Brenda Wilbee's "Tea Time" Blog

#74: Excerpt From Updated Sweetbriar - Chief Seattle Plots Necessary Revenge

2019-10-14T17:37:00.001-07:00

Herring House, Duwamish River / Sketch by Brenda Wilbee

During this time, Seattle moved between residences on Elliott Bay and at Old Man House, where Angeline [Kick-i-som-lo] said he hunted elk with bow and arrow....

- David M. Buerge in Chief Seattle and the Town That Took His Name

In the Moon of Swan Migration, a full decade before the Borens and Dennys took the Indian trail to Oregon, destination unknown, fifty-five-year-old Chief Seattle went to visit his second wife at her village near the Duwamish River mouth. He wanted to take their mid-grown sons hunting; his intention to find an elk for Kick-i-som-lo, his twenty-one-year-old daughter who lived with her two little girls at Old Man House, his primary residence. That he was devoted to his eldest went without saying. Today, in preparation for the hunt with his boys, however, he sat on the floor of the long communal deck of Herring House village, legs swinging off the edge, double-checking his arrowheads. He preferred bow and arrow over the Hudson’s Bay Company’s muzzle-loading rifle. Faster to load and silent.

The village ran in a line along the beach, most of the homes built on stilts to avoid the high tides, most with steep cedar-plank roofs. With white men now on the Nisqually Flats and Muckleshoot Prairie, they’d been able to trade for tools: the adze to split cedar into long thin planks; saws, hammers, and nails to build framed homes.

“ʔi čəxʷ!” Hello!

Curley, Chief Seattle's brother

He looked out to the water in surprise and rare smile to see his little brother of the same mother but different father drive his dugout onto the beach—considered “little” because Chief Curley stood nearly a foot shorter than Seattle and fifteen years younger.

“ʔi čəxʷ! Haʔɬ sšudubicid?!” Seattle greeted. Hello, good to see you!

Named for his hair—rare but not unusual—forty-year-old Curley was primary chief of the Duwamish and lived not far away in Little Crossing Place on the east side of the Wulge. “I ran into Pat Kanim!”

Seattle’s scalp tingled. It had been six months since Owhi, war chief of the Yakima, had murdered his nephew. Almost daily he’d been waiting to hear from Pat Kanim, chief of the Snoqualmie and Snohomish—who lived closer to the mountains.

“Stab kʷ(i) adsyəcəb?” What’s the news?

“He saw a band of Yakima come through the pass!”

Seattle’s mind leaped like lightning, the space between his thoughts crackled. “Is Owhi with them?” he asked, dropping half a dozen arrowheads into his soft doeskin pouch, taking the nearest stair off the deck and meeting Curley at one of the beach fires.

“No. But he says they’re headed down White River.”

“How many?”

“Thirty men, maybe more.”

Thunder rumbled in Seattle’s head…a war party. “He must think me weak to send so small a flotilla.”

“Thirty men make a high blood price.”

He’d have every last one of them, and said as much.

His word was law. No one argued. No one wanted to. And not today.

With his straight legs and well-fed body, Seattle towered above everyone—not only in stature but in sheer force of will and experience. He used speed and surprise to bring down his enemies. Even the Haida had come to fear him, and their raids on the Wulge had long ago sputtered to an end. His use of language, rich with metaphor and music, inspired the brave, stirred imagination, braced the cowardly, rallied the weak. Muscular, deep chested, he could project his voice three-quarters of a mile and orate for an hour. On cold days, a mile. Today he called for warriors; they came out of nowhere. He chose two of the quickest and strongest to go upriver at once.

“I want to know exactly where they are, and if we have time to set a trap. Portage between the river’s curls. We’ll follow within the hour.” To Curley, he said, “We’ll ambush them at the Bend if we can.” To fifteen-year-old Jim, begging to go, he said, “I promised Kick-i-som-lo an elk. It’s up to you now.”

“If it wasn’t for her, I’d get to go.”

“Yes, opportunity ripened and I must revenge.”

Jim seized a rock and in mindless fury hurled it, accidentally catching a slave in the shoulder. The surprised old man screamed and fell to his knees, clutching his dislocated joint.

“Your temper,” said Seattle to Jim, “will be the end of you one day. But today you will go find the shaman.” He dismissed his ill-tempered son and ordered a Skokomish slave to bring Curley freshly steamed clams; and Curley dropped to a squat by the fire and greedily sucked down the hot meat with smacking lips. Within the hour, they pushed off, leaving Herring House in eight canoes, three warriors to each.

____

Seattle Sweetbriar, updated and illustrated, to be re-released 2020

#73: Forgiveness Intervenes

2019-06-17T15:55:00.002-07:00

Phil, Heather, Blake

A single mother for years, people often asked, "How ever did you do it?” There was an assumption I did do it.

The kids are grown and gone and have kids themselves. Eight in fact, and more on the way. When I sold my house to down-size in 2012, I spent a lot of time going through old files and came across a folder of Heather’s school work. She was six when I left her dad, and she's suffered the most. Because she gave me no trouble, I tended to leave her to herself. There were so many other things to do.

One of my most painful memories of her childhood is when she broke her knee. She was out riding her bike a few blocks from home when a neighbor kid plowed right into her, dropping her straight down on her knee. Somehow she managed to get the bike and herself home and into my bed. She instructed her little brothers to pack her knee with ice and waited until I got home.

I was at a writers conference an hour away. No cell phones then. When I returned, she’d been in pretty brutal pain for hours, watching her knee swell despite the ice and aspirin. I bundled her into the car and over to emergency, where they splinted her leg and suggested a surgeon. Amidst my sea of guilt, I was thunderstruck at how stoic and smart she’d been.

Yet I couldn’t be everywhere—physically, emotionally. I was far away in world of unrelenting stress and juggling the impossible. Balls dropped and rolled away. I was always scrambling after them and starting again. This was my reality. And unfortunately hers.

Here's a letter from that file. Heather had been asked to write it.

“Are you wondering why I am writing you a letter? It’s because Mrs. Morris is making us. We have to do this every week on Friday and it has to be returned, signed by you. If we bring it back on Monday we get 25 points. For every day it’s late, we lose 3 points. I know you hate reading and signing letters...”

She’s referring to the inundation of paper work I constantly received from the schools for all three of my children; everything had to be reviewed and signed and returned and, yes, I hated it. The clutter of it all in my head—while struggling to get the bills paid and food on the table and attend all the other things needing attention—was too much. I didn’t mind reading the material; it was the constant of signing and keeping track and reporting to the teachers that I minded. Why all the falderal? When I was a kid, we did our homework and that was that. None of this running back and forth between home and school. As a kid, it would have driven me nuts. As a mother?

But reading Heather’s letter years later, away from the pressing needs of yesterday, I realize my irritation had been hard on her. Not only did she have the responsibility of orchestrating the paperwork, her grade depended on it—she had my resistance. Stoically, she'd soldiered on. I'm bothered by this.

A second realization. “...it’s not my fault,” she'd added. She tried so hard not to burden me. This really bothers me.

But if this first letter bothered me, it was the one dated October 9, 1989, that upset me. In the middle of her narrative, Heather wrote:

“Now, I’m supposed to tell you what I’m doing this weekend. I’m going to Dad’s. I don’t think you care what we do.”

Right in the solar plexus. I did care. But the weekend reports with Dad triggered rage, and disgust. My children’s lack of care was so profound--and I so helpless--that early on I’d begun to steel myself and eventually trained myself to remain passive when hearing about it. For instance, in the early days they had to sleep in urine-soaked sleeping bags. They came home reeking. Their necks were dirty. Their hair uncombed. In later years my habit was to simply listen, to remain disengaged from their lives outside my sphere. Today I realize that Heather interpreted my passivity as “not caring.” I was remiss and this bothers me.

So to answer everyone’s question, “How did you ever do it?” I here and now answer, "I didn’t. I failed."

But here’s the twist. Heather and her brothers seem to have forgiven my faults and negligence. And if ever I doubted it, a letter from Phil is the pile alongside Heather's. Apparently some huge crisis occurred in March 1999. I have no memory, there were so many. This must have been a doozy though. Phil was 21. He writes:

"I had no idea this was going on, you say this started on the 30th? I have already prayed for you, and prayed again. Mum, I don't want you to scare me like that again. You have been so strong for all of us our whole lives. I am not telling you to be strong now, because I can understand, no, I can’t, but I simply ask that you allow us to be strong for you now. Tears run down my face as I hear your distress, think about the beautiful things. Any year now you may be holding a grandchild in your arms. You can teach them to love themselves as you have taught me. Sending my children to grandma’s house is something I have dreamed of my whole life, to let them experience the love and encouragement I was so fortunate to have….Please always remember that I love you and that I, we, will be strong for you…"

Their whole lives, they watched me lurch from one upheaval to the next while I struggled with poverty, poor health, and all the attendant worries that come with any kind of parenting. My faults speak for themselves. But it seems forgiveness intervenes.

#72 - Uncovering The Easter Bunny

2019-04-10T14:20:00.002-07:00

WHEN I WAS A KID, I had no idea how the Easter Bunny came by all those candied eggs. I was edging into old and wearing my first pair of bifocals when I stumbled onto the truth.

The C Shop of Birch Bay, WA.

December 2006 I moved uphill from Birch Bay's iconoclastic C Shop, housed in the old Birch Bay Resort of 1904. Owned by two retired school teachers, Patricia and Patrick Alesee, the ShePat and HePat keep busy during Lent to fill the Easter Bunny's baskets, who for years has been hippity-hopping those baskets right to your own front door.

The Pats and I became friends and about the end of January, and the ShePat started making noises about not getting the lead out of her feet. She was officially a week behind the "big start," an intense ten-week, round-the-clock, labor intensive effort to get all her chocolate bunnies, roosters, teddy bears, frogs, and chickies... ready for you know who.

I got in from grocery shopping one day in early February to a phone message: Pat had the lead out of her toes at last and needed to make 25 boxes of mint daisies. Did I want to come down and do the centers?

Patricia's very famous "white chocolate" mint daisies actually go out all over the county and country year round, but first someone has to make the yellow centers where the mint lives and permeates the flower. In 2008, that would be me. So here's the "inside" scooby-doo from The C Shop to you on how to make mint daisies.

First you have to use a lollypop stick--without the lollypop--to transfer very warm "white chocolate" (that's really really yellow and very very minty) into the daisy centers of the dozen-to-a-sheet mold. You work beside a heater to keep your fingers hot, the chocolate smooth, and you make sure to drop a perfectly round circle--no spilling or sloppy stuff. If you twitch? Wait for it to cool, pop it out, and start again. I, just so you know, did not have to do that too often. Just sayin'.

Now someone's go to fill the molds. That would be the ShePat. She has a dispenser that squirts "white chocolate" on top of the yellow centers, filling in the petals in the exact same way teenagers working at Dairy Queen squirt soft ice cream into cones. Squirt, squirt, squirt, very fast, very impressive.

Then she gently whacks the mold against a table top, whack, whack, whack, another whack, turning and jiggling the chocolate down into the flower pattern.

Now into the freezer. Sheet after sheet to harden. Rows upon row. Shelves of them. Centers all made by me. Thank you very much.

Hardened, we pop them out and box. Thirty to a box.

Now here's some really good news if you're hungry. No longer do you have to wait for the Easter Bunny! Today you can order your own box of daisy mints--

--along with all kinds of other Easter candy.

Click here! Go!

Oh, yea, nearly forgot. Not only is the C Shop where the Easter Bunny gets his haul, the C Shop is where the Easter Bunny lives! See him here with his Honey Bunny? And now I know, and now you know too!

#71 - On Meeting God

2019-02-19T20:42:00.000-08:00

June 1968 - 16 years old

WHILE SHARING one of my stories with a friend, she interrupted, “And you still believe in God?”

Belief is my story. A story that began the day I died—August 3, 1969.

I was seventeen years old that sunny Sunday just outside Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The Chicago Cubs were about to defeat the San Diego Padres, Elvis Presley was playing in Las Vegas; and two weeks before we’d all watched Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin make their historic moonwalk. Nothing in my own world suggested anything out of the ordinary. True, my asthma was troublesome. But my parents had left me in care of my uncle, a doctor, before taking off for short-term mission work. That sunny Sunday I woke to the usual racket in the house, my five cousins stirring, Auntie Anne hollering to hurry up, breakfast was ready. I showed up but begged off church. I just couldn’t breathe.

I retreated to an upstairs’ bedroom. My lungs began to tighten. I struggled to draw air and was grateful to hear the car pull up just after noon. Car doors slammed, hinges squealed. Five kids tumbled through the front door and up the half flight of stairs. My uncle came to check on me and with a worried look told eight-year-old Patti to get me a spoon. “A tablespoon,” he told me, handing me a bottle before leaving on a house call.

Almost immediately I was in trouble. Tight lungs tightened, an iron grip climbing into my throat, leaving only a wee sliver of airway. I couldn’t call for help, and in mounting panic I focused on making each tiny breath count. Vision closed in. Sound came to me as though submerged. Patti popped her head around the corner. Freckles jumped in her face and she fled. Within seconds, my aunt arrived. I lost grip of the bedpost, and Auntie Anne struggled to keep me sitting while I hung to life by a thread of air, and in full-blown panic.

A funny thing, time. Ticking away, a steady beat but petering out as the mind whirls in a kaleidoscope of tumbling thought and fear and madness for oxygen, each belabored breath a countdown. Sharp, twinkling pricks began to plague, and I felt my body to be a universe of stars blinking painfully out one by one and in rapid clusters, and I knew myself to be dying.

Uncle Stan returned. I had no sense of sound, though I felt him heft me into his arms. I flopped like a thing already dead, legs swinging, banging into the doorjamb, down the stairs, out to the car. Somehow I was sitting on Auntie Anne’s lap in the back seat. I could see the leaves of the trees, tiny and bright, ever so green and oh-so-lovely while we rocketed downhill on the pitted, gravel road of 6th Avenue to 56th Street, the main drag out of town. How can I see them? I didn’t have my glasses.

Moments later we pulled into my uncle’s office on 56th. I felt a sting and jab to my thigh. Epinephrine? Fear surged, each breath cruel disappointment. Don’t let me die! Please, dear God, don’t let me die! But I was dying. No matter my begging, I wasn’t going to make it to the hospital. Was there sunlight in heaven? Do trees grow? Did birds sing? Could I walk a beach with waves at my ankles? Don't let me die!

Yea, through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.

A verse surfaced in the storm—a buoy on waves. I will fear no evil. I will fear no evil. We approached the George Massey tunnel that ran under the Fraser River, the hospital ten minutes out. Sunlight rippled through the stretch of overhead slats. I will fear no evil. We descended into the yawning cavern. I will fear no evil. I fear evil! I was going to die in that tunnel! In a rising tsunami of terror, foot braced beneath the front seat, I pushed up for a last desperate breath. For thou art with me, thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. Next verse surfacing, we shot into the tunnel. Peace (all pain and panic gone) swept me into the darkness.

George Massey Tunnel

“I think we just lost her,” said my aunt. My uncle whirled, face white.

How can I hear Auntie Anne if I’m dead? How can I see my uncle’s face?

A light began to grow in the distance. I emerged from darkness into a butter-yellow brilliance that held in its core a more brilliant light yet, white, more dense but transparent, luminous and shimmering. No one had to introduce us—and for a moment I stood surprised by the radiating love of God.

Over the years, I’ve struggled to find words to name what I felt in those brief moments. Bliss, harmony, a oneness with the source—more than this. Serenity, connection, grace, inclusion, love. More still. A holy wonder far outside the gamut of love we so poorly know and experience here.

But I was to go back.

I don’t understand.

You have a purpose to fulfill.

I don’t want to go back. I don’t want to die again. I didn’t. I wasn’t a fan of the process.

You’ll go back to Abundant Life.

Have I been healed?

You have a purpose.

Richmond Hospital

The Light of God gave way to sunlight, and I saw large red letters spelling EMERGENCY, bobbing ahead at an angle impossible to see from the backseat of a car. I floated up through the roof, the letters below me. I trailed behind like a kite attached to the bumper—though I had no sensation of speed. The car wheeled left, juddered to a stop at the hospital curb. I swung pleasantly around to a different position as if by centrifugal force, ending up in front of the car, facing it, though much higher up and no longer tethered. I hovered like a hummingbird. My uncle jumped out, ran around behind, and came up the other side to pull me from my aunt’s arms. He couldn’t get me out. A flurry of hospital staff appeared. Curiously, I watched the frenetic attempts. No one seemed to understand my foot was stuck, wedged beneath the front seat—jammed when I’d pushed up for air I couldn’t find.

“My foot is stuck!” I hollered down.

The anxious staff circled. Someone else tried. I shouted again, this time using my hands to megaphone. I had no hands—but I did. I could move them, I could feel them on my cheeks. I had no cheeks. I looked down. No body. A void, without shape or form but curiously alive. My thoughts whirled and a thousand things flitted through my mind. But the commotion below unnerved me.

"MY FOOT! MY FOOT IS STUCK!”

“Her foot is stuck,” said Auntie Anne.

They pulled me loose and lay me on the gurney, looking like nothing more than a heap of summer clothes. But then I was back—a brutal, horrifying shock. One minute floating, free, the next incarcerated inside my ribcage, trapped by skin and bone. Claustrophobic, crammed into close quarters, confined, no escape—and again in a roaring thrum of terror and madness for air.

Breathing eventually returned, and I recovered. But I had not been healed.

Summer over, my family returned to the Midwest where we lived at the time. I spent more days out of school than in, and again was in the hospital. Late October, family friends suggested I go live with them in Arizona. My mother took me down, enrolled me in high school, and on Veterans Day, November 1969, put my fragile life in the care of a Christian doctor in nearby Scottsdale, a Young Life leader at Scottsdale High.

She waited for me in the waiting room. More than hour later I wobbled out, pale and shattered and unable to speak. I still don’t speak of what happened. In three months’ time I’d gone from the gates of heaven to the gates of hell. Life derailed—a different trajectory, and I bumbled along as happens to the abused.

So much for Abundant Life. Yet Jesus warned of thieves who come to steal and kill and destroy. He told us, too, He’d come to give life—abundantly. I was confused. Fifty years later, I understand. God resurrects our lives and restores our souls, over and over and over again, and as many times as it takes. The summation reveals abundance too easily missed.

“So you still believe in God?”

I do. He is. I met him, and I understand better than others of His love. Perhaps this is my purpose for which I’ve been sent back, to simply bear witness to Love Divine, a holy wonder outside the gamut of love we so poorly know and experience. Love so sacred it pulls us through the profane.

Anne and Stan Wilbee
Mercy et merci.____

Two years ago I asked Uncle Stan and Auntie Anne what they remembered of that day so long ago, on August 3, 1969. My aunt says she doubts that she'd ever have said, "I think we just lost her."

