By Julia Van Develder
Nov11
My St. Joseph statue has gone missing. Exactly how long he’s been gone, I’m not sure. Weeks, I suspect. The last I remember, he was wearing his cream-colored plastic robes (as always), his beard neatly trimmed, staring blankly out at the world from the middle shelf of the bookcase. True, he did look a bit uncomfortable sandwiched between the stacks of DVDs and boxes of Nicorette. But I imagined he was happy to be there, happy at least not to have been left behind at my old house, buried upside down in the front yard.
I’m somewhat ashamed to admit that that was the fate of my previous St. Josephs. One is buried in front of the pink house in Lagrangeville, the other in front of the house in Pleasant Valley—or un-Pleasant Valley, as my daughters used to call it. It was my intention to dig them up and bring them with me, but in both cases, I couldn’t remember exactly where I’d buried them.
So, yes—I used them, if that’s what you’re thinking. I enlisted their aid to help me sell those houses, and once they did their part, I abandoned them. The best they can hope for at this point is that some archeologist centuries from now will dig them up and make wild conjectures about the belief systems of the peoples who once thickly populated this fertile valley.
But this time, I had two witnesses to the burial, one of whom paced off the distance to the burial spot from the front walk, so I knew where to dig the day before the closing. It took a bit of poking around with the shovel, but I found him, all right--washed the mud off of him and brought him to my temporary abode with the intention of planting him right side up, facing in, in the front yard of my new house, when and if I succeed in purchasing it.
You never heard of this bizarre ritual? When you want to sell your house, you’re supposed to bury a St. Joseph statue upside down, facing away from your house. If you want St. Joe to watch over your house and protect you and your family, you bury him right side up, facing toward the house.
Mind you—I don’t really believe any of this. I’m not a Catholic and never was. I’m not even a Christian, although I was raised as one. In fact, my parents were missionaries when I was a little kid. And then, when I was a bigger kid, we moved back to the States and my father went back to school and got his doctorate and became a teacher of preachers. For a while, in my teens, I tormented my parents by declaring myself an atheist. In college, I switched to agnosticism, and after college, Judaism. Twenty years later, after my divorce, I almost became a Quaker. I like the Quakers a lot and attended silent meetings for a couple of years. I quit, though, when they asked me to sign up for real. I’m just not much of a joiner. Plus the committee work was killing me. So now, I’m a Buddhist. Real Buddhists probably wouldn’t consider me one, but whatever. This story isn’t about my spiritual journey; it’s about my St. Joseph statue.
In case you’re wondering why I engaged in this practice if I didn’t actually believe in the power of an inanimate object to influence the outcome of my real estate transactions: I just thought—couldn’t hurt. And in point of fact, it seems to have helped. The first time, I sold my house to the first people who came to look at it. The second time, I can’t remember how many people looked at the house, but not many. It sold within three weeks. And this time? In a terrible market? The house was only on the market for a week—sold to the second person who came to look. If that doesn’t make a case for St. Joseph, I don’t know what does. And clearly, St. Joseph doesn’t care what you believe. He’s an equal opportunity saint.
I can’t remember who told me about St. Joseph, but I do remember feeling a little nervous about buying one of these statues. I purchased the first one long before the advent of Ebay, when people still bought things in stores. Near where I worked, there was a strip mall that had a store devoted exclusively to selling Christian paraphernalia. I went in—the shelves were a little bare. The proprietor, a middle-aged man who might best be described as “beige” sat on a stool behind the counter, reading a dog-eared copy of The Thorn Birds. “Can I help you?” he asked.
“Just looking,” I lied. I was pretty sure he would disapprove of what I intended to do with this statue, so I didn’t want to just come right out and asked for it. I checked out the Jesuses and the Virgin Marys. There were a couple of dusty plastic crèches that I pretended to find fascinating. I didn’t see any St. Josephs, but I didn’t really know what he looked like.
“If you don’t see what you’re looking for, I can order it,” said the proprietor.
“Actually—have you got a St. Joseph?” I asked.
“Selling your house?” he answered.
On the shelf behind him was his stash of St. Josephs, about a dozen little boxes neatly stacked. He gave me one and rang me up. It was less than $5, I think.
Since he didn’t seem to be offended, I thought I might as well pick his brain while I was at it. I asked him how deep I was supposed to bury him: “Oh, a couple of inches ought to do it.” I asked him whether I was supposed to say “Hail Joseph!” or anything like that: “Hail Joseph?” I asked him if it worked for non-Catholics: “I suppose it might work better if you’re Catholic,” he said, “but I don’t really know. I don’t really believe in it.” I must have looked crestfallen because he hastened to add: “But some people swear by it. I sell a lot of these.”
I can’t remember where I got the second St. Joseph, but the most recent one I purchased on Ebay. He came with instructions advising the purchaser to get his/her house ready for market before planting the statue—in other words, not to put the whole burden on a piece of plastic. The instructions ended with this endearing multicultural slogan: “Trust in Allah, but tie up your camels.”
I was quite proud of myself for having dug up St. Joseph and brought him with me. It assuaged my guilt for having abandoned his predecessors. And I started to build a little narrative about the future around him. Maybe now I could stay put. I’d plant him right side up in my new home and live happily ever after.
The immediate problem was that I didn’t have a new home to move into. The house sold so quickly that I hadn’t figured out yet what to do next—rent? buy? move away? stay here? get a job? jump off the Mid-Hudson Bridge? So many choices!
Luckily for me, I have some good friends who offered to let me and my two labradoodles live in their basement while I figured out my next move. “Basement” doesn’t really do the space justice. It is in the basement, but it has high ceilings and big windows looking out on their pond. They said they’d been planning all along to make it into an apartment, and as soon as I said “Yes!” they built me a patio and put in a kitchenette. “And you really should have your own entrance,” they said. Yes—very good friends. So they ordered a lovely Pella patio door and arranged for their carpenter to install it.
Let me tell you—this guy is no ordinary carpenter. He was in the process of converting their garage into a “man cave” for the husband when I moved into the basement. John is his first name, and his last name is Italian. Not “John Italian,” but John with an Italian last name that I can’t remember at the moment.
If you want to know how terrific a carpenter John is, just ask him. Actually, you don’t even need to ask. All you need to do is spend about five minutes with him and he’ll volunteer that information. He’s won awards for his work, both in this country and the “home country”—Costruttore dell’Ano, which is Italian for “Builder of the Year.” Plus? He’s a published author. In case you didn’t know, he’s written many, many short stories that have been published in the New Yorker and similarly prestigious magazines. “I should apologize for how good I am,” he told me with a straight face.
I offered to help paint the man cave to get it ready for a visit from the building inspector, which is how I came to spend an afternoon with John the Magnificent. I’d been in his holiness’s presence for about 15 minutes when he complimented me on my painting skills and said that this was why we needed a woman president and that we’d be a lot better off with someone like Sarah Palin in the White House.
I was confused for a moment. So that she could paint it? What, what?
When I realized that he was serious, I figured I’d better keep my mouth shut. He sermonized for about half an hour straight. Told me that he lived in an apartment in Poughkeepsie and that people couldn’t believe that he, with his brains and talent and good looks, didn’t own his own house. But he’d made some bad decisions in his youth—alcohol was mentioned briefly. Fortunately, God had saved him. And that was why (he said) he was a creationist—because, how could so perfect an invention as the human being have been anything other than a divine creation, set down on this earth fully formed in God’s own image?
My head was spinning by now—maybe it was the paint fumes. But. I just couldn’t let that go, even though I knew I should. “Have you been to the Grand Canyon?” I asked innocently.
“Oh, yes!” he said, coping on immediately to my drift. “That’s why I am a creationist and an evolutionist.” He proceeded to explain that he believes in evolution when it comes to rocks and stuff, but he believes that humans—specifically, Adam and Eve--were was created by God in more or less their current perfect form and plunked down on a planet that had been evolving for a few billion years. I may have gotten a few of the details wrong, but that is the gist.
I didn’t say anything else, I swear, except “Uh-huh,” and “Interesting!” But I’m pretty sure he knew I thought he was a nincompoop.
Which is probably why he stole St. Joseph.
That—or maybe my bumper stickers drove him to it. After the rapture, can I have your car?
He’s the only person, other than my gracious hosts, who had access to my room in the basement. The lovely Pella patio door he installed is right next to the bookcase where St. Joseph stood, waiting patiently to be taken to his new home.
