June

The mingling of wild honeysuckle and sweet clover

is the fragrance of early summer.

In the morning dew, the presence of its perfume

floats above the green fields like a veil,

behind which is the sunny face of June.

She lingers in a small windowless room

off the sacristy.

Soon, she will take her father’s arm.

Soon she will stand at the altar

in those still white moments of prayer and proclamation.

And then, her veil removed,

she will kiss the brighter face of a bridegroom

whose very heat will singe the top notes

of honeysuckle and columbine,

will smolder in the bass notes of clover

and mown grass.

And later from the bridal bed,

the sweet scent of peony

will be just a memory.

Shannon Vesely

Both the bluebird and the indigo bunting are elusive birds. I hear them in the woods behind our house, I see their dark silhouettes in the tops of the trees at the edge of our timber, but I rarely have the chance to see them close enough to take in their blue splendor. Still, I crane my neck every time I hear their songs and scan the treeline for any flash of blue.

These are private birds, indeed. Except for the cadet blue of the common Blue Jay, brilliant blue is an anomaly here in the Midwest. Each spring, blue birds and buntings could flaunt their colors amidst the browns, russets, and grays of native birds. They could, but they do not. And this is what makes their allure even more precious. Their privacy is a ten-carat sapphire hidden in a pile of limestone and shale.

In his Notebooks 1951-1959, French philosopher and author Albert Camus writes:

Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but ‘steal’ some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.

Opt for privacy and solitude, neither of which make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. The blue birds and the indigo buntings are poster children for privacy and solitude, and we might do well to take a lesson from them. Perhaps our unwillingness to do so stems from a belief (albeit a misguided one) that there may be something more sinister behind that state of privacy. He believes he’s so much better than the rest of us; she is plotting something; he clearly has something to hide, etc. Those who value privacy are too often subject to such criticism. Failing to understand why anyone would opt for privacy, would need to breathe and to be, we look down upon them from social perches of superiority.

Some social media has, in many ways, made a mockery of privacy, choosing instead to air everything publicly, freely, frequently:

John Doe is drinking his first latte at the Starbucks on the corner of  Lattimer and Green! Jane Doe is starting day #7 of a new diet and exercise regimen destined to transform her in every way! John Doe’s son participated in the 25th annual county basketball tournament! Jane Doe’s daughter just befriended a new student who moved from Texas! 

Social media posts are sometimes like those infamous Christmas letters–but on steroids. You know, the ones that make you feel like you and your family are chopped liver? The ones that broadcast a family’s every triumph, every accomplishment, every plan that will make the world a better place. Those letters that get under your skin and cause you to justify your own family’s worth.

And what of these posts in which nothing is private? Are they valuable simply because they are public? Author Gore Vidal writes that Eventually all things are known. And few matter. If so many things are posted so that they may be known, will they ultimately matter?

French author Milan Kundera is less kind:

When a private talk over a bottle of wine is broadcast on the radio, what can it mean but that the world is turning into a concentration camp?

A concentration camp? That’s harsh–perhaps much too harsh. Still, he has a point. When what is private–and is generally best kept private–is broadcast, there may be unforeseen consequences: a loss of significance, intimacy, and sadly even integrity. Too much good stuff may dull our senses. Too much celebration may prompt us to turn a blind eye. When discernment is lacking, social media may be more of an assault than a refuge.

In her article, “The Psychology of Social Media” (Psychology Today, Nov. 14, 2016), Dr. Azedah Alai cites research that reveals that “engaging in upward social comparisons on social media is associated with negative outcomes for users such as lower self-esteem, and the potential for depressive and/or anxiety symptoms” (e.g. Vogel et. al., 2014; Vogel & Rose, 2016). In fact, Vogel’s earlier research (2014) reported that people tend to believe that others who use social media actually have better lives than they do. Our compulsion to scour social media in an attempt to keep up with the Joneses is literally making us sick. A healthy dose of privacy could be just what the doctor ordered.

And those who feel compelled to confess publicly? Often these confessions are desperate cries for acknowledgement, for affirmation, for some sort of connection. Certainly, there may be power and value in  connections with others who offer compassion and understanding. Private confessions, however, have the potential for so much more power and value. When you sit knee-to-knee with another human being who is willing and able to listen, it doesn’t get much better than this. In these private and intimate exchanges, we build genuine and lasting relationships that don’t depend on internet availability.

Don’t get me wrong. I use social media regularly and delight in pictures and posts from family, former students, and friends. To an extent, social media has made the world smaller, bringing people and places from far away right into your home. And for this, I am generally grateful. But I am more grateful that I can walk away from my computer and walk into the countryside around me. I am more grateful that I can choose to keep some thoughts, some feelings, and some dreams private. And I am eternally grateful that I can select with whom I will share these. Or not.

The first female Middle Eastern editor-in-chief of an English newspaper, Aysha Taryam claims that And so it is inevitable that the day has come when we write about privacy with such nostalgia, analyzing it as we would some unearthed fossil of a creature our human eyes had never fallen on.

Perhaps the fact that I am writing wistfully about privacy is evidence that we have come to look upon it with nostalgia. I can imagine sitting with my grandchildren and recalling those days when we had no wifi, when we learned to live with our own portion of solitude, when we relished a privacy that had everything to do with simply being and nothing to do with being antisocial. I can imagine explaining how some things are so precious that they need not be shared–or perhaps that they be shared with discernment.

