Driving Audhumla

I can blame it all on Jane

Years ago my family hosted a series of Japanese students, an experience everyone  enjoyed a great deal.  I was so taken with the students that eventually I spent part of each summer teaching ESL classes to groups of Japanese students, here in the U.S. for one-month homestays and language study. My contact with them piqued my interest in Japan, a country about which I then knew very little. Soon this interest blossomed into an intense focus on Japanese culture, literature, history and language.

Jane was my next-door neighbor in the cul de sac in Bellevue, Washington,  where I was living at that time. She had two little girls who were the same ages as my two daughters. The girls played together, and sometimes she or I would take all four of them on outings. That their race might be an issue to others never occurred to me until the day I took all four girls out for ice cream, and someone came up to me and complemented me on my kindness to ``those poor little Vietnamese orphans.''  But Jane's daughters didn't come from Japan. They were born here in the U.S. to their Japanese-American parents.

A few days later I was in Jane's living room and happened to notice her parents' wedding picture. The bride and groom were dressed in conventional American-style wedding clothes. I asked Jane why her mother wasn't wearing kimono and got an angry response I didn't expect. ``My parents were born here, and  married here,'' she said. ``Do you want to see some other family pictures?'' Without waiting for me to reply she pulled a book off the shelf, opened it up and pointed to a photo that was clearly shot in the 1940s.   The photo was of a mother dressed in her best clothes,  a stylish little 1940s-style hat perched on the front of her head. With her were four little kids, all of them with big cardboard tags attached to their clothing.  ``I'm the baby,'' Jane said, pointing to a doll-like little girl, balanced on the mother's knee.

She flipped through a few more pages of the books. I saw other, similarly clad mothers and children walking across a dock to board a waiting ferry. Accompanying them were soldiers with bayonets fixed in their rifles.  ``What's going on?'' I asked Jane. ``Why were soldiers there with all these women and children?'' Jane turned back to the front of the book, which was titled ``Executive Order 9066.'' The book was a collection of photos and commentary about the internment of people of Japanese descent that took place in the West Coast states beginning in February 1942.  Executive Order 9066 was the order that mandated their removal from coastal states. Jane told me about how her family was uprooted from Bainbridge Island, in Washington State's Puget Sound, and shipped off to one of 10 concentration camps along with 120,000 others of Japanese ethnicity.

I was born in California and grew up in the Pacific Northwest, spending virtually my entire life on the Pacific Coast. Yet I had never once ever heard a single word about the Japanese internment, not in school, not from my family, not anywhere.  To say I was shocked and horrified would be to make a major understatement. If I hadn't seen the photos in Jane's book, I would never have believed such a thing could have happened.  

For years since then I've thought about the camps and wondered what life was like there. I've tried to imagine how it must have been for Jane's mom to have to head off to an unknown place with four little kids -- Jane's father was taken to a separate camp as they didn't believe he was a citizen and there was some issue about the dynamite he used to blast the stumps out of his strawberry field.  Jane told me that her family was part of the first group of people of Japanese descent rounded up and that they were shipped off to Manzanar in California's Owens Valley. Janes's parents were Nisei (born in the U.S. of Japanese parents), and she was of the Sansei generation (born of parents born in the U.S.).

Wonderful, eloquent and tragic photos exist of Manzanar and the people who were interned there. Both Ansel Adams and Dorthea Lange documented the lives of the internees. But seeing photos is not the same thing as being there. So I decided to go visit the came myself. I spent the Labor Day weekend traveling to and from Manzanar, which is in a dry windy valley between Mt. Whitney and the Inyo Mountains.

The first thing I saw, from a long distance off, was a reconstructed guard tower, placed on the same site where one of the eight towers surrounding the 540-acre camp once stood. A hawk was sitting on one of the crossbeams when I shot this photo. Behind are the sharp-toothed eastern slope of the Sierras.

Next I saw two stone gatehouses and the sign, ``Manzanar War Relocation Center.''

The camp is now a National Historic Site, administered by the National Park Service.  At its peak Manzanar held 10,000 women, children and men, many of whom were U.S. citizens, deemed a threat for nothing more than their Japanese ancestry.  When the internees arrived, they were  given large canvas bags which had to be stuffed with straw to serve as mattresses for one 20' X 20' room in a tarpaper-covered barracks alloted to each family. Each barracks had six such rooms.

There was no running water, other than a spigot at the outside corner of each barracks. The toilets and showers were in a separate building, causing the Japanese women mortification at the lack of partitions and privacy at each. No furniture of any kind was provided, and given that the internees were limited to only what they could carry, very few brought any furniture with them. ( I read Jane's brother's account of the internment in which he mentioned that the thing he thought important to bring with him was a small rubber model of a John Deere tractor. In that photo I mention above, if you look carefully you can see him clutching that tractor).

Even though the internees arrived in family units, the War Relocation Authority initially made no provision  for schools for the children. And more than 100 Japanese-American orphans were also rounded up and brought to a special ``children's village'' on the site because they were seen as a potential ``threat to national security.''

The uninsulated barracks had been thrown up hastily, and when the internees first arrived many could look up through holes in the roofs to see the sky. Here's a photo of one of the barracks reconstructed.

An auditorium built by the internees has been turned into an interpretive center, with a model of the camp, exhibits about every day life, a memorial wall listing all the internees, and photos that illustrate the anti-Japanese hatred that raged in this country in the days following the attack on Pearl Harbor. Here's one of the photos that was enlarged and made part of the exhibits.

This next photo shows a mock-up of a typical room in which an entire family had to live. Image trying to take care of four little kids in this space!

There was nothing outside except the hard alkaline soil  the endless winds in the Owens Valley turned into dust permeating every crack in the buildings. When the kids went outside to play, they were soon covered with that dust.

Initially there wasn't much for the new arrivals and their children to see or do. Some of the internees volunteered to help build the barracks and other facilities. Others scrounged scraps left from construction or packing crates to make crude furniture.  Eventually schools and a hospital were established, both staffed largely with internees themselves. Some of the internees were the gardeners who created the gardens and landscaping of the wealthy residents of Pasadena and Beverly Hills. They quickly turned their efforts to creating gardens, some of which eventually contained streams and the kind of rock features you'd find today in the Japanese tea garden in Golden Gate Park. Here's the remnant of one of the gardens, this one adjacent to the on-site hospital.

 
Some internees died during the 4.5 years of the camp's operation. They were buried in a cemetery adjacent to the site where this ``Soul Consoling Tower'' monument was built by internees. Today visitors to the cemetery often bring small offerings, such as flowers, coins or strings of origami cranes.

Here's another shot of the tower, with some of the other visitors included, to give you an idea of the scale. You can see some of the strings of origami cranes.

Some of the internees were able to work while they were in the camp, weaving camouflage nets that were placed over military sites to disguise them from enemy aircraft. I found myself wondering if the people from Bainbridge Island ended up making camouflage nets to disguise the Bremerton Naval Yards or the Boeing Company, since their proximity to each was one of the rationales given for their internment.

Only those internees who were U.S. citizens were allowed to work at the camouflage factory. Over time some of the internees were filled with bitterness, and some of them became ``no no boys'' when they were asked to answer affirmatively to two questions about their loyalties and their willingness to serve the the U.S. Military. I had read John Okada's No No Boy years ago, so was aware of the loyalty questionnaire. But seeing this FBI file on an internee who had served in the U.S. military in World War I, and who was rejected on the grounds of his ancestry from serving in World War II was chilling. The man whose photo you see answered ``no'' on both questions, was sent to Tule Lake, also known as the ``camp of the disloyal,'' and at the end of the war was so disgusted at his treatment and that of other internees that he went to Japan and never returned to the U.S.

Later on in the war, the draft-age men in the camp were encouraged to volunteer, and many of them were part of the legendary all-Nisei 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which became the most decorated unit in U.S. military history.  This link will take you to a photo of Sadao Munemori, a member of the 442nd, who was posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor while his mother was interned behind barbed wire at Manzanar.  And this link connects you to a photo of the blue star banner Monemori's mother displayed in her barracks window while her son was serving in Germany.  Some women chose to serve also, as you can see in this photo Ansel Adams shot of Kay Fukuda, who left Manzanar to become a naval cadet nurse.

Naturally the interpretive center at Manzanar had a bookshop and naturally I came home with several books. My favorite is The Art of Gaman, by Delphine Hirasuna. The word ``gaman'' doesn't translate terribly well from the Japanese, but means something like enduring with dignity and patience. The book contains photos of a wide array of art created in the camps. Often the art is made from the most mundane materials, such as string saved from bags in which onions arrived, packing crates or electrical insulation board. What was really interesting to me is that many of the items pictured in the book were made from the most mundane materials, yet exhibited such a high degree of craftsmanship as to be museum-worthy. 

Jane and her family were at Manzanar for only a year. Like many other internees from the Pacific Northwest they were transferred to the Minidoka camp in Jerome County, Idaho, which is now also a National Historic Site.  Even though her family was not at Manzanar for the duration of the war, I still was able to find their listing in the computerized database at the interpretive center.

When I was standing in the interpretive center looking at the exhibits, a Buddhist monk came up and started talking to me. He asked me why I was there and I explained about my friend Jane and mentioned that she was from the first group that was interned. ``From Bainbridge Island?'' he asked. When I said yes, he asked me Jane's name and then said of course he knew who she was, and that her brother -- who is a dentist on the island -- takes care of the local Buddhist monks' teeth pro bono.  Small world, isn't it?

The site on Bainbridge Island from which Jane and her family were sent to Manzanar has now become an affiliate of the Minidoka monument. It's called Nidoto Nai Yoni, which translates into ``Let it not happen again.'' This story from the Seattle PI about the monument contains the photo of Jane's aunt Fumiko Hayashida carrying her daughter Natalie that is probably the iconic image associated with the internment. Every time I look at it, it makes me so sad. Here's a video from KING-TV about the dedication of the Nidoto Nai Yoni wall in which 100-year-old Fumiko Hayashida and daughter Natalie talk about the internment.

My friend Jane was not at the dedication. She died very suddenly and unexpectedly in 2002. She lived a good life of service to the community, always real role model in terms of her energy and commitment. I'm so sorry she didn't live to see this day.

This Sunday is the 10th anniversary of the terrible attack on the World Trade Center. I remember well that in those frightening days after the attack, some of the voices of reason came from the Japanese-American community, which cautioned restraint and warned against irrational hatred of all Muslims for the actions of a few. Those who were sent to the camps -- and their children and grandchildren -- want to make sure that we let it not happen again.

The last photo I shot at Manzanar is this one. The cemetery there was, strictly speaking, outside the bounds of the camp. That Soul Consolation Tower was built on the other side of the barbed wire, which tells me there really was no escape from the camp and from those hard times for a group of people treated so badly just because of their ancestry. Nidoto nai yoni!

 

They must think we're nothing but heifers

The recently published photograph of some 50 of jailed polygamist leader Warren Jeffs' wives took me aback, but maybe not for the reason you'd expect. The young women, all wearing long-sleeved pastel-colored dresses and arrayed as if they were posing for a class portrait, reminded me of my own eighth-grade graduation photo from Seattle's Holy Names Academy more than 50 years ago.

Like the ``celestial wives,'' we were all young, pretty, and wearing what, in 1957, was considered appropriate clothing for 13 and 14-year-olds. My dress was white, but most of my classmates' dresses were in those same pastel Easter egg tones so beloved of the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints women. Our skirts were almost as long, and the neckines of our dresses covered us up to our collarbones.

There were several huge differences of course. Unlike Jeffs' brides, we knew our lives were just beginning, that years of education lay ahead of us, and that myriad choices were opening up for us.  The nuns who were our teachers kept encouraging us to set high goals and work hard to achieve them. I can remember being told over and over again ``don't let anybody ever tell you that you can't do something just because you're a girl.''  And I think I can safely say that all of us in my class were virgins, and none of us were part of a selective breeding pattern intended to bring heavenly glory to one older man.

One of the things that distressed me as I've learned more and more about the very strange and very sick goings on in the FLDS, was that some of the leaders of the church were applying principles they used in breeding their cattle to the selection of their wives and the begetting of children: one old (and very perverted) bull servicing a field of heifers. ``Celestial wives'' were selected for their breeding potential, and intimacy between them and their husband were governed by a schedule based on the women's cycles, with the aim the conceiving as many children as possible. If this isn't  the ultimate objectification of women, reducing each of them to little more than a receptive uterus, I can't imagine what else could be.

