PeaceBang

Remembering Tim

Writing helps me make meaning, so I’m going to write about Tim. I’m going to be honest, because Tim was always honest and because he loved the blogging community and because he was always honest on his blog. Also, there’s this: he would love the attention. I know that. If I could call him right now I would say, “So listen, I’m going to try to make you a little bit legendary, okay?” And he would laugh, I think, and say, “Oh Vicki, I can’t WAIT.” I can just hear him saying it.

We met at a Massachusetts Historical Society conference on the New England Transcendentalists in 1994 or 1995. He was a minister in Oregon and I was a seminarian at Harvard Divinity School. I’ll just say it: we had instant chemistry but I assumed he was gay. Because of that, I didn’t try to be cute or appealing, I was just 100% myself. We palled around for a few days and then on the last day of the conference we walked across the Boston Common together where he made a sweet and ardent romantic declaration. I was stunned and dismayed. My new, fun gay friend was a STRAIGHT BOY!

For various reasons I won’t go into here, I bawled him out. He seemed to be both chagrined and charmed by this, and because he was charmed I was intrigued. We exchanged e-mail addresses and kept in touch, which pretty much amounted to heavy intellectual discussions about Unitarian Universalism (history, tradition, theology, etc.) and me bawling him out some more. That period of time established the dynamic for the rest of our relationship: Tim is the only man I have ever known who could hear my unadulterated opinion at all times and remain totally unperturbed by it. He amazed me. No matter how much invective I ever hurled at him (not always about him), he sifted through the worthy and weak bits of my critiques and responded thoughtfully and constructively.

I adored him for that. He knew that I adored him even though I so often played hard to get. He loved women. He was crazy about women. He was stupid-crazy about women. He even adored women at our most petulant. I gave him plenty of petulance and he responded always with smiling indulgence and love. He spoiled me. He was truly a safe harbor for my stormy temperament. Every now and then we would switch roles and he would be the bratty one — negative, angry, imperious. And then it was my turn to listen, to stay close, to embrace him as he was. This brought us very close.

We never became a romantic item, in case you’re wondering. We talked about it a few times. He would propose a romance and I would say “No, that’s insane.” Once, over ten years ago, I proposed a romance and he said, “No, that’s insane.” He LOVED being the one holding that card. I let him have it. I am happy that he still had it when he died. You can have that card, you big galoot.

I was his Jewish mother when it came to dating. “You have STAR WARS pillowcases, Tim,” I said after visiting him in his Carlisle parsonage. “You are SO not going to get lucky with Star Wars pillowcases.” Tim replied, reasonably, that he had bought the pillowcases on sale for $1.00. “I’m just saying that you think you saved money on these, but they’ll cost you Big Time in the long run.” We fell asleep talking sometimes and I would wind up curled up with Obi-Wan Kenobi after all.

Like many ministers, Tim moved a lot and I was always after him to unpack all his boxes, make himself a real home. He never did. Well, he did sort of. He had the most terrible soap dispensers in his bathroom. They were so terrible that I can’t even describe them. They were like something you would find in a flea market in deepest Appalachia — figurines of a tacky, troll-like man and woman. I brought them into the kitchen one afternoon. “WHAT ARE YOU THINKING!!!?? THESE ARE SO HIDEOUS!!” He laughed. “I like them.”
I put them back. “You will die alone,” I intoned. He laughed and said we’d have to go shopping for household furnishings lest he remain a life-long bachelor. “Yea, let’s pick up some more sexy ‘Star Wars’ pillowcases. I think you need a Luke Skywalker one.”

He was aware of his addiction to purchasing books. He has many thousands of books — I mean THOUSANDS. I don’t know what his family will do with them. Tim’s fantasy was always to live on a sail boat. His intention was to rent a studio apartment to store his books in and to keep a futon in for a little pied-a-terre for those times he would set anchor. A studio apartment for his books.

He was a little bit eccentric. I like that in a person.

