State of the Union: Flashback

I had a flashback during the approximately 30 minutes I could bear to watch of the State of the Union address.

In the summer of 1974, which for me was the summer between high school and college, I was working the front counter at Kazdal’s Deli on University Way in Seattle. Kazdal’s (which later became the Lock, Stock and Bagel) was more of a lunch spot than a dinner restaurant. So just before 6 p.m. on August 9, the place was pretty quiet.

Suddenly, someone burst in our door and asked if we had a TV. “Nixon’s about to resign!” he said.

No, we didn’t have a TV. “But the Continental does,” said the cook, who had come running in from the kitchen. “Let’s get over there.”

The Continental was the Greek restaurant across the street. The cook dashed on over. I looked around—not a customer in the place—grabbed the keys, locked the front door and followed him.

I was about halfway across when a cop on a motorcycle roared up to me.

“Get back on the sidewalk, Miss. I’m writing you a ticket for jaywalking.”

“But Officer, don’t you know? Nixon’s resigning right now and I have to get to the Continental to see it on TV!”

The policeman was unmoved. He took down my name and address and gave me my ticket, watching me as I ran up to the crosswalk, waited for the light to change, and ran into the Continental, just in time to catch Nixon weirdly yammering on to the American public. He was actually trying to talk about his accomplishments. It seemed, to my 17-year-old ears and eyes, like a badly acted play about a sad, half-crazy man who thought he was the president, which is of course why it came to mind during Trump’s State of the Union speech.

But Nixon’s tone-deaf farewell also felt like the beginning of the end of a bitter, cynical, cacophonous era. And that’s why everyone at the Continental clapped and cheered.

And then, just like that, Gerald Ford was our president, for two and a half years, which meant that those of us who entered college at that exact moment in history got a pass from the daily outrage that had been the lot of our older brothers and sisters. I am not proud of our mid-70s apathy, but I do get it. We were politically worn out by the time we could drive.

In a way, I’m thankful for Gerald Ford. I can see how he played a part in the emotional repair of our exhausted country. Yes, we were appalled when he pardoned Nixon. Later, it became easier to understand why he did it. In 2001, the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation even gave him a Profile in Courage award for doing it.

And there were those priceless Chevy Chase impressions on Saturday Night Live: also part of our national healing process.

If Trump ever resigns or is impeached, it is hard to imagine Vice President Pence rising to the role of Calming Presence in Chief the way Ford did. I prefer to imagine a dreamworld scenario in which Pence is also ousted, and the post-midterm-elections, future democratic Speaker of the House becomes president.

But on January 30, 2018, it was that lack of connection to the real United States of America in which we all live—as opposed to Trump’s fantasy United States of MAGA—that reminded me, along with Trump’s faux-patriotic delivery and love of stagecraft, of Nixon, nearly 44 years ago, in his final hours as president.

There was certainly stagecraft aplenty in Congressman Joe Kennedy III’s response, filmed in front of a car with its hood up at a technical school in Fall River, Massachusetts. But after Trump, I was more than ready for Kennedy’s honest anger and rousing shout-out to what really makes America great: as he put it, “our highest American ideal: the belief that we are all worthy, we are all equal and we all count. In the eyes of our law and our leaders, our God and our government. That is the American promise.”

If you didn’t watch the State of the Union, don’t bother. Check out Joe Kennedy’s speech. Cheer yourself up with an old Chevy Chase skit. Or, if you’re feeling brave, dial on back to August 9, 1974, and see what Nixon had to say.

Seattle readers: I’ll be teaching Intro to Memoir Writing at Seattle Central College beginning April 9. SCC Registration opens February 12 for returning students and February 20 for new students. 

 

 

 

 

 

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After 2017: Wound Care

One year ago—before the Inauguration, before the women’s marches, before everything else that has happened since—I attended a New Year’s Eve get-together at which everyone made a prediction for 2017.
Mine was that the next (“hopefully great”) Democratic presidential candidate, “someone we haven’t even thought of yet,” would emerge by the end of this year. Others predicted that Trump would be impeached. Or that his first Supreme Court nominee would somehow be blocked. Some guests offered more general forecasts: “the pendulum will swing;” “people will come to their senses.” My husband vowed that we would see the “total cratering” of the Republican Party. His prediction may have come closest to the mark.

And though my own hope was misplaced—I think we’re still not even close to identifying the next Democratic candidate for president—I do believe the pendulum is swinging, and many people are coming to their senses. They just may not be the same people we had hoped would come to their senses.

