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News to Me

Bonnie L. Casey — Fri, 25 May 2012 12:09:40 GMT

On a Wednesday morning in 1965, our teacher, Mr. Anderson, was pacing up and down between the rows of desks in the eighth-grade classroom of our Christian school. We were starting our weekly Missionary Volunteer meeting as we always did by singing several selections from Happy Songs for Boys and Girls, accompanied on a battered upright piano by one of the girls who could sight-read, a skill that had eluded me to my everlasting relief. On this particular Wednesday, Mr. Anderson halted in the vicinity of my desk, standing just behind my right shoulder until the final notes of “The Golden Morning” had drifted out the open windows into the dusty California sunlight.

I liked Mr. Anderson, who was young and energetic and worked hard to make lessons interesting. Unlike other male teachers I’d had, he was never creepy with the girls, so his stopping beside my desk set off no internal alarms, just a mild curiosity. Was my shoelace untied? Had I forgotten that I was milk monitor this week? After a brief pause, instead of announcing, “Now turn to page 63,” Mr. Anderson bent toward my ear and whispered, “You’ll be doing a solo next Wednesday for special music. You have a nice singing voice.” This was news to me.

In 1965, Petula Clark’s “Downtown” was the #1 hit single on Billboard. The Temptations’ “My Girl” was the #1 Motown hit. Simon and Garfunkel recorded “The Sounds of Silence,” The Animals appeared four times on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” and Keith Richards and Mick Jagger were working out the opening guitar riffs of “Satisfaction.” God-fearing parents were taking futile steps to prevent their children from listening to the Beatles, whom the Queen of England that year dubbed Members of the British Empire. My feeble act of adolescent rebellion was to hide a transistor radio under my pillow at night, maintaining muffled contact with pop culture and the outside world via KJOY, “1280 on your AM dial.” But while I knew all the words to all the songs by everyone from Herman’s Hermits to Chad and Jeremy, my heart belonged to Peter, Paul and Mary, those paragons of 1960s folk music. My parents approved of them and bought me all their albums. Most days after school, in my bedroom concert hall, Peter, Paul and Mary and Bonnie would perform classics such as “If I Had a Hammer” and “Puff (The Magic Dragon).” I loved Mary Travers’ soulful voice and tried to mimic her style—her rapid vibrato and oblique entrance on certain notes. I thought I might be starting to sound like a real folk singer, but had no confirmation until that Wednesday morning when Mr. Anderson got snoopy.

At the Christian high school I later attended, I sang second soprano in the chorale, and sometimes Mr. Winn, our director, would give me a solo part. But my father, whose overheated ambitions for me had so far resulted in piano lessons, drawing lessons, and even bowling lessons, was never happy to leave well enough alone. He decided that if I was going to sing I must have singing lessons. So he engaged Mr. Winn to give me some vocal polish, no doubt hoping to fulfill his ardent desire that I would someday appear alongside the Lennon Sisters on “The Lawrence Welk Show.” Thankfully, Mr. Winn, to whom I am deeply indebted, had a pure soul that saw beyond my father’s wallet. After just two sessions in his studio, he turned from the piano and said kindly, “Bonnie, I don’t think you should take any more lessons from me. You don’t really have the pipes to be a classical singer. You have a sweet, folk-style voice that comes naturally to you. I could train it out of you, but I believe I’d be doing you a disservice. Keep doing what you’re doing and be happy.” I left with a satisfying vision of my dad’s Janet Lennon fantasy popping like a champagne bubble.

After graduation I was so anxious to leave home that I enrolled in summer classes at Pacific Union College, a Seventh-day Adventist institution two hours away in the hills above Napa Valley. Until the dorms opened in the fall, I boarded with my uncle and his family, who lived near campus. One afternoon, just days after I moved in, my cousin Steve met me at the front door with a guitar slung over his shoulder. Forgoing any formalities, he grinned at me and announced, “You’re going to be in a singing group with me and another guy.” Again, it was news to me.

For the next two years the college public relations office employed Take Three, as we called ourselves, as the face of PUC, student ambassadors sent out on weekends to recruit new students and impress alumni. Our program in those first years was a blend of popular folk songs and traditional ballads in the style of (who else?) Peter, Paul and Mary. We played Adventist college and high school auditoriums, won grand prize at the Fresno Community Talent Show, and once even provided half-time entertainment at a beauty pageant. It was terrific fun. I often arrived at a distant venue with laryngitis from laughing so much during the car trip.

In the summer of 1972, PUC recruited Take Three, now consisting of Steve Wallace, Lauren Smith, and me, with Ed Wright on double bass, as part of a team that crisscrossed California doing Christian outreach and public relations for the college. Almost overnight we needed a full program of gospel music. We thought briefly about covering old standards, until we discovered that two of us had written several gospel songs on our own. We started rehearsing the ones we’d already composed and turned our energies to writing even more. At the end of that summer we recorded our first album in a modest church sanctuary connected by cables to a mobile engineering studio parked outside. Two years later we released our second and last album as Take Three.

After college, with record sales still strong and requests for concerts still frequent, Lauren and I joined with our friend Roger Stebner to produce an album of more original songs and some traditional gospel favorites. In our final musical transformation in the late 1970s, Lauren and I teamed up with cousins Ron and Greg Evans as Bonnie Casey & Daystar to produce one last album of new and old gospel music in the tradition of Take Three, but with an updated sound.

This brief synopsis does nothing to capture what singing meant to me during those years. All along, I was incredibly fortunate to have the support of people who believed in me, and to share the road and the stage with young men who gave their friendship and musicianship with open hearts and hands. Nor can I describe what a privilege it was to bring hope and happiness to people merely by doing what I loved to do. Once in a while some dear old fundamentalist would rush to the foot of the stage after a concert to wag his finger in our faces and denounce us for playing “the Devil’s music,” or to scold me for swaying my hips or tapping my foot as I sang. (I noticed, though, that none of these scandalized saints ever left during the intermission.) Most people were eager to tell us that our music had touched their hearts, or just made them feel good about their faith. Each time I heard this I was overwhelmed with gratitude, since I felt that I was the one doing all the receiving.

In those days, when my voice was in top form, the act of singing could approach a peak experience. Some people asked why I usually sang with my eyes closed. I suspect they thought it was an affectation, but for me it was a way to “enter” my voice. Words are inadequate here, but when I shut out my surroundings my consciousness turned inward. I was aware of nothing but a desire to fully experience the passage of air through my vocal cords. With my eyes closed, I could “see” the music moving through me out into the space beyond. When the last note died away and the audience responded, my awareness would snap back into the present, as though returning from a deep meditation. Nothing in my life has ever given me that same feeling of perfect control and perfect transport.

By 1981, the members of Bonnie Casey & Daystar were starting marriages and careers, and had separated geographically. There was no farewell concert or official disbanding. We just turned down so many requests for concerts that the requests gradually stopped coming. People often asked me why I stopped singing. Sometimes the question sounded like an accusation, as though having done a particular thing well I was obligated to keep doing it in perpetuity. It was never clear, however, who I was obligated to—God or record sales. I did miss singing now and then. I missed the exhilarating high of audience approval and the inner flight of those peak experiences. But my life had turned in a different direction, and instead of living in regret or fruitlessly trying to replicate the past, I offered up my gratitude for an amazing ride and embraced the challenges of the present.

There was another factor in play, however, that had nothing to do with high-minded resolutions. The truth is that a few years after the concerts stopped, I simply lost the ability to sing. In my last solo performances, nearly two decades ago, I had to struggle to produce a clear sound, or even to stay on pitch. The bell-like tone and vocal control that used to come so easily to me gradually disappeared. These days, I can’t even count on a clear speaking voice from one day to the next. One could argue that, like any muscle, a voice needs exercise to stay in shape, and that with hard work and good coaching I could restore my singing voice. On the other hand, fibromyalgia, a chronic condition of widespread muscular pain that I have dealt with all my life, can also affect the larynx. I’ve noted sadly that as my fibromyalgia symptoms have increased, my vocal clarity has declined. Whatever the source of the problem, when I stopped singing I made a choice to channel my creative energies in new directions—especially into writing, which I think of as singing in a new voice.

That should have been the end of the story of Take Three and Bonnie Casey & Daystar, with cassettes and 8-tracks moldering in attics and dinged-up records discounted at garage sales. But email and the Internet have unexpected powers of resurrection. A few years into the new millennium I began receiving a trickle of emails from old fans wanting to know if my music was still available—a trickle that turned into a steady stream after I published a memoir and started blogging. At first I responded with personalized messages of thanks and regrets, for our music had been out of print since the early ‘90s. But as the number of these entreaties increased, and I started sending boilerplate replies to “Dear [fill in the blank],” I realized two things: a) I was getting really tired of repeating myself, and b) there was clearly still a demand for those four old records. Why, I wondered, didn’t somebody in a position to do something about it start reissuing our albums in updated formats? The trouble was, as a little investigating soon revealed, the copyrights and publishing rights to those albums were now held by people and entities located in two western states and remote regions of Eastern Europe. I asked around, but no one in their right mind wanted to take up the legal, financial, and practical challenges involved in getting all those far-flung ducks to paddle in a row.

