Zen Dixie - The Front Page Blog

Reach Out. It Might Save A Life

1/25/2021

Last weekend (AKA yesterday and the two days that preceded it) I had more than the usual number of contacts with people who live or lived in abusive situations. By the time I signed off Sunday night, I felt like I'd spent the last few days getting repeatedly punched in the head and gut. I went to bed trying to figure out a way to explain this and why it was important to post about it.

I woke up at two in the morning thinking about KC Green's "This is fine." meme. Yes, that was it.

People ask what group is the hardest to work with. Many then offer their opinion that being on a paediatric crisis unit or talking down suicidal people has to be the worst.

Nope.

Let's go back to that meme. Intervention can be compared to getting people to leave a burning building. The kids will follow you out, the depressives will let you lead them out. People with abusive partners will either refuse to budge or they will run back into the fire once you get them out.

I talked to people who wanted me to tell them how to get their partners to stop hitting them.

I talked to people who escaped abusive relationships but wanted to go back because "every child needs a father/mother."

I talked to people who would go so far, admit things were not good and then double back with, "But I love him/her!"

One thing I did not do was give up on them. They gave up on themselves. I pray they see the point where they've had enough and begin to rebuild themselves into the person who finds the strength to get themselves and their children out.

It is statistically likely you know someone in this situation. You may not have heard from them lately. You may think everything is fine. You don't have to do very much. Just check in with them. When you do that, you leave a door opened just a little so light can come in. You give them a nudge that there is life beyond where they are.

Asking For A Friend

12/29/2020

The Holy Family's flight into Egypt detail from the Moone High Cross. (10th C Ireland) photo courtesy Wikimedia Creative Commons

A quick note: Everyone mentioned in this post knows I have written it. They read it before I hit the button and want to help anyone else who may be turning over the same issues right now.

What does the church have to say about abortion? It wasn't any easier to answer this question when the person asking was the same age as her daughter is now and I was her age. If anything, it's harder to say where the church stands.

Oh, gosh. The details. She asked the specific priest because I'd written about him and she did the math. Then she asked about me, which led to me asking the prerequisite questions. Did she ask about me by my legal name or my pen name? What did she say about how she knew me? Does all of this matter? Yes, it does. I told him to go ahead and give her my email address. Her note arrived roughly twenty minutes after J. told her how to reach me.

She's doing well. She loves being a mom. She loves her work. She loves her life.

Yesterday, her daughter asked her, seemingly out of the blue, what she thought about abortion. She was asking for a friend. My gut clenches whenever a kid adds that qualifier. I know sometimes they really are asking for a friend. I've spent nights on the only nonsectarian youth crisis line in Nashville answering the kinds of questions young people are afraid to ask their peers, parents, and other trusted adults. After a while you take a chance that someone is taking the piss and just answer the question. The worst that can happen if you get a kick in the seat and the best is when you can put someone's mind at ease because now they know.

If she couldn't tell her what she thought, what did the church think? A text and an email to their minister netted her no answer, so she decided to contact the next parish over, to ask a priest I'd occasionally written about. He told me he'd given her the stock answer, that she'd have to search her own conscience. It didn't feel adequate.

Probably because it's not.

He knows that and I know that and he knows I know and the person who reached out to both of us more than likely knows we know. We also both know I thought I had all the answers back in 1989. I was almost finished with my undergraduate degree and getting ready for a gap year and then graduate school. That was also when one thing led to another that culminated into a rather reckless weekend and a broken condom led to me being pregnant.

One of my favorite expressions is, "Man proposes and God says, 'That's cute!'" That's pretty much what happened that Fall. I always thought I'd do what any proud feminist pro-choice person in my situation would do and just take care of it and go on my merry way. It wasn't that easy. This was a brand new life. My rubric for acceptable graduate schools changed from places with a good theatre/creative writing program with interesting anthropology classes to good for writers/good for babies. I looked for schools with excellent early education programs so Rowan or Willow (aka Sproglet) would have a running start at being well-cared for and educated.

Even as I argued for every woman's right to make choices for her own body, I felt like I was choosing for two. This was so big, this finding out I wasn't the only one listening to lectures about Victor Turner's ritual systems and the elegant mechanics of Italian set design. Those who knew felt differently. Some of it came from shared politics while others worried about my future. I could not end Sproglet's life. It made as little sense to me as capital punishment or needless lab tests on animals. Life, it turned out, was life.

