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In 1970, archconservative journalist John Steinbacher seethed at what he considered the worst casualty of the Sixties, a decade defined by two Democratic presidencies, expanded federal intervention in what felt like every dimension of daily life and defiant young activists sporting shaggy beards and miniskirts rejecting authority of all kinds. Unable to withstand these seismic shifts, he despaired, the American family was in grave peril.

The post The Democratic Party and the (not-so?) new family values appeared first on OUPblog.

From 5-19 October 2014, Pope Francis held the Extraordinary Synod of Bishops on the Family in Rome. The purpose of the synod was to discuss the Church’s stance on such issues as divorce, birth control, and especially, the legalization of gay marriage. On 13 October, the Synod released a relatio (a mid-term report) on its preliminary findings. Paragraph 50 of the relatio stated:

Homosexuals have gifts and qualities to offer to the Christian community. Are we capable of providing for these people, guaranteeing them a place of fellowship in our communities? Oftentimes, they want to encounter a Church which offers them a welcoming home. Are our communities capable of this, accepting and valuing their sexual orientation, without compromising Catholic doctrine on the family and matrimony?

Even though the paragraph was phrased more as a question than a statement, it was immediately pronounced an “earthquake” in the history of Catholicism. Apparent sympathy toward homosexuals delighted liberal Catholics while horrifying conservatives and traditionalists. When the synod concluded, this language was removed from the final version of the document, having failed to acquire a necessary two-thirds vote from participants.

Although the Mother Church has always held synods and councils to reassess doctrines and practices, it presents itself as timeless and immutable. In the nineteenth century American bishop John Ireland mused, “The church never changes and yet she changes.” When change does occur (or is even suggested), conservatives often respond with horror. The paradox of an unchangeable, changing Church creates what sociologist Peter Berger calls a grenzsituation (drawing on the work of psychologist Karl Jaspers), in which a taken for granted reality suddenly appears alien and factitious. To articulate their feeling of betrayal, critics of Church Reform frequently invoke the language of evil and the demonic.

Following the “earthquake” of 13 October, those opposed to the relatio used a variety of strategies to express their dissent including legalistic arguments, suggestions that devil was confusing the synod, hints of conspiracy, and even snippets of prophecy delivered by Marian seers at Fatima and other apparition sites. This response demonstrated the same constellation of forces that occurred in the aftermath of Vatican II when traditionalist Catholics turned to a homemaker from Queens who claimed to see visions of the Virgin Mary. Veronica Lueken, “The Seer of Bayside,” was declared “the seer of age” primarily because her prophecies offered a framework by which traditionalists could make sense of the radical changes of Vatican II. Lueken’s most controversial revelation was that Paul VI––the pope who approved the Council’s reforms––had been replaced by a Soviet doppelganger. Accordingly, loyal Catholics were justified in rejecting Vatican II because it was, in reality, the product of a demonic conspiracy unfolding in the final days.

Today, as in the 1970s, conservative Catholics express pain and outrage that a pope would challenge their understanding of what it means to be Catholic. Some have presented legalistic arguments, citing such documents as a 1986 letter from the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith that described homosexuality as “an objective disorder.” But repeatedly, conservatives have articulated their dissent by invoking a dark triad of demonology, conspiracy theory, and millennial prophecy.

On 20 October, Archbishop Charles Chaput gave a talk entitled “Stranger in a Strange Land,” in which he suggested that Catholics were now the targets of intolerance for advocating traditional family values. When asked about the synod, Chaput first specified that he had not been there and that the media might be distorting what was actually said. He then added, “I think confusion is of the devil, and I think the public image that came across was one of confusion.”

In the Catholic magazine First Things, Peter Leithart discussed the synod in terms of spiritual warfare, suggesting that advocates of gay marriage are the victims of demonic deception. He explained, “When Christians see something that looks like a collective delusion, they’re looking at demonic deception and/or divine judgment. We live in a culture that has venerated idol-ologies of unbounded freedom with relentless zeal, and God has given us over to the logic of our folly.”

Others invoked the language of willful betrayal and conspiracy, rather than demonically-inspired confusion. John Smeaton, co-founder of Voice of the Family, commented, “Those who are controlling the Synod have betrayed Catholic parents worldwide. We believe that the Synod’s mid-way report is one of the worst official documents drafted in Church history.” In this assessment, it is not the synod itself that has betrayed Catholic families, but by a shadowy “them” who are controlling it.

