Category: Life

Beautiful Chaos

According to the Urban Dictionary, beautiful chaos means someone whose life and/or personality are hectic or chaotic. When you have long defined yourself and your output as a “hot mess,” this positive reframing is welcome.

Tidiness and order do not come naturally to me. I am sure this deficit in me is attached to a trauma-filled childhood. Parental modeling has to be another. My mother’s aunt raised my mother to believe: “If you don’t learn how to do housework, then you’ll never have to do it.”
That view seemed fairly short-sighted on great-aunt Grace’s part, then and now.

I believe my great-aunt Grace was preparing my mother to live a life above her birth station. What it accomplished was a domestic incompetent who was inordinately proud of being so. Mom may have secretly suffered for her lack of housekeeping and cooking skills, but like many other things, she made a joke out of it.

“Cooking,” she would say, “is like murder. You only have to do it once to be one.” In her back pocket, she had but a handful of “go-to” recipes on the few occasions that I remember her making a homemade meal. “Joni marquette,” for example.

Joni marquette was an elevated moniker for a tasty dish of ground beef, macaroni, and a can of stewed tomatoes. Easy to throw together and admittedly tasty. In moderation.

But if there was a meal to be made and Mom was the only person available to do it, joni marquette was likely the main course. I later discovered that “joni marquette” was actually based on a US-Italian recipe called Johnny Marzetti. The Wikipedia article on the origin of the dish is an interesting read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Marzetti

The joni marquette entree was occasionally followed up with a dessert dish Mom was fond of making. We weren’t especially fond of it, but no matter. If dessert was called for, floating islands are what we got. That dish was prepared much like one would make meringues.

You know the crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside cookie confection of soundly whipped egg whites, infused with sugar and vanilla, and baked to golden brown perfection. A French derivation and specialty made popular by French cuisine superstar Julia Child. In French, they are called oeufs-a-la-neige. (eggs on clouds) https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/19050/floating-island-oeufs-a-la-neige/

Mom’s variation was to make the beaten egg white base with sugar as directed. She would then carefully ladle individual “islands” into a warming milk bath in a frying pan to cook. And voila. Floating islands.

To me, there was something vaguely off-putting about floating islands. It may have been their squishiness. Sort of like marshmallows but not nearly as firm and awash in milk. They felt funny in your mouth as if you were chewing on sweet foam. Maybe they weren’t so bad when I think back. Maybe it was their frequency as Mom’s “go-to” dessert that rendered them vaguely unappetizing.

Mom’s lack of domestic skills was a great source of humor for her. She often touted Dad’s skills around the house as being well above her own. He had been a bachelor practically forever when they met and married so was well familiar with domestic necessities.

Dad could cook and enjoyed it. He was also a little guilty of overdoing the “one-dish I’m good at.” In his case, it was cod au gratin. He would buy a large piece of cod – preferably fresh – and mix it with what I now know as roux. That is a flour, milk, and butter-based white sauce that he made extra thick and seasoned with salt, pepper, and Worcestershire sauce.

He would pour this mixture into baking dishes I now know are called ramekins. He topped each ramekin with about an inch of sharp shredded cheddar cheese. Then he popped the ramekins in the oven until the cheese melted and the fish and roux had heated sufficiently. Pretty good eating.

But a little like Mom’s joni marquette, Dad’s cod au gratin was served excessively. Seems the mindset was that if you have a winning recipe, why deviate from it? A generational thing maybe.

My cooking adventures have been a combination of both parents’ approaches. I have a few “go-to” standards but take great delight in experimenting a little more than they did.

Of course, now if a new dish I am making doesn’t work out exactly like the picture on the New York Times recipe page, I am happy I no longer have to describe it as a “hot mess.”

What you have in front of you, I will say, is my own self-curated special dish, Beautiful Chaos. Would you care for some more?

The Birthday Box

Today is my birthday. A milestone, so that narrows it down some. But I am not going to share exactly how old I have become today. The reason is old-fashioned and likely a little vain. For my mother, it was a survival strategy. Especially in the workplace.

Mom used to talk about “the box people put you in.” Once people knew how old you were, she reasoned, they made assumptions. Often erroneous. Inevitably “limiting.” It is still the way it is “out there.” A 19-year-old singer on America’s Got Talent is viewed more favorably than a 27-year-old. Longer-term marketability, the younger they are.

