It's MY Body

My grandmother was left to die on an illegal abortionist’s table. She pulled herself up, dragged herself home, and raised her five kids.

It was the Depression, and she couldn’t afford another mouth to feed. Eventually, my grandfather left her, and she raised the five kids. She’d also marched down Fifth Avenue as a Bloomer Girl for the vote for women. She is the matriarch of our family, and my daughter is named for her.

When I told this story to a long-ago boyfriend, he was shocked. Then his grandmother spoke up, “I had an abortion, too. How do you think I kept from having too many children?”

So how do we think women made do before effective birth control? How do we think they made sure their already-born children had enough to eat? Did you ask your grandmothers? Those women did what they had to do to raise that Greatest Generation, and they had abortions.

I know women who, after being fitted professionally for cervical caps, became pregnant. I know women who consented to abortion should in vitro fertilization yield multiple embryos. I know women who were told they were carrying fetuses with genetic abnormalities. I know women who became pregnant in college and would lose scholarships if they had to leave school. I even know a girl pregnant by her father.

These women – all these women, all of us – had control of our own bodies and had a legal option: abortion.

We women in our Third Third know these stories; we know that legal abortion saves lives – the lives women want to have that an unplanned pregnancy would disrupt.

I’ll say that again:

I’m going to stop here before I march down my fury road. I’m going to stop here before I go on about poorly-funded budgets to work with hungry children, abused children, and homeless children. Before I go on about slaps on the wrists for rapists, for unfunded birth control, for de-funded childcare.

I’m stopping here just to stick with that one thought: many of us have the lives we have because brave and desperate grandmothers or mothers faced illegal abortionists so there’d be enough food in the mouths of their children.

The lives I want to save are the potential lives of the young women with dreams. Dreams to go to school, dreams to get out of an abusive relationship, dreams for their futures. Who is anyone to say they deserve less, that their lives get deferred?

So some law wants to force a vulnerable 14-year-old to a nine-month sentence of prolonged occupation of her body while rapists are still getting slaps on the wrist? These are the same people who covered Viagra with health insurance, but not birth control. These are the same people who want to eliminate maternity care from lower-cost health insurance.

I know people who stretch poorly-funded budgets to work with hungry children, abused children, and homeless children. Low-income women have to find jobs, but childcare is de-funded. I know people who work with rape survivors, women suffering domestic violence, women sold into sexual slavery. Indigenous women just “disappear,” rape kits get lost, and yet the big issue is what’s in a woman’s uterus? My own uterus – which is no business of yours.

As I march down my fury road, I start inventing scenarios. I imagine some rich and powerful guy – maybe a legislator or a judge – a guy who “can do anything” – having an extramarital affair. Many of them do. What would he do if that other woman got pregnant? I am pretty sure he’d locate a quiet and confidential abortionist. What do you think?

I am in my Third Third and pregnancy fears are long behind me, but they’re always present for a new generation of women. I am in my Third Third, and I cannot believe women still have to argue for control of our own bodies. I am in my Third Third and this is my body.

These are dangerous times, and I’m marching down my fury road because abortions save lives.

Jumping Hurdles

When I was in high school, I was the manager for the boys’ varsity track team. Somehow I got the idea that when I reinvented myself at college, I could tell people I did the low hurdles. I was going to lie to be someone I pictured myself to be but wasn’t.

I don’t think I actually did the lie, but Wikipedia says, “Low hurdle races are a now, generally defunct form of track and field hurdle racing.” I find it fitting that now in my Third Third, my first third aspiration is … defunct. But low hurdles are still in operation for women’s track, so I guess I’m all right (if I were to reinvent myself).

I think of low hurdles as obstacles in my path that seem more do-able than impossible. A high hurdle – a whole foot higher – might stop me dead, like a wall. But the low hurdle is a challenge to get past. And what’s a low hurdle for me might be just a blip for you.

As I was preparing to leave Toronto, my sister phoned. My month there had been a 10-out-of-10, but I was in the middle of my hurdle accounting: I had to get on the plane ... with less than fifty pounds in the suitcase. I told Elizabeth the trek to the airport was rife with hurdles:

1. I had to pack less than fifty pounds in the suitcase without a scale to measure. And I had accumulated a lot of paper: theater programs, books for my friend Mark on Toronto’s urban planning, four magazines on Toronto’s culinary treasures for my friend Judith, library handouts, maps, more maps.
    
2. I had to get the suitcase on the 65-Parliament bus, and if the old style bus came, it would be hard to get in the front door. I needed the new kind of bus to pull up to the stop.
    
   
3. For some strange reason, Toronto’s subways only have escalators that go up and stairs that go down. Usually that’s no problem, but not with fifty pounds of suitcase. I could always bump it down one step at a time, à la Winnie the Pooh, “bump, bump, bump.”
    
4. And then, here it was, the Big Hurdle, the one that chilled my blood: weighing in at the check-in with my suitcase. What if it were more than fifty pounds?!?

Some of you might be thinking: what’s the big deal? So you pay extra or you move some stuff around.

No, hurdles are personalized. This was my Big Hurdle, maybe not yours. You may have problems going to live in an unknown big city all by yourself for a month, but that’s a blip for me. My Big Hurdle was facing an airline agent with a suitcase to be weighed. It kept me up at night.

My other sister said, “Mail stuff.” I had already been that route. Canada Post, even with its lovely pink mailboxes all around town, cost A LOT. It took me $30 to mail a 1-pound picture book to a friend. A woman I met said there’s a service called Chit Chats; they drive your stuff across the border and mail it in the U.S. for way cheaper. My sister said, “Use Chit Chats.” Uh, oh, new thing, new thing! That’s another hurdle alert!

When I think of my Urban Infusion months, I think of my first time using a borrowed cell phone, my first time using VRBO and Airbnb, my first time using Lyft, my first time not knowing my geography, my first time all alone; and they were harrowing. But they were low hurdles and I made it over. Once you make it over, hurdles become blips; but they still start out as hurdles.

Chit Chats was a hurdle.

So I prepared: I isolated my paper products in a bag inside the suitcase, so if it was too heavy, I could move it to carry-on. I chickened out and left the culinary magazines behind in the apartment. I departed the apartment a hurdle-fearing nervous wreck.

1. The right kind of 65-Parliament bus came.
    
2. As I approached the stairs of the subway, a man reached out, grabbed my suitcase, and took it down the stairs.
    
3. At the airport, I mustered my courage and thought, “Project confidence. Be friendly, and she’ll let your overweight bag on.” I slid the suitcase on the scale: 47 pounds exactly.

Sigh.

