Driving Audhumla

What would Gerard Manly Hopkins say about Pantheacon?

Home again from Pantheacon, and reentering the mundane world after four days spent in liminal space. I have so many friends and family members from outside the Pagan world, and I often wonder what they would think if they were to step inside Pantheacon.

(Pantheacon is an annual conference or convention for those of us who follow many non-traditional spiritual traditions. You will find everything from traditional British witchcraft; Heathenry; Dianic Wicca; Egyptian, Celtic, Roman and Egyptian reconstructionism, religions of the African diaspora, and Hinduism, just to name a few. It takes place every year in San Jose, California, and draws Pagans from all over the West, as well as participants from as far away as Australia and Wales. Many Pagans from the Midwest, the East Coast and even the South also attend).

I remember the time I walked through the door at the first Pantheacon I ever attended. I had been a member of a women-only circle that was very wary of sharing ritual space with men. I came to P'con on a Saturday morning, which is the day in which many of the men don kilts. The first thing I saw was a kilted tall broad-shouldered man with a fierce-looking beard and wild tangles of shoulder-length hair so dark that it was almost blue black. He was wearing leather boots that were almost knee height and had various other leather devices and bags attached to his belt. He was the vision of my worst nightmares and I almost walked back out the door.

Now, when I see the same guy, I rush up to give him a hug for I know him to be the gentle and kind man who has shouldered so many of the burdens associated with the Pagan Alliance, of which I am a member. And besides, it's a lot of fun to hang out with him.

I remember going to presentation and rituals that first time, some of which were fun and easy to understand and others that left me quite puzzled, like the ritual in honor of Inana, at which the priestess passed out raw asparagus sprinkled with cinnamon, which she maintained had been revealed to her to be the proper food for devotees of that Sumerian deity.

That Pantheacon was more than a decade ago. And I've been going ever since. It's the huge annual gathering of all the Pagan tribes that takes place over the Presidents' Day weekend. Paganism is the big-tent religion that is practice rather than belief-based. So we can and do all gather together, celebrating rituals, focusing on environmental and social-justice issues, and learning from scholars despite whichever pantheon we honor.

Pantheacon is held at a hotel, unlike many Pagan festivals in other parts of the country, and while I balk at the cost, I am so thankful that this means sleeping in a bed, having flush toilets and letting others do the cooking. This way we can focus on what's important and, except for the dedicated volunteer staff that takes care of logistics, we don't have to worry about structure.

I always go to Pantheacon alone, even though I am so eager to meet up with friends once I'm there. I find this weekend to fill up so much of my head and heart that I need solitude in order to make sense of it all.

This year the theme was ``Making Changes: Open mindedness, togetherness, tolerance, inclusion, benevolence compassion.'' I would say that the subtext was radical inclusiveness. I think over the past five years, every year more pains are taken to make sure that all in the Pagan world know they were welcome, and that people are working hard to remove barriers to inclusiveness. I saw people who range in age from in utero all the way to very ancient seniors tottering around. And over the years we have much more of a rainbow in terms of people of color, and sexual orientation and gender presentation. As the priest who was leading the Dionysos Hestios revel and devotional said ``you're all welcome here regardless of the color of your skin or the configuration of your crotch.''

And indeed, if you had seen the throngs dancing to the wild drumming, you would have seen a cross section of all humanity. I'm the old crone who walks with a cane and my dancing days are over, yet I was invited to sit in a chair amid the dancing, and we less mobile ones were brought our cups of wine before anyone else. I saw one bearded man dance by, wearing only high-heeled shoes with white anklets, a teeny bikini bottom, and a gold chain mail tank top, if that gives you any idea. Lots of women my age, as well as wild and energetic young people, some with crowns of grape leaves in their hair.

Probably the most moving event for me was the Sacred Mass in Celebration of the Dark Mother, presented by the Order of the Black Madonna. The ritual commemorated the 1100 people of color killed by police and trans people murdered in hate crimes. The ritual was simple, dignified, elegant and powerfully moving.

Many of us came to the Pagan world from Rome, and I think this ritual hit all our buttons: our love of the community from which we came, the betrayal or rejection that led us to leave, the gratitude for the good things we brought with us, and the powerful grief and loss for all we had to leave behind in order to proceed with integrity and authenticity. I could look across the room and see those among us who came from the same roots and I could tell that this was an earth-shaking ritual for each of us. And I was happy that our late friend Amethyst Moonwater was one of those who was commemorated in a special way at the ritual. And oh, the music was absolutely transcendently beautiful!

Lots of really good scholarship was presented this year. Most compelling, I think, was Gus DiZerenga's presentation on German neo-Pagan religion from the late 19^th and early 20^th century. Oh my, who knew? Some of the photos he showed us of early-day German Pagans and their families could very easily have been shot out in Golden Gate Park or up in Sonoma County in the 1970s, or even last week. Gus explored the differences and similarities, and the diverging paths that led, on one level to Neo-Paganism as it is experienced today and, to the dark side, the evils of Nazism. I cannot wait until he publishes a paper on the subject. I expect many eyes to be opened.

I also really enjoyed Max Dashu's presentation on Norse shamanic seeresses. Max has devoted her life to independent study of women's history in earth-based religions, and, as usual brought a wide range of imagery that I'd never seen before and opened my eyes to new aspects of our Pagan/Heathen culture. I'd never before seen the seidstaffs -- used by the seeresses and symbols of their power -- as distaffs. Now I find myself thinking about that image of Mater Admirabilis so beloved by women who have been educated by nuns from the Society of the Sacred Heart, and wondering if one of the reasons for its appeal is the ancient memories that are awakened because of the distaff standing at Mary's side. Guess I'll have to talk to Max about that some time.

There are several different branches of Druidry that were present at Pantheacon, and I attended a ritual aimed at bringing more rain to California conducted by the ADF Druid Fellowship. We did our best, and apparently more rains are due beginning tomorrow.

Patricia LaFayllve is one of our Heathen scholars, and I was glad I had a chance to hear her presentation on Seidhr, which is a Heathen oracular practice. (BTW the term ``Heathen'' refers to those who practice the reconstructed pre-Christian religion of Northern Europeans). I have sat in the high seat and acted as a seeress on a few occasions, and it was good to learn more about the history of the practice as we can decipher it from the Eddas, and to hear about others experiences and ways of doing Seidh.

As usual I had to go to my friend Prudence's presentation on Romuva, which is the Baltic version of Paganism. I see many similarities between Romuva and some of the Heathen practices (and garb), and we have, in fact, imported Romuva's tradition of circle-casting into our own circle because of what we have learned from Prudence. As is the case with many other forms of Paganism, Romuva was revived by cultural scholars and has rapidly caught on with many who are exploring their cultural roots.

Three notable Pagan scholars -- Sabina Magliocco, Tanya Luhrmann and Sarah M. Pike -- presented a panel on what is happening with Pagan studies in the academy and what they are observing in Pagan culture here in the U.S. What I found interesting was the comment that as Paganism is more widely accepted, many Pagans are returning to solitary practice, perhaps no longer needing the support and secrecy of groups. There was also a discussion of the growing Paganification -- if such a word exists -- of practices and even the physical arrangements -- within traditional churches. Certainly the recent photo I saw of women sitting on yoga mats in the sanctuary of St. Joseph's, the Jesuit parish in Seattle where I grew up would bear that out.

Trust me, we did a whole lot more than listen to lectures. I always say the real Pantheacon takes place in the coffee shop and maybe on the ledge in front of the lobby fireplace. It is like a family reunion and I was so happy to see so many friends and spend time in deep conversations with them. Even my  Pagan ``cousins'' from Minnesota's Harmony Tribe were there and, to my delight, are coming out with a book on ritual practice.

I don't usually hang out in the hospitality suites, but this year went with a friend to the OBOD -- Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids -- suite, where I sat there laughing for more than half an hour as a woman who plays the part of a young lad at the Dickens Fair every year got into character, and acted/told us funny stories about what happens behind the scenes.

I missed most of the late night events -- hey, I'm a crone, after all -- but I know many folks danced and drummed and Goddess only knows what else -- at some of the late-night sessions. I did stay up way too late one night having a lengthy conversation with Rowan Fairgrove about the Parliament of the World's Religions, about which I had previously had only an imperfect understanding.

And I pretty much avoided the huge vendors' room where just about any Pagan-oriented merchandise was available. Not because I don't like the stuff, but because my present lack of freelance work is meaning I have to be careful about money, and also, my task as a crone is deaccession rather than acquisition. I did take my precious amber sølje to Just Rewards to see if one of their genius craftsman could repair the accidental damage I did to it the first time I wore it. And because I am a bestemor, I did have to pick up a little something from Practical Rabbit for my Star Boy grandson. But that's what grandmas are expected to do, right?

A lot of workshops addressed social justice issues or those relating to personal growth. Black Lives Matter was very much on peoples' minds, as are transgender inclusion, environmental issues, interfaith work, and Pagan prison ministries. (The latter is a growing field, not because many Pagans are going to prison, but because many people who are incarcerated discover Paganism and are not having their spiritual needs met by chaplains who too often are fundamentalist Christians and cannot tolerate other world views).

I am sitting here now looking through the program and seeing all the great presentations, rituals and other events that I missed. There is literally just too much going on, but that's a good thing because there is something for everyone and then some. And equally important is skipping a few workshops just to hang out with friends.

One of the best parts of Pantheacon for me this year was a lengthy breakfast with Michael R. Gorman, a Druid from Sacramento. We've both experienced similar losses with respect to our family and spent some time sharing coping mechanisms. We came up with an idea for a ritual for Pantheacon next year -- unrelated to family stuff -- and I'm really eager to start working with him on it. It will be the first time I've ever developed a ritual with someone outside the community of women with whom I circle, so it should be a real growth experience for me, and I hope for all who attend it.

The first time I came to Pantheacon, the reporter/Capricorn judging part of me was working overtime and I kept looking around at the participants in their crushed velvet, leather corsets, animal horn headdresses, belly dance hip wraps, pounds of amber jewelry, multiple piercings, tattoos, combinations of beards and prom dresses, kilts, and turquoise-dyed hair and thought to myself ``WHAT are these people thinking, going out in public like this?''

But how I've changed over the years. Now, every time I step through the doorway into Pantheacon's space, the same work by Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins -- ``Pied Beauty''  -- comes to mind. The only thing I would do would be to change the poem to a more polytheistic orientation. Otherwise, it's exactly what I see when I encounter my Pagan sisters and brothers all together, all at once:

Glory be to God for dappled things –

   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

     For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;

     And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

     With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

                                Praise him.

Remembering Mom, 97 years after her birth

Today my mother would be having her 97^th birthday. However she's been gone since 1972. She missed so many changes in the world, in social mores, and even in her own family, and today I find myself thinking and even wondering about who she really was. 

She lived to meet only six of her 12 grandchildren, none of her great-grandchildren. She would not recognize any of the places where her children live today. Of her four children, she would have known the spouse of only one of them, and, never even saw that child be married.

Mom was born Mary Kathryn Mead on Feb. 3, 1919 in the small central Washington town of Ellensburg. Her family was one of the oldest in that part of the state, living there since Washington was part of the Oregon territory.

She was the eldest of six children and grew up on a ranch bounded by a bend of the Yakima River. She was the fourth -- and last -- generation to grow up on the family holdings. Here's the very first photo I have of her. She is, of course, being held by my maternal grandmother.

My mother is a complete mystery to me. She was always very self-contained, and seldom disclosed very much about herself to anyone. She professed to have had no memory of her childhood at all. And her siblings remember her largely by her absence.

When Mom was less than two years old, her brother was born. I'm sure like any first-born, she was jealous of the attention the new baby received, and in some normal two-year-old fashion wanted that ``bad baby'' to go away. It must have terrified her when that is exactly what happened and my grandmother was convulsed with grief over the loss of her infant son to diphtheria.

On so many levels, I think this event played a key part in my mother's psyche. How guilty she must have felt -- on an unconscious level -- that this most forbidden of wishes actually came true.

And it didn't help any that her two surviving brothers both got polio, with one of them very severely disabled as a result. From the time that polio came into the family, the boys' needs had to trump everything else.

Mom compensated by disappearing. She had been given a pony when she was very young, and from the time she could mount the saddle and stay on the pony -- and later on, a succession of horses -- she was gone. She was always up in the hills surrounding the Kittitas Valley, often with the cowboys or the sheepherders who worked that open high-country range land.