"I wasn't going to give up hope," she told me. Yet I clearly remember and wrote about it within days of the event.

Uncle Stan said she sang from the tunnel to the hospital, and I suspect this was the music I heard as I slipped from darkness into Light. My aunt has the voice of angels and I like to think they sang together, seeing me safely through the valley of the shadow of death and back.

I am grateful that neither gave up.

NOTE: While the medical profession prefers to call experiences like mine "near death experiences," many of us prefer "back from death." We've gone through the process of death and might as well name it. Interestingly, scientists are beginning to understand we don't really come back; we remain different, one of the most documented is our inability to wear watches. We kill batteries, our electrical circuits taking a hit. Furthermore, how we die also affects how we come back and what we're like. Death alters us in ways science has not yet come to terms with.

#70 - A Little Girl and Her Dad

2019-02-06T13:35:00.001-08:00

“How about one last toboggan ride, Brenda, before we call it a day?”

Winter 1963, we lived at Laurentian Lodge, an Intervarsity Christian Fellowship ski resort seventy miles north of Montreal. College kids came up on the weekends. Mum cooked. Dad ran the ski hill and other things. I was ten years old, and in the mountains of French Canada night came on quickly. To go for one last ride with my father before tromping down to the lodge was all a little girl like me could ask for. Yes, yes! I hopped up and down on toes gone cold. He looped the toboggan rope around the towline in an easy slipknot, and I scrambled aboard the aluminum sleigh, grasped him around the middle, and waited for the jerk. There it was, we were moving, and I pressed my cheek against Dad’s cold woolen jacket.

It wasn’t a smooth ride up. The toboggan lurched, slacked, then jerked into motion. I fell into the rhythm of Dad’s arms stretching and pulling in, and I heard his occasional grunt more by the vibrations coming through his jacket than with my ears. The forest fell away to the right as we ascended, the evergreens dark and snowy white in the gathering gray, the larch and elm skeletal. I breathed and shivered and hung on tight, and I smiled in the sheer pleasure at the sensation of the snow beneath me.

“John!” Dad hollered, lifting an arm to wave at Mr. Hardy skiing downhill past us. “This’ll have to be your last run.” Mr. Hardy nodded and whizzed on by. The toboggan gave a lunge, throwing me back. “Daddy!” I shrieked.

He threw back an arm to snag me but missed, and the snow gave a snatch and flung me into its lap, belly down. I pulled a mitten off to dab at the snow in my eyes, then quickly stuffed my frozen hand back into its icy cocoon. It was really cold out. I clambered to my feet and peered uphill, stomping a bit to try and dull the burn in my toes.

Gray shadows crept over the hillside, the forest-green trees bruising into black, the other trees disappearing. Lamplight from the towrope posts glared down; at the bottom of the hill, where the machine shed stood, the last few colors of the day remained. All around, however, the sky closed in. I could feel the air shift into deep freeze.

Seven to ten poles lined the trail, each with a pulley three-quarters of the way up, with the towline feeding from one to the other. I watched the rope loop, pulley to pulley, on its way back down the mountainside to the shed where, inside, an immense machine kept the hefty cable circling, sending it back up to me. It circled past at my waist, and I cupped my hand around it to feel the heft slip through my palm. I could still get to the top, I realized, and flung myself belly first over the rope and grabbed on, expecting a wobble and slow crawl. But the frozen snow on my mitts let the rope slide on. I chewed at the ice clumps, spit them out, fur in my mouth. I tried again. This time I caught and, rope slithering beneath me, started sliding up to where Dad would be waiting.

“Get out of the way!”

I looked up. Dad was plunging downhill straight at me! I rolled, spinning sideways. I hurried to my feet, but the snow was soft and I floundered. Dad tore past, toque flying. What in the world?

I looked uphill and gaped, even as I heard the crunch and ping of the metal toboggan high up. There it was, shiny in the lamplight. It hadn’t come loose but was riding back downhill, riding over each of the pulleys, its cheap metal twisting and buckling, dislodging the rope, and I crawled in disbelief from the deep snow onto the beaten path just as the contorted toboggan hit the post nearest me, metal screaming as it slammed into the pulley. The rope bounced out and with a whoosh through the air, landed at my feet with a thud. Overhead, the toboggan continued its steady course, the tin of it pinging and screeching, more rope crashing through the air and dropping. What if it went through the window into the machine shed?

At the bottom, Mr. Hardy frantically clawed at his feet, trying to kick aside his skis so he could get in and flip the switch. I snatched up my father’s toque and ran after him. “You lost your toque!” I hollered, slipping, standing, sliding again, stunned by the speed at which everything was happening. A quiet, slow world thrown into chaos.

One more pole to go before the toboggan rammed through the open window of the shed—then what?

I watched in disbelief as Dad, going too fast to stop, smacked right into the building, bounced, caught himself, then right-angled into the door. He stumbled over Mr. Hardy, disappeared. And then…suddenly…quiet.

I descended down into the stillness, darkness pressing in and stars coming out. Outside the shed, the twisted toboggan hung in the air, glistening in the eerie light, so mangled it was beyond recognition. A fantastical piece of tinfoil.

“Daddy?” I stepped into the shed. His back was to me on the other side of the ginormous engine with its fan belts and knobs, his elbows resting on the open window that fed the rope in and back out. He turned and I saw weariness play across his eyes. He smiled, though. Blue eyes, marble blue in the cold light.

"Why don’t you go down to the kitchen?” he suggested. “Help Mum with supper. We’re going to be here a bit.”

I offered his toque. “What happened?”

“The knot froze.” He chuckled softly. “Looks like we're going to have to fix this mess.” He laughed again with an off-hand phooey and took his hat and patted it down around his ears.

“Do you have to do it now? It's so cold."

“It might snow tonight. Or ice over. Best do it now. By morning, it might be too late.” He tucked his head back through the window and leaned, twisting his neck to better see the toboggan. “So much for my slipknot,” he told Mr. Hardy with another chuckle. To me, he said, “It’s getting too cold. You better go on.”

I pulled a hand out and sucked on my stinging fingers. The warmth made it worse. I shoved my hand back into the mitt. I walked to the door and looked down to the lodge where I knew my mother and sisters were setting the tables. On Friday nights Mum made the visiting college kids a dinner of roast beef and potatoes, with peaches for dessert. My sisters and I had to make sure the peaches were dished out with their round sides up. “They’re more likely to eat them,” Mum told us.

“Do I have to?” I asked Dad.

“No.”

He and Mr. Hardy took the ladder from a corner. I scrunched up against the doorjamb to let them pass, then followed after them, shivering, chin bouncing.

How can he stand it? I wondered, watching my father set the extended ladder against the first post, give it a shake, then start to mount. He had to disengage the mashed toboggan before attempting anything else.

He and Mr. Hardy set to work and I huddled near the shed, hiding from the wind. Constantly I banged my feet against each other; sometimes I turned and kicked them into the building. The bright overhead light looked yellow and warm and I slid down the wall to sit in the pool of butter. The cold seeped into my bum like tiny ice picks. What was left of the toboggan finally fell with a puff. Its distorted shape scared me and I stood up, and stepped away.

Dad climbed down the ladder. He and Mr. Hardy moved to the second pole, looking strangely naked without its rope. Mr. Hardy helped Dad heave the towline onto his shoulder and up he went, ladder rattling. Balanced on a high rung and leaning against the post, he struggled with bare hands to lift the rope back into the pulley. Gusts of white fog escaped his lips as he labored, and I saw him wince as the frozen rope dug into his shaking hands.

Tresa On Saucer, Me On Top

How can he endure it? I wondered again, and looked longingly down to the lodge where its small windows cast wee squares of light into a world gone black. Oh to be home, I thought. To shed my coat and boots, my mittens and toque, to stand over the furnace grate, four feet by four feet, and listen to the icicles melt off me and sizzle into the fire below. Oh that I was there.

My stomach hurt from shivering, I banged my toes into the ground, and banged again. Incessantly. I forced myself to look away from the warmth of home and focused instead on Dad’s face. I could see it clearly in the lamplight that shone from each post, a face haloed by night. I winced with each grimace he made.

Determined to stay, I hopped foot to foot and up and down while Dad and Mr. Hardy took turns. Once Dad caught my eye and smiled. I tried to smile back. My cheeks wouldn’t move. I tried again, and shivered some more. Slowly up the mountain we pushed, the night stealing in darker and colder. Up to the next pole. Up to the next. I wanted to cry, I was that cold. Yet on and on they worked, Dad and Mr. Hardy. And me.

As night set in for real, ice began to sheet the ground. They sent me back to the shed for a hatchet. I was glad of the task. When I gave it to Mr. Hardy, he said, “This is no job for a girl!”

“Don’t chop the rope,” I told him.

“That’s your job,” he said. “To make sure I don’t.”

We were almost there! Two more poles to go!

But Dad and Mr. Hardy headed straight for the final post. Dad groaned as he fought to stretch what was left of the rope into place. I feared he'd lose grip and fling himself backward, off the ladder. Or teeter sideways. He didn't.

But they weren't done. Not yet. There was that one last post, one down from us. We backtracked. The rope had little play. Brute strength would be needed to wrangle it up and over the pulley. By now, I was without pain. No stinging burn in my fingers or feet, no shivers. I lifted my arms woodenly, bent over at the waist, knocked them against my legs. I checked to see if my feet were still there. They were, which almost surprised me.

“Finished,” my father called down.

Mr. Hardy tossed his hat up. I watched it spiral lazily down. Watched him catch it and put it back on.

I tried to help carry the ladder back down but couldn’t keep the pace. Instead I slipped along behind them, the newly formed ice catching my boots against the holes they'd gouged with each step. At the shed, Dad and Mr. Hardy put the ladder back in its corner.

“Want a ride down to the lodge?” Dad asked, snagging another toboggan and flipping off the lights. I must have nodded.

Outside the night was velvet—and filled with moonlight and stars. Dad dropped the sled onto the snow. I was so numb I couldn’t bend. “I can’t sit down, Daddy.”

He and Mr. Hardy helped me.

“Ready?”

"Yes."

Dad took the line in hand and I waited for the jerk and momentum, then settled in, happy with the sensation of riding over the undulating snow, slipping this way and that on the hilly descent, watching the window light of the lodge expand as we approached, listening to Dad and Mr. Hardy talk in the wind. A snowflake. Another. And another. I stuck out my tongue to catch them.

Down the hill we slithered. The wind picked up. The flakes thickened, fluffing up in front of us. The windows grew large enough to see the tables indoors, surrounded by cheerful skiers nursing mugs of hot cocoa, their peaches gone, the bowls empty.

A whisper in my ear. I felt Daddy lift me.

“She’s frozen through,” I heard him tell Mr. Hardy.

I hardly remember sitting on the four-by-four-foot grate, heat leaping up at me. I hardly remember anything that followed. Nothing, actually. Only that I had stuck it out. I had not abandoned my father. A sense of euphoria overwhelmed me.

Many years have passed since that cold, snowy night in the Laurentian Mountains of French Canada. Yet I often go back, the memory as crisp and clear as the night. A little girl in love with her father, and so full of wonder at how he could laugh at any upset—and always make it right.

Roy Wilbee | Brenda, Tim, Linda Wilbee 1963

Epiphany: Resistance to the Empire

2019-01-05T23:06:00.000-08:00

The Adoration of the Magi by Edward Burne-Jones, 1904

__________________________

Before they went to Bethlehem, the wise men had a meeting with Herod. “I have a problem,” Herod explained to them, “and I need your help. I need to find this child. I suspect he’s somewhere near Bethlehem, so I need you to ask around, use your sources, follow your star — then report back to me...

Throughout human history, individuals and institutions have had to make difficult and risky decisions in response to unjust directives—especially those directives framed as required cooperation “for the good of the country.”

"When The Wise Men Refused to Collaborate With The Empire"
by Kate Jones Calone / click for article in Sojourners Magazine

__________________________

"People who revolt against Trump
Are Revolting Against God"
-- Pat Robertson --

On January 6 we celebrate Epiphany, the day the wise men of old finally found Jesus. We all know the story, three men on camels bearing gold, frankincense, and myrrh in search of a "newborn king." King Herod told them to come back to the palace with news of the baby's whereabouts so "he too could go and worship him." The wise men chose instead to take another road home, and in a dream God warned Joseph to flee with Mary and the baby for another country. Herod in his rage slaughtered every baby in Judea under two years old.

On this day of Epiphany, 2019, I approach the new year with trepidation and some fear because I find myself at odds with many of the people who like to tell this story. They don't see a disconnect between their admiration of three wise men and a hunted refugee family...and what's going on around us.

John Moore's Viral picture
click for full story

The grown-up teachings of this refugee infant by necessity seems to pit me against the majority [PEW Report] of evangelical Christians (81%) and nearly half (45%) of all Catholics who find in our American "King Herod" a savior--a self-made god who markets an end to abortion, punishment of gays, dehumanization of the transgendered, a demigod who mocks the disabled, promotes misogyny, agitates for violence, denies civil rights, supports voter suppression, brags about sexual violation, covers up promiscuity, flaunts adultery, bullies the abused, denigrates war heroes, lies every day, ignores his advisors, fires his smartest, meets dictators in secret, admires the world's scariest leader, Kim Jong-un--and separates thousands of children from their parents to secret them away in tent camps, cut off from love with no blankie, no teddy bear, at risk for physical abuse, sexual assault...and death. In short, everything Jesus came to refute. And, like Herod in "one of the most terrible accounts in Scripture [Calone, Sojourners]," the U.S. president lies to those not wise enough to see through his words, "Follow me and I too will worship Jesus." And like Herod he sacrifices thousands of children to build his Empire and suit his agenda.

click for full story

For two years I've watched and wondered, head spinning, sick to my stomach. And yet this chunky percentage of American Catholics and evangelicals do not sway but stand firm, intractable, seemingly comfortable with the cruelty, quick to defend, calling the narcissistic divine. Pat Robertson of the religious right preaches that any opposition to Trump is opposition to God. Franklin Graham tells Jimmy Carter that God would kill gays, not marry them. In an interview with the Washington Post, Jerry Falwell said impoverished citizens offer little to society. "A poor person never gave anyone a job. A poor person never gave anybody charity." My head spins. Calling evil good, these men and their followers have come to prefer loyalty to the Empire over Jesus and his teachings. Loyalty to the Empire is more important than grace and mercy and risk and vulnerability. More important than love.

And so I approach 2019 with trepidation. I find myself in bewildered disagreement with those who once told me in that little Baptist church that "Jesus loves the little children of the world. Red, brown, yellow, black, and white, they are precious in his sight." They no longer teach this. Jesus is more selective now.

So despite my trepedation and, yes, fear, I am driven to resist the majority precisely because I believed them when they told me Jesus loves the little children of the world. I believe, too, he loves the adults they become--this I know 'For the Bible Tells Me So.' All of them. All of us. All around the world. Red, brown, yellow, black, and white. Poor, sick, starving, lost, and mocked. Frightened, scapegoated, disdained. South of the border, north of the border. All around the world. Bruce Larson of University Presbyterian Church in Seattle, WA, once said, "If you want to find God, go to the poor. They're the folks he likes to hang out with." I can't find God in what passes for Christianity in 2018.

So this January 6 is my own personal day of Epiphany. Jesus tells me to give the coat off my back, walk the second mile, turn the other cheek, feed his sheep, sell all my goods and give to the poor, to suffer the little children to come unto me, and "to act justly and love mercy" [Micah 6:8 NIV]. I am therefore compelled to resist evangelical leaders and their followers in their unabashed scramble for self-preservation and power at enormous cost to millions and the abandonment and condemnation of those God loves best.

Ironically, it's not the Empire that frightens me. I confess, it's the evangelical majority who support it.

________________

It’s abundantly clear that Jesus was a disrupter. . . Again and again, he reminds us that we’re not called to defend the institution but to promote a Kingdom in which the marginalized flourish and the forgotten are raised up.

"Churches Must Address the Toxic Residue of Elitism"

by Elizabeth Evans | click for article in Sojourner, 9/28/2018

Born To Die, A Christmas Gift

2018-12-09T15:14:00.001-08:00

December 10, 1957, my dead sister was born. She'd be 61 now, and each year she is a part of my Christmas Advent—as surely as the Christ Child of so long ago. For it was her life and death that put me in the front row seat with a view into eternity and first-hand experience with the grace of God.

______________________________________________

She’d been born to die, Heather, a Christmas gift wrapped in grief. The year, 1957. Me, six. My mother returned from the hospital without my baby sister. My father explained. Heather had been born with a hole in heart and was not expected to live. He lifted me into my high yellow chair for supper and scooted me in. He did the same for Linda and Tresa. Seven, six, and five, me in the middle, I stared into the night and at our reflections in the large window on the other side of the table, wondering if the glass might fall in from the weight of sadness pressing against the house. Unable to eat, I pushed the food around on my plate. Dad cornered off some mashed potatoes. "Eat this much and you can be excused.

“Leave her be,” said my mother and I burst into tears.

But it was the grief, like sunlight through stained glass, which made Heather’s fragile life so lovely. She stayed with us for three years and how we loved her, my other sisters and I.

The first eighteen months of her life we only knew her through hushed whispers and the occasional trip home. But when Mum and Dad brought her home for good—after her second open-heart surgery and not expected to survive the trip—one look at this frail little sister, so weak and so blue, and looking for all the world like me, my terrible grief eclipsed into magical wonder. God had hung a smile from the stars.

For a long time we were not allowed into our parents’ room where Dad set up Heather’s crib under an oxygen tent. Exceptions were made if we donned surgical masks and scrubbed our hands just about raw with Fels Naptha. We didn’t mind; we could kill her with germs we didn’t know we had. We could, however, peek through the door all we wanted. Sometimes I just sat on the cold tile floor and watched. Mum usually had her propped up in a corner of her crib, and Heather amused herself by watching the butterflies Mum had made from candy wrappers, hung from a coat hanger. She also had Aunt Grace’s “Puppydids,” a mink shawl of heads and tails that she’d fallen in love with. When I softly opened the door lest I startle her and inadvertently kill her, she’d smile a weak soft smile that came mostly from her eyes. “Hi, Heather,” I’d say. What I meant of course was “I love you.”

She blossomed in the warm rays of family sunlight. She learned to sit up, to talk, and, delightfully, to sing—a clear sweet voice that floated through the house like bird song at dawn. Mum began taking her outdoors on sunny days and let us push her gently in the baby swing.

When she gave a Heather a bath out by the clothesline, we were allowed to pass the soap and help dribble water over her pale blue skin—as delicate and translucent as a poppy open to the sky. It hurt me to see her scars, two zipper-like marks that ran horizontal around her rib cage, one under each arm. I’d distract myself by showing her how to wiggle her fingers in the water and make a splash; and I’d wonder at the courage she possessed.

