What Makes YOU Feel Safe?

All this talk in the media about feeling safe enough -  even my own talk here yesterday on the Huffington Post - has me wondering: what do most of us do to feel safe in a day-today way?

I don't mean what do we overtly do, like put on a hazmat suit or never cross a bridge. I mean what we do to feel safe inside, the way we felt when we were little kids in overalls sitting on the floor in front of Captain Kangaroo, or watching dust motes circle lazily in the empty dining room when the sun painted the whole room gold?

If I were still a high school English teacher and you were my students, I'd make you all sit on the floor in a circle and have you make a quick list right now, of three things that make you feel safe in this cozy old way.

What would you put on it? I'll mull this over today, and see what I myself can come up with by morning.

Class dismissed!

Standing Tall

For over 20 years Liz Walker was a new anchor with WBZ-TV Channel 4 Boston. Last week I wrote about what great things she said as the keynoter at the recent Girl Scouts Leading Women Awards Breakfast, which you will see at the top here under “This Week’s Column.” It's worth looking I think for the way it so exactly matches the spirit of the times.These days she does amazing things in the world, both close at hand - as an ordained minister on staff at the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church – and far away in her work with the many innocent people in Dafur and the Sudan who are daily asked to suffer on a scale you and I can scarce imagine.I first met Liz back in 1986 when she came to my living room with a Channel 4 cameraman to ask me what it felt like to be the only print journalist in New England to get to the finals in the NASA-sponsored competition to send one of us up in the Shuttle. Earlier that day another network had also sent a news team.“Have the children cling to her skirts!” said the producer. “She LOOKS a little like Christa McAuliffe!” said cameraman. This was just four months after the Challenger blew and it was pretty clear they were setting this up as another Mother of Young Children Dies For NASA Story.With the camera rolling, the reporter placed her big microphone before the small face of my Fifth Grade daughter. “Would YOU like to go up in space one day?” she asked her. “No WAY!” said the child.“And how about you dear?” she then asked, lowering the mic to the height of our Second Gradeer – who pushed her hair quick behind her ears, took a step forward like one about to recite an ode and in a calm ‘teaching’ voice said, “No - because when I get big I’m going to be a mother and I don’t think a mother should leave her children.”Thirty minutes later the news went out over AP wire: “Children of New England Space Finalist Oppose Her Going.” A news veteran pal was on the line to me within 60 seconds. “Don’t let them NEAR your kids!” she said – and so when Liz came to my living room that evening they were safely upstairs with their dad.She asked me intelligent questions and I answered them and there was only kindness and thoughtfulness in the exchange. I still have the videotape of that interview somewhere and maybe I’ll dig it out and put it up here too. I wasn’t used to talking on TV back then so I seem really stiff and robotic, like a person who'd just had Novocain in both jaws and three or four Botox shots to the face but you’ll see Liz Walker just as she still is today, natural and curious and lovely.Right now I’m watching the sun rise over the snowy rooftops and trying to line up all the work I have to do day. I don’t know what Liz has lined up for today but it’s a good bet it’s work on the side of the angels. You can see what she's up to right now by going to her blog  On the Road.

Recipes for Healing

THIS IS NAN ON THE LEFT, WITH COUSIN ELEANOR

I’m in Florida, the land of scooting lizards and drinking water that smells like a swamp - only here at my sister Nan’s house Nature is banished. Her husband Chuck saw to that: he built this place five years ago and all night long the ceiling fans turn in rhythm with the comforting rumbles of the seeming dozen of systems all working to keep thing cool, dry and varmint-free.

The two of them were five years into their marriage when they came here. Chuck’s beautiful wife Betty had died of cancer and Nan’s high-energy husband Tom had died of a heart attack. Tom was one of the only two men I have ever known who would smoke while downhill skiing off the trail. He also would eat six raw hot dogs, chased by six-hard-boiled eggs, chased by a pint of ice cream. Nan and their 15-year-old daughter Gracie suffered so much when he died, as did the four wonderful kids from his first marriage all in their 20s, that tender and precarious decade.

