shoutforjoy.us

Scott

Scott was a good friend of mine in junior high. He was on the ski jump team. At Theodore Wirth Park, there was a huge, wooden ski jump. Next to it, was a smaller jump built into the hill. Scott would be there, training with his jumping skis. I would be skiing on the downhill slopes on the park board slopes on the Saturdays I couldn’t get away to Wisconsin, or after school. One Saturday, Scott found me and let me use his jumping skis on the smaller jump. What a thrill! He tried to coax me to go off the big, wooden jump. I knew I didn’t dare. The likelihood would be I would jump off the wrong side of it. Another Saturday morning, Scott finished with his jumping practice. He had forgotten to bring his downhill skis and didn’t have a ride home until later. He found me and persuaded me to share my skis. He let me use both my poles. He just used a single downhill ski. He taught me how to ski downhill on one ski! That was a useful skill. The rope tows were a little tricky. I would end up slowly wilting to one side and pull all of the other passengers on the line down with me into the snow.

Scott was a beautiful boy, and charming. He had a fort he had built behind his house. In the summer after 8th grade, guys and girls would hang out at his house. Couples would use his fort to make love. I was not aware of this until my girlfriend told me it was “our turn”. I declined. I was caught completely off guard. That ended my relationship with that redhead. That was OK. I am so glad I waited until marriage.

During junior high and into high school, Scott was one of those who called me on a few occasions contemplating suicide. My sister, Sue Ann, and I, it seems, were known as the suicide counselors for our junior high. How that came to be is anybody’s guess. All I know is that Scott and I spent time talking, listening, crying, laughing, renewing a reason to live.

We went to different high schools. The night in 1972 in our junior year when Scott killed himself, he did not call me. It still hurts. Scott was the fourth of my friends to commit suicide.

(You may purchase this painting on my art sale site: www.shoutforjoy.net )

More than Pearl Harbor Day

As I start to write this, it is the 76th anniversary of the Japanese bombing of the US Navy base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941. This was the provocation that galvanized the US public to get behind World War II. My parents remembered where they were when they got the news, just as everyone in my generation can recount where they were when they learned that JFK was shot, and the next generation knows when the Challenger blew up, and so on, until the post-modern world is ensnared together by a single polarizing event on 9-11.

December 7th is more complicated in our family than Pearl Harbor Day, however. Ironically, it became the day I learned to bake Christmas cookies. You see we had to, because my mom’s mom died, and she was too sad to make the krumkake, rosettes, spritz, jam thumb prints and bourbon balls. I was 12. My sister, Sue Ann, was 14. We were not going to have a cookie-less Christmas. Grandma Ingham had died in the wee hours of the morning. My older brother had driven (since he was sober) to the nursing home with my dad. She had been in physical therapy for a broken shoulder. The therapist didn’t heed her cries of pain, and forced it, and broke her spine. It was gruesome.

Sue Ann and I just took over the kitchen, read the recipes, baked cookies for four days. Tom, Alison and Dad were taking care of the details that needed taking care of; talking to relatives and friends, etc. Mom just shut down. She looked more like her mom than ever I had seen her. Her mother suffered from chronic depression and alcoholism. We didn’t have a single picture of her without a look of sadness in her eyes. Now that same look was in my mom’s eyes. It stayed there almost uninterrupted for at least two years.

All of the cookies turned out well, except the spritz I made. The dough was so hard I nearly broke the spritz press forcing the dough out of it onto the cookie trays. I had added green food coloring to make them festive. When they came out of the oven they had not spread and were a bit scorched. Most of them were now green and brown. We put them in a box and added them to the assortment when we put plates of cookies out. Everyone complimented us on our baking. Nobody broke any teeth on the spritz, thankfully.

We went through the visitations and funeral at the funeral home. The younger cousins learned from the two oldest cousins, my brother Tom and cousin Deb, that our grandpa had had another wife between our grandmother, Jane, and our step-grandmother, Wathena (whom we all called “Aunt Wathena”). They were only married for about two years. She wanted to move to California. Cranford just couldn’t do that, so they divorced. I didn’t cry over Grandma Ingham’s death until Christmas Day, when the maple rocking chair where she always sat when she came to our house was empty. One of the afghans she had made was draped over its back. (I cry and sob whenever I read this sentence to this day.)

