Tuesday, March 29, 2016
Race, Opioid Addiction, & Crack Cocaine
A brief essay on how race may impact our approach to drug addiction. Worth watching and considering…
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/there-was-no-wave-of-compassion-when-addicts-were-hooked-on-crack/
Wednesday, January 17, 2016
Poetry From Prison: From Jail to Yale
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/stuck-behind-bars-a-writer-found-a-way-to-connect-to-the-world/
From the book Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, author Sherry Turkle of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology gives us her favorite quote: “Technology makes us forget what we know about life.”
This is a worthwhile conversation…
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/how-your-cellphone-is-silently-disrupting-your-social-life/
Saturday, September 5, 2015
Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy
I came across this interview with Bryan Stevenson by Charlie Rose by accident last evening, and this man is my new hero… what a beautiful, humble human being. It is riveting television, and I think he has it exactly right about race in America. I hope you’ll take the time to watch it.
If you have trouble with the link, go to http://www.hulu.com, search “Bryan Stevenson + Charlie Rose” and click on the first video.
http://www.hulu.com/watch/834956
Bryan Stevenson’s book is called Just Mercy.
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/just-mercy-bryan-stevenson/1120199052?ean=9780812984965
Friday, August 21, 2015
Allergic to WIFI
For quite a while now — 2-3/4 years, since sustaining a concussion which was one of several over time — I have been a “canary in the coal mine” on the subject of Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity: an “allergy”, for want of a better word, to electromagnetic fields such as those caused by cell phones and wireless internet. This is not a fun cultural role to play: it is extremely isolating, frightening, frustrating, and, at times, dispiriting.
With the explosion in diagnoses of autism, anxiety, depression and other neurological disorders among children, a growing number of scientists and citizens are adding their voices to concerns about the harm this radiation pollution can cause, particularly to children and young adults who are still developing. Here is an article from Boston Parents magazine that is worth considering.
http://bostonparentspaper.com/article/is-wi-fi-in-schools-safe.html
KS
Friday, August 7, 2015
Building an Oasis in a Philadelphia Food Desert
This story is so inspiring! We’ve become familiar with the extreme difficulty that people living in poverty face in accessing fresh produce and healthy food, and also with the barriers faced by those who have formerly been incarcerated in securing employment after release. Here is a wonderful man — a grocer — who is solving both these problems in an exceptional way.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/building-oasis-philadelphia-food-desert/
The Case Against Laptops in the Classroom
By Jennifer Senior
Last week, at the Aspen Ideas festival, there came an interesting little moment between Kentaro Toyama, a computer scientist, and Jim Steyer, a lawyer and entrepreneur. Both declared that they’d banned laptops and other electronic devices in their lecture halls.
“Many of the students actually appreciate that,” said Toyama, who teaches at the University of Michigan, “because it encourages real discussion, and they know that as soon as there’s a laptop in front of them, they’re going to start Facebooking each other, and that means that they’re not present for the class.”
Steyer jumped right in. “You should know that in my Stanford classes five years ago, I started banning laptops,” he said. “There was no way they were paying attention. They all whined about it constantly for the first three weeks.” He added that his colleague, with whom he co-taught the course, was terrified they’d made the wrong choice. “She was like, They’re gonna just kill us on the reviews!” he said. But by the end, their students, too, expressed gratitude.
As the founder of Common Sense Media, which evaluates the relative merits of kiddie screen fare, Steyer would perhaps inevitably come around to this point of view – he knows a thing or two about kids and distraction. Ditto for Toyama, author of Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology, whose misgivings about the Internet are built right into the title. Both are wary of mindless tech boosterism and obviously willing to say so out loud.
But they may also represent a new kind of logic when it comes to electronics and education, suggesting that more professors are willing to rethink the value of these devices – or at least express their reservations aloud. Not that many years ago, it would have been considered curmudgeonly – hostile to progress, even – for teachers to voice concerns about laptops and iPhones. Yes, there were early un-adopters (the University of Chicago Law School, for instance, turned off its WiFi in classrooms in 2008) and vaudevillian dissenters (like the University of Oklahoma physics professor who, in 2010, braised a laptop in a bucket of liquid nitrogen and then smashed it on the ground – watch the clip here for a quick hit of Luddite porn). But they were outliers, mainly.
Last year, though, no less than Clay Shirky, the Internet philosopher whose views on new technology have always tended toward the enthusiastic, wrote an essay for Medium explaining why he, too, had reluctantly decided to banish smartphones and laptops from his NYU classroom. “Both the form and the content of a Facebook update are almost irresistibly distracting,” he wrote, “especially compared with the hard slog of coursework. (“Your former lover tagged a photo you are in” vs. “The Crimean War was the first conflict significantly affected by use of the telegraph.” Spot the difference?)”
Attention researchers have long known that we humans are lousy at task-switching. Our brains simply aren’t optimized for it. Slaloming between two streams of information almost guarantees that our learning will be shallower; it prevents us from making intelligent and lasting associations with either body of material. In the case of a distracted college student, one of those bodies of material – a Facebook feed, say – isn’t important to master in the first place. Yet as Shirky points out, social media software is hypnotically diverting, like a tropical bird in mating season – noisy, seductive, colorfully-plumed. How could a bored undergraduate resist? (“Our visual and emotional systems are faster and more powerful than our intellect,” he notes.) Indeed, how could nearby students resist? (This, to Shirky, is the most powerful argument for banning laptops: They’re diverting other students in the vicinity: “Allowing laptop use in class,” he wrote, “is like allowing boombox use in class .”)
In the last few years, a number of studies have also shown, quite convincingly, that students learn better – and get better grades – when they take notes by hand. (My favorite: “The Pen is Mightier than the Keyboard.”) The reason, quite simply, is that typing leads to a certain compulsivity about getting the words just right, a slavish attachment to literal transcription; whereas writing, which is slower, forces people to process and summarize the ideas they’re hearing.
In fact, studies examining the efficacy of laptops in the classroom date back to 2003, when a pair of researchers from Cornell gave two groups of students – one with open laptops, one with closed – the identical lecture and then tested them on the material immediately afterwards. Guess which group did better. (Dan Rockmore, a professor of computer science at Dartmouth, discussed both of these studies in his own essay for the New Yorker last year about why he, too, banned laptops from his classroom; they’ve formed the basis for many teachers’ objections.).
Steyer, of Common Sense Media, recognized this immediately. “And then they’d protest, ‘But I take notes on my laptop!’” he told me after his panel. “And then I’d say, ‘Oooooooh, you don’t know how to write? You’re a Stanford student. I assume you took penmanship.’”
Today, he says, far more of his colleagues are banning laptops than they did five years ago. His own rhetoric, meanwhile, remains gleefully strict. “I tell my students that if I catch them, I’m going to take away their computer or phone for 24 hours,” he says, “which I of course don’t have the right to do.”
Wednesday, June 24, 2015
Living on the Street in Los Angeles, Islamabad, Nairobi, Rio and London
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02tmcvp
What is it like to live on the streets? An estimated 100 million people are homeless around the world. And those are the ones who are counted; a similar number is not thought to be part of any official statistic. To get a sense of what their lives are like, World Have Your Say spent time on the streets of Los Angeles, Islamabad, Nairobi, Rio and London to hear a series of intimate and revealing personal stories.
Shanaz is living in a small tent in Islamabad with her husband and seven children. “We just survive,” she says. “What am I supposed to expect for the future of my children?”
“I’ve got a nice little spot on the street,” Brant explains. He has been living on Skid Row in LA for 16 years, on and off. “I appreciate what I have.”
In Nairobi, they meet a woman who went from drug user to doctor. “Growing up as a street child I saw how health was an issue. I saw it as a platform to solve some of those problems. People can be moved from the street; you can never take away their hope. ”
PBS Newshour, Monday, June 22, 2015
The Roots of Hate
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/finding-roots-dylann-roofs-radical-violence/
Saturday, May 23, 2015
Servant? Leader? Both.
“Ministry is… a mutual experience… [Jesus] wants Peter to feed his sheep and care for them, not as ‘professionals’ who know their clients’ problems and take care of them, but as vulnerable brothers and sisters who know and are known, who care and are cared for, who forgive and are being forgiven, who love and are being loved.
Somehow we have come to believe that good leadership requires a safe distance from those we are called to lead… Someone serves, someone else is being served, and be sure not to mix up the roles! But how can we lay down our life for those with whom we are not even allowed to enter into a deep personal relationship!
We are not the healers, we are not the reconcilers, we are not the givers of life. We are sinful, broken, vulnerable people who need as much care as anyone we care for. The mystery of ministry is that we have been chosen to make our own limited and very conditional love the gateway for the unlimited and unconditional love of God.
Therefore, true ministry must be mutual. When the members of a community of faith cannot truly know and love their shepherd, shepherding quickly becomes a subtle way of exercising power over others and begins to show authoritarian and dictatorial traits. The world in which we live — a world of efficiency and control — has no models to offer to those who want to be shepherds in the way Jesus was a shepherd. Even the so-called ‘helping professions’ have been so thoroughly secularized that mutuality can only be seen as a weakness and a dangerous form of role confusion. The leadership about which Jesus speaks is of a radically different kind from the leadership offered by the world. It is a servant leadership — to use Robert Greenleaf’s* term — in which the leader is a vulnerable servant who needs the people as much as they need their leader.”
~~ Henri J.M. Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus, Reflections on Christian Leadership
*Robert K. Greenleaf, Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness
Monday, April 6, 2015
“Give Me a Shot of Anything: House Calls to the Homeless”
I find these video clips to be riveting. What do you think?
Night Time House Calls
http://www.givemeashotofanything.com/#!videos/vstc6=night-time-house-calls
Trailer
http://www.givemeashotofanything.com/#!videos/vstc6=extended-teaser
The Film Maker
http://www.givemeashotofanything.com/#!videos/vstc6=newfilmmakers
The Website
http://www.givemeashotofanything.com/#!
Boston Health Care for the Homeless
Tuesday, March 3, 2015
The Video: Death on Skid Row
I have just watched the video of a homeless, mentally ill man being shot to death by Los Angeles police. Regardless of what the investigation about this death reveals as to cause and fault, this is one of the saddest, most terrifying pieces of film I’ve ever seen. People, we gotta’ change some things.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/02/lapd-shooting-cops-gun_n_6787310.html
Wednesday, February 18, 2015
Lent: I’m Not Much, But I’m All I Think About
This evening I sat in the beautiful Church of the Incarnation and listened to a wise, direct, and very profound sermon by our rector, Bishop Anthony Burton, on preparing for Lent.