As I was reflecting on  this, thoughts of a popular reality television program kept coming into my head. I am referring to ``The Bachelor,'' a program on which 25 willing young women are presented to a man who takes them on a series of exotic dates with the aim discovering which one is the right one for him. I actually watched this show one season with the kind of fascination one would bring to observing the aftermath of a train wreck. The potential brides are arrayed in their finest clothing, jewelry, hair styles, and makeup, and are falling all over one another in their efforts to demonstrate that they're ``there for the right reasons'' and that they're ``there for (fill in Bachelor's name here).'' They don't even know who the man is when they start the show, and yet they were all vying to demonstrate their willingness to do anything this potential mate asked of them, and ultimately to marry him.

They may have been dressed more fashionably than the FLDS women, but their roles weren't terribly different.  They mainly hung out around the harem -- a big house in the hills above Malibu-- until they were summoned to spend some time with the bachelor. Certainly they have better control of their fertility than the FLDS women, but their time in the ``fantasy suite'' with the bachelor struck me as sex almost as ritualized as it apparently was on the special beds Warren Jeffs had made for the temple on the  YFZ ranch in Texas.

Then last night I happened to catch a segment of ``Toddlers & Tiaras,'' a reality show tracking child beauty pageants. I covered these when I was a journalist working in Louisiana, so the excesses that were shown on the program weren't particularly surprising to me.  There's the grotesque display of three-year-old girls wearing false eyelashes, false teeth, full-body makeup,  earrings, massive wigs, and more sequins and glitter than you'd see on a Vegas showgirl.

I saw one mother rehearsing her child's ``talent'' presentation. (Trust me, the threshold for ``talent'' for a three year old is pretty low). She encouraged the child to turn her back to the judges and  shake her bottom, with the mom calling out ``tushie tushie tushie'' to encourage her daughter's efforts. And another mother commented to the camera as she was supervising the application of makeup on her daughter's face that she wanted her child to look so good that ``the judges would want to take a bite out of her.'' The contestants who were old enough to remember any dance steps were performing moves you'd expect to see done by Lady Gaga's backup dancers, not by little girls still too young to write their own names.

You can tell me about scholarships and poise  and opportunities for these little girls until the cows come home, and you can also point out that there's a companion show to ``The Bachelor'' in which a young woman gets her pick of 25 male candidates. But at bottom, both of these shows remind me of what Warren Jeffs sought in and did to women.  It's the objectification and commodification of females that just gives me shivers. Factor in the premature sexualization of toddler girls,  and there you are, back in FLDS land, in my opinion.They're all terribly disempowering to women.

And this all takes me  to Anders Behring Breivik who last month slaughtered more than  70 people in Norway. I've read many parts of his lengthy manifesto and seen his video, both of which are available in many places online. What does he hate and fear more than anything else? It's the idea of the matriarchy and the empowerment of women. He was unsuccessful in reaching his primary target, Gro Harlem Bruntland, who was Norway's prime minister for more than 10 years. Bruntland, who was Norway's first female prime minister, is a physician who went on to serve as president of the World Health Oranization after leaving government.  She's affectionately known as ``landsmoderen,'' or ``mother of the nation.''

Breivik blamed Bruntland for the ``feminization'' of Norway and the ``emasculation'' of white male-dominated Europe. And what did Warren Jeffs say to his celestial wives, many of whom were barely even pubescent?  He told them to ``keep sweet,'' and explained that this meant being ``submissive and obedient.''

It strikes me that this is all related. Rule by the patriarchy is, I hope, in its death throes. But it's dying hard and as that dinosaur thrashes around on the ground, lashing out with its teeth, claws and tail, the most bizarre excesses are played out before our eyes: ``spiritual wives'' being ritually deflowered before an audience in a temple, young women in a reality show cattle call to see if any of them please the designated bachelor, three-year-old hoochie mommas performing in eye shadow and  bare midriffs, and, finally teenagers shot down in cold blood because they were daring to build a diverse, democratic and open nation.

I'm not a bitter separatist. I'm the daughter of a man, the mother of two men, sister of a man, widow of a man. I'm blessed to have wonderful kind compassionate creative smart and competent men in my circle of friends and I'm grateful for the richness they've brought to my life.  But I don't have any use for the patriachy any more, not in any form whatsoever. It doesn't seem to have done the world a lot of good.

That doesn't mean I want to set the matriarchy up as the dominant paradigm either.  We women have our excesses, too. I guess what I'd like is a neither-archy, and a movement beyond any kind of ``power over'' with an egalitarian ``power with'' mode in its place. Goddess only knows we don't need any more of the patriarchy's abuses. As a Pagan woman, I've chosen a non-patriarchal religious life, and I only hope this option will someday seem desirable to those I'm seeing so heavily under the patriarchy's thumb.

I went to summer camp on an island . . . .

When I was growing up, my paradise was a small island at the south end of Puget Sound. There were no roads to the island, so when I was a child, and later when I was a counselor, we would take a surplus World War II landing craft back and forth from the mainland.

Besides the landing craft -- which was rechristened ``The Walrus'' -- there were a few other items of military gear to be found at the camp. When we took the kids out onto the water, they had to wear heavy cork-filled canvas life vests the equal of which I've seen only in a few World War II movies. And in the mornings we ate our oatmeal in heavy white handle-less mugs that were also Navy surplus.

Camp Blanchet, one of three camps then operated by the Catholic Youth Association in Western Washington, was a place of magic, of long summer twilights, of the scent of ripening blackberries, of forests with huge cedar and fir trees, and sword ferns that grew taller than some of the youngest campers. Mock orange bushes were always deliciously, fragrantly in bloom during the summer sessions, as were ox-eye daisies, deep purple vetch, pink and white wild radish, and, in the forest, an occasional white or wine-colored trillium.

Our days were filled with fun: crafts, athletics, swimming, boating, and always singing, singing, singing. When I'm an old old lady in the nursing home and everything else has left my memory, I'm sure some of the songs we sang around the campfire will remain.

I attended camp as a child, worked there as a counselor when I was in high school and college, and  sent some of my kids to this camp. Cousins galore also spent part of their summers there. The idea that it could be anything other than an oasis of peace, community and fun would be incredible to anyone I know who ever set foot on that magical island.

My memories of Camp Blanchet have been the back story to the horrible news that has come from Norway over the past few days. As a parent myself, I don't have to try very hard to understand the shock, disbelief, grief and anger that must be overtaking those parents who sent their kids off for an idyllic time on Utoya island, to have them come back home in body bags, or lying in beds in hospitals, maimed by bullets intended to do maximum damage by exploding when they entered a human body.

Years ago when I was a student at Holy Names Academy in Seattle, our teachers continually reminded us of the Parable of the Leaven. We were told we were to be the leaven, and it was our responsibility once we left school to bring change and growth and positive values to society. I'm sure this is very similar to what the youth on Utroya Island were told. They were the future of Norway's Labor party, which had as its core values democracy, and an open, free and inclusive society.

If you look at the photos of the kids who survived, or begin to read the names of those who have died, it will become very clear that these were not only blue-eyed blonds who looked like Anders Behring Breivik. You can see boys in Sikh turbans, and kids with Asian and Middle Eastern features. They were poster children for the new Norway, which is exactly the Norway Breivik hated. (They looked like kids from the multicultural California where I live).

I don't know if it's still online, but yesterday I had a chance to see the video Breivik made and posted on YouTube. He seems to have a rather elaborate fantasy of himself as some sort of avenging knight, out to keep Europe European and free from cultural dilution by, most particularly, Muslims, but pretty much anybody who didn't look like him.

One thing really struck me from this video. He was calling for ``unity, not diversity,'' ``monoculture, not multiculture,'' and ``patriarchy, not matriarchy.'' All three of his goals are exactly antithetical to the religious and cultural life I have chosen as a Pagan woman.  All the women in my coven have come from somewhere else, as have most of us in the Pagan community. If I were to say the one thing we all have in common, it is that we are refugees who fled the patriarchy and its pernicious influence.

That patriarchy has, in most of our views, not done terribly well in terms of human rights, concern for the environment, commitment to diversity, and harmony throughout the world.  With all three of the Abrahamic traditions maintaining , that the earth is theirs as sovereigns and masters, that women have their limited place, and that God is always on their side, blood has been spilled for millennia.

When I was a very little child, the first prayer my mother taught me was how to make the Sign of the Cross. Today, when I see crosses emblazoned on the knights pictured in Breivik's video, I shudder. Under this sign, new horrors were wrought. I don't want to be part of any tribe that picks up a religious symbol wears it, and, in its name, fills the streets with blood and the skies with smoke from bomb blasts.

Those of you who know me well know of my pride in being a Norwegian American. I've been proud of my family's long long history in Norway, and of the accomplishments of my family members here in the U.S. I've traveled to Norway, stood in the churchyard where so many of my ancestors' bones lie, and sat for hours on the rocks at Alta, tracing with my fingers the petroglyphs carved by some from my tribes thousands of years ago.  After the Lillehammer Olympics, I was thrilled that champion skater Johann Olav Koss used his prize money to establish a foundation to aid disadvantaged youth. And I know that every time there's a natural disaster or people are displaced by war, Norwegians are there to help. 

So I guess I am taking this recent tragedy terribly personally. I am so angry and so filled with grief that such a thing would happen. Someone at my coven's Lammas ritual said yesterday that on a purely statistical basis, the events of this weekend affected more Norwegians than people in this country were affected by 9/11. 

A number of years ago, some members of the Heathen community who were concerned about the use of the sacred symbols of the old Norse religion by skinheads, neo-Nazis and others who would use them to repress people with different skin colors and racial backgrounds. So the tech-savvy Heathens erected a virtual nidstang in cyberspace. A nidstang is a kind of curse that dates back to Viking times. You can read all about it at this link. Scroll down to the red text to read the actual language.

This particular nidstang calls down punishment on evildoers if they do not halt their actions. In other words, this is a curse that's invoking consequences for evil actions done in the name of racism.  The language of this nidstang is powerful, invoking many of the major deities in the Norse pantheon.

At one time there was a viable nidstang ring. Now, many of the links are dead. But I think it's time again invoke this nidstang against those -- like Breivik -- who would slay our own children rather than embrace a diverse world, who would crush the matriarchy and set the patriarchs back on their thrones, who would bear arms emblazoned with crosses  or stars of David or who would invoke Allah while spilling innocent blood.

I am hoping this is my last word on the subject. And that despite this horrible blow, Norway can remain open, inclusive and democratic.  So mote it be!

I can only speak from my own experience

I was so involved in leading two workshops at Pantheacon and connecting with out-of-town friends that I was oblivious to the concerns that were raised about the exclusion of transwomen from one of the rituals.  So I cannot address what actually happened, but will refer people to Jason Pitzl-Waters' ``Wild Hunt'' blog for various accounts.

But people who know I came to Paganism through a Dianic--an all-woman--tradition have begun asking me questions, and I've been thinking long and hard about what to say. So first of all I want to address my own personal issues around femininity and feminism.

I was born in 1944, right when all the Rosie the Riveters were building Liberty ships at the Richmond, California shipyard. My mom was not one of them as she was pregnant and married to my dad, who was serving in the U.S. Navy.  She was probably too conventional to have considered such an option anyway.

When I look at the photos of me as a baby and toddler, I see a pretty child with big eyes and a square little face framed with ringlets. When I got a little older, long braids replaced the ringlets, and most often I was photographed in a navy blue jumper over a white blouse that was the uniform of the all-girl's school I attended.

I remember when my mother was the president of the mother's club at the coed  parochial school attended by my brother and sisters.  The school had student crossing guards, but mom wouldn't let girls participate. ``The job of the male in our sociey is the protection of women,'' she pontificated. I remember thinking this was silly and unfair, but I didn't dare question her decision.

I grew very tall very early. Within months of my 13th birthday, I was 6 feet tall, although the rest of the changes of puberty took a few more years to arrive. I didn't feel pretty or feminine at all. In fact, my alcoholic and abusive father constantly told me I was so awkward, so clumsy, so unfeminine and so ugly that ``no man is every going to want you.'' He also insisted that it was a waste of money to educate me as ``the best you'll ever do is be a clerk in a 10-cents store.'' When I was about 9 or 10 he got drunk one night, grabbed me, and chopped off my braids right next to my head for reasons I never understood. But I felt deprived of the one thing that made me feel feminine in any way.

So I had very little confidence in my femininity, although I knew I was a girl, and felt it was the right thing that I was born into a female body.  There were things I wanted to do that were restricted to boys, and I guess I pretty much accepted those restrictions as par for the course.  I wore girls' jeans that zipped up the side and was unhappy that I had to have a boy's bike so it could be handed down to my brother, who would never be humiliated by having to ride one intended for a girl.

