Why?

Why is life so unfair? Why do some good people experience sadness, loss, frustration, illness – a litany of Wednesday’s Child’s woes – while others (some of whom are real rotters) – skip happily through life without a care? Yes, I know that books have been written on this subject, but I feel compelled to ask the question anyway.

Consider this: a toddler – barefoot, sweet, innocent, loving – sees a horse and runs to pet it. The horse is loose and grazing peacefully – facing away from the on-coming child. The unexpected touch startles the horse and it does what a horse is wont to do: kicks in reaction. The child’s skull is shattered; she lies unconscious.

How did this happen? A series of events occurred, and if any one of them had been ever so slightly changed, the outcome would have been different.

1. It is the end of August. The pasture is dry and over-grazed, so the horse is allowed to feed on the lawn. (This was a normal occurrence).

2. The grandmother and aunt sit beside a swimming pool up-hill from the horse. They can see the horse, but because of the rolling yard, they can not see the horse’s lower legs. A row of arborvitae trees stand between the house and the hill leading up to the pool, blocking the view of the horse from the driveway and house.

3. Two neighbor girls enter the yard and ask if they can pet the horse. The grandmother says no, they must never go near the horse because she is easily spooked and might kick them. (The words of this conversation described exactly what would happen moments later).

4. The grandfather returns from picking up the toddler and her mother. The round-trip has taken him about half an hour. (One more car at a stop-sign, one red light being green would have changed the outcome).

5. The mother, child and grandfather get out of the car. Mother heads toward the back of the house to get her bathing suit off the clothesline, and as she does, all three hear the telephone ringing. Thinking the toddler is with the other, both the mother and the grandfather run to answer the phone – the mother to the back door, the grandfather to the front. They meet in the kitchen at the phone, each asking the other where the toddler is. Mother answers the phone while grandfather runs back to find the child, but the child has disappeared.

6. The phone call is from a disabled aunt who has never phoned before. She called the mother’s apartment, getting no answer and apparently being determined to make a call, decided to try calling the grandparents home. The aunt had no particular reason to call, nor did she know the grandparents. The mother quickly says she can not talk right now and hurries outside to find the toddler. (What caused this person to make that pointless phone call? What sparked the idea to also try the grandparents’ house?)

7. Meanwhile, the grandmother and aunt see the horse jump and comment on how they had just warned the neighbor girls about such a thing. Although they had been watching the horse, the lay of the land blocked their view of the toddler approaching it. (Turn the horse so slightly so that the toddler’s approach was not a surprise...)

Seizures and paralysis followed, were treated, and the toddler regained her health and lives a normal life until thirty-six years later when she suffers a grand mal seizure, the apparent result of that long-ago head injury. Following a seizure, a person must not drive a car for six months; in a rural area, there is no mass transit. This grown-up toddler, now a home-health nurse and the mother of a 4-year-old, has suddenly lost the ability to go to work, to earn a living, to get to the grocery store, or to “drive my son to the beach.” She has done only good in this world. Why did this happen to her?

Wizard Oil

You don't want to know how they squeeze this stuff out of the wizards...

1866

photograph: "Heads Up" - sunflowers near Christ Church, Upper Canada Village © 2006 wizenedeye.com

I can't get enough of Upper Canada Village. The creation of the St. Lawrence Seaway flooded several small towns and thousands of buildings that stood near the river's low-lying shores, and this Canadian Heritage Park was created as an attempt to preserve and commemorate a part of what was lost.

The Village is a re-creation of a typical rural community of southern Ontario in the year 1866. Some of Upper Canada Village's buildings were moved from areas soon to be flooded; others came from nearby towns and are representative of structures from the period; a few buildings are newly constructed using lumber milled at the water-powered sawmill in the Village. To go there is to step back in time (minus the worries of that age, of course).

I love to visit the seamstress or the miller or the cooper; love watching the piglets run free. I smile and nod approval to the gardener in one of the healthy-looking, weed-free vegetable gardens, note the goldenrod-dyed hand-spun wool yarn at the weaver’s, and admire the beautiful quilt being pieced in one of the log farmhouses. I sniff in the smell of freshly sawn boards at the water-driven mill. The St. Lawrence River flows nearby, the sun is ripening this summer’s abundance of apples and pears, and for an afternoon I forget about global warming, oil dependence and wars.

http://www.uppercanadavillage.com/home.htm

On My Nees

Men take their names for granted, and why shouldn’t they? They’re given a name at birth, and 99+% of them keep it until death. I have only known two men who changed the surname they were born with. The first was one whose grandfather had sired only female offspring. Realizing that his own family name was about to peter out (there’s an interestingly appropriate phrase...), this man asked one of his grandsons (who had a male offspring) to take the legal steps to assume that family name. The other name-changing man did what seemed to be quite a modern – and unique - take on marital name assumption: he and his wife combined their two surnames into a whole new spelling, the marriage creating a new identity for both.

