Let's Go Fishing

This post was inspired by a discussion I had with some friends on the topic of economic inequality. We did not all agree with one another, but I'm not convinced we are as far apart from one another as it often seems.

Below I've extended a familiar metaphor to illustrate what I mean.

This is just a starting point. I am not making any particular assumptions about the roles of the market, private charity, or the government in addressing each point. I'm only claiming that each point in and of itself is something most, if not all, of us buy into.

And just look at how many points there are!

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Here’s the starting point:  “Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime.” (The gendered language, which is ironic in the context of a blog post about equality, must be a topic for another day.)

We know people need fish to survive.

We want people to have the opportunity to fish so they can provide fish for themselves and their families. Simply giving people fish isn’t a viable long-term option.

We agree that we need to teach people how to fish, and we mostly agree on the idea of pooling our resources to do this.

We mostly agree that it is okay—even good, but at least okay—to give people fish while they are learning how to fish.

We understand that sometimes we’re not very good at teaching people how to fish. We also understand that sometimes people have a hard time learning how to fish.

We recognize that sometimes people don’t believe they can learn how to fish or that they can have an opportunity to fish like everyone else.

We understand that there are people who will never be able to fish, some who used to fish but can’t anymore, and some who can’t fish temporarily.

But we get frustrated with people who refuse to learn how to fish when they seem perfectly capable of learning or who refuse to fish when they already know how. We don’t like it when people take advantage.

It’s hard, though, to tell which people are which. And what’s truly going on underneath what we can see. How do we truly judge?

We recognize that we ourselves might not be able to fish one day. It could come sooner than we think. We may not be expecting it; we may not have had a chance to prepare for it. And if it ever does happen to us, we’d rather not feel shamed for it.

However we slice it, all of the people who aren’t fishing for themselves—many of whom have children—can end up without fish and risk going hungry. When it comes right down to it, all but the most cold-hearted among us believe children shouldn’t go hungry even if it means their parents get fish they might not deserve. Because we actually don’t like the idea of anyone starving.

Some people have to make difficult choices when it comes to balancing the time they should spend fishing with the time they should spend taking care of their children. Sometimes those choices seem impossible.

We generally support the idea of people having equal opportunity to fish, but we know we fall short of that ideal.

We love the idea of having lots of options for places to fish as well as kinds of fish to catch. Some people have access to many fishing holes that are well stocked with fish. Some people have very few options, only poor options, or sometimes no options at all.

Most of us support the idea of helping people gain access to a fishing hole and the equipment they need to fish. Because what good is knowing how to fish if there isn’t anywhere to fish or anything to fish with?

Some of us want to use our own initiative to create more options for people, and we want to be as free as possible to do that. But wherever people go to fish, we also want the water to be clean and we don’t want the fish they are catching to make them sick. And in times of drought, we don’t want the fishing holes to dry up if we can help it.

We know that we need to renew and expand our supply of fish, especially as our population grows, so we don’t put everyone at risk if there are not enough fish to go around, or worse, no fish left at all.

We understand and accept that once people are fishing—even in the very same pond—some will catch more fish than others and for the most part that’s okay. It’s just the way it goes. Sometimes it’s due to skill or experience. Sometimes it’s due to luck. Sometimes it’s due to people being able to use the smaller fish they catch to catch bigger fish. And for many it might be better or worse the next day or the next.

Many of us empathize with people who spend all day fishing and don’t catch enough to live on. We especially empathize with people who spend all day, every day, day after day fishing and fishing but failing to catch enough.

And we empathize with people who are on their way home with their catch and lose it through no fault of their own—maybe they are mugged by a bear?—leaving them empty handed. Better yet, we want to protect people from having their fish stolen in the first place.

We see that some people are inclined to share their catch with others. Sometimes that is enough. But when we look closely enough, we see it too often isn't. 

We also see that inevitably there are people who take advantage of another person's generosity. None of us like that.

We understand that people don’t like being forced to share, especially when they’re worried about having enough fish for themselves.

If people hire other people to catch their fish for them, we want the people they hire to be able to take home a reasonable share of fish.

We--including even some of us who are in a position to do this--are not okay with people who claim most of the fish for themselves.

We recognize a relationship between societal instability and some people having fish while others don't. We understand that kind of societal instability can lead to violence in extreme cases.

We value human existence.

We know people need fish to survive.

