Here Comes Everybody!

Ghana is represented in the Winter Olympics. And Ethiopia. Cyprus. I love this! I love the world. The whole world, everybody from Andorra to Iran to Israel to Tadzikistan. Tell me it's all schmaltz. I won't believe you. On nights like this the idealist in me is alive, flaming in fact. We are everybody and yes, we are the world. All of it. Playing together on this pale blue dot. Sadly, the Jamaican Bobsled Team didn't qualify. But Moldova is represented. Here comes everybody! My daughter watched the Torun Olympics from either Italy or Estonia, I don't remember which. But I do remember her jubilation at being in the Town Square in Tallinn Estonia when their first gold medalist, a cross-country skier, returned home to an enormous crowd as the conquering Queen. I love this parade, this Opening Ceremony, the time we take to honor each participating country, the reminders of who we all are and the faces given to strangers, neighbors, ancient enemies. The ironies are striking. Turkey and Armenia. Bosnia and Serbia, Serbia and Montenegro. Macedonia and Greece. Iran and Israel. I'm sentimentally attached, of course, to Estonia and Sweden and Poland, and I will be cheering every chance I get for a Swede to beat a Norwegian. The huge Chinese delegation walked in and every single one of them held up a camera to capture their experience. The Georgians were somber and clearly affected by the tragedy form earlier today. The lone Mexican competitor looked lost. The Poles brought their best hopes, cross-country skiers, and got through without being the object of any tacky jokes. But it came close. And then the United States comes in, all boisterous and overwhelming and confident. It's a herd of Americans! This is always a striking moment for me. There is pride, of course, but also a sober sense of awareness of scale. We're big. We're really huge. And to see our relative strength in numbers out there on the field, well, what can I say? What needs to be said? Having sat in living rooms across the world and watched the United States show up in force, I always feel the embarrassment of riches. Seeing us as others see us. Dominant and dominating. Overwhelming. It's a poignant moment, always. I'm never moved to apologize for who I am, who we are. But I always do feel a sense of responsibility and humility. With great wealth comes great requirements. And I wonder, are we worthy? Are we good stewards of all we are, all we have? Sport, war, humanitarian aid, relief, music, art, literature, science, medicine, economics. Oh yeah, we compete, we share, we each bring our best, and, idealist that I am, flaming idealist that I am a night like tonight makes me wonder, even hope. Human frigging beings that we are, could we try a little harder to pull this off, more often? All the time? Okay, I'm not crazy. Not all the time. But, nevertheless, ready or not, here comes everybody!

"Over my dead body!"

Oh, this is flattering! In his column last Sunday in the New York Times, Nobel Prize winner (Economics), Paul Krugman compared the current level of functioning in the United States Congress to that of the Polish Sejm two centuries ago. It's a disturbing picture. And too true to be good. This gives me the excuse to offer a little history lesson and another insight into the Polish psyche. And perhaps, while we're at it, a glimpse into our own. It's all about the "No." As the Polish nation began to come together, as early as the Jagiellonian dynasty in 1264, a basic Jewish Charter was established to promote Jewish trade within Polish lands and by 1515, King Sigismund I extended the policy to promote Jewish settlements and a policy of tolerance toward Jews throughout the realm. This was at a time when Jews where being pushed out and persecuted throughout western Europe and squeezed into a vise that narrowed their options for freedom, promoting Jewish culture and religion, and for making their livelihood. The Jewish communities within Poland were gathered under an elected tribunal of rabbis that administered their own affairs as an almost semi-autonomous state within the state. (This is not particularly relevant to the argument at hand, I just wanted to throw it in because it is a little known part of history, which does cast a certain, different light on the history of Poland and Jewry. But anyway, I digress.) This came at a time when Poland was already on the path to a Constitutional Monarchy, one of the first in the world. Poland had a bicameral parliament, sejm, by 1497, comprised of nobility. The Catholic bishops and the Papal authorities wielded considerable power as well. Skip twenty chapters of dense Polish history, names, dates, wars, schemes, intrigues.... Oh, my goodness, this is all so complicated. There will not be a test later. Poland was one of the first nations to see the emergence of a powerful parliamentary system. The members of this parliament were the Polish nobility. A very powerful class. They pushed, they pulled, they took land back from the burghers, they cut deals with the Jewish merchant and guild classes. They adopted an attitude and a lifestyle of entitlement, and, of course, privilege. The Polish nobility was numerous by European standards. 25,000 noble families, altogether about 500,000 persons, represented as much as 6.6 per cent of Poland's total population. At the same time, for example, France's nobility comprised only one per cent of its population, and England's nobility was only two per cent. [Clearly, the Poles were more noble than anyone else!] They were a closed estate, their privileges protected by a labyrinth of detailed laws. They controlled their own destiny and that of everyone else in the Polish republic of roughly 7.5 million. They governed according to "their private inclinations." Nice gig if you can manage it. Well, these nobles felt so entitled and empowered that they were at pains to preserve the power of every single one of their caste. Which is to say, nobody wanted to allow anything to happen that they themselves would not benefit from. "If it's not good for me, it's not good for Poland." Or, at the very least, it's not going to happen. Poles may be the world's most notable idealists. By 1652, they enacted procedures that assured the Sejm would act always in unanimity. That's right. Can you imagine? They proceeded from the notion that no law could be enforced if it had not been made by unanimous consent. They wanted to avoid the chaos that comes from conflict. They strove to create harmony in their civic life. And, anyway, if a policy did not have universal consent, if it could not be convincing to everyone eligible to decide, then it must not be worthy of adoption. Yes, idealism. Indeed. My mind, which ranges toward cynicism on occasion (okay, often, when it comes to matters of the administration and distribution of power), wonders if there wasn't also an element of "over my dead body" that prompted the Sejm to give veto power to all of its members. "If I don't want it, it ain't happening." "If it's not good for me, it's not good for Poland." Kind of the reverse of the old adage, "what's good for GM is good for America." What isn't in my best interest isn't going to happen. The motivations for this policy, such as we are privvy to them, seem high-minded, if naive. But it created chaos. Eventually. Nothing got done because, surprise! the nobles did not all agree. They used the "Liberum Veto" for matters large and small. Petty and churlish. And the country stalled out. Okay, that's simplistic. But you didn't sign on for Polish History 440, the graduate seminar, after all. The point is that a lovely concept degenerated into misuse and selfish, mean-spirited, vindictive obstructionism. That pesky human nature at work once again. Now, read Paul Krugman. Sound familiar? It happens everywhere. In families, school boards, sewage oversight committees, country clubs and quilting groups. And even in churches. Striving for consensus is one thing, a noble thing. But giving veto power to the churlish, ignorant or paranoid is always a bad idea. As Krugman points out, Poland disintegrated and disappeared, degenerated into chaos, became ungovernable and vulnerable to the predatory intentions of its neighbors. Respect for bound conscience is one thing. "Liberum veto" is another. Concern for consensus is great. But the petty don't deserve to win.

I scared the dog

It is not pretty. The mucky non-productive cough of pneumonia. The Daisy dog is permanently scarred, and scared to come near me. I hope we can patch this up one day. I hope I stop coughing one day. It's been a week now. And I, for one, am not enjoying it. But at least one thing is better than the last time I had pneumonia. You. Christmas Eve 2000. I shook several hundred hands as the congregations left worship services. Somebody had Influenza B. The bad one going around that year. Christmas morning 2000. I woke up feeling like I'd been trashed by a team of roller derby queens. Which is to say, not good. But there was a worship service and it was my turn to do Christmas Day duty. The next day was a funeral and burial. The day after that was the church staff Christmas party. At my house. A kitchen full of guests, last minute preparations, gravy, mixing a salad. I could hardly stand up. So when they all went in to the dining room to sit down for the meal, I went upstairs "for a few minutes" to rest. I woke up ten hours later. I had this wicked Influenza bacteria and I got pneumonia. And, as some of you have been relating similar stories, pneumonia is nasty. And it lasts a long time. One friend wrote tonight of being sick for a month and a half. As it was, I was down, ennervated, totally wiped out for three weeks. It was six weeks before I really felt back to almost normal. I saw the doctor weekly and was on mega-doses of antibiotics. You can check my insurance records. It's true. As you have been following this blog you know that I am recovering from an attack at work. That happened in October of 2002, so about a year and a half later than this bout of illness. After I returned to work at the parish, I learned (not right away) that the "word on the street" --- which is to say gossipy emails, parking lot conversations, coffee klatches and telephone calls --- was that I didn't have the flu or pneumonia at all. In some versions, alternately, I was not sick at all and just faking it. Or, this was the most popular, I had a mental breakdown. The irony of that story was that 18 months later, in fact, their incessant and devilish harassment, sabotage, and abuse did result in my having a severe mental injury. I guess they were just planning ahead. The congregation was behaving according to a long pattern. And when I say congregation I should clarify that a core group of perhaps as many as fifty persons were gung ho on Operation Kill Jan, and others got dragged in or caught up in some of the gossip. And of those fifty, perhaps only as many as twenty or so were the most vigilant and diabolical in their behavior. The pattern that had worked for them before worked for them again. Pimp up the young assistant, undermine the senior pastor (me) and split the staff apart. It only works when the young assistants are guillible and needy. It hadn't worked with the previous team but oh, did it ever work this time. Moral of long story made short, my getting pneumonia and Influenza B became the first opening, the big opening, for mischief. (Mischief is as appropriate a descriptor here as bombing is for describing what happened at Hiroshima.) It was the opening campaign of the war they won on October 22, 2002, in the parking lot of the church. The next eighteen months were pretty much unmitigated hell. If you can imagine it, they did it. I've been reading all this week, Sophie's Choice about the holocaust, The Things They Carried, about the Vietnam war, All the King's Men about corruption in the early 20th century south, Willa Cather about the hardships of life and the moral breakdowns that were part of early life on the Nebraska prairie. The things we are capable of. Doing. To. One. Another. I realized how naive I still am. How genuinely hopeful I am about the human race. But mostly naive. Even though I know it happened, these and other terrible things, I have to confess, I have a very hard time wrapping my head around them. Really? People do these things to one another? There is still a big part of me that is in denial. Sometimes I have to watch the reality crime shows on TV just to convince myself that people, "normal" people really do terrible things. I will confess one thing more. I'm not sure if the denial isn't a perverse flip side of cynicism. Maybe I'm not so hopeful as I want to believe. Something changed inside of me as a result of that experience. Not unlike veterans who come home and talk about having become numb, even cold. I get it. Whether or not that's healthy, I'm not sure. Thanks for all your good wishes, suggestions and encouragement. I really DO have pneumonia and I'm not especially worried this time about a raging gossip campaign asserting otherwise. Thanks for being trustworthy. And kind.

