I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

from “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost

I am a child of metaphor, born from magic and genetic instinct so strong that it shatters the literal, sending shards of otherness into living space. And each shard is a sacred facet which holds its own, offering a way to grace, a path beyond the thing into a nether world of possibilities. This knocks my socks off every time.

American author Bernard Malamud writes: I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. The Sanctuary of Metaphor is a bountiful one in which one can feed the multitudes with a single loaf. Not just choosing between two roads in the woods but taking the one less traveled by, choosing a life path that has made all the difference. [“The Road Not Taken,” Robert Frost] Not just fog but yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes. [“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” T. S. Eliot] Not just faces in the crowd but petals on a wet, black bough. [“In the Station of the Metro,” Ezra Pound] Not just the hands of a man and a woman but their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark. [Rabbit Run, John Updike] Two loaves where there seems to be one. 

As a child, my play was grounded in metaphor. Nothing was ever as it was, as it seemed. Narratives spun naturally from rocks-turned-precious gems, boxes-turned-doll palaces, a single piece of rope-turned-tourniquet-for-battle wounds. Some may call it make-do-ness, but I prefer to think it was more magic than utility.

One particularly muddy morning in the park as I was working with a group of preschoolers in a city-sponsored program, I had to tell the kids that we couldn’t take the balls or jump ropes out that day. When they whined, I offered up a solution: We could pretend that the merry-go-round is our spaceship. Thirteen preschoolers said nothing but their faces said everything. You’re crazy, lady. There’s no spaceship here. I persisted: But we can pretend this is our spaceship. Still, no takers. So, I jumped aboard the merry-go-round and called out: We have to take off in two minutes! Two minutes until the storm hits! Let’s go everyone–take your places. Hurry! And that was all it took to double the loaf we had been dealt that muddy morning. We rode that merry-go-round-turned-spaceship until snack time, when I led a then reluctant and sweaty group of three and four-year olds to the shade for Kool-aid and graham crackers.

The metaphor is perhaps one of man’s most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him. [Jose Ortega y Gasset, Spanish philosopher and statesman]

I do believe that metaphor is one of man’s most fruitful potentialities. It is, indeed, a tool for creation that transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary, the literal into the symbolic, the concrete into the abstract. There is little more magical than this transformation in a world gone soft from those who continually attempt to rescue us from all that is difficult. Well-intentioned as these folks may be, they are no lovers of metaphor.

The magic of metaphor requires investment, a willingness to see a thing for what it is and what it may be, to work with the writer or speaker to uncover the intended meaning. Metaphor asks for a willing suspension of disbelief: It is a field of lavender, but what else? What more? Seated before the magician, we wait expectantly for the rabbit to be pulled from the hat. We invest ourselves in the act. We hold fast to the truth of metaphor: one loaf will become two right before our very eyes. And when it does, there is no applause greater, no celebration more pure than that born of metaphorical magic.

Aristotle writes that The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor; it is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in the dissimilar. In his essay, “Education by Poetry,” Robert Frost claims that metaphor is all there is of thinking. It may not seem far for the mind to go, but it is the mind’s furthest. The richest accumulation of the ages is the noble metaphors we have rolled up.

To relish noble metaphors, to apprentice ourselves to the masters of metaphor, to train for the mind’s furthest–this is truly all there is of thinking. With apologies (somewhat sincere apologies) to ACT, SAT, and any other standardized intelligence tests, there should be but one true test for matriculation: that students successfully read, understand, and elaborate upon a noble metaphor. Give them a great poem, a literary or philosophical passage, and charge them with going the distance, probing and performing their magic on a thing until it becomes the intended other. Frost called this process ulteriority: saying (or seeing) one thing in terms of another. Ulteriority is not for sissies, and it literally separates the men from the boys, the women from the girls. It is more than sufficient to discern the genuine graduate from the pretentious pretender.

Writer Joseph Campbell says that If you want to change the world, change the metaphor. And just what metaphors will we change? America was once a melting pot that became a salad bowl. Finding these metaphors lacking, some argue that we must change the metaphor now. To what? Only time and the multicultural lobby will tell. But as Campbell claims, this metaphor will undoubtedly change the world.

And as much as I love a great metaphor, I admit to also loving really horrible ones. Like these that came from the Washington Post Style Invitational Bad Simile and Metaphor Contest:

1. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.
2. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just
   before it throws up.
3. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry
   them in hot grease.
4. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant, and she was the East
   River.
5. McMurphy fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.
6. It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it to the wall.
7. She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs.
8. He hung from his arms like a piñata, and Mary was the birthday-boy with the stick.

These student writers may not be ready to matriculate with their peers, but oh there is a place for them in this world! Metaphors-gone-wrong have sustained me through many lonely hours of paper-grading. Alone, after everyone else had gone to bed–or retired to more entertaining things–I laughed long and loud and, for years, kept a notebook of the hall-of-famers. What more can you say to a student who has just given you hailstones that leap like maggots when you fry them in hot grease but thank you! From the bottom of my heart, THANK YOU!

Years ago when our church van broke down at noon in a small Nigerian town, we were told that it would be hours until someone could make the repairs, and we could be on our way. When others saw defeat, I instinctively saw opportunity. I tore a single sheet of paper from my notebook, and muscle memory took over as my fingers folded, creased, and folded until an ordinary piece of paper became a sleek aircraft. I could feed the 5,000 (actually more like 25) with this. For an hour, this paper airplane–made precisely the way my dad had taught me–transported all of us from the oppressive noonday sun and the tedium of nowhere to go and nothing to do. We traveled to places we had only seen in picture books, exotic places of fairy tales and dreams. Until a well-meaning Nigerian gentleman shooed the children away when he thought they had worn out their welcome.

You see, I have lived with and trained under a metaphor master, my dad. His paper airplane-making skills were only the tip of his craft, though. He taught my siblings and me to see the ordinary objects of our world in terms of something else and to use language well so that we might take others with us as we transformed one loaf into two. In his composition handbook, A Shape A Writer Can Contain, he writes:

Let’s say you want to write, or try to write, or are asked by your teacher to write. You sit there in your desk. Throughout your elementary school years, you have sawed, squared, and planed that oak which is the English sentence. And you have stored those sentences in your mind. But now you don’t know what to do with the lumber in your attic. What you need is a blueprint, some shape you can contain while you go on and inward with your thinking.

This metaphor has sustained me throughout my life–as a teacher and an individual. It has served me well when I desperately needed a shape to contain my wonderings and wanderings and when I strove to lead others who also needed such a shape. I have lived as a two-loaf person, blessed among single loafers.

How do you begin to measure the worth of such an apprenticeship? Honestly, I’m not sure that you can. But I am convicted that you must share the wealth by apprenticing others in metaphor. There will be those who turn their backs and hold their noses, preferring anything and everything literal and one-dimensional. And then there will be those rare ones whose astonishment in the presence of a great metaphor is reward enough for your efforts.

In the Sanctuary of Metaphor, I think it best to let Robert Frost to have the last word here:

       Unless you are at home in the metaphor … you are not safe anywhere.

