When I lived in North Platte, I was a Lutheran-in-training. My maternal grandfather and great-grandfather were both Lutheran pastors, and my dad was a mostly unchurched sociable tenor, so attending First Evangelical Lutheran Church on the corner of 5th Street and Sycamore was not exactly a huge decision. Dad sang in the choir -- he sang "O Holy Night" at the Christmas Eve services, and I would give anything to have a recording of his beautiful voice. Mom's circle of friends was drawn from the church, and until I started school, so was mine. Church picnics in Cody Park, Vacation Bible School, covered dish suppers in the fellowship hall, Cherub Choir -- First Lutheran was a huge part of my life in North Platte. It was absolutely amazing to me that the building had hardly changed in nearly sixty years. My initial plan was to go there just once, on the first Sunday, and then visit other churches in town. Instead, I ended up going there a total of five times. The first time I met the office, took pictures, and ended up buying a ticket to the upcoming Harvest Dinner. A gal's gotta eat, after all. That put me in touch with some helpful local connections.Then I attended the Reformation Sunday service, which started me thinking about Martin Luther, me, and ongoing revelation. The next Sunday was All Souls -- something that was not observed back in my day (maybe too Catholic?). Since my home church was observing Samhain that very day, how could I not go back to First Lutheran for comparison? So for my last Sunday in North Platte, the only possible place for me was First Evangelical Lutheran. and what a perfect choice it was for me, right at that moment. The regular Pastor was in Minnesota for the christening of a new grandchild, and in his place was Rev. Rachel Ziese Hacker, campus pastor at University of Nebraska, Kearney. According to her UNK profile, Pastor Rachel is "a former magician, passionate sci-fi fanatic, and book nerd. She attended Texas Lutheran University (‘04) and Yale Divinity School (’07). She is an early church history geek who voluntarily took seven years of ancient Greek, instead of the two required. She is the Lutheran version of Rev. Elizabeth Lerner Maclay, my own early church history geek minister, with her Harvard Divinity School education. She is also in the latest generation of young women to follow in the footsteps of Elizabeth Platz, the first woman ordained in what is now the ELCA, and recently retired Lutheran chaplain at the University of Maryland. What a convergence! Pastor Rachel did not follow the common lectionary used by the major Christian denominations, because, as a campus pastor, the academic calendar and the liturgical calendar don't jibe. (No Christmas on campus, for one thing.) So her first reading was Isaiah 1:10-18, which closes with the "correct the oppressor" verses. 16 Wash and make yourselves clean. She followed up with a very scholarly reading of the story of Zacchaeus from Luke 19. And then she dove into the original vernacular Greek and a little Roman history that made the story much more complicated. Zacchaeus was not a corrupt man; he did not repent and change his ways. The verb tenses used in the original, and the context of the Roman occupation suggest he was trying to do his best to avoid the notice of the Romans while not screwing his neighbors. He was not "short", he was "diminished". Zacchaeus was between a rock and a hard place: his Roman overlords who could replace him with someone worse, and his distrustful neighbors who had ostracized him. He was, as Jesus said, "A son of Abraham" -- a child of God. "And that", Pastor Rachel concluded, "trumps everything". Boom. The only reference she made to the election.
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It is Sunday; I start my journey back to Maryland on Friday. In the time I have been here, I have settled in, watched and listened, met a few old friends, and made a whole bunch of new ones. I have learned some things about clothing in North Platte, but more about myself. And wasn't that the plan, all along? I have not blogged much in the last few days, though I have written in my paper journal and posted thoughts and pictures on my personal Facebook page. One reason is that I was writing a report that demanded several hours of research, thought, and writing every day. My word limit arrived with a bang by mid-afternoon, and I would be done with writing. But the bigger reason is that my head has been a jumble of confused thoughts, between the election, the death of my poetic ideal Leonard Cohen, and the sensations produced by being here, in North Platte, at this time in my life. I drove into the Sandhills again yesterday, all the way to Thedford, about 65 miles north of here. It is desolate, yet inspiring, landscape. Driving -- most of the time as the only car on the road -- through the rolling grass-covered hills -- was like being on a small boat on the ocean. Except in the sandhills, the waves are standing still, and only you are moving. On the way north, I listened to side one of Leonard Cohen's "Live in London" album; southbound, I listened to side two. I played my favorites, "Anthem", "Hallelujah" and "Democracy is coming to the USA". So how do I spend the next five days? There will be a visit to a local clinic, to deal with this lingering ear infection before it causes permanent damage, and there will be laundry. There will be writing in the morning and microfilm at the library in the afternoon. Probably more time in Cody Park, more sunsets (and maybe sunrises), and at least one more long drive besides the one to Denver on Friday. I am hoping for more new acquaintances, and good conversations. At some point, the North Platte that was has slipped further into the past, and I am firmly in the North Platte that is. It's a place worth knowing and understanding, for me at this precarious time.
