Helmet hair

By the time she was my age my mother had had helmet hair for fifteen years. You know what I mean. Every Saturday morning she went to the salon to have Verna wash and set her hair with tiny curlers and stick her under the dryer and then shellac her head with hair spray so that it was hard as fiberglass for the next week.She used a satin pillowcase to keep it perfect while she slept. Every now and then a brushy curler would appear for an hour or two to keep her bangs rolled up tight. It stayed that way for a full week. Not a strand out of place, the whole head of it stiff as a plastic bowl. My mother's head was more or less interchangable with those of other mothers, and most other women of her age. Pat Nixon, Betty Ford, Lady Bird Johnson come to mind. Different hair colors, same helmet hair. When I step out of the shower in the morning I flop my long hair forward over my face as I towel it dry. I comb it. And flop my hair back and comb it again. I put my freshly showered head in the path of a blow dryer just long enough to fluff up my bangs, to prevent them from hanging limply in front of my eyes. That's it. That's all. Of course, I don't suppose she worried much about having a bad hair day.

Turn around

Yom Kippur. I miss the old neighborhood today. A few old neighborhoods, in fact. Men in long black wool coats, hats, walking in clusters to temple. In the building on Manhattan's lower east side, a new condominium with twenty-six stories, the elevator buttons have all been pushed so that no one needs to do that work today. My first neighborhood in Chicago was adjacent to a Hasidic seminary. I loved watching out my window as the young men gestured passionately, arguing the finer points of the law, or maybe the fate of the Chicago Cubs, I was never sure. Yom Kippur. Repent. Turn around. Heartfelt contrition. Grief, sorrow at what I've done. One doesn't need to go to temple to move through this process. Some find it harder to focus on the essentials of the occasion in the company of others. Yet, we are called to gather. I'm not one to venture into religious services these days. Distraction, disturbing memories. It is hard to get past that. So. Here I am. Repenting online. Within this small community that gathers from time to time to share reflections and ideas here where the palm tree in Poland intrigues and amuses. I am praying today, reflecting and resolving. And, I have to confess: it would be a good thing if the religious community of which I am a part (not Judaism) might consider doing likewise. Not necessarily today, it's not their occasion. But once, some time. Wouldn't that be amazing. Then again, it's taken seventy years for the Berlin Philharmonic to come to Warsaw, this past Saturday, to play a concert, an act of contrition, of reconciliation. Seventy years. I can wait. I expect I'll have to.

Lois' Closet

"Lois, why does your mother keep a baptism robe in the closet?" It wasn't a baptismal robe. My mom told me this story sixty years later and she was still ashamed, as if it were her fault that her best friend's parents had Ku Klux Klan garb in a spare room closet at their house. "I didn't understand at the time," she told me. "But I knew it was something bad." Yes, it was. Very bad. "Lois was my best friend, from the first day of school. We walked together every day for nine years. We met at the corner and walked up 11th Avenue. After that day, my mother didn't like me to go over to Lois' house anymore." They had been playing hide-n-seek when my mother discovered the KKK robes in her hiding place. Lois was embarrassed but not clear herself what the white garments were for. "They take them when they go out at night," she explained. "Let's ask my mother." Ugly, mean words were said. My mom had seen nary a Negro in her young life, in the very small northern Colorado town where they lived. She had studied history, slavery, the Civil War. But her few trips to Denver had steered clear of 'that' part of town. America in the 1920's was so segregated that it was not uncommon for a child to not have had opportunity to interact, or even see an African American, especially in the West. My mom didn't grow up in a household that harbored hate. A grudge or two, especially against the uncle who inherited the family farm and had the temerity to sell his crops -- sell them! -- not only to his poor brother who, as the younger of the two, inherited nothing, but also to his father, who gave him the farm. For god's sake. I digress. So, yes, a grudge. But hate, no. My mom went home and told her mom or, more precisely, asked a lot of uncomfortable questions. Ten year old Ethel returned as she described that day to me with a trembling voice, misty eyes, a sense of horror and shame. After sixty years. She later learned more about the activity of the Klan in Colorado during that period; prominent politicians participated. She winced and pulled away from their association whenever Lois related that her parents had been "out there" the night before. Lois herself never expressed sympathy for these unconscionable activities so my mother decided to continue their friendship all the way into high school, offering her, in fact, an alternative vision of the world. Colorado. 1920's. 1930's. The Ku Klux Klan was active in Colorado, even thriving. I remembered that today when a debate on facebook (gotta love facebook!) devolved to the point that I was put in my place, "this hate speech all started with the Clinton's." Um, no. No, not quite. Not at all. We've been in that gutter for a very long time.

Choose moose!

Where are all the mooses? In the spirit of choosing life, I spent the last several days looking for moose. A trek through North Park, the moose capital of America (obviously betraying the U.S.-centric view of America)netted no moose. Not one. I waited patiently at Moose Crossing signs, scanned every bog, slogged through thick woodlands for forty or fifty miles, rented a helicopter to conduct an aerial search and came up with nothing. Not one moose. Okay, so there was no slogging or helo-ing. But I did look hard. And long. And didn't see a moose. And you know what, I don't care. The hunt was its own reward.

Choose Life!

Happy New Year! Shana Tova, 5770 I was invited to preach on Rosh Hashanah many years ago and it was one of the great honors and highlights of my life. I am not Jewish. But I have deep, deep respect for Jewish faith and tradition and great affection for Jewish culture. It was an honor to be invited to ponder the meaning of this High Holy Day and to have the opportunity for reflection, dedication and renewal. I'm sure I got way more out of it than the congregation did! The sermon I preached is in a box in the basement with the rest of my professional materials and books. It seems more and more likely that I will retrieve them and find them a place in the upstairs mainstream of my life again soon, but, in the meantime, of course I don't remember that sermon; I don't remember what I had for dinner. I'm pretty sure it would have included something along these lines. The Jewish faith tradition is absolutely radical about this: to love mercy, do justice, and walk humbly with your G-d. To love the Lord your G-d with all your heart and soul and mind and strength. To welcome widows and orphans. To beat swords into plowshares. To love the sojourner. And this: choose life. Choose life. Choosing life. It is not so easy as crossing a field, as the Russians say. It is a roundabout, up and down, down and out, over and around and under. A lot of under, to my mind. To choose life in the midst of terror and trauma, defeat and disaster, is not so easy. To choose life after death, in the midst of death, is as difficult a thing as there is to do in this world. To do it every day. Every day. The poet said this, "To choose what is difficult all one's days, as if it were easy, that is faith." W. H. Auden Those words are inscribed under a photo I keep on my desk of a friend whom I believe has embodied that difficult choice every single day. Truth is, it could be inscribed under a lot of people's photos. It's never easy, okay, rarely easy, to choose life, not when one can choose garbage instead. Or gossip. Or deceit, or the couch, or giving up. Giving up. The gravest temptation. Devastating and total traumatization, "complex trauma," it's called, has made me afraid of the world, of life. Danger: unpredictable, capricious, irrational, from here, from there, everywhere, especially when I least expected it. Nobody jumped out from behind a bush at me; I wasn't walking down drug-dealers' streets. I was in a church, for G-d's sake. I was dealing with the people who taught Sunday School, made mission quilts, took casseroles to shut-ins. With folks you trust your teen-agers with, and with officials who have taken vows of charity, of all things, and service. These past seven years (SEVEN flipping years! That is a long time!) have required me to make that choice for life every single day. It's as stupid as my being afraid of the grocery store and making myself choose to go there anyway. As enormous as being unnerved (and not in a good way) when I hear the Lutheran liturgy and traditional church music. As silly as being fearful of taking a shower (don't ask, that's a very odd one), and as sad as being terrified to drive in Littleton. You would not believe how far out of my way I will go to avoid the streets within Littleton city limits (we live just beyond). I still flip out when I hear the classic melodies of the liturgy. My brain screams: DANGER! Isn't that sad? Day by day, I choose, one must choose life. To get out of the tomb where it is safe and check things out in that big wide world. It's now to the point that I need sunglasses. That's a good thing! I'm out that much. New year, new life. New commitments, new choices. It is a gift, to be given this new year. A new year in which to have one's name written in the book of life, and to choose life not only for oneself but for others. I have always been drawn to this high and holy day as my new year's beginning. I suppose as a Gentile I can fly below the radar and make my dedications and commitments without all the fuss and falderal of the onlooking, co-celebrating Jewish community, much less the secular world on New Year's Day, January 1. Rosh Hashanah has not been corrupted by the retail world. It is still is a sacred, holy day without all the goop and gobber of the Today Show bloviating about resolutions to walk more and stop speeding (oh, that's me!) and little black dresses and champagne toasts and morning-after hangovers. That's all fine in its place but it also takes away the holiness, the sense of making a solemn commitment, of preparing to be renewed. I think New Year's Day and I think Rose Parade. I think Rosh Hashanah and I think, be new, be renewed. Renew purpose. Prepare to live. Choose life. Blessings and shalom as you choose life again and again and again in this new year.

