I was a high school English teacher for 25 years before I retired to write full-time. This winter, I got a call to do a stint of teaching, only my students wouldn’t be teen-agers; they would be adult learners at a community college. People my own age-ish. Hm.

When I taught teen-agers, I learned early on that a lot of the job is about personal connection. The students must like you. By “like,” I don’t mean the teacher and the teen go out for breakfast and paint one another’s toenails. (Ew.) “Like” means the student accepts that even though the teacher’s subject is something lame like, say, English grammar, the class is OK because the teacher is fair (“fair” means the teacher cuts people slack now and again). The teacher does not bludgeon one student with another (doesn’t play favorites). The teacher is not a hypocrite who says one thing and does another. For a teen, a teacher should be consistent, clear, and helpful without being a pushover. Bonus if the teacher is funny or even playful.

This kind of teacher will be able to pull some effort from most students, although it must be acknowledged that a great deal of teen-agers’ passion is directed at their peers and activities rather than their academics. It also should be noted that it’s even tougher to get work out of students who don’t like the teacher, because these students suffer at their desks like prisoners serving a sentence.

With adults, however, liking the teacher is moot. With adult learners, optimal learning means squeezing out everything the teacher offers and then rolling the tube tight to get out that last little dab. There’s nothing passive about it. Whereas a teen-ager, generally, is reluctant to ask for clarification or extra help, an adult insists on it. Adult learners work jobs and rear families and have now added the burden of school. They don’t want to mess around. They want to learn, dang it, and if you’re their teacher, you’d better deliver.

I LOVE THIS ATTITUDE. When I sit down with an adult student, I deal with an equal who has gray hair and wrinkles and lumps, somebody who pays bills and hauls kids and endures hardship and knows there is no free lunch, not no way, not no how. Adult learners do not feel entitled, except insofar as they have paid for the privilege of learning and insist that it happen. An adult learner already has a full life but wants a better one. Whereas teen-agers are trapped by compulsory education laws, adults have chosen education as a means to an end. A teen-aged learner might count off the days until freedom rolls on down like a mighty river; an adult learner is that supermarket sprinter who’s dashed in for milk because he’s got to have supper on the table in one hour. They want to git 'er done.

The United States has 1.5 million adult learners, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Some adult learners are just out of high school. Some of them are great-grandparents. All of them are in school because they see education as a path to a living wage and a life of dignity. Learning new things can be fun, but going to school is hard, doubly so when it's only one item on your daily list of things to do and triply so when your skills haven't been brushed up for 25 years and many of your fellow students are half your age.

Therefore, it’s no exaggeration to say an adult learner is on a hero’s quest. The man who defined the hero’s journey in The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1949), author Joseph Campbell, says the hero’s journey occurs when an ordinary person is called to leave behind the familiar and embark on an adventure in search of something important. The hero may be protected early in the adventure by a mentor or may acquire allies along the way, but ultimately faces a final battle. The hero returns home, having defeated his adversary and won the prize, which the hero then shares with those who were left behind.

What I didn't anticipate when I began teaching adults was that many of my students would become my heroes. They've left what's familiar to go on an adventure in search of something important, and when the adventure is over, they'll bring something valuable home. Let me introduce you to a handful of them (I’ve changed names and skewed details to preserve their privacy.):

“Deb” and her husband have endured hardship and raised a family. She’s training for a career that will put herself and her husband in a better place when they retire. Deb hasn’t been in school since before computers were invented, yet everything nowadays is done on the computer. Imagine somebody shutting you in a horse barn and ordering you to saddle up a creature you’ve only ever seen on TV. Luckily, this stint in school ain’t Deb’s first rodeo.

“Ruby” is divorced. Her ex hid their assets, so Ruby is back in school for the first time in twenty years so she can train for a job that will let her pay her bills and put food on the table. Ruby can’t study in the college library as long as she’d like to because she has to be home when the school bus drops off her kids. Once the munchkins go to bed, though, Ruby hits the books.

“Alan” is ex-military. He’d hoped to make the Army a career until he was injured. Now, Alan is working on a business degree despite physical pain from his injury that never quite leaves him—which means Alan’s battle doesn't end when he goes home at the end of the day. He soldiers on anyway.

“James” suffered a brain injury some time ago. He can’t remember things very well from day to day, so his learning path doesn’t run in a straight line. It loops. James has been in school for a while, though, because he likes to learn. He perseveres. He runs his race one mile at a time, round and round, without dropping out, and if he passes the finish line more than once and keeps on running, well, that's just the way he rolls.

“Felicia” was born here, but her parents came from another country. English is Felicia’s second language. Felicia has worked alongside her parents in low-wage jobs, but she wants a better life for herself, so she’s studying to make English her first language—not by birth but by choice.

“Sally,” five feet nothing in her stocking feet, always wanted to drive an 18-wheeler tractor-trailer truck. At age 72, she started a truck-driver training course, half of which was online. She couldn’t even turn on a computer when she started school. Despite that, Sally got top grades and outscored everybody in the behind-the-wheel portion of her coursework. Sally had a dream job offer in hand when she graduated, and now she's a road warrior.

These six and others like them have allowed me to mentor them on their hero’s journey. Thanks, guys, for letting me tag along.

This was going to be a post about the holidays, but I can’t make myself write about end-of-year celebrations because the central fact of my life right now is that I lost my best friend on December 19, 2016.

My best friend came into my life ten years ago on a crisp day in October; he was my birthday present to myself. The day he came home, dry leaves skritched over the sidewalks. Jack-o-lanterns and fake spider webs sprouted on every other house in my neighborhood. My friend was younger then, and everything he saw surprised or delighted or, sometimes, scared him. A gaggle of kids walking to school attracted him like light attracts a moth. A tin Real Estate sign clanging in the wind sent him running for cover.

But regular meals, a roof over his head, a soft bed to sleep in, and plenty of affection showed him that he was home. No matter that he had to learn on his third day with us that he should not jump up on the kitchen table to help himself to an entire baked chicken. No matter that his mom had to learn to let go of problems at work earlier than she wanted to because she had somebody at home who needed to go outside.

You’ve guessed that the best friend I’m talking about is my dog, Homer, who died unexpectedly just six days before Christmas of a burst liver tumor.

Until Homer came along, I’d been a cat person. I was afraid of dogs, having been chased by a German Shepherd when I was a kid. Plus, to be honest, I’d never been inclined to own a dog. Dogs were so…needy. They were kind of icky, what with the drool and the doggy stink and the poo—I used to watch my elderly neighbor trot past my house behind her Schnauzer, plastic bag fluttering in her hand, and I’d imagine wrapping my hand in a bag and then wrapping that hand around warm dog droppings. Disgusting!

Then one summer I agreed to dog-sit my friend’s Bichon.  I enjoyed it. I began to imagine the unimaginable: maybe I could have a dog.

I approached dog adoption like I approach everything: I studied. I took a 90-question compatibility test and chose the breed that would best suit my lifestyle, the Golden Retriever. I studied costs, life span, energy level. I bought a book so I could learn how to train a dog. I decided on a mixed-breed shelter dog or a Golden rescue rather than a purebred animal, as so many deserving dogs need homes. The last thing the world needs is more puppies, I decided. I haunted Petfinder. I visited shelters. I registered with a rescue group. It took three months to find Homer, who was half Golden Retriever and half Mystery Meat (guesses ranged from Collie to Great Pyrennes).

Unfortunately, a couple of days after I brought the dog home, I was pretty sure I’d made a mistake. Everything about dog-ness was new to me. Certainly, one can make predictions about an animal’s temperament based on breed or upbringing or sex, but studying dog as a concept isn’t the same as living with an individual dog.  

Despite my misgivings, there was something about Homer I wanted to know and needed to learn, something this two-minute video captures, although I hadn't learned it yet at the time. And so he stayed.

For ten years, Homer blessed my life with his sweetness, his gentleness, and his tolerance of my faults. He forgave my ineptitude, my clumsy learning of his language. He was mostly obedient unless he detected a squirrel or a rabbit in the yard; then, nothing could stop him from chasing the beastie away or, if he caught it, shaking the life out of it. He was a sometime-pest, an always-friend, a furry baby, the fellow that forced me to keep normal hours and got me outside twice a day, rain or shine. No matter how cold it was in the depths of January, he did his puppy dance while I geared up to walk him in the 20-below-zero darkness over icy sidewalks. No matter how hot the July afternoon, he did the same dance when it was time to go out, although even on the hottest days, he never wanted to wade out into the river any deeper than his chest. He loved to walk in the woods, and so on three out of four outings, he pulled me toward the long path through the trees. I obliged him only one time out of ten, and yet he always forgave me—and he never gave up trying to entice me into the forest. Another way to spell “dog” is “H-O-P-E.”

Homer taught me that you learn about yourself when you try to communicate with another species. Wanting to understand my dog forced me to be vulnerable and to truly pay attention rather than insisting the communication be only one-way. Like a mother learning her baby's cries, I had to learn my dog's different barks. About three weeks into my being a new dog mom, Homer tried to tell me that somebody was breaking into my neighbor’s outbuilding. I shushed him, but the next morning, my neighbor discovered her shed lock broken on the ground and a can half-full of gasoline beside it. We’d had a rash of arsons in our town; we believe the dog’s barking scared away whoever had come to burn down her shed. After that, I paid attention when the dog tried to tell me something. I tried to read his eyes. I learned to watch his ears. I learned that his weird, guttural throat noises meant I was supposed to look up because he had something to tell me.

Homer was never one of those dogs that barks at the drop of a hat, but he made other noises. He woofed, under his breath, like that uncle who hangs back at family gatherings listening to everybody and once in a while gruffing out a “Hmph!” which isn’t a clear statement of anything in particular so much as it is a reminder that he’s listening to every word. If anybody knocked on our door—including me with an armful of groceries—Homer gave a bugling “Bwoo-oo-oo!” to let the house know somebody wanted in. If my brother stopped by, Homer made ecstatic mock-whiny puppy noises and groveled at my brother’s feet. Homer wasn’t a Velcro dog with me, but he could never get enough of my brother. “Go eat the cat,” Dan would suggest, but Homer would not leave his side.

As regards the cats, Homer was their buddy. They all grew up together, Homer bridging the gap between one generation of cats and their successors. One day, Homer spent fifteen minutes following his best buddy, Chip, from room to room licking him and wagging his tail, waiting for the cat to settle so they could nap together.

It is nice to reminisce about my dog, but it hurts. While introducing former New York magazine executive editor John Homans's book What’s a Dog For?: The Surprising History, Science, Philosophy, and Politics of Man’s Best Friend, Maria Popova talks about “the inevitable pain we invite into our lives when we commit to love a being biologically destined to die before we do and the boundless joy of choosing to love anyway.”

Quite simply, choosing to love means choosing to hurt. A couple of days ago, I ran into a dog park friend whose big hound, Cooper, died three years ago. “I still cry about Cooper,” she said, hugging me. “I had to get therapy when he died. You will never forget Homer, and he’ll always be with you. Homer was your soul mate.”

