Yellow and Pink Think

 

Maybe little children make the best philosophers. William Steig may have thought so. “Children are genuine,” he said in an interview, and his much-awarded books for children deal with serious issues of life and death and everything in between: ambition, fulfillment, love, abandonment, family, restoration and magic. (Be careful what you wish for. Sylvester and the Magic Pebble) In 1984, at the age of 77, he published Yellow and Pink, one of his lesser known but, I think, most important books.

Yellow and Pink are two articulated wooden dolls who have just realized that they exist. In 28 pages, they pit their wooden brains against the great existential questions: Who are we? What are we? Where did we come from?

Pink studies the remarkable structure of Yellow and decides “Someone must have made us.” Yellow looks at the same evidence and insists they are too intricate for a creator. He’s never seen such a person, so he must not exist. “I say we’re an accident, somehow or other, we just happened.” Pink laughs. Being able to reach, turn, breathe, walk “just happened, by some kind of fluke? That’s preposterous!”

Yellow reaches for “time and chance” to explain the existence of sentient dolls. “With enough time—a thousand, a million, maybe two and a half million years—lots of unusual things could happen.” He envisions a walking guitar, an arrow-head tree, a snake with a goofy caterpillar face, a five-legged, four-armed creature with two heads. “Why not us?”

But Pink wants specifics. Yellow thinks hard about how legs might have come about. Ah! A chunk of wood fell from a tree and split on a rock. Arms, fingers and toes? After eons, a lightning strike forms them.  Eyes? Wrought by woodpeckers. Or hailstones.  But how do we see and hear through such holes? “Because that’s what eyes and ears are for, dummy. What else would you do with them?” says Yellow.

      Then, for a second doll, the process repeats, maybe over a million years, and produces the chubbier Pink. How he and Yellow got their colors is the next challenge. Each of them must have rolled through a puddle of spilled paint, yellow for Yellow and pink for Pink, with precise drops of black or white to make their buttons. Yellow changes the subject. “But why are we arguing on such a fine day?”

Most of Steig’s heroes (and villains) are animals in a fairy-tale world where children can marvel at Pearl the pig, Sylvester the donkey, Dr. DeSoto, a mouse, Amos and Boris, a mouse and whale, and even the ogre Shrek. Yellow and Pink stand out as not animals, but not exactly human either, though they deal with human dilemmas and related questions.

The punch line in the story is the appearance of “a man who needed a haircut.” He shambles and hums out of tune as he comes to claim the dolls. My guess is that this man is the fairy-tale version of Steig himself. Some old portraits online might be taken as evidence of his needing a haircut. I wonder whether he heard this from a wife, from time to time.

The book-man has a moustache, but a later photo shows that apparently by the time he grew a moustache, Steig had developed a shiny dome. Thin evidence, I grant. But he was a creator, and what he knew of the process of creation might well have inspired the questions of Yellow and Pink. He drew his characters boldly, just the way he wanted. But do they recognize him? Tucked under their maker’s arm, Yellow asks “Who is this guy?”

Pink doesn’t know.

If I had to guess which side of the creation- versus- accident debate Steig would come down on, besides his own creativity, I would draw on the dedication that precedes the story.
“To some recent arrivals: Jonas, Jonathan, Nathaniel, Max, Paige, Will, Serena.” Sounds like grandchildren to me. New little human beings coming into the world can make you think about the big questions. In a few years, they ask the perennial “Why?” And they insist on an answer too. Maybe little children are the best philosophers.

What Are You Wearing?

 

Homemade and hand-me-downs were the clothes of my youth, with the occasional new item from Sears. I never thought about it much until high school, where other girls (the cool ones, anyway) exulted in Villager dresses and Bobbie Brooks suits. Or was it the other way round? Didn’t matter. We couldn’t afford either one.

       I made my own wedding dress. When my husband started working for a company that staged big fund-raising banquets, I made a slinky blue nylon halter dress that held its own pretty well with the gowns for which the wealthy flew to Atlanta.

       Now a grandmother, having retired all the giant tee shirts and homemade maternity pants and having husbanded our income to a comfortable depth, I could probably afford any clothing that strikes my fancy. But the expensive designer outfits are striking something else.

       The last high-end mall fashion magazine that crept into our mailbox was filled with models who looked like heroin addicts draped in rags. The latest came with a New York newspaper. New York City! World fashion capital! Well—the models look a bit less desiccated, though we suspect a couple of the women might be men.

Facial expressions range from misery to a sort of hostile desperation. Didn’t models used to smile? Like they were happy to wear the lovely clothes? But the desolate faces go with the clothes. “You’d have to pay me to wear that stuff,” was my first thought. On further consideration, “You couldn’t pay me to wear that stuff.” Aside from the realization that many models appear to have forgotten their undershirts, the outfits scream, “I started with tacky and carried it to a new dimension.”

This is from Chanel. Chanel! They've gone from Coco to Coocoo.

I can duplicate these "shoes." I need only sweep up after the dog and scoot through with glue on the soles. Swiffer chic.  

When Mrs. Harris went to Paris, she wound up with a gorgeous, flattering gown. That was close to the year I was born. I'd like to buy something gorgeous, but I guess it's not happening in my lifetime. They may have to bury me in something homemade. I do have some extra fabric somewhere.                                                                                                                       

Baal, Right on Target

 

At last, the children who have all had to go naked since they stopped the alphabet-jumble-wheel on “DAWAALAINM” (Do Anything With Anybody As Long As It’s Not Marriage.) have a haberdasher in Taregret stores. Who can forget the kindergartener who tied her shoes properly for the first time, looked up, pumped her fist and cried, “I’ve got it, Parental Unit. I’m Queer! So I can’t wear these ordinary sneakers any more. Or any of the clothes in my closet.” Or the little person whose finger stopped on the third item on the children’s menu and announced, “Hey! I’m Gay! So my board shorts will simply not do. I’ve got to have a swimsuit that looks like a girl’s and has special construction to mash my wee-wee down.”

