O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree, I love your plastic branches

 
There are people who would rather eat a bug than get a fake Christmas tree. I am not one of those people.

I used to be, especially when the kids were little. Going to a tree farm or a tree lot to get our Christmas tree was a fine family outing. Sometimes.

The kids loved the tree and some years took the initiative to help decorate it, but mostly it was a mom project, and let’s face it, they were more interested in what went under the tree than what went on it.

In 2000 my mother told me that she wasn’t going to get a tree that Christmas because it was too much fuss. I could understand what she was saying – she was 85 and we know now was not feeling well – but I hated to think of her having no tree.

I was working at the then-True Value Hardware store, and we had these adorable little trees that had fiberoptics in the branches, and a color wheel in the base so the fibers changed colors. It was maybe two feet tall, if that. For most people it would be a decoration, not the Christmas tree, but I thought it would be just right for my mom’s little house, and she could set it up and plug it in and voila! Christmas tree! I bought one and mailed it off to her. She got it, and stowed it in her car’s trunk, unopened, and there it stayed.

Well.

On the 22nd of December, she began to feel poorly. She’d been having “terrible stomach aches” for a couple of years, and this was a bad one. She eventually got home and collapsed in bed, where she stayed.

Some neighbors of hers wondered how she was the morning of the 23rd and came over to check on her. They called 911 and my mother was taken to Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz, where she was diagnosed with a heart attack. Two of the arteries in her heart were completely blocked. A couple of stents later she was booked into their critical care unit and put into a medical coma so her body could recover.

I hopped a plane down to San Jose, where I rented a Geo Metro, a car about the size and stability of a soda can.

I spent a lot of time at the hospital that week. My brother and sister-in-law flew in from New Mexico, and together we all waited to see which way our mother was going to tip. Her cardiologist told us to get ready for the worst.

But she hung in there. I stayed about a week, until she was stabilized, and it looked like she was going to survive this. I realized they were not going to wake her up for a while yet. I flew home.

When they woke her from the coma and I talked to her on the phone, I realized that her brain was scrambled from her coma experience. She was in a hospital room, and she told me, “This is a funny house. There are people coming in and out all the time.”

So now I know not to be alarmed when someone wakes up from a coma with a scrambled brain. She regained her sense and her senses in the days that followed.

She was transported to a recovery/rehabilitation center in Capitola. My cousins, Charlotte and Nancy, went down from the Bay Area to visit her. She loved that – they really did cheer her up.

When she was ready to leave rehab, my brother and sister-in-law came back, picked her up, and took her home with them to New Mexico, where their yellow lab kept trying to grab the tennis balls on the end of her walker’s legs.

I went to visit her in early March. She wanted to go home to her house in California. Which was not to be.

The last day when I was getting ready to leave, she sat down at their piano and began playing, and I sang the songs she played. She was my first accompanist, way back when we stood around her piano and she played and we sang I’m Looking Over a Four Leaf Clover, and The Caissons Go Rolling Along, and the Army Air Corps song – “Off we go into the wild blue yonder …”

Those aren’t the songs she played that day. I don’t remember what she played, only that she did play, and I did sing. I knew this was the last time I would see her, and it seemed like a perfect ending for us, music.

After she died, that Christmas tree, still in its shipping box, was one of the things I brought home. For Christmas, 2001, I got it out and set it up, and hung jewelry ornaments on it – mostly pearl earrings I picked up at Granny’s Attic for $1.50 a pop – and that was our Christmas tree that year. By that time the boys were 19 and 16 and not so into Christmas. They still got presents, and we still had our silly string shoot-out at the end of opening presents – that was a tradition for a few years, and I have seldom laughed so hard.

For a few years, that little tree was our Christmas tree. Rick and I loved it. It was no fuss, no big deal, and it got the job done. I’m not sure when or where I lost it.

Since then I’ve had a succession of fake trees. Sometimes I’d buy them at Granny’s before Christmas and donate them back after Christmas.

The I got one last year that I really like, so I kept it, and when it was time to set it up this year, I discovered that its base was gone. So I got another base, meant for a real tree, and somehow made it work. Duct tape, my friends, duct tape.

It is standing in the living room, and has a slight list to the right, but has not fallen.

So far.

Maybe today is the day I’ll start putting on the ornaments. Probably should put most of the weight on the left side.

Where Is the Life That Late I Led? (thanks and a tip o’ the hat to Cole Porter)

 

Warning: this is Grandma talking about all the things that are wrong with her body. You might be bored reading that sentence, much less the essay. So feel free to stop here if you don’t think you want to read about my gripes and complaints. I don’t blame you. I’m not proud of this lament.

Most of my life I was a hearty soul with a functional body. Now I have trouble hearing, seeing, and walking.

I have hearing aids. They make a difference but are not the same as my original hearing. Every time I speak, I feel like I’m talking through a PA system. I have trouble making out what people are saying sometimes, but I’m not saying, “What?” to everything.

I was up to blended trifocals when I ran out of money for eye exams and prescription lenses, and as we all know, Medicare does not cover glasses. I have not made it a priority to accumulate enough money to have an eye exam and get new prescription glasses, so I have a whole clutch of reading glasses of various strengths, which are usually lost around the house. My distance vision is still pretty good, which is a mercy, and when I’m not trying to read or write or look at Tik Tok on my kindle, I don’t wear glasses.