Initially, “soul mate” sounded too extreme. A soul mate is somebody who loves with a love that passeth understanding, a love that accepts all, endures all. A soul mate loves purely with his whole heart. Soul mates feel such depthless devotion to one another that the sudden exit of the beloved is like the cutting off of a limb: shocking, painful, crippling.

Maybe Homer was my soul mate. I have certainly never felt so deeply and completely loved for my own sake. I have never felt so bereft.

And now Homer's ashes sit on a shelf in my house. I will never see him again.

Like the deepest water in the ocean slowly rolling to the surface to get oxygenated and then slowly rolling back down to the deep, so it is with grief. It comes in waves. Our rhythms change when somebody passes. We have to learn new ways of doing things. For many days, at both breakfast and lunch, I was about to set my plate on the floor to be "pre-washed" until I remembered my pre-washer was gone. When I brought home groceries the other day, as always, I schlepped everything out of the car in several trips to a pile beside the door because a golden ball of fur used to come barreling out the minute the door opened. The other morning, I wondered if I could get away with writing one more page before it was time to walk the dog—then I remembered there was no dog to walk.

When somebody passes, no matter the species, there are rituals that you do only at such a time. Five days before Christmas, I washed Homie's bed and scrubbed his dishes and washed the rugs. Four days before Christmas, I vacuumed up the dog hair in my living room. Three days before Christmas, the vet called to tell me Homie's ashes already had come back from the crematory, so I drove out there to pick up the walnut box containing the physical remains of my friend. Afterward, I took his leftover toys and food to the animal shelter. While I was at the shelter, I wandered into the dog department just to look at who was there. Then it hit me: I wasn't looking for another dog. I was looking for my dog.

EB White writes a lighthearted obituary for his dog, Daisy, and the fact that White applied his greatest gift to his canine friend honors Daisy with the best White had to give her.

John Updike’s poem "Another Dog's Death" is not as light-hearted; it is, rather, a simple elegy that shows how well the man and the dog knew one another:

    For days the good old bitch had been dying, her back
    pinched down to the spine and arched to ease the pain,
    her kidneys dry, her muzzle white. At last
    I took a shovel into the woods and dug her grave
 
    in preparation for the certain. She came along,
    which I had not expected. Still, the children gone,
    such expeditions were rare, and the dog,
    spayed early, knew no nonhuman word for love.
 
    She made her stiff legs trot and let her bent tail wag.
    We found a spot we liked, where the pines met the field.
    The sun warmed her fur as she dozed and I dug;
    I carved her a safe place while she protected me.
 
    I measured her length with the shovel’s long handle;
    she perked in amusement, and sniffed the heaped-up earth.
    Back down at the house, she seemed friskier,
    but gagged, eating. We called the vet a few days later.
 
    They were old friends. She held up a paw, and he
    injected a violet fluid. She swooned on the lawn;
    we watched her breathing quickly slow and cease.
    In a wheelbarrow up to the hole, her warm fur shone.
 
As for me, I put one foot in front of the other. I take it one day at a time. I get up. I eat food. I try to work. I don’t walk the dog. I layer my broken heart in logic and common sense and wait to feel less pain and more gratitude for the incredible blessing that my big, silly boy brought: he made me a better person. Like the lyric from Wicked says, "Because I knew you, I have been changed for good."

Homans says “It’s not that a dog accepts the cards it’s been dealt; it’s not aware that there are cards. James Thurber called the desire for this condition ‘the Dog Wish,’ the ‘strange and involved compulsion to be as happy and carefree as a dog.’… Even in the most difficult times, dogs are cheerful and ready for experience.” I laugh, even now, at this video of a dog (whose goofiness reminds me of my boy) when the dog finds out his dad just brought home a kitten.

My dog taught me that I can’t control everything and that I shouldn’t want to. He taught me to enjoy the breeze, to appreciate every meal, to be grateful to be alive. Homer was the best of dogs, gentle and sweet. I hope when I go to heaven he will be the first to greet me, like Katie greets Chris in this clip from What Dreams May Come.

RIP, my beautiful, happy, beloved pup. I will love you for the rest of my life. I will be grateful that I knew you as long as I live.

From the age of 16, I belonged to the theater. I dipped in a toe in high school and ended up majoring in theater in college. I ran a theater program for 13 years. I mentored young theater artists, many of whom went on to professional careers. I know theater in my bones.

I know it takes artistry for “techies” to create a world out of paint and canvas, light and sound. I know it takes roughly two hours of rehearsal for every minute onstage, because an actor has to BE somebody else, convincingly, night after night, staying true to the playwright’s intention and the director’s vision while at the same time adjusting on the fly to the vagaries of live performance: A baby crying. A bat flittering in the lights. A famous person in the house.

Nowadays, a live theater experience usually is arranged so audience members sit in a dark space and watch the action onstage through a window (the “fourth wall”). Sometimes the audience participates, although interactive theater can be problematic. Sometimes, even in movies (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off comes to mind), the characters acknowledge they’re being watched.  

Bottom line, though, performers and audiences in the modern theater usually share the same time and place on different planes of existence. At my theater, in fact, actors were required to get out of makeup and costume before they could go into the house. Why? Because we wanted the magic to last beyond the performance. We wanted people to keep on feeling what we’d worked so hard to help them feel. We wanted the characters to go on singing in the audiences’ minds, to go on teaching them how to be human beings, without reminding them that we were making it all up. 

What’s my point? Something happened in New York City on November 18 when vice president-elect, Mike Pence, attended a performance of Hamilton, a musical about the life of American Founding Father Alexander Hamilton. The show, with music, lyrics, and book by Lin-Manuel Miranda, was inspired by the 2004 biography Alexander Hamilton by historian Ron Chernow.

Alexander Hamilton was a big deal. He convinced New Yorkers to ratify the U.S Constitution. He was the nation’s first secretary of the treasury, and his policies strengthened the economic position of the federal government, which bolstered the economy of the fledgling nation. His work as an attorney led to the creation of the judicial review system. He co-founded the Bank of New York.

Hamilton, the musical, is a big deal, too. Hamilton  won a record-setting 16 Tony nominations, winning 11. Snippets of Hamilton were performed at the White House.  In May, the show was sold out eight months in advance. Tickets to Hamilton are supposed to start at $139 with premium seats starting at $549, but Hamilton is such a hot ticket that some secondary-market tickets are selling for $2,500 each (although matinee tickets are available for less). 

Something else that’s a big deal is being second-in-command of the United States. Mike Pence will take on that job on January 20, 2017—but I'd like to set aside the new job and focus on what happened to theatergoer Mike Pence last Friday at Hamilton.

The show was over. The audience was still clapping, but Mr. Pence was on his feet ready to go, no doubt being urged along by the Secret Service. As Pence was leaving, however, Brandon Victor Dixon, who plays Aaron Burr, called out to him. Pence stopped. Dixon launched into a statement that asked Pence to make sure the new administration supported diversity. Pence was periodically booed—or perhaps Dixon was being booed—during the interlude.

Somebody lost no time in telling president-elect Trump what had happened, and Trump lost no time castigating the cast on Twitter: “Our wonderful future V.P. Mike Pence was harassed last night at the theater by the cast of Hamilton, cameras blazing. This should not happen!"

It was like somebody threw a grenade into social media. Everybody had an opinion. Theater people whooped it up about free speech. Memes appeared:

Detractors used words like “rude,” “arrogant,” and “cowardly.” People said Pence had been ambushed, because who goes to a play expecting to be singled out and lectured from the stage? (I certainly don’t.)

Granted, it’s no surprise that LGBT, POC, non-Christians, differently-abled people, women, and non-Christians in the United States were horrified at best and terrified at worst at the outcome of this month’s election. A couple of my gay friends, for example, were accosted by Trump supporters who viewed the election as permission to unleash their inner crazy person. I am certain Mr. Dixon felt righteous delivering the people’s demands to the king, as it were, from a safe place, surrounded onstage by his peeps. Mr. Dixon said his piece in front of an audience that had just seen musical theater history. His words hit Pence, who stood like a deer in the headlights.

Let me be clear: politically, Mr. Pence and I diverge at “go.” Pence was a Conservative radio host (he called himself "Rush Limbaugh on decaf"). He’s a supporter of the Tea Party. He supports education but not public schools or teachers’ unions. He supports gun rights and the coal industry but not the Environmental Protection Agency. He favors low taxes and low wages. He wanted to keep Syrian refugees out of Indiana. He opposes abortion. He opposes any expansion of rights for LGBT people. He’s not a fan of science either—in 2001, Pence said, “smoking does not kill.” I abhor every single one of these positions.

So why was Mike Pence the player in this five-minute drama who moved the needle on my Empathy-o-Meter? Because Pence didn’t attend Hamilton as the vice president-elect. He attended as a dad taking his daughter to a show. Unfortunately, instead of being allowed to sit in the dark like everybody else and leave the theater humming show tunes like everybody else, maybe pick up a T-shirt, Pence was sucker-punched.

Some say Pence isn’t like everybody else because he’s the future vice-president. By that reasoning, we can all expect to be accosted wherever we go. A teacher will have to explain a math problem in the produce aisle. A physician at a cocktail party will have to diagnose somebody’s symptoms. A plumber out for a fish fry will have to take a look at a busted coupling. Do these kinds of interactions already occur? Sure, but I’d bet money the teacher, the doctor, and the plumber don’t like being off-duty and then having somebody bust into their personal space. And I bet the event doesn't get shared with the known universe.

Did Pence have it coming, being a person who's thrust himself into the public eye? After all, movie stars are stalked and mobbed and so forth—it's the price you pay for fame, right?

How about if we try a little empathy exercise from the theater? How about if we put ourselves in Pence’s shoes?

You're Mike Pence. You endure months of a brutal political campaign. Sleep becomes an option. Your family and home become Kansas while you’re flying all over Oz; like Dorothy, all you want to do is go home. But you made a commitment, so you roll with it.

You’re a Midwestern guy. You haven’t spent a lot of time in big cities. You haven’t gone to many Broadway shows—why would you?

Then you are elected vice president of the United States. Your daughter wants to see Hamilton. You can afford the tickets now. You know you’re going to be pretty busy for the next four years starting in January, so you figure you’ll take a night off and spend it with your daughter and her cousin.

Hamilton blows you away. You never thought of the Founding Fathers as being…cool. The lyrics make history come alive, which you dig despite the cussing. You get to the end of the show and you’re feeling pretty fly. Maybe you have a tear in your eye. You’re proud to be an American. You get why everybody has been talking about this show.

Toward the end of the curtain call, your Secret Service detail lets you know it’s time to go. You get up.
Then you hear your name. It’s one of the actors. Is he going to thank you for coming? You mentally gear up to be gracious—should you wave?—while at the same time conveying to the actor that you’ve got to bail.

But then somebody in the audience boos. More than one somebody. The secret service guys move in, ready for anything, The actor says something about your administration representing everybody. And you think, Really? NOW? It feels like this actor, this Dixon guy, is talking forever, even though it’s only a couple of minutes. When he’s done, the Secret Service hustles you out to the car. You wouldn’t repeat the words they’re muttering.

