Conflict – Page 4 – Plain and Fancy

Fighting Spirit: Rhetoric, Rotten Rulers, and a Sex Strike

April 26, 2014April 26, 2014 marianbeaman24 Comments

Is a family graduation on your calendar this year?

As a faculty member at Florida State College at Jacksonville (then Florida Community College), I attended graduation every year in full regalia with hundreds of ecstatic grads, joyful families, and proud faculty and administration.

The Tawdry Tale

One year stands out though: 2001. State Representative X rose to the podium to deliver the commencement address and announced that his remarks would be short and to the point. Relieved, the audience sat back to enjoy a brief speech entitled A Short Guide to a Happy Life. Hmm . . . the title sounded familiar, I thought. Then he went on to tick off the main points: 1. Don’t confuse life with work. 2. Life is what happens when you are making other plans. 3. If you win the rat race, you are still a rat. . . . Then it dawned on me. I have heard this all before. In fact I’ve read it. Recently. In a book. In a book by Anna Quindlen with the same title. This man with an honorable title in high office is plagiarizing his speech, giving no credit to Quindlen or reference to her book. His whole speech. Boldly. Baldly. With no bones about honesty!

My sense of justice on high alert, I set out to right the wrong. No, to expose the guilty. I contact the campus president in charge of graduation. Yes, she will check up on my suspicion and she does follow through. There are more emails and phone calls, which in the end boil down to the critical question: Where is the audio recording of that address? Alas, it is never un-earthed. We are told the recording mechanism failed (?) and thus no incriminating evidence is available. Sadly, just my words remain which have now fallen. Flat. On deaf ears.

* * *

My own college graduation is a distant memory. When I graduated from Eastern Mennonite College with a degree in English, I was still a plain girl, but with a B. A. degree in English education. I don’t remember at all who spoke at the commencement address or what the topic was, but I am sure there was an emphasis on service to others, demonstrating peace while upholding justice, still strong tenets of my alma mater, now Eastern Mennonite University.

The Nobel Laureate

Tomorrow another graduation occurs. On Sunday, April 27, 2014 an honorable woman, Leymah Gbowee, co-winner of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize and a 2007 EMU alumna, will give the 96^th annual commencement address at Eastern Mennonite University. Gbowee was the focus of a documentary “Pray the Devil Back to Hell,” which demonstrates how women, both Christian and Muslim confronted then-Liberian President Charles Taylor “with a demand for peace and end a bloody 14-year-old civil war.” Her genius: Gbowee rallied women, all dressed in white from various ethnic groups to lock arms, protest, and over time literally pray the ruthless rebels, including the President, into retreat. They even staged a sex strike which her book describes in more detail. In 2007 Leymah Gbowee received a Master of Arts in Conflict Transformation from the Center for Justice and Peace-building at EMU, also her alma mater. No doubt in her graduation speech she will make reference to her book: Mighty Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation at War.

But I can assure you—she has plagiarized neither her book nor her speech!

* * *

When have you become outspoken against an injustice? What were the results?

Have you heard of Leymah Gbowee? Anyone else you know with her qualities?

Flying the Coop: Leaving Mennonite Land (guest post)

April 7, 2014February 21, 2015 marianbeaman12 Comments

In the movie based on Beverly Lewis’ best-selling romance novel The Shunning, pretty Katie Lapp senses something is missing in her simple Amish life. Then a fancy woman comes to Lancaster County looking for the baby girl she gave up for adoption nearly 20 years earlier. When Katie makes the connection between this woman and her own existence, she takes a bus to explore life beyond the boundaries of her Amish upbringing.

I’m not a character in a best-selling novel, but I did venture beyond the limits of my own Mennonite life to explore a different style of life. Unlike Katie, I wasn’t shunned. But, like her, I did take a bus, a Greyhound bus, to move on.

Today my story is featured on the blog of Mary Gottschalk, who got out of her own comfort zone by sailing the open seas with her husband in a 13,000 mile adventure she recounts in her memoir Sailing down the Moonbeam. Click here to meet this fascinating author and also read my post on stepping into a new world.