Book #16: Only the Lover Sings

My reading choice this week reveals another layer of my pathology when it comes to books, this time specifically in acquiring them. I ordered Only the Lover Sings after hearing about it during some podcast interview or another. It clearly struck a chord for me, but I didn't read it straightaway and now I have no memory of exactly why or in what context it came to my attention.

Josef Pieper was a German Catholic philosopher who passed away about 20 years ago. This is a slim volume of speeches and essays he wrote, primarily in the 1950s.

After reading it, I now have my suspicions about why I bought it, but they are many and varied. Which means I'm glad I read it. The essays explored several ideas I've been contemplating, including contemplation itself. Also among them: Working to survive in relation to pursuits that exist for their own sake, the rhetoric of silence, creativity, connectedness, the need for us to truly see what exists--from a perspective rooted in love--if we want the journey of humanity to progress, to transcend. And, ironically, memory.

The challenge in writing a short post about a collection of essays that address a wide range of things is figuring out what to home in on. I took pages and pages of notes, far more than I want to put here.

So I've decided I'll simply share this recent experience, which came to my mind more than once as I read:

When I woke up the morning after we returned from last week's lovely soul- and family-nurturing trip, Roger kissed me. I had been thinking about papers I needed to grade for one job and hours I needed to put in at my other job, especially to make up for the time I'd missed. I started to whine about having to return to "real life."

He kissed me again.

"This is real life," he said. "This is real life."

The Friends Who Came Along

For the first time ever, Jack and I had the same week off school for spring break. Roger and I stole him away from his friends and took him north on an adventure to Seattle and Vancouver Island.

When we stopped at a hotel the first night, Jack pulled out a VW van he'd made out of Lego and put it on the nightstand. He'd filled it with mini-figures, proxies for his friends. He said it was his way of taking them with us.

As we traveled, he pulled out the van to take pictures. Sometimes he even took all of his friends out so they could get a better view.

Here are some of the highlights:

Arriving at the Space Needle

Catching the view of downtown Seattle from the Space Needle

Watching a tug boat navigating the locks between Puget Sound and Lake Union

Stretching legs at the Boeing Factory. So sad we couldn't take a camera inside.

Exploring the tulip fields near Mt. Vernon, WA

Exploring tidal pools in Sydney, BC

Navigating the stepping stones across a pond in Buschart Gardens

Enjoying the surprise inlet at the bottom of the Japanese garden (Buschart)

Hiking along the shore in Victoria, BC

And a PS that we found entertaining: There are more old VW vans per capita driving around on Vancouver Island than I have ever seen in one place. Seriously, we must have crossed paths with 50 of them! Jack and his friends fit right in.

Book #15: The Guest Cat

Whenever Roger and I go on vacation, we have a tradition of finding an independent bookstore and buying at least one gem there. We found this one at Ivy's Bookshop in Victoria, BC. Such a welcoming place!

While we were browsing, multiple customers dropped by to chat with the women who worked there, including an older gentleman, who regaled them with tales of Norway in a thick Norwegian accent. Happy, happy.

Roger has long been drawn to Japanese fiction, so he gets full credit for discovering The Guest Cat. The clerk who rang us up said that they discovered it and decided to stock it after a customer special ordered it, then ordered more copies to give as gifts.

The story, written by a Japanese poet more than a decade ago, then translated into English last year, is a simple one about a couple who live in the guest quarters of a large walled estate with a meticulously kept garden. They unexpectedly connect both with their wealthy, elderly landlords and with a neighbor's cat, more fully than they ever imagined they would.

This was where I started the book. (It may have been a bit windy and chilly, but I had a hood and a pair of gloves.)

French Beach, Vancouver Island

And this was the serendipitous gift of reading this particular book while traveling through such a beautiful part of the world: it gave me the eye of a poet--a poet who knows how to see the smallest details that make up the sense of a thing, like a person or a cat or a place.

I dipped into the book enough for it to cast its spell. So I may not have gotten much read that afternoon at the beach. Or on the ferry rides the next day. Or as we drove through Snoqualmie Pass.

I finished it on the way home as we barreled by 18-wheelers and monotonous sagebrush in southern Idaho. By the end of the story, the couple had to leave the walled estate with the meticulous garden. Both their elderly landlords and the cat were gone.

But their hearts had opened to possibility.

