Write for God

Tom Waits, circa 1974

“Hot and sunny” usually describes Florida but “cold and wet” have been the weather report since 2010 arrived. The black beret I save for the chilliest days has had a workout lately, as have the gloves and scarves we bury in the hallway closet.

Call it La Niña or call it “God’s in control of the weather,” but it’s been very un-Florida in Florida for weeks. This morning, my husband emailed me an appreciation of sunshine coming through our bedroom window after I’d left for work. On most Florida days, the complaint du jour is to curse the relentless sun and to scurry into the air-conditioned wombs of our workplaces and homes.

My 24-mile commute to work was sunny and cool, which lifted my spirits to start the work week. The Elvis Costello compilation that’s been in the CD player for weeks got reprieved and I drove into downtown St. Petersburg accompanied by The Heart of Saturday Night, a Tom Waits album from 1974 that has some real gems. New Coat of Paint, San Diego Serenade and Shiver Me Timbers could make anyone’s commute more enjoyable, although Waits’ jazzy growl isn’t to everyone’s taste.  It suited my mood perfectly this morning. (You have to love a guy whose name sounds like a sentence in a Hemingway novel.)

I thought of the line, “Where the clouds are like headlines on a new front page sky” from Shiver Me Timbers and I was grateful at that instant for the sun through my windshield. Since Florida has been as dark as some Tom Waits songs, finding a bit of pleasure in one of his songs brightened my ride.

On a sunny morning after days of clouds, I arrived at work relaxed and awake. Listen to Shiver Me Timbers here:

Chili dogs taste better in grills where they've been served for decades.

Let me tell you about the last greasy spoon and the last grill guy with a heart in America.

In a time of mega food corporations and generic burgers that taste the same from Timbuktu to Tallahassee, there’s a little place across the street from my office where the menu hasn’t changed in 50 years and the guy behind the counter trusts strangers. Honest–they exist.

Meetings and rain changed my lunch plans today. Instead of going out before noon to a restaurant further away for my Friday lunch out, I had to find the closest eatery as raindrops began falling. I crossed the street to the lunch counter where the menu has a few basic grill items and the decor is not much to look at.

A grilled-cheese sandwich, bowl of chili and soda later, I went to the register with my debit card to pay for my $5 lunch. Since I don’t like carrying cash, I had a total of 37 cents on me apart from my bank card. The grill guy handling the register actually said hello and asked how I was before I began using the debit card to pay for my lunch.

After trying to swipe three times without having the transaction go through, I thought I had no alternative but to find an ATM on foot in the rain or to ask the man behind the counter to hold my driver’s license until I could bring back the cash. The burly, bearded grill cook asked me where I banked. When I told him, he said, “Sometimes we have a problem with those cards.”

Out of solutions, I told him I was willing to keep trying until the transaction went through and that’s when he said something extraordinary:  “Do you work across the street? Just bring back the $5 next time you’re back in.” With that, he wrote my first name on the folded receipt and stashed it behind the register.

He didn’t ask for my ID or my firstborn’s birth certificate, but I insisted on having him write my full name and office number on the slip. He obliged and I left a Mom and Pop restaurant having had lunch without paying. A patron who was heading to my office witnessed the transaction and it must have amazed her, too. We crossed the street together as we chatted. Kindness and trust, it seems, are contagious.

Could I have been a scammer planning to bilk a little eatery out of a grilled cheese and chili? Perhaps. Did it occur to the grill guy that I could  walk out and never return? A possibility. Was he the kind of person who still trusts strangers and who believes people are decent enough to pay their debts? Of course. I felt like a bit player in a Frank Capra movie and Ward Bond was behind the counter.  

The little grill across the street may not have greatest selections on the menu or the most healthful food choices, but I walked out with something better:  an example of the trust that still exists in the most humble places in America. And that nourished me more than the meal.

Our daughter Tally with flowers from our garden. They bloomed for only a day or two but their beauty remains.

“Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression, and we are ever and anon reminded of them.”

–Henry David Thoreau

The Lord knows those He blesses because they, in turn, praise Him.

I work with a woman who exudes positive Christian enthusiasm. She’s helpful, friendly and generous. No one can help feeling uplifted around her. You could say that Kim is that way because God has given her health and riches, but you’d be wrong.

She had been unemployed until recently and was working temp jobs to support herself. That would place in the middle of the economic meltdown that has created millions of other people without jobs. Even when she didn’t have a job, Kim had a greater gift:  Faith.

She knew God would not abandon her. She knew something would come up. She knew that what the bosses in those temp jobs wanted was not a moper, but a doer. 