But lo, the wonders of incipient dementia! Just days after I turned 60 a pesky little fire ignited under my backside and a voice in my head said, “Oh, just do it yourself!” Skirting the implications of hearing voices, and sparing you the nitty-gritties, I will say only that, in less than three months, with considerable assistance from a savvy business partner and a big-hearted legal advisor, I had acquired all the rights necessary to reissue those four record albums as CDs and mp3 downloads. This new business venture, incorporated as Dryad Music, LLC, is in the process of getting a logo, a home page, and a web page dedicated to the music of Take Three and Bonnie Casey & Daystar, from which people will be able to order individual CDs or complete sets, and download albums or single songs onto their mp3 players or smart phones. All four albums have been digitally remastered to remove the pops and crackles inherent to vinyl, and their original covers have been vividly reproduced.

Getting this project off the ground has been a rewarding and exhausting adventure. If someone had suggested to me a year ago that learning a completely new skill set was an excellent recipe for juicing up one’s Wisdom Years, I would have laughed and said, “Well, that’s news to me.” But here I am, asking that you check Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Bonnie-Casey-Take-Three/179580998830468?ref=ts) (and to “Like” us if you’re so inclined) for news of Dryad Music’s launch of its Bonnie Casey/Take Three web page sometime in June.

I’m truly amazed that, after nearly four decades, the songs that expressed the heartfelt yearnings of a few young seekers are still cherished and sought after. I’m thrilled to be able to make this music available once again to loyal fans and, I hope, to a new generation who can appreciate a unique musical expression of faith.

Hope for the Past

Bonnie L. Casey — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 13:51:40 GMT

Every now and then my favorite bluegrass station (http://bluegrasscountry.org/) plays a song called “Ain’t No Future in the Past.” I love bluegrass for its authenticity, musicianship, and unapologetic blend of banjo and bathos. Sometimes the naked heartbreak in a song is so over the top it risks careening into comedy, as in “Nothin’ But the Curtains Waved Goodbye.” It’s easy to think of a title like “Ain’t No Future in the Past” as merely an excuse for some sardonic word play, but the underlying message was timely for me this month. Hearing it again on the radio made me realize that, while the wisdom of living in the moment and not letting your personal history dictate the outcome of your whole life is sound, at times there’s much to be gained from a mindful rummage through the past.

Last month the UPS man delivered a battered little cardboard suitcase with an embossed covering resembling alligator skin. The lid was taped shut with multiple layers of shiny package tape, with a narrow slit left for the handle to poke through. It was mailed to me by a cousin who had been storing it unopened for years, and contained some personal possessions that nursing home staff had collected from our grandmother’s room when she died there in 1987. Knowing my interest in family history, the cousin had asked if I wanted to take responsibility for the contents of the little suitcase. I said I’d be happy to. Still, after the suitcase arrived it sat undisturbed in a corner of my bedroom for more than a week. I eyed it with a mixture of curiosity and dread as I sidestepped it to get to my closet. I had no idea what it contained, but I figured whatever was inside would stir family-related memories and emotions that had lain dormant for a quarter of a century. Unless you’re a sucker for abuse, it takes some preparation to willingly inflict what Evelyn Waugh called “a blow upon a bruise” (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1114934/).

I know little about my maternal grandmother’s early life, but what I do know is intriguing. Bessie was a native Californian who grew up near Santa Rosa. She was daughter number eleven in a brood of thirteen girls (a brother, born late to the family, lived only a few weeks, possibly expiring from sheer trepidation). Bessie’s father was a circuit-riding minister, at least part-time, known to his scattered congregants as Father Yeager. He trained my grandmother as a marksman, and family legend claims his wife had Cherokee blood. Bessie had clear memories of standing on a hilltop with her family on an evening in April 1906, watching the lurid glow on the southern horizon cast skyward by the flames consuming San Francisco on the night of the great earthquake.

Bessie had three children of her own (and at least one miscarriage) and fostered scores of other people’s children to supplement her family’s income. She and my grandfather were living next door to my parents when I was born in Southern California, and they moved north to Lodi when my father established his dental practice there. I don’t remember a time when I couldn’t visit Grandma by just walking across my back yard. She was a constant, stabilizing presence in my unstable childhood, always glad to see me, always ready to hug me, feed me, or let me use her home as a safe house during my parents’ violent altercations. She reserved a little patch of ground in her yard for me to grow pansies in the spring, right next to her beloved rose bushes. I would tag along as she dead-headed her roses, and would gasp, “Oh, Grandma!” whenever she popped a handful of rose petals into her mouth and chewed them up. She finally talked me into eating a large pink petal. I can still feel its silkiness on my tongue and taste the delicate rose attar at the back of my throat.

Bessie was a superlative baker, which made up for her appalling cooking skills. In her kitchen all comestibles submitted to her three-step process: 1) cover with water, 2) cook on high heat until the water boils off, 3) scrape from the bottom of the pan and serve. But give Bessie yeast and flour and she made magic. There always seemed to be a gigantic earthenware bowl covered with a dish towel on top of the drier in her steamy laundry room, from which wafted the rich aroma of whole wheat under the influence of happily fermenting yeast. I can still picture her, caked in flour to the elbows, vigorously kneading a lump of dough in a rhythmic rocking motion. When your childhood is infused with the scent of freshly baked wheat bread, the one piece of Scripture you never question is “I am the bread of life.”

When Bessie wasn’t baking our bread she was sewing our clothes—school clothes, church clothes, play clothes, even winter coats. They always fit and they never wore out. I usually got to choose the fabrics and patterns I liked, but Bessie had her own notions of accessorizing. She was convinced that any garment was improved by a row of decorative buttons or a ruffled flounce, and there was always room for one band of rick rack—or two or three. When I broke my arm and had to wear a plaster cast for six weeks, she made me a new church dress out of pink and white striped polished cotton, then made a matching sling for my cast. I know for a fact that at least one of my little friends asked her momma if she could break her arm too.

Bessie had a streak of vanity and loved to be admired, but she was blessedly free of moods. She did her work and cared for her children without complaint, even when her hearing dimmed, her knees gave out, and she developed an alarming tendency to set accidental house fires. She just laughed, shrugged her shoulders, and went on humming a wobbly tune, soldiering through her appointed rounds on her thick bandy legs, secure in the love of God and family.

Grandma was devoted to all of her children and grandchildren, but it was my siblings and me, her daughter’s children, for whom she was a constant presence and whom she helped to raise. Which is why I found the contents of her little cardboard suitcase, the remnants of her last dementia-clouded years in a nursing home, so disturbing. Aside from a few framed photographs of my uncle (her only surviving son) and his children and grandchildren, the suitcase held a jumble of papers, much of it trash—old church magazines, junk mail, even letters belonging to another resident of the home, tossed in with my grandmother’s things by indifferent staff tasked with hastily readying her room for a new tenant. The rest consisted of cards and letters. Before reading them all, I sorted them into two piles, one for my mother’s family and one for my uncle’s family. My uncle and his wife wrote frequent, newsy letters expressing their love and concern and offering vignettes of their life in Africa, where they were serving as missionaries. It’s doubtful that Bessie’s mind could grasp many of the details, but I was captivated by these accounts of my relatives’ life in Rwanda in the early 1980s, just before the devastating revolution. There were letters and seasonal cards from my grown cousins as well, who wrote less frequently than their parents, but often enclosed photos of adorable great-grandchildren. They did this with full knowledge that Bessie might not recognize the faces in the photos. Their signatures were accompanied by full explanations: “…with love from your grand-daughter, Elton’s daughter.”

The other stack, representing my side of the family, was much smaller and consisted mostly of letters from my mother—letters with uncharacteristically candid confessions of love and gratitude for Bessie, along with countless excuses for why she could not come for a visit. Besides these notes from my mother, there was one Christmas card apiece from me, my brother, and my sister. I could hardly believe it. In her last years, I had sent my beloved grandmother one measly Christmas card. I leaned against the foot of my bed, surrounded by these dry remnants of a good and dutiful life, and cried tears of sadness and shame. What had happened to me to make me forget, or run away from, a bond of love that had sustained me well into adulthood? How had I allowed myself to ignore the simplest acts of kindness toward someone who had so selflessly nurtured me?