For all our kidding around and bemoaning our Weird Single People behaviors and predicaments, we were dead serious about ministry and spent much of our friendship consulting about church life. Tim felt very strongly that All Ministry is Local (I can hear him cheering when I say that). He worked with great sincerity and diligence for every congregation he served. He deeply admired good ministers and was always looking for a way to work “smarter” and “better.” He always had big ideas and many plans, high hopes and high aspirations for himself and his congregations. He was a Romantic in many ways, and sometimes I gave him a good crack upside the head when I thought he was missing the point in a church conflict or being a numbskull in general. I was very tactful during these conversations. I would say things like, “Tim, you are TOTALLY BLIND to what a jackass you’re being about this. Listen. To. Me.” We’d make plans to visit and we’d talk for hours and hours about church, and go for ice cream or nice dinners. Tim always paid.

We went to Portsmouth, New Hampshire one day. He was my “GA Boyfriend” every year we attended together (an arrangement that, for us, involved meeting for coffee between events and having him take me out to dinner a lot — do you sense a theme here?). In search of good ice cream another time, we visited a dairy farm near Concord, MA, where we submitted names for the new calf (I think we suggested “Emoo-son” — no, that’s not true, but we should have). We went to see Tim’s favorite musical, “Into the Woods” when I first moved back to Massachusetts. I took him shopping for clothes. He waited for me whenever I got sucked into the vortex of a shoe store. He was eternally patient with me. We had lunch or breakfast at diners and I would give him hell for flirting with young waitresses (“Stop getting hysterical, I’m just being friendly,” he would say). He spoke admiringly of some of the Old Boy ideals in ministry and I would shoot them down like Annie Oakley picking off clay pigeons. He would laugh and say he got tired trying to straddle the generation between the Old Boys and the New Kids.

No matter how much like a fat frump I ever felt like, Tim always praised my beauty and attractiveness. The last time he did so did not go over so well, however. It was at about 4 AM on Nantucket immediately after I had emptied a jar of his pee. This is not a funny story but it’s an important one. Here is a man who, after a bout of agonizing pain, will stop his friend functioning as night nurse to tell her she looks beautiful, “with no make-up, with your hair unfettered.” Here is a guy who uses words like “unfettered” at 4:00 in the morning under heavy doses of morphine. I’m so sorry that I didn’t thank him, but said, “Tim, shut up and go to sleep now.” I wish I could hit the “rewind” button there. I would have said, “Go to sleep, I love you but don’t make me kill you now.”

We did not say anything even close to “goodbye” when we parted in Nantucket. He was eternally optimistic and I went right there with him. If he was paddling down De Nile River, I was his willing passenger. I truly thought he had some years left.

He had an amazing store of knowledge in his head that I grieve we’ll never get to hear, or read. I am so grateful to have a copy of his Ph.D dissertation on the Wares (“The Wares: Three Generations of American Unitarians”), within which he inscribed, “Read, be inspired, then go and do well.” Well, I will, but I had always planned to read the damned thing and discuss it with you, Tim!

Tim has an essay on Unitarian and Universalist history in Redeeming Time: Endowing Your Church With the Power of Covenant by Walter P. Herz. It’s good; you should read it. He also wrote a super, super article on Emerson’s Divinity School “Address” that you should also read. It’s “‘Their Own Thoughts In Motley…’: Emerson’s Divinity School Address and Henry Ware, Jr.’s Hints On Extemporaneous Preaching.” Journal of Unitarian Universalist History 24 (1997). Worth finding and getting. He wrote it soon after we met and I remember flushing with reflected glory when I read it. I know this guy!

My favorite memory of Tim would probably be the occasion of my Installation as Minister of First Parish in Norwell. It had been an absolutely beautiful day, a perfect day — a wonderful worship service in the morning, the Installation at 4pm, and a dinner afterwards with nearest and dearest colleagues. Tim came from Nantucket and stayed with me that night. He knew I was far too wired to sleep and valiantly stayed up with me talking all night, each of us taking turns falling asleep for short naps before waking up to talk some more. I watched the sun come up while Tim gently snored next to me on top of the covers, wearing a T-shirt and jammie bottoms and looking comfortable as a clam.