After I fell and fractured my L3 vertebra last spring, I was astonished – how could I break my back twice in one lifetime? The L2 was broken in a rollover car accident in 2000. Now L2 and L3 are a matched pair of compaction-fractured bones in my spine. This is one of the conditions that make walking difficult.

Funny (to me) side note: when the L2 vertebra was broken, I ended up with a pinched nerve down my right leg that hurt most of the time and sometimes it felt like my right thigh was on fire. At the time of the fall in which I broke the L3 vertebra, I had sciatica in my right hip and leg that was brought on by sitting in a lousy seat on Frontier Airlines* when I flew back from Denver a few days before I fell. When I fell, the sciatica went away! I still have pain from the pinched nerve in my right thigh, but not as much. Not worth breaking another vertebra, but it is nice to have one good thing come out of the experience.

*Digression:

FRONTIER AIRLINES: They are soulless vacuum cleaners of money. They lure you in with ads for cheap fares, and then after you have paid your cheap fare and think you have bought a ticket to somewhere, you learn that you have only paid for the right to pick out and PAY FOR your seat. My ticket was $31! What a deal! But I paid $47 for an actual seat up near the front of the plane. Seats from about halfway back to the tail were $19, and they were all booked by the time I got to the website.

Then the clerk at the airport told me that it was $39 for luggage, whether you stowed it or carried it on. That’s right: $39 for carry-on luggage.

So. $31 “fare” plus $47 for a seat plus $39 for luggage: $117 for that $31 ticket. The tiny bottles of water they sold on the flight were $3, no cash, plastic only.

That $47 seat brought on sciatica.

So a big thumbs down to Frontier Airlines for their misrepresentation of what it costs to fly on them.

My left knee was ruined in a dog-walking incident a few months after my car wreck in 2000. I was still wearing a metal back brace. Our two dogs and I were out for a stroll when our Doberman, Sadie, took off after a cat, and jerked me sideways and because the back brace held my back straight, something inside the knee was the first thing to give.

As you may be aware, torn ligaments do not heal. They deteriorate. Twenty-one years later I can feel the bones in my knee rubbing together. The fall that tore one of my cruciate ligaments didn’t help, either.

Which is why I was using a cane before I fell and broke my L3 vertebra last May. Now I use a rollator, which is a little sportier than a regular walker, with four wheels and a shelf for carrying things, and for sitting when I’m feeling exhausted.

In 1994 I fell and broke my right arm at the cervical neck – that’s where the ball on the end of the bone goes into the shoulder socket. My arm is shorter, and my shoulder is frozen and hurts every day.

My left hand and fingers are full of arthritis after sixty years of playing guitar. I don’t feel that, or any, pain when I am playing the guitar. Musicians understand that.

So, yeah, the body is not what it was when it came off the assembly line. I am still here and am happy to be so. But I am downright nostalgic for the functions I once took for granted, not to mention the absence of pain.

Can you relate?

I Don't Get the Insanity

“There comes a time in the course of human events when no amount of cursing will suffice.” – John Barrymore. Maybe.

That quote popped into my mind recently. I think this is one of those times “in the course of human events.”

I just don’t get it. I do not understand how so many people – millions of people – could get so many things wrong. Yes, I’m talking about anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers, Trumpers, seditionists, white supremacists, hate-filled evangelicals, conspiracy theorists.

The insanity has taken on a life of its own – Trump was the beginning nexus; now he’s superfluous to the movement. Oh, they still love him and believe he is Jesus’ anointed to lead us out of the valley of the shadow of libtards, but if he crosses his tribe, they’ll turn on him as fast as he turns on people.

Like the time a few months ago when he encouraged people at one of his rallies to get vaccinated, and the crowd booed him. He has not said anything about getting vaccinated since. Even Jesus’ anointed can be thrown under the bus.

That’s the people, the voters. Then there are the politicians – omg, the politicians – who persist in their suicide mission of telling people not to mask or vaccinate; their attempts to keep everyone who does not agree with them from voting; and their ongoing effots to manipulate the country for their own power and greed, and then lying about it. Lying about everything.

I heard a Republican strategist on the radio the other day. He told us that Republicans are willing to work in a bipartisan fashion, and it is Democrats who are slowing down or blocking legislation because “the thin slice of left wing progressive extremists is insisting on their pie in the sky agenda.”

So, everything is the Democrats’ fault because they are all Satan-worshipping-cannibal-pedophile commies who won’t allow the Republicans to pass their legislation for the country’s good.

Lies, lies, lies. And projection. I keep saying this because I believe it: if someone persistently accuses you of something, or rails against something (like being a pedophile), I tend to look at the accuser and ask myself, hm, where did they get those ideas?

I suspect the accusers are the pedophiles, like all those pastors who railed against homosexuality and then got caught propositioning a kid in a public bathroom. Whited sepulchers, the lot of ‘em.

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness.” – Matthew 23:27, ERS

It makes me dizzy when I think about how many people are retailing these lies, and how many people are swallowing the lies whole, and there is no way to reason with them, or, at this point, trust them.