On December 7, 1978, our second daughter, Rosalie, was born, at home, during a blizzard. The midwife was the ever vivacious, traditionally built Sandy Perkins. She arrived at our front door in East Greenville, PA, and immediately asked if I had water boiling. I replied, “What for? That’s just what they assign men to do to get them out of the way.” In her best black mama voice she said, “You mean to tell me you just made me drive over 45 minutes in a snowstorm, and you don’t even have my coffee ready!” Rosalie was born in our bedroom without complications. Sandy weighed her by hooking a blanket to a fish scale forming a sling and placing Rosalie in it and holding it up.

In late November, 2000, my sister, Sue Ann died. She was 47. It took my older sister, Ali, and me a month and a half of research to uncover the fact that she had committed suicide. Our dad wanted to keep that hidden. I flew out to Minnesota for the funeral. On the morning of the day of Sue Ann’s funeral, I went into Minneapolis to visit Grama Ethel Haanpaa at the Lutheran Home, the high rise retirement community where she had lived for several years. Ethel was not our grandma by blood, but by adoption. She was actually Becky Shostrom’s grandma. I had been engaged to Becky when I was a senior in high school until finals week of my freshman year of college. That’s when she told me she had fallen in love with the bus driver on the spring break choir tour. Grama Ethel and her husband, Emil, kept inviting me to all of the special occasions at their chocolate brown house on 25-1/2 Avenue North. We had become good friends, along with Ethel’s first husband, Al Shostrom, and his girlfriend, Mamie. We were a strange lot. When Bethann and I got engaged, I introduced her to Ethel and Emil. Ethel welcomed Bethann to the family with open arms. Emil passed away shortly after we moved to PA in 1977. Ethel became another grandma to our four girls. We exchanged Christmas gifts and birthday cards, letters and phone calls and always visited her when we got back to Minnesota.

When I got to the Lutheran Home, I did not find Ethel in her apartment. I inquired at the desk and discovered that she was in the hospice care unit. I visited her and can remember our conversation like it was yesterday. She told me that she didn’t want to take the pain meds, because they made her befuddled. She was dying and didn’t see any point wasting what little time she had left being befuddled. She said she needed to settle her accounts and needed a clear head to do that. She then recounted to me what she considered to be her failings and sins. Now she had been a Baptist all her life. Baptists don’t do confession. But I heard hers. We cried together. I assured her that God loved her and she was forgiven for all her failings and regrets. At the time, I was an Orthodox Christian layperson. When I got home, I told my priest, Father Boniface, about how I had heard her confession and assured her of God’s forgiveness. He said, “You did good.” As I left to go to my sister’s funeral, I knew that this was the last time I would see dear, sweet Ethel. She would never bless my “pointed little head” again. In fact, that was the last conversation she had. She slipped into coma and passed away a few days later, on December 7, 2000, at age 92.

So I lost two grandmas on the same day, 23 years apart, and gained a daughter in between.

Best Use for Spaghetti Squash Yet

For years, I was subjected to the practice of using spaghetti squash as a substitute for spaghetti. I am not a fussy eater. I generally like everything. I would eat the spaghetti squash with the sauce, but it was always a slog, never a delight. Recently, we received a spaghetti squash from the local food bank. Bethann had found a recipe online for “Spaghetti Squash Fritters”. I made them the other night. It was a simple recipe, although the way it was written was confusing and needlessly specific. I mean, do I really need to be told what kind of salt to use, or what spice I want in my fritter? (“Sea salt and pepper”) Do I need to be told, down the author’s snoot, to use “ghee, real lard, or coconut oil”? For breakfast, this morning, I fried a slice of bacon and used the grease left in the cast iron skillet to fry my spaghetti squash pancakes.

I think not.

