Moon Landing Anniversary

The reminiscences about the July 1969 moon landing started a couple of weeks ago. It got me thinking about that summer and my experience of those events. I was exactly a month shy of my 15th birthday on the day of the moon landing. There's a picture of me from that summer that I remember. It's a polaroid taken by my aunt in the back yard of her house. It's one of a tiny handful of pictures of me that I actually liked at the time it was taken. I thought it made me look good. I still do, but my camera-shyness pervades the frame. She's looking for the picture and if it's found, I'll post it.

We took it for a specific purpose. I was visiting my cousin in the town of Winterset, Iowa, to which I introduced you in a previous post. There was a film crew in town that summer making a movie called "Cold Turkey." It didn't get released until 1971, but they shot it that summer. I was thinking about showing up at a casting call for extras. I can't remember why I decided not to do it, but one of the requirements was a photo.

I asked my mom what she recalled about watching the moon landing, because I remember being in Winterset watching the television in the living room of my cousin's home. Well, what I really remember is the television being on, all of us being in the living room, but with the kids less eagerly engaged than our elders thought we ought to be. I remember my mom being mad at us for not paying enough attention to the telecast of the momentous events. Of course, for the kids, it was another space mission. We had already been watching them take off for eight years.

She remembers it differently. She thought we had watched coverage of the Apollo 11 mission on TV in Winterset, but that we had left to drive home to Kansas City on the afternoon of July 20. She recalls getting home just in time to see the landing on TV.

I've wondered what the counterpart to the moon landing is for my nieces and nephew whose ages range between 18 and 25. Maybe it's the Internet, but I think I'm looking for an event that can be marked at a particular point in time. Maybe they know.

My recall of that summer is of specific incidents and moments in time. I don't really remember the order in which things happened. Most of the memories have something to do with watching the movie get made. Many of the small towns in Iowa have an event they call "Crazy Days." There is often a parade, an ice cream social and sidewalk sales by the downtown merchants. Winterset still does it, I think.

The 1969 Crazy Days in Winterset had a parade with a costume contest. My cousin and I entered with an homage to the film. "Cold Turkey" is about a town whose entire population quits smoking at the same time. Our costumes were a cigarette and a match. I was the match. My hair was redder them and I teased and sprayed it into a point to look like the flame on a match. Then I constructed a tube made from posterboard and painted it tan. I climbed inside the tube in my swimsuit and I was dressed. My cousin used a posterboard to create a cigarette with a brown filter closest to her head and a red edge at the bottom to make it look like it was burning. She had to cut an eyehole in the posterboard to see out. She cut handholds in the sides of her costume. I'm not sure how I kept mine in place.

We didn't practice walking in the costumes. When we arrived at the staging area for the parade, we put them on and got in line and the march itself turned out to be a test of endurance. The bottom edges of the posterboard tubes raked the backs of my ankles as we walked. For some reason we had decided we would have to walk barefooted. It was really hot that day and our feet were miserable on the pavement. The costumes forced us to take tiny, quick steps instead of regular strides. My cousin nearly broke her neck trotting to keep up and with limited visibility.

The parade route took us around the square of Winterset - a leisurely walk of maybe 10 minutes duration under ordinary circumstances. When it was all over, our feet were fried and I had a noticeable sunburn on my face and shoulders. The scars from the scrapes on the backs of my legs took more than a year afterward to go away. A week later we were notifed that we had won second prize in the costume contest. I remember reading it in the local newspaper. The prize was money - maybe $5 for each of us.

The town of Winterset is deeply woven into my memories of summer. I remember a lot about how I felt at the time of those visits. It's interesting to me that a town where I spent, at the most, a few weeks out of every year is so evocative of time and place - like a song or a scent. Those summers created a memory that holds together 40 or more years later. I have visited Winterset the last two summers for vacation and it has changed remarkably little in that time. I spend a lot of time on those visits walking and bicycling around the town. The familiarity I used to have with it comes back after a little while, but it still looks different at least partly because my cousin and sister aren't there with me.

Midsummer

I don't remember liking summer all that much in the past. Maybe I liked it when I was a little kid, but I have very few clear memories of it. I'm someone who has never had much tolerance for sun exposure and those fun outdoor activities involving the water involved serious sunburn for me. I grew up at a time when there was no such thing as sunscreen. When I was in my teens I remember summer as a time of feeling stressed about looking fat in a swimsuit and my mom fussing at me not to stay out in the sun too long.

