Greeds and Needs

I have been reminded again in the past week of both greeds and needs in our global society. While watching television late one night, I saw a spot discussing designer purses with the brand name of Mulberry in London with a price tag of between $42,000 and $50,000. According to the piece, the Mulberry is the latest "must have" bag for women of distinction.

On the other side of the coin, I was also thinking last week about the great sacrifices our pastors and missionaries make both in the United States and abroad. One of my former students from John Brown University dropped by our house for an overnight visit. She is now living in North Carolina but has been reared in Kenya in a missionary family since the age of seven. She turns twenty-one in a couple of weeks. While she was with us, she remarked that our house was "the nicest place I have ever stayed." I was a little bit shocked I have to say in my American middle class complacency. Later, as we went to a late lunch at Cheers, our local favorite neighborhood restaurant, she spoke of her life in Kenya and that she and her family did not have running water at their compound, which is located north in the country just south of Ethiopia and Sudan and west of Somalia. She and the three other siblings often had the responsibility to fill up their water containers from afar. Yes, they have their basic needs met of food, shelter, and clothing but certainly have lived for years in a country without the greeds that we have been so accustomed to in our part of the world.

Teej, as Julie's nickname goes, is now living in North Carolina, working at McDonalds, and saving her money so that she will not go into debt for the remainder of her undergraduate degree. She carries on a long distance relationship with a student she met at John Brown University. He is a native of Central America. Together they both long to go to Israel for missionary opportunities. Sponsoring mission organizations simply will not appoint new missionaries if they are in debt. Her grandfather, a pastor on a Cherokee reservation in Robbinsville, North Carolina, has also come from a long line of missionaries and pastors. It seems that several generations of the Teasdale family have given up their greeds in order to serve others.

Today, as I look at the dashiki Teej gave me two years ago after a trip with her fellow students through Arkansas, Tennessee, and Mississippi, I think once more of our great wealth here in America. Our retirement house is modest by most standards and unlike our "dream" home we still own in Siloam Springs with its custom-built features, wood floors, and large one and one-half acre wooded lot. The dashiki is a brightly colored tunic-style shirt that one wraps around her. It has colorful motifs and fringe around the neck and borders. The dashiki can be worn with brightly colored pants and a hat as an outfit. It has even gained popularity in America during the 1990s! Today I look at it and value it more dearly than a mere $42,000 Mulberry purse.

The Real Secret

Rhonda Byrne has recently published a book entitled The Secret that has become incredibly popular. She purports to share "the secret" with all those who read it. It is, of course, the secret to receiving vast amounts of wealth, health, and happiness. As I think about this topic, I also remember another popular bestseller within the Christian community a while back. It is The Prayer of Jabez by Bruce Wilkinson. Based upon a prayer in the Bible from I Chronicles, Chapter 4, it says this: "And Jabez called on the God of Israel saying, 'Oh, that You would bless me indeed, and enlarge my territory, that Your hand would be with me, and that You would keep me from evil, that I may not cause pain.' So God granted him what he requested." It seems that many of us are looking for a simple formula that will ensure us all the blessings possible. I believe this formula changes over time as we get older.

For our three year old grandson, Charlie, the formula for happiness comes through receiving toys that he doesn't have at the moment. For example, he has recently become a Star Wars aficionado. Since our move last year to Little Rock, I had saved a box of our son's action figures and fighter vehicles from 1977. I cleaned these up, after collecting dust for thirty years in our attic, and gave them to him. He was excited for about thirty seconds, and then his attention turned to the the color brochure I had also saved which listed all the action figures possible, as well as other toys in the series. He immediately decided that he needed a C3po and a land rover to make his happiness complete.

For our eight year old granddaughter, Caitlyn, the formula for happiness comes through having friends and thinking of ways she can help other people. I have really loved watching this new developmental change within her as she has turned recently from Charlie's formula to a new one for herself. Developmental psychologists tell us that age eight is the time to observe this shift from children's obsession with themselves more toward altruism. We are planning a short trip together during her spring break, and she is excited about choosing small presents for each of the seventeen cousins she will visit in Texas.

For Garlan and me in our thirties, the formula for happiness came from not only buying all the firsts we had never owned in college, i. e. two cars, house, furniture, and fold-out camper, to being successful in our respective careers as comptroller and secondary school teacher. We found somehow that happiness still eluded us, however, with the pressures of combining two careers with good parenting.