A Year of Biblical Womanhood: Rachel Held Evans’ Secrets Divulged

March 19, 2014March 18, 2014 marianbeaman20 Comments

This evening my alma mater, Eastern Mennonite University, is hosting author Rachel Held Evans, one of the foremost thinkers and writers in evangelical circles today who has appeared on Oprah and The View and spotlighted by NPR, the BBC and The Washington Post. Her spell-binding book will stir you to see women, biblical and otherwise, in a new light.

If your comfort zone is just too cozy to leave right now, you can read about a gutsy woman who ditched her comfy life-style, visiting “an Amish schoolhouse in Gap, Pennsylvania; a pig farm in Cochabamba, Bolivia; and a Benedictine monastery in Cullman, Alabama.” Admitting to being domestically challenged, she took up knitting and baking even working her way through the recipes in Martha Stewart’s Cooking School.

Rachel Held Evans characterizes herself as a liberated woman, but for one year she became an Old Testament woman who admits she “spent an afternoon on my rooftop, adopted a computer-baby, camped out in my front yard during my period,” and left eight pounds of dough to rise in my bathroom.”

via Rachel Held Evans' website — via website of Rachel Held Evans

Intrigued by many of her friends who abandoned their careers for traditional gender roles in the home, “Evans decided to try it for herself, vowing to take all of the Bible’s instructions for women as literally as possible for a year,” sometimes pushing them to their literal extreme. The result is A Year of Biblical Womanhood: How a Liberated Woman Found Herself Sitting on Her Roof, Covering Her Head, and Calling Her Husband “Master,” a New York Times best-seller.

Each chapter records a month in which Evans focuses on a biblical virtue: October – gentleness, November – Domesticity, and so on.There is nothing starchy about her subtitles with chapters like February/Beauty “My Breasts are Like Towers” and March/Modesty “Hula-Hooping with the Amish,” who she mentions don’t wear white for their weddings because it’s worldly and don’t marry in June because that’s worldly too!

The end of each chapter “month” features a character study of women like Eve or Mary Magdalene, but includes more obscure women like Junia, the Apostle or Huldah, the Prophet. That’s where Evans’ astute scholarship is most evident. With two unanswered questions, author Evans plunges into astonishing biblical research as her 8 pages of documentation verify: What does God truly expect of women? Is there a prescription for biblical womanhood? She admits:

I took my research way too seriously, combing through feminist, conservative, and liberal commentaries, and seeking out Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant perspectives on each issue. I spoke with modern-day women practicing ancient biblical mandates in their own lives—a polygamist, a pastor, a Quiverfull daughter, an Orthodox Jew, an Amish grandmother. I scoured the Bible, cover to cover, isolating and examining every verse I could find about mothers, daughters widows, wives, concubines, queens, prophetesses, and prostitutes.

But Rachel had divine help along her pathway: Ahava, an orthodox Jew she met online who advised Rachel on all things Jewish. Guys in the food aisles at a Wal-Mart in East Tennessee who helped her search for Kosher ingredients for her Seder celebration. And her ever-accommodating husband Dan, whom she praises with a home-made sign at the city gates of Dayton, Tennessee, near where they live.

Seder table setting courtesy Wikipedia images

Evans’ book is definitely a page-turner. I read her 310-page book in under 3 days. As one reviewer exclaims; “An unexpected, laugh-out-loud then turn the page and tear up, enjoyable and poignant read.” Another agrees that Rachel Evans tackles “the most sacred cows, willing to ask the trickiest questions” and observing fresh perspectives. For example, she reminds readers that it took the defiance of two queens to save the Jews—Esther by appearing before the king, Vashti by refusing to.”

Her website: http://www.rachelheldevans.com

Eschewing the traditional interpretation of Proverbs 31 that yokes most women with unreachable goals, Evans strives instead to be more like the Hebrew Eschet chayil, woman of valor, at its core a blessing to invoke, not a title to be earned. “plain and fancy” observation

What do you think of author Evans’ experiment? Its outcomes?

