Me and Membership

(Blah blah social justice wyt lady personal journey, blah blah.)

I wrote about the end of my library career waaay back in 2012, and I'll leave the details there, but the gist is that a seriously disturbed library volunteer waged an inexplicable, literally baseless, hate campaign against one of my employees.

A trustee told me to begin the firing process for this employee.  It was unethical, illegal, and unearned and I wouldn’t do it.   He then began a Machiavellian campaign to get rid of me.

And then another trustee — we had two who represented our area — took me to lunch. She diplomatically expressed her lack of support for Other Trustee and for Library Boss, and said she'd like to see me stay.

So, there in 1994, I'm sitting across the table, touched and grateful for the first show of support by anyone with power in this situation. But also wondering why it hadn't come soon enough.  I was worn out and I'd already burned my bridges. Figuring out whether I was handling it right, or I was a failure seemed irrelevant.

What this 1994 event has to do with 2021 is this:

This was the event that made me look at how caring about my reputation was making my life impossible.   I’d gotten a total witches' brew of messages all my life, from a bunch of different sources. Summer camp said I was crappy, my 4th grade teacher thought I was great, etc. etc.

Leaving the job didn’t resolve it, in the face of years of contradictory messages.  Was I a Good Witch or a Bad Witch?

 

Forming a sense of self starts with input — family first, but also society and culture. All these, though, are opinions of people with their own damage, needs, agendas both good and bad, their own wisdom or ignorance or love of wielding power, or their simple stupidity.  

So the next step was realizing that life required a sorting process, to at least try to know myself.  I’m still lousy at it, yet no one but me could do it accurately at all.

And yeah, you're maybe liking this, up to this point, but here's what a lot of people won't like.

I’ve never called myself an ally.

It’s not a term anybody should award herself anyway, it’s about standards determined by others, and I think claiming or seeking it is unhealthy.  I’ve tried, awarding myself a summer camp “G” because I thought I deserved it, and realizing that it was the acceptance, not the ornament, that I really both craved and needed to let go of. 

Even if my basic values are strong for equality, democracy, voting rights, ending racism and discrimination on religion, ethnicity, gender-anything, ending economic injustice, and line up 90% with everyone else, I can’t agree to follow an agenda set by others  ; and that’s pretty much the dictionary definition of being an ally. 

Liberal is a label I get to give myself without seeking approval. There’s debate about what earns people the Liberal label too, but there’s no authority making those decisions. Being an ally, though, does mean stepping back and letting those with whom we’re allying take the lead and determine what we should support and oppose. I can’t commit to that. 

I do know that belonging doesn’t require lockstep thinking, debate is ok.  But. There are things that are considered too essential to argue with, and that pretty much get my membership rescinded.  And they baffle me.

Sweeping statements like “politically correct just means being a decent person” are a Thing that I’m supposed to believe, only I think that statement is bullshit.

If I say that some campaign that I think is absurd is political correctness run amuck, I’m told that it means “I support treating people like crap.”  No.  It doesn’t necessarily mean that and I don’t support that. 

You may think Snow White reinforces rape culture.  I think that’s absurd.

No, some white kid wearing dreds is not doing a damn thing wrong. I’m very wary of the campaign against “cultural appropriation” at all, yeah, really, which makes me poor ally material.

No, Horton Hears a Who is not a story of White Saviorism.

Here’s an exact quote I am unapologetically not going to identify or attribute :

You might be wondering what [Game of Thrones] has to do with a radical qtpoc politics. Much of the GoT fandom probably cannot feel with and for people in the real world who face structural violence on a daily basis, the most vulnerable to everyday systems of exploitation.

Maybe some readers agree with me that that’s loony, but I guarantee that an unbroken stream of “So insightful!” and “Thank you for enlightening me!” was the response it got.

Yes, social media lets us cocoon with those who are like-minded, which explains some of the apparent unanimity that’s, in truth, not unanimous at all.  But the craving for acceptance that the sheer quantity of it represents is a real deal. 

I have trouble being polite about such lunacy but I’m ok with bypassing the GoT  type conversations altogether.  Other things, though, seem too important for that.

If you’re tempted to explain to me why I’m wrong on these issues, please know that it has been explained to me thoroughly, and you’re welcome to disagree but the reason for this post isn’t to engage about single issues.  I didn’t offer them to try to convince y’all to agree, and it’s fine if you don’t.  They’re here as illustrations of why “ally” isn’t a good fit for me.

I understand I’m disqualified to be an ally, not because of a particular opinion, but because I can’t agree with having standards set for me, not when they’re about about right and wrong.

Here we run into a good example:

This is the point at which I’m expected to add a line about how, of course, I’m asserting my right to agency and to choose my battles, while vulnerable people live their lives with this agency too often denied them.

It’s true.  But my neglecting to type it in doesn’t mean I really forgot my privilege, and typing it makes no difference in changing a thing on earth for these vulnerable people.

Typing it serves exactly one purpose : to flash my Hall Pass to maintain my membership in acceptable standing.  Seriously.   

