The Natural Laws of Good Luck: A Memoir of an Unlikely Marriage

Ellen Graf was a lonely sculptor and mother of 4 mostly grown children living in rural upstate New York, when a Chinese friend suggested that she might like to meet her brother in China, who was also a lonely divorcée. Graf decides to take a chance, travels to China to meet Zhong-hua lu, and marries him. What follows is a moving and frequently hilarious account of two people from exceedingly different cultures attempting to make a life together. Graf has an advantage, as it is Zhong-hua who emigrates and must learn English and try to fit in to American culture. However, Graf too must adapt to living with someone whose most basic assumptions about human interactions -- and in fact, life in general -- are alien to her.

I like reading memoirs of all sorts and I enjoyed this book. I marveled at the leap of faith that brought Graf and Lu together and the hurdles they managed to clear. I recommend this book.

Book Review: Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry

This was a reread for me. When I first read Hannah Coulter a few years ago, it instantly became one of my favorites. I was a little bit worried that if I read it a second time, I wouldn't like it as much. Having finished it, I can say that the writing is nothing short of astonishing.

In Hannah Coulter, Berry continues his ongoing story of a place -- Port William, Kentucky -- and the people who make their lives there. These are the same people who are in Berry's other novels: Jayber Crow the barber; the Coulter Brothers, Burley and Jarrat; the Catletts, the Feltners and the Wheelers. Into this "membership" of Port William (as Burley Coulter calls it) comes Hannah as the young bride of Virgil Feltner. Hannah has only been married to Virgil a short time when the U.S. enters World War 2. Like all the young men at that time, Virgil is drafted and goes to war, and like too many of them, he goes "missing in action, presumed dead."

Now a young widow with a baby daughter, Hannah continues to live with Virgil's parents. Eventually she is courted by Nathan Coulter, one of the lucky ones who returned from the war. The rest of the book tells the story of the life Hannah and Nathan made together on the farm adjacent to her former in-laws.

The story is narrated by Hannah, as an old woman who has lived to see the turn of the 21st century, looking back on her life and the lives of her Port Williams neighbors. It is a simple, quiet story, but the writing absolutely shines.

I dog-eared many passages. Here is a favorite:

I began to know my story then. Like everybody's, it was going to be the story of living in the absence of the dead. What is the thread that holds it all together? Grief, I thought for a while. And grief is there sure enough, just about all the way through. From the time I was a girl I have never been far from it. But grief is not a force and has no power to hold. You only bear it. Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery.

Another:

The chance you had is the life you've got. You can make complaints about what people, including you, make of their lives after they have got them, and about what people make of other people's lives, even about your children being gone, but you mustn't wish for another life. You mustn't want to be somebody else. What you must do is this: "Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In every thing give thanks." I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.

And another:

My mind, I think, has started to become, it is close to being, the room of love where the absent are present, the dead are alive, time is eternal, and all the creatures prosperous. The room of love is the love that holds us all, and it is not ours. It goes back before we were born. It goes all the way back. It is Heaven's. Or it is Heaven, and we are in it only by willingness. By whose love … do we love this world and ourselves and one another? Do you think we invented it ourselves? I ask with confidence, for I know you know we didn't.

Wendell Berry's writing speaks to my heart and soul.

Father of "Balloon Boy"?

Wendell Berry

Enduring much snark and eye-rolling from my teen-aged daughter -- who thinks her mother has gone way over the top when it comes to food-related things -- I went to hear the farmer/poet/essayist/novelist Wendell Berry speak on Sunday afternoon. Here is something that was truly mind-blowing: After so many free tickets were distributed that his presentation had to be moved to a larger venue, he ended up speaking to a capacity crowd of 2000! Let me repeat -- Berry is a farmer/poet/essayist/novelist from rural Kentucky, not a rock star! I think he was a little blown away by the crowd as well.