I did not plan to be in North Platte during the election; it just fell that way. We had a social event scheduled for the third weekend in October, and my son's birthday is a month later, so here I am. Once I realized the timing, I figured it would make it more interesting. O-h-h-h-h my. In the two weeks I have been here, I have seen a Trump/Pence sign here and there, chatted with some Trump supporters, and hung out with members of the local Democratic Party, many of them former Bernicrats. Let me say at the beginning that even small town politics can be very complicated, and and I would have to be here much, much longer to make any kind of sense out of the picture. I hung out with the Stalwart Dems, as I call them, for the first three hours of election returns. That's Bob, the transplant from Brooklyn in the glasses and cap waving on the left. And on the right are my new friends Susan and Sean. The gloom descended on the room early on, and people started drifting off after ten. No one in the group expected Nebraska to turn blue, but they were hoping that a ballot measure to retain the ban on the death penalty would pass; it didn't. By close to eleven, I was starting to fade, and took my leave. Luckily, I was by myself when Florida was called. After that, I was caught between my need to know and my urge to curl up in an anxious ball. I slept maybe four hours in all. I wake up slowly on a good morning, and this was not a good morning. It was in the 20s outside and I am down to my last pair of warm socks. The friendly local coffee shop seemed less inviting, populated as it must be by cheerful Platters who voted for Trump. (And a few, very quiet folks who didn't.) Here's what it is actually like: The staff were as cheerful as always. The regulars were all there (not the Dems; they'll be here on Saturday). Yes, they were talking about the election. But here are the snippets I overheard:
In the time remaining: more listening. Much more listening. i hardly know where to start. Every day I make more contacts and more connections, and learn more about myself. I spent six straight hours at "the office" -- the Espresso Shop on Dewey Street, in what used to be one wing of Montgomery Wards. Some of that was writing a report about dress codes for a state charter of the ACLU, but most of it was talking to the locals. First, there was my new Facebook friend, Dan, who contacted me even before I arrived and made me feel welcome. Then it was the group women with the spinning wheels and knitting needles who gather once a month for coffee and fiber goodness. The it was my once-upon-time neighbor and playmate, Dennis, who remembered practicing our lariat skills in our backyard on Willow Street and reminded me of the fun and mischief to be had with an irrigation ditch. The conversations are mixed and interwove so much after a while I can't remember who said what. But the idea of North Platte feeling like a world apart came up again and again. We had all spent part of our lives elsewhere, and we had all experienced what it is like to feel connected to the rest of the world. Sometimes, in my home in the Washington, D.C., it feels like world events are happening just on the other side of my front door, and it is hard to escape from the misery and urgency. But there is something about being in a self-contained community miles from a major city, even with the Internet, cable news, and social media, that has created in me a sense of separation that makes me feel calm and safe. Several times, one or the other of us used the expression "the middle of nowhere", until one of the weavers smilingly said, "I like to think we are in the middle of everywhere". So that's where I am, right now, or trying to be. In the middle of nowhere, and the middle of everywhere. And hoping I can be in that place, no matter where I am.
Feast your eyes. This is the view of the First Evangelical Lutheran Church, taken from the balcony during the service today. There were two beautiful things. First, the quilts. These are the quilts completed by the ladies of the church in the last year, ready to be given to the homeless, the needy, the refugee.
The other beautiful thing was the roll call of saints, members of the community who had died in the last year. Among those names was a familiar one: Ardith Woolson, probably my mother's best friend in North Platte. She and her husband Walt were frequent guests in our home; I have photos of them sharing Christmas dinner with us. We saw them when we came through NP back in 1993. I missed seeing her by just a few months; she died in August. But I was able to show her photo to her friends and share my memories of her, and Walt, and their son Alfred. This was my fourth visit to First Lutheran, and my second service. I have been thinking quite a bit about whether this would still be my church home if we had not moved. I left the Lutheran church fifty years ago, unable to reconcile my own beliefs with church doctrine. I have been a Unitarian Universalist for 34 years. I remember our minister, Paul Johnson, staying that he left the Lutheran seminary when he realized that everything he believed about Jesus was reduced to just a comma in the Apostles' Creed. That comma between "born of the Virgin Mary" and "suffered under Pontius Pilate", which is all the reference there is to his core teachings: love God, and love your neighbor. have probably been a universalist since I was ten or eleven. I gave up on the Trinity a bit later, along with the divinity of Jesus. But I have also been a member of the same UU congregation for that entire time, through good times and bad. Community matters to me, and this community still feels like home. There aren't any more theologically liberal options here; I suspect I would not be the only person in North Platte choosing community despite differences in belief. I just don't imagine I'd be teaching Sunday School! It's been a week, and I have been soldiering on, but this cold has finally won. I am feeling better in most ways, except for this: my hearing has gone wonky. Imagine you are hearing everything in stereo, but with a slight delay on one speaker, and the two audio streams are tuned a half step apart. Annoying, right? Especially if you are in a coffee shop trying to write a pretty boring report and there's background music.
