I’m Baaaack!

This has been a very long year for me, and all on top of all the disruptions of COVID last year. At the end of last November—for a “fun” way to end 2020—I was diagnosed with endometrial cancer. My primary doctor (who is an angel in jeans) did the biopsy when I came to her with bleeding, and even though she kept on the lookout for the results, due to the way MyChart posts lab results the second they are ready, I beat her to the draw and learned I had cancer a few evenings later through the lab results on MyChart. Not the best way to get that information! But she called me the next day, gave me her cell phone number and said to use it any time, and to call her that day, as she was not in the office. And she set me up with the proper people in Madison, (which is an hour away from me, and more depending on where in the city I go) from my insurance plan (SSM/Dean) to get started on treatment.

I had begun a journey of nearly a year, and many weeks involved not just one appointment, or even two, but sometimes three. As I described in my last blog post, I spent much of the year “on the ride,” often unable to have time to do my regular tasks, let alone the activities that feed my soul.

One thing I did do, and I recommend it to other cancer sufferers or others dealing with rough times in life, was that, after carefully informing the people close to me, I opened up on Facebook and shared my journey as it went on with my friends there, which led to amazing support, prayers, and sharing of caring energy.

My insurance plan uses St. Mary’s hospital in Madison but also cooperates with the University of Wisconsin hospital. So early in December I went for a consult with a doctor from St. Mary’s who explained how the surgery, then scheduled for Dec. 9, would go. Then I had the fun experience of a PET scan. I had to do all this alone of course, because of COVID, which required the person being treated to come into the hospital alone, and the support person to communicate in the appointment via their cell phone, so this left my husband in a cold car while I had appointments. This was the case until literally the day before my actual surgery in March (more on that later). Based on the PET scan, when I met with the UW doctor who was to assist, he said there was one lymph node that had lit up, and so the whole procedure had to be moved to UW Hospital (apparently St. Mary’s was unable to deal with this thing? I doubt it). I have referred to this moment as a highjacking of my cancer treatment. Fortunately in the end it was only the surgery that was highjacked, and especially because of later events, the rest of my treatment was through St. Mary’s and SSM/Dean. More on that later.

So now, because the situation was so serious, um, they put the surgery off for three weeks, until the day before Christmas Eve. I had a less-than-positive experience meeting the doctor who was to do the surgery—when I asked her if I was going to die, her response drove me to tears: “I’m glad you asked, yes, probably.” She later explained that was because I had a virulent type of cancer (serous) that tends to keep coming back, but the damage was done. (In my later encounters with her, the actual pre-op appointment and the rounds after the surgery, she had other people who did most of the talking, as I think the word got out what she had said to me, via the nurse maybe, who found me in tears after the consult.) I spent much of the day before the surgery date on the phone with the nurse preparing for the surgery. But the Saturday before, I had had the required COVID test, in yet another location, and it came back positive. I was, in fact, positive that this was an error, and had another test the next day that came back negative. And everyone, then or since to this day, including the contact tracer on the phone, all my doctors except for the surgeon and UW Hospital radiation department, agrees that the negative test outweighs the previous one. Everyone, that is, but, apparently, the anesthetists who were to be part of the surgery. So the night before, after all the preparations, the surgery was canceled.

The surgeon called me the next day (Christmas Eve) and said the hospital’s policy was to wait three weeks after a positive COVID test. I reminded her that the next day I had had a negative one, and her response: “How do you know the negative test wasn’t the false one?” But, she said, we would start with chemotherapy and do the surgery after three treatments. (I later learned that the surgeon had then left on three weeks’ vacation, so was unavailable for any further consultation.) So that was the background to our Christmas celebration, which was of course just my husband and me, because of COVID. Anxiety through the roof. Christmas Eve about 4:30 PM I apologetically took my primary doctor up on her offer and called her at home, in tears about all that had transpired. She comforted me and made some suggestions.

Oh my goodness, I didn’t plan to go into all this, but here we are, deep in the story. On Monday I started calling both the UW Health and SSM/Dean cancer contacts, asking about when the chemo would be set up. Each clinic blamed the other for not acting on this, and I went round and round, until finally the lead endometrial cancer nurse at SSM/Dean took over and made me an appointment with the “gyn/onc” (gynecological oncologist) there, for 1:30 on New Year’s Eve. Finally something happening. As it turned out she was a wonderful person/doctor and met with me after the clinic had officially closed for New Year’s Eve. Her first words to me were: “I’m so sorry for what you’ve been through so far.” And set up my first chemo for the next day, New Year’s Day—and because it was a holiday it was done at St. Mary’s hospital, and I had a whole room to myself—but as usual, my husband had to sit freezing in his car in the parking garage, for most of the day, as the chemo time was lengthened due to emergency delays at the hospital and procedures for the first chemo.

Two weeks later my hair started to fall out, and it’s just growing back now.

Thereafter my treatment went well. My next chemo was at the doctor’s office, then the third was at a hospital nearer my home, supervised by another type of oncologist that did this kind of trade with the “gyn/onc” to keep patients closer to home. Then the surgery, finally, on March 10. The doctor with such a poor “bedside manner” was an excellent surgeon, and the results were that outside my uterus, which was done away with (I’m 74, so no need for it anyway), there was no cancer in any lymph nodes. The three chemos had apparently done away with anything suspicious.

The one advantage of treatment at UW Hospital was that I was eligible for a free wig and fitting of said wig by an actual hairdresser. I also bought another one I liked, and had already ordered two others before I found out about the hospital wig salon. But as it turned out, I didn’t wear them much, as they always felt kind of fake to me, like I was in disguise or something. I preferred the pretty pre-tied scarves I found online.

Then, after healing from surgery, three more chemos, these again in a different place, the more local doctor’s other office in nearby Fort Atkinson. Pretty much wiped me out, especially by the last one, but it was worth it. What’s weird about cancer, caught early enough to treat, is that you don’t yet feel any effects of the cancer, but wow, the treatments/cure are rough! It took me four months to recover from the longest side effects of poisoning my body to cure my cancer, which was bone pain in my hips and issues with balance.

But meanwhile, I was asked to take four sessions of brachytherapy. It is a less burdensome form of radiation, which I won’t describe in detail, but provides local radiation where it is needed.

The same week I ended that I began special PT for cancer patients. That was totally worth my while, as it helped me with my strength and balance issues and also a shoulder that has turned inward and a leg that has turned outward, due to the position they put me in for the surgery.

And that was the final end of my cancer treatment. A CT scan in July had found no evidence of cancer remaining, though I must always be wary, because of the nature of the type of cancer and its tendency to come back, maybe this time in an organ that can’t just be dispensed with, and I have regular check-ups into the future. But for now I’m healthy.

I have still been moving so slowly, and taking naps every day with my “nurse cat,” who insists, as does my body, but I get ever-so-frustrated at the tasks that pile up and I don’t get done. But finally I decided to take the couple days a week I used to take to devote to writing, including this blog project and the latest book I had started on, and see how it goes. So here I am again, on my blog, whether anyone reads it or not (I know a few do). Hoping to keep it up.

On the Ride

Sometimes it seems like my life gets to be just a series of calendared situations where I run from one appointment, event, meeting to another with barely time to catch my breath. For a few months during the current pandemic, this abated a little, but as people have learned to manage social and business life—careful appointments with safeguards, Zoom gatherings instead of in-person ones, or socially distanced outdoor gatherings during the nice weather—my calendar again fills up. I am the kind of person who prefers to plan my own days, doing my own projects, not racing to one calendared event after another. But it seems like, way too often, I get into situations where I am doing just that, sometimes for a day, but often for several days in a row.

