J Daniel Hess’ Blog

I’m wearing my Colt’s hooded sweatshirt today in honor of a fine team and a fun year. We enjoyed the Super Bowl and congratulate the Saints.

( I delivered this essay yesterday at Mennonite Arts Weekend.)

I’m pleased to be here at the 10th biennial meeting of Mennonite Arts Weekend. To Cincinnati Mennonite Fellowship I say a big thank you for recognizing the rightful place of art in both the secular and sacred spaces of our lives.

A thank you also to my colleagues in our writer’s group in Indianapolis. They contributed greatly to this presentation.

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The genre that I represent here at the meeting is the memoir. Before addressing memoir itself, I shall comment on the genre. You will recall that we use the word genre to designate a category of literature characterized by similarities in form, style or subject matter.  Because of personal interest and my profession, I’ve had opportunity to use in class and to write in many different genres.

the so-call objective news story

the human-interest feature article

the editorial or opinion piece

ads and other forms of promotion

research reports and monographs

the expository essay

the critical review

poetry

the film or video script

and there are many more

Yes, you may call the sermon a genre in its own right and the youngsters among us would insist, were they in a college classroom, that texting may be considered a genre.

Each genre has its peculiar boundaries that participants know at least unconsciously and, in general, conform to, although this presentation is going to raise questions about those boundaries.  Indeed in postmodern literature writers seem inclined to move the fences and sometimes to blur the boundaries. I will later invite your perspectives on this genre and its boundaries.

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The memoir belongs to the family of personal writing. For a minute I wish to highlight that family, because of the richness of the several family members. One of the family’s siblings is the friendly letter that was once a popular prose form but is now going out of style. Here is an example of a friendly letter, actually Sherilyn Ortman’s extraordinary Christmas letter. She is a colleague with Advancement Associates.

“Will and I have a tendency to not quite finish things, often leaving undone just one small, but important, detail. He’ll varnish a woodworking project and then leave the brush soaking in a tin can in a far corner of the kitchen counter…indefinitely. I’ll do all of the laundry each week… except for a tablecloth with a particularly tough stain which remains wadded up at the bottom of the hamper for months. He’ll replace a faucet and then bury the old one in a back corner of the recycling cupboard…and there it sits because neither of us knows how to properly dispose of it. After a long summer of use, I’ll turn off the walk-in cooler in the garage but neglect to dump the last box of apples…until the next June when I get to spend an afternoon scrubbing down the whole unit with dish detergent, a garden hose and a sturdy push broom.”

Another sibling is the journal — if it is truly a personal journal. One of my favorite journals was written by Thomas Merton, the Cistercian monk who spent a substantial portion of his adult life at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani.  This excerpt is from The Sign of Jonas.

“March 6, 1949. First Sunday in Lent

“Yesterday Seeds of Contemplation (that’s one of his books) arrived and it is handsome. I can hardly keep my hands off it. Laughlin says the burlap effect on the binding is a material they are using now in night clubs for wall covering.

“Every book that comes out under my name is a new problem. To begin with, each one brings with it a searching examination of conscience. Every book I write is a mirror of my own character and conscience. I always open the final, printed job, with a faint hope of finding myself agreeable, and I never do.

“There is nothing to be proud of in this one, either. It is clever and difficult to follow, not so much because I am deep as because I don’t know how to punctuate, and my line of thought is clumsy and tortuous. It lacks warmth and human affection…. .”

Another sibling is the personal narrative. I myself make a slight distinction between the straightforward personal narrative and the personal essay. The latter is typically dressed with the fabrics of fiction. In my opinion the best book of personal essays from “our people” was published in 1997 by the University of Georgia Press. Titled Scratching the Woodchuck, this book of personal essays was written by David Kline, an Amish farmer from Ohio. He wrote chapters on moles, night crawlers, the gray tree frog, birds’ nests and even flies. Here is an excerpt from his chapter on crows.

