Mistakes, Missed Opportunities and a Mishmash of Thoughts

Levi, my schnauzer, is so predictable yet he fools me every time I come home and he acts like he’s got to go outside to pee near his private fire hydrant. “I’m desperate, Mom, hurry up and open the door!” I oblige his canine-to-human mind communication and open the door to the garage, intending next to open the door that leads to his yard. Only instead of him following me he leisurely strolls around the car sniffing and lingering here or there to see where I’ve been, then he goes back in the house. Yesterday before going back inside he gave me a dirty look. I think he knew I went to the pet store without him.

I normally do take him with me to Dog Shopping-land but yesterday wasn’t a normal day. I woke up, had a quick breakfast, let Levi take care of his business, took a shower and raced off to the senior hall to catch a bus: destination the First African Church in town and a Buddhist Temple, part of the monthly ‘How we Worship’ series. The problem was I was a day too early. It was on my calendar correctly but I made an old person mistake and got my days mixed up. Don’t tell anyone, okay? Plan B. With extra time on my hands I went to the pet store and post office then dropped my primary ballot off at City Hall. Ya, I finally made up my mind who to support.

In case you’re wondering about Levi’s private fire hydrant in my back yard, Don bought it from a scrap iron place years ago when we were on our way out West. He bought two to keep and others to sell for a shocking profit---but it was a challenge moving around inside our motor home with fire hydrants covering the floor. That was so typical of Don. I still have those two hydrants. They were restored at a body shop. One is very small, over a hundred years old and I wonder if they’ll let me take it to nursing home when I go. I suppose I should be taking a photo of it instead for that time when we’ll have to part company. Now, it sits next to an Eco Air Meter and a large Mobil flying Pegasus in my tribute-to-my-husband corner of the garage. They are the last of his gas station memorabilia collectibles. Not sure if this is true or not, but I’ve always believed that Native American Indians in the Old West used to pick up peddles, feathers and small things to put in their possible bags as souvenirs of special days or events. Don and I used to kid each other that we had Indian blood in our veins because we were the king and queen of bringing souvenirs back from our trips.

So here it is the correct morning of the church tours and I’m trying to decide if I want to go. I’ve been spoiled by the mild winter we’ve had and we have a monster storm due to hit my area about the time I’m supposed to leave. They’re talking lots of blowing snow, accidents and wide spread power outages. The weather people are calling it “heart attack” snow because it will be wet, heavy and deep. Okay, just typing that has made me decide to stay home and finish the book I was reading into the wee hours of the morning. The senior hall only cancels their tours if the schools close and I suspect tomorrow’s lecture on storm chasing will be collateral damage of the storm. But if they send the kids home early today, and I’m on the tour in the heart of downtown dependent on the school bus drivers, we could get stranded and end up at the soup kitchen with the homeless for dinner and a night sleeping on the floor. Yes, my imagination is out of control. At least there will be no chance of snow for next month’s church tour. We’re going to an Islamic Center where we’ll have a transitional Muslim lunch. We have to wear long sleeves, dark colors and head scarfs and I hope some mad shooter doesn’t pick that day to demonstrate his hate. Sad, isn't it, when fear and going to a place of worship gets bundled in the same sentence.

I’ve been watching The People VS. O.J. Simpson TV series. It’s fascinating. I remember when the real trial was televised. Just about everyone I knew was glued to the TV day after day include Don and me and I have since read all the books written by the major “players” in the trial. I thought Don and one of his brothers would come to blows over whether or not O.J. was guilty. I wonder if his brother is watching this series and still thinks he’s innocent. Does anyone still think O.J. is innocent? 

Time to get some breakfast and hope I didn’t make a bad call by not going on the tour. The missed opportunity to see the Buddhist Temple made the decision hard. The weather people have been wrong before but the satellite maps show a pretty wide storm approaching, not much chance for mistakes in their forecast. Time will tell and in the meantime I have a book about living on Mars to finish. ©

The Church Tours

I’ve told the story of why my dad left the Catholic Church before but I’m going to tell it again. Back in the 1920s when Dad was eight years old a priest, while teaching Sunday school, accused my dad of throwing a spitball. If you don’t know what a spitball is, it’s a piece of paper that’s been chewed and shaped into a ball. Dad always claimed he didn’t do it but that didn’t stop the priest from opening the door on a potbelly stove, picking my dad up by the seat of his pants and the collar of his shirt and pretend he was going to throw Dad inside to teach him about the fires of hell where bad boys go. After that, my dad refused to go back to Sunday school and while his siblings continued growing up Catholic my dad was sent off to the only other church in town, a Methodist.

