Things Come to Pass

In the summer of 1975, I was working in the young adult department at the Hyattsville Branch of the Prince George’s County Library. I was pregnant with my daughter Dawn. It was hot. I could barely get my feet in my Dr. Scholl’s sandal.

Things weren’t going as smoothly as I would have liked. My father-in-law was really pissed off about our choice of name for a daughter—Dawn Elizabeth. My mother felt that I had betrayed her by on ur asking my mother-in-law to come for the baby’s birth. And my father was angry that we hadn’t asked Mom to come. I was trying to complete a district-wide photo contest for teens and finish up other projects that I was responsible for. And it looked like the baby might come early [NOT].

I was sitting in the YA area at the branch with my feet propped up on a chair to see if I could get some relief, when a friend tiptoed into the area, put a small piece of paper on the desk, and slipped away.

I picked up the paper and discovered one of the most soothing sayings that I had ever read—“Things Come to Pass, They do not Come to Stay.”

If you know me, you know that is my life’s mantra [along with “Fear Not Tomorrow, God is Already There”].

My friend Sally Thurston had heard the saying at an AA meeting the night before and knew I needed it.

I felt instantly transported to a cool glade in the woods next to a high waterfall, and I could put my feet into the stream.

Dawn was two weeks late. My mother came the week after she was born. And the two sets of parents continued as good grandparents.

Sally Thurston died this week, alone in her apartment. I heard this afternoon, and wonderful memories are seeping in as I try to deal with her passing.

There is a huge hole in the universe this week where the one-and-only Sally once was.

I'm Back

I have not written since last July at the time of Dick's mother's death. When I recently looked at my journal, I realized that I had written almost nothing in 2011.

I finally made the connection that the grief of the past several years had taken a much larger toll that even I admitted. There have been nigglings at the back of my brain that it is time to start writing again.

A young woman by the name of Rachel Held Evans has gotten my attention. She is an Evangelical lay person who writes a blog about various Christian topics. Most recently, she has done a couple of postings about women's issues in the Christian church.

In her latest, she took on Jon Piper, a Baptist minister who is revered in many fundamentalist circles. He wrote this week about the Masculine nature of the Church, or as he put it "the Masculine Feel of the Church".

I have been in the Episcopal Church for 32 years. I am a Methodist PK, and when I came to TEC, I felt as if I had come home to Wesley's church. Women had been ordained legally three years earlier, and I found the "new" prayer book a beautiful blending of the old and new liturgies. I hadn't been in the trenches for all of the preceding warfare; in fact, I only heard stories about the zebra trial liturgies and the knock-down drag outs of the female clergy battles.

I did face my own battles for women in those days, and I will always be grateful that I did. [And I will write about it in another post.]

Rachel's posts this week, and the responses to it, have been a real wake up call for me. At almost 65, I haven't taken on too many battles for feminism lately. I have been surprised to hear younger women vehement about not being feminist. Two of my friends who are former military nurses are also vehement about not being feminists, and yet, their attitudes and actions belie that. I think it is the label they resist.

So folks, heads up--Beth, the pushy Yankee female, is back.

I am going to post several items over the next few weeks from my own experience. I can at least add some of the stories from the earlier generations.