You'd think that anything this important to her would provide important memories, but she only spoke of this in the most generic terms. ``I rode my horse into the hills,'' was all she would ever say.

Very few photos survive of my mom as a child, partially because photography was considered an expensive luxury during the Depression years, and partially because the family home on the ranch burned to the ground at Christmas 1956, taking with it several generations worth of memorabilia and photos.

In the few that I have seen, Mom is a serious and sad looking child, with her hair cut in a severe Dutch bob, and wearing the lumpy and uncomfortable-looking clothing inflicted on little girls in the 1920s. I once found a buttonhook among her possessions and Mom said she had worn high-button shoes and heavy knit stockings that had to be held up with some sort of elastic contraption when she was in school. She is the child on the right in the photo below.

By the time she got to high school, her beauty began to manifest. I guess in other times you'd call her a ``blond bombshell,'' except for her constantly serious mien. (I know she did very well in school, well enough to have won a full four-year college scholarship). But with the exception of a set of photos shot on a friend's ranch, I never saw one single picture of my mother smiling as a young woman. This photo of Mom with her skis is from that one set of rare smiling images.

My very Catholic family sent her off to Forest Ridge Convent in Seattle, where she did her first two years of college. After the nuns in the Society of the Sacred Heart closed down Forest Ridge's college department, Mom went on to Marylhurst College in Oregon, a small women's college operated by the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary.

There she majored in chemistry with what was described as a minor in bacteriology. She graduated summa cum laude in 1940, one of a class of only 24 students. Her listing in the college yearbook describes her as a ``tall platinum blond, exotic, sophisticated, but disarmingly talkative,'' and as a ``resident of the chemistry laboratory, future Madame Curie.''

Mom was only 5'6" but perhaps by the standards of the time she was tall. I am not at all sure how and why somebody just off a Central Washington cattle ranch would come across as exotic or sophisticated, but maybe that's only yearbook talk. She does not appear in any photos connected with any of the college's activities or student organizations.

I know that after she graduated, she did an internship at one of the Seattle hospitals, and then med tech work for a medical practice. While she was working at the hospital, she met a  Norwegian-immigrant doctor from Eastern Washington, who, in turn, introduced her to his brother. She dated the brother and they were married in April 1942.

My father Bjarne Slind was a Lutheran, from the Haugean sect, and because of this, although they were married in the Catholic church, my parents' wedding ceremony was truncated and had to take place outside the communion rail. For years I had thought that the big objection to the marriage had to have come from my ultra-Catholic grandparents, but now that I am older, and know a bit more about my dad's family, I realize that they were the ones who had even bigger reservations about this so-called ``mixed marriage.'' Here Mom and Dad are on their wedding day, photographed in the ``music room'' of my grandparents' home on the ranch. They were both 23 at the time.

One time I found two typewritten stapled-together pages in with my mother's papers. She snatched them from my hand and explained that they had been given her by a Jesuit priest a week before her wedding. The paper explained what people do sexually when they are married. She said the priest told her to read the paper once and if it gave her impure thoughts, she had to go to confession before the wedding. I can believe it. This is the religious/cultural mindset inculcated into her.

The wedding came four months after Pearl Harbor, and Dad then enlisted in the U.S. Navy. After he completed basic training in Illinois, he was stationed first in Ogden, Utah, and then went on to Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay. My mom followed him, and was pregnant by the time they moved to San Francisco. Before I was born, she was able to discover some of the exotic life of the city. Here's a photo of her with Dad and other military couples at the famed -- and long-since defunct -- San Francisco nightclub Bal Tabarin. She's  the blond on the left, and next to her is Dad in his Navy uniform.

 

Wartime housing was almost impossible in the city, so Mom ended up with a rented room in a house belonging to an elderly widower out in San Francisco's Excelsior district. And every day she would take the streetcar in to Notre Dame de Victoires, the French church in the financial district, to pray that Dad would not be killed in the war. My name is Mary Victoria because of her connection to that church. I suspect this photo was taken the day I was baptized shortly after my birth in 1944.

I am the eldest of her four children. My brother Eric, also born in San Francisco, came along in 1945, so the two of us qualify as genuine war babies. After Dad got out of the service, my parents bought a 10-acre plot covered with second-growth timber in Washington State's south Snohomish County,  where they built a simple flat-roofed cinderblock house that was our first real home. Here's the house in progress with Mom and Dad taking a break from their labors.

My mom was pregnant again, this time with my sister Brigit, and suddenly was in a place considered way out in the country, with three little kids, a husband who took the only car for a long commute to Boeing every day, and left her with a menagerie that included three goats, two pigs, about 50 rabbits, Muscovy ducks, geese, chickens, cats and a dog to watch over and care for.

I remember our time there as idyllic, with woods in which to roam, wild blackberries to eat right off the bushes, and wildflowers galore. But it must have been so hard for her, and probably very lonely.

Our telephone hung on the wall, and had no dial. You had to put the earpiece to your ear, get close to the mouthpiece that was attached to the wall unit, and tell ``Central'' which number you wanted.

I don't think anybody much ever came to visit very often, with the exception of my aunt Doris and Uncle Toby, who lived in Capitol Hill in Seattle. I do know Mom went to mass regularly, and on occasion, the pastor would call at the house. Otherwise, I think most of Mom's everyday life was consumed with survival, taking care of three little kids, washing clothes in a wringer washer and hanging everything out on endless clotheslines, hoping to dodge the Northwest's ubiquitous rains.

The rabbits -- which Dad raised for fur to supplement his income -- provided an endless supply of rabbit manure, so the garden flowers grew to Guinness Book of Records size. My main memories are of Mom ironing, running an endless stream of diapers through the wringer, and sitting at her sewing machine making clothes for my baby sister. And she cooked rabbit for dinner most every night, telling us it was chicken with an extra pair of drumsticks.

When it was time for me to start first grade, my parents sold the property and bought a grand old house on Capitol Hill's Interlaken Boulevard in Seattle. It had been built at the turn of the century by someone who had gotten rich after the Yukon Gold Rush and wanted to outdo all the neighbors by creating a truly splendid mansion. The arrow indicates the house as it looked when my parents bought it.

But by the time we moved in, living styles had changed, so there was no longer a maid for the back bedroom and the back stairs, or a butler for the butler's pantry. The house was huge, maintenance had been deferred, and I am pretty sure that Dad -- and maybe Mom -- had a dream of ``modernizing'' this old house. Which they did in the very worst 1950s fashion. Just about the only sin they didn't commit was that they avoided putting wall-to-wall carpeting down on the glorious hardwood floors.

Otherwise everything that had made the house elegant and distinctive was ripped out in the dual names of economy and progress. Out went the leaded glass windows; in came the giant picture windows. Out went the beautiful natural wood paneling and in came the dark green flat paint. The peaked roof was dropped something like 28 feet, so that it was no longer possible to walk around the outer circumference of the third-floor ballroom while standing straight up.

The marble countertops in the kitchen were replaced with yellow linoleum, and the giant Tiffany chandelier in the dining room was sold to the junk man for $25 and replaced by a dropped floating ceiling of acoustical tile (probably asbestos-laden) with recessed fluorescent lighting. The exterior was covered with raked cedar siding and was painted a color one of my friends calls ``dental green.'' This photo, taken from the rear of the house, is an ``after'' shot.




I spend so much time talking about the house because that, more than anywhere else, is where Mom spent all her time. She didn't ever work outside the home. She had loved skiing and riding before her marriage, but never ever did I see her on skis or a horse. She never really made friends with the neighbors, or in our parish, much beyond the other family members who lived there. I can't remember her ever going out to lunch with people, or going to a movie.

She read a lot, as indeed do all the women in our family. She made ceramic figurines, which were sold to benefit the Carmelite nuns. She went to mass on Sunday and as often during the week as she could. She cooked, although never very well, with way too much dependence on the newly available frozen vegetables, which she too often boiled into mush. I don't think she was ever very interested in cooking.

Mainly, I think, she served as Dad's handmaiden. Dad was very demanding. His pants had to be freshly pressed every single day. His shirts had to be just so. He was a compulsive acquirer of tools and supplies he needed for his various home-improvement products and often Mom was out on shopping expeditions for some obscure kind of webbing or grommets.

Dad's alcoholism surfaced just about the time we moved into Seattle, although I have some dim memories of some really terrifying beer-fueled Sunday afternoons when we were still living in the country. Once we moved into Seattle, Dad's work at Boeing turned into top-secret stuff relating to the big intercontinental bombers. He was literally working seven days a week, or at least that was what we were told. He'd come home late, after having hit the bars with his Boeing buddies and their Air Force opposite numbers.

Mom would try to cook the limited number of foods he was willing to eat, and to have the meal ready for him when he came home, as he demanded. But he was a meat-and-potatoes kind of guy, and nine times out of ten, when he came home so late, the food was overcooked, and we'd have to hear a diatribe about ``Mary, you killed the meat. You killed the God damned meat again.''

These were the times of his weeping jags, lengthy self-pitying monologues about how ``I'm no good, I'm  no damned good'' and inconsistently applied discipline from Dad that put all of us into a state of constant anxiety. Mom never talked back to Dad. She just set her face into a very sad expression, cleaned up the dish he had thrown at her or the vomit on the floor, and sat at the table patiently listening to Dad go on and on.

I think in these years she tried so hard to do whatever she could to make our father happy that often our needs as children were neglected. We never went to the dentist. We wouldn't have gotten our shots or had other medical care had it not been for our uncle, the doctor. I can remember going to school with the sole of one of my shoes flapping loose for weeks.

It wasn't that Mom was lazy or indolent. She was just so preoccupied, and probably so badgered and beaten down by Dad. And she had one single obsession, the conversion of Dad to Catholicism.

Now that I can look back on these times, and now that I know more about the Lutheran sect into which my father was born, I find it more than a little bit ignorant, insensitive and downright disrespectful that she was so insistent that Dad abandon the faith of his family. For these Lutherans, the Reformation was still very much alive and well, and Catholics were still feared and mistrusted.

Maybe this photo can give you some idea of how very Catholic my family is. It was taken at what was then the Jesuit seminary, Alma College in Los Gatos, California. The family had gone to California for the ordination of one of its members. Charles Suver S.J. He's the guy in the long cassock in the center of the photo and later in life was famed for saying the first mass on top of Iwo Jima during World War II. You've probably seen that photo in history books.  Mom is the second from the right, wearing a black hat. My maternal great-grandparents are standing directly to the right of the newly ordained priest. Making this long trip from Washington State was very big deal in those days, and that fact that so many family members are here can give you a pretty good idea of the level of piety and commitment to Catholicism was part of our culture.

Maybe on some levels, Mom thought that if Dad converted, all the bad things would end and we could have a so-called normal life. But on others I think she simply was infected with the zeal of the Church Triumphant, and really thought there was no salvation outside the Catholic church.

When I was in fourth grade, a florist's bill came to the house for a dozen red roses Dad had sent, not to Mom, but to some other woman. The Christmas  just before this, a card had come to the house wishing a Merry Christmas to Bjarne and Dorothy. But my mom's name was Mary.

So finally Dad's infidelity was out in the open. Dad departed, to live in a rented room behind Volunteer Park, and we were left with Mom to make it on our own. His departure seemed to trigger a mandatory family rosary to be said kneeling around Mom's bed every night. We were supposed to pray that ``Daddy would become a Catholic and come home to us again.'' Only none of us wanted him to come back. We were so tired of being terrorized and beaten and having to put up with his drunken rage and endless rant.

Mom became ever more religious and now went to daily Mass. The prayers we had to say after the completion of the rosary became longer and longer. She consulted a lawyer to get what was known as a ``separate maintenance agreement.'' The lawyer was Catholic, of course, and she used to write him long anguished letters that were as much about religious issues as they were about Dad's behavior and their financial situation.

The fourth child, my sister Martha, was born early on in my parents' separation. Mom had to go to the hospital alone, and came home to take care of the new baby and the three older children all by herself. Having had four kids under five myself, I just cannot imagine how she managed on her own.