By two-and-a-half she'd learned how to pull herself up despite the doctors' prediction, and could walk by holding onto our fingers in front of us. How she came by her black patent leather shoes I don’t recall, but the three of us didn’t begrudge her the shoes we had no dream of ever owning for ourselves. And as much as we loathed our Buster Browns—shoes so ugly and uncomfortable we had to stick our feet in an X-ray machine so the salesman could tell if a new pair was too big or too small—we took pleasure in Heather’s good luck. At eight years old and seeing her shoes, I understood that prayer was not a waste of time.

She had a bedtime routine. I might be busy doing cutouts, or playing a game with my other sisters, or coloring or reading to myself, but I found comfort in the schedule unfolding around me. Her jammies on, she first had to have her blue may-he-dun, then her pink. Never the reverse. Once when Aunt Grace was visiting she got it backwards. What a hullabaloo. We of course sprang to the rescue and explained the error, and prayed that the upset wouldn't stop Heather's fragile heart. After her mayhedun, she had to be carried about the house, shutting all the cupboards and drawers, everything tucked into place and put properly to bed. Jamie Boy had to have his bird cage draped and the counter wiped. Finally, sitting down on the yellow rocking chair before a fire, Mum had to sing “Holy, Holy, Holy” and two verses of “Silent Night.”

The routine was soothing as oil, a serenity that became as much my goodnight schedule as Heather’s. Her stints at the hospital left the house empty and I didn’t sleep well and I rattled around with a hole in my own heart. When she returned, the house filled back up and I shut my eyes at night to a world very much at peace.

She spent her third and final Christmas with us at home. We decorated our tree with her butterflies and I kept an eye on her, thrilled to see her open her stocking and smile with each surprise.

One night some time later I awoke from a deep sleep sensing something was wrong. I threw back the covers and crept into the hall. At the far end a sliver of light slipped through the crack at the bottom of my parents’ door. An eerie glow washed over Mum’s well-polished tile floor. I sprinted, bare feet cold against the tile, and inched open my parents’ door. Dad was sitting on the edge of the bed with Heather, carefully keeping the oxygen mask a few inches from her mouth. Put too close, she’d panic. Years later, I understood. Rubber suffocates.

“Daddy?”

He looked up.

“May I come in?”

He motioned that I sit beside them. The bed sank a little under my weight. Heather startled. I reached over and took her blue fingers in my own and was happy it calmed her. Mum paced at the end of the bed. In front of me stood the oxygen tank.

In the terrible tension and rushed tiny gasps of my sister, I became fascinated by the gauge needle slipping closer to the red empty mark. I gave Dad a running commentary. Finally, in uncharacteristic abruptness, he said, “Brenda, it would be better to pray than to chatter.”

I instantly let go of Heather’s hand, and bowed my head in agony. I’d been caught pretending she wasn’t dying. But she was. I did know this. And I knew that if she didn’t regain her breath within minutes, before the precious oxygen was gone, the sun would rise without my sister in its light.

Frantically I prayed. I begged. I watched the needle sink into the red zone, like the spinner in Shoots and Ladders settling on the line between six and one. I reminded God of all the other times he'd saved her. Do it again. Please. The hiss of the oxygen tank suddenly sputtered out. I slid my eyes sideways, afraid.

She was asleep, her lovely translucent skin the soft pink of sunlight at dawn.

“Daddy?”

He looked at me with bone-weary eyes.

“She didn’t die.”

“No, she didn’t,” and he reached with a smile to ruffle my bangs.

She died two months later while I slept.

Did it hurt to die?

“She just went to sleep, and woke up in heaven,” the preacher said that dull day mid-June, 1961, while I stared with stinging eyes at the little white box in front of the church. How did he know she just went to sleep and woke up in heaven? He wasn’t there; no one was there... Her third open-heart surgery and she’d been left in her hospital bed, needles sticking out of her, alone under the plastic canopy and surrounded by her beads, her Ned the Lonely Donkey which was really mine, her string of red monkeys looped across the crib bars—and her Puppydids, of course, kissing her face while the oxygen pointlessly hissed. Had she cried out? Found no one there? While I slept?

God’s smile hung from the stars came crashing down, and I stared at the white box in mounting panic. I did not know where to find the scattered shards.

Over the years I've stumbled across them, finding her in my own suffering and finding, too, assurance that God gives us grace in the hard times. And so while I've spent my life missing my sister, I've never once regretted her birth. I'm so grateful she was ours, that our parents saw fit to allow me—and my others sisters—our eye-witness access to the fragility of life and it's exquisite beauty when reflected so clearly through the terrible prism of compromised life. A baby born to die, yes, a Christmas gift wrapped in grief. But a gift of life, too.

Merry Christmas to all, and may God bless us, Everyone!

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: A Curious Animal and Petroglyphs

2018-12-01T10:02:00.004-08:00

Post-traumatic stress is a curious animal, like a bobcat lurking in the shadows, snarling, pawing the air. It circles, keeping you in its sights. Sometimes you can stick your fingers in your ears and go la-la-la-la-la and it goes away, but eventually the yellow eyes of the past don’t slink into the shadows anymore. The pointed tips of its ears instead lay straight back, and the beast crouches and crawls across the stones of time toward you. You hyperventilate on the fear but you know if you run, it’ll leap out of the past and take you down.

A few years ago and finding myself mired in a dark place of emotional and creative paralysis, I remarked to my youngest son, “I wonder if I have some kind of PTSD.”

Blake was twenty-nine at the time. He has blue eyes. When he's happy, they lighten to a bright, translucent color that reminds me of an Arizona swimming pool. When thoughtful, they turn a deep navy, and you can almost see his prodigious mind pulling data from every nook and cranny as he thinks and the color deepens. The day I blurted out my rather off-the-wall and oh-so-casual comment—"oh, BTW, maybe I have post-traumatic stress"—he slid his eyes toward me. They were a deep navy blue. “Perhaps in more ways than one,” he said. Ah…a circle of bobcats. And so I went to the Arizona desert to see what they would do.

They ganged up on me, that's what they did.

So much so that I checked out two books on post-traumatic stress disorder from the Glendale Public Library.

Have you ever been in a natural catastrophe? the authors ask.

Check.

Were you ever sexually assaulted?

Check, check, and check.

As a child, were you physically maltreated with excessive beatings or spankings?

Check.

Have you ever been kidnapped, abducted, raped, burglarized, robbed, or mugged?

Check to much of the above—if we count my ten-year marriage from hell and the seventeen years of single parenting that followed.

Were you ever injured in an accident?

Check. And more checks.

Have you ever been involved in a situation in which you felt that you would be harmed or killed?

Do I have to answer this?

A single “yes” is enough to tuck me snugly into the DSM-IV’s category of PTSD. No wonder I was overwhelmed. There are other questions in this list, of course, and my continued “yeses” should have alarmed me, but I instead felt relief. The circling chaos, closing in on me in the Arizona desert where much of my pain lived, actually held a pattern...so said the books. A kind of dot-to-dot, if you will, that I, and anyone else traumatized, can find comfort in for all its tragic commonality. The books went on to say that by learning to recognize these patterns I, and everyone else, could gain mastery. A bit like learning how to parse a night sky, I think, into Orion’s Belt, the Big Dipper, the North Star--that glimmering beacon of hope that led the oppressed out of a slavery to the past into a future unfettered.

My first observation upon recognizing that I actually did suffer multiple traumas was that not all my trauma carried the same import. For instance, my crippling anxiety over tornadoes is only triggered by certain weather conditions. Most of the time, I don’t even think about them. I only fall into hapless panic when the barometric pressure plummets a certain way. This simple discovery that I can sort and perhaps prioritize was a godsend. Because in the desert heat it had become clear that my sexual molestation of forty years before had become the lead bobcat of my original metaphor. Gain mastery of this crouching beast and I might, just might, find a way to contain them all.

So I came up with a plan to tackle at least this one cat. On the 40th anniversary of my initial sexual assault, November 11, I made a list of everything Dr. Don Mattson had ever done to me, burned the damning evidence, then got my high school BFF to take me up South Mountain, sacred to the Hohokom, where I could leave the ashes of my past in symbolic gesture and sit alone—and just “let” all those panic-instilling memories at last “intrude.” Sit and wait, see what happens. See if the bobcat, ears back and crawling across those stones of time, pounced and took me down.

I did need my BFF, though, to execute. In the old days Wayne had been the one to take me to the doctor. I’d get through by going "elsewhere" in my head, knowing he'd have me laughing before I could wobble outdoors into the beastly heat of the old days we shared. The whole idea of sitting alone in the desert, all by myself with those memories, was so scary I couldn’t imagine doing it without him. What if I started to keen? To howl? What if I couldn’t find my way back? What if all those memories took up residence and never left, leaving me forever crazy? Yes, I needed Wayne.

He agreed.

On the morning of the 11th I was crying before I ever got to his house thirty minutes away.

“How are you this day?” he asked when I pulled up. He was standing in the driveway.

“I’m okay."

We climbed into his car, a Saturn I don’t mind telling you I’d fallen in love with. Part of my trauma is the on-going saga of car troubles and I have, from time to time, had to borrow Wayne’s. Climbing into his bells-and-whistles vehicle was like climbing into the lap of a familiar and over-indulgent lover. “We’re going to make a stop first,” he said, “a surprise.” I love surprises. He knew this and grinned.

While we wandered through the lovely streets of Ahwahtukee in South Phoenix, he gave me a history of South Mountain rising up beside us and of the Native Americans who go back as far as the Hohokam, an ancient civilization that built multi-story apartments and ran miles of irrigation ditches that far surpassed anything Europe was doing at the time and which the city of Phoenix, to some extent, has appropriated.

By the time we reached a small parking lot of the world’s largest park, and were ascending by foot a short trail his friend had put in, Wayne was talking of Marcos de Niza and look, here’s his name etched on the stone, with the date of 1539. I was amazed. Wayne’s summation of the various interpretations of history, the various debates regarding the name’s authenticity, where he himself weighed in on the argument, fueled my delight. “There’s more,” he said, and I trotted excitedly along after him down and around the trail to a rock face that took my breath. Petroglyphs of unknown antiquity.

“There is no Rosetta Stone for this,” he said. “We have no idea what the symbols mean.”

Squared-off spirals, “lizard” men, boxes in boxes, concentric circles, squiggles all scraped into the desert “varnish” of the stone. What did they mean, these symbols? Perhaps they were simply names; perhaps warnings; maybe marks of possession. Or maybe they told a story. A sad story? I didn’t want a sad story. Yet if sadness stood here, wasn’t the narrative testament to survival? Or perhaps these markings were here to celebrate a victory, some kind of triumph, a document of achievement.

Gradually I became aware of Wayne telling me about the descendants of these now silent story tellers, people who live on the Gila River Reserve and who still make forages into the many hidden parts of South Mountain where white men are properly banned. They go, Wayne said, to practice their ancient rites, to seek the ancient gods. They take their own relics and leave them. I thought of Chief Seattle’s grave in the Pacific Northwest and of the many relics found there on any given day. “Just like you’re doing today,” Wayne told me. “Come on. Now that you’ve seen this and I’ve finished my lecture, we can go find a place for your ashes.”

We went to two more spots before he was happy. It was Veterans’ Day; the trails were busy. I needed privacy. We ended up where it was easy to duck off the main trail and scrabble up into the crevices of South Mountain just as the Hohokam must have done hundreds of years ago. I had no idea where we were on the map, but kept after Wayne as he climbed up higher into a hot seam that, when I turned around, opened onto the desert and Phoenix sprawl. Forty years ago it had been nothing but cotton fields.

“Is this good?” he asked, balanced atop a boulder. He pointed out numerous small caves and tiny hollows in the rubble of stone where I might leave my relic.

“It’s good,” I said, my palm sweaty from the plastic bag I carried.

He disappeared. I was on my own and found a hollow, hardly reachable, and scraped my skin leaning over to dump the ash from my bag into the basin of this small enclave. Not much substance, I thought, looking at the ash…for the damage it represented. For some reason, I suddenly felt protective, as if the ash was the girl who’d been so wronged, the girl who’d been me and was all burned up and now being banished. But the ash was not me; the ash was Dr. Mattson and his dark deeds. I leaned over and blew. The ash swirled deeper into the stone. I blew again, driving it up against the pocket wall. Let the Hohokam spirits take it, let God have this. Leave it in this sacred place that reaches back in time and still survives.

I clambered away, up the seam to a new place, and sat down into a place of three stones, a chair of sorts, the heat of the earth a cushion beneath me.

Can I name my thoughts? Describe my feelings?

Wayne came to check on me. Quietly he went away.

For the first time ever I didn't fight to keep tears at bay. Let them come. Let the bobcat take me down. But they didn't. Sitting alone in the desert, staring down the beast that circled, yellow eyes on me, I kept harking back to the petroglyphs. Something seductively new. My curiosity called me away from Dr. Mattson. Perhaps the ancient symbols of unknown meaning on weathered rock were a mixed bag of good and bad, triumph and defeat, momentous and mundane, and why not? Is this not life? Were they any different, I wondered, than what had been scraped into the patina and varnish of my own psyche? And how, I wondered with a terrific jolt, could one excise the tragic without marring the rest? How could I sandblast the "lizard" men without damaging the boxes-in-boxes and squiggle lines?

I stood up in agitation. Had I really hoped to cut from my mind this horrible piece of my past? Cut it out as a surgeon cuts cancer, throwing out body parts and leaving behind devastating mutilation? How could I expect to do this without destroying everything attached to it? For despite all its hellish aspects, my first year in Arizona was hands-down the best of my life. A Charles Dickens’ “best of times, worst of times” sort of thing. Did I really want to rid myself of it all? In almost a state of panic I started back down the seam.

But where was Wayne? My heart started to pound. Where was he?

I descended farther, out to the open.

He was sitting atop a high stone about fifty yards off, guarding the entrance to my place. Down below bikers wheeled along the trail. I began picking my way over. He spotted me, started toward me, directed me this way, that, until only a sheet of stone stood between us. “Are you all right?” he asked when I stepped over.

I was not. Trembling, I took hold of his shirt and pulled myself into his arms, nose in his chest. “No,” I whispered, so agitated I couldn’t think.

He tucked me in. “But was it worth it?”

I think it took all of twenty seconds to figure it out. The bobcat had not pounced.

It’s been a few years since I tethered that bobcat to the sacred seam of rock in South Mountain of Phoenix, Arizona; where I looked past the yellow eyes of my pain to see instead a whole wall of symbols written on my soul. The disfiguring damage from Dr. Mattson remains, true, a cruel and deeply offensive marking that can make rock weep. It claims its space alongside other trauma I’ve endured and will one day be forced to sort through. But there are the other symbols as well, labyrinths, spirals, wheels--and the concentric circles that to me speak of friends and more friends—not only my bet buddy Wayne whose wisdom and kindness is a North Star in my life but all the others who made that year so wondrous: Gwen, Jeff, Rita, Tom, Jon, Rachel, Rod, Uncle Bob and Donna, Rachel, Jody, Nancy, Carol, Linda, Cherry, Marie, Jamie, Peter, the little church we all attended, McClintock High where I graduated, Legend City, Big Surf, Jonathon’s white ’59 Chevy pick up truck, drive-in movies, and scorpion hunting…

Sandblast Dr. Mattson out of my life? No wonder I'd been agitated. To do so would forever mar the surrounding etchings that better define me. I am all of these things and they're connected.

“What?” said Wayne. I’d stopped. The desert was sooo beautiful, and I just had to stand and absorb, and stare into the horizon. Other layers of my PTSD lurked off the skyline, I knew. More bobcats on the prowl.

"You okay?" Wayne asked.

I nodded. When they did, I’d drive a stake into their ashes and tether them too, in this place where demons have always been left in God's hands.

"I am," I said. And I was.

(see my statement on Dennis Hensley, 2018, another bobcat who made its appearance 19 years after this.)

Finding Fred 5 of 5: Finding Granny

2018-11-06T19:02:00.002-08:00

IN LOOKING FOR MY GRANDMOTHER, I found my great-grandfather and then I found her: Leona Bagley Goodfellow Bent.

That first meeting was fraught with anxiety, I think for both of us. My Aunt Penny and Uncle Day and I tromped down the wide nursing home hallway, the tile floor glimmering in the florescent lighting. And then we were at the door. A narrow entry opened to nothing fancier than a hospital room, minus the paraphernalia. She sat in the corner on an easy chair, holding Baby.

I'd been warned about Baby. In her old age, Leona had taken to calling a small white teddy bear Baby. She wouldn't let go of it, and it doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure out what this is all about.

We went down to the cafeteria, with Baby of course. My missing grandmother, Baby on her lap, asked, "Why did you keep looking for me?"

"Because you're my grandmother and I've missed you all my life."

Five minutes later, "Why did you keep looking for me?"

Five minutes later, again.

I finally figured I wasn't addressing her real question of why. When she asked for the fifth or sixth time, I said, "Because you're my grandmother, and I love you."

She put Baby down and reached across the table to take my hands. "And I love you, too."

For the first time in a very long time, she let go of Baby. Uncle Dale captured the miracle on film. My missing grandmother had, for just a few moments, found relief from the pain over losing my mother.

She wasn't much help in sorting out the story, though. "One mustn't speak ill of the dead," she told me and clammed up, much like my old aunties--her sisters-in-law.

Penny tried to prod her into speaking about Isabella, but Leona stopped her. "Now, Penny, I've told you before. Granny Goodfellow did what she thought best at the time. And in the end that's all any of us can do."

Blow me away with a feather.

Between Penny and my mother this is what I had pieced together by the time I met Leona. Leona and Les were married the summer of 1927, childhood friends from two families who knew each other but didn't socialize. One was strict Protestant, the other nominal Catholics. One great-grandmother, Lucy May Bagley, pawned her pretty and costly purchases with my other great-grandmother, Isabella Stewart Goodfellow. They were neighbors, at one point living on the same street in Calgary, Alberta, in the same block, on the same side of the road. Sometimes Lucy May couldn't bring back the necessary cash to retrieve her precious purchases and lost them to Isabella. I didn't know growing up that my favorite bowl--a lovely large cut glass bowl we used for sugar--had actually been one of Lucy May's. Fred Bagley's Mountie pension and poorly-paid civil service job didn't allowed the Bagleys very many luxuries--and Lucy May apparently overspent her budget with some regularity. I suspect the arrangement between the two women spawned some level of resentment on Lucy May's part and disdain on Isabella's; and may have been the seed of disapproval from both families when Les and Leona unexpectedly married.