Heaven help us! We have to stop doing this!

This is what bothers me. Read on, I'll get to it. A small group of people, a powerful minority, took exception to my leadership at the congregation I served in Littleton. They voted against my initial Call, and stood apart from the beginning. They had another candidate, one who, incidentally, had left his previous call after allegations of sexual harassment and abuse. They opposed me on every level, in every venue, about everything. Everything. I was assured they would come around eventually and I confess to spending an inordinate amount of time seeking to know them and to help them know me right from the start. It was not out of my need to be liked or popular but because every leader knows how important it is to have broad understanding and, if possible, support. Whether or not they liked everything I did, every initiative, I believed it was important to be transparent and forthcoming about reasons, background, and expected outcomes. Again, simply what all good leaders do. In a congregation that numbered roughly a thousand souls, these folks got more than their fair share of my time and energy. But it was never enough. You know what I'm talking about. It happens to all of us, in any setting. As the old saying goes, "you can't please all of the people all of the time." So it goes. You've been there. Somebody suggested once that I walk on water. But then, of course, the complaint would be that I couldn't swim. Sadly, though, there were a small number of folks whom I could never please, not any of the time, no matter what I did. Because, finally, it was not about that. It was not about anything visible. It was about something secret. I was not a perfect leader, not there, not anywhere. But, if I can quote a number of colleagues who were on top of the situation from start to finish, I was "damn good," "as good as they're going to get." And most definitely, "good enough." But it wasn't good for them, not in their view. Because I knew. Official sources had broken our confidentiality agreement and disclosed to these church members that I knew the unknowable, the taboo. They were anxious enough when I arrived, what with my background and expertise as the churchwide director of the ELCA Strategy for Responding to Clergy Sexual Misconduct. But when it was confirmed to them that my knowledge was not simply theoretical, topical, and that I was aware of their history, the anxious behavior flew off the charts. Unfortunately, I did not know my trust had been broken. That is, I didn't know they knew I knew. At that point,I was not sure what to do yet, wanting to be careful and considerate of the painful array of experiences within the congregation, wanting to be, first and most of all, compassionate and kind toward any who were victimized. But during this time of prayerful consideration, these members of the congregation received information that could not but make them extremely anxious. They also received untruthful information (which is to say, they were lied to)about my intentions as to what needed to be done with respect to that dangerous knowledge. So of course they were scared. Can you blame them? I proved to be impervious to run of the mill tactics, tactics that had been successful for them in the past, to intimidate and run pastors off, they ratcheted up the stakes. I enlisted two well-known national experts in congregational conflict, health,and organizational dynamics as guides and resources. Speed Leas has been a giant in the field for decades. Richard Blackburn of the Lombard Mennonite Peace Center is widely utilized and respected for his useful applications of a variety of methodologies, including that of Rabbi Friedman and other systemmic approaches to congregational conflicts. They spent hours advising me, behind the scenes, along with friends who were former bishops in my church and leaders of other denominations. Unfortunately, my bishop was not helpful, inasmuch as I soon discovered that I was not receiving honest information and reports from him. That betrayal was devastating to me. To a person, these advisors made this observation about life in our times. We begin with the stance that if you disagre with someone, you tell them. You express your views. Then, if you disagree or don't like someone, you express your view to them and seek equal respect for your point of view. You want to be heard, considered. Next, one works to impress upon them the rightness of your perspective. From that it escalates to one's needing to persist and prevail. Mutual tolerance is not enough. One has to win. Then, the need to dominate. Then the need to exclude. To humiliate. To ruin. Then the need to destroy. These experts suggested to me that our society has become less tolerant of difference and that this need to win, to prevail, to dominate that has always been with us, has become increasingly a need to ruin, to destroy. Whether or not its new, its true. As time went on, the hostility against me escalated to these alarming proportions. Even though only a small minority of members of this congregation had these fears and intentions, their behaviors disrupted the mission and daily routine ministry to the point that it became a consuming reality that surrounded and pervaded my daily life and that of the entire community. The harassment, hostility, stalking, threats, and sabotage I experienced pulled my energies away from healthy positive activity. Because I could not count anymore on getting honest information, I was constantly off-balance. On the second September 11, in 2002, one year after the most horrific and dramatic death I had ever encountered as a pastor, the bishop's office issued a "report," by which the bishop sought to evaluate the conflict and advise the congregation and me of steps we might take toward a healthy future. I forwarded a copy of that report to Mr. Leas and Mr. Blackburn and several other leaders around the church. Again, to a person, their response was, "he put a target on your back, Jan." "He did everything but kill you himself." "Jan, it's open season. He's given the greenlight for anybody to do anything to you." "You are the sacrifice, the scapegoat for all that has gone wrong in this congregation in the last thirty years." "He took every complaint these folks had and wrote it down. And calls that a report." The report made no mention at all, gave no acknowledgement whatsoever that the majority of those who expressed their views to the bishops' office took exception to the behavior and the perspectives of this minority. From that evening on, after I distributed the report to the congregation, sure enough. The hostility escalated. I was warned to not be at the church building alone. I was advised to be careful, to watch my back when driving. I confess, as much as I continued to be prayerful, to be mindful and to meditate, I was scared, more and more as the days and weeks went on. No, that's not quite true. I was terrified. It was a green-light to violence. I was hanging out there on my own. "Go and get her," the report was interpreted to have said. At some point, I dissociated and became a high-functioning zombie. Now, back to what bothers me. Certainly I'm bothered by what happened to me, to this congregation, by the abuse I encountered. But what is bothering me today is the disturbing pattern that has been building over the past several months, of demonizing President Obama. It is an old axiom in the anti-war and non-violence movements that "any attempt to dehumanize my neighbor is a step toward war," toward violence. The current discussions about racism expose the ugly under-belly of this country. Of course, we are still racist. Some of us less than others. The steam-roller of hatred that continues to gather force is disturbing on so many levels. President Obama has back-up that I never had, not officially, not when it counted. He has protection that we can only imagine how desparately is needed. That grieves me. It grieves me that his focus can be distracted, that he should have to be fearful, that his family is fearful. I see the looks on Michelle's face sometimes, as he moves into a crowd, and I cringe. I can only imagine what she feels. We need a President who is free to give his full energies to the challenges that lie before us. We need a President who is criticized but not demonized. Even if it is only a small minority who are spurred on by this belittling and demonizing rhetoric and activity, even if it's only 50 out of a 1000, it's enough to do terrible damage. To impose a grave danger. I hear the likes of Rush and Glenn and Sean with painful sensitivity. Their extreme and ill-considered words, the exaggerations and lies, the demonizing is an invitation to violence. I know. And that is why I share my story. During the days from mid-September until the attack that finally levelled me in late October of 2002, I lived in fear, unable to focus. There was already enough cortisol flooding my system to fill a reservoir. I lived on high alert. The experience of facing hate and hostility on a daily basis was exhausting. I had no idea.