And I have started to call those situations, with a sigh, being “on the ride.” It feels like I am getting on a ride at a carnival. I have my ticket, I step into the little car, and I have no more control of the situation until the ride ends—I just roll with the punches, doing what comes next. There is no time to plan for myself; I just run from one event to the other, with maybe time for the most necessary of daily routines, some sleep, some rest breaks, but mostly in the situation of looking at my watch or calendar and saying to myself: 11:00. Time to run to this appointment, and then after that a quick lunch break then run off to this event. And then tomorrow there is this event. I just get on the ride and flow with it.

Of course the time before “the ride” starts often includes preparation for those events, and for sure the time once the ride finally comes to a stop has to be filled with recovery time for my introverted soul, time to catch up on all the every day tasks I’ve put off during the ride, time to rest a bit, and so the interruption of “the ride” includes both preparation time and recovery time before I’m able to sink back into my own daily routines.

As an introvert who nonetheless loves people and has many friends, but who values, nay, who requires, some down time and some time to plan for myself, times on the ride are exhausting, even when they are pleasant. Certain times of the year seem to accumulate, often within a week or two, a whole slew of family or friend gatherings (nowadays socially distanced in the back yard, or on Zoom)—the gatherings are wonderful, but the accumulation wears me out and becomes a “ride.” During periods when I’m racing, say, between one medical/dental/eye appointment and another, it’s even more stressful. And during times, say, of some surgery or other medical procedure requiring preparation and then recovery time, as occurred this summer for example, the ride goes on for quite a while.

So this concept, of being “on the ride,” helps me name and define for myself what is happening when my calendar gets too full and my stress level starts to build. There’s no planning for myself, I’m just running between one event and the next; I’m “on the ride.”

Focusing

When I was younger, I was so busy I just raced through my days, once in a while being stopped in awe by something I noticed, but mostly overwhelmed just trying to get through my days, filled with caring for small children, and caring for our home, being involved with church work as well, both local and on state and national levels, going hither and yon; and being hostess to so many people who took us up on the invitation to make our home a place they could drop in when they needed or wanted, so that I never knew how many people would be at my supper table at night, and more than once my children woke up in the morning to someone unexpected in the guest room; and later when my kids were in school, struggling with grad school in the midst of all that; and then in still later years trying to raise adolescent children as a single mother, driving them hither and yon, teaching college and interacting with students and their work and their issues, trying to research and write scholarly papers, fitting so much into every day that I had little time to just sit in awe at some beauty I noticed in the world. And this was how much of my earlier adulthood went.

I remember sometimes I was stopped in awe: hearing the joyful sound of my children and their friends playing in the back yard; that one day in May when it is suddenly warm enough to have the windows open and the fresh air and sound of spring come into the house; being with dear friends; being near water in its many forms; watching a student suddenly “get it,” or make an amazing comment that stops me in my tracks; the sparkle of new snow.

I feel like I’m still too busy much of the time now, in retirement, at the age of 70-plus, too many places to go, too many things to attend to (even as life has changed with the COVID pandemic), all while dealing with a lot of nerve pain that stems from a bad back having caught up with me after all the years, though I am now learning to live with a spinal cord stimulator that masks much of the pain, so less pain but still some confusion and time required as I learn its ins and outs. And while there is less that I have to do, there are so very many things that I want to do that I still feel like I never get it all done. But I’m nowhere near as busy as I was in younger years, and I can’t even fathom, now, all the things I was able to/had to fit into a day in those years.

But one thing I do now have more time for is consciously focusing on things that cross my path in my days. I’m no longer living so fast that all I have is a second to notice a beautiful sunset before running off to the next responsibility. Most often I can stop and pay attention to the new art work every day that crosses the sky when the sun sets.

Part of it is, I have more time. Part of it is, I now am really conscious of how few years I have left to live on this earth in this form. I mean, I knew that before, but I didn’t really think about it. It seemed like my life would just continue on from year to year and decade to decade. Now, I am aware that the remaining years of my life are not limitless.

So I am conscious, or try to be conscious, of all the beautiful things that cross my path. My grandchildren, who are growing up so fast and change every time I see them. As with my own children, I carry them at each age in my heart and always will. Friendships, which have become ever more important as the years pass, new ones and ones that have lasted decades.

The flowers I grow, both the perennials I planted, thankfully before my mobility and pain became problems, and the annuals I am still able to put in pots on my deck every summer. The scents of flowers, especially the spring perennials: daffodils, lilacs, lilies of the valley, and the amazing peonies that cap the season.

(Example of the difference: we had peonies in the yard of the house I lived in when the kids were small. I noticed them as they blossomed and picked some and loved the smell, but I was too busy to really focus on them. Now I focus on those amazing flowers and their amazing scent.)

Yes, sunsets, different every day. The full moon that stops me in my tracks. The occasional rainbow. The day in April when the trees leaf out. The colors they turn in the fall.

And animals. My mother always loved birds, but I was too busy to notice them. Now that I have an indoor-only cat, we feed the birds, and so many species, both colorful and drab, come to belly up to the feeders. We also feed hummingbirds, which I had never experienced before, and I love and notice my little hummers. We also feed the squirrels who live in our yard, and pesky as they can be, they crack me up laughing on a regular basis with their antics.

At Christmas time, with the days so short and cold, I comfort myself as we drive along by focusing on people’s festive lights and decorations, trying to light up and cheer the cold, dark time.

When I get to go back East where I grew up and I see again the mountains of my childhood. Yes, I took them for granted when I was young. No more. They are utterly amazing, and I am in awe.

I once wrote: “I’m learning, when I notice something like that, not to go—oh, look at that—ok, moving on. But to not move on till I’ve focused on it for a while. Sunsets, full moons, the morning light on the trees.”

So, even though I am getting old, and dealing with physical limits, and feel way busier than I’d like to be, I do have the time now to be conscious of the beauty around me, and for that I am very grateful.

A Women’s Story—Genesis 38

In the book of Genesis is found a multi-chapter tale that hangs together in such a way that it is described by biblical scholars as a “novella,” a short story about the man Joseph, hated by his brothers and sold to Egypt, who rose to power in that kingdom. But right in the middle of this literary composition is a chapter that breaks the flow of the story. Suddenly, the Joseph saga is brought to a temporary halt so another, shorter story can be told, about the time when Joseph’s brother Judah, now an adult, has a domestic situation that begins with him as the father of a family of three sons and one daughter-in-law. Genesis chapter 38 thus interrupts the Joseph story, but there was no other logical place for the final editors of the book to place it, as Judah is a grown man with his own family, but he lives in Canaan before the family goes to Egypt to live.

Genesis 38 has long been one of my favorite biblical stories, largely because it portrays a resourceful woman, caught in the trap of patriarchal custom, figuring out how to solve her problem. And, of course, the best part is she comes out a winner in the end!

Here, in brief, is the story. Judah, son of Jacob, has three sons. Judah has taken as wife for his oldest son Er the Canaanite woman Tamar. However, Er dies childless. The story involves a custom that seems odd to us, called the levirate, in which the widow of a childless son is passed on to the next eldest son (the levir, in technical terms) in order to produce a legal heir for her dead husband, their first son becoming legally the son of the dead brother. Therefore Tamar is next given to Er’s brother Onan. Onan too dies childless, and there is one brother left, Shelah. Now two things come into play. Apparently Shelah is still too young to marry; and in addition we have a hint that maybe Judah is worried that Tamar may be somehow jinxed, or somehow causing the deaths of her husbands, because even when Shelah grows up, Judah manages to neglect to marry him to Tamar.

