Author: Bev

I understand it but I don’t really “get it.”  I guess we need an official “holiday” (April 22, 2020) in order to collectively pick up litter and celebrate the magnificence of the land we live atop.

I am not a romantic.  I am a person who fathoms not the concept of making a celebration out of every little thing.  Consequently, with some “holidays” I just can’t perceive the point of setting a day apart from all others to celebrate it.  Some of us celebrate these things every day.  I honestly just go through the motions with a few of these “minor holidays.”

Don’t get me wrong.  What I call a “minor” holiday might be one of your favorites and ranks high on your celebratory radar.  And that’s cool.  Have at it.  You certainly don’t need my “hoorah” to get excited about a day, or get a nod from the federal government or the post office to take a day to celebrate, away from the usual grind.

In fact, what’s minor to me might be major to most everybody else and vice-versa.  Having studied the Bible I used to be downright annoyed that Hebrew and Christian scholars called Habakkuk a “minor” prophet.  What?  I’ll bet God didn’t consider him or Malachi minor.

So, did we not celebrate mother’s before May 9, 1914?  And was love not the object of revelry before the 18^th century embellishment of Saint Valentine’s “Day?”  Now we have Siblings Day.  I love my siblings every day and some don’t love theirs any day, but a holiday?   Surely, we didn’t give one hoot about cleaning up the earth before “Earth Day” was conceived on April 22, 1970, did we?

I don’t know, but I think I’ve been picking up litter my whole life.  I grew up in rural Pennsylvania, specifically Bedford County.  I wonder if when our rural mother’s “picked up the house,” which meant tidying up the mess strewn about, came from “picking up” the litter strewn about their outdoor home.  The “land” we lived on was significant, noticed, and respected.

I’ve walked firmly on the terra of this local land, intermittently, throughout my life.  I see minor things like squished worms on the pavement; bright red, expended shotgun shells; oddly shaped or colored mushrooms; Snicker’s wrappers; beer & energy drink cans; empty chocolate pudding cups & chocolate milk bottles; gnarly, knotted vines; smokeless tobacco (snuff) cans; golf balls; differences in the look of mosses, up close; Styrofoam containers and packing material of all shapes, sizes and uses, from “peanuts”  to takeout trays and coffee cups to huge cubes from someone’s latest Amazon acquisition, all in or near the woods.

These are objects that your usual auto or truck passerby doesn’t notice.  One only sees these things with your feet on the ground.  With the tons of roadside litter available to be picked up, apparently there are far fewer of us with our feet on the ground than in our vehicles, tossing the packaging of our lives out the window to the great beyond, or just to the brink of the woods.  Also, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation Litter Laws distinguish unintentional litter from the other, as the stuff that blows around in the wind, Kansas-style, Dorothy.

Oh, and I’ve seen even more “imaginative” things which I’ve picked up with the proverbial “ten-foot pole,” plastic gloves, and tank of antibacterial soap at the ready.  Not really.  I use a $1 generic dollar store “grabber-stick” to distance myself from the nastier objects that I pick up and discard in a trash bin or take home to include with our recycling.

“Out of sight out of mind” is real, my friends.  And the opposite is true for me and my tribe of walkers, hikers, joggers, and ploggers (joggers who pick up litter, the Swedes “invented” this, just like Al Gore “invented” the Internet in some election cycle, some years ago).

“Where the rubber hits the road,” means when theory meets reality.  Walkers see the reality of litter, every time we take a walk.  Earth Day is not just a commemorative day to us, one that seems good in theory or in the abstract.  It’s an everyday reality.

Socialism is not just a theory, studied in a book.  To Venezuelans and others, it’s a devastating reality.  The Holocaust is not a myth, talk to a survivor, read The Diary of Anne Frank, or Elie Wiesel’s books, especially, Night, which are NOT fiction.  Climate change is, boots on the ground, real; what we should do about it is another matter altogether.