Twenty years ago, I discerned that the now-Mom who contacted me really was asking for a friend. At the time, I told her I was was Pro-Life for me, but I wasn't sure I could make the same call on behalf of someone else. While that sort of response might give me the impression I was off the hook, it really doesn't help the person asking for guidance.

I brought this up to J. To be fair, J. had no idea until after the fact. I failed Sproglet. As much as I wanted Sproglet to be a part of my life, I couldn't carry him/her to term. Everyone who knew seemed relieved except me. This is probably the most I have ever written or talked about it. J. was there to offer advice when I grieved, but at the time, I found no guidance from the church.

So I talked to this sweet Mom who told me she was sure her daughter really was asking for a friend and she knew who. AND, she needed to hear what I and what J. had to say. We told her we really didn't have answers. The question is not without nuances. One thing J. and I agree on is we do need to make it easier for people to ask the hard questions.

I feel more than a little frustrated that we as a denomination, a communion, and a congregation shrink away from real life questions that could off the comfort of biblical answers. We can sing of the loss of the children Herod killed and we can't discuss the lives affected by an unexpected pregnancy. I was in my twenties, educated and moving forward with my life. What if I'd been younger, poorer, a person of color, and not yet finished with my secondary education? Would I have made the same choices? Would I have felt comfortable contemplating a change like this?

As a part of the Anglican Communion, I am glad we have a feast day for the innocents. What I wish we did less of is saying, "Amen" and "Thank you" and more talking, listening, and contemplation of how we can help the innocents who walk among us right now, some of whom may be carrying innocents of their own.

Namaste, y'all!
Jas Faulkner

And So This Is Christmas...

12/27/2020

A local friend posted she woke up before everyone and logged in to the internet expecting to find greetings from far-flung friends and family. Instead, she found our city all over the news. Someone exploded a car bomb in downtown Nashville at approximately 6:32 am CST. At the time, I was still trying to figure out what happened. One news outlet stated the vehicle was parked near the AT&T Tower (AKA the Batman Building), while another equally trustworthy agency said the RV was next to the Metro Courthouse. All of this was confusing, because those particular landmarks are at opposite ends of the district. Then someone mentioned the arts area, which consists of Downtown Presbyterian, The Frist, Anne Brown's place, and few other galleries, all of which are a few blocks away. The only thing the stories agreed on was it was deliberate.

The only thing any of us could do was stay out of the way and wait.

Even though we exchanged presents and I finished making the Christmas dinner I'd prepped the day before, everything felt tamped down as we went back to the news to see if the police, TBI, and FBI released any more details. It was safe to assume that the majority of us in this big city and environs were safe. Still, a free-floating fear tinged the day. We kept seeing reports of three injuries and hoped that was the extent of the human cost. Still too high, but had this occurred, say, an hour or two before a Titans or Predators game, it could have been so much worse.

By nightfall and throughout the 26th, I found myself unable to shake off feelings of dread. This is not something new. Having worked in inpatient and outpatient clinical psych, I'd been trained to expect the worst and think out what I would do if those grimmest of "ifs" became a reality. That backing track of fear has run through my life since then. What if someone came into my office with bad intentions when I ran a legal outreach NFP? What if someone took exception to the pastor at my mother's UMC church? What if I visited a synagogue and someone decided to plow through the sign asking visitors to call ahead and identify themselves? What if someone did the unthinkable at a clinical facility or the city's arena while I was covering a game? Silly as it may sound, all of these things ran through my mind whenever I was in a crowded place.

I was not there Friday morning. To everyone who has called and texted, even while admitting they figured I was okay, thank you. I am. I have been offering prayers for the first responders and those who lived in the lofts above the street where the explosion took place. My thoughts are with those who expected to get up and celebrate the day only to hear the eerie sound of a recording warning everyone within earshot to evacuate.

Oh, my God, my God. Were are so close to emerging from under an uncontrolled pandemic spread, only to find people want us to live in fear. One theory going around is the person responsible is/was afraid of 5G and wanted to target AT&T, which is a popular tele-carrier around here. As silly as it sounds, I hope they are right. I am anxious for my country, for my state and city to begin to heal. We can't do that well if we're afraid of each other.

