Day 188 - The Day the Shuttle Blew Up

Image of the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion
by MATEUS_27:24&25, via Flickr.com

I knew from my experiences living in Iran before I joined the Foreign Service that it was essential that I find an activity outside of work. In Iran, I joined the German School Orchestra. In Germany, I joined the Metropolitan Club, a social organization for those between 18 and 35. I was pushing that upper limit, had in fact already slipped over it, but I could see many members were similiarly over that line and I wanted to contribute by joining instead of just taking part in their programs.

The Metropolitan Club wasn't a place. It was a group of people who organized activites that took place every Tuesday, most Thursdays, and many weekends. Weekend events included trips to the Bavarian Alps for cross-country skiing in the winter and for hiking in the summer, for example. Weekday evening meetings included lectures, tours of museums, meals in local restaurants, whatever the member organizing the event wanted to do. Because the group met so often, I could take part regularly even if I had to work late one or two evenings a week. In fact, often on the days of Metropolitan Club meetings, I worked late anyway since the meetings either included or followed the evening meal. If the meetings weren't at a specific location such as a restaurant or museum, they were held in the American Cultural Center, a few blocks away from the consulate building.

Meetings were conducted in English, not German, although the majority of members were German.

On Tuesday, January 28, 1986, I decided to stay in the office after close of business because I planned to attend a Metropolitan Club meeting that evening. I was sitting at the one Wang terminal that the entire visa section shared, when the Marine on duty came into the office and told me that the space shuttle Challenger had blown up on take-off. We didn't have TVs in our offices, so all we could do to find out more was to turn on a radio and tune in Armed Forces Radio and Television Service (AFRTS). I don't remember what the program at the Metropolitan Club was that evening. We mostly sat around and talked about what a tragedy the loss of the shuttle was.

That evening, I went home looking forward to a phone call from Thom, a friend in Minneapolis who called me every Wednesday morning, Tuesday evening his time, because I knew the Challenger disaster would be a bigger blow to him than to anyone else I knew. Thom was a space exploration junkie. While we worked together as software engineers in the Minneapolis area, Thom wore a NASA jumpsuit to work on the day of every previous shuttle mission launch. His ex-wife had baked a cake in the shape of the shuttle for him to share with the rest of the engineers on April 12, 1981, the day of the first shuttle launch. Thom was a real engineer, trained in physics and computer science. He had worked for Honeywell on defense projects before joining the company both he and I later worked for as software engineers. But I never thought of myself as an engineer. Whenever I heard someone say something like, "Oh, you engineers are all alike," I would turn around and look behind me to see who they were talking about. I was an engineer by chance. Thom was an engineer down into his bones. The loss of Challenger was going to mean he would need to talk.

And so it did. But he didn't call me on Wednesday morning, as he usually did. And he didn't call me on Thursday morning. I realized that there must be someone else with him, someone else for him to talk with about the loss of the Challenger.

I left Minneapolis to join the Foreign Service at least in part because Thom didn't ask me to stay.  I had sought the opportunity for so long, but my life had continued in the meantime, making me uncertain whether I still wanted it. But Thom's decision not to ask me to stay meant that if I turned down the opportunity, it was likely that our relationship would end anyway. It was frustrating to realize that it didn't matter what I decided, the result would probably be the same in at least that one regard. But after I made the decision to accept the offer with State, Thom and I stayed together and talked about how we could remain connected even with the separation of distance. Our Wednesday morning telephone calls were one way we kept connected.

I waited until Friday morning to call him. And when the phone rang, Beth answered. Beth was the girlfriend of Thom's best friend, Bob. They lived in Ohio, and they had visited Thom the summer before, so my first hopeful thought was that Bob and Beth were in town again. That would explain why Thom hadn't called me the morning after the shuttle blew up. And it would explain why Beth had answered the phone. So I hoped.

When I got home from work on Friday, Thom called and admitted that Beth had now been living with him for the past month. He had always placed his Tuesday evening-in-Minneapolis / Wednesday morning-in-Stuttgart calls to me from a room where Beth wasn't so she wouldn't overhear our conversations. So while Beth knew me, she didn't necessarily know that Thom hadn't ended the relationship - or at least that I didn't know Thom had moved on. That was the last phone call I received from Thom.

And that is the story of what the day the space shuttle Challenger blew up meant to me, the closing of the door through which I could have returned to Minneapolis and recognizing I had to face the open door of my State Department future head on, instead of in half-hearted bursts.

Day 180 - A Secret in the Heartland

Sharon put down the book, recognizing that emotions were choking her up. She didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Laughter would be aimed at herself for being so naive. Crying would be for any of her classmates or students of other classes who had gone through the same experiences as the author of the book she had just finished reading. But maybe he was the only one, she thought, almost hopefully, even though her real hope was that no child would ever have to experience predatory actions from adults, especially from a teacher.

The book was a novel, but the author indicated it was based on events from his childhood. In the epilogue, he spelled out what happened, without naming real people, of course. But Sharon knew the teacher was Mr. C, her favorite elementary school teacher.

Sharon had felt she was special to Mr. C, but not in any shameful way. She thought Mr. C considered every student in his class special. She knew that she had considered Mr. C special, because he had taken the time to verify that Sharon's inconsistent grades were not the result of not knowing the material. It was because Sharon needed glasses. Whenever Mr C handed out problems to solve or tests on paper, Sharon got most of the answers right. She tried so hard to make no mistakes and Mr C had already tried to console her when tears filled her eyes whenever her grades weren't what she expected. It had always been that way. Tears came all too easily for Sharon, the source for the nickname she had had throughout elementary school and that followed her, behind her back, of course, into junior high school: Cry Baby. Mr C told her that her ability to bring tears to her eyes so easily might be a talent she could develop later in life if she decided to try acting. Actors need to be able to display all emotions at any time. Mr. C was the first teacher to give her encouragement, not to cry, but to see her ability to bring up emotions so easily, or more precisely her need to develop the ability to control her emotions for the right moment, instead of just telling her to stop it, to grow up and quit behaving like a baby. It was no wonder her classmates picked out the nickname Cry Baby for her. Most of her teachers thought she was acting like a baby, too.

One reason Sharon's grades disappointed her was that when Mr. C wrote the problems or questions on the board, Sharon couldn't always see them clearly enough. If the problem involved words, she could figure out what she couldn't see by what she could see, but when the problems involved numbers, she couldn't always figure out what the shapes were by what was around them. So she made mistakes, lots of mistakes. Fourth grade was when multiplication and division were introduced, so there were lots of number problems to solve.