As you’re being driven home, your daughter says, “Dad, I’m sorry that happened.” Your body flushes. Unbelievable. You were having a great time, but in the back of your mind you also were thinking maybe you’d take a closer look at the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts. Maybe you could talk to a couple of people in Congress to make sure the NEH and NEA funding doesn’t dry up, since the president-elect is kind of “meh” about theater.

But now? No way. Theater people are unpredictable. They don’t know how things work. They bust a guy’s chops in front of his daughter. And how dare they suggest you and Donald Trump won’t be their leaders! The two of you got elected, didn’t you? You text Donald. He tweets in your defense.

You slam shut the door in your mind that Hamilton opened up, and you vow never to open it up again.

Could this be how it felt? Mr. Pence said on Fox Sunday morning that he would leave it to others to decide whether a Broadway theater was the appropriate venue for Dixon's message.

I’d like to weigh in: No. It wasn’t.

There are many ways to convey ideas, to persuade. Maybe Mr. Dixon figured this was his shot, and he didn’t want to throw it away.

But turning the theater into a bully pulpit from which you demand that somebody in the audience treat everybody fairly is an ironic move: Mr. Dixon demanded equal treatment but did not extend that courtesy to Mr. Pence, who, on Friday night, deserved to be treated like everybody else in that house who bought a ticket. Nobody else in that theater was called out—and despite the noble words, Pence most assuredly was called out.

Alexander Hamilton, who did exactly the same thing to his detractors, knows exactly what I'm talking about.

Not cool.

Rain

The mists of Ireland are a strange thing for a person accustomed to the climate extremes of the Upper Midwest. Where I live, it doesn’t mist. Here, clouds gather in a black mass and lightning forks and thunder booms and the clouds dump fat drops that splat on umbrellas and whoosh into gutters and rush down storm drains and swell rivers until they crest and flood. Midwestern rain is rain and no mistake.

Irish rain is softer, and Irish mist is softest of all. If it’s night and you’re looking at mist in a street light, you can see it swirling like wet dust, lighter than the air.

If you’re out in it, you feel it on your face like the fine droplets that hover near your morning shower before you step into it to start your day. Irish is mist is normal air, only wetter, unless the wind is up; then the droplets get shoved together, and that becomes rain you can feel and see and hear.

An old saying, "You don't go to Ireland for the weather," means it can be sunny one minute and raining the next—sometimes for three whole minutes, then the sun comes back out. Ireland’s climate is moderated by the Atlantic Ocean, so storms can blow in without notice. Temperatures range between 40 and 50 degrees (4 to10 Celsius)  in the winter months and 60 to 70 degrees (16 to 21 Celsius) in the summer months. Irish weather is mild and wet, one reason the Irish favor wool, which keeps a person warm, wet or dry, but also breathes. Wool, of course, comes from sheep, of which there are 3.3 million in Ireland.

Sheep

You can’t turn around in rural Ireland without seeing herds of sheep. A sheep is not the national animal of Ireland (that honor goes to the stag), but it should be, because every rolling hill is clotted with them.

Sheep feed in fields that are never more than half a day from a good misting.Hill after rolling hill is blanketed in lush grass and tufted with white sheep all the way into the green distance. The Irish flag is green, white, and orange for a political reason (green for Catholic, orange for Protestant, and white for the peace between them), but one can easily imagine those colors were chosen to represent sunrise over a sheepfold.

Most sheep farms are small, family-run enterprises. At Kissane Sheep Farm in Moll’s Gap, County Kerry, next to Kilarney National Park, John Kissane raises 1,000 Black Faced Mountain sheep. We stopped there to see the dogs herding the sheep and watch a shearer remove a sheep’s fleece for the winter.

We took our spots on the viewing bleachers after meeting the herding dogs, Pepper and Dash, who quivered under our hands whilst they awaited their chance to work. Sheep think dogs are wolves, so the dogs’ low-bellied runs frighten the sheep into forming a massive white cloud that turns and flows on the hillside whichever way the herder wants, very like the way humans are manipulated by the nearest reward or punishment without seeing that we’re being herded (which is a tale for another time). Kissane says his dogs are fed protein but never any raw meat as it might turn them into sheep-killers. Pepper and Dash did seem to particularly enjoy the times their job required them to streak in for a quick nip.

Inside the shearing barn, the shearer sat the sheep on its rump like a drunk in a corner of a pub. He kept the beast moving, which kept it calm while its coat was shorn away. It was the sheep’s last shearing of the season. Each sheep must be sheared before it is turned out to pasture for the winter—if the wool is left on, the lanolin gets hard like butter and the creature can’t move.

Each sheep gets shots, oral medication, and a blob of paint before it is turned out, but Kissane mentioned the economics of sheep farming more than once during our visit. He worries about keeping the farm going. He says that one shearing from one sheep used to bring in $7, but now it brings in $2. Costs have gone up and regulations have gotten tougher. Kissane says there are 130,000 family farms in Ireland now, but in 20 years, there will be only 20,000 left. Smallholdings are being bought up by conglomerates, and farmers are forced to sell due to changing European Union regulations, increasing food and medical costs, and declining prices of lamb and wool.

Paying visitors like us take Kissane away from his work, but they keep him in business, as does his program that allows a visitor to “adopt” a sheep.

The past shaped the present

The third thing you can’t ignore—or, more accurately, can’t stop thinking about—is the history of the Irish people. Stereotypes about the Irish abound: They’re drunk all the time. They eat mostly potatoes. They all sing or play a musical instrument. They’re all redheads. They have leprechauns and pots of gold. They’re great talkers. They’re greater fighters. They love to party. A 2012 Huffington Post blog about Irish stereotypes by an Irishman concludes, “We really aren’t drunk all the time (I’m only half-cut right now, for example), and we usually fight with each other instead of strangers - we pride ourselves on our hospitality (another cliché that is true: the Irish really are welcoming)...Sure we’re harmless really.”  The stereotype of the merry Irishman dancing a jig and then cooling off with a pint may have some basis in fact, but the Irish don’t necessarily party because they’re happy.

Edna O’Brien, one of Ireland’s great modern writers, tries to explain herself and her countrymen in her memoir, Mother Ireland. O’Brien says being Irish is a state of mind as well as an actual country. “Being Irish is being at odds with other nationalities,” she says, because the Irish have a “quite different philosophy about pleasure, about punishment, about life, and about death.” A hundred years and more of austerity, fear, and persecution will do that.

The history of Ireland is the history of a land whose ports and proximity to (yet safe distance from) the rest of Europe have attracted the attention of everybody from the Vikings to the Nazis. For centuries, Ireland has endured plunderers coming in waves to steal from and enslave her people. A further complication embedded in the Irish national psyche is the Catholic religion, which teaches forbearance in the face of suffering. Catholicism was brought to the island by one of the world’s favorite saints, Patrick.

Patrick was born at the end of the 4th century in Roman Britain. As a teen-ager, Patrick was captured by Irish pirates and sold as a slave to tend sheep in pagan Ireland. Patrick's captivity lasted about six years, and then he escaped and was reunited with his family. He later returned to Ireland as a Catholic missionary. Since Patrick had worked for a Druid master, he knew pagan traditions. He knew that the first fire lit during the spring festival of Beltane was supposed to be kindled on the Hill of Tara by the high king. Instead, Patrick lit a fire on a nearby hill to commemorate Easter. Somehow, this in-your-face act led to High King Loigaire’s granting Patrick permission to preach Christianity, which he did for the next 40 years, and Catholicism took root in Ireland.

But England’s Henry VIII booted the Catholic Church out of England and made himself head of the (Anglican) Church, and having a Catholic neighbor only a day’s sail away made the English nervous. Both Henry and his daughter, Elizabeth I, labored to bring Ireland fully under English control partly by pummeling them on the battlefield but mostly by planting hundreds of Protestants in the country and bestowing upon the transplants lands belonging to native Irish Catholics. By the time Elizabeth’s successor, James the I and VI, came to the throne in 1603, the native Irish were hemmed in by Englishmen.

Then came a systematic campaign, the Penal Laws, designed to subjugate them and other non-Protestants entirely (the last Penal Law wasn’t eliminated until 1920). Viewed from our own time, the Penal Laws are so horrible they seem to have been imagined by a sadist, even though it’s sadly true that man’s inhumanity to man is played out every decade in every corner of the globe, including our own country.

The Penal Laws said Catholics couldn’t marry Protestants. Catholics couldn’t go to college. They couldn’t buy land. They couldn’t be judges. They couldn’t adopt Protestant orphans. They couldn’t own a horse. They were fined heavily for pretty much anything Catholic-related.

Catholics couldn’t serve in the government or in the army (until England needed troops later on during the Revolutionary War). Catholic priests had to register with the authorities and swear allegiance to the Crown. They had to take an oath that the Pope had no authority, that Purgatory didn’t exist, and that other normal aspects of the Catholic faith were humbug. Catholics could worship only in private, yet if a private Catholic service were leaked to the authorities, the priest, if unregistered, could be taken up and turned in for a bounty.

The reward rates for capture varied from £50–100 for a Bishop to £10–20 for the capture of a priest. To give you an idea of how much money that was, and why a bounty hunter would risk the hatred of his neighbors to narc on a priest, the average yearly wage in the 1700’s in Ireland was £17 for a farm worker and £22 for a miner. So a man could earn double or quadruple the average laborer’s salary if he turned in a bishop and nearly a year’s wages if he turned in a priest. The Priest Hunters by Colin C. Murphy delves into this practice.

The persecution of the Irish in their own land by the English carried on through the Great Famine of the mid-19th century, when plenty of food was grown in Ireland to feed all the people, but they were not allowed to eat it because their English landowner lords required it be exported for profit.

One person who believes the English consciously committed genocide is Ciarán Ó Murchadha. In his latest book,  The Great Famine: Ireland’s Agony 1845 – 52, Ó Murchadha says, “Between 1845 and 1855, approximately one-quarter of the inhabitants of an entire European nation, amounting to some 2.1 million persons, were permanently removed from their homeland.”  More than a million died, and more than a million emigrated. Over 95 percent of emigrants came to America, which now has 39.6 million citizens (including Scots-Irish) who claim Irish heritage. That number is almost seven times larger than the entire population of Ireland (6.3 million) today. Many people descended from Irish ancestors still haven’t forgiven the English for what they did nearly two hundred years ago—and this longstanding ire might be more than a grudge. It might be genetic.

A scientific theory gaining popularity, epigenetic memory, says traumatic experiences in people’s past, or their ancestors’ past, can leave molecular scars that adhere to a person’s very DNA. If this theory is true, the Irish and their descendants share a genetic stamp related to being persecuted and starved generation after generation.