There are a lot of us, people of privilege who heavily support justice and equality while enjoying safe and quiet housing, free exercise of their rights, well-stocked pantries, generally a nice personal comfort level.   

If we place the required acknowledgment where it’s called-for, we don’t get called out for trying to have both privilege and acceptance as an ally.  No one expects me to relinquish my safety and comfort, only to voice awareness of it.   My objection to trying for ally status is that it’s based on the properly placed disclaimers, not on the values I live.

It’s not based on having awareness, it’s based on demonstrating awareness.  

To whom?  Who stamps my hall pass, but more importantly, what does that do for any of the victims of violence and injustice?

Liberals berating — if done gently, it’s “reminding” — other liberals has not, in several years of social media politics, made the real problems of, and deadly dangers to, BIPOC and LGBTQ people get even slightly better.  Things are getting worse.  Violence and injustice come down on the vulnerable harder than ever, while Liberalism is being identified with rigid and sometimes irrational political correctness, hurting our winning elections or changing anything.

Did it matter if supporters were posting solid black squares as their Insta profile pictures for BLM, and one celeb had a thin white border around all her pix including that one?

The absurdity there is not that hers was the right way to do it.  That’s another one I’m not going to address, because it’s separate debate from the debate we need to have, which is:  

Let’s say it was the wrong way.  Did it do one single thing to weaken the fight for racial justice?   Lots ranted about it, but does that mean it wasn’t adequate support for BLM, or are we just desperately in need of something to blow off a shitload of steam about?  I call it the latter.

Maybe a bunch of us really believe that statements like “Due process is a basic right that still applies in sex crime cases” or “Friends wasn’t ‘problematic’ for being about a group of white people” cause actual harm.

The beratings and debates happen in liberal bubbles nowhere near the violence and injustice.  They happen between people who are on the same side against violence and injustice.  That we can solve anything by creating an Allowed position on And to Think that I Saw It on Mulberry Street or whether Al Franken should have a hearing — not be exonerated, just have a bleeding hearing(!) —  is a delusion.

It’s a wasteful fight against at best, soft targets, at worst, unimportant ones.  We need to feel we’ve made some small difference somewhere.  People are being slaughtered.  We’re horribly helpless against atrocity, but we can go after Scrambled Eggs Super.  We’ll debate whether a Black actor cast to portray a real life historic Black person is dark enough. We’ll berate a social justice activist for not including the disclaimer line.

I haven’t totally lost faith in sanity prevailing.  The flap about the biographical movie faded pretty well.  The outrage about “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” did die down, corrected when it was established that it’s a female empowerment song, not a rape culture song. Good, but too many did not.

No, supporting what I believe is right, is not “centering myself,” it’s centering a position that I sincerely believe supports justice on an issue.

Yes, I’m “staying in my lane.”

Trying, however imperfectly, to uphold justice IS my lane.

Graymatter 2001-2016. And leaving.

We're coming up on four months since we lost Graymatter, and I've been avoiding writing about it.

I try not to batter myself over honest mistakes, but all I can seem to write is that we had a gutwrenching, difficult year, the best I could do sucked, I feel like crap.  Then, that invites people to tell me how great I am and how it's not my fault.  It's like trolling for comfort.  Don't do it.  Just read on.

We moved in November 2014, to what we thought was the perfect house, our positive step into a happy new situation after a very bad couple years.

We were sure it would be paradise for cats.  Nooks and crannies, walled garden.

Instead, we found that the previous owner had made it a feral cat colony, fed them, let them shelter in the crawlspace, and definitely let them inside.

Graymatter was driven insane by the proximity to the ground, by the constant prowling of other cats around doors and under floors, their smells.  She spray-marked all these places, constantly.

Add to that her constant campaign to drive her brother Downy from the house, a project that escalated after he was seriously ill in 2012 but dared to get well instead of dying as she wished him to.  I joked for a decade about her dislike of him, but as it grew into some cat version of hate it went beyond my ability to joke.

In the new house we had to tear out the laundry floor to the studs, treat the studs with odor-combatting chemicals, and replace it with tile.  We had to close her out of one room, then another, then we simply divided the house.

She lived on one side.  Downy and Scooter on the other.  Gray felt lonely and left out.  She was alone all night, no more shoving my pillow aside to give her a place to sleep next to my head.

To give her time with her humans meant to leave the orange boys alone.  Downy would sit in the kitchen watching us through the glass door that kept us all apart.

Graymatter got sick and then sicker.  I was warned, God forgive me, that the tranquilizers I gave her could do that.  I said I was OK with her having a shorter life, if it gave her a happier life.

I'll have to live with that, which would be a little easier if it had helped more, but it did help a little.  I guess it did.  It made her a little calmer.  Then it destroyed her liver.

Through her last 6 weeks, we tried to bring her back.  The liver can regenerate.  We coaxed water and food into her.  She resumed being engaged with life, exploring, demanding a treat-toss game.  But her liver was distended and her body, despite her eating fairly well, all bone.

