Freedom Floats

This may be Independence Day, but I’m far from independent; I depend on the stability of this most nurturing of all nations. I’m dependent on God. I’m dependent on all of you.  That must be acknowledged.

But I am free --  I can choose what I want to do with my days --- I’m sitting here in an old chair that was my mothers; my laptop is toasting my leg while I finish this post.  Later Tom and I will walk down to the park for the 4^th of July celebration, then I might go out and climb into the blue and white striped hammock under the catalpa tree and read a while.  Sometime this afternoon I’ll bake that peach pie for the party tonight.  Tomorrow I’ll choose something else.  My life is like that. 

Even when I’m teaching I have lots of choice about what I’ll teach when, about when I’ll actually read those papers I assigned, about what I’ll do when I’m done.  I’m not rich by American standards, not at all, but I am rich if you look at the big picture.

Most lives lived by most people who have existed on this earth have not been even close to the abundance we enjoy.  Most have had to work non-stop from sun-up to sundown just to gather enough to eat for the day.  That statement is not overly dramatic – it’s the truth.

Imagine being the wife of an Anglo-Saxon warrior huddled around a smoky fire pounding grain into flour or roasting a rabbit over the open flame.  Or picture eking out a living in the rice paddies of the Ming dynasty never knowing when the next uprising would bring the savage vengeance of the warlords to your village.  Almost any scenario you dream up involves misery, danger, hunger, and servitude.

Being American is new and amazing.  Two things make the lives of Americans vastly different than the rest of the world, past and present, and both are derived from God.  We were created free to choose Him and we were created free (because of the inherent abilities God gave us) to become prosperous enough to enjoy our lives.  “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.” John 10:10

In America I have been free to know God.  His Word has been readily available; I haven’t had to risk my life to study it. I live in a country founded on the idea of Truth (“We hold these truths to be self-evident…”) and though scoffing at that concept is trendy right now, much of our prosperity comes from the trust that a belief in Truth provides.

I live in a society that has been aimed at God’s perfect Justice; we haven’t achieved it, but as long as that is our value we will edge ever closer to it, and in that environment we are free to pursue the ideas, inventions, and creations God gives us.

I live in a country where righteousness has been the norm – that is fading and it scares me, but we are still capable of horror at some of the behaviors of the powerful, the famous, and the misguided, and perhaps we will one day return to holding ourselves, our friends, our families and our elected officials to His holy standard of goodness.

These concepts have given us freedoms  that have produced a prosperity greater than any the world has ever known.  I have more in the way of comfort, health, pleasure, and happiness than kings ever used to have. I am free to putter away this glorious day because I can afford it.  I’m confident about my next meal, about the temperature of my environs, the cleanliness of my clothes, the adequacy and safety of the water I’ll consume.  I have enough – of everything. 

In a sense I earned it; my husband and I have worked hard all our lives.  But so did the folks in the rice paddies and all it got them was an early grave.

I have had the blessing of working hard in a system that rewards me for doing so and encourages me to work inventively and efficiently.  Everyone else in this country has had that advantage, which has produced all the things  that currently make my life pleasant instead of the historical norm of steady suffering.

On this 4^th of July let us celebrate the dual freedoms of this amazing country – the freedom to truly know God and the freedom that freedom itself brings – the freedom from the drudgery of life lived just to stay alive. Let us make this holiday another Thanksgiving.

I could live in Egypt – but not safely or prosperously since I’m a Christian.  I could live in a crowded dormitory in China and work at what they tell me to do.  I could live in the malaria-infested jungles of Africa, the barren steppes of northern Russia, the tumultuous streets of a crumbling Greece.  But I don’t.  I live in America, the most blessed nation of the world.  If the forces of evil, both within and without, have their way, it won’t be for long. 

We are free today, so free that it feels like it floats, but wherever freedom has struggled to the surface, it has lasted a very short time.   Let us take a moment and be profoundly grateful for the choices we still have today.

Henry Jay and the Tail

I have no idea why I try to garden: I can’t say I enjoy the process, the results impress no one, and Tom doesn’t like vegetables.  Go figure. 

For over twenty years we’ve owned a house that sits stolidly on almost a half acre of land and I’ve often wondered what God wanted us to do with all this yard; it seems that something useful should be produced here.

The land is fenced into a front yard, a back yard, and what we call “the outback,” an area of neglected fruit trees and star thistle.  Several years ago, the guilt of unused land weighing on my prairie soul, we built two large raised garden beds, necessary since the dirt here would more easily produce bricks than beets (I’ve lived in Oregon for half my life and the idea of buying dirt still amazes me.). Each year we’ve planted and watered and weeded and not produced enough to have paid for the seed, let alone the soil. 

This year, having more hope in our souls than sense, we planted again and, in spite of the long soggy spring, things are growing; I haven’t bought canning jars yet, but I am encouraged. 

In the spirit of that hope Dink and I were out weeding in the south plot last week.  Dink is our longhaired miniature Dachshund and he’s more of a gardener than I’ll ever be.  He looks like something out of a Harry Potter novel – one blue eye, one brown one and long, black-streaked chestnut hair.  I suspect he has magical powers and could, if he wanted to, helicopter up to ceiling height and zigzag around the room, but I’ve never actually seen him do that. 

Instead he digs.  Whenever I pick up a garden tool, he watches me closely for a few minutes, then starts pawing into the ground right next to me. He diligently yanks up any roots I’m chasing and has even learned the difference between weeding and planting; I noticed him a couple of weeks ago using his long nose to carefully cover up the ground I had just disturbed.