One day as class was about to be dismissed, Mr. C asked Sharon to stay after class. Once the rest of the students had left, Mr. C told Sharon to stay in the back of the room while he walked to the front and raised one of the maps that covered a section of the blackboard. On the board were several arithmetic problems. These were all completed, so it wasn't like a test. But the problems were a mixture of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Multiplication and division had been difficult for Sharon and the plus sign for addition looked so much like the times and division signs to her from the back of the room. Mr. C asked her to read the problems. She had to guess a lot and she admitted that as she read, telling Mr. C that because she could see one of the top numbers and the bottom number, she could figure out the other number and whether the problem was addition or multiplication because she could figure it out by either subtracting or dividing.

After Sharon completed reading the problems to Mr. C, he gave her a note to take home to her parents. He told her the note said he thought she needed glasses and suggested that her parents have her eyes tested.

Sharon's mother was surprised when she read the note because she knew the school gave eye tests each year and none of those who tested children's eyes had indicated Sharon's vision needed correcting. But no one had ever asked Sharon if she understood what the eye test was for. She knew it was a test, so it was just one more time when she wanted to give all the right answers. Sharon didn't remember if she did anything to make sure she answered correctly, but as an adult, she believes she just might have done so. The eye chart in elementary school wasn't like the one in optometrists' offices. The eye chart in the school only had the letter E on it. Sometimes the E was correct, sometimes it was backward, sometimes it was lying on it's back, and sometimes it was standing on its three arms. Students were supposed to point in the direction the arms were pointing.

When Sharon had her eyes tested in a doctor's office, it was clear that she needed glasses. The day after her exam, she told Mr. C that she was getting glasses and asked him not to tell anyone in the class. She wanted it to be a surprise when she arrived in school the next week wearing her glasses.

In addition to being able to see everything written on the board with her glasses, Sharon noticed that people's faces no longer looked fuzzy. She realized that for at least the past year she had been seeing everyone with two noses until they were close enough for her to recognize. This inability to recognize faces at a distance may have contributed to her feeling that people were ignoring her. Her classmates probably had thought she was ignoring them since she didn't say "Hi" to anyone unless they were right next to her.

Years later, when Sharon was in high school, Mr. C had been her Sunday School teacher. Some of the shine of her admiration of him was tarnished that year as she discovered Mr. C opposed the integration of schools all at once. He proposed that the schools should be integrated one grade at a time, beginning with first grade and then adding a grade each year, giving everyone time to adjust gradually. The need for integration and bussing children across town was not an issue in Sharon's home town so there didn't appear to be any immediate impact of the desegregation of schools and no children in her town were going to have to be bussed to a school any further from their homes than was necessary already. But Sharon and her classmates all felt that it was important for all children to get a good education and if that meant children needed to ride a bus to school so that all the schools would provide equal education to all children, they agreed it was the right thing to do. But Mr. C objected.

Sharon began at that point to see Mr. C as more like all other adults than as the special teacher he had been to her in the fourth grade. But he remained one of her favorite teachers because of what he had done for her so many years before.

But now, five years after Mr. C's death at 82 years old, she learned that at least one of Mr. C's students saw a side of Mr. C that Sharon couldn't have imagined all those years ago, even when Sharon's mother told her after Mr. C had left the school district and moved out of town with his new wife that there were some ugly rumors about the reason for his departure. In fact, Sharon thought the reason for his departure was that the marriage was troubled and any talk of divorce among the teaching staff at that time was scandalous. It was only now, after reading the work of fiction that developed characters along paths that the author might have taken himself as a result of Mr. C's inappropriate attention, that Sharon learned the real reason for his departure from her home town. Mr. C remained married for the 44 years until his death.

Sharon knew that her friends and family considered her to be a bleeding heart liberal - too ready to give someone the benefit of the doubt. Those whose political alignment differed significantly from hers saw the world in more sharply delineated black and white tones. Sharon saw shades of gray. But she couldn't stop remembering the good he did just because he also stepped astray. She thought about all the crime shows on TV about child predators and recalled the message of them that was repeated again and again that such people could never be cured. Once a predator, always a predator. Sharon wanted desperately to believe that was wrong, that at least one man who acted inappropriately with at least one 9-year-old child did find redemption though counseling and a 44-year-long marriage.

Sharon worried about what Mr. C's widow would feel when someone told her about the novel. Someone would eventually mention it to her. She must also be in her 80's by now. What would it feel like to have to confront an event from nearly half a decade ago at such an age?

Yet the author had lived the consequences of keeping a horrible secret for that same length of time. Would it have been better had he written the novel six years earlier, while Mr. C was still alive to respond? Or would that have just raised dust unnecessarily in a new town?

Did Sharon's mother act correctly in telling Sharon that her beloved teacher had left town under a cloud without telling her the details? Was it kinder to Sharon, to Mr. C, to Mr. C's wife, to leave the details out? Surely it seemed so at the time, but perhaps an open airing of the details would have encouraged the author and possibly other children who experienced the same inappropriate attention to confront the facts instead of surpressing them and turning them into ghosts to haunt them in the future.

What do you think?

Day 165 - The Road to the Foreign Service

Interpreter image by xmacex, via Flickr.com

It all started in 1965 when Miss Buslee assigned a research paper on careers we were interested in. At that point all I knew was that I wanted to do something with foreign languages. I had started studying German in ninth grade, the earliest time that foreign languages were offered. The alternative was Latin, but I wanted to study a language that was still being spoken. I would have had to wait a year to begin studying French or Spanish. So German it was.

I was a long way from mastery of German then - still am - but I jumped into the research enthusiastically. I learned about the difference between translators and interpreters. I learned that beyond those two career options, nearly every other career that involved foreign languages involved mastery of something else. In fact, the foreign language part was secondary to whatever that something else was. Even translators and interpreters had to understand the subject matter they translated. A musician wouldn't necessarily have the vocabulary or knowledge to be able to translate a medical or engineering paper.

That led me to explore careers that involved travel where knowledge of languages would be an advantage. That is how I stumbled on information about the U.S. Department of State and careers in the Foreign Service.

As exciting as such a career sounded, however, what I learned back in 1965 led me to conclude it was not likely a career for me. First, there were the medical requirements. Somehow I had gotten the impression that my eyesight was so bad that I would never be hired for certain jobs, as a flight attendant, for example. And the information available in 1965 about the Foreign Service made it sound like only those with perfect vision could get in. And then there was the fact that until 1972, only single women were accepted into the Foreign Service. It was never in the law that women in the Foreign Service who married would have to resign, but it had become practice. In addition, it was practice that only married Foreign Service Officers would be sent to certain countries of the world, including eastern Europe. As a result, after completing that research paper, I put aside any thoughts of a Foreign Service career. I concentrated on other options for using foreign languges and travel. Teaching English as a Second Language was the path still open.

