Choose This Day

     If you chop up the stuff you put in the compost pile, it disintegrates faster. I’m pretty sure this applies to human cultures too. How many ways can we divide people up? Black vs. white? Male vs. female? I guess the barriers are nothing new. Buffalo Springfield sang a long time ago about “battle lines being drawn.” And there’s sure enough been some rapid decay.

     A while back, I saw it pretty vividly in the beating heart of middle America, the package pick-up department at Sears. A man’s T-shirt dug a fetid trench with its picture of two voluptuous blondes in bikinis perched on the sides of a boat. A caption praised the boatmaker’s “twin screws” and opined that “Two screws are better than one.” Next to the man stood his little daughter, about three or four years old.

     Feeling rather sick, I turned my eyes to the lone clerk on duty, who was having a tough time with customers who didn’t quite grasp the system. He asked a woman about her vehicle, and she stared blankly. “Car? Truck?” he said. “Something to carry your purchase in?” Finally, she caught on and led him out the door.

     On his return, he walked around the room and asked the rest of us for our receipts. He got another blank stare from a man standing near the warehouse door. The man finally said he didn’t have a receipt, but he was here to pick something up and that his wife had talked to a lady. Was there a lady in there? The clerk explained that he was the only one around, and he could not bring any goods out without a receipt. The customer was sure he didn’t need one. He wanted to talk to “the lady.” The clerk repeated the necessity of a receipt. Finally, the customer exploded in profanity. “Ah, ____ it!” he shouted. “I tried to get the ____ing thing Thursday,” and on and on. He complained and cursed his way out the door. As the clerk backed through the warehouse door, he looked at me, shook his head, and said, “Some people.”

     Soon he reappeared with my picnic table on a dolly and rolled it out to my waiting van. He was working hard, and drenched with sweat. As he hefted the table, I tried to think of a way to encourage him. Brows crinkled in sympathy, I said, “I’m not mad at you.”

     He burst out laughing and nudged my arm. “That guy sounded like that rapper, that Tupac Shakur.” He was still laughing as he returned to the store. I was left to ponder some facts. The man with the filthy T-shirt was white, maybe late thirties. The man with the nasty mouth was white, probably in his fifties. The clerk was young and black. And even-tempered. And wise. A middle-aged white lady, I admired him for seeming to recognize that the dividing lines here were drawn not between black and white, male and female, young and old, but between decent and indecent, mannerly and crude, considerate and selfish— one might even say human and anti-human. I was happy to think that we both had rejected the foul and degrading and stood on the side of God’s law: Love your neighbor as yourself. Maybe more of us could give it a try.

What's for Lunch?

   More than twenty years ago, I found myself in a Pizza Hut at lunch time.  Ordinarily, I would not choose Pizza Hut for lunch, but, waiting for LensCrafters to finish my new glasses, I had first tried a Subway where several people stood at the counter while the sole worker complained loudly into a telephone that he was alone in the store, and there was no way he could do a special order. He was still complaining into the phone when I gave up and left. I was tired, hot and pregnant, and so hungry and dehydrated, I dragged myself to the first available alternative. Like a good Presbyterian, I figure there is a reason for everything, and I think I was driven to that Pizza Hut to observe a remarkable scene.

     Over my enormous pebbly plastic tumbler of ice water, I watched as two women entered the store and sat down together. They wore smart outfits which suggested they must work in an office, maybe an insurance broker’s, or a bank. The waitress who greeted them and took their orders was rather a raw-boned creature with bleached-blonde hair pulled back a little too tight from an angular face. She gave the ladies their drinks and brought their lunches. The two ate and headed back, I suppose, to the office.

     So what? Well, one of the office workers was white, and the other was black. The waitress looked the part of a redneck. And it was all perfectly ordinary. That was the remarkable part to me. Remarkable, because I was born in 1950, grew up in Florida and remember the lunch counter sit-ins of the Sixties. Black students, dedicated to non-violence and human dignity, sat at “white only” lunch counters in “five and dimes” in several cities and asked to be served. Occasionally, they were, but sometimes they sat all day.