Choose Life

Before I went there for the first time in 1980, this is what I knew and thought about Poland, when, rarely, I thought about Poland at all: Auschwitz. The Holocaust. And I knew it was part of the Warsaw Pact. Communist. That’s it. Period. Poland? When you live on the north side of Chicago you learn this about Poland: it is where your Jewish neighbors were sent like cordwood in box cars to death camps, like Auschwitz and Treblinka and Majdanek, from which these remnant few had somehow survived, traumatized ghosts without family or home or faith. I watched Hasidic neighbors from my window go to the Yeshiva every morning. I saw the wives with their wigs play with children on the front stoops. I walked past three synagogues on the way to the grocery store. How could I go to Poland? I struggled for a time with a feeling that I would somehow betray my Jewish friends and neighbors by going to Poland. It was for them a symbol now of death, of trauma. I would be treading on their ghosts, their haunted memories of loss and torture. Having Jewish neighbors, whole communities of Holocaust survivors, the Hasidic Yeshiva across Argyle Street, an Orthodox seminary a few blocks west on Foster Avenue, thriving congregations just up Kimball and scattered all through the neighborhood, and observant religious Jews living next door, all meant learning firsthand about the Nazi horrors, the desperate struggles to live, the terror of being torn from mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and, worse, one’s children. I read their histories, their theologies, their narratives. I read Elie Wiesel, read Night, and carried, as part of me now, the haunting picture he described, of a child hanged on the gallows at Auschwitz, and the angry cry of a fellow prisoner, “Where is God? Where is He?” As Wiesel was forced to march past the boy, hanging between life and death for over half an hour, the man behind him asked again, “Where is God now?” Wiesel writes, “ And I heard a voice within me answer him: ‘Where is He? Here He is. He is hanging here on this gallows.....’” (Night, page 62) In Poland. Martin Buber, Abraham Heschel, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Viktor Frankl, Wiesel, Hannah Arendt, Chaim Potok — I inhaled their writings. They were foundational to the theology, still Christian, that was constantly forming and reforming within me. I would go to Poland with the witness of these Jews in my heart and mind. “Religionless Christianity,” “the cost of discipleship,” “the way of freedom,” the penetrating insights of Dietrich Bonhoeffer were the dominant influence on my Christian views. Bonhoeffer, a German pastor and scholar, became a leader in the resistance movement in the run-up to World War II and throughout the war, sharply critical of the German church that allowed itself to be coopted by the Nazi’s and was silent in the face of anti-Semitism and other atrocities. DB (as we groupies affectionately call him) ultimately gave up his life trying to save the world from Hitler; as part of a plot to assassinate Hitler on July 21, 1943, he was arrested, sent to Buchenwald, and was hanged in the last days of Nazi power, May 7, 1945. While his own experience was dramatic, heroic, and profoundly sacrificial, worthy of the deepest respect and a challenge to any Christian who hears the words of Jesus, “take up your cross,” and “whoever would save his life must give it up, for my sake and the Gospel,” it was his writings, especially the Letters and Papers From Prison, that gave voice to my own deepest convictions about God and the world. I would go to Poland with Bonhoeffer in hand. Poland. Poland. Poland? I would go to Poland and ask questions. I would go to Poland and wonder about evil. I would go to Poland and try to understand something more about faith. About living. I would go to Poland, defiantly, choosing life in the face of death. So I did. So I do. Humbly, gently, carefully. And I chose. Life.

Round Trip to Auschwitz

The train to Auschwitz left from Platform 4.

Peron 4. A sign pointed the way.


It had been a leisurely morning. A cheerful voice greeted me with a seven o'clock wake up call. I hit the snooze button twice, finally shambling off to a warm shower at seven thirty. The small hotel in the Kazimierz district of Krakow served a marvelous breakfast -- scrambled eggs, perfectly prepared, with chives and bacon, a warm croissant with sweet Danish butter, crisp fresh pineapple, orange and grapefruit, salad (Europeans always need some sort of salad for breakfast), a bit of brie, a chilled glass of freshly squeezed pulpy orange juice exactly as I like it, and perfectly brewed rich black coffee.

I took a direct route to the train station, stopping only at a Bank-o-Mat -- in this case a German bank -- for yet more zloty, and dodged the occasional car heading up onto the sidewalk, where parking is customary. The street was torn up as new tram lines are being laid down but that has nothing to do with why cars are on the sidewalk. Cars are always on the sidewalk in Poland. The narrow streets leave no other choice for parking.

I strolled on, happening upon shop owners cranking out their awnings and sweeping the stoop, readying to open for the day. I passed students hurrying back from a quick trip home to the villages, barely in time for a new week of classes at Jagellonian University, one of the very first chartered universities in Europe. These students dragged suitcases, lugged awkwardly heavy backpacks. I followed a smartly dressed businesswoman of my own age, who knew exactly the most efficient way to navigate the maze of paths and obstacles through construction zones, one way streets, and tunnels. We bridged a ten-foot-deep trench on a sturdy plank and stepped around the worker in his royal blue and, so far, neatly pressed overalls. He was laboring to level ground for new paving stones.

The sky was clear blue with only a faint hint of the early morning haze, dew rising from the rolling fields just beyond the city. The sooty dank coal smell that I remembered from visits in the 1980's was conspicuously absent. It felt fresh and new and good to be about.

I arrived at the railway station with twenty minutes to spare. I bought a round trip ticket to Auschwitz/Oswiecim for 22 zloty. Coke Zero cost 3.5.

The train left precisely on time, at nine fifteen, as Polish trains do. We stopped at the Krakow Business Park, a skyline of red and yellow cranes putting up a score of modern office buildings to join the gleaming multi-storied corporate offices already there.

I believed I'd found a forward facing seat in the front car of the train, my choice. But when the train began moving, my mistake was obvious. I was in the last car. Looking back.

Did my unconscious will out after all?

No matter, I moved forward at the first stop and found a comfortable place across the aisle from two young women speaking in their animated, cheery French about friends, travel and ordinary things, about life. (I love eavesdropping.) The older man facing me read a succession of periodicals, a daily tabloid newspaper, a more serious newspaper, a magazine about Formula One car racing, and finally another lightweight weekly. His briefcase sat on the vinyl seat next to him. He got up, then checked the time on his cell phone several times, apparently anxious to get to an appointment on time. His grey tweed sport coat, stylish striped shirt and smart tie put me in mind of an architect. His glasses were new and of the very latest and highest fashion and his serious mien seem ill-suited to his choice of reading material. Of course, I never did figure him out. A journalist, maybe? Nah. Who knows.

Another, younger man in the last row of our car looked like one of Sarah Palin's 'Joe Six Pack' fixtures. He spent his time with a book of crossword puzzles, or else staring out the window, his arm resting on a small, brown canvas duffle bag.

The countryside from Krakow to Auschwitz ranges from gently to bigger, then big rolling hills, from woods and forest to patches of farmland, some villages and small towns. We passed through Dulowa, a sprawling village of two-story stucco houses, set at the base of a small hill surrounded by woods. A modern church, built to resemble the prow of a ship rose from the midde of nowhere, between this village and the next one.

Homemakers were out, taking advantage of a warm dry spell, hanging laundry to dry, digging around in gardens. It was wash day in Galicia: brightly colored blouses and skirts hung like flags and waved freely in the pleasant breeze.

We passed through Trzebinia, the biggest town on the route. A power plant with a tall red and white tower rose like a lighthouse. A railworker stood in the weeds of the trainyard, curly blond hair tossing rings around her face, talking on a cellphone. Several people got off in Trzebinia. A few others got on. The railworker was still on the phone.

Autumn was in its waning moments. Leaves turning from gold to brown, falling, drifting, like lilting notes of a completed season, or sonata. The trees looked bleached out and tired. The willows drooping, pulled down by the weight of life. Beech trees, cottonwood, all spent.

The man across from me checks the time evermore frequently. Pulls out a presentation folder. A printed document. Is it a lecture? A business proposal? His phone rings. He seems relieved to have made contact.

Ten eighteen. We stop in Chrznew.

The man is restless. He pulls out a well-worn gold appointment notebook, very old-fashioned. Then his wallet. Then he reviews all the documents contained therein.

Getting close.

We are now surrounded by woods. A few fir or pine, I can't quite tell which. We go under a bridge being constructed as an overpass for local cars. Life must be picking up around here. The train bed becomes rockier, then so much so I have to stop writing. The train bed is sitting up fifty feet above the forest floor. I'm a little freaked out.

Did everyone brought to KL Auschwitz arrive by train? On these tracks? Didn't I read that the first, Polish political prisoners arrived by truck transport?

There are freshly painted gray coal cars sitting, empty, on a siding.

The French girls who were laughing earlier have become more serious. The man combs his hair. Again. A few minutes later he does the spit and polish on his hair, using the cell phone's face as a mirror. Now he's checking the packages in the big Bass (brand) bag he has alongside.

Clutching both bags. We're not late. Why the restlessness? Is he coming to be interrogated? Tested?

Or is he on a pilgrimage too?

We pass a lovely large yard with rich green grass, an ornamental windmill, trees heavy with fruit, a small orchard of trees well-pruned. A big house is nearby, still under construction, the roof beams exposed.

The man across from me finds and checks another wallet but he doesn't seem frantic, searching for some lost item, just perusing. He checks a credit card or two, then reviews some business cards.

He reminds me of myself on some of the business trips I used to take, fumbling out of nervousness, low-level anxiety, boredom, eagerness to get on with it. I think ADD or something like it.

Now I see that all of the trees are completely washed out. Nature is past its peak. Even the pines look faded, bleached, tired of holding on.

But here and there, a brilliant red or gold band of trees stand out among the barren. Occasionally, the silvery trunks of birch gleam in the sun, which has been playing hide and seek all morning. We move along very slowly, bumping over the rocky train bed.

