The Lion and Its Two Whelps

One of the people I follow on Twitter is writer Reza Aslan, the author of Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. I became aware of Aslan when he got attacked on Fox News for writing about Jesus even though Aslan is a Muslim. So naturally I read the book, and can recommend it for those who like biographies and history. A lot of what was in the book I am familiar with from reading earlier works by other authors, but Aslan gave a more thorough history of the Zealot movement than I had seen before and is very good at conveying details that let you see what is happening.

So when Aslan began tweeting about an upcoming project of BoomGen studios, a television series called Of Kings and Prophets, based on the book of Samuel, I decided to watch the first episode.

I had forgotten that I tend not to like historical dramas. It’s not a bad show, and I’ll probably watch at least another episode, but I couldn’t really get into the story. And because I couldn’t get into the story, little details that I might otherwise have overlooked began to nag at me, and one of those details involved a lion.

Following the old dictum of “show, don’t tell”, the writers concocted a portion of the story about David waking up one night to find that a large number of the flock of sheep he had been tending had been attacked by a large predator. As a result of the attack, his family was unable to pay their taxes. When David went to the tax collector to explain the situation, the tax collector ordered him to be flogged. David was able to escape flogging by volunteering to go and kill the animal, a lion. David was able to track it, kill it, and bring its pelt back to court.

Now, practically none of this is in the first book of Samuel. What we have is the account, in chapter 17, of David going to the Israelite camp to bring food to his older brothers just as Goliath has issued his challenge to fight a single champion. As David finds out, “And it will be, that the man who will kill him, the King will enrich him with great riches, and he will give him his daughter, and he will make his father's house free in Israel.”  (Schmuel 1, Chapter 17, verse 25 from the online Tanach at chabad.org)

Rashi’s* commentary, a very nice feature of the online Tanach, explains “and he will make his father’s house free: from the things mentioned in the laws of the kingdom,” one of which things is the obligation to pay taxes.

David does not take just one person’s word for it. He asks several other soldiers and gets the same answer. So as we all know, he goes to Saul and offers to fight Goliath. Saul is dubious that a shepherd lad can fight a man who has been a warrior since childhood, at which point David claims, “Your bondsman was a shepherd of sheep for his father, and there came a lion and also a bear, and carried off a lamb from the flock. And I went out after him and smote him, and saved it from his mouth. And he arose upon me, and I took hold of his jaw, and I smote him and slew him. Both the lion and the bear has your bondsman slain, and the uncircumcised Philistine shall be like one of them, for he taunted the armies of the living God” (verses 34-36)

So here we have the elements of the story that OKAP tells: David concerned about freeing his family from taxes; David slaying a lion to rescue a lamb. Unfortunately, as several reviewers have pointed out, in the OKAP version, David comes off as the worst shepherd ever: he’s asleep when a large portion of his flock was slaughtered: enough so that his family is unable to pay its taxes. In the Bible version, of course, David is watchfully protecting his flock to the point of killing an animal as large as a lion or bear if need be to rescue a single lamb from its jaws.

But here is where we get to the detail that bothers me. The animal that is harassing David’s flock is a male lion, not a lioness. This doesn’t make a huge difference to the story in the Bible version. While the job of hunting to feed the tribe usually falls to the lionesses, not the males, male lions can hunt. Both male and female cubs are taken on hunting trips with their mothers and taught to hunt. Males, however, when they do hunt usually hunt larger game, like gazelles, not smaller domestic animals, like lambs. In the Bible version, David has rescued a single lamb from the lion’s jaws. It is not impossible that a young male, leaving his birth pride to find a new one, gets hungry along the way and grabs a lamb from a flock. But a full grown male harassing a whole flock of sheep? I dunno. That sounds to me more like the kind of hunting a lioness or two or three would be doing.

So being me, and following Reza Aslan on Twitter anyway, I tweeted him to ask why, given that lionesses are the hunters, it wasn’t a lioness killing David’s sheep. I did not get an answer.

Okay, I can understand that, in one way. It is hard to convey in 140 characters that a question is not a rhetorical one whose object is saying, “Nyaah, nyaah, you screwed up, and on a detail that anyone who ever saw The Lion King would know.”

The thing is, it wasn’t a rhetorical question, because actually, I could see some legitimate reasons for making the sheep killer a male lion, and I really did want to know if one of them applied. 

Certainly one possibility is ignorance - not knowing that the lioness does the killing, but that’s not exactly abstruse knowlege, so that to me was the least likely explanation. 

Another possible reason is translation - maybe the Hebrew word used excludes lionesses and only applies to males. It turns out that Hebrew does have separate word for lioness, but once again we have Rashi’s commentary to turn to: “Both the lion and the bear: These three words (גם את גם) are of inclusive nature, meaning a lion and its two whelps, and a bear and its two cubs.” I think the example he gives means the words are inclusive of males, females, and children of the animals named, so even though the word David uses is translated lion, it could include the lioness, just as the English word “lion” does. 

Okay, so what about tradition? David is of the tribe of Judah, a tribe whose symbol is the lion. Maybe there is a future plot point in which the lion skin that David brings back to court becomes the symbol of his tribe. Or not - the association between Judah and a lion goes back to the book of Genesis: specifically, the blessings Jacob gave to his sons at his death. “A cub [and] a grown lion is Judah. From the prey, my son, you withdrew. He crouched, rested like a lion, and like a lion, who will rouse him?” Rashi considers this to be a prophecy of the coming of David, “He prophesied about David, who was at first like a cub: 'When Saul was king over us, it was you who led Israel out and brought them in' (II Sam. 5:2), and at the end a lion, when they made him king over them.” Well, maybe something will be done with that in future episodes.

So the one explanation left in my mind is visual impact. Lions have manes. A male lion’s pelt makes more of an impact than a female’s pelt when you stride into a court holding it draped over your shoulder.  