     In 1963 came a low point of cruelty, a high point of courage, and a turning point in the movement. A mixed group of black and white sat at the lunch counter of the Jackson, Mississippi, Woolworth’s. Refused service, they stayed and waited. This group was soon pressed by a mob of young white yahoos with rolled sleeves and cigarettes. Not content with screaming insults, the young men began to anoint the sitters’ heads with sugar, ketchup, salt, mustard. This made the news. There’s a well-known photograph of the young heroes and their tormentors. I think this image made many people see the inhumanity of racism and the nobility of the movement inspired by Martin Luther King, Jr. It had that effect on me. Thirty years later, I compared that tension to the ordinariness of the lunch scene in front of me. I called down a blessing on the brave pioneers and on these three women. How ordinary. And how splendid.

All God's Children Got Dancing Shoes

     People of different races can’t possibly understand each other’s lives, I’ve been told of late in discussions surrounding the George Zimmerman trial. You’re a racist! You’re illogical! How can we possibly be friends? Perhaps by being brothers and sisters.

     It’s thirteen years ago now, but our church held a hoedown in the sanctuary, disguised for the evening as a barn with pumpkins and hay bales. A professional caller taught us square-dance moves, line-dance steps and traditional reels. (I myself am hopeless at line dancing and get dizzy when swung.) Beaded belts and boots, silver collar tips and gingham dresses whirled about the floor.

     My friend Mariela, who comes from Colombia, had decorated her straw hat with bright flowers. I told her it reminded me of Minnie Pearl. Crystal, from Taiwan, got thumbs up for her plaid shirt and jeans. Claudio, a transplant from Chile, got teased for hailing from western South America. Rose, a tall, dark, elegant African in a denim shirt, danced with her French husband. He knew minimal English and didn’t understand the caller, so they often wound up in the wrong place, but always with big smiles on their faces.

     A teenage boy picked up one of the bandanna- bedecked toddlers and danced with her. During a reel, each pair of dancers raised their hands in an arch for the rest of the dancers to pass under. When two tiny girls took their turn, one of the big men got down on hands and knees to crawl through.

     The caller, the real thing in his tall hat and assertive belt buckle, took a break from explaining steps and teasing the square that somehow wound up with three sides to tell us a story. “Once upon a time, a bunch of wonderful people came to Pine Ridge Church. That’s it,” he said. We cheered.

     Later, I said to Rose, “You’ve experienced some real American culture tonight.”

     She replied, “I love it. I’ve never done anything like this before.”

     Soon I realized how much we both had said. Until the multiculturalists hacked America into hostile, competing groups, each asserting that our oppression is worse than your oppression, the United States was a place where everyone could share an ideal of constitutional government and equality before the law. We’ve had plenty of missteps and failures, sure, but most of us could be nudged toward fairness by an appeal to the ideal. That’s why the civil rights movement succeeded in spite of the dogs and fire hoses.

     The church also offers unity around an ideal. Our pastor points out that people were divided into separate tribes with different languages at Babel. Then they were reunited at Pentecost when the Spirit of God came to live within His people, and those who had come from afar heard the praise of God in their own languages. We’re all cousins, the Bible reminds us, and there is no room for racism in the family. By faith, we gather at the cross of Christ with absolute equality.

     As our society fragments, this message ought to be shouted from the rooftops. Here and there, people are living it. What do you say? Want to dance?