I met Kim during a temp assignment at our agency. Her laugh, her enthusiam and her hard work made her stand out among the many other temps our agency hired during the H1N1 pandemic. There was nothing she wouldn’t do and nothing she didn’t want to learn to do. We got used to seeing her smile in meetings and hallways.

As her temp assignment was coming to an end, she applied for one of the few permanent jobs in our agency. She was one of more than 200 people who applied for the job and she knew competition would be tough. One afternoon, she came in my office and asked if I’d pray for her during the hiring process.

I wrote a note about her prayer request and placed it in my SFGTD box. Once you know that those initials stand for “something for God to do,” you would realize that I took her prayer request to heart. We talked about my little prayer box and I showed her all of the slips of paper I’ve placed inside with my petitions. When something is too big for me to worry about, I scribble a note to God and place it inside my SFGTD box.

Kim went for her interview and told me later that she didn’t know how it had gone, but that she had told God she would trust His judgement. Days passed and she didn’t hear any news. Meanwhile, another company that had interviewed her called to offer her a job at about the same salary she would be making with us. She accepted the job, but something didn’t feel right. Her first choice was a job at our agency because she felt she belonged here.

The prayer slip remained in my box for a few more days and I also enlisted my prayer warrior husband’s help. A few days later, an ecstatic Kim walked into my office to tell me she had been hired by our agency and that she turned down the other job.

In the middle of a rotten economy, she had found two jobs. The hiring authority at the job she turned down thought she wanted more money and upped the salary by a bit. She still took the job with us instead.

You could say the Lord blessed Kim during a time when job seekers can’t find one job–never mind two. He blessed her because she blessed Him, too. Her faith never wavered, even when others were telling her she was a fool holding out for the second job she she had been offered one in a tough economy.

Among the dozens of temps in our agency, she stood out because of her positive attitude and her willingness to work. Nothing was below her and there wasn’t a day when she didn’t greet people she didn’t know. Kim made herself employable.  She’s a joy to have as a co-worker.

Kim also makes jewelry and she crafted a  filigree badgeholder for me as a gift. I don’t like fabric or plastic lanyards to hang my ID badge, so she made me what looks like a fine bead necklace that dresses up all of my outfits.  Each day when I do something as mundane as put on my work badge on, I think of Kim’s incredible talent and her even more incredible faith.

Howard Zinn

Historian, essayist and rabble-rouser Howard Zinn died on Jan. 27 after a lifetime of writing books and essays that always challenged the status quo.

His best known book remains A People History of the United States: 1492-Present, the work that pointed out to many of us that history is always written by the victors.  Those who were left out of the textbooks we read in class found a vibrant life in Zinn’s inclusive history.

Zinn also wrote You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, which intertwines events in his life with the tangled history of the 20th century. He ends his memoirs with this message for the 21st century and beyond:

“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.

“What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places — and there are so many — where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

“And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”

"District 9" was a smart sci-fi film with apartheid as a theme.

The Academy Award nominations were announced today and, even though I haven’t seen most of the films in contention, I made sure to check out the list.

Because of the lack of civility and respect in moviegoers and society in general, I can no longer cultivate my passion for films on big screens. Each moviegoing experience turns into a maddening ordeal of others’ conversations, crunching food wrappers, ringing cell phones and yelping children at movies not made for them.  Still, I follow cinema and eventually catch films that are now showing on my TV screen thanks to Netflix.

The big film this year is Avatar, James Cameron’s animated fantasy. My 14-year-olds saw it with family; the boy loved it, the girl hated it. I guess I’ll have to see it to make up my own mind.

It felt good to see Jeff Bridges nominated for Crazy Heart, a film I will definitely catch on DVD.  Bridges is today’s Henry Fonda, the stalwart who was always excellent but never got an Oscar until he was at the end of a distinguished career. In every film, Jeff Bridges makes intelligent choices in his material and his performances. I hope that he can be rewarded for the body of his career while he’s still young enough to enjoy it.

The selection of District 9 as Best Picture was surprising. This sci-fi film was released many months ago and had a tiny budget.  It was big on ideas, which are sometimes lacking in the most successful films today. Although it was designed as a pseudo-documentary about aliens arriving in South Africa–stay with me here–it was actually a polemic against apartheid.

The aliens are segregated in slums called District 9, an inverted version of the District 6 where racism relegated the black residents of Cape Town to areas away from their white neighbors. The film mulls over notions of what racism means and how putting oneself in the skin of the oppressed (literally in this case because we’re talking about sci-fi) can change one’s viewpoint.

Food, Inc. sounds like a shoo-in to win Best Documentary. It’s an exploration of where our food comes from and how it arrives processed and “safe” at our supermarkets. I won’t forget the grieving mother-turned-activist who lost a toddler to contaminated food or the struggling chicken farmer ruined by the food industry just for telling the truth.  The film is not for the squeamish or for picky eaters.