But one happy memory of summer has to do with the time I spent in two small towns in Iowa called Winterset and Indianola. I had family living there including a cousin close to my age. My sister and I would spend weeks at a time in one or the other of those two towns every summer. We had the run of the town on bicycles. It was a fascinating change for me to go from the suburbs of a good size city - Kansas City, to a town of fewer than 5,000 residents.

I've gone back to Winterset for vacation the last three years. My present job tends to be stressful and omnipresent and being able to go away on vacation has become very important to me. The town hasn't changed too much in appearance since I spent my summers there. It has a few more houses and maybe a few more people and some businesses whose products and services didn't even exist when I was a kid, but really, it's about the same.

If you ever read The Bridges of Madison County, Winterset is the town where that story takes place. It's also the birthplace of John Wayne. The small victorian cottage where he was born has been restored and it's a national historic site. The town has some beautifully preserved/ restored victorian residential architecture, a nice swimming pool and a downtown square that is mostly occupied. There are still a couple of stores there that were in business when I was a kid. The city government and business community have been smart about promoting the town as a tourist spot for readers of the novel and John Wayne fans.

Walking or cycling around Winterset or being at my aunt and uncle's home in Indianola are some of the most evocative experiences of my adult life. When I'm there I remember with crystal clarity what I felt like the summer of my eighteenth birthday - just out of high school, waiting for life to start happening. I remember the music that played on the radio when my cousin and sister and I sat out on the deck late at night talking and watching cars go by on the highway. We waited every night for my cousin's boyfriend to ride his motorcycle out highway 92 past her house listening to Alice Cooper sing "School's Out" and Derek and the Dominoes playing "Layla." I was not a carefree child or adolescent, so I won't tell you that those summers were idyllic, but the memory of them stays with me.

I made my reservation yesterday for a week-long stay in Winterset later this summer. I'll post some pictures and write more about it when I get there.

Many Hats

I'm working on several different projects right now, most connected with the historic church building which is the home of my congregation. It's on the National Register of Historic Places and was finished in 1888. The architect who designed it only designed two public buildings that are still standing west of the Mississippi River, so it's a distinctive and special building.

Today we had a photo shoot for a guidebook to be distributed to visitors to the building. A crew of eight people with lights, scaffolding and a generator were in the building from 6:30 am to 6:30 pm taking pictures. They started yesterday and will continue shooting for another two days. The pictures are spectacular. As soon as I receive the disk, I'll post some here.

We also had a crew working on the brick facade of the building and we have another group rehearsing a play that opens the first weekend in June. All the time this has been going on, I've been working on a major grant application for more funds to restore the building and keep up with my job as a parish priest.

My niece graduated from high school this week and her graduation party is at my home this weekend. In addition to work "at work" there's a lot going on at home - putting plants in pots, sealing the deck and assembling some new outdoor furniture along with the usual homekeeping work of cleaning and cooking.

It's a busy and productive time, but I frequently have the feeling of venturing into territory where I don't really know what I'm doing with serious consequences for making a mistake. It reminds me of the feeling I get when I'm navigating an unfamiliar city and trying not to get lost. The real problem is not having good information or skill in a particular area and not knowing where to go to get it or time to really learn it. One head can only wear so many hats.

A Great Trip

The week after Easter I went to Canada. I belong to a Canadian interfaith group whose annual meeting was held this year in Stratford. It's a very picturesque city, easily walkable with nice things to look at including a beautiful river, swans and ducks and cool architecture. Unfortunately, I hadn't quite figured out my new camera while I was there, so I only got one picture.

The meeting featured authors Ronald Wright and Nino Ricci. Ron Wright is a Canadian who writes about the United States. Hearing Canadians' comments about the US was really interesting. A couple of highlights:

• Fundamentalist Christianity is not a political or social factor in Canada. They think it's really strange.


• The standard medical and insurance industry scare responses to discussion of a single-payer health care system, e.g. the horror of "socialized medicine" provokes bemusement and ridicule. The question commonly asked is why, after all of the other western industrialized nations have been reasonably successful with it can anyone in the US believe they're getting away with the weird scare tactics; and more importantly, why would anyone in the US put up with the current godawful health care mess we have here.


