IndyAnne: The Naptown Scribe

On Letting Be

noreply@blogger.com (IndyAnne) — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 16:28:00 +0000

Link here to YouTube video of The Beatles, "Let It Be"

Thanks to the Internet, I have some experiences that knock me down from time to time, things that used to drift slowly through postal mail, using headlines or obituaries clipped from papers in towns where significant people live. Sometimes, a person could never know something important about someone who might have been a relative, or a close friend, because the ties would break down and the news would never travel to that corner.

I used to receive letters and clippings from my mother. She would let me know of the death of a classmate or friend, or a teacher, or the engagement of a relative, then we would talk on the phone, and see each other because of the funeral, or the wedding.

My first bereavement experience online was of the man I thought I would marry once upon a time when I was very young. He was the sweetest boy, yet tortured and inwardly bent and broken so that he could only commune in nature, near-silence, walking the hills of his woods. He was an artist, and a musician, and at heart, a hermit. I became infatuated with him when we were in college and he was breaking up with a long-time girlfriend. We passed each other on the sidewalk, noticed each other, and began to ask others who we were.

I pursued him, and he allowed himself to be caught. Yet, when I began to make little departures for adventures (Bolivia, India, seminary, Mississippi ...), he was hurt and afraid. I wanted him to pursue me, but I had to go. I began to learn, I had to let him be.

He became to me like a bird, flightly and beautiful, always there in his Lookout Mountain woods, could be heard but not seen, somehow staying on the other side of the tree as I looked for him. Over time, I left him to his woods and songs; I let him be, and, as I let him be, I let him go and let my own life be. He would call from time to time, not without its exquisite pain in those moments.

I found my true love one day, or she found me; and one day became years and years, through changes and growing, and making a life together. She died in a freakish storm of devastation and crashing world. Brain death. Discontinued life support. Ashes. Shattered, I picked up pieces and kept on going, moving, becoming.

One day, in the midst of fresh grief, I thought I heard the call of that bird of my youth, when I entered a new wood in a new city. I saw a flicker of a feather escaping behind a tree on my new campus. My heart, at the time grieving the loss of my true love, skipped a little. I reached out over the net, to see if he could be found in his familiar wood. What I found silenced his call forever, scattered his feathers on the ground. I found his obituary.

The symmetry is cruel. This elusive bird of the deep woods died the same death as did my own true love. A missed diagnosis. A chest procedure. A botched bleed. An embolus to the brain. Brain death. Discontinued life support. A funeral. Ashes.

Later, in a confrontation of anger and shame, being cast out by my father, I explained, "You see, Dad? Either way, I am a widow. You will know how this feels one day. I hope then you will think of me, and understand."

Within two years, I lost my own true love and the elusive bird of my youth. I am now much older. This horrid symmetry still grips me in my depths, wracks me with tears, and will not let me be.

Over time, to function and to keep going, I have taken anti-depressants. As a result, I do not cry. I also lack high spirits. I stay quite level, but tend toward depression. I take adversity stoically. I have anger, I feel the blues, I feel happy, I have fun. I find deep inward joy in music and art, and working with my hands. I know, in my pathological intellectualizing (according to some) there is a grasping and holding on, a way of living in the past, letting this pain live on -- actually, it evolves, changes, becomes something else as I evolve, change, become someone else all the time, at least that is what I tell myself, and hope is true.

People tell me I have a disconnect between feeling and affective presentation when I tell my stories in settings ritualized and formalized for that purpose, telling and feeling, emoting, affect-ing. They say this as if I have a pathology that could be overcome. I must wonder: If I can I let this be, what do I care if others cannot?

This is my task: let it be.

To Taos -- Maybe

noreply@blogger.com (IndyAnne) — Sat, 29 May 2010 13:59:00 +0000

I've been scheduled to go to Taos, NM, since March. As a challenge to my "J" or J-ness (for those who don't know what I'm talking about: The Myers-Briggs Personality Type Inventory), my friends who invited me have been on a blissed-out wedding adventure. Blessed with a dominant P (perceiving), and living, as it were, in Wonderland, anything is always possible -- so delightful!

Meanwhile, as Burns would have it, in his conversation with a field mouse, I have laid my best plans, but they predictably gang aft agley. A touch of anxiety stirs around the solar plexus, and I speak to it as if it were a person: "Calm down, it's all relative, and tomorrow will still be here one way or another."

Most recently, the new hubbie injured his hand, requiring therapy of some sort, so they could not haul out to Italy as originally planned. And, the hands are the living and the life of this happy couple. Injury would be disaster. So, travel to Taos was cancelled.

I began to make other plans, like going camping with the fam next week, writing in the mornings; working in the garden; replacing skins on the Airstream. Amazing how one's mind can transport through time, opening up possibilities, moving present to a future that does not exist.

Then, a few days ago, we're back on: the hand is not as bad as it seemed, and a honeymoon may still be do-able. The ticket still stands, so yes, I say, I can still go out to Taos!

The ticket is the only concrete future. Tomorrow is race day at the Indy 500. Traffic will be wild, and my flight is scheduled for 10:30 am, which means going to the track by maybe 8 am, or earlier, so R can get to the church on time. If she had a church in Speedway, she would not have church tomorrow :-) The plane will depart with me or without me. My mind sees both at the same time with equal valence.

Today is the day of decision, or is it?

Yes, my J-ness is challenged by their P-ness, and I wait ...

... and I wait ...

Genealogy Research and Accidents of Fate

noreply@blogger.com (IndyAnne) — Wed, 05 May 2010 18:37:00 +0000

Genealogy Research and Accidents of Fate

Anne G. McWilliams

May 5, 2010

Genealogy is something I thought I might get into when I retired, like most of the people I know who have kept the records in my family. It seemed to me that genealogy research required long hours in libraries searching microfiches of poorly scanned images of newspapers, government records, and ephemera donated from private libraries. One of my mother's cousins and I used to talk about driving to North Carolina to find the record of our Scottish ancestor's arrival in America. Such research must require time and boredom to become an obsession. Or does it?

I was dragged into genealogy recently, out of curiosity about my father’s family. The vacuum created by the void of stories became stronger in the past year in credit to forces beyond my control. I say “beyond my control” with a sort of tongue-in-cheek attitude, referring to my decision to overcome travel exhaustion and get myself up and out to church on an early Sunday morning, something later I would be tempted to call “a God thing”.

At church that morning, I met a Muslim Imam, our guest preacher, Mikal Saahir. It turns out he is a descendant of a person who was enslaved by my ancestor. I have written a good bit about that meeting. I’ll distill to this one droplet: Mikal and I met because of one simple reason – my church encourages members to wear name tags. This social-club practice is more or less common, gaining in popularity with churches seeking to attract and keep new members.

As a result of meeting Mikal, I have found many facets of reflection upon the human drama of race, politics, religion, manners, morals, and memory. Two facets emerged and merged during the same day. For one, some time ago, I applied to work with the 2010 Census. I didn't get the job, but I did run into a friend at the screening exam. We met for lunch yesterday. And, yesterday, I went to vote in the Indiana primary election. The convergence of these federal functions is the basis for my story today.

Going to the polls is a chore. Rachel says I am irrationally upset by this: our neighbor is an official with the poll workers, yet insists upon campaigning for the Republican Party far inside the 50 foot limit, inside the polling place. It's hard to deal with this, because he is a beloved retired teacher. Alas, this is not a battle I want to choose at the moment. I recognize a familiar transference reaction to my own father’s entrenched conservatism. Therefore, I won’t say anything. Maybe this is fodder for another essay. Besides, my intransigent Republican neighbor very kindly asked about my adventure in genealogy of late. Voting and the Census -- I'll bring it all together, I promise.

I joined Ancestry.com one night around 10:00 p.m. I paid the trial fee and began my search. I could not believe my eyes. I typed in the outline of my family tree, beginning with my father, and adding the few names I knew of his ancestors. From time to time, I would return to the tree to find little green leaves on some of the names, especially the males of the spousal pairs (most every one of those pairs appeared to have been officially married).

Clicking on the green leaves, I would find hints that held the possibility of confirming the vital statistics of that person, spouse, children, and other members of the household. Other genealogists had made links to my ancestors, and thanks to them, I could link documents containing details I would otherwise never find on my own. I could not believe it, finding out so much so quickly about my family. One ancestor, for example, had a record of slave ownership recorded by the federal slave census in 1850. He had at least 17 slaves. I am vague about the number because my eyes were crossing with sleep deprivation.

[Recently, I became equally obsessed with a game on my iPhone: Tap Out. I worked the free version incessantly until I reached the end. I stopped talking to my family, except to draw them into the game to help me. Now, they are all working on Tap Out, but they won’t finish it as fast as I did because they have job and school schedules, and they go to bed religiously at 9:00 p.m. Losers. Slackers.]

Never mind. My family slept peacefully in their beds upstairs; the dogs were asleep in their crates in my study. I heard them whimpering their chasing dreams in little dog-lip muffled barks. Meanwhile I sat on my round blue exercise ball, squinting at the MacBook screen, tracking down census reports, Social Security Death records, marriage licenses, and other confirming documents, linking confirmations to the people in my growing family tree. I kept up this click-and-shock game until 4:30 a.m. Good thing I do not have a job working for someone else. This could become a habit affecting my performance.

The next day, or, rather, later the same day, I had lunch with my friend who is working for the 2010 US Census. On the way to meet him, my unconscious, hard at work with all the preconscious details of my search, dredged up and delivered to me a little gem of insight.

The census forms prior to the Civil War (1850, for example) were quite simple: names, ages, skin color, birthplace of father and mother, value of property. After the Civil War, Jim Crow showed up.

Limestone County, Alabama, and Giles County, Tennessee, were the main census forms I was finding, thanks to other, more serious genealogists who had followed their own links to my ancestors. The forms became quite complex after the Civil War. For example, forms after 1860 asked if inhabitants had attended school in the past year; could the inhabitants read and write; did the inhabitants rent or own property?

I recalled from my history lessons that persons with black skin color could not vote at the time. States and the federal government differed in policies. The “three-fifths human” policy in effect since the seventeenth century continued well into the 20^th century. In this policy, blacks were not considered to be fully human, and therefore lacked the full capacity to give consent to the government by voting. Women also shared this inability to give full consent for the same reason: they lacked the full powers of reason required to engage in the responsibility of electing those who would govern the state and the country.

Later, as full humanity became bestowed upon blacks (and women) in order to vote, blacks had to overcome an unofficial but life-threatening obstacle: to pass a reading test and a writing test. African Americans were lynched and shot for attempting to register to vote, even as in slavery they were murdered when discovered to be able to read and write. Fannie Lou Hamer, in the middle of the 20^th Century in Mississippi, was beaten almost to death, leaving her maimed for life with a limp, because of her effort to gain the franchise for black folks. The three Civil Rights workers murdered and buried in the earthen dam in Neshoba County, Mississippi, were, according to the local politicians, “Yankee agitators”, out to register black people to vote for the Democrats in the national elections.

Now, a zealous convert to my own personal genealogy, I am dying to get my hands on these actual documents. I need my own proof of these names, these records of census takers who visited my ancestors and interviewed them.

Those long-ago census workers walked across the creek, up the path, and across the plank porch of a cabin I now own on 80 acres in Limestone County, Alabama. Those census workers exchanged air in a room with my ancestors. Their oxygenated blood empowered muscles that moved an old-fashioned dip pen across the page of an official government document, recording names and vital statistics. (The writer, Shelby Foote, kept that close to the page, writing the first drafts of all of his manuscripts with dip pens, with Esterbrook Probate 313 nibs.)

As my own fingers strike these keys on this peripheral keyboard, and the print-like image of letters appears across the page-like image on the screen, my fingers stop and flex and imagine the scritch across the dry leaf as the census enumerator recorded those names and details. They also demonstrated varying ways of spelling the names. And, in transcribing the names in the Ancestry.com database, some scribes made some curious errors. For example, my mother’s ancestors, Bowers, became Boviera in the electronic documentation that accompanies the facsimile of the form. Fortunately or unfortunately, paying members of Ancestry.com can correct these errors.

The census is important, we know, for calculating public service needs and taxation to support healthcare, safety, and education. However, it is easy to see how census taking might be viewed with suspicion and reluctance today. As the census worker recorded details of property, literacy, and relationship, they were also drawing back tightly upon a bow-string that would release its killing energy upon its target for another ten years ahead.

My new friend and possible relation, Mikal Saahir is descended from people who could not vote, whose lives depended upon their ongoing servitude to my white ancestors for decades after the Civil War. Their chattel status continued long after the law of the land affirmed their humanity, their capacity for reason, their right to vote and participate in their own governance.

In a census year, 2010, I am mindful of the ease with which I completed and mailed my household census form, even though my marriage status continues to be denied by the state and diminished by its record as “domestic partner”. Facebook, Twitter, Ancestry.com, are all new since the last census. The online facsimiles of the old records of past decades and centuries provide stunning reminders of the unknowing ways in which we accumulate a record of our humanity, our moral decisions, our exercise of justice.

Historians and literary critics urge us to avoid the fallacy of anachronism. Pointing to the uses of census taking in the past must not be interpreted as a sign of future continued abuses, they say. Did a government of a state, say, Alabama, in a decade, say, 1880s, in an era, say, of Reconstruction misuse the cold facts of a census form as a weapon against darker-skinned human beings? If those dark-skinned ones were not fully human in 1880, should we fault the State for treating them like animals?

Other critics say we should not throw the baby out with the bathwater. If the benighted white leaders of a benighted era made a categorical mistake that they could not help but make, should we discount also the good they tried to do? The cold light of observation cannot but filter through the accumulations of those people who actually were fully human all along, people living out actual realities across the generations, and accumulating a record of having been sinned against by those who made “a big mistake”.

Not discounting my own personal and private pains and sufferings interspersed throughout a life of blessedness, I have known such small suffering, and immeasurable benefits from my own accidents of fate. I ended up on the winning side of history, thus far, because my ancestry treated fellow humans like animals. Somehow, “sorry” just doesn’t measure up.