By late Friday and well into Saturday, I have to admit not feeling anything but shocked and still fearful of what this might bring. A friend who is in recovery from COVID described having days when he couldn't find the bottom of his lungs. It's probably not nearly the same, but I had that same feeling. I hope it subsides soon.

God bless us all, everyone, and God help us get back to that place of peace.
Jas Faulkner

An Open Letter To PR People About Reviews

12/21/2020

Starting January 2021, I will regularly review what I'm reading, watching, and listening to. Sometimes these will be new things, sometimes, I'll devote space to works I think deserve another look or listen. Last year, I took some tentative steps toward regular reviewing and then ended up walking away from the endeavor, muttering to myself. What had turned into a happy thing where I got to hopefully point some people to things they might like turned into a source of frustration.

So I am going to offer some guidelines that might make it easier for everyone involved. If you already do these things, great! If this is not on your to-do list, at least think about adding these items. If you think I'm too demanding, I am sure there are plenty of websites with writers who will be happy to accommodate you.

1.) Reviews will be posted here, at Goodreads, and on Librarything.
I have posted on platforms that offer easy ways to post at Amazon, B&N, and other sites. Even when those devices were in place, some authors used a multi-step approval process where I would be asked to post on more sites. Sometimes the links in the emails did not work and I couldn't get back to the right page to post and...

Okay, you're going to see this phrase more than once: If you create unnecessary steps for me, I'm gonna walk away from your book/movie/music/whatever it is.

2.) Please, please, please in the name of everything that is good, have an e-tear sheet.
A couple of years ago, someone put out a call for reviewers on Twitter for a comic book they were publicizing. I have experience in this area and volunteered. This person was very pleasant to work with and fairly prompt when I requested an e-copy for review. Here is why I never reviewed the book. They sent an email expressing excitement about working with the movie director whose name was being used to brand the series. They mentioned the revival of the genre the book represented. Aaand that was it. Here are the pieces of information their email did not contain:

The Writer
The Artists (Pencilers? Colorists? Backgrounds? Lettering? Cover Art? No, no, no, no, and no. I guess it was put together by elves.)
The Actual Title Upon Release (It changed.)
When It Was Going To Be Released
The MSRP (The US MSRP would be great, and please know I have readers in Canada, AUS, NZ, and the UK. Prices for consumers in those countries might be nice as well.)
Available Formats (Those darned elves, they're so low-tech!)
Where it's available. (Strange elves on street-corners distributing media is no basis for a system of publication.)
ISBN
Number of Pages
Cover Art -or-
Preapproved Image of Author(s) or Illustration(s) From The Book

When I sent this list to the PR person, they sent me one, sometimes two of the pieces of information I asked for. After the third request for details about the book, I gave up. A week later the, "WAAAAAIT! Where did you GOOOOOOOOOOO?" emails started. ::sigh::

One other thing, if I have to search the internet for cover art or scan the letter enclosed with the book if it's a paper copy, it might not get done in time or to your satisfaction. I have had to pull reviews because "Our deal with the artist fell through," "We changed our mind about images," "We don't own the rights to the cover." Yes, someone actually asked me to remove the images for those reasons.

So I'll say it again: If you create unnecessary steps for me, I'm gonna walk away from your book/movie/music/whatever it is.

3.) Keep It Simple
I get it. You've poured you heart and soul into your work. You feel protective of it. Vet me by searching for previous reviews if you feel the need. It won't hurt my feelings. I am happy to answer queries within reason. If you come at me with a series of byzantine measures where you email me part of the thing and then I give you my impressions and then you might email me the rest and then I send you my review and then... No. Send me the information with the information I need so my readers can find what you're selling and I'll put up a review and send you a note with URLs if you want to see what I think.

Once again, with feeling: If you create unnecessary steps for me, I'm gonna walk away from your book/movie/music/whatever it is.

With all that written, I wish everyone a happy, productive, creative, and prosperous year to come.

The Next Best Thing

12/12/2020

I am working with a friend on a project she started about the difference between fully living in the world and having a simulacrum of life where people act more like audience members than actual participants.

Some of the people she and I talked to included clergy who held services on social media and virtual environment platforms pre-COVID, members of defunct online theatre games groups, and a theatre company that used avatars (!) and teachers who worked in online/virtual classrooms before the pandemic made this a necessity.

