valley, or into the Bay Area with Alcatraz and the Golden Gate bridge, we’d vacation at a Sunset Beach rental, a two-hour drive from our home. We’d settle into a cottage on the shore and not go near the car. My sister and I rode huge inflated pillows on the ocean waves all day, coming in at night too tired to breathe — although I liked to sing in the shower.

Looking back, I can see that my parents would have had to use force to stop my chatter about the wonders of the road if we continued to visit Uncle Frank and his trumpet or even Grandma’s parrot. If they’d stifled my commentary, my spirit would have been crushed; I’d have withered, never becoming the drama queen I was destined to be. In place of a ride north, my parents made the right decision to go to the beach at vacation time.

I accepted the change. Singing “Home on the Range” in a shower is almost as fun as narrating the passing view from inside an Oldsmobile.

We hear a good deal about spirituality these days. The writings from gurus of the spirit like Simone Weil and Thomas Merton teach us to be compassionate, aware, and peaceful as we seek God. However, I got my spiritual lesson by way of raising a teenaged daughter — in Berkeley. 

Back then I dreamed of leaving teaching and going to Berkeley to study in the school of religion, where I’d learn from the teachings of spiritual masters. Imagine my surprise when, one September morning, a loud voice interrupted my mystical musings —

“I hate your motherfucking car.”

My daughter Maggie stood in my bedroom doorway glaring at me. She looked formidable in her nightshirt and mammoth high-top sneakers. “What are you talking about?” I asked, surprised by her outburst so early in the day. “My car? You’re going to school. It’ll be okay. ”I finished making my bed, knowing Maggie wasn’t finished. 

“That car sucks. I wish I lived with Daddy,” she declared, her dark hair an uncombed mass around her face. “He’s got a good car. I hate living here.” She turned and stomped away.

We weren’t talking about cars. My13-year-old daughter had voiced — in her characteristic language — our misgivings about starting the school year, middle school for her and a new semester of teaching at San Diego High School for me. 

I bent over to put on my teaching shoes —black leather flats that seemed like the boots of a mountain hiker. Could I face another year of high-school students, theatre productions, the irritable man in the supply room? I wanted to leave teaching and go to graduate school and seek a spiritual center, perhaps even find God.

I headed for the kitchen, where I made tea. Daisy, my golden spaniel, gazed up at me, wishing for a walk. She looked sad, reflecting my disquiet. “Cheer up, old girl,” I said, speaking to both of us. Maggie’s fury emanated from her bedroom. Was she shoving furniture?

Teaching shoes, the dog’s face, and my spiritual longings — telling signs. Within months I walked away from high-school teaching, took my daughter and my dog, and went to the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley.

When I arrived, I found a place with pleasant surroundings and a rich variety of people: gay activists committed to social justice, Asian students talking of “buffalo theology,” a professor interested in religious humor, and one who taught ethics. 

My daughter adapted to Berkeley in an instant and moved about the city like a shadow. She wouldn’t attend school and turned to smoking God-knows-what and hanging out at La Val’s Pizza. She was arrested, found driving a stolen pickup, and had drug paraphernalia in her bedroom.

I was never left to myself, it seemed, never could get far from the dark streets where I’d search for my daughter. If I’d had a hair shirt, I’d have worn it.

Then this: “We have to go on Friday, ”Maggie said. “You see, it’s this great thing. We’re going to dress up and everything.”

“What are you talking about?” I muttered and looked outside the apartment window at a gray cat. “You have to explain. Costumes?” A breeze lifted the cat’s thick fur as it walked across the top of a wall.

“We have this movie we go to. It’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show. We go every weekend at midnight. ”As she explained, she looked like an Aztec princess, I thought.

“You want to go to a midnight movie? Wearing a Halloween costume?”

“No! We go at nine to get ready! We sit in the front and we wear the clothes they wear in the movie, and we go over it until we know it.”

“Until you know what?”

“Until we know every word of Rocky Horror! We talk it with them.”

“I see,” I said. “Do you want dinner?”

“I want you to come with us.”

“Go with you? I’ve got this paper to do, and I can’t possibly stay awake that long. Wouldn’t your friends think it funny to have your mother there?”

“I want you to see me in my Rocky clothes. You’d really like it.”

Outside, the gray cat must have continued pacing.

At the movie theater I found the group of young teens fully costumed. My daughter looked like a Native American version of a French housemaid. When the movie started the teens stood up and recited lines with the actors. They sang along to songs like “Hot Patootie.” I was over whelmed by the passion in my daughter.