Outside the sphere of mainstream discourse, traditionalist groups have been much more explicit in framing the synod in terms of an apocalyptic war with Satan. Lueken died in 1995, but her followers, known as “Baysiders,” strongly opposed the 13 October announcement. These Last Days Ministries, a Baysider, website, prefaced a report on the relatio with a prophecy delivered by Lueken on behalf of Jesus on 3 May 1978:

The Eternal Father has given mankind a set of rules, and in discipline they must be obeyed. It behooves Me to say that My heart is torn by the actions, the despicable actions, of My clergy. I unite, as your God, man and woman into the holy state of matrimony. And what I have bound together no man must place asunder. And what do I see but broken homes, marriages dissolved through annulments! It has scandalized your nation, and it is scandalizing the world. Woe to the teachers and leaders who scandalize the sheep!”

A Catholic author named Kelly Bowring even speculated that the relatio signaled a the beginning of an prophesied end times scenario, writing:

Will today be remembered as the first day that led to the Church’s prophesied schism? Quite likely yes. By many accounts people are waking up to see that the Family Synod of October 2014 is an officially Vatican-orchestrated work of manipulation. The mid-way report was released October 13th, a day of great spiritual significance.

Like many apocalyptic Marian groups, Bowring has located the relatio within a “theology of history” by finding other significant dates that also occurred on 13 October. On 13 October 1884, Pope Leo XIII composed the prayer to Saint Michael. According to Catholic legend, he did so after a mystical experience in which he overheard a conversation between God and Satan in which Satan was given “time and power” so that he could attempt to overthrow the Church. The “Miracle of the Sun” in Fatima, Portugal occurred on 13 October 1917. The Marian apparitions at Fatima were the most significant in modern history and the three “secrets of Fatima” delivered by the child seers remain the object of intense speculation among traditionalist Catholics. Finally, on 13 October 1973, Sister Agnes Katsuko Sasagawa, a Marian seer near Akita, Japan, delivered a prophecy of a great schism that would destroy the Church. By forming these connections, Bowring can locate new developments like the relatio within a cosmic scheme of history.

These responses––from off-the-cuff remarks equating confusion with the devil, to intricate webs of numerical correspondences––can be read as attempts to make sense of what previously seemed unthinkable. For some, it is easy to dismiss such language as hysterical or even evidence of mental illness. But demonology, conspiracy, and millennial prophecies are all interpretive tools that can be brought to bear in times of crisis. For lay Catholics who feel helpless and betrayed as strangers in Rome attempt to shift the core values of their tradition, these are also discourses of resistance.

Critics of Veronica Lueken claimed she was either mad or a con artist. (One reporter even suggested that her visions were a side effect of diet pills.) But if we examine Catholic tradition as an asymmetric collaboration between lay Catholics and Church authorities, figures like Veronica Lueken are easier to understand. Marian seers do not simply pop up fully formed. Instead events like Church reform create an alignment of social forces in which seers arise. The relationship that forms between seers and their followers creates a charismatic authority that––in some cases––can rival the authority of the Catholic hierarchy. For this reason, it seems likely that as Pope Francis continues to voice his preference for social justice rather than tradition, we can expect a backlash that imbues reform with dark and apocalyptic significance. Like Paul VI, Francis will likely be a pope who gives rise to seers.

Featured image credit: “General Audience with Pope Francis” (2013) by Catholic Church England and Wales. © Mazur/catholicnews.org.uk. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

The post Prophecy, demonology, and the Extraordinary Synod of Bishops on the Family appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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A friend of ours, Rachel Dowell, died last weekend after a long and dignified battle with cancer. Rachel was able to hold on long enough to witness an important life event, and then Cancer won out.

Friends, relatives, even pets who depart leave not only ghostly trails of their presence in our lives, faint footprints left in photographs and Facebook postings, but at least for me, also generate crucial moments of reflection and inventory.

Sandy will officiate at Rachel’s memorial service, and I’ll be there too; I can hear my cousin Craig at my uncle Bob’s service saying, “These are the good times.” Of all the honors we have in life, being part of the communal experience of mourning is one of the most significant and memorable.

It was easy enough to hit the Undo button for ALA Annual, transferring my registration to a friend who needed one, canceling the hotel, deferring road trips, excusing myself from meetings. I fly Southwest so much on business that the ticket will be used by October if not earlier. I’ll be at ALA in Seattle next January. Of all my ALA happenings, I miss breakfast with Steven Kerchoff and the road trip with Skip Auld the most, but I’ve asked Skip to be my Friday date for Midwinter — and the libraries we would be visiting will be there all year round — and I’ll have breakfast with Steven in Chicago next summer.

But I had another moment of clarity, the sort of epiphany where I wake up with a fully-formed realization hovering in front of me like a dragonfly, and when I shared it with Sandy we were in agreement. Not a big or momentous deal, but just that I’m dialing back the New Zealand trip to be a pleasant professional activity of not longer than a week, just me solo flying to NZ, doing my conference thang, seeing a couple of libraries, a couple of extra days in Wellington.

