trauma – Emptying The Backpack

Sacred Bears

When I shared the following events with my writer’s group and asked them to put a timeline on them, most guessed the 1950’s. Learning this occurred in 2002 disturbed them. Truly disturbing, though, is that, sadly, no one in this country right now would be surprised to enter a town square in nearly any southern state in the US and see again today what I saw then.

Black and White Teddy Bear on overturned children's chair

Sacred Bears

“Some old lady got my buddy in trouble!” was what I heard another pastor declare as I sat down at the weekly lunch of local United Methodist pastors in the county. (“Local Pastors” do not attend seminary but rather several years’ worth of courses in order to be allowed to preach from United Methodist pulpits.) I was running late, but I knew immediately what he was complaining about and I was annoyed to realize quickly he had only heard part of the story. “He was at the weekend school…”

“Course of Study,” I offered.

“Yeah. The Course of Study. Anyway, there was this festival on the square down there in Pulaski….”

“They called it ‘White Christian Heritage Festival’ but they were handing out KKK literature,” I added. He frowned.

“Okay…. so, this old lady just took what my buddy said all wrong. Then…then, she told the guy in charge.”

“Grady?”

My colleague stared at me, determined to finish the story. “That old lady told Grady my buddy was part of the KKK!”

“Actually,” I said after I ordered my chicken salad with ranch on the side, “that ‘old lady’ told Grady that your buddy confessed to her that he could see where their teachings made sense. He said they made sense.’ So, since he is allowed to preach at a United Methodist church and to teach children and youth….”

“She probably just misunderstood.”

Surely, I thought, this guy will catch on soon. I sighed. “So, I shoulda just let that slide?”

The others at our table were clearly amused that my colleague didn’t get why I knew the story so well. In his defense, he attended a different Course of Study, lasting four weeks, in Atlanta for full time pastors in the United Methodist Church. His buddy and I were part time, which meant only 60 hours a week of work. Our Course of Study classes met over eight weekends a year with reading and papers in between those weekends, sometimes in Jackson and other times at Martin Methodist College in Pulaski. Pulaski, if you aren’t aware, is known for being home to some members of the Mars candy family (think Milky Way) and is also generally credited with being the birthplace of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the KKK.

I especially hated the overnight stays at these weekend schools. That particular weekend, I do not remember another woman in attendance. Not only was I away from my sons, but I was alone. In a motel room. In a strange town. A single woman. Newly in recovery from trauma. In other words, someone who knew bad people did lurk in the shadows. Assuming all the men around were trustworthy was a luxury. So, I slept not at all. I took to wedging whatever chairs were in the room in front of the door in an effort to at least rest.

On one particular Saturday, several of us left class to make a lap around the nearby downtown square on our lunch break only to encounter what was that day touted as a “Celebration of Southern Culture.” Displayed on the assorted tables were handtooled leather goods, canned peaches, okra and pickles. A brochure I found had previously invited area residents to join in the “family fun,” including a cakewalk.

Pretty quickly, though, I was stopped, jolted a stuffed teddy bear sitting among the books and maps under the magnolia trees. I believe God created Teddy Bears to provide a tactile reminder of love and affection, of comfort. This bear, though, had, through no fault of his own, become aligned with pure evil: he wore a white cotton robe and a white pointed cap that covered his face. This child’s toy was disguised, as if he, too, needed to hide his collusion with evil, like the men who had donned those robes and hoods in the night for so long. I thought they were a thing of our past and yet there they were, not hiding their affiliation at all and they had brochures, newsletters, books and even maps, the texts and visual aids to present these “Southern” beliefs. The first murmurs from the other pastors with me were indignant: how did these folks get to determine the definition of what was “southern”?

Eager to share with us about how God meant to order society, one of the men began to carefully explain the rationale for hatred, including their understanding that God, of course, looked just like them. In that moment, the inference was that God most resembled a skinny, pasty middle-aged man in black slacks, a white shirt and a decades-old tie. A couple of pastors seemed interested in engaging. I was far from confident in my ability to face evil head on though; I, instead, focused on the contents of the tables.

Besides books and t-shirts, decals, key rings, watches, pins and flags, there were maps. I would not give them my money for books but I did consider buying one of the maps, a large laminated wall map designed to settle once and for all the mystery of the disappearance of the two “Lost Tribes” of Israel. Finally, I chuckled. They’d migrated, it seemed, from the Middle East and crossed over the Caucasus Mountains, stopping, of course, in Scotland before heading into North America. My ancestors were among those Scots who came through the Cumberland Gap and moved on into Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri. I hadn’t known, however, that we were either lost or a tribe of Israelites. This journey was credited with solving the mystery: the Lost Tribes were now known as “Caucasians,” according to the map, by virtue of having traversed the Caucasus Mountains. I kick myself now for not purchasing that map, but, at the time, I could not stomach giving these people my money.

I did try to offer them money for the Teddy Bear, for the sake of the children these men likely influenced, for the sake of the legacy of Teddy Bears the world over, and for the comfort and benevolence children had so long depended on them to provide, I wanted to scream, “How dare you?!”

Gotta hand it to the KKK, though. Aligning an innocent source of comfort and safety with the evil of the KKK, twisting what a child loves and trusts and using it to promote hatred and exclusion is socially and theologically powerful. Teddy Bears are bordering on sacred, as far as I’m concerned, objects that carry children through those times when the adults are absent or preoccupied or already asleep.

The Teddy Bear in the hood and robe makes more sense when you recognize how much of the most destructive theology through the ages has been born out of childhood pain. We may never know who was the child who’d been hurt enough that he grew up and somehow chose to cover himself and his head and face with a white hood so his grandmother or his neighbors or his children did not see him when he was cruel and ugly. I wanted so badly to rescue that child, or at least rescue the Teddy Bear, to allow God to do what God does best: redeem both that Teddy Bear and whomever it was who dressed him up.

I wanted so badly to rescue that child, or at least rescue the Teddy Bear, to allow God to do what God does best: redeem both that Teddy Bear and whomever it was who dressed him up.

“He is not for sale” was the response, though, and so I left behind that embodiment of evil and prayed for the trust and spirits of all the children these pasty white men were teaching or had taught so far.

I did pick up some brochures and printed newsletters and walked away before they realized I did not, in fact, agree with their understanding that our country was designed as a White Christian nation or that we ought to somehow respect men who hid behind masks to terrorize others. Later, I would discover the literature went so far as to advocate for internment facilities for those who had contracted AIDS, for example, or that we all were invited to a worship service that night, complete with “great white Christian fellowship” and a “brilliant cross-burning!”

I was no longer hungry, so I walked back with one of the younger pastors. After a few moments’ walk in silence, I said simply, “I was not expecting that.” I was feeling shaken that this evil was so openly displayed and discussed; I’d been blissfully ignorant, I realized. I had honestly thought these clowns in hoods were anachronisms, relics of a bygone era, that they were no longer active, like the sundown signs I would later learn sat as sentinels along the highways at the edges of the town where I preached. Those signs–simple painted sunsets on road signs–were nonverbal warnings: if you were a person of color, you’d best not be found in this town after sunset. The signs had been taken down, but the sentiments, fears and prejudices were not so deeply buried. I would later be disturbed to find out, for example, that two members of my congregation had been “card-carrying” KKK members while I was pastor there. As a white woman, I had been ignorant and thus, negligent.

As we walked back to classes that weekend, though, my companion, a pastor who was about 15 years my junior, pointed out that “southern culture” was his culture. Then he added, “They did make some valid points. Did you realize they’re Christian?”

The hair on the back of my neck stood up.

“If you listen to what they are saying,” he went on, “you will discover that they make a lot of sense.”

He was a pastor.

He taught a children’s Sunday School class, too, and he seemed interested, not disturbed, but interested in the Teddy Bear in the robe and hood.

“How,” I asked as calmly as I could while placing one foot in front of another, “would you go about teaching this to children?” I wanted him to clarify, to make me realize I’ve misunderstood, to tell me he wasn’t teaching ‘southern culture’ to the children, but he didn’t say any more. As we approached the classroom for our last afternoon that weekend, I wondered what the other pastors might say. Turns out, very little. I remember watching the others in the rest of the day’s lecture and discussion, wondering why no one mentioned what we’d seen. Had they debated at lunch? Had they discovered others open to these ideas? No one seemed angry, at least not that they’d admit. I felt like I was playing a game my sons liked where you had to pretend that the floor was lava, so don’t dare put your feet down; it was dangerous. I hoped that the overt racism we’d witnessed had shocked them too. I feared, though, they knew from experience not to admit out loud they “got” where these guys were coming from, that, like my walking companion, they knew to simply shut down the conversation if they thought they’d shown their own hood to the wrong person.

Once we’d finished for the day and each of the pastors was headed home to prepare to preach the next morning, I found Grady, the professor in charge. I explained I did not want to cause an issue for a colleague but I was disturbed about what this pastor might be teaching, especially in Sunday school for children. I wasn’t sure what to do and had not felt safe addressing him directly. Grady listened, got the particulars, then told me it was his place to address it.

I heard nothing else for a month until I received an email from Grady; he’d spoken to the younger pastor’s District Superintendent, who evidently had found “no reason to believe such reports” and had never even spoken to the guy. This information hit my inbox just before leaving for the next weekend class. Once there, I was dismayed to find that the young pastor was there before me, annoyed, and looking for me. He was pretty sure I was the one who had ratted him out. I was the only “old lady” there.

He greeted me with “I got called on the carpet by my DS,” which was a stark departure from what my professor had been told. “When can we talk about this alone?” he wanted to know.

“Excuse me,” I said, walking away; that was as much as he got for the rest of the weekend from me.

I still count that entire episode a disappointing failure, though I didn’t know how to do anything differently at the time. Not tossing my books and overnight bag in my car and leaving right away seemed the best I could manage for the time being. Clearly, I needed to learn how to counter this twisting of theology openly, to be prepared to teach the children and youth in the churches I served that Jesus really meant it when He said He loved every body. So I stayed. For the rest of that weekend, I kept my distance. I kept my guard up. I didn’t sleep.

I wasn’t surprised then a few weeks later at lunch, though, when this “old lady” was being castigated and labelled a busybody sticking her nose in other people’s business.

Just to be clear, I asked my angry colleague, “That old lady ought to have simply looked the other way?”

“Exactly!” he said. “It was none of her…your business.”

Here Lies Jimmie’s Arm: A Pastor’s Tale of Smalltown Challenges

(Includes an excerpt)

With your support and encouragement, Here Lies Jimmie’s Arm, my first book, is out and ready for consumption.

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An excerpt:

From “The Women’s Kitchen Jug Band.”

Lela, Rebecca, Molly and Sally were all part of this impressive gaggle of hardy women who had lived long enough and worked hard enough to say they didn’t really care what anyone else thought any more, though they were not shy about telling you what they thought. What they “thought” often and vocally was that “Mildred was goin’ to hell.” That was because Mildred, who lived across the street from Lela, never let the shadow of the steeple at church fall across her path, even though she was mobile and still drove when she wanted.

The first time I tried to visit Mildred, I called to ask if she’d mind a visit and she proceeded to cuss me out and tell me with every imaginable expletive why I needed to leave her the #*#* alone! Then she stopped and took a breath, but before I could apologize for bothering her, she asked, “Now, who IS this?”

“Your new preacher,” I offered.

“Well, damn.”

Like many of the elderly I visited, Mildred, who was even tinier than Rebecca, and even more impatient with the younger folks around her, complained about the same issues every time. She also told me about her “constitutional.” Her need for me to know her bowel habits was, strangely, not unusual for this congregation which was, admittedly, mostly populated with folks old enough for regularity to be an issue. Nevertheless, I never knew so many people in one congregation who needed their pastor to know they were regular. I was not prepared for that. I expected they’d share what they were ashamed of or when they’d strayed from the straight and narrow, but not this. If I’d had a bingo board to take to every visit, “regular bowel movement” would have been the center spot. Mildred was no different.

I learned quickly to move to another topic in those visits. If I’d been willing, I could have shared what was working or not working for others in the congregation and even wondered if I needed to copy those old timey door-to-door peddlers and carry with me a big black valise filled with stool-softeners, laxatives and Pepto-Bismol. I decided instead that this line of conversation was simply a warped reminder of my responsibility to keep boundaries and not share what was not mine to share. I chose not to take the bait in those conversations.