Drama

Poles have a reputation and they do a good job upholding it. Polish politics are fractious. To put it mildly. Polish politics are a contact sport. The level of name-calling, petty muckering, silly and vindictive obstructionism is without parallel in the universe. That's what my Polish friends will tell you. They have no idea. In an article in this week's Polityka, on the 20th anniversary of the commencement of Poland's first non-communist government, its first post-communist Prime Minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, spoke to journalist Jacek Zakowski about these past twenty years of democracy. "It was very hard to fight for freedom over the years," he said, "and then it turned out that the building up of freedom was not easier." [crude translation mostly mine] Jerzy Baczynski, chief editor of Polityka, wrote this week of "verbal aggression," and the excesses of popular opinion, putting party above all else, and "not only in Poland." Oh, preach it brother. There has been an awful lot of drama during this peaceful transition. So it goes. "The quality of Polish politics, and Polish politicians has broken down during these past 20 years," he writes, and then, in a truly Polish touch, celebrates that, in fact, this is only normal, "normality." This is how it goes in times that are "not extraordinarily serious or romantic," like too many times in the past, WWII, the Partitions, failed insurrections. This is normal, is the message. And an important one. This is what democracy looks like, acts like, sounds like. Nevertheless, all three men lament, we can do better, we have missed opportunities because of our failures to work together. But, in spite of the missed opportunities and deterioration of the quality of public debate and leadership, the Poles -- and the journalists credit Mazowiecki especially -- have "disrupted the fate of Poles over two hundred years" that rarely succeeded and stopped the run of "heroic failures and big initiatives that ended in tragedy." "Poles have argued forever," he writes. Of course. Fractious. Contentious. Shoots self in foot. But they have made something out of, well, not out of nothing but out of not much. Their transition from communism to market capitalism and democracy is nothing short of a miracle, especially that it has come to pass without any road map, no precedents, and no violence. And believe me, the dangers were not absent. They've done enough, listened enough, reformed enough. You will hear me complain -- on their behalf, of course -- of Poles not getting their act together sufficiently to build a decent national highway system. The process of privatization lags. And the current President has been known to send Polish foreign policy entirely off the rails in the course of an afternoon. It's not always a pretty sight. But, they did it. They do it. Somehow. So. Here we are. I'm thinking we have sunk beneath the level of normal. We Americans have, without question, grabbed the trophy out of the Poles' hands, the trophy that is for stupid, reckless, self-defeating politic rhetoric. "Verbal aggression," and "slander of the state is incredibly harmful," Mazowiecki says. Amen. We are all drama all the time. Never mind substance, let's go for theater. Children's theater, at that. As I listen to the discourse about our need to reform health care I am distressed almost to the point of complete despair and cynicism by the lack of respect that I hear coming from the red side of the aisle's populist supporters and, to an extent, the political leaders themselves. How on earth are we going to get something this complex figured out if we don't listen to one another? How can we succeed if we don't stop repeating as fact those things that have been proven false, beyond a reasonable doubt, or even, to use the lesser standard, by a preponderance of evidence? How can we make something good for ourselves and all our citizens if we do nothing more than hurl accusations, inflame passions, and misrepresent and malign the goodwill of those who have different proposals? To paraphrase Steve Jobs in his bid to recruit John Scully to Apple, "do you want to keep selling sugared water" -- in this case, poisoned water -- "or do you want to change the world?" We need respect. We need restraint. We need fairness and honesty. And, if it's not asking too much, I'd even like to request some good humor. We need to be worthy of this great gift we've been given, this history, this treasure of democratic freedom. We are in the gutter. And we're rolling around in mud. Can we stop now? I'm not sure who in this country has the moral authority anymore to call us to account, as Mazowiecki does, as an institution like Polityka does. Let's take a lesson or two from the new Polish democracy. They will be flabbergasted we asked. {And speaking of trophies, we were, weren't we, how about we send Caroline Wozniacki home with the big one from the U.S.Open.}