By the time I had arrived at this point in my thinking, I had googled enough about lions to be reminded that the lion in Narnia is named Aslan, a connection I had honestly not made before. So I tweeted Dr. Aslan again, but still didn’t get an answer to my question. Okay, perhaps I should have thought a bit about how tired anyone with the name Aslan could get of Narnia references, Muslim or no. Perhaps no response is not the worst possible outcome. At least he hasn’t blocked me, which means I was able to see the link he tweeted to an interview in the Huffington Post with OKAP’s executive producer Mahyad Tousi, and while I didn’t expect an explanation of why a lion to emerge from it, I read it anyway, and encountered this exchange:

Q: On the one hand, Hollywood excludes minorities and women and, on the other hand, it has a history of perpetuating stereotypes. Women are often shown as two-dimensional sex objects. Do the show's female characters defy this stereotype in any way?
A: Yes, absolutely. Our job as dramatists is to breathe life into all the characters. It's no secret that the Bible generally doesn't provide much in terms of character psychology or motivation for its women, with a few exceptions of course. So from the start in our conversations with Adam Cooper and Bill Collage (the show's creators) and subsequently with our showrunner Chris Brancato, we were in agreement that the women of Of Kings and Prophets must play a far more central role than they are provided with in the Bible. Personally, I operate from the perspective that even in the most patriarchal societies women have been key players, even when the history books don't reflect that. I believe this is also true of scripture.

A quick search for Chris Brancato reveals that despite the promising first name, he’s a man, too. So from the start, three men agreed that, “The women of Of Kings and Prophets must play a far more central role than they are provided with in the Bible” and decided how to do that.

I was wrong. The interview did, in fact, answer my question about the lion.

*Rashi is an acronym for Shlomo Yitzchaki, 22 February 1040 – 13 July 1105), Latin name  Salomon Isaacides, a medieval French rabbi and author of a comprehensive commentary on the Talmud and commentary on the Tanakh.

Welcome!

This is a video of Canadian children welcoming Syrian refugees to Canada by singing a historical song that was sung to the Prophet Mohamed when he sought refuge from Makkah to Medina.

Now pardon me while I go hunt up a hanky.

Refuge

Egyptian border, somewhere around 1 AD, give or take

Egyptian official: Okay, you two with the baby, hand over your papers.

Joseph: Papers? I’m not sure what you mean.

Egyptian official: Identification papers, proof of citizenship . . .

Joseph: We don’t have any of that. I’m Joseph, and this is my wife Mary and our son Jesus. We are looking for refuge.

Egyptian official: So you say. Where are you from, anyway?

Joseph: We came here from Bethlehem.

Egyptian official: Bethlehem? Why do you want to leave Bethlehem?

Mary: It’s Herod. He’s killing all firstborn infants. If you don’t let us take refuge here, Jesus could be killed!

Egyptian official: You’re from Herod’s kingdom? In Judea? Look, the last time we let in any of your kind in it ended with plagues, locusts, our own firstborn being mysteriously killed. You all left saying you wanted your own country and your own language, and your own religion, and now you want to come back? 

You’re troublemakers, all of you. The Babylonians couldn’t control you, the Assyrians couldn’t control you, I bet not even the Romans could control you. If Herod is cracking down on dissidents in his own country, I’m sure he has his reasons.

Mary: If you can’t let us in, could you at least let our little boy in? Surely some family would want to adopt him. If you don’t, he’s going to die!

Egyptian official: No, ma’am. Nobody here wants him. He needs to be with his own parents. Just not here, is all.

Obligations

A few weeks ago, I saw someone I follow on Tumblr use the neologism “conversate” in place of “converse” and got to thinking about the process of “back formation” - the process of creating a new lexeme (roughly, a new word) by removing actual or supposed affixes.  Since many words that end in the suffix “ation”, the way “conversation” does, do derive from root words that end in “ate”, (think dominate/domination, navigate/navigation, celebrate/celebration) “conversate” isn’t a bad guess if you don’t know that the word you are looking for is “converse”. Dictionary.com actually dates it back to 1970-75, which surprises me. I would have been willing to bet that “conversate” didn’t exist back in the 1990′s.

There are a number of words, however with the suffix “ation” that do not have roots that end with “ate”. We have imagine/imagination, accredit/accreditation, denote/denotation, discolor/discoloration, expect/expectation, to name a few. I wonder if we are ever going to see the use of “imaginate”?

I think we are stuck with “conversate”. It sounds both less formal and more extensive than “converse” does. Besides, there is precedence. In American English, at least, we have both the word “oblige” and the word “obligate”, and each takes the noun form “obligation”. “Obligate” is also an adjective, but the verb form dates back around five centuries, according to my googling, and has been found in the novel Pamela, contradicting the charge that it is purely an Americanism. There are a few guesses as to why we have both words, but the one I find most convincing is that “obligate”, like “conversate” and “orientate”, is a back formation, in the case of “obligate” from the word “obligation”.

Interestingly enough, though, my reading also revealed that in American law, at least, the words “obligate” and “oblige” have different degrees of force, and it does make a difference which one you use.

So maybe a few hundred years from now,  linguists will be arguing over the  the nuances of using “conversate” versus “converse”. So be it.

I just hope we never, ever get the word “imaginate”.

The Party

This being the wedding day, I am posting the last of the three true love stories that I originally wrote for my friend on Tumblr.  If someone that I know reads my blog and is a character in the story wants to quibble over details, just let me remind that person that I got the story second and third hand because he tends to tell these things to other family members and then assumes he has also told them to mama. No matter, the details aren't what's important, anyway. 

This is a true story. It happened to two people I know.

She wasn’t supposed to be at the party. 

She was from Venezuela. She and her husband met in high school, attended college in the United States, married and had a baby. She thought she knew everything about him, but it turned out she didn’t. Now she was living in London and he was living in Scotland, and their divorce was almost final. She brought her little boy up to visit him and then they were going to spend three days seeing Loch Ness.

But there was a mix-up with his driver's license, so she went back to London. After all, there was that party.

He wasn’t supposed to be at the party.

He was from the United States. In 2008, he had taken a job with a start up company. The owners’ plan was to build the business up enough to be tempting enough for a larger company to buy, but then the recession of 2009 hit, so the owners had to run the company themselves. There was enough European business for the company to send him and his boss to live in London as their European branch. 

His cousin was getting married back home that weekend, and he was supposed to be there, but he couldn’t get the time off.

But there was that party. That was how they met.

