I'm Thanksgiving!

1    

I’m sure the lovely Madelyn Simone will have something profound to say about Thanksgiving before the month is complete, but for now I’m borrowing my opening thought from a fellow grandmother. Here’s what three-year-old Anthony told my friend Corey: “Ma, do you want to know what I'm Thanksgiving for? I'm Thanksgiving for my homes and dog, Gracie.”

You’ve got it right, Anthony. As Thanksgiving approaches, I am “thanks-giving” too, because as William Arthur Ward reminds us, “Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.’ Here is what’s on my list this year.

I’m thankful for the Ashland Public Library because they host a fabulous used book sale a few times a year; allowing me to stock up on enough books to carry me through until their next sale. I’m also grateful they’ve started sending out notices by e-mail before my books are due, potentially saving me from my own forgetfulness. What an awesome place.

I’m thankful for the Ashland Times-Gazette. Not only does it print seven hundred words from an opinionated woman each Saturday, but it continues to connect us as a community. My hometown newspaper is shutting down the presses and shuttering its doors in January, and my non-internet savvy mother is already feeling its loss. Yes, I know that “the times, they are a-changing,” but a newspaper is so much more than the pages on which it is printed.

I’m thankful for the voices of heritage and history that keep knocking on my door. Those voices whisper wisely to me through the pages of both historical fiction and biography, and from the photo albums and living history of family and friends. The Ashland County Historical Society carefully preserves our shared heritage, and will welcome guests into its home for a Holiday Open House on December 7 and a Candlelight Christmas Open House tonight – maybe I’ll see you there after the parade.

Sticking with the heritage theme, I’m grateful for the Massillon Museum, another keeper of the legacy, as it helped me tell the story of Eliza Duncan, whose husband founded Massillon. Salvation Army archives are playing a similar role as I am imagining the voice of Eliza Armstrong, a young girl whose staged procurement in 19th century London made life safer for generations of young women. I’m definitely grateful that the memories of the past are held securely by faithful guardians so we can create a healthier tomorrow for our descendants.

Here are a few more. I’m thankful I live in Ohio instead of Buffalo this week. However, I was tempted to join the crew shoveling out the Bills’ stadium, as the promised compensation included a free ticket to Sunday’s football game – still on my bucket list. I’m glad Harry London’s Chocolates in North Canton gives out free samples on its free tour. I’m also grateful I made it to the A & W before it closed for the winter, and that I won a Jake’s Steakhouse gift card this week. Small graces of life, I know, but reasons for gratitude just the same.

I’ve seen more than enough through the years to be truly grateful for a roof over my head, a comfortable bed with clean sheets, and tasty food to nourish my body. I am thankful for the richness of family and friends, and for the joy of my precious relationship with the lovely Madelyn Simone, even though she ate cherry-red lip balm and fed grapes to the dogs on my watch this week. I’m grateful for the gift of faith that saves my soul and makes me whole, as well as for honest work that continues to place me where my deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet (Frederick Buechner’s understanding of vocation). Yes, I am a blessed woman.

By now, you may be pondering what you’re “Thanksgiving” for today. As you make your list, I hope that Khalil Gibran’s words will encourage your gratitude as they do mine: “You pray in your distress and in your need; would that you might pray also in the fullness of your joy and in the days of abundance.” Amen.

The Bells are Ringing

It’s that time of year. It began with the faint ding of my cell phone indicating a text message had arrived. “Waaaayyyy too early for kettles,” wrote my sister from a suburban Buffalo store on the first day of November. She had heard a bell ringing as she walked towards the entrance and she knew it was “that time of year.”

In the 1942 film “For Me and My Gal,” a great question is raised: “Do you hear the bells go ding dong, do you know why they’re ringing?” Gene Kelly answers his own query in the first line of the familiar refrain. “The bells are ringing for me and my gal.” They were wedding bells!   

Unlike Kelly’s answer, the constant ringing we will begin to hear on our weekly trek to the supermarket doesn’t come from wedding bells, nor does their echo signify the end of war as church bells did at the conclusion of the Civil War. No, these ordinary and sometimes annoying bells clang throughout our land to signify that the war isn’t over and an Army continues to do battle in that war.