Meanwhile, Sandy and I will take trips this year and next that are on our “bucket lists,” from a train trip in Canada at leaf-peeping time — something Sandy has talked about for as long as I’ve known her — to my humble but real hankering for a return trip to Cambria and Hearst Castle. We are mutually agreed on visiting a growing list of friends and relatives we haven’t seen enough in the decade, visits we can’t do once people leave this earth. Plus I need more writing time, just for myself, and I would like a few more San Francisco “staycation” days.

Don’t get me wrong,  I’m excited about the New Zealand trip (especially the librarians, the libraries, and the beer), but I had been spinning it out into a family vacation neither of us had prioritized, when as a librarian and minister we do have to pick and choose our grand adventures. And in the end taking one week in September is about as much as I feel comfortable doing that time of year. I am (to echo a post I’ll write about in the future) The Man, and as The Man, have responsibilities.

Do I have advice for you? As it happens, yes. Have that difficult conversation you’ve been avoiding, and do it now, before things get set in concrete.

I blogged in 2008 about dropping out of a PhD program. There’s another part to that story, which is that the morning after my arrival, I woke up with the unshakeable conviction I should immediately turn around and go home–not one of those brief moments of insecurity common to many endeavors, but a flashlight-bright understanding of my circumstances, like those brides who, standing at the altar, pick up their skirts and flee.

I cried on the phone; I felt it in my heart, even though I could barely explain my anxiety. (There were “circumstances,” not worth reciting here, but some of my concern turned out to be unnervingly premonitory.) But I stayed, out

Before I finish out this month’s blog challenge, I’d like to take a few moments to talk about something to which most of us can relate.

When I was growing up in the 50’s and 60’s, my parents and grandparents taught us lessons. Some of those lessons came at the end of a parent’s arm, in the form of a solid hand landing on a padded behind. That was before the days when self-expression was encouraged and corporal punishment was banned as being barbaric and cruel.

I’m just making a point about the differences in society between then and now.

One of the big lessons taught in our household, and in many other homes as well, was that there were places in the world where people went hungry on a daily basis, and that we should be grateful for what was placed before us on the table.

I think everyone between the ages of 45 and 100 has echoing voices in your heads right now that testify to that piece of instruction.

My family was considered slightly poor by the standards of children raised in town, whose folks worked in a shop, for IBM, or the university. My dad was blue-collar, and we lived in the country. Those were big considerations back then, too. I didn’t know any of that until high school.

We didn’t go without food, clothing, shelter, fun, a good car, or the rest of the material things that “mattered.” Most of those living in the country had as many or, in come cases, more of their needs taken care of, than those in town, without our mothers having to work outside the home.

We knew we had it good. It was understood. We learned by example when Mom took the time and effort to feed those who came to the door and asked for food and something to drink. Hobos were common in those days.

Our country culture demanded that we provide sustenance to those in need. It never occurred to her to turn someone away without at least a meal and clean, cold water to drink. Usually she gave them iced tea and whatever was leftover from dinner the evening before.

All of which brings us back to the question of that hunger lesson. I know that there are thousands of children all over the U.S. who go to bed knowing real hunger. I was never one of them, thank God, but I’ve known my share of them over the years.

I got to thinking about that this afternoon, and the admonition drilled into children to this day at the dinner table. Children cannot relate to something they’ve never experienced or seen first-hand. Unless the child who lives in the well-kept house, with all the toys scattered unthinkingly throughout, actually sees the consequences of hunger, it’s impossible to get the lesson across.

I’m tempted to wager that the majority middle-class and upper-lower-class citizens have never known hunger in this country. They haven’t gone a few days without something to eat and decent water to drink. If they had experienced real hunger on a regular basis, I doubt it would not exist in the country for long.

The realization of this difference between my generation and those coming up blazed

Do not click the link if a) you haven't had your lunch, and b) you have aunts who are fond of puckering up? I will not be held liable for any nightmares, waking or otherwise, or family disputes.

My flash (because it's bright and blinding) story Vicious Vanity is today's story over at the most wonderful 'The Daily Tourniquet'.

You've been warned.

The more eagle eyed of you may have noticed that my story at 52 Stitches is by the most wonderful Cate, and that this is by Catherine J, and that's because there's change in the air. Catherine's stories are running thin and Cate is about to usurp her position - she's been working very hard in the background and most of you have already seen her most brilliant website. Am I insane? Of course, I like it that way.

I have all these grand thoughts I want to blog about, but I’m either bogged down in micro/maco work stuff or I’m doing personal writing of the long, non-bloggy type, or I am reading. Once in a while I do something beer-related, sometimes successfully and sometimes not. Under duress, I clean and garden.

Maybe it’s all cyclical? I spend some time on Facebook, a little on Twitter, and a lot more offline. I am refocusing on neglected personal-writing tasks that took a back seat to conference and travel activities. I have my taxes (yes, I filed an extension). We have also been organizing things.

