There Is A Palm Tree In the Center of Warsaw

There is a palm tree in the center of Warsaw. It stands on the spot where Hitler should have died, blown to bits by Polish assassins on October 5, 1939. Had it gone off according to plan, thousands of pounds of dynamite would have exploded beneath him as he took his victory lap through the Polish capital in the earliest days of World War Two. Inexplicably, the plan, one of many failed attempts by Germans, Poles and others to assassinate Hitler, was abandoned – or betrayed, sabotaged, or discovered. He carried on, unscathed. I had no idea. How many times have I crossed through this intersection? Thinking of donuts. And dinner and my next appointment. How many times a day do I hurry across the wide boulevard, determined to keep pace with the old ladies and hoping the traffic stalls long enough so I can catch the tram I see coming? My mind is normally racing ahead, making mental notes, the day’s to-do list, and, often, composing my next email home to my daughters. Today I have something remarkable to tell them. Here, in the middle of this intersection where, improbably, a palm has sprung up, in the heart of Warsaw, this ancient center of a distinguished, diverse, and elegant culture, right smack in the middle of this intersection, Hitler was supposed to have died, on October 5, 1939. If only. To think, think! what if. It is hollow speculation, of course, ridiculous. But how can you not wonder, as I will from now on, if only. How differently things — lives and nations — would have turned out. Families not ripped apart, cities not leveled, shtetls not dismantled. Invasions not launched. Bombs not dropped. No genocide. Jewish civilization in Eastern Europe not wiped out. No ghettoes, no death camps. Auschwitz, Treblinka, Dachau would not be in anyone’s vocabulary of terror. No Holocaust. We know so much about the devastation of Nazi war against the Jews, more than we can bear, more than anyone should have to take in. We need to know, we must know it, remember. And learn. We know less, perhaps nothing at all about the Nazi’s savage dismemberment of the Polish nation, the systematic attempt to entirely exterminate Polish culture. Mass executions of Poland’s leading scholars, doctors, judges, artists, teachers, and military officers. Three million ethnic Poles killed. The same number as that of Polish Jews who died. Civilians and soldiers dead, traumatized, wounded, and orphaned. Futures shattered. But what if, on this spot right here, Hitler had died that day. How much might have been stopped? Stalin perhaps even stymied in his own imperialistic ambitions over Eastern Europe. To think, think! If only. What if. Perhaps. Who knows. Warsaw still inspires such melancholy rumination. This city is alive with its past. To be in Warsaw now is to be in Warsaw then. Everyone who lives here has a story, and every story is still important. These are not just memories, they are part of the manual, instructive for one’s approach to life: to living, making a living, and living with others. There is not a child alive in Warsaw today who has not learned firsthand from someone about the terrors of the war, the heroic resistance, the remarkable rebuilding, and, most of all, the amazing resilience of these good people. Hanka’s grandmother was a courier in the underground Polish resistance force, slogging through filthy and disgusting sewer tunnels, delivering messages, arms, and supplies. Marcin’s uncle detonated small explosives to disrupt and harass the German occupation troops. Henryk fought in the forests, burrowing into earthen caves to sleep by day, marauding with patrols at night, raiding Nazi depots, rescuing Polish captives, and attacking German barracks. Like thousands of other ethnic Poles, he was captured and, by dint of sheer luck, was not executed on the spot, but spent years as a prisoner in Auschwitz. Alicja, the clerk in the print shop where I get more business cards, tells me of her aunt, a sniper, who pretended to be a boy, so she could be a fighter with the partisans in the woods. Anya married a paratrooper, Lesczek was a navigator, and Wladyslaw became a radio specialist and code- breaker. Grazina’s father was a spy, slipping into German camps to overhear their plans, and blond, blue-eyed Marya insinuated herself into the affections of Nazi officers in order to gather information she passed on to the Polish Home Army, the underground collection of resistance fighters. I never have to search out these stories. They simply emerge, from everyone, everyone! in the course of conversation about family, the past, one's heritage. It's not quite, "meet my mother, she threw grenades during the Warsaw Rising." But close. The topic comes up. Always. It is as much a part of who they are as my having lived in Chicago for many years or my father growing up on a farm. Especially this time of year, as the fire burns atop the mountain of buried rubble, these days of remembering the last heroic acts of resistance. Heroic resistance, suicidal sabotage, crazy attempts to disrupt and unnerve the German occupation, these are stories familiar to every Polish child from the oral history of their own parents, uncles and aunts, grandparents. It is woven into the sinew of their bones, and now lives in the collective consciousness. The tales are as sparse as an Ernest Hemingway narrative, haunting, direct, unflinching in the face of disaster. “He found the wire hidden under the low brush. He unsheathed the tool he always carried, tucked into his waistband, snipped the wire like this, click, and went back into the forest.” “She caught the German soldier alone in the barn, she shot him in the head. “ No fancy descriptions, no “tangle of new growth,” or “gleaming silver knife,” or “ghostlike,he disappeared into the gloom from whence he had come.” These stories require no embellishment. “I hid under the pile of hay with the machine guns and grenades. I was scared to death. But they didn’t find me.” Halina waits at this crosswalk, strides purposefully to the other side, goes about her business. At the quivering edge of her 85-year-old consciousness is this sharp throb of awareness, that here, in this place where a palm tree now stands, something didn’t happen, something that could have saved her from years in Pawiak Prison, from starvation, the loss of her lover, her life. So many, so much lost, ruined, wasted. If only. To their credit, Halina and the other Poles I know don’t second guess their history as much as I do. It happened. They have made their peace with their war, not ones to wonder, pointlessly, what if. Sorrow, yes; waves of sadness wash over the city on a regular basis. Wariness, worry, yes. Regret, yes. But better still, they learn from their memories: Resilience. Resistance. Sacrifice. Courage. Recover. Rebuild, rebuild, and rebuild: lives, families, faith. Early in the twenty-first century, the Poles are creating new art. new industry. A nation. And they go on. And on. They put up a palm tree in the center of the city, in the middle of, what else: Jerusalem Street.