Grandpa Les had been living in Vancouver BC for two or three years, working as a mechanic for Begbie Motor Company when Leona, two years older than him and a school teacher on the Alberta prairie, went to Vancouver for summer vacation. They married unexpectedly, and no one was pleased.

From her savings, Leona bought a house, but things seemed to unravel quickly. Within a few months she was pregnant, Les invited his best friend Phil to come live with them, and he fell in love with Marguerite. By the time Leona went into labor the first of October, 1828, Les was living with Marguerite and Phil was still in Leona's house. Leona had to call a taxi and get herself to the hospital. She got herself home, too, with Shirley Elizabeth Goodfellow, the spitting image of my handsome 1920's playboy grandfather.

I can well believe Leona was depressed. Married only fourteen months, home with a newborn, husband living with another woman, a stranger in her house...no means of income. Who wouldn't be? It seems she held out while her savings lasted--another year perhaps.

Isabella Goodfellow
Shirley Elizabeth Goodfellow

My mother was told a different story. Isabella and all the aunties told Mum that Leona had abandoned her when she was just six weeks old. That Leona wanted to leave Les and go home. That Leona's famous father had said yes "but leave the brat behind." Mum was also told that her mother had neglected her, that she was malnourished and had to be taken to the hospital where her father gave blood for a transfusion.

Leona's story differs. She managed to get a job teaching school in Alberta, and arranged for Les' parents, Isabella and Walter Goodfellow, to leave Calgary and come live in Leona's Vancouver house and look after Shirley while Leona, after teaching the week, took the weekend train from Calgary to Vancouver, paying the Goodfellows for Shirley's care from her meager salary. A strenuous arrangement for sure--and one that abruptly stopped when Shirley was about eighteen months old. I can't even imagine the shock. The cruelty.

Les and Marguerite picked Leona up at the train station that weekend. Les put her into the backseat and told her she'd be allowed to see their daughter only briefly and for one last time. He and Marguerite would take her right back to the train depot. My grandmother was not even allowed to enter her own home or hold her own baby. She was forced to say goodbye from the doorway. The Goodfellows took Mum to Calgary to grow up as Betty--where she was never allowed to dilly dally after school lest her mother come and kidnap her.

By the time I finally met Leona in 1996, this is all that I'd pieced together. Penny and I didn't get much more out of her, however, and I went home just as curious but happy. I'd finally met her, and, no, Fred Bagley had not said, as rumored, "Come home but leave the brat behind."

Six months after meeting Leona, she fell and broke her hip. From her hospital bed, delirious with pain and in a morphine haze, she kept asking for me."Don't let them take the baby!" she cried when she saw me. "Brenda! Don't let them take the baby!" and she wept in grief so terrible it sent spasms rippling through my heart.

I gave her the teddy bear. "Here she is," I said, trying to comfort her. Baby wouldn't do. My missing grandmother wanted the real baby, she wanted my mother, and she kept crying and pleading, begging me. "They've taken the baby! They've taken her! PLEASE GET MY BABY!" She was 92 years old. All this had happened 64 years ago. Decades of suppressed pain exploded loose, tearing her apart, tearing me apart. And in that first hour, morphine weakening her guard, more of the story spilled out.

Leona never did understand why Phil was living with her and Les; or why he remained in the house after Les moved out. She had to feed him, do his laundry, fix his meals. She'd been beaten, she didn't know why. Her father had brought my mother a wicker baby buggy from Banff for her to sleep in. And for some bizarre reason, Isabella kept yanking Leona's wedding ring off (a ring she'd purchased for herself). One night, after Isabella had again tossed the ring into the trash, Leona snuck into the kitchen, retrieved the ring, and tucked it into the woven wicker of my mother's baby buggy.

"Why did you tuck your wedding ring into the baby buggy?" I asked when her sanity returned.

"I said that?" Leona asked in shock.

"Yes." When I pushed for a reason, she shrugged, bewildered.

"I don't know. I guess I just wanted it to be near the baby."

"Who beat you?"

"I told you this?" More shock.

"Yes. Who hurt you? Did my grandfather beat you?"

She wouldn't say. It wasn't nice to speak ill of the dead.

She died within a couple of months, and her painful secrets went with her. I'll never know what really happened. Except this. A terrible wrong was done.

Yet... Yet Leona's astonishing ability to endure and live with secret pain filled the enormous hole I once had. Informing me more fully of who I am. From her comes my own courage and fortitude and ability to endure and live beyond pain. Not as great as hers, not by a long shot, but nonetheless hard at times to bear. And here is my hope. Maybe, just maybe, maybe someday I'll find that I too am made of the stuff that can say, "So and so did their best, and in the end that's all any us can do."

By searching for Leona, I found Fred. And in searching for Fred, I found her. And in her, I found a measure of myself.

And somewhere in Vancouver BC Canada is a wicker baby buggy, forgotten in an old attic and or on sale in an antique shop, with a wedding ring hidden in the weft. If you find it, it belongs to my grandmother and tells a story that whispers and nags despite the secrets taken to the grave.

Finding Fred 2of 5: His Early Life

2018-10-21T16:59:00.002-07:00

Fred Bagley

RESEARCHING FRED'S EARLY LIFE
begins not on the Canadian prairie where he made history but in Nanaimo, BC, at the the home of my aunt and uncle, Penny and Dale Bent. My mother and I had been researching Fred as a Mountie. Penny, however, researched Fred's parents, grandfather, and his early life. She'd gone all the way back five generations to Col. James Bland, a Scotsman born about 1793, who, while in the British army, was stationed long enough in Barbados to father Catherine Ann, Fred's mother. And so I drove up through Vancouver to Horseshoe Bay and boarded the ferry for a two-hour crossing to Departure Bay of Vancouver Island to see what information she might have.

__________________________________________

Below deck and parked, I got a binder of my research from the jeep, hoofed it up three flights of stairs, and hunted down the cafeteria where I began reacquainting myself with what material I had while eating some very bad scrambled eggs and not very good sausage.

My aunt and uncle had retired to Nanaimo, and I found their new abode on a hillside overlooking Departure Bay. Ferries go in and out all day; on clear days you can see Vancouver across the water. It's just about the nicest place to live. But the view paled in my excitement to see what Penny had unearthed.

My great-great-great-grandfather Colonel James Bland had been an officer in the Royal Army, stationed in the British West Indies (now the Bahamas) between 1829 and 1832--leaving behind a toddler and presumably a mistress. Piecing what data we have, a possible scenario emerges. From a birth certificate of one Catherine Ann born in 1830 to a Rebecca Harker, a mulatto, we might well think my great-great-great-grandfather had had a dalliance with a woman of mixed blood. Presumably African. But my DNA says no. I'm about as white as you can get.

There's another scenario.

When Fred and his siblings were all grown up, they inherited their mysterious mother's aunts' "plantation" in Jamaica. These two aunts were Gordons, and the Gordon family were multi-generational British military--which explains why a family of that name lived in the West Indies when James Bland was there. He may well have married a Gordon daughter, which is far more likely than bedding a mistress whose DNA isn't mine. But this begs the question as to why he didn't take his Gordon wife and toddler with him when he retired back to Scotland in 1832. Why, indeed?

Catherine Ann Bland Bagley

The wife could have died in childbirth, a lot of women did. Or she could have died from any number of the beastly diseases rampant in the military environment and so common to the West Indies. As widower, he wouldn't have been expected to raise his own child. At that time, widowers either remarried or left their offspring with a friend or relative. Perhaps Catherine Ann's mother didn't die. Perhaps she just didn't want to go to Scotland with a forty-two-year-old man. What we know for sure is that Captain James Bland retired on half pay back to Scotland, where he joined the Royal Aberdeen Highlanders Militia as their Paymaster and Adjutant. We also know he kept in touch with his daughter because many years later, when Fred was two years old, his family visited the old man--then retired to Jersey Island in the English Channel. Fred wrote to his daughter Marian that he remembered the visit because they'd landed in storm, with waves crashing over the boardwalk.

Whoever Catherine Ann's mother was--a mulatto whose DNA isn't mine, or a Gordon, or even some other nameless woman, the Gordons were nonetheless critical to Catherine Ann's upbringing: Her two aunts (whether by blood or close friendship) deeded what was left of their plantation to her children--worth all of $300.

Whoever her mother was, Catherine Ann married Dick Bagley, a lowly Gunner in the British army.

One has to ask why, if she indeed was a Gordon. At the very least protected by the Gordons? This was the Victorian era. Crossing rigid class lines wasn't to be tolerated. The army too had its rigid class structure. An officer's daughter would never stoop to marry a low life in Britain's Royal Army!

Victorian custom aside, why would she give up her luxurious life for the impoverishment of army life in disease-ridden forts? And why did the navy even let Richard marry her? Non-officers were routinely denied wives. Their pay couldn't support it, the work was unforgiving, and living conditions harsh.

The how or why of Catherine Ann and Dick's marriage remains a mystery. Love overcoming all barriers, one might like to think. But as my aunt says, "These weren't romantic people." And if it was love, I think Catherine Ann lived to regret it.

Their first daughter, Evangeline or "Eva," was borne in Belize, Honduras; Fred came next, in Jamaica. The three of his six surviving daughters disputed this for years, one sister saying Barbados, another Jamaica, my grandmother Leona, St. Lucia. She even went to St. Lucia to prove herself right. However, the pertinent documentation had been burned by a fire. I have, however, Fred's baptismal record of Sunday, November 14, 1858, showing that he was baptized at Fort Charlotte, Lucea, Jamaica. An understandable error on my grandmother Leona's part: St. Lucia or Lucea. And so unless Dick was transferred sometime between his son's birth on September 28 his baptismal six weeks later, my great-grandfather Frederick Augustus Bagley was born in Fort Charlotte of Lucea, Hanover County, Jamaica.

Interestingly, Dick Bagley was promoted to Bombardier the day after Fred's baptismal. Had he been serving elsewhere, then, when Fred was born?

Wherever he was born--Fred himself claiming it was Jamaica--his earliest memories were of crying and being shushed with a sugar cane, given him by a black nanny. This suggests his family may not have lived in the barracks but on the plantation where his mother may have grown up. Perhaps, though, the black nanny was as a hired barrack army servant. Whatever the case, Fred wrote that the sugar cane turned him off sugar for life.

The black nanny disturbs me. England had abolished slavery in 1808, but it wasn't until 1838 that Jamaican slaves became fully emancipated—just twenty years before Fred was born. This black nanny would have had little choices for herself back then and, if over twenty-five, could have been deeply traumatized by her own slavery. Attitudes take a long time to change and she was part of a race that had been over-the-top brutalized in Jamaica. I wonder what her history was.

When Fred was two, his father was transferred to Kent, back in England. This is probably when Fred visited his grandfather on the Island of Jersey--a short boat ride away.

For the next eight years—1860 to 1868—Fred's family bounced pillar to post, his mother having babies every two years in a different parts of the country: Frank, 1860; Albert, 1863; Amelia Ellen "Nelly," 1865; Alex, 1867. A year later, in 1868, his dad retired after 21 years in service. Chelsea Hospital housed the retired wounded, the able-bodied were given Chelsea pensions. He became a "Chelsea Pensioner" at half pay, nothing a family of seven could live on, and was described as "39 and 9/12 years old, six foot one inch, fair complexion, dark brown hair and blue eyes" and, remarkably, no marks or scars. My Aunt Penny points out that this means he was never flogged or injured in battle. An amazing accomplishment, given the time. The family moved into 14 Equity Buildings, St. Pancras, Marylebone--one of the poorest slums in London. Charles Booth in 1898 described the Equity Buildings as "a queer little paved cul-de-sac; low one-story two-roomed cottages, with a little wash-house and yard behind...; rents from 6/6 to 7."

Growing up in the army, Fred and his siblings would have enjoyed school. All this stopped when his father retired. Whatever the failings of the British army, it wasn't in the education of their children. Fred and his brothers would have been immersed in horsemanship, music, and the three R's; his sisters in the three Rs plus sewing and household tasks. Now no longer in the army, they would have attended public school...perhaps.

When Dick retired in 1868, family lore says he bought a tavern with some mysterious money of his wife' and burned through it all while Fred and his siblings worked alongside him in the pub. My aunt doubts this; they were too young. However, I've read enough Dickens to know that England's children during this time suffered terribly, especially poor children. They were put to work for long hours, no pay, school a luxury. All the hard work was for nothing. By 1870 Dick was penniless.

Fort Henry

Across the Atlantic, four Canadian provinces had confederated into the Dominion of Canada. England expected her to take care of herself, and was bringing back all her troops. But Chelsea Pensioners were being sought to train the new Canadian Militia. Dick seems to have jumped at the chance. Free passage his, he left his family behind in the slums to fend for themselves. Canadian census reports put him at Fort Henry in Kingston, Ontario, where he served as part of the British military presence in the brand new country—a very necessary deterrent to the aggressive ambitions of a post civil war America.

Pancras Work House, London

The English census lists his wife with another baby. Other records show her living in abject poverty, eeking out a living in the very worst of London's slums as a dressmaker before finally, at long last, succumbing to the Pancras Poor House.

Fred seems to have refused the humiliation and as a 12- and 13-year-old kid he ran free on London's streets—right up to the day when he was brought into the work house prepatory to their departure for Canada.

Who paid for their tickets?Aid societies abounded, trying to deal with the overwhelming poor in England's economic decline. But why would Catherine Ann even want to join a husband who'd left her destitute? She might well have loved him once, but now?

Samartian

Yet what other choice did she have? Poor Eva was back and forth between the hospital and service, cleaning for a wealthy family; the other children were housed in a different section of the work house, away from the women's ward; thirteen-year-old Fred was on the streets. In May, she somehow got them all aboard the Sarmartian and set sail from Liverpool for Canada on May 26, 1871. We'll never know her feelings.

In Kingston, Ontario, Canada, the children once again enjoyed a good education--though at fourteen years old it ended. Fred joined Kingston's Battery "A" as a bugler and enrolled in the gunnery school. When recruitment notices for a newly formed Mounted Police Force to police the Canada West went up, his life changed--and he became the Mountie who helped shape Canadian history.

Not that easy, though. He was only fifteen; you had to be eighteen. He hightailed it down to the recruitment office, and lied. Good plan, but he ran into the commandant of his school—Col. French. Worse, French went round to his house to report him to his father and, according to some reports, there was quite the row.

A self-confessed student of James Fenimore Cooper, Fred yearned to save the Indians out west from the dastardly American whiskey traders and envisioned himself "hobnobbing about with dusky Indian princesses."

In part, he was running away from home. Dick was a harsh man. To punish his boys, he took them out to the gym and boxed them into defeat, then beat them with a belt. Around the girls he managed to keep his fists to himself; nonetheless, they feared the lash of his tongue. So this must have been a hard fight. Finally Dick acquiesced. "Go ahead and take the lad! He'll get over his fascination for buffalo and redskins in short order, I reckon. If nothing else, it'll make a man out of him. But on one condition," he added. "He can only enlist for six months."

The Force pulled out of Kingston in June, 1874. Catherine Ann bid her oldest boy, not yet sixteen, adieu amidst all the fanfare, reminding him to say his prayers each night. She gave him a gold watch and chain and a diary that helped me find him a hundred years later.

Poor Catherine didn't see him for another fourteen years. The occasion called for this remarkable photo with Fred with his siblings. He didn't stay long and was soon back on the Prairie.

_________

My quest isn't over. Looking for my missing grandmother Leona, I found Fred Bagley. I also found his parents and much mystery in Jamaica. But what about the children of Fred's other daughters? Leona's sisters? My cousins?

Finding Fred 3 of 5: Our Bigger Worlds, His and Mind

2018-10-21T16:58:00.002-07:00

Fred Bagley

I DON'T RECALL recall the summer I made the trek back to Banff to see my friend Louis and to track down where the Bagleys and Goodfellows had lived and vacationed. All I knew was that Goodfellows owned a summer cabin. My mother ever the bone of contention between them had me wondering how "inconvenient" it might have gotten for the Montegues and Capulets of Banff when they ran into each other at the grocery store.

I arrived about 5:00 to a town undergoing what looked like open heart surgery. Banff's Avenue had been fenced off. Huge diggy machines and bulldozers were hard at work along the center. I made a U-turn and headed for Bankhead, the old CPR ghost town Louis had made come alive in my mind and heart. Once a thriving community of immigrants brought in from all over Europe to mine the coal, this once-upon-a-time pristine town was home to about one hundred Germans, Ukranians, Italians, and others...and Chinese. A town of Once Upon A Time.

Main Street, Bankhead AB, circa 1910

ONCE UPON A TIME, Main Street ran along a steppe of Cascade Mountain, chuck full of coal and sole reason for Bankhead's existence. The mountain rose high to the left, where the town sat on another natural steppe before the mountain really took off, a trail going up and up to three portals reaching into the hiding coal. The mountain dropped off Main Street to the right, down to the slag heaps and mining operations. As Main Street headed north, the one-block commercial street narrowed and took a climb to Holy Trinity Church easily seen on the hill.

Holy Trinity Church, Bankhead AB

While it was a Catholic church, Holy Trinity was typical of pioneering days, sharing the space and resources with other village denominations. Sunday mornings saw two or three services, while on Saturday nights the Polish, British, Irish, Russian, Germans, Hungarian, Slovakian, and Czech took turns hosting community dances. One week, it might be the Hungarians with a waltz. The next week, a German polka. Everyone participated except the Chinese, their way of life and religion far too surreal and mysterious to amalgamate.

All that's left today
Photo by Trip Advisor

I was prepared to find Bankhead overrun, each year more and more invasive, but I was astonished by the relentless reclamation. Early pictures of me digging around for laundry tubs and cigar cases in open spaces show a stark contrast to today’s crowding trees and underbrush. I had to scrabble up stony deer paths and push through young birch to find the steps to the old Catholic church I love so much. I did find it, and stood at the top, looking down; down into a basement where different nationalities took turns hosting Saturday night dances. Trees grew up from where women's skirts once swirled, ethnic music nothing more now than the wind.

Two Jack Lake

Evening coming on, I headed down the new road that cuts through Bankhead to Two Jack Lake and got myself a camping spot. While roasting a hotdog, I wondered why the draw to Bankhead, perhaps the same draw for Banff--my great-grandfather. When Fred was stationed in Banff—first in 1888 with the first detachment and then again in 1890 when he married Lucy May—he'd started the Bankhead Band. It was in this old ghost town where a kid named Louis Trono met him as a nine-year-old in knickers.

Your granddad came out from Banff to start a band. I wanted to play trumpet, but no matter how many times I asked he kept saying I was just a kid. Finally, to shut me up, I think, he gave me his own trumpet and told me to take it home for a week, see what I could do. When I finished playing for him the following week, he said to the band members, :Now here is how you play music." But he had enough trumpet players. He gave me a trombone. I've been playing trombone ever since, all over the world.