A year later, she got a promotion and a transfer, back to Houston. Around the same time, his company told him that having him based in Europe was too expensive, and that when his visa ran out, they wanted him home, back in Austin. Since he mostly worked either from home or onsite, he asked if really needed to live in Austin. Could he maybe live in Houston, and just go to Austin the few times a year he was needed there?

So now they both live together in Houston. They are building a house and making wedding plans.

He says he wasn’t supposed to be at the party. She says she wasn’t supposed to be at the party.

I say they were.

The Flowers

This is the second of the true love stories I wrote for my Tumblr friend. By the way, that's "true love stories" as in love stories that are true, but I certainly hope they also depict True Love. All of the stories were written last summer.

The picture showed up in my Facebook feed, a dozen roses and a card with pictures of the two of them from over the years. The caption was of course in Hungarian, “Szerelem, boldogság 10 év után is” followed by a heart, which Google Translate renders as “Love, happiness, even after 10 years”.

Ten years? Ten years ago in May? Ten years ago this coming August she arrived in the US from Hungary, our third foreign exchange student, sixteen about to turn seventeen. I sat with her while she unpacked and watched her pin a picture of her and a young man to the oversized bulletin board we kept for just such mementoes. “Who is that?” I asked.

“My boyfriend.” He looked a little old for a high school student, but I remembered high school well enough to know how differently the young men in it had matured. Still, I had to ask, “How old is he?”

“Twenty-six.” Anna laughed at the expression on my face. “My parents were worried when I first met him, but once they got to know him, they said it was okay for us to date.”

“And then they sent her to the U.S. for a year,”  my husband  pointed out to me later that night. Not quite a year, but still. The handsome young man in the picture would have no trouble meeting interested women closer to home, and closer to his age.

Anna quickly talked my husband into buying a microphone and some software for his aging computer and used it to talk with J, the boyfriend, every afternoon. She also talked to her parents, her brothers, and several friends. American Field Service guidelines suggested discouraging much contact with home, maybe a letter a week and one phone call a month, but Anna had bonded to us like Superglue within days of meeting us, and easily made friends at school. She found young men to escort her to the Winter Formal and the Junior-Senior Prom, and even held a party at our house to entertain her friends at the end of the school year. It would have been petty of us to interfere with her communication to those back home.

The year after she left, we visited her in Hungary, and met J. We could see why her parents were impressed. He wasn’t immature, he treated her with affection and respect, and they just seemed right for each other. I was amused by one story Anna told us. She and J had gone to Croatia for vacation the summer before, after she returned from the US, and while there she got a henna tattoo. When she returned home, she convinced her parents it was a permanent tattoo, and they were furious with her.

“So let me see if I get this,” I told my husband later. “Her parents don’t mind her spending her vacation alone with an older man, but they have a hissy fit over her getting a tattoo.” I reminded myself again that I’m not her real mom.

Anna moved to another city to go to college and J got a job there and moved with her. They lived together in an apartment. We visited Anna again a few years ago while spending a long visit with my son in Paris, and then two years ago they came to spend time with us while we were on another visit with my son, this time in London. By this time Anna had graduated and was working. I asked if there were any wedding plans and she said that J was worried about getting married because he had friends who broke up soon after marrying, but that he knew it was important to her and was saving up for a ring. Last fall they announced their engagement. They bought a house this year, they are coming to visit us for a few weeks this fall, and the wedding is next year*.

Ten years. Ten years between them. Ten years together. Ten years since she last was here with us.

Ten years.

*This August, and we're going.

How I Met My Husband

While looking for some medical information that I hoped I had scanned into my computer, I found a folder called "True Love Stories", written to give to someone on Tumblr who was collecting stories of unconventional meetings and couplings. Since I have been too preoccupied with my son's upcoming wedding to write lately (not too busy, mind you, just too preoccupied), I decided I can post these, at least. This is the first one.

Some background to the story: when I was in graduate school, I met my first husband. He was an Eagle Scout and enjoyed camping, so he volunteered as an assistant scoutmaster with a scout troop near the university we attended. Our first real date was to a covered dish dinner award ceremony (Court of Honor) for scouts achieving merit badges. I don’t remember any of the scouts I met that night, but keep in mind, there were a lot of them there.

Next background bit: ten years later, my husband and I were invited to a party for the troop’s 50 year anniversary. By then we had a two and a half year old son. Our marriage was getting a little rocky, given that he had a hair trigger temper, but I was in it until death do us part, and not looking for anything more than a few minutes conversation with the cute young man with curly brown hair standing next to me at the refreshment table. In fact, by a day or so later I had forgotten him.

By four years later, it had become apparent that the death that was going to part my husband and me was likely to be untimely, likely to be violent, and likely to be mine. I tossed him out of the house and filed for divorce. Eventually I joined a singles group that, among other activities, held a weekly volleyball game. One night, I looked across the volleyball net and saw a cute younger man with slightly splayed feet, a feature that for some reason I found totally adorable. I also thought he looked ten years younger than me, and figured he wouldn’t be interested.

It turned out he was interested, and only six years younger than me. After a few weeks of volleyball, he asked me out for dinner. We talked the usual getting acquainted chit-chat people do on first dates, and I learned he was a) from New Orleans and b) an Eagle Scout.  “Where in New Orleans?” I asked, suspecting I knew. “Uptown.” “What troop were you in?” I wasn’t surprised to hear the answer. “Did you know (ex’s name)?” “Yes, he was one of our assistant scoutmasters.” “He’s also my ex-husband.”

By this time I decided if I had spent my first date with my ex-husband watching this kid get his Eagle Scout award, there wasn’t going to be a second date for the two of us. In his zeal to prove to me it wasn’t so, the next week the cute young man showed me the dated certificate that came with his Eagle, and along with it he had a program from the 50 year anniversary party.

Oh, my gosh! The curly haired young man  (now less curly haired, and starting to gray) from the party!

Eight weeks later we were engaged, and slightly less than a year from our meeting at the volleyball game (the meeting I refer to as “the one that took”), we were married. Twenty-seven years later, we are still married. I fondly imagine Fate pushing us together two or three times, saying, “Will you idiots just get it, already? I have other business to attend to.”