In a few days, my little cabin near the woods will be completed, thanks to my husband’s carpentry skills and willingness to make my dream come to fruition. Even though it is a mere 100 yards from my house, it is far enough and separate enough to provide me with an ample supply of privacy and solitude. This will be my Walden, and like Thoreau, I will go to the woods because I wish to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I will write in this cabin and choose what–if anything–will become public. In truth, I suspect that much of what I think and write will remain–as it should–private.

And if I happen to see a blue bird or an indigo bunting close enough to take in its blueness, I will choose to keep this private, too, reveling in an intimate moment that truly matters.

for my mom on Mother’s Day

A white rabbit dozes in the shade by our chicken coop. Under the grill, his white son watches the yard warily. The gray son hops from the base of an oak tree to the edge of the timber, while his mother crouches beneath the cage that was her former home. Only the white daughter is missing. Until I spot her ears sticking up from the brush by my husband’s trapping shed.

In the spring of 2017, I bought two rabbits (of unknown gender) for my grandchildren for Easter. And these bunnies lived happily together in their hutch until the morning when I opened the cage to feed them, and there were three hairless babies squirming in the corner. This was when Tiger, the proud father, got a new home. Two had become five! And the five were soon separated, each in his or her own cage.

All winter, I fed, cleaned, and unthawed hundreds of frozen water bottles. Because my grandchildren have recently gotten a new puppy and had long lost interest in the cute bunnies that had grown large and become much less cute, I pronounced that we would let them go, loose them into the wild (the timber that surrounds us). Hearing no protests, I waited until two weeks ago when I was convinced the grass was greening and the weather cooperating. Then I let them go.

I was prepared for a collective bolt for freedom. In those moments before sleep, I had feared for their lives as they were forced to survive in the wild. They needed a Rabbit Grylls (a Bear Grylls for would-be wild rabbits), a helper, a mentor for the transition from kept to independent living.

But alas, I worried for naught. They didn’t bolt. The woods didn’t beckon them. The grass was not greener on the other side. In short, they stayed with what was familiar, often sleeping below the very cages of their captivity. When I woke this morning and looked out of my bedroom window into the backyard, there were Tiger, Cocoa, and their offspring–now official yard rabbits–grazing on the rain-drenched hillside.

Familiarity breeds content, claims writer and columnist Anna Quindlen. The yard rabbits wholeheartedly agree, preferring the familiarity of the mown yard to the tangle of timber that surrounds. They co-exist with the cats and dogs and have become a common sight as I work in the yard or play with the grandkids on the swingset.

Recently on a trip to my family home in Kearney, Nebraska, I found myself seated in the same auditorium I sat in for assemblies during seventh grade. Now renovated into a performing arts center, my old junior high dazzles with a spacious and well-appointed lobby, a remodeled auditorium with cushy seats, and restrooms that look–and smell– nothing like the ones I remember. My mom had taken me to an evening of Barry Manilow’s greatest hits. One of the youngest in the audience, I sat beside my mom and her 80-year old friend, waiting for a Canadian gentleman and his band to take the stage.

Surrounded by senior citizens (oh wait, I am a senior citizen now!), I was taken back to the spring of my seventh grade year when I tried out for cheerleader on the very stage in front of me. I was instantly transported back to those moments when I stood on the wings of the stage, pacing and running through the cheers in my mind in preparation for my tryout.

And then I was in Miss Lindstrom’s math class on a Friday afternoon, listening as she read (in character–beautifully and bizarrely in character) a weekly chapter of Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby. Long before political correctness, Miss Lindstrom reveled in her weekly oral performances, and we listened, lest she pull out the ruler she used to rap our knuckles.

And when the performance began, the songs of my college years flooded back: Mandy, I Write the Songs, Can’t Smile Without You, It’s a Miracle, Looks Like We Made It–the hits kept coming. I could sing them all, could see myself on the dance floor of Dickie Doogan’s on a Friday night, could feel the way those songs shaped my young adult notions of love and life. It was all so gloriously familiar–the place, the company, the songs.

Pulitzer prize winning author Wallace Stegner writes:

I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can’t go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places.

It may be less likely, and perhaps we have lived too shallowly, but like Stegner, I do believe that the familiar draws us back to those places intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to. You can come home again. And when you do, you can leave the shallows for the deep waters of familiarity.

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity, writes Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Coming home again, I often find that the very things I took for granted now take on new importance. They shimmer in their simplicity and familiarity. A newly upholstered auditorium seat, a Barry Manilow tune, the scent of your mother beside you. What was hidden before when you were younger and home was a place to launch from is now magnified, awash in colors you had only imagined.

I spent several days with my mom, eating at the same table around which so many family and friends have gathered, sleeping in my old bedroom, sitting on the sofa and looking out at the blue spruce tree that has come into its own magnificence over the years. Home.

The familiar is underrated, I’m afraid. In our quest for bigger, better, and newer, we may turn our backs on the wonders of those familiar people, places, and things that are the essence of home. Truthfully, I think the rabbits have it right. What is familiar has it own unique parameters, and you can find hidden treasures within them for the rest of your life.

For me, my mom represents the best of what is home. Each time I visit, I drink another cup of coffee, for I’m never in a hurry to leave the woman and the place whose familiarity continues to sustain me.

Because I’ve been singing his songs and because he says it so well, I’ll let Barry Manilow have the last words here:

For Gracyn on her 9^th Birthday

Cross-legged, you sit before a pink plastic palace,

a remnant of your childhood now dormant

in the preteen years.

Brushing the mouse droppings and sawdust from its rooms,

you finger a canopy bed and mirrored vanity.