The idea that a woman should “take her husband’s name” undoubtedly goes back to the fact that women have generally been considered the property of men: don’t let them own property (the first state granted women the right to hold property in their own name, with their husbands’ permission, in 1839), don’t let them vote (true in this country until 1920), and be sure they are labeled so that others may know which man makes their decisions for them (still true in too many cases!).

In 1967, in the style of countless brides before me, I marched down the matrimonial aisle, said I did, and signed my new name on the license. I was now Young Woman Jones, nee Wizard. Simple, no hassle identity change – or perhaps theft. It was accomplished by a minister, a minister who would later be thrown out of his church for his anti-Vietnam War views, not for legalizing a bad marriage.

Divorce followed, but even though I was single again, I remained Young Woman Jones, nee Wizard. Admittedly, Jones was easier to spell than Wizard had been.

I married again, this time quite happy to dump the Jones surname and take on the name of my beloved second husband: Young Woman Smith, nee Wizard. The marriage and the name stuck.

About five years ago, I became interested in tracing my ancestors. I realized how many things I had never asked my parents about their roots and set about trying to find the answers. It has been an interesting search, and it has led to an interesting result. As I uncovered more and more of the history of all the “greats” and “great-greats,” a sense of identity emerged. I am now Older Woman Smith, nee Wizard, but the name just isn’t who I really am.

My mother’s family had been early American colonists, Quakers who were banished to Canada in the late 1700s because they refused to bear arms during the Revolution; my paternal grandparents were Austro-Hungarian immigrants. I tried on various combinations of my parents’ surnames with my given name, first favoring the simpler-to-spell maternal name, but somehow that didn’t feel balanced. I divided a piece of paper with a vertical line, wrote my father’s surname at the top of the left-side column and my mother’s surname on the right side. Beneath the name on the left, I listed my traits, talents, abilities etc. reasonably attributable to my father; on the right, those things about me that seemed to have been inherited /learned from my mother. To my surprise, the lists were quite equally weighted. There was my answer: I would use my given name with both of my parents surnames, however clumsy and hard to spell it might be.

I tried it on, and it fit comfortably. That is who I am. I still have trouble writing it, and I still have not gone through all the legal steps to make the change official, but I am using my new “old” name. It feels really good to be off my nees.

Across Lake Champlain

It seems like a good day to showcase the beauty of the North Country. Here's a view across Lake Champlain toward the Adirondack mountains. Photo © 2006 by wizenedeye.com.

Nurse

Last weekend my daughter took a three-day break from her job as a home health-care nurse. She works hard, caring for a number of people who are almost invisible to the rest of us. They all have health problems far greater than our headaches and elevated blood pressure readings, scrapes and head-colds. To her family and friends, they are nameless and have no addresses, known only to us as “a client” in one town or another in this vast area we call The North Country. They must live in urban locales too, where city nurses change their dressings, give their daily enemas, administer their drugs and treatments and at times provide their one link to the world beyond a bedroom or hospital bed installed in a living room or den. She has kept them alive, and sometimes she has seen them die. She has seen the best and the worst of families, of humanity, and she must wonder at the unfairness of life.

My daughter took a three-day break from her job, and during what might have been a wonderful time with her son and companion, she suffered a medical calamity and was taken by local rescue squad to the nearest hospital. Preliminary tests are encouraging, but she doesn’t yet know how her life may be impacted by this illness.

My prayer for her is that the medical people treating her will be the kind of loving and caring doctors and nurses that she herself is. She deserves no less. And of course I want her to be all right. I love her very much.

Max the Bull/Goodbye, Childhood

Max must have come of age gradually, changing by imperceptible increments over several months. I was caught off guard the day I noticed his gleaming eyes and the testosterone-driven threat he posed, for gone was the cute, playful calf, and here was a powerful mass of muscled, hostile, black and white bull. The idea of a breeding program based on live stock rather than artificial insemination suddenly seemed like a really bad idea: looking at Max, I couldn’t imagine how any human could facilitate courtship between him and the ladies of the barn without risking life and limb. The owner of the farm apparently had come to the same conclusion, because not long after my barn visit, a phone call was made and Max was trucked away to meet his McDonalds.

It was a long time ago - and I’d lived a few more years than Max - when a similar sort of thing had happened to me. One hot, sunny day in 1956, I was lying on my stomach in a pile of straw; facing me was a blonde, sun-tanned boy. The other kids had gone home for lunch, but the two of us stayed, resting under the summer sky at “the fort.” For reasons not understood then, it suddenly felt so good to be near that blonde, sun-tanned boy... Probably – like Max – I had been gradually, imperceptibly changing and didn’t realize it, and – also like Max – my life would never be quite the same again. It was nothing more than a new awareness, but that day marked the end of my childhood, the day the “Tom-boy” I had been for ten years was sent off to meet his McDonalds.

And by the way, this story is true - no bull.

Hummingbird Moth (and Hummingbird for comparison)

Bugs are interesting (as long as they aren’t eating your fruit or vegetable gardens). Here’s a photo of a Hummingbird Moth. After being a yellowish-green caterpillar with darker green lines and reddish-brown abdominal spots and a yellow tail horn, it has a wing-span of about 1 ½ - 2 inches and – in its flight stage – lives the lifestyle of a HummingBIRD.