“I once had a pet crow — pilfered from a nest of four young. I was fourteen when the less-than-two-weeks-old crow came to our household in early May. On a diet of hard-boiled eggs, bread soaked in milk, and cheese, “Crow’ grew remarkably fast and became as tame as a kitten…

‘When Crow was fully feathered and learned to fly, his antics began in earnest. Loving small objects — especially shiny things — Crow gathered pieces of colored glass, nails, and clothespins, and even cleaned out an open toolbox on the Oliver hay mower of nuts and bolts. …

“Crow also had quite a vocabulary. Not human sounds but bird language. In the morning he would “sing” for us – a soft guttural, almost cooing sound. During the day Crow would often mimic the calls of other birds. He never cawed. Was that something that had to be learned from other crows?

‘When we worked in the fields, Crow went along. He often rode on the backs of the horses, a habit that worried my uncle who owned a spooky mule named Jim … .”

While listening to David Kline’s prose, some of you surely thought of Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, most worthy of its Pulitzer Prize.

In the family of personal writing, the memoir is traditionally understood to be a first-person factual and interpreted account of a broad or more restricted portion of one’s life. “This is what I experienced.” “This is how it affected me.”  Kathleen Norris, who wrote about living in western Dakota called her memoir “a spiritual geography.”  It’s an account of her soul’s nourishment in the vacant stretches of prairie that she found so full of potential. Rudy Wiebe’s wonderful memoir Of This Earth pertains to his Mennonite boyhood in the Boreal Forest of northern Saskatchewan. Some of you will have read Miriam Toews’ Swing Low: A Life, which was a memoir relating to her and her father, a victim of lifelong depression. The memoir that I published for my family consists of 70 short accounts that I label autobiographical vignettes, one for each of my first 70 years.

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Now that I gave an overview of personal writing and more specifically the memoir, I’ll tell you why I think this family of personal writing is so resourceful. I came to value the personal genre through teaching a college writing class — I wonder how many times I taught that course — in which students wrote one example of perhaps five or six genres. So I got to read critical reviews and feature articles and expository essays galore. The one genre that elicited the the deepest response from students — the most authentic and best work — was the personal essay. Many of them were subsequently published through the on-campus Pinch Penny Press.

Here’s one I remember.  A lad is totally bored, altogether spent on campus, swamped in ennui, unable to recall why he went to college in the first place. He sees no alternative but to pack up on Friday and head on home. He drives north on Route 15, not motivated to go home either. He then turns east on Route 20 toward Ohio. While his mind is adrift, he approaches a lift in the road and there on the other side he comes upon a car crash in its awful stillness right after impact. One car is upside down. The other, across the road. He feel the shock of this emergency, but controls his reactions. He pulls over. He goes to the overturned car. On the ceiling over what had been the front seat is a woman totally still.  Dead he concludes. In the rear is a baby, crying. He is aghast. Others arrive and call an ambulance. He reaches into the car and lifts out the baby which he holds in his arms until the ambulance arrives. This event, wrote the lad, reached deep inside him and opened a door. He didn’t use the word epiphany but that’s what it was. On Monday morning he was back in class, propelled by new purpose.

I could tell many such stories. The co-ed in Costa Rica who discovered to her shame that she was very rich. The football quarterback of the team that won state … on an illegal play.

Common to these essays was the closeness, the immediacy of first-person voice. When that voice was candid, revealing what occurred in life, good and bad, and when the reader was a worthy confidant, class readings became a holy moment.

Sometimes I found it difficult to know how to respond to such writing. One day I told a student to make a perfect copy of her personal essay, gift-wrap it, and send it to her best friend as a Christmas present. Since that time I’ve seen the value of the personal essay as an act of exquisite sharing, a gift that lasts a long time.

I like personal writing, including the memoir not only because of its portrayal of real life, but also because lays bare the soul. I find that spirit, sacred spirit moves from the writer to me allowing me to identify, to learn and to grow.

Jerry Waxler, whom I do not know, annotates 70 of his favorite memoirs in a website. He says, “When I talk about the power of memoirs, people often ask, “which ones do you recommend.” The answer is “It depends.” There are so many memoirs, of all manner of experience, in various styles, by ordinary people and celebrities, about recent memories or distant ones, of tragedy and comedy. Do you want entertainment, empathy, insight, or all three? Since I am a lover of memoirs, I keep searching and finding new styles, new subjects, and deeper lessons.

