Pamela Jean Owens off-line

Write.

I think one of the prophets starts that way. God says, “write,” and Ezekiel responds, “What shall I write?” God gives him a vision and he writes it down. I always thought Ezekiel was pretty scary, except in the Tennesee Ernie Ford song version of it. That song would make a good music video. I should check on youtube and see if someone has made a video of it. I know there must be a Lego version of it, because someone did the entire Bible in Lego. Someone with too much time on his (her?) hands. His, I think. Sounds like a guy thing, all those battles to stage. Very much a Lego-guy thing. So, as Pastor Tom said, if you were thinking of spending your spare time, or your retirement, doing the Bible in Lego, you can cross it off your list. Somebody beat you to it.

I wonder how they made the Lego dry bones? I know how my dry bones have been feeling. Maybe I’m living what Ezekiel’s vision was about. I won’t say “really” about, because my faith persuades me that the Bible means what it means to each generation, indeed, to each person, and it has no “really means” that is for all times and places. You may not agree with me here, but that’s ok, my faith allows for yours, even if yours does not allow for mine.

Ezekiel had a vision of a valley of dry bones, and in the vision the bones begin to take life and reconnect themselves to each other, forming new wholes, new people. I wonder if Paul had that same image in mind when he wrote to people in some of those churches he had started, “you are a new person, the old is left behind and the new is born,” or something like that?

This is the point where I need to stop and get a Bible, or go online perhaps, so I don’t have to go inside and lose my concentration while I read Ezekiel and skim through the letters of Paul. But I think I’ll wait on that. Part of being a mess of dry bones is the lack of concentration it brings. When the head bone isn’t connected to the arm bones and the brain isn’t connected to the leg bones, it is hard to remember what the brain was telling the hands and feet to do. And if the heart bone isn’t connected to anything, how can you know what you feel?

Dry bones.
For Israel, the dry bones represented a life dried up, the vision and hope of a people dried up, the promises God had given their ancestors in time before memory – those were all dried up. All remaining resources appeared useless, for the frameworks of action, belief, reflection, and even memory had all been torn apart. Many people were dead. Hope was dead. Even memory had begun to die. Courage was a thing of the past, for courage requires vision, and vision requires hope. “Where there is no hope, the people perish,” someone famous once said.

Israel was in mourning, and she had been in mourning for a long time, by the time God spoke to Ezekiel. She had begun to assimilate to the ways of Babylon, not forgetting the ways of the Lord, but trying to practice them side by side with the ways of the Babylonian people amongst whom she was living. Her daughters and sons were marrying the daughters and sons of Babylon, and children were being born who had never known Jerusalem. It had been years and years – it seemed like an eternity – since the people had seen their homeland. Some were no longer sure it had ever existed. Some heard it as a pretty story of long ago, but one with no base in reality, or at least not their reality. Some did not even know they were living as dry bones, but the elders knew. Ezekiel knew. And God knew.

And God told Ezekiel to write. Write. What use was that? Israel already had books. Plenty of books. Books filled with the stories of the promises of God to her ancestors, the stories of glorious times, and the stories of her failure and her time of defeat. How could more scrolls help, when what was needed was action?

The children of Israel had been lost before, in the desert of Sinai and, instead of moving them on, God took Moses up on a mountain and told him to write something down.

God seems to have this funny way of addressing people in crisis. God seems to be very fond of saying, “Write.”

And so, I am writing. I never cared for Ezekiel all that much. As I said already, I found it a bit scary, except in Tennessee Ernie Ford’s great song. But writing isn’t scary. And if writing can put my dry bones, and my heart and my brain, back together into a functioning whole, then I will write and write and write, until it happens and beyond.

I’m looking at the people sitting in the McDonalds on Cuming at 24th Street. Black people, brown people, white people, old and young. Teenagers, families, people like me who come in by themselves. Around lunchtime, and morning coffee break time, work crews from the construction constantly going on in the area, or in winter from the snow plow trucks and the like. Some eating quickly, some watching CNN on the television, others leafing through the newspaper kept on the counter for the customers to read.
This McDonalds has more than its share of street people, being located close to the bus station, the Catholic Worker House, and downtown. But it also has Creighton University people, people on the way to work, and a steady crew of retired black gentlemen who know they’ll see a friendly face and people to call them by name. Being near the interstate and on the way to the airport, this McDonalds gets the occasional tourist, especially when it is College World Series time, and sometimes the families of patients at Creighton Medical Center stop in here.

This McDonalds is not a large store. In fact, it may be the smallest McDonalds in town. But it wins the friendliness award, hands down, in my book. I feel comfortable in this sunny window, knowing I’ll be welcomed and recognized.

If I get here early enough, I’ll see Jack, who shakes too much to be driving his truck all the way from much further north, but isn’t going to quit if he doesn’t have to. If I stay long enough, I’ll see Mr. Ramsey, who comes in on crutches and always sits at the same seat at same table. He counts on someone to get his coffee or sweet tea for him, and often times they’ll pay for it as well. He seldom eats anything here, but occasionally he’ll get a hamburger. He knows all the managers and most of the workers, and they all welcome him and welcome his teasing, returning it in good measure. The staff all worry about Mr. Ramsey’s health, and they worry about Jack’s driving, and when they see one of them coming, it’s not a bit unusual for one of the managers to hold the door open and pull out a chair.

I’m looking at a McDonalds, but I’m seeing an old-fashioned corner coffee shop, complete with a corner. I’m counting on it being here for me, and you’re welcome to join me any morning. But be sure you move over when Mr. Ramsey comes in, if you happen to be sitting in his seat.

Where do extroverts go when it rains?

Well, I guess the flippant answer would be, “If you’re Gene Kelley or Debbie Reynolds, you go Singing in the Rain.”

So (starting again), where do extroverts go when it rains, if they don’t want to get wet and they aren’t on a movie set?

I ask this question both to myself and as a public service announcement to all the extroverts reading my blog who are troubled by the question. I will pass over, without further comment, the unlikelihood of a true extrovert sitting still long enough to read blogs at all, much less having the patience to read mine, and simply say, in good University of Chicago fashion, that I am choosing to “bracket out” that whole discussion, for the purposes of this essay.