When I got home I took off my shoes and glasses, undressed and tried to sleep, but I was visited by a rerun of scenes from the movie and the frolicking players. The vision of my daughter as housemaid took me into a housecleaning of my own. The woman who lived behind my saintly eyeglasses had studied a gray cat more intently than she’d looked at her daughter. 

I realize now that spirituality doesn’t come from books about God or from hours of meditation. I’m convinced that compassion, awareness and peace come with intense worrying, until our defenses drop away like old boots and we stand in bare feet.

Violent attacks on Asian-Americans have erupted again here in the land of the free. We’ve demonized the Chinese, blaming them for Covid-19. Active hatred still prevails against the Japanese since World War II. White-supremacists have scapegoated American Asians, afraid they dilute the American stereotype — the Anglo-Saxon white. 

Little has changed since the day that American racism and fear of Asians touched my life. I remember …. 

“Can I get some free paper from the butcher?” I asked Mother, and climbed into the passenger seat of our black Chevrolet. “I told Mrs. Oldham I would, for a banner for Scouts.”

“Yes,” Mother said. “You ask him yourself, and be sure to thank him.” Mother’s glasses shone as she turned around in her seat and backed the car out of the driveway. She had a stern look, as if we were going on a long trip costing a lot of money. We were making the weekly drive to the grocery in our Southern California town, San Gabriel, named for an angel.

Every time we got in the car it was serious business, because in 1942 gasoline was rationed. “There’s a war on,” you heard the grownups say.

The summer sun burned my legs through the windshield, but I was distracted from the discomfort when we passed the San Gabriel Archangel Mission church. A wisteria vine, ripe with purple blooms, covered a high wall that seemed to protect the church from the war. I longed for protection from the guns and bombs that might hit us. We had to darken our windows at night or the bombs could find us.

In town I got out of the car, glad I’d worn my shoes because you could see the waves of heat radiating up from the asphalt. Pretty soon, I thought, I’d get new shoes for Fourth Grade. I loved getting new shoes. Mother looked at me to make sure I was next to her as we crossed the street, but she didn’t take my hand.

The butcher stood behind the white cases of meat along the side of the small market. He tore off some paper, made a roll, and put tape over the end. With the roll over my shoulder like a rifle, I marched behind Mother singing quietly to myself:

From the halls of Montezuma,
To the shores of Tripoli,
We will fight our country’s ba-a-ttles,
On the land and on the sea.

That was my favorite song about the war. General Eisenhower, commander of US forces in Europe, was about to take some 400,000 servicemen to the “shores of Tripoli.” The Germans had attacked Stalingrad. Close to one-third of Europe’s nine million Jews had already been exterminated, but I knew nothing of those facts, let alone where Tripoli was. 

Mother and I left the grocery and went next door to the produce market. I was surprised to see no bins of vegetables out front on the sidewalk. The place looked shadowy. I couldn’t hear the familiar music from Mr. Nakajima’s radio. A man in a fedora and white shirt stood outside smoking a cigarette. He stopped us as we started to enter. “This store is closed,” he said. “Mr. Nakajima and his family had to leave.”

“Where’s Mr. Nakajima?” I asked Mother on our way to the car.

“You heard. He had to leave.”  I waited for more information. “He’s been taken to a special place for Japanese people because of the war.”

Nothing had ever disappeared from my life before. Everything had always been there — cars moving on our streets, the mission wisteria blooming, Mr. Nakajima in his green apron listening to Bing Crosby on his radio. The bewildering news from this stranger in the hat changed everything. The stores, the heat and the cars had been swallowed by the darkness from inside the empty market. I thought of my five-year-old Austrian cousin Uta, who lived with her family inside the German lines. They had to hide in a dark basement because their home had been destroyed by bombs. I shivered.

“What place?” I asked as we got back to our car. “Who gets his store? Are they coming back? Is Mr. Nakajima in the war now?” You had to ask Mother a lot of questions to get answers.

 “They probably won’t be coming back until the war’s over,” she said.

“Why not? He was here last week when we came. He didn’t say anything.” 

Mother sat facing straight ahead, her hands on the hot steering wheel. “The Nakajimas had to leave because some people think they’re spies.” She talked slowly as if she didn’t want to say those words.

Spies? That word made me think of black-and-white movies with scary men lurking on a dark street. Mr. Nakajima didn’t fit in a movie like that. I clutched my paper rifle and hummed my song about “the shores of Tripoli” trying to cheer myself with thoughts of new shoes for school. 

Did Uta have the shoes she needed, down in that basement?

More about efforts to combat racist attacks against the Asian community can be found at StandAgainstHatred.org.

This is an excerpt from a longer piece, “California, 1942,” published by the Preservation Foundation, 2015.