Which day did God make all the fossils? That one probably really got his goat. Or maybe it was Halliburton got your Medicare.
I can’t prove it, of course. Nor do I want to. But it is kind of ironic, isn’t it? That a so-called Christian would break one of the Ten Commandments? For what? To rescue a plastic statue from a heathen?
Since Catholicism is one of the few religions I haven’t tried, I’m not sure what the Catholics would have to say about this matter. I do, unfortunately, know what the Buddhists would say: It’s my fault.
And not because I thought derogatory thoughts about John. I’ll get to pay for that one eventually, but this one—the theft of my St. Joseph—has to be the consequence of a similar act on my part: taking something that didn’t belong to me.
According to the Buddhist way of thinking, nothing can arise in your experience that you haven’t created by your own word, thought, or deed. In other words, nothing can happen to you that you haven’t done to somebody else sometime or another.
So let me see…have I ever stolen somebody else’s St. Joseph statue? Ummm—no? I would never do that. And if you think I’m going to list all the things I did steal, think again. The last time I checked, confession was strictly a Catholic thing.
Besides, digging up daylilies from the side of the road and transplanting them to other places that need a spot of color—your yard, for instance—is not stealing. It’s spreading beauty, which is a good thing, a mitzvah.
As for my St. Joseph, I hope he’s in a good place, and I sincerely hope that John will someday have a home of his own to bury him in front of. Frankly? I’m just relieved that he didn’t take the iMac.
By Julia Van Develder
Nov02
To tell you the truth? I kind of knew better. The signs were clearly posted: no parking without a permit, violators will be towed.
But it was late on a Saturday night, and my daughter Meredith and I had just spent six hours: sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic, driving in pouring rain, getting lost in south Boston. My daughter Rachel, whom we’d come to visit, came down from her fifth-floor walk-up to meet us, and we pulled into the driveway next to her building because there didn’t seem to be anywhere else to pull over.
As it happened, that driveway led to a perfectly charming and practically empty parking lot.
“Do they tow?” I asked, eying the signs posted at regular intervals around the perimeter.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never heard of anyone getting towed.”
“It’ll probably be okay for the night,” I said, “but we’ll have to move it in the morning.”
And it probably would have been okay if I’d moved it in the morning. And it did occur to me, however briefly, before we took the T downtown for lunch.
Walking back from the T hours later, I could see her building on the corner and, through the trees, the parking lot in which my white Subaru Forester was no longer parked.
“Guys,” I said to the girls, “they towed me.” In unison: “Oh, no!”
Oh, yes. It’s funny now--now that I have my car back and I’m back home in New York. But at the moment, all I could think about was the hell I was pretty sure my afternoon was going to turn into. “The good news is, it’s early,” said Rachel. We had hours of daylight left to try to find my car and get it out of hock.
As luck would have it, just as we were turning into the driveway to go see where the car wasn’t, a tow truck came barreling down on us. It didn’t have my Subaru or anybody else’s in tow, but it seemed like a safe bet that the big guy with the shaved head sitting in the driver’s seat would have a clue. We flagged him down.
In a Boston accent as thick as an Irish sweater: “Yep. We towed it this morning. Don’t you people read signs? It says it right there, monitored 24 hours.”
I asked him what I had to do to get my car back. He shook his head. “You’re gonna have to take a taxi all the way to Brighton,” he said. The girls and I looked at each other in dismay. Brighton? It couldn’t be that far, could it?
He radioed his base. “I got the lady who owns that white Subaru here, and she wants to know how much it’s gonna cost her.” He turned back to us. “$136, and you gotta pay cash.” Ka-ching. The cost of my little weekend jaunt to Boston was adding up.
“Will I be able to find my way back here?” I asked, trying to keep the panic out of my voice. He shook his head. Two or three times. “I can give you directions, but it’s tricky.”
And then he looked at our three sorrowful faces and took pity on us. “Tell you what—throw me a little extra, and I’ll take you over there. I’m not supposed to let anybody ride in the truck, but what the hell. I’ve gotta go back over there anyhow.”
He promised to take me to an ATM along the way, so I climbed into the cab and waved goodbye to my two lovely daughters standing forlornly on the curb. “She’ll be back in an hour and a half,” he told them, “two hours tops.”
I had a flash of anxiety—what was I doing? Wasn’t Boston the town where there were massacres and stranglers and things like that? I tried to pay attention to where we were going so I’d be able to find my way back, but it became obvious within minutes that “tricky” was a euphemism for “damn near impossible” unless you were a native or equipped with GPS. Coursing down parkways, zigzagging a maze of streets, whirling through roundabouts—I postponed worrying about getting back for later.
It’s amazing, isn’t it, how quickly we human beings adjust to misfortune? If you’re in a car accident and your car is totaled, you feel “lucky” to be alive, and somehow you overlook how unlucky you were to get in an accident in the first place.
So now I was feeling quite fortunate and grateful to my bald companion. In the game of getting my car back, he’d advanced me at least three or four moves and saved me hours of aggravation.
“You think this is a good job,” he accused me, “it’s not. People get mad at us. All the time. One of our guys? Got assaulted last week. People should read the signs. It’s private property. How would you feel if you were paying $300 a month for parking, and you came home, and somebody was in your spot? You’d be pretty pissed off, right?”
“Right,” I agreed. He said he’d be lucky to break $25K this year, said fortunately he was living with his girlfriend and only had to pay half the rent, said he wasn’t complaining—he was glad to have a job.
“Have you lived in Boston your whole life?” I asked him.
“My whole life,” he said. “Fact, I’ve only been out of the state one time.”
“Really!” I said. I mean, that’s a pretty amazing fact in this migratory day and age. And the next question was obvious—where’d he go that one time? I imagined a hunting trip in the Poconos or a pilgrimage to Disneyland with the wife and kids.
“Don’t get scared or nothing,” he said, which of course got me a little scared. “Ten years. Federal penitentiary. Near Plattsburg.”
“Oh, my,” I said.
“I used to do stickups,” he said cheerfully, “banks, grocery stores.”
“Wow,” I said, thinking that the upcoming stop at the ATM might be less routine than I’d imagined.
“Yeah—the last time, five minutes after the stickup, I was in cuffs. Turned out my girlfriend at the time was an informant for the FBI.”
His two-way beeped and he picked up the handset and launched into a Click-and-Clack routine with his boss about a mechanical problem with one of the trucks in the fleet, in the middle of which my cell phone rang. I answered it—it was Rachel—but meantime he was gesturing vehemently at me to silence the phone. It took me a minute to figure out that I wasn’t supposed to be there, and if his boss heard me, he’d get in trouble.
“Mom?” said Rachel, very earnest, “Now, don’t argue. Meredith and I talked it over, and we want to contribute to the cost of the towing, so—“
I cupped my hand around the cell phone and whispered hoarsely, “Rach—I…can’t…talk…right…now.”
“Mom? Are you okay? Mom! What’s the matter?” I glanced over at my bald friend. “I’m…okay,” I whispered, “can’t…talk.” And closed the phone, and then, with a little prayer to a god in whom I don’t believe, turned it off. I just hoped Rachel wasn’t calling the cops to report a kidnapped mother.
When he got off the radio with his boss, I asked him how he got into a life of crime in the first place. “I was always bad,” he said breezily, “from the time I was a kid. Foster homes, juvi. I straightened out for a while. Had a pretty good job, working over at the Gilette factory, pulling down $75K. I had a wife, three boys.” He was telling me all of this stuff in the same tone of voice that I might use to explain how I made some not-so-great decisions during the dot-com bust, sort of a “that’s life” tone. “But then I got into cocaine. That’s when I started doing stickups. Part of the problem is I like danger, see. The sound of sirens gets me goin’. I had a bulletproof vest, the whole thing.” He swerved over and pulled up in front of a Chase bank. It took me a couple of seconds to remember that I was supposed to get out and use the ATM.
We hadn’t specified what was meant by “a little extra,” and I don’t have any sense of what’s expected in situations like these. How much do you tip a former bank robber who’s doing you a big favor? So I asked him, “Is $20 going to be enough?” figuring his face would tell the truth. He looked perfectly satisfied with that, happy, in fact. “Sure!” he said. So I got the dough, hopped back in the cab, and off we went.