In speaking of the temptations that Christ experienced during his forty days in the wilderness — which we symbolically replicate through our observance and celebration of the Lenten season — Bishop Burton clarified them in a way I hadn’t previously understood: Christ, he said, was tempted to become the star of his own show — the centerpiece of his own movie. He refused.
As I sat through the service, surrounded by the majesty of a church I’ve loved for decades, I observed how often my thoughts are centered upon myself. Briefly, I can be fully present within the momentous mystery and magic of what is going on around me, but quickly and automatically, I am back to… assessing myself, critiquing myself, speculating about myself… which then turns in an equally automatic way to quick and sometimes even scornful and petty judgments of people around me.
To quote a friend who has spent decades successfully working twelve-step programs, “I’m not much, but I’m all I think about.”
Referring to the unremitting humility of Jesus and of His unwillingness to become a person of consequence and importance — or, perhaps in today’s parlance, one could say His unwillingness to become “relevant”, the bishop said, “I want that.”
So do I.
ks
Church of the Incarnation incarnation.org
Thursday, January 29, 2015
Bored & Brilliant
Those who know me even a little know I’m a fan of unplugging from technology — mild understate. I’ve gone so far as to ban electronics for a week on family beach vacations… if I felt I could get by with it. Slightly autocratic I admit, but the results in calmer grandchildren who let their creativity shine amidst this “boredom” and wonderful conversations between adults — not to mention just gazing out at the scenery as opposed to down at the electronic device — was impressive. Of course, this does not mean that one can’t be creative with and through technology. Still… Needless to say, I was interested to hear this interview on the BBC World Service.
Slight conundrum: participating in this project of unplugging from technology requires an “App”! (It’s only in the last couple of years that I figured out what that word even means.) And this project comes through a website called “New Tech City.” But even a luddite was impressed with and intrigued by this interview. Also, yes, I am aware that, once again, I am putting this “out there” on a computer through WIFI.
Saturday, November 29, 2014
On Boston Streets: A Night on the Pine Street Inn Outreach Van
by Karen Shafer
I had the privilege last month to ride along on the overnight Outreach Van for Pine Street Inn, the largest homeless shelter in New England. On the van that night were a physician, Dr. James O’Connell, founder and President of Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program, and three Pine Street outreach workers.
The van goes out 365 days a year into the city of Boston to minister to those men and women who live on the street and who are either unable or unwilling to enter the shelter system on any particular night. It carries food — soup, oatmeal, sandwiches, hot chocolate and bottled water —as well as blankets, coats, hats, gloves, underwear and socks. The workers track each person’s progress and monitor their health conditions and concerns. In an emergency, an individual can be transported into a shelter. Perhaps the most important component of what the staff provides is personal contact and compassion. And they are friends to those who often don’t have many.
The dedicated Pine Street staff, along with medical personnel from BHCHP on some nights, know by name most of the people “sleeping rough”, as well as their personal stories. These service providers are so respectful of the privacy of each individual that if, on previous nights, the person has requested not to be awakened to receive the van’s services, they do not disturb them if they are sleeping. On this particular night, the temperature was in the forties — chilly, but not life-and-limb threatening. All of the “regulars” — generally referred to as the “chronically homeless” — know the van staff well, and Dr. O’Connell, whom they call Jim, has in fact been friends to many of them for as long as thirty years. It was a tremendous privilege to to follow Dr. O’Connell out onto the street as he approached each person, to have the opportunity to be introduced to them, and then to be trusted enough through the currency of his and Pine Street’s long-standing relationships with them to hear some of their stories.
There were people sleeping out who were struggling with serious head trauma, with mental illness, with chronic and acute health conditions, with addiction. One of the people I remember most clearly and felt particularly drawn to was “Sam,” lying on a cold sidewalk, his wheelchair nearby and his girlfriend on hand to look out for him. After many years on the street, last year he became afflicted by a permanent disability due to frostbite, but he still doesn’t want to go indoors.
On this night, he was dozing under the awning of a business with a security light shining overhead. Dr. O’Connell first greeted him, checked on his condition, then returned to the van to secure a blanket and food. I asked Sam if he could sleep with the brightness of the light overhead. “Not really,” he said, “I wish I could shoot it out.” “I’ll go back to the van and get my pea shooter and see if I can take it out for you,” I joked with him, and despite his evident discomfort, he smiled. The radiance of his personality shone through even the bleakness of his situation. He was so weak that, when Dr. O’Connell brought him hot soup and a sandwich, he couldn’t sit up to eat them, so the doctor leaned in close, unwrapped the sandwich, and put it in his hand.
I was surprised by the tolerant and even supportive attitude that some downtown Boston businesses have towards their homeless brothers and sisters. At one of the van’s stops, there were freshly built cardboard shelters in which people were sleeping under the overhang in front of a mattress store. Astonished that people were allowed by the city to sleep in this location, I was even more amazed when the Pine Street outreach workers informed me that the business owner or other nearby citizens bring fresh boxes each night which the people use to build their shelters in the business doorway. In the morning, a city recycling truck comes to pick them up. If criminalization of the homeless is a part of street life in the city, I didn’t observe it. This is The Boston Heart.
There are federal laws regulating the circumstances under which people can be involuntarily committed to care, and Massachusetts interprets those laws with an emphasis on personal liberty and respect for individual rights. I count this as a very good thing, but sometimes it makes it particularly challenging for medical personnel and service providers to deliver the kind of care people “sleeping rough” need most — when that care involves being inside an institution. Often, individuals will agree to be hospitalized long enough to deal with an acute health challenge, but will return to the street when the crisis has passed.
This is where Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program sets the standard nationally and internationally for the delivery of medical and support services to the homeless and those living in poverty. The staff of more than three hundred physicians, dentists, nurses, social workers, physician assistants, nurse practitioners, psychiatrists, mental health counselors, case managers, dental hygienists, administrative staff, building maintenance, and food service workers brings health care to those who would not otherwise be able to access it — to the street, to domestic violence and emergency shelters, to hospital walk-in clinics, to temporary and permanent supportive housing units, and in their own respite care facility, Barbara McInnis House. Their doctors are on the teaching faculty of Harvard University, Boston University and Tufts Medical Schools. It is an extraordinary system and one that is well-coordinated with other service providers throughout the City of Boston and surrounding areas.
Monthly, a group of service providers in Boston — BHCHP medical staff, shelter directors and case workers, police, and others who interface with those living on the street — meet to assess the specific needs of around a hundred homeless individuals needing particular attention, and coordinate their plans on how to help them. Equally impressive is the fact that at any point in time, Dr. O’Connell and his medical staff can access by email the number of their patients who are in the city’s emergency rooms or have been admitted to its hospitals.
As I rode along with the Pine Street van and observed first hand the functioning of a respectful, organized, efficient system of registering patients and delivering to them direct care on the street — seamlessly carried out in a milieu of kindness, love, generosity and respect — I was in awe. It is a model of compassion, service and cooperation to which every city should aspire.
Boston Health Care For the Homeless Program: http://www.bhchp.org To request a copy of BHCHP’s newsletter or be added to their mailing list, please contact Carrie Eldridge-Dickson at <celdridge-dickson@bhchp.org>
Pine Street Inn: http://www.pinestreetinn.org
Boston Globe: https://theintermittentvolunteer.wordpress.com/2014/10/29/why-some-bostonians-refuse-shelter-in-the-dead-of-winter-and-how-they-survive/
From the Boston Globe: listen to the story here…
http://commonhealth.wbur.org/2014/02/homeless-cold-winter-shelter
Why Some Bostonians Refuse Shelter In The Dead Of Winter, And How They Survive
A van crawls through the streets of downtown Boston, pausing at the intricate iron entrance to a city landmark or a doorway carved in stone. By day, these openings are passages to power and wealth. At night, they are coveted shelters from wind, sleet or snow. People inside the van know this. Their carefully trained eyes scan the shadows of every building, stairway or bench, watching for hints of life.
On Winter Street, at the end of a brick alley, there’s a flicker of movement. The van pulls over and a figure in a light coat emerges.
“Is that you James?” asks a man with a reassuring, deep voice who has stepped out of the van. “You going in tonight?”
Nelson Bennett knows James. He sees this young man often as Bennett circles downtown Boston in Pine Street Inn’s outreach van. It’s packed with blankets, hats, gloves, underwear, socks and sandwiches. Large insulated containers keep hot water handy for instant soup, oatmeal and hot chocolate.
“It always helps, especially in these conditions, to get some warm liquid into your body,” Bennett says.
Bennett and his crew are also out every night trying to persuade people who plan to sleep on the street to spend the night in a shelter instead.
Now, with the temperature at 15 degrees and dropping, Bennett wants to know, will James come in?
No, James says. His girlfriend was assaulted at one of the shelters and won’t go back, so he’s staying out with her. James stands next to a pile of ripped boxes from which he’s pulling pieces to build their bed. It will be three layers of cardboard pushed up against a glass office front with a short wall around the sides.
“I kind of go a little overboard,” James says, laughing. “I don’t want any of the rodents and whatnot getting in.”
James explains he collects new pieces of cardboard every night and throws them away in the morning.
“Once you get in this situation, it’s like impossible” to get a job and get back into housing, James explains. “I have my own issues up here,” he adds, tapping his head. “I’ve had a lot happen, but I don’t want to deal with it so…”
“Where do you guys stay during the day?” asks Lyndia Downie, the president and executive director at Pine Street Inn who is listening to James’ story. “Have you applied for housing?
Yes, James says, pinching his hands to stave off frostbite, but he’s discouraged.
“If you don’t have kids or you don’t have a disability, they make it seem like you can never get housing. I can’t even explain to you how hopeless I feel sometimes,” James says. “My dream is to be able to come home from work again, just fall back on the couch and mind my own business, and I feel like it’s never going to happen.”
Downie takes some more information from James that she will give to Pine Street’s daytime street team. Bennett brings James some underwear, hot chocolate and two blankets. They are the only bedding James has.
“Thank you, thank you very much,” James says as the crew moves on.
At this hour, around midnight, the streets are empty except for a few garbage trucks, taxis and Pine Street’s van.
‘Justice To The Body’
Outside Macy’s in Downtown Crossing, Bennett approaches bundles of people in each doorway. Cindy peaks out from under a cloth sheet, a Mylar and one wool blanket. She and her husband Carl are among three couples who claim the store’s sheltered entrances every night, in snow, sleet and bitter winds.
