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!

The Red Hat Society: A Different Chapter

February 22, 2014February 22, 2014 marianbeaman20 Comments

Red hats, purple dresses, feather boas — all signatures of the Red Hat Society. There is even a Queen Mother, Sue Ellen Cooper of Orange County, California, who founded the Society in 1998 after she hosted a fancy tea party for ladies decked out in purple and red. Since then, Cooper has written two best-sellers about her Society, which has spawned thousands of chapters of women with “hattitude” nationwide.

"When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple / With a red hat . . . !" — “When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple / With a red hat . . . !”

My sisters and I had our own Red Hat Lady, my plain Grandma Longenecker’s fancy cousin, Mame Goss, who brought picked-over hats of all colors to us from a millinery shop where she worked in Middletown, Pennsylvania. Getting hats from Mame was heady stuff! She was a main character in the script of our youthful play-acting.

Mame is one step closer to revealing the treasures in her bag now. Soon we lay eyes on the partly smashed trousseau of hats, left over from the spring season. We fight over who gets what, of course.

* * *

“Here’s a straw hat with a polka dot bow, “ I say but cast it aside. Janice and Jean don’t pick it up either. They are eying the red satin bows and lavender netting attached to other headgear.

* * *

“Hey, I want this one,” Janice and Jean tussle over a swoopy hat with pink flowers. Jean finally picks up a white thing that looks like an upside-down, flat-bottomed boat with a wad of blue tulle tied in a fluffy bow in the back. Janice’s is flat and round and dark, not my taste, with black-eyed Susan circling the straw hat. I get the best hat, I believe. It is flat and round too, but navy, and studded with azalea pink silk flowers around the edges. Best of all, I can pull a dark blue net over my face. Instantly, I become a woman of mystery and allure.

* * *

We take our newly-found treasures up to Grandma’s bedroom and indulge in more fantasy. The space between her marble-topped vanity and tall headboard becomes our runway. We take turns prancing in front of her vanity mirror with wavy glass, cocking our heads just so and smiling at our reflections.

One day Auntie Mame brings another batch of hats. When I spy the red felt with broad brim, I know it is mine. Our catwalk this time is not the narrow confines of Grandma’s bedroom, but the front lawn along Harrisburg Avenue: Marian, Janice, and Jean preen for the camera this time. Soon enough we will stuff our hair under a prayer veiling, but until then, we’re fancy girls!

Home movie from the 1950s

Do you remember playing dress up as a kid? What were your costumes? Inquiring minds want to hear your story.

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!”

Do You Know Your Ethnic Mix?

February 15, 2014February 15, 2014 marianbeaman33 Comments

“Your DNA has a story. It’s time to discover it,” invites an ad on the back cover of the February 10, 2014 issue of The New Yorker. “It’s easier than ever to discover your ethnic heritage – and possibly find new cousins along the way,” the advertisement continues. Simply send in a small saliva sample, the key to revealing your DNA strands, which will unlock the secrets of your ethnic roots and disclose where your ancestors lived up to a thousand years ago.

Genealogy, roots, ancestry . . . In my Pennsylvania Dutch family tree, names and dates were often written in the family Bible:

Longenecker Family Bible with German BIble at right — Longenecker Family Bible with German New Testament at right

Eight generations ago, Ulrich Langenegger (1664-1757), left his birthplace in Langnau, Switzerland, because of religious persecution, and moved to the Rhine Valley in Germany and subsequently immigrated to America from Rotterdam on the good ship Hope.

In America, his son, Christian Langenecker (1703-1759) settled in the rich farm land of Donegal Township in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania where followed two more generations of Christian Longeneckers, with the initial “a” in the last name changing finally to an “o.”

Henry Risser Longenecker, my Grandfather, son of Levi Longenecker, listed in the family Bible. — Henry Risser Longenecker, my Grandfather, son of Levi Longenecker, recorded in the family Bible.

And so the family tree on my father’s paternal side continues:

Christian Longenecker, Jr. 1785-1855 buried in Bossler Mennonite Church Cemetery

John Longenecker 1817-1898 married Nancy Garber, my great-great grandmother

Levi Longenecker 1850-1931 married Annie Risser, my great-grandmother

Henry Longenecker 1876-1946 married Fannie Martin, my grandmother

Ray Longenecker 1915-1985 married Ruth Metzler Longenecker, my mother

On my father’s maternal side some of our history is recorded on the bottom of a chair given to me in 1975. Even then it had a 150-year-old history of Martins, Brinsers, and Horsts in the lineage of my Grandmother Fannie Martin Longenecker.

My mother’s story is a blend of other Pennsylvania Dutch Names: Landis, Harnish, Hernley, and Metzler. After attending the 275th Metzler reunion last June, I wrote a post entitled Another Valentine, A Different Romance, recounting the parallel history of Swiss-German Mennonites who also came to Pennsylvania at the invitation of William Penn to farm the rich soil of Lancaster County.

