Our Children's Expectations

“I know what makes evil in the world,” my five year old announced for no reason apparent to me.


“Really what?”


“One day somebody made a mistake and didn’t tell.”


Our goal was to raise our children “Catholic without the guilt” and she had not yet heard the word sin from us, but her imagination often took her to places of wisdom, and on this day she defined “Original Sin” for me.


In the aftermath of the Tucson shootings, the media has been attempting to find reasons that will stop our grieving. I’ve listened to pundits both left and right analyze political conversations as far back as the death of Alexander Hamilton at the hand of Aaron Burr to explain and/or justify the collective/individual American psyche which celebrates free speech that may or may not lead to violence because while one may not "falsely shout Fire in a crowded theater", one may carry a handgun into it.


I’ve listened to conversations about mental illness that attempt to explain the complexity of our brains but still leave people believing that “if only someone had done something” maybe the tragedy would not have happened.

"We should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children's expectations," the president said at the memorial service for the Tucson victims.

Thirty years ago my daughter set the bar very high.

“Try to do right.” ‘Fess up when you’re wrong.”

What I Read on My Summer Vacation

While visiting, we picked up

Kearns on the Double by Eamon McCarthy Earls

Kearns is Bill Kearns, a postman turned detective turned journalist who lives and works in a quiet town in Central MA in 1920. I am privileged to own a signed copy because the author is my sixteen year old cousin. Eamon used family legends and traditions to build his characters, but this is not a family memoir. Eamon clearly did his research and captures the era for his readers (intermediate school) as well as Richard Russo did for adults in Empire Falls. Read together, one journeys through time from a hope filled immigrant mill town just before the Depression to the despair of post-industrial America. I like Eamon’s perspective better.

As we traveled we listened to

Blasphemy by Douglas Preston – Buried beneath land rented from Native Americans, scientists are prepared to go to the center of the atom, but as they get closer, a voice they believe to be God’s begin to speak to them. At the same time, a fundamentalist preacher is manipulated into calling the experiment the beginning of Armageddon, and the Native Americans realize their land will no longer be theirs if the experiment succeeds. The triangle of conflicts led to conversations on the relationship between faith and science, and lots of guesses, whenever we stopped, which wasn’t often, as we were held spell bound by Scott Sowers reading of this novel.

Ender’s Shadow by Orson Scott Card read by a full cast.
Ender is Ender Wiggin of Ender’s Game, a science fiction novel found on high school reading lists as a complement to Pride and Prejudice. We know from the beginning of Ender’s Game that he is being trained to save the world at Battle School. Ender’s Shadow is the story of Bean, a street child, who talked before he was one, and solved moral dilemmas by age four, who discovers when he is sent to Battle School that if Ender cannot accomplish the task, the responsibility will fall to him. Ender’s Game is a story of a child sorting out internal conflicts through action. Ender’s Shadow is a story of self-discovery through logic and analysis. As we listened, I imagined which book would be the better introduction to the series for my 12 year old relatives. Each stands alone, and together they challenge adults to appreciate the whole of a child, and encourage young people to question, question, question, and to trust their own answers - Maybe the families will get the whole set.

Library books read in the comfort of the RV
Shades of Grey by Jasper Fjorde
Chromatica is a world where the strata of society is defined by color and one must do as commanded by anyone above your color in the spectrum. Defy the authorities and you are punished … or worse. One can move up, of course – Red marries Blue and voila, Violet. The Greys are everyone’s servants/slaves. Our protagonist is Eddie Russett (a red of course) who, in an attempt find out how Jane (a grey) moves in and out of places she doesn’t’ belong, discovers the rigidity in the rainbow and the colors of his heart. Fjorde’s fantasy world is populated by the absurd, and at first feels too contrived, but when one trusts his imagination, one’s own is opened to the possibilities in our world, which is why one reads, is it not?

Day After Night by Anita Diamant – Set in the Atlit Internment camp , a “holding place” run by the British in Haifa for Jews entering Palestine after WWII, we learn of the Holocaust and the dream of Israel through the eyes of four young Jewish women imprisoned there. Diamant does not preach nor embellish the day to day lives of the women. She just imagines four of six million points of view and through their memories, or denial of them, we learn what it means to find hope grounded in a reality most of us will never experience, and we begin to understand what it means to begin again.