“Because we’re married,” Cindy says. “We stay together. We sleep together. There needs to be shelters where married people can get on their feet as well.”
Cindy says she sleeps with one eye open. A few nights ago someone took one of the couple’s blankets.
“But we manage,” Cindy says. “Body heat, love, big word, [and] strength.”
A van outreach worker comes back with the couple’s order, soup and sandwiches. Carl asks if they can also get a blanket.
Pine Street will hand out 60 to 70 blankets tonight, between two vans: one that circles downtown and another that runs through Back Bay into Brighton and Chestnut Hill. A handful of people refuse all offers of help.
“This guy won’t talk to us,” Bennett says walking up to one of two cocooned figures. He stands quietly for a minute, watching for any sign of life.
“We’ll make sure they’re OK, they’re breathing, the blankets are moving, and we’ll leave ‘em alone,” Bennett explains.
The van rolls down Summer Street to a brick facade with an arched opening. The door is four or five feet back, leaving a covered, nearly enclosed space that almost hides a man. Downie approaches.
“You don’t have to come in all night,” she says with quiet pleading. “You could just come in for a few hours and get out of the cold.”
“I don’t mind,” says the man named Stephen.
“I’m cool, or actually I’m pretty warm, I should say,” he laughs. “I like my privacy. That’s all.”
Stephen chooses solitude over the warmth of a crowded shelter, where men are packed tight on a lobby floor this particular night because all the beds are full. Stephen forces himself to get up and move on every morning around 4 a.m. He doesn’t want to get caught sleeping here, to risk losing this space.
“I just don’t want to be in the way, you know what I mean, to be an eyesore for everybody,” Stephen says.
The temperature has dropped to 13 degrees and there’s a biting wind.
A man carrying one sheet of cardboard approaches the van, asking for a coat. There aren’t any. He settles, gratefully, for chicken noodle soup. “Aw you guys are great, thanks,” says the man, also named James.
This James is a gambler, who says he’s just back from Foxwoods where he stayed in one of the big hotels and feasted on lobster and steak.
“I’m bankin’ three grand,” James whispers to Bennett. “I caught on to how to beat the casino at their own game, $400-500 a week, guaranteed. It’s a no-lose game. Where I’m headed now is paradise,” James says as he wanders off.
It’s these guys who Downie worries about the most, the ones who aren’t speaking rationally, aren’t dressed for the cold, who aren’t suicidal but show signs of mental illness.
“He lives in what I call no man’s land,” Downie says, “because if you’re a danger to yourself there’s a possibility of some kind of commitment or guardianship, but if you’re not, your options are pretty limited. In some ways the disease stops you from getting treatment so it’s an odd paradox for people.”
The van has 30 to 35 regular stops, places where the crew expects to find people sleeping outside. The stops change with construction, or as businesses crack down on overnight street occupants.
Street regulars, as some of the homeless folks call themselves, know where to find the van. Subhash is waiting as Bennett hops out on a corner near the Theater District.
“How you doing, boss? You going in tonight?” Bennett asks. And finally, Bennett gets the answer he’s been hoping for, a yes.
Subhash says he had a strategy he hoped would get him through the night.
“I was planning to just walk around,” Subhash explains. “Sleeping can get a little tough in the cold. So probably like 30 minute lie down, then you have to start walking again.”
Except Subhash is now losing feeling in his legs. Still, deciding to go in, where he’ll be on a floor, with someone’s feet in his face, is not the obvious choice for Subhash.
“If you’re homeless, sometimes you just want to lose the crowd,” Subhash says, “to feel a little more reassured about who I am and what not. But a lot of times it doesn’t really do justice to the body. You have to compromise one way or another.”
As the van nears Chinatown, it’s swarmed by almost a dozen men and women in their late teens or 20s.
“I need gloves and socks, for me and my girl,” one man calls out.
“Yeah,” says another, “we need gloves over here.”
The crew runs out of gloves and blankets and heads back to Pine Street Inn to restock.
“Normally we don’t get flooded like that where there’s all those people,” says Jill Fortuna, a full-time outreach counselor on the van. Fortuna says many of these young people aren’t regulars and may just be passing through Boston.
“It’s worrisome to see kids that young out there,” Downie says.
Back at Pine Street, Fortuna unlocks the door to a metal storage container and squints into the dark. Bennett points a flashlight at the labels on a stack of boxes.
“Psyched,” Downie yells after a few seconds. Bennett grins, “gloves, gloves, yes, yes.”
Bennett rips open the box to reveal dozens of flat packages, wrapped by volunteers from Natixis, in red snowflake and green snowman paper.
Downie bursts into laughter. It’s Christmas all over again, here at 1 a.m. in the dead of a cold winter night. But could the box be mislabeled?
“Let’s hope there’s gloves in here,” Downie says.
She and Bennett rip open the packages with the fury of any 8 year old.
“Yep, bingo,” Bennett says.
Downie is relieved.
“We’ve been going through gloves like crazy cause it’s been so cold,” she says.
The restocked van heads toward North Station. It’s closed, but four teenagers huddle near the entrance. Fortuna recognizes them.
“They’re a bunch of young kids that just recently showed up,” she says. “They’ll make a big huge bed near Haymarket. There’s four or five of them who sleep there.”
One by one, the teenagers come to the passenger window of the van. Ben Williams, the driver, writes down their name, date of birth, the last four digits of the Social Security number and the ZIP code of their last residence, information for Pine Street’s client database. One young woman, Marie, asks for soup and blankets, but says she’d rather sleep outside than go in.
“I’ve been doing it for a few years. It doesn’t really bother me,” Marie says in a sing-song voice. “You just bundle up and all that jazz.”
Marie shrugs and walks away as a man named Michael steps forward, saying he can’t take it any more. “The temperature, the wind, there’s no public restrooms,” he explains.
Michael just got out of prison on a cocaine conviction.
“Come to find out,” Michael says, “the lady who tested my drugs said the drugs were real. Annie Dookhan, yeah. Now I come home and there’s no housing.”
Michael says he doesn’t like shelters because the rules seems to change depending on who’s in charge.
“I really think about going back to jail, cause it’s like I know what to expect,” he says. “I expect to be in a cell, with a bed, a toilet, two inmates, breakfast, lunch and dinner. It’s simple.”
As the van drops Michael at Pine Street, Downie imagines a night when there won’t be anyone sleeping on the streets and shelters won’t be crowded. She says it would take about 2,000 new rooms.
Research shows that the units would pay for themselves over time, Downie adds, “because the expensive emergency service numbers go down and that offsets any new housing dollars. So doing nothing for chronically homeless people costs more money than putting them in supportive housing.”
The Patrick administration seems to agree. It expects to release details of a multimillion-dollar social investment project this spring aimed at reducing the number people like Cindy, James, Subhash and Michael who spend nights on the street, even in the dead of winter.
What Happens To The Body Of A Person Who Sleeps Outside In Extreme Cold?
Dr. Jim O’Connell, with Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program, explains:
When a person gets cold, their body shuts down blood going to the skin to preserve warmth near the heart. When hands and feet don’t have enough blood they may develop frostbite.
With frostbite, hands, feet, ears and noses can swell and blister. The skin turns black and necrotic. In cases of severe frostbite, dead tissue will fall off or autoamputate. Some patients are left with a disfigured toe or finger, some lose the tip or whole digit.
In the last two weeks in Boston, a homeless man who sleeps on the street lost one leg below the knee as well as part of the other foot to frostbite. Another man will need to have one of his legs amputated below the knee.
O’Connell explains the body’s reaction to cold in depth here.
Tuesday, October 14, 2014
Tonight at the Post Office
I walked into the local post office this evening to drop a package in the bin, and a young woman was sitting by the door on a blue plastic mail tub turned upside down. She was packed for travel — her belongings in disposable sacks — but she didn’t appear to be going anywhere. It’s unusual for anyone to be hanging out in the p. o., and as I left the lobby, I said to her, “Is everything OK?” “Not really,” she answered. Me: “Do you need some help?” She: “Yes, but I don’t suppose you’ll be able to do anything.” I’ve been out of the “homeless business” for several years, but, as things happen, the h.b. doesn’t let me go, probably because people without homes are everywhere.
“So what’s going on?” I asked her. “I need a place to stay for a couple of nights,” she answered, “I’m about to be out of a place to live.” She made it sound immediate and temporary, but I wondered if it was and asked, “Are you sleeping out tonight?” — not a good idea for anyone, and never for a woman alone. She said yes. “I know a few people I can call who help people who are homeless…” I hesitated, “I don’t know if you are…” “I am,” she replied. “Well, let me go to my car and get my phone and make a couple of calls,” I responded. “If I don’t reach anyone, I will give you some numbers to try later if you have a mobile.” “I do,” she said.
I asked her first about the local shelters, and she knew the ropes — too late to get in. I mentioned the possibility of emergency beds opening at midnight for overload, but she said that would only happen if the temperature was below freezing. “Should be 40 degrees,” I commented, for no reason, as it’s in the 70’s here today.
As I got back into my car and reached for my phone, I felt in a hurry — I was doing errands on my To Do List, and was running behind schedule. “Oh, no you don’t,” I chastised myself for feeling that there was anything more urgent than this lost young woman who had crossed my path. One of the things I’ve learned since being out of touch with “the street” the past few years is that one forgets… about what matters, about how it never is Us and Them, about the primacy of Now. We want life to be slick and smooth, and every cultural message around us tells us that is should be… but it isn’t.
I knew who to call — friends who run organizations helping unhoused people — and the first call I made was the right one. “Karen! How are you?” said my friend, who was still at work at 9 P.M. and still answering her phone. We exchanged regrets about not having dinner in a while, and I told her the situation, asking, “Can you find a place for her?” “If it’s an emergency,” she said. This woman always comes through for people in trouble as no one else does. “How will she get here?” my friend asked. “I don’t do this any more,” I said, “but I think I’m just going to bring her. We’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
I used to take strangers in my car from time to time, but I’ve stopped for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it started to feel like not-the-right-thing for me to do. But most importantly, my eleven-year-old granddaughter, who is very wise, learned about it and asked me just last week if I did it still. When I said not usually, she replied, “Good, I don’t think you should.” I trust her judgment.