Good Dog

     I was talking to a pair of adorable missionary girls at my daughter's front door when grand-dog Sirius decided to check them out. He pushed his big black head out between my leg and the door. His head reaches well above my knee. I am not a short person. One of the girls said "Oh!" and stepped back. Sirius has that effect on people.
     My son-in-law from Wyoming wanted a big dog, and he got one. Sirius is a combination of German shepherd and rottweiler. A grandson and I came up with a name for the breed: shepweiler. (I've discovered since then that people do use that name for the combo. It can also be used as a Yiddish insult.) The dog has a chest that could bump cows into place, a broad black back, and a long tail that's practically a deadly weapon. (Kind of like his breath.) He can stand under the dining table with his head in one diner's lap and his tail knocking the person on the other side out of his chair.
     If someone climbed through the window with ill intent, I do believe that person would depart without his face. Yet Sirius is also one of the sweetest creatures I've ever met. When his masters produced their first child, Sirius immediately became the baby's protector. My co-grandma came to visit and reported that when she walked around the house with little Edward in her arms, Sirius shadowed every step, eyes riveted on the little bundle. The boy is now four, and he hugs Sirius, lies on Sirius, kisses Sirius-- even tries to ride him. When the dog's had enough, he just walks away. When I come to babysit, he wags and wiggles and begs to have his ears scratched. He rolls onto his back and uses his enormous paws to hang onto my arm and keep me scratching. I love the big lug. 
     There's a new member of the pack, a baby girl for brother and dog to look out for. Sirius has sniffed her thoroughly, and I look forward to seeing him adapt. He loved big brother, though he was forbidden to lick him. I have seen him sidle up to baby Edward in my lap, ease his head close, and whip his tongue out sideways for a quick kiss. I'm guessing he will be the same with baby Chloe. He seems to want nothing more than to patrol the house and make sure all is well with his charges. During a party, he was sent to the back yard. Someone had left the gate open. Sirius made his escape-- and ran directly to the front door. "Freedom, schmeedom, I want to be with my people." Good dog, Sirius, good dog.

Bygones

     I dredged up my high school German to translate the words on a stained-glass window in a Protestant church called Martinskirche in Langenau, Germany. Just after Christmas in 2005, I was there to chaperone the Orlando Deanery Boychoir and Girls Choir on their Prayer for Peace International Tour. While the children rehearsed the evening's concert program, I studied the window in the 400-year-old building. A list of names cascaded from ceiling to floor. A date followed each name, 1916, 1917, the First World War, the "war to end all wars." Among the names were the words I translated as "They gave their lives for others."
     Nearby, more names were painted on a wall. This section was dated 1939-1945. A wreath stood in front with a banner that read, I think, "We remember our dead." In my mind, I had to peer around the horror of Hitler, but finally it struck me: these people reacted to the loss of their soldiers in exactly the same way we react to the loss of our soldiers. And this day, grandchildren of their enemies had come to sing to them. The choirs sang carols in German and traditional church songs in Latin. They sang American spirituals with contagious enthusiasm. They sang "Prayer for Peace," written especially for the choirs after Sept. 11, 2001. It asks God to protect us from evil and to strengthen us to stand for what is right. 
     The tour was meant to extend a hand of friendship to the people of the Czech Republic, Germany and Austria. It seemed to work. The audience of dignitaries at the Ambassador's Concert Series in Prague (where men with dogs and pistols swept the room beforehand) demanded encores. One was a carol in the Czech language. They sang along. At an informal performance in Munich, I saw a woman singing along with the lovely Latin round "Dona Nobis Pacem," which means "grant us peace." Another woman leaned toward us choir moms and said, "They are wonderful!"
     In Vienna on New Year's Day, an American deputy ambassador heard them sing on an outdoor stage and followed them to the cathedral where they sang for a mass. Afterward, he told them that his job was to present the best of American culture to other nations, and that they had done exactly that with their singing. In the Martinskirche, though, there was something more. A reporter who covered the concert for the local paper noted a "spiritual dimension" that made the performance "intensive and expressive."
     When I told the story of the window and the wall of remembrance to a friend at church, she said, "We all come together at the foot of the cross." That was it. In Langenau, they read the Bible in German, but they learn the same truths, and they serve the same Savior. In this place of humility, we could all recognize our own flaws and reach out to one another as human beings in the name of Jesus Christ, even if there had been hatred and destruction between us in the past. We offered our music, and we held out our hands.