Your thoughts added to mine can launch an animated conversation!

It’s Not Easy Being Green

March 15, 2014March 15, 2014 marianbeaman21 Comments

This post first appeared March 15, 2013 now published again to celebrate the wearing of the green!

It’s a long way from Lancaster county, PA to Jacksonville, FL, but years ago our family moved into a neighborhood called Killarney Shores with street names like Emerald Isle Circle, Leprechaun Court, and St. Patrick Lane. On the day of Ireland’s famous saint, I give you my story of keeping it green:

The lurid orange zoning sign meant something, stuck ominously at the edge of the woods where our children used to roam freely up and down the deep ravines and along a serpentine creek bordering the neighborhood. I have always loved natural beauty, so it is no surprise that one of the items on the wish list for our next address was “a house on a hill with tall trees.” A hill with tall trees–a laughable request especially since most of Jacksonville is flat with palm trees bordered by the beach. But our prayer was answered–a huge corner lot with 17 magnificent laurel oak and live oak trees, romantic symbols of the Deep South, nestled in a secret cove just blocks off a busy boulevard.

Yet there was much to fear that November day when I spotted the land use / zoning sign: The memory of the terrorist attack on our nation on September 11, 2001 still overwhelming our minds, our community had to address an encroaching menace much closer to home: Our rural, residential zoning status was being challenged by big box Wal-Mart, who wanted to build a Super Center (gasp!) in the woods 200-feet from our homes. This would threaten the woods our children had played in, close to the burial site of our family dog, and near a lake by which we moored our canoe, Killarney Queen.

First, we had to find out what was going on. There were trips to the Planning and Development Department downtown with my good buddy Ann. If we are going to fight Goliath, the behemoth of retailers, our tiny neighborhood of 65 homes had to be educated. When we weighed in as opposition during the first City Hall hearing, dozens of residents responded to my hastily printed green fliers, some out of curiosity, some with animosity, but all with concern for the preservation of the quality of life in our secluded neighborhood. I, along with my neighbors, became familiar with a strange new vocabulary: Land Use Amendment Application, Planned Unit Development, Rezoning Ordinance.

Neighbors opened their doors to strategy-planning meetings, furnishing refreshments and dishing up good-will. Residents from up-the-hill met those from around-the-circle . . . . as we joined hands in consensus. Even our councilwoman joined in, assuring us she would have a decision to develop the rural residential area into commercial uses deferred and deferred and deferred. We hired a City Planner for big bucks to “give us credibility.” On April 11, 2002 we had a showdown with the Walmart bigwigs, their cool, professional presentation countered by our-best-we-could-do foam-core display. Residents packed a school auditorium, wearing shamrock buttons that read “Keep it Green.” My neighbor Richy recently diagnosed with kidney cancer came to show his support. We all listened to Wal-Mart’s company staff show-and-tell session, which extolled the merits of the store to the community, implying the layout would make their 215,000 square-foot presence virtually unobtrusive. However, when our council-woman took the stand, we were in for the biggest let-down of all: “Really, you’d be better off if you let Walmart develop the land. The company has big bucks and can make loads of concessions to you. Why they’ll even make a big retaining pond with a lovely fountain to enjoy as you drive by. What if an adult entertainment facility buys the land later? Or a huge liquor store? Then where would you be?” To rub it in, the Wal-Mart people asked for some of our shamrocks, “to show solidarity in pursuing the green,” they said. Green? Green like money?

In the end, the journey toward a resolution was a zig-zaggy path of uncertainty fraught with the unexpected. It was truly Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. But we were bound together to face our common foe. The St. Johns River-keeper became a new friend, a neighborhood advocate from a nearby community coached us to anticipate possible next “moves” from City Hall and Wa-Mart. The Florida Times-Union ran progress reports, the local TV station featured us on an evening newscast. The process proceeded with fits and starts: rapid action following by long waits. At the final meeting at City Hall, for example, we signed in at 5:30 p.m. and were heard by the formal City Council at 12:45 a.m. Though the decision for land use was ruled in favor of Wal-Mart, our community gained thirteen concessions, including 4.7 acres of conservation easement to compensate partially for the additional impact on traffic and loss of wetlands. And the fountain!