Boobs in Boob Land

It takes a lot to leave me speechless and startled, sort of stumbling through the Looking Glass. It started with the hospital gown hanging outside on the front door, but it was ALL THE PINK that proved overwhelming. I had entered Boob Land. No, I had entered Boob Land!

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month and many of us are very, very aware of breasts because we’re very, very aware of cancer. In our Third Thirds, the numbers in “the club” just seem to be growing every month, October or not. This time, cancer visited my friend, Barb. Hopefully, it was just a visit and the unwelcome guest won’t be returning.

More than a month ago, Barb sent out “save the date” invitations for her end-of-radiation party. I put it on my calendar. I thought all the women would come, we’d eat, drink wine, talk.

I never expected to be throwing orange ping pong balls into bras.

It’s like Barb had completely redone her home in Breast Décor. There were pink boob-type decorations everywhere, pink boas, posters. Pink socks as party favors. Pumpkins with breasts and nipples.

I didn’t expect Barb to be greeting us in her hospital gown with boas either.

And now the pièce de résistance: the reminder to get your mammogram – squeeze those marzipan breasts between graham cracker plates. Use your imagination, that plateful was a real eye-popper.

It’s a relief to celebrate someone who discovered her cancer so early that her prognosis is good. It’s a joy to celebrate the strength, the resilience, and the courage this cancer requires of women. And it’s a total treat to spend an evening laughing with women who are funny, talented, and happy to be alive. So happy to be alive.

Did you Duck and Cover?

If you’re in your Third Third, you know what “Duck and Cover” means. Maybe you hid under your desk at school during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Maybe you thought your father should build a bomb shelter in the backyard. And you certainly know what “Cold War” means.

Our trip through South Dakota included a thought-provoking counterpoint to all the natural beauty – the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site – with the potential to destroy it all. The wonderful visitor center took us through the Cold War and the arms race, mutually assured destruction, and ultimately, arms reduction.

You can see the visitor center; it’s above ground. Delta-01 Launch Control Facility and Delta-09 missile silo are mostly underground. Delta-01 is where the two missileers worked on 24-hour alert duty shifts, ready to launch ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles) in the event of nuclear attack.

I thought of that word missileer. It sounded like Disney’s imagineer so at first I just didn’t feel the heaviness of it. It seemed creative, musical even. But the exhibit took us through the psychological pressures, about what it would take to be trained to “press the button.”

There were photos of little kids under their desks at school. Little kids wearing the dresses and hairstyles we wore in the early ’60s. They looked just like us. I still remember my Weekly Reader emphasizing that Florida was just 90 miles away from Cuba. My friend Denise grew up in North Dakota knowing they were a big X on the USSR missile map.

At the height of the Cold War, both the Soviet Union and the U.S. had more than 10,000 nuclear warheads. The exhibit takes us through the build-up and the reduction. Acronyms like SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) and START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) suddenly make sense on a timeline.

And then we get to the last room, the one describing “the man who saved the world,” Stanislav Petrov. Petrov was the duty officer in the USSR on September 26, 1983 when alerts went off that five missiles were headed to the Soviet Union. He made the crucial decision not to alert his superiors, guessing that if the strike were real, the U.S. would have sent more than five missiles.

The tension he endured was immense. He guessed; we all won.

Apparently, a movie was made about this in 2015. I’m trying to get it on interlibrary loan. September 26 is Petrov Day: “Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, take a minute to not destroy the world.”

That last panel goes on to describe other false alarms: one where a training tape of a Soviet invasion was mistakenly inserted into the early-warning computer, another where a Norwegian rocket on a scientific mission to study the aurora was mistaken for a missile.

These were equipment mistakes, technological errors; they can happen any time. But the humans staffing the machines have to be able to stay calm and process the evidence rationally. Always it comes down to the one person who might be the one who “saves the world.”

Many times in my life I’ve explored what it takes to make peace as opposed to making war. This exhibit put another layer on it: how do we train people to refrain from pushing buttons, to pause, to consider? Because so far, the only time the world was saved was when a button wasn’t pressed.

Not a scaredy-cat – a worrywart

Recently, the subject of bravery came up, as in “Barbara, you’re so brave to head off to another city for a month alone.” So I started writing about fear, but realized I kept mixing it up with worry. I wrote that “fear and worry riddle my life,” but by the time I finished, I knew that was wrong: fear compels decisions, worry riddles my life.

Sometimes I make choices based on my personal hierarchy of fear: is this less scary than that? So, for example, I’m not going down the Grand Canyon. When I wrote here about Becoming a Wimp in my Third Third, it was a full year-and-a-half out from the planned raft trip. I canceled. Heights and cliffs and rapids – nope. I’m going to London instead. Compared to the Grand Canyon, London didn’t even register on the trauma charts. (Not even today.)

Some things simply don’t scare me. While surveys show that most people fear public speaking more than anything else – more than death – it doesn’t give me pause. Just give me a little preparation, and I’m good to go. I even enjoy it.

People who don’t live in Alaska think much of our normal, daily living is fearful. Moose in backyards, bears in parks, mountains, wilderness, earthquakes – those may send a tiny speck of shiver down Alaskans, but mostly they just arouse caution.

The big list of American fears includes heights, bugs and snakes, claustrophobia – I am all about being scared of those things – but there are SO MANY other things that fuel fear. This is my current big fear: Tim will drown in the Grand Canyon, I will crash on the plane to London, and Sophie will be all alone.

I cannot believe I even wrote that sentence down, as if voicing it unleashes some horrible karma in the universe. Right now, my superstitious self is crawling with anxiety.

And then I worry that all the resultant cortisol pumping through my system is wreaking its own havoc.

Fear cascading upon fear. What ifs generating more and more calamities. Imagination run amok. Is this the process that turns fear into worry?

Gasp. Do other people do this???

In my Third Third, as I reflect, I don’t think I really discovered fear until I had a child. The responsibility for someone so essentially vulnerable is the biggest, scariest thing I’ve ever encountered. Even so, I didn’t want that child to be limited by my fear so I kept our lives open to travel and outdoor adventure. Ziplines, climbing, skiing. Trusting strangers, being independent. Caution, but not fear. Now that she’s older, some of the things she tells me scare the willies out of me, but I keep my mouth shut.

My siblings used to joke about two kinds of people in the world: “emotional cripples” and “kamikazes.” I was the kamikaze of the family because, when faced with decisions, I often leaped. That must have looked like bravery, but it’s really fear of sluggish indecision, of dawdling about in some hesitant limbo land. The reason I do is not because I have no fear of doing but because I have a HUGE fear of stagnation. Of letting my world become small.