I’ve been following the efforts of justice lawyers to stop mass incarceration and have learned that Arizona is behind in its work to improve our prison system — way behind in keeping us safe, way behind in screening those arrested, way behind in making improvements to jails and prisons. In Arizona, nonviolent offenders spend almost twice as long in prison as the national average, and 40% longer for drug offenses. The need for change is urgent, the experts say.

As a former teacher I’m especially concerned about the welfare of young offenders. Last month Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the majority opinion that a minor can still be sentenced to life without parole if the young person is “permanently incorrigible.” Isn’t the problem of children who commit crimes more complicated, more nuanced?

I’ve been to prisons and jails with my credentials spread out on grubby tables, heard the sounds of clanking iron, and been left in waiting rooms with stained walls and pungent smells. One time I was ordered to change my shirt before I could enter because when I lifted my arms the waistband of my slacks showed. I was visiting a teenage student from my sophomore English class who’d been sentenced to life in prison for murder, and I was too intimidated to laugh at the waistband rules. I walked into this:

Quiet desert
Enormous towers
A huge place with tiny humans
Ants in a remote stronghold.
He waits in a noisy room
Plastic chairs
Peeling walls
A boy of seventeen
In a hot Mojave fortress
Two men; a fat woman
In dark green
Hung with weapons
Survey from above
Bored and chewing
Who are you?
His teacher
That’s a new one.
The boy’s face
Fair/blue eyes
Meant for angel paintings
You came.
Yes.

Charles is still there, now a sick middle-aged man. His attempts at parole, over the forty years he’s been locked up, have been unsuccessful due to department ineptitude and his own reluctance to speak up and show contrition.

While serving his sentence he has managed to get academic credits and obtain various jobs that help him survive. He’s taught himself computer skills and assisted prison workers. I’ve monitored his writing and watched him grow intellectually. He has developed a newsletter, hoping to reach an audience, but he is not capable of shouting for his rights. Child offenders, like him, are supposed to get special consideration, be eligible for parole when found to be cooperative, but Charles can’t demand. He’s a quiet person.

The detectives, the lawyers, the probation people I’ve met have sometimes been talented and kind. The facts, however, are hard. In his book American Gulag, Mark Dow reports that American immigration authorities hold people in prison under extremely harsh conditions, like the Somali man they left to bake in the sun in a sealed car to discourage other immigrants from applying for asylum. In Ted Conover’s book Newjack, Guarding Sing-Sing, about his job as a prison guard, he describes dehumanizing conditions. Again, the need for change is urgent.

I’m appalled by our efforts to contract out the building and maintenance of prisons to private companies to run them for profit! The results have failed. Scotland, New Zealand, and Norway have instituted some productive, humane solutions that deserve attention, and I’ve read that South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia and Texas are slashing incarceration rates after concluding that the old lock-em-up policies are a pricey failure. North Dakota has made changes after studying the innovations in Norway, where guards must have at least two conversations per shift with each inmate under their supervision. What a concept!

Mostly, we’re afraid to coddle prisoners lest we encourage them and let them loose to hurt us. It’s time Arizona took a more sensible look at our systems. What keeps us safe, anyway? It doesn’t seem to be adding new jails and loading cells with people of color. I’m sure it isn’t English teachers whose waistbands might drive a prison population to revolt. I’m not qualified to pronounce on what can work best: decriminalize drugs? improve our schools? find ways to employ young men? better training and screening of police? I do know we need a system in which a boy like Charles is not lost forever.

I like the metaphor ‘raising all boats’ as a way to look at social problems. With the goal of improving life for all people, I think our kids will thrive.

Elaine is offering a class on memoir for women. If you're interested, contact her at egjordan34@gmail.com

‍I have a long list of complaints about aging, of course. Along with worrying about arthritis, I worry about the teens I see around me. Their lives seem so complicated — so overwhelmed by social media. However, I’m delighted to see many of them confronting life with daring energy. When I saw some young people wearing tee shirts that said ‘Wild and Free,’ the message reminded me how much I love feisty teenagers.

‍

It’s the obedient ones who worry me — those not threading their way through our confusing culture, suffering and learning as they find their way. It’s as if they’re hiding, kept from the world so completely that they don’t understand it.

While in my community they often grow up to be honest and hard-working, I find bland, well-behaved youth dull. My aging soul is not enriched — or surprised, or charmed — by robotic predictability. Though kindly folk on the whole, some young people are intolerant of diversity and horrified by everything from Harry Potter to sex education. While I don’t want our youth to defy civility, curse at me, ride roughshod over the landscape or hurt animals, I’d like to see some original thinking from that corner. I’d like them to look through wide windows open to the world and let in a freshness.