But I didn’t intend to tell about Dink, or, really, even about Henry Jay.  Henry is the scrub jay who has lived in our yard for the last half dozen years. He’s fond of us because we feed him walnuts from our outback trees, a habit he finds endearing, so he follows us around the yard, ever optimistic.

On the day in question he had been sans walnuts for a while and had, evidently, decided to fend for himself.

As I said, Dink and I were working the south plot, pulling up woodbine starts and searching the soil for some sign of intended vegetation.  I paused for a second and, leaning on the hoe farmer-style, I stared out across the outback to the north plot. 

There something caught my eye; in the dirt next to an emerging squash plant writhed an eight-inch length of some unidentifiable substance, something that appeared to be alive and in agony. 

It was about as big around as my little finger, too big for a worm, and no worm in my lengthy experience ever behaved in such an unseemly fashion.  The thing was swinging into an arc and then with equal violence, reversing the arc, thrashing around enough to kick up dirt.  It was too tapered to be a snake and snakes aren’t given to fit-throwing either.  I just stood there too horrified to look away.

It was Henry who came to my rescue.  He had been perched on the edge of one of the wooden planks that make up the bed.  I had been vaguely aware of his presence, but it had seemed normal for him to be there close to me. 

He covered the space between him and the thing in a nanosecond and was flying off toward the old plum tree before I could catch my breath.  He seemed both resigned and triumphant about the thrashing string of flesh that hung from his beak. 

At that moment a flash of something light-colored caught my eye.  I focused and saw what was left of a yellow-beige lizard zipping off to my left.  It was about half a foot long, and it was missing its tail. 

I suspect Henry was up to more than just yard maintenance.  He’d been greedy enough to go for that whole lizard – how else would the tail have been dislodged in the first place?  It must have surprised him that Liz had just walked away from half of herself.  Walnuts don’t do that. 

But he had quickly regained his composure and adjusted to the new reality.  I have no idea what he would have done with the whole lizard anyway; it was as big as he was. 

Meanwhile, Liz had gone underground to grow a new tail, Dink was still digging, and I was just standing there horrified at the violence I’d just witnessed.  True, Henry had enough lunch for his whole family,  and Liz would grow a new appendage,  but it was a nice tail and she was, like Eyeore, “pretty attached to it. “

The Place That Wasn't

 Sing along -- “Oh, give me a home where the buffalo roam…”  Nah, actually I want a home where the restaurants are within walking distance and the streets are neatly numbered.  I’m glad buffalo still exist, but I’m more interested in getting where I’m going.   I need not  to get lost.  Now, being a little confused about which turn to take isn’t lost.  Thinking, mistakenly, for several hours that you’re heading off in the right direction in an area that offers nothing in the way of pedestrians to ask or landmarks to spot, and doesn’t even show up on your only map – that is lost.  Last summer in Montana we were as perplexed and far astray as I ever want to be. 

One should, generally speaking, avoid being adrift in Montana – the miles are much longer there, so lost becomes a much more impressive experience.   One missed fork in the road and before you find a sign that raises an eyebrow, you’re already fifty miles off course. 

Last summer’s expedition was, I’m afraid, another Adventure with the Chadwells.  These adventures started thirty-some years ago when we left the tidy cornfields of eastern Nebraska and came west.  Our friends have learned to avoid traveling with us.

Once we ditched our raft in bad rapids, which produced some Reader’s Digest moments during which the icy water kept sucking me under and whacking me against bone-breaking boulders. 

Once we lost our way skiing in a blizzard.  I thought I’d taken a wrong turn and was headed straight down the mountain.  I dug my poles in hard only to discover that I wasn’t moving at all – it was just the wind and the total whiteout.  I can remember one of our kids moaning, “ I thought we left Nebraska to get away from all this.”  Good point. 

We’ve done the roll-the-new-dirt-bike-off-the-cliff thing, the left-the-new-suit-in-the-hotel-room thing, and, of course, we’ve been lost in Seattle; that happens to everyone.

But we’d never been lost in Montana.  That day we were attempting to drive south from Bozeman to Idaho Falls down through the Jefferson Valley; there really aren’t many highways there, not much to choose from, so it takes talent to get it wrong.  Especially these days.

Which is why I should bring up Dory.  Dory is our GPS navigating system.  (We’ve never actually heard her say, “42 Wallaby Way,” but we keep expecting it.) She has saved us many a time and has actually tamed Seattle, but she’s also made some really miserable mistakes.  I’d like to blame her and her annoying little “recalculating” voice for the Montana fiasco.  But I can’t – we had embarked on a 3,000-mile trip and left her charger at home. 

So there I sat riding shotgun, soaking up the vastness that is Montana, with nothing but a small atlas on my lap.  I value efficiency, so I had turned the atlas to the Idaho page since we’d be driving in Idaho most of the time.  I thought. 

We headed west out of Bozeman and left the Interstate at Whitehall turning abruptly south into the Jefferson Valley and down to Highway 41.  That would take us to Dillon and from there onto another freeway and down into Idaho.  By the time, that day in late June, that we hit a hamlet called Twin Bridges it was close to noon and the sun gave us no inkling that the road we followed had slowly veered east and morphed into uncharted Highway 287.

