I wrote a brief summary of section 132 here, and a very short video on the book, here. Thanks to Brian Whitney of Kofford Books for engineering that.
The official release date for the book is February 27, 2018, but Amazon already has it in the queue. Here’s the official Kofford page.
Thanks to all who had a hand in producing the book, including the many hours Loyd Ericsson and Brian Whitney and others put into editing and to all the scholars I was able to draw from and the many excellent staff librarians at the archives I visited. I especially want to acknowledge my fellow bloggers at BCC who put up with my explorations of Mormonism including section 132 there that formed an outline for thinking about the revelation for me. They’ve been a great support. Finally, I want to thank Brad Kramer (at the time with Kofford) who convinced me that there was a book in me on this topic.
This kid. Lately we call him Philosopher Bean. I kick around ideas with him, and he bats them back to me, with questions tacked on and insights I had not considered. He’s got way more of his dad in him than I ever expected—and they’re the very best parts. I see beautiful pieces of David developing and rising to the top.
He’s a deep thinker. And his deep thoughts are on big—sometimes metaphysical—vast spiritual and scientific ideas. He grasps abstract concepts and mathematics in ways that take my breath away, and these quantum leaps in growth have happened seemingly overnight. It leaves me trying to catch my balance as his mom.
I had been kicking around the idea of writing my next book on raising a gifted child with autism. But, as he’s grown, I have pushed that idea further and further back. If I do write this book, I believe it will be with him. I am aware of and support the movement away from parents controlling the narrative about their children with disabilities. Bean will have his own voice, his own memories, his own perspective on his upbringing, and it will be his to tell, should he want to. I don’t anticipate this potential project being easy or painless, but I think it might be worthwhile. Someday.
In the meantime, I am learning how to move away from the intense intervention that was needed from me when he was younger, into more of a supporting role as he moves to the forefront of his own advocacy. It’s not always easy, but me getting out of the way is integral to him taking over his own growth. And he is more than capable.
When he needs me, I am still there—and I always will be. But stepping back at the appropriate time is a huge part of raising a child with a disability. It has been my job to protect him, to advocate for him, to insist on the services he was entitled to, to provide the scaffolding he needed to grow and learn; but the real goal has always been to someday not need those supports.
He had a bit of a rough patch this week, but in the days afterwards, he had insights into himself that he couldn’t have received any other way. Not only could he see that, but he was able to explain it to me, talk about it, and frame those insights into usable tools for himself for the future.
This kid. He has been a singular gift to this family since his birth. As I watch him get ready to move beyond his family, to flap and test his wings, and interact with the world, I wonder what gifts he has in store for the rest of us. Bear with me as I figure out how to navigate the changed mothering roles necessary in this new world. Respecting him, his wishes, his story, and if I can, still carve out a space for my own overflowing heart.
In the meantime, I will return to reading the crazy-dense article on particle physics he found about capturing light waves and freezing the light particles in crystalline form, and how this may solve the world’s energy problems.
]]>I can justifiably praise the humility, obedience, and on the whole, industry of the missionaries in these missions . . . but when these virtues are named, speaking of the missionaries as a whole, you name the sum of their qualifications for missionary work, and there are serious defects in their “equipment” for the work required of them; among which may be suggested first, the lack of knowledge amounting to almost total ignorance of the current religious thought of the present day, with a consequent lack of ability to make any application of our religion to modern thought, or what is of any immediate interest to people . . . the existence of a “boyish” conception of things . . . . inadequate education . . . not in terms of academic achievement as much as a lack of ability to read with ease the most common books, to speak grammatically, to say nothing of speaking coherently, logically or forcefully . . . there is a serious lack of training in simple “good manners” . . . on the whole, this reveals our deficiencies as a community on which is laid the responsibility of instructing the whole world in . . . moral and religious matters.[1]
Discuss.
———–
[1] Edited for length, a certain harshness, and with some silent summary.
I’ve produced a book manuscript that details textual/historical aspects of certain sermons of Joseph Smith, and as a spin-off of that effort I’ve done work on another book that just focuses on the famous King Follett sermon, delivered on Easter Sunday, April 7, 1844. Because the first book is quite technical and the second more historical, it so happens that I don’t appeal to Laub’s version of that sermon too much in either work. That said, Laub’s work is still kind of fun, and his summary of the sermon is rather unique and sometimes clever, sometimes clearly defining the issues, sometimes probably combining his own thought and those of others with Joseph Smith’s remarks as he remembered them and perhaps briefly recorded them, as he says, on “scraps.”[2]
George Laub ca. 1870. Laub is buried in St. George, Utah. Laub was ritually “adopted” to John D. Lee. That didn’t work out.
Anyway, here’s a couple of excerpts from Laub’s little notebook on the April 7 sermon:
How came spirits? Why they are and were self existing as all eternity and our spirits are as eternal as the very God is himself
This excerpt has the advantage of focusing on one of the key points of the sermon and at the same time reveals one of the odd faults of the sermon’s internal logic that exists in most of its reports. The point is this. One of the purposeful shock points of the sermon is that God wasn’t always God. The separate declaration about human spirits being self-existent[3] (not contingent) and “as eternal as God himself” appeals to the audience’s prejudice that God is not contingent as God. You see the oddness. It’s a time error, in the sense that Smith seems to be giving two sermons in two separate timelines. Laub does a nice job of peeling this back to the bone I think. God and humans are self-existent beings, their time-linked status is not. I don’t think Laub thought this through, really, but it works well in his report and I don’t think Joseph Smith was trying at some subtle cleverness here either. Of course, all this is something of a presentist extra-textual rationalization. The post-Smithian historical rationalizations took altogether different directions in any case.
Here’s a longer bit from Laub that is really quite good:
those who die without the obedience of the gospel here will have to obey it in the world of spirits for so long as they do not obey they will be miserable and as if they were in torment of fire and brimstone. Thus is the signification of torment . . . But Satan, or Lucifer, being the next heir and had allotted to him great power and authority even prince of power of the air. He spake immediately and boasted of himself saying send me I can save all and [he] sinned against the Holy Ghost because he accused his brethren and was hurled from the counsel for striving to break the law immediately. There was a warfare with Satan and the gods and they hurled Satan out of his place and all them that would not keep the sayings of the council. But he himself being one of the councilors would not keep the first estate for he was one of the sons of perdition and consequently all the sons of perdition become devils. [Elipsis is Laub’s.]
Laub’s point implicitly but pretty clearly appeals to the idea of vicarious work for the dead. That notion is less clear in the more contemporary audits of the sermon and it suggests to me that Laub is doing what is formally called a “content audit.” That is, he may be expanding his memory/notes here with his internal thinking or external reference (he’s using ideas from another source). Laub’s focus on “the council” is certainly “Smithian” if you will but his reconstructed narrative of Satan is unique to his report of the sermon. Laub’s notion that Satan “sinned against the Holy Ghost” is almost surely a compression of Smith’s expressions in the sermon about “sons of Perdition” and the “sin against the Holy Ghost.” In other reports, Smith works out the Satan narrative thusly: Jesus points out that some mortals will lose their chance at salvation—namely the sons of Perdition—and this becomes the sticking point in the heavenly debate. Satan argues that this category shouldn’t exist and this is the fundamental insult to God (according to the sermon). And it’s pretty clear from the other reports, particularly the aural audits, that Smith confines the sin against the Holy Ghost as a strictly mortal risk. It can’t be executed without a body. I quite like Laub here though. The protology is still rather Smithian since it still carries along Smith’s irony about the Devil and “one-third of the hosts of heaven”: they object to the possibility of permanent dark penalty and then manage to incur it themselves.
George Laub. Thanks George.
—————–
[1] Laub made a copy of parts of this notebook/journal and gave it to the LDS Church Historian’s Office in Utah, ca. 1858. This later version was published in BYU Studies (Winter 1978) as edited by Eugene England. I don’t use this later version here. The earlier notebook has the more clouded provenance but other factors suggest it’s the older of the two.