I know he believed in heaven (afer a fashion) and eternal life. He believed in God and had faith in God’s love and righteousness. I know that he is in heaven and that he is in the arms of the loving Creator who was his origin and who shall be his eternity.

And he is with The Adorable Parker, his beloved Boston Terrier who made us laugh so hard once by laying a series of truly fatal farts in the car that we had to pull over and get out to catch our breath. Tim, you know I had to include that.

Summer, 2008. Portland, ME.

The Rev. Dr. Timothy W. Jensen

I have just learned that my dear friend, Tim Jensen (who commented here frequently as The Eclectic Cleric) died yesterday morning. Tim had been battling cancer for the past 18 months.

When we were last together in June, we got into about ten one-sided arguments (me crabbing at Tim, Tim good-naturedly tolerating my bitchiness) during a trip to Tim’s beloved Nantucket. I knew he was very sick but he was so hopeful. He moved back to the West Coast immediately following our jaunt to Nantucket to be close to family and passed away peacefully yesterday morning (the hour of worship, how appropriate) after a very rapid decline.

You can read Tim’s blog here.

His last act of friendship to me was to send Max three wonderful chewy toys in the mail.

Tim, I love you, I will miss you, God bless you.

Moon

It is one of my first memories.
My parents called me into their bedroom to watch the little black-and-white TV that was in there. I was 3 1/2 years old.
“Watch this, Vicki,” one of them said. “This is a very important moment in history. That man is walking on the moon.”

It was Neil Armstrong.
I remember being fidgety. I didn’t understand, I didn’t see any moon, I wanted to go play. I pretended to give all of my attention to the TV set. My parents were obviously extremely moved; I think my father was in tears.

I am definitely going to read Buzz Aldrin’s book, Magnificent Desolation: The Long Journey Home From the Moon, about the landing. I just read an excerpt from it in the The Week magazine and it’s really riveting. There must be at least a few good sermons in this anniversary. I hope I can come up with one really good one. I am SO not a science person, which I feel is a huge detriment to my ministerial skill set. I keep trying, though. I read things that are written for the lay person, and I am impressed by them and appreciate them, but when it comes to translating them into something that preaches I am left dumb.

The lunar landing, though. Even I should be able to find something in that, eh?

Oh, apparently this was all faked. So say about a bajillion blogs out there.

Dad

My father died twenty-six years ago, and he is a distant memory by now. What I mean by that is that I have thoroughly incorporated his being into my own in some ineffable and permanent way. It’s just plain truth that I was shattered by his death. I have never “gotten over it.” The loss changed the course of my life in what I believe are positive ways, and life goes on.

Twenty-six years is a lot of birthdays, anniversaries of his death and Father’s Days without him. Usually, I’m fine.
This year, I’m extremely depressed and missing him painfully.

And there’s nothing I can do but cancel my plans for the afternoon (I’ve had a terrible few days and don’t have the energy to fake a social appearance with theatre buddies, or to drive 45 minutes and see a show), take a nap, go get Maxfield from my friend’s house, bring him home and feel sad.

Right now I just feel like I would literally give an arm to pick up the phone and hear my dad’s voice, have a conversation with him and meet him somewhere for a hug. Just to smell his coat lapels. To see his hands and feet. To know his face so well, still, that I wouldn’t even need to look closely at it. To walk on the beach with him and see his thinning hair get ruffled in the wind and to talk about all the things we used to talk about — mainly, about what kind of person I was going to be, what he saw in me and for me. He would have so much to say by now. We would just fall into step beside each other as we always did, and he would tell me how his perspective had changed as one of the ancestors. He would make everything clear for me.

I would say, “Dad, can you believe that I’m now DATING men your age? And that I’m just seven years younger than you were when you died?” And he would look at me with those coffee bean brown eyes and say in that wonderfully wry, deep radio announcer’s voice, “Ah, bullshit. You’re still my baby.”

Road Trip For Friendship

Later this week I will depart for points south — specifically, Philadelphia and Washington, DC. This trip is all about soaking up the love of friends and reunionizing (so much better than “unionizing!”).