3:45 in the morning

NOTE to SELF: Large latte at 2 pm is BAD idea.
Since 1 am last Tuesday, our lives have been on other folks time tables. Since last Wednesday we have been in sleeping in a strange bed  [Hampton Inn's].
Dick's mother died Tuesday morning, and the funeral was Friday.
Until last night's 11 o'clock news, I had successfully blocked out the chaos of US politics. But we are listening to the book, Citizens of London, which is about the Americans in London prior to the United States declaring war in Dec. 1941. The US did not enter the war until after Pearl Harbor because Republican isolationists from the Midwest controlled Congress and public opinion. The US and Roosevelt were happy to let one tiny island attempt to fend off the advancing savage by itself. British citizens endured nightly bombings and severe rationing of food and clothing, while Congress insisted that Britain was exaggerating its plight and need.
Congress could not understand that the United States of America, the land of milk and honey, was a world citizen, not a world unto itself.
Sixty years later, the US Congress again does not understand that the United States of America is not just a world citizen, but for now, we are expected to be leaders in that world. The American debt ceiling is our private affair; it is about US taxes and spending. It has nothing to do with world finances.
George W. Bush took a healthy economy, lowered taxes for his wealthy buddies and corporations, started two wars, and left the country with enormous moral and financial debts. He used the excuse of a single attack on the United States that killed a few thousand people to engage in a war essentially based on his own need to avenge his father who had been threatened by one country's leader. He left the American people with a deficit in the trillion dollar figures. I had never heard the word trillion used before another Republican, Ronald Reagan, left the US with a 10-digit debt.
We are a selfish, self-absorbed nation that suffers under the illusion that we can have it all  without paying for it. We have a grid-locked Congress that cannot see beyond the next election and definitely cannot see beyond our own borders  [we are building a fence to protect us from our southern neighbors].
The world is filled with despots and tribal leaders who maintain their power by slaughtering thousands of people; large parts of the world have been living with drought for decades and trying to exist with very little food and water. But only one despot was worthy of an all-out American war, he happened to control a lot of oil.
We are going to be away this September 11, and I am so glad because the US will go on and on and on about how we were wronged one day 10 years ago.
I enjoy the niceties of the United States, I am happily married to a man who is very well off and has provided that his children and I will be taken care of financially. Our house is paid for, and we have the luxury of not having to work. But I fully understand that we are the privileged class. And  although I am not ready to sell all that I have and give it to the poor, I do want to share generously.
It is now 4:30, and I am still not sleepy, and I will pay later today for my stupidity of yesterday, but I am so glad I have gotten some of my frustration and anger out. It has been seething inside, and I cannot speak freely of it.
Listening to Citizens of London has once again made me aware of how selfish and self-centered we Americans are.

When is a check not a check--or this is the 21st century

Many years ago, someone told Madeleine L'Engle that the signature on her check didn't really matter, that tellers looked only at accounts and amounts. Flabbergasted, Madeleine tested it out. She wrote a check and signed with a name from literature. No questions asked. She felt like a nonperson, someone who wasn't even a name on a check. In the ensuing days and weeks, she had a grand time with all her favorite characters--one day she might be Elizabeth Bennett, or Alice in Wonderland, or Charlotte Bronte, or Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She eventually went back to being her honest self--Madeleine L'Engle.

In the meantime, some banks got smart and started asking for IDs or comparing the signatures with electronic file copies of signatures.

Today I discovered what I consider to be a 21st century equivalent.

I admit I am a dinosaur; I still write checks for groceries, clothing, prescriptions, etc. Two young men in the family have made it clear that they resent standing behind someone in line who is writing a check. Some day they will be dinosaurs of some sort, and this current generation will die out. Until then, be patient guys.

I was at the grocery store this afternoon, and I had a bill for $37.15, so I wrote a check for $67.15. I signed the sworn statement that I had money to cover the check and if not I would pay some outrageous penalty. The clerk handed me my receipt and the postage stamps I had bought. When I asked about my $30 change, she looked at the "check" receipt and the grocery receipt. Both read $37.15, but I was holding a canceled check in my hand that was clearly written and signed for the amount of $67.15.

She told me nothing could be done about it; the amount on the "check" receipt had been debited from my account. I could go buy something else and write another check  with the $30 extra. She also said that her keyboard was sticky [right, I have a bridge to sell you]. When I went to the office desk for help, a pleasant young man said the same thing, but he was willing to take a check for $30, without my buying anything.

I stood there staring at my check and the various receipts in total disbelief. Not only was my check a non-check, but I had just discovered how easy it would be to steal from my account.

Friends regularly send me emails that are looking back lovingly on another, better time, or they are casting aspersions at the current state of the world. I usually don't read them; nostalgia isn't very helpful in the present. It can be fun and memorable, but we are living here and now.

However, experiences like this make me look back and wonder whether the new electronic age is all that it is cracked up to be.

Signed,
 A Friendly Dinosaur