On her last afternoon. The others knew she was very ill and did not bother her as she walked the garden, resting often.

Larry found every egress from the back garden through which she could escape or be injured, covered them all with chicken wire, and she got two afternoons outside.  I followed her.  She roamed and roamed, smelled everything, explored everything.  The second day, she did less, but flopped to rest often and then hiked herself back up and kept going.  That night, at 2:30 AM, she died.

All through watching Graymatter succumb to heart failure, I could comfort myself with life being better for Downy now.  The whole house open, his flopping places accessible again, evenings with us humans.

And he vanished.

He and Scooter went out to the back yard, as always, at about 5 AM, and Downy was not seen again for two weeks.  13 horrible days of my imagining coyotes, snakes, kidnapers for animal-fight rings.

I barely mourned my little girl, worrying if her brother was scared, hurting, being abused.  His return seemed so miraculous, and the relief of not having to deal with her foul behavior so immense, I can't pretend to have given her the grieving she deserves.  This is where I stop trolling for comfort, and reveal that I'm a piece of crap.  It's over.  I didn't help her, maybe I couldn't, maybe sitting with her that awful last night was all I could do, maybe not, past, done and over with.  I don't want to think about it any more.

But I do.  I miss the dear, funny good times.  They hit me at odd moments, but I never forget how many years in the past they were, as things deteriorated.

"Lost pet" flyers WORK, folks.
Use them!
Use EVERY RESOURCE, mass mailings, social media, everything, but do put up flyers!!

We're done with the house.  It goes on the market when we can get it ready.  We have my parents' house and we're back to our old neighborhood, some renovations done, others scheduled.  It seems like a better thing.  But I've lost faith in trying to do anything right.  We tried it with buying that house.  That Right Thing was Wronger than I ever dreamed.

Back on the marsh, things are good.  There will be no more outdoor roaming for either cat.  Both Orange Guys spend almost all day on the screened porch, and seem to find it acceptable.

Downy especially.

Extra! 1000s More of Her Emails Released!

Graymatter, 2001-2016

Those who have followed our cat life over the past decade should know that we've lost Graymatter.

May 12th.  And this is it for now.  It was all tied up in other things that were going on and I will be back to tell about it, but I can't yet.  The rest of us are ok but it was a very hard month.  Farewell to my dear troubled girl.

Rain

Since nobody reads blogs anymore, especially when they're kept up as seldom as this one has been, I guess I can just thought-stream about strange things.

It dawned on me the other day how much raw feeling humanity has had for rain; joy, fear, despair.  Just how much sheer time humanity has spent thinking about rain.

Early human communities worshipped the sun, knowing it was life-giving, but I think we worried about it less than we did about rain.  Food depended on both, but the sun was more predictable.  Rain, rain, too much, too little, too early, too late.  One crop flourishes, one withers, under the same timing and amount of rainfall.





Floods.   Parched earth.   Floods followed by parching.  Praying and begging for less rain.  Praying and begging for more.  Finding yourself watching a deluge with cold fear, and then a few months later, day after day of dryness, wishing and hoping for rain.  Give us life, don't take life away from us.  What can we do to bring the rain?  To stop the rain?  Prayers and cloud-seeding and human sacrifice to a god who seems angry enough to withhold rain.

It's used as a metaphor for scary, for stressful, for Bad days.  Rainy days, versus sunny days.

         Don't sorrow for sunshine, learn to dance in the rain!

Sunshine seems benevolent, its dangers known but controllable.  Its apparent less danger is only a seeming, but it seems more passive.  It's just There, whether clouds mask it or not.  Droughts are not thought of as its presence, they are the absence of the clouds and the rain.  The sun gets less blame.   Or God gets less blame for too much sun, than he gets for too little rain.  

Rain gives life, but it's capricious, scary, its ability to kill as obvious, and as unpredictable, as its healing and life-giving powers.

But both of them, the sun and the rain, give both.

 

A delightfully mundane Christmas Eve

There's been a huge amount of work to do, back at the house we moved out of, where I've finally had time to sort through 12 years of stored stuff left in the basement, including the stock from our 2005 real walk-in store.  And a lot to do at my parents' house that's now ours and getting some serious repairs and renovation. So for a couple months, I have hardly had time or energy for mundane tasks at home, except on odd days.  The Spouse has microwaved an awful lot of Mac'n'Cheese.

This December 24th, I am home, unstressed (because tomorrow's dinner was ordered ready for the oven, and you BET that's wonderful), and puttering around.  I've laundered grubby potholders.   I've seasoned some old cast iron pans.

I know they still don't look great but that was some serious steel-wool scrubbing - and I'm OK with the rough look!

One daughter is here from Up North, and we all braved the shopper crush at Kmart and I got a new vacuum cleaner bags and a nice sweater for 10.99(!). Came home and unclogged the vacuum cleaner of its impacted cat hair.  I cleaned the mat under the dish drainer.

The only Christmas-y thing I've done today was to put my grandmother's near-hundred-year-old star on top of the tree.