One of the privileges of being an American is being able to gripe about the government without getting thrown in prison. So I have complained plenty, but I do not wish to have the government overthrown and replaced with a rotten theocracy/fascist dictatorship. Or whatever it is the rapscallions want, these self-described “patriots” who are trying to bring down the country.

It makes me sad. Polar ice is melting, oceans are rising, storms are becoming more deadly, wildfires rampage every year. There wasn’t a “wildfire season” for most of my life, but now there is. All this is knocking on our doors, saying, “Yoohoo, climate change,” but some people are still too busy trying to amass power and wealth to pull together for the good of all living things, not to mention humans, or to rebuild a survivable planet.

Some people are trying to do that, against all the odds, against all the resistance to reality.

I have tried to be comic relief and social worker combined for myself and others, because so much of how we experience life depends on our attitude.

Now I ask myself, “What can I do in the face of the hopelessness I feel for my country?” and other countries which are caught up in the fervor for authoritarianism.

The answer to what I can do always comes down to, “Write, and sing.” Those are my skills.

Most days I do not want to do anything but read British mysteries and watch streaming mysteries, movies, and baking competitions. Sometimes, though, the energy regroups and says, write something, or record another song. There’s a little life in the old girl yet and a long life has shown me that you never know.

So let us encourage one another. Do what we can. Live our best lives. Pray. Laugh. Have lunch.

Yes. Don’t forget to have lunch.

Hard and Scary

I did promise people that I would keep writing even though the Loop has ceased publication. A couple of people have come up to me and said, “So?”

The thing is that ever since last May 26, when I lost my balance and fell on the concrete behind Sporty’s, my main activity has been to recover from the fracture of my L3 vertebra. It has been a long, long, slow slog.

Really slow.

This experience certainly broke up any boredom I was feeling when I was isolating for more than a year. Suddenly I was the center of attention, more the center of attention than I wanted to be. Sheesh. For example, people in rehab facilities put a lot of stock in bowel movements, which I did not feel was their business, but God help you if you miss a day.

But all that fuss is over. I was in the hospital five days, and in the rehab facility for a little over three weeks, and when I came home, my house had been cleaned out by Episcopalians and Company, and I had lots of visitors, some of whom brought me food.

I was confined to a wheelchair most of those first weeks. Learning to navigate without running into walls or door jambs or anything else was a steep learning curve for me, and when I started using a walker, I had to learn how to navigate that without having a collision with something.

Near the end of August it was pointed out to me that my beautiful, sweet Marley, my canine pal, was coming to the end of her life.

She was not well. She was peeing and vomiting in the house, which she had never done unless ill. There was a haze of pain in her eyes.

I took her up to the fields by the Food Bank so she could run around, and she wouldn’t get out of the car. That poked a big hole in my denial.

I spoke with a vet who said Marley had outlived her life span already, and I was lucky to have had her as long as I did.

Oh.

So, on a pleasant Tuesday in August, the vet came down and saw Marley on her way.

I miss her. A lot. Her beautiful, sweet spirit, her unconditional love … okay, not the constant barking so much, to be honest, but all the rest.

Not having a dog feels like a huge deprivation, but it’s Marley I’m feeling deprived of, not some dog I’ve never met, for those of you who think I should get another dog, the sooner the better.

The Delta variant of Covid-10 came along this summer, and the novelty of my hard times has worn off, so people are not coming over much anymore, so I’m back to feeling isolated, and feeling the accompanying squirrelly-ness. I have started going to water walking again, which really helps. Those women are family, even the ones I don’t know yet.

I signed up for an Alzheimer’s Prevention study a few years ago, and every three or four months they have me take some memory tests, mostly to see if I remember whether I have seen playing cards before, and so far, according to their lights, my memory is not deteriorating. I’m coasting along about the same.

It doesn’t feel that way to me some days. I’m always trying to remember people’s names, and specific words for what I mean, and I’ve become adept at working around the inability to pull up the right word when I want it.

A lot of my friends talk about having the same issues. So many people I know have said that they feel the same inside as they always have, in their thoughts and feelings, but their bodies and memories are letting them down.

I do not want to be one of the people whose bodies go on while their minds and personalities have sailed away. Who is going to take care of me when I can’t take care of myself? It’s frightening to consider the possibilities.

Of course, my body is fairly disabled now, I have had breast cancer, and I have an ongoing relationship with a cardiologist. Perhaps I won’t live long enough to become demented. There’s a happy thought, eh?

I am old and getting older – I will try to live my aging life with as much grace as I can muster, but this confronting and accepting the loss of memory, loss of the use of my body, and, the unknown date and manner of my death, is hard, and scary.

Fortunately I’ve lived my whole life dealing with hard and scary. That could be a plus now.

Marley, My Sweet Dog

Last Tuesday, my dearly beloved dog, Marley, was shuffled off this mortal coil with a couple of hypodermic shots. She was lying in my arms, scared by what was happening to her. I hated that - I wanted her passing to be peaceful, but instead she was trembling until the anesthetic took effect and her consciousness flagged.