In Mom’s case, she was a woman in a profession dominated by men. Truth be told in her generation, every professional field was dominated by men. There were a lot of truths about living in that reality, shared as sly witticisms that most women could relate to.

“To do as well as a man in the workplace, women have to be twice as good and work twice as hard as men do. Fortunately, that isn’t difficult.”

Or a more veiled reference: “It is hard to soar with eagles when I am surrounded by turkeys.” I remember a cartoon that circulated in Mom’s workplace. A down and dejected bald eagle is in the center of a group of blank-looking turkeys. The point hit home.

I knew the frustration of being expected to be a “hard news” reporter when that was the predominant role respected in our TV newsroom. If your strength was current affairs or my wheelhouse, human interest, you were clearly of less value than the ambulance chasers or political analysts.

Never mind that I actually enjoyed doing human interest pieces and that they were well-received. They were never going to grant me a shot at being a war correspondent or a bureau chief or heading up a newsroom.

Mom’s challenge was even harder in the 60s. There were distinct “ladies’ pages” in the newspaper business. And ladies, of course, were expected to “cover” issues of interest to other ladies. Teas, weddings, and significant births and deaths in the community. The social pages. Writing obituaries was clearly women’s work.

Mom fought for a “beat” like her male colleagues. After much cajoling and complaining she finally got her wish. She ended up covering the port of Saint John, New Brunswick with the comings and goings of major vessels and reports on the cargo they carried.

To my chagrin, she liked to announce to all and sundry when I was too young to see the humor that she had a job “working the waterfront.” The conjured image of my mother in fishnet stockings and too-high heels made me writhe in discomfort when she shared her little joke with my friends.

Today is more of a day of stock-taking for me. I look back on the other birthdays of other significant decades. I think about what I have and haven’t accomplished. Most poignant, of course, have been challenges that I did and those I did not overcome. Loss became a constant companion if not exactly a friend.

My dear friend Ursula Wawer, MD became a forensic psychiatrist. On a trip we once took, she seized upon a piece of art. It was a drawing of a maze of sorts with many paths but all leading ultimately to the same destination. She said at the time it was much like the healing path many of her patients took.

Not everyone comes to the same desirable destination of love, peace, and fulfillment via the same path. Ursula concluded it doesn’t matter how you get there. What does matter is that you keep putting one foot in front of the other. Do the work to eventually arrive where you want to be and not where others deem that you should be. That journey can take a lifetime.

And so it has been for me. Lots of learning along the way and many lessons I would rather have read about in a book instead of learning about them firsthand. Life isn’t fair and that is one of the biggest and most important learnings of all.

When you land at a point of your life at a destination you only once dreamed about, that feels like a life – if not consistently well-lived – then at least you can say it has been a life of some value.

As I “celebrate” my birthday today, just as you might be celebrating yours today or soon or certainly someday, that feels like the greatest present of all.

My life to date has been valuable to me for all the challenges, children, lessons, dear friends, adventures, and romantic experiences along the way.

I greet the upcoming decade with a warm welcome. Intention being about 99% of the success of any endeavor – another lesson I’ve learned. Bring it on. Happy birthday to me.

Margot’s Chateau Margaux

Oh boy. Some things pop up on the Internet and you just gotta shake your head.

Book merch, for example. It’s a thing.

Check out this Esquire article.
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a44449495/book-publishing-influencer-merch-explained/#%F0%9F%8D%BE%F0%9F%8D%B7

I’ve often bemoaned the widespread dereliction of words and literature. Increasingly, consumerism trumps education and literary exploration as a leading social value.

And why does that matter? Because good literature gives us insight into the human condition and the amazing range of roles we play as humans on the planet.

Text speak has reduced “what were once words” to a series of acronyms and emojis. So now, whatever we’re feeling, we just have to match it to the closest emoji to convey our feelings to the world. Hoo boy.

As a former professional “marketer,” I hold my nose over the introduction of book merch. Umbrellas with a favorite author’s new book title on it? Galoshes and raincoats and book covers and whatever else to show your allegiance to the words of whomever? Seriously?

Here in my blog, I have written about the rampant “commodification” of book writing and publishing. Book coaches. Book retreats. Book writing challenges. Book webinars (pick a genre, any genre). I note there is no industry accreditation for any of these purported “experts.” Just plenty of chutzpah.