The people who are coming to their senses are not the people who voted for Trump. We now understand that most of them (a minority of Americans, let’s not forget) are very unlikely to change their minds. The people who are coming to their senses are us. By which I mean the whole big crazy quilt of the Left. Or “The Resistance,” as Trump now likes to call us, in air quotes, thinking that it’s a scathing put-down. To which I say: Congratulations, Everyone! We’ve made enough noise this year to get our own group nickname. Long live the Resistance!

We now understand that that we will win elections by getting our own selves to the polls, including our oldsters who may need rides and our youngsters who may need to feel more firmly respected for their views. After Alabama, we now understand that we will win elections when all Democrats feel that their vote is urgently needed.

2017 has been, if anything, more dismaying than I had ever believed it would be. I’m an optimist at heart, and this has not been a great year for optimism. But now, at the end of the year, I see so many reasons to hope.

In my last post, I called Trump an infection that has put our democracy’s health at risk. I declared that we, individual citizens, are the hard-working antibiotics who will ultimately prevail. And I do believe we will. In fact I think we could see a dramatic return to health right around mid-term election time, which is not much more than ten months from now.

But, just as I learned a few things about infections this year following foot surgery, I am now learning about the next phase: wound care.

I now know that wound care is a specialty that requires unflinching precision, compassion and the ability to inspire optimism—there it is again, my favorite word!—all while gently but firmly instilling in the patient—in this case, me—the understanding that optimism must be earned, through compliance. Attention to detail.

Wounds heal. But they heal better with the right care. And so it will be for our democracy, and for us.

I would venture that even as we fight off the infection, we’re already starting to heal. Wanting to get better is an essential first step, and we can check that one off. The women’s marches, last January 20^th? That was all of us saying: “We want to get better. We will not give in.” The fights in the courts over immigration, the push-back on the proposed repeal of Obamacare, the victories in this fall’s special elections? All are signs that we are determined to be well again, and to come back stronger than ever.  

This Christmas, we watched It’s a Wonderful Life for the first time in at least a few years. Wow, does it resonate in 2017. You have to wonder if Trump watches it for inspiration, trying to be more like greedy, rich Mr. Potter every day; learning to perfectly imitate Lionel Barrymore’s signature lip curl as Jimmy Stewart makes his passionate plea for the rights of working people to live in homes that they own, rather than rent hovels from a slumlord. It’s an optimist’s dream story line: people working together to help each other can make the world a better place. People working together can heal the wounds of depressions and wars and personal tragedies: anathema to Trump and his rogues’ gallery of hangers-on, which currently include nearly every member of the forever-tarnished Republican Party.

Infections can be swift and merciless. Wound care is nearly always painstakingly slow. And there will be scars.

On the morning of the shortest, darkest day of the year, I watched as the sun, low and crisp, lit up a long, taut length of spiderweb in the corner of our bedroom. The thread stretched all the way from the ceiling, down six feet or more, to the branch of a palm in a clay pot. I wondered why the spider had hurled out that line. I marveled that spiders can do such a thing: that they can create a new something, in an instant, where there had previously been nothing. But we do that too, when we heal; we manufacture brand-new tissue and bone and skin to fill gaps and fuse breaks and stitch cuts. We keep at it until the scars fade to pencil marks.

And that is my hope for 2018. That we’ll work together. we’ll spin out lifelines; we’ll do whatever it takes to heal this democracy’s wounds.

Find your January 20th, 2018 march here.

American Infection

Sometimes we writers search too hard for the perfect metaphor. Sometimes, it’s right under our nose—or, in my case, right under my blue, Velcro-strapped boot.

Infection: that’s what Trump is, I thought this morning, as I took my nineteenth of the twenty Amoxicillin tablets we brought home from the pharmacy ten days ago. Trump has infected our vigorous, 241-year-old democracy. And like so many infections, this one is fire-engine red and spreading, unchecked and unmedicated. Meanwhile, the patient is hot with fever one day and shaking with chills the next. Nothing tastes right. Muscles ache. Vaguely flu-like feelings abound. Waves of determination to soldier through—we’ll get over this!—are followed by languorous apathy: let’s just give up.

