A Day in Ordinary Time

A Day in Ordinary Time

The day was ordinary only in the sense that nothing much happened. It had been months since she had been able to come and go at will. First, it had been the surgery, her own of course a minor root canal, but more overwhelming had been his cardiac operations.

The trip to the emergency room where he was diagnosed with a 'cardiac event' - new speak for what used to be called a heart attack - had been followed by his transfer to a larger and more specialized hospital with a dedicated cardiology center much further away.

"Always choose a hospital in a wealthy town," Irene had told her, after the fact. But as it happened, the doctor in the emergency room hadn't consulted her about where to take him. There was a system, and once you became a part of it, the system reigned supreme. The professionals knew best and wasted little energy and less time in the niceties of consultation.

And so the children returned to offer what they could to help. Taking turns at visiting hours so she didn't have to drive or even go in alone to see him. Spelling her so she could tend to the tasks of normal life.

The hospital stay was shorter than she had expected, and, once he was home, the kids returned to their own lives. But the driving didn't end with his discharge from the hospital. Day after day they travelled to stress tests and therapy centers, to blood tests and check-ups.

And then came the ice.

The weeks of continuous snowfall had built up walls of dirty plowed snow that melted at noontime only to freeze again when the sun fell behind the mountain. The lane on which she lived now had begun to take on the look of a luge course as the walls of now encroached on the roadbed with the melt ice trapped between them.

Gradually her world had shrunk as the combination of walking and diving on ice threatened both her sense of well-being and her actual safety. Never one to engage an enemy, she simply stayed home.

But today, an ordinary day if ever there was one, today the ice was melting. The lane had become a mushy bed of watery snow, running down the mountain to the brook.

And, best of all, the sun was shining.

THE THICKET

I was a rather solitary child who lived in the imaginary worlds created by the books on my grandmother’s bookshelf.  I had never seen a thicket; the only thickets I knew were those which filled the old books.  In the cautionary tales that dominated those books, children were often lost in thickets; princesses fell into comas in castles hidden in thickets; crones and witches with their black cats lived in one-room cottages overgrown by the mosses and vines that marked their thickets.  Maidens were imprisoned by jealous stepmothers in decaying houses hidden deep within thickets with elves and fairies their only companions.

Somehow, despite the unpleasant reality of actually living in a decaying hovel somewhere in a remote thicket, the image always appealed to me. The birdsong, mystery, ruination and solitude of the thicket spoke to me through the tales, and made a soothing setting for what was - in reality - frequently a story of evil and cruelty.

It never occurred to me that there might have been life before the thicket.  In the tales of old, the thicket and the home it surrounded were frozen in time like one’s relatives in an old tin type.  The witch or crone was perennially old; the stepmother always wicked; the dwarves had always been working in the forest.  I didn’t think about a time when the cottage or the castle might have been bright and new, set in a pretty woodland, its occupants young and happy.

I try to imagine the folk tale characters before their thickets tucked them in.  Was the wicked stepmother once a young bride, smiling and pretty as she moved hopefully into her new home in the forest? Did the witch ever have a family of her own? How did they spend their younger days? Did they trim the vines and weed the paths? Were their cottages once neat and trim and new? Did they manage to keep the spiders at bay? Did they cook and mend and clean? How old were they when they surrendered to the thicket? Was it a conscious decision? Or, did they just sit back and watch from a window?

And then, yesterday, I noticed the moss on my roof.  Later, I saw that weeds had grown up between the rocks in the wall behind the house.  Grasses were beginning to edge into the path that led to the brook, and silken webs were hanging down from the eaves of the porch roof.

Once upon a time, I would have weeded the rock wall, edged the path, and taken a broom to the cobwebs.  I might even have scraped the moss from the roof.  But that was then - I was young and strong and agile.  Now I sit on the porch with pen in hand, and write while my ever-encroaching thicket gradually surrounds me.

