bubarnes820

[bubarnes820]

Two Posts

January 26, 2022

 More Chaos

This week it looks like Russia will invade the Ukraine, probably taking advantage of Joe Biden’s belief in staying out of war. I can’t do anything about it, so I’m not letting myself worry about it, but just watching it like at movie at this point.

I was near someone with COVID at church (in the choir loft) on Sunday after staying away from church two Sundays, to avoid being exposed. There was the annual Parish meeting and Vestry elections, so I felt like I should go, and I did. And now, although not officially contact traced, I’m wearing a mask for 10 days when around anyone, including family, and probably will get tested in a day or two. It’s confusing because the Omicron variant can come up much more quickly than the others, but they haven’t changed the guidance about when to get tested.

While meditating today, I started visualizing creation out of chaos and thinking about how unpeaceful our world is now and how peaceful it was supposed to be at the very beginning, by the time Adam and Eve were settled at home in the garden. It didn’t rain but a mist rose up, and there was no pain in childbirth. But soon after, all kinds of ills came into the world: pain and conflict, murder and floods, and separation from God.

So when Jesus came to restore our connection with God and thereby restore peace, it wasn’t such an easy task. He said he came to bring a sword and conflict, but he also said he was giving us his peace. That must mean that inner peace is the only kind of peace we can be assured of. If we have to wait until we die and “go to Heaven” or become one with the Universe (God), we might find ultimate peace, joy, harmony, and bliss from being back in God’s arms or God’s universe, whichever you prefer to believe, as part of the bigger picture. But being part of God, through Jesus and his Spirit, during our physical life, doesn’t guarantee us any kind of peace other than deep inside. Outside, there’s disease, death, hatred, anger, conflict, war, and natural disaster. Every day. In the night.

January 31, 2022

I didn’t go to church yesterday morning. I did go to the Bluegrass service at 5:00, after taking medicine to my mother and checking on her. Bluegrass music can be such a peaceful and contemplative medium for a church service. The sermon was on I Corinthians 13, a chapter that my dad preached on many times. I think it was his favorite sermon to deliver. It was also one of the scriptures that Cary and I chose for our wedding, and Evan read it beautifully at age 11. 

But the sermon was thoughtful and stressed how God is with us and loves us, here and now, in our imperfection, even though the passage talks about the perfection that is yet to come. Reading the chapter and trying to evaluate ourselves by it can make us all feel inadequate if we don’t know that.

It reminded me of the affirmation tapes my mom made for the boys when they were about 13 and 9, I guess. They said a lot of untrue put positive things, like “I get up every morning, make my bed, straighten my room, eat my breakfast, and make sure I have all my homework ready for school.” After hearing his, Dylan said dryly, “well if you were already feeling depressed, that might just put you over the edge.”

We don’t measure up. We don’t love enough or turn the other cheek or consistently do all the behaviors Jesus taught us about. But we try and we know we’re imperfect. And that he is perfect for us, on our behalf. God didn’t make the world easy, but he is love, and that’s enough.

[bubarnes820]

January 21, 2022

Peace/relax 

My word for meditating this year is Peace. But along with that, I'll be reminding my body to be at peace by relaxing. 

It's hard to be at peace with the world and the U.S. in chaos, but that makes the word even more important. I can be at peace within myself and let the whirlwind spin around me. 

I haven’t posted in a couple of years. I’ve retired and started writing more, and I’m going to start posting again. Last year’s word was Breathe, because I was having trouble feeling like I could take a deep breath. I even consulted my doctor about it, and it’s all from stress and anxiety. I’ve had it most of my life when I feel stressed.

Walking outside is excellent for breathing. Using an under the desk elliptical machine is also good, as well as my daily yoga, and practicing deep breathing throughout the day. I can yawn a lot more easily now. I do have to talk myself down from anxiety at times.

In the night last night around 3:30 or 4, while I was awake after going to the bathroom and worrying about Lucy's grumbly sleeping noises, and also saw a bright light (from the neighbors' house or my own motion sensor?), I did my self-hypnosis visualization of a walk down steps (from when I was pregnant with both boys), and I went to sleep before I got to the bottom of the steps and entered the secret garden with the pool and the gurgling water source. That's always one way to relax, along with the 4-7-8 breathing. 