No drama

We don't even have a wheel cover on the left front tire. "Not too many '97 Voyagers come down this street," Dave remarked as we turned around in a cul de sac after leaving the mongo house where Annika is having dinner with friends before they all head over to the Homecoming dance. "Oh, I disagree," I said. "Their cleaning people drive them. And maybe the fish people. And the pool people. And the light-changing people. And the flower people. And the yard service." Actually, my good friend's cleaning lady has a much nicer, newer minivan than me. It does occur to me when I visit my friends in neighborhoods just a scootch bit different than mine, when I drive through the gate the sentry probably assumes I'm a service person rather than a friend. Doesn't bother me none, just makes me smile. And feel glad my friends aren't put off by the difference in our economic status. Or, I hope, the lack of a wheel cover. Damn things keep falling off. We're back from the ritual picture-taking, just up the road, at her friend's house, about two miles and two million dollars from here. Annika asked me this afternoon about how we did the picture thing when I was in high school. We didn't. A boy came to the house with an orchid or a mum corsage. We awkwardly exchanged greetings with my parents. He fumbled with the flower, not wanting to touch me there, at least not in front of my father. I honestly don't remember ever taking pictures. And, thank heavens, none survived. I think there was a photo booth at the prom but not everyone availed themselves of it. You went out to dinner with, maybe, one other couple. You went to the dance. You went out 'parking.' You came home. No limos. No reservations for thirty-five, or sixty. No excursions to the Botanic Garden or an especially beautiful hotel lobby for photography. When my older daughter was a freshman in high school I discovered that we parents were invited to show up at 5:00 at one of the girl's home for pictures. It seemed like overkill for both Dave and me to take a few snapshots so I went off with the camera and showed up in whatever I'd been wearing that afternoon. Oops. I walked in to join a group of parents looking dressed for dinner at the country club, sipping wine and dipping celery into a low-fat dip. It was an event. After pictures on their terrace overlooking the lake, we were invited for to stay for cocktail hour. I fit right in. Or not. Eight years later, I've mastered the drill. When time came for my younger daughter's first Homecoming, we spent more hours looking for the best place to take pictures than for her dress. And it wasn't my idea. Just so you know. In fact, great drama was created by some of the other mothers around this very issue. Sigh. Sometimes the kids go out to eat and more recently, they have been having dinner together at somebody's home. The house is chosen for its photogenic qualities. We've got a gorgeous backyard but our house is not deemed suitable for inside pictures: ceilings too low. Tonight we had our choice of two staircases. The circular one in the entry hall won out. Of course, the initial plan was to pose the kids outdoors with the Scottish style golf course, its berms and bern, in the background. Too bad it was pouring rain. Our younger daughter is now a senior and she is SO done with all this. For the first two years there were hair appointments for updo's, manicure and pedicure appointments, make-up appointments, matching shoes, a wrap, flowers, jewelry. Today she came home from the football game and parade and lounged around in sweats until, oh, about an hour before departure. She took a shower, dried her hair, put on the dress she wore to another dance last year, found some shoes, decided they were too uncomfortable and left the house wearing flip flops. Don't tell Michael Kors. I wore jeans and a no-great-shakes shirt. Too bad. We drove the '97 minivan. It fit right in. Or not: among the SUV's and Audi's and Beemers and a lowly old Jeep Wagoneer. I'm sure the guard at the gate wondered what we were doing there. The hosts were lovely and we had wine and cheese and stood around waiting for everyone to arrive, the boys looking beyond uncomfortable in their dress shirts and ties, girls in adorable strapless, flirty dresses and, except for one very special young woman, glittery, matching shoes. Updo's and stunning, subtle jewelry, and a little glitter on the cheeks were de rigeur. They looked gorgeous! They're seniors now so the girls and boys don't separate as they used to, into tiny knots several feet apart; the awkwardness is gone. I found myself wondering..., oh, never mind. We parents stood in another room and shared small talk which, this year, has devolved into a theme and variations on, "my how time flies." Next September these kids will be scattered from East Coast to West and everywhere in between. I wonder what they all think of that. Everything is the last time for these kids, their last Homecoming, last first day of school, last football season. I wonder how many of them will ever see each other again. So it goes. I can't tell you how pleased I am that my daughter wore flip flops. She looked great!

That Day

My day started with donuts. Dorothy Lockhart, definitely among the Mazerati's of God's creation, one of the most genuinely spiritual and irreverent people I've ever met, was scheduled for heart surgery at 6:30 a.m. at Porter Hospital. I arrived at 5:45 to find the family waiting room empty, no coffee anywhere, and Dorothy being treated to a few ugly pre-surgical procedures. I ran over to the King Sooper's at Colorado and Yale and bought a chocolate-frosted donut and a very large cup of coffee. Okay, I bought two donuts. Dorothy and her husband, Bruce, were ready to visit with me and pray together when I returned, and then the anesthetic started its work and Dorothy faded away from the demands of consciousness for the next five hours. She awoke to a world changed and to find one of her favorite people in the world now overwhelmed by grief. Pastors never have one day like another. Hospitals, hospices, courtrooms, and classrooms were as familiar as my office and the church sanctuary as venues for my work. Crazy hours were normal. I didn't have a regular work day, never had, in twenty years. Pre-dawn surgeries and late night crises in emergency rooms were routine. I got emotional whiplash on occasion, moving directly from a pre-divorce counseling session to story time with the pre-school to lunch with the architect the church was engaging for a renovation project. Over time, and by inclination to begin with, I got so comfortable with this dizzying pace and variety that I rarely noticed how much it demanded. The early morning pastoral visit on this day gave me a window I coveted, time to head back home briefly to see the girls before school. The soft classical music I listened to in the car gave me time to settle into the day. As it turned out, I missed seeing my older daughter but opened the door from the garage into the house to find my husband and younger daughter standing, transfixed, in front of the television. A plane flew into a building. It was 7:03 a.m. mountain time. Like all of you, we watched in disbelief. It only got worse. We heard the catch in Pentagon reporter Jim Mikleszewski's voice as he first felt and heard a crash there. Eventually, Dave and I left together to take our younger daughter to school. I went on to the church and spent time consoling parents of our pre-schoolers, some of whom were fire fighters. I spoke on the phone to a church member whose son worked in the White House and went over to their home amid reports of several planes unaccounted for and, reportedly headed for Washington. As you remember, it was a beautiful, sky blue day. I drove past the football fields at my daughter's high school. At 8:47 a.m. Denver time came the first AP report of a plane crashed in a field north of Pittsburgh. I shivered. I was directly opposite the high school athletic field on Windermere at the moment. I will never forget that. It is as vivid as anything in my life, ever. It was an inconclusive report and no details were known, including whether or not it had anything to do with the attacks on New York and Washington. I pulled over to the side of the road and just sat a few moments. It was the last time for several days that I would take time to do that. We all have our 9/11 stories and all of them are important. Up to this point, mine was not all that different from most of yours, those of us, anyway, who were not in NYC or Manhattan. To you, David, Ann, Barbara, Reji, Mike, and others, my heart is with you this day, too. I'd been with the family of the young person working at the White House for, perhaps, half an hour when their phone rang. She gasped. After a moment, she indicated the call was for me. I will never forget what followed. Ground zero had come home to Littleton. The directions I was given were wrong. That just added to the disorientation of the day. The door was opened by a woman I knew but had never seen distraught. She was in shock. Now, today, September 11, 2009, I am watching the MSNBC re-broadcast of that first morning, in 'real time.' It is the first time I've ever seen the rest of that day's larger story unfold. And this is the first time I've ever written about or told my larger group of friends here about it. On 9/11 I was cocooned within a home in Littleton with a family for whom ground zero was a field in Pennsylvania and their home on a quiet street. A TV was on but muted. The house was visited by official personnel from an airline. Sheriff's officers set up a perimeter to keep news crews away. Friends drifed in and out. It was surreal. The family's story belongs to them to tell. I will tell you that it was a day of terrible grief and sadness. Confusion and disbelief. Public confirmation of flight numbers. Official visits and details. One very small shred of hope. That was gone by early afternoon. Terrible ironies. Crushing grief. Shock. I close my eyes now and am back there. See the faces. See the sofa, the table with fresh flowers. Open the front door to more friends. At one point, let the sheriff in to use the restroom. Feel cut off from the rest of the world. Utterly absorbed in one tragedy, one family's terrible loss. Stunned. By the end of the day, another church family called to report the death of a loved one in Tower Two. Another pastor went to care for them. A prayer service was arranged for the evening in the church sanctuary. I stayed where I was. This national tragedy had become for one family, and another, and another and another, all over America, a very personal one. And so it was for the next weeks. Out there, on the television, on the hearts and minds of everyone else, a terrorist attack the magnitude of which we'd never imagined. In here, it was personal. It was not until this morning, as I listened in 'real time' as of that day, that I've been able to imagine what it was like for the rest of the country, watching the ongoing coverage with its panic and chaos from Lower Manhattan, reports of more bombs, nuclear-winter-like conditions near Ground Zero, people jumping, debris filling the streets. I heard about these reports but did not experience them then. The sense of fear you all felt as rumors swirled around, of more attacks, I didn't feel then. I was utterly consumed, feeling and responding to the tragedy at a very different level. The next days and weeks were filled with one family, and another's specific plans for memorial and other details, and with caring for persons whose lives were ripped apart. And with caring for a church community also grieving with its members. The next time I remember having time -- being able to disengage from the intensity --came in the early evening after the memorial service, a week later. I got in the car and drove up and down the highway that fronts the foothills, again and again, and burned off some of the adrenalin that had spiked and surged nonstop for seven days. I hadn't slept. I hadn't cried. I pulled over in the parking lot at the Red Rocks and breathed. Again, again. For the first time. Poor Dorothy woke up late in the afternoon of September 11. Another pastoral minister was there for her and Bruce. She didn't learn for a day or two that her dear friend had suffered the ultimate loss. I've never been back to that King Sooper's on Yale. Two weeks later I was preaching when we all heard the first plane fly over on its way to Centennial Airport. The congregation told me afterward that I gasped. Life is never the same.