As I was blow-drying my hair one morning about 15 years ago, my son Quinn appeared at the bathroom door–fully dressed, backpack in hand–and announced, You need to get going, Mom. Remember, you have a faculty meeting this morning. And he was right. I was running late, and I did, indeed, have an early morning meeting. But when did he change from son to personal assistant? When did he willingly turn off early morning cartoons, pack his own backpack, and wait on me?

Several years later, my husband and I sat in our car in the mall parking lot behind the Air Force Recruiting Office where a bus traveling to Lackland AFB in San Antonio was soon to depart. We watched as our daughter, Marinne–all 95 soaking-wet pounds of her–lugged her gear to the bus, boarded without looking back, and left us for basic training. When did she get such resolve, such courage, such fierce confidence? And when, weeks later, we attended her graduation ceremony and heard her address adults as ma’am and sir, saw her stand at solemn attention in dress blues, somehow taller and older than the girl we had known, I turned to my husband and said, When did she become this woman? 

It was shortly after this that I joined my daughter, Megan, in Switzerland for a short European vacation. She had just finished a semester of study abroad in Spain and flew to Zurich to meet me. From there, we rented a car and drove through the country to Geneva. Megan drove, Megan handled the money, Megan ordered the food, Megan led. And I followed. I recall a moment in which, childlike, I opened my hands to reveal a palmful of euros and said What do you need? And when she suggested that we tandem para-glide in the Alps? I followed her lead, and we leapt off an alp into brisk, Swiss air, strapped to two guides who (thankfully) were veteran gliders and appeared to have all limbs still intact and no visible scars. When did she become the mother and I, the child? When did the strong-willed child become the fully competent adult?

A few years later, my daughter, Collyn, gave birth to my first grandchild, Gracyn. I stood at her hospital bedside, heard the doctor deliver the news that Gracyn was breach, and he had just ordered a c-section. And I watched her fear give way to the sacrificing love of motherhood. When did my baby become a woman who would bear a baby? When did the girl I had taken care of become a caretaker herself?

The past years have been a progression of transference, each year, each event giving way to another watershed moment of child-becoming-adult, of those who-needed-cared-for becoming those-who-care-for. Such is the progression of time and the natural order of release. But oh, how the years have flown! All parents say this. And cliched as it is, it is nonetheless a bittersweet truth.

It is this handing over of care-taking and decision-making that both amazes and scares the living hell out of me, though. For I know there will be a time when I am wholly dependent upon my children to check up on me, drive me, care for me. And as grateful as I am for my four glorious caretakers, I also lament the inevitable final transfer from mother to child.

In a season of transference, I don’t think it is much about power but, rather, about purpose. When you are the mother-in-charge, you have a clear purpose that guides your every moment. You go to bed thinking (obsessing?) over the parenting decisions you made–or failed to make–and you mentally run over the calendar of events and appointments that you must not forget. Lest one of your children doesn’t get a fluoride treatment or you miss the Muffins with Mom event at school or someone’s PE clothes aren’t washed and packed for the next day. Your purpose is to stay on top of things. One step ahead of the game, always. You are needed to run your family, for most mothers understand that most fathers will fall into bed and, within seconds, snore their way into oblivion. No mental calendaring for then. No siree.

This season requires deliberate repurposing. When your daughter calls to ensure that you have told everyone about upcoming Christmas plans and when your son asks you to text him when you arrive at your destination (to make sure you made it in one piece!), you repurpose. You have raised responsible, caring young adults, and your new purpose is to celebrate this. Some may whine about being relegated back into a kind of childhood, but not you. You relish the transfer. You wear a coat of many colors: joy, comfort, peace. Look at my children, the responsible ones! See how they care for me! 

The season of transference begins when we are often too busy, too preoccupied with the daily grind to notice. But it begins and inches forward, the tortoise in our world of hares. Its slow and steady feet move imperceptibly, but they move. And on that day, in that moment in which you catch sight of the tortoise, you blink hard, and your breath catches.

In “Letters to My Daughters,” poet Judith Minty writes:

I give you this to take with you:
Nothing remains as it was. If you know this, you can
begin again, with pure joy in the uprooting.

In a season of transference, there is joy in the uprooting, for nothing remains as it was. In many ways, I am an uprooted woman. My children are grown, my life’s work retired, I need transplanting, to begin again.

If tomorrow brings some sun, I will separate the hostas that have overgrown their bed and transplant them under the lilac bush in a spot where grass doesn’t grow. In this season of transference, I’m looking for a spot where grass fails to grow, where I might plant my uprooted self for repurposing.

And I will take much solace in the fact that my children-turned-caretakers will see that I’m regularly mulched, watered, and fertilized. Indeed, one could do worse.

I used to imagine that my three sisters and I were living a real-life, Nebraska version of Little Women (except in our version, Beth lives to love and hang-out with her sisters for perpetuity). The March girls/the Welch girls . . . Jo, Meg, Amy and Beth/Shannon, Timaree, Erin and Kael . . . different place and different time, but sisters nonetheless.

As my father was dying this summer, my sisters and I were blessed to have shared his last days with my mother and countless visitors who came to sit, bedside, recounting their favorite memories, the lessons he taught them, those that made them who they were today.  My sisters and I tag-teamed, we used the gifts we had, gifts born from an exquisite blend of our mother and father. We stayed until we had to rejoin our own families for a time, leaving our parents in the watchful care of another sister–or two.

My sister Erin’s efficiency and expertise at nursing rivals seasoned RNs. While my father was in the hospital, Erin listened and took notes as  the doctors and nurses spoke or delivered care. She served as a conduit of information, delivered hourly updates through text messages,  and anchored us all in a semblance of order when our world was chaotically spinning out of control. And when my father came home with hospice care, it was Erin who stood, shoulder to shoulder with the nurses, watching how they changed sheets, cleaned his wounds, administered medications. I looked on in sore amazement, for I could not imagine how she had become so brave, so competent. One afternoon when she left to return home for a few days, leaving me as the sole sister, I could only think of the moment when my mother left after the birth of my first child. As my mom pulled away, I stood with my head pressed to the window and cried, Don’t leave me. I can’t do this by myself. As Erin drove off, my hands turned cold, and it was all I could do not to run after her car, to beg her to stay for one more day until I could learn from the master.

My sister, Timaree, can plan and multi-task with the pros. Like my mother, she can see out for days and weeks to come, anticipating what needs to be done. Even though I am the oldest sister, as children, I learned early that Timaree was the one to speak to sales clerks, to make phone calls, to lead. Content to follow, I stood behind her as she shouldered her way through conflicts and situations that scared me spitless. Timaree ran our high school’s student council. Timaree choreographed our cheerleading and dance routines. Timaree led with a clarity and confidence that left me breathless. And, if the truth be told, envious. Author Louise Gluck writes that Of two sisters one is always the watcher, one the dancer. I was the church mouse who watched from her shadow, grateful–oh so grateful–to have this dancer’s shadow to rest in. So it did not surprise me that Timaree organized the meal after my father’s memorial service, and she weeded my parents’ backyard.