I liked a lot of the things that girls were told they could do: my grandmother taught me to bake bread, knit and embroider, and I loved picking out fabric and sewing not only my own clothes but also theater costumes. Because I was a nerdy Mariner Girl Scout, I had the chance to learn and do some things that most girls never had a chance to do: even now I remember Morse code and how to box a compass and navigate by dead reckoning, and some of the happiest moments of my life are from the 100-mile hike I took over the High Divide in Olympic National Park. But they were all done within the context of Girl Scouting, and, in retrospect, I doubt I would have had the opportunity to do any of those things on my own. I think maybe if my culturally conservative parents had paid attention to some of these activities, they might not have approved. But the aegis of Girl Scouting made these activities palatable, or at least gave my parents an excuse to ignore them.

I learned well those lessons from my dad  about how unacceptable I was. As a result I always felt awkward and clumsy and disentitled to the things that were associated with feminine beauty. Even now I dress badly, at least by my fashionista daughter's standards, and the only thing I've ever figured out to do with my long hair is braid it and pin it on top of my head. I buy makeup every year or two, put it on once, and feel so ridiculous and awkward that this is as far as it goes.

Puberty came late, as I said earlier, and I was still waiting for a bra when many of my classmates already had voluptuous bosoms. Although I didn't realize it at the time it was the cause, the Von Willebrand's Disease bleeding disorder I inherited from my father made menarche and all the cycles after that horrible, messy, and endless.

I was quite certain that I would fail at other things associated with my female biology. I was truly shocked (and so very pleased) that I got pregnant so easily, but figured it went with my whole not-a-very-good-female body that all my babies had to be delivered by C-section.  I married when I was young, and, in retrospect, I think some of the reasons for that ill-considered marriage were that it would validate me as a woman that some man would want after all.

When I was in my final year as an undergraduate, I was engaged. I can remember sitting in my classes toying with my engagement ring as I tried to sort out the turmoil that was raging within. I so desperately wanted to be ``normal'' and married to what we used to call ``a good Catholic boy.''  At the same time, I was a very able student, drawn to the life of the intellect, and I knew I didn't want  my most important discussions to be about the centerpieces for the Mother's Club tea.  There were only two lay female professors at my school that I ever saw, and I knew I didn't want to be like either of them: eccentric single women who were even more physically awkward and less feminine than I felt I was.

I did both marry and go on to graduate school, but left school once I got pregnant for the first time. I fell totally in love with my babies and had the luxury of being at home with them in their early years. At the same time, the issues of second-wave feminism came to me and I began to question and chafe at the restrictions that were placed on me because of my gender. I didn't see any female doctors, lawyers, judges, police officers, scientists, letter carriers, highway flaggers, mechanics or priests and I began to wonder why not.

Fast forward to many years later, and my entry to the Pagan world. Like so many other women (and more than a few men), I came from Catholicism, and an utter sense of frustration with what I perceived as the institutional misogyny of the church.  I'd had it with men in dresses telling me what to think and do, how to conduct my reproductive life, and what my role in the Church and society ought to be.  I left in a rather dramatic fashion, somewhat akin to Nora's slamming the door in Ibsen's ``Doll's House.'' Maybe some other time I'll tell that story.

When I found a Pagan women's group I was enchanted. I remember walking into a ritual and seeing held up as sacred images that reflected my life and experience as a woman.  I realized that any experience I'd had of unconditional love came to me from my grandmother, and that the image of the bearded old man on a cloud had always felt disconnected from me.

Eventually I discovered there were circles and covens and groves and groups in which men participated with women. I knew I didn't want to do this as I had old old habits of deference to male authority in a religious context, and that was something I did not want to carry forward from Catholicism to my Pagan life.

Increasingly the emphasis in the group I attended was on Artemis/Diana and  the women in the group began calling themselves Amazons. This didn't feel quite right to me, but I went along with it for a while because I knew I didn't want to go back to Rome, and was not yet ready to share my Pagan spirituality with men.

And then one night the uber-leader of the Dianic movement with which I was connected started holding forth on transwomen, calling them men who had mutilated themselves so they could come into our space and take over. This struck me as both preposterous and deeply insulting to those who'd made that terribly painful journey.

In my circle I started to hear the phrase ``women-born-women'' and, even worse to my eyes and ears, the leader started insisting we refer to ourselves as ``womyn'' or even ``wombyn.'' (The spelling offended me almost as much as the sentiment).

Then I went to a large weekend all-women's retreat and was told to put my hand on my womb and feel the goddess within as some kind of spiritual connection to my sisters. But because of the von Willebrand's Disease, I'd had to have a hysterectomy well before my 30th birthday, so I was apparently lacking something that was necessary for this brand of spiritual sisterhood.  I confronted the leader who said ``oh well then, you can just put your hand on your womb space instead.''

``WTF'' wasn't yet part of my vocabulary, but the phrase would have perfectly described my response.  And all my old insecurities rose up again. I apparently wasn't enough of a woman to be a good Dianic. That's the message all the womb talk gave to me.

Eventually I left that group and was one of the founding members of the coven to which I presently belong. It is an all-women group, but we don't define who or what constitutes a woman.  Those who self-identify as female have come to our group. And we also frequently interact with the Pagan Alliance, standing beside our brother Pagans for rituals, festivals, and service projects. My friendship with many of them has become dear to my heart. And so is my cherished friendship with women who may not have begun life in a body with a conventional female configuration.

So I've been thinking about what happened at P'con this year, and can only offer commentary drawn on my own experience.  What I call the ``transphobia'' of a large segment of the Dianic community both infuriates me and breaks my heart. And, in a funny way, it reminds me of the gay-marriage debate.

I've never been able to understand the argument that letting same-sex couples marry detracts from the institution of marriage. It's not like there's a finite amount of marriage out there and same-sex couples are going to suck the marrow out of it.

Likewise, my understanding of the sacred in terms of a female presence cannot be exhausted by the participaton of those who didn't start life with the same genital configuration I have. 

When I think about it, gender essentialism seems to me to be a kind of blasphemy. When I talk about my understanding of the sacred, I say that the Goddess as I perceive her crooks her finger at me and invites me to come and participate in the messy, scary, awkward, exhilarating process of life as co-creatrix. The Goddess is Changing Woman and so am I.  I think about this when I make art, when I bake bread, when I plant seeds or sing a song, or gather together 5-gallon plastic buckets so my coven sisters and I can drum up a wild ruckus under the moon. That invitation doesn't specify how the genitals have to be configured.

My father tried to define what was feminine to me and told me over and over again that I could never measure up. So how can I dare convey that message to anyone else? It's a message so filled with hurt and contempt that it undercuts everything I hold so dear in my Pagan life.

At Pantheacon I generally lead a art-making workshop on yoni self-portraits. The first year I offered it, the Pantheacon organizers were a little apprehensive as I asked for four ironing boards and four irons, and I think they feared we were going to do some kind of scary kinky stuff.  But now it's almost become a Pantheacon institution and I got many queries this year about why I didn't offer it this time.

In this workshop we use fabrics to create an image that tells a story about how we feel about this part of our bodies that has often been an occasion of shame, fear, harm, joy, sensual delight for us. Every woman has a different story and every woman has used different imagery over the years.  It seems to me there would be no problem with a transwoman's participation in this workshop.  This workshop is conducted in sacred space, and we generally tell stories about the images we create, and  listen respectfully to one another. What is said in this workshop stays in this workshop.

Over the years it's provided women with a safe space to talk about things they might not have had a chance to share in other contexts. Some of the women have liked doing this so much that they come back year after year.

 I'm not sure what effect the raging debate will have on Pantheacon next year. Certainly Paganism as I think of it is the big-tent religion with room for all. Many who come to us are refugees from the Abrahamic faiths, whose unique gifts and talents were scorned and even dishonored.  How can we say to them they're not women enough to dance with us in our sacred spiral dance?

I'm wondering why there is such a concern about gender these days?  Have you tried to buy a toy or an article of clothing for a baby lately? Everything is so strongly gendered that it's nearly impossble to find something that's gender neutral. What kind of anxiety about social change does this address?

My kids--sons and daughters--all had trucks and dolls and none of them seems the worse for it. My eldest son came home from the hospital wrapped in a pink receiving blanket, in a little nightgown printed with rosebuds that matched the pink in his soft baby cheeks and everyone thought he looked wonderful and never raised an eyebrow.

Certainly what separatist Amazons want to do on their own time and in their own space is their business. But they should not bring exclusionary events to public multi-tradition gatherings such as Pantheacon. The fee I pay as part of my registration for Pantheacon pays for the conference rooms that are used for workshops and rituals. And, frankly, I'm not prepared to help support a ritual to which there's some sort of gender bonafides that must be satisfied.

Yes I believe there is a place for all-women and all-male workshops and rituals at Pantheacon. But the people who wish to attend are themselves the arbiters of whether they are male or female enough to participate.

So that's my two cents worth.  Your mileage may vary.

 

As delivered June 14, 2008

I was cleaning out my email queue and found a couple of emails from relatives asking for copies of the eulogy I write for my father Bjarne Slind when he died three years ago. I'm embarrassed that I never responded and figured today that maybe the best thing would be simply to post it here on my blog so that people who are searching for information about my father it can find it in one place. I also know that eulogies and obituaries are often useful to people who are doing genealogical research. Dad died April 12, 2008

So here the eulogy is below a photo of Dad when he was about 8, a little boy living on a wheat farm in Washington State's Palouse country:

Our father Bjarne Slind was born in Vikvarvet, Selbu Kommune in Sør Trøndelag County, Norway on April 17, 1919. He was the youngest of six children of Ingeborg Klegseth and Ole Slind. His older siblings were Gilbert, Ole, Christine, John, and Johanna.  Of his family of origin, only Ole survives.

He was baptized in the Evangelical Lutheran church in Selbu, in, the same stone building where his parents, grandparents and even more remote ancestors were baptized and married and in whose churchyard many of them are buried.

His father raised dairy cattle, cut timber, ran a grist mill and worked as a blacksmith. His mother grew vegetables, helped with the haying, took care of the dairy cows, spun, wove, knit and sewed her family’s clothing.

When Dad was three years old the family left Norway in June 1922 aboard the SS Stavangerfjord, a coal-fired steamship on the Norwegian Line, built in 1917 especially to haul immigrants to the North America.  The family was among the 800,000 passengers who sailed from Norway to Ellis Island aboard this ship over the years.

After they left Ellis Island, they boarded a train for Spokane. The children were all wearing new heavy woolen clothing that their mother made for the journey. All the clothes were dyed black, and as each child outgrew the clothing, it was passed on to Dad. The black dye faded into brown, and Dad had a lifelong hatred of brown clothing because of this. ``Brown is the color of poverty,’’ he used to say.

From Spokane they went to Lacrosse, Whitman County, in the heart of Washington State’s Palouse country. There Grandpa became a wheat farmer. Dad was still at home for a few years when his siblings went off to school, so he had more of an opportunity to speak Norwegian to his mother—who never learned English—and he remembered many little folk stories and songs she taught him.

Eventually he was old enough to go off to Mud Flat School with the five bigger kids, and there he quickly learned English. Two important things happened to him in those years. His mother died of von Willebrand’s Disease when he was 10 years old, so his older sister Christine was forced to drop out of school at the end of 8^th grade to take care of the kids and the house. Dad formed a powerful bond with his older sister, and, for the rest of his life, cared deeply about what she thought and felt about him.

The other significant event was that one day he saw Charles Lindbergh fly overhead on a promotional tour after Lindberg’s successful attempt to make the first solo flight across the Atlantic. Dad, who was a little boy standing in the middle of a wheat field in bib overalls,  looked up, saw the plane and said to himself, ``some day I’m going to fly.’’  Years later, when I was standing in the Smithsonian with my finger on the piece of moon rock they permit museum-goers to touch, I looked up and saw hanging from the rafters Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis, the plane in which he made his epic journey. And I realized that it was Lindbergh who motivated Dad to the career choice that made it possible for anyone to bring rocks back from the moon.

Dad attended the Selbu Lutheran Church in Lacrosse, and was confirmed there when he was 15. He was a member of the last class to make confirmation preparations and be confirmed in the Norwegian language, as that immigrant church began to be Americanized, just as its congregation had begun to assimilate.

After grade school he went to Lacrosse High School where he excelled, academically and also made beautiful, well-crafted items in wood shop .There was little time for the kind of frivolity most high school students enjoy, for Grandpa was a demanding taskmaster, and Dad and his siblings were needed to help work the farm.

The farm work was hard. In those days, the plows and combines were pulled up and down the Palouse Country’s rolling hills by teams of mules. Dad said he had to hitch up the teams during harvest, sack the wheat, sew the wheat sacks shut, then haul them down to the railroad siding and load them into the box cars. He blamed his back trouble on damage from tossing those heavy wheat sacks into the train cars.