My teenage neighbor Linda finds me dangerous because I favor reproductive choice for women. She’s going to stay chaste, she says, until she gets married. Linda seems to be a classic example of a strictly controlled Bible-believing girl who’s kept at home, forbidden television, and monitored in social situations. She tells me her father beats her when she disobeys the rules of family and church. I imagine Linda trapped behind sturdy fortress walls.

Linda concerns me not only because she’s ill treated but also because she’s as lost to us as the woman hidden behind a scarf in Iran. It seems to me we have to allow our young people a chance question what’s out there — what I call critical thinking. While young people always need guidance, our youth need to make their journey unimpeded by the domination of church or the tyranny of heavy-handed fathers. It’s not overstated, I think, to call that overprotection a betrayal.

Youthful, counterculture exuberance ... is the mark of a healthy society.

I wish these passive teens could stand their ground and try on more muscular thinking. They say we lack moral fiber. What is moral fiber anyway?

The glory of being young, as I see it, is a capacity to shock us, to push the rest of us around a corner. I’d like them to confront us and our certainties. Lately we’ve seen young people march against oppression, call for justice, and exhort us to work for climate change. That sort of youthful, counterculture exuberance — made visual in some eccentric clothing — is what I feel is the mark of a healthy society. I’m thinking of young people such as David Hogg and Alex Wind, who have been at the center of a massive youth movement for gun control after a massacre at their school. Marley Dias, at fourteen, wrote a book with a black heroine because she was tired of reading about white boys and their dogs, she said.

Nothing’s wrong with wholesome living, but it should be evaluated as much as any other way of life. I think the young should badger, question, confront society and ask penetrating questions we don’t want to answer. If we keep them closeted or marching in robotic lockstep, I don’t think they can bring a worthwhile response to our complex society. Give me a quarrelsome, fired-up teen and I’ll show you a human being on the way to wisdom.

If compliant youth would look through the slits in their walls at me, I’d enjoy fixing them with an aging brown eye. I’d argue with them about the flag and the Bible and the sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman. I have some experience in the marriage department.

According to Doris the Dieter, writes a humorist, “It is better to have loved and lost than it is to have loved and put on 15 pounds.” I go for the 15 pounds and love. We think too much about those pounds. I’d go so far as to say that it’s cost us our very souls when we think constantly about our weight.

I’ve been paying attention lately to our pervasive wish to be thin — those worries about not being as tiny as a twelve-year-old. Some of us women want to look like famine victims instead of people with different body shapes. The cause of this obsession has been studied, but I’m most interested in the results, what the dream to be thin is doing to us. 

After every meal we review whether we need to feel guilty about having eaten too much. The time we spend on such nonsense is incalculable. Kim Chernin’s book about people who are obsessed with being thin is called, of course, The Obsession, and it pretty much describes me. I’ve associated being trim with success in love, with success in my youthful hopes to be an actress, and with success as a worthy human being. How can that have happened to me? I’m a student of religion, for God’s sake, one who ponders the infinite — and her body weight.

We know about the growing incidence of anorexia among young girls. These girls become “celebrities of self-discipline,” Chernin says. They claim to hate their bodies, and I’m sorry that our culture has made them think something is very wrong with the person in the mirror. They waste away, and some of them die. They deny natural instincts until there are no more.

We need to come to terms with the fact that we are flesh and blood.

As I’ve watched myself and the students I’ve taught, I’m aware that if we feel overweight, the horror at what we see in the mirror seeps into consciousness until we despise the very self within. Our powerful self-critical spirit is affirmed, and that self-hatred is not healthy. It’s not normal. Not life-affirming. It’s a serious source of depression. We’ve taken this thin-obsession to the point of absurdity. We’re in trouble when we make remarks like this: “I’m sorry to hear she has cancer, but at least she’ll lose weight,” a comment I overheard recently from a middle-aged woman.

Religious teachings have created part of the problem, believe it or not. They’ve promoted a dislike of our bodies, as if our bodies are evil and their urges evil. That thinking has dominated pious folk for centuries. Our Puritan heritage of values like fortitude, commitment, hard work, and piety has left us some darker values as well. In fact, Puritan diaries, especially those of women, reveal a harsh, punishing attitude toward anything plentiful, comfortable, easy or silly. These ascetic Puritans preached attention to righteousness to such an extent that outward signs of easy pleasure were taken to be indications of inward sin. (I think they still are — ever had a lazy day without feeling guilty?) Puritans watched each other for signs of these indiscretions, fearing that their neighbors were headed to hell. One of these evils was gluttony. We still bear their legacy of guilt for that second helping.

Some religious teachers say we need to overcome desires of the body because they are bad even though our natural appetites urge us to eat, and rest, and want sex. Those pleasures are decadent, they say, so we should deny ourselves and be concerned with . . . what? Matters of belief? Yes, said the Puritans. Their young girls who didn’t pray, read their holy books and deny the self were punished harshly.

