Second Thoughts

Cataract surgery -- Rite of passage or speed bump?

2012-02-29T07:51:00.001-08:00

Last week I had cataract surgery, a rite of passage, it seems, for people my age. Some might call it and similar events we older folks experience a speed bump, still others the new normal.

I recall that when I retired from college teaching in 1990 I received a large brown paper envelope from a large distributing firm enclosing commercial coupons for the following:

A laxative

Arthritis pain medicine

Denture adhesive

Undergarments for leakage control

Bran flakes

A specially designed chair for people with back problems

Door chimes to extend the sound of the doorbell

Magnifier for reading

Card shuffler

Side-cutting nail clipper

Specially designed slippers for people with feet that change in size during the day

A hearing aid – and more.

As I flipped over the glossy four-color ads, I felt myself deflating like a punctured tire. If these products were selected specially for me, who was I? What was in store for me in this new life?

Now, some 20 years later, I know. Cataract surgery is one older-adult hurdle as are hip/knee replacement, morning stiffness, and many others. Comedian Dave Barry has written an account of his colonoscopy, another rite of passage for everyone over a certain age, that will cause your endorphins to chase each other with playful glee.

The news reported that former South African leader Nelson Mandela was recovering after a short hospital stay as was appropriate for his age –the 90s.In other words, there are core changes related to aging and also illnesses everyone gets.

Yet what is appropriate for this time of life? Change often comes so subtly I am not aware of it until one day I have to say, “Yes, I am old, and that’s okay” and my children murmur to themselves, “Mother is old” – but not to me.

In my book Border Crossing: A Spiritual Journey, where I mention the above list, I compare the way we older people and the young ones resemble each other and our rites of passage. I had written several books on aging for various agencies. Now it was time to chronicle my own story. The book is about my journey from full-time employment to being granted more than 2,000 discretionary hours each year. It was truly a border crossing.

Both young and old identify closely with the physical body and its changes – the young with developing strength and defining body image , the old with lessening strength and dealing with increasingly poorly defined shape and firmness.

Both old and young use drugs, sometimes, sometimes to excess, the younger group uses street drugs, energy drinks, and soda; the other group coffee and prescription drugs. I’ve noticed some of my age group take about ten to 15 prescription drugs each day.

Teenagers like their sofas overstuffed and roomy enough for all limbs at one time or else they head for the floor. Older adults look for a firm chair because we know a soft couch spells disaster. They may sit on it for eternity. And the floor? Surely you jest.

Both make travel a way of life – the one to games, band tours, field trips; the other on tour buses, recreational vehicles and airplanes to see the world – for a while.

Both are thinking of changing housing. The young ones are off to college dormitories or their own apartments. The older ones head to apartments, retirement centers and nursing homes.

A sixteen-year-old is aspiring to acquire a driver’s license. An 80-year-old is thinking of turning it in. Many in my group are ready to get off the road, yet sorrowful, for without a driver’s license goes independence.

In my book Prayers of an Omega one prayer is titled “I sure liked to drive my car.” When I read that piece at an older adult retreat a few years ago, I noticed an older man in the front row sobbing silently. Later, his friend told me he had given up his driver’s license the day before. He identified with my words: I miss the feel of a ring of hard keys in my pocket. I reach for them, just to give them a caress. But they’re not there. I want to go out and start the car. For no reason. Then I remember. The car is gone. I will never back it out of the garage onto the road again. I will never again experience the power of the engine with me at the wheel.... Reach out your hand, my Lord, and place it here in the warm hollow of my hand where I used to hold the keys.

Letting go of the car keys may be a rite of passage but also a high speed bump.

So back to my cataract surgery. I am recovering thanks to great doctors and modern technology. I am waiting to get new lenses for my glasses so that I can read again. There will be more speed bumps, more rites of passage. Then it is time to read again what I once wrote for others, especially my chapter on turning losses into gains in Life After 50: A Positive Look at Aging in the Faith Community: "Old age need not major in losses if transitions [rites of passage and speed bumps] are seen as movement toward the culmination of a life well lived with God and humanity." It is a goal that keeps me going.

And while I’m mentioning my books, a friend e-mailed me this brief review published recently in a library newsletter: The Atchison (Kansas) library has a new book “How to Write your Personal or Family History: If you don’t do it who will?” by Katie Funk Wiebe. A couple of chapters caught my eyes. “Writing your last ‘rites,’” “Writing about the life others don’t see,” and “The best and worst times in your life.” This is worth reading, especially if you are having trouble getting started . – Cora Chambers, editor

The Life of Pi and I

2012-02-21T06:46:00.000-08:00

On occasion, I’ll admit I wish I was back in the college classroom teaching literature, especially when I come upon a novel that has level upon level of meaning.

One such novel is The Life of Pi by Yann Martel, a Saskatchewan writer. My copy states that when it was published in 2001 there were more than six million copies in print. I can see high school and college literature classes studying this novel in decades to come. I’d like to be in on the discussion.

The novel is about a boy, a boat, and a Bengal tiger adrift on the Pacific Ocean for 227 days. The framework of the book is fairly simple: a middle-aged man by the name of Patel, originally from India, is telling his story to a writer.

“I have a story that will make you believe in God,” he tells the writer. He calls himself Pi, the symbol for the geometric ratio that goes on and on.

His father, a zookeeper in India, sold his animals when the political climate in his native country became uncomfortable, and decided to move to Canada. The family boards a ship with several zoo animals and heads for America, only to experience shipwreck on the Pacific Ocean.

The only survivors are Pi, a 450-pound tiger named Richard Parker, an orangutan, a hyena, a zebra, a rat, some flies and cockroaches—an interesting ecosystem. On the journey the hyena kills the zebra and orangutan, the tiger kills the hyena and the rat, and the flies and cockroaches fly off into self-destruction.

What I like about the book is that it can be read at many levels:

Adventure/action story full of suspense and danger. Life aboard a small lifeboat with a tiger brings with it anxious moments about who will survive. It brought to mind novels like Jack London’s Call of the Wild. Pi has an adult tiger in front of him, sharks beneath him, and a storm raging around him. Will he endure?

To stay at that level means restricting yourself to a diet of skim milk when you could feast on cream, lots of it. So read it as a survival story similar to Swiss Family Robinson which survived for 38 days or Robinson Crusoe who also went on an extended journey and survived by using his wits.

If you want something more, read it as the story of human/animal relationships in the same category as Moby Dick. Ahab fought the Great White Whale. Pi Patel fought a fierce Bengal tiger. Each novel has a wealth of information about the animal worlds but also about life’s enigmas.

I see it also as a coming of age story, similar to Huckleberry Finn, or even Catcher in the Rye. A young man undergoes initiation into the adult world as he comes to new awareness about himself, his environment and life itself. At one point in his scary journey Pi makes a decision to stay alive. He pits his moral strength against the tiger’s brute strength. He is no longer a boy but a man.

I find some readers think of it as mystical/fantasy/fiction bordering on science fiction. Yes, certainly there must be a willing suspension of disbelief to enjoy the fantastic elements of the book. Author Martel creates a tiny world in a 26-foot lifeboat and peoples it with Pi, the tiger, a hyena, orangutan, zebra and rat, and sends the remnants of this little ecosystem across the Pacific until they reach the coast of Mexico.

The reader has to accept certain premises – shipwreck, a tiger glaring across the boat at you for a good part of a year, hauling in fish after fish and turtle after turtle to keep you and the tiger alive . The story becomes more and more out-of-this world with each chapter, especially when the reader arrives at the floating island, which at first seems near perfect, with a Tree of Death instead of a Tree of Life . Its inhabitants are thousands, maybe millions, of meerkats, whose essence is meekness as opposed to Richard Parker’s ferociousness.

After reading it again recently I have begun to see it as akin to Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress with numerous archetypal images. Both Christian and Pi are pilgrims, one by land, the other by sea, away from family, order, and community to isolation, disorder and loneliness and weakness and despair and eventual rescue.

The main question remains: What was the author trying to say through this compelling read? Is it about a boy’s search for God? He is a Hindu, becomes a Christian, and also a Muslim, and in trying moments runs through his pantheon of gods in desperate prayer. What does Richard Parker, the tiger symbolize?

Pi admits that without Richard Parker in the boat he would never have survived. Unless we have an enemy to battle, we lose the will to live and become like the meerkats who almost beg to be killed. In the end Pi is grateful for having had the huge Bengal tiger Richard Parker on the long journey with him. The tiger kept him alive.

Would the novel have persuaded me to believe in God? That is debatable. It did reinforce in me the need to always live with hope, regardless how grim the circumstances.

And Martel does this in one hundred chapters, short and long, just like life, which has its short and long chapters.

Yes, I once waved a banner for women

2012-02-10T07:07:00.000-08:00

I have sometimes said that at this point in life I feel as if I am standing on a mountaintop looking back on my journey. I am in the eighth decade. I can see the hard climbs, the gentle paths, the cliffs, and the temporary footholds where I stood and waited for strength to continue. This look back happens in particular when someone draws to my attention events that happened long ago.

Recently it was my son James’s passionate account on his blog about how the death of his father in 1962 affected him in his growing-up years. Read about it at JamesWiebe.blogspot.com at “Hasking and Other Reflections on Fatherhood.” His well-stated comments about his scrabbling for memories of a father he never knew brought back a flood of memories about how hard it was to be a single parent. How difficult it was to be a working mother. How trying it was to be a woman wanting to be involved in the life of a traditionally oriented church when it came to the role of women. How discouraging it was to being an uncoupled woman in a male-oriented world.

Over the last few months I have read several books related to the women’s movement and those events that featured large in my life at one time:

When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 by the Present by Gail Collins.

Radiating Like a Stone: Wichita Women and the 1970s Feminist Movement, edited by Myrne Roe.

Draft of a Ph.D. dissertation written by Canadian historian Doug Heidebrecht in which he examines the hermeneutical process by which the Mennonite Brethren church arrived at its position with regard to women.

To this I could add my own book You Never Gave Me a Name: One Mennonite Woman’s Story in which I describe my own journey through the women’s movement.

All these readings are a second look to another time and another way of looking at life. At times reading was painful, at other times enjoyable. Few events affected my life as much as the death of my husband at age 44 in 1962. I was 38. I went from being a stay-at-home mother to becoming a “working woman,” as if I hadn’t worked before. I went from being comfortable as one member of a couple to becoming head of a family of four young children. And from being keenly aware of what was happening inside church life to being relegated to non-participating outsider. Yes, it was a different world.

Each reading moved me through experiences I thought I had left behind, better stated, grown out of.

*Collins’ book is a survey of what happened in the United States.

* Roe’s is a collection of essays by about 75 writers about the women’s movement in the city of Wichita.

*Heidebrecht’s dissertation is a carefully researched, documented account of the way the movement worked its way through the Mennonite Brethren church, (and is still working its way) and finally my own struggle which began when I was in my early 20s and the church council decided I could not be leader of the youth group because I was a woman even after the young people had elected me.