It JUST SO HAPPENS that on the day I was to start my drive to Philadelphia, friends I haven’t seen in about 25 years will be getting together for a reunion of “Little Mary Sunshine,” a show I did in the fall of 1983. Or was it 1984? I actually don’t remember. It was immediately after I played Hodel in “Fiddle On the Roof” (another phenomenal experience with an unforgettably close cast) and very soon after my father died. It was NOT a good time, but these lovely people — all of whom were much older than I — made it bearable. I have always had an especially warm place for them in my heart. Two married couples came out of that show, and although one couple has since divorced, they are still friends and will be there on Friday night. The other couple have a high school-age son who is starring in “The Pirates of Penzance,” hence the reason for the reunion. Most everyone lives in CT, and when I got my invite (thanks to FaceBook) I thought, “Holy Cow, is this timing or WHAT?” I’ll be able to make it and have plenty of time to get to Philadelphia for a Saturday night party to celebrate a former congregation’s 50th anniversary.

What do you call that? Serendipity? Good luck? Fortune? Fate? Coinkydink?
I call it Thanks, God! This road trip was planned for the express purpose of celebrating my wonderful friendships with inspiring people, and this unexpected gathering of people I haven’t seen in decades is just icing on a big ole cake.

If you haven’t seen “Little Mary Sunshine,” it’s the most insipid fun you can have — a brilliant spoof on the old Nelson Eddy- Jeannette McDonald romances. This is what I looked like as “Nancy Twinkle,” the sassy, naughty-with-the-boys maid. I was all of 17 years old.

Hurricanes Happen

[I am preparing my sermon for tomorrow morning, "Oh What a Piece of Work: Outrageous Stories From 12 Years In Parish Ministry" -- my last service before a 5-month sabbatical. I may or may not tell this story, but I thought you might enjoy it. - PB]

We weren’t a real outdoorsy family. Our idea of sports was backgammon, and “camping” meant no television in the hotel room.

So it was with some trepidation that I agreed to go on the annual camping trip with my new congregation. I was so excited to be with them, you see. My optimism trumped common sense and experience.

The first evening at the campground went very nicely with me faking outdoorsy proficiency and wincing every time my campsite hostess pumped her little Coleman stove. “I’m absolutely sure that won’t blow up!” I told myself, and then, as her efforts grew more vigorous, “We’ll probably still be alive by tomorrow morning!” Rain fell steadily upon our tarp and we ate our meal huddled under waterproof ponchos.

Some will recall that a surprise hurricane passed through western Maryland on Labor Day weekend of 1999, but for most, the heavy winds and torrential downpours were merely an inconvenience. For me, they were a terrifying Bronx cheer from the elements; a kick in the metaphysical pants for trying to pass as a Nature Girl with my new congregation. In the howling dark night, I waited like Elijah in my tent for some kind of god to make itself known to me; some still, small voice to direct me off the ground, to my car and straightaway to the nearest motel.

Peer pressure and the need to for approval are powerful things. The need for approval kept me waiting in that tent for far too long, but by midnight there were several inches of water– and rising– to soak me out of my terrified paralysis. When it finally occurred to me to ditch my sagging tent and run for my car, the whole works came down on my head and I wound up in a flailing death match with a soaking mass of canvass.

Of course it’s funny now. But during the first moments wrestling with my tent, I actually thought I might suffocate or drown, or just die of stupidity and embarrassment. After an attempt to escape through what turned out to be the tent window (who knew tents had windows?) , I found the correct doorway zipper and slithered out onto the muddy ground like some kind of slimy newborn reptile, yelling and yelling for help into the black night. In the midst of this calamity and a tempest that filled my mouth with water every time I hollered, I finally heard a sleepy reply: “Whaaat!?”
Carol, my campsite mate, had slept through it all.
What’s more, her dachshund Hoover was also sound asleep, warm and safe in the tent.