Fortunately, it turns out that Saturday morning is the gathering time for the Stalwart Democrats of Lincoln County at this very coffee shop. I crashed their party last week, then dropped in at their monthly meeting on Thursday, so there were some familiar faces by now. It's a trip to Oppositeland for me. After all, I live in a very blue county in a blue state when Dems bother to vote -- (cough) Larry Hogan (cough) -- and my GOP friends and acquaintances worry about their yard signs and whether they should "come out" at work. Here, registered Dems are less than 20% of the electorate. I share their social paranoia (sorry Sara, the "Pantsuits for President" button is still on the desk in my motel room) but am also trying to share whatever shreds of optimism I can muster. I am not pessimistic about the election; I believe that Hillary Clinton will win. But I have no illusions about our ability as a nation to put the incivility and venom of the last twenty-five years behind us. At the very least, it will be nice to have company on Election night. So I wrapped up my work for the day and headed back to the Husker Inn to take more medicine, drink lots more water, and catch a nap. No sunsets for me tonight, just more writing and an early bedtime. Also no music until my Eustachian tubes settle down. It was laundry day today. I originally planned to got to the movies and see Dr. Strange (in 3-D!) but the weather was just too fine, so I headed to the river instead. Later, I headed to one of the two places in town (so far) that carries microbrews and had dinner. A woman who had been at my talk stopped by and we had a nice chat about being liberal in North Platte. Much to digest. Here is that poem, in case you'd prefer to read it than listen to my cold-ravaged voice. How far has the river of time carried me?
How do I map the distance, the depth, the eddies of life? Here I am, an old woman (or nearly old) standing on the bank of the same river I knew as a child. As if I never left. Yet nothing is the same. This water, 60 years ago, was in a cloud, or a jelly glass, or an antelope’s eye. The swings in the park behind me are new. Safer, and smaller.Or maybe I am just bigger. I’ve met a few old friends and driven by many more, in the graveyard. What hasn’t changed? The sky. The smell of the river bank. The reddish brown squirrels.The yellow autumn. The flow of the river, always south and east. And somehow, in ways I cannot see or say, but only feel — me. The drive from Denver was beautiful. I know that people who live elsewhere think of this part of the country as flat, empty, and boring. But here's what I thought: Vanishing Point I moseyed along my way, stopping to visit the church in Brush, Colorado, where my grandfather served as pastor eighty or so years ago. The current pastor and church secretary were warm and welcoming, and shared some of the parish's history with me. Finally, I made it to North Platte. The road into town was unrecognizable; lots of chain restaurants, a WalMart, a shopping mall. But soon I was driving through the old part of town, and over the viaduct that carries the Main Street across the railroad tracks. Within minutes, I was driving into Cody Park, past the swimming pool and the kiddie rides (closed for the season) and reaching the banks of the North Platte River. The familiar sights and smells, the grasshoppers leaping away from my footsteps, all brought tears to my eyes. A fellow about my age stopped to talk -- the first of many conversations I have had in my few hours here. And therein hangs a tale. I think of myself as an introvert, someone who is usually reluctant to chat with strangers. But the genial neighborliness I have encountered here has triggered a memory of learning to look away from strangers instead of smiling at them, to nod instead of saying hi. I remember walking down the street in Westwood, New Jersey shortly after we moved there, and saying hello to a woman only to have her look at me with a startled expresssion that clicked quickly to annoyance and then to a mask, averted away from me. So far today, I have had short conversations with:
The flight from Washington, D.C. To Denver was as pleasant as air travel in 2016 can be for a 5' 9" human. The skies over most of Nebraska were clear enough that I could follow the Platte River westward from Omaha, but not quite to North Platte. Rather than do the whole trip in one day, I opted to pick up my rental car, stay overnight at an airport hotel, and drive the 3 1/2 hours this morning.