Whether nature or nurture, Edna O’Brien recognizes the lingering sting of being Irish. She says of her native land, which she left in 1958, “it warped me, and those around me, and their parents before them, all stooped by a variety of fears—fear of church, fear of gombeenism [the practice of looking to make a quick profit at somebody else’s expense or by accepting bribes], fear of phantoms, fear of ridicule, fear of hunger, fear of annihilation, and fear of their own deeply ingrained aggression that can only strike a blow at each other, not having the innate authority to strike at those who are higher.” Not that the Irish take abuse lying down. Between 1534 and 1998, there have been 20 uprisings on the island, including the 1916 Easter Rising and the Troubles.

The Bogside Artist murals that cover whole sides of buildings along Rossville Street near Free Derry Corner in Derry, Northern Ireland, commemorate a time in Irish history when the Irish rose up against their oppressors. In the Shankill Road area of Belfast, the gates still stand that used to shut tight every night to contain citizens during the Troubles (1969-1998), a time some Irish say is forgiven—though it’s hard to forget, which you find out if you speak to anybody who holds the Troubles in living memory.

Hire a guide, let’s say in Derry. Ask him to tell you about the Troubles. He will gather himself. He will tamp down…something…and he will tell you about the years Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants turned on one another. Killed one another. His voice will be carefully controlled as he recounts the Bloody Sunday massacre of 30 January 1972 in the Bogside area of Derry, Northern Ireland, when British soldiers shot 26 unarmed civilians during a protest march against internment (internment meant the army could arrest you without cause and hold you indefinitely “at her Majesty’s pleasure”). Fourteen people died, many of the victims shot while fleeing from the soldiers or trying to help the wounded. After Bloody Sunday, support for the IRA rose. It took the British government nearly 40 years to admit the killings had been unjustified.

“Never again,” the Derry guide will say as he wraps up the story, “we won’t go back to that.” But his body may hunch over and his eyes hood just a bit, masking something he won’t admit unless he’s cornered: if they push us, we will push back. We will always push back.

“Scratch the surface,” O’Brien says, “and underneath you will find Irish hearts on the boil.”

Music

But Irish hearts don’t boil themselves dry. Instead, they sing. Music is woven into the fabric of the country, whose symbol is the Irish harp. Any pub you walk into is a strange pub indeed if it doesn’t feature live music played and sung by people who very likely work during the day at something else but must make music at night, like a pressure cooker must let off steam or a kettle on the hob must have water poured in or be ruined.

For the Irish, music is whistling in the dark. It’s thumbing your nose. It’s the howling of the pack. It’s a language one Irishman speaks to another like birds in a forest calling back and forth: the rest of us hear the song, but only the birds themselves take in the meaning of every note. Irish music is fun as well, of course, and so are Irish musicians. Traditional music icon Seamus Begley sang in Irish (Gaelic) for us at Siopa Ceoil (the Dingle Music Shop), but paused mid-performance when he got the giggles. He explained, “The funny thing about singing Irish songs for Americans is that if I repeat a verse, they don’t know the difference.”

True enough, although it’s also true that people who listen carefully may hear what simmers under the words.

In Kinsale, a local advised me to ask the Auld Ones performing that night at Dalton’s Bar to sing “Waltzing Matilda”—but what I heard wasn’t the version performed by Tom Waits. There were no instruments. No clapping along. Just the voice of a white-bearded gentleman keening the lament of an injured soldier who comes home to no parades, no family, no glory, carrying his loss and regret like a permanent pack on his shoulders. Nobody in Dalton’s spoke, nobody poured a drink. The place was quiet as the grave. Everyone present became, for a few minutes, more than a spectator. The song pulled us in, our breathing became a part of the story, and we felt this soldier’s homecoming as though it were our own.

Tourists go to Irish pubs and clap along with the music, smiling, perhaps imagining it is purely joy that drives the Irish to make music. But watch the pub performers as they sit shoulder-to-shoulder, together, facing the crowd. Watch their eyes. Listen to the lyrics of “On the One Road” or “The Ballad of James Connolly.” Try not to sing along with “Dirty Old Town” or “Will You Go, Lassie?” on your Wicklow Mountain pub tour. If you let the music in, you may begin to twig why the Irish make a joyful noise.

Irish music underscores that the need to be free burns in Irish hearts, as common as sheep, as certain as rain, as fierce a fire as ever burned on the Hill of Tara in days of old.

I’m short. Five foot, one and a half inches, to be precise. Being short has not been a problem for me; like everybody else, I played with the cards I was dealt. When I was little, I scaled the cupboards in my mother’s kitchen like a goat; when I got my own kitchen, I bought one of those library step-stools and gave it its own little cupboard to live in. I use it daily.

I honestly don’t know if I’ve lost or gained jobs or partners because of my height. How can you find out about the ones that got away if they got away?

I don't wear high heels to compensate for being short because heels hurt. (I once knew a woman who wore stilettos every day, and the result was that her Achilles’ tendon shrank. She had to wear heeled slippers at home. True story.) The one time I wore platform shoes, I fell off them and put my ankle in a cast during rehearsals for a play, which had a second-act setting of a cellar that could be accessed only via a set of steep stairs, stage left. I crutched along for weeks, but my cast finally came off the day we opened. I hadn’t ever tried the scary stairs on two good ankles let alone a good ankle and an unsteady, unshaven one. To my director’s dismay, I chickened out of using the stairs and made all my second-act entrances from the wings. I pretended my character knew a secret passageway into the cellar. ‘Nother true story.

My lack of stature meant I looked up to pretty much everyone, and that was OK too. The only time I really wished to be taller was when I was pregnant, because the distance from my last rib to my hip is only six inches, so my baby had nowhere to grow but out. I looked like a tootsie pop on two sticks. If I’d fallen on my back, I’d have been as helpless as a June bug, my little arms and legs waving in the air while I waited for somebody to turn me over.

So. Yeah. Short. I share this because last month I listened to a program on National Public Radio’s This American Life titled  “Tell Me I’m Fat.” (If you have never listened to This American Life, please do. It will make your life better. Honest.)

In this segment, journalist and author Lindy West (author of Shrill) talks about her experience of coming out as a fat person. She talks about working for a man whose favorite jokes were fat people jokes, shared with everybody on company email.  West says, “You know, just moving through the world as a big person is hard. I take up a lot of space. It's undeniable. It's awkward and embarrassing. And I'm just constantly knocking stuff over with my butt, you know?” West talks about deciding to be happy as a fat person rather than perpetuating the myth that inside every fat person is a skinny person dying to get out. No, West says, inside this fat person is me, and I like myself just as I am.

Another guest on Ira Glass’s show, Elna Baker, chose a different approach to being fat: diet pills. Why? She’d been told she would never have a partner or a job unless she lost weight, which was an idea she scoffed at—until she lost 110 pounds and forthwith found both work and love. But, Baker says, she gave up being happy as one person in order to be happy as somebody else. There’s a sense of loss in Baker’s story when she talks about the fat girl she used to be: “It's sad that new Elna gets everything old Elna wanted, because I think old Elna was a better person than new Elna.”

The program includes a short interview with Roxanne Gay, a fat black woman who can’t even shop at Lane Bryant because she is “super morbidly obese.” The program discloses that a well-known religious university refused to allow fat people to matriculate unless they lost a pound a week. The Pounds Off Program (POPS) at Oral Roberts University that ran from 1976 to 1978 was a mandatory weight-loss regime for fat students who were required to lose a certain amount of weight in order to maintain their status at the university. Even now, ORU requires freshmen to wear a Fitbit that tracks their daily aerobic activity; a minimum of 10,000 steps per day is required. (The Fitbit tracks their whereabouts, too, in case you were wondering.) The Fitbit replaces the school’s old end-of-semester test in which students had to run 1.5 miles.

Never mind that 1 Samuel 16:7 reads, “But the Lord said unto Samuel, Look not on his countenance, or on the height of his stature; because I have refused him: for the Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart.”

What is it about human beings that makes us so inclined to pass judgment on other human beings?

My theory is that judging others comes out of our survival instinct. We see strangers and we think: threat/not threat; potential rival/nope; wouldn’t kick him out of bed for eating crackers/never in a million years. But the key to the social compact is that we judge others silently in our minds. That’s where judgment of others should stay, according to Victoria Cohen Mitchell, who says in the July 2 issue of The Guardian, “We are kidding ourselves if we ever think it’s ‘helpful’ to tell somebody what we think is wrong with them. Deep down, our motivation is not so benign; it’s actually about our own desire to vent irritation at someone else’s weakness. It’s a nasty trait.”

Think about it: who among us does not have a weakness? Who among us is all the way strong, every day, in every area of our lives? Not me, that’s for sure.

I’m short, I already told you. I vacillate between glorious self-confidence and pathetic self-doubt. I am also, if you wanted me to lay my Evil Cat Hiss on you for saying it out loud, what you might call a dumpling. I wish it weren’t so. I joined a gym three years ago, but while I’m definitely firmer, I’m not any skinnier. Lindy West says, “The way that we are taught to think about fatness is that fat is not a permanent state. You're just a thin person who's failing consistently for your whole life...I don't know why I live in this imaginary future where I, you know, someday I'm going to be thin.”

Where is the line between hope and resignation? I think we're all skipping along that line, all the time.

As for me, I do not live in an imaginary future where someday I will be a tall, lanky, young Katharine Hepburn. I’m a butterball, and I can live with that. I’m not interested in being the right size according to somebody else’s standards. I’m interested in living the life I choose to live, and that life includes wearing comfortable shoes and eating chocolate and strawberry shortcake for however many more years I get. I quit smoking already—whaddaya want from me?

(Oh, and if I don't want to go swimming, it's because the water is too cold this time of year. So there.)

Hello, My Name Is Doris has been on my radar since I saw the trailer last fall, first because of Sally Field and second because of the movie’s basic premise, that people over 60 ain’t dead yet. As of April 2, the movie hasn’t come to my town, but  a friend in Los Angeles who saw it said it was nice to see a decent part written for a 60-something female. The fact that this was my friend’s take-away says a lot about Hollywood’s disdain for Women of a Certain Age.

It makes sense, I guess, that an industry built on visuals would insist that its female visuals be pleasing to its customers, although I could make a case for the beauty of a face lined with the experiences of a lifetime, like the total babe at the bottom of this post, whose hands were soft and smooth as peony petals. You had a grandma—maybe you are a grandma—you know what I mean.

Or I could talk about movie demographics. I could tell you that 31 percent of the population is aged 18 to 39 and buys 36 percent of movie tickets, while 35 percent of the population is over 50 and buys 25 percent of tickets—but that the numbers in the younger age bracket have been shrinking while the numbers in the older age bracket have been growing as the Boomers move through the demographic pipeline. I could tell you what Rebecca Pahle reported in 2014, that 52 percent of moviegoers are female but that only 15% of the main characters in the Top 100 grossing films of 2013 were women.

Small wonder so many people stood up and hollered "You go, girl!" when Jessica Chastain announced in February that she was launching Freckle Films, a production company with all-female executives. Chastain (who credits her grandmother for her career), Queen Latifah, Juliette Binoche and Catherine Hardwicke have joined the production company We Do It Together to produce films and TV that boost the empowerment of women, including Women of a Certain Age. Women like Doris. Like me.

