Poems for when you are old

Each time I visited Helen Alderfer in her two-story Indiana wooden frame home, she placed her “75-dollar- teacup” before me.  Valuable things are meant to be used, not just admired from a distance.

Her warmth and friendliness dismissed my fears that I might break this precious teacup like Elizabeth,   neighbor of the voluble, overbearing Hyacinth of the BBC TV series, “Keeping up appearances,” has.  She asks for a mug so she won’t smash the Royal Doulton teacup with the hand-painted periwinkle flowers set before her.

Tea with Helen was brewed exactly three minutes –she used a timer—and then we drank together,  not just tea, but friendship. We shared writing tips, confidences, and encouragement.

Helen was one of my first editors, when she worked with Christian Living.  She coaxed a number of articles out of me.   She was also the first to invite me to travel a long distance, in fact, to fly, to Pennsylvania, to speak at a widows gathering.

 I could not quite grasp that some group would spend money for a plane ticket for someone like me still working my way through the dark days of widowhood.  I had never done that before. But I flew and was nurtured in sharing  myself with this group of women.

Over time Helen and my roles changed.  In the early 1990s I was the editor and she was the writer.  And I still enjoyed tea with her.

In her later years she turned to writing poetry, “Lyrical descriptions of ordinary life as well as life’s larger stages and transitions.”  The Mill Grinds Fine was published in 2009 (Cascadia).

I wrote a blurb for the publisher' fact sheet: “Pick any poem, and you have chosen a jewel of rare quality. Each word edge sharply reveals truth about a life stage. Each facet reflects beauty in an unexpected way. This slim volume of poetry is a loving gift to the reader, bringing joy that lingers long after the book is laid down.” From time to time I  brew my own cup of tea and linger over her words..

Recently I turned again to her poem “Old age.”  She was still sharing her words of wisdom.

Tread carefully, Helen. This is new ground.

This is not the childhood you survived

Not the turbulent years of youth,

Not the desert places of middle age.

This is a land with new rules:

Among her “new rules” are admonitions not to give advice, to tell old stories, to recite ills (“They are dear only to you”).  Don’t ask people to speak up or repeat (“Not all they say is worth repeating”).  And much more. She finishes her litany of advice with the words: “ Twirl a few dance steps while the tea water boils.” 

Tea water boiling. Three-minute brewing. $75 cups for guests. A recipe for friendship.

Once when I was in Goshen, Indiana, for a speaking engagement, a woman asked me where I was staying.  “At Helen Alderfer’s place,” I replied.

“Oh, the blind lady,” she responded.  Blind? Hardly. Although I had known of Helen’s eyesight problems, seen her large newspaper reader device and large font books, I knew Helen was not blind. She could see far into people’s souls. And enjoyed sharing the light in her own.

Rhinestones from heaven?

The fall toward the end of the Depression n the 1930s  an unusual family moved into our little village. The man (the father?) was white as was the woman, but two children were black and one was white.  Gossip said this family had circus connections. 

That winter I helped teach the Sunday school class in the United Church in which at least one of the children was enrolled. My  friend Mona  and I, in a sudden fit of missionary zeal, visited their home one late afternoon.  I recall noting how desperately poor the family was. The little hovel  was dark and dismal.  I remember seeing a loaf of dark bread dough rising on the stove warmer, looking as if it could sit there all day and never rise.  We were poor but this was abject poverty.

In spring the family suddenly left the community. My sister Sue tells me  that before they left town Mrs. Welsh came to Dad in the store and gave him a rhinestone necklace as her thanks for the food he had often given them. She thinks Mother gave them some of our too-small clothing.

Sometimes I wonder how many families have Dad to thank for food when they didn’t have any. Dad couldn’t bear to see people hungry possibly because he had experienced hunger during the famine in the Ukraine in the 1920s.  

Dad didn’t want the necklace but accepted it anyway.  At some point he gave it to my oldest sister Frieda.

In 1966 when I was beginning free lance writing,  I returned from a writers’ conference in Wisconsin with new ideas and energy. Editors kept saying they were looking for material with seasonal emphasis.  I had just had a story rejected by Canada’s large Family Herald and Weekly Star.  It had the Welsh family  with its assortment of children as its main characters.

I revised my story, changing  the time to fall, before Christmas, and added a Christmas school concert in northern Saskatchewan. I called the story  “The Red Catalogue Dress,” in which a little black girl and the  rich doctor’s daughter both wear the same Eaton’s catalogue  red velvet dress to the concert -- with a surprise ending. 