He told me that after he started robbing banks, he quit his day job at Gilette and cashed in his 401K and gave half to his wife. “I knew I was going down. And I just wanted to be able to look back and say that I did at least one thing good. So I told her to take the money and get away from me, and get the boys away from me. Told her to find a decent guy and get a new life. And she did. She moved out to Wisconsin where her sister lives, met a guy. The boys are doing good. Two of them are in college, the youngest is still in high school.”
“Do you ever get to see them?”
“Nah—it’s better this way. I was a bad influence.”
By now, we were in a peopleless area with derelict warehouses and scary-looking industrial buildings, the kind of place where they shoot the really disturbing episodes of Law and Order SVU. He pulled over and pointed up ahead to an opening in a cinderblock wall. “See over there? That’s where your car is,” he said. “Go in there, pay the girl in the booth, and when you come out, you can follow me back. I have to go back over there anyway.” I gave him the $20 and thanked him. Profusely, I hope, although I can’t really remember what I said. I was too busy imagining myself walking through that gap and getting mown down by James Gandolfini et al.
But sure enough, there was my little white car, in amongst the Land Rovers and BMWs whose owners were no doubt freaking out trying to track them down. When I pulled out of the lot, my bald friend was waiting up the street. I never would have been able to find my way back to Jamaica Plains without him. I would have had to stop somewhere and buy a map, or put the girls on speaker phone and let them google-map me back. I followed him through Brighton and Brookline to Boston, where he pointed out my daughter’s building and waved goodbye.
Obviously, he hadn’t needed to go back to the towing lot, because he didn’t do anything there but drop me off. He probably didn’t need to go back over to Boston either. I don’t think it was about the $20. Maybe he was just bored. Or maybe he just had a streak of goodness in him that years of craziness hadn’t managed to eradicate.
As for me, I counted myself lucky. I could have had a boring afternoon, sitting around acting motherly. Instead, I got this great story. $156, and worth every penny.
By Julia Van Develder
Nov02
I was born in Pasadena, California, the second child of Mary and Frank Van Develder. It was 1952. The world was slower then, so this was still considered the aftermath of World War Two. And people were poorer then, much more accustomed to hardship. There were such things in our country as charity hospitals. I was born in one.
Some people claim to remember being born. I am not one of them. I don’t remember anything about California or about the move to Wyoming or the little church where my father was the pastor. I don’t remember the move to Mexico City where he and my mother studied Spanish before entering the mission field. I don’t remember arriving in Bolivia. But my mother does. She says it was just like that scene at the end of the movie in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. You remember? Trying to escape the man in the white hat (“Who is that guy?”), they go to Bolivia, of all places. They get off the train—dust, and chickens running around. Sort of primitive. Then they get nailed.
My earliest memories are of Bolivia. When I examine these memories to try to set them down here as truthfully as possible, I notice that they have components. There is what I believe to be the actual memory, which in some cases is nothing more than a single image, or even a sound. And there is my understanding of the memory, which has evolved over the course of my life. As you go through your life, things begin to stick to your memories and eventually become part of them—a photograph, for example, or an explanation offered by a parent of something you wouldn’t have been able to understand at the time.
For example, I have a memory of sitting in front of a fire with my mother and my brother, watching his cowboy hat burn up. The meaning of the memory didn’t come until much later. It was a punishment, because he’d been caught playing with matches; there were gasoline tanks on the farm, and a match in the wrong place could have killed him and us and all of the farm workers. But I couldn’t have understood that then. The memory is the visual image—his face in the firelight—and the feeling I had that he’d been bad, and that I didn’t want to be bad, ever.
I remember a man’s bloody hand. I can see it in my mind’s eye even now, more than 50 years later. It was probably the first time I’d seen a violent injury. I think I remember that it was at night, and there was a knock on the door, and urgent talk, but do I actually remember that, or is it a narrative that attached itself to the memory afterwards? He was one of our farmers. He’d been attacked by one of the wild dogs that roamed the farm. My father drove him to the hospital in LaPaz.
I think I remember the sound of a gunshot. I was in the house with my mother. I think she was holding me. After the gunshot, my father came inside. He didn’t look at us. His eyes were open, but he was seeing something else. Do I actually remember this, or have I imagined it from what I know now about my father and how he must have felt about having to shoot our dog, Triste. The dog was chasing the pickup truck and got caught under the wheels. My father had to put him out of his misery.
Interestingly, I don’t remember much about the house. I have actual pictures of it—a substantial house, made of stone, with a long porch with stone arches. It had belonged to a rich landowner but had been confiscated by the revolutionary government. Which revolutionary government, I’m not sure. Bolivia had many. How did we get to live there? I don’t know.
According to my mother, at some point during our time there, the house caught on fire. One of her most terrifying memories is seeing my brother standing frozen at the top of the stairs, framed in flames. This must have been traumatic, but I don’t remember it at all.
I do, however, remember my little kitchen—a little kitchen cupboard, made of wood, just my size. A very satisfactory kitchen. Outstanding, in fact, in my four-year-old opinion. How on earth did my mother manage to procure such an item in the Bolivian hinterlands?
I remember the man who was in charge of the mission—Earl Hunter. Actually, I know the name because I’ve heard it since. What I remember about him was the time I wandered into a prayer meeting where the grownups were all on their knees in a small circle, and he was praying out loud. I think I was looking for my mother. He grabbed me and forced me to kneel down in front of him, sort of imprisoned by his body. I had to stay like that until he finished praying, which was a long, long time. Was this the beginning of my dislike of organized religion?
I remember distinctly seeing a chicken with its head cut off running around in circles near a swimming pool. This, I’ve been told, was during a vacation in Cochabamba.
I remember cars stretched as far as I could see in either direction on a high mountain road. There had been a rock slide, and we were waiting for them to clear the road. My father took me and Paul for a walk while we waited. We climbed down a hill; there was a huge house built on the hillside. It was empty. We looked in the windows. I remember the bathroom. I had never seen such a bathroom. I think the tile was pink, and the fixtures were pink.
My sister, Becky, was born during our time in Bolivia. I have no recollection of this.
Paul, however, looms large in these early memories—larger than my mother and father even. After all, they were the ground. They were me, weren’t they? There was no me without them. He, on the other hand, was an “other.”
The clearest memory of all is Paul and the cave. Now, this is very strange. I can close my eyes and see the cave—a long “room” with rough walls, and a number of cubicles. It seems to me that we were in there all by ourselves. Can this be? I have a photograph of the caves—they were high up on the side of a steep cliff. These were the caves where the rebels had hidden, apparently, during one of the revolutions. I wasn’t afraid of the caves or the dark corners or the possibility of wild animals or spiders. I remember being interested, looking in each of the cubicles.
What were a four and five year old doing there by themselves, and how did we get there? And yet, I know we were there because one of my most terrifying memories is how we got back to the farm. There were two ways. I knew this, so this can’t have been the first cave expedition. You could climb down the rocky slope, which was difficult and took a long time, or you could run down the road, which was easier and faster, but you had to go right by a shack where an old woman lived with two vicious dogs who were either chained up or behind a fence of some sort. I wanted to climb down, but Paul made the executive decision to take the road. I think he held my hand—I hope he did. I remember the dogs lunging at us and snapping their jaws and barking insanely.
Not all the Paul memories are scary. I remember riding in the back of the pickup truck with Paul and playing guess-where-we-are. It was night; I think we were on our way to some sort of church gathering in LaPaz. We were lying down in the bed of the truck with a blanket over us, looking up at a million stars. The idea was to pull the blanket over our heads, ride a little ways, and then try to guess where we were. Paul would shout something out and then pop up like a jack-in-the-box and peek over the siderail to see if he was right. I think I was mainly an audience in this game—I probably didn’t have a clue where we were--but I loved it. I loved him.
The last Bolivia memories are of leaving. I remember at the airport a monkey jumped on me and had to be pried off by the grownups. Can this be? Were there really monkeys roaming the airport?
When the plane landed, I remember men in green uniforms with thick black belts coming on the plane and spraying nasty-smelling stuff in the air. My mother covered my nose and mouth with a handkerchief. I think this was upon our return to the United States. But those uniforms in my mind’s eye look much more like the Hollywood version of South American military regimes than their American counterparts. If it was upon our entry into Bolivia, then I suppose it would have to qualify as my very first memory, for I certainly have no memory of anything pre-Bolivia.
What’s true? What’s not? It’s very hard to say for sure, isn’t it? How do we make sure of anything that’s happened in our lives? I’ve dreamed things that seemed so real, the next day I believed they happened. How do we make sense of it?