I realize it’s not all about fear. It’s about interest, curiosity, and preference and how they can offset fear. Something in me dreams about London but worries about the Grand Canyon. So while I might be worried about a long airplane flight, it’s required if I’m going to get to London. (It’s required to live in Alaska, period….) In the hierarchy of fears, it had to get displaced. Maybe the secret is displacing the fears that don’t serve us.

The opposite of fearful might be brave, but the opposite of worried would be … calm? My interior worries – the imagined what ifs, the squirrelly feelings, the worst-case scenarios – are things that scare me from the inside out and have nothing to do with heights or river rapids or cliffs. I’m not a scaredy-cat; I’m a worrywart. You would think by my Third Third I would have dealt with this.

But right now, I’m worried that while I’m writing, sitting is the new smoking, and how many hours a day do I spend sitting?

Next I’m trying meditation. Do we do that sitting down?

Heroes or Goats?

Like a lot of us, I was watching the Oscars Sunday night. I saw the Great Mistake in the announcement of the winner for Best Picture, and while it was just one moment, it set me down a winding, philosophical path.

NOT, as one commenter put it, “Don’t let the 80-year-olds do it anymore.” In my sympathetic Third Third, I think, “That could have been me,” and I cringe at the jump in people’s minds to feebleness. I felt bad for Warren Beatty; the whole thing did made him look feeble and confused. He had a reason to be confused (so he passed the problem to Faye Dunaway).

My friend Steve focused on something else: he marveled at the graciousness on display:

“The mistake was acknowledged immediately and openly and the response was all so adult, so gracious, so harmonious. … Our news has been so dominated by three-year old tantrums lately, that this is a wonderful relief, and we should all be glad for the error, just to see how decent people behave.”

But my friend Marie had a different take:

“So, if Warren Beatty knew something was wrong, why didn’t he say something? At that moment, he had the opportunity to correct a mistake but didn’t. … Let’s promote taking responsibility where we can. When you see something or feel that something doesn’t feel right, say something.”

That reminded me of an interview I read a long time ago with Philip Zimbardo, the Stanford professor famous for the prison experiment where the “guards” ran amok with their newfound power. He was trying to account for the one person out of 100 who does the right thing.

Zimbardo was once sitting in the front row of a presentation when he noticed the speaker having difficulty, so he interrupted – just before the speaker collapsed. As he puts it:

“Essentially, it’s shame and guilt: you have to live with the guilt of not doing what you should have done vs. the shame of doing the wrong thing. All my life I’ve done things to make people laugh at me, and playing the fool means when the time comes I don’t care if people laugh.”

“…when the time comes, I don’t care if people laugh.” I disagree that you have to “play the fool” to prepare for this, but you do have to prepare yourself. Maybe as pre-teens, we’re too caught up in the fear of ridicule, the pressure of the peer group; but we’re in our Third Thirds now. Are we willing to risk embarrassment? We live in a world of “see something, say something” – are we ready? Can we all do it?

Sometimes I think I was born with a big mouth. Friends might have a hard time thinking of me as “reticent.” Yet I have uncomfortable memories of the times I balked, times I imagined all the eye-rolling I’d get for making a fuss, and so I abdicated. Like Charlie Brown, “I could have been the hero ... instead I’m the goat.”

It comes back to what Marie talked about, taking responsibility and speaking up. Zimbardo calls them “everyday heroes,” the ones who move from passivity to action. We can’t know how we’ll react in an emergency, in confusion, when faced with injustice. We can’t know if we’ll be gracious when a mistake is made.

I’m sure Warren Beatty is kicking himself. We can all take that as a cautionary tale and hope we’re ready when our test comes. But we can’t lose sight of heroes when they do emerge; the La La Land heroes took the microphone and volunteered their congratulations to Moonlight. Yes, they were adult and kind and generous.

I’m practicing my “see something, say something” muscle, right along with my squats.

How do you say "panic" in Japanese?

I think most of the things I’ve learned in my life have been absorbed gradually. I noticed, became familiar, picked up new information: a nice, steady process of learning. But every now and then, I’ve received a sudden burst of knowledge, a direct infusion to the brain, a BLAST of realization.

I speak two languages (Spanish also) and have, in previous Thirds, spoken two others: German and Hebrew. (I have trouble keeping more than two in my head; the extras just get pushed out.) I’ve lived in a Spanish-speaking country, traveled in countries that spoke other languages. I teach English to refugees and immigrants. I thought I was pretty aware of what goes into language acquisition.

But a couple weeks ago, in a class at the Alaska Literacy Program, Polly demonstrated how she’d begin teaching English to someone who didn’t know a speck of English. She had to start with pointing to herself when she said “I,” pointing to us when she said “you.” We got it. She held objects up, said it was a “bird,” a “dish.” We got that, too. And we got it when she wrote on the board “bird.”

And then Polly pointed to herself and said something in Japanese! She pointed to us and said something else. We had to repeat.

Repeat? I wasn’t even sure what I’d heard. How could I pronounce what I couldn’t even hear right?

And she didn’t stop. She kept saying things in Japanese. My heart rate went up. I think the bird was a “tori,” but there were other sounds around it. Did those mean “This is”? Or is there some suffix that goes with nouns? How could I figure out the grammar when I couldn’t even be sure what I was hearing?

She just kept on. Everything was Japanese.

Then she pulled out some charts:

That was the bird. That sound in front was the T sound for that “tori” sound.

Polly pulled out cups and dishes and horns and her hand and said a lot more Japanese. They jumbled up terribly in my head. If I learned one, I forgot another. So Polly put them all in sentences:

By then, I think I’d describe what I was experiencing as “panic.” But deep down, I also knew it would end. Eventually, Polly would stop talking in Japanese and she’d return to English. My world would return to English and I could breathe easily again.

But Yousef in my class can’t return to Sudan. Muna can’t return to Iraq. They left war-torn countries and had to leave their languages behind. They had to land in a world of English and ADAPT. Street signs, TV, magazines – wherever they look, it’s English. And the remarkable thing is, they’ve learned it.

I am in awe.

Researchers say that immigrants have a greater forward focus than other people, that they’ve opted to make a future for themselves, to tackle the major changes that future requires. They’re motivated. They’re brave.

And what do they want to do? They want to volunteer, to contribute, to do something helpful while they improve their English. They want to make friends who’ll have the patience to let them speak English and get better at it.

It’s been two weeks since my Japanese trial by fire, and I can’t remember a bit of it. I haven’t tried because … because it was uncomfortable. It was a New Thing I was glad to ditch … and I could.

But it was a major blast of awareness, a staggering recognition of how very, very hard it is for our new immigrants. That’s the New Thing I’m glad to re-learn over and over again.

Citizen Amanda

A new year, a new beginning, a New Thing; and it’s not even mine. It’s Amanda’s. Amanda is a brand new American citizen.