For that is what thickets do in real life.  They creep, surround, and ever so gradually encroach.  Acorns fall from the oaks, then sprout and grow, sending their roots deep into the rocky soil to become first seedlings and then saplings and take their place in the ever-wilding thicket.  Wild flowers - black-eyed Susans, Queen Anne’s lace, cornflowers - cluster around their trunks.  Grass seeds and berries, accidentally dropped from the air by migrating birds, take root and turn into vines and weeds or thorny shrubs that criss-cross old paths and choke the carefully planted perennials.

Across the road, leaves in tones of gold and red and orange pile up and turn brown, warming the soil as they rot and become part of it.  A tiny spider rides on the warmth of the steam from my coffee, spinning a web from the base of my lamp to its shade.  A squirrel gnaws at the opening in a birdhouse chosen years ago because it resembled a cottage from one of the fairy tales. She may be hoping to find a few eggs left by a long gone robin.  Or, perhaps, she’s just seeking somewhere warm to spend the winter.  Either way, she adds one more level of ruin to what is rapidly becoming my own thicket.

As the weather cools, I’ll spend less time on the porch, preferring instead to sit at the window, warmed by a small fire in the fireplace, and watch as leaves flutter down, birds assemble for their flight to warmer parts of the world, and squirrels store their food against the coming winter.

As I withdraw into my own winter haven, the thicket beyond my walls will continue its relentless takeover.  Soon, I’ll become the crone within it.  Small children, seeing me in the window, will shiver and point at me as they turn and run.

Perhaps they already do.

Musings from a Schoolmarm

THE THICKET

I was a rather solitary child who lived in the imaginary worlds created by the books on my grandmother’s bookshelf.  I had never seen a thicket; the only thickets I knew were those which filled the old books.  In the cautionary tales that dominated those books, children were often lost in thickets; princesses fell into comas in castles hidden in thickets; crones and witches with their black cats lived in one-room cottages overgrown by the mosses and vines that marked their thickets.  Maidens were imprisoned by jealous stepmothers in decaying houses hidden deep within thickets with elves and fairies their only companions.

Somehow, despite the unpleasant reality of actually living in a decaying hovel somewhere in a remote thicket, the image always appealed to me. The birdsong, mystery, ruination and solitude of the thicket spoke to me through the tales, and made a soothing setting for what was - in reality - frequently a story of evil and cruelty.

It never occurred to me that there might have been life before the thicket.  In the tales of old, the thicket and the home it surrounded were frozen in time like one’s relatives in an old tin type.  The witch or crone was perennially old; the stepmother always wicked; the dwarves had always been working in the forest.  I didn’t think about a time when the cottage or the castle might have been bright and new, set in a pretty woodland, its occupants young and happy.

I try to imagine the folk tale characters before their thickets tucked them in.  Was the wicked stepmother once a young bride, smiling and pretty as she moved hopefully into her new home in the forest? Did the witch ever have a family of her own? How did they spend their younger days? Did they trim the vines and weed the paths? Were their cottages once neat and trim and new? Did they manage to keep the spiders at bay? Did they cook and mend and clean? How old were they when they surrendered to the thicket? Was it a conscious decision? Or, did they just sit back and watch from a window?

And then, yesterday, I noticed the moss on my roof.  Later, I saw that weeds had grown up between the rocks in the wall behind the house.  Grasses were beginning to edge into the path that led to the brook, and silken webs were hanging down from the eaves of the porch roof.

Once upon a time, I would have weeded the rock wall, edged the path, and taken a broom to the cobwebs.  I might even have scraped the moss from the roof.  But that was then - I was young and strong and agile.  Now I sit on the porch with pen in hand, and write while my ever-encroaching thicket gradually surrounds me.

