It’s a Wild Ride, so Hang On

What you see here is a 1979 Chevy Super Six truck, formerly owned by Greg’s grandfather, and given to Greg by his mom in 2008 or so when we decided to move to the farm. It’s not old enough to look like a classic; it’s just old enough to look old. Its lines are plain and spare, lacking the truck-on-steroids look of modern designs. Even the color is an understated slate grey. But all that is gold does not glitter, and people who know about trucks find this one strangely exciting. Older men see it and spout fond recollections of trucks they owned once and wish they owned still. Our trusted mechanic back in Krum, who restored the truck to good running condition, praised it in glowing terms I didn’t understand in the slightest. Greg’s friend Joey enthusiastically pressed on the hood, demonstrating the strength and durability of the steel body. Apparently they don’t make them like this anymore.

After sitting inert in our driveway for the past several months, the truck is now fully operational again, thanks to a new starter installed by Greg. Course, the windows are now stuck in a halfway down position, leaving the interior exposed to precipitation and cats, but that’s a repair for another day.

I'm not sure what that drill's doing there, but Greg knows what he's doing.

Today I needed to take Emilie to the equine center to work with her horse, and the truck was the only vehicle available to me, so I got to renew my acquaintance with its “three-on-a-tree” transmission. The layout of the gear-shifting scenario is something like a capital H, and after three years it’s still not exactly second nature to me. The bench seat doesn’t come up far enough to accommodate my five feet, two inches. The first time I drove the truck, I started out perched on the edge of the seat so my feet could reach the pedals, but the mammoth effort required to push in the clutch caused my rear to slide backwards. For a while I tried to stay at the edge of the seat by clinging for dear life to the steering wheel while shifting gears, but this proved too exhausting. I ended up in a semi-recumbent posture, with my upper back pressed against the seat back to provide necessary stability, and my head so low I could barely see over the dash. Once in a while the gear-shift knob came off in my hand.

But that was long ago and I’m now pretty well used to the truck’s vagaries. A throw pillow behind my back keeps me from sliding or reclining, and I manage to get from Point A to Point B without too much trouble. Occasionally a man in a truck of comparable vintage will raise his hand to me in the laconic salute of country people. We understand each other, he seems to say. We drive old trucks.

There was a time when the thought of driving a vehicle like this would have paralyzed me with fright. By nature I am not a risk-taker. I am not quick on my feet. I don’t like embarking on any course of action without feeling reasonably certain what the outcome will be. Also I don’t like doing things I don’t already rock at. But that’s sort of limiting, isn’t it? We can’t all rock at everything, especially when we’re just starting out. And security is just an illusion anyway. Life is risk. Sooner or later you have to take the gear shift in your hand, press down on the clutch with all your might and main, and go for it.

Another function for the truck: providing an outdoor perch for Emilie.

My Better Half

I nearly lost my temper the other day. Someone got under my skin with a thoughtless question arising from false assumptions, and within seconds I was ready to fire back a terse, cutting response. A few well-placed keystrokes would teach my questioner to choose her words a little more carefully in the future—or possibly even avoid asking me anything again, at all, ever.

Some small restraining influence whispered that maybe a full artillery barrage wasn’t called for here, that maybe I ought to be less of a hard-nose and exercise a little patience. But I did need to make some sort of response, and soon.

So I went to my husband and asked for his help.

Greg immediately stopped what he was doing, listened to the facts of the case, and guided me away from the biting retort that was fomenting just behind my fingertips and toward a thoughtful, well-reasoned reply. He even came up with a couple of sample sentences to get me going. He was completely right, and I told him so.

He brushed off my thanks. “You’d have seen it yourself by morning,” he said.

That, of course, was the whole point. Once past the heat of the moment, I’d have understood what sort of response was really needed. But I didn’t have time to wait to calm down. Asking Greg’s help was like taking a shortcut through the future.

When I submit a manuscript to my writers’ group for critique, I don’t give equal weight to every comment from every person. I sift and consider, keep and discard, taking into account what I know about the individual making the suggestion. Some writers have irrational hang-ups about commas; some eschew past perfect tense with maniacal zeal; some just don’t “get” certain genres. My estimation of a given critiquer’s sense, taste, and judgment is a function of my history with him. Is he a good, seasoned, experienced writer? Does he understand the demands of the marketplace? Have I agreed in the past with his critiques of other people’s work? If so, I’m likely to take his advice.

A lot of the edits I end up keeping are things I would have caught myself if I’d let the story rest a couple of weeks and returned to it with fresh eyes. But the rushed nature of magazine work often makes the cool-down period a luxury I can’t afford. And sometimes a good critiquing partner will make a brilliant suggestion for something I never would have come up with no matter how much time I took.

When you think about it, trust is an amazing thing. It involves placing yourself in the hands of another, giving up control, often acting contrary to your own instincts, all on the strength of a personal association. It’s risky. The decision you make based on a friend’s advice could go south, leaving you embarrassed, frustrated, and wishing you’d kept your own counsel. But risk is the gateway to adventure, opening up possibilities which would otherwise remain forever closed.