I had no idea what to expect from his talk. I guess I had it in my mind that he might address the politics of agriculture, perhaps because he writes about that sometimes and he was here on the heels of Michael Pollan. That would have been great. What he did though, was to read aloud one of his short stories -- Making It Home from the collection entitled That Distant Land. It was enthralling. One of my all-time favorite novels is Berry's Hannah Coulter, and hearing him read aloud his own words reminded me of why I love that book so much. The language of his writing is luminous.

He also took questions from the audience. The thing that he said that has stayed with me is that we Americans keep thinking that the big problems should have big, global solutions, which in some ways absolves us as individuals of taking responsibility. However, in reality, big problems are solved by many, many people finding small, localized solutions, and in most cases individual contributions will go unrecognized and unrewarded by the larger world. But each of us must still work on solutions in our own way. It reminds me of this passage from Britain Yearly Meeting Faith & Practice, or of Margaret Mead's famous quote: Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.

I did purchase a copy of Hannah Coulter, but I didn't wait in line to have it signed, because the line was too long. (Rock star …) If you haven't read any Wendell Berry, he kind of has something for everyone. I recommend giving his writing a try.

The Ant and the Grasshopper

Without a ready source of tomatoes for canning this year, I decided I would be like the grasshopper and enjoy the last lingering days of summer and buy canned tomatoes this winter. Around about last week when the weather got chilly and I wanted to make chili, I realized the folly of my ways. To top it off, a friend told me that commercially canned tomatoes -- even the organic ones -- came in cans lined with plastic. Gack! Like some poor sea creature caught in plastic 6-pack rings, I could feel myself choking on the stuff! In unseasonably cold weather -- snow, even -- I took myself down to the farmers' market on a mission to buy tomatoes. Surely someone had stripped their plants the night before in anticipation of the first frost!

Pumpkins galore, potatoes, doughnuts, ostrich meat … Roma tomatoes, $20 for 25 lbs! I paid for a 25 lb. box, finished shopping (buying apples from novelist Jane Hamilton -- one of the perks at the Dane County Farmers' Market) and drove my car around to pick up my tomatoes. Thinking, "Hmmm … are those tomatoes going to be enough to carry me over until next tomato season?" With my car in the middle of the street, emergency flashers going, I quickly made a deal to buy another 25 lbs. of tomatoes.

This is the 3rd year I have canned tomatoes and the first time I did it all by myself. I canned half yesterday and half today, all in all 6 hours of intensive labor -- blanching, peeling and coring the tomatoes, partially cooking them, sterilizing the jars, filling the jars, boiling them in a hot water bath … Rather than trying to multi-task, I broke the process down into discrete steps -- a decision that I think saved time in the end. Hallelujah, all the jars sealed nicely, and lined up on the kitchen counter they look like sparkling jewels.

Bon appetit!

Food For Thought

On Saturday I attended the annual Food for Thought festival, put on in Madison by the REAP (Research, Education, Action, and Policy) Food Group. It is such a cool event, starting in the morning and going into the early afternoon, in conjunction with the Dane County Farmers' Market. I roused myself from my Saturday morning stupor to go and hear Michael Pollan speak. He was speaking under a large tent, with many people spilling out the edges. I settled myself on the sidewalk, pulled out my knitting (of course), and was thoroughly inspired.

There was some (what I consider to be) trumped up controversy surrounding Pollan's visit to Madison. This from a REAP email:

The president of the Wisconsin Farm Bureau suggested that Pollan is against farmers and in an op-ed called some of his ideas "disturbing and immoral."

A bus load of farmers showed up, wearing "In Defense of Farmers" t-shirts and calling Pollan's work "elitist". Personally, I think they lost a great deal of credibility when I found out that a big agri-business had chartered the bus and rallied them. I also wondered how many of them actually have read Pollan's work. It smacked of tea party politics.

Pollan called for a regional food economy, saying he is not a dogmatic locavore. A regional food economy has room not only for the small farms producing heritage and artisan foods, but the mid-sized farms as well. He emphasized the need for all farmers to diversify, noting that separating animals from crops (to paraphrase Wendell Berry) took a near-perfect system and created 2 big problems: what to use for fertilizer and where to dump the animal waste.