For that is what thickets do in real life.  They creep, surround, and ever so gradually encroach.  Acorns fall from the oaks, then sprout and grow, sending their roots deep into the rocky soil to become first seedlings and then saplings and take their place in the ever-wilding thicket.  Wild flowers - black-eyed Susans, Queen Anne’s lace, cornflowers - cluster around their trunks.  Grass seeds and berries, accidentally dropped from the air by migrating birds, take root and turn into vines and weeds or thorny shrubs that criss-cross old paths and choke the carefully planted perennials.

Across the road, leaves in tones of gold and red and orange pile up and turn brown, warming the soil as they rot and become part of it.  A tiny spider rides on the warmth of the steam from my coffee, spinning a web from the base of my lamp to its shade.  A squirrel gnaws at the opening in a birdhouse chosen years ago because it resembled a cottage from one of the fairy tales. She may be hoping to find a few eggs left by a long gone robin.  Or, perhaps, she’s just seeking somewhere warm to spend the winter.  Either way, she adds one more level of ruin to what is rapidly becoming my own thicket.

As the weather cools, I’ll spend less time on the porch, preferring instead to sit at the window, warmed by a small fire in the fireplace, and watch as leaves flutter down, birds assemble for their flight to warmer parts of the world, and squirrels store their food against the coming winter.

As I withdraw into my own winter haven, the thicket beyond my walls will continue its relentless takeover.  Soon, I’ll become the crone within it.  Small children, seeing me in the window, will shiver and point at me as they turn and run.

Perhaps they already do.

"… things lost in the psyche are all still there.  So too, this well of instinctual intuition has never been lost, and whatever is covered over can be brought back out again."  [1]

Requiem for the Fourteenth Grandmother.  Part I

The documentary film, “For the Next 7 Generations,” examines the work of thirteen wise women or grandmothers who are using their collective folk wisdom to spread peace and understanding throughout the world.[2]

The cultures represented by the Thirteen Grandmothers are as disparate as the Maya, Lakota, Inuit and Tibetan.  The women wear their traditional ethnic costumes as they travel, meeting and speaking with international leaders and their representatives.  Yet, neither European women, nor any North American women of European heritage, are included. 

An American woman at a recent showing of the film commented on this absence and asked why no women of Western European origin had been included in either the film or the discussion panel which followed it.  Her question generated a lively discussion of what might be called Euro-Woman and her place - or lack of it - in the global community of women.  In the end, there was an uncomfortable consensus that she didn't quite fit in, but no one could explain exactly why that was so, other than that she wasn't "indigenous." 

This begs the question of how useful it is to make longevity in place - the underlying definition of indigenous - the critical characteristic when gathering the wisdom of women from around the world. 

Euro-Woman shares the need expressed by the Thirteen Grandmothers to recover her ancestral ways of prayer, peacemaking, and healing, not just for her own well-being, but because the world needs them.  Indeed, she - and the world - hunger for it. 

This hunger is evident when Euro-Women in great numbers show up at medicine wheels, pow-wows and other indigenous gatherings.  Noting this, one Lakota woman asked a friend why white people “always suck up to us Indians.” To which her friend answered, "because all of our medicine women were killed.”

The sobering fact is that the Wise Women of Western Europe and North America were indeed killed and with them their wisdom and traditions, victims of the witch hunts and the scientific revolution of the fifteenth and sixteen centuries.  Not all of them, however, were eliminated.  Those medicine women who survived the European witch-hunts were – like Persephone - driven underground.  As a result, their daughters have been allowed – even forced – to forget their heritage, or to regard it as an amusing remnant of the past, similar to witches' costumes on Hallowe’en, Mummers' parades, Maypoles, or Easter bunnies.  Disconnected from their roots in traditional lore these things seem quaint, not to be taken seriously.  And yet, they persist.

***

In the wake of increasing computerization, Euro-Woman's daughters are experiencing a hunger, a yearning for a return to traditional ways that is evidenced by the revival of such women's skills as needlework, herbalism, and food-ways.  Their attendance at women’s healing circles is further testimony to the need to return to a traditional, goddess-based, conception of human society and behavior.