All of these women, at different times, worried me to no end, and the challenge was to try to talk them down off those ladders at their age. Mildred prided herself on a perfect lawn, and no one could do it as well as she could. She was so tiny, though, that the brand new “Yardman” riding mower she bought would not start for her because she was not heavy enough for the seat to register that she was actually riding the mower. Undeterred, she doctored the spring system and drove around her steep and hilly lawn at least twice a week during the warmer months while the neighbors cringed and begged her to let one of their sons help her out. Her own son would not help, however, so she was damned if she would let someone else’s son show him or her up. She would not stop mowing, not even after she tipped the mower because she found a new gopher hole. One tire dropped into the hole but kept going even after Mildred fell off. Thankfully, it did not get far before it rested against a small tree and burned itself out. The jolt sent Mildred tumbling and she found herself stuck, headfirst, in a hole. It wasn’t a tight hole and her head had fallen into it so she hadn’t gotten hurt too badly. She would have easily been capable of extricating herself from the offending hole except she didn’t have the arm strength to push herself back upright and so she had to wait, head first in that hole, listening to her precious mower burn itself out against the silver maple tree until one of the neighbors smelled the engine burning and came over to see what was what. That neighbor got cussed out, too. Mildred was nothing if not consistent.

A couple of years later, Mildred died, still alone, and still cussing out anyone in her way, but also still quite regular. All she wanted was a short graveside service and that was certainly her choice except that she died during the coldest February I could remember. Only the Kitchen Band ladies attended and, as was to be expected, each dressed “to the nines” to send Mildred off to her fiery eternal home. Because the only people who would be attending on that frigid morning were these ladies in their nineties, I was grateful the funeral home was prepared with a small tent and some space heaters. I assured the Directors I would keep things brief, and only included a prayer and Proverbs 31. “Who can find a virtuous woman?” In retrospect, I had to admit Mildred had only sparsely shared about her past issues so talking about her as an excellent wife might have seemed disingenuous to the women who knew her well. At the time, though, we all were simply grateful to recite the 23rd Psalm and The Lord’s Prayer and be done with it. Unfortunately, as I took a flower from the pall and broke it up to crumble onto her casket, while I prayed, “Ashes to ashes,” a foul and acrid smell made me choke. I looked up to see one funeral director frantically trying to swat sparks while the other gagged. Rebecca, who’d ventured too close to the heater, had decided friends don’t die every day, so she would celebrate the occasion by resurrecting her fox fur stole, its head hanging where a nice brooch ought to have been. The beady eyes of the dead fox haunted me throughout the short service, but it was the smell that was most memorable. It was not just the smell of hair burning, which is foul enough; it was seventy-year-old fox hair we were smelling, an odor that stayed with me for days. I know, as we moved as fast as we could to get the ladies back into their cars, Mildred was either cussing up a storm or, perhaps, cackling gleefully. Maybe both.

Not convinced? How about some advance reviews?

“Here Lies Jimmie’s Arm is a treasure of a book, especially if you have ever attended a small church. The author describes her experiences growing up and becoming a pastor with much humor and great style. The reader is drawn into the dramas of small towns, small churches and in some cases small minds. How she survives and thrives and laughs along the way is truly brilliant and entertaining.” ~ Nancy B.

“Very readable. And engaging. These pieces welcome the reader into this country setting, with all its charms, peculiarities and characters. The author juxtaposes the troubled histories of her parishioners with her own, inviting readers into a novice pastor’s inner thoughts, worries and fears. Should be required reading for all would-be pastors.” ~ Charlie M

Free Cookies

I come for the cookies….

“Why,” I asked the woman seated next to me, both of us with arms outstretched being squeezed by thin rubber tourniquets, “would someone go to the trouble of giving blood to that venerable institution called the Red Cross expecting that their blood would be rejected?” I kept my eyes trained on hers to avoid witnessing either needle being inserted, grateful for the distraction.

“To see if they’re still clean,” was the answer she gave that summer afternoon in the Red Cross’s makeshift donation center in our little town’s City Hall. From the looks of it, the BloodMobile staff had the travel and setup routine down and, on this particular afternoon, business was booming in that air-conditioned meeting room. Word was out and neighbors in the Highland Rim town of Portland, Tennessee, population just over 5,000, were lining up, enticed perhaps by some visiting and sharing of the cookies and orange juice handed out to donors, all playing out indoors where there was air that you could breathe in August. The tech loosened the rubber tourniquet around my arm and the young woman in the next chair leaned over and explained. “If you suspect you have AIDS, you can let the Red Cross diagnose you. They’ll only use your blood if it’s clean,” she said. “Lots cheaper than paying for a test. And no one asks you questions you don’t want to answer.”

Plus, there are cookies.

People amaze me. I sat back as the blood flowed and reviewed how creative types could see what the rest of us cannot, who find ways to work around existing services to fit their needs, even if the services were not intended to diagnose, for example. These workarounds can be quite ingenious, but less about artistic visions and more often the child of necessity. Were folks adapting the services of the Red Cross the way others did those phone hotlines, I wondered? The ones where you could find someone to talk to you for free? Maybe not, I thought, more like 2-1-1. Used to be, if you wanted to talk to someone but you don’t want two police officers showing up at your door to do a “well check,” you could dial, or rather, punch in “2-1-1.” The idea washed over me that our culture used to, at least, have a number of systems, screenings and alert systems apparently in place. Some were designed to separate the lonely from the disturbed, some alerted us when we needed to see a doctor, still others, a process of interest to me at the time, offered to determine if you were among the “called” or simply delusional. As someone whose life path led me into ordained ministry by way of teaching, social work and writing, I was becoming familiar with this web of services.

You’ve Got a Friend….

I was serving Neeley’s Bend UMC by this point and our proximity to Nashville meant we had access to a 211 directory. Our little town of Portland, nearer the Kentucky state line, where my son and I still lived as he finished out high school, did not have such service, a system where anyone could call and chat with another, live person for a bit at no cost and about pretty much anything. Designed to help steer local residents towards food pantries or accessible ride programs, the lines were answered by folks who became, at least for a while, the only friends some could claim. Turns out, lonely people were also creative and many of them figured out they could call every day. In fact, lonely callers so overwhelmed the 211 system that a few rules became necessary: callers were limited to one call a day per person for a limited duration. Rules ruin it for everyone, some lamented, but, then again, even if only for ten minutes a day, you still had a friend who’d listen to you, for “free.” No strings attached. The beauty for many was that there was no real effort on the caller’s part except to dial the phone; no quid pro quo was necessary and no relational reciprocation was required. Someone was always at your (beck and) call. At least once a day. Whether we were annoyed with the smell of our pet’s kitty litter or the price of avocados, we could talk to a person through 211 about anything for ten minutes and they’d listen. They could even tell you where to get free groceries and usually there’d be cookies. All for free. Not sure how many towns have those systems in place now, but they definitely serve a purpose.

Along the same vein, (pun intended), while I sat in that chair watching the bag fill with blood, I had learned that, if you believed God talked to you and you wanted to know if you were sane, there were workarounds; in particular, there were helpful gatekeepers. While some folks slide easily into ordained ministry, others of us step onto the path shakily, unsure for ourselves and aware that those around us will be more than a little skeptical. For me, the first step was admitting to my husband that I prayed. We had been married more than a decade when I sat on the edge of the bed we shared, clutching a lumpy pillow, cringing as I told him that swearing was not in fact the only time I used the word “God” (with a capital ‘G.”) This was the man who was outspoken about his belief that only mental weaklings believed in a deity of any kind.

God talks to you?!?! Of all people…?

For years as a teen, long before I’d met my husband or considered turning to the church for a vocation, I had struggled with anxious thoughts, worries that felt like there was one of those old mimeograph machines in my head. Perhaps you are old enough to remember those: the kind with the drum that you cranked by hand while the paper revolved around and your words were printed on multiple pages, the precursor to a copy machine. For most of my life, I’d been trying to make decisions absent any sage advice from my parents who, when approached for advice, waved me and my siblings off, annoyed, as if to remind us they were overwhelmed enough already by our existence and life in general. My father once described to me his own anxieties by sharing that he had spent most of his adult life feeling like he was hanging dangerously onto a ledge and, above him, people were constantly stepping on his fingers to make him let go, give up, go away. He could offer no guidance or help to anyone else while he was just hanging on.

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.”

On occasion, because of my own anxieties, on the mimeograph machine in my mind, it seemed like a couple of pieces of paper would come loose and flap wildly as the drum turned. My mind was that drum and my thoughts were that paper flapping uncontrollably. I had tried a variety of ways to ease my anxieties: visualizing silly images like a cat with a stop sign attached to its tail or locking my worries in a dumpster, but nothing helped much until I found my way into an Al-Anon meeting one day. I was nineteen and dating David, a man who shared early on that he was a member of Alcoholics Anonymous and, who, after having known my mother for a few weeks, thought he ought to tell me about Al-Anon. “I don’t know much about that group except they used the same 12 Steps we use in AA. Who knows? It might just be a lot of old women complaining about their drunk husbands, but it’s there and worth a try.”

You could always try those meetings….

He shared this one morning over coffee; I’d sought him out, distraught after encountering my mother drunk that morning. His suggestion hit me at the right moment and I found a meeting that evening at the back of the small storefront where the AA meeting was held. I was too worn out with navigating the alcohol and moods to be nervous about walking into a room where I knew no one. What happened then was that I walked into a roomful of loving, wise, patient surrogate parents who shared with me the Twelve Steps. Members of Al-Anon are, like me, those who have lived with or currently in relationship with alcoholics. The first three steps to that philosophy are designed to help you recognize that your life is unmanageable; likely if you grew up in an alcoholic home, your life had always seemed pretty unmanageable. The Third Step talks about believing in and trusting that there was a God and that God could help. The idea of letting go of control of my life seemed dangerous but I kept going back and sharing how stressful and chaotic my family’s day to day life was. My own life at that time was a mess as well: I couldn’t tell you what I believed or what I needed to do for my next job, let alone as a career. So, per their suggestion, I attended 90 meetings in 90 days, letting those people love on me and studying the Steps. In contrast to everything around me, the Twelve Steps were not chaotic, but rather offered a different way to make decisions and live life. Then, one afternoon, I was curled up on my bed, emotionally exhausted and lost. It seemed a voice in my head, a benevolent voice, said, “You just need to sit down and shut up.” Suddenly, it felt like I was not alone in making decisions. I took a breath and stopped asking myself or God or anyone who’d listen; I just sat quietly, suddenly reassured the answer would find me if I sat still and waited. A revelation. There would be more. Eventually. I stopped dating David, but I kept coming back to the meetings regularly for nearly two decades, wherever I lived, and I know that that program and those people saved my life and even helped me grow up, at least a bit.

A decade later, married and teaching with two small boys, I finally told my then husband that I prayed and, when he didn’t laugh at me, I admitted that God not only talked to me but that I believed I was meant to be involved full time in some ministry. You might think that everyone around you would celebrate if you announced your call to church ministry, and that’s true in some circles. I’d been attending a Methodist Church regularly with our sons, but most of our friends at that time were not attending any church; most were agnostic at best. Thus, I felt the need to be selective when telling anyone that I had regular conversations with God, even those that are only in my head. It didn’t help that God and I were negotiating what ministry for me might look like and I was still quite leery of admitting God wanted anything from me, of all people. If nothing else, at the time, I cussed like a sailor. I had to wonder how that would work!

Moving forward into what would become an increasingly complicated path towards ordination, it was clear that I had to be subtle about my next steps, and at least appear sane and convincing enough to be taken seriously. The first step was to write a letter to the Methodist Superintendent of the district I lived in and declare my desire to “explore ministry.” Somewhere in there, it was necessary to admit publicly – to say out loud in front of others – that God spoke to me and told me that I was “called” to ministry. Another chance to cringe.

My First Church

The process of moving towards ordination (in the Methodist Church at least) had certainly been more involved than dialing 211, but it was not dissimilar. I’d written that letter and one of the first things the church did was assign me someone to be my mentor, someone who would listen to me and ask lots of questions. Kind of like a free friend, but with a purpose. From then on out, as I went through the process, there were plenty of folks who were ready and willing to swim in the deep end of thoughts and emotions with me, like those free friends, or better, like counselors I didn’t have to pay. The first thing they did, though, was send me to a psychologist’s office because there was a test in my future. Not free, I remember thinking, but a whole lot less dramatic than calling the local hotline and telling them I talk to God, I guess.

The psychological exam was just one of the many steps involved in becoming a Methodist minister, a process that is quite long and involved, and can become expensive for many. I had to laugh when I found out, though, that people also used this process, or at least the psychological testing, as a workaround for their own mental screening; it wasn’t free and was far more involved than a simple phone call. I had to wonder: Did they want to be stopped before they hurt someone? I remember sitting in a leather chair in a paneled office with a massive wooden desk between me and the psychologist. I will be forever grateful he started the conversation with, “First, your test reveals you are mentally strong and resilient. All good.”