I go to bed earlier and/or sleep later, with the result that I sleep more hours than I used to, before I retired. It's wonderful.

[bubarnes820]

May 3, 2020

The King of Love

John Leach just preached a sermon on Facebook Live on the 23rd Psalm. He sang two verses of the hymn, “The King of Love,” a cappella, beautifully, and talked about conducting three burial services about a year ago where we read the Psalm. One of those services was Cary’s, although he didn’t mention names. Afterwards he began singing the hymn to Poppy at night. He talked about how God knows us all by name and cares. It made me cry, enough that I had to go upstairs and wash my face.

Holy Apostles was, I think, the place where Cary became aware that God knew him by name and that he truly belonged. He was always worried about belonging throughout his life, but I knew he knew he belonged at church and with me.

John showed the church banner behind him, and I had also put on my Holy Apostles T shirt this morning, maybe as a coincidence, maybe not. I don’t think I was thinking about the 23rd Psalm specifically, but I was thinking of what the church meant to us.

I miss church, and I miss people, and I’m sad a lot of the time.

I miss Cary and I keep trying to figure out how to explain. The things we did together because he liked them included making fires, having a drink on the deck, cooking and grilling, watching and feeding birds, gardening, watching baseball, shopping… and I don’t want to do those things because the pain is more acute when I remember, but I do want to do them, sometime I hope, in his honor.

Yesterday I took the last three pounds of butter he had bought, in quantity, and we had laughed about and Evan had made an unboxing video of, to Heather, along with some old newspapers I picked up at the library, and I told her they were the last (communicating by phone and by text—we didn’t see each other), and she said “NOOOOOO…I feel like he’s with me when I cook with it. Can’t imagine it’s gone.” And I told her I might have to order some more… and that he’s still with us, inside.

But it made me so sad to pull the box out of the freezer where he’d put it about two years ago. This is the box (below):

These little losses mount up, and I don’t know if people want to hear about them or not. I’m glad I can write about them.

Here’s the peonie blooming today from our landscaping project from 7 or so years ago (I was worried that the plants had died, but they didn’t).

And the peach rose that Daddy tended in Searcy and Cary transplanted here, as well as the red roses he planted himself. They’re beautiful symbols of love but also symbols of loss. I don’t know what to say to my friends and loved ones about them, but I want to share them.

I feel sure that Cary would like to be appreciated now as much as he did when he was here. Now he’s in another room, somewhere, and although I don’t know exactly where that room is, and no one else knows either...

I want to say I love you, Cary, and I honor you. Your death anniversary and your birthday and our wedding anniversary have all passed by in the last six weeks, while I’ve been quarantined here with my mother. I miss you so much. I want to build a fire in the fire pit, but not without you. Not yet. Maybe someday I will.

[bubarnes820]

Today is the first anniversary of Cary’s death. I’ve taken the day off (while we’re in a controlled tizzy, getting ready at school to teach online). Early this morning I had prayed and cried and done yoga and meditated. I had been thinking about the fragility of life, how horrible lung cancer is, how terrible the global pandemic is, and how we need to live our lives fully in spite of it all.

My plan for today was, and is, to spend time with family, feed the birds, take care of the flower beds, light a candle, and cook.

And then a terrible thing happened. Right before my eyes I watched through my patio doors upstairs as a huge, fat possibly pregnant raccoon climbed up the oak tree where the barred owls have their nest, climbed into the hollow, and raided it. Both owl parents were fighting it and flapping around, and they were unable to stop it. It stayed in there for a few minutes, finally exited the hollow, and shimmied down the trunk, lumbering across the yard as they swooped at it. Then for the past three hours both owls sat in the rain, one above the other, on branches of the pine tree at the back of the yard, staring. I just checked and they’ve finally left that post. I wonder if they’ll be back, try to lay more eggs, continue on, or move to another location because the raccoon might return. Will they ever even go back into the hollow? I have a camera that catches some of the activity and I don’t know when I’ll be able to bring myself to watch the footage.