Yet, for many women, the post-feminist revival of such wise-woman practices as goddess worship and witchcraft has not fully satisfied the need.   Euro-Women no longer have their time-honored talismans, the costumes, beads, feathers, and drums of their ancestors and have had to reinvent them.  As a result, these retrospective gatherings and ceremonies often feel flat, lacking the depth of ancestral beliefs that only time can provide

The rise of domestic goddesses like Martha Stewart or Rachel Ray offers further evidence of this yearning, however much the media version of domesticity may have distorted the essence of Goddesses like Hestia, Ceres, Demeter, or Bridget that fuels their popularity.  Similarly, their herbal lore has not so much been handed down as recreated, and has been rapidly co-opted by big business under the aegis of 'nutraceuticals.' 

Euro-Women have no traditional costumes that identify them among the community of women.  High heels, tweed blazers and briefcases have displaced the kirtl, apron, and cauldron as Euro-Woman has abandoned her place at the hearth and taken one in the market place.  At first glance it would seem that all our medicine women have indeed been killed.  However, if they have only been driven underground, there is hope for their resurrection.  Like Persephone, they may return, if only for half of the year. 

The purpose of this essay is to examine the remnants of the ancient culture of Euro-Woman, in the hopes of resurrecting it and restoring her to her rightful place among the Grandmothers.  To begin that restoration, it is important to understand the process by which Euro-Woman lost her identity in the first place.

***

There clearly was an indigenous culture of wise women in Europe, as is evidenced by the strength with which it was suppressed.  Two forces in the early modern period [c. 1500 to 1800 AD] were strong factors in its demise.  The first was the religious upheaval of the Reformation along with its antithesis, the Counter-Reformation, in which the Roman church struggled to retain its primacy against the rise of Protestantism.  The second was the struggle of the scientific rationalists to gain equal standing within a culture dominated by theologians.  The wise-woman healer was the victim of each.

In the end, the combination of the imperial intentions of the Medieval Church and the Scientific Revolution’s rationalization of thought and information united to repress and even annihilate such women.  Hundreds of women were hung or burned as witches in the pivotal period in which magic, science, and religion struggled for political and intellectual position in the rapidly changing culture of Europe.[3]

Women's use of natural herbs and roots threatened the rise of scientific medicines.  Although the church attributed the success of women’s herbal medicine to collaboration with the devil, a self-serving accusation, it was not so much in support of the scientists, but because the very existence of women threatened the newly formulated doctrine of celibacy. 

In order to impose that doctrine on its clergy, the church had to wage an intellectual war of public relations against human sexuality.  The task of convincing young males to adopt a life of celibacy was a daunting one and the Church mounted a massive public relations campaign against women that persists to this day.  The most effective method of doing this was to denigrate women and the attraction they naturally hold for most men. 

Celibacy became the higher path in life for men, at least for the clergy.  The rise of the Virgin Mother as the ideal woman was the ironic matrix against which this took place.  Although marriage and motherhood were sanctioned by the church, sexuality was not. 

The Cult of the Virgin, ostensibly an elevation of Mary, the mother of Jesus, to a place above the Saints and Angels, intensified this marginalization by creating the dichotomy of the virgin and the whore.^[4]  If virginity was the ideal, then – for real women, at least – motherhood was tantamount to whoredom.  By focusing so intently on Mary's virginity, and by setting her up as a role model, the Church was able to deem women with normal sexual lives sinful, and to exalt the celibate state for men.[5]  It was in this period that Mary Magdalene, about whom the Bible actually says very little, was redefined as a prostitute.  The only hope for a woman lay in the convent where nuns lived apart from the rest of the community in perpetual virginity.  Throughout the Middle Ages these views combined to marginalize women.