Did any of you listen to the December 24 session of “Talk of the Nation” with Neal Conan?  Entitled “Why we love (or love to hate) memoirs,” the session featured a discussion with Ben Yagoda who recently published Memoir: A History.  Yagoda traced memoir through the years beginning with Julius Caesar. Listen to the names: St. Augustine, Jean-Jacues Rousseau, Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass and Helen Keller. The genre has been one of the most popular in the 20th century.  Sylvia Plath, Frank McCourt, Mary Karr, David Sedaris, and more recently Julie Powell, Andre Agassi and Sarah Palin.

I enjoy reading memoirs and have mentored a number of people (like my 84-year-old Uncle John) who begin, at last, to share their stories — accounts that inform the family, entertain the neighbors and sometimes prove therapeutic for the writer.

(Here is a commercial. Shari Wagner, a member of our Indianapolis Writer’s Group, teamed with her father to write a splendid reflective narrative of one year that the family spent in Somalia. A Hundred Camels. It’s a treat, and on sale here.  Another of our members, Ryan Ahlgram has begun writing his memoir as a pastor. And if I have my way, the other two will begin by writing autobiographical vignettes that could lead to a memoir.)

Perhaps some of you who attend my workshop this afternoon have been aspiring to write personal stories. Great. You will be the subject. You will construct a narrative that tells your reader of an ordinary — or perhaps extraordinary — experience, perhaps even an account of you in sacred time or place. If you take your reader to the event, close in, and let him re-experience what occurred to you, you will succeed not only as a writer but also a teacher, an inspirer, perhaps a warner and surely an entertainer, all without being preachy.

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Unfortunately my speech, entitled “Memoir: the resourceful and troubled genre,” isn’t yet complete. For a segue to the second part I shall tell a personal story. Having been inspired by others’ stories, years ago I decided to write my own personal stories, beginning with childhood. What happened to me as a young child? What did I do?  Where did I go? When and where did I learn? What were my bumps? What did I make? Over the course of several years I wrote perhaps 50 or 60 such accounts. Some time later when I showed them to a colleague he said that the stories not only revealed who I was as a child but also offered a picture of rural (and Mennonite) life in the 1940s.  He suggested that I send a selection to Christian Living magazine, which I did. David Hostetler, the editor, not only accepted them but asked for two things more — a supply of photos from my childhood and a sidebar of how-to-do-it, that is, how to write personal stories. Of course I was delighted.  Then surely enough, the big issue of Christian Living arrived. Here it is (show the mag).

(Page through the magazine.)

By this time I was more than enthusiastic about personal writing and wondered how far I could ride this genre. Some notes in campus mail fed this enthusiasm.

Alas, my celebration was short-lived. In days I received my first letter, one from Dorothy Siegrist.

“… your story caused some sadness and hurt to me and my sister … you published this story without ever informing us beforehand …wouldn’t journalistic sensitivity direct you to attempt, at least, to contact me and let me know of your intention to use this incident and my name, especially when the story implies that my sister and I were negative factors in your moral development?

“Second, your story, while it may be a ‘family story’ and good reading, is untrue …  When I was “big — maybe 12 years old’ as you wrote, I no more knew where babies came from than you did….

“Mr. Hess, you have written a beautiful little anecdote, but the blurring effect of 40+ years has apparently also caused you to embellish the details of your story…”

Here is a letter to the editor:

“Has Mr. Hess lost touch with the feelings of people he writes about?”

Then I received a copy of a letter to the editor from an acquaintance whom I esteemed for her artistry and excellent personal taste.

“Perhaps he had checked with [the two girls] and they saw it as a big joke, and that is all right with me. I only know that their brother was unhappy with the publishing of the story and he hoped his mother would not see it. ..Dan has a marvelous memory, and his descriptions are accurate–and entertaining. But it made me feel uneasy with the power of a writer. I wouldn’t want Dan writing about my childhood….”