Speaking of organizing things, sometimes people ask me how Sandy is doing. She’s doing very well (except for a bad cold) considering that she’s been out of work for a year. The process of finding a new church job is always slow, and even slower in this economy. Profiles get sent out, church committees meet… and meet.

Some of the well-intended approaches people recommend don’t really work. For example, she needs to stay in her denomination, which will mean we move somewhere at some point.  (This is something we hadn’t factored in when we moved here: there are almost no UCC churches in this area, and by that I mean a very broad geographic area.)

Prior to our move here, she had a series of successful jobs, so I am sure she will land another. It may take a more creative approach, and we are being very careful about the “where,” but it will happen.  We do think about issues such as indefinitely living on one income, COBRA running out, etc. — we have to.  Our heads are not in the sand.

I have a telework job; will I be able to stay in this job if we move? It all depends. Teleworking a short hop from Atlanta would certainly work. Teleworking from Juneau might not. (No, there is no chance we are going to Juneau.) Honestly, I don’t worry about those issues. I am too busy!

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Ninth Letter

The latest issue of Ninth Letter — a physically-gorgeous journal from the University of Illinois — includes my essay, “The Outlaw Bride,” about my marriage to my partner Sandy in 2004 and its aftermath after our marriage was invalidated by the state. It’s an essay about the meaning of marriage, and love, and stuff even bigger than that, and I hope you read it.

I remember thinking that with marriages being legalized in California, “The Outlaw Bride” would be an anachronism.  Remember the old days, when we couldn’t marry? Instead, as Californians head to the courts to fight the passage of Proposition 8, it’s very timely. I write about what it was like to have a wedding… and what it is like to be married. And after sixteen years, there is really nothing the state can do to unmarry us.

Happy Valentine’s Day, one and all. Remember that love makes us all outlaws one way or the other.

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We had been considering ourselves super-super fortunate — we didn’t have a tree crash into our house, we aren’t in a flood plain (maybe in a 1000 years, but right now our house is on a hillock in an elevated section in the west part of Tallahassee), we didn’t have to drive in this mess… when we heard a loud crash, which was part of our guest-bathroom ceiling falling in.

(The guest bathroom is “my” bathroom, sort of — we are a bit territorial that way. Except now that there is a giant hole over the bathtub, we are Sharing the other bathroom.)

Well, I had been wondering what the third thing was. You know how things come in threes. There was Sandy’s car, then there was the microwave oven/kitchen fan (far too boring to blog about), and then This.

I may have brought this on by finding the $120 FM traffic receiver that goes to my GPS, which was actually never lost but was just camouflaged among the the 8,000 other cords I had placed in my new glove box, all tidily rolled up, perhaps too tidily.

These cords are all black and about the same length, but one of them conversationalates with traffic conditions in big cities (n.b.: that would not mean Tallahassee) and has already saved my bacon on one trip by asking me if I wanted to avoid a traffic jam (yes! I did want to avoid a traffic jam, as a matter of fact) and steering me out of Atlanta through what a friend who lived years in Los Angeles calls “surface roads” and what reminded me of several scenes in The Bone Collector, but it worked and that’s what counts.

(Nota bene #2: I have never placed gloves in a glove box.)

Or maybe I made this happen by figuring out that my iPod’s butt-hole (as I think of its syncing port) may have gone slightly off-kilter when I landed full-force on top of my iPod during a bad fall while running in Provincetown, and if you have to fall anywhere and any time, it might as well be P-Town in May.

I have had trouble syncing my iPod ever since then (I also tore up my elbow, but who cares about that), and more than once had to coax pins back into place with a sewing pin. Then I decided to try to ease the interface board more centered to the butt-hole by gently but firmly pushing it with a strip cut from an old hotel room swipe card, and that has worked beautifully. So the iPod couldn’t be “three.”

Continuing the “I don’t want to bore you” motif, I won’t tell you all about hurricanes and deductibles in Florida, except to say I am glad we are fiscally conservative and I never liked blue in that bathroom anyway. But I am very, very glad the ceiling chose to fall in two hours after my shower, because the plaster and nasty stuff that rained down might not have so much have scratched me, but just the sound and surprise would have given me a heart attack!

So, my apologies for not giving you a savvy link-roundup or astute insights into our latest writing workshop. Even after a bracing glass of grape-flavored nerve medicine, I still feel rattled. Crawling into the ceiling with a flashlight, this appeared to be the only damage, and compared to what others have experienced, it’s not very much. But I resent that this storm has crammed its hands into our wallets.