But earlier in the week, I did clean and paint an old metal Santa sleigh left behind in the garden shed by the house's previous owner.  Wrapped some small gift boxes for it to hold.  Crocheted little mufflers for the reindeer we got a couple weeks ago at our local nursery/garden center.  See how Martha Stewartish I can be?  OK, notsomuch.  The mufflers are just 2 quick crochet rows with a border, 30 minutes or so.  If I were Stewartizing, I wouldn't get Christmas dinner delivered!

So!  This is just my annual Merry Christmas, joyous holiday post.  Be well, have peace, and may this turn of the year bring good things to any and all who are reading this!

Linear time

Having to live in linear time -- always unable to change the past -- is both the Classic Human Dilemma, and lousy.

I know it's exactly what I need to do.

I know that if I didn't have to live with consequences, I'd never gain any wisdom.

I know it's no harder for me than it is for anybody else. Still, it would be nice for life to come with just a couple of do-over tickets.

Or one.  I'd take one.


But it might not matter even if I could.

Anybody who's ever seen It's a Wonderful Life has encountered the concept of alternate time lines, but what got my brain working on it was this book, which I bought when I was about 17, at the Intimate Bookshop in Charlotte, NC. Southpark Mall, specifically.  It was a slightly life-changing experience.

Or, one of the stories in it was. The title is "Random Quest," by John Wyndham.  It's about alternate universes. Specifically, it's about a man who temporarily trades places with the version of himself who is living out a somewhat different life in a different time-line.

This is going to get confusing, because the story contains these two "Colin Traffords" so I will call ours "Traff One".  He's the only one we meet and know, the one who tells the story.  He lives here in our very own universe, which I'll call Universe One. He works in a physics lab and gets knocked out when the test of a big new reactor goes rather badly.

He wakes up ... somewhere else. In a world both familiar and not. Some places and people are the same.  Others are different.

There's also a Colin Trafford in this alternate Universe. Traff Two, Universe Two.  He was hit by a Universe Two bus at the same moment that Traff One, here in our world, was knocked out during the reactor test.

They have swapped consciousnesses.  Traff One's consciousness -- his memories, his knowledge, his self -- is now occupying Traff Two, whose own "consciousness" now, presumably, occupies Traff One's comatose body back here in our familiar world.

So here's Traff One's "awareness," "consciousness," whatever you want to call it, in Traff Two's universe.  He finds it quite navigable but...odd.  Technology is different, less advanced.  This is the 1950's but he finds radio, but no TV.  AM but no FM.   Cars look funny.  Fashions look funny.

The big thing is that, there in Universe Two, World War II never happened.

So. Because there was no WWII in Universe Two, Traff-Two didn't go to war and therefore did not follow his war work into the field of physics. He became a novelist instead.

He also became a nasty, unpleasant sort of chap.

He also found this really great woman and married her. But he's slowly destroying the marriage.

You can guess where that's going.

Back here in Universe One, Traff-One's comatose head regains consciousness after 3 weeks. That means Traff One is zapped back here into his own world and his own time-line.

But Traff One is NOT happy to be back.  Not without Her.   Perfect Woman, whom he's now obsessed with finding.  After all, Trafford had managed to determine that both time-lines were alike until he was about 8 years old, so Miss Perfect likely exists here, but had a different life from that point, just as both Colin Traffords did.  He sets out in search of her.  Thus the "Quest" of the title.

As a teenager, I of course sighed over this "meant to be" love story.

I also was even more impressed by the fact that the exact date of my birth was mentioned. This is when Traff One first wakes up in Time-line Two, and wanders around trying to figure out what has happened.  He picks up a magazine dated January 22, 1954.

This made "Random Quest" the most important short story ever written, in my mind.

Predictably it's been made into movies (Here's part one of a modern BBC version on youtube, in several parts), but they're basically love stories.  They barely explore the uncomfortable questions of what's meant to be, or which history is the Groundhog Day type "right" one we keep stupidly failing at.  Or whether there is a "right" one at all.

The original story gives Traff One, and us, only tantalizing glimpses of these fascinating ideas, entirely aside from the One Perfect Soul Mate thing.   It took me a few years and a few read-throughs, but eventually I saw that the point of the story, made quietly, is that nothing was meant to be.

Or rather, that everything was meant to be, and is out there, being. In one alternate universe or another. Every possibility occurs. Ninth Grade physical science didn't really prep me to talk about theoretical physics, but apparently it gets into ....

Let me just type a "Random Quest" quote in here. Colin Trafford (Traff One) explains:

One was brought up against Einstein and relativity, which, as you know, denies the possibility of determining motion absolutely and consequently leads into the idea of the four-dimensional space-time continuum. ... In other words, although the infinite point which we call a moment in 1954 must occur throughout the continuum, it exists only in relation to each observer, and appears to have similar existence in relation to certain close groups of observers.