Now that I read and summarized the letters, you may be curious what I wrote. It was about the old swimming hole. It was the account of how I at a very young age learned about sex and babies. It was about cigarettes and alcohol. When I wrote this essay, I chuckled in gleeful memory. Needless to say, when I received the letters I was embarrassed and saddened. So far as I can remember, and that’s not saying a lot, my facts were accurate and not embellished although in the description of the road, the covered bridge, the meadow, the creek, the train, I brought together a class of events. Nonetheless the hurting of other people led me to doubt my judgment in the other stories I had written. Since that occasion I have come to see memoir as both resourceful and troubled.

In recent years three memoirs jumped onto the newspaper’s front page. In 1978 Christina Crawford published a memoir entitled Mommy Dearest. It was made into a film in 1981. In the book Christiana alleges that her mother Actress Joan Crawford abused her. Her mother had died the year before and thus could not refute the story. Was Christina Crawford’s revelation true? If true, did she ever find occasion to confront her mother?  Was it fair to publish after her mother could not respond?  This memoir ushered in an era of tell-all memoirs. For some writers, the juicier the details, the better.

Was it true?  Was it fair? Did those private details belong in the public domain?

In 2003 James Frey published A Million Little Pieces, the story of a 23-year-old alcoholic and drug abuser. Crucial to the account was his experience in a twelve-step treatment center. Pat Conroy praised the book, calling it “the War and Peace” of addiction. Two years later Oprah picked the book for her Book Club. It topped the New York Times Best Setter list for fifteen straight weeks. Then in January 2006 it was discovered to contain extensive fabrications and was not, as originally represented by the author and publisher, a completely factual memoir.

Is it acceptable to fabricate? Can the genre accommodate fiction?

In 2008 Herman Rosenblat wrote a touching memoir Angel at the Fence, the story of his future wife sneaking him apples and bread at a sub-camp of Buchenwald. Rosenblat’s believers included not only his agent and his publisher, but also Oprah Winfrey,  film producers, journalists, family members and strangers who ignored, or did not know about, the warnings from scholars that his story did not make sense. Rosenblat then acknowledged that he met his future wife on a blind date in New York. He issued a statement saying that he was an advocate of love and tolerance who falsified his past to better spread his message. “I wanted to bring happiness to people,” said Rosenblat, who now lives in the Miami area. “I brought hope to a lot of people. My motivation was to make good in this world.”

These three memoirs highlight a number of issues: the motive for writing a memoir, first-person integrity, accuracy and fairness, and the “rights” of writer’s privilege, that is  the immunity gained through poetic license, the freedom granted by storytelling liberties.

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Which brings us to the year 2009 and to our own Mennonite family tree.  Henry Holt published Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen who grew up in the Mennonite Brethren community in Fresno, California and then left the community and her Mennonite identity. She currently is a professor of English and creative writing at Hope College.

I learned about the book at an impromptu Sunday morning breakfast on our Catholic street. Andy Eifert told me he had just seen a review about “something Mennonite.” I returned home to retrieve my own New York Times Book Review later that morning. The review was a rave. I headed downtown to Borders to buy the book.

Let me say this. Any time a writer can make a reader smile, that’s a base hit. Any time a writer can make a reader laugh aloud, that’s a homer. I personally heard many laughs in my own house from a reader of the book. Shirley Showalter, a former colleague and later president of Goshen College and now vice president at The Fetzer Institute, has read and reviewed more memoirs than anybody in our several Mennonite denominations. She writes about them in “100 Memoirs,” her web site. She wrote, “When I read Rhoda Janzen’s Mennonite in a Little Black Dress late at night, the bed posts shook. I had to choke back gargantuan guffaws in order not to wake my Mennonite husband.”

The memoir has been a commercial success, thanks in part to very positive reviews. The last I heard, 50,000 copies had been published. Google Rhoda Janzen’s name and you will come upon a blizzard of reviews and responses.

What do people like about the book?