The book publishing industry has gone way, way, way beyond satisfying the simple ego motivations of self-publishing, or encouraging impatient authors to utilize the so-called “vanity press.” Sadly, like cultivating love and friendship and a career “calling,” the mystery of writing as a gift of the fates and happenstance has also evaporated.

“Find your ideal life partner by following these five easy steps!” “How to make 20 friends in 20 days!” (with a money-back guarantee! No, I was just kidding about getting any money back). “Fifty ways to leave your lover.” (No, wait that was by someone else about something else.) No matter. You get my drift.

I am first to admit guilt in the realm of needing a fairly swift kick in the ass to have me consistently put pen to paper. In full sentences. Mostly.

But I never see myself giving in to the marketing claptrap of “book merch” to claim I am “successful.” I simply define success (as most writers I respect and admire) as just putting your bum in a seat every day and cranking out something. Anything.

Then again, hold up. The possibilities are undoubtedly endless for a Chateau “Margot” Margaux. Jeesh, I am a soft touch.

But seriously. Ptooey!! As if I have anything to say that is going to change or “influence” anything ….

Old school values die hard.

Happily Married

Happily married? An oxymoron in my world. My family background is filled with marriages that ranged from just okay to horrific. And everything in between.

My oldest paternal uncle drank to excess. It was a family disease. His wife solved the problem by keeping up with him. I am told their daughter cut them out of her life after one visit with them. Cleaning under the bed after her parents went home, daughter Betty found countless empty booze bottles. High marks for the integrity of not trying to cover up their problem?

Orlo and Aline produced four children and had long lives. Beyond the drinking, I heard of few other issues. The marriage seemed stable enough. But my mother shared Aline’s confidence that she spent the entire first year of their marriage “crying over the sink while doing the dishes.” Ergo, the compromise. Since Aline couldn’t beat him, it appeared, she joined him.

Within the family, I heard countless stories about regular and casual beatings of my female ancestors by their husbands. It was partly a familial characteristic but also a cultural one. Punishing one’s wife “to keep her in line” or “straighten her out” was seen in some bizarre way as a husband’s “duty.” Talk about a free pass. Go patriarchy.

Other marriages I heard of in my family were more benign and at least congenial. There were healthy working partnerships here and there. My father’s brothers made good marriages that could be called true partnerships. But inevitably, there were issues. My Uncle Doug died suddenly at just 49 years old. His wife Pat remained a widow for the rest of her life.

My own parent’s marriage fell in the horrific category. There wasn’t much to cheer about except maybe the black humor that came out of it. The marriage was riddled – as was my childhood – with pills and pain and violence and infidelity and histrionics. That marriage came to a decisive end with Mom’s suicide attempt at 42.

Having crawled out of the gutter of addiction and mental illness, Mom eventually found work at a city newspaper. Dad had moved to Newfoundland to find a paying job after the dissolution of his marriage and businesses in New Brunswick. On a visit back to New Brunswick to see his kids, he visited Mom in the newsroom.

A colleague of Mom’s gushed on meeting him: “Oh Mr. Brewer, I can’t tell you how happy we are to have your wife here with us.” (The labels die hard in New Brunswick, with intervening legalities like divorce a mere nuisance.) Without skipping a beat, Dad replied: “Madam, I can’t tell you how happy I am that my wife is here with you.”

To say I had skewed notions of what a marriage was or could be as I entered adulthood would be something of an understatement. A steady boyfriend in my late teens gave me a sweet anniversary card during our relationship in which he wrote: “Let’s make this the first in a long string of anniversaries.” I froze. I could not conjure a mental picture of what that life might even have looked like.

So, of course, I sabotaged the relationship and, in my mind’s eye, “released” him to find a steadier and more suitable life partner. Something stuck though. I never stopped regretting the loss of that relationship.

My first marriage on paper was an unmitigated disaster. I entered it for all the wrong reasons having succumbed to all sorts of social and familial pressures which had nothing to do with what I wanted or needed. In a way, the marriage was as much a victim of my immaturity as his life generally was of his own.

Then I met Hank. Later in life. On the internet. A half a continent away. From a different generation. Ballsed that one up pretty well, too the first time around. But the love didn’t die. We reconnected again three years after to broke up.

I wake up in a state of awe and gratitude every day. I am happily married. There’s that oxymoron again. My husband is like the manifestation of a dream I had a long time ago. Lots. of compatibilities in spite of different nationalities, different generations, and wildly different family backgrounds. On top of the list is our sense of humor.

