For Pete's Sake

He pedaled up

rapped loudly on my hermit cell door

interrupting a frantic turn to chalk and key boards

facing a Sunday morning deadline—well into Saturday evening.

I turned him away

angry for the interruption

I didn’t even know he’d returned,

for Pete’s sake!

He’d gone to Africa to save his marriage—

          returned with a new ring, tied to a woman he barely knew

Nature

Nature he loved, fought so hard for, robbing him of volition

                    Stealing words, memory, function

Frontotemporal dementia

          Devil incarnate

                   for Pete’s sake.

Still, he played me for the fool—more times than I’ll tell you

just wanted to listen to “this Irish band”

                    stepped uninvited on stage

                    hoisted the bodhrán

                    played,

played as if life depended on it

                    because it does

                             for Pete’s sake.

 Weeks we ate fish and chips

          until I couldn’t eat them any more

          watched sports—

                   cheering Aby Wambaugh on

          he played, I listened

                   I danced

                             for Pete’s sake.

He was taken North

          I moved farther still

                   cell door bust open

                   dancing shoes at the ready

                    “bursting Joy’s grape”

                              for Pete’s sake.

Renée Zenaida, 1/3/16

All the News that’s Fit to Print: World Free Press Day

May 3, 2015:

All the News that’s Fit to Print: World Free Press Day at All Souls Unitarian Universalist of Putnam County

A few months back my sister—she and her family live in Mexico City—wrote to me that her eldest son—my nephew Scott—had found a picture on line—a picture of our father from the night our brother Scott died in a fire. That night, on the heels of the gentle and good police officer—who’d taken my Dad to identify the body and poured whiskey on their return—three “reporters” knocked on the door. They said they could help with the “investigation.” They had us looking for photographs, and asked questions—the answers to which no longer mattered.
The next day, they published a photograph taken at “the scene,” Dad standing in the dark with smoke still floating up from the fire that had consumed his only son.

That’s the photo my nephew found, and I’m pretty I’m the one who posted it—along with a rant about heartless journalism.

Often, too often, I dip my broad brush into that night—and judge the free press by it. I forget that Walter Cronkite essentially ended our role in the Viet Nam war—with words. With words, and images, the free press ignited the battle against Chicago’s cruel slaughter houses and continues to question our human role in this interdependent web of all existence, of which we are a part.

Journalists still risk their lives every day—to bring us, all of us, the truth.
Then there’s Fox News. I gave up television years ago, and had only heard about Fox News. I’ll be honest…I thought it was the on-air version of the Enquirer. I didn’t think anyone took it seriously until a visit to Gainesville’s after-hours clinic. While I was filling out the paperwork, Glen Beck was spouting off on the office’s television. When I turned in my forms, I sheepishly told the administrative person at the desk—“By the way, you have Fox News on.” Rather than leaping up in horror and changing the channel, the young woman leveled her eyes into mine and said “I suppose you’d like to have CNN on.”

I sat down and tried not to look or listen but like a train wreck, I couldn’t turn away—ending up exchanging horrified but silent glances with a young Southeast Asian man who was waiting with his wife.

In 1897, New York Times owner Adolph S. Ochs coined the phrase: “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” in essence covenanting with the reading public to report the news impartially. In 2015 the phrase “All the News That’s Fit to Sell” resonates.

Still May third is the day we celebrate the "fundamental principles of press freedom—to evaluate press freedom around the world, to defend the media from attacks on their independence and to pay tribute to journalists who have lost their lives in the exercise of their profession.”

Around the world we find journalists sentenced to ridiculous prison terms and murdered—for telling the truth—for proclaiming the truth. Words…and images.

In February 1968, Walter Cronkite closed saying:

“…it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.

This is Walter Cronkite. Good night.”
Overnight war became a dirty word.

The soldier was no longer a buttoned-up portrait but a multi-dimensional character in a nation’s morality play.

The power…the beauty…of a free press is that it holds a mirror up and says “Look!” We see the good, the bad…and the ugly.