Big help, wasn't it?  Yes, that's sarcasm.  Other sci fi pieces speak of alternate universes "splitting off" but that's apparently sort of an inaccurate metaphor.  The theory seems more to say that every possibility is happening and perception of which one is "reality" is matter of where you are standing.

Trafford One can't find the moment of diversion at all.  He can only narrow the date of the split down to a guess that it was when he was around 6-8 years old.  His own life back in Time-line 1, and his alter-ego's in Time-line 2, were the same till about then.

Yet one world is not better than the other.  The story definitely does not advocate the idea that one worked out "the way it's supposed to" and the other didn't. Some people are better off in Time-line 2, while others, including himself, are much more productive and emotionally healthy in Time-line 1.  Wyndham has a lot of fun giving us inexplicable examples of differences that Traff can't track down in his mere three weeks there, so we can't either.

His titular "Quest" to find Miss Perfect allows some wiggle-room for the idea that something can be "wrong" and that the space-time continuum might, once in a long while, hiccup and make a correction.

But the idea that it's a correction is only an interpretation.  It could be just a space-time goof. Wyndham drops some cool little hints about "good" and "bad" events.

So, the death and destruction of World War II didn't happen there in the Alt-Universe? "Good."

Well, maybe. Colin glimpses a newspaper story in which Germany is conducting nuclear research -- testing atomic fission at the time of the story, in 1954. You have to wonder if the world of Universe Two is one in which the war was merely delayed.  Delayed until nukes were in the hands of Germany, and that in Time-line Two, the Axis might about be to unleash a war and win it this time.

Our world just marked the anniversary of the atomic bomb that ended the Pacific war in 1945.

A few years ago we acquired this copy of a map strategizing the Allied Invasion of Japan; the plan they'd have needed to follow if the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs had not been dropped:


Lines show the Allies pushing forward across Asia, slowly pushing enemy lines to their hoped-for 1946 mark.

My dad was 17 when he entered the Navy in 1945.  He once told my mother that if the bombing of Japan hadn't occurred, he would probably have been killed somewhere along those fronts so neatly mapped with nice little dotted lines as "1946." Or 1947.  Or...  Pushing across the landscape, as 10s of thousands more died.

So I might owe my existence to the bomb.

"Random Quest" got me thinking at an early age, when my brain wasn't yet petrified, about how the way things happen can't always be identified (with our limited knowledge)  as good or bad. As one of those who's into God stuff, I actually manage to reconcile the two, since I believe that taking the inefficient route to where my Higher Power wants me only makes it harder for me but doesn't stop me from getting there. Likewise, I think Humankind gets off-track but back on.

If the theory works the way it seems to in sci fi stories, then in some alternate time-line, I'm a glaciologist. In another, the bomb never dropped and I was never born.

And in another one, I'm a lawyer. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

But read the original "Random Quest," and let it dance with your mind.

Vice and virtue

My worst vice is anger.  Loud, obscene anger.

Second worst: ingratitude.

Best potting shed shot I have at the moment. From a rainstorm in May.
Rain has been rare enough to celebrate with photos.

This garden shed was one of my first loves in buying this house.  Turned out, it was roof-caved and rotted, and termite-destroyed, to the point that it was --not hyperbole-- held up only by its siding.

So it's in process of repair.  It's taking forever.  Everything has been shoved into the greenhouse potting-shed part, to let the workers work.  Their job is hard and brutal in this heat.  Whatever they need to do, they should do.

But if I had known it would be this big a job I would not have started any plants for this year.

My gratitude is way lower than it should be.  In a world of slipshod work and charlatans, we've found the best contractor and the best crew on earth.  We can afford it (at least, we can now that Larry has spent months doing the inside framing, by himself and saved probably $thousands).

Using the potting shed was doable until the insulation job, for which a few too many things got shoved into it, and the thousand pound, wheels-won't-roll-unless-powered-on mower took up too much space.  Insulation complete, I wrestled the thing back out, loudly damning it to fires of hell, because I wanted -- not needed, just wanted -- the much easier water source of the sink.

I am angry at this heat.  I am angry at having to get water that isn't scalding, to come out of hoses, angry at the highly temporary loss of sink access.  My anger at this lawnmower came close to getting it put out on the curb for anybody to take.

My virtue is, I guess, perseverance, because I decided it was my problem to solve, and I solved it.  I got it out.  No it does not really weigh a thousand pounds, but unwieldy and un-rollable as it was, it sure seemed to.  And I guess my sign is polite enough not to offend the crew, God, I hope, because they are working in hot, cramped conditions.

I could go into the subject of the gasket-blowing heat, tedium, AND gallons of wasted water in this drought, that are involved in using the outside hoses and hauling water for dozens of plants, but.....that's the Executive Summary.

Some self-discovery going on, too.  I have always thought I would make a great post-apocalyptic survivor, living off any grid, managing water and shelter and food like a Caroline Ingalls on steroids.  But if growing plants and accessing water is this hard for me now, when water comes right out of any faucet I turn.....that does not say anything good about what I thought would be my positive attitude in the face of hardship.

