Indiana Oh Indiana

This morning I was thinking about blogging and why I or anyone else would continue to post information, ideas, hopes, and dreams into what the writer Armistead Maupin called “the void, into the grey ether of faceless strangers.”  I suppose that one reason I continue to blog is that it is an incentive to organize and express my thoughts almost on a daily basis. Maybe it’s my way of postponing Alzheimer’s. My friends are always in mind when I’m writing, though I don’t express my views based upon their comfort zones, or anyone else’s.  People send prayers based upon faith that those prayers will land somewhere and be heard and in hope that they will be answered in time.  In a way blogging for me is like that.  Each day I imagine someone reading what I write and either agreeing or being stimulated to disagree.  Sometimes I envision people reading what I’ve written and saying things like, “Ah yes, he’s right on the money about that,” or perhaps, “This guy is completely nuts!”  Either way, I am heard.

Ego certainly has a hand in my writing and probably in that of most other writers.  As I never had children, there is usually an unspoken desire that I leave something behind to be considered after I’m gone.  Though not a consistently conscious reflection, it is, I believe, often just under the surface of my efforts to leave behind something well written.  In that respect, the six books of mine that have been published bring me comfort on some level, and working on the next two books gives me a continuing creative purpose. In the Middle Ages, even monks had the desire to leave some of their own thoughts behind in writing.  Though monks were often scribes copying sacred texts in breathtaking illuminated manuscripts, many also wrote little notes in the margins about their personal views on earth and heaven.  In 1953 the American composer, Samuel Barber (1910-1981) compiled ten such improvisational texts by Irish monks from the 8th to the 13th Century in translation and created a song cycle from them.  One is about a monk and his cat, each pursuing his purpose, one immersed in study, the other preoccupied with catching mice.  In another, called “The Heavenly Banquet,” the monk scribbled in the manuscript margin that he hoped to see in heaven the Virgin Mary and the Holy Family ‘round a great lake of beer.  I’m not sure that he ever really expected to be read and remembered for that verbal image, but he felt a compulsion to express it on paper, nonetheless.  That “compulsion” goes back even further to those who carved messages in stone or pressed them into clay tablets.  Maybe they too were “blogging.”  Those who tell their stories to bartenders or to grandchildren are perhaps satisfying the same need to share their experiences and views.

People who feel the need to text daily, to e-mail, to create graffiti, are all “bloggers” of different sorts.  Again, it all goes back to the need to communicate, which is a very human pursuit.  For perhaps the first time in history, we are all able to share our thoughts with hundreds or even thousands of others at once without having to be on the radio or on television.  There is, therefore, all the more reason for us to refine or distill our thoughts in writing in order to express something in the best ways we can, whether for sheer entertainment or enlightenment, which often overlap anyway.   JB

The domino effect of racism from even before the American Civil War has intensified once again, filtered only through the national media, since the Trayvon Martin case just three years ago. Though blacks in poor, gang-ridden neighborhoods seem to be killing each other in far more staggering numbers in recent years, it is the case of blacks being gunned down by white police officers that has become the ugly fat rising to the surface of this dreadful vat of toxic soup called racism in our country.

The most recent example is that of the teenager gunned down in Chicago and shot sixteen times after his defiance of a white policeman. The shameful cover-up of the details for over a year has left Chicago politicians and law enforcement personnel standing around with some of that ugly fat covering their upper lips. Though the kid wasn’t exactly a National Merit finalist or someone to be trusted with anyone’s car keys, he didn’t deserve to be killed in cold blood. OK, I wasn’t there, but sixteen gunshots in his body in just a few seconds, while the kid was armed only with a knife, speaks of an irrational, uncontrollable rage on the part of that cop.

Of course, my white middle class experience about such conflicts usually makes me believe that if somebody, no matter what color, isn’t committing a crime, he probably won’t be bothered by the police, but I’ve been told that my attitude about avoiding crime in the first place is naïve in the face of the oppression, poverty, and disenfranchisement endured by so many more blacks than by whites. The bottom line, however, is that had the same crime been committed by a white kid, the chances of his being shot sixteen times would certainly have been reduced or eliminated. About that I have little doubt. We are still one of the most racist nations on earth, but we see it in laser focus only in these instances of slaughter, especially in the church shooting in Alabama last summer by the racist lunatic, who like many other poor, uneducated whites, sees black pride and anger as “uppity.” This has helped me to understand better the true meaning of “Black lives matter” and the insanity of those very bad losers who are still angry that they lost the war 150 years ago.