Amanda came to the United States from El Salvador six years ago as a 20-year-old au pair. In El Salvador, she’d been a nurse’s assistant, but when she decided to come to the United States, she took another year and a half to learn English in preparation. Now, after a couple of years at the Alaska Literacy Program – where she was one of my students – Amanda is enrolled at UAA to get credentialed.

It’s hard.

Her whole venture has been hard. In six years, Amanda has not been back home, has only seen her mother on Skype. Her second year was the hardest, when most of her au pair peer group returned home, and she was lonely. Amanda is outgoing, creative, fun to be around; but 20-somethings don’t readily forge friendships with people whose English is developing. Think about it: how many of our friendships are with people who want to improve their English? The people Amanda meets in ESL (English as a Second Language) programs often return home after a year or so.

But Amanda persisted.

I read recently that immigrants have a future orientation; they’re looking to make a brighter day. That future orientation often leads them to giving the economy a push. Something in Amanda wanted the future, and she kept at it, making it happen.

Fortunately, her au pair employer appreciated her so much that she hired Amanda after her service ended. Eventually, Amanda met Ryan and they married. In 2013, Amanda applied for residency and now, years later, she could become a citizen.

My mother used to work for the Family Court, and she said the happiest days of her week were Thursdays: Adoption Day. I bet the happiest days in the Federal Building are Naturalization Ceremony days. Families come as parents and grandparents, wives and husbands, become citizens. Friends and colleagues, teachers and neighbors are there, and everyone is dressed up for the occasion.

The room was full with about forty new citizens from all over. There was some music, some singing, and a heartfelt address by a now-successful immigrant. All the speakers and the judge acknowledged that these new citizens may have to face a lot of negative comments and insults in the America we now experience – a sad message to people who swear an Oath of Allegiance pledging to support and defend the Constitution and laws of the U.S.

Many of these new citizens have left war or famine, persecution or other tragedies behind. They have lived here for the required three to five years of residency, may have learned a new language or a new vocation. None of it is easy. The only easy road is the one I traveled simply by virtue of the accident of having been born here … because my grandparents fled persecution and faced that tough road themselves.

When I was 20, I was a happy-go-lucky college kid. When Amanda was 20, she was moving alone to a new country.

Citizen Amanda, I’m glad you’re here!

Lessons of the Chilkoot Trail #3

Question for my Third Third: If it’s not enjoyable, why am I doing it?

Climbing the Golden Stairs required intense focus. Mountain climbers like that feeling, they say it makes them feel really alive. I like intense focus, too; I call it “flow.” My flow comes from a creative activity: art, writing, theater, problem-solving. Not from clinging to a rock on a mountainside.

It wasn’t just the Golden Stairs. The whole Chilkoot Trail requires focus. Every footstep has to be planted, whether it’s over a shaky plank or on rocks through a creek, through rocks and scree on an eroding trail or assessing the depth of mud. You can’t just amble along, idly hiking and humming like Winnie-the-Pooh without looking at your feet. When we’d get to the rare spruce needle path, I’d shout hooray and relish the cushiony simplicity of merely walking and looking around.

What I like about hiking: the big, wide, expansiveness of Nature, how it invades your senses without any extra attention.

What bothered me about the Chilkoot: the big, wide, expansiveness of Nature was where I placed my foot. Sure I stopped frequently and looked around and marveled, but the focus was on the ground, on my next step. I had to interrupt to appreciate the Nature around me.

On the other hand, the terrain and landscape was spectacular. I look at photos I took and gasp at the beauty.

I think fondly of the people I met along the trail. By traveling from camp to camp, you meet up at the end of each day’s hike. The crowd from Sea to Sky Expeditions became special from the very first. Nathalie and Kate shared their gourmet meals, and we all shared conversation. Marty and 12-year-old Lucas were a particular delight; camp didn’t feel complete till I found them each day.

Afterwards, relaxing at the end of the Trail, at the last camp in Bennett, I looked at the photos Lee took on the Golden Stairs. (She lifted her hands to take a photo!) Joan and Barbara were on two legs, not all fours. “This must have been after the first false summit, right?”

“No, that was on the main part.” But how could they stand up??? I don’t understand. Was I just crawling when everyone else was walking? I was all alone so I had no one to observe (even if I could take my eyes off my immediate hand-holds). How real was my horror?

I emailed the National Park Service and Parks Canada to find out just how steep the Stairs are, and they told me “that the Golden Stairs hill has an average slope angle of 35 degrees with the steepest part measuring in at 45 degrees about 3/4 of the way up the Stairs.” That is VERY, VERY STEEP. I am not just a scaredy-cat.

So now we’re back at Barbara’s question: “What exactly was the point?”

Was it some bucket-list aspiration? Was it about conquering some difficult task and feeling the pride of accomplishment? Was it about stretching myself? Or was it about enjoying the company of women in the beauty of Nature?

It was all those things. But you don’t conquer the fear of heights. You stifle it, get past it, don’t let it limit your life choices, but you don’t enjoy it. I once took a behavior modification class where people learn to get over fears. We began with the intellectual: is the catastrophe you imagine realistically going to happen? The next step is doing a lot of the fear-inducing thing till you’ve minimized it. Finally, there are relaxation and calming exercises.

The only thing that worked on that mountain was brute emotional force.

And let me tell you about relying on brute emotional force: it’s not what I want for my Third Third. That’s it. I’ve earned – and learned – better. It’s no test I want to “pass”; it’s a test I don’t even want to take. I have it, I’m capable of doing it, but I don’t have to seek it out.

Would it be a terrible shame if I’d missed all the glorious aspects of Nature on the Chilkoot Trail? If I hadn’t seen all those artifacts close up? If I hadn’t met all the warm-hearted people I spent time with on the Trail, shared the camaraderie of the women? No, there are more beautiful places in the world than any of us can visit in one lifetime. Find one that fuels your soul.

I say this, and I mean it. This is the lesson I’m taking from the Chilkoot Trail. But I’m beginning to think the Chilkoot Trail is like labor and delivery. After a while, the discomfort fades and you tell jokes about it, laugh over it. It didn’t kill you, right?

If you find me laughing about being terrified on that mountain, smack me about the head.

Lessons of the Chilkoot Trail #2

Two hours into the Chilkoot Trail, we stopped for a snack break. I sat in a lovely spot under a tree … in a pool of sap. My pants were a sticky mess, soaking through to my underwear. When I pulled them down to go to the bathroom, it tore from my skin like duct tape. For the rest of the trip, I carried bits of the Trail with me, stuck to my pants.

This was not a problem on the Trail. This was a “funny anecdote.”