        Across the country, progressive, virtuous mothers shed a little tear and said, “Oh, my brave darling, I’m so proud of you. I must post this milestone on social media.” A hitch arose when the children shed all their sexuality-limiting clothing and were forced to go around naked. Enemies of self-expression refused to allow the unclothed children on their platforms, thus snuffing out the Actual Lives of these little heroes.

        “Oh, Baal. Oh, Moloch, anybody but that Creator guy, help us!” cried the mothers. The prayer trickled downward. The gods stroked their horns and thought.

        “Ooo, ooo, I’ve got it,” piped up Baphomet. “You know I’ve got a deal with this English guy who uses my image on tee shirts and pretends not to believe in Satan, but quotes him anyway? Because that way he can tell anyone who objects that they’re stupid morons for thinking he’s a Satanist? Hahahahaha.” All the assembly leaned on each other and guffawed until they gave a final squeak and wiped their eyes with their tails.  

        “That’s it,” bellowed Baal. “You get with him, and we’ll get Taregret interested. We already have an ‘in’ there, you know.”

        Thus was the prayer answered. At last there were complete wardrobes with a wealth of accessories for the DAWAALAINM. Naked no more, they could wait happily for the day when they could proudly show their surgical scars on social media. No longer would they be oppressed by the perfectly healthy conventional sex organs they were oppressively born with. Progress!

 

Festivus Comes Early in the Plague Year

 

Since I’m turning stinking 70 in the Plague Year 2020, and there’s no telling where I might be during the approaching Festivus, I shall start early with the Airing of the Grievances.

I was a Brain in high school. Not in the “in” crowd, not a cheerleader, never on Homecoming Court, never up on the latest fashions and not good at styling my hair. But could I ever ruin a “curve,” especially in English class. When we got test papers back, someone would ask the teacher, “Will you grade this on a curve?” She would answer, “Sorry, there’s no curve. Someone got 100.” And Harold Eastwood would roll his eyes and say, “I wonder who.” (This is not the grievance. I liked Harold, and his teasing was always good-natured.)

The grievance attaches to the NMSQT. Not an identity, it’s the National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test. Standardized tests never scared me, and I filled in those little rectangles with confidence. I did all right.

Then, at the end of the year, there was one of those ordeals they called an assembly. One of the school officials announced the thrilling news that a sophomore had taken the NMSQT and earned an honorable mention. Great news for our school, he intoned. Most sophomores wouldn’t even try the test, but here we had a brilliant, brave young man who not only took the test, but got Honorable Mention, something almost unheard of in the history of NMSQTesting, which is ever so challenging, and we can hardly believe we have such an achievement in our student body, and on and on. He ended with “Wealsohadawinner,DianaHeman.” I didn’t think anybody heard it. So, yeah, it was true, I was chopped liver.

At the end of the day, I was walking to my locker. A teacher stood on the little porch of her “portable” classroom. She was apparently the one person who heard that last sentence. She called out, “Congratulations.” I stared for a moment, thinking, “Yeah, sure,” but didn’t say anything. I regret that I was rude to her. I guess she has a grievance too.

Fugu Fugue, or Blowfish Blues

      No doubt in idle moments of Covid-19 quarantine, your thoughts have turned, as did mine, to this question: Are the blowfish that live in Florida waters the same as the fugu that are eaten with great ceremony in Japan? And now it can be told. Yes. Yes, they are. 

They’re all Tetraodontidae, which means they have four big ol’ teeth that can crunch through shells, and almost all have tetradotoxin, which, according to Cuteness.com (Really. Cuteness.com has lots of info about blowfish.) is more than a thousand times as poisonous as cyanide, and one fish-worth can kill 30 people. And my brothers and I used to eat the meat with some regularity. Well, maybe that’s not the best word. Frequency? Anyway, we ate it, and we lived.

            In Japan, chefs train for three years to be allowed to serve fugu. They learn to trim off the skin and scoop out the innards without puncturing anything. The poisonous bits get their own trash bowl. And people pay hundreds of dollars to eat slices of raw fish so thin they look smeared on the plate, or crispy fried chunks. A character in a novel I read said that eating fugu made the diner feel high, because he had skated so close to death and come through alive. That’s assuming he did come through alive.

          Here in Florida, you can hardly avoid catching blowfish in places like the Banana River on the east coast. The Air Force base where my father was stationed had a boathouse where officers could check out a modest fishing boat for free. Remember that phrase. When we kids were there for summer visits, he’d take us fishing. Fish were free food. We caught from angelfish to zebrafish. (At least that’s what we called them. They weren’t the cute little aquarium fish that turn up on a Web search.) And whiting. I think we had that right. They’re common and OK to eat. And, of course, abundant blowfish.

          As oldest sibling, my brother got the job of cleaning the fish at the kitchen sink. He snipped the tails into zigzag points or little scallops. And he got his fugu training. It didn’t take three years. It was, “Here’s the knife, here are the utility scissors, don’t punch a hole in the liver.” Three seconds maybe? The graduation speech: “Yes, it’s poison, but I think it will be all right.”

          The edible bit of the blowfish is two ovoid shapes on either side of the body, looking like chicken oysters. I had to look up the name, but chicken oysters are the yummy round bits in indentations on the back of the chicken, usually overlooked in carving. You can pop them out with your thumb, and do they ever taste good. The blowfish blobs are pale grayish and have a network of tiny veins on the surface. They taste like… frog legs, maybe. No matter how hard you try, frog legs do not taste like chicken.