After high school he went off to Washington State University, entirely on his own. He did odd jobs on campus, and worked harvest in the summer to pay the bills. After several years he transferred over to the University of Washington, near where his brother Ole was completing an internship at Providence Hospital.  Dad started work at the Boeing Company as a draftsman, and also helped Grandpa Tjerendsen—Uncle Ole’s father-in-law—who built finely crafted wooden boats.

Dad met our mother through Uncle Ole. Mom -- Mary Kathryn Mead -- was a medical technologist working for a doctor who practiced at Providence. They were married four months after Pearl Harbor Day, and shortly after that, Dad enlisted in the U.S. Navy for the duration of World War II. He said he chose the navy because he knew he’d always have a clean bed instead of having to sleep in a foxhole.  He was stationed first at Great Lakes Training Center near Chicago, then in Ogden Utah, and eventually at Treasure Island, in San Francisco. Mom was pregnant with her first child when they were in Ogden, and moved with Dad to San Francisco right before Christmas 1943.   That's why I was born in a naval hospital in Oakland.

Dad’s expertise was in electronics, and he spent much of the war teaching his skills to others at Treasure Island. He did go to sea, but never told any of us very much about that time. Eric was also born in California when Dad was in the Navy.

After the war, he and Mom bought 10 acres largely covered with second-growth timber in Lynwood Washington.  The idea was that he would build a large two-car garage on the land and we would live in it while he built the big house. He did build the garage that became house, and we moved in in 1949 after Brigit was born in Ellensburg.

The house was made from cinderblocks, with a flat roof, and a concrete slab floor. It was surrounded by gardens where lupine and delphinium grew to gigantic proportions, fertilized with manure from the rabbits Dad raised to supplement the family income. We ate rabbit nearly every night but Fridays, and Dad sold the rabbit skins to a furrier.

We also had chickens, Muscovy ducks, pigs, three goats, and some domestic geese that terrorized Dad by periodically taking nips out of him whenever they could sneak up behind him.  Dad bought a brand new car after the old Packard he received from our grandparents gave out. It was a pale green 1949 Ford with what seemed to our eyes to be the ultimate in modern styling.

Dad’s commute to Boeing from Lynwood was too much in those pre-freeway days, so in 1950, Mom and Dad sold their property and bought a huge three-storey house on Interlaken Boulevard on Seattle’s Capitol Hill. There we attended school and our sister Martha was born in 1953.  Dad worked on a series of ever more secret Boeing projects: the B-47, and B-52 intercontinental bombers and the Minuteman missile. Dad flew on many of the tests of these airplanes, and in his papers I found a photo of him in the helmet and ``G-suit’’ he wore for high-altitude flights, looking like something out of a primitive science-fiction film.

In 1960, Boeing transferred him to Cape Canaveral, and the whole family moved to Cocoa Beach Florida. This was a very difficult time in the life of the family, with Dad working long hard hours, and drinking longer harder hours with the Boeing Air Force liaisons after work.

I can’t begin to say how important Boeing was to him. how central to his life. When I was going through his pictures and papers to get ready for this memorial, I saw for the first time many photos of him at work. He looked happier and more self-assured than he did in any photos ever taken of him at home.

Boeing gave him the chance to be creative, something we forget sometimes when we think of dweeby engineers with their plastic pocket protectors and their slide rules. But Dad was creative at Boeing.  I didn’t know, for example, until I read his personnel file, that he was the one who designed the electrical system for the Minuteman missile.

He dressed like an engineer –when I saw the movie ``The Right Stuff’’ and its scenes in Mission Control, I had to laugh because all the guys were wearing dorky short-sleeved white shirts that were the exact duplicates of the ones Dad wore to work when he was at Cape Canaveral.  He loved his Boeing engineer’s flat-top haircut and wore his hair that way for the rest of his life, although when he got old, he had more of what looked like a kewpie doll curl in front. 

Being an engineer at Boeing influenced his speech, too. He was always going to ``work the problem’’ and when things went badly at the Cape, he’d come home and say ``they really screwed the pooch today.’’

Dad had a number of unique expressions we’ll never forget. Some came from the navy: When we were little and got into trouble, he always threatened he’d hold a ``captain’s mast’’ hearing. Things had to be ``squared away’’ properly, and he always called his white boxer shorts and his t-shirts his ``skivvies.’'

When something pleased him, he’d always say ``I really got a bang out of that’’ and I honestly think he was innocent of the phrase’s sexual innuendos. And when he liked someone, he’d always say ``I think the world of’’ whoever that was.

His work on the Minuteman gave Dad his first chances for international travel. He went back and forth between tracking stations in Woomera, Australia and Madrid, Spain, and was  thrilled when he had the chance to fly all the way around the world on one trip.  He was an enthusiastic traveler, and always came home with tales of exotic places he visited, and strange little items he bought—I think mainly in airport gift shops—for his curio cabinet at home. 

He was, however, the world’s worst photographer and the photos he brought home from his trips were invariably out of focus and filled with double exposures. One Palm Sunday he was in Munich and he shot—from what had to have been a distance of at least two city blocks-- a 36-exposure roll of identical slides of the archbishop handing out pussy willows instead of palms.  It’s funny that so many of his descendents have turned out to be excellent and skilled photographers. For sure they didn’t get it from him.

When we first moved to Florida, we lived in a rented house with a swimming pool that backed up onto a canal. Two weeks after we arrived in the state, Hurricane Donna came ashore, one of the most devastating hurricanes of the 1960s. The house was flooded, the screen enclosure around the pool was ripped apart and Dad said a small alligator found its way into the pool from the canal.

After a year of rented housing, he and Mom built a house on a different canal. It was the first and only new house they ever had. But he was seldom home to enjoy it, as the pace at the Cape grew ever more intense. And the drinking problem got worse and worse.

The family moved back to the Seattle area in the summer of 1964 and lived in a rented house on Mercer Island. He and Mom loved the house and eventually bought it. Dad moved from the Minuteman to the Lunar Orbiter project that photographed possible landing sites on the dark side of the moon. He brought home long strips of the digital black-and-white photos as they were transmitted from space. And after the success of the Minuteman, Dad moved on to Boeing’s AWACS project. This is the airborne warning and control system in the form of a big mushroom-shaped radar dome rising up out of the back of a B-52.

Mom was diagnosed with cancer in the late 1960s, and died, after a long and hard struggle, in December 1972.  Dad was at odds, living alone in that big house, and not doing well at all.  He married his second wife the following December. They lived together in the house in Mercer Island until her death 31 years later.

It was initially difficult for us to realize and then accept that Dorothy, his second wife, was the love of his life, rather than our mother. To say he simply adored her would be to make an understatement.  There was nothing he liked more than making her happy in any way he could. And she made him the center of her life.

Dad was always very sensitive about the fact that he had never managed to finish college. This fueled much of his sense of inadequacy and embarrassment. Dorothy was sensitive enough to know how this rankled and she gave him something he truly treasured, a University of Washington ring that he always wore proudly.

Dad retired when he was in his early 60s, and spent the first decade of his retirement taking Dorothy with him on his travels. They got to Norway and Germany and it seemed as if they were always on the road somewhere.  Their life together became very self-contained, and Dad loved the absolutely immaculate order in which Dorothy was able to keep every part of the house.

Dad began keeping a diary. It wasn’t much, just a few lines written in a book every day about the weather, which animals he saw out the window where he sat when he wrote, and occasionally he mentioned the events of the day. When his grandson—and namesake—David Bjarne Flor died in a mountaineering accident in 1989, Dad simply wrote that it was the worst day of his life. And on 9/11 he wrote of his puzzlement that such an attack could ever have happened.

His health problems restricted him more and more. The von Willebrands Disease he inherited from his mother got out of control, and he spent part of every week at the Puget Sound Blood Bank being infused with various blood products and receiving whole blood transfusions. His travels stopped as he was too anxious about being away from his doctor and the blood bank should he have a bleeding episode.

He had other health issues too, including several heart attacks, and more surgery that he could remember. Soon his life settled into a pattern: trips to the blood bank, taking Dorothy to the hairdresser, and their lunches out at several restaurants they favored. Their community of friends seemed to shrink to the various health-care workers who were part of their lives, and one or two old Boeing stalwarts.

The last family event Dad ever attended was his sister Christine’s funeral near Tacoma. He was very ill that day, but he insisted on attending, and I will always remember how tenderly he placed a spray of wheat, cedar and red roses on her coffin.  Several days later he went into the hospital to have his faulty heart valves replaced.

Dorothy always took care of Dad, but she was the first to die. In her last months of life, he started doing the shopping and cooking as best as he could. Her last days devastated him, and when he returned to the house after her death, he was in deep and furious denial about his inability to live on his own any longer.

Eric and Martha pressed him hard on the issue because they knew he couldn’t survive on his own. They courageously pushed, prodded, pleaded, yelled and tried to reason with him, and eventually got him moved into an assisted-living facility on Mercer Island.  Island House was a great place, filled with staff members who cared about him, but Dad was never really happy there, and always viewed it as a temporary placement. He’d badger Eric to go out and reassemble all the household goods they’d dispersed when he moved to Island House because he just knew he’d be up and on his own in no time again.

He bought a new car, and after several years at Island House, he barely put 100 miles on it. But it was an important symbol to him of mobility, and it was a sad sad day when he had to give it up.

Dad fell and broke his hip last year, and after the hip-replacement surgery, it was clear that he needed more assistance than Island House could give him.  Eric looked and looked and eventually found him a place at the Kelsey Creek Family Care Home. Of all the possible nursing home situations, it was the very nicest, and it was clear that Dad was well cared-for and respected by his caregivers.

But his health issues—and the accompanying depression—dragged him down. The last time I saw him—which was about a month before his death—he seemed so small and gray, all curled up in his wheelchair, bent and twisted with osteoporosis.. He read the paper from cover to cover every day, but didn’t seem to have much appetite for anything else. I knew when I saw him that time that I would never see him alive again.

He did love receiving visitors. And I want particularly to thank Uncle Bob, our mother’s brother, who visited him faithfully, and always cheered him up. And Jim Peterson, his old Boeing friend from Mercer Island remained important to him to the very end of his life.

Dad died on April 12, one week shy of his 89^th birthday. His death came suddenly, and by the time the paramedics arrived, all they could do was pronounce him.

So those are the facts of Dad’s life, which reads like the story of many of this nation’s immigrants.. He was the youngest child in a six-child family. He married twice. He had four children and certainly was a father to his second wife’s daughter.  He had many grandchildren, and was fortunate enough to have known some of his great-grandchildren.  Like many Seattle-area men of his generation, he was a Boeing man through and through.  Dad made true Boeing believers of all his children. To this day, whenever I get onto an airplane, the first thing I do is pull the card out of the seat pocket to check and see if it’s a Boeing jet.  

All of us here who share Dad’s DNA are like him in many ways, and unlike him in others. I hope that each of us has inherited some of his best qualities: his capacity for and pride in  hard work,  his meticulous craftsmanship, his curiosity about the world, his deep and abiding love of the land, particularly the West.  He was an immigrant from a Norwegian peasant family who never forgot his roots yet had a career his parents could never have imagined.

Before I finish, I want to say something about my brother.  Usually in a family, it’s the daughters who end up being the caregivers for an aging parent. Because all of Dad’s daughters live in other states, Eric took the primary responsibility for his care.  It was a singularly difficult and, most of the time thankless, task and I know that it was one that broke his heart many times over.  He treated Dad with unfailing wisdom, kindness, and compassion. I will be grateful to him forever for giving Dad this care. As I’ve told Eric several times, the most important thing he’s done is to teach his children by example how to care for him when the time comes.

(The eulogy closed with the invitation given below for others to share stories about Dad).

I know we all come from different religious and cultural perspectives and finding the right note for this memorial was difficult. But I would like to end this eulogy with an invitation for each of you to share some brief memory of Dad, if you will, and then we will close with some music that seemed strongly related to his life.  We will pass Dad’s walking stick around as a ``talking stick’’ and your chance to speak will be when it is in your hand. Everyone else will listen to you and no one will interrupt you when you are talking. If you don’t feel like talking, it’s OK just to take the stick and pass it on to the next person.   Your memory doesn’t have to be serious or solemn, just something you recall of our father. After all, what is remembered lives!

Coming together, 50 years later

Well, I did it. Made it to the 50th reunion of my class at the all-girls' school I attended in Seattle.  Decided to drive rather than fly -- my cranky left knee is in utter misery after 15 minutes in cramped tourist-class airplane seats -- so I had lots of time to think on the way north, and speculate about who would be at the reunion and what we'd have to say to each other.

