Five Years and Counting . . .

Happy birthday, RJ Kroc and company. Or should I say, “Happy anniversary?” Can it really be five years since Ashland’s Sunday afternoon naptime was disturbed by a Salvation Army band triumphantly marching from 40 East Third Street to 527 East Liberty Street? It seems like just yesterday that we had the privilege of opening the doors of the Salvation Army Ray and Joan Kroc Corps Community Center to the people of Ashland. Then again, I can barely remember the grassy field that had been tucked away behind Luray Lanes for so many years, as the Kroc Center seems like an old neighborhood friend that’s been around a long time.

The passage of time is tricky to measure. Of course, we measure it in minutes and hours, days and weeks, but we also recognize that our perception of time changes, as time can either fly or drag on. As J.K. Rowling tells us in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, “It's a strange thing, but when you are dreading something, and would give anything to slow down time, it has a disobliging habit of speeding up.” Dr. Seuss asks us, “How did it get so late so soon?” Yet when you’re five years old and waiting for Christmas morning, time creeps along at an agonizingly slow pace.

There were days during the Kroc Center development that I wasn’t sure we’d even make it to the ground-breaking, but now we’re marking the five year anniversary with a weekend of celebration. There will be a civic dinner honoring Ashland’s Ev DeVaul, an arts festival offering instructional sessions, an arts display, and a sidewalk chalk art contest, and a worship service with Commissioner Todd Bassett, a former National Commander of the Salvation Army as the guest speaker. But here’s the best part - our own KC Big Band will be on stage on Saturday night (April 5) at the Kroc. Music coordinator Neil Ebert has chosen some of my favorites – He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands, Show Me Your Ways, and a glorious rendition of I’ll Fly Away. (Disclaimer: my husband and sons did not pay me to write these words – I really do love the Big Band sound). Get more details on the Kroc website or at the welcome center.

If I’ve done my math correctly, it’s been 1807 days since opening day, April 17, 2009. Those days have been filled with many measurable outcomes, computations expected by funders in today’s world of philanthropy. We as a community can be glad for those outcomes, because they symbolize skills achieved, employment maintained, and families fed.

But as I reflect on the impact the Kroc Center has had upon the Ashland community and on me, it’s the intangible influences that speak most deeply. The strains of live Dixieland music swinging through the corridors of area nursing homes. A beaming young boy displaying his first place prize in an ugly tie contest. A circle of knitters, learning the wisdom of “if in doubt, rip it out.” Water cascading from the tumble buckets at the spraypark on a blistering summer afternoon, hard as that feeling is to imagine with snow still in the air. A holy hush at the labyrinth. A homeless woman accompanied by caring companions as she walked through the valley of the shadow of death.

During my years of high school French, I was introduced to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s story, “The Little Prince.” Back in the day, I was able to read it in French, but those skills are long gone. However, one phrase has remained with me: On ne voit bien qu'avec le cœur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux. Translated, the Little Prince taught me, “One sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye.”

As we gather for next weekend’s festivities, we’ll embrace friends both new and old, recount the funny stories, and reflect on the impact the Center has made on Ashland. But if I seem a bit distracted from time to time, don’t worry – I’m planning to do some heart-seeing and heart-remembering too. Hope to see you there.

Hide and Secret

The lovely Madelyn Simone came to visit at Pop-Pop’s House this week. Yes, I live there as well, but from day one of language development, it’s always been Pop-Pop’s House. At one point during her whirlwind visit, she asked me if I would a play a game with her. “What game,” I asked, hoping her answer wouldn’t be the dreaded word, “Monopoly.” “Hide and Secret,” replied Madelyn.

I quickly smothered my smile, but her name for the age-old world of hide and seek took me back in history more than seventy years, to a time and place where the life-and-death game of survival truly was, “Hide and Secret.” Perhaps best known in the hidden child literature is the story of Anne Frank, recorded in the posthumous publication of The Diary of a Young Girl, as her regular entries detailed her life in hiding during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Concealed behind a bookcase in the Achterhuis, a secret annex, Anne chronicled life in a true “hide and secret” time for Jewish people across most of Europe.