And it took 2 or 3 tries, but we finally got it.

I'll Ride with You, But Do I Have to Bring Jesus with Me?

I woke up in the middle of the night to see a tweet from dancer Sharna Burgess, that said “Thinking of you” with the hashtag, “prayersforsydney”. [Thanks, lsn, for the correction. The error was all mine, not that of the lovely Sharna Burgess, and I made it twice.] Knowing that she is Australian, I figured she meant the city, and a little further reading showed that there was a hostage situation going on in a cafe there.

By morning I woke up again, this time to the hashtag “illridewithyou”. Since the hostage taker is Muslim, Muslims around the city are concerned about reactions to them, and their fellow Australians have begun offering to accompany them on public transportation to prevent harassment, or worse. “Illridewithyou” is trending worldwide as I write, with both concrete offers of help along specific routes and supportive comments.

And as it happens, the offers of help fit in well with the subject of yesterday’s sermon at St. Anonymous.

I showed up at church after a long absence. Not so long, when you consider that I was there three weeks ago for the bake sale, but that was Layperson Sunday, so Pastor J was not there. Yesterday she greeted me like the prodigal kid, minus the ring and the fatted calf. I wonder if she would be so happy to see me there if she knew about my habit of discussing her sermons on my blog, not usually in a favorable light. I really need to make more of a point of writing about the ones I like and appreciate, not to mention about the things I like and appreciate about St. Anonymous in general, but the whole point of my blog is to give my grump side a place to play.

Yesterday’s sermon, however, was not one of my favorites. It was based on the story of the shepherds in Luke:

The Shepherds and the Angels8 And in the same region there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. 9 And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with great fear. 10 And the angel said to them, “Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. 11 For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. 12 And this will be a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger.” 13 And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying,14 “Glory to God in the highest,    and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!”[a]15 When the angels went away from them into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go over to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has made known to us.” 16 And they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby lying in a manger. 17 And when they saw it, they made known the saying that had been told them concerning this child. 18 And all who heard it wondered at what the shepherds told them. 19 But Mary treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart. 20 And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.Luke 2:8-20English Standard Version (ESV)

The story itself, I love, not the least because it is, of course, the story that Linus recites in A Charlie Brown Christmas, when Charlie Brown despairs of ever finding the true meaning of Christmas. Dr. J, however, really, really, loves it, and said she could preach any number of sermons on it. This time she chose to focus on the latter half of verse nine “they were filled with great fear” and verses seventeen and twenty. The shepherds, despite being filled with great fear, spread the word about what they had seen and heard.

Dr. J went on to use this story as scriptural proof that we need to be out there talking to people about Jesus, even though it is scary. She hears from so many members of the church that their way of witnessing is to do good things for others, not talking about Jesus, and she used the shepherd story to show that this attitude is “not scriptural”. The shepherds were afraid, but they went and spread their story anyway.

She went on to deal with the argument that “I don’t know a lot about Jesus”. She urged us to review the events of each day and look for places where Jesus could have been acting - the smile a stranger gave us, our not speaking up in a meeting when it wouldn’t have been advisable, finding our lost car keys.

Okay, that last one was mine. But by this time it had occurred to me that people with a story to tell, tell that story without urging. The shepherds saw a light from Heaven and heard an angelic voice, followed by an angelic choir. Do you think they needed prompting to tell that story? A few generations down the road their grandkids were probably saying “Not this again” at holiday dinners. The “Jesus helped me find my car keys” stories I see on Facebook don’t come close. 

Pastor J went on to say that if all we did was to do good for others, we would build an awesome life for people, but how would they ever hear about Jesus?

Not seeing the problem here.

"It’s like we are saying to God, 'God, I’ll help you build your Kingdom, but I’m not willing to talk about you' . . . It’s easier to do good things for others than to talk about Jesus.”

Okay, seriously? Has she not noticed that there are a lot of people in public life talking about Jesus, and that we still don’t have this paradise on earth she’s envisioning if we all substituted doing for talking, or for talking about what we are supposedly doing? Meantime, my cousin Garett is still in Liberia, as far as I know, and so are a lot of health workers who are risking their lives in a place where thousands of people have died of an incurable disease and she seriously wants me to think that that is easier than telling people about Jesus?

But I started off talking about #illridewithyou, so let me get back there. Suppose I were in Sydney and free to offer what escort service I could provide to someone in a headscarf. What would it sound like to that person for me to say, “I’m doing this because Jesus wants me to” or “I’m doing this to be Jesus to you today”. I know that Muslims revere Jesus as a prophet, but would they take those statements as a sign that we have some beliefs in common or as a sign that I’m part of what they are afraid of? How much sensitivity to their fears would I be showing, and wouldn’t showing sensitivity to their fears be something Jesus might want me to do?

I think if I were going to bring religion into it at all, it would be by listening. “I know a little about your religion, but probably only enough to get a lot of it wrong. What does the Quran say is the obligation of believers in a situation like this?” Maybe that would get us around to a discussion of our shared and disparate views of Jesus, maybe not. I’m having a hard time seeing how strangers offering friendship to other strangers in jeopardy is going to give Jesus a sad.

I imagine, though, if I were there ride sharing with people in jeopardy, eventually I would wind up with a story to tell: a story that one of them told me, a story about what it felt like, sharing non-privileged status with a stranger, a story of other strangers offering support.

And as I said, people with a story to tell, tell that story without urging. Maybe that would have been a better message, to get out there in the world and do something, do more than you are doing now, do more than you think you can do. Sooner or later, you will have a story, and you will tell it.

Family Values

My cousin Garrett is in Liberia, helping people cope with the Ebola epidemic. Here he is being interviewed via Skype by a reporter at New York’s WPIX:

If that doesn't work, here is the URL:

http://pix11.com/2014/10/03/ebola-relief-worker-describes-liberia-situation/

By Miss Manners’ reckoning, Garett is my first cousin once removed; by my family’s traditions, he is my second cousin, and by the calling customs of my nieces and nephews, he’s my baby cousin, being the son of one of my first cousins and the grandson of my dad’s younger sister. I’m not entirely sure I ever met Garrett, unless it was at a barbecue his uncle held while I was in NY visiting my sister this past July. He and I are Facebook friends, but he doesn’t post much. I knew about this interview because his uncle and aunt posted the link to this interview on Facebook. We are all quite proud of him.