One way is to try to systematically verify everything—compare notes with the others who were there, try to pin down what’s knowable and what’s open to interpretation. I mean--why are there four gospels?
That does get you somewhere. Your mother, for example, might verify that yes, in fact, a monkey did jump on you in the airport. You’re not making that up. But even if you’ve verified that one fact, there are a hundred others that you’ll never pin down.
No matter. I love these memories, even the cave. Of all the people I’ve met in my life since, only one has ever even been to Bolivia—he was a Spanish professor at Vassar. So it’s safe to say that this was an unusual beginning for an American life. What it’s given me is a bigger framework for understanding the world. There has never been a time within my memory when I didn’t know that there was more than one way of life, more than one language, more than one set of cultural norms and practices. That may seem obvious in today’s global culture, but it’s really not. The war in Iraq is at least in part about our failure as a nation to recognize and respect the endless variations of the human experience. So I am enormously grateful for that more expansive view. Except for the gifts of life and love, there isn’t a more precious gift my parents could have given me.
By Julia Van Develder
Jan13
In his controversial 2002 book A New Kind of Science, mathematician and MacArthur winner Stephen Wolfram puts forward the theory that everything is a computation. Everything—the entire physical universe, including you, me, and everyone we know—is the product of a few simple rules played out ad infinitum. We’re talking mathematical rules here, as in: if A, then B multiplied by C equals F.
So. Take leaves on trees, for example. There are thousands of leaf shapes, and thousands of variations on those shapes. In other words—complexity. And it turns out that all of those iterations can be generated by a mathematical rule played out ad infinitum.
These rules are called cellular automata (which, I think, refers to the discrete cells on a page of graph paper, not biological cells), and they’re the subject of intense study and speculation among physicists, biologists, mathematicians, and other scientists because they show how extraordinarily complex and unpredictable patterns can arise from the application of very simple rules. (If you’re interested in looking at an example of a cellular atomaton, google the Game of Life, a fun little automaton developed by John Conway, a British mathematician. For a very readable analysis of Wolfram’s ideas, get a hold of The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul by Rudy Rucker.)
What interests me is not the math (I hate math!), but the idea that there may be a similar principle operating on a moral or spiritual level—that the entire spiritual universe is the product of a few simple “rules” played out ad infinitum. Spiritual automata, if you will.
Take the situation in Gaza today. The situation is as complex and tangled as any highly charged political conflict the world has ever seen. You could devote your entire life to becoming an expert on any one aspect of the situation. You could become a historian of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. You could look at the conflict from the perspective of a political scientist, an economist, a sociologist, a scholar of religion. You could build an entire career on your expertise and become a Middle Easternist at a well known university or in a think tank or at the State Department or at the CIA.
You could. Or you could simply state the obvious: violence begets violence. The violence in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is so exponential at this point that even if both sides laid down their weapons today, it would take centuries for the consequences of their prior aggression to play themselves out.
So the spiritual automaton would be something like this: If you kill another human being because s/he is a member of a group that you hate, you create the possibility that a group you belong to will be the target of hateful aggression. The automaton couldn’t be something as straightforward as, if you kill another human being, you will be killed, because that would effectively eliminate hateful aggression in the world, and we know that’s not the case.
But there’s something there. Violence does beget violence. Who doesn’t know that?
There is a corollary spiritual automata that goes something like this: If you are the victim of hateful aggression and you refrain from retaliation, you create the possibility of a nonviolent future. Every major religion—Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Confuscianism, and, yes, Islam—has codified a version of this spiritual automata—turn the other cheek. So why do we still have wars, most of them fueled by religious intolerance?
Because the automaton is simple, but its outcome is not. Turning the other cheek doesn’t guarantee that you personally will be spared (Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr.) or that you will be immediately victorious or that peace will reign on the earth. At least—not in the short term. Not until it’s played out ad infinitum. Plus, even if you have the courage to initiate the nonviolence automata, it’s going to take time before the violence automata plays itself out. It is, however, literally the only hope for change in the direction of peace.
Of all the world religions, Buddhism seems to come the closest to describing something like this idea of spiritual automata. According to Buddhist thought, every single thing you do, think, or say plants a karmic seed. We are each planting these seeds at the rate of about 60 per second. How the Buddhist thinkers came to this number, I don’t know. And whether or not it’s accurate I have no way of knowing. Maybe it’s only 10 per second, or 1 per second, or 10 per day. That’s still a lot.
The seeds are deposited in the alaya—the spiritual ground, so to speak. And when the conditions are right, those seeds sprout. So many seeds are being planted that there’s no way, even if you are a highly trained holy person, to control them all. However, even those of us at the bottom rung of the spiritual ladder can practice controlling the most basic ones. We can, for example, not retaliate.
Let’s take an example from the playground. Bobby hits Billy. First, let’s examine Billy’s victimhood. Is he a victim? Perhaps he never did anything to Bobby. But has he ever engaged in an act of aggression? Is there a five-year-old who hasn’t?
For the sake of argument, let’s agree that the effect that Billy is seeing in his own life (getting hit) was caused by his own previous aggressive behavior (a seed he planted in the alaya). At this moment, Billy has a choice. If he retaliates, he plants another seed of aggression that will sprout in the future. If he restrains himself, he creates a different future. He may still have some other aggressive seeds waiting to sprout, but at least he won’t be planting any new ones.
At the moment of choice, what is it that creates the possibility of doing something different? Christianity would say that this is the moment of grace, of divine intervention. Buddhism calls it basic goodness, bodhichitta. Christianity posits an external goodness that reaches in and touches the basically corrupt being and changes it. Buddhism posits a core of goodness, or intelligence, within the human being that arises at such a moment.
I suspect that Christianity characterizes this as a moment of divine intervention because it is, at first glance, so contrary to “human nature.” When we are hurt, our first impulse is to lash out, to protect ourselves, to reduce the aggressor to ashes if possible. What could restrain us at such a moment other than God, or if not God then the teachings that have been transmitted to us about what God wants from us. At such a moment, you want to kill the other person, but the voice of your Sunday school teacher speaks up in your mind and tells you to turn the other cheek.
Buddhism questions whether this impulse to retaliate is “human nature,” or all of human nature. We can think of less dire moments where our human nature is to refrain from retaliation. Say, for example, that your baby is teething and in pain and his/her flailing arms land a blow to your nose, and it hurts! You don’t then punch your baby, do you? You are in pain, but at the same time you feel compassion for the suffering of your child. And this compassion is as much a part of our “human nature” as the other part that desires revenge. Which impulse becomes stronger depends on which one we exercise.
But the end result is the same, isn’t it? Whether you are a Buddhist or a Christian, the idea is that you are to refrain from retaliation.
There is a difference. In Christianity, we are advised to turn the other cheek, but there is a suggestion that this is the stuff saints and holy people are made of, not ordinary folks like us, and not people in the real world, where terrorists crash planes into skyscrapers. Furthermore, if you do turn the other cheek, you can now at least have the satisfaction of thinking that you are superior to the person who attacked you.
From a Buddhist perspective, the rationale for turning the other cheek is much more practical. You do it not because you are holy or better than the other person but because you are tired of getting slapped, and you know that if you retaliate, you will most certainly get slapped again at some point in the future.
One thing I like about the Buddhist notion of how the world works is that it applies to everybody. The rules, just like physical rules, are universal. The laws of gravity apply to everyone, whether you’re a Taoist or a Muslim, whether you live in Russia or Spain. It makes sense to me that spiritual rules are universal as well—that whether you are a Buddhist or a Christian or a Muslim or a Hindu or an atheist, the same spiritual automata are at work.
We might not know what every one of these automata are, and we might not be able to unravel the complexities of how they all interact, but we do know what the main ones are. In fact, every single one of them derives from one primary, universal automata: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Do not do to others what you do not want them to do to you. Confucianism, Analects of Confucius, 15:23
This is the sum of duty: do not do to others what would cause pain if done to you. Hinduism, Mahabharata 5:1517
None of you truly believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself. Islam, Al-Nawawi’s Forty Hadiths
A man should wander about treating all creatures as he himself would be treated. Jainism, Sutrakritanga 1.11.33
Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful. Buddhism, Udana-Varga 5:18
As ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise. Christianity, Luke 6:31, King James Version
And if thine eyes be turned towards justice, choose thou for thy neighbor that which thou choosest for thyself. Baha’i, Epistle to the Son of the Wolf
Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. Judaism, Leviticus 19:18
Don’t do things you wouldn’t want to have done to you. British Humanist Society
Regard your neighbor’s gain as your own gain, and your neighbor’s loss as your own loss. Taoism, T’ai Shang Kan Ying P’ien
Whatever is disagreeable to yourself do not do unto others. Zoroastrianism, Shayast-na Shayast 13:29
By Julia Van Develder
Dec01
Two waspy Watch Hill women
encumbered with enough stuff
to see them through the season
mount the weathered steps to their cabana
without a backward glance.