One could argue that Cronkite broke the impartiality covenant. But I believe he was being honest—it wasn’t about ratings.

Today we might still be in Viet Nam, as we are in Afghanistan and Iraq.

A friend and fine journalist, Jeff Klinkenberg, reminded me of the words of Eugene “Gene” Patterson:

“At its simplest, a free press keeps people free. 
No society can stay free if its rulers go unwatched. For power corrupts. Given secrecy, people with power can do as they please, and seize yet more power until they crush any who differ.
A free press stands vigil on their acts and tells the public what they’re up to.

So the public can identify the rascals and, with the free vote, turn them out.

Blind the people to scrutiny of its leaders and they will saddle it with tyranny as surely as history foretells the future.
Every authoritarian regime that has oppressed a people has first hushed its free press.

No people informed by a free press will long accept oppression.

Remember this always when foolish citizens grow impatient with imperfections of a free press. Their chance to stay free rests on its right to be wrong.”

I get most of my news online, although NPR is usually playing in the background. And although a transplant, I’m a true Floridaphile baptized in swamp cathedrals and driven past the edge of sanity by no-seeums.

Until quite recently I fed my currently indoors-too-much self by reading Jeff Klinkenberg’s Florida tales published in the Tampa Bay Times. I didn’t subscribe. He posted the stories to his facebook page. I think I still have one or two saved to read later.
Then he announced his unexpectedly early retirement.

What is it now?
Three or four corporations own all of our media outlets?

When I spoke with Jeff the other day, he said the current trend had him in fear for our democracy.

I’m scared too.

The power of the press is indisputable.

In 1950, J. “Ding” Darling drew a cartoon—two tiny key deer pursued by huge dogs and hunters. Although I’ve heard them described as six-pointers that fit in your cooler, no one hunts for key deer anymore.
Given today’s social media, there’s a chance that that cartoon could—for better or worse—end hunting altogether.

When the press gets it wrong, things can get very wrong. On the way over this morning I was listening to the Bob Edwards show memorializing May 4—the shooting at Kent State. Turns out because a local news outlet assumed a Guardsman had been shot, they announced it, and rumors of student snipers went rampant. Even after the truth had been revealed, because of that first impression, more than half the public believed the students were responsible for their fates.

Have you thought about the power you wield with your mouse?

Has social media replaced the free press? From Arab Spring to Ferguson and now Baltimore, social media—facebook, twitter, Instagram—is the fuel that feeds the flame of truth…and untruth. Have you seen the stuff the creationists post? Or the tea party? Or the White House? The Unitarian Universalist Association? All Souls?

Who’s going to tell us what’s true and what’s false?

I remember watching an interview with Connie Chung. She said that the initiation for young reporters was to show up at the cemetery on the anniversary of President Kennedy’s death in the hope of “running into” Rose Kennedy. I thought that a macabre ritual.

But you know what? I would have read that story.

In 2014, sixty one journalists were killed, and I don’t think we have a handle on how many are imprisoned or otherwise captive. Men and women, reporters, photographers, cartoonists, publishers risk their freedom and their lives to tell the truth…in words and images.

With the exception of interacting with some of Florida’s more colorful flora and fauna, my friend Jeff Klinkenberg wasn’t risking his life—but he was telling the truth about Florida to a public that thinks of Florida as Disney World, condos, and spring breakers. He chalks most of what’s going on to brutal economics. I shared at least a dozen of Jeff’s stories with my facebook friends. I wish I’d subscribed—I wish my friends had too. 

Reporters and photographers for local and national newspapers are being cut. And I know they’ve all cut the editorial staff—I can hardly read some articles for the typos.

Have you thought about the power you wield with your mouse? With your dollars?

Sure Faux News gets it wrong most of the time, but when CNN is almost as bad—it’s time to speak up.

“At its simplest, a free press keeps people free.”