Now Nan is suffering again: For the third time in four years she has a MRSA infection and this one is bad. She wants me to do a kind of 'public service' column about MRSA and I can try to do that as soon as I get home to Boston, but right now it's 8am and I'm sitting in this lovely tree house of a home on the bayou and the fans are turning and Nan is quietly infusing herself with the killer antibiotic Vancomycin, the only drug at all shown to be effective against this methycillin-resistant staph infection.

She has an opening in her arm where the PICC line enters, then heads north, then south again and straight to her heart. (The abbreviation stands for Peripherally Inserted Central Catheter.) It’s very important that that site remain clean and a wound care specialist comes every day to look both at it and at her foot, where the infection began. It’s in the bone still, even these seven weeks into treatment, and everyone is praying she can keep her toes. At one point they thought the foot was even a goner. At its worst Nan says it looked like a shark had bitten her. It was raw and open, pulsing and red.

She wouldn’t let me come until now. “I'm fine. I have Gracie,“ she emailed me the one time. “I have Chuck.” But every single day she has to go for what could end up being nine or even ten weeks to lie for two hours each time in the Hyperbaric Chamber which is said to speed healing. And then there are the doctor’s appointments. And Gracie couldn't work from this house forever. And on the phone once Chuck said in a very small voice, “I’m just having a little trouble with the meals."

So I got on the plane the second Nan gave me the green light. I here came Thursday at 4:00 and I will leave tomorrow morning at 10:00 and in that time I have made a Chicken Cassoulet meal and a heart Meaty Loaf meal; an old-fashioned Roast with Pan Gravy, and a Baked Ziti that would feed a dozen; a hot Pear, Pork and Arugula Dish with Walnuts and Bleu Cheese and a Chopped Broccoli Salad with Bacon Bits Cheddar and Red Onion. Yesterday I went to the Winn-Dixie and bought ten Tupperware containers and today I will start freezing it all, because they have barely made a dent in it, natch.

It’s funny though: I’m just looking at this list to see that that while the Pork and Arugula Salad is a new favorite of ours everything else has meaning: The Roast with Gravy and the Zesty Meat Loaf were our Mom’s specialty. My girl Annie-the-chef told me to make the Baked Ziti and sent me down here with the recipe that bears her quirky stamp (“Mix the whole mess up in a bowl...”) The Chicken Cassoulet is our cousin’s Carolyn’s specialty and the Cheesy Broccoli Salad is Cousin Eleanor's. I’m pretty sure Eleanor herself is coming at the end of August. I know Cousin Sheila arrives in just two weeks. My girl Carrie is sending a CD and a book down. And faithful-hearted Cousin Mary Lou calls and calls, expressing love and compassion though Nan is too weak yet to tackle a phone call.

Dodson is a beloved honorary son of David and me and he might as well be son to Nan and Chuck too for how they love him and his new bride Veronica - just as much as we do. They came here to Tarpon Springs from Sarasota just for the day Saturday and just sat with us on our couch. We are all on the couch it feels like. We are together in spirit, and hoping for our miracle.

To Full Equality

This is My Independence Day Story: To Full equality, in marriage and everywhere else !

How would it be for you as a parent, if you gradually came to understand that your just-emerging-from-college daughter had fallen in love with another young woman, and six years passed and she loved her still?

How would you feel if you belonged to a church that around this time chose to examine the possibility of going on record as a place welcoming to any woman who loved a woman, to any man who loved a man, the same as it is to any person who entered there to worship?

And if one day during this 18-month-long period of study, prayer and reflection designed to let people really examine this possibility, a woman stood and expressed her concern about how “these people” might fit in, I wonder if it would surprise you to hear the man in the neighboring pew whisper to his wife, “She doesn’t realize: she’s talking about our son.” Or if it would surprise you to learn that a half-dozen other parents present that morning were likely thinking the same: “You speak of our children, onetime singers in the Junior Choir and assistants in the Sunday School; our children, whom you have known since their infancy.”

I wonder how you might then feel if, after that lengthy consideration, your church voted “Yes. Let the word go forth that we in this 150-year old community of the United Church of Christ unanimously choose to be known as an Open and Affirming congregation.”