The pandemic of Corona-virus is no joke.  Go to New York, oops, no you can’t, to see how it looks on the ground.  For heaven’s sake wear a home-made cloth mask to the grocery store, it won’t kill you.  I’ve done it, it’s not that bad, compared to the alternative.  Wash your hands more often and more thoroughly.  What harm can that do?

We’re all losing income right now and staying “home,” well….  Let’s face it, having “enough” money is relative to how you define “enough.”  I think it’s fair to say that you and I don’t have enough of it.  And, staying home should feel pretty good to those of us who have one.

In fact, a while ago when I was picking up litter along a secondary rural road while walking, a young man emerged in his vehicle from a local industrial business, stopped, rolled down his window and asked point blank, “Do you have a home?”  After I picked up my jaw from the pavement, unfixed my duh-stare, and sufficiently suppressed the hysterics about to overflow from my gut, I said, “yes I do, thank you for asking.”

Granted, I wear some casual clothes when I walk/jog, not tracksuit- or gym-clothes-worthy, but I really didn’t think I was exactly bag-woman-chic either.  What did they call it? Boho?  Maybe I should coin a new term for it: Earth Day Fashion, EDF-gear?

Presumably if you’re reading this in April 2020, you live in or near rural Pennsylvania and you’re spending a LOT of time at home.  How about joining my tribe, but in your own time and location, and celebrate the concept of earth day?

Go to your favorite dollar store, donning your recyclable cloth mask and pick up a “grabber,” and set out for a plogging adventure.  And keep your polite, best, COVID19 distance from the other ploggers.  Maybe this endeavor will become a personal tradition, as well as a national holiday.

 

What do you believe?  What you hear?  What you read?  What you observe?  Your gut (like Gibbs on NCIS)?

Getting to the truth used to be reached via the traditional journalistic 5 w’s: who, what, when, where, and why.  But who are your sources?  Are they trustworthy?

It was 1970-ish and Christian pop-singer-songwriter, Gary S Paxton recorded a song titled, Evidence.  I had the recording on an 8-track tape.  It’s the kind of song that sticks in your mind like Cher’s “Do you believe in Love after Love” hit.  Am I right? You’re welcome.

Anyway, the Paxton song goes something like this: Evidence.  Evidence.  Does your life show enough evidence…?  Evidence.  Evidence.  What does your life say…?  The word, evidence, is based on evident, videre (Latin), for video; or to see.  And, if “seeing is believing,” holds water, then evidence is what’s needed to support belief.

But, is “seeing is believing,” waterproof?  As it turns out, not so much.

The whole quote, never shared in its entirety, of Thomas Fuller, 17^th century English clergyman, is “Seeing is believing, but feeling is the truth.”  And, if “doubting Thomas,” the Apostle who wouldn’t believe Jesus was resurrected from the tomb until he saw the nail scars in his hands, for himself, testifies to anything, is it “seeing is believing?”

If “feeling is the truth,” then there appears to be something beyond sight that leads to belief; something beyond evidence.  At the dawn of the new millennium we were led to believe, by the hugely popular CSI television franchise, which saturated the airwaves and has yet to completely fizzle and burn out, that DNA evidence and forensic science would solve all contemporary crime.  Again, not so much.

Fast forward to the election of 2016 when we sloshed around in the throes of “fake news,” and a flood of already published misinformation circulated like a virus through social media.  We stood as midwife at the birth of an ever-increasingly sophisticated fact-checking industry that eclipses the DNA-evidence phenomenon (Snopes was birthed in 1994 but in 2020 is considered a bit of a rag in the fact-checking business).  Now, it’s factcheck.org.

We find ourselves in a relatively new crisis of exaggeration if not misinformation which eclipses government /politics and involves a life and death virus, virtually spreading like wildfire through social media.  Fact-checking businesses have proliferated into the hundreds and have shoved their way past the forensic scientists of the global media machine to suck the fun right out of willy-nilly posting of “information,” on the Internet.