We talked about how our own lives had changed since being online for the past three decades made it almost too easy for shy folks and introverts to essentially hide. Yes, there was no small amount of self-assessment going on. There are probably a lot of people in our field who would prefer to not acknowledge that, but it happens.

There's no argument we can't have life as we knew it before the pandemic, at least for the time being. Things are changing. At some point in the near future I am going to be able to go out in the world again. So are a lot of other people who are clinging to some semblance of feeling like they're part of the human race by means of social media.

One priest who has worked with us quit doing virtual services because he felt it was at some level still playacting. The larger the groups got, the more it seemed like he was getting more expected responses than actual inquiry.

This hit home.

Another thing he brought up was the idea that more of us seem to be converging into groups of monologists and those who made up their audience. He told us his friends list had grown from a little over eighty people to just south of a thousand.

Another thing he shared was a conversation he had with his wife. She asked him how many on that list were people he could comfortably approach just to talk, to seek comfort from if they needed to do so, were people he felt comfortable about calling.

F. and I agreed it was a pretty brave line of inquiry and one that might lead to some uncomfortable answers. It is one I will be asking myself in the week ahead.

Years ago I sent a friend request to someone I had interacted with on a message board in the past. Her response was something to the effect that I was nuts if I thought she would want to be friends with me. For a long time, it made me very cautious about sending and accepting requests. Although I have to admit the "lonely guys just looking for love in all the wrong places" are still fun to mess with! I haven't had one in a while. They keep running away when I mention the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation Internet Fraud Division. Pleh. Killjoys.

F. and I were very honest with each other about how easy it has gotten to hide from the world. Kind if silly, really. After all, we're both part of the proud, the nearly unemployable, the ones with at best marginally marketable skills, the people with anthropology degrees.

Here are some of the thoughts we have about online "life."

1.) If people aren't responding to you, you're not in the right place.

2.) Assess your expectations. If you're getting what you need in the way of information in a passive environment, ie. online lectures, that's great. Keep it up. If anything, this experience should have given a lot of us the chance to broaden our knowledge base.

3.) The following things might be a stopgap, but without inclusion and direct participation, they are pale imitations of the real thing. Moreover, they might actually exacerbate depressive tendencies. I'm thinking of: online religious observance, some kinds of creative collective groups, support groups... All of these are more dependent on the shared energy of people being with us than we realize until we lose that particular attribute. F. adds classroom dynamics have drastically changed as well. She says the whole concept of pedagogical presence has changed.

Does this mean people should do away with ALL online interaction because in-person is better? No. We all have those Cheers-like places where you log in and everybody yells, "NORM!" If you don't reach a point where you feel like you may have found your people, why are you there?

I used to chalk these sorts of questions up to being spectrum-y and overthinking everything. Then F. started asking her students questions about this and asked me to work with her. From what we've asked people about life online before and life online after, it seem a lot of people are either settling in or asking if they are seeking friendship or accepting something that is actually very different.

There's so much I miss. I think other people miss these things, too. What worries me is if I get too comfortable accepting little or no interaction, it's going to make it harder to engage when the pandemic is under control.

A Call For Compassion

12/7/2020

Yes, I know. Advent wreaths have five candles. Alice's boys want their wreath picture posted and she's taking a hard line on it staying in the family. I'm tempted to find some similar candles and make one of my own to show. Here is where I cop to the fact that we didn't do our Advent Two thing because I worked 10 hours and then promptly went to sleep.

I tried to find the Canterbury Cathedral Advent services. They posted nice pictures and hashtags that take you to long lists of things that are, at best, marginally related to Advent. The last time I looked, I saw someone posted a knitted naked old people Advent. Okay, let's get one thing straight about that. I have nothing against naked old people. When I get in the shower, I become one of the ranks of naked old people. I just don't want to see little knitted versions of them carousing around their teeny living room, playing with their little knitted dog and leaving little knitted cookies for Santa. I can't unsee that. Canterbury Cathedral Social Media People? Please post LINKS! This also goes for your other series. Do you know how distressing it is to see "Becket Pilgrimage, Part Two?" Where is Part One? Do I search for "Becket?" When you think about it, searching under the terms "Becket" and "Canterbury Cathedral" is a bit like looking for "Joe Bob" in the Lubbock, Texas directory.