In 2013, the Chicago Sun Times laid off all its fulltime photographers. They published the photograph of my father. I still have it. My father must have cut it out of the paper and saved it. For forty-four years I’ve been so angry with the three men who came to our home after being at “the scene.” How could someone snap a photo of a man’s heart breaking?

I took the now-fragile newspaper clipping out again this morning, after reading the sixty-one names of journalists killed last year. Forty four years—and I saw it today for the first time.

I wonder.

I wonder how many fathers held their sons just a little bit closer, talked to their daughters a little while longer, and held their spouse’s hand a bit tighter.

I wonder.

A Pearl of Precious Price

I remember having that argument with my father—people rioting, damaging their own neighborhoods. Just today I’m remembering. He couldn’t understand—to be born here, in this land of opportunity, and burn down something so abundant as the American dream.

“How can they?”

I often argued with him, a man I love dearly, but of whom I was sometimes afraid. Dishes broken. Heels ripped from mother’s shoes. Brother laughing while spidermanning the underside of a box spring. My own flinches winked at.

Still, my startle reflex, a delight to many, was an affront. Jump and gasp when he appeared, and he would rage at me—who did I think was there?

After our move from Chicago, Dad became enamored of a small suitcase. If you walked in on him, you might startle him shuffling through papers in the suitcase.

Physical distance never mattered. When, in Chicago, he had a heart attack; I woke up with chest pains, in a dorm in Gainesville. The night he died…he had been so afraid… . I don’t believe I will be.

Yes. I have the case. Opened in solitude, it held pictures I’d seen before, an old silver ring, a broken rosary, a calendar with notes in Polish, and a nonsensical collection of papers. Not what I’d been looking for.

When I want to beat a dead horse, I begin with allusions to Dad’s most told story—three times they stole the Church bells. Between his 1914 birth and life on a remnant of our family’s once impressive farm and his departure at the beginning of the Second World War—German soldiers, likely neighbors, stole the bells from the village Church to make armaments.

Lately I’ve been thinking about turning guns into bells.

We never argued over guns—he led, but we all hated them. Some nights, sleep came guised as gratitude that there was not, and never would be, a gun in the house.

No guns. Ever. Not even that late-sixties Chicago night when the man who taunted me with the N-word drove himself, Mom, my brother and me into the depths of the projects and left us in the car while he took a box of clothes and food and I don’t know what up into one of the buildings we turned our eyes from when going Downtown or to the Field Museum—where the highway shared its right-of-way with domicile-warehouses.

Just tonight I’m imaging not waiting in the same car where he half-cheered the murder of my hero Dr. King, but imagining what kept him walking up those stairs…to where a man he admired for his work ethic was waiting…who hurried him out and away.

Just tonight, I’m in the doorway—hurried, sorry, anxious, embarrassed, confused, and knowing why the man was laid off from his Union job.

Reflections on Unitarian Universalism's Seventh Principle

We affirm and promote: Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

For those of you with spider and snake phobias, beyond the usual eeewwh factor, I apologize.  I’ve been there.  I used to be terrified of snakes, but I had a true spider phobia. At the sight of a T-tiny jumping spider I would hyperventilate. I still jump when surprised.

Once, in my parents’ home, in Fort Myers, there was a dead wolf spider on the floor, barring me from the kitchen…sprawled between me and the coffee pot. I crawled over the kitchen “bar” to get to the coffee, and crawled back over, cup in hand. I waited for my Dad to get up, find, and dispose of the wolfie before I came out of my room again.

My folks relied on pest control, almost as soon as we moved to Florida. Tightening our belts meant my Dad going room to room with noxious pesticides. So, for the most part, the only spiders I ever saw were dead spiders.

Then, a number of years later, I found myself living in Cross Creek—the North Central Florida town made famous by Majorie Kinnan Rawlins. It was a sane two-bedroom, cement block home—butted up against the marshes of Cross Creek.

What was I thinking?

Nature, as I’d never known her, was all around. In the evening I’d gaze out over the creek to cypress trees festooned with Spanish moss, and I woke up to the sounds of a family of barred owls nestled into an oak beside our window. Late at night, the frog song was so loud the walls vibrated.