We have other dubious sources that encourage dieting. The gurus of healthy eating caution us to avoid all fatty foods. New research is showing that fat in the diet not only brings comfort, it aids digestion, protects the circulatory system, and makes skin and hair glow. It may be that enough fat provides the strength necessary to keep us from craving sugar and white flour. Try telling that to the hard-line dieters who are hell-bent on avoiding the pleasures of rich food. It’s easy to see that sacrificing pleasure on the altar of health makes for sour faces and yet more self-hatred.

I think we need to come to terms with the fact that we are flesh and blood. If we keep denying appetite, wishing we were a different size, yearning to be what we are not, we are unable to accept even the soul-parts of ourselves. That is, when we hate our bodies, we can come to despise our inner selves, our spirits, because body and soul are connected. We are unified beings. The spirit vibrates to the way the body moves and lives. We dancers need to dance. We singers need to sing. We gardeners need to plow. Our hungers need attention. We need to value the body as it is, and stop wishing it away.

I sing the body electric.‍

A writer gets encouraging news

It took six months for the results of the writing contest to arrive in the mail. With trembling hands — as we say in bad fiction — I opened the envelope from the organizers of the San Francisco Writers Conference. There it was! Seven of us had been named as finalists in the memoir category, and my name was at the top of the list! I was the First Place nonfiction winner. An excerpt from my memoir had won.

I’d been working on that book about my life in Arizona for three years, typing away in  my little office and yearning for recognition. This prize would mean I’d present my work to an audience, reading my words in a public setting. I loved the idea! I liked to be in the spotlight. As a kid, I longed to be a movie star like Katharine Hepburn. How hard could it be to do a public reading? Put pretty clothes on me and let me strut my stuff! Here was an opportunity to stand before a sophisticated assemblage and read from my own writing.

I’d written this Arizona memoir about my rocky marriage and my choice to lead a small congregation as a Protestant minister in the tiny area known as Dewey. The memoir had originality, funny people, and a unique western setting. Entering that book into a prominent contest at a prestigious conference seemed a way to let me know whether readers would be interested in my Arizona world. It would let me know if I was a real writer who might one day be published. It would be the inspiration I’d need to keep writing. And then, who knows?

Asking friends, and my sister, to read portions of my book was the only way I’d had any feedback on my memoir so far. Who knew whether a retired English teacher could write anything? Maybe I was fooling  myself. I’d hoped this contest would tell me if my book was worthy. I needed to know.

At last I had a supportive announcement from outside my community — from San Francisco, the cosmopolitan City by the Bay. I could imagine that evening. After we winners were presented in front of the entire conference of several hundred, including my sister, I’d stand at the podium and read from my memoir. Writers from around the country would be there, as would literary agents. This win would launch my memoir into publication! I couldn’t keep the news to myself.

I wrote an email to our local writers club and they notified the entire association that my memoir excerpt had won a prize at the San Francisco Writers Conference. The members’ kindly responses to the announcement came in at once. I contacted my sister, who also gave generous remarks of support. I’m not shy about sharing. I told everyone.

“You’ve made it!” said a gray-haired woman in my singing group.

“I can’t wait to read your memoir,” said my chiropractor.

“You’re the first writer I ever knew in person,” said my hairdresser.

“All that work has paid off,” said my husband.

I was informed the next day in an email that the San Francisco Conference Anthology would include my submission to the contest. That was even more encouragement. The photo of the Golden Gate Bridge to be used on the cover of the collection looked so inspiring; surely the book was an authentic volume of good writing. However, I did notice that the anthology was to be compiled of all the contest entries in 17 days. The publisher would be selling the anthology to us at the conference. Never mind the self-interest there, I decided; I was actually published in a book.

“You’ve made it!” said a gray-haired woman in my singing group.

I spent some time rehearsing my reading. I polished the first page so it read like “silk off a spool,” as Emily said in Our Town. Reading in front of an audience — in San Francisco! — could be daunting, and my memoir selection had to be perfect. I had fun imagining the experience — the audience, the stage, the distinguished judges.

Then I planned my wardrobe for rainy San Francisco. We’d be at a fine old hotel, the Mark Hopkins, and I’d need to wear the sophisticated black of a Nob Hill honoree. This was the perfect opportunity to wear the Ralph Lauren jacket I’d found on sale. Everything seemed to fall into place. I was set for the trip.

Rain did indeed fall, right on my head, bigtime. The day before I left for the conference I had an email telling me that if I’d not been notified of a prize, I was not a winner in the contest. I’d had no notification that I’d won a prize. My name on the top of the list of finalists didn’t indicate the first place winner; it wasn’t second or third place either.