Each year, Oscars are announced in the same order, with Best Picture as the most prestigious to be listed first and awarded last. In today’s listing, as it is each year, the writing awards are at the bottom of the nominations, as if they were incidental. Yet, if it weren’t for writers, the pretty people onscreen and the zillionaire producers offscreen would have nothing to say or do while showing off their pulchritude and wealth.

Writers are the creators and the superstars are the interpreters. Some little films are up for Adapted and Original Screenplay Oscars and I hope to catch them all soon.  The Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man is among those small projects listed as an original screenplay, but it really has a very old basis for its story:  It’s a modern, serio-comic version of the story of Job.  Didn’t someone say there was nothing new under the sun?

Each decade, we take attendance in the United States. The process is called the Census and this is the year when it’s our turn to raise our hands.

Conspiracies are already swirling tying the Census to more government control and some are saying that an accurate account will be impossible. Foreclosures by the thousands, more homeless people and a slew of undocumented workers who stay below the radar are sure to skew the results, they say.

That may be true, but the Census is also how we determine a community’s representation in Congress and how federal spending filters to each state.  It’s actually mandated by Article 1, Section 2, of the U.S. Constitution, where it’s called “enumeration.”  An exodus from one state means a boom in another and, each decade, these shifts are taken into account by the Census.

An accurate count in my county means that our health department will receive funding to care for some of the poor and uninsured who grow in number each day. Waiting rooms and waiting lists are full here. The volunteers who will be going to find the homeless and undocumented will help us account for the growing number of the poor in our community.

This year’s Census is going to be distributed by mail to every household. It will be short and mailing it back will mean no visitors with a clipboard knocking at your door. Addresses selected at random will receive a longer questionnaire, but most households will have 10 questions to answer.

Along with information about the U.S. Census, government agencies are also distributing warnings about scams associated with it. The GOP, those beacons of truth and justice, have already mailed out a suspicious “census” that purports to be official government business, but is just a fundraiser for their cause. 

Beware of shysters and con artists who use the pretext of the Census to enter your home or to ask you for money. Look for identification and for inappropriate questions about your finances or banking information.  The Census has been in existence since 1790; think hard and you’ll recall filling one out in 2000.

A good count benefits us in Congress and in health care. Go ahead, raise your hand and be counted.

Mahatma Gandhi, 1869-1948

A Facebook friend posted a reminder of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination 62 years ago on Jan. 30, 1948. The apostle of nonviolence influenced Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and countless other advocates of peace long after a zealot’s bullet felled him during the bloody days of the creation of the modern states of India and Pakistan. That these two nations are still on a hair-trigger away from pointing their nuclear weapons at each other is a sign of how deeply tensions ran and still run in the region.

Gandhi died a martyr’s death at 78 after decades of using the principles of satyagraha to defeat the British without ever resorting to violence. His only weapons were truth, courage and persistence. Gandhi was once asked if he was a Hindu. He replied, “Yes I am. I am also a Christian, a Muslim, a Buddhist and a Jew.” His philosophy of nonviolence adhered to the purest principles of every religion that has love of one’s neighbor as one of its tenets. He went beyond dogma and divisions.

Oct. 2 is the Mahatma’s birthday and it’s a more apt day to remember his legacy than the anniversary of his assassination. As we mark another year since his death, we can remember the other victims of the bloody 20th century:  John and Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X, Archbishop Oscar Romero, Father Ignacio Ellacuria and the murdered Jesuits, the casualties of endless massacres and wars, Dr. King and John Lennon. We still mourn their loss to senseless violence, but their deaths have energized so many of us to take up causes that serve to create a better world.  One of my favorite singer-songwriters, the Panamanian Ruben Blades has sometimes introduced a song based on the murder of Archbishop Romero by commenting, “In Latin America, they kill people, but they can’t kill ideas.” Each of these martyrs was silenced by bullets, but their message spoke louder after their blood was spilled.

Archbishop Romero’s last Gospel reading was also his own epitaph:

Amen, amen, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit.  Whoever loves his life  loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will preserve it for eternal life.

As we remember Gandhi and the other martyrs, our commitment to continue their work can also produce much fruit. The next step is up to us.

Connie May Fowler and Katie

I read the way drunks guzzle six-packs of cheap beer:  indiscriminately and to the exclusion of nourishment and common sense at times.  I am Henry Bemis, the myopic bank clerk in the quirky Twilight Zone episode where the revenge wreaked on the little man who just wants time to read is to have his Coke-bottom glasses shatter without hope of finding another pair.

