Day: February 17, 2017

Last week, at the Mansion Valentine’s Day Party, Barbara, a resident there, waved me over and asked me to take a photograph of her as she happily blew on a pinwheel that had been sent to her and each of the other residents.

The pinwheels, I could see, were a favorite of the many gifts sent to the residents. Barbara loved the colors as the spun, it made her smile. And she loved going through the bag to see what she was sent.

Barbara is a lot of fun, she is lively, direct and has a great sense of humor and life. I love the story she tells about her trip to Alaska, and the blue ice she saw. She is outspoken and honest.

Yesterday, I got an e-mail in the morning, it was just signed Jane T—-.

“I sincerely hope that someone posts a photo of you in your dotage blowing, or attempting to blow, on a pinwheel, and writes “John is happy with his new toy,” said the e-mail. That was all.

At first, I thought it was a joke. The Valentine’s Day party was a sensation, in part because of the inventive, colorful and much loved gifts readers of the blog sent, more than 1,000 letters and a gift bags, cookies, cards, letters, chocolates and flowers. People loved the pinwheels, they were spinning all over the place.

I joked back that I was nearly in my dotage as well, and that I loved pinwheels, I have three I put out on the lawn each Spring, and nothing makes me happier than to blow on them or see them blowing in the wind.

It wasn’t until I re-read the letter that I realized it was angry, and not a joke.

I am good at reading the tenor of e-mails, but never quite imagined that an event so warm and affirming as the party could be controversial. (Nor did I imagine that some people would be angered that I suggested giving inexpensive gifts to refugee children who are here legally and in great need.)

I’ve been writing online for more than 30 years, the internet was created in part by teenage boys and they have left their testosterone  mark, and long ago I started what I call the Civility Project.

When I get a hostile message I sometimes respond quickly and courteously, challenging the writer to communicate in a courteous way and to try to see me as a human being with emotions and feelings, I suggest that they talk to me, rather than to an issue and succumb to the easy and nasty undertone of so much  e-mail.

These angry messages do  not require much thought, or perspective, there is no consequence or accountability for the harm they do.

Some people, I have learned, are just jerks, and there is no point in wasting my time. Most are just like me, except they just don’t seem to realize that they are writing to a person, not a bot. I can’t imagine sending angry messages to strangers.

Every time I make a human connection, I see it as a victory for humanity community. A good number of the people I’ve communicated with this way have become the most loyal readers of my blog and books. They are actually quite nice.

Sometimes this experiment yields wonderful conversations and replies.

I’ve learned that most cruel or angry messengers don’t think of the target as a human being, they can’t imagine I might listen.  They are used to being ignored – by politicians, corporations.

When they are reminded of their hostility, they often apologize or respond more thoughtfully.

Sometimes they go away, abashed.

If they send another angry or cruel message in reply, I move on. This program has taught me a lot about humanity and digital communications. It has also taught me to never give up on trying to be human.

I wrote Jane back. First off, I said, Barbara asked to have her picture taken. The pinwheels made her feel good.

Secondly, I have never seen anyone at the Mansion treat any of the residents as anything but dignified adults, they are never condescended to or infanticized or patronized in any way.  It is one of the reasons I love working there with Red.

Nor would I ever do that myself, and there is no reason to. These are not children in any sense of the word. The people I know at the Mansion are articulate, engaged and quite adult.

I told Barbara this, and I told her my wish for her is that she didn’t communicate with people in cruel a way. If something was bothering her, she should talk about it in an open and courteous way. I said I love pinwheels,and would be happy to get some in the mail at any point in my life. The photograph (above) was much-loved and shared.

I had a good feeling about Jane, a sense she was listening. Over the years, I’ve developed a feel for it, and then, I hang in there.

The next morning, I got another message from her. She apologized for the first message and explained:

“Sorry,  am 80. My spouse, who recently died, was in a nursing home where he was infanticized and the person who he really was, was disregarded.”

I read and  re-read the letter and Jane told me more.

The nursing home, quite different from the Mansion, treated her husband as a child, and he felt a great loss of dignity and self. It was difficult for her to watch, no one paid any attention to his feelings and wishes.

And no one listened to her pleas to treat him differently, to preserve  his dignity. So she just assumed I wouldn’t listen either.

Her descriptions of his last months were painful to read, It is an awful thing to be disregarded at any age, especially when you are older, and society often disregards you.