Ten years after completing that research paper, I rediscovered the Foreign Service. Several people I met in Tehran signed up for the written exam, the first step in what was then a several year process of gaining acceptance into the Foreign Service. The written exam was only given once a year, on the first Saturday of December - in every country of the world on the same day. I heard my friends who took the exam talk about how difficult it was. Everyone seemed to know someone who walked out in the middle of it, giving up at that first step.

I was still devoted to the idea of teaching English around the world, so I didn't sign up for the exam while I was overseas. But after a year of living in Romania where my sense of civic duty was heightened after watching the effect of oppressive practices in both Iran and Romania at the same time as I gained first-hand experience with what those working in an embassy did, I decided I had to try to get into the Foreign Service. I loved teaching English, and I loved the travel it offered, but I was not excited by the lack of certainty such a life offered. Both the job in Iran and the Fulbright position in Romania were temporary options. And in both cases, I didn't know that I was going to get them until less than a month before I needed to ready to leave. A position with the federal government that would transfer me from one place to another seemed the perfect solution.

In 1978, I took the written exam for the first time. There were two separate sections that were graded in addition to a written exercise that was only looked at if the candidate passed the other parts. I passed one of the two graded sections, but not the other. So the following year, I took the exam again. That time, I passed all sections. That meant I would be invited to the second round, the oral assessment.

That year, the oral assessment was offered in Minneapolis where I was living. On each assessment day, six candidates are invited to attend. On my day, only five of us showed up.

The oral assessment involved an-hour long leaderless discussion during which we were observed as we each made a presentation in favor of a proposal that the group would have to decide whether to fund. About half way through the exercise, one of the assessors informed us that we had just had the funding cut, so we would not be able to fund all of any of the proposals. We had to decide how to allocate the smaller amount of money. Most of the candidates seemed to think they would only pass if their proposal was funded. But the exercise was about leadership, and clear thinking, and making sound decisions, not winning or losing.

Discussion image by Writers' Centre Norwich,
via Flickr.com

Another segment involved a two-on-one interview. Two assessors asked questions of each candidate to assess critical thinking, experience, social awareness, and all those things that go into what I recall Dad referring to as "common sense," usually spoken in the sentence, "You don't have any common sense." I recall being asked to describe the Brezhnev Doctrine. I was sure I failed when I admitted right away that I didn't know what the Brezhnev Doctrine was. Later I learned that was the best answer I could have given, unless I knew what it was.

The final segment involved writing - the segment that had been part of the written exam the year before was moved to the oral assessment stage instead - and an in-basket exercise. I enjoyed that part, although I didn't score all that well on it. The scenario was that the candidate had just arrived in country and had one day ahead of the first business day to go through the in box of the predecessor who had left several weeks before. The in box seemed full, but in time I learned what was represented as several weeks of work was more like a day's worth of work. I discovered that all the names of all the people mentioned in the documents were non-gender-specific. That meant that any gender biases in the responses were those of the candidates, not those who wrote the exam. From conversations after this section, it was clear the other four that day hadn't noticed this. They all referred to the ambassador as "he" when the name was a gender-ambiguous Chris.

Interview image by Writers' Centre Norwich,
via Flickr.com

I passed that stage as well, which led to two more stages that could occur simultaneously - the medical and security clearances. Only when they were concluded did I learn that my name was on the register, the list of names, ordered by scores, highest to lowest. Names remain on the register for 18 months. The names move up and down during that time, depending on the scores of those added or dropped off later. Only about half of the people whose names go onto the register are offered entry into the Foreign Service. I knew that my name was in the middle third, but I couldn't learn more. Eighteen months passed. My name never came to the top. And so I started the process again. The second time around, the oral assessment was in Chicago. Other details were similar and familiar. I passed again, and the waiting began again.

Twenty years after Miss Buslee assigned that research project, I had succeeded. I was offered a position as a Foreign Service Officer. It was a long road. More than once during those seven years that I actively sought entry into the Foreign Service I answered that question that was typical during annual assessments - where do you see yourself in five years? - with the admission that I expected to be a Foreign Service Officer by then. It probably wasn't a wise way to answer that question, but when the opportunity came for me to accept the position, I felt the two former bosses I had given that response were as excited for me as I was for myself.

Day 144 - Father's Day

Father's Day cake by Jim, The Photographer,
via Flickr.com

This is the first Father's Day without Dad. It is also the first Father's Day with James in our lives. That's the circle of life, I guess.

At church this morning, Pastor Andy said in his sermon that he had been at St. Andrews Lutheran Church long enough that he has used up all the great stories of his father. So he told us one about a parishioner in his first church. Lilian* was in her 70s when she told Pastor the story, so he thinks the story took place in the early 1920s.

Lilian grew up in a very strict household. Her mother preached against playing cards, dancing, and going to movies, fearing that her daughter being involved in such activities would lead her astray. But Lilian, being a typical teenager of any decade, had a streak of rebellion in her. Not wanting to lie to her mother, Lilian stretched the truth a bit, telling her mother she was going to a friend's house for the evening. It was just stretching the truth because Lilian did go to her friend's house. But then she and her friends went to the cinema.

It was Lilian's first trip to see a movie, so she was very excited. Once she and her friends got settled in their seats, Lilian was surprised by a tap on her shoulder, but even more surprised when she turned around and saw her father in the seat behind her. In an instant, Lilian figured out what had happened. Her father had seen her with her friends as they were buying their tickets, but instead of approaching her outside the cinema, he decided to make the lesson larger by allowing Lilian to spend her money on the ticket and refreshments. Lilian didn't have much money, so when her father finally demanded that she pick up her purse and come out of the cinema with him, the lesson would really hurt.

But that's not what her father said. Instead, he said "I won't tell if you won't tell." Lilian remained in her seat in the row with her friends while her father remained behind her. And Lilian realized after that day that her father would always have her back.

Pinocchio by turbulentflow, via Flickr.com

Lilian's story reminded me of the first time I went to a movie. Dad took me to see Walt Disney's Pinocchio. I must have been about four years old. I remember the experience so well because I was absolutely scared to death of the  big waves and the storm in the movie. Instead of seeing Pinocchio learning the lessons that he should stop telling lies and start being kind and obedient to his father who carved him, I remember wondering why Dad would take me to see a movie that was so frightening.