Of course, there is more concrete and asphalt next to our beloved woodlands, but our community will never be the same. We have learned the importance of team-work to meet an outside challenge, and in the process have become true neighbors.

Yes, Kermit the Frog, is right:

“It’s not that easy being green;

But green’s the color Spring.

And green can be big like an ocean, or important like a mountain,

Or tall like a tree.

When green is all there is to be

It could make you wonder why, but why wonder why?

Wonder, I am green and it’ll do fine, it’s beautiful!

And I think it’s what I want to be.”

When we moved in years ago, Killarney Shores was very WASP-y, with the origin of many residents reflective of the street names. Now we share care, concern, and meals with Burmese, Bosnian, African-Americans – folks of all colors, a lovely palette of skin tones; white mingles with tan and mahogany. Symphony member, handyman, business owner, retirees live side by side. And if an outside threat strikes again, I have no doubt we will present a united front.

Yes, green is important — very important. And in these times of awareness of our earth’s fragility, it is important to preserve, to recycle, even to restore our resources. But even more important is learning to value of community that can exist in all neighborhoods, all citizens of our planet and residents of a close-knit community with families from around the world.

Do you live in a neighborhood where there you have noticed changes recently? In the last few years? How have these changes affected you?

Tell us your story.

Story of Hope: A Killer’s Wife Speaks

March 8, 2014March 10, 2014 marianbeaman16 Comments

When I bring 5-pound bags of Wenger’s famous ham-loaf frozen from Pennsylvania to Florida, the plastic-coated tubs of meat are wrapped in newspaper and then shrink-wrapped in plastic. The wrapping on one of the packages (we need two to feed the clan now!) revealed the riveting story of Marie Monville, the widow of Amish school house shooter Charlie Roberts.

What Happened

In a story that brought international attention to Lancaster County, Charles Roberts methodically shot ten Amish girls inside a one-room school-house, killing five, injuring five others, and then turning the gun on himself. Roberts’ wife Marie learned of the impending massacre through a letter Charles left for her directing her to his final phone call, which revealed the unresolved feelings he harbored after the deaths of two of his daughters, one a premature birth and the other an ectopic pregnancy. Though the couple went on to have three healthy children, the loss of Elise and Isabella, he says in the letter, “changed my life forever. I am filled with so much hate, hate toward myself, hate toward God, and unimaginable emptiness.”

Immediately After

Because he hid his clinical depression so well, Marie had no signs her husband was so deeply disturbed and headed for a psychotic break-down. Even the police queried, “Were there any signs of violence before the shooting?” She also feared what the public may be thinking: Are you a liar, covering up a failure to act? Are you an idiot, blind to the obvious? But Marie had been blind-sided.

Her own family and her husband’s family were “stalwart,” Marie writes. “A beloved aunt and uncle gave her family a place to hide out from the media in their own home in Lititz, Pennsylvania, comforting and feeding them in their darkest hours.

Forgiveness from the Amish Community

1. Just hours after the horrible shooting, Marie’s father greeted a group of Amish men who knocked on the door. She writes:

An Amish man with a long gray beard stepped toward my father and opened his arms wide. My father fell into those arms, his shoulders heaving, held and comforted by a friend. Grief met grief.

2. Shielding the family from the media, “the families of the slain girls went to the cemetery for Roberts’ burial. They also went to a meeting at the Bart Fire Hall for families and first responders, sharing their feelings” and saying they were praying for Marie and her children.