Empowerment is good, because most people—women, especially—are afraid of getting old. I get that. It’s tough to acknowledge that your buns of steel have turned into buns of bread. It’s disappointing when, after a couple of babies and a couple of decades fighting gravity, you have to trade in a handful of silk for an industrial-strength brassiere because your boobs look like the ones in National Geographic. My brother knows what I’m talking about.

But I think it’s not being old that scares people. I think it's getting old after being young first, especially in a country that warehouses the old and the frail so we don’t have to look at our own future. A young-sounding reporter on a March 25 Wisconsin Public radio broadcast of This American Life titled “It’ll make Sense When You’re Older” stated, “There are a lot of things that make sense when you're older, as in a grown-up. And then there are things that make sense when you're actually getting old, when you start to make sense of losing things. That is what I'm sure most of us cannot fully grasp until we get there ourselves, to know—to really know—there is no path back.” The reporter on this piece conveyed  a distinctly mournful attitude toward getting older, maybe because she saw her own future in the folks she interviewed. It's tragic, because older people are brimming with wisdom.

But I do understand the fear. Aging is sneaky. Once you're an adult, time passes so slowly, day after day, year after year, that it feels like nothing will ever change. Then, one day: Pow! Men notice their hairlines receding. Women notice for the first time that when they smile, those lines at the corners of their eyes don’t smooth out. You see something shiny in your hair, but when you yank on it, you find out it’s not a silver lamé thread from a sweater—it’s a gray hair.

This is the point at which people who have spent the first part of their lives chasing things outside themselves—education, jobs, relationships, career advances—slow down and say, “Holy crap, I’m getting old!” They buy Rogaine and hair dye and face cream. They join a gym. They try to stop time, even though youth isn’t anybody’s to keep forever. You only get a little bit for a little while, and then you get the bum’s rush: Move along. Nothing to see here.

But something I have noticed as I've edged closer to my own Good Night is that I...actually...like getting older. The pressure is off, in so many areas of my life—and apparently, plenty of other people feel the same way. According to psychologist Laura Carstensen, getting older is when your life actually gets better because “recognizing that we won't live forever changes our perspective on life in positive ways.”

Carstensen’s research shows that older people are actually happier than younger people. According to Carstensen, “When we recognize that we don't have all the time in the world, we see our priorities most clearly; we take less notice of trivial matters; we savor life; we're more appreciative; we're open to reconciliation; we invest in more emotionally important parts of life, and life gets better.” You can listen to Carstenson’s fascinating 11-minute TED talk “Older People are Happier” here.

Carstensen validates what I’ve felt ever since I retired: I am tickled pink to be exactly where and who I am, a female dancing along in my own Doris shoes. My income is (mostly) sufficient for my needs, so I don’t have to punch a time clock to make ends meet. My body and I have known one another long enough so I can tell whether it needs a session on the elliptical or a square of chocolate. Either or both. If I want company, I can find it, even though I’m an “older lady,” like San Francisco’s Donnalou Harris sings about (if you haven't clicked on a link yet, pleeeease do yourself a favor and click on that one). Harris sings,

“Well, I ain’t 16
Not a beauty queen
And my eyes are baggin'
And my skin is saggin'
And if that's the reason that you don't love me
Then maybe that's not love.”
 
Betcha a bright, shiny nickel that Donnalou still gets The Look, and so do I. If made an effort, I could have all the companionship I wanted.

I don't make an effort. I'm perfectly fine spending time on myself, quenching my own thirst. This, too, has gotten a green light in the larger society; apparently, being alone relieves stress, boosts confidence, and makes a person more creative.

Travel? Yes, please. Challenges? Yes, always yes. Time enough at last? Well...I know I won't get the 500+ years I'd need to write all the books I have in me or read all the books that make me tingle all the way to my toes, but I'm having a ball going for it anyway. When I was a teen, I read columns by Sydney J. Harris in Chicago newspapers. In one column he said, “The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one’s mind a pleasant place in which to spend one’s leisure.” At 16, I decided that meant I should stuff my eyes with wonder, like Ray Bradbury says. So that’s what I did. That's what I do.

If I'm not stuffing my eyes with wonder thirty years down the road like these folks, well, I hope I'm still able to hit the ground running—straight for the coffee pot—and then spend all day doing what I always wanted to do. Yes, I do know how lucky I am to be here.

I think I learned to appreciate where I am and what I have from my mother, who at age 84 is still the life of every party, and from my paternal grandmother, Bessie Woodford Peterson, who reared eleven children during the Great Depression, who sent a fiancee to World War One and a son to World War Two, and who grew up in the horse-and-buggy days but lived to see a man walk on the moon. She was the foundation of a very big family and a woman who taught everybody in it how to grow old with grace.

For me, so far, getting older has been as great a gift as being born in the first place. If I can hang on for a few more years, I might even become a Grandmother of a Certain Age.

A conversation about the “corrupt” media inspired me to write about how the media have changed in my own lifetime. The more digging I did, however, the more I saw that corruption is like the legendary hydra: if you cut off one head, the hydra grows two in its place.


Hydra Head Number One: Government

Bernie Sanders reminds me of the boy who cried wolf. You know the story: a boy is sent out to guard the villagers’ sheep. It’s boring. One night, just for kicks, the boy hollers, “Help! Wolves!” Naturally, the villagers run to his side to fight off the threat, but when they arrive huffing and puffing to the field, the sheep are peacefully browsing and the boy is laughing like a loon. The angry villagers go home. The boy does it the next night with the same result. But, as often happens in these kinds of stories, on the third night things change. Wolves really do slink out of the woods and attack the sheep. The boy cries, “Help! Wolves!” and the villagers roll over in their beds and go back to sleep. The sheep and the boy are devoured. The moral of the story is don’t pretend you’re in trouble if you’re not.

But Bernie Sanders' hollering about Wall Street and greed in every speech isn't "crying wolf." When Sanders talks about the longstanding, ongoing, pervasive mutual back-scratching that exists between wealthy donors and elected officials, he's talking about something real.

Don't get me wrong. Being wealthy isn't bad. If it were, the lottery would go out of business. The problem is that, throughout human history, rich people have enjoyed privileges that poor people simply don’t have access to: adequate food, clothing and shelter; protection from enemies; proper medical attention when they are sick or injured. It also is true that those who Have want to hold on to what they have; those who Have Not must stand in the snow and look in through the window. This is the way the world has been, is now, and probably always will be. Jesus himself said “The poor you will always have with you.” But Jesus also said it would be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter Heaven.

He wasn’t saying he didn’t like rich people; he was saying rich people generally care more about money than about improving their souls or helping poor people—some call this greed—and we all know Jesus was all about seeking god first and loving your fellow humans second. Got questions.org explains, "The rich man so often is blind to his spiritual poverty because he is proud of his accomplishments and has contented himself with his wealth. He is as likely to humble himself before God as a camel is to crawl through the eye of a needle." Major world religions recognize that greed exists and urge their followers to help their fellow humans. One of the five pillars of Islam, for example, says that Muslims should give alms to the poor.

Some rich people do help others. Other rich people, however, use their money to influence public policy, and the connection between government and business is...messy. Government regulation of business is supposed to prevent companies from making a profit at the expense of people’s health and safety, but regulations sometimes are pushed aside. It happened at Love Canal in New York, where the government approved the dumping of industrial chemicals—and then had to come in and clean up the mess after people started getting sick. Koch Industries, one of the top three polluters of America’s air, water, and climate, has paid and continues to pay fines and penalties but goes on polluting. The toxic water in Flint, Michigan, has been in the news for months. By now, we know that the government knew the water was bad but did nothing. In the state of Wisconsin, the past five years has seen an unprecedented dismantling of the state's environmental laws in a partisan effort to smooth the way for big business.

These examples of corporate greed colluding with government and trampling on human welfare are troubling. But greed and government have been in cahoots from the founding of the republic. Mother Jones shares a timeline of campaign finance transgressions going all the way back to George Washington. This disheartening list shows that few presidential administrations—no, not even Lincoln’s—have been corruption-free.

One of the best-known and longest-running corruption machines was New York City’s Tammany Hall, also known as the Society of St. Tammany, the Sons of St. Tammany, or the Columbian Order. This organization was founded in 1786. It played a major role in controlling New York City and New York State politics from the 1790s to the 1960s.

To be sure, Tammany Hall provided real, necessary help to immigrants in a pre-welfare era. Tammany Hall provided food, money, legal advice, and jobs. No immigrant had to watch his children starve if Tammany Hall embraced him. According to The Reader’s Companion to American History, Tammany Hall’s popularity and endurance resulted from its willingness to help the city’s poor and immigrant populations.

But there was a catch. Tammany Hall didn’t help immigrants just to be nice. Under William M. “Boss” Tweed, Tammany supporters filled out paperwork, provided witnesses, and loaned immigrants money for the fees required to become citizens. They also bribed judges and other city officials to go along with whatever Tammany wanted. In exchange for all these benefits, immigrants voted for political candidates Tammany favored. Tweed biographer Kenneth D. Ackerman, quoted in Wikipedia, says, "... The Tweed ring at its height [controlled] key power points: the courts, the legislature, the treasury and the ballot box…Tammany depended for its power on government contracts, jobs, patronage, corruption, and ultimately the ability of its leaders to control nominations to the Democratic ticket and swing the popular vote."

Another alliance between government and business that caused an uproar was the Teapot Dome scandal of the 1920s, which, before Watergate, was the "greatest and most sensational scandal in the history of American politics" according to Robert Cherney in Graft and Oil (2010, History Now).

What went down is this: in 1921, Warren G. Harding’s Secretary of the Interior, Albert B. Fall, secretly leased naval oil reserve fields at Teapot Dome, Wyoming, and Elk Hills, California, to Harry F. Sinclair and Edward L. Doheny without anybody else having the chance to bid on the leases. This was legal under the Mineral Leasing Act of 1920. What was not legal was that, in return for the leases, Fall got loans and gifts from Doheny and Sinclair totaling about $404,000 (about $5.36 million today). Fall funneled the money into his ranch and his businesses.

Lawsuits related to the scandal went on for years. Finally, in 1927, the Supreme Court ruled that the oil leases had been fraudulently given out. The Court invalidated both leases and returned the land to the government. Fall was convicted in 1929 for accepting bribes and became the first U.S. cabinet member to be imprisoned for crimes committed while in office.
 
Did this scandal end bribery? Nope. It continues through the present day. This video clip shows a meeting between the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and Georgia legislators in June 2015 during which ALEC wined and dined legislators so they would propose legislation to benefit the corporations ALEC represents. To make it easier for the lawmakers, ALEC kindly wrote the laws they wanted passed.

That’s right: lawmakers don’t write these laws; ALEC does. According to the Center for Media and Democracy, "through the corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council, global corporations and state politicians vote behind closed doors to try to rewrite state laws that…often directly benefit huge corporations." ALEC is at work in all 50 states.