Carol’s equilibrium affected an epiphany for me: no reason to take this storm personally, after all. Hurricanes happens. And what kind of help was I yelling for, exactly? I realized I would likely survive to tell the tale, believing the psalmist’s promise that weeping may endureth for a night, but coffee and dry clothes cometh in the morning. I groped my way to my car, unlocked it and slept in the front seat, awakened in the morning by the alarmed voices of parishioners who found my deflated tent but not their new minister in it.

Every year since then, I reconsider camping, and every year, I say “maybe next year.” And while I listen with an encouraging smile and a believing heart to friends and parishioners’ tales of joy by the campfire, I am content to meet them by daylight and to return home by dark with renewed appreciation for bed and roof. There are some ways we can all be together, and some ways it’s just not smart to try. With every tent that falls on my head at midnight, I am that much the wiser.

Ode: Intimations of Immortality

I am using some of Wordsworth’s poem, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” as the basis for my prayer on Sunday.

Reading it again brought me back to my English major years when I first encountered it in a class on the Romantics. It had an enormous impact on me, as it has had an enormous impact on millions of others who have read it, and I treasured many of its phrases and committed them to memory. I was not a religious young adult in any traditional sense of the word but this was a poem that articulated much of my personal theology at the time.

I hope you’ll grant yourself the joy of reading it in its entirety here.

When someone later in my educational process dismissed Wordsworth as sentimental and gooey, I delivered a passionate defense of his work. My first pilgrimage, in fact, was taken after I finished with my semester of student teaching and unable to find a teaching job mid-year, I took a job as a nanny and earned enough money to pay for a trip to England, where I visited Grasmere and Dove Cottage. I sat on Wordsworth’s own lawn and read his poetry. For all the years that I taught high school English, I kept this image of him on my wall:

I would like this to be read at my funeral someday:

I thought of Thee, my partner and my guide,
As being past away.–Vain sympathies!
For, backward, Duddon! as I cast my eyes,
I see what was, and is, and will abide;
Still glides the Stream, and shall for ever glide;
The Form remains, the Function never dies;
While we, the brave, the mighty, and the wise,
We Men, who in our morn of youth defied
The elements, must vanish;–be it so!
Enough, if something from our hands have power
To live, and act, and serve the future hour;
And if, as toward the silent tomb we go,
Through love, through hope, and faith’s transcendent dower,
We feel that we are greater than we know.

“The River Duddon: A Conclusion”
Wm. Wordsworth

Most Upsetting Comment Ever, And How You Can Help Redeem It

I’ve been blogging for three years now, or is it four?

I’ve moderated and responded to hundreds of comments — maybe even a thousand. The vast majority of them have been delightful to read, and the conversation here energizing and interesting.
I’ve gotten into squabbles, been frustrated or irritated, and had my share of good rows, certainly.

But no comment has yet sickened, upset and depressed me as this one has. It appeared the other day in response to my suggestion that Ashley Todd be locked in a cell with a group of “tall, black men” (the bogeyman she invoked as her attacker when she had inflicted the wounds herself). I said, very clearly, that I respected Todd’s inherent worth and dignity enough to assume that she would learn something from the ensuing conversation.

The commenter wrote,

I suppose your idea of a fitting punishment is that those 20 tall black men would do violence to a lone woman. Probably sexual violence. And this seems likely.

A very disturbing suggestion from someone employed in ministry.

When I first read this comment I immediately thought, “Oh, some random racist troll chiming in, don’t bother responding.”

But then I saw that this hateful accusation and virulently racist remark had been contributed by someone calling herself “Dalai Grandma” — an active UU and long-time student of Buddhism. And my mouth fell open in shock and I felt physically ill.

Because, of course, what the “Dalai Grandma” wrote was a perfect, textbook example of projection and literal demonization. When I invoked “group of black men meeting with one white woman,” her imagination immediately led her to scenes of rape. Even though I made clear that Ashley Todd should meet with a group of men who had NOT been taken into custody but very likely COULD have been if her story had been more credible, Dalai Grandma was blind to that. She immediately translated “black men” into “dangerous criminals who want to rape white women.” Because in her mind, of course, that’s what black men do when they’re angry — they don’t talk, they attack and rape. “And this seems likely,” she confidently states.