Things don't last. Like afternoons on the beach and ferry rides. But if we open our eyes, we can store the smallest details in our souls, and if we open our hearts, we will go on to find new wonders.

Book #14: Forever, Interrupted

I've been wanting to read this debut novel by Taylor Jenkins Reid ever since it was released because her mom, Mindy, was a classmate of mine growing up in Massachusetts.

Now Taylor's third novel is coming out in July, and a movie of Forever, Interrupted is actually in development with Dakota Johnson cast as the main character, Elsie!

(I am still not adjusted to the fact that people my age have children who are doing grownup things like having children themselves, finishing medical school, and publishing novels.)

I read it this week because road trip. It's a great vacation read, the right mix of sad and happy. Full of love, loss, and healing.

Plus, I totally bonded with Elsie when I read this line: "I ordered a caprese salad and a Diet Coke." A perfect meal, imo.

I also totally bonded with Elsie's mother-in-law Susan when I read this line: "I remember one night I was lying there, Ben between us, and I thought, This is my family. This is my life. And I was so happy in that moment. I had my two guys. And they loved me and I belonged to them."

Because that is my life, too, the three of us. Roger, Jack, and me.

What I can't even touch in my imagination, though, is the line that follows: "And now, I lie in that same bed and they are both gone. I don't think I have even begun to scratch the surface of what that has done to me."

Nope, not going there. Losing both a husband and a son? Nope.

Glad it's just a story.

Book #13: The Bromeliad Trilogy

I've appreciated Terry Pratchett for a long time. I have a lot of friends and family members who love Terry Pratchett. And in fact, I've sold a lot of Terry Pratchett books. But until now I've never actually read a Terry Pratchett book. I know. It seems inconceivable. Sorry.

When he passed away recently, I asked Roger if we had any of Pratchett's books. This is the one he produced from our bookshelves, primarily because he knew that growing up I had loved stories about tiny people living in a human world (The Borrowers, The Littles).

This trilogy was written for a young adult audience. As with the best of that genre, it's full of sophisticated philosophical themes I understand he explores in many (all?) of his books.

So it wasn't just about resourceful tiny people living in a human world, but in this case it was also very much about the journey of figuring out what the "world" actually is.

"Are you trying to tell me you came from Outside?" he said.
"That's right."
"But that's impossible!"
"Is it?" Masklin looked worried.
"There's nothing Outside!"
"There isn't? Sorry," said Masklin. "But we seem to have come in from it anyway. Is this a problem?"

The trilogy reminded me of a quote I recently came across from Robert Persig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) and shared immediately with my college writing students (I'm always pushing them to stretch the boundaries of their thinking): "We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world."

Can we always be certain of what we think we are certain of? For me, I will keep grabbing more handfuls of sand.

Book #12: Orange Is the New Black

The bottom line is that there wasn't a chance I was going to finish the book I meant to write about this week in time.

(In my defense, it is technically a trilogy. That's the only clue I'm going to give. You'll have to wait until next Sunday to find out what it is.)

So I pulled this week's selection from the "I read most of the book when I first got it, but somehow I got distracted and didn't finish it" stack (which is, in fact, embarrassingly high).

In the case of Orange Is the New Black, I read most of it when I was on vacation in Wisconsin after my sister gave it to me for my birthday last summer, but then I spent three days in the car driving home, and, well, yeah.

Also I must confess that I have never seen the Netflix series based on the book. I don't have a Netflix account. I'd like to watch it, though. I think Piper Kerman has written an insightful and complex account of her time in the federal prison system. And she did it with a great sense of humor, which I always appreciate.

Anyway, I picked up where I left off. Kerman was getting close to the end of her sentence and was sent to re-entry classes, which felt, all humor aside, like a joke. No real respect for what many of the inmates were up against upon release.

Because teaching re-entry classes for jail inmates is actually exactly what I do, I read her critique carefully.

Hopefully she exaggerated how clueless the instructors were about transitioning to the outs for the sake of writing an entertaining narrative. But I doubt she exaggerated much. While I constantly tweak the way I teach my classes to be as relevant and helpful as possible, I also know that what I do is hardly enough.

We are missing key pieces in the system, both structural and cultural.

I'm encouraged by a criminal justice reform bill recently passed by our state legislature that focuses in part on developing better structural re-entry support as a means of reducing recidivism. As with anything politicians do, the risk of it all just being lip service is high, but I will do my best to leverage it into something concrete and effective, at least in my little corner of the world.