Speaking as one who tried to ignore an infection for several days, I can tell you it is not a strategy that works. After foot surgery on November 6, I assumed the three incisions on my right foot were healing up nicely under all those bandages, just the way they had on my left foot, last May. And they probably were, for the first several days. But then something somehow went wrong along one of those neat lines of stitches. At that point my foot was in a plastic cast, so I couldn’t see it. And for reasons I cannot explain, I chose to believe that feeling like my foot was on fire was probably “normal,” that fever and chills were a “part” of healing, and that I would magically “get over it.” Wrong, wrong, wrong. Thank God for antibiotics.

And so: if Trump is the infection, what is the cure?

The first and worst news, of course: it’s going to take a lot longer than ten days.

But we have to get the treatment started. And—despite the screaming-red, oozing tax bill that, at this writing, is poised to pass—I would argue that we have started.

WE are the antibiotics. Every time we make a phone call to Capitol Hill, every time we contribute to the ACLU, Emily’s List, Planned Parenthood or the Sierra Club (my own favorites), we are giving our ailing patient, our democracy, another life-saving dose. And every time a new, energetic progressive candidate is elected to a local or state office, that’s a mega-dose. Tukwila, a Seattle suburb, just elected Somali-American Zak Idan, 29, to its City Council. Seattle’s east-side suburbs just tipped our statehouse fully blue by electing Indian-American lawyer Manka Dhingra to the state senate. There have been similar victories in other states this fall, notably in Virginia and New Jersey. All of this bodes well for elections in 2018.

But this infection is ugly. As Charles Blow writes this week, it stinks of sanctioned racism and that smell just keeps getting stronger. In just the past few days alone, Trump has tweeted anti-Muslim hate videos, insulted Native Americans, and tried to revive his Obama-smearing Birther campaign. And as Thomas Edsall writes, the infection has spread its noxious tentacles deep and wide. But we, the antibiotics, must keep on until we turn the tide. Make those calls, write those emails, support progressive candidates at every level. Or be like Idan and Dhingra and run for office yourself.

And know that while we’re working to turn the infectious tide in 2018, there are specialists who are deploying other life-saving measures. Robert Mueller and his staff. Several state attorneys general. Senators like our own Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, both of whom are very busy right now identifying all the nasty bacteria that has been stuffed into the tax bill, like Arctic drilling and repeal of the health care mandate.

This won’t be easy. The antibiotics will take time. There will be a lot of wound care, too. Scar tissue. Rehab. But we’ve got to save our patient. How will we answer to our children if we let democracy die?

 

 

 

Field Trips

Restless Nest readers, I want to share with you this guest post I wrote for the Wide Open Writing blog. Wide Open Writing is for writers in search of inspiration; they offer a few gorgeous retreats every year, virtual writing groups and one-on-one support. Their website will make your mouth water. What I wrote for them is below. I didn’t take pictures on the day of my field trip, so here’s one I took at Seattle’s Lincoln Park, just to get you in the right mood:

Why Writers Need Field Trips

I thought I was going to take a quick stroll down the beach. Instead, I walked straight to the water’s edge, sat down, took off my shoes, and waded into Puget Sound. My toes dug happily into the dark, kelpy sand. My calves were electrically, perfectly cold. After a few minutes, I backed up and sat down where the tide could still lap my toes. I lifted my face to the sun and the breeze, both newly freed from the summer wildfire smoke that had blanketed Seattle for days.

I felt like I’d come home, after a long time away.

None of this involved thinking. All of it simply happened, as if some irresistible magnetic force was pulling me. As if I knew with my body, not my brain, that at this particular suburban Seattle beach, Richmond Beach, the thing to do was to get yourself right into the water the minute you got there.

I never go to Richmond Beach. I live in southeast Seattle, and it is northwest of the city limits. But just over the hill from Richmond Beach was the home where I lived from zero to five. That much I do know, though all I remember of those first years are slivers and glimmers of our life in the little ranch house on NW 183^rd Street; a jumble of memories that includes only the briefest flashes of this shore.

But here I am. And here my feet are, wiggling in the cold water. And here now is this feeling washing over me, of utter contentment; a feeling that the shape of this beach and this sky and this driftwood and these train tracks all feel—right. Mine. Home.

I’m a memoir writer, and I teach memoir writing at Seattle Central College. I often tell my students to take themselves on field trips; to go back, if they can, to where they grew up. To be anthropologists, journalists, and study their own lives. I acknowledge that it’s easy for me, because the places where I grew up are not very far away.

The problem, of course, is that those places have changed: like me, they’ve grown older. Or they’ve disappeared. Or, if it’s a house, someone else now owns it and they’ve remodeled or painted or replaced the rhododendrons with drought-tolerant grasses.