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So Sandy’s car is kaput (of course, since she’s temporarily between jobs — isn’t that how it works?) and I am going to bequeath her my trusty Honda Civic and get a new-to-me set of wheels. Probably not brand-new. I’m thinking a gently-used Prius or Mini-Cooper — exactly what I was thinking these last few months when I told myself that it wasn’t a good time to buy a new(er) car. But now it is, because this isn’t a walking/bus town, so we can’t share a car.

The last time I bought a car was 1998. It was my Civic, then almost five years old, and I vaguely remember using newspaper classifieds. It’s 2008 (in case you hadn’t noticed), and I have no idea how to buy a car. I suspect it has something to do with The Internets, which through a series of tubes process new and used cars which then extrude into sundry communities across the U.S.

At least that’s my first guess. If you have suggestions, I’m all ears. I’ve heard it might be the season for rental agencies to sell their cars. I’d like to cut to the chase and ask Avis to sell me the green Prius I keep renting here in Tallahassee, because I love that car.

I admit to being a teensy bit excited about the idea of a new (to me) car. My Civic is a superb little vehicle that has treated me well all these years. I love driving it, it’s been easy to maintain, and it has Been Places. (New Jersey, New York, California, and now Florida — plus it traveled Route 66 in 2001, when we moved to NorCal.)

But even though it’s not the financially easiest time for us to get new(er) wheels, I do keep thinking about the features in the cars I drive when I rent. Even the incredibly stripped-down budget car I rented in Boston two weeks ago (hello, manual windows and locks!) had two accessory outlets and cupholders. Yes, shallow, but my cup-holders have never worked (they were an early model…), and on a five-hour drive I like a place to park my diet root beer. I am even a little tiddly over the idea of a car in which I could unlock the driver’s side without opening my door and pressing a button. Little things, things that I have chosen to live without, but now that Moderne Automotiveness beckons to me… well, I am tempted.

Naturally, this thread segues into the work of the ALA Task Force on Electronic Meeting Participation.

We on the Task Force completed a survey last month, and though I haven’t gone over the data yet, a quick peekaroo indicates that a lot of us love ALA dearly, but we do think we’re ready for an upgrade. We don’t want to leave ALA; I’ve said earlier, if we tried to form a library organization, it would end up looking a lot like ALA. But we do want to see our dear old association get a makeover.

We want to be able to fully participate in the work of the association without expanding our carbon footprint to the size of Bigfoot’s.

We want our work to be seamless.

We want ALA to stop distinguishing between “virtual” members and other members (and to stop punishing librarians who choose to participate electronically), because in this day and age, we’re ALL virtual members.

We want ALA to support our virtual efforts and to stop pretending that a meeting is more “open” if it’s face-to-face, even if it costs thousands of personal dollars to travel to.

We want ALA to be accessible to all.

We want to be part of ALA, unencumbered.

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“Where there is no vision, the people perish.” — Proverbs 29:18

About a year ago I stated quite firmly that I don’t do professional goals.

But before I launch into that, I’m aware I’ve been relatively quiet here. My bloggy silence is due to a combination of bad stress and good stress that has eaten into my personal writing time. I’ve been working hard to be more of a presence in my family life and get some other stuff done, and for me, writing happens when my mind is clear and I can devote several quiet, sustained hours of concentration on nothing but the words on the page.

Instead my brain constantly natters, “Hey, think about THIS, no think about THAT, but what about THIS, and then about THAT…” In my one recent writing session, after three hours of listening to that bloviating gush  of random thoughts I gave up and wrote email to old writing buddies.  Not a bad thing to do, actually.

The bad stress is that Sandy is no longer the pastor at her church; she will be consulting while she looks for a settled or permanent position.

I won’t go into details here now or any time in the future, but stuff happens. Sandy has had great church jobs before and she’ll have them again. She’s back “in search,” as they say in her denomination, where her profile is distributed to the regions she has identified (with my involvement and approval).

Yes, that does mean we’ll eventually pack up our troubles in an old kit bag. We have our health and one another, not to mention our ever-amusing cats, and even, in an amazing sign of God’s goodness, naturally curly hair.

I can’t discuss the good stress just yet, but it’s good many times over.

So. Goals.

I still believe that there are few people more annoying or patently false than the strivers living in the future tense, “always thinking about how they are going to get to the job that puts the right title on their door.”

But I think my anti-goals-ism of a year back was an artifact of one ghastly experience. Since then, I’ve been blessed to work with a group of people who aren’t climbing over one another to put Shiny Job Titles on their doors. Nonetheless do think quite naturally about the direction of their careers, the skills they acquire, and the positions they seek to hold, even when that direction is heavily influenced by the desire to stay where they are and do the very best they can do, and become the best they can be, for Their Place Of Work.

(If there can be an MPOW and a YPOW and even an FPOW [where F = Former], then TPOW is valid, as well.)