The endless indoor environment problem with Graymatter the Psychotic Cat is making my days difficult, and making indoors unpleasant, so some immature part of me feels entitled to have my way in my attempts to garden.

Right now, I kind of feel like I suk.

Scooter is a better Person than I am, since lack of access to the potting shed affected him too, but he behaved better about it.....oh.  Wait.  He did poop on our bed.  This project has royally screwed up most of his yard access and joy in life.  He deserves happiness more than anybody I know, or at least as much as my poor hardworking spouse does.  Despite not liking myself much for how angry the shed-clearing made me, I can feel good that Scooter has now got access to his birdwatching corner again.

I don't know. It's all some kind of Opportunity For Growth.

Paint out the stars

2014 was a peaceful year.  I'm talking outer peace, not necessarily inner peace, but nobody's Facebook Sunrise Placard saying "outer peace is worthless without inner peace" is gonna change my mind:  a whole year low on personal tragedy, conflict, and anxiety is very wonderful, even while I am still processing a lot of unresolved and unexplained stuff, as well as loss.

Another funeral came into our lives, a friend of Dad's, and here's where I break a former promise ;  I was absolutely not going to talk about Episcopal church division anymore.  When I said that, it never occurred to me that I didn't know everything.  

My parents were so involved in this parish, such huge givers to, and supporters of, it that their names are on a plaque in the fellowship hall.  Seeing the blasted thing is like remembering something good that's lost.

Not just because I have lost them, but because the Episcopal Church in SC is torn, and it tore at them.

The church was foundational for them.  They freakin' met at the Episcopal university club.  They were serious about it.  They taught Sunday School (they taught teenagers! I mean, that's dedication), they led study groups, they served on Vestries and as Wardens, they served on search committees and Dad founded a group to feed hungry kids.

Then the denominational unity began to erode. They kept their marital unity together, love and hurt coexisting, but their Episcopal unity came to a painful and ragged end when the splitting process began.  Mom passed in 2010, and the official division wasn't till 2012, but their parish, with many other SC parishes, took preliminary steps in earlier years, and my folks were vocally and tearfully on opposite sides.

I wrote long ago that I would not attend that church after Dad was gone.  This funeral was my first service there since Dad's funeral in August 2013.

People came up to me repeatedly to tell me how much they loved my parents, and miss them, and I kept thinking,

Dear lady! what would happen to your heart if my mom had lived long enough to reveal the level of her anger over this church breaking with TEC?  You remember my "parents" as a church unit.  Like that plaque says.

These are good people.  I have no doubt that they would still love both my parents, and that they would, if technically, admire the integrity that Mom and Dad each had to stand up and be counted.

What really blew me away is that I don't think any of them know that the plaque honors only the past, a time dead and gone, a time when they were all in this together. 

I swore off of this subject years ago.  The problem is, I got some new information.

The 2012 split was (and is) big news in South Carolina.  Local papers interviewed people on both sides, lots of "feelings" journalism, and I read it all.

Then I wrote my own letter to the editor.

I told about my sense of loss, accused both sides of "cutting the baby in half," which, I said, left out in the cold those of us who can tolerate neither First Millennium science nor Third Millennium skepticism.

They printed my letter.

But I got a very interesting reply from a member of the local TEC church telling me I was misinformed.

I had assumed the parish my parents gave so much to for 27 years, the parish Larry and I were married in, had veered to the right with integrity;  that, though I disagreed with their beef and with the division, they were telling me solid, unambiguous truth about what TEC had done and said.

I'd sat through meetings with Dad, and read all the literature that came to the house.  So I wrote that letter based on the conservative Anglican sources, without doing my research, which is not like me.  And I got rightly put in my place.  Finally, I started doing some reading.  Duh.

TEC embraces a wide spectrum of views, from the symbolism-and-myth take on the Gospel story, to "credal" theology -- in line with the Nicene and Apostles' Creeds.   So far they are managing peaceful, if sometimes a little testy, coexistence.  An ability for all to freely jaw about interpretation, but worship together.

So, yes, they have not repudiated, defrocked, or excommunicated John Shelby Sponge (Yes, I know how to really spell it)  or others who call supernatural beliefs "baggage" we need to dump.  But the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds are right there in the "What we believe" section of TEC's website.

And in the current prayer book.

And the catechism, which is also right there in the new, annoyingly gender-neutral, most recent Book of Common Prayer, basis of every church service that we alleged apostates attend, is traditional creed theology.

Thing is ;  this love of tolerance is NOT NEW.  TEC has drawn a wide circle for well over a hundred years.  It has affirmed "reason" as well as the Bible and Tradition, as the "three-legged stool" it rests on, since Richard Hooker in the 17th century, yo.  I was raised in it and never, ever was taught to be a Biblical literalist.  Back then, only boys could be acolytes, women had to cover their heads.  As those things fell away, objections happened, but never rose to an Article of Faith, division level.

Later - o yes, different story.  Stricter Anglicanism expanded. 

But nobody accused TEC of outright apostasy.  The wide circle that TEC drew to include a spectrum of belief, right or wrong, has been around for decades.