This is one of the few times I wish I was rich - rich enough to have somehow patched her up for a few more months. Or days. Or hours. 

It was hopeless. 

I had taken her up to the field where she could run free the day before. All her life when I took her there, she knew where we were going when we got close and she started whining in happy anticipation of getting out in the field to pee and poop and sniff and wander around, and sometimes play with other dogs who were there. Last Monday she was silent. She was lying in the back seat of my car and wouldn't move when I opened the door for her to get out. She just looked at me as if to say I was asking too much of her. Just, "No."

Her kidneys were failing, and she wasn't going to get better. The vet told me that I was lucky to have had her this long, and she had already outlived her expected life span.

I thought she was 13, because when she came to live with us in 2012 we were told she was four years old. I was also told that American Staffordshire Terriers lived "about 14 years." Which seemed like a long time back then, and gave me the wrongheaded idea that she should have another year. Thus I was hobbled by my expectations - no, she can't go now. She's only 13. (The internet says 12 - 16 years for Staffies)

She was pure love. She never judged me, even when her incessasnt barking got on my nerves and I yelled, "Shut the fuck up!" Not that yelling at her ever made her shut up. I think she thought I was barking with her, not at her.

I also think she barked out of boredom, or to tell me to do something - "Pay attention to the dog. Go sit on the couch and let the dog cuddle up next to you. What are you doing that is more important than that?"

In the evening, when she was ready to go to bed - in my bed, that is - she would stand at the end of the hallway to the bedroom and look at me with meaning. The meaning was: "Come to bed." If I did not turn off my British mystery and come to bed, she would give up after a while and go down the hall to jump up on the bed and snuggle in. After I came home from rehab in early July, still dealing with my broken back, going to bed early was appealing, so I would often heed her call. "Yeah, Marley, you're right. Let's go crawl in." 

One of her vets and I speculated that she was the product of a puppy mill. She had purebred problems - shoulder dysplasia, and a crooked jaw that left her tongue hanging out most of the time. She was all white (a color "not encouraged" in the breed) and would have an allergic reaction to the grass she loved to lie in during the hot days of summer. She'd get hot spots. 

Fleas were not much of a problem. Because she was shorthaired and white, as soon as a flea jumped on her, I could see it and remove it. I kept her flea control in hand, using what seemed like magical drops between her shoulder blades, and did the same with my cat, Mellow. Not magical - the drops are chemical and are poison to fleas and stay on the animals' skin killing pests for weeks or months, which means a flea-free animal and house. 

If you had lived through flea infestations, as I had before these drops came along, it was easy to embrace the drops. Poison, yes, but so much easier to live with than poisoning the whole house with those flea bombs that killed everything, and told you to leave the doors and windows open and not to come back in for at least three hours and to remove all your potted plants as well. Oh yeah. Only had to use those bombs once, but that was sufficient to make me diligent about flea control before fleas got out of hand ever after. 

One unexpected benefit of those bombs: I had an old hand-me-down dresser that was infested with some kind of wood drilling bugs. There were little holes in the wood that sawdust dripped out of and onto the floor. After the flea bomb, no more holes, no more sawdust - no more drilling bugs. Also, we had no more fleas, which was the desired outcome.

But I do digress.

Marley was the sweetest dog I've ever had. AmStaffs' temperament is described as, "friendly, tenacious, devoted, loyal, attentive, courageous." Marley never had to prove her courage, but she was all the rest of those things. 

She did have abandonment issues from losing her first two or three homes. She becamse anxious when I left, and totally freaked out when she was on the wrong side of a door she wanted to get through - her magnificent jaws and teeth made slivers out of our French doors, our front door, and one of the bedroom doors when she got stuck in there. She actually pulled the trim off the wall. She also chewed up some doorframes in one of Joanna Gardiner's rental houses, but we don't talk about that. They were fixed by a carpenter who showed up out of the blue.

Marley shed so much of her short white hait I'm surprised she didn't go bald. It was everywhere. It still is everywhere, and I will look at it fondly when I run across it.

Well. 

Goodbye, Marley, you good dog. How I miss you.

 

It’s Been Good - the last Loop essay

 Steven Allen, who has kept the Loop going all these years, bless his heart, has announced that this is the last issue of the Loop that he will be publishing. Turns out he has a life, and paid employment.

Steven has let it be known that if someone wants to take on publishing the Loop, they should speak up. Does anyone have a dream of publishing an alternative island newspaper? Contact Steven Allen, editor@vashonloop.com

The Loop began as the Ticket, and was started by Hamish Todd, with a lot of help from Rex Morris and several other people. The Ticket was political, and funny. When Hamish injured his ankle, someone asked him if he had fallen off his soapbox.

In 2002, I was working at the then True Value hardware store. One day Rex Morris came in and asked if I would like to write a column for the Ticket, with an illustration by my cartoonist husband, Rick.

In July of 2002, I wrote the first Spiritual Smart Aleck column. It was titled, “Grandma’s Diary,” and was accompanied by a drawing Rick did of me asleep on a couch with a baby snoozing on top of me (that baby is now 19 and starting college in a couple of weeks).

My intention at first was to write a humorous column, a la Erma Bombeck, about home, and the kids, etc. You know.