* James, in his blog, looks at our fractured home life from his perspective – and his loss of a father. Would I have become a supporter of the women’s movement if my husband hadn’t died? Big question.

The women’s movement of the 1960s and 70s created a huge stir because what had seemed the norm and natural for women for decades, was purported to be unfair and needed examination – and change.

Some people were insisting women are the weaker sex with less brain power and too much emotional baggage. Therefore they had no place in the public sphere. Women’s place was in the home – the kitchen and the bedroom. They should be guardians of everything good, pure and beautiful, never the precursors of change, never acting independently of husband or father if they expected to be respected. And own their own property ? Unthinkable.

If they dared move out of the home, it was into subservient roles. In offices, grown women, even elderly women, were referred to as the “girls” just as African-American males of any age were once referred to as “boys.” The girls were the lackeys who made the coffee and brought the cookies. Standard clothing included panty hose, girdles, and high heels. Their only concern was their hair and nails --because that was what society expected of them. Men were paid more than women in the same positions because they had a family to support. Single women with children weren’t in the equation.

The few that dared become doctors or lawyers were referred to as a “female doctor,” and “female lawyer,” just like today a man who becomes a nurse is called a male nurse. A woman poet was a poetess, an woman actor an actress.

But things have changed, especially the way women look at themselves and the way people look at women. Daughters grow up expecting a different life than that of women in the 1960s and 70s. They know that women can think and can lead. The change has not traumatized society as was predicted. And hopefully it is still taking place.

Yet the struggle hasn’t ended, especially when I think of domestic abuse being on the rise, young girls being enticed into prostitution, very young girls being groomed to act and look like vamps, and high school girls turning down an education for a job in a fast food place to earn money to buy more shoes and clothes. We’ve come a long way, but we’ve sure got a long way to go. Maybe it’s time to start waving another banner.

I'd rather have a talking frog

2012-02-03T07:10:00.000-08:00

I hadn’t seen my friend Rubie for several years so when she sent me an invitation to her 90^th birthday party, I put the date on my calendar. Daughter Susan and I drove to the huge retirement complex looking for Building F, which didn’t follow Building E. A new alphabet? But we found the place.

Rubie looked great. We visited a bit. “I told her your story the other day at a function here,” she said.

“My story?”

“The one about the talking frog.”

Any talking-frog story belongs to everyone. I recalled telling the story at some gathering about the old man walking in the garden when all at once he heard a noise on the path beside him. It was a frog trying to get his attention.

“Pick me up and kiss me on the lips and I will turn into a beautiful lady,” it croaked.

The old man picked up the frog and stuffed it into his pocket. The frog continued to croak. “Didn’t I say if you kissed me on the lips I would turn into a beautiful young woman?”

The old man kept sauntering through the garden. “At this time in life I’d rather have a talking frog.”

I remember that whenever I told this story, it elicited a laugh from my “old” audience. They understand it. Younger people don’t.

People my age recognize that at times there is a greater need for a good laugh than for a romp in bed. Poet Gerhard Manley Hopkins writes about giving “comfort root-room.” I think it is important during tough times to also give humor more root-room.

Humor helps us accept the process of growing older – especially when the losses slowly or speedily outstrip the gains. Much of life involves pain. Life isn’t fair. Never has been.

My daughter Christine, who died at age 46, lived with me for five of her last eight years. I was caretaker and ombudsperson. Giving hope room to grow was like trying to grow an oak tree in a flower pot. “I have death perched on my shoulder,” she told me.

Sometimes we had an exercise at the end of the day to discuss what during that day had been life-giving and what had been life-draining or life-defeating. The life-defeating moments were easy to identify. The life-giving moments a little harder to isolate.

Life-giving: She had kept her food down, someone had phoned, a letter from a friend showed up in the mail, the words of a poem or Scripture burst with new meaning. Sometimes when we could think of nothing that had lifted our spirits and everything seem life-defeating, we would hug each other and cry together. That, too, was life-giving.

Other times I would rent a comedy video to force us to laugh – to get our minds off the challenges before us. For just a little while we could forget what lay ahead. You can’t be angry or depressed or even anxious when you are laughing.

I don’t like anything with a laughter sound track. I want to decide if something moves me to full-bellied laughter. I don’t like what many TV shows think is funny. It’s not my brand of humor. What I laugh at now I wouldn’t have a generation ago.

Life needs more talking frogs and fewer scenes of sexual encounters, nudity, foul language, violence – and trivia. We have a surfeit of sports and political analysis. Little of that gives hope or comfort root-room to grow.

And so, I tell another story, which only my generation fully understands. It’s about a 60ish widow who showed up at events with a new “boyfriend.” He was always poorly dressed, not clean shaven, and his personal-hygiene habits left a lot to be desired.

Her friends were flabbergasted that this gorgeous woman was being seen as an obvious loser. Was he rich, perhaps an eccentric, especially romantic or brilliant and intellectually gifted?

“No,” she said.

“Why then are you going with this obvious loser?”

“He drives at night.”

Rubie, tell that one to your group next time.

My prayer cheat sheet

2012-01-27T08:37:00.000-08:00

“How do you pray?” she asked me.

I wanted to say, whoa! That’s like asking Mitt Romney or Newt Gingerich for their tax returns. How I pray is my business. Personal, private, not open to inspection.

I plunged in and told her my morning routine for my quiet time before I plunge into the day, if “plunge” can be used to describe my often slow start to the day. It takes a while for all muscles and bones, and even my brain, to fully cooperate. They need a little encouragement.

But she wanted more detail. So I showed her the template I use for prayer many mornings. I have typed out an outline for prayer attached to a piece of cardboard so it won’t get lost in the maze of papers and files on my desk.

“So you have a cheat sheet!” she pronounced gleefully.

A cheat sheet? I hadn’t thought of it that way. And why not? When I was teaching I sometimes told students they could bring in a cheat sheet the size of a postcard, or, if I was feeling magnanimous, the size of two postcards, or even more. By organizing their information in miniscule writing, they were probably studying harder than usual.

My prayer cheat sheet is letterhead-size. When the page becomes too messy with handwritten changes, I make corrections on my computer and print out a new one.

I like my cheat sheet. I don’t think God minds that I need a little help those mornings when my mind is wandering or time is limited.

I start with “Good morning, God almighty. Good morning, Jesus the Christ. Good morning, Holy Spirit.” By using the words “Good morning” I’m starting a conversation. I say “Good morning” to the desk clerk or the parking valet, never “How are you?”, those empty words tossed into the atmosphere that don’t expect a reply anyway.

I speak first to God. “Almighty God, I worship you as Creator, Sustainer, Ruler, Organizer.” Some people pray only to Jesus. I include the Godhead.

Next I address Jesus as “ the risen Christ, Redeemer, Conqueror of evil, sin and death.” I admit my cheat sheet reveals my theology. Then, on to the Holy Spirit, often forgotten, whom I address as “the source of all wisdom and power, as the one who gives me strength, who makes me holy” – when I am holy-- who “guides me into all truth, who empowers me, who prays for me.”

Next I turn to each member of the Trinity for specific requests. I want to be aware of God’s presence throughout the day. I move through my cheat sheet, adding details, omitting items as the Spirit moves.

I try to mention each child and grandchild by name. My mother told me once she remembered every grandchild's name (all 18) by praying for them daily. I never want to forget one of mine.

Why do I do this? Because my inner life is nourished through these quiet moments, my regular reading of devotional literature and Scripture. Because prayer is a way of living with hope.

People my age tend to give up hope too soon as if life, when you’re bent, out of shape and feel forgotten, no longer has something to offer. To pray means that this day has promise. This day can bring God’s strength and joy into my life. Hope is what it is all about when you are an octogenarian.

Every once in a while I reread Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning to set my inner life on course once again. His words once gave me hope after my husband died suddenly leaving me with four young children to support and raise.

Frankl points out that he noticed that when he was a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II those fellow prisoners who chose to live in the past, believing life no longer had anything to offer them, were the first to die. When prisoners gave up hope in those most dismal circumstances where everything was decided for them – when to get up, what to wear, what to eat, what work to do – they soon let go. When they realized that life still expected something of them in this hell-hole – the responsibility of deciding their attitude toward what was going on – they had more chances of hanging on.

So my cheat sheet gives me a path through the sometimes waylessness of life. I don’t think God minds. It's not perfect, but it helps.

Good morning, God almighty. Good morning, Jesus the Christ. Good morning, Holy Spirit. Sometimes just those few words are enough to set me on track for the day.

OLD -- and proud of it!

2012-01-16T08:04:00.000-08:00

My journal entries tell me that in January 1994 I visited my mother for the last time in Edmonton before her death that same year a little while later at age 99. I was the sister assigned to move her from the hospital where she had been for a few days to a rehabilitation center to be “rehabilitated,” a task I readily accepted. She had traveled her life’s journey from a lowly upbringing in one of the Mennonite colonies in the Ukraine to Canada with strength and dignity. Always a real Mensch!

I didn’t know what to expect in this new facility, but it was what the government agency had decided was best for her. The admitting person asked her where she wanted to go when she was finished with the rehabilitation.

“To be with the Lord,” was her calm answer. She was finished with life. She didn’t plan to return to her little apartment. It was time to take the next step.

The model of aging employed at the time was that when you were finished with the hospital, the next stage was a rehab center where you learned to cook and such stuff so that you could take care of yourself again. It apparently applied to all older adults, even people Mother’s age. Mother hadn’t cooked for herself for a long time. My sister Anne brought her food which she just warmed up. At close to the century mark, she was sure her life was ending. But the government decreed otherwise. It had a model of aging that applied to everyone – no exceptions.

Models of aging change over the generations. Believe me.

In the Ukraine where my parents grew up, old men in the village sat on benches in front of the house and “neighbored,” that wonderful Low German word that dares translation. Old women puttered and checked gardens and flower beds.

In the Slavic community in Saskatchewan where I grew up, my father accommodated the old men of the village by providing them with benches in front of his store where they could sun themselves, reminisce, argue, and chew sunflower seeds by the bushel with skills learned over years of practice. This front-bench resting was an acceptable model of aging in that small town, a holdover from the Old Country.

When Dad retired he thought he would follow that model. “I want to rest,” he told me a number of times. He had spent his energies managing a store which included lugging sacks of flour and sugar out the door to waiting wagons and trucks. At age 70 he thought he deserved to rest. He was tired. But he didn’t expect to rest for the next twenty years.

The resting model no longer worked, especially when he and mother moved to a city without benches in front of the stores. Resting alone on the sofa didn’t measure up. He learned his adopted country demanded a new model that required planning for old age—financial resources, goals, living arrangements – and the aggressiveness to find his own front benches if society didn’t provide them.

Unfortunately old age cannot be eradicated like small pox or some of the other vicious communicable diseases. With better health care, better sanitation, and higher living standards people are living longer and hopefully better.