Her Book

Marie Roberts Monville intersperses her account of the tragedy with the story of her own life in rural Lancaster County and tells as a teen-ager meeting Charlie Roberts, the grandson of a church friend, at a dinner one day. After marriage, they had three children, aged 7, 5, and 18 months old at the time of the tragedy which occurred over seven years ago at Nickel Mines.

“One Light,” written from a Christian perspective, shows how the author’s faith in God has sustained her through unimaginable grief and brought healing. Now re-married, she is a stay-at-home Mom and blogger on whisperandwonder with the subtitle “quiet musings from my heart.” Marie wrote the book to tell her true story of how horror and tragedy met love and forgiveness. She also seeks to connect with readers who are in the midst of suffering by posing the question:

What is your story? Mistreatment, injustice, torment, suffering, grief or even the worst that humanity can do to one another? Receive the gift of love. And when again the lights go out, you too will see that one light still shines.

Though her experience is similar in some ways to that of Marina Oswald, wife of President Kennedy’s assassin, Marie Roberts Monville has refused to become a pariah, but now lives life to the fullest, sharing light and hope.

Do you know someone who has survive trauma and grief?

Do you have a story of survival of your own to tell?

Mennonites, Ventriloquists, and Memoir

March 1, 2014March 1, 2014 marianbeaman22 Comments

The wild, permissive Rentzels with a red porch light live next door to our family, the Mennonite Longeneckers, one of several plain families that live on Anchor Road.

In their parlor, the Rentzel’s old Emerson black & white TV has introduced me to the wonders of The Howdy Doody Show with Buffalo Bob. As often as I can, I escape at 4 o’clock every day, running next door to ask Mammy Rentzel whether I may watch the show. Of course, she says Yes. I become part of the Peanut Gallery, mesmerized by Howdry Doody himself, a freckle-faced boy marionette with 48 freckles, one for each state of the Union in the 1950s.

My favorite parts are seeing Quaker Oats shot from guns, cannon-style and laughing along with the speechless Clarabell the Clown, who talks with a honking horn or squirts seltzer water. The shades are always pulled in the Rentzel’s tiny living room that smells like pipe smoke and mothballs, adding to the secretiveness of my television viewing. We’re not allowed to have a TV at home. Our church forbids it, but there is no rule to keep me from watching shows on somebody else’s TV! (Statement of Christian Doctrine and Rules and Discipline of the Lancaster Conference of the Mennonite Church,1968, Article V, Section 7):

Television programs are often destructive to the spiritual life and undermine the principles of separation from the world, the precepts of Christian morality, the proper respect for human life, and the sanctity of marriage and the Christian home.

Yet, Phineas T. Bluster, Clarabell the Clown, and Howdy Doody himself, continue to cast their spell upon me. Before I knew the word, I observed that Buffalo Bob Smith was a ventriloquist, himself voicing words that appear to come from the mouth of Howdy Doody.

The word ventriloquist derives from two Latin words: “venter” referring to the belly and “loqui,” to speak. Isn’t that what writers do? Speak on paper or computer screen from a place deep inside themselves where language mixes with thought and feeling.

Critic Brian Boyd says of writer Vladimir Nabokov, “In his novels Nabokov can not only ventriloquize his voice into the jitter and twitch of [his characters], but he can also” invent incidents . . . names, relationships.” Like a ventriloquist, Nabokov in his autobiography entitled Speak, Memory translates his life experiences into words.

Yes, memoir writers do just that: Give life to their memories by putting them into words. If your life is recorded as jottings in a journal or collected as photos in albums, you are “writing” memoir, perhaps starting out as amusement for yourself, but just so bequeathing a legacy to the next generation.

I’ll bet you may already have recorded your history, ventriloquizing your voice into something tangible: letters to family members in college, love letters, scrapbooks, family photo albums (physical or online) even recipes.

How are you ventriloquizing your experience: art, journals, recipes, a memoir?

Inquiring minds want to know. The conversation starts (or continues) with you. As you know, I will always reply.

Dear Heart: My Driver’s License Speaks

February 26, 2014February 25, 2015 marianbeaman29 Comments

Tucked under the signature of my Florida driver’s license are two words in blood-red that indicate that I am an organ donor.