Back in the p. o. lobby and ignoring that judgment, I told Lakita, “I’ve found you a place, and I’ll take you there if you want to go.” She hesitated and asked where it was. I told her — “Not the best neighborhood, I know, but you’ll be safe there” — but she shook her head. “OK,” I said, “then here are the numbers of some people who can maybe help you tomorrow. If you get in trouble tonight, I think it’s safe these days to call the Dallas Police — didn’t always used to be, but I think things are better.” “Oh, they know me,” she smiled, “It depends on who’s on duty.” “So I’ve heard,” I smiled back. Gallows humor.
“Best of luck,” I told her. “Thank you,” she said, and I left the building.
As I walked to my car, Lakita opened the door of the post office and called out to me, “If I could, I’d give you the world!” I replied, “Right back atcha’!”
Click on the link to see how beautiful these gardens are!
From Gangs to Gardens: How Community Agriculture Transformed Quesada Avenue
Ten years ago, the residents of the crime-ridden neighborhood started planting gardens—and everything changed.
by Katherine Gustafson
posted May 30, 2012
Flowers bloom alongside Quesada Avenue.
Photo by Katherine Gustafson
In 2002, two neighbors armed with spades and seeds changed everything for crime-addled Quesada Avenue in San Francisco’s Bayview-Hunters Point area. The street had been ground zero for the area’s drug trade and its attendant violence. But when Annette Smith and Karl Paige began planting flowers on a small section of the trash-filled median strip, Quesada Gardens Initiative was born. Over the course of the next decade, the community-enrichment project profoundly altered the face of this once-blighted neighborhood.
Jeffrey Betcher is the Initiative’s unlikely spokesperson. A gay white man driven to the majority-black area by the high cost of housing elsewhere, he moved into a house on Quesada Avenue in 1998 to find drug dealers selling from his front stoop and addicts sleeping beneath his stairs. He told me about the day that he returned home from work to discover that his neighbor Annette had planted a little corner of his yard.
“Even though there was a throng of people—drug dealers who were carrying guns, pretty scary folks—she had planted flowers on this little strip of dirt by my driveway,” he told me. “I was so moved by that . . . I thought, that’s what life is about. That’s what community development is about. That’s what’s going to change this block faster than any public investment or outside strategy. And in fact it did.”
We too often fail to consider food a social good or to understand that growing, selling, and eating food is by its nature a meaningful social act.
A group of neighbors got together for a barbeque, and Jeffrey—who has a background in community organizing—started a conversation about the positive aspects of living in the neighborhood. What followed was a long-term, consensus-based process that resulted in the creation of a series of gardens on vacant land in the surrounding blocks. On Quesada Avenue, the median strip was transformed into a wonderland of Canary Island date palms, bright flowers, and leafy vegetation. Any neighbor who wants to can organize a new gardening effort, take responsibility for the existing gardens, or put together a public art project.
While Quesada Gardens Initiative is not specifically focused around growing food, it does incorporate a food garden used to teach local children about crops, as well as free-form community garden plots. And the way the project uses gardening as a powerful locus of community engagement and empowerment demonstrates an important truth about the social value of food that we seem to have largely forgotten in this country.
A major reason our food system is so damaged—so dominated by corporate interests, rife with unhealthy products, and unbalanced by unequal access—is that we too often fail to consider food a social good or to understand that growing, selling, and eating food is by its nature a meaningful social act. What we eat is far more than a pile of commodities. Not only is food’s essential job to nourish our bodies, but it can also serve as a creator of quality livelihoods, a locus of community engagement and cohesion, and an engine of citizen empowerment and education.
To improve our system, we must realize and act on this fundamental truth. Most of the industrial food corporations do not. Their central motivation is profit, and the highest profit apparently comes from treating food as a product like any other—a plate full of widgets that can be engineered, created, priced, marketed, and exploited.
Luckily, a growing number of people concerned with the origins and impacts of their food are rejecting this materialistic and one-dimensional view of what we eat. Projects and organizations all over the country are putting food back into the social context it has traditionally inhabited.
“The change that we’ve created is not about the garden, it’s about the gardeners.”
For example, companies and cooperatives that supply local food to an area’s population strongly demonstrate that food is central to community cohesion and to local economies. In school garden programs, students learn the complex processes and intense collaboration that go into making what they eat. Projects that help underserved populations like refugees and inner-city residents grow produce help make food once again a central concern of family and community life.
Quesada Gardens Initiative reflects the power of growing things to bring a local community together in a powerful way. Jeffrey made this point as he took me on a tour of the garden plots dotted amongst the houses and stores of the surrounding neighborhood.
Quesada Avenue, the block once known as the most dangerous in the area, has been transformed completely and now serves as a hub of community life. At the top of its hill, Jeffrey showed me the beautifully designed food garden for educating kids. Behind the chain-link fence, stalks of corn stood at attention beside a glowing patch of leafy greens.
At another garden a few blocks away—a patchwork of small plots that had previously been an improvised trash dump—a sandbox and rope swing indicated that the garden was for more than growing food. Kids, in fact, had painted the signs that ringed the garden’s perimeter with such slogans and quotes as “Don’t dump on my garden” and “If you want to change the world, start in your own neighborhood – Harvey Milk.”
Quesada Initiative’s success arises from the project’s appreciation of gardening as the means to an end more profound than a harvest of lettuce and peas. While the plants produced are of course a key motivation for any gardening enterprise, growing food can also—should also—serve other important social purposes, like cultivating a culture of civic engagement and an ethos of community participation.
“The change that we’ve created is not about the garden, it’s about the gardeners,” Jeffrey told me. He stopped to greet a neighbor as we rounded the corner back onto Quesada Avenue. As we continued on our way, he smiled at me with satisfaction.
“We realize we have done something right here,” he said.
Katherine Gustafson wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions for a just and sustainable world. Katherine is a freelance writer and editor based in the Washington, DC, area. Her first book, Change Comes to Dinner, about sustainable food, was published this month by St. Martin’s Press.http://www.yesmagazine.org/happiness/quesada-gardens-initiative
Pine St. Inn’s bold move to end chronic homelessness
By Shirley Leung | GLOBE STAFF JULY 16, 2014
Last winter, the Pine Street Inn saw an overcrowding of homeless men trying to escape the extreme cold.
Five years ago, Lyndia Downie had a crazy idea. What if Pine Street Inn, a haven for Boston’s homeless, reinvented itself, turning from an emergency shelter provider to a landlord?
Downie, who runs Pine Street, warned her board it would be a hard-to-stomach decision, one that would involve closing some shelters and shifting those resources to instead buy homes. Today, that change is official: Pine Street Inn now manages more beds in homes than in shelters. Just a decade ago, the ratio was about 30 percent housing to 70 percent shelter beds.
It’s a bold strategy and one the city, which also runs shelters, is accelerating under the Walsh administration. Could Boston be on the verge of solving chronic homelessness?
“I am hoping within a handful of years,” said housing chief Sheila Dillon.
That’s amazing, given that we just went through a deep recession, and signs point to a widening gap between rich and poor in this city, where there will be two Four Seasons but hardly anywhere for the middle class to live.
What Downie saw years ago was buried in a trove of data she scoured: 5 percent of the homeless population took up more than half of the beds at Pine Street on any given night.
The truth is that most people who come through Pine Street are there because of a temporary crisis.
They often just need a place to stay for a few days. But Downie began to imagine what would happen if Pine Street focused on that 5 percent — the people who live on the street for months or years.
Few people thought her idea would work. These street people didn’t want help.
Not true. A year after moving into a Pine Street home — where they also receive counseling — 96 percent of the chronically homeless are still there.
Downie didn’t come up with the idea of “housing first” for the homeless. It actually came from New York. But while it will take more than one good idea to solve New York’s massive problem, Boston stands a fighting chance.
Our city has about 300 chronically homeless, down from about 570 in 2009.
“That’s solvable,” Downie said this week at a former Mission Hill hospice Pine Street has converted into a 18-unit house, one of three dozen the nonprofit owns in Boston and Brookline.
Overall, Pine Street manages nearly 900 permanent beds compared with about 670 emergency beds. And thanks to a recent $20 million capital campaign funded by private donors, it will be able to maintain those properties and buy more.
If not for the Mission Hill house, Paul Sullivan would be in and out of shelters.
He had a drinking problem that left him jobless and homeless. The former insurance administrator is now sober and has lived under the same roof for five years. Sullivan, 61, pays $238 a month in rent, or 30 percent of his Social Security disability income.
He has his own room, and shares a kitchen and bathroom. It feels like a home. “The camaraderie is terrific,” Sullivan said. He does volunteer work and hopes to some day get a part-time paying job.
That’s good for everyone.
The chronically homeless regularly end up in emergency rooms and tax public safety systems; keeping them in long-term housing adds up to an annual savings of $9,500 per person, according to advocacy group Massachusetts Housing and Shelter Alliance.
That’s a big reason why the Patrick administration is also helping to fund Pine Street Inn’s “housing first” initiative, as well as similar efforts around the state, said Aaron Gornstein, undersecretary for housing and community development.
No one is saying that emergency shelters will disappear, certainly not at Pine Street. But we have a shot at making chronic homelessness a thing of the past.
Related coverage:
• Graduates of Pine Street Inn’s job training celebrate
• Bitter cold drives homeless to shelters
• More young adults call streets of Boston home
• Kevin Cullen: Moving story of a once-homeless veteran
Shirley Leung is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at shirley.leung@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @leung.
A loving family… what everyone needs!
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/one-familys-quest-unite-orphaned-chinese-girls-happy-home/
Does this look familiar to anyone aware of the situation of homeless people in the U.S.? How do you feel about the way they are being treated by authorities?
How would you feel about having these people as your neighbors? Would you feel that they were taking your jobs and benefits?
Food for thought…
Christmas, 2013
“Every child comes with a message that God is not yet discouraged of Man.”
~~ Tagore
“Ask yourself what you can do, and what you need to let go of, that God’s light of love and truth might shine through you. Pray to Him to help you clear away the debris of fears, worries, resentments, or other limiting thoughts that create obstructions between you and Him, and between you and other souls.
As the Lord Jesus shared our human nature and felt infinite compassion for us in all we pass through, let us try to be patient with ourselves and forgiving toward those around us. Every though or action that reflects divine understanding and harmony allows God’s grace and blessings to flow into your life, which in turn can enlighten others in this world…”
~~ Sri Daya Mata, Christmas Letter 2004, Self-Realization Fellowship of Paramahansa Yogananda
Friday, December 20, 2013
“When you have nothing to say, say nothing.”
~~ Sting
Tuesday, September 3, 2013
Bear Witness
“Bear witness to injustices that result in poor health, and work to remove those injustices and build health equity. This is what healers owe society. And this is what our society desperately needs at this moment in time.”