Homeless in Nebraska

Ten years ago today our family was homeless. In Nebraska. For five hours. Four strong men with arms as big around as the football they tossed back and forth a few times carried four filled-up file cabinets out of the basement of our Naperville house and onto an oversized moving van that was eventually stuffed absolutely to the hilt with all of our worldly possessions. My mother's cedar chest, the girls' doll houses, the ping pong table, three queen-sized hide-a-bed sofas, twenty DIY teak bookcases, seventy-five boxes of books, and a few pots and pans lined the driveway as two more men with as much mathematical as physical skill devised a way to pack it all in. I'm pretty sure my dressor made the entire 1100 mile trip upside-down. I must tell you. These men were not happy about hauling all of our stuff out to the truck. They complained every single minute. By the time they had finished, they were a regular Greek chorus: "Don't Go! Don't Go! DON'T GO!" "You can't move those beautiful girls to Littleton," they went on and on, and on. "It's not safe." We moved to Littleton Colorado a few months after Columbine. That Columbine. As Henry picked up a stack of four big blue Rubbermaid tubs filled with Polly Pockets and My Little Pony, stuffed animals and Beany Babies and Barbies, he pleaded with me, "It's not too late. You don't have to do it." Up until the last minute when they slid rakes and shovels under the barbeque grill and then set the bikes up before padlocking the heavy double doors they begged. "Please, don't move to Littleton." The great irony, to my mind, came in hearing these black men from the south side of Chicago warning us against going to the -- up until recently -- milquetoasty town of Littleton. The moving van rumbled off. We, okay, I cried. A lot. Then we all cried. I was in a state of shock. I knew it was the right thing to do but it seemed unbelievable, an out-of-body experience. We walked through the house one last time, found a forgotten baseball, hugged our beloved Linda, next door neighbor par excellence, and set off in our caravan of, oh, how cute: Caravans. Both Dodge minivans -- yes, we had two -- we likewise stuffed to the gills with computers and such and all we would need for the next week until the moving van was scheduled to unload. Heading west, one parent and one kid per car, we set out for Iowa, and Nebraska, and Colorado. There are two ways to drive west from Chicago. We took the tollway that requires an easy transition up to Interstate 80 two miles before the Mississippi River Bridge. You might think these are tedious, irrelevant details but, oh no, watch. Something's coming. The signs from I-88 to I-80 began five miles out. "INTERSTATE 80 IOWA NEBRASKA WESTBOUND EXIT RIGHT 5 MILES." Another sign reminded us at the three mile mark. And another, very big sign, a banner sign spanning the width of the highway, at the two mile mark, "EXIT RIGHT TWO MILES INTERSTATE 80 WEST MISSISSIPPI RIVER BRIDGE IOWA." I moved to the right lane. One mile, another big sign. One-half mile, another sign. And even at the quarter-mile point, another enormous sign. "NEXT RIGHT: IOWA 80 WEST." Well, duh. At the exit, another banner sign with a long arrow pointed right, "EXIT NOW I-80 IOWA." I missed the exit. Kaia looked over at me, "Mom?" Within the mile, the road petered out. Dave pulled up next to me and asked, "where are we going? Do you need to stop?" "No. I just missed the exit." "You missed it!?" "I missed it." "How do you miss that?" A very good question. We backtracked, Dave led the way, we got on the road and drove on. West. In Iowa. We had planned to drive through the night. Probably, a bad idea. We pulled over on a side street in some town in the middle of cornfields and took turns taking naps. By ten o'clock on the morning of Friday, September 10, 1999, we had made it all the way west past Grand Island and Kearny, and were almost to Gothenburg -- where my grandmother, Hannah, settled as a three-year-old, arriving with her parents and six siblings after their ocean crossing from Sweden in June of 1886. My cell phone rang. I signalled Dave to pull over. The call was from Win Wehrli, our real estate attorney in Naperville, letting us know he'd completed the closing on our old house and the money was in the bank. The girls whooped and hollered, "we're homeless! We're homeless!" What a privileged life we lead. To joke and make light of the fact. Knowing, of course, it was temporary. It took my grandmother, Hannah, days to get to Colorado from Gothenburg. We zipped through Ogallala and Big Springs and were in Denver four hours later (yes, I drive very fast! and Dave will too, to keep up), and had closed on our new home by three that afternoon. And so it is that our family came to live in Littleton. Ten years ago today. Even tho' I missed the exit. Should that have told me something?

How do you say that?