For us now in retirement, the formula for happiness centers on enjoyment of the leisure time we have together. We know these are precious moments and that we are approaching in a few years the biblical life span of "three score and twenty." If we are blessed by God to have more time, we hope to continue to travel to Seattle to see our grandson, Cole, and our daughter, Kimberly. We hope to continue small trips around the state of Arkansas with Caitlyn and Charlie, as we have in the last couple of weeks, to see the Old Mill in North Little Rock and to dig for diamonds at the Craters of Diamonds State Park. In short, happiness when one is in her sixties means family. That's the "real" secret.

Better Places

The announcement was buried, as they say, in today's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. It was on page 7B in the bottom left hand corner. It told of the Women's International Day to be held tomorrow in Little Rock to protest the war and to celebrate women's achievements. I wondered how, in the capitol city of Arkansas, the event could receive so little attention. Have we become so passe that neither war, nor a celebration of gender, can take us away from our own sacrifice for the war: rampant consumerism? Our men and women are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan while we buy gourmet dog snacks for our pets. I confess these two images are from a recent sermon by Dan, one of Trinity Cathedral's pastors.

I have never quite gotten myself to the point though where I can be a protester in public. I guess I dread being hauled away by the police and seeing the video later of myself being carried away by two big hulking representatives of the law. I have certainly had plenty of chances to become involved. After all, Garlan and I were students in college in the 1960's during Viet Nam, and I would have been much more unobtrusive then among thousands of people rather than now, with a mere 50 women in pink expected at tomorrow's event.

While I cannot protest with others, I will "take the easy way out" and offer a protest, not with pen and quill of the past, but with the computer keys:


Better Places

The Mantras

I. - Spring

Outside the fragrant breeze parted the curtains of the
miniature house into which it blew.
A man and his son silently watched as a pair of robins
repeatedly pecked the March grass beneath their beaks.
The television carried the Presidential speech:
“The world will be a better place;
It is better to fight them there than in the streets of America.”
The son rose, turned on the lamplight, and said,
“I must go.”

II. – Summer

He read his novel by the flickering lights on the army base.
Would he, like Tolstoy, also see a red flower blooming in the desert tomorrow,
or was that simply a romantic vision only?
He was about to extinguish his reading light when
The commander hurled himself into the barracks, barreling out his words:
“Soldiers, we leave the base at 0:500; I want you to know
Iraq is going to be a better place because you men of honor
have chosen to serve your country.”

III. – Fall

He slumped in his wheelchair as he tried to focus on the autumn trees
outside his window at Building 18.
The leaves dropped one at a time before his uncomprehending eyes.
He placed his hand upon the left side of his skull,
and felt the softness underneath his bandages.
“Don’t worry, soldier,” the attendant seemed to be moving his lips,
“We are going to move you to a better place soon.”

IV. – Winter
The barren landscape of the day surprised even the most hearty
of the farmers at the graveside service that day.
The father sat with the folded American flag in his lap,
running his fingers gently over the stars.
No bird sang; no leaf fell.
The people flowed past them
one by one, all repeating the same words,
“He is in a better place.”

The Fascination: "One Never Knows, Do One?"

For the past two weeks the media have been fascinated by Anna Nicole Smith's life and death. A couple of days ago Larry King interviewed Barbara Walters about her Oscar special on Sunday, the 25th. Barbara, with her usual elitist tone, haughtily said to Larry that The View would not spend any time on the subject, implying that the subject was not worthy of coverage (plus she was likely also miffed by thirty minutes of Larry's show being devoted to the latest developments in the Anna Nicole custody fight over her body). Later, however, Barbara admitted to covering the Britney Spears' story but justified it by essentially saying Britney was talented and Anna Nicole was not. Larry asked Barbara what the fascination was regarding these stories? No one seemed to have an answer.

I would like to weigh in, along with other journalists the next day or so, on the question: Why are we so fascinated by Anna's story? Perhaps musician Fats Connor gave the only true answer though when he said, "One never knows, do one?" We have already heard from psychologists a plethora of reasons including America's obsession with celebrity, weariness from watching the coverage of the Iraqi War, even more exhaustion from hearing about the spats between presidential contenders some two years before the election, and escape--induced from all the disaster specials (the latest was John Stossel's two hour coverage on 20/20 of fearful, hypothetical happenings in the future).