All of this reflection came about during the lunch hour between lunch with the census enumerator and exercising my right at the voting booth, prompted by investigating my family of the past online. Maybe after dinner, I can work on world peace.

David and Goliath and Healthcare*

noreply@blogger.com (IndyAnne) — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 17:35:00 +0000

In my opinion, the vitriol of the healthcare debate is all ideology and political money all around. Republicans in the pockets of the healthcare industry which includes insurance companies and hospital corporations (Goliath); Democrats in the pockets of the poor and under-represented, the same people Republicans want to make the whipping boy of any progress in social justice (David). (Apologies for an expedient eisegesis.)

The abortion scare is a perfect example. The abortion argument is, in disguise, a ploy based on elitism, spread abroad to repeat the fear-mongering of the Philistines, to bring the Israelites into submission, to enslave them and keep them poor.

The abortion scare is a language game, propaganda generated for the same reasons the Republicans always pile responsibility on the backs of the poor and persons of color who are marginalized by each and every Republican "cause" on the present platform. Ever since HIV appeared in the 1980s, a prime case study, Republicans have forced the health care system into its typical posture: suspicion of and scapegoating of the poor and persons of color. Poverty; public education; civic development -- the same coded language and inaction kill millions of faceless people.

The Tea Party members and even a (probably Republican) member of the house played their hand: race and phobia of the poor couched in the fear language designed to dupe well-meaning good people. I appeal to the example of Jesus: the poor were his #1 concern, not the political and fiscal hegemony "scare" of the Pharisees. The Republicans will have to figure out another strategy. Their "tell" in the past weekend has blown their cover.

Meanwhile, David has emerged from the unwashed masses with his sling and five smooth stones. He managed to bring the monster down, maybe not with the first shot, but he's down -- down.

Democrats, my David trope, likewise, have another monster on the way: the challenge to lead toward the implementation of what could be the most monumental step of progress in this century (spoken by one who will most likely only see the first 1/3 or so of it, actuarially speaking). David -- keep your eye on the monster.

Nota bene: These arguments are so divisive because they are designed to hit us where we feel rather than where we think. The abortion argument is an argument of the amygdala, not the hippocampus. Or is it the other way around? The emotional hit in the gut by the abortion argument is meant to bypass the brain and go straight to the ballot box and the checkbook. Don't fall for it!

*I'm in a debate on Facebook with a man I first met when he was a seminarian. Now he's a minister, and I think he's a wonderful person.

Image is from http://www.biblepicturegallery.com/free/screen-sized%20pictures.htm

My Very Personal $.02 for Health Care Reform and Why I Wrote to my Congressman, André Carson

noreply@blogger.com (IndyAnne) — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 17:48:00 +0000

Dear Mr. Carson,

I am your constituent, I voted for you, and I am very proud of your representation of our district of Indiana.

I am also a friend of your home mosque, Nur Allah, in Indianapolis. Below, I will include a link to a wonderful story of discovery between Imam Mikal Saahir and me. We were on the cover of the Indianapolis Star on February 20, 2010. Our families share close ties, rooted in slavery, in Limestone County, AL, where Mikal’s parents and my parents and I were born.

As your constituent, I'm writing to tell you why I'm such a strong supporter of health reform. My story about health care is a desperate concern for my own family.

I am one of many women of an age, 50+ (I am 52), unemployed, searching for work, and unable to afford health insurance. When I moved to Indianapolis in 2007, to be with my new family, I knew I had a job here for one year at Christian Theological Seminary. During that one year, I had excellent health insurance, with generous benefits. Since July of 2008, I have had no insurance.

I have an academic background, but in a field that is very narrowly defined, Pastoral Care and Counseling. The impact of the economy upon institutions of higher learning have made it practically impossible to find work teaching in my field.

When I began the job search, in 2007, while I was on a limited one-year contract as Interim Associate Academic Dean at CTS, I was warned that a woman over the age of 50 could expect to be in the job search process for an average of 18 months. I passed that mark last December, and still, I have continued to search without success. And, I continue to be without health insurance. For a very brief time, I was employed at a very low wage, and had coverage, but when that position ended, I could not afford the cost of COBRA.

I have applied to Wishard Health Advantage and am waiting to hear from them about my eligibility. When I consider my career prior to moving to Indiana, the work and the benefits, I feel very awkward applying for insurance that covers the poor, even though I suppose I have to realize that I am now poor. I have a place to live with family who love me and care for me. In that I have a roof over my head, and food to eat, I am not poor; but, in terms of earning my living at a job that provides not just an income, but self-esteem, I am devastated. I have spent all of my savings.

I am capable of earning a lot of money, with companies or institutions that would offer excellent benefits. Meanwhile, I could be taking the place of someone who needs the coverage more than I do. Yet, this seems to be my only recourse during this period of unemployment (do you hear my expectation, that I will work again in my field?). This hope, for coverage by Wishard Health Advantage, is my beacon against drowning in debt if I should need it.

Fortunately, my health is very good. I have no major pre-existing conditions. As I continue to age without coverage, unable to afford the basics of preventive medicine, I am monitoring my diet and exercise, trying to avoid the need for medical care. I do worry, however, because I have not had the essentials of mammogram and annual physical exams and check-ups recommended for a woman my age.

For the minor conditions for which I do need medication, I have been blessed to receive free for a limited time, from a drug company, a medication that would otherwise cost over $150.00/month. That prescription will expire soon. I have another generic prescription that I am blessed to be able to purchase for $5.00/month at the Kroger pharmacy. If I do qualify for Wishard Health Advantage, both medications will cost the same, $5.00/month/prescription, from Wishard pharmacies.

I wish to emphasize two factors. One, I am in many ways a person of privilege. I have an excellent education (Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University). I have known good success as an employee all my working life. I taught in my field for seven years in Ohio, prior to moving to Indianapolis.

Secondly, I am "a woman of a certain age" in which job opportunities are, obviously, very limited. When I went to orientation and training at the Work One center, an employment counselor advised me to do two things:

1) downplay my level of education

2) disguise my age

I learned to prepare a résumé that has no specific dates of employment and no reference to my academic career, so all an employer knows is that I do have a bachelor's degree. I do not provide the dates of my education completions so that my age could not be calculated. Both of these pieces of advice are uncomfortable because they do not reflect the full reality of my background.

I have been involved in a full-time job of seeking employment. Each week, I receive postings of openings, and I apply to the ones that seem to align with my talents and training. In the past three years, I have had one call from an agency that screens potential employees from corporations in Indianapolis.

I have sent my academic credentials to many colleges and universities in Central Indiana. To date, I have had no interviews. Thanks to my one year contract at CTS, I have been invited to teach on an adjunct basis. One course in the spring semester and one course in the fall semester are the extent of my employment as an adjunct. I am deeply grateful for this chance to use my skills and earn some money for my family ($6,200/year).

With this income I earn, I hope to qualify for Wishard Health Advantage. I will be deeply grateful if I qualify. If not, I do not know what will happen to me and my family if I experience sickness, injury, or any other kind of medical need.

I hope the health care bill will pass and change will begin for me and countless other women over 50 who are unable to do what we want to do: work with our skills, and manage medical care when we are unable to find a job. I hope that Wishard Health Advantage will extend to me while I am in this period of unemployment. If it does not, for whatever reason, I will be in deep despair and will live in fear of the welfare of my family.

I ask that you help me and others by supporting health care reform. I am hopeful that we will have a national plan that includes all citizens of Indianapolis, and that covers all persons in our country.

Please see my message to you, along with the stories and photos of other Americans from your district and across the nation, at http://my.barackobama.com/HereFor

Here is a link to the story of the first encounter between Mikal Saahir and me, one year ago this month.

http://indyanne.blogspot.com/2009/03/spiritual-dna-or-day-imam-met-southern.html

http://indyanne.blogspot.com/2010/03/story-in-star.html

Your constituent,

Anne G. McWilliams

The Story in the Star

noreply@blogger.com (IndyAnne) — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 18:52:00 +0000

I finally scanned the Indianapolis Star article with photos and graphics of the story of 2/20/2010. Thanks again to Bobby King.

I posted the articles on Dropbox in four pieces, the best I could do with my scanner size here at home. Thanks to those who asked to see the photos and graphics.

I've also started a blog of our research on the McWilliamses of Limestone County, AL, and I'll post that update soon.

Here are the links:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4819731/McWilliams-Saahir_Star_20_Feb_2010_1.pdf

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4819731/McWilliams-Saahir_Star_20_Feb_2010_2.pdf

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4819731/McWilliams-Saahir_Star_20_Feb_2010_3.pdf

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4819731/McWilliams-Saahir_Star_20_Feb_2010_4.pdf

... and what about the prom?

noreply@blogger.com (IndyAnne) — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 18:52:00 +0000

I sat down today and visually visited my high school Facebook friends. I’m thinking about the whole idea of "prom." Back then, there were comings-out of girls in the elite society of white girls. I guess I should go ahead and crack the old nut: I had my coming out much later, around the age of 27.

At Athens High School, there was no prom. Along with desegregation, prom was discontinued. I think of that today with the news of the high school in Fulton, MS, that cancelled their prom because a lesbian couple planned to go together as a couple.

That the school would cancel its prom, placing the burden of a stupid adult decision on the backs of a couple of kids is so sad to me for the two girls and for all the kids who looked forward to their prom. But, you know what? I've been there, in a couple of ways. For one, I went to a school that did not have a prom for reasons adults thought made sense. Secondly, I've felt the social ostracism of being controversially different. With everything in me, I wanted so much to fit in and, especially, to not rock the boat. Of course, we had gay schoolmates back then -- we're everywhere, always. But, it was hard for those who could not pass. One person I know of committed suicide. I had no language for or consciousness of my own gayness back then, but I did feel the pain of difference. But, really, back then, we were frying other fish, so to speak. I can remember only that we were all twisted up about race.

So, why did my high school not have prom? Because: parents of white girls did not want the risk of their girls dancing with black boys. And, school officials did not want the set-up for inter-racial violence. That's it, in a nutshell.

Proms and coming out balls were (are?) for putting people of the same education and social class together to make couples, to make families, to make society. That's why schools once were in neighborhoods. Society girl rituals are about presenting young ladies to the world, to say, "I'm ready -- I will graduate, I'm fertile, come and court me." The more elite clubs are about social engineering sharpened to a point. And, as the Baptists said back then, everyone knows if you allow teenagers to have sex before marriage, it could lead to dancing. No one thinks overtly, out loud about the design of social rituals. It's all about birds of a feather. That's the thinking of the good ol' days -- the Old South.

Somewhere along the way, the elite sorority I mentioned earlier, the one that would finally move me out of strangeness into popularity, hosted a formal-dress dance for the white kids, by invitation only. The brief time I was a pledge, I wrote kids' names on bids and envelopes, decorated the ballroom, and ran the scut-work errands for the sorority. The bids were presented at the door of the Athens Country Club (need I say, whites only Country Club?), and one year, at the ballroom of the Jetport in Madison.

Above, that's the photo from my senior year, dressed in the gown my mother made for me. In our alternative-prom formal, couples (boy-girl) promenaded across a stage in a ceremony called the "lead-out." The tuxed boy with the gowned girl on his arm walked with head-high dignity out into the spot-light and paused for the photograph. Where is that tuxed boy now? He was older than me by 3 years -- an older man.

This same sorority also held the Sadie Hawkins dance every year. Whites only, of course. For this dance, the girls asked the boys, turning the tables of chivalry. I think that dance was at the old Fairgrounds in a barn-like building.

The idea of both dances is that they were off school property in private locations, hosted by a private group that was not officially affiliated with the school. Parents were chaperones. Teachers and school officials were invited, unofficially. I wonder if anyone back then questioned what we were doing? Well, why should anyone's conscience be any different from mine? There I was, a Christian, a caring person -- and a self-absorbed teenager trying to fit in.

Why does my mind anachronistically wish to have been more enlightened back then? The lines were drawn for us, racially and sexually. We all knew our "place" in society. I suppose by now, I have moved through my life to such a place that I find it impossible to give in to nostalgia. Sure, it was a sweet time at times, but would I go back and live it again? Not just no, but, hell no.

School Days: Class of '75

noreply@blogger.com (IndyAnne) — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 17:06:00 +0000

In the spring of 1975, I graduated from Athens High School, Athens, AL. I think our class must be due for a reunion this year, a multiple of 5 -- or do they go to 10 year increments after thirty years? Anyway, wow, 35 years ago!

I have five or six classmates on Facebook, some of whom I knew since elementary school. The benefit/burden of living in a small town is that everyone knows everyone -- sort of.

It's not so small anymore, and, even back then, we always seemed to have newcomers.

Athens would not like to see itself as a bedroom community to any other city, but, in my memory, that was one of the interesting things about the town. The Huntsville industries brought a lot of "new kids" to town, children of people who worked in the science industries. In my mind, the most notable industry was the Space and Rocket industry, led by Werner von Braun, who led the development of the Saturn rocket, that made possible JFK's vision to land earthlings on the moon. Our 10-year-old is fixin' to go to Space Camp with her school this month, at the Space and Rocket Center.

Huntsville was the place to go as a teenager, if you wanted a nice date to a movie and a restaurant (The Fog Cutter, Red Lobster, -- you know, the fancy places). Athens had no movie theater at the time, at least not with new releases. I did work in the then-new Athens Cinema in my senior year, I opened the building, turned on the big projector, and started the popcorn machine -- all processes that took a long time.

I have been thinking about Athens High School lately because of the recent acquaintance with "the other McWilliamses" of Limestone County. How much I do not know of my own heritage ... Talking with Mikal Saahir and telling others about the story of our meeting (see earlier posts) have peeled back layers of memory and associations -- and the lack of them.

In 1975, our class graduated with a history of (not sure about this) five years of desegregation. I recall that we attended the old Athens High School when the Middle School was created around the same time, and I was in the 8th grade. Those who had attended 6th grade at Athens Elementary School spent 7th grade in another school for one year, while arrangements were made for the creation of the Middle School. [Memory is notoriously unreliable without documentation, so I'm not really sure about this chronology.]