Swiss Family Robinson book by
kayray via Flickr.com

A few years later Dad took several of us to see The Swiss Family Robinson. That one also had a few frightening moments in it, like a scene where one of the boys was caught in a giant spider's web, but I was old enough not to let the the frightening scenes distract me from the rest of the story. After we got home from the movie, Dad teased us about the movie. He asked us if we thought it was a good story or a true story. We all said it was both. But Dad insisted it was either a good story that wasn't true or a true story that wasn't good. I think I realized he was right, but I really wanted it to be a good story that was true.

I asked Dad not long ago how he met Mom. I expected him to tell me about the moment he first saw her across a room because I thought everyone would remember that point in time when they saw their love for the first time. Instead, Dad said he couldn't remember. He said he had always known who she was. Both his family and hers used to go to watch movies that were projected against one of the buildings downtown in Hitterdal, a precursor of outdoor movie theaters like the Starlight and Moonlight in the Fargo-Moorhead area.

Dad used to take us to movies at an outdoor movie theater now and then, especially when the entry price was per car, not per person. I always enjoyed those nights, even though I heard Dad complain to Mom about what went on in the other cars. I didn't know what he was talking about. I always watched the movies. I never looked at what went on in the other cars.



*a name, not necessarily the right one

Day 143 - Home

312 Dudrey Court, Moorhead, MN, aka home

I noticed when I was in Iran that I started to think differently about what home meant. Instead of home conveying warmth about where I was currently living, I realized that I thought of home as the place I wasn't, the place I came from. I realized that when I lived in California after graduating from college, I thought of home as Minnesota. And when I traveled back to Moorhead from California, I thought of California as home. So it wasn't surprising when in Iran I thought of both Minnesota and California as home. Minnesota would always be my home state. And I expected to return to San Francisco. I went to Iran expecting to stay there two years, so it would never be home. But when after 15 months I traveled back to the U.S. on vacation, I surprised myself when I found myself thnking of Tehran as home. It happened both in Minnesota and California. I found myself talking about returning to Tehran as returning home.

Shellagh and Bill in my home in Tehran, Iran

After Iran, there was Romania, another place I hadn't expected to stay long, another place I knew I wouldn't ever consider home. So California and Minnesota were both home to me during that year. But while I was in Romania, California voters passed Proposition 13 which changed the way school districts would be funded. And the immediate response was for schools to stop hiring teachers. And that meant my return to California was no longer likely. Instead, after a few weeks in Minnesota, I was hired via a telephone interview to join the staff of the Center for English as a Second Language at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois. It was a one-year appointment, although I thought I might be able to remain there at least a few years. But Minnesota remained home during my stay in Illinois.

After Carbondale, I ended up in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area, back in Minnesota. And while I was there, I only had Minnesota to think of as home, until I joined the U.S. Department of State as a Foreign Service Officer. Now I was in a career where home was always going to be somewhere else. Minnesota would always be my home state. While overseas, home would be the District of Columbia metropolitan area.

An incident in Germany during my first tour emphasized this for me when one of the women I met there told me I looked familiar. She was a soldier, so I didn't think we had ever been in the same place at the same time, but I rattled off the list of places I had lived and when I lived there. We didn't find anything in common through that list. But then Lisa, another woman in the conversation, mentioned that she knew I had lived in Arlington, Virginia, for six months while I attended orientation and language classes at the Foreign Service Institute. The soldier asked me when and after I told her, she said that is where she had seen me. While she was stationed in DC, she had a part-time job as a security guard at one of the FSI buildings. She had seen me as I came and went each day.

The view from the kitchen of our home
in Arlington, Virginia

I learned a lot in that conversation. I learned that being in a place for a temporary period, even if only for a few months, doesn't mean it wasn't home. And I learned that it is all too easy to walk by someone every day without seeing. I decided that I would never do that again. I would look at the people in my life and I would see them, not look past them.

For the next 25 years, home meant three places - the one I was in; Washington, DC; and Minnesota. Then in August, we sold our house in Arlington, Virginia, and moved to San Diego. So many years had passed since I thought of California as home. I'm learning to think of it as home again. But a bit of my heart is still in Virginia, in the District of Columbia metropolitan area. Minnesota will always be my home state. And someday maybe California will again feel like home.

Living Room in El Cajon

Day 135 - Reflections on How Fargo of You

My keeper of a sister-in-law, Julie, gave me a fascinating book to read for my plane ride back to San Diego from Fargo last month. The title, How Fargo of You. The author, Marc de Celle. Thank you again, Julie.

Marc de Celle moved to Fargo in 2005 and found it so unlike anywhere else he had lived that he coined the term northern prairie culture to name it and the phrase How Fargo of You to acknowledge examples of anonymous kindness he encountered himself and that he heard others describe about their own experiences living in the zone spanning Manitoba and Saskachewan in the north down to Iowa and South Dakota to the south. He posits that Fargo is at the center of this culture which is why "How Fargo of You" works. That and the fact that "How Northern Prairie of You" doesn't have the same ring to it.

I am not surprised that it took an outsider to discover the qualities that make Fargo and its environs so unlike other places. I grew up across the Red River of the North from Fargo, in Moorhead, Minnesota, and I have spent a good number of years exploring other cultures. For all these years I have been observing how different everywhere else is when a more accurate observation might be how similar everywhere else is and how different Fargo-Moorhead is from all of them.

For example, de Celle pointed out that the media's crime reporting in the Fargo-Moorhead area initially sounded nothing like what he was accustomed to in Phoenix where his family had lived before their move to Fargo. Instead of the long list of crimes reported on TV, a single crime seemed to be the focus of reporting over a long period of time. Since he had been told by friends in the media in Phoenix that the more "ordinary" murders never made it into the news, de Celle was surprised that the crimes reported in Fargo ended up being vandalism and break-ins, not bigger stuff. But then he did some research and discovered that what was being reported reflected what was happening. Very few crimes occur in Fargo-Moorhead, so very few make it into the media headlines. But those that do are covered exhaustively, from initial report of what happened, to the arrest of suspects, to the trial, and eventually sentencing. De Celle came to appreciate that what gets reported locally in fact reflects exhaustive research by reporters, something that doesn't always happen in other localities where "local" news ends up just being rehashing the news sources from elsewhere. Instead of being amused that local news, local sports, and local weather are really local in Fargo-Moorhead, de Celle began celebrating the localness.

I lived for a school year in Carbondale, Ill, a college town in the middle of farming and recreational lake country, very similar in many respects to the Fargo-Moorhead area, where I taught English as a Second Language at Southern Illinois University. In the nine months I lived there, I heard multiple news reports of "alledged" rapes and at least one case of a farmer discovering the remains of a decomposing body in his field when he began plowing in the spring. The contrast in the local news there made me wonder initially if Fargo-Moorhead was underreporting crime or if Carbondale was over-sensationalizing the news. I knew that Carbondale appeared to be different, but I thought Carbondale was the anomaly, not vice versa. I had spent so many years trying to figure out how to get out of the Fargo-Moorhead area that I hadn't recognized the values I would miss when I left.