As I have read it is supposed to be, those differences are strengths in our marriage. We are as much friends to one another as we ever were lovers. We are companions as well as each other’s critics and cheerleaders. He spends a lot of time rolling his eyes at me as I come up with yet another cockamamie plan or idea. I spend a lot of time feeling like the little kid who sulkily defers to the inherent wisdom of his age and experience.

I sometimes wonder what Mom would think. She never remarried after she and Dad divorced. Indeed, I raised my kids alone and stayed single for decades we often muse that god decided s/he was sick of seeing me and Hank flailing around in our respective lives and steered us toward each other.

Though no one can predict how much time we’ll have together, I prefer to focus on what we have today and every day: a happy marriage. Not without issues but full of love and fun and satisfaction.

Don’t know what I would tell Mom if she were still here today. Maybe, whodda thunkit?

Broken Birds

It is commonly believed – somewhere – that a fertile young woman inclined to get herself in the family way will seek out the strongest, healthiest mate she can find as a father to her children.

The reasons are two-fold. A strong healthy male might be expected to produce the strongest and healthiest babies. A strong healthy male might also be expected to be a good provider.

I’m the first to admit that these are wildly, out-of-fashion assumptions, and options in the baby-making realm these days are just as wildly variant. Many young women plan to not only have but raise and take care of their babies all by themselves, thank you very much.

But abused children as adults do not necessarily seek out what is good for them. Quite the opposite, in fact. I saw this manifest in my mother operating as an adult from her own abusive background (though she would rather eat nails than admit that it was.)

My mother was repeatedly drawn to the birds with broken wings. She invariably sought out others as abused and oblivious to its impact upon them as she had been. Our childhood was filled with an assortment of ne’er-do-wells and problem drinkers and people “not quite right” whom she could and would take under her wing.

She aspired and identified with the local “intelligentsia,” who willingly came to her countless parties and drank copious quantities of free booze. The professors. The lawyers and judges. Occasionally doctors, but her conversational boundaries with them were reached pretty quickly. Doctors were usually much too starchy and grounded in reality for her liking. She much preferred philosophers.

Mom married a bird with very broken wings indeed. His childhood of physical and emotional abuse showed up in adulthood as sex and alcohol addiction, domestic violence, and an inferiority complex the size of Greenland.

In retrospect, she would say about her attraction to him, “I was going to love him so much he would heal and get better.” And of course, he never did. Not with her. What she didn’t say is that water seeks its own level.

People change themselves if they are going to change at all. They may be motivated by someone else but the work of “changing” is theirs and theirs alone. And the “savior complex” my mother had was never completely altruistic.

There was something reminiscent of trying to remove a splinter in someone else’s eye while ignoring the log in their own. Mom came to see – after years of enduring my father’s abuse and her unceasing pain – that her assumptions about her marriage were painfully naive.

But she never really fully let it go and moved on. She liked having been married to a lawyer. It meant a lot to a small-town country-raised girl. I used to say that their divorce was only on paper.

And after the parents’ divorce, Mom continued attracting broken birds to her circle. The “recovering” alcoholics. The “between real jobs” handymen. The sketchy English professor who was “down on his financial luck.” She was inordinately proud of helping them. If they could be helped.

To me, they seemed like a rogue’s gallery of lesser men of even less fortune who were happy to prey upon my mother’s vanities and vulnerabilities. Children often see things differently than their parents.

So, in kind, I picked a broken bird. Our shared history of parental alcoholism was a bonding issue. But dysfunctional backstories do not set a firm foundation for a lasting marriage. My own views were so crippled and skewed that on our wedding day – carrying our first child – I blithely mused: “If it doesn’t work out, we can always get a divorce.”

Life and the children I would bring into this world drove the message of my own naivete home in waves of dull pain for all of the following years to date. I still have to carefully bridge conversations where my daughter bemoans the “fine line” she has had to walk her whole life between her father’s world and mine. “Mom screwed up,” is all I can muster by way of comfort.

Hindsight is 20/20, of course. But in choosing a father for my children, I did what I had been taught to do. “Pick a broken bird and make him better.” Poppycock, of course. I can only say that my children were the catalyst for my own embarkation on a healing path.

As my children wrestle with their own issues emergent from a dysfunctional background, I hope that owning up to my own mistakes will give them better emotional grounding and source material than I had to work with.