The river had reached flood stage and the ranger warned us at the outset that waters were waist high. Fortunately, by the time we got to the worst part, the river had crested and people had laid out planks of wood to traverse the miles-long swamp. We had to climb over rickety debris to figure out the next path through the muck, tilting and turning, stretching to reach the next foothold. One false step and we’d be soaked and filthy.

This was not a problem on the Trail. This was an adventure. We called it the “jungle gym.”

The last thing on my to-do list before going was to sew and secure the buckle on my backpack. I didn’t get to it. After stopping at our first camp, Gwen approached me with a found buckle: mine! The trip would have been impossible without it.

This was a potential problem on the Trail that didn’t materialize.

The Trail includes a long suspension bridge. My fear of heights rose up and lodged in my throat. The bridge swayed, the slats looked rickety, the river below roared. I had to keep moving and force my way forward. Somewhere in the middle, I thought I’d throw up, but then I’d have to lean over the side or look through the slats. I made it over. I have steely resolve, after all.

This was a problem that foreshadowed a far bigger problem: the Golden Stairs.

When I'd looked at the pictures of the stampeders going over the Golden Stairs in winter, all lined up, it didn’t look bad: they were standing on two legs, there were a lot of them in a line. That’s winter, when 1,500 steps were cut in the snow. This is summer, when there are only boulders up the steep, 35-to-45-degree slope with orange wands planted intermittently so you can find your way.

This is what you have to do to climb the Golden Stairs: you reach up with your hand and find a stable boulder that holds its position. You search your feet around to find supports for them. You look ahead for the wand. Sometimes your head can’t lift because a jutting boulder blocks your pack; you have to reposition with a shifting 37-pound pack on your back. At all costs, you DO NOT look down. Your whole world is just your next step: choose a rock, test it, step up, fight off fear, don’t look down. Choose a rock, test it, fight off fear.

Hysteria nipped at my psyche. By then, I knew I was nimble and strong. On any other rocks, I would be scrambling like a monkey, sure-footed in my trusty, beloved new boots, but here I was high up on a steep slope.

I made it to the first false summit. There are three. It levels off for a bit so I calmed because now I couldn’t fall the whole way down anymore. Then it started raining. Then I became trapped behind a guide and an extremely fearful, slow-moving woman. Then the wind picked up.

The summit is less than halfway on that day’s hike, and there’s a hut at the top. I’m sure I read something once about a ranger there, about hot chocolate. It turned out to be a freezing closet that could barely hold eight people. When my teeth started chattering, I knew I had to get going. The next camp is four miles away over more difficult rock scrambling; shifting, eroding paths on the steep edges of water; hazardous creeks and icy snowfields to negotiate; yes, beautiful wildflowers and waterfalls.

It took 11 hours to go the eight miles from Sheep Camp to Happy Camp.

I walked into Happy Camp and two women offered me hot tea. “Do you have a cup?”

I stared. Cup?

“Here, use our bowl.”

After three bowls, I set up the tent in the pouring rain. Later, when Barbara and I were lying in the tent, she asked, “What exactly was the point?”

Tomorrow, the point. Or not.

More than the sound of music

When I wrote yesterday about all that culture in New York City, you might have noticed a glaring absence: what, no music? Well, barely any: there were two Broadway musicals, but that was just incidental. I don’t seek out music. Mostly, I actively avoid it.

I don’t know if it’s being sort of tone deaf or the ulcer I got at age 12 from piano lessons. The day I quit piano lessons – and I was pretty far along – was the last time I touched a piano.

Oh, I love the Rolling Stones and a good dance beat. I like the early Bob Dylan and Joe Cocker and Laura Nyro; and lately, I’ve been experimenting with cello performances and I enjoy them. When Sophie played the bass, I loved the deep, enveloping sound. I’m thinking of taking bass lessons. So I’m not a music-hater, more like music-reluctant.

When Grant Cochran of the Anchorage Concert Chorus asked if I’d take the part of the narrator in this week’s (tomorrow and Sunday) performances of Verdi’s Defiant Requiem, so many alarm bells went off for me: music! Classical music! Religious classical music! Catholic religious classical music! And then, because these performances highlight the Requiem in the Terezín (Theresienstadt) concentration camp, more alarm bells: not another Holocaust-Jewish-victimhood story again! Jews having to perform for Nazis like little puppets.

Everything said No! … so I said yes. But I was worried that with two performances AND two rehearsals it would be a struggle not to fall asleep in front of an audience.

Then my world shifted.

Wednesday night was the first rehearsal, and I am STUNNED. No, let me put it more accurately: I have FELT music, and it is TREMENDOUS!

Even the first view of the stage can knock you off your feet: 200 singers and 80 musicians! It’s the Anchorage Concert Chorus and UAA Singers, 13 music professors, Anchorage Concert Chorus orchestra and UAA Sinfonia. They’re all there!

I sit with six basses, ten cellos. There are four bassoons. Way over the sea of violins are giant drums, more trumpets. And when the singers sing, it’s no anemic, barely-heard-above-the-music singing – it’s a thunder of singing.

Murry Sidlin, the conductor who brings the Defiant Requiem around the world, clarified things. The inmates of Terezín sang the Requiem – from one copy of the score, committing it to memory – for themselves, not for the Nazis. They were nobody’s puppets. Long after they’d labored all day, mostly starving, mostly sick, they sang. They sang for an audience of mostly starving, mostly sick, mostly beaten-up fellow inmates. When one survivor says this singing gave her “pure joy” – in a concentration camp – I started to understand. This music was their creativity, their affirmation, their expression of personhood in a place that sought to deny it. It kept them alive.

When they were forced to do it for the Nazis – just once – they sang it to their faces. They sang out their courage, their being human, their having dignity and character and music. The Defiant Requiem is a story of defiance, not victimhood. It’s a story of standing up in refusal to be beaten down.

Now I get it. Music-reluctant me gets it. When the trumpets do call-and-response, when sweet sounds come from some place I can’t locate, when the voices rise up with spirit and defiance; I FEEL it. When all those basses rumble, my insides rumble. When the whole chorus erupts in song together, something inside me boils over. My whole self gasps and stands up.

Is it the music or the history? I don’t know; I’m a music novice. But I suspect they can’t be separated. I don’t know the words; all I hear is boldness and will, just like the Terezín inmates heard. Do the musicians and singers inject the spirit? Did Verdi? Do we the listeners?

Or is it just the sound of the big life force of being human?

I don't get it.

Every now and then, I encounter a New Yorker thing that I just don’t get. Sometimes it just seems odd; other times, it’s a way of living that I don’t (wouldn’t?) participate in. Take, for example, the concept of “books by the foot.”