You suck in your breath

as you pull a yellow-haired doll from beneath

a tangle of tables and chairs.

Yesterday you delivered a handwritten birthday list:

shorts and tank tops,

cute sandals,

throw pillows for my bed,

decorative stuff.

I scanned the list for what was not there.

At nine, there would be no dolls,

no tea sets or tiaras.

At nine, we will talk fashion and décor

as we eat cake from yellow paper plates

with no trace of Disney princesses.

Oh, but you are so lovely

in this nether world of becoming.

Your freckles, once invisible, now spread across your nose,

a pale dusting of cinnamon.

Pink-polished now,

your slender fingers tease the air.

And your eyes, still blue enough to shame the sea,

speak light.

Still today, you will hold my hand

as we walk from my house to yours.

And palm to palm,

we will remember these last days

of April.

With love,

Your Grandma and biggest fan

Photo by Brian Schrack

The desire for symmetry, for balance, for rhythm in form as well as in sound, is one of the most inveterate of human instincts.

Edith Wharton

Early in my teaching career, I sat with a community college student in an empty classroom at the end of the day. He had come to see himself as a poet in mid-life. For months, he had been trying on different voices, different forms, different perspectives. Now, he said, he wanted to learn to write traditional poetry with perfect meter and rhyme. The rhyme part was coming along, but the meter? I’m struggling, he confessed. Teach me to hear the rhythm, so I can master meter. 

Truthfully, I had never considered how I heard rhythm and counted meter. I just did from as early as I can remember. I inherited an ear and love for the rhythmic symmetry of perfect meter. Iambic pentameter? Its five iambs registered in my ears naturally and musically. And iambic pentameter gone wrong? Like the gash of a bow raked wildly across violin strings, its discord was an auditory assault for me.

As we sat together peering over a poetry anthology, I began to read aloud, exaggerating the meter of each line. My student listened intently through an entire William Wordsworth poem and then said, I just don’t hear it. I could make an educated guess at the meter, but I’d be guessing. I just can’t hear it. 

And he couldn’t and didn’t–even after several tutorial sessions. He conceded that he would stick to writing free verse and leave the meter and rhyme to other poets. He desperately wanted to hear that symmetry of rhythm, the predictable metric pattern of many classical poems, and he understood this compulsion to be one of the most inveterate of human instincts. This is the power of symmetry. Even when we can’t achieve it or wholly understand it, its instinctual presence lives to remind us of what is perfectly there, just beyond our grasp.

There is something in us that loves and seeks such balance. A candlestick on either end of a mantle. A pairing of photos on the wall. Two silos of the same height and width silhouetted against a Colorado sky.

Socrates writes:

If measure and symmetry are absent from any composition in any degree, ruin awaits both the ingredients and the composition. . . Measure and symmetry are beauty and virtue the world over.

To a great degree, there is beauty and virtue in symmetry. Consider the intricate beauty of a snowflake. Each snowflake is unique, but each is completely symmetrical with itself. Or consider the beauty we find in such natural phenomena as romanesco brocoli, an amazing example of fractal symmetry. Each part of the broccoli has the same geometric pattern as the whole.

Symmetry is such a show stopper. Ladies and gentlemen, in the center arena: the coneflower! To your left: the fern frond! And to your right: the chambered nautilus!

And the Master of Ceremonies? Such exactitude displayed in so many magnificent creatures and creations can only be the work of an artful and mathematical designer. Symmetry flies in the face of chance and thumbs its nose at randomness. Mathematicians kneel, awestruck, in the throne room of the Golden Ratio. Musicians bask in the faultless marriage of treble and bass. In adoration, lovers marvel in the light of their beloved’s face: one eye, one cheekbone, one nostril mirrored perfectly in the other.

Novelist and playwright Stefan Zweig writes:

Art knows no happier moment than the opportunity to show the symmetry of the extreme, during that moment of spheric harmony when the dissonance dissolves for a blink of an eye, dissolves into a blissful harmony, when the most extreme opposites, coming together from the greatest alienation, fleetingly touch with the lips of the word and of love.

And what of the symmetry of extreme opposites, coming together from the greatest alienation? What of that blissful harmony when the dissonance dissolves for a blink of an eye? When two individuals, two extreme opposites, come together in respect and understanding, this is symmetry that can change lives. And when from the greatest alienation one warring nation with one particular philosophy comes together with another warring nation and philosophy, this is symmetry that can change the world.

Poet and Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott argues that if we break a vase, the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than the love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. Perhaps it is in the reassembling, the coming together, the matching and piecing of parts to the whole that we love the best. For if we take symmetry for granted (and I think we do), recreating it makes us painfully aware of its magnificence. And when symmetry is restored, for a time at least, all is right with the world.

Humans may duplicate the perfect designs they see all around them, but they neither imagined nor created them. Symmetry is, indeed, an exquisite effect of a more exceptional cause.  In the sanctuary of symmetry, if we have eyes to see and ears to hear, we can find this exceptional cause in God. And seeking God, too, is one of the most inveterate of human instincts.

I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –

Emily Dickinson

In my middle years, I mostly lived in a hard-kept house with double-pane windows meant to keep things in. And to keep things out. Things like possibilities that glimmered tauntingly on the horizon. And doors? They were solid, oaken slabs that shut convincingly with no need for weather-stripping. Like most, my middle years were working years during which responsibilities and obligations left little room for possibilities. And in my middle years, my days marched with regularity inside the perimeter of these four walls.