One of the greatest lessons I have learned about life is that hope springs eternal. Indeed it is often said of “second marriages” that they are a triumph of hope over experience.

With the all too human “compulsion to repeat” from those of us who emerged from dysfunctional families, it is one of those quiet blessings for which I often express thanks and gratitude.

Meandering Around the Mall

I was 18 years old when I got my first writing job at a newspaper. Full disclosure, my mother was one of the co-owners. And she was the newsroom equivalent of chief cook and bottle washer.

Mom and a similarly disgruntled journalist friend who met at the Telgraph-Journal in Saint John, NB were sick of the bland and myopic editorial point of view espoused by The Northern Light in Bathurst, New Brunswick, Canada. To read its competitor and dominant local news source The Northern Light was to be assaulted with consistently positive stories about the city’s overseers with zero political or social analysis and scant actual news content.

The rest of the provincial newspapers were owned or influenced by the powerful and famous/infamous K.C. Irving and his family.

The complaint was the Irving corporation’s interference in its’ newsrooms and its’ journalism. Offensive or unseemly stories about Irving’s business practices or government entities or friends of the Irvings were largely ignored and swept under the rug. Bumpy rug.

My mother and Sharon Miller cooked up a plan and were determined to put a stop to it. The paper was published weekly and included a section in French. The paper was composed on old typesetters in those days long before computers became widespread, printed, trimmed, and attached with wax to the broadsheet page template.

My first assignment was to produce copy for the Meandering Around the Mall column in its regular weekly slot. I hied myself to the Bathurst Mall to meet and chat with people. If I knew them, the more the better. But often the interviews were along the lines of, “What brings you to the mall today?” “And is that your granddaughter with you?” “And oh, it’s her birthday?” “Which one?” “And is she having a party?”

From this meaty exchange, I would dutifully jot down both grandma and granddaughter’s names, record her age (the granddaughter’s, of course, not the grandma’s), and weave this information into flowing and supple prose. Of course, I had to talk to a few people or the column would have been very thin indeed.

Three to four people were usually enough to give me adequate column inches. Interspersed this with upcoming deals or events or special guests coming to the Mall. It must have been paid advertising but I never saw it as that.

But looking back, it was pure New Brunswick. People are curious about other people. Most people back then loved to see their names and the names of their loved ones in print. In any section but the obituaries. Depending on the relative.

A fond memory I had was the frantic activity around “putting the paper” to bed. We had a deadline at the printer in another city three hours away. And sometimes the typesetter would pile into the company van and head down the road with our precious cargo. The formatted newspaper original laid in a broadsheet-size box.

The printing press worked us into the schedule among the dailies it produced. We’d wait at the printer all night. I still remember sleeping on a pile of mailbags in the press room. The next morning, the published paper was loaded into the van. We trundled back to Bathurst, turned the van over to the distributor, and the newspapers were dropped at their appointed destinations all over the New Brunswick North Shore.

Meandering Around the Mall was an extremely modest forerunner to Facebook, which has taken the model to unimaginable heights. But it does hearken back to much simpler days when – essentially – stalking and chatting people up looking for personal information wasn’t a slightly sketchy or maybe even a criminal act.

I had some wonderful adventures at The Bathurst Tribune but my newsroom tenure didn’t last long. I started there in the spring and by early August, I had been admitted to university. My life was about to change dramatically.

The Bathurst Tribune didn’t last long either. It survived until finances and local hostility from the powers that were in charge at the time killed it off. Just under two years in all.

In retrospect, the Quixotic journalism effort seems faintly quaint and very twentieth-century. But there was a sense of being involved in a meaningful upstart project designed to disperse “hard” news that the population might otherwise never hear about.

Meandering Around the Mall was clearly not that. But it was a charming “slice of life” that elevated locals to mild levels of recognition when that sort of thing mattered.

I wrote “hard news” stories, too about politicians speaking in town or union meetings or car accidents and their outcomes. But for some reason, it was that odd little weekly column that sticks in my memory.

To this day, I can still have a lively, if fleeting, conversation by engaging a proud grandma with her granddaughter at a shopping venue. Some things never change.

Body Love

As I sometimes do, when another author’s message speaks to me, I feel compelled to share it.
Such is the case with this musing on what our bodies really need by blogger Hollie Holden (hollieholden.me).

I, for one, can relate to her message.