The aftershock continues in other parts of society too. This past week protestors at Princeton University demonstrated against any honors recognized by the school for Woodrow Wilson (a former college president there and President of the United States during WWI) whom the complainers have now labeled a racist who allowed his presidential cabinet to be composed entirely of white men a century ago.

If I were black, perhaps I could better comprehend such outrage along with the anger felt against those who still cling to the American confederate flag as a symbol of God knows what in the year 2015. I agree that people in our history should be criticized for their mistakes but praised for the good they did. History books need to include unpleasant facts, whether they offend or not. Such things are parts of our past as a country and we must see them for what they were in the context of when they occurred. Shall we erase or revile, for example, those American Presidents who owned slaves while in office? They would include Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, Taylor, Polk, and Tyler. At some point it becomes necessary for us to see the past for what it was when it was happening.  One would think that at Princeton a gold statue had been erected to honor someone like Governor George Wallace.

If we begin giving carte blanche to everyone who is offended by the timely and unintentional weaknesses of characters who also did great things, our history books will become tomes of blank pages. As a nation we have grown  and continue to do so, even while we’re making new mistakes, but we need to remember that the world a century ago, two or three centuries ago was a different place with leaders who did good along with bad done at times through sheer ignorance shared by the usual majority of each era. Criticize the wrong that is rampant now. Staging witch hunts for the dead who once had heavy worlds upon their shoulders isn’t as enlightening as it is bitter, angry, and misplaced.   JB

What is there about extreme religious fanaticism that brings out the basest, most savage behavior in human beings, who otherwise at least seem like peaceful, productive individuals? The weapons used by modern religious fanatics are still, despite guns and bombs, the same old methods of persecution through the dark, evil motives in deeds as old as history, going back to rituals of sacrifice and shedding blood for beliefs that have absolutely no material presence or confirmation in this world. The basic tenet of this “thinking” is, “Because you don’t believe exactly what I believe, I’m going to kill you, or make your life as miserable as I can in the name of my god.” The Allah of ISIS is certainly not the Allah for the rest of Islam. After their murderous sprees, the members if ISIS always shout, “God is great,” but one can’t help but wonder to what kind of cruel, insensitive, primitive deity they pray. Apparently this “god” is a figment of their own dark, broken imaginations and lusts for power, a power which they see only in terms of destruction and death.

The actual motives are based often upon fear, need for complete control over other people, and an awful terror that others might be living pleasant, meaningful, independent lives under different sets of “rules” that may contradict the persecutors’ rigid, oppressive, or even impossible laws of human behavior. In fact, such irrational, barbaric reactions to the happiness of others has nothing at all to do with a god of any name or type of devotion to anything but a severely stunted view, so narrow that it excludes any life outside its vacuum of hate, terror, and a twisted fear that someone might be experiencing some sensory comfort or other moment of joy. This has always been true of the dogmatic, confined convictions of any fundamentalist religious sect. It is still true, to some extent, even in our own country,  minus the bombs. A wag once wrote that the Puritans were a group of religious people who lived in fear that somewhere someone might be having a good time. That mentality led to the Salem witch trials of 1692, but modern fanatics like those associated with ISIS use guns and body bombs instead of Bibles to persecute, murder, or maim those who don’t fit into the thimble-sized, airless world of slaughtering one’s way to paradise, a concept so foreign to most people that it must be labeled “psychotic,” not “religious.” The events in Paris last January and this week have demonstrated the treachery and cowardice of hatred disguised as religious faithfulness or devotion, a treachery for which human life means less than nothing. If there is any good news regarding such unbridled madness, it is that such dictatorial and inhuman behavior will burn itself out, because it has nothing to offer but invisible pie in the sky rewards at the cost of all joy and compassion in this world. People are not lab rats that can be forced into inane beliefs that deny the freedom the human spirit craves as much as oxygen itself. The self-appointed lunatics who see themselves as enforcers of such ugly lies upon the human soul are fighting a losing battle. Their beliefs have nothing to do with real Islam or any other religious doctrine. Their entire existence is a desperate sham.