Oh, but the earlier and later years! These years are a fairer House with numerous Windows. And there are superior Doors which, by their very nature, are open more than closed. This is a house that glimmers. This is a house of coming and going, of trying on and moving on. This is a fairer house, indeed.

Last week, I attended an event at my granddaughter’s school in which third graders researched and dressed up like famous figures. As I entered the gymnasium, I looked out upon a sea of possibilities, children who were living the lives of such men as Babe Ruth, Elvis Presley, and Albert Einstein and of such women as Rosa Parks, Indira Gandhi, and Annie Oakley–if only for a day. Gracyn stood along the north wall as Shirley Temple, her blond curls loosed by the April wind of two recesses.

Third grade houses are such fair ones! At 8, becoming the next Shirley Temple or Babe Ruth is not only possible, it is palpable. Just within your reach, a presence so tangible that you can see your life spread out before you, and it is glorious. Never mind that you can’t sing or hit a baseball. These are formalities, details to be swept out with the day’s dust. The doors are open, and you see yourself walking from possibilities into realities.

And if third grade houses are such fair ones, imagine the houses of preschoolers. Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland, admitted that Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. In this photo, Gracyn, as Alice, folds her arms against her chest as if to keep the possibilities from escaping. Her costume is merely the outside trapping of a heart whose windows and doors are magnificently flung open to impossible things of all shapes and sizes.

French poet and essayist Charles Baudelaire writes that Imagination is the queen of truth, and possibility is one of the regions of truth. She is positively akin to infinity. There is something akin to infinity when one lives in a fairer house. For seasons of my life, I remember how, in those minutes before sleep, I shaped and reshaped possibilities, creating stories into which I took on heroic roles of rescuing, creating, and inspiring.  And when I tired of one story, I tried on another and then another and yet another. From this springboard of infinite possibilities, I dove into magnificent dreams each night.

In my later years, I have found myself loosening the strictures of my formerly hard-kept house. As I wake many mornings–with the sun and not an alarm clock–it takes a few moments to realize that a bell will not ring every 45 minutes, that I won’t have to wolf down a meager lunch in 19 minutes, that I won’t have to plan bathroom breaks, and that I won’t haul a laundry basket of student essays home for grading. But when I do, a day of possibilities stretches out before me. I could take a walk along the old highway and stop to pet the horses in the small pasture off the south side of the road. I could read anything I want and for as long as I want. I could call my mom on the phone in the middle of the day. I could start a home project and finish it. Or not. I could wander the mall in search of something or nothing. English novelist, George Eliot, claims that the world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome, dubious eggs, called possibilities. Oh the handsome, dubious eggs called possibilities of these years! I may not have been able to imagine them in my middle years, but they are real nonetheless.

Poet Wendell Berry writes:

A man cannot despair if he can imagine a better life, and if he can enact something of its possibility. It is only when I am ensnarled in the meaningless ordeals and the ordeals of meaninglessness, of which our public and political life is now so productive, that I lose the awareness of something better, and feel the despair of having come to the dead end of possibility.

I am painfully aware that despair growls at the door of even the fairest houses. It comes in the shape of chlorine gas and fatherless children. It peers in the windows with sharp eyes of hunger. And we are tempted to pull our blackout curtains tightly to protect ourselves from the dead end of possibility. 

Still, there continue to be those who go about the business of building fairer houses. They can imagine better lives and see the glimmering possibilities of something better on the horizon. They choose infinity over dead ends, and they press on.

As I helped Gracyn out of her Shirley Temple dress and tucked a loose curl behind her ear, she said, “You know what I want to do when I grow up?” Sing, dance, star in movies like Shirley Temple, I thought? ” I want to start a slime-making company. I think this could really be big, don’t you?” From Shirley to slime in a single day. Such a fair, fair house of possibilities!

for Griffin, vicarious-living extraordinaire

Vicarious: experienced in the imagination through the feelings or actions of another person 

Each afternoon when Griffin gets home from preschool, he grabs his chaps, rodeo vest, spurs and cowboy hat and transforms from Iowa boy to Lane Frost. Lately, he’s even taken to wearing one glove on the hand he uses to hold the bull rope. This is a cool addition, I must admit, and has further authenticated his look. He already wears boots with any and every outfit. Jeans with boots, sweat pants with boots, shorts with boots–hey, even underwear with boots. Boots make the man, you know.

Griff has been living vicariously through Lane Frost (via the movie 8 Seconds) for the better part of a year. If they gave a lifetime achievement award for the one who has watched the most minutes of 8 Seconds, he would win hands down. But he doesn’t just watch the movie; he lives the movie. As Lane Frost is bounced, jerked, and ultimately thrown from the backs of various bulls, Griffin flails himself dramatically from his imaginary bull to the floor or ground. And then–and this is an extremely pregnant pause–he waits for one of us to say, “Lane, are you alright?”

He dusts the imaginary arena dust from his chaps, gives the traditional Lane Frost two-handed wave to the crowd, and says, “Yeah, I’m alright.” And then he repeats the entire scene again. And again and again. . .

If I were to bet today, I’d bet that Griffin will never see the back of a real bull. He talks a mean game and certainly has the rodeo garb to look the part, but in his words, “I’m afraid of getting stung” (his word for gored). Still, the tenacity of his vicarious bull-riding experiences moves me.