A French girl yawns. The other one, with darker hair, is quite quiet, pensive.

The man checks his watch again. And fidgets with his pockets, pulls out a slim red lighter. And a cigarette.

Forest on either side of us now. I think, it would be easy to hide in that forest, even now, with all its dense undergrowth.

We approach another tall smoke stack, painted red and white, another lighthouse. Full coal cars sit on the siding.

It is ten forty. We have stopped just short of, in sight of the Oswiecim/Auschwitz station.

We will arrive on time.

The girls take out packets of candy and each have one, their talk now strangled in the chocolate. They chew heavily, their jaws working like presses on the sticky candy.

We speed the last few kilometers, rocking rather wildly from side to side. A fringe of red oak lines the edge of a clearing. A large corn field extends beyond the woods into the distance.

More houses, small plots, typical edge of town. A big yellow Caterpillar sits on the next track, obviously rebuilding it, laying down steel rails. Whose equipment was it that helped the Nazis build the extra rail lines they required to KL Auschwitz-Birkenau?

Now we are wobbling across a bridge that spans what reminds me of a northern Colorado irrigation ditch, like the one where my father learned to swim and carouse with his cousins. We pass old, faded red brick, two-story square houses. They all have satellite dishes installed on their sides. There are newer stucco houses too, even a lime green one. They have satellite dishes too.

And we're here. Auschwitz/Oswiecim.

We're late.

I wonder, did that happen a lot?




My trip by train to Auschwitz.

Does anyone do this and not think. Not think about what was. About what was then. Was horrific. Terrifying. Brutal. Inhuman, inhumane.

How did a simple banal train trip become, in time, at one time, evil?




The last train back to Krakow today leaves at 19:17. I don't want to miss it. I take a photo of the schedule so I don't get mixed up. I get to go home. Today.

Blue Numbers and White Lace

The tablecloth was lace. The candles were lit.

Sunday dinners at this family’s table were times for playful political bantering, and for poignant history lessons. Parents, children, different views, differing priorities, common values. I was glad to share dinner with my friend and his family.

I struggled to understand the meaning of swishing Polish consonants sweeping past, all sz's and cz's and dz's --- chshjenchtz (not a real word but a lovely sound that whooshed by time and again). Much of the conversation was lost in translation but I got the message.

One a bright,warm Sunday in June, we shared soup -- borscht -- and pork with apples, fresh bread and butter, a variety of garnishes and specialities, and a green vegetable that I assure you was not cabbage.

I don't remember all of that, I know it only because I wrote it down. But this I do remember. Can see even now.

The deep indigo numbers imprinted on his father’s forearm. A strong arm resting on white lace. He had passed me a bowl of salad, this middle-aged Polish man, and set his arm on the table between us. Numbers. What I remember now is how the typeface was so dark, distinct, easy to read. Tattooed, burned into his skin. His identification mark. From Auschwitz.

I never had the nerve to ask him directly but I did ask his son, “does he still think about it? Talk about it? Often?” “Sometimes, not very often. And not very much,” Christopher said quietly. “There are some things he cannot talk about.”

I had no idea that ethnic Poles had been sent to Auschwitz, for the crime of being Polish. This man had fought the Nazis in the forests of Poland, from encampments that were crude and barely fortified. His father had been shot in front of his eyes; as a 14-year-old boy, he witnessed the murder of his father by Nazi soldiers. As a teen-ager he fought to sabotage and undermine the crushing Nazi occupation of his country.

And he was caught. "He didn't have a gun in his possession at that moment, else he would have been shot on the spot." But he was sent to Auschwitz.

65 years ago today, Soviet soldiers liberated the biggest concentration camp in the entire Nazi system. They arrived early on a bitter, snowy morning and found dozens dead, but, miraculously, dozens alive, huddled together, hidden under haybeds, hidden even amongst corpses. 1.1 million humans were murdered on those grounds alone -- Auschwitz-Birkenau, most but not all of them Jews. But some had survived.

Including the man who passed me the salad.

Thousands of Auschwitz survivors had been force-marched in the previous weeks westward to Buchenwald and other Nazi camps. Of that number hundreds died along the way. Jews, Poles, Roma (Gypsies), and others.

The Holocaust stands as a singular event in human history. We have done dastardly, terrible things through the centuries. Even in that same last one. But, the systemmatic, scientifically organized murder, the intent to exterminate an entire race of people, the dehumanization of millions, the efficiency of the killing -- unimaginable horror -- of the Holocaust haunts us all and reminds us of the slim cord between control and tyranny. We are vulnerable to our own worst inclinations, our own worst instincts. The Holocaust reminds us of the requirements of vigiliance, and generosity, of the dangers of arrogance and, at the other end of the spectrum, and often at the same time, of fear and paranoia.

On this day, sixty-five years ago, the biggest death camp was torn open. The children who survived as skeletal heirs of an entire culture walked, or were carried out of the barracks and given over to the gracious care of the soldiers who liberated them, entrusted to the care of local Polish families, and nursed back to life. Young men like my friend's father, staggered through the snow to begin their journeys home. And the world was forced to stop ignoring the Nazi killing machines.


I've been to Auschwitz-Birkenau on two occasions. Both of them, life-changing experiences. It is eerie. It is harrowing. It is a moral "in your face" to all of us, all of us.

I've included some photos from a recent visit, photos that I could not bear to view myself for some months afterward. Yet these photos do nothing to truly convey the gravitas of the horror.

The true witness to the Holocaust, to the death camps, is best found in the stutter of the survivors, the haunted look in their eyes, the nerve damage that was permanent. The empty shtetls, the stolen art and stolen homes, and stolen lives. The cost of the Holocaust, among Jews and other victims, including ethnic Poles, is all too apparent in the next generation, as the children of survivors have paid a price for their parents' trauma.

But there is another witness that has come from this grim moment in history. The witness of human resiliency, of grace, generosity, work, dignity, and love.

At that dinner table, the strong arm that still bore a tattoo was also the strong arm that raised up a new generation, rebuilt and built new, carried and created a new society, albeit derailed for forty years by the lie of the imposed workers' paradise.

Strong arms. Blue numbers or not. Strong arms on white lace.

I figured it out!

I did.

I figured it out. What Poland really needs is my dad's cousin Bill.

Or The Judge. Justice Erickson.

Poland needs Judge Erickson, Bill, in its back pocket.

My father's cousin, Justice William H. Erickson, died last week and I've been reflecting long and gratefully about his life, his firecracker personality, his deep and abiding commitment to justice, and his faithful loyalty to what is right.

And I've been gratefully thinking about his kindnesses to his family.

At the Memorial Service today there was some conversation about nomenclature. Some of his former law clerks can't think of calling him anything but Judge Erickson, or even The Judge. He was on the Colorado Supreme Court for 25 years and was the Chief Justice for part of that period. So some colleagues can't but call him Justice Erickson.

To me, he was Bill.

In the past few years we had been working together on some family history (see above, Sex With Kings) and he told me stories that had as much to do with the practice of law and his own father's stealing apples from William Jennings Bryan's apple tree and the great legal cases of the century as with our own Erickson clan. It was a lot of fun. And we even managed to get a product completed!

But my most grateful memory of Bill was the morning he sat in my living room and respectfully invited me to rehearse the sordid, disgusting history of my experiences at the church here in Littleton, the experiences that resulted in my becoming badly injured and leaving, experiences that are simply evil. There's no other word for it.

I was still at the point of not quite being able to believe it myself. "Things like this don't really happen, do they? People don't do these things, do they? Am I making it all up?"

He listened patiently. And he nodded and validated every single experience I described. He'd heard it all before. He knew it was possible. I didn't say anything that shocked him -- except insofar as it happened to me. He was disgusted and angry.

And that meant the world to me.

When outrageous things happen to us, especially when they seem to come right out of left field, unexpectedly, from sources we didn't think could be capable of such hideous crap, we don't believe it. We doubt ourselves.

When injustice occurs, when we are trampled, when we're blindsided by hatred and fear and incompetence, we often feel that we're misreading the situation. But we know we didn't. We have transcripts. We have data. We have witnesses. But still, we don't quite believe it.

It is so urgently important in such a case to have a person of credibility and authority who can sit and say, "Yes, this happened. You're not crazy. You read it correctly. You did everything you could. You don't deserve this, you are better than this."

Bill wasn't quite as vigorous as my friend, Christopher, whose reaction was, "Where do they live? Where can I find them? I'm gonna beat the hell out of that man." I loved it.

Bill was an expert on the law and the law doesn't smile on taking matters into one's own hands.

But he respected me. Given the complex law governing Church/State issues, we decided not to launch a civil suit. He would have been there for me had it been appropriate. Had it been any other profession I was in, it would have been a slam dunk. Knowing that was empowering. Knowing he knew that, believed it, was empowering and terribly heart-warming.

Being validated, respected, believed, affirmed is a critical part of the healing process. Justice Erickson, Bill, did that for me.


As Chief Justice of the Colorado Supreme Court, he wrote the opinion in 1993 that found the Episcopal Diocese of Colorado liable with respect to a civil suit filed by a victim of clergy sexual abuse and awarded a few million dollars to her in damages. That opinion shocked and scared the shit out of church officials who realized for the first time that they would be held accountable for passing along to other parishes the clergy they knew to have been sexually involved with parishioners.

I loved it! And it was the landmark case that caught the attention of church leaders overall and helped to change the dynamics so that most Protestant churches now have policies that are respectful of victims and have a bias toward preventing abuse rather than covering it up. Sadly, that message didn't get through to all leaders --- ask me! --- but, hey, we're working at it.

How odd, from very different professional positions and responsibililties, Judge Erickson and his cousin's daughter collaborated on moving this along. How cool is that! At the time I was the ELCA's churchwide point person for responding, and teaching bishops, to respond to clergy sexual abuse. Chief Justice Erickson and the Colorado Supreme Court did part of my work for me.

So, Bill, thank you. For the character and inspiration you've provided over the years, to me, to hundreds of others, for the kind and generous spirit you shared, for being an advocate of justice. And thank you for that morning when you asked and I answered and you listened and I finally began to take it in.


Poland -- back to Poland -- is still waiting for the world to validate their WWII experience, all they suffered, how valiantly they resisted and fought, and for someone with the same relative authority and credibility in that arena that Bill offered to me in mine.