Relieved, I sat back in the leather chair, and let out a laugh, then admitted, “I’ve got to ask about one of the questions in that test.”

“Sure,” he said.

“It was something like, ‘Do you like to smell other people’s shoes? Do some people actually admit to enjoying aroma of another person’s shoes?’”

“You’d be surprised,” the psychologist said.

“Why on earth would you do that?”

“It’s a way to ask for help, ostensibly without actually asking. They want us to catch them before they do something dangerous,” he explained.

I sure understand that, I thought, making a mental note to be, as a minister, more focussed on the reasons behind those workarounds than the tricks themselves. The reasons were where ministry would happen, I realized. Sometimes people need someone to help them figure out if they are crazy because they talk to – and hear from – God. Just as often, though, folks need to be encouraged to share what they believe God is telling them. Walking people through that process for the United Methodist Church requires years of discernment, writing, interviews and 84 hours of seminary. In other churches, you simply walk up to the front of the sanctuary and declare that God talks to you, indeed, that God is calling you to ministry. I get why it’s so tough to get through the ordination process for the UMC, though, and, don’t get me wrong: I respect it. Even after all the schooling and the discerning and retreats and writing and interviews, after all that I learned about myself and about ministry, I still stood behind the pulpit of my first church and wondered if I was in the right place. I suspect though that God is more able to use us when we are not so sure of ourselves, when we remember we need God. And, my experience has been that, often, we learn we need God through recognizing we need one another, whether we find one another through a phone call, a church or a self-help meeting.

Sometimes, in perverse moments, though, I will admit, I’ve wondered if we don’t just need to suggest people start with dialing 211. It’s a whole lot faster and cheaper and they will even tell you where to get free cookies.

D-Day Promises, Guilt and Forgiveness – Eighty Years Later

Because coming home is just the beginning….

In a previous post, (“You Can Have My Seat on the Mourner’s Bench,”) I introduced James, (not his real name), who struggled mightily with ongoing guilt and grief about his past actions. For years, I didn’t have a clue what those might be.

I did not know what troubled James, only that he was miserable, but when the Lady Preacher came by, he focussed on how I wasn’t preaching or leading worship in a way that would help him feel like he’d “been to church.” Apparently, as I explained in that eariler post, he was convinced that IF that Lady Preacher could dish up some good old-fashioned confession, that would fix things for him, at least temporarily.

My job, as he saw it, was to offer him a chance to relieve his guilt (for at least a week) through confession and some time on that mourner’s bench. There was no mourner’s bench at Wartrace UMC by the time I was sent there as pastor, though, and, unfortunately for James, I was not on board with the kind of spiritual bloodletting he seemed to want.

Wartrace United Methodist Church circa 1850
where a split log bench wih no back was reportedly the “mourner’s bench.”

Sadly, though, James, perhaps more than anyone at Wartrace needed his Preacher to see how guilty he believed he was, to convict him and then to help him leave that guilt on there, even if he never actually graced the church with his presence. I tried a few times to reprise my sermon from my perch on a sticky metal kitchen chair on his back porch, but the sad truth was that even if James had been able to feel forgiven by God every week, even if he had felt Scriptural preaching wash over him every Sabbath morning, he was in grave danger of never being able to forgive himself.

For years, I was unaware this was what he felt he needed. I would visit him regularly but we were not speaking the same spiritual language for the longest time. Until I preached about D-Day.

Wartrace United Methodist Church,
Greenbrier, Tennessee
(Photo Property of Rev Jodi McCullah) 2023

I finally learned why James was continually unhappy with my preaching on a sticky Sunday afternoon in June when I was directed to lift some old blankets and newspapers and take a seat on a sagging recliner in the corner of the porch at James’ house, a corner too dark and hidden even to be seen before. James had decided I was to be trusted finally, not because I had finally made him feel like the worm he thought he was; rather, on that sweltering Sunday in June, his son had called right after worship let out to tell Daddy that the Preacher Lady had shared a D-Day story in her sermon.

D-Day Promises

I had told the story of Rev. Herman Yates, a retired pastor connected to the church; he and his wife had moved there a few months earlier. He had never preached at Wartrace, not even in revivals, and he and his wife were homebound, too, but Wartrace claimed him because he’d grown up in the area. He was on my list of shut-ins to visit, and he had given me permission to share his story on the first Sunday in June. Herman, a sergeant in the United States Army on D-Day sixty years before, had joined other NCO’s who strapped on flimsy orange and white vests with large crosses on them in order to lead their platoons’ landing crafts and soldiers onto the shore. Eyes and throat burning from the acrid smoke, trying to drown out the screams, they were halted time and time again by the force of nearby explosions. Herman and the other Sergeants moved methodically forward, though, careful to move slowly enough for their men to follow and, of course, he said, slowly enough to be a perfect target. When I met him, Herman was able to tell the story calmly after relating it hundreds of times from pulpits across the area. He told powerfully of how he had bargained with God that day that, should he survive, he would dedicate the rest of his life to preaching. God took him up on the deal.

For those unfamiliar with World War II, “The D-Day operation of June 6, 1944, brought together the land, air, and sea forces of the allied armies in what became known as the largest amphibious invasion in military history,” according to the Eisenhower Presidential Library. “The operation, given the codename OVERLORD, delivered five naval assault divisions to the beaches of Normandy, France. The beaches were given the code names UTAH, OMAHA, GOLD, JUNO, and SWORD. The invasion force included 7,000 ships and landing craft manned by over 195,000 naval personnel from eight allied countries. Almost 133,000 troops from the United States, the British Commonwealth, and their allies, landed on D-Day. Casualties from these countries during the landing numbered 10,300.” Combat would continue for nearly another year in Europe. (eisenhowerlibrary.gov)

Knowing what little I do about the massive undertaking that was D-Day, I have long been amazed at the instructions Herman received that morning before the terrifying landing began. “If you make it to the beach,” Herman’s orders had been to “go to the ‘big’ tree, turn right and meet up a mile down.” Herman and at least a few of his platoon somehow safely made their way onto the beach, somehow found some trees still standing on that battlefield, and somehow chose the right big tree from among many. Herman always knew how all that happened and how he had survived the rest of the war. He went on to serve churches for some forty years.

James was proud, he said that Sunday, proud I’d shared Herman’s story. For the first time since I’d arrived at Wartrace, sitting in the old recliner, I did the math and realized James was shaking because he’d been there as well. Tragically, though, James’ story was neither heroic nor admirable.

“I sent them all out there,” he said with litte introduction, “out there to die.” He paused and looked at the flickering television screen, his only constant companion for years. “One by one,” he continued, “the boats went out. We heard and we knew. We were wishing them a safe journey. We knew though. We didn’t know how many, but we knew, we knew. We were safe, right where we were.” He wasn’t in danger but he was painfully certain that his actions were killing soldiers – his own soldiers – on that beachhead as brutally as any bullet or exploding shell. After he shared his story, his voice trailed off and he mumbled to himself for a bit before I made a pitiful attempt to be helpful.

An estimated 20 percent of all combatants historically suffer from the effects of “combat trauma.”

Soldier’s Heart

nostalgia

“to be broken”

shell shock

“The affliction (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) has had many names over the centuries, demonstrating that it is a condition accompanying not just modern wars but all wars. Its cluster of symptoms was first diagnosed as ‘nostalgia’ among Swiss soldiers in 1678. German doctors at that time called the condition Heimweh, and the French called it maladie du pays; both mean homesickness. The Spanish called it estar roto, ‘to be broken.’ Civil War Americans called it soldier’s heart, irritable heart, or nostalgia. In World War I, it was called shell shock; in World War II and Korea, combat fatigue. ‘Soldier’s heart’ indicates that the heart has been changed by war. ‘Nostalgia’ and ‘homesickness’ bespeak the soldier’s anguished longing to escape from the combat zone and return home. Estar roto describes the psyche’s condition after war—broken.”
(War and the Soul: Healing our Nation’s Veterans from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, by Edward Tick, Ph.D, p. 99)

I doubt James heard anything I said that afternoon. I’d like to believe I offered him some kind of relief from his guilt but I’m pretty sure my words were wasted. I couldn’t do what he wanted, couldn’t agree with him that he should feel guilty, couldn’t acknowledge that he was indeed as guilty of killing Allied soldiers as any German bullet, bomb or soldier. I toyed with the idea of offering him one of the confessions we regularly used from the hymnal on Communion Sunday, but not one word I could think of was gonna do.

In every house of worship in the nation, veterans of wars are in the pews. Many have spent decades grappling with grief from their wartime experiences. Few of them feel like their part was heroic or admirable. Maybe they “won,” but too often, they are leary of telling us how ugly the “winning” was.

Evidently, James had been needing to visit that mourner’s bench for decades, so maybe telling Herman’s D-Day story created a space for James, as if we gave him permission to risk sharing the shame he felt. Perhaps being able finally to tell his story out loud was the confession James craved. Like too many combat veterans, though, he needed not only to share but also to not be shunned.

Years later, I would sit in a veteran’s retreat and listen to veteran after veteran tell their combat stories, usually with trepidation. So many were like the Iraq war veteran who shared his story of killing “anything that moved” from the helicoptor he piloted. That veteran believed himself to be a “monster” and was certain he should no longer be allowed in our midst. Like this combat veteran and so many others, James needed to tell his story and not have anyone, as one veteran feared, “run screaming from the room.” He needed to know I didn’t see him as a monster and that I would still visit, still speak to him, still consider him part of the flock. He had been needing to visit that mourner’s bench for decades, and telling Herman’s D-Day story gave him permission, at least in his mind, to risk telling his story out loud. Maybe Herman knew what would happen when I shared his D-Day story. God certainly did.

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Facing the Big Dogs (Part 2 of 2)

To read part one of this two-part essay, see Speak Up, Young Lady. Be warned, parts of that essay may trigger victims.

Wise ones tell us that we often have to “learn” the same lesson over and over until we get it right. My hint: once you figure out whatever lesson it is you seem doomed to repeat in your life, get on that. Study it. Dissect it. Get it right so you can get it done…or, at least, get good at it.

For me, evidently, one lesson that I have felt doomed to repeat is “Speak up.”

After being fired at age 17 from a fast food restaurant for daring to write a letter to corporate about requiring female workers to wear short skirts (this was in the late 70’s) I found work that fit my college schedule at the county juvenile detention facility. I was thrilled to get the job if only because I was considering a career in social work by that time. Never mind that there was little or no training for the position or that most of my co-workers and I were still teens ourselves; the county simply needed folks willing to work all hours, and willing to be locked into the facility with teens in trouble. College students fit that bill nicely. There were three shifts a day, each eight hours, round the clock, and we all pulled at least one midnight to eight a.m. shift a week. I’m grateful that the teens we supervised were “less criminal and more neglected” teens, picked up mostly for truancy or petty theft or vandalism, but mostly just guilty of being unsupervised. There were three pods of four teens each and our biggest struggle was keeping them from being bored and trying to ignore smartass remarks. I generally worked the 4 p.m. to midnight shift on three of my four shifts, always sharing supervision and feeding and fielding complaints alongside another college student, always a guy since we were locked in every night with boys and girls.

When the dog bites….

Only once did we realize how vulnerable we were, but some training we received came in really handy then and years later for me. During a self-defense training, we learned about getting out of holds and about using weak spots like the instep which is usually vulnerable when someone grabs you from behind. I would years later be grateful for another piece of that training: when we were taught how to react when someone bites you. An unarmed combatant might bite and, while the instinct is to pull away, the best move is to push into the open jaws. That movement will cause the assailant to open their jaw wider and allow you to then pull away. Years later, while out walking in my neighborhood, I would use that with a dog that jumped his fence and lunged for me. I am grateful I saw him coming, though, raised my arm (covered thankfully by a heavy jacket) and pushed back into his jaw as he lunged. He was unable to bite down. We repeated this two more times, him lunging and me pushing back while I yelled for help before another neighbor came out. I’d heard people say time seems to slow in life-threatening moments, and I remember calmly being focussed on my arm going into that dog’s jaw.

It was terrifying.

It was also empowering and would help me in so many ways.

I’d been given one way to stand my ground and I’d seen it work. This would not come in handy until years later, though. At that time, I am grateful to say we had little reason to be afraid of our detainees in the juvenile detention facility.

Again with the troublemaking.