Author and humorist David Rakoff claims that there is nothing more cleansing or reassuring as a vicarious sadness. As a child, when the first notes of the television program Lassie filled our living room, I teared up. I loved Lassie, the beloved collie, Timmy, Ruth and Paul Martin, Doc Weaver, and Ranger Bob. And through the poignancy and sadness of each episode (which was resolved in the final moments, of course), I cried those cleansing tears of one who felt herself a genuine member of the Martin family. For those precious minutes of each weekly episode, I was emotionally transported into the Martins’ lives. And I loved it.

Canadian American businessman and engineer Elon Musk writes:

I think life on Earth must be about more than just solving problems. . . It’s got to be something inspiring, even if it is vicarious.

I’m all for inspiration through vicarious living. When I returned home from breaks during college, I was once again enveloped in an inspiring story that starred larger-than-life characters. The author and director? My brother, Chad. There was the Gilligan’s Island saga, starring Chad as Gilligan (naturally), my father as the Skipper, my mom as Lovey, and two of my sisters as Mary Ann and Ginger. Because there were no more “girl parts” for me, I was relegated as the Professor (I also was assigned the part of Sulu in the Star Trek days; I never scored a female role.) I watched my brother live vicariously through a host of characters, often dressing the part. One of my personal favorite roles was when he was Dr. David Banner/the Incredible Hulk. He wore a button-down shirt which he would quickly remove to reveal a T-shirt my mother had artfully ripped for him to simulate the effects of bursting chest muscles. This was vicarious living at its finest, and even with bit parts, I was blessed to be a part of it.

There may be a darker side to vicarious experience. Steven Pinker, a popular science author, writes:

We can make fun of hockey fans, but someone who enjoys Homer is indulging the same kind of vicarious bloodlust. 

Hockey fights, spectacular car crashes, ski runs gone wrong, Greek battles, Texas Chainsaw-type massacre scenes–there is vicarious bloodlust in these and so many other events. We love to live vicariously through disaster and horror. From the safety of the bleachers or our arm chairs, we gasp, we cover our faces (and peer out from our parted fingers), we shudder and utter the obligatory, “That’s so terrible!” And then, when the moment has passed or a commercial has interrupted the programming, we return to our popcorn and check our text messages. Such is the nature of vicarious bloodlust: these things are truly awful for others but, thankfully, not for us.

In his poem, “Out, out–“, Robert Frost tells the story of a young boy who is cutting wood with a group of men. Just as his sister arrives to call him home for supper, he cuts his hand so badly that the doctor is called to the scene. Frost concludes the poem here:

And consider the ultimate vicarious act. German theologian and Holocaust victim Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes:

A love that left people alone in their guilt would not have real people as its object. So, in vicarious responsibility for people, and in His love for real human beings, Jesus becomes the one burdened by guilt.

Christ acts with vicarious responsibility for us, taking on our guilt, our sin and sorrow. I might have lived vicariously through Mary in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, but when the film ended and the lights came up, I could begin the transition from Golgotha to my comfortable home in rural Iowa. Not so for Christ whose vicarious responsibility for his children and their sin is, indeed, the consummate vicarious act.

There is much to be said for vicarious experience. As for Griffin’s rodeo alter-ego, I’ll all for it for as long as it lasts. And when he grows weary of Lane Frost, I’m hoping there is another adventure waiting in the wings.

For Gracyn, soon to be 9 years old

The day before St. Patrick’s Day, Gracyn and Griffin came over to make leprechaun traps. We sat on the floor with two cardboard boxes, colored paper, tape, glue, leftover Easter basket grass, jewels (because jewels are always a positive addition to any project!), pom poms, and whatever else we could find in our craft cupboard. Thirty minutes later, they had created two authentic traps destined to lure any self-respecting leprechaun.

The next morning, however, Gracyn pulled me aside and said, “Grandma, my mom told me the real truth about leprechauns.”

“The real truth?” I probed.

“You know, about how leprechauns are just make-believe. That truth,” she explained.

In that second, I was transported back to my third grade year, the year I learned the “real truth” about Santa. I may have cringed visibly, but I hope it was just internal cringing, the cringing of a grandmother who loves a little-girl-soon-to-be-a-young-lady.

But she smiled and winked. Then I breathed again and ventured, “It’s fun to be the one in on the secret, the one who can make it special for Griffin, isn’t it?”

She nodded, and I could see that she was already thinking, imagining, planning what she would do with her brother’s leprechaun trap. The girl has a memory and mind like a steel trap, and she remembered that I had a small leprechaun gift tag that had been in the bottom of the craft drawer for several years. She told me to distract Griffin, and she headed to the basement–the dark basement, the basement she never enters on her own–to retrieve the leprechaun and hide it in her coat pocket.

When I visited their house the next day, Griffin ran out carrying the leprechaun that Gracyn had lovingly placed in his trap. “Look, Grandma! I got one!” he cried.

From the corner of my eye, I saw Gracyn beaming. In an instant, she had transitioned from leprechaun-getter to leprechaun-giver. In an instant, she looked less like a little girl and much more like a young lady. And in this instant, I felt the promise of a new season, which would undoubtedly prove to be just as lovely as the last.

In truth, I witnessed the first sprouts of this season several weeks earlier. Classroom queen for the week, Gracyn invited me to sit with her and two chosen friends for lunch. As we unpacked our lunches on the special table reserved for just such occasions, one of her friends began to tell me of all the pets she had. She had pets at her mom’s house, and–she said expectantly–reptilian pets of all sorts at her dad’s house. For ten minutes, she and the other friend regaled me with pet stories, each one more curious and spectacular than the last. All the while, Gracyn nibbled away at her sandwich and listened.