It was painful, but not difficult, to recall the circumstances of my life then that would account for such neglect. In the late ‘70s I was 600 miles away from Bessie’s nursing home, working as a college instructor and supporting my husband through his doctoral studies. Our work consumed evenings and weekends and left us with less than $100 in the bank between paychecks. A road trip was out of the question, and Bessie was too deaf and senile by then to warrant a long-distance phone call. I was struggling with serious clinical depression and barely holding the frayed seams of my own life together. Then in 1981, I moved to Maryland, putting an entire continent between me and Bessie. None of this excuses my lack of regular correspondence with someone for whom a cheap card could be the highlight of the day. I simply dropped the ball.

I can’t go back and do what I should have done, things that, from youth or self-absorption, I was unable to do then. But this is the point, at the confluence of guilt and helplessness, where hope for the past can offer a form of redemption. I have no convictions about what Bessie may be conscious of on “the other side,” merely hopes and intuitions that sustain a kind of faith. I’m confident she has forgiven my late neglect, and hope that she is gratified by the many things I have done in recent years to honor the life she lived and shared with me. In my memoir, Growing in Circles, (http://www.bonnielcasey.com/GrowingInCircles.aspx), I wrote about how she and my paternal grandmother anchored my young life and gave me my only taste of unconditional love. I have told stories about her and honored her life during council sharing in my Sacred Circle. Three photographs of Bessie are on display in my home. I often stop in front of one of them to express my love and gratitude, or just tell her about my day. Each night, the last thing I see before going to sleep is a faded but elegant studio portrait of my grandmother and her twelve sisters, whose names I have taught myself to recite from memory: Susan, Maude, Elfleda, Frances, Birdie, Daisy, Alda, Belle, Mary, Ruth, Bessie, Marguerite, and Norma. These sisters form a major current in the river of ancestors that carried me into the present and links me to the past.

I’m deeply sorry that my attention drifted from my grandmother as she declined into dementia and death. It was not the work of my better self. But I hope that the love I keep alive for her and the honor I pay to her memory will help to transform my past mistakes into something I can bear. As David Ray wrote in his poem, “Thanks, Robert Frost” (http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2007/01/31):

Do you have hope for the future? 

someone asked Robert Frost, toward the end. 

Yes, and even for the past, he replied, 

that it will turn out to have been all right 

for what it was, something we can accept, 

mistakes made by the selves we had to be, 

not able to be, perhaps, what we wished, 

or what looking back half the time it seems 

we could so easily have been, or ought... 

The future, yes, and even for the past, 

that it will become something we can bear….

Battle for the Belly

Bonnie L. Casey — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 17:22:45 GMT

In the spring of 1987 I was five months pregnant. It was the perfect time of year to be in the most enjoyable interval of gestation—after the puking and before the hemorrhoids. My belly had swelled to a nice ripe roundness. It was big enough that strangers no longer had to guess whether I was pregnant or just fat, but I could still see my feet. I was happily awash in a marinade of hormones that filled me with an utterly unfamiliar sense of well-being. I felt as though I had invented maternity, that the Earth was bursting into bloom in sympathetic harmony with my own fecundity. I felt like a goddess!

In our collective unconscious, the womb is the most primal and profound metaphor for fertility, life, generative power, and sustenance. It is the archetype of the mysterious, sacred Source. No wonder, then, that in the pre-Christian Celtic calendar, early spring was called Imbolc (pronounced IM-bulk or IM-ulg), an old Irish Gaelic word meaning “in the belly.” In early spring, the Earth itself is pregnant with new life, like the ewes beginning to lactate ahead of spring lambing (Imbolc is sometimes translated as “ewe’s milk”). The old Anglo-Saxon calendar’s equivalent of April was “Eosturmonath” (Eostre month). The historian Bede wrote that this month was named in honor of Eostre, goddess of spring fecundity whose name, according to many sources, is linguistically linked with Easter, estrus, and estrogen.

Long before there was a clear understanding of the male’s role in reproduction, the female womb was venerated as the source of life. In many cultures’ creation stories, the entire universe sprang from the womb of the Great Mother. A few species of animals actually do reproduce asexually by way of parthenogenesis (a word derived from Greek roots meaning “virgin birth”), wherein the male is completely superfluous. The female simply self-replicates, almost always producing daughters only. As Natalie Angier writes in Woman: An Intimate Geography (http://www.natalieangier.com/main.php?id=woman), “Parthenogenesis is not a terribly common strategy, but it occurs. In fact, it tends to appear and disappear over evolutionary time. A species that once was a sexually reproducing one, requiring the existence of males and females, will for any number of reasons lose the male and turn parthenogenetic. In other cases, a parthenogenetic species will discover the benefits of having a fellow around… In either evolutionary scenario, males come and males go, but the female remains. There is no species where there is no female. The female, the great Mother, is never lost.”

Well, maybe not biologically, but the Great Mother has certainly been banished from religious and political discourse thanks to the historical rise of monotheism and its partner, patriarchy. Virtually all human societies have had a religion of some sort, usually focused on a hodge-podge of male and female deities. But as historian Gerda Lerner points out (http://www.amazon.com/Creation-Patriarchy-Women-History/dp/0195051858), the rise of patriarchy that accompanied the triumph of monotheism created a shift in the balance of power. The Mother Goddess was first demoted then banished altogether, and her generative powers were transferred to a male God who created without the need for a female. As Angier writes, with the advent of monotheism, “the goddess is banished from the tabernacle…. In Genesis we see the ultimate pact between males, Yahweh and Adam, to expropriate female procreative power. Adam agrees to honor a monotheistic vision, stripped of the Goddess, and Adam in turn wins the right to name Eve and thus to give symbolic birth to her, and so to be the mother to the mother of us all, and so by rights to own the products of her womb.”

And lest you assume, dear reader, that this struggle was played out long ago in the dusty annals of history and bears no relation to the here and now, let me draw your attention to the Battle for the Belly being waged in this Year of Our Presidential Election 2012. The Obama administration is trying to get insurance companies to cover the cost of birth control for women, a move that in some quarters is seen as the first salvo of Armageddon. Never mind that insurance companies routinely cover the cost of Viagra, women’s claim to the same right to have sex whenever they choose, without fear of pregnancy, is deemed the opening wedge in the Crack of Doom. Many conservative voices are trying to turn the debate into a dire attack on religious freedom, which has never been under less threat in all of American history. They argue that a religious institution’s insurance company should not have to pay for birth control methods that could result in the expulsion of a fertilized ovum, because that would be a violation of moral conscience. Fair enough, but there is no evidence that these same religious institutions object to coverage for Viagra, even though it could be used to commit adultery.

In recent weeks we’ve been treated to the sight of ovary-free panels of “experts” debating the pros and cons of female contraception. Some of the men who seek to lead this country, or at least influence public opinion, have also weighed in. The free exchange of ideas is a human right, protected by our Constitution, and as a proud gyno-American I welcome informed debate on critical issues—“informed” being the operative word here. Because, as it turns out, some of the most influential voices sounding off on the subject of female contraception don’t have a grasp of the most basic facts.

When I was a kid, my father would entertain us at Thanksgiving dinner with this good-natured exchange with my grandfather, an immigrant from England:

“Hey, Pop, want some pumpkin pie.”

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

“Don’t like it.”

“Have you ever tried it, Pop?”

“Nope.”

“Then how do you know you don’t like it?”

“We di’n’t ‘ave it in Cornwall.”

In a similar vein, some conservative male leaders apparently don’t know what birth control is used for or how it works. They just know they don’t like it.

After Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke testified before a congressional panel, arguing that birth control pills should be covered by her university’s private insurance company (not by taxpayer dollars, as some of the loudest critics have alleged), she faced a barrage of abuse from radio pundit Rush Limbaugh. He called her a slut and a prostitute and demanded that she post sex tapes of herself on the Internet as a fair exchange for his tax dollars (see above). He expressed outrage that Ms. Fluke was “having so much sex,” for which she required “so many birth control pills,” that the cost of contraception was overwhelming her budget.

Oh, where does one begin? Perhaps with the fact that Rush clearly neither listened to nor read Ms. Fluke’s actual testimony, which bore no resemblance to Rush’s rendition. Or maybe with the bizarre fact that this grown man who has had four wives doesn’t know how the Pill works. Unlike condoms or Viagra, the Pill does not have to be deployed every time one has sex. A woman takes one pill a day whether she’s a nymphomaniac or a cloistered nun. And why, you might ask, would a woman who never engages in sex need to take the Pill? Because hormonal birth control pills are prescribed not only to prevent pregnancy but to treat an array of female health problems that arise from hormonal imbalances and that affect women’s overall health and productivity and therefore—drum roll, please—the economy!