The very language of Christendom reinforced this denigration of women.  There is a legend, for example, that Jesuits entering a church were trained to wipe the seats of the pews after a woman had sat down, lest her evil qualities afflict them.  The creation of such myths as the succubae, seductive female entities who visited men in their dreams, was a convenient way to blame women for causing otherwise chaste men to have sexual dreams that were beyond their control.[6] 

 The value of women’s ceremonies and celebrations paled against the Rites and Rituals of a patriarchal Church.  Home-based ceremonies based on the Passover Seder were swept away as high church liturgies dominated the religious life of towns and cities.

***

Learning from the model provided by the Church, the secular rationalists waged a methodological war on the women's gifts of intuition and tradition as they attempted to raise Science to the status already held by Theology.  Potions, nostrums, and tisanes, the healing tools of the wise woman, were increasingly disdained as male scientists isolated the active ingredients in common herbs and roots, thereby co-opting them as ‘medicines’ which required that they be prescribed by a trained physician.  Healers who lacked such training were redefined as quacks or frauds. 

Women's intuitive approach to healing, because it did not lend itself to scientific investigation, was gradually degraded as unscientific or non-existent.  Women, by virtue of their degraded status, were then denied the scientific training and the new information it provided.  Science - like Theology -became the domain of men, while women's skills were disdained as witchcraft or demonology.[7]

These twin processes of denigration and annihilation culminated in the witch trials of the 17th century in both Europe and America.  Those women who were not killed as witches gave up their healing practices or were driven underground. 

It is hard to recognize the remnants of our traditions in a world of cell phones, chat rooms, and microwave cooking.  Nevertheless, there is evidence that remnants of that culture are still with us.  Industrial/commercial overlays mask the folkish roots of our traditions.  Yet, they are woven into our folk and fairy tales, our holidays, festivals, and food ways.  

They remain in those quirky habits of Italian and Jewish great- grandmothers, for example, who tie a red ribbon on the crib of a newborn to keep the evil spirits away, or knock on wood and say, “Gahfabid” [God forbid] or “Kunna Hurra” [Yiddish: Kein ein hora].  Both of these traditions involve tying a red ribbon on the baby’s crib to ward off evil spirits.  The Yiddish words, meaning "no evil eye," are used when someone compliments the baby.  Similarly, the Italian "God forbid" and knocking are designed to negate or drown out a compliment paid to the baby lest the spirits become envious.  Other childbirth traditions include the Christian precept that mother and child do not leave the house until the baby is baptized, again protecting the infant from evil spirits before his soul has been protected. 

***

Euro-Woman as wise woman disappeared from European culture, so much so that today, even other women do not recognize her as a kindred spirit.  She has had her traditions ignored, not only by those men who set the rules for church and science, but also by her sisters among indigenous women like those who constitute the Grandmothers Council; worst of all, she herself has accepted the belief that there is no indigenous women’s culture in the west.  And yet....

The exclusion of Euro-Woman and her cultures from such an important undertaking as the Thirteen Grandmothers’s crusade for global peace creates a ‘we/they’ situation in which 'you white women' are seen as somehow usurping the culture of the indigenous women of the Council.  But if the Council is truly in a quest for peace and understanding, such an exclusion is counterproductive.  It is also a misreading of our mutual history.

Paraphrasing a Jungian concept, Clarissa Pinkola Estes notes that, "things lost in the psyche are all still there."^[8]  It is quite possible that for Euro-Woman the culture of our grandmothers has never been totally lost, and - more importantly - that whatever is covered over can indeed be brought back out again.  It is here that we can begin to locate the remnants of our traditional culture.  Like archeologists, we must uncover our culture, shard by shard, image by image, and restore it, rather than adopting the culture of others. 

---

[1] Carl Jung, paraphrased by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run with the Wolves, NY: Ballantine/ Bertelsmann 1992, 1996, P. 83.

[2] Their first major gathering was in 2004.  In attendance were Gloria Steinem, Alice Walker and Helena Norberg-Hodge [see Shambhala Catalog. Fall/Winter 2009, p. 31]

[3] For more on the anomaly of tribes annihilating their own women, see Leonard Shlain, The Alphabet vs the Goddess.

