Guns & Violence & Problem Solving

So here’s the thing about guns and problem-solving – guns don’t solve problems; people do.

Sound familiar?

And here’s another thought that arises from bumper-sticker philosophy: if people kill people (rather than guns, as the bumper sticker so catchily proclaims), then it stands to reason that people are the problem, which means, does it not, that it is people that are not to be entrusted with guns?

Violence and gun-toting problem solving I have encountered in my lifetime has involved . . .

A man, now dead presumably of old age, who got so angry by the fact of a right-of-way granted by his father to his neighbors (who were also relatives) that he took to shooting at said neighbors (including a 60-year-old woman carrying her groceries into her house), gas meter readers, pizza-delivery folk, and anyone who dared to exercise their lawful right to ingress and egress.  Before he died, said gentleman yielded up virtually all his earthly wealth to said neighbors.  I wonder if those shots were worth it to him?  His cousin will never know if she’s alive because he missed on purpose or was just a bad aim.

Then there was the old drunk who lived next door to my neighbor.  While we painted her house, my then 3-year-old son played in the grass with his ball.  I had warned him to stay out of the man’s yard, but he was only three and when his ball crossed the invisible line of ‘mine and not yours’, my son ran after it, at which point the angry neighbor called my son a racial slur.  One of the men of our party reacted angrily and the escalating words prompted threats of the exchange of gun fire.

Then there was the man threatening to kill his wife in the middle of the street in front of my house one night, threatening to pursue her onto my porch where she hid behind me as I stood my ground with no weapon save a telephone to get him to back down.

Or the man in a divorce case who bore down on me in the hallway, just having lost his latest bid in court, his fist raised with threatening words on his lips as I slowly took off my glasses (so they wouldn’t be broken – they were pretty expensive for me back in those days) and simply waited my fate.  At the last minute, he dropped his fist and stormed away.

Then there were the young soldiers at the many checkpoints in Iraq.  The ones I remember stood before us, myself and a colleague and three Iraqi college professors seeking redress for the mistaken bombing of their university.  We were ankle-deep in mud.  It was cold.  We waited there for hours.  The boy-men soldiers were clearly uncomfortable treating me, the only one from the US in our party, so discourteously that they invited me in to their hut for warmth, but refused to allow anyone else to enter, so we all stood out in the cold, the only protest we had available to us for the refusal to hear these men.  And in the freezing hours of waiting, I heard about one young soldier’s pending divorce and the new baby he had never seen, having nothing to offer him save my caring ears.  And I heard their apologies – they had no choice but to hold us at gunpoint, you see.  They wouldn’t have shot us, at least so I think.  But to force the situation was to place them in harm’s way from their commanders.  So we simply waited, silent witness to the cold.  Eventually we gained entry and were heard and an agreement was reached.  Success.  Until a day later when the officer who had reached agreement with our friends reneged.  Apparently he could do by phone what he could not do face-to-face.  But that too was a violence.  And there were guns behind it.  Lots of guns.

What was the difference between the man who shot at his own family members and all the rest?  Time.  Time to better reflect.  So it was that the drunken gentleman had a wife who intervened, inserting herself between him and his desired shotgun.  And the man in the hallway, had he been armed, probably would have shot me and then thought about it.  But because he had the length of the hallway and only silence from me in which to think about what he was doing, he had the chance to reconsider his choices.  And the husband chasing his wife?  A gun in his hand would have eliminated the need to cross the street himself and stand face to face with us and reconsider.  And even the young soldiers faced no opposition.  All we offered in protest was our calm presence.  There were lots of folks killed at checkpoints just like that one and many of them meant no harm at all.  But those boy soldiers lacked the time to reflect on their actions and instead shot first.

What do guns take away that knives and fists and raised voices and other weapons do not?

Time.  Time to think.

And therein lies all the difference to the outcome in the world.

So if you want to know why I am in favor of controlling human access to weapons of such destruction, for me, it’s all about time.  And I am willing to give up quite a lot to buy the would-be shooters among us a little time to reconsider.  Because it might just make a difference.  I know it has for me.