My youngest sister Kael and I shared more time together in the weeks that led to my father’s death. We sat in hospital waiting rooms together, ate supper in the hospital Subway (undoubtedly, the staff there knew our orders by heart), and later, spent days and nights in my parents’ home. Anyone who has met Kael is immediately drawn in by her hospitality. Everything about her says Come in. Stay awhile. She is the hostess with the mostest, able to greet and comfort those who came to our home with coffee cakes, casseroles, and tears. For the days I spent with her, she was my confidante. The one to whom I could voice my fears and grief. The one to whom I could unabashedly laugh and cry without fear of judgment. Daily, she comforted others, and as she did, I felt strangely warmed in a peace that truly passes all understanding.

Together we were better. I don’t think the March sisters have anything on my sisters. I have seen the power of their gifts and felt the grace of their presence, and I cannot imagine a life without my sisters.

They have given me stories that have delighted students in three states. Ask any of my students if they recall the turtle story, and I’d bet that they could retell it in glorious detail.

When my sister, Timaree, and I were 5 and 7, we begged my mom to let us get two small painted turtles at the local dimestore. In a moment of certain weakness, my mom consented, and we came home with two turtles–one red, one blue–a plastic turtle bowl with a fake palm tree, and a box of turtle food. Life was good. Until the day my turtle disappeared.

Convinced that Timaree was playing a trick on me, I marched down the stairs and into the kitchen where my mom was washing dishes and my visiting Grammie was drinking her tea. I confronted her, adamant that she return my turtle to the bowl before he dried out and died. What happened next lives on in infamy.

Behind me, three-year-old Erin entered the kitchen. Grammie shrieked, throwing her toast skyward. My mom gasped. And I turned to see one tiny, green turtle foot dangling from Erin’s bottom lip. I screamed. Erin screamed, and her mouth stretched and gaped, revealing her tonsils–and my turtle who lay prone, lifeless across her tongue.

You killed him! You ate my turtle! Gagging, Grammie turned away. My mom stepped away from the sink and demanded, Spit it out. Here in my hand, right now. And there it was: a motionless, blue-shelled turtle in my mom’s palm.

Later, my dad said that Erin’s system must have been lacking something to make her want to eat a turtle. Too young for sarcasm, I believed him and told Timaree to stand guard over the remaining turtle, lest he meet a similar fate.

My sisters and I donned high heels that my Aunt Susie had worn in the Miss America pageant and strolled the sidewalk leading to our house like a grand runway. We judged each other on how well we walked in high heels, in how elegantly we could turn, throwing our heads around in beauty pageant splendor. Our little girl feet stuffed into the pointy toes of high heels, we clomped our way into imagined glory.

We rode stick horses in packs around the neighborhood, we transformed wooden crates that my dad gifted to us into circus elephants and stallions. We organized neighborhood missions–elaborately planned and mapped on large pieces of newsprint over Kool-Aid and graham crackers in the McDaniel boys’ garage. Never mind that we didn’t really intend to carry out these missions. It was all in the planning, the Kool-Aid mustaches, and the furtive glances at the two cutest boys we had ever seen. It was all about sisters together.

The girls across the street told us that we should never roller skate over a section of sidewalk that had buckled, creating a kind of ramp that sent up momentarily airborne. They claimed that fires from the pit of hell had erupted, breaking the cement and creating a hole straight to damnation. They warned us that one false step, and the Devil would get us. And so, my sisters and I skated right up to this spot, exited the sidewalk and inched our skates through the grass and around the hole, and resumed skating. For years, we were bound in a shared conviction that we could escape hell if only we skated and biked with caution.

I would be lying if I didn’t admit that, like most siblings, we often annoyed each other, took advantage of each other, even tortured each other. We borrowed clothes that we didn’t return and that ended up in heaps in our closets on the very day that our sister had to have them. We offered to pay a younger sister to retrieve our Barbies from the basement (because it was the basement and it was scary), and later reneged on our promises. Because we never had any money, and after all, this was the role of an older sister and the lot of a younger sister. We haggled and re-haggled over who got to use the car. Around the supper table, we disagreed, argued our views, and sometimes left the room in disgust.

Still, we marveled at each other’s words and deeds, at the choices that, secretly, we could never see ourselves making but that were perfect for our sister. A thrift-store aficionado, Kael put together outfits that often took our collective breath away. We whispered to each other and to our mother, She is NOT going to wear that to school, is she? But when she did, and when her classmates not only accepted her attire but emulated it, our fears were silenced. When Erin took a job as a Girl Scout camp counselor in Pennsylvania (clear across the country! in another state!), I admired her courage and conviction. And when she came home, every inch of her body ravaged by weeks of mosquito bites, I could honestly admit that I could never have done what she did. When Timaree sang in our college swing choir, she never failed to raise the hairs on the back of my neck. I longed to open my own mouth and hear the clear soprano voice of my sister burst forth. And I longed to dance with the ease and innate grace that she did. When she sang and danced, time stopped for me.

In her novel, Beloved, Toni Morrison describes the interactions between sisters as sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be. Oh yes, I’ll take me some sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings from the sisters I am blessed to know as friends. Double-size my portion, please. No triple-size it. You don’t have to count calories when it comes to sister-size portions.

As shining and splendid as sisterhood is in childhood, it is that much and more in adulthood. In her New York Times Notable Book, The Dazzle of Day, Molly Gloss writes:

You know how it is between sisters in their middle age? that old old friendship, how loose-fitting it is? the comfort and safety in it? how you can let silence lie between you without it taking on any weight? how you can let words out of your mouth without wariness or precision because you know your sister will listen to what’s worthwhile and let the rest fall out of her ears into the air? how you can be surly, unreasonable, stupid, in the certainty of her grace?

What could really be better than loose-fitting friendship between sisters, like a much-loved pair of sweat pants (because jeans, with all their zippers and buttons, are unforgiving for those with middle-aged apple shapes)? What could be more satisfying than letting silence lie between you without it taking on any weight? In real-life, where we must be eloquent and articulate, filling the space between others with something reasonable and meaningful, the silence between sisters is a gift of inestimable worth. Who but a sister can let the worthwhile stuff sink in and let the stupid stuff simply blow away like the insignificant chaff it is?

And where else can you rest in the certainty of grace but in the presence of your sisters?

So here’s to my sisters who have made and who continue to make me a better human being. We are better together, and for this, I could not be more grateful.

For years when my son, Quinn, was a boy, I drove with the raucous sounds of battling from the backseat. Ninja Turtles, Power Rangers, Transformers, action figures come-to-life in the hands of a little boy. For years my backseat was strewn with the casualties of battles won and lost, fought and refought during those 11 miles to school and back. And for years, under every sofa cushion, every end table and bed, there were homemade creatures carefully constructed of computer paper, folded sharply into killing points, and stapled excessively to withstand active combat. Such is the life with a little boy. Such is the life.

One day, after having failed to draw my students into Macbeth’s world, I grabbed a handful of Power Rangers from the backseat, smuggled them into the high school in my book bag, and reenacted the death of Banquo and his son for every class. I knew the sounds to make to enhance the performance; I’d been hearing them for years. And never mind that the Power Rangers were not dressed appropriately. They filled the bill quite nicely, and even today, students proclaim that this was one of the best days ever. At least it was one of the most weirdly unique. But such is the life of a mother of little boys who learns to use what speaks to other little boys (and girls).

