Memoir

Mostly recollections of family, teachers, good times, bad times

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Miracles (I)

             The Latin mīror means “I wonder or marvel at.” The miracle is in the eye of the beholder. Witnessing a “miracle,” many will want to explain it by rational means. Others will take a wonder as a wonder. No need to explain to them. Such are the miracles in my life:  improbable, yet easy to explain away, if you are a doubter by nature.

According to the etymology of the word— miracle comes from the Greek thaumasion and the Latin miraculum—the definition follows: that which causes wonder and astonishment, being extraordinary in itself and amazing or inexplicable by normal standards. (emphasis added)

There is nothing of the divine in this definition, except maybe “inexplicable by normal standards.”  The truth is: every miracle can be explained by science, coincidence, illusion– even gullibility.  The key part of the definition is “that which causes wonder and astonishment,”  because if I wonder or am astonished you can’t take that away from me. A miracle can be ordained by me.

I remember four miracles in my life. Two of the miracles involve my choice or calling to be a teacher. If it was merely my choice to teach, then not so much a miracle. If I was abruptly launched into teaching–that might be a wonder.

Hamilton College had several composition courses for academic purposes and one course in “Writing for Publication.”  My career goal was to write–in journalism or free lance. I was stuck majoring in English Literature, entertaining, but not career-enriching. I hadn’t thought much about this when I applied. That was how I groped through life in those days.

So my senior year brought the abrupt realization that I had no preparation for writing. I had graduated from Hamilton with a B- average, although with departmental honors in English Literature.  I slap-dashed three applications to journalism schools and a creative writing program and submitted them with my woeful transcript.  To this day I cannot imagine why I was so casual about applying. I set myself up for failure. That’s what happened.

In the meantime, I had spent Winter Study in January with a professor and three other English majors teaching sophomores who had placed out of Freshman Composition. Despite arriving on campus with advanced placement, they felt, or had been told, they needed a refresher in good writing style. Our senior team took on 4-5  freshmen each, Winter Study courses met every day. At the the end of the first week our team of seniors met to talk about the class we had designed and to reflect on our progress. Our professor made occasional suggestions, but left us to teach on our own. We met this way for three and a half weeks.

The feedback from our students was very positive, and we felt we had improved their writing in three short weeks. It was my first teaching experience, but it was not a miracle. Teaching was a distraction, not a career goal. I had the condescending notion that: Those who can, do; Those who can’t, teach.

A few months later Professor Lindley, our teaching supervisor, called me into his office. To this point I had never taken a course with him, because Early English Literature was not on my bucket list. But he had noticed my aptitude and interest in teaching. He told me he had received a letter from the Harvard School of Education to recommend someone for their new Master of Arts in Teaching program. I thought, Why not? Even though I had a pathetic B- average and had not prepared to study education. He told me he would recommend me.

Then the miracle: I got in. After botching three journalism/ writing applications, I got into Harvard!  To that point I had a slight, but not decisive interest in teaching. Now I was fired up! I packed my bags for Cambridge in June, since my program began in the summer, and I was on my way.

I had taken just one Education course at Hamilton and didn’t like it. By all rights I should have been looking for a summer job. I had failed at writing and stumbled into teaching–in retrospect a turning point.

Three improbable things had happened that made this a miracle for me:           

  • I signed up for a teaching class with no plans to teach professionally.
  • Professor Lindley recommended me for an M.A.T. program at Harvard, even though I was barely an average student and had never taken his classes.
  • Harvard accepted me with a B- average.

When three improbable conditions come together at a turning point in your life, you can’t be blamed for calling the outcome “a miracle.” Not the kind that made y0u say, ” It will take a miracle to get me into Harvard.”  The kind that says, I was headed in one direction, and an amazing incident turned me around.

The spiritual side of me said, “I was saved by grace.”  With a more objective perspective fifty-five years later I say “I was saved by grace.”

And the miracles weren’t over . . .

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The Passing of the Torch

When Kamala Harris spoke of “the tired, old playbook” on Tuesday she was not only referring to the refrain of grievances. She was referring to the former President himself. Now who’s the ancient one? Kamala is Generation X.

The age discrepancy was never so obvious as the calm alto voice returned the sputtering volley of the lapsed President. You could even turn off the sound of your TV and see what was happening. One generation supplanting the other. It’s natural, not criminal.

It is not only the tired Trump who stumbles in the limelight; it is the baby-boomers, who have refused to step down from power. Baby boomers plus the older “Silent” generation comprise 53.8% of Congress and 27% of the general population. Even following the “older, but wiser” adage, the ratio of two overage Congresspeople to one citizen is askew.  It is a sign of the stubbornness of the age.

Not only did Trump fume and stumble, he insisted he was a victim of the younger moderators, who insistently fact-checked him.

In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats,” Trump declared. “They’re eating the pets of the people that live there, and this is what’s happening in our country.

Actually, it’s not happening, as the debate moderator David Muir pointed out, noting that ABC had reached out to the Springfield city manager to confirm this. Trump and his supporters were incensed that the ABC moderators, who fact-checked some of Trump’s statements in the debate live, corrected this and a few of his other egregious lies—for example, pointing out that killing newborn babies is illegal, contra Trump’s claim that in some states, doctors can “execute” babies after birth. [https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2024/09/trump-blames-everybody-but-himself/679797/?utm_campaign=atlantic-daily-newsletter&utm_content=20240911&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=The+Atlantic+Daily]

The outrage was spectacular, as you can read in the Atlantic article, cited above.  Never have so many immature defended one so decrepit.