Safe to say, I'm having a hard time keeping up, and that's just over the liturgical calendar. For some people, it's a far more serious thing to contemplate. Not keeping up can mean feeling isolated goes from being a vague concern that will pass when everything gets back to something resembling normal to a crumbling sense of self-worth. It can mean having to balance meeting family expectations regarding holiday customs with paying rent, feeding yourself and your family, keeping everyone healthy and safe. Not keeping up can mean a motherlode of ways we don't meet some arbitrary standard when it comes to spirituality, relationships, or material comfort.

I bring this up because I am talking to people whose distress is beyond what I normally encounter on a typical day at work. Our little part of the big for-profit that employs us usually sees around eleven suicidal callers in a month. We had over fifty this weekend. At one point, I took three suicidal callers in a row.

This year has been hard for a lot of us. It's safe to say that the stressors we've been dealing with are well out of the realm of the usual first world problems. It's been pretty darned brutal. And this holiday? For many people, it's turning out to be a big bowl of creamed, chipped wretchedness. If you're doing okay, that's great! Just don't take for granted that everyone else is doing the same. Drop a note. Tap out an email or text. Reach out and ask people who might not be on everyone's list how they're doing.

Are you okay? If you can't answer that right away, let me ask you: Do you need to talk to somebody? There's no shame in asking for help. If anything, it takes strength to admit you need help. I have been keeping up the proud family tradition of working with the wobbly-pated for almost three decades now.* I have seen what it takes and I have a tremendous amount of respect for anyone who seeks help.

According to the Weebly statistics widget, most of the people who read this site are in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., so here are some places to contact if you're feeling like everything is hopeless. I hope you'll use them if you need them. And please remember: You are loved. You are cared for and you are here for a reason. On top of that, you are wonderfully and fearfully made of star stuff.

Stay safe!
Jas Faulkner

US: National Suicide Prevention Lifeline 1-800-273-8255
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline Text Chat

Canada: Crisis Services Canada 1-833-456-4566
Crisis Services Canada Text 45645

UK: Samaritans 116 123
Samaritans Online Chat

*One ancestor rode with General Hood on multiple campaigns, another followed Patton into the European theater. Yep. We are genetically predisposed to be crazy-magnets.

Making Do

11/29/2020

For those of you playing at home who are not Episcopalian or Roman Catholic or Methodist, today is the first day of the Christian year. It marks the end of Ordinary Time and the start of Advent.

Waitwaitwait. Isn't Advent that thing where you get a calendar that has little doors and you open one every day and get a chocolate or a little bottle of wine or an ornament or mascara?

Dale: Can you imagine a Cheech and Chong Advent calendar?
Me: Really, Dale?

Let's try this again.

You know how you'll start buying things for the holidays and you'll see someone in the candle aisle muttering and fussing because they can't find pink, purple, and white tapers? You might be thinking they are going for a different color scheme for Thanksgiving or Christmas. If you're really clueless, you might assume they're trying to fill up their menorah. Nope. Those people waited too long to buy their Advent candles and will either have to pay quite a bit more for a set from the cathedral store, settle for a different set of colors or votives, or suck it up and get them from Amazon.

Advent is, as I have already written, the start of the new year on the Christian liturgical calendar. It is the first in a series of four Sundays when we panic because we haven't made our Christmas cards and... okay give me a minute to breathe. Advent is when we celebrate the birth of the Christ Child and reflect on how to bring the example of His life into our day to day living.

A typical Advent wreath has greenery and four or five candles, depending on which tradition you follow. (Mom is Methodist, so I added one in the middle. I'll have to ask my priest because I am not sure why we use four. Maybe one got lost when we set fire to Guy Fawkes.)

Edit: I just got a call from a fellow former member of the Student Interfaith Council at one of my alma maters. She said, "Episcopalians use five candles. Even I know that, you yutz!" She was the president of our sister religious house, the Jewish Student Union.