But, are today’s fact-checkers, known as “neutral cool,” just another form of CSI-crime busting popular kids, if not elite bullies?  Who’s checking the integrity of the fact-checkers and their “facts?”  Believe it or not, there is now such a watchdog, The International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) conceived in the prestigious journalism school, the Poynter Institute, who’s Pulitzer prize winning fact-checker is Politifact.com.

However, no matter what the facts are, if we don’t feel it, according to Fuller, they matter not, to our belief.  If evidence is what we see, then what’s with the rest of the massive iceberg that lies below the surface?

It used to be the role of journalists and psychiatrists to dig below the surface to unearth the mass well-hidden beneath the obvious (what’s seen).  Are we any closer to the truth in 2020 than we were before the millennium?

Are more people seeing psychological professionals, for answers?  “How does this make you feel?”  Can we trust journalists with the information they disseminate?  “I’m not feelin’ it!”

“Faith is the conviction of things not seen” Hebrews 11:1. Seeing doesn’t get to the truth.  There has to be conviction to convince some of us to buy that horse.  I’m not sure there is ever sufficient evidence to convict if faith is not involved.  There is some sort of mystical proof that supplies this conviction and it’s not sight.  If it can be identified at all, perhaps it could be called, if not faith, then empathic knowing.

Maybe we could ALL use some metaphorical cataract surgery.  The blinders that keep us bound to one perspective, the one in front of our nose, might be best removed.  “If you wish to know the truth then hold no opinions” – Zen saying

Let me close with a few lines from I Can See Clearly Now (1972, Johnny Nash, songwriter):

I can see clearly now the rain is gone

I can see all obstacles in my way

Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind

It’s gonna be a bright (bright) sunshiny day.

Hope so.

Let’s have some fun with pass-words.

First, there’s the elephant in the room: The Password.  Just like “Open Sesame,” or “Swordfish,” got you through the door to a Speakeasy in the 1920s, we’ve got to have a password to do most things electronic, two decades into the 21^st century.

The Password is your entrance to anything on the Internet; and don’t forget the “phone password” to get anything done with a bank or corporation via the old-fashioned telephone.

In order to get past Hello, you must present your “secret” code.  Then and only then can you move forward in the conversation.

Everybody has them, some of us have collected a whole slew of them.  Or if you’re techno-shy, someone has several of them for you.  “It must be at least 8 digits long, with one capital letter, one symbol, one number, and unique to this use.”  Yeah, right.  How many people still use 12345AbC or 000000Ab…?

Second, as a matter of comfort to the afflicted, we say “This too shall pass.”  And, it does.

Third, we take the Bypass, to go around the main road into a town or city.   This is an attempt to lose the traffic and congestion of the downtown, but can backfire.  My husband and I in many a domestic road trip, have taken a pass on the Bypass around a city, which experience taught us is far more congested than our fluid passage right through the city center.

Or, we bypass “step 3” in the directions for assembling that IKEA furniture we bought at such a great price; directions written by a brilliant Asian guy, translated to English by an equally brilliant Swedish guy, that this English-speaking American doesn’t want to read in the first place.  Bypassing step 3 just feels like the right thing to do.  Don’t pictures speak a thousand words?

Fourth, we have the passing lane.  Can I repeat, passing lane?   Now, some folks don’t get the concept of the passing lane.  It’s for passing, not for cruising.  Enough said.

Fifth, the passport.  Now, I think it’s funny that in today’s modern Pennsylvania governmental bureaucracy (atop the Federal bandwagon), we need either a passport (originally intended for foreign travel and access to countries not your own) OR the newly conceived REAL ID driver’s license to fly domestically.  Mind you, the REAL ID costs $60.50 as opposed to the regular driver’s license at $30ish, for no apparent reason, because it’s valid for four years just like the regular one.  Oh my.

Sixth, “Please pass the veggies.”  Or, others may pass on that.