Reviewers admired Janzen’s persona and literary skills, and often commented positively on the character of Mennonite community that could lead to healing. The memoir served well to give both a traditionally rich and a warmly human version of what heretofore was characterized as a stark, isolated, rigid, judgmental religious sect.

To get a Mennonite perspective on the book, I checked into the Center for Mennonite Writing (www.mennonitewriting.org) where a lively discussion began shortly after the September Journal published a review by Jessica Baldanzi, now teaching at Goshen College.

“ Mennonite in a Little Black Dress is simply a great read, simultaneously funny, wrenching, and … heartwarming … Throughout the book, Janzen’s intense philosophical musings about the purpose and significance of life itself …  carry the work … into the ranks of more lasting and powerful memoirs… .”

Baldanze makes a positive appraisal of Janzen’s humor than moves on: “Part of what keeps the book afloat is that Janzen has made it to the other side—and here’s where the “Mennonite” part of the title comes in. Janzen engages in affectionate, though near-constant critique and questioning of her heritage, from Mennonites’ penchant for extreme thriftiness—’Whenever my parents used a coupon to procure something, they felt 100 percent committed to liking it’—to the replacement of dancing with ‘liturgical movement,’ which ‘gave the older Mennonites bilious indigestion.’ ‘I hope it’s clear by now that the Mennonites wouldn’t want me,’ one chapter even begins. Yet she returns to her family, and the Mennonite community she grew up in, to heal—and although her life is far from resolved at the end of the book, she does seem to be at home.”

Shirley Showalter, like many professional critics, applauded the book, but then turned to her misgivings. “Now for the other side of the story. As much as I laughed while reading the book and as much as I celebrate the word “Mennonite” conjoined with “funny” in other reviews of this book, I cringed while reading more than once. No one laughs harder at a Mennonite joke than a Mennonite—unless it is cruel or inaccurate.

‘Elizabeth Gilbert, the bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love, calls this memoir “wincingly funny.” I didn’t wince hard at the obvious candidates—the racy or sometimes too-cute language, the author’s physical and emotional pain, or her critique of the small worldview of her own family.”  [But Shirley says she did wince ... many times.]

“One of the major controversies in memoir writing is how much we owe to other people in our stories.  Annie Dillard sets the memoir high bar: ‘I don’t believe in a writer’s kicking around people who don’t have access to a printing press. They can’t defend themselves.’

“Janzen does not appear to hold such scruples and will go far for a joke (or even for revenge?). One wonders what future Thanksgiving dinner will be like in the Janzen household. Sisters-in-law Staci and Deena come across as vastly inferior in sensitivity and taste than Rhoda and her sister Hannah. Janzen mentions the fact that she has seen Staci only a few times in the last five years.  She damns with faint praise, approving of Staci’s honesty in not pretending to closeness she does not feel and then quotes the thoughtless things Staci said to her. Staci could certainly not enjoy seeing these words in print, even if she said every word between the quotation marks, which could only be the case if Janzen has perfect recall.

“Here is my wish for her future: may she borrow more of her mother’s kindness and a tad more of her father’s integrity – without losing an ounce of her own wonderful chutzpah. And may she turn a forgiving but clear-eyed focus on her true antagonist, herself.’

To help you understand Showalter’s disquiet, I will give you a sample of Janzen’s comments about a living person. It’s her brother Jonathan whom she names Aaron, but everyone in Fresno knows who Aaron refers to.

– “I can’t speak for rich people, but in my experience higher education does not produce people who think they have all the answers, unless you count my brother Aaron.”
–”The gap between Aaron and me was marked by so much more than a divide between left and right brains, between science and the humanities. In fact, I don’t have much in common with either of my brothers.  In college they remained content with their opportunities in Mennonite circles …They both went to Bible studies. They dated sincere gals who hair sprayed their bangs and went on mission trips.”
–”My brothers never ask me about my life or work, a silence I interpret as disapproval. Whenever I ask them about ideas or politics or beliefs, they change the subject.”
–”With Aaron I knew I would never be close, but there was a moment in my adolescence when I thought that Caleb and I might become friends.”