By the time 8th grade opened up at the Middle School, desegregation had happened. I remember being led into the hallway on the first day of school, each class with its white students, lined up to greet our new black classmates. The air was charged with anxiety on both sides of the hall.

How did that desegregation work that year, from a system perspective? Only later in life did I begin to think about what my new classmates lost in desegregation. Trinity School was a beloved place for a lot of people, yet it was closed down and left to deteriorate. I recall driving through "the black section of town" and seeing the weeds and vines crawling up the walls and roof. Or do I? I think I remember that.

Instead of integrating both Trinity and Athens High, Trinity was closed, and, eventually, a new high school was built on the north side of town. This new school was located on Highway 31, not far south of the junction with I-65.

As I moved on through school, in those high school years, there were incidents of violence, especially at football games, it seems to me. I was in the band, and as far as I knew, or was concerned then, the band was a place of discipline and order. Mr. Bacon and Mr. Havely ran a tight ship, and music kept us all focused. Band was my joy in high school, along with my church youth group, the UMYF at the First United Methodist Church, and, of course, my horses.

For reasons I came to understand much later in my life, high school was not a happy time for me. I felt that I did not fit in. I was a tomboy; I was not particularly popular; I didn't date much, but had a series of boyfriends. When I was a senior, I was rushed into the sorority that I thought would make my social life complete. But, I quit because it interfered too much with my horse time. [Kids are so cruel to each other. Rumors and lies drifted back to me much later, but I was too far gone to care.] Life at home was fractious. Interracial dis-harmony, Vietnam, Watergate all created a -- here comes the cliché: turbulent time in which to be a teenager. I could hardly wait to get away and go to college.

When I did go away, I kept on going. Now, I'm here in Indianapolis, with my partner, a woman, her 10 year old daughter, our three dogs, and one cat, and surrounded by inlaws/outlaws I dearly love -- and, here, it's mutual and I feel so very normal. My family of origin, however, is painfully broken. My dear dad, full of bitterness and grief, still lives in Athens. My remaining brother is in Nashville, frequently homeless (see earlier poem). Robert's wife and kids live in Florida, and his teenage daughter is doing her best to find him in herself and her friends.

I had to move to Indianapolis to meet up with some wonderful people from Limestone County, with whom I share a history that is older than Athens High School. They mention names to me of their relatives, classmates and schoolmates with whom I shared nothing in common back then. I wish I could hear some stories of both the Trinity and Athens Middle and High kids who gained something and lost something back then.

Reflections at One Year

noreply@blogger.com (IndyAnne) — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 01:28:00 +0000

Take a look at this photo from my great-aunt's scrapbook. If you click on it, it will open larger in another window. The "Uncle George" of the caption is George McWilliams, freed from slavery at the age of 9, in 1863. Some members of his family are on the porch of the slave cabin where I suppose George lived most of his life. How often would this family have had such a portrait taken? Look closely. A young white male has one arm around a younger man, possibly George II, and with his other hand he has his fist full of George's coat. I suppose this little white boy, a rascal for sure, is my grandfather, Bob Lee (Robert Lee) McWilliams, who disappeared from my father's life -- and my life -- when my father was 8 years old. As we say Down South, Bob Lee 'turned up dead' in the late 1970s in Salt Lake City. Word was, he was an alcoholic, and an abusive husband, who brought a lot of pain and misery to a lot of people. The Hebrew Bible says that the sins of the ancestors are visited upon the descendants from generation to generation. I consider the stories, told and untold, in my family and I believe this is true. And, yet, the drunkard womanizer, King David is the ancestor of the Christian Messiah. Irony makes such good storytelling. This story is about so much more than race and slavery; it includes layers and nuances of human misery. At one year, I ask myself, "What's the point?"

Tonight, I had a conversation with reporter Brandon Perry of the Indianapolis Recorder, the weekly paper of the African American community of Indianapolis (and beyond). Mr. Perry's article will be the fourth publication*, within two months, of the story of the meeting between Imam Mikal Saahir and me, one year ago, March 8, 2009.

One year later, I still find myself shaking my head over the unlikelihood of that meeting a year ago. Mr. Perry asked me what I would like for people to take away from our story. After a lot of rambling on, with some of my academic thoughts and personal reflections, I settled on this thought:

So much has happened since 1863, when the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect in North Alabama and Southern Tennessee, when my great-great-grandfather, James LaFayette McWilliams freed from slavery the nine-year-old George McWilliams. Let me break that down, in case it isn't clear. In 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation was enforced for Jim Fate McWilliams and other slave owners in the Tennessee Valley region. I do not for one moment think George McWilliams would have been freed from slavery any other way. There was no magnanimity in the action of Jim Fate McWilliams.

Now, on the one year mark, I have a lot more questions than I did on that day Mikal and I met for the first time. Firstly, why or how did his family come to know and hold and cherish this story of emancipation? I had no idea of this story, and could have lived out my remaining days without knowing it, had events not conspired (a G-d thing?) to bring us together in Indianapolis, IN, far away from Elkmont and Athens, in Limestone County, Alabama.

Secondly, what happened to little 9-year-old George on that day in 1863? He had a brother, bought by the McWilliams family at the same time, some time in their young childhoods. A third brother was bought by the Yarbrough family. What happened to him? Where did little George and his brother live? Who took care of these children? Were there other slaves in the McWilliams estate at the time? I know, from the photos gathered by MIkal's family, that George McWilliams continued to live on the McWilliams property, living in the cabin that was the slave quarters, at least according to tradition. Were there others? Did any adults, taking the McWilliams name, leave the estate and venture away from the others?

Finally, for today, how did Jim Fate McWilliams take the news of the enforcement of the E. P. back in 1863? He would have been a man in his 30s. What changed in his household, if anything did, because of the legal end to slavery?

I have none of these stories. The cloudy past of my father's "people," including the black McWilliamses, will most likely obscure this story for me for a long time. Now I have some questions for me.

What will I do with this information?
Why was my initial reaction to Mikal's introduction into my past a response from a place of guilt and shame? What is in this story that affects my ego to such an extent? Sure, it's all in the past and I can't influence it in any way. Seana said, on our vacation with friends in México last week, that I could work out my reparations with her. That was funny, a little twist on the question about, when will we ever be finished paying for the sins of the past? When will the learning be complete? Dear g-ds: if racism is over, then what kind of misery are we, in the majority, willing to continue to support in our cities? If racism is over, I need someone to explain to me what to do about this stain upon my name? If racism is over, what happened to the revolution? I missed it entirely.

What is the point of this story?

I told Brandon Perry that this story brings my situation as a white Southerner -- who witnessed the dismantling of Jim Crow and the growth of Civil Rights and my experiences in consciousness-raising efforts -- out to a place of new scrutiny, to be sure. I have my response, and it is my response. I do not speak for anyone else as I live through this awakening.

One of the main points I take away from this encounter and its ongoing revelations is a repetition of something I learned from Maya Angelou, Oprah Winfrey, and Henry Louis Gates. Human beings are 99.99% exactly the same on the chromosomal/genetic level. Without the statistically insignificant differences contained in the 1/100th of one percent amount of difference that might emerge as skin color, hair, eyes, etc., we are all the same. What violence and evil we have made of that 1/100th.

Another point is the closeness we share, unknowingly, with others around us. How amazing: Mikal Saahir and I, two McWilliamses with roots from the same county, met on a Sunday in Indianapolis, IN. Indianapolis: his home town for life, my new home since three years ago.

I gave up a while ago my firm grip on the personal G-d. Too much bad stuff happened all in a row, and my faith was not much help. Still, I am drawn to community, to people who gather in G-d's name. I am so glad that there was a place that Sunday morning, where people gathered to reflect upon the Spiritual DNA of the children of Sarah and Abraham.

What to make, then, of the meeting, that it happened at all? What's the point? Where will this journey take us from here? It is a small world -- we are all interconnected -- what happens to one affects all -- a rising tide lifts all boats -- I am sorry -- I forgive you -- these phrases are so common because theses kinds of little miracles happen so often.

What now? I am left with a feeling of Mystery, with a capital M, trembling before a grace that is beyond me, that blesses me in a particular way that feels very personal. Shall I take the Mystery personally?

*other publications:
Indianapolis Star
My corrections to the Star article are below on February 20, 2010
Focolare's Living City Magazine
Muslim Journal (article not posted online/essentially the same as Focolare's version)

IndyStar Article: Bound by the Past

noreply@blogger.com (IndyAnne) — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 17:11:00 +0000

Image from Indianapolis Star article, credit goes to Stephen Beard and Robert King of the Star.

Thank you, Bobby King! You did a great job with a story of very tangled-up details. The front page of the Star! You forgot to mention that when we talked on Thursday, you sneaky reporter.

Below, I have posted the article that appeared in today's Indianapolis Star. There are some errors that I want to correct, but I don't want to go anywhere near the comments section of the newspaper because -- despite some nice comments -- it is such a cesspool of human ignorance and hatred. So there.

In fact, when I scanned the comments, I saw that a reader recommended Edward Ball's book, Slaves in the Family. My friend Laurel sent the book to me immediately when I shared this story with her back in March of 2009. I read the book in one sitting. Then, I sent the book to Mikal Saahir.

Here are some corrections marked like thas this and with more info in brackets like [this].

I want to say much, much more about this story, more than already, in an earlier post. I will do that soon.

TTFN

BOUND BY THE PAST

By Robert King on February 20, 2010

Meeting reveals shared ties to the culture of slavery

When Michael Saahir and Anne McWilliams crossed paths over coffee between Sunday services at her Northside church, they easily could have passed from each other's lives without another thought.

But Saahir noticed her nametag and made a comment that there were McWilliamses in his family.

The overture could seem odd, given that Saahir is black and McWilliams is white. And even stranger, Saahir is Muslim -- a kufi-wearing imam, in fact -- and at the time, McWilliams, was an administrator at a Christian seminary an educator by training, was preparing for a five-week stay in Guatemala to attend intensive Spanish language school. [actually, I was at CTS in 2007-8; in March 2009, I had just finished a unit of CPE at Methodist Hospital; I have been an adjunct at CTS off and on since I was Interim Associate Academic Dean at CTS].

Yet McWilliams couldn't help but come back to Saahir, who was the guest speaker at her First Congregational [United] Church of Christ, and pick up the thread connecting them. It didn't take long for them to realize they were connected by more than a thread.

Both had family in Alabama. From rural Limestone County, a place so small it's almost hard not to be related somehow. McWilliams had grown up there, she said. Saahir spent summers as a kid there and still has family there.

Then Saahir said his ancestors had been slaves, some of whom were owned by a man named James Lafayette McWilliams. She recognized the name.

It was her great-grandfather great-great-grandfather.

"I was just stunned," she said.

Making the connection

The McWilliams family -- its white and black iterations, its parts rooted in slavery and slave ownership -- had completed a long journey that Sunday almost one year ago. It was a trip that covered nearly 150 years, four to five generations and almost 400 miles.

Saahir and McWilliams have come to see it as a divine appointment.

McWilliams had just joined the church a few months earlier the previous month. Back late from vacation the night before, she considered sleeping in but went anyway.

Saahir was a visiting guest speaker. He had come to address the theme of the day: the "Spiritual DNA of Abraham" -- to speak about the common history of Muslims and Christians.

But he and McWilliams also wound up giving a brief lesson on racial history -- how a black man and a white woman in Indianapolis can learn about their shared ties to the slave culture.

"It was rather extraordinary," said the Rev. Richard Clough, pastor at First Congregational, who invited Saahir to speak. "I witnessed their conversation as it unfolded. It was really just an astounding thing."

The conversation continued after church.

Saahir realized that a black and white photo in his family history collection showed his once-enslaved ancestor, George McWilliams, circa 1928, holding a little white boy in his lap. That child, it turns out, was one of McWilliams' great-uncles father's first cousins, Thomas Martin Gilbert.

Talking further, Saahir, 53, and McWilliams, 52, realized that as kids they had walked some of the same streets. Saahir grew up in Indianapolis but spent his summers with family in Athens, Ala., where McWilliams grew up. Both went to the movies in a self-segregated [Ritz] theater -- she downstairs, he in the balcony.

And then there was Mary McWilliams Gilbert, a lively little old lady who, even late in life, lived in the "big house" on the McWilliams family's farm in Elkmont. [She was the mother of the little boy, Thomas Martin Gilbert, in the photo with George McWilliams.]

She was one of Anne McWilliams' great-aunts great aunt. But they had met briefly only once, after a family funeral after McWilliams' estranged grandfather's death in 1978 or 1979.

Saahir, though, had had an extensive conversation with Gilbert in the 1980s while on a fact-finding mission.

Gilbert told him that she had given his mother her name -- Gloria. It shows, he said, how the residue of the slave culture still held sway well into the 20th century.

It was so extensive that the last slave in the family, George McWilliams, freed as a boy [age 9] by the Emancipation Proclamation, in the 1930s still lived in the cabin behind the "big house" he had occupied as a slave.

That influence carried on, in fact, to Saahir. Much like Malcolm X or Muhammad Ali, Saahir took a new name after his conversion to Islam in 1980, dropping his Anglicized name for a new one. It was both a statement of faith and a rejection of the names his ancestors inherited from white slave owners.

Even so, when Saahir went to visit Gilbert in 1985, his Alabama relatives told him not to knock on the front door because, as a black man, he wouldn't be allowed in. Instead, they said, he should go to the back entrance, where slaves had once entered and black servants still used.

Saahir was too interested in hearing about the history to risk upsetting protocol. So he took the advice. "I had waited so long to get the interview I was afraid of being turned back," he said. "It was just the way it was."

Accepting the past

McWilliams' family research was more limited. She had once plugged "McWilliams" into a genealogy Web site and made contact with a Florida doctor judge [Alan Todd] who gave her some printouts. Mostly, though, McWilliams saw them just as names on paper.

Never did she conceive that her family had owned slaves.

Her dad, Robert Lee McWilliams, [Jr.] never talked about his side of the family. Her mother's side had been simple farmers, and she just assumed the same was true on the other side.

"It hit me with shock," she said. "And I just have to be honest with you that it hit me with shame."