I settled down with a crackling fire under the black pine, content to be “home,” listening to the music of my great-grandfather reaching through time and playing in the trees--and looking forward to knocking on Louis' door the next day to say hi. Perhaps a dinner at Banff Springs Hotel would be fun, where Louis still played his trombone in what was left of my great-grandfather's "Banff Hot Spring Hotel Band."

I was saddened to learn the next day from the curators at the Whyte Rocky Mountain Museum that Louis had died three years before, his wife just three weeks ago. Had it been that long since I'd been to Banff? I had to blink a few times.

The good news, the curators were quick to share, was that Banff had renamed the bandstand for Louis and installed a lovely plaque with a bit of Louis’ fascinating musical history. I was not surprised to find Fred mentioned as his mentor and teacher. How rich my life has been by looking for my missing grandmother. First Fred, then Uncle Dale. Louis. Banff feels a little lonely for me now, without my friend.

Getting any information on where Fred and Lucy May might have lived, though, was a bit elusive. In the public library, I found a huge book called I Live In A Postcard, a collection of histories on Banff's families. Fred and Lucy May weren't listed. Next door at the museum archives they were equally surprised, but pictures of his funeral show a long line of friends stretching all down Banff Avenue, many of them stepping into the cortege as the hearse rounded the corner onto Buffalo and out to the cemetery. His hearse was accompanied by six Mountie, three to the left, three to the right, Mounties stationed all along the way, each raising an arm in salute as my grandfather passed for the last time.

A curator found some color slides. Goodness. The day was ablaze with autumn orange leaves and riotous red tunics! I hadn't yet been born but I could smell the day deep inside.

I went straight to the cemetery and had a picnic supper at his grave, where he’d been interned with a Union Jack draped over his coffin. I’d stopped on the way up to see one of Mum's many Goodfellow cousins in Salmon Arm, BC. Sylvia was exactly half way between home and Banff, a convenient stopover. After some lunch she'd sent me on my way with an egg salad sandwich and other hand baked goodies. Now, perched on the Bagley plot's concrete edging, with the chilly granite of the tombstone at my back, I munched it all down, looking up at Sulphur Mt. as it plunged skyward in a blanket of trees. I got to thinking about the entrapment of time—a terrible inconvenience for writers and historians. How is that I was sitting here, alive, with Fred dead and my grandchildren having their whole lives ahead of them? Weird.

My second day it was back in the archives, where Lena, one of the curators, pulled out the old tax records, heavy tombs of boring information like lot and block and assessed value. I learned that Fred never owned his house—there are no records of him ever paying taxes. The Goodfellows, however, had a cabin and property worth $650. Taxes ran from $6 to about $11 or $12.

Craig Cabin
perhaps similar to the Goodfellows

The old phone books were the mother lode. Major and Mrs. Fred Bagley lived on the corner of Elk and Beaver; which is now an apartment building. Rats. I couldn't go knock on the door and charm my way in. It turns out Walter and Isabella Goodfellow lived only 3 or 4 blocks away at 422 Marten Street, also an apartment building.

Rats, rats, and more rats. I had my heart set on being snoopy. I did find the answer, though, as to how awkward it might have been for the families--one trying to see their granddaughter, the other determined they not. Answer: Very awkward.

Banff Hot Springs

I ended my third day at Banff—a glorious sunny day with gentle breezes—researching in the public library across from a man I’d spotted the night before at the hot springs.

A friend and I used tell each other stories of complete strangers we’d see. So there I was the night before, reveling in the hot springs that's made Banff so famous, making up stories about the various people I saw. I had this guy pegged for a banker, widower, living in his head and trying to pull himself out of it. At the library we started to chat. Turns out he's researching residential schools in Canada for an online class he was taking. Shows how remarkably creative I can be.

In the morning I was to head down to Pincher Creek to meet my mother’s “missing” cousin, Doug Connelly. By the way, Pincher Creek is where the Mounties raised their horses and where Old Buck, Grandfather's horse, was put to pasture after many years of service. The town that grew up around the Mountie horse ranch is nestled in the Rocky Mountain foothills, and I am quite fond of the rolling, dry countryside, caught as it is between the mountains and plains. I look forward to meeting more Bagley kin, and to learn what memories Doug may have of his grandfather.

For a treat, I stayed my last night at the Banff Hostel, a grand place for little money and all the amenities. Best yet, the old Train Depot hauled out of Bankhead in 1922 sits right next door.

I can't believe it. I'm right back to Once Upon A Time!

Yup, that's me!

Finding Fred 4 of 5: Answer To A Question

2018-10-21T16:56:00.002-07:00

Fred Bagley

I STARTED MY JOURNEY looking for my grandmother Leona Bagley, but Fred's cookie-crumb trail had taken on a life's of its own. I heard about my mother's cousin Doug Connelly, son of Leona's younger sister Marian. A rancher, he lived at Pincher Creek with his wife Sally. And yes, it turns out that Doug and Sally were the couple to donate Fred's badges that my son Phil found in the Pincher Creek Museum several years before. "Cousins perhaps?" was now a solid "cousins once removed." Or is it "second cousins?"

Remember, family lore held that when Leona wanted to leave my Grandpa Les and return home, Fred Bagley had told her yes, but leave the brat behind. It had irked me, but but what I was learning about Fred was that he loved music, horses, and kids. Did he love my mother?

Pincher Creek

PINCHER CREEK LIES in the Porcupine foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Southern Alberta. Here the Mounties of Canada West bred their horses and here is where Old Buck, Fred's pony, was put to pasture in his old age. A singular reward; all the others were unceremoniously sent off to a glue factory. No one had it in their hearts to condemn a famous and faithful pony to such a fate. Old Buck, however, was allowed to roam the prairie at at will.

Old Buck
my great-grandfather's pony

He quickly formed a routine, circling between Fort Macleod, Fort Calgary, and Pincher Creek, where he was always welcomed with carrots and apples. But in 1898, at 32 years of age and ancient in horse years, he was "humanely put down." This is the year before master, my great-grandfather, after 25 years of service with the Mounties, resigned. Fred and Old Buck were in it together, beginning to end.

Here too in Pincher Creek is the old homestead and home of my mother's lost-and-found cousin, Doug Connelly, keeper of the Bagley artifacts, manuscripts, and family Bible. Doug's grandfather homesteaded this land and his mother, Fred's youngest daughter, married into this cozy place on the prairie.

Doug and Sally Connelly
Pincher Creek AB

I hardly knew what to expect when I drove up to the gate--though my mother insisted and assured me that Doug and Sally would be happy to meet me. Turns out Mum was right, so right in fact that Doug and Sally let me spend the entire day at their kitchen table pouring through letters and military orders and diaries, and showing me the many artifacts still in their possession. Much of the material has been loaned out to Glenbow in Calgary and the little museum in Pincher Creek, but Doug has retained several of our grandfather's things: a swagger stick; a cane of sorts; a souvenir horse-bit given to him when he escorted Queen Victoria's carriage in her Diamond Jubilee parade through London's streets in 1887; a silver tea set he won in rifle match I believe it was; as well as many other interesting and fascinating things.

The most fascinating, however, was my mother's name recorded in Fred's handwriting in his Bible. There she was, Shirley Elizabeth Goodfellow--Oct. 2, 1928. My mother's name, Fred's pen. I think I loved my great-grandfather at that moment and found it hard not to cry, to see that he did in fact acknowledge my mother. Her brother's story of Fred wheeling a whicker pram onto the train in Banff and off again in Vancouver, a gift to her, came to mind. I no longer had to wonder. Fred Bagley loved my mother.

This much came even more clear as I read his many letters to his youngest daughter Marian. His affection, his humor, his delight in all three of his girls--Kate, Pittising (Leona), and Tiny (Marian)--comes singing off the antiquated pages. And his joy and concern for his grandchildren are equally evident. Did he, each October 2nd, wonder where his eldest grandchild was? Did he wonder how she was doing? Did he look at her name in his Bible and ponder the mysterious circumstances that brought about their separation? Did her absence bring him sorrow?

He was a man who kept track of his brother and sisters scattered about the States and Canada; he kept track of his daughters; he loaded his Christmas tree each year in Banff with gifts for Dale, Doug, and Mick. Did he miss not having presents for Mum?

Leona and Les

The other discovery that made me happy were three photographs of my grandparents: Les and Leona. All three reveal an affection and energy. Despite what happened, Les and Leona were a couple in love--and in love over a long period of time.

"The three girls," Doug told me, speaking of his mother, my grandmother, and our aunt Kate, "were very close. They kept Leona's secret all those years--at least until Kate spilled the beans on her deathbed." Doug speaks and I stare at these images of my grandparents, so in love, so happy, sharing their lives in a way I've never experienced--and I wonder, what happened to them? How did this all fall apart?

I know Les had invited his best friend to live with him and Leona. I know my grandfather was an alcoholic. He liked to party and was probably very much the Roaring Twenties playboy. I'm not sure how all this sat with Leona. But at some point Les moved out of the little home she'd bought with her own money to go live with Marguerite. He left Philip behind. What was that all about? We know Leona was alone when Mum was born.

So what happened in that little house in Vancouver? And why did it mean I lost my grandmother? And Fred?

After saying good-bye around five o'clock, I drove west to Fort Macleod and the open prairie. I camped along the Bow River, a place I'd taken my sons one year. Sleeping in the back of my jeep, listening to the river play over the rocks, and then the rain, I thought of families and how when we do the best we can and still do lose.

Some people easily sum up the story with a shrug and "it's all for the best." I don't think so. We just don't have the luxury to line up "what was" and "what could have been" and declare a winner.

All I know is this. Fred lived a life of adventure, intrigue, and faithful duty, surrounding himself with love, music, and family. From his perspective, it wasn't my grandmother and himself who'd gone missing. From his corner, it was my mother who was lost.

Antidote to Systemic Racism

2018-09-19T10:50:00.002-07:00

Ann Arbor, MI -- 1964
Tresa, Tim, Me, Dad, Linda, Mum

The Sept. 6 shooting of an unarmed back man--in his own home, minding his own business--dispels any notion that our police force is innocent of systemic racism. What is the answer?

I came to the U.S. at the height of civil rights in the mid-sixties and discovered an abhorrence for racial inequality--seeded by my Civics teacher who had us read books like Animal Farm, Black Like Me, To Kill A Mockingbird. With each book, we had to write an essay--which Mr. Stewart rebutted until satisfied--and I began to seriously write. My early teen angst was profound and needed an outlet.

I'd come from a county where policemen did not apply fire hoses to anyone, a country to where escaped slaves had fled, and I found my thirteen-year-old self alarmed that so many white people had so many excuses for police racism and brutality. I came out of that civics class with an A and a heart for the social justice.

Flash forward forty years. After the 2008 presidential elections, St. Louis Police Officer Ronald L. Fowlkes emailed 23 other city cops with "I can’t believe I live in a country full of NIGGER LOVERS!” followed by 31 exclamation points. This is what that looks like: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We didn't need to read To Kill A Mocking Bird to know that African Americans live in a scary shadow no white person ever has to know. Today, in 2018, the shadow is more scary and obvious than ever. The Black Lives Matter movement emerged--but was effectively deflected with All Lives Matter and police acquittals despite evidence. No more water hoses to be sure, but lots of shooting down of unarmed black kids and men with immunity. The shooting of Botham Jean is just one more.

I was thirteen when Sandy, a black girl, and I became friends. I was thirteen when I had sleepovers at her house, with too many children crammed into close quarters, Sandy and I curled up on broken bed, my back to the thin wall that allowed me to hear the black dialect of Michigan's impoverished working class. I was thirteen when I understood that her family faced discrimination daily, that emotional violence and the threat of physical harm met her every day at school. I was thirteen when I understood that I loved my friend and I loved her family.

Love freed me from the sin of racism so prevalent in this country I adopted as my own.

Here's the thing: You can't love what you don't know. I knew and loved when I was thirteen. Hanging out with Sandy eased my angst. I invite us all to do the same.

Why God Gives Us Dogs

2018-09-17T13:04:00.003-07:00

Pensi just was. I was three when Dad carried her into the Haney house looking more dead than alive, a shaggy black and white sheep dog just out of the vet’s office.

“You have her bed ready, Betty?” he called to Mum, kicking the door shut with a boot.

“In the girls’ room!”

Linda, Tresa, and I, three little girls, two, three, and four years old, me in the middle, traipsed along behind him, trying not to get in the way as he entered our perfectly square room and eased Pensi down onto a collection of clean towels Mum had fluffed up in the corner.

“Daddy,” I said, “I think she’s dead.”

“She’s just sick. She’ll feel better soon.”

Mum arrived with another towel, this one warmed in the oven.

“She looks dead, Mummy,” I said again, alarmed at how Mum took the time to lift each paw to tuck in.

“It’ll take a couple of days. Remember, she had an operation—”

I couldn't picture how they "spayed" dog. So I imagined a man in a white coat setting the sharp tip of a shovel against Pensi’s belly, heel to the blade, and giving a sudden lunge. That’d stop a dog from having puppies all right. “Are you sure she’s not going to die?” I asked.

“She’ll be fine.” Dad was squatting, carefully gauging her condition. When he gave her a comforting pat, Pensi opened her eyes, too weak to do much more than stare at us through pain-laced eyes, but apparently grateful for the lovely warmth and soft scratching behind her ears.

In the morning I found Pensi gone. “She died!” I shrieked. “She died!”

Mum popped her head into the room. “She’s in the kitchen. Eating her breakfast.”

I jumped up and down in joy to see her lapping up a thin gruel. By the day’s end she was tearing all over the place, trying Mum’s patience, licking our noses, and whining to go out.

At the time, my father was building our new house in the next town over, deep in the forest and assessable only by an abandoned logging road. When he loaded up our ’52 Chev with his tools, Pensi was right there, good company for him while he hammered and sawed--when she wasn't stalking the surrounding woods for skunks and smelling out the raccoons, or sniffing the trail of an old bear. The days we went along, Pensi played with us on the cement chutes and in the gravel, barking happy barks.
I was four when we moved into our new house, incomplete. It had outside walls, partial flooring, and a roof. Each night Dad tucked us into three army cots. He zipped us into snug “mummy” bags, and we said our prayers while starlight fell through the gaping holes that would one day be windows. There were no interior walls to speak of, and before I closed my eyes I could hear and catch flickering glimpses of my parents talking quietly before a fire on the other end of the house—Pensi curled at their feet, one ear up, listening for danger we might need to fear. I was four years old, the nights alive with starlight and fresh forest smells, and never in my life have I felt so safe. Pensi on watch.

Our Auntie Vi was our mother’s aunt. She often visited from Victoria, a ferry ride away. She wasn’t a dog lover. Whenever Pensi licked our noses—or we licked hers, she’d squeal in mock horror; and I, at least, lived to make her squeal, for Auntie did such a fine job. “Ick! How can you?” she’d cry, throwing up her hands, rolling her eyes, the three of us girls giggling and laughing and rolling around on the sofa, begging Pensi to “do it again!”

“Don’t you know where that dog’s nose has been?”

We knew. Did we care?

“What about her breath?” insisted Auntie.

What about it?

Winter coming on, windows in, Dad installed the furnace. A huge thing, four by four and floor to ceiling, taking up a corner of the utility room. I was scared of it. At night I could hear it kick in, the flames ignite with a swoosh. What if it burst into fire and we all burned to death? But then I remembered Pensi. She’d bark and wake us up.

We had no running water. Mum sometimes called on one of us to take a pot out to the rain barrel. When it snowed? A whole new job! My grandfather used to say that dogs and children know what snow is for. We did. Out we tumbled in our snowsuits, with pots, pans, and Pensi. We discovered that if we packed a snowball and raised our arms, she’d set out pell-mell, snow flying, yelping for joy as we launched the missiles—only to stop dead in her tracks dismayed. Where’d they go? A small poof, and they were gone, a dimple in the snow.

That Christmas, Christmas Eve morning, Grandma and Grandpa and our Uncle Stan arrived from Vancouver to help Dad get his new water line hooked up to the newly installed city main. They suited up and grabbed their shovels. Grandma, Pensi, and us girls went out to get our last snow for morning tea. Grandma taught us how to make snow angels; Pensi taught us how to wreck them; and in the afternoon we all played on the iced-over swamp, prickled through with bulrushes and skunk cabbages. The men hauled the three of us around on brooms, swooshing us through the rushes and reeds and around in circles while Pensi slithered and slid from one to the another and on to the third, barking and dancing, her body twisting in glee so contagious we kept spilling off in fits of laughter. I tried to pull her on with me but we both went flying. I abandoned her; I needed my hands to hang onto the broomstick. She retaliated by yapping at my coattails and pretending to growl. That hallowed night the grownups got ready for Christmas Eve, getting out the ginger ale and finding safety pins so we could hang our socks, and Mum poured us a bath—our first since moving in. Pensi, remembering such things, slunk away and hid.

The house slowly went up around us. Next door, trees started to come down in preparation for a subdivision; and the old bear, hungry or curious or both, began making appearances. This made Dad and some of the other men nervous. More and more kids were walking the logging trail to school, civilization slowly making inroads into the forest. Dogs, I suppose, were insufficient protection and one day Dad and Pensi, along with some men with guns, went out to stop trouble before it could happen.

I was nervous—not for Dad. Dad could take care of himself. But one swipe and that bear could send Pensi flying, smack her up against a tree, and that’d be the end of her. No need to worry. The bear was shot and Dad, who’d done some taxidermy as a teenager, skinned it and began tanning the skin to make a rug. Each day after school, I came skipping around the back corner of the house and hopped onto the patio. I’d lift the heavy ceramic lid of the tanning vat sitting right by the back door and peer in with plugged nose, reset the lid, and bounce on into the house. “Is it ready?” I’d badger, finding Dad.

“Not yet.”

When it was finally done, he gave it to the LaRues in Haney. “But that’s our bear rug!” I was inconsolable. He tried to explain that he hadn’t done a good job, and that Mrs. LaRue wanted it, holes and all. But I wanted it! And hadn’t I kept an eye on it? Checked it every day? To satisfy me, Mum took me over to the LaRue’s, and Mrs. LaRue let me wallow in the cool lush fur. I’m not sure seeing the holes helped because for a long time I grieved the loss of that rug. Only Pensi’s cool, lush fur could comfort me.

Once she and Dad went for a walk and next thing we knew we could hear him hollering out by the swamp. Pensi had startled a skunk. Must have stuck her nose right up against its rump and gotten it full in the face, for she was banging her head against the ground, pawing her ears, whining and crying, groveling all over the ground and rubbing herself in the mud. Linda, Tresa, and I watched through the big plate glass window in the family room while Mum carried out some clean duds for dad and a shovel—going as far as she dared. “Here! I’ll get a tub going for you and Pensi!” she hollered.