Let's get the most important business done first. Caroline Wozniacki has the best outfit in the U.S. Open. Not Serena or Venus this time, or Maria Sharapova. But the Polish girl. Of course! Polish women are all about style. Even in the most desperate days, designers were whipping up clever, cutting edge fashions. "Go to Chmielna, then two doorways down and into the first courtyard, through the arch to the second passageway and around the corner to your right, the third doorway and down the stairs..." Sure enough. Bold, dynamic fabrics and cuts, lovely dresses, always elegant and sensuous. To die for. So, with flounces, delicate mauve color, and smashing deeper lilac coat, of course it's the Polish girl who shows up in the loveliest tennis dress. Oops, not Polish. Danish. Caroline Wozniacki is from Denmark, wouldn't you know. Her parents are from Poland. Boy that does that sound familiar. Over the centuries Poland has lost some of its very best (but not all of them!) to emigration. Sadly, Poland has proved an inhospitable and stifling environment for too many of its own. Chopin, Madame Curie, to name only two of their most beloved native sons and daughters. Caroline's parents, Anna and Piotr are top flight atheletes and moved from Poland in the late 1980's to pursue their sports, especially Piotr who joined a professional soccer team in Denmark. Caroline was born and grew up there and so, of course, if you ask her, she's Danish. Except for tax purposes. Like so many of Europe's wealthy celebrities, now she's from Monte Carlo. The late 1980's were horrific in Poland, a depressing period when many young adults decided to give up on the possibilities of change coming soon enough to do them any good. I have Polish friends who left then for Australia, Paris, England, the States, and Sweden. Now my Polish friends are Swedish and have thoroughly Swedish kids. We find that ironic -- I was the Swedish-American about whose Swedish background much was made. Caroline is Poland's best hope for glory at the U.S. Open this year. Even if she speaks English with a strong Scandinavian accent. And, oh my goodness, a class act. For the record, Oudin and Wozniacki played an entire set of tennis in the time it took the President's special guests and Cabinet to entire the Joint Session of Congress. And they were halfway through the second before President Obama got in and started speaking. I'm not sure if that says more about our political traditions and falderal or the pace of this match. Now, let's get that name right. It is not Woz - nee - ack - ee. (emphasis on the third syllable) Say it with me, everyone, everyone: [emphasis on the second syllable] Vozh - n'y atch - ke.

Unremitting Relief

Time for a good Polak joke: The Pole has a dilemma when asked, "You have two prisoners in front of you, a Nazi and a Russian, and you get to shoot them both. Which would you kill first?" "The German, of course. Duty before pleasure." That joke is dated. Thank god. That era is over. Some of my favorite Poles would not think it a pleasure to shoot Russians in any case. But the age-old conflicts still stir about. Unresolved history stands in the way of moving forward. And not only between nations. One of my favorite things about myself is my sense of humor. Perverse, perhaps. Droll, wry. But unremitting. My old friend, Steve Elde, wrote tonight, "I laugh, therefore I am." It is the truth. It is the absofricckinglutely pligging truth. The first thing I read after I'd been attacked was humor. Calvin Trillin is my drug of choice. I reread everything he'd ever written and even the serious stuff I figured out a way to find it funny. Then it was the joke threads on the internet. And Calvin and Hobbes. And Dilbert: "Since when did ignorance become a point of view?" I still want an answer to that one.

I Am My Dog, My Dog Is Me

I am just like my dog. Daisy and I have too much in common. It disturbs me. It does. Something happened to her before she came to live with us, something to do with lightning. More than thunder, she is terrified of lightning. And she has a visual radar that alerts her to lightning that can be seen only from the other side of the house, only by peering out a window while standing sideways on tiptoe. In other words, her threshold for anxiety about lightning is, roughly, nil. If there is lightning in Wyoming, I'm convinced Daisy is aware of it. Likewise Kansas, Nebraska, Utah and New Mexico. And probably Oklahoma. Aware of it and anxious. There is one spot where she feels safe, but only sort of. She is too nervous to settle down tonight and now I'm antsy myself. Anxiety is contagious. I've held her and petted her and given her a million little love talks. I don't know about you but I baby my dog and speak to her as if she were an infant. If she only understood me when I tell her it's okay, she's safe. But I understand that. I understand that she doesn't understand. I understand her animal brain oh, far too well. In acute danger, our brains switch to auto-pilot. This is not the night for a serious scientific discussion of brain function, I'm sorry, I'm too anxious. But it is a night I can relate to you that the brain on terror is a brain that gets fried, fast. Too much cortisol, too much stimulation, the circuits fry. Mine did. It takes a long time for them to heal. In the mechanical, inanimate world, recovery is not possible. In our human world, our sophisticated brains, it is. But it doesn't come quick. There is nothing rational for my dog to be worried about tonight. The lightning is miles and miles away. Almost to Kansas. But she doesn't get that, her brain doesn't sort out that kind of complex information. It is on a default setting. It sees lightning and goes bananas. DANGER! And there is no talking her out of it. It's like that old setting has been baked in, or programmed to the point it can barely be undone. I'm like that. My brain is still practicing -- okay, all of us, our brains are still practicing -- and it has a long ways to go. It is locked on the default setting that says, "DANGER" whenever I see people, in person. That's a problem when it comes to living on this planet. I see people and my animal brain goes bananas. I don't sort out complex information as readily as I used to, as -- I hope -- you do. But I'm healing. Learning, or unlearning, or relearning. And it's coming along. Frankly, I'd rather be terrified of lightning than people. But people were my lightning. Out of the blue, from the most unexpected sources, people did very dangerous things that caused me grave injury. I don't trust them. I don't feel safe around them. It's irrational, I know, I know. But it was burned into my animal brain. It took me a long time to figure out why I felt safe in Poland. Nobody there tried to kill me.

Tellin' Ya Now, Just So You Know

I can be a voyeur anywhere. Chancey Gardner had it right. "I like to watch," he said, and I am all over it. If I had my way, I'd spend the rest of my life looking. I'd happily wander the face of the earth, from the south of France to middle Siberia, gliding across the icy north with my Lapplander ancestors and sail over sand dunes in Namibia. I'd buy a Range Rover and roam the back roads and dirt lanes, logging trails and dried up streams nearer my home, through ghost-like prairie towns not far from here, like the one where I spy a grungy old hippie through the grimy, smudged window of his tiny trailer, brooding, idle in the middle of the afternoon, surrounded by squalor that extends from the broken-down, rusted rubbish strewn and tumbleweed filled yard that I can see to the whisky bottles standing empty on greasy counters that I imagine, inside. The shell of an old greyhound bus is fading nearby, while a scrawny white horse looks for a few healthy stems of grass to munch. Rocinante, anyone? It all makes me wonder. I'll watch anywhere, spy on anybody. Mind you, I'm no peeping-tom. I don't go in for kinky, or intrusive, but it's probably safe to say that my habit verges on nosy. Today I'm watching tennis, of course, but a report has just reached me from the Taste of Colorado downtown. Poco -- heard of them? remember them? -- played a few sets on the main stage in front of their old, and now I do mean old, fans. And some of them still light up. The fragrant aroma of sweet grass wafted through the crowd. Well into their seventh decade, a posse of five passed around a reefer, just like the old days and they'd clearly not lost their touch, cupping it close. A mixed bouquet of establishment and barely funky types, baseball caps over not-long, wavy hair joined by a guy wearing a pony tail way down his back, tattoos, nobody blinked when the pot appeared. Sunday afternoons in Warsaw tend to be a bit more traditional. Last Labor Day weekend, I wandered the Old Town along with families and young couples, queueing for ice cream, tripping over cobblestones. Ancient men in long white beards drove old-fashioned carriages led by Percherons down chimney-wide streets and toothless old biddies hawked cracker-crusty baby bagels. Six-year-olds with flaxen hair begged for mylar balloons, a pink unicorn being by far the favorite. I flirted with the prospect of stepping in and buying one of those miniature metal license plates with your name on it, for a sweet-faced kindergartner who wanted one the worst way, Andrzej. Lovers snuck kisses in dusty vestibules. Ladies gossiped. Children pulled, hard, on their mother's arms, they begged for cotton candy and whistles carved from beechwood. I walked behind two matrons in mohair hats (it was much too warm for any sort of hats) who seemed to have it in for their missing neighbor. I assume her ears were burning. Teenagers horsed around, climbing on the town wall and laughing at tourists who tripped. A bunch of kids were clustered around a ball of string attached to a kite so high you could barely see it. I took a step backwards, to get a better shot from my camera, and almost fell off the wall. The boys laughed. So did I. But, I swear, this is how I'm going to die: stepping backwards off a wall, a cliff, a rock, a roof.