Surrender is frightening but exhilarating, and, if your trust is well-founded, sweet indeed. A lifelong companion, close as your own skin, a worthy guardian of your sacred trust, one who shares your vision and your experience, is the finest blessing this side of heaven. Such a one might rightly be called your “better half.” In your weaker moments, he steers you toward that which your own better self—your calm, objective, rational self—would choose. But he is no mere doppelganger or shadow-twin, existing only to complete or validate you. He is himself, distinct and matchless.

The most precious gift that marriage gave me was this constant impact of something very close and intimate yet all the time unmistakably other, resistant—in a word, real.

~C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

Survival: A New Story Published on Smashwords

Yesterday my suspense novella, Survival, was published on Smashwords, a platform for multi-format ebooks. I started this story about three years ago, shortly after we moved south. We were living at the time in a drafty little WWII-era house smack-dab in the middle of hundreds of isolated acres, surrounded by mesquite scrub that flowed on and on like a sea of choking thorns. In this part of Texas, even the plant life can be hostile, and it takes a special sort of toughness to survive or thrive. This story is about people who manage to do that–some with honor and courage and decency, others with barefaced malice and savagery–and about what happens when their worlds collide.

You can find Survival here, where you can sample the first 20% for free. I also have a personal Smashwords author’s page.

My other ebook, a short story entitled “The Home Place,” was published last year by NoTreeBooks. It’s still available here.

You don’t have to own a Kindle or other e-reading device to download my stories. I actually don’t have an e-reader myself yet, simply because I haven’t made up my mind which one would best suit my needs. What I do have is Kindle for PC, a free app available from Amazon. It installed in mere seconds on my laptop and enables me to view ebooks on my computer screen. Amazon also has Kindle apps for Mac, iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, and others. Links to these apps should be accessible from the Amazon page for “The Home Place.”

I’d appreciate it if you could take a few minutes to check out my work and also spread the word. Thanks for your support!

I Don’t Like Bullies; I Don’t Care Where They Come From.

We all know about the types of dreams that are pretty much common to mankind. The Naked-In-Public Dream. The Alligators-Circling-The-House Dream. The Back-In-College-With-Finals-Looming Dream. The Something-Is-Chasing-You-But-You-Can’t-Run-Away Dream. Actually I’ve never had that last one, though it seems to be the most common of all. But one dream I do often have that hasn’t made the list is the Bully-Confrontation Dream.

I had one of these last night. I was in a department store with my youngest daughter and a big group of her friends. One boy started physically dragging Emilie to a different part of the store, ignoring her protests that she wanted to stop and try on some cute pajama pants and T-shirts. I made him let go of her, then shoulder-bumped him and generally talked him down until he went away. So far, so good.

But that was only the beginning.

Emilie chose some stuff to try on, but she was hesitant to use a fitting room because there was some sort of complicated procedure involved (as usual, the dream left the details vague) and she was worried about whether she’d be able to return the garments to their proper places after trying them on. I told her to just go for it and leave the things she didn’t want at the rack that’s usually provided for this purpose. Then an aggressive woman completely unknown to me butted in and started telling me about the proper use of the fitting room. Her manner was repellant, her facial expression was borderline psycho, and I didn’t care for her interference, so I told her to buzz off. In response she grew even more aggressive and started invading my personal space. So I grabbed her finger, bent it backwards, put her in a wrist-lock, and calmly walked her away from my daughter.

Turned out the woman wasn’t some random busybody but an actual store employee. She soon returned with another employee even taller and more physically imposing than herself. Both women had strong facial features and big hair and were dressed alike in disturbing yellow-and-white polka-dot outfits. Both were maniacally insistent about the complicated fitting room procedure. It was all very annoying and intrusive. All I wanted was for my daughter to be able to go in, try on some clothes, and walk out again.

Then the women told me about the cameras in the fitting rooms. The idea was that once a store patron got her outfit on, she would pose for a picture, which would presumably end up on the store website. My daughter was expected to comply with this procedure.

I was so stunned by the idea of a high-resolution webcam in a fitting room that it took me a moment of horrified silence to amp up my indignation to the next level. During this interval I woke, charged with adrenaline and about ready to punch someone, and realized it was all a dream. I had a good laugh at myself.

My bullying dreams follow a certain pattern. Someone makes an unreasonable demand or imposition, and I confront him head-on with superior reasoning and/or physical force. The overall feel of the dream is positive. I’m confident that I will succeed and I do. I am heightened and alert but calm, never fearful.

I think the reason these dreams are so common for me is that in recent years I’ve become preoccupied with the whole concept of intimidation, by which I mean that process by which people try to get their way with you when they really have no true power over you, whether of authority or superior physical force or even moral rectitude. But they act as if they do. Maybe he’s physically bigger; maybe he has a well-honed sarcastic tongue or an insolent gaze. Maybe she’s a pseudo-intellectual with a knack for tossing out big words and specious arguments, and people are afraid to challenge her because they don’t want to look stupid. I’ve even met spiritual bullies who couch their own opinions in Bible quotes and religious slogans, putting anyone who disagrees with them in the position defying God himself. It’s all a big bluff on the order of the emperor’s new clothes. And most of the time it works.