Today, my little boy has a man-sized body, but his heart still beats boy. Last summer as I was cleaning his bedroom (because boys do NOT clean), I found a paper creature, points intact, under his bed. Had this survived the years between boyhood and college? Had he, perhaps, made this recently, secretly battling in the depths of his basement bedroom? Or had he stashed it there, unwilling to part with this vestige of boyhood, of kingdom-saving battles that were neither escapes from real life or foolish fantasies but life itself?

And today, as my grandson, Griffin, makes the 50 yard trek from his house to ours, he rarely comes empty-handed. A tractor, an action figure, an engine or four-wheeler, he comes bearing the treasures of boyhood. Sometimes we play with them, and other times it’s enough that they have made the trip and rest snuggly in his pockets. Just in case a boy needs his stuff.

These days, he yanks his coat off, dropping it where it falls, and says, Can we get the monsters out? The monsters are the action figures that have survived Quinn’s childhood and have been stowed in a Rubbermaid container in the closet, just waiting for the next little boy who will battle again. Dinosaur-like creatures, one surviving Ninja Turtle, three Power Ranger evil creatures, a kangaroo-looking ninja master of sorts, and random pieces of Transformers lie before us with shiny promise. What guy to choose? What battles to fight? 

And when the battle noises begin, I feel strangely at home once more, comforted by the growls and gasps, the staccato strikes of weaponed arms on the floor–or furniture–and the melodramatic sighs of death and defeat. In those moments, I am transported to my son’s childhood, when his life spread gloriously before him–and after me.

But my boys are not all boasting and battling. Beneath their warrior exteriors lie hearts that often take my breath away. When Quinn was 7 or 8, we spotted a dead doe on the shoulder of the road as we pulled from our drive onto the highway. The battle noises stopped. And then he said, Someone should do something about that. I glanced in the rear view mirror to see that his hands were strangely folded in his lap, his eyes colored with concern. I think you should call the governor, Mom. This just isn’t right–that poor deer. It’s dead, and you should do something. 

When I explained that the governor really couldn’t do anything about deer that had been accidentally killed on our highway, that the driver didn’t intend to hurt the deer, and that we would, undoubtedly, see more dead deer on our drives to and from school, his stoicism unnerved me. There were no more Power Ranger battles that day, and we rode in silence the remaining 10 miles. Pulling up to his school, he shouldered his backpack–along with his heavy heart–and made his way across the parking lot to join his classmates who had lined up by the school door. I watched him carry this weight and felt my own heart break for the death and loss he would continue to shoulder with age.

Last week, I bumped into my daughter, son-in-law, Gracyn, and Griffin in the grocery store. If you could bottle the gleeful reactions of my grandchildren upon seeing me, I would buy it. Lots of it. Gracyn immediately asked if she could ride home with me. This was dangerous business–taking one without the other. Her mother consented, and we made a quick, quiet get-away before Griffin could really take stock of what was happening. About 20 minutes after we had unloaded the groceries and were preparing to make homemade slime, my daughter called.

Griffin was beside himself. First he asked if Sissy would come back to life, convinced that her disappearance meant death. Later, as they buckled him into his carseat, his anguish mounted and he cried, My Gracyn is lost in there! We are leaving her! Having moved from death to loss, his grief was palpable. His Gracyn was gone. My daughter called, on speaker, so that Griffin could hear his sister’s voice. Not convinced, I said Bring him over when you get back, so he can see that she’s o.k. and hanging out with Grandma. 

Ten minutes later, he burst into the front door, leaving it open while he kicked wildly at his boots to remove them. One arm freed from his coat, the other still constrained, he stomped up the steps, made his way to the kitchen and looked. There was his Gracyn, seated at the island in the throes of making homemade slime, her hands in blue goo and the surfaces around littered with empty glue bottles, a shaving cream can, a box of food coloring, and assorted measuring cups. See, I’m here, Buddy. I’m not lost, Gracyn reassured him as she plunged her fingers in and out of the slime. Worry drained from his 3-year face, and he turned his attention to other matters, like who got to squirt the next dose of shaving cream into the bowl.

As my boy prepares to leave and begin a new life in a new community as the teacher and coach he has trained to be, there are too many moments when I mourn the passing time, my toyless backseat, and the stapler-I-can-always find-now. Yesterday in my entry way, my son’s size 12 Nike tennis shoes sat beside my grandson’s toddler boots. Boy shoes. Wonderful boy shoes with all their mud and stink and scuffs. Oh, that there would always be boy shoes that litter my entry way!

In The Giving Tree, Shel Silverstein writes: . . .and she loved a little boy very very much—even more than she loved herself. How I love these boys, how their battling and balling, their boisterous days and poignant moments have blessed my life.

They will leave, these boys, having grown into fine men. And I will take heart in the knowledge that, as Neil Postman writes, they are living messages we send to a time we will not see. [The Disappearance of Childhood, 1982]

Indeed, Quinn and Griffin will take grand living messages into this world and a world I will never see. But I’m keeping some boyhood with me in a Rubbermaid container on the shelf in my closet. And from time to time, I may take it down, open it up, and listen to the battle sounds of boyhood, released from captivity, once again

Photography compliments of Collyn Ware, wonderful mother of Griffin and sister to Quinn

I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Truthfully, if someone were to ask me what I am currently reading, I may not be able to tell them. In this season of retirement and many, many books, I empathize with Emerson who cannot remember the books he’s read any more than the meals he’s eaten. Even so, they have made me. 

In the car, I listen to a book on Audible. At night when my husband is sleeping–or trying to sleep–I read on my back-lit Kindle. And for all the other times, there are glorious books in print. On the floor beside my bed, on the bookshelf headboard, and blocking my view and reach to my alarm clock are stacks of books. Books arrive via Amazon too often to admit. Fiction, nonfiction, poetry–it’s all good. No, it’s all great.

One of my unspoken talents is that I am above average when it comes to vicarious living. My mom relates that I teared up within a few measures of the opening theme song to the television program Lassie. I anticipated the danger that Timmy would find himself in and the worry that would line the faces of his mother and father. Often, I mouthed the words of television characters, wholly unconscious of the fact that I had left my world and entered another. I cringed at the theme song for I Love Lucy. Intended to be funny, sitcoms threw me into fits of anxiety. Don’t do it, don’t say it, don’t do it, I would mutter under my breath. Immersed in these worlds, my muscles contracted and knotted for 30 agonizing minutes. Yes, I would say that my vicarious living is Oscar-worthy.

 Not only do I live vicariously through the characters in the books I read or listen to, I live vicariously through the imagined lives of their authors. In J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, his protagonist, Holden Caulfield says:

What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.