          My husband’s family fished at every opportunity. They were probably within a mile of our boat on every outing. His father told them to throw the blowfish back. Then one day they were at the home of an alcoholic cousin who went about preparing for them, with his shaking hands, a nice mess of blowfish. My future father-in-law kept quiet, the boys ate the blowfish, and everybody lived.

          Fugu still kills a few hundred people in Japan each year, supposedly because of uncertified rogue chefs. I guess they charge less. But you wouldn’t eat their fugu any more than my adolescent brother’s or my husband’s alcoholic cousin’s. You wouldn’t, would you? It’s been 60 years since I ate Banana River blowfish, and I feel like running out to get my stomach pumped. The thrill of having avoided death is way overrated. Anyone for a burger?

The Florida February Farm and Fetch Workout

It’s February in Florida, and time to get in shape with the Farm and Fetch workout.

Attire: Drag out that purple sweat-wicking workout shirt. You gotta wear it some time, you big faker. Leave the casual skirt on. It’s too much trouble to change into workout pants, because who knows which drawer they’re in anyway. Slip into Xtratuf rubber boots, which seem to be well-enough thought of in the rubber boot community to command a list price of $85, for crying out loud, but you would only buy on super-double-clearance-closeout on Sierra Trading Post. And work gloves, because your pansy hands wouldn’t last five minutes. Straw hat; it looks authentic.

Equipment: Three or more overgrown raised garden beds, which you really should have cleared out and planted in January, or at least covered so they wouldn’t have quite so many tenacious weeds. A solid garden rake, the new one you bought when that hardware store went out of business, because the one that’s older than you are snapped its handle in two right where it went into the tube-ish bit on the rake head and you’ll be darned if you’re going to scrape the rotten wood out around the rusted screws. A bucket. I think there’s one out there. A dog, for whom Fetch is the greatest good. A toy that used to be red canvas but is now a blob of slobber and dirt. (I told you you needed gloves.)

Moves: Smack the rake down into the dirt and pull. After five seconds, pick up disgusting toy where dog has dropped it at your feet and is now bouncing about like a drop of water on a hot griddle. Throw as far as you can without putting it over the fence where the unpleasant neighbors live. Rake for ten seconds while dog lopes back with toy.

Pull out astonishing mass of green sprouts and roots and drop into bucket. Throw toy. Rake. Pluck. Throw. Rake. Pluck. Throw. Repeat until right shoulder burns, and you know you’ll be hearing from it tonight. Survey beds and decide it’s not too bad. Tell dog, “One more throw, and then we go in,” which she understands and agrees to because, boy, is she tired.

Recovery: Get inside, get something to drink. Sit down at computer to write up a report, and do it right now before every muscle in your body seizes up entir

Fire and Lutefisk

Winning souls for Christ with fire and sword was the strangest concept I wrestled with during my Road Scholar trip to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. (Except for some of the unmarked, two-handled shower controls. Inscrutable.) A book they told us to read, The Northern Crusades, had me hollering down the corridors of time at the founder of the Cistercian order of monks, “Bernard, what were you thinking?”

     Bernard of Clairvaux. You picture him like this, right? Humble. Saintly. Give him points for writing about loving God because of Who He is, and for reforming the monastic movement, but he also wrote the book on how soldier monks can knock the (literal) demons out of pagans so as to prepare them to hear the Gospel. Wherever crusaders might go, he said, they should fight the unbelievers “until such a time as, by God’s help, they shall be either converted or deleted.” Um.

     Bernard wrote the rule book for the Knights Templar, of Holy Land crusade fame, and the Teutonic Knights adopted pretty much the same constitution. The Teutonics started out as a small group in Palestine. Then some German nobles decided they needed their own version of the Templars and started enriching the humble hospitalers with cash, castles and property. Just in time, they had a trained and disciplined army ready to subdue the pagans, and, oh, by the way, take over some new territory to the east. A bishop or two spoke up: “If they had come to strengthen the Christian faith… they should do so by preaching, not by arms.” Well, yeah, the Bible says a thing or two about that. But the Pope said go, you’re official crusaders, and your sins will be absolved.

     The conquests are a long story. Some of the “missionaries” went full Old Testament on temples of scary four-headed idols, tearing down the statues, chopping and burning what were by all accounts beautiful buildings. But they brought the Good News: join our church, or we chop your head off. On occasion, the pagans chopped and burned them right back.

     Now Latvia and Lithuania are mostly Roman Catholic, and there are churches all over. The tour guides who show them to you still say, “Christianity came to us with fire and sword.” And Estonians say, “We are the least religious people in the world.” I couldn’t decide whether that was a boast, a joke, a neutral fact, all of the above? The country is nominally Lutheran. I’d go for the coffee and lutefisk over the death threats too. Well, maybe not the lutefisk. But I vote for doing things the way God says in His Book. More potlucks. Less mess. And maybe a faith that’s more than nominal.

    

The Stones Cry Out

     Why is Soviet architecture so ugly? On a Road Scholar tour to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, I saw a lot of it, and, boy, is it ugly. When the USSR had control of those countries, they plunked these bare concrete boxes down next to variously colored and ornately decorated homes and shops from previous centuries which have kept their charm. Not that baroque is exactly my cup of kvass, but it’s fanciful and ebullient. Earlier styles have symmetry and decoration. Soviet brutalism (the perfect name) is not fanciful or ebullient. It’s the wet blanket of European architecture.

     In Tallinn, Estonia, they’ve tried perching super-modern glass enclosures on top of the brutish concrete. My personal jury is still out on that technique. Points for effort. In all three countries, they’re working on renovating the depressing structures to make them more attractive. It takes a lot of time and a lot of money and, no doubt, a mighty effort of the spirit.