Bullies of all sorts are used to coercing others without ever having to make good on their implied threats. When you refuse to give in, when you look them levelly in the eye and cordially invite them to bring it, they really don’t know what to do but escalate—loom a little taller, talk a little rougher, bring out some even bigger words. If you again refuse to give in, they will again escalate their intimidation routine. By now things are getting uncomfortable. People are starting to look. And you may feel that by continuing to stand your ground, you are being a jerk. Bullies know this and will use it to their advantage, projecting their own blameworthiness onto you in a sort of “look what you made me do” scenario. But you weren’t the one who brought things to this level, and you’re not in the wrong for refusing to cave.

A few bullies may actually have the wherewithal to deliver a sock to the jaw or a really sound argument or whatever, but I suspect the number of those who do this is far smaller than commonly supposed. People who can deliver don’t generally make a lot of noise about it. I find that intellectual bullies in particular aren’t really all that smart. They’ve learned a few tricks of expression and some Nietzsche quotes, and that’s about it. Dare to poke a finger at their façade and you’ll find it’s about as thick as tissue paper.

 

“Do you want to kill Nazis?” Dr. Abraham Erskine asks Steve Rogers in CaptainAmerica: The First Avenger.

“I don’t want to kill anybody,” Steve replies. “I don’t like bullies; I don’t care where they’re from.” Neither do I.

A Princess Inside

Some years back, my girls and some of their friends were being mistreated. The details aren’t important; it was just one of those things that happen all the time, caused by carelessness more than malice. I could have complained—I was in the right and can be eloquent when roused—but in so doing I would have damaged some relationships to a degree out of proportion to the problem. The girls weren’t being harmed, just annoyed. My best course of action was to swallow the pill and move on.

And that made me think of the book of Job. Not that my daughters’ suffering, or my vicarious suffering on their behalf, had anything on the trials of Job, but Job’s experience does shed a lot of light on unmerited suffering in general.

The book of Job is fascinating for many reasons, not least of which is that it shows Satan having access to heaven. We’re not given details of the arrangement, but there he is in verse 6 of chapter 1, presenting himself to God.

  7 And the LORD said unto Satan, Whence comest thou? Then Satan answered the LORD, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.

Evidently Satan just cruises the planet, seeing what’s up.

Then God says something extraordinary.

  8 Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil?

The word “perfect” doesn’t mean “sinless” in this context, but rather “complete” or “mature”—like a perfect fifth in music or the “more perfect union” spoken of in the Constitution. God doesn’t claim absolute moral purity for Job. Still, the claim he does make is a big one. And he’s making it to Satan, the Accuser, who gets off on defying God and discrediting his followers.

I just can’t get out about that. Here is a man so praiseworthy that God himself holds him up as an example of upright character.

It’s easy to imagine a sneer in Satan’s reply.

  9 Doth Job fear God for nought?

 10 Hast not thou made an hedge about him, and about his house, and about all that he hath on every side? thou hast blessed the work of his hands, and his substance is increased in the land.

  11 But put forth thine hand now, and touch all that he hath, and he will curse thee to thy face.

At this point you can almost hear a chorus of “Oooooooooo!” from any demons who may be in attendance. Then heavy silence. The court of Heaven awaits God’s reply.

For this is the sort of question which, once raised, cannot be dismissed. Do we follow God merely because he blesses us? Are we mercenary creatures, obeying God in order to reap the benefits of a godly life, without loving God himself? Is virtue a strict business relationship—sort of an I-stay-chaste-and-honest-and-you-bless-my-crops-and-protect-my-health-and-family thing?

Or is there more to it than that?

There’s only one way to answer the question: put it to an empirical test.

  12 And the LORD said unto Satan, Behold, all that he hath is in thy power; only upon himself put not forth thine hand.

Once permission is granted, catastrophe falls swiftly on Job. In a stunning series of acts of war and freakish natural disasters, his blessings of wealth and comfort and children are wiped out in a single day.

We must remember that in Job’s culture, material blessing was considered the mark of God’s favor. The whole cause-and-effect, blessings-for-obedience thing was intrinsic to contemporaneous thought. It was just the way things were.

Job knew he hadn’t sinned in a way that could have merited such heavy retribution from God. He’d been faithful—unusually faithful—superlatively faithful. A chasm gaped before him, an apparent rift in the very order of the universe. How could he reconcile what he believed about God’s goodness with the evidence of his eyes?

  20 Then Job arose, and rent his mantle, and shaved his head, and fell down upon the ground, and worshipped,

  21 And said, Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.

  22 In all this Job sinned not, nor charged God foolishly.

Imagine the exultation among God’s angels and, yes, God himself when Job spoke these beautiful words. A mortal man, prone to frailty and doubt and despair, and not privy to the counsels of angels, had risen above cultural assumptions and held firm to God when he had ample reason not to. When you continue to love and trust someone even when his behavior baffles you—when you say to yourself, “Well, I don’t know why he’d do that, but he must have a good reason,” and you are content to wait on the full explanation—it means you have faith in that person’s character. He is a friend of the highest order.

The thing that caught my attention that day four years ago is how God regarded Job. He had confidence in him; in some mysterious way he trusted him, if I may be allowed to use the word. He trusted him to such a degree that when Job’s integrity was questioned, God could say with assurance, Go ahead. Put him to the test. You’ll see. God allowed Job to be attacked because he thought Job could take it. And he was right.

