“Deep down I know I could never be that innocent again..."

World Toys and Gifts where I listened to their story...

“Deep down I know I could never be that innocent again, however much I'd like to be.”  

This quote and others in this blog are from Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl.
When I first read this book I was a freshman in high school and the same age as Anne was when she was writing. I finished it with sobs and immediately read it again.  I gave myself completely to the book.
 “If I read a book that impresses me, I have to take myself firmly by the hand, before I mix with other people; otherwise they would think my mind rather queer.”  
 I was of course reading the original version, the only one available at the time.  I have recently read the 2010 "diary as Anne Frank wrote it" that includes the approximately 30% of Anne's diary--largely those sections dealing with her sexuality and her conflict with her mother--that were excised by her father Otto Frank. (And who can criticize a father who wished to preserve the innocent child that he would never see as an adult?) Nonetheless, the young teen reader I once was would have identified with those issues. The recognition of sexuality and maternal conflict are hallmarks of female adolescence and neither Anne nor I were exempt. During the time that I read the original I was quite depressed and I am not over stating when I say this book and taking Anne's advice saved me:
 “The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely, or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quite alone with the heavens, nature, and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature. As longs as this exists, and it certainly always will, I know that then there will always be comfort for every sorrow, whatever the circumstances may be. And I firmly believe that nature brings solace in all troubles.”  
{How I wish that I could be certain, as Anne was, that "the simple beauty of nature" would "always" exist but I have also read Rachel Carson, Annie Dillard, and a host of environmental writers and am quite aware of our assaults on the earth that savage habitats while our haze and blazing light darken the sky and dim the stars.}
At a time when my faith was most weak, Anne Frank was one of my best teachers:

“People who have a religion should be glad, for not everyone has the gift of believing in heavenly things. You don't necessarily even have to be afraid of punishment after death; purgatory, hell, and heaven are things that a lot of people can't accept, but still a religion, it doesn't matter which, keeps a person on the right path. It isn't the fear of God but the upholding of one's own honor and conscience. How noble and good everyone could be if, every evening before falling asleep, they were to recall to their minds the events of the whole day and consider exactly what has been good and bad. Then, without realizing it you try to improve yourself at the start of each new day; of course, you achieve quite a lot in the course of time. Anyone can do this, it costs nothing and is certainly very helpful. Whoever doesn't know it must learn and find by experience that: "A quiet conscience makes one strong!”  
Decades later I would learn that a Jewish teenager had been my first teacher in the Daily Examen of Ignatian spirituality.

Having  revisited the friend of my youth, I am now considering reading  her other writings. This link is worth clicking to look inside and see the wonderful photographs (from the Peter Harban's hardcover edition) of Anne and of her handwriting.
I think I would like to also consider Anne Frank as a feminist writer. “And now I have a question for you. 'Do you also put clothes on the flowers you've picked and refuse to talk about their delicate parts? I don't think there's a very big difference between people and nature, and since we're also a part of nature, why should we be ashamed of the way nature made us?”  

Houston is home to Holocaust Museum which I have not visited and may never visit despite the fact that I worked with and greatly admire Dr. Milton Boniuk whose name is on HMH Library and who, with his wife Laurie in memory of their son, founded Rice University's Boniuk Institute for the Study and Advancement of Religious Tolerance.
I don't go  because I am convinced that I have a very good sense of the horror and  just hearing or saying the word "holocaust" roils my stomach and can give me nightmares for weeks.
I don't go because I heard the first hand account of the two lovely sisters who ran World Toy and Gifts that is pictured at the top of this posting.
This street view no longer exists, torn down, gentrified, gone to all but those of us who remember.

 I spent countless hours visiting the Rice Village; my first off-campus date with DMP was probably at the theater. I seldom walked to the Village without stopping at the toy store. I loved the things of childhood and the respite a good browse brought from academic stress. I often bought small gifts there for my friends because even adults, maybe especially adults, need the pleasure of play. Mostly I dropped in to say hello to the elderly sisters I had come to love.
Once I brought them Valentine cookies that I had made. They reminded me of Grandma Wieland.