I’m a little in shock too, as I try to process it all: first remembering Cary’s last days and his death, resolving to start thinking more about his life when he was healthy and less about the trauma of those last five months; then thinking about the virus that’s upending all of our lives; and finally watching this violation: an all too vivid example of how fragile we all are.

I was glad that Lucy was sleeping inside when the nest raid happened. Over the past four nesting seasons I’ve worried about the owls and tried to protect them (and Lucy) and limited letting Lucy out in the back yard; but this kind of attack was new—to my knowledge—even though we have squirrels and crows and other wild creatures all around.

My mother is staying with me for a while instead of living at the Village, and we both hope we won’t get too stir crazy. We’ll have the kids here today, maybe go for a drive, read our books, and try to stay well. I’ll keep working, some at school, some from home. There’s a lot to do.

I will always love Cary—his kindness, his wit, his love of life, his strength and calmness in the face of calamity. He would say it will all be okay, but he probably would have been frustrated that there wasn’t enough time to shoot that raccoon. I miss having him with me.

Life doesn’t end with death. I believe that, and I also believe in loving others and living in the present. Staying in the world, messy as it is, and not in my head. Tending the garden.

[bubarnes820]

Saturday Grief Work

November 23, 2019

I was sitting here remembering how people have said, “At least you had some time to prepare…” and realizing that we really didn’t have time to prepare. We didn’t know how or when Cary was going to die; we knew he wasn’t doing well, but the sad dilemma with cancer is that you aren’t supposed to give up hope. He was still undergoing treatment until he went to the hospital on March 13 with chest pain. We didn’t know that the cancer had spread to his brain again and that he had had a series of small strokes. And that there was fluid around his heart again which they didn’t recommend draining. We knew he was too tired and weak to travel to Tampa to be screened for a clinical trial, but we didn’t know the immunotherapy wasn’t going to help (and there’s no way of knowing, but it may have made things worse—that was a possibility, and now I think it did). We didn’t know that they would abruptly tell us that there was nothing more they could do, that they recommended palliative care and/or hospice, and that he would die four days later. They didn’t even know or predict that it would happen that fast. I barely had time to make those fast decisions about hospice vs. home vs. the hospital. So we didn’t deal with the Jaguar or finances or anything that would make us admit we had given up. And “just in case” would have been a lie, because it would have really been an admission to put the Jaguar in my name, and doing anything different with our finances; we’d had our wills done years before. So we didn’t have time. We were putting all our energy into trying to fight, even though we knew it looked like we were losing.

On the one hand, I knew in February when I told our priest that we knew what was happening and he didn’t need to explain, that it was important to live one day at a time; I knew in January when they said the latest CT scan showed rapid progression after the first two chemo treatments; I knew in December when he couldn’t bring himself to get out of the house and got sick when we went for a drive; I knew back in October when we got the blood test results that said his cancer antigens were over 20,000 when they weren’t supposed to be over 60 (or was it 35?), and then when we were told it was in his brain. I knew in September when he said “I have cancer” and that it had gotten into his shoulder from who knows where.

But when we would go to the doctor and he would tell us there was hope that we’d find a targeted therapy (some have worked for people in Stage 4), that the chemo would be hard but then he’d feel better, that they had finally come up with a clinical trial for his genetic markers, we felt hopeful—at least I did. I’m not sure Cary ever did. He wasn’t eating and wouldn’t try. He wouldn’t get up and walk unless we nagged him, and then we were told not to nag him. I read the Bernie Siegel books and tried to stay hopeful and at least make the most of each day. I felt like I had to keep up enough hope in my heart to work for both of us. Even when we got the bad news that he probably wouldn’t live more than five years, that made me think we had a lot more time. We were hoping he’d be well enough to go on the trip to Norway in June, even though I called to find out about cancelling. And Cary was the one who said we shouldn’t cancel and get a refund.

We didn’t know he was going to die at all, and especially not on March 18. Not that fast.

So when an old friend died suddenly this past week and it was so sudden—a day or two after a medical catastrophe, it was hard not to compare. They didn’t even have time to think about it—we did have time to do that. But we were pushing that thought away as hard as we could.