Last night I had dinner with a former student, Wayne Watts (aka DK). Wayne was one of my star pupils in a service learning course I team taught about a decade ago. It was, by far the riskiest, more challenging, scariest course I ever taught--and the most rewarding. The title was Popular Culture and Literacy in America, and I will confess right now that I put "popular culture" in the title -- to recruit unsuspecting students into a service learning course where they would tutor students at a large, minority-majority high school. If I had given it a more straightforward title, I would have been preaching to the choir. We let them know the first day of class what we would be doing, so they had the chance to find another course if they wanted. When I say "team taught", I am not kidding. The course was planned, steered and assessed by myself, a PhD student, and a team of undergraduate teaching assistants who met at my house every week for debriefing and planning. Wayne took the class as a student once, and then served as a teaching assistant for several more semesters. Since graduation, he has pursued two passions: his musical career and mentoring. For him, they are deeply connected; he takes them both equally seriously and uses one to enhance the other. Right now, in addition to his performing gigs, he is running an after school tutoring and mentoring program very much like the one in our course, but much bigger, with multiple locations, and a cadre of mentors who are not students, but older adults who need training and support to connect with their young students. He is also developing a program of online mentoring podcasts and interviews that is simply brilliant. See more about this impressive young man on his website: http://www.dkakawaynewatts.com/about-dk. This has nothing to do with my Nebraska trip, at first glance. But I found myself wondering, as we spoke and laughed last night, what life would have been like for me without the many direct experiences I have had with people of other races. More to come, as I think of it. This is a bit of a departure for me, but since this blog is literally "everything else", what the heck! My favorite blogger mredlich21 nominated me for this chain letter-style blogging activity, and I am always looking for new ways to procrastinate. Here are the rules:
Many thanks to mredlich21 for thinking of me and for not giving me film-related questions to answer! 1. Why did you start blogging?I have kept a journal since high school (over fifty years), so daily writing is pretty much a habit. My first blog was on LiveJournal, and was essentially just a more public continuation of my paper journals. Then I added a series of blogs related to my professional work. The now-inactive ones that lasted the longest are Nice White Lady (2007-2013), which was about conscious consumption, and 23 Sherwood Drive, an experiment in memoir in which I transcribed my diary from 1965-66 and added comments from my perch forty years later. Right now I have two blogs, Gender Mystique, which focuses on my research on clothing and gender, and this one, which is -- um -- everything else. 2. What keeps you going online and writing?I believe that writers need to write every day. Sometimes I write in my paper journal, sometimes in my private online journal. But the value in blogging is in writing for an audience -- no matter how small. So I post something somewhere every day. Sometimes it's Facebook, sometimes Twitter, sometimes Instagram, sometimes a flash fiction app called TaleHunt, sometimes in Gender Mystique, and sometimes here.I write to share my thoughts and also to save them for later for myself. 3. What is the best comment you have ever gotten on your blog?That's a tough one! I have too many to pick a favorite. My son-in-law asked some great questions on 23 Sherwood Drive that forced me to think more deeply. I have also learned quite a bit from readers on Gender Mystique, especially folks from other countries who have shared their stories in the comments. I like questions the best! 4. What is the favorite blog post you have ever written?It has to be this one. Stupid me, I thought that writing a book and blogging about it would mean that I would stop getting asked the same question over and over (and over and over) by reporters. I finally got so tired of answering it that I wrote this post, and now when I get asked I just send them the link. 5. What is the favorite blog post you have ever read?Another tough question! I go back to mredlich21's analysis of Diwale Dulhania Le Jayenge so often that it is clearly a recent favorite. 6. Why do you like writing about what your blog is about? My focused blogs reflect my scholarly interests in fashion, gender, and sustainability. They help me stay on track with my research (publish or perish is real, people!) and also let me get my work to a public audience faster than any traditional mode of publishing. 7. Has your blog changed focus since you started? Lordy, yes. (See question 1.) Gender Mystique has helped me write two books and I am now working on a third, and the focus has shifted to reflect my current project. First, it was baby and toddler clothing, then unisex and androgynous fashion, now it's fashion and age. Having the Everything Else blog has been very liberating. Lately it has been very Shah Rukh Khan heavy, but that will change once I finish watching all if his movies. I am even reblogging old posts from my other blogs here. Focus? what's that? 8. Are you embarrassed sometimes when you go back and read your earlier posts? Sure. That's the wages of publication. There are old journal articles I could torch if I could. But so far nothing has been so awful that I have actually deleted it. (Updates, yes.) 9. What makes you happiest about blogging? When a reader comments or emails me. I write to communicate, so making that connection is the best! 10. What makes you grumpiest about blogging? Proofreading. I swear that typos are living, reproducing organisms. 11. If you could change one thing about the people on the internet, what would it be? I would make them read that post about pink and blue so they would stop asking the same damn question all the time. That was a good hour's work! Now I am going to be a bad girl and not nominate additional bloggers because (1) I don't actually read that many blogs these days and (2) I just don't do the "tag you're it" thing. (Sorry.) But feel free to respond on your own, and post a link to your post in the comments!
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