With the innocence of a child caught up in the unknown, Anne reportedly left a few belongings with a friend before going into hiding, telling her, “I'm worried about my marbles, because I'm scared they might fall into the wrong hands. Could you keep them for me for a little while?” Her marbles survived the Holocaust, but Anne didn’t, dying at age fifteen from typhus, just two short weeks before the prisoners were liberated from Bergen-Belson in April, 1945. However, through her diary, Anne’s words live on: “I don't want to have lived in vain like most people. I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I've never met. I want to go on living even after my death!”

Another child caught up in the world of “hide and secret” was an eight-year-old Polish girl named Nelly Toll. She and her mother spent thirteen months hidden in the small bedroom of a Catholic family, forced to hide on the sill of a window that was bricked up from the outside when anyone came into the house. As the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum notes, the life of Nelly and children like her “was a life in shadows, where a careless remark, a denunciation, or the murmurings of inquisitive neighbors could lead to discovery and death.”

Like Anne, Nelly also kept a diary, and her book, Behind the Secret Window, tells of her childhood experiences. She had been given a watercolor set by her mother, and during the days and weeks of fear-laced hiding, this young girl painted small pictures of what she imagined a normal life to be outside the walls of her captivity. “I draw my pictures, and make up little stories, which I enjoy a lot. Because when I paint I forget to be afraid . . .” In Nelly’s art, she found the strength to imagine a better word, a world that clung to hope in the midst of terror. These two young daughters of the Holocaust never met, but Anne spoke for both of them when she wrote, “Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.” Like Anne, Nelly’s diary has been preserved, as have the paintings she did in that hidden room so many years ago.  

The Massillon Museum, located less than an hour east of Ashland, is exhibiting Nelly’s artwork through May 18, and admission is free! Details of the exhibit and associated activities, including a presentation from the artist herself, can be found at www.massillonmuseum.org.

Anne Frank wrote, “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death.” At age eight, Nelly Toll captured that truth through her paintings. Our granddaughter can’t understand much of this at age four, but Madelyn and I will visit Nelly’s paintings at the Museum, planting a seed of connection to both Nelly and Anne, girls who experienced the reality of “Hide and Secret.” And one day, when it’s time, I will tell her the rest of their stories.

To Remember

It’s been a week of mystery on the world stage, as a plane carrying 239 passengers disappeared literally into mid-air. As of Thursday, when I completed this column, no trace of the plane, its black box, or its passengers has been found. Did it veer off course, did it attempt to turn back, or did its pilot actually “land” on the water and the plane sink to the floor of the South China Sea? No one knows.

A bit closer to home, a mummified body, believed to be that of Pia Farrenkopf, was found in the garage of her Pontiac, Michigan home. As best as can be determined, she has been dead since 2008. Since she had traveled quite a bit, neighbors thought perhaps she had gone to Germany, and kept the grass cut at her home, while her bills were automatically paid from her checking account until it ran dry. That’s what ultimately brought authorities to her foreclosed home, where they made the unexpected discovery of Ms. Farrenkopf.

A third story, aptly titled “Grave Science,” told of the work of JPAC, the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command. This military operation identifies the remains of American military personnel found in sites around the world. According to reporters Kelly McEvers and Megan McCloskey, “More than 83,000 people are classified as missing in action or prisoners of war from World War II and the Vietnam and Korean conflicts. The Pentagon deems 45,000 of those ‘recoverable.’ JPAC is charged with finding and identifying them.” In 2013, the remains of 60 people were identified, at the cost of one hundred million dollars. Let me write out the zeroes: $1,000,000,000.00. That’s how much per successful identification? You do the math, as I couldn’t figure out how to put the line over the repeating 6’s.