To our amazement, she seemed to know exactly what to do. She set the hose into the tub outdoors, came in, started the electric kettle, dug around for what tins of tomato juice she could find—and took it all outside, along with the big bar of Fels Naptha soap.

I thought for sure Dad would have to drag Pensi bawling to the tub, but she came willingly enough. Her misery was palpable. Baths over, Dad went back to the swamp to bury his clothes.

“Why can’t we just wash them?” Tresa asked Mum, our noses pressed against the glass.

“They’d stink up the house for weeks.”

“Why not hang them on the line?” I asked.

“That kind of smell you have to bury.”

She didn’t let Pensi inside for days. The tomato juice supposedly cut the smell, but it was in her fur so badly it took a week of rolling around in the dirt before she got it all out.

She did hate to get her bangs cut. It took all three of us to hold her down while Mum went at the shag with determination; me scared the whole time she’d poke Pensi’s eyes out, Tresa crying over Pensi’s distress. On the other end of the scale, she loved chasing cars, which brought equal anxiety. At first it wasn’t much of a problem. Cars were few and far between on the old logging road. It was more of a problem when we went to the river park or into Vancouver to visit Grandma and Grandpa. On such occasions Dad’s uncharacteristically harsh commands went unheeded, and Mum, afterward whopping Pensi’s bum with a rolled up newspaper, only managed to send her skulking off. Next car that came along? Off she shot.

Sometimes I grew dizzy watching her race alongside the back wheel of a car. A sheep dog, she had lightning speed, and she nosed right in while I held my breath and teetered on my feet and Mum and Dad hollered. Eventually the car outdistanced her and she’d trot back, shying away from Mum and looking guiltily at Dad.

We’d probably been living in our forest house a couple of years, interior walls up and doors at least installed in the bathrooms, when Dad began spending his Saturdays working with a few of the men erecting Southside Baptist Church. He always took Pensi. One night he came home early without her. She’d been hit by a car while he and Jack Bariff stuccoed the exterior walls.

That night, after Dad tucked us in, helping us with our prayers and giving us each a kiss, Linda whispered in the dark, “He put her in the living room. She’s under a tarp. He’s going to bury her early in the morning." She always knew such things.

Our living room was Dad’s workshop—full of sawdust and saw horses, saws and tables. It’s where he hauled in the trees he'd felled and debarked them, and where he measured and cut the kitchen cabinet doors. I got out of bed and tiptoed down the long, cold hallway and cracked the fancy door Dad had made, leading into the living room. Moonlight fell through the bank of windows, casting an eerie glow and there, at the far end, a heap. Dead Pensi. An hour later I woke up crying.

Dad climbed into my bed. I came up for air, blubbering and tasting the salt of my tears. “Daddy? Can you make a rug out of her? Like you did the bear?”

I often wonder what went through his head. I’m surprised he didn’t laugh. That he understood my loss, though, is clear. “You’ll always have Pensi. Close your eyes, think of a special day you shared. Can you see her?”

I could. We were at Grandpa’s beach house, running through the waves with a crowd of seagulls cawing above us, looking like noisy hankies headed for heaven on a wind.

“Whenever you’re sad or lonely, or whenever you’re happy and just want to play, go there, go inside your head where Pensi will always live.”

“But she can’t make me happy, in my head.”

“You’d be surprised. It’s why God gives us dogs.”

Years have passed, decades in fact, and Dad was right. A thousand times I’ve gone there, a thousand times more, inside my head where Pensi lives, racing along the water’s edge, waves lapping, the ever-present gulls raising a ruckus. Sad or lonely, happy or scared, or simply skiing down a mountain slope in the pristine beauty and clear skies of our world, I find Pensi unbidden kicking up her heels, snow flying.

She barks, and licks my nose.

Six Orange Crates and "Stuff"

2018-09-17T10:01:00.001-07:00

Wayne and me Spring 1970

Eighteen years old and headed for college--years ago. At the time I was living in Mesa, AZ, and on "move in" day at Grand Canyon College (now a university) my best friend Wayne rolled into the driveway with a borrowed VW van. I had everything ready: six orange crates packed with everything I owned.

Since then I've moved a gazillion times, each time with an ever increasing accumulation of life's flotsam. The last time, I got rid of an antique piano, six bookshelves of books and the books, bins of research, sacks of clothes I no longer fit, pictures, paintings, pots, pans, canning jars, salves, and ointments that my youngest swore were around before he was born.

The last time I moved, I tossed at least 300 books this time around. Hundreds of research files, box after box of ever more research, garden boots, clarinet music from junior high ("You're never going to play music so many black notes," said the youngest child ), even paper dolls I've been hauling around since I was ten years old and living in Northern California.

Each time I go through this process, I inevitably thought of Wayne and that beastly hot day in Phoenix when he helped transport my six orange crates of belongings into a small dorm room and the rest of my life. Where did all this stuff come from? What happened to the days when I needed so little to create a corner of home for myself?

For six summers while driving tour buses in Alaska I lived in small spaces. I loved it. But I also knew I missed home, where my "belongings" waited my arrival for winter. The "stuff," I realize, provides memories--Grandma's pansy tea set; reminders of childhood Thanksgiving--the antique ad for "Swift's Premium: A Canadian Tradition"; and a place to sprawl--a sofa. A TV to watch, sufficient cutlery, decent pots and pans. I like comfort.

But should midnight strike and I lose my glass slipper, I'll still have six orange crates and not just Wayne but many friends. And I'll be bouncing down some freeway or the other, off to some kind of "college"and the rest of my life, where it truly takes very little to create a corner of home for myself.

Let Me Speak: A protest to Donald Trump's "boys will be boys" defense

2016-10-09T08:32:00.004-07:00

in response to video of Donald Trump and Billy Bush boasting about their routine violation of women.

I am a survivor of sexual assault. LET ME SPEAK.

The rape culture in which we now live is clearly evidenced by this article and today's Facebook commentaries that defend Trump by soooo many men, even women. LET ME SPEAK.

The rape culture began for me in Grade 8 in a science class at Slauson Jr. High in Ann Arbor, MI, 1968. A slip of a student teacher ironically wearing go-go boots told us we're responsible for exciting the boys in the class--and that it was up to us to hold them back lest they get to a breaking point. to the point they wouldn't be able to hold back their arousal. Here's me: skinny, shy, unseated by danger. I cast a quick glance around. Was I at their mercy? Their arousal somehow my fault? And how was I supposed to know what would set them off?

Was I expected to accept as fate any boy's violence against me?

I did something I NEVER did in class. I raised my hand and I asked a question. Fear overcame my shyness.

An inarticulate question, to be sure. I had no words. My teacher did not give me words. I had only this helpless angst. I tried: "Are you saying boys HAVE to hurt girls? They can't just go squirt their stuff into a toilet? It HAS to be IN a girl?"

"No, but it's not what they want. It's not fair to put them in that position."

LET ME SPEAK.

She did not tell me that putting it IN a girl without consent is illegal. She did not put the law on my side. She just said I'd be "unfair" to the poor, suffering boy, overwhelmed by his uncontrollable urges--and only God could know what THOSE urges might be.

WAS DONALD TRUMP IN MY CLASS?

Was Billy Bush one of the sniggering boys?

LET ME SPEAK.

So is it any wonder, then, that at 17, when a doctor tells me to take off all my clothes, no gown, and then spends an HOUR--one HOUR--doing everything short of penile penetration?

My mother in the waiting room was frantic. I could hardly walk to the car. I was nauseous, faint, trembling, sore. I had no reason to believe that my vicious violation was illegal. Only that somehow I had been "unfair" to Dr. Don Mattson. I understood that I was to accept in silence this fate. My mother wanted to know what was wrong with me. What was I to tell her? My teacher's voice of four years before that fateful day of November 11, 1969, clanged in my ears.

LET ME SPEAK.

A year and a half ago I had a double mastectomy. I have massive scarring on my chest. And every morning when I wake up, and I move, and I stretch, and I pull back the covers, the tearing and tugging I experience puts me right back in that doctor's office 47 years ago next month. Can you understand the terrible pain that any mastectomy brings? Beyond the physical? Add to the molestation so horrifying I had to bite my lips and go somewhere deep inside my head in order to endure. In order to survive. And now, my chest scarred and tearing, I have feel that doctor's hands tearing and tugging my body every day--for the rest of my life?

LET ME SPEAK.

Donald Trump is not a man for presidency of even the local Elks Club. He is of the rape culture that continues to blame women and exonerate the boys who can't help themselves.

I have spent some of my day weeping for that girl forever lost. I emerged, though, to find myself enraged, ENRAGED, that THIS is STILL going on!

In the US presidential election.

LISTEN TO ME! And LET ME SPEAK!

"Stop the madness!"

Learning To Think

2012-01-23T18:28:00.000-08:00

In going through some very old files while getting ready to move, I came across two things that meant something to me: One, a sketch I’d done of John Cabot in the late 1960s and, two, essays I’d written for my civics teacher in grade nine at Slausen Jr. High in Ann Arbor, MI.

I sketched a lot growing up and was sad when, having moved to Arizona for health reasons my senior year of high school, my mother threw out my art work. To her defense, there was quite a pile in the basement of our Iowa house. The two years I was at Maurice-Orange City High School (my sophomore and junior years), I took Drawing; and this consisted almost entirely of sketching classmates very quickly. We might go through five or six models in the course of one hour. I suppose, if I were my mother, I’d have given the whole stack a toss, too. Still, I’ve often wondered how good I was. And so discovering “Giovanni Cabot[t]o,” I was surprised to see I’d developed a serviceable skill at least.

My second satisfactory find was a sheaf of essays written for my ninth grade civics teacher at Slausen Jr. High in Ann Arbor, MI. I’ve always credited him for teaching me how to think.

He did this by handing off a list of famous quotes and requiring weekly opinion essays utilizing one of these quotes. “Ask not what you can do for your country, but what your country can do for you” sort of thing. And so we’d write, he’d rebut, we’d rewrite, and he’d rebut our response. A single essay could go back and forth several times before being accepted, and not until he felt we’d sufficiently clarified and articulated our position. In this sheaf, I became intrigued by an essay using Thomas Jefferson’s “All men are created equal.”

“All men are created equal,” I began, quoting Jefferson in his preamble to the Declaration of Independence. “But what does it really mean? I believe that when Jefferson wrote this, he meant that all men were born with the desire to have liberty, an opportunity to live, and to seek happiness.”

I went on in what is clearly a very un-Republican way of thinking with respect to government. The government needed to afford opportunity for everyone, I wrote. Not just the lucky few. My teacher's rebuttal was extensive. “Why should the government supply these opportunities? What status is there in being a ‘mere working man’? If liberty is inalienable, how come some are taken away—or never granted by some governments? Why does democracy tend to not try to take them away, but rather to protect them? Or does it?”

I struggled to clarify. “It is up to the government to supply jobs, or how would anyone earn a living? The country would rot away. It is up to the government to keep it strong. One way to this is to have jobs for everyone.”

He pushed back. “Why can’t the government merely see that private industry is prosperous enough to have jobs for all? Isn’t this what we want?”

I had to rethink my position. Finally, I wrote: “I think it’s up to the government to create an environment where job opportunities abound and where everyone can earn a livable wage.” I remember being pleased with myself, the clarity ringing clearly in my brain. I’d gone from vague to specific. Government providing jobs, no, but an environment for jobs? yes—two very different things. This teacher not only taught me how to think—but how to say it.

I’m approaching sixty. These essays and drawing are more than forty-five years old. Do I throw them out? They’ve served their purpose, I know. I can’t imagine anyone else being interested. But still, their discovery reminds me of who I am. An serviceable artist. An articulate thinker. What if I forget? I am pushing sixty.

I think, if it's okay, I’ll hold on a bit longer. Maybe when I approach eighty, I’ll discover them again. And again be surprised.

The Olympic Flame Is Out...

2010-03-01T12:57:00.000-08:00

...and so last night my friend and I went up to join the thousands in downtown Vancouver to be "in the moment."

What a moment! The torch flame out, only one bridge into the city left open (too many people!), we somehow found free parking, and stepped into a slice of history where my countrymen were not only buzzed from their record-breaking Olympic gold medals but intoxicated in the aftermath of a hard-won hockey Gold, the heart-stopping, lose-your-pulse greatest game ever! Canada’s Sidney Crosby making the winning goal in an overtime shutout with the US!

“Ca-na-da! Ca-na-da!” chanted the surging crowd.

Madness! Euphoric madness! People dressed in flags, faces painted, fists in the air, horns going, the energy of pride, camaraderie, bursting into the air like the America’s “rockets’ red glare.” The Canadian flag very much there.

Oddly, Kay Dee, a displaced Texan, was more “in the groove” than me, letting out a shriek and a holler and a “Go Canada!” to passing strangers, fist-bumping people wearing flags like Super Man’s cape, high-fiving old and young. "Oh, Canada! Our home and native land! True, patriot love, to all our sons command..." she sang. Me, a misplaced Canadian living eight miles south of the border, I trudged alongside her with typical Canadian reserve but still managing to enjoy myself.

“Hey!” I grabbed Kay Dee’s elbow. “Take that girl’s picture!” Kay Dee trotted after Miss High Hair, me in pursuit. Epitome of grace, the lovely girl struck a pose. Cameras spontaneously flashed.

“Ca-na-da!

“Ca-na-da!
“Ca-na-da!"

All around me Vancouver’s majesty and beauty towered. Lights shimmered off the inlet. Flowers twinkled in the streetlight. I saw it all through the filter of time, as a child coming into the city to visit the dentist, running errands (like the day we bought a copper milk jug somewhere in the loop off Oak Street Bridge and Marine Drive), long days at Stanley Park, visits to grandparents, playtime with cousins. A whole history here of pleasure, a garden of adventure, a haven of allure. My city. My country. My countrymen. I suddenly missed my home and yearned for all the days when life was simple and predictably peaceful--but ripe.

“I have to have a flag,” I said. Everyone had flags.

We almost tripped over a pair selling them. Big ones, four bucks. Little ones, two. “Do you have a twony?” I asked. Kay Dee shuffled through my backpack where we’d put her Canadian change.

A flag now mine, I secured it to my backpack. Yup, I was getting in the groove.

“Not in My House, Not on my Land.” We came across two posters we didn’t understand, held aloft by stationary strangers, a fixed point in a sea of humanity. We stood in the surge, trying to figure it out. A tall man, blond, blue-eyed, dressed in red, and leaning against a lamppost, shouted down from his lofty height, “That’s our goalie! Roberto Luongo!”

“Not a protester?” shouted up Kay Dee.

“No! Our goalie!” He turned to sport his LUONGO #1 jersey. "Our goalie! He’s saying, ‘You can’t have the gold! Not in my house, not on my land!’”

“Oh!” shouted up Kay Dee and I, both thrilled to understand. I reached and offered my first fist. “Ca-na-da!” Touch. A fist-bump, a connection to humanity, a reminder that it’s people, not government, who live in this world. We belong in it together. To quote the Americans out of context, “We, the people…” When had I forgotten this? Yeah, go Canada! Go world!

I turned around. Kay Dee? Kay Dee? One minute I was staring down into the public ice rink, ten second later… Kay Dee? Seymour and Pender, this was where we parked. This was our agreement; go back to the car, start over. But she had the map.

“I lost my friend,” I told the stranger next to me. “Can you tell me where Seymour and Pender is?”

“Two blocks up, three blocks over. Good luck!” Another fist bump.Touch.

It took awhile to push my way through the curb-to-curb. Finally! But, wait, the entrance doesn't look right. I head down the slope into the garage. Nope. I'm turned around. Coming in the out. Typical. I start back up the exit. At the top do I turn left? right?

Miraculously—I do believe in God, I do believe in God—there she was, walking past the exit. “KAY DEE!” I bellowed. She whirled, saw me. Her face lit up, her arms went up. I chugged uphill, my own arms up, and just like all the slow-mo movies of lovers running through flower fields and blue sky, Kay Dee and I ran through concrete corridor and artificial light and happily threw ourselves at each other.

Headed back into the madding crowd, we tucked arms. “I don’t care if we look like lesbians,” she shouted, “we can’t lose each other again!”

I agreed.

We agreed too, to stop in at the Olympic Store, temporarily held in the Hudson’s Bay Company. I have to say, the Bay is my favorite store. In the olden days, this is where we'd stop in to use the bathroom—a huge, high-ceilinged affair, designed with black and white mosaic tiling, regal and majestic with tall mirrors, green fixtures, and golden taps. If my sisters and I were lucky, or if we were with an old auntie, hands washed and feeling better, we’d head for the basement where the food was. At the deli, Mum, or an auntie, would buy us “pigs in a blanket,” sausage rolls wrapped in flakey pastry—to be dipped, of course, in mustard. None of this exists anymore.

What exists was a long line just to get in. Kay Dee and I inched forward, peering in through the windows where Olympic jerseys and jackets littered the floor and looked too much like Ross’s Dress For Less to suit me. A madhouse once in and a push and shove through the throngs in search of an Olympic baseball cap, for Kay Dee’s husband, that wasn’t white.

“Hey, what’s this?” I squealed with delight. Maybe I’m in love with the Hudson’s Bay Company because I’m in love with their blankets. I grew up with the traditional white one, with its yellow, green, and red stripe, keeping me warm at night. Today I have two red blankets, with black stripes, a six-point and four-point. Meaning, once upon a time they cost six and four beaver pelts respectively. But here, on display and lined up in a row, mannequins sported a variety of coats and jackets created from the blankets. A contest, apparently. Only one was chosen for manufacture, a mere $695. Ouch. The fox, a lovely four-point coat, was not in the running. Too bad. Lose the fox, and I was in.

The bathroom is now in the basement, and is--no surprise here--now sterile and generic and very Ronald MacDonald in its sheer ordinariness. But surprise, surprise, coming back up the escalator, we found ourselves fenced off. What, what? We can’t get out? Help!

Finally! Whew! Back outside, the crowd was getting thicker, younger. A singular vulgarity suddenly interrupted world peace. “Fuck the USA. A whole new way!’ Okay, enough. We popped into Tim Horton’s to rest our aching feet, have some soup, a sandwich, decaf coffee. A security foursome was hunched over fries behind Kay Dee. Two officials with ear sets relaxed behind me. A trio of flag-decked kids tromped in. “Can I take your picture?” Kay Dee asks. We’re right back to goodwill, courtesy, and Canadian character.