They think I am one of them
and ask me over-the-shoulder
to get the gate.
I comply and then duck under,
desperate to pee,
and squat between two rolls of dune fence
exposing my indecency.
Into the spaces between their chatter
of Who’s Who in Westerly
the pee rushes and roars
leaving me half-amused
by my own audacity,
half-expecting the hew and cry
of indignant respectability
to hound me from hiding.
Empty at last
I drip dry
zip my fly
and sally forth
onto that mile-long stretch
of sundrenched sand
looking like I own the place
but willing to share, noblesse oblige,
with three fish-belly bathers
two bronze fishermen
and one imperious gull.
By Julia Van Develder
Dec01
Five days a week for five years
minus vacations
equals one thousand seven hundred
and twenty-five times
you’ve driven past
at least a hundred houses
on your way to work.
Raised ranches
in suburban semicircles,
handy man specials
with rusted chevys up on blocks in the yard,
yuppified farmhouses
with complicated swingsets.
All these years, you’ve rarely
seen a soul.
But on this particular morning,
you leave home early
for no particular reason
and find yourself
stuck behind a schoolbus
that stops at the white house
with the blue shutters
you never noticed until now.
You sigh inaudibly,
thinking why me,
the one day I was actually
going to be on time.
And then you watch
as five grown men
walk single file down the gravel drive.
One carries his lunch box tight against his chest
like a prize.
Another has his hair gelled up
and a puffy white coat.
The last one
smiling smiling
stops and stoops and ties his shoe
and you realize
in that split second
that you never knew.
You never knew.
By Julia Van Develder
Nov30
Two magnificent ordinary
sea gulls
side by side on the shore
naught but froth between them
look out on the white sea
with unblinking eyes.
My love, he says.
What? she says. What is it?
You loved me once, he says.
True, she says, I did.
And now? he asks.
She turns away.
Look, she says.
Look at the unfeathered:
See how they walk beside the sea
hand in hand
murmuring unintelligibly
content to find a bit of
blue beach glass
or a bunch of bladder wrack
or a smooth sea stone
as though for them
this midmorning stretch of sand is all there is.
And your point? he asks dryly.
Why must there always
be a point? she asks.
The point is, he squawks,
their ease is predicated on the primitive!
What do they know of diving
headlong into the sea?
Of winter storms and summer squalls?
What do they know of
the scarcity of sticks?
Of nest-building codes?
Their food is in the basket!
Their nest neatly unfolds!
Their courage dissipates
at the threat of thunder!
And your point? she asks dryly.
You idealize, he says, you romanticize.
What you seek is illusion.
That may be, she sighs,
and spreads her wings.
And he, foolish clever bird,
puffs out his chest and
watches her wheel away.
By Julia Van Develder
Nov17
If I had the whole parenting thing to do over again, I would do at least one thing differently: I wouldn’t praise my children.
Parenting styles and ideologies come and go, and every new generation of parents finds ways to improve on the job their parents did. My mother’s generation bottle-fed their babies because that was the modern, “scientific” way to parent. My generation went back to breastfeeding because by then the science had shown that breast milk is the ideal food for human infants.
People in my generation put their babies to sleep on their stomachs to prevent them from choking to death on their own spit-up; today’s parents put them to sleep on their backs to prevent Sudden Infant Death syndrome.
Bottle or breast, cloth or paper, crib or cradle or family bed--prevailing views on issues like these seem to do a 180 every generation or so. But there’s one parenting tenet that has become so entrenched that no one, at least in our culture, seems to question it, and that’s the belief in positive reinforcement as the best practice for encouraging appropriate behavior and self esteem in our children. This dogma, rooted in B.F. Skinner’s work on operant conditioning, was popularized and spread by America’s all-time favorite parenting guru, Dr. Benjamin Spock.
At this point, we have lots of evidence that positive reinforcement doesn’t create self-esteem. We’ve all known parents who bent over backwards to recognize and praise their children for anything and everything from learning to tie their shoes to sharing their toys. “Wow! You shared! That’s so great! I’m proud of you!” Yet many of those children have grown up to become adults who are just as plagued by self-doubt and self-loathing as previous generations who were raised under the “spare-the-rod, spoil-the-child” paradigm.
Some critics of modern child-rearing practices argue that the failure to produce the intended result is because praise is meted out too easily, without children having had to really earn it. The children know it’s bogus, but they still come to expect it as their due. Then when they get to the real world, the rug gets rolled up with them inside of it.
I’m sure there’s some truth to that, and I’m also sure that Dr. Spock would wince at some of the misapplications of the principle of positive reinforcement. But I think the problem with the positive reinforcement model is more a matter of structure than application. It has a fatal flaw, which is that it inevitably sets up its opposite--criticism. Even if you’re getting more praise than criticism, even if you’re getting only praise, your sense of self-worth becomes a conditional commodity. You learn to feel good about yourself only insofar as your behavior generates praise rather than criticism.
When I was growing up, my older brother was constantly in trouble. I remember sitting on the basement steps in our little brick house in the suburbs, listening to him get yelled at upstairs in the kitchen because he stole my allowance money to buy a kite. My parents were church people. My father was a seminarian, preparing for his ordination. Stealing was one of the Big Ten no-nos.
The unconscious decision I made was not to be like him---not to be bad, not to ever do anything that would cast me out of the warm circle of parental approval. I dedicated myself to being good, worked overtime to avoid criticism. I was a good student. I was obedient. I was helpful and considerate. And my dear sweet parents praised me for it. (And praise does work, by the way—according to controlled experiments, verbal praise is actually much more effective than tangible rewards in shaping behavior.)
That made me an easy child. But it also set me up for some not-so-great relationships as an adult. I was easily controlled by my fear of disapproval and rejection. When you’re a praise junkie, one critical comment or even a disapproving glance can send you spiraling down into a pit of despair, and you will do just about anything to claw your way back to emotional safety. Prostrate yourself, humiliate yourself, abuse yourself—whatever it takes to earn forgiveness and be reinstated in the “Good” category.
Why would an otherwise sane adult be paralyzed by fear of criticism?
One persuasive explanation is offered by Paul MacLean (now deceased, former head of the Laboratory of Neurophysiology at the National Institute of Mental Health) who developed an evolutionary (and controversial) theory known as the triune brain theory. (See The Evolutionary Neuroethology of Paul MacLean: Convergences and Frontiers, 2002.) One of the principal complaints among neuroscientists is that his model is too simplistic, and I am about to add insult to injury by providing a ridiculously simplified version of it. Basically, MacLean’s theory is that the brain comprises three parts:
The R-complex, also known as the “reptilian brain,” includes the brain stem and the cerebellum and controls the muscles, balance, and autonomic functions, such as respiration.
The limbic system, also known as the “mammalian brain,” includes the amygdala, the hypothalamus, and the hippocampus, and is the source of emotions (responses to pleasure and pain) and instincts.
The neocortex, also known as the “cerebral cortex,” is found in the brains of higher mammals and is the source of higher-order cognitive skills, like reasoning.
These three components are connected and function as one, but not always smoothly. Take the limbic system, for example, where pain and pleasure and their attendant emotions are recorded. When you experience pain, the limbic system doesn’t automatically refer this experience to the neocortex for analysis.
In mammals that do not have a highly developed neocortex, what happens in the limbic system, stays in the limbic system. Let’s say, for example, that a puppy is mistreated—a child kicks the puppy or pulls its ears. The puppy feels pain and fear. If that experience is repeated enough times, you’ll eventually have a dog that “isn’t good with children.”
The dog can’t differentiate temporally or spatially. It can’t say to itself, “Hey, that was a different kid, and it was a long time ago, when I was a helpless little puppy. Now I’m a big strong dog. I don’t need to be afraid of kids.” No—the dog’s brain says, “Kids--BAD.”