Aaron is only one of numerous persons to be slighted in this memoir that Janzen says was intended to show affection. I have been led to believe not only by the article in the Mennonite Weekly Review, but also personal correspon-dence, that the book caused anguish in family and community circles in Fresno and beyond. If it was intended as a tribute, the tribute bombed in Fresno.

And so I have tried to say two things: the memoir is a resourceful and popular mode for telling one’s story; second, and I shall use the words of Judith Shulevitz’s: “Given the monstrosities that memoir-writing has produced, must we admit that the genre is unseemly?”

I have opted not to be so presumptuous as to give a final word about the matter. Knowing the spirit of Mennonite Arts Weekend, I invite you to wrestle with some questions. (I will have typed out the questions shown in bold letters, and ushers will distribute this sheet. I will go over the questions and then open for  discussion).

“The Memoir: Resourceful and Troubled Genre”  — Questions

1. How have personal stories (anecdotes, autobiographical vignettes, memoir) been of value to you? Give examples.

2. When reading a memoir how do you discover the writer’s motives? Comment on Raymond Walters Jr.: Think of the memoirist “as a person to whom you have just been introduced. Size up as best you can the personality of the man or woman who is talking and take it constantly into consideration as you judge … what he (or she) has to say.”

3. The memoir is first-person centered. How might a memoirist be his own best hero? How might the memoirist be his own worst enemy?

4. Ann Hostetler writes, “We all know how each one of us has a different version of the same family story. Even autobiographies that purport to tell the “truth” are always suspect in regards to objectivity.  Is a memoir more about the truth, or about one perspective on experience?”

5. How might a writer first quicken and then test her memory?

6. Do you think that most readers feel cheated when a memoir is exposed as including fictions?  or are fictions assumed in this genre?

7. Here are two opinions. Which comes closer to the way you feel?

Else K. Neufeld: “Those who are unhappy with how they were presented have the option to write their own memoir to set the record straight.”

Cynthis Hockman wonders how people sacrificed on the alter of memoir recover.

8. Do you think that some people, including Mennonites, are too squeamish about how they are portrayed publicly?

9. Traditional societies make a clear difference between the public and the private spheres. Do you think that the memoir has gained or suffered from the erasing of the distinction between what is public and what is private?

10. Ervin Beck remarked about Rhoda Janzen: “Mainly, we need to see that she did not write the book for Herald Press and a Mennonite audience, but for the mass American reading audience, via Holt … Her speaking voice is not a conventionally Mennonite one, nor one she would use if she were writing for a Mennonite audience.  But it is an appealing one for both the mass and the sophisticated reader, bold, brassy, slangy, sometimes vulgar, it seems to me.” Is a writer justified in arguing that the memoir is meant only for a particular audience?

11. Are there resources from within our Anabaptist Mennonite heritage and from its artists that might serve to clarify aesthetic and ethical principles for our further work in this genre?

I am spending the weekend in Cincinnati to participate in the 10th biennial Mennonite Arts Weekend, an event that brings together artists and art lovers. I’ll tell you three specifics about the weekend; however, you should know that 1 + 1 + 1 = for more than three.

One: the theme was “The Art of Place: Sacred Spaces and Common Ground.”

Two: the artists include Todd David (poet), Penn State University; Jayne Holsinger (painter), New York City; House of Doc (four musicians), Winnipeg Manitoba; Sidney King (film director), Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Dennis Maust (potter), Lititz, Pennsylvania; Naomi Pridjian (artist), Chicago, Illinois; Ted Swartz (actor), Harrisonburg, Virginia; Juanita Yoder, (fiber-reactive dyes on silk), Robbinsville, New Jersey.

Three: meals were catered by The Juniper Spoon; its owner and chef is Lali Hess, my daughter.

So what was beyond the 1 + 1 + 1 =  3? I don’t have adequate words for it: I think it has to do with the breath of spirit that moved from person to person, from artifact to person, from music to person. Living breath moving through the arts, through people, and through the Common Ground at a Cincinnati Presbyterian Church which became for us all a Sacred Space.