AmeriCares, so their website tells me “is a non-profit emergency response and global health organization. In times of epic disaster or daily struggle, we deliver medical and humanitarian aid to people in need worldwide.” Garett is Vice President of Emergency Response, hence his trip to Liberia. His organization has been providing supplies that medical workers need in order to provide the care that they can without risking their own lives or infecting other patients.

AmeriCares has scaled up its response by providing eight emergency shipments of essential medicines and personal protective wear to both Liberia and Sierra Leone to help treat Ebola patients and to provide protective gear for health workers facing great risks in trying to control the outbreak. 

The shipments contained over 90,000 pairs of gloves, 88,000 face masks, and over 28,000 units of protective clothing including scrubs and disposable coveralls and gowns. Shipments of intravenous fluids to rehydrate Ebola patients have also been sent to Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Now they are working on large shipments of bleach to be used in infection control. People find Ebola scary, and rightly so, but it isn’t an airborne virus. Catching it requires coming in contact with blood or other bodily fluids from an infected person, all too easy to do if the proper protective wear and disinfectants are not available, but preventable if they are. Ebola is also not necessarily a death sentence. If patients get symptomatic care (such as rehydration) to keep them alive until their immune systems kick in, it is possible to survive Ebola. It’s not the same as getting over the common cold, but there is no reason to shrug and say, “Oh, well, what can we do?” either. 

So what can you do? Donate, obviously, if you possibly can. You can donate to AmeriCare here, but if any readers know of other reputable organizations working on Ebola relief efforts, go ahead and post about them in the comments.

If you are the sort to pray, or send good thoughts, or use other blessing rituals to signify your solidarity with people going through bad times, yes, please do! Garrett is not involved in direct patient care and does not anticipate being in any danger, but there are the many medical workers, the patients themselves, their family members, and anyone with the potential to be infected  to whom you can direct your efforts as well.

And go ahead and remember Garrett while you are at it, just in case. Because even if neither of us could pick the other one out of a police lineup, he’s family. Apparently, he’s one of the people who sees the rest of the world as family, too.

Update: More from Garrett here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/garrett-ingoglia/a-firsthand-account-of-li_b_5958884.html?utm_hp_ref=tw

Happy Birthday, Elyse

Today was Elyse’s birthday. I say “was” because Elyse is with us no more. She died on an April night at the age of 16 when a congenital aneurysm that no one knew she had ruptured. I knew her parents because I worked with her mother, and when I heard of Elyse’s death, I went to their house, where a large crowd had gathered to be of what comfort we could. Elyse was brain dead but being kept alive on life support so her organs could be donated. That was important to her parents, who were overcome when they learned Elyse’s heart was too damaged to be donated.

“She had a good heart,” I reminded her mom, one of those stupid, useless things you say when you want to be comforting but there are no words that can do that.

My friend told stories.  Elyse was a quiet elf of a child with an engaging grin. She had asthma, but like most teens, she wanted to fit in with her peers. So for months she did not tell her gym teacher about her condition. My friend told about how she learned that when the class had to run sprints, Elyse bravely puffed along, well behind everyone but willing to try. I could see her in my mind. It sounded like an Elyse thing to do.

I had to leave the next day for a planned visit to family, but my husband went to the funeral. He said it was crowded, and he was on a long line to see the family and pay his respects when another coworker saw him and took him on a shortcut through a side door. “The Bishop was there,” my friend told me when she returned to work weeks later. Seeing that Elyse’s father was the principal of one of the city’s Catholic schools, I didn’t find the Bishop’s attendance excessive, but I was glad that my friend had that comfort.

Five months later, on Elyse’s birthday, two airplanes slammed into the twin towers in New York City. Today everyone is remembering, and mourning, the people who died in that attack. It is appropriate that they do so.

But I woke up this morning remembering a little blonde elf of a girl who will never be older than 16, and whose death was no less tragic.

Happy birthday, Elyse.

Like a Girl

I swear I used to be able to write poetry once. Maybe not very good poetry, but actual poetry. This one, inspired by the Always (Proctor and Gamble) "Like a Girl" ad campaign, is more like a really bad essay broken up into verses, but it's what I've got.

Her name was Jeanne.

She was a peasant. She loved her country, 

She loved her church.

She led an army, and won a victory

And then another, 

Like a girl.

When she was murdered,

For so called witchcraft, 

her fame outlived her.

Now she’s a saint

Just like a girl.

Her name was Sacagawea.

She was a teen.

She was a mother.

She helped an expedition, 

Across the waters,

Across the mountains,

She guided the men,

Just like a girl.

Her name was Harriet.

She was a slave,

Who found her way free.

And she led others along a railroad,

Like a girl.

They followed markers

They followed the North Star

They followed quilts displayed on clotheslines

Made with stitches and patches

By many girls.

Her name was Florence.

She traveled with armies,

To nurse the soldiers,

Injured in battles planned by old men.

She nursed the wounded,

She heard their screams

She was unflinching 

When she came to tend them, 

Just like a girl.

Her name was Amelia.

She was a pilot,

She owned the sky.

It wasn’t men’s then,

It belonged to anyone.

So she explored it, 

And tried to conquer it

Just like a girl.

Her name was Rosa.

She rode a bus.

One day she planned it, 

She kept her seat

When someone else demanded it.

She did not waiver.

She sparked a movement,

Like a girl.

Half an Acre

I am holding half an acre
Torn from the map of Michigan
And folded in this scrap of paper
Is a land I grew in

Think of every town you've lived in
Every room, you lay your head
And what is it that you remember?

Do you carry every sadness with you
Every hour your heart was broken
Every night the fear and darkness
Lay down with you

A man is walking on the highway
A woman stares out at the sea
And light is only now just breaking

So we carry every sadness with us
Every hour our heart were broken
Every night the fear and darkness
Lay down with us

But I am holding half an acre
Torn from the map of Michigan
I am carrying this scrap of paper

That can crack the darkest sky wide open
Every burden taken from me
Every night my heart unfolding
My home

I first heard the song Half an Acre on a Liberty Mutual ad several years ago, and found it on iTunes and purchased it. It’s a haunting song, and still one of my favorites to listen to when the mood strikes.