~~ Jessie M Gaeta, M.D., Medical Director of Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program
Commencement Address, Boston University School of Medicine Convocation, 2013
Monday, August 26, 2013
Wise Words From Someone Who Knows…
“You can’t preach [the Gospel] to someone who is starving.
You can’t entertain people who are dying.”
~~ Pastor Karen Dudley, Founder and Senior Pastor, Dallas International Street Church
Sunday, March 17, 2013
Cold Feet
by Karen Shafer
Although it’s cold here on the New England lake where I’m staying with my family — in the thirties — the weather has not stopped my ten-year-old grandson, Louis, from organizing family rowing parties on the lake the past two days. It goes without saying that he’s the ship’s captain, which is almost certainly a motivating factor for any ten-year-old. He’s enthusiastic about being in charge and even got his mother to go out rowing this morning when it was 29 degrees!
As a family, we’ve rowed across the lake twice this weekend and staked our claim, like settlers, on the shore of an island or promontory, which my grandson has dubbed ‘New Louis.’ (Please don’t tell the people in the waterside mansions up the hill from where we landed that new settlers have arrived: they no doubt think they own the land.) Today when he, his eight-year-old sister, Anna, his father and I made ‘the crossing’, it was 37 degrees and also quite windy — and we were rowing into the cold wind and against the waves. At times, it seemed seemed to me that we were either going backwards or sitting still in the middle of the lake, paddling our hardest, and I thought, “Hmm, making this crossing yesterday was really fun, but this is starting to feel a little like actual work.”
Eventually, though, we gained the coast of New Louis and clambered ashore — or rather, they leaped, and I crawled. While the other three first scrambled up a pine tree that had been blown over and uprooted to a 45-degree angle by a recent storm, then went off hiking, I sat on a wall, regretting the fact that I’d left my winter boots in Boston. My feet in tennis shoes and cotton socks had gotten damp from water in the bottom of the boat, and how cold they now felt became the full focus of my attention, delighted though I was with the outing and with our newly conquered territory.
I soon figured out that, though the temperature was in the mid-thirties, if I took off my damp socks and shoes and sat barefoot with my feet under a pile of dry leaves and grass, my feet were warmer and I was more comfortable than I was sitting in wet shoes. I hung my damp socks on a branch to ‘dry’ and piled more dry pine needles over the ‘nest’ into which I’d pushed my feet. Chastising myself for being a wimp and a whiner did nothing to erase the fact that nothing seemed more important to me than how cold my feet felt. And I had only been out in the wind and damp for about forty-five minutes… an hour max.
As I sat on the wall pondering what a softie I’ve become in middle age, I began to think of our homeless brothers and sisters, out on the street in similar weather and that which is much more severe. I remembered how, in times past when I’ve been around homeless people in the winter, there’s nothing they’ve seemed to need more — and nothing which is more often lacking — than clean dry socks and shoes, and I recalled how charities serving the homeless population often emphasize this. Being in New England, I thought of sock drives sponsored by the Boston Red Sox. I vowed that the next time I show up at a service provider which helps homeless people, I’ll do so with at least a pack if not an armload of white athletic socks… and I wistfully and pitifully imagined borrowing one of those pairs of socks for myself at that moment, just until we got back to the house.
My family came back from their hike, and we rowed back across the lake… with the wind this time, and in a quarter of the time, thank goodness. I did more reflecting as we paddled; the rhythm of the oars moving through the water was conducive to it. I thought about how comfort-dependent I am, especially as I get older — and, indeed, what comfortable lives most of us middle-class Americans live. How pampered we are, and how miserable it must be to be homeless, living on the street, and know that you are facing hours, days of cold, wet feet. How does one cope with that?
We reached the small sandy beach in front of the house where we are staying, pulled the rowboat onto shore, traversed the yard and entered the lovely, warm, dry house. I rushed straight to my slippers and greeted them with a sense of appreciation and affection I’d forgotten I could feel for shoes.
KS
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
Connected
“When a butterfly flaps its wings in front of me, it can be felt in China.”
~~ A Carthusian Monk
Wednesday, February 13, 2012
Common Cathedral
I’ve just been invited by my daughter, her family, and a wonderful friend who is a nurse serving the homeless community in Boston to attend services at Common Cathedral one Sunday in the next few weeks. Can’t wait!
Monday, January 28, 2013
Pleasant Life
What a pleasant life might be had in this world by a sensible old lady of good fortune blessed with a sound constitution and a firm will.
~~ Jane Austen
Sunday, December 16, 2012
While cleaning off a bookshelf today, I found a bookmark with this printed on it in one of my mother’s old prayer books. Not so easy to do, but worth trying for… KS
Prayer for Peace
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
And where there is sadness, joy.
O, Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved, as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
Friday, November 30, 2012
“Nature is a part of our humanity, and without some awareness and experience of that divine mystery man ceases to be man. When the Pleiades and the wind in the grass are no longer a part of the human spirit, a part of very flesh and bone, man becomes, as it were, a kind of cosmic outlaw, having neither the completeness and integrity of the animal nor the birthright of a true humanity…
The ancient values of dignity, beauty, and poetry which sustain it are Nature’s inspiration; they are born of the mystery and beauty of the world. Do no dishonour to the earth lest you dishonour the spirit of man. Hold your hands out over the earth as over a flame. To all who love her, who open to her the doors of their veins, she gives of her strength, sustaining them with her own measureless tremor of dark life. Touch the earth, love the earth, honour the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places. For the gifts of life are the earth’s and they are given to all, and they are the songs of birds at daybreak, Orion and the Bear, and dawn seen over ocean from the beach.”
~~ Henry Beston, The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod
“When you learn to trust yourself, then you can begin to trust others, and the world can begin to unfold before you as it is supposed to.”
~~ “An American in Canada,” PBS
Saturday, October 6, 2012, Cape Cod
Elemental Things
“My house completed, and tried and not found wanting by a first Cape Cod year, I went there to spend a fortnight in September. The fortnight ending, I lingered on, and as the year lengthened into autumn, the beauty and mystery of this earth and outer sea so possessed and held me that I could not go. The world today is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot. In my world of beach and dune, these elemental presences lived and had their being, and under their arch there moved an incomparable pageant of nature and the year. The flux and reflux of ocean, the incomings of waves, the gatherings of birds, the pilgrimages of the peoples of the sea, winter and storm, the splendour of autumn and the holiness of spring — all these were part of the great beach. The longer I stayed, the more eager was I to know this coast and to share its mysterious and elemental life; I found myself free to do so, I had no fear of being alone, I had something of a field naturalist’s inclination; presently I made up my mind to remain and try living for a year on Eastham Beach.”
~~ Henry Beston, The Outermost House: A Year on the Great Beach of Cape Cod (1928)
Sunday, September 2, 2012
Intrepid Heart
My cousin Linda was born in 1946 with a serious heart murmur. “She’ll be lucky to survive a month,’ her doctors told my Aunt Davida and Uncle Kent. When she not only survived but thrived, the experts shook their heads. “It will be a miracle if she makes it out of childhood, though,” they said, “and she will never be able live an active life.”
In middle school, she made cheerleader. Of course she did — she was a gorgeous brunette with long, thick, lustrous hair, a beautiful face, luminous brown eyes, a curvaceous figure, and a calm personality with mischief underneath. Her heart murmur was still there, but apparently it didn’t know she wasn’t supposed to cheer.
Once she got to high school (where she was cheerleader again), and the crop of pretty freshman girls were reviewed by the senior boys, the drum major and Big Man on Campus, Leonard, asked her for a date on a $5 bet from a buddy. Leonard and Linda fell in love, but he went off to Germany with the Army, and she went off to college.
She was a cheerleader in college, too. BaBum, BaBum, BaBum, said her heart — murmur and all — ticking along, as she herself broke boys’ hearts right, left and center. The Big Man on That Campus fell for her hard, and she married him while Leonard was in Germany.
Time passed. When Leonard returned from military service and learned that her marriage hadn’t worked out, he proposed, and they got married right away.
“She’ll never be able to have children because of her heart,” the doctors had said all along, so she went ahead then and had three beautiful kids by natural childbirth, a son, Perry, a daughter, Wendy, and second son, Eric. All are superstars, just like her. Their family lived the dream — all the kids in sports, good students, their beautiful home the center of action and activity in the neighborhood. When my family and I came to town, we spent a lot of time at their house, and my daughters were in awe of their older cousins, who always included them in activities like driving out of town to procure fireworks on the Fourth of July and shooting them off in front of the house!
Years went on, and Linda’s mother, my Aunt Davida, developed breast cancer, had a radical mastectomy, and herself beat the odds, living without recurrence for over 30 years. At some point after her mother’s surgery, Linda called me long distance. “I’ve never had a mammogram, but I think I’d better have one, don’t you?” “Yes, I think for sure you should, but I’m not worried at all. I know they’re not going to find anything,” I said. “I don’t think so either,” she said.
But they found stage 2 breast cancer that had spread to a few of her lymph nodes. Her surgery was followed by chemotherapy and radiation, and she did a lot of research on alternative medicine. She combined her medical treatment with about 45 vitamin and herb pills per day. She walked three miles a day throughout her treatment, drank about a gallon of water daily, and did visualizations designed by medical intuitive and mystic, Caroline Myss. She meditated. She prayed, and so did I and a lot of other people.
Although the chemotherapy was strong and toxic enough to require a port implant in her chest, she never had a day of fatigue or sickness during her treatment and credited the holistic medicines she took alongside her chemo for her strength and resilience. One day I drove into our hometown in East Tennessee from Dallas and went looking for her. She was at the local park, in a pretty bold blonde wig, hoofing it around the track in the heat of the day. Later she told me that on another day which was supposed to be her worst after a chemo drip, she planted flowers in her yard for eight hours and never felt tired. She had to be doing something right, because the blood count that usually drops during chemo stayed up and strong to the point that her oncologist, Dr. G., said, “Hmmm, I don’t think I’m poisoning you enough. Your blood looks too good.” “Very funny,” she replied. “Well, I don’t really believe in all this vitamin and herb stuff,” he said, “but whatever you’re doing, keep on doing it. Another patient on exactly the same regimen as yours is very ill and her numbers are dangerously low.”