[2] Laub got a number of the dates wrong for the sermons he reported—sometimes he was off by a year as well as a day(s).
[3] This idea is not unique to the Follett sermon. Smith’s post-Liberty Jail preaching often packages it with some kind of declaration against material creation out of nothing. It forms an interesting complex of ideas that rise from the ashes of the failed Zion. Not going there now though.
]]>The Jonathan Edwards Center has been given larger, newly renovated spaces by Yale Divinity School, and we invite you to a reception to help us celebrate and officially to open our new home. Please join us on February 22, 2018, 4:00-6:00 p.m., in the lower level of the northeast wing of the Divinity School. Attendees can enjoy refreshments, tour the facilities, meet our staff and research fellows, and view a special exhibit of original Edwards artifacts kindly provided by Rev. Robert Rafford of Middlebury, Connecticut. Door prizes include copies of Edwards volumes signed by the editors.
Please RSVP by February 15 to 2034325341.
]]>Pretty much.
So the California Hippie Girl is re-surfacing hard as I hit midlife. (What even constitutes midlife anymore? I don’t buy forty being the new twenty or whatever the kids are saying these days, but I kind of think falling down the stairs a few weeks ago (see: January 67th) gets me my Midlife© Card.
Anyway, I grew weary with the lack of recycling options in my neighborhood and went on the warpath (can I say that, or is it culturally insensitive? I am honestly asking.) It turns out our waste management company DOES offer recycling, but since almost no one uses it (seriously, if you drive around my neighborhood on trash day, there are NO recycle toters out at the curb) they don’t really advertise it. I have a shiny new blue recycle toter being delivered ASAP, and I am retooling the kitchen setup so I can teach my kids the glorious art of separating the trash!
I’ve also made the move from plastic food storage containers back to glass and 86’d paper plates or other disposable single-use products. I’ve had the same cloth grocery bags since 1991, so I’m good there. Seriously, it’s not that hard, just keep them in your car. It takes a week or two to get used to it, but once you do, it’s second nature. In the part of California where I’m from (and where most of my family lives) you can’t even get plastic bags anymore. People griped at first, but they got used to it. It’s amazing what our big brains can do! All of this used to be like breathing to me, but moving east sent parts of me into hibernation. I’m going to try and wake some stuff up.
I’m not quite ready to institute composting, but mostly that’s because I hate the outdoors in Virginia, and there is no way in hell I’m going to garden. Swamps are not meant to be lived in by this many people. While you can drain the water, the mosquitoes and humidity are eternal.
I don’t make new year’s resolutions per se, but in the 654 days of January, I had time to reflect on some stuff, and I realized we really don’t need any new stuff. I mean, seriously. We just don’t. I cut back on Christmas last year, and we focused on activities and going to NYC as our big family present. It was worth it. I am trying to make a genuine effort to examine any potential purchase and ask if we really need it. This might make me sound like a ton of fun (and January me wasn’t super awesome, I admit) but it’s actually exciting because less stuff will allow us to take more trips and go more places, and experience more life, and that’s a very good thing.
So, regardless of what happens with the damned Groundhog tomorrow, we will have six more weeks of winter, per the only calendar that matters: the moon. Spring equinox is at 4:15 in the afternoon on March 20, regardless of what a rodent and Bill Murray do. The days will be perfectly balanced for that moment, before we begin the tip towards peak summer sunlight. Equinoxes > Solstices. I know Solstices are fancier and get bigger parties, but I love that balance point, where you can feel the year tip.
Here’s to a mercifully accurate 28 days for February. So far, so good.
]]>I fell down the stairs today.
I am not old. My bones are not yet brittle. I found myself, tumbling the entire length of our long staircase, landing in an undignified thud at the bottom. I couldn’t stop it from happening, even as I watched the walls fly by, my shoulder banging into the wainscoting, and my tailbone hitting the landing. I think I made a frightening noise, because within seconds, all four kids and the dog ran to me.
I was dazed and confused for a few moments, feeling my body, trying to discern if I was actually hurt, or just rattled. I think, were I a couple of decades older, it would have been a potentially catastrophic fall. Now, hours later, my shoulder is sore, my lower back is tender, and three fingers on my left hand hurt quite a bit—though I don’t recall how that happened, I must have jammed them. I also skinned my elbow. I am otherwise sound.
It’s got me thinking though—or as Carrie would muse, “I couldn’t help but wonder…” how much we depend on each other to make it through this fraught mortal journey. When we are young, we are supple and flexible, and usually surrounded by people who love us and are watching out for harmful things we do not yet understand. As we get older, we are full of the hubris of young adulthood, stronger still, flexible, and brave. I’ve come to believe this belief is necessary to function when we starting out, otherwise the perils of what might come would paralyze us.
As we get older, we can start to see what all the fuss is about, all the things from which we were protected when we were younger—and even the dumb luck that may have graced us over and over. We look at our parents with new eyes when we ourselves become parents. “Oooooh, I get it now, mom…” as we watch our own hearts walking around outside our bodies for the first time. How does one even live this way? I don’t know, but the locus our bravery is forever permanently moved outside of us.
It’s like the ever-opening lotus. For the first time today, I felt my own fragility, and my children felt the unfamiliar rising of their own strength and bravery in the possibility—even in the inevitability—that mom was breakable.
We’re like waves at the sea. We each have our out path to the shore, swelling, growing, cresting, crashing, rushing up the beach, and gradually ebbing back into the eternal sea. I notice my own mother’s hands looking more like my grandmother’s hands each time I see her. I notice my own hands staring to bear the gentle signs of years of caring for others, knitting, cooking, writing, and living creative life. There are veins that once were deeper, skin that is more translucent, rings that spin under my knuckles.
And life goes on.
I hope I don’t fall down the stairs again any time soon. Or maybe ever.
]]>You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor any thing. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose… That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes it is gone, a wave on the sea. Would you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself?
—Ursula K. LeGuin
Disheveled and disgruntled as only an 11 year-old after a tedious school day can be, Abigail flopped into the raveling thrift-store chair opposite my desk. It’s everyone’s favorite chair; threadbare on the arms, an earthy green brocade with sea-blue weft threads, thick and heavy cushions worn to the shape of humanity with time. She stared over my shoulder out the window, opened to the unseasonably warm January afternoon.
I let her be, alone with her thoughts, keeping one eye on her as I quietly wrote. Her gaze shifted to the wall over one of the bookshelves lining my tiny office. A linen tapestry hangs there, embroidered with blue morning-glories. “Did you make that mom?”
I look at the piece of needlework, flashing briefly through dozen different walls in my homes on which it has hung. “No, I didn’t. I bought it at an estate sale decades ago.” I have reached the point in my life where I still feel young enough, but it’s possible for me to say a sentence like that and for it to be true. Decades ago… I have lived enough time now that decades ago seems close enough to touch.
“Why would someone sell that?” she asks, admiring what surely is familiar to her. It’s hung nearby her whole life. The fine linen square, once intended to cover a small table, is now covered in late-afternoon rainbows from the prisms hanging in the sunlit window.
“Hmmm.” I stop typing quietly and regard my daughter. Her hair is deep brown like her grandmother, but she has my wild cowlick on her hairline, splitting her bangs forever into disarray. Her eyes appear brown, until they are hit by sunlight, where they show their true deep green. I think the Punnett square precludes a brown-eyed daughter from two green-eyed parents I smile to myself. “I don’t know why anyone would get rid of something so pretty. And it’s not just that it’s pretty, it’s an example of material culture. By material culture, I don’t mean fabric—though it is fabric—I mean the things women make that denote their own histories.”