Every generation expresses outrage when corruption rears its head yet again. The Occupy movement, for example, is about the intersection of state and corporate power. Unfortunately, corruption is easier to hide nowadays when money can be moved electronically with nobody the wiser, and political contributions can be made by corporations who, due to the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United, have been granted the same rights as actual living people.

Hydra head Number Two: Media

In both Tammany Hall and Teapot Dome, the media played a part in bringing the corruption to light. In the 1970s, the Washington Post brought to light the skullduggery of the committee to re-elect the president. Last year, the video clip exposing ALEC’s machinations was produced by an NBC affiliate in Atlanta. But the media itself aren’t now and historically haven’t always been on the up and up.

One example of corrupt media is the Yellow Journalism that existed between 1895 and 1898, which helped push the United States into war in Cuba and the Philippines.

According to the U.S. Department of State, Yellow journalism was a style of newspaper reporting that emphasized sensationalism over facts. Named for a popular comic coveted by major newspaper publishers Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, Yellow Journalism referred to both publishers’ profit-driven coverage of world events. Pulitzer’s and Heart’s coverage of the Spanish-American war was so intense  and captured the attention of such a vast readership that when the U.S. government wanted to go to war over Cuba, public support for the war was already in place. According to PBS, "Without sensational headlines and stories about Cuban affairs, the mood for Cuban intervention may have been very different."

Yellow Journalism isn't over. Think about what your favorite news medium offers as "news." Think about the last time your favorite medium presented both sides of an issue. Furthermore, the "free" press nowadays has a big problem.

The student mentioned at the top of this post was asked by her professor whether a liberal or conservative bias exists in the media, and, if so, whether that made her trust the media more or less.
The five media she was asked to examine were Fox News, Microsoft National Broadcasting Company (MSNBC), the New York Times, the Washington Post, and National Public Radio.

The problem with this professor's premise is that only five corporations own the vast majority of magazines, books, music, news feeds, newspapers, movies, and radio and television stations in America.
Clearly, a liberal or conservative bias in the media can exist only if the parent company allows it.

According to "Democracy on Deadline," a film featured on PBS’s Independent Lens Series, in 1983, 50 corporations controlled most of the American media; by 2000,only six corporations had ownership of most media. Today, the five corporations that dominate the industry are Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch's News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany and Viacom (for the record, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and NPR do not belong to any of these). Even on the internet, 80 percent of the top 20 online news sites are owned by the 100 largest media companies.

Liberal? Conservative? The professor’s question is moot, because he didn't mention other kinds of bias (racial bias, coverage of electoral politics, coverage of foreign news), nor did he mention the most insidious kind of bias.

A dangerous bias in the media is their corporatist bias, a tendency to select and to slant specific news stories that increase a corporation’s profits. A liberal or conservative bias can exist only if the media are free to arrive at an independent conclusion; the media cannot lean left or right if they are forced to choose programming and take editorial stances according to whatever is likeliest to increase profits.

This is hard to take. I grew up in an era when the press was seen as playing a central role in a functioning democracy because it acted as a watchdog. Back then, the press was called the "Fourth Estate," a term invented by Edmund Burke, which conveyed that an independent press was like a fourth branch of government. According to "Journalism in the Digital Age," a Stanford University research project, the Fourth Estate means "the role of the press is twofold: it both informs citizens and sets up a feedback loop between the government and voters. The press makes the actions of the government known to the public, and voters who disapprove of current trends in policy can take corrective action in the next election. Without the press, the feedback loop is broken and the government is no longer accountable to the people. The press is therefore of the utmost importance in a representative democracy."

Do the media still serve this function? Does anybody think that the independent Washington Post, which broke the Watergate scandal in 1972, would have pursued the story that led to Nixon’s resignation in August 1974 if the Post had been owned by, say, a corporation that had bankrolled Nixon’s re-election? Woodward and Bernstein would have been told to back off.

Even major players in the journalism world who remain independent are said, by some, to lean one way or another. News Junkie says, “We all remember that during the buildup to the war in Iraq many journalists, even at the New York Times, were beating the drums of war to make America’s public opinion favorable to the invasion. The New York Times has also a long history of bias in favor of Israel. More recently, some serious allegations were made of collusion between some journalists of the Washington Post and their sources at the CIA." Are these allegations true? I don't know, but I'm glad somebody is asking questions.

Are there journalists who want to tell the truth? Certainly, but many, according to Into the Buzzsaw, which won the National Press Club’s Arthur Rowse Award for Press Criticism and was selected by the New York Public Library as one of the most extraordinary titles of 2002, have been prevented by corporate media ownership from reporting major news stories. Worse, the number of the number of full-time journalists at nearly 1,400 daily newspapers has shrunk from 55,000 in 2007 to 32,900 in 2015.

The love of power is the root of all evil

But controlling the media and influencing the government aren't enough. Some corporations also want to control the future of the country. A graphic by Represent us shows the top five donors to the top six presidential candidates as of February 18, 2016. Jeb Bush dropped out of the race last week, but his top donors come from Wall Street. Both Hillary Clinton’s and Ted Cruz’s top donors are Lawyers.  Marco Rubio’s top donors are people from the Real Estate industry. Bernie Sanders’ top donors are people in Education, although Sanders is the only candidate who, so far, has not accepted large political donations (as of January 2, the average donation to Sanders was $27.16). Last but certainly not least, Donald Trump’s top donor is… Donald Trump, which may be one reason his party is having a hard time controlling him.

The United States is going to elect a president in nine months. Money is affecting the election because it is determining what voters hear on the airwaves and in the press. Money is financing campaigns. So it's important to know who is paying whose piper.

How much have corporate contributions contaminated elections? According to USA Today, the result of Citizens United has been a deluge of cash poured into political action committees (super PACs) in support of political candidates. Worse, much of this spending, known as "dark money," never has to be publicly disclosed. Speaking of Citizens United, USA Today says the "definition of corporations as people protected by the First Amendment created a loophole that campaigns and PACs are all too happy to use to their advantage."

And get this: USA Today cites a Brennan Center for Justice study from 2014 that found that of the $1 billion spent in federal elections by super PACs since 2010, nearly 60 percent of the money came from just 195 individuals and their spouses.

Are you OK with 195 couples providing over half the funding for federal elections? Do you suspect those folks might expect something for their contributions? As Bernie Sanders says, “People aren’t dumb.”

How did we come to this point and how can we change our course?

The whole hot mess started in 2002 when the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) of 2002 limited the contributions that could be made by interest groups and national political parties to political campaigns. It required candidates for  political office, as well as interest groups and political parties supporting or opposing a candidate, to include in political advertisements on television and radio a statement identifying the candidate and stating that he or she approved the ad. 

The act was challenged in late 2007 by a conservative organization called Citizens United, which wanted to run TV commercials to promote a political documentary that dissed Hillary Clinton. Months-long wrangling resulted in the Supreme Court’s decision in 2009 that the BCRA’s prohibition of all independent expenditures by corporations and unions violated the First Amendment's protection of free speech. The Court said that corporations, as associations of individuals, have speech rights under the First Amendment. The Court said it is wrong to limit a corporation's ability to spend money on campaigns because it limits the ability of its members to associate effectively and to speak on political issues.

In other words: a corporation has the same right to free speech as a person. The catch: a corporation's pockets generally are deeper than yours or mine.

Not every justice on the court agreed with the majority decision. Justice Stevens wrote the minority opinion, saying the 5-4 ruling in favor of Citizens United, "threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the Nation. The path it has taken to reach its outcome will, I fear, do damage to this institution." He further wrote that "A democracy cannot function effectively when its constituent members believe laws are being bought and sold."

Is it possible that our democracy isn't the one we grew up with? Is it possible that the people we have been, the people we want to be, isn't who we are any more? John Cole, professor of history at the University of Michigan, gives ten reasons the United States is the most corrupt country in the world, and they all have to do with the contaminating influence of money.

Long ago, one of my professors wanted to illustrate the idea of integrity. He told this story:
Pat and River met in a bar. Pat asked River for sex. Offended, River said, “We just met. I’m not that kind of person.” Pat asked if River would have sex for $10,000,000. River said “Sure.” Pat handed over a ten dollar bill and said, “Let’s go.” River said, “What do you think I am?” Pat said, “We’ve already established what you are. Now we’re just haggling about the price.”

The purpose of this post is to pose a question: If people who “donate” to prostitutes expect to get something for their money, isn’t it possible that people who donate millions to candidates and corporations who gobble small, independent media outlets like potato chips expect to get something for their money as well?

Lincoln contemporary and poet laureate of the United States Walt Whitman said, "Of all dangers to a nation, as things exist in our day, there can be no greater one than having certain portions of the people set off from the rest by a line drawn — they not privileged as others, but degraded, humiliated, made of no account." Whitman is talking about people being cut off from the blessings others enjoy. Do we have citizens born in America today who are "made of no account" as Whitman describes?  Of course we do.

How can we fix that? One thing we must do is end corruption. Another thing we can do is seek out independent news groups and organizations (NPR is a beaut). We can contribute to candidates who don't take huge sums of money from questionable sources. We can spread the word to our friends.

Because if we take an interest in our country, maybe we can take it back.

When my son was in high school, his math teacher used a game called Zobmondo to teach critical thinking and group discussion. "Zobmondo” is slang derived from “Zob!” which is a word somebody might yell if he or she felt horror, pain, or frustration. The game requires players to choose between two options, from the intriguing “Would you rather be granted the answers to any three questions or be granted the ability to resurrect one person?” to the horrible “Would you rather eat a newly born baby rodent or a small sack of crawling caterpillars?” Players aren’t allowed to choose “neither” or to change the question in any way. Besides having to consider abhorrent scenarios, players must correctly predict the consensus choice of the other players. My teen-aged son loved the game. (More Zobmondo questions here.)

Zobmondo came to mind last week after I had watched The Revenant (set in 1823) and The Martian (set in 2035) within five days of one another. The films tell the same story told 200 years apart. Naturally, I tried to decide which situation would be worse.

Both films feature a man left for dead by his companions.  In both, the environment is  a major factor in the action, with nature-based disasters (a bear/a storm) providing the inciting incident for each protagonist’s struggle. In both, procuring adequate food is a problem solved by ingenuity (building a fish seine of rocks/growing potatoes). In both, critical help appears at a critical moment (a Native American man traveling alone/a planetary probe left behind by a previous mission).

Granted, the stories aren’t exactly the same. Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio), the scout in The Revenant, isn’t alone in the world. Oxygen and water are plentiful. Resources exist—if he can find them. Mark Watney (Matt Damon), the astronaut in The Martian, is alone, and he has limited resources he can lay his hands on. Even though both men struggle against their hostile environments, Glass’s worst enemy (arguably) is hostile humans, whereas Watney’s worst enemy is time, as in too much time for him to last given his dwindling resources. In addition, very different hearts beat in the two protagonists. Different motivations keep them going even though each knows the tiniest mishap could kill him.

Hugh Glass pushes himself to survive near-death experiences because he needs to kill the man who murdered his son. Glass is gritty. He’s a growler and a yeller and an eater of raw fish.  