We are all mature enough to use gas stoves without adult supervision. We can make our own decisions as to which spices or cooking oils we prefer to use. This “recipe” is more of an idea than a true recipe; like an omelet or scrambled eggs. I have tried a few variations with that single squash. I am sure there are dozens and dozens more. Here goes.

(I’m writing the instructions for rank beginners.)

Cut the squash in half. Scoop out the seeds and discard.
Place the halves face down in a shallow baking pan, in a half inch of water and bake at 350° F until fork tender. (approximately one hour)
Use a Tablespoon to scrape out the meat of the squash. It will come out in strands. Have about a quart sized bowl ready for this.
For each small batch of Fritters or Pancakes, you will need 1 cup of un-squeezed squash, so measure and divide it into 1 cup bowls or cups.
Squeeze each of these down, draining the excess liquid out. This will reduce the volume to about half.
Set aside all but one of the portions. You can put them in containers and refrigerate them or freeze them for later use.
In a bowl, add 2 eggs to the squash, along with your spice of choice.
I have used Curry, Ginger, Parsley, Pepper and Turmeric for a dinner side dish.
I have used Lawry’s Seasoned Salt and Italian Seasoning for a lunch entree’.
I have used an additional egg, 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg and 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon and served with a little genuine maple syrup for gluten free, high fiber pancakes.
Mix together with a fork.
Use oil of your choice. Fry in skillet until brown.

First Haircut & Robin Center

Mrs. Pool lived next door (on the back door side). All of us kids called her Aunt Helen. Her husband, at least I think he was her husband, who had very little hair, gave me my first haircut in a little shop in the back of the house. I’m not sure of the relationship. I didn’t like him. I am told that I cried and screamed when he cut my hair. He didn’t seem to be around much. It wasn’t a regular barber shop. He was very quiet, unlike any other barber I’ve met since. Aunt Helen’s house was the one house in the neighborhood that was the typical cottage style, with a white picket fence. She baked cookies for the kids, too. It was a little creepy for a lot of the kids. I liked Mr. Kuperman much better. He had the shop in Robin Center. We could walk down there. It was only a block and a half away. He would always wink at my mom and give me the quarter change from the haircut, if I “was a good boy.” He was Jewish and had escaped from a concentration camp in Germany. He talked with a Yiddish accent, I ended up going to kindergarten and all through school with his nieces and my older sister was in his son’s class. I think his son and my sister ended up practicing medicine in the same hospital for awhile.

Robin Center was built in 1955, the same year I was born, the crest of the Baby Boom. The land it was built on had been turned over to the state as useless swamp land by someone who was fed up with paying city taxes on unbuildable land after the town had encroached on what had been a rural area prior to WW2. An enterprising citizen of Robbinsdale redeemed it from the government; then shipped in fill. At some places the swamp was forty feet deep. The shopping center had to be built on pylons. It has stood the test of time. It has had two face-lifts, one in the 1980s and one at the turn of the millennium. At this writing, it is still prospering.

Mr. Kuperman’s shop, the Mother Goose Stride Rite shoe store and the Fanny Farmer candy shop were all in a row there. A giant goose in the middle of the shoe store would dispense a genuine, 1921 or 1922 silver dollar each time we bought a pair of shoes. I was born with malformed joints in my ankles, knees and hips. Until I was three, I had to wear braces on my legs and feet when I slept. Whenever it was time for me to get shoes, there was only one choice for me to make: brown or black. They were always corrective wingtips. I couldn’t wear them home, because the special heels had to be installed. For all the good they did! I spent my entire childhood with bloody ankles because of those shoes! I remember the feeling of jubilation of successfully rounding the landing going up the stairs in the house on Shoreline Drive, only to have my face firmly hit the top step as my right toe predictably hooked my left ankle.