But Nature was inside as well…a loaf of bread would mold if left out a day, and spiders marshaled each corner of the garage. I tried not to look. One morning I went to slip on my gym shoes, for a hike, and swear I heard a shriek…”No! Don’t!” I was tired and didn’t listen until my toe was smack dab against the screaming spider.

To my credit, I wore those shoes again, many times.

We weren’t terribly welcome in the neighborhood—we didn’t attend the local Baptist Church, my black cat arched her back in the window when we weren’t home, and we let the yard go—lawn orchids popped up uninvited and a quarter acre of purple spider wort was our pride and joy. The neighbors hired our adolescent friend to mow it all down.

The same young man came over shouting one day. “Jeff.” “Renée.” He barreled into the house with a small corn snake in his hands to tell us about the five or six-footer he’d just stepped over to get to us.

Before my eyes they hatched a scheme, the adolescent and my then husband, to photograph the huge snake. The young corn snake was foisted into my hands and only returned when it was my turn to grab the two and a half foot branch they’d annoyed the huge snake onto so I could lay it up against a tree…so Jeff could get some shots. It struck at me twice before careening at lightning speed up into the crown of the wee tree out front…no photos were taken…and I’ve loved snakes ever since.

We affirm and promote: Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

After six months we moved away from Cross Creek, from the air boats that would blast into the marsh that was our yard, from the bellowing gators that literally lifted the deck beneath my feet, from the barred owl that shared its hunting evenings with us. We moved to the sandhill—remnant of a phosphate-mining-development boondoggle—a dry, misused, but no less lively habitat.

We were quiet. And the creatures came back. Squirrels and raccoons busted the bird feeders. Spiders set up housekeeping in the upper corners, safe from the cats. They took over pest control. I squealed and found an eyepiece to look under the deck to watch a wood rat build her home. I called her Pumpkin. Then the snakes moved into the yard—black racers, yellow rat snakes, even an indigo.

Native roaches chewed into bitter acorns, and rarely found their way inside.

A friend turned the 8 x 10 pool into a pond, and during a drought I had to pause on the drive to let the toads and frogs find their way. Dragonflies laid their eggs, and we watched pupa and tadpoles transform. Real life resurrection!

I heard a great horned owl take a raccoon, and watched swallow-tailed kites rounding the skies above the pond. Grey fox turned old gopher tortoise burrows to their liking. Red-shouldered hawks prowled. You could almost hear things falling into place, back into place.

We affirm and promote: Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part, but only a part… .

Thoughts to prompt discussion of Unitarian Universalism’s Sixth Principle—

We affirm and promote:

The Goal of World Community with Peace, Liberty and Justice for All

This principle, sixth of seven, is perhaps the easiest to read right through without savoring —thegoalofworldcommunitywithpeacelibertyandjusticeforall—

a seedless grape rather than a pomegranate.

Toward the end of the day Friday, I got into a discussion with a woman I work with about pomegranates.  She and her husband grow food for the farmer’s market, and she was listing off all the fruit trees they’d just planted. I wanted to know if you could grow pomegranates here. She thought yes, but she had no idea what you do with a pomegranate.

“I’ve seen the containers at the store, but I don’t know what you do with it.”

I’ve seen those containers too, little plastic cups filled with pomegranate seeds—all neat and tidy.

That’s no way to eat a pomegranate!

First you find your pomegranate. You can’t tell what’s inside, so you need to go by feel. You hold it in the palm of your hand and feel for the heaviness, for the juice full to bursting in each seed.

Then you’ve got some work to do. You need to get inside and pull it all apart, separate the seeds from the bitter membranes. Your fingers get stained red, as does everything else if you let the seeds escape the bowl.

Makes the little containers of seeds sound promising, doesn’t it?