After working there for nearly a year, though, as the juvenile detention facility (which seemed like a lifetime for me at eighteen, by the way) a new worker was hired. Without warning, my schedule was cut in half. It took a week or so to figure out what was happening, but, evidently, the new worker was dating the boss. Remember, this was the seventies. No one even thought of filing complaints then, at least not in Springfield, Missouri. I was angry, but was told at our monthly staff meeting this arrangement would be temporary. By that time, I was living in a tiny apartment. The kitchen was so small I could not open the oven door more than three inches because the refrigerator stood in the way. The bathroom had a claw foot tub with a skylight overhead, though, and a balcony, and I was thrilled to have it, but I would not be able to pay my rent on half a paycheck. Already, I had learned the art of “robbing Peter to pay Paul,” and relied as well on the four meals a week I shared with the detainees at work. This job had been my way out of working fast food; I knew I was far too clumsy to be a server at a restaurant. After nearly a month with my hours cut though, I found it difficult to be cordial when I went to pick up my diminished paycheck and encountered my replacement. I’d thus far received good evaluations, so I was frustrated about having to consider another job. That is perhaps why I figured I had little to lose when the next monthly staff meeting rolled around. After our boss offered updates and training information, he handed out new schedules for the month and, again, I was facing half of my regular paycheck. I raised my hand. My boss called on me. I was standing at the back of the room, aware that others were disgruntled at how things were working out but only two of us had lost significant portions of our paychecks. I simply asked, “What do I have to do to get my hours back?”

My boss looked at me, frowned, and asked me what I meant.

“You know what I mean.” I said, “What do I have to DO to get my hours back?” He definitely knew what I meant. He looked at his girlfriend who was seated next to him up front, then frowned at me. I guessed it was time to start searching for another job. I certainly had no intention of actually sleeping with the jerk. And, while a well-reasoned letter to my boss’s boss might have seemed more professional, as it happened, I got my hours back the next day. Troublemaker. It wasn’t pretty, but it was effective. Noted.

Speaking up, asking people to do the right thing hasn’t always been as successful as I might wish, though. Over the years, the stakes became higher. Sometimes, it did not make me friends with those in charge, and sometimes those in charge used their power in ways that cost me lost opportunities and/or lost income. The best news for me was that often there were others standing with me, and, on occasion, I have been pleasantly surprised by someone speaking up for me.

Sometimes, feeling the need to speak up cost me more than a lost date. While in college, I was invited to apply for a scholarship through a local civic organization to study in France for a year because French was my minor. The opportunity to study abroad would no doubt have opened doors I could not imagine. I wrote my application essay and my resume in French and English, and, of course I listed Leadership opportunities, including some speaking engagements explaining the Equal Rights Amendment in town or on campus. I was told, though, that the scholarship was given to a young man. I would have received it had it not been for my work on women’s issues; evidently the group imagined me sailing across the sea to start riots, maybe even to burn my bra.

I had two ways to see that, I reasoned. I could stop speaking up and go along to get along, but I would have to agree to be like the people who had disappointed me which might lead to me being the reason someone else was disappointed. All these lessons in speaking up followed (or led?) me into teaching and ministry and, while it got some easier, I never really got used to people being angry when I speak up. Now, when I find out, though, that there’ll be consequences or someone is angry, I (eventually) shrug. There are people close to me who I am loathe to upset, but everyone else can just take a number. I might be surprised and disappointed but we’ve come too far now. People just expect it.

Who Knew? My Life Lessons Aren’t Just For Me.

Turns out, learning our life lessons isn’t just for us. What we learn can benefit others. In ministry, I have been called to speak up for my LGBTQ students, those behind bars, wounded soldiers. I was, honestly, as proud as I was distressed to be called “that woman” by some of the folks dealing with wounded warriors at Fort Campbell.

All of my lessons, it turned out, helped in these cases, as did the understanding that the folks who needed someone to stand with them or speak up for them were in far greater pain than any discomfort I felt at speaking up at this point in my life.

Personally, speaking up was easier, in fact, when I was no longer the only one affected. When I had children, I felt keenly the need to protect my boys or anyone else who was vulnerable. My first chance to act on that came when a neighborhood dog began getting out of his fenced-in yard.

Facing the Big Dogs

In this case, I thought the “Big Dog” in the small town where my husband and I had settled with our boys was the Collie living on the corner across the street from one of my son’s friends. He was so large he could put his front paws on the shoulders of an adult and look him in the eye. He started demonstrating this on folks in the neighborhood who were strolling around the small downtown area, knocking more than a few of them down. The owner, when informed, usually snarled and slammed the door. When I heard the dog had knocked down the elderly piano teacher around the corner, though, I resolved to call animal control. I discovered though there was only a part time animal control staff in our small town in spite of a growing number of dogs allowed to roam free. I decided to write a letter to the editor -again with the letters, right? – to encourage folks to speak up and perhaps convince our city government to make the animal control agent a full time position. The letter was also an “open letter” to my neighbors with dogs to encourage them to follow the leash law in town and inform them of what was then the local rule at least. According to that rule, a dog owner whose pet bit another person could be made to pay any doctor bills. A dog owner whose dog bit a second time could be sued and, after a third offense, an animal would be put down by the city. I encouraged dog owners to protect both their neighbors and their dogs. Once again, I believed I’d written a well-reasoned letter.

The Big Dogs Bark

The letter was published on a Wednesday. That evening, I received a phone call from the mayor. My anticipation of a good conversation was usurped almost immediately when our illustrious city leader, whom I had never met, began berating me angrily and basically telling me to mind my own business. The big dogs were barking.

I quickly gave up on an actual conversation when it became apparent this was not a dialog. I was honestly surprised that any adult would yell like that at any other adult who wasn’t in their family. He didn’t even know me. I was also confused about why he’d been so rude and aggressive and I began to worry about encountering him in public. I was still pretty unsure what to think about his behavior when, early the next morning, I answered my front door to find the animal control officer in uniform.

You gotta be kidding, I thought.

She was smiling, though, and, after introducing herself, asked if by any chance I’d received a call the night before from the city mayor. Turns out, the mayor had made a habit of nightly drunken calls to people who ticked him off, and this officer often was dispatched by the local sheriff to apologize to the recipients of those calls. No wonder the city couldn’t afford a full time Animal Control officer. We took notice that the understanding was they’d keep up this practice of apologizing for him until the next election. I began to worry about how angry our neighbor with the collie likely was, if he had read the paper.

The Bite

Photo by Tara Winstead on Pexels.com

We got the chance to face him fairly quickly when, a week or two later, I was walking with my eight-year-old to his friend’s house and the collie on the corner lunged out from behind a bush and bit me on the hip before we even knew what was happening. He only lunged once, thank God, and, fortunately, we were just a few feet from the friend’s house. The boy’s mother and I quickly decided I needed to see a doctor. The bite had punctured the skin and drawn blood, but he had not clamped down or torn the flesh. I had not needed to put my juvenile court training into action, I thought, since he only lunged once. The importance of the lesson about standing your ground, though, contained a much wider meaning, I would find out.

The bleeding was minimal but the bruising had already begun and I’d need a tetanus shot. As soon as I finished at our local clinic that day, I walked over to the police department and swore out a warrant. I was driven by the terrifying thought that, had my son been walking on the other side of me that morning, the dog would likely have bitten his face or neck. The thought made the hair on the back of my neck stand up and I knew this was a chance to begin the process to make our neighborhood safer. Though I feared we’d all still have to avoid that part of the neighborhood for a long while, we had put this bully and his dog on notice and try to find some official help.

Amusing detail: the officer who took my information was surprised to discover, through a congenial conversation, that I not only actually loved dogs, we had two big dogs; we just didn’t let them run free. She and her colleagues were under the impression I hated all dogs. She gave me a court date and I left, already afraid and realizing I’d need to warn my boys to watch out in case the neighbor decided to retaliate once he was served with the papers. We stayed close to home for the next few weeks.

When the morning came to face the dog’s owner in court, I will admit I was nauseous and more than a bit afraid not only of facing him but also of how the case would be treated. For all I knew, this dog owner played pool with the local judge. When the judge called us both up to his bench, the neighbor immediately started complaining, “Judge,” he said, “this crazy woman–” but the judge cut him off and asked me for the evidence I had of the bite, which meant both men would be viewing pictures of my butt and hip showing the puncture marks and bruising. A stellar start.

I was beginning to regret the warrant when the judge laid the pictures down, turned to the dog owner and asked, “You drunk, Sir?” My neighbor’s blustery and belligerent response was the judge’s answer.

“You, Sir,” the judge continued, “may or may not be aware that this bite is your dog’s first offense, his first strike.” He held up his hand when my neighbor began to protest.

“You will pay her for her medical bills before you leave. And because you disrespected this court by showing up drunk, your dog now has two strikes against him.” Once again, he held up his hand to stop any protests. “I understand you own some property outside of town; I’d suggest the dog move there. Today. Step back.”

Going through all of that was exhausting and literally gut-wrenching, but I had reached a point where NOT doing anything would have felt far worse.

I’d finally reached a point where NOT speaking up was more painful than swallowing what I needed to say. I did not want to end my life filled with regrets. I’ve hated learning to speak up but I hated not speaking up more.

…where I am today is light years better than where I began, represents so much distance from curling up in the backseat, sure no one would believe me if I spoke up.

This has been my journey and, while speaking up can still be tiring, today I have allies, I have freedom to walk away and I have lots of practice. The need to speak up is mostly easier to face.

This life lesson is no longer the big dog in my emotional neighborhood lunging at me until I fall down.

Maybe you never think twice about speaking up, but I know you have your own challenges, your own life lessons, and I hope you’re moving through them, growing, reaching, finding your freedom. I hope as you reflect on where you’ve been, that you give yourself the benefit of the doubt and that you recognize you likely did the best you could, the best you knew to do, at the time. If nothing else, you survived and learned to do things differently the next time.

My hope for you, then, is this:

May you figure out your life lessons swiftly and early in life.

May you accept help and welcome allies along the way.

May you not reach the end of your life wondering

Where you’d be or

What you’d be doing

If you had stared down your hounds,

If you had pushed back on the jaws that threatened you,

If you had felt strong enough…finally…, become fed up enough, worn out enough to say what you needed to say when you needed to say it.

“Honestly, I wanna see you be brave….”

Sara Bareilles, “Brave,” 2013

What’s ‘Just enough’ Christmas?

Christmas swings like a pendulum do….

My paternal grandmother, Arbaleta (Grandma Leta), and maternal grandmother, Marie (Grandma Ree), could not have been more different creatures, and this was never more obvious than at Christmas. At first glance, it seemed to me that they were polar opposites when it came to wintry holidays especially; in retrospect, it is evident they were each on opposite points of the pendulum that has come to symbolize Christmas for me. Generation after generation on both sides of my family seemed to be unconsciously caught up by the wild swings of this holiday pendulum, a reactionary arc between a resounding “Yes!” to Christmas and its counterpart, an adamant “Hell, no!”

My Granddaughter’s depiction of our favorite activity: swinging. She is so wise….

Finding Healing Around Christmas

Maybe your family needs some healing around holidays as well. Sure, it seems strange to talk about Christmas amidst all the paper and ribbon and cookies and tinsel, but it is, in fact, the best time to step back, recognize struggles and disappointment and start our families on paths to peace with Christmas; maybe along the way we could even figure out what’s “enough” for joy. I offer this reflection then to all our families because we cannot find healing if we do not know our family’s wounds. Here’s hope for discussions about upcoming celebrations: may they be intentional, loving and truly joyful for all.

For me, it seems the best place to start is with the grandmothers. Both of my grandmothers were born around WWI; each married during the Great Depression. Neither had, as they say, “a pot to piss in,” not while they were growing up and not while they were young mothers. Both worked hard to support their families outside the home as well as in. Dad’s mom, Arbaleta, had two children, a boy and a girl, nine years apart. Mom’s mother, Marie, had three daughters all close in age.

Arbaleta’s husband, my Grandpa Mac, fell from an electric pole when he was young and wasn’t supposed to ever walk again, but did, in great part because Arbaleta would not let him not walk. She reportedly insisted he move his legs and even moved them for him for months as physical therapy until he could walk and work again. While I was never close to Grandma Leta, I have always admired the steely determination that these actions showed.

Marie had a husband who was always on the road as a truck driver, mostly because the bus or truck driver jobs close to town weren’t well-paying. He died of a massive heart attack at age 50; she lived another 30-plus years and married her high school sweetheart, then outlived him and married another kind man when she was eighty. At that wedding, the minister declared what we all knew, “Marie is a hopeful woman!” Grandma Ree, as we called her, was the quintessential kindergarten teacher when teachers still had time for nature walks, ironing leaves between sheets of waxed paper, and silly songs. Thus, she was the kind of grandmother I aspired to be: she played games with us, prayed for us, encouraged us and defended us when necessary. For most of her life, she modeled a love of learning: she earned a master’s degree, helped “plant” two churches, became an accomplished painter and was memorizing her favorite Bible verses in her seventies because she was losing her eyesight.