More than three decades later, October 1993, in a follow up visit with an orthopod after my acetabulum had been shattered and my ilium fractured in a motorcycle accident, the doctor asked me if I could walk. I told him that I had walked into his office, so, yes. He was looking at my hip X-rays and told me that this was impossible. He had been practicing his specialty for over 40 years and had never seen anything like this. I told him that it was rather difficult for the first three weeks after the truck hit me, but I was OK now. He said, “No, I’m looking at your good hip. You should not be able to walk!” I told him that I have congenital hip. He said that he knows congenital hip, and that there is no way I should be able to walk with these hips. This is not that. “Are you sure you can walk?” I told him that I used to run cross country. He looked at the X-rays again and just shook his head and said that it was “weird” and asserted again that with my hips, it should be physically impossible for me to walk. That’s how I received a professional evaluation that I am weird to the bone.

Revisiting that first haircut, many children have traumatic reactions to the first clipping of their hair. Tonsuring in the taking of monastic or priestly vows in various religious traditions is rooted in this primal, childhood reaction to this. The first haircut signifies the infant’s entrance into the community. All transitions have their measure of stress or trauma. There was always a small clipping of hair, or tonsure, at infant baptism in the ancient church, and to this day in the Orthodox Church. Growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, hair, length of hair, hair styles, were all a big deal, and focus for fashion, discussion, and even conflict.

In Minnesota, it was against the law for women’s beauty shops to cut and style men’s hair or for barber shops to cut and style women’s hair. I knew this, because my mom told me about her beautician’s (who was a gay man) after hours business for gays, transvestites, etc. My parents were very active in the Republican Party. They had met in law school. They had no fear or problem with homosexuals. They would have defended this man had he ever gotten in trouble for his practice. I ended up disagreeing with almost all of their political views, but I am indebted to them for my basic sense of justice and the respect of true equality of all regardless of race, gender, mental ability, nationality, birth status, or age. They taught us very clearly that no human is illegitimate! Our next-door neighbors, who had escaped Auschwitz, were shining, ever present examples to never let anyone tell you that anyone else is sub-human!

How’d we get from haircuts to here? This is how this memoir will go, I’m afraid. I am in tears and catching my breath.

Why write?

For years, in all sorts of conversations, all sorts of people told me I should write my life story in a book. Perhaps they were suggesting this because a book silently sits on a shelf and gathers dust. It is much easier to ignore than a living, breathing, speaking, shameless agitator. I have read a few memoirs, many biographies, and several autobiographies. Not all of them were by famous people. Several of them became famous after their memoirs became bestsellers. I don’t hold any illusions of grandeur on that account. I’m not from the right demographic. I was born at the peak of the baby boom, in a lily white suburb in middle America to parents who met in law school, the youngest of four children: two girls, two boys, evenly spaced, two years apart each, boy, girl, girl, boy.

My folks came from very different backgrounds. My mom grew up in a small town in Wisconsin until she was about eight, when they moved to Edina, the new, rich suburb of Minneapolis. They had live-in maids and nannies all through the Great Depression. Her father, my first namesake, Cranford Williams Ingham, was an executive with State Farm Insurance. Cran considered himself to be a very proper man. He smoked a pipe, was Episcopalian; to say he was thrifty would be a major understatement. He couldn’t bear to watch or listen to children eat, so he made my mom and her younger brother, my uncle Pete (Cranford Arthur Ingham) stay in the kitchen with the help to eat. They received quite an education on the ways of the world from the help. By the time I was born in June of 1955, Cran had married his third wife, Wathena Meyers Ingham, whom we all called “Aunt Wathena”. She had been one of my dad’s legal secretaries and my folks set her up on a blind date with grandpa, and they got married within the year, and it lasted until they died, he in 1977, she a couple of decades later. Aunt Wathena became my godmother at my infant baptism in the Episcopal Church.