I have been reading my journal from my days in Iran recently, hoping to find more stories to write about. What I wrote in my journal, however, was not a string of stories; I wrote about feelings. And having read de Celle's book, I now have a better idea about why I had so many very negative, or at least conflicted, feelings in Iran. Once again, it wasn't that Iran was all that different from much of the rest of the world (well, maybe it was partly that); it is that I grew up experiencing a world where things worked. There were rules in place that people in Fargo-Moorhead followed, like de Celle's amazement at motorists on the Interstate merging into the left lane when advised that the right lane would be closed a mile down the road instead of zipping to the absolute end of the lane and then trying to merge in after successfully passing all the patient and polite motorists who merged early.

I have often told Alex that when we go through security at the airport in Fargo or Minneapolis, they mean it when they say to empty your pockets and place containers with liquids into a zip lock bag which must be placed into a bin separate from your carryon when items go through the Xray machine. In Washington and other cities through which we have traveled, those rules are more often suggestions. Failing to follow them may result in a TSA agent's ire, but more often can someone be excused through self-deprecating humor that allows the TSA agent to chide kindly instead of scolding seriously. But where Alex has considered this rule-following behavior as inflexibility, I have always seen it as serving the greater good. Instead of the tragedy of the commons, northern prairie culture exhibits the celebration of the common good.

That kind of behavior provides a level of predictability that was totally absent in Iran. I now think my culture shock was amplified by the contrast not just with U.S. or Western norms, but with the northern prairie norms that hadn't entirely evaporated from my expectations. After reading my journal from Iran, I recall just how out of place I felt there. And I can't help but wonder whether my bosses might not have concluded at least tentatively that they had made a mistake taking a chance on me.

I am so very glad that Marc de Celle and his family moved to Fargo so he could experience northern prairie culture from his outsider's perspective so that I can benefit from his analysis to understand my own journeys outside of the northern prairie better.

Day 133 - Allowances

Image of coins by oceandesetoiles, via Flickr

When I was a child, probably no older than five, I began to receive an allowance. I received 15 cents a week. Of that 15 cents, I put a dime into my piggy bank, a penny into my church envelope, and I could spend the remaining four cents any way I wanted to. Back in those days, four cents could buy quite a bit of penny candy and I learned quickly that if I bought the two-for-a-penny candy, I had many more pieces to eat. But I also learned that if I wanted to buy a candy bar, I had to save a penny from one week until the following week so that I would have a nickel, the price of the cheapest candy bar.

My penny wasn't the only coin that went into my church envelope each Sunday. Mom put in another coin, usually a dime or a quarter, so the amounts in my envelopes always were an unusual number - 11 cents or 26 cents.

No one could ever have convinced me that I only received four cents for my allowance. I knew I received 15 cents.

Those dimes in the piggy bank grew in number. I was saving them to buy a new bicycle. But I recognized that the pace at which they grew was pretty slow when compared to the total I would need for a new bicycle.  After a couple of years, I decided there might be another way to experience a new bike: I decided to use the dimes I had saved to buy paint to paint my bicycle, giving it a new look. Mom decided this would be an excellent opportunity to teach me about tithing. She suggested, or was it something stronger, that I should take one dime out of every ten to put into my church envelope. I was perhaps a bit too young to understand the lesson because what I did instead was to cheat just a little. Instead of taking one dime out of every ten for my envelope, I counted out ten dimes and then I took one from the remaining pile which had the net effect of my tithe being more like 9% than 10%. I can even recall thinking that I had already put nearly 10% of my allowance into my envelope in the past.

As I got older, my allowance increased. By high school, the amount had increased to $5.00 a week, and I no longer had requirements on how to use that amount. Instead of being told how much to save, how much to put into my church envelope, the guidelines were simpler: from that $5.00 weekly allowance, I was to buy all my clothes, shoes, cosmetics, and toiletries - anything that wasn't purchased by Mom for the whole family.

I learned a lot about managing money through that allowance. I learned that an allowance came with responsibilities. We kids shared the responsibility for washing dishes after the evening meal. I also helped with cleaning the house. I hated cleaning the Venetian blinds. I learned that steady accomplishments over time can lead to expectations of increases in income. I also learned that sometimes I had to put off getting things if my resources in hand were insufficient. And I learned that sometimes I had to put aside money now to have more later.

I could probably have learned these lessons even without a weekly allowance. But I had the gift of an allowance.

Day 132 - Eulogy for Dad

As the oldest child, I had Mom and Dad all to myself for three whole years. I have trouble separating memories of Mom from Dad during those years except for these few:

Dad took me to basketball games at MSTC and Concordia.
Dad took me fishing.
Dad took me to the Fargo-Moorhead Twins games.
Dad told me bedtime stories.
Dad read the comics to me - but not always with the words in the bubbles.
Dad held me up in the air on his hands.
Dad took me to see Pinocchio, my first movie.

So, on reflection, while Mom took care of me inside the house, Dad took me out.

Dad had a mischievous sense of humor that on reflection I can recall from my childhood. He gave us all silly nick-names. I can only remember two - Schnickelfritz and Gerald McBoing Boing. I remember the time we spent a week in a cabin at one of the lakes when he brought a garter snake into the cabin while Mom was on her hands and knees washing the floor - who washes the floor when they are on vacation? He told Mom he had brought in a snake and he put it on her back. She just laughed and said she wasn't going to fall for that trick. She was sure it was a rope, until it slid off her back and into the pail with water and soap that she was using to wash the floor.

While he didn't always know the best ways to show us, it was clear that Dad was proud of us and he wasn't pleased when we didn't get the respect we deserved. One year, my sixth grade class was putting on an operetta that involved two of my classmates and I singing the song "Three Little Girls From School Are We" from Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado. I was particularly excited to be one of the three because it meant that I could wear the purple silk kimono that Dad brought back from Japan from his Merchant Marines days. I volunteered to bring the kimono to school to show it to the teachers, but on the day, none of the teachers involved asked me about it. And I was too shy to push the issue. When Dad found out, he went straight to the school with the kimono and talked with the teachers about why they hadn't asked me. I don't remember what happened next. I just remember how pleased I was that Dad went to the school on my behalf.

A few years later, I wrote an essay in junior high about the importance of voting in favor of a school bond issue. My teacher showed the principal. The principal of the school sent it to The Fargo Forum, and the paper printed it. I only learned years later that Dad had cut out that column and carried it around in his wallet. Mom had to tell me that; Dad didn't want me to know he was bragging.