This means that if I were in a fatal crash, my kidneys, liver, lungs, corneas—even my heart could be harvested for transplantation. Harvested and transplanted, two very agricultural-sounding terms for the brutal evisceration that must transpire before another human being can benefit from these vital organs.

Eleanor Vincent describes the impact of such a supreme gift from a mother’s point of view in her poignant memoir, Swimming with Maya: A Mother’s Story. When her 19-year-old daughter is left in a coma induced by a crushing fall from a horse, Eleanor struggles to make a heart-rending decision. What should be the fate of Maya’s healthy organs? Especially her heart. In the end, Maya’s heart is given to middle-aged Chilean businessman and father of two young children. Along this bumpy ride to full acceptance, Maya’s mother, whose husband no longer played a role in her daughter’s life, begins to think of Fernando, the heart recipient, as her daughter’s adopted father, “a kind of benign benefactor.”

Without telling anyone . . . I appoint Fernando the titular head of my family—a family that has shattered on the physical plane but one that I reconstitute in the ghost realm of my imagination. Seeing Maya’s continuing life through transplantation offers me a spiritual replacement for the searing physical absence of my daughter. She is dead, yes, but not entirely. Fernando experiences her vitality. As the home of Maya’s heart, he becomes a father figure for my daughter. As long as I see it this way, I don’t have to conduct the tug of war between my pain and his healing all alone. (216)

* * * * *

Like author Eleanor Vincent, surgeon and writer Richard Selzer describes the sense of comfort the emphatic, but soothing, lub-dup, lub-dup conveyed to the ear of the fictional Hannah, who made an equally heart-wrenching decision to donate her husband Sam‘s heart so that its recipient Henry Pope can live. As she lowers her ear to Henry’s chest, she senses her husband’s presence:

She could have stayed there forever, bathed in the sound and touch of that heart. Thus she lay, until her ear and the chest of the man had fused into a single bridge of flesh across which marched, one after the other, in cadence, the parade of that mighty heart. (27)

Clearly, organ donation of a loved one is dear, costly in both physical and emotional terms.

The designation “organ donor” has been on my driver’s license for a long time. I am not young, like Maya, or even in early middle-age, like Sam, So, I ponder, if donation became an option, would medical people even want my organs? Would my husband sign the papers to authorize such a donation? Now he says “Okay” to the kidneys, lungs, and corneas and possibly other tissues. But No! to my heart.

Your heart belongs to me, he says.

The case, apparently, is closed.

Do you know someone who has participated in organ donation either as a donor or as a recipient? Have you? Other thoughts?

* * * * *

I’m celebrating my blog-i-versary. One year ago yesterday my first blog post was published. Thank you, thank you for making this first year so rewarding and memorable!

Thank you, dear reader!

Moments of Extreme Emotion: Flunking

February 19, 2014February 19, 2014 marianbeaman35 Comments

Yes, I have flunked my driver’s test—again.

Is it the bullet-nosed, grey Studebaker I am learning to drive on, or is it just me? Anyway, the patrolman’s decision is final. I cannot drive alone. At least not yet. I have practiced driving with eight people stuffed into this Studebaker to Bossler’s Mennonite Church and back without crashing. Oh, there are some yells and screams along the way, but I haven’t careened off the road yet. (We’re frugal Mennonites and don’t waste gas on driving two cars if we are all going to the same place. Think: lap-holding, no seat-belts.)

Driving test Studebaker, 1950s — Driving test Studebaker, 1951

The first time I don’t pass my driver’s test is because I can’t parallel park right. (Yes, the ability to parallel park was part of the test back then.) And the second time, the cop says, “You were riding the clutch the whole time. If you keep on doing that you’ll wear out the transmission!” So I have flunked the driving test twice.

Me: I never flunk anything. In fact, I get all A’s in school. Now why can’t I pass this dumb test. I KNOW how to drive!