Seventh, many of us have been heard to say, “I nearly passed out when I saw my paycheck last week.”  I’m fortunate that I’ve only nearly passed out.  I know it’s a regular occurrence for some of you party animals.  Personally, I’m not fond of losing control, nor am I nurse-material.

I once worked for a Podiatrist who arranged to have a few hours in a hospital for outpatient procedures.  I was clearly an office assistant, not a nursing assistant.  But on occasion, Dr. Podiatrist asked me to assist.  I didn’t know which end was up on the blood pressure cuff and I was just as likely to get a reading of 70/40 as 260/120 on the same patient 5 seconds apart.  Long story short, I was asked to assist with a minor operation, in a tiny, windowless room, dressed in my kitty-covered nursing scrubs.  Once a certain amount of blood flowed, I fought with every ounce of my being as waves of blackness swept over me in 2 second intervals until I could escape the confines of that asphyxial medical cell, and not pass out.

Eighth, “The buck stops here,” popularized by President Harry S. Truman, epitomizes a certain humility with responsibility one would expect from a leader.  But, passing the buck, blaming someone else, or even falsifying the facts, unfortunately seems to characterize too many of today’s leaders.

Ninth, I learned a song at the dawn of the 1970s when I was a teenager, called Pass It On.

The chorus goes like this:

It only takes a spark

To get a fire going

And soon all those around

Will warm up in its glowing.

That’s how it is with God’s love

Once you’ve experienced it

You spread His love to everyone

You want to pass it on.

Proselytizing, often associated with religious belief, is the act of recruiting or converting someone to your point of view because of your fervor over your personal experience with God.  Some of us feel so strongly about our point of view that we literally can’t hold back the desire to spread that opinion, thus the share button on Facebook.  Freedom of the press and “it’s a free country,” permit all of us ordinary folks to share away without censure.

But, sharing or passing it on, goes many ways.  This is where responsibility comes to play.  Referring to those lyrics above, it only takes a spark…and soon all those around…spread it…you want to pass it on.  Do you?  In view of recent events (COVID-19) perhaps we would prefer not to pass it on, spread it?

Tenth and last, but not least, we Christians and Jews celebrate Passover in a matter of days.  I’ll leave the details of the theology of Passover (Exodus 12) to any number of qualified clergies: pastors, ministers, priests, rabbis, to elaborate on.  But, one thing I know about Passover, like passing away, and it came to pass, is that it is about being released from captivity, slavery, and the pain and suffering inherent in life. 

Can we agree that we all want a mighty move of Passover this year?  Then, can we celebrants pray that the resurrection representative of Easter restores not just the old life we knew, but a new, improved, better version of this life? 

Borrowed from our Jewish brethren – l’chaim– to life!

Pandemic, now there’s a big word for you.  I would surmise that many of us were unfamiliar with this word a few weeks ago.  However, in the context of countless articles with pandemic in the title, posts with pandemic in the subject line, and electronic commentary with pandemic used in a sentence or two, we all could probably guess that it means, a global epidemic (affecting all and every nation).

                “I like big ‘words,’ and I cannot lie

                You other brothers can’t deny….”

                That a well-rounded big word in your face

is a thing of beauty!

                I apologize to those of you with sensibilities that won’t allow you to appreciate my mocking-parody of a 1992 rap tune about big butts, that I mostly remember being delivered by the potty-mouthed Donkey, I believe, in a Shrek movie.  I just had to…. Song lyrics pop into my head randomly.  Maybe it has something to do with the rhyming of lyrics pasted onto a memorable melody that remains in my brain tissue only to leak out at sometimes odd moments.

I’ve been accused of using big words.  Okay.  So, you want little words, short words, small words, perhaps four-letter words?

I like big words and fancy words.  I’m the Dolly Parton of big words.  I like disused words and unusual words.  I just, flat out, love words.  I can’t imagine why I’m a reader and writer.