It is safe to say the moderators only pounced on the most egregious lies that they could have anticipated because there was a steady stream of questionable claims that no one could have fact-checked in real time. But fact-checking anything at all was all viewers could have asked for, since the master of hyperbole was on his way to creating a whole alternative universe Tuesday night.

The aftermath was  indignant, as supporters of Trump called the corrections of the youthful David Muir and Linsey Davis “a drive by shooting, ” criminal election fraud and interference,” and “sabotage.”  How generous of them to defend the elderly!  How cynical of them to ignore the dangers of failing competence!

Can anyone who has asked a grandfather or grandmother to give up their driver’s license relate to this?  How many are willing to imperil the young in preference to their own ego and convenience?  How many are blind to their declining memory and reflexes and insist they haven’t lost a step?

Nostalgia is another kind of blindness. Why are boomers marching to the tune of “Make America Great Again”?  Why are they blind to the racism, the segregation, the materialism of the ’50’s and ’60’s? It is a near-sightedness that transmutes everything old into gold. Our generation was the best generation! Nothing today is as good as yesterday!  But we can revere past generations without worshipping them.

Ageism aside, the blindness of the old guard goes back to , and beyond, the senility of Oedipus (legend) and the indulgent favoritism of Isaac (patriarch). Age is not always kind to judgment, though there are remarkable exceptions.  Unfortunately most of the boomers think they are the exceptions. They have lived too long with privilege.

Trump’s performance under pressure Tuesday night reflected the faltering competence of fellow boomers. Voters should stop electing the declining and turn toward the intelligent energetic. As we go to the polls in November, we should all weigh the compromised wisdom of age against the insightful energy of youth. It is not unfair or discriminatory to consider youth an asset with the potential to govern the rest of us.

 

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The Willow

My parents loved flowers and worked hard in the yard on weekends to plant flower beds and a few vegetables.  I was less enthused and related planting to Adam’s curse, working in the dust of the ground.

When I was nine or so, we replaced some ugly crab grass in the back yard with grass sod. It was hard work pulling and digging and planting, and I complained a lot. I remember my mother saying, “You’re part of this family, and you should help with the work as well as the play.” I grumbled silently after that. I actually benefited from the nice turf because it became the outfield of my wiffle ball  games, but I didn’t have the vision.

My one joy in nature demanded nothing of me– the willow tree. The willow was the dominant feature of our back yard. It was broad with a low division of  the trunk that made it easy to get into its lap and reach the spreading branches above. The branches stretched out nearly parallel to the ground, and when you climbed into them they bent low, but never broke, the spindly lines and leaves touching the ground. I remember watching from indoors as the branches swayed in high winds, concerned they would break off, but only once did a leader split– during a hurricane.  It was a minor injury, but to me it was like a broken arm.

The willow was the center of my dreams. I spent a lot of time climbing and sitting in it, sometimes just peacefully, sometimes imagining it was a pirate ship, sometimes secretly listening  to or watching the girl in the yard behind us. I was too shy to speak to her, even though she was in my class in school. She was taller and skinnier than I was.

My friend Marty and I climbed the tree together, and then sat on opposite branches pretending we were deejaying station KBM– Bill and Marty.  We were most interested in announcing the local news, busy-bodying the neighborhood, but we occasionally sang the station jingle or one of the few hit songs we knew.

There was one branch about eight feet off the ground that stretched out like a trapeze, and  we launched ourselves into space innumerable times and landed like parachutists in the soft grass, That was so much fun I did it even when Marty wasn’t around. My mother worried about our parachuting, and once I mildly sprained a wrist falling backward after landing, but that was the only injury of my childhood. The willow was kind to me.

My grandmother lived with us intermittently, and she loved to work in the yard. She was out there every day in good weather, pulling weeds and watering. None of it was work to her. Even though she was half-blind with cataracts, she would admire every plant, flowering, vegetable, or just green.  She grieved when we decided to move to the north shore of Long Island. She told my parents, “You’ll never have a yard as nice as this.”

She was right. Our next house had more bedrooms and a bigger yard, but all the plantings were immature, looking bare. My parents worked hard in the flower beds, but it never felt like Eden, never grew a willow tree.

Whenever we passed a willow tree in the car, I would point and say, “There’s a willow,” but they were all tall and inaccessible, not like the willow I had climbed in. Occasionally I tried to shinny up willow trees with tall straight trunks, but they had no lower branches. They could care less about my getting into their curtain with lines of leaves.  There was never a willow like the kind, motherly willow in my back yard.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Our Chief End

What is our [man’s]  chief end? Our [Man’s] chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy God for ever.                                  Westminster Shorter Catechism

The defining words of Christian life are the praising and the living. My second miracle was how I learned both of these ends.

For some young Christians in the 1970’s, the yearning for “more” was satisfied by the “Baptism of the Spirit.”  Mainline Christians became “charismatic,” experiencing what Pentecostal Christians had been practicing for decades: speaking in tongues, interpretation, prophesying, singing in the spirit.  Pentecostalism had gone mainline across the denominations, even in the Catholic church. Christians who received this gift called themselves “completed Christians.”