Blanka, Bold and Beautiful

“We knew the war was coming. They taught us to shoot.” Halina pulls me down to sit right at her ear, down into the faded upholstered sofa, an overstuffed shelter that invites secrets and has, over the years, harbored confidants from London to Kiev, Montreal to Minsk. I ask why she decided to join the resistance and take up fighting. I had might as well have asked her, why didn’t she live on the moon. “Was there a choice? Not for me. What else would I do?” Algebra comes to mind. Halina’s gem-blue eyes are not the least bit clouded, not with age or with sorrow, and her tone is nothing but blunt as she answers my question, “but where, how did you learn to do this?” I could be asking her telephone number, for all the drama I get out of her. She is all matter-of-fact, cool, unencumbered by emotion. “In school,” she goes on. “Our teachers prepared us for war. For life.” The tiniest edge of exasperation creeps into her voice as 86-year-old Halina, code-named “Blanka” by the Polish resistance in World War II, describes her school curriculum in the months leading up to Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939. “What else would we do? What else should we be learning?” Of course, I think. This makes sense. I think again. Fifteen-year-old school girls, learning to shoot? People. Learning to shoot people. To shoot soldiers. Using torsos for target practice. Preparing for war? This makes no sense at all. Halina is the best friend of my best friend’s mother, Leonarda. They lived in the same building, across the hall, for thirty-five years, and Halina lives there still, climbing six flights of stairs up and down, maybe more than once a day, avoiding the elevator unless the steps are being washed – she knows what time this is done daily – or she is exhausted from too many errands, from too long a trip across town. Halina makes me feel lazy. She has taken three buses and a tram, no, two trams, to get here today, to Leonarda’s new home, a garden apartment on the far edge of town, a long subway ride from the center – if you’re a subway sort of person – or the three buses, two trams and, did I mention, the mile walk at this end.. Halina is impeccable in her everyday outfit, a tailored, silky blue blouse with pearl buttons and delicate ruffle detail around the collar, handsome wool sweater and coordinated, plaid skirt, fashionably sturdy shoes and leather handbag. I, on the other hand, look like a campaigner just in from the march, blown through a windstorm, by the time I arrive, shirt half-untucked, scarf askew, and hair falling out every side of my bun. Halina has not a hair out of place; it is exquisitely and, it seems, effortlessly swept up in a silver chignon. She is perfectly prim and proper, and tailored to a “t”. I quickly imagine that she would have been the well-turned out lady at the finishing school. And I would have come in need of a whole lot of finishing. She has a teacher’s mien. You feel obliged to say, “yes, ma’am; no thank you, ma’am.” I suck in my stomach and try to sit up straighter. Unfailingly gracious, she doesn’t raise an eyebrow, sigh, or silently groan. Rather, she greets me warmly, ignores my disheveledness, shakes my hand in the manner of a queen, then takes me to her bosom like a long-lost friend. I feel as though I should curtsy. Halina gossips to me about politics, customs and, surprisingly, Dancing With the Stars – the Polish version. We agree to disagree about our favorites, dancers and otherwise. After a fine chat about this season’s strawberries and breaking news from friends in Kiev, she resumes her stories about her history. “Every day we had shooting practice. Eventually, we stopped our other studies and spent all day preparing for war. Guns. Ammunition. How to run through the woods without being seen. What to do if we were cornered, caught. It was a routine.” Routine. In the same spring of 1939, my mother was perfecting her pie crusts, preparing embroidered towels for her trousseau, crocheting the edges of bed linens, making the antimacassars that remain carefully boxed in tissue paper to this day, passed on to her daughter, to me, safely tucked away in an antique carved bureau. When she was fifteen, my mother studied flower arranging, the care and keeping of fine fabric, and menu planning. Exactly the same age as Halina, my mother came of age in another world. In the days of middle adolescence, in the class for practical arts, my mother was sewing. Halina’s world required a different sort of home economics: Defend. And preserve. Halina learned to shoot. On the dry Colorado prairie, my mother maintained a steady battle with errant mice, straying under doorsills and up into rafters. A world and more away, in eastern Poland, Halina fought against invading Nazis, an army intent on the devastation of everything she held dear. In class, Halina learned to take apart, clean, put together, and load a gun. Blindfolded. All of a sudden, she stops. Interrupting herself in mid-sentence, Halina intuits a certain energy emoting out of the ether and she clicks the remote. Across the room, channels change and familiar music comes through the television. She is gone, lost to me now, enveloped in a reality as intense as the one she had been describing. She lets go my hand, drops it like lead, left awkwardly in her lap until I pull it back. I am forgotten. Her exploits are forgotten, she has dropped the thread of her story and it has vanished as surely as the world it recalled. Halina now exists entirely within the world on the screen. I turn to look at her face, concentration so intense it is unnerving, captivated by these characters who stand in a Hollywood apartment, with metal blinds and galley kitchen, and again, at a grim, hospital bedside. She is as there as they are. She penetrates through to their reality and she is part of it. For the next thirty minutes, she is Blanka, with The Bold and The Beautiful. Halina never misses her soap opera. Neither would my mother.

Was It Just Yesterday?

It seems like yesterday. Thank you, so many of you, who sent notes asking if I was okay. It didn't happen yesterday. Even though it seems so. It was, in fact, several years ago, not long before the attack in the parking lot. The car crash was only one incident in a long, ugly chapter. But it does seem like yesterday. In fact, it was yesterday, in 2002. Seven years ago. More than the memories are fresh. So too the sensations, the fear, the paralysis. That is the legacy of profound trauma. It comes back. Lurks around, lingers. And sometimes erupts into full-blown panic. Seventy years ago. September 1, 1939. The night before, Warsovians were living their lives, somewhat wary, worried. But not expecting the bombs to fall. They did. The first day of the war, bombs fell on Warsaw. Bombs fell on fleeing civilians on the roadways, intended to incite panic. Not quite out of the clear blue, but not what they expected, either. Shock. Terror. Panic. Paralysis. Frantic fleeing. We respond differently to traumatic events. Depending upon our life experiences, our current situation, the resources around and available to us, our health, our intellectual and emotional framework for understanding and absorbing the blows. And we respond differently to trauma at different points in our own lives. Again, depending. So many variables. I confess, I cannot imagine, just given my experience, how the citizens of Warsaw got through the experiences of war. Of course, the same can be said for other survivors of other wars but this story is about Poland and a significant reason for telling it is that it is so terribly unknown, unappreciated and it needs to be known and understood and given its due. Dresden, Coventry, London, we know. Warsaw, we don't. And we need to. My car crash was the beginning of the end of a tragic and terrible period in my life. It was also the beginning of the beginning of a different painful and challenging period in my life, of complete collapse and injury, and then, healing. My "war" was a lot shorter than the Poles, and a lot less physically injurious. Their war, WWII, was a six-plus year war that brought devastation and catastrophe on every level. Six million Poles, including three million Jewish Poles died during World War II, in those six years. They died in the most hideous ways. The survivors witnessed evil beyond comprehension. They experienced evil that defies imagination. How did they go on? How could they get up afterward and rebuild? Their experience continues to teach and encourage me. It also humbles and challenges. I too encountered unimaginable evil. I hope in these blog posts to explore, with you, the stories of anguish and renewal, of hope and courage, of conscience and humility. By weaving stories together, I hope we can see together how our lives and the lives of others are more connected than we might think, and to find new insight into our own messes. Meanwhile, getting back to the action.... For the third day in a row now, we woke up to the smell of wood fire smoke, and to see a reddish glow reflecting from the sunrise. I looked over at the wall opposite my eastern window to see the shadows of the sun dancing on the white paint. It was red. More than a thousand miles and several mountain ranges away, California, here it comes. It is eerie to wake up to the smell and the hazy air from fires. I can't begin to fathom the experience of waking up to the acrid smells and thick smoke from bombs falling on my city. September 1, 1939. To the survivors, it seems like yesterday.