I was grade school, too, when I had a life-changing ‘church’ event of my own. Less dramatic but just as hurtful and long-lasting. I can still see myself with long pigtails and wearing a pink print dress standing on the playground during recess and being told by a classmate that she couldn’t play with me anymore because I was a “heathen who didn’t go to church.” The day before, I had gone home with her after school to play and her mother had given me the third degree. “What church to you go to?” Blah, blah, blah. It was after that when my parents had my brother and me start walking up to one of the four churches close-by for Sunday school and it didn’t matter which one. Our choice. At one of those churches I learned that God was an image cut out of a book, pasted to a piece of flannel and slapped above a flannel-backed cloud in the sky where He overlooked a field full of cows. 

Oddly enough, my date for the junior prom was the son of a dairy farmer. A deeply religious farmer who beat his son for dating a girl outside of their church---that would be me in case you’re having a Dense Dianna Day. My friend ran away from home after that beating but he didn’t stay away long enough for his black and blue marks to fade. He told me that farming was in his blood and if he didn’t break up with me, his father would disinherit him and give the family farm to his cousin. I got over the breakup quick enough but I spent the ‘60s trying to figure out why God encouraged his followers to abuse little boys with spitballs, polite little girls with pigtails and a nearly grown boy who thought I was special enough to introduce me to his parents. 

Being brought up in what was known as the "city of churches" I learned the art of avoiding the topic of religion early on in life. I have a master’s degree in avoidance so imagine my surprise when I signed up for a senior hall tour of a church denomination that’s only been in town for ten years: The Unitarian Universal Church. Why did I want to learn more about this church? Because several (holier than thou) people I know think the place is the devil’s spawn and by contrast, one of my favorite and most admired bloggers is a member of the UUC. So I dusted off my eggshell walking shoes and hoped my seatmate on the bus didn’t want to talk Christian doctrine. She didn’t. The church tour series goes to two different churches every month and the other church on our agenda Thursday was the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, another controversial church according to some. 

The local UUC church actually holds its services in a Jewish Temple and has been doing so since its inception which seemed weird until I learned that the UUC’s logo---a flaming chalice---has ties to an underground group during WWII that helped Unitarians and Jews escape Nazi persecution. Sometimes we’re so busy looking at the differences between people and groups that we overlook their similarities and where their histories intertwine. I was impressed by the minister saying they are an inclusive community that celebrates theological diversity. She is free, for example, to base her services on readings from scripture, Buddha, the Torah, Maya Angelou or wherever else she finds inspiration. A recent sermon of hers I found online was inspired by Donald Trump saying he doesn’t have time to be politically correct. Another thing that sets them apart from some other churches---if I'm understanding it right---is they consider Jesus to be a high prophet but not God, not part of a holy Trinity.

The other church we toured, the LDS, was everything I would not like in a church but the hour and a half we spent there was certainly interesting. If you’ve ever had two of their missionaries stand on your porch steps you’ll get the picture of the tag team that walked us through the workings of their church, throwing in a heavy dose of evangelizing for good measure. 

Tour or no tour, I do occasionally wonder if I’m still searching for that enlightenment I think I found in my twenties. Will I wake up one day with a desire to start attending church? If so, the UUC is probably the only place I could feel like I belonged. Life would be less complicated if I had a church here in the city of churches. A church comes with a social life and that would be nice, too. But I’d feel like a hypocrite if I took up a religion like the LDS that personifies the meaning of God as I have come to know God---that combined goodness of mankind, a force for and of goodness. Can you believe it, in one of the class rooms at the LDS they even had a cut-out silhouette of God/Jesus standing on cut-out clouds. The more things change the more they stay the same. Not since college have I seen so many prints of Jesus in one place. There must have been over fifty in the building.

When I was an art major in college, we studied a lot of religious works of art because throughout man’s early history anyone with an artistic talent was basically enslaved by the church for the express purpose of personifying God. And while many religious philosophies of the world used artists to do pictorials to teach spiritual concepts and lessons to the masses who could not read, the Christians were the most prolific, especially during the reigns of Sixtus IV and Pope Julius II. Fast forward a few centuries when the depicted messengers became more important than the message---how do you put that Jeanie back in the bottle? How do you embrace God if you think of God as something separate and outside of yourself, outside of your own ability to create goodness and love? How can a person claim to know God yet carry out actions rooted in hate? I guess that's a diploma for those who do it to explain because try as I might over the decades, I haven't figured it out.