Like Holden, the intimacy I feel with the authors of great books makes me want to just call them up. Just to say how wonderful their works are, how these works have made me. Just to hear the voice of those who have birthed such marvelous characters and plots. For weeks after I finished Hillbilly Elegy, I searched for ways to directly contact J. D. Vance. I felt compelled to communicate with him, for his book profoundly moved me, and I genuinely wanted him to know. After reading Lilac Girls, I yearned to call Martha Hall Kelly. We would be friends, I just knew it. Around my kitchen table and over many cups of coffee, we would talk books–those we had read and loved and those we had yet to read.

Driving to and from town (and more times than I admit, sitting in my driveway), I listened to Camron Wright’s The Orphan Keeper and lived through 7-year-old Chellamuthu’s life as he was kidnapped from his small Indian village and then sold to the Lincoln Home for Homeless Children. Later adopted by American parents and growing up in Colorado, he longs to find his Indian family, to return to the home he can barely remember. When he is finally able to travel to India to search, I spent agonizing minutes as the car idled in parking lots or in my driveway, convinced that this next chapter would bring an end to his search and answers to his prayers. Ezra Pound writes that Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand. In the hours I listened to Chellamuthu’s story, I was intensely alive. In the moments before sleep, I could hear the Indian reader’s voice, a fourth dimension to Wright’s character development. The Orphan Keeper was a ball of light in my hand, a brilliant narrative orb that illuminated the places and people of another world.

My life, like most, is a relatively insulated one. I’ve been blessed to travel some, but the majority of my life has been spent in the Midwest, at home and at work. Generally speaking, my trials have been personal ones, particular to my life and circumstances. And from my insulated, singular perspective, I often fall prey to the kind of self-indulgence that blinds one to the world at large. And then I read a great book that humbles and silences me. American author James Baldwin wrote:

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.

When you realize that your heartbreak has lived and breathed in 17th century Spain, in the dusty streets of Kabul, through the blizzards of the Nebraskan frontier, through the foot-binding rituals of China, through the poverty of Appalachia or Southern India, through the helplessness of Nazi-occupied France and the sacrifices of the French Resistance, with invisible men and women, with mothers and fathers whose dreams for their children cling to faint breaths of hope, then you know that your loss has connected you with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive. Then you turn the last page of that book with reverence, for you feel the weight of each sacred and universal word.

I can still remember the fervor with which I talked books to my high school students. As I was reading a good book, I recounted scenes, shared characters, and read passages of perfectly-crafted dialogue or setting. I sold books with an unabashed passion. I lost myself in this selling and retelling, and occasionally found my students losing themselves as well. Truthfully, there were too many days during which I read when I should have been cooking supper or walking into school. Once, I actually walked into a parked car in the faculty parking lot. It was a particularly good chapter, and I really believed that I could walk and read at the same time.

In The Fault in Our Stars, John Green writes:

Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.

This is it me exactly. I become filled with this weird evangelical zeal, convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book. I babble, I foam at the mouth, I sigh and sing. If only the world would read this book and be healed.

These days, I don’t drive and wave to friends and family who pass by. I’m too busy listening to a good book. Hey, I’ve grown, though. I can now do two things at the same time: drive and listen. But don’t ask me to drive, listen, and wave. Three things at the same time are entirely too much for a reading retiree like me.

Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

from “A Blessing”, James Wright, Above the River: The Complete Poems

This is a season for blossoming, literal and metaphorical. Lilacs are budding, tulips have braved the uncertainty of March and burst forth in all their perennial splendor, and beneath the rotting leaves of last autumn, there are tiny green sprouts waiting for just the right sun.

As I watched my granddaughter at dance class last week, I witnessed another season of blossoming. No longer a child, she took her place in the line of 7-8 year old girls and danced. What I saw both delighted and pained me, though. A child would dance with abandon, all arms and legs, strands of hair pasted across a damp face, and eyes, like bright fish, darting wildly about the room. A child would not see the eyes upon her. A child would sing with the recorded music, losing herself in the familiar melody, safe among a cozy clutch of little girls.

But Gracyn is no longer a child. As the music began, I watched her begin to move. Small, subtle movements as she were a marionette whose strings were held much too tightly by the puppeteer. The arc of her movements restrained, she fixed her eyes ahead, casting furtive looks to the girls beside her now and then. The clipped rhythms of her classmates’ tap shoes echoed throughout the room, but hers were muted taps, the uncertain taps of adolescence that would soon descend upon her. When a classmate flapped with too much vigor sending one shoe arcing over her head and across the room, girls giggled. But she did not. I could almost hear her thoughts: Is it o.k. to laugh? What if she is embarrassed? What if this were me? What if this happens in the recital? What if. . .? 

Standing against the wall, I wanted to scoop her in my arms and say, throw your arms to the sky, laugh with your eyes, tap loudly enough to wake the dead. I wanted her to dance like we did when she was little, collapsing in a sweaty mess of glee. More than anything, I wanted to postpone the inevitable self-consciousness that would soon overcome her as she moved into adolescence.

Before I was a mother, I was moved by Ann Sexton’s poem, “Pain for a Daughter.” In this poem, she writes of her daughter’s obsessive love for horses, a love that drives her to the neighbor’s stable to care for their flaming horses and the swan-whipped thoroughbred. When a horse steps on her foot one day, she limps home, the tips of her toes ripped off like pieces of leather. In the final stanza, Sexton writes:

Blind with fear, she sits on the toilet,

her foot balanced over the washbasin

her father, hydrogen peroxide in hand,

performing the rites of the cleansing.

She bites on a towel, sucked in breath,

sucked in and arched against the pain,

her eyes glancing off me where

I stand at the door, eyes locked

on the ceiling, eyes of a stranger,

and then she cries. . .

Oh my God, help me!

Where a child would have cried Mama!

Where a child would have believed Mama!

she bit the towel and called on God

and I saw her life stretch out. . .

I saw her torn in childbirth,

and I saw her, in that moment,

in her own death and I knew that she

knew.

For a moment as I watched my granddaughter dance, her eyes locked on the wall in front of her, I felt as if I were looking into the eyes of a stranger. Like Sexton, I saw her life stretch out into adolescence and beyond. I saw the pain of first love and loss, the pain of self-doubt, the pain of childbirth and the ferocious, all-consuming love for a child. And I knew that she knew. Oh the brutality of such blossoming! In its tender beauty lie the thorns of adulthood.

Lately, I have watched how Gracyn cares for her brother. When she asked to have a sleepover at my house–precious time alone with grandma–she included Griffin. As they walk from their house to mine, she walks alongside him like a caretaker, urging him to stay the course and not become distracted by unusual pine cones or sticks that might be used as weapons. When he correctly identifies a letter of the alphabet, she looks on with a seasoned pride and says, Good job, Buddy! There is so much life beyond her life, and she is seeing it, feeling it,and knowing that it is her responsibility to affirm it. She is blossoming.

And when she feels the pain of another, I see her mother at about the same age. It was an unusually warm spring day, and the neighborhood kids were playing in the backyard as I cleaned the flower beds and prepared them for new mulch. Suddenly, my daughter was beside me, looking up intently as she said, What’s wrong, Mom? Are you o.k.? I said nothing, stunned momentarily, for I had no idea what had prompted her to ask. Until she said, You were making that face. And then I understood: the sun in my eyes, I was squinting and scowling as I raked and worked my trowel in the dirt. I’m fine, I reassured her, I just forgot my sunglasses, and I have to squint to keep my eyes open. She looked up at me dubiously, scanning my face for signs of distress, and then finding none, ran off to join her sisters and her friends. Such a small moment, but a blossoming, indeed. I saw her life stretch out before her and knew that she knew. 