Why hadn’t they said in the letter that “from this list of finalists the winners will be chosen?” Maybe they said that and I missed it. Why hadn’t I read the letter more carefully? Why wasn’t I skeptical of their questionable book promotion? I wish I’d done a lot of things. Among the first that comes to mind is the practice of restraint, a sign of the mature person. In the heat of triumph I’d set aside reason, rearranged reality, and made myself a prizewinner.

I went to the conference with my sister and sat primly when prizes were awarded. Everyone envied my Ralph Lauren jacket.

Elaine’s memoir, Mrs. Ogg Played the Harp, was eventually published and won first place in the Great Southwest Literary Contest. Contact her at egjordan34@gmail.com.

Last April I found a collection of letters handwritten by solders on the battlefield. They were from young German warriors fighting in World War I, the “War to End All Wars.”

The letters had been filed among my books for many years, translated from the German and typed on onionskin paper. The pale type is like the faded idealism that emerges from the words. I feel I’ve uncovered the cries of children. Like toddlers, these letters interrupt my cleaning project. They make me sad, wanting to eat or watch television so I can forget that our youthful warriors still bleed and hope on battlefields today.

Letter One: Before he was killed in December 1914, Emil wrote that he was fighting for “a pure, true, honorable Germany, without baseness and deception.” He added that Germany’s victory in that war will “make people inwardly better.” Emil was 22.

Letter Two: Martin believed he’d return triumphant. An infantryman, Martin believed he was an instrument in God’s plan. “I will live on and on. I am calmed and protected,” he proclaimed before he was killed at 21. He wrote that he’d rather die to make Germany more honorable, pure and true, than win a war that had no purifying effect.

Letter Three: Wilhelm — killed at age 20 — wrote in the midst of “burning villages, the moaning of the wounded,” saying, “God’s goodness will always create a compensation, a completing and fulfilling.” He too was convinced of the sacred nobility of the fight and its final triumph.

It’s as if I’ve found these patriotic words of hope written on papyrus in some ancient cave instead of in my bookcase. I hold Emil’s letter on its thin paper, astonished at its religious sentiments from a soldier of an army that had smashed through Belgium and advanced on Paris. The German army wanted to crush the nations that allowed the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne to be assassinated. 

By the time of Wilhelm’s letter, they’d fought in grueling trench warfare and used poison gas. With their defeat of the Russians at Tannenberg, Emil and the others may have felt new aspirations, inspiring the hope we find in their letters. Or perhaps the “moaning of the wounded” forced them to turn to their religious and patriotic convictions for support.

Years ago I’d put the letters away unread. I was a busy young mother when they were handed to me by Helena Nye, who was living at that time in a retirement complex in my neighborhood. A former scholar of the German language at Stanford, Nye had been tutoring me in German.

When I visited Miss Nye I could leave behind the trials of raising children and the sorrows of a bleak marriage. I found comfort in her spirit and in the quiet of the gardens at her residence. She gave me the translated letters one afternoon after our walk around the adjacent nursing home. She’d visited the bedridden while I sat in hallways and listened to the murmuring of the people she patted and encouraged.

Miss Nye died shortly after she gave me the letters, but I kept them safe, knowing the ideals in them touched her heart. I’m sure she intended to publish them, perhaps in some pacifist manifesto. “And now the letters of fallen students,” she says in an accompanying comment. “Note the earnest and pitiful searchings . . .. These soldiers have an idealism of soul, yearnings for democracy, for humanity, for God.” She made each dead youth a blameless victim and his loss tragic. Her notes vibrate with heartache.

Miss Nye called war wicked and stupid. I imagine she hoped her angry message would influence her young American pre-meds at Stanford — all male in her day — cautioning them to think before waging senseless wars of “terrible carnage. ”Her passion may have helped inspire the dissent of the decade that followed, after she retired, when students marched to protest the Vietnam War. I like to think her spirit marched with them.

Those German letters seem not only from the past but also from another planet. War as the refining fire? God’s protection in battle? War making people inwardly better? It amazes me that these warriors of 1914 believed their fight was part of a noble cause ordained by God. They actually believed they could keep evil from the gates with their heroic sacrifices because they were on the side of the angels.

The kind of triumphal high-mindedness we find in those German letters is what I see here in America, where our nation is proclaimed to be part of God’s plan and our perceived enemies the “axis of evil.” I’m shocked by religious leaders who preach American exceptionalism, characterizing the United States as a place ordained by the Bible. They mistakenly bathe American schemes in a light of glorious rectitude that resembles the idealistic glow emanating from my 1914 letters.