I have an inconvenient kind of mind, however. I can’t listen to words like “I am holding half an acre, torn from a map of Michigan” without thinking, “That must be one big-assed map.” I used to live in a house on a half acre lot. It seemed large enough when I was mowing the grass, even with a riding mower, but I if I look at a state map of Louisiana and try to pinpoint where that half-acre is, well, pinpoint is the operative term.

So today for some reason I decided to figure out just how big-assed a map we are talking about. Google and I had a little sit down and I discovered that one half acre is 21, 780 square feet. Michigan covers an area of 96, 716 square miles. In case you are wondering, one square mile is the equivalent of 27, 878, 400 square feet. So half an acre is very roughly one one-thousandth of a square mile, and Michigan is roughly 96,000 square miles. If met calculations are correct, half an acre is roughly one 96-millionth the size of Michigan.

A pinpoint is looking a little large.

And speaking of points, of course, the feasibility of holding a half-acre scrap torn from a map of Michigan is not the point of the song. I get that. The song is about fear, regret and disappointment, and how each of us needs a home place we can go to, even if only in our minds, when those threaten to overwhelm us. The scrap of paper is a metaphor for the half-acre more or less that we carry in our minds.

The mind that in my case, can’t help asking, “But just how big is that scrap of paper?” Because asking such questions and tinkering and figuring out, that’s my home.

Read more: Hem - Half Acre Lyrics | MetroLyrics or listen here.

Meta Mavis and Meta Tabitha Have a Chat about Their Authors

“Why do I smirk so much?” Mavis asked. “I’m not a particularly smug or supercilious person. Why can’t I have a shy smile, or a fond smile, or an occasional grin? Or a moue? A moue in the sense of a flirtatious pout would be awesome, although a few grimaces of distaste for Mikhail and his roaming hands during the judges’ comments would have been okay, too. Why can’t I have a moue?” 

“I don’t know. I’ve been pretty much banished from existence until my recent engagement.” Tabitha flashed her ring in the light from the window of Mavis’s condo. “I’m not in a position to understand current authorial conventions in fanfiction.”

“That’s true. I’m glad you’re back, actually. I was getting tired of all the drama with Karl.”

“Drama? With Karl? My Karl? How do you have drama with Karl?”

“I’m supposed to be secretly in love with him.”

Tabitha trilled merry peals of laughter. “Oh God. Why am I trilling merry peals of laughter instead of laughing like a normal human?”

“I don’t know. Maybe our author has been reading attemps at Regency fiction. Or getting into the Denim Vodka.”

“The Denim Vodka doesn’t sound like a bad idea,” Tabitha smirked. “Wait a minute. Now I’m doing it, too. Why am I smirking?”

“Our author got tired of writing ‘said’, I think.”

“Now I really need the vodka. You?”

“I can’t. I’m pregnant.”

“Again? Isn’t that like the third time this month? Maybe you should sue the people who make your NuvaRing. Is Mikhail with you this time, or did you throw him out thinking you weren’t worldly enough for him?”

“It’s not Mikhail.”

“Karl? My Karl?”

Mavis hung her head in shame. “It wasn’t my idea. It wasn’t even Karl’s idea. One minute I was giving him an affectionate peck on the cheek to congratulate him on your engagement, the next minute my lips were on his and before I knew it, I was doing something called ‘deepening the kiss’.”

“Better than smiling/groaning/moaning into his mouth, I guess. But you didn’t get pregnant from kissing.”

“No, next thing I know I was on the kitchen counter and we were deepening something else.”

“On the counter?”

“Yes, and I had left a corkscrew on it, too. Ouch.”

“I can’t wait until some of our authors get older, gain a little experience, and see the advantage of mattresses,” Tabitha sighed. “We have a new one.”

“Sleep Number or Tempur-pedic?”

“Sleep Number with a memory foam top. So what are we going to do about the baby?

“You’re going to run me out of town. Wait, is that ‘you’re’ or ‘your’? You are going to run me out of town, I’m going to convince Mikhail that the child is his, and for about a decade I will tolerate a loveless marriage in which we have two more children.”

“Mikhail can’t count to nine?” Tabitha said off-handedly while trying to fit “Mikhail”, “Mavis” and “loveless marriage” into one coherent sentence. She gave up.

“It’s the accent. Accents automatically remove 15 IQ points. Unless they’re French.”

“How about if you tell Karl about the baby, I bow out gracefully, and Mikhail and I go through a few bottles of Denim Vodka and have drunken sex?”

“Suit yourself. Just so you won’t be too disappointed, let me warn you. He wasn’t joking about the hat.”

Girl at the End of the World

For I don’t know how long I have been seeing this picture on Patheos when reading the several blogs I follow there. It looked interesting, but I wasn’t particularly moved to read the book. 

Then one of the bloggers I follow on twitter retweeted something that sounded interesting from someone called Elizabeth Esther, and I began following Elizabeth Esther, too. I shortly discovered that Elizabeth Esther is the author of Girl at the End of the World, so I decided that if I could find it at the library, I’d read it. A trip to our library’s website revealed that yes, they had the book (2 copies), I could put a hold on one and have it sent to the library closest to me, and a few days later, there it was. Forty some odd years ago when I got my first (barcodeless, cardboard) EBR Parish Library card, I did not envision such efficiency. Now I’m looking forward to the day when a drone drops the book off at my door.

The book is a memoir of the author’s upbringing in an Apocalyptic church, one started and run by her own family. 

I was raised in a homegrown, fundamentalist Christian group—which is just a shorthand way of saying I’m classically trained in apocalyptic stockpiling, street preaching, and the King James Version of the Bible. I know hundreds of obscure nineteenth-century hymns by heart and have such razor sharp “modesty vision” that I can spot a miniskirt a mile away.Verily, verily I say unto thee, none of these highly specialized skills ever got me a job, but at least I’m all set for the end of the world. Selah.