And yet, there is joy in the blossoming and blushing. The little girl who would once stick a feather in her hair becomes a young lady who prefers dangling earrings. Full skirts and ruffles give way to printed leggings and tunics. And frenzied romps on the trampoline with your brother? Well, they only give way to more ladylike jumping when a friend is around.

But when she and her brother are alone, she is all arms and legs, all shrieks and giggles. In these moments, if she would step out of her body, she would surely break into blossom.

You do not have to die this certain day.
Death will abide, will pamper your postponement.
I assure you death will wait. Death has
a lot of time. Death can
attend to you tomorrow. Or next week. Death is
just down the street; is most obliging neighbor;
can meet you any moment.
You need not die today.
Stay here–through pout or pain or peskyness.
Stay here. See what the news is going to be tomorrow.
Graves grow no green that you can use.
Remember, green’s your color. You are Spring.

Gwendolyn Brooks

Remember, green’s your color. You are Spring. Are there more beautiful words for these March days? In spite of the occasional gray, the nagging reminder that death is just down the street, green is the color that washes the landscape in seasonal covenant. Green whispers I’m here. Look closely into the brown pout, through winter’s brittle pain and ragged peskyness. There you will see me in buds and blooms-that-promise-to-be.

In A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway writes:

When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself. 

I admit that I have been a skeptic lately, holding my breath during these days of what I fear is false spring. Having lived in the Midwest my entire life, I have seen spring come quickly and dissolve just as quickly into more winter . Still, I have given myself to days in which there are truly no problems except where to be happiest. And fortunately for me, I have two little people who live 50 yards from me who are as good as spring itself. After a dozen under-doggies on the tree swing and a few walks around the pond to search for frogs, we can proudly proclaim that green is our color, we are spring people.

Spring is less a noun than a verb, a progressive verb, a becoming thing. In his poem, “Spring is your time is my time is our time,” poet e. e. cummings feels the emerging season:

(all the merry little birds are
flying in the floating in the
very spirits singing in
are winging in the blossoming)

Flying, floating, singing, winging, and blossoming. Spring is, indeed, a splendid becoming thing.

Ranier Maria Rilke writes that when spring arrives, The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart. I like this. The lilacs near my front door remember the lyrical words of Whitman and Shelley. The crocus recite their haiku, which unfurl themselves, image by image. And the red and gold finches sing the refrains of their ancestors with softer rhythms and sunny rhymes. When you know the poems by heart, each line spills into the breeze just as it has and just as it will for springs to come.

I admit that I am a sucker for the pasteled aisles of little girls’ Easter hats, M & Ms that sport pinks and yellows and powder blues, Chick Days at the local Tractor Supply Store, and the scent of warm rain. The sky is never as blue as it is in the early days of spring. Not quite cornflower or cobalt, it defies description. And this is quite alright with me, for I am also a sucker for things that defy description.

I can’t say it any better than A. A. Milne:

She turned to the sunlight
    And shook her yellow head,
And whispered to her neighbor:
    “Winter is dead.”

from When We Were Very Young

So, take heart. Green is our color. Let’s shake our yellow heads, for we are spring, and winter is dead.

                         In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.                                      

Robert Frost

As much as some universities have valiantly tried to create safe spots to protect students from anything that might offend or disturb them, for those of us out here in the cheap seats of life, there are no such safe spots. We face a daily barrage of threats and doomsday calls. Cliches grow ominously and persistently larger than life:  The end is near; Live today for tomorrow you may die. We are all going to hell in a handbasket. 

In a handbasket? What does that really mean anyway? One theory on the expression’s origin is that it refers to the baskets used to catch the heads of those sentenced to death by guillotine. That conjures up some pretty frightening images, to be sure.

But the threats are not of a religious nature, in spite of the fact that “hell” is often waved frantically about, a wild flag of doom that hangs from a quivering pole of terror. No, the threats are largely political and social in nature, flooding the airwaves and computer screens with a force to be reckoned with.

We’ve had a shift in power, a change in administration, a new sheriff has come to town. The fact that this sheriff lacks the couth and posture of most former sheriffs is cause enough for many to simultaneously fear and rage, to wring their hands and cry, This is bad. This is very, very bad.

Here comes the disclaimer: I have cringed–and continue to cringe–at his unfiltered remarks and tweets, wondering why there can’t be a royal filterer. Someone, anyone, to monitor and curb the flow of communication that often has to be “walked back.” And I, too, pray for healthy restraint and heartfelt reflection.

And here is the second disclaimer: I do not deny nor diminish the genuine fear and anger that exists today. Change of this nature is traumatic for those whose sheriff is no longer in power. This has always been so, and will always be so. When we passionately believe in and support an idea, a person, a vision for the future, anything counter to or less than this is simply awful. And we grieve the loss of what could have–what should have–been.

Still,  for a time, I am willing to suspend my judgment and to quell my fear. For I am old enough to have seen that when pendulums swing far to one side, they invariably swing far to the other. From the structured spelling books of the early-mid 1900s to the invented spelling of the 1980s, from memorizing spelling words, consonant and vowel blends to spelling-as-I-hear it. From house to haws. Before the pendulum of spelling and language instruction had decisively swung far to the left, there were teachers who grabbed their spelling manuals and closeted them away in hidden places, safely secured from administrators who would sweep in to clear their schools of outdated materials and pedagogies.

Although we pay serious lip service to compromise and moderation, in reality, the pendulum rarely rests in the middle of anything for any period of time. We may wish it motionless, but oh how it moves! And when it does, there will be winners and losers–and some who remain stodgily indifferent until something directly affects them.

Both the Beatles and Robert Frost claim that though the pendulum swings as it will, life goes on. Frost even writes that everything he has learned about life can be summed up in these three words. In the midst of such a season of angst and anger, these simple words often sound condescending and trite. A bandaid on a gaping wound, the gangrene beneath festering, spreading, and threatening to destroy the organism.

And when a loved one dies or a family home burns down or one’s world is upturned forever? Tragically, there will be fatalists or pragmatists (or unfeeling idiots) who deliver the words Life goes on as if this truth will minister to the grieving. These are not the folks to suffer with another, for they will busy themselves with their own lives, which do, indeed, percolate with rhythmic regularity. (Until, of course, their world is upturned forever, and they need more than words to set it back on its axis.)

And when the Beatles sing their bubblegum melody, ob la di, ob lad da, life goes on? As catchy as the tune and lyrics are–certainly a snappy marching song for the likes of the Seven Dwarves–it is all but impossible to sing them as if we believe them. As if they are the words of life.

And in a sense, these are the words of life. It does go on, with or without us. So perhaps the question should be how should life go on?

 When a pendulum swings, this is the ten dollar question. I may not have a clear answer, but like most, I have answers that I believe are better than others. And I am well aware that my answers will contradict, trouble, and even outrage those who hold what they proclaim as better, truer, righter answers. So where does this leave us?