The Goal of World Community with Peace, Liberty and Justice for All

It’s just a goal after all. We’re not saying we’re going to bring about world community, we’re not promising to grant peace, liberty and justice. Just pull off the lid and sprinkle the seeds on a salad and enjoy—let’s move on to number seven.

For Unitarian Universalists, this principle can even feel a little disingenuous—in the beauty pageants of religion, it our pat answer to the personal question at the end of the pageant.

I want to help bring about world peace.

Do you remember those questions? I haven’t watched a pageant in years, but when I did, when I was a little girl, in between bouts of walking with a book on my head to improve my posture, I remember waiting for it. Yep, now she’s going to talk about loving children and wanting world peace.

Then there was a pageant that changed everything. It was a Miss Universe pageant, and instead of a lovely evening gown—how I loved the evening gown competition—Miss Israel walked out in a tight-fitting black jumpsuit, with a machine gun slung over her shoulder.

I was stunned.

Sitting on the floor in front of the black-and-white television, alone, I cried—as devastated by the sight of a woman with a gun as I was by the notion that fire power was the answer to the question—how do you plan to contribute to the world community?

But then, hasn’t that always been the answer? The country with the most weapons, the biggest, baddest weapons, dictates what the world community looks like, feels like, tastes like. Toss that pomegranate in the air, and shoot it. Yes. Just like skeet shooting.

Everything ends up stained red.

We affirm and promote:

The Goal of World Community with Peace, Liberty and Justice for All

As we enter this new week, with the loudest shout out for women’s rights being that American women are cleared for combat, with Walmart fending off a run on ammunition, and with so many parents burying their lost, blood-stained children—that’s no seedless grape of a principle, no neat little package of seeds either—isn’t this principle asking us to put the pomegranate back together?

Where do we start—overseas, in Washington or Chicago, or just a few blocks away from here? How in a world of so many different faiths, beliefs, and philosophies? How in a world with child soldiers and gang warfare? When do we start? When everyone is armed alike, or when we see who is left standing? What can we do?

I don’t have the answer, perhaps no one does. But I do know this…if I take your hand…and your hand…and you take the hand next to you…we’ll have all the arms we need.

To prompt discussion on January 20, 2013...

...on Unitarian Universalism fifth principle:
We covenant to affirm and promote: The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large. 

I’d like to take a moment to settle into this weekend. It’s quite the weekend for celebrations—the birth of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the second inauguration of President Barack Obama.

For the inauguration luncheon this year, 15 chefs will be scurrying around to produce three courses representing the agricultural bounty of the entire country. Okay, I admit it. When I tour the White House, the room I most want to see is the kitchen… . I’m willing to chop vegetables for the tour—shoot—I’ll wash dishes.

Things have really changed in that kitchen. Martha Washington, who brought the first slaves into the president’s kitchen, likely trained the slave Hercules herself—and he excelled. He ended up with eight assistants, and worked the system so he could dress like a dandy, and enjoy some of the better things in life. However, when Washington was planning to leave Philadelphia for Mount Vernon, Hercules escaped. Although I’m sure he packed his favorite chef’s knife, his story ends there.

Not so the president’s kitchen.

The story of Hercules, and the stories of other slaves who served in the government in particular, remind me how much we tend to simplify slavery—to see one side, one vignette—but it’s so much more complex. Christianity Itself was stretched and molded to accommodate slavery. Our Founding Fathers accepted that entire races of people were incomplete.

Right of conscience and the democratic process brought us from Hercules to Obama and will, I pray, take us beyond.

But, what takes us from discomfort over something being not quite right to I’m willing to run away, to be beaten, jailed, and even die to stop this?

We simplify as well the moment of that enlightenment. Surely to develop that level of commitment takes time…nurturing… .

I think of a passage in a book I read years ago—Letters from an American Farmer by Crèvecoeur. I offer a caveat here. I read this book with about 15 other people, and of them, grad students and favorite and lauded PhD professor, I was the only one who thought it was a satire—if not satire, then allegory.