Then came the deadly infection. She went in for a chemotherapy drip, and a nurse administering it failed to wash her hands after touching a bathroom door knob. A hard-to-identify and treatment-resistant bacterium entered Linda’s bloodstream. She was hospitalized, and, to keep from going crazy, continued her walking program in the hospital halls, repeatedly making a loop that she measured out to give her the mileage she needed. Finally the hospital lab identified the germ: it was rare — only nineteen people had ever contracted it… none had ever survived. To that point, it was 100% fatal.
Undaunted and unafraid, she kept walking the hospital halls and made the hospital her home, decorating her room and settling in, as staff in the hospital lab fought against the ‘bug’ in a petri dish, trying every combination of antibiotics they could think of to kill it. Five weeks passed: the germ didn’t die. But neither did my cousin. Befriended by a lab technician who visited her in her room, he said, “I’m not giving up until I find something that works.” He did. She lived, the first survivor of that germ.
She sailed past her five-year mark cancer free, and her ten-year anniversary was approaching.
One summer we had a business together in a beach mall in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, which was the place on earth that she loved most. Just as my daughters and I got onto the island, one from college and one from high school, and moved into her condominium with her for the summer, she made a trip to Knoxville for her annual visit to her oncologist Dr. G. She called me from there. “Bad news,” she said, “my tumor marker is up, and there are lesions on my femur and ribs.”
She came back to the island, and we discussed it. “I’m not taking the chemo drugs right now,” she said. “Dr. G. has given me some time to make up my mind. I may take them later, but I’m going to try alternatives first.”
She found a kinesiologist in North Carolina, set up an appointment to see him, and drove up there the next week while my girls and I ran the business. He put her on a strict diet, took her off some of her vitamins and put her on others. “Ugh,” she said, when she got back, “I have to give up coffee, sugar, and alcohol.” “I’ll be happy to consume your share of those things for you, especially desserts,” I said helpfully.
When she went for her check back with Dr. G. in a few weeks, he couldn’t figure it out. “I don’t get it,” he said, “your tumor marker is down.” She went in for a bone biopsy, and the radiologist turned out to be an old boyfriend. “Would you have this biopsy if you were me?” she asked, and added, “off the record.” “It could cause a fracture,” he said, “and, if you see a horse, you call it a horse.” “Meaning?” she asked. “I think it’s malignancy,” he said. She left without the biopsy.
She was strict about the diet, and went back to the North Carolina kinesiologist for homeopathic injections, which she said were painful. Her tumor marker stayed down, and later, on the next scan, many of the bone lesions seemed inexplicably to have receded.
After that summer, our communication was scattered but consistent. Letters, pictures, phone calls, visits to Knoxville when my father and stepmother died and for her mother’s funeral.
Several years ago, she reported that her tumor marker was up again and she was taking a mild chemotherapy drug for a sort of maintenance but it was not making her ill. Then she stopped reporting on her health, and for some reason I stopped asking. In my mind, things had just stayed right there — a mild maintenance treatment was keeping her illness at bay. I made an alliance with denial and silence, and she did not intrude upon it with bad news.
Last week I was in Knoxville and called her as soon as I got to town. I had family business to transact and went about it for a few days, then called again and left a message several days before I was to leave. “Let’s have lunch or dinner and catch up,” I said on the voice mail. When she didn’t respond, I told my out-of-state daughters by phone, “I hope she just didn’t get the message and it’s not that she’s sick or something.”
Every day that week I ate lunch at restaurants where she and I had always eaten together. They were close to my hotel and were in the neighborhood where Linda, Leonard and the kids had always lived. One of the restaurants is owned by a chef who went to culinary school and had roomed with their son, Perry, also a chef. I spoke with him about the family. “Tell the whole crew hello,” he said. I drove by the houses where my family and I had visited Linda’s family so many times and thought a lot about what good times we’d had there.
Finally, I hadn’t heard from her and had to leave town without seeing her. As I pulled out of Knoxville, I felt somehow unfinished, but it was time to get on the road, and I thought, “When you grow up somewhere, you are never finished with that place.” I drove back toward Dallas, stopping in Memphis to stay with a friend.
At bedtime my first night in Memphis, I got a message from Wendy. “Karen, I received the message you left for mom. Sorry to inform you that Mom passed away this evening at home surrounded by family. I’ll let you know funeral arrangements once they’re made. The cancer had spread all over her body, and it was finally in her liver. Call me tomorrow, and I can give you more details. We love you, Wendy”
~~~
Who of us hasn’t had loved ones die of this illness? Both my mother and stepmother died of it, and I sat with them during their passing. But here are some particular things Wendy and Leonard shared with me by phone over the past two days:
A month ago, Wendy tells me, Dr. G., Linda’s oncologist of 22 years, came into the room where she waited for test results. He was wiping tears from his eyes. “The chemotherapy isn’t working on the disease in your liver,” he told her. “The treatment is going to kill you before the cancer does, and we should stop it.” They did.
“There were a couple of funny things,” Leonard said. “During the past two weeks when she wasn’t able to get up, I’d go in to check on her while she was sleeping. One day she woke up, looked up at me and said, ‘Every time I open my eyes, you’re standing there staring at me. Why is that?’”
“Then, a few days before she died, she woke up and asked me pointedly, ‘Am I dead yet?’”
Her wicked humor didn’t abate.
“Over the years,” Wendy said, “they’ve written mom off so many times and said, ‘OK, this is it.’ ‘Go to hell,’ she’d tell them.’” Wendy and I laughed at this, because there’s no anecdote more typical of Linda’s fighting spirit.
~~~
I find that I am angry alongside my tremendous sadness. I know anger is a stage of grief, but it feels more personal than something that is merely part of a predictable pattern — these things always do. I’m looking for the victory in this outcome, and I’m having difficulty finding it. Victory is something we’ve all come to expect of Linda, and, though her battle is victorious beyond measure, I so wanted her not to suffer as she did and to be well.
But Grace… there is Grace all through it… in the fact that I took this trip to Knoxville unexpectedly early, and it was a trip I’d been putting off for a while. Circumstances beyond my control compelled the timing of the trip — I’d been planning to go two weeks later. My older daughter said to me on the phone after we got the news of Linda’s death, “The timing is just very strange. I’ve got to figure it out. But one thing we know for sure: a lesson in this is ‘If not now, when?’”
All last week, after calling Linda and not getting a reply, while I spent part of every day in the suburb where we’d gone to high school, where her family had lived, in places we’d always gone together… she was in my thoughts almost all the time. I kept wondering if she was in town and thought, “Well, maybe she’s in Hilton Head,” but in fact, all week long, I was five minutes from where she lay dying. If I had known, I would have been by her side. Leonard said to me after, “Karen, I think it’s good for your own sake that you weren’t.”
Then last night, I got a note from a good friend here in Dallas, and there was something in it, esoteric and inexplicable as it sounds, that I hadn’t been able to put together, but that pierced my heart as the truth: the note said, “maybe somehow she wanted you nearby even if the words were unspoken between you.”
KS
Thursday, August 30, 2012
For my cousin, Linda Stone: mentor, protector, role model and friend
March 22, 1946 ~~ August 28, 2012
Dixie Chicks
“Bitter End”
The words that you said
They still ring in my head
Don’t you know
We say goodbye
With a tear in our eye
Oh, where’d you go
It’s alright you can sleep tonight
Knowing you’ll always live on in a song
Farewell to old friends
Let’s raise a glass to the bitter end
Farewell to old friends
Will you be the same when we see you again
Remember the days
When we’d laugh as you played
Who would have known
The [illness] would come and just take you away
Oh, where’d you go
It’s not alright
I can’t sleep tonight
Knowing you should have played on
On and on
Farewell to old friends
Let’s raise a glass to the bitter end
Farewell to old friends
Will you forgive me when I see you again
…
Farewell to old friends
Let’s raise a glass to the bitter end
Farewell to old friends
We’ll still be here when you come round again
Thursday, August 24, 2012
Falling In Love Again… Or Is It the First Time?
In my misspent youth, I could find very little to love about my hometown in East Tennessee. It was too provincial, I felt, and it made me feel claustrophobic, as though I needed to claw my way out it, surrounded as it is by hills and mountains, albeit very beautiful ones. It won awards sometimes in national polls for Good Places to Live, but I for one could not see it. My perspective was that, though I loved the mountains, they trapped in the air pollution and collected the acid rain, and they were most definitely trapping me.
So, after my longer-than-average-and-longer-than-necessary college career there in my home town, I got out — first to Atlanta, the closest big city, and then to Dallas. No problem with mountains there — Dallas grew up out of a a cotton field.
Forty years later, after raising a family I wouldn’t trade for any other and spending forty Texas summers addicted to air conditioning, I can also see the climatological upside of being able to garden in Dallas almost year round. I had wanted different, and different I got.
During the intervening decades, my family and I drove yearly to East Tennessee for Christmas with my parents and extended family. I missed my relatives terribly, and it was always a wrench to leave them when our holidays ended. There were ongoing discussions with my own family about moving back to ‘hillbilly country’, but we never did.
When each of my parents died — mother, father, stepmother — I came to home to be with them, sometimes with my children, sometimes alone. It was an incalculable honor to be with my parents when they passed away, but it also meant that most of the memories of East Tennessee during the last fifteen years have been sad ones. So, for the better part of a decade, I’ve stayed away. When lifelong friends called and tried to stay in touch, I made excuses for not coming ‘home.’ I was compartmentalizing, I guess.
Yet there is always something about ‘fiddle playing’ — when I hear strains of it in Appalachian / Celtic music on the radio — that gets to me like no other instrumentation. That, and the banjo. You can take the girl out of the hills (or she can take herself out), but…
Last week, I needed to come home on family business and decided to make it a road trip. I stopped to stay with my lifelong best friend in Memphis, who is also named Karen. (Growing up, since we went to the same kindergarten, grammar school, high school, and college, one of us was “Karen” and one “The Other Karen” — yet which was which depended entirely upon who was talking!) Over the years, this lovely woman and her daughter, Joanna, have opened their home to me and my family every time we’ve passed through Memphis on our way east, which adds up to quite a few overnights.
This is my BFF Karen: I needed to make last week’s trip on the short notice, so I got on the road and called her from somewhere between Dallas and Memphis (after not talking to her for months) and said, “Uh, I’m going to be in Memphis tonight, and I was wondering if I could stay…” “Of course!” she said, “I’ll leave work early. [She’s the boss, so she can do that.] You’ll have to overlook the cat hair in the corners. John and I will cook for you.” “Sorry for the late notice,” I said. “You’re family!” she replied. By the time I pulled into town, she’d rounded up her daughter, son-in-law and grandson for a reunion, and we all sat down to a lovely home-cooked meal with fresh flowers, two different wines, and candles.