The world will not bow to such colossal stupidity that offers nothing but the guarantee of a crushed spirit and unspeakable misery. No, there will never be multitudes of people flocking to join the ranks under such a monstrous lie, devoid of hope, meaning, or beauty. Those few who do follow such a blind, hateful creed will be only the few who have an abiding hatred of humanity and the world itself, and even for themselves in their quest for some kind of identity, and who find some terrible appeal in pain and destruction for everyone around them. The distinctions between religious fervor and mindless, wanton cruelty have blurred in their own minds but have become crystal clear once again to the rest of the world, a world now uniting as never before to fight against this senseless evil to make sure that civilization and love itself are strengthened and protected, not in the name of some horrible abstraction but in the name of healing the real world for all its people.   JB

My old Friend Charlotte Kooistra wrote something about why rescue animals are so important in our lives. I was so deeply moved by it that I’ve decided to share the letter with the world-at-large. (with Charlotte’s permission)    JB

True Companions Who Have My Back

My oldest nephew Scott, once very allergic to pets, asked me why I had pets, currently a very sick one, when they brought some joy but also so much heartache and grief. This was my response:
Eighty-seven animals…a perpetual kennel with revolving doors….yes that used to be US. Now we have one elderly dog with whom I share age related pains, loss of hearing, and excess weight. And we have one elderly cancer ridden cat who is on her way out with the door closing very slowly behind her….a door stop there for now keeping it open as long as possible. I think you have missed the joy of companion animal ownership though your life has been enriched in so many other ways.

There are no regrets when they pass. You can only grieve in proportion to how much you love them which is why I fall apart upon a death in our sentient creature family. They are my adopted kids, the ones I never had. But they love me no matter what. I could have really messed with the life of a human baby. These just drool and stare at you with wonder and unconditional love. Unlike tactless conversations with humans I regret, judgments that I fight when someone wrongs me or another loved one, these critters just really don’t give a flying crap (pun intended) no matter what I say, do, or think. And they are in touch with my feelings. Say that about all my human contacts….. They choose us as their owners or rather they own us…we rent them for a period of time on their terms…they come into our lives to teach us things and at times have been the only connection I have had to the outside world, joy, compassion, laughter, and healing.

When I was depressed and anxious, they sensed my anguish. During my darkest days donned in my chenille robe with bed hair I have arisen only to feed one of them which then got me to the shower, to eat a good meal, and to venture out to get the mail. Tales wag as I reentered the house because my dog greeted me like I’ve been gone forever. He is so happy to see me, he squeals.

We have a contract with them and they may know the start and end dates before we do. When we have learned enough from them, they pass on only with the promise that we will bring in another rookie dog or cat and save a life. In fact I think they tweak that process too because as they get closer to their passing, I find myself looking more at animal rescue sites or photos of kittens or aged dogs…subliminal or obvious messages sent by those who sleep on or at the foot of our bed. That’s also when they leave. To give more room to the fledgling, the underdogs or under-cats who need us, the young ones from an overabundant breeding year or an old one who stays with us as hospice care and gets a 10” thick pillow for a bed and homemade grass fed hamburger.   Now I ask you who has sat on your bed and worshiped you lately?  Char

All through school I was someone who didn’t look forward to gym class. Competing with other boys at physical games, in races, and on tumbling mats was something for which I occasionally even faked illness to avoid.

The ego-defeating experience in middle school of doing laps around the gym and hearing Coach Blint’s sarcastic dictum of “Come on, Fluffy, this ain’t no ballet!” has never left me, even in college, when I played tennis under the sneering instruction of Coach Barnes, who made us play outdoors in December snow wearing only our tennis shorts and polo shirts in order to “toughen” us up and mold us into “real men.” That last phrase, simplistic and primitive as it is, has always intimidated me to the point of often, in groups of other men, making me feel I’m attending a party to which I wasn’t really invited, and this is not in any way based upon other men trying to lower my self-esteem. There’s never anything deliberately inflicted that should make me feel subordinate. The feeling of inferiority is already inside me, where it cowers at talk about football and golf scores, both sports of which I would happily give up in favor of a root canal or mild case of melanoma.

For these reasons I have generally gravitated socially toward groups of what society calls “men of academia,” that safe stratum of manhood where conversation hovers around the twists and turns of verbal communication more than around what I see as distant, impersonal, abstract talk about sports teams, not one of whose players I know by name or who knows me either. And that isn’t to say that an egghead can’t be an avid sports fan or a superb athlete can’t be intellectually gifted. Stereotypes work only part of the time, but somehow our society perpetuates a value system of people based too much upon black and white, overly conventionalized portraits of the way it believes men and women, respectively, are supposed to think and behave. No wonder there have been several feminist movements over the past century!