In the meantime, however, when Onan dies, Judah sends Tamar home to live with her own family again until Shelah grows up. She clearly is still considered part of the family of Judah, however, as we see in ensuing events. She is not a free woman, she is simply to bide her time and eat her father’s food instead of Judah’s.

Years pass, and Tamar notices that she has not been recalled to Judah’s home. This leaves her in a very difficult position—she is not free to marry and have sons (the one act that gave women legitimacy); she is being left on the shelf as it were. Therefore she plots to meet her needs. At the time of sheep shearing, when she knows Judah will be traveling (and conveniently, he is himself widowed by this time), Tamar disguises herself as a prostitute. She places herself on the road where she knows Judah will pass, and the upshot is that the two have sexual relations. Since he cannot at the moment pay her, she arranges “credit.” She will keep his staff and seal until he returns from the sheep shearing with her payment.

Important to note is that the things she keeps are the biblical equivalent to his driver’s license and Social Security card—they symbolize his identity and legitimacy in his world.

When he returns from the shearing the prostitute is no longer there, so Judah goes home, minus his staff and seal. A few months later Tamar turns up pregnant. And, outraged, Judah threatens to have her burned to death for adultery. Adultery? She isn’t married. But apparently she is, to the house of Judah, perhaps as a legal daughter-in-law, which is a custom found in other ancient Middle Eastern cultures. Clearly she is still under his authority and has been expected to remain chaste until Judah disposes of her.

We see now how daring Tamar’s ruse was. She was risking her very life. However, she comes out the winner, because she produces Judah’s staff and seal, announcing that the owner is the father of her child. Judah now recognizes his failure to provide for his daughter-in-law properly, and declares that she is more right than he. Evidently her act was not considered sexual infidelity since it occurred in the family to which she had been legally married; if a little unusual, it was at least morally and legally acceptable. Tamar has twin boys, and Judah provides for her for the rest of her life, although they have no more sexual intercourse.

A very strange tale indeed, according to our values today. Several parts of it are shocking, so that when I teach this story to students or other groups, they think it is disgusting—how could a proper young woman behave in such a way!

However, in the time in which it was set, values were clearly different. In the first place is the custom of levirate marriage, and the related notion, clearly operant here, that the young woman was married, not to an individual, but to a family as daughter-in-law, in a bond unbroken by the death of two of the brothers, therefore making any sexual activity outside the family adulterous.

Second, the nature of Tamar’s ruse is shocking. The idea that she would pose as a prostitute, and then be considered, in the end, to have done the right thing, is abhorrent to the modern reader. And finally, that she would purposely have sexual intercourse with and get pregnant by her father-in-law would be considered incestuous today. Clearly these were not the moral issues at the time of this story, however.

The moral issue was Jacob’s refusal to marry Tamar to his third son and thus do his duty to both the childless woman and his two dead sons.

My interest in this story has to do with the issues that are addressed in it. Clearly the story was ultimately saved in the Bible, despite the fact that it interrupts, both stylisticly and narratively, the otherwise well-crafted tale of Joseph, because it ends with the birth of an ancestor of David, and so it becomes a lineage story of Israel’s greatest king. However, this intriguing and unusual story addresses several issues that, I think, may indicate its original purpose. The issues of importance, I think, indicate that the story may well have been originally a “women’s story,” first told and circulated by women, and this is the point I want to make. (I have presented papers on this topic in academic settings.)

Here are the concerns that are addressed in the story:

Tamar is placed in a position in which she is neither really married nor unmarried; she is unable to marry outside Judah’s family because she is technically betrothed to Shelah, but she has concluded that she will never be given to Shelah.

Why is this a problem for her, one might ask? Why should a woman in such a male-dominant culture want so badly to be married to a man no doubt years younger than herself in order to produce a child whose legal purpose would be to serve as heir to the older brother? What is in it for her that would cause her to go to such drastic lengths? The answer is that she must, in order to gain any legitimacy in her society, bear a son. A childless (actually, sonless) woman had no real place in the community, and no “social security” for her old age, as she would expect her son to support her as she aged.

Although sometimes Tamar is painted as simply an incredibly loyal member of Judah’s family, determined to do her duty to her first husband Er, despite Judah’s reluctance, her actions make much more sense if viewed from the perspective of a woman’s need for a son. In this way the story is very similar to the book of Ruth. Scholar Phyllis Trible has analyzed that book and this particular issue within it (God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, 1986), which points to the reality that the story of Ruth was about a women’s issue. This story, although only one chapter, has several similarities to that book.

Like Ruth and Naomi, Tamar had to come up with some strategy for obtaining sons, a legal need for the patriarchal line of the men, but a social and survival need for the women.

Also, the way Tamar goes about ensuring her social legitimation and physical survival within this patriarchal system is risky but resourceful, and in the end she wins the day. While remembered in the history of Israel as a heroine for doing her matrimonial duty against all odds and thus ensuring the continuation of the line of Judah (and later, in both stories, of David), I suspect that her heroism in the original tale, as it was first told, probably orally, and remembered, if one reads between the lines, contained some smirks and snickers about the courage and resourcefulness of a woman who was able to beat the system and get what she needed despite the patriarch’s recalcitrance.

These issues shine through the present form of the narrative, and show, I think, the original purpose and focus of the story—a tale about a woman who was able to operate within the social structures and strictures of her time to get her needs met. I think it began as a story told by and circulated among women.

 

 

Fallow Time

I wrote this nearly a year ago, when my life often seemed to be a daily round of appointments for this and for that, some social and pleasant, but some necessary, like medical appointments and household maintenance. But these days, all unbeknownst to us then, many of us are lying fallow and have been for a couple of months. I have enjoyed watching my next-door neighbors, two little boys and their parents, in normal times coming and going, with regular friends and family around, now spending time together, playing ball in the back yard, riding all manner of wheeled toys around the big driveway, taking walks and bike rides as a family, and, I imagine, playing quiet games together in the house.

Some people are busier than ever: health care people, grocery store clerks, restaurant employees who prepare and deliver carry-out meals, emergency care providers, others. But many of us are lying fallow most of the time, staying in touch with friends and family by phone or on Zoom, being social with others on Facebook or other social media, but spending most of our time alone or with those in our own households. So I thought a post on the advantages of lying fallow might be timely. Here’s what I wrote at the end of last summer:

I have just come off a long period, several months culminating in a manic past month, with something I have to do or go to or be here for almost every single day.

I do not operate well in those circumstances. I know people who do, who thrive on constant activity and get energy from having something on the calendar every day that has to be gone to or prepared for. More power to them!

But that’s not who I am. That kind of manic activity wears me out, and I am energized not by that but by time alone, quiet time when I can remember who I am and what I am about.

I have been so busy and overwhelmed with activity recently that I have not even taken the twice-weekly “writing days” I have carved out for myself since I retired from copyediting. I usually try to avoid having things on the calendar those days, but I gave up on that for a while, as even if one of those days was free, I had to shove off to that day all the things I didn’t get to do the day before in my home or the rest of my life. I don’t thrive on this.

Now things have calmed down at least so that for the present anyway I have writing days, when I push off other tasks, close my home office door if I need to, and only emerge to do necessary upkeep tasks that I use as breaks.