Life hammered that sort of wholesomeness out of me fast. While I have written of spiritual topics, and humor, I wrote a
bout dialysis when Rick’s kidneys failed. I wrote about grief after Rick died. I ranted a lot after the 2016 election.

A little rage, a little religion, a little humor, and a few true stories, like the one about the night Rick and his friends went deer hunting on a golf course in Marin. In a Volkswagen beetle. With a spear made from a lead pipe.

They got one, too.

The uppity yuppie who wanted to know where the “secret ferry” was – the one only we islanders knew about – because he did not think he should have to wait in line for a regular ferry. So a nice woman at Sound Food said, why, yes, of course, and gave him directions for getting to Manzanita Beach.

Around 2004 the Ticket changed hands. Marie Blichfeldt and Troy Kindred took over and renamed the paper the Loop.

Most other contributors and I kept writing for the paper, and for a few years Rick kept drawing the illustrations for my column as well as drawing his comic strip, Offshore.

A little historical review: after 9/11, George W. Bush went after Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, was allegedly hiding. In 2003 we went to war with Iraq, because of non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

Children who were in elementary school when those military actions began have grown up to fight, and die, in Iraq and Afghanistan.

By 2007, the housing bubble popped, and the economy crashed. So many homes were lost, as well as jobs.

In 2008, Obama was elected, and he and his Democratic Congress did the best they could to clean up the financial mess Bush et al had left. They passed the Affordable Care Act, which we hoped would lead to healthcare for all. Alas, so far, we, as a country, have been too stupid to take care of our greatest resource, our people.

The racism and white supremacy that had been festering covertly became overt. All the racist worms crawled out of the woodwork, blaming Obama for the Bush administration’s Great Recession. Not the first or last time Republicans would ignore facts and manufacture bull poop.

Which somehow led to Donald Trump becoming president in 2016. Because pocket gophers, nine-banded armadillos, and kudzu have electoral votes.

Now here we are, with a “Republican Party” that is trying to overthrow the American government and institute a pure white fascist regime. I do not know if they will make Trump their puppet dictator. It is his dream job, but we all know that he is a murderously clueless loose cannon.

Then there is that covid pandemic, now well into its second year, and the homicidal weather that is attacking all over the world.

There will be so much to write about, but this is the last Spiritual Smart Aleck column for this version of the Loop. Will it rise again? We’ll see.

 I shall post my writing on my blog in future. Google “Spiritual Smart Aleck,” to find a link to my blog.

All in all, writing the column has been a great ride. Thank you for reading. Thank you for coming up to me in the grocery stores and at Granny’s to thank me for writing the column. That kept me going.

Peace.

Amen.

 

Lordy Mercy!

 When I began writing this column nineteen years ago, I wished to write about the spiritual side of the spiritual smart aleck; that is, my faith (Christian) and my church (Episcopal). I knew that Vashon has a lot of churches, but also a lot of agnostics and atheists who would be more likely to read the Loop than some of the churchgoers.

I was afraid I might get some hostility from anti-religion people, but by that time, I figured that if I was going to be a Christian, I was not going to apologize for it. If anyone was offended by my Christian writings, they never told me.

My adult conversion began in my mid-30s, a time of life during which many people discover a more thoughtful and perhaps spiritual angle to their lives. Some come to a faith or practice for the first time. Some delve deeper into the faith that has been part of them since childhood. Some find new life in a faith from which they had walked away. Some become Baha’i, or Buddhist, or Hindu, or Muslim. Some think they would rather be a secular humanist, thanks. Some dig in and say it’s all a crock.

My attitude after all these years is, “Whatever floats your boat.”

That would not fly in the Baptist Church in which I was raised. We were supposed to get out there and save souls so they could spend eternity in heaven, and every soul we missed would burn in the fires of hell.

As a child I wondered, what about all the people who were born before Christianity? Were they all sizzling away?

It is good to remember that Jesus was not a Christian. He was a Jew, probably a member of the Pharisees, a large sect of Judaism in those days. The Pharisees he denounced were leaders who did not act like true people of faith. They were in it for the money and power.

Sound familiar?

After the American Revolution England was so mad at the former American colonies that they would not allow a Church of England bishop come over to ordain priests in the American church, but the Church of Scotland obliged, and once priests were ordained here, they could ordain others because they were part of the Apostolic Succession.

What in the heck is the Apostolic Succession?

To the best of my understanding the Apostolic Succession means that you have hands laid on you by someone who had hands laid on them, who had hands laid on them, and so on, in an unbroken chain of laying on of hands that goes back to Jesus’ Apostles, who did the original laying on of hands in first century Palestine.

You are now asking, “Who kept track?” Good question, and I do not have an answer. Those of you who are learned Christian theologians could explain Apostolic Succession more accurately.

In the 1970s when women began to demand to be ordained as priests in the Anglican and Episcopal churches, it was the belief of many in the church that when the Apostolic Succession reached a woman, it dropped dead: “Okay, missy, maybe you have been blessed by this ancient rite, but you cannot pass it on to anyone else because you have the wrong chromosomes.”

To which women priests said, “Hah.”