Shame because McWilliams had always thought of her family as enlightened. As a child, she remembers asking her parents about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and hearing them speak favorably of it as a means to make all people equal, regardless of color. She had been taught never to look down on others.

As an adult, McWilliams chose the church where she and Saahir met in part because it was the kind of place that would be involved in interfaith work and would turn over the pulpit on the first Sunday of Lent to a Muslim imam.

Learning of the lost history forced her to re-examine much about her family's past. The fact she grew up in a house with a black maid who did all the cooking and cleaning and dirty work seemed different now. More unseemly than it had as a child.

So did the memory of being told as a child that all the [other] McWilliamses in the Limestone County phonebook were black, and of no relation. She came to feel cheated out of an important part of her past.

"I've never had an encounter so clearly, face to face, with my history as a Southerner, a white Southerner," she said.

And McWilliams began to feel some guilt.

"There's an assumption in a lot of circles that if you are white in America that you are racist because of the way racism is so systematized in this country. I sort of believe that," she said. said, "I have to take the longest step forward to bridge that gap."

To that end, McWilliams has asked Saahir and his wife if she can accompany them to his family reunion in Alabama this summer. She wants to meet the ["other"] McWilliamses of Limestone County and learn from them.

For Saahir, the lessons of this new family connection aren't about inducing guilt. He's told McWilliams she bears no burden from the distant past. But he is hopeful that their story can help heal some of the racial problems in America by encouraging people to understand their history.

"There is a lot of untold stories that we are ashamed of," he said.

Like many Southerners, Saahir's family migrated north from Alabama looking for work and a better life. McWilliams bounced around the country in pursuit of her education, and for her work in academia.

Their own lives -- the segregated movie theaters as kids, the need as adults to still respect the code of the big house back entrance -- evidence vestiges of a past not so far behind us.

But both say their willingness to put themselves in an interracial setting where they could meet is a hopeful sign, a measure of progress.

Yet they won't chalk up their meeting to simple coincidence.

"It just seems like a conspiracy of factors, spiritual and cultural, that brought us together," McWilliams said. "I'm sure you can explain it away in many different ways, but it was so efficient, so instant."

"It is the plan of God," said Saahir, the imam. "And I don't fully understand it yet."

[Neither do I, Mikal, -- neither do I!]

Prose Poem: Unruly Tenants

noreply@blogger.com (IndyAnne) — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 21:20:00 +0000

   A group of unruly people followed me home from band rehearsal last night, and crawled into my dreams.

   These people rented spaces in a massive old house.

   The landlady was cranky. She called a meeting of all the tenants.

   Was I an observer or one of the tenants? The dream world is not always specific about this assignment.

   The landlady revealed the tennis scoreboard she had set up in the lobby. Each tenant's name appeared in the vertical column to the left, and out to the right of the names, horizontally, were the numbers of the rented spaces and the contracts they made to renovate the space. So far, nobody was winning.

   The landlady was furious with everyone. No one was keeping to the terms of the contracts.

   The renters were:

a dancer
a philosopher
a chef
a writer
a healer
a teacher

Some had spouses; some had children; not all with spouses had children; not all with children had spouses.

Each renter had excuses:

too busy
other priorities took over
the work was too expensive
or too hard
or needed more skill

   The landlady was cracking down: Get it done or get out.

   Caught in the landlady's headlights, each renter was wide-eyed with terror. There was no place else to go. There was nothing else to be done. Time's up -- get the work done, or you are out of here.

   Later, I went to a party at the dancer's house. He showed me how to get to the Caribbean ocean through a tube. We swam there, or the current took us there. We landed on a beach.

   An Afro-Caribbean man on the beach opened a large scallop shell and showed me how to feed abundantly on the fruits of the sea there on the beach. He also told me that if I came across a grouper as long as his arm, he would pay me $100 for it. {Yeah, I know -- sometimes seafood is just ... seafood.}

According to the dancer, whenever the going got too stressful in the house, we were free to take the plunge and find the ocean and the beach. The tube is always open, and you can breathe underwater. Go there any time.