The Salvation Army’s care for the poor is not a new concept for people of faith. Historically, the Hebrew people declared a Year of Jubilee every fifty years as slaves and prisoners were freed and debts forgiven. In the last century, Catholic social teaching introduced the ‘preferential option for the poor,’ explaining that God gives preference to the poor and powerless, and so should God’s people. And in our century, new approaches to address poverty continue to spring up in faith communities around the world.

Government has also tried to stem the tide of poverty. Early approaches included auctioning off the poor, the development of Poorhouses, and the twentieth century answers, the advent of social security and welfare payments. Even with these adjustments, the poor remained with us, so President Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty in 1965, to be followed by the welfare reform of the 90s.

Yet despite all these well-meaning interventions, still the bells must ring. Some see it as a quaint custom, like the child’s rhyme. “Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat, please put a penny in the old man’s hat.” Others pass by unaware, engrossed in conversation or checking cell phones for urgent messages. Some respond to the bell with irritation, tired of hearing it, while others hear the bell and remember that lives can be transformed as a community pools together the spare change in its pockets.

This Christmas, local Salvation Army units are kicking off their bell-ringing campaigns with events designed to create excitement in the community, celebrating the hundreds of volunteers and staff who keep the bells ringing between now and December 24^th. The festive Jingle All the Way 5K is this morning, giving the Ashland bells a running start at 8:30 a.m. For those of us who would jiggle rather than jingle if we attempted a 5K run, there’s a pancake breakfast after the race, followed by the annual Red Kettle Bazaar from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., a great way to get a jump start on Christmas shopping.

In Richland County, the bells will ring at a traditional breakfast gathering at the Mid-Ohio Conference Center on November 19. And for the music lovers among us, the Salvation Army in Wooster will welcome its Ring a Bell, Change a Life campaign with the holiday music of Ashland’s own Kroc Center Big Band on Monday at 6:30 p.m. I’m looking forward to my first taste of Christmas cookies during that event.

I do hope the Kroc Center Big Band plays “My Grown-up Christmas List” on Monday night, because its writer, Linda Thompson-Jenner, communicates better than I can. “As children we believed the grandest sight to see was something lovely wrapped beneath our tree.” Now, as adults, we recognize the rest of the picture, for “heaven only knows that packages and bows can never heal a hurting human soul.” I wish the kettle bells didn’t have to ring this year. But until the war on poverty is truly won, the Salvation Army bells will keep ringing their message of hope.  

Election Day Musings

As I walked into the Eagles Club on November 4, I was transported back in time more than fifty years to the days when I would ‘vote’ with my mom and dad at the Boy’s Club in Tonawanda, NY. As Yogi Berra has said, déjà vu all over again! The touch screens are a far cry from the levers of that day or punch card ballots with their potential for hanging chads, but the feel is the same. Whether pulling a heavy curtain to shelter our vote from prying eyes, or trying to remember where to insert the voter card into the desktop machine, we perform our yearly duty with thoughtfulness and reverence, and proudly sport the sticker: I Ohio (love) voting. Time to cue the patriotic music.

We the people of America, from all walks of life, from all sides of the track, come together to determine the leadership of our communities, our state, and our country in the days and years ahead. We bring our children in tow, not because we don’t have a babysitter, but because we want them to know this is what Americans do. We vote.

My most recent writing project (Eliza Duncan: An Imagined Memoir) included research into the suffrage movement in the 1800s. The battle to gain the vote for women began at the first women’s rights conference in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848. Early suffrage leader Antoinette Brown Blackwell reflected on the process: “We fully believed, so soon as we saw that woman’s suffrage was right, everyone would soon see the same thing, and that in a year or two, at farthest, it would be granted.”

Her prediction proved naïve, for those working towards women’s suffrage were not successful in passing the nineteenth amendment until 1920, less than one hundred years ago. Unlike Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, early leaders of the effort, Mrs. Blackwell was the only one of the early suffragettes who lived to see that day. She was ninety-five.