That brings me to the real reason for my writing this little essay. Though I’m not really much overweight, I’ve joined a gym, where I work out three mornings a week in order to tone up a body that, if left to its own devices, would eventually resemble a large potato. I’ve been working hard on the treadmill and on machines that provide resistance exercises targeting various muscles for this body, which will turn seventy this winter. The many men and women who work out there represent every possible age group and body type.

Everywhere are posted signs that read, “No Judgment,” a message upon which I hope everyone there focuses from time to time. The locker room and showers are where the unadorned truth is most evident about the degrees of sculpted beauty achieved by the many participants with bodies resembling everyone from Frodo Baggins in The Hobbit to Adonis from classical Greek mythology.

I remain somewhere between those two images and must leave it to the reader’s imagination to summon whatever appearance he can. Maybe by next spring my confidence will be sufficiently improved that even the insults of my old coaches can no longer prove a menace to me.   JB

I respect a person who stands up for his or her deepest beliefs, even if I don’t always agree with those beliefs. My respect intensifies if that person is willing to make a personal sacrifice for that conviction without harming other folks.

There has been much controversy over Kim Davis, the Ashland, Kentucky county clerk from Rowan, who has staunchly and consistently refused to grant same-sex marriage licenses, despite the Supreme Court ruling from earlier this summer. Seeing her unyielding stance from behind that office counter on multiple pieces of TV news coverage has made me think carefully about what it all signifies, on both sides of the issue.

To my knowledge, all of the Christian saints died for their religious beliefs, and rather horribly at that. I can’t think of an example of a saint who sacrificed someone else to satisfy his or her own individual credo. Personal sacrifice, for whatever cause, means that the individual gives up something prominent or momentous that brings about his own suffering. The problem I have with Kim Davis and her very self-righteous and self-inflicted maltreatment (if indeed it may even be called that) is that in her grandstanding as what some may call a heroine, she has really not given up anything, but rather has gained publicity and kudos from her fundamentalist Christian friends. Note I didn’t say the word Christian by itself. That word has much broader and more compassionate significance than the manufactured meaning given it by the far right, which often seems to be using the word as a mask for personal prejudices and ignorant accusations based upon whatever may be lifted out of context from The Bible, in which Christ himself never said a word about homosexuality.

The problem for me is that if Kim Davis were really an honorable woman with sincere purpose founded in Christian love, she would have said, “My religious beliefs are simply too strong, and I need to resign. This job places me in too much compromise with my convictions.” Instead, she was willing to use the media for personal attention and to sacrifice the happiness and wellbeing of others by refusing them their legal rights. How dare she use God’s name as a threat for her personal biases! The noblest way she could have addressed this problem was to quit her job, thereby not being responsible for any “sin” she thought was being committed but without hurting anyone but herself for her own cause. She is not God and had no right to be His temporal voice in a matter already decided by the Supreme Court.

A considerable segment of our society is flummoxed by the tremendous changes in our culture over the past several decades through the civil rights movement, equality for women, child protection laws, gay rights, etc. all of which at one time had very dark interpretations by Bible thumping preachers, who believed things should stay “traditional,” even if those things were obviously unjust. The changes have been fast and furious, leaving many folks confused and lost. Those are the people outraged that some of the beliefs they held for so long have been modified or deleted altogether. This has created anger and indignation for those who feel that the only anchor for them is the religious credence they’ve held, often since childhood. I understand this terror of change and the feeling of being left behind, but we have to remember that during the American Civil War, people were outraged, because their lifelong interpretation of the Bible had been that slaves were God’s will and that those slaves being freed was an assault upon God’s will and grand design for the universe. Outlooks change over time, because they have to. There are many “religious” beliefs that often coincide with ideas of right versus wrong, but they change as we learn more and become more aware and compassionate. Our understanding bends with enlightenment, as well it should and as well it must.