But, and there is a but, a big one. Today’s culture keeps reminding me that at my age I should hide the wrinkles, mask my white hair, leave the cane behind if possible, joke about memory lapses, use euphemisms for death – in effect, be ashamed of being an old person. As if “old” is a four-letter word, a disease. Old people with strong signs of aging shouldn’t be sitting on front benches where everyone can see them.

It bothers me that people watch the elderly like they watch toddlers, only in reverse. Hey, she’s still walking. He is using a cane. Now a three-pronged one. Wheelchair coming up! We are warned that we will all end up warehoused – lots of empty shells stacked in memory care homes because of some form of dementia.

Aging is a mystery compounded of joy, sorrow, pain, confidence, indefiniteness, and sometimes fear. It has few specific answers.

I listened to Barbara Ehrenreich, author and columnist, encourage jobless people living on a lower standard than before to be proud and poor. Poor was nothing to be ashamed of.

The words rang a bell with me. Proud and old. OLD AND PROUD!

Proud whether striding, tottering, articulate or forgetting names.

Proud whether having to lean on someone for support or walking marathons.

Proud because this time is still my time. I am still someone made in the image of God.

My heart leaps up when . . . .

2012-01-06T06:54:00.000-08:00

I nodded my head in agreement as I read the letter in the local newspaper by a man mourning the departure of handwritten letters from our culture. At his mother’s death, he had found among her effects a box of mementos, including a letter written by his father to her years ago which she had treasured to her dying day.

I, too, mourn the departure of handwritten letters, not for business matters, or day-to-day concerns, but for what goes on in the spirit.

Years ago, when my parents were living, it was their custom to place letters we children had written to them in the basket on the coffee table for any of us who were visiting to read. Mother and Dad also read these letters again and again, squeezing all possible meaning out of them. They were their lifeline to the family. I wrote my parents once a week for years, prompting Dad to write, “You are the best letter writer.” By then I was typing the letters, however, to make it easier for them to read.

Mother never wrote many letters. Her excuse was that Dad had so few things to do in his retirement, she left this task to him, so he sent off short missives to each child when he had some news. Sometimes they were not more than twenty words, but they were his way of keeping the family connected. “Jack and Joyce visited us. Mother made green bean soup for dinner.” He made sure his end of the connection was intact.

When he wrote letters to Mother’s relatives in the Soviet Union, they complained that his letters were too short. Letters to a foreign country, far away, should be long, very long. I have a file of his longer letters to me in which he discussed a topic he was concerned about, but they were the exception rather than the rule.

I read recently that some schools are discontinuing teaching cursive writing, a useless skill in a computerized age. I grieve, for I recall when I worked in my father’s store in the 1930s watching illiterate immigrants from Slavic countries bring a check to him and endorse it with an X, above which Dad would write “His sign” and sign his own name.

What a tragedy when someone cannot read or write even their own name. What a tragedy when someone finds writing (or typing) more than a sentence a chore.

A letter is an artifact that I can pick up in my hands and touch with more than just my eyes. A letter is something I can hang on to. Mother kept all my letters to her. As I reread them I cringe as I see the person I once was but I also utter a “bravo” to some bold words and accounts of acts. How will today’s technology preserve our computerized letters in easily accessible form? I already have a box of tapes, discs, and so forth not accessible to me on this computer. Are they lost forever?

My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky. My heart leaps up when I receive a handwritten note or letter, handwritten or typed. It is communication with a human being.

I grew up with coal and wood stoves, hand-powered washers, manual typewriters, and radios with static reception. We melted snow for water in winter and hauled it from the well in summer. I would not want to return to any of this. I appreciate modern appliances and the swifter methods of communication. On Christmas Day I received greetings from a friend in India and a relative in Moscow. But the faster I run to keep up with modern technology, the farther it moves ahead of me. Yet I believe that staying in touch is most important in any form. Here's to more letters in the New Year!

Katie interviews Katie

2011-12-27T08:23:00.000-08:00

Since I don’t see the reporters lining up by the dozen to interview me at the end of the year, I decided to do it myself. And ask myself the questions reporters never ask me.

1. What are you most thankful for as the year draws to a close? The mute button on the TV remote.

2. What are some things you would like to see less of? Green bean casserole with mushroom soup, raccoon eyes on young girls, wrinkled cleavage on old women, low-rider pants on young men and comb-overs on middle-aged. And, oh yes, lengthy election campaigns. I’d like the election to be next week.

3. What fuels you? Gas fuels my car but stimulating conversation or a good book or lecture keeps my inner being primed.

4. What nurtures your spirit? I am strengthened by listening to a well-thought out pastoral prayer, in which the prayer-giver gathers the entire congregation present and absent, in his or her arms, in well-chosen words of praise, petition, and thanksgiving. When I have been in the presence of God Almighty, I don’t need a sermon.

5. Do you have secret fears? I have never lost of my fear of fire, so I rarely burn a candle, any kind, and am tempted togo around blowing out candles in other homes when I am visiting. It stems back to my childhood when I witnessed the burning of an entire block of business buildings, several large grain elevators, some houses, and a lumber yard behind our house at a time when everything was built of wood, and yet had to be heated night and day because of the extreme cold in northern Saskatchewan. As children we were warned about fire constantly and Mother had us place our shoes, side by side, on the rug by our bed ready to jump into in case of fire and we had to jump out the window onto the snow below.

6. What is most surprising to you as you rush towards ninety? Some days I feel amazingly young, and I’m back in my youth, ready to skate with the boys and gossip with the girls. Other days, I am quite ready to start pushing the daisies with my friends who I bury with surprising regularity. I read obituaries always and check ages – how many older than I am, how many younger. With every new twinge, I know I will be gone in a week. With every spurt of energy I am ready to aim for a hundred. Like Woody Allen said, “I’m not afraid of death. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”

7. What are you most proud of having accomplished last year? I think it was getting a lengthy account of my aunt Aganeta Janzen Block, who spent her entire life in the former Soviet Union and Russia, enduring intense suffering as she and her four children were shipped here and there as political pawns of an unfeeling regime. She suffered 11 years as a slave of the state, always concerned first of all about food for her children. I gave her a legacy. The response has been great. As my niece Nancy wrote, her story puts things in perspective when one is tempted to whine and moan about modern hardships.

8. What is one wish you have for the New Year? To write a perfect sentence, and know it is perfect, and not be tempted to write and rewrite until I end up with something that closely resembles cold mashed potatoes.

9. How did you get started reviewing books? I started reviewing books in 1961-2 when the man assigned to do this task for a denominational organ ran out of time. He brought me a box of books and said, “The job is yours.” Reviewing books forces me to remain a disciplined reader, not just someone who flits through a book and says, “I have read this book.” I read a book for the first time, usually quickly, making notes about key observations and impressions. Then I go over it again, especially sections I have marked. Then I start compiling my thoughts. Then I write, and savor the writing process as I gather thoughts and comments.

10. Who is one writer who influenced you? I would have to mention William Barclay, the devotional writer popular decades ago. I read once that after he had written something he read it to his unschooled servant. If he couldn’t understand the theological jargon, Barclay went back to his desk to rewrite. That has always been my goal – to write in such a way that I will be understood but also that I will have said something significant in an interesting way.

Venturing at LifeVentures

2011-12-14T11:33:00.000-08:00

One thing about people my age is that we usually like each other. We like to get together because we understand what that other person is going through. We understand stiffness in the morning, digestive problems in the late evening, adjustments to new medications, struggles with old ones, sleepiness in the early afternoon, insomnia at night, inability to run fast yet the need to hurry, especially to the bathroom.

In 1992 I attended a conference on aging (yes, there were such strange events then) at Messiah College in Pennsylvania. People talked about what it meant to grow old in this century. I had been sent there by a Mennonite church agency to get some basic understanding of this group of people that I was contracted to write a study guide about. I was just about into this age category myself.

What I remember most distinctly about that conference is that when presenters talked about the elderly, it was always “they,” rarely “we” even when it was obvious they had been on Social Security for many years. No one dared identify with this declining group. To be old was to be over the hill, finished, on the downward journey. At the time the word “old” was a four-letter word.

There are many situations in which an older adult is just tolerated, not welcomed. I have heard of congregations bemoaning the fact that the majority of its membership is old – therefore the church can’t grow-- as if older people are a stagnant body harboring strange life forms that prevent forward movement.

Such thinking leads to the kinds of Christmas letters in which parents extoll what their children did during the year – and not how they themselves grew.

When I returned from that conference I started looking for an organization that viewed this age group not as a finished work but as people with possibilities for intellectual and personal growth, for developing new relationships and learning new skills. I found it in what is now known as LifeVentures, formerly Shepherd’s Center.

It is an inter-faith, non-profit organization. By inter-faith I mean that no one religion gets top billing. No one denomination is top dog. It’s a volunteer-based organization with a few great part-time employees to keep the ship afloat. Check out our website at www.LifeVenturesKS.com

For nearly twenty years I have attended classes sponsored by this group each Tuesday for eight weeks in fall, winter and spring. I have heard lectures in just about every subject often taught by retired professionals. I have gone to classes in history, religion, health, travel, and much more. There are classes in art, poetry writing and creative writing. A woman at age 94 teaches piano. At lunch one day a man age 75 played the accompaniment to “Happy Birthday.” It had been his lifelong dream. Before this session he had never played a note. Ezma taught him. On the program are also tai chi and yoga. At lunch I keep meeting new people and connecting with old friends. I love these people.

I have taught poetry writing, journaling, and especially writing personal or family history. I’ve pushed the importance of telling our stories, for if we lose them, we lose our connection to ourselves and our families. I've told my own story. Through the years I’ve learned many intimate details about members’ lives as they read last week’s assignment

When I first started attending I didn’t know that this association would lead to lasting friendships. What I learned in the classes was the side benefit, not the main one. Older people look for closeness in organizations such as this one but a prerequisite to making friends is the willingness to reach out to new people.

My age group doesn't want to be abandoned in our declining years. We long for and need friendship. In the movie Cool-hand Luke, the main character, is in prison at the mercy of abusive guards. He is sickly, weak, and knows he can’t hang on much longer. To taunt him the guards place a heaping plate of food in front of him and threaten more punishment if he doesn’t finish it, every last spoonful. As his fellow prisoners walk around the yard each one furtively grabs a spoonful of food from his plate as they pass his corner to share his burden.

I see that as a wonderful portrait of what happens in organizations like LifeVentures-- people sharing the burden of life while enriching their minds and spirits.

A desperate form of birth control

2011-12-06T07:57:00.000-08:00

For thirty years I wrote a biweekly column for our denominational organ. It gave me the opportunity to think in public about many subjects. I remember some columns I was proud of. I’ll also admit to some bloopers.

A column I wrote in 1980 titled “Convenience...Or Murder?” brought me the most mail I had ever received. It came primarily from those for whom the issue of abortion was etched in black and white. My editor later wrote that one letter was signed by 15 women from one congregation stating they did not want readers to operate under the misconception that I was speaking on behalf of all women. I never intended to. To them this column was worse than a blooper.