Mom: “Some people just don’t like girls with coverings on their heads.

Me: Well, that’s ridiculous!

Mom: When you take the test again, just wear a bandanna on your head. That will cover up your covering and you’ll probably pass.

Me: Why would that make a difference?

I do pass the third time. Hallelujah!

Now please tell me why. This is a multiple choice quiz:

a. I finally got over my nervousness.

b. Three’s a charm.

c. The policeman noticed I wasn’t a plain girl.

d. The policeman suspected I was a plain girl and thought I probably could even drive a tractor. So, “What the heck—She passes!”

False Pregnancy

February 1, 2014May 25, 2015 marianbeaman27 Comments

If I swallow a water-melon seed, my stomach might swell up.

If I touch freckle-faced Ricky with the dirty fingernails, I might grow a baby. Oh no!

Those were my childhood fears. With a limited sex education, I tried never to swallow watermelon seeds or touch grimy Ricky. But my parents also had fears, largely unfounded. What my Daddy dreaded most as the father of three adolescent girls is that one of us might turn up pregnant some day and bring shame and disgrace upon the family. “We don’t ever want to hear of that happening in our family,” he exhorted. In my Bible he wrote this not-so-veiled admonition from Ecclesiastes:

Daddy's inscription of Ecclesiastes 12:1 in the flyleaf of my Bible — Daddy’s inscription of Ecclesiastes 12:1 in the flyleaf of my Bible

Why he worried about my falling into mortal sin was beyond my comprehension: I always had my nose in a book and rarely dated Mennonite farm boys, or any other boys for that matter.

My experience with the lusts of men were of the non-Mennonite variety in my early teens. Summers I worked behind the meat counter for the Kleinfelters at Middletown Merchandise Mart. No worries with Mr. Kleinfelter, though he was often a bit tipsy, but some of his suppliers were another matter. Oily-haired Mr. Zapcic would creep up to the counter and invite me to “help” him in his produce business in Lancaster. “I need somebody to work behind the counter. You would be perfect!”

“That’s pretty far from Elizabethtown,” I mentioned innocently. Lancaster was almost 20 miles away.

Without my asking, Mr. Z. offered: “Oh, I’d see that you got there. You could ride with me.” It finally dawned on me what he was after and afterwards tried to ignore him. Yet he continued to harass me. Like Pamela in Samuel RIchardson’s novel, I rebuffed the man’s advances. Finally, I had to solicit some Kleinfelter help to get him to let me alone.

* * * * *

During the summer of 1964 my Aunt Ruthie and I attended Temple University, she to complete her Master in Education degree and me to begin it. From the hamlet of Rheems at 4:30 in the morning, we drove to Lancaster, took a train from Lancaster to Philadelphia, then rode the subway into north Philadelphia and walked eleven blocks to the campus of Temple University with classrooms filled with students who chain-smoked. I still wore a prayer veiling with a crown of dark brown braids fastened with hairpins underneath, ever the epitome of moral innocence. Ruthie’s classes lasted longer than mine, so I waited for her on a circular, wooden bench on the grassy campus outside the classroom.

A suave older man approaches me and raves about my hair. It could be a scene right out of Bird Life in Wington, Gertie the Goose meets Willie the Wolf.

I notice at once his pearly white, even teeth and brushed back hair. Is he a college student? He for sure doesn’t look like one. Other students are milling around, I notice, so what could be the harm in talking to this stranger?

Willie: “Sprechen ze deutsche?” Not waiting for an answer, he spouts, “You have gorgeous hair. It’s so thick and glossy.”

Gertie: Oh,uh [Insert Pennsylvania Dutch lilt] . . . why thank you.

Willie: I own a hair salon in the suburbs of Philly. I’d take you there and give you a different hair-do. It would frame your face really nice.

Gertie: Really?

Willie: Of course, I wouldn’t charge you anything.

Gertie: Well, thank you.