And near the end of the book, Kerman absolutely nails the cultural shift we need: "Lack of empathy lies at the heart of every crime--certainly my own," she writes. "Yet empathy is the key to bringing a former prisoner back into the fold of society."

Book #11: Moments of Clarity

I bought this book while listening to Christopher Kennedy Lawford's keynote address at a conference on addiction at Utah Valley University a few weeks ago. (Seriously, wifi access is not helpful when one has a compulsion to buy books.)

I decided to read it this week after seeing a comment a friend of a friend made on a Facebook thread. He was tired of any of his hard-earned money going to help addicts.

"Let them die," he wrote.

I don't know this guy's story. Maybe he's experienced some real trauma due to someone's addiction, maybe even his own.

Or maybe he's just an ass.

Whatever the context, I find it impossible to reconcile those three words with the conversations I've had over the past few years with literally thousands of people who struggle with substance abuse or other addictions.

Real human people.

I get to talk with most of them when they are clear headed, and while it's true that many of them will go more rounds in the justice system, I see so much intelligence, humor, talent, spiritual sensitivity, and compassion.

Real human people.

Lawford said during his keynote address that part of his mission with his writing, speaking, and advocacy is to change perceptions about addiction, and particularly about people in recovery. Yes.

Moments of Clarity contains, in their own words, more than 40 stories about the turning points some of his friends and acquaintances experienced that led to their sobriety. All of them were unique, but they had similar underlying arcs:

(1) painful hopelessness became tentative hope became true and even joyful surrender to hope and

(2) self centeredness, often rooted in anger or fear, became self awareness became self respect.

In his story, actor Malachy McCourt said, "out of all this, the greatest achievement was finding self worth. That's the greatest thing, finding out that I really deserve to live."

Let them die, Mr. Friend of a Friend? Not in my book.

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. 
-- Ernest Hemingway.

Book #10: The Bishop's Wife

This book has been sitting in my top priority stack of books (read: on my nightstand) since the day it was released at the end of December. I had to buy a copy after reading the positive review in the New York Times because (a) I've known author Mette Ivie Harrison since our bookstore days and I like her and (b) the story, a mystery, is set in a Mormon ward in a town north of us and I'm always curious to see how writers present the culture I am steeped in.

There are many directions I could go in this post, but in honor of the fact that today happens to be International Women's Day, I am going to take my inspiration from one of the key themes Harrison explores in the book: the role of women in the LDS faith, which is patriarchal and life-encompassing.

Like many things, and Harrison illustrates this, it is far more complex than the two competing narratives we generally hear: women (and motherhood) are honored and revered or women (mothers) are silenced and second class. Not only are there other stories as well, these two competing narratives are hardly mutually exclusive.

This passage from The Bishop's Wife reveals what could be an apt metaphor about well defined gender roles:

Whenever friends from other parts of the country come to Utah, the first thing they mention is the feeling they get from the mountains. Some people feel oppressed by them, others feel safe, like they are wrapped in a cocoon. But I am so used to them, I take them for granted. If I go elsewhere, somewhere without mountains, that's when I realize how much I miss them. I don't know how anyone can tell what direction they're headed without mountains around to help.

I grew up in a very different geography, both literally and, or so I thought for many years, figuratively. I am my own person! But the older I get, the more I realize how much I have subconsciously absorbed about gender from the world around me, and without being aware, I let it reign me in.

Coincidentally, it was Harrison who posted on Facebook an article that I read earlier this week about writing female characters in fiction. I thought many of the points it made could apply to the real world we are experiencing and trying to understand and working to create. One idea particularly struck me: "Some readers may not notice the shallowness or cliché because it is a portrayal they expect to see and have seen a thousand times before. Its very familiarity comforts and feels right [emphasis added]."

What we see and hear over and over becomes our truth whether or not it is true.

One area this happens, especially on a subconscious level, is with the language we use. Tomorrow in my freshman writing class, I happen to be covering strategies to avoid using gendered nouns and pronouns when they are meant to include more than just men.

My whole life I was reassured, though--at school and work, but particularly at church and with scriptures--that the language is not important. All we need to do is shift our assumptions. Whenever it says man or men or mankind, we should just read it to mean that it applies to women as well.