It’s no wonder that a book on my boss’ shelf caught my eye while I was in her office talking about work. My eyes wandered past the document we were discussing and fixed on the title When Katie Wakes on the shelf.  The author’s name, Connie May Fowler, was instantly familiar. I had interviewed her years before during my newspaper days and I had read two of the novels based on her heartbreaking childhood. My supervisor told me how she had purchased the book at a Fowler reading. One of the neighborhoods in the book was my boss’  little area of St. Petersburg, FL.

When Katie Wakes is a memoir that tells the story behind the abusive childhood tales in Before Women Had Wings, a novel I’d read and one which Oprah Winfrey had also liked. In fact, the queen of daytime TV produced and had a role in the film version of the novel a decade ago.  The little girl in the book lived in Suitcase City, the very real transient part of town in Tampa, which in itself is a city of tourists and transplants, anyway. 

The tale of the abused little girl, her hopeless mother and the grim part of town where they exist on the fringes of society resonated with me. I recognized the real Suitcase City, which is still crime-ridden and dotted with cheap motels where hookers and addicts compete with the poor for temporary lodging.

In the case of When Katie Wakes,  my boss and I had no trouble identifying the unnamed older man who beats Fowler during their abusive relationship. It took me just a page or two to realize that a famous voice I’d heard a million times on Tampa Bay radio and a face I’d seen on Tampa Bay TV belonged to the sadistic opportunist who lived off Fowler’s bartender earnings after he’d been fired from the media posts he had held.

That smooth, silver-haired, sophisticated talking head who had been the king of Tampa Bay’s airwaves was  really a nasty drunk enslaved by his demons, which included a desperate need to be back at the top of the heap.

Worst of all, I had worked with one of his ex-wives. She had told me about their fast lifestyle and his being courted by people at the highest levels of influence back when he was a somebody. He was much older than she was and she had traveled with him to glamorous sports events and expensive hotels and it had all been dazzling for a while.  There had been plenty of money and booze, but their marriage ended long before I knew her. Reading Fowler’s memoirs, I was haunted by the possibility that this man had abused the woman I knew. Abusers and leopards don’t change their spots.

Stories about abused women are always told under a mantle of shame and secrecy. Fowler explains how her childhood abuse and her physical bruises from Mr. Airwaves remained her secret and how she became adept at covering them up.  The red and purple marks where Mr. Airwaves choked her and the wound where he stubbed out a cigarette on her cheek are hidden by scarves or makeup.  Mr. Airwaves treats her like a mangy dog and she can’t bring herself to move on. Patterns of childhood abuse are etched deeply into the soul and, in Fowler’s case, are inherited from the abusive parents who, in turn, were abused during their early years.

The Katie of the title is a friendly mutt who helps Fowler break free of her own insecurities and grief. Connie May Fowler is one of Florida’s best writers and she now has a supportive husband and an impressive list of books. If only the lives of all abused women had the grace that Fowler’s writing talent and intelligence bestowed on her.

The shock of seeing such an ugly side of Mr. Airwaves, whom most Tampa Bay residents of a certain age could easily identify from reading Fowler’s book, pales next to the horror of the lifelong abuse that Fowler writes about.  The soul murder that physical, mental and emotional abuse commits upon children lasts for the rest of their lives. The cycle of violence is almost impossible to break when the wounded child becomes a wounded adult.

My mother has been volunteering at a Tampa shelter for abused women and their children for more than a decade. She works with the kids who spend their days in a one-room schoolhouse while their mothers try to get their lives together.  Some children have told her they never want to see their fathers again and others have been witnesses to terrible violence perpetrated against their mothers by men.

The kids don’t stay long enough for my mother to follow their progress after their time in the shelter is up but, unfortunately, there’s always a fresh crop of children to tend to. Lately, she has been seeing more Eastern European children in the shelter. A little Russian’s face lit up when my mother used the two or three words she knew in his language. A simple word made him happy.

Children are resilient and fragile at the same time. They survive the most unspeakable abuse, but their psyches can shatter into pieces. Fowler’s book is a beautiful reminder that sometimes blessings come from a God-given talent, from the love of a good man and from the devotion of a faithful mutt.  It’s a testament to triumphing over pain.

Msgr. Joseph Serge Miot, one of thousands of victims of Haiti's earthquake

Our brothers and sisters in Haiti, the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, are suffering today after a devastating earthquake that has left untold thousands dead, including the Archbishop of Port-au-Prince Msgr. Joseph Serge Miot. Please pray for the devastated nation of Haiti and consider making a gift to Catholic Relief Services here to assist in the recovery efforts.  May God bless our fellow brothers and sisters in Christ today.