Suddenly my vexing little social irritation took on a new significance. Could it be that God thought I could take it, too? That he trusted me to handle this small piece of unmerited suffering with grace and tact and self-control? If so, then it was a compliment for me to be experiencing it at all.

And suddenly I wanted to make good on that. I wanted to justify God’s confidence in me—to glorify him. I would take the blow on the chin, keep my feet under me, and smile.

Job’s trials didn’t end that first day. By the time Satan had finished, he’d lost wealth, health, family, and community standing; and the company of visiting friends only added to his misery. True to their culture, Job’s friends held stubbornly to the dictum that suffering is the direct result of sin. Actually, most people are quick to search for simple cause-and-effect relationships to explain suffering, even those who don’t consider God part of the process. You did X, and now Y is happening to you. The reaction is a defense mechanism. We want to distance ourselves from the possibility of future suffering of our own, and it makes us feel secure to believe we can avoid Y by not doing X.

To a degree, this is sound thinking. It’s prudent to take note of relationships between behavior and consequences and direct our paths accordingly. They say experience is the best teacher, but experience doesn’t always have to be direct and personal. The book of Proverbs is all about gaining wisdom vicariously.

But the truth is that people often suffer through absolutely no fault of their own. And that is a terrible thing to see.

This is not to say that unmerited suffering is without purpose. God does nothing by chance, and he puts limits on what the Enemy can do to us. But we don’t always learn in this lifetime what that purpose is. The point is that the suffering may not be our fault. It may even be our merit.

But I think we can safely say that undeserved suffering always has one particular purpose behind it. That purpose is the demonstration of character.

This works on earth as surely as in heaven. When adversity delivers an upper cut, some folks cave and others stand firm. I am a devoted student of human nature, and I watch these reactions and quietly file away my observations for future reference. I’m sorry if this sounds creepy, but I can’t not do it. I assess character all the time. I’ve seen some friends and acquaintances handle serious adversity with such cheerful patience and faith in God’s goodness that I feel humbly grateful just to know them. Others have lost my good opinion by pouting and making others miserable over small matters. Most of these folks would probably be surprised to learn that their integrity of character matters to me in the slightest, but it does.

Sara Crewe, the heroine of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic story A Little Princess, is a pampered girl who has always been surrounded by luxury and affection. She is well-mannered and accomplished and treats others with kindness and consideration.

But she wonders how much of her reputation for goodness is deserved, and how much is owing to the environment in which she was raised.

‘Perhaps I have not really a good temper at all, but if you have everything you want and everyone is kind to you, how can you help but be good-tempered? Perhaps I’m a hideous child, and no one will ever know, just because I never have any trials.’

Later in the book, Sara loses everything—family, wealth, position, and almost all physical comforts—in one Job-like swoop. This is her opportunity to show what she’s made of. Sara proves her quality, and it is sterling.

‘Whatever comes,’ she said, ‘cannot alter one thing. If I am a princess in rags and tatters, I can be a princess inside. It would be easy to be a princess if I were dressed in cloth of gold, but it is a great deal more of a triumph to be one all the time when no one knows it.

Being a princess is not the same as being rich or comfortable or happy. Being a princess is an identity. A princess is a king’s daughter. She might lose her fine clothes, her wealth, even the high regard of the multitudes, as many princesses throughout the history of the world have done. But she never stops being a princess inside. A princess is a princess, always—as surely as her father is a king.

The Opossum in the Cabinet

We had an odd arrangement with our contractor, who was also our former pastor and good friend: we hired him to build the house, and he hired Greg as his framing crew. He knew we needed to do all we could to cut costs, and he graciously accommodated us. I worked on the house too, as much as I was able, mostly on painting and clean-up. The kids were then six, three, and two years of age. They spent long days with us at the house-in-progress, helping with the work and running around the three-acre property.

No doubt the new house would be a big improvement over the old. Since before Daniel’s first birthday, we’d lived in 1100 square feet of bad plumbing and particle-wood sub-floors. We’d been grateful to get that place, and certainly it had its good points. But we were reveling in the expectation of 1600 square feet of brand spanking new living space that could be counted on not to fall apart around us anytime in the near future.

We’d gotten home late that night from working on the house; we’d thrown something together for dinner, fed the kids, and put them to bed. Greg and I were sitting at the kitchen table, talking, when I heard a scratching sound coming from inside the cabinet under the sink.

This was not an unheard-of thing. Our baby-proof latches had long since worn out, and our cat Pud had a knack for opening certain cabinet doors with his paw. Probably he just liked the privacy.

Untroubled, without shifting in my seat or pausing in what I was saying, I opened the door.

Perched on top of a box of dishwashing detergent was an animal. Smaller than our grown cats, whitish, with round black eyes, a long snout, and a bald, pink, prehensile tail.

I shut the door. Then I turned to my husband.

“Greg,” I said, “there—there’s a—there’s an opossum—”

He was already nodding, his eyes intently fixed on my face, willing me to stay calm. “I know. I saw it too. It must have come in through that hole in the cabinet floor. We’ll just leave it shut in the cabinet for the night, and tomorrow after it goes away I’ll seal up the hole.”