Ahhumm, to continue. I puzzle over this question, you see, having finally been diagnosed with much certainty as having nothing about me that is more absolutely certain than the fact that I am an extrovert to the core. And the esteemed psychologist who made said declaration uses CORE as a technical, as well as metaphorical, term.

I received this proclamation and diagnosis with some confusion, having had both the Myers Briggs inventory and my favorite professor and mentor at Austin Seminary tell me that he (with the advice of Mmes. Myers and Briggs) could see what I carefully hid from most of the world, that I was a closet introvert wearing an extrovert’s clothes and functioning, for most appearances, as the true extrovert which I (truly) was not. I received his pronouncement with some relief, as I was very tired at the time and the description of what was going on seemed a reasonable explanation. For an introvert, to behave as an extrovert all the time is very tiring and more than a little stressful, and that was certainly how I was feeling and had felt many times before. Now I hear, from someone I trust almost as much as I trusted Bob Shelton, that I have been an extrovert all along. That would mean I need a whole new explanation of why I am so tired and stressed. Can you see now why I am confused?

At my age, even if 60 is the new thirty, it would be nice to know who I am. Am I Piglet wearing a Tigger costume? Or am I really Tigger, who bounces along, rather unfocused, on oceans of energy, then gets caught up short by all the places he (or in my case, she) needs to be quiet and still and act nice, but he (or she) doesn’t know how? Or am I, as one close friend maintains, more of Owl in a Tigger costume? And if so, what would that mean? I’ve never gotten to know Owl very well in Milne’s stories, and perhaps that fact, in and of itself, should tell me something. Is there a CORE Map based on the stories of Winnie the Pooh?

On my CORE Map profile (the CORE Map is a more nuanced advancement on many of the same principles behind the Myers Briggs), I always show up very low on Relater skills, and high on both Entertainer and Commander. Certainly Tigger is low on Relater, well-meaning though he certainly is. And without any doubt Tigger is nothing if not Entertaining. Usually Entertainers (and often Commanders) are out-front people, true extroverts, while Relaters are commonly introverts, so all that fits. But then there are those actors and other professional Entertainers who, when interviewed by David Letterman, admit they are terrified every time they step on a stage. Personally, I find that hard to imagine.

I love entertaining, in all its forms, for whatever that may be worth at this point. I took to heart in childhood Shakespeare’s wisdom that “all the world’s a stage, and the men and women in it, merely players,” and I have been living life as though on stage ever since. I think that may mean I really am an extrovert, or it may just as easily mean I am not. You see my problem?

Now if I were purely Entertainer, and not also that pesky Commander and even pickier Organizer, I could just go with the flow, happily and blissfully bouncing along, never minding what is coming along in front of me that I may trip over, or what forest I may be about to get lost in.

But, alas, I am not purely Entertainer. I am also Commander and I am somewhat of an Organizer. And I am very certain that I am a writer. And a writer is, in CORE Map theory, almost always an Organizer of some sort, as well as sometimes something of an Entertainer. I LIKE organizing things, I just get bored easily and have trouble making up my mind how to do it so it will work, amuse me, and also be attractive. But (woe is me) Entertainer/ Organizer is not a possible emotionally healthy CORE personality type. Entertainers need an audience. Organizers have to work a lot in solitude. Writing is a solitary task, one that takes much concentration and isn’t often carried out in a group setting. That’s why writing often is the habitat of Organizers, and of Introverts.

But I have a passion for writing. Whether I am a writer or not is not in question, no matter what any inventory says about me. When I get an idea in my head, it feels like it will burst out and crack my skull open if I don’t put it in words, and put it down where others can read it. I don’t think introverts are particularly fond of putting their words out there — aren’t introverts the writers who have boxes full of great stories they never published that their children find after their death and publish (or don’t publish), with great fanfare and the public hanging on every word?

Yet if I stay indoors too long, my brain starts to burst in another way. I get what Mother called “stir crazy,” and saying “crazy” is no exaggeration. If I don’t get outside and get some fresh air and sunshine, or whatever is passing for sunshine on any given day, my brain starts to burst through my skull as though it is itself reaching for a window or door. I have to get out of the house every day, or I know without a doubt that I will end up depressed and immobilized. Ok, note to self: “needs to get out, maybe not an introvert.”

So, back to the question, “Where DOES an extrovert go when it rains?” Do you see where I am going with this? A writer generally needs to be indoors, or so it would seem, like an extrovert when it rains. So a writer who is an extrovert, like me, faces the same quandry on a daily basis as does my metaphorical extrovert in the rain.

The answer is simple, and it is, in fact, the answer given by many writers when asked the question, “Where do you write?” Second only to a quiet solitary study, comes “a coffee shop,” or “the McDonalds,” or “the bakery,” or sometimes even “the park.” Any place with people coming and going works, when you are not an introvert (!), as long as it’s a place you can sit all day without anyone complaining. Free refills on whatever you’re drinking, for as long as you stay, is nice too, but a thermos in the park might be place of choice on a beautiful day. If it’s beautiful, but cold, I just choose a sunny window in the corner at my favorite McDonalds, and I get the feeling that I’m getting my vitamin D and fresh air, even if it isn’t quite the original of either. And, oh, the people I meet! But those are other stories for other days and other essays. For now, I’ve answered the question, and that’s all I promised.

(Ok, already, this is not earth shaking news and maybe not even interesting, but, hey, I liked the title and I got you to read it, so that’s enough for me.)

Daddy loved to measure things. Anything. Everything. I’m sure I always knew that on some level, but it never hit me with such certitude as when my brother and I were sorting and packing the contents of the house where we grew up. I spent most of last summer in Dallas packing, after helping Mother “downsize” to a small retirement apartment in assisted living. We had moved Daddy to nursing care nearly three years earlier, but we’d never sorted through all that much from Daddy’s things in the meantime, except for paper and computer clutter that was collecting dust and clearly had no value to anyone.