Dad was also willing to do nearly anything for us. A very small example from my childhood dealt with my dislike of green beans. I was willing to eat the beans, but not the shells. One day Mom wouldn't let me leave the table until I ate all of the beans - shells and all. She left me at the table. Dad came to tell me I could leave the table because he would hide the shells under Wayne's plate on the high chair. I don't think Dad thought that one through very well because when Mom found the shells under Wayne's plate, she came to me to tell me that hiding them wasn't good enough for her. But since she didn't make me eat them anyway, I guess Dad must have confessed that I was innocent. Green beans are now one of my favorite vegetables.

As I grew older, I was eager to get out of town, to become independent. As the oldest child, I had to fight the battle over the independence boundaries much longer than my siblings did. After my second year of college, for example, I wanted to go to New Jersey for the summer, as a volunteer in an inter-denominational summer program for elementary school-aged children. Because I was under 21, I needed my parents' permission. Dad wasn't ready to sign the paper, but Mom looked Dad in the eye and told him - stretching the truth just a bit - that I was over 18 and therefore I really didn't need his permission. With that clear, Dad signed the form, but I don't think he was pleased. A few years later, when I decided I wanted to teach English as a Second Language after college because I saw that as a way to get overseas, I don't think Dad was all that pleased about that choice either, although he must have felt a little bit of conflict since he had done his own international traveling and working when he was even younger than I was at that point. In the end, he and Mom came to visit me when I lived in Romania, in Germany, and in Barbados. And one of Dad's favorite mementos was his list of the countries he had traveled during his life.

Mom was the spokesperson for Dad. I can recall many conversations that began "your father isn't very happy about. . . " Dad never told us; Mom spoke for him. And there were many times when Mom told us something about Dad's health that came with the warning, "Dad didn't want me to tell you because he doesn't want you to worry."

When Mom died, Dad no longer had a translator. He had to tell us himself how he felt. He had to tell us his news himself. He had to tell us himself what he wanted or needed us to do. And in the course of those conversations, we all got to know him a little more.

I had always connected with Mom through letters or email, but that option didn't work for Dad. Dad had to make a phone call to connect. One day he called just to talk, but eventually he said he had something to tell me, that he had a date. It felt like a good friend sharing his news with me and that felt wonderful. That date was with Dolores and therefore the beginning of her becoming an important part of Dad's life, and ours. The two of them were so happy and as they each began to face health challenges, we worried what would happen when the first of them passed. We lost Dolores in February. Dad's short-term memory was very weak at that point, so her loss wasn't as devastating to him as we had feared. But her passing was a big loss to us.

Sandra, Amalia, and Dad

Dad had a much younger special friend, Amalia, from Romania. He and Mom met her at a Sons of Norway meeting in Fargo when she attended with her Norwegian language professor from Concordia. Dad told me that when he met her, he decided to be the friend for her he hoped I had found in Romania while I was there. Amalia graduated from Concordia and with a lot of help from Dad made her way to Seattle for an internship year. The following year, Dad called to ask me to help Amalia get settled in Virginia as she had received a full scholarship for a masters degree program at Georgetown University. Since he rarely asked for help, and in this case the request was even rarer because Mom was still alive, yet Dad made the phone call. I was happy to do what I could. In the first few months after Mom died, Dad came to visit us in Virginia, in order to attend Amalia's graduation. For the first time, he was more a guest than a dad. Dad the dad used to find things in the house that needed to be fixed and he'd get busy fixing them. But Dad the guest let us take him around town to see the sights. In addition to attending Amalia's graduation, Dad, Amalia and I attended a Sons of Norway meeting. Years later as we kids moved him from his apartment to the nursing home, we found documents indicating how much more help Dad gave Amalia than we had known. How would have learned this wonderful fact about our father if he still had Mom as his translator? So thank you, Mom, for giving us the last eight years with Dad so we could get to know the wonderful man you married.

And thank you Dad for all you did for us, for all you gave us, for the example you set for us, for being the gentleman you were.

Day 124 - Choices

“IT IS BY CHOICE AND NOT BY CHANCES THAT WE CHANGE OUR CIRCUMSTANCES.” 
― Nadia Sahari, Breakaway: How I Survived Abuse

image vy emilio labrador, via Flickr

Everyday we make choices. Even when we don't think we are making choices, we are making choices.  When we let someone else make decisions for us, we are making that choice.

My friend Kathy let other people make choices for her. She did this in part by assuming that everyone around her had a hidden agenda. When she went shopping, for example, she assumed that the clerk in the store who helped her choose a blouse, dress, slacks, etc., had some hidden purpose behind her suggestions. So nine times out of ten, once Kathy brought her purchases home, she would begin to question whether the color was really good for her skin tone or the neckline complemented the shape of her face or the waistline of the slacks made her look slim. After stewing about it overnight, she returned the items. Instead of making her own choices, she let her assumptions about others make those choices.

image by Leonard John Matthews, via Flickr

Kathy lived with me for about a year. My house had one bathroom. Both Kathy and I grew up in houses with just one bathroom and lots of siblings, so getting along with one bathroom wasn't a problem. The medicine cabinet above the sink had two sliding mirror doors which met in the middle. Because the point where the doors overlapped distorted the image, Kathy used to stand to one side of the sink so that she could see her face on just one of the doors. In contrast, I used to slide one of the doors open half way so that I could stand centered at the sink and see my face without the distortion of the split mirror. When Kathy saw me slide the door half way open, she laughed because it had never occurred to her that she could do something about what she didn't like. She was so used to making adjustments to herself instead of to the world around her.

“Because to take away a man's freedom of choice, even his freedom to make the wrong choice, is to manipulate him as though he were a puppet and not a person.” 
― Madeleine L'Engle

Day 122 - Velveteen Kitty

Velveteen Kitty

Velveteen Kitty is the gentlest of creatures. When he wants some petting, he raises his paw to catch the attention of the nearest humor. If the humans aren't observant enough, he'll tap his paw ever so gently against a leg, arm, hand or even cheek. He is insistent, but not aggressive. No one can ignore his gentle taps. But even when he is invited to jump into a lap, he waits to be sure his presence isn't an intrusion. He is the gentlest of creatures.

Life could have been so different for him if he hadn't found Lori. Of course, Lori thinks she found him when she spied him in the cardboard box of free kittens. He was the runt of the litter. His fur was absolutely totally and completely unruly, sticking out in every possible direction, making him look more like Gizmo from the movie The Gremlins than a kitten. Lori's family had just lost a cat so her eyes locked onto Velveteen Kitty's eyes and it was destiny that he should go home with her.