We ate lunch in some nameless village and drove on, clueless.  By mid-afternoon we were curious and very alone. We’d seen no other cars.  By the time we crested a rise and coasted into Nevada City, which is neither in Nevada nor a city, we were downright disturbed. 

Nevada City is a ghost town.  It consists of nearly a hundred weather-beaten, 19^th century buildings, fully furnished, looking like the whole town had just gone out to the rodeo.  Chalk still lay on the abandoned slates in the old school house; the day’s assignment still scrawled across the blackboard.  The dressmaker’s shop was full of calico bolts and rolls of lace, a dress-form half-draped in brocade.  The banker’s house stood open – lace curtains at the windows, pans on the stove, but nobody was home.  Nobody had been home for a hundred and fifty years, but the furniture was dustless.  And this place wasn’t on the map either.  Not on my 21^st century map. 

It’s profoundly unnerving to suddenly find yourself in an uncharted place in the wrong era, with no idea how you got there.  Time warp?  The Twilight Zone?  We couldn’t both be having the same hallucination.  But the afternoon was dwindling and, as far as we could tell, we were no closer to Idaho Falls.

Reluctantly we continued down the same highway; it was the only highway.  A few Montana miles later we drove through Virginia City (I know, what’s with these names?  Were the town fathers as confused about their whereabouts as we were?).  Virginia City is an inhabited version of the ghost town, quaint and charming, but according to the map, just as non-existent. We snapped a few pictures, trying to make the most of whatever this adventure was.   

Then we drove on to the next town, which turned out to be fully and comfortingly 2010. We stopped at a gas station.  I took my little lap-map in, swallowed my pride, hid my mounting fear, and, handing the clerk my atlas, asked if she could show me where we were.  She pointed to Ennis – which is close to Big Sky, a good fifty of those long Montana miles east of where we were trying to be. 

Eventually, after cruising down hours and hours of empty roads, through breath-taking terrain, past lavish ranches tucked into the base of black-green mountains (The only car to pass us was a Lamborghini.), we worked our way down into Idaho, and civilization eased back into place.   

We discovered that had I been turned to the Montana page I would have known about Highway 287.  (Why would mapmakers leave off random highways?  Were they trying to save ink?)  Aside from feeling like the universe had slipped sideways for a few hours, it was a grand adventure.  

 I’d like to revisit Nevada City (which is owned by the state of Montana and functions as both movie set and outdoor museum) I’d like to arrive there on purpose.  I’d like to sleep in the hotel and drink a beer in the saloon.  I wouldn’t even mind seeing a buffalo.  I doubt, however, that I will.  That adventure was a gift and gifts seldom repeat themselves.  

From Gershwin to Gaga

 

We are a nation attempting to dissolve itself.  Our poets write of Turkey and Mexico, and drizzle the names of obscure European philosophers through narcissistic nonsense.   Our artists paint nothing.  Those who aren’t artists pretend to be – hang two chairs on the wall, place two cinderblocks on the floor and label the jumble esoterically, enlightening no one.  (That's not a virtual example; my sculpture instructor in college was very proud of just such a piece.  He called it "Marriage for Two.") Our musicians abuse their instruments, de-reeding their saxophones and shouting obscenities into the naked necks (I saw that happen too -- at a dance concert where the dancers cavorted through a pile of dirt and took their clothes off.)   Our drama must have plunder and propaganda and offensive language, often no language at all, just explosions and body parts and sex.  

We are a nation in love with the false dream of security – and we want it without having to bother with integrity.  We want prosperity without work, success without risk, fun without consequences.  We want to obey only the rules we find easy to follow. Which leaves us mindlessly voting liberal, believing everything -- or nothing.  It's too hard to take a reasoned, moral stand -- so hard that we find ourselves hating those who do.

All this unwound from a culture sure of its purpose, sure of its God.  All this from a people so grand they could imagine a civilization though there was nothing but forest and scattered tribes aimlessly scratching existence from the rocky coastline.  Cities beautiful and towering, farms productive and orderly, roads to everywhere, planes overhead, trains across the prairie vastness.

Jazz and baseball and Rockwell and Frost.  Fried chicken and tractors and Hiawatha and quarterbacks.   Barbecue and victory gardens and Microsoft and tap dancers.  Huck Finn and fly fishing and Levis and convertibles.  Speed and open spaces and wind and mountains,  Elvis and Gershwin and Hopper and Wright.  Wilder, ah Wilder, and Sandburg and Ford.   All rusting in a continuous drizzle of acidic sophistication, of fashionable hatred, envy, and monstrous wallowing guilt.  Jonathan Edwards to Jeremiah Wright.  Abe Lincoln to Barack Obama.  Will Rogers to Al Franken. 

The thread is still there, the heartbeat thin, but steady.  Can we werite another hymn, return to face our God, and walk on into the destiny we could have? With God all things are possible.  Let us pray.  Let us learn about Him again.

Betrayal, the Natural Way

 

Nothing is tastier than a blackberry pie still warm from the oven, and nothing is nastier than the blackberry bramble it came from.  We spent the morning doing battle with the spiky vines that have invaded our fotinia hedge and we’ve come away bloodied and exhausted.  The bramble won.  Here in the Northwest they always do.

The Pacific Northwest is filled with many natural amazements:  conical, snow-covered volcanos, tumbling white-water rapids,  forests that each spring bloom with rhodendendron and dogwood.  We can gape sky-ward toward the tops of ancient redwoods, stand in awe at the rolling power of the Pacific, or catch a glimpse of a grizzly snagging a salmon at the base of the roaring falls.  We are surrounded by Mother Nature.