The city could not have been prettier driving out, crossing back over the Burrard Street Bridge, cutting left onto Broadway, up Granville, cutting another left to Oak, up Oak, and then over the Oak Street Bridge—somewhere down beneath us a cluttered shop that sold my mum our pretty copper milk jug. An hour later I was in bed in the States. Outside my back window were the lonely but lovely lights of Cypress Mountain in the distance, twinkling in an inky sky, serene testament to two-plus weeks of peaceful world competition. Hearts were broken, records were made, all testimonial proof to ourselves that, despite the isolated jerk free to chant vulgarity in our faces, we can, we’re capable, it is possible, to achieve connection to humanity; we can override governments and barriers, reach across divides and shake hands, and fist bump the world that is us. Touch, feel, be. The flame might be out but, “Yeah, go us.”

The 2010 Games: Where Is Everyone?

2010-02-12T12:39:00.000-08:00

I live just south of the Canadian/American border, a woman with dual citizenship, and with family who live and work on both sides of the Peace Arch. Today, driving home from the gym where I work out at the senior center in Blaine, WA, I drove through the strangely deserted border town, puzzled by the lack of traffic that's been predicted for the Games. Which everyone knows is to be held in Vancouver--a city very few know I was born in. But considering the fact that the games begin today, I am wondering, "Where in the world are all these people who are to be storming this border?"

In Blaine and the surrounding area, we've gone through quite the uproar, getting ready for these hordes of people. The border has been expanded, more lanes put in, security beefed up, extra guards hired, the community disrupted, invasion of privacy accelerated. Heat-sensitive cameras look right into the houses that line the 49th parallel, and a student of mine at the community college said her father's complaints about having to pee and brush his teeth for an audience being a gross violation of his privacy were summarily dismissed for the "greater good." So what's this all about? This no show on the day the entire world chants "Let the games begin"? Is my student's father taking a pee in public for no good reason?

Puzzled, I drove out on the Drayton Harbor spit to see if any cars were lined up to go through into Vancouver. Amazing. There were cars piled up going into the States, but all lanes going into Canada? All green, a first in my personal history. I've been through this border a thousand times and have never seen all lanes lit to "go," with guards on duty and ready to pass people into the land of my birth. More astonishing, half of the lanes were empty--no lineup of any kind. Believe me, I can count on one hand and have fingers left over, and still give you an accurate count of how many times I've actually driven up and had my chat at the gate without have to wait my turn idling in line. Where in the world is everyone?

I'm going to assume traffic will pick up. A shame to be the prettiest city in the world and have no one show. And in case anyone's interested, the map below and to your left is the map of my family's connection to 2010's Olympic Games--and by working my way down the page you can see that I'm probably in pretty good position to tell you something of an insider's view. I can give you some background that I doubt NBC, ABC, or even CTV can share. Leave all the important stuff to them--like who wins the gold--and the trivia no one cares about to me. I begin at the map's top: Whistler and Squamish.

First, Squamish is headquarters to one of the four First Nations groups being represented at the Olympics. It's also temporary home for my youngest son Blake. He is finishing his MA in Theology at Regent College in Vancouver but will be putting a small dent in his student loans by driving a bus for the Olympic athletes. He writes from Squamish, where he and his buddies are housed in the old Love Boat and are being fed like paying customers: "My job is to go to the athlete's village in Whistler every morning and pick up athletes going to the slide center. That means I drive skeletoners, lugers, and bobsledders. Cool, huh?"

If that isn't enough fun, he writes: "Last night the Olympic torch came through Squamish so we went to the festival. They had the torch, music, a logging show, and lots of free coke (liquid type). I even got to hold the torch! So things are fun, I'm getting to know the other drivers from our company, and I'm practicing my French with all the French speakers on the ship."

Moving to the south end of the map... My daughter and her family live in Ferndale (near me in Birch Bay), but Heather actually works in Langley just over the border. She writes: "I cheered the torch on as it went by my office today- I'm excited!"

In between the bottom end of the map and the top you'll find Vancouver. I was born here, and went to the dentist here, but I grew up in Pt. Coquitlam, 18 miles up the Fraser River. The "Bay House" (two blocks from the border) is where I was taken right out of the hospital, just three days old, the summer my father built my grandfather a cottage on the bay. I consider this home, for after leaving Pt. Coquitlam when I was nine I became a vagabond, criss-crossing the continent on both sides of the border. The Bay House, torn down and rebuilt by my Aunt Thelma, remains the only consistent spot on the map of my life.

Currently, my immediate family (less one sister) lives near me south of the border (though two of my three children go to school or work north of the line). All of my extended family and big sister, however, live throughout the greater Vancouver area--and my lucky McMillin cousins also have a condo at Whistler. It has seemed very strange to me that people from all around the world will be converging on my turf, when I have spent a life time living everywhere but.

And yet, today, February 12, 2010, official start of the games, I see no one going "home." Really, where are they all?

Forget Forgiveness. whatever the heck it is, or isn't

2010-01-26T13:10:00.001-08:00

NINE YEARS AGO, my youngest son Blake was to preach at his big brother Phil's church, and I got a phone call from Evelyn, Phil's three-year-old. Was I coming down to her house?

"Yes, do you want to play?" I asked.

"Yes, and we can sit next to each other. And hold hands."

You gotta love little girls. They're so relational.

And so I went down and spent the weekend with Phil and his family, held hands with Evelyn, and heard Blake preach.

His sermon was on forgiveness, something Blake and I go around and around on all the time. Here's why: No one has a very good definition.

I grew up with this one: Forgive and forget. Mmmmm. Charlie Brown "forgives and forgets" when Lucy sets a foot ball in front of him. How well does that work?

Or this: Let it go. Go where? What does that look like? How does one do this? Seriously, what are you talking about? Step by step, how is this done?

How about "Get over it already." A kind of "it's your fault you can't get over my adultery... my sexual assault... my bad tempter... my putting you down... my..." This is nothing more than blame the victim for inflicted damage.

Or this: You haven't forgiven unless you forgive seven times seventy. Fantastic. Somewhere between one and 490 beatings you wind up dead.

Here's another favorite. Just move on. Another esoteric bit of mumbo jumbo that's hard to get your head around. Like cotton candy as soon as you bite. Poof! Gone! What do those words mean. And try telling them to survivors of abuse so severe it's damaged their souls and minds.

The one definition that Blake and I both agree upon is Anne Lamott's. She posits that forgiveness is the letting go of the wish for a different past. Okay then! Here we go! No airy-fairy words, where meaning vanishes the longer they're pondered. This gives one something to do.

So let's talk about a different past. I was seventeen and out of the house when I was badly molested by a Christian doctor. Not something one just "gets over." It catapulted me down a path of sexual fear, resistance and cynicism of Christian men, and a sense of God's helplessness to intervene and protect me. I certainly do wish this had never happened. But it did, right smack dab in the middle of a whole lot of really good things. So if given the option of erasing the bad, I have to consider: What happens to the good that was knit into it and around it? How does one extrapolate an event from the surrounding many? You can't. You take the good and suddenly you don't yearn so much for a different past. You want all those good things! Here's the beauty. The victimizer becomes inconsequential. Forgiveness doesn't really have anything to do with it anymore.

I so much as shared this with Blake afterward. "Great, but what about Dad?" he asked.

Well, that's a big one. On that score I certainly wish I had a different past. Oh my goodness, who and what could I have been if I hadn't suffered ten long years of denigration, neglect, emotional abuse, and stripped of any reason to exist but to please him?

My preacher-boy looked me in the eye and said, "Well, whenever you wish you'd never married Dad, just take a look at Evelyn."

Ahh! See how this works?

Forget forgiveness. Forget whatever the heck it is, or isn't. Instead focus on the life and love that is miraculously growing out of all that darkness.

Merry Christmas! Prickly Pear & Fruit!

2009-12-23T10:10:00.000-08:00

"We wish you a Merry Christmas
We wish you a Merry Christmas
We with you a Merry Christmas
and a Happy New Year!"

Christmas Day swiftly approaches but, because I was in Arizona for six weeks this fall, I did not make a Christmas card--and so extend instead to everyone on my list this snapshot of my five little elves and me, taken last Friday at my daughter's house. Merry Christmas!

The bad-so-sad news of 2009 was that my much loved Jeep died en route to Phoenix last October. I buried her under a rainbow in San Jose, CA, at a car cemetery called Pick and Pull. What a ignoble death to something so loyal and brave as was my jeep, 220,000 miles old. With the grand total of $241, which the junkyard, I mean cemetery! gave me, I rented another car and limped into Phoenix, distressed over not just the loss of my wonderful car but the financial difficulty this had put me in, now eighteen months unemployed. Blake, my youngest son, had this to say over the phone however: "Mum, you enjoyed sixteen years of a long and loving, monogamous relationship with that car. You loved that car. You will never love another car quite like that one. But, Mum, it's time now for you to start sleeping around." Perspective restored, two friends from high school helped me go car shopping. I now own a 2005 Toyota Scion which, after a few hurdles, runs like a charm.

The good news of 2009 is that my son and daughter-in-law have received word that we now have a Chinese baby to add to my grandchildren list. "Alice" was abandoned January 2 a year ago. The only information we have on her is from last August, and is cause for concern. She's already suffered two broken thighs and is suspected to have brittle bone disease. In my expression of worry over what this will cost emotionally as well as financially, my son said, "We could not hear of her and not go get her." My other son said, "Think of what her life would be like if left in China."

I did think. A few years ago Blake was in China teaching. He knows what her life would be like. I do too because Blake flew me over for ten days. I saw the plethora of beggars in the streets, suffering all manner of deformities and disease. Blake never passed a single one without dropping to his knee and rolling wadded-up yen into the beggars' cups. He touched them, spoke with them, let them know he saw them, that he cared. Would Alice, without Phil and Katie in her life, grow up with nothing to look forward to but broken bones and perhaps the streets?

And so Phil and Katie are waiting to go get her, and I suspect that our little Alice will bring the same wonder and joy to my family as did my little sister fifty years ago, born with a severe heart defect. For you cannot live with an ill child without seeing a bit of God. I once heard a minister say God does not intervene in the affairs of the world. I agree that at times he seems to utterly vacate, to leave us entirely to ourselves (which isn't necessarily a bad thing!) But my sister, born to die, undeniably brought the divine into our home. Sometimes life is not so much how much we can get out of it but how much we can put into it.

The highlight of my year was the momentous--but wonderful--journey to Arizona this fall, forty years after first moving there as a seventeen-year-old kid. I drove down through California and stopped both coming and going to see friends at the ranch where I lived as a ten-year-old and in San Jose where I lived as a young mother. These are friends who are the same wonderful people they were "way back when" and it did me good to bask in their love and our memories of each other. In Phoenix itself I was surrounded by numerous friends--from the church I once attended, from high school, from college, from when I worked at First National Bank of Arizona. How is it, I kept wondering, that friendship can survive long years apart? I don't know. But I am grateful.

I sign off with a picture or two taken of my Thanksgiving morning. My friend Wayne (BFF from high school) planned it all. His sister Carol and I arrived at his house at the same time, breathless and happy, nine o'clock sharp. I'm gluten intolerant and all fall Wayne had been introducing me to various grains indigenous to the Southwest Natives that are gluten free; he surprised me Thanksgiving morning by preparing breakfast appetizers of tepary beans and two new grains. Carol and I lapped them up and I thought, isn't it wonderful to have such two fine friends?

Anyway, we headed out for our hike up South Mountain to see more petroglyphs (I have fallen in love with the ancient symbols) and to eat a breakfast of prickly pear cactus fruit. I've never enjoyed a better Thanksgiving. Do you see Wayne teaching us how to get past the prickles to the fruit? Now isn't that a metaphor for life?

It's good to have Thanksgiving right before Christmas, instilling a sense of gratitude for family and friends. There is no better gift, I think, under any tree. In that spirit, then, I wish all my family and friends everywhere a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Please link over to this delightful card, sent to me by Jeanne and Lizz. I forward it on to you all.

Christmas Carol--a la Jim Carrey

2009-12-15T09:13:00.000-08:00

If anyone is debating whether or not to go see the Jim Carrey version of Dickens' A Christmas Carol, go. Or at the very least read my son's review of the film posted on his blog.

I think I actually felt snow falling on my face in the theatre, the 3-D was that good. The film itself, though, is one I'd use in my English classes, getting the kids to write compare and contrast essays between two presentations of story. This is a must-see, must-have movie that no one can tire of. b--

Copy and paste the link below to get to Blake's blog:
http://www.heartbeknowledge.blogspot.com/

Water Under The Bridge

2009-10-28T09:45:00.000-07:00

October 26, 2009
Forty years ago today I arrived in the Phoenix desert, a physically fragile seventeen-year-old, to live with family friends. I’d just survived a near-death experience; and a second hospitalization that followed on its heels suggested there was little the Midwest medical community could do for me, a severe asthmatic. Our only real option remaining was to check me into Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, to see if the best minds in America couldn’t find a way to keep me alive. But then family friends unexpectedly stopped by for a visit, enroute to Phoenix for a new job at Arizona State, and invited me to come live with them. The desert was supposed to be good for people like me, and thus I arrived. Forty years ago today—October 26, 1969.

For me, there is much water under the bridge in this Arizona desert. To say that my year in Tempe, Arizona, was the best of my life is an understatement. Seventeen and finding myself suddenly healthy, away from home for the first time, and going to a high school that required nothing more of me than literature, sculpture, and music? Surrounded by new friends and, in today’s vernacular, stumbling onto a BFF? I wonder, do we ever recapture the intensity of being a teenager? A time of life when everything touches the soul so deeply? Is of such import? Perhaps this is why my concurring sexual molestation at the hands of the Christian doctor into whose care I’d been entrusted was so damaging, sliding my happy life sideways and then right off the road—though it was a long time before I ever came out of what feels to have been an emotional coma to the rubble I was in. Aware enough, though, that when I left the state five or six years later, I never spoke of Arizona again. Until my divorce at the age of twenty-nine. So much water under the bridge.

Two and a half years ago, though, nearly four decades of disassociation ended. How to describe this? Once, when cleaning out a closet, a dirty cast fell on my head. Whose broke arm had this been for? I’d wondered, thinking of my children. Blake’s? Phil’s? Heather had broken her leg; it wasn’t hers. Like the cast, my molestation fell out of a closet and hit me on the head. Not that I’d ever forgotten, far from it, but what was it doing back in my life? How did it get here after all this time? And why fall on my head now?

So after thirty-eight years of repressing Arizona I returned to the desert to reconnect with friends “who knew me then” and to face for the first time the trauma that subconsciously defined my life, now floundering on a bedrock of Self that had been smote and cracked, necessitating I live two lives of “then” and “now” with no real way forward. My BFF’s sister, the minister’s wife of the little church we all attended, and one of my youth group leaders took me over to the doctor’s office, now a parking lot for Scottsdale Hospital. Quite the crying jag. I’d never wept over this, but thirty-eight years of pain and confusion broke through some kind of emotional dam. My friends sat quietly with me, but in the murkiness of that gutting pain that caught me off guard and took my breath I sensed their love. How is it that in thirty-eight years of silence such love survives? I was amazed, and fortified, but still I felt I might drown and sink into some kind of emotional abyss, never to return. I could not stop crying, they could not help me—and then I remembered my BFF.

Wayne had been the one who’d begun taking me to the doctor all those years ago—never knowing, of course, what was really going on. I got through it all by picturing him in the waiting room, patiently waiting for me. I can see him still, sitting in a corner, opposite the receptionist’s window. I can see the pictures on the wall over his head, I can see the little table beside him full of magazines. He picks one up, takes a look, throws it back. He jiggles his knee. I only had to survive and he’d take me away. Is there a way to explain this man whose very presence evoked calm, whose smile and humor healed my soul? We certainly were not lovers, nor had we ever admitted any level of love for each other, yet it was evident enough to everyone around us that love was a living thing in our lives. And in all the years ever since? I’ve never heard or seen anyone with such an attachment. But it was by remembering this that I pulled myself together outside Scottsdale Hospital’s parking lot two years ago—remembering my old BFF who never failed to take me away from it all.

Back at home and all cried out, I was happy to have it out of my system at last and ready to begin the task of integrating my lost self with my real self, knitting together “then” and “now” into a cohesive trail forward into time. Not. Dr. Mattson continued to haunt me, as did my life after him—so full of anguish. For I’d I married badly in the Arizona desert, and immediately found myself trapped in a loveless and demeaning marriage. “Your body is not your own,” I was told, the Bible shoved under my nose to prove it. And indeed it was not. Nor was mind, my heart, or my soul. I only existed to be a Christian man’s domestic and sexual slave. Years later, still married, Oregon passed a law against marital rape. My husband was righteously indignant. I yearned to move to Oregon. Yes, a lot of water under the bridge in this Arizona desert.

So this September I found myself again planning a return to what had been the happiest time of my life and concurrently the most unhappy. Consciously it was to escape the rut I was in, an attempt to try and write, check out the job market, play with old friends—to put distance between my stagnant life where I could not find a job, could not focus long enough to write any one of a gazillion book ideas I had in my head…could not forget the desert of my life.

When Judith Couchman heard of my plans she wrote to remind me of the many Biblical stories involving deserts and exile…and forty days and forty nights and sometimes forty years. All were odysseys, she pointed out, taken by individuals, whole cities, entire nations. Always their journeys brought about transformation (http://www.judithcouchman.blogspot.com). I quickly added up the six weeks I planned to be gone. Forty-two days. Close enough. I added up the years. Forty. Right on the nose. Suddenly, my conscious decision to face the desert took on new meaning. This was a spiritual odyssey. Somehow, I think, I’d known it all along: I was desperately seeking transformation.

No one knows what Jesus suffered in his wilderness, or Moses on Mt. Sinai. Or Elijah in the cave at Mount Horeb. Joseph Campbell in his many books on mythology, religion, and psychology, writes that such wilderness journeys are life-threateningly tough. We can feel devoured, overcome, hopelessly lost. Such journeys require tasks to be completed, demons to be confronted, hurdles to be crossed. They’re journeys that require letting go of everything old to embrace everything new and unknown, and which exact self-examination that can border obsession. But not to worry, he writes, we’re all given “magical” help whenever we need it. Jesus received wisdom in the desert, Moses the Ten Commandments on Sinai, Elijah food at Mount Horeb. We too receive. The darkest hour is where we find the divine. All our stories, Campbell points out, tell us it is in the wilderness where we find new health and healing and hope.

Three days into my own journey and not yet at the desert, my faithful jeep of 220,000 miles died—leaving me stranded in San Jose, California, at the home of former friends. Do I go home? It was a viable question to ask. Retreat to safety and stagnation?

Or do I go on? Into the unknown?

Marilyn, upon whose doorstep I’d landed, said, “You need to go on. You can’t go back.” It was a little hard for both of us to miss the Biblical mandate or for me to miss Campbell’s “Call to Adventure.”