Had Emil lived beyond his twenties, he'd have learned that his enemies would triumph. Perhaps he would have acquired my cynicism, his idealism seeping away into the bloody dirt of war. I can imagine him with Martin and Wilhelm on a wide porch in rocking chairs as they puff on pipes, sip their schnapps and despair at fallen dreams of their god’s protection in a righteous war.

We’re all on that porch, I think, trying to make sense of military interventions and speculating where God is in all the suffering.

Elaine Jordan, author of Mrs Ogg Played the Harp, is a local editor who’s lived in Prescott for thirty years.

I sit alone at my desk at the end of the school day, organizing and planning, my efficient teacher’s hands piling papers in necessary stacks — the work of a productive professional. I look up to see a gaunt woman standing in the classroom, a flat purse held in front of her stomach like a shield. She has a troubled look, as if she’s lost her way.

I stand and face my visitor, surprised by a person I don’t know. What’s this about? Late sunlight comes in slanted beams through the window-blinds, marking stripes of light and shade on the two of us. She and I don’t match, though we must be the same age. She’s a shadow— an imploded soul, protected by a purse, standing opposite my healthy, high-heeled persona garrisoned behind a solid oak teacher’s desk.

“I’m Jared’s mother,” the woman says. Facing me is a mother whose son had recently died of complications from the flu. “You know we lost him on Friday,” she adds. “I’m here to collect everything you have in . . . his handwriting.” She looks around the room as if searching for her boy.

“Oh . . . yes.” I’d known of Jared’s incomprehensible death. He’d been a student in my Junior English class. The news of his death had shocked me, but I was unacquainted with the sorrow I saw in this woman. Did I have any of Jared’s papers? Was there an essay on the bulletin board? No. I’d eliminated the boy from the room, crossed off his name and re-ordered the seating chart. Looking back, I’m astounded at this callous reaction from one who teaches the wisdom and compassion of poets.

My face flushes. A clanging noise interrupts from outside. Someone has taken down the American flag for the night, and the fasteners slam a harsh reprimand against the pole. “I’m sorry. I don’t think I have any of his papers . . . Mrs. Kenten.” Embarrassed for stumbling over her name, I’m unable to meet my visitor’s eyes. Why hadn’t I anticipated this? A child had died, for God’s sake. My head starts to ache. “I’m so sorry.”

I’d not really known Jared. His narrow white face matched his twin sister’s. They had the same thin brown hair and dark eyes. He was a silent boy. I didn’t remember a word he’d offered during class discussions. What books had he read? Did he laugh with the rest at classroom antics?

Mrs. Kenten hurriedly leaves the classroom. I gather papers and follow. Outside, a fall darkness is descending too early. Conscious of my unsteady walk, I go to the drinking fountain, take two aspirin, and force myself to walk to my car. I want the quiet of my home. Once there, I can tend to the grassy yard where a sycamore tree, and a silent cat, provide steadiness and calm.

Later, dressed in the clothes of a gardener, I screw the nozzle on the hose, turn the pressure to full force and make a wide arc of shimmering water in the twilight. The sycamore accepts my ministry without a noisy word. My gray cat Prince at my feet, I try to blend into the green in some metaphysical way. But the scene doesn’t shimmer with transcendence; it surrounds me, as inert as always. The cat brushes against my leg. I’m bound to this prosaic backyard by uncomfortable reality. Jared, I’m sorry.

Then, in a whiff of sunlight, a spray from the hose drifts over me like a blessing, bringing smells ofwet grass, leaves moldering. A bold mockingbird calls out. She’s eyeing Prince so she can dive down and peck his vulnerable bottom. They race around the yard, but Prince manages to evade attack by taking shelter in the ivy. They do this every day after school — the bully and the victim. I try not to see myself in that brutal bird.

I move to the paved driveway, and the sight of the water shooting pebbles off the asphalt diverts guilty thoughts in a pleasant scattering rush. Pushing those stones makes me feel like I’ve cleared a path, found a way forward.

Inside, a few minutes later, Prince hops to the couch and positions himself to observe the birds fluttering in the sycamore outside. I sit in a comfortable chair facing outward too. Cat and I stare into a grayer world, empty of birdsong. I see no promise in the coming darkness. Feelings of guilt return, thundering in my head.

Then, an image of the sun on watered grass brings a dappled hope. Perhaps everything depends, as Emily Dickinson wrote, on the “slant of light.” Maybe I can go on trying to be a teacher. With enough light, I can believe that violence will end, the planet will survive and people will find ways to exist with enough resources. Hope and despair seem to move in my consciousness like the shadows on the floor of the classroom.