Mother Nature.  What an interestingly vague and benevolent concept,  even more difficult to define than God.  He at least told us what would tick him off, but with Mother Nature, we have never really known. Our ancestors even went to the extremes of sacrificing their next of kin to keep her mollified.  And yet the term “mother” carries such an affectionate, cookie-baking, kiss-it-and-it-will-feel-better connotation that it hardly fits with the reality of nature. William Wordsworth, in a fit of romantic zeal and wishful thinking (while, no doubt, taking tea on a spring afternoon in his well-tended rose garden) once said , “Nature never will betray the heart that loves her,”  and I suppose many a tree-embracing environmental enthusiast would agree with him.  But if this is true, then he must have meant something different by the word “nature” than I do, and I’m sure I harbor a different definition in my head than the one floating nebulously through our national band-width.

I suppose that since mankind naturally (pardon the pun) squanders contentment and wastes his days yearning after what he can’t have, and since we have won so many of our battles with Mother Nature, that we now lust after what we think we “remember” about those pristine times when all was natural.  Never mind that in the good old days starvation and disease did most people in before they were forty.  But now, having trumped nature in a few areas,  we seem to long for the days before central heating and useful medicine.  We want to get back to nature, however  irrational that may be.

In the first place I have to contend that nature consists of more than just trees and hills and sucker fish,  that human beings are nature too.  Granted, we can  make machines, but we aren’t machines and just because we sit at the top of the food chain doesn’t oust us from it.  So much of our public discussion makes man sound like some ungrateful alien upstart, a Grendel-style monster with the audacity to try to stay alive and improve his existence at the expense of other preditors.  We don’t seem at all appalled at the ladybug who will selfishly wipe out entire colonies of aphids just for her own benefit; we even employ her to do the job for us and praise ourselves for using “natural” gardening techniques when we do.  No, we got here the same way everything else did and that makes us, too, a natural phenomenon.  Which brings me back to Wordsworth -- if we include mankind in nature, then his statement is patently ridiculous.  Volumes have been written on human betrayals.

But if mankind does not belong in the definition of nature,  what does?  Could we say that nature is everything in the world except man and what he has made? That would mean we would have to include our national nemesis, petroleum, since that substance developed naturally thousands of years before man found and learned to use it.  Under this definition we’d have to include nuclear radiation as a part of nature, and quit treating it like a Frankesteinian human invention.  Bacteria and viruses would qualify as well, with or without mankind, and we’ve all had to deal with stomach flu and head colds and we’ve all felt betrayed. Then, if we include the “nothing man-made” clause we would have to exclude all gardens and farms and Wordsworth didn’t seem to be shunning domesticated animals or his climbing roses. Did he just mean the outdoors?

That creates problems as well.  If nature is so benign, why have we humans spent the last six millinia trying to avoid her?  We build shelters and spend most of our time inside those shelters, cleaning up the messes that just naturally  accumulate, and creating our own climate, which in most parts of the world far outshines the natural climate outside the walls.  Even when we wax all maudlin and sentimetal and rush off into the woods to camp and “get back to nature,” we pack up half our worldly possesions so we can stay safe and comfortable in the forest.  Wordsworth could make his pollyanna remark because he  never tried to live through a Montana winter or a Texas tornado.   What was Hurricane Katrina but nature betraying all those jazz-loving Louisiannans? 

In fact, humans have found natural climate conditions rarely condusive to staying healthy.  Mankind was created with little to protect us from the elements.  We have no insulating coat of fur or feathers, no protective scales, and a body temperature that we need to keep stablized, so we have built roofs to keep out the rain, walls to stop the wind and and warning systems in case Mom Nature decides to turn unusally nasty;  nature doesn’t have to change her behavior much to make our existance impossible.  A little too much rain, and our houses are ripped from their foundations and go floating down the fickle river. Too much wind, and roofs fly off.  Too much cold, and the pipes freeze.  We have paved the world’s surfaces so we can move about unhindered by nature’s weather whims, but then she freezes the rain or dumps tons of snow and we are still in trouble. 

In fact Mother Nature is such a sweety that we long ago discovered we were better off huddled together in cities, not only to protect ourselves from marauding lions and tigers and bears (oh my!), but to lend each other a hand in our never-ending attempt to outsmart the old girl.  Many summers ago I spent a week in Manhattan. Upon my return to the Rogue Valley, my Nebraska brother and his family came to visit and one day we decided to drive over to Gold Beach. My husband, who loves to drive and scare our flat-lander relatives, decided that the lonely old logging trail called Bear Camp Road would be the ideal route. By the time we were heading home, the sun was setting and we crept slowly over the pass, scaring black bears off the road, spotting cougars slinking through the trees and generally feeling isolated.  For over two hours we spied no other humans and the forest grew darker.  Finally we rounded one last bend and the road dropped down past Ennis Riffle and we saw the lights in the charming brown cabin that guards the turn-off.  The minute I spied the lights, I relaxed and I realized that I had been less uneasy walking through the midnight streets of New York than I had been that night on Bear Camp Road.  Granted, people die daily in the Big Apple - I watch TV too - but I’d rather be shot on a crowded street corner than die the way a salesman did on this old road  several winters ago.  He got lost in a snow storm at the top of the pass and it took three months for the rescue team to find him. I doubt that he died quoting Wordsworth. 