What remained, what I spent a summer sorting and packing, was all that Mother had deemed of enough value to keep. Anything that Daddy had loved. And a lot that had simply accumulated over the years. Quite a bit of it was art, of one form or another. Items purchased on their travels, each with a story I’ve heard many times. Paintings, prints, lots and lots of miscellanea and bits of this and that.

For Daddy, the slide rule was a work of art. I lost count of the number of slide rules I found as I was packing: six-inch ones, twelve-inch ones, thick ones and thin ones, expensive ones and ones that had been “giveaways” from someone with whom Daddy had done business. I already knew Daddy had lots of slide rules. And I knew he had lots of rulers and yardsticks and tape measures. And I knew he had lots of triangles and t-squares and other drawing aids. I always loved the “mechanical drawing” sets he had, with their ultra-fine line pencils, their precision compasses and protractors, their little containers of leads and of erasers. He let me use them when I took geometry and solid geometry in high school, but I had to be very careful and could not take them with me to school. Fortunately, Daddy had two drawing sets, as those seemed to be the only items in the entire house that my brother and I both seriously wanted to keep.

And I also knew Daddy loved clocks. He never stopped mourning the loss of his grandfather’s clock, and he always blamed his mother for discarding it, along with his high school yearbooks and other treasures of memory. The tragedy happened when Daddy was away at college and the family had to move in a hurry because their rent-house was sold out from under them. I suspect it was a very traumatic time for my grandmother, a time I never heard about in detail but that always seemed to hover in the air and drive her desire to make a permanent home for Papaw.

Last summer, when I was going through my grandmother’s “things,” things that had eventually become boxes in the tops of Mother and Daddy’s guestroom closet, I discovered a box marked “Mother’s treasures.” The box had been labeled, I think, by my Dad, probably when he packed up his parents’ house after Papaw died, when Mamaw had to move to a nursing home to live out her remaining years.

That box of Mamaw’s treasures reminded me that, ever since I left home for college, I have had a box or two marked “Pammy’s treasures.” I’m guessing now that Daddy labeled them when he helped me pack for college. The boxes are filled with memories, not gold or jewelry or anything else that a stranger might expect to find in a box marked “treasures.” One box has a little doll made of soap that Aunt Mattie gave me with a bath set when I was about 10 or 12. Last time I unpacked that box, last time we moved, I saw that two tiny plastic dolls had become dismembered, as the tiny elastics holding their arms and legs to their bodies had rotted away. Those are what Daddy labeled as my “treasures.” A Valentine from my aunt that opens into a ballerina that sits up all by itself. Daddy recognized a treasure when he saw it.

The treasure is not so much the dolls themselves, or the Valentine, or the soap. I do love the little dolls, for example, but they are treasures because each one wears a tiny dress adorned with lace and a fastener, one dress with a little tie and the other with two tiny snaps, lovingly made by my grandmother. One time when my boxes were stored in an unused room in the church where I was pastor, I discovered that the box of my treasures had been opened and gone through. That was the first time it occurred to me that a stranger might see the label and presume the box was of monetary value. What a very strange idea that seemed to me to be.

As I sorted through Mamaw’s dusty boxes, I could tell that her treasures were similar to my own. Inside a large box, she had a small box containing the cards that had come with baby gifts when my dad was a newborn in 1922. Every single one of Daddy’s grade school and high school report cards seemed to be there. And a box with his tin G-man badge and similar sorts of tiny boyhood treasures was there as well. Clearly Mamaw was not at all the sort of woman who would have deliberately discarded any box containing treasured memories, whether they belonged to her, or to her husband, or most especially to her treasured only child, my dad.

My guess, and I so wish Daddy were still in his full mind so that I could tell him this, is that Mamaw or Papaw carefully packed the treasures they saw in Daddy’s room, when they had to move so suddenly, and that one of them lovingly labeled it “Tom Jr.’s Treasures.” And then, I feel very certain, movers came to put the boxes on a truck and transport them to the family’s new residence. Somewhere along the way, whether when the boxes were sitting on the sidewalk at the old house, or when they were being loaded or unloaded from the truck, or even when they were about to be safely deposited in the new house, someone saw the label “Tom Jr.’s Treasures.” Whoever that was, whether a mover or a neighbor or just a passer-by, must have thought the contents of that box would be worth money, worth selling. And so the box disappeared.

The depression was not long over, and people were still desperate. I can understand how it happened. Possibly Mamaw and Papaw did not even know the box was missing. Perhaps they put all of Daddy’s boxes in his new room, to wait for him to come home and unpack them. It may have been months before the loss was discovered, or it may have been only days. I’m sure I will never, in this life, know for sure.

I am pretty sure that Daddy will go to his grave without forgiving his mother for losing his treasures, especially his grandfather’s clock. I do not know if he ever even told her how upset he was, or if she tried to explain, or if the whole affair was one of those events his generation left unsaid. I do hope that, when they meet in heaven, Daddy and Mamaw can clear the air, and perhaps in Daddy’s mansion his grandfather’s clock will once again sit on his dresser, next to his high school yearbooks and other lost treasures.

And I realize now, after carefully packing enough grandfather clocks to give one to each of my children, as well as keep one for me and another for my brother, that Daddy never stopped looking for his own grandfather’s clock. Every flea market, every junk store he visited, as he so loved to do — each one must have sheltered the possibility that Daddy would finally be reunited with his boyhood treasures. Every grandfather clock he collected stood in for, but never replaced, the clock of his grandfather’s that he missed so much.

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

So reads what is known universally as “The Serenity Prayer” as it is used in 12-step groups all over the world. So wrote Reinhold Niebuhr, or so the story sometimes goes, on an envelope, or the back of the bulletin, or some other random piece of paper, during the morning service one Sunday in 1942, or thereabouts. It was only the opening stanza of a longer prayer he would deliver in that service, after a sermon on Practical Christianity, never dreaming it would have a life that extended far beyond his own.

Although in later interviews, after “the prayer” had become famous, Dr. Niebuhr did take credit for the prayer, he also admitted that the ideas in it may well have been “floating around for centuries”; research has shown he was correct in that statement, although he never revealed whether he recalled the source from which he had borrowed the ideas. Whatever its true origins, within a few short decades the prayer had taken on a life of its own, and a title: “The Serenity Prayer.”