He also issued a passionate call for people to prepare meals at home using real food. I know that will raise some people's hackles -- but tell me, just how convenient is so-called "convenience food"? I was thinking, I can make a pan of mac & cheese in 25 minutes, plus baking time. The boxed stuff is not much quicker than that!

He also warned that the food industry is beginning to fight back, and it is important to vote with your dollars and be a food activist.

I also enjoyed browsing among the many displays from food-oriented businesses and non-profits. I had to resist the urge not to say something snide to the Whole Foods people. I went out of my way to greet chef Tori from L'Etoile and thank him for everything he does for my daughter's middle school (while munching on one of his homemade brats -- mmmm.) I picked up a recipe for making an anti-viral tea ('flu preventative) from Community Pharmacy.

Oh yeah, and I bought In Defense of Food from A Room of One's Own, my favorite independent bookstore. I was so happy to see them there and told the owner so, as I paid cash for my book. "Thanks, Suzy. We appreciate your support," and I thought, "She knows my name!!" Guess I'm a preferred customer now. (Yeah, yeah. Little things can give me big thrills.)

I was still a bit buzzed about the festival when I went a book sale at one of our branch libraries on Sunday. I bought a 1946 edition of Irma Rombauer's Joy of Cooking for $2.00! At first I was thinking it would just be a neat curiosity, but as I read through the recipes I realized that it has a lot of relevance to what Michael Pollan had been saying. Real food, prepared at home, on a family budget. I quickly cleared two froo-froo cookbooks off the shelf -- ones that I sometimes salivate over, but never cook from -- to make room for my vintage Joy. (And I just read that this is a virtually the same as the 1943 edition -- the one that Julia Child received as a wedding gift -- and has a collectors' value of $60 - $200! How cool is that? Of course, I will not be selling it.)

That was my weekend. Yours?

More from the mouths of kindergartners …

As a 23-year veteran kindergarten teacher I have developed the skill of waiting … waiting for the stragglers to come to the rug, sit criss-cross applesauce (kindergarten language for sit down and shut up,) clean up the playdough, get in line, etc. I have a whole repertoire of waiting songs. So on Friday the entire class but one is in line to go to art class. The one is putting on his shoes. It is taking a long, long time. I start singing this song (you know, so the others don't get restless and start some insurgent activity) that has movements for the kids to copy. We're singing, and gosh, the kid is taking a long time, and I'm running out of ideas for hand motions, so I start to do this bastardized rock-and-roll thingy, moving my fists up and down, and this little girl pipes up from the back of the line: "Teacher! Are you squeezing a cow's boobs?"

Making the Case for Manual Labor

I just finished reading the book Shop Class As Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work by Matthew B. Crawford. I have to say, I knew nothing about this book when I first opened it. I selected it purely because of the title. In fact, I thought it might have something to do with the sort of projects you find in the magazines Readymade or Make. Silly me. But, boy, was I glad that I read it.

Matthew Crawford holds a PhD in Philosophy, and now supports himself doing motorcycle repair. Shop Class is a difficult book to classify. Part autobiography, part pornography for motorcycle geeks, Crawford makes a very strong case for manual labor. He begins the book by talking about the history of "shop class" in the twentieth century and the dismantling of most high school shop programs in the eighties and nineties, as everyone was supposed to become "knowledge workers." He shows how disastrous this trend has been for American workers as more and more jobs have been shipped overseas where labor costs less, and points out that your x-rays can be read by a technician in India while plumbers, on the other hand, must be local.

Crawford discusses the disconnect that so many workers feel in white collar "knowledge" jobs where they never see the results of their work, compared to jobs in the trades where there is a very clear connection between the work and the results. (I was pleased that he included teachers in that second category.)