Poland still needs to be loved, respected, believed and acknowledged for what happened to them. Maybe in my own modest way, I'm using this blog to do for the Polish people what Bill did for me.

Listen up!

It's a wonder

It is a wonder she hasn't done this before.

Kaia is doing the major clean. As in clean out her room in preparation of giving it up rather sooner than later.

The books will stay, of course, and the trophies and the goofy little troll with purple hair and a jewel in its belly that Annika "gave" her on the day Annika was born, a Happy Big Sister present.

Her very first beanie baby, Rover, and her favorite one, Bones, the dog with floppy ears, and a bear with a knitted sweater with a red heart on its chest, and the eagle she got to go with her high school basketball team, and the Mickey Mouse she got at Disneyland are staying, along with other favorite stuffed animals, on top of the bookcases, along with the silver Peter Rabbit bank and the wooden race car she made in Shop class in 8th grade. Her guitar and hockey stick are staying, and some basketball and soccer jerseys and a few favorite tee shirts from 3rd grade basketball. She has decided to keep her shin guards, but in a cabinet, not on display. I convinced her to keep her Junior High Yearbooks. And we just looked at the packets of photos she took on her 5th grade outdoor education trip, her 8th grade trip to Washington, D.C., and her summers at camp. Those go in the scrapbook box.

It will be her room, still, when she comes home but it is going to be less her room when she's gone.

When will she be home? We've been so lucky. She's spent all three summers of college living here and teaching nearby. And she's been home for a good five or six weeks every winter. And at Thanksgiving, Easter, Spring vacations.

This feels big. She's not exactly moving out but it feels for sure like she is moving on. She may or, more likely, may not move back here after she graduates from Macalester in May. It feels like the end of something important.

So, like a mush, I sit here -- as she organizes and puts folders in boxes and folds clothes to give to Goodwill -- and cry.

I am not at home with this. It went too fast. Did I miss something? Could we have a few do-overs? Not because they were wrong but because they were so right, so very right.

None of the rest of you ever felt this way, I'm sure. I'm the only one. Harhar.

We let go in stages, in inches. Since the day she was born, I've been holding on and letting go. And, as I wrote the other day, even saying, "GO!" I raised her for this. I raised her to pack up and move on. To find her place in a wider world. And she is succeeding, wildly, at that. She's ready!

But maybe we could get out the Beanie Babies and play one more time before she goes.

Don't hold your breath

Be careful what you teach your children. When we parents offer our children up to the world, to serve, to give, to go, to heal and teach and dig wells and make justice, we'd damn well be clear about what we are doing. We are giving them up. A "brilliant light" and vibrant life has been taken away from this life. He died along with the poorest of the poor, the desparate, precious people of Haiti. A young man whose mother and father taught him to love and risk and sacrifice has paid the ultimate price for his commitment. Ben Larson is lost within the rubble of a building in PAP where he had gone to teach. His life is lost to us, to his wife, to his friends and family, including his siblings and his parents, April Ulring Larson and Judd Larson. I know his mother. And I confess, it's April for whom my heart is breaking most of all. She is a great mom. She brought up her kids to love God, to give and give and give. And so they did. Be careful what you do, moms. Be careful what you do, dads. You give your children to the world and it doesn't always spare them. My daughter spent several weeks in L'Aquila, Italy a few years before the earthquake there. She was there to serve. When the earthquake struck, she was in an unreachable village in rural South Africa. She was there to learn, to serve. It was an unnerving reminder that we send our kids out into the world, honoring their commitments to justice and healing, and we are not in control. Of course, of course, we're not in control anyway, anywhere. And who expects an earthquake in Haiti, of all places? A big one? I'm probably too rattled and too overcome with sadness tonight to make this make sense. But really, I think, the point is this. We share our children, we share one another with the whole world. They do not belong to us. We nurture and guide them along, we encourage and succor them. And, if we're like the parents who are grieving tonight in Duluth, we enourage these risky behaviors, for the sake of the world. It's a good thing. Yes, it is. It is a good thing. To share our lives, our children, our gifts with the world. It can be dangerous. It can be deadly. But it is right. I never knew how much my mom worried about my bouncing off to the Soviet Union all the time when I was a young adult, until the last year of her life when she gave me her journal to read. She was a nervous wreck. But she never told me not to go. I'm grateful for being given up, to the world, to serve a larger purpose, a larger community, a higher good. And I do the same with my own two girls. Send them off, send them out. To change the world, to take risks and perhaps live dangerously. For the sake of love. It's not something to be taken lightly. And now, as the scenes of wrecked and ruined buildings and broken bodies fill the screens, stories of devastation and loss, of grief and unspeakable horror, we are overcome with sadness for every human life that has been lost and torn apart. And I am especially holding April in my heart, another mother who told her kid, "Go!" and he did. Peace to her, to Judd, to the rest of their family, and to all who mourn. Life comes from death. Every time. One way or another. Every time. Life comes from death. And it will now, too. It will.

First we admire them, then we eat them

Denver has an extra season. It's called Stock Show weather. From the beginning of time the frigid icy weeks in January when the National Western Stock Show is going on have been designated as wweather weeks from hell. There are nights when the Nine News forecasters simply tell us, "well, it's Stock Show weather." And we know what they mean. Dreary gray overcast, bitter winds and zero temperatures. Enough said. It is Stock Show time and I am all about cows. Or, rather, cattle. And horses. You will not believe how many breeds of cattle are out in the fields, and pens, these days. Limousin and Red Angus, Simmental, and the up and coming Gelbiveh. And Lowline and Maine-Anjou and South Devon and Tarentaise. Our Estonian Intourist guide told us years ago that, "here in Estonia we have two breeds of cows: the black ones and the brown and white ones." I remember those days two: Herefords and Angus. And, for exotica, Charolais. There are a few magical memories mixed in with the mundane from childhood and many of mine involve trips to the Stock Show with my dad. I miss him. I miss him telling me for the umpteenth time about how to 'get ahead' of the steer and get it roped and penned. I miss his funny story about his "Catch It Calf" contest win when he was 16. My kids have now heard them umpteen times from me but I tell them anyway. The idea is, you're a kid in a big arena with a bunch of other kids, and they open the chutes and turn loose a herd of cattle. With their bare hands, the kids struggle to catch and wrestle a calf to submission. There is an art to this. And a science. And grit, strength, and a bit of luck. In my dad's case, grit played a larger part. He caught a calf. Quickly. He turned its head to the side and wrestled it to the ground. He held it for 18 of the requisite seconds required. But it fought him like a mad cow. And wriggled and twisted and almost got away. My dad caught it again --- by the tail. And my dad held on, please do picture this! for three rounds around the dusty arena, the calf running, straining, pulling my dad on his butt, cowboy boots dug into the dirt, being dragged around in circles again and again and again by this recalcitrant beast. And on each pass, dad pulled himself up a little more, edging over the hind end of the calf until, finally, he got his arms wrapped around it again, wrestled it down, and held it for all 20 seconds this time. The crowd whooped and hollered, cheering for him -- not the animal -- and when he finally had it, they went nuts! His picture made the bigtime newspaper with a quirky headline that I've forgot, like "Lucerne 4-H'er hangs on for the ride of his life." His jeans were worn clear through the bottom. And he was sore. But he'd won his calf. And raised it for the next year, tending it every single day, feeding, brushing, training it for the show ring. He loved that calf. And then it was Stock Show time again. He brought a half-ton steer back to show, won a prize, sold it, and gave it up. Somebody had some mighty fine pot roasts and brisket that year. We admire them, then we eat them. Being at the Stock Show does a number on your omnivorous inclinations. I sat in the arena watching gorgeous Angus yearlings being admired and judged from quite literally every angle. Enjoyed seeing the boys I'd met earlier in the morning, as they scrubbed and vacuumed and brushed and shaved their animals and got them all ready to show, using a special prodding stick to hold their legs just so, take the blue ribbons in their class. Their steers were damn weird looking. A newer breed called Gelbiveh. See photos. I read later that one of its best features is "biggest scrotal circumference." I don't think I've ever been to an event before where that came up. Besides these cattle, the arena was crowded with black angus and red angus and cows that, I must say, were really beautiful. You get up close, you look in their big black cow eyes, and you feel their sweet soft fur (hides, okay). And then you head into the Cattlemen's Grill and eat them. Or not them, but their daughters and sons. I had brisket. Where else but the Stock Show would you count on getting the best prime beef you've ever eaten. Amazing. Lean, and very tasty. What a weird world. The Omnivore's Dilemma, indeed. This is not exactly my daddy's Stock Show anymore. "World's Best Semen" signs fought for my attention as I walked through the cattle barns. The emphasis is on breeding. The cattle are shown for the sake of establishing breeding lines, of selling 'product.' Most of these cattle will not be sold for food, not yet, but for stud, or breeding. It doesn't feel quite so warm and cuddly as it did when I was a child. But I will walk up and down every aisle, ponder every bovine beast, marvel at the variety and the abundance of creatures that share the planet. Then, it's time for horses, ranch horse riding, steer roping, cattle cutting and penning, range riding. I could watch horses gallop all day. Um, come to think of it, I did. And go back for more.