"Poland is not yet lost"

"Poland is not dead yet So long as we still live That which alien force has seized We at sabre point will retrieve." * By the 1st of October, 1939, Poland was an occupied country. Occupied not as France was occupied, or Belgium or Norway or Holland. Occupied as in savaged. Bombed beyond belief. Ruined. Brutally occupied. Polish citizens were shot without reason, without provocation. Civilians were as much the target of Nazi and Soviet brutality as the soldiers. Oh yes, by this time the USSR had invaded Poland as well. Even as Polish civilians were fleeing for their lives from the Germans, to the east, the Soviet Red Army kept its half of the agreement it had made with the Third Reich and crashed into Polish villages and cities on its eastern frontier. Thousands -- untold numbers well into the tens of thousands -- of Polish citizens were loaded onto trains and sent to Siberia. Did you know that? Didn't think so. A kind reader wrote to me yesterday, "Poland had it bad." Indeed. Crushed doesn't even begin to cover it. Warsaw was a mass of rubble, although not as ruined as it would be in the final Nazi campaign to level the city entirely in 1944. The Nazi regime intended to destroy, that is, wipe out, annihilate the Polish people to give room for good Aryans to expand, living room for Germans. A few Poles would be kept alive to provide slave labor. But the vast majority of Polish citizens were to be 'removed.' By the 1st of October, 1939, Polish boys and men had fled to the forests and begun forming up into rogue fighting units. The Polish Army held off the Germans for weeks longer than anyone could have ever imagined. Nazi forces suffered far greater losses than they had expected. But, finally, their overwhelming superiority of numbers and their tanks and trucks and other technological advantages had worn down the Polish Army and it was all but over, the initial blitzkreig, this first tragic chapter of the war. There was no Vichy style government in Poland. There were not Polish politicians and leaders who collaborated with the Nazis. But, in spite of all this, the Poles kept singing, "Poland is not yet lost..." Their national anthem, a defiant song if ever I heard one. "Poland is not dead yet," and by miracle and dogged determination and just plain cussedness, Poland was still alive at the end of the War. They lived to fight another day. *translation of the anthem largely from Norman Davies'.

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.