My thought about the fascination is that Anna was all of us. She was the mother who could shower us with love or withhold her blessings upon her whim; she was the ideal woman of beauty and figure (even with her weight gain, she endeared herself to us even more, representing a woman other than the slinky anorectic model; she must have been a terrific lover as evidenced from the loud weeping of her attorney/lover Howard K. Stern and her photographer lover Larry Birkhead; she overcame a background of poverty and lack of education to become a household word; she evidently treated her assistants well (Big Moe, the bodyguard, and Kim, the personal assistant) have defended her honor repeatedly; she was someone we knew from her reality show, full of foible yet very vulnerable and in obvious need of protection and intervention. In short, we liked her, just as we liked Marilyn Monroe in the past for all the same reasons. I am not sure we feel the same way about Britney, Nicole, Paris, and Lindsay.

Was Anna Nicole's life like a Shakespearean tragedy as the Florida judge suggested this week? I would conclude that the answer is yes. It could allegedly be a revenge tragedy where there is a death or murder that must be solved by the next of kin (Daniel's and now Anna's), at least one ghost (Daniel and now Anna), and a mad person (perhaps Anna or someone still to be revealed). Let us hope that the answers to the mysteries will come together in the next few weeks and that our fascination with Anna can be put to rest, as she is.

Slouching Towards Disaster

I was trying to get a break from all the disastrous news on television yesterday when I read an article in the new AARP magazine about Joan Didion. I was introduced to her work back in the early 1980's when I took a course in graduate school with John Clellon Holmes, a comrade of Ginsberg and Kerouac. At that time, the new rage in writing was beginning to be called "creative non-fiction." Didion's book Slouching Towards Bethlehem went on to become a modern day classic with its theme that the world is falling apart and that, basically, the center of it cannot hold any longer. Yet here we are, a number of years later, still predicting the same dire fate for us as a world community.

Just last night CNN on the Anderson Cooper show featured a short spot called "The Edge of Disaster." Instead of the usual question mark that all the cable news channels use these days, the title appeared to be simply a statement of fact. The viewer was treated to several possible hypothetical situations: perhaps a flood along the California coast, an explosion in Boston's harbor which would release poisonous gasses throughout the city, or even another gas attack on thousands of people in Philadelphia as they watched a Sunday afternoon ballgame. Has the world gone mad with its nightmarish suggestions?

I have been puzzled for a number of years on why educated people want to panic over what could possibly happen in the future. It was 1999 when I first started observing this phenomenon. Garlan and I had spent the fall in Alaska while I was on sabbatical from the small liberal arts university where I taught. As we began to sail south to Seattle on a weekend ferry, we began to hear more and more people talk about the computer Y2K meltdown ahead. We had done nothing to prepare our computers at home for such a disaster. Also, we noticed, and this was especially noticeable among our conservative Christian friends, that they were stashing away water and food for a six month period for the impending event. I am doubly perplexed by this behavior since both my friends (and, yes, even some of our close relatives) were prepared in this way. Do we not all believe that our lives are ordered by God? After all, we love the spiritual laws booklet in our faith that reminds us "God has a plan for your life" every time we open it.

I certainly do not want to be a "do nothing" person either and slouch my way, unconcerned, towards disaster. But then--I remember Dale Carnegie's book that is very dated now but still has some applicable advice it seems. He spoke these words: "Ninety percent of the things we tend to worry about we have no control over, ... It's the worry that gets you, not the lack of sleep." It seems to me that the answer to the dilemma is to be alert, to be prepared, and to trust. The rest is in His hands.

To Caitlyn With Love

With actor Ryan O'Neal's latest scuffle with his son Redman and his girlfriend, I have been thinking again of his famous line from the movie Love Story. Who can forget the weepy film starring O'Neal and Ali MacGraw, whose character is dying from leukemia? The line, "love means never having to say you're sorry" is repeated twice, once by MacGraw in the middle of the film and once by O'Neal as the last line. From 1970 on, the line has received a lot of ridicule, parody, and spoof with perhaps the most famous from John Lennon who said, "Love means having to say you're sorry every fifteen minutes." Today I'd like to revisit that line and argue that perhaps it does have true meaning.