Today I need to go upstairs and pack away all the notebooks Cary left on his shelves: three-ring binders labeled “Health,” “Retirement,” “401K,” and other labels, filled with recipes, landscaping info, and his work and church and CPA records. I’ve already looked through them, so it won’t be as hard, but it’s not going to be easy. There’s also the Cancer Journey binder from Baptist, all the insurance papers, and a lot of painful memories concentrated on those shelves. I need to do this so I can sleep upstairs in my own room again. I’m sleeping in another room until Dec. 7, when the movers will come back, and I need to have things ready by then. So I’ll pack things away, chip away at it, and take my time.

But we weren’t ready, and we didn’t have time.

[bubarnes820]

Prayer Changes Us

September 21, 2019

After school yesterday I came home to see about Lucy and I lay down to take my afternoon rest/nap. My body feels like lead sometimes and I think it’s the fatigue of grief I’m feeling. It’s different from normal fatigue after a day at work before the loss happened. When Cary was here I usually didn’t get a nap—I’d be connecting with him, either walking Lucy or talking about our days or sitting out on the porch. Maybe cooking, one of us, or going through mail, but we would be together. So to come home is different. At least I have Lucy and it worries me to have her not be completely well. I did pray for her and she is better, but I don’t believe my prayer is what made the difference—it was the actions that went along with the prayer, the time in the kennel, the rest, the medicine. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t; prayer helps with my anxiety, my sadness, my need for a base of belief; it heals me.

[bubarnes820]

January 19, 2019

Cary slept in and I got up around 8:30 on this rainy Saturday morning. For the past few days, we’ve seen the owls in the back yard—flying in, roosting on the pine branches, mostly silently, but calling out sometimes. Our caregiver, Glenda, and I watched one the other day that had flown up to a low branch of a tree near the deck, and Lucy had gone out to bark at it. I called her in and turned off her automatic dog door to keep her from scaring it away—she had already done that once, Glenda said. So the owl stayed put in the pine tree.

The owl sat out on our tall pine tree for at least seven hours today. I watched him from downstairs and then from upstairs when I first got up. He sat as still as a signpost. But when I looked again, I saw another very large bird land in the bare branches of our middle grove, with a head too small to be an owl. It was a hawk. They’re all around Memphis, and I saw one fly through our front grove the other day to land on the neighbor’s tall fence. This hawk was not far away from our silent, watchful owl, so I wondered if there would be any conflict.

In a minute or so, the hawk flapped over to another branch, and then to the tree where the owl was sitting, landing a few branches above him but closer to the trunk. It didn’t seem that they were very interested in each other, though. There was a squirrel on the branch just above the one where the hawk had landed, and he was being considered as a possible breakfast. The hawk was stalking the squirrel, not in too big a hurry, and the squirrel was trying to figure out where he should go, running along the branches and jumping up to a higher one. Lucy saw me watching all this from the patio doors above our upstairs deck, in our sitting room. So she ran down, went out, and in half a minute, she was under the tree. She barked once, and the hawk flew away. The owl stayed exactly where it was until late afternoon. Lucy came back to the sitting room and I kept her in with me for a while. I don’t want her to interfere with the owls, but she’s part of the ecosystem too, and I won’t monitor her too closely until the chicks start to come out. She doesn’t like squirrels, but she saved one from a hawk today.

The show begins.

[bubarnes820]

Learning As We Go

Evan Baker has gumption—Robert M. Pirsig would be proud of him. First he fixed our icemaker last week, succeeding in taking it all the way out of the refrigerator and clearing the clogged pieces of ice, then putting it all back together; then this week, he cleaned the lint out of all the accessible parts of our dryer and, when it still smelled like something was burning (it was—there were little pieces of lint that were blackened near the heating element), he watched the dryer repairman take the drum out so that he could possibly do that the next time. (I don’t want him to do that the next time!) We asked the same dryer repairman how to replace the light bulb in the microwave, which had burned out several years ago and we had never tried to replace. He explained to Evan how to take the microwave off the wall and put in a new bulb, which he did today. After I helped him lift and hold it to put in the bolts and hang it back up (it’s a convection/toaster/microwave and is really heavy), he was putting all the extra pieces back on and said “Oh my...”. and I said “What?” He showed me how he could have just replaced the bulb without taking the microwave down. He and the repairman had both thought the OTHER bulb in there (which is possibly the toaster element?) was the bulb they were trying to get to. Evan had figured out which one it was after putting it on the counter but didn’t see the access point until it was back on the wall. This is how we often learn—by doing. So glad he’s handy!