This excerpt from the back cover sums up both the book’s content and the author’s breezy style, a style that covers a world of heartbreak. In one sense the book is an easy read: it’s written simply, there are no mind boggling statistics or difficult academic concepts to absorb, and it’s broken into short chapters. In another sense, the book is a difficult read, as books about abuse and suffering always are, especially if any of it happens to resonate with some of the reader’s own experiences. Rachel Held Evans described the book as, “the sort of book you plan to read in a week but finish in a day.” My experience was the opposite: I planned to read it in a day but had to keep putting it down because it got to be too much, so it took me closer to three.

Part of what made the book so difficult for me was that the author does not belabor her experiences. Her matter of fact style in describing what she went through (multiple daily spankings, being made to quit an after school activity she loved and needed to get into a private college because it interfered with her numerous chores at home, having a teacher question her science project because when she measured her resting heart rate it was over 100) more than anything she actually says conveys how the bizarre can seem normal when you are raised with it.

In the end, Elizabeth Esther was able to make her way out of the cult she was brought up in, find a new way of living with her husband and children, and even make peace of a sort with her parents. I find it interesting that for her, finding her way to the Catholic Church was part of her healing path. My relationship with my stepmother was a stormy one, but the one thing I am immensely grateful for is that she sent me to a Methodist church and not the Catholic one I had been baptized into. Well, that, and the whole saving my life thing, but it’s pretty much a toss-up in my eyes.

Fortunately, neither Elizabeth Esther nor I are tasked with selecting each other’s spiritual path, and her reasons for becoming attracted to Catholicism make perfect sense to me, even if it’s a path I wouldn’t have chosen. In the end, that’s what makes the book so heartening, the message that we can overcome childhood brainwashing (the author’s own term, from the Prologue) and look at the world through our own eyes. I do recommend reading the book, whether in a day or three or even a week. 

My Own Abbreviations

Things I write out the long way frequently online, and wish other people knew my abbreviations for:

ICBWAT - I could be wrong about that, mostly written when I’m sure I’m not.

IWBIWFU - It’s weird, but it works for us, needed since my husband and I are strange.

ETA: I suppose you could also use IWBIWFM - It’s weird, but it works for me.

YWNGTC - You would not get the chance, my (usually unspoken) response to IWHI, for I would hit it posts on TD. (Yeah, I don’t post much there anymore.)

WMYTYGTC - What makes you think you’d get the chance? See above.

So does anyone else have their own unique abbreviations? Feel free to add them in the comments.

It Rained on My Birthday

At least, it rained all morning long. Having just turned 67, I can be philosophical about rain on my birthday, but we had a lot of errand running to do, and the heavy rain made it inconvenient. We were going to go pick up my birthday cake and a few odds and ends at Whole Foods, and then go see Maleficent, at my request.

John thought there was an early showing of Maleficent, but it turned out that that was for Saturday only, as I found out after he dropped me as closely as he could to the theater before going to park the car.

He always does that. When it’s raining, he drops me off as close as he can to wherever we are going, parks the car, then braves the rain on his own. When we are done, he goes to get the car while I wait until again, he gets as close as he can to pick me up. He has done that for as long as we’ve been together.

So we decided to go see if the cake is ready early. As I waited inside the door for John to finish parking the car, I saw the fresh flower display. I picked out a combination to make myself a bouquet with, and when my husband found me there, I announced that we were buying me flowers. He didn’t argue over that, or the bag of mix and match cookies that I added to the cake, milk, and rosewater that we went there for originally.

The reason I am dwelling on the cookies, the flowers, and the rain is because ever since DWTS ended, I have had romance on my mind. Well, not so much on my mind, but it’s been on the minds of the young fangirls I hang out with on Tumblr, as they review every look, gesture, hug, and sentence that occurred between “Mavis” and “Mikhael” throughout the season. I frequently see things like, “I want someone who holds me like that” or “I want someone to tell me, ‘I don’t need you to be better. I need you to be you and I’ll do better.’ ” Sometimes it’s, “I won’t settle for anyone who doesn’t look at me like that.”

I appear to be the only one who gets an entirely different lesson from these last several weeks, the lesson that goes, “It has never occured to me to tell my husband ‘I don’t need you to be better. I need you to be you[rself] and I’ll do better.’ I bet he’d love to hear that.”

I’m not sure about the lovestruck gaze. I think if he caught me gazing at him like that, he’d assume I was having a neurological event and rush me to the emergency ward. But he might like it if I could at least refrain from rolling my eyes when he launches into another story about his latest day of dam inspections.

Of course, I have been on the other side of this situation: accepting crumbs and trying to convince myself that they were true love. I understand the younger ladies of my internet acquaintance who are shaping their views of what it is possible and reasonable to expect in a relationship. I’m glad they are determined not to sell themselves short just to have a man* in their lives.

I hope though, that life will broaden their views of what constitutes not selling themselves short. I may have to pick out my own birthday flowers at the grocery store, but I don’t have to wade through a rainy parking lot to get the car. My husband may not send moony-eyed looks in my direction, but he will do battle with my problems with only a plastic teaspoon, if need be.

So maybe I don’t need him to be better. Maybe I just need him to be himself, and I’ll be better. 

Or maybe we could both just be ourselves, because we seem to like each other that way.

*or woman, but I associate the kind of “you need one, so do what it takes to get one” thinking with advice pressed on heterosexual women. I could be wrong about that.

Hospitality

The ironclad rule of Southern Ladyhood Hospitality, or so I have gleaned from polling everyone that I knew would agree with me, is that if you really want to invite someone, whether to an event or just to hang out, is you do it yourself. You don’t necessarily have to send a handwritten note: a card, a phone call, even a text message is fine. Secondhand invitations, we all agreed, are out, even if they come via a close family member, like, just to use an example pulled out of thin air, a son.

Okay, in other, totally unrelated news: we had a visit from my son, his GF, and my steppish (to use my son’s term) grandson over Memorial Day weekend. They were actually in town for Neal’s stepmom’s family get-together, but they stayed with us because his stepmom ran out of room. They also extended their stay a few extra days to have time to spend with us. Yay! Having a four year old underfoot is more exhausting than I remembered from my days when I worked with them for half an hour at a time and then handed them back to their moms, but it was fun, too, and way too quiet when he left. I am just now getting to the point where I don’t hear the little one’s voice around the house and remember his shampoo and toothpaste smell.  We took him to the aquarium in New Orleans and to the local park, which has a Splash Pad, read a lot of books, and patronized a few local restaurants. We also had "quiet time" (a euphemism for nap time) at home, which Nonna needed, whether Ace did or not.