I apologize to anyone still reading this super-sized blog post. I usually don’t post things longer than 900 words but try as I might I couldn’t edit down my thoughts and anecdotes any more than what I’ve shared above. I even cut a whole passage about drum circles, Christian hymns and wailing walls that I particularly liked. If I’ve inadvertently said anything unflattering or untrue about your religious beliefs, I’m sorry. Please feel free to correct any errors or misrepresentations I may have made. ©

Widows in the Cemetery and Red Hats in Church

Sometimes on paper things can look a little weird but in real time doing that something is downright fascinating. That was the case with a tour I signed up for at the senior hall. The day of the tour forty of us, dressed in serious rain gear, got on the bus early in the morning. The weather forecast was a 90% chance of heavy rain off and on all day and it was raining hard at the time. We would have had a full bus but ten people stayed home, afraid they might melt in the summer rain…or the ghosts might get them, I guess, in the fog that comes with morning showers and eerie places. We were headed to the oldest cemetery in town for a two hour walk and talk. 

Our tour guide was a man who’d written several books on “the art of memory” as he likes to call his fascination for the tombstones of our city’s founding fathers and this guy’s research was thorough! He was a retired lawyer and is a frequent lecturer at the local museum who had, for example, tracked down the court records of a couple of murder trials of the residents under some of the elaborate stones. He also got into the history of the Rosetta Stone and how that influenced the style of some of cemetery art we were seeing. Like in any town, the streets and buildings named after the founding fathers are known long after they're gone but how they made their money and what their contributions to the growth of the city were is often forgotten. This tour brought them all back to life. I can honestly say I never knew our town has such an interesting cemetery, complete with an Egyptian style pyramid mausoleum no less. I thought places like this could only be found out East. And the rain? For some miraculous reason the only time it didn’t rain all day was when we were walking around the cemetery. The ghosts who reside there must have enjoyed our company and put in a good word to the Rainmaker.

The next day I was supposed to go on a walk-about with my Red Hat Society Chapter. Seventeen of us had signed up for a guided tour of several churches downtown with lunch sandwiched in the middle. The architecture and stained glass windows (some by Louis Tiffany) are really something to see---I’d seen them many times in the past when I was working in the floral industry---but that wasn’t the reason I emailed my cancellation after I got home from the cemetery tour. One, I was exhausted at the moment and wasn’t sure I could climb all those steps and walk the downtown streets so soon after my cemetery tour. But, in hindsight I know that wasn’t the only reason I bowed out. The other reason is because I was stupid and I let some hurtful comments cause me to second guess myself.

The back story on those comments: Last week in another blog that I frequently visit there was a shocking---at least to me---discussion about The Red Hat Society. Some of the comments were: The Red Hat Society “encourages older women to be worse than invisible, it shows older women as being ridiculous.” Another person said, “I would rather have no friends and hang out with my cats than pal around with a bunch of loud, absurdly dressed women,” and a third person said the Red Hat Society “spawns conformity” and that they are “an annoying part of society.” The one that really got to me as a widow was a comment about how she’d rather enjoy the company of a man. Well, duh, we don’t all have that choice and some of us don’t want to be cougars just to be with a person who stands up to pee. Does she know the demographics of men to women in the over 70 age bracket?

I left a few comments of my own, trying to balance the negative stereotypes being thrown around and so did a few others but as much as I tried not to let the discussion bother me, over the next few days the nasty comments were like a single pimple on a flawless face. You can’t quit zeroing in on that pimple when you're looking in the mirror! When I thought about what I was going to wear to the walk-about the nasty comments were there in my head….and I hate to admit it, they kept me home and from having an interesting guided tour and a pleasant lunch with some nice ladies who don’t want to let widowhood (or their couch potato husbands) keep them at home. I guess I need to re-read the poem that inspired the Red Hat Society so I can screw up my courage and resolve again. The whole point of the society is that at a certain age women no longer have to care about the societal conventions that put restrictions on us when we were younger---when we had too many responsibilities and other people to answer to, jobs and reputations to uphold as well as needing to be good role models in our families. We are free, now, to wear colors that don’t match and laugh in the streets and explore the world around us. The red hat is a symbol for that kind of freedom. Will someone cross-stitch those last two lines on a sampler that I can hang in my kitchen?  ©

 

Warning by Jenny Joseph

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple

With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me.

And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves

And satin sandals, and say we've no money for butter.

I shall sit down on the pavement when I'm tired

And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells

And run my stick along the public railings

And make up for the sobriety of my youth.

I shall go out in my slippers in the rain

And pick flowers in other people's gardens

And learn to spit.

You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat

And eat three pounds of sausages at a go

Or only bread and pickles for a week

And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes.

But now we must have clothes that keep us dry

And pay our rent and not swear in the street

And set a good example for the children.

We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.