While I know little of Arbaleta’s childhood except poverty and hardship, I know Marie helped her mother run a boarding house after her chiropractor father divorced her mother, something which mortified both women.

That I’m aware of, Arbaleta seldom left her home after we were born. At least we never saw her leave her home, though, as far as we knew, she was perfectly capable. Our collective memory of her is of her seated on the sofa in her silk pajamas. Every time we visited her, we would wave to her from a few feet away as she perched on the sectional sofa in the corner, surrounded by shelves of various sizes and shapes of cacti. In one hand she held a lit cigarette, ashes threatening to crumble onto the silk, and the other hand held the ever-present bean bag ashtray (you know, the kind that has the bean bag on the bottom and the colorful aluminum tin bowl on the top.) That I can remember, she never once kissed, hugged or touched us in any way, shape or form. And, though she was pleasant, there were no memorable conversations, just the cloud of cigarette smoke that circled above her.

As for Christmas, well, I can’t remember there being much of it in their home at the edge of a Kansas golf course where she and Grandpa had retired. Ironically, I’m not aware Grandpa played golf, though my Dad did well into his eighties. As far as Christmas goes, Arbaleta represented the point in the arc where celebration was merely tolerated. Every few years, our parents would tote our gifts to their house to open on that rare occasion we woke up there on a Christmas morning, but the mood in the house was that Christmas decoration was, well, perfunctory. There was a tree and maybe a wreath, but evidently, for Grandpa and Arbaleta, a tree and some lights outside were “just enough,” though I suspect they were only put up to satisfy us. If overcoming poverty was Arbaleta’s life goal, she met it, thus the home on the golf course as well as the purchase of a new Lincoln every year. Secular or religious, it didn’t matter; Christmas was a formality, expected, tolerated for the children. Christmas dinner involved polished silver and store bought sweets, if any. “Please wait until you have permission to touch.”

Arbaleta died when I was seven and, suddenly, the focus of Christmas on my father’s side of the family shuddered and swung hard to the opposite extreme. Her daughter brought in Christmas every year from then on with a vengeance, lovingly, but with an overwhelming force. Every year, my aunt seemed to be competing for best Christmas ever, ostensibly in response to her own mother’s lackadaisical attempts.

While certain treasured and expensive statuary graced my aunt’s mantle for Christmas, for example, every year, the Christmas tree itself, usually the biggest tree I’d ever seen, sported a different theme with new, all handmade ornaments. I often asked when she started making them, sure she must have begun the previous New Year’s Day. She also made most of our gifts; they were always of Pinterest quality and I treasured several sweaters she knitted for me, for example.

As if it were necessary, she also became an amazing cook and thus, Christmas visits always involved impressing us with recipes for new dishes. Ironically, my mother didn’t want the recipes and my mother’s mother, Marie, didn’t need them; my mother was too busy leaning into that dysfunctional pendulum that was swinging back to the starker side, likely in reaction to her mother’s seasonal excess.

Marie, my mother’s mother, was on that same swing of the pendulum as my aunt, though I believe Grandma Ree went all out for her Christmas celebration for different reasons. Her husband, Grandpa George, also died when I was seven, but that did not slow Marie down in life or around the holidays. From the moment you opened the door into her home at Christmas, the scent of pine and wild berry candles carried you through room after room of greenery, holly, bells, poinsettias and new figurines or miniatures each year. Also new each year were the sweetbreads and cookies and homemade candies, all awaiting our discovery after hugs and kisses were exchanged and the coats and mittens and caps were piled onto a bed in the back of the house.

Grandma Ree with her brother, Mother and Sister, c. 1960’s.

A Family Nightmare

While Marie’s response seemed to me to somewhat resemble that of Arbaleta’s daughter, the driving force behind Marie’s likely unconscious Christmas reverie gone amuck was a well-kept secret, a family nightmare. On two separate Christmas Eves, during her childhood and youth, Grandma Ree had lost family members to suicide. I was, of course, an adult before I was made aware of that history or the details: one drank poisoned alcohol and one shot himself, both on separate Christmas Eves. Of course, the grief and shock of their actions was complicated by their (conscious or unconscious) efforts to ruin Christmas forever for some of their family.

How painful were their memories of the holidays?

Before we assume that Marie’s attempts to reclaim Christmas was the reason for the pendulum’s extreme movements, though, we need to recognize that some calamity in earlier generations drove those men to choose Christmas Eve to end their lives; we have to ask how painful were their memories of the holidays that drove them to risk also ruining the holiday for their spouses and children? How far back did the pain begin and what don’t we know about that?

In other words, it’s not likely either man, both of whom must have been suffering and feeling hopeless, started the family on that path.

The result, though, seems to have been an unconscious struggle to compensate. Those grand swings between holiday excess and hopelessness left subsequent generations still unconsciously at a loss to figure out what’s enough celebration. Further, while we can understand what might have spurred Marie’s need to excel at Christmas, I’ll likely never know what caused Arbaleta’s lack of enthusiasm for the holidays, and so I’m left simply to marvel at the overwhelming force of her daughter’s frenzied Christmas efforts. Sadly, or thankfully, no one now has picked up that mantle and the extended family is so fractured as to make these discussions nearly impossible.

I offer these reflections then to my nuclear family as the beginning of some discussions around conscious choices rather than wild reactions.

How does a family figure out what’s enough Christmas when the family’s history is, well, fractured? My own efforts were often emotionally unsatisfying; not only were my mother’s Christmas efforts headed for the stark extreme in reaction to her mother’s and her sister-in-law’s excesses, but they were complicated by my general lack of interest in cooking or baking except when absolutely necessary.

It was my ex-husband who started me thinking about some of our responses to holidays years ago: he protested the idea of Valentines’ Day for example, saying we could and should give one another cards or flowers or candy at anytime of the year and not just one day chosen by candy and card companies and florists. Yes, we can, I agreed wholeheartedly. But do we? Of course not, I pointed out. To his credit, he came by his dislike and struggle with holidays honestly and thus brought his own reactions to our holiday table: his birthday is the day after Christmas, and he was one of six children. His Christmas gift always came with a declaration that, “Oh-that’s your birthday gift too.”

Over the years, I certainly have struggled with holidays, whether it’s decorating or preparing a feast or just planning. Don’t get me started on birthdays for children; too many of those ended in my tears from exhaustion and a sense of failure. Did I tell you about all the “Pinterest Fails?”

All these things and more (all these things and more) that’s what Christmas means to me, my love….)
Stevie Wonder

Plenty of us struggle with the holidays, though, whether because of grieving a loss or knowing you’re the only one who can’t afford the gift exchange. I’ve tried over the years to make our gifts for Christmas but again, I know too many of my family members and friends were less than thrilled with the results. Mea culpa. We tried spreading the Christmas holiday over several days to lessen the wild two-minute frenzy of Christmas morning. We tried taking Christmas to the mountains; we tried staying home. We wondered what would happen if our family just gave up one Christmas and had lots of little ones? Could that not translate into lots of chances to do or give or be kind to one another? So many of our attempts at intentional Christmases revolved around not expecting one or two people to create a magical holiday that only left them in tears and exhausted.

We’ve finally begun to incorporate some activities intentionally. Instead of china and crystal, we copied someone else’s snowman place settings, something the granddaughter and I could share. Last year, we started some silly story telling. This year, we introduced Karaoke and I am trying to reclaim the joy of baking by helping my granddaughter learn; watching her “knead” the goop she bought at the store made me think. Lo and behold, she discovered the joy of yeast and how it rises and how the baker must punch down the dough, then knead it. Her eyes grew wide after she made a fist and punched away. “That is soooo satisfying,” she said. A keeper.

In case you’re wondering, religion did not seem to figure at all in the wild reactions to the holiday through the years for my extended family. While Arbaleta was, as far as I know, agnostic, and Marie was a strong Christian, neither of them addressed or seemed to include the religious holiday in their efforts to reclaim or dismiss Christmas. For our family, that’s a different pendulum altogether. I personally love a good candlelight Christmas eve service singing and the idea that God came to be with us as an infant. Nevertheless, culturally we continue to struggle with all that Christmas celebrations have become for generations and we cannot heal from pain we do not acknowledge.

For our family, the faith and religious rituals are different pendulum altogether. I will never know why my Grandma Ree did not incorporate more of her personal faith into the celebration. Personal experience suggests she was treading lightly with agnostic family members and, as is true for many families, also celebrated on different days with different parts of the family, balancing church events with home. Nevertheless, culturally, we continue to struggle with all that our secular celebrations of Christmas have become for generations, often leaving us to begin another year frustrated, sad, discouraged. That is where we can start, but we must look collectively at this because we cannot heal from pain we do not acknowledge.

The best time, I believe, to reflect on how we celebrate Christmas is when we are all together…and we’ll before Christmas comes around-unexamined-again.

For my family, I continue to try to reframe Christmas in light of the history I bring to the holiday. I guess I hope through reflections and questions to step completely back from that wild, reactionary swinging between excessive celebration to indifference and even disdain.

I think one key is that we focus on the children, but with respect for their needs and not our own needs to give them the best holiday ever!

They get tired; we pay attention. They want to dress up; they don’t want to dress up. Quiet time, dancing in the kitchen time, gifts that involve us engaging with them. I’m not saying we’re the best with children ever or that ours are happier than any other. What I am saying is that like in so much of life, the children around me ground me. What they need is so often what I need. Let’s sing Jingle Bells, yes, at a gathering, but we mustn’t forget the bells themselves and our need to jingle them to make the song come to life.

A little percussion goes a long way and when we sing “Jingle Bells” there need to be jingling bells….A five-year-old taught me that.

Music must also be a source of holiday joy for many families. I’m jealous of those who manage a musical gathering but hopeful that might be in our future as well. Certainly with percussion everyone can participate! The idea of introducing music brings us back, though, both to the need for sensory awareness and to the idea of joy and reverie throughout the year. In order for there to be music next year, we need to practice throughout the year – often and, by practicing, remember the things that do bring us joy without wearing us out. I write this and share it now, after the holiday blitz, planning to share it with my family, to start the conversation we can have in anticipation of next year. I am curious to hear from them, and find out if they are aware of, or experiencing their own pendulum of Christmases, maybe even unknowingly riding that pendulum right now. I’m hopeful that with some lowered expectations of ourselves and a little yeast, we just might be able to rescue the holidays from the extremes of that dysfunctional pendulum my family rode for far too long AND decide for ourselves what is “enough Christmas.”

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Of Hiking, Floods and Fragmented Memories

In the previous Post called The Boulder Fields of our Lives, about hiking Longs Peak and working at the YMCA of the Rockies, I ended by explaining that our summer work (and “Hikemaster” Course) were cut short not long after we scaled the 14,000+ foot Longs Peak because of a natural disaster in the canyon below us. A few days after the climb, a year’s worth of rain fell in 70 minutes and the Big Thompson River below our camp washed out nearly everything and everyone in its way.

“On July 31, 1976, the skies opened up over the Big Thompson Canyon, setting off the deadliest natural disaster in Colorado history that claimed 144 lives and caused $35 million of damages.” (https://www.coloradoan.com/story/news/2016/07/29/big-thompson-flood-killed-scores/87524858/)

Fragmented Memories

For decades now, because my memories of being just above the “500-Year Flood” are so fragmented, I have not told the story of being there, which is unusual for me. Most days, I am known to bore anyone close enough to listen with a story or two; I usually can’t help myself. The stories I have not told then generally are ones I cannot remember OR ones I do not want to remember. Only after writing about climbing Longs Peak, as I looked at the photo of me and my climbing companion, did it occur to me that the story of that summer was not complete without talking about the flood.

“The chaos along an otherwise trickling Big Thompson River killed 144 people, five of whom were never found, and carved out a chapter in the history books as Colorado’s deadliest natural disaster.”
https://www.coloradoan.com/story/news/2016/07/29/big-thompson-flood-killed-scores/87524858/

Both the hike and the flood were, for lack of a better word, watershed moments for me, but the lessons have been realized slowly and in fragments. To better remember those days, I looked at a couple of television news reports of the flood, but they were recorded decades after the flood. Strangely, the lack of technology at the time affected both the before and the after, the event and the memories. The only phones in 1976 were landlines and, so, warnings came only through emergency personnel going door-to-door; at least one first responder died trying to warn others that night. Only a few black and white photos are available as well, making attempts at remembering as cumbersome as the warning system had been. Nevertheless, I have felt driven to try to piece together a coherent memory of those days and, as I researched and read and poured over old photos online, I read the words of one Colorado disaster preparedness official. She said,”We learn the most from chaotic events.” As I have tried to remember and reflect, I think that she was right; we do learn much from chaos, but we have to work to find those lessons.