But what I wanted to write about goes even further than that. There are times in my life when I need, require, to lie fallow, to do much of nothing, to wait, as fallow land does, for the sun and the rain to renourish me so I can go on. Fallow time for me should not be social. I need time to commune with myself, which I often do by writing, journaling. I always say I figure out what I’m thinking by writing, and it’s true. Or on a nice day I might sit on the deck and do nothing but listen to the birds and watch the silly squirrels. Sometimes I have to go away alone for fallow time, get in the car, for an hour or a day, and just go where my soul leads me, usually by way of small country roads, preferably so narrow the trees touch at the top.

Another good way for me to spend fallow time is by a body of water, just sitting and looking at the pond, or lake, or, once in a while in my life, the ocean, and watching the creatures that are busy there. Or getting my feet in—or my whole body, maybe lying on my back in the water, just looking at the sky and floating.

I know I need fallow time when I start feeling apathy about everything, not caring what gets done and what doesn’t. Or when I become irritable, wanting to bark at the people around me.

It doesn’t have to be a long time, although I sometimes daydream about having a place all to myself in the woods on the water where I can lie fallow as long as I want. Sometimes I take a day, or sometimes a couple of hours and drive through the nearby Kettle Moraine, and maybe sit by one of the nearby lakes. Or sometimes it’s just sitting on the deck for half an hour or holding my sweet kitty for a few minutes.

But the point is, we all, I think, need occasional fallow time, in order to give the fields where our lives’ work grows a chance to rest. Some of us need more of it than others, based on our internal temperaments. But I think we all need it, and we need not to feel guilty when we take it.

We live in a fast-paced world, whether we are children, teens, working adults and parents, or even retirees, and sometimes we just have to say: stop. Just stop. Give me a little time to just be. To lie fallow and thus enrich the soil of our lives and activities.

Feeding Those Who Need Food, Then and Now

The New Testament contains five stories of Jesus feeding masses of people, some say four thousand and some say five thousand, who have gathered to hear him teach. Mark has two stories, one of each, and Matthew, Luke, and John each have one. This seems to be an important story, and is treated like a miracle, five small loaves of bread and two small fish being enough to feed thousands of people, with, in each case, either seven or twelve baskets of leftovers.

These stories can be found in Matthew 15:29–38, Mark 6:34–44, Mark 8:1–9, Luke 9:11–17, and John 6:1–14.

My personal take on miracles is not that they are magical things that would normally be impossible in the natural world, but that they are natural events that happen just when they are needed.

In the case of the feeding of the four or five thousands, I once heard or read an explanation that made perfect sense to me, because it’s how human nature works. Here’s how I imagine the event remembered in the Bible went.

Jesus was teaching to a large crowd of people, and it was the end of a long day (or three days depending on the telling) in the sun. The people were hungry. The disciples considered the idea of sending the people to nearby towns to find food, but Jesus said no, we’ll feed them ourselves. How much food can you find?

What they found was a few loaves of barley bread (five in most of the stories), and a few little fish, probably dried. “This is nowhere near enough,” they complained. Jesus told them to bring him the food, said the blessing of thanks over it, and had them pass it out to the crowd. The traditional idea is that it magically multiplied into more than enough for everybody. But I don’t think that’s what happened.

I think the people began sheepishly pulling the food they had brought out of their sacks when they saw Jesus sharing the little food he had, and sharing it with each other. I think it became a massive picnic, a potluck dinner on a grand scale, and those who had extra passed that extra along to those who didn’t have much, or any. And that’s how the five loaves and two fishes fed everybody. People gave up their selfish hoarding and began to share, and a spirit of fellowship took over the crowd; there was laughing, smiling, maybe even storytelling as neighbors shared with neighbors or even strangers.

The miracle is that Jesus jolted the people out of their selfish hoarding of their food and created a fellowship dinner.

When I was a kid that was what we called church dinners where everyone brought something to share; we called them fellowship dinners. Where I live now we call them potlucks—I’ve also heard them called covered dish suppers. But whatever they’re called, the point of them is sharing food, and the magical thing is that even people who didn’t bring anything are able to be amply fed, and there is always food left over.

Now, during the time of Coronavirus, or COVID-19, people are instructed not to gather in groups, so potluck dinners are out for the count. But what’s happening instead is that, with schools and other institutions closed, and grocery shelves going bare of food that is shelf-stable, people are stepping up to help those who need help—in our community that is those families whose children depend on school breakfasts and lunches for their nutrition, the usual amount of poor and even homeless people, and college students who must remain on campus because they are unable to go home but have no meal service and can’t afford groceries (who knew, when I was in college over 50 years ago, that today college students would be so beaten for money that they’d have trouble finding food to eat?). The community has set up a food distribution center in a local church; a local restaurant is giving out meals to take home; and the schools are giving out food to children who depended on them for breakfast and lunch.

Miracle? Yes. Just like the feeding of the thousands. People share what they have, and everyone can have enough.

Dictated to Me by My Cat Bridget—Her Story as She Remembers It

I always knew I wasn’t meant to be a barn cat. Yes, I was born in a barn, one of a litter of kittens whose mother had the job of keeping mice out of the barn and providing food for herself at the same time. The people paid little attention to us—our purpose was to be the same as our mother’s, to do our job on the farm. Once in a while someone came out and petted us a bit and said how cute we were, especially when we were little. But it just didn’t feel right to me. I was, I am, a long-haired cat, and my fur was always getting caught on bits of hay and other more nasty barn things.

I heard that our father was a long-haired house cat, but because our mother was a barn cat and we were born in the barn, I was a barn cat. I was the only one of our litter that had long hair though. And when we ventured outside, the other cats made fun of me because of my long hair, and my  mother said I wouldn’t be much good on the farm, so I felt really timid and afraid of the other cats as I grew older. I learned to walk around the edges of the barn so maybe I wouldn’t be seen as much.

Then one night I had a vision. It was of a gray stripey cat who said I could call him “Uncle Softie.” He said he had died not long ago and his human mommy was so sad that it made him sad. It had been his job all his life to take care of her, even going so far as waiting outside the bathroom door during a shower to make sure she didn’t go down the drain, sleeping with her at night, making sure to be in whatever room she was in so he could keep watch over her, moving around the country with her several times into different situations, and finally settling in with her when she remarried and making friends with her new husband. He told me all this so I would know how important his spirit visit was.

He said he needed to find a new cat so his mommy wouldn’t be so sad, and he had decided on me as the one she needed. I should go the next day, he said, up to the road. I should take one of my brothers with me, and a man would come along and feel sorry for us and put us in his car. I woke up the next morning and asked one of my brothers to join me, even though he was a rough and tumble kind of guy, the kind humans called “feral,” but because of that he wasn’t any more popular in the barn than I was.

So we went up to the road and just as Uncle Softie had said, a man came along and saw us and stopped his car and picked us up, because he was afraid we would get hit by a car on the road like that. He took us to a place called a veterinary clinic, a long word to mean a place where doctors and nurses took care of animals who were sick.

We weren’t sick, but we were pretty scared! This was all new. We had never ridden in a car before, and now we were in this clinic place with lots of people and all kinds of animals. Cats and believe it or not, DOGS, and some other ones. But it wasn’t a barn. There was a room with little cages and we each got put in one, our own cages, with litter boxes and food dishes, and they took care of us there. We didn’t have to hunt for mice, and there was no hay and other stuff or dirt to get stuck in my hair.