As I suspected this would, it piques her interest. She is so bright, and so interested in what is happening around her. She moves through the world in a bit of a cyclone, trailing bits of paper, glue, ink, rocks, sand—anything that has captured her imagination this week. We discuss women’s history, and how the gatekeepers of what we know as history have often been men, and women’s work is historically quieter, harder to find, but it’s there. And this is why I buy linens and samplers and recipe cards at estate sales. Some people don’t recognize this for what it is: women’s history, speaking just as clearly as the trumpeting of men, but quieter, and requiring eyes to see it.
She looks at me, her mind visibly rolling these stones over. “Is this why you write, mom?”
My heart flutters. “Yes. This is why I started writing, for certain. I was a young mom at home, not even pregnant with you yet, and I wanted a connection with my grandma. I missed her, and while I have things that belonged to her, I didn’t know what she thought, what she felt, when she was home with three little girls. So I started writing.”
“It’s kind of weird that there’s a record of every day of my life on Dandelion. I mean, I like it, but I don’t know anyone else who has something like that.” She is relaxed, staring out the window again.
I smile at her over the tray of pens and papers and candles on my cluttered desk. “Yeah, I guess maybe it could be weird. But it belongs to you, this story.”
“I like it. I like reading back over the stories of when we were little. I like the memories that are there. I like knowing dad is there, too.”
I nodded at her, resting my chin on my hand and closing my computer.
We talk quietly for a while about history—mine, hers, her great-granmother’s, and about my idly imagining someday, maybe someone, would find what I thought would be a humdrum life interesting. She laughed. She already knows that’s not exactly how things worked out.
“I’m hungry.” She peels herself from the great green chair and circles the desk to lean on me, her version of a hug, and kisses the top of my head. Our enormous dog trails behind her in hopes she will bless him with scraps of her snack as she heads downstairs.
It’s time to introduce her to Laurel, I think.
]]>Levi’s 501 button-fly original jeans. I know that’s not even worth mentioning for most kids, but this is a child who, at 14, has never (ever) worn anything except the softest sweatpants (no bumpy seams!), snug velvety leggings (which have morphed into athletic compression tights as he’s gained teenager size) and shorts. That’s it. He’s never worn any other type of pants.
He used to cry if his pants were “flappy” and couldn’t tolerate anything that tickled his skin. Last week, Jon and I found a pair of Levis on clearance in his size. They were dyed a bright turquoise, which made me think perhaps he’d give them a shot. I left them on his bed, and left him alone. Last night, while I was in my office, I overheard Jeffrey explaining how to manage the button fly and showing him how to fasten them up. I held my breath, but said absolutely nothing.
This morning, he got up, and instead of putting on his fancy pants, or his party suit, or his tights, he put on his 501s. He came into my room and asked me to help him cuff them, and then went happily off to toast his English muffins like he’s done 5,110 other mornings. He did wear a tie-dyed shirt—I mean, we can’t be getting too crazy.
***
In other news, I am in the stage of writing a book where the writer does everything humanly possible to avoid sitting down and starting. Jon called me out on it earlier in the week. “I see you’re trying not to write.” he observed, as I was fixating on fixating the under-counter cabinet lighting in the kitchen. Jerk.
He’s right. There’s a new book fermenting, and I don’t want to do it. Why is it so painful? Why does it have to get to the point where not writing it hurts more than finally giving in and putting my butt in the chair? Be a writer, they said. It’s so much fun, they said.
Speaking of, I am the guest speaker at a book club this Saturday night. If you’re in the DC/Metro area and want join us, message me. (this actually is one of the fun parts of being a writer…)
***
So government shutdowns suck if you’re a federal employee. There’s a crap ton of misinformation and propaganda out there about government jobs, and it’s mostly wrong. When the government shuts down, it hurts the lowest paid workers the most. Congress all still gets paid, but the janitors, cafeteria workers, office assistants, secretaries, cooks, and even the regular white collar jobs? They don’t get paid. They may eventually get paid when whatever they are fighting over passes, but there is no guarantee. There is also no way of knowing how long a shutdown will last. How many of you could make it three weeks on no income and still honor all of your commitments and bills? It’s incredibly stressful and the people on the bottom rungs are the ones who are hurt the most.
In this shutdown this last weekend, I know people who had to come home from vacations they’d planned a year out, because all scheduled leave is canceled and recalled in a shutdown. Transit and airport employees don’t make a lot (salaries are public record, look it up) but they had to buy last minute tickets home to report for duty, on their own dime, to a job they didn’t know if they would be paid to do. Consider that. Think about what that would do to your finances and family budget. If they had not come back immediately, they would have been AWOL and could have been arrested. That’s what a government shutdown means on the ground to regular workers.
It’s not all mid-six-figure salaries and fat cats. It’s blue collar workers living paycheck to paycheck trying to take care of their families. And it’s millions of them.
We’ve got to find a better way move this country forward.
I support CHIP fully, and I am grateful it’s been funded for 6 more years. It’s the only civil thing for a nation as rich and broad as this one to do. I fully support DACA. I support Dreamers. I want our representatives to do right by these people and protect them under the law. Do it. Do it now. And don’t roll anyone else over with the bus while you do it.
]]>The dog doesn’t leave my side. Well, that’s not entirely true—he’s afraid of the bathroom, and if I’m in my bedroom reading, he will sneak into Jeffrey’s bed and I’ll shortly hear his rumbly snore. There’s nothing like the snore of a 165 pound dog shaking the floor. Really. If I am in my bedroom doing yoga, he is insistent that he help. That’s another issue.
My office seems to be his favorite place to nap. He circles twice and then flops heavily on the floor, sighs deeply, and starts another nap. It’s a hard life. If I change chairs or move around, he faithfully gets up, circles the tiny room, and flops again at my feet. I’m pretty sure he can’t tell time, but every afternoon, just before 3:00 he rouses himself, gives a big back-arching stretch accompanied by a wide yawn, and then heads to the office window behind my desk.
He stands still, ears cocked forward, eyes scanning the street below. It will be a good twenty minutes or more before Bean and Abby round the corner, but he stands at attention, never leaving the window. I believe he hears them before he can see them—his vision is compromised—but I know he hears them when his tail begins to batter the back of my desk chair. He stands there, wagging with joy, listening with perked ears, until they round the corner and he finally sees them.
As soon as he sees them, he spins around and races out of my office and down the stairs, where he presses his nose against the glass in the front door, his whole body wagging with joy, while Bean fumbles with his key in the lock.
Every. Day.
He’s a more accurate timepiece that the old German cuckoo-clock I restored that hangs in the dining room. I never know what hour it’s going to chime, but the dog…the dog knows.
]]>In the lucid and surreal manner of dreams, there is no before, but instead it begins with the overwhelming ripping and burning intensity of the baby crowning. Reaching down with my fingertips, I can feel the downy head leaving my body, a euphoric cocktail poured over the agony of my body tearing apart, forming a gateway for another life.
The little body slides from me, still tethered with the pulsing blue cord and streaked with crimson, and is placed on my chest. A redhead, another son, with new-penny lashes and the faintest veil of copper haloing his soft velvety head. Complete complete complete, my mind swirls, I have been waiting for you!
I wake up with tears on my cheeks and pillow.
Another child was always part of my plan, but life was life and didn’t care much for my plan. Abigail was 4 months old when we lost David to drugs the first time, and in retrospect, I cannot fathom going through what the ensuing years brought with an even younger baby added to the nearly crippling load I carried. And yet… the missing has never gone away.
I thought enough time had passed now. Abby is eleven, Bean and Jeffrey are both in their teens. I have a step-daughter I love who brings me additional delight—my basket is full and I am keenly aware of my own blessings. So why am I still dreaming of that baby?
There was a pregnancy after Jon and I got married four years ago. We were surprised, but incredibly happy, as we braced for starting over with a new caboose. Eight weeks in, I lost that baby, and we both grieved for what would not be. It forced us to really look at our lives and ask ourselves what direction we wished to move. I had to face the fact that the miscarriage was incredibly taxing and stressful on my body and it took me a long time to recover and feel healthy again. Hyperemesis in one’s early thirties was one thing, in the early forties, entirely another. Was it worth the risk?