• And, they're really envious of Barak Obama. Their guy is George W. Bush with a better command of the English language.

After my third visit there, I continue to love our neighbor to the north. My impression is that its citizens have, in general, a stronger sense of and commitment to the common good than we do in the US. They also have, in general, a stronger orientation toward civility in social and business interactions. And, they have much better public transit. I flew into Toronto and took the train to Stratford - a very comfortable journey that got me to my destination on both segments of the round trip on time and without incident. In both the cities I visited, Stratford and Toronto, bus and streetcar service was frequent, comfortable and on-time.

After my meeting ended in Stratford on Saturday afternoon, I joined friends for a farewell dinner at an Indian restaurant there. It was the best Indian food I've ever tasted. Then they put me on the train for Toronto where I stayed for three days.

I visited three churches during my stay in Toronto: St. Mary Magdalene Anglican in the "little Italy" area of the city, Holy Trinity Anglican downtown next to Eaton Center and St. Andrews Preabyterian on King Street in the financial district. I got pictures of the latter two.

I also visited the Hockey Hall of Fame, which was great and the Textile Museum of Canada, a long-awaited destination and one of the most amazing museums I've ever seen. I walked all over downtown Toronto. The weather was great except for one day which featured 40 degree temperatures a driving rain and umbrella slaughtering wind-gusts.

Memorable meals at Raja in Stratford and Nota Bene in Toronto.

I have a cat whose name is Tennison. She is 12 years old, a tortoise-shell domestic shorthair. Tennison has none of the docility that a few Angora or Persian genes will add to your average house cat. She is nice to me and my husband most of the time, but she has no good will toward anyone else. When we have visitors, she will approach them looking friendly. When a guest, charmed by her beauty and elegant bearing holds a hand out for her to sniff, she does, then looks deeply offended, hisses dramatically and stalks out of the room. You should see her at the vet.

Tennison has had trouble keeping her teeth clean since she was a kitten. She never eats anything except Science Diet kibble, but according to the vet, her teeth looks like she's lived on a diet of beeswax and caramel between her annual visits. Having the vet clean her teeth is expensive - not to mention the lousy attitude she brings home when we have to leave her there all day. So I look for ways to keep them clean. I found these little fish shaped cat treats that are supposed to help, so I bought a package.

When it comes to food adulteration, Tennison has the nose of a 1950s vintage KGB agent. I can put half of a tiny, crushed tranquilizer pill in two tablespoons of her favorite canned cat food in preparation for getting her into the carrier to go to the vet. She will inhale an unadulterated serving of canned food, living as she usually does on dry kibble. But when the pill is in the bowl, she just knows. She walks toward it with a suspicious air, sniffs once, takes a tiny taste and walks away after giving me a really dirty look.

Knowing that, I put a couple of the teeth cleaner treats on her place mat. She ignored them, so I put them in the bowl with her food. She looked at me like I had filled the bowl with dill pickles. When I looked a few minutes after she had eaten, she had managed to eat a swath around the two teeth cleaner fish. The next day, I buried the little swimmers in a large bowl of kibble. When I checked, she had made it down the hatch. The next day, I put them on top of her food and she ate them first. I guess they taste good if you can get past the desire to appear to be a picky eater. As I listened to her crunching away, I harbored hopes of a brilliant feline smile at the next vet visit (not that they would see her smiling - but I can dream).

The following day, I put the food in the bowl and the fish treats on top. She ate the treats, then stepped back from her bowl with an expectant look and a polite meow. I told her we would have more treats tomorrow, and to eat the rest of her food. She stalked into a corner and began to yowl like the cat from hell - really loud and insistent. I ignored her, so she jumped on the dining room table - off limits to anything with more than two legs. I told her to get down - and she ignored me and kept on yowling. I picked her up - which one does not do to Tennison if one expects to live on with ten fingers. She started sqirming, hissing and yowling. I put her on the floor and she walked back to the food bowl and stood there with an expectant look.

During the last few years, a lot of us got in the habit of confusing treats with everyday life. We bought bigger houses than we could afford, bigger cars than the environment could afford and went shopping for entertainment. Now we're living with the rude awakening. It was interesting to see those same unrealistic expectations expressed by my favorite feline with equivalent emotional maturity to your average two-year-old human.