What I mainly remember of those years, besides all the praying and the financial tightrope, is of Dad's coming back to the house late at night, drunk, banging on the doors, Mom's eventually giving in to let him in, hearing the sounds of him hitting her and knocking her down, or of him spending the night, taking the doorknob off their bedroom door to keep us kids out. All in all, it was a very confusing time.

I don't know what the precipitating factor was, but one day when I was in eighth grade, Sister Superior came into the classroom and told me I was to go home immediately. When I got to the house, Mom was furiously packing everybody's clothes into suitcases and piling them into the car. We learned that we were all going over to Eastern Washington to live with Dad's older brother, who was a surgeon in a small town in the wheat country.

I never will understand why we went to someone from Dad's family rather than, say, my maternal grandparents' home on the ranch, or to one of Mom's sisters or brothers. In any case, we -- all four kids and Mom -- lived with my uncle for the better part of the school year. It all felt very odd. We had gone from very urban schools to what was essentially a three-room school, Catholic of course, while we were living with our very Lutheran relatives, whose kids went to big public schools. The adjustment was difficult, to say the least, and it must have been awkward for my mom to be home all day with my aunt,  her husband's brother's wife.

The aunt and uncle were cordial, but at that point we didn't know them very well. And the Lutheran thing was strange and scary for us. Back then, Catholics were taught they couldn't even set foot in a Protestant church, yet here we were going off to see our cousins in their Sunday School Christmas pageant.

I never quite knew what went on, but all of a sudden, in just about the last month of the school year, we left the relatives' house and moved back to Seattle, and Dad moved back into the house. He was apparently on his best behavior, and some time during that month, he went off to church one afternoon and was baptized a Catholic.

That summer we went on our one and only family vacation, all six of us plus a cousin who came along for the ride. We drove to Yellowstone, stayed in motels for the first time in our lives, and ate in strange western-themed restaurants where the counters were set with silver dollars. We ran out of money at one point and Dad had to go into Missoula to find a place to cash a check (no cash machines or credit cards in these days) so we'd have enough money to get back home again. Mom brought along her new electric frying pan and on the nights we didn't go to a restaurant, she cooked something -- generally those  frozen``minute steaks'' that were popular then --  in the motel room for our dinners.

After we returned from Yellowstone and I started high school,  Dad began to slip back into the same patterns of drinking and abuse. And Mom simply endured. She worked on her ceramics. She planted petunias and lobelia. She sewed dresses for us girls. And one year she spray-painted a bunch of empty pineapple juice cans black and poked holes in the metal so they could be used in some way for centerpieces for some Mother's Club luncheon. I remember looking at them, and thinking sadly that this is what my mother's education had come to, making ugly centerpieces for an event that she wouldn't even be attending.

She read anything she could get her hands on, and, I am beginning to suspect, she sometimes drank in the daytime. I never caught her in the act, but my siblings insist that this was going on. (I was away from the house for as many hours of the day as possible, escaping to the tranquility and safety of my school and the support of the nuns who were my teachers, or hiding out in the green splendor of the Washington Park Arboretum).

I don't think I ever saw my mother cry, but she was always so sad. And photos from this era support my memory. Mom was also very very beautiful. And I mean movie-star beautiful. Although her heritage was more Dutch and German, she looked like the quintessential Nordic ice princess, with sharply defined cheekbones, brilliant blue eyes, and long blond hair worn in a chignon at her neck. Even today when people who never ever met my mom see her photo, the first thing out of their mouths is ``Oh! Your mother was SO beautiful.'' Well, yes she was. She was also very bright, if her school marks, and her choice of major in college are any indication. She had a certain measure of creativity, and did nice work in any of the visual arts she attacked. And she came from an old and well-established pioneer family.  In the photo below, Dad took Mom over to the Palouse country to meet his family. I can just imagine what it must have been like to have had her show up in her fur coat out in the middle of a wheat field.




I think that on some levels, for my dad she was the ultimate trophy wife, so beautiful, so well connected, so smart and well educated, and, on some levels, so cultured. She was everything he could want, but also was everything that could make him, as an insecure immigrant who lost his mother early and who felt he never fit in, feel unworthy. I think he had to reach too far, or at least he felt he did, to keep up with her. And the only way he could feel good about himself was to tear her down.

If I had a nickel for every time he ranted ``Mary, you don't know anything. You don't even know the formula for Mercurochrom,'' I'd probably never buy another lottery ticket. He criticized her appearance, and her dress. Her housekeeping could never measure up. He wasn't interested in the books she read or the art she made. And he ranted about her terrible cooking night after night after night.

What was hard for us as children was that she just stood there and took it. One time my grandmother had been at the house during one of these particularly nasty confrontations. Afterward she wrote in a letter to another family member that the look she saw on her daughter's face ``was like Mary's at the foot of the cross.'' In other words, emotional suffering elevated to a pious act.

In those years we begged Mom to kick Dad out and make it on her own. But she'd never worked outside the home since her marriage and, as she kept saying all the time ``I made a solemn vow before God'' when she married our father and was not ever going to violate that.

I often wonder what was the attraction he had for her. I heard bits and pieces about the guys she had liked before Dad came along and I suspect that, while she was a very good and obedient daughter, she just wasn't interested in the ``nice Catholic boys'' who showed up and won my grandparents' ready approval .Dad was different, from a world outside of hers, and probably had just enough of a ``bad boy'' in him. Whatever it was, Mom never wavered in her affection for him, and in the last days of her life was urging family members not to forget him and to be good to him.

Dad started to work on the space program and we moved to Florida to be near Cape Canaveral in August 1960, arriving there about a week before Hurricane Donna came ashore with 160 mph winds. We had just gotten settled in our rental house when we had to evacuate to higher ground. And when we came back, a foot of water was in the house, strange creatures-- including alligators and poisonous snakes-- had invaded, and the fiberglass enclosure that comprised an outdoor room around the swimming pool was twisted and torn beyond repair.

Dad was at the Cape almost 24/7 and when he was at home, he was even more of a martinet than before. I guess he was like so many men who worked in the space program at the time. They were in the zero-defects atmosphere at work and couldn't understand why their wives and children and homes and pets couldn't ``straighten up and fly right'' like everything in the workplace.

Plus there were at least 40 bars and motels between the Cape and our house, and for the high-flying engineers, military guys and astronauts  it was party central. I've seen my dad in a lot of drunken states but it was never as bad as when we were in Florida.

For the first time we were able to afford household help and Mom had free time, but had no place to go and nothing to do. Our schools and church were 20 miles away, as well as even the nearest supermarket.

There was some pressure to socialize with the other wives of the engineers, scientists and military men at the Cape. Mom began going to mid-day pool parties with these women, at which numerous pitchers of daiquiris were consumed. And suddenly Dad was expected to bring Mom to Friday night blowouts at the officer's club on the nearby Air Force base. So they were out Fridays, both drinking, and sometimes bringing the party back home with more than a few people ending up in the swimming pool with all their clothes on. It was a lot like the Astronauts' Wives  series that was on TV last year.

It was such a weird and confusing time. Nothing in Florida was at all like our life in the Pacific Northwest. None of the plants or animals were familiar. We no longer were in the Jesuit parish with so many members of the extended family. Mom couldn't find familiar brand names or products in the grocery store. And the very vocabulary people used was unfamiliar. People said ``hey'' and instead of ``hi.'' The African-American woman who helped with the housework asked Mom to ``carry'' her back home at the end of the day. Drinking fountains and even the schools we attended had ``whites only'' labels,'' and Dad's advice to Mom in the wake of all these changes was just to go along with it and not rock the boat.

My maternal grandmother and grandfather had died in the year before we moved to Florida and I think Mom missed them terribly. Someone once found a letter she had written to our grandmother from Florida, tear-stained and tucked into an apron pocket, unmailed. `

This was before cell phones and inexpensive air fares, so it was very hard to keep in touch with her family back home in Washington State. Dad kept an iron control over such things as the number of long-distance minutes on the phone bill and every day would go out and check the odometer on Mom's car to see how much she had driven that day.

I'm sure she felt terribly trapped. She did what she could to assimilate and find some outlets. She collected pounds of shells on the beach, began to cultivate some of the local tropical plants, and even eventually had an atrium built to house a giant cage full of colorful finches. And she read. Mainly trashy supermarket mass-market paperbacks, but they really were just about all she could find in the small beach town.

I left after one year and returned to Seattle to start college. So I don't know what all went on during those next years in Florida. I did come back for part of one summer vacation and found Dad's behavior to be the worst I'd experienced so far.   None of my siblings spent any time around the house if they could. We had a power boat and a dinghy with a small outboard motor and whoever could get hands on the dinghy first was gone down the canals and out to the lonely beauty of the mangroves. Or we hid out down on the hard-packed ocean beach.

Mom seemed to have zero freedom. And all I can remember are the 40-mile round trips to the supermarket, Sundays at mass, and one or two day trips to the likes of Palm Beach or Orlando. We of course had to be home before Dad's estimated time of arrival.

The family moved back to the Northwest in the summer of 1964. Surprisingly they didn't go back to Capitol Hill but instead rented a home on Mercer Island. Once more there were no friends or family nearby. There was a new parish church and a new grocery store, and eventually, a new sewing machine. Mom planted geraniums in her favorite shade of pink, occasionally played one of several pieces she had learned in her youth on the grand piano they could now afford to buy, and, I think may have been doing some serious secret daytime drinking. Again, I never saw this, but my siblings say this was something they definitely noticed when they were still living at home.

I got married in June 1965. I never lived in the house on Mercer Island, moving directly from my college dorm to the house in which I lived as a newlywed. In essence, I left home for good when I was 17, so I didn't see Mom up close and personal in those later years.

She was generous to some of my college friends, particularly those who had some kind of difficulty. In some ways, I think kindness to people outside the family was a little easier for her than to those who had grown up in the toxic atmosphere within.

I started to have babies, and Dad didn't like to have them come over to the house and potentially disturb the harmony of his routine.  And he would never go anywhere for any family event. So most of my contact with Mom was on the phone. I would call her nearly every day and talk for as long as half an hour. Things were rough in my marriage, and at one point -- before any of my kids were born -- I was desperate to leave. I called Mom and asked for help and she gave me the same line ``you made a solemn vow before God'' and refused to help me in any way. So I went back home to my husband and Mom stayed with hers.

A few odd things happened in those years. My brother got married and, while my two sisters were bridesmaids, I had no particular role to play. I went to the wedding and afterward to the reception. Mom came up to me about half an hour into the reception and told me ``it's time for you to go. You must leave now.'' Even now I don't know why that happened that made her not want me to be there.

Another time my dad was out of town on business and Mom was hosting her siblings at the house. I came by for some reason and all of a sudden Mom tore into me, saying ``you think you are so superior and you know all those big words.'' Huh? I just don't know why she had to do that. She was every bit as well educated as I.

I grew very rapidly when I went through puberty, hitting my six-foot adult height shortly after my 13^th birthday. Despite years of ballet, I know I was somewhat physically awkward when I was adjusting to my new dimensions. So it really hurt when Mom constantly told me ``you're so awkward. You're so clumsy. You can't do anything right. Here let me do that because I can't stand to watch you try to do it.''

I don't think she was deliberately cruel. On some level, I would guess that she had been victimized so much by Dad that this was the way she learned to relate to her children. The abused becomes the abuser.

She got a small inheritance from her parents and used it to buy some property on Lake Cle Elum in the mountains of Central Washington, just outside of the tiny coal-mining town of Roslyn. When Dad traveled for business -- and in those days of the space program, he was constantly on the move between various tracking stations in Europe and Australia -- she would head over across Snoqualmie Pass and spend the night camping on her land.

We had a very bad winter for snow one year, with a number of avalanches sweeping across the pass, killing a few motorists each time. I got worried about Mom's driving back and forth across the pass, and asked her not to go during the big snow season. I told her I was afraid something would happen to her. ``Would it even matter?'' she said bitterly. I think that is the only time I ever really heard her express how filled with despair her life had become.

Dad had a very lengthy business trip set for Europe and for once, he was told he could take his wife with him. Back then it was still a very big deal to take a trip abroad, so Mom went in to the doctor to get what were then considered all the necessary shots and for a pre-trip physical. I have the passport photo she had taken in anticipation of the trip overseas and, with hindsight, it was easy to see that she was already sick.