Time to Fly

The geese are flying.  I do not see them lifting from the nearby river, but their distinctive – that call and response – the hail to arise, to fly, to form up and move on – impossible to mistake.

Funny, they’ve slept in, but not really.

We humans in this part of the world ‘sprang forward’ last night, somehow ‘saving’ time (as if time could be saved – silly us, we keep trying) and in the process, losing an hour (who came up with that ad campaign?  I wonder).

Whatever we humans call this hour of the day, the geese know what time it is.

It is time to fly.

In the Frame 2

I love pictures – the capture of a moment in time that somehow looks nothing like the movement of the moment into the next and the next, but still catches something – elusive.  When I see other folks’ pictures, I often try to guess at what’s going on, like people watching at the airport and trying to guess what they’re about.

So here’s one for you.

There’s a woman on her knees with three dogs around her.  She smiles, holding a piece of paper in one hand and leashes in the other.  It’s a beautiful day of sunshine.  In the background are stacks of long weather-worn wooden planks, a couple of plastic lawn chairs, a fence.  On the other side of the fence stands another woman with a folded flag draped over her left arm, peering into the frame.

Write or imagine your own story about the picture.  Who are the women?  What is the woman doing with the dogs?  Why is there a piece of paper in her hand?  What are the wooden planks for?  And what of the woman on the other side of the fence?  Why is she on the other side?  Why is she holding a flag?  Why isn’t the other woman acknowledging her?

What on earth is going on here?

[Your imagining]

So here’s the story of the picture – it’s pretty prosaic, really.  But when I look at it, backing away from what I know, I am struck by the positioning of the two women with the fence between them.

On a warm October Saturday, Rhet was at the Post Office, filling in for Glenna, as is their Saturday custom.  It’s getting toward the end of her Saturday shift at mid-day and Rhet has come out and taken the flag down for the day.  Still carrying it, she walked across the parking lot of the Post Office and then across the only partly-mown field beside it to stand at the fence that separates my back yard from the field, flag still cradled in her arm.  

We are having our annual Animal Blessing Service and Dot Terry sits on the ground with some of her dog buddies, reading from a piece of paper I had given her earlier – a scripture, a reflection, on the blessings bestowed by God upon all creation.

It is a beautiful day and we have done this eight times now, but this year is different – we had a parade through town, which set a light-hearted tone to an already celebratory event – folks move about and Dot sits and frolics with the dogs and all is well.

What’s outside the frame are the other folks calling out to Rhet to come and join us and Rhet saying she can’t yet – her shift isn’t over.  What’s outside the frame is Rhet coming a while later into the church parking lot after most of the folks had already headed home, with a dog in her truck beside her to be blessed – this dog one she’s caring for as part of her new business venture.

Dog blessed, shift over, Rhet heads home, but not before she got captured in the frame, even from the other side of the fence.

It was a good day – might have been perfect, but Dot reminded us that the dogs were pretty upset that they didn’t get communion.

Next year.

The Good News Clock

Friend Hank sent me this link today – it’s a clock – well, sort of.  I mean, there is a measure of time, but it’s

Doomsday Clock

not really measuring time, this internet ‘device’ – it’s measuring the annual accumulations of the world in numbers . . . people born . . . people dying . . . (both at least implicitly seen by the counting creators as bad news) . . . murders . . . fuel consumption rates . . . how we’re dying . . . what illnesses are piling up on the collective body human . . . extinction rates . . . how much we’re consuming . . . well, you get the picture.

What grabbed my eye, however, is the category Smile (it ain't all bad news).  I’m not sure what I expected, but beyond ‘# of 1st kisses’ (which I keep wondering how on earth they claim to measure), I find their categories pretty depressing: # of divorces . . . beer (and wine) consumption rates . . . cars purchased . . . Coca Cola’s drunk . . . and # of Google searches.

Really?

Even tongue-in-cheek, this is the best you can do for smilie-good news?