Mitt Romney, father of five sons, appears also to have an alarmingly loose grasp of basic facts about issues he seeks to wield enormous influence over. At a town hall meeting in Sioux City, Iowa, a woman questioned Romney’s stated support for a Senate amendment defining life as beginning at conception. The woman said she was concerned that such an amendment would effectively ban hormonal birth control, which is what more than 80% of women who use birth control rely on. Romney replied that he wasn’t against birth control, because “life begins at conception; birth control prevents conception.” Not exactly, Mitt. A barrier method such as a diaphragm prevents conception, but hormonal birth control methods prevent the implantation in the uterus of an egg that becomes fertilized in the fallopian tubes. This is basic physiology available in high school textbooks and on Wikipedia. The law Mitt supports would not only indirectly ban the most widely used form of birth control, it would also make IUDs illegal and could theoretically make every miscarriage subject to criminal investigation. If Mitt had daughters, is that really the future he would want for them?

Rick Santorum, father of seven, also supports making “life begins at conception” a matter not just of morality, ethics, or faith, but of law. He has stated publicly that a woman or girl who becomes pregnant after being raped by a stranger, her date, or her creepy uncle should accept any resulting fetus as a “gift” from God, failing to explain why God can’t just give the gift of protection from rape in the first place. No matter where you stand on the issue of abortion, you have to wonder about a man who would draw the boundaries of the limited, unobtrusive government he seeks to establish as nevertheless encompassing every American female’s womb.

Especially in early spring, I dream wistfully of a world where the Great Mother had not been banished from the public imagination and discourse, where Christianity had found room in its three-person pantheon for the Female Principal. Perhaps then we wouldn’t be having these uninformed debates and vicious power plays. As things stand, if such arrogant, ill-informed men have their way, they could forge a nation that would be forced to spend its treasure building new prisons to house countless numbers of doctors, pharmacists, teenage girls, single women, and mothers. A nation where Uncle Sam wields a speculum.

Sandra Fluke’s testimony:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwWNh_4QAAk

Rush Limbaugh’s attack on Sandra Fluke:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jfb9f7yFYgw

Mitt Romney on contraception:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jfb9f7yFYgw

Rick Santorum on rape and abortion:

http://piedtype.com/2012/01/23/santorum-raped-pregnant-its-a-gift/

Eeek!-ing Out a Life

Bonnie L. Casey — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 15:17:43 GMT

Standing on the top landing, staring aghast at the basement floor below, I wished for the first time in a long time that there were a man around the house. I’d been heading downstairs to the washing machine, my arms laden with dirty clothes, when my eye caught something out of place at the foot of the stairs. The yellow strip of sticky gel that was normally tucked into a dark corner to trap camelback crickets had somehow migrated about three feet north by northeast, and something round and dark was stuck to one end of the strip. For a few seconds I thought maybe a leaf had been blown onto the trap by a stray draft, but then the dark thing twitched and I froze in terror and dread. My pulse raced, my vision blurred, and all my blood headed straight for my feet. For the first time in 30 years, I had a mouse in my house.

Since my ex-husband left seven years ago, certain distasteful aspects of household management have fallen to me, the nastiest of which is dealing with insects laboring under the mistaken notions that indoors is better than outdoors and that I will be tolerant of multipedal companionship. I’ve always had an embarrassingly girlish horror of creepy-crawlies, especially spiders. When we were children, my little sister would grab a flashlight and chase after spiders under my bed while I quivered under the sheets. As an adult, I had no qualms about calling my husband at work to beg him to come home and kill a spider in the kitchen.

As a matter of ethics and spirituality, I honor all forms of life and am more than happy to share the ecosystem with creatures great and small, but I draw the line at my living space. That’s why one of the first things I bought after getting divorced was a BugZooka (http://www.bugzooka.com/home.html), a marvel of engineering for the squeamish. Armed with this ingenious device, I’ve faced down countless wayward lightning bugs, flies, spiders, and even wasps. But not even a BugZooka could solve my mouse problem.

I knew immediately what needed to be done. The mouse was clearly alive and struggling, its tail and at least one hind foot stuck fast to the glue in the cricket trap. Leaving it there to die slowly from dehydration was unconscionable, not to mention impractical given my need for clean underwear. No, I wanted the mouse out of my basement and released, if possible, to the wild—just not by me.

When I regained the use of my legs, I tossed my dirty laundry back into the hamper, ran out the front door and headed straight for my nearest male neighbor, Jonathan, who had worked in Africa for nonprofit organizations. I figured he must have wrestled a boa constrictor or two and maybe even shooed a rhino away from his Land Rover. I fervently hoped he would not be intimidated by a stuck brown mouse. Yet, even as I rang his doorbell I was ashamed of this brazen retreat to cultural stereotypes. Here I was, playing the cartoonish role of the “little woman.” I might as well have been up on a kitchen table, my knees clamped shut, shrieking “Eeek!” And poor Jonathan, bearing the male burden of rescuing a damsel in distress, yet demoted from dragon-slayer to rodent-wrangler. And why did I automatically assume that he would have the stomach for peeling a mouse off a sticky pad when I clearly didn’t?

If you Google “why women are afraid of mice” you’ll get a variety of information, from sober descriptions of musophobia as a psychological disorder to Internet discussions where most female respondents staunchly aver that the stereotype is slanderous and that they adore the cute little critters. Those who admit to an aversion to mice offer a variety of excuses, most of which make little sense under close inspection. Most musophobes cite the fact that wild mice are dirty and can spread disease, forgetting that the same could be said of pets and children. Others claim a distaste for having to dispose of dead mice caught in guillotine-type traps, apparently unaware that there are many humane, live-capture mouse traps available. I can empathize, however, with those who fear the shock of having a mouse dart across their path or (eeuw!) over their feet. I suffer from hyperreflexia, a disordered response to stimuli characterized by exaggerated reflexes. When a doctor taps my kneecap with that little rubber hammer, I go into a paroxysm that nearly knocks me off the examining table. I worry sometimes that I could literally be startled to death by, say, a mouse darting across my feet.

However, I’ve learned enough about myself to recognize that my extreme response to the mouse trapped in my basement stemmed partly from an identification with the little mammal’s dilemma. The suffering of animals has always paradoxically affected me more profoundly than human suffering. Instances from my childhood, when I endured abuse I was helpless to relieve or even understand, have so sensitized me to the suffering of mute creatures that is causes a post-traumatic stress reaction. My inability to rescue the mouse I had inadvertently captured was cowardly, but at least I recognized its source.

Jonathan arrived on my doorstep smiling indulgently and sporting a pair of thick leather gloves. I poured out a torrent of embarrassed apologies and heartfelt gratitude as I led him to the top of the basement stairs. I explained about the sticky cricket trap and begged Jonathan to try to free the mouse and release him into the bushes across the street. I switched on the light over the stairs and mumbled abashedly, “I left the door to the outside open for you. I’m sorry, but I just can’t look.”

Moments later, when I heard the garage door open, I ran to the front door and watched Jonathan stride across the street holding the yellow plastic cricket trap by one end, the mouse still clearly stuck at the other. He knelt with his back to me for several minutes. Jonathan is tall and lean with blue eyes, a trim beard, and a quick smile. He and his Irish wife are the parents of one-year-old twin boys whom they dote on. He has the look and bearing of a Knight of the Round Table, and as I watched him crouched on one knee, gently attempting to rescue a tiny mouse, I wished I could have honored his courage and chivalry by providing him with a proper dragon to engage in battle. Or a snake at the very least.

A few minutes later Jonathan rose and crossed the street holding the trap, now bearing only a few shriveled cricket carcasses, a patch of brown fur, and a ragged edge where the mouse had attempted to chew itself free. “As soon as I got his tail and hind feet unstuck he ran off into the bushes,” Jonathan said beaming, “so I guess he’s okay.” Nearly prostrate with relief and gratitude, I took the trap from my young champion and tried to thank him adequately, but he waved it away. “Oh, it was nothing,” he said. “Let me know anytime I can help out.”

Most of the time, as a satisfied single, I enjoy my solitude and work hard to maintain my independence (http://www.singlewithattitude.com/). I’m proud of my ability to tackle minor home repairs and redecorating projects by myself. But living alone has its occasional challenges, and for a certain type of individual these can lead to unfortunate quirks. For instance, I don’t want to grow paranoid and needy like the old woman who lived next door to me years ago. She would bang on my door at odd hours, her eyes glistening with panic, and beg me to come to her apartment and sniff her tap water, which she insisted smelled “funny.” Or she’d call at 10 o’clock at night, pleading with me to make an emergency run to the pharmacy for vitamin C. I brooded on these sorts of things for hours after Jonathan had left, and tried to re-establish my sense of competence by baking a dozen blueberry muffins and delivering them to him and his family in a wicker basket. So much for avoiding stereotypes.