Mark Watney pushes past several near-death experiences because he won’t allow something without a brain—the environment—to beat a human whose intellect got him to Mars in the first place. Watney sees the irony in his situation. He’s a joker. One of his lines reveals his wry approach to survival: “In the face of overwhelming odds, I'm left with only one option, I'm gonna have to science the shit out of this.”

Personally, I’d rather be in Glass’s situation, injured and freezing, but on Earth. Why? I have been injured and have come out the other side. Bodies heal. And don’t tell my neighbors, but I like winter. I understand cold weather. When the weatherman says “significant snow event” I get happy. If I were in Watney’s situation, however, I would not survive. I could grow potatoes, but I couldn’t rig up a water source. So, yeah, I guess if I had to choose, Zobmondo style, I’d pick wandering into the path of a mama grizzly over wandering around on Mars waiting to starve to death.

However, if I had to pick an attitude toward death, I’d pick Watney’s because I’d rather grin than growl. That’s what I did the first time I faced death thirty-five years ago this month.  
 
It went like this: to support myself in college, I drove a school bus. One blizzardy day, school got out early, so I was put on the biggest bus ever made as a sub on a route I’d never driven. “The kids will tell you where to go,” my dispatcher said, and it was so. Visibility was poor. By the second half of the route, the roads were getting clogged, but the bus already was half empty. We were going to make it.

Then my child-guide directed me to drive down a dead-end road.  “Are you sure about this?” I asked. “How will I turn around?”

“At the end of this road,” my guide said, “you go up that hill and there’s a turnaround at the top.” I dropped off two sets of kids and drove up the hill with half a dozen riders left on the bus.

Indeed, there was a turnaround at the top of the hill. But there was no guardrail to prevent anybody from plunging over the edge of the hill and rolling end-over-end to the valley below. It was too tight to back up. I had to take the turnaround. I didn’t dare slow too much lest I get stuck, but I couldn’t go so fast I would lose control. It was one of those situations where you are heading into a danger you can’t avoid so your only choice is to keep going and pray. Ever hit a patch of black ice on a sidewalk and feel your feet go out from under you? It was like that. Literally.

Because when the tires hit the outside curve closest to the drop-off, the bus started to slide. There was sheet ice under the newly fallen snow. The kids shrieked. I prayed.

The bus stopped before we went over. I asked the biggest boy to exit the bus and go get help at the last farmhouse we’d passed. He took off running though the blinding snow. I couldn’t leave my seat because I didn’t dare let go of the steering wheel. If I did, the wheels might shift, and the last stop on my route would be at the bottom of a ravine.

I had to get the kids off. So I started them singing “99 bottles of pop on the wall,” and as they sang, I had them exit the bus and go stand on the other side of the bus in the middle of the turnaround. It took just a couple of minutes, but it felt like forever until there was a knot of kids safely away from the bus and its driver, sitting with her hands clamped like death on the steering wheel.

You might think I would let myself feel my own fear once the kids were safe, but even though I knew the bus might go over before help came, I remember feeling pretty calm. I remember thinking, “I’ve had a great 24 years on Earth. I wish I could have had more. I wish I could have gotten married and had a kid. But this was pretty good.” I waited to slide over. I wondered if I would see my whole life flash before my eyes like they say you do just before you die. Would I see something I’d forgotten about?

Then I heard a chug-chug-chug. I heard the kids cheering. I saw through the falling snow the red cap of a farmer. I saw the smoke billowing from his tractor as it slowly climbed the hill.

The farmer sized up the situation in seconds. He didn’t get off his tractor until he’d positioned his vehicle. Then he got off, sent the kids back out of the way, attached his chains to the bus—gingerly—and climbed back aboard his tractor. He put it in gear and eased incredibly slowly forward. The bus eased incredibly slowly away from the edge of the cliff until the whole bus was off the ice and headed in the right direction.  I still didn’t dare leave the bus, so I hollered  “Thank you!” out the window and hollered at the kids to get back on. I focused on two things for the rest of the route: driving safely and breathing deeply. When the last kid was safely delivered to his home, I drove back to the bus garage, my vehicle covered with snow and my heart singing because I was going to get more than 24 years after all.

Life is as precious now, all these years later, as it was that snowy day. I got the family I hoped for, a career I loved, and a retirement many would envy because it lets me do this. Oh, yes, I still want more.

But I learned that day—and The Revenant and The Martian reminded me—that life is not a sure thing. There are no guarantees. Sometimes, the only thing between you and freezing to death is a horse carcass. Sometimes, the only thing between you and starving to death is a package of potatoes. Sometimes, the only thing between you and a fiery death is a farmer with chains and a tractor.

I don't know about you, but I plan to enjoy every minute.  

If you follow Downton Abbey, you’re aware of the strained relationship between sisters Lady Edith and Lady Mary Crawley. Mary disdains Edith; Edith avoids Mary. The sisters undermine one another every chance they get. “I know you!” Edith says to Mary, “I know you to be a nasty, scheming b*tch!" Between the two lies an unrelieved…let’s be kind and use the word “coolness.”

My sister, Janet, was born one year and 364 days after I was. When she and I were little, I wanted to be front and center in the middle of the action; she was an unwilling tagalong. I, the oldest, bossed her and our baby brother. When Jan got older, she realized if she refused my commands, I couldn’t do a thing about it. That was the beginning of an ongoing…coolness…between us.

Our younger brother usually played with Jan because the two were closer in age, but once in a while, he hung out with me. Unlike Jan, he went along with anything I suggested. One cold early fall day, he and I holed up in the corn crib with a bucketful of rotten tomatoes. When Jan wanted to join us, I pelted her with the tomatoes. My brother reluctantly threw one. Jan ran inside to tell Dad what we had done, so Dad made my brother and me stand in place while he and Jan let fly with the rest of the tomatoes. “How do YOU like it?” he said. Not so much, dad. Lesson learned.

As Jan and I got older, unlike Edith and Mary, we began to find things to appreciate in one another. Jan had a wicked sharp sense of humor. She was a terrific artist. I asked her to illustrate a poetry magazine I edited in high school, and she appreciated the positive attention she got for her fine pencil drawings. A couple of months before I graduated high school, my sister and I took baby steps toward a grownup way of interacting. We shopped together. We hung out. We laughed. I hoped Jan and I would continue to grow closer.

 It didn’t happen. When I left home at 17, I grabbed my freedom with both hands and dove into life on my own. I felt like George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life who says, “I'm shakin' the dust of this crummy little town off my feet and I'm gonna see the world." I ran like sixty from my past toward new things, new jobs, new people. I moved to the West Coast, to the Twin Cities, to England. I assumed, incorrectly, that with my family, no news was good news.

Jan finished high school. She got a job at a fast-food restaurant. She started college. She met a man. She fell in love. She stopped doing art. She dyed her hair blonde and began intense dieting. She dropped out of college. She moved in with the man. And one day he beat her up.

I didn’t know. She didn’t tell me, and I didn’t think to ask. I could never have predicted that the spitfire I grew up with would let anybody hit her without paying him back in triplicate. Jan’s infrequent letters were full of chit-chat: how her job was going, how cute their trailer looked. Her letters never said she missed days of work because

of black eyes and ripped-out hair and broken bones. Her letters never said her trailer was cute because her husband went on a rampage and broke everything so she had to buy new. In one letter, Jan told me a little porcelain vase I’d given to her years before had broken, but she didn’t say her husband had smashed it to bits in order to hurt her. She didn’t tell me one of his favorite forms of torture was to grab her wrist and use her hand to hit his own face over and over.

Finally, Mom told me what was going on. I went to visit my sister. It was tense in their trailer. Jan told me Dick (not his real name, but the shoe fits) timed her whenever she went for takeout. He constantly accused her of cheating on him. She walked on eggshells around him. She strove to please him. She fit every textbook description I’d ever read of an abused woman, which I haltingly pointed out and which she angrily denied.

I invited her up to visit me for a weekend. Dick gave permission, even though I lived 300 miles away. While she was there, I cut my hand on a glass I was washing. I asked Jan to take me to the hospital. She refused, because, she said, “I never get to be alone.” I drove myself to the hospital with a dishtowel wrapped around my bleeding digit, but instead of feeling bewildered about why she didn’t take me in for stitches, I should have seen that she was so desperate for peace she’d grab it any time it came along. That weekend was our last good time together.

The family tried not to badger Jan about leaving her situation but also reassure her that any time she wanted to escape, we would help. But Jan said she had married Dick and that was that. If she gave in to our meddling, she would break her marriage vows. I said he broke his vow to love her every time he hit her. No, she said, he didn’t mean it. No, she would not leave him.

She found two ways to escape without leaving. She began to suffer mental problems when her husband beat her. She told Mom that sometimes when Dick beat her, she felt her mind floating above her body, allowing her to see Dick’s fists pummeling her without having to feel the pain or sense the damage he was doing to her body. She would wake up later, bruised and bloody, and he would apologize, and they would have a honeymoon period of bliss until it happened again. And again. She began to drink, her second means of escape. Alcohol poured on that situation was gasoline on a flame.

They had a child. When Dick abused the child, Jan finally decided she had to get out. She typed up for the judge a record of the abuse she’d suffered, which read like a police blotter. I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that she’d endured things that shouldn’t happen to anybody, let alone the sister I’d shared weeknight suppers and Sunday dinners with for 17 years.

Jan and Dick divorced. We thought it was over.

But some time after the divorce was final, Dick came to her house and beat her and threw her down the basement stairs. She was in a coma for long, horrible weeks. She suffered permanent brain damage. The beating knocked her eye loose so it looked out at a different angle from the other eye. She could handle only menial jobs, which she lost one after another because she kept drinking. She telephoned my mother several times a day and my brother several times a week. Her diet was horrible. She hid cash under furniture cushions and was robbed more than once by “friends.” Her gait was unsteady, and we worried about her falling down the exterior stairs she had to climb to reach her second-floor walk-up. Her life centered on old TV shows and booze and cigarettes. She began to suspect that the FBI was spying on her, and when I laid out logical reasons that was unlikely, she began to suspect I was in cahoots with them.

Over time, in Jan’s mind, my failure to prevent or end her suffering morphed into deliberate malice on my part. I became somebody to blame. If I hadn’t been so mean when we were growing up; if I hadn’t left home right after graduation; if I’d been more of a friend; if I’d paid her more positive attention; if I’d written or visited oftener—if I’d been a better sister—her life would have turned out better.

Her physical and mental condition deteriorated to a point where Mom found an assisted living facility for her. My brother and I boxed up her stuff and loaded it into the moving van. The day we moved her out, we started to wash down the walls of her apartment, sticky with nicotine residue. My brother scrubbed just a small section of wall before declaring the whole place would have to be professionally cleaned, particularly since cockroaches had built their own Atlantic City under her stove and no self-respecting bacteria would have been caught dead in her toilet.

Jan resented Mom and me for "making" her move. Not my brother, of course, because he was only following orders. Not our father, who, by that time, had passed away. Not Dick, who never was brought to justice for what he had done, unlike this abuser.