What I described is what happens when you don't live in a state experiencing uncontrolled spread during a pandemic. Here is what our Advent setup looked like earlier tonight:

I am not sure if these candles were purchased last year as a backup for Advent in case the dog managed to chew one up or if we just happened to have a number of candles that were close-ish to traditional Advent colors. I annointed them during a break from work. (Sunday is one of our busiest days, so yes, the ox was in the ditch.) We just plain forgot to cut some holly until it was already dark and decided not to risk disturbing our local raccoons, possums, and Rizzo, the unwed pregnant squirrel who likes to eat Annie's Bunnies on our front porch. We decided to use a potted plant that earned its place inside by surviving the first freeze. It was that or the bundle of dinosaur kale in the crisper. All of it is sitting on a rolling craft table. It's not Evensong at Canterbury Cathedral, but we enjoyed it. Here is tonight's Evensong at Canterbury Cathedral if you insist on making a comparison:

Was ours the most primitive of Advents? No. I contacted Alice and Jeffrey in Louisville to wish them a Happy New Year and Joyful Advent. The boys were in the kitchen arguing about the best carrier tortilla for tacos and the merits of Baby Yoda's name reveal while Jeffrey was hiding somewhere in the house discussing fantasy league football. Alice said her candles never arrived and their church was out of them.

"What about emergency candles?" I asked.

"We're saving those for emergencies," she said. "We scrounged around and found four perfectly good candles we'll be using this season. Given that one of the boys hates wine and we have been using Goldfish crackers for at-home Eucharist, I think we'll survive an untraditional Advent setting."

When she told me about it, she immediately added she would not send a picture. I tried. I really did, but she's not budging. As I type this, her family is gathering around Batman, Spider-Man, the number three, and a Scottie wearing a Santa hat.

Happy New Year!

And That's A Desperate Way To Look For Someone Who Is Still A Child

10/8/2020

A buddy from my sportswriting days told me about a conversation he had with his six-year-old daughter yesterday.

     Daisy: Daddy, are you gonna get COVID at work?

     Ben: No, honey. That's why I watch games at home and the team does most press stuff by phone and internet.

     Daisy: But what if they make you go to a party and everybody gets COVID and then Momma gets COVID, too?

     Ben: Not gonna happen. I'll just go stand in the unemployment line.

     (Daisy thinks about this for a second.)

     Daisy: I'll stand in line with you.

     We need to do better for those who depend on us to make the right decisions. VOTE!

Namaste,
Jas

Forgive Me, For I Am Remiss...

9/28/2020

...and that would be about so many things!

Stuff in the works can be great, but if it doesn't go live? If it isn't read? The road to backlogs is paved with good intentions. I am probably cursing myself to a fate of broken promises, but here is what I am working on aside from my job, a new novel that is not a very bad allegory for America as an abused infant, and my horribly messy studio:

A new section on knitting with patterns for people who are really bad at knitting and can't seem to quit it. There is a fund-raising element for good causes that is completely optional.

Two more pieces for Plague Life

I watched "Revenge of the Sith." This is the last Star Wars Movie with Ewan McGregor as Obi Wan Kenobi and Natalie Portman in one of my favorite roles of hers. I chased it with "Christopher Robin" and Pooh made me cry. Now you get to suffer, too.

And that's it for now. I hope everyone in this hemisphere is enjoying the Fall weather and those who have a place in my heart in the Antipodes are seeing warmth and sunshine. Yes, your possums are cuter, but I am betting good money and a chess pie they're venomous or lay eggs in your abdominal cavity or something else y'all's bestiary of DeSade's Muppets do after they lull us into a false sense of security with their cuteness.

Namaste,
Jas

That Day

9/16/2020

   I know what last Friday was. So do most of you. This past September 11th, (Patriot Day, if you must) was oddly quiet compared to the ones that followed 9.11.01. If it was reminiscent of anything, it was an awful lot like the latter half of the first 9/11 of the century.

     The common question everyone seems to ask and sometimes answer year after year is the same line of inquiry that is asked about any watershed event. Where were you when the Challenger exploded? What were you doing when the Berlin Wall was dismantled? What do you remember about the events of 9/11?

     Not much, really. I worked third shift at a youth crisis center. We'd had a rough night. One of my coworkers admitted a twenty-three-year-old prostitute to the program at the end of his shift, left it to the second shift people to tell her she couldn't stay, and then I came on duty just in time to do the paperwork, and... I just wanted to go home, take Dogface McFuzzybutt out for a wee and a quick jog, then sleep off the frustration.
And that's exacty what I did, having no idea the world as I knew it was going to end in a little over ten minutes.