The plan wasn’t ideal, but under the circumstances it was the best we could do. Neither of us wanted to grapple with the animal, and if we were to flush it out of the cabinet and try to hustle it through the front door, there was no guarantee that it would go where we wanted it to without a fight. I’d heard of opossums doing a lot of damage in houses to which they’d somehow gained entrance.

We blocked the door with a chair and a box, trapping the critter and preventing Pud from strolling in for a little down time and making the awful discovery. Then we went to bed.

Next morning, we opened the cabinet. No opossum! It must have slunk out in the night, just as Greg had predicted. Greg sealed the hole with some of that expanding foam stuff that comes in a can. When he was done, there was no opening left through which any opossum could possibly pass.

He went to work, and the kids and I stayed home. Sometime that afternoon, I opened the undersink cabinet to throw something away.

The opossum stared up at me from inside the trash can.

Let me say here that I do not fear opossums on principle, or bees or wasps or spiders or snakes. Faced with wildlife that isn’t actively attacking me in a life-threatening manner, I can keep my head as well as anyone. But I do hate to be startled. I don’t fear Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke either, but if I found him inside my trash can, I would probably scream.

It all depends on context.

And I screamed now. To my credit, I also had the presence of mind to quickly throw away my handful of trash and slam the cabinet door shut.

The kids knew that Mom did not make a habit of randomly screaming. They wanted to know what was wrong. Rattled, but determined to recover my calm, I said, “Oh, nothing, almost nothing at all. There’s just an opossum in the trash can.”

(This is as good a place as any to address the largely obsolete spelling “opossum.” Throughout most of the incident of the marsupial in our cabinet, I referred to the animal by this, its rightful name. “Why do you call it that?” Greg asked. “Nobody says opossum anymore, just possum.” The thing seemed to matter deeply to him, so I started saying the word his way. I even pronounced it without the apostrophe traditionally used to indicate missing letters.)

I called Greg at work. We agreed that the possum had most definitely not been hiding out in the trash can while he was sealing the hole in the floor. Nor had it been skulking in a corner of the cabinet behind my mopping bucket. Where, then, had it disappeared to, and reappeared from?

We reasoned that the possum had slipped into the space behind the dishwasher and hung out there while Greg was working on the cabinet floor. Perhaps it was napping, or cowering in abject terror. One way or another, it was back.

Then the full import of the situation dawned on us. Greg had, in fact, sealed the possum inside the house, contrary to his intent.

And Greg was about to leave town for the weekend.

“You can keep him shut in the cabinet while I’m gone,” he said in a half-apologetic, half-coaxing tone. “When I get back I’ll set the live trap inside the cabinet and catch him. I’ll do whatever I have to do to get him out after I get back, but I just don’t have time to deal with this right now.”

There are times in my married life when my husband needs me to rise to the occasion, to be more than what I am, to laugh in the face of minor irritations and major adversity and so on. I’ve often failed, but not that day.

We blocked the cabinet door again, and Greg left for a visit to his dad.

Obviously I couldn’t have the beast perishing of hunger inside my kitchen cabinet, so a couple of times a day I tossed in some of the kids’ sandwich crusts. I figured it would get a subsistence level of water from the faulty plumbing under the sink.

It was kind of an unsettled time. It’s hard to really relax when you know that there is a hissing animal with needle-sharp teeth hiding in your kitchen. The whole concept probably has the makings of a horror movie. The underbed has been amply explored as a region of primal terror, but there is untapped potential in the undersink, home to dangerous chemicals, leaky pipes, garbage, nameless slime, and itinerant marsupials.

Greg came home again, set the live trap, baited it with a cheese sandwich, and put it in the cabinet. I had my doubts. Could the animal really be naïve enough to be lured by such blatant means into a metal contraption so obviously meant to confine him?

Yes, it could. In the morning Greg opened the cabinet, and there was the possum, snugly ensconced in the trap. This was my first opportunity to get a good look at the animal. It was a young possum and sort of cute.

Something like this.

Pud was sleeping nearby. Throughout the whole possum occupation he’d been an ineffectual watchcat, never even sniffing suspiciously at the cabinet. Greg held the cage close to him. The possum tensed; Pud slept on.

Finally Pud woke, looked at the strange animal, and fluffed up his fur. His pupils dilated and he began to yowl.

But the time for a rumble had passed. The delighted children accompanied their father and me down the street and across Mayhill Road to the lovely woods beyond. There we released our evicted tenant. It scuttled off into the herbage, never to be seen again, at least by us.

After church that day I got out a roll of paper towels and a bottle of cleaner and happily went to work, removing all signs and odors of the possum’s stay. I crawled inside the cabinet to reach the space behind the dishwasher. In a surprisingly short time, all impurities were purged away.

Within a few months we’d moved into our new home, which was never once invaded by a possum during the nine years we lived there, though it did have quite a few brown recluse spiders. But we have great memories of the old place. It was a good home to us, marsupial squatters notwithstanding.

Whether an animal, or even a person, qualifies as a pest, an invader, a guest, a pet, or a resident depends on the homeowner’s point of view. Scorpions are never welcome inside the house, and cattle belong outside the fenced yard and away from the compost bin. The status of the outside cats fluctuates depending on whether they are lounging on the porch, slipping inside to steal food off the counter, or controlling the local population of Rodents Of Unusual Size. Just this morning three of the dogs were demoted to varmint status when they chewed some of Emilie’s stuffed animals and ate her bag of horse treats.