This from someone who has studied Buddhism for years. I find it just staggering, and I have been unutterably depressed since I read it. Masssive disillusionment, I guess. Such a gross insult to all black men that it makes me heartsick. I had seen them in my mind’s eye, filing one by one into the cell with Ms. Todd, taking their seats and sitting forward while they talked urgently and passionately about the damage and harm she could have caused, about their own life experiences as black men in Pittsburgh, and about her responsibility to involve herself in some good works with the African-American community to attempt some kind of reconciliation with their people. I saw them in fleece pull-overs, jeans, sneakers, or sweaters, khakis and boots, maybe some coming from work in a suit and tie — I saw them as witnesses and truth-tellers. She saw them as rapists.

When I taught at Proviso East High School in Maywood, Illinois, I had a great conversation with some of my male students one afternoon. I had been driving to school that morning and had seen them hanging out on the corner together, slouching around, “cutting their eyes” and looking generally thuggish. I wanted to know what was up with that. I knew that these guys were not, in fact, gang-bangers — that they were athletes and good students and responsible kids who wanted to avoid winding up a statistic (dead or imprisoned).

The boys — I remember that one of them was Kamal, and one was DeShawn — I don’t remember the others — explained to me that they had to look tough on the streets for the benefit of other, truly tough kids and also for white people.
The latter option was more for fun — they knew that white people feared them on principle because they were young, black and male and standing on the corner in a group — so they acted the part.

We talked about the “White Lady Purse Grab” — the move they reported was made by literally every white woman they ever walked behind either singly or together. I got up and did it for them with my own purse and we all howled with laughter. The girls chimed in about what it felt like to be trailed all over every store they ever entered by nervous white managers who assumed they were there on a shoplifting expedition. We also talked about the “White Man Car Lock” — a move that Kamal performed with great gusto, pantomiming the wide-eyed fear and slapping of car door locks made whenever a hapless white person accidentally found him or herself at a stop sign or red light in Maywood, obviously having accidentally wandered over from nearby Oak Park or Forest Park.

“Yea, but I’ve done that,” I said to them. “Because you guys, come on. Some neighborhoods really are bad and dangerous and the cops have even escorted me home from some of them when I got lost late at night.”
“That’s true,” said my students. “But Ms. V., how would you feel if you SAW people slamming down their locks the second they see you? It just makes you WANT to scare them!”
“Well, don’t!” I said. “You know what you should do? You should imitate them and mock their fear and laugh and walk away. Don’t play into their low expectations of you!”

So we’d go on like this, and I learned so much from them. I will never forget them and their humor, resiliency, generosity of spirit and gift for openness and authenticity.

And then I think of the last time I gave a talk in a prison about peace-making in the system, using the ideas of Bo Lozoff (author of We’re All Doing Time and founder of the Prison Ashram Project, www.humankindnessfoundation.org). I think I pretty much bombed, but the 100+ African-American Men’s Caucus who had invited me, were kind to me, if obviously frustrated by my lack of ability to do anything concrete for them. I was definitely nervous being left alone in an auditorium with over 100 prisoners without any guards around, but that was more because I didn’t know what to do if my program tanked so badly that the men totally lost interest. What if I had scheduled too long a session? Who would help me supervise or facilitate some other kind of program?

So I don’t know. I’m not so naive as to think here aren’t overtly racist, irrational and inflammatory Unitarians out there, but it still depresses me. DalaiGrandma doesn’t think she was being racist or that she owes me an apology for accusing me of wishing violence and sexual assault on Ashley Todd. She claims, of course, that she is, in fact, the victim of my anger. Which is an avoidance technique with which anyone in social justice work is well-acquainted. “If you challenge me or call me to account for my statements, you’re victimizing me, because this all about ME.” Not a very original response.

DalaiGrandma, I hope you read this tidbit from the University of Michigan’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Awareness Center:

Myth: Black men target White women to sexually assault.

Fact: 93% of all sexual assaults are intra-racial. This means that White men are the primary perpetrators of sexualized violence against White women, and likewise African-American women and women of color are most commonly assaulted by African-American men and men of color. Of the 7% of sexual assaults that are interracial, 3.4% involve the assault of a Black woman by a White man, while 3.3% involve the assault of a White woman by a Black man (Menachem Amir, criminologist, 1991).