Though, he might have at the start of his ill-fated journey.  It is beautiful up there; ridge after ridge of navy-blue mountains,  ancient Douglas firs, cascading rivulets, rugged rock outcroppings and the occasional patch of snow.   Mother Nature is an attractive old broad - attractive, but dangerous. She is also generous, providing, when she feels like it, beauty and susteanance, rest and water, health and healing.  When she feels like it.   And she is wealthy beyond our wildest dreams, capable of fulfilling our every need and desire, but she is also capricious, unstable, unforgiving and uncompromising. We must find better ways than the ancients did to accept her largess without incurring her wrath and we must always respect her dictums because she will betray us, whether we love her or not.     

Ernest and his Lucite Core

I’d like you picture this --- It’s 11:30 on a Saturday night and Jane has a tiff with her boyfriend and decides to leave the party early and hitchhike home; two weeks later police find her body dumped in a ditch.  Jonathon, who was also at the same party, leaves drunk, chooses to speed to the freeway via the off-ramp instead of the on-ramp and breaks his back in the ensuing head-on collision. Picture also George who, despite his mother’s drunken rampages, is determined to graduate from college and spends that Saturday evening pouring over his chemistry text.  He will pass the exam and get an A in the class.  Each of these people chose certain actions that had semi-predictable results..  Each exercised volition, free will.    

Granted, Jane might have made it home in one piece, so might have Jon.  George might have passed the chemistry exam without studying, but he greatly increased his odds by hitting the books.  It was really bad luck that Jane crossed paths that night with a homicidal maniac, but her free will put her on that path. (Her choice, of course, does not exonerate the nut case; it just put her on his radar.) It was a nasty coincidence that a tractor-trailer rig loaded with concrete blocks was headed down the on-ramp that night, true, but had Jon not chosen to get drunk, to drive, to drive down that road at that speed, it wouldn’t have mattered. Each person used free will, which we like to claim when convenient, but which has taken quite a beating in the last half-century.  The further we move away from personal responsibility, and we are traveling at warp speed in that direction, the further we are from truth, from choice, from God. 

            Several years ago I enjoyed occasional philosophical discussions with an unusually bright student of mine – I’ll call him Ernest.  Ernest, who was very adamantly an atheist, had an interesting fixation on the concept of free will.  I found it somewhat odd that an atheist could find that concept so captivating.  “Free from what?” I would ask him.  I failed miserably to convince him that if existence is only material and we’re all just so much protoplasm, then we are hopelessly controlled by our biology and free will is meaningless.  If, however, we are created by an omnipotent, sovereign God (who in spite of His sovereignty has allowed us volition -- even to choose against Him), then free will is an interesting construct.  Perhaps that’s what I’m doing here.  Having one last go at Ernest. 

First let’s look at the denotative definition of free will.  Contrary to popular, psychiatric thinking, free will is not hampered by anything but natural law.  (i. e. I can’t choose to inhabit two places at once.  I can’t decide to vanish into thin air.)  But it is, after all, free will.  “Free” as in untrammeled, unfettered, un-impeded.  “Will” as in I will, I won’t, I decide. Free will is not frozen because of a bad childhood (We are screwed up because our families are screwed up).  Free will is not fettered because someone has provoked us (He makes me so mad.  No – he’s a jerk, but we make ourselves mad. ) Free will isn’t even abrogated by our bad habits – the negative exercise of that free will is what gives us bad habits.    Free will chooses – it chooses whether to give in to peer pressure and drink.  It chooses whether to be mad or understanding, whether to be punctual or late, whether to believe or doubt, whether to work or play.  Free will chooses our emotions, our behaviors, our friends, our attitudes, our relationship with God.  Free will even chooses, to a certain extent, our mental and physical health.

The outgrowth of popular, Freudian thinking and its theories about the origins of psychoses, neuroses, and general bad judgment is just an end run around the personal responsibility that is the other side of the free will coin.  Pop-psychologists have us blaming our parents, our siblings, our weird Uncle Bob, our first grade teacher, the weather, our previous lives, and hormonal upheavals for every rotten choice we ever make.  This creates two problems: 1) It lets us wiggle out of things we’d be better off facing up to, and 2) It robs us of our free will.  If I’m a mess because my dad was an alcoholic, then I’m just stuck. I have to be a mess. There is no way out -- except expensive, neurotic therapists and exotic pharmaceuticals, and if either of those worked, they’d no longer be necessary. 

But if free will is just that – free, in every sense of the word, we can choose not to slog through meaningless lives completely at the mercy of all that had come before -- & before -- & before -- & before.  If I’m like I am because of my manic-depressive alcoholic father, then he was a bipolar drinker because of his overworked father’s early death and the poverty of the Depression, and his father ended up in that position because of his father’s restless need to come the new world, and, and, and, until the weight of it all is hopeless.  If we have free will, we make choices of our own – all our own and we are not doomed to follow the dictates of our ancestors’ experiences.

As I think back on those conversations with Ernest, I realize that it is no wonder that so many 21^st century Americans place little value on freedom – for anyone who sees people as nothing but agglutinative masses of molecules, the concept is empty.  Empty-ish, anyway – regardless of our philosophies we all seem to know what we ourselves want, what we’d will to happen.  However, if we are at the core, clear Lucite units of volition, if we are born with the capacity to choose, to be at least partners in the formation of our own ultimate destinies, then freedom matters,  really matters.  Is there God? Choose.  What think ye of Christ?  Choose.  Will you take this man/woman to be your lawfully wedded ….?  Choose.  I’m not willing to turn those choices over to either my DNA or another human being.  I don’t think Ernest is either.