I could tell: the landlady really wanted everyone to get the jobs done. She knew: if each tenant fulfilled her/his contract, the massive house would be fabulous. She wanted everyone to stay and to complete the work.

~~~***~~~

Of course, this is all a metaphor of the Self, and each character, location, and talent is some aspect of mySelf.

The unconscious brings such gifts!

I have this Thirst for Poems

noreply@blogger.com (IndyAnne) — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 23:22:00 +0000

I have this thirst for poems. Mary Oliver. Robert Frost. Anyone, really, who has just the right blend of the concrete embodied reality of the little horse standing by the snowy wood, or the soft animal body of the goose flying overhead, and the mystical tending toward the universal desires.

Attending to this thirst, I remembered that a book by Donald Hall, Life Work, was on my shelf. And, seeking more about form, an unopened Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook, on poetry's forms, a text for one who aspires to write poems -- like me. Earlier in the month, I read another wonderful text about writing, Reading like a Writer, by Francine Prose.

I watched a DVD movie, or should I say film, Local Color, a story of a young artist who wanted to learn from an old master. This film brought images and thirst together.

Rachel brought home a volume of poems assembled by Garrison Kiellor, Good Poems for Hard Times. In that volume, I found a form that I could imitate, to tell the story of getting fired. I still don’t know what I am going to do. But, I sat down and wrote the poem, because I knew that I would rather write than die. Getting fired made me feel a way of death, not of suicide, but some soul-killing thing that wanted to eat away at my heart. Writing the poem gave life to me and defended my soul from death.

Hall’s Life Work came into my hands as a bequest, a gift to my late partner, Nancy, in 1993, from our friend Jane, who loved books and poetry. Jane introduced us to Laurie R. King, still my idea of the best of the kind of fiction I want with me on a desert island.

Life Work I picked up some time after Nancy’s death, when I was wondering what would come next, as I wrote in a journal and talked into a micro-cassette recorder, talking to Nancy and missing her. I made some notes in the margins in that earlier reading. But I did not finish. I could tell that things were not going to go well for Donald, and I just could not deal with that at that time in my life.

As he recollected his grandfather's farming life, and his cancer appeared, I could not continue to travel with Donald. Nancy’s cancer was too close yet. So, I put the book on my shelf, with other poetry.

I read thirstily through the Keillor volume, but like a kingfisher watching for the shine of one fish at a time, finding the poets I knew well first. I put the volume down and picked Life Work up again.

I had to press through Life Work. It is a lovely little book, but it is not light reading. (My ordination mentor reminds me that I am very intense, so perhaps anything would be heavy reading for me.) I soldiered on to the end, as Donald began his chemotherapy, as he and Jane Kenyon held each other and wept in their anticipation of his dying.

When I finished Life Work, I picked up the Kiellor volume again and kingfished for Donald’s poems. I found Donald’s poem about Jane Kenyon’s death. What a sad irony and symmetry, that she died before he could die. She left him. His poems about her death, the theme of his book Without, express his “deep grief and fury” or so said one biographer.

I know that grief and that fury.

The partner of a colleague took her life last week. I wrote a poem to try to defend my senses against, again, death. How wonderful, how helpful to me, that I can turn to Donald Hall in his loss of Jane Kenyon, and to Mary Oliver in her loss of Molly Malone Cook (Thirst; Our World). Others have sought through poems to defend against death, to rage on Heaven and drag the clanging metal cups of their earth-prison cell against the bars and make themselves heard, to get. it. out. C. S. Lewis used his craft. Hemingway used his.

How many times in my own experience have I found myself overswept by a memory of a specific grief, and have been told to “let it go”? These phrases are so common because death is. Eventually, for some people, these phrases go on to become helpful; that’s why the very people who could not hear them when they were tossed out in the height of grief go on to say them to the other sufferers in the height of their grief. These phrases sell a lot of shiny and frilly commercial greeting cards. But, please, there must be a time for silence. Can a card contain silence in a kind of large blank space, with something at the very bottom, or centered in the middle, like "I am so sorry" or "I miss her, too." or "I do not want you to be alone. Come."

Who gets to decide when you let go? What is the deadline after which your grief becomes a pathology? I'll tell you one: some arrogant bastard in an office with framed diplomas on the wall. When you've exhausted your curses, against the insensitive types, and the Pollyannas and the Nietzsches (what does not kill you makes your stronger), then, I say, grab your own pen and paper and write it all down. Let it flow.

Where are the listeners to the stories of those who grieve? The listeners. Ones who listen. Listen. Here is a holy act, an act of the apostles of love, the ones who sit with and hear. That's how it is, reading Oliver's Thirst. Here are poems that give a glimpse of what it was like for her to lose her. And, maybe that helps, somehow, hearing how another tells it, this experience of losing and grieving.

As I read through the poem, Last Days, (Hall) I felt again that desolation of loss. And now, I await the sound of the garage door opening and the door swinging in, and the chatter of the new family, the one I love and her little shadow, the child, whom I also love, but so differently. I love this little one like a custodian of a work of fragile art, belonging not to me, but to others for whom she is a priceless treasure, moving through this world here on a very bumpy path. This woman I love and her child are out playing basketball, boisterous and oblivious to the passage of each present moment and their proximity to mortality. And that is just how it should be. We know better than to stare into the sun. Besides, who would want to? We prefer to stare at what the sun makes possible: life. Our life together, here.

What more universal theme than death could there possibly be for poetry? How does anyone survive without it? Prose is just too facile, too prone to preaching. (Like now.) A poem can contain it all, from sorrow to fury. Just writing about it now feels shallow, like trying to find the perfect prize for my beloved in WalMart. As if some plastic imitation will do.

This reflection ends in listening. And, maybe a small pretty glass of something amber-colored, a fine Central American rum.

Donald Hall, the Poet, and his Book, Life Work

noreply@blogger.com (IndyAnne) — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 23:03:00 +0000

Other People and the Noise

How do you write poems in a house with other people, especially a child, and dogs that need to be fed, and a cat whose box needs to be cleaned out, who sits outside the upstairs bedroom and howls at you?

Donald Hall said that Gertrude Stein wrote in her Ford, parked at a busy Paris street corner. By law, drivers had to sound their horns when approaching an intersection. So, imagine the cacophony of that scene. She said the noise took the top of her mind off so she could pay attention at the right level. The next time I feel the top of my head coming off, I will look for my notebook and pen.

I can do it if I close the door, I can tune it all out, and I can write. If there is not music with good flatpicking guitar, because that makes me want to pick up my own guitar; or music with lyrics that compete with my attention and my present level of emotion, because that makes me want to make rhyming tunes; without these kinds of distractions, I am fine. If no one calls my name or asks anything of me, I can deal with it and let the noise go on behind the closed door.

I can’t really say that the background noise is helpful. I prefer silence, and a view out a window into trees, like now, in approaching winter, with empty limbs, and in the spring and summer, with leaves, with birds and squirrels, and grass and flowers. Just not people. Not words. Not music. Only quiet and the natural world. Kind of like AlderMarsh on Whidbey Island, WA, or a campsite at Brown County State Park.

Donald Hall said that he and Jane Kenyon worked in the same house at the same time, each having a study in opposite sides of the house, and for the entire morning, worked without disturbing each other. Then, they made lunch, and after lunch a short nap and sex, or was it sex and then a nap? Then errands. Then supper, followed by a ballgame and dictating letters. Sounds so nice.

I can work out of the playfulness of right-brain mind here in this back room overlooking the back yard, with the door closed. The puppies will want to come in and sleep in the seat of the recliner while I work. I sit on my big blue exercise ball.

I don’t need a typist for proofs. I compose while sitting at my desk on my big blue exercise ball, words moving across the screen of my MacBook. I edit and read out loud – another reason to crave solitude, no one listening to my phrases and sometimes curses.

Thank you, Donald Hall, for your book, Life Work.

String Theory: Or, How you have forever changed our holidays

noreply@blogger.com (IndyAnne) — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 17:39:00 +0000

reflecting upon the suicide of the partner of my colleague

Help me weave a web of care

back onto this weaving

this safe soft landing

some will want to fall, or lean for a moment, or rest some time

the one in the book of life said

love the one whole soul you have been given

the only one you will ever have

the only one whose skin in this present

time enfolding your only you in full

now

the one that leads you through the universe

cosmic imagining becoming something other

in your dreams

this pin-point of light a galaxy

within a galaxy

contains all the light of you

so you do this thing

release your light now or

later

it flows on in matter and energy

some know

more than they will say

what they know

they cannot bear

they cut their strands

binding them to time

to you they say

strings are there

linking time to time

forget syn-chron-ic

time

is because all

happens not at once

you are timeless and I am bound to now

always and only now

yet

you bound your strand to some fixed point

you could not bear the manner

of tendential time

and its gravity

pulling inward all your light

becoming a mountain

the size of a pin-point containing

now and future and what went before

flowing into the same space

falling and sliding and sweeping you in

until

you were only able to climb

the stairs and fall

into the constraint of one visible strand

the one that began at the bitter end

and led our gaze

into the up or the beyond

the space without time we cannot see

and on the other end

there is no end

on this visible end

you left something

sweetness of a kiss

love imperfect and sincere

and all this uncertainty

your little ghosty-faced dog

you have gone under the flow of time

our tears our seine for our memories of you

into the oceanic depth and expanse

or the nothing of everything at once

meanwhile

I -- caught in time --

tap myself at the temple

and grasp at my heart

bend over at the middle of my grief

my knees finding hard cold stone

say, oh, why can’t I remember

must I be reminded like this:

capture this moment and it dies

in your hand.

Help me weave a web of care

back onto this weaving

this safe soft landing

some will want to fall, or lean for a moment, or rest some time.

The man who looked like Gandhi in his mIddle years: Homeless, dying a slow septic neurological death

noreply@blogger.com (IndyAnne) — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 22:22:00 +0000

My brother, Pat. (born November 4, 1963)

A sweet man with a monkey on his back. I wrote this poem about him and his recent hospitalization.

The Man With the Dark Sad Eyes

Homeless, Dying a Slow Neurological Death

Anne G. McWilliams

Good Samaritan delivery

to the emergency department

found down in an alley

behind a bar

downtown.

The young blonde nurse

called the chaplain to come

to the neurological

intensive care unit

to please continue the quest

to identify the silent small dark man.

Trim of beard and spare of body

he lay in white sheets

dark sad eyes stared ahead

as if thinking deep thoughts

brow furrowing

in pain?

solution of lactated Ringers dripping into a vein

closed soft lips absolutely silent.

now and then startling his head up from the pillow

pointing the oxygen saturation probe

taped to his forefinger like the extra-terrestrial

phone home?

slowly soundlessly

you might say

deliberately

but probably not.

Compact and brown

like Gandhi in his middle years

hair black sprinkled with silver

peaceful and present like a saint

a peasant

a king

an imam

a holy man

a professor.

Dark sad eyes beneath

wire framed glasses

free of scratches

clothing neat

soiled with human waste

collegiate

blue chinos

rugby shirt

Rockport shoes

no socks.

Bag of belongings

signs of ER detective work:

his clothing and

Googled pages

images of India

Pakistan

Middle East

Africa

Elephants

Camels

Taj Mahal

Jameh Masjid

Pyramids of Giza

Arabic script

God is Great

Allahu akbar!

Word spread to speakers of languages

the United Nations

of a hospital’s underclass

housekeeping

sanitation

cooks

the dark-skinned people from the basement trades

came up the service elevators to the fourth floor

in the middle of the night

to speak phrases

Urdu

Farsi

Hindi

Arabic

Swahili

Tamil

tribes of

Kenya

Ethiopia

Madagascar

Liberia

no answer

no evidence of comprehending

dark sad eyes looking

wise

lost

dying.

Signs of Islam

cut of hair and

facial hair

female staff please

do not touch

or pray

falsely

avoid offense

to person

place,

and faith.

All of our projections

could not find him

create him

identify him.

Infection crept through

every cell

sinus abscess

sick brain

sepsis

seizure

and, without a word or sound

after a long time

death.

In death, illusions fell away

like leaves of paper shredded

in the nursing station

in morning shift change

as with the battle-hardened on the front lines

the tongues did wag and strip away

what dignity created in mystery

we remember -- disgusting --

he stank of urine and feces

and decomposition

and gangrene of the sinuses.

My brother is often homeless

alcohol dependent

drug-addled

twice head-injured

left for dead

he looks like a world traveler by foot

dark skin, black hair sprinkled with silver

a beard not so neatly trimmed

and dark sad eyes.

You might place him

without ID

in Italy

Brazil

Nicaragua

He could be Roma

Latino

Uzbekian

I don't know

Call the UN.

Will a young blonde nurse

in the neurological

intensive care unit

page a patient service assistant

to give him a bath

with the green soap

call a patient old chaplain

to hold his hand

to speak softly to him

fetch an extra blanket

a drip of water

with some sugar in it?

Will he

reek with lingering stench

finally naked

beneath clean white sheets

brunt of chatter

at change of shift

man of mystery.

And after

a long time

laid to rest

without benefit of clergy

the coroner's burden.

Amperage, or, Why We Had To Let You Go

noreply@blogger.com (IndyAnne) — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:33:00 +0000

Amperage, or, Why We Had To Let You Go

It’s not only that

you’re not working out or

there are questions about your performance in group and your issues with authority,

or that your life could really use some clarity.

But, see, it's like this: you tipped your hand

too soon and let us know

you are not happy

here with us

you have no joy

and too many others

played their hands

close to the vest

and

just

left.

So, really, it's a business decision, you see: our attrition rate

is too high and our VP is threatening some involuntary attrition on us.

And, so, we had to

beat you

to the draw

before you could finish this cycle of trauma and death and birth

before you could make more friends here

we had to

fire you

before

you

could

quit.

It’s not that

you needed this job so much

but, we found out

you did -- here, have a tissue--

and, therefore, you understand, we had to take it away from you

before

you could find something else.

We know you want to be home

with your poetry

with your puppies

and your power tools

and your welding machine.

It's just that

you seem to be quite a poet

and we are

afraid of you

because we know how much hay a poet can make with places like this

and people like us.

We want you to be home, too.

We need no poets here, plowing in these parched fields of the corporate mind

We have our soul-speak

and you have your heart-break

and so

you

will please

sign here -- no?

Leave your badge and keys

and we will walk you out

into your poetry and amps

and whatever comes next.

As for us

We'll keep stomping about, welding our cold steel processes

onto this veil of love covering

the thin places between heaven and earth.

Image is from this web site, accessed 11/17/09

More pool animosity

noreply@blogger.com (IndyAnne) — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 23:16:00 +0000

Imagine the lawsuits that resulted in the inclusion of these warnings in the pool pump manual, especially the "evisceration/disembowelment" item:

WARNING – Suction Entrapment Hazard.
Suction in suction outlets and/or suction outlet covers, which are damaged, broken, cracked, missing, or
unsecured cause severe injury and/or death due to the following entrapment hazards:
Hair Entrapment- Hair can become entangled in suction outlet cover.
Limb Entrapment- A limb inserted into an opening of a suction outlet sump or suction outlet cover that
is damaged, broken, cracked, missing, or not securely attached can result in a mechanical bind or
swelling of the limb.
Body Suction Entrapment- A pressure applied to a large portion of the body or limbs can result in an entrapment.
Evisceration/ Disembowelment- A negative pressure applied directly to the intestines through an unprotected suction outlet
sump or suction outlet cover which is damaged, broken, cracked, missing, or unsecured can result in
evisceration/disembowelment.
Mechanical Entrapment- There is potential for jewelry, swimsuits, hair decorations, fingers, toes, or knuckles to be caught
in an opening of a suction outlet cover resulting in mechanical entrapment.

Water, water everywhere?

noreply@blogger.com (IndyAnne) — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 21:49:00 +0000

The Ryme of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge is still hooked into my brain from the college poetry class, "Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink."

As abundant rain falls here on our lawn and our garden, we curse the rain's inconvenience for mowing after work, but we welcome the rain upon our kitchen garden because we have declared we will not use municipal water in the garden.

I think this must be one of those predictable irrationalities -- we withhold city water from the garden, yet we frequently add water to our swimming pool.

By the way, I hate that pool. I spent $5,000 that I could really use now, on a new liner for that @#$% pool before I even moved in here! I hate the pool. I am waiting for the rain to slow now so I can go out and replace $100 worth of parts in the pump -- which had to be replaced last summer for about $500. It's almost like owning a boat, except with a boat, you do have a small chance of going out and catching something to eat. I refuse to eat any wildlife that turns up in the skimmer by accident.

First, You Make a Roux: Theology of Pastoral Care

noreply@blogger.com (IndyAnne) — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 17:06:00 +0000

Part I: Prolegomenon to My Theology of Pastoral Care: First, You Make a Roux

First, an Item of Cultural Competency

What the *&^% is a Roux? And, how do you pronounce it? Roux = roo, rue, rhymes with blue, true, shoe, canoe.