I also still strongly believe in balance. I tune out the people who want to tell me how many hours they put into their job. They don’t have to tell me; I’m sure their family members have kept careful track for them.

I recall an administrator at a FPOW who misted up when she remembered the good old days under a former director, where they’d stay up until 1 a.m. on a project. I also remember the snide response from someone who had to participate in those sessions and whose spouse was none too amused. They were never on some truly significant project; they were simply performing in an all-emergency all-the-time mode.

But I have also noticed that in the past few months I have looked at certain projects and been so bold as to muse, “I could do that.” Or even, “I SHOULD be doing that.” I’ve allowed myself to remember with pleasure some of the best professional challenges of my career, some of the Manhattan Projects that involved a certain amount of insanity and messianic belief to bring to fruition.  Partly through my mentee, I’ve gotten in touch again with my Inner Administrator.

Once life settles down a little bit, I’ll resume writing at five miles per hour. (The writing workshop is crucial during this fallow period. It might seem like a distraction to read “other people’s work,” but to dig down deep into a manuscript is its own little mini-class, and yes, it also counts as reading. Since I’m obliged to participate — I started the damn workshop, after all — my brain calms down and cooperates long enough to let me do my share of effort.)

But I’ve let myself dream myself into the future, and that’s not a bad thing at all.

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O.k., this blog isn’t really after world domination… I suspect I’d have to post a lot more often, for starters, and besides, I have to get ready for the Florida Library Association conference.

But on a whim I created a Facebook page for Free Range Librarian, and then posted it to my Facebook profile, and then made myself a “fan” of the page, to break the ice (since no one ever wants to be the FIRST fan of anything). Then others began making themselves fans as well. Someone even created a page for the Fans of the Fans of Free Range Librarian.

As I browse the list of people who call themselves “fans” of this blog, I hurtle down a sweet corridor of memory. I see friends from library school, California, New York, New Jersey, and elsewhere. I see friends I’ve known forever and good folks I’ve just met. I see friends who have walked with me through some tough times and friends who I’m just getting to know.

(The demographics are fun, as well. 70% of the “fans” are under 45. Take that, Father Time!)

I realize we’re supposed to qualify the notion of “friendship” on Facebook, and I do know the difference between someone who has walked with me through thick and thin and someone I met in an elevator or know through someone else. But I just revised my Facebook profile to note that Ed Wood is one of my favorite movies, and that’s because there’s a scene I consider to be the best description of friendship I know: where Ed Wood makes a terrible movie and his friends all show up at the theater and applaud him. That’s a great description of life and the people who make it survivable.

The page/fan meme will no doubt quickly exhaust itself, part of the Facebook silliness we’ll remember someday. But I hope I don’t forget the warmth I felt when I saw old faces and new “fanning” themselves for this little blog.

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Our friend Gail just received a kidney/pancreas, after what felt like a decades-long wait.

If you “mean to” get around to ensuring you’re a donor, please do it. Someone’s decision gave Gail a new lease on life.

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I’m not really driving a hybrid (not that I would object if Santa put a forest-green Prius in my stocking this year); I still have my 1993 Honda Civic, which gets a respectable mileage for its 4-mile commute to my office. So the title of this post is a metaphor for how I’m approaching Lent this year.

Usually I stop doing something for Lent. (Quick synopsis of this season: According to the Scripture, Jesus went into the desert. The Devil sought to tempt Jesus with worldliness, but Jesus, thrice, resisted. He came out of the desert, got whacked, and three days later rose from the dead. Notice how there are no bunnies in this story.)

My own Lents of previous years have been fairly typical. For 40 days (less a few slip-ups), I deny myself that “thing” — fat, carbohydrates, refined sugar, whatever. Then I observe the Passion of Christ, celebrate His rising, and resume my regular habits.

But Jesus didn’t go into the wilderness to take off a few pounds. He was looking for other things, such as introspection, education, and — most crucially — transformation.

This Lent I’m not looking for a quick diet or for presto abnegation. My goal this Lent is to move farther down the food chain, and closer to our local growers. I want to connect with the miracle of the food cycle right here in the Big Bend region. I want to understand where my food comes from. I want to talk to the people who grow my food. I want to know that what nourishes me supports my neighbor.

I’m not on some “test” where I do or do not “cheat.” Some days are easier than others, and travel is always tough. But I’m trying to avoid refined flour and sugar, and I’m also trying to embrace local markets, local foods, local farms, regional, seasonal products, and in general become more aware of and sensitive to the consequences of how we produce food in America. I’m trying to avoid CAFO meat and dairy, but also to embrace meat, eggs, and cheese from happy animals. I’m asking why I need to buy fruit from Peru or California when I live in an area with its own fabulous produce, and I’m also trying to understand what food should be available at this time of year — not just what we force into availability. As some of my favorite food writers have discussed, I’m trying to be a better omnivore.