[4] The Church distinguishes between virginity and celibacy.  Although the highest ideal may be perpetual virginity, that status is primarily reserved to women.  The panoply of female saints is replete with women who - like the virgin/martyr Saint Agnes - were canonized precisely because they defended their virginity, defying parental or other pressures for them to marry, and giving up their lives in the process. The male version of the saintly tale begins with a dissolute life as a soldier or a knight in which wine, women, and song predominate.  This tale culminates in a spiritual conversion, with the canonization of the now-reformed man as a saint of the Church.  See for example the life of Saint Ignatius.

[5] A survey of the language of the prayers of the Roman Church reveals that the word 'virgin' is used consistently in referring to the Mother of Jesus, as well as to other holy women of the early Church.  Given the theological precept that Jesus never married, and is presumed to have had no sexual relations with women, it is significant that the word virgin is never used in conjunction with him, nor with any of the male Disciples who followed him.  Within the Church there is a significant distinction between celibacy and virginity.  The first is a choice, the second is a physical state.  Males could - and did - lose their virginity in their profligate youth, only to recover [wc] later and take a vow of celibacy.  For females, the preferred state was absolute virginity.

[6] The male version of this 'demon' was the incubus/incubi.  Both of these were sexual dreams or nightmares that visited the sleeping Christian, doing things that the waking person would never do.

[7] It is interesting to note the origin of the word witch, which derived from the word 'wit' or wisdom.  Estes p. 97.

[8] Estes, Clarissa Pinkola.  Women Who Run with the Wolves, NY: Ballantine/ Bertelsmann 1992, 1996 p 83.

A Home is More than a House

A Home is More Than a House

It is an extension of oneself and should be cherished as such. 

When I was selling my house several years ago, I spent an inordinate amount of time decorating it so that it would appeal to the unknown buyer who would make it financially possible for me to move to the Poconos and retire. 

I simmered nutmeg and ginger on the stove every day to hint at baking and domesticity.  I placed huge, beautifully-illustrated tomes on the coffee table to suggest literary leisure as a way of life that came with the house.  I placed flowers in a white milk glass jelly jar in the middle of the kitchen table in a tribute to homeliness and an agrarian way of life.  I even color-coordinated rooms that had been thrown together color-wise for the entire time of my sojourn in the house. 

I was warned that all this was unnecessary, that the buyer would not be seeing what I was choreographing, but would see rather the ‘bones’ of the house.  Nevertheless, I persisted in creating this faux image in a house that had – in its original state - served me well for many years.  Because of [or despite] my efforts at simulating a lifestyle, the house did sell; the new buyers seemed very pleased with their purchase, and we moved on. 

I’m told that within six months, the buyers had taken it all apart and redone it in their own image.  My cross-and-bible colonial front door?  Gone.  Replaced by a dark oak door with a stained glass oval insert.  The dogwood tree and the hosta that my children called ‘the back to school flowers’ surrounding it?  Also gone.  The shed that had been custom-built as a miniature version of the house?  Dismantled and sent to the dumps.  The ivy that had been in large vases on the altar when I married, then planted around the front borders when we moved to the house, was pulled up and discarded overnight.

Given the amount of change that they imposed on it, I have to wonder what it was about the house that had caught the buyers’ fancy in the first place.  Since they had rejected the very things that made the house stand out from its neighbors on the suburban street, their selection was a mystery to me.

What lesson can I take from this?  I haven’t a clue.  Were I to attempt to sell another house, I would probably do the same things.  But I suspect that somewhere within the buyer in all of us is a need to make the house our own.  And only by eradicating those things that meant so much to a former owner can we accomplish that.

I wish the new owners well.  I only wish I had been able to bring with me a few sprigs of the ivy and a pot filled with hostas.  But, I will now have to make a new and different mark on my home in the Poconos. 

The things they discarded were remnants of my younger days.  My Pocono memories will be based on a different set of experiences.