In the tongue-in-cheek mode (or not), how about # of FB friends made . . . or # of blades of grass growing without human help . . . or # of cat videos posted on YouTube (you know you watch them – and hey, if someone’s making a cute cat video, chances are they’re not up to mischief – a good thing, I’m thinking – and yes, on a scale of the good, I put cat videos ahead of drinking a Coke) . . . # of Top 10 lists posted . . . # of times people turned off their computers . . . # of good dreams (I’m guessing if they can measure first kisses, dreams wouldn’t be much of a stretch) . . .

Or better yet, if it’s a measure of genuine good news we seek, how about measuring and reporting on the number of new species found . . . trees planted . . . hungry fed . . . those who went to bed safe the night before . . . have adequate clothing . . . found shelter . . . received needed medical attention . . . went to school . . . have loving parents . . . were not murdered . . . lived to a ripe old age . . . heard a kind word . . . spoke a kind word . . . read a book . . . created something . . . preserved something worth saving . . . had an idea . . . served someone . . . loved . . . worshiped . . . praised . . . laughed . . . danced . . . enjoyed the sunshine . . . were brave . . . got their dream job . . . or just got a job . . .

It’s another day on planet earth and there are those among us who count and measure the passing time by what’s happening.  I wonder why so many of our professional counters measure to the doom, without also including the many bits of good news.

I’m no Pollyanna, but it seems to me that we’d be far better off as a species if we remembered not only the bad news, but also the good; and there is actually quite a lot of good to remember.

And that’s a blessing.

Heart Beats & Hand Grenades

Of late I feel my heart beating
it’s disconcerting, to say the least
one of the luxuries of a heartbeat
is unawareness – blythe indifference
lack of attention to it all as this
marvelously crafted body does what
a body is to do – without notice
except that now I notice and somehow
the noticing feels like an unexploded
hand grenade of ticking – or ticking
down – time – and I have to say –
I don’t like it much –
but who asked me?

I Was So Young When Nelson Mandela Was Dying

I was so young when Nelson
Mandela was dying – weren’t
we all?  Decade after decade
time passed and how strange
it must have been – to be man
and icon at once – how is that
skin inhabited?  Housed?
Defined?  Imprisoned?

Now Nelson Mandela is dying,
this time in earnest.

And a friend starts a FB group
of those of us who worked
and laughed and played and
fought together lo those many
years ago in ordinary time –
who can even remember the
80's?  I know I was there –
but they are truly
a blur in my memory now –
and he posts pictures – and I
look and am struck – as I always
am these days – by how very
achingly young we were –
we who knew so much that we
held the world carelessly in
our hands – living our blessed
lives in the far away from Africa
place that is West Virginia –
we laughed and worked and
played and fought as Nelson sat
and sat and sat – and who
could know then that freedom would
be his?  That leading the country
he begged to change would be his?
It never does to count too much on
things staying the same, for they
never do – a good thing, that –

and now it is a millenium later
and Nelson Mandela is dying
and I wonder if he was ever young
in that laughing, working, playing,
fighting kind of way that I was – so
unaware – I doubt it – it was a luxury
he was not accorded – that unawareness
and he, I think, was the better for it, the
one to be envied – ah, Desmond, what
will we do without him?

I was so, so young when Nelson
Mandela was dying.

In the Child is the Man

I study an old photograph of an ancestor long dead as an infant, in the days when boys and girls alike wore dresses while young, and ponder that I never knew this baby . . . that I am so much older now than he then . . . that his blue-eyed genes reside somewhere inside my brown-eyed self . . . and wonder whether the old man who may have known me means his child self knew me too?

Outside I long to capture the footprints I left last night alongside the later cat prints and earlier bird prints all alongside each other, as if we three walked side-by-side in the night snow.

Time layers itself upon time – back- and forward – until I come back to the child in the photograph, so happy on Mother’s lap, looking forward into a time that is already past, and I seek out the old man the child has become and gone and wonder if his own footprints rest somewhere in time, side by side, the baby and the man.

A Different Infinity

Driving yesterday, I listened to NPR to pass the miles.  A man spoke of a “different infinity”, where the space between becomes the measure of things.