As the lunch period was coming to a close, Gracyn looked at her friend with the reptilian multitudes and said, “Tell my grandma about. . .”

And there it was: the tangible sprouts of transition. My sweet granddaughter deferred the entire lunch period to her friends, allowing them to take the throne that she, as classroom queen, was gifted for the day. As the other lunch tables began to empty and students lined up at the door, Gracyn smiled, gave me a quick hug, and said, “Thanks for coming, Grandma. See you tonight.”

Be still my heart! Such graciousness, such magnanimity, such guileless generosity. This was the sprout that would soon blossom in a single act on St. Patrick’s Day.

Dr. Elisabet Sahtouris, biologist, speaker, and consultant, writes:

Caterpillars chew their way through ecosystems leaving a path of destruction as they get fatter and fatter. When they finally fall asleep and a chrysalis forms around them, tiny new imaginal cells, as biologists call them, begin to take form within their bodies. The caterpillar’s immune system fights these new cells as though they were foreign intruders, and only when they crop up in greater numbers and link themselves together are they strong enough to survive. Then the caterpillar’s immune system fails and its body dissolves into a nutritive soup which the new cells recycle into their developing butterfly. 

The caterpillar is a necessary stage but becomes unsustainable once its job is done. There is no point in being angry with it and there is no need to worry about defeating it. The task is to focus on building the butterfly, the success of which depends on powerful positive and creative efforts in all aspects of society and alliances built among those engaged in them.

Just as the caterpillar is a necessary stage but becomes unsustainable once its job is done, so is the necessary but unsustainable innocence of childhood. In a world of increasing darkness in which schools and shopping malls are no longer safe places, we might wish to sustain this innocence–if only for a few more years, a few more months.

But the task is to focus on building the butterfly, and the cells of the failing caterpillar give way to the nutritive soup from which the butterfly will emerge. I like to think of childhood as the nutritive soup from which adolescence and then adulthood will develop. And believing this, I can consider Gracyn’s fading childhood as a rich broth that is giving way–moment by moment–to something magnificently more hardy.

And if her transition wobbles on awkward legs for a time, I can take heart in the promise of coming attractions. During spring break of my sophomore year of college, I was at home one morning when a friend of my mother’s and her teenage daughter came for coffee. The woman asked my mom if she could take her daughter upstairs to see our wall of portraits. Actually, most of these were school pictures that ranged from kindergarten pictures to more professional senior photos. As the pair was coming down the stairs to rejoin us, I heard the mother say, “See Kim, I told you these girls were pretty homely in middle school. But they turned out just fine, didn’t they?”

And there you have it: the homeliness present in my sisters’ and my adolescent photos was living proof of the inevitable wobbling towards something more comely and less awkward, the caterpillar yet to become a butterfly. That our homeliness might also serve as the nutritive soup for another struggling adolescence makes our middle school “row of shame” quite bearable.

Author and journalist Teresa Tsalaky writes that Light precedes every transition. Whether at the end of a tunnel, through a crack in the door or the flash of an idea, it is always there, heralding a new beginning. As my granddaughter is about to turn 9 years old (how can it be?), I can celebrate the light of her childhood and anticipate the light that has already begun to herald a new beginning. 

There may be those who wish to expedite transitions, uneasy with their awkwardness and all too eager for what is to come. Not me. I’m all for a season of transitions, for I have smelled Gracyn’s first blossoms, and the fragrance is more alluring than I could have imagined.

Years ago, chalk in hand, I recall facing a class of high school students moments after I had written “grace under pressure” on the blackboard. I had assigned Ernest Hemingway’s short story, “The Undefeated,” and we were just beginning our discussion of Manuel Garcia, the protagonist. An aging, washed-up bullfighter, Garcia continues to beg his promoter, Retana, to find him work. Finally, Retana consents and finds him a fight for much less money than the younger, more promising bullfighters are earning. Garcia then pleads with a friend, Zurito, to “pic” for him (serve as a picador or horseman who uses a lance to help the bullfighter).

Looking on, a bullfighting critic writes that the bull Garcia draws is “all bone.” It takes Garcia five tries to stab the bull. Although he finally kills it, he is gored and rushed to the doctor for surgery. As Zurito looks down at his friend on the operating table, Retana hands him a pair of scissors. Hemingway writes:

That was it. They were going to cut off his coleta. They were going to cut off his pigtail.

Manuel sat up on the operating table. The doctor stepped back, angry. Someone grabbed him
and held him.

“You couldn’t do a thing like that, Manos,” he said. He heard suddenly, clearly, Zurito’s
voice.

“That’s all right,” Zurito said. “I won’t do it. I was joking.”

“I was going good,” Manuel said. “I didn’t have any luck. That was all.”

Common sense, age, and injury should all lead Garcia to the inevitable decision to quit bullfighting. Cutting off his coleta would symbolize an end to the bullfighting career that had defined–and continued to define–his life. Even as he approaches surgery, he insists that he “was going good” and that he can continue, that he must continue fighting.

In a profile titled “The Artist’s Reward” which appeared in the the New Yorker on November 30, 1929, author Dorothy Parker asked Hemingway: “Exactly what do you mean by ‘guts’?” And Hemingway replied: “I mean, grace under pressure.”

To some, Manuel Garcia is a foolish old man who clings to a romantic notion that he can continue to fight bulls; to others, like Hemingway, he is “grace under pressure.” That is, he refuses to meet defeat with fear or resignation. He will not let them cut off his coleta, which would signal utter defeat, and instead, insists that “he was going good” but didn’t “have any luck That was all.” Like Santiago from The Old Man and the Sea, Francis Macomber from “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” Lieutenant Frederic Henry from A Farewell to Arms, and many other Hemingway heroes, Garcia has a special kind of “guts” which literary critics attribute to many Hemingway “code heroes”.