I’ve always had a problem with the Serenity Prayer. In fact, I’ve rejected it much more often than I’ve prayed it, a fact that almost everyone I meet finds close to heresy. Rejecting the Serenity Prayer has become the unforgiveable sin against modern civil religion, against “common knowledge,” tantamount to blasphemy against the public manifestation of all that is holy. To question the Serenity Prayer is seen as speaking against the very fabric of the self-help movement itself. The reaction of people ranges from shocked disbelief to outright pity, so I don’t mention my heretical thinking often.

Far be it from me to suggest that the word “serenity” is only one of three petitions lifted up in the prayer, and not the one in the ultimate position, syntactically. I am well aware that if anyone “Googles” the phrase, “Serenity Prayer,” there is not a single doubt that this is the only prayer to which thousands of links will direct their browser. Thousands of websites present the Serenity Prayer, probably tens of thousands, if not millions, in every language imaginable, in words I can’t pronounce and scripts I do not know.

Google took just 0.14 seconds to tell me that there are “about 721,000 results,” for “serenity prayer,” but I think that may just be the ones in English. If some are in some other language, I know Google translator can translate them for me, but I don’t need it to. No matter the language, I know what it says and what it means to whoever posted it on the page. Googling “courage prayer” or “wisdom prayer” will also return thousands of results, but they will point to all manner of prayers posted for all manner of reasons. No one can quote “THE” Wisdom Prayer or “THE” Courage Prayer, even if many of us might have our own nomination for each of those designations.

“Serenity: the quality of being serene.”
That’s what the dictionary says “serenity” means, which only begs the question.

In all the times I’ve heard the prayer said, it has seemed to be almost forbidden to ask what “serenity” actually means. I’ve always felt as though I’m just supposed to intuitively know, yet if there is one thing I do know it is how very NOT intuitive I am. Ask a recovering alcoholic about serenity, and you’ll probably hear the word “sanity” in his definition. Ask a recovering battered wife at an Al-Anon meeting, and you might well hear “survival.” Ask a group of adult children of alcoholic parents, and you would probably hear something about coming to terms with their childhoods as they were, instead of wishing childhood had been the way they wished it had been.

Going a bit further with the dictionary search uncovers this as the meaning of “serene”:
1. a: clear and free of storms or unpleasant change “serene skies” b: shining bright and steady, “the moon, serene in glory” (Alexander Pope)
2: august — used as part of a title, “his Serene Highness”
3: marked by or suggestive of utter calm and unruffled repose or quietude, “a serene smile”

I don’t think the “august” title is relevant, but both of the other meanings intrigue me.

I can hardly imagine a life clear and free of storms. Not in this world, anyway. And unpleasant changes are hard to avoid. So how can one even imagine the state of being serene as a human quality? “Unruffled repose or quietude”? How very boring that would be, other than for periods of deliberate meditation and prayer.

The Serenity Prayer actually petitions for more than serenity: it also requests courage and wisdom. Courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference between what I can change and what I cannot. Serenity is prayed for in a particular type of situation, when there are things “I cannot change.” If I can change it, then I ask for courage, or at least I do in the Serenity Prayer. Sometimes I feel like those lines are simply being quoted by rote. Like “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Who really wants to only be forgiven to the extent she is willing to forgive others? Not me! What I should be praying desperately is to be forgiven in much greater measure than I have been able to forgive others! But who is thinking that in the Sunday service, half asleep, when responding by habit to the intro, “Our Father…”?

Back to the Serenity Prayer: ultimately, if I pray that prayer, I am asking for wisdom. Specifically, “wisdom to know the difference.”

Ah, that is the rub. Knowing the difference. Wisdom is much harder for me than courage. I can do courage. But how do I know when to call on it? How do I know the difference between serenity and mere resignation? By wisdom. And isn’t wisdom much harder to gain than serenity? Might not it be that what some people call “serenity,” others would call “giving up integrity”?

All the years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus in Montgomery, had it been wise for black people in Alabama, and elsewhere, to take their appointed seats at the back of the bus, serenely accepting what they could not change? Should Rosa Parks have continued accepting Jim Crow laws as something she could not change? Had it previously been wise to accept, or had the people simply lacked the courage to change the things they could? Was it that Mrs. Parks was wiser than others, or was she simply crazy? Believe me, I ask that question with absolutely no disrespect. Is the wisdom to know the difference the product of rational analysis? Or is it the stuff of daydreams? Or, rather, might it be the craziness of patience stretched beyond endurance? Is wisdom the knowledge of the right time, or is it eternal truth, outside of time and space?

Most times that I recall having demonstrated what others called “courage” in my life, I thought I was simply doing that which I could not not do. At the time, courage did not enter into it. I didn’t decide to organize women to get rid of “women’s hours” at Vanderbilt University. I simply did what I had to do not to lose my sanity, as well as my patience. Later my friends would tell me that they only went along with my outrageous ideas because I was acting so bizarrely they were afraid if they refused, I might just jump out the window. I don’t remember it already being “after hours,” so I think I could have still walked out the door, but maybe that wasn’t really what they meant.

It struck me as very funny when they told me later how I had looked to them that day. I don’t remember it that way at all. I remember being very rational in devising a strategy and carrying it out: petitions, floor meetings, picketing, finally a rally. I remember endless discussions of what would be most effective and what we needed to do to get enough women to join us, so as not to become marginalized. I also remember being positively evangelical about it, and I remember consciously knowing I was using many techniques of leadership that I’d learned in Training Union as I was growing up at Gaston Avenue Baptist Church. I don’t remember anyone at my church ever telling me that women were supposed to be silent in church, that’s for sure! The Daves and the Withers and the other leaders taught us to stand up for what we believed and never mind the cost.

That first afternoon of what we would come to call “the campaign,” when I received a letter from my friend Judy Johnson who went to a small Lutheran college in Iowa, telling me they had just successfully gotten rid of hours for women at their school, I do remember storming into my friend Mary’s room waving the letter, and I probably was shouting. I still remember what I said, more or less anyway. “They’ve managed to abolish women’s hours at some little Lutheran school in the middle of nowhere. If they can do it there, we can do it at Vanderbilt.”