Recently I read Frederick Philip Grove’s Settlers of the Marsh, a novel about pioneer life in Manitoba in which some women, overworked, undernourished, without medical care, figured out a strange method of aborting a fetus.

The novel was first published in 1925 and condemned as “obscene” and “indecent.” Grove taught in the Winkler, Manitoba, school system for several years and married a Mennonite woman. It was later republished in 1989 and heralded as great literature. The novel has a dark outlook on life and is sometimes compared to works by Thomas Hardy, Theodore Dreiser and others.

In Grove’s novel women suffer because they are expected to work like men yet accept the burden of childbearing to provide future workers for the farm. Ellen’s mother had been forced to leave behind two of her three children in her native Sweden when she and her husband emigrated to Manitoba in the early 1900s. Her husband demands she help him with the outside work, yet satisfy his needs at night. When she becomes pregnant, he blames her as if she has committed a crime, for pregnancy keeps her from helping clear the land and build his farm. What can she do?

Throughout the ages women have shared secrets and folklore about birth control. It happened when I was a young married woman. It happens today even though birth control is no longer illegal or immoral as it was in my mother’s and grandmother’s era. I sensed as a child that female relatives were discussing something clandestine related to a topic I did not understand.

A woman in an earlier time was expected to accept however many children the Lord gave her, for hadn’t the Lord said to be fruitful and multiply? And without birth control women sometimes kept bearing children into their middle forties, year after year. My genealogical records show women who bore up to 12 and 14 children, one after another – and then died to be replaced very soon with a new wife – and child-bearer. I wish I could share the stories of some of these women.

In Grove’s novel, a neighbor gives Ellen’s mother her own foolproof method of not bringing a child to full term: work harder than a man in the early stages of pregnancy. The mother does that – lifts heavy things, walks behind the plow for a day, saws huge logs with a bucksaw, chops wood with a heavy axe, carries bundles, clears brush until she miscarries. Her husband carries the little bundle out to the woods to bury it. And the process starts again. The mother tells Ellen she recognizes she is murdering her unborn children, but can see no way out of her dilemma of working like a man yet bearing children like a woman.

Even when she is a skeleton of a ghost her husband prays mightily at the bedside before insisting on his rights as a man. After one difficult miscarriage he orders her to whitewash the cabin. Her strength gives out and she dies.

Vilhelm Moberg broaches the same topic of too many children and not enough strength in his novel The Settlers, the third book in his series The Emigrants about Swedish pioneers in Minnesota. Kristina is certain her weakened body cannot survive another birth, yet finds herself pregnant for the eighth time. She had prayed earnestly, desperately, to be relieved of the sick and miserable feeling for the first few months, the shuffling about on heavy feet to carry the increased burden of her body, and at last the terrifying labor, her strength spent, and then the great weakness and fatigue afterward with her limbs heavy and aching. Why did God create another life in her? When her prayer is not answered, she doubts the existence of God.

Other immigrant novels examine the same topic of too many pregnancies in weakened bodies, with greater gentleness and delicacy. It appears too often to be ignored as unrealistic.These novels depict the desperation of women forced to bear child after child and what they did to prevent this burden. Only fiction? Fiction is often closer to truth than reality.

As I re-read my column of 1980, I wondered again why readers had been upset. I did not advocate abortion as a method of birth control. I only asked readers to look at the inconsistencies in our thinking about it. For example, personhood begins at conception some people proclaim vehemently, yet an early miscarriage is flushed down the toilet, an unnamed blob of mucous and blood, sometimes accidentally. If this were truly a person, shouldn’t it be shown the respect and dignity of a name and a proper burial?

In my old age, I am less concerned about certitude about many issues that troubled me earlier. I hope I am becoming more tolerant of women in this country and underdeveloped countries about their concern about an issue that has been discussed too little. At what point is enough children enough?

I want my aunt to have a legacy

2011-11-29T07:55:00.000-08:00

I come from a one-dimensional family. Let me explain. My father had a mother, five brothers and one sister. No father that I was aware of. Lots of Funks around. My mother had no father, no mother, and only one brother, or so I thought. Few Janzens. Having relatives on only one side seemed natural.

Of course, while we children were growing up there were passing references to a former home in the Ukraine, to our Janzen grandparents, to Janzen aunts and uncles and many more, but those people weren’t as real to me as my Funk relatives whom we visited regularly. A child accepts whatever reality she experiences as normal. One grandparent was sufficient – and I never realized until later that most children had four grandparents, all living.

Only as an adult did I learn I had a huge extended family on my mother’s side who had been trapped by the Bolshevist regime in the Ukraine after 1929. Some had spent what will have seemed like endless lifetimes to them in forced labor in Siberia.

I met one aunt in Germany and another in Moscow in 1989 and began to aggressively research my mother’s relatives. Who were these people who had contributed to my gene stock but also my cultural upbringing?

Recently I wrote a 4,500 word article with photos about Aunt Aganeta Janzen Block, which was published in CMBS Newsletter Fall 2011 She lived an entire lifetime in Russia and the former Soviet Union. Unfortunately it is not online but available for a suggested of $5 or more sent to Center for Mennonite Brethren Studies, Tabor College, Hillsboro KS 67063. If I live long enough I hope to expand this writing into a book-length manuscript.

After my visit with Aunt Neta Janzen Block she began writing her life story in letters to me, a sister, an aunt and to her nieces. She was a reader and a story teller. During the limited time I spent with her in 1989 she told me stories about her life while I took notes feverishly. I collected everything I could lay hands on. In the article I wrote about her life I could only highlight a few major events of her amazing, though difficult, life gleaned from her letters.

She wrote about her conversion as the result of an experience with the demonic in the life of a young man in her community.

About being married to the son of a kulak (landowner) and the resulting hardship of being forced out of their home three times, carrying only a suitcase in one hand and a child in the other.

About the Great Trek from the Ukraine to Poland of thousands of German-speaking citizens of the Ukraine during World WLar II. She wrote later that she only understood what was going on in that terrible march when she read about it decades later in the Rundschau in historical reports.

About the night her husband left home after being conscripted into the German army. He died on the Belgium front. She sent me his last letter to his family – a last will of his hopes for his four children.

About being shipped like cattle to Siberia to work in forced labor in forestry work, heavy construction , mining and similar industries, always hungry, always cold. Always mindful of her four young children.

About being interrogated by the secret police, night after night, who attempted to force her to tell lies so they could “legitimately” punish her.

About seeing her sister Tina after a separation of more than 25 years. This sister and her family had been exiled to another part of Siberia in the 1930s.

In Canada, Mennonites are familiar with these accounts. A large wave of Mennonites who had survived the tumultuous events of the war and its aftermath immigrated to Canada from Paraguay and Europe after World War II and brought with them their stories about life during the Bolshevist rule. Here in the United States we know about the Amish, the Pennsylvania Dutch, the Mennonite migrations of 1870s from Russia to the prairies, and such events, but too little about this aspect of our story and the difficult sojourn in the cold hell of Siberia. It needs to be known.

My aunt deserves a legacy. Through this article I have begun to give her one. It is the least I can do.

One Hundred Points of Meaning

2011-11-15T08:45:00.000-08:00

In the weeks before my daughter Christine died in 2000 it was sometimes hard to hang onto life – not just physical life, but the spark that is life itself. So, in the evening before we went to bed, sometimes we tried an exercise in staying alive. Could we identify what in that day had been life-giving, what life-denying?

Sometimes the ledgers were heavily weighted on the life-denying side as we sorted through the day to find a life-saving moment: A phone call from a friend. Christine had kept down one meal. A bird had tweeted a song just for her outside her window. The postman had waved. Small events, no doubt, but life-giving.

Recently I watched a TV show in which a man with Lou Gehrig’s disease was explaining how he stayed “alive” while he was dying. His suggestion was to make a list of one hundred things that gave meaning, joy, or pleasure to life. Then, though some will disappear, slowly or suddenly, one by one, you will still have 90, then 85, then 80 items that give meaning.

He recommended that people should talk about death more. I admit that people talk about sex today as freely as they do about yesterday’s ice cream sundae with a cherry on top. They know all the ingredients, how long it takes to eat, how it tastes. But death – that is left to the hospitals, doctors and nurses -- when it could be an enriching experience for all concerned.

At this stage in life I am very much aware that I am mortal. I am closer to 90 than I am to 80. And so I have begun listing my hundred points of meaning.

1. I enjoy the feeling when my tongue slips over my teeth after I have brushed them in the morning. I wait each morning for that clean smoothness, the fresh taste.

2. I enjoy having a shower, feeling the hundreds of points of sharp wet heat hit my skin—but not too much, or too long, advises my dermatologist. My skin is getting too thin, too dry for extended enjoyment under the shower-head.

3. Speaking of skin, I enjoy remembering the feel of my husband’s skin against mine even after these many years that he is gone. I’m thinking, in bed, without clothes.

4. . I enjoy eating my morning oatmeal, but not the instant kind. It’s a throwback to my childhood when I rushed home after school to be the first to grab the leftover breakfast porridge, the stuff crusted at the bottom of the pot, from long cooking. I eat mine today with skim milk, artificial sweetener – and that’s okay.

5.. Writing in my journal nearly every morning gives meaning to life. I look forward to my time with my journal. Not that I write many wise things, but it is a way of fastening down my life so that I can look at it.

6. I look forward to my quiet time with God in the morning. Years ago I didn’t have time for more than a quick prayer before I headed for the door. Now I can take time to read, to pray, to meditate. My faith sustains me. But I don’t get antsy if I don’t have time. God understands.

7. Holding a newborn baby gives me great pleasure, but it doesn’t happen often. The softness, the smells, the snuffling, the helplessness, the beauty of innocence—life has chance to try again.

8. Creating with words still excites me.

9. . I love a cup of tea brewed with real tea leaves, not the tea bag stuff made with floor sweepings. Green tea is good as is Zechung Oolong.

1 10. I like my little lists of things to do, e-mails to write, purchases to make, ideas to think about, and such stuff. I like even more crossing out items when I get them done. It makes me feel in control.

11 I like standing at my window watching that last leaf on a branch hang on. Tomorrow I will look again and the next day, again. Until it’s gone.

12 I like doing the daily crossword puzzle as well as the long Sunday one. Mission accomplished, I tell myself. My mind is still working-- to a degree.

13. I like having lunch with my son and observing how much he resembles his father whom he never knew. Heredity is powerful.

14. I like having lunch with friends who have time to talk ... and talk. None of this eat and run.

15. Which reminds me that I love stimulating conversation above many things.

16. I like listening to CDs with the old music on them. Eine kleine Wassermusik. Even Elvis Presley singing old Gospel hymns soothes my spirit.

17. gives me joy to hear a grandchild phone and say, “Hello, Grandma!” It doesn't happen often enough in this age of Facebook and Twitter.