The Day Before the Days After

I remember exactly. The moment we first contemplated the unfathomable. The moment, the time of day -- early evening, the sky outside my window -- hazy but cloudless, the feeling that came over me -- stunned horror. Unbelievable. Surely, not. Dave came in to where I sat reading, "Turn on the news," he urged. "New Orleans could be entirely under water by this time tomorrow." I remember thinking, "impossible." Surely this was a worst case scenario, the nightmare exaggeration. This is what could happen. But it won't. It couldn't. A whole city? Nothing like this, nothing of this magnitude had ever occurred in my lifetime, in my world, close at hand. It couldn't happen. Surely, not. We watched, glued to the screens through that night, just four years ago. I reluctantly went to sleep in the early hours of the morning only to come fully awake in an instant to blurry images on the television screen and the shocked voices of news reporters confirming the worst fears. Because I do what I do from home and on a flexible schedule, I stayed stuck on the story all day, as the flood waters poured in, buildings were submerged, and lives were lost. It was absolutely unbelievable. "This isn't happening." Yet, the odd sense of inevitability was coupled with the nagging questions, 'couldn't something have been done?' to prevent this horror. It was awful. And I was a thousand miles away. Life there, unimaginable. Absolutely unimaginable. My god. Crossing that devil ocean, to another time and place, another late August, this one 1939, Europe. Poland. The day before the day of, the days after. In one of his novels, Isaac Bashevis Singer writes of the last evening, August 31, 1939, in Warsaw. The cafes were filled with old friends sharing gossip and funny stories, families enjoying the late summer warmth, romance blossoming, shy lovers having a light supper. The scene he sets is not one of desperation but of life, ongoing, quite normal. As it was. Except. To be sure, soldiers were on alert, scouts were out scouting, diplomats were negotiating. But the die had been cast. Open archives from the British Foreign Ministry document the dozens of telegrams back and forth between Hitler himself and his high command, on the one side and the British foreign officers on behalf of their government, on the other. The duplicity of the German offers of continuing negotiations are heartwrenching to read at this late date. As late as 9:15 p.m. that last evening, the Germans acknowledge the Polish commitment (conveyed through the British) to enter into direct talks aimed at resolving the supposed issue, namely control of the port city of Danzig / Gdansk and a 'corridor' connecting Danzig with East Prussia, to the Germans' satisfaction. The tone of the telegrams alternates between respectful diplomatic protocal and imperious entitlement. The Poles are promising to talk, "we'll talk, we'll talk, we'll talk," they are saying. But even then, the Germans were poised and prepared to commence their attack in the wee hours of the morning, September 1. And, on this very evening, a small cadre of German convicts dressed in Polish uniforms "attacked" a German radio station in southern Poland, providing the final pretext for the Nazi's full-on assault on Poland. The next morning, the rest of the world awakened to the ridiculous news that Poland had attacked Germany. The promises of British and French assistance were the finger in the dike against a German declaration of war on Poland. Formal treaties were in place, promising assistance. But, Hitler knew something the Poles were unwilling to accept. France and Britain would not come to their aid. They would face the blitzkreig and the onslaught of the Nazi War Machine all on their own. The levees would not hold. Shock and awe. Do you remember the eve of the war against Iraq? How strange to watch it all develop on television. I think about the horrors that followed. And can almost begin to imagine the level of cruel, vicious assaults on Poland. But not only its military. The German bombers targeted civilians. This is what Hitler said on the eve of this war, a war he had no intention of calling off, for any reasons. There was a people to exterminate. No, two. The Poles. And the Jews. Hitler told his command, " I have sent my Death's Head units to the East with the order to kill without mercy men, women and children of the Polish race or language. Only in such a way will we win the Lebensraum that we need."