The doctor found that she had a tumor on her heart that had already invaded her lungs. And here's the really odd thing. I can remember going over to the house and having her tell me about her health issues. What I will always remember, and shudder when I do so, was the weird look of triumph in her eyes when she said ``and the doctor said it was inoperable.''

In retrospect, maybe she saw her cancer as an acceptable escape from her hellish marriage. Or maybe it was even some sort of masochism disguised as suffering she could ``offer up.'' Whatever it was, I was sick at heart to hear her say those words.

Mom's last illness and dying took a couple of years. There were rounds of chemo and radiation, metastasis here and there, moments of remission when it looked like the cancer was going away, and then bitterly disappointing relapses.

In those days most cancer treatment took place in hospitals, and Mom was at Providence Hospital for months at a time. Dad didn't do well with having her hospitalized, and whenever she was well enough to be discharged, would take out his frustration on her physically, or with verbal abuse, or would simply demand that she cater to his whims.

He was restoring his MG TC sports car, and when Mom was up and well enough to drive, she was sent hither and yon in search of roll-and-pleat upholstery for the car seat, certain kinds of lug nuts and Goddess only knows what else.

I remember one time when she was newly home from the hospital and Dad demanded that she get up out of bed, press his pants and pack his suitcase because he was ``going on an AA retreat.'' Mom got up and dutifully pressed the pants, and packed the suitcase and sent him on his way. We later learned that the ``retreat'' was really a lost weekend with the woman who had been his girlfriend ever since that bouquet of red roses more than a decade earlier.

When Mom was in the hospital, I didn't get to see her very often. She was immune-compromised because of all the chemo, and with my four little kids, I was living in a petri dish in which every known childhood disease was constantly being incubated. And then Dad told me he didn't want me coming to the hospital because he was ashamed of how I looked and didn't want his family looking down on him because of me. Go figure. I hope it was just his insecurity that moved him to say this.

In any case,  I wasn't with her when Mom died. A few months before her death I was able to take all four kids up to the hospital to see her one last time. My youngest was a little more than one year old. I remember thinking that most of them would probably never have any memories of my mother, and it's true that they don't.

Mom was such an odd person. While her siblings and her nieces and nephews speak of her so fondly, my two sisters, my brother and I can mainly remember her only as distant, and somewhat cold and judgmental. I don't ever remember holding her hand or sitting in her lap or being physically close to her in any way. Never heard her say ``I love you'' to anyone. I think that's why I find it hard to say even a casual ``love ya'' in passing. It feels like a very scary phrase to use.

She had some favorite words. After our Florida days, anything she liked was ``maaaaarvelous.'' She always said her favorite word was ``poisonous'' because she liked the way it sounded. When she was in a fabric store and found a textile she liked, she'd run it between her thumb and index finger and make a little slithering ``ssssssth'' sound.

She liked licorice allsorts, bourbon, Mozart's ``Alla Turca,'' and Christian Sinding's ``Rustles of Spring.'' She loved the mountains and the wildflowers, and even became something of a mushroom expert. She discovered tarragon in the last years of her life, and used it with a heavy hand in nearly every dish she cooked. Her long golden hair was her pride and glory and losing it to chemo was, I think, the hardest thing she ever had to face. Although her cooking was for the most part pretty miserable, for some reason she could make fabulous ratatouille, so delicious that I used to come home from school, open the oven door and sneak spoons full right out of the pot. And she's the one who invented my chocolate angelfood birthday cake without which a celebration of my birthday is never quite complete.

She could be high-handed, like the time I stopped by the house a few months before my wedding and she showed me the fabric and the dress pattern for my going-away-suit she had picked out  with zero input from me. On the other hand, my wedding dress of white silk peau de soie was so beautifully constructed, and was, down to every last silk-covered button, exactly what I had asked her to make.  Here's a photo from my wedding day, with Mom and Dad, and I am wearing the dress of my dreams that she sewed. By the way, it was only in the past year that I began to wonder why she wore a white suit to my wedding. I don't think mothers of the bride usually do that.




I have very few things that belonged to her. Several months ago I gave her beloved and beautifully bound copy of Whitman's ``Leaves of Grass'' to my daughter Martha. Hanging on the wall of my kitchen is one of her Blue Willow-pattern platters, the one with ``Made in Occupied Japan'' printed on the back. And I've read and re-read her copy of ``Anna Karenina,'' one so old that it is illustrated with photos from the 1935 film version starring Greta Garbo.

Some photos of Mom are framed and hang on my walls, but not in a public area of my house. I really don't have family photos out on display, but people who know me well enough can step into my dressing room and see lots of photos of the whole extended family. Viewers' eyes are always drawn to images of my mom, and there is always that same ``she was SO beautiful'' phrase uttered.

Bottom line, I suppose, is that Mom will always be a mystery to me. Today is her birthday, and I have to say I am remembering this with a wry smile. Mom was born on the feast of St. Blaise, a relatively obscure martyr in the early Christian church. He was a bishop from Armenia who was killed by being raked with metal combs and then beheaded.

For some reason -- maybe the beheading -- he is always associated with the throat. So on the feast of St. Blaise we always had to go to church to get our throats blessed. This was accomplished by kneeling at the communion railing and having the priest come by and place two candles tied in the shape of a letter X on our necks and say a prayer. The idea was that this would protect us from choking to death on a fishbone.  (I am NOT making this up. Don't know if this is still done, but I suspect this practice may have gone away following Vatican II).

I can remember really hating this. Not getting the point at all. But because the throat blessing took place on Mom's birthday and because it was some pious practice she wanted us to perform, we always had to do it. I think the last time I went in for the throat blessing, I glanced up at the priest and thought to myself that the look in his face indicated that he probably considered this to be just about as much BS as I did.

So anyway, Mom would be 97 today. She would have had to deal with the fact that three of her four children are divorced from the partners she saw them marry, that one of her children has come out as gay and is married to a same-sex partner, that not one of her children is a practicing Catholic. She might even have seen that her husband eventually married the woman to whom those red roses were sent, and that every trace of my mother's presence was then eradicated from the house in which she had lived.

I wonder what she would have thought about all the technological changes? Would she ever have learned to use a computer? Would she have had a cell phone? I bet she would have voted against legalizing recreational-use marijuana in Washington State. What would she have thought to have seen women on the Supreme Court and as mayors, governors, and senators? Where would she have stood on the Gulf wars and how would she have responded to 9/11? Would she ever have recovered from the death of her first-born grandchild? Would she have been judgmental when her son-in-law died of AIDS? I wonder if she would have let her golden hair go gray.

If she were still here, I suspect she would probably have lost her heart to every single one of her 11 great-grandchildren, and been curious about the choices made by her grandchildren, all of whom are now adults. And I would hope that she had become as beloved to her grandchildren as her mother -- my grandmother -- was to me.

I wanted to love my mother and I wanted to be loved by her. From the perspective of 44 years after her death, it's hard to know what really transpired between us. In the first years after she died, she was my sainted dead mother who had suffered so much in life, and I found it impossible to look critically at any aspect of her life. As I got older and began to see how much more complicated things are than they seem, I look back and so often wonder why her life unfolded the way it did. I try not to blame her and I try to honor her memory. I probably learned much more from her than I will ever know or be willing to acknowledge. At the same time, I look at so-called ``normal'' mother-daughter relationships, and they seem light years away from what went on in our family.

We Pagans say what is remembered lives. And in the writing of this, so much of what I remember about my mother has come to life again. Not all of it is easy or pleasant, but it's who she was and she's what I have in the way of a mother. And that's just how it is.

Oh, and one coda to this story. This is about my mom as I saw her. Others' views may be very different, and if so, I hope they find a way to tell her story their way.

How is clerical sexual abuse like a pond in the Arboretum?

One of my favorite places in the Washington Park Arboretum in Seattle is an area known as ``Woodland Glen.'' This was where I came to play most often during my childhood. I used to call it ``double ponds,'' because there is a fern-ringed pond that drains, via a rock-strewn creek, to a lower pond edged by flowering cherry trees. It was the magical place to which I returned countless times, feeling so deeply a profound connection to its serene beauty.

I used to sit on one of the big stones on the edge of the upper pond watching water-skimmer insects row their way across its surface. From time to time a frog would plop into the water and demonstrate the breast stroke as he crossed the pond. And in the autumn, the Japanese maples would drop flame colored leaved that would float on the surface.

Most of the time, though, the pond was still and glassy. Sometimes its surface would reflect the trees and ferns so perfectly that it was like a mirror laid in the midst of all that greenery.

When I saw the list that the Archdiocese of Seattle released last week of priests and other religious who had acknowledged abusing children or for whom there were accusations of abuse deemed credible, I thought of those ponds in the Arboretum.

Drop a rock into one of those ponds, as I often did, and ripples flow out in all directions, disturbing the surface. The ripples travel all the way across the pond, hit the edge and return back to the center. The reflections of the trees and ferns are shattered and distorted.

The pond, it seems to me, represents the church community. It's comprised not only of the clergy and the hierarchy, but also families: adults who supported the institution of the church, and their children who were to be inculcated in its values and culture.

Members of those families were born into the pond, so to speak. Most knew of no life beyond its borders. And it was supposed to be a safe and beautiful place where all shared common goals.

But what has happened to the pond? It seems as if truckloads of gravel and garbage were dumped into its midst. And ripples are going out in all directions. There are big splashes, whitecaps even, and the once clear water is disturbed and turgid.

That's really how it has felt to me in the years since the first revelations of the abuse came to light. Each act of abuse is one pebble dumped into the pond, and the ripples it generates go out touching and disturbing all. It's not just the single child victim who is disturbed and harmed. It's that child's parents, siblings, and even that child's adult self. It's spouses and children, and even grandchildren.

The harm done by the abuse hits all generations. In addition to a loss of innocence causes so much pain, distrust, dysfunction, and out-and-out fury at the institution that enabled this abuse or simply looked the other way. Abuse is the gift that apparently never stops giving.

I know people who are so damaged by what has happened that they countenance any discussions of God or religion in any form. Others are never again capable of emotional or physical intimacy. In some cases, the victims have gone on to become abusers themselves. In others, the pain of the betrayal by the religious leaders they trusted is so severe that the victims even find it impossible to go on living. In some families, deep alienation has developed between those who have been wounded and those who still want to believe in and support the institutional church.

Maybe one of the big mistakes that has been made is for the church to try to go on with business as usual, while dealing with the abusers and their victims in secrecy. I don't think the church as institution really understands how deeply and profoundly people have been changed by the experience of being abused themselves or learning that friends or family members were targeted.  And the countless apologies from pulpit and chancery -- made way too late in the game --  don't seem to do much to fix the situation.

Someone said in the past week that people who leave the church over this are cutting off their souls to spite the institution, that they are rejecting salvation because of their anger at the conduct of a few bad priests. What that critic failed to understand, I think, is that the church's mishandling of abusing priests has caused many of those once classified as ``the faithful'' to lose faith in the institution itself, particularly when it's being revealed that even some of the most revered and beloved bishops played a dangerous game of musical chairs, transferring abusing priests from parish to parish.

One of my priest friends had an issue with alcohol. He was frank about it, went to the bishop and was sent off to a center that specialized in the treatment of priest alcoholics. Over the years when I heard that other priests had taken leaves of absence for health reasons or `exhaustion,'' I just assumed that most of them were guys with alcohol problems and were sent off to what I just to call facetiously ``the clerical drunk tank.''

I've even heard priests joke about this, particularly in the era when so many of them left the priesthood in order to marry. The old saw ``first it's Punch and then it's Judy'' is one I've heard a number of times from priest's mouths. I saw this happen and I thought I understood what was going on.

But now it appears that many of these ``reasons-of-health'' leaves had much more to do with the sexual abuse of children than the treatment of a substance-abuse problem.

The Vatican's initial response to the snowballing abuse problem was to blame it on gays the priesthood. Programs were set up in order to root out the homosexual priests and seminarians. I think this program is misguided at best. Many of the priests have been equal opportunity abusers, targeting children of both genders. They've just had more opportunity with boys because, until recently, girls didn't serve mass or take part in a lot of parish and youth-group athletic activities.

The Archdiocese has released a list of 77 names. Does anyone seriously believe that the problem has now been dealt with and that there are no more abusers out there, yet to be identified? According to the most recent figures on the Archdiocese website, there are 298 priests and 109 male religions (Christian Brothers and the like). Estimates on the Bishop-Accountability.org website are that between 5.9 and 10 percent of the priests in any given diocese have been accused of abuse. I expect a lot more names to surface in the future, and, regrettably, I suspect many of the names will be of younger men. (So many of the names on the recently released list are of priests who are dead or well into their dotage).