     I asked my fellow Scholars, “Why is Soviet architecture so ugly?” A couple of the engineering-minded men opined, “It’s cheap.” The Soviet occupiers wanted to make their presence known for as few rubles as possible. And a woman added they didn’t do any maintenance either; they just let things rust. All of this made sense, but something else still whispered on the edge of my awareness.

     Then I got a chance to visit with a Lithuanian friend of a friend. He kindly drove me around the city of Vilnius, saving my poor tired feet and giving me a different perspective. So I asked Egidijus, “Why is Soviet architecture so ugly?” He answered without a pause, “Because they reject God.” The pieces dropped into place. The human ability to create and appreciate beauty is a gift from the One Who made us in His image. Gazing on beauty may nudge our thoughts to the sublime and get us thinking that there is something, Someone, higher than the state. And if we’re building the Soviet Man, we can’t have that, can we?

     The brave and beautiful Baltic countries have come a long way since throwing off Soviet rule. May they have all success in covering the lumps and scars with beauty. And may they know whence comes their help.

Fort IX

     Outside Kaunas, Lithuania, the bus turns down a fairy-tale lane where leafy branches brush the windows on both sides. The lane opens onto gentle green hills as smooth as a golf green, looking softer than down. The setting calls for picnics and kites and curly-haired babies taking first steps. But to the left is a concrete sculpture that blasts from the earth in three tall jagged sections. I can’t make sense of it and must turn my eyes away.    

Our guide leads us to a dent in the earth, too large for a ditch, not quite a ravine. It is covered with the soft green grass. At the far end is a brick and stucco wall, pocked and scarred in patches. Perhaps from bullets. This is Fort IX. 

     A paved plaza is lined with memorial plaques, one for Russian soldiers and many for the Jews, the 50,000 people killed here. The city of Munich acknowledges with shame and mourns the thousand Jewish citizens who were sent to this place to die. Their plaque is a blue mosaic riddled with black lines like cracks.    

     Time to look at the fortress built into a hill by the Russian Tsar’s army for a garrison. At first, it has an image of Old World charm, a pink wall and a red brick enclosure with green-roofed turrets. But when you get closer, you see the barbed wire. When the Soviets came, they used it as a prison. When the Nazis came, they made it a death camp. 

     We learn that one Japanese diplomat stood for humanity by issuing visas to allow Jews to escape. Some Lithuanians hid their Jewish neighbors. Others turned the Jews in and helped to murder them.    

We have read the memorials and looked into the depths. Now we turn to face the sculpture. It roars and rages, masses of arms and fists and furious faces, jagged, frightening, overwhelming. Like the memory. Like the truth. It stabs upward through the grassy earth and shrieks at the sky. In a beautiful world, men still work evil.

     I don’t see any birds, not even a pigeon or a piebald crow. There are flowers, though, along the paths, under the fences, tiny wild ones like purple clover and Queen Anne’s lace and bright yellow flashes of some brave little blossom. Small, but alive. Small, but real. Innocent and beautiful. Thank God. We drive away, brushed once more by the green leaves.

Long Live the Kings

     Little green anoles used to be all over our Florida yards. Young persons were known to catch them and persuade them to bite onto their earlobes, where they dangled like earrings. What can I say? We didn’t have cable. Anyway, they were cute. But lately, dirty Commie brown anoles from Cuba have crowded them out. Supposedly, the green ones can escape to a higher level of shrubbery, but the brown ones EAT BABY GREEN ONES, the dirty stinking cannibal Commies. But even worse, they eat monarch butterfly larvae.

    Really. While people all over North America are cultivating milkweed, because that’s the only thing monarch larvae will eat, and paying money to be certified as Official Monarch Inn and Spa Way-Stations, ugly anoles are scoping out the milkweed and puffing out their nasty orange double chins while they wait for the microscopically tiny monarch larvae to hatch from their pinhead-sized eggs, crunch down the egg shells and fatten themselves up on milkweed leaves just enough to be interesting to ugly brown Commie anoles.

     I fumed when I learned this. I had monitored the milkweed pods until they popped open and ran like a crazy person to stuff the seeds into my pocket before they floated away on the breeze. Have you ever tried to peel hundreds of seeds’ worth of that floaty stuff that sticks to fabric like its life depends on it out of a shirt pocket? Well, have you?

     I devoted a whole raised garden bed to milkweed, planted scads of seeds and sang to the sprouts and stroked their little leaves. OK, I didn’t do that, but I did get sweaty. Monarch butterflies fluttered over the house and plunged like dive-bombers into the milkweed patch. I found eggs. I rejoiced at the sight of teeny-tiny stripey caterpillars. And they disappeared. Dirty Commie anoles.

     Enter the single-wide camper’s box mosquito net. If little kids can hatch monarchs in one of those net cage thingies, then surely I could do it on a larger scale with this thing. I hung its metal corner rings over bamboo sticks cut from the corner of the yard where we can’t get rid of the stuff. Bamboo takes over the world, in case you didn’t know. Don’t plant bamboo. Clipping shoots is a pain, but sometimes the sticks are useful. Like for hanging a box mosquito net.

     I had to kill many milkweed bugs before I sealed the net around the bottom with bricks. They are orange and black, and they lay little yellow eggs by the squillions, and they gobble milkweed. Commies. But the bed has been covered for a week or so, and today I spotted five big fat monarch larvae on the milkweed leaves. Do the chrysalis thing, little guys. Give me that thrilling marvel of Creation—or next year you can plant your own darn milkweed.

The Pleasure of Your Company: A Fable

If you think your sexuality is for nothing more than screwing, that you can and should make it with any guy who looks good in jeans, or buys you a drink, or several, or even if he says “Let’s move in together. Who needs a piece of paper?” and if a baby comes about, it’s nothing more than an inconvenience, something to flush, or to have pulled out and tossed into the medical waste bin, your heart gets colder and your soul emptier with every sex act and every abortion. Then, when someone dares to call it wrong and begs you to consider the life of the child, you shriek like a banshee. You’ve devoted yourself to a devilish lie, and you can’t bear to hear it contradicted.