At the Strand Bookstore:

We can assemble a great book by the foot collection for you that will satisfy the mind and please the eye. Book by the foot collections can be made to order based on color, binding, material, size, and height to match your specific style and home decor.

Who picks their reading lists by color, size, and height? Oh, I see, they’re not to be read. And Steven Spielberg is one of their clients? Oh, I see, maybe he’s doing it for movie sets. I hope so.

I also don’t think New Yorkers cook meals, but that just may be New Yorkers who live in apartments. Or maybe that’s just New Yorkers who live in Manhattan in studio apartments. I’m still trying to get to the bottom of this one.

My apartment has a dishwasher. As my cousin pointed out, there’s not enough room in the cabinets to have enough dishes to even make a load. There’s not enough room in the cabinets to stock any staples. A friend of mine’s fully-equipped, high-end kitchen still has only two burners. I was in a delicatessen one evening around 5:30. Suddenly, I was swamped by people ordering a half-pound of this, a pound of that. They don’t cook, they “heat up.”

New Yorkers and their kids ride scooters, not skateboards. Kick scooters, like Razors, the ones Sophie and the Alaska kids had when they were little and which are now clearly an old, dead fad. Not in New York. That’s what they ride here. My guess: in a crowd, it’s easier to pick it up and over a curb than bending down to retrieve your skateboard with your head in everyone’s butt. But that’s only a guess.

Runners. Runners here run in thick crowds, on concrete, around obstacles, on horrible paver stones. I am a spoiled runner. The idea of running in and around LOTS of people who are not running, who are strolling or just waiting for a bus – who are wearing suits! – is beyond unappealing. I can’t even believe these runners attempt what they do – why? They’ll ruin their feet on the concrete, and what kind of meditative experience is it? But that gets to Nature and wilderness and Alaska and me, and that’s a subject for another day.

I don’t get what the trucks are doing between 2 and 5 a.m. that can possibly make THAT MUCH NOISE right in front of the apartment building. The doorman thinks they’re unloading and reloading office furniture … every night of the week. I checked … and that’s what they’re doing!

Sometimes, the thing I don’t “get” is more profound. I spent one afternoon at the Transit Museum in Brooklyn. They had an exhibition on operating in crises: 9/11, the power blackout of 2003, Superstorm Sandy, etc. Going through the 9/11 photos and video testimonials was powerful. Regular subway operators described how they encountered terrified people in the Cortlandt Street Station and stopped to jam them on the train because they were so frightened. Bus drivers ferried as many people as they could out and home. Photos of New Yorkers – more than you could ever imagine – walking across the bridges trying to get home.

I was in San Francisco on 9/11 for a week’s run of my one-woman show. Flight 93 was headed to San Francisco; it was full of locals. The City was put on lockdown, the Golden Gate Bridge was closed. 9/11 felt very immediate. We all know where we were when it happened.

But I wasn’t in New York City. Ground Zero was GROUND ZERO here. Regular old people in their regular old jobs had to take on emergency duties, had to take on life-saving duties, had to conquer their own fears and step up. Had to live with what happened that day.

9/11 wasn’t TV coverage for New Yorkers. It was right here, and they had to deal with it, go to sleep to it, wake up to it, live with it. We all know the “you had to be there” feeling, the way you just can’t describe something to someone who hasn’t experienced it. The New Yorkers who lived through 9/11 were touched in a way that I was not. I have a new and profound respect for their ability to get up, get moving, help out, face grief. I imagine they look at each other and know, in their souls, “We were here.”

I wasn’t.

Facing down the Big F

I’d first discovered Brené Brown back in November when I wrote about her work as a “vulnerability researcher.”  So now I’ve just finished her book Daring Greatly, and there’s a couple of things that really resonated with me.

Brené’s daughter was freaked out about having to race breast stroke at a meet, that the breast stroke wasn’t her event, that she’d be the last girl in the water. Brené asked her, “What if your goal for that race isn’t to win or even to get out of the water at the same time as the other girls? What if your goal is to show up and get wet?”

Brené explained that there were many things she’d never tried in her life because she feared failure. As a result, she’d missed out on feeling brave. Her daughter could have scratched, could have avoided the whole contest. Instead, she “got wet,” performed pretty badly, but felt brave afterwards. I guess Brené’s advice is what being a “vulnerability researcher” is all about.

Elsewhere in the book, Brené thinks about the well-known quote, “What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?” And instead she asks this question, “What’s worth doing even if I fail?”

That’s a whole different question! In the first, you’re evaluating your choices while liberated from potential failure; you’re saved from failure in advance. In the second, failure – in all its soul-crushing devastation – descends. The second question forces you to confront the experience of failure, forces you to decide whether to be brave and still do it. It presupposes failure and then asks, “So what will you do with that information?”

Failure is a profound experience. Such a bottoming-out, crushing, unpleasant experience. I failed so badly at graduate school, I think it left me with a stutter for a while: I was afraid of expressing myself and being shot down yet again. But it set in motion a new plan for my life, new paths I’d explore. It helped me define what I wanted and where I’d find it. Mostly I think if I’m happy with my life, even the bumps, the mistakes, and the failures got me here so they all served a purpose.

My mother used to say whatever doesn’t kill you outright makes you stronger (which drove me crazy as a kid). That whole graduate school experience made me a little less fearful of failure. It did something to my self-esteem, too. After a while, I could look at academia and critique it instead of feeling demeaned by it. I could understand the influences I’d let operate on me and instead know that I had to make better choices for myself. I began to know myself as resilient.

But twice (at least) I dodged the bullet, didn’t get in the water. Both involved travel to somewhat risky locales, but I think I exaggerated the risks to justify my fears. I still feel squirmy about them, knowing that I caved, knowing that I missed two extraordinary opportunities.

So what does all this mean for my Third Third? How much of my future planning is constrained by a fear of failure? What if I sat here and said, “Try it. It will all go wrong, but will that matter in the end? Will you feel squirmier for not doing it than you will for trying it?”

The thing about the fear of failure is that you have to dissect it. Is it fear of failure or are you just not interested in pursuing something? Are you just fooling yourself (“Oh, I don’t really want to do that anyway.”) or are you backing away? Sometimes we’ve become so practiced at eliminating options that we don’t even know why they fall off the radar. And sometimes, we just dawdle them away.

So now I’m going to look at my assorted Third Third scenarios and examine them: would I feel brave afterwards? Would I feel squirmy if I didn’t pursue them? “What’s worth doing even if I fail?”


* Special little technological treat that I just discovered from Pogue’s Basics by David Pogue. He has all sorts of handy dandy little tricks, like this one: if you have to write Brené with that accent over the é, and you have a Mac, you hold down the e key and – lo and behold – seven different variations of e show up and you get to pick the one you want! That is my delight of the day!