Yes, I know this problem is not unique to the Catholic Church. I've read about hideous cases within various Hasidic Jewish groups, abuse by leaders in the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, and certainly abuse of children of both genders that happens in just about every school system in the nation.

But I don't come from Hasidic or Mormon roots, and I didn't go to school in the public school system. The Catholic Church is the milieu in which I grew up. It's where I worked, lived, celebrated, marked the significant life events of myself and my family, and, finally, it's the institution to which I entrusted my own children.

A few years ago I was in Oaxaca. One of the places I visited was the Museo de las Culturas de Oaxaca, which is housed in a former monastery adjacent to the Santo Domingo Church. It's a beautiful old building, with arcaded cloisters and walls that are at least one foot thick.

Besides the art of the indigenous Zapotec and Mixtec people of that region of Mexico, the museum also has a collection religious statues, some carved from stone and some from wood. Many are life-sized or even larger and have been in Oaxaca since some of the earliest days of European contact. These statues had to have been carried up the sides of the mountains on horses, burros or the backs of human beings. So great was the faith of those who were attempting to promulgate Christian Catholicism to the indigenous people that no task was considered too difficult, including the transportation of these massive statues.

I found myself standing in front of those statues, thinking about how my mom's side of the family had been Catholic for as far back as anyone knows. And of how precious the Catholic faith and culture had been to my very religious family over the years.

I realized that I was probably the first person, at least the first person in my generation, to vote with my feet and to say I could no longer support the institutional church. There was a momentary hesitation, with my asking myself how dare I turn away from something that had been so central to and valued by my family.

But it was only momentary. I remembered so much of the rest: the sexual abuse by and of people I know, the institutional misogyny I banged my head against time after time. I remembered the creepy Jesuit on the campus of my university who could spot an engagement ring from 50 yards and who loved to sidle up to the newly engaged girls and ask ``so tell me about the problems you must be having with chastity.''

So, to return to that pond in the Arboretum. For me, it is irrevocably changed. It's fully of muddy, even filthy water. Its surface will never be calm enough again to reflect perfectly the overarching trees or the big cumulous clouds that sail across a Seattle sky. Its banks have crumbled, and the plants it once nurtured have been poised by its toxic runoff.

Your mileage may vary. You may still be able to find that pond to be a place of beauty, peace and even joy. But please understand and accept that for some of us, this will never again be possible.

So where do I go instead? The magical place in my memory is Klapatche Meadow, on the flanks of Mt. Rainier. It's filled with myriad wildflowers of every hue. Here and there the meadow is dotted with Christmas-card perfect alpine firs. And over it all presides Mt. Rainier, Tahoma, the sacred mountain. At night it glistens in the moonlight, it's golden in the dawn, and the setting sun turns it into a great mound of strawberry ice cream.

I dance in that meadow with my sisters. I bow to no man's authority. I stand in the full light of the sun where there are no secrets and no shame.

Two movies, one church, many memories, and too many tears

The last two movies I’ve seen have both weighed heavily on me. Both of them have dealt with two same two themes, and with my profession’s response to both.

One of them, ``How to Survive a Plague,’’ is a 2012 documentary about the early days of the AIDS epidemic. The other one, ``Spotlight,’’ is a 2015 film about the investigative unit of the Boston Globe that broke major stories about clerical child abuse in the Boston archdiocese and Cardinal Law’s role in covering it up.

Both of them focus on sexuality and, in one way or another, some of the effects the Catholic religious community’s response to sexual conduct.

AIDS was my story early on. I am pretty sure I wrote some of the first stories about the epidemic that were published in any mainstream paper in Louisiana. It started when I got a call from the Director of the New Orleans Department of Health who told me about a PR person from one of Louisiana’s publicly traded companies. The man, who did some freelance writing on the side, was fired for ``inefficiency’’ two days after his story about his fears of being infected with the HIV virus was published in People magazine.

I talked to that writer, got the go-ahead from a wonderful and understanding editor and ended up writing a four-part package about AIDS, people’s growing fears, legal issues that were beginning to arise, and irrational and homophobic responses to the epidemic. The editor made each one a cover story and we sold out every issue.

Back then we didn’t know that much about how AIDS was transmitted except that gay men and Haitians seemed to have a lot more cases than anyone else. I was, at that time, sharing a house with a gay man – my dear friend Michael – and began wondering if sharing a meal or bathroom with him could put me at risk.

Several days after my first story was published, Michael and I went to the opening of a play that had been written by the guy who had been fired. The writer was ecstatic about my story, and came up and kissed me on the cheek.

I was so scared. As soon as I reasonably could, I exited and went into the bathroom, wet a paper towel and scrubbed hard the spot on my face where the kiss had landed. I didn't know how AIDS could be transmitted, and I didn't want to insult the guy by flinching from his kiss.

In the course of reporting on my story, I talked to a lot of people, everyone from funeral directors to divorce lawyers to operators of the gay bathhouses. Nobody knew much about how AIDS was transmitted and everyone was either terrified or in denial or both.

Several months after my stories were published, I got a job offer from Los Angeles, and moved to California to take a reporting job at a daily legal newspaper. AIDS was still very much on my mind, so much so that one of the very first profiles I wrote for that paper was of the director of the AIDS Civil Rights Project in San Francisco.

My friend Michael then moved to Los Angeles and into my two-bedroom apartment and after he was settled in his new job, we began to volunteer at AIDS Project Los Angeles. At that time AIPLA had an AIDS education campaign featuring photos of  Zelda Rubenstein, an actress famous for playing the role of a Jewish mother. The posters with her apron-wearing image had the caption ``now be safe, dear. Don't forget your rubbers.’’

Somehow it seemed to me that this wasn’t the most effective strategy, but Michael and I were willing to do whatever we could to help out. This included, one Halloween, our donning costumes and heading to the gay bars and bathhouses to hand out condoms. (I stayed outside the bathhouses).

After I was in Los Angeles for 18 months, I was recruited for a legal newspaper in San Francisco that was under new New York ownership. I moved up to northern California and persuaded the editors to let me have a weekly column on AIDS and the law. And I never once ran out of subject matter.

At that time so many legal issues relating to the epidemic had not yet been settled. Health insurance companies were cancelling coverage on the strength of one prescription for an AIDS-related drug. Doctors were keeping double books, sending in innocuous diagnoses to the insurance companies for their patients with AIDS. Hospitals were refusing to treat AIDS patients, and funeral directors wouldn’t handle their dead bodies.

Wives of men who turned up HIV positive were suddenly denying their former spouses any access to their children. And blood banks were talking around in circles in their efforts to deny responsibility for testing the blood supply with a test that could have done a pretty good job of screening out a lot of contaminated blood. People were still losing their jobs once their HIV status was known.

Cops donned rubber gloves when AIDS activists were demonstrating in the streets. ACT-Up was fighting desperately to get pharmaceutical companies to push drugs through that might have an effect on the AIDS virus and were shaming companies they thought were profiteering from the epidemic. And for a very long time, the word ``AIDS’’ was never on the lips of then-President Ronald Reagan. Lawmakers like North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms said despicable things about AIDS and gay people, and people even burned down houses where children with AIDS lived.

Against this backdrop, I met someone, fell in love and married him. He was an Irish Catholic widower, someone I would never have dreamed could possibly have been infected. This proved to be a mistaken assumption, and suddenly the AIDS epidemic came home for me. So many of the legal issues about which I had written were now our own personal battle.

In the middle of this, my eldest child was killed in a mountaineering accident. I didn’t know where to turn. My husband was demanding his HIV status still be kept secret, I was terrified about my own health status, our daughter – who had lost her mother to a form of cancer a year before I showed up – was going through a stormy adolescence, and my husband was visibly fading right before my eyes. Then I discovered he had no life insurance and that the expansiveness that sometimes accompanies early-stage AIDS dementia left us ruined financially. Eventually, after my husband’s first serious hospitalization, it was clear that I was to be the sole support of the family, financially, physically and emotionally.

I went to a meeting of a support group for parents who had lost a child. Can’t remember the name of the group, but I used to call it ``Mothers of Dead Kids.’’ I remember sitting in a circle of folding chairs in a church basement, listening to other mothers talk about how they couldn’t take pleasure from their tennis games because they were mourning their lost children. One woman actually said ``I just can’t enjoy a manicure any more.’’ I’m sure their losses were as monumental as mine, but I thought to myself that I was up to my neck in alligators and couldn’t ever even think of manicures or tennis games.

And then there was the fight for the drugs. I ended up buying black-market AZT from men whose lovers had died, leaving behind half-empty bottles of the antiviral drug. Insurance companies were then still cancelling policies on the strength of an AIDS-related prescription. The list of drugs my husband had to take grew and grew as each new opportunistic infection surfaced. Doctors were throwing anything at AIDS they thought might help, and my husband ended up taking drugs that had been developed to treat such conditions as leprosy and tuberculosis.

I’m a fairly resourceful journalist and even before the World Wide Web developed, I was out there searching the literature, looking for any new drug that was promising. I found a clinical trial of Crixivan, the first of the new class of protease inhibitors that ultimately did prove effective. Got him into that trial with its complicated protocols. But ultimately it was too late and his body was too damaged from the ravages of the various opportunistic infections.

Meanwhile his mind was failing. The brilliant handsome articulate lawyer I married became skeletal, confused, and often the things that came out of his mouth made little or no sense. He was in and out of the hospital and when he was home, I had him in a day care program for people with AIDS.

Ultimately he slipped out of the house in a driving winter rainstorm in January – a lot like this January – and after a desperate five-hour search, the police found him standing in bar in soaking wet clothes – just a t-shirt, sweatpants and sneakers with no socks --- drinking a cup of tea.

He then went into the hospital for the last time, into the hospice unit at a Bay Area hospital with a very large AIDS patient base. He was there from January until his death at the end of April. Most of the time he didn’t know me any longer. Like me, he had been raised Catholic and I thought just maybe he might want to see a priest. A friend made arrangements for a gay-sensitive priest to make a call at the hospital. I remember walking into my husband’s room that night, noting the priest’s business card on the tray table and asking how the meeting with the priest went. ``Oh, the plumber was here,’’ was my husband’s response. And that was that as far as reconciliation with Holy Mother the Church was concerned.

At least I had made the effort. And this effort was despite the fact that the Church kept saying that the use of condoms that kept me from getting infected was expressly forbidden and that homosexuality was a gravely disordered condition. This was despite a visible percentage of gay members of the Catholic clergy, and the fact that a number of them were also falling victim to the epidemic.

When I saw ``How to Survive a Plague,’’ it brought it all back. It’s a really good documentary, comprised of archival news footage from the early years of the epidemic. Then film has more of a New York focus, but when the footage from the International AIDS Conference that took place in San Francisco in 1990 came on the screen, I recognized all the players. I had covered that conference, the disruptions by ActUp, and had had a very hard time not joining the group in its demonstrations in the street.

From the perspective of more than 20 years on, it's hard even for me to believe things were as bad as they were. I guess I was just so involved in the day-to-day struggle that I didn't dare stop and try to look at the big picture, the way the film ``Surviving the Plague'' did.

The other film, ``Spotlight,'' brought home once more the great scandal of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests. I saw the film last week, just before I went to Seattle, which is where I spent most of the first 37 years of my life. Ironically, the very day I left Seattle to return home to the Bay Area, the Archdiocese of Seattle released its list of names of 77 priests and other religious for whom there had been either admissions of sexual abuse of minors, or what the archdiocese called ``credible allegations.''

I knew some of the names on the list already because there had been extensive news coverage of some of the cases. Some others confirmed suspicions I had. Other names were a complete shock to me.

One of the names belong to a Jesuit who had taught philosophy at the university where I got my undergraduate degree. I majored in philosophy, but for some reason, never took a class from this particular professor. He was always hanging around in the student union, had a great number of fans among my fellow students I didn't think were particularly intellectual rigorous, and just seemed a bit too much hale fellow well met for me. So I deliberately avoided his classes.