First, setting the stage for our story….

After my freshman year in college, I went to the mountains near Estes Park to work for what I thought would be a summer of fun. Once there, I was surprised to find a sense of peace that I had not expected. I was, for the first time, hopeful that I might actually be able to find a peaceful and stable home once I could support myself. I surprised myself, in fact, by making some plans to continue working at the camp in the fall.

Though I kept journals off and on, little remains of what might have been written that summer. I do remember that, on the back of placemats, during lulls in our work, I sometimes wrote letters or journal entries; most of them are lost, but the only one I have found from before the flood surprised me. I wrote:

Tuesday, July 20, 1976

“Storm clouds have mingled with the mountain peaks since sunrise; we here in the valley are enclosed, shut away from the crowds that would disturb us….peace of mind must certainly follow. Here, in my room, I am lulled into a tranquil mood by the clouds every day. Even when my work day is long and busy and even frustrating,” I wrote, “…the calm is inescapable.”

Calm was something I could not claim before that trip and safety was not a place I remembered.

At that point, the clouds covering the tops of the mountain peaks around us (The highest peak in our area was Longs Peak at more than 14,000 feet in elevation.) were benevolent. I wrote: “These clouds draw your thoughts. Constantly changing, first ringing, then entrapping the peaks, they are playing quietly and are a source of constant amusement.”

I worked days in the bakery and often used the back of placemat/maps for journal entries and letters.

Those “playful clouds” would soon turn deadly, though. During our Hikemaster classes that summer, we learned to appreciate the danger of the storm clouds that often came up quickly in the mountains. On July 20, though, I was simply calmed by their presence and movement. I needed that calm desperately; the family life I would return to was chaotic, unpredictable, traumatic. The rules changed daily and nothing that occurred in my home could surprise me anymore. The overwhelming feeling that I had carried with me when I tried to escape to the mountains from a tumultuous family life was fear. Fear and anxiety wore me out and, I know now, the trauma, fear and stress are why so many of my memories are fragmented at best.

And now, a word about trauma….

Trauma is destructive. Like the different kinds of skin cancer, trauma can create a wound that burrows deep or spreads outside of you, like when you fear for your loved ones in such a depth as to make others question you, call you hysterical even. And yet, because you have experienced trauma, you know. Accidents DO happen. People, even people you trust, DO harm one another. Your parents did not protect you. No one saved you. Nothing, not even seeing another day, was guaranteed. All the worst, all you feared, was indeed possible, did happen. And no amount of reassurance from others can repair that trust completely; we can learn to manage the fear but we never know when some sound or smell or person or newscast will bring it all rushing back.

Like a broken mirror, trauma shatters both our sense of self and our memories. Too many of my memories lie in shards on the floor and picking through them, trying to piece them together, trying to make sense, to have some timelines or events make sense is most likely why I write.

Even the effort to capture the memory of that time is fragmented: all that remains are three pages written by that seventeen-year-old me as I tried to capture what I saw and a couple of newspaper pieces I wrote after I got a job working at the local paper and my editors learned I’d been in the “500-year Flood of ’76.”

The morning of July 20, 1976, though, I was feeling calmer than I ever had, safer, more at peace and, to my surprise, I was enjoying even the colder weather on the mountains. I have long been known to dislike the cold intensely, so as I read the words I wrote, I am struck by what I believed I had found there: a home and place where I was being trained to pay attention to my surroundings, to know my own capabilities, and how to prepare for and help others in disasters. Wanting to help others is one response to trauma. I know I was hopeful that I might at the very least return the next summer to be Hikemaster and even one day make my home near the clouds.

I wasn’t able to stay, though, and thus much of what I remember, even as I try to piece it together, still seems fragmented and lost to me. Like most of my co-workers, I went home soon after the flood, and immersed myself in college classes. I never saw any of my coworkers again and I never spoke to any of them afterwards either; those relationships simply ending undoubtedly contributed to a sense of loss.

Now, as I try to access any memories of that time, I am left with the handful of days afterwards, days when all of us above the canyon were trying to figure our what was happening below us. Even though we were aware, we did not want to talk about how we ourselves inexplicably had escaped being swept up.

That first day, though, we didn’t know what was going on below us in the canyon.

Like the many campers along the river, we were enjoying the scenery. The Big Thompson River was one of the jewels of the area, a mighty source of income because of all the tourists it drew. Most of the year, “…the water runs only a few feet deep and fifteen to twenty feet wide…happily rushes over rocks and gurgles through pools as it descends 8,000 feet from the high range to the south Platte on the prairie. The water is clear, numbing cold, and playfully sparked by the sun.” (Big Thompson: Profile of a Natural Disaster by David McComb, Pruitt Publishing Company, 1980.)

Saturday, July 31, 1976

Today is unusually rainy.

Normally, storms approached Estes Park and the YMCA camp from the south; thunderstorms, while normal, are of short duration, with clouds often enveloping peaks by 10 a.m., which was why hikers needed to climb summits of the various peaks in the range in time to skedaddle back down below the treeline or risk becoming a lightning rod. Our Hikemaster course is teaching us a great deal about safety and we are training to lead hikes, which would mean teaching tourists about safety as well. Too often, though, tourists in the park dismiss any safety preparations or climbing instructions with disastrous consequences. The tourists we met traveling up to the summit the day we climbed Longs Peak weren’t interested in safety tips. As we were headed down to the timber line, we passed, for example, a woman in a summer dress, wearing tennis shoes and carrying a purse on her arm as if she were headed to a party. They would be fine, they told us, and they waved us on. They had evidently never seen a person who’d been struck by lightning. Unprepared hikers found their way to our camp often enough though and several of our coworkers are among those trained to rescue hikers.

We did not know at that time that many of our Hikemaster instructors would be called upon to help flood victims the next day.

The storm was approaching from the East, though, we noticed, and it just seemed to camp above us, a thunderhead with no high westerly winds to move it. Reports were that during that Saturday evening, twelve inches of rain fell, about the normal annual rainfall amount for the area. Estes Park and the YMCA are above Lake Estes on the Big Thompson River, but, just below us, the unrelenting water from several tributaries gathered debris and swept down the canyons, both restricted by and guided by steep walls. By the time the waters reached the North Fork and the Big Thompson, there was already enough force to destroy bridges. All along the canyon, this storm surge ripped up everything in its way, including homes and campsites, swept up by a water level estimated at nearly twenty feet above the normal. Reports I read later told of at least one emergency worker dying in his attempts to go door-to-door to warn people.

We Learn from Chaos….

One of the innovations that came out of the Big Thompson flood was a national warning system for floods and other national disasters. That, with the advent of cell phones has greatly reduced the number of deaths in floods.

Sunday, August 1, 1976

The camp is secluded from the world as usual, except for the hymns and local newscasts being broadcast on the radio in the bakery. Rain falls steadily still and a heavy fog had settled on Big Thompson Canyon. Four of us went by van higher up into the mountains to a lodge to feed some visitors. While the lodge was only thirty feet higher than the camp, it was eerily sitting just above the clouds and driving on those narrow roads on the sides of those mountains felt even more dangerous than normal.

Sitting in the lodge’s kitchen after breakfast, we listened to the radio to learn when we could expect some sunshine. Mountain thunderstorms seldom lasted even more than an hour or two, so this second day of fog and rain was disconcerting. The announcer became somber, reading a report that surprised us: “The Big Thompson River had overflowed its banks in the narrow canyon leading to the valley and four persons were reported dead.” We became quiet, not having known that the storm was dangerous. The cook was worried about his family, knowing they lived near the flooded area. The storm, we heard, was stationary, and we could look forward to more rain.

A lightning flash warned us we needed to take the van back down the mountain before trying to drive became even more treacherous AND before the van started attracting electricity. We warned the visitors in the lodge not to drive anywhere or even to go outdoors because they’d be lightning rods.

Throughout the morning, as we worked back at the bakery and kitchen, we listened to any news reports coming over the radio. We worked silently through the day as the reports began to seem unreal; the number of dead grew to more than sixty before evening. We began to slowly comprehend the devastation that was apparently just below us. No one wanted to ask if it were just dumb luck that we were above the deadly flood and others were below it. The folks in charge were not sharing much information; maybe they didn’t want us to panic. No one really was surprised to learn that our phone lines were down. That was not terribly unusual, but the announcement added to the somber mood and hushed tones all day. The frequent updates on the radio and our director forbidding us to leave the YMCA property kept us all close to the kitchen even long after our own shifts had ended. Only the maintenance crew left to take the trash but the normal 30-minute round trip took hours and they returned with widely varying reports of the flooding just 1500 feet below us. If any of my coworkers or those in charge were afraid, I did not see it.

Monday, August 2, 1976

Monday, August 2, 1976

This morning, the fog is even lower than before, which meant rescue helicopters were grounded. Several refugees have been brought into the camp in the night. So forlorn, they are wet and cold and dirty. They wait for some coffee and a blanket; dirty pillowcases in the hands hold the few belongings they were able to salvage. They are lucky, though; hundreds more are still stranded. Many more are missing and most are expected to be dead. Still there are no phone lines available and a trip to Denver, normally a couple of hours, would take six or seven and that was only if you had a four-wheel drive vehicle. Technical climbing skills are needed now for rescuers because roads are washed out in the canyon and the only way out is up over the cliffs.
Tuesday, August 3, 1976

For three days, we have heard little about what was happening below us, except by the radio. I suspect now they were trying to prevent any kind of panic; we also did not know what the rest of the world thought about our fates, either. We were surprised to find for example, that our parents had heard mostly dire reports about Estes Park and the YMCA camp above it being unreachable and even obliterated. Some men we didn’t know came to get us today and told us we were going to be calling our parents via ham radios set up. The instructions to “tell your parents you’re still alive” stopped me for a moment. I had not known nor had I had a moment to worry what they might be thinking at home.

The overriding feeling it seems was somber but also a bit bizarre. For one example, our local radio station published a newsletter/bulletin we could see every morning, and next to the names of the dead each day were that day’s baseball scores.

Rumors

Rumors abounded. One account said all manner of snakes, also apparently trying. to escape the waters, were chasing survivors up the sides of the Big Thompson River canyon.

There was one report of a baby, who became known as Baby Moses, stranded on a rock in the rushing water.

One newspaper wrote: “After it opened, the refugee center at Loveland High School became a source of personal details as survivors, some with nothing more than the clothes they had worn into the canyon, told how an evening of cards with friends was interrupted by rushing water and a mad dash to scale slippery rocks. Throughout the first days rumors were abundant. There was one report of a baby, who became known as Baby Moses, stranded on a rock in the rushing water. One national publication called to verify that the baby had been rescued by a woman who lassoed it while riding a white horse. But no one could substantiate any of it, and The Coloradoan reported it as an example of the rumors.”(Big Thompson: Profile of a Natural Disaster by David McComb, Pruitt Publishing Company, 1980.)

“We learn the most from chaotic events.”
Disaster Preparedness Official in Colorado

I Learn from Chaos

For the longest time, I realize now, I felt profoundly disillusioned after that flood; the safe home I thought I had found, in fact, was as treacherous as any place could be. I was not able to stay and create a home there that I was seeking because of the flood and damage. It took me years to acknowledge that and even longer to name the terror. I could not risk feeling that terror then; none of us could afford to name the terror that was just below us.

I certainly had seen the power and wisdom of what we had been taught while learning to hike safely on those granite peaks. I cannot necessarily agree that we “learn from chaos,” but I can admit that I learned from how others around me operated in the chaos.

Over the years since I left the camp, I know that I consciously incorporated lots of those lessons into my life. When you hike, take only pictures and leave only footsteps. When you journey, make sure someone knows where you’re going and when you should be back. When it’s cold outside, layering is the key to staying warm. If you’d asked me before what that summer taught me, I would have acknowledged all of that readily. I also spent a lot of time the next few years in jeans, hiking boots and denim shirts. I even decorated any space I inhabited with topographical maps. I started jogging in order to build up my endurance. I even tried caving because I was not near any mountains.

Mostly, trying to remember any part of that time has shown me that I had learned and incorporated lessons from the flood into my daily life much more extensively than I realized. Being just above the flood and watching how others navigated that danger, in fact, would inform and guide me for decades, if only because so much of what we’d learned in our classes had been especially effective in the midst of that chaos and tragedy.

There is wisdom and, often, survival, in choosing to be careful, and to work together. We learned to look before you step over a log or rock, make sure you pack what you need but only what you need, and, naturally, respect the power of nature and especially of water. In life lessons, those translate to being intentional, learning when enough stuff is enough and admitting to ourselves that we are not the most powerful force out there.