Some things are easier than others. The bowls of office candy were hugely tempting for several weeks. Now I look at them and see high-fructose corn syrup and preservatives — basically, government-subsidized garbage. I already fight the tubbiness common to aging office workers; the nervous office nibbling needed to stop anyway. The more I read about our broken food system, the more repelled I am by commodity meat and dairy; I see those poor animals packed shoulder-to-shoulder in feed lots, forced to eat unnatural foods, and I don’t want to be part of that misery. I go to the market and bring home white eggplant and Vidalia onion greens grown in local farms, and my mouth waters all day as I think about how I’m going to cook them.

In a season associated with denial, I’m looking for transformation from a baby lettuce leaf. From a ruddy, hand-hefty tomato. From a sweet, crisp oyster.

Recommended reading: Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma; Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle; Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation.

Bookmark to:

Note: my kgs at bluehighways dot com email address is the only functioning address for me right now. Of course, you can twitter me at kgs or IM me at freerangelib.

A couple of weeks ago a physicist who had been exchanging pleasantries by email with me commented that I seemed down, and I told him it felt as if my life were assembled from someone else's quarks.

I have spent the equivalent of a long summer job in a highly-visible position a lot of people would love to have. It was an interesting experiment, I worked with great people, I had fascinating challenges... and I have resigned to pursue other interests and spend more time with my family.

It wasn't so much a question of what I was doing, as what I wasn't doing; and it wasn't where I was, as where I wasn't. About a month ago I wrote some colleagues to ask their opinion, and my dear, dear, dear--and hugely patient--friends wrote back to say, in large part, what I knew deep down: for those of us who have some work choice--and what a privilege it is to have work choice in the first place--work takes up too much of our lives for us not to be doing something we love.

As announced earlier, this year it's the big five-oh. Genny had commented how much better it is to be 50 than a teenager, and I fully agree. For my 30th birthday, I allowed myself to give up dancing and took myself on a driving trip through the Benalux; for my 40th birthday, Sandy threw a big bash that was as good as having my own wake well in advance of the event that will prompt it; and for 50, though it's months away, I allowed myself to go, rather than stay, in a position that was not a good fit. (Technical expertise was not the issue; once I sussed out the academic jargon, I realized we weren't really doing anything I hadn't done before, and sometimes much earlier.)

I will miss a lot of people, but that's always the case. In the last several years, I've had a number of people pop up from various former lives, and each time what we share are the people stories.

Do I have plans? Of course. I always land on my feet, and I have several things brewing. Am I a little scared? Naturally. Then there's the guilt of leaving good people. But most of all, I'm resting, writing, and catching up on my life... and even enjoying Tallahassee, in all its sunny, slightly sticky spring glory, as if I had just moved here again for the very first time.

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(Melinda Baumann on Apr 20, 2007 2:54 PM) Wow. I admire your choice very much. I hope you'll keep blogging at FRL.

A tree in our front yard is brushed with pink, and grey-green streams of Spanish moss sway in the breeze. Woody, a huge woodpecker in tuxedo and bright red fez, clings to a telephone pole as he drills for his petit dejeuner, rat-a-tat-tat, rat-a-tat-tat. Black Cat, our scruffy neighborhood scout, patrols up and down the quiet street before flopping on a sunny corner.

Our home is still a nice home, and one we could never have afforded in the Bay Area; the city is still woodsy and pleasant; our park neighborhood is every month more beautiful in new and interesting ways.

But I'm undergoing the inevitable adjustments that attend a major household move. Like a marriage, the hard work has just begun: to make friends, build relationships, commit to life in this new world.

California had an impermanent feeling to it for the five years we were there. Sandy had two temporary jobs in a row, and the first year almost no work at all beyond a grim spell as an office assistant; I managed a grant project that relied on annual funding (and was shaky from my first arrival...most people don't know that my "welcome" to California was "Hello, we're cutting your budget 40 percent"). It was an experiment, and not a bad one; "Don't die wondering," Sandy says, my loyal life partner. I wanted to move back home, and of course you can't do that, but now I know, and along the way Sandy finished a DMin, I earned an MFA, and we had much Dungeness crab and not quite enough trips to the Emerald City, my home town.

That impermanence made California easy in some ways, because we always knew it was possible we wouldn't be staying. Life is much different when you know this is not the dress rehearsal, the pass-through place, the pictures you run across much later while looking for something else and say, "Remember living here?" before you turn the page and forget.

I was doing all right until the Weber grill episode yesterday afternoon. I know Trader Joe's will arrive one day; it's working its way down the Mason-Dixie Line, and I am confident TJ's will soon be Way Down South in Dixie. CostCo is reportedly imminent (we won't shop at Sam's Club); Netflix and Amazon keep us well-stocked.