But all four of the big dogs earned praise two nights ago when they alerted us to an alien presence in the yard. Greg went outside and found a possum curled up in a hideous playing-dead pose: eyes wide and staring, limbs stiff, lips pulled back from rows of jagged teeth in a horrible grimace. Greg picked it up by its tail and chucked it over the fence.

If only it were always that easy.

The Three Little Orangutans

The three little orangutans had been together since infancy, and as juveniles they’d shared a space too small for them. The arrangement had worked all right so far, but now the zoo had additional space available. Two of the orangs were about to move into apartments adjoining the one where they’d grown up. They would have plenty of room in their new digs, room to spread out and swing around by their long arms and do whatever it is maturing orangutans do.

There was just one problem. They wouldn’t go.

My visiting elementary school class watched in fascination as the young primates wrapped their long, strong arms around each other and refused to be parted. A keeper grabbed one orang, pried him loose from the grip of his companions, and hustled him through the door. Before the door could be shut, the other two came trailing after. When the keeper tried to put those two back in the first room, the third returned with them.

I don’t know what the zoo staff ever did about the orangs, but the memory of their camaraderie, their determination to stay together, remained with me through adulthood.

Greg and I weren’t overburdened with money or space when our kids were young, and for a while the three of them shared a bedroom smaller than the first orangutan enclosure. Anna slept on an improvised trundle, an extra baby mattress that slipped under Emilie’s crib during the day. Daniel, though tall for his age at four or five, managed with a toddler bed.

It was hard to get everyone to sleep at once and keep them all asleep. Daniel was old enough to appreciate a good night’s rest and be annoyed by his sisters’ nocturnal baby chatter. It was also hard to maintain anything resembling neatness. I kept their toy collections as streamlined as possible; children who visited us were sometimes surprised to look over all the possessions and realize that this, indeed, was it.

Shortly after Daniel’s seventh birthday, we moved to a relatively enormous house of 1600 square feet. We rejoiced in the kids’ large bedrooms; with all this space, they wouldn’t have to be constantly in each other’s face anymore.

As it turned out, not much changed. The kids were always together. Even when they got on each other’s nerves, they just couldn’t do without each other. Whenever one of them got particularly annoying, I’d tell the offending party to leave the others alone; but the others wouldn’t leave that one alone. Within minutes they’d be together again, tumbling around in a bundle of confusion, kinetic energy, and noise.

We homeschooled from the beginning, so the kids were typically together all day every day. Texts and binders jostled for space on our dining room table, overlapping, just like their lives. They were each other’s constant companions, playing elaborate games with stuffed animals, Legos, action figures, and cardboard boxes.

Their sense of solidarity astounded me. They were always quick to share good news with each other and to assume that a treat for one meant a treat for all. If one kid happened to be in the kitchen when I was shredding cheese for a recipe, and I told him he could have a handful, he’d take off before even claiming his portion, announcing to the others, “We can have cheese!” (Yes, this was ample cause for excitement at our house. We lived frugally.)

I think this strong sibling unity is one reason my girls grew up so physically capable. If one of them was too scared to perform some daredevil feat like jumping off the top of the jungle gym into the shallow waters of the stock tank below or riding a bike down a slope so long and steep that just looking at it gave me vertigo, the others would mock that one until she gave in. No one ever got hurt this way; I speculate that they all developed a healthy sense of what their bodies could do, which actually protected them against injury.

When Emilie was around six, she had a bout of impetigo. If you’ve never experienced this bacterial skin infection, I hope you never do. The treatment involves the painful scrubbing of tender raw tissues, the sheer horror of which has been known to drive many a strong man out of his house for the duration of his child’s anguish. Daniel and Anna weren’t bothered by the cries of their little sister; they were used to being told to suck it up. They even made some rather callous jokes about leprosy. But when they learned that the contagious illness would prevent Emilie from attending our church’s annual Baptism and Barbecue—which promised to be a particularly epic event that year, as it was being held at an absolute wonderland of a private swimming pool complete with slides and trapezes—the joking stopped and they wept in unashamed compassion. Anna was eight; Daniel was ten.

A few years ago our family moved away from the area where we’d lived since Greg and I were in college. We left a lot of friends behind, and making new ones hasn’t exactly been the work of a moment. Sometimes it seemed we had just each other. And that’s not a bad place to be. I want us to be each other’s best friends, to support and rely on each other. The family is a core of permanence in a shifting world. We cling to each other with uncompromising tenacity.

But suppose you took the quality of commitment normally reserved for family and selectively applied it to a larger group, in a way that would expand the kinship without diluting it. Then you would have a clan—a group of households forming a basic tribal unit. Is such a thing even possible in modern American culture? I think it is. I pray it is.

A group of us had a gala occasion Friday night. It was a delightful concatenation of special events: a homecoming, a birthday, a reunion. Some of the kids had been away at college; my own boy is still away at Fort Benning. The evening’s energy level was pretty high. Lots of sugar and coffee were consumed. Somebody tazed a pumpkin, and somebody else smashed it with a sword. Two and half months’ worth of stories were hastily retold. Teenage boys were picked up and hoisted to the ceiling. The dog ate a package of Twizzlers.