She said she understood from my blog posts that people at the Mansion did not appear to be treated in that way, the image just brought up those angry and difficult memories of her husband’s final days. They were always given him toys when he said he didn’t want them.

The loss of dignity and self is, I suspect, commonplace among the advanced elderly. It would be easy to patronize them or talk down to them. I have never once seen that happen at the Manson and have never, to my knowledge, done it myself.

I love the way the Mansion staff talk so naturally to the residents and listen to them so patiently,  and know them so well.

It was in my hospice volunteer work that I learned to never speak down or lie to a patient. I always speak openly and naturally to them in hospice or assisted care or nursing homes, I never tell them everything will be fine, because it isn’t  always the truth, and it is a sin in my mind to lie to a person in institutional care or near death.

Mostly, I listen. It is not my place to tell people how they are or will be.

So Jane and I chatted back and forth, across these strange new geography that e-mail and messaging are, and we connected to one another as people. We talked easily to each other.

She is loyal and loving and in grief, she could not be with her husband at the end of his life or ensure his dignity, she had too many issues of her own to contend with. She felt she had failed him.

Jane sent me another message thanking me for encouraging the Valentine’s Day party, and she said she might consider blowing on a pinwheel herself, it did look  like fun.

Tomorrow, I am sending her one of mine, courtesy of the Online Civility Program. One candle lit.

 

Cassandra Coney has been coming by every morning this week, and we have settled into a comfortable routine more quickly than I might have imagined.

I suppose I am sensitive to the idea that I am growing too old to take care of the farm. I was just at the hardware store buying bird seed, and Amy said there was no way she was letting me carry the two 20 lb bags out to the car. I can handle it, I said, but she said no, “Maria doesn’t like you carrying heavy things by yourself.”

Cassandra also keeps an eye on me, saying she wasn’t sure about my carrying firewood into the house, “Maria will kill me if you have a heart attack,” she said, forthrightly.

I appreciate everyone’s candor, and I can’t really see me from the outside. People tend to be wary of open heart surgery patients carrying too many things, but it’s an odd reality. I shoveled tons of snow this week and raked more tons off of the roof. I have hauled firewood for two stoves all week by myself.

I took a two-mile walk this morning with the dogs and felt no discomfort of any kind. At the same time, I don’t want to deny reality, all this concern might be grounded in reason, and perhaps I should be more accepting of help. A hard thing to sort out.

When I got home from the hardware store I carried the two bags out of the car and across the back  yard and into the barn. Nobody suggested that was a bad idea, and it was no sweat carrying them and pouring them into the feeders.

Cassandra and I have reached a very comfortable rhythm. I come out once in awhile to take photos. Cassandra is all business, we chat a bit and she moves impressively and efficiently through her chores. She comes into the house, cleans out the cat litter, brings a few more logs in for the stoves, and then goes to work.

She is impressive. No drama no bullshit, she has a dry sense of human and loves the dogs and other animals. I’m getting easy with this idea, even though the snow and my computer troubles have blown up half of my creative fellowship, the reason for Cassandra being here in the first place.

Raised on a farm, she knows what to do and how to do it.

But I’m still sorting things out.

Why do I need help with the chores if I can’t work on my book? It is nice to have this help in either case, the days are long and hard, doing the chores of two people, and I am tired at the end of the day. So I can use the help.

It is nice to know Cassandra will pull in every morning and help out.

I am opening up to it.

My computer will not be ready today, and most likely even tomorrow. The techs at Apple partitioned my hard drive the other day to check for malfunctions,  and couldn’t get the partition undone so my memory is all gone, and  a wizard tech from Vermont is going to take a whack at it in the morning.

Looks like all of my stuff was backed up and saved, so nothing should be lost.

My new chapters were also saved, I believe,  although I won’t  have access to them at least until Monday. I might need a new computer if they can’t sort this out, but I hope not. It could certainly be worse.

(I loved the light this morning, the rising sun just lit up the frost in the pasture.)

I’ve patched up Maria’s old laptop and I can blog from it, although it is slow and grumpy. Vintage, they call it. So my weekend will be different – no book work. Maybe next week, if the de-partitioning goes well. My instinct is write a cold chapter on Maria’s computer if I can find Microsoft Word, which doesn’t seem to be there.

Today, I want to put up some photos and I have this itch to go see Batman the Lego movie, I liked the last one. In my other life, when I got lonely or sad,I always went to the movies on Friday afternoon, so maybe I  am lonely and don’t quite realize it.