Women continue, in all things, not just religion, to struggle to get men’s feet off our necks. It never ends.

Well, anyway, I felt called and I became an Episcopalian around 1986. I love the liturgy, the music, the expectation that you will use the brain God gave you, the Book of Common Prayer, and the Episcopalians. And singing in the choir, which we all hope will happen again someday.

That initial rush of conversion calmed down long ago, and life has smacked me around some, but having a firm faith has been, well, everything. How do you get a firm faith? Same way you get to Carnegie Hall: practice, practice, practice.

Then there are lame Bible jokes:

Q: What kind of car does God have? A: A Plymouth. He drove Adam and Eve out of the garden in a Fury.

Q: What kind of car did the Apostles have? A: A Honda. The Apostles were all in one Accord.

I will give you a little time to recover from your groans.

Ready?

Over the years I have been a lot more smart aleck than spiritual in this column. Whatever you believe, or do not believe, I hope the column has given you some smiles and laughs and even some comfort. After all, what’s a spiritual smart aleck for?

My mother told me many times when she thought I was being sassy, “Nobody likes a smart aleck.”

She was wrong. People love smart alecks.

Big Fat Lies

 When Trump was in the White House, I reached the point of feeling that a rock would cry out at the insanity going on. Some of my columns here were those rocky cries, expressing what I felt about watching the Republican party follow Donald Trump over a cliff and try to pull the country over the cliff as well. Granted, the Right Believers had been primed to go over that cliff for the last thirty years, but they found a leader they could die for in Trump.

After President Biden was sworn in, I thought that perhaps we would settle into the more conventional kvetching that is aimed at all presidents.

Hah. I am so naïve.

In the tradition of the late (unlamented, at least at my house) Rush Limbaugh, the right wing media continue to lie, edit videos, and make up windmills for the cultists to charge, and a large audience continues to swallow this poison and smile and ask for more, and as we have seen, the MAGA crowd and their elected representatives are committed to overthrowing the American republic. Patriots, pah. I spit in the corner.

A couple of weeks ago the Republicans were running around like chickens with their heads cut off because Joe Biden was going to take away their meat, limiting everyone to four pounds of meat per year. This was a lie that the citizens of Trumpworld bought right into, and not only grassroots people but politicians like Governor Greg Abbott of Texas.

“Ain’t gonna happen here!” he tweeted.

No, Greg, it is not. Because that story was a Big Fat Lie.

OneAmerica News (which is somewhat to the right of Fox News) declared on January 6 that the people invading the Capitol had to be antifa disguised as Trump supporters because, of course, Republican/Trump supporters are never violent, unlike the antifa-commie-socialist-Democrat-black protesters.

If you are ever taking a psychology class and need an example of what “projection” is – look to the Republican/right wing Americans who constantly accuse everyone else of doing what they are doing.

Meanwhile, back at the insurrection - at least OneAmerica’s insistence that the rioters could not be Republicans shows that there was some awareness that day that invading the Capitol was wrong. There are still people who are trying to blame antifa for the insurrection, which is a Big Fat Lie.

Then there is THE Big Fat Lie – that Biden did not win the election. Millions of people believe that, the poor gullible dangerous saps.

I hear that many younger people coming along are fed up with the lies, calumnies, and outright claptrap of the far Right. That gives me hope. Please, young people. Save us from the sins of my generation and the generations that came before. I like to believe that we, as people, are becoming better in small increments, but it is not enough.

Joe Biden has turned out to be a President who acts. For starters, he has taken steps to fight the pandemic, is trying to reunite the families that were ripped apart at our southern border, and has reclaimed money that was taken to finance building the border wall that would not keep anyone out and would destroy a lot of natural habitats for some species of flora and fauna.

Is Biden perfect? Oh, heck no. That reclaimed money is going back to the defense budget. Wahoo. He was in the Senate too long not to know how to play politics.

But who knew that there were politicians around who would work for the good of the people? Such a quaint old notion, eh?

Now - next I would like to see all the people who claim to be Christians start practicing love instead of hate.

I am so naïve.

(pause)

In other news, my grandchild is graduating from high school, and his parents have bought airplane tickets so that I can be present for this milestone in his life.

Perhaps you know that the thought of flying makes me sick to my stomach.

There were times over the years when flying seemed necessary – when there were deaths in the family, mostly.

And then, in September of 2001, the day we remember as 9/11 happened. All my fear of the many things that can happen on an airplane came rushing back into my psyche, plus more things I had not imagined.

I have not set foot on an airplane since, and I have been okay with that.

It is almost certain that these upcoming flights will be fine, but because every time I fly, I’m afraid I’m going to die, I will say: It has been a pleasure writing for you all these years, and I really appreciate your reading my columns. Thank you.

Blessings, beloveds, and I encourage you to fight the Big Fat Lies.

Wild Things

 The first earwig of summer showed up today. It scampered out from under my blood glucose testing kit and was scurrying across the kitchen table at earwig top speed when it met with misfortune: I got all medieval on its fanny and brushed it over the edge. Earwigs give me the willies, with those big pincers on their heads, and they show up when I least expect them.

Earwigs do not respect my boundaries.

Nor do slugs.