My girls and I were the last to go, and our leave-taking was a thing not easily accomplished. The kids would physically grip each other and not let go, or at least not for long. They’d hug goodbye but not depart, then hug goodbye all over. I would manage to get one daughter pried loose, and while I was working on the other, the first would reattach herself to the group at a different spot. The easiest thing would have been to load the whole group into the Suburban and take all six home with me.

Finally they gathered into a group hug, and I just stood and watched. The two boys each had a wing span in excess of six feet, effectively binding the group into a tight circle of humanity. They were like the three orangutans, only six this time.

I’ve lived long enough to have a lot of regrets. I see now that for most of my life I’ve taken friendship for granted. I’ve enjoyed it and been casually grateful for it, but I haven’t always valued it to the point of fighting for it. I’ve been too quick to let inconvenience or pride or fear come between. My children are wiser than I was at their age.

Hold on, little orangutans. Don’t let go.

Zero Tolerance. Because Catchy Phrases Are Way More Important Than Stuff Like “Justice.”

Some years back, a man I know—we’ll call him “my husband”—had a run-in with a coworker. It wasn’t a little personality clash; the other party was violating company protocol and trying to get away with it. My husband called him on it and didn’t back down.

An unpleasant scene followed, and after the dust had settled a manager was dispatched to investigate. Greg maintained that he’d been in the right. But management isn’t comfortable with the concepts of “right” and “wrong”—even, bafflingly enough, in regards to defending company protocol. It likes to spread blame around evenly, like so much Nutella on a slice of bread, and hold all parties responsible for keeping the peace. This is called empowerment.

“It takes two hands to clap!” the manager said to my husband. He then perkily clapped his own hands, twice, in my husband’s face.

Yeah, well, it takes only one hand to smack someone upside the head, Mister Manager, and that’s what happened in this particular conflict.

There’s an idea afoot that being involved in any conflict makes you guilty—even if all you did was stand there and get attacked. This is the same jaw-dropping idiocy behind zero-tolerance policies that punish kids for defending themselves at school. It’s also behind the manager-speak spoken to my husband that day. The company had a policy that if an employee assaulted another employee, both would automatically be terminated–and the policy is by no means unique to that particular company. Someone attacked you at work? Well then, you obviously deserved it. Who can argue with that logic?

We can all agree that some conflicts simply aren’t worth pursuing. Sometimes an honest cost-benefits analysis shows it’s better to walk away, to let it go with a smile or even a cold, silent glance. But there are other times when that just won’t work—times when standing down makes you complicit in bigotry, cruelty, larceny, or other serious jerkdom. Maintaining the peace at such a time is tantamount to cowardice.

But decent people find conflict unpleasant. Standing our ground, even when it’s the right thing to do, makes us feel bad. Self-doubt whispers at us, asking whether we could have prevented things from coming to this pass. It’s certainly a possibility worth considering. A soft answer turneth away wrath, but grievous words stir up anger (Proverbs 15:1). But there are times when a soft answer simply will not suffice. You can reason, you can sympathize, you can cajole, but you can only do so much. Ultimately you cannot climb into the cockpit of another person’s soul.

So how do you tell the difference? There are few hard and fast guidelines, but a functioning conscience backed by moral courage and genuine regard for fellow human beings is quite capable of sorting things out. My concern is that our culture often denies the very possibility of the line in the sand. There’s also a disturbing tendency to urge the more reasonable person in the conflict to be more tolerant. In other contexts, this is called blaming the victim.

“Gentlemen may cry ‘Peace, peace,’” said Patrick Henry, “but there is no peace.” No, not when a hostile force is bringing war to your doorstep.

I’d like to end this on less of a downer, but I’m not sure how, except to say that God cares about justice—and so do most human beings, in spite of the organized efforts of misguided authority to make the whole concept go away. The fight may feel like a lonely one, especially at first, but I’ve observed that once the first brave individual makes his stand, others will often find their courage and follow. So take heart, and remember that justice is worth defending. In a culture where justice is not honored, mercy is emptied of meaning and power.

Brandi’s Cardinal Rules of Romance Writing

These have worked pretty well for me over the course of twenty or so published short stories.

1. Men are cute when they’re vulnerable.

2. But not needy! No one likes a needy man.

3. Chicks dig guys who bring them coffee. Baristas rock as romantic heroes.

4. Tool belts are sexy.

5. So are work boots.

6. In fact, hard work and the tools and evidence thereof are pretty sexy all around.

7. You can always find a reason to have the hero take off his shirt. Stab wounds, a rip in the sleeve, a pick-up game of shirts-and-skins football, a soda dumped over the head by an obnoxious stranger, whatever.

8. But it doesn’t have to go farther than that, or even as far, to pack an effective punch. There is more genuine sexual tension to be found in a Louisa May Alcott novel than in many a bodice-ripper.

9. A lot of people think passion should be irresistible at all times, but that’s just not true. Self-control is terribly attractive.