I am almost certain I know what the answer would have been that afternoon if anyone had telephoned the chancellor, or the members of the Board of Trustees, or certainly the parents of many women students, and asked if there were any possibility that before the year was out women at Vanderbilt would have successfully petitioned the Trustees to abolish the long-held tradition of women’s being required to sign in and out whenever leaving their dorm at night, much less successfully challenge the idea that the university was entitled to, even perhaps responsible to, set the hour by which “co-eds” must be safely stowed away in their dorms. I am very doubtful that anyone, except possibly Chancellor Heard, who seemed almost prescient at times, would have said it was remotely possible. Now truth be told, I think our Dean of Women was quite delighted with the events as they unfolded. I already admired Dean Cunningham for having been one of those rare women who had the chance to earn a Ph.D. in the roaring twenties, never imagining how long-lasting would be their echo. I’ve often wondered if she and her cohort of feminists had any idea how long it would be before another decade would roar as loudly for women as the twenties did.

Was what I did courageous? I hardly thought of it that way. It was exhilarating. It was remarkable. Perhaps it was brilliant. I know it was fun. But courageous? Not that I recall.

And was I wise? If that means, “Did I act because I was wise enough to know that rules could be changed?” the answer is certainly “no.” But I believed they could be changed, if we did it right. It was 1968, after all. The summer of love had faded to the summer of rage, and change was in the very air we students breathed that fall when we returned to our campuses. I hadn’t been at the Atlanta Women’s Conference, but I knew it had been important.

I hadn’t been to Chicago, to the Democratic Convention, but I had touched Bobby Kennedy’s hand as he came down the aisle when he spoke on campus the previous spring, and I’d cried when I woke up one morning that summer to hear my clock radio telling me he was dead. But I had also looked out my dorm window in the spring of 1967 and seen the National Guard tanks process by as they headed to take up their positions in Centennial Park for the night on which Martin Luther King, Jr., and Stokely Carmichael were speaking from the same stage on the Vanderbilt campus, anticipating unrest that never occurred.

Last November we elected Barak Obama, voting for “change we can believe in.” But before we could believe in it, we had to imagine it. And before we could work for it, we had to have the wisdom to recognize what could be changed. To tell the difference in what could be changed and what should be serenely accepted. Is wisdom knowledge? Or is wisdom dreaming big dreams even when those around you scoff?

I’m glad Rosa Parks did not serenely take her seat at the back of the bus that day in Montgomery. I’m glad I did not serenely keep following the rules laid out for women at Vanderbilt in 1968. And I’m glad the American people did not serenely accept the common wisdom that our country was not ready for a black president “yet” in 2008.

They say Neihbuhr prayed the “Serenity Prayer” at the end of his sermon on Practical Christianity. I’d be interested in reading that sermon. I may see if I can find it anywhere.

Who ever heard of such a thing as “practical Christianity”? How can belief in the impossible being possible be practical? How can belief that life can overcome death be “practical”? The very idea strikes me as absurd. Maybe Neihbuhr explored how one can live Christianity, as a practical matter. Maybe the sermon was really about the practice of Christianity?

Refusing to move to the back of the bus was hardly “practical” in Montgomery, Alabama, in the era of Jim Crow. “Practical” was serenely riding to work, any way you could get there, and being glad you had a job in the first place. “Practical” is “going along to get along.” Challenge to the way things are is seldom practical. It may be courageous. It may even be wise. And it may be the only way for some people to ever achieve serenity.

The wisdom to know the difference. That is the prayer I think the world needs. Otherwise we run the risk of calling something “serenity” when it should be labeled as what it truly is: giving up.

I make no claim to understand economics. None whatsoever. Never took a course in it, have no “investments” other than the Pension Fund and the Credit Union accounts, and have no idea what “retirement” would even look like.

But I’ve been doing some thinking, since watching the Super Bowl ads on Sunday and thinking about Cokes. Cokes Then, like the famous Mean Joe Greene ad, and cokes Now, Coke Zero, as in the new remake of the same ad with the current nice guy of pro-football, (somebody please send me his name before I have to google him).

When I was a kid, a coke cost a nickel. It didn’t matter if you got a fountain coke at the soda fountain at the drug store, or the lunch counter at Woolsworths, which was also known as the “dime store” or even the “five and dime,” or from a machine in some public place. As far as I can remember, a coke probably cost a nickel at the picture shows as well, and pop-corn a dime, but I can’t swear to that.

I’m not just talking about the 1950s here. I’m talking about the 1960s as well, when I went off the college. Every morning I went downstairs in my dorm and bought a coke from the machine and took it with me to breakfast, where I poured it over a cup of ice, just like I’d been doing since I was a teenager. Back then in the C-Shop (the central campus snack shop and quick lunch place), an ice cream cone also cost a nickel, or a dime for a double dip. As far as I knew, that was what ice cream always had cost and always would, a nickel a dip.

Then the president put a boycott on Cuba and the price of sugar soared sky high. Coke machines doubled their prices to a dime, and I toyed with boycotting the coke machine in the basement of the dorm, buying mine in the grocery and bringing them back, but with no car, there was really no percentage in trying to do that. Friends who could went to Cuba on Venceremos Brigades, and die-hard Coke addicts like me bit the bullet. After all, Carolyn Candler, one of the heiresses to the coca cola fortune, was in my class at Vanderbilt and on Lupton 1300 with me freshman year, and they were doing the best they could just to scrape by. Sort of like the Wall St. barons are doing today. Who could begrudge them an extra nickel per coke? Of course that was double the old price, which seemed to pay for a bit more than higher sugar prices, but, hey, the machines couldn’t very well charge 6 cents could they?

Actually, there were some places, like church offices, where the machine was owned by the place, not by the vending machine distribution company, and regular people put the drinks in and took the money out. They couldn’t change the price so easily — who’d have ever thought they’d need to do that? — so they came up with various solutions. Most popular was putting a box on top of the machine and trusting everyone who got a drink to put in an extra penny! I’m not kidding. I well remember the machine in the Christian Church in the Southwest Regional Office in Ft. Worth still had that system when I was there years later, around 1978 or so.