So why did the breakaway Anglicans say that TEC denied the basic tenets of the faith?

I don't know.  I know that one of the strongest and most destructive temptations in life is the temptation to lie about "the enemy" because you sincerely believe people are in peril and must, must  be steered away from it and toward your own camp; the belief that if you need to lie to save lives, or, in this case, souls, you should do it.

I can only guess that the breakaway group is THAT concerned about people getting damned to eternal punishment for non-celibate gay relationships.

I can further only guess that they seriously think that TEC's support of gay relationships is deceiving people into unwittingly consigning their souls to Satan.

The anti-gay stance will neither fly in a court, nor with the public.

Is this why they've made a claim against TEC for something much more fundamentally wrong?  Or do they really think TEC has changed on the articles of faith?

Apparently, at the last TEC General Convention, some group called for a vote that "Jesus is Lord," and the vote was refused.  I first read it in a conservative newsletter, which railed, aghast, that TEC could not!  would not affirm Jesus' Lordship, OMG!

Trouble is, that all that affirmation is right there in the still intact catechism and creeds.  The vote was refused because it was redundant and would have been followed by a series of "Further, I call for a vote on [Atonement!  Authority of Scripture!  Marriage!  yadda yadda],"  grinding the convention to a halt.

At that funeral, I spent 2 hours with people my parents loved, and who loved them, and felt like I was hiding my own division from these breakaway supporters, just as I was hiding the division between my parents, hiding the fact that my mother would have opposed their vote.

This is a lesson in boundaries.  I need to embrace the lesson.  I did not choose this battle.

I think that if the general population of the breakaway group knew how TEC does and would gladly embrace their Creed-lovin' thought and beliefs, they would not want this split either, no matter what they feel about gay rights.  The gay question does not need to be settled to keep a denomination together, it only needs to be recognized as a lesser issue than the beliefs that are the church's basis.

They've split families, they've split friends, they've stripped off the letters.  Each church seems to have dealt with the "Well, we're not them, but we're Episcopal, but not really, but...." signage differently.

One way is to paint out the stars.

I hope sincerity is driving them.  I hope it is not Pride of the worst kind. 

Peace and happiness to everybody!

Having a quiet, simple celebration this year.  It's been a peaceful and good year. 

The treetopper came from my grandmother's home when she was young.  My guess is 1920's.  I always tuck it into the tree somewhere, but Spouse suggested using it as the topper this time, as it was intended.  I love it.  We did not put a bulb in that hole in the center.  We're doing low stress and don't wan to stress the star either.  8~)

Wishing a joyful turn of the year to everybody!

Red, white. Blue.

You knew this was coming, didn't you?

I've complained a lot about living here.  As we slowly empty the house to move to a place that's, in many ways, the inland home of our dreams, here I am.  Getting sad.

I haven't forgotten the minuses of living here.  Development is stripping away woods in every direction. The bike bridge brings tourists dumping trash, killing wildlife.  Thieves and intruders have become frequent.  Even as I took these photos of beauty I don't want to give up, the highway noise ground on and on, with varying pitches and decibels, peaking with motorcycle roars.

But living here was a gift from my parents.  It enabled us to survive this decade.  Their love for us is in these walls.

And our love for wildlife permeates this little patch of wood.  Larry especially has grown and nurtured the trees and garden, kept it chemical free, made it a haven for more birds than I can name, bees, garden spiders, dragonflies, little bugs of unknown name.  We've brought highway-trapped turtles here at least 8 times.  We've relocated more raccoons than I can count, 6 in an 8-day period last year.  The loss of woods has them crowded and seeking food, and we can take them to a couple different huge preserves.

We may not see a lot of those guys in the inland suburbs, though we did have a possum a few weeks ago.  8~)

Happy Fourth!

Still, I love the new house more and more.  We take boxes and unload, water plants, eat lunch, hang out, and it gets harder to leave there, but the cats are still here at the Inlet (moving them is a big worry), and we still need to be here to wrap things up.

Moving out of this Inlet house does not necessarily mean losing it.  We own half of it and it can't be sold to some twit who will clearcut to get a better view, without our OK.  Neither my bro. nor I can quite settle on what to do with it, but Larry and I put so much into it, the bond is there.

I bond with homes.  They shelter me and become inhabitants of my heart.

It's getting bare.  And after all my complaints, I confess, the sight makes me sad.

If you think global warming is not a problem

...then this guy we saw in the grocery store, whose cart I asked Larry to surreptitiously photograph (well done, love!), clearly knows something you don't.

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First

    What is unseen

     flows to what is unseen

     passing in part

     through what we partly see

          -  W. S. Merwin

Happy Flag Day

Feeling pretty fortunate today.  Have a good one.

Here comes money trouble

So in the past few months, an occasional news story has said food prices would rise, last year's drought being a major factor.  Lots of extreme weather and crop damage in 2013.

I read them and thought, yes, we'll be paying "more," a term that's a solvable problem when you're in the privileged class, and a crisis when you're trying to feed a family and make ends meet.