And “Beach Books” found at campground book exchanges
Los Alamos by Joseph Kanon (suspense) Minor in Possession by J.A. Jance (murder mystery)

Sabbath for the Gulf Coast

“It is the end of the world as we know it.” With this statement, made on Day 31, my daughter, a resident of the Gulf Coast, brought the oil spill up close and personal to her New England family. Her ability to approach and resolve challenges with humor and vision is legendary, but her words were void of both. Her cousins were silent. Their children looked to their mothers for comfort. To ward off nightmares, theirs and mine, I asked “Given that what you said may well be true, what is the world we want to know?” We talked of “Green Energy” and “Organic Living”, but on day 70+ of the disaster, I have yet to find comforting answers to my question.
The President quoted a priest who participated in the blessing of the fleet in LA a few weeks ago. “The blessing is not that God has promised to remove all obstacles and dangers. The blessing is that He is with us always,” a blessing that’s granted “even in the midst of the storm.” In that spirit, I've made a commitment to celebrate our Sabbaths with a sense of gratitude for the gifts of creation, and to abstain as much as possible from the use of petroleum product on Sundays. Art’s response? “That means no TV or Computers, but I’ll do it if you will.”
Check out this site to see what else we’ll try not to use on Sundays - http://www.ranken-energy.com/Products%20from%20Petroleum.htm
And please let us know if you’ll join us.
Peace and good_________,
Beth

The Kumquat Festival: Or how another industrial town maintains its identity despite a half century of economic challenges.

Dade City FL

January 30, 2010

A Florida Project Adventure

The Kumquat, a native of China and not quite a citrus fruit*, is about the size of a grape and packs a tart or sweet punch depending on your choice.(Nagami = tart, Marumi= sweet). After a not so long drive through Florida’s Green Swamp, we ate at the Kiwanis booth - hotdog or hamburger with all the fixings plus fries and a drink for 6 dollars. We were served by H.S. athletes, working under the Chief Cook/ Athletic Director, helping out their little brothers and sisters (all the money raised at the festival would go to the elementary school for playground equipment).
The streets were crowded with vendors – arts and crafts mostly - but we’d come for the kumquat jam so we headed straight to the Kumquat Growers Association Booth. Good thing too, as a downpour sent us to the car and, as it was early in the day, a trip to the Pioneer Florida Museum & Village, a mile away.
We expected to see history from the 1800’s when the Homestead Act gave land to pioneers (We thought they all went West, too!) instead, we found what is left of a train station and the memory of a bustling company town of the 1950’s. While Art played engineer on the 1913 Porter-Steam Engine, we chatted with Tom, the volunteer Stationmaster and discovered the history of an area that centered on cattle and citrus. Trains that once ran 24/7 as 6 lines from Sanford to Tampa to Lakeland to Miami, criss-crossed an area as big as New England, mostly stopped In 1989 when a deep freeze sent the citrus industry south and the many packing plants in the area closed. In our two hour visit, two coal trains, one empty, one full, heading to and from the Tampa Power Plant, reminded us once again that the United States is not just the name of our country, but the reality of our lives. We also again realized how large the state is (The Green Swamp Preserve is 173,000 acres in only 5 of Florida’s 67 counties) and how rich its history. Hence – our Florida Project. Our goal – to visit at least one festival or state park monthly so that we will learn and love Florida’s history as much as we do our home here. We invite you to share our journey on Roots and Routes.
(Words don’t do the museum justice. Check out our pictures on http://therami.shutterfly.com/)

*The Kumquat was re-classified as a member of the fortunella genus – cousin to citrus – in 1915.

La Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver - a Review

Violet Brown, the narrator of La Lacuna, Barbara Kingsolver’s latest novel, is the kind of faithful person I wonder if I am. She is loyal to her employer who becomes her friend and defends him beyond death as he is caught in the tide of anti-communism that flowed from the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the 1950’s. Her employer is Harrison William Shepherd, whom we meet as quite a child of the streets in Mexico in the 1930’s, naive to the political intrigue that surrounds his life, cook to Lev ("Leon" Trotsky) friend of Frieda Kahlo, son of an American Government worker and Mexican beauty. He begins his adult life in the United States when he accompanies art work from Kahlo and her husband, the muralist Diego Rivera, to the United States. After working as a protector of American Art during WWII and a short stint as a Spanish teacher, the success of his first novel, set in long ago Mexico, gives him the freedom to stay at home and write. The irony of the freedom to stay confined is subtly reflected in Shepherd’s dry, voice, a voice the reader clearly hears because the author is so, so, good at her craft, but that draws no empathy from the reader. He has become after all, an adult who has chosen to shut himself away, never discussing the only freedom he ever allowed himself - that of swimming in La Lacuna, an underwater tunnel when he was a child in Mexico. In the end, we remember that time. We remember that there is always hope if one waits for the tide to change, but not until we fully empathize with Violet Brown’s dilemma – whether to let written accounts of Shepherd’s life define him or let the world know the soul of the man by publishing through the journals he’d kept since childhood that she had not destroyed when he’d asked.
In Violet Brown, Ms. Kingsolver has given us an honest, hard-working, woman whose passion for the good comes through her conversations with Shepherd. Her idealism doesn’t blind her to the darkness Shepherd faces as the insidiousness of the politics of the early 1950’s overtakes their lives (and the novel.) “You are a poet, Mrs. Brown,” he says as he acknowledges the truth in her advice while choosing not to heed it.
My advice to you, dear reader, is to stick with this novel as it slogs through a very difficult time in American History. While Ms. Kingsolver comes close to proselytizing, the lesson to be learned is deeper than how fear controls politics. It is one that speaks to the power of fidelity and it is not learned until the book is closed and we say, “Wise choice, Mrs. Brown.”

Science Fiction Gives a Moral Compass

When I was eight years old I read a folk tale that said anyone who could kiss her elbow would turn into a boy. A middle child, and the only girl, I found the concept intriguing and practiced for days. In the same story collection, I met King Midas, I imagined myself his daughter, and then her mother. I was Pandora. I was hope. Myth, legend, folk tale, and fantasy rolled into one in the genre Science Fiction I discovered in my twenties. The science behind the fiction made it possible to trust the questions I asked of myself (and everyone who’d read the books along with me). Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, Frank Hebert’s Dune, and Issac Asimov’s I, Robot inspired this flower child to seek community, work for justice and accept that while evil is a reality, humanity can choose to create a good that will survive it.
Now the children of the 60’s are approaching their seventies and their Science Fiction has morphed into apologia. In The Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood allows her personal despair about the lack of international Climate Change policy and technology without regulation to color her characters with a shallow, dark pen. The “flood” is a pandemic brought on by a virus developed by corporations in order to sell the cure. But the virus is not the only gene alteration we discover in this future. Technology has changed the balance of the planet and the only ones who seem to care are religious cults that warn of the dangers, but live in isolation. By making her protagonists religious eccentrics, Ms. Atwood offers those of us in the mainstream world little hope for change or motivation for action. And there is much: for those reading this review who would like to take action, GOOGLE your faith community name and ecology. I found over 200 sites organized by Catholics.
Catholic stories of saints and martyrs also formed my conscience, which may be why I recognized the spiritual quest in Stephenie Meyer’s Host. How strong is your Self? How strong is your commitment to those you love? Would you be willing to let another being reside in your brain in order to bring peace to the world? What if that meant never loving your family again? For Melanie Stryder, our heroine, the answer is obvious. Love and Self will not give in, so the peaceful alien who invades her body works with her. This intriguing novel gives the reader the opportunity to debate questions of life, death, love, commitment and wisdom with as many moral twists and turns as the caves in which the protagonist finds her family. Theirs is not an easy journey – anyone ever faced with a moral dilemma knows how confusing conversations in one’s own head can be – but Ms. Meyers gives us balance and opportunity in her characters and a romantic adventure as well.

A Blessing for Jackson

A blessing for Jackson

Light upon you
Light before you
Wisdom holds you
Firmly, open

Breathes the life
Of those before you
Gentle men of whom
You’re one.

Truth. Courage.
Faith. Compassion.
Weave the fabric
Of your soul

Threads of sorrow
Will pass through it,
Yarns of Laughter,
Lift it up


Stories told
At Grandma’s table
Where we sit
This quiet night

While I hold you
Gently open
Welcome, Jackson
To the light.

Written in memory of Kevin and in celebration of Zak and Scarlet