I say this because of a recent babysitting adventure with our granddaughter Caitlyn and her brother Charlie. Caitlyn is eight years old, and Charlie is three. Pop B and I arrived at the house promptly at five so that the children's parents could go out to a nice restaurant and later to a play downtown in order to celebrate Valentine's Day. All went very well until bedtime at nine o'clock. Up until that time, Caitlyn and I had spent three hours playing Native Americans living in the nineteenth century in a tee pee. She was Speaking Rain, a little girl who was blinded when her parents were killed in a fire. I was Speaking Rain's adoptive mother. We stayed in character even as we ate two heart-shaped pizzas for dinner; Caitlyn called them bear meat and deer meat respectively. After playing, the children managed to get baths and hair shampoos, and later Caitlyn and I studied four lessons in her science book for an upcoming test the next day.

The trouble began, however, when I told Catilyn I needed to go upstairs to put her brother to bed. She began "pitching a fit" as we say in the South accompanied by a hard shove to her little brother's chest. For the next hour, she cried, screamed, jumped on her bed, and ran around the downstairs area. As she was finally wearing out around ten, I told her that if she wanted to say she was sorry the next day she could call me. I also told her about my first experience at saying I was sorry (at least without prompting by my mother).

I was also eight years old at the time. Mother typically sent Judy and me to Tutwiler in the Mississippi Delta for spring break so that she could get a spring break herself. One lovely warm afternoon, I remember sassing my grandmother Mam for some unexplained reason. Later, I began to feel guilty for the first time in my life. I remember distinctly going outside and seeing Mam hanging up clothes on the line outside the house. I stood beside her for a long time, saying nothing, until finally I finally did it; I said, "I'm sorry" in a tiny little whisper. She forgave me instantly, of course. But the reality of the situation is that I knew I was greatly loved by my grandmother and that nothing I could ever do or say could change that love; she loved me unconditionally. Therefore, doesn't true love really mean "never having to say you're sorry"?

Another possibility perhaps for the true meaning of the line is that, if one passionately loves another, as the O'Neal and MacGraw characters did, does he or she ever regret that decision to love in spite of illness, impending death, or whatever threat might be lurking?

All of this musing has led me to wonder when the awakening of a soul takes place? Theologians are adamant that it is early and, therefore, it is essential to train children early to be aware of God's spirit speaking within them. I tend to agree, though it has been two days, and Caitlyn still hasn't called.

The Happiness Scale

My daughter and I have always had this question to ask one another every time we get together. It is the "Where are you now on the happiness scale?" The answer must always be between 1 and 10 with 10 being the highest possible. I surprised her recently by telling her I was an eight: I called even to let her know that my number had recently risen. She has been a nine for the past few years; that relates, I believe, to becoming a mother two years ago, having a fulfilling career that she loves, and being in a solid love relationship for the past twelve years.

Even though I usually have a somewhat optimistic personality, I have found myself in recent years falling to about a five or a six due to circumstances. These circumstances have included having a husband down-sized after twenty-six years of hard work, losing several friends and relatives who died too young, struggling financially to make ends meet, and dealing often with petty work jealousies. These losses have often kept me tenser and unhappier than I needed to be.

Sunday as I was driving into church, I was listening to National Public Radio when I heard someone say, "The closer you get to death, the more you enjoy life." I really do not know if my happiness jump is related to thinking about death more or just not having to work any longer. After forty-one years in the work force, I love the enjoyment of getting out of bed whenever I choose, not when the alarm clock comes on. I love taking an early morning walk and hearing the birds sing even on a cool February day as the people in my neighborhood one by one start their engines and roar off to their jobs. I love the freedom to light a fire in the living room, to burn a vanilla-scented candle, and to lie on the sofa with a good book like Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky. I don't live by a clock any longer.

I have to say it is ironic that the circumstances of the past seem to hover ever so much quieter in the background of my life. Enjoyment of life is accompanied now by a focus on the senses: the smell of chocolate cupcakes baking in the oven, the instantaneous touch of a three year-old who grabs your hand as you cross a parking lot and go into a movie, and the taste of snow cones on a hot summer's day in the South with your grandchildren.

As I think about it, I might even surpass my daughter's happiness scale as I continue to move toward death--enjoying every moment of life.