One Sunday evening, in search of this completion, I drove to Mount Vernon, N.Y., about forty miles from my home. It was a Presbyterian church, pastored by Harold Bredesen, an outspoken, published, charismatic Christian. I sat in a large sanctuary listening to Christians of diverse denominations singing and speaking in tongues. A few stood up and interpreted tongues in English. It was unlike any Presbyterian service I had ever attended.

At the end of the service I knelt on the steps of the platform in front of the altar.  A “Spirit-filled” woman laid hands on me, while speaking in tongues. I didn’t feel anything and became nervous. She encouraged me: “Just start speaking, it will come.” Sure enough, when I opened my mouth to speak, I felt a rush of excitement, and I was speaking in tongues. It felt truly “charismatic.” It sounded to me like an Arabic tongue, but I never believed it was an identifiable language. It was more the excitement of praising God without processing the words. It was scintillating. I left the service with a new voice.

By the time I got home my parents were in bed. I went into my bedroom to pray, opened my mouth in praise, and the same rush of the Spirit filled me. I was speaking in tongues again. Excited, I went into my parents’ bedroom to tell them what had happened. My mother was perplexed, but glad for me. My father was asleep, so I didn’t know what he thought. His brother was a Pentecostal minister. We had visited his church, but tongues never happened for us. It seemed so foreign. My Dad said he had previously heard of Puerto Rican Christians speaking in Spanish, and that did not sound like a gift of the Spirit.

The next morning, Dad said he was glad about my gift, but guarded about what this meant. The baptism was nothing he expected to receive, but he never openly questioned the authenticity of my experience. I took some secret satisfaction that I had gone beyond my parents’ spiritual experience.

This was the second miracle in my life, but I link it with life in  graduate school. Some doubt the authenticity of charismatic gifts, even many conservative Christian churches. For me, it was assurance that God was active in my life. It was the most physical manifestation of God I had experienced. It made faith less theoretical, more pervasive, at a time when faith was fragile, finding my way onto a new campus with a new direction.

I found a Presbyterian church in Cambridge like the place where I had “received the Spirit.” They had traditional services on Sunday morning, but charismatic services on Sunday evening and smaller groups teaching and worshipping in the Spirit on Wednesday night. It was also a college church, where students from Harvard and M.I.T. attended for the time they were students and then moved on. The pastor and church leaders felt this transient congregation was part of the mission of the church. It was a dynamic, multi-cultural church.

This church became my life through fifteen years. I found room mates from the church during graduate school. I found other room mates from graduation until I was married to Kathy Hessert in 1974. I found my wife in this church. I struggled to find a teaching job for two and a half years in this church. They prayed for my longing to teach.

I found my first full-time job from a member of the church. He taught me to be a bookkeeper. I found my first teaching job during this time. My employer let me out of work to go to every teaching interview I had, knowing I would be leaving when I was hired to teach.

I learned to live in Christian community in this church. The idea of maturing in faith kept us aspiring to change as a community. We formed small groups that made our faith more experiential. We had open discussions with each other about what we were learning about ourselves, about our shortcomings and gifts.  Kathy and I shared leadership in one of the groups.

Kathy and I experimented with communal living with another couple from the church. It ended after a year, but we learned more about “life together.” To this day I have friends who shared our life together in the church, even though it went through a painful transition in our last five years there.

After I found my first teaching job we moved about fifteen miles away from church and infrequently went back to visit.

But in those fifteen years I learned how to “glorify God and and enjoy God forever.” There was glory and there was life. That was my second miracle.

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The Great Teacher

For some reason students are glad to give teachers credit for identity or character formation. If it weren’t so immune to measurement or controlled experiments, we might believe that teaching is more about compassion and example than test score elevation. A classroom:

When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?
They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah, and still other Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”
“But what about you?”he asked. “Who do you say that I am?
Simon Peter answered, “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.”
Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven. And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.”
(Matthew 16: 13-18)

Jesus was concerned with unleashing the potential of his followers. He planned a short stay on this planet, and he needed disciples who would seamlessly take up his work after he left. In the verses above he contrived an unstandardized test to measure the readiness of his disciples.
1) Who do people say the Son of Man is?
2) Who do you say that I am?
The first question has several answers, more in the way of reporting than solving a problem. “Who do people say that I am?” ranged everywhere from “John the Baptist” to “Jeremiah.”
The second question “Who do you say that I am?” is clearly the summative measure of their progress, and Peter, the star pupil, steps into the breach with the best answer “the Christ, the Son of the Living God.”

The next move is where the teaching really begins, even as the learning curve often rises in the post-mortem of a test, more than from the test itself. Why do these questions even matter?

Jesus’s first lesson is “this was revealed . . . by my father in heaven.”  You learn by listening to God, not those who speculate that Jesus was Elijah come back from the dead.

The next move is lending perspective to what has just happened. Another thing you can’t readily assess: the pupil graduating to a new identity. First, Jesus addresses him as “Simon,” then as “Peter” signifying his growth and potential for growth. And then prophetically, “On this rock I will build my church.”

In my latter years of teaching teachers, I suddenly began to hear myself say “You’re going to be a great teacher” when a student shared a great insight or experience. And I wished I had made such outrageous predictions much earlier in my career. Because I realize now that students remember those moments better than all the professional wisdom I could impart, and the memory may help them later in their careers.