The ability to differentiate is the province of the neocortex, the reasoning brain. But the neocortex and the limbic system are not very well integrated, so in human beings, just as in dogs or other mammals , the painful or pleasurable experiences recorded in the limbic system continue to trigger the same emotional response unless the neocortex intervenes. How many Americans, for example, say, “Muslims—TERRORISTS,” and fail to use their capacity to reason to differentiate between 19 hijackers and a world population of one billion Muslims? How many veterans have a fight-or-flight reaction to the sound of gunshots during hunting season, or to fireworks on the Fourth of July?
The good news is that the neocortex can intervene. In this respect, human beings seem to be a unique species. The bad news is that most human beings don’t have access to this important information and remain trapped in the reactive cycles generated by their limbic systems. You might be fifty years old and still not realize that the person calling the shots is the scared five-year-old inside you.
So what does all this have to do with parenting techniques? The problem with positive reinforcement (and punishment as well) is that it conditions behavior via the limbic system without bringing the neocortex in on the deal. Kid does something “good,” parents praise kid, praise triggers feelings of happiness and security. It’s no different, really, from a dog learning to sit in order to get a milkbone.
What happens if praise isn’t forthcoming? If praise is withheld? In this system, the absence of praise isn’t neutral. It’s a negative reinforcement in the sense that it will push the child to double his/her efforts to regain the pleasurable feelings.
By the time the kid becomes an adult, s/he presumably will have the cognitive skills to understand why certain behaviors are or aren’t conducive to social well being. But this more mature understanding doesn’t automatically undo the damage at the limbic level. Whenever you find yourself overreacting to something or someone, the likelihood is that your limbic system is in charge.
But if we don’t use positive reinforcement, how do we raise children to do the right thing and also feel good about themselves?
A possible answer, I think, comes from the East.
There’s a famous story about the Dalai Lama and the concept of self esteem. Here is Jon Kabat-Zinn’s version of the story (Wherever You Go, There You Are, pp. 162-3):
“In conversations with the Dalai Lama during a meeting in Dharamasala in 1990, he did a double take when a Western psychologist spoke of low self-esteem. The phrase had to be translated several times for him into Tibetan, although his English is quite good. He just couldn’t grasp the notion of low self-esteem, and when he finally understood what was being said, he was visibly saddened to hear that so many people in America carry deep feelings of self-loathing and inadequacy.
Such feelings are virtually unheard of among the Tibetans. They have all the severe problems of refugees from oppression living in the Third World, but low self-esteem is not one of them.”
How is it that Buddhists don’t suffer from low self-esteem? This is an interesting, complicated question that I won’t presume to answer. But I recently watched a film that offers some clues--The Cave of the Yellow Dog, written and directed by Mongolian filmmaker Byambasuren Davaa.
Davaa wanted to record a way of life that is disappearing—the nomadic life of sheep herders in Mongolia. She used a real family, a Buddhist family, in The Cave of the Yellow Dog to tell the story of a little girl, Nansal, who finds a dog and wants to keep it, despite her father’s insistence that she take it back to the cave where she found it.
This isn’t a documentary about Buddhism or about childrearing practices in Mongolia, but it nevertheless opens a window onto a way of approaching parenting that is subtly and profoundly different from our way in the West.
Example: At the beginning of the movie, Nansal, the oldest daughter—seven or eight years old?--is coming back to her family after months of being away at boarding school. That evening, hanging around in the yurt, she asks her father if he would like to see her school work. He says yes. She shows him her workbook and points out a gold star she got on one assignment (the very icon of our system of positive reinforcement!). The father runs his fingers over the star and then points to the next page, which also has a star, and says, “And another one.” He doesn’t jump up and down praising her. Neither does he minimize her accomplishment. He’s just with her.
The family has three children--two girls and a boy who’s around two years old—and there are many moments in the film where we see the parents parent. There are dramatic moments (such as when Nansal is lost in a storm) and moments of conflict (such as when her father tells her to take the dog back to the cave) and moments of obvious love and affection between the members of this family. But there isn’t a single instance of praise or criticism, reward or punishment—even when Nansal disobeys her father.
Here in the West, the praise-criticize habit is so entrenched and so pervasive that it’s extraordinarily challenging to stop doing it. And then that becomes another thing we use to criticize ourselves---“OMG, I praised my kid…I’m such a bad parent!” But it is possible to relate to people, including our own children, without making them good or bad. And you don’t have to become a Buddhist to try loving people, including yourself, just because we exist and not because of anything we do or don’t do.
By Julia Van Develder
Nov02
I’m looking for a desk. I’m planning to leave my job of eighteen years and launch a business, so I need a desk for the home office I’m envisioning. I don’t want to spend a ton of money because I don’t have a ton of money. Plus I’m trying to learn how to think like a businessperson, which in this case means “buy cheap.”
I find a pretty cool desk on Ebay—one with “I know what I’m doing” written all over it—and it’s cheap, so I bid on it, and I win. “You got a steal,” the owner emails me. $163.99. Oak. L-shaped. Custom made. The only problem is that it’s in New Jersey and it’s “pick up only.” I figure I’ll go down on the weekend in my little Subaru Forester and pick it up. But I see now that it’s too big, so I’ll have to rent a UHaul. And “no weekends,” says the guy who sold it to me--somebody named “Jules”--and btw, bring some help because Jules has a bad back.
I don’t have any help. I’m divorced, my kids are grown, and my friends work for a living. So now my big bargain of a desk is going to cost me a UHaul and a hired hand and a day off work. This kind of thing is always happening to me. When am I ever going to learn?
I call my handyman. He can’t come that day, but his brother-in-law who’s got a little farm north of here has a Mexican guy that he can’t really keep in full-time work, so he’ll see if I can borrow him. He pays him ten bucks an hour, but whatever I want to pay him is fine. The only problem is he doesn’t speak English. No problem, I tell him. I speak Spanish, sort of. I lived in Mexico for a few years when I was a kid. Perfect, he says, the guy is a hard worker.
I don’t ask, but I assume he’s undocumented. My handyman is an ex-Marine and a staunch Republican, but he’s got five or six mouths to feed and is struggling to make ends meet, so I assume he’s pragmatic when it comes to credentials. On the day, he arrives with Fernando at my house at 9:00am. My dog charges ferociously into the yard. He’s all talk, but Fernando has no way of knowing that. He tries to look unafraid. I grab the dog and hold out my hand to shake. His face registers surprise that I speak Spanish. He’s a small man—maybe five-one. He’s wearing new sneakers, jeans, a zip-up hoodie, and a baseball cap. He looks to be in his thirties, but it’s hard to tell.
I’ve already picked up the UHaul, so we’re off. The desk is in Lyndhurst, two hours away. I’m happy for the chance to practice my Spanish, but a little embarrassed by how challenging it is to say anything that’s the slightest bit complicated.
I stick to the slow lane because I’m not a great driver and I don’t like driving trucks. I begin to explain this, but I can’t remember the word for “truck.” “Camioneta,” he tells me. He says he doesn’t know how to drive. He could learn, everyone can learn, more or less, he says, but he’s illegal, and he doesn’t want to risk getting in an accident and encountering the police.
I ask about his home. He’s from a small village in the state of Pueblo, very poor, but tranquil. He has a wife and two kids, a two-year-old and a four-year-old, a boy and a girl. I ask how long it’s been since he’s seen them. He says that this time, he’s been here almost a year. He arrived last June. He’s hoping to stay one more year and save enough money to go home and build a little house.
I launch into a tirade against my government’s border policy. He disagrees with me very politely. He says that maybe my government is right to crack down on illegals. He says that there are a lot of bad people who come over and make trouble, drug traffickers, pimps. He doesn’t blame my government. His government, on the other hand, he has no respect for. It doesn’t matter which party is in power, all they want is to keep all the money for themselves. They do nothing to help the people. A few people are very very rich, and everyone else is poor. And all the police are corrupt. If you go to Mexico City, which he does sometimes to visit family, the police stop you on the street for no reason. They want a bribe just to leave you alone. On the highways, it’s the same. At least in this country, he says, the government tries to help people.
We argue back and forth about whose government is worse. I tell him that his government may be more corrupt, but mine is just plain silly. My government is getting ready to build a huge wall between his country and mine, a wall that will cost billions of dollars, to stop illegals from coming in. Why don’t they take that money and build businesses in Mexico to employ people? People cross over because they’re desperate for work. You want them to stop? Give them work!