Infinity presupposes some sort of measure, doesn’t it – this notion of a limitless sequential procession of the numberliness, the orderliness, of things.

I like the notion of a different infinity.  That’s what eternity is in my understanding – limitless, like infinity – but there the similarity ends.

But this side of that equation, I am stuck with infinity, only barely able to imagine eternity – that whole through-a-glass-dimly thing Paul describes so eloquently.

So the different infinity I inhabit just now is the infinity of moments . . .

Learning of my mother’s car accident on her way to visit me for a few days, I spend eons waiting for the phone to ring with the latest news – inhabiting the trough of time passing ever-so-slowly.

Frustrated with my inability to travel to her due to the crazy weather all round me (even as the sun shone above the skies I inhabit), time moves too slowly and too quickly all at once.

Determined, the next day I set out on a course that literally circumnavigates the weather pattern, circling ever closer to my mother in hospital, finally arriving into the arms of waiting family.

The excruciating minute by minute passing of the drive time concerned not with the view or journey, but only the destination in mind.

Rubbing Mom’s ice-cold feet with lotion.

Sitting at bedside, watching the monitors.

Listening to the beep . . . beep . . . beep . . . pronouncing life, but life in trouble . . . seconds stretch into centuries.

Sleeping on the cramped couch then the floor, the night creeps and flies.

And who knew how excruciatingly long the Three Stooges episodes are?  And exactly who is in charge of the television choices in the waiting rooms of the world?  In this one, quite small, there are actually two (competing) televisions – until I stepped out of the infinity-ness of this existence and turned one of the damned things off - who needs infomercials at 2 a.m.?  That’s the thing about infinity – whether it’s the same old one we (think we) know or a different infinity entirely – its just so . . . infinite. . . infinite in its tiredness . . . in its sameness . . . in its troughs . . . in its tick, tick, ticking off . . . one moment inexorably following another . . . until it doesn’t – turns out infinity isn’t infinite at all.

The Gift & Curse of Time

Yesterday Celia and I each ordered the same sandwich.

We were hopeful with anticipation.

Alas, disappointment is sometimes a sandwich.

And for me, at least, a wee bit of irritation – you can do better than this.

Today, amusement and pleasure anticipated that Celia and I share the memory of the same bad sandwich.  At some other meal, we will remember and we will laugh at how we both pushed the bad bread (how can bread be bad?  Trust me.  It can.) to the side and settled for mediocre innards, the one time in his waiting career the young man probably never asked how the meal was – fortuitous.

The gift of time is also its curse: so precious, we want more, as anticipated future so quickly moves to remembered past.  Knowing it will all end for each of us some day becomes its own disappointment, pain, anger, and loss.  And that’s the thing, isn’t it?  If time weren’t such a gift, we wouldn’t mind its loss so much.

May your times be filled with precious memories in the making, now and evermore.

Time Measured by Prayer

It used to be that time was measured by prayers.  So, writes Bee Wilson in her book Consider the Fork, reviewed in this month’s Smithsonian magazine, “‘. . . time was measured by prayer. . .’ describing how old-time recipes gave cooking periods in prayers (boil a walnut for two Miserere*). . .”

During my work days, I measure time by task: how long it takes me to do certain tasks is so routine that, if I still had a watch, I would set it by them.

But holiday time – that’s something different – and oh, so special.

There’s early-morning time, when I’m first up, alone in the quiet of a house not yet stirred, the time when I wander and prepare for the coming stampede of feet, the quiet before time.

Then there’s Rowen’s-up time, when my grandson, the next to awake, comes down for breakfast, where he and I sit quietly at the table and chat, each keeping company with the other, to our mutual satisfaction.

Next comes Daddy’s-up time, sometimes happening naturally, like the rising of the sun; sometimes prompted by Rowen’s get-up-Daddy prompting.  Somewhere in between, the coffee will have been turned on and breakfast supplies laid out (well, first breakfast, anyway.  Second breakfast, or brunch, comes later).

Depending on how many are here, the getting-up time can stretch almost to noon, with some sleeping in the living room moving into a vacated bed upstairs to lounge just a bit longer.