The myth of Black men targeting White women to sexually assault is based on a racist belief system. The myth of the Black rapist was created during Reconstruction to justify the lynching of Black men. Today, lynching is much less common, yet the myth of the Black rapist still permeates our culture. Read more about systems of oppression and the myth of the black rapist here.

And to directly address DalaiGrandma’s defense that sexual assault is common in prisons, yes it is: but it is overwhelmingly man-on-man violence and rape.

I will let Cornel West have the last word, from his book Race Matters,

Americans are obsessed with sex and fearful of black sexuality. … the fear is rooted in visceral feelings about black bodies and fueled by sexual myths of black women and men. … White fear of black sexuality is a basic ingredient of white racism. And for whites to admit this deep fear even as they try to instill and sustain fear in blacks is to acknowledge a weakness — a weakness that goes down to the bone. Social scientists have long acknowledged that interracial sex and marriage is the most perceived source of white fear in black people — just as the repeated castration of lynched black men cries out for serious psychocultural explanation. ”

Today I called the NAACP in Pittsburgh and asked how I could become a member. An individual membership is $30 ($15 for youth) and there are chapters or units all over the country. You can find one near you here. If you want to show solidarity with the Pittsburgh community, write and request a membership form from the Pittsburgh NAACP at 2203 Wylie Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15219, Att: Gwendolyn Ware.

You can also download membership forms online in PDF file, and write Unit 2285 if you’d like your membership to be with the Pittsburgh chapter (the NAACP is a national organization but each chapter fundraises separately).

The NAACP celebrates their centennial next year in New York, and they are in the midst of a big membership drive right now. Let’s make some kind of silk purse out of this sow’s ear. I hope you’ll join.

Newman’s Own

I just learned that Paul Newman died yesterday.
My feelings for him have always been mixed up with my feelings for my Uncle Marvin — they were the same age, both total studs, and even remind me of each other physically.

Newman was a class act. He was one of the only celebrities to brand himself beyond the silver screen and not make an oaf of himself doing it. His products are great, he got on the organic bandwagon early, and made buckets and buckets of money for charity.

His long marriage to Joanne Woodward, herself a total class act, was admirable.

Newman lived for a time in the same neighborhood as my Uncle Marvin in Connecticut, and they played tennis together. Legend has it that I visited as a toddler, was swept onto Newman’s lap by the great actor, and promptly soaked my diaper on his knee.

Sorry, Mr. Newman.
We sure will miss you.

9/11

Hard to believe that it’s been seven years since that horrible day.

I will never forget it — the hours immediately following the attacks and the sense of apocalyptic terror, my numb panic and urge to hide from my pastoral responsibilities. Weeks later, still the fear, the shock, the sense that this was unlike anything I had ever felt before, or ever imagined feeling. It’s silly, but for at least two weeks I could eat nothing but McDonald’s Quarter Pounders with cheese, french fries, and Coke (not Diet Coke…Coke). Anything else made me ill.

The images. The sounds of bodies falling on metal. The smoke and ash. The plane down in Shanksville. The gaping hole in the side of the Pentagon. Mail carriers wearing white gloves, scanning the sky for airplanes coming from Andrews Air Force Base. Dread, dread, dread. Glued to the television news, the scenes of trauma and chaos and desperate searches for the missing, reading the Psalms day after day and night after night. Hear my prayer, O Lord, let my cry come to you. Do not hide your face from me in the day of my distress.
O Lord how long shall the wicked, how long shall the wicked exult?

The war drums started beating immediately. I thought some wiser perspective would certainly prevail.

Such stupidity. I watched with everyone else as Bush made a case for attacking Afghanistan and then invented one to invade Iraq.

In early October my mother and I went into New York City to support a few of the Broadway productions that were in danger of closing. We laughed heartily and applauded especially loudly. We walked down to the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center and stood speechless. A lone trumpeter played “Amazing Grace.”