Wanted: An all-consuming passion

I’ve just finished reading The Great Detective: The Amazing Rise and Immortal Life of Sherlock Holmes by Zach Dundas. I read all the Sherlock Holmes’ stories when I was in junior high … except the very last one because I didn’t want to live in a world that had no new Sherlock Holmes.

Little did I know there’d be Benedict Cumberbatch, Robert Downey, Jr., and Elementary.

Dundas was that kind of kid, too. As a preteen, he founded the first Sherlock Holmes fan club for fans under 21. Now, with a young family, he decided to find out what the Sherlock Holmes mystique is all about. He visited the Baker Street Irregulars (New York’s still-active fan club from the 1930s) and London’s Sherlock Holmes Society. He met the editor of the Baker Street Journal, discovered the Baker Street Babes. He read or watched the scripts, plays, and films “starring” Sherlock Holmes. He researched Arthur Conan Doyle’s life, all the derivative literature, the Great Game (scholarly studies about Holmes and Watson). He checked out assorted 221B Baker Streets, the moors of the Baskervilles, London streets. Along the way, he discovered that FDR was a secret fan member and that a whole genre of fanfiction (“fic”) exists (which I think is kind of Sherlock porn).

The book is funny, fascinating, and well-researched, but it’s also something bigger: evidence of a quest, a mission. And I am so jealous.

Here he was with something that interested him so much, he’d invest years in it, drag his family along on his exploratory travels, meet people, attend things, follow up on leads.

I want an interest like that.

Back in 1980, I discovered my first waterslide in Spain. I ran up, slid down, ran up, slid down, all day. Then, when Sophie was 2, we discovered a tiny waterpark in Puerto Vallarta. It was a little bitty thing, but it whisked us out a tube in a whirl of water and splash. I was hooked.

After that, I found waterparks wherever we traveled. I told Sophie that if I ever had a summer off, we’d cross the country by waterpark. So then I got a job with summers off.

I began correspondence with waterpark designers, manufacturers, trade associations. They sent specs, photos, videos. We started mapping out our path across the country. Then, in the summer of 2002, we did the National Waterpark Tour. We drove 10,000 miles, visited 24 waterparks across the United States, wore out three bathing suits, and only had ten stitches to my head. Along the way, I stopped off at public radio stations and delivered commentary. We met with waterpark owners. Where we had family or friends, we’d drag them off to the waterparks, too. Tim met us mid-trip.

At each waterpark, we were the first on line at 9:30, the last out of the water at 8 p.m. Every waterpark was different. Every single one aroused our interest and delight and challenged our fears and courage. It was a summer of pure joy. I could write a book about it – and did (an unfinished one).

For years, I couldn’t go anywhere or do any speaking engagement without people asking, “So tell us, which was your favorite waterpark?”

But that was 14 years ago. And nothing has taken the place of that mission, that passion, that all-encompassing quest, since then. Many, many things interest me, but not to the level of two years of preparation and dream fulfillment. And yes, a major part was the chance to spend that time with 10-year-old Sophie.

I could sit here and tell you waterparks may be a silly passion, a shallow exercise in adrenalin. It’s not saving the world, after all. In fact, it’s right up there with surfers following waves, and they’re at least in nature. But really – the thrill, the cleanliness of water, the absence of my land-clumsiness, the variety in design. I still love a good ride, but another tour? No.

My friend Angelo has been in love with trains his whole life; in his retirement, he’s collecting oral histories of railroad folks. He’s working on a book about it. This passion drives his retirement years. I want that!

You can’t install a mission into your life. It has to develop organically from passion. I do believe you can set yourself up to be receptive, to be open to a new interest, but mostly you just have to be ready to follow passion when it emerges. In the meantime, you have interests and projects, mini-passions and mini-quests.

Where is the Big One? How do I find it?

Vietnam: It was "our" war

If we’re all in our Third Thirds, then Vietnam is a big part of our past. Whether we fought in it, fought against it, had brothers who did or didn’t, friends who did or didn’t; it haunted our lives for a time. And long afterwards, we lived with the decisions we’d made during that time.

Maybe it was a formative time in my life – high school and college. Maybe it was the combination of civil rights, feminism, and Woodstock, but I feel the Vietnam War helped make me into the person I am now.

Nevertheless, I seem to be visiting a lot of World War II museums lately. First Portland, now the National World War II Museum in New Orleans.

I learned a ton of things I never knew. I hadn’t heard of Ruperts, dummy paratroopers that made the D-Day invasion look larger to the Germans. I hadn’t heard of Operation Bodyguard which was the giant deception plan to make the Germans think the invasion was going to be somewhere else, complete with inflatable tanks so they’d appear real to enemy aircraft. In the “Road to Tokyo” exhibit, I realized I knew not a bit about the geography, the islands, and where things were fought; it was all a big empty space in my brain.

But something is bothering me about all this. I’m going to bounce it around here so please help me out if you can clarify. When my book club read To End All Wars, we were blown away by what was happening on the home front during World War I. There were disagreements, raging controversy, political divisions. Big ones, like domestic war.

This is one of the things I got from the World War II Museum: it was won by America’s massive, unprecedented, and truly astonishing production. Planes, tanks, the invention of the Higgins boat right there in New Orleans. When I read about the HUGE load of materials needed overseas for D-Day – it took two years to accumulate it – I saw the enormity of the task.

Yes, the Museum had a Rosie the Riveter poster, but my own mother was an air raid warden, yet I’ve never seen that in a museum. I don’t even know how wartime rationing occurred in the U.S.: were there coupon books?

I know there’s a difference between risking your life and screwing in a bolt, but if everyone says that was a time when everyone pulled together, then where’s the “everyone”? Museums have gotten better in some things: there are panels about the highly decorated Japanese regiment and the Tuskegee Airmen and about how those soldiers came home to discrimination. There were photos of the liberation of the concentration camps … but no mention of the turning away of the St. Louis and its Jewish refugees.

I guess what I’m driving at is the messiness of war. We used to say the Vietnam War was fought in our living room. Uncles insisting their sons would go; sons planning moves to Canada. Families glued to television sets, waiting for lottery numbers to be drawn. Black armbands, marches, protests. “The Ballad of the Green Berets,” body bags, Agent Orange. Pentagon Papers. My Lai.

I don’t know if there’s a Vietnam War Museum in the works. Is it even possible to make a Vietnam War Museum? Would the fights about what goes in it be the same as those fights in the living rooms? Do we have to wait years and years to reflect on our history and does that tend to smooth it out, soften its edges? Give it a false nostalgia? Paint it with a “greatest generation” brush and erase any controversy?