Whole-hearted Evil: Kermit Gosnell

     They say he joked about the size of some of his victims. “Big enough to walk to the bus stop.” They say he kept the feet. Cut them from the bodies and preserved them in jars. Trophies, I think, like the head of a deer, or the skin of a Jew stretched onto a lamp shade. At the trial, he smiled. Found guilty of three child-murders, he seemed surprised. Too evil to be real. But real.

     In Perelandra, by C. S. Lewis, the character Ransom wakes one morning to the discovery of the body of a colorful little frog, crippled and left to suffer. “The whole back had been ripped open in a sort of V-shaped gash, the point of the V being a little behind the head. Something had torn a widening wound backward—as we do in opening an envelope—along the trunk and pulled it out so far behind the animal that the hoppers or hind legs had  been almost torn off with it… He told himself that a creature of that kind probably had very little sensation. But it did not much mend matters.”

     Ransom follows a trail of twenty mutilated animals. It leads him to the character Weston tearing yet another frog, “almost surgically inserting his forefinger, with its long sharp nail, under the skin behind the creature’s head and ripping it open… Then he finished the operation, threw the bleeding ruin away, and looked up. Their eyes met.”   

     Weston “looked at Ransom in silence and at last began to smile… a devilish smile… It seemed to summon Ransom, with horrible naïveté of welcome, into the world of its own pleasures, as if all men were at one in those pleasures, as if they were the most natural thing in the world and no dispute could ever have occurred about them. It was not furtive or ashamed… Ransom perceived that he had never before seen anything but half-hearted and uneasy attempts at evil. This creature was whole-hearted. The extremity of its evil had passed beyond all struggle into some state which bore a horrible similarity to innocence. It was beyond vice…”

          They say he joked about the size of some of his victims. “Big enough to walk to the bus stop.” They say he kept the feet. Cut them from the bodies and preserved them in jars. Trophies, I think, like the head of a deer, or the skin of a Jew stretched onto a lamp shade. At the trial, he smiled. Found guilty of three child-murders, he seemed surprised. Too evil to be real. But real.

Sterling Garbage Men

  

     “Even our garbage men are white,” said the city manager of a town with a nasty past of racial violence. I was a girl reporter at the time, as white as they come, blonde and blue-eyed, and he seemed to assume I would be impressed with the pallor of the city’s staff. I thought he was an idiot. That was 40 years ago, so he may have gone to his reward. I just hope his soul came to life before he met his Maker. Since then, I’ve lived in neighborhoods served by the full spectrum of garbage men, and I’ve found the content of their character to be, for the most part, sterling, regardless of the outer layer.

     Across the street from us once lived a retired couple. The husband was disabled, so the wife did all the outside work, including hauling the garbage down to the curb. One particular garbage collector, a very large black man, always carried the can up the driveway to the garage after emptying it. This was the only house that got such extra service. If the woman was outside, the collector would greet her cheerfully. He was doing a kindness to a little white lady, just because he saw she could use some help. I was so impressed, I called the garbage collection company to tell them about it and congratulate them on the quality of their employees. I think the woman who took the call was happy to hear something other than a complaint.

     Sometimes my little grandson and I are outside when the recycling truck comes by. The men, who mostly appear to be Hispanic, always smile and wave at three-year-old Edward, and the driver blows the horn. The guy who empties our bin into the hopper knows he’s putting on a show for the pre-school cutie-pie, so he pulls the lever with a flourish and grins at the rapt little face as the machinery roars, lifts and crashes. He gives a thumbs-up as he hops back onto the truck.

     This morning, I happened to be out by the mailbox when the garbage truck pulled up. I crossed the driveway, smiled at the man who emptied the can, and said, “Thank you.”

     He answered with enthusiasm, “You’re welcome, ma’am.” That made me wonder how often he and his co-workers hear thanks, or even how often they are recognized as human beings. Hey, everybody! These men are doing a strenuous and very important job. (What would we do with our garbage otherwise?) They deserve a smile, a wave, and a word of gratitude.