We have watched three different stores cut, and cut, and cut items we buy.  It wasn't one chain in trouble, it's all of them around here.  Fewer organics, fewer gluten free (purchased on a real MD's advice, so please, no lectures about how moronic the gluten-free "trend" is), less variety in general.

Today we hit our most-visited supermarket.  I was flabbergasted at the start, AND at the finish.

You'll need to enlarge it to read the price tabs.  I thought they were a mistake.  Seriously.  And they weren't.

I've bought these fruit juices, yes, organic and pricey, for several years for breakfast smoothies.  They've crept up from the 3.99 range into the 4.99-ish rage, and when I read about crop failures I must have thought they'd jump a full dollar (or gosh!  even more!).   But...??!  Not to nearly 10 dollars.  Tack tax onto that.

Nearly 10 dollars.

The store knows that's not gonna fly, and they've just started stocking a new brand, also organic, back down at 5.89, and I did buy it.

On we shopped, with our usual list.  Long ago we decided that healthier food was an investment that might keep us a little healthier, a little longer, as aging and higher disease risk started workin' their magic.  So for stuff we use most, we have not bought the cheapest options for a very long time.

We also do plenty of of regular, normal Big Food Industry products.   Each is a considered decision.  Organics are more important when they're something we consume a lot of.  I get organic juice in glass bottles, and not major non-organic brands in plastic bottles.  We do organic milk.

This is all to point out that our shopping doesn't change much.  So when we got to checkout and the total was

TWO HUNDRED FIFTY-NINE dollars, I was ......  I was......

I can't provide an item by item comparison.  We got two containers of whey protein, not one, and two magazines, but they don't explain this being about $80 more than I was used to spending for similar -- again, not identical -- but similar carts full.

This is unsustainable.  Partly for us, but we can adjust and comparison shop and work harder at it, but mostly for the economy.

Those brands in the photos can't stay in business if they have to charge close to 10 bucks for a bottle.

The substitute brand will supposedly have to raise its prices too, even if they manage to beat the competition.  I don't think close-to-$8, or close-to-$9, will sell much better than close-to-$10 does, and more shoppers will be over in the Big Food juice aisle, dropping spending back down, but to the standard brands' also-rising prices.

Families with budgets are already there in the Big Food aisle, where those higher prices will hurt them, badly.  Where will they get the extra money?

I'm liberal but I am not a progressive  (whole 'nother topic), and Mother Jones magazine annoys me way too often, but it does have some good information, and one column in the March/April issue was enlightening about SNAP buyers and how they stretch their dollars.

Don't get me started on the writer's defense of using SNAP money for junk food, which made me say very bad words.

So.  How much further can these buyers stretch it?

The crash of 2008 had analyses written about it ad nauseum.   One article I recall from very early in the crash pointed out that the trigger was the gas price jump.  Not that the mortgage debacle wasn't the root cause, not that the economy was healthy before that.  It emphatically was not.  But its plates could keep spinning in the air until those homeowners paying those absurd mortgages could no longer budget for them.  And that was the extra 30, 50, 100 dollars they had to put in their gas tanks every month.

That's what the article said, and, again, it wasn't the root cause, and multiple other articles haven't mentioned it (though I could have missed some) but it had to be a major factor.  The dollars of your income per month are the dollars of your income per month, even if filling your tank has jumped from $30 to $50.  I remember emptying my account to fill a Honda Civic's tank, and I know for sure a whole population getting hit that hard was unsustainable.

Here we are again.  Natural events may have jacked this basic budget item up, but how many families' budgets will tank this time, and can we do anything but batten down?

Normal things in life can still be crappy

Every afternoon, when Dad was here, I would come over and we would watch reruns of Bonanza on the old kitchen TV (which was my old 1991 TV, and which I still had in the basement and brought over for him when his TV quit).

"The Cartwrights are in big trouble.  I'm not sure they'll get out of this one," he would say with a mocking look of concern. "Oh dear," I'd reply, as though it were possible that the Cartwrights would succumb to any villain.

Today, for the first time, I am watching it in his kitchen without him, to occupy myself while estate appraisers go through every, and I mean, every item in my parents' house.   This was their life.   These were the things they used, and were given for their service in church offices, and collected, and cooked with, and listened to on the CD player, and decorated with at Christmas, and read, and remembered their own parents by.  Now it's all being inventoried for "fair market value" to value the estate, as estates must be valued.

It's what happens as each generation passes, and it's normal, and it's really crappy.   I'm trying to enjoy Bonanza but I miss Dad.

The joy of our vine-covered cottage...

O yes, we love this house, but you HAVE to control those lovely vines.

Here you see what they do and why they need regular chopp-  pardon me,  regular pruning. They'll work right up under your siding and slowly ruin it.  Roof shingles as well.

The ice storm caused a lot of headaches -- more photos to come -- plus there's regular maintenance like this, and it's good, satisfying work.  I like nurturing this nifty little house.