Why did Peter need to hear that bold prediction from Jesus at that moment? First, he had made himself vulnerable by saying what other disciples were afraid to utter. Many were thinking it. Only Peter was willing to say it. Second, he was about to see the man he called “the Christ” imprisoned and tortured. The whole dream was dissolving. Third, Peter was going to contribute to Jesus’s humiliation with the three denials, something he swore he would never do. The timing of Jesus’s prediction was crucial, because it would carry Peter through his trial by fire.

There is a cliche in teaching that we teach the student, not the subject matter.  Students remember who you are and how you teach, not just what you teach. Research shows that education students often imitate their best teachers in the past more than the teacher we try to impose on them in their teacher education. This is good from the point of view of knowing good teaching, but bad from the point of view of developing your own character as a teacher.

In teaching student teachers I finally learned that how I teach and how I treat students is the curriculum students receive more than the research about best practices and new classroom approaches. I began to realize that Jesus’ effectiveness as a teacher came from his daily actions as a compassionate, inclusive and personal teacher that left the most enduring memory on his pupils.

My conversion to Jesus, the teacher, came late in my life. At least half way through my journey.  But it came in the nick of time, when I was trying to teach teachers, who were eager for my experience as a high school teacher. What they did not know was that I was teaching more and more by example as I learned what the real curriculum was, what they would carry with them into student teaching.

Jesus shows us that character and identity formation are the heart of great teaching. His teaching was not successful because his disciples had a good grasp of the Law and the Prophets or even impressive faith. He was successful because he taught them as individuals, as much as the curriculum of the Good News.. He was successful because they could take up the cross as they had seen him do it: feed the hungry, heal the hurting, encourage the hopeless. They caught the spirit and the intent of his teachings, the part that would stay with them after graduation.

And that’s what made this rabbi a Great Teacher.

 

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The Addiction of Dualism

Addiction: we know it’s bad for us, but how hard it is to stop! I’ve had battles with caffeine, sugar, sports ranting with relative success, but in the past month I have had to abandon all three, just to preserve my sanity.

Caffeine was the most obvious one. I stayed up all night twice in a week, and when I was sleeping, it was the wrong time, such as during sermons and when my wife was telling me something important and when the evening news was on.  So I bought some de-caffeinated coffee, and the sleeplessness stopped. I found out the other antidote was afternoon naps.

I beat the sugar habit decades ago, but I have occasional lapses. We went on a cruise in early February, where unlimited drinking was part of the package. Since I am not an alcoholic I enjoyed trying some mixed drinks for my inexperienced palate. It was fun, but I soon began to feel like I was getting a cold. Then the cold started to go away, when I stopped the mixed drinks, and I knew it had been my old nemesis sugar taking hold. Fortunately my sensitivity allows me to drink beer.

I decided to give up “angry writing” for Lent, because it created a permanent seething in me, instead of relieving my anger. I decided to stop ranting about the Cardinals’ not signing another top-of-the-rotation pitcher. A couple of weeks ago I deliberately went on Twitter to chew out the Cardinals’ President of Operations, John Mozeliak, for being too cheap to sign Jordan Montgomery. I’m very good at spending other people’s money.

So I stopped the ranting, and it wasn’t that hard, because the baseball writing at the beginning of Spring Training is so optimistic and hopeful, it is soothing to the soul.

Now political ranting is another thing. My blogs are full of political ranting, even though I always present evidence and counter-arguments. In the last thirty days I have posted twenty political pieces, and I write only about four times a week.  I really try to write on varied topics, but my favorite theme is the political, because, when I read the Op-ed’s and listen to “Morning Joe” on MSNBC every morning, they usually get my juices flowing.

None of these addictions are bad for most people, but I can’t keep up with the Happy Hour crowd, and I have to step back when I am with the ice cream gourmets, because I know I will feel bad tomorrow.  Caffeine is like poison to me, but I spent the first 75 years of my life loving it.  Political writing has become a guilty pleasure since I retired, but I notice it feeds the beast in me. Now I have something nasty to say about the Christian Nationalists every morning.  They may deserve it, but they have become my favorite scapegoat. I don’t like that.

Political writing has stirred up my dualistic self.  Jung would call it the “shadow self.” It’s the”us vs. them” mentality, almost the definition of politics. The professional politicians know how to keep this beast under control. It is a sign of the amateurs getting into politics that divisiveness has become the order of the day.

The dualistic mind is essentially binary, either/or thinking. It knows by comparison, opposition, and differentiation. It uses descriptive words like good/evil, pretty/ugly, smart/stupid, not realizing there may be a hundred degrees between the two ends of each spectrum. Richard Rohr.

Sports fans are a prominently express dualism. They range  from true fanatics to connoisseurs of the game, who can cheer when an opposing outfielder makes a sterling play.  It may take a home run away from the home team, but the educated fan will probably sigh and say, “Good play you f – &^%$. ” It is often said that certain cities have savvy fans, because they appreciate good play, not just plays that favor their home team.

At the other end of the spectrum are the majority of fans who call into sports-talk radio shows. They are usually provoked by the host of the show, who knows the people who listen to him. The callers are all self-proclaimed experts who disagree about everything.  Where two or three sports fanatics are gathered, there are usually six or seven opinions. Avoiding the dualist trap, I will say that most of us are on the spectrum between the connoisseurs and the fanatics.  We are fans, but we love our team, even when they are losing.