Jon and I both nearly lost our mothers to complications from later pregnancies and miscarriages. I had to weight the very real needs of our children here with the idea of another who haunted my dreams, and the physical limitation of my body. It was a teary decision for both of us, but we definitively closed the book on that chapter of our lives.
Neither of us regrets it.
And yet, I still dream. I dream of the little redheaded boy I am missing, and that dream is persistent, recurring, and very, very real. There is nothing I can do about it; the limits of the physical world hemmed us all in.
I’m sorry, baby. I am sorry for time, for addiction, for aging, for the impermanence of open doorways. I am sorry that circumstances made it impossible for me to bring you to our family, regardless of how much I wanted you. I don’t know how these things work. As a matter of reality, I’m not certain of very many things at all as I get older. But I am certain that I love you.
]]>Several weeks ago, I was the invited guest at a joint book event for The Burning Point and for my friend Rachel Hunt Steenblik’s book Mother Milk. As I was preparing my remarks (on the fly, from the stool in front of a room full of people, as one does.) I realized a stretch of prose actually worked as a poem. It was unexpected.
When the call came
when the letter arrived
when the sunlight finally
fell on your face
the struggle fell away
and you only remembered
the beauty.
It was like childbirth
everyday.
We brought forth
our future.
Every choice we made
determined
what raw materials
would be in the hands
of tomorrow.
Some days took years
and were times
of transition
where we thought
we might die.
Some years were full
of euphoria
or rushing release.
Most years were
slightly uncomfortable
until we remembered
how to breathe.
So there’s my first poem. It may not be any better than the angsty crap I wrote on my t-shirts in Sharpie at art school when I was 16, but I’m putting it out there anyway.
New Years resolutions haven’t ever been my thing, but I am making a few small(ish) changes and acknowledgements. I stopped writing after I turned in my manuscript for TBP last year. I hear it’s natural after such a cathartic project, but I also realize I need to write like some people need their Diet Coke. I work out my mind, clear the chaos inside, find the northstar, whatever you want to call it, I do it by writing. Not all of my writing is here, and I have a couple of book projects that are still in embryo, but here is where I turn to most faithfully. At this point I doubt anyone is reading, considering blogs have gone the way of the wooly mammoths, but just as when I started and had zero readers, I have never been writing for an audience. I write for my own sanity and center, and sometimes I even do a good job. So we are back to the beginning where perhaps someday my grandchildren will find this interesting. Or not. I do it for me and that’s enough.
I’ve deleted my calendar apps from my phone and computer, and moved to a paper calendar and journal format. I cannot believe how much more productive I feel swapping out this format. There is something about putting pen to paper that transcends a well-designed little icon on my phone. I need that visceral touch. I need to scratch things off my to-do list, and to messily move things around with arrows and boxes and whatever pen color is on hand. It feels good.
I’ve deleted some social media from my devices, too. I know lots of people are doing/have done this. I’m a late adopter? I’ll still use it when I want and when it suits me, but I’m less and less interested in keeping up with a thousand different streams of thought when I can barely keep on top of my own.
Christmas was good. Very low key. We spent the week before in New York City with (most of) the kids. It was free form and completely enjoyable. We didn’t get into any shows, and didn’t really have a master plan, but spent each day just sort of going wherever sounded good. We rode the Staten Island Ferry back and forth, which remains one of Bean’s very favorite parts of NYC. We ate a lot of cheap slices of pizza, and found some good restaurants. I got to meet up with some Manhattan friends for brunch, and we hit the Christmas market in Bryant Park. We caught services at Trinity Church, and spent a whole day at The Met. I rode in my first NYC taxi, and took the subway a bunch. It was a perfect holiday, and we were back home by Christmas Eve.
New Years week found us filled to the rafters with Tennessee and Missouri family. I love having people fill my home. I don’t mind the chaos, the clutter, family everywhere—it makes me happy to be surrounded by people I love.
Now it’s nearly mid-January and the kids are all finally back in school. The winter cyclone of arctic air pretty much shut down the eastern seaboard for the first week of the year—even yesterday we were still in the single digits. We’re not used to that level of cold, and our homes and infrastructure isn’t either. Everything shut down. The trade off is that we get miserable summers where everything molds and the heat index sucks the life out of you; we’re not supposed to get crappy ice vortexes of winter.
Today is my first day all alone since December 15. If you’re an introvert you probably know how I’m feeling at the moment. As much as I love the holidays, I can feel my tank filling as I sit here in the quiet of my office, no tv, no video games, no kids, no ambient sound at all except my little space heater and the dog softly snoring nearby.
Happy New Year.
]]>Or @TextualStudies132
]]>My grandmother’s kindergarten picture, c. 1922
Today would have been the 100th birthday of my grandmother, Kathryn Isabel.
She was a shining beacon of love in my life—I was her first grandchild and held a special place in her heart. My memories of her are deep and vast, and she is associated in my subconscious with safety, love and softness. I lived with her when I was very young, while my also-very-young mom got her feet under her and our lives stable. She was flawed and imperfect in a million ways, but she was also a place I always knew I was safe, and she is woven through the years of my life in strong and visible threads.
There are reminders of her everywhere in my home and in my heart. My entire adult life I have kept a key to her back door on my keyring, even though the house is long gone. On my dresser sits her black leather jewelry box, opening in a tri-fold of soft velvet red. It still smells of her Jean Nate and Coty powder. She loved carnation pink lipstick, the color yellow, and a real Coke poured over crushed ice. She taught me to play Canasta, cribbage, rummy, and poker. She made the best grilled cheese sandwiches in the world, and she would let me squeeze in her rocking recliner with her while we watched M*A*S*H. She told me to always tell the truth, that way “You never have to remember what you said.”
I also understand now with adult perspective that her life was hard and complicated, neither simple nor easy. She was an only child who grew up during the great Depression, raised by a single mother in the days where that wasn’t simple or easy. She is part of the Greatest Generation, and she lived that fact out in every facet of her life. She was a model for the Red Cross during World War II, then married a soldier, my grandfather, who was one of the first wave landing on the beaches at Normandy on D-Day. She had three daughters, who she ended up raising mostly alone because Korea followed quickly on the heels of WWII and military wives do what they have always done.
Jack and Kathryn c. 1950
I wish I knew more about her everyday life—how she felt, what she imagined, what she hoped for, the challenges of raising three daughters alone while grandpa was overseas, and then how hard it was when he came back and we didn’t have words for PTSD. One of the reasons I started writing this blog so many years ago was because I wished for a daily journal of my grandma’s life. I figured if no one else cared, maybe my children or grandchildren would be interested. She isn’t here any longer for me to ask her those stories; it’s a loss that simply cannot be recovered. (Abigail has a near-daily journal of her entire life, and she won’t ever wonder what her mother thought or felt. Maybe that’s good? It will be up to her to decide.)
GG Alexander, grandma Kathryn, holding my newborn mother with my aunts at her feet.
She moved to San Francisco in 1967, just in time for the world to change and for my aunts to embrace the ethos of California. San Francisco, while her adopted home, held a special place in her heart. She had original paintings by local artists of San Francisco landmarks and photos of the Golden Gate in her home. She loved her City and never moved again. This is the world into which I was born.
I don’t have many photos of her in her later years. She didn’t like having her picture taken, and she was vocal about hating growing old and the aches and pains that plagued her. She was fond of saying “Growing old ain’t for sissies.” Her hair never went salt and pepper, but instead turned perfectly snow-white. Despite her complaints, I found her soft skin and tender hands beautiful. It would appear the adage about mellowing with age doesn’t apply in our family, because grandma certainly didn’t… she had a necklace made of gold that said “Oh Shit” much like some people wear their names. She wore it all the time, and was known to flip people the bird in traffic, her white hair and pink lipstick flashing through the open window of her little blue Volkswagen.