Yet the trend continues, where high school students are steered toward 4-year colleges, 2-year technical colleges are offering more "college prep", and the trades -- some of the most stable professions around -- are stigmatized. (This is personal for me as I watch my daughter struggle to pay off the $30,ooo loan she accrued in just one year of college, and people don't understand why she "dropped out" to work in a restaurant.) I found it curious when I watched President Obama address the nation's schoolchildren, that he encouraged them to go on to college, to become doctors, lawyers, teachers, join the military … and he did not say a word about entering the trades!

My one criticism of this book is that the writing was fairly dense -- or maybe just too geared toward gearheads. I am neither a motorcycle mechanic nor a rider, and there were points where my eyes glazed over and I skipped whole chunks of the text. But the overall theme resonated so strongly with me, and I had a hard time putting it down. In fact, I will be buying this book to re-read and mark certain passages. This is a very important book -- highly recommended.

The GOP's Latest Health Care Plan

Who says that affordable health care isn't available to everyone?

Looking forward to …

• seeing Brandi Carlile in concert this Monday. Gratitude to David for introducing me to her music!
• going to hear author/local food advocate Michael Pollan speak on Thursday. (No, he's not local; he passionately advocates for the buying and eating of locally grown food.) He is also speaking at a $200/plate fundraiser for my daughter's middle school, which is just so cool.
• going to hear author/poet/farmer Wendell Berry speak on October 11. (He is the author of one of my favorite novels ever, Hannah Coulter.)

INDOCTRINATION!!!

I finally saw President Obama's speech to the nation's schoolchildren in its entirety. It was bad enough that children were being forced to listen to subversive messages like, "Obey your parents and teachers" and "Do your homework." But when he said, "Wash your hands so you don't get sick," well, I felt downright unclean.

(It was shown at our first all school assembly of the school year. One youngster was escorted out in tears. When the principal questioned her about why she was crying she said, "I'm - I'm just so happy he's president, it makes me cry.")

Paddling My Own Canoe

I have canoes on my mind. Maybe it's because I'm reading the book Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog). We've owned a canoe for several years. It's a big old aluminum Grumman that we inherited when Mr. Ether's parents moved from their house to a condo. When we first acquired it we were very excited, and bought new PFDs and paddles for our anniversary. I envisioned sunset picnics and Sunday afternoon outings on Madison's 4 lakes.

Well, since we've had it, we've gone canoing exactly twice -- once when we loaded it on top of the car and drove across town to Lake Wingra, our smallest lake. It was lovely. We paddled across the lake to the University of Wisconsin Arboretum and visited haunts that we normally access by foot. The other time we took it up to Lake Michigan with us on our annual camping trip. It is definitely not designed for the bigger waves. I got scared, Mr. Ether got exasperated with me, and we had a little fight out on the water. Since then the canoe has held the concrete of our driveway down very nicely and that's all.

Recently I had been thinking of getting rid of it. It's monstrously heavy. We live, literally, two blocks from a gentle peaceful river that connects two of our lakes, and we never use the canoe. Last weekend I was talking with a friend about it, and she threw out the idea that some of us could go in on a nice lightweight canoe as a kind of time-share and rent space from the city parks department to store it.

*Lightbulb above my head* Why don't we -- DUH -- instead of buying a new canoe, just rent a spot for the canoe we already possess? I called the parks department today, and for $75/year I am leasing a berth on a canoe rack that is right next to the river three blocks from our house! I am psyched!

Kindergartners -- Can't Live With 'Em, Can't Live Without 'Em

Day 5 of the new school year. I finished work, went home for a little while and then it was back to school for the PTO meeting. (I am a regular attender, along with my knitting.) Leaving the meeting to go home and walk the dog, my principal stopped me in the hall to inform me that one of my students had smuggled his scissors onto the school bus in his backpack after school, and given himself -- and a friend -- haircuts! The other child's parent was at the PTO meeting. Fortunately she was laughing about it. Fortunately my principal was laughing about it too. I'm wondering, is it enough of a logical consequence to have to go around with funky hair until it grows out? I'll say one thing for certain about my job -- it is never boring.