This summer, I was invited to read at the Richmond Beach Library. The minute I put it on my calendar, I began to plan my post-reading, memory-lane field trip, first to the beach and then to 183^rd Street. I had no specific writerly questions to research; I just wanted to see how it felt to be where I was in the very first years of my life, the years before reading and writing; the years in which every memory was sensory. Personal. Not complicated.

We lived on a street of then-new ranch homes, just a few miles inland from the sweeping public shoreline. At the end of our block, there was a tangled green patch which we called “the woods;” I knew from previous drive-bys that it was long ago covered with more houses. I remember riding my tricycle into the woods with a neighbor boy named Bruce, my very first friend my own age, and watching, astonished, when he unzipped his pants and peed. I remember he and I got into trouble once when we tried to walk by ourselves to the nearby Tradewell Supermarket.

The beach was way too far for us to even think of walking to by ourselves. And there were those train tracks. My older brother and sister knew all kinds of scary stories, told by kids even older than them, about crossing those train tracks.

But when we drove to the beach, and walked from the parking lot right over the train tracks on the overpass, me holding tight to my mother’s hand, and then kapow! –that huge, sky-filled world opened in front of me—I didn’t have words for it then, and I still don’t. I just knew I wanted more of it. To this day, I want more of it.

More huge sky, more water, more beach. More wildness.

After I left the beach, I drove over to our old home. My route zigged and zagged around the ravines that run through the neighborhood. And then there I was, on our block, staring at a one-story, light blue rambler (it was red when we lived there) that I wouldn’t have recognized if I didn’t know the address.

There were two cars in the driveway, so I didn’t feel like I could linger and stare. But I took in the shape of the house. I knew which window had been my bedroom window in the room I shared with my sisters. I walked from room to room in my mind.

And then I drove away, back to the neighborhood I now call home, through a grueling Seattle traffic jam that no one could have imagined when I was five.

I don’t know whether or when my Richmond Beach field trip will find its way into my writing, but I know this: for one fleeting afternoon, I remembered a bit of what it felt like to be two, or three, or four years old. I felt that sensory ecstasy, unfettered by thinking, thinking, thinking.

Maybe someday that feeling will find its way into my writing. Maybe I just need to let it wash over me for a while, like the tide washed my tired toes on an August afternoon.

http://www.wideopenwriting.com/blog/2017/8/26/why-writers-need-field-trips-guest-post-by-ann-hedreen

Seattle friends: I’ll be reading with Maine poet Dana Robbins at Columbia City Gallery on September 7 at 7pm. 

The Long Game

It was the hottest evening of the year. So far. I rested my post-surgical, boot-encased foot on my husband’s leg as we sat with a group of like-minded, anxious Seattle progressives and listened to the ACLU’s state communications director answer questions.

“What should we do?” was what we wanted Doug Honig to tell us. Meaning: about Trump? During his presidency? What should we do? How can we help?

Honig’s advice, which I’m paraphrasing and which he delivered with more nuance, was essentially this: Try to stop obsessing about Trump. This isn’t about Trump, this is about the Republican plan to remake our country. The Republicans have deep pockets and many loyal foot soldiers and they are in this for the long game. And so we need to be, too.

What does that mean? It means supporting local, state and national politicians and candidates who stand for compassion, not cruelty. It means raising our voices in defense of the Affordable Care Act, immigrants’ rights, our national parks and monuments, clean air, clean water, and everything else we care about that is threatened not just by Trump’s vicious, bullying twitter feed but by his clever cabinet appointees and his allies on Capitol Hill, who love love love that he is providing constant, highly distracting cover while they pursue their draconian agenda.

Stay in, people, for the long game.

“There’s a part for you to play in the next great progressive comeback story,” Senator Al Franken writes in his new memoir, Al Franken: Giant of the Senate. “But only if you can keep from losing your mind or getting so discouraged that you quit before the comeback even begins.”

Politically, this summer is already about as un-pretty as my swollen foot on a 96-degree day in June. And as with my foot, there’s no going back.

“Do you ever just wish you hadn’t done it?” a friend asked me, as I crutched toward her. It was a remarkably intuitive remark, given that I have been wishing exactly that, frequently, as I face the reality that it’s going to be quite a while before I’m walking normally, or new-normally, after a surgery involving three incisions, one metal plate, two screws and six weeks of roller-carting. Sure I wish I hadn’t done it, because then I could be doing all the things I love to do in the summer: hop on a bike, hike up a mountain trail, jump in the lake. 