iGap

My daughter spoke to a friend on the phone. This, please be clear, is news. Had it been the 22-year-old talking on the phone, I'd be surprised but not shocked. But this was the 17-year-old. Talking on the phone. To only one person. At a time. Granted, now, it was simply to clarify directions that had become too complex to explain via text messaging or Googlemap. But still. She talked. On the phone. To a friend. I noticed the emerging iGap three years ago. Older daughter chatted on the phone with friends, deciding on plans, arranging a meeting place, the usual back and forth: where do you want to go? what time? but maybe we'd prefer to.... At the same time, her younger sister, by only four years and a few months, not even a meaningful fraction of a generation gap in years past, had stopped talking on the phone altogether. Gone were the delightful specialized ring-tones that each of her favorite friends had created, "Pick up the phone, pick up the phone! Annika, this is Hanna, pick up the phone, pick up the phone!" I even got one, "This is your mother. You need to talk to me. Now." It was great fun! We haven't heard one of those ring tones in years. When Annika and I made our first trip together to NYC in 2008, she spent more time texting her friends than interacting with me. "I'm on 5th Avenue," "I'm at Michael Kors," "I'm on the Staten Island Ferry." And she was kept up on all the local gossip; she had might as well have been right there at the pool herself every afternoon. She was absolutely, entirely, virtually in two places at one time. When Kaia and I made our first trip together to NYC in 2005, the only time her phone came out of her pocket was once or twice -- to call me to check on a meeting time and place. When Kaia was admitted to college, in the spring of 2006, Facebook was a brand new phenomenon. To think, kids going to the same college could begin to connect before they got there. How cute. How clever. Sometime during that summer, she and her classmates began finding Facebook -- and what a different Facebook it was then. It felt exclusive, you could join your university's network and that seemed just about all there was. When Annika received her Early Decision admittance to NYU a few weeks ago, the first thing she did -- after hugging us and screaming for a full five minutes -- was text all her friends. It was viral within half an hour. At one point she had 28 new text messages. The second thing she did was look online and sure enough, there were already two new Facebook groups for early admits to NYU Class of 2014. Thanks to technology, she now 'knows' future classmates from around the globe, including two she's met, from Vail and the Ranch, just down the road. They are 'talking' constantly about the relative merit of various dorms, scanning virtual floorplans, and choosing roommates. They text constantly. And it is simply a part of their social arrangement that it's okay to be texting others while with some. They multi-task, she does, anyway, perhaps 16 things at a time. I'm doing good if I can listen to classical music and concentrate on writing this. The NYTimes comments on this change, this quickening in the technological gap, today, citing a forthcoming book by Larry Rosen, calling children born in the 80's, now in their 20's, the Net Generation, and those born in the 90's, still teens, the iGeneration. I confess, I sure like these monikers better than the Gen X and Gen Y that has been used in the past. So, the NetGen and the iGen. I buy it. But that gap is closing fast. As older young-adults get hold of iPhones and other new generation technology, sometimes out of fairness, before their younger siblings, they are quickly changing from tone to text. I see Kaia texting far more now than she used to. And with an iPhone, her adaptability to new applications is remarkable. I have 12 extra apps on my iPhone. She has about 30. She too is multi-tasking, maybe eight things, at a time. The other night at dinner, she whipped out her iPhone seven times to collect info from the 'net about matters ranging from sheep (!) to geophysics, to NY style pizza. I smugly proved that Hayden Colorado was where I thought it was, way out northwest, by googling it and pulling up the map. And history. I have to say, it does tend to keep us from running out of things to talk about. Remember when complaining about the remote -- and surfing channels was new. So last century. We want information, and we want it now. And we get it. Now. No waiting. Dr. Rosen wonders what impact this will have. I think I have some idea. Already, we are more and more impatient, expecting data, contact, change to occur immediately. Think about -- whatever you think politically -- the evaluation of Obama's first year in office. The 'war on terror' is not won: Fail. The economic catastrophe he inherited is not fixed: Fail. A new health care plan is not in effect: Fail. Are we serious? Do we really expect that much that fast? We do if we are living according to the iWorld, where everybody is instantly accessible, I read the NYTimes this morning in bed from my iPhone (not even my laptop), and send out an instant commentary before I'm done with my second cup of coffee (still in bed). We expect instant change when we live in a world where we can touch Yemen and Tadzhikistan and the latest images from the Hubble all in three minutes. I remember taking a business class about 15 years ago -- geez, where did that time go? -- where it was news -- new news -- that technology was turning over so quickly that generations of technology were new every few months. That trend is unending. My exercise routine is now an iApp, my weight loss program is LoseIt, I read the latest Sara Paretsky on my iKindle and before today is up, I will have read at least four newspapers from around the world, including my beloved NYTimes Weddings stories (thank you, Calvin Trillin) on my iPhone. I'll take a photo or two, record a few notes for the novel on the voice memo and do the "old fashioned" thing, write a few memos on the iPhone's legal pad. I can check the scores -- like I care! -- of playoff games, and listen to an NPR podcast. I'll check Facebook, update my status via Twitter, and send a few text messages. It is not likely that I'll talk on the phone. I too now prefer texting to talking. In the past week, I've sent 62 text messages, including some to my family in other rooms of the house, and have spoken on my phone five times. I've sent and received hundreds of emails and well, I wonder if, for some of us geezers, the iGap is closing. I'm in the process of buying a car and plan to do it -- all except the test drives --online. Even the financing. It is unlikely I'm telling you anything you don't already know, and do. But the point that strikes me this morning is that we're going to have to keep our expectations out of line with our capacities for communications. There is this uncontrolled variable. I think it's called human nature. And as long as that is in play, it will take longer than a year to enact comprehensive health care reform, win the war against terrorism, convince Wall Street banks to end the practice of usury, and put an end to stupidity on television. In the meantime, I've got to go. Annika is awake and I need to text her to find out what her plans are for the day.

Sex With Kings

I am so bummed. I went back to the bookstore today to get the book, "Sex With Kings" but it was gone. Somebody else bought it out from right under my nose. Is someone else around here illegitimate? Yes, it would seem that my great-great great-great grandmother had sex with a king. Half of the family is so pious they are scandalized. The other half is amused. I made myself an honorary member of the other side, the happy side, a long time ago. (Does this have anything to do with "sad Danes" and "happy Danes?") I'm playing with this notion in a work of fiction and decided it was decidedly more delightful to ponder on this Friday night than the material I'd been slogging through earlier, the shit at the church. So, don't mess with me. Don't mess with me indeed. I'm a (great great great great grand) daughter of the King. And in case you wonder why I don't look Swedish, it's because I'm partly French. No, not a French King. The Swedish Kings are French. Go figure. So. The good news of my heritage is that I have, on the one hand, a half acre of swamp land in northern Sweden, currently on permanent loan to the Swedish Defense Department for its defensive missiles. And, on the other hand, I need a tiara. Happy weekend! And if you got that book today, can I borrow it? I'm kind of curious.

The long way around

That is what's required. Taking the long way around. I am well known for taking the scenic route. Whether the trip is five miles or fifteen thousand, I am going to find the scenic route and take that. When I moved to New Jersey from Chicago, it was by way of southern Ohio and West Virginia. When classmates at Princeton finished their graduate degrees in three years, I was taking the long way around. I completed all of my professional requirements in 1983. They had been long done, in 1979. But I took the scenic route, with studies in Poland and a trip to Moscow thrown in. Mary Daly, an astonishingly brave and brilliant Catholic theologian just died but she sent me on a trek the long way around thirty-four years ago, changing my name, moving out of the mainstream, and, to my endless delight, earning me a special trip to the dean's office "because you are over-identified with masculinity." What that revealed was the quaint and well-worn trip over the same old road that apparently most women were still making, while I was seeking to work in a traditionally male field and dared to acknowledge my assertive and leadership proclivities. Proclivities. To leadership. My sweet lord. Mary Daly, peace to your soul. And thank you for sending me out into the wild lands. Epiphany is all about taking the long way around. This event, this holiday and feast day in the Christian church, is about the Magi, the Wise Men, who showed up late at the manger and got warned that King Herod wanted to kill the baby Jesus. He assumed they would stop by and tell him where this baby King was. But they didn't. They took another way home. They went home by another way. They took the long way around. And so it goes. And so it goes. I just read another book about healing after great trauma and injustice. The author says, "get active, get busy, get even." I like the exhorting to busyness, to activity, but I'm still not about getting even. I'm getting odd. The long way around. I'm gonna go 'home' by another way.

"Trees in Love"

The first time I heard Jim Post sing "Trees in Love" I fell off my chair. People say things like that all the time and what they mean is, I laughed really really hard. But I laughed so hard I really did fall off my chair. Really. Then, for years on end, every year on New Year's Eve we listened faithfully to the Midnight Special on WFMT fervently hoping and actually praying to hear "Trees in Love." Some years were good. Some, we had to settle for Woody Allen's riff on the Berkowitz' ("the moose mingled...), "Throw Your Cat Away," "Mooseturd Pie," "I Hate Liver," and Brian Bowers "The Scotsman." Then we moved to Colorado. No more WFMT. Until free internet live streaming. And now I am praying with my eyeballs squeezed real tight and my head bowed all the way to my chest and my hands folded inside out that we'll get to hear "Trees in Love" tonight. At least we get "I Hate Liver." The girls love it. So, this is revenge for Lady Gaga. New Year's Eve's I have known. Parties with a house full of friends, quiet nights with Swan Lake, the first New Year's Eve as a nervous mother who left the babe for all of forty minutes to run down to the corner restaurant and quaff a glass of champagne, nibble at a scrumptious round of baked brie with pinyon and apple before racing back home, to hold Her. Years of games, Trivial Pursuit, Apples to Apples, Scrabble, and noisemakers and movies and concerts. Somehow, thank God, I managed to miss church on New Year's Eve once I'd left my parents' nest and the yearly Moody Science Films and "Watch Services." Actually, one year, in an upstairs room of the church building, a high school boy kissed me at midnight. I was thrilled. And I don't even remember his name. Years we celebrated at 9 p.m. -- the new year, Halifax time, when the girls were little. Years I fell asleep, bored and tired before ten. The year, 1991, when, in San Diego, having carefully calculated the time difference, I stood in awe at noon, tears running down my face, as the flag of the USSR, all red and ruined, its hammer and sickle rusted, was lowered at midnight Moscow time, lowered over the Kremlin for the last time. The year, 2000, celebrating with Beethoven's 9th at the Symphony. So many new years, old years, memories, resolutions. Some kept, many broken, forgotten, neglected, given up. It is now midnight, 2010, over the Sargasso Sea, where the sea turtles whoop and holler. Soon it will be our turn. And the constants, every year: hoping and praying for "Trees in Love" and, yes, artichoke dip. Happy New Year everybody. May your trees, your friends, your families and your own dear hearts know great love this year. Love wins.