What scares me more and more in a complex and legally secular society such as ours is that religious zealots think that they can use the “religious belief “ card to trump anything standing in the way of judging others as inferior just because they have other convictions, peaceful or not, convictions that don’t necessarily coincide with very specific religious doctrine. We are not yet a theocracy, but we are moving in some parts of the country back to a time that was. The year is 2105, not 1692. People are no longer lashed in the public square or put into the stocks because they missed a prayer meeting or disagree with the powers that be in the canonical beliefs of just one group. People should be able to keep their religious beliefs, but when those beliefs destroy the lives of other people, the believers need to accommodate themselves to the prevailing law that protects those other people. Just one religious doctrine can no longer prevail and bully the rest of the population with its mean-spirited accusations, and persecution however “holy” the believers claim they may be. Look at Muslim fundamentalists to see where this can lead. The Christianity that makes sense to me is that which goes back to Christ himself and his almost constant messages of compassion, inclusion, love, and kindness toward our fellow beings. None of this has appeared in any way or on any level in the diatribes from people like Kim Davis.   JB

It was a remarkable day in late September. Every day is remarkable in its own way, but I was touched by something unexpected during my last class of the day. Because it was Friday afternoon and the end of the school day with my most difficult class (the leather-jacket, juvenile delinquent crowd), I was feeling sorry for myself, thinking as I watched them taking their Friday vocabulary test that I was not really reaching them as I had hoped to do. I saw my reflection in a big mirror that I used to keep tabs on everything that went on in the room even when my back was turned. My face looked sad. Though the rest of the day had been very successful and most enjoyable in my other classes, I was focusing once again on what I felt was a failure on my part to inspire everyone in the room and have them excited about what we were going to be doing after the test.

Then there was a knock on the door, and a messenger from the main office delivered a package to me that had just arrived. My students were distracted by the interruption (always an arduous task to get them back on track after ANY distraction, even a sneeze). One bold kid in the front row (the one who was proud that his brother was in prison for armed robbery) asked who it was from and what it was. I read the return address and said that the package was from a former Morton student, Jim Davis, from many years ago (thirty-four to be exact). One kid joked that it might be a bomb, but I replied that I was going to open it anyway and that we would all go up together…like bottle rockets.

Their curiosity was aroused by now, and excuses for distraction aside, they were genuinely interested to know the contents. I opened the box to find a five-page letter from that former student, who was a trucker for twenty-five years before opening his own mortuary in California. He had been in a “problem” class just like the one I was teaching that hour…a “basic skills” English class. We corresponded over all those intervening years, and he continued to send me news about his life, including, at last, pictures of his grandchildren.

He worked for several months after 9/11 at Ground Zero clearing debris and corpses. He worked with the New York City Fire Department and Police Department as head coroner. In the box was the cap he wore during his work there. It was covered with dirt and badges for his valor. It was the thing of which he was most proud. The letter said that I had always been his favorite teacher and that he still thought of the ways I had inspired him to be his best even though he was now fifty-one years old. He wanted me to have the cap, because he was proud of it, and I was his hero in a time when the world was calling him a hero.

My eyes filled up as I looked at it and explained to the class what it was. They were absolutely silent (perhaps the first time they had ever seen a teacher cry). The bell rang and they left quietly (as they had never done before). Maybe they too were touched by what had occurred. I don’t know. It may be that they were simply shocked by my reaction. It didn’t matter. I had not been so moved in a long time by a gesture like that gift. It came at just the right time to let me know that teaching had indeed made a difference and that there were influences that continued long after students were gone. I felt quite blessed.     

Jim had heart surgery two weeks after he sent me the cap and died October 23, 2003. I’ll include the final letter I sent to him before his death. I retired the following spring.

September 19, 2003

Dear Jim,     

Your package arrived today during my most difficult class (the leather- jacketed delinquent set). They all have learning disabilities and I often feel that I am not reaching them and that my work is of no use. Just keeping order in the class is a constant and draining job.  So much for my whining.

One student in the front row asked what the package was and how had sent it. When I answered that it had come from a former student, someone said, “Look out! It might be a bomb.” I replied that I was going to open it anyway and that we would all go up together like bottle rockets. I read only part of your letter before my eyes filled up. When I came to the cap, I lost my composure and sobbed. The students were absolutely silent. They saw how very moved I was and I believe they understood what I was feeling. I don’t think I have ever been so proud or touched by any other gift in my whole life as I was that cap and that letter. It suddenly made my whole career make sense. It helped me to know that what I do is not in vain and that positive influences continue even after my students have moved on to other things and other places.

I can’t tell you, Jim, how much it meant to me to receive what you sent. I shared it with some people in the main office downstairs before I left school today, and they cried too. What a beautiful gesture you made!     

Please know that you will be in my thoughts and prayers. I will want to know how the surgery went and that everything is going well for you again. You are an extraordinary man of great courage and gallantry. In spiritual terms there is nothing wrong with your heart. It is the best and biggest one I know.     