She died in 1999, shortly after David and I were married. I took her surname when David and I divorced, wrapping myself in the safe security I felt with her. It’s another one of a string of sorrows that she never got to meet her first great-grandchild. She would have utterly delighted in the fat, bouncing, redheaded boy I produced. She loved chubby babies, and a redheaded boy would have tickled her pink.
When she died, she had long-prior made all her own arrangements, and didn’t want services of any kind. She wanted her ashes scattered at sea, and the day her boat went out under the Golden Gate Bridge, my mom and brothers and I gathered pink roses and walked out across the bridge. We scattered the bright pink petals to the brisk Pacific winds that sung her to sleep each night, and that finally helped carry her to her final resting place.
Happy birthday, Grandma. I still miss you every day.
p.s. I named my daughter after you. You’d love her, too.
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I understand why this formulation–“If woman X were my daughter/sister/etc., I (as a man) wouldn’t want someone to treat her that way; therefore, treating women that way is wrong”–bothers some people. Men often use the women in their lives to prove a point about women in general, not acknowledging that their daughters/wives/whoever are individuals and don’t necessarily represent women in general. (I see this a lot in Mormonism. “My wife is a very strong woman, and she doesn’t want the priesthood.”) But the problem isn’t men thinking of the women in their lives who are personally important to them and concluding that women in general deserve respect, but men thinking of the women in their lives as the exception: “My women are important. Other women are not.”
I get why it troubles people, men thinking in terms of their women versus other men’s women, even if the conclusion is that all women should be treated with respect. Women are persons in their own right and should be treated with the respect due to any human, regardless of any men they might be related to. But I’m not convinced that all men who reference their daughters/wives/etc. really think in terms of “my women/their women”–not when their conclusion is that all women deserve respect. If all that mattered were the woman’s relationship with some man, the degree to which she deserved respect would depend a great deal on how much deference that man required. But I believe most men who think of their daughters when pondering the treatment of women in general actually are relating to their daughters as people, not some form of (their) property.
Imagine Donald Trump saying, “As the father of a daughter, I’m outraged.” He wouldn’t. His own daughter is the exception. He has said he’d date his daughter if she weren’t his daughter (and I think we can safely take “date” as a euphemism). She’s a person to him only because she’s his; she’s not a reminder to him that women are people.
Maybe it’s not as morally evolved to have to think of one’s daughters and wives before thinking of women in general as people. But it’s much better to have men who bother taking this extra step–“my daughter is a person and she’s a woman; therefore, women are people”–than men who never get to the place where they can empathize with women at all. And I’m not convinced that it is less evolved. Our relationships are a huge part of our humanity. It’s not just men who find their personal relationships helpful for increasing their empathy generally. As a woman, having sons has definitely helped me relate better to men and have more empathy for men in general. It’s not that women who don’t have sons can’t have empathy for men, but for me, this helped. I don’t think that makes me morally inferior. I think it means I’ve evolved as an individual.
As I said to a friend, when the subject is abuse or discrimination against the disabled, I sometimes reference my children with autism. I don’t do it because my autistic children aren’t persons in their own right; it’s only to express why this issue is personal for me. It’s not that I wouldn’t be outraged by such stories if I didn’t have a personal connection. (I mean, I know I was outraged by child abuse before I had children.) The point of mentioning my children is not to appeal to my own authority as a parent, just to express a personal stake in the story. We all have relationships of some kind, and unless we’re sociopaths, our relationships are important to us. So while referencing one’s father(of-daughter)hood can be problematic in some cases, it is not inherently problematic. What matters is the conclusions one draws from that experience.
At one point in my natural-hair life–and I have pictures to prove it–my hair, in the right light, had a sort of coppery sheen to it. So maybe there’s natural redheadedness somewhere in my DNA. (My father had a red mustache, back when he had a mustache. I have never grown a mustache. I can’t tell if either of these factoids is relevant or just an interesting aside.) But that was before I started greying in earnest and back when my natural hair was sometimes exposed to sunlight and also before I became old. Now everything that grows out of my head is grey or mouse brown, but mostly grey.
I’ve been coloring my hair continuously for the last 10 years. Originally I used permanent hair color, but a few years ago I switched to demi-permanent because it is supposed to be less damaging and better for curly hair. My hairstylist sister is a big demi-permanent booster. Unfortunately, you can only go darker than your natural color with demi-permanent, and going darker has, I think, added almost (but not quite) as many years to my face as growing grey did. And dark red looks browner than light red, especially since reds tend to brown as they fade anyway, so I am actually surprised that people still consider me a redhead, natural or otherwise, since my hair looks very un-red to me most of the time.
Also, since my natural hair is mostly grey–especially at the front of my head–the red color looks exceptionally brassy and punk-rockish (a little bit purple) for the first week or so after a touch-up. I didn’t mind this so much initially, but in the last couple of years it’s started to feel undignified. So a few months ago I started doing what you’re supposed to do when applying red color to grey hair, which is dye it brown first. This is a huge pain in the neck, in case you were wondering why I was so willing to live with brassy-purply hair for so many years. I hate doing it. I hated coloring my hair before, when it was only one step. Now that it’s two, it is practically unbearable. Also, as you can imagine, dying the roots brown first also makes the finished hair…extra dark and extra brown and even more un-red. Which defeats the whole purpose, IMO. All of the purposes.
Also, I’m supposed to touch up my roots every 6-8 weeks, but my roots start showing around week 4. Grey roots are slightly less obvious with demi-permanent color because there isn’t this bright line where new hair meets old, but by the time I’ve stretched out the color six weeks, my grey roots are very, very obvious. So while the two-stepping and extra-browning have made me seriously consider returning to permanent hair color, hair damage be damned, the obvious-roots problem remains an issue.
So I am now seriously considering going back to the brassy-purply hair. It is, after all, a temporary effect (before it fades into something normal-looking), and at least it is lighter than the brown-red-but-mostly-brown hair. Also, one step, not two. I am only at four weeks right now, so I have a couple weeks to decide (in case you couldn’t do the math yourself). Sometimes I wonder if I will ever be in a financial position where I wouldn’t feel guilty spending the money to get my hair professionally colored. Probably I should get a job. But probably I should get a job anyway. And now I’m on a topic that depresses me even more than getting old does.
I would really like nothing more than to stop coloring my hair altogether because it is such a pain in the neck–except that the thing I do like more than not coloring my hair is not looking like my husband’s mother. My husband finally looks like he’s in striking distance of my age–mid-thirties at the youngest–and I’m not keen to race ahead of him again in that department. Also, I already look old and haggard with my unnatural hair. I don’t want to think of how old and haggard I would look with the hair that made me look old and haggard at 36.
I’ve already written about how jaw surgery and orthodontia changed my face for (I think) the worse. I don’t regret either, because I’m very happy to be able to breathe and also to keep my teeth, hopefully into my (actual) golden years. But I’m a little too vain to be grateful for things like breath and teeth all the time. I sometimes think I could accept this new face more if I could just have the hair color I deserve.
Of course, no one actually observes a decent mourning period after a mass shooting or any other tragedy, but it’s not because people are too political. It’s because their attention spans are too short. Ideally, we could take a day or two to grieve the dead before we started talking about possible measures to prevent future tragedies. For one thing, it usually takes at least a couple of days to get all of the relevant facts. For another thing, decisions made in the heat of the moment tend toward foolishness. (Think of the anti-terrorism measures taken in the wake of 9/11 and ask yourself how many of them seem like great ideas sixteen years later.) However, Twitter and Facebook are quite right that no one can afford to wait a day or two before putting in their two cents on gun control or whatever because in a day or two we’ll all be talking about something else.