He died in 1976, a little more than a decade after I graduated, and shortly after that, I got a letter from the university, soliciting me -- as a philosophy major -- for a donation to help fund a lecture series in this man's honor. Because I never had him as a teacher and wasn't particularly fond of him, I declined to make a donation.

As it turns out, this particular man had abused boys when he had been on the faculty of another Jesuit university. The father of one of his victims came onto campus with a gun with the intent of killing the alleged abuser. What did the Jesuits do? They transferred him over to my university where, according to case files, he abused more boys.

The university knew about his past, yet asked me for money to pay for a lecture series in his honor! This is one of the reasons I will never donate any money to the school where I got my undergraduate degree.

Another name on the list was a priest who had, for 10 years, headed the Catholic Youth Organization in Seattle. Like most Catholic kids my age, I was active in the CYO. I attended CYO summer camps, and worked there as a counselor for a number of years. Took part in a lot of CYO activities on the parish level as well as some that were diocese-wide.

There was a news story in the Catholic Northwest Progress in 1964 that this particular priest had to take a leave of absence related to ``ill health'' and ``exhaustion'' related to his parish duties. He was shipped off to the Servants of the Paraclete Center in New Mexico, a facility where priests who had problems relating to sexual abuse of children were treated. According to the archdiocese records, he was on leave for six years, after which he returned, and was placed in new parish assignments. Yes, that's right, parish work, where he had daily contact with altar boys and other kids who were enrolled in parish schools.

He was replaced as head of the CYO by a priest I had known since he was a seminarian and we both were counselors at CYO camp. When we were at camp, he is the one who painted all the beams in the main lodge with beautiful designs that were derived from Haida and Tlingit art. I would have to say that my love for this tribal art dates from this time and today, you will see a number of examples of Haida and Tlingit work in my home.

His record shows no instance of being sent off for treatment anywhere. He was moved from parish to parish. Somewhere along the way he allegedly abused a boy who grew up to be a labor union official alongside a member of my family. Years later the boy accused this priest of abuse, and when he got no support for his allegations, he drove to the parking lot of the parish where the abuse occurred and blew out his brains with a hand gun.

That priest is still alive, albeit in his mid-80s now, has been laicized, and, according to the archdiocese' report, is now living a life of ``permanent prayer and penance,'' whatever that means.

Another one of the priests whose name was on the list is a guy I remember as the seminarian who always drove the big green bus on which we hauled the kids off to summer camp. He was a big but gentle man, who always led the camp songs with particular gusto.

One of the names on the list belongs to one of the priests that were sent into our religion classes at Holy Names Academy every Wednesday. They were ostensibly there to supplement the religious instruction we got from the nuns, but I think the real purpose was to check and make sure of the orthodoxy of our religious training.

This particular priest came to my religion class during our junior year. This was the year that we were given the notorious pamphlet ``Modern Youth and Chastity'' to study. (It was very unintentionally funny, warning us that, among other things, we were in a state of mortal sin if ``venereal commotion'' occurred. Seriously!)

Because this was what we were studying at that time, we would place the pamphlet open on the desk behind which he sat when he came to class. He would always give one quick glance to the pamphlet, blush fiercely, slam the pamphlet shut and say ``now gurrrrls, take out a sheet of notebook paper and write out the words to the `Hail Mary' and the `Our Father.' '' This guy was on the list as an abuser and yet was totally unable to talk about anything pertaining to sex with my class.

Well, I could go on and on with all the familiar names. Suffice to say that the Catholic priesthood in the Archdiocese of Seattle in the years of my youth was rife with abusers. And they weren't the marginal guys. One of them had the plummy assignment as editor of the Catholic Northwest Progress, the diocesan newspaper. Others were pastors or curates at the most prestigious and wealthy parishes.

Much of the abuse occurred in the 1950s and 1960s, yet the Archdiocese did not make the names public until 2015. Most of the priests on the list are now dead or very old. But I have no doubt that abuse occurred in the subsequent decades and that some of the perpetrators are even now in parish assignments. The 77 who were named are only the tip of the proverbial iceberg, I fear.

The film ``Spotlight'' focuses on the efforts of an investigative team that uncovered evidence of the hierarchy's cover-up and enablement of the abuse that happened in Boston. Unlike largely secular Seattle, Boston was a heavily Catholic city. Many of the reporters and lawyers involved in the case were members of the very same religious community that was accused. In some cases, reporters were pressured by friends and family members to halt their efforts, for fear of embarrassing the very church that had formed them.

I totally get this. While I knew about some of the abusers in Seattle, it simply undid me to learn about others. And, in the case of the CYO director, in the back of my mind, I had a memory of his name associated with the Paraclete's treatment center for years, but I just couldn't bring myself to believe it for sure. Not this smiling young priest who was such a key part of my growing-up life!

``Spotlight'' made me so proud of my profession as a journalist and of those reporters and editors who had the courage to take on this difficult story. I only regret that I was never in the right place at the right time to write part of it myself. At the times I was in the right place, I was not at publications with the kind of leadership that could take on such a hot-button issue. And when I was at publications with great and courageous editors, we were always focused on technical subject areas that did not lend themselves to this kind of story.

I am very proud of one friend and former colleague who did a bang-up job covering the abuse cases for the LA Times. Once lawyers for the archdiocese learned she had grown up Catholic, they had a very mistaken assumption she would assume that their side of the story was the only one worth telling. Boy, were they ever wrong!

I have been thinking so much in the past week about sexuality, the Church, and its clergy. One of the thoughts that is foremost in my mind is the utter stupidity of sending 14-year-old boys off to the seminary, to a life of celibacy. I've been the mother of teenage boys and, trust me, at that age, they know so little about themselves as humans, much less as sexual beings. The idea that they could be kept sequestered in a hothouse for nine years, to emerge as fully formed priests with a lifelong commitment to celibacy at the age of 23 simple boggles the imagination.

And then there is the emphasis on avoiding the ``particular friendship'' during the seminary, for fear, I would suppose,  of encouraging homosexual behavior. One friend of mine told his spiritual advisor about having same-sex attraction to another seminarian and was sent to a doctor who prescribed valium at such a high dose and with unlimited renewals that my friend was left with a heavy addiction that took him years to shake. Another seminarian I know acknowledged an issue with masturbation to his advisor, who then said  to him ``well now young man, let me see your organ . . . . ''

So it seems to me not particularly surprising that these young priests who emerge from the seminary confused and emotionally immature end up unable to have any kind of meaningful peer relationships, sexual or not, and instead feel they can have a special kind of closeness only with children.

Another issue is misogyny. It is, it seems to me, an inescapable part of seminary training. One of the so-called ``fathers'' of the church that seminarians study is Tertullian -- actually Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus -- a writer from Carthage in the second century of the Church's existence. Tertullian, who is considered the founder of western theology, wrote that woman ``is an open sewer from which vomits forth the filth of the universe.'' He's the one who said that women should wear black for all of their lives ``because of their participation in the sin of Eve.'' He viewed remarriage for widows as adultery, and said that sex even within a marriage coarsened the body and soul and drove out the Holy Spirit.

If this is what is taught about women in the seminary, no wonder we are so devalued by the church, and why priests may turn to male children as a sexual outlet instead.

A while back someone on Facebook chided me for posting something critical of the Church. He, who is a conservative Catholic, said that since I had so obviously turned my back on the Church, I had no right to speak out.

My answer to him is that my Catholic upbringing has left deep fingerprints on my psyche. It's a huge part of who I am. The very hardest thing I ever did in my life was to leave and, as I have often said, the only thing that would have been harder would have been to stay.

Yes, I dance with the Goddess now, and love celebrating the turn of the wheel of the year with the women in my coven. And I will never again kneel before a man in a Roman collar, even if it's sweet Francis in his white cassock.

When I was growing up, we were taught to think of the church as ``Holy Mother, the Church.'' But even the most indifferent of mothers don't fail us the way the church did. I know abuse of minors is not unique to the Catholic church, but this is the milieu in which I grew up and with which I have great familiarity.

So anyway: these two movies. I don't usually cry at movies. But I blubbered my way through both of these. Both hit me where I live. Your mileage may vary.
 

Autumn nostalgia: Japan style

Based on all the Japanese novels I've read over the years, autumn is regarded as a time of nostalgia. Maybe it's the changing color of leaves, the earlier sunsets, or the chillier weather, but there's something about that season that most Japanese writers like to use as a setting. I can't count the times I've read phrases about the smell of roasting chestnuts, or the mixed joy and sadness of walking under maples amid falling leaves.

I've been in Japan twice during the autumn months, once in late November when I was as I was walking along the banks of Shinobazu Pond in Tokyo's Ueno Park on a grey day. The leaves of the lotus that clog a third of the pond were browning and drooping, and a few tufted ducks paddled in a desultory fashion in the pond's open water section. Cormorants roosted in the bare-branched cherry trees edging the pond.

It was hard to imagine what a crowded and bustling place the park would be during cherry blossom-viewing season because part visitors seemed to have their winter faces on already. Most people were walking briskly around the pond, rather than pausing to take in the beauty of the setting. It definitely had that kind of somber beauty that is so key to the Japanese aesthetic vision.

The other autumn trip took place in mid-October. I spent most days interviewing lawyers whose firms had just opened offices in Tokyo following a change in regulations that would permit them to practice law in Japan in a limited way.

I had one Sunday free, so decided to take the train down to Kamakura on the Izu peninsula. It takes a little more than an hour on Japan Railway's Yokosuna Line, which departs from Tokyo Station four or five times an hour. It's a commuter train that connects Tokyo to Yokohama and bedroom communities beyond, so if you travel on weekdays, be prepared to experience some of the legendary crush associated with rush-hour trains in Japan.

Once I stepped out of the Kamakura station, I felt like I had stepped into the pages of one of my favorite Japanese novels.  The surrounding hills were aflame with Japanese maple trees in red and gold. And right away I encountered a kuri man rolling his charcoal-fired cart up the street, filling the air with that famous fragrance of roasting chestnuts. Here's what I saw right outside the station.




Kamakura is popular enough with Western visitors that I didn't attract the kind of attention that I sometimes get in rural Japan and China, although I was trailed throughout my entire time there by a college student who wanted to practice his English conversation skills.  We actually ended up eating bowls of noodles together at a little café outside the gates of one of Kamakura's many temples.

 Of course I had to see the Daibutsu, which is a giant statue of the Amida Buddha. It's about 40 feet tall, and has been a popular pilgrimage site ever since it was cast back in 1252. I had previously seen Nara's much older and larger giant Buddha statue, so wasn't blown away by its sheer size. As usual it was mainly being treated as a photo backdrop by individual visitors and organized groups. People also like go climb around inside the statue. Statue interiors don't have much appea for me and I thought it was much more interesting to shoot a photo from the back side.




I went to so many temples that day that I can't remember where I shot this photo. It was quieter, and the Buddha was in a much smaller scale. I liked the effect of this statue's green patina against the orange leaves.




When I returned from Japan, I pulled Kawabata's Izu Dancer off my bookshelf and read it again. It's set on the Izu peninsula, which was a favorite hangout of Japanese literati.

Izu Dancer, the debut novel by Nobel laureate Kawabata Yasunari, is a sweet tale of unrequited love between a student from an elite Tokyo high school, and a young member of a troop of dancers traveling through the Izu peninsula, performing at various venues.  It's a much beloved book in Japan, and has been made into films several times.

Kawabata took me back to Kamakura and that nostalgic beauty of that time and place. I don't know if I ever will have the chance to return to Kamakura. Certainly the walking tour of the temples is beyond me now. But I so often think of that day whenever I see Japanese maples in flaming colors before the leaves begin to fall.  

Quilts and how not to make them.

That first quilt I ever made could probably qualify for entry into somebody's worst-quilt sweepstakes. Boy, did I ever not know what I was doing.

My youngest was going off to college with the knowledge that her father was terminally ill, and I wanted her to have something she could wrap around herself and be surrounded with memories of home and good times.

I decided to make a series of blocks from fabrics that she could relate to some family events. Shopping for appropriate fabrics proved not to be difficult, as lots of so-called ``conversation prints'' could be found that fit in a wide range of themes.  So there were blocks that covered favorite things like picnics and holidays, including even one for Mozart's birthday, which we always celebrated with aplomb.

I brought home a rotary cutter, mistakenly thinking I could just lay the fabric out on the table top and cut away. Ooops! That meant a quick second trip to the fabric store to buy a mat on which to cut.