He was so small then. But now his body has grown into the mass of fur that surrounded his kitten body, giving him an almost regal look. The thick fur poses challenges. Between the hairs he shed and the hair balls he coughed up, Lori had had enough. She took Velveteen Kitty to be groomed. He gets a lion cut so that his head and tail retain evidence of the thickness of his fur while the rest of his body is as smooth and soft as velveteen. Velveteen Kitty does have one drawback: he drools. When he has finally been convinced to sit in my lap, his head goes under my hand wherever it is - on the keyboard of the laptop, on my book - and while he gets my attention, he drools. But I don't mind.

Mas

Velveteen Kitty shares his human home with a few other animals. There is Lily, the almost entirely orange tabby who seems to forget who Velveteen Kitty is for a few days after he gets his new lion cut. During those days, Lily hisses and spits at Velveteen Kitty, giving the impression that she is pretty tough. But in fact, Lily runs at the sight of her own shadow and hides in back rooms when the house has more people in it than she is prepared to share it with.

There are also the two dogs, Max and Kirby, each one barely Velveteen Kitty's size. The dogs ignore both cats most of the time, concentrating all their energy on making sure the joggers, walkers, dog-walkers, runners, and occasional drivers who make their way down the street in front of Lori's house keep away. Their barks are ferocious, although their size makes it easy to overlook them, especially during the winter when they blend into the snow that covers the yard.

Day 121 - Minnesota Nice or How North Dakota of You

image by J. Stephen Conn, via Flickr

I have been in my hometown for nearly two weeks and I keep being reminded of what a wonderful place it is, setting the matter of the weather aside. I spent so many years of my life trying to figure out how to get out, probably because I didn't realize what I would be missing or how much less of the wonderful stuff I would find elsewhere. Here are some examples.

On Sunday when my sister, brother, sister-in-law and I were at a local restaurant for dinner, a young woman came to our table as she was leaving and asked if we could use a coupon for 20% off our bill. It was only good through that day. My initial thought was cynical. What was she getting out of it, I thought. So my first response was that we had already received our bill so I couldn't use the coupon. My sister pointed out that I could use the coupon at the cash register, so we accepted it. And sure enough, the coupon knocked one whole meal's cost off the bill. That's Minnesota nice.

The other day, I went to a McDonald's restaurant and found the door locked when I got there. I thought that was curious, so I walked over to one of the windows to peer in to see if it was closed. Within seconds, one of the customers in the store had come to the door to open it for me. She said she also found the door locked when she arrived. It was a statement, not a complaint, and she smiled at me as she held the door open. That's also Minnesota nice.

image by J. Stephen Conn, via Flickr

I ordered a meal, but I wanted to substitute a strawberry lemonade for the drink. What I got was both the strawberry lemonade and a glass for a beverage. I thought about filling the glass with a soft drink to take home with me, but then I drank a large sip of the lemonade and got the worst case of brain freeze ever. My head hurt. My nose hurt. My eyes hurt. My eyes watered. My throat hurt. My heart started pounding. All I wanted to do was lie down until it went away. All I could do was put my head in my hands and wait for it to go away. At that point I didn't want anything more to drink so I picked up my tray and the rest of my lemonade and headed toward the refuse bin to toss the wrappers, leaving the empty cup behind on the table. The woman at the table next to me ran after me to give me back my empty cup. That's Minnesota nice.

Today I went to a local pharmacy to print off some photos. The sign at the photo station instructed me to go to the next register. But the next register was empty and had a sign saying to ring the bell for help. A woman was standing there, having rung the bell at least twice already. When no one appeared, she turned to me with a smile and said we could just as well take our things and leave. But she didn't mean it, of course. Instead, she rang the bell again and waited until one of the clerks finally arrived. How North Dakota of her.

On reflection, I now realize that by leaving this area, I had expected to find the wonder of big cities and exotic places along with that Minnesota Nice attitude. People here are generally trustworthy which means it is safe to assume someone is telling the truth until proven otherwise. In so much of the rest of the world, the opposite is the only safe assumption. While I can't imagine my life turning out any way other than the way it has done so far, I am very happy to have started out here, with the safety and security of trustworthy people around me, with policemen who really do serve the public, and counselors who counsel instead of taking advantage of those in their care.

Day 118 - The Flood

rising Red River of the North, April 2013

In the spring of 1997, the Fargo-Moorhead area experienced what was described as a 500-year flood, based on the historical likelihood that a flood would only reach that height once in 500 years. The Red River of the North flooded to such a height that entire cities along its borders had to be evacuated. More than 50,000 people in Grand Forks, ND, East Grand Forks, MN and the area around them were evacuated as both cities we nearly completely inundated. In addition, a fire broke out downtown Grand Forks that destroyed eleven buildings and 60 apartment units.During that time, people all over the state of North Dakota and the northern half of Minnesota opened their homes to those who were evacuated.

TV crews from CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, convened on Fargo and Moorhead and broadcast the events. One of my favorite radio stories about that event was an interview by a reporter from one of the big news outlets who asked a woman from one of those towns who sheltered evacuees why she was willing to invite strangers into her home. Her response, after a significant pause, "You're not from around here, are you?"

The cities of Grand Forks and East Grand Forks have been rebuilt since the flood. Flood control measures including construction of dikes to hold the waters within the river's banks are in place.

river side of the dike on Rivershore Drive,
April 2013

Since 1997, there have been two more floods referred to as 100-year floods.  In 2009, the home of my brother, Brian, and his wife, Lori, was in the path of the first of those 100-year floods.  For three weeks, schools were closed, neighborhoods were cut off from the rest of the town, and my brother and his neighbors, with a lot of help from volunteers, placed sandbags around their homes, barricading them on an island formed by the sandbags. They moved everything from their basement to the main floor - beds, sofas, washing machine and dryer, clothes from closets, boxes, bookshelves and books. 

My brother and his family had lived in their house since 2004, but they hadn't met many of their neighbors. As the river threatened to rise, one of those neighbors, one who had just recently moved into the neighborhood, came to the door to ask Brian to join him and the neighbors who lived between them to sandbag the houses as one island instead of placing separate barriers around each house. Brian didn't immediately agree to help out, leaving the neighbors uncertain that they had convinced him. The next morning, however, they found Brian outside already beginning the wall of sandbags to separate their homes from the river. For two weeks, until the river crested, they worked in shifts to make sure that the pumps in place to remove any water that broke through the sandbags was pumped back over the wall and back into the river. For another week, their homes were cut off from the rest of the city until the city removed the sandbags and the temporary dirt and clay dike down the center of the street.