Thank you, Mom, for modeling for your children an appreciation for the written and spoken English language.  It was one of the joys of my own life to have taught my child to read.  The circle of life.

As to the accusation of my using too many big words, it came from a student evaluation of my teaching skills, a long time ago, from a lad or lass in an Introduction to Sociology course.  Then, students could say anything they wished in an evaluation of the course, and the Instructor was expected to take it on the chin, hopefully either improving their performance or dismissing it as a disgruntled kiddo who thought they deserved an A but earned a C.  As there was no recourse to a student evaluation back then, it was what it was, I responded definitively but silently.

My gut-reaction, rebuttal was a sarcastic, “Get a dictionary.”  The expanded version, in my head was, “This is college.  Expand your vocabulary, expand your world.”  Then, “come on, really!?”  Then, probably some purely reactionary and unimaginative four-letter word.

As an aside, listen up people, especially movie-makers and script-writers – they didn’t use the F-word in the middle ages even for the “sex-thing” (not until late 15^th century) and certainly not for an exclamation of disdain (19^th century).  Just sayin’.  One of my pet-peeves.

About that aforementioned student evaluation, which was penned many years ago; I’ve mellowed since.  So, now when people accuse me of using big words, I go into my head again, never really saying these things to people.  I go back in time yet again, and refer to the tactic I used with students in my Developmental Studies Reading Lab at a university I worked at in Kentucky.  It’s simple.

Look at the context of what you’re reading to determine a general gist of a big word’s meaning.  I do it with Romance Language foreign words all the time.  French, Italian, Spanish, and many English words are based on Latin.  From the English, many times I can suss out the meaning of a French, Italian, or Spanish word I’m confronted with.  Not being fluent in any of these foreign languages, I can get by with greetings and the niceties, this way.   Or, when I need to make a point and English just doesn’t do the sentiment justice, I study the context in which I want to use a foreign word and having heard or read the foreign word before plus a little help from Google Translate, voila.

                “With a yawn, and a gentle pandiculation of her sleepy limbs, she drifted off to dreamland.  Something I would know nothing about. Insomnia is more my style.”  Could the word pandiculation mean to stretch?  And, it’s a much more fun word than stretch, I think.

Now, back to the big word, pandemic.  Can we learn some related pan- words that might expand our vocabulary as well as our generosity toward “all” in this global time of trouble?  How about panorama?

Many years ago, I had a dream wherein God gave me an option.  “You choose,” He said, “the panorama or the single pane.”  And I was shown a huge, 360-degree view of “It’s a small world,” at Disney World.  This was one of my favorite destinations at the park, back in the day.  Everywhere I looked, the objects in view were white, soft, jewel-like, sparkly, feathery, shiny, innocent, and childlike.  It was a fantastical utopia.  The single-pane window, in contrast, was one of those divided panes.  It was crowded, confusing, confined, utilitarian, and wholly undesirable. Of course  I chose the panorama.  I wanted it all.

How about Pan-Christian?  Uniting all branches of this group of believers.

Pan-cultural or pan-traditional = spanning many cultural traditions.

So, here we are back to pandemic.  ALL, ALL, ALL …. And, to combat it?  How about panacea?  “One for all, all for one” (The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas).  The goal is to work separately (socially distanced) but toward one outcome, benefiting all. 

I had an opportunity today to correspond with a customer in Hong Kong.  We agreed that “we’re all in this together.”  And, together, we’ve got this.

In my head and in anticipation of the publication of my first column in the Bedford Gazette, it was 3 a.m., when most people develop their best creations, right?  I was in that half-awake, half- asleep dreamlike state known officially as a hypnopompic state.  It seems that I am at my most creative during this state, and in the wee-hours of the morning.

This time, I went on the offensive about my recently public written work.  I’d been writing for decades but wiser men & women than me agree with the writer of Ecclesiastes, “there is a time for everything and a season for every activity under the sun” (paraphrased).