As is usual with teachers, we rarely find out what becomes of our ex-students.  Ernest marched off to Stanford, an institution his free will chose.  He came back to visit once, but I was in the middle of teaching a class, so I have no idea if he ever satisfactorily resolved his Lucite issue.   All I can do is hope his chemistry has been making the right decisions. 

My Apologies

For thirty-two years I stood in front of classes of high school students.  I now teach at the college level, but I sometimes miss the energy and urgency of teenagers.  I often muse about those days…..

I have been in the presence of genius: brains so keenly alive and omnivorous they barely need teaching, souls so hungry I must scramble to find fodder, synapses snapping so fast the air crackles with the energy.  I have been in the presence of those who managed daily to step forward strongly in spite of bodies weakened by injury and disease. 

I have also been in the presence of souls so numb from the loveless battery of uncertainty that they can barely absorb air, let alone ideas.  I have seen young people utterly exhausted from -- what?  Sleeping in a car? Staying up all night playing video games?  Arguing with parents? Doing homework? Doubtful. Doing drugs? Quite possibly. Fixable? Who knows?

I was constantly surrounded by paradoxes incarnate: these new people – both childlike and adult, simultaneously worried and cavalier, scared full of bravado, both curious and blasé, both earnest and incurably lazy.  My own brain has acquired the habit of thinking in tiny electrical, virtual bursts. It is said that in Columbus’ time, folks thought the world was flat; my students thought the world is square, that it lights up when you flip the switch, that you can change it by merely pushing a button, relocating a mouse. They were very sure that if you miss something, the whole world would rewind, will TIVO reality into convenience.

 I have witnessed their amazement when they discover that a car accident actually hurts, that homework has to be actually produced, a book actually read.  In their world reality and imagination have no mutual boundaries, no sure signals, no Welcome to Fantasyland signs to let them know they’ve crossed an invisible frontier.

I have been in the presence of very worried people, fresh, young, vulnerable people who already know all about rape and incest, torture and terror, famine and wealth.  They have learned well the lessons of global warming, capitalistic evil, nuclear holocaust.  These kids were in grade school when the World Trade Center went down – over and over again, in front of God and everybody.  They know it is “only a matter of time,” and that time is their time. My students were very aware of time and  very sure that it goes by too quickly; few seemed actually bored.  Most were frantic, fractured, running on static.  I may be onto something there – most were usually plugged into something electric, wires draping from pockets and backpacks, cell phones hidden in folded hands, IPods humming on their desks. 

At my old school one of the most important hidden curriculum pieces was the assiduous teaching of procrastination, and our students took to it like mechanics to grease.  All due dates were officially whine-able, especially if a parent, preferably a rich parent, did the whining,  and by allowing this we succeeded in enlarging the student sense of impermanence and uncertainty. I could be angry with my kids for not finishing projects on time, but I helped set up the culture that allowed that.  It is a kind culture.  On the surface.  It is a culture straddling several vast caverns, so all is unstable at best.  We tried on the one hand to see to it that no student could slip by without doing all that he needed to do to learn.  We tried, on the other hand, to encourage timeliness. Since kids all march to some pretty off-beat drummers, they are not all going to learn on schedule, so do we bow to the time god and march on without the slower ones (And, how do we know if they’re slow-lazy, slow-drugged, slow-abused, slow-slow?)?  Or, do we struggle slowly on, vowing to “leave no one behind,” due dates be damned?  

I was daily in the presence of students who were very sure that nothing is true.  Except, of course, that statement.  They learned this from some very good teachers. They didn’t know what to say when I suggested then that we all just go home.  If nothing is true, why learn? 

We have taught them this very trendy idea in order to straddle another canyon – the supposed gap between thought and faith.  Is faith (read that Christianity) so fearful that we have to obliterate logic and thought in order to avoid it?  And yet, it breaks my heart that those beautiful, confused, and frightened young people couldn’t be told that guilt, fear and anger are optional, that the problems of the world are traceable and controllable, that God is not only in His heaven, but He is here too in the devil’s world.  What would be so bad about all those brilliant, nervous brains facing the future with hope instead of dread?  with a sense of duty instead of entitlement, with love and logic and thoughtfulness?   What have we done?

The Chalkboard Walk and Parisian Geography

  

My brain stores strange things.  I know that the Beauvais Cathedral in France was never finished because, at 158 feet tall, its architecture extended beyond the strengthening physics of the flying buttress.  It collapsed three times.  I know that in the 60’s Jim Hall built a racecar, the Chaparral, which used suction to give it a winning edge.  I know that no high school in the country has a tardy policy that works. 

Not only do I pack away useless facts, I suspect that my brain even sports a special lobe for the memory of the many odd people who would otherwise rattle around loose in my head.  Why these people would occupy real estate in such an over-populated and dilapidated neighborhood, is unclear, yet, there they are: my aunt and uncle who, in one year, spent $5000 staying in a motel in Omaha; a student who had a cat named Laundry; my mother-in-law who “ironed” her eggplant before she cooked it.  My head is as full of eccentric people as a Dickens novel, and perhaps the strangest of them all is Miss Dunlap.