Because of their unique heritage as plain folks, focus on Mennonite ancestry is not unusual. But interest in tracing one’s ancestry has ballooned nation-wide in the last decade. “Finding Your Roots” the immensely popular PBS series by Professor Henry Louis Gates which aired in 2012 mirrors that trend. Using both traditional research and genetics, the series traces the family roots of such disparate celebrities as Condoleezza Rice, Sanjay Gupta, Margaret Cho, Robert Downey Jr., and Rev. Rick Warren. There are some surprising intermingling of genetic roots among the stories as I recall.

Thus, as our family trees expand and send out branches in many different directions, the fascination with our roots continues: Healthy roots, thriving branches, the tag of Homecoming Weekend at Eastern Mennonite University last fall, says it well.

* * * * *

Do you know your ethnic mix? Does it matter to you?

Is your story more complex because of adoption?

What fascinating discoveries have you made in learning of your ancestry?

Your thoughts matter to me! I look forward to hearing from you.

Be My Valentine

February 14, 2014January 15, 2015 marianbeaman12 Comments

“All you need is love. But a little chocolate now and then doesn’t hurt.”

So says Charles M. Schulz. Valentine’s Day is interpreted by many to include cards, chocolates, candlelight and roses. Some even break the bank buying expensive jewelry. Valentine’s day was named for a Christian martyr dating back to the 5th century, but according to Arnie Seipel in an essay for NPR, its origins are dark and bloody even, beginning with the wild and crazy Romans and their feast of Lupercalia.

During the Middle Ages tokens of love were first expressed by handmade paper cards. In the 14th century Chaucer helped romanticize the holiday with his love quotes like “love is blind” from The Canterbury Tales and his Parlement of Foules, featuring an assembly of birds gathered together to choose their mates. From the Renaissance to the Victorian Age and beyond, poets wrote sonnets extolling romantic love: Shakespeare, known especially during this season for Sonnet # 116, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s famous lines “How do I Love Thee? Let me count the ways” in Sonnet # 43.

Today, Valentine’s Day is big business. In 2011, sales reached $ 18.6 billion. This year the figure will probably exceed 20 billion. Seipel quotes Helen Fisher, a sociologist at Rutgers University, who says that if commercialization has spoiled the day, we can blame only ourselves for buying into it. But the celebration of Valentine’s Day goes on nonetheless. Even with some sayings on candy hearts we never imagined:

A few candy heart sayings we never saw: Courtesy Google Images — A few candy heart sayings updated by social media: Courtesy Google Images

Years ago, candies like these were hand-picked for that special one, but many valentine cards were home-made. I remember making valentines for friends at school or punching cut-outs for classmates and dropping them in to the big, square box decorated red and white for Valentine’s Day at Rheems Elementary School. Stories in our readers illustrated children making, not buying, Valentine cards for friends:

"The Surprise Valentines," Gray and Arbuthnot, Scott Foresman & Company, 1941. — “The Surprise Valentines,” Gray and Arbuthnot, Scott Foresman & Company, 1941.

Do you remember making or receiving hand-made valentines? Are you holding on to an old Valentine card for sentimental reasons?

Vintage Cut-out Card, Cliff Collection — Vintage cut-out card, Cliff Collection 1966

Your thoughts start the conversation—or keep it going. Thank you!

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Thank you for your response. ✨

Purple Passages with Pictures: February 2014 edition

February 12, 2014March 6, 2014 marianbeaman8 Comments

Grapefruit Harvest in February

Think of February as God’s special gift of time sandwiched between all the hubbub of past holidays and the upcoming arrival of a busy spring. To me, February is the ideal month to regroup . . . to review where I’ve been and to rethink where I’m going. I have found it is the best time of the entire year to pause for several concentrated weeks of deliberate reflection.

Chuck Swindoll, Insight for Living 1999

February is merely as long as is needed to pass the time until March. — Dr. J. R. Stockton

LOVERS

Marionettes from Prague - Books from all over — Marionettes from Prague – Books from all over

MUSIC: The Mozart Effect (Notes from Lecture) March 2000

Classical music, like Mozart or Hayden stimulates Beta waves suited for high-quality, analytical thinking.

Jazz: like Miles Davis or John Coltraine, creates order from chaos, good for thinking that does not lend itself to simple linear solution. Generates theta waves: highly creative brain consciousness associated with out-of-the-box creativity, spiritual insight.

Rock: Makes a statement about TIME, especially suited to people who need to be vigilant like those in an inner city environment. Sharpens awareness!

New Age / Alternative: Music organized around SPACE; suited for people who live in a highly mental structure.

Music creates a current on which images flow. It can catch an image in its nets so it can be looked at, analyzed. Glamour, January 1999

IN THE ZONE/ATTITUDE

I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten, happy, absorbed, and quietly putting one bead one after another. Brenda Ueland

And frame your mind to mirth and merriment / Which bars a thousand harms and lengthens life.” Wm. Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew

We do not see things as they are; we see things as we are. Anais Nin

Your turn:

Add a quote? Comment on one or two you have just read?

Coming next: Do You Know Your Ethnic Mix?

February Garden: Forlorn or Fabulous?

February 8, 2014February 7, 2014 marianbeaman22 Comments

Ordinarily, I am proud of my patio garden.