I could be doing all those wonderful things this summer, that is. But what about ten years from now? Twenty years from now? The point is: I didn’t have this surgery for me, right now, age 60. I did it for me at 61, 65, 70, 80, God willing. This foot-rebuilding project is a crazy (and temporarily crazy-making) vote of confidence in my own future. I’m in this for the long game.

And if what we care about is not just getting rid of Trump but ensuring a better, more humane world for our children and grandchildren, then we have to stay in for the long game. We have to work our political muscles for more hopeful summers in the future.

As my booted foot and I bumble about, it cheers me to think of the march through downtown Seattle back in January. Hundreds of thousands of strong feet, filling the streets of Seattle, Washington DC, cities and towns all over the country.

I look forward to marching again. Meanwhile, I’ll do what I can.

Friends in Seattle and South King County: I’ll be reading at the Renton Library at 7:00 pm on July 26th. 

 

 

Stay Hungry

2016 was a hungry, hungry year. Month after month, we hungered for justice and peace and hope, and we just kept getting hungrier. We thought November 8 might take the edge off; might give us a little encouraging broth for the journey. But no. Now we’re more famished than ever. And it’s very easy to feel like the best solution might be to simply curl up in a fetal position and hoard what little energy we have left.

But we can’t, can we? We owe it to ourselves, our children, our neighbors down the street and around the world, to stay hungry. To feel that driving bite in the gut, that ache, that howling growl that demands attention.

We are going to be offered pablum and junk food and we’ll be tempted to take it. We’ll be told to eat this, calm down, stop your bellyaching. But we can’t. We’ve got to stay hungry.

Yes, 2016 feels like the Worst Year Ever. But as one friend brooded on Facebook, what on earth makes us think 2017 is going to better?

Lest you think my only goal here is to write the most depressing post in Restless Nest history, I offer this morsel of optimism. Here’s what could be better about 2017, if we all stay hungry: this could be the year that we all do more than we ever have to make the world a better place. Instead of giving money to presidential candidates, we can give it to the people who are in the trenches, working against hate and for human rights; against climate change and for clean air, water and wilderness protection; against violence and for peace and reconciliation. Instead of talking about Nate Silver’s latest election prediction or Hillary Clinton’s email server or the latest egregious revelation about Donald Trump’s past, we can talk about what we can do, today, to protect vulnerable people and places and rights. We can volunteer to help immigrant children with homework, or help their parents gain citizenship. We can volunteer for medical research. We can rally. We can march. We can write letters and emails. We can support local and state politicians who are working for change. We can follow Senator Patty Murray’s lead and ask each other what we’re doing, not how we’re doing. Because we mostly know how we’re doing: we’re hungry. And we’re going to stay that way, for what could be quite a while.

Need some ideas of who to support? Here you go: ACLU, SPLC, Planned Parenthood, IRC, NOW, Emily’s List, LCV, NRDC, Sierra Club, Democracy Now, The Alzheimer’s Association, Seattle Globalist, Casa Latina, and Global Washington. Seattle-area friends: volunteer opportunities include Casa Latina, Refugee Women’s Alliance, Horn of Africa Services (after-school tutoring) and the city’s Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs.

 

 

 

 

 

How Trump Made Me Love My Day Job

       As I write, Donald Trump supporters are lining up outside a stadium about thirty miles north of here for a rally that begins many hours from now. This is confusing to me. Lining up for Trump? Who are they?

Yesterday, my husband and I met an immigrant family of nine and talked to them about how a local non-profit is helping them through their grief over the death of their baby girl. Last week, we visited an Adult Day Health Center that serves people who have dementia or have suffered brain trauma. We talked to a woman in her fifties whose face lit up with joy as she described how the time she spent at the center had given her the courage to go back to work after a stroke. The week before that, we interviewed a Seattle teacher who found an affordable apartment for herself and her son, with the help of a housing non-profit.

This is our day job: making short films for non-profits to help them raise money and spread the word about what they do. August is always a busy time for us, as our clients get ready for their fall events.

We feel very lucky that we get to do this work for a living. That we get to hear, and tell, stories about people helping people. Stories that debunk, over and over again, the American myth of rugged individualism; that show how much we Americans can do, when we pay attention to one another’s needs. When we are able to truly see each other, and recognize that we are all connected.