The dialogue continues for another minute or two, and then two things happen: I feel an electrical zap down my spine and a visitation from the Holy Spirit, who urgently whispers — “NO!” in my ear: “Run for your life. This guy is up to no good.”

Scales fall from my eyes as I swiftly dismiss his cunning ideas–and find an excuse to leave the bench and search desperately for Aunt Ruthie. Her class must be over. Soon, I hope. God, I hope soon!

Willie the Wolf in roadster tries to seduce Gertie Goose — Willie the Wolf in roadster tries to seduce Gertie the Goose in Calvin Reid’s cautionary tales

It’s your turn. Any narrow escapes from unsavory characters in your early years? Other threats to your moral virtue?

Your story is welcome here, and I will always reply.

Are You a Sneetch?

January 29, 2014September 9, 2014 marianbeaman6 Comments

Last Sunday afternoon, we took our red-haired grand-kids, the Daltons, to the Jacksonville Symphony Family Series, featuring The Sneetches. There was a pre-concert Orchestra Zoo with dozens of kids standing in lines to bang on, blow into, or saw the strings of grown-up instruments.

: Patrick & French Horn at the Orchestra Zoo

During the concert, the conductor asked each section of the orchestra to play a segment of a piece separately to let the kids hear the true sounds of the various instruments.Then came the pictorial story of the Sneetches animated on screen and read by a narrator, all accompanied by the whimsical strings, the complaining woodwinds, and the booming drums in Jacoby Symphony Hall.

If you need a brush-up on the Dr. Seuss plot line, two camps of yellow, fantastical creatures called Sneetches are separated by whether or not they have stars tattooed on their bellies. The Star-Belly Sneetches think they are best and make their Plain-Belly counterparts feel sad and inferior. Magically, Sylvester McMonkey McBean comes along with his Star-on and Star-off machines. Now the Plain-Bellies are thrilled because they match the elite. But the original Star Bellies are angry because they no longer stand out as special. Now no one is happy.

Between the Star Bellies and the Plain-Bellies there is plenty of bad feeling to go around. Then the conniving Star Bellies hatch an idea: Let’s get Sylvester McMonkey McBean to remove all the stars from bellies. Determined to find a solution, money from both belly camps gets stuffed into McBeans’ pockets, and he leaves town a rich monkey. Poorer in pocket, but richer in understanding, none of the Sneetches can remember who was what originally now that they all look the same. Finally, there is a level playing field.

The Sneetches’ conclusion: It doesn’t really matter what they look like—they can all be friends, stars or no stars. As the story ends, conviviality reigns.

In the car on the way home:

Jenna: “I really liked it! Those Sneetches were really cool, and they all liked each other at the end.”

Patrick: “It doesn’t matter what you look like. Everyone is the same. Oh, and there’s another thing: Don’t give away all your money away for a dumb reason.”

Grandpa: “You are special whether you have a star on your belly or not.”

First of all, I wouldn’t want a star on my belly, would you? I wouldn’t want to draw attention to my worst feature whether it looked cool or not.

If you are human, you probably are a Sneetch, prone to some of the dark emotions these yellow bellies felt: feelings of inferiority, pride, dis-content, fear, frustration, and envy.

You may or may not agree with Alex Daydream (that has to be a pseudonym!) who claims that no emotion is strictly good or bad.

No Emotion Is Strictly Good Or Bad

Anger clouds our judgement
Love can make us blind
If emotions are so ruinous
What good one can I find?

Empathy makes us better people
Pain brings us back always stronger
Sadness gives way to happiness
Meaning a better life lived longer.

Alex Daydream

Some of the writer’s conclusions may be questionable (I have to wonder does “Pain bring us back always stronger”?) Growing up a Mennonite in the Longenecker family of Lancaster County, we children were not encouraged to show our real emotions, especially not in public. In my memory, there was a huge gulf between feeling emotions and being able to truly express them.

But what matters is what you think.

Were you encouraged to express your true feelings as a child?

As the poet claims, does allowing oneself to feel emotions make for a more meaningful life? What about expressing them?

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