In an earlier entry, I called attention to memory tags — little events from bygone days that tug onto a brain cell like the skin tags that attach themselves to my torso. Well, here is one.  Warning: this is of no consequence whatsoever.

I was a passenger in a car in a funeral procession that wound its way through Lancaster, Pennsylvania en route to a cemetery out of town. As is the custom, police escorted the procession which was fairly long. Consequently we passed through intersections even though the lights turned to red. When we came to a major intersection we were to make a left turn and so we proceeded. A pick-up truck was on the cross street. When the driver saw his light turn to green, he sped out into the intersection, but our car continued in its turn cutting him off. He became furious, leaning his head and middle finger out the window and yelled bloody murder, then cut into the line for a block and turned right on the next street toward his destination.

Did he ever learn that we were a funeral procession? If so, how did he feel?

But let us assume that he never found out about his breech of protocol and civility and that he proceeded on his errand, then and forever ignorant of the “truth” of the event. I wonder how many times I am he, not necessarily breaking into a funeral procession but behaving badly in a situation that has within it data that I am unaware of.

Again today a successful member of the medical profession complained to me about government spending. “We can’t pay for all the programs Washington is dreaming up,” he said. In such short dialogues I don’t lift my end of the logue. I said nothing. But what I  was thinking would have dumbfounded him: I don’t mind paying taxes, especially if those funds are channelled to the public domain and to services for those unable to care for themselves.

The comment came on tax day at our house. The dining room table is covered with W-2s, 1099s, quarterly tax receipts, charity receipts, real estate tax payment receipts, business income and expense records, pencils, an eraser, the stapler, a cup of coffee, and thank goodness, my computer with Turbo Tax software. Since we don’t have a high income, our tax bill is modest, yet the printer expelled 35 pages for the federal and state reports. We will get back a modest refund which will be nice. But I’m saying that I’d be willing to pay more if the funds went to the right ends.

Where will our tax dollars go?  I suppose into the big pot. My sources indicate that each dollar of mine will be apportioned something like this:

$.23 national defense and war

.20 Social Security

.19 Medicare and Medicaid

.17 other mandated

.05 interest on federal debt

.04 TARP

.12  other discretionary divided as follows

$.0696 to defense and the war

.0084 to education, training employment and social services

.006   to income security

.006   to health

.0048 to veterans’ benefits and services

.0048 to administration of justice

.0048 to international affairs

.0036 to natural resources and the environment

.0036 to general science, space and technology

.0024 to transportation

How I wish I could effect changes to those numbers in order to help build a good society. Such are the thoughts on tax day.

Friendship is driving 88.3 miles to a restaurant to meet a friend who is driving 60 miles to get there, hugging each other in the parking lot and talking all the way into the restaurant where we sit by the window so we can look out on the patio.

Friendship is joshing with the waitress about seeing our shadows today and ordering Arnie Palmers and talking about winter.

Friendship is drinking tea and lemonade and saying our spouses are doing just fine and ordering the soup and salad bar and why not the pasta bar also but staying put to talk about children and grandchildren.

Friendship is finally getting bowls of broccoli soup and talking about cycling and snowboarding and football and old classmates and long after the waitress takes the soup bowls getting plates of lettuce and red beets and carrots and cole slaw.

Friendship is forgetting what the lettuce and red beets and carrots and cole slaw taste like and talking about Einstein and Marx and Unomuno and Tillich and Gordon Kauffman and Ruth Armstrong and Marcus Borg and the “Ground of Being” and the Jesus Seminar and the relationship of faith and imagination.

Friendship is answering the waitress that we are buddies from way back and that we will indeed get pasta before the restaurant closes and talk about “Constantine’s Sword,” and “America before 1492” and Big Bang and then go to the pasta bar and select a pasta and point to the things we want on the pasta and then talk while the pasta cooks and then take it back to the table and talk about lodging in a snowstorm in Wyoming.

Friendship is signing the bill for $11.45 plus tip and talking about succumbing to fear of heights in the Rockies and telling our stories and rehearsing the legends and talking about remarkable surgeons.