And if you were yourself one of these parents and if your above-mentioned daughter and her beloved sought to undergo a Liturgy of Commitment here, I wonder how you would feel to have the Deacons say “Yes. By all means yes, and we are delighted. For you are our own daughter, and this one that you love is our daughter now too.”

I wonder how you might feel if, during this ceremony, your husband of 33 years with his hair now white but his manner still so gentle stood to recite a fatherly poem to the two; if he prefaced it by saying he knew he spoke too for the much-missed dad of your daughter’s beloved, gone now into death’s quiet corridor; if he then paused and looked over at this young woman where she sat beside your girl and said aloud to the very large assembly there gathered that he couldn’t be happier that his daughter had chosen her for a life partner.

I wonder: Would it not lift your heart to hear the verses he then read by poet Gail Mazur?“What you want for it you'd want for a child, “it goes. “That she take hold; that her roots find home in stony winter soil; that she take seasons in stride… “That she know, in her branchings, to seek balance. That change not frighten her, rather that change meet her embrace... that she find her place in an orchard.”

And if, in the year following, a baby should come to their house, would you not rejoice and be glad? As we rejoiced last month when we first saw this newborn with his grave and curious look, with his chest no wider than a lady’s hand, held so tenderly in their slender young arms?

I think you might, if it became personal for you in this way.

I think the realization might dawn within you that this is what is chiefly asked of us here: That we make a family. That over the long years we spend ourselves in many deeds of care and kindness, and make a place where such children as we are sent can shelter. And take root. And one day find their own place in the orchard.

Eyes in My Eyes

For the past four days I’ve been in New Orleans where I found myself so completely out of my element that when a young woman kept calling me “ma’am” I took it for sarcasm.

I was trying to book an appointment through her and was confused about the billing process and so fumbled along with many questions.

“Yes MA’AM”, “No MA’AM”, “Whatever you want to do MA’AM” she said until I got so rattled I flat-out asked if she was annoyed with me.

“Annoyed?! No MA’AM!”

“Really? Because up where I come from nobody calls you Ma’am unless they’re trying not to call you something worse.”

Now it was her turn. “Really?!” she said. And her friend behind the counter chimed in: "If our mothers ever caught us failing to say ‘Ma’am’ we would get plain smacked!”

And that’s how it was for my whole time in New Orleans: I was in a world wholly new to me and found myself thinking again and again of what all my best teachers said to me in the years from 2000 to 2002 when I was studying to be a massage therapist: “What you think it is, it isn’t,” they’d say. “Be humble and before you lay hands on that body before you summon total attention and pray God he send eyes into your hands so you can ‘see’ what’s really there.” In other words, summon all your knowledge, leave your ego at the door and your fine notions too of how You Wonderful You, will bring the healing.

It’s advice not much different from what I have had from the people I most respect most in my primary career as a newspaper columnist. They too say you never can SEE a thing right when you first look at it. You can’t, either because you’re a little nervous, or a little rushed, or else you think you already KNOW what the story is or again you’re too enamored of the notion that Insightful You will bring understanding where understanding has been lacking…

I went to New Orleans for "We Have Not Forgotten," the Katrina-based conference of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists and in these last days have looked at things I never thought to see in this country. Thirty-four months after the storm I saw a man struggling to control his tears as he spoke to us, even though as a public school principal in that hardest hit area of St. Bernard Parish he has likely told these stories of loss a thousand times.

At least I think I saw him struggling. I wasn't a foot away from him as he spoke.

Later, after we’d left him and were lunching hugely at Dooky Chase’s amazing Creole/ Soul Food eatery, I stepped outside into a sudden rainstorm. A brick housing project across the street was being razed and I looked at the sea of dark-red rubble dotted with the brightly colored remains: a bright lawn chair here, a splayed umbrella there. The rain drummed hard, both there and on the street and on the small patched-over houses next to Dooky’s and I looked and looked - for nine, ten, twelve minutes - and knew finally what I would have to do: I would have to come back here again, pray for eyes in my hands and eyes in my eyes, then roll up my sleeves and start in helping.

(Education at every level was affected.)