"In the Meantime" Living Between Memory and Hope

St. Augustine describes our human life succinctly, "We live between memory and hope." It is hard to live "in the meantime." In fact, it often feels like the mean time. Remembering is the mood of this day. Teddy Kennedy is gone from us, and the memories are pouring forth from his sons and daughters, his family and colleagues and friends, including Boston Celtics great, Bill Russell, who was just interviewed on MSNBC. Russell and Kennedy became good friends over the years, especially in the days when Black basketball coaches and players were unwelcome in Boston (and elsewhere). We've been hearing wonderfully poignant stories of Ted's commitment to the poor and disenfranchised, the outcast and the sorrowful. Remembering remarkable stories of generosity, perserverance and heroism enriches our lives by lifting us up above self-interest, self-pity, and self-concern. It was deeply moving hearing the words of Matthew's Gospel, as Jesus says, "inasmuch as you did this to the least of my brothers and sisters, you did this (good) to me." Kennedy's life was framed by these words that are suspended between memory and hope, command and fulfillment, expectation and reward. His sense of moral responsibility came straight out of the Scriptures. The meantime often feels to us like empty time, between already and not yet. I am frequently frustrated with impatience as I wait for what I trust is coming but not yet real. It can be a time of wallowing, paralysis, and distress. As the poet, T.S. Eliot, wrote, "suspended in time ... the soul's sap quivers." So, what do we do in these mean times, between starting and completion? Kennedy got busy. And his example and commitment inspire me this day. We're not there yet -- wherever we believe 'there' will be. There is so much to do. So much completing and fulfilling to be accomplished here on earth where "God's work must surely be our own." On the other side of the Atlantic, the Poles are remembering too. On any given day I can open the Polish News Agency compendium of news releases to find a list of anniversaries, and today is no different. The big anniversaries this weekend are the significant -- and epoch-changing -- agreement signed between Solidarity and the Communist government in 1980. And, also of epochal importance, the beginning of World War II, in 1939. This is the 70th Anniversary of the start of World War II and European leaders are gathering to commemorate this tragic occasion. Yesterday, the Polish President traveled to remember the anniversary of the liquidation of the Jewish Ghetto in Lodz. So many anniversaries. Poles are excellent at remembering, articulating the stories of past heroics and victories along with the tales of suffering and loss. Perhaps it is some influence of the large Jewish population within the Polish nation for centuries, this penchant for remembrance, for reciting the ancient stories. Nobody does it better. Dreams of future fulfillment are legion, too. Or have been. One of the difficult realities of Poland in this modern era is the lack of articulated vision. Once the future opened up and the euphoria of victory over Communism wore off, the long, hard sog of refashioning society commenced. Unlike the urgent needs of the Post WWII period, when the country lay in ruins and housing needed to be put up quickly and basic infrastructure restored, and there was still an external enemy to contend against, these last twenty years have been tedious and tendentious. Infighting and fractured loyalties have characterized this recent period. Nevertheless, and perhaps in spite of government actions (and the lack thereof), Poland has developed a strong economic engine, strong enough to be holding its own even in the current economic crisis. It is the mean time in Poland, as it is here. Listening to the litany of legislation written and passed under Ted Kennedy's leadership, one is profoundly moved by the legion of changes: Voting Rights and other civil rights legislation, Title 9, Medicare, Cobra, the Americans With Disabilities Act -- you've seen the lists. To think that only 50 years ago, segregation was legal. Only 50 years ago. In my lifetime. A "whites only" lunch counter, in my memory. I sat there. You may have, too. Or on the other side of that same counter. "Colored only." It went on too long. That it went on at all, morally reprehensible. We have accomplished a lot, changed so much. Bill Russell was asked what one might consider an absurd question this morning, to wit, Given the great changes that have occurred since the days when you were a scandal as a Black NBA coach to this morning when an African American President of the United States offered the eulogy for Senator Kennedy, can you say Kennedy's work is completed? Of course not. Russell was tactful, "It's not complete." We still live in the mean time. As Lech Walesa leads the celebrations of Solidarity's victory in 1980, and later, the observances of the start of WWII in 1939, we will remember sacrifice and success. But, with wars ended and a nation rebuilt, with democracy established and a much higher quality of life, there is too much yet to be done. A recent poll indicates that a startling number of Poles long for the [bad] old days. I get the sense at times that many Poles don't quite know what to long for, to work for, to aim for. Not yet. Suspended between initiation and completion, Poland still lives in the mean time. Between memory and hope.

What would you do?