Pendulum swings bring out the best–and worst–of us. They illicit passions that bless and curse others. The excite and inspire some, while they stab others in the heart of all they hold dear.

I certainly don’t proclaim to have all the answers, but I do think that life goes on much better when we all step back and breathe. And while we’re breathing, we can remember how we felt when the pendulum had swung to the side that we didn’t endorse, that we most feared. As we remember our sense of loss and fear, we can sympathize with those who now feel much the same way. And for those who agonize over the current state of affairs? They, too, can remember that others once felt this way and suffered through this season.

It’s rare that universal sympathy of this sort would ever result in name-calling or threats or hell-in-a-handbasket cries. Sympathy more often paves the way for compassionate dialogue, a means of disagreeing humanely. Certainly, life goes on better when we disagree humanely.

We will disagree, and life will go on. It is my fervent prayer that it goes on with a larger dose of sympathy and compassion.

. . .we are each other’s

harvest:

we are each other’s

business:

we are each other’s

magnitude and bond.

from “Paul Robeson” by Gwendolyn Brooks

Godmothers are in the business of harvesting, of making others’ business theirs, of willingly becoming others’ magnitude and bond. Caroline Woolsey Ferriday was just such a godmother. And she made the business of the Ravensbruck rabbits both hers and the world’s.

There are letters in the archives at her family home in Connecticut addressed to Ma Chere Marainne or My Dear Godmother. Subjected to barbaric surgeries and sulfamide experimentation that left survivors horribly scarred and disabled,  female survivors (rabbits) from Ravensbruck looked to American heiress, Caroline Ferriday, as their dear friend, their benefactor, their godmother and savior.

Because the rabbits were Polish Catholics–and not Jews–their stories paled on the dark  stage of Jewish genocide. The post-war world was just beginning to comprehend that 6 million European Jews had been systematically killed, and the stories of 72 Catholic girls went largely unnoticed. That is, until Godmother Caroline Ferriday took up their cause.

Some may say that Ferriday was an unlikely godmother. Born into status and relative wealth, she was an only child who showed an early interest in the plight of others. To the dismay of others who generally viewed acting to be too risque for polite society , she took to the Broadway stage as an actress. Fluent in French, she left the stage to work as a volunteer in the New York French Consulate by the time Hitler had risen to power. Ferriday had a particular heart for French children who had been orphaned by the war. During the war, she worked tirelessly to raise funds and provide clothing and food for them.

After the war, she joined the ADIR, or National Association of Deportees and Internees of the Resistance,  a group founded by females who had served in the French resistance and who had survived German concentration camps. She was moved by the work and stories of ADIR members Jacqueline Péry D’Alincourt, Genevieve de Gaulle, Anise Postel-Vinay, and Germaine Tillon. All four women, political prisoners, had been imprisoned at Ravensbruck. Through her work with the ADIR and through relationships with Ravensbruck survivors, Ferriday learned that some of the special bonds created in the camp were in response to the plight of 72 prisoners referred to as the lapins or rabbits.

In 1958, Godmother Ferriday went to work. She contacted Norman Cousins, the editor of the Saturday Review, for she had learned of his work with the “Hiroshima Maidens”, a group of several scarred Japanese women brought to the United States for cosmetic surgery. She also met with Polish officials and worked to gain the trust of the Rabbits, so that she might arrange their trip to the U. S. for medical treatment. As a result of her advocacy, Cousins wrote a series of articles about the Rabbits for the Saturday Review, stories that struck deeply into American hearts and resolve for action. In one of these articles, Cousins writes of their trip to Poland:

Caroline Ferriday has an almost magical gift for inspiring confidence. Her first few days in Warsaw were not without their difficulties, but after awhile the project began to move. Then, at the end of the week, we received a cable saying that the Polish authorities were cooperative and gracious and that prospects were excellent.

An almost magical gift. That’s the stuff that many godmothers are made of, and Caroline Ferriday shouldered the mantle of justice with vigor. Unmarried and without children, she devoted herself to her charges, Polish women whose legs and souls were irreparably scarred.

By this time, only 53 Rabbits had survived, but 35 eventually traveled to the U.S. and spent an entire year–from December 1958 to December 1959–receiving medical treatment. Renamed the Ladies, the women were hosted in 12 cities across the country. Cousins wrote that the most remarkable change in the group as a whole . . . was in the emotional and psychological regeneration of the Ladies.

The best godmothers are healers of bodies and souls. Caroline Ferriday was a godmother extraordinaire. She opened her Connecticut home and her heart to the Ladies, who, in turn, opened their hearts and forged a bond that crossed social and national boundaries.

Soon after the Ladies toured the U.S. and even visited Congress, publicity and public support resulted in the German Embassy’s pledge to pay for the medical costs of 30 of the 35 who had traveled to America. In addition, they reported that the [German] Federal Government was thoroughly and urgently examining possibilities of further relief.

The world needs more godmothers. Not the plump, petticoated Disney type, but the nearly six foot tall Caroline Ferriday type. The humble type who, upon her death, would will the medals she had received, the Cross of Lorraine and the French Legion of Honor, to her Polish Ladies. Yes, the world needs more godmothers and godfathers, godsisters and godbrothers who will champion the interests of those whom the world has not seen.

Ultimately, godmothers know that the business of others, the bond we forge with them is the business and bond that Jesus speaks about in Matthew 12:46-50.

While Jesus was still talking to the crowd, his mother and brothers stood outside, wanting to speak to him.  Someone told him, “Your mother and brothers are standing outside, wanting to speak to you.”

 He replied to him, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” Pointing to his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.”

Jesus’s words here are clear enough but oh so difficult to live. Our lives are filled with enough responsibilities and duties, peopled with enough family and co-workers to look beyond immediate boundaries. To godparent others, to consider them our mother and father, our sister and brother? To harvest in new fields where the harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few? To champion and care for our own rabbits?

In the historical novel, Lilac Girls, Martha Hall Kelly creates a romance between Caroline Ferriday and Paul Rodierre, a French actor she first meets in New York and later nurses back to health after his imprisonment in a concentration camp. She weaves their romance between Caroline’s unfailing devotion to her work at the French Consulate and, after the war, to her commitment to the ADIR and the Polish Ladies. For the purposes of historical fiction, I suppose she intends this romance to give depth to a character who could appear to be one-dimensionally too good to be true, a character whose sole foundation appears to be service to others. The real Caroline had no romance with a famous French actor that spanned decades and continents. For most of her life, she did, indeed, set her sites on helping others. Perhaps she was one-dimensional, but what a wonderful single dimension this was! In the end, she was as good as she appeared to be, and she made the world a better place for many.

There will be rabbits, but thankfully, there will also be godmothers. So let’s hear it for Caroline Ferriday and all the godmothers to follow. We will always need them to mend and to love the wounded.

Ravensbruck Concentration Camp

In 1939, Ravensbruck, a concentration camp built to house women enemies of the Reich, opened about 50 miles north of Berlin. Most of its residents were Polish, and 72 of these young Polish women became known as “rabbits.” Used in gruesome medical experiments that rival the worst experiments conducted by the infamous Dr. Mengele, the rabbits who survived were left horribly scarred and disabled, some destined to “hop” for much of their lives.