Unfortunately, moving my sister into a nicer place did not move her into a happier frame of mind. She ignored her doctor’s orders. She stopped taking her medication. Her body began to fail. A large, laminated poster I’d given her to brighten up her new place she used instead to slide across the carpet from place to place because her legs stopped working. A new chair Mom had bought for Jan became soaked with urine. By December 2008, Jan was in the hospital. She was done being unhappy.

My brother and I went to see her. We stood on either side of her bed, each of us holding one of her hands. She had lost much of her hair. Her face was puffy. Her skin was the color of old parchment. We listened to the machines that breathed for her, that drained her bladder, that pumped nourishment through a tube into her stomach. We listened to the December wind blowing under the eaves outside. We spoke softly: “Remember when we built that fort in the haymow? Remember that time Penny and Shirley rode their horses all the way to our place? Remember the kittens?”

She opened her eyes. She saw and heard her brother. She saw and heard me.

Then she did something completely in character that surprised me anyway: she threw away my hand and clasped our brother’s hand with both of her own. “I do not forgive you,” her gesture said.

Jan died a couple of days later, the day after Christmas 2008. She was 50 years old. We buried her two days later in the pajamas I’d bought her for Christmas and a cap I’d sewed to cover her poor bald head. I wish she'd felt able to forgive me before she died.

I never expected to share my sister's story, but forgiveness has been on my mind lately because of something going on in my city: the county treasurer and his secretary recently were convicted of having stolen $1.39 million of taxpayer money from the county treasurer’s office between 2001 and 2013. Two weeks ago, a front-page story in the local paper indicated that the ex-treasurer and ex-secretary were hoping that the judge in their case would be lenient when he sentenced them.

They wanted forgiveness. They wanted mercy.

Four days after that story appeared, letters to the editor indicated that some taxpayers did not feel mercy was warranted. One letter writer said, “They had excellent employment, insurance, benefits and retirement that many of us can only imagine. They betrayed the public trust…They did not steal for need but for greed.” Another said, “As they ask for leniency, we should be reminding ourselves of the old saying, ‘If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.’ ” A third writer said, “Throw the book at them.”

Clearly, showing mercy is not natural. Our first instinct is to lash out when we're hurt. Mercy and forgiveness go against that instinct, which may have been why Jesus said we should turn the other cheek when we're wronged. If we can forgive others as we have been forgiven, we're living the Golden Rule.

Shakespeare considers the matter of mercy in The Merchant of Venice. In the play, a Jewish moneylender named Shylock demands gruesome interest if a loan isn’t repaid: a “pound of flesh” carved from the man who guaranteed the loan, Antonio, Shylock’s enemy. When the loan comes due, Shylock takes Antonio to court to demand his pound of flesh. An attorney urges Shylock to show mercy and reminds Shylock that everybody needs to be cut some slack now and again,

The quality of mercy is not strained;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
‘T is mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown…
Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That, in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy….”  (IV.i.179–197)
 
But even though Shylock is offered twice what he is owed, he insists on extracting his pound of flesh. The attorney tells Shylock to start carving, but that the contract doesn’t say anything about blood, so if Shylock spills one drop of blood or takes one iota more than a pound, he must forfeit all his lands and goods under Venetian law. Shylock changes his mind, but it's too late.
 
The duke shows mercy to Shylock, but it’s a vindictive kind of mercy: Shylock must convert to Christianity, he must bequeath his entire estate to his daughter and her Christian husband, and he can never loan money to anybody ever again. Shylock’s costly lesson is that if you want mercy for yourself, you have to show mercy to others.
 
In my town, regarding the money stolen by the county treasurer, the judge was not merciful. He sentenced the treasurer to nine and a half years in prison, which will become a longer term if restitution isn’t made. The secretary will be sentenced in March. In his remarks, the sentencing judge said, “Misconduct creates cynicism...To say it spits on the face of democracy is an understatement. If we can’t trust public officials…we have anarchy.” The threat of punishment is supposed to keep people on the right side of the law, so if people choose to do wrong anyway, society must follow through with the promised punishment. Right?

But what about mercy? Mary shows no mercy to Edith, nor does Edith show mercy on the rare occasions she has the upper hand. Shylock shows no mercy, so none is shown to him. I thought I was doing my best for my sister, but she couldn't forgive me for not doing enough.
 
The next time I'm in the position to extend forgiveness and mercy, I hope I will remember that a pound of flesh isn't worth it. I hope I will remember what it is to have my hand flung away by a dying woman who can never take hold of it again.

Rest in peace, little sister. I hope you are finally happy.

How do people decide what to name their children? How do writers decide what to name their characters? It depends on where you (or your characters) live. It depends on when.

For example, in China, naming schemes often employ a generation name. That means every child in a given family’s generation shares an identical character when the name is written in Chinese characters. But English is taught in China's secondary schools, so many Chinese teenagers acquire English names, which they may keep and use. This sometimes leads to teens choosing English names like Chlorophyll, Candy, Devil or Whale. Periodic fad names like Aoyun ("Olympics") also appear.

In England, babies traditionally were named after relatives of both parents in a fascinating pattern that was popular in England from 1700 to 1875. This naming pattern definitely influenced my choices for character names in the JEM books. Here's how it worked:

    The first son was named after the father's father
    The second son was named after the mother's father
    The third son was named after the father
    The fourth son was named after the father's eldest brother
    The first daughter after the mother's mother
    The second daughter after the father's mother
    The third daughter after the mother
    The fourth daughter after the mother's eldest sister

Going by these rules, in the JEM books, Margery’s eldest sister, Nessa, was named for Margery’s father’s mother. But if you’ve read the JEM books, you know that Margery’s grandmother is named Kestrel. What’s up with that? Then, as now, people call themselves what they wish to be called; in this case, Granny Kestrel chose to honor a bird with which she shares a magical bond.

But Granny couldn't have done that in Malaysia, where the names of all animals, fruits and vegetables are banned.  

Other countries have naming rules too. New Zealand bans names that might offend a reasonable person, including King, Major, Knight, Prince, and Princess, although other names have been allowed in the country, including Number 16 Bus Shelter and Violence. In New Zealand’s defense, a 9-year-old girl named Talula Does The Hula From Hawaii was allowed to change her name, and parents who tried to name their children 4Real, Fish and Chips (twins), Yeah Detroit, Keenan Got Lucy and Sex Fruit were turned down.

In Saudi Arabia, forget about naming your child anything that offends religious sensibilities, is affiliated with royalty, or is of non-Arabic or non-Islamic origin. Morocco is a tad more lenient, allowing you to pick a name not on the approved list if you pay a fee, although Moroccan dads living outside the country have to be careful: babies given a name not on the approved list may have trouble entering the country to visit their relatives.

Germany and Japan have naming rules, too. In Germany, you can’t use a last name as a first name. German law dictates that first names must be gender-specific, may not be a trademark, and cannot endanger the child. Italy won't let a parent bestow an embarrassing name.

Even in the freewheeling United States, some rules apply. Many states ban obscene names or limit the number of characters in a name because of the limitations of record-keeping software. Some states ban the use of numerals or pictograms. "Black" sounding names have been shown to minimize the likelihood that a job candidate will be interviewed, but from the beginning, black Americans have had unique names, according to Salon's David Zax, who writes, "the folklorist Newbell Niles Puckett turned up thousands of such names culling records from 1619 to the mid-1940s, names like Electa, Valantine and Zebedee." The practice of choosing a unique name for a black child skyrocketed after the 1960s, Zax says, when Black Pride and Islam began to influence parents' choices—but creating unique names doesn't happen in Iceland.

Iceland has strict rules; for a story set there, I spent half my research time hunting appropriate names for the characters. Why? Because Iceland doesn’t use family surnames. A spouse cannot take his or her spouse’s name upon marriage. If the couple produces a child, they must choose a given name from a limited list.

It works like this: The last name of a male Icelander usually ends in the suffix -son (“son”) and that of a female Icelander in -dóttir (“daughter”). So a boy and girl in the same nuclear family won’t share the same last name. When it comes to first names, Icelanders often don’t name a child for its first three months so the parents can get to know the child (before it is named, a child is called stúlka, “girl,” or strákur, “boy”). When it’s time to pick a name, the parents have to stick to a list of legal first and middle names, none of which contain the letter “C,” which isn’t in the Icelandic alphabet—sorry, Charlie. Currently there are about 1,712 male names and 1,853 female given names on the list. If you choose a name that isn’t on the list, your child will have problems, like being denied a passport.

This summer, online magazine Parent Society listed some of the more unusual baby names out there, but for names like “Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116,” go here. The article doesn’t explain why parents would do that to their own flesh and blood.

For writers, the naming rules of the countries in which our stories are set should figure in when we name our characters, but we also want to embed meaning into their names, right? So, do you name your female romantic interest the name you wish you had been given? Do you name your action hero something short and dashing? How about last names?  How do you decide?

One author who is good at crafting names is Nora Roberts. In THE SEARCH, the hero is Simon Doyle [Simon=sigh man, which is what he does because he keeps getting yanked into doing things he doesn’t want to do]. The heroine is Fiona “Fee” Bristow [Bristow=bristle, which is what she’s about, at least initially]. The villain’s name is the most perfect of all, but if you don’t want to know it, don’t click here because I don't want to spoil it for you. It could be I’m reading into Roberts’s choices, but I don’t think so. Roberts is an intelligent, successful writer; she knows that names are important. So do most writers. (Tangent: You can answer ten short questions to find out which Nora Roberts character you “are” here. Me? Margaret Mary Concannon. Thanks for asking. )

A name can suggest personality. A character name you initially dislike can grow on you if the character does; conversely, if you initially favor a name (or are at least neutral), when it is bestowed on the bad guy, you may dislike it forever after.  A character named after your eighth grade nemesis may even keep you from fully engaging in the story.

My JEM character names (at least, the ones not culled from history) were chosen deliberately based on a number of factors including literal meaning, geographical accuracy, mouth-feel, pronounce-ability, and so on.  When I was in the process of crafting a surname for the bad guy, "Patch," I wanted something that would suggest his Darkness, but I didn’t want to minimize his power or his danger. (I chose “Duncan,” which means brown warrior—a name that also suits his geographic origins).

Using the British naming rules above, it took an entire morning to name Margery’s siblings and near-family relations, including the name of Granny Kestrel’s husband, Dylan, who crossed the moor from Wales to find her.

A good source for name discussion is an oldie titled TREASURE OF NAME LORE by Elsdon C. Smith, which includes sections on American Indian names, anagrams, names in other countries, extra-long names, and names popular in different religions.  Smith writes, “In writing fiction, since all the author has to put his ideas across to the reader are the words he uses, he cannot waste any by selecting names for his characters that do not have connotations that help to describe the character. Even the sound may be used to convey an impression of the one named . . . Dickens was an expert in selecting names that contained a subtle half-suggestion of other words in our language which are associated with the traits embodied in the characters he delineated.”

There you go: let the great Charles Dickens be your guide. Use the magical power of names to boost your story’s impact.