Today is one that never passes without bitter, painful memories for a good friend of mine in Eastern Europe. It doesn't matter if she was from Poland or the Soviet Union, from Hungary, Czechoslovakia or the German Democratic Republic, East Germany. The same despicable thing occurred in all of them. She remembers the date easily because it was the day after, and the day before, two uniquely signicant occasions in her life. The birth of her first nephew. And the day of her own wedding. Something between twenty and thirty years ago. She is not one of my closest friends but we've had a longtime friendship and have shared some deep conversations and a few wild adventures. She told me this story not long after it happened, a bold move on her part as the dangers implicit were still at hand. It grieves me every time I think of this. She's given me permission to relate it so long as there are no distinguishing characteristics. Because she still is a little bit afraid. Amidst the last minute preparations for her wedding -- a civil ceremony at the town registrar's office followed by a party, a reception, if you will, at a lovely restaurant -- she was stopped in the florist's shop by a woman in the serious, ugly, ill-fitting wool suit of a bureaucrat and directed to come along to an office some blocks away. It was a time when very few people had cars and so, of course, they walked. In silence. Through the busy streets. Until the frumpy henna-haired official opened a door and pointed up the stairs. It was a dark and narrow stairway, behind a facade that was so nondescript one never noticed it. A small office with grungy yellowed walls awaited and behind a desk sat a stern doughy-faced and rolypoly man in a cheap black suit. She remembers noticing a flimsy metal chair opposite his and a lamp on the desk and flickering overhead lights that buzzed slightly. The details of the conversation that followed are so painful she has never found the nerve to speak of them except in generalities. She was asked questions about members of her family, and her family-to-be. She was asked about two of her former colleagues. She was given information that was intended to intimidate, to frighten her, with awareness that she and these friends and family had been under surveillance. The man in the black suit and the henna-haired woman suggested to her that embarrassing information could come to light in ways that would be damaging to her own career and that of these others. She was offered a choice. Compromise. Blackmail. Intimidation. It was excruciating. The stakes were not small. What would you do? Of course, I think, from the luxury of my world far away from hers, I would never give in. I would never allow myself to be coopted, to be bought. Nor would I succumb to the threat of humiliation, the loss of career. Oh, no. I think, I would be strong. Really? Am I sure? They offered her time to consider their 'offer.' She told me she felt cold dread come over her like a shroud. She alternately felt feverish. She began to shake, her entire body was shaking. She remembers it as an out-of-body experience, looking down at herself, so small, so scared, sitting in a battered metal chair. She turned her hands over and over again. And then she looked up. And, still feeling as though she was on the outside looking in at herself, she stood, still shaking, and squared her face into a firm grimace, looked at her two inquisitors, and said, "no." She turned and walked down the stairs and out the door. She didn't dare to stop and lean against any of the nearby doorways so she moved back across the streets of her town and walked for a half hour or so, faster and faster, until she felt she had begun to reinhabit her body again and was regaining control of herself. She went back to the florist, apologized for the interruption and completed her purchase of big blossoms for the reception. She carried on with the rest of her errands, went home, said not a word to anyone, and got up the next morning, put on her wedding clothes and was a beautiful bride. I'd known her for some time before she told me this story and it did not surprise me at all. By then, her character was clearly before me and she oozed integrity. Other choices she'd made were consistent with this one, if not so dramatic. Her courage took my breath away. Later in my life, I came to see that we too, even here, in not such a grim place or circumstance, are presented with difficult dilemmas, to compromise, to let ourselves be bought off. To tell secrets, to keep secrets, to give in to threats of blackmail. What I learned from my far-away friend is that such decisions have far-reaching consequences. She was free -- Free! -- to move through her life lightly. She was far less fearful than others I know, in a similar time and circumstance, who gave in. She never looked over her shoulder. And, not entirely surprisingly, none of the dire outcomes that were threatened ever came to pass. She is still a strong person of great resolve and integrity, well-respected and constantly creative. And a lot of fun! Complicity corrodes one's character. And undermines the good. It brings great harm to many people. I remember this on days like today, when I think of her, her wedding anniversary tomorrow, and her unflagging determination to do what is right. Happy anniversary, my friend!

Can you count on your allies?