10. What people leave conspicuously unsaid is as important as what they say.

11. Handsome is as handsome does. Seriously.

Of Love, Insanity, and Large Amounts of Money

I love looking through bridal magazines with my teenage daughters, but not for the reasons the editors suppose. We have two of these magazines in the house and go through them every few months for a gut-busting, endorphin-inducing laugh fest. These magazines are fun the way a Brendan Fraser mummy movie is fun, only the makers of the mummy movie don’t expect you to take it seriously.

Since our kids were small, Greg and I have worked to make them aware of marketing ploys. They have a healthy cynicism toward advertising in general, and most magazines are more ads than articles. Magazine editors know which side their proverbial bread is buttered on, and they don’t print articles that will hurt their advertisers. Ads and articles work together to create a construct of an artificial universe, as detailed and bizarre as you’d find in a fantasy novel.

Judging from the pages of bridal magazines, marketing professionals operate under the assumption that most American women are criminally insane.

Witness the postures and facial expressions of models in bridal gown ads—hips outthrust, heads tilted at defiant angles, elbows pushed forward to articulate the toned deltoids , eyes narrowed in hostility, upper lips curled in Billy Idol sneers.

The brides aren’t the only ones with thinly veiled violent impulses. In one ad, a bride is flanked by two bridesmaids in red who look past her at each other, clearly plotting to kill her. (Judging by the look on her face, she deserves it.) And watch out for the mother of the bride! She is typically thirty years of age, with the body of a dedicated athlete and risqué taste in clothing. If I’m reading her face right, she’s planning to poison the bridal party and snag the groom.

Each magazine has a couple of ads devoted to the tuxedo-wearing members of the wedding party. The groom might as well have a dialogue bubble coming out of his mouth, proclaiming, “I’m whupped.” You have only to look at his vapid countenance to know he’s handed over his manhood on a doily-lined platter.

In ads that aren’t pushing tuxedos, men are used as props. One memorable ad featured an individual my girls now refer to as the Nude Dude. A bride in an elaborate gown stands high on a metal staircase, while a naked man, presumably the groom, ascends the steps. Most of him is in shadow, but one side of bare rear is plainly visible. She looks down on him from her superior elevation with a look of…I don’t know what. Hostility, maybe, or aggressive narcissism. Just what chain of events is supposed to have led to this scenario? And just what are the advertisers trying to sell? I don’t remember what product was being pitched, and there’s no way to find out, because Emilie long ago removed this shocking image from her magazine and put it in the trash can where it belonged.

Anna likes to make up captions for the photos. “Who needs the groom? I have my reflection to look at!” “Still not recovered from the bachelorette party…” “I guess we had to have a brunette in here somewhere!” “You want me to walk down that aisle? Over my dead body.” “Can we get a chiropractor over here?” “Forget the wedding…I’m on a Quest for Self.” “If that photo goes on Facebook, you’re dead. Then I’m defriending you.”

The photo features are softer and gentler than the ads; the women shown here are not so much criminally insane as just plain insane. One of our favorites is a montage set outdoors. A waiflike, ethereal blonde bride and two blonde flower girls traipse through pastoral settings in a series of frothy, dainty gowns, accompanied by a retinue of farm animals. Anyone at all familiar with livestock and pasture grass knows how crazy this is, but since when has reality gotten in the way of a photo feature? In one shot, the bride, who appears to have popped too many Valiums, holds a little lamb in the lap of a $3,990 ecru floral lace dress. The fluffy-haired flower girl, obviously a vampire child, casts a sardonic sidelong glance as if she knows what the lamb is about to do to the dress. In another, the bride reclines in a meadow, wearing an ivory strapless gown with flocked tulle skirt ($1,650), an ivory waist cincher ($385), and a headpiece that appears to be made of meringue ($345); she carries an ivory fan ($235). I cringe at the thought of what the grass seed heads will do to the transparent netted lace of the skirt.

The Q and A columns are fascinating in a train-wreck sort of way. The questions betray an appalling lack of empathy and sense. “I want to go to Las Vegas for my bachelorette party, but my bridesmaids say they can’t afford it,” says one questioner. “How do I get them to change their minds?” Another says, “My mom is a recovering alcoholic. Since she and my dad are paying for the wedding, they are insisting that the reception be alcohol-free. I think that would be unfair to our guests. How can I get around this?” Could the writers be making up the questions? One can only hope.

During a recent run-through of bride magazines, Emilie was particularly aghast at an article on how to make your fiancé give up his tacky décor and furnishings. The substance of Emilie’s impassioned response: How about if we assume men have something like “feelings” and respect them as fellow human beings rather than treating them as pawns in our little game? How about if you remember it’s his home too?

This is a radical concept for most modern brides, who’ve had it drilled into them lifelong that men are there for nagging and remaking. Most relationship advice found in print media boils down to instructions for how to disguise your nagging and make it more effective. It really chaps my hide…but that’s a subject for another blog post.

A typical American wedding costs more than my Suburban did when it was new. Marketers know that weddings are hotbeds of performance anxiety, unarticulated expectations, primal impulses, unresolved family conflict, and body image malaise; they prey on our insecurities as parents, providers, lovers. My own girls are feisty and smart; they see men as rational creatures, not fashion accessories, and show admirable resistance to blind consumerism. A few of the saner magazine images have found their way to Emilie’s bedroom wall—and that’s fine. I’m confident in my daughters’ ability to keep their wits about them and choose wisely when their time comes.