And thus I landed back in the Arizona desert just days before the fortieth anniversary of my initial arrival, no longer seventeen but fifty-seven—without a car and the house I’d rented dirty, no hot water, the toilets backing up. As my mother would say, a real fine how-do-you-do. Thank you very much God, thank you very much Joseph Campbell.

As with Marilyn in San Jose, I was at the mercy of former family and friends; as with Marilyn they rushed to help. The house I am renting is actually right next door to my former mother-in-law. In fact, it was Nelda who’d made all the arrangements. It was she who immediately lent me cleaning supplies, a radio, coffee maker, who brought over a Merry Maids mug ironically labeled “Savor your clean house,” and who just now brought over a microwave rice dinner she’d picked up for me at Costco. My old BFF Wayne jumped right in and lent me his car and agreed to help me find a new one. His little sister Carol had me over for supper and sent me on my way with more cleaning supplies and kitchen equipments: dishes, pots and pans, measuring cups, utensils. She came over the next day with a table and chairs and spent several hours cleaning windows and helping me settle in. Ten days into my wilderness venture I was unable to shake the loss of my jeep and the financial drain it was creating…but I was surrounded by love that overlooked decades of silence; in Nelda’s case, deep hurt. I, after all, had divorced her son.

When Elijah headed into the wilderness to seek the brook Cherith, God sent ravens to bring him bread and meat in the morning and bread and meat in the evening. It wasn’t exactly a balanced meal but it’s a story that tells us there is provision in our desert experiences.

Yet on the thirteenth day of my exile I hit melt down, the many ironies and conflicts—and sheer weariness—catching up with me. My former mother-in-law and I went to church and afterward lunch (“You’re going to Baptist church?” my youngest son had asked the night before on the phone. “You’re going to a Southern Baptist church?), only to find Wayne on my doorstep when we got back. He’d left his cell phone in his car—which I of course had. He wanted the phone back. At the sight of him, hands in his pockets and patiently waiting, a stance I’d seen a hundred times when we were kids, tears stung.

“What’s wrong?” he wanted to know, his grown-up self greeting me at my door.

“Oh, Wayne, I’m having such a bad day.”

He sprawled onto one my couches, but not without laughing at the blankets I’d placed over them both. I amuse him with my leeriness of the dirt around here. His laughter made me laugh. “So what’s going on?” he asked, his summer-sky eyes seeking my face, the color and gaze a part of my past.

The car of course. That I was borrowing his, that I couldn’t work up much enthusiasm to find a new one, my awareness of taking so much of his time in looking. “I just want to buy a jar of peanut butter,” I said. “But there’s a whole row of peanut butter! So many different brands, different sizes, different ingredients. All I want is just a jar of peanut butter!”

But mostly, I told him, the whole molestation thing was hitting me hard. I didn’t tell him it had occupied my attention all morning while a Southern Baptist minister at times made my skin crawl with self-deprecating arrogance. I’d forgotten how some preachers can be this way, how some congregations can laugh, enjoy the comfort of their own superiority over the misguided and unenlightened world. I said instead, “Tomorrow will be the fortieth anniversary of my initial arrival here. Forty years. October 26.”

He expressed no surprise that I could be so anal about this. In reality I have both a calendar—which I remember keeping, and a journal—which I have no memory whatsoever of writing.

"And on November 11…” I had to look away. “I don’t know if I can talk about this,” I said.

“It’s up to you. I don’t know what you need. I don’t understand how this happens in the first place. I can’t tell you how to fix this.”

I slid my eyes sideways. He was watching me.

“November 11th,” I repeated, heart catching, fluttering like a butterfly in my throat, “will mark forty years to the day of his first assault.” I started to cry a little, and had to look away again. “It would have been better if he’d raped me,” I finally said. “I could have at least told someone about that. But…”

Everyone I know and everything I’ve ever read tells me the only way out of this kind of thing is to tell someone. Get the words out, put them somewhere else. Yet how, if I literally cannot talk about it? And truly, if it were that simple, I would have done it a long time ago. Joseph Campbell, I realized, was absolutely right when he said it could feel life threatening. “I can’t—literally I can’t—talk about this,” I explained to my old BFF, obviously with an emphasis now on the second F. “I try, but the words stick in my throat. So, on November 11th…”

“November 11th,” he said, thinking this all through. “That’s Veterans’ Day. There’s no trading. I don’t have to work.”

"This is what I’m thinking,” I told him, buoyed by his willing support with whatever and wherever I was going with this, and shared the plan I’d more or less come up with while sitting in Nelda’s church, the old Baptist hymns holding better memories than the preacher. How had I gotten through before? I’d asked myself. The answer was glaringly obvious. I’d gotten through because Wayne had been there. Waiting for me. Behind the closed door all I had to do was go away in my head and then come back when it was over, and he’d take me away, make me laugh again, plant me back in a world where life was good and wonderful and safe. I said, “I’m going to try and write this down, Really try. But then I think I’ll burn it all and make ashes, and put the ashes in a baggie. I don’t want anyone else burdened; it’s too terrible. But if I brought the ashes to your house? Will you take me up South Mountain? It’s pretty there. I like that part of the desert. I would feel good to just leave it all there. I can find a place to either bury it all or just let it all blow away in the wind.”

“I can do that.”

“But you can’t be there when I do it. I’ll cry. I don’t want you see me. But I need you close by so that if I start howling you’ll know to come get me. I need you to come get me. I’m scared of falling into an abyss and never finding my way out again.” With sudden clarity I knew this was my terrble fear. What if I reentered that place, one last time, disappearing deep into my mind in order to survive, what if this time I couldn’t find my way back out? For surely the River Styx runs through my psyche as dangerously and treacherously as it does in myth.

"I’ll come get you,” he promised.

Amazing how a plan can make all the difference! More amazing is how I can reach back in time and find my friend just as I remember him.

I actually slept well and in the morning, this morning, the fortieth anniversary of my initial arrival in the desert, I hurried over to Wayne’s house, driving freeways that never existed in our former life, actually looking forward to test-driving one of the cars we’d found the day before my melt down. He was waiting outside. “How are you today?” he asked when I jumped out of his Saturn, stretched, and all but jumped into his arms.

“I’m good!”

He laughed.

To the casual observer and perhaps even to Wayne the day was mundane enough. Test-driving one of two cars he thought reliable, taking it over to his mechanic, meeting Carol to celebrate and sign on the dotted line that made me the new owner of a 2005 Toyota Scion. But momentous, too, for all day long with Wayne—taking care of the car stuff, running errands, having lunch and laughing over the differences in our memories, making a date for him to come see me in the Pacific Northwest next year when the movie Eat, Pray, Love comes out—I couldn’t help but compare our “then” to “now” and think of all the water under the bridge. When all is said and done, it is my desert that forges our friendship. That's a good thing.

At one point in our running around and driving past something that astonished me, I asked, "What’s this called?”

He filled me in, then pointed out, “See the orange flowers, reaching up from the mounded foliage over there?”

"Yeah...”

"That’s Birds of Paradise.”

So that was Birds of Paradise. I fell in love.

He pointed out the sycamore trees.

They were like the eucalyptus.

"Do they smell?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

For forty years Arizona has been in my mind a barren landscape of sand and city concrete, blinding sunlight and unbearable heat, painted grass, plastic geraniums planted in artificial rows. Now? Today, I found myself suddenly planting a garden in my mind. I’d have Birds of Paradise alongside a lavender-like plant that I have growing in my own garden back home, but which also grows here. I’d put in some of that magenta bougainvillea—the torch kind, the kind Wayne really likes and which Sue Grafton writes about in her mstery series. The orange, the lavender with its silver foliage, the magenta…all back-dropped by an apricot adobe wall? How pretty is that? Add some prickly pear cactus off to the side, some saguaro strategically placed to add height.

"What are you doing?” he asked. “You thinking of taking some of that home with you?”

"What?”

"Birds of Paradise.”

"No! I’m planting a garden here!” and I laughed, surprised at myself.

It’s evening now. I look around this house I’ve rented. Everywhere I look, I see Carol and Nelda my mother-in-law (we agreed to drop the “former as too precise and probably not all that accurate)—the coffee maker, the table, the dishes, the mugs on the kitchen windowsill.

If I get up and go look in the garage, I’ll find my new car. It’s metallic gray, same color as the pots and pans Carol has lent me, a car picked out by Wayne. Even though he doesn't like boxy cars.

Yes, a momentous day.

I can think of another very similar day.

Not long after my divorce, maybe twenty-five years ago, I was having lunch at Seattle’s Shilshoe Bay with my friend and editor Jerry Jones and some our friends in the publishing business. It was one of those perfect summer afternoons, sun glinting off the water, boats of all shapes and sizes bobbing on the bay, good food, happy company. Afterward everyone dispersed, leaving just Jerry and me—and the swooping, soaring gulls that populate the waterfront. I was suddenly quite overcome with happiness to be divorced, to having endured the pain, to now have these friends, to be amongst people who admired me, who valued me. I threw up my arms and spun around.

"Oh Jerry,” I told him, “I’m so happy to be alive!” and I hurtled into his arms, surprising him and beside myself with gratitude and love.

His snort is actually a delightful sound, one only he can make, a sound I still hear it in my mind whenever I think to listen. That day he snorted loud and laughed hard, and let me wallow in my happiness.

Today is kin. I’m not on the waterfront, no seagulls caw in my ears. I am in the desert. Where much water lies under the bridge.

But water, I'm finding, that can nonetheless nourish my soul.

When The Net Appears

2009-10-24T16:20:00.000-07:00

ODE TO MY JEEP

“Just go!’ my youngest son said, silencing my many fears and worries over my odyssey to the Arizona desert where I was going ostensibly to write and get way from fifteen months of unemployment. In reality I was headed for more of a spiritual odyssey than anything else. You see, I think I’m actually in full-blown post-traumatic stress—paralyzed by forty years of accumulated anxiety. Time to go back to the desert where life first slid sideways. Time to try and let go of old trauma so I can find a new beginning.

“But what if my Jeep dies?” I asked Blake. Too Cool is the coolest car I ever had. After eleven years of junkers that only a single mother of three can afford, in 1993 I bought myself a brand spanking new Jeep Cherokee Sport. Together and over the last sixteen years we’ve put on 220,000 miles. Every winter for sixteen years she’s taken me skiing, never a moment of fear, not even when we once slid into a ditch. Out she chugged, kids squealing in the back seat. We’ve been to Banff in the Canadian Rockies too many times to count, roamed the prairies, just the two of us, driving Big Bear’s trail, connecting the dots on my great-grandfather’s whereabouts as a Mountie during Sitting Bull, poking our noses into gullies and following old rivers and finding all kinds of surprises.

"Just go, already!” said Blake.

So I packed up Too Cool and headed south, to the desert, to sunnier skies and family and friends who, despite the forty years, still love and care for me. And where I hoped to undergo some sort of esoteric experience of “letting go.”

She started to overheat while driving into San Jose, California, where I’d once lived and where I’d scheduled a stop to visit my old Bible study teacher, a woman who’d tempered the wind for me in dark years of fundamentalist Christianity and other troubles. Controlling the hot engine by turning the heater on full blast, I limped into Marilyn’s place, one sweaty gal and a wee bit worried. Was it safe to drive on to Phoenix where the temperatures would be even hotter? Even if I could, could I cope with the heater going full blast, the temperature outside 100 degrees?

Weekend coming up, Marilyn’s husband Fred advised me to get the car into a mechanic. They called their son-in-law, a former mechanic, to recommend someone else to take a look at my hot Jeep—how ironic her name is Too Cool. Four and half hours later and Friday at five Michael and Company had no idea what was going on. I’d have to bring her back Monday morning for more poking around.

So instead of one night with Marilyn and Fred, I spent several, stranded and at the mercy of these long-ago friends to house, feed, and help me cope with mounting angst. Their love, rooted decades ago, blossomed—their graciousness a fragrance I find hard to describe. I began to hope that Too Cool might be all right after all, for how could bad things happen when I had such good friends? But Monday morning the nice man behind the counter said his only option was to pull the engine, another six hours of diagnostics—and that would only buy me a diagnosis. From there the cost would continue to go up; he was thinking cracked gasket and other mean-sounding things. I was sick to my stomach.

Someone once told me you can’t love things, only people. But I love eucalyptus trees, I love the falling snow, and the first robin in spring. And I love that Jeep. Just three months ago I’d refused to pay $200 to replace a broken seat belt buckle. Too Cool blue-booked out at 300 bucks, and it was hardly worth it, but I found myself okaying the additional $600 diagnostics and called Marilyn to come pick me up.

When she arrived, we sat in her car while I fought tears. She quietly suggested I change my mind and junk the car. It was a punch in the gut to an already sick stomach. “At least take some time to think about it,” she said. So I went in, got my keys, and followed my friend back to her house in tears, only to find that Fred agreed. Junk the car. I called my children.

“Look, she’s served you well,” the youngest said, the same young man who told me, Just go! “We knew she had to die sometime.”

“Yeah but you told me not to worry!”

“Right, don’t worry.”

My middle son said, “Mum, this really should come as no big surprise. You need to cut your losses. Everything will be okay. It’s all just logistics.”

My daughter simply said, “Oh, no! I’m so sorry!” I like her response the best.

I called my best friend from my high school, senior year, seventeen in Arizona, hoping Wayne's humor and smart mind might save me, save my car. “I’m the only dissenting voice,” I told him.

“And why are you dissenting?” he asked when I gave him the particulars. “It’s sixteen years old. It’s a Jeep. (Like Jeeps totally suck.) It has 220,000 miles. You’re lucky you’ve gotten this far.”

“But what if I try to drive it to Arizona at night?” I wasn’t going to give up. “When the temperature is cool?”

He didn’t even hesitate. “Absolutely not. That’s not going to happen.”

How do you even junk a car?

Fred and Marilyn found some phone numbers, a task I seemed incapable of doing. We finally settled on Pick and Pull, an offensive name as far I was concerned; but they offered to pay me $241. Not quite Blue Book, but enough to let me rent a car for the rest of the journey—or get myself home. Marilyn pressed. Forward, not backward. This is a spiritual odyssey. It’s about letting go, new horizons. It’s about trust. True… And I really did expect to let go of things along the way—things like ideas, not my car! I see now it was a rather transcendental view, sounding good on paper and even in my head, but when the rubber, so to speak, really met the road? My car? I had to let go of my car?

When Too Cool was still brand new I’d bought her a fancy ski and car rack. The ski rack had been taken off sometime last summer to load lumber and was still at home in the garage. The car rack, years ago, had gone to my son-in-law—though I maintained dibs whenever I needed it. He’d dutifully removed it from his car back to mine less than a week ago. How was I to get this back to him?

Fred made a cardboard box out of recycle in his garage and we all went down to FedEx and I shipped off all that would remain of Too Cool. It was like removing a wedding band and sending it off to the next of kin. We then stripped Too Cool down to her skivvies and headed for Pick and Pull, gray clouds gathering and clumping like knots in the sky, rain trying to spit against the cracks lacing my windshield.

I parked on the street. Fred and I went in. A rather efficient, cold-hearted operation. I handed over my car title, the man no older than twelve tapped on his keyboard awhile, printed out a check for $241, thirty pieces of silver, and passed it to me over an industrial desk. He and Fred went to “check her in” and I sat numb in my metal chair.

I did not expect to see Too Cool again. But there she was, right there at the foot of the stairway when I went out, right in my face, red ink scrawled all over her windows, a humiliating end for such a faithful car. I looked away, blinking hard, almost ashamed that I could do such a thing, and I walked a little faster, a growing sense of betrayal somehow lodging so firmly inside my chest that my heart actually hurt. By the time we reached the street, tears stung. Fred--an arm around my shoulder and quick hug--said, “Look.” Spilling out of the steely gray swarm of clouds hung the two ends of a brilliant rainbow that arched the expanse of heaven. “Does that say anything to you?” he asked.

Did I say this was a spiritual odyssey? Even a hardcore atheist has to be hard pressed not to see a sign of hope in such a universal symbol.

It’s been four days now. I write from the desert, where I did arrive safely; and I find myself once again trusting long ago friends to take care of me. The house I rented is dirty, there’s no hot water, the toilets back up. And I have no car of. But Like Marilyn and Fred, my former mother-in-law and my friends from high school have pitched in with grace and goodwill. Cleaning supplies, kitchen equipment, Wayne's snazzy wheels on loan. Old habits die hard, though, and I fret over my finances and what kind of car I can buy on an unemployment check. I wake up nights in a cold sweat, dreaming I’m back to the old clunkers I used to drive.

“I just can’t go back there,” I tell Wayne. “I just can’t.” I don’t tell him I’m in the throes of flashback time, so many flashbacks to car failure and danger it’s like watching my grandpa’s old movies. Jerky. Moving too fast. But instead of images of my dad as a boy, it’s all my old cars falling apart. I see myself pumping gas by Seattle’s Kingdome and watching it pour right out the bottom of my camper van. I’m climbing a summit in the Santa Cruz Mountains and losing my clutch, rolling backward, nearly off a cliff. I have to get a kid to the doctor and the car won’t start, again! I shut my eyes to block the jerking kaleidoscope of memories.

“I can’t, I just can’t go back to all that, Wayne.” He tells me not to worry, he won’t let me buy a car that isn’t reliable, and while he doesn’t think it can be done on my budget he’ll find a way, he’ll make this work.

This much I know. Wayne will never lie to me. In the old days he never knew the dark trauma of my early days in the desert forty years ago (something I will probably never share with the world) but he was nonetheless aware of how troubled I was at times. He not only made my life work, but he gave me the best year of my life. So this much I know. Wayne will never lie to me. Never. I suddenly discover that I have at least this much trust.

In San Jose I’d asked my son Phil, “Do you have any last words before I take Too Cool to the junkyard?”

“I don’t know… It’s been a good ride?”

Yes, it’s been a good ride. And though it stings like hell to say goodbye, it is goodbye. Time to let go. Time to trust friends, and to thank God for letting my faithful car die under a rainbow.

Rest in peace, Too Cool.

Family and friends are the sunrise on a new horizon.

P.S. After writing this I found myself in tears again. The son who insisted, "Just go" told me on the phone last night, "Look at this way, Mum. You enjoyed a long and monogamous relationship with that Jeep. You loved her. You'll never love another car like her again. But now I think it's time to start sleeping around. You got to start looking for one that will at least do."

I laughed.

It's All in the Feet. Oh, yeah, don't forget the tongue...

2009-10-05T12:27:00.000-07:00

Introducing Nathan, my second grandson, seven years old, and hooked on Wii. What was I doing when I was seven? Mmmmm.... Grade 2 and board games. Actually, Nathan and his little brother Jamie are only allowed to play once a week; it's a big deal. The tiny voice you hear in the background? Evelyn Rose, three years old.