When poverty becomes a crime

When Poverty Becomes a Crime

As the political circus heats up for November, one New York gubernatorial candidate has decided to cast his lot with those for whom poverty is symbolic with decadence, if not criminality. 
Although Carl Paladino does not explicitly use those terms, his welfare reform suggestions - that the State of New York convert its underutilized correctional facilities to housing for the homeless and mandate that those on welfare take part in his workfare projects - is not without its subliminal implications.
Moreover, to include lessons in 'personal hygiene' in the proposed programs is not only insulting to the poor who are systematically denied access to public areas for hygiene, but reinforces a range of stereotypical notions about the poor as lazy, dirty, and criminal.

While the adaptive reuse of excess institutional buildings is a positive approach to preserving the American way of life, it seems that he is using language intentionally chosen to inflame the already inflamed, dividing and conquering the poor from the almost poor among us.
His choice of words like prisons, hygiene, and welfare  to describe his projected into a package impugns a wide range of people for whom the new post-industrial economic system has failed.
Indicating that "everyone capable of doing work will be expected to work or prepare for work if they want financial assistance," he glides over the systemic problems that have led to the increasing numbers of those on welfare, most of whom are mothers with children.  Given the paucity of child care in New York, those mothers are caught between a rock and another rock.  Stay home and raise your children - but without adequate income - or, leave your children unattended [or, try taking them to work with you!] and work at a low-paying, less than full-time job. Either way, the people to whom his campaign is directed will be among the first to throw stones.
There has to be a better way.  Indeed there are better ways, but they don't make for sexy campaign slogans.

A soliloquy on Guns, Gun Control, and Cold Dead Hands

A soliloquy on Guns, Gun Control, and Cold Dead Hands.

It started with a sign in a shop window in a little hamlet in the mountains near where I live.  I had stopped to pick up several cups of coffee for my friends back at the cabin we were renovating.  The shop was a general store, a relic of an earlier time before specialization.  One section carried basic groceries and supplies – bread, milk, cold cut, soap and toilet paper.  Another was set aside as a small restaurant serving breakfast and lunch.  A third carried camping and fishing supplies.  The fourth sold guns and ammunition.

Written in white shoe polish on one picture window was the message: “Obama will take your guns away; stock up now.”  “Get your ammo while you still can.”

The message in the second window linked the newly-elected president to Nazism, echoing the message of a series of blogs circulating on the internet.  The words made me uncomfortable.  It was more than just that I didn’t agree with the sentiments they expressed. It was the tone of the message; a warning, a call to arms – literally.

 I was suddenly afraid that the people in this area might think of me as an enemy, for reasons I couldn’t fathom.  I wished them no harm; indeed, I didn’t even know them.  But in my heart of hearts, I disagreed with them about the wisdom of universal gun ownership.

Charlton Heston’s widely quoted statement warning the government, and anyone else who promoted gun control, unconsciously held within it its own counter-argument – guns are deadly.   “I'll give you my gun when you take it from my cold, dead hands,” he warned.  At that extreme, one might have to kill him in order to get his gun – or be killed in the attempt.  This was – and is - not my idea of a good civic engagement.

Nervously, I went in to get the coffee.  The waitress with the faded blond hair and tobacco-roughened voice welcomed me warmly; a 30-something counterman with a gentle smile and a wiry young stock boy both nodded in greeting.  Who were these people?    Why did they hate the brand new president who seemed to me to be trying to create a more peaceful world? Why did they feel so strongly about owning guns and ammunition?

To me, the evils of guns seemed so obvious: the young honor student shot to death on a Chicago street; the old woman gunned down in an urban tenement hallway, the little girl shot through the window of her bedroom.  These were all-too-frequent indicators of gun ownership gone wild.  The greater danger, it seemed to me, was the proliferation of guns and ammo, not their regulation.

