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.

Second Amendment Rights (and Wrongs)

 “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” This is the Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights.

Conservative Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger on the Second Amendment: "The Gun Lobby’s interpretation of the Second Amendment is one of the greatest pieces of fraud—I repeat the word fraud—on the American People by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime."

How many times have you heard someone say, “They’re coming for our guns?”

How many times has that happened?

Zero times. That is how many times the government has “come for our guns.”

That is the fraud to which Justice Burger was referring. The fraud persists.

People are forever yelping about the threat to their Second Amendment rights. My totally subjective take: I am so fed up with the fear-hate-mentally unbalanced mindset of the poor deluded gun lovers who have been sucked in by this fraud, this lie, among other lies that are frolicking across the American landscape.

I have no patience for the people and conditions that sell the lies to create that mindset. I am appalled that so many people in this country feed on delusions like, “they’re coming for our guns.”

No, they are not coming for your guns. That is a lie which you have swallowed whole, and it is making all of us sick.

Now that the restrictions of the pandemic are beginning to loosen, mass shootings have returned. I have not missed those shootings, and I am certain that there has been gun violence in America right along throughout our Plague Year, but it did not get the publicity because, you know, pandemic.

In the type of mass shooting to which I refer and which occurs in the United States, the shooter is almost always an angry young white male, and the victims are innocent people who were minding their own business up until all hell broke loose.

The weapon of choice is the AR-15 automatic rifle, which, when it hits people, turns them to mush, which is exactly what it was designed and built to do.

Some people have formed private, unregulated militias to protect their Second Amendment rights, as they see them. A lot of those militiamen showed up at the Capitol on January 6, and at some state capitols, including ours, all duded up in their pseudo-military uniforms, flak jackets and bulletproof vests. They came not to secure our free state, but to overthrow it.

They call themselves patriots, which they are not, and say they love their country, which they do not. They love the fear and rage they have about what the country should be and is not in their opinion, and what it used to be, which it never was.

These patriots do not realize that what they are voting for and literally shooting for is the enriching of the already rich and the impoverishment of themselves. They consistently vote against their own best interests to elect people who do not give a rat’s patootie about them.

That is what this old lady thinks, anyway.

I personally do not have any guns, for two reasons. First, I am gun-ignorant, and have heard that having a gun “for protection” but not knowing how to handle a gun can lead to your being shot by your gun.

Second, when my kids and my grandson were little, I did not want to have any tragic accidents.

My dad had two rifles and a shotgun that lived in a gun safe in the hallway. He had cause to use them sometimes around the ranch.

My late husband, Rick, had two guns, a .22 rifle and a black powder pistol. He had to make the lead balls for the pistol himself by melting lead and pouring it into a mold. A few months before he died, he gave both guns to an old friend of his. When I asked why he gave them away, he said, “Because I know you hate guns.”

He wanted them to go to a good home. He knew he was dying, and he was probably afraid I would toss them. He spared me having to decide what to do with them, which was kind.

All of us have lived with guns and mostly guns are used for hunting, target practice, or maybe knocking off predators.

My dad took my brother and me out target shooting one day when I was quite young, and it was great fun and it turned out I was good at it. Once my mother got wind of it, though, my shooting days were over. It wasn’t easy being a girl in the fifties.

Has It Only Been a Year?

 Celebrated my one-year anniversary of being in isolation this week. Most of us are observing that one year milestone: isolation, quarantine, sheltering in place, lockdown, pain in the butt, whatever you want to call it.

Looking back at the year in review, I feel like 2020 nearly finished me off. The stress was huge: the life-threatening virus, the contentious election, and being isolated with only the dog and cat for company worked on me hard. It has taken me until now to recognize how hard it has been and see some of the cracks that have opened in my psyche under the strain.

 

“Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack, a crack in everything

That’s how the light gets in.” – “Anthem” by Leonard Cohen

 

Good old Leonard Cohen.

The last year has been hard on everyone, even without job loss, business failure, and losing your home because you cannot make rent or mortgage payments. I hear that many people who have never been depressed before are now dealing with situational depression. Clinically depressed people also have situational depression. However we label it, we are all bummed out, for good reason.

My sincerest sympathy to all of you. All of us.

And that is before reckoning with the loss of people we loved, or the losses of our friends and extended family.

I have a whole new understanding of the meaning of the word, “plague.” I do not think I will be able to use it casually to say something is “plaguing me” anymore. Nope. Whole new perspective. I think I had an attitude that this was something that happened far away and long ago – the Spanish flu in 1918, or the Black Death in the Middle Ages – or Ebola in Africa, for example. Not that much to do with me, right? The Covid-19 pandemic has been right here, right now, and has everything to do with all of us.

As more of us are vaccinated, there is an anticipation of returning to normal. I can see the light in peoples’ eyes and faces, even on zoom

Oh, to go to a restaurant, a movie, a play, an opera, a church service – a choir practice!

Oh, to get together with that gang of mine over coffee or tea or guitars, mandolins, and violins, to laugh and talk like we used to back when there was no harm in it.

Oh, to have weddings where we do not have to worry about some or most of the guests contracting Covid-19 and dying.

Oh, all that normal that we took for granted all our lives, until last year.

We have Baby Boomers, Gen-X, Gen Y, Millennials … will the children of this time be known as the Covid-19 generation? I am talking about the children who are growing up with this plague as part of their lives. Many of them will not be able to remember the Time Before. How will their attitudes be affected by living with the virus all their lives?

The whole world is different now. It would be different than it was at the beginning of 2020 anyway, but not this specific kind of different, the one with 2,700,000 people dead worldwide from this virus and its variants, and about 550,000 people in America alone dead from the virus.

Those statistics count the people we knew had Covid-19. There were people who slipped away without anyone knowing it was the virus that took them.

Driving up to town this afternoon I heard a program on the radio of people talking about the one-year anniversary of the pandemic. They talked about the good stuff that had happened. They mentioned getting to know people in their neighborhood because now they were taking walks, with or without dogs. They talked about money saved and stress averted by working at home – no commute, no wardrobe to keep up, a tank of gas lasts for weeks or months. No high heels!

Okay, so parents are going out of their minds with home schooling, and many women have given up their jobs/careers to come home and take care of the kids, but this part is about silver linings.

They found they had become closer to family and friends far away because they got in touch more often, via Zoom or Facetime or video calls. We have had to try harder to stay in touch with people, and we have had more time to do that. More time to be human.

There are some changes I hope we will keep as pandemic restrictions ease up, like livestreaming church services and other events, and meeting on zoom. Some people are not able to get out, pandemic or not, and now there is technology that includes them, and this is a good thing. We need each other.