I remember at Vandy we soon discovered that at the BSU the campus minister had decided not to raise the price, so more and more of us started ducking through there on the way across campus to buy a coke. Trust those old mainline Southern Baptists to get us in their door one way or another (that was in the days when Baptists were BAPTIST, not fundamentalists…. but that is another story). Anyway, God bless old Pitts Hughes (that was a woman), for saving us anyway she could. I haven’t forgotten her welcome offer of salvation on the pass-through to one and all, that’s for sure. (That last sentence was for those of you who didn’t catch the bad pun in the previous sentence, sorry.)

Back to the price of coke and the economy: somewhere by the time I got to grad school at Chicago, coke had climbed to a quarter, then gradually to fifty cents, depending on who owned the machine and where it was. We addicts had an internal compass to the cheaper machines again, and once again, leave it to those immersion baptizers to get us in: at the University of Chicago, the last 25 cent hold out was the Disciples Divinity House basement. That wasn’t quite as easy for the general public to make use of on the pass-through, since you had to have a key to the front door or know someone to let you in, and you had to go back out the door you came in, unless for some reason the fire exit to the alley was open, so it was a little harder to be subtle about your reason for being there. But for those of us who were House or Out-House Scholars, it was a cheap fix and the Disciples didn’t ask nearly as much in faith as the Baptists had done. (Just kidding, they didn’t really ask us to believe anything at all at Chicago, so I exaggerate in saying they only asked “not nearly as much.”)

Ok, I finally got my ph.d. in 1997, and by then I think the DDH had gone up to at least 35 cents, by close vote of the House Council, and machines across campus were running anywhere between fifty cents and seventy five. Hotels had gone up to a dollar a coke on the machines in their hallways, and movie theaters were out of sight with what they were charging for drinks, and for popcorn too. Restaurants, however, were really all over the map, and of course by then that included pepsi and a host of flavors, amounts of sugar and caffeine, and even fruit flavors in the cans, not just at soda fountains where they added real limes or cherry syrup. Moving from the south I discovered that some strange people thought “coke” only referred to a coca cola, not all soft drinks. What a strange idea that was the first time I heard it!

Another new idea was born, as restaurants tried to decide what to charge: the idea of soft drinks as being a drink that entitled you to refills, like tea or coffee or water. That certainly would have been laughed at if anyone had suggested it back when coke was a nickel. Of course, cokes were a LOT stronger back in the fifties, so a large coke, which cost a dime, was about all the caffeine any kid could handle. Somewhere in there fast food restaurants came alone and the size of sizes began to change almost day to day, along with the price.

Raise your hand if what Wendy’s now calls “small” was what McDonald’s sold as “large,” not so very long ago. Really, it wasn’t long ago at all. The old “small” is now “senior size” or even “kid’s size,” depending on where you are. Current “large” didn’t even exist until after it had been introduced as the “super size” for hot summers in the south. Most places do offer free refills now, which seems to give at least a nod to the idea that coffee and tea drinkers might well be using as much sugar as coke drinkers, which I argued back in 1967 or so! Why didn’t they raise the price of coffee, I asked, as I watched friends stir spoonful after spoonful of sugar into their nickel cup of coffee, and its free refills, while I paid a dime for my one coke and never thought of getting a free refill. Well, of course they didn’t raise the price of coffee because people would never have stood for it. Remember that argument?

It was related to the “people will stop driving before they pay $2.00 a gallon for gas,” or was that $3.00? or maybe $4.00? We didn’t find out who would stop driving if it got to $5.00, at least not where I live, but the common wisdom was defeated with all the other increases, so that one would have probably gone through too. Now more people complained about the price of gas than complained when coke went from a nickel to a dime, but that was only a matter of scale and of who was doing the buying, I want to argue.

The reasons for coke going to a dime and on from there and gas going to — well, whatever the oil barons want to charge — are just about the same. We boycott Cuban sugar so coke goes up. We subsidize oil companies and sleep with the shieks, so they can charge whatever they want, and brag about it to congress, and pay themselves bigger and bigger bonuses to go with the higher prices of everything.

That’s my nickel’s worth on the economy. I don’t bother watching for the Dow Jones numbers. I know what’s happening by the price of a coke. That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it. That’s making me thirsty, so I’m headed to get a coke now, check you later.

A couple of weeks ago, on a Saturday evening as cold as tonight is, I answered the phone, seeing an unfamiliar number on the caller i.d., and heard a man ask if I was Dr. Pamela Owens.  I said yes, and was surprised, but not as surprised as I might have expected, when he identified himself as a detective from the police department in Kearney, Nebraska.  He asked if I was by any chance related to a Mr. Ron Davis.

I said, “No, we are not related.  Ron worked for me around the house and yard for the past several years.”

“Ron’s a good man,” I added, “Is he ok?”  I knew Ron carried my phone number in his pocket, and gave it to anyone who wanted to be in touch with him, but the last few times someone had called with a message for him, he never had called to check.  I’d  figured, or at least I’d hoped, that he was doing ok and maybe had settled in for the winter.

Since Ron would never hurt a fly, if the police were calling, I was much more worried something had happened to Ron than any thought that he was in trouble, and I was right.  “Mr. Davis has passed away,” the officer said, “and we are trying to find someone related to him to see about burial and a funeral.”

“Was he out in the cold?  Is that how he died?” I asked, knowing the last I’d heard he was still looking for an apartment.  “No, he had found an apartment and was moved in,” the officer quickly assured me.  “He passed away in his apartment.  Do you know if he had any medical conditions?”

How could I answer that question?  Ron had the medical conditions of a man who couldn’t catch a break.  He looked years older than his age, which I think isn’t far from my own, and he told me once he didn’t even know if he would recognize his own children and grandchildren if he saw them, it had been so long.  I had the sense that once he had been a drinker and probably a smoker, but that must have been a long time ago, because the strongest drink I ever saw him with was a 7-Up or a Dr. Pepper.