In World War II museums, I’m shown patriotic movies that stir the soul, not Japanese internment camps, for example. I learn “how,” not “whether” (and I’ll grant the necessity of the war itself). But if the intent is to thank, isn’t that a war memorial, not a museum?

When I walked through the state museum exhibit about Hurricane Katrina, I saw the heroism of individuals, the supportiveness of community, the sheer glory and tenacity of human beings. But I also saw an indictment of political apathy and infighting; scathing rebukes of political deceit and negligence; rethinking of scientific policy. There was no dancing around the issues. I saw how things went bad, thought about how they could be improved.

A Vietnam War museum would have to be as tangled as the jungle, as angry as protesters, and as unsure as the newest recruit. Brave enough to look at the mistakes and damage, the heroism, sacrifices, and lessons. Inclusive enough to honor all viewpoints and to remember the home front, but sensitive enough to lead us to understanding. I’d spend days in a museum like that.

"Taking no shit" in our Third Thirds

Every now and then, you get an insight into yourself. Or you see yourself in a certain light, and it’s really glaring. A couple of things happened recently where I became aware that my reactions were different from other people’s. Now I’m wondering if they’re part of my character or part of reaching my Third Third.

The first one happened with my sister. She’s in what I consider an intolerable work situation: unreasonable organizational demands with zero institutional support and a malevolent boss on top of all that. Even just writing that, my blood boils. Maybe it’s because this is my youngest sister whom I love and she should not be subjected to that, but mostly I think no one has to take shit like that. To my sister I said, “Life is short. Get out.” (I admit, I also said, “Tell her off.”)

The second one happened with someone I gave time and attention to, and he didn’t acknowledge me. I told him he didn’t, that I noticed, and that expressing thanks would get him further in the world. He’s a terrific guy. He got the message and thanked me, saying he was glad I “told it like it is.”

Then the third one was a conversation I was part of: did I like the window or aisle seats on an airplane? On red-eyes, I like the window, even though there’s less space, so I can lean against the wall. “But,” another woman said, “then you can’t go to the restroom when you need to” (or something similar). Things like that mystify me: not be able to go to the bathroom? If I have to go to the bathroom, I simply tell middle and aisle seats that I’m getting up. I either climb over them or they get up to let me out. Am I supposed to squirm for hours??

I don’t think I’m a steamroller, mowing down people in my path – I hope not! – but it is sort of vigilante behavior. I don’t think I was always like this. I remember being downright timid in college, intimidated by professors, too nervous to go to their office hours.

But somewhere along the line, I spoke up or got out. When graduate school turned out to be a torture chamber of power and bullying, I left. When friends started dying of AIDS in my 20s in San Francisco, I learned that life is short. I read about a study that researched why some people with AIDS lived for years and others died sooner. They concluded that the survivors were VERY QUICK to remove negative influences from their lives, whether they were jobs, relationships, whatever. That stuck with me. And then, when I was fired from a job after an election replaced the administration, I knew that jobs didn’t keep you warm at night and institutions don’t come with loyalty.

So you see what I’m getting at? By the time we reach our Third Thirds, have we simply learned to “take no shit” or was it part of us to begin with and I just have an extra dose of brash? Will I become one of those old people who push to get to the front of the line? When does healthy assertiveness become “old curmudgeon”?

Yikes, just look at the stereotypes in that last paragraph!

I found myself in a conversation with Connie and Elizabeth: were we “nice” women? When younger, Connie always tried – unsuccessfully – to be quiet. I made New Year’s resolutions to be “demure.” It was never a take. Now, in our Third Thirds, are we claiming our right to be heard … but still feel the pull of being nice? Is this the particular social context our Second and Third Thirds were/are in, where women emerged from old gender expectations?

So maybe this is a nature vs. nurture question. I’m just so curious whether this is learned, whether I bring to my Third Third the benefit of realizing that life is too short to put up with malevolence, discourtesy, ridiculous conventions. Or whether by the time we reach our Third Third we simply have the confidence to express ourselves.

Or whether I’m just not as polite as other people.

The fruits of slavery

Recently, a national columnist wrote about how university presidents were being removed because of whining college students. She even remarked on the example of students – whining students – being subjected to racial slurs.

Whoa… Are you whining when you stand up and say, “Enough!”? When this problem keeps happening and happening and the administration does nothing … and only listens when the football team stands up, too? I must admit, I thought it was brilliant to get the football team’s support. Many football players leave university with barely a college education (not to mention brain injury), but they will have brought in alumni money. What a game changer to have them involved!

A few days ago, I heard about the Harvard Law students wanting to change the official seal because it depicts sheaves of wheat from the Royall family crest. The Royall family were slave traders. One person interviewed asked, “What are we going to do? Change the name of our capital because Washington owned slaves?”

Hmm, this is an interesting question. I thought, “What if the seal featured a swastika?” That would really offend me, make me feel like every time I saw it, it was saying, “You’re not welcome here.” That’s why we object to the flying of the Confederate flag.

But then I thought about what a new university seal would mean. It would mean that no one would know about Harvard’s history coming out of the slave trade. It could quietly disappear from awareness. We could pretend it didn’t happen. What’s the best way to proceed?

I recently read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book Between the World and Me. Coates is a powerful writer, and he writes things like “Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free.”

“Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.”

When I visited my sister in Berlin, I saw Stolpersteine, cobblestones or “stumbling blocks,” laid into the sidewalks in front of residences where people had been deported and later exterminated in concentration camps. They’re meant to remind people – maybe even those living in the residences – that they can live there because someone else was murdered.

We don’t have anything like that in the U.S. Imagine if people who bought homes with FHA loans had to put markers in front of their houses saying that they qualified for federal mortgages – and the homes which appreciated in value – because they were white, that nonwhites were barred from living there. What if when those houses were sold, their heirs had to sign a paper acknowledging that their inheritance was a result of the racism practiced by the U.S. government in enforcing housing segregation and the creation of ghettos?

I don’t know how many of you I’m losing here, but I firmly believe that racism is so ingrained that we don’t realize how many of our benefits TODAY accrue from that.

So what if the Harvard law students instead insisted that everywhere the seal existed, there had to be a companion statement: “These sheaves of wheat represent the slave trade, which was instrumental in financing the founding of Harvard Law”? Hey, we require warnings on cigarette cartons. Ooh, I just discovered a revised seal showing black slaves hauling the sheaves of wheat!

Oh, no, here I am in my Third Third, and I still prefer the in-your-face approach to social change. But you know what? Yesterday I thought about where I was when Star Wars came out. And then I thought of where I was when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. Civil Rights defined our formative years, and I’m disheartened, frustrated, and so angry that the wrongs continue unacknowledged.

I wish America could confront our “moral debts.” I wish America could become whole.