We cross the Poughkeepsie bridge, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Bridge. I tell him Roosevelt was a great president. I don’t know the words for “The Depression” or “financial collapse,” but I tell him that when the people were very poor, Roosevelt created jobs for people to build things--post offices, bridges. My explanation is garbled, but he understands that I am trying to say something that matters to me. “He was a good man,” he offers. Yes, a very good man.
I ask him about how he got here. He looks away, out the window. “Es muy duro, senora. Suffri much.” It is very hard, ma’am. I suffered a lot. He waited at the border for three months. The first two times he tried to cross, he was caught and sent back. Life at the border is hard. There are so many people there, trying to cross, and the shopkeepers take advantage. Everything is expensive—even food. Once during the three months he had to go home because he ran out of money for food. The third time, luck was with him. He had to pay the coyote three thousand dollars--three thousand dollars, ma’am! There were fifteen in his group. They crossed near Nogales—two days and two nights in the desert.
Was he afraid? Yes, of course. It’s dangerous—there are poisonous snakes. Was he afraid of bandits? There are bandits, but the path that he took is protected by the drug traffickers. The coyote pays the drug traffickers, and they allow the coyote and his group to pass through. So many people are crossing, so many groups. You sit down to rest, he says, and another group passes you. You don’t bring anything with you—nothing. They’ll steal your hat off your head.
He tells me again that he suffered to get here, and this suffering is visible in his eyes. His demeanor hasn’t changed--he delivers this sentence deadpan. But his eyes are pools of pain. He’s remembering something so demoralizing that I can barely imagine it.
He tells me about the times he came before, the eight years he spent in California, working for a Mexican American who treated his workers much worse than the Americans Fernando has worked for. The guy is very very rich. He has three huge farms, acres and acres. He buys expensive cars for all his kids. He goes on vacation to Europe. The guy makes his living on government contracts, reforesting large tracts of land. He gets paid a dollar for every seedling he plants, but he pays the workers only a nickel a plant. You wear a kind of belt around your middle with all the seedlings in it, and you practically have to run, planting them as fast as you can.
Fernando had an accident while he was working for that guy--a chainsaw kicked back and caught him in the face. His cheek was hanging off, blood everywhere. The guy took him to a plastic surgeon who sewed it back on; he gave Fernando a few days off work, but then he had to go back to the field with his face still in bandages. The plastic surgeon wanted him to come back for a second treatment so it wouldn’t look so ugly. But his boss didn’t want to pay for it, so the surgeon said he’d do it for free. Fixed him up almost good as new. You can hardly tell. And that boss was Mexican, ma’am—Mexican.
When we get to Lyndhurst, Jules is waiting for us with the desk in two pieces on a dolly. The three of us manage to lift it and slide it into the van. It is quite heavy. I worry about how Fernando and I will manage to get it out of the van and through the yard and up the stairs to my house.
And that, two hours later, proves to be impossible. I call my handyman for backup, and he calls his brother-in-law who sends his stepson Jake--big strong kid, perfectly smart, but deaf-mute. The three of us manage to get the desk as far as the entryway, but it’s about an inch too wide for the opening.
I go get tools, and the three of us figure out how to take the desk apart. It’s not a simple matter of a few screws. The top is attached in mysterious ways, but one by one we ferret them out. Jake communicates with us on a handheld device, I respond with pencil and paper. “Wow, you type so fast!” I write. He beams—“A lot of practice, chatting with my friends, college.”
It’s an odd scenario---three people with radically different communication skills solving a problem together. But it’s not a Tower of Babel--we find a way. We each have something to contribute here, and in these few moments, the playing field is level; we’re equals. When the last screw comes out and the top comes off, we are jubilant. Jake pounds Fernando on the back, Fernando gives him the thumbs up. Mission accomplished.
I pay them well, more than I had planned, more than I should if I ever want to learn to think like a businessperson. For days after, as I walk around my house, I see it as it must look to Fernando--rich, extravagant. I think about Jake--so many strikes against him, but facing life cheerfully. Has he ever been bitter? There must have been moments. I don’t believe it’s possible to go through the public education system with a disability like that emotionally unscathed.
As for me, I want to help Fernando. The least I can do is give him work and pay him well. The next weekend I hire him to help me reseed my lawn...and two weeks later to rebuild a stone wall...and after that to paint my porch. But the place he’s living at is about an hour away, and I have to pick him up and take him back and think up things for him to do, and it basically eats my Saturday. So the next time I go to pick him up, and he’s not there, I’m relieved. I can stop now. He let me down, so the next time he calls looking for work, I can make an excuse without feeling too guilty.
But I am guilty. I am no better than the government I railed against. It is extraordinarily difficult to stay present to the suffering of others for very long without feeling overwhelmed and powerless and ashamed, without finding a way to blame them for your failure of compassion.
By Julia Van Develder
Nov02
Love is not like
your misplaced car keys
or your reading glasses
or your blood donor card
or the extended warrantee
on your new tv
or any of those things
you will find
if you look
hard enough
long enough.
No amount of looking
will find love.
All you can do
is become someone who
is willing to risk a wild ride
on the Merry Mixer
without holding on
for dear life,
someone who is willing
to be dizzy and dazed
surprised and amazed
by the inexorable
and heartbreaking
beauty
of everything,
every
single
thing.
By Rachel Posner
Nov02
It’s funny how I remember you, the history of who you were to me. Before I knew you, you were just something I read about in health, a movie with the girl from Growing Pains in it, a page in a textbook, something I joked about with my little friends. “Look, guys—I’m anorexic!” I’d say, and eat like half a piece of a green bean. You were something only dancers knew how to be, some secret club all the A students were a part of, the elite, the Aryan race. Too special for someone as mediocre as myself. I was so sure of that fact that when I actually met you for the first time, who knows exactly where, I didn’t even recognize your face. You smiled at me and I tried to smile back. I don’t remember if I did. I didn’t know who you were, or why you would be smiling at me. I was in awe. You looked so strong standing there, so beautiful, so perfect---everything I wasn’t. Everything I wanted to be.
How did we become friends from there? I’m not sure. I guess it started because you’d keep me company at lunch. We’d make up the rules, and they didn’t seem too drastic, and I followed them with a perfection I didn’t know I was capable of. “See! You’re good at something!” you’d whisper to me. From then on we were together---I was with you in a crowd, with my friends, at the dinner table with my family, the mall, and even when I was alone in my room. Sleep was all that separated us, and sometimes not even then. I thought about you until I fell asleep. I didn’t even dream---I just listened to my nightmares. Soon you were everywhere, and you told me that if I listened to you all the time, I’d never have to feel bad. I’d never have to feel anything, and when I thought about it, I knew you were right. Since I’d met you, I had felt alienated from everyone, and I loved the feeling. It was the ability I’d always wanted, to not care. There was no more pain. The anxiety at school had begun to fade and I was strong. I’d never felt so strong or so safe, especially around people. It didn’t matter if my body was growing weaker because of it, if my nose bled during class, if my skin was green and my head ached, if my heart pounded. The people who asked didn’t matter. Stupid body---it was to blame for everything. I didn’t care what happened to it as long as I had this, as long as I had you. I would punish that body for all of its crimes, and I would not spare a single moment’s pain for that horrible creature that killed me in so many ways. Now it deserved to die, the beast, and I would kill it if it meant killing myself! It had been the source of pain for so long. At least...I thought it was...the shame I felt for my body looked a lot like the shame I felt in every other aspect of my life...but this was closer to me, this was my goal.
You and I had become one, and we were more powerful than ever. I began losing pound after pound, and nobody really understood except you. They’d all stare at me and talk about me and they hated me because I wasn’t weak anymore and they couldn’t step all over me. They hated me because I was beautiful. We knew that they were just jealous. They wanted me to tell them about you, but I wouldn’t. They were afraid of you and I didn’t want them to stop us, so I lied. When I’d lost another fifteen pounds people began to talk, everyone, and my mother who was hysterical put me into therapy and sent me to see a nutritionist for my “eating problem.” That’s how they found out. But I didn’t have a problem. She did. She was the crazy one, with the scary health-freak boyfriend. She let him berate me, she showed me how to be weak, she made me terrified of being a woman and so many other things. I was just normal for once. I was confident, and they wanted it. They wanted me to turn you in. They wanted the only thing I had left---and the world suddenly seemed full of greedy, horrible people. But you wouldn’t leave me. You reminded me to stay on track, that I was still fat and gross and a horrible person and that the only way I could be accepted was if I lost more weight. That was the only option I had left, and I took it with a smile. You always knew what to do. I’d show them.