Three Little Words: A Memoir by Ashley Rhodes-Courter

This book made me late yesterday. (Really, I would have been on time otherwise.) Each time I sat down to read just a little, I became so totally engrossed in Ms. Rhodes-Courter's story that I could not put the book down. When Ashley Rhodes-Courter was 3 years old, she was removed from her mother's custody and became a ward of Florida's foster care system. Thus began a 9 year long nightmare, over the course of which she had 19 different foster parents, some okay, some marginal, and one in particular, frighteningly bad. When she was finally adopted by a loving couple at the age of 12, it took many years for Ashley to trust that these parents were really there for her, and she finally began the long journey toward healing.

While the book was clumsily written at times (she wrote it as a very young adult) Ashley Rhodes-Courter impressed me with her resilience, her clear-eyed observations, and her amazingly positive outlook even after everything that she went through. This is a scathing commentary on Florida's foster care system. At a couple of different points she poses the question of why the state was willing to pay millions of dollars for a failed system where people ran foster homes like puppy mills and caseworkers looked the other way, but was utterly unwilling to spend even a penny to help teenaged mothers like Ashley's so they could provide a home for their own children. She also wondered why -- even when the evidence was in plain sight -- the caseworkers and therapists always assumed that the children were lying about their mistreatment, to get attention. (They even ignored multiple phone calls to the child abuse hotline from Ashley's teachers!)

Ashley eventually brought a suit against the state of Florida. In reviewing her files, she figured out that out of 195 people who had had some responsibility for her case over those 9 years, the two who had really advocated for her and gotten her out of the system -- a Guardian ad Litem and a lawyer -- were volunteers.

I admit that I wept while I read this book. It made me consider the carelessness with which some people treat their lives and the lives of others. Ashley's mother was not a bad person, but was herself a product of careless parenting -- as was the abusive foster mother. I found Ashley's story to be very important and moving. Highly recommended.

Book Review: A Yellow Watermelon by Ted Dunagan

A Yellow Watermelon was published by Junebug Books -- the children's division of New South Books, a publisher that specializes in contemporary Southern authors. It tells the story of one memorable summer in the life of 11 year old Ted Dillon. Ted is the youngest of 3 boys in a family that is just barely scraping by in small town Alabama. His dad works in the local sawmill which, like just about everything else in the vicinity, is owned by Mr. Cliff Creel. Ted makes pocket money by selling the weekly newspaper Grit.

One evening Ted sneaks into the sawmill after hours to explore, where he meets Jake -- a black man who has been hired to watch the mill. Through Jake he learns of the Robinsons, a dirt-poor black family who are in danger of losing their farm through the dirty dealings of Old Man Creel. Mr. Creel, in collusion with the local preacher, is also stirring up prejudice against the Robinsons. Ted befriends Poublum Robinson, a boy his own age, and is determined to help them out.

A Yellow Watermelon tells an interesting story and has a whole lot of heart, and I really, really wanted to like it, but in the end I found it disappointing. I thought that it oversimplified the whole idea of racial prejudice in the Jim Crow South, to the point of making it seem insignificant. The onus for the hateful behavior was put on mean Old Man Creel and the weak-willed drunkard preacher with everyone else being bystanders who didn't say much but acted sympathetic to the Robinsons because no one liked Mr. Creel very much. In no way was the hateful institution of Jim Crow laws ever even addressed! In fact, while it was believable that Ted might have befriended both Jake and Poublum, I found it utterly unbelievable that everybody accepted the friendships with almost nary a word, even while they all referred to their black neighbors as "niggers" and "darkies."

This may be a trifling point, but the dialogue when the black characters spoke was cartoon Southern black dialect, peppered with "sho 'nuffs" and "dis" and "dats". It reminded me of reading a vintage version of The Bobbsey Twins in the Land of Cotton and really bugged me.