When you refuse self-control, commitment, and the gift of new life, you are standing in the alley eating from the dumpster while someone stands on the doorstep and calls to you, “No, that’s just scraps, a poor imitation of a feast. It’s dangerous. Look how filthy it is. The real dinner is inside, at the table. Please, leave that and come in.”

“There’s nothing wrong with what I’m doing. It’s what I choose. You just want to control me. You want me to sit at a table and use a knife and fork? Stupid outdated rules,” you say.

“But there’s something so much better, the beautiful banquet with all the courses, so many flavors and colors, you can hardly imagine. There’s a seat for you,” says your tormenter.

“It’s MY F---ING DIGESTIVE SYSTEM,” you shout. “Not yours! Not the government’s! I control it. It’s my right. You can’t tell me what to do.”

Eventually, the person on the step gives up. She goes inside and closes the door behind her. But she doesn’t lock it.

Tee Shirts for Life

          My seventh grandchild is in the works. Seeing as how darling daughter has slimmed down considerable since the last production, I get to seek out bargains in maternity clothes for her. Size zero. From my outpost in 12-14 land, that looks like no size at all. Hahahahahaha. Sorry. But it did mean some way-low clearance prices on classroom-acceptable duds from one major merchant when the teensy size was the only one left. I clicked in triumph.

          On a whim, I searched “maternity” on a discount website not especially known for clothes. Up --or out-- popped dozens of tee shirts with baby room and all sorts of designs. The cheesy: sprays of flowers and variations on the word blessed.  No. Lots of colors with “due in (month)” to answer the common first question, and plenty announcing boy or girl for the second question. Others I read over again, asking, “Did they put that on a shirt? They did put that on a shirt.” Among the milder texts, I did snort over “I just wanted a back rub” and “It’s all fun and games until somebody gets pregnant.” Didn’t buy them.

One that I did buy.

          Then came the peek-a-boos: image of a zipper with baby peeking out. Girl babies, boy babies, twin babies. White babies, black babies, Asian babies. Jedi baby. Army baby. Even a mooning baby. Cute. Funny. And in a natural, incidental, even accidental way, powerfully pro-life. Somehow, in a day of 4-D sonograms, surgery in utero and medical advances that save tinier premature babies than ever before, there’s a movement to insist that the little creature in there is not a baby. “Noooottt a baby,” as one tweeter contended to me. This cultic dogma calls itself “science” while it stubbornly ignores all logic and evidence of the senses. Evidence, schmevidence, you gotta believe.

          But, still. Ordinary people with brains unwarped by PC death-worship (I’ve been called a “fetus-worshipper.” So, nyah.) and its sacrament of abortion know perfectly well what’s growing in that pregnant woman. Moms and dads know it. Grandparents know it. Little kids know it. Designers of tee shirts know it. I think somewhere deep down in their twisted, dark little doctrinaire souls, defenders of abortion know it. They just don’t want to look.

Handling the Sword

The Bible calls God's word "living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart." (Hebrews 4:12) Ephesians 6:17 mentions "the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God." Given that, shouldn't we expect the pastor of a church to have a pretty good handle on the word of God? Or at least to know which end is which? If you grab a sword by the wrong end, you might get cut. Well, here is a Methodist minister in South Africa making a proclamation based on a Bible verse. It says "Jesus was the first to decriminalize sex work. John 8:7" The group that happily posted a video of the scene works to "decriminalize" prostitution. Not to rescue women from it or to discourage the practice, but to make it legal. And this pastor claims to have found that idea in the Bible. Here's the verse: "But when they persisted in asking Him, He straightened up, and said to them, 'He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.'” 
     Problem. This passage is about a woman caught in adultery, not prostitution. The mob wants to stone her to death on the spot, never mind a trial. They are operating outside the law. Jesus' beautiful solution is to ask the one who is without sin to throw first. They are not so far gone that they deny their own sinfulness. When they slink away, Jesus tells the woman He will not condemn her, but ends with "sin no more." Few seem to want to quote that bit. 
    Jesus forgives our sins. (Thank You. Thank You. Thank You.) He can do that while maintaining justice because He took the punishment for sin on the cross. He expects us to quit the sins, not to go our merry way, pounding in a few more nails. 
     "Not many of you should presume to be teachers, my brothers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly." (James 3:1) And Matthew 18:6, “If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea." 
     Whether you believe the Bible or not, you have to see that John 8 has nothing to do with the legality of prostitution. When a "pastor" uses it to promote a sinful practice, to tell women that there's no sin in selling their bodies for sex (and apparently no blame for the customers either), he is certainly causing them to stumble. He will face judgment one day. The one Who truly is without sin, the one Who is the living Word, will teach him just how sharp is the Word of God.