I'll Be Home for Christmas

Phew! Transition from Warsaw to Denver, or more particularly to suburban Denver, is always jarring. For a number of reasons: I can speak English. I have my family all around me. The aesthetic and actual comforts of my home are substantial. My favorite foods are easier to prepare and enjoy. Real Mexican food, Hatch chilis! But the most dramatic change is this: in less than an hour, I drove to the eye doctor and picked up new glasses, drove through the drive-through dry cleaner to pick up a coat, stopped in at the office supply store to pick up notebooks and pens, drove over to the mall to run in and get my daughter a shirt she wanted, and then went to the post office to buy stamps and mail a package. I covered roughly eight miles, back and forth, completed five errands. In Warsaw this would have taken me all day. Even with a car. We have a phenomenon here in America that has fueled our consumer binge spending: the strip mall, the mini-mall, the neighborhood shopping area. And, of course, wide roads that expedite driving several miles in minutes. Never is this more obvious than now at Christmastime. We literally do have one -- or ten -- of everything. A store for every possible consumer wish. And some we hadn't even thought of yet. The shops in Warsaw are packed with parkas and scarves and sweaters and jackets, tennis racquets, skiis, books, fine crystal and gorgeous pottery. The mall makes me feel at home. Sadly, pathetically, whenever I'm homesick in Warsaw, I head for the Zloty Terasy, Arkadia or the Galleria Mokotow. I find all the top European shops, Zara, Marks & Spencer, even H&M. There are luggage stores, a zillion jewelry stores, outdoor recreation shops, home furnishings, and, most curiously, dozens of fine lingerie shops. But that's nothing compared to what I find when I come home. It is over-saturation. Complete over-saturation. Stunning over-saturation. My first trip back to Warsaw a few years ago, after a long absence, was a shock. It seemed then a consumer paradise. And compared to the bleak communist period, it was. In the course of just a few hours, I took a bus across town to buy a CD player, groceries, had a lovely sit-down dinner of fajitas and fine wine, got notebooks and a framed poster for my apartment wall. That would never have happened before. It was a marvel! I was blown away. In the following weeks and months, I easily furnished an apartment with the linens and dishes, pots and pans, rugs, towels, and could have bought chairs and sofas more to my taste too. It felt like a wonderland! But, then I came home. And realized that even with all the new consumer razzle dazzle in Poland, it didn't come close to the craziness of home. And now. And now. Christmas. Williams Sonoma, and Hollister, and Crate and Barrel, and the Pottery Barn, Anthropologie, and Eddie Bauer, and 250 shops in the mall plus the acres of stores surrounding it, speciality shops for hair extensions, Bosum Buddies for specialty bras, Pampered Passions for exotic lingerie, twelve different furniture stores, fourteen cosmetic shops, and, surely, a store that sells a partridge in a pear tree. As exhausting as we say it is to negotiate the crowds at the malls, trust me: it's nothing, nothing at all compared to the hassles of driving from one side of Warsaw to another, no strip malls with ample parking and a vast variety of options. If you're into consuming, America is heaven. But if you would rather wander through parks blanketed with snow, and amble around gorgeous architecture sculpted by ice, marvel at a castle in the heart of town lit up by fairy lights, and spend your time in a steamy-warm cafe and a tall mug of hot chocolate, I heartily recommend Warsaw. I have just the place in mind. Ummm....

Here comes the sun!

Waiting is not passive. Not always, not necessarily. This is not our year for the big blizzard at Christmas. Three years ago we were buried under a few feet of snow, the airport closed for two days and Kaia didn't make it home until Christmas Eve morning. This year, of course, it's the East Coast that is socked in and I'm reading of friends stranded in Cincinnati, Charlotte, and Burlington, trying to get home to Warsaw, Paris and Istanbul. To say nothing of Baltimore, Greenwich Village and Boston. We're lucky. The skies are clear between here and Minneapolis and, unless the pilots overshoot their destination again, by, say, a thousand miles and end up in San Diego, we should have a full house by tonight. We don't have to wait much longer. Waiting is not much fun at all. In my experience, waiting means one of two things: fretting, fidgeting, fiddling or paralysis, idleness, passivity. We wait for many things in this life. To get older, to get younger, to get wiser, to get richer, to get better, to get happier, to get healthier. We wait for people to arrive, for people to leave (!), for a new season, for a new possibility, new relationships, for renewed relationships, for understanding, for reconciliation, for sun. George Harrison wrote the sweet Beatles tune, "Here comes the sun!" at a particularly bleak point in his life. His marriage was ending, the Beatles were ending, his future felt closed, not open, regrets, fears, anxiety beset him and he was worrying, wondering, waiting for what would come next. He was out one early morning, feeling morose, and, voila! the sun rose. "Here comes the sun!" Today we can all sing, "Here comes the sun!" The Swedes up in my old part of the world, within mere miles of the Arctic Circle, where reindeer really do roam, knew something when they made this big fuss of the Solstice. The sun is coming! The light is coming back! This day is not the last day, it is the first day. The official Solstice came just an hour or so ago. So far I'm not quite feeling it. But that means nothing. It is happening nonetheless. It is happening. It is happening! Here comes the sun! The future is open, not closed. The days ahead are bright, not dim, not dark. Nature is so full of genius! We can hold fast to these hopeful signs from the heart of life itself. Life is telling us truth about itself, ourselves, our universe, our own worlds. In the darkest, shortest day, where in the far north there is nary a light at all, the promise is grounded in the motion, the rhythms of nature. Here comes the sun! Waiting for this sun, for light need not be a passive exercise, nor a cynical one. God knows, the process of moving back from dark to light, from despair to hope, from paralysis to purpose has been excruciating for me, for many, at times, for seasons. But always, this day, this day when the world does turn. When the very ground of being moves forward, edging purposefully and inexorably toward sun. Two things I read this morning --- thanks, Jim and Christy for sharing --- that speak to this movement. To sun, to light. "What gives me hope for the future is simple. I am certain that cynicism is the product of a broken heart, and that a heart that can break can heal...What is closed off can be opened; what is denied can be reclaimed." - Dorothy Allison, Contemporary American Writer As the light comes, I claim this promise, this healing for myself, first of all, this healing of heart, this closed off cynicism. And I hope and pray for it to claim you too, as you need it. The second word of wisdom from my brother, Jim, "...On this Winter Solstice...the Divine Giver is the Great Forgiver. I read that the Hebrew word for forgiveness translates to "drop it". Time to drop a lot, once again." I'm going to be dropping things today. If you hear crashes and bangs and thuds, it could be the stuff I'm dropping. Or perhaps it's the stuff you are dropping. Forgiving. Letting go, purifying, emptying in order to be made full. Perhaps along with the ritual of lighting candles to welcome the light, there might first be a ritual of dropping, to leave the darkness behind, of cynical broken-heartedness. Waiting need not be passive. It sounds like there's a lot to do. Even while sitting in an airport, or in traffic, or standing on line at the check-out, or waiting for the house to fill up. May the brokenhearted be healed, and the closed, opened. May the hurts and wounds we carry be dropped, if only to lighten and open our own souls. The church was really smart to tie its own story of God with us to this bleak midwinter, when the promise of life comes: of light in darkness, and the darkness can not, can not, will not overcome it, will not overwhelm it. That is potent stuff. Strong enough to stir up my cynic's blood today, my sad spirit tomorrow, and to go a long ways toward mending a broken heart. And, while we're at it, may the church itself be open, not closed, light, not dark, and may its own heart be mended. To honor the sun, or, the Son.

Why is there a menorah in my pocket?

There's a menorah in my pocket. A small brass menorah has taken up residence, if you can call it that, in the left pocket of my green jacket. I almost forgot. It's been a good long while since I wore a jacket. I have two heavy wool sweaters that keep me as warm as the Triple Fat Goose down parka that lives in the back of the van, "just in case." I got the khaki green jacket in Warsaw mostly to shut up all the nosy ladies who felt obliged to tell me every day that I should "wear a jacket." The green jacket came home from Warsaw packed in a box that I sent by way of China, Samoa and New Zealand so I didn't have that jacket for a very long time. And lo, and behold, I got it out and there's a menorah in the pocket. We already have a beautiful menorah, a very beautiful blue china menorah with a white dove, so we didn't need another one. But I got this little brass menorah just outside the entrance to Lazienki Park one fall day because, it seemed to me, I should have a menorah from Poland. The vendor was always there with his small collection of ancient items, books and what nots, reminiscent of a long-ago and now mostly lost Poland. I bought the menorah not because it was the only one I'd seen in the country, not at all, but because I liked the look of the old man. He reminded me of something, in fact he reminded me of the old Poland that was mostly gone forever. Now the brass menorah lives near my desk, where I see it every time I sit down to write. I can't find candles small enough for it but that's okay, it is a beautiful symbol of a faith and a culture and a way of life that enlivened all of Poland's spirit for centuries. There is much to say, yes, very much to say about Poland and Judaism. And tonight is not the night for it. Except to say that, while hard to do, you can find signs of Jewish culture and life in Poland yet today. And a project very near to my heart is underway, a Museum of the History of Jews in Poland. Lighting the candles of the menorah is a reminder of tenacity. And faith. And courage. And cussedness. "We will survive, damn it. We will." Of course, the 20th century history of Europe tells a different story; Nazi intentions nearly won out. But not entirely. And this menorah is one more proof of it. Happy Hanukkah! Shalom!

Human Really Being

Perspective. One of the great gifts of being human is having perspective. You can think of this in a number of ways. The artist's use of perspective. The out-of-work banker's sense of perspective. The coach's perspective at half-time. And then there is perspective that we lend to every circumstance and situation in which we find ourselves. Put another way, we compare, use analogy, size up our mess by putting it alongside that of another. It is a sanity saver. Perspective. Consideration of one thing in relation to another. To be human is to have a sense of perspective. We do well to use it often and carefully. In the months after the declaration of martial law in Poland I was somehow able to talk and otherwise communicate with a number of friends for whom the shock of betrayal and disorientation had not yet worn off. In extreme situations, most of us manage to function at least partly, part of the time. We can drag ourselves out to the grocer, to care for children or parents, to meet basic obligations. But there is yet a sense of confusion, a haze, a wariness that does not soon wear off. So it was for those with whom I spoke. High-functioning, prominent and responsible men and women felt themselves at sea. Unsure, unconfident, and "so cynical I can't keep up." Yet. And yet. They went on. They taught their classes. They administered their bureaus, they carried out their research. They bathed and fed their children. They even went to the cafe, and to official functions in, if I remember it right, pajamas, and made fun of the whole sorry mess. What I want to tell you is that I was amazed at how resilient, determined, clever and energetic they were. They were. All of those things. Resilient, sassy (remember the description at the top of the blog!), creative, wily, courageous. It was impossible not to be impressed. Even with the bouts of depression and, as I described it yesterday, feeling "frozen," it was obvious from the start, these powerful demonstrations of will and wit and wisdom. But I was not amazed. That's the point I want to offer tonight. I didn't then realize how much it took, to be so strong, to get up and keep going. To be resilient and sassy and clever and creative. I took it for granted. I had no personal perspective from which to measure or evaluate their actions. When I sat, finally, with friends who described to me their emotional, very personal reactions to the initial declaration of war: the first frozen days, the biting cynicism that seemed frighteningly bottomless, the sense of life breaking in half, breaking down, the despair, I was profoundly moved. I assumed I understood the depths of their despair. I realized later, and much humbled, that I had not a clue, not really. And I assumed I understood also what it took, what it meant for them to express their courage and will, to enact this resilience that so attracted me. I had no idea. Until many years later. As I've already indicated in earlier posts. Perspective. The oddly wonderful human capacity to look at one situation and say, "you know, I remember something like this. I'm going to see if I can learn something from it." One good look at my last name -- Erickson or Erickson-Pearson -- and you can be pretty sure I'm not interested in Poland because it's in my blood. No, I'm drawn to Poland, as I've noted before, because it teaches me. The daring and sometimes darling creativity, sassiness and, here we go again: resilience of the Poles, is a perspective that continues to inspire me. And this reminds me, I need a nice pair of pajamas.