Just by way of illustration–yesterday I saw a bunch of tweets about how useless praying is when it’s gun control we need…along with a bunch of other tweets about how Donald Trump is such an uncultured swine that he doesn’t know how to feed koi properly. Obviously, humans are capable of keeping more than one news story in their consciousness at the same time. Lots of important stuff happens every day. However, Donald Trump dumping a bunch of fish food in a koi pond is not one of them. Even on a slow news day, this story probably should not take up any of our consciousness. For one thing, it turned out that Trump was only doing what Prime Minister Abe had done moments before. For another thing, so the crap what? Twenty-six Americans have been murdered in their church, and there’s still a civil war in Syria, but I’m supposed to care that Donald Trump fed fish, correctly or incorrectly? Is this really page one material? Isn’t a Kardashian pregnant or something?
Yes, there’s also the whole Mueller investigation, but that’s so last week. We’ve all moved on. Five weeks ago 58 people were murdered and 546 injured in Las Vegas, but by the time the next mass shooting happened, we had all moved on. We’d all moved on weeks ago.
Anger is a legitimate response to grief. I understand why people react to a tragedy by expressing anger and frustration. It’s normal to seek someone or something to blame. It’s instinctive. It helps us feel safe. If something could have been prevented, that means we can prevent it from happening again. Of course, not all terrible things can be prevented. We know this intellectually, but it doesn’t stop us from trying–nor should it, really. I mean, I hope not. But we don’t take enough time to figure out why or how something happened, in order to effect actual change. We take enough time to express our outrage at the lack of action–because there’s no time to waste on mere grief without taking action–and then Trump says something stupid, and oh look, a squirrel. Does anyone know what’s happening with bump stocks these days? Have we banned those yet? We definitely haven’t figured out exactly what happened in Vegas (too soon for “what happens in Vegas” jokes), but we do know bump stocks were involved, so what’s the deal there? Does anyone still care, or are bump stocks so October? It’s all about “domestic violence loopholes” now. Until the next mass shooting, of course.
The sad part is that this terrible thing–twenty-six dead at the hands of a guy who was court-martialed for assaulting his wife and fracturing his infant son’s skull (and did a whopping one-year sentence for it)–actually could have been prevented, and under existing law, too. It was already illegal for him to buy a gun, but the Air Force didn’t enter his domestic violence conviction into the data base. Enforcing existing laws isn’t as sexy as making new laws, of course, but it would be an excellent place to start. The very best place, actually, since we don’t even have to get past the evil NRA lobby to do it. But we’ve been failing to enforce gun laws since before Columbine. I’m not holding my breath that anything will change. Not when it’s so much easier to complain that we’ll never have common-sense gun control because ‘Murica. But we’ll always have Donald Trump’s fish-feeding fiasco, in one form or another.
The song I was listening to the other day was Aretha Franklin’s cover of “Eleanor Rigby,” which I do like better than the Beatles’ version, which is still a great record, but I prefer to hear Aretha Franklin sing it. Have a listen and tell me what you think.
Then there’s David Bowie’s cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “It’s Hard to be a Saint in the City.” When I first started buying MP3’s, I couldn’t get a digital version of Bowie singing it, so I bought the Springsteen version, which I had not had previously. And Springsteen’s version is fine–I mean, it’s his song–and it’s really not very different from Bowie’s version, but I think Bowie sings it better, no offense, Bruce.
Before I came fully to terms with my middle-agedness, I only had two Barry Manilow songs on my iPod, and one of them was his cover of Paul Davis’s “I Go Crazy.” I’ve always liked the Paul Davis version. I still like it. I don’t even remember how I came to know about the Barry Manilow version, but I think I just randomly found it, listened to it, and…I don’t know. I don’t know why it’s so good. The differences are subtle, but they make such a difference. Plus, I think I have a strange emotional connection to Barry Manilow that I just can’t explain. He’s like an old friend.
I like Talking Heads quite a lot, but one of their songs I never cared much for was “Burning Down the House,” until I heard Tom Jones sing it. Because who can resist this? You’d have to be dead inside.
Donna Summer’s Cats without Claws was one of my favorite albums back in the ’80s, and I don’t care what anyone else thinks, her version of “There Goes My Baby” is better than the Drifters’ version, don’t @ me.
What are your favorite cover songs?
Historically, I’ve reserved the word hate for politicians like Hugo Chavez and Kim Jong-Il. Really, truly horrible people. I don’t say that I hate U.S. politicians. As bad as some of them are, they’re not murderers or dictators or murdering dictators. I am personally indifferent to most politicians, even the ones I disagree with. Nancy Pelosi, I am indifferent to you. Same with Chuck Schumer. When I do dislike an American politician, it’s not really for their policy positions but more because I find them annoying. I disliked John Edwards because he was smarmy. (Although now that he is out of public life, my dislike has waned. I don’t dislike a man so much when he is down.) I disliked Harry Reid because he seemed like a jerk. I disliked Barbara Boxer because she was an idiot. (She’s probably still an idiot, but I don’t think about her much anymore. She’s still in the Senate, yeah? Just not much in the news anymore, I guess. Trump takes up all the space.)
Trump is in a different category than any of these other U.S. politicians I have actively disliked. It’s really not enough to say I actively dislike him. I kind of hate him. And yet, he’s not a murderer or a dictator. Obviously, he’d like to be a dictator, but lots of people would like to be dictators. He isn’t one because he can’t be one. If he could be, he would, but as I said, so would a lot of people. The point is, he’s still not a murderer. He doesn’t have rape and torture rooms for his enemies. I mean, we really need to keep things in perspective here. But he’s not a good person. In point of fact, he’s a bad person. Should he be roomies with Hitler in hell? Probably not. But he’s still a bad person. He’s a bully. He’s spent years using his power and influence to enrich himself at the expense of others, people who can’t defend themselves. He stokes racial hatred because it gets him attention. He might actually be a racist. He was still calling for the executions of the Central Park Five after they were exonerated. But that may be less because he’s a racist and more because he doesn’t care what’s true or false. He cares only about his ego. He enjoys humiliating people and exerting power over them. He seems to have no control over his emotions, at least none that he chooses to exercise. He’s not above anything. He just does want he wants because he can.
This sort of person can’t be a good leader. He can’t be a leader at all. Leadership is not in his wheelhouse. He’s a provocateur and a demagogue. He’s in this for himself, and not in a cool, lone-wolf, Han Solo way. More like a Jabba the Hutt way, only Jabba was a better businessman.
It was apparent from the beginning that he was unsuited to be President. I honestly don’t understand what his initial supporters were thinking, except that he was a celebrity and Americans do love celebrities. He had a certain magnetism, I guess. I mean, he had the ability to command people’s attention. I imagine that his early thought the same thing as the people who were initially skeptical but eventually endorsed him thought: they thought they could use him. They thought they could use him because they thought they could (somehow) control him. They were fools. If they couldn’t “reign him in” while he was merely a candidate, what made them think they could pull his strings when he was commander-in-chief? “This dude’s out of control, but once he has the nuclear codes, surely he’ll settle down.”
I confess it still baffles me. Maybe it was so obvious to me because it wasn’t my career and life’s work on the line. I don’t know. But whatever was clouding their judgment, the fact remains: Republican politicians fell in line behind Trump because they wouldn’t have been able to continue in the party otherwise. Paul Ryan couldn’t have remained Speaker of the House while opposing his party’s nominee. No one who opposed Trump could hope to get money for re-election. It wasn’t a problem of cowardice but of pride; they thought America couldn’t spare them. What they didn’t foresee was that Trump would prevent them from succeeding at the very jobs they’d sacrificed their dignity and integrity to keep. As I said, they thought they could use him. They didn’t think it would be the other way around. But it was, and it is.