I’m not sure what happened but I got some mail mail when I started writing about immigration, and a few threats, and the techs found some malware in the system when they started checking it. It seems hardly imaginable that helping refugee children would be controversial but this is America in 2017, so everything is controversial.

Of all the things I’ve written about, sending donations to children in need of blankets and toothpaste was, in my mind, the least controversial thing I’ve ever written.

(Oh, and just so you know, your voluntary payments and monthly support are on a different system, no financial information of any kind is stored on my site or on my server, my site has no access or pathway to  your money in any way.

There is no evidence that I was hacked in any way – I have two strong security systems protecting the blog  – it is possible that someone sent a hostile mail or link, or more likely, that I picked one up while browsing.

It happens. And no, I will certainly not stop writing about the refugee children. I hope things will get back to normal on Monday, although I am not sure what normal is any more.

My donation today: Microfiber Bed Sheets: $13.99

“You will never know how much it cost my generation to preserve your freedom,” wrote John Adams. “I hope you will make good use of it.

I think nothing much is new in politics or history, America has often struggled with immigration, this fear seems to come and go in waves, there is something schizophrenic about this country, we are a nation of immigrants, immigration is built into the national soul and DNA, yet refugees engender fear and resentment as well as regeneration and hope.

It makes sense, really, they are the unknown, the threat, and in our times, the very idea can sometimes seem especially dangerous and frightening It is hard for any human being to digest what we call the news every day and stay grounded.

As much as refugees are sometimes feared, they are also loved and cherished and welcomed. Your gifts to the USCRI Amazon Refugee Gift Page have been astonishing, touching and so much appreciated.

At times I have struggled to figure out how to deal with the divisions and conflicts sweeping across the country. My idea has been to not argue, but to do good. For pennies or a few dollars, I can touch the lives of suffering and good people and remind them – and me – just what is is that has made America so great.

Some of these refugees come from Syria, they must deal with great fear and confusion as well as the loss of their families, homes and savings. Your donations have touched them deeply and revealed what I believe is the true soul and spirit of America.

My answer to these difficulties, in large measure, is the gift page. Every morning, when I sit down to the computer I browse the page and donate an inexpensive gift – soccer balls, pots and pans, sheets and comforters, toothpaste and toys. So have hundreds of others, the refugee committee warehouse was overflowing.

So today I’m donating a bedsheet or two. My favorite donation is the $2 prayer rug for Muslims, I can not imagine a better way to greet people to the land of the free that helping to support their faith, their daily prayers five times a day. I hope it makes them feel welcome, I know it makes me feel good.

In recent weeks, I have been re-reading Adams, Lincoln and Jefferson seeking out their thoughts on compassion and the American spirit. Adams believed that for democracies to be preserved, citizens had to re-invent their revolution, again and again. At the core of his vision was religious tolerance and freedom. No country in the history of the earth had enshrined that idea into their vision for government.

“The United States is not a Christian notion any more than it is a Jewish  or Mohammedan nation,” he said. People of all faiths, he wrote, are welcome here.

Many people in America love to invoke the Constitution when it meets their needs. As with Christ, people love to evoke him, but very few seem to remember what he really stood for. It is clear to me that Jefferson, Adams and Christ himself would have welcomed these refugees.

I am honored to follow in their footsteps.

If you are so inclined, please take a look at the gift page, set up by the U.S. Committee On Refugees and Immigration. New refugees are arriving every day, they are her legally, they have been exhaustively investigated, they are no threat to you, your job, or your community.

This is a simple and inexpensive and private way to do good.

The refugees have suffered terribly, and are in need of everything. You can check out the page, and do good and honor your country by going here.

It was a surreal morning to me, I was disconnected from my work – no computer. I took some beautiful photos in the morning light, but I can’t share them with you.

I don’t know if all my work and new chapters and all of my photos have been damaged or destroyed in the computer crash, possibly the result of some kind of attack. I am waiting for the computer repair shop I use to open and get the news. So far, silence.

Maria called me very briefly before midnight to say she was heading out to the village of Bolpur for two days and would be out of touch – no Internet, blogging, cellphone service – at least until Sunday. We were both a little nervous about that.

We really are apart for a few days, she could hardly be farther if she was in the Antarctic. It is unsettling to  be writing this on Maria’s old laptop and to be waiting for the fate of my computer. This was supposed to be the week I was focusing on my new book. Maybe over the weekend.