Miss Anthony did vote in 1872, but was arrested for her effort and found guilty in a highly publicized trial. According to a current exhibit at the Massillon Museum, a former Massillon resident ran for president in 1872, although she would not have been allowed to vote for herself. Victoria Woodhull, a candidate of the Equal Rights Party, advocated the regulation of monopolies, an eight-hour workday, direct taxation, the abolition of the death penalty, and free love (including accessible divorce). The final days of her campaign were hindered by her incarceration on obscenity charges, for she had published an account of the alleged adulterous affair of prominent minister Henry Ward Beecher in her newspaper. It is unclear as to how many popular votes she received, but no electoral votes were recorded for her candidacy. Truth can be stranger than fiction.

The right to vote for women was highly contested for many years, as evidenced by the pronouncements of the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage. They worried that more voting women than voting men would place the government under petticoat rule, and the votes of married women would only double or annul their husbands’ votes. They also claimed that 90% of the women either did not want the vote or did not care.

It is this last statement that sends me to the ballot box every year. No matter how tired we are of political ads by the Tuesday after the first Monday in November, we bear witness that we care about our communities and the lives of those around us when we step into the voting booth. While the campaign process is far from perfect (and don’t get me started on the $3.7 billion spent on an estimated 2,969,370 ads for the House and Senate races), we have the right and privilege to vote, an opportunity my grandmother didn’t have until shortly before my mother was born.

Suffrage opponent John Boyle O’Reilly claimed “the success of the suffrage movement would injure women spiritually and intellectually, for they would be assuming a burden though they knew themselves unable to bear it.” I’m glad millions of American women proved him wrong on November 4.

Dressing for the Holidays

I spent an autumn day with the lovely Madelyn Simone this week, and her four-year-old presence gives me tremendous joy as well as continued inspiration for my writing. Our agenda took us to Tiny Tikes Nursery School and then to Price Park in North Canton, with its rather raucous duck and geese population that was quite attracted to Madelyn’s four small crackers. To say that I feared for our lives is no exaggeration, for there was to be no miraculous feeding of the five thousand feathered friends that day.

Next on our agenda: lunch. Where should we go? One of our favorite haunts is Sam’s Club, where we can snack on a variety of free samples and, if we’re still hungry, purchase a hotdog and drink for under two dollars. There’s always a lot to see at Sams Club, so we checked out the decorated cakes, watched a few minutes of a movie playing simultaneously on twenty television sets, and searched for those hoped-for free goodies. Monday must be a slow day on the free sample circuit, however, as we only located one complimentary food item.

Because we are girls, we also checked to see if they had any dresses or fancy clothing that Madelyn so enjoys. Although I’ve put myself on restriction, vowing to stop spending money on my favorite (and only) grandchild, I’m an easy target for adorable outfits to make this lovely child even lovelier. And, besides, there’s nothing wrong with looking, right? Isn’t that what’s called window shopping?

They had some really cute ensembles with brightly colored tops and leggings, and I will admit I was sorely tempted to indulge in a purchase, but when we looked at the other side of the rack we noticed that many of these outfits were themed for the holidays. Some were orange-and black striped, some sported the colors of autumn leaves, and others shouted out to us in the reds and greens of Christmas. Yes, we’d discovered an assortment of holiday clothing. I could have purchased outfits for Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, and I’m guessing that if we come back in a few months, we’ll find some options for Valentine’s Day and St. Patrick’s Day as well.

I was nearly convinced to make a spur-of-the-moment purchase, as the Thanksgiving outfit, complete with a multi-colored gobbler, was really cute, but I held myself back. It became one of those, “what was I thinking of” moments. Why would I even consider spending twenty dollars on clothing for a child that she would probably only wear once in her life? After all, this is far from a wedding gown or bridesmaid’s dress. Madelyn does not need a pumpkin dress or a turkey top and pants.