I sent if off to the Family Herald once again hoping no editor would remember its previous rejection.  In two weeks I received $125 and later resold it at least once, if not twice.  This was my first big “success” in writing.  I was launched.

But then the story gets even more interesting.  At some point Frieda gave the rhinestone necklace to her niece Grace, who gave it to her daughter, Olivia, to wear to her senior prom.   Was that necklace once worn by a circus performer? 

Grace says Frieda gave her two necklaces.  She  also gave me one. Where did all these necklaces come from?  Were Dad’s five little loaves of bread multiplying? Were rhinestones  falling  from heaven? And if I give mine away will it reproduce once again? 

The invisible [old] man -- and woman

In the 1950s African-American writer Ralph Ellison wrote the highly acclaimed novel The Invisible Man.  The main character, a black man, admits he is not literally invisible, just socially invisible.  Although he functions like any other human being, he is only part of the background.  People don’t talk to him, consult with him, laugh and cry with him. In other words, they don’t see him. He is invisible to them because he is black.

There’s a whole another group of people who are invisible in our society – the old.  I’ve seen this happen in various settings when, instead of staying for conversation, some of the elderly  leave because, as one woman  said, “No one talks to me.”  

 Possibly standing for twenty to thirty minutes is difficult. More likely too few people seek them out. And they are too withdrawn to do so themselves. They are invisible, not just then but at other times when old and young are grouped together. They, like Ellison’s narrator become invisible, living on edges of society.

I thought of my childhood when old men, in particular, were very visible, at least in church services – they always sat in the first pews to the preacher’s left, sometimes on the platform behind him. They were the ones asked to give the final blessing before the congregation left for the week of work, like Simeon in the time of Jesus. Their wise words were respected.  

About a decade or more ago I wrote a great deal about aging. I spoke about the topic. I wanted people to understand that aging is not the “relentless enemy” to be defeated at all costs.

 I also didn’t want people, young and old, to see aging as the time to mostly develop a play/leisure lifestyle. Even now people ask me if I have travel plans. The implication is if you’re old you travel. I tell them I don’t travel well because of mobility issues. How can I explain again and again that growing old is part of life, difficult as it may be, and requires a different agenda.

  The latter years are certainly not the golden years for all older persons. Yet despite all the difficulties many of us encounter we have a contribution to make to church and society and it’s not strength and vigor. Though it’s our money, if we have it, that people want, it’s  experience and wisdom we should be giving -- what we have learned over years.

What would I like to see happen with regard to older people now that I am one myself?

1.     To have the elderly fully integrated into church life, not just having a once-a-month social with themselves.

2.     To have the non-material needs of the older person spoken to again and again and attended to. Children, church and society seem to think they have done their duty when they have seen a frail elderly father or mother safely ensconced in a nursing home or a retirement center. Now they can relax. Mom is being taken care of – a load off their shoulders. She is warm, safe, fed, and her medications regulated. But her spiritual needs are not met with a once or twice years pastoral visit.

3.     To have freer discussion of death and dying long before the last illness. We need to be encouraged not to “go gently into the dark night.”

4.     To help us resist the real relentless enemy--the fear or aging and looking old.  Our society has a particularly high emphasis on looking young and glamorous.  Young girls aspire nothing more than to forever wear a 38 triple D bra and young men to show off biceps the size of watermelons.

5.     To help us to deal with loss of health, mobility, finances, family members, and  opportunity—and sometimes faith.

6.     To  helps us nurture personal faith despite sometimes almost daily  losses.

It boils down to the words I once read of someone saying, “I see you, old woman, I see the YOU, not the old. In your eyes I read the story of the years, of the pain, of the sweet delights.  I see you.”

       When people see only gray hair, slow step, and weakened voice they make the real person invisible. They don’t see the real “you.”

Pen or the Sword Part III

The issue of whether to use violence or words came to a head for the German-speaking settlers of the Mennonite colonies in southern Russia in 1918.  Should they abandon four hundred years of tradition upholding non-bearing of arms in time of war or defend themselves against the vicious enemy at their door—the vicious anarchistic Makhno bands?

These bands consisted of hundreds of released prisoners and an untold number of unhappy, miserably poor, landless peasants. They murdered, looted, burned and raped at will. Mercy was not part of their vocabulary.