Politics has a similar spectrum of experts and self-proclaimed experts. Some want to discuss issues to understand why the opposition thinks differently. Some want to prove their party is better than your party. And all of us in between.

For me politics is complex and needs untangling, so I often want to listen. But don’t get me started about the topics I think I know about: Christianity or public education.  Then you are in for a diatribe with enemies named and scorned.  Lately my anger has waxed about Christian Nationalism. I mean it, don’t get me started.

Nothing creates bitter enemies more than politics and religion, and that is one reason I need to fast from political writing. This is the dualism that hurts others, but it hurts the provocateur as well. In religion, especially, the dualistic mind turns us into self-righteous prigs. As Richard Rohr says

 Most of us settle for quick and easy answers instead of any deep perception, which we leave to poets, philosophers, and prophets. Yet depth and breadth of perception should be the primary arena for all authentic religion. How else could we possibly search for God?

Just as there is nothing wrong with drinking if you are not an alcoholic, there is nothing wrong with political writing unless it turns you into a raving dualist.  Sports ranting and political ranting are not that different. As we say, they generate more heat than light.

To replace the ranting of politics,  I will try to write more affirmative writing: inquiry, reflections, memoir, poetry, that kind of thing. My recent post on “Angry Writing” would qualify in the category of “reflections.” Probably this piece would qualify, as an inquiry into rants and diatribes.

But, to my surprise, my withdrawal from political writing has been much harder than my withdrawal from sports ranting.  Every morning I get incensed by political news and want to spout off about it.  There is evidence of addiction here, evidence that I want the Christian Nationalists to get my message, because they are sooo wrong and self-serving.  Maybe they are, but I probably will not be the one to convince them. I am too incensed.

See? I sneaked a little politics even in my “apolitical” writing. This is going to be a long Lent.

 

 

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Sleeper, Awake!

Well, I’ve finally humiliated myself for dozing during the day, in this case during a sermon, in this case sitting in the choir loft for all to see. The choir sits in public view on the congregation’s left in our sanctuary, so we are part of the service, even as we wait to sing after the sermon. Here I was, enacting my disregard for the Word spoken, sleeping in public.

In recent years I’ve had trouble sleeping more than six hours in a night. This is a new issue since most of my life I’ve been a sound sleeper, easily enjoying the standard eight hours a night. The result has been midday dozing, a habit that has offended Victoria, because of my checking out, taking absence, while she remains awake and alone in the living room. I’ve even faded out as she was talking to me. That, I understood, was offensive. The rest seemed to me the innocent behavior of a sleep-handicapped person.

I’ve seen a sleep therapist. I’ve taken on the onerous burden of a C-Pap gadget. I’ve taken afternoon naps. I’ve succumbed to decaffeinated coffee. I’ve tried, and still I doze during the nightly news and sometimes begin to fade while Victoria is in mid-sentence. I just check out without warning until she says, “Are you falling asleep?” with a slight edge in her voice.

I’ve also found it hard to distinguish between meditation and sleep. When I have tried to meditate in my morning devotions or respectfully during the sermon, I pass into oblivion. That is not what meditation calls for. And yet meditation is a relaxed form of prayer, a sense of peace before God. How do I convert sleeping into worshipful prayer?  Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, while his disciples dozed. How did his earnest prayer for “Not my  will, but thine?” contrast with the weary catnapping of his followers?

Until now I have felt like the disciples, just trying to recover from a long day’s labor. I felt like Victoria was unnecessarily annoyed by my innocent drifting off. I remember my father taking a siesta during the sports segment of the late night news and my mother finding him in his recliner, chastising him, “Tuck, wake up and come to bed!” Then my Dad would rouse himself and say,” I just want to hear the sports,” after he had already missed the lead story. Why can’t a man sleep, when he wants to?

I felt it was an innocent dalliance, until I missed the last five minutes of the sermon, bent over in full view of the congregation and the choir during the Sunday service. This was a full-Monty from meditation to public humiliation. I’m not sure if the pastor observed my insult to his preaching the Word, but I hope my offense was ignored or forgiven.

Now it was public and chronic. Now it was failed meditation. Now it was ignoring the Word of God,  boring or not.  The sleeper was not innocently slipping into the Land of Nod. He was obstructing the Spirit from bringing home the message.

I get it. Sleeping at the wrong time is rude. Sleeping can  say, “I don’t think you are important enough for my undivided attention.” Sleeping can even say, “Don’t bother me, God. This sermon lacks relevance.” Or to anyone, “I’ve given you enough time; let me sleep.” Sleeping is the opposite of listening.

As Victoria has pointed out, I used to make my living as a listener. I hardly ever lectured as a college professor. I spent about 60 % of my class listening to my students. My students were future teachers. I was trying to model good listening for them, and they appreciated it. So I was pretty good at listening for 75-minute or 90-minute intervals. Not so sure about after that. I can be easily distracted, even when I stay awake.

I  need to apply some of those skills to my non-professional friends, not to mention my spouse. Actually I will mention my spouse, who has to live with this annoyance every day. I need to adopt a more alert posture. In fact I will begin with posture.