The Latte Bowl

     I won the hideous holiday outfit contest at a

party, so I got to go first in the present exchange. The voters went for the burgundy and gold tulle ribbon bow in my hair, pink-circled cheeks, striped shirt of fuchsia and  pink, forest green sleeveless jerkin, red belt, red capri pants, brown Fair Isle patterned tights, red and teal striped socks and red sneakers with huge jingle bells tied to the laces. Hideous. But I got to go first in the present exchange. 
     It was one of those in which you may unwrap a package from the gift table or steal something that someone else has opened, thus allowing nice Christian people to indulge in coveting and theft. But if you go first, you also go last and can excise from the whole collection. First I snagged a pretty candy jar and a "latte bowl," both of the Pioneer Woman brand. "Anybody know what a latte bowl is?" Shrugs all around. But it was a handy size and had a microwave lid. I liked it.
     Somebody stole it. 
     I opened a set of TV speakers. What corner of the warehouse were they in that they met the $10 limit?
     Somebody stole them. 
     I got a bag harboring a chocolate coin, a little Tupperware bowl in a leopard print (say what?), a "lump of coal" candy wrapped in black, and a can of hair-remover. Nobody stole that. 
    Last turn was mine. I studied all the goodies, but none supplanted the first. There in the hands of a sweet young thing were the jar and latte bowl. I took them back and handed her the maligned bag. She said,"Ohhh, grrreat." 
     Only dimly aware that latte is a type of coffee, I Googled. A blogger related a visit to a coffee shop at which he was served a latte in a bowl. A latte bowl. You can find them all over second-hand shops, he said. I had a brand-new one. Ha! But what exactly is a latte? 
     Espresso-- pressurized coffee-- mixed with warmed milk and topped with foam. I happen to own a cute little Italian moka pot. I even had a package of espresso-ground coffee with instructions in Italian. Check. Now, the foamed milk bit. There are battery-operated milk frothers out there. They spin a little loopy coil to foam up the milk. To the hopelessly unhip, they look ridiculous. Figuring that clever people must have made lattes before that invention, I took stock. My eyes lit on a salad-dressing mixer-- a plastic jar with a blade thingy and screw-on lid. It would have to do. 
     I fired up the moka pot, poured half a cup of milk into the mixer jar and shook it madly. The volume doubled, so I supposed that was foam. The moka pot burbled its last drop, and I poured  the brew into... a different bowl. It had seemed like a good idea to microwave some steel-cut oatmeal in the high-sided, Ree Drummond-endorsed bowl, but when they say to use high power, well, they lie. The hard-won official latte bowl was still in the dishwasher. A rice bowl volunteered. In went the espresso, the warm milk, and, by golly, foam. Voila, a latte, made by me in my very own kitchen. Pretty darn good, too.
     

What does Starbucks charge for a latte? I figure this creation cost less than 50 cents. And, of course, my last shred of dignity, but that wasn't much anyway. Just listen to my sneakers jingle as I take another sip. Ahhh. Delicioso. 

The Best Part

    There's this thing called "referred pain," and it's not the best part of anything. Yeah, it's the kneecap that's broken and has the scary incision over it, but swelling and displacement and, I don't know, perturbation of the humors makes other bits hurt. I refer to my manifestation as the shin splint from hell. Moving the leg up and down can trigger it. Pulling the brace up when it slips down the leg can trigger it. A therapist bending the knee ferociously can trigger it. Even stretching in bed can trigger it. And if you have a dream in which you are sitting against a wall, and someone tries to steal a valuable knife that's down by your side, and you kick him with the left leg, which in the dream is fine, does that ever trigger it. Boy howdy. First you wake up and think, "Ow. Bad idea." And then you think, "THE FRONT OF MY SHIN HAS SPLIT WIDE OPEN AND WHEN I TOUCH IT I'M GOING TO FEEL A BLOODY MESS." Only the leg feels perfectly solid and dry. It just hurts. Like the shin splint from hell. I mean, the incision was pretty bad the first couple of days, as though periodically filled with lighter fluid and set aflame, but that wore off. A mere bit of prickliness remains. Referred-pain killer shin splints linger on, gradually a little less groan-inducing.

How it feels

How it feels, II

       But then there's the friend who brings you an orchid plant and a couple copies of The Enquirer (yeah, I read 'em) and offers to get groceries, even though she has to go to two stores because inventory hasn't recovered from the hurricane. And another stops in with food, empties and reloads the dishwasher and takes the dog out to the yard to play fetch, a one-woman band of elves. There's the young dear who's busy with her own life who sets up an online bring-a-meal list and goes first. And here come the comfort foods: lasagna, meat loaf, shepherd's pie (we almost fought over the last serving), an unusual chicken stroganoff (for which I must have the recipe), homemade Cuban picadillo with rice and black beans and the thinnest, crispiest tostones ever, and lentil soup and beef and vegetables and brisket and pork roast and a chicken and tomato dish worthy of a French bistro. And breads and salads and fruit and chocolate chip cookies and bourbon-laced brownies. (Yes, sir, gotta love them Presbyterians.) Couple of restaurant gift cards too.
    I am strict about exclamation points. I edit them pitilessly from all church publications. The aforementioned organizer of meals knew she was taking a chance when she emailed that it was no problem to arrange help because our church people love us! She used exclamation points! I didn't mind a bit! I love them too. And that's the best part.

The Middle Part

    They didn't bring me dinner in the hospital because there was a slim chance I could go for surgery in the morning. No one was sure because of Hurricane Irma. Once it got late enough that the staff knew I wasn't on the schedule for Sunday, my nurse scrounged up some chicken noodle soup in a styrofoam cup and a very plain sliced turkey sandwich in one of those clear plastic triangular packages. Hunger truly being the best sauce, I savored every bite.
     There was a hurricane out there somewhere, but up on the seventh floor in that sturdy building, there was little sign of a storm. My bed faced away from the window, so I couldn't watch the clouds, or even take it very seriously when they rolled my bed as far from the window as possible because of a tornado warning. My survival instincts fixed instead on getting somebody in here with a bedpan stat. (I never actually used the term "stat," but it sounds ever so imperative.) Imperative was the word of the night, since I'd been forbidden to drag myself to the bathroom. This is distressing to a person who has given birth four times, is under major stress, and is... old. So, sorry, adoring public, but that was my focus while Irma did her worst outside.
       If I'd been ambulatory, I might have seen the staffers of all kinds that I later heard were bunking down in offices and break rooms to make sure there would be enough nurses and techs and transport people to run the place the next day. Did I mention how thankful I am for modern medicine? And extra thankful for the people who do things like that to make sure little old me is taken care of? I told one of the nurses, "You make me feel like I'm the only person in the hospital." She smiled. "That's the goal," she said. I learned later that a staffer or two had been perfectly happy to stay where electricity was guaranteed, as opposed to their hot, dark homes. I don't care. They're still noble.