As I continued the drive eastward the following day, I felt surprisingly exhilarated. I was delighted, surprised, amazed at the joy I felt in returning to East Tennessee… I was homesick but hadn’t known it. Cruising down the freeway and into my hometown at the end of the day, I felt as if I were driving through a virtual matrix of emotions — sad ones, happy ones… feelings long shut away.
The next day, weaving through the campus of the university there that is my alma mater, I came face to face with the feelings of failure I carry about my uneven college career: the 3.5 GPA semesters alongside the 1.2 one that was my first time living away from home in the dorm; dropping out without graduating my ‘second senior year’ because I was tired of working and going to school.
There was happy stuff too: passing the campus theatre I remembered a class I took for which I was required to perform in a comic play, and, despite my ice cold terror, miraculously remembered my lines, and actually got a laugh.
More in the mixed-review category, I remembered when I discovered that the vending machines in the basement of that freshman dorm could replace meals as I pulled all nighters and then slept through the 7:30 a.m. freshman zoology exam I’d been studying for. (Speaking of which, why did I think that subject involved actual mammal-sized animals? Because it contains the word ‘zoo’???) I somehow became the official hair cutter for the girls on my floor, except I had no clue what I was doing — the closest I’d ever come to being a stylist was cutting the manes and tails of ponies in my youth. Those were some great girls in my dorm — tremendous support as I gained the Frosh 20 eating from the vending machines and ‘outgrew’ all my clothes.
As I passed by the Panhellenic building on campus on my driving tour last week, I thought of the time I was roped into being in a fashion show there and learned just before walking down the runway that my size 10 feet were going to have to fit into size 8-1/2 shoes. And they did. Ouch.
And then I drove downtown. When did my hometown grow up and become a radiant beauty? Completely without my help, while I ignored it and looked the other way, it has transformed itself into an exquisite jewel, a combination of historic treasure and trendy upscale hipness. (I, on the other hand, have bypassed the trendy, the upscale and the hip entirely.) All of the buildings that I remember from my childhood and dream about — the ones I shopped in, went to the movies in, sat at the soda fountain in, when I was allowed by my parents the thrill of riding the bus ‘downtown’ from the suburbs with my older cousin, Linda — they are STILL THERE, refurbished in period detail, clean and sparkling with love and care. The past is not just honored there, it is cherished. I am so proud.
Somehow this past week, something has happened. Something magical, and healing. I don’t feel trapped by my hometown any more — I am in love with it, as it is, and as I remember it. Maybe I always have been.
KS
From Henri Nouwen:
“Let me tell you about a[n] experience connected with my move from Harvard to L’Arche. It was clearly a move from leading to being led. Somehow I had come to believe that growing older and more mature meant that I would be increasingly able to offer leadership. In fact, I had grown more self-confident over the years. I felt I knew something and had the ability to express it and be heard. In that sense I felt more and more in control.
But when I entered my community with mentally handicapped people and their assistants, all controls fell apart, and I came to realize that every hour, day, and month was full of surprises — often surprises I was least prepared for…. Often people responded from deep places in themselves, showing me that what I was saying or doing had little if anything to do with what they were living. Present feelings and emotions could no longer be held in check by beautiful words and convincing arguments…. Without realizing it, the people I came to live with made me aware of the extent to which my leadership was still a desire to control complex situations, confused emotions, and anxious minds.
It took me a long time to feel safe in this unpredictable climate, and I still have moments in which I clamp down and tell everyone to shut up, get in line, listen to me, and believe what I say. But I am also getting in touch with the mystery that leadership, for a large part, means to be led. I discover that I am learning many new things, not just about the pains and struggles of wounded people, but also about their unique gifts and graces. They teach me about joy and peace, love and care and prayer…. They also teach me what nobody else could have taught me, about grief and violence, fear and indifference. Most of all, they give me a glimpse of God’s first love, often at moments when I start feeling depressed and discouraged.
My movement from Harvard to L’Arche made me aware in a new way how much my own thinking about Christian leadership had been affected by the desire to be relevant, the desire for popularity, and the desire for power. Too often I looked at being relevant, popular and powerful as ingredients of an effective ministry.
The truth, however, is that these are not vocations but temptations. Jesus asks, ‘Do you love me?’ Jesus sends us out to be shepherds, and Jesus promises a life in which we increasingly have to stretch out our hands and be led to places where we would rather not go. He asks us to move from a concern for relevance to a life of prayer, from worries about popularity to communal and mutual ministry, and from a leadership built on power to a leadership in which we critically discern where God is leading us and our people… Old patterns that have proved quite effective are not easy to give up.
I leave you with the image of the leader with outstretched hands, who chooses a life of downward mobility.”
~~ From In the Name of Jesus, Reflections on Christian Leadership
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
Personal Message
from
Pastor Karen
“Where there is no vision the people perish”
Proverbs 29:18
In talking with more and more youth there seems to be a lack of vision for their generation. Many are meandering through life without purpose or goals. With this mindset it should come as no suprise that many find themselves in bondage to drugs, alcohol, cutting and abusive relationships. In other words they are perishing. And adults are no better in that they suffer from the same emptiness. No vision. Thats where the church stands in and and cast the vision of God before His people in order that they may get a vision for themselves, their marriage, their family, etc. If we want to stop the perishing in our communities then we the church must begin to cast the vision of God but before we can do that we must first have a vision of God ourselves.
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Journal Archives: Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Cookie-Free Zone. Or Maybe I’m a Luddite?
I’m staying in a New England coastal town. It’s the off season, which I like — no crowds, little traffic, but there’s the company of friendly locals so that one doesn’t feel isolated. The weather is beautiful: sometimes sunny and mild — and sometimes chilly, blustery and raining.
Today I’ve returned to the spot where I come every day, and many other people seem to feel about this particular place the way I do. The few tourists that are here at this time of year, as well as ‘year-rounders’ — retired residents out for a stroll, workmen at lunch or on their way home at the end of the day, teenagers out of school for spring break — every few minutes people pull into the car park where I’m sitting overlooking the sand bars stretching out into the Atlantic Ocean beyond us.
Some, mostly tourists like myself, take pictures. A few people descend the stairs to the beach to walk their dogs, search for shells, fly kites, play catch or just amble. Others sit in their cars or stand on this bank above the beach and gaze at sand interspersed with sea that expresses itself in some inexplicable combination of ease and power.
A few point at the beach and ocean, turning to their companions and discussing… what? Whether that is a gray seal or just a log way out on the sand bar this early in the year? (Seals!) Anticipating the unusual appearance of the Great White Sharks that have come in recent years to hunt the seals and wondering if they’ll appear this season — is there a chance that’s a fin way out in the water?
Earlier in the week, I spoke with a man who comes here weekly from a nearby town simply to see how the shape of the sand bars has changed.
A minute ago, a middle-aged man came up from the beach. It’s cold today, but he was barefoot! Well dressed, balding, tidy jeans rolled up. I said to him, “Like your shoes!” He laughed and gave me a ‘thumbs-up’.
There are dunes to the right of here, then, beyond, more ocean. Far down the coast are shoals — nicknamed ‘Turner’s Terror’ — which caused the Mayflower to turn back in 1620 while it was attempting to reach the Hudson River to set up a settlement in the New World. These shoals are the primary reason that New England was started first at Provincetown on Cape Cod, and ultimately at Plymouth [Plimouth] rather than on what is now Long Island, New York.
During a hurricane a few years ago, this was one of the places which was charted to be ground zero. I remember seeing a television reporter standing on this very beach, being almost blown away by the near gale-force winds, trying to anticipate with some accuracy what was to come within the hour. Fortunately, the hurricane moved off its expected course and spared what lies in front of me now.
It is mesmerizing, calming, yet moving to be here. It is peace. Along the coast, and particularly in this spot, are the only places I’ve been in a long time where people just come, sit, look and think. There is no intermediary here between oneself and the natural world — — no one interpreting, screening, collecting your ‘cookies’ in order to send you Google ads that fit your profile.
One almost never sees people here driving around speaking into their cell phones, nor do people in restaurants talk on their mobiles or text. Instead, they talk to each other animatedly over dinner or while sitting in a pub over a pint. I don’t know why it’s that way, but I like it.
KS
Saturday, July 14, 2012
Hugh Laurie May Have the Answer to America’s Political Conundrum…
Most Americans may know Hugh Laurie as Dr. House, but I’ve never watched ‘House’ as I tend to imagine / fear that I have / will get diseases when I hear them discussed in detail.
For years, though, I’ve loved the inimitable Mr. Laurie as Bertie Wooster — in the PBS series, Jeeves and Wooster — a social satire taken from the books by P.G. Wodehouse skewering the British upper classes by showing the brilliant Jeeves, Bertie’s valet (played by Stephen Fry) consistently using the old grey matter in a manner infinitely more brilliant than his wealthy, idle employer.
In those Jeeves and Wooster scenes where Bertie plays the piano adeptly, one realizes that Hugh Laurie is playing the instrument rather than faking it and is a musician as well as a great comic actor. In the following YouTube video, he sings with his real-life band and seems to solve some of those pesky, gut-wrenching dilemmas that cause the Obamas and Romneys of the world to go at each other hammer and tongs. Take a look…
Tuesday, July 3, 2012
Freedom, Blessings, and the Fourth of July
My God! How little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy! ~~Thomas Jefferson
How often we fail to realize our good fortune in living in a country where happiness is more than a lack of tragedy. ~~Paul Sweeney
There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America. ~~William J. Clinton
Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves. ~~Abraham Lincoln
For what avail the plough or sail, or land or life, if freedom fail? ~~Ralph Waldo Emerson
Thanks for the quotes to Don Hood, attorney and friend.
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
“The Art of Procrastinating”
from the book, The Art of Doing Nothing, by Veronique Vienne with photographs by Erica Lennard
“When confronted with a flat surface — stone, ice, or glass — water always meanders…. One of the most plentiful compounds on earth, water is also the single largest constituent of our bodies. The world is 70 percent water — and so are we. It should come as no surprise, then, that human beings tend to dillydally as soon as they are in a pressure-free environment. For us, as for most living organisms in nature, the path of least resistance is a succession of languid curves.
Procrastination is innate. It is an invisible force that drives rivers into serpentine patterns, undersater currents into sinuous pathe, jet streams into winding courses — and you and me into a rambling mode.
What purpose these convolutions serve, no one knows…. To be sure, there are, for people at least, definite advantages to meandering.