But I can't buy a Weber grill within 200 miles, and that is the turn of the screw. I thought I was hitting the stores at the wrong time--in January I tried to buy mulch, and a huge man in an orange apron scoffed at me--but it's not that at all.

Our grill needs a part replaced, and we decided--ok, I decided, but I'm Grill Girl in this household; Sandy won't even fire it up--that it was time to replace our hardworking little outdoor oven with a grill of suitable size befitting women with a real backyard. I tried hard to love the grills I saw, but I've owned a Silver Genesis A for five years, and I want a Weber. (The Silver Genesis A, a two-burner model, was the only size I could squeeze onto our tiny patio at our condo in the East Bay. It's a wonderful little grill, but you can't do indirect cooking very well on a two-burner model, and I do like ribs.)

Every grill I saw made me yearn for another Weber. Thin grates. Too many small, rust-prone parts. Even the wheels--Weber wheels are vastly superior. I don't know why, except that they are by Weber, I thought to myself while the Sears guy droned; he had one eye on the door as if expecting my "husband" to walk in. (Buying a grill is similar to shopping for computer equipment; when I asked how it was possible to do a really good job of indirect cooking with the burners running perpendicular to the back of the grill, the salesman's face read, "Now I've seen a dog standing on its hind legs!")

I was bargaining with myself about the grill while my hairdresser wrapped my head with foil--not to protect me from wifi, but to restore my blonde locks, something she did beautifully. Why, most brands other than Weber come standard with a side burner. Wouldn't I like a side burner, I wheedled with myself. Then I mentioned the grill shopping trip I was planning after my coiffure was complete.

Hairdresser: You know, I bought one with a side burner. I don't never use that side burner.
Me: Me neither.
Hairdresser: Doesn't get hot enough. Something about the wind.
Me: I know. With my first grill, I once used the burner to heat beans, and that's it. I'd rather have the space to set down my Pyrex.

We fell into silence, pondering the profit and the loss. She walked me to the hair-dryer and pulled the huge pink plastic bubble over my head. I sat fluffing my feathers and brooding, while the color baked on. (You can at least get good hair color in the South.)

Naturally, I may not really want a Weber. Consumer Reports doesn't rate them that highly; a Kenmore or one of the brands at Lowe's or Home Depot might do just fine. I could buy one online, for a steep delivery cost, but that's not the issue. I want the life where I could buy one, where it was "the" brand, where that was what we did, when we wanted a grill: we bought a Weber. I can't go back to that life; even if we moved to California tomorrow, it would be a different California than the place we had left, Weber grills regardless. Our five years in California taught me that it is not the place, so much, as the time since gone, sand through the wasp-waist funnel of time.

Maybe that's why I wrote personal essays for my MFA thesis. Maybe it was luxurious, but important, time-travel down the streets of my past. If I have one regret about my life right now, it is that my job is so huge, so demanding, so encompassing, that it takes a trip to the garden department of Sears to bring tears to my eyes and grant me the relief of mourning.

Perhaps I'll replace that part on my grill and make do for a while, to keep the past with me a while longer, or pretend that I can.

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(Julie on Mar 5, 2007 10:11 AM) I actually bought my Weber from Amazon - because it was incredibly cheap due to it's bright-yellow paint job and Simpsons branding. Apparently Simpsonsmania does not extend to grilling. It's covered when not in use, so who cares? I don't recall the shipping cost, but I would have taken that into consideration. You DO want a Weber, they're fabulous. I also bought an electric starter wand.

(Laura on Mar 5, 2007 4:12 PM) Please consider expanding this into an essay (in your copious spare time!). It's really, really good.

(sheryl on Mar 5, 2007 7:25 PM) It sounds like the new place honeymoon is over! I think a couple of months after I moved, I started crying over bread. I had been used to buying bakery bread or a favorite store bakery bread but after I moved, I just got sick of trying out new breads - I just wanted the one I knew I liked!

(Max on Mar 6, 2007 2:05 PM) Keep in mind that cockroaches live in spanish moss - I found out the hard way. Oh it's so pretty! What is that crawling around in it?

(Dinah Phillips on Mar 7, 2007 11:57 AM) It is tough to move to a new place. I remember when I moved from San Antonio to California, it took a whole year till I felt at home. It just took so long to have some friends around that I wasn't still introducing myself to. I do so appreciate hearing about how things are going for you and Sandy. Wish you were closer, but I'm glad we are in cyber-touch.

(Phalbe Henriksen on Mar 11, 2007 2:12 PM) Redbugs live in Spanish moss, too. Before you use it in the house, nuke it a little. And too much Spanish moss will kill the tree. Pest control and lawn maintenance companies can kill the Spanish moss.