A couple of years ago when deeply embroiled in the layout phase of my photo-essay book, I started to prepare myself for its inevitable criticism.  In fact, so much had I thought about this upcoming criticism, I put a little anticipatory reminder on my desk-computer monitor, “everything you write will offend someone, somewhere, sometime” – and I could have added, and they will lash out.  It’s just that kind of world.

I’m not only an introvert but I’m a highly sensitive person (HSP, in psychology jargon), so I have to prepare for such things as criticism.  Peopling takes preparation.  I’m not shy; I’m even gregarious at times.  I like people.  But, I’m most at ease with space, silence, ideas, nature, and being alone.  I have to “get ready to get ready to ‘do people.’”  “Getting ready to get ready” is my husband’s thing and as far as I know, he coined the phrase; no diagnosis, just observation.

Criticism is not easily brushed off by my tribe.  Thick skin is not something we’re born with.  We have to consciously fight to not overthink, analyze-to-death, and deconstruct every experience, outside stimulus, and word/gesture/feeling we get from people, just being in proximity to them.

God bless my husband; can you say Amen?  Don’t go too far in pitying him, he’s got stuff too.  News flash, everybody’s got stuff.

I’ll never forget reading about a female scientist from one of the inhumanly frigid Pole’s, who had to be “life-flighted” back to the States for emergency cancer treatments.  She said to the press, in essence, “everybody’s got something, mine happens to be cancer.”  How powerfully resonant is that, in a count your blessings, stop feeling sorry for yourself kinda way?

This brings me to my aforementioned offensive, or preemptive strike.  If you like the Bible as your basis for moral and lifestyle guidelines, here’s one of my favorites.  “He who is without sin (wrong-doing) cast the first stone.”  This is Jesus’ words (always expect a paraphrase from me) in John 8:7. What could be clearer in the vein of “judge not, lest ye be judged;” (Matthew 7:1 – I first heard and learned this scripture from the King James Version, thus, the ye); “who are we to judge?” Or, “who do you think you are?”

For my purposes in this particular musing, I’m mixing my metaphors between the actual, barbaric and hateful act of stoning a human being as capital punishment (often for adultery, as in the case of the woman Jesus defended).  It is/was intended to kill someone for their offense.  But in the context of this essay, I’m referring to sticks, stones, words, names, and aspersions.  In this sense, the act of casting stones, no different than in literal stoning, is all about tearing down rather than building up, a human being.

To stone someone requires a purposeful gathering up of collected ammunition – a pile of stones not aimed at building something, a structure for example, but stacked for the purpose of ripping apart a life, killing, if you will their reputation, self-confidence, peace, happiness, goals, dreams, etc. To stone someone requires intentionally taking time from living your own life to assault the life of another, whom you as an individual or as a participant in “group-think,” have deemed having done wrong.

Lest you think the childhood defense against hurt feelings – “Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me,” is anything close to authentic or that “real” stoning does not include name-calling, fabrication, set-ups to suit your beliefs, politicizing, or defensive mechanisms, have I got a film for you!

My husband and I like the occasional foreign film.  You get used to subtitles.  Years ago, we watched the 2008 film, “The Stoning of Soraya M.”  Not before, nor since, has my soul been so impacted by a movie.  It’s not for sissies.  You will come away, I challenge you, devastated by the injustices of the world and I hope aspire to, with the best of your consciousness, never again endeavor to be the first to cast first stones.

Sometime along the line in my younger years, I heard the phrase, “Everything in Moderation.”  I wondered if it had originated with the Scripture attributed to the Apostle Paul in I Corinthians 10:23, “All things are permissible but not all things are beneficial.”  But the Greek poet Hesiod and Roman dramatist Plautus said this in different forms way back before the first century.