[bubarnes820]

9/11

September 11, 2018

I’m in the middle of the quarter now, teaching other people’s classes and helping with projects. But today is 9/11. I remember being at work in the library and watching the towers fall, mouth agape, thinking “what just happened?” Watching the people who were jumping before that…

All on live TV, because we had a TV in the workroom and had gotten a call about a plane hitting the World Trade Center.

Lord have mercy.

Last week there was a shooting by an officer of a young black man, in his home, who was just living his life. He happened to be an alum of Harding University, working for a respectable company, actively leading songs in his church on Sundays, and loving everyone. People loved him too. This police officer killed him because she apparently thought she was in her own apartment (and if that’s true, which I’m not sure I believe, how could she be that crazy or drunk?)

Lord have mercy.

People are hateful to each other, selfish, thoughtless, careless. People have raging egos and put themselves above others. People hold tight to their possessions to guard others from having as much.

Lord have mercy.

I pray that today will be one filled with mercy, grace, and love. I pray this for everyone.

[bubarnes820]

Feelings...

August 27, 2018

Feelings are neither good nor bad—they’re just what they are. To repress or deny them is to go backwards; to acknowledge them and actually feel them is important. They can tell us things we need to hear, clear out our souls, and help us move on.

They can help us identify a problem; they can help us experience and work through grief; they can add flavor and depth to life, whether they’re feelings of joy, regret, sympathy, even love or hate.

To use more careful wording, I’m not sure that hate adds depth. I wonder if experiencing hate can be positive—maybe hate of an action is, but hate of a person or other people is a feeling that needs to be dealt with and not shoved down and ignored. When I dislike someone, I try to figure out why, and I tell myself that I probably don’t know that person well enough, or if I do, I try to understand that they have struggles too. I remind myself that nobody’s perfect and that I’m certainly not.

Hatred of an injustice or cruelty is a different kind of hate. There are probably a lot of variations of types of revulsion, dislike, disgust, and other negative reactions to abstract evil and bad behavior. And I don’t hate snakes or spiders, for the record, but I choose to stay away from them most of the time.

We need to feel our feelings, and if we do that, life is better.

[bubarnes820]

Right Mind

August 23, 2018

Our feelings come from our thoughts, not the other way around. And our actions are usually based on our thoughts and our feelings. If we believe that there’s a werewolf outside, we’ll be afraid and probably won’t go out. If we believe that there’s not enough to go around, we’ll be afraid of being destitute and won’t give away our possessions. Just two examples.

Getting our mind right is a lifelong challenge. Learning that there is plenty to go around and that others are in need helps us feel more compassion and do a better job of sharing. Learning that the world is by and large a safe place, even though danger does exist, helps us feel confident as we venture out to work and to live in the world, taking sensible precautions. And knowing that death will eventually come to us all, but that we’re fully alive right now, helps us to experience joy, stay in the moment, and take one day at a time.

So we try to learn as much as we can and think carefully about the best way to live our lives. So here’s a quote for the day: “For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.” —2 Timothy 1:7

[bubarnes820]

Maya

August 16, 2018

The world is an illusion. The Hindu scriptures first said it, and now science agrees in part. There are billions of neutrinos shooting through our bodies every second, and we can’t see them. But we do see things that aren’t there, like the flatness of the earth and the blue colors in the sky, indigo buntings, and our eyes. We also assume the reality of things that don’t happen or exist—Sasquatch? Bad motives in other people? Dangers that might be lurking? Do we make these things up, or is it because we believe other people who lie, or even believe what we want to believe? How do we know what’s real except through our senses and the things other people have told us?