I never knew their names. They weren't posted anywhere. I doubt they knew mine; my purchases were always small and in cash. By the time our relationship had grown into a friendship it would have been awkward to ask or perhaps we were just past the need for naming.

We chatted; they were always asking me questions about where and how I grew up.
They laughed and shared happy childhood memories.
They learned my mother's family was German and that they had come to America in the 19th Century, "so before the war?" They asked that question more than often.
They asked about what I read, what I studied, what I thought.
"Have you read Anne Frank's Diary?"
Then one day they rolled up their long sleeves; they wore long sleeves even in Houston's hot, humid summers. Even when the store was warm and stuffy.
The older hesitated and the younger prodded her, "Sister, we decided... you know... we must tell the story."
Their arms were tattooed with numbers.
The older sister would not meet my eyes. She said, "You understand what this means."
"Yes, a concentration camp during the war."
And then she said she was "ashamed" of the numbers and what it meant. These dear ladies were ashamed to have survived when others had not. And it broke, it still breaks, my heart.
Over the next several years whenever I visited the toy store and there were no customers, they shared their story.
I listened.
Sometimes they lapsed into German which I understood only in bits and pieces.
Twice they sang songs to each other.
Sometimes we cried.
I have few regrets but I deeply regret that I did not go straight back to my dorm room and write down every word of their story me.
I too often choose the demands of my daily ordinary life over what is truly important.

I no longer remember their words but I will never forget the sound of their voices, the burden of their grief, the way the older would shake her head, the way the younger would pat her arm, the way they wrapped one arm around each other in a sort of sideways hug to get them through the ugly details.
That is why I will not visit HMH. Because I know there are many voices telling the story of the Holocaust because we must not forget but I want to remember their voices, the voices of two sisters.
The voices of my dear friends telling the story that was uniquely theirs.

Although in truth it was not much different from many others.
Not much different from Anne Frank's:

 "Jews and Christians wait, the whole world waits, and there are many who wait for death...”  
“No one is spared. The sick, the elderly, children, babies, and pregnant women - all marched to their death.”   

“...don’t believe the war is simply the work of politicians and capitalists. Oh no, the common man is every bit as guilty; otherwise, people and nations would have rebelled long ago! There’s a destructive urge in people, the urge to rage, murder and kill. And until all of humanity, without exception, undergoes a metamorphosis, wars will continue to be waged, and everything that has been carefully built up, cultivated and grown will be cut down and destroyed, only to start allover again!”  

“If we bear all this suffering and if there are still Jews left, when it is over, then Jews, instead of being doomed, will be held up as an example.”

“Look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness.”  

 “How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” 

What I'm reading...

I intended to blog more often this year but...  I'd planned to blog on my birthday a week and a half ago and woke up sick.  The next day my computer didn't wake up at all.  The following Monday my husband became very ill.  It will be a long time before I've put all the pieces back together but everyone and every thing at least seems to be up and functioning more or less normally.

What I've been reading:

Fiction:

Conroy, Pat: The Prince of Tides. 1986.  Kindle.  I seldom read any best-selling book until it's been kicking around a few years.  "Popular" does not equal "time-tested" and there is so little time to read.  I also tend to avoid 20th Century male authors; their world view is often too depressing for me.  I knew I would love this book and I also knew I would hate it.  I loved the first half and hated the last half;  I prefer "elegy" to "nightmare."   Pat Conroy wrote a great novel in the tradition of the great Southern novel with the requisite beauty, quirky characters, and disfunction.  kindle location [kl] 859 "...you're southern to the bone, Savannah.  It don't wash out."  loc 1268 "The southern way?" she said.  "My mother's immortal phrase.  We laugh when the pain gets too much.  We laugh when the pity of human life gets too... pitiful. We laugh when there's nothing else to do."  "When do you weep... according to the southern way?" "After we laugh, Doctor.  Always.  Always after we laugh."  kl 3646 "...in the South.  Sorrow is admired only if it's done in silence."  kl 3748 "I've always found paranoia to be a perfectly defensible position."   It has some wonderful descriptions of childhood and some painful ones:   kl 169 "Later when we spoke of our childhood, it seemed part elegy, part nightmare."  kl 1504 "There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory."  kl 3046 "There is no fixing a damaged childhood.  The best you can hope for is to make the sucker float."  It offers descriptions and commentary upon the 20th Century struggles against racism and those of feminism and environmentalism.   kl 201 "This has not been an easy century to endure."  Chapter 18 should be required reading.  I don't know that I've ever fully appreciated the role of a coach, despite having a couple in my family.  The descriptions of the North Carolina locale are heart-breakingly beautiful and made me want to go live on an island and fish. One of my favorite quotes is about reading:  kl 997 "You get a little moody sometimes but I think that's because you like to read.  People that like to read are always a little fucked up."  There is, of course, a movie and it's a good one but the book is better.  I've decided to read some more Conroy: My Reading Life.  Doubleday, 2010.  Kindle.

Victorian scholarship:

Adams, Maureen: Shaggy Muses.  The dogs who inspired Virginia Woolfe, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browing, Edith Wharton, and Emily Bronte. New York:  Ballantine Books, 2007. Kindle.  My friend, Cathey Roberts, recommended this book {she also mentioned a seminar on Creativity and Madness which riffs nicely with Conroy's book and brought a smile to DMP}and I immediately downloaded it and read it straight through without iterruption--one of the advantages of physical weakness and no computer is that one may read and read and read. kl 3361 Quoting Virginia Woolfe:  "Half the horrors of illness cease when one has a book or a dog or a cup of one's own at hand."   kl 4496 "Like many creative people, she [Emily Dickinson] depended on someone else to oversee the balance between having time alone against the need for connection with others to avoid being engulfed by the work."  Emily Dickinson and her friend Susan Gilbert, who married Emily's brother, "shared a hatred of housework, a love of literature, and an intense interest in religion."  Sounds a bit like me. 

My "intense interest in religion" groups six very different books:. 

I'm continuing the Annie Dillard Reader and have just finished the excerpts from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, perhaps my favorite work of mysticism.  kl 4236 "that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames." kl 4270 "An infant who has just learned to hold his head up has a frank and forthright way of gazing about him in bewilderment.  He hasn't the faintest clue where he is, and he aims to learn.  In a couple of years, what he will have learned is how to fake it..."  kl 4567 "But although the pearl may be found, it may not be sought.  The literature of illumination reveals this above all:  although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always, even to the most practiced and adept, a gift and a total surprise...  I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam."  . 

I was asked to read an excerpt from For the Time Being during a Sunday worship--which I was too ill to read--and as a result I'm reading W. H. Auden's Collected Longer Poems which I haven't touched since my undergraduate course with Dr.  Monroe K Spears, Poetry of W.H. Auden: Disenchanted Island.  I have a much better appreciation of the modern poets now than I did in my youth. 

"Remembrance of the moment before last

Is like a yawning drug."

Several weeks ago, DMP and I went to see the new Narnia movie which has given us an excuse to re-run the movies and re-read the books.  I first read C.S. Lewis's literary scholarship (the dreaded and still dispised Milton semester with Alan Grob) and happened upon Voyage of the Dawntreader so I started the series in the middle.  It's always been my favorite and  one reason is that dear swashbuckling mouse Reepicheep reminds me so very much of DMP.  This story is also a commentary upon "reading the right books" and celebrates imagination rather than information.  A lesson that our universities might well learn before they slash the funding for humanities and libraries.

I continue my slow progress through Robert Alter's The Book of Psalms which is masterful and magnificent.  From the 39th Psalm:  "Let me know, O LORD, my end and what is the measure of my days.  I would know how fleeting I am... a nothing... mere breath.... For I am a sojourner with You, a new settler like all my fathers.  Look away from me, that I may catch my breath before I depart and am not." 