Through reading, I have been taught that it helps to stay as upright as possible while meditating, to maintain the boundary between listening and sleep. Not slumped or even bowing in the alleged posture of prayer. I have also learned to keep attention by focusing on my breathing and letting idle thoughts drift away. This works pretty well in prayer.

Could I apply this to people and TV?  Maintain an erect position and focus on the person, not on stray thoughts. This sounds a little formal, but recall this is a recovery behavior, not a casual reform. My falling asleep is so abrupt that I can’t catch myself in the act. It’s like a sudden blackout. I need a deliberate approach, kind of like abstinence for an alcoholic or an overeater.

So now, if I pretend to focus by closing my eyes, as I am wont to do, that should send an alarm to my conscious brain to straighten up and pay attention. I can try this during the news or when listening to Victoria’s sometimes rambling stories. I know, if I ask her to summarize and stop, she is very cooperative. No excuses there.

As for the twenty-minute sermon, I need to take the alert posture and turn to my left and follow the pastor as he journeys to the front of the platform and back to the pulpit.  Bowing in meditation is out for now, just as the alcoholic resolves not to take a small sip of alcohol. Maybe I’m distracted, but no one can tell from my focus, my alert posture, my portrayal of listening. As they say, “Fake it till you make it.”

Sleeper, awake!

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My Brother, Doug

When I was three years old I greeted my first sibling: Douglas Allen Tucker. He was chubby and cute like a lot of babies, and I had fun playing with him. He made musical grunting noises when he was happy.  Sometimes I got to feed him to give my mother a break. He loved to eat and be fed.

When I was four or five my parents began to worry about his development.  He seemed unresponsive to stimuli, except for food. He wasn’t walking. He couldn’t handle a spoon. My parents visited several doctors my fifth year, an expense that kept us behind financially for a long time.

We eventually got the diagnosis of cerebral palsy. My brother would probably never develop beyond his one-year-old alertness. He would eventually walk, but with an unsteady gait typical of cerebral palsy. He would never speak beyond his singing/ grunting noises.  He grew longer and skinnier. He looked like a starving war victim, but he ate well. Despite a lot of practice, he could never feed himself.

This was an endless trauma for my mother. When he couldn’t handle a spoon, it was the breaking point. She would often leave the room sobbing, and my father would say “Oh, dear,” and follow her into the bedroom. They would shut the door to protect me from my mother’s grief.

I found the trauma confusing, because Doug was the same kid he always had been. I would talk to him, and he would grunt back to me. When he was happy his voice would ascend an octave and would make an “Ee-ee-ee”. He made this noise when I chased him around the fireplace. We had a central fireplace that separated the kitchen and the living room. Doug’s main recreation was awkwardly walking around it. When I chased him, he would make his ee-ee-ee sound, raise his hands over his head and clasp them, one under the other, and we knew he was happy. Sometimes I still raise one arm over and around my head, when I am relaxing. I think I learned that from him.  He was fun for me, too. Doug was just a baby brother, in my mind. It was my mother’s weeping that upset me.

My mother had difficulty caring for Doug, because he wore a diaper for his whole life and had to be changed often. He also “failed to prosper,” and that seemed tragic and inconsistent with a loving God. We went from one healing minister to another, asking for prayer and hoping for a miracle. When nothing changed, that seemed more cruel and heedless of a loving God. My mother never lost her faith, but she never stopped saying, ” I don’t know why God allowed this. He will never grow up to be a normal adult. I don’t know what his purpose is.”

My grandmother came to live with us for several years, stayed in Doug’s room, and generally mothered him every minute of the day and night.  She could not comprehend how God would let this happen, but she was not bitter.  Maybe a few words for the clumsy doctors.

She held Doug in her lap and sang to him, with a little bouncing on her knees:

Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross,
To see a fine lady upon a white horse;
Rings on her fingers and bells on her toes,
And she shall have music wherever she goes.

He seemed to like it; he was musical in his own way.

When I was ten, my mother became pregnant with my sister. They didn’t announce the pregnancy until she was well along. My mother had had two miscarriages before this successful pregnancy, and my parents were nervous about the baby’s development and birth, because of my brother. They had been given the theory that my brother’s condition resulted from the umbilical cord getting wrapped around his neck, depriving him of oxygen. My mother always suspected it was some malpractice of the physician that caused my brother’s disability.

Our family doctor advised us to place Doug in a facility for the developmentally disabled before my sister was born. I wasn’t privy to the discussion, but it was out of concern for my sister as well as my mother. It did not seem likely my mother could handle both children with equal care. So my brother was placed in the Willowbrook State School on Staten Island. It wasn’t a pleasant place, but my brother seemed unaware.  We saw him in an open indoor recreation area each month.  Occasionally he showed marks of being hit by other children.