The next day, I still couldn’t pry the mouse problem from my mind. I fervently hoped another one would not find its way into my basement, but that prospect was dim enough to make me call an exterminator for an inspection. I bought and set out a couple of live-capture traps and repeatedly visualized myself putting on thick gloves, picking up a quivering trap (deep breath in, deep breath out), and releasing the mouse across the street. What on earth was so frightening about that? The mouse would want nothing more than to run away from me as fast as he could. What did I imagine would happen? That before hightailing it into the underbrush the vengeful rodent would turn on me, bite my thumb, and snarl, “Thanks fer nothin’!” No, this was doable, and should the need arise, I had to do it myself, I thought. I had to conquer my fear, be self-reliant, and stop annoying my neighbors. Nothing less would suit my urgent need to be a rational, independent, courageous Wise Woman.

Then the fever broke and I saw that scenario for the delusional bunk it was. The Wonder Woman who is all things unto herself was my own creation and bore little relation to my circumstances or the way things work in the larger world. After all, I know full well that nothing gives me as much joy and satisfaction as helping someone in need. Whether it’s buying a llama from Heifer International (http://www.heifer.org/) or grabbing a box of cereal off a tall supermarket shelf for a mother with a baby on her hip, helping makes me feel real, useful, connected, and simply happy. Why should I deny to others that opportunity for happiness by stubbornly refusing to ask for help when I need it? The truth is, I can’t do everything for myself—I’m not strong enough, brave enough, smart enough, or rich enough.

But if we can’t all do everything, we can all do something. I gave Jonathan a chance to express his kind and generous nature, as well as a good story to tell his friends about the crazy lady next door. I may never conquer musophobia, but I can make boffo blueberry muffins for those who have. Maybe in the great scale of the universe, it all balances out.

Going Like Sixty

Bonnie L. Casey — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 13:17:53 GMT

A few weeks ago Karen, my therapist, looked at me quizically and said, "Let me get this straight. You have half an eye, you're in constant pain, and your 60th birthday is just a few weeks away. But you can't figure out why you’re feeling a sort of malaise?”

I’d been reviewing the month since our last session, moaning about my lack of ambition and general lethargy. I recalled the years when I juggled a job, a husband, and a high-maintenance child and marveled at how much I used to accomplish in a day. Half an hour after getting home from work I had a hot meal on the table. Then I’d make lunches, oversee homework, iron shirts, balance the checkbook, and do a bit of freelance editing before bedtime. Lately, however, it seems to take so much energy to accomplish so much less. I slouched in the chair in Karen’s office, idly fiddling with one of her purple pens. “I don’t even have anything to write about for my blog this month,” I whined. It was true. I’d told myself over and over that writing takes discipline, but every time I’d start down the hall to my study, a malevolent force would repel me and I’d slink off to read a book or rearrange a drawer. I’d searched every cranny of my brain for inspiration, but my mind was like an anorexic’s refrigerator: the light came on but there was nothing to look at.

“Half an eye” was Karen’s lurid but accurate reference to my ongoing ordeal with a vitreous hemorrhage that occurred last summer and left a large milky blob floating across the field of vision in my left eye. Constant pain was evidenced by the walking stick I’d brought that day to alleviate severe sciatica, and yes, a decade birthday looms just over the horizon. Taken together, these things made a compelling argument for malaise, but I chose instead to berate myself for being stuck in brain fog, a disgrace to the wise sisterhood of crones. “My only ambition these days is to be able to retire in five years,” I sighed, still tormenting the purple pen. “I may just have enough money to live on if I eat nothing but oatmeal for the rest of my life.”

That’s when Karen, who is clearly underpaid, leaned in and asked for clarification—her tactful rendition of “What? Are you nuts?” My 55 minutes were about up, so she closed by giving me an assignment. “Look,” she said pointedly, “you’re dealing with a lot of difficult stuff, not the least of which is turning 60. Yet you insist on beating yourself up for taking things a little slower and for having a hard time coming up with an idea for your blog. So your homework this month is to stop being so hard on yourself and just wallow! Give yourself permission to wallow in self-pity from now until two weeks after your birthday. Then you have to snap out of it and move on. I mean it—wallow for all you're worth until after your birthday. It's perfectly appropriate. And forget about the blog! Then next month we'll talk about how to be 60 years old."

I love that woman.

* * *

As a rule, I ignore my birthdays. I don’t lie to others about my age or to myself about the implications of getting older. I just don’t think my birthdays are a big deal, except when they mark a new decade, and 60 is feeling like a very big deal. Hitting 40 and even 50 didn’t faze me, but 60 is getting in amongst me, as the Brits say. For one thing, 6 is my least favorite numeral. It feels weak and squishy to me. Furthermore, in my mind numerals all have assigned colors, and 6 is orange. I hate orange. I’m looking at ten years of orange sixes, for pete’s sake.

Then there’s the matter of labels. I resist most labels for myself, but must admit that some labels help you get your bearings in the flow of time and the crush of humanity. They reassure you that “You Are Here -->.” But where exactly is 60? Late middle age? Early old age? When I was a kid, “old” started around 35, but aging Baby Boomers keep moving the goalposts in their favor. Now they say 70 is the brink of elderly and 50 is the new 40, none of which helps me figure out how to be 60. According to middleage.org, “middle age is that point in your life when you shift from seeing the future in terms of your potential and begin to see it in terms of your limitations.” Fine. But what if you’re stuck somewhere in between, regretting your limited potential and dreading your potential limitations?

As any true-blue American would do in a crisis, I turned to television for guidance. Especially the commercials, which are eager to define who you are and exactly what you need. But even there, the message aimed at my demographic was confusing. The agenda for an active senior, or whatever the hell I am, would appear to be something like this: Over morning coffee, earnestly discuss affordable life insurance premiums with a suspiciously knowledgeable neighbor, preferably from an ethnic minority. Later on, scoot downtown in my power chair to stock up on Metamucil and Aspercreme, then drop by the country club for a vigorous dance class to demonstrate that my dentures don’t slip (big toothy smile!). End the day watching the sunset from side-by-side bathtubs with a pharmaceutically enhanced male companion, being careful to wear my Life Alert pendant for when I fall and can’t get up.

Confused? Me too.

* * *

I had hoped this business of who I want to be and how to live an authentic life would be all wrapped up before I started qualifying for senior discounts, but it appears to be a lifelong endeavor. Every year I try to shed more of the irrelevant cultural norms and expectations that accrue like barnacles on the free spirit that is everyone’s birthright. In the last seven years, taking advantage of the solitude that being single again affords, I’ve made significant strides toward reconciling my outer and inner selves, taking heart in the fact that for many people I admire, age has fostered the freedom to shake off various ill-fitting roles without regard for public opinion. I look forward to exploring that opportunity for myself in the next decade, and even cherish some small hope of becoming charmingly eccentric.

As a toddler it was my habit to push aside a helping hand and stoutly declare, “Baby by-self!” There’s still a good deal of that spirit alive in me, and I wish it were all I needed to chart the way into my seventh decade. It would be so brave and adventurous, so Katherine Hepburn, to say “Screw the rules and stereotypes about getting old! I’ll do it my way and make it up as I go along.” And I’m sure I will find and express a unique 60-year-old voice, but whether it will be pure Baby by-self is open to question because, like it or not, one’s true self can never be fully embodied in a life bound by the urgent rhythms and artificial necessities imposed by society. My deepest dreams for myself as a Wild Woman in her crone years will necessarily be circumscribed, at least for some time yet, by the need to earn my keep and behave myself in public. Being a grown-up requires compromise after all, but my dread of ending up as conventional as I began is no doubt why I love reading about people who explore the extremes of existence, either breaking barriers of thought and belief or testing themselves at the edges of civilization (most recently, This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland, by Gretel Ehrlich, http://www.amazon.com/This-Cold-Heaven-Seasons-Greenland/dp/0679442006).

My son and friends need not fear that I will embarrass them by running amok, or even making headlines, in my golden years, but I do have the beginnings of a plan for remaining vital, interesting, and true to my ideals in my 60s. It bears a striking resemblance to my plan for how to be 50, but I’m confident it will evolve even as I do. Sadly (or not), my plan does not include mushing across polar ice, leading a revolution, or retreating to the life of a Druid priestess. It is extreme only in my determination to continue on the path to enlightenment at my own speed, honoring kindness as the highest good and cutting deep to the hard bone of truth.