18. I enjoy writing my weekly family email. Does anyone read it? A few say they do. But I know I am doing my part to keep the glue of family relations from drying out. Faithfulness is important.

19. This next is a non-entry. I could write it down and then cross it off. I no longer enjoy shopping. I only do it in stores that have carts I can hang on to.

At this rate, I think I could make it to 100 points of meaning. I’m well on my way. So how many have to be gone before I can say, “I have finished my course” and let go of life? Twenty? Thirty?

But maybe as I keep listing old meaningful items, I can keep adding new ones as well.

Old and new -- now that gives life meaning.

The Other Holocaust

2011-11-10T07:09:00.000-08:00

A few years ago I told the chairperson of a women’s club that I would be speaking on “The Other Holocaust” at their upcoming meeting. Later, she told me she had hurried to the university library to research the term so that she could make a few meaningful comments before I began speaking. She never found any entries referring to another holocaust. I had coined the phrase.

Few people do not know about the Holocaust that annihilated about six million Jews during World War II in the infamous gas chambers of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

Too few people know of another Holocaust in which possibly more than sixty million Russian citizens were killed, directly or indirectly, as a result of Communism between 1920 and 1990. I had always used the figure of thirty million. Then researchers kept adding to that figure. On March 24, 2001 The Wichita Eagle reported the number as sixty million. I call that The Other Holocaust.

Why no general outcry? Because the crimes were committed by the Soviet government against its own citizens. It was an insider job.

My own interest in this holocaust stems from the fact that among those millions of citizens who perished because of the war, executions, starvation, imprisonment in gulags, forced labor, confinement prisons, were close relatives of my mother. They had remained in Russia after the large migration in the 1920s, which brought my parents to Canada.

During the 1930s any religious and intellectual leaders such as ministers, poets and writers, kulaks (landowners) and children of kulaks – anyone who threatened the Bolshevist regime in any way-- was shipped off to the gulags or into forced labor, to prisons, or simply disappeared.

One aunt and her preacher husband and family were exiled to the Perm area in Siberia in the early 1930s where he died shortly thereafter. There were hundreds like them. Writer Solzhnitsyn describes these gulags as “man-made hells.”

In the 1940s the USSR needed energy to develop its rich natural resources in Siberia. Thousands of German-speaking Russian-born citizens were forcibly exiled to sites in Kazakhstan following the division of Berlin by the Yalta agreement. They were condemned as traitors to their country.

They were crammed into cattle cars and transported across the vast Soviet northern expanse to work at hard labor in forestry, construction, mining and industry at near-starvation rations in the bitter cold. Lives were expendable. There were always more available. The supply was inexhaustible.

Among these expendable bodies in forced labor camps in Siberia were my mother’s six sisters and their families. Husbands and brothers had been mostly conscripted into the military or labor army and died there. Being a conscientious objector to war was not an option. Over a period of years one aunt who survived wrote me the story of her experiences in forced labor after I visited her in Moscow, where she was living with her daughter and family.

Reading her experiences and as many accounts as I could get my hands on when I became aware of these relatives in the 1950s brought me to the conclusion that sixty million was a big enough number of think of this as The Other Holocaust.

The other evening I went to hear Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried, a fictional account of his experiences as a reluctant soldier in Vietnam. It too was a holocaust of massive proportions. It claimed the lives of more than 58,000 Americans and wounded another 300,000. Estimates place the number of killed or wounded North and South Vietnamese at roughly four million soldiers and civilians – roughly 10% of the population. I recommend the book highly.

His point was that instead of being “healed” of experiences such as the Vietnam war, we should remember them. Remember the horror. Remember the uselessness. Remember the waste of human lives on both sides.

He writes: “War is hell, but that’s not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.”

A holocaust only makes you dead.

And so I continue to write and speak about this other Holocaust that cost countless human lives. I don’t think the exact number will ever be determined. Is it sixty of seventy million? I don’t know. Even one person who dies at the whim of another is too many. We must never forget.

To Hoard or Not to Hoard

2011-11-01T06:25:00.000-07:00

I don’t watch TV reality hoarding shows. Once was enough. Looking on as some woman agonized whether to toss a stack of Styrofoam takeout trays saved from McDonald’s or to keep them was not for me. People like her need more help than a TV show can give.

Hoarding is not my vice. I learned not to stockpile from my mother. She had years of experience with bare cupboards during the Russian Revolution of 1917-19, the ensuing famine, and then the Depression years in Canada. She learned to live more with less.

In my little apartment the top and bottom shelves of my kitchen cupboards are nearly empty because I no longer climb on step-stools to look for a long-unused item or fold together like an accordion to retrieve an out-dated can of beans near the bottom. Extreme couponing to build stockpiles of food is not my way of shopping. I see that as another form of hoarding.

But let anyone suggest I throw out files – or even books – and I’m defending my stash like a she-bear with newborn cubs. Let anyone recommend thinning files grown fat over the years and I tremble. Clinging to paper is my besetting sin. Clutching books to my bosom when someone suggests getting rid of a few brings on heart palpitations. Books are friends on whose margins I have jotted notes and comments to the authors. To get rid of books would be like saying, “Be gone, old friend, I have no need of you.”

De-cluttering is a task my age-people are encouraged to do, especially things. If we don’t do it, someone else will do it when we’re gone. Yet clutter—any kind-- whether things, paper, even ideas, beliefs, pet words and phrases, or habits -- can bar the soul’s forward movement even as the body declines with age. And so I take my yellow pad and make a new list of what needs de-cluttering:

FAT FILE NO. 1 FEARS: Fears easily accumulate from childhood on up and over-stuff the shelves of the spirit. New ones are added each decade: fear of making left turns in heavy traffic, fear of the new pain in my left hip, of parallel parking (I never learned that), fear of the old twinge in my right hip, fear of forgetting to take a medication or to make a payment on time, of throwing out a document I should have kept. Fear of the long night, lying awake hour after hour. That file has love handles, saddle bags, flaps, and overhangs, and more.

OBESE FILE NO. 2 UNEXAMINED THEORIES AND BELIEFS: Over time certain favorite beliefs find a stronger and firmer lodging spot in our thinking. They start in early life with a comment, sermon, movie, article, maybe even a conversation, and get stuck—firmly. Protective fences and armaments are added with the years to make sure they aren’t dislodged accidentally. These pet theologies find a comfy hiding place and are never pulled out into the light of day and from protective safekeeping to be examined in the light of new evidence. And eventually they take over the inner being and leave no room for new thinking, or better thinking, about our set-in-cement interpretations of favorite Bible passages. And become the main issues in elections.

FAT FILE NO. 3 GRUDGES: I have been teaching writing personal or family histories for decades now and find that some of those wonderful people in my age category store grudges about events that may have only brushed past them in childhood and have now become monsters still bothering them. Preachers, teachers, parents, siblings, business partners and many more--someone gave them a sharp blow – and keeps giving it in memory, year after year.

OVERWEIGHT FILE NO. 4 PET WORDS AND PHRASES: I cringe when someone calls me “young lady.” I shudder when someone with an obviously impoverished word bank who has never met me before calls me “honey” or, even worse, “hon.” I grow weary when TV interviewers say, “Tell me a little bit about how you felt.” Why not “a lot”? Or when people on Antiques Roadshow respond to an evaluation of their cherished item with “Wow.” Some say they weren’t going to say that word, and then do anyway. And why bother to interview athletes? I have yet to hear one say something significant. It’s “like” and “you know.” Well, you know.

So though I may not be a thing-hoarder, I keep asking myself, “What in the filing cabinet of my soul is whole cloth that holds my inner being together and should be hoarded and what is wrapping paper and ribbon?”

Jesus talked about not hoarding treasures that get destroyed by rust or are eaten by moths. Someone who followed him wrote about another kind of hoarding—filling our minds with what is pure, just, lovely, gracious, excellent, worthy of praise.

What would a TV show about this kind of hoarding be like? Or a home? Boxes full of praises. Shelves full of love. Files full of grace and forgiveness. Cupboards stuffed with justice. There’d be no room for, like, my fat files of fears... you know.

I like books that echo again and again

2011-10-24T08:38:00.000-07:00

I like books that echo in my mind long after I have read them. Frederich Buechner, whose collection of daily readings I am working through, writes about his love for words that echo like the tones of a choir in a large cathedral. I would like to expand that idea to whole books that stick with me for several days, sometimes weeks, echoing and re-echoing, inviting me to reread certain sections.

One such book is Scott Turow’s Ordinary Heroes, a novel about the experiences of a son who discovers among his deceased father’s papers a letter revealing that he was engaged to another woman before marriage to his mother, and secondly, documents that show that his father, a U.S. officer in World War II, was court martialed at the end of the war and condemned to be executed. Yet clearly that hadn’t happened, for he lived a fairly uneventful life as a lawyer in the United States, married to a Jewish woman and raising two children. Using military archives, letters and his father’s own notes, the son uncovers the truth of his father’s life.

I had read the book before, racing through it to find out what happened. This time I stopped along the way to savor key actions of the main characters, both chosen and stumbled into, and the truths unfolding along the way. Turow also describes the almost indescribable horror of war as seen first-hand by a soldier in combat. Some ideas kept echoing in me, especially the main character’s thoughts about his relationship with his parents over the years. His parents had kept the details of what happened during and after the war secret. They had lived a lie. He comments that parents deliberately keep secret certain details of their lives.

Because I have been working on a biography of my parents’ lives for several years, I was forced to agree with Turow’s main character. In telling me about their lives in that faraway land of the Ukraine, Mother and Dad had picked and chosen what they wanted to reveal. Some of it was too painful to talk about, I think, so they hid it deep inside themselves. Now years later, as I try to piece together their lives I wish I had asked more when they were alive – but at the time I didn’t know what to ask.

I have long believed if my father had been freer to speak about his experiences during World War I when he was a medic with the Russian Red Cross on a hospital train bringing the wounded back from the front to hospitals for treatment, life might have been a little easier for him in his later years. Now and then a story would slip out, but in the main, the war experiences were a closed book. That and the horrors of the Russian Revolution and the famine, pestilence, destruction of property and lives by the anarchists, and loss of a much-cherished way of life in the Mennonite colonies. Someone has described this earlier ideal period as “forever summer, forever Sunday.” If a story accidentally dropped out of my father's memory bank, he regretted it. He knew it would come back to haunt him at night in the form of vivid nightmares.

Turow writes, “When our parents talk about their lives, they relay what they think is best, for their sake or ours. And as their children, we hear what we want, believe what we can, and, as time lengthens, pray and judge and question as our needs demand. We understand them in that light. And when we tell our parents’ tales to the world, or even to ourselves, the story is always our own.”

And so, as I write my parents’ story about their lives in Russia and in Canada, am I actually telling the story of my own fears and travails of the spirit? I wonder.

On a more humorous note: Buechner comments that the umlauts of the fathers are visited upon the sons. People with an umlaut in their name know that anyone seeing it written doesn’t know how to pronounce it and anyone hearing it pronounced doesn’t know how to spell it. Umlauts are the burdens of children.