These psalm readings work really well with the book that is the companion of the Open Door class study of Genesis.  Walter Brueggemann's Land kl 231 "...any society is likely to treat its land in the same way it treats its women."  kl 307 "...land is never simply physical dirt but is always physical dirt freighted with social meanings derived from historical experience."  kl 485 "Biblical faith begins with the radical announcment of discontinuity that intends to initiate us into a new history of anticipation.... rooted in the speech of God..."

Blog note:  I will continue using the Amazon associate links and images in the text of the blog because Amazon usually allows readers to take a look inside or download a sample.  I've switched the sidebars to LibraryThing which lets me maintain an on-line catalog and collection lists.  They have the advantage of being readable on the Kindle.   http://www.librarything.com/home/KCummingsPipes 

I first saw the LibraryThing used in Catherine Pope's Victorian Geek blog: http://blog.catherinepope.co.uk/2011/01/an-eye-for-an-eye-by-anthony-trollope/ and clicked the link in one of sidebars.  The first 200 books is a free membership if you want to give it a try.

Decoupage - snips of my day

I live in the heart of a sprawling city where "all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And bears man's smudge and shares man's smell..." and yet sometimes I am surprised by great natural beauty.  The wild turning of a bayou, a kingfisher perched on a wire, flights of birds or butterflies that swirl like schools of fish in the sea, swooping martins, flowers, flowers everywhere.  "...nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep-down things..."  These two ideas play tug-of-war in my thoughts.  {The quotes are from my favorite poet Gerard Manley Hopkins whose words are as deeply etched in my heart and as voiced in my prayers as any scripture.}

Yesterday I went to the zoo with my sister-in-law, my neice and her young daughters.  When one goes to the zoo one expects to see animals, animals in cages--no matter how lovely the habitat of the cage may be.  My favorite animal was wild and uncaged--a young cotton-tail rabbit sitting behind a palm tree nibbling a tidbit from the plantings.  A "dearest freshness deep-down thing" reminds me that this city is an overlay on an ancient landscape.

After I got back home I rested by catching up on blog reading.  CFS in her blog Link to this blog wrote, "The other day I was driving home from work, on 290, going posted speeds with the rest of the Houston population, and do you want to know what I saw: a duck and her four baby ducks. That is right, there was a duck trying to cross 290 with her 4 babies!!! It was a disturbing picture for me. How on earth did that duck and her four babies get up on 290?"    I identify with the duck and wonder how such a fast-moving, dangerous thing as U.S. Highway 290 came to be on the peaceful Katy prairie, ancient home to migrating water birds.   "...all is seared with trade" and the prairie is being devoured by that sprawling city that is my home.

I think of my friend DTA and her pressing concern for the over-population of the earth.  I remember  petri dishes filled with nutrients and seeded with bacterial cultures.  How very much pictures of the earth from space--the spreading lights, the destruction of forest, the growing deserts, the Texas-sized gyre of litter in the Pacific, urban sprawl creeping across the big blue marble, "all... bears man's smudge and shares man's smell"--resemble those petri dishes with the bacterial colonies eating thier substrate until all is gone and there is nothing left but death.

Another friend, VFS, blogs   Link to this blog  about the Polyphemus moth in Annie Dillard's An American Childhood.  I don't need this reminder of a disturbing story that has long lived in my memory.  I remember my mother asking me to take a look at the "worms" that were eating one of her prize plants and finding a butterfly chrysalis and watching the process of a butterfly unfurl and take its first flight, a "dearest freshness deep-down thing."  I am in sore need of such comfort.