Big fat juicy happy envelope arrives!

This has nothing exactly to do with Poland, although I'm sure I can come up with an angle if I think about it long enough. However, I'm too impatient. In one of those moments that parents everywhere can relate to, the college admission decision arrived in the mail today. We sit, with our kids, on needles and pins and wonder and wait. And I'm not good at waiting. There are small, thin envelopes and very big, thick envelopes. You know the instant you get to the mailbox what the decision is. There is nothing like seeing your daughter sprinting back from the mailbox, skipping up the sidewalk waving an oversized white envelope, her smile the size of the sun. She opened it up and those sweet three words said everything we cared about, "Congratulations and welcome!" We danced around, hugging and screaming -- I mean screaming -- for five minutes. So. That's the news from Littleton today. p.s. Annika says that even though classes don't start until September 7, she's planning to go out there in May and sit on the sidewalk with her suitcase and wait.

Next Day of the Apocalypse

It was impossible to know on December 14, 1981 what the next days would bring. It sounds histronic to use words like "apocalypse" to describe an action by a government against its own citizens that did not involve carpet bombings, summary executions and wholesale destruction of cities. As had World War II. On a physical scale, "martial law" or the "state of war" in Poland in 1981 had minimal impact. But on a psychological scale, the imposition of war, the government against the citizens, was devastating. Even those intelligentsia, inclined to a so-called 'realist' view of the situation that impinged upon Poland by its fraternal neighbor to the east, even those who were not sympathetic to the Solidarity reform movement, even everyone in Poland was shocked, appalled and disgusted. The justification widely observed held that if Poland didn't invade Poland, the Soviet Union would invade Poland. This may be true. It has been recently alleged, likewise, that the Polish Premier, General Jaruzelski asked the USSR to invade and when they refused, he ordered the Polish tanks into the streets. This will be a matter of judicial review for some time to come. The point, however, is this: within the tightly controlled Soviet empire, novelty could not be tolerated. The absolute authority, the so-called "leading role" of the Communist Party in each of the Soviet satellite nations could not be called into question. Solidarity was threatening to become an out-of-control mass movement of social action. It was already a mass movement of social action beyond the control of the Communist Party. The question was: how far would it push? How far could things go? Power likes itself. Power likes to keep its power intact. Power does not tolerate challenges with equanimity. Power is a force unto nature, insisting on remaining in control. Usually. There are wondrous and generative exceptions. But this was not one of them. The next day of the apocalypse was every bit as disorienting as the first. Telephones didn't work, for the most part. If one wanted to consult with one's family, friends, colleagues, one had to physically go out and find them. But where? Thousands of activists were arrested. Others were in hiding. Family units were disrupted. Business associations were stopped in their tracks. A strict curfew was enforced. It felt like a war on the streets of Warsaw and, I imagine, elsewhere in the country, during those wintry, ugly, bitter days. Paralysis sets in. The famous "fight or flight" impulse is stymied. Where to flee? And whom to fight? Both options are untenable. So the third option comes into play: freeze. "I didn't do anything at all." "I sat in a chair and didn't move, not even to eat, for two days." "I paced. Looked out the windows. Tanks in the street. Patrols on the sidewalks. I felt powerless for the first time in my life." I think the worst of it was the sense of becoming dispirited. Hopelessness. Options cut off. All movement stopped. There seemed no constructive means to confront this overwhelming show of force. There seemed to be no useful avenues for dialogue. It is hard to talk to a tank. And so, for weeks, really, weeks, the country was frozen. Frozen in an ugly gray wintry slush. Frozen in an ugly imposition of force against which, toward which any sense of dialogue seemed impossible. Power can be used in this way: to intimidate. To thwart. To impose, stomp out, cut down. To those who choose to use power in these ways, it seems to them an inevitability, the only means to protect what is most valued, most vulnerable. "We had no choice." But to those who are shut down, trampled down, cut down, the deeper reality is always something of which they are aware: there is another way. Dialogue. Mutual concessions, cooperation. The creation of something fundamentally new. One feels it in one's skin, one's bones and body, one's nervous system. The experience of being thwarted, stopped from making the most obvious, and useful, next move. It feels like being jammed up. It is unpleasant, like being electrocuted at low voltage. It is dangerous, if it builds up over a long time. And it is profoundly dispiriting, ennervating. Woe to those who abuse power. Woe to you who shut down, stop up, trample, intimidate, ignore, and thwart the legitimate exercise of will, of creative, generative, generous activity. In these days, we celebrate and commemorate very different events back to back to back. The imposition of Martial Law, the victory of the Jews over the Maccabees, the end of Communism, the fall of the Berlin Wall. Let this be lesson to those who win temporary victories. I keep a piece of the Berlin Wall on my dressor. I know what it means. "The days are coming...." It's Advent. Still, we wait.

First Day of the Apocalypse

Oh, I don't want to write this post. December 13, 1981. A Sunday, as it is today. Families living on Pulawska Street looked through the frost on their windows that morning to notice the marquee on the Moskwa Theatre, "Last Day of the Apocalypse." But for them it was the first day of the apocalypse. Tanks on the streets. Soldiers on patrol with bayonets, automatic rifles. Martial Law. Poland had declared war on itself. Barbara learned that morning to never leave home again without listening to the news first. She left her apartment early with plans to meet a friend near the city center. She walked only a few blocks to the main avenue in her district before she saw the first shocking signs of war. Armored personnel carriers. A trio of soldiers -- in Polish uniform -- goose-stepping their way past a kiosk selling bus tickets, cigarettes, and magazines. A mother and daughter sitting on the bench at the bus stop, crying softly. A man standing stock still, too stunned to move, to speak. On the bus, Barbara sat alone, near the back, afraid, confused, trying to puzzle out what was happening. A policeman got on after several stops and Barbara asked him, "what is going on?" "I was just going to ask you," he replied. They shook their heads. "I only just got back from holidays," the officer said. "I am going in to the headquarters for the first time in a week." Across town, another friend looked out his window and saw tanks on the corner. More soldiers. More assault rifles. More truncheons. It had been a tense time, difficult confrontations between Solidarity and the communist government led nowhere. There were always fears of a Soviet intervention. But this, Polish tanks on Polish streets, Poland at war against itself, nobody expected this. Friends of mine had happened to have been at the Moskwa Theatre the night of December 12. As they passed through Our Savior's Square later, they saw tanks blocking the side street, Mokotowska. Where the Solidarity headquarters were housed in an old school. But still, it didn't occur to them that this was war. Martial law is our term for it. Polish language lacks an equivalent and simply called the whole tragic mess, "a state of war." Polish troops patrolled the streets, thousands were arrested and interned, it became impossible for Poles to leave the country, telephone connections between Poland and the outside world were severed. Poles turned on their radios and televisions on that early morning, December 13, 1981, expecting to see traditional children's programs but were confronted instead with the somber visage of General Wojciech Jaruzelski, leader of the Polish Communist Party and of its government, announcing the formation of a Military Council of National Salvation. Schools were closed, businesses disrupted, travel within the country was restricted. I woke up that morning in Hyde Park, near the University of Chicago, with plans to meet Polish friends, Fulbright scholars, for a late lunch. WFMT, the classical music station, led with the story, spare on details. Public radio. TV news. Frantic phone calls. No more news. A few days later the newspaper featured a photograph taken in front of the Polish Academy of Sciences, where I had been to class. Tanks. Tanks in front of PAN, the equivalent of tanks blocking all access to Harvard. Professors were among those arrested. Still, no detailed news. What was happening? The state of war lasted more than a year, but the sense of betrayal and mistrust can still be felt. We are betrayed in life by all sorts of people, with varying consequences. Some of the infractions are small, easily repaired. Others more challenging. And then, there are the betrayals that shake the foundations on which we stand. Betrayals of trust that suck at the very center, the core of our being. My Polish friends felt that way about the state of war, about martial law. I felt that way years later about the behavior of a bishop and other church leaders I trusted. It is a life-changer. Not to equate one with the other, but the human impact of betrayal of trust cuts one to the quick. Cynicism, anger, the impossibility of trusting others, disruption of significant relationships of all kinds. Healing and recovering takes a long time. When I was able to get back into Poland in June, six months later, my best friend met me at the airport, "Welcome to our war." It's over. It is over. But the wounds are still with us.