Anyone who has mainly sewn garments has a bit of a transition to make when it comes to quilts. Garments generally have a five-eighths inch seam allowance, while quilt are sewn with a mere quarter inch. For garments, most seams are pressed open, while with quilts they are pressed to one side. In my garment-sewing days there was a lot of easing and use of a steam iron, while quilts pieces rarely have to be eased together, and, I found at least, using a steam iron can often cause the fabric to stretch.
 
I probably made every mistake that could be made on that quilt, choosing a high thread-count sheet for backing that resisted most of my efforts at hand-tying. I didn't know about chain-piecing, so laboriously started and stopped, lifted the presser foot, cut threads and began again what seemed like a thousand times. Some of the fabric I bought was, I discovered, inexpensive for good reasons too many to iterate here.

The finished quilt was lumpy and irregular, but the daughter took if off to college anyway, and, I hope, it provided her with a measure of consolation and connectedness during that first year away from home.

Undeterred by my first lumpen attempt, I let hubris get the better of me, and decided next to make a lone star quilt. For those of you who aren't quilters, let me explain that a lone star quilt is made up from diamond-shaped blocks, which means that each piece will have at least two bias edges, and fabric cut on the bias (diagonal to the weave) wants to stretch and will do so at the last provocation.

That second quilt suffered from what I'll have to call ``volcanism.'' Once I got all the pieces together -- and that required some major wrestling and wrangling -- the quilt rose up in the middle like a volcano. There was no way I could get it to lie reasonably flat. I fought it into submission, but there were myriad tiny unintentional pleats on the finished top.

If that wasn't enough of a stretch, my third quilt was one I made for my husband, using a pattern designed by Ruth McDowell. As in Ruth McDowell quilter extraordinaire and MIT graduate. Each block featured four frogs arranged in a geometric pattern, and had, if I remember correctly, something like 20 pieces, most with bias edges.

I carefully made templates for each piece from a flexible plastic, and then, cutting around them with my rotary cutter, managed to gouge and nick and trim them so they had little resemblance to the mathematically precise pattern McDowell designed. Precision is not part of my psychic makeup, to put it mildly.

 Nonetheless, the finished queen-sized quilt was great, I thought, although if I were to pull it out now and take another look, I'm sure I'd groan. My husband liked it, and that's what counts.

Since then I've probably conjured up more than 100 quilts in all sizes for all occasions. And I've seduced a number of my friends into the joy of quilting, too. Like many quilters I have a stash
of fabric that is way too big, and to which I continue to add more anyway, because I can get drunk on color and pattern.

Earlier this year I told some of my friends that when I die -- not something I'm planning to do any time soon, by the way -- I want them to hold an outdoor quilt show, stringing clothesline from tree to tree up in Tilden Park. And everyone for whom I've ever made a quilt is to come and hang them all on the lines. And then they are to weave flower head wreaths for themselves and sing and dance in the meadows under the flapping quilts.

Favorites over the years? I loved the Odin quilt I made for my dad, using am image from a runestone of the Norse deity riding his eight-legged horse, with the prow of the Oseberg Viking ship prow rising up out of the sea. My father wasn't very fond of it, and hung it in a back hall so no one could see it, but it made me happy to have made it. 



Another is the quilt we used for our Samhain altar cloth. It has four big blocks, each one with four witches whose pointy hats grow out of a snail's trail pattern. Each witch has a different colored face and expression on her face. My idea was to celebrate the diversity of women in our Pagan community, but to do so in a fun way.




A number of years ago I made a quilt for a little girl who had neuroblastoma, one of the most dreaded childhood cancers. She wanted something with princesses on it and her mom said she loved pink and purple. I think I succeeded in making her a quilt she loved without my having to go all Disney princess.




For my favorite niece I made a wedding-ring quilt using a more geometric pattern than is usually seen. I appliqued an image of Norse goddess Freya at the top, scattering flowers and blessings on the newlywed couple. Must have worked because the bride got pregnant the first night she slept under it. Here you see the quilt.




When my youngest got married, I made two quilts, one for her and one for her husband. Hers has diamond-shaped blocks, with each one centered with an image of something I wanted to call in for her. Here's a small section of that quilt.



Her husband's was comprised solely of square blocks of floral fabric, with lots of roses. The idea was that I was calling in a marriage that would be a bed of roses for him.  Here's his quilt and I knew he was secure enough in his masculinity that a rose-covered quilt would be just fine for him.





When I was growing up, I was told that artistic talent belonged to others in my family, that my slot was as the family's gawky too-tall intellectual. And it's true that some of my attempts at drawing and painting have been pretty pathetic. But oh my, hand me fifteen different fabrics and I will be so happy, and, I hope make something that I, at least, consider wonderful and beautiful. 

Captured by the Kacho

He showed up at my hotel in Ginza 15 minutes early, beating me at my own game of conspicuous punctuality. After the de rigeur bowing and exchanging of business cards, we headed to a taxi, the first one I'd encountered in Japan since my arrival in Tokyo two days earlier.

The cab had lace antimacassars on the seat backs, and the driver was clad in a business suit and immaculate white gloves. He pressed a button on the dashboard and the door to the cab swung open automatically.

Our destination was Shinjuku Station in Tokyo, the busiest transportation hub in the world. We were to catch a train that would take us away from Tokyo, at a time of day when most of the station's 3.5 million daily users were arriving there on their way to work in the city.

I've been six feet tall since shortly after my 13^th birthday, so I am easily a head taller than most Japanese people. So as we pushed forward into the station, I was like a salmon trying to swim upstream against a shoulder-height river of black satiny hair rushing past me.

I was with a kacho, which is a mid-level manager, from a Japanese conglomerate. He was a PR Kacho, taking me to view his company's vineyards in Yamanashi ken (county) on the back side of Mt. Fuji. Aim of the trip was for me to interview the winemaker for a story I was writing about the Japanese wine industry.

Kachos occupy an interesting position in Japanese companies, they aren't often highly compensated, and are expected to work unrelentingly long hours. They are beginning to have a fair level of autonomy in their careers, in return for their loyalty to the company and their lockstep seniority.

Dining out at fancy restaurants is a rare luxury for most Japanese. But when a kacho  has the responsibility to entertain a foreign visitor, one of the big perquisites of the job is the ability to use the company's expense account, often to visit restaurants that would be otherwise unaffordable or even unattainable, in terms of access.

I can't remember this particular kacho's name so let's just call him Watanabe-san, Watanabe's being one of the most common surnames in Japan. He was solicitous, and I think anxious that I might come away with a bad impression of Japan in general and his company in particular.

The train trip to the vineyard took a couple of hours, winding through snow-covered hills (this was in January). We had to change trains at one rural station, and I remember standing on the platform looking out at a snow-covered persimmon tree on which the bright orange fruit stood out as sharply as Christmas tree balls.

When we finally got to the vineyard, it was impressive. Viticultural methoods were a little different from what I had seen back in the U.S., with some accommodations made to a higher propensity for mold in Japan's more humid climate. The leaves were gone, but they had left some bunched of grapes hanging on the vines, with an open  white sheet of paper carefully placed at the top of the bunch.Watanabe-san explained that this was to keep mold from migrating from the leaves to the fruit.

Even though it  was a chilly January day, we had lunch at a table set up out in the vineyard, looking out over rolling vine-covered hills to that perfect cone of Mt. Fuji. I was eager to see what the winery chef would decide to serve, and was somewhat taken back when the meal proved to be a bowl of beef stew, probably the very last thing I expected to eat there. But the stew was piping hot, so, while it was a surprise, it was just right for such a day.

I don't remember much about the wines except that they weren't much to my taste. They were made with unfamiliar grape varieties, mainly Koshu -- a white wine grape -- and Muscat Bailey A, which produces a light red wine. The grape varieties had been chosen for their ability to tolerate long freezing winters, and the humid region's propensity for mold, and those are not necessarily the qualities that make great wine.

Once we got on the train heading back to Tokyo, Watanabe-san started asking me what kind of food I liked and where I wanted to go for dinner. I hadn't expected that dinner was part of the experience, but, to be polite said that would be lovely and anything would do.

He kelp pressing me for more details, so finally I just said ``Nihon ryori,'' which means Japanese cuisine, figuring I'd get a chance to have some really good sushi in the land from whence it comes.

We had to stop to change trains again, and this time the station was full of school girls, all clad in the middy-blouse and skirt uniform that is standard at most Japanese schools. Clearly they didn’t see foreigners that often up close and personal, particularly a very tall western woman traveling alone, so they stared and stared as they gulped quick bowls of noodles.

Our train came but once we were about 10 minutes out of the station, it stopped. The conductor kept making announcements to explain the situation. I knew just enough Japanese to be befuddled by what he was saying, as he kept using the word ``tako,'' which I knew was the Japanese word for octopus. I could not figure out why an octopus would have anything to do with a train stalled in the foothills near Mt. Fuji.

Finally Watanabe-san explained that ``tako'' is also the word for kite, and that a kite had gotten tangled in the overhead wires and shorted them out. The train, of course, was electric.

So we sat for some hours, as darkness fell and it began to get colder and colder. Finally the line was repaired and, several hours later, we drew into Tokyo's Shinjuku station. Watanabe-san parked me on a bench in the vast station and headed over to a pay phone to make several animated phone calls. This was, of course, in the days before everyone was carrying around cell phones.

Finally satisfied, Watanabe-san came over to collect me and the two of us got into another taxi that had been summoned through one of the phone calls. We drove for about 20 minutes and finally stopped in front of an unimpressive doorway, behind which a flight of stairs was visible.

Watanabe-san said we had arrived at the restaurant and seemed to be excited and eager to ascend the stairs. I don't know what I expected, perhaps something with tatami mats and low tables.

Instead, we were met by a waiter wearing black knee breeches, black stockings, black shoes with large silver buckles, and a white shirt with billowing sleeves, rather like a pirate might wear.

He ushered us into the dining room which had heavy dark wood tables and wing-back chairs upholstered in a dark floral design. The walls had dark wood wainscoting running up to a chair rail, with a floral wallpaper above. Prints of 18^th century sailing ships framed in dark wood hung on the walls.

The table was set with heavy white linen, and had candles in silver candlesticks. Each place setting had an army of silver cutlery arranged in perfect geometric order extending in each side from the silver charger.

The waited handed us menus, which were written only in Japanese. So I asked Watanabe-san to order for me. A lengthy consultation with the waiter ensued, and finally he went off to turn in our orders. He returned with large glasses of the wine we had tasted earlier in the day up in the vineyard, so I assumed that this restaurant must have been one of the winery's customers.

Eventually our food came. Watanabe-san had ordered the same meal for both of us. It came in lidded silver porringers with pierced-work handles at one side.

 I lifted the lid and what did I find? More beef stew. Certainly exquisite beef stew, with each piece of carrot and potato meticulously cut to the exact same size. The beef was beyond tender, although I really hope they hadn't used that incredibly pricey Kobe beef for such a mundane dish as stew.

I was mystified by the food. This didn't look like any Japanese food I had ever eaten before, and the restaurant certainly had no elements of décor I would have recognized as Japanese. Then I took a look at Watanabe-san's face. He was, as one might say, in hog heaven. He was thrilled at the meal, and was eating each bite with great relish.  

Watanabe-san's English was not terribly nuanced, so it took a while for me to craft a question for him that, I thought, wouldn't be too impolite. I wanted to ask him why in the world we were eating beef stew when I'd told him I liked Japanese food.

Although Watanabe-san got an embarrassed look on his face after hearing my question, he quickly insisted that this really truly was Japanese cuisine.  I gestured to the waiter in his knee breeches and to the sailing-ship prints on the wall and asked Watanabe-san, ``Nihon ryori honto?'' (Really Japanese food?) Again he insisted that this was true Japanese cooking.  

So then I asked him what kind of Japanese food this was. His reply came quickly: ``Oranda ryori.'' Oranda? I'd never heard of a region in Japan known as Oranda. In fact, the only time I'd ever heard that word was in connection with a kind of long-tailed goldfish.

What in the world could Oranda be? Then I remembered that Japanese has a lot of loan words from English and other European languages. So what sounds like Oranda in English?  Oranda, Oranda?

Then all of a sudden I got it. Oranda . . . Holland. This had to have been  Dutch-inspired Japanese food.