Except, of course, for when we mysteriously shouldn't.

Book #9: Night

I've read books about people's experiences in concentration camps during World War II, but hadn't yet read Elie Wiesel's account, which was originally published in the 1950s. It was time this week.

Early on, Wiesel tells of a man from his village who had been shot and left for dead by the Gestapo while he was traveling through Poland. Moishe returned to the village and tried to warn people.

He spoke only of what he had seen. But people not only refused to believe his tales, they refused to listen. Some even insinuated that he only wanted their pity, that he was imagining things.

And then Wiesel makes his own record of events in the hope that people would listen and believe and keep them from happening again. We want to keep them from happening again.

But it is not as easy as it sounds.

I believe these are two reasons why: We hear stories we don't believe but should, like Moishe's, and we hear stories we shouldn't believe but do, like the stories the Nazis told themselves about Jews (and Roma, and homosexuals, and Jehovah's Witnesses, and so on).

Sometimes we underestimate a real enemy. Sometimes we create enemies out of people who are not our enemies.

At the end of the edition of Night that I read is the text of the Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech Wiesel gave in 1986. "Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion or political view," he said, "that place must--at the moment--become the center of our universe."

May we always strive to be there and on the side of the persecuted, and watch carefully that we do not become the persecutors ourselves.

Book #8: The Curve of Time

For years, Roger has recommended this book every time I am casting about trying to decide what to read next.

This week I finally took him up on it.

The Curve of Time is a beautifully written memoir of the summers a mom, her five children, and sometimes a dog, spent in the 1920s and 30s exploring the waterways between Vancouver Island and the mainland coast of British Columbia by boat.

Because I come from sailing stock on both sides of my family--maybe even Vikings going back in my maternal grandfather's line--it was not hard for me to be drawn into their happy adventures and narrow escapes.

I started reading the book Monday morning as we set out on an expedition of our own in our Jeep. My dad is visiting from out of town, and the rest of us all had a holiday from work and school.

The foreword began with a detailed description of the cramped sleeping quarters on the boat. I could immediately relate. Roger and Dad were riding in front; Jack and I were cozy together in the back, nestled between the cooler on one side of us and a backpack on the other, our feet penned in by the handle of a shovel (carried in case we ever have to dig ourselves out of something).

I didn't marry a sailor. I married a boy who lives between mountains and loves the desert. I married a boy who loves to drive off the beaten path.

So, I realized, as we bounced over rocks instead of waves, our Jeep is our boat. Our desert is our ocean. Our canyons are our inlets. Our sagebrush is our seaweed. Our dust we kick up is our wake. We breathe deep and we live. Our wind is our wind and our sky is our sky.

All week as I read, I dreamed of heading up to Seattle over spring break to explore the San Juan Islands by ferry. Maybe we'd even have time to go all the way to British Columbia.

This may have been a risky book for Roger to recommend to me. Because he married a girl who comes from sailing stock on both sides and loves the sea.

Book #7: Black Like Me

In 1959, the same year my parents got married, writer John Howard Griffin changed the pigment of his skin, shaved his head and spent nearly two months traveling through the southern United States as a black man.

I knew this memoir was a classic, but I still went into it with some trepidation. Would it be superficial? Would it be exploitative? What were Griffin's intentions?

What I found was a deeply insightful book that brought out the multi-faceted complexities of racial identity, injustice, cultural barriers, humanity and inhumanity.

While we are far beyond that Jim Crow era, Griffin's observations are still meaningful today. We are clearly not done untangling the threads that have been a knotted mess through many, many generations.

Yesterday, my friend Loki, who is dedicated to untangling those threads, wondered about a couple of white kids he saw walking down the sidewalk carrying .22 rifles with total impunity. Where are the police? "Oh yeah," he wrote, "they didn't fit the profile." A couple of people pushed back on him, not engaging him on the specific point he was trying to make, but criticizing his negativity. They wanted him to look on the positive side (the kids were just out having fun!), and to be his usual inspirational self.

Shortly after I read that exchange, I read a passage in Griffin's book about a friend of his who ran a local paper. "For the first year," he wrote, his friend "managed to please everyone and offend no one. The paper had prospered . . . [He] had fence-straddled all major issues, if he mentioned them at all." Eventually he "entered into a battle with his conscience, his sense of decency. It became clear to him that though he wrote in his paper what his readers wanted to see, this was not always the truth. . . . As the situation in the South degenerated after the 1954 Supreme Court decision on segregation [Brown v. Board of Education], he was faced with a choice--either he must continue more and more to alter truth to make it conform to people's comfort, or he must write the truth in the dim hope that people would alter their comfort to conform to it."