I will keep my mind open to new ideas and try not to believe everything I think.
I will give my imagination and creative spirit plenty of room to play.
I will cherish my friends and revel in their company as often as possible.
I will take good care of my body (I’ve already taken steps to deal with “half an eye” and sciatica), then accept inevitable changes with grace and good humor.
I will fulfill my duty as an elder to share what I’ve learned about life as a spiritual being in a human body.
I will hone my intuition and follow my mystical inclinations further into the wonders of existence.
I will listen to the voice of the Divine, the power behind the natural world, the life spirit that directs us and tells us who we are.
I will nurture spiritual growth through my Sacred Circle (http://www.bonnielcasey.com/GrowingInCircles.aspx) and daily meditation.
I will laugh, cry, and dance under the moon to remind myself that I’m still alive.
I will be tactful and circumspect when necessary, but bear in mind Ms. Hepburn’s delicious admonition that “if you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun.”

I just might amaze myself, but right now I’m going to pull the covers over my head and wallow some more. Don’t blame me—it’s homework.

The Tao of Penguins

Bonnie L. Casey — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 14:00:33 GMT

Last month a friend in Hawaii sent me a link to a video about emperor penguins (http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=SkY03n0_sD8&vq=medium). Perhaps I should say a video “of” emperor penguins, because it’s not “about” penguins in any sense that National Geographic or Sir David Attenborough would recognize. The film, produced by Defenders of Wildlife, is five minutes of unnarrated, uncaptioned footage of penguins in the snow, the adults loitering in their stately and inscrutable way, now and then giving an affectionate nudge to one of the impossibly cute babies at their feet.

A few days later I passed the link on to some friends with the message: “Here’s something to help you believe in Life just as it is,” a statement whose sunny equanimity must have startled my friends, who are more accustomed to messages from me along the lines of, “Why am I still suffering? Haven’t I learned enough already?” Which perfectly illustrates the point I wish to convey about the penguins. Even though I’d learned way more about penguin habitats and lifestyles watching Dudley Moore’s “Really Wild Animals” years ago with my toddler son, the wordless video had a soothing effect on my spirit, which took some quiet contemplation to fully appreciate.

Everybody loves penguins. They’re so unlikely (flightless birds surviving in the world’s most inhospitable environment), so cute (waddling around like pregnant maitre d’s), and so easy to laugh at. Penguin jokes abound, from Monty Python’s classic penguin sketch (“What’s that penguin doing on the telly?” “Standing.”) to Garrison Keillor’s metaphysical take on penguins (Two penguins are standing on an ice floe. The first penguin says, “You look like you’re wearing a tuxedo.” The second penguin says, “How do you know I’m not?”). But the truth isn’t that simple. Being a penguin isn’t just about sliding down the ice on your belly and vamping for the cameras; a penguin’s life is hard and fraught with danger. Adults are virtually helpless to protect nestlings from ravenous skuas and petrels. Babies who do survive to adulthood are prey to seals and orcas whenever they venture into the water. During breeding season, males and females take turns trekking 60 to 100 miles from nesting grounds to the open ocean to feed. The parent who stays behind to incubate eggs and care for the young can go without food for months at a time.

Knowing something of the harsh realities of emperor penguin life is what made this particular film so poignant, because the penguins don’t seem to be brooding on their precarious existence. I don’t claim any special ability to peer into the penguin mind, but you can’t watch this film and believe that these gorgeous creatures are worrying about the effects of climate change on their habitat, or stressing over preparations for the next arduous march to faraway feeding grounds, or fretting over whether their chicks will survive long enough to sustain the emperor population. Yes, they engage in a daily struggle for survival, but they don’t appear to be vexed by questions of why they are here and what it all means. They just ARE, here and now, and for penguins, that seems to be more than enough.

The evidence suggests that humans are the only living things with self-consciousness, the only animals who can look in a mirror and recognize that the image looking back at them is themselves. More importantly, though all living things die—bugs, trees, tortoises, microbes—we are the only creatures who know we are going to die, and that affects absolutely everything. One of the penguins in the film shuffles slowly and carefully across the ice carrying a fluffy gray chick on his feet, the way I used to stand on my father’s shoes as we “danced” to Benny Goodman records. That penguin may well have been a leopard seal’s lunch the day after his film debut, but if so, I’m certain he didn’t spend his last hours worrying about the possibility of his imminent demise. He just lived his penguin life moment by moment, driven by innate urges and needs, surviving as best he could without freighting his days with needless mental anguish.

We, on the other hand, know we will die sooner or later, and for the vast majority of us, this knowledge causes fear. Not the sudden, adrenaline-fueled panic of stepping off a curb into the path of a speeding car, but a constant undercurrent of dread simmering just below the surface of consciousness, driving our ambitions and dictating our choices. Knowledge of our mortality can have a positive effect, of course, goading us to make the best use of our brief time on Earth and making the good things in life, like love and beauty, all the more precious. But I’ve come to the conclusion that fear of death—of the unknown, alien state of nonbeing—lies at the heart of most human mischief. Devoting one’s life and talents to amassing more money, territory, or stuff than the next guy, collecting hordes of Twitter followers, or starring in a reality TV show are all, at bottom, attempts to ensure a kind of false immortality. Even crimes of the heart can be an attempt to avert one’s gaze from the inevitable. In the Oscar-winning movie “Moonstruck,” when Rose suspects her husband Cosmo is being unfaithful, she asks her daughter’s fiancé why men cheat on their wives. “Maybe it’s because they fear death,” he says. When Cosmo comes home late that evening, Rose confronts him angrily: “I just want you to know that no matter what you do, you’re still gonna die, just like everybody else!” “Thank you, Rose,” says the nonplussed Cosmo.

I’m not suggesting that anyone who isn’t in constant, excruciating pain should actually welcome the prospect of death, only that we might do well to shift our perspective a bit. I speak as someone who suffered for most of her life from an overweening fear of death, for which I blame my father. My grandfather died when I was nine years old, and my father insisted that I accompany him one evening for a viewing at the funeral home. My mistake on that occasion was trying to hide behind a potted fern in a far corner of the room, forgetting in my panic that my father did not countenance displays of fear in his children. Before I could yelp in protest, Dad hoisted me up by my armpits and dangled me over the side of the coffin so I could enjoy a close-up of my embalmed grandpa, on the same theory, I suppose, that shoving someone off a cliff would liberate them from a fear of heights. Not surprisingly, this tactic merely fostered an even more crippling dread of death and dying that I didn’t confront until I was in my late thirties.

For those with similar fears and questions about the Great Unknown, the marketplace of ideas offers no end of possible answers. Atheists urge us to quit whining, grow some spine, and face the cold reality that this life is all there is. There’s nothing awaiting us after death, no punishments or rewards, no departed loved ones, no childhood pets bounding over a rainbow bridge into our tearful embrace. Just nothingness and nonbeing. Most religions, on the other hand, offer the hope that this life is merely a prelude to an eternal existence free of strife and pain. Some of these religions hold as an article of faith the resurrection of the physical body at some future apocalypse. This belief has fostered an entire industry, along with the pernicious practice of entombing dead bodies in fortresses of lead and cement, supposedly making the reanimation of their constituent parts more convenient for the Almighty. This defies both logic and nature, since we’re biologically constituted to become compost.

Now that I’ve offended almost everyone, let me hasten to say that I appreciate the fact that religious beliefs about an afterlife have offered immeasurable comfort to generations of believers. Personally, I’m okay with not knowing what awaits me after I die, but I respect others’ right to believe anything they like, so long as they acknowledge that it is only a belief. Because there’s no getting around the fact that nobody knows what, if anything, happens to us after death except for the dead, and they’re keeping stubbornly mum. Anything we think we know about whether life on Earth is all there is can never be more than a belief or a hope.

When he wasn’t traumatizing me for my own good, my father tried to instill the wisdom that it’s no good complaining about what can’t be changed (“Of course it’s hot! It’s the middle of summer! That’s what ice cubes are for, fer cryin’ out loud!”). My spiritual path is founded on somewhat the same philosophy, although my father might not have seen it that way. I choose to live in harmony with, and derive wisdom from, the observable facts of nature, and nature, as even the most desultory gardener can readily observe, decrees that death is not an enemy to be vanquished. In the natural order of things, death is not even merely the absence of life—it is what makes life possible. Every living thing on the planet, from humans to penguins to radishes, is composed of raw materials derived from other living things that have died and decomposed. Look under any rock and you can watch death being chewed, churned, and excreted into the stuff of new life. There is no food without death, no summer without winter, no room for new humans and animals unless some exit the scene to free up space and resources.