Brian taped the words Thank you backwards on the windows of his living room to let all those who helped know how they felt.

Red River above flood stage, April 2013

The following year, 2010, a second 100-year flood struck along the Red River. This time, the city of Moorhead began early enough to erect dirt and clay dikes along the edge of the river so that my brother and his neighbors did not have to sandbag their homes. That October, my brother passed away seven weeks after having been diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. After his funeral, many of us gathered at his house where we continued to reminisce with my brother's friends out on the driveway and yard where those sandbags were placed in April and May the year before. At the end of that day, my beautiful sister-in-law and my brother's wife Lori gave several of us a hug and said a most remarkable thing: Thank God for the flood. She knew that she wouldn't have gotten to know the neighbors without it.

Street side of the dike on Rivershore Drive,
April 2013

Following the 2010 flood, Moorhead bought out the houses closest to the river and erected a permanent dike to protect the rest of the city. My brother's neighbors across the street were among those who sold their homes and moved. The remaining neighbors have continued to provide Lori help with broken garage door openers and other maintenance challenges.

This year, the river crest is predicted for Thursday, May 2, at 37 feet. The gates at the dike at the end of the street where Lori's house is were closed this morning, providing protection up to 42 feet. Even the neighbor across the street who chose not to sell his home is doing nothing to protect his home this year as his house is safe so long as the river does not exceed 40 feet.

Floods and silver linings. Remarkable people.

Day 86 - Lessons From Church

Messiah Lutheran Church and Preschool
image by Dick Kruse

I am not sure children learn what their parents bring them to church to learn. I think parents expect children will learn about the wonder of the story of Jesus' birth, of the miracles performed by Jesus, of his death on the cross to take away our sins. And while I remember those stories, I also recall not having had enough life experience to know what wonder was. Every day someone - Mom, Dad, teachers, Grandmas - every day someone told me stories that were full of fantasy, of wonder. They were fairy tales, myths, story book tales. I could not distinguish between the truth of Bible stories and the fantasy in fairy tales.

The Christmas story is a good example of how I heard the words without understanding their significance. There were so many new words. Words like "manger." The only context I ever heard that word in was the Christmas story. Jesus was born in a stable and was wrapped in swaddling clothes and put into a manger. I had never heard anything else referred to a a stable, although I knew what a barn was. I didn't know what swaddling clothes were, although I knew what a receiving blanket was. And I had no idea what a manger was. I am sure a Sunday School teacher explained that a stable was like a small barn and a manger was like the feeding trough. But by then, I was so used to the story that the wonder of the details no longer conjured up any wonder. They were already routine.

I didn't undertand the symbolism of Jesus as the Good Shepherd until I lived in Romania where I saw shepherds living among their sheep for weeks or months at a time. It really hit home when we drove around a curve on a highway in Transylvania and had to come to a quick stop because a truck had collided with a flock of sheep that were crossing the road. There were dead sheep all across the road. And the shepherd was sitting on the slope of the hill on the side of the highway, his head hung down in his hands, crying.

There are other lessons from going to church that I didn't realize until I returned to being a regular church attender. There are four lessons in particular. I learned the value of ritual. I learned the beauty of poetry. I learned about new vocabulary and spelling and syllabification rules. And I learned how to read music.

First, rituals. Rituals permeate church services and the church year. The church calendar begins with Advent which begins in late November or early December. I know the timing of the celebration of Christmas is tied to the pagan traditions of the early church, not to the known or presumed time of year of Jesus' birth. I understand the reasons for observing Christian holidays during the time of pagan holidays was not an attempt to lure the pagans into Christianity; it was to maintain a low profile during the times when being known as a practicing Christian was dangerous. I find it uplifting that the church calendar provides a second opportunity in our twelve-month year to observe a new year, a rebirth, a renewal. And the fact that the new year of the church calendar coincides so closely to the beginning of the season of death - winter - makes the renewal all the more striking.

Rituals also provide something familiar to hold onto, or in my case to come back to. The music of the liturgy had changed a great deal in the nearly 30 years since I had previously attended church regularly. But the order of the service was the same, familiar, something that anchored me.

Second, poetry. All those hymns we sang during Sunday School and in the church service were poetry set to music. Many were translations from German, Luther's native language, which has a different normal word order than does English. In German, the verb is always second in a sentence, but if the verb is a compound verb, such as future or present perfect tenses, the helping verb is in second position with the rest of the verb forced to the end of the sentence. Sometimes the German word order is maintained in the translation, with the result illustrating poetic license. Most hymns rhyme, illustrating the usual form of poetry. Through hymns and the Psalms, and much of the prose in the church service liturgy, I learned there are other ways to use language to express ideas, although no one labeled going to church as a language lesson.

Third, vocabulary, spelling and syllabification rules. Because hymns are poetry in music format, nearly every hymn introduced new vocabulary, without a glossary at the back of the book to explain the meaning. I either had to ask what the words meant or figure it out from context. The words of the hymns appear under the musical staff in the hymnals. Words of more than one syllable are separated into syllables with hyphens between them. This separation of the syllables familiarized me with where words can be broken at the end of a line while writing. The separation into syllables also helped me recognize the many ways sounds in English are represented in letters. The word chorus for example begins with ch but those letters do not represent the same sound as they do at both the beginning and the end of the word church. Reading the words while singing requires my eyes and brain to look ahead of what I am singing in order to know just how to pronounce the next word. I learned to recognize the spelling and pronunciation rules through singing hymns, although no one labeled singing hymns as a vocabulary lesson.

And last, music. I know that the elementary school I attended had one of the most dedicated music teachers, Miss Ingram, who taught us more about music in six years than I think many of my contemporaries learned in 12. I did learn to read music in school, from Miss Ingram and from Mr. Pullicicchio (about whom my dad teased me by calling him Mr. Polly-chicken-toe), but every Sunday I got practical experience through singing the hymns and liturgy. In school, the music we read when we sang was just one melody, just one set of notes on a single musical staff. But in church, the hymns were printed with several lines of melody on two staffs, the treble and bass staffs. So while I could only sing one line of the melody, the soprano melody, I learned to recognize the harmonies corresponding to the alto, tenor and bass parts as well. In church I learned ways to use music to express ideas, although no one labeled going to church as a music lesson.

I enjoyed excellent schools and exceptional teachers in my first 18 years of living. But on my return to regular church going, I came to believe that attending church and Sunday School reinforced what I learned at school, giving me an advantage over my classmates who did not attend church regularly. Lessons in school, practiced in church.

And there are also all the lessons in morality, in ethics, in citizenship, in respecting others that were learned primarily in church. Lessons in church, practiced in school.

Everything is in balance.