We did not know how bad it was until Robert Kennedy, our U.S. Senator, investigated Willowbrook, forced its closure, and got the residents placed elsewhere. My brother had already come to stay at the Melville State School, much closer to us.  An entry from Wikipedia summarized:

By 1965, Willowbrook housed over 6,000 intellectually disabled people despite having a maximum capacity of 4,000. Senator Robert F. Kennedy toured the institution in 1965 and proclaimed that individuals in the overcrowded facility were “living in filth and dirt, their clothing in rags, in rooms less comfortable and cheerful than the cages in which we put animals in a zoo” and offered a series of recommendations for improving conditions.[8]
For the rest or his life, Doug enjoyed certain privileges at every place he stayed, because of his history with Willowbrook. He always got the best bed and the best care. It was all the same to him.
As tragic as this episode of Willowbrook was, it was my mother’s weeping every month, when we left the facility, that troubled me. For her it was partly the pain of leaving him and partly the pain of his stunted existence.  My mother was convinced, and she was probably right, that he never recognized us. We were only the nice family that brought him ice cream.
My father’s discomfort with my mother’s grief closed my emotional door. I don’t remember crying until twenty years later at my grandmother’s funeral. Even that was privately shared in the car afterward. It wasn’t that I felt it was unmanly, but because it exposed lack of control.  It exposed your pain.
After Doug was moved upstate, we saw him less and less. I made my last visit to suburban Albany on a trip from Michigan to Cape Cod. With a furrowed brow, Doug looked a little darker than when we were kids. As usual I brought ice cream, and that greatly interested him. His care-givers spoke warmly of  him. He never bothered anyone else, but he could not be induced to participate in organized play. He loved to eat.
More than a year later I received a phone call  from a nurse in a hospital somewhere in upstate New York, who said Doug could no longer swallow, and he was eating with a tube through his belly button. It was startlingly clear that he had nothing left to live for. He was recovering from a respiratory illness, and I made it clear no heroic measures should be taken to preserve his life. A  couple of months later I was informed of his death.
My mother was so wrong about Doug having no purpose. Beside being my boyhood companion he gave me an empathy for disabled children and adults. He gave me a tenderness of heart. Capped over for years, my tears started to bubble up in my thirties and later sprung up as my uncle was dying.  I was thirty-seven. I have barely paused weeping for joy or grief since then. I started to cry at the beginning of writing this paragraph for love of my only brother. Doug got under my skin and found my tender self.
When my tears well up at a sappy movie, when they leak at a young people’s concert or theater production, when they mist my eyes as I sing a hymn about mercy, when they rise from the deep as I am writing about the poor or sick or weak of mind, I remember Doug. That was his purpose for me.

 

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Sixth Grade and Living the Dream

This morning I awoke with a signature tune in my head from Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore: “He Is An Englishman.” This patriotic song was so revered by the British that every time it was sung to a British audience they would stand in unison, as if it were “God Save the Queen.”  Not unusual for me to awaken with a tune in my head, but by coincidence (or not) in sixth grade the role of the singer, the Bos’un, who sang “He is an Englishman,” was played by my childhood best friend, Marty, who was currently visiting us with his spouse, Hope.

Actually I don’t believe in coincidences. I immediately began to write this piece that morning.

In the operetta HMS Pinafore, the patriotic “He is an Englishman” comes at a critical moment when the lowly sailor, Rafe Rackstraw,  has been exposed as courting the Captain’s daughter, and the Captain is about to send Rafe to the brig.  Josephine, Captain’s daughter and romantic interest of Rafe,  declares “He is an Englishman!” meaning he should be treated with the same rights as all Englishman. so the gathered crowd echoes her words and then the Bos’un takes up the theme:

He is an Englishman!

For he himself has said it,

And it’s greatly to his credit,

That he is an Englishman

(Crowd response: That he is an Englishman!)

And the song goes on to explain how Rafe has been faithful to England and so is worthy of the Captain’s daughter. It is quite a dramatic moment, so if the audience were standing, it would be appropriate as the turning point in the operetta, as well as tribute to England.

But this is about Marty’s father, Lennie Lazarus, who was a weekend director of many community drama performances, but who gave up many consecutive Saturdays to direct a motley crew of sixth graders in Gilbert and Sullivan’s sophisticated satire of the British navy. At the time this seemed natural to me that the father of a my friend at Seaman’s Neck School would do this. Later as an adult I appreciated the sacrifice he made to work with the rankest of rank amateurs to make this performance respectable.

To me it was the peak of my elementary school career, because Mr. Lazarus and Mr. Hicks (music teacher) offered me the understudy role of the Captain, which was a bigger deal than it sounds. The understudy got to perform his role at half of the performances and for me it was two starring roles. Marty, who had a stronger voice than I, seemed content to play his role with the signature solo “He is an Englishman.”

I also took my role as Captain for granted, because I had  sacrificially accepted the lead romantic role of Rafe Rackstraw.  On the nights when I didn’t play the Captain,  I had the embarrassing job of kissing the female lead, Josephine, at the end of the play. As it turned out it was only a hug, and I liked the lead girl who played Josephine, the petite, but lovely Noreen Swenson. So on alternate nights I played the love interest, which was not a coveted role in sixth grade.

I recall asking my mother why wouldn’t Marty’s father cast him for the lead? My mother surmised he didn’t want to show favoritism in giving out the best role to his son. I thought how strange being the director’s son would be a curse, rather than an advantage.

In retrospect I have thought: how many fathers would be scrupulous enough to exclude their son from lead performer?  How many fathers would assume the challenge of playing a low visibility role as the director of a crew of sixth graders, who loved the limelight? How many fathers would be so patient with his keystone cops of a cast and even explain the funny parts, most of which we did not get in the rehearsals.

My debt to Mr. Lazarus was more than this. I was a diminutive kid with a small voice who had never before played in a drama. I did not have stage presence, to say the least, but by the time of the last performance, I felt proud of my accomplishment and even imagined a career in theater. I ended up as a career teacher, who sometimes needed those skills to keep a class on task.