Of course, Trump doesn’t deserve all the blame for the Republican party’s implosion. Trump wouldn’t have won the nomination if the Republicans had made serious efforts in the last, say, twenty years to build a diverse coalition based on common interests. They relied entirely too much on their advantage in various culture war battles and their advantage with white voters. They made no serious efforts to address the concerns of minority voters. This is not to say that no Republican ever tried to court minority votes. Of course, individual Republicans did, but not enough of them, and it was never a party priority, despite the country’s obviously shifting demographics. Well, Democrats over-relied on their advantage with minority voters; as 2016 amply demonstrated, the white vote is still plenty strong. Do Democrats deserve some blame for stoking racial tensions? Sure. But Republicans placed the blame for minority alienation entirely on Democratic/progressive rhetoric and took no responsibility for their failure to sell their policies to all Americans. They also failed to acknowledge where their policies hurt some Americans. (And they crapped all over the Fourth Amendment, but in fairness, everyone was doing that.)
So yeah, the Republicans screwed up, and here’s Trump. Of course, Trump couldn’t have won if the Democrats hadn’t also screwed up. But I’m not here to tell the Democrats what they did wrong. I don’t share the Democrats’ agenda. That’s why I quit being a Democrat. Well, as it turns out, I don’t share the Republicans’ agenda either, which is why I quit being a Republican. I’ve never been a political purist. I’m prepared to compromise on quite a lot. But I don’t share the Democratic vision for America’s future. And I don’t think the Republicans even have a vision for the future. I don’t think they themselves know what they’re trying to do, except maybe to cut taxes—and cutting taxes without cutting spending (which they clearly have no intention of doing) is just fiscally irresponsible. You had one job, Republicans! If you’re not even going to avoid flushing the economy down the toilet, what are you good for?
But back to Trump. Yes, I’m very angry about Trump. I can’t decide who I’m most angry at, though. I’m not angry at Trump himself. As horrible as he is, he’s never pretended to be otherwise. I feel a tremendous personal animus toward him because of what he is, but I’m not angry at him. He does what he gets paid to do. I’m angry at the media for propping him up, but I’m angry at Americans in general for worshiping celebrity in the first place. I’m angry at Democrats and progressives for keeping their outrage at 11 for every single freaking thing Trump does, as though every new thing is just as bad as the last thing and just as bad as the next thing, and the sky is always falling—which it may very well do, but how will we be able to tell that the sky is actually falling when it has been allegedly, continually falling since Trump took office? I mean, I know I said I didn’t want to give you advice, but save something for Act 2, good Lord. But maybe I’m most angry at these Republicans who keep defending Trump and putting party over principle every time, literally no matter how insane it gets. Technically, I’ve washed my hands of you all, but I keep waiting for you to hit rock bottom, and the bottom just keeps moving.
I can’t help wondering what would happen if a bunch of us got together and decided to ignore Pres. Trump for, I dunno, a week. I mean, just pretend he didn’t exist. If everyone just agreed to unfollow him on Twitter and just not pay attention to anything he said and go about our business as though he were an actual toddler throwing a tantrum, not just a grown man acting like one. I wonder if he’d spontaneously combust. I can’t help thinking it would be worth a try. Not that things would be so much better once he was gone. All the problems that led to Trump’s ascendency would still exist. But it would be so very satisfying, just on a personal level.
And no, I’m not complaining about doing the laundry. Doing laundry is one of my few legitimate skills. (It might even be marketable in some contexts.) I’d just like to appreciate the full extent of my talents.
I opened a Twitter account ages ago, but I never used it very much because a) I’m really bad at restricting myself to 140 characters, and b) since it is basically an information firehose, I found it a little overwhelming (and frankly, annoying). I started using it regularly during the 2016 presidential campaign because a) I had a lot of political feels that were finding their way onto my Facebook (honestly, officer, I don’t know how those got there!), which I think is generally a bad idea, but b) I still had a lot of political feels that needed to go someplace, and I figured Twitter would at least restrict me to brief (if entirely too frequent) expressions of said feels.
Why did I not just go back to blogging? Well, I did write some political posts during the campaign (if you were here, you would have seen them), but I found myself getting so apoplectic that I couldn’t write very much that was coherent or lucid or worth reading. (So why did I still think I needed to say anything? Good question, gentle readers. I’ll have to ponder on that some more before I attempt to answer.) So I stuck with retweeting crap on Twitter and the occasional pithy “SIGH” or “WHAT THE ACTUAL HELL?” As you can imagine, it had its reward.
But you can see how 140 characters just isn’t enough for me, right? Not even one of the new, beta 280-character accounts would be sufficient to hold all of my profound and totally smart musings.
So this is the context in which I have returned to this space for the gritty reboot of “I Am the Giraffe,” and by “gritty reboot” I mean that it’s probably going to suck–but, as another middle-aged woman with an unfortunate career trajectory once said, what difference, at this point, does it make?
What really inspired me to dust off the old WordPress login page is this Twitter hashtag #WhyIWrite. I stopped taking myself seriously as a writer a couple years ago. I know. It’s funny because I stopped being a serious writer long before that, but you know the old saying, the unserious writer is always the last to know. But this hashtag gave me some more unpleasant feels, of the non-political variety, because I do miss writing. And the real question for me is not “Why do I write?” but “Why don’t I write?”
I started blogging when my kids were still very young. I think Princess Zurg was six. Mister Bubby was three. Elvis was one. Girlfriend had not yet been thought of, except in the abstract sense of me thinking I might eventually have four children total (but certainly not more than four). I should have been too busy to write, but I found time to write blog posts, almost every day, for a very long time. I don’t remember spending tons of time writing individual blog posts. Which is not to say I wrote short blog posts, but that I basically just typed whatever I was thinking. There was not a lot of editing. Quelle surprise, I know. I don’t remember neglecting the children to accomplish this, and yet I find it so much more difficult to sit down and write a blog post anymore. I think there are a couple of reasons for this. Or maybe three. I dunno, let’s see what happens.
But you know what? I’m tired of not writing. I’m tired of Twitter. Will I still go on Twitter? Of course I will. Like a dog to its vomit. I’m only human. But I’m not doing anything else. Well, laundry. I’m doing laundry. I’m doing the dishes too. Occasionally I even sweep the floor. (And I do mean occasionally. I thought about doing it today, but I’m here instead. Maybe tomorrow.) I run errands. I practice my clogging. I feel like I shouldn’t eat unless I’ve exercised that day. Does not exercising keep me from eating? Absolutely not. But I feel guilty the whole time I’m doing it, and that takes at least 30 percent of the pleasure out of it. But I digress. Where was I? (You haven’t missed this about me, have you?) Oh, yes. I’m not doing anything else. And I’m not apt to do anything better with my time. It would be rad of me to start volunteering and giving back to the community and crap, but I’m not yet that person. (I haven’t given up on the idea that I might be that person someday, but I’m at peace with the fact that I’m not yet that person. Which means I’ll probably never be that person, but I’m not admitting that yet. One deep character flaw confrontation at a time, kids!)
The best thing about blogging, back in the old days, was just putting stuff out there, knowing that anyone on earth could see it and also knowing that probably no one would. I don’t know what was so great about it, except that I kind of miss it. As my readership grew, blogging became more rewarding in many ways, but also more stressful. It’s always more stressful when people expect things of you.
Taking part in the Ann Dee Ellis 8-Minute Memoir Writing Challenge. This is Day Forty-Seven.
I’ve been stuck on this one, letting it drift in and out, and considering skipping it—because I was also stuck on the narrow idea of lapis blue pools surrounded by concrete, and my general distaste for the sting of chlorine in my nose, and the itch of my skin post commercial swim. Then I realized I was looking at it wrong.
I dont hate swimming, but I am not a creature of the water. If you pull my real astrological chart and look at the math, I am all air and fire. When you add water you get a swamp. It’s not my thing. But I can appreciate it for what it is.
When I imagine hell, it’s deep and watery and dark; not the classical burning and brimstone of Dante. And I may never forgive Steven Peck for making a library so terrifying, but that’s another story for another day.