He liked his drinks in a paper cup with ice and a straw.  We had that in common.  When he’d work in the yard with me in the hot summers, I’d bring the soft drinks from the house and he would take both of our cups over to the convenience store across the alley and fill them up with ice.  Sometimes I’d drive over to the Sonic and get us both hamburgers and fries, and we’d sit and eat them on the front porch together.  Ron was very neat, always cleaning up after us, always clean and fresh smelling himself, like a man who once had lived a more comfortable life.

I don’t know if he ever lived a comfortable life.  He talked about living in Vegas and working in the music business, that he used to sing and play some instruments.  Sometimes it was hard to tell which stories were memories and which were just long ago dreams.  I know they were all real to Ron, and he spoke of them so much that they were real in my mind as his history.

I never particularly thought of myself as having a “hired man,” but that’s what he was.  He weeded my garden, and raked my leaves, he helped me carry stones from the back and make a path to the curb that wouldn’t get so muddy in the winter.  He checked on me and worried about me if I didn’t answer the phone for a while.  And when he said he’d be over at a certain time to help me, if I showed up a few minutes after that time, I’d know he’d be sitting on my front porch, rocking in my rocking chair.

I couldn’t help the Kearney officer with burying Ron.  I said, if he were in Omaha, I’d certainly be pleased to preach his funeral, but Kearney is a long drive from here, especially in the dead of winter, so I didn’t suggest that I come there.  The only other number in his pocket was a man named John, in Vegas, and I doubted he would know any more about Ron’s family than I did.  I’d talked to John once myself, and he was only a place where Ron had left his car to be fixed when he left Vegas the last time.  Or that’s what Ron told me.

More than once Ron told me I was his only friend, and I guess I was.  He was a good man.  He deserved more friends than just me.  He called me family, that I was like his mother and his sister all rolled into one.  I told the officer I didn’t think Ron looked very good the last time I saw him, when he told me he was leaving Omaha and heading to Kearney to try to live there, where it was smaller and safer.

I do hope he felt safe there.  I hope he chose to die there, because he was safe.  He needed a home, more than he could have just working for me and a few other ladies in Omaha.  He needed the kind of home Warren defined in Frost’s poem, or maybe the one his wife Mary described:

“Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.”

“I should have called it
Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”

Ron knew that, in some way or other, we would always find some work for him.  But we couldn’t take him in.  On the other hand, he didn’t have to do anything to deserve having a friend.

It’s another cold Saturday in January.  I’m glad Ron is warm now, at least, and very very safe.

I found this blog item in my documents folder — I can’t quite figure out if I ever posted it.  In the melancholiat at coming to the end of a momentous 2008, personally and for the world, I was feeling rather down, feeling the house too quiet after the holiday bustle of family and a baby once again.  But with so many stars in my sky, how can I not give thanks for my life?  My posting again starts with those who are gone, but it is about life, not death, something I need to daily remind myself to remember:

“Let the dead walk before you and acquaint yourself with their names…”
So speaks the motto splashed boldly across the print Jim Dombrowski gave me of an original poster he created commemorating one of the bloody police massacres of union organizers in labor history.  I do remember those who have walked before me and I endeavor to acquaint myself and others with their names, as my elders taught me to do.   I consider myself to be one of the most fortunate and blessed individuals I know, for the lifetime I have had to sit at the feet and be taught at the knee of such great men and women of social justice history as those with whom I have crossed paths and sometimes shared a day, a week, a month, a year, or more.

Jim Dombrowski — Th.D. Union Seminary, 1920’s sometime — thesis on communistic societies of the early American republic — old line union organizer, North Carolina and throughout the south — beat up and ridden out of town on a rail, countless times and places I’m sure.  C.P. member? Maybe.  Freedom fighter,  Definitely.  Widower, grandfather, lover of justice, of art, of kindness, of life, of family and friends, and of New Orleans.  Mentor to young adult organizers my age, but just as much of budding toddler artists like our little Ruthie.  If I were to “google” Jim today, what would I find?  I wasn’t on-line as I wrote these thoughts, but I’ll check it later.  Would I be as amazed at what I would find about Jim as I was when I “googled” Anne Braden, my old friend, the widow of my primary mentor in organizing, Carl Braden?  I had no idea how widely she was known, being out of the south so long.  Fire brands when I knew them in the seventies, she died not so long ago, respected by all strata of those who love justice.

Anne and Carl were my teachers, my surrogate parents at times; they showed me what parents of activists could be like when I felt far from my own. Carl brought Jim Dombrowski to meet me, interview me, and then go to New York City to raise the money to pay me to organize on the Charolotte Three and the Wilmington Ten.  Carl and Anne were committed to the struggles in North Carolina, in particular, because their own correspondent for the Southern Patriot, Jim Grant, was one of the Black organizers who had been targeted.  And oh, what I learned from Jim, who still lives, as far as I know.

I was blessed to live in the house with T.J. and Vicki Reddy when Julien Bond, then “merely” a poet, came to visit T.J., a fellow poet, in jail.  I was blessed to be sleeping in the apartment whose steps made the platform for the late Allen Ginsberg to do his “after-hours” reading when he came to Vanderbilt University in 1969.  My boy friend’s roommate was Allen’s host, and was sent to buy Allen a toothbrush, since Allen had forgotten his at his last stop.  What little things we remember.  I don’t remember what he read, but I remember that he sat on the stairs as we spilled out of the hallway into the street, because there was no other place to be, and that he waved his hands as he spoke, and that he needed a new toothbrush.  Oh, the importance of poets for our movements.  Denise Levertof, who I never met but who T.J. spoke of as a sister.  So many more.