Which is why it is so hard for me to understand the Trump supporters who are standing in that line. I wonder who they are, and how it is they came to actually support this candidate who stands for slammed doors and high walls and connections based only on hate and fear.

The people I meet in my work are not the West Coast bubble-dwelling limousine liberals Trump loves to disparage. They are people who have rolled up their sleeves to actually find solutions to the toughest problems we face: homelessness, affordable housing, how to help vulnerable people weather trauma, loss, illness. How to make our schools better. How to protect our wild places for the next generation. If I dwell in a bubble, it is one in which compassion and inclusion are the norm. It is one in which people are allowed to be poor, or new to this country, or different in abilities, and dignified at the same time.

The interviews we do are my favorite part of the job. I love to listen to peoples’ stories. I love it when they surprise me, which they nearly always do. What’s much harder is what comes next: going back through those interviews, selecting the very best bits, and laying them out in an order that makes sense. It’s so important to me to get their stories right, especially during a year when slandering whole groups of people has become the Trumpian norm.

So I’m going to get back to work now. Thanks, Trump, for inspiring me to appreciate my day job even more. And I think we all know your rally is not going to make a difference in how our state votes. Because not very many of us live in your bubble. Thank God.

Here’s some inspiration to put on your calendar: A reading by writers who have experienced homelessness, September 12 at 7pm at the University Branch of the Seattle Public Library. Check out  Nicole Brodeur’s Seattle Times column about the Mary’s Place writers and their writing group leader, Julie Gardner.

 

 

 

Stockholm Syndrome

Nine years ago, a freelance critic for The Seattle Weekly suggested, in print for all to see, that I might be suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. She was right: I was. I tend to fall hard when I fall in love.

The critic was reviewing a short film my husband and I made called Art without Walls: the Making of the Olympic Sculpture Park, which aired that week on KCTS, our local public television station. Her point was that I was clearly way too enthralled by Seattle’s new sculpture park to produce an unbiased documentary about the making of it. Guilty as charged: I loved the sculpture park.

The term “Stockholm Syndrome” was coined in 1973, after several hostages in a Swedish bank holdup-turned-siege became emotionally attached to the robbers who had imprisoned them in a vault for six days. (I am one-eighth Swedish-American: could there be a genetic tendency at work?) In 1973, I was 16, and I read about such events with great interest, perhaps because I was still not fully recovered from my first and most dramatic bout of Stockholm Syndrome, which struck when I was 13.

Do you remember the brief fad for chocolate fountains? How beautiful the chocolate looked, pouring over and over, endlessly bountiful, into a surrounding pool. How agonizing those fountains must have been to anyone who was dieting, or diabetic.

When I was 13, I dove right into the chocolate fountain of evangelical Christianity. So sweet, so filling, so sublime. And at first, it felt so uncomplicated: just believe. Believe Jesus Christ is the one and only way to eternal life, and eternity is yours. Believe you can speak in tongues, and presto: you can! Believe men are superior to women. Believe premarital sex is wrong. Stop thinking. Simply believe.

But it turns out I couldn’t stop thinking. Thinking has always been my downfall. Thanks to excessive thinking, I failed at flirting, tennis, knitting and my first fifty attempts at parallel parking. And I failed at being an evangelical Christian.

I swam in that silky, rich fountain through much of my teens, but the romance ended abruptly when I got to college. At the time, I remember feeling like I was both betrayer and betrayed; like I had turned away from Jesus with the secret hope that he would try to win me back, but instead he went off to court a new crop of acolytes. I felt like a rejected first wife: older, wiser (or so I thought), but not nearly as cute and fun as I once was.

Twenty years later, I returned, tentatively at first, to church: this time, to a welcoming, liberal kind of congregation where I sensed that a closet doubter like myself could safely blend in; that this could be a place where I could find spiritual sanctuary while I continued to ask the questions that never went away.

And now, unbelievably, another two whole decades have passed, and I’m still going to that same church. And the questions haven’t gone away. I never cured myself of too much thinking; if anything, I’ve gotten worse. But I have, finally, accepted my spiritual self for who I am: an observant doubter. A survivor of Stockholm Syndrome, who wants to live meaningfully.