Metaphors rely upon shared worlds. When I wrote this essay, I assumed enough people were acquainted with popular figures such as Emeril (Bam!) and Justin Wilson (the Cookin’ Cajun), and that Cajun cuisine had charmed its way into every enclave of America, even the insular New England states (wink to D. C. at FCUCC). Hasn’t everyone had a bowl of gumbo, a plate of jambalaya, a serving of étouffé?

Here in the Midwest, I have introduced my palate to many strange things: goetta, chicken and noodles served over mashed potatoes, chili that is not really chili served over spaghetti, chili that is chili served over elbow macaroni. Before landing here, I have eaten New England boiled dinners, I love steamers, and I love lobster so much I won’t eat it anywhere else but on a New England coastal picnic table. I pine for true Mexican poblanos in crème sauce. Rice and peas in Bolivia were somehow tastier than blackeyed peas and rice here at home. I will be very disappointed if I never get to go to Argentina for a steak. The curious palate is a good friend.

When I submitted this article, without this introduction, to my foodie friends, they received it with glee, finding it relevant and even provocative in a Pavlovian sense. One friend went right out that day and bought the ingredients to make a lovely gumbo for a dinner party that weekend.

Now, here in Indiana, I find that my reference to the roux has fallen flat like an unleavened biscuit left too long in the oven. There is no ring of truth, no salivary response, no urge to shop, cook, and serve. How, then, can I possibly expect to connect this phenomenon of my experience with my new world? How can I get an A on the assignment, to write my theology of pastoral care?

Not only must I explain, but I must get the attention of my examiners, who seem not only ignorant of this delicious preparation, but are also not the least bit curious to know or understand. I must take responsibility for this, to be sure my communication has not failed in our mutual service.

Isn’t this the way diversity works? Something strange and unknown comes along. To have any hope of crossing into the awareness of the Other enough to raise curiosity – the first step in empathy, I believe -- I must make these incurious and possibly suspicious readers hungry. I need to try to win them over, to bring together our two horizons of understanding, to create a hermeneutical moment that will satisfy both/all of us to the best possible degree. Only with this effort can I hope to convey the richness, vitality, and piquance of my cherished pastoral theological concepts.
The Roux Defined

A roux is the base for many recipes in a Southern kitchen, especially an Acadian or coastal kitchen. Try a quick Google search on the phrase, First, you make a roux. I got 3,180 hits. The phrase has become a code, a watch-word for those cognoscenti of the kitchen. The cliché also serves in any situation to indicate that there is one essential starting point for any process. Want to change the oil in your scooter? First you make a roux, meaning, Do you have the tools? Do you know the grade of oil to use? What kind of vessel are you going to use to catch the old oil? Want to perform surgery? First, you make a roux. Do you know what a scalpel is? Have you taken gross anatomy? Can you also suture? Nothing starts until you have the essential, crucial, most necessary ingredients.

Strictly speaking, the roux is the thickening agent added to other ingredients to form a stock, a sauce, a stew. This thickening agent is far more desirable than the lightweight corn starch and water, which should only be used in an emergency or in Chinese cuisine. In this strict sense, a roux begins with some form of flour (I use wheat) and oil or fat or grease (I usually use canola). Stricter traditionalists would use a tasty animal fat such as butter, lard, or the grease drained from a cooked cut of meat, preferably pork. The flour and the oil are stirred together into a thick paste.

The color of the roux is also a matter of folkloric argument. One dish calls for a light roux, one for a dark roux, one for a medium roux. You can measure the length of cooking time for a roux by the number of beers that are consumed while stirring the roux. What I’m talking about here is, to what degree can you cook the roux, browning the flour and oil, before burning it, to produce the solid line of bass and baritone that will hold up the range of symphonic flavors you will add to your creation?

With more practice, more refined nuances can be achieved in color: peanut butter, chocolate, coffee, brick, black. Flavors become more nut-like with more browning. Never stir more flour into a roux at the last minute. Under-cooked flour is pasty; it must be given enough cooking time to blend. Vegetable oil will get the darkest roux because the oil has the highest tolerance for heat. Butter and other animal fats will burn quickly. Olive oil will burn more quickly than canola.

Once the roux has attained the color you desire, add vegetables such as onion, celery, garlic, carrots – stout and flavorful vegetables that provide much of the seasoning. The French and Acadians call the mix of celery, onion, and carrots the marapois. Adding these ingredients to the roux and allowing them to cook to a transparent consistency will draw their flavors into the roux.

The stage of adding ingredients to the flour and oil is still the roux. Only when a liquid is added, such as stock, water, beer, wine, and the flour and oil disperse into the liquid, and vice versa, does the roux cease to be strictly the roux. Then it becomes the next stage: the base, the sauce, the stock, etc. But, the roux is always still present. The flavor and color of the flour and oil permeate the recipe and make all the difference in the overall success of the meal. Different vegetables, spices, and meats flavor and define different distinct recipes, but the essential starting point, the roux, is the foundation. Now, on to pastoral theology.

Part II: My Theology of Pastoral Care: First, You Make a Roux

The possibilities for theology of pastoral care are quite thick and rich and might prove to be overwhelming to prepare. Within the span of a few pages, I find only three categories are manageable, but these three can give shape to a satisfying enough recipe. I wish to present my theology of pastoral care by using three broad categories, incarnation, community, and healing. They form a thick and rich base for pastoral care, just like the elements of oil, flour, and the heat that binds together a roux fit for any good stew.

Recently, my niece requested a copy of my recipe for The McWilliams Family Roux, as if we have such a thing, a named recipe, codified within our family kitchens. Her request is precious. Her father (my brother, Robert, rest his soul), was a fine cook, and she saw him prepare many wonderful meals from scratch. Such a thing as a McWilliams Family Roux brings tears to my eyes, and brings to mind a recipe tested over time, applied the same way in all circumstances with such consistency that its endurance is unassailable, and its identity would be immediate for anyone who tasted it. Ah, yes, this gumbo started with The McWilliams Family Roux, no doubt!

There actually has never been such a recipe as The McWilliams Family Roux, until I wrote it for my niece and posted it as a note on my Facebook page for her and all friends to see, use, comment on, take issue with, improve, disprove, or whatever might come to mind. In fact, at the end of my writing, I invited all such interactions with my recipe. One friend reminded me that the document I posted for my niece was of such length and illustrated with such stories as to account logically for the failure of her use of my much shorter version sent to her on an index card. Now that she has all of the little nuances of time, temperature, color, and stories of applicability to varieties of soups and stews and gravies, she will replace her card with this longer and much more colorful example.

As I present my theology of pastoral care, I have a similar feeling to approaching the task as I did in presenting The McWilliams Family Roux to my niece. I have made long years of study of the theology of pastoral care. I have written about it, taught it, and performed it for so long, yet taking up the pen to set out a reasonable account seems as if it must be happening for the first time, ever.

Rather than turning to trusted texts of Seward Hiltner, Nancy Ramsay, and Emmanuel Lartey, I am going to tell this story of my theology of pastoral care as I did for my niece. I am going to start by telling what I do, making recommendations along the way and illustrating with enlightening encounters in which I have found the method to have proven to be, as for Goldilocks tasting the porridge of the Three Bears, “Just right.”

Incarnation

My theology of pastoral care begins with the concept of Incarnation. I am most familiar with the Christian version of incarnation – the embodiment, flesh-and-blood realism, actual presence – in the world of God’s person for God’s people, Jesus of Nazareth. Many faith traditions have exemplary figures of self-giving divine love sent to care for those who are suffering. I take my own call to action from the story in Luke’s Gospel, 4:18-21. Jesus announces to the people, "The Spirit of God is upon me; God has anointed me to tell the good news to the poor, to announce release to the prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, to set oppressed people free …”

I take this passage personally, as my own call to be God’s embodiment in the world, to be present with those who are oppressed, poor, imprisoned, wounded. Acting upon these words is, for me, the work of pastoral care, bringing the people of God into places of suffering in the world.

In the hospital setting these past four months, I have seen this text presented to me time and time again. I shared with my CPE group the stories of two different cases, two women caught up in desperate circumstances of poverty, oppression, disease, and mental handicaps. In each situation, these women were preyed upon by others who were also broken and suffering. Social service agencies could have served as a form of incarnation, addressing the poverty, addictions, and mental handicaps suffered by these individuals. Who will help if these democratically erected services fail? Somehow, the incarnation is present in the chaplain’s witness and the nurses’ ministrations of care. I felt the limitations of my usefulness in each story, yet I felt that I was called to be God’s agent to advocate for the well-being of each. Only God knows how their stories will continue. My call is to be faithful in these moments, to do and be God’s person, to embody God’s presence.

Community

The second essential ingredient is the setting of community. Pastoral Care as a discipline of study is relatively a recent addition to theological education. The timing could not have been better orchestrated. At the beginning of the 20th Century, the sciences of psychology, psychiatry, sociology, and anthropology took root in the American and allied European universities and centers of health and healing, and along with them, the field of pastoral care flourished. For many decades, pastoral care was maintained within the boundaries of human sciences, as an extension of the theories and practices of these sciences, especially as a study of the individual and his or her maladjustments to the modern world. However, many recent scholars and authors have pointed out that the exchange between theology and the human sciences was not reciprocal.

Psychology, psychiatry, sociology, and the other human sciences did not embrace theological explanations of the roots of human suffering in the mainstream. Such concepts as sin, bondage, oppression, spiritual dis-ease, and soul-sickness were regarded as relics of a former age of superstitious religiosity. The mainstream of pastoral care did not disagree, and for a very long time sought to distance itself from the backwaters of theological understandings of the human condition.

Lately, however, pastoral theologians have begun to write and teach that the language, theories, and practices of the human sciences cannot fully explain the features of and answers to human suffering. Human community and its core values, whether expressed through churches and other gatherings of faith, family systems, neighborhoods, or cultures, are better places (than the institutions of human sciences) to reorient suffering people, to help them find the bonds of trust and safety, the stories of meaning and belonging, and the resources of restoration that they need. Meaning, belonging, restoration, and trust are but a few essentials of human flourishing within community. Finding these in the actual exchanges of understanding of both theological and human science resources is the responsibility of pastoral caregivers. We are trained to recognize the differences of explanations and benefits of both worlds of meaning, to act in the interstices of these worlds and help mediate between them for the benefit of individuals and communities.

In the hospital context, the range of community of care-giving is visible in weekly or daily care planning meetings on units of care such as Family Medicine, Hospice, and the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Chaplains are accepted members of the team in these units, along with nurses, physicians, specialists, housekeeping staff, social workers, psychiatrists, and many others, as decisions are made for discharging patients after their stay in the hospital. Patients’ own pastors are invited to be part of the ongoing care of their parishioners. Surely, the opposite can be true, that faith communities can sometimes limit possibilities for flourishing, but when possible, involving an opening for meaningful engagement in church, synagogue, nursing home, and other supportive systems can improve the outlook for someone’s suffering. Even the act of privately praying with an individual has a communal aspect, opening up the communication beyond the single voice or thought to include others.

Healing

Finally, the element of healing brings together the paradoxical notions of hope amid suffering, abundance amid poverty, sight amid blindess, binding up of wounds, and freedom of captives. Healing is found in many expressions besides recovery of a previous state of apparent wholeness. Wholeness may depend upon a new sense of meaning of the term, “healing.” A wounded person may not recover to the condition that existed prior to the wounding. Healing for that one might not be a visible condition of restoration of a limb, an eye, or a body part. Healing might refer to some aspect of the person that is not readily understood to be related to the “presenting concern.”

I met with a young man, father of four children, son of a broken marriage, with himself having been married once before, and kept at a distance from two of his children. He was waiting to have part of his hand removed due to an incurable infection. He was helpless to change the outcome of this disease. He also was in need of help from his mother.

His current family became homeless while he suffered helplessly in the hospital, uncertain of their future. His lover and two children of his current relationship needed the young man’s mother to open her heart and her home to take them in. The young man knew that he could not afford to keep his family in hotels while he recovered, and other than his mother, the only people the children and their mother could turn to was a stepfather with a history of child sexual abuse.

Turning to his mother was his only choice. Not even a homeless shelter would take them in because they were not married. He was truly poor, oppressed, wounded, and captive. Because of a long history of poor impulse control due to a mental illness, he had been estranged from his mother and her husband. This young man had to beg his way back into his mother’s grace to secure a safe home for his family. Going back to this home would represent a kind of healing for this young man. As he left the floor for surgery, he was hopeful of his mother’s mercy.

As I conclude this over-long essay, I find that these three essential ingredients of incarnation, community, and healing provide an excellent base to start any substantial program of care. This recipe holds up well, invites the addition of varieties of texture, flavor, and setting. As many of my favorite recipes begin, so begins my theology of pastoral care: First, you make a roux.

Image borrowed from http://www.cajunfrenchblog.com/2009/01/louisiana-leroux/ who got it from http://www.flickr.com/photos/deadhorse/401048298/ until I can shoot my own.

Spiritual DNA, or, The Day the Imam met the Southern Belle

noreply@blogger.com (IndyAnne) — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 17:30:00 +0000

Spiritual DNA, or, The Day the Imam met the Southern Belle
Anne G. McWilliams and Michael “Mikal” Saahir
Sunday, March 8, 2009
First Congregational United Church of Christ
Indianapolis, Indiana

Today was an extraordinary day. True to the promise of the first covenant, G-d made Abraham a blessing in this place.

As I drove into the church parking lot, I saw a very tall, physically large man of dark complexion walking away from his car toward the back door of the church. He was wearing a handsome brown business suit and on his head was a cap that I thought was typical of Muslim men. A petite woman, also of dark complexion, followed soon after from the same car. She wore dark slacks and a pretty blouse, and she was drawing a colorful scarf around her hair and her shoulders.

I gathered my permanent name-tag from the rack in the foyer and moved downstairs to the big room where we have the early service. I walked past the Imam who was speaking with the pastor, Dick Clough. I went to my seat to review the new list of monthly events on the calendar that had been handed to me when I arrived in the room.

On the calendar was a little blurb about the Imam. When Dick introduced him, I learned that he was the Imam at Nur-Allah Mosque for many years, and he was involved in a variety of service works in the community. Dick said he was a bridge-builder, not a wall-builder. My curiosity grew. I wondered if he would be from another country or if he would be an American? I considered how many Muslims I actually know; known well, none; acquaintances, a few; what's my point of reference? Mostly Middle Eastern and African, maybe African American. What kinds of hints are bringing these associations to mind? A name? A culture? An ethnicity?

The service, true to its non-traditional order and style, proceeded in its typical multi-sensory fashion. A YouTube film told the story in cartoon drawings of Jesus in the wilderness. We sang songs of a mixture of genres, accompanied by an electric piano and a trap set. A woman and a man presented a skit that was prepared for this day.

The skit presented the spiritual DNA of the three major Abrahamic faiths, using comedy, relying on the prop of a laptop computer; delivering factual content that could have been derived from Google and Wikipedia. The skit drew an ever-widening circle from the smaller derivative Christian denominations, to the historic mainline churches, to the globally recognized predecessors of Judaism and Islam, arriving at the one that linked them all: Father Abraham -- our common source of spiritual DNA.

All of the symbolisms of DNA, family trees, and genetics captured the generous spirit of inclusion that would hold our thoughts throughout the day. In my church, it's practically a requirement to be willing to stand side by side with people of very strong Trinitarian commitment, with those who hold a moderate Christology, and with those who are frankly Universalist. This wideness is one of the inclusions of our community, and one of the things I was looking for when I ended my search for a church home here.

Once the Imam, Mikal Saahir, began to speak, I recognized that he was fully an American, an African American, who came to Islam as a young man through the influence of the American movement of the Nation of Islam. His voice was quiet. I must have been expecting a booming voice to emerge from a tall and big man. His demeanor projected a calm, humor-streaked, gentle, self-effacing authority.