I’ve got a sort of inherent intuition or knowing of health and nutrition.  My sister Dee has even more astute knowledge in this area, picked up informally through alert cultural observation and lots of reading.  I suppose we’ve picked up tidbits from popular media, our whole lives.  I took a graduate class in Maternal/Infant Nutrition years ago at the University of Kentucky.  That may have helped a little bit.

My point is, both Dee and I have had weight issues since childhood.  Both of our bodies really want to go big (and go home, where the heart is, if you must finish a couple of add-on adages).  I’ll take Dee off the hook now and say that I would much rather OVEReat than eat with moderation.

In fact, I once told an ER doctor, just having been diagnosed with Hyperventilation, of all things (associated with anxiety, cumulative stress, and a panic attack mimicking a heart attack), that I didn’t find it all that surprising that I would OVERbreathe in that I OVERdo lots of things.  Can you say OVERthink?

I was embarrassed having gone to the ER with what I thought was a dumb complaint after all, thinking I was dying young from a heart attack.  Also, I was mortified that I hadn’t shaved my legs in a couple of days.  That saint of an ER doctor said not to feel bad, he hadn’t shaved his legs in quite some time either.  Good man.

Then there’s moderation in politics – NOT.  There used to be moderates on both sides, if my memory serves.  But today one seems hard pressed to find a good, thoughtful, calm, intelligent moderate on either side.  Moderates seem to be the animals on the planet with the most reasoned common sense.  Are these guys hiding in the closet, afraid of the politically correct crazies who holler the loudest?

In this nation, it’s either cultural anorexia/bulimia or we’re headed to a collective over eaters anonymous gathering.  Why can’t we just sit down together to an old-fashioned family-style meal after the hard work of barn raising, and pass the veggies please.

I know how important it is for people to sometimes overdo something.  More than 15 years ago I lost 82 pounds the old-fashioned way, by obsessing over food and exercise.  I couldn’t have achieved that weight-loss had I not taken diet AND exercise to heights beyond any stretch of the definition of moderation.  Maybe one has to counter one extreme with its opposite extreme in order to achieve balance.  Overdoing anything comes surely from an effort to compensate for something that is out of whack.  We’re trying to tune the instruments of our lives through overdoing it.  Moderation comes after you’ve peaked and shrieked, so it seems.

The Greeks, after all, gave us democracy and they gave us the great thinker, Aristotle who said, “moderation in all things,” in 350-something BC and “observe due measure, moderation is best in all things,” was Hesiod in 700 BC.  I have to give it to Oscar Wilde though, who said, “Observe moderation in all things, including moderation.”

The Bible, says in Ecclesiastes, the personal essay of wise philosophical if not skeptical musings, “there is a time for everything under the sun.”  And, I’ll borrow a Simon & Garfunkel song lyric to end my own musings, “the times they are a changing.”  The times that are trending now are to cut and paste: cut moderation and paste overdoing it!

But a girl can hope.

This piece was conceived in honor of Pat Scott’s humble and dignified life and is published with the deepest respect for Ralph and their family.

Pat Scott’s faith-filled death was awe-inspiring because of its dignity.  From her husband, Ralph’s account, Pat’s process was one of acceptance that “if this is my time, I’m ready.”  However, it was not resignation, giving up, or hopeless, but such a kinship with God that I would call it the epitome of “crossing over,” “passing through,” and “living life to its fullest.”  When I taught a Death & Dying course many years ago, Pat’s is what we called a “dignified death;” and I would call it the ultimate unification of the human with the divine.

I write this essay with a familiarity that I don’t really deserve.  I only knew Pat by name, “she was a Steele.”  But it is a matter of “country facts,” (the counterpart of the urban legend) that I know Ralph Scott and his family of origin.  I “know” him through that six degrees of separation way typical in the countryside, not unlike “turn left at the big oak tree next to the 25 mph sign on the dirt road up ahead,” or “my neighbor’s cousin graduated from high school with your sister.”  This is how I know Ralph: “you know the Scott’s, they lived on the ‘back road’ from Sunnyside to Cypher where our bus driver when the mood struck, took the route backwards so I saw where they lived because I got off the bus last instead of first.  I think Sandy was a year ahead of me and Ralph a few years ahead of her in school.”