As uncomfortable as it makes us, we need to face the truth that Loki was trying to get at: in our society, white people are far more likely to be able to walk down the street carrying .22 rifles with impunity than are people of color.

I can already hear the arguments defending that reality. They are the same arguments Griffin dispelled in Black Like Me more than 50 years ago.

We still have work to do.

Book #6: The Bean Trees

This week's selection falls into the category of "books people probably think I've already read but I actually haven't."

Unexpectedly, reading this book was exactly what my soul needed this week.

In The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver, people are lost, people connect, and people are healed.

"I can't even begin to think about a world where people have to make choices like that."

"You live in that world," [Estevan] said quietly, and I knew this but I didn't want to.

From time to time, the balance between trying to make a difference and preserving my own mental health gets precarious. Lately, I've been slipping down the wrong slope, and it's overwhelming to even think about climbing back up again to get to a place that is right.

Says Estevan near the end of the book, before we know how things will work out, and giving me fresh perspective, "Mi'ija, in a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is to make things as right as we can."

Book #5: Death Coming Up the Hill

This week's book is a YA novel written by a friend of mine, Chris Crowe, and set in 1968, a pivotal year on so many levels. The main character grapples with the Vietnam War, the hard realities of racism, and the breakup of his parent's marriage. The story is told entirely in 976 haiku. Here's why:

There's something tidy
in seventeen syllables,
a haiku neatness

that leaves craters of 
meaning between the lines but
still communicates

what matters most. I 
don't have the time or the space
to write more, so I'll

write what needs to be
remembered and leave it to
you to fill in the 

gaps if you feel like 
it. In 1968
sixteen thousand five

hundred ninety-two
American soldiers died
in Vietnam, and

I'm dedicating
one syllable to each soul
as I record my

own losses suffered
in 1968, a 
year like no other.

Honestly, it was an emotional read.

This in part because we are still going around and around and around with essentially the same things that divided us back then. Civil rights. Enemies both real and perceived. Militarization. Profiteering. I can't breathe. War and unrest. Marriage equality. Je suis Charlie. Controversy over the film American Sniper.

But let's not forget we survived 1968.

Well, some of us did. Among others, the book reminded me, sixteen thousand five hundred ninety-two American soldiers, three black youth in Orangeburg, South Carolina, Martin Luther King, Jr., Bobby Kennedy, and untold numbers of Southeast Asians didn't.

Still. We do survive.

Book #4: Change Anything

I finally sat down this week and read Change Anything from cover to cover. I've been dipping into it off and on for months as I've been adapting the material from a course based on the book to teach at the jail.

The premise is fairly simple and constructive: having the will to make better choices in our lives is essential, but if we're not aware of things that influence our choices--such as a lack of skill or information, social pressure, perverse structural rewards, environment, etc.--and wrangle as many of them as we can to work in our favor, we may well be set up to fail. Click here to watch a short video that explains more.

"They just need to make better choices!" I hear that a lot. And not just about inmates.

This kind of sentiment often comes from people with a privileged perspective--people who, yes, had the will to make good choices and did, but who are often unaware of everything that worked in their favor and even more unaware of things working against the people they are criticizing.

Today, in fact, I saw again the old meme with the picture of the pointing finger of shame that reads, "Don't blame your behavior on someone else. You are 100% responsible no matter how bad you are feeling or what's happening in your life."

Yes, it is true, what the old meme says. Unless we lack some essential brain capacity, we are ultimately 100% responsible for the choices we make. Try as they might, no one can force us to behave in a certain way. At some point it requires us to choose whether to cooperate.

But, I want to shout, that is only part of the story. 

Not one of us makes our choices with perfect knowledge or ability. Not one of us makes our choices in a vacuum, independent of our environment. Sometimes we can't even see there is a better choice to make. If we fail to understand this we will continue to shame people, including, by the way, our own selves. And shame can be truly counterproductive.

What if, instead of pointing fingers of shame, we all opened up our eyes and saw the whole story? Imagine the power in that. Maybe we actually could change anything.