There were also references that were way too modern, and seemed designed to teach young readers a lesson about prejudice rather than to make a good story; for example, when Ted crosses the invisible line in his uncle's cotton field to pick cotton with Poublum he says, "In the summer of 1948, I reverse integrated the cotton field."

One review on the back of the book compared A Yellow Watermelon to the classics To Kill A Mockingbird and Huckleberry Finn. I beg to differ. This isn't an awful book, but if you're interested in something to show kids what racial prejudice in the South was like, they'd be better off reading Mildred Taylor's Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry or Christopher Paul Curtis' The Watsons Go to Birmingham - 1963.

Whoa, W-a-a-a-y Behind On My Book Reviews

That's what happens when school starts. The train leaves the station and all I can do is hang on. I have read a few books in the last month, and I will attempt to give a brief synopsis/review of each one. You may have noticed that I like most of the books that I read. I'll let you in on a little secret: If I start a book and really dislike it, I give myself permission to not read any further. I rarely buy books anymore, especially books that I haven't already read, so it is no big deal to just close the stinkin' book and return it to the public library. I LOVE my public library!

The Invention of Air by Steven Johnson is a biography of Joseph Priestly, the eighteenth century scientist who, among other things, discovered a process for carbonating water, founded Unitarianism, counted Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson among his friends, and conducted pioneering experiments in his home laboratory on the nature of the air we breathe. He was hounded as a heretic from his comfortable life in England and settled in the United States in its infancy as a nation. This was a fascinating and fun book to read. Highly recommended. (Steven Johnson also wrote The Ghost Map, a story of the last cholera epidemic to hit London. Also a fine book.)

I have a love-hate relationship with Made From Scratch: Discovering the Pleasures of a Handmade Life by Jenna Wogenrich. On the one hand, she is writing about many of the things that have long been near and dear to my heart: shopping at thrift stores, making your own music, knitting, preserving food, living sustainably, raising chickens … it was like looking into a mirror! (In fact, Mr. Ether declared that she had stolen my identity and I might have to kill her.) On the other hand, here she is, a sniveling 26 year old upstart who has essentially lifted all these things from other people and then has the chutzpa to write a bestseller about it as if she had discovered all of these wonders and was imparting them to us. Harumph. (Here's the super mortifying part. It is a library book and I took it with me on our camping trip. We had a torrential rain storm and the book got wet. I didn't realize how bad it was, returned it to the library, and got a call from a librarian in Monroe, Wisconsin informing me that the book I had returned was wet and moldy! I was so embarrassed! So now I own the book, and I didn't even like it all that much! Oh well.)

Dr. Monkey and I share a common interest in the artist Dahlov Ipcar, author/illustrator of many children's picture books. A few years ago I picked up a copy of A Dark Horn Blowing, a novel she wrote for young adults, and I finally got around to reading it. What a treat! The story is based on several different traditional Scots ballads, as well as Norse folktales. If you like fantasy, this is a great addition to the genre. It reminded me of both Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn and an obscure little book by folklorist Katherine Briggs, called Kate Crackernuts.

Most recently I finished The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly. Written for the middle grades, it tells the story of one year in the life of an 11 year old Texas girl at the end of the 19th century. Calpurnia is a spunky heroine in the Anne Shirley, Jo March, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm tradition. The only girl in the middle of 6 brothers, she is expected to learn "the science of housewifery" when she really wants to be studying the world around her. She finds an unlikely ally in her grandfather, who educates her in the scientific method, loans her his personal copy of the scandalous new book The Origin of the Species by Charles Darwin, and shows her that she can follow her dreams. I loved this book! Not to sound sexist, but I think it would be an excellent choice for a girl in the 9-12 year old range, if you know any. It's really a nice break from fantasy stories, as well as the pre-teen "problem novels" that seem to abound. It falls into the category of what my friend Sminthia calls "sciency fiction." (I am looking forward to reviewing Sminthia's book when it comes out!) Highly recommended.