Cran divorced my grandma, Jane Edith LeMay Ingham. She suffered depression and was alcoholic. Of course, Cran was also alcoholic, but he was higher functioning. Jane’s mother was a nasty woman who destroyed both of her daughter’s marriages and lives by never accepting their husbands and always saying terrible things about them and setting up impossible situations, etc. It was so bad that before my older brother was born, my mom told our great-grandmother that we would never know that she was related to us. She had ruined her daughters’ lives and damaged her grandchildren’s lives. She was not going to have a shot at another generation. My mom was good to her word. As it turned out, we did meet her once without knowing who she was. We did not find out that we had a living great-grandmother until we went to her funeral in Menomenie, WI, in 1969. It turns out, she had outlived both of her daughters, so it fell to my mom to make the arrangements. We stopped by the funeral home on our way out to Ohio to visit my dad’s mom. The place was empty for the visitation. I wandered into another room. It was set up with an old man half sitting up in an open casket for a viewing. That was the first time I saw a corpse. I hung out alone there with him until it was time to go. It was more comfortable than with my family and the closed casket in the next room.

We proceeded from there to Racine, WI, to pick up my dad’s older sister, Aunt Betty Lund. We continued on to Youngstown, Ohio, to visit my dad’s mother, Mae Wise Coulter, in a convalescent home. She would come home again, once after that to her house that she shared with her longtime boarder and housemate, Aunt Phoebe. Mae was Holiness Methodist, but not fanatical about it. She was a practical woman. Her husband, my second namesake, Joseph “Freeman” Coulter, was an atheist, or as they called them back then a “free thinker”. No one called him by his name. they called him Free or Freeman. He was an auto mechanic. He loved his work. He liked his drink. He worked hard. He made decent money all during the Depression. He managed the business and brought the profit home for Mae to manage. Mae gardened and had a little Upjohn business on the side as well. During the Depression, Mae was always sending one or another of the four children out the door with meals and sacks of produce, sometimes with envelopes of cash included to various neighbors who had fallen on hard times. At any given time, they were supporting two or three other families. They were wearing threadbare clothes and going with very little to do it. Free was happy working. As long as dinner was on the table; his work uniform was laundered; his lunches were packed and he had a bit for the pub on Friday night, he was happy as a clam. Times were tough on everyone. From the stories my dad, his sisters and brother told, I think the Great Depression were the happiest times there were in America! And they seemed to be much happier for those who were sharing than for those who were not.

So, why write? After 30 years of working as a Christian minister, I have abandoned that faith and now view the world more similarly to my father, who described himself as a “Buddhist atheist.” Unlike my father, I am a communist, not a Republican. I have come to regret raising our four daughters in the naive faith in Christian mutual care. It just plain does not exist. As soon as charity has the name of a faith attached to it, it ceases to be charity, and it has become bait for a con. All during my years of ministry, I refused to approach it this way. For that stance, I was abused and bullied by Christian clergy of every stripe. One Mennonite pastor even threatened to kill me. So I write my story as a cautionary tale.

The stories families tell shape the lives of the people raised in those families. Some of the stories are true.

Chicken a l’Orange with Quinoa

This is a simple, economical, nutritious recipe that I whipped up because we didn’t have any brown rice; quinoa is too blah to just dump mushroom soup on; so I looked in the refrigerator for alternatives. It turned out to be a refreshing change of pace. It is simple to throw together. Here goes!

Ingredients:

3 or 4 Chicken Legs (Breasts would work just as well, if you prefer white meat)
1 cup Quinoa
~3 T Avocado Oil
1 Tablespoon Cinnamon
2 cups water
3 Oranges

In a medium sauce pan, toast the Quinoa in the Avocado Oil until aromatic, then add water, juice of one orange, and 1/2 Tablespoon Cinnamon and boil for at least five minutes, stirring often. Cover and turn off heat. Peel and segment two remaining oranges. Spread the Quinoa in a 10″ x 13″ baking pan. Lay the chicken pieces on top. Slice lengthwise and butterfly spread each segment of the oranges and place them on top of the chicken and the quinoa. Sprinkle remaining Cinnamon over the chicken. Add a few ounces of water to the pan. Bake at 375ᵒ for about an hour, until the internal temperature of the chicken is at least 165ᵒ.

Serve it with a green vegetable of your choice or a salad, and you have a balanced meal. We had Brussels sprouts.

Poof da boona!

Ginger, Artichoke, Pepper, Pumpkin Soup!