I started at Holy Names Academy in first grade. It was the first school I ever attended, so, for years, everything I knew about school was seen through this filter. The school, which was founded in 1880 and is the oldest continually-operating school in Washington State, occupies a building that takes up an entire block on Seattle's Capitol Hill. The present building, which was constructed in 1908, is crowned with a huge dome that is a Seattle landmark, visible across the city in many directions. The school is shaded with massive elm trees that have, so far, managed to evade the Dutch elm disease. It's set in a neighborhood of stately homes, many of which were once filled with Capitol Hill's 12-child Catholic families. Here's a photo of the school I shot the day of the reunion

 

When I climbed the steep hill to school for the first time, I proudly wore our uniform of a navy blue jumper over a white blouse. The blouses were short-sleeved in grade school and long-sleeved once we got to high school, and we even had uniform shoes (brown oxfords) and socks (white ankle socks) in grade school, which gave way to white bucks and navy blue socks for high school.

Our teachers were members of the community of the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, a teaching order founded in Longueil, Quebe, in 1844, 100 years before I was born, by Eulalie Durocher. The particular charism -- or mission -- of the community was the education of women. The community always placed a strong emphasis on the arts, in addition to the usual reading, writing, and math skills.

I know many women (and some men) who went to Catholic schools and had nuns for teachers like to talk about being rapped on the knuckles with a ruler and about how neurotic and uptight their teachers were. It was never that way for me, or, I think, for most of my class. School was an oasis of peace and calm, the only place in my difficult childhood I found acceptance and encouragement. I remember that the teachers always called us their  ``pupils'' rather than ``students'' and, to me, that meant a close connection  and a vested interest they had in the outcome of our lives.

The decorum would seem very old-fashioned by contemporary standards, I suppose. Our desks were in straight lines, and when called upon to ``recite'' -- i.e. answer the teacher's questions -- we stood by our desks. Whenever another teacher came into the classroom or whenever we met one in the hallway, we always greeted them with a slight curtsey and ``Good afternoon Sister Whatever her name was.'' We were supposed to walk the hallways between class in silence. I was a musician so didn't have to take physical education, but my classmates who did had to wear horrible bloomer-like gym shorts, and could play only half-court basketball.

We learned to write with metal pens in a wooden holder that we dipped into inkwells at the top corner of our desks. When ballpoint pens came along, they were barred because teachers believed we would lose the fine penmanship they strove hard to teach us.

My great aunt had graduated from my school, as had two of my aunts. My mother graduated from a university taught by the same order of nuns, and another aunt briefly attended a second university they operated. My girl cousins came to the same school as I, and a few years ago, the daughter of one of my male cousins graduated there, making us a four-generation family. In other words, it would have been unimaginable for me to have attended any other school.

What did this group of women in my class have in common? We were born in the middle of World War II in either 1943 or 1944. Most of us had a father who served in the military in that war, and at least one member of my class never knew her father because she was born while he was overseas and he never returned.

We were Catholics and grew up in the American Catholic church of the 1950s. Our parents watched Fulton J. Sheen on television, many voted Republican and applauded the addition of ``under God'' to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954 at the behest of the Knights of Columbus, and were stunned by the death of Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1957.  The mass was in Latin, celebrated by a priest who stood with his back to the congregation, and assisted by boys in black cassocks and white surplices.  Our teachers wore the traditional habits of their order, a stiff white organdy bonnet that had the effect of horse blinders, covered with a black veil and worn with a long black dress with long sleeves. 

Most of us didn't know very much about the world beyond that we experienced in our families, our parishes and school. For those of us who grew on on Seattle's Capitol Hill, in the neighborhoods around our school, we assumed the rest of the world was like ours: heavily populated with Catholic families with a large number of children. Those who were lucky enough to be born into a 12-child family had the opportunity to see the archbishop come to the parish to baptize that 12th child.

Few of us had mothers who worked outside the home. Our moms were of the June Cleaver, Harriet Nelson era, and when we were in grade school, very few of them were ever seen in anything but a dress. (That did change when we went to high school, and those awful polyester pants suits began to catch our moms' attention).  We rode in cars without seat belts, X-rayed our feet at the Red Goose shoe stores without a thought of health consequences, and were continually exposed to second-hand tobacco smoke at home, in restaurants, and in our parents' cars.

The ogres of our youth were what were called ``Atheistic Communism'' and ``the Bomb.'' The University of Washington had had a big anti-Communist witch hunt when we were in grade school, and there was an official policy -- largely ignored -- that required us to get permission from the Archbishop if we wanted to go to school there or at any other state university.

On occasion we were all herded into the basement of the school where the lights were turned off and we were told to kneel down and say the rosary. This is what passed for a bomb drill at our school. Our fear of the atomic bomb was great: many of us had fathers who worked for Boeing and the gospel we learned is that inevitably Seattle would be a first-strike target of Russian bombers ( and later, ICBMs) because Boeing made the b-52 bombers my dad helped develop. Every Wednesday at noon we heard the wailing of the air-raid siren test, and when we were in grade school, we all wore metal ID bracelets with our names, addresses and phone numbers that were supposed to be useful should we be separated from our family in the days after a nuclear blast.

``Convenience foods'' as we presently know them had not yet been invented.  The very first frozen vegetables were showing up in grocery stores, generally in white packages with pictures of igloos or Eskimos on the label. Most of us had the first television set arrive in our homes when we were in grade school, and very few of us had seen anything but black and white broadcasts by the time we graduated from high school. The telephones in our homes were black, with rotary dials, and most homes had only one.  Perma-press fabrics were just starting to come in, so most of us spent a few hours every weekend at the ironing board, helping our mothers with the mountains of ironing that needed to be processed every week.

We said ``Negro'' or ``colored'' instead of ``black'' or ``African American,'' ``oriental'' instead of ``Asian,' and certainly ``Indian'' instead of ``Native American,'' and ``Mexicans'' instead of ``Hispanics.'' Our school was multicultural, so from first grade onward I had classmates of all races and colors. I had grown up playing ``war'' with my brother and his friends, a game in which some of us got to be ``the good guys'' (namely U.S. Marines), and the others were stuck with being Nazis or``the Japs.'' (Years later when I had many Japanese friends, I cringed to remember our childhood games).

Every year on the feast of the Immaculate Conception (December 8) at Mass we took the Legion of Decency pledge, promising not to go to movies that were rated ``B'' or ``C.''  The C movies were condemned and we were told it was a mortal sin  to see any of them. (Among the condemned movies were ``Psycho,'' ``Spartacus,'' and, later, ``Rosemary's Baby.'')  Mortal sin was also the consequence for reading anything on the Index of Forbidden Books, which included such titles as  Victor Hugo's``Les Miserables,'' Montaigne's ``Essays,'' Flaubert's ``Madame Bovary,''  and anything ever written by Jean-Paul Sartre, Emile Zola, Maurice Maeterlink, and Andre Gide.

When we were out of uniform, we were expected to dress according to SDS standards. And no, that acronym did not stand for a radical student group. I think it stood for ``Supply the Demand for the Supply'' and was a modesty crusade. Skirts were supposed to be 12" from the floor, straps on our formal dresses had to be at least 2" wide, two-piece bathing suits were verboten, and no cleavage could ever show. Amazingly, one of the downtown department stores went along with this and ever year had a special SDS fashion show and tea attended by girls from all the Catholic high schools.

We went through puberty in an era before the birth control pill, or legal abortion, and I think both ideas would have seemed impossible to most of us. Instead, we read``Modern Youth & Chastity,'' a pamphlet with a red cover, which said we would have committed a mortal sin if we were kissing someone and ``venereal commotion'' occurred. As you might imagine, that phrase is forever stuck in my memory. The big question always put anonymously into the question box during our class retreats was whether French kissing was always a mortal sin. (Every priest who gave a retreat said it was).

But growing up and going to our particular school at this time in history was about so much more than sexual repression. Our teachers were radical rabid feminists by the standards of 1950s America. They insisted we do our best, encouraged us to stretch ourselves, and never to let someone tell us we couldn't do or be something just because we were female. Over and over again they demanded we take hard classes, with plenty of math, science and foreign languages so that we didn't ``prematurely close any doors,'' in the words of one of my junior-year teachers.

Meanwhile in the world outside, we were getting very different messages. If our moms had worked during the War, they were encouraged to stay home when the men came home, freeing up jobs for returned veterans. I loved Seventeen magazine, and, in fact, papered the inside of my closet with its covers.Years later I had to pony up mega-bucks to buy several copies of the magazine from my era on Ebay, and saw again the world it told us we would inhabit. Even though Seventeen had a target market of 14 to 17-year-old girls, Its pages were filled with ads for engagement rings, hope chests, china and silverware patterns, and its editorial advice was always on the lines of ``don't ever let a boy think you're smarter than he is.'' Judging by the ads for schools in the back of the magazine, we could aspire to be secretaries, airline stewardesses or models.  

Because we were born during the war, we didn't qualify as baby boomers, even though our teachers often had to cope with the 50-student classes that were necessary when the boomers arrived.   We came along at the tail end of what is known as the ``Silent Generation'' or ``the traditionalists.''  We came of age just a little too early for drugs, sex and rock and roll, and by the time the sexual revolution hit, many of us were married, pregnant, mothers, or had entered the convent. 

I skipped from fifth grade to seventh, so didn't finish school with the class with which I started. When I came into the new class, I was physically and emotionally behind, and, in retrospect, I would have to say that while grade skipping is probably OK, making that leap at that particular point was very difficult for me. My new classmates were all were growing breasts, starting their periods and mooning over the 7th grade boys at the parish school several blocks away, while I was still more interested in riding my bike and catching polliwogs.

Academic content has changed a great deal since we were at HNA. The periodic chart in our chemistry book listed fewer elements than you'd find in a contemporary chemistry text;  while evolution was touched on in biology, DNA and gene sequencing didn't come up; and in physics we learned that maybe someday man might go to the moon. When we wrote our papers for English and history class, if we were lucky we could type them at home on a typewriter. If not, they were hand written in Palmer Method script on lined notebook paper. I don't think I ever heard the word ``computer'' at school, although, with a Boeing engineer father, such subjects came up at home.

Despite the fact that the boys from Seattle Prep and O'Dea (the two all-boys' Catholic high schools) called us ``the homely dames from Holy Names,'' they were largely the guys we invited to the girl-ask-boy formal dances that are known in the Pacific Northwest as ``tolos,'' and some of us even went on the marry some of them.

I was always the tallest girl in my class, and skipping a grade didn't change that for one minute. I hit six feet close to my 13th birthday, and I remember my mom's despair because she'd bought me an expensive wool coat I was supposed to wear for all four years of high school. It very soon had elbow-length sleeves as a result of that growth spurt. I thought I was the  biggest disaster in the whole school, but the other day, when I looked at a couple of our high school yearbooks, I really couldn't figure out why some people were considered cute and others were considered impossible. We all looked pretty much the same: awkward, tentative, and unformed. Here's a part of a page from our sophomore yearbook I scanned into my computer. You will see what I mean. In case you're looking for me, I'm the dorky one in those so-stylish black harlequin glasses.

The night before I went to the reunion, I had dinner with the members of my old Girl Scout troop, and there was a considerable overlap between the Girl Scouts and those who were in the orchestra with me at school. Nerds were us, but I probably took the prize back in school, loving to pass notes to my friends in class written in Morse code and having way too much fun using my dad's slide rule in trigonometry class.

But funny thing, when we showed up for the reunion, we all looked pretty cool as old ladies. And the next, day, so did the rest of my class. I saw very little Botox or, as they say in Hollywood, ``work'' that had been done, and most women were still filled with enthusiasm for life, their work, their families and their communities. Here's a photo of the Girl Scout dinner.

People from my class have accomplished amazing things. One member of my Girl Scout troop had actually worked for the CIA. Several others had been in some of the very first groups of Peace Corps volunteers, and had served in such countries as Afghanistan and Ecuador. Another classmate is the author of a definitive text on fish histology, and, according to a website I found, was a candidate for ordination as an Episcopalian bishop. Another worked for the United Nations Habitat program, coordinating a program for women and habitat, and now lives in a house she and her neighbors built from mud and bamboo in the mountains of Columbia.  Another was a firefighter and emergency medical technician for more than 30 years. Another found a fulfilling career as a musician and music teacher.

Several women have been enormously successful in business, one establishing a restaurant empire and another developing a very large chunk of commercial real estate in Seattle's Fremont district. Many were teachers, and few were nurses, including one who has just retired as a post lung-transplant coordinator. Two were librarians, one a pharmacist, and another an engineer. One classmate, who worked as a university librarian for years, is now an independent scholar, authoring papers on such diverse subjects as the influence of Claude Monet on children's culture and the cultural significance of rubber ducks. A classmate who runs a ranch and bread-and-breakfast inn in Saskatchewan wrote that while she can ``install a toilet, gut a steer or roof a barn,'' she finds working with her computer ``as weird as purple dirt.'' I think I am the only journalist, although many of my classmates write exceptionally well.