I’m trying now to write more about all of this. I’m starting with the story of what came first: my fervent, young faith—how it happened, and why I think it happened, and how it fit into what was happening in the world at the time, and did we really speak in tongues and swallow the apocalyptic visions of The Late Great Planet Earth? I want to include stories of some of the people I’ve traveled with along the way. I want to connect with others for whom faith and doubt co-exist; I believe there are many of us who live along this spectrum, far from the noisy extremes of fundamentalist faith or unwavering atheism.

I don’t know yet where this is all leading, but giving myself the time to do it means posting less frequently on this blog. See you once a month or so. The nest is ever restless!

I’ll be teaching Introduction to Memoir Writing again at Seattle Central College beginning April 11. Six Monday Nights. Here’s the link.

 

 

 

Mangers Everywhere

Two days shy of the darkest day of the year, silhouetted against a rainy twilight sky, I watched a young woman emerge from a tent, tugging a stroller behind her. A young man followed. They turned the stroller around and bumped it down a muddy knoll, lifting it over a ditch and onto the sidewalk. Their tent, pitched next to Interstate 5 at the 50^th Street exit in Seattle’s University District, flapped behind them, sagging under the relentless rain, leaning half-heartedly against the wind, ready to cave in to the next good gust. As we waited for the light to change, all I could see of the baby in the stroller, across the two lanes of traffic that stood between us, was that at least she or he was covered with a blanket.

My husband and I were on our way to see the latest movie version of Macbeth. The very first shot in the movie is of a dead baby. And the weather in medieval Scotland, as seen on screen, was only slightly worse than the weather outside the theater in mid-winter Seattle. I shivered at the thought of living in such brutal conditions: no heat, no light, mud everywhere. But that is exactly how the young couple I’d seen coming out of their tent were living. Right here in my own high-tech hometown. Right now, in 2015.

As we drove home, we took in the sparkling lights of all the construction cranes in South Lake Union and downtown. It’s as if they’re competing this year for the most festive displays: long strings of brightly colored lights, even trees and Santas perched high above the city. And why not celebrate the ongoing construction boom? Five years ago, Seattle was dotted with half-dug holes, half-built buildings, half-done projects halted by the recession.

But the young couple with the stroller haunts me. How do two young people come to be so desperate that they pitch a tent on the edge of the freeway? And they’re not alone. The tents are everywhere. It seems that for every new crane hanging over another new construction site, there are dozens more tents popping up a few blocks away, often in places we haven’t seen them before.

It’s not my imagination. The Seattle Times reports that as of late November, 527 unauthorized homeless encampments were shut down by the city this year. 527. Those are just the ones that were actually shut down. That’s up from 351 in 2014. 131 in 2013. Eighty in 2012. On November 2, Seattle Mayor Ed Murray declared a homeless emergency and authorized five million dollars to be spent on shelter and services for people found sleeping outside.

Meanwhile, according to the Puget Sound Business Journal, nearly 21,600 rental units are currently under construction. But the Journal is also reporting an “alarming deterioration” in the local apartment rental market. Deterioriation! What could this mean? Here’s what it means: rents have dropped an average of $59 a month in the last quarter, in all neighborhoods except South Lake Union. Twenty percent of landlords are even offering “incentives” such as a month’s free rent. The vacancy rate is up from 4 percent to, wait for it, 4.3 percent.

Is this really how we define “alarming?” The fact that rents have taken a baby step backwards, towards actual affordability, is “alarming?” And you can bet rents are still so far from the reach of the people in the tents that they may as well be millions, not thousands, of dollars per month.

I don’t know what to do about the young family I saw coming out of the tent. Should I have pulled over, that evening, and given them whatever crumpled bills were in my purse? How much longer can I rationalize that doing the same small things, over and over again—volunteering when my church hosts homeless women and children overnight, buying diapers and toys for the families we sponsor at Christmas, giving coats and sleeping bags to the neighborhood kids who are collecting for their school, handing energy bars to panhandlers—is enough? And yet we, I, can’t not do these things. How could we not?

Mayor Murray is promising that the city will find shelter for the tent people. But is it? Are we? What’s going on in Seattle? Where and how are we going to find room at the inn?

Back to Macbeth for a moment. In this latest interpretation of Shakespeare’s 400-year-old play, director Justin Kurzel and actor Michael Fassbender as Macbeth are unflinching in their portrayal of a warrior who could have been a true hero and leader, if only he had found the strength to resist the temptations of power and greed. And we know where those temptations got him: to one of the most cynical, sad moments in literature, when he pronounced life “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

But life is not that. If it were, the couple in the tent would just give up. Instead, they went out in the rain, presumably in search of food and help for themselves and their infant. Because, as theologian Henri Nouwen wrote, “we are called to be people of hope.”