Friendship is talking from the restaurant out to the parking lot and hugging again and driving home … refreshed for having shared a pew in a tabernacle.

This afternoon I spied a red-tailed hawk in the redbud on Ora’s property, just across the fence from our deck. I’d not seen a red-tailed hawk so close. I was surprised that it wasn’t skittish. It was eating something black — a starling? When I walked within perhaps 20 feet, it took its lunch to a tree along Pleasant Run.

At the rear of our property we are building a wild life refuge by letting stuff grow and throwing our Christmas trees into the low shrubs. Who knows what lives there. When I took refuse to the compost pile last week, a lazy possum sat on the fence no more than 12 feet from me. I know there are raccoons nearby. Our bird feeder hasn’t yet attracted a variety of birds apart from cardinals, doves and chickadees and of course English sparrows. This summer I hope to give better hospitality to the humming birds that frequent our back yard.

I haven’t seen a coyote in town like Sam saw in his yard in Carmel, nor deer like those who traipsed through Ben and Sam’s garden in Dayton. But I’m on the look out.

What helped me get rid of a grouch?

“Alleluia: An American Hymnal” sung by the Kansas City Chorale led by Charles Bruffy who also leads the Phoenix Chorale. The Nimbus Records disc includes five sections: Southern Harmony,Shaker Songs, The Sacred Harp, Sunday Morning, and Spirituals.

Faure”s Requium, performed by Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, directed by Armin Jordan. Our newspaper said this past week that there aren’t atheists in foxholes, nor among listeners of “In Paradisum.”

“Absolute Heaven: Essential Choral Masterpieces” performed by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra & Choruses directed by Robert Shaw whom I saw in several live concerts. This disc contains 15 works which mutually outdo each other.

I did a quick sum. The total number of readers who want to know that I’m grouchy today is zero. Where has empathy gone?  Thus, since there’s no readership I’ll write to myself. The illustration that my dictionary uses for the word grouchy is “The old man grew sullen and grouchy.” How do they know about me? And what right have they to publish it? If I could find an honest lawyer who doesn’t overcharge, I’d sue. Actually, I’m not going to find such a lawyer, so I’ll just be irritably nasty on this cold January night, here in our house, when the symphony orchestra is presenting Faure’s Requiem downtown. We aren’t there and we aren’t in sunny Florida either like happy snowbirds so I’ll just sit on this rocking chair and when I finish this sentence, I’ll just stew some more. P.S. Why was the sauce for the rice so hot tonight at supper?

One of my colleagues reported a restaurant owner’s saying, “If my food’s not very good, I can do something about it. If my service isn’t very good, I can do something about that, too. But if people eat at home I’m in trouble.”

This quote identifies the quandary of small businesses in these days of national recession. Patterns of earning and spending change during downturns in the economy. Those changes, in turn, affect the producers of goods and the providers of services.

Advancement Associates work with small non-profit church-related organizations that are feeling the strong impact of this recession. In our annual meeting, we seemed to be reading the chapter entitled “Nobody’s having much fun these days.”  We are accustomed to our clients’ talking with us about advancement and development. That’s not the topic these days. The clients’ agendas often pertain to paying the bills, cutting staff size, increasing the census and reinforcing staff morale.

During our sessions while I tried to focus on the “hard science” of business management theory, my mind tended to wander to the “soft sciences” and more specifically to the attitudes that  might grace the business manager in these times.

1. Pause to name and to count your blessings.

2. Do good work each day and say aloud that it is good.

3. Recognize the wise decisions that you have already made.

4. Bring into immediate consciousness the positive difference your organization and you yourself have made in your community.

5. Rest in the goodwill of your colleagues, and in turn, nurture that goodwill.

6. Note the positive results of reducing expenses, of eliminating clutter, of erasing inefficiencies.

7. Welcome these moments of realistic forecast, candid admission and honest soul-searching.

8. Be grateful for options, for possible strategies you may employ at this time.

9. Chat with four people outside your organization who will give to you a sense of being supported by loving friends.

10. Make a specific gesture of understanding and support to someone who has suffered more than you during this recession.