And the priests — some dead, and some still living, in my life, I’ve known them well.  George Celestian, who took me to hear John Prine in Austin when he had an extra ticket, then soon went to Central America with his order and I don’t know what became of him later.  Tom Sheetz, the Jesuit who was getting a Ph.D. in Economics at the University of Texas so he could vote the Jesuit’s shares in companies such as Gulf and Western, and bring social conscience to the stock holders meetings of large corporations doing evil.  Father Al Moser, Paulist Priest, lover of life and love, gentle soul who told us to name our children something we were comfortable with (when we asked how to do the last name thing), because if they were our children, they would choose their own names when they wanted to anyway.  How right he was!  Still I say the prayer he taught us, “Holy Spirit of God, take me as your disciple. Guide me. Illumine me. Consecrate me.  Be my God.  Be my guide.  Wherever you lead me, I will go.  Whatever you say, I will do.  Whatever you forbid, I will abhore.  Lead me then, into the fullness of your truth.” I think I may have a few of the words wrong, but more or less correctly, that has been my prayer for the past thirty plus years.  Father Al Moser, I don’t know whether you live now on earth or in heaven, but I appreciate you and thank God for your being in my life.

Father Joe Znotas.  The stories I could tell . . . . Another day, another blogging.  We named our first son for you.  That says it all. I strive always to do what I think you would do in any situation of daily life, for you taught me more than anyone that the real work for justice is in the minutes and the hours, not in the campaigns and the headlines.  You died too young.  You are sorely missed.

I am thankful that Angela Davis and I crossed paths for a few days in North Carolina, shared a bedroom in Professor Helen Otho’s home, sat through a trial together and spoke on the same rally platform.  I learned from you, my tall black sister, and I think perhaps you learned from me as well, though I will probably never know.  I saw you vulnerable, soon after you had been those many months in solitary confinement in jail, for no reason, innocent but held anyway, with no blankets but the ones they let you crochet to pass the time, with poor food, for you were a vegetarian, with nothing but time to think, to meditate, possibly even to pray.  I wondered if you, an avowed Communist, were truly an atheist.  You seemed full of the spirit to me.

Some are dead: Elizabeth Chavis.  Igal Rodenko. My grand parents.  My Aunt Maude. Rachel Henderlite. John Jansen.
And some are living:  Ralph DiGia.  David McReynolds, Karl, Judith, Walter Harrelson, Martin Marty, James Gustafson, David Tracey, Anthony Yu, Prescott Williams, Bob Shelton.  In my life, I’ve loved them all.

I have roots.  I have a base to stand on and a reservoir of wisdom to tap and call upon.  I have never gone out into the world alone, even when I knew no one in the room, for the cloud of witnesses behind me are always with me.  The cloud of witnesses is not just a pretty platitude from the epistle to the Hebrews; it is reality and I feel it daily, hourly, minute by minute.

I am so very very blessed by those I have known, loved, and been loved by.  How, then, can I want for anything?

I have been busy and not blogging, but “YES,” I am thrilled with the outcome of the election nationally, even if we didn’t get a new congressman or another Democratic senator from Nebraska.  But we did make history with getting the first ever single electoral vote from a state that can split its vote.  We took Nebraska CD2 for Obama, despite the rest of the state going red.  Yeah!!!!!  And we did unseat a sitting county commission with our friend, the terrific public servant Marc Kraft!  Congratulations, Marc!

Well, here I am in Tyler, Texas, in the coffee shop of my mom’s retirement home.  Not a particularly exciting place to watch a debate!  And I’ve already bummed her out by my up-front witnessing to the good news of the Democratic Party in public wherever we go.  How come it’s ok to witness to the good news of Jesus Christ and no one should be offended, but it’s considered bad manners to witness to the good news of political change?  I’m proud to be a Democrat, all the time, but especially this year!  If you are proud to be a Democrat, let it be heard.  Shout it out!  “Read my lipstick:  I’m voting Democratic” (bumper stickers available from Emily’s list).

It’s been exciting in the Dallas area to see a collection of “I’m voting Democratic” yard signs.  “Had enough of Bush now?  Vote Democratic ‘08″ and many more.  So much fun to see them all over my hometown!

CNN is now going bonkers about the poll changes today — wow!  the multi-colored map doesn’t look like it did a few weeks ago AT ALL!

CNN says the whole world is watching the debate tonight to see what the next U.S. President will be doing that will make a difference in the world economy.  Duh!  This is sort of important, isn’t it?  Why is the economy hurting McCain and not Obama?  Well, maybe finally faith in the rich guy has been shaken.  If so, it’s sure about time!

Will he raise the issues of Bill Ayres and Rev. Wright tonight?  Are those issues for the American public at this point?  Surely not at this point.  I knew both of them in Chicago, Bill as a friend, Rev. Wright as an adjunct faculty member at the Divinity School.  I hope McCain has something more important on his mind than Obama’s pastor or his colleagues in city government.

8:02 p.m

It is so good to see a moderator respected by absolutely everyone!   Let’s hear it for Bob Schaefer!

well, right off the bat, one leveler -0- they are sitting instead of standing.  That means we don’t see anybody’s cute backside, or not cute.  No walking or pacing or getting up and down.  No way to tell who is taller than the other.  Remember, until 2004 the taller candidate won every election since television debates in 1960.  Al Gore?  Remember, he DID win the popular vote, just not the Supreme Court.

8:17 p.m.

“Countries that don’t like us very much” is a pretty large category these days, Sen. McCain, have you been to Europe lately?  We aren’t liked much anywhere except where we are buying oil; they love us, just the way we are.

“The most spending since the Great Society……”  Well, the dollar is worth a lot less than it was in LBJ’s day — my rent was $17 a week, for a nice little two room apartment with a bathroom down the hall on what is now Music Row in Nashville.  But would everyone about to start getting MediCare, or who is thankful their parents are getting MediCare, really want to go back to before the Great Society?  When I was in high school, what we now call MediCare was being opposed by the Republicans as “socialized medicine.”   Now we have a Republican president who wants socialized financial institutions.  Something is very confused here, IMHO.

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9 p.m.

Education and Health Care are the Civil Rights issues of the 21st Century.  McCain acknowledges that on education, but he just doesn’t get it on health care.  They are a right, not a privilege.  Joe the Plumber knows that, give him some credit.  If he’s making $250,000, he’s now management, not labor!  Duh!

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AND REMEMBER, GET OUT AND VOTE!  VOTE EARLY, VOTE ALL THE WAY DOWN THE TICKET. AND GET EVERYONE YOU KNOW TO VOTE TOO.