A number of those in my class who entered the covent after graduation are still in religious life. One served as a hospital chaplain in a number of western states. Another works with immigrant women, largely from Mexico, and at Marie-Rose House in Wapato, Washington, provides friendship and a wide range of services for the women and their children.  One of my classmates who  is not a nun,  married, had kids, got an advanced degree in ministry and founded the Ignatian Spirituality Center in Seattle, an amazing achievement for a laywoman. Another is a minister and founder of a Pentecostal church. At the reunion mass, the two of them gave the homily, something that would have been unthinkable 50 years ago. And they did extremely well. I think I am the only out-of-the-broom-closet Pagan in my class, but given the high percentage of Catholic women I find in all Pagan groups, I suspect I may well have a few sisters in the class.

Many women in the class are grandmothers and have found much satisfaction raising their children. Some have had children with challenges, such as Down syndrome or multiple sclerosis. We were in school before the Salk polio vaccine came along and two members of our class are still dealing with the damage that disease did to their bodies.

We've already lost 19 members of the class, several to cancer, and two to multiple sclerosis. And I suppose our numbers will continue to diminish, despite everyone's best efforts. I'll probably see very few of these women often and some I may well never see again. 

One of my closest friends from Holy Names is Sister Mary Ellen Robinson SNJM. She's the one who runs Marie-Rose house in Wapato. We had been talking, after mass, about how all the little birds we once were had grown up and flown out of the cage. Then I reminded her of how our teachers all told us we were the leven and it was our responsiblity to go out and change the world for better. We talked about that secret phrase that went from mouth to ear during the French Revolution as a call to arms, ``the bread is rising.''

Mary Ellen was asked to say grace before our luncheon. And oh, she gave my Pagan heart such a thrill. She stood up in front of us all, flung her arms wide and said ``God our Mother, the bakery is open, the bread is rising and  we have made changes and are here to make more.''

50 years ago, Mary Ellen, another classmate and I took a backpacking trip to Mt. Rainier's Summerland meadow several weeks before Mary Ellen entered the convent. I have a faded photo of Mary Ellen and Sandra sitting there in a a flower-filled meadow on a sunny summer afternoon.

We were all so young, so idealistic, and so naive about the world. But I think that the teachers who nurtured us at Holy Names Academy would be proud of what all three of us, and, indeed of the women each of the members of our class have become.  The bread has truly risen!  And here we are at our reunion.

Along the Avenue of the Giants

If for us Pagans the whole world is our church, then surely the groves of redwood trees along the Pacific Coast are some of our cathedrals.

Each of us has some few places with special magic. The  first time I set foot in Mt. Rainier's Klapatche meadow filled with alpine flowers, I knew the immanence of the divine. Even now, all I have to do is close my eyes and I am transported back to that flower-filled meadow, where the bistort nodded in the breeze, bees buzzed above the heather, and the cerise of the Indian paintbrush was so intense that it felt like the color was boring into my retinas. And I feel wrapped in the love of and from Mother Earth.

There's a weeping cherry tree along Azalea Way in the University of Washington Arboretum in Seattle that, for a few days every year, is like a giant umbrella and, when the branches are shaken, fills the air with a blizzard of pink petals. We've held some of our most sacred family rituals invoking our female ancestors under that tree, and it's one I try to visit every time I'm back in the Pacific Northwest.

The view from the top of Steptoe Butte in Washington State's Whitman County is another special place. The odd geological formation that rises high above the volcanic loess gives a view of the rolling hills of the Palouse that, at th time of the wheat harvest, is a molten-gold Impressionist painting. Ever year at Lammas when we have the blessing of the bread, I am transported back to that peak, with a 360-degree view of the earth's abundance.

Dawn at the Barataria Unit of the Jean Lafitte National Park in Louisiana is a glimpse into the primeval, with clear black water, and the rising sun turning the trunks of the moss-hung cypress trees a soft pastel pink. I always feel like I'm present at the creation -- or at least the early stages of human evolution-- when I walk down the park's boardwalks. 

On a difficult day a few years ago, I stood on the white sands of Sanibel Island, watched the turquoise sea break into waves, and saw jewel tones of the tiny coquina shells spangling the beach.  I stood there, and, for the first time ever, really and truly knew that Yemaya of the ocean truly is She who hears all our tears.

One sunny August afternoon, I was standing waist-deep in the bathwater warm Eel Fiver, watching the red and blue dragonflies dart among the fireweed spires leaning from the banks toward the water. I held a container of honey high in the air, and watched its golden stream fall on the bodies of my sisters who were floating with me in the river. We all knew that day we were daughters of Oshun, swimming in Her river.

Last month when I went to Seattle for my class reunion, I decided to return via the Pacific Coast. Shortly after I crossed the border into Northern California, I left the main highway and drove down the road called the Avenue of the Giants. It covers 31 miles and runs through groves of giant coastal redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens).

It's not a route for people in a hurry. And the minute you drive off Highway 101 and into the first of the groves, everything changes. The scale of the trees dwarfs your car and anything else. What sunlight does come through is filtered, and even on the hottest days, the air feels cool. And, aside from abundant birdsong, it's a very quiet place, even though runs through a massive ``cathedral'' covering thousands of acres.

The ground below the trees is covered with a soft forest duff, and populated with several variety of ferns. Pink oxalis blooms dot the undergrowth with light, and, on banksides that get a little more sun, Douglas iris grows among the ferns. Two minutes into the grove and you know it's time to turn off the car radio, roll down the windows and to go slowly, taking it all in. It is a place like no other on earth. Here's some of the pink oxalis, also known as wood sorrel.

Some of the trees as as much as 350 feet tall and have lived for 2,000 years. Hard to imagine that you can step out of your car and touch something that was alive back in the era of the Roman Empire, isn't it?

The first time I drove down Highway 101, they were still doing a lot of logging of old-growth trees and it was common to see a logging truck completely filled with just one section of one of the giant trees. Now, with more protections for old-growth forests, such sights are relatively rare.

This photo may give you an idea of the scale of some of these trees. Look at the two-lane road and then the tree to its immediate left.  If you've never been to this part of the world, imagine standing at the side of this tree.

When Georgia O'Keeffe painted ``The Lawrence Tree'' in 1929, her subject was a lodgepole pine in New Mexico rather than a redwood. But when I saw that painting in a show of her work a few years ago, it certainly reminded me of what it's like to stand next to one of these big trees and look up up up up up.

Because everything that grows under the big trees has to fight for light, here poison oak becomes almost vine-like crawling up the sides of trees. It still has those same leaves of three, and you must let it be, however.

Here are a few Douglas Iris that manage to get enough sunlight to bloom. In open areas they are generally more intense in color.Here they look like little lavender butterflies darting in the undergrowth.

 
To give you some idea of scale, I could have driven Audhumla through this gap between parts of a fallen tree and the trunk would have been taller than the car.

But apparently this place doesn't speak to some people. As you will be able to tell from this photo, I was pulled completely off the road, and this guy in the red car came up behind me, laid on the horn and then headed down the road peeling rubber and probably doing 60 m.p.h. I wonder why he even bothered. 

When I was a child, I saw one of the films made about Robin Hood. I wanted to go off to Sherwood Forest and live with Robin and his merry men. And because I grew up here on the west coast, in the land of the great coniferous forests, I imagined that Sherwood Forest would look a lot like the groves of redwoods along the Avenue of the Giants. Alas, forests with any kind of giant trees in the U.K. have been logged off for hundreds of years, made into masts and keels of the sailing ships of the British navy. They would probably have been deciduous trees anyway, and Sherwood Forest, even in its heyday, wouldn't have looked much like the redwood groves.

The very last time I was able to take my husband out of the hospital, we drove down the peninsula to Butano State Park, which is in a redwood-filled canyon south of Pescadaro. By then his AIDS-related dementia made it difficult for him to be oriented in time and space. And he was no longer very mobile. But I wanted to get him out of the sterile hospital atmosphere for just a few hours if I could.

After I drove into the park and we entered the canyon, I helped him out of the car, held his arm, and walked with him to a fallen redwood log where we sat down. We could hear the chatter of the jays and the scolding of the crows. He sat there quietly, looking up at the big trees. He was beyond most speech at this point of his illness, but I could still see in his eyes the intelligence and sensitivity that were once part of who he was. And I could tell he knew he was in a sacred place. I hope it was one of the memories that stayed with him during those last difficult days of his life. And I would bet that when he crossed the rainbow bridge to the Summerland, it looked a lot like a California redwood grove, a cathedral beyond anything humans have ever built. 

Not as motherless as you might think

Back when I was playing violin in my school's orchestra, one of the pieces we performed was ``Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.'' I can remember sitting there in the orchestra and thinking that being a motherless child was a very sad state in which to find one's self.

And then my beloved grandmother died, when I was a junior in high school. Several months later we moved from Seattle to Cocoa Beach, Florida, because of my dad's work in the space program and I had to leave behind everything that was familiar.

My mom was somewhat distant to begin with, but after we got to Florida, and Dad's drinking got so extremely out of hand, I mainly knew her only as an absence. Dealing with an out-of-control and violent husband took all her energy. He became increasingly demanding about how she was to cater to him. I think in the name of emotional survival she was unable  to do much else but dance attendance upon him, running all his errands, buying all the toys he demanded, pressing his pants every single morning, and trying to have dinner ready for him no matter what time or in what condition he came home at night.  I started to know what this motherless-child stuff was all about.

I left home for good two weeks after my high school graduation, lived in a college dormitory for four years, and then married two weeks after graduation. After the family moved back to Seattle Dad couldn't or wouldn't let me come over to the house for what was an ever-changing set of reasons. So  in the next few years, what contact I did have with my mother was mainly over the telephone, and not all that frequent.

She was diagnosed with cancer before I got pregnant with my 4th child, and died not long after that child's first birthday.  She spent the last two years of her life mainly in the hospital and because her immune system was severely suppressed from the chemotherapy and radiation treatment, and I was living in the petri dish that is a home with four little kids, I could rarely come to the hospital and see her. My father actually forbade me to come to the hospital because, he said, I looked so terrible that he was ashamed for fear someone from the family would see me. (As I think I've said before, he was pretty unclear on the concept that his children were his family).

Mom died just before Christmas in 1972, and I remember standing in the snow in the mountain cemetery in the Washington Cascades where she's buried. A very dry snow was falling and the individual snowflakes spangled the dark fabric with which her coffin was covered.

Dad married again, one year to the day after Mom died. He didn't invite any of us to the wedding, or for that matter even tell us he was getting married. Instead he presented us with our new stepmother as a fait accompli. I'd met her only once before, when she was introduced as someone he'd met just recently.  We all knew otherwise.

This is a long prologue before I start writing about the person who has been like a mother to me for my entire life. She's been there for me and the rest of the family through all our ups and downs. She's never given me -- or anyone else in the family, for that matter -- anything but unconditional love and acceptance. I've never had to seek her approval because she's always been the head cheerleader for me and for everyone else in my generation in our large extended family.

She's my mom's sister, my favorite aunt, the matriarch of our family, the one who describes herself as ``your crazy old Aunt Doris.''  Here she is with my mom's other surviving siblings at our one and only family reunion a few summers ago on Whidbey Island. The t-shirts they're all wearing have my grandparents' wedding photo on the front. She's the one with the beautiful silver hair.

I don't recall meeting her because she's been here as long as I can remember.  My first memory may well be  a vague recollection of having been downtown in a San Francisco department store with her some time when I was really young, probably not more than three or so.

There's a film of her December 1945 wedding to my Uncle Toby and I show up briefly as a toddler in white high-top shoes. I can't remember the wedding, but I do recall years later cutting a huge piece out of the back of my mom's cerise velvet bridesmaid dress from that wedding and making it into a doll dress. I know from looking at her wedding photos that she was glamorous, and my Uncle Toby as handsome in his Army Air Corps uniform.

The Christmas right before I was five years old, we stayed my grandparents' ranch in Ellensburg while my mom was awaiting my sister's birth in January. I remember looking out the widow one night and seeing that the granary was on fire. No one would believe me because I was just a little kid until Aunt Doris stopped to listen, looked out the window and saw that it indeed was in flames. She believed me when no one else did.

I used to love to stay at her house in Seattle. It was full of odd interesting things like a pump organ down in the basement; a large square grand piano; two pile-upholstered sofas, one cherry-colored and the other pale lime green; old fancy liquor bottles she'd fill with colored water and place on the windowsills; and an decommissioned monstrance in which she kept her spare car keys.