Last Spring I was at the Perelman Center at Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania for some tests and orientation prior to my open heart surgery. I found this wonderful ginger, artichoke and carrot soup at the little lunch bar off the lobby. It was one of a couple of dozen choices. I spoke with the chef who made it and gave him my compliments. Today was my second attempt to produce something similar. My first attempt was a complete failure. It was totally overpowered by the ginger. Today, I needed to make lunch and we didn’t have any meat to speak of. We will be feasting tomorrow. I have lots of pumpkin that I froze last month, so this seemed like a simple, healthy meal for the eve of the feast.

Ingredients:

1 quart processed Pumpkin
3 cups Water
2 Carrots
~ 1-1/2″ fresh Ginger, peeled
2-6 oz. jars Cento quartered, marinated Artichoke Hearts (Cento has 4% DV sodium compared to 18% for most other brands.)
2 green bell Peppers
2 cloves Garlic
1/2 teaspoon Nutmeg
6 grinds Black Pepper
1/4 cup Olive Oil

Directions:

Thaw the pumpkin ahead of time. Pour it into a medium sauce pan. Start heating on low heat. Stir frequently. Rinse out the remaining pumpkin with the water into Ninja blender. Add the Carrots, Ginger, undrained Artichoke Hearts and Green Peppers. Pureé this mixture thoroughly, then add it to the saucepan. Press the Garlic onto a cutting board and let it sit for 15 minutes before adding it to the saucepan. Have a larger pan with water in it to set the saucepan in, to form a double-boiler. Stack them and use it like a double boiler to avoid scorching the soup. Add the Nutmeg, Black Pepper and Olive Oil. Let the soup heat for an hour or more. 6 to 8 tasty servings. It needs no salt.

Preparing to Confront Fascism

Stay ready or get ready, think things through, act accordingly. This piece by Yale historian and Holocaust expert Timothy Snyder is making the rounds on Facebook. I would amend or supplement his reading list but his points are well-taken:

“Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so.”

Snyder is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (which includes former Secretaries of State), and consults on political situations around the globe. He says, “Here are twenty lessons from the twentieth century, adapted to the circumstances of today.

1. DO NOT OBEY IN ADVANCE. Much of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then start to do it without being asked. You’ve already done this, haven’t you? Stop. Anticipatory obedience teaches authorities what is possible and accelerates unfreedom.

2. DEFEND AN INSTITUTION. Follow the courts or the media, or a court or a newspaper. Do not speak of “our institutions” unless you are making them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions don’t protect themselves. They go down like dominoes unless each is defended from the beginning.

3. RECALL PROFESSIONAL ETHICS. When the leaders of state set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become much more important. It is hard to break a rule-of-law state without lawyers, and it is hard to have show trials without judges.

4. WHEN LISTENING TO POLITICIANS, DISTINGUISH CERTAIN WORDS. Look out for the expansive use of “terrorism” and “extremism.” Be alive to the fatal notions of “exception” and “emergency.” Be angry about the treacherous use of patriotic vocabulary.

5. BE CALM WHEN THE UNTHINKABLE ARRIVES. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that all authoritarians at all times either await or plan such events in order to consolidate power. Think of the Reichstag fire. The sudden disaster that requires the end of the balance of power, the end of opposition parties, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Don’t fall for it.

6. BE KIND TO OUR LANGUAGE. Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that thing you think everyone is saying. (Don’t use the internet before bed. Charge your gadgets away from your bedroom, and read.) What to read? Perhaps “The Power of the Powerless” by Václav Havel, 1984 by George Orwell, The Captive Mind by Czesław Milosz, The Rebel by Albert Camus, The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt, or Nothing is True and Everything is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev.

7. STAND OUT. Someone has to. It is easy, in words and deeds, to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. And the moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow.

8. BELIEVE IN TRUTH. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.

9. INVESTIGATE. Figure things out for yourself. Spend more time with long articles. Subsidize investigative journalism by subscribing to print media. Realize that some of what is on your screen is there to harm you. Bookmark PropOrNot or other sites that investigate foreign propaganda pushes.