They gave us food, and a nice person looked us all over to make sure we weren’t sick, and I had an operation! They poked something into me and I went right to sleep and when I woke up my belly hurt—in fact it hurt a lot. So I wasn’t feeling as good about being in this place now, I was kind of scared. But everyone was so nice to me, and stopped to talk to me when they went by, and reached through the cage, or even took me out, and petted me to make me feel better, and let me play a little.

I got to know the people there, and they were nice. My brother never got used to being indoors though. I don’t know what happened to him. But I liked the people, and I thought that this would be my new home. I was glad the man had stopped to pick me up, and had brought me to such a nice, clean, friendly home where I didn’t even have to hunt for my own food.

And then one day, after my belly stopped hurting, two people came into our cage room. A man and a woman. They looked sad, but still hopeful. I knew they were the ones Uncle Softie had lived with and that was why they were sad, especially the woman he had taken care of all his life.

And one of the nice women, the one they called Dixie, opened up my cage and picked me up and handed me to the woman. Yes, I knew she was the one who was going to be my mommy! So I licked her nose to let her know I knew she was the one. And they brought me to their home.

The first night was a little strange. I had never lived in a house before. I still walked close to the walls of the hall going through their house, as I had walked close to the barn walls out of fear of the bullying cats, because I was a little afraid, even though they seemed nice. They showed me where my new litter box was, and where my food dishes were, and that’s all I needed. I knew they intended to keep me. And make me a house cat!!

They sat down after their supper and turned on this box that had pictures moving on it, and I sat in my new Mommy’s lap and started purring and went to sleep. Her hands felt so good on my fur.

Then I explored my new home, but the evening ended badly. When they were in another room I climbed onto the table and began exploring the things on it. And by accident I knocked a dish off and broke it with a crash! My new people came rushing in and I thought, “Oh no. Now they’re going to punish me, and maybe send me back to that place with the cages, or maybe even to the barn!” So I quick ran away so they couldn’t find me, and I stayed there all night. It was behind a tall bed pushed against the wall, with dressers pushed underneath, and just room for a little cat to sneak in and hide behind them. Now they would never find me and could not send me back!

I stayed there all night and the people stopped looking for me (now I know they hoped I would come out from wherever I was on my own, but then I thought they didn’t care and would never find me and I’d be safe). But the next morning my new Mommy started crying and moving things and looking everywhere and I realized she was looking for me. And my new Daddy started moving those dressers and there I was behind them!

I came out, I had to, they had found me, but they didn’t take me back, they just loved me and petted me and cuddled me, and I began to love and trust them. They named me Bridget. At first I was a silly kitten, and into everything, trying to fully explore my new home. Nothing was safe from my curious mind and playful spirit. I played and played until I got sleepy, then I’d fall asleep right where I was and then wake up and play some more.

But gradually I learned the rules and what I was allowed to play with and what I wasn’t (no to rubber bands—in fact now when I find one they accidentally left out I bring it right to Mommy or Daddy); no to paper clips; no to plastic water bottles—though they roll so beautifully over the floor and down the stairs! But yes to jumping up on the banister walking along it and even climbing to the top of the banister post to the ceiling; yes to playing fetch (they said I did it like a dog, yuck! But it was fun anyway). Yes to playing with all the toys they bought me, playing soccer they called it down the hall batting with my front paws back and forth a little ball that jingled when it rolled. I mostly learned what was no and what was yes. Mostly, I say.

Now I’m getting to be an old lady. I had to give up jumping onto the banister rail and walking back and forth on it like a tightrope. But I can still, if I triangulate carefully beforehand, jump onto that high bed for my morning nap. I take more naps and play less. But sometimes I still have the energy to barrel down the hall doing what Mom calls the “Kitty 500.” And I still like to cuddle, even more than I used to when I was little. We cuddle a lot.

I have a pretty good life. Thank you Uncle Softie for finding me.

 

 

 

Holy Week Diary, 1963

When I was a teen-ager, in 1963, and a more traditional Christian than I am now, I wrote, in the week before Easter, an imaginary diary of a girl my age who lived in Jerusalem.

I thought it might be appropriate during this season to copy it and post it here.

__________________________

April 6, 1963

Holy Week starts tomorrow, and I want it to be the most important week of the year. But I don’t know what to do. I think, though, I’m going to write letters each day as if I were a girl that first Holy Week. I think I can better understand all the events that way.

Apr. 7

An imaginary diary of a girl in Jesus’ times:

Sunday

Dear Diary,

Today has been so warm. Spring is certainly here! Today has been like a holiday! Do you remember Jesus, the man that healed me when I was sick and raised Lazarus, my uncle, after he had been four days in the tomb? I am sure he is a man of God. This morning he rode into Jerusalem on an ass, and it seemed he was the promised one. Could it be he will rid us of Rome, and will restore Israel? Everyone seemed to feel as I did, and everyone laid their coats in the road before him. We all shouted “Hosanna to the King!” I hope he does become king and overthrow Rome, for he is good and can heal all the sick and lame, and even the blind. Then Jesus went up to the temple and threw out all the money-changers and the sellers of doves. I have never seen a man so angry. Then he healed more of the blind and the lame. The Pharisees, though, seemed displeased. Perhaps they were jealous. Then Jesus left Jerusalem and went to Bethany probably to the home of Aunt Mary and Aunt Martha for the night. Oh, it has been an exciting day.

 

Apr. 8

Imaginary diary, Monday

Dear Diary,

Today has been another exciting day. Jesus came back this morning to Jerusalem and has been in the temple talking with the Pharisees and scribes. I was getting water as he and his disciples were coming down the way, and as I watched, he said something, and a fig tree withered right away! Then he went to the temple and the chief priests and elders kept trying to mix him up, but he always answered their questions. Of course I am allowed no further than the court of women, but I heard some of what he said. He spoke about a kingdom, a kingdom of God, and he said those sinful publicans and harlots would be first in this kingdom. I do not understand all he said, but he talked in stories, and made many things seem real. I saw John, my brother, who is a friend of Jesus, and he told me the scribes and Pharisees seemed afraid toward the end, and were plotting to lay hands on him. I know he will never die, though, for he is our new king, and will overthrow Caesar!

 

Imaginary diary, Tuesday

Dear Diary,

Today Jesus spoke again in the temple. He said such things about the Pharisees! He was really brave, for they can have him killed! He seemed to denounce the laws of Moses, saying things so different from what we know. But yet, he said to do as the Pharisees say, although not as they do. I had always thought they were righteous, and could do those things, but now I do not know. Also he said something about gathering Jerusalem’s children together as a hen does her chicks. Is not this blasphemy, since Jerusalem is where God lives?

 

Imaginary diary, Wednesday

Dear Diary,

Early today Jesus went to Olivet with his followers and talked. John told me they talked of when Jesus would come in glory, and of the kingdom of heaven, but even he didn’t understand it all. Later I heard Caiaphas and the scribes in the market plotting to kill Jesus. Later, in Bethany, for I am spending the night with my aunts, and Jesus was at Simon’s house, a woman came and poured precious ointment on his head. He said he would not always be here. Maybe he heard of the plots. Then suddenly Judas Iscariot got up and left quickly. I wonder where he went?