Please don’t think that I’m condemning my grandmother friends who’ve gotten tugged into the revolving door of holiday clothing for the little ones. After all, they really are cute, and Madelyn does have Christmas pajamas that say, “Grandma knows Santa.” Instead, I am making an observation about how our culture has changed from the day when a little girl would have one party dress that would be worn for church, Christmas, and school pictures.  

What do we really need? I read of a woman in Brooklyn who lived a minimalist lifestyle. She was determined to own only eighty possessions at one time, including her toothbrush, frying pan, and jeans. If she brought something new into her home, she gave away something she already had so as to keep under her chosen number of possessions. My husband can only wish that I’d limit myself to eighty books!

Mokokoma Mokhonoana, a South African philosopher, provides us with a helpful perspective on needs and wants. “Generally, people need less than a quarter of what they want,” he says, while “Needs are imposed by nature. Wants are sold by society.”

I’m glad for the reminder that values run deeper than turkey dresses. But I’m not relinquishing my grandparent’s “spoiler” prerogative completely, because Kidz Closet, the new children’s resale shop in downtown Ashland, is opening soon! I wonder if they have any Christmas dresses, preferably a red and green plaid with a Peter Pan collar.  

Mercy Rules

At the start of the high school football season in 2014, a new rule was put into place on gridirons across Ohio. The “mercy rule” goes into effect when one team is ahead of the other by thirty points or more at the end of the first half. When that happens, officials start to use a running clock, only stopping for specific actions such as an officials’ time-out or stoppage of play after a score. If the losing team manages to close the gap to under thirty, then the normal clock management resumes, still allowing for the possibility of a miraculous comeback.

Having sat through more than my fair share of painful routs in the past, the mercy rule is a welcome change, shortening the drawn-out blood-letting and hopefully reducing the possibility of injury in a game that is beyond redemption. Since the Ohio High School Athletic Association officials determined about one third of the games were impacted by the rule in the first week of the season, it appears as though the mercy rule has its value.

There’s been a similar scenario in Little League for years. Known at times as the slaughter rule, the game is called if a team is ahead by ten runs or more after four innings. The mercy rule has also been in effect in backyards and sandlots for many years, because kids understand perhaps better than adults – when you’re getting beat badly, it’s time to cry “uncle” and live to play another day.

It’s certainly possible to take the mercy rule too far. A recent incident in a peewee football game in Georgia brought a $500 fine and a one week suspension for the coach when an eight-year-old boy scored on a pick-six, an interception he ran back for a touchdown. The penalty was enforced against the Lawrenceville Knights because they totaled more than thirty-two points against their scoreless opponent. How is a third-grader supposed to understand that he should have dropped the ball?

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines mercy as “kind or forgiving treatment of someone who could be treated harshly,” or “kindness or help given to people who are in a very bad or desperate situation.” I’ve got to wonder: if the mercy rule can be put in place in the competitive world of sports, then why not consider its use in the broader context of life?

What would it look like if mercy was the guiding force in our families, the workplace, the classroom and the church? If my rule of thumb was to choose mercy rather than make sure the other person gets what he or she deserves, would I react differently the next time someone gets in the express lane at the supermarket with seventeen items?

I’m not suggesting we become marshmallowing parents, the sweet but gooey response that creates dependency and lack of responsibility. Nor should we create a classroom or workplace with no consequences for behavior. Yet it is possible to live in a structured and nurturing way where mercy becomes the natural choice long before the other person needs to cry “uncle.”

Mercy involves giving another the benefit of the doubt, or seeing through their eyes. Mercy also uses the tool from addiction treatment, the acronym HALT. Is the other person hungry, angry, lonely or tired? If so, could I help to alleviate that concern so together we can figure out what’s really going on?

In a football game, the weaker team may be less talented, less prepared, and less practiced, and so, because of both their actions and their inherent weakness, they deserve to lose. But, the mercy rule would whisper, they don’t deserve to be slaughtered, humiliated – in football or in life. Here’s how the Old Testament prophet Micah provided balance to the question. “And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”

Pope Francis says it this way: “A little bit of mercy makes the world less cold and more just.” I’m glad the mercy rule isn’t just for a frigid Friday night at the stadium, but one we can claim to live in community together.