Of all the students I have taught over the past thirty-five years, you will remain one of the ones for whom I keep the fondest regard. That cap will be on my bookshelf always to remind me of the valor and compassion you have shown your fellow-beings. You have taught me at least as much as I have taught you.

Your friend,

John Bolinger

Wherever I am, I still think often of Morton High School, a building I entered for the first time in my early twenties, a place that for me will always echo the voices of thousands of students, who have passed through its halls, the sounds of chalk on blackboards, the turning of millions of pages in books, the bounce of basketballs on the gym floor, the roar of crowds cheering at touchdowns on the football field, the crack of the ball and bat, the music of choirs, orchestras, and bands slightly out of tune, a place where so many young people became men and women.

Clusters of powerful recollections flooded my mind that afternoon of June 9, 2004 as I finished putting final grades on scan sheets. For lunch my friend Logan Clark had taken me to a favorite Chinese restaurant, where we also polished off a large pitcher of Mai Tai before going back to school, where I said my goodbyes to custodians, office staff, and some teachers, who were still grading papers and putting final grades on the scan sheets. Then I gathered up my electric box fan, and old Zenith mahogany radio from 1955.

At the door to my classroom, I turned to look once more at where I had taught for so many years, a room uncharacteristically silent that afternoon, as I turned out the lights and closed the door for the last time. I went down the same stairway I had climbed and descended so many thousands of times. The parking lot was almost empty, as I loaded my car trunk. Driving from the lot, I saw the school building grow smaller in my rear-view mirror, a shrinking image that became almost a mirage as I sped off into the warmth of approaching summer. It was over.     JB

Chapter 13: Eluding Molly

I live in a little gated community of condominiums on a small lake in Pompano Beach, Florida.  I like my neighbors, but I’m having a problem with one of them, a seventy-five-year-old woman named Molly, who uses a walker to navigate her way around the second floor, where my apartment is.

Molly is a spry lady, despite her dependence upon the walker, and she has the booming voice of a Teamster union rep. She can be heard all over the complex without the benefit of a megaphone, but a bizarre set of circumstances came about to help me realize why people scattered when they heard Molly’s less than mellifluous voice coming down the walk.  For me, it began when she knocked on my door to ask me to change her air conditioner filter. Then she wanted me to open a jar of pickles, followed by other requests to check this or that in her apartment. I realized finally that there was something terribly amiss, when she knocked on my door to ask me to put a hairnet over her new permanent in order to protect a do for which she had paid fifty dollars.  She said that I should not mention to Steve, Harvey, Pearl, Donna, or Marilyn, the other residents on our floor, that I had helped her.  When I asked why, Molly’s reply was simply, “Oh, they were nasty about it and refused to help.”  At the time, I took her answer at face value, not putting the puzzle pieces together until later.  I simply put the hairnet on her head and continued fixing my lunch.  Minutes later there was another knock on the door. “John, my phone isn’t working.  Can you come over and look at it?”  My first thought was, “Do I look like a telephone repairman to you?” but I held back actually saying it aloud.  I followed Molly to her apartment, where her cell phone was charging.  The illuminated screen read, “Battery charging,” so I told her to leave it alone for at least an hour to allow the battery to be strengthened. With no land line phone, she needed the cell. I understood that.  I returned to my apartment, where only fifteen minutes later there was another knock at my door to say that her phone wasn’t working yet.  I sent her back saying that I would go to her place after the hour was up.  After the phone was turned on and working again, I believed, perhaps naively, that I had seen the last of Molly for the day.

Three more knocks on my door were to inform me that her toaster wasn’t working, her TV remote was stuck, and that her hair net had come off.  The toaster wasn’t plugged in, the TV remote batteries were loose, and her hair net had snagged on a coat hanger in her closet.  OK, I started to feel that she was simply lonely and looking for any excuse to talk to somebody, anybody.  It was, however, after her sixth knock on my door that I became annoyed enough to ponder the circumstances in order to figure out that the real reason she wasn’t knocking on the doors of other residents was that she had already done that enough times to annoy them too, so that one by one they told her to go jump off the nearest cliff, with or without her walker.  I must have been the only one left who hadn’t rebuffed her requests for help.  I was apparently still fair game.