And I am lucky to have this laptop.

I didn’t have time to say much more than goodbye to Maria, I got up to look at the itinerary that she left for me, and that I look at every morning. She did ask me to pass along that she will not be blogging until Sunday night or Monday. Her writing is so important to her now, I know how she feels. Our blogs are our voice and connection to our creativity, and her reports from India have been beautiful and powerful.

Many women say she is making this trip for them, and so she is.

Here’s her itinerary for today through Monday:

• Feb. 17. Morning drive to the village of Bolpur. Check into TVE funded community based tourism hotel. Visit Women’s Interlink Foundation Community Center and enjoy home cooked meals from the hospitality training program. (This is one of the organizations helping the victims of sex trafficking, Maria may get to teach her potholder-making there.)
• Feb. 18. Spend today visiting artisan shops and markets in Bolpur. Learn about initiatives to create jobs and keep young women in the village to prevent falling into trafficking rings in the big cities.
• Feb. 19. Drive back to Kolkata in the morning and check into hotel. Visit to red light district crisis center in the evening.

So we really are out of touch for  awhile, and that feels strange. I plan to resolve the computer crisis one way or another, even if I have to buy another computer. If I’ve lost my photos, then they are gone, and I will take new photographs.  That is one of the wonderful things about photography, the world begins anew every day. My photos will also be free to anyone who wishes to use them.

And my editor has copies of my first four chapters, should it come to that. I don’t think it will. I backed things up on Wednesday.

I don’t wish to be a complete prisoner of technology, life happens, every day, and it can eat you up or give you strength and resilience. Perspective is part of my faith. Plato said be gentle, everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.

Many of the people Maria is photographing in Kolkata would love to have a computer, even for a few minutes. Or hot water, or a place to live.  I am not important, in the scheme

The tragedy of technology is that for every good thing it brings, it also takes something away. I feel the same way about computer troubles as I feel about the loss of a dog, in a funny way.

I see all over Facebook that people are updating other people on the death and sickness of their dogs and cats, and chronicling their illnesses,  people seem eager to follow these losses and their details.

People share their illnesses and grief in a way I am not comfortable doing, and I hope it is comforting for them, I am sure it often is.  I respect them and their suffering, and we all deal with it in our own way, but I have chosen a different path for these inevitable consequences of being alive.

When I lose something, I go inward,  not outward. I have to help myself. Perhaps this is a survival technique, or a symptom of being closed.

I might just be blind to the comfort that is so readily available and so easily dispense.  I don’t really ever want to have so many people sorry for my losses. They have theirs, and I have mine, and how can I muster the strength and perspective to deal with my struggles if I am always handing them over to people? Everyone is fighting a battle, none of our losses are unique to us.

Before I share my travails, I must learn to live with them and accept them. In Maria’s post the other day she went to teach some trafficking victims how to make her potholders, but they didn’t get to her lessons, I’m sure she will get to them later. She acknowledged her disappointment and accepted this with grace, this is a part of life, just like breathing. It is not tragedy or drama. I would not say sorry for her loss, although I know this is important to her.

But for me, life is not loss, life is life.

Death and loss and crisis and mystery are not shocking to me. If you love dogs, you will see many deaths, they just don’t live as long as we do. What do we expect? Immortality for us and the things we love? That we are exempt from the laws of life and nature?

If so, we shall be shocked and disappointed all through life.

I don’t need to watch the news all day and I don’t need updates on the suffering and death of dogs. My computer crisis has rattled me – my whole creative is inside of that machine, and my plans and routines have been upended. But crisis and mystery is always around the corner, and perhaps it is because I am getting older that it is not a great shock for me.

I have seen firsthand how many of my plans live a very short life.

The question is how will I deal with loss and disappointment? Panic? Lament? Self-pity? Complaint?  Facebook or Twitter? I think not.

I worry sometimes that we use technology to hide and forget, and do not ever learn how to deal with the inevitable pain and loss of being human. I find, curiously, that I have never written on anyone’s Facebook page “sorry for your loss.” It seems too much like stealing to me. But that is just me.

Grace is not the absence of trouble, but the way in which we respond to trouble. Last night I read, meditated, thought about me and Maria and her journey into the Indian heartland.

Her journey goes way beyond a trip to India, it is a very personal journey of strength and affirmation. Like me, she is learning about the reality of life every day, and like me, it will make her stronger yet.