This is, as Lucretius wrote sometime before 55 BCE, the way things are. I recently read the only surviving work of this Roman poet, a 7,000-line poem outlining his philosophy, called “On the Nature of Things.” Lucretius didn’t believe that his fellow Romans needed to look to a pantheon of gods and goddesses to account for lightning, storms, harvests, wine, disease, reproduction, or death. He argues that these are all natural processes that can be understood by careful observation of the natural world. He’s particularly concerned that humans not live in constant fear of death, since it is the natural partner of life. He compares the process of one generation succeeding another to a relay race in which the runners willingly pass on the torch of life, and that our own deaths are the necessary condition for the constant renewal of the world. “The old must give way, pushed aside / By the new, and one thing by another thing is re-supplied.” His purpose, he writes, is to “toss that Dread of Death out on its ear / Since that’s what stirs the lives of mortals into such turmoil / From the very depths, and there is nothing that it does not soil / With the smirch of death, no pleasure, pure and clean it does not spoil.”

In December, as the year subsides into deep winter, the Earth itself seems in the throes of a kind of death. Days shorten, temperatures drop, the ground is strewn with withered leaves. The darkness and cold of winter can burden the human body and spirit, making us yearn for the return of the light. This longing is the origin of all Yule and Christmas celebrations, where candles, hearth fires, and holiday lights signal our joy, at the darkest point of the year, that the winter solstice marks the slow but inexorable return of the life-giving sun. I used to dread winter, but my perspective has begun to shift as I’ve tried to live mindfully with the rhythms of the year. I no longer think of winter as merely the absence of summer, but as a vital part of the cycle of life, a chance for living things to rest and conserve their resources. Instead of mourning the starkly barren trees, I imagine them as I am after a long day’s work—eager to strip off all my clothes. I imagine the winter trees stretching their bare limbs to the sky and sighing, “Aaah, that’s better.”

Perhaps now and then a particularly sensible penguin gives a fleeting thought for the morrow. Who can say? But there’s something uplifting about these creatures’ apparently serene acceptance of their essential penguin-ness. It gives me courage to face the inevitable fact that we’re all navigating the same River of Life, a river that, at its furthest reach, plunges over the edge of a cliff in a vast cataract. Early or late, all living things go over the edge, relinquishing their elements to the resourceful, nurturing Earth to be recycled. Until then, it seems only right that we should take some time to float on our backs and gaze at the stars, or slide down some ice on our bellies.

In the natural order of things, Lucretius wrote, “one thing rises from another—it will never cease. / No one is given life to own; we all hold but a lease.” Wise words from a man who, it’s a good bet, never laid eyes on a penguin.

The Crooked Ladder

Bonnie L. Casey — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 19:31:32 GMT

Few things trample my spirit as thoroughly as the feeling of helplessness. I’m a fixer by temperament, which can be a burden in a world that offers so much to feel helpless about. News media bombard us with disasters and injustices of staggering proportions. We watch in passive rage as a rapacious few despoil the earth and pick the common pocket. The culture socks us with standards of physical perfection and lemony freshness unattainable by mere mortals. We shrug in bewilderment as our hair thins, our hips spread, our spouses leave us for someone named Tami or Lance, and our children blame us for ruining their lives. This may explain my determination to tackle the problem of the crater forming outside my kitchen. A small-scale problem with a discernible cause and a clear solution doesn’t come around all that often.

When I first discovered it, the hole in a narrow strip of ground along the side of my house was only about ten inches across and five inches deep. I wondered briefly if a dog or raccoon had dug it, but a closer inspection of its smooth contours convinced me it must have been scooped out by water. I only had to look up, then, to find the culprit—a bit of gutter that had come loose from the roof and gotten bent under the pressure of rainwater and fallen leaves. More rain was forecast for the rest of the week, so as a stop-gap I filled the hole with gravel and tamped it down hard, hoping that would stop further erosion.

The next day, as rain poured steadily from a grim October sky, I leaned over my kitchen sink and craned my neck for a view of the bent gutter. Sure enough, a small cataract was spilling over the edge and slicing into the ground below. I grabbed an umbrella and slogged around to the side of the house, but even before I reached the crater, a trail of muddy gravel told me my experiment in environmental engineering had been a bust. That’s when the gnawing sense of helplessness set in, because the only ladder I owned was just five feet tall. Which meant that the task of nailing a single spike through one end of gutter would involve searching Angie’s List for a reasonably affordable handyman who would agree to do such a dinky job, because the guy I pay to clean my gutters can only come when he can borrow a ladder and doesn’t speak English worth squat even though he has a green card and has lived in Maryland for 14 years! I could see this one-nail job stretching out for weeks and costing me more than the price of a new ladder, which is when a light finally went on.

I’d been eyeing a pair of buttery-soft black leather boots that, when I tried them on in the store, looked hot and felt like slippers. I craved those boots with a greedy lust and fretted that giving them up for an extension ladder would be emblematic of a dull, dutiful life. But when I weighed the sensuous pleasure of the boots against the virtues of self-reliance and the possibility of amortizing the cost of the ladder in less than a year by cleaning the gutters myself, my Puritan tendencies eked out a win. I found a 12-foot aluminum ladder online, with locking hinges that let it fold into 3-foot segments like a capital M. This and its weight of only 25 pounds meant that I could carry, maneuver, and store it all by myself. No more feeling helpless about domestic jobs more than five feet above ground. No more waiting to be rescued by handymen in droopy pants who charge 80 bucks just for showing up.

But a victory dance was premature at this point because, as I would soon be reminded, helplessness and self-reliance are slippery concepts. No one is truly self-reliant because no one accomplishes anything entirely by their own efforts. Ever. In the same way, we are usually not as helpless as we feel. There are some circumstances we can do little or nothing about (a painful truth for anyone stalled in freeway traffic), but whether in dire personal straits or tragedies of immense proportions, we are rarely without some recourse. Small steps add up, and though all may seem chaos and vanity, any one of us could be the butterfly whose wings stir a whirlwind on the other side of the world.

I suspect that in most cases, feelings of helplessness are fueled by a kind of tunnel vision where we imagine rescue in a single guise, riding in from a single direction, on a schedule of our own devising. But “help” encompasses a universe of possibilities and timetables, from a friend’s instantly outstretched hand to the slow unfolding of world events. It may reveal itself as inner resources hitherto untapped or supernatural forces only dimly perceived. Help, in other words, may arrive like a child at Halloween—disguised as something else. Not, perhaps what we were looking for, but precisely what we need.

When my new ladder arrived by FedEx a week later I was pleased to find that I could maneuver the cumbersome package down the stairs to my basement without much trouble. Once I wrestled it out of the box and its shroud of plastic wrap, I saw that the only assembly required was to attach a stabilizer bar at each end of the ladder. These horizontal bars had rubber tips at each end that served as the ladder’s “feet”. All I had to do was push the stabilizer bars into slots at each end of the long side bars, insert four bolts and secure them with washers and nuts. My only disappointment was that the job wouldn’t involve power tools.

However, when I tried to insert the first stabilizer bar, I found that one arm of one of the slots was bent, causing a pinch of a mere millimeter or two that was enough to prevent the bar from sliding in. I checked the other end of the ladder and found the same thing—a pinched slot on one side. I tried to force one of the bars into a bent slot by hammering on it, then tried to pry the slot open by inserting one end of a wrench and hammering down on the other end, but it was clear I would never get the job done with the resources at hand. I surveyed the packing materials strewn around the floor and pictured the effort it would take to stuff everything back in the box and haul it to a FedEx office. The packing slip included a stern warning that I would have to pay for return shipping, and that unless I could prove that the manufacturer was responsible for damage, my refund could be as low as 50%. The ladder was useless as it was, so my only choices were to return it and swallow the loss, leaving me and my leaky gutter right where we started, or pay a man to fix either the gutter or the ladder. So much for self-reliance. I tossed my tools into a corner, cursed myself for getting into such a muddle, and hauled my tattered self-sufficiency off to bed.

The next weekend I was strolling through the Shrine to Limitless Competence, better known as the local hardware store, and started chatting with one of the clerks. On a whim, I described my damaged ladder and asked if he thought it was salvageable. He nodded knowingly and said, “You need to talk to Maurice. If he can’t fix it, it’s not fixable. The guy’s amazing,” he went on. “He’s 89 years old and still works here four days a week. On Mondays he volunteers at the Smithsonian designing and welding metal frames to display airplane engines at the National Air and Space Museum. After you ask him about your ladder, ask him about his years in the R.A.F. during World War II.” I knew then that he was describing the brisk little man with a British accent who had helped me numerous times over the years. I’d barely finish describing what I was looking for when he would stop me with a raised index finger, turn on his heels, and march directly to the needed item, making me jog to keep up. I was abashed that I had never asked his name and had no clue about his colorful history.