Mikal’s presentation in the first service was brief, promising to go into more detail with questions and discussions during the Sunday School hour after the early service. Following this promise, the early service followed its patterns of songs, conversational and casual comforts, prayers, and exhortations. We formed a large circle around the room for the benediction, then broke for coffee and pastries and fruit.

Several people approached the Imam, but I approached his wife, Carolyn, to introduce myself to her. We began to exchange names. Mikal turned to me, shook my hand, and read my name-tag. In the murmurs of conversation swirling around us, I thought I heard him say something about knowing another McWilliams. (There is another Ann McWilliams, no e, in Indianapolis, a great R&B singer-songwriter.)

After completing a couple more sentences with Carolyn and others who had joined us, I turned back to Mikal and said, “What did you say about someone else ‘McWilliams’?”

He repeated, “I have a relative named Anne McWilliams.”

“Here in Indianapolis?” I asked.

“No, not here, in Alabama. She passed away some years ago,” he replied.

“Alabama? I’m from Alabama.” I am aware this is not always obvious or audible to people, because I tend to adapt my accent to my location.

“What part of Alabama are you from?”

“Athens. It’s about a hundred miles …” I began to locate the town of 18,000 souls almost equally between Nashville and Birmingham, on I-65. But, there was no need.

“I know exactly where Athens is. My parents are from Athens.”

Combining all of the places I have lived and visited, I could count on three fingers the number of people I have met from Athens. I did the cartoon double-take: Athens? Are you saying, Athens? Meanwhile, Mikal, who knows my home town, is clarifying his statement:

“Actually, my mother is from Elkmont.”

When my brain, not yet recovered from Athens tries then to take in the name, Elkmont, I am off balance and unprepared.

“Did you say Elkmont?” I ask, again with the double-take. “My father was born in Elkmont.”

“My ancestor, George McWilliams, was freed from slavery at the age of nine by his owner, a McWilliams, in Elkmont. The owner’s name was LaFayette McWilliams, but they called him ‘Fate’.” Mikal is delivering this information thoughtfully, slowly, perhaps also trying to get his balance about this unfolding story, this very unlikely encounter, this revelation.

“Jim Fate McWilliams,” I interrupted him. I know this name from a genealogy I received long ago. James LaFayette McWilliams (LaFAY-t, Fate) But, I can’t place him in his generation, I just know the name.

“Fate McWilliams freed my great grandfather when he was nine years old. And, he had a son, and a daughter, Mary McWilliams …” he continued.

“…Gilbert. Mary McWilliams Gilbert. My father’s aunt. I met her when I was in college. Her brother was my grandfather, but I never knew him.”

I feel weak in the knees as I realize, Fate McWilliams, my great grandfather, was a slave-owner. This is news to me. I began to perspire, I feared I would faint. How Southern Belle, to faint – Anne, don’t faint.

Somehow, I stayed on my feet. This news devastated my white liberal sensibilities, my struggle with internalized racism. Mikal delivered my history to me in a tone that matched mine, of amazement, of unfolding realization of our connection, our ties to place and home, our shared history. Has it been just four generations since the Civil War, Emancipation, and Reconstruction? But, the conversation is running on ahead of me, and my mind shifts to a closer past as I think about my father’s aunt.

My father took us to meet his Aunt Mary in 1979, when she called to tell us that my father’s father had died and had left him a small bequest. I was anticipating graduation from college and going to Bolivia for six weeks before entering seminary.

Mary McWilliams Gilbert’s husband was Van Buren Gilbert, whom I never met. He was the county sheriff, and eventually was appointed to head the Alabama State Patrol. He worked for the likes of Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor and George C. Wallace, governors during the Johnson administration and into the 70s and desegregation of our state’s public schools and colleges, among other upheavals of the Civil Rights Era.

I said, “Mary McWilliams and Van Buren Gilbert had two sons. One passed away when I was a child, but one still lives in Athens, Thomas Martin Gilbert.”

Mikal agreed that he knew this, and added, “I have a photograph of my great grandfather George McWilliams holding Thomas Martin Gilbert when he was just a baby.”

Thinking of my father, I said, “I would love to see that picture. I’m sure my father would love to see it, too.”

“I have it at home, a digital copy, I can send it to you.”

“I would love that,” I replied, thinking about Thomas Martin Gilbert, my father’s first cousin, a man I met thirty years ago, yet only had seen once since, at my mother’s funeral in 2001. I think of him as my coach into a life of travel and adventure. I suddenly feel that I want to visit him, talk with him. I suddenly realize what a distantly orbiting satellite I have been to my family in Athens.

Mikal very tenderly reported, “Mary Gilbert named my mother.” To my ears, this was both a beautiful gesture and a troubling one. I heard this news with tears forming behind my eyes.
Later, Mikal continued to explain this legacy to me:

“From what I understand, Mamie McWilliams lived in the house of her father George. George’s house was very close (just north) to where Mary Gilbert last lived in Elkmont. Mamie married William Edward Brown and from this union 15 children were born, one of whom was my mother Gloria, born in 1933. My mother married my father Oliver Flanagan who lived in Athens. They moved to Indianapolis in the early 1950s as part of the great migration of many African Americans who left the south seeking employment and education in the north. Nonetheless, apparently my grandmother Mamie (McWilliams) Brown and your great aunt Mary (McWilliams) Gilbert were close associates – close enough to suggest and have fulfilled naming my mother the beautiful name of Gloria.”

The name Gloria continues in Mikal’s family. His brother Thomas named his daughter Gloria who in turn also named her daughter Gloria. In our ongoing conversation, Mikal clarifies the meaning of this naming: “Thanks to your great aunt, the name Gloria (which means Glory – praise, honor, thanksgiving) continues to be a part of my family.”

Dick Clough provided a pen and paper and Mikal and I sketched out the generations of our two families, side by side:

his great-grandfather, George McWilliams, freed from slavery at age nine by

James LaFayette “Jim Fate” or “Fate” McWilliams, my great grandfather;

his grandmother Mamie McWilliams Brown, and her contemporaries,

my grandfather, Robert Lee (“Bob Lee”) McWilliams and his sister, Mary (McWilliams) Gilbert;

his mother, Gloria Brown Flanagan, named as an infant by Mary Gilbert, and her contemporary,

my father, Robert Lee (“Bob Jr.”) McWilliams;

finally, for this day’s telling, our generation, Michael Flanagan (52) who became Michael “Mikal” Saahir, and

my brothers’ and me (51). Robert Lee McWilliams, III (born 1960, died at age 44 in 2005); Patrick Butler McWilliams, born in 1963; and me, Anne Grace McWilliams, born in 1957.

We continued on to the Q&A upstairs in the library. I arrived in the room to find Mikal and Dick relating this story to the group gathered there. I sat down, continuing to feel quite stunned by this discovery of connection. When I left my house that morning, I was groggy from the time change and still re-entering from a vacation to Mexico. Now, I was buzzing with excitement, but also thrown for an existential and theological loop.

Long ago, I moved away from my evangelical certainties and developed a very stubborn non-interventionist streak when it comes to G-d’s work on the personal level. I have not had a very good history with the personal G-d of the ICU or of the parking space. But, I do know that something or someone holds me within some kind of orbit around the G-d of my environment and my people. Let’s just leave it at that.

Now, however, I feel that I am being visited by Providence. Or Something. I said to Carolyn Saahir, “This feels like a divine appointment.”

As we continued on through the morning, into the 11:00 service, Dick called Mikal and me up to the front of the church during the children’s moments. He had been talking with the kids about this G-d of Abraham, and this Abraham of the Jews, the Christians, and the Muslims. Same G-d, same spiritual DNA.

Dick invited Mikal and me to recreate our conversation down in the coffee time earlier in the morning. I was near tears. People in the congregation were transfixed. We closed our testimony addressing each other, “Cousin,” and a handshake that became a hearty hug.

After the second service, we continued to gather scraps of information. Among many other details, Mikal told me that he felt impressed to go and visit with my father’s Aunt Mary in 1984, just 5 years after I met her for the first time. He had a long conversation with my great-aunt, the person who named his mother Gloria. I wish I could have been a fly on the wall!

Yes, today was a most extraordinary day. Today, the Imam came to our church. The G-d of Abraham was present in our wide circle of inclusion. I found a wider love and a deeper grace. Into my constantly expanding sense of family, I found a cousin, most likely not of flesh and blood, nor only of geography and place, but a DNA of Spirit that extends back as far as Father Abraham.

Assalamu alaikum ~~~ Shalom ~~~ Peace

Photo Details: George McWilliams (b. February 1854 – d. June 30, 1938) holding Thomas Martin Gilbert (b. 192?), Elkmont, Alabama. Contributed by Mikal Saahir from family archives.

The Emancipation Proclamation was extended to the Tennessee Valley of northern Alabama on January 1, 1863.
In what year was this photo taken? 192?
In what year was Thomas Martin Gilbert born?
George McWilliams (b. February 1854 – d. June 30, 1938). Born into the Yarbrough family, along with two brothers. George and one of his brothers were purchased by James LaFayette McWilliams. George was freed from slavery (along with his brother?) in 1863 at the age of nine.
If : Thomas Martin Gilbert was born in 1923 (estimating: he is older than my Dad who was born on October 9, 1929, in Elkmont; TM looks to be about 18 mos.); and,
If : George McWilliams was nine years old in 1863, when Jim Fate McWilliams was required to give him his freedom (he was!); and,
If : this photo was taken in 1925;
Then : In this photo, if it was taken in 1925, George McWilliams might be around the age of 69, Thomas Martin about 18 months.

Maddeningly Tedious E-mail Correspondence

noreply@blogger.com (IndyAnne) — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 19:42:00 +0000

Start at the bottom at BEGINNING and read upwards to END. I am yours truly. Secretary is the person attempting to set an appointment for the interview for CPE residency.

Would someone please take a look at the response from yours truly and tell me how this could be misunderstood?

Let's begin with the week of March 9 - 13. I will hold this week open to your convenience of scheduling. If nothing works for that week, I can keep going through the next week, also, March 16-20. I am eager to complete the step of interviewing. Scheduling this interview will be my #1 priority, and I will work around it.

I'm not sure, but I think I'm being punished. This interview will not be for another MONTH!

END
March 20, 2:00 p.m.
Thank you,
yours truly

On Feb 23, 2009, at 2:31 PM, Secretary wrote:

No there is nothing earlier.

Secretary

-----Original Message-----
From: yours truly
Sent: Monday, February 23, 2009 2:31 PM
To: Secretary
Subject: Re: 's schedule change!

Nothing earlier?
On Feb 23, 2009, at 2:26 PM, Secretary wrote:

Ok so does this mean you will be available for March 20th at 2:00?

Secretary

-----Original Message-----
From: yours truly
Sent: Monday, February 23, 2009 2:25 PM
To: Secretary

March 9-13
March 16-23

On Feb 23, 2009, at 2:20 PM, Secretary wrote:

I guess I am not understanding what days you are available.

Secretary

-----Original Message-----
From: yours truly
Sent: Monday, February 23, 2009 2:13 PM
To: Secretary
Subject: Re: 's schedule change!

Secretary, March 2 will not work. As I said below:

March 9 - 13. I will hold this week open to your convenience of scheduling. If nothing works for that week, I can keep going through the next week, also, March 16-20.

Perhaps you meant March 20?

yours truly

On Feb 23, 2009, at 1:14 PM, Secretary wrote:

Ok. I have it set for March 2nd at 2:30 p.m.

Secretary

-----Original Message-----
From: yours truly
Sent: Monday, February 23, 2009 12:04 PM
To: Secretary
Subject: Re: 's schedule change!

Secretary:

Let's begin with the week of March 9 - 13. I will hold this week open to your convenience of scheduling. If nothing works for that week, I can keep going through the next week, also, March 16-20. I am eager to complete the step of interviewing. Scheduling this interview will be my #1 priority, and I will work around it.

Thank you,
yours truly

On Feb 23, 2009, at 11:42 AM, Secretary wrote:

Due to some events that are taking place this week I will have to schedule you sometime in March. Could you give me some dates and times in March?

Thank you,
Secretary
BEGINNING

Self-Disclosure Games

noreply@blogger.com (IndyAnne) — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 17:21:00 +0000

I've decided not to go to Chicago today. Icy weather here is going to give way to snow, and there must be more even more north of here.

I'm reading Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems, by Mary Oliver, Mariner: 1999. I love this poet. I also enjoy essays by writers about their craft. Mary Oliver is not much for self-disclosure in the direct way that we ask for it in therapy and pastoral care.

My colleague in CPE told me about her interview. Two men and a woman on the interview panel worked her over in that way of guerilla gonzo pseudo-psychoanalytic probing into the wounds of one's life. I have this interview to look forward to, also. So, this morning, I am thinking about self-disclosure.

I wonder sometimes if I had had a "normal" widowing*, if I would not have had such a long grief, with spells of -- torrents of -- self-disclosing pain, injury, wounding, anger, rage, self-pity? -- even as recently as this month. I'll never know. Maybe I can be an illustration for "complicated grief."

This interview will come. How shall I prepare? Everyone says, "Just be yourself." Indeed. I'm thinking it feels like a game. I've lived too long and trained a lot in the psychological strategies used in the service of ministry. One time, I refused to play by the rules of the game, withdrew from the game, and found a better pub in which to toss the darts, better friends to play with, but it did cost me some time and got me a reputation as one who now has "unfinished business" in the old place. Maybe.

Mary Oliver said, on xii in the preface to Winter Hours:

I have felt all my life that I was wise, and tasteful too, to speak very little about myself -- to deflect the curiosity in the personal self that descends upon writers, especially in this country and at this time, from both casual and avid readers. ... I am only too aware of the ways in which inclination and supposition will fill whatever spaces in this world, or a life, are left vacant.

Yes, Ma'am -- the universe abhors a vacuum, and transference is real. People will fill those gaps, as they will.

She goes on to say that, in this book, she is going to do a bit, tiny bit, more disclosure because she realizes she is getting older and some will claim to know her, so she wishes to [my paraphrase here] have some control over filling in some of the gaps, excepting the "important and proper secrets of a heart."

Wise and tasteful. I have been neither, often. Not that millions will read my writing. But, perhaps more importantly, people who know me well, or think they do, often read these thoughts. I am chastened by this thought, sometimes. Still, this sense of others reading over my shoulder has not stopped me from saying some things that might offend. I've never been one to say, "Oh, *&^% 'em," as Reb regularly responded to my reports of hurtful things, mindless things coming from ones I thought better of. I've not been one to take a "live and let live" attitude about some matters, believing that I could be persuasive and change someone's mind. Arrogant?

I have strolled into strange pubs and joined games in progress, hurling my points toward any board that I faced. Maybe I can be more selective now.

As I approach this interview, I realize I feel curious and interested about what kinds of questions may come, what darts will find a way to my center; will I cry when they do? Will I let anger show? Will I go in with a good humor, tell it slant? Develop an angle of delivery that will answer with a clever twist?

Look -- I just want to get on with this next phase of the learning, hazing and all. Earning a Ph.D. should be good practice, already. Somebody hand me a Guinness, I need to play my way through. It's only a game.

*a "normal" widowing: nothing the freedom to marry would not fix

Friending and other Facebook Phenomena

noreply@blogger.com (IndyAnne) — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 16:46:00 +0000

I was a reluctant newcomer to FACEBOOK back in the day, August 8, 2008. 8/8/08 -- that was not intentional, but what the bleep? One day, I realized I had over 100 friends. Somehow, that was shocking. It's been a long time since I've been "Annie Social" (in seminary). I think I've become more of an introvert over time.

One day, I looked at that list of friends and realized I was not really friends with that many people. We go to church together, we went to school together, we met at a party, or someone thought we would have a lot in common.

One day, I realized I was using FB to process too much of my inner life to have that many acquaintances looking on. I also realized I could not really say I wanted to be friends with some people who perhaps were students at some distant past time, or maybe we had known each other in college, before I knew I was a Lesbian, and this would be juicy gossip to pass around the old circle of friends. Maybe we knew each other from times past that I had left not just geographically, but also spiritually, emotionally, and the like. Some ground is just too full of roots and stones to keep breaking your plow over again.

So, I unfriended a lot of people one day. I figured maybe if someone I unfriended really wanted to be considered friends, they would miss me and get in touch. And, happy to say, one person did that.

I've had some contact from long ago acquaintances who wanted to "friend" me. I feel ambivalent about it, so I just don't respond. There's something kind of rude about blocking someone outright. Maybe if I let the invitation linger, there might be some additional correspondence later on with some additional self-disclosure, explaining more about why being friends with me would be a good or helpful or just pleasantly friendly thing to do.

Sometimes I think I learned to be too guarded in the past. For so many years, as I was coming into awareness of who I was in terms of loving a woman, and deciding how political I wanted to be about that (very much, as it turns out), I wanted control over access to my private world. Turns out, others made their incursions. I've written much earlier here about how that worked, with being outed, with people passing along rumors and lies along with some of the truth, with people of faith turning out to be extremely cruel and stupid. Yea, verily, don't cast your pearls before swine.

A time came when I relinquished that control. But, in the Facebook world, with people showing up again after eras of life have come and gone -- and with the present being so full of what it simply IS every day -- matters that once were private, like coming out, are now passé to me yet shocking to others. Now, I find that same old pearl-casting is falling into the wrong trough.

Maybe I'm too self-conscious to be comfortable on Facebook. Or, rather, maybe it's that I want too much to have my life integrated and consolidated through all of these eras and changes. I want so much for it to have a story line, a narrative, a point.