They all uniformly hated the author of the letters and took him to task for every puny, boneheaded thing he said that he did. Still, whether it was a scathing indictment of Early America written by a cad or a scathing satirical indictment of Early America written by a crafty wordsmith—it was scathing enough that he was asked to leave the country, and not return.

In the passage, Farmer Crèvecoeur is off to dine with a planter, and being no fool, chooses to walk a shaded path. Coming to a clearing he finds a caged human beset by birds. On reflex, he shoots…and the birds fly off…a short distance. I won’t read you the passage. It is gruesome, and you’d probably end up hating him too.

In the cage is a slave, near death. Crèvecoeur laments that he doesn’t have another ball for his musket, else he would put the poor man out of his misery.

Of course, what is he doing walking a shaded path in 18^th America with only one ball for his musket? I guess they weren’t a well-regulated militia even then.

The man is begging for water, and unable to end his misery, Crèvecoeur actively debates giving him water and prolonging the misery—he does it because it’s the only way he can make himself feel better. Then he heads along to dine, with the planter whose slave it was—and where he is assured that the execution was on the up and up with the law.

I know. How could he not do something? How could he break bread with the man who had caused it? I could intellectualize the argument; he’d be risking his own life—but I wanted a hero, I wanted to believe I would have acted differently.

One of the things I miss the most, and the least, about living in the country is country roads. On days when you’re not in a hurry, the weather is fine, and there are many more horses and cows than cars…nice.  Then on a morning just like that, I noticed something in the road up ahead. It was a beautiful rattlesnake—5 or 6 feet—but someone had driven over it, one tire, and although it was plastered to the pavement the width of a tire track, the first 4 feet continued trying to move forward. I hoped it was dead, and this was reflex, but I didn’t know. There was only one right thing to do.

I drove up a ways, turned around, and drove a lot farther in the opposite direction than I needed to before I turned back around and aimed for the snake. I couldn’t do it. I tried twice before I saw a car coming up behind me and I continued on my way.

Forgive me, but damned cages.

They’re everywhere. Within 15 minutes of turning on my computer, I was invited to watch a TED talk on human trafficking, compelled to action by a Syrian facebook page, and notified that a woman inadvertently left a couple of guns and some ammunition in her first grader’s backpack.

But who needs to look that far? 

I live in Porter’s Community. For those of you who do not know, Porter’s is a very old, Black Gainesville neighborhood with a checkered history that is on the brink of gentrification. When I first moved in I used to go outside in the evening, let down the tailgate of my pickup truck parked in the drive, and sit and chat to my neighbor Angie…and whoever happened to walk by. I was determined to meet people and really experience the neighborhood. And…I did. I don’t sit out on my tailgate anymore.

But even with just a window to the outside open, I can hear the cages clanging.

Young men, who have no jobs and no prospects, congregate in groups of six or eight through the day, wherever someone has been able to score some beer, and turn shiny black SUVs, with 2 dollars in the tank, into four-door, faux leather upholstered radios. Listen and you can hear the frustration building—whether the talk is about a woman, football, boxing, or the dogs they are trying to raise for profit—harsh words rise into the afternoon quiet, a challenge cracks like a whip, and then a laugh breaks, a crude joke, a bruising tease—but things calm back to women, or football, or boxing, or dogs.

The other evening, the trick didn’t work. I had to weave through 20 police vehicles just to get on my block. Everyone was outside. A young woman had been stabbed, on my block, right in front of the community center, and the perpetrator walked right on out of the neighborhood. No one stopped him or let one of the many officers know that—hey, that’s him. Everyone, including the police, just stood around and watched.

Damned cages. They’re everywhere.

It’s overwhelming, but let’s enjoy a moment together. It’s late tomorrow night, maybe even early Tuesday morning, and President Barack Obama nips down to the kitchen for a healthy snack (of course)—and you just have to imagine old Hercules, smiling, and dishing up a big piece of Martha Washington’s own Great Cake.

For a long moment, imagine you’ve knocked one of those cages down and bent back all of the bars—what would the moment look like, and who would be smiling?