For one thing, it takes you places you would otherwise have missed. It also gets you to do things that are long overdue. Instead of paying bills, for example, you decide to organize your sock drawer. Rather than fix the garage door, you give the new puppy a bath.. How about working on your novel? First you want to strip the waxy buildup off the kitchen floor. Maybe procrastinating is nature’s way of tidying up messes and cleaning up corners.
Too bad most of us postpone goofing off until Saturday or Sunday. In doing so, we ut pressure on the weekend. Procrastinating on schedule creates yet another form of obligation. So try to waste time on the spur of the moment, on a Wednesday or a Thursday. Later — much later — when you get the hand of it, you’ll be able to show off and fritter time away on a Monday.
Also, begin your procrastinating practice at home. Learn to vagabond between four walls before you venture outdoors. And because decelerating involves quite a lot of zigzagging and bounding up and down, be sure to wear athletic shoes in order to get enough traction.”
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Man Walking
Today I was driving to lunch with one of my daughters when we saw an elderly man walking along a road in East Dallas carrying a plastic trash bag full of what I assumed were his possessions. He looked very much in need of a good meal, so we turned the car around and went back to find him, pulling over at a cross street as he came to the corner.
“Hi,” I said, “Do you need some money?” My daughter looked at me quizzically and asked quietly, “Would anyone ever say ‘no’ to that question?” But in fact, street people often do refuse help if they don’t need it, and the question genuinely reflected the information I was seeking. “Yes, I do,” he replied, “I could use some food.”
My daughter opened my billfold and handed me some cash. The man certainly wasn’t begging near an ATM or gas station — in fact he wasn’t begging period — so no panhandling laws were being broken, not that it would concern me much if they were.
“I’m Karen,” I said, “What’s your name?” It was a simple name, the same as that of a famous R&B singer. “So how’s it going?” I asked him as I handed him the money, leaning out my car window.
“Well, I recently got hit by a car, and it smashed my hip. I was in the hospital, right next to a woman who had been burned over 50% of her body. Here she was, in such bad shape, but she was happy! She was going through so much [he described her injuries], and I had only my hip to worry about, but I was so sad about my condition. Yet here she was, like I said, happy. I just couldn’t get over it.”
Now this man, mind you, was quite thin and weathered and appeared to have very little in the way of possessions. His eyes were cloudy from what I’m guessing were cataracts. His walking was slow and labored.
He continued. “So, seeing the way she was, [in such bad shape], but happy, I made up my mind. I said to myself, ‘My hip is well — it’s not going to bother me any more.’ And I left the hospital.”
And he, in turn, was happy, inspired by the lady in the next bed. He had decided that it was so.
People are just remarkable, aren’t they?
KS
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Work
“She was nothing so solid in make, and rather less pretty in shape, but I had expended enough hard work on her to make me love her. No influential friend would have served me better. She had given me a chance to come out a bit—to find out what I could do. No, I don’t like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don’t like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work,—the chance to find yourself. Your own reality—for yourself, not for others—what no other man can ever know.”
~~ Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness: Marlow on the “twisted, ruined, tin-pot steamboat” he’s restoring.
Borrowed from the blog, The Greenery:
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
Solitude
A little over a decade ago, I had the serendipitous good luck to find myself staying in a small village in France called Ermenonville after a wedding I attended in a nearby town. At the time, I had no idea that the [very inexpensive but lovely] chateau hotel where I was lodging was the location where Jean Jacques Rousseau had, in 1778, spent the last months of his life.
I fell in love with the village, with the castle itself, and with Parc Jean Jacques Rousseau across the street from the chateau, where I went hiking many times. On my hikes, I carried along a journal and a sketch pad, and stopped to write and to draw various sites in the parc. I still can’t believe my good luck in spending a week in those lovely surroundings.
The odd thing is, on one of my hikes in the park, I was grappling with the question of my own at-times-competing needs for solitude and company, and I was able so resolve some of these vexing questions while in that extraordinary natural setting.
I had read Rousseau in school but remembered little about his writing, so when I came home I purchased a book or two of his, one of which is Reveries of the Solitary Walker. Here is an interesting quote from the chapter entitled ‘Third Walk’ on the subject of solitude, a subject with which Rousseau grappled as well.
“It is from this time that I can date my total renunciation of the world and the great love of solitude which has never left me. The task I had set myself could only be performed in absolute isolation; it called for long and tranquil meditations which are impossible in the bustle of society life. So I was obliged to adopt for a time another way of life, which I subsequently found so much to my taste that since then I have only interrupted it for brief periods and against my will, returning to it most gladly and following it without effort as soon as I was able; and when men later reduced me to a life of solitude, I found that in isolating me to make me miserable, they had done more for my happiness than I had been able to do myself.”
~~ Jean Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of a Solitary Walker, “Third Walk”
Parc Jean Jacques Rousseau
http://www.gardenvisit.com/garden/ermenonville_parc_jean-jacques_rousseau
© Bruno Hanniquet
Photograph © denis38100
Photograph © denis38100Thursday, April 19, 2012
Lessons Learned in a Rowboat
[Rowing With My Grandchildren]
c Karen Shafer, 4/2012
Photo by Mandy Mulliez
'Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream.'
1) It’s important to work as a team.
2) Every crew member has something special to give to the effort.
3) If you don’t appreciate the way someone is rowing, try, just for a minute, to row along with them.
4) Never underestimate the power of the Young.
5) Sometimes there’s chop, and sometimes there’s smooth.
6) If you’re drifting off course, correct your direction as soon as possible.
7) At some moments, even on a good day of rowing, things can feel a little dicey.
8) If you have a choice of when to row against the current, do it when you feel fresh.
9) It’s really nice sometimes just to drift.
10) Each time of day has its own kind of rhythm and beauty.
11) The appearance of the boat doesn’t determine how ‘yare’ it is.
12) Never underestimate the power of the Old.
13) Rowing with a lot of effort increases your level of endorphins; so does just sitting in your boat on the lake and feeling the peace.
14) Just because brush obscures the shoreline doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
This Pretty Planet
[A Song Louis and Anna Learned at School for Earth Day]
Photo by Mandy Mulliez
This pretty planet,
Spinning through space —
Your garden, your harbor,
Your holy place.
Golden sun going down,
Gentle blue giant,
Spin us around
All through the night,
Safe till the morning light.
Photo by Mandy Mulliez
'Touch the earth. Stay grounded.'
Saturday, March 17, 2012
To Tech or Not To Tech? There’s a Different Answer for Everyone
Friends sometimes ask me, ‘Why aren’t you on Facebook??? How do you keep up?’ I realize we are coming from different perspectives and that it may be hard to explain.
I want less internet, not more. I see the online world as an invaluable tool but also as a kind of necessary evil. It seems to me that it can be addicting, yet that it is somehow inherently unrewarding. Maybe I’m looking for some sort of response there that I never get. Could the response I’m missing be the three-dimentional experience, either from human beings or from the natural world? (Or, if you’re a particle physics fan who’s interested in String Theory, that would be more dimensions than three!)
Another way of saying it: ‘I want to smell the actual-not-the-virtual flowers and to pull the three-dimensional weeds.’
I want to sit and stare. At the trees, the sky, the birds and butterflies (and at this time of year, the shower of pollen!) Not at a computer screen or a handheld device. It’s taken me so long to start to learn to ‘be here now.’ I hate to voluntarily give it up any more than is absolutely necessary. My ‘lights’ will flicker and dim soon enough.
As a news junkie, I prefer to get my info from the BBC World Service on radio, the television evening news, and PBS Newshour. As it is, I think often enough of, for example, of what’s going on in Syria, that I have a friend who lives in Damascus — and that I have no way to know if he and his family are OK. I don’t really want my newsfeed to be more frequent than that it already is.
It may seem disingenuous to say this, given that this blog is on the internet. The worldwide web has it’s uses, without a doubt. An extremely positive one is spreading the word about certain crises in the world that need our attention and care. I just somehow feel that sharing and caring about what time of day a celebrity ate a piece of pizza is definitely TMI.
I even think that it’s probably harmful to the human brain to experience the world increasingly through ‘screens’. I recently learned of a study which found that electronic devices are addicting to the brains of children. But am I a retro freak who’s behind the times and way out of touch?
Along comes an interview with writer Paul Theroux to save my reputation (the word ‘reputation’ is hyperbolic in relation to myself, but please indulge me)!
The Atlantic Monthly: What does the advent of the e-reader mean for reading — for the health of narrative storytelling as a form, for the market for fiction, for the future of books? E-readers certainly make it easier to tote lots of novels and other texts while traveling. But don’t we lose something — in sustained concentration, or in a sense of permanence, or in the notion of a book as an art object — in the migration away from the codex?
Paul Theroux: Movable type seemed magical to the monks who were illuminating manuscripts and copying texts. Certainly e-books seem magical to me. I started my writing life in the 1940’s as an elementary student at the Washington School in Medford, Massachusetts, using a steel-nibbed pen and an inkwell, so I have lived through every technology. I don’t think people will read more fiction than they have in the past (as I say, it’s a minority interest), but something certainly is lost — the physicality of a book, how one makes a book one’s own by reading it (scribbling in it, dog-earing pages, spilling coffee on it) and living with it as an object, sometimes a talisman. Writing is one of the plastic arts, which is why I still write in longhand for a first draft. I can’t predict how reading habits will change. But I will say that the greatest loss is the paper archive — no more a great stack of manuscripts, letters, and notebooks from a writer’s life, but only a tiny pile of disks, little plastic cookies where once were calligraphic marvels.
TA: Does the migration to e-readers increase access to good stories or diminish it?
PT: Greatly increases access. I could not be more approving. But free libraries are full of books that no one reads.
TA: What has the Twitter-ization of our attention spans, and the hyperlinking of our storytelling, and the Google-ization of all our knowledge meant for imaginative literature as an art form and a vehicle for transmitting ideas?
PT: In a hyperactive world, the writing of fiction — and perhaps the reading of it — must seem slow, dull, even pedestrian and oldfangled. I think there is only one way to write fiction — alone, in a room, without interruption or any distraction. Have I just described the average younger person’s room? I don’t think so. But the average younger person is multitasking. The rare, unusual, solitary younger person is writing a poem or story.
Crawling into bed and picking up my hard-bound copy of Henry James’ The Golden Bowl is the most peaceful and satisfying part of my day. I feel like he’s my ‘friend,’ even though neither of us has a Facebook page, or, if he does, I’m pretty certain he’s not the one who put it up!
KS
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