When my parents showed up a few days later to take me back to Missouri, they said I was different. The summer had been grueling in a number of ways, but I had learned so much that would inform every step I took from then on, would help me create the safety I craved whatever path I chose. I don’t doubt that the summer has helped me feel brave enough to continue to travel and explore new places, albeit with safety ever in mind.

Until now, I hadn’t talked or thought much about that time. I chalked it up to being forced by circumstances to abandon the path I had begun to enjoy so much. I felt for the longest time that I’d had an adventurous summer but it was over and so the memory and the possibilities were simply filed away like a summer fling; they were simply not relevant going forward. What I didn’t recognize was that I was on another trek, one that would last my lifetime and what I learned during that summer was helping me all along to find my way, help me create the safety I craved. I say “create” rather than find because all that I learned that summer helped me slowly realize that the safety I sought I had learned to carry with me. “Safety” would be wherever I found myself when I paused long enough to look up from the path.

I will continue to unpack the backpack, to try to remember the story of those days and others still dark. I can recognize one truth, though, folded neatly like a bandana in my jeans pocket: chaos and danger will be all around no matter where I travel or where I land, no matter where I make my home. Because of that training, though, I have tools, guiding principles and more confidence to continue exploring whatever path has been before me.

D-Day Promises, Guilt and Forgiveness

Because coming home is just the beginning….

For years, I was unaware this was what he felt he needed. I would visit him regularly but we were not speaking the same spiritual language for the longest time. Until I preached about D-Day.

D-Day Promises

An estimated 20 percent of all combatants historically suffer from the effects of “combat trauma.”

Soldier’s Heart

nostalgia

“to be broken”

shell shock

“The affliction (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) has had many names over the centuries, demonstrating that it is a condition accompanying not just modern wars but all wars. Its cluster of symptoms was first diagnosed as ‘nostalgia’ among Swiss soldiers in 1678. German doctors at that time called the condition Heimweh, and the French called it maladie du pays; both mean homesickness. The Spanish called it estar roto, ‘to be broken.’ Civil War Americans called it soldier’s heart, irritable heart, or nostalgia. In World War I, it was called shell shock; in World War II and Korea, combat fatigue. ‘Soldier’s heart’ indicates that the heart has been changed by war. ‘Nostalgia’ and ‘homesickness’ bespeak the soldier’s anguished longing to escape from the combat zone and return home. Estar roto describes the psyche’s condition after war—broken.”
(War and the Soul: Healing our Nation’s Veterans from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, by Edward Tick, Ph.D, p. 99)

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For Combat Veterans, Memorial Day is No Picnic

For those who survive combat and return home, the duty to keep the memory alive of the ‘true heroes’ can become a lifelong, sacred mission lived out daily.

Conversations with veterans of war will teach you one thing quickly: for many, the only true “hero” is the one who didn’t come home. Thus, for so many combat veterans who have lost a battle buddy, a friend, even an enemy, in war, the duty to keep the memory of the “true heroes” alive can become a lifelong, sacred mission lived out daily.

Sadly, Survivors’ Guilt is one of the main contributors to veteran suicides that continue to plague this country. Living with the fact that you survived when so many others did not then means Every Day Becomes Memorial Day.

For many combat veterans, the survivor’s guilt, or the belief that you have done something wrong by surviving a traumatic event when others did not, can be debilitating and disturbing. Survivors of all sorts of traumas will question, feel guilty, and often even begin to believe their survival makes them somehow responsible for the other person’s death.

“Why did I survive?”

“I stepped one way and my buddy went another. He took the bullet.”

“I switched seats with another pilot and he was killed. It should have been me.”

“If I’d leaned forward, I would have been the one hit, not him.”

The grief of losing those under your command or knowing that another person died saving you is a particularly heavy burden. Especially plaguing for so many combat veterans is the reality that they were responsible for taking the life of a child, whether a combatant or just an innocent bystander.

Even just returning when so many others did not, though, can feel like too much to bear. Thus, remembering and honoring the “real” heroes with some kind of meaningful ritual or task that honors the fallen then becomes the new mission.

Eddie G.

His Sergeant Major brought Eddie G. to my campus ministry one rainy day in 2011. He’d already deployed into combat as an engineer three times and he was only 25-years-old.

“Got any work our guy can help with?” Eddie stood by his truck across the parking lot, out of earshot.

“Well, I was needing to make this entrance accessible. Probably a ramp….” I nodded to the young vet leaning against his truck.

Seems Eddie was sleeping in that truck. He was not allowed to see his daughter or go home. Sergeant Major was running out of ideas and Eddie was not the only vet in crisis in Clarksville, which is adjacent to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, home to the 5th Special Forces Group and 101st Air Assault. At that time, the base was dealing with more active duty suicides than any other U.S. military base. Eddie was just one of many vets in crisis but he’s the one Sergeant Major brought to see me that day.

“You need something built; Eddie’s your man,” said Sergeant Major. Eddie had been building bridges for combat transport. Never having done that, I could not and did not at the time realize the frustration and grief of building a bridge to transport your unit into combat only to watch them be destroyed almost immediately. Too often at the cost of the lives of your buddies. “He just needs a task. To be useful. Helpful.”

And just like that, a hurting vet was building a ramp for our campus ministry. He showed up at an ungodly hour the next morning in the pouring rain. For the next four days, our only conversation was me asking him if he wanted a cup of coffee or needed anything. He never needed anything but the coffee. I’d stand out there with him, attempting to make some small talk but everything I said seemed pretty lame.

He worked silently. Alone. In the rain. For four days. Didn’t need any help. Didn’t want to talk to anyone much. I watched him a lot those four days, wondering about how we could help him. I called another, older veteran I knew and asked him for suggestions, ways we could help this guy who worked so methodically, silently, almost prayerfully to build a ramp to make our building accessible.

“Leave him alone, and let him build,” my friend said. “You ARE helping him.”

For four days, Eddie worked in the rain, silently, taking only the occasional break to smoke a cigarette and stare at the ramp as it took shape. The day he finished, he sat for a couple of hours, I guess, in his truck, smoking and looking at the finished ramp.

I was afraid to let him leave, afraid he needed so much more, but painfully aware I didn’t know what that might be. I went out and took some pictures and he said I could send them to Sergeant Major and he’d get them. I said thank you and he stabbed his cigarette out, then said goodbye. As he turned to leave, though, he added so quietly I almost didn’t hear it: “At least nobody is gonna blow this up.” I never saw him again. I pray he found another project.

“Survivor’s guilt is a complicated kind of grief and treating it needs to be very individual,” says counselor and combat veteran Lantz Smith, former Executive Director of Soldiers And Families Embraced (SAFE), a free counseling program near Fort Campbell.

Often, he says, the kind of complicated grief carried by war survivors is never finished. Certainly, he says, there seems to be no straight progression through the many stages of grief, and little hope of the grief ending neatly with any sense of closure.

“Quite often,” Smith says, “survivors of combat are more afraid of forgetting than anything else. Their fear is that NOT feeling grief intensely is dangerously close to forgetting, and forgetting would be unforgivable.”

Ask any combat veteran and they will tell you whose memories they personally are keeping alive.

In his invaluable book, “Warriors Return,” Dr. Edward Tick of Soldier’s Heart explains, “Survivors shape their lives and suffer their nightmares as ways to not break faith with the fallen. Canadian Lt. Colonel John McRae’s World War I poem, ‘In Flanders Fields,’ reads, ‘If you break faith with us who die / We shall not sleep…’”

Poppies are still reminders of those who have fallen in conbat.

“Civilians taking oaths of military service become bound to serve and sacrifice no matter what is asked of them, even unto killing or being killed,” says Tick. “Combat also binds, producing an intense intimacy between brothers-and sisters-in-arms and with foes. Survivors often take oaths to remain loyal forever to those with whom they have shared the experience of hell. They strain to honor the memories of their fallen, prove themselves worthy of their sacrifices, and fulfill last promises, such as delivering messages home,” he explains.
Tick, Edward, PHD, Warrior’s Return: Restoring the Soul After War, Sounds True Publications, Boulder, Colorado.

Helping these survivors find ways to remember a fellow service member’s death without constantly emotionally reliving the trauma is the challenge for trauma counselors.

The New Mission

While many combat veterans will never finish the healing process after they return home when their brother- or sister-in-arms did not, they can find ways to make peace with and live with this new mission in life. Memorializing is one effective method, says Smith. Like Eddie G., for example, they can build something that will not be destroyed.

Memorializing means creating places and activities to hold part of the grief and help the veteran find a healthy way to keep alive the memory of those who have fallen in battle.

One veteran, a fighter pilot, was haunted by the way he could take another life while staying “above the fray,” and be an anonymous danger to those below him. His memorial? He has loaded as many pennies as he can in a large bowl; each one represents a life lost in a bombing raid.

He regularly picks up the weighty reminder because, he says, he needs to feel a physical weight to accompany the emotional burden of those whose lives he took, who shared the hell of war with him but who did not ever see him. He feels the weight of this grief and does his part to remember the weight of war.

A sailor who cannot “unhear” the voices of those who could not be saved from drowning becomes a counselor to help those who are drowning emotionally like he once was.

Some veterans find help for the guilt of surviving by sharing it in music or stories. Ancient cultures are said to have brought warriors home and, after a time of cleansing, asked them to tell the rest of the community everything they saw and felt and all that they did. When they finished, the community then helped them carry the burden of their memories and guilt. Sharing is also a way of keeping a memory alive, of honoring the fallen.

Aaron Voris, combat veteran, attending a SAFE songwriting retreat. Used with permission.

One young soldier, who was wounded himself when he returned, was haunted by the memory of having to carry the body of a small child to a burn pile after a battle. He knew nothing about her, and her family could not be found. Perhaps they did not survive either. For the longest time, that memory was disturbing and his greatest desire was to drive the pain of that moment from his mind.

With the help of a counselor, however, he chose to see the memory not as a haunting spectre but as a desire to be honored and remembered. That child – whoever she was – deserved to be honored and remembered, too, and, he realized, there might be no one else to do that. Remembering this innocent victim of war was his new mission and embracing that gave him some peace. He gave her a name and then he planted a tree dedicated to her in the field behind his home. He tends to it and hopes she is at peace as well, knowing she was remembered.

“If you break faith with us who die / We shall not sleep…’”
Canadian Lt. Colonel John McRae’s World War I poem, “In Flanders Fields.”

These rituals will never erase the profound sense of loss or the survivors’ guilt, but they can keep the veteran from turning the grief and guilt inward in destructive ways, Smith says.

Veterans build raised gardens to provide hands on therapy “giving life,” rather than taking it .

Finding Meaning in Survival

Rituals also serve as regular reminders that survivors were likely spared for some reason. These acts and memorials become the new missions that can help combat survivors bear the duty of remembering.

I believe Eddie was deep in thought the entire time he was building our new ramp, promising his fallen buddies that each nail driven and each step taken on this ramp was a reminder that war was not all there was and that those who fell would be remembered and honored every time someone entered that campus ministry building.

Accepting their new mission, embracing this sacred duty to remember and honor, can, with the help of families, friends, counselors and ministers, ease the survivors’ guilt enough for today and help them cope with the fact that, once a combat veteran returns home from battle, every day becomes Memorial Day.

Thank a veteran next time you see him or her but remember, they don’t think of themselves as the heroes. In fact, it may disturb them to be called a hero. “Thank you for your service” is enough. Even better, how about we all just take a minute and reflect on why we have designated a Memorial Day in the first place?

This is first of a series of posts about war, loss and healing.

I am a veteran, retired United Methodist Minister and co-founder of Soldiers And Families Embraced (SAFE), a non-profit offering free counseling to combat veterans and their families. In 2011, at the height of the US military’s largest scale armed conflicts since the Vietnam War in Iraq and Afghanistan, I served as the campus minister at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee, which is adjacent to Fort Campbell, Kentucky. At the time, more than 17,000 Soldiers were deployed into combat from the fort, which had the highest suicide rate of any other base in FORSCM. Veterans, their spouses and their children began bringing to campus the effects of multiple, year-long combat deployments, including Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Traumatic Brain Injuries. In response, with the help of a veteran studying social work, we began a free and totally confidential counseling program based on the story of Lazarus emerging from the tomb, still wrapped in the trappings of war and death. SAFE continues today providing free counseling to those affected by all wars.

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Of Pakistan, Chewing Gum, Chatty Cathy Dolls & Valiant Efforts

A favorite talisman from Pakistan. I loved how all the different sizes nested one inside the other. I’ve carried this painted wooden toy with me for nearly sixty years now. Cracked and repaired, broken but still beautiful, a cradle of memories.