Today, there were intermittent knocks all afternoon on my door accompanied by Molly’s inimitable voice yelling, “Hey, John.  My phone is on the fritz again. What are we going to do about it?”  I admit it.  I’m a coward in the sense that I don’t want to confront Molly with what I would really like to tell her, which would go something like this:

“Look, Molly.  I’m not your caregiver, and I don’t WANT to be your caregiver.  After your sixth knock on my door yesterday, it occurred to me that you were a lady, who uses people and that you would continue using me as long as I didn’t protest.  Well, my dear, I’m protesting right now.  I don’t know what makes you think that these are my problems, and I certainly don’t get your sense of extreme entitlement in the matter, but you need to begin solving problems yourself.  Your Miss Congeniality trophy is in serious danger of tarnishing.  Honey, if you can’t even put on your own hairnet, you probably can’t make toast or even brush your own teeth and shouldn’t be living alone in an apartment.  Maybe you need to be in assisted living, a nursing facility, or the hush-hush ward at Imperial Point.  You seem to have no sense of borders, limits, or extremes, so I’m telling you now that my door is wired to deliver a high voltage shock if you ever touch the knocker or doorbell again.  Do you understand what I’m saying, Molly?  Is any of this getting through that hairnet?”

The worst part of all this is that for the past couple of days I’ve been turning out lights, turning down the sound on the TV or radio whenever I heard the sound of Molly’s walker inching its way down the walkway on the second floor, and not answering the door when she knocked or rang the bell. I admit that hiding from a seventy-five-year-old woman is about as cowardly as one can get, but the alternative is being brutally honest with her, which I’m not yet ready to do, but give me a couple more days. 

In Harper Lee’s novel Go Set a Watchman there are fewer clear-cut values regarding politics and racial issues than in the subsequent book, To Kill a Mockingbird, at least from the viewpoints of Atticus Finch and his brother Jack. Written in the early 1950’s, To Set a Watchman is a more naked, pre-Civil Rights look at the South, Alabama in particular of that period. To Kill a Mockingbird, though written later, has as its setting Alabama of the early 1930’s when Jean Louise was still a child and civil rights for Negroes (later called Blacks by their choice) seem not even to have been an issue in Alabama (and other places in the South) perhaps because Negroes of that era were so beaten down that rights for them were assumed by many or most to be unattainable.

Jean Louise Finch (Scout) in To Set a Watchman is in her early twenties, having lived for a while in New York City and with a racially color-blind view that she has managed to keep from her childhood, a view she got from her father, Atticus. The clash between her liberal views and the surprisingly more racist views of her relatives provides the principal conflict of the book, which is a story about loss of innocence and the confrontation with the painful reality that parents, who we think are perfect, actually have flaws and weaknesses that can be irreconcilable with our own ideals, even if those ideals are viewed as unrealistic and simplistic by the very parents who taught them to us in the first place.

Atticus in this earlier book is not the model of wisdom and perfection he is in To Kill a Mockingbird. He tries to justify and sugarcoat his denigration of Negroes with a supposedly wider view of what Southern whites have lost through cultural shock, including scapegoats like the NAACP. This rather harsh view, which Atticus prefers to think is “reality” shatters Jean Louise’s childhood view of her father as a paragon of virtue and fairness. Superman is revealed as only a myth, a myth with powerful flaws, and Jean Louise is forced to consider finding some level of reality through a middle ground, rather than to be completely separated altogether from Atticus, who in this earlier book is a much more calculating, pragmatic, unsentimental man than the Atticus of To Kill a Mockingbird, and more a figure of his time and environment than the beloved icon he was to the younger Scout. This is probably a familiar dilemma to most of us, who as children didn’t see the flaws in our fathers that we saw when we became prouder and more self-righteous as young adults. I think we need to read both books to see the real Atticus Finch…a childhood view and one from that of the young adult struggling with the harsh realities of the world outside the home town.

Readers may find less clarity of purpose in Watchman and views that are less, dare I use the phrase, “black and white.” We are left to make our own peace with the values and history we have observed and experienced in our country since the more than half a century since these two books were written.   JB

We were born from dust — stardust — yet we have this astounding capacity to stare into the vast universe from whence we came — and search for a place, a world view, to call our own. Even as you read these words, humongous supernovas are shooting billions of fresh born stars across the universe. And trillions of earthly creatures are scrambling across earth, trying to find our way home. We’re all connected; we are all made from the dust of stars.

 Something in us is always curious, always longing to know more truth tomorrow than we know today. So we join the long pilgrimage — the marvelous, inexhaustible human search, for larger meaning and truth. Anonymous