So it was a turning point in my life as a student. I am grateful in retrospect, if I did not realize the significance at the time.

Marty was also stellar as the Bos’un, singing his featured song with gusto. The audience did not stand (since they were ignorant Americans) but they knew this was a climax in the operetta.  I always thought it was hilarious that:

But, despite of all temptations

to belong to other nations,

He remains an Englishman.

He remains an Eng-eng-eng-eng-eng-eng-eng-Eng-lishman.

(Crowd echoes his lines)

What? Were all the other countries recruiting Englishmen to join them now? Even “the French or Turks or Russians or perhaps Ital-i-ans”?  That seemed a little far-fetched to me.  Today, with America’s famous whistleblower Edward Snowden living in Moscow, this seems a little less far-fetched. But at the time I thought it was a little patriotic overreach. Maybe Gilbert and Sullivan, with tongue in cheek, thought the same.

We were all justifiably proud, and we really owed it to Mr. Lazarus (and some to Mr. Hicks), whose sacrifice most of us did not truly appreciate. I do appreciate it now. So, thanks, Mr. Lazarus,  for making a difference. I’m sure somewhere you are receiving your reward.

 

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Should the People Vote on Abortion Rights?

From the start the Pro-Life movement has been anti-democratic. The striking down of Roe vs. Wade was accomplished by a Supreme Court appointed by a Senate Majority, which did not represent the majority of U.S. voters. Poll after poll has shown that the majority of voters opposed the absolute form of anti-abortion law, the criminalizing of all abortions, including those resulting from rape and incest.  The Supreme Court marshaled its 6-3 majority to overrule the majority of U.S. citizens.

On Tuesday, August 8,  the State of Ohio put an initiative on the August ballot, for which a tiny minority of citizens will vote, to raise the percentage required to pass a Constitutional amendment to 60% of citizens casting their vote.  As the New York Times reported, this August ballot comes after “Early this year, Ohio legislators ended the practice of regularly holding elections in August, pointing to the high costs and low turnout.” (August 8, 2023).

But the legislature decided it could afford one more August vote, because a vote on an abortion rights amendment to the state constitution was coming up in November. The threshold for passing a constitutional amendment in Ohio is currently a majority.

“This is 100 percent about keeping a radical pro-abortion amendment out of our constitution,” Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican who’s also running for U.S. Senate, said. “The left wants to jam it in there this coming November.” In other words a majority vote should not be allowed to express the will of the voters.

An abortion rights amendment is also proposed for the fall ballot in Missouri, but the cost evaluation of the amendment has blocked it so far. Attorney General Andrew Bailey argued that the amendment would cost the state billions of dollars in unborn tax payers, but he was over-ridden by the Missouri Supreme Court, supporting the State Auditor Brian Fitzpatrick who put the cost to the state at $51, 000.

Next two Republican lawmakers filed against Fitzpatrick, saying that his  estimate is “inaccurate and  in a way that is both misleading to voters and obvious and curable by the auditor.” This is apparently re-litigating the same lawsuit brought by the attorney general, but it delays the attempts of supporters of the abortion rights proposal from gathering signatures to put the proposal on the ballot.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri complained, “This is another attempt by power-obsessed politicians to prevent Missourians from voting on reproductive rights. The bogus lawsuit parrots the already court-rejected claims of the attorney general.”

The constitutional amendment in question would outlaw penalties for both patients and physicians participating in reproductive-related care.  Normally a petition can get on the ballot in an average of 56 days, but this petition has already taken 150 days.  These nuisance lawsuits apparently attempt to prevent this petition from getting enough signatures to appear on the ballot.

Why would pro-choice advocates in a deeply Red state such as Missouri be so desperate to prevent a vote on the rights of pregnant women and their physicians? Because when the most recent poll asked potential Missouri voters if “you think it should be possible for a woman to legally obtain an abortion in the state of Missouri… in the first 8 weeks of pregnancy,” 58 percent of respondents said they agree, and 32 percent said they disagree. Ten percent said they were not sure.” (https://www.news-leader.com/story/news/politics/2022/08/26/missouri-poll-abortion-exceptions-incest-rape-gun-background-checks-popular/7888170001/).

The majority of voters appear to support reproductive rights within eight weeks of pregnancy, but that majority should not be permitted to vote on such an amendment, according to the litigants against the ballot proposal.  The idea that voters should be allowed to express their will on the issue of abortion could be squashed in Missouri because of the time required to get the signatures to support the petition.

Voters of good faith may disagree on whether or on what terms abortion should be legalized, but voters have not been allowed to express the will of the people so far in Ohio and Missouri. Whether these proposals make the fall ballot in either state remains to be seen. One thing is evident–Pro-life legislators are desperately afraid of a democratic ruling on the topic of abortion rights.

There is a moral issue and a democratic issue on the legalizing of abortion. Moral convictions ought to be respected regardless of the numerous positions taken by people of good faith. But so should the will of voters be respected. The unscrupulous tactics of some Pro-life legislators is not justified by their moral convictions.

Voters should be allowed to express their beliefs at the polls on the legal rights of mothers and their physicians. Supreme Court rulings have consequences. So should the ballot decisions in every state, regardless of the convictions of a minority.