All over

Mothers are tearing out their hair trying to perfect their daughters' hair. Dads are saying, "let's just get on with it." Chubby legs no longer than my forearem are being stuffed into lacy tights and crisp taffeta and silky velvet dresses with itchy collars are being pulled over tiny heads overflowing with copper curls. Legions of tiny Tim's are clipping on ties and pulling at their long sleeved dress shirts. Their new shoes are too tight. Older children are fidgeting with hairbows and goofing around with the dog as they wait for the signal that "it's time to go!" Young 'tween girls have argued with their mothers about getting to wear nylon tights for the first time and have secretly put on a smudge of mascara. Boys are pulling lint out of their pockets and wondering what is something interesting they can put in them to ward off the inevitable boredom. Tomboy daughters are being bundled into the least frilly dress their mothers could find. A younger brother is about to bust out the seams of his too-small borrowed-from-cousin sport coat. And all across America tonight families are smushing into cars and driving over to school for the Christmas concert. Mr. Nelson in rural Minnesota got the car started ten minutes early, to warm it up and has brought it over to the front walk. Four kids and two frazzled parents listen to the tires spin on the icy farmyard before catching traction and moving out. The yard light, high on a pole, always their beacon that home is near, shines a halo of sparkly white light across the garden and out toward the feed pens. A single star is visible in the sky. Mrs. Johnson in Cleveland recovers two stray barrettes from the table at the doorway as she hustles her children out into the cold night. The girls walk gingerly in their new patent leather t-strap shoes, while their brother tries to pretend he's not cold by offering his scarf to Mama. They meet up with the Silvio's and the Mahoney's at the corner and slip-slide their way across, numb knees and stinging cheeks red from exposure. The yellow light in the school yard beckons them and they scuffle along, trying above all not to fall. In upstate New York and southern New Mexico, Delta Mississippi, spongy Seattle, and wooded Arkansas, in tiny hamlets and the nation's biggest cities, in rural Iowa and hilly Pennsylvania, from Anchorage to Miami, families of all kinds and all sizes and all ages and degrees of dysfunction are going to school music programs tonight. As I sit here in the crowded auditorium of Arapahoe High School in suburban Denver, where anyone arriving less than forty minutes before start time is not going to get a seat, it dawns on me that we here are participating in a ritual that is shared across this land and, no doubt, many others. Parents are rifling through the programs, making sure their child's name is spelled correctly, noting that Laura must have dropped orchestra this year. Dad's are fidgeting with the buttons on video-cameras and moms are chatting about the latest ordeal, or delight. As we slid over slick roads to get here tonight, I thought of all the cars in other towns and along rural highways and the subways and buses and sidewalks that were carrying other families to similar scenes. The old Chevvy pickup packed with a family of four up front, crunching over the frozen snows of Wyoming, the Volvo in Naperville, the Taurus in Chattanooga. All of us engaged in this ageless ritual that I hope will go on and on and on. Somewhere tonight someone else's two-year-old will rock back and forth on her heels as she sings "Mary had a baby boy," thankfully leaving out the virgin aspect for the moment. And somebody else's second-grader will be dressed up in a black and white checked outfit with matching tights and cool boots, leading the long line of students into the auditorium singing about Christmas around the world. And another family will be grimacing, but still pleased, by the sound of a grade school orchestra playing White Christmas. A clarinet will screech. A drum will beat one beat too many. Somebody will stand in the wrong place and somebody else will fall off the risers. Out there in America tonight is a child whose parents fought all the way over to the school in the car and who wants to just disappear. And a child whose dad didn't show up, or mom didn't. And a child who looks out into the asssembled crowd, freaks with fright and starts to wail. And another child who looks out into the audience and sees her mom and dad and can't help but say, "Hi mom!" and wave. A toddler will pull her dress up over her head and her parents will be mortified. Another tyke will play with his pants zipper all through the performance and, of course, both of these children will be -- no matter what city or town -- in the front row. A high school senior with curly black hair and an Irish lass charm of smile will hit every note of her solo with bell clarity and the audience afterward will gasp with satisfaction. Beauty, perfection. A choir will sing its hardest song so well -- and so surprisingly perfect -- that the conductor will have tears running down her face. Parents of the youngest and the oldest of these children have something precious and poignant in common. That first pre-school pagaent, the first wiggles, pushing the child standing next to him into the right place, even if it knocks said kid over. The sheer unpredictability of it all, the wonder, this tiny creation, up in front, standing on carpeted steps singing about frost and stars and the magic of a baby. This wisp of a person, so recently so small, small enough to be inside you, is now standing up in front of a crowd and belting out the words, wishing us a Merry Christmas. And the parents of the high school (or college) seniors are remembering every single concert -- or feeling a smack of guilt because they can't -- and tearing up at the thought of this being the last Christmas concert and then the last Winter Dance and the last Prom and, whoooosh, it's over, this school time, this very precious and, as it turned out, fleeting schooldays time of life. The girl who stands with poise and presence in the center of the choir, who sings with honest emotion and expression, who has learned the value of discipline and rehearsal, this girl with a gorgeous face and flowing hair, this girl who is going away to college in too few more months, shines like the sun and her mother and father wonder what on earth they are going to do when she moves away. When there are no more school concerts to go to. Savor. Savor, savor every moment.

Happy birthday, Kaia! We got you pipe cleaners

She will be thrilled. Short of actually hacking into a human brain and watching the process in real time --- which of course wouldn't happen because, if you actually hacked into the human's brain it wouldn't work anymore now, would it? so this really is better --- the best way to recreate the process of glycolysis is with pipe cleaners. On the wall. Kaia will be spending part of her 22nd birthday today -- December 9 -- glorying in the wonders of biochemistry. She just aced the test and says it is because she used the pipe cleaners to make three-dimensional diagrams of the processes and then put them up on the wall for her housemates to enjoy too. I too was there to bear witness and what this girl can't do with a diagram of glycolysis simply then can't be done at all. 22. 22 Decembers. 22 summers. 22 years of wide-eyed discoveries and 22 years of unexpected adventures and 22 years of carefully planned expeditions. She has made her way, discovered her way, followed a way forged by others, all of the above. She has decided that "to whom much is given much is expected," and that there is no way but "you make the way by walking," and that what the world really needs is someone who has come alive -- so figure out what makes you come alive and do that! I get all soppy and sentimental on the girls' birthdays. I have nothing profoundly poetic to say, nothing of that nature to do justice to the glory of their existing and breathing and singing and laughing and learning and loving. I treasure their being, their being alive, their being who they are. And so, Kaia, I treasure you. From Italy to Estonia, from Berlin to Paris, from South Africa to South St. Paul, you make the world better by offering yourself to it, by being part of it. From the funky lofts of Printers' Row to kid heaven in Naperville to life in Littleton, to the mountains and oceans and deserts that have called to you to explore, to learn, you have covered a lot of territory. But it's still just beginning. Can you imagine that? Twenty-two. I can hardly wait to see what evolves out of your interests and skills and talents and sense of responsibility. Choose, always choose what makes you come alive! And happy birthday! Have some chocolate. Love you, Mmo

The cost of a sweater

I'll never know for sure. But I'm pretty sure that the price for that rich, warm, gorgeous Afghani (or was it?) sweater I was almost persuaded to buy 29 years ago would have been higher than the thirty American dollars I was asked to pay. My first trip to Moscow. December. 1980. As Ellen Goodman once wrote, "the last westerner to be invited to Moscow in the middle of winter was Napoleon. And we know how that turned out." My visit was enchanting and successful. The snow sparkled on the trees, the steam rising from thousands of boilers looked magical. Gorky Park had none of the sinister connotations it has in the novels of Martin Cruz Smith. Skaters skated, sledders sledded, and the golden domes of the Kremlin towers and cathedrals gleamed. I cleaned up on cut-rate Mischka the Bear Summer Olympics souvenirs. As you may remember, the U.S. had boycotted those Olympics because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Tourists stayed away in droves. So sweet little bears filled the shops and I brought home marble bears, wooden bears, and lots of Mischka pins. They still show up around here and make me smile. Day three. Ukraine Hotel, Moscow. One of the statuesque and Stalinesque monstrosities that loom over the skyline. It felt so Soviet, so completely Soviet, right down to the bugs in the walls and the monitors at the doors and the "floor ladies" who kept your key whenever you left your room. It was Advent and, as a guest of the Russian Orthodox Church, my meals were strictly in keeping with the Advent fast. Lots and lots of fish. No meat. Creamy red borscht. A menu that most Moscovites could only dream of. After dinner, I took time to browse the Berioszka shops in the magnificent lobby. More bears. An amber pin. Carved toys. Marble angels dancing together. Lots of tiny inlaid boxes. And an attractive man, also shopping, who became very chatty, friendly, as we wandered from one display to another. Finally, far away from the attendants, he spoke in a low voice, "I have sweaters, Afghani, and carpets, my room. You see. Room 712." If I didn't have a heart for adventure I wouldn't have been in Moscow at the height of the Cold War in the first place. So his invitation was a temptation that I could not resist. I dragged a colleague along. We wandered the halls a bit, a labyrinth of hallways that turned in on themselves and led to elevators that took us up and down and finally to Room 712. Sure enough, this charming, exotic, Omar Sharif-looking character was waiting, offered us tea. "No thank you." He was in Moscow, he said, from Afghanistan, a civil servant learning how to rebuild his country's infrastructure according to the Soviet plan. And he had a room absolutely stuffed with carpets, woolen blankets, mittens, and sweaters. It was his own private store, and the prices were attractive. He showed me a sweater, a heavy, fisherman knit type, with a marbled pattern, tan and white. It was very very nice. And I stood there thinking, wow, what a story. "Yeah, I bought this on the black market from an Afghani in Moscow who was there officially to learn to be a good Soviet diplomat but was secretly critical of the USSR and running his own underground scam market out of his hotel room." The sweater had a flaw. Not a big one, and it could have been repaired by a good knitter. But I hesitated. He lowered the price. In fact, he kept lowering the price so much that I began to wonder. Just how desparate was he to unload this sweater? He spoke of supporting his family at home. But I knew the rules, the protocols. How would he get this money back to Kabul? And, moreover, how would I get this out of the USSR, through customs, when I left in a few days. Still, the story was compelling. Every time I shook my head and said, "no," this inky voice inside said, "oh, go for it!" My friend, Fran, shot me looks that said, "DON'T" and finally I thanked "Omar" profusely for the generous offer but said that it would not be possible to buy a sweater, or mittens, or a large carpet, either. He was crushed. We backed out the door and took our leave. We left the hotel for a brief walk -- that's what you did when you needed to talk without 'minders' or 'ears' listening in. Perspective. The frigid air and the wide boulevards gave me a necessary perspective on the experience. What had happened in there? Was I being set up? I'll never know for sure. But probably. Given everything, what are the odds that he could have been selling all this loot with impunity. What would I have faced when the train crossed the border in the middle of the night again at Brest? It was a good idea to not buy that sweater. But I miss it every single day.