I reminded myself that in this area I was the outsider.  Clearly, my new neighbors had a different view.  To them the Second Amendment was a major, if not the major, guarantee of their freedom, and they intended to defend it. To paraphrase Dorothy, I wasn’t in suburbia any more.  My dislike of firearms was decidedly the minority view here.  I had better tread softly, or at least keep my thoughts to myself.

But it was more than just the politics.  Somewhere in this there was a very important cultural dissonance, and it suddenly seemed important to me to understand it.  Why did it matter so much – on both sides of the issue?  People of good will clearly held widely divergent opinions, and were willing to go public with them.

For one thing, the geography is different.  As the merchandise in the gun shop attested, the people of the area were hunters and their hunting was more than merely sport.  They were rural folk whose livelihoods were largely seasonal.  Their hunting is more than merely sport; it was a portion of their daily work. They rely on game to provide them with meat to get them through the long winters when outdoor work dries up and seasonal work has left with the summer people. 

In the city, at least until very recently, work is annual.  One has a job and does it weekly, monthly, and yearly.  Meat in the city is available all year long – provided one has the job and the income it provides.  Taking a gun out to hunt in the city would yield a very different and largely inedible breed of animal.

The space here is different too.  Suburban homes require some form of greenery to shield one family from the eyes of my neighbors, here, people were often miles from their neighbors and even more miles from the public services that city folk take for granted.  Police, fire, ambulance, and road plowing, even garbage disposal, were miles away, if available at all. A power outage can render them totally isolated and vulnerable.   Hungry bears or malevolent intruders are dangers to be warded off single-handedly.  A gun was beginning to look far less ominous; the opposition to gun control, more logical.

On the other hand, the folk wisdom of isolated rural areas is no more universally valid than that of the city dwellers who live with the horrors of drive-by shootings, or for that matter, anyone who has dealt with the results of youngsters playing with their fathers’ “unloaded” guns. 

Accidental shootings are not restricted to urban areas.  Hunting season often gives rise to cases like that of a little girl shot by a hunter through the walls of her mobile home.  Her family grieved her no less seriously because they too owned guns.  Where can we find the right balance?  Is it even possible?

And then there is the rhetoric of anger and hate.  Despite my new understanding of the need for guns in rural areas, I still found the Hitler allusions on the shop window not only unpleasant, but frightening.  People, especially those who lives demand more self-sufficiency, are more readily aroused when their way of life is - or appears to be – under threat.

Images from old movies, in which the ‘villagers’ march on the castle carrying torches and pikes, flitted through my mind.  A media that repeatedly tells us that we are under siege from some mammoth government powers can only intensify this tendency.  Similarly, a spiral of silence on the opposition side intensifies when a large number of gun-wielding countrymen hold a position and hold it loudly, and no one dares to offer an alternative opinion.

The people in that little store wished me no harm, and, no doubt if they were to meet him, would wish President Obama no harm.  Yet their windows reminded me that my ideas were more than a little alien in this environment.

I longed for a dialogue with them.  I wanted a personal understanding free from Internet slogans and radio sound bites, from the ranting on the right and the carping on the left.  I wanted to hear all their thoughts about guns, and I wanted them to listen to mine.  I wanted a conversation in which we could open each other’s eyes to the problems we face, rather than blind us to each other’s humanity.  But I was afraid to begin the discussion.

Perhaps we can someday reach a time when there are more than two sides to the issue, and when the third side is the voice of reason.

 “Why do you want to own a gun?”  “Because in the dead of winter, when food is hard to come by, I can feed my family.”

“Why do you fear guns?”  “Because in the dead of night, the sound of gunfire in the streets reminds me that even in their beds, my children can be murdered by someone they have never met.”

“I am afraid of hunger.”  “I am afraid of gangs.”

“I want my children to be fed.”  “I want my children to be safe.”

“I want peace.”  “I want freedom.”

Are we really so very different?  Surely there is still room in America for a conversation in which the hunter and the commuter can share their values and come to a mutual understanding about the meaning of the second amendment and the role of guns in modern America.