The great thing about Tennison is that she can be hissing and whapping at you one minute, then five minutes later she returns to the scene of the argument purring like crazy and head butting you to scratch her ears. I wish people were like that.

Yesterday I drove to Warrensburg, Missouri to record some on-air breaks with my friend, Jon Hart, who is the Program Director of radio station KTBG-FM - 90.9 The Bridge. It's the NPR affiliate at the University of Central Missouri. You can listen to it online at ktbg.fm. Jon and I worked together at the legendary KY-102, Kansas City's great album rock station, about 30 years ago. I've been on the air a handful of times in the last 20 years and it remains fairly instinctive. I see that mic and start talking, usually fairly coherently.

Jon and his crew at The Bridge are working hard to create a radio station where the music really means something. It reminds me of the "underground" FM stations of the late 1960's. When you turn on the radio you hear something interesting and frequently new every time. The Bridge features the major NPR news shows and some of the public radio syndicated entertainment shows like World Cafe, Blues Quest and Car Talk, but most of the time they play Alternative music, frequently introducing new artists into the playlist well before commercial radio.

Jon and I both are fortunate to be doing work that allows us to feel like we're creating something new every day. Both of our organizations are struggling to survive from one minute to the next, but their survival is worth the effort it takes to move mountains.

Jon is an intelligent and insightful guy. We finished our work in the studio and went to lunch. During the course of the day we had a chance to talk about what it was like 30 years ago to work at the coolest radio station in town. I can still remember the energy and sense of accomplishment we felt. We were all getting paid, and certainly the management had financial targets to meet, but it was about more than the money - for all of us.

At the end of lunch Jon told me he had a surprise. It turned out that two of our other KY-102 colleagues were meeting with him that afternoon and would be at the station when the two of us returned there - and so they were. I have to admit, it was weird the four of us there together all aware of that shared experience and all aware of being 30 years older. What was great about it is that we had all taken interesting and worthwhile journeys since that time. Remembering the old days was a thrill, but we're all happy with where we are now.

We took a picture of the four of us which I'm posting with it. From left to right: Stan Andrews, Bob Garrett, me, Jon Hart.

I had interesting conversations with two friends yesterday. During the course of the first one, my friend noted that people are more drawn to negative energy than positive energy. The way she put it was "we'd rather watch a train wreck than a sunset." Even though I dislike the fact that this is true, I believe it is. Moreover, nine times out of ten, if you gave me the choice of hanging out with someone who goes to the effort of trying to convince you and (him/herself) that he/she prefers sunsets to train wrecks (and there are a few out there), I'll take the train wreck afficionado every time.

So, people create drama - sometimes out of thin air, sometimes out of whatever is lying around. Remember the story of Henny Penny - the chick who ran around telling all the other animals "the sky is falling."

My conversation with the other friend started with the observation that everyone seems really exhausted lately. Nobody has much energy to do anything. The worry about money, security, the future - all of that stuff during the last six months or so has drained everyone of motivation to step outside the regular daily orbit of essential activities.

You could describe someone in my profession as being charged with the task of helping people get beyond that daily grind and consider what it means and where it is going over the long haul. Some people call this spiritual life and that's as good a name for it as any. For many of the aforementioned sunset fanciers it's about a place to feel safe and comfortable, where they can imagine that nothing bad is every going to happen to them or anyone else. For the train wreck fans, it's more complicated. Some of them want to dig deep and aren't sure how. Others are more inclined to blow off the notion that there's anything more to existence than putting one foot in front of the other. Others are spiritual, but not religious - and that is, imho largely the fault of religious institutions that have consistently squandered opportunities. They have done that by presuming to make sense of all the slings and arrows life offers rather than offering people a framework for doing tha themselves. They have given people a fish rather than teaching them to fish.

verbalize it . . .

I've been thinking about this business of turning nouns into verbs. Have you noticed it? Do you do it? Do you think it's a good idea.

I don't care for it, but it interests me that one word at a time seems to be the one chosen for this grammatical metamorphosis. The word of the moment is transition which has evolved (and I use that word loosely) into transitioning.

As a verb it can refer to something or someone that is undergoing change. I recall a parent discussing her 3-year-old child who invariably became cranky when it was time to leave pre-school. She said "Lauren loves pre-school and she's happy to be home but she has trouble transitioning." Maybe she said it that way because she didn't want her kid to hear her say "Lauren is an infernal little demon in the car on the way home."