Book #3: The Rosie Project

I read this novel because it is our February selection for book club. I read it a month early because I had the fortunate chance to hear the author, Graeme Simsion, speak at The King's English in Salt Lake City last night. It was a brilliant choice. Entertaining book. Fascinating author.

I'd read about a quarter of the book before Simsion's presentation, then read the rest of book with his voice reading Don Tillman--the main character who unfolds in first person his story of setting out in a most logical fashion to find a wife--ringing in my head. Also brilliant.

Don Tillman's voice is unique, and not just because he speaks with an Australian accent. Simsion rooted Tillman's character in people he worked with in the computer industry during the 1970s. 

People just like my own brother.

My brother packed information into his brain, picked apart the logic of everything, and had an unusual sense of humor that I realized wasn't unusual at all after I took a job in the computer industry myself.

And once my sister and I listened to my brother talk about a woman he'd met, and our jaws dropped when he complained that she wouldn't go out with him after he'd told her the three things she'd need to change to be perfect for him. For Pete's sake, he said, it was only three things!

But also in many ways not just like my brother.

While my brother had very specific ideas about how the world should work and didn't always adapt very well when it didn't, he did not share Tillman's methodical approach to living. Also, emotion spilled every which way out of my brother.

Was Tillman somewhere on the high functioning end of the autism spectrum? Maybe. Maybe not. Simsion was deliberately vague on that, he said. But people who are on the spectrum do identify with Tillman. And people who know people who are on the spectrum have said they appreciate the opportunity to get inside Tillman's head and better understand his way of thinking.

Was my brother on the spectrum? Maybe. Maybe not. Simsion explained that he was deliberately vague about Tillman because being on the autism spectrum doesn't mean just one way of being. People are, after all, individuals.

"I consider you remarkably intelligent--"

"Don't say it."

"Say what?"

"'For a barmaid.' You were going to say that weren't you?"

Rosie had predicted correctly.

"My mother was a doctor. So is my father, if you're talking about genes. And you don't have to be a professor to be smart. I saw your face when I said I got seventy-four on the GAMSAT. You were thinking, He won't believe this woman is that smart. But he did. So, put your prejudices away."

It was a reasonable criticism. I had little contact with people outside academia and had formed my assumptions about the rest of the world primarily from watching films and television as a child. I recognized that the characters in Lost in Space and Star Trek were probably not representative of humans in general. Certainly, Rosie did not conform to my barmaid stereotype. It was quite likely that many of my other assumptions about people were wrong. This was no surprise.

In the end? Don Tillman learned he couldn't even rely on assumptions he'd made about himself.

Book #2: Why I Write

George Orwell wrote Why I Write while "highly civilized human beings [were] flying overhead, trying to kill [him]."

England had been sucked into World War II; the U.S. had not yet entered. Orwell had already published Animal Farm, but had not yet written 1984. It was fascinating to get into his thoughts at that moment in time, especially predictions he made (hoped for, at least). He was convinced, for example, that if Great Britain emerged from the war victorious, it was destined to become a socialist nation, including state ownership of vital industries.

"Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936," he said, "has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it."

Full disclosure: I know I'm meant to write about a book I finished this week, but I actually finished this book a month or so ago, during the height of the controversy surrounding the grand jury verdict about Michael Brown's death in Ferguson, Missouri, and wanted to include it in this project. I couldn't help but read many of Orwell's words through the lens of that situation and others and the larger context on which they shed light.

Over and over as I read his assessment of what had led up to the point he and his compatriots found themselves in, I was impressed by how thoroughly American ideas and sensibilities are rooted in British ideas and sensibilities, and how so many of the observations he made could be written today, about either country.

One passage, for example, that particularly struck me:

Here one comes upon an all-important English trait: the respect for constitutionalism and legality, the belief in 'the law' as something above the State and above the individual, something which is cruel and stupid, of course, but at any rate incorruptible.

It is not that anyone imagines the law to be just. Everyone knows that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. But no one accepts the implications of this, everyone takes for granted that the law, such as it is, will be respected, and feels a sense of outrage when it is not. Remarks like 'They can't run me in; I haven't done anything wrong', or 'They can't do that; it's against the law', are part of the atmosphere of England. The professed enemies of society have this feeling as strongly as anyone else. . . . Everyone believes that the law can be, ought to be, and, on the whole, will be impartially administered. The totalitarian idea that there is no such thing as law, there is only power, has never taken root.