Back to the future – I know Ralph now, as we are Facebook friends.  This is how I know of this most important and personal passage in the life of his family.

Beyond writing of Pat’s extraordinary faith, I am respectfully writing this because of her dignity.  Our culture could use some dignity and decorum.  I’m proudly a baby boomer, growing up in the 50s, 60s, and 70s.  We have some experiences to recount at this age.  Far from knowing it all, we’ve lived a lot.

Back in our formative years, we honored privacy and we kept things like sex, money, politics, and death, to ourselves.  It wasn’t secret, it was private.  BIG DIFFERENCE here.  Private means choosing boundaries and comfortably staying within them.  Secret means hiding from the potential pain of disclosing something shameful.  Unless you deem me an artifact and un-hip, I also taught Human Sexuality many years ago, so I’m all about keeping sex private but not secret – it’s a matter of decorum.

Death was private too.  In fact, my best friend from junior high thought my dad was dead because any time she spent the night at our house he wasn’t there.  But she never “said” anything about it.  The fact is, my dad worked in construction and his jobs often took him out of town or out of state during the week and he was home only on weekends.  I never “said” anything either.  It was private.

Family members of school mates tragically died back in the day of our growing up and I only heard of it as a result of a reunion conversation of a friend of a friend.  Nothing was “said,” that I heard at the time.

Politics was off-topic in my home of origin.  Voting was a private endeavor.  My dad was loudly a member of one political party and my mom was a member of “the other party.”  So I grew up, fortunately, with an open mind.  I “let my dad” rant about political things with my mouth shut and my mind decided if not open, but respectful of his opinions, strongly held.  My mom just shook her head and believed what she believed.

We watch a lot of British television in our household, primarily dramas or crime/mysteries.  Mostly through this medium, all I have known about the British parliament is one person standing up, yelling at the crowd of lawmakers across the aisle, with a freight train roar of disapproval from the gallery.  I used to think this process somewhat barbaric and was proud of our American political decorum, by contrast.  Wow!  Have things changed?!

Relatively new to us baby boomers, is the nonstop and immediate nature of the “news” cycle.  Thanks to this and the redefinition of journalism, minus the objectivity, politics is no longer private, civil, or dignified.  Walter Cronkite, reporting the evening news on the black-and-white TV, our culture is not.  Now we have a 24-hour presentation of some snippet of fact enhanced for us by a sound-bite of analysis, explanation, contextualizing, and interpretation of current events.  It’s activist-journalism, meant to incite emotion and get a visceral reaction.  As long as the media darling cites their bias upfront, bias is okay in today’s journalism.

Today’s dictionary.com Word of the Day: soniferous (conveying or producing sound) reminded me of the proverbial sound-bite, or the boastful person who loves the sound of his/her own voice.  We have an acquaintance who tells everyone who will listen about his money, apparently millions of it.  Aside from the point that I believe money is a private thing, can you say decorum?

And then there’s the soniferous media-driven celebrity of otherwise ordinary people, blown way out of proportion to what’s authentic – I would have used the word real here, but that word has been so bastardized by “reality-TV” and “real housewives,” that it’s useless to describe authenticity.  These people are famous for being famous, not for displaying some great talent, intellect, or skill, but for entertaining the, supposedly bored with their own lives, masses, via a sex-tape gone rogue, a job as a drunken host/hostess of outlandish parties, or their extravagantly plasticized faces or bodies.  Can you say dignity?

We could all take a lesson from Pat Scott and live with dignity and behave with decorum.  THANK YOU PAT for your generous gift and humble example to us all.  You were loved and will be remembered.

(Note: This piece was conceived in honor of Pat Scott’s humble & dignified life and is published with the deepest respect for Ralph & their family.)