I gave up on planting vegetables years ago. My yard is in a declivity in the west side bluff, surrounded by tall trees - firs, cedars, big leaf maples, and the horse chestnut that blocks off about a third of the sky in the summer. When I planted vegetables, I was merely feeding slugs and other plant predators, but mostly slugs.

I tried various slug remedies. The little containers of beer that they would fall into and drown were effective but disgusting to clean up, and the beer got a little expensive.

For a few days once, I went out with a paring knife, and stabbed slugs. I got a little sick to my stomach stabbing slugs. I felt like a Mongol horde, laying waste to the slug community. I felt like a monster. Worse, my slug assaults never seemed to make a dent in the slug population.

I read that if you put a ring of marigolds around the garden, the pungent plants would stop the slugs before they got in. So I went out and bought a bunch of marigolds and planted them around the garden.

Next morning - you have probably guessed or know from experience - the slugs had eaten all the marigolds. After that I stopped growing vegetables and used slug bait where I did not want slugs.

Earwigs, slugs, and then came the feral cats.

Around 1989 there was a feral cat city here in our ‘hood. Rick and I began trapping cats and having them spayed and neutered (with financial aid from VIPP. Thank you!) and then released. At the time some people thought we were loony, but this is a common method for controlling feral cat populations now. It was new then.

After we did that, the feral cat population in the neighborhood stabilized, and the cats were no longer wearing themselves out making kittens. They all died off after fifteen years or so, and in that time VIPP had taken over most of the kitten and puppy action here on the island, so cats were no longer dumped in the neighborhood. Now my yard is patrolled by Mr. Mellow, a tuxedo cat of charm and drool.

Because we fed the feral cats kibble in trays we put outside, raccoons became frequent visitors. That went on until the last feral cat died. A raccoon is a rare sight in my yard these days.

For years deer have jumped the fence and come into the yard to graze. I do not mind them grazing in the yard if they do not strip off my roses and leave naked little sticks.

Then there are the squirrels, and the crows, and the smaller birds, and the insects. Lots of wild things live or hang out in my yard.

Coyotes, I am told, live all over the island. In 2019, five separate packs were counted. I have yet to see a coyote on Vashon, but I know they are here.

I saw the cougar that lived here a few years back in security camera videos posted online. I have heard of sightings of other cougars on the island, mostly on the south end. I have seen bears, who, like the cougars and the deer, sometimes swim over from the peninsula. Bears do not seem to settle in here like the deer and that cougar.

In the 1970s, I saw nary a bald eagle here at all, but their population has recovered. They have been hard on the heron rookeries, I hear, but I see both birds in my rambles around the island and seeing either one gives me a thrill.

Herons are usually standing alongside or in the water.

Eagles are usually soaring overhead, although sometimes I have seen them sitting in a tree. Thinking.

Sometimes eagles are attacked in the air by three or more small birds. Plucky little vigilantes.

Random encounters:

One day while I was parked by the side of the road south of Burton, two otters came down the hill, dived into Quartermaster Harbor, and started coming up with fish.

A mink once came up out of the ravine here at the house and spotted me sitting on the porch. We both froze and stared at each other for a while, then the mink left.

Wild things.

They make my heart sing.

They make everything groovy.

Wild things.

Resurrection for Dummies

 It is now the Easter season in the Western Christian church.

Eastern/Orthodox Christians will not observe Easter until May 7. They are still in Lent.

You do know that Easter is the re-named pagan spring celebration called Eostre, that was co-opted by Christianity, right? Once the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great became Christian, he propagated a policy of re-naming and Christianizing pagan special days. So he was a proponent of the faith, but he waited until his dying day to be baptized because he figured that would cover (all his sins) (his butt).

For us Christians, Easter is the celebration of the resurrection of Christ, the burgeoning of new life, as we see all around us at this time of year.

The day of the crucifixion is remembered on Good Friday. I have asked lots of times what was so good about it, but it is a necessary part of the Triduum, the three days of Easter: first, a meal together with Jesus washing the disciples’ feet to show his servanthood on Thursday, followed by Jesus’ death and his followers’ and family’s despair on Friday, followed by resurrection Sunday morning, followed by what I recently saw described as the terror of the women who came to the tomb to wash Jesus’ body. They found the tomb empty and were told by a man there (who was that guy?) that Jesus was gone. He was alive. How were they supposed to process this?

There is not a one of us who has not experienced a personal Good Friday, when despair gains the advantage. Like the disciples on that first dark Friday, we think it is all over and we see no way out.

Those of us who experience depression certainly know that feeling. Perhaps if you are not subject to depression, you experience that feeling only when someone you love dies, or some other misfortune of that magnitude occurs. I do not know.

At those times, like the disciples, we do not believe that Easter is coming. It usually is not someone dead coming back to life, although I do not rule out the possibility. It is an upwelling of the life inside you. It might take some time and a good therapist, but you are glad you did not give up.

We all experience resurrections in our lives. Perhaps reconnecting with a family member or a friend whom you thought was lost to you; the mending of a broken marriage; the child you were told was developmentally delayed, who was actually deaf and is in fact rather brilliant; some modest victory that you were convinced could not happen; learning that the object of your affection reciprocates your feelings (that is when the trouble begins, but that’s another essay).