     It was just after eleven in the morning when my mother woke me up to inform me the Pentagon had been attacked and the World Trade Center was gone. As I tried to wrap my sleep-fogged mind around what she told me, she went into the living room and turned the television to CNN.

     There was the then new, now ubiquitous crawl running along the bottom of the screen. Every edge seemed to stream information as if the newsreaders couldn't get it out fast enough. These new elements framed the shaken journalists who introduced replay after replay of what happened earlier that day.

     "Do you have gas in your car?" my mother asked. I shook my head. "Well, you need to fill up your tank. I don't want you to get stranded coming or going. In fact, I'd rather you stayed home."

     A quick sidebar to explain something about Nashville. Whenever something goes wrong anywhere in the world, people here immediately panic and go buy as much gas as they can. There can be a storm somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico and everyone else is fine. Atlanta? Chattanooga? Houston? Safe as houses with full tanks. Nashvillians will suck the pumps dry and then sit shivering over stockpiles of Oreos and AA batteries. So yes, there were lines at some stations while others were already closed with "Out of Gas" signs taped to their windows.

     After we took care of that errand, we bought lunch and sat out on the patio. We listened to reports that no one was flying anywhere over the U.S. until they knew more. The skies were indeed emptied of everything but birds.

     The shelter was just a few streets over from Vanderbilt's medical campus and on the most used path of their Life Flight helicopters . For the rest of the week and then some time after, every time a rescue craft roared over, our residents would pile out of their rooms and sit in the common room. Nobody slept. Normal was something we figured out we took for granted.

     For the fortunate children at home, their senses of what was sure and safe had shifted. Crisis calls had never been particularly frequent. My one or two callers an hour who needed to blow off steam were now jockeying for talk time with children who waited for their parents to go to bed. Mom or Dad worked in the Tennessee Tower or at Fort Campbell or BNA. What if bad things happened there?

     One night, my conversation with a young boy was interrupted by his mother. When she reaized who he was talking to, she sent him back to bed and started talking about dealing with her and her children's fears.

     "When does normal come back?" she asked.

     I told her what I told everyone who asked that question. I didn't have an answer. Almost twenty years later and I am back to listening to people talk through their hopes and fears. They ask about normal. They tell me their hopes for life when we all go back to normal. I listen and tell them I hope they move forward to what makes them happy.

    Like many Americans, I've been dreaming a lot lately. The dreams are vivid. Sometimes the information that streams through my unconscious state lingers as I surface through REM back to wakefulness. I hear and see fleeting remnants of those dreams.

     Very early last Friday, I woke to find I'd been sleepwalking. I remembered following my old sheepdog down the hall where I was sure there was a door to a room that had something I needed. (This has a point. Please bear with me.) There was just a bookshelf, as there had always been. Touchstones to the things I loved live on those shelves: Zipes and Dundes on fairy tales, Levi-Strauss' elegant account of a taxonomic record of shared experience expressed in a new disciplinary language and yet has the brocaded feel of a fable, Turner's rabbit hole of ritual behavior defined and parsed in Western theatrical terms.

    I began to panic. Where was it? I looked at my dog, who in waking life has been gone over ten years now. He shook his head, making his hairy ruff fly wild and his collar jingle, and looked back at me.

     "This is normal," he said. "Might as well be who you are. Nothing else is an option."

I started to kneel down to pet him, and that was when I woke up.

"Normal is gone," I said to myself.

I meant to write this essay last Friday. For some reason, words would not come. Morning prayer included a meditation on 9/11. At that time, the minister... (Celebrant? What is the proper word? Me talk purty one day.)
The minister made the observation that sometimes the best tribute is silence. Maybe that's what some of us needed last Friday: quiet skies and the time and space to just think in the midst of our current state of sturm and dang.

     What is normal? It looks like whatever it will be is up to us.

About this blog...

Someone asked about an essay I write for the front page some time ago. I'd always thought of the home page as something akin to a Buddha Board. Whatever I wrote for it was there as long as I needed it, and then it disappeared. Maybe I do need to save those pieces. At least for now, I'll put them here for anyone bored enough to read them.

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Legal stuff to make you very sleepy (binaural beats not included.)

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And furthermore...
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