 The Dutch came to Japan in the early 17^th century, and after they sided with the Tokugawa Shogunate in crushing a rebellion by Catholic Christian Japanese, they were the only European nation permitted to remain in Japan.

They were given the former Portuguese trade concession on Dejima Island in the Nagasaki harbor, and for the next century provided Japan's only window to European science and technology. The Dutch left their mark on Japan, including a number of loan words that became Japanized, such as ``biru,'' which came from the Dutch word for beer (bier), ``garasu'' for window glass (glas), ``renzu'' for lens, and ``dansu'' for dance (dans).

And apparently they left some of their cuisine behind, including beef stew. After I returned from Japan, I did a little reading about Dutch cooking and discovered that ``hachee'' is a popular beef stew containing carrots and potatoes, onions, and a little vinegar. I'm pretty sure that's what we had that night.

Watanabe-san had never been to this restaurant before, and it seemed that a beef stew was a big treat for him. Plus, in a restaurant with high tables and chairs, plates and silverware, he didn't have to worry about embarrassing issues relating to meals with foreigners such as whether I could sit on the floor and eat with chopsticks (of course I can), or would find raw fish to be too yucky (which I definitely do not).

After dinner Watanabe-san was eager to take me to a bar, also on the corporate nickel, but it had been a long day, and, besides, I wasn't that eager to go to some little hole in the wall, as most Japanese bars are, and sip his company's very expensive whisky for hours, as is the prevailing practice.

He seemed disappointed, realizing that his ride on the winery's expense account was ending for the night. He summoned another cab, which took me back to my hotel, and after a few more rounds of bowing and a declaration of undying friendship, he finally left and I headed back to my room.

For Watanabe-san, this meal was a very big deal. For me, with two big bowls of beef stew in one day in Japan, of all places, it was something else. Not bad, of course, but certainly not what I expected, or hoped to find. Who could ever have dreamed of going to Japan to eat beef stew, much less what was undoubtedly an incredibly expensive beef stew?     

What can you do with a big shiny purple vegetable?

One summer when I lived in New Orleans, I stuck a few eggplant seedlings into the ground, never expecting very much would come of my efforts. Certainly in the Pacific Northwest, I'd never seen anyone grow eggplant successfully, and somehow got the notion that they were rare and difficult to grow.

I hadn't factored in Louisiana's rich delta soil, or the long hot summers characteristic of that region. It seemed as if less than two months later, I was bringing laundry baskets full of football-sized eggplant to work in efforts to share the bounty.

I don't come from eggplant-eating people. In fact all the members of that Solanaceae family are rare ingredients in Nordic cuisine. We had tomatoes in our salads of course, and maybe an occasional green pepper, but the vegetables more common to our way of cooking and eating are the root vegetables and brassicas, both of which do well in short, cool growing seasons.

But for some reason, my mother made a dynamite ratatouille. When I stop and think about it, I wonder where she ever learned that such a dish existed, much less acquired a recipe. Certainly I never saw any food containing an eggplant when I stayed with my maternal grandmother on the ranch in Ellensburg.

In the early autumn, sometimes when I walked into the kitchen after school, I could smell something magical. I'd open the oven door, lift the lid on the brown crockery bean pot, and there it would be, ratatouille in all its glory, bubbling away. It was a glorious mixture of eggplant, tomatoes, peppers, onions and garlic, simply layered in the pot, with only added salt and pepper. (Olive oil, a staple ratatouille ingredient, was unknown in my house. In fact, in my first years of cooking on my own, I had some major cooking disasters based on my mistaken assumption that olive oil was the juice one poured off a can of olives).

I used to sneak some of the still-cooking ratatouille into a cereal bowl  just because I couldn't wait until dinner time.  And once I figured out the role of olive oil, it became one of my favorite dishes to cook.  It doesn't really take a recipe, in my opinion, as it's a seat-of-the-pants approach, depending on what's available. Certainly great tasting ripe tomatoes add a great deal, but I've even made pretty great ratatoulle with almost marble-hard cherry tomatoes. Many people use summer squash, too, but I find if you add too much, it can make your ratatouille awfully runny.

I like to use the big Black Magic eggplants, but any of the half dozen either kinds I've found in local farmers' markets work just as well. Eggplants come in a wide range of colors and shapes, with some of them the white or green skinned and as small as an egg. It's more work to peel lots of small eggplants, and my preference is for peeled eggplant in ratatouille.

If you're here in the Bay Area and looking for unusual eggplant varieties, check out the Old Oakland Farmers Market, which operates on Friday mornings beginning at 8 a.m. You will see more varieties of eggplants  (and other unusual produce) than you ever dreamed possible. But get there early as the best  stuff goes quickly. 

Did you see the great Disney animated film ``Ratatouille''? Here's the recipe Disney created. It includes tomato sauce, which I never use, and a lot more summer squash (probably for the color effect) than I like. But hey, it's endorsed by the Mouse Kingdom.

However, here's a link to a recipe using unpeeled eggplant that I conjured up a few years ago for my friend Mark's Seasonal Chef website. You insert slices of tomato into slits cut into halved eggplant, cover with chopped celery,  onion and garlic and once it's baked, you have a ratatouille-like effect.

Caponata is another favorite dish made with eggplant. I learned my version from the Time Life Foods of the World series published back in the 1970s, but a zillion other very good recipes abound.  I've served it hot as a vegetable side dish, and cold as an element of an antipasto. It's also very good spread on some excellent toasted French bread.

Some people don't like capers very much, but for me, that are an essential element in caponata. And yes, as is the case with this recipe from Williams-Sonoma, you do add raisins and sugar. Caponata is a Sicilian dish, and sugar and dried fruit are sometimes seen in recipes from that region.

And then there's the Turkish take on the baked eggplant genre. It's called Imam Bayildi (which means ``the imam fainted,'' supposedly because he was horrified at how much costly olive oil his wife used to prepare the dish). It's a great dish to make when you have an abundance of eggplants, as each person gets a half eggplant that is stuffed with onions, garlic, parsley and, of course, tomatoes.  This particular version calls for half a cup of olive oil and don't stint. Besides, as the Mayo Clinic says, olive oil is good for you (all those monounsaturated fatty acids).

You can make your fainting imam dish either on top of the stove or bake it in the oven. I'm of the oven persuasion but your mileage may vary. Here's a pretty good recipe that gives you both options.

As you may have figured out by now, eggplant and olive oil go together like milk and cookies. Eggplant likes to soak up as much olive oil as you will give it. Eggplant Parmesan takes full advantage of this vegetable's affinity for olive oil. Most recipes, including this one,  involve slicing the vegetable crosswise into inch-thick slabs, breading and frying them, and then placing them in a baking dish in layers, alternating with a good marinara sauce,  and Parmesan and Mozzarella cheese. 

In India and Thailand, eggplant is frequently used in curry dishes, sometimes in combinations with other vegetable such as green beans. There are a lot of pretty complicated eggplant curry recipes to be found on the web, but this Thai version  has the virtue of simplicity, and it can be cooked fast enough for a just-came-home-from-work-and-what-do-I-cook night.

So far all the eggplant recipes I've listed have been vegetarian-friendly. Not so Greece's moussaka, which includes either ground beef or lamb as part of a many-layered baked eggplant dish. To make a good moussaka, you will also need to be able to whip up a bechamel sauce, which is used in the layering process.

You will note the inclusion of cinnamon and allspice in this moussaka recipe, and yes, they are essential, in my opinion. Too often we thing that spices like cinnamon, allspice and nutmeg don't belong in savory dishes, but when used judiciously, they add just the right note.

The simplest way of all to prepare eggplant is one of the best, made preferable with long skinny eggplant, such as the Japanese or Chinese varieties.  I just slice them in half lengthwise (without peeling them). paint the cut side very liberally with olive oil and run them under the broiler until they are soft and custardy.

Baba ganoush takes advantage of eggplant's propensity for getting all soft and smooshy when exposed to heat. This is another very simple dish that leaves you with a flavorful eggplant spread, really good on pita chips. Before you start this one, make sure you have some tahini (sesame paste) on hand. Here's a Persian version, but  really, baba ganoush is common throughout the entire Middle East.

If you are looking for eggplant on the other side of the Atlantic, be sure to ask for ``aubergine.'' That French name for eggplant is a favorite term designers use to describe that deep purple color that is, well, just like an eggplant skin. Italians know eggplant as ``melanzana,'' and  In India, eggplant is called  ``brinjal,'' so when you see that term on a menu in an Indian restaurant, you will know eggplant is an ingredient.

Now is the hour of eggplant abundance. And I'm a firm believer in eating foods in season. There are two big shiny purple footballs in my refrigerator that will be tonight's (and probably tomorrow's and the next day's) ratatouille. Now all I need is some good French bread.

Wanderings in journalism's vineyard

An inch wide and a mile deep, or a mile wide and an inch deep: those are the two kinds of knowledge and background journalists bring to their jobs. 

Me, I've spent time using both. Got my first gig after I walked into a suburban Seattle newspaper office with a bottle of pre-phylloxera Ch. Lafite Rothschild in hand. I was there to promote an auction of rare wines being conducted by the chain of wine shops where I taught wine-appreciation classes. 

The newspaper had been looking for a wine writer and there I was. Spent the next several years holding forth on such issues as the qualities oak barrels from different species of oak trees bring to red wine, the emergence of the Willamette Valley wine industry, the non-vinifera grape varieties with which Japanese vintners were experimenting, and the reasons that cabernet sauvignon wine made from grapes grown in some regions of California could have an unpleasant hint of bell pepper aroma.

My most recent job was with what I call the Very Big Media Company, where I wrote a daily report of the developments in intellectual property law. The Very Big Media Company serves the global business community, and my job was to cover developments in patent, copyright, trademark and trade secret law, and write about them in a way that is understandable and interesting to non-lawyers. In other words, I was writing about what could be perceived as very wonky subjects that, nonetheless, could make huge differences in corporate bottom lines.  Most of what I've written over the past few years can be found on the Internet if you Google my name and``intellectual property.''

In between? I've written about everything from legal issues around the AIDS epidemic, the menus served at offshore drilling rigs, potato exports to fuel McDonald's worldwide french fry sales,  Norway's witch persecutions, Cajun music, wearable devices to monitor blood-sugar levels, the rise and decline of an employee-owned regional airline, and even profiled some of the captains of the Mardi Gras carnival clubs known as krewes. A couple of years I doubled as a performing arts critic, and oh how I miss those two seats on the aisle in the 10th row for ballet and opera performances.

It's been a great run and I've loved every minute of it and hope to continuing laboring in this vineyard until they have to pry my cold dead hands away from a computer keyboard.  I mean, what's not to like? I get to learn new things every single day, and then can sit down and write about them.

Writing has always been the easy part. I've never understood writers' block. In fact, the tips of my fingers almost start to itch when I am away from the computer and start thinking about something that I could write about.  Once someone asked me what was the favorite present I ever received as a child. He was taken aback by my response. That best present was a box of stationery I got at my seventh birthday party.  Here was a whole box of blank paper I could fill with whatever I wanted.  And I think I wrote my way through that box within two weeks,  sending letters to family and friends.

And before I joined the Very Big Media Company, I wrote often in this blog, which has been somewhat neglected of late. The title, ``Driving Audhumla,'' was chosen when I took off, in the summer of 2005, on a round-the-nation trip in my then-Taurus with a personalized license plate  It referred to the name I had given my car. Audhumla is the great cow in Norse mythology, so I chose that name for my car, figuring she'd get me here and there on many adventures.

I'm now driving Audhumla II and we've had some grand road trips, too. This photo is of me and a friend's Australian cattle dog riding around in Audhumla II from about three years ago.

These days, given the ubiquity of wi-fi and Internet access, I can write and post to this blog from anywhere in the world. It's all so much easier with today's technology. I can remember when portable computing was a new thing and I'd be sitting in a hotel room, trying to hook up one of those little portable computers we referred to as ``trash 80s'' to an acoustic coupler so I could send in a story at the slower-than-crawling speed of 300 bauds.

I suspect I'll be writing here more often for a while. Want to keep my writing chops up while I'm on a quest for great new work. And I'm sure I will also continue posting on Facebook regularly.  Job-related suggestions and connections are more than welcome. 

 

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!