When the Mennonites arrived in south Russia in the late 1700s and early 1800s, at the invitation of Empress Catherine the Great, to settle the rich farmlands along the Dnieper and Molotschna rivers, they had her promise of freedom from bearing arms in time of war for “perpetuity.”  What more could they want?

They came. They saw. They settled, developing thriving, self-sustaining communities, enclaves, if you will.

For the next century their young men fulfilled their civic cuties in alternative service such as forestry work. My father spent three years as a medic with the Russian Red Cross during World War I.When the new regime was unceremoniously ushered in under Lenin, that type of service was no longer an option. All previous promises of privileges became null and void.

Now, in 1918, the Mennonite colonies were faced with the threat of being murdered willy-nilly by the anarchist or picking up guns and resisting. The Red and White armies raged back and forth, and this group, referred to as the Blacks, did as they pleased without government restraints.

The decision on the part of some Mennonites, as I wrote in my previous blog, was to form their own armed self-protection units, or Selbstschutz.  This is well-documented in history books. Is there a lesson for us today as gun violence increases and people are urged to protect themselves?

David G. Rempel, in his excellent account of his early life in the village of Rosenthal in the Old (First) Colony in Chortitza, has a thorough discussion of the self-defense issue. (See A Mennonite Family in Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union 1789-1923). Rempel received his Ph.D. from the University of Stanford and taught at the College of San Mateo as well as serving as military historian to General Dwight Eisenhower. I can only summarize his thoughts here.  He writes that the Mennonites chose to take up arms and kill for several reasons;

The German occupation troops of the previous year encouraged young men’s “protective instincts and manliness.”  In other words, you weren’t macho if you didn’t fight. According to Rempel, the German military dispensed two wagon-loads of rifles, ammunition, hand grenades, and even one machine gun in his area of Nieder-Chortitza. They likely did the same in other places.

The Mennonites believed that nonresistance was no longer a viable option with an enemy that wouldn’t negotiate and relished using force. With an unstable government, if they didn’t quell banditry now there would probably be “future outbursts of long-simmering Ukrainian peasant hostility.”

Another concern was the question: Was the teaching of nonresistance biblically based or only a tradition?  If it was only a tradition (we do this because it was always done before), they needn’t abide by it. 

This particular concern was discussed at a meeting held in 1918 in Liechenau, Molotschna as were all other aspects of historic Mennonite nonresistance. They learned that not all early Anabaptists held to a nonviolent approach.  There had been variance in conviction even then.

They decided to remove “pious” language from their resolution, which at the same time removed its soul.  They decided to not coerce the conscience of any member who thought differently on this question.  It became a rational argument unsupported by biblical views. The reality of kill or be killed erased the privilege of being nonresistant.

Removing theological language from the argument, the backbone of Mennonite beliefs, meant the congregations and individuals  no longer had the strength of a unified body to uphold their views.  The way was open to take up arms.

Rempel’s own view is that they did not hold to their nonresistant stance because churches and schools had failed to teach basic Mennonite beliefs and history for many years. “Might not a deeper foundation in our historic beliefs have lessened the aberrant acts of many and saved us all from some of the retributive horrors later inflicted by the Makhnovites?”

He writes that many people struggled with their faith during these desperate times when innocent people were being murdered, women raped, and many other unconscionable acts of brutality committed. Later, Canadian and U.S.-born Mennonites wondered how the Mennonites in Russia could have lost their faith, resorted to self-defense, and despaired during a period of “blackest anarchy.”  Some writers refer to this as the “Russian dance of death” and the Selbstschutz as a blot on Mennonite history.

Rempel’s response is straightforward: “What do you know of such traumatic experience? And what assurance do you have that your faith would have been firmer, or that you would have offered the other cheek?”

Rempel thinks there is another lesson for people today.  He writes, “Why …. did a group [the Mennonites] which championed the separation of church and state, freedom of conscience, and so many other personal freedoms, refuse to support the most elementary rights for the native citizenry, even the cry of Russian sectarians for freedom of worship and their right to conscientious objection?  Unfortunately, with hindsight, we can see that the Mennonites’ blindness to the plight of their neighbors also made them blind to the tragedy that would ultimately befall them.”

His book upholds the need to combine words with deeds of love, with speaking up for those who cannot speak for themselves, with supporting the weak, needy, and downtrodden.  Simply said, words of negotiation fail when not supported by deeds of love.  Then the weak pick up the sword.  It is interesting to speculate what difference it would have made if all Russian Mennonites, not just a few, had been known for their love for the Russian peasants.