Tales from the Shark Tank

Outside a blizzard is quite literally howling around the house, rattling the shutters and the sliding doors. It’s cold, in addition to the snow and wind; the temperature has dropped a solid 40 degrees since mid-afternoon.

But we are all safely inside, with everything we need and no reason to set foot out the door. I have a throw blanket my mother-in-law gave me about a year ago wrapped around my shoulders, and a down blanket I found over me. My son is asleep nested in his blankets, and my husband in ours. I’ll go join him in a few minutes here.

Warmth and peace and safety. All is well.

I’ve debated whether or not to post this. I’ve been deliberately trying to focus on humorous things here recently, as much as anything to remind myself to look for positives in the midst of all the negatives and stressful things that are in my life right now. I don’t really expect my blog to change the world, either; it is one small voice out of millions. And yet – the first step in tikun olam, the obligation to make the world better that is so intrinsic to being Jewish – is to be mindful; to notice where there is a need and mark it. So if you’re not in the mood, read no further. I won’t be offended. Probably I won’t even know of it.

I grew up seeing photographs of small children starving in Bangladesh and other places. All my mom’s magazines had ads for the Christian Children’s Fund, which encouraged you to “adopt” an impoverished child in another country and make a monthly payment to help them get what they needed to find their way out of poverty – proper nutrition, medical care, an education, clothing, or whatever else the administrators came up with. I have always known what “third world” meant. But it was always somewhere else, another country, or perhaps, if in the U.S., then in a place so far removed from my experience that it might as well be another country….big city slums, or some isolated region like Appalachia.

I’ve been aware of the increasing problem of homelessness more recently; I’ve seen the men lined up outside the Wheeler Mission on Delaware St. in Indianapolis, for example, or noticed nondescript bundles of cloth-wrapped possessions under bridges as I drove by. And if you read the news at all, it’s difficult to miss that the “homeless problem” includes families, which in turn by definition includes children.

But somehow there’s a visceral difference between seeing it in the news or in journalistic photographs and seeing it unexpectedly, as you go about the ordinary business of living. It was a balmy 6 F. when I went to Chicago for my 1-year checkup with the oncologist. Driving north from the Skyway, I saw a woman walking down the street. She had that classic look that shouts “homeless” – not just the wheeled cart full of possessions with a worn quilt tucked over the top, but the bundled coats and scarves that say the wearer expects to be out all day no matter how cold it is. That would have had impact enough. But she was steering that cart with one hand. The other held the hand of a tiny girl, no more than 3 or 4, equally bundled up. She trotted quietly along, staying with her mother. Clearly this was familiar to her.

That is not only heartbreaking, it is purely, profoundly wrong. In a place suffering the tectonic disruption of war, it is wrong but at least understandable. Not here. Not now. It should not be happening in the United States in the 21st Century. It should not be happening in a first-world country for whom war happens only in far distant places. If we are the wealthiest country in the world, then we have a commensurate obligation to our people, beginning right here at home. So I was taught, and so I believe. To fail to meet that obligation – to not even try – is to repudiate the principles of community and responsibility we try to teach our children.

I know what those currently in power would say: that it is indeed a pity, but that it “isn’t the Government’s business”. But to those in power who make much of what “good Christians” they are, especially when it is politically expedient? Allow one who is not and has never been Christian to remind you of something your own Teacher said.

“Whatsoever you do unto the least of these, you have done also unto me. And whatsoever you do not do unto the least of these, you have not done unto me.” That little girl and her mother, surely, are the least of us.

The flooding that happened a few weeks back, while I was in Illinois, has resulted in an inundation of mosquitoes now. You can’t go out the door at any time of day without getting swarmed. I spray through the screen before I let the cats in, just to keep from getting dozens of the whiny little monsters in with them. And they’re huge; I wouldn’t put it past them to carry off Miss Cloud if a couple of them teamed up. Repellent doesn’t really seem to help much against insectoid clouds like these. I can’t do much about it out here, with forest behind us, fields to either side and (worst of all) marshland across the road. But in the town nearby, they’ve fogged for the things, so I decided to drive over (it’s about four miles) and take my walk through the neighborhoods there.

Main Street (aka State Rd. 2) is completely torn up between the shopping center and the center of town, a stretch of perhaps a quarter of a mile that has utterly disrupted the little town. I parked at the shopping center on the north edge of the chaos and started walking down the street into the nearby subdivision. I had never gone that way before, never had a reason to do so. I found a small park with a playground our son will enjoy, and admired the flowers a lot of people had planted, bright in their end-of-summer glory. I wasn’t just walking past looking where I was going; I was seeing what I was looking at. I suppose you could say I was being mindful. Most of the streets leading off the one I was on are actually courts, with perhaps a dozen homes along the sides and around a circle at the end. They are not nearly as homogeneous as most of the subdivisions being built now. These are the homes I remember being new-built when I was in gradeschool. They are pleasant, middle-class homes, but no longer new or fashionable. I have achieved middle-age in the intervening years, and so have they.

Looking around, down toward the end of one of the courts, I saw a banner hanging on the front door, shadowed by the porch roof but still clear to see if one was looking. White with a broad red border, it had two stars on it. The upper star was gold; the lower one blue. Below the blue star were the crossed swords of the Marine Corps. A service banner, on the door of the home of a Gold Star Mother.