Four year olds are fun, if wearing. Like his coevals, Ace asks a lot of why questions. He also talks right over the answers, usually with another why question. My attempts to answer his questions were frequently punctuated by low-voiced utterances of “Mom” by my son, when he deemed my answers too complex, too abrupt, too God-knows-what, leading me to finally complain to my husband, “If that little brat doesn’t quit his whining, I’m going to smack him one. Thank goodness that at least the four-year-old knows how to behave.” 

One of the “why” questions I did not have a satisfactory answer for is why I didn’t go with them to Neal’s dad’s house to go swimming. When they first arrived, Neal told me that his stepsister had told him that I was welcome to come to her house to swim with them so I could spend more time with Ace. He understood why I didn’t feel comfortable with that. I told him I like his stepmother and stepsister, and to say I appreciated the offer, but that John and I also needed some alone time anyway, since John had just come in from an out of town trip and was preparing for another one.

Ace, however, did not understand why I didn’t just come along with them every time they went. I could hardly tell a four year old the real reason that I don’t want to be around my son’s dad, and it was hard to say no to meltingly brown eyes, so this rapidly became a small problem in an otherwise enjoyable visit.

My son finally admitted on their last day that Ace had been overhearing his stepmother keep telling Neal that he was welcome to bring us along with him to play in the pool, and that Ace had overheard. In addition to being eternal askers of “why”, four year olds are the original pitchers that have big ears. Don’t say anything in front of them that you don’t want repeated, and repeated, and repeated elsewhere.

Which reminds me: I did, despite my son’s lack of faith in my ability to understand four year olds, get to babysit for Ace while my son and his intended went out to dinner. I’m not sure of all of what I said to the little one before he finally fell asleep, but I bet it made for some merry conversation on the four hour drive back to Houston.

But at least I wasn’t there to hear, “Mom!”

Real Fiction

A long-time reader, lsn, left a comment on my recent post, The Hour That the Ship Comes In that reminded me of a recent conversation on Tumblr. 

First, lsn’s comment:

OK... there's fan fic about reality TV?!?

Oh Lord.
I honestly had no idea... I kind of get the reasoning behind fanfic about fictional characters, but writing it about actual human beings who are not in fact fictional characters no matter how much the editing does kind of is a bit... well, icky to me.

Now the Tumblr conversation. The first commenter has extensive interests (and over 1,000 followers) including WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment, an admittedly scripted form of wrestling in which the wrestlers, while real athletes, play characters. Grandma D would have been a huge fan.) I’m not familiar with the second person, but she seems to be another wrestling fan.

Person A:….are wrestlers fictional characters?

Person B:i’d say yes, generally. though it’s a question i find very interesting.the distinction is easier to make with some wrestlers than others. the undertaker, bray wyatt, and other similar characters are obviously fictional. at the other…

Person A:It always trips me up. Like, calling an Actor their characters is kinda rude and just plain weird. But then if you call a wrestler their birth name, that’s disrespectful.It’s kinda like you read my mind and put my thoughts in a post. Lol.

My response, which I suspect neither of them noticed, was as follows:

I don’t think real-fictional is a binary; I think that there is a continuum from real to fiction and that we all position ourselves at different points along it depending on who we interact with. So an actor playing a role is further along the continuum toward fiction than the wrestler is, but even the actor is calling on some of his/her real self in playing the part. (Shoot, some actors play themselves over and over.) I was present at a reading that Attica Locke (fantastic author, BTW) gave and she began by saying, “I’m going to be real”, and I thought “no, you’re not”, not because I thought she was lying, but because simply using the phrase reflects an awareness that we present ourselves in different ways in different situations, so she had to pull up “real” from the pool of potential personas, and how real is that, when you think about it? 

We all have ways of presenting ourselves that involve some to a lot of artifice, and we all recognize that other people have ways of presenting themselves that involve some to a lot of artifice.

So let’s take that idea further in dealing with lsn’s point, the ickiness of writing about “actual human beings who are not fictional characters.”  Actual human beings have been known to Google their own names and can easily find said fanfic, and might be a bit nonplussed to discover that their significant others have been vanished down a rabbit hole, their sexual orientations have undergone wholesale revisions, or that they are now either pregnant or about to be fathers.

We present ourselves with various degrees of reality/unreality, but we also see other people the same way.  To me, being able to see other people as being as real as ourselves, as the stars of their own lives and not bit players in our own, is the biggest task of growing up. I think we have all had the experience of working or going to school with or living next to someone that we see purely as a PITA, and then one day get that one glimpse or one bit of information that makes their behavior make sense from their point of view. I remember one summer working with two other therapists in a social skills group for teens. One particular young lady was causing me a lot of frustration with her constant talking and inability to stay on topic. Finally one of the other therapists told me that the young lady had recently been diagnosed with anxiety disorder and placed on medication, and was only now starting to talk in social situations at all. Oh! So the training wheels had just come off the bike and she was naturally still a little wobbly. I could deal with that. After all,  that was my role in the group in the first place, teaching conversational rules.

Sometimes our only way of knowing particular people is through them being presented to us as entertainment. We see them on television in reality shows that are carefully contrived and we read about them in magazines that are designed to entertain. So what we get is fiction, not complete fiction, but somewhere along that continuum between fiction and reality. The distinction between the person I call Mikhail and Jane Austin's Mr. Darcy is blurrier than the distinction between Mr. Darcy and the young man in the next seat in English class, or the teacher presenting the lesson. It’s one small step from fanfiction about Mr. Darcy to fanfiction about Mikhail.

And unless teen girls have changed even more than I think between my days in high school and now, one more small step from fanfiction about Mikhail to fiction probably not published on the internet about the young man in the next seat in English class, or maybe even about the teacher presenting the lesson. A girl can dream after all.

A girl can dream, and then write about it.