    Sunday morning, I was still on the no-food list, so nobody brought breakfast.

There was mention of oatmeal, but the promise was washed away with the storm. Fortunately, there was plenty of oxycodone. I seem to remember some sort of fairly edible lunch. Then, good news: no dinner for you. Because you're on the list for surgery on Monday. After non-breakfast, the surgeon came in and initialed my left leg with a marker. It was on.
     I wish I had more to say about the operation, but all that registered was being rolled to the surgery staging area, where the most interesting sight was the man across the way. He had a beard like you can't imagine: rolling masses of variegated gray surging across his chest from shoulder to shoulder, Lear's limerick brought to life. "There once was a man with a beard/ who said, 'It is just as I feared./ Two owls and a hen/ four larks and a wren/ have all built their nests in my beard.'" Gotta love the classics. Then the nice anesthetist came along and poured some oblivion into my IV. Next thing I knew, I was back in my room with two screws in the kneecap and a couple of wires stretched over it to keep it in place.
     I was starving. I told the nurse that back in my baby-having days, we got apples and freshly baked cookies in this very same hospital. She brought me some more chicken noodle soup in a styrofoam cup and a turkey sandwich in a clear plastic package. And a packet of mayo. When darling daughter's family came to visit later that afternoon, the nurse brought in a stack of graham crackers. So that's all right. The little guys wrote and drew adorable get-well notes on construction paper. That's a whole lot better.

The Worst Part

     The worst part of slipping in a puddle of dog urine when a hurricane is near and breaking your kneecap in two is... um, that. Hurricane Irma was due in Orlando on Sunday, so on Saturday I was going to get all laundry and dishwashing done and turn the ripe bananas into banana bread, all the things that require electricity, before the storm struck. I was hustling a stack of shirts back to a bedroom when I located the latest dog puddle. The Amazing Shelter Dog had been suffering an infection that made her forget her house-training. Feet flew up, head and elbow thumped against youngest son's door, and knees went into a swan dive with a one-and-a-half twist. My bottom went smack into the puddle.
     As menfolk emerged from respective rooms, my hand flew to the painful spot, felt round bone off to the left of where it belonged, and squeezed it back into place. Still felt worst pain of my life. Hollered. Hubs called 911, and we mopped up as much dog pee as we could with paper towels. When EMTs arrived, they couldn't fit gurney into the hallway, so bundled me into a carrying chair of some sort, lifting the leg as gently as possible. I hollered some more.
     Turns out the best way to get from this carrier to the gurney is to hoist yourself, while an EMT transfers the leg. "Last time I did this," I said, "I was in labor. It wasn't any fun then either."
     The worst part of being hoisted into the ambulance was feeling the soaking wet skirt, now cold under me, and thinking I would leave a wet imprint on the sheets. Focused on the hubs tail-gating the ambulance. "Is that your husband?" one of the EMTs asked. In the Winter Garden ER, they gave me a shot of morphine. The worst part of morphine is that it sends a creepy sort of tension up the neck and through the jaw, and the pain relief only lasts 15 minutes or so. The doc ordered X-rays, and in rolled a portable unit, so I could remain in my puddle while they detected the worst of the news: kneecap was broken into two separate pieces on the horizontal. Quad muscle attached to top half and tendon attached to bottom half both gave their halves a good, strong, dislocating tug. Whee. Must transfer downtown to where the ace surgeons are. When a room becomes available. In the meantime, got a steel and canvas brace strapped onto the leg. Worst part of that was, I couldn't kiss the hand of whoever invented the thing. Keeping the knee still was better than morphine.
     Hey, a room is available. Call the transport people, who haul me onto their gurney on the damp sheets. "One, two, three." At least no one can look askance at the wet spot. Riding backwards in the big ambulance was disorienting. They might have been driving me anywhere through the great masses of gray clouds, but they pulled up to the Florida Hospital door and trundled me in, through lobby and hallways, into elevator, up to seventh floor where all the busted legs go to await the sawbones.
     Had any nurse ever before heard a patient beg, "Please oh please, put me in one of those drafty, embarrassing hospital gowns"? Well, this one did. I have to admit, the gowns have improved. They actually extend across your rear, and you can tie them at the side. Could have been worse.
To be continued. 

What She Was Made For

     Many a nature film has showed me lions bringing down an antelope or wolves selecting and devouring the slowest caribou, so suppose I was as well prepared as any child of the suburbs. And yesterday my dog Tiger Lily leapt repeatedly at the porch screen, snapping her considerable jaws, until a trespassing dragonfly lay on its back on the sill, one leg twitching its last. In fact, it had only one leg. Tiger Lily couldn't know that I really like dragonflies, with those huge glinting eyes and iridescent wings. An intruder is an intruder. She has even barked furiously at the little windows next to the front door until we realized she was protecting us from the scary dried starfish whose alien arms stuck out beyond the top sill. 
     Today she caught a squirrel. She walked out with me and my bag of eggshells and banana peels to the compost bin. I was about to set the empty bag aside and get ready to play some fetch when she dropped her shredded, filthy knotted-rope toy and dashed at the big oak in the rear corner of the yard. A squirrel skittered up the trunk, as usual. Then a second one appeared. Lacking wit to climb straight up, it ran around the trunk, only a foot or so above ground, with Tiger Lily right on its tail. 
     We're pretty sure Tiger Lily is a Catahoula leopard dog. They breed them, a mix of many, in Louisiana to rout wild hogs out of the swamps. Her body shape is somewhere between a boxer and a greyhound: big chest, tiny waist, long spine. She's very fast, strong and smart. She likes people better than other dogs, and she has the brindle pattern common to the leopard dogs, in her case a tawny base with distinct, black tiger stripes. And I can easily picture her bounding through the bayou, snapping at the heels of a hog. 
     For this chase, she kept a tight radius, and, as the squirrel slowed a little on maybe the tenth circuit, she grabbed it and flung it onto the grass. Pounce, grab, shake. When it flies loose, nudge it to see whether it's playing dead, which it did a time or two, then tried to run. It didn't get far. 
     I did hope she wouldn't go full feral and try to extract its liver while I fetched the shovel. She stood guard over the corpse while I dug the deepest hole I could manage and restrained her instincts while I slid the shovel underneath, noting the teeth marks and slobber in the grey fur. Covered it, tamped down the soil and picked up her fetch toy. Normally, when she returns it to me, she shakes it until I have to say, "Yeah, I think it's dead, girl." For this session, she brought it to my feet and dropped it. 