And there we have the deeply fundamental reason why some people are rising up to protest law enforcement overreach and some people are rising up to defend law enforcement, and why some people, like me, are doing both.

Book #1: When Women Were Birds

Roger and I were in Salt Lake City for his Aunt Darlene's funeral the other day, and we stopped by The King's English bookstore on our way home. I always buy something when I stop in because I am committed to voting with my dollars there. As Roger wasn't inclined to buy anything for himself, I justified leaving with two books, including Terry Tempest Williams' When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice, a continuation of Refuge, her earlier memoir of her mother's illness and death.

In the book, Terry Tempest Williams processes the fact that her mother left her three shelves full of her journals which turned out to be completely blank (!) by exploring the idea of voice--how we find it, how we use it, why we silence it, and how silence can speak volumes.

Williams' love of creating written language does not seem to come from her mother. Her love of birds, though, and of nature more broadly, was deeply instilled in her by her family.

One of my early paradoxical memories of my own mother was that despite her utter dislike for birds, she studied her field guide and kept in a notebook a meticulous list of every bird she saw near our house at the edge of the woods. I did not inherit that drive. But I found comfort in her record keeping, and I have taken great pleasure in Williams' writing over the years as she describes the extraordinary details she observes in the natural world.

An old friend asked me yesterday why I write here, in a public way. I told him that it is a practice. I am trying to experiment with language, to find my voice, to sort through what I think, to remember. Making it public keeps me accountable, both to the discipline writing requires as well as for the ideas I express.

And I often wonder, will people change the way they see me as they read what I have written? Will they hear what I say differently if they discover I don't see the world or heaven or hell the way they do? Or the way I saw those things yesterday? Or the way I'll see them tomorrow?

I suppose I am keeping a record like my mother, but instead of birds, it is of my thoughts before they fly away.

Red Tails, Green Pants

(Teaser: The book I'm reading and will be writing about later today reminded me of this story.)

The day of my uncle's funeral at the end of November, we drove in the morning from Massachusetts to Connecticut and then later that night after dinner, we separated into two groups: Mom, Dad and my sister Linda headed back to Massachusetts and my sister Maryann and I headed to Rhode Island to visit friends.

At nearly midnight, I got a text from Linda. She'd discovered that while she was gone, a red-tailed hawk had busted through her front window and was sitting in her living room, possibly injured. Calling 911 had been no help. What should she do?

She ended up spending the night with the hawk. (Well, the hawk spent the night in the living room and she spent the night locked in her bedroom.) All was as well as it could be in the morning, and an animal rescue team came for it some time that day.

The actual hawk my sister discovered in her living room

 
Over brunch, Maryann and I discussed the situation with our friends. "Maybe," someone said, "It was the spirit of your uncle?"

"I don't think Uncle Chuck would come back as a hawk," I said, thinking that he would have come as something that manifests irrepressible joy, something that seeks places where the sun shines, something that would not have been afraid to wear bright green pants.

"He'd have come back as a toucan."

And then the game began. What would Uncle John come back as? He's the one who would have been a raptor. A hawk, an eagle, an owl. Sharp eyes. A man of definitive action.

"What kind of bird would Mom come back as?" I asked Maryann, forgetting for a moment that Mom doesn't like birds the way I don't like snakes. Willies. Lots of willies.

Maryann didn't miss a beat. "Mom? She'd never come back as a bird."

Thing One and Thing Two

It wouldn't be a new year without a new writing goal. And in 2015, I'm adding two!

One: In an ongoing attempt to finish reading books I start (numbers unknown, but it would definitely take all of my fingers and toes to count them, likely even all of the fingers and toes of everyone in the family), I am pledging to finish at least one book a week and to write something about it on Sunday. My posts won't be book reviews, which I generally find soul sucking. Mostly I will write about something I learned or something the book made me think about.

Two: I'm finally starting a project I've been meaning to start for a long time: a blog about making peace with my house, which is pretty much always overwhelming for me because I'd really rather be paying attention to other things. Though I am inspired by a few aspects of homemaking, I am mostly a reluctant homemaker. In this new blog, called Home*Making*Peace, I will explore all sorts of ways to come terms with it all. And, hopefully, my house will end up reflecting my cerebral efforts.

Click here to see my first post.