Now before you question my patriotism or concern for our deceased veterans, I wore a Viet Nam era POW bracelet until it broke in two, and its pieces still sit in my jewelry box. Major John Held encircled my adolescent wrist, and I prayed for his return, for his family, and for those still at war. And as I’ve watch the POW-MIA flag flying from our neighbor’s flagpole, I’m  grateful that we still remember. But how much is enough?

These juxtaposed stories, connected as they are by the specter of death, raise questions that are tough to wrestle with. What is the value of life? Of identifying remains? When do we move on? How do we seek – and find – closure? How will we be remembered? How do we live in a way that someone will miss us when we’re gone? Writer Annie Dillard describes our existential probing like this: “We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what’s going on here.  Then we can at least wail the right questions into the swaddling band of darkness.”

Author Frederick Buechner provides us with additional perspective on this, as he writes of the need “to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember—the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.”

Even though seemingly forgotten in death as in life, we remember Pia and her kindred sisters and brothers in the anonymity of their lives and deaths.

Even when the sky over Malaysia is vacant, and the whole world asks, “Where is Malaysia Airlines Flight 370,” the cell phone will keep ringing, as those who have loved will hope against hope, remembering.

And even when the telegram grows brittle and the broken POW bracelet gathers dust, we pause to remember fathers and sons, brothers and sisters who died alone, far from home.

As Isabel Allende explained in Eva Luna, “There is no death, daughter. People die only when we forget them. If you can remember me, I will be with you always.”

 

Character, Courage and Commitment

 

Given the continued cold temperatures we’ve enjoying well into March, it’s appropriate that this month is National Frozen Foods Month, as well as Irish American Month, National Peanut Month, and Music in Our Schools Month, an observance near and dear to my heart.

Beyond my love for music, for many years my Salvation Army ministry, academic pursuits and writing interests have been interwoven with the lives of women, particularly those who have struggled in the face of poverty and prejudice. I’ve even been told that some within Salvation Army circles see me as “that radical woman,” a label I’m actually quite fond of, as radical means ‘from the root.’ So along with the focus on frozen foods and peanuts, as a radical woman I am especially glad to note that the month of March is also National Women’s History Month, celebrating women of character, courage, and commitment.

In my early academic endeavors in the 60s, the classroom textbooks seldom mentioned the role of women in the history of our country or our world, yet as I discovered their stories on the shelves of the local library, somehow I knew they belonged in those history texts as well. I doubt that I understood the long-lasting impact the accounts of Elizabeth Blackwell, M.D., Harriet Tubman, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Dorothy Day would have on the trajectory of my life, but their biographies planted seeds of inspiration in the life of that young girl.

Times have changed, and since 1980, women from a variety of areas of achievement have been honored during this month of recognition, and this year’s list includes a pharmacologist and public health activist (Frances Oldham Kelsey), a congresswoman and Iraq War veteran (Tammy Duckworth) and Anna Julia Haywood Cooper, the slavery-born author and educator with a life mission to open the doors of higher education to children of color.

Chipeta, also on this year’s list, was a new name to me, a woman born into the Kiowa Apache in the 1840s and remembered as a peacemaker, wise elder, and advisor to other Indian chiefs. I also was awed by the many accomplishments of Roxcy O’Neal Bolton, who founded Florida’s first battered women’s shelter, convinced the airlines to offer maternity leave to its pregnant flight attendants (instead of firing them), and persuaded the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to name hurricanes after both women and men.

Yet it isn’t only the historical achievements of women that are being honored during March. Since 2007, the Secretary of State’s International Women of Courage Award has recognized women around the globe who have demonstrated exceptional courage and leadership in advocating for peace, justice, human rights, gender equality and women’s empowerment, often at great personal risk.

This year, these women include Dr. Nasrin Oryakhil of Afghanistan, a prominent leader in the field of maternal health, and Beatrice Mtetwa, who is Zimbabwe’s most prominent human rights lawyer, fighting against injustice, defending press freedom, and upholding the rule of law. With the eyes of the world focused on the unrest in the Ukraine, I took special notice of Ruslana Lyzhychko, a civil society activist, human rights advocate and a leader of Ukraine‘s Maidan movement for democratic reform. Her bio notes that Lyzhychko’s “steadfast commitment to non-violent resistance and national unity helped channel a series of popular demonstrations into a national movement against government corruption and human rights abuses.”