I deal in “fake news” a lot—trying to teach students how to discern fact from fraud, and how to think critically and show healthy skepticism. But the principle of the illusory nature of the world goes way past lies, fake news, and optical illusions. It addresses our ability to know anything at all.

Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach” answers the question of meaning in life by saying “Love, let us be true to each other.” I do believe that love is the answer—not just love in a romantic or erotic relationship, which is one of the closest and most verifiable ways to experience reality, but love for all beings, nature, and God. Even though we can’t always be sure what’s really true, what’s really there, and what’s really happening.

[bubarnes820]

August 9, 2018

James

Today my brother’s son, James Robert Ulrey, turns 8 years old. This boy has the most engaging smile and the sweetest personality of any human I’ve ever known. He hugs freely, pays wonderful compliments, deflects praise for himself, and loves, loves, loves people. He has learned to play the guitar, likes to skateboard, and build with Legos. But he’s talented and smart at just about everything he does.

We will see him, his beautiful, artistic, and sensitive sister Grace, who will be 10 in a few weeks, and his good parents Robert and Jill, in about a week when we go to Searcy to get Mother’s last few items that she wants to bring to Memphis. I hope he knows how much we love him. I sent him a superhero card and will buy him and Grace presents, but somehow I need to figure out a better way to celebrate them.

I will try to pretend I love our new 7th graders at school just as much as I love James. I’m not sure I can convince myself, but I’ll do my best. Some are slightly evil, some are sweet and good, and some are just hyper and rowdy. They’re all loved unconditionally by God and seen as perfect in his eyes. They all have special individual gifts that can’t be duplicated by anyone else. I hope to help them unveil and display those gifts, to be the best people they can be.

Happy Birthday, James! Love you,

Aunt Bonnie

[bubarnes820]

Beloved

August 2, 2018

I finished reading Beloved by Toni Morrison last night. This was my last catch-up book of the summer, even though it’s not a YA book per se. I’d say the experience is similar to reading a Faulkner novel, and I have more questions than answers about this beautiful but desperate book. I was thankful for some of the student notes in the margins of the used copy I had picked up. What must it have been like to be a slave, to be used as an object, tortured, and maligned? I can’t imagine killing a child to protect it, but I haven’t been through the trauma Sethe experienced. Why did the ghost of the murdered child come back? What was she trying to do—destroy the mother or become one with her? Was she a mythological symbol of evil as she slowly grew and took over to the point of starving her mother? Sethe’s sons left and never came back—what is that saying about the perpetual losses people suffer once an original sin is committed?

In the preface, Morrison refers to the story of Medea, who in classical literature killed her children to keep them from potential suffering at the hands of enemies (and because they didn’t have their father?), but I don’t remember enough from my Sophomore lit class in college to compare the two characters much further. I do remember wondering how a person could do such a thing at any point in history, unless there was immediate danger such as a painful death by fire or torture. But in Sethe’s world the dangers were immediate, and her own suffering proved it could so easily happen that she must have been reliving it at the moment she took action against her own babies.

I do think the “ghost” of slavery, genocide, and general inhumanity from 19th century America is still coming back to haunt us—those of us who have “no skin” especially (why does she choose that expression, and does it always refer to white people, or am I missing something else?). The collective guilt grew—as I read it and thought of ways I, too, unconsciously participate in racism or just plain arrogance. The poor abolitionist who only wants to help is seen as a perpetrator at the end, and it’s easy to understand how that could happen with the legacy of such terror still buzzing in one’s brain. In some ways the Garners and other benevolent whites were equally responsible.

A final question: why the names Denver, Sethe, Halle, Howard, and Buglar? The narrative, like Faulkner, is confusing when we can’t tell who is speaking or what exactly they’re saying, but that must be the point. It’s a challenging read.

[bubarnes820]

Quiet Irony

July 8, 2018

 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

I finished reading this anti-war classic on our July 4 retreat to Gracehill B & B near the Smoky Mountains National Park. It was ironic that our peaceful national holiday with dear friends was the time I chose to read this, but it was next on my list. The fact that Paul, the main character, goes on leave and finds that people don’t have any idea of what’s going on wasn’t lost on me. There are always things going on that are disturbing and terrifying, even when we’re comfortable, happy, and calm. And this holiday took place during the immigration crisis and the drama of the 12 young soccer players in Thailand who are still being rescued from the depths of a cave.