Until recently, I had never heard of John Woodruff, the 800 yard runner who took gold at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Like most, I had read about Jesse Owens and had marveled at his accomplishments as both athlete and individual. But Woodruff? I can’t recall ever even hearing his name.

Unusually tall for a middle distance runner, at 6 ft. 3 inches, John Woodruff had earned the nickname “Long John.” Although he had college running experience, he had little international experience prior to the Olympics. The grandson of former Virginia slaves and a star high school football player, he quit football because his mother insisted that the practices were interfering with his chores at home. Later, he dropped out of school at 16 to seek employment. During the Depression, however, work was scarce, particularly for African Americans, so he returned to school.

Woodruff joined the track team whose practices ended early enough for him to complete his chores, and his mother gave her blessing. After success at the high school level, he attended the University of Pittsburgh. During his freshman year (1936), he placed second at the National AAU Track Meet and first at the Olympic trials. In spite of his age and inexperience, his impressive times made him a favorite for an Olympic medal.

During the first 300 yards of the Olympic 800 finals, an inexperienced Woodruff found himself boxed in by more experienced runners. He understood that if he broke free from this box, he may foul other runners and risk disqualification. And so he committed what the New York Herald-Tribune called the “most daring move seen on a track.” Woodruff explained that he “stopped and moved over onto the third lane of the track. I let my opponents pass me by, and then I started the race all over again.”

In a New York Times article describing the race, we read:

“I didn’t panic,” he [Woodruff] said. “I just figured if I had only one opportunity to win, this was it. I’ve heard people say that I slowed down or almost stopped. I didn’t almost stop. I stopped, and everyone else ran around me.”

He didn’t panic. He literally stopped and restarted his entire race. With 500 yards to go, he took off again from a dead stop. Refusing to panic or to give up and setting his sites on winning? Indeed, these are the traits of one who exhibits grace under pressure. If Woodruff were a literary character, he would certainly find himself among the ranks of the finest Hemingway code heroes.

It goes without saying that running at an Olympic 800 pace is a feat by itself. But stopping, restarting, and then exceeding your previous Olympic pace? I have no words for this.

Woodruff’s incredible story has made me wonder why I had never heard of him. Having scratched twice, sprinter and long-jumper Jesse Owens nearly didn’t even place in the long jump during this same Olympics. But with advice from his German opponent, Lutz Long, Owens not only successfully completed his final jump but won the gold medal. An African American winner of four Olympic gold medals, Owens could also be considered an authentic example of grace under pressure.

But what of Woodruff’s gold and his story? Owens’ accomplishments continue to shine, but Woodruff and his accomplishments have been seemingly lost.

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about Woodruff’s bold decision to simply stop, to move aside, and then to start again. When we consider courage, we most often think of one who acts and continues to act–not one who stops and steps aside. Hemingway’s code heroes persevere. If Manuel Garcia had not been gored, he would have finished his fight and urged his promoter to schedule the next. For most Hemingway heroes, there is really no stopping or moving aside.

But what if, in certain circumstances, true grace under pressure may require more than forging ahead? What if it asks us to stop whatever we are doing, to let others move ahead, and then to start again?

Twenty minutes into a high school English lesson, I realized that I was wobbling and then (gasp!) teetering on the edge of instructional disaster. The lesson I had planned, the one that had seemed so right and destined for success, was moments away from utter failure. Students were lost, and I was floundering. This was not my first brush with classroom disaster. I had found myself on this very precipice countless times before, and I had soldiered on. Some may have called this courage. This forging ahead in the face of imminent disaster. This persistence that fueled that final 25 minutes. This refusal to quit talking, as if I could talk my way out of confusion. Two paths had diverged in the instructional woods, and I had not only taken the one less traveled, I had taken one that no one would ever travel!

But on this particular day, I stopped the lesson. I looked up from my text book and said, “I’m really sorry. What I had planned seemed like such a good idea, but now I can see that you’re hopelessly confused. And to be honest, so I am. We are just going to stop and forget this whole lesson. Instead, we’re going to look at . . .” What I had chosen to study next has escaped me. But I did a John Woodruff. I stopped, let others catch their breath, and then I started again. In short, on this day under these circumstances, the most courageous thing to do was to stop and begin again. Ironically, this may have been one of my finer moments as a teacher, a moment of true grace under pressure.

Sadly, how many other times in the face of impending failure have I just kept going, desperately trying to keep my head above water and–at the very least–to save face? And how many times have I believed these acts to be courageous? Too many, I’m afraid.

I’m not too old to take a valuable lesson from John Woodruff. Honestly, once my momentum is going–in whatever I am doing–it’s hard to slow down, let alone stop. But Woodruff instinctively knew that, if he had a chance to succeed, he must stop. It’s also worth noting that he could have pushed his way out of the box, hoping that officials wouldn’t see the contact. I fear that there are far too many athletes who bullishly push forward regardless of the potential consequences.

John Woodruff was a class act. He played by the rules, he gave his fellow athletes the courtesy he believed they deserved, he restarted his race, and he won. If this is not grace under pressure, I don’t know what is.