Yesterday on an NPR news item, an earnest woman used the word transitioning in the same sentence three times: twice as a verb, once as a noun. Frequently now when someone leaves a job (or loses a job more likely) he or she is described as transitioning rather than being out of work.

I first noticed this phenomenon in the 1970's. That decade's memorable noun to verb transformation was parent to parenting. When I was a kid mothers and fathers raised their children - or if they were really stodgy, they reared them. About the time I was graduating from high school and slithering out of the parental clutches, they were all set to begin parenting. That may have been a bullet I dodged.

In the 1980's it was impact which frequently looks the same whether it be noun or verb. (Now do you see why learning English makes people crazy?) Once in a while someone will say impacting.

I don't remember a specific noun to verb metamorphosis for the 1990s. What I remember from those years is the gratuitous repetition of is before that in a sentence. "The trouble is is that I don't like brussels sprouts." My theory is that people heard Bill Clinton utter that immortal question (maybe a slight paraphrase) "It depends on what the meaning of is is," and we were off and running.

Thirty-five years ago, a group of linguists set out to measure the speed at which a new element of language was adopted generally within a population. It was a "rough and ready" field experiment. A group of grad students set out to introduce the expression "in a pushcart" into colloquial English. The phrase didn't mean anything until they decided to use it as a slang term meaning the same thing as the expression "having one's ass in a sling." Three or four of these students began introducing it subtly in casual conversation without any explanation. Four days, later, one of them was standing in line at the supermarket and heard the checker use it in conversation with a customer as she was punching prices into the cash register. That's how quickly a weird and meaningless variation can creep into the language.

I've been thinking a lot lately about envy. I've likely been motivated by a couple of personal life incidents that were motivated by it, but were ascribed to other motivations.

People confuse the words envy and jealousy. For me, jealousy involves a relationship with another person that one fears is being threatened or encroached upon by someone else. It can be a romantic relationship, a professional partnership or a familial bond among other things.

Envy is something different - it's wanting something someone else has: a possession, an advantage, a personal characteristic or a talent or ability. I work hard at redirecting the feeling of envy when I experience it because it's a self-destructive waste of time.

Recently, I've experienced it myself and been in the path of the fallout when someone close to me experienced it. In both instances, the characteristic that was envied involved an innate gift or talent that was turned into an advantage by diligence and hard work.

In both cases, the enviers (both of them well into adulthood) threw screaming fits when they found themselves feeling envious. They blamed their negative feelings on the people they envy and, in one case, dragged a bunch of other people into the fray.

Envy can lead us all to an appreciation of our own abilities and advantages and the goodness of our lives. In some cases, it can also be a motivator that gets us off our behinds and sets us to work making the most of what we have. What it shouldn't be is a pit of misery to wallow in.

Last refuge of . . .

I recall being in a discussion group about ancient faith communities who had committed, among other good works, to taking in persons who had suffered emotional damage of one sort or another. The idea was that these communities would welcome the sufferer and provide a quiet, safe and nurturing environment in which he/she could heal from emotional pain.

The expectation was that the time of healing would be finite. The sufferer would be restored to emotional health and either join the committee as one who was capable and willing to nurture others - with a sense of empathy. Or, he/she would leave the community and return to the world, restored to emotional health and capable of functioning productively. The community didn't particular care which outcome was realized - only that the person was healed, thus making space available for others.

It occurs to me that our contemporary faith communities understand the part about creating healing space for those who have been harmed in one way or another, but lack the expectation that they will eventually be healed. The problem lies in both sides of the relationship. The communities are only to happy to nurture ad infinitum the lost lamb. And, the lamb is only too happy to remain lost, demanding endless spiritual care, always too fragile to take the role of healer.

Someone I'm close to has characterized the church as the last refuge of screw-ups. I don't consider myself at liberty to be quite so harsh, but I understand what he's talking about and I don't necessarily disagree.

In the healing stories in the gospels, the ones who are healed always get well. Jesus and his followers expect it to happen and it does. In the baptismal covenant we promise to respect the dignity of all persons - but doesn't that mean holding them accountable for realizing the level of emotional health of which they're truly capable?