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What's in a name?

2011-10-13T10:58:00.000-07:00

What does it mean to pray in Jesus’ name asked the leader of our Sunday morning discussion group. Is it necessary to say these precise words for the prayer to be effective? What about when one is asked to prayer in a multifaith situation as I had been asked to do the following week? There were varied responses.

We would not expect a Muslim to say a prayer in the name of Allah at a public function, said one person. In such events it might be better to be more generic even though some Christians think it is important to say the words “in the name of Jesus” at the end of every prayer, or it loses power. To such people the right words are a form of doctrinal correctness. Yet expecting people to say the "right" words can easily become a shibboleth, a way of judging the speaker. The language in a prayer or sermon becomes a test of the speaker’s authenticity. If you don't say the politically correct names for Deity you're off my radar.

So what’s in a name, any name? To know somebody’s name is to know the person. We may talk to people we meet on a plane, in a discount store aisle, or at coffee in the church basement, but until we know that person’s name, we feel we don’t actually know him or her. To know a person’s name breaks down an invisible barrier to communication.

For an unnamed infant to be known only as “Baby” for weeks is an insult. Even a pet has a name. When we give a baby a name, we give him or her life, an identity, or, according to some African cultures, the life of relatedness. To live without a name would be severe handicap. People would have to keep saying, “Hey, you there, with the blue shirt,” or “You with the heavy beard.” That, then would eventually become a name, as it did for the Anabaptist George Blaurock.

I used to think it was funny the way my Russia-born relatives born played the “name game,” climbing up and down the family tree with the agility of a monkey until they had located a relative on a particular branch. Every one of my mother’s eleven brothers and sisters, male or female, included “Franz” as their second name. Before she was married my Mother was Anna Franz Janzen. Stating her name brought in the whole clan sired by Franz. Naming father Franz invoked his presence.

In Old Testament times a name was the expression of the nature or identity of a person. A vital connection existed between the name and the essence of the person. To know someone’s name was to perceive and, to some degree, enter into the life story of the bearer of the name.

So when that essence or identity changed, the person’s name also changed. Jacob the Deceiver became Israel; Sarai, the scoffer, became Sarah, the woman in whom God’s promises became true.

So back to my original question. What does it mean to pray in Jesus’ name? To merely say the words may be an attempt to manipulate God through a kind of religious magic, like uttering “abracadabra” over a top hat and expecting a rabbit to jump out or the money we’ve been waiting for to arrive by special delivery.

The best illustration I can think of to explain what it means to pray in Jesus’ name comes from my growing-up years in the Slavic community of Blaine Lake, Saskatchewan. Many local immigrants to this area were illiterate. When they had a check to cash, they came to my father’s store where I watched Dad endorse the check with the man’s name. The man would then pencil an “X” under his name and Dad would write “His mark” below that and sign it with his own name as one who could speak accurately as to the identity of that person. Dad's signature was as good as the person’s to whom the check had been made out. He was acting in that man’s name, on his behalf. His signature stated boldly, “I know this man.”

J.B. Phillips in Your God Is Too Small wrote that we tend to give God many names, such as Managing Director, Puppeteer, Magician, Resident Policeman. Over the years I think our names for God have changed to the giver of Money Purse, Power Dispenser, Success Insurer, and Security Provider--in short, God's name has become the means to the good life.

We do not name God. God has a name through which he wants to reveal himself to us. It is important to know the true name of God before we speak in his name.

Thoughts on being old-old

2011-10-06T07:06:00.000-07:00

It is now 21 years since I retired from college teaching and moved to the next stage of life. I recall feeling eager, yet a little shaky. I was like a baby learning to walk -- ready to explore this new life stage, yet concerned. Life without a daily assignment looked too daunting.

I faced one of the biggest challenges of my life. Two thousand discretionary hours had been handed me for the coming year and for each year thereafter I stayed alive. Do the math. Actually it's more than two thousand for someone like me who put in many hours beyond the required forty hours per week. I recall that, at the time, the main resources to launch me into this leg of the journey were tons of advice about eating right, doing my daily exercises, and managing finances. Gerontology was a new discipline. Among this plethora of advice I found little on how to ward off the lions, the Richard Parker's of Yann Martel's novel, The Life of Pi, crouching at the other end of the lifeboat,ready to pounce at the least sign of weakness.

When you retire, people at once shift you to the "old" slot. Now, 21 years later, I know I am there, well, actually, in the "old-old" category. Young-old or middle-old no longer applies. Not all organizations even have an 85+ category for people like me. We get dropped off the chronological map.

When I retired people were called old only if they had been born before you. At the first conference on aging I attended in Pennsylvania early in my retirement, I recall that presenters and participants only used the nebulous pronoun "they" when speaking about the cohort of people classified as old, never "we." There was no warm "we, the people" feeling here.

"Old" was a four-letter word. People avoided it. When I wanted to talk to friends about their feelings at being in this category,they refused to discuss it, as if just mentioning having birthdays over a cup of coffee might infect them. Old age and leprosy were in the same category. The warranty ran out at age 65. You were useless, kaput. I gleaned it was essential to good mental health to invest time, money and energy on looking young. Wrinkles, gray hair, bags under the eyes, were signs of this disease, signs to flee from. Treat them soon, fast. Aging is a medical problem. However, the birthdays kept coming, and coming.

In the intervening years, I have studied aging, written about it in several books (Border Crossing, Prayers of an Omega, Bless Me Too, My Father, and so forth), and lectured far and wide, to convince others --and myself-- that aging is part of God's plan, not a mistake.

I thought of that again this week when the oldest member of our congregation died at age 102 and a great-grandchild was born into our extended family. I tell myself that the challenge is to accept with grace and as much vigor as I can muster that this last stage of my life with all its strange feelings, misgivings, moments of great courage and bursts of energy but also times of weakness and withdrawal are all normal. To say good-bye to what can't be sustained and hello to the blessings of this time is a daily task.

Young people talk about having fun. Aging is not usually fun in that sense, but there are treasured moments I would never want to forgo. The last twenty years have been some of the best in my life. I appreciate being able to view life as if from the mountaintop -- the whole cycle of life. I relish the times I have to meditate, to ruminate, to enjoy my own company. I rejoice that I have been able to finish some long-term projects. Yet there are times when I worry about that tiger at the opposite end of the boat, but those thoughts are best left for another blog.

A Life Pilgrim of Indomitable Spirit

2011-09-29T08:44:00.000-07:00

When I came to the final chapters of Harry Loewen's most recent book of stories about people in Mennonite history, Cities of Refuge, I recognized at once that I had met the main character of one story many years ago.

In 1989 while with a tour of about thirty other Canadian and American tourists interested in their Russian-Mennonite origins, we visited Karaganda in Kazakhstan. As our plane flew mile after mile over densely forested territory to the north,I was reminded of scenes in the movie Dr. Zhivago. This was the Siberia I had heard much about. We had already visited the Ukraine where I was privileged to walk the streets of Rosenthal, where my parents had lived, loved, worked and endured. In 1923 they and thousands of other Mennonites left for Canada. But now I was back in the land of their birth.

The tour schedule was rigorous so one Sunday in this far eastern part of the former Soviet Union I stayed in my room during the evening church service to sleep. I was worn out. About 9:30 p.m. Clarence Hiebert, our tour leader, came knocking on my door with a local minister, Johann Koop and his adult son. They wanted me to join them to visit the elder Koop's father, David Klassen. There was a possibility that he had worked together with my parents at Bethesda Hospital for the Mentally Ill in the Ukraine.It would give the old man great joy to talk about his early life there. I agreed to go with them.

We drove to a high-rise apartment building. In the central court children were still playing as old women, probably their grandmothers, watched. I found little to please the eye. Everywhere there was quickly-built housing -- a forest of apartment buildings, each like the other, each without architectural adornment, all beginning to deteriorate. But this was before perestroika.

At the Klassen apartment a pile of shoes and a mound of rugs greeted us at the entrance. This family was in the process of redoing their apartment before leaving for Germany. They, like hundreds of other German-speaking people living in Russia, had been infected with emigration-fever to become Umsiedler (resettlers) in Germany.

Everywhere we went during our tour, the talk was about who was leaving and who was staying. One minister told me, "We don't know if the emigration is of the Lord, but we can't stop it." In the 1920s some people had hesitated to leave. Times would improve now that the Russian Revolution was over. Why leave? Later they regretted their decision. Now people of German-origin were rushing through the open door. Who knew how long it would stay open?

Old Mr. Klassen, age 90, was already in bed, so he was awakened. A daughter-in-law dressed him in a shirt and someone covered his legs with a blanket to make him respectable for the "American visitors." He had been deaf for a while but now was also blind. We spoke to him through a speaking tube made out of a newspaper held to his ear.

He told us his story briefly. During the 1930s and 40s he had been exiled three times for a total of about 25 years because he was a minister of the Gospel. His wife had been sent away for ten years because she had gone to church services. As she was driven away, her young children clung to the sleigh, but the driver whipped their little hands.

I learned he was a poet and a musician as well as preacher. He took my hands in his long, strong ones and wept. He had worked in Bethania from 1925-27 until it was torn down because of construction of the Dnieper dam. My parents had already left that institution by that time. No overlap.

Before we left we prayed together. He insisted on standing for prayer "to the glory of God." No sitting during prayer for him. I learned he died the following year.

Every once in a long while we meet a memorable character. David Klassen is one of those people I will never forget because of the impression he made on me in those brief moments we had together. He was a man of spirit, faith, and will. He went back to sleep, I assume, after we left -- and I lay awake to ponder his story.

What I've learned on my way to becoming 87 years old

2011-09-19T07:19:00.000-07:00

Last week I celebrated my 87th birthday with flowers, chocolates, nuts, cards -- lots of them, and especially people. What have I learned to this point? About ten years ago I made a list of my learning to that point. Here are my revisions and additions to that list:

10. I think I could live in a nudist camp. A few years ago I couldn't answer the phone unless I was fully clothed, even buttoned up. It felt absolutely obscene to answer the phone in less than the required minimum The change came when I went to water exercise classes. When I entered the dressing room I didn't know where to focus my eyes amid all the breasts, buttocks, buns, and bellies both freely and modestly displayed in all sizes, shapes, and colors as we women dressed and undressed. Most of my new friends had surgical scars up the front, down the side, across this vast expanse, up that narrow strip, under that flap. With time I could look at them in various stages of undress and calmly carry on a conversation about the best way to make macaroni salad without embarrassment. And now I even answer the phone in the all-together if someone phones just before I plan to jump into the shower.

9. You don't need to forward an email to five addresses even if the sender says the boogeyman will get you if you don't. Believe me, you don't have to read all the stuff sent your way, and if you worry about having deleted that wonderful joke, forget it. It will come back to you again, and again, and again.