I remembered the first time I had seen such a banner. I was about ten, living in central California. There was an older woman who lived near to the grade school who had such a banner in a window, and a magnificent rose garden that took up most of her front yard. I saw her outside one day when I was out riding my bike and stopped to tell her how pretty her flowers were, commenting that I thought the banner was really pretty too. She very gently explained to me that it wasn’t just “for pretty”; that it meant that her son had died in the war. “A blue star means someone you love is fighting” she told me. “They change it to gold if they’re lost.” I don’t know how she managed to be that calm, explaining it to a child. If memory is accurate I sat there for what must have been several minutes, on my bike, then got off, put the kick-stand down, walked straight up to her and hugged her because I couldn’t figure out what to say. I think that’s what I did, but it may be only what I wish I had done.

That was nearly forty years ago. It was the height of the debacle in Vietnam and the protests about it here at home. Because it gave me nightmares, my parents had stopped permitting me to watch the news, with its coverage showing the body-bags being carried off the transports. The music I heard on my parent’s record player, heard played by my older cousins and my friends’ older siblings on their guitars and by the occasional hippie included Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ In The Wind, written in 1963, fairly new and very popular. Talking to that woman, it suddenly made a kind of sense it had not before.

And damn it all, it still makes the same sort of sense, and it is still just as topical. The gold star service flag I saw today was of exactly the same design as the one I saw in 1968, with the same meaning, representing exactly the same futile expenditure of lives because someone was looking for “victory with honor”. To me, at least, that implies something considered and dignified. In the end, there was nothing dignified about the withdrawal of American troops from Saigon, only a mad scramble to get the last few out alive. I expect that something similar will happen in Baghdad, with a similarly horrifying aftermath once the lid our people are keeping on the pot is removed and it all boils over. I was ten when I learned about those flags; now I have a son who will that same age in a few months. I have no answers. I am only heartsick at the needlessness of it.

How many times must the cannonballs fly,
Before they forever are banned?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind,
The answer is blowin’ in the wind.

When I was in high school, one of my catch-phrases used to be “understood and accepted”. I meant that; once I understood the motivations or reasons for something, I couldn’t stay angry about it, and would generally accept it. Sometimes that made no sense, because I would accept things that had hurt me without objection on the basis that they were understandable. That it was possible to accept anything once understood reflected both the tremendously sheltered nature of the world I lived in and my own idealism and ability to put myself in another’s shoes, at least mentally.

I stopped using that phrase long ago, but I was reminded of it with my friend’s comments on the man who attacked her. She does understand him, both what made him what he is and why he acted as he did, and so do I. But his conduct remains entirely unacceptable. I won’t say he’s lost his claim to human status, but he has certainly lost any claim to civilized status. He has also forfeited any claim to a place in our society. I am still idealistic; it still helps, if not the way it did in my teens, to understand the reasons for a person’s actions or behavior. But it no longer leads automatically to acceptance. It no longer defuses anger. There are some things that one should be angry about, some things that are unacceptable no matter what the explanation. It doesn’t matter that this jerk attacked a person who was trying to help him, nor that he did it in the context of his own trial. It matters that he attacked another person, period. And what exacerbates it for me isn’t that he attacked his counsel, or my friend, but that a tall, strong 20 year old man attacked a 50 year old woman about 5’3″ tall with bones like a bird. He’s locked up now, and will be until he himself is middle-aged, assuming he doesn’t antagonize someone into killing him. She, and all the rest of us, are safe from him. While he may not understand the connection between his actions and the consequences of them, the rest of us do, and no amount of understanding can make it acceptable.

Every so often, I find myself wondering what this farm was like two or three or four generations ago. The current barn is basically a metal tool shed on steroids, a utilitarian structure with a concrete floor and a huge asphalt area in front of it that must have been put down by the folks whose farm it was, judging by the heap of extra asphalt behind the barn. That scrap heap is very ugly; I still have to figure out a way to cover or conceal it. Clearly the structure, with its metal walls and roof, was put up pretty recently.

But there are walkways in the front yard leading to a wall with a window, and bits and pieces of sidewalk peeping out from under the grass in the back leading nowhere at all. I chose an area about a hundred feet from the house in the back yard for a garden, and the harrow turned up not just the expected stones, but pieces of brick. I dug in further back with my spading fork, intending to put in a patch of yarrow, and turned up some laid brick from a walk or floor or something about eight inches down. I put the yarrow someplace else, but I wonder what was there. Is that where the original barn was, or a path to it? Were there other outbuildings, and what would they have been? Or was there a bricked-over yard to provide a surface for trucks or wagons to drive over before the front was paved in asphalt? If so, then they had to approach from either east or west. South of the house was fields. Now it’s been let to go back to woods, but that too has to be relatively recent, as the trees are only about a foot across. North of that patch of brick is the house, and in between the house and the area the sidewalks lead to are a number of huge old trees. Maples and sycamores don’t grow to a diameter of four feet quickly; no trucks could have passed that way in the last fifty years or more.

I wonder what life was like here, when those walkways led to something and the bricks hidden under the back yard paved or floored a structure. I wonder why those things were torn down and how the walks and brick paving came to be covered over in earth and grass. The owner is my age; she can tell me some of her family’s stories, but some of what I’ve found she can’t account for either. All that survives of that original farm are those huge trees, this house and the fields to the west of it. But clearly there was far more at some time, and I can’t help but wonder what it was.