 It was always an adventure to come and see her. I was always welcome  as any grownup to sit at the breakfast bar with her and talk and talk. Even when I was a child, she treated me as if I might have something to say that was worth listening to.

She and Uncle Toby were sometimes the providers of forbidden treats, like the time they brought us a whole array of fireworks, including a cardboard merry-go-round that spun round and round with a whistling noise when you lit the fuse. And sometimes the two of them would take us out for what was then called ``a ride in the car'' on Sundays, back when that was still a somewhat exotic thing to do.  She took us to our first drive-in-restaurant, a place called the Burgermaster, where there really were car hops on roller skates.

During my first three years of college, while my family still lived in Florida, I spent school vacations at my aunt and uncle's house. I sewed my going-off-to-college outfits on her Singer featherweight, and it was in her kitchen sink that I bleached my hair platinum (huge mistake, by the way). I remember the time she let me streak her hair, using a crochet hook to pull  the strands to be bleached through holes we punched in a shower cap.

She drove a Volkswagen Beetle that she'd had painted brilliant lime green,  and was often seen chugging around Capitol Hill in her usual and accustomed routes between home, the supermarket, St. Joe's. and any garage sale she could find.

I was always welcome to bring my college -- and my old high school -- friends to her house and unlike at home, I never had to worry about a drunk or abusive adult present. She knew about the terrible crush I had on the boy across the street who spurned my advances to go become a priest, and never once teased me or made me feel foolish.

When I was married for the first time, as was the tradition in our family, she ``poured'' at the wedding reciption, and hosted the wedding shower. I learned to make spaghetti sauce from her, and beef stroganoff, from a recipe that was far from canonical, and so loaded with cholestrol as to be a cardiologist's nightmare. Every Christmas I make her almond roca bars, using a recipe card in her handwriting that is now splotched with spills from my nearly 50 years as a cookie baker.

Here she is at my wedding in 1965.

When my kids were little, I lived in the suburbs, but drove them to preschool in Seattle's Central Area each day so they would have a chance to go to school with kids of different races and economic levels, rather than in lily-white middle-class Bellevue.  At least one day a week I'd go to Aunt Doris' house while the older kids were in preschool, and in time she had the typical grandma plastic clothes basket filled with toys to delight those of my children who were still too young to go to school.

She sewed the dress I wore to my youngest sister's wedding, and also whipped me up a frock to wear when I was invited to a Shinto wedding in Japan.

On my 30th birthday, she said she'd take a trip with me to San Francisco only if I'd get my ears pierced. I finally caved in and had them pierced and, of course received the special earrings she'd bought for me. We had a great time in San Francisco, climbing up and down all the hills, hitting every museum and vista point, and spending a wild day up in the Napa Valley tasting wine alongside a motorcycle gang.

When second-wave feminism came along, and I began to question the patriarchy and the political and economic order that said I was an automatic second-class citizen, she jumped right into the fray at my side. After many years of faithfully cleaning the sacristy and mending Jesuit's clothing, she suddenly got really mad when she wasn't allowed to be a lector and was told to sit down and be quiet. She never sat down and she wouldn't be quiet either.

After my mother died, my aunt-- who had been her primary caregiver -- realized she wanted to help people who were less fortunate. She started her career as a volunteer at Country Doc, which began as a free clinic serving the underserved on Seattle's Capitol Hill. She was a faithful volunteer for what had to have been more than 30 years. And she also began to demand that her family's charitable donations that were made to the Catholic Church be matched with equal donations to Country Doc.

She and Uncle Toby raised two great kids who are now among my very favorite cousins, good men who are great fathers to their own kids, and loving, respectful and supportive to their parents.

When I left my first marriage, I instantly became the family's pariah. Except to Aunt Doris and Uncle Toby, that is. They never closed their door to me, and Aunt Doris filled my mailbox with letters and newspaper clippings during the years when  no one else would even speak to me.  Over the past few years I've developed the habit of sticking her letters into various books so that when I open a book, I often come across several sheets of yellow legal tablet paper on which she's brought me up to speed on the family, politics, the Church, and anything else she thinks might interest me. 

Here's a photo of her and my Uncle Toby I shot at the Inn at the Market above the Pike Place Public Market in Seattle. I think it dates from around 1993.

 

Of course she showed up for my second wedding here in California, and she came back down to the Bay Area for my husband's memorial up in Tilden Park. I think she even put some of the stitches in his panel for the AIDS Quilt. And she brought down some of those little champagne-bottle poppers we shot off in Tilden at the end of the memorial.

She's a liberal's liberal, and hasn't had much use for a few of our recent presidents. And she's not at all thrilled with that guy in Rome who speaks with a German accent. She told me the last time we talked that ``Oprah's my pope,'' probably because she loves Oprah's humanity and compassion.

She finds my Pagan life interesting and understands that it has its roots in my feminism. I'd love some time for her to meet my coven, for I know they'd all fall in love with her as the crone of all crones. And she'd love them back in equal measure.

She does have one tiny Achilles heel: her love of garage sales. That's where she can really be dangerous. She even wanted to stop at a garage sale on the way to my husband's memorial. What's really hard to accept is that we should probably have paid attention to her and stopped because she wanted to buy the big beach umbrella she saw at the sale. It was truly hotter than the hinges of hell that day, with all of us persons of pink getting extreme sunburns in the meadow where we held the memorial.

She and Uncle Toby have just undergone a very hard seven-month period. A water pipe broke at their condo at the beginning of October, and they've been stashed in a motel ever since while the insurance companies endlessly debated who would pay for the repairs and which repairs would be done. It looks like this coming week they'll finally be able to go back home again after all this time of being trapped in one single room together 24/7.  I'm sure it will take time to get settled, and, given that she's in her late 80s and Uncle Toby is deep into his 90s, it won't be easy or automatic.  

After years of resisting, she's finally joined the plugged-in crowd, and sends email and even has her own Facebook page. My cousins bought her an i-Pad, and enticed her to learn to use it by pointing out that the ads for garage sales were now on Craigs List instead of in the newspaper.

Her hearing's not what it used to be, and she has some moments of forgetfulness. Her thick blond hair is now a beautiful silky silver, and she reads through a pair of heavy black-rimmed glasses. I suppose she'll have to get back into the habit of cooking in a real kitchen after so many months of making do with a microwave in a motel room and she may find that doing a big grocery shopping or hitting a number of garage sales in one day might be challenging.

I am looking forward to seeing her and Uncle Toby next weekend, after I go to my class reunion.  Given their age, I am always afraid that each time I see them might well be the last .  So I always tell them the same thing, that they are the best thing in the world that ever happened to me and my sibs, that without them we would not have survived to adulthood. I've never been that much of a hugger or kisser -- comes with the Nordic psychic DNA I guess -- but it would be unthinkable for me to leave without planting a kiss on Uncle Toby's whiskery cheek or to have a nice squishy bosomy hug from Aunt Doris. Here's a photo I shot of the two of them in Seattle's Volunteer Park a few years ago.

They're the two people in the world who make me feel much less a motherless child. Who could ask for more?

Why this obsession?

It really doesn't make any sense, this immense amount of curiosity and interest I have in the doings of the House of Windsor. After all, I detest inherited privilege and wealth. And I'm  the widow of  an Irishman for whom ``those bloody  Brits'' was a frequent expression of contempt.

But there I was last week, watching every minute of the wedding and obsessively reading all the coverage in every U.K. newspaper available on line, and most U.S. publications too.

And yes, I bought a commemorative coffee mug on eBay, and also scored one of those odd made-In-China mugs created  in a factory whose foreman who probably thought white dudes all look alike, and who substituted a photo of Prince Harry for Prince William.

I don't think my interest is because of all the fantasy and fairy tale stuff. I've read enough about the House of Windsor (and its predecessor dynasty) to know that things are often tough inside those palace walls, even if Prince Charles has a butler who squeezes the prince's toothpaste on the prince's toothbrush twice a day.

Maybe it's because it's a family that, for historic reasons and now, enabled by technology, it's possible to observe very closely, to a degree that would be rude and intrusive to people I actually know. We journalists are all voyeurs at heart, you know. And part of it is probably my magpie brain that pecks away at anything shiny and brings it home.

My friend Thalia always talks about how the two of us have more information stored in our heads that won't earn us money. In my case, a lot of those factoids have to do with Elizabeth and her kinfolk.

It started years ago at the time of the Coronation. My favorite aunt and uncle had a boarder, a British ``maiden lady,'' as unmarried women of a certain age were once deemed, who was the parish secretary. She gave me a copy of the coronation edition of the British version of Town & Country and I poured over it, reading it obsessively, and even now remember many of the details it revealed.  Did you know that dukes have four rows of ermine tails -- actually sealskin spots-- on their coronation robes and that their coronets have eight strawberry leaves? I do. I also know that the cloth-of-gold canopy is held over the sovereign's head by four Knights of the Garter. Never play Coronation trivial pursuit with me because you will lose for sure.

I wrote a poem about the Coronation when I was in 4th grade and it got me into big trouble at school. I remember that it had two stanzas of 12 lines each, while everyone else in the class composed a rhyming couplet of two lines of iambic pentameter. My teacher didn't believe mine was original work, and I was sent home from school in disgrace because  of the alleged plagiarism. She didn't understand that I had read so much about the coronation that I had lots of imagery on which to draw. If you aren't old enough to have seen it on TV in 1953, here's a little archival footage of the Coronation with overblown commentary from the Beeb.

   

Maybe it was in 5th grade that I realized that there had been a Queen Victoria. I knew no one else with that name, so became very interested in her. Read several full-length biographies of her, including Lytton Strachey's before I was out of grade school. I realized that although her name and her era were synonymous with prudery, she was, in fact, a lusty Hanoverian, who was passionately in love with her husband, and who pined desperately for him until the day she died. This trailer from ``The Young Victoria'' makes this abundantly clear.

 

And once I read about Queen Victoria, I became equally interested in her descendants. The fact that so many of them had hemophilia was particularly compelling as in my family, we have von Willebrand disease, which is a non sex-linked form of hemophilia.  It seems such an odd coincidence.

Poor deaf -- but oh so elegant -- red-haired Queen Alexandra was interesting. Like Diana, she had a husband -- Queen Victoria's  eldest son--  who had to wait years and years and years to assume the throne, and who had mistresses right and left, including one who actually was Camilla Parker-Bowles' great-grandmother. Now that's irony! Here's a little video biography of Queen Alexandra.

 

And then there's German-speaking May of Teck, who was engaged to the heir to the British throne. He died suddenly of pneumonia six weeks into the engagement, and what the heck, her marriage was then arranged to his next oldest brother (the King George who was Queen Elizabeth's grandfather). Queen Mary, as she became, was haughty, imperious and may, in fact, have contributed to her son Bertie's terrible stammering problem. During World War I, she had her chauffeur drive her around the British countryside, gathering of scrap metal to be recycled into armaments. Only, for the most part, what was gathered up was working farm machinery that courtiers had to return very quietly the next day.  Here's a brief video bio of this queen.

 

Her son Edward VIII abdicated from the throne to marry the woman he loved, who was by most accounts a rather brittle, unintelligent, mean-spirited and twice-divorced Baltimore native. Their political views were so shocking -- they did hang out with Hitler -- that they had to be banished to the Bahamas for the duration of the war in hopes of avoiding huge embarrassment or worse to the U.K. Here's the abdication speech in his own voice.

 

Most everyone is probably up to speed on Queen Elizabeth's parents after seeking the excellent film ``The King's Speech'' which won so many Academy Awards this year. If you've missed it, do check it out. It's very well done, with great performances by a trio of actors. Here's the trailer, if you've missed it. 

 

When I was a child, I read The Little Princesses, a  biography of the present queen and her sister as children, written by Marion Crawford, their governess. LIfe with governesses and ponies, and coronation dresses were so far from the world I inhabited as to be unimaginable.

And always playing in the background, of course, was the religion issue. Naturally British history in a Catholic school leans heavily toward Henry VIII, his many wives, and his rejection of Papal orders, and the persecution of the Catholics during the reign of Elizabeth I, including what became known as ``The Bloody Question.'' It really seemed strange to me that a king or queen could be head of a church that was so similar to, but so unlike the church of Rome. I was shocked the first time I realized the Archbishop of Canterbury was an Anglican. After all Thomas a Becket, the pre-Reformation bishop who was hacked to death at Canterbury Cathedral, was one of ``our'' saints. Those lines from the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales remain locked in my memory more tightly than almost anything else I've had to memorize:

Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of engelond to caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke

I remember seeing photos of Prince Charles and his siblings as they were growing up, a few years younger than I. They wore such odd clothes, I thought. I remember one photo of Charles as a little boy wearing what looked to my eyes to be a girl's winter coat with Mary Jane shoes and white socks. Even as a little boy, he almost always wore a necktie, something the boys I knew wore once for their first communions and never again until they were in high school. 