8. Under the skin, Mennonites (all stripes), Methodists (all stripes), and Baptists (all stripes) and even Catholics (one stripe) are pretty much alike. I know. I've mixed with all kinds. Also all the other denominations. I haven't found that any of them bite.

7. If after you've read the first chapter of a book and it is boring or doesn't make sense, feel free to drop it. Let someone else plow through it or simply keep it on their bookshelf to add the aura of erudition to their home.

6. Even if I'm on a "Do not call" list, solicitors still call to tell me I have won the lottery or some such big prize if I donate money to their cause. I've learned it's okay to hang up. Machines have no feelings.

5. I've learned it's important to stop and grieve over losses, even something as small as a file misplaced in the boxes around me. I hear again and again about "getting on with one's life" after the loss of a family member or other tragic event. At times it is necessary not to get on with one's life and stop to mourn the loss of a body function-- or a relationship. And then start moving.

4. It is important to face the day running, or stumbling, or with the help of a walker if need be. Face the day and it won't stare you down.

3. An assignment to write an article still gets my creative juices flowing. And my mind active.

2. Once you get into the swing of getting rid of stuff (on shelves, in boxes, in closets), it gets easier and easier. When we finally leave all our stuff and get stuffed into a long narrow box, whatever happens to our stuff won't matter. I've learned to carry one thing out every time I bring something in.

1. Each birthday, especially in the eighth decade of life, forces an admission of human limitations, but also an increasing awareness of God's unfailing grace. This time of life has its glories just like any other. Faith forms faith.

A family reunion revisited

2011-09-07T13:48:00.000-07:00

In 1994 I attended a Peter P. Wiebe family reunion in British Columbia. There were about 120 of us, many of whom I didn't know, having lost contact with the younger generation over the years and because of the distances that separated us. I had been asked to speak on Sunday morning. What to say? The words fell into place:

Heredity is powerful! Anyone looking over this group of Wiebes would immediately know they were related. My son walks the same way his father Walter walked. There is that characteristic Wiebe eyebrow arch, the character traits that appear and reappear such as the love of singing and music in many of them, the urge toward creativity, particularly writing poetry and much more.

Pain is omnipresent! From my decades of association with many of them, I knew the depths of pain and heartache some had experienced. Illness, death, disappointments, failures, wrong steps -- all were present as they are in all families.

Grace is abundant! As I looked over the crowd of faces that Sunday morning I became very much aware of the grace that had prevailed in their lives -- the perseverance, the continued reaching, the encouraging,the forgiving.

Grace had been imparted to me by many of them. As I wrote in my first book Alone: A Widow's Search for Joy, a tiny, white-haired grandmother, her face lined by many years of hard work and poverty, sensed my fear as I faced the birth of our first child. My younger friends told me what to expect at the hospital, how many diapers and nighties I would need and all about formulas and night-feedings. This mother and grandmother, my mother-in-law, said simply, "The Lord helps at such times."

A glimpse of grace will not send a burdened person deeper into despair and self-pity, but will lift and encourage and help him or her to see a God able to meet their need. With these words she built a bridge by which I could walk in faith into one of the deepest experiences of a woman's life. She was telling me that when a woman needs God, God is there to help. And he was.

All twelve of her children had been born at home, miles away from the white sterility of a hospital. Perhaps she was thinking of the time one baby arrived in the dead of winter in the old frame homestead on the cold, snow-covered prairies. Perhaps she was reminded of the time she held a limp, feverish little girl in her arms on a hot, dry August day in Saskatchewan to watch her breathe her last. Whatever had been her own experience, she was offering me faith, steadied by the grace of courage.

As I think over that reunion I am reminded of Oswald Chambers' words: "The lives that have been of most blessing to you are those who were unconscious of it."

Heredity, pain, grace -- all three come plentifully. Heredity comes without our choosing. We do cannot choose our genes. Pain likewise. Most people would not choose pain if they knew how to avoid it. Grace is something we can open ourselves to all times.

Who can be a purveyor of grace? This gift is not limited to specific types or groups of people, or to certain denominations even though their fences are erected high to keep grace limited to their kind, or to some theological persuasions. I have been blessed by the words of a stumbling speaker more often than the carefully crafted production of a slick orator which slid past me like a greased pig its would-be-capturer. The imperfect and the perfect, the poor and the rich, the sick and the well, the educated and the uneducated -- everyone can be the means of grace to others.

Heredity, pain, grace. All three play a part in our lives.

A Midas touch that has nothing to do with money

2011-08-18T07:58:00.000-07:00

Last night I finished reading Yann Martel's book of short fiction titled The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios. Having read his novel The Life of Pi I was ready to see what other kind of writing he did.

Each piece in this unusual collection shows the strong social conscience of an exceptional writer. The first story features a young man dying of AIDS and his close relationship with his friend. He became infected through a blood transfusion.

In the second a young Canadian university student visits Washington, D.C. and experiences the Vietnam War through an intense concert performed by a group of veterans in a theater being demolished. In the third Martell describes variations of a warden's letter of comfort to the mother of a man he has just executed. The execution is, of course, "always painless."

I identified most with the last story about a young man visiting his elderly grandmother. He is bored beyond words by her nattering about her life ... blah, blah, blah, blah .... and the objects that surround her in her home..blah, blah, blah. At the end the young man is forced to acknowledge that "My grandmother has a sort of Midas touch; every object she touches becomes eternal.... Every object in her house was infused with an indwelling psyche that spoke to her of somebody or something of her long life." It is another way of saying that if you want someone or something to stay alive, you have to keep remembering.

My little apartment is alive through the objects that surround me. On the TV stands a mantel clock with the words "Time by Tim." A student named Tim made it for me when he graduated from college. He fell in love with Shakespeare during his studies and named his first son William in recognition of the great playwright.I look at the carefully-made clock and think of Tim -- and Richard II, or was it the III?

Above the TV hangs a zinc etching of the Funk windmill that stood high on a windy hill on the outskirts of Rosenthal, in the Ukraine. My grandfather owned and operated it for several decades in the early 1900s. Daughter Joanna drew the picture. Brother-in-law Henry had it etched and mounted. I tell myself that picture represents my past, a good past, a complicated past, with war, revolution, famine, pestilence, and migration, and new beginnings woven into it.

The marble bookends on the antique stand were given to my husband at the time of his ordination in 1954 by his sister and husband, John and Susie. A whole lifetime of experiences with these friends/relatives rises to the surface when I look at the bookends. Like the grandson in Martel's story they speak to me of an event and keep friends alive.

My mother's workbasket stands in a corner. She used to keep her knitting in it. I recall sitting next to her as she sat in her easy chair, her German newspapers around her. "These are my friends," she said. She loved to read. On Sunday mornings she carried the workbasket into the bedroom. Knitting as work; on Sundays she rested.

Across from my recliner is Christine's nun's chair. When she worked as a parish nurse at a Catholic church in Chicago, she scrounged for furniture in the rectory attic for her apartment. She brought back this discarded nun's chair to Wichita when she moved here. Christine died in 2000 but her memory is very much with me, and also the image of a nun, in habit, calmly rocking in that chair with simple lines, across from me.

Son James made the coffee table in a high school woodworking class. Daughter Susan stitched the quilted wall hanging above the kitchen table. My apartment comes alive when I look around. It doesn't have things standing around, but people.

I live alone and yet I don't live alone. I live with artifacts that speak to me of events and relationships in my long life. To give these up is like giving up living people, and the reason why the elderly resist moving to one room in nursing homes. The things that gave meaning to their lives have to be left behind and that hurts. It changes milk with heavy cream into skim, watered down.

Life without mirrors

2011-08-08T08:40:00.000-07:00

In the movie Fried Green Tomatoes, the older woman in the nursing home tells the younger woman visiting her regularly the story of the Whistlestop Cafe and the women who managed it. She states, "People stay alive if you remember them." She is keeping those two women alive by telling their story.

I want to keep my aunt Aganeta Janzen Block alive by telling her story. I met her in 1989 in Moscow when she was living a daughter and husband in a high rise apartment building.

Aunt Neta had an amazing spirit despite decade after decade of unspeakable hardships, including eleven years in forced labor in Siberia during the 1940s. At the time she had four young children, the youngest about two and the oldest a growing boy of 16. Her husband, conscripted into the German army, died at the Belgium front during World War II.

Aunt Neta was a woman of indomitable faith in a loving God despite years of living with extreme cold, hunger, and brutal treatment at the hands of overseers. She wrote me about her life in about sixty to seventy letters, which I have been translating. It became clear to me wherever life gave her a resting place, even for a few minutes, and she had an audience, she would tell a story. Here is one:

At the death of her grandfather in 1915, she, then a young girl of nine, and her parents traveled 60 kilometers from Trubetskoy, where her father was working, to the funeral. My mother Anna and sister Tina and the houseparents at Bethania Mental Hospital, who were all employed there, came for the funeral also.

She writes that her two oldest sisters, whom she barely knew, having been away from home a long time, were attractive young women at the time. She especially remembered my mother, who was wearing a beautiful sky-blue shawl with a long fringe. She heard people say, "What lovely girls the Janzens have."

That wonderful memory of my mother remained with her. She said as she was writing about that image, it was like it had happened yesterday.

At the age of 15 [girls from poor homes left home early to help earn money], she left home to work for her Uncle Hans Janzen, whose wife was sick. They had four young children. She had to look after the whole household, which her uncle valued. One day he brought her a large white shawl -- not sky-blue.

Years later, in 1932, she and her husband, son of a kulak (landowner) were struggling to stay alive in Siberia, working in the forest. During the period of collectivization, landowners were displaced and their land seized by the regime. The forest work was hard. Her children small. The mosquitoes merciless.

One Sunday, early, they had gone to the nearest town to try to buy supplies. In a ,waiting for her husband, she carefully examined her surroundings and the people. All at once she saw a woman who looked exactly like her sister Anna, only her shawl was white. She couldn't quit looking, she was so drawn to this woman.

When her husband showed up, she said, "Come, I'll show you someone who looks just like my sister Anna."

"Yes," he replied, "and that woman is my Neta."

How could she have been so mistaken, she asked herself. The walls were mirrors and mirrors were no longer a part of her life. Later, they often laughed at her mistake.

I have since wondered after reading her story, what life would be like if one morning every mirror in the U.S. shattered and we had to live without them. What difference would it make? How much time would we have for other things?

Stuff and more stuff about stuffy stuff

2011-08-04T07:26:00.000-07:00

A friend said she was sorting photographs. She was moving into an apartment. "You only have so much room in an apartment," she said sadly. She couldn't take it all with her.

Another friend mentioned he was sorting tapes. He used to be a minister and the audiotapes of his sermons had piled up. Now what? Who wants audiotapes in an age of CDs? He was in a quandary.

Years ago I found this anonymous essay about stuff, which I haul out from time to time as a reminder that a moving van won't accompny me at the cemetery.