The Gift of the Betty Crocker Magi

(a very short piece of fiction based on a number of actual events)

They arrived en masse late one afternoon. The kitchen was a mess, and a plumber was trying to coax water from the faucet into the sink full of yesterday's dirty dishes. Dinner wasn't showing any sign of materializing out of the clutter.

They had trouped into her house á la surprise party, carrying paper plates and a chocolate cake. "How nice!" she exclaimed with false enthusiasm. Their purpose was to spread the joy that Christians know, but as far as she was concerned, the only thing spreading was crumbs. She thought about how she liked cake with ice cream rather than piety.

She'd had some experience squashing rapture. Once many years ago, her first husband invited two Mormons to their house. It was the holiday season, and besides loathing proselytizers, she was busy. The three wise men sat in the living room discussing Jesus; she wrapped Christmas gifts on the dining room table, tolerating the visitors until one of them gave her husband a knowing, sympathetic smile.

"You have no idea who or what God is," she announced loudly to the followers of Joseph Smith. It wasn't as immediately effective as if she'd proposed to slip into something more comfortable and break out the martinis, but they soon headed for the door, convinced there was no likelihood of diverting her from the road to Hell. The thought of that evening always amuses her.

"I don't really like your chocolate fucking cake,” she said sweetly. (Like them, she believed in the power of The Word).

The Betty Crocker Magi fled more hastily than the Mormons had, just as the plumber announced, "There!" and water began to flow into the sink.

While washing the dishes she decided to have peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for dinner. She wasn't really very hungry, but she would say a prayer of thanks to her god for this food, and she would smile.

Amen.

The Great Bank Robbery

It was a hot summer afternoon in Potsdam, a lazy college town that had turned its students and teachers out to summer pasture. The merchants were complaining about things being “slow” (as they always did at that time of year), yet they, like everyone else, were secretly enjoying the quiet of the off-season. Then it happened: The Great Bank Robbery of 1987.

It certainly wasn’t on anybody’s list of expected occurrences, so the robbers had the advantage of surprising the employees of Community Bank’s tiny satellite location. While they had the element of surprise on their side, they had the distinct disadvantage of being the only three black men in a white Cadillac convertible within probably a hundred miles, and that in a county full of rednecks in pickup trucks.

The local police quickly jumped into action, although they weren’t exactly sure what sort of action they should jump into. By 2:00, Alfred, the town’s one black businessman, had been arrested twice by two different State Troopers, only to be immediately recognized by the local chief and turned loose, his apologies to Alfred gradually morphing into a string of expletives aimed at the visiting forces.

The police did manage to set up roadblocks while the robbers were driving around town trying to decide which way to leave. It would later be learned that they had come to Potsdam on the invitation of a local professor who hoped to do them some social good, but apparently they were in such a hurry to make the most of the opportunity presented that they hadn’t bothered to get their bearings. Someone reported seeing the trio studying a map in the hospital parking lot shortly after the commission of the crime.

At 3:00, Alfred was arrested again, freed again, and decided he might as well go home for the rest of the day.

Lost, confused and road-blocked, the robbers eventually decided to ditch the car and make their get-away on foot. The Cadillac was found at the south side of town, on the north edge of the great swamp.

Meanwhile, the local coffee counters were a-buzz with speculation as “Three men and a Cadillac” began to take on gangland proportions. Not everyone, however, had heard the news. Irv Thompson, high-school English teacher, was home relaxing in blissful ignorance of the excitement... in his house bordering the swamp...

News of The Event reached Vic Jarvis early in the day. He was the proprietor of Vic’s Barbershop and Figure Skating Leotard store, and one after another his clientele wasted no time in giving him the scoop. “Just in case,” Vic set his scissors aside, took his pistol out of storage and placed it in readiness for any would-be robbers. He’d never had any black men come looking for haircuts (or leotards, for that matter), so he figured he’d know them for what they were if three came knocking on this afternoon. Maybe it was the latent figure skater in him, maybe it was just good common sense, but Vic was nervous.

When the location of the found Cadillac was announced, Vic’s fears reached panic proportions. He grabbed the gun, flipped over the “OPEN” sign, jumped in his car and sped south. Although he didn’t know it, Vic reached Irv’s place about the time the first of the bank robbers quietly and peacefully gave himself up.

Bursting into his friend’s living room, gun in hand, alternating frantic questions concerning Irv’s well-being with excerpted news bulletins, Vic made an immediate and profound impression. The idea was that Irv should have the gun to protect himself; an idea punctuated by the deafening blast it made as Vic endeavored to show Irv that it was safe because it wasn’t loaded.

The town’s memory of that eventful day has faded with time. The fate of the bank robbers and their collegiate co-conspirator is forgotten by most of us these years later – most of us except maybe Alfred who still shakes his head in wonder at honky stupidity, and Irv and Vic who occasionally look at a hole in the fireplace mantle and chuckle at how lucky they both were when the shot was fired.

This is a true story. I have changed the names, and 1987 is my best guess at which year these events actually took place.