Last fall, Amy L. Wax, Robert Mundheim Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and Larry Alexander of the University of San Diego Law School co-authored an op-ed entitled “Paying the Price for the Breakdown of the Country’s Bourgeois Culture” [The Philadelphia Inquirer, August 9, 2017]. In their op-ed, they had the audacity to identify and endorse behavioral norms that were collectively endorsed between the end of WWII and the mid-1960s:

Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.

They went on to argue that these norms “defined a concept of adult responsibility that was a major contributor to the productivity, educational gains, and social coherence of that period.” Immediately after publication, a fire storm ensued. There were letters, petitions, and proclamations from both students and staff at the University of Pennsylvania Law School denouncing Wax’s position as” racist, white supremacist, hate speech, hetereopatriarchial,  xenophobic, etc.” There were demands for her resignation from committees and removal from the classroom. In addition, law students were invited to monitor Wax and to report any “stereotyping and bias” they might experience or perceive to be present.

Finally, in an open letter to the Daily Pennsylvanian, 33 of her colleagues condemned the op-ed and a subsequent interview she gave to the school newspaper. In this letter, her colleagues rejected all of her views and charged her with “sin of praising the 1950s—a decade when racial discrimination was openly practiced and opportunities for women were limited.” Her colleagues offered no counter arguments, no substantive reasoning or explanation as to the error of Wax’s and Alexander’s views.

In a speech delivered on December 12, 2017 at Hillsdale College’s Allan P Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D. C., Wax said:

I do not agree with the contention that because a past era is marked by benighted attitudes and practices—attitudes and practices we had acknowledged in our op-ed!—it has nothing to teach us. 

Wax continued:

The reactions to this piece raise the question of how orthodox opinions should be dealt with in academia—and in American society. It is well documented that American universities today, more than ever before, are dominated by academics on the left end of the political spectrum. How should these academics handle opinions that depart, even quite sharply, from their ‘politically correct’ views? The proper response would be to engage in reasoned debate—to attempt to explain, using logic, evidence, facts, and substantive arguments, why those are opinions are wrong. This kind of civil discourse is obviously important at law schools like mine, because law schools are dedicated to teaching students how to think about and argue all sides of question. But academic institutions in general should also be places where people are free to think and reasons about important questions that affect our society and our way of life—something not possible in today’s atmosphere of enforced orthodoxy.

Enforced orthodoxy? Now, that’s a mouthful. And it is perhaps one of the most terrifying academic, political, and social forces today.

Twenty five years ago, I stood outside my community college classroom as my Advanced Composition students exited for the night. As I turned to make my way down the hall to my office, a student stopped me. “I want to ask you what you believe, what your views are,” he said. “What I believe? About what?” I asked. “About anything and everything. I just need to know because I am NOT taking this class again.” His eyes flashed with anger.

I asked him what had happened that had made him so angry and fearful that he would fail and have to repeat this class. He explained that his experience at another university had jaded him and that he simply couldn’t afford to repeat classes. I probed further. “You failed composition? Tell me about that.”

And he did, recounting his research paper in which he argued that military women should not hold combat positions. He explained that he received an F for the paper, which counted for most of his grade. “Let me guess,” I queried, “was your instructor female?” “Why yes,” he said. “And was she a self-professed feminist?” I asked. “Why, yes again,” he said, “how did you know?”

How did I know? Because I had encountered far too many students like him who had not survived professors who held tightly to such enforced orthodoxies.

In deference to another composition instructor and with the knowledge that there are many factors that contribute to a failing grade, I asked a final question, “Did you receive any comments on your writing, any suggestions for improvement?” He looked me squarely in the eyes and said, “Just one: This position is unacceptable.” I attempted to reassure him that I would evaluate him based on the strength of his argument and his supporting evidence, that what I personally believed would not color my assessment of his work, but I could see that he was skeptical, at best, and unconvinced, at worst.

His instructor taught and evaluated according to a code of enforced orthodoxy: there is one acceptable, established, and passing position. Other conflicting positions were wholly unacceptable, regardless of the strength of their logic and evidence.

Like Wax’s 33 colleagues who instructed students to report her heresies, this instructor may have believed that she was protecting her students from harmful, false positions. But Wax contends–and I agree–that “Students need the opposite of protection from diverse arguments and points of view. They need exposure to them. This exposure will teach them how to think” and that “Democracy thrives on talk and debate, and it is not for the faint of heart. . . We should be teaching our young people to get used to these things, but instead we are teaching them the opposite.”

Enforced orthodoxy shuts down debate. It excludes and shuns unorthodox ideas. Its persistent attempts to protect individuals from all that is incorrect are tragically undemocratic and even more tragically unethical. We are so weak, so faint of heart these days that we demand safe spaces and cry foul at the first hint of something or someone we may not like. In truth, we are simply not in shape to face encounters with positions contrary to our own. Given few opportunities to practice such confrontations, we are flabby, unskilled, and destined to hang out in the locker room with like-minded folks. Only the fit will cry, “Put me in, coach!” Sadly, the unfit grossly outnumber the fit in college classrooms, in politics, and in general society.

In her closing words, Wax offers a stern warning:

Disliking, avoiding, and shunning people who don’t share our politics is not good for our country. . . It’s possible that people we disagree with have something to offer, something to contribute, something to teach us. We ignore this peril.

Civil discourse, reasoned debates, substantive arguments? Listening to and learning from those with whom we disagree? Aren’t these precisely the types of opportunities that we should expect institutions of higher education and governments to offer their students and citizens? In a season of enforced orthodoxy, however, these opportunities are increasingly rare. Finally, enforced orthodoxy threatens freedom, and this threat, above all, is one that we should not ignore.