Remarque didn’t hold back in revealing that war is hell, opening a window into the eyes and the mind of a young soldier during the Great War (World War I). It reads like a factual account of the day-to-day trials of a soldier, even though it’s fiction, like The Red Badge of Courage, Catch-22, and many other war stories. It shows how war exists on a different plane in the universe, even within one person’s own consciousness. And as we viewed the fireworks from the hilltop, taking place simultaneously in seven or eight locations below, I had just been reading about the red, green, and blue bursts of real fire young Paul was experiencing on a regular basis while hiding in shell holes. So this year, our fireworks brought to mind all the wars that have been fought and all the lives lost, often by young men who didn’t know what they were fighting for or about.

Another irony was that Twitter was lighting up with jokes about the rumored “civil war” that liberals in the U.S. were supposedly planning to start on July 4. I’m not sure where the rumor started, but of course, it was fake news.

Regardless of all the ironies and the troubles we’re facing today, I’m glad I finally read this book. It’s written beautifully and clearly, and it should be on the required reading list for all people living today.

[bubarnes820]

Summer Reading

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas: A Fable by John Boyne

Here’s the epigraph: “Fences like this exist all over the world. We hope you never have to encounter one.”

I’d started reading this book before—it seems like it was at one time on the book report list for 7th or 8th graders at my school. The language is deceptively simple, and it was easy to mistake it for a children’s book and put it down. (A friend used to call me a Holocaust junkie, which I was not, but I have read a few books about the Holocaust; maybe I wasn’t ready for another one in 2006.) Of course, now that I’ve read it I can say that this one, like the others I’ve read, is different. No two Holocaust stories are alike, as no two people or stories are exactly alike.

In this book, the two boys are almost exactly alike. They are about the same size, except that one is thin and one is not. They discover that they share the exact same birthday; they live in the same place now, except that one is on the safe side of the fence and the other is not. They become friends of a sort, but there’s a naivete to the “safe” boy, whose father is the Commandant, that is hard for some readers to accept. If the book is read as a fable, it makes more sense that the “safe” boy is so naïve and that he doesn’t allow himself to imagine the horror that exists on the other side. When his head has to be shaved because of head lice, he looks even more like his friend, and when he puts on the same striped uniform so he can slip under the fence and explore the other side, the resemblance is complete.

Back to the audience: it soon becomes clear that this isn’t truly a YA book, a children’s book, or an adult book. As Boyne says, “it’s a story.” A writer, like Madeleine L’Engle, sets out to write a book that tells a truth from the writer’s experience, and it may involve a certain age or type of person. This book is like that. Boyne has written mostly adult novels and wasn’t writing this book for children, but the language gives us the perspective of a child.

The current effort of some people in the USA to build a wall and keep “others” out, to separate families, and to demonize those who are different, reminds us that this book, written in 2006, will never become irrelevant. In an interview at the back of my edition, Boyne says, “One of the reasons why the Holocaust happened . . . [and genocide still happens] is through the complacency of people who sit by and watch these things going on and do nothing about it.”

Like the others I've read this summer, I find both relevance and prophecy in The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.

[bubarnes820]

May Day

May 1, 2018

It’s May again—a hopeful time because it’s the end of the school year and the beginning of warm, sunny days when it doesn’t rain so much. Everything is green and lush and blooming, and we can see light at the end of the academic tunnel. Time for parties and leavings, with people retiring, graduating, moving away—and that’s partly sad but mostly happy.

We’re getting ready for Mother to move here. That will be a project, getting all the details ironed out and the physical work done. I’m excited for her and looking forward to a time when she’ll be just down the street, or better, having dinner with us regularly at our house. I want her to be happy and will do my best to see that she is.

We plan to have a sleepover with the girls soon. They love to go outside or to the park. Once we took Marian to Shelby Farms playground; this time we could go to the Botanic Garden or just up to the lake where there are two playgrounds that Marian and Zoe love.

I’m tired from a long, technically and personally challenging school year, but I’m ready for the energy that is May.