Next up: A Yellow Watermelon by Ted Dunagan. I'll keep you posted.

Street Scenes

Yesterday evening we were walking to a nearby restaurant with our neighbors, when we were accosted by some seedy trench-coated ruffians. (Well, actually it was a perfectly ordinary-looking young woman and man.) "Do you want a cupcake?" the woman said. What? "No, seriously, we have a lot of cupcakes to give away. Do you want one?" They go around to the trunk of their car and pull out a big box of cupcakes. Not just any cupcakes, either. Gourmet cupcakes, with whipped cream frosting and flavors like mocha with real berries on top. As it turns out, they were in a local bakery at closing time, and the proprietors had a lot of leftover cupcakes that they didn't want to save until the next day so they gave them to the couple, who decided to share the largesse with the madding crowd. (Note to self: Go to Daisy Café at 4:55.)

It was a quintessential near-eastside Madison experience.

Reflections on Getting Older

From Britain Yearly Meeting Faith and Practice. This spoke to me today.

If we are getting older it will be harder to acknowledge that we have not been called to spectacular service, that we are unlikely now to make a stir in the world, that our former dreams of doing some great healing work had a great deal of personal ambition in them.

A great many men and women have had to learn this unpalatable lesson -- and then have discovered that magnificent opportunities lay all around them. We need not go to the ends of the earth to find them, we need not be young, clever, fit, beautiful, talented, trained, eloquent, or very wise. We shall find them among our neighbors as well as among strangers, in our own families as well as in unfamiliar circles -- magnificent opportunities to be kind and patient and understanding.

This is a vocation just as truly as some more obviously seen as such -- the vocation of ordinary men and women called to continual unspectacular acts of loving kindness in the ordinary setting of every day. They need no special medical boards before they embark on their service, need no inoculation against anything but indifference and lethargy and perhaps a self-indulgent shyness. How simple it sounds; how difficult it often is; how possible it might become by the grace of god.

-- Clifford Haigh, 1962

Forgiveness, Part 2

I guess the lesson for this week is forgiveness. Here's a sticky one that challenges me in a different way:

William Calley, the former Army lieutenant convicted on 22 counts of murder in the infamous My Lai Massacre in Vietnam, publicly apologized for the first time this week while speaking in Columbus.

“There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai,” Calley told members of the Kiwanis Club of Greater Columbus on Wednesday. His voice started to break when he added, “I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry.”

Calley claims that he was following orders on that day, and I suspect that he was. In fact, I have read that the orders for the massacre and the cover-up go all the way up to a certain Maj. Colin Powell. War is hell on soldiers as well as civilians, and I often wonder how some -- like Hugh Thompson, Glenn Andreotta, and Lawrence Colburn -- find the moral strength to intervene when something is so terribly wrong, while others follow orders and perpetrate events such as the My Lai massacre.

I am moved by Calley's apology. I wonder if he could/would return to My Lai on a mission of peace and restorative justice. What would that be like for him, and for the survivors of the massacre and their families?

A Question of Justice Being Served -- or Not

My recent post about the release of the alleged "Lockerbie bomber" made me think of Leonard Peltier, and then this showed up on HuffPo today:

BISMARCK, N.D. — American Indian activist Leonard Peltier, imprisoned since 1977 for the deaths of two FBI agents, has been denied parole after authorities decided that releasing him would diminish the seriousness of his crime, a federal prosecutor said Friday.

Peltier, who claims the FBI framed him, will not be eligible for parole again until July 2024, when he will be 79 years old.

I ask, where is the justice or the mercy in continuing to hold Peltier? I suspect that releasing Peltier -- and there is some pretty compelling evidence that he did not pull the trigger on the weapon that killed the FBI agents -- would draw attention to other prisoners being held under questionable circumstances. In fact, Amnesty International considers him a political prisoner. So holding him prisoner serves a purpose beyond a question of justice and accountability for a crime he may or may not have committed. This underscores one of the great failures of our penal system.