 

Apr. 11

Imaginary diary, Thursday

Dear Diary,

Today when I returned from Bethany, I heard two of Jesus’ followers asking a man if they could eat the Passover in his upper room. Then I saw Jesus and the 12 go in. Later I saw Judas come out, and he had a funny manner about him. Then the rest came out. They seemed very sad, especially Jesus. Then later I heard noise and saw soldiers taking Jesus from Gethsemene. Then they went to the priest’s palace, and I followed to the porch. I heard a girl asking Peter if he wasn’t one of them, and he denied it! Then the sun came up and the cock crowed, and Peter began to weep. This all seems so strange, and so different from Sunday.

 

Apr. 12

Imaginary diary, Friday

Dear Diary,

Today Jesus had his trial. Of course I wasn’t allowed in the court. I heard a man outside, though, telling how he threatened to destroy the temple and build it again in three days. Then I found myself wanting to cry “Crucify Him!” with the rest. I don’t know what went on inside, but I do know that later they came out. When I saw Jesus, who helped me and loved me, carrying that heavy cross, I could have bitten my tongue out, and I started crying. Then Jesus looked at me, and such a look was in his eye. It was sad, and lonely, and no wonder, for all his friends have deserted him. But it looked compassionate, too, and he said, “Weep not for me, but for you and your children.” Then he stumbled, and fell under that heavy cross, and the cruel soldiers made Simon of Cyrene bear it. Then they lifted it on Calvary, and stabbed my Lord, and nailed him to it. Then they mocked him, and Jesus never said a word. Later he committed his mother to John’s care. He thought of others even on the cross. Something kept drawing me nearer, and then I heard him say, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” He forgave those who killed him! Then suddenly it got dark as night, and the earth trembled and shook. I heard the centurion say, “Surely this was the Son of God.” Three hours later it began to get lighter and Joseph of Arimathea asked for Jesus’ body, and took it and put it in his own tomb. My heart feels so empty now, I can hardly bear it.

 

Apr. 13

Imaginary diary, Saturday

Dear Diary,

My heart is broken and my hopes are torn from me. Life seems to hold no meaning. I thought that Jesus was going to lead us, and save us, and now he is lying cold, in the tomb. All his disciples have scattered and are back at their occupations. John is fishing today with Peter and Andrew. He must work, he says, to support Mary, poor woman, but he loves her dearly. I went today to the tomb, and there was a huge stone before it, and soldiers on guard. They wouldn’t let me near it. Oh, what a terrible day!

 

Apr. 14

Imaginary diary, Sunday

Dear Diary,

Hallelujah! This morning some women went to Jesus’ grave with spices to anoint him, and he wasn’t there. It is said that angels appeared to them, and that Mary of Magdalene saw the Lord, and he was alive! Now I know he is God’s Son, and his Kingdom is not of this world. Many do not believe he is alive, but I believe, oh, I believe!

 

 

My Father

I have had issues with my father beginning when I was a teen-ager, but now that he has been gone for many years to “another shore” as certain liturgies describe, I have felt those old issues healing, I have begun to appreciate the things I could appreciate about him, and I have even felt him helping me from the world of spirit.

I have inherited some things from my father: on the down side, I deal with anxiety, which is what I recently realized is what caused many of his struggles, and also a certain amount of obsessive-compulsive leanings. On the plus side I have inherited his goofy sense of humor, and maybe most of all his love of words, especially funny words.

I remember him reading the newspaper and suddenly saying out loud a word he had found, repeating it several times: “Gamal Abdul Nasser” (the leader of Egypt at the time); “Jawaharlal Nehru” (the leader of India). He loved words, especially interesting and unusual words, and so do I.

I remember some expressions he used frequently. Describing someone who didn’t have a clue, he would say they didn’t “know beans with the bag open.” When he was puzzled by something, he might ask: “What in the Sam Hill?” At the end of the day he would “put up the car,” that is drive it into the garage.

Everywhere we lived, Dad had a garden, where he grew vegetables for our table. I remember our mother pleading when we wouldn’t eat certain vegetables: “But your father grew this in his own garden!” The one time he couldn’t have a garden, when we lived in the midst of a town as our parsonage didn’t back up to a hill or a field but to an alley with houses on the other side, was when his mental health went off the rails. I recently have wondered whether there was a connection, whether his working in the garden, planting, hoeing, reaping, were what kept him calm. I have a photo of him as a little boy, wielding a hoe whose handle was so long he couldn’t manage it, hoeing in his mother’s garden, so gardening got in his blood very early. After he finally retired early he put in a garden in the little house they rented, and when my mother flew to visit me in Illinois where I then lived, she opened a satchel when she got to my apartment, and it was full of ears of corn!

He was an attentive father (though too attentive for my taste as I got older). We lived in one small town where my brother and I had to walk down a stone retaining wall from where we lived on a hilly curve, to get to the flatter part of the road on our way to the school bus. Every single morning my father’s last words before we left for school were: “Don’t fall off the wall!”

One of Dad’s other household tasks was the weekly bonfire. This was before the time of weekly garbage pick-up, at least in the tiny towns where we lived, and all our trash went to the bonfire pile, where Dad regularly burned it up.

He also mowed the lawn regularly, using an old-fashioned push mower (no motor, just push). I loved the smell of new-mown grass, and would rake it up and build “blueprint” playhouses, with piles of grass outlining each “room.”

By profession, Dad was a rural Methodist minister. We lived in six different small towns during my growing up years, and by small I mean just crossroads with a few houses up and down the crossing streets, until the final town which actually had a few blocks and streets. He always had two- and one time three-point charges, meaning he was the minister to two or three churches at a time, driving every Sunday to each church, running the service and giving the sermon, doing weddings and funerals, helping families in crisis and illness, and leading meetings and programs in each church, including youth groups, Vacation Bible School, potluck dinners for church members (which we called fellowship dinners), dinners to make money, where he led singing for the people who had to wait in the sanctuary for there to be room for them in the dining room. He also always led singing for the opening exercises for Vacation Bible School, which always began with all the classes together before splitting into age groups.

When I became a teen-ager I benefited from the two-point charges, because I participated in the choirs and youth groups of both churches, thus doubling my friendships and innocent youthful fun. In fact my first real boyfriend came from one of the “out-appointments,” as the secondary, smaller churches were called.

I remember once a friend asking me what else my dad did, because she thought his whole job consisted of preaching on Sunday morning. I was appalled. In addition to all the activities of his two or three churches, he spent a lot of time in his study, which was always in the parsonage, writing his sermon. And it was up to him to make the Sunday bulletins, typing them onto mimeograph stencils on his ancient typewriter; the mimeograph was an “old-school” technology that involved wrapping the typed stencil around the drum of a machine that was inked, and cranking a handle to carry the stacks of paper through the machine, coming out printed. And then he had to fold them and get them to the church.

Maybe the biggest part of his responsibility, though, was calling on his parishioners. Those were the days when most women, and many men who were farmers or otherwise worked from their homes, were usually around during the daytime and welcomed the idea of the minister stopping by. Every afternoon he would get in his car and go calling, managing to see most everyone this way on a regular basis, and more often those who were sick or in crisis. He saw this as the most important part of his job, even though it usually involved drinking a cup of coffee at each stop, and often eating a piece of pie.

He was always “nervous,” though, meaning often worried and jittery, which made his family nervous and jittery as well, especially when we were on vacation trips and he worried about the car; our old cars did often break down on trips, but he did not take it in stride. He would fuss and worry until we all, at least I, was cringing. This I now believe was anxiety and obsessive tendencies, which as I said earlier, I understand personally now as, in my older age, I struggle with anxiety as I never used to.