The quiet of the morning moves to a burst of activity and levity as the gathered come full awake.  Laughter and lounging go together in my family: we do both really well, especially when we can do them at the same time.

Then there’s stand-before-the-refrigerator time as each forages for lunch or mid-afternoon snack.  One hunger breeds another as we all process in a semi-line to find something to eat, proclaiming there’s nothing on hand that suits as we stand in front of a loaded frig and wonder where all the food went.

Late afternoon is for football and napping.

Evening - supper and coming alive again with laughter and games and more laughter and more games, some being drug into the fun others have organized; some hating games but loving their fellow gamesters enough to play along, a child’s voice moving from the edge to the middle and back out again whenever the next diversion catches the young eye.

Nighttime – back to quiet and talk winding down the day, remembering times past, yearning for the moment to last – just a bit longer.  Sleep.  Awake again and repeat until the final day when the detritus of travel home is thrown into cases and bags and flung into cars and SUVs that head back home from home, with me standing out back waving good-bye, running to the front to catch them again, just one more time, standing and smiling through the tears in the rearview mirror.

Ordinary time resumed, I walk back inside, carrying the missing of them . . . until the next time.

Nothing particularly wondrous or amazing happens whenever my family gathers, yet it is still, somehow, holy ground, a prayer, if you will, this time measured in moments and memories.





_______________
*Miserere: from the Latin for “have mercy on me, O God”.  The Free Dictionary  I do not know whether it was a short form prayer or a recitation of the entirety of Psalm 51 from which it is taken.

My Body Ageing

I can almost feel it on the cellular level – this body on loan to me ageing.

I stand at the sink and wash my hands, aware of their morning stiffness, with a prescience of time yet to come when one hand, of necessity, will cradle the other, frozen in place by the vagaries of time.

Where did my ancestors get the courage to get out of bed?

Grandma, walking and walking and walking some more, hoping against hope to walk the pain out; or maybe just needing to prove to herself that in spite of all, she still could – until she couldn’t.  That was the day she died – the day when she could no longer walk.

My people are a moving people.

We may move in place – marking our territory with our pacing.

Or we may travel far.

But we are a moving people.

My mother now travels with her mind in the books she reads and with her fingers with the many family and friends she ‘visits’ across the many lines, tangible and intangible, that now connect us.

It’s true: bodies in motion tend to stay in motion, while bodies at rest, well . . .

Time is a sneaky, creeping thing: there’s always plenty of it . . . until there isn’t.

My body ageing is warning me – don’t believe Sister Time’s lying ways.

Time Out

I am back in Virginia, back in the county where I live, back in the village where I work, back in the house I call home.  I had forgotten how lovely it is – not in a general way, but in the specific beholding-with-your-own-eyes-in-the-moment way . . . the mountains covered with trees . . . the forest canopy that shields most of the road home . . . the church grounds . . . the home I’ve decorated and adorned with the trinkets and colors and comfort that are uniquely me – I love them all.

Sundial at Culzean Castle, Scotland

But I also love the very rare – unique in my own life, actually – gift I was given – the ability to spend 7 weeks of my life in Scotland, doing whatever I wanted whenever I wanted, having to be nowhere at any particular time, having to answer to no one about what I would do or not do or when I would do or not do it.

It was, it is, the liberation of the disconnect.

It wouldn’t do for a lifetime, but for a wee while, it was . . . heaven – the essence of the practice of being made easy.

We don’t get time outs very often, if ever, we grown ups.

Being so precious, so rare, perhaps something spectacular should come out of them.

But that’s the thing about just being.  It isn’t about the spectacular.  I’m not sure what it is about, but it’s not about that.

I am back in Virginia.

And the lessons, if any there are, will come.

But for now, I have had my time out and it was glorious.

And that is
enough
more
than

Time

If time were a color
it would be white
for its ever-present
presence of all things
jammed
crammed
slammed
into this one moment

If time were a color
it would be black
for its ever-absent
absence of all things
emptied
poured out
sacrificed
given
and given over
out of this one moment

Time
into
and
out of

Do we travel time
or does it travel us?