But Nouwen also said this: “we cannot go around despair to hope. We have to go right through despair.”

There are mangers everywhere, in this Advent season.

Father Solstice

 I was in it for the Beaconettes. What’s not to love about a holiday choir decked in sky-high beehive hairdos festooned with strings of lights? So I braved the bone-chilling Seattle December rain and headed for the annual tree-lighting at our neighborhood’s new gathering spot, a mini-park called the Columbia City Gateway. My husband was waiting for me, hot chocolate in hand. Aahhh.

We tried to figure out where the tree was. Turns out it was a telephone pole. This would be a pole lighting. But that’s OK—it’s Columbia City, where even a pole lighting in a downpour can somehow still promise to be festive.

There were some mercifully short introductory remarks, and then the night’s celebrity guest was introduced: Father Christmas himself, or, as the announcer added, “Father Solstice, if you prefer.” And what a magnificent Father Christmas/Solstice he was: fur-crowned, green-robed, cascading white beard and hair.

I was kicking myself for not having added one more layer to my winter-rain getup and feeling anxious to see the Beaconettes before I crossed over into hypothermia. My husband saw me shivering and put his arms around me. Then Father Solstice stepped up to the microphone, wrapping us all in his gentle yet commanding presence: the kind of presence that long years of addressing such crowds can give a man, especially one with mythical tendencies.

I’m paraphrasing here, but this is what I remember of what Father Solstice said: “I won’t talk long, I promise. I know you’re wet and cold. But I just want to remind you about some refugees you might have heard about. Two thousand years ago, they were looking for a place to stay, because one of them was about to have a baby. Door after door was barred against them. And I’m bringing them up because this year, we’re more tempted than ever to bar our doors against the refugees of the world. More tempted than ever to act out of fear, instead of love.”

“Who remembers,” Father Solstice went on, “when Seattle was declared a Sanctuary City in the 1980s? Maybe it’s time to reclaim that vow.”

The soggy crowd was quiet.

“OK,” said Father S, snapping us back to the present. Let’s count down and light that pole!”

We all counted down, clapping and cheering when the telephone pole lit up. Then the Beaconettes stirred and glowed and we crowded in so we could hear them over the deluge as they belted out their trademark carols featuring rewritten lyrics about contemporary life in Seattle, which this year included riffs on marijuana, Amazon, Fitbits and Bertha the wayward tunnel-digger. They were hilarious, as always.

But it was Father Solstice who stayed with me, as we walked off into the dark.

Is it still possible to be a sanctuary city? What it technically means is that Seattle is a city where police officers are not allowed to ask about an individual’s immigration status. What “sanctuary city” also meant, in the 1980s, was a place where many churches and activists provided sanctuary for refugees fleeing violence in Central America and, later on, other turbulent places in the world.

Is it possible, in these times, not to offer sanctuary? In his Sunday speech from the Oval Office, President Obama called the terrorists of the Islamic State—which is neither reflective of more than a tiny, warped sliver of Islam, nor a state—“thugs and killers.” How can we not offer sanctuary when murderous thugs are driving waves of terrified people into exile? How can we be the ones who cry out, “no room at the inn?”

And yet: what kind of sanctuary are we, when our country is flooded with firearms, bedecked and bedazzled with them, to a degree that must make the violent thugs of the world quiver with envy? When our politicians shout, “yes, bar those doors!” even as they encourage the flow of guns from the factories and into the hands of everyone who wants one or two or two dozen, whether they’re terrorists, armed robbers, or duck hunters?

Turns out Father Christmas/Solstice is a long-time peace activist in Seattle named Bob Barnes. I had the honor of meeting him, and thanking him for what he said, after the pole-lighting; an event, I told him, that I won’t soon forget. Thanks, Beaconettes, and thank you, Bob. The holiday season in Seattle may be dark and sodden, but it has its bright moments. “Bright,” as in happy strings of lights on beehive hairdos and on one telephone pole. And “bright” as in: a man in a green cloak and furry crown, willing to shine a light right where we need it most.

In the mood for another seasonal tale? Here’s one I called “A Manger Story,” published this week on the Patheos Good Letters site. 

Radio news: After four years, The Restless Nest has retired from its weekly radio spot on KBCS. This will give me more time to work on some longer projects. But I’ll continue to post here at least a few times a month.