Today, some years later, I no longer wear high heels or live under a sycamore tree, and I don’t remember her face, but I’ll not forget that purse and the sound of the fasteners clanging on the flagpole, a memory ofmy failure that lives like a pebble fastened in my heart.

Photo by Cheryl Berry

I have an old push-broom in the garage — like one I remember from long ago, when I noticed another push-broom in the hands of a silent man.

We’d decided to spend the summer in Virginia, after our junior year in college. We’d go to a town called Petersburg. It would be exciting for us sheltered 19-year-olds — to go far away from our California college to a town where my boyfriend was a youth leader in a Methodist church. We’d work as his assistants with the Sunday school children. He assured us he’d take care of everything. And he did — except he couldn’t ease our shock at being set down in the reconstructed South of 1955.

My friend Ann, a blue-eyed blond with a wide smile, was a science major from California. I was her tall, brown-haired literary friend, also from California. We were both comfortable with church work and enthusiastic about a trip to historic Virginia. We arrived in Petersburg on a hot day in June. My boyfriend greeted us heartily, as if we’d landed in a delightful resort. However, except for his high spirits, Petersburg seemed sodden with low energy. Movement was slow. Voices were muted; the air moist. Indoors, ceiling fans provided the only movement of air. Virginia felt like the outer reaches of the Amazon.

“You two Yankees?”

“No. We’re from California.”

“You sound like Yankees.”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

As ignorant college students, we didn’t know we’d stepped onto a Civil War battlefield where General Grant had cut off supply lines to the town during a horrendous attack, decimating and killing. The people in the church remembered everything. Ann and I were not aware of this memory of suffering. It seemed inconceivable, even laughable, that we were suspected to be enemy Yankees, as if we were part of a battalion hiding out in California waiting to invade and burn down houses. Actually, we’d invaded Petersburg from a prosperous western town, all sunshine and orange trees.

We didn’t realize that when rage reconstructed the South after the Civil War, it built a zone of customs while we in the sunny West panned gold and irrigated our deserts.

“You walked over here to the house in those pants?”

“Yes. They’re comfortable —"

“We don’t wear pants on public streets.”

“I see. I’m sorry.”

“We’ll drive you back.”

We had no language to access the culture, no map to help us find our way in this wooded land where the Civil War burned a slash through wounded hearts. As a young college student who should have known better, I knew more about ancient Roman slave practices than I did of the American South in the Fifties, but we settled into our little Petersburg rental, and under our desultory ceiling fan Ann and I talked into the night about this curious place.

Despite our clumsiness, the church work with the children was fun. Watched by the silent custodian, Washington — leaning over his broom — we set about getting to know the church. Along with our students, we planned a party at the church for the Black children who lived in a local orphanage. We’d have games and treats and perhaps build friendships. Church members seemed to approve.

“That sounds like a nice idea.”

“We could set up tables in the back area and eat outside!”

“Yes. That would be fine, except …”

“Is something wrong?”

“The Negro children won’t use the church bathrooms, of course.”

Did she really say that? As a white girl in the segregated South, I have to say I wasn’t infuriated. We adjusted. We were the outsiders and wanted to get along. Ann and I couldn’t articulate — or even feel — any outrage; that would come later. Still, we took note, made sure we’d remember.

“Would you like to stay and teach in our schools?”

“I’m only 19! I have no degree!”

“That’s not a problem. Our Negro schools need teachers.”

In Petersburg I was part of a ruling class, a privileged order. Like our church custodian, Washington — never without his broom — Black folk were servants, silent and apart, while I could be loud, pushy, and in front. I’d swept into a storybook place where jobs were offered. I was a princess to whom people bowed. If I’d been twelve years old, I’d have enjoyed the deference.

One day the tidy white church secretary gave us startling instructions: “That Nigra woman can’t sit on our church steps. It wouldn’t be right.” Through the window, we glanced outside to see a woman in a straw hat fanning herself.  She rested on the church steps next to her shopping bag.

“What are you saying? We can’t tell her to move!”

Then Washington spoke from where he stood in a doorway leaning on his broom. “I’ll take care of it.” What must he have thought? Maybe you can’t really know what it’s like to live in a divided world until you push a broom in a bathroom you can’t use.

Now, from my older perspective, I look over my spectacles at my town, at Prescott in the present day, and am aware that divisions are still with us, still separating the favored from the marginalized. Even in our so-called ‘Everybody’s Hometown’ we’re being served by people who don’t have real names, people who don’t meet your eyes, people who avoid being alone in a room with you. Worse still, a recent standoff on the Square reminded me that some here are ready to attack protesters carrying signs for equity.

Those disturbing events bring back Virginia memories — and the image of Washington leaning on his broom.