It got so bad in his last church (the one with no space to garden) that he was put on what we called “nerve pills,” which I later understood was valium. It had just been invented, and he was on it for the rest of his life. He had made dinner time so unpleasant and actually scary with his ranting and raving that after he got the prescription and the ranting was especially bad we sometimes would ask him “did you take your nerve pill?” And often he had not. He took the pill and felt—and more importantly to us—acted better.

My mother tried to explain away his behavior, which was so very distressing to me as I got older, by saying he had had an unhappy childhood and we had to understand. And it does seem true, that he had a sad mother who, apparently from a letter Mom found years later, had suffered from post-partum depression, and who died young, leaving him with a demanding and perfectionist father who was always disappointed that Dad always served small rural churches instead of being “promoted” to large city congregations.

But Dad was a rural pastor. Aside from the compulsive and nervous behavior, which mostly affected his family, he knew what rural churches needed, and he was very good at providing that.

Now, Dad having been gone for almost thirty years, an interesting thing is happening. Part of my own anxiety (now much allayed by medication much more benign than Dad’s valium) has been fears of traveling, despite the fact that in younger years I happily traveled everywhere using all forms of transportation. But in the past year or so, especially when I am driving, and often when I am being driven or am taking public transportation, I feel my Dad’s presence with me, flying along with me above my car in spirit, protecting me and reminding me that I know how to drive well, that I will be ok also when I’m not the one driving. Dad had a big part in teaching me to drive, along with Mom and my driver ed teacher in school, and he reminds me that I learned well and am a good driver, and he is protecting me from accidents caused by other people as well. I invoke him and he is there, reminding me that he would be there even if I forget to invoke him. Call this “woo-woo” if you wish. It feels real to me.

This stems from a memorable event not long after he passed away and Mom gave me his car, a VW Rabbit. I was just completing a solo camping trip back east to all my old places, homes, churches, schools, and sightseeing spots along the way, what I remember as my “sentimental journey” (this was obviously before my travel anxiety reared its ugly head). I was on I-80/90 in Ohio, noticed a police car under the overpass, and so did a truck that had been passing me at an excessive speed. I was in the right lane and kept going, and the truck slowed down, pulling into the right lane just as I had almost passed him, and sending my little car flying (literally—he found paint from my car afterward high up on his truck) around the front of his truck. I remember gripping the steering wheel and thinking “This is it,” when I made a complete turn around the front of the truck and landed in the median going the other way. I could have been smashed by the truck; I could have flown into the opposing lanes of traffic and been in a horrible crash; instead I landed in the median, put on the brake, and stopped the car. Nothing in my car, loaded with camping gear and with a boom box in the front seat to play music, had moved a bit. I ended up with a big dent in the front door and that was it. After the policeman talked with both of us, I drove back on the highway and was on my way. And the insurance money I later received allowed me to buy a new car, even though my little VW was still drivable.

That should not have happened that way. And I knew, as much as I have known anything, that my father had been there, protecting his daughter in his former car from serious injury or worse. And now he guides me again—probably always has, it’s just that I am aware of it now.

Now, this is getting longer than I had thought it would, but I have to end with a poem Dad had memorized and used to sometimes declaim when asked, or to entertain a group from church. I thought it was incredibly funny, especially with the “oratorical display” with which he spoke it, and I used to ask him to recite it; and he finally wrote it down for me. Here’s the poem (which, for readers who no longer have to speak pieces or learn poetry by heart, is made up of bits of many poems).

Dad’s Poem

Once there was a little boy whose name was Robert Breece,

And every Friday afternoon he had to speak a piece.

So many poems thus he learned that soon he had a store

Of recitations in his head, and he still kept learning more.

 

Now this is what happened: he was called upon, one week,

And he totally forgot the piece he was about to speak.

His brain he cudgeled; not a word remained within his head.

And so he spoke at random! And this is what he said:

 

“Oh beautiful, oh beautiful, who standest proudly by;

Twas the schooner Hesperus, the breaking waves dashed high!

Why is this forum crowded? What means this stir in Rome?

Under the spreading chestnut tree, there is no place like home.

 

When freedom, from her mountain height, cried “Twinkle, little star!”

Shoot if you must, this old gray head! King Henry of Navarre!

Roll on, thou deep and dark blue castled crag of Drachenfels;

My name is Norval, on the Grampian Hills, ring out, wild bells!

 

If you’re waking, call me early; to be or not to be!

The curfew shall not ring tonight; Oh woodman, spare that tree!

Charge, Chester, charge! On, Stanley, on! And let who will be clever.

The boy stood on the burning deck, but I go on forever!”

 

His elocution was superb, his voice and gestures fine!

And the audience all applauded, as he finished the last line.

“I see it doesn’t matter,” Robert thought, “what words I say,

As long as I declaim with oratorical display!”

“Okay Boomer”

My daughter jokingly says “OK Boomer,” when I say something that’s dumb or reflects my age and generation. Others don’t talk about us jokingly, but actively resent us. I want to speak from the middle of the “boomer” generation.

We were born soon after the end of the last world war (I only two years after it ended), when soldiers had come home to father a huge “baby boom” of children.

I have in recent years read several books about people’s lives during that war, mostly in Europe, and I only recently began thinking about the fact that, while everyone on this earth even two or three years older than me was alive during this terrible time (and it was mountains more terrible in Europe than here in the US), and was affected by it in some way, either fighting in Asia or Europe, displaced if living in those two continents, wounded, killed, rounded up into concentration camps (also in the US if they were of Japanese heritage, though not killed as Jews and others were in Europe), in the US living without family members, losing family members, dealing with shortages and rationing, or just plain fearful of the horrors of that war. And in the summer of 1945 the world rejoiced that it was over, and soldiers, those who survived, began to come home and make babies. Even children in the relative safety of the US were affected—they didn’t see the war on television as we did during the Viet Nam and later wars, but they heard about it daily on the radio, they watched their parents being fearful, and grieving over lost family members.

The thing that hit me recently is that, as a child, even as a teen and later, having been born only two years after it ended, the war and its after-effects were not a part of our consciousness. I am sure that some of us whose parents fought in the war may have talked about it, but I’m also aware that many soldiers were so affected by what they saw and what they had to do that they could not talk about it, only internalized the trauma and suffered in silence (what we today call PTSD).

But we grew up without hearing much about the horrors that everyone born before 1945 experienced in some way. I am starting to think we were protected from it; the adults wanted to make sure we had a normal life, that we didn’t have to hear about what they had gone through only a few years before. It wasn’t discussed in school—we blithely read about white kids named Dick and Jane and Sally, who lived in a war-free suburban world where Father went to work in a suit and tie and briefcase, and Mother stayed home to care for the family. As we got older and began to study history, because classes never could cover the whole book in a year, we usually didn’t get as far as World War II.

We were taught that we lived in a democracy, the best form of government ever, that our leaders were duly elected by a majority of voters. Eisenhower (Ike) was President, and we liked and trusted Ike. As children we were oblivious to the McCarthy witch hunts, although we knew that the Russians, being Communists, were the bad guys. We were taught that America was the land of freedom and all good things.

We were, and I start to think it was purposeful, protected from what had just gone before. However, and this is a big however, my generation grew up pretty sure that sooner or later Russia would strike with a nuclear bomb. And another however on top of that—we were taught that if/when that happened we would be spared if we just hunkered down under our desks at school with our arms over the backs of our necks. We had bomb drills along with fire drills. How stupid was that? Our parents and teachers knew what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki only two years before I was born—they knew that crouching under their desks would not have saved school children there, not only from the bomb blast but also from the following radioactive fallout.