When I was seven, my brother, who was eight, my sister, who was six, and I got dumped in our grandparents’ laps, a harsh ending to what had begun two years earlier as a grand adventure, meant to last a lifetime.

Once it was announced that Dad had secured a coveted engineering job overseas, we had all been celebrities at one festive send off after another from Springfield, to the unknown and mysterious West Pakistan, (now Pakistan). The biggest Bon Voyage event, where each of us had been presented with brand new suitcases to go with our brand new outfits for the journey to the other side of the earth, reflected how impressed friends, coworkers and neighbors had been when Dad had secured the contract.

That the way to Pakistan involved so many shots for so many illnesses was annoying, but, for me, the memories of those jabs are overshadowed by those of international flights on Pan Am where the pilots brought all the children on the flight into the cockpit and each of us received a souvenir Pan Am flight bag and our own set of pilot’s wings. I remember buying a doll in Tokyo, where I was convinced that I could speak Japanese because I could speak to the sales clerk. I remember arriving in Karachi to be served warm milk and runny eggs and that we slept twenty-four hours before driving to our new home in a walled compound in Northern Pakistan. I remember much about our time in Pakistan, but I do not remember the trip home.

Thoughout the two years we were there, Dad was likely excelling in his work, but, before the contract was completed and we could be posted at yet another overseas project on another continent, Dad was forced to break his contract and return to the states on short notice, with little or no money, no job and much anger.

So, just a few days after boarding a plane for home, the three of us children found ourselves seated in a row on the edge of the bed in a motel halfway between our grandparents’ home in the little town of Waynesville, Missouri, and wherever Dad had found a job. The motel bed was low to the ground; our toes just touched the linoleum and we were each individually toeing the floor and pushing the old bed up and down, causing the box springs to creak softly. Next door, we could hear our parents and grandparents arguing loudly. We did not know then the three of us would not be going to the tiny apartment Dad had managed to find.

I clutched my Chatty Cathy doll. Bless her heart, she’d stayed with me throughout our time overseas in spite of looking like she had mange because my little sister had taken a pair of scissors to her black hair. My sister clutched a stuffed monkey who had a permanent grip on a plastic banana. She had already given up the doll she’d been given, one who giggled when her arms were squeezed, and who likely ended up in another child’s arms, looking like she was just out of the box with that curly, blond hairdo intact. Don’t think it didn’t cross my mind, though, to experiment on her with scissors. Maybe my sister was just more angry at that time than I was.

New Clothes, a Bon Voyage Party, Poufy Hair? Pictures courtesy Jodi McCullah All Rights Reserved

“Say goodbye to your children!” my father had hissed moments before all three of us climbed in the back of our grandparents’ sedan. Mom’s eyes were already glazed over though; she wasn’t responding. She had said nothing while my father had been yelling for weeks, it seemed, most recently in the next motel room, in front of her parents, who also were silent. We couldn’t hear any of those angry words at all, only loud voices, then we each flinched as the door to our motel room had swung open and we saw our parents standing there. “Say goodbye!”

Grandma Ree and Grandpa George seemed just as dumbfounded as we were, I think, and were really in no financial position to take on more, but to their credit, they put the three of us into the back of their tiny dark blue sedan anyway. Driving away from that motel, each of us rode silently, wide-eyed, tacitly agreeing it was better not to ask.

His Adventure; Her Nightmare

On our way home from Pakistan, we’d each been wearing a new pair of leather shoes made from a cobbler in Pakistan. Even finding shoes while we were there became an adventure for my father who savored every side trip to a bazaar and whose shopping addiction devoured cameras and jewelry and handmade rugs and carved tables with ivory inlay for playing chess. Being there while the country was at war with India was a nightmare for our mother, though; after my parents ventured to the bazaars, she had nightmares about the children who had been purposely maimed in order to make their begging more lucrative. By the time we left Pakistan, Mom had begun obsessing about keeping the windows covered with foil for nighttime blackouts, long after it was necessary.

The civil engineering position Dad had secured with this company overseas was his dream and meant to last his whole career; he had not planned to have to return to southwest Missouri with his family at all, certainly not as a quitter. This contract was his chance to escape small towns and small minds, and that dream was not meant to die a quick death because his young wife discovered the balm of alcohol and realized that some men could be sweet. Mom, bless her heart, had been thrust into a world she had never contemplated and one she was vastly unprepared to engage, understand or master. Dad, on the other hand, had served overseas in the Air Force and, when he returned, he invested in National Geographic in order to know more about the world he had only tasted in his two years in Puerto Rico. This job had been his chance to immerse himself in adventure and travel.

A small-town girl who had never left Missouri before, Mom continued dutifully each day to don a crisply ironed dress and heels while struggling to learn to oversee servants, like the first one, a “Bearer.” The Pakistani manservant who did not speak any English was in the house all day, and ironed and cooked unrecognizable meals for us. He didn’t last long. A gardener, a “Mali,” was required, if only to keep up appearances in the European-style neighborhoods built by the company that had brought so many engineers and families from all over the world. We knew, though, that walking outside one morning to find the gardener, proudly holding up the cobra he’d caught in the yard where her children played was too much for Mom. She began to unravel. Our father held out, though, and doubled down on social activities, including starting a Boy Scout troop, in hopes Mom would adjust. Instead, she discovered the alcohol that had never been allowed in her home growing up. She found the mathematics of rum, to be precise. One drink made her feel good, two made the barbed wire on the compound walls fade, and four drinks made all the lizards and maimed children and strange men in the house just slip away for hours and hours.

A Church Wednesday Night Meal in Mangla, West Pakistan
Pictures courtesy Jodi McCullah All Rights Reserved

We never saw Mom drink, though. We were in bed every night by seven p.m. We never saw her drink and we never saw our father much at all. For the two years we lived in Pakistan, our father kept twelve-hour work days and so our paths did not cross for two years, except on the occasional family shopping outing. During those two years was the only time we had allowances and every few weeks, the family would venture to the compound’s shopping area where we could find a Pakistani furniture store, a European-style restaurant complete with a dessert cart filled with petit-fours, and a toy store, where we were happy to spend our allowances, most often on comic books since there were no Saturday morning cartoons. We had no television at all in our home there, in fact, so by the time we left after two years, we had amassed more than three hundred Archie, Superman and Richie Rich comic books and often participated in a robust trading circle with other neighborhood children. Once, though, we all three saved our allowance to buy a pale blue scooter that we could see high up on a corner shelf in the toy store. We visited that store several times without buying any new toys or comics, simply to be sure no other children had purchased that little scooter high up in the corner. We were struggling not to run or pull on our father’s hand to get to the store when the day for purchase finally arrived. Together, the three of us proudly plunked down our rupees onto the counter and watched, holding our breath, as the store owner pulled the scooter down and dusted it off. When he rolled it around the corner of the counter, however, to present that blue beauty to us, my older brother and I realized that the scooter, heretofore only viewed from afar, was too small for either of us. Only our little sister would be able to enjoy it. There was no going back, however. The store owner was beaming at having sold the toy that had taken up his store’s top shelf for months and our father would have been too embarrassed to halt the purchase. Typical of our relationship, though, my brother and I did not commiserate; we were silent as our feet dragged on the dusty road going home. Our sister stayed on the sidewalks with the scooter but I do not remember her using it very often after that, which only added to our disappointment.

Other than the occasional shopping trip, church and the bowling alley, we did not see our father. Even at those venues, we did not interact with him. Our understanding was that, like the other engineers who worked long hours building that dam, our father was excused from many family activities. When we did participate as a family, like at the bowling alley, the children went off unsupervised mostly, so we still didn’t see our parents unless we were causing a problem. Dad was apparently a minor celebrity at the bowling alley, though, often bowling perfect or near perfect games. Our time there consisted of ordering tuna fish sandwiches and zombies to drink at the adjacent grill and watching, fascinated, as the Pakistani workers reset the pins after each throw of the ball. No automated pin replacement there.

Though I was very young, I remember a lot about when my Father was helping in the beginning years to build Mangla Dam in West Pakistan, now Pakistan (as opposed to East Pakistan, now Bangladesh.) Most of our old photos from that time, however, are lost. I do remember that strange juxtaposition of Western and Pakistani. We attended a British school where I learned some Urdu and to add an “e” in the middle of judgment, (i.e., British spelling) a bowling alley and we enjoyed a wonderful series of public pools. We also explored some historic sites and went to school with children from all over the world, including Pakistan. (See Wikipedia, Mangla Dam and Mangla Dam Memories on Facebook.)

Otherwise, the three of us were on our own outside of school hours. The compound was large with an American side and a European side and a bus that drove around both sides all day. On any particularly boring day, the three of us would simply climb onto the old, repainted school bus and ride down all the streets of both sides of the compound, cooled by the hot wind coming through the open windows and fascinated by what our neighbors might be up to that day. I am still amazed that we were simply allowed to wander at five, six and seven years old. In Pakistan.

The entire adventure seemed a contradiction in terms, characterized for me by the fact that we lived in a compound surrounded by a stone wall with barbed wire and cut glass on the top but where the gates were always open and unguarded.

There was an open gate at the back of our own yard, in fact, and from it, we could see a small village where, we were told, women slapped cow dung onto the walls of the homes to dry to be later used as fuel for the fire. Every day, we could hear the calls to worship; they were haunting and beautiful, a call to an Islamic understanding of God that serenaded us as we walked to our Christian church potluck supper. For some of the year, the dust on the side of the road was a fine and deep silt and we would slide our feet through it as if it were snow; other times, during monsoon season, there seemed to be nothing that was dry.

Unsupervised. In Pakistan. At age 7.

That we were largely unsupervised outside of school hours made sense to someone I guess. Until the injuries began. First, my five-year-old sister got stitches trying to climb up a ladder to dive off of the high dive at the crowded community pool. Then, I nearly drowned just a few feet from my mother in the same pool; another mother noticed me struggling to keep my head above water and grabbed me. Mom was busy chatting. There was a broken arm, then stitches for me. Twice. This time, however, neglect was not the problem. I had become the target of choice for my older brother who gleefully ran his bicycle into mine, causing the pedal to tear into the fleshy part of my lower right leg, leaving white tissue oozing down my shin. He later threw a cutting board at me, just missing my eye socket but also requiring stitches. We may never know if another parent intervened or if our father walking into the living room to see our mother kissing the neighbor, but there came a day when Dad sat all three of us down on the edge of a bed in our shared bedroom to tell us our mother was ill and would be “going away” for six months or more. It had been decided we three would wait for her there, in Pakistan.

That’s when the wailing began. Paid mourners could not have been louder or more dramatic. At the time, we were terrified, but we were also resolute, huddled together eyeing that dark and dangerous chasm that seemed to open up before us. We did not know this man. No way were we letting Mom go quietly. We did not stop crying until Dad returned to the room hours later to tell us we were all going home.

Our relief was short-lived, though; once my father dragged Mom away from that motel, we did not see or hear from our parents for months and months. The timeline is vague for me but I remember attending three schools in second grade. So, once we were settled in my grandparents’ two-bedroom duplex in Waynesville, I took to running away, searching for her. From school, from my grandparents’ home, even from church services, I escaped, watching for unsupervised moments and unlocked doors, taking advantage of crowds and distracted adults, always looking for my mother.

Grandma Ree and Grandpa George. Good people who loved fiercely.
Pictures courtesy of Jodi McCullah All Rights Reserved.

More than once, because Grandma Ree was exasperated, I was simply allowed to stay home from school on my grandfather’s day off and we watched cartoons and ate Oreos while he ironed the work shirts he wore driving trucks. Grandpa George seemed to me to be the only adult who was not angry with me; I remain convinced that was because he understood my quest.

Once, after I’d run away from school, the school principal found me. He and a teacher picked me up in a car after they’d driven all over that little town looking for this wayward seven-year-old.

“There, there,” he said, offering me a piece of gum in a green wrapper folded around shiny foil, very much a treat then. Defeated for the moment, I cooperated and got into the old car, only because I’d been wandering for hours and it was getting dark. Offering me a stick of gum, though? Did the adults around me really think that would fix this? I remember looking at him as if he were clueless. It would be years later, though, before I could be proud of that seven-year-old slapping that piece of gum from the principal’s hand in the back of that car, and even longer before I could appreciate the courage it had taken for the three of us to stand up to our father.

We all paid a price, though; we would never have back the mother we had known. When we saw her again, she was subdued, defeated. She had endured shame, therapy, even, we were told later, shock treatments, all because her dream was not his dream. She was not unlike many women of her day, praised for obedience like a child. For the rest of his life, though, my father was on notice. I’m not certain to this day that we accomplished much, but our little rebellion was uncharacteristic of us and I am proud to be able to look back and say that those three little souls refused to go quietly into the darkness.