But January 2014 was tough in Florida: two nights in the 20s and several days around the freeze point. And so the plants in my garden took a beating. The impatiens, in spite of being covered, froze to death. The pentas bushes were reduced to black, ashy stems and had to be trimmed back. Daughter Crista, the green thumb in our family, assures me they will come back strong.

Last night, there came a frost, which has done great damage to my garden. . . . It is sad that Nature will play such tricks on us poor mortals, inviting us with sunny smiles to confide in her, and then, when we are entirely within her power, striking us to the heart.

~Nathaniel Hawthorne, The American Notebooks

Welcome to My Garden: dead Impatiens, live asparagus fern — Welcome to My Garden: dead impatiens, live asparagus fern

If you live in Hawaii, my garden may seem forlorn. Alaska your residence? Well, then it may look just fabulous.

Wisteria and passion flower vines are gone, leaving a naked metal fence, still bent where it took a hit from a falling oak tree branch. What remains? Red sister, rose bush in a planter, aloe shoots, asparagus fern, bromeliad with perky red flower.

Soon the passion flower and wisteria vines will intertwine to soften the metal fence. The pentas will flower up, and I’ll buy new impatiens. There’s hope!

If winter comes, can spring be far behind?

― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ode to the West Wind

While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.

Genesis 8:22 KJV

Do you like to garden with either indoor and outdoor plants?

I remember Grandma and Aunt Ruthie paging with intent through the Burpee seed catalogs in February or March each year picking out the varieties they like best. What about you?

Tell your gardening story here.

What Will You Be Doing At 72?

February 5, 2014February 5, 2014 marianbeaman27 Comments

Now you are probably thinking . . . age 72 is a long way off, or it’s just around the corner. Either way, it’s a question worth pondering.

In 1700 the average life expectancy was 37. In fact, 40 would be pushing it. Yet, in that very year Mary Granville Pendarves Delany was born and lived to be 88. More impressive is the fact that at age 72 she invented mixed media collage and eventually created “an astonishing 985 botanically correct, breathtaking cut-paper flowers, now housed in the British Museum and referred to as the Botanica Delanica.”

Poet Molly Peacock, author of The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany begins her life work at 72, recreates the “Aha!” moment for Mary Delany early in the book:

One afternoon in 1772 [the recently widowed Mary Delany] noticed how a piece of colored paper matched the dropped petal of a geranium. After making that vital . . . connection between paper and petal, she lifted the eighteenth-century equivalent of an X-Acto blade . . . and began to maneuver, carefully cutting the exact geranium petal shape from the scarlet paper.

Then she snipped another and another, beginning the most remarkable work of her entire life.

". . . if a rose had a round watch face" (65) — “. . . if a rose had a round watch face” (65)

Her most famous and popular image is the Damask Rose, appearing on postcards, place-mats, tea towels, and canisters. The main flower includes about 71 pieces of carefully cut papers, covering the gamut of pinks from slivers of red to blush and “under-the-finger-nail pink.”

Nodding thistle, a cousin of the dandelion, with swirling foliage

The theatrical-looking opium poppy is cut from a single green piece of paper. “The whole effect is of a kimono-like gown billowed by a breeze, like the robe of a star soloist falling down from her shoulders” upside down (118).

" . . . lines swoop and swoon with freckled energy" (141) — ” . . . lines swoop and swoon with freckled energy” (141)

Mary Delany’s output was phenomenal. In 1777, the year she constructed the passion flower, she cut out her collage/mosaics at the rate of one per day, and between the ages of 77-87 creating one every four days (185).

For the passion flower, Mary Delany cut out 230 petals scissored “like little grass skirts, where the strands of grass are attached to a belt” (169). She made up her colored papers . . . washing whole sheets of paper in varying hues. In the case of the passion flower, olive, loden, beige ivory for the leaves, and the flower rust, red, purples, deep and pale pinks, lavender. To the pigments she added gum arabic, honey, ox gall to prepare and preserve the papers. All done on a matte black background, always on dramatic black.

Mrs. Delany was born into the aristocracy with a wide circle of friends which included composer George Frederic Handel and the satirist Jonathan Swift. John Wesley even courted her. Yet her posh outer life was checkered with challenge: an arranged teen-age marriage to an aging drunken sot, problems with cash flow, at mid-life the loss of her soul-mate, Patrick Delany, a man who knew her worth, then deaths of close relatives, and finally her own illness.

Yet like her flowers, cut with a blade, not outlined by a brush, Mary Delany blazed a path for herself with a scissors, scalpel, tweezers, and needle. Combined with her imagination and gutsy determination, she made art that endures.

Age is the sum of all we do.

Charles Bulkowski, quoted by Molly Peacock (343)

The root of the word inspiration is “breath.” What activity do you do that inspires you, gives you energy?

Or takes your breath away – maybe even give you a second wind?

What will you be [still] doing at age 72?

The career of flowers differs from ours only in audibleness.

Emily Dickinson, Letters

Our conversation together is just a click away. You know I’ll always chime in!

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.

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If winter comes, can spring be far behind?

― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ode to the West Wind

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