           

I seldom watch a Rosetta Stone ad without the specter of Miss Dunlap stalking across the screen.  The folks at Rosetta Stone claim the ability to teach me a foreign language without memorization, which flips my cynic switch -- I remember Miss Dunlap’s French class and those horrid little verb quizzes, the impossible conjugations, and the nonsense of gendered nouns.  What, pray tell, is essentially feminine about a window?  I spent quite a bit of time in her class staring through the second-story nine-paned windows (les fenêtres) of Dunlap’s classroom – out across the ten-foot lilac hedges to the American elms that, in the earl 60’s, lined 64^th Street in Lincoln, Nebraska. Perhaps that’s why I recall that French noun;  boredom was a factor in that class, maybe that’s why I memorized her.

Fear and Crumbling

We no longer hunker in caves, terrified that our precious bit of fire will go out or that the monster howling in the dark will brave that fire and come after us.  We no longer build walls around our cities, women rarely die in childbirth, and children rarely die in childhood.  Most of us here have more than enough to eat.  Yet we are crumbling around the edges, quaking deep in our nervous souls.

           

What is it we fear? Since we have what we need to eat, we fear the contents of that food.  Will it raise my triglycerides?  Will its nitrates urge my cells to turn rogue? Will the pesticides kill more than the bugs they were aimed at?  Sugar has morphed into a major monster, yet I clearly remember when it was a guileless treat.  Meat is bad; fish is full of mercury, peanut butter is laced with allergens and fat.  Wheat is questionable, milk is full of monstrous lactose, and honey just brings us back to sugar.  I cower through the supermarket as each food snarls at me from the shelves.  I’m left with the choice of going home hungry and empty-handed (thereby hangs anorexia) or prostrating myself in front of the chocolates and shouting, “Take me! I’m yours. “

Of course, we’re all afraid of terrorists  (Osama’s demise notwithstanding), which actually may be reasonable since fear is what they do. We seem, however, to be more afraid that they won’t like us than we are that they’ll blow us to grizzly bits and make us wear burqas. 

We’re worried now about this house of cards we call our economy, which is dangerously tipsy.  There’s 9.0 earthquake gearing up just off the coast here,  and at any time some batch of lunatics may set off an EMP.

We’re scared to fly, but driving is worse.  We worry about the driver with the cell phone,  the drunk driver, the car-jacker, the red-light runner, the lady who does her mascara in the rear-view mirror, not to mention worrying about the gas.

           

Because of the gas we are riddled with planetary guilt, which is generating enough fear to make us shiver in the cold and obsessively sort garbage, scared to death of our own carbon footprints. What is amiss when we strike terror into our own hearts over the very stuff of which we are made?  We are carbon. 

           

We must, however, if we are to be trendy members of society, be afraid that the climate is warming.  After all, consensus is consensus.  I wonder if it’s OK to be afraid of science done not by evidence, but by peer pressure?  After all, even if the climate warms, will we not adapt? Move north? Crank up the AC? Will we not survive the demise of the polar bear?

           

Yes, I know – Rachel Carson, but we know now that species go extinct all the time and this big wide wonderful world just keeps rolling along, but that implies purpose, and a great many of our fellow-travelers are most afraid that this whole shebang might actually be meaningful, and therefore may be expecting meaningful thought and behavior from us.  Heaven forbid -- which seems to be their problem.

             

But fear is fear, and if we breathe too much of it, we develop hypertension, duodenal ulcers, arthritis, insomnia, indigestion, depression, and a killer drinking problem. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

Speaking of which, I wonder if the cry of a hungry wolf reverberating through a dark cave was worse.  It was bad enough to drive us to the way we live today – odd though, that we haven’t yet rid ourselves of the fear, and that fear itself is causing us to crumble.       

           

Soap Sense

I make soap.  I realize it’s a ridiculous thing to do in the beginning of the 21st century, since you can walk into any supermarket and buy bars of soap at reasonable prices -- soap designed to “wash all of your 2000 parts,” soap that claims to be 1/4 cleansing cream or 99% pure.  Perhaps I make soap because I’m worried about what chemical lurks in that other 1%.

Though, I’ll admit a great deal of my soap motivation is a decadent yen for luxury, for elegantly scented soaps blended from lavish and exotic oils.  Now it is  true that you can amble into any trendy tourist shop and buy amazing soaps;  soaps sold by the slice, translucent, jewel-toned, and aromatic, smelling of apricots and rosemary, mint and chocolate, cassia and sandalwood; soaps filled with floating herbs and spices, flower petals and grains; soaps wrapped in swatches of expensive fabric or sheets of handmade paper; soaps in embossed boxes tied with gold cords.  You can even walk into the health food section at Fred Meyer and find reasonable facsimiles.  So why go to the trouble of making soap?

And it is trouble. Granted, you no longer need to leach lye from wood ash saved from the cook stove.  Instead, I pick up a can of sodium hydroxide in the cleaning supply section at Freddy’s.  While the pioneers had to butcher a cow and render the fat,  I can merely buy olive oil -- already pressed -- and coconut oil for the lather, apricot kernel, hemp seed, and sweet almond oils for their skin-softening properties. I also buy essential oils and spices to scent my soaps.  These can be costly, so I can’t plead frugality as my motivation; I don’t save money making it myself. 