I love Annie Dillard who voices my tug-of-war and grows my spirit.  It's time to read her books again and I'm pleased to find that I can now add her books to my Kindle:  Pilgrim at Tinker Creek  American Childhood  The Writing Life  For the Time Being  Holy the Firm  Teaching a Stone to Talk  An Annie Dillard Reader The Maytrees  The Living

My blogging friends both work with issues of childhood, although in very different fields.  Their blogs resonate with each other, echo through my thoughts, disturb my rest.   How many children did I see at the zoo today who are Dillard's Polyphemus moth?  How many mothers and children are caught in a world that has changed and is moving much too fast?  How many of us are caged in spaces too small to spread our wings and fly?  We and all creation bear the curse of a by-gone Eden, "bleared, smeared with toil..."

I find it's easy to weep.
It's harder to hope.
I share the depression that often crippled the poet.
Yet, Hopkins concluded his poem:
"Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs--
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings."

Link: to Hopkins poem on the Victorian Web.

Earth Day Theology

Growing up on a farm, I learned, early and often, that "the land" is the source of life.  "It's the land, Katie Scarlett" as a succinct statement of family values could have served my own father as well as it did Gerald O'Hara in Margaret Mitchell's novel Gone with the Wind, 1936. 
I remember the sweet, rich, ancient, earthy odor that filled the air when Daddy broke our last bit of native sod.  I remember that he did so only in response to governmental regulations that he feared would prevent him from ever being able to cultivate that land if he didn't plant it that year.
Family legend preserves the words he spoke to Mother when their first irrigation well pumped water from the Ogallala Aquifer, "Well, it's done. If we're lucky, the water will last long enough to get the kids through college with maybe enough left to buy you a brick house in town."  Unlike, most we never expected that "the water will never run out."  We never wasted water, not on the farm, not in our home.  Yes, the water paid for three kids to graduate from the colleges of their choice: Rice University, Texas A&M, and Texas Tech.  Finally, when the "water ran out" to the well that supplied the house,  Daddy & Mother bought a brick home in Floydada.

Our family philosophy, stated more by our actions than our words, was:  conserve, preserve, replenish, pick up the trash.  We were Conservationists.  Library of Congress exhibit for today includes a link to the history of the American Conservation Movement

I remember the first Earth Day in 1970. That was the date I added "environmentalist" to "conservationist" as part of my self-definition. The next year, I took the only "free elective" of my undergraduate career. When one changes majors multiple times and with only 3 semesters left switches from Science & Engineering to English Literature and still graduates in 4 years, there just isn't freedom in course selection. The course I chose was Environmental Stuides, which could be taken as a science, as a social science, as economics, as political science, as history, or as a humanity. On the course reading list was Silent Spring by Rachel Carson:  "Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species -- man -- acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world."

DMP's second masters degree is in Environmental Science & Engineering.  In our home, we have always recycled; we have always made decisions that reduced energy useage; we have always been careful of pesticides, herbicides, and plant selection.   We have a reasonable, rational, scientific understanding of the earth as an interwoven web of life which is sufficient reason for our ecological views.

However, these views are also informed by our faith. DMP and I have always understood our relationship to the earth as an issue of Christian stewardship.  As Christians, we believe that "in the beginning, God created..." and God said, "let the earth bring forth..." and it was "very good."  In the second chapter of Genesis, God's command to humankind was "to take care of" the earth.  

The Hebrew text is always richer--that simple phrase "to take care of" is וּלְשָׁמְרָהּ. shamar meaning  "to hedge about... to guard, to protect, to attend to"  [which reminds me of The Law] and "to beware, to be circumspect, to take heed to oneself" [which says that personal behavior matters] and "to keep, to mark, to look narrowly, to observe, to preserve, to regard, to reserve, to save" [which means paying attention and taking action]-- and all those shadings in meaning color that command, defining the relationship of humankind to the earth. 

Anyone who is a "creationist" is called by the Creator to be a conservationist, an environmentalist, earth's caregiver.  [Noting the shared root of two English words: "conservationist" and "conservative" should make environmental issues a core value of Conservative politics.  Oh, that it were so!]

Quite literally, we all stand on this common ground and we must work together to וּלְשָׁמְרָהּ. the earth.
Earth Day.  Today and every day.