Eyes Quit

     Yesterday I spent an hour in a torpedo tube with a  jackhammer, a pile-driver and a woodpecker. MRI. It stands for Major Ruckus Inside. I got through one round of the Lord's Prayer before I became the mother in Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron. (Short story. Read it.) Halfway through, the tech slid me out to stick a needle in my arm. Vein collapsed. Switched to back of the hand. She extracted the needle when the hand started to swell and sting, but enough stuff ran in for the necessary cranial chiaroscuro. Can't wait to see the proofs.
     Keeping eyes closed during the jaunt was easy, because my right eyelid hardly opens at all, and the left is at half-mast. Two fun things are careening along side-by-side: blepharospasm and double vision. A while back, my vision suddenly doubled. While I was driving. Doc said it's common with age. (Stinking age.) Corrected it with prism lens in glasses. A year later the double vision doubled, needed twice the correction. Made him nervous. Tested me six ways to Sunday, found nothing organic, but referred me to specialist to make sure I had no bugs in the brain.
     All this time, I'd been alarming friends and family with almost constant squinting, made worse by stress. One solution, Botox, said the doc. Needles around the eyes? Um, no. But the specialist couldn't bear to watch me blepharospasming, he said, when he knew Botox could help. Nowhere near as horrible as I imagined, he and his assistant assured me. Finest needle in existence, smaller dose than cosmetic use, placed differently. No plastic face. No sweat. Seven sticks per eye, two in upper eyelids, were about as much fun as you'd expect, but Lamaze breathing got me through four childbirths, and it got me through this. Then he ordered the MRI and blood tests to spot any cysts, tumors or chips inserted by aliens to cause double vision.
     By evening, I had fever, abdominal cramps, pain across my back, nausea and general misery. About 2 a.m., I thought to ask Siri "what are side effects of medical Botox?" (She says "bottocks." Heh.) And there they were: fever, cramps, back pain, nausea, general misery. Drooping eyelids too. That started a couple days later as the first delights started to fade.
     Called the spec's office. No, no, no, said they, nobody ever gets side effects like that from this application. No patient ever has. Droopy lid isn't unheard-of, but it should be better in a week. Four days later, joke's on you, the right eyelid is lower than ever, and the left opens only halfway. I think I look like I've had a stroke, but the hubs says I only look drunk. Hey, that's a relief.
     In another couple days, the spec should have the MRI results. He will also get an earful-- an eyeful?-- about side effects.
     

Faults in Our Stars; Faults in Ourselves

     Michelle Malkin and friends explode in mockery over Katy Perry (a singer) seeming to suggest "no borders" and "co-existence" as answer to terrorism. "No!" shriek KP fans. "Listen to the whole interview!" I did. She was mostly incoherent about "fanbases" uniting and not being nasty to each other on Twitter-- I think-- but it was in response to a question about the bombing of an Ariana Grande (another singer) concert in England. So, MM was maybe too quick to ridicule, but it wasn't all that far-fetched, given the context and KP's use of heavily-loaded terms like "no borders" and "co-exist." Verdict: both wrong.

     Meanwhile, some are lambasting Ariana (the singer) for failing to dash to the hospital to comfort injured fans while condemning Islamist terrorism. Why does anyone think she would have anything useful to say beyond "This is horrible"? And are patients and their families sitting there asking "Where the heck is Ariana?" And just why, exactly, does anyone look for cogent political, religious or sociological analysis from people who sing and prance around in odd costumes for a living? And why do such people keep trying to give it?

     Mean-meanwhile, others berate Demi Lovato (a singer), who was accused of the sin of "cultural appropriation" for wearing her hair in dreadlocks, only they weren't dreadlocks, but they're still mad at her for failing to thrash herself with sharp barrettes over the very possibility that she might have ever even allowed the notion of dreadlocks to enter her fashionable head, and of course she wouldn't because that would be just intolerable. My head hurts. Maybe my cornrows are too tight. Anyway, a disillusioned fan illustrated what the problem is with all of this. He said Demi's flippant response was rude to "fans that rely on you to provide them an up-lifting attitude to the world." Good grief, lad, she's a performer. Provide your own attitude. 

     I recall really liking the Moody Blues. Eric Clapton. Smokey Robinson, both the Beatles and the Stones (there were militant camps back then). I might have nodded sagely to Buffalo Springfield and "There's somethin' happenin' here; what it is ain't exactly clear..." They could be pretty deep, man. But relying on any of them for anything more than cool music would have been dumb.

     It was also dumb for people to burn piles of Beatle records (those flat, round, vinyl things) after John Lennon said, "We're more popular than Jesus." At the time, I thought I got his point. Teenyboppers were much more likely to scream and proclaim their adoration at Beatle concerts than at church. He wasn’t claiming to be better or more important than Jesus… but he probably shouldn't have said it. And certainly no one should ask.