My best recollection of swimming is as follows:
There was no moon. Despite deep nightfall, the surface of the black lake was balmy and warm and as I lowered myself silently into the silky darkness, the water cooler the deeper my legs slipped, and my breath caught in my chest. Slick plants tickled my ankles as I pushed away from the worn wooden dock, still holding heat of the August day. Acrid smoke from forrest fires hung heavy in the air, carried on the evening breezes away from the lake, but making the air pungent with cedar and off-season holidays.
Pushing gently further from the dock, I slipped the floating tube under myself and laid back into the embrace of the water. The sky above was inky, but the show was supposed to start soon. My eyes closed, the rolling edge of the lake tickled my neck and I breathed in the silence.
I was waiting on the Perseid Meteor shower. Peacefully and and deeply content, I floated alone on the vast still lake. Silently the meteors began to rain down, the only light in the deep black summer skies. I imagine them reflected in my eyes, and wondered what things the world had in store for me. I felt magical- like God put on this show just for me, while everyone else slept. Everything was possible.
]]>Lead editor, Mark Ashurst-McGee, gives an overview of the period for the volume.
Documents 6 is an especially important volume in the Documents series, covering the period where the Saints exit Kirtland and establish Far West, Missouri. There is an explosion of revelation during this 1838–1839 period and of course, the Mormon–Missouri War is represented in the volume, along with Danites, Hawn’s Mill, Crooked River, Liberty Jail, and the exodus to Commerce, Illinois. Take a look as the editors give more details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjLTIocks0c&feature=em-subs_digest
]]>Summarizing and expanding a bit here. Responsibility profiles for the PB have varied. In the 1970s they became more deeply connected with the Church’s youth organizations. Eventually that role was withdrawn and they now function in supervising Church business matters including real estate, commercial corporate interests, humanitarian operations, etc. though at present the Presiding Bishop sits on the Church PEC, hence he is a discussion partner in youth issues.[1]
Presiding Bishop Victor L. Brown in 1973: What *is* Melchizedek Priesthood MIA? Does anyone really know?
It’s commonly proposed (similar to what was discussed in part 3 of this post relative to D&C 68 and D&C 107) that the PB is the body that can adjudicate a disciplinary case involving a Church President (or possibly a counselor in the First Presidency – though that is less clear). This is false in the sense that it never did nor does it now exist as a revelatory paradigm. When D&C 107 was incorporated in the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants (as section 3), there was no PB, much less when the November 11, 1831 revelation was delivered. Only local bishops (twice) ever sat in judgement on a First Presidency member and revelations delivered in January 1838 (and canonized shortly after in Missouri) revoked that process and moved it to multi-local one (every stake had to hold a trial and majority rules. It was more complex than that though.) The current philosophy (Wilford Woodruff was point man here, though he followed somewhat similar claims from BY and even JS) is that God will simply cause the death of a rogue president. In reality, barring death, a rogue president — hardly a likely scenario, would find it hard to get away with much. President Kimball for example, while convinced that priesthood restriction had to go, took a considerable period before broaching the subject to other leaders. Consensus is key.[2]
PB members have never been subject to fixed retirement schedules. While the Seventy in the general quorums are usually released from service by age 70, some members of a previous PB exceeded that age by a substantial margin. A previous PB consisted of Harold David Burton (age 74), Richard Crockett Edgley (age 77) and Keith Brigham McMullin (age 71). [Ages approximate at release, March 2012.] The current PB is Gerald Causse, Dean M. Davies, W. Christopher Waddell.
Current Church literature declares that the Presiding Bishop has the “keys of the Aaronic Priesthood” (all ward bishops have these keys according to the most recent handbook of instructions). Ward bishops function per D&C 107 as president of a quorum, the priests quorum. Since the PB has no quorum, there is a slight terminological problem I suppose. There’s a lot more fun there, given various explanations of the word over the last thirty years. That goes beyond the scope of this stuff.
The PB has always exercised considerable authority in financial matters and bishops in general have the same charge. The interface between the PB (in this role) and other Church leaders has had its interesting moments. During Joseph Smith’s and Sidney Rigdon’s first visit to Missouri in 1831, the bishop (Partridge) was in charge of providing transport for their return trip along with other traveling companions. Partridge bought canoes for the party and Rigdon never forgave him for his cheaping out (Rigdon’s canoe capsized and he nearly drowned along with some of the others — budding dissenter Ezra Booth who was along for the ride used the incident to poke fun at Sidney and Joseph).
PB Sylvester Q. Cannon. Stonewalled J. Reuben Clark over public assistance. They fixed him. Made him an apostle.
Since the organization of general authority seventies quorums and the shrinkage in the number of general conference sessions (PB members usually spoke in general welfare sessions before those ceased) conference speech time has become a premium. It is rare for more than one member of the PB to speak in a general conference but at least one gets the nod at each conference in recent years.
PB members who spoke in a given April or October conference since 2007.
2007 April (Burton and McMullin)
2007 October (Edgley)
2008 April (Burton)
2008 October (McMullin)
2009 April (Edgley)
2009 October (Burton)
2010 April (McMullin)
2010 October (Edgley)
2011 April (Burton)
2011 October (McMullin)
2012 April (Edgley -previously released in March 2012)
2012 October (Stevenson)
2013 April (Davies)
2013 October (Causse)
2014 April (Stevenson)
2014 October (Davies)
2015 April (Causse)
2015 October (Stevenson -released, made an apostle)
2016 April (Waddell)
2016 October (Davies)
2017 April (Causse)
So at least from October 2007 to April 2017, one member of the PB has spoken in General Conference. Moreover, the ordering has been predictable. This October, it looks like Bishop Waddell is up to bat. The conference topics of PB members have not been restricted to welfare or other temporal issues. The first bishops were temporal ministers seen as part of the New Testament’s dictum to seek after and care for the poor, an emphasis augmented by Joseph Smith’s revisions and additions to biblical texts and early revelations. The office evolved to temporal/financial duties and a spiritual ministry — bishops keep the doors of the temple (and Church employment) and oversee the first ecclesial level of Church administration. The bishoprics gradually assumed much of the duties and responsibilities of early Melchizedek Priesthood quorums and became the exclusive first line of Church discipline. Local bishoprics were key players in the coming of correlation. That is just too much to get into here. The Presiding Bishopric actually had a less radical change spectrum and have never been associated with the title “presiding high priest.”[4]
The Presiding Bishopric. An office born out of revelation, expanded and focused by necessity.[5]
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[1] The PB has always had some role in Aaronic Priesthood issues. The role seems less evident now than in the past. For example, in 1960s, Aaronic Priesthood matters in local units were to be taken directly to the PB. Present Church handbooks don’t mention the Presiding Bishopric much beyond a few financial issues. At the beginning of the 20th century, the Presiding Bishop was still a regular speaker in the general priesthood session of general conference. Minutes of these sessions show the PB addressing the training of young AP holders. In terms of recent years, you may have observed Bishop Burton on the stand at the recent general YW meeting.
[2] See Edward Kimball’s recent biography of President Kimball (you should read the CD version that comes with the book).
[3] The First Council of Seventy didn’t get much face time in general conference until the 1890s. The somewhat earlier expansion of the recorded public speaking corps had much to do with the Raid. The FCS was chronologically ahead of the PB in local Church administration by ten years or so. These days, a GA is a GA is a GA.
[4] Early priesthood quorums had responsibility for discipline of quorum members in terms of their ability to function as priesthood holders and even on occasion, Church membership. A return of those days would make for fun stuff. Correlation might be good for uniformity, but it removed a lot of distributed power and responsibility. Easier for upper level control though.
[5] One very important topic I have not explored is the relationship between the PB and the Relief Society, which was also in the business of temporal ministry. With correlation, RS assets came under the PB’s control. Another topic skirted here: Gentiles! A complex relationship existed with Utah gentiles and the PB.
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