10. PRACTICE CORPOREAL POLITICS. Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on the screen. Get outside. Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people. Make new friends and march with them.

11. MAKE EYE CONTACT AND SMALL TALK. This is not just polite. It is a way to stay in touch with your surroundings, break down unnecessary social barriers, and come to understand whom you should and should not trust. If we enter a culture of denunciation, you will want to know the psychological landscape of your daily life.

12. TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE FACE OF THE WORLD. Notice the swastikas and the other signs of hate. Do not look away and do not get used to them. Remove them yourself and set an example for others to do so.

13. HINDER THE ONE-PARTY STATE. The parties that took over states were once something else. They exploited a historical moment to make political life impossible for their rivals. Vote in local and state elections while you can.

14. GIVE REGULARLY TO GOOD CAUSES, IF YOU CAN. Pick a charity and set up autopay. Then you will know that you have made a free choice that is supporting civil society helping others doing something good.

15. ESTABLISH A PRIVATE LIFE. Nastier rulers will use what they know about you to push you around. Scrub your computer of malware. Remember that email is skywriting. Consider using alternative forms of the internet, or simply using it less. Have personal exchanges in person. For the same reason, resolve any legal trouble. Authoritarianism works as a blackmail state, looking for the hook on which to hang you. Try not to have too many hooks.

16. LEARN FROM OTHERS IN OTHER COUNTRIES. Keep up your friendships abroad, or make new friends abroad. The present difficulties here are an element of a general trend. And no country is going to find a solution by itself. Make sure you and your family have passports.

17. WATCH OUT FOR THE PARAMILITARIES. When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching around with torches and pictures of a Leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-Leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the game is over.

18. BE REFLECTIVE IF YOU MUST BE ARMED. If you carry a weapon in public service, God bless you and keep you. But know that evils of the past involved policemen and soldiers finding themselves, one day, doing irregular things. Be ready to say no. (If you do not know what this means, contact the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and ask about training in professional ethics.)

19. BE AS COURAGEOUS AS YOU CAN. If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die in unfreedom.

20. BE A PATRIOT. The incoming president is not. Set a good example of what America means for the generations to come. They will need it.

Monochromatic Hero and Suicide

On Sunday, I painted my first monochromatic painting. It is an 11″ x 14″ acrylic on stretched canvas of André Trocmé in burnt umber. He is one of my heroes. That turned out so well, I followed it on Monday with an 11″ x 14″ painting of Bobby Glaeser in phthalocyanine blue. Bob was a classmate and neighbor of mine growing up. In early December 1974, a year and a half after we had graduated high school, he killed his parents, his younger sister Ann, and himself, with a 12 gauge shotgun.

André Trocmé was a Huguenot pastor in southern France. Before and during the Nazi occupation of France, he led his city and the neighboring city and surrounding countryside to give refuge to Jews fleeing Hitler’s genocidal death camps. It started with the boarding school his church ran. He did not believe in discrimination, so the school accepted Jewish students, who wore the school uniforms and lived lives indistinguishable from the Christian students. It grew into families sheltering families. He trained them on how to blend in and how to respond to the authorities. They set up an underground railroad to help families escape from France to safety in non-Nazi occupied countries. No one in their network betrayed a refugee into Nazi captivity. His nephew’s class was raided, where he was teaching a few dozen Jewish children. The Nazis seized the children to take them to a camp. Trocmé’s nephew insisted on going with them, as their teacher. He died in the concentration camp. It is estimated that they saved over 3500 lives.

I read Pastor Trocmé’s story over 30 years ago. It was also made into a movie. As always, the book was better. He had corresponded with Dietrich Bonhoeffer and with Gandhi. He was a pacifist and had a strong ethical belief in honesty, charity and non-discrimination. He never made excuses for having to lie to the authorities. He felt that it was still sin, but to tell the truth would make him complicit in the deaths of fellow human beings, which would be a greater sin. He had been taught a hard lesson by his strict father, when he was a lad. He learned that it was not only right to do good; “it was essential to do the good on time!” It was his position that Hitler’s rule, the rise of the Nazis, and World War II was totally preventable, if only people of good conscience in Germany had done the good on time. Once he and his cohorts were in power, it was too late to stop him without doing evil and causing death and destruction. This is an important lesson and one that America needs to heed today.