I got up in the middle of the night to watch Charles and Diana's wedding. My first marriage was ending and I can remember watching this wedding with such sadness, wondering if this 19-year-old virgin and Charles, like my first husband and I, were from two such different planets that, finally, any rapprochement was impossible. If you've managed to escape all the rerun footage of their wedding this past week, here's a small taste.

 

Diana died the same year I became a widow. I was living in a friend's basement, waiting for my loft to be finished so I could move in. I kept trying to watch the funeral on TV, much to the bemusement of the friend with whom I was staying.  The wave of grief that swept the UK was very different from what I had experienced when my husband died, and I reflected on the different effect a sudden accidental death has on a family as opposed to the slow relentless pace at which AIDS nibbled away at what was left of my husband. What I will always remember best about that funeral is Sir John Tavener's heartbreakingly beautiful ``Song for Athene'' sung as a recessional, with the only other sound coming from the shoes of the Welsh Guard members  bearing her coffin on their shoulders.

 

And now it's 14 years later. It's a new beginning for the house of Windsor that certainly has had its self-inflicted wounds over the past two decades. If the wedding is any indication, it now looks like someone who is advising the court has a better sense of the world outside the palace walls than was the case back when Charles and DIana married, or even when she died.

As I listened to the Bishop of London's homily at the wedding, I heard many good words of advice, advice that would have been in good stead for the beginning of any marriage. I truly wish I'd heard some of them when I was married the first time. He seemed to say what I would say were I to officiate at a wedding (and by the way, I do have ULC credentials and can do so, if you're interested). Here's the homily.

 

I saw a young couple whose body language eloquently spoke of their regard and respect for one another. And there were a few moments that really surprised me, such as seeing Prince Charles pick up one of the 3-year-old bridesmaids and hold her very gently on the balcony so she could see the throngs below. Another little bridesmaid's frowny face peering over the balcony as the bride and groom kiss probably makes for one of the most memorable and fun wedding photos.  I liked the grace and dignity with which the bride's parents comported themselves.  And the greenery in the abbey, including jasmine just like the vine growing in my garden, was such a refreshing change from overdone baroque flower arrangements.

Yes, I loved seeing the frocks. I hope the wedding dress begins a trend as I am very very tired of all the A-line strapless wedding dresses that have been de rigeur for the weddings of the past decade. The bride's dress was very beautiful, I thought, and I enjoyed reading this story in the UK's Daily Mail about how the secret of its details was kept.   I was fascinated by the fascinators and I can see that next Ostara, we will have to make ourselves fascinators to wear to the ritual.  I laughed my head off at Beatrice's hat (hat?) that resembled a cross between a diagram of the female reproductive system and a set of felt reindeer antlers. People are having way too much fun with her hat, as this video indicates.

 

And now the wedding is over and done, and instead of steaming off on the Royal Britannia yacht as Charles and Diana did, they have returned to a farmhouse in Wales and Prince William will be back on the job as a search-and-rescue pilot Monday morning. Somehow this part of the story goes at least a few English miles toward mitigating the whole wealth-and-privilege thing.

Three years later

The first Shakespearean quotation I ever learned was from Marc Anthony's funeral oration for Caesar in Julius Caesar. ``The evil men do lives after them; the good lies oft interred in their bones.''

April 17 would have been my father's 92nd birthday. He's been dead three years now. And what I am finding is that as the days go by, It's harder and harder for me to recall positive memories of him.  Instead, I'm hit with a rush of the negatives that I find myself chewing over, and wondering once again, why he had to be that way. That quotation from Julius Caesar continues to resonate

It's not that I need to dwell on the hard times. Rather, it's that I find so much of what happened to be almost impossible for me to understand, particularly in the light of the way I feel about and try to treat my own children. Sometimes I just sit here and puzzle about it.

A great deal of the problem was my father's upbringing,  although his older siblings seem to have escaped relatively unscathed. For Dad, though, the combination of the immigrant experience; of being the stay-at-home baby when everyone else went off to school, quickly assimilated and became Americans; losing his mother when he was 10; and having a brutal, deliberately cruel father all left their scars. I  can be sympathetic about all of those factors.

What I cannot forget or forgive is what he visited on his family, that is to say, his wife and children. Funny thing, though, I don't think Dad ever thought of us as his family. For my father,  the word ``family'' meant only his family of origin. I remember the first Christmas after our mother died. Dad abandoned us because he had to go ``spend Christmas with my family,'' namely his older siblings.

And years later, when we had a terrible terrible confrontation in which he told me he hated me, wished I'd never been born, and  was sorry I hadn't died at birth, he made such a telling statement ``because of you I can't hold up my head around my family.''  I don't think he ever ``got'' that his children  -- including me -- were his family. Instead, he was, to his dying day, a motherless child who could not live without constant female nurturance and approval from either of his two wives, or from his elder sister who was a surrogate mother to him. His own children didn't fit into that picture.

Alcohol played a significant role. Dad grew up in an Evangelical Lutheran family that eschewed alcohol. But once he got to Boeing and the hard-drinking fast-lane life in flight test, he had to be one of the boys.  I  can't remember a time in his life when he wasn't drinking, except for when he was in his extreme old age and incapable of getting anywhere to get his hands on alcohol.

As anyone who's had an alcoholic parent can tell you, living with someone with a drinking problem means a life of walking on eggs, never knowing what will set that parent off into a rage, a crying jag, verbal abuse, whiny self-pity or physical violence.  A friend of mine once wrote a book about what happens to children in an alcoholic family, and I've always thought his title was particularly apropos: The Opposite of Everything is True.

I truly never knew what to believe, or what to expect. A remark that was deemed harmless one night would get one of us a fierce verbal attack or worse the next night.   Dad used to lay Draconian punishments on us, and then, an hour or two later, would rescind his own orders.  I used to want him, just once, to follow through  even if I suffered serious punishment as a result, just so something around our house would be consistent.

There was often psychological warfare too. He would work us against our own siblings, playing favorites, teling each of us bad things about the others or how favored the others were. And when he had grandchildren, it was just as bad. He didn't hesitate to harp on all of what he perceived to be my children's failings, and those of my sibs' kids, too.  Perhaps it was for the pleasure of getting a rise out of one of his kids, but this mean-spiritedness was unacceptable and unnecessary. And so much of it was lies. My friend who wrote the book about alcoholic parents had a line I'll always remember: ``How can you tell when an alcoholic is lying? His lips are moving.''

I've worked very hard to gather some measure of self-esteem, but oh how difficult it's been!  I heard the constant mantra from him from my earliest days: ``you're so awkward, you're so clumsy, you're so unfeminine, you're so ugly. No man is every going to want you. You're so worthless that the best you'll ever do in life is work in a 10-cents store in Cocoa, Florida.''  The first time I ever sewed a dress for myself -- I was about 14 -- I donned it to show to him, and he said ``it looks like an English riding saddle on a Clydesdale.'' And my kids wonder why I have no fashion sense or self-confidence about my appearance! Even now it's a big struggle to avoid self-sabotage because, of course, I don't feel entitled to have good things happen to me.

He did the same thing to my mom. She was movie-star beautiful, with bright blue eyes, long blond hair, and the kind of cheekbones a supermodel would kill to possess. She was also smart. She majored in chemistry in college, graduated with honors and went on to do graduate work in bacteriology.  But she never worked outside the home once she was married, and in his worst rants, Dad used to say ``Mary, you don't even know the formula for Mercurochrome any more.''

I suspect Dad was probably bipolar, and self-medicated with alcohol. And he had very very low self-esteem, despite his considerable achievements in his professional life.  I think, on some levels, that he was so filled with self-loathing that there was no way that anyone who had descended from him could be worth anything either. 

When he was in his most self-pitying state, he'd sit at the table and cry, ``I'm no good, I'm no damned good Mary (my mom), I'm no damned good.'' But the idea of therapy was out of his realm of possibilities.

It's odd because Dad could be so personable to those outside the family. He often treated outsiders far better than he did his own family. It almost was a joke in the later years of his life that he'd be surrounded with photos of the various health care workers who took care of him and of their children. And he was always buying them presents and sending them cards. There was not a single photo of me in his house for years, but he gave pride of place to my a photo from my ex-husband's second wedding. Go figure.

Once we were out from under Dad's roof, he shoved each of us as far away as he could. Whenever we wanted to come and visit or bring our children by, he'd always say no. He ``couldn't stand it,'' was what my stepmother would say.  He missed birthdays, baptisms, recitals, Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving,  and graduations.  Or he'd be so falling down drunk -- the way he was the night I graduated from high school -- that he was off the hook. 

I got married in June 1965, two weeks after my college graduation.  He arranged a business trip to Spain so he wouldn't have to come to the wedding, insisting that the entire U.S. space program couldn't move ahead  without his making another trip to the tracking station right then and there.  My mother, for once, stood up to him, called his boss and managed to have Dad sent home in time to attend. 

The wedding reception was ``dry'' because I was afraid of what would happen if there was any alcohol .  I needn't have bothered for Dad laid in a supply of liquor at the house for after the reception and proceeded to get good and drunk that day anyway.

Holidays were always a nightmare when we were growing up. Invariably Dad would decided to cancel Christmas because of one child or other's misbehavior. The only way we could ever get it back was to engage in intense self-abnegation, promising over and over that we'd be good. I think we all grew up disliking Christmas intensely, and couldn't really celebrate the holidays with any joy until we had our own children and had developed our own traditions. I'm positive none  of us has ever threatened to cancel any holiday for our children. 

The last few times I saw my father, he was in a nursing home. Osteoporosis had shrunk his Viking frame until he looked like a small gray gnome in his wheelchair, slouched and curved like a shrimp.  He was angry that he couldn't live on his own anymore, and wanted all his dispersed possessions back again.  He was lonely because no one but my brother -- who was his primary caregiver -- and one of my mother's brothers would visit him regularly.  I don't think he ever realized that he pushed everyone so far away that most people just gave up.

He was still quick to judge. He always asked me when was the last time I'd been to Mass,  even though he hadn't been inside a church for decades. He always had something bad to say about what I was wearing and how terrible I looked.  And for some odd reason, I think he suspected that I was a lesbian. He was always asking me about why I was ``hanging around with all those women all the time.''  He looked askance, even when I told him about my boyfriend in New Orleans.

The other day I was talking to my friend Thalia and mentioned that all these negative memories of Dad were driving out anything positive I could recall. She suggested that maybe I was finally realizing that I could stop trying to please him, and was accepting that  despite my best efforts, he was not pleasable.

Perhaps that's the case.  I'm the eldest of Dad's four children, and it's true that the eldest child in an alcoholic family often tries to make things better no matter what. 

At Samhain three years ago, I tried to make a candle for my dad for the Dia de los Muertos altar. After this many years of decorating these candles, I've gotten pretty good at it. But no matter how hard I tried, Dad's was totally messed up. The photo wrinkled, the paint smeared, and it was altogether an ugly mess. I saw it happening and it reminded me of how I used to burn dinner by accident when I was mad at my husband. I guess my hands know what's in my heart, even when my head isn't willing to consider the possibility.

Several years ago one of my mother's brothers died, and, within the year, his wife followed him. As I was writing this, I found myself thinking of this aunt and uncle and remembering attending their 25th wedding anniversary celebration many years ago.  One by one their children got up and talked about how much they loved their parents, and all happy times they had with them and the many kindnesses with with their parents treated them. 

I can remember sitting there,  puzzled.  My cousins genuinely loved and respected their father (and their mother, too, of course).  ``They really do love their father,'' I kept saying to myself in disbelief. ``A father is someone you can love and respect? And he clearly loves his kids.'' What a strange and radical idea that was! More's the pity this story could never have been told about my father.

My kids don't have most of these bad memories of their grandfather. When they were young and he was doing some of his worst drinking and acting out in the years after my mother died, I wouldn't let Dad see them if he was drinking. I didn't want them to become targets, too. So their memories are, I hope, largely benign, unlike the memories my sibs and I have.

And of course, the story's mixed anyway. I'm proud of what Dad accomplished in his professional life. I love my Norwegian heritage that came from his side of the family. I'm sure my love of travel, and my desire to be competent at my work come from him.  I wanted to make him proud of me and  hoped someday he'd find a way to approve and love me back. But that was never to be.

We Pagans always say what is remembered lives. I only wish more of what I remember could be positive.  But there we are, back to Mark Anthony's speech again.