The last days of August, 1939 were gloriously bright and sunny. The always fashion-forward women of Warsaw were home from summer holidays with the latest Paris couture. The streets were filled with color, smiley, kissy greetings, gossipy conversations. But. But. Looming just over the horizon, an ugly storm was brewing. An undercurrent of fear and impending doom frazzled nerves from Gdansk in the north to the Czech border in the south. And most especially along the western frontier with Germany. Hitler had already claimed the Sudatenland. Furious conversations flew across the continent, attempting to stave off the impending war. There were signs. Signs pointing to trouble. Disaster. But what could you do? Do what you could. That's all. Poland was counting on England and France. They had signed treaties, promising to come to the aid of the Polish nation in the event of a Nazi attack. Would this be enough to intimidate Hitler? Now, please. Don't ever misunderstand me to equate the magnitude of evil events in Poland, especially during the War, with the experience I had while a pastor here in Littleton. I only seek to make some extrapolations in order to help me, and perhaps help you, make some sense of basic human behaviors and events. Having said that.... It was gloriously sunny and bright here in the last days of August, ten years ago, 1999, as I prepared to move my family and to take up the responsibilities of serving as pastor of a local Lutheran church. No Parisienne fashions for us but we all had new clothes. I bulked up on clergy collars and skirts that work with black shirts. The girls prepared for a new school year, and a move. Dave started packing away his suits and ties, preparing for a more casual lifestyle. There would be hikes and trips to see golden hillsides of aspen, easy visits with extended family. But. But. There were signs. Not far over the horizon were disturbing signs of trouble. The allies I had to depend upon, colleagues in the regional offices of the church, were evasive, not altogether forthcoming, or even honest. It was worrisome. But I held off judging, and hoped for the best. Frankly, I hoped I was misinterpreting or misreading what I heard. What could I do? Be wise. Be open. Be careful. I did what I could do. I had promises, assurances of support. The question was, could I count on these allies? I believed I could. I believed them, believed in them. With all my heart, all my might. Poland learned in the long, awful month of September, 1939, that England and France were not jumping to their defense. It was disaster. I learned a little later that my allies would betray me. It was disaster. Devastating. Poland's allies came late to the war but they did come. And, while the alliance was fraught with difficulties for the duration of the war, they did work together. I wish to heaven I could say the same about the situation here. Not only for my sake, and my family's, but especially for the sake of God's work in the world.

"Is there any chance....."

I had x-rays on my bum foot the other day. I will forever remember the technician with gratitude. "Is there any chance you may be pregnant?" The last time I was pregnant was in 1992. August 19, 1992, to be exact. I was pregnant on that day for ten hours and four minutes. And then, and then, and then, Annika was born! Seventeen years ago today. The birthday bagel has been lit and the candles blown out. Birthday bags have been opened, oooh's and aaaah's have been expressed, the singing card has sung, the gifts have been gathered up and thanks for them has been given. The birthday dinner is being digested and the birthday girl has now gone to bed. Her alarm clock goes off in the morning at 5:15. We've hugged and laughed and been glad together for this amazing gift of Annika in our world. So, no. I'm not pregnant. Not a chance. Not even. But, oh, it was fun for a moment, to ponder the question. No, not of how it might feel to be pregnant again, to await another birth. But of what it might be like to be young enough again so the question could be something other than ridiculous. I took my time answering. And didn't say what I was thinking then, "are you kidding?" "Hell, no!" "Not on your life, sister!" I smiled sweetly. And gently said, "no." It's a little bit like getting carded, for an ID, when buying beer. Could I, really, look young enough? No.

Collateral Damage

Violence takes its toll on a much wider swath of the community than simply the few persons directly, and physically, harmed by attack. It is an oddly sad day for me. I've listened this afternoon to the live stream from the Churchwide Assembly of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, to which I belong and which I serve (albeit passively now) as an ordained minister. The annual gathering is in Minneapolis yet through the magic of internet technology, Twitter, facebook, and several blogs, I can feel as if I'm in the convention center. (And, at the same time, eat an ice cream sandwich and, more importantly, pet and comfort my dog, Daisy, who is terrified of the ongoing thunderstorm.) I watch my friends make speeches on the video screen that introduce the Lutheran Malaria Initiative, our partnership with the larger UN Foundation's "Nothing But Net" campaign to provide malaria nets to everyone in Malaria-prone areas of Africa, Cindy, Andrea and others. This is the same campaign that Bill Gates, Ashton Kutcher, and Bono champion. We're part of it. $10.00 from you buys a net. Saves a life. We Lutherans do this sort of thing really, really well! We get resources on the ground and with less overhead than almost anybody else -- including organizations such as the Red Cross, national government, and UN aid. In the aftermath of the tsunami in Asia, Hurricane Katrina, and other disasters, we had money and supplies in people's hands within hours. Our ten bucks a head will go directly to purchase the nets. We're very efficient at this sort of thing. Besides buying "nothing but net" we are very good at delivering medical care, training medical professionals in Africa, and promoting the development of essential infrastructure that brings long-term, self-sustaining progress in Africa and elsewhere. It is moving and wonderful to learn of this activity. It makes me proud of our church. It may be just about the best thing we do. My daughter plans to become a medical doctor, her special interests are public health and medical care to underserved communities. This initiative is something I could easily imagine her getting excited about, and perhaps even committing her time and talent to. Sadly, because of what happened to me, and the church's response to it -- this same larger church that does some things so well -- she will have nothing to do with it. Of course, my daughter's vocation will be carried out in fulfilling and important ways. And the church will find the personnel required to deliver the care it seeks to offer. But I always rather expected, and imagined, that my daughters would also serve through the church, in part because, in this arena, it does such a great job. Not only my daughters and husband are lost to this church, but scores of others. And not only as a consequence of my experiences, but in relation to hundreds of other instances where the church has failed to care for victims of violence within the church. There are millions of Americans who have become estranged from churches, ours and others, because of the crass, self-serving, and mean-spirited actions of its leaders. I respect their decisions, especially as many of them are deeply spiritual persons who have found creative and meaningful ways of serving the world and honoring its people. They are often profoundly compassionate, humble, and hard-working in the ways they do divine work, even without so naming it. My family has taken other paths over the past several years, ones in which they have discovered new ways of engaging their values and commitments. I am so proud of them. I honor and respect them more than I can tell. The world will be grateful and make excellent use of their gifts. And they will find exciting ways to give. But on a day like today, I'm reminded that we have come out at a very different place than I expected years ago. And I can not but feel melancholy and a bit sad. There is never a containment policy for violence. It spills out. In ways we could not have imagined. Beyond boundaries we could not have predicted. We need to count these costs. The church can get along much more easily without me than it can without all these others. And they are legion. Legion.