My dog, Marley, experienced a resurrection miracle this Easter week.

She had stopped eating and drinking. She was sick and in pain, and her hind legs gave out beneath her.

Monday morning was a Good Friday day for me, as I drove her to the vet’s, believing that she would not come home again.

The vet techs carried her into the clinic on a stretcher, and they told me to go home, and they would call me in a while. I did not think there was anything they could do for her, but okay.

I figured that if I brought Marley home, it would be to do doggy hospice.

The call came in an hour or so: come and pick her up. Really?

The vet said Marley had a bad infection. They walloped her with antibiotics and sent us home with more pills for Marley.

Giving her the pills at home was a wrestling match because she was not eating. Once I got the pills down her throat, she retreated to the other couch and would not speak to me for a few hours.

On Tuesday she was slightly better; on Wednesday, she began to drink water; on Thursday she began to eat, and I was able to wrap pills in cheese and chicken and she snarfed them right down.

By Friday she was almost her old self, starting to bark and beg again.

I imagine this is how people felt during World War II when penicillin saved lives that would have been lost before that time. Antibiotics are miracles. My dog was pulled back from the brink.

I want to thank Dr. Teri Byrd and her staff at the 4 Paws Veterinary Clinic for kindness and swift treatment of my Marley. And thanks to Sylvia at Fair Isle, who when they could not fit Marley in, gave me the number for 4 Paws.

Island veterinarians and their staff members rock, and resurrection is real, if you know how to recognize it.

Lordy Mercy!

 

 

When I began writing this column nineteen years ago, I wished to write about the spiritual side of the spiritual smart aleck; that is, my faith (Christian) and my church (Episcopal). I knew that Vashon has a lot of churches, but also a lot of agnostics and atheists who would be more likely to read the Loop than some of the churchgoers.

I was afraid I might get some hostility from anti-religion people, but by that time, I figured that if I was going to be a Christian, I was not going to apologize for it. If anyone was offended by my Christian writings, they never told me.

My adult conversion began in my mid-30s, a time of life during which many people discover a more thoughtful and perhaps spiritual angle to their lives. Some come to a faith or practice for the first time. Some delve deeper into the faith that has been part of them since childhood. Some find new life in a faith from which they had walked away. Some become Baha’i, or Buddhist, or Hindu, or Muslim. Some think they would rather be a secular humanist, thanks. Some dig in and say it’s all a crock.

My attitude after all these years is, “Whatever floats your boat.”

That would not fly in the Baptist Church in which I was raised. We were supposed to get out there and save souls so they could spend eternity in heaven, and every soul we missed would burn in the fires of hell.

As a child I wondered, what about all the people who were born before Christianity? Were they all sizzling away?

It is good to remember that Jesus was not a Christian. He was a Jew, probably a member of the Pharisees, a large sect of Judaism in those days. The Pharisees he denounced were leaders who did not act like true people of faith. They were in it for the money and power.

Sound familiar?

After the American Revolution England was so mad at the former American colonies that they would not allow a Church of England bishop come over to ordain priests in the American church, but the Church of Scotland obliged, and once priests were ordained here, they could ordain others because they were part of the Apostolic Succession.

What in the heck is the Apostolic Succession?

To the best of my understanding the Apostolic Succession means that you have hands laid on you by someone who had hands laid on them, who had hands laid on them, and so on, in an unbroken chain of laying on of hands that goes back to Jesus’ Apostles, who did the original laying on of hands in first century Palestine.

You are now asking, “Who kept track?” Good question, and I do not have an answer. Those of you who are learned Christian theologians could explain Apostolic Succession more accurately.

In the 1970s when women began to demand to be ordained as priests in the Anglican and Episcopal churches, it was the belief of many in the church that when the Apostolic Succession reached a woman, it dropped dead: “Okay, missy, maybe you have been blessed by this ancient rite, but you cannot pass it on to anyone else because you have the wrong chromosomes.”

To which women priests said, “Hah.”

Women continue, in all things, not just religion, to struggle to get men’s feet off our necks. It never ends.

Well, anyway, I felt called and I became an Episcopalian around 1986. I love the liturgy, the music, the expectation that you will use the brain God gave you, the Book of Common Prayer, and the Episcopalians. And singing in the choir, which we all hope will happen again someday.

That initial rush of conversion calmed down long ago, and life has smacked me around some, but having a firm faith has been, well, everything. How do you get a firm faith? Same way you get to Carnegie Hall: practice, practice, practice.

Then there are lame Bible jokes:

Q: What kind of car does God have? A: A Plymouth. He drove Adam and Eve out of the garden in a Fury.

Q: What kind of car did the Apostles have? A: A Honda. The Apostles were all in one Accord.

I will give you a little time to recover from your groans.

Ready?

Over the years I have been a lot more smart aleck than spiritual in this column. Whatever you believe, or do not believe, I hope the column has given you some smiles and laughs and even some comfort. After all, what’s a spiritual smart aleck for?

My mother told me many times when she thought I was being sassy, “Nobody likes a smart aleck.”

She was wrong. People love smart alecks.