After Midnight

After midnight. It was not all peaches and cream. It was 12:04 a.m. I stopped at the red light. A firetruck and accompanying ambulance spun out of the firehouse with lights blazing and the siren already blowing. The light in front of the station had turned red and, dutifully, I stopped. I'd been at the hospital that evening with Deanna and her family. Waited with them through an interminable interval as an ambulance was requisitioned, tracked down, and finally sent to transport her to hospice. She was dying of bone cancer. Actually, it was melanoma metastisized to her brain and her bones. Gruesome. Excruciating. Depressing as all hell. Deanna was not old by any measure. And if you counted age in terms of liveliness and generosity, Deanna was easily in her prime. She'd got a hole-in-one on the golf course not long ago. She was a vital and loving mother to her five children. She was a delightful partner to Ron. And then she got cancer. And got it again. And again. And finally, this was going to be it. Traditional, experimental, every kind of treatment -- all failed. It was awful. Awfully sad. But the family had been given a good day of time together. Take-in Chinese food, an aroma that beat the hospital smells all to death. Laughter. And peace. They were done fighting. At their request, I hung around, in and out, getting other work done in the waiting room as I waited for the ambulance and Deanna's final trip as a living, breathing human. They'd asked for a blessing when that time came. It got very late. Very very late. It was almost 11 when I left Swedish Hospital. I needed to stop in at my office on the way home. I arrived at the church at 11:15 to find a meeting still going on. It was one of those kinds of meetings, not a useful, good-spirited gathering. I clearly interrupted discussion that did not welcome me. But I answered questions, chatted a bit, stopped in my office and headed for home. Exhausted. More emotionally and spiritually than physically. Diabolical, that's what I was thinking. Deliberate, willful meanness. I wasn't familiar with it. Why are people like that? 12:04. Red light. Sirens blaring. And, BOOM. CRASH. CRUNCH. (There's got to be a better way to write about a car crash.) The SUV going 45 mph behind me didn't stop at the red light. It stopped when it slammed into me. No braking. That's what the cops told us, later. The driver just plowed right into the back end of my beloved green minivan. My head bobbed back and forth several times, hitting the steering wheel. My torso slammed into the wheel and I ended up sort of skewed on the floor between the front seats. Everything hurt. Badly. Ironic. To have an accident directly in front of the fire station but no ambulance. The firefighters heard the crash and ran out, assessed me and dialed my cell phone to call my husband at home. Not the call he wanted to get. A dispatcher inside tracked down a neighboring emergency unit and I heard it coming a mile away. I was in shock. I couldn't move my torso. And I was completely spent. Whatever heroic resources I usually summoned in a crisis had been used up. I ended up on a backboard in the back end of an ambulance and then in the Emergency Room. It was the beginning of the end.

"A flash of red"

The ship was there on a "Friendship Visit." Some friends. The first shot of World War II came at exactly 4:45 a.m. on September 1, 1939, from a German battle cruiser moored in the bay off the Free City of Danzig (Gdansk). "At that moment I saw a flash of red and the first shell hit the gate." Ignacy Skowron was a 24-year-old soldier from the south of Poland whose regiment was charged to guard a military depot on the peninsula at Westerplatte, near Gdansk. 182 young Polish soldiers faced the superior fire power of a battleship and 3,400 German troops. The Wehrmacht assumed the first battle of the war would be over in minutes. At the end of seven days, between 200-400 Nazi fighters had been killed, and 15-20 of the Polish troops had died, five of them in a dive-bombing attack on Day 2. Cpl. Skowron and his comrades fought back with machine guns against the persistent shelling from the battleship, bombing attacks, and, finally, flame-throwers. In an interview last month for the BBC, 94-year-old Skowron remembered the first moments of the war. "I took the telescope and looked out at the channel, first right and then left and then at the cruiser that was moored in the bay. At that moment I saw a flash of red and the first shell hit..." Indeed, the Schleswig-Holstein shot off a barrage of 170mm and 280mm shells that should have devastated the compound and demoralized the Polish army in hours, if not minutes. "I grabbed a machine gun..." the old soldier recounted. The ship shelled the depot for hours, then called in bombers. The barrage lasted for days. The site, and the regiment should have been vanquished immediately. Instead, heroic fighting continued for a week, inspiring the nation to continue its fierce resistance elsewhere in Poland, long after the Fuhrer's "Mission Accomplished" victory tour had come and gone. I visited Westerplatte in 1980. The concrete ruin of a guard house is imprinted in my memory. Skeletal, elemental against a piercing blue sky. Symbol of courage. Holding out. No surrender. It moved me then and it moves me now. Where does such courage come from? What made those men so brave? So determined? What kind of character does it take? Five men died when that building was bombed. Five men who could have given up already, the first day. Five soldiers who fought shells and bombs with machine guns. And darn near won. Westerplatte still stirs Polish hearts. As well it should. Doomed from the start, a small regiment held off the superior firepower and numbers of the enemy until, when forced to give up, the German commander allowed the Polish commander to keep his ceremonial sword, telling him, "If I had such an army I could fight the whole world." German Prime Minister, Angela Merkel, Russian leader, Vladimir Putin and 18 other world leaders joined Polish Prime Minister, Donald Tusk at Westerplatte today. Wreaths were laid. Words were spoken. Healing continued. The legacy of war stretches well into the third and fourth generations. Some things were broken that will never be repaired. Some things were lost that will never be regained. That's the way it is. Apologies, regrets or no. Lasting consequences. Lasting changes. History teaches hard lessons. And meanwhile, the Colorado Corvette Club made the local news this morning, on its way in caravan to Kansas City and beyond, to a national convention. No note of this anniversary in the headlines of U.S. newspapers and broadcasts. Life goes on.