Don't Get Even, Get Odd

I am exhausted. A broken-down treadmill, a spindly-legged white wood table, a conical -- and comical -- yellow metal Christmas tree and two very large boxes filled with junk blocked the driveway when Annika got home late last night from time out with her friends. She entered laughing. And texting. Seems the friends decided to deposit a load of leftover garage sale junk at our house. A prank. A very funny prank, to my still juvenile mind. The kids came over soon after and -- isn't this nice? -- put all the stuff back in Tyler's truck. Good guys. Then they came inside. "Mom, we have some hungry teenagers here." We offered string cheese, Doritos, and popcorn. Easy crowd. "This is so great," I told them, "because I've been wanting to do just this very prank to some people and now I've got the stuff to do it with." Matt looked at me as if I were joking but I assured them I was not. Oh no. I'm serious. Very serious. PTSD does funny things to people. It left my brain with a hankering, no, a craving, an almost uncontrollable urge to do mean pranks to mean people. It started soon into the recovery period. "Let's deliver flaming bags of poop!" my friend suggested, joking. I wanted to do it. The very first reading I did as I started to think again in coherent passages was to surf the internet for "Prank and Practical Joke" threads. I printed out a few hundred pages of possibilities. It occupied my mind -- and offered the sweet promise of revenge -- for months. Eventually, I compiled a book of my favorites. My family got worried. Insomnia was also part of the package. I was awake long after everyone else had gone far far away into REM sleep. What if I took the car one night and did these deeds? What if I did post crime-scene tape and leave a chalk drawing of a victim on the sidewalk of someone's house? What if I had a load of sand delivered to the home of the man who stalked me? I am proud, I guess, to tell you now that I never did a thing. Not one. I helped my friend teepee her neighbor's house one night a couple of years ago but that's it. That wasn't even on my list. I've been very good. All things considered. No prank phone calls, no tomb stones on the church lawn on Halloween, no loads of crap in anyone's driveway. But, oh the temptation. Last night. Here was a ready-made opportunity. And I had six teen-agers all hepped up and dying to do the deed for me. "Just give us the address," Tory begged. "We'll do it!" "Ah, c'mon!" they urged. "We won't get caught. And you won't even be involved." I tied myself to a chair and put a sock in my mouth. This is so hard. My fictional alter-ego will not be so pure. She is going to haunt and annoy the perpetrators of dastardly deeds, relentlessly. Maybe. But not me. Not the real me. I did get odd but I can't even imagine how I could ever get even. Ever. I can't do it. I think this is a sign that my brain is healing. I hope so. Impulse control. A good thing. But, exhausting. I am, according to my family and friends, less odd every day. It does occur to me to wonder, do you think nations could ever get to this point? Maybe a few pranks (more of these another day) would be good. Just don't ask Cuba to do any teepeeing; they have a critical shortage of toilet paper at the moment. What if Poland left a pile of junk on Russia's driveway?