******************************************

”Today I asked my body what she needed,

Which is a big deal

Considering my journey of

Not Really Asking That Much.

I thought she might need more water.

Or protein.

Or greens.

Or yoga.

Or supplements.

Or movement.

But as I stood in the shower

Reflecting on her stretch marks,

Her roundness where I would like flatness,

Her softness where I would like firmness,

All those conditioned wishes

That form a bundle of

Never-Quite-Right-Ness,

She whispered very gently:

Could you just love me like this?”

-Hollie Holden https://www.hollieholden.me/

Art by Yulia Ustinova

Conditional Atheist

Thank you for this poem, John Roedel. Beautiful words of a fierce and gentle anarchist. I share his perspective. Guess I am a conditional atheist, too.

“I’m a conditional atheist

God does not exist for me on

the tip of a sharpened sword

or on the lips of a sermonizing

hate evangelist who is foaming at the mouth

or in the licking flames of a torch held

by a marching bigot

or in any dogma that have been soaked in the ancient poison of guilt and self-shame

the divine doesn’t

exist for me anywhere

where wounds are being

caused in its name

I don’t know about

how any of this works

but I’ve never found

much of God in the towering

hierarchy of unchecked power

the Great Mystery isn’t a cracking whip

or a flag or an internet manifesto

or a pointed finger or a political party

or a dividing line or a box of ammo

or a corvette driven by a tv preacher

or a specific gender or a book bonfire

Creation is more of a florist

than she is a fundamentalist

the Weaver of Life is more interested

in stitching us together into a quilt

than how to separate us into metal bins

to come into relationship

with Unending Love shouldn’t

require us to loathe ourselves

~ it should be the exact opposite

to know ourselves

is to know God

to love ourselves

is to love God

my love,

I believe that the divine

is just about everywhere

~ except in the slow-poison

sands of fear and control

where so many have built temples

for us to worship inside

~ in those places

I am an atheist

but everywhere else

there is so much

fertile soil

where we can let the sunflowers

of empathy grow wildly in

the spaces between us

and I’ve heard

that if we remain still

and listen so very closely

these evangelizing sunflowers

will whisper to each of us

a secret we once knew while we

were cooking in the cosmic womb:

“We are all loved equally.”

(photo: Mike Murrah)

~ john roedel

May be an image of flower and nature

So Was Picasso

I am the black sheep in my family. I have pushed back against the dysfunction in our family since childhood. I asked for my needs to be met. I was ignored or ridiculed. I asked for safety. I was thrust repeatedly into harm’s way by my parents’ ignorance and obliviousness. I sought relief from my pain. I was labeled histrionic and, most frequently, “dramatic.”

To protect my mother, the near and extended family clustered around her belief system as if it was gospel, and she the patron saint of non-conformity. “We weren’t dysfunctional,” the chorus would crow in unison. “We are special.”

Our academic and business achievements and worldwide travel thinly covered the truth of a family awash in pain and self-loathing and mutual disrespect. Our family was the living epitome of cognitive dissonance. We acted one way – successful and self-confident, especially in the public arena – and felt completely other in the tight-knit family system. Scared and broken little girls each and every one of us.

Tight-knit we were. To reinforce the themes of superiority and hide the abject vulnerability of each member of the system, no one outside our circle was permitted to get very close. Unless, like us, they were broken and needy and in awe of my mother. then they were granted full admittance to the so-called inner circle and gratefully did my mother’s bidding.

Sinead O’Connor died this week. I had mixed feelings. The musicianship of this Irish wildcat was unmatchable. But her very public pain and defiance against her own dysfunctional and abusive childhood alienated her from a large part of society.

The very public act of tearing in half a picture of the Pope that had hung in her wretched mother’s bedroom was widely misinterpreted. Many of us seeking answers to our upbringings know the misunderstanding that can come when sharing our private pain publicly. It is frequently misunderstood and rejected.

Especially when it treads on other people’s sacred cows and belief systems. Note how long it took the world to take sexual abuse in the Catholic church seriously. I know for a fact many Catholics do not believe beloved priests are capable of such heinous acts.

These song lyrics were recently shared in the wake of Sinead’s death. A tribute song Kris Kristofferson write for her when she was booed off the stage at a Bob Dylan concert in 1992.