I found Maurice at the back of the store making a key for another customer. As I waited, I observed him closely for the first time. He was short and muscular, with a full head of white hair and ice-blue eyes. He looked like Santa’s oldest elf, who absolutely positively refused to discuss retirement. He handed the customer his new key and turned to me, shoulders thrown back at attention. “Now, young lady, what can I do for you?”

Maurice assured me that he could make my ladder workable and told me to bring it to his house the following Thursday afternoon. He wouldn’t discuss payment until he’d seen the damage. When I said, “So, I hear you work at the Smithsonian …” he stopped me with a raised index finger, reached into a pocket, and pulled out half a dozen photos of himself in full welder’s gear, posed next to a massive airplane engine supported on one of his custom-built frames. I admired each photo, then leaned on my shopping cart while Maurice spent the next 20 minutes telling me stories about joining the Royal Air Force as a teenager and surviving the war years working on airplanes in the Middle East and North Africa. After the war he and a buddy bought an old Army ambulance and drove it from London to Cape Town. After crossing Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean, they loaded the ambulance onto a barge in Egypt and chugged up the Nile for 29 days to reach passable roads further south. He told me about fashioning cups and cutlery out of empty soup cans and trading them with villagers along the river for food for himself and his buddy, and about marrying a South African woman and coming many years later to America. Other store clerks sidestepped us, smiling indulgently as they went about their duties. No one was going to tell the old fellow he needed to get back to work.

I told Maurice about my British heritage and my year at a college in the English Midlands. I also told him what I did for a living, and that if he ever decided to write a memoir, he knew where to find an editor. He beamed at me and said, “You know, Bonnie, I’ve already made a start on that. I think it was very lucky my meeting you today.” He patted my arm and gave me a wink, and I left the store with a smile that wouldn’t quit. I’d found someone to mend my damaged ladder and a new chum besides. I walked to my car with the sage words of Saturday Night Live’s pioneering pundit, Roseanne Roseannadanna, resounding in my ears: “Well, Jane, it just goes to show you.”

On Thursday I arrived at Maurice’s house with the ladder stowed in my trunk. I went through the gate and up the front walk past a jumble of garden gnomes and airplane-shaped weather vanes, wondering if old Maurice would remember who I was and what I wanted. But before I could ring the bell he swung the door open with a cheery, “Hello, Bonnie! Let’s take a look at that ladder of yours.” With the ladder locked in a W on his front walk, Maurice quickly assessed the damage and bent to the task of adjusting the damaged slots to accommodate the stabilizer bars. I made myself useful handing him tools as he called for them.

Neither of us paid attention to the middle-aged man in a faded red sweatshirt and baseball cap who strolled past on the sidewalk, until he turned around, walked back to the house, and slipped through the gate. “Hi,” he said, approaching us tentatively. “Would you be interested in some seafood?” When Maurice, absorbed in bending aluminum to his will, didn’t look up, the man smiled and moved a little closer. “Seafood?” I asked, noting that he wasn’t carrying anything with him. “Yeah,” he said pointing to a small truck parked at the curb. “My buddy sells frozen seafood to restaurants and private customers in this area. He’s made all his deliveries for the day, so we’re just going around the neighborhood trying to sell what’s left in his truck. I help him out sometimes. He has really great stuff, if you’re interested.”

I thought going door to door trying to sell frozen seafood from the back of a truck was a bizarre business plan. But the afternoon was fine and I was feeling good, so why spoil the mood by being aloof and suspicious? The fish man was polite and well-spoken, not bad looking, and if things got hinky I was pretty sure Maurice could still take him down. This whole thing with the ladder was turning into such an unexpected adventure, I decided to just go with it.

“Well,” I laughed, “I’m afraid your pitch is lost on me since I’m a vegetarian, but Maurice may be interested.” Maurice was still oblivious, so I tapped him on the arm and said, “Maurice, you got anything for supper? This guy’s selling fish.” He looked up from his work then and studied the man in the baseball cap, who smiled and gestured toward his friend’s parked truck. “What’ve you got?” asked Maurice. The man rattled off a list of whole fish and prepared entrees that meant nothing to me but clearly piqued Maurice’s interest. When he gazed longingly at the truck, I urged, “Go ahead, get yourself something good for supper. I’m in no hurry.” But he wouldn’t hear of it. He asked the fish man if he would wait a bit, because “this lady and her ladder come first.” The fish man readily agreed, apparently not overly concerned about his friend slouched behind the wheel of the truck. He looked over Maurice’s shoulder and became absorbed in our attempt to fix the bent ladder. When Maurice ducked into the house to get more tools, I cleared up the fish man’s confusion about who owned the house and who owned the ladder and how I had come to meet Maurice. I told him what I knew of my remarkable new friend, how he was still working at a hardware store at 89, about his reputation as a legendary fix-it man, and about his service in the R.A.F. during World War II. “R.A.F.?” the fish man asked. “Royal Air Force,” I explained. “See?” I said, pointing to Maurice’s red Jeep. “There on his license plate: RAF WWII.” When Maurice returned, the three of us chatted like old friends about the weather, gardening, and the challenges of getting older. Fish man was amazed that he and I were the same age and commented that vegetarianism appeared to be working well for me. He even made himself useful by holding a stabilizer bar steady as Maurice succeeded in tapping it into place.

When all the bolts were secured, I folded the ladder up and schlepped it out the gate and down the sidewalk to my car, while Maurice hustled over to the fish truck to inspect the goods. I was stowing the ladder when the fish man startled me by peering around the open trunk lid. I thought he had gone with Maurice to check out the fish. I said cheerily, “I told you it’s no use, I don’t eat seafood.” As I closed the trunk he adjusted his cap nervously and said, “Oh, I know. I’m not trying to sell you fish. I came over to ask you for a date.”

I played for a few seconds of time by mentally reviewing all the things this man did not know about me, starting with my name. There was no way I was going out with him, but during the few minutes of our acquaintance he’d been a perfect gentleman, so I didn’t want to hurt or embarrass him. I smiled and said sincerely, “Oh, that’s so sweet. What a nice thing to say. But I don’t date. I’ve been divorced quite a while and I’ve come to enjoy being on my own.” “Well,” he said, “I’m divorced too but I’ve never gotten used to it. You seem like a nice, lovely lady, so I thought I’d ask you out.” I walked with him back to his friend’s truck to pay Maurice, who was now giving his formidable attention to a box of frozen stuffed flounder. The fish man and I chatted for another minute, and then I said it had been a pleasure to meet him and shook his hand. I waved to him as I drove away—and giggled all the way home.

So far my crooked ladder had brought me a handy new friend and a brief encounter with a stranger who made me feel young and attractive. But it hadn’t run out of gifts just yet. The following day my son, who has Asperger’s syndrome, came over in the afternoon to earn some cash by helping me with yard work. He has always shown unfailing filial devotion to his father, while our relationship has often been rocky and nearly disintegrated after his father and I divorced. Lately, however, we’ve been doing better, and I cherish the time we spend working amiably together in the yard, talking about movies or whatever he’s interested in. I’m careful not to stir up bad feelings or unhappy memories during these times. But my encounter with the fish man had brought to mind how my son had lauded his father’s remarriage four years ago as the inevitable consequence of his father’s manifold perfections, while assuring me that I should not expect a similar outcome. As a prospect for romance I was, as he put it, washed up, a spent force. I might be forgiven, then, for wanting to gloat just a teensy bit about my force not being quite as spent as my son had imagined.

I was pruning an azalea with my back to my son, who was dead-heading the hydrangeas, when I said casually, “You’d never guess what happened to me yesterday. A man asked me for a date fifteen minutes after meeting me, without even knowing my name. He said I seemed like a nice, lovely lady.” My words hung in the air while I went on snipping. Then from over my shoulder I heard my son say, “That’s great, Mom.” I stood up and turned around to see if he was being sarcastic, but he was looking at me and smiling. “What was that?” I mumbled. “I said that’s great,” he repeated. “I’m glad that happened to you. The man was right, you are a nice lady.”

I dropped my pruning shears and threw my arms around my son’s neck, holding him tight, like I used to when he was little. “You didn’t say yes, did you, Mom?” he asked in my ear. “No, Honey,” I laughed, “I could never date a man who doesn’t know what R.A.F. stands for.”

As Roseanne Roseannadanna might have said, “You just never know.” How could I have known that a crooked ladder purchased in a moment of helplessness would bring help from unexpected quarters, a renewed sense of self, and the priceless insight that even in her Crone years a woman bears the eternal imprint of the Maiden and the Mother? These thoughts engulfed me as I stood by the hydrangeas unable to let go of my son, who was no doubt embarrassed beyond words. I couldn’t help that, any more than I could hold back my tears.