Rudyard Kipling understands: “If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.” The stories of women add a rich texture to our understanding of history and of contemporary life. These are the stories I want to tell my granddaughter: stories of her fore-mothers who left all they knew to immigrate to the United States, stories of women in history who risked their lives for the rights she will take for granted, and stories of women around the world today who do what they have to do to feed their children and to change their world. I want the lovely Madelyn Simone to know women of character, courage and commitment in her community, her country, and her world. Let me tell you a story, Madelyn . . .

 

Bring on the Nursery School

With her fourth birthday now history, the lovely Madelyn Simone is more than ready to begin nursery school in September. Her scheduled preview visit was on a Nana day, so I became the designated driver. On that magic morning, she tiptoed out of her bedroom with a huge grin on her face, and brushed her teeth with no prompting. Even with a wardrobe malfunction that included a hole in her tights and a stubborn zipper on her dress, she was ready to go with an hour to spare. This child wants to go to school. Sure hope that feeling lasts into middle school.

Upon her arrival, Madelyn was off to explore, visiting the Lego table and the building block corner. She cradled a doll for about sixty seconds, and then moved on to try out the train table. No separation anxiety for this little whirlwind of energy. Nursery school socialization isn’t going to be a problem for our granddaughter. No surprise there.

Free play was extended while the teacher worked with each child on a handprint art project, allowing me to observe the interactions in the classroom. I was struck by the gendered activities and groupings as the children selected their own activities. While there was some interchange, the boys spent much of their time at the Lego table with a Wreck It Ralph kind of mentality, climbing on the chairs to build their towers to the utmost height, while the girls were engrossed in assembling their own creations at the art table.

Where was Madelyn? Checking it all out, making a moustache out of raffia with the girls and claiming her own space in the Lego world. I wonder if she’ll continue to maintain a variety of interests or if she’ll self-select to the world of Barbies by kindergarten?  

Social butterfly that she is, she won’t have trouble getting to know the kids in her class, but based on our visit, I’m not sure how she will do with the classroom rules and routines. She started out well in circle time, especially enjoying the “jump, jump, jump” instructions from the teacher. While the veteran children politely raised their hands to volunteer, Madelyn jumped up and down with excitement. And then, after sitting in the circle for a bit with the other children, she decided to sit in the middle of the circle, with a twirl or two on her way, earning a look of disdain from her temporary classmates.

Things got a bit dicey when they moved on to snacks, because Madelyn munched on her cheese balls as soon as they were served to her. She didn’t know that the children sang the “sun and the rain and the appleseed” grace before they ate their snack. The little girl sitting beside her had had enough by that point, and said to me, “You have to tell her to stop eating.” Oops, another social faux pas for my Madelyn.

Having gobbled down her snack, she and the boy beside her began to purse their lips and blow on their forearms, making the sounds of flatulence that fascinate so many four-year-olds. I don’t know who started it, but my money’s on Madelyn. The culprits were pleased with themselves, but their actions were met with looks of disgust from the self-proclaimed preschool police.

I stifled a chuckle at the outrage the children expressed over Madelyn’s missteps, intrigued that by the age of five, some had little tolerance for her exuberance and naiveté. Unlike the children, I understood that Madelyn didn’t yet know the rules, the social cues, and the expectations of the classroom. After a few weeks in school, she’ll understand what’s expected and do just fine, even if she still twirls around.

Our day together at Tiny Tots challenged me to be more patient with those who are new to a situation or whose social cue radar is deficient. Sometimes people legitimately don’t – or can’t – get it. Loosely paraphrasing Ecclesiastes 3, there is a time to enforce rules, and a time to extend hospitality to the stranger by rolling up our sleeves and blowing some raspberries. Our world needs both, but I’d rather err on the side of raspberries and grace.