STUFF
Every fall I start stirring in my stuff. There is closet stuff, and drawer stuff, attic stuff, and basement stuff. I separate the good stuff from the bad stuff, then I stuff the bad stuff anywhere the good stuff is not be too crowded until I decide if I will need the bad stuff.

When the Lord calls me home, my children will want the good stuff (I hope), but the bad stuff, stuffed wherever there was room among the other stuff, will be stuffed into bags and taken to the dump where all the other people's bad stuff ends up.

When I visit my daughter, she always moves her stuff so I will have room for my stuff. With their stuff and my stuff....well, it would be much easier to use their stuff and leave my stuff at home with the rest of my stuff.

This fall I had an extra closet built so I would have a place for all the stuff too good to throw away and too bad to keep with my good stuff. You may not have this problem, but I seem to spend a lot of time with stuff -- foodstuff, cleaning stuff, medicine stuff, clothes stuff, and outside stuff. What would life be like without all this stuff?

Now there is all that stuff we use to make us smell better than we actually do. There is stuff to make our hair look good. Stuff to make us look younger. Stuff to make us look healthier. Stuff to hold us in and stuff to fill us out. Stuff to play with, stuff to entertain us, stuff to read, and stuff to eat. We stuff ourselves with food stuff until we're too stuffed to stuff in any more. We end up looking stuffed.

Well, our lives are filled with stuff -- good stuff, bad stuff, little stuff, big stuff, useful stuff, junky stuff, and other people's stuff. Now, when we leave our stuff and go to heaven, whatever happens to our stuff won't matter. We will still have the good stuff God has prepared for us in heaven. -- Author unknown

A house as a place, not just space

2011-08-01T08:14:00.000-07:00

Recently I placed all the photos I could find of houses where I have lived in an album in chronological order. There aren't as many as I expected. I got the idea from Leland Harder of North Newton who wrote his memoirs, a chapter on each house he had lived in from childhood on up. He went to great effort to get pictures of each house and to recall what went on in that particular house.

I looked at each of my pictures carefully. The first picture is the house where I was born in Laird, Saskatchewan, in 1924 -- nothing but a low, ugly, wooden shack. Two rooms. A kitchen and eating area. A bedroom and living area. Both miniscule. Both crowded. Washtubs, boiler, wood, shovel, outhouse are all outside. When space is limited in a house, people claim the great outdoors.

In the doorway stands my handsome father in shirt and tie and Mother with me wearing a frilly bonnet in her arms and little Annie and Frieda beside her. The family was probably ready to walk to church when Dad's brother John came out of the shack next door with a camera and snapped the picture. They were all newcomers to the land -- recent immigrants from the Ukraine.

For some people, a house represents their station in life -- rich or poor, high class or low class. Yet as I look at each picture, the house in it represents much more than the space where I lived at the time.

I like the way theologian Walter Brueggeman differentiates between space and place. I now live in an apartment of about a thousand square feet. Some people would say I don't have much space, and sometimes I think so myself, when books and files get piled on the bed and dining room table. A friend recently thought I had a very spacious apartment.

I recall visiting an aunt in northern Germany in the late 1980s. She had recently come from Russia with her daughter's family consisting of husband and six children as Umsiedlers. They (nine people) lived in a cramped apartment in Espelkamp. I had written her to reserve a hotel room for me. I didn't want to intrude on their already crowded space. She resisted my request. Reserve a room for me in a hotel, away from them? Unheard of. "During the war," she said, "we could have housed thirty people in this space." Space is relative.

Place is something else.

"Place is space that has historical meanings, where some things have happened which are now remembered and which provide continuity and identity across generations," writes Brueggeman.

He sees a place as space in "which important words have been spoken which have established identity, defined vocation, and envisioned destiny."

I look at that first picture in my album and I wonder what words were spoken between Mother and Dad, strangers in the land of Canada, in those close quarters. At what point did they decide that this land would be their land, and that they would merge their identity with it? Can a person have more than one homeland at a time? Or does new space result in a time of uncertainty?

As I examine each of the other pictures I think of the words that were spoken in them -- or that should have been spoken. In which house was my identity established? In which did I begin to dream about the future for myself -- especially as a writer?

I remember lying on the woodpile in Blaine Lake, Saskatchewan, basking in the warm sun and dreaming of life beyond this little hamlet north of the Saskatchewan River. I never realized that though the one-and-a half story frame house painted cream with green trim may have been the space I was occupying at the time, it was also the place where my destiny was being shaped by the stories I was being told about life not so long ago in Russia, about life as my father experienced it now in his store on Main Street, about the words I was speaking to myself, silently, cautiously, about becoming a word-maker.

Place, not just space. We turn space into place with words.

Writing that transfuses blood

2011-07-25T13:27:00.000-07:00

In a used bookstore I picked up a copy of Frederich Buechner's Listening to Your Life, a compilation of selections from his books arranged for daily reading. Sixty-five cents, the tag said. Why not? I have enjoyed Buechner's books in the past, especially The Hungering Dark.

His idea of good writing is to stick a pen into a vein and start writing. Passionate, life-giving writing is fueled by blood. I have sometimes told would-be writers to think of writing as wearing your heart on your sleeve for all to see what makes it tick. That kind of writing hits home.

Buechner mentions writers like Flannery O'Connor (The Artificial Nigger), John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany, and Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory as some of the stories and books that put new blood in his veins.

Most people remember real blood transfusions -- IV in the arm, bag of blood suspended above, nurse in attendance looking worried. They also remember immediate return to strength. Renewed vigor. Readiness to take on life once again.

I have only had one in-the-arm blood transfusion, but many through the words of others. I mention only a few:

I encountered the writing of A.W. Tozer in the 1960s: Of God and Men, Born After Midnight, The Pursuit of God. I gulped his words into my soul. They were balm to my spirit after years of reading abstract, vague writing about the Christian life that wandered all over the place and never hit home. I wanted to write like Tozer -- clear, precise, to the point, hard-hitting.

I remember also Davita's Harp by Chaim Potok. Young Davita prays in the synagogue near a gap in the curtain separating men from women. Here and there, in the women's section other women say "Amen" to her words. She opened a way for them --and for me. I needed to speak up. I did and wrote about women's concerns near a gap in the curtain of the church. I heard other women say "Amen" to my words again and again. It fueled my writing.

I cling to Steinbeck's East of Eden, certain passages much marked. The Chinese servant Lee tell the twin Cal that he always has a choice--the glory of being a human being. Just like Cain, his counterpart in the Old Testament, had a choice not to kill his brother Abel, he has a choice to forgive. The key phrase is "Thou mayest..." A choice to kill -- or not. A choice to forgive -- or not.

Steinbeck had a great love for the "glittering instrument, the human soul--always attacked and never destroyed" because it has free will.

The last book I will mention in this blog is Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory about a pathetic little whiskey priest in Mexico who comes to a new understanding of what it means to be a dispenser of God's grace. It helped me understand the Apostle Paul's words about grace.

Novelist Thomas Wolfe once described writing as putting a piece of paper in the typewriter and starting to bleed. That kind of writing reveals truth and brings life-giving blood to readers. My son James encourages me to blog -- and bleed, both a painful and life-giving exercise.

I need to remind myself of that, even as I write this blog.

Second thoughts about second thoughts

2011-05-05T08:18:00.000-07:00

In 1981 I wrote in the Preface to my book Second Thoughts: "I talk to people. I talk to God. I talk to myself. Sometimes the conversation with myself isn't very long, deep or even mannerly. Usually it is about something that bothers me. Then, after I've had time for reflection and study, I put my second thoughts about the subject of that conversation on paper."

In this book I attempted to articulate for readers the puzzlements, joys and concerns we all share about life. The writings, most of which had been published previously in some form, represented a cross section of my searching for truth, changes in my thinking, and my affirmations about Christ and the church. I offered them at the time with the hope they would cause the readers to have second thoughts about them.

As an octogenarian I am having second thoughts about aspects of life I have written copiously about earlier when I was looking ahead, not backwards. Not always did I have answers, but I had questions. Even now I don't have a lot of answers, only a lot more questions.

I have often said that too many people write about aging before they are old, based on what they have gleaned from research -- about the "normal" face of aging, about the "average" old person. Many of these so-called experts haven't actually lived even sixty or more years. What is it like to be over eighty and to know that the number of years ahead is probably a fraction of what I have already enjoyed? That is a subject I want to explore in these second thoughts. Join me in the discussion.

Octo-thoughts about weddings

2011-05-04T07:13:00.000-07:00

As an octogenarian I have attended many weddings. Recently we had a wedding in the family (David and Jennie's in New Orleans) and with millions of others, I also watched the wedding of Prince William and commoner Kate Middleton. You have to admit the British know how to do weddings. The pomp and circumstance, adherence to tradition, both good and overdone, is impressive.

I didn't get up early for the actual wedding, but I did watch in the evening. The bride was beautiful in her gown that didn't cater to trends in dresses. You know what I mean. The groom was handsome and his brother equally so. Real hunks.

But, oh, the hats! I am thankful we no longer wear hats, but there was a time when a woman didn't leave the house without her hat. Down in the dumps? Buy a new hat. A celebration of some kind? Buy a new hat. I saw hats at that wedding on TV that would give me nightmares with their strange arrangement of antlers or feathers. One hat I am sure needed a permit to be attached so strangely to the wearer's head. There were others that looked as if they might sprout wings and fly. And still others, if they were worn in a theater, would have the usher asking the wearer to please remove her hat. But now it's over. And a commoner has become a princess.

There were constant comparisons between this wedding and that of Prince Charles and Princess Diana in 1981. One person commented that it must be difficult for William and Harry to understand that everyone loved their mother except their father.

Every young girl wishes she were a princess at some time in her life, at least to be a little beautiful. I remember when I was about 15 or 16 I was a princess for an evening. In 1939 in our little village of Blaine Lake we held a mock coronation and an ice carnival. Marguerite Perrin reigned as queen and Fern Horner and I were princesses. The other two girls were dark-haired beauties. I had only mousy-blonde hair. I never knew how I got into that lineup. We wore floor-length tiered crepe-paper dresses over our woolen snowsuits and thought we were beautiful. It took little to satisfy us during the penurious 1930s. If I knew how to insert a picture, I would. I am learner at blogging. But an octogenarian, like an old dog, can learn new tricks.

But back to weddings. Syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts writes that a wedding is an act of faith and defiance. "To get married is to make a bet on always and forever. To stay married is a function of will and work, even more than love." He comments that Prince Williams parents' marriage began as a fiary tale and ended as a horror story. But he was ready to stand up in church and make promises. And that is what about it is all about -- standing in the face of everything that militates against marriage and family and saying "We're going to try again. And that's what it takes.

Second Thoughts Revisited

2011-04-28T10:28:00.000-07:00

Many years ago I wrote a column called "Second Thoughts" for the Christian Leader (Hillsboro, KS). It gave me an entrance into the minds and hearts of countless readers. I found it very fulfilling. This blog I hope will again give me an opening by which to share my thinking as an octogenarian.