Abused adult children desperate for answers and relief from their pain may see themselves in these lyrics. God bless Sinead O’Connor. She sure wasn’t wrong in her belief that child abuse is the fount and mother of immeasurable untold evils in this world. Would that she had an easier ride on this planet. She certainly will now. RIP.


Sister Sinead, Kris Kristofferson (2009)

“I’m singing this song for my sister Sinead

Concerning the god-awful mess that she made

When she told them her truth just as hard as she could

Her message profoundly was misunderstood

There’s humans entrusted with guarding our gold

And humans in charge of the saving of souls

And humans responded all over the world

Condemning that bald-headed brave little girl

And maybe she’s crazy and maybe she ain’t

But so was Picasso and so were the saints

And she’s never been partial to shackles or chains

She’s too old for breaking and too young to tame

It’s askin’ for trouble to stick out your neck

In terms of a target a big silhouette

But some candles flicker and some candles fade

And some burn as true as my sister Sinead

And maybe she’s crazy and maybe she ain’t

But so was Picasso and so were the saints

And she’s never been partial to shackles or chains

She’s too old for breaking and too young to tame.”


Oxpecker Haven

My good friend Dale Estey and I decry the fact that – as we’ve grown older – we’ve come to realize there really is “nothing new under the sun.” There are few stories or facts so amazing or unique or unpleasant that we haven’t heard of them before – in some variation.

It’s a truism nailed in Ecclesiastes 1:9.

“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” Ecclesiastes 1:9

It is true there is little – fantastic or horrific – that shocks or surprises me now. Folks be crazy. So many stories or objects feel like attempted recreations of familiar and well-worn themes. Stories follow well-worn paths to eventual resolution. Products ebb and flow in supermarkets and box stores. There is a certain sameness to them all, in spite of the come-ons promising “new and improved.”

My husband is an artist. For his doctor friend Dr. Marc Blasser, Hank painted a portrait of a rhino in situ on the plains of Africa. The rhinoceros is a special symbol for Marc. (His email handle is “King Rhino” for heaven’s sake. He is clearly committed.)

So when my husband delivered the painting some years back, Marc admired the finished product but, upon closer inspection, stared quizzically at the painting and asked: “Where are my oxpeckers?”

When my husband told me this story, I was a little taken aback. Oxpeckers? Seriously? Well, yes. They are a real thing. See all those little guys on the back of that hippo below? That’s them.

I knew vaguely of a symbiotic relationship that existed among African wildlife with some kind of birds. I did not know – until this recent conversation – what they were called.

Large African animals of many varieties – rhinos, hippopotami, giraffes, gazelle, water buffalo, et. al. – have an implicit deal with the oxpeckers. The large animals tolerate what might otherwise be the incessant and annoying presence of the birds.

The oxpeckers peck away at will on the lumbering beasts to rid their skin of pests, such as lice and ticks, and a variety of other savory and tasty bugs. In return for this favor, the animals do not kill the oxpeckers outright with a swat of their massive tails (like giraffes might do) or eradicate them en masse by suddenly submerging them under water without warning, (as in the case of hippopotami). That would be biting the bill that feeds off them.

It is a symbiotic and mutually beneficial relationship between beast and bird that you might be able to identify with if you’ve ever been covered with unwanted masses of lice or ticks. Personally, I have not.

Inspired by this story and the delightful and unusual moniker of these birds, I set out to integrate them into our life on a more permanent basis. We are in a new house and needed to set up a new internet domain. Oxpeckers Haven, I thought. Perfect.

There won’t be another domain name in the neighborhood to match it and it will likely cause the same sort of delighted comment that I had. Maybe a laugh or two, I mused.

Oxpecker. I admit I did not initially recognize the potentially obscene connotation. As it turned out, oxpeckers would not pass the internet service provider’s censors. Then I thought about it. Oh right. Well, it wasn’t as if I tried to call the domain name “bull’s penis” or somesuch. Maybe that would have made it through. I guess the offense was the suggestion of vulgarity.

I was doomed by the authority of the ignorant and presumptuous ISP censor. I was forced to concede that ours would not be the new internet home of Oxpeckers Haven. We chose a more banal, if personally meaningful to my husband, domain name: PanAmRTW. That may well be the subject of a blog post up the road.

Pity the poor oxpeckers. I sadly came to realize why I would never have learned about oxpeckers in geography class at the conservative and prudish school system where I received my elementary education.

Which, in the humble opinion of this lowly scribe, is bullpuckey.