After a year or two of talking to the therapists and staring at them blankly, I got bored, and we decided that ninety pounds was just not cutting it anymore, so I dove...down. Lettuce became my favorite food, and tea became the center of my world. When anything I needed wasn’t in the house, I would freak out, and beg or scream at anyone who was listening to get me whatever it was. I didn’t care who I hurt or what I had to do. I lied, I stole, I cheated, I manipulated. I was losing it. I was losing everything---not just the weight. My hair was coming out in huge chunks. Every face except my own in the mirror was unfriendly and painful. They reminded me of a life I was no longer a part of...my life. I didn’t know anyone anymore. They were all either somewhere far far away or in my way. My family were obstacles I had to get around, my house was just a place I was sleeping at night. You were the only real thing left, everything else was an illusion, a distraction. I didn’t feel alone even if I was. Your presence was always with me, encouraging or shrieking at me, I could barely tell the difference, but I knew you were there. And I was still comforted, still fell asleep to the sound of your voice.
After a few months, I wasn’t feeling so on top of things anymore. I’d stopped going to school. I just lay on the couch all day wishing I had the strength to climb the stairs up to my room, but it was such a long, long way. I was so tired I couldn’t even pull the brush through my hair, and when I took a shower, thinking it would be warm and calming, each drop left a bruise that made me cry out in pain. I could have another cup of tea in half an hour, but my body was frantic for something, anything---now! My brain was in more than one place. My legs never stopped moving, from fear or the cold, I didn’t really know which it was. Then you and me got into our first fight ever when my mom gave me the choice of waiting another three weeks to get help or going to the hospital right then, and I didn’t say anything. I held a pillow over my face and hoped you wouldn’t kill me. “I’m scared,” I told you later in my room. I knew you wanted to wait, to see how much more I could lose. “I can’t believe you’re so weak!” you said. “What about everything we’ve worked for! You’re throwing it all away!” I just turned away and cried because I was afraid that you were right, and I was afraid of losing your support. But I was more afraid to die. You went along with me to the hospital. We started to have more fights, especially toward the end. Sometimes you won and sometimes I did. No one was really keeping score. All I knew was that your face was changing. It was no longer the beautiful, perfect face it had been---shiny and hopeful. It didn’t have the answers I thought it did. Now whenever I looked in your eyes, I saw pain and destruction, exhaustion and loneliness, savage anger, like a trapped animal. You were no longer my best friend, and the more I looked at your smile, the more it didn’t look like a smile at all.
When I left a few months later, we weren’t always on speaking terms, and the following few years were up and down, eventually more ups than downs. Some days we were inseparable, like old times, but I didn’t believe in you the way I used to, and you knew it. I guess that got in the way. The more I knew about you, the less I could trust you, but whenever things got tough, I’d always cry and find myself calling you up. “Please come back. Make me safe again. I need you! I’m sorry! Please...don’t leave me!” And you’d come back and you’d smile and help me and kill me just like I wanted you to.
More years and I don’t see you so much anymore, but I hear people calling your name everywhere I go, and it seems so strange...not to know you, not to have you in my life. People sometimes ask me if I knew you and I say yes, and they ask me who you are and I don’t know what to say. I realize I don’t know who you are. I only know who you were to me. I miss you sometimes, especially when I’m having a hard day. I think of that time you told me I was special and that I could do anything, or when you said you’d always be there for me. Sometimes I see you in a stranger’s face, or an emaciated body, or a child’s frozen eyes. Sometimes I still see you across the room and I want to talk to you so much. But when I start to speak, I remember how much you hurt me. I remember all the pain and fear, and I can’t go through with it. I turn and walk away.
By Julia Van Develder
Oct28
I knew they were there. I had heard them once before, but this was the first time I actually saw them. To see five of them that clearly, at eye level--that is something I will never forget as long as I live.
The spectacular sighting was in part because of the way my house is perched on a rock outcropping. It’s not as dramatic as it sounds. I’m not out in the wilderness or anything like that--just an ordinary neighborhood on the outskirts of a little town in the Hudson Valley. There’s a two-acre zoning requirement, so the houses are spread out, and we’re on a fairly steep hill with lots of these picturesque rock outcroppings that were probably a nightmare for whoever developed the neighborhood.
The deck of my house juts out over one of these outcroppings, and just beyond the deck, there’s a drop of about twenty feet to a little wooded area. So from the deck, you’re looking into the treetops.
We have all kinds of wildlife here: deer, of course, and turkeys. Occasionally you’ll see a fox. There must be a whole pack of coyotes. You see them rarely, but at night their demon chorus is enough to raise the hairs on the back of your neck, their twisted howls and yips echoing through the woods.
Also, once I saw a bobcat. And even bears are not unheard of. I saw one once, not on my hill, but in a residential neighborhood not far away, lumbering down someone’s driveway.
But I didn’t expect rhinos. And I certainly didn’t expect to see five of them roosting in the treetops as I stood on my deck one moonlit night. The moon drifted out from behind a cloud and suddenly they were illuminated. It took my breath away, literally. They were sound asleep.
You know those pictures in some children’s books where you have to find the hidden object? That’s what this was like. The rhinos were cleverly camouflaged among the leaves, and everything--trees, rhinos, rocks--was painted the same pale gold color by the moon. Beautiful.
The time before, even though I hadn’t actually seen them, I knew somehow they were rhinos. There was no moon at all that night. I am ashamed now to admit that when I heard them out there, singing and rustling the leaves, I went inside and got projectiles to throw at them--apples, I think. And maybe an onion. I threw those things at the rustling rhinos, and one, I am pretty sure, fell to the ground and then crashed away through the underbrush.
Until I started throwing things at them, they were singing in a sort of barely intelligible rhino way--hymns, I think. But that isn’t why I threw things at them. It was purely territorial. They were in my trees, and I didn’t want them there. And I was a little afraid. What if more came and suddenly I had an infestation?
Pure stupidity, I admit. A slight shift in viewpoint and I could have seen them as they really were, miraculous messengers rather than interlopers. I could have felt honored and awed instead of petulant and self-righteous. Besides, I don’t really own those trees, do I? I mean, really own them, in a philosophical sense?
As is the manner of human beings, I attempted afterwards to deconstruct these visitations. One such visit might be attributed to anything--poor digestion, Mercury in retrograde, whatever. But two? Who were these rhinos, and what were they doing in my (I use the word “my” loosely here) trees? Why rhinos rather than, say, panthers? And why five of them? Was there some significance to that number? It could mean something, couldn’t it?
It could, I suppose. But in the end I decided not to dig any deeper into the matter and just let the rhinos be. Parsing them too closely robbed them of some essential part of their being and their power. It was just another attempt to control them--engulf them, the way a cell engulfs a viral invader. Oh, our defenses are so highly evolved! They save us, I suppose, but at what cost?
I’d rather have rhinos in my trees than be safe. I hope I haven’t scared them off forever.
By Julia Van Develder
Oct17
I see a cow on the news
and decide that now’s the time
to give up eating meat.
The anchor’s point
is lack of proper oversight
in meat packing plants
but the picture on the screen
is just this one cow
dazed and disbelieving
eyes rolled back
stumbling up the ramp
to the slaughtering chute
prodded by a man with his face
fuzzed out.
It looks to me
like the cow is wondering
how it came to this
how in a million years
she ended up here
in this cement stall
waiting for the ax to fall
instead of on a lovely farm
somewhere near Burlington, Vermont.
I know, I know---
cows don’t use words like lovely.
I plead guilty
to anthropomorphizing.
But pain is pain
and the cow was in it.
That much is clear.
I won’t lie to you---
I love cow meat---I do.
I already miss it
just like I still miss cigarettes.
I wish they could make
safe cigarettes.
I wish they could make
blue cheese bacon burgers
at the Racoon Saloon
without killing cows.
I wish a lot of things.
I wish fall and spring
were longer and winter shorter.
I wish I’d had the guts
to emigrate to New Zealand
when I had the chance.
I wish wishes were horses
so beggars could ride.
But what’s the point?
I could wish until the cows come home
and if they ever do, I could not eat them.
I could do that.
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