Maybe everyone goes through radical changes and interruptions in their previously settled senses of what is normal. Surely, I'm not the only one who has allowed the messy, the unexpected, the shock of death, the coming home to self that is being gay, the snags and hooks of certainty that are embedded in a certain way of having faith, and the senses of essential self and essential desires to find meaning and purpose in ways that continue to bring unexpected and unconventional quasi-, parti-, non-, semi-resolution over time. And, I really hope that essential self and those essential desires will hit home with some, to have that feeling of settling down in easy chairs by the fire to catch up and be with each other, authentically.

Apparently, many people want the same. And, I really love the here-and-now information sharing that simply moves us all, even the trivial "I'm up now and blowing my nose" posts that say we're all just getting on with our days. Somehow, that number of friends keeps creeping up over 100. Not sure today, maybe around 125? I'm just going to let it be what it is.

See, I loved and love many of these old friends who keep showing up in my inbox, my request box. I wish to say, come on in, see what has been happening all these years. See what there is to see. Stay, if you like. Move on with me. See what Love has brought to me over the years. See what Living has taken, too. Be sad with me. Rage against the injustice with me. Celebrate the whole with me. I'll try to be as forgiving as I want you to be with me. There is no time to linger, it all changes so fast.

Surviving Adolescence: Literature, Reading, Words

noreply@blogger.com (IndyAnne) — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 21:49:00 +0000

Teen Survival

Books and horses helped me to survive my teen years. Horses are still my totem animal, my symbolic world of strength, threat of death, survival, and confidence. Horses are another story, impossible to convey in prose. Maybe poetry, or poetry that will become songs, but not here, not yet.

Besides horses, I survived adolescence because of literature. The first people I encountered outside my own family who influenced my taste in literature were the Dearmans. I dated Bill, a twin, a musician (trumpet), a smart boy, an agnostic, and a tortured soul (spinal curvature, brace). We sat on a piano bench behind the band room and I noticed immediately that he smelled good. He always seemed to smell good. It was a combination of his deodorant, something spicy in his aftershave, and the fact that he showered a lot. Maybe that brace was hot and smelly. I miss that boy. I miss that girl, some, but that’s just the mist of nostalgia.

I might also credit my ninth grade English teacher, Mrs. Peterson, Rita, and her husband, Don, one wicked-smart couple. That’s another story for another day, because so many elements of mastery, self-confidence, and self-understanding are in my halo of good feeling and memory of them. They had to go and ruin that halo by becoming really true post-Moral Majority evangelicals, which in my mind makes the halo into something kitschy and two-dimensional, like a stage prop you don’t want to get too close to because then you’ll ruin your illusion. Before that, however, they were just young, smart, edgy, and they helped me move forward in my self-differentiation in very significant ways. I thank them, over and over. Wow, what a ham-bake this paragraph is turning out to be. I think I’ll get back to the Dearmans.

The Dearmans senior were a couple of erudite taste. In my memory, Mrs. Dearman – Ella -- never missed worship at the First Methodist Church. Mrs. Dearman always recognized the pieces I played on her piano. That could have come from having so many kids and insisting on piano lessons for each of them. That would have meant a lot of Chopin études over the years. Ella smoked like a chimney, and talked whild she exhaled her smoke. She always seemed to be interested in what I had to say about things. And, Mr. Dearman – Commodore – seriously, although most called him C. C. (Commodore Columbus Dearman – who names a baby that?) – walked around the yard with, in a plastic cup, white wine in his top shirt pocket. In a dry county. He was taciturn yet readily critical, in a kind of Bostonian Brahmin Southern Accent, of most things coming out of his sons’ mouths, and he generally ignored me. He is the first person I ever knew not on a farm with a garden but no pigs who had a compost pile. He experimented with this compost pile by placing some raw chicken in aluminum foil into the center of the pile. The heat of the composting process cooked the chicken. Bill and I agreed he was some kind of nerd, although that word did not yet have wide use. I think C. C., who never went to church, walked around half-toasted on his white wine a lot of the time. They even cooked with white wine. They had a special dish, prepared by C. C., for special occasions, called Chicken Supreme. It was very special to be invited over when that was being served. I think Bill’s graduation was such an occasion. So was the evening after Tony Dunnivant died in his motorcycle accident and I mentioned it at the table, and Bob, Bill’s twin, burst up from his seat and slammed out of the house. I found it hard to swallow my Chicken Supreme after that.

Commodore, as his wife called him, began a fallout shelter in the backyard in the 60s, but he never finished it. He worked somehow with the government or the military or something mysterious (to me) in Huntsville, that capitol of top secrets, that Pentagon of North Alabama, for which my hometown served as a bedroom community.

Much to my surprise, I ended up living and having the most significant of my early serious adult experiences in the town that was Ella Dearman’s childhood home. She had a cantankerous old mother-figure/stepmother/someone, a stout yet very small and spry, and did I say: old woman who was very smart and sharp: Clara Weathersby. I visited Clara's home in high school with Bill and his sister Sally and her husband Ed. To tell the truth, I was kind of scared of Clara. She loved to argue and debate, and she got me cornered at least once on that visit. Only much later in my life would I learn how to hold my own in a hot debate, and I hope one day beyond time, I can tangle with Clara again, since I could probably enjoy it now. So, anyway, Clara was a devout Methodist and managed single-handedly to defy the Mississippi Conference cabinet, and keep open and supplied with a pastor a little church on the west side of Hattiesburg, MS. Clara was formidable. Only after she died did they finally close that church. Or, maybe they did it when she became so feeble that they merged her little one-woman congregation into the West Lake United Methodist Church.

Anyway, back to Ella and CC and my literary development: I spotted a book on the shelf (they had many shelves of books), A. E. Hotchner’s Papa Hemingway, maybe in the tenth grade. I wanted to be erudite, too, so I took this book home and read it quickly. I knew Hemingway was important to my erudition because I saw the Spencer Tracy film of The Old Man and the Sea, and there had to be some kind of gravitas and smarts in having such a tragic fish story made so famous, I mean, other than Moby Dick, which is, of course, one of the ultimate tragic fish stories besides Jonah's. My dad read Hemingway. My dad read a lot of good literature. I think he should have had a better education, but he had what he had. And, my Mom, with her college education, had a good liberal arts background. She also read well. I think I had to get out of the house and see some other shelves in order to go back home to my parents and my grandmother and suspect, somewhere around my junior year of high school, that some good titles waited on their shelves.

I read Hemingway. Somerset Maugham. Evelyn Waugh. Oh, yes, I took my Evelyn Waugh novel to my high school English teacher, thinking that she would be impressed. Not only do I think she never read the novel, but she also never returned it to me. She was so beautiful, new, fresh, a homecoming queen in my childhood. I know now that I had a crush on her and wanted her to be impressed with my adult taste in literature. It was easy, therefore, to skip my senior year of high school English, take it the previous summer at Lee High School in Huntsville with Gail Baugh, and get on with moving out of high school and home, on to college at Athens College, which was threatened to be closed by the UMC since the merger with the EUBs, and the decision of the denomination in the Southeast to really begin taking integration seriously. There were too many colleges to keep afloat what with integration and preservation of the historic black colleges and those schools with more cachet, like Birmingham Southern and Huntingdon, and Montevallo. I got to talk to a state senator and a state representative at the college at a luncheon mixer with alumni, students, and legislators, to explain how that college had been such a significant presence in my life. And it was, truly. My first rock concert, where Black Oak Arkansas played, and the opening band exploded one of those huge glass lab jars, ten gallons big, with a tiny opening at the top, probably a lot like plastic water cooler jars now. I saved a piece of the jar, kept it for years. The lead singer said, “Bummer, man” and kept playing. We could not have been more terrified and impressed with the coolness of that. It was probably better than sex would have been at that age, but I really did not have the comparison in mind at the time. It would probably have been even cooler if I had been stoned like a lot of my friends were, but, I swear to you, I tried really hard to smoke pot all those years and some combination of fear, conscience, and a deep parental omniscience transference kept me from smoking pot.

The college survived. Not the sweet old liberal arts college with Methodist minister scholars, who raised their smart kids along with us regular civilians in the First United Methodist Church, and sent them to smart colleges like Birmingham Southern and Harvard and Yale, at least to Alabama. But, the State of Alabama made sweet old Athens College first into Athens State College, the upper two years of the baccalaureate to complete the county’s junior college, John C. Calhoun Junior College, the first two years or associates degrees. I guess they got a doctorate of education or business or nursing, one of the trades of higher education in poor southern state community college systems. The signs on the interstate now have rectangles in newer shade of green and reflective white, with “university” placed over the “college.” For us natives, however, who still live there or who return from time to time will always simply call it, The College. They have the Olde Tyme Fiddlers’ Convention every October over at “The College” with the backdrop of the four columns of Founders Hall, the four apostles, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

To this day, I have never smoked pot. Sometimes I think I missed out on something important, sometimes I think I was spared a lot of heartache, like my brothers’ fates, one dead, one in the grip of addiction. I never even got to go to Raney’s at the State Line (TN) with people who went drinking and driving on the weekends after football games, or Saturday nights, or all the time in the summers. By the time I could drive and could to there myself, Jesus was the center of my life and I could not go, or did not go. My abstinence held pretty much until after high school. I mean, how can a girl in a dry county, with Jesus at the center of her life drink beer, especially when the one time she does, and tells her dad about it, he breaks down and cries? Wow, that kind of disillusionment is really hard to take. These days, why I think I can enjoy my whiskey and beer and wine and not fall into the abyss, I don’t know, maybe because I somehow do not have that gene. But, I missed out on the whole chemical hook that got my brothers. Maybe it will get me later, when I’m old and need more drugs. Maybe I’ll sooner die.

See, the whole problem with me and authority is really all about parental omniscience and x-ray vision, and believing my dad when he said he would not bail me out of jail if I got arrested for drugs. Drugs were very new in my youth. Only the most marginal of people did drugs before Vietnam and Watergate – poor white trash, and black people who lived in the country and frequented the joint at Dogwood Flat. Eventually, no one would be without drugs in the family, not the minister or the chief of police or the school superintendent or the college president, not even the preacher at the Church of Christ. But, Dad had no idea what he was talking about. He bailed my brothers out time after time, and in his desperate love lost their respect, and mine. He let them take him for all he was worth. Every penny. I kept going in my inward struggle, going for many years toward conformity with an edge of rebellion, overcompensating, seeking healing in Jesus, pre-Moral Majority evangelicalism and Jesus movement psychology and spirituality. Fortunately, I was a good reader. I could explore the edges of my duality in literature. I’m so grateful to literature and reading. Here I sit, writing my heart out about reading and literature.

Even as early as fifth or sixth grade, I pulled For Whom the Bell Tolls from the shelf in the library, before the new high school was built, before shifting around schools in the changing political dynamics of our town, even before learning how to change classes, use a locker, and have time for a drink of water and the bathroom. The librarian, Mrs. Wathen, whom I later began to call Sheila -- because I grew up and was college roommate with Virginia, and young adults get to call their childhood adult figures by their first names; it’s a rite of passage – Sheila told me that book was over my head. Not only on the shelf, over my head, where I was working as some kind of reward for boredom as a library assistant at my school, making all the spines and the Dewey Decimal System lined up perfectly with the edge of the shelf, but over my head intellectually and developmentally. To this day, I line my books up by pulling all the spines to the edge, then taking a book out and with its spine, on its side, slide all the spines together to a common even distance from the edge. Wow. Books can really get into your head. That denial by Mrs. Wathen was all the challenge I needed. I told my Mom about it, and she gently suggested that I could try the book, and see how I liked it.

Mrs. Wathen’s type of challenge and my growing loss of respect for my father provided a rich bed of rebellion and general lack of respect for authority. I honestly believed the administrators at my school were stupid, except my history teacher/guidance counselor/Sunday School teacher, Mrs. Elizabeth Brett. I lived a double life of wanting to be good, a good girl, and wanting to be smart, which was subliminally related to being bad, out of line, out of my place, and somehow different.

My grandmother had For Whom the Bell Tolls at her house, so in my many summer days and weekends at her house, I read the book, anyway. And, I read Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (a good basis for a budding environmentally conscious young adult who has an Earth Day sticker on her guitar case), Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and Taylor Caldwell, and Leon Uris, and Robert Ruark, the one who wrote The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, a powerful film for a young adult to see, all that WASP/Jewish clash of sensibilities, the antagonism and ambivalence that emerges in late teen years, making it necessary to begin both loathing and enjoying one’s social location, especially if it is white and middle class. I hated school enough to miss out on the Honor Society and good scholarships, but I took for granted that I would go to college and do pretty much what I wanted. I just didn’t really know what that was. Teach school in Athens, Alabama? Become a large animal veterinarian? Mostly, I majored in hating the Establishment, but really needing to please the same Establishment. Vietnam was too close yet, but eventually, it became literary stuff, and I can look back and sort out all of that social/cultural/personal chaos. It seems that these great upheavals of culture need years of unconscious ferment before good literature can emerge. What is that about?

Being a good reader always helped me through the awkwardness of my teen years. I knew I was different in a way that would not serve me well in life as I knew it then, so I cultivated the dual personae of inwardly nursing curiosity and outwardly wanting desperately to conform.

So, why did I go to college at UNA? Why not Birmingham Southern like other smart people in my class with good Methodist leanings? Who knows. But, my hero there had a very interesting intersection with the Petersons, The College, my growing interest in playing the guitar, and he was a really smart guy from the sticks: Bill Foster. Now, I wanted to impress Dr. Foster. I did not do so well in his Shakespeare class. I know now that I am an emotional learner, and I needed to talk and process all those plays and sonnets. But, the processing came after the pop-quizzes. That did not stop me from majoring in English. Being required to read a lot was like pizza to me, a treat and almost daily sustenance on campus when I had the money.

Thanks to Mr. Kingsbury, who recently passed away, and that pompous writer who shouted me down about his beloved England in creative writing, who told me I probably would not be able to write until after age 30, and Mr. Strickland. Lindsay. I was in over my head with the beat poets, but I will never forget the very proper and precise Lindsay Strickland. I understand him so much more now, and it’s not just the aging that I understand. I get him, his apparent solitary life, his quiet, almost secretive existence. Some kind of duality going on there, too, I think. Dr. Albert Sydney Johnston -- am I remembering his name correctly? the same as the Civil War General? -- another wee sissy, but kind of interesting to a student from a dry county who never met a queer she wasn't absolutely fascintated with -- who would come to class totally wasted, drunk as a skunk, lean on the podium and expound wistfully on whatever topic in poetry, with his very interesting old-South accent a bit like an Oxbridgian don, with a little listing and waver in his step, move toward the windows, weave back to the podium; or, just not show up at all.

Classics, “great literature” and creative writing – the hunger and appreciation of these have always sustained me. Thanks to my family, friends, and my education for giving me some structure. Please send me more and more suggestions for my list. My nightstand is piled high, and I will build more and more shelves. I am a reader. I love books. I will celebrate books as long as I can know and comprehend. Books let me know that I can not only escape into fiction, but can become something even more real than I can know without them. Oh, dammit, words fail. Maybe I'll find a good passage in a book to let you know how important this is to me, how much I need reading and books and writing to become me, to grow, to find life in words.

My mom died of side effects of Alzheimer's Disease. I want so much to be able to hold on to these words. So, just in case, I write all of this to you, a reader.

An Anniversary

noreply@blogger.com (IndyAnne) — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 16:56:00 +0000

It's a big anniversary this week. Pilgrims saved from starvation by Native Americans? Yes. Sadness, grief, bereavement? Yes. 10 years.

And then, the next year, near-death for a dear friend. Yes. 9 years.

And, since being in the hospital on a holiday is a miserable thing, I'm going to keep my same schedule at the hospital, visit some folks on the Family Medicine floor (reminds me of something Nancy would do), and some wee ones and their families in the NICU.

CPE is a great experience for me. It's not just about connecting to the past, or hoping there's a future in it; it's about being present with others, slowing down, listening, paying attention.

I will be remembering. I am so very thankful.

Thank you, Rachel. Thank you, Grace. I love our family. I love you.

Thank you, friends. Thank you, family. I love you.

Thanksgiving.