We have both major parties putting forward the most despised presidential candidates in our history. Both are bigots. One is a capricious fool; the other is a shrewd politician committed to endless war. One would incarcerate Muslims and Latinos here; the other would (and already has) kill Muslims, Latinos and others overseas. They have 30% acceptance rating between them from the electorate. Yet people are deciding their votes on fear of one or the other, instead of doing the right thing and rejecting both.

It is time to do the good on time.

Bobby was a good friend in grade school and junior high. His family lived two blocks away from mine in Golden Valley, Minnesota. We would bicycle together, sled and skate together in the winter, and sometimes camp out in our backyards together in the summer. He was a beautiful boy! He was handsome, with thick, dark hair, athletic and smart. All the girls loved him. Most of the boys wanted to be him. He did not appreciate all the attention. He was shy and became more withdrawn in his junior and senior year in high school; to the point of not allowing any pictures of himself to appear in the yearbook. This painting is based on his two pictures in the 1971 Robin. The pose is from the soccer team’s group shot, but his eyes were closed, so I looked at his yearly picture for details of his face.

The last time I saw Bobby was in the spring of 1974. I was visiting a few of my friends at the University of Minnesota’s main campus. At that time Pioneer Hall was for both men and women; every other room for each gender. I greeted Bobby as he darted stark naked from the showers to his room. I was shocked at this, not because of modesty, but his apparent lack of it. He had changed, and changed radically. Early December, 1974, we heard the news that Bobby had shot and killed his father, his mother and his sister, Ann, then himself, with a 12 gauge shotgun in the middle of the night in their Golden Valley home. A neighbor discovered their bodies four days after when North Memorial Hospital called her to check on his father, because he had not showed up for his on call assignment. He was a doctor.

Bobby’s case was written up in a feature article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. He had suffered some sort of mental breakdown prior to this and had been in treatment. He left the treatment and had been alienated from his family. They reached out to him. He was home for dinner that night to discuss re-entering treatment as an inpatient. After they had all gone to bed, Bobby got his hunting gun and shot his parents and his younger sister while they lay in their beds. Then he shot himself.

The four of them had a joint memorial service at Valley of Peace Lutheran Church. Their were four, beautiful Christmas wreaths on stands in the front of the packed church. Pastor Stine gave this horrible message. He said, “Heaven is God’s gift to us at Christmastime. Bobby gave his family their Christmas gift early.”

I got up, then and there, and walked out of that church! What an ass! This was the same ignorant pastor who had kicked me out of confirmation class one month shy of completion for asking too many questions about heaven and hell, and how one gets to heaven, after my best friend, Steve Rainoff had died by falling through a skylight, chasing a soccer ball, in a locked school in New Jersey.

In the spring of 1975, the Mpls. paper had a feature article on Angel Dust. The authorities had just seen a rise in its use. The symptoms of its use and long-term effects sounded just like Bobby. I have always wondered if he could have been exposed to that, and that is what changed his personality so never know.

I painted his portrait in monochromatic phthalocyanine blue, from a happier time in his life. Bobby was a beautiful boy. He had all the advantages. That could have been me.

X

Many years ago, I wrote an article in The King’s Jubilee newsletter about the Autobiography of Malcolm X, in which I recommended that every white man in America should read it. I got some feedback on that! Of course, the negative feedback was all from people who were too narrow minded to read it. Several people said that “everyone should read it!” That missed my point. To overcome racism, it is important to gain understanding from other perspectives. Malcolm X became a hero of mine not because I agreed with everything he said or did, but because he had the courage to live a self-examined life in public. He was not so proud that he would not change his course when confronted with hard new truth.

I painted this with acrylics on 16″ x 20″ stretched canvas. It is available for sale at www.shoutforjoy.net