One of the Ravensbruck “rabbits” after surgery

Each rabbit suffered six separate surgeries under the direct supervision of Dr. Karl Gebhardt, Chief Surgeon in the Staff of the Reich Physician SS and Police and personal physician to Heinrich Himmler, and Dr. Herta Oberheueser, the only female doctor convicted in the Nuremberg Medical Trials. Doctors made incisions in the rabbits’ legs to break bones, sever tendons, and insert contaminated materials–rusty nails, glass, splinters–so that the Nazis could research new treatments for battlefield wounds. Without pain medication, rabbits lay in casts for weeks in crowded and secret hospital wards. Their infections resulted in high fevers, dehydration, and for some, death. All the while, Dr. Oberheueser studied her rabbits and recorded her findings to her Furher.

Dr. Herta Oberheueser

Sarah Helm’s nonfictional works,  Ravensbruck: Life and Death in Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women and If This Is A Woman, as well as Martha Hall Kelly’s historical fiction, Lilac Girls, offer intimate views of the rabbits’ struggle to survive and the physicians who gave themselves to Nazi ideology. Both stories are equally tragic, equally horrific in distinctly different ways.

For the Nazis, the rabbits were little more than experimental opportunities. Hitler himself was invested in this experimentation because a friend died from battlefield wounds that he believed were treated incorrectly. Karl Gebhardt sought to redeem and defend his surgical treatment of contaminated war wounds in the face of new antibiotic treatments of such injuries. And Herta Oberheueser, a young, promising surgeon before the war, welcomed surgical opportunities to advance her career. There will always be rabbits to justify research, to defend practices, to promote careers, to explore solutions and onto which we can pin our hopes, our principles, and onto which we might take out our rage and helplessness.

For the Ravensbruck prisoners, the rabbits were their protecorates, their precious children and their unflagging belief that something good might come from something so very, very bad. As the Allied troops began to win the war in Europe and the inevitability of loss grew imminent, the Nazis were determined to kill all the surviving rabbits, leaving no evidence of the surgical atrocities committed. Still, the prisoners hid them, traded numbers with them during daily attendance, gave them extra rations of food, and encouraged them to live so that, one day, they might be living testaments to the horrors of Ravensbruck. There will always be rabbits to protect, to provide for, to encourage, and onto which we can pin our hopes, our principles, and truthfully, our courage and love.

Even today, there will be rabbits and their doctors. Sadly, both will be our friends and neighbors, our teachers, our employers and leaders. With the advent of new ideologies and practices, the lure of experimentation will convince even the most previously rational, compassionate individuals that they are called to new work. And with this advent, innocent others will give themselves over to the seemingly capable hands of such physicians.

In my own state, a handful of educational leaders–armed with research they claim is comprehensive and reliable–have succeeded in implementing reading testing that will determine whether a third grader may move to fourth grade or will be retained. This test measures fluency,  whether or not a child reads accurately, quickly and with expression. Clearly, there is a body of substantial research devoted to the role that fluency plays in effective reading. The key word, however, is “role.” Fluency itself is not the whole of good reading. Recall the cute, Shirley Temple-like girl from the former Hooked on Phonics commercials. Cute as a button, she stood confidently at a podium and read complex text fluently. It didn’t take a reading specialist, however, to question what–if anything–she understood from this text.

The fact that fluency experimentation is well-intentioned from those who sincerely believe that this measure will ensure that no child is left behind is still little defense for its mandatory state-wide execution. But the reading physicians have spoken, and the rabbits will be tested. In the future when fluency research will be inevitably and resoundingly replaced by new research (hopefully with comprehension playing a much bigger role), some of these reading specialists and the teachers who were forced to do this work will sincerely regret their actions and, regenerated, will jump on the newest reading bandwagon. Others will claim they were only doing their duty or following the research or taking the path of least resistance. Some will have to be dragged kicking and screaming to new practices which force them to denounce their former fluency allegiance.

And the rabbits? Only time will tell, but it stands to reason that at the very least, many will turn their backs on reading forever, the bitter taste of repeated testing still lingering in their mouths. They will live a life in which they are functionally literate but simply choose not to read. And this aliteracy will be as personally and socially devastating as illiteracy.

Oh yes, there will be doctors and rabbits, I’m afraid. Such is our human nature: to experiment and to succumb to experimentation. For the doctors, there is something profoundly enticing and noble about exploration and its rewards, about committing yourself to a cause, to a body of research, to a charismatic leader(s), to a golden principle. And for the rabbits, there is something profoundly innocent and vulnerable in the release–willingly or by force–to another’s cause.

In these super-charged post-election months, I am painfully aware of how some may read this metaphor, for the current administration has been compared to Nazis, their ideology to fascism, and the state of the nation to the inevitable demise of the Third Reich. Most certainly, it is not my intention to feed into this frenzy with the mention of Ravensbruck and third grade reading testing in the same blog post.

It is my intention, however, to lament the real and present danger of experimentation that has not been tested ethically, practically, and humanely. It is my intent to call physicians from all fields and in all leadership roles to task. Even those of us lay people understand that you can find research to support almost any claim. The real professionals are those who have examined the larger body of research, considered conflicting results and claims, and have decided upon the best treatment for the most patients. They are those who consider the whole and unique person, as well as the effects that any given treatment may have on him or her. The good news? These individuals are out there, but they are often marginalized by louder, more influential folks.

And it is my intention to offer caution to potential rabbits, as well as to the friends, parents, or caretakers of potential rabbits. If individuals can voluntarily submit to experimentation, then they should do so only after they have wisely considered the consequences. If they are forced to submit through laws and regulations, through social or commercial expectations,  or through prevailing ideologies, then there must be those who are willing to pick up the pieces when things go badly and to testify to the tragic consequences. Cliched as it sounds, history must not repeat itself, for most rabbits’ stories do not have happy endings.

As I read the accounts of surviving rabbits from Ravensbruck, I am sorely amazed at their will to live and to tell the world of all they experienced. Likewise, I am humbled by those prisoners who risked all to hide and feed these Polish girls.

I am also amazed at the resolve of such doctors as Dr. Herta Oberheueser. Once a promising young medical student with an entire life of helping others before her, she became a butcher convinced that she was serving the Reich with her God-given talents. How easily she transformed from healer to butcher, how devotedly she served until she was captured and tried for war crimes.  Even after serving a 20 year sentence, she began a new family medical practice and life. Until a Ravensbruck survivor recognized her and turned her into the German authorities who disbarred her from ever practicing medicine.

How did she live with what she had done? How did she muster the resolve to open a family practice? After two decades, how could she continue to claim that she had been “forced” to conduct these experiments? Herta Oberheueser was a living testament to the great power of those who relish the role of experimenter.

There will be rabbits, but we can pray that there will be fewer of them and that they will suffer less. And we can pray for the doctors, too, who often begin as idealistic, driven and talented individuals and end at best, as misguided explorers, and at worst, as fiends.