My soap habit also has a lot to do with a Little House on the Prairie  mentality. Though I have it much easier than the Wilder family, and I can’t imagine going to the extremes of butchering a cow or leaching lye, I do think that part of my soap-making propensities come from a romantic notion of self-sufficiency, of pioneer toughness and independence.  Never mind that without Fred Meyer and several California mail-order houses,

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I wouldn’t know where to start.  But the ritual makes me feel the way I felt when I sewed my first dress, the way I feel when I’m kneading bread from grain I ground myself,  or knitting a sweater that would be cheaper and easier to buy.  My self-esteem ratchets up a notch knowing I can make something useful, something beautiful. 

And somewhere in my psyche is buried a high regard for things handmade, things made with a singular intensity and love of process, which carry with them into the world an aura of passion and romance all their own.  Someone gave part of her life to create this thing, so part of her is mystically melded into her hand-spun yarn, her hand-thrown pot, her silky-smooth aromatic soap. Maybe that’s it. 

Maybe.  But there is little romance in the actual procedure.  I use plastic containers (Sodium hydroxide will eat holes in any metal other than stainless steel.).   I heat the oils in my microwave, which is not the way they did it On the Banks of Plum Creek.  I use my aging Kitchenaid mixer to do the stirring  -- I use it for little else since the sodium hydroxide has peeled the enamel finish off.  In fact, the soap making corner of my kitchen is closer to a chemistry lab than to a log cabin.

For one thing, the quantities need to be measured with a chemist’s precision: so many grams of lye, so many of distilled water,  so many grams of each of the oils.  This is not  a creative matter.  The last time I got creative I ended up with a mass of nameless army green goop that failed to harden into bars, but congealed a few stages past liquid soap.  It didn’t seem wise to pour it down the drain; I could see the trout gasping and rolling over sideways as soon as the slime hit the river.  I scooped it into Ziploc bags and hoped for a chemical revelation, or miracle, whichever came first.  By the next day the goop had escaped and was oozing across the kitchen floor.  The mopping  was messy, but the floor ended up hospital clean, so I surmised that the slop was still soap.  Which it might not have been.  It looked nearly nuclear.  With chemistry you never really know.  Once I asked my four-year-old grandson, who had recently requested sulfuric acid so he could “make pollution,” if he wanted to do an experiment and help me make soap.  He put his geeky little hands on his hips and said, “Nana, if you know what you are going to get, it isn’t an experiment.”  But then, he’s never made soap.

           

And I wouldn’t have let him help with the whole process; the lye is very dangerous.  When sodium hydroxide meets water, the water heats almost to the boiling point and noxious fumes fill the steam.   You don’t want to breathe deeply or spill any of this mixture onto your skin.  It burns. 

           

While the lye-water cools, I heat the oils so they match the temperature of the lye. Then carefully I pour the sodium hydroxide mixture into the oils while the mixer sloshes.  The mixing causes saponification (the chemical reaction that produces soap).  Every molecule of lye must come into contact with every molecule of oil in order for the chemical transformation to take place.  If the soap maker doesn’t completely stir the soap, some of the lye will remain suspended in the oil, and when an unsuspecting hand-washer hits one of those pockets, he loses more off his hands than dirt.  Lye will burn holes in skin even faster than it burns through metal. To avoid this I leave my trusty Kitchenaide running at a fairly high speed for at least 45 minutes.  I drape an old dishtowel over the mixer so the caustic would-be soap won’t fly all over the kitchen. I check it from time to time to see if the soupy stuff is starting to “trace.” When it thickens enough to prove the chemistry is doing its thing, it starts to look like melting ice cream, and if I drizzle some over the surface, traces of the solution will float there for a while.  Then I can get creative.

           

Do I want the soap to smell like English lavender or winter spice? Lemon grass or bergamot? Do I add chamomile for skin care? Paprika for color? Oatmeal for exfoliation?  I have made gardeners’ soap with cornmeal to scrub the dirt, vanilla bean soap with actual bits of the bean floating in it, and  masculine dark brown soap scented and colored with cinnamon and clove.  I’ve made soap marbled, layered, transparent, and liquid. I’ve made soap with green tea, with rosewater from my own roses, with rosemary from my herb garden. I have made round soap, square soap, milled soap,  sliced soap, molded soap.  The molding part is fun, but risky -- you have to remember two things when choosing a mold; the saponification won’t be complete for another month, so no metal molds, and  the soap will eventually have to come out of anything you pour it into, and it won’t do that easily.

           

Once I have the soap solidifying in its molds, my family goes on alert.  Early on in my soap making career, my husband was attracted to a glass baking dish on the counter.  It was filled with a creamy-looking, mint-smelling, pale green “dessert.”  But it was soap. Tom doesn’t do much random sampling in my kitchen any more. Neither does my son-in-law who once mistook grated castile for parmesan.  Even handmade soap tastes like soap.

           

Once poured, the soap will need to sit, its fragrances filling the house, for at least two weeks, so I have to plan ahead for gift-giving.  Once I knock it out of the molds it will need to have the rough edges and oxidized surfaces cleaned off and it should air dry for a spell to make it last longer.  Then I can have the fun of wrapping and packaging the gift bars. Or better yet, the luxury of a long hot bath with skin-smoothing, delicately scented handmade soap.                          

           

Of course I could have gone to Terra Firma and bought some; I didn’t have  to make it.  But then I wouldn’t have the fun of knowing I can, the attention I get because I do, and I wouldn’t have the wonderful romantic feeling of being tied to my prairie ancestors,  of having satisfied the lust for the illusion that I too could survive --or at least stay clean -- more or less on my own.