By high school and college we knew better than to think we would survive by hiding under our desks, though we still were pretty sure the bomb would fall sooner or later, and we played thinking games about who we would include in our bomb shelter (which many people had built in their back yards), and were told we should stock the shelter with not only food but also guns because we would have to shoot anyone else than our chosen families if they tried to join us, because there would only be room for a few.

But this was futuristic thinking. About the past war, and bombs, and trauma, we didn’t learn much.

And it was a time of prosperity, after the war. Children grew to expect loads of toys under the Christmas tree, they got new school clothes at the start of each term, sometimes divided into winter and summer wardrobes. I remember one friend in junior high talking about how she and her mother, before school started, were “concentrating on sweaters this week” in their shopping. Everyone had cars, no one rode the trolley or the bus to work any more. People went on vacations; “See the USA in your Chevrolet,” as Dinah Shore sang every week on tv. And everyone had tvs, and shows they watched regularly and talked about in school.

I wasn’t really a part of that, as my dad was a rural minister and we didn’t have a lot of money. Thinking about my friend concentrating on what new sweaters to buy I was amazed—I had one sweater, a cardigan that I wore when it was too warm to need a coat. We did have a car (two cars after Mom started teaching when we got older) but it was always a used car and several years old. We did go on vacations but we camped in tents and saw the eastern USA that way. We didn’t have a tv until my brother and I wheedled so much that our parents finally bought a used one (black and white of course) in 1956. Because we lived in the hills, we got one channel. And Mom did try to spoil us a bit at Christmas, but we got cheaper versions of the things we wanted.

And of course I’m not talking about what life was like for most people of color, people who lived in the inner cities, immigrants, people who lived in the hills and worked coal mines or eked out a living on little farms.

But the people we saw in books and magazines, the people we thought of as “normal” Americans, yes, did live in comfort, many in new homes, though mostly modest new homes in the Levittowns and other suburbs built after the war.

My generation was taught, not about the war that had preceded us, but about what it had been fought for and we now had, according to our teachers and other adults. We had prosperity, we had freedom, we, most of all, had a government we could question and participate in when we saw it was needed.

And about the time I was in late high school and college, many in my “boomer” generation did see that need. The glory years of Ike and everything’s coming up roses were over. The shock of my generation was in 1962, in November, a time everyone in my generation remembers where they were when they heard the news (cafeteria study hall, for me): our exciting young president had been shot, was dead. And a few years later his brother Robert, now running for President, was also shot and killed. The dreams of living in a perfect country began to be eroded. This was followed by a build-up in sending “advisors” to intervene in the French war in Indochina, which in my late high school years led to an attack on Americans in the Bay of Tonkin—and then we were officially at war.

Here’s the thing. Our parents’ generation had fought, either as soldiers or as supporters at home, gladly, against Hitler and Mussolini and against the Empire of Japan, giving their lives if necessary to defeat those hateful regimes. And then they had fought in Korea against the new enemy, Communism.

But my generation looked at what was happening in Viet Nam and thought for ourselves, as we had been taught to do in those lessons on democracy and freedom and thinking for ourselves. We understood that this war that our generation was being drafted into was not like our parents’ war. It was not a just war. And it was none of our business.

But the national enemy now was Communism, and this war, we were told, was being fought against Communism, that it was part of Russia’s (oh, excuse me, the USSR’s) “domino theory,” to get one country after another to turn Communist, so it was a threat to our freedom as Hitler had been in our parents’ youth. And our young men should go gladly to fight it and die if necessary for freedom.

And thus the “generation gap.” It broadened to include our elders’ anger at our music, our clothing choices; young men were even disinherited for refusing to cut their hair and shave their beards.

And on top of all that there was the Civil Rights movement. I first learned about that in high school, though it had been going on well before that. The older generation of whites kept telling African Americans that they “had to wait” until they were ready to give them their rights, to meet their demands. And so the world was torn again when Martin Luther King was shot and killed. And cities were shattered by violent riots, both before and after King’s death.

Young people, full of the idealism they had been taught from childhood, the idealism of the freedom and democracy and right to think for themselves and change their government if needed, that our parents had fought for, could not understand when our parents now came down hard on them for doing those very things.

We were the young, the spoiled young as our parents’ generation saw it, given everything by parents who had survived a decade of economic depression and then a horrible worldwide war. And we didn’t know enough to appreciate it. (I’m using “we” here loosely, as I was not really part of the recipients of this bounty, though I did have the luxury of not dealing with the crises of the two decades before my birth. And I did not really rebel.)

And so, many “dropped out.” Dropped out of the tidy lifestyle we had been given. Many became “hippies,” or modeled themselves to some extent on the hippy culture. Not everyone went to San Francisco in the 1967 “summer of love,” but we admired the idea. We had a massive outdoor music festival in 1969 that symbolized for all time the youth culture of the day.

But mostly, we questioned authority, questioned the values we had been taught, as it seemed to have turned out that in fact we did not have all the freedom we were taught we had. It turned out we could not change the world, we could not make our democracy work for everyone, as poor blacks and whites both still suffered and were poor and were mistreated. The music became angry, much of it. Popular music went from the rock ‘n’ roll that our parents’ generation didn’t like and considered too sexual, to “rock,” hard, throbbing music that they didn’t like even more.

And then came the 70s. For most of my generation, we buckled down to try to earn livings, raise families, make adult lives for ourselves.

And now suddenly (it seems like) we are the older generation. Not even the middle-aged older generation that our parents were when we were rebelling against them, but really old. In our 70s or thereabouts. Old people. We don’t know how it happened. We were just living our lives, earning our livings, raising our families and then loving their families as grandchildren came along, trying to do the best we could in our chosen fields, and then, suddenly, we were retirement age and old.

And now we are “OK Boomers.” Laughed at for our old ideas and ways of being and thinking. Or worse, blamed for the shape the nation and the world is in. People are angry with us as a generation, again, only this time it’s not our parents, but our children who are angry. We are blocking progress, we are on the wrong path, we were spoiled as youth and somehow it’s our fault that we were the last generation to do better economically than our parents. We could afford to go to college and now young people have to make herculean efforts to get through higher education and pay for it for the rest of their lives. And we are resented, because it was easier for us.

Yes, in fact, young people have it much harder today than we had/have it. They do not have the pensions that our parents (and sometimes we) had to get us through retirement, and the government now on top of that keeps threatening Social Security. They are still paying off college loans that prevent them from starting families and buying homes.

And it’s true, since the presidency of Bill Clinton (the first boomer to have that office), boomers have sat in the Oval Office. It’s true that today the super-wealthy are sometimes boomers (though not all; many are younger, and some are older). But the country and its economy began going downhill before Clinton, when presidential administrations (let’s name names: Reagan, who was no boomer) tried to institute “trickle-down” economics, when groups like ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) began suggesting “model legislation” to state governments that would benefit the rich and big business, when the NRA no longer was a group supporting hunting but became a wealthy, powerful lobby whose purpose is to sell arms at any social cost to anyone who wants them. When the labor unions that helped our parents up the economic path now became hated by industry and vilified and then destroyed. This was all a snowball starting down the hill before the boomer generation came into power.

“OK Boomer” us if you want. Most of us will be gone in ten or twenty years, and then it’s up to the rest of you to try to manage that snowball.

Yes, in the experience of younger folks, we are the stodgy old people who had it better and now we are the problem. But look for just a moment at how it feels to be a boomer with our history and the changes we fought for.