On My Soapbox – The Monica Chronicles

June 30, 2017

Putting Bones on the Body

For the past five years I have been an active member of our local Habitat for Humanity chapter. I was recruited as a volunteer at our first Town of Stanardsville July 4th celebration when I my eye caught sight of a bright Federal Safety yellow t-shirt waving in the breeze as it hung from the side of a canopy. Sure, I thought, I’d buy a t-shirt to support Habitat for Humanity. Little did I know what I was getting into. In short order I was providing my contact information and within a few short weeks was attending a Steering Committee meeting and installed as recording secretary.

Like most people, my understanding of how Habitat for Humanity works was based on news blurbs I’d seen highlighting Jimmy Carter swinging a hammer on a home build. I could do that. I wanted to do that. As a small child I was encouraged to learn how to handle tools and watched my father fix almost everything in our house that needed repair. I was ready, willing and able to pick up a hammer and get going. I also believed that this was work worth doing, a way I could put skin and bones on the body of Christ and actually work to make a difference in someone else’s life.

As a member of the Greene County Habitat for Humanity Steering Committee I learned pretty quickly that it takes a whole lot more than willing volunteers with hammers and mechanical aptitude to build a house. Before the first nail can be hammered, it takes a group of people willing to spend hours of planning and problem solving and a whole lot of cash.

Prior to my joining the group, the model had been to fund raise and build in alternate years but over time and had successfully build four homes in eleven years. Due to a variety of circumstances, the core group on the Steering Committee shrank to barebones. Eventually, for all intents and purposes I was left the “last man standing”. With the help of a very young and energetic Americorps Volunteer, we were able to recruit additional committee members and stay keep Habitat for Humanity alive in Greene County.

Over the years we have attempted to raise funds by a handful of unsuccessful mailing campaigns, spaghetti dinners and community events with meager results. I think most people (myself included) think that project funding for Habitat for Humanity comes from the vast resources of an international organization. Not true. In fact, for the most part, every single dollar spent on our local Habitat for Humanity projects must be raised from within our community. Not only that, we are forced to compete with Habitat for Humanity International in our fund-raising efforts. Just a few months ago I received a solicitation from HFH International as I’m sure most folks in the county did. And, my guess is that many folks made donations under the misimpression that they would be benefiting our local organization.

Volunteers pose on a new ramp at the end of the day.

With limited funds, for the past several years our group has concentrated on providing handicap access ramps for our community which as a large population of disabled people living on very modest fixed incomes. While the work has been rewarding, we all dreamed of the day when we could fulfill our mission and provide a safe, affordable home for a working family in Greene.

Last summer an opportunity to do that became available. Habitat for Humanity Virginia, our overseeing entity, was able to purchase a home through a HUD foreclosure program in the town of Stanardsville. Since November, our volunteer crews have been working to rehab this long neglected home and get it ready for a deserving local family.

With a combination of Federal Neighborhood Stabilization Program Funds and resources at hand, we were certain we’d be able to easily complete this project. Last year we began our Partner Family Application Process and chose two families to participate in our program. One of these families will move into our current project home.

There is a common misconception that Habitat for Humanity gives homes to people. This is simply not true. Not only do our families have to secure mortgages to pay for their homes but they also have to actually help build them. Each adult family member has a required number of “sweat equity” hours they must work and we diligently track them. On any given Saturday, if you stop by our project home, you will find not only the family who will move in, but the next one in line as well, doing whatever they are able to do, whether it’s hammering, painting, sanding or even cleaning.

Volunteers get started on the deck of the Holmes Run Place project home.

People also believe that all the materials used on our projects are donated. This is also not true. While we sometimes receive discounts for items purchased, most of the time we pay full retail price for everything we need. Our real savings comes in labor costs. By relying on a volunteer labor force, we are able to cut the cost dramatically. In this respect, we have been blessed. On any given Saturday workday, we will have between fifteen and twenty volunteers of all ages; some even from our local high school, all working to “get ‘er done.”

Members of the Greene County Ruritan Club brought pizza to our work crew in March.

We have also been blessed by the generosity of our neighbors who provide lunch for our work crews. Organizations including the local Ruritan and Farm Bureau Ladies’ Auxiliary and other individuals have delivered hot lunches to our site. On our last workday, lunch was provided by one of our previous partner families, the Jenkins, who will be celebrating their eighth anniversary in their Habitat home this coming September. It was a real treat to our volunteers as well as the partner families to meet them and hear their success story.

Working with Habitat for Humanity in Greene County has been an incredible experience for me these past five years. It has helped me become a real part of this community in ways that most newcomers don’t get. It is a warm, generous community eager to help their neighbors whenever they can. Getting the word out is our biggest challenge.

Greene County is tiny and borders the much larger Albemarle County. Nearby the City of Charlottesville and University of Virginia tend to grab most of the media attention for our area. All too often when I’m out and about in the community people tell me they volunteer with (and probably donate to) the Habitat for Humanity group in Charlottesville because they didn’t know we have a chapter in Greene.

So, in case you didn’t know, Greene County does have its own chapter of Habitat for Humanity and we are alive and committed to provide safe and affordable housing for our community. We can’t do it alone. We need the support of our entire community. If you would like to help out, you can send a check to:

Habitat for Humanity Greene County , PO Box 150, Ruckersville, VA 22968

or go to our webpage (www.greenehabitatva.org) where you can use your credit card. Any and every little bit helps.

Our Mission

“Habitat for Humanity works in partnership with God and people everywhere, from all walks of life, to develop communities with people in need by building and renovating houses so that there are decent houses in decent communities in which every person can experience God’s love and can live and grow into all that God intends.”

November 18, 2016

Our room in the Brickhouse Tavern, Colonial Williamsburg

Last Friday morning I woke up under the blue and white checks of a four-posted canopy bed in a colonial tavern on Duke of Gloucester Street in Williamsburg. After several months jam-packed with volunteer activities, Dave and I were taking a well deserved getaway. When we booked our trip, we had no idea just how much we’d need to get away from.

It was a beautiful sunny crisp fall morning and the streets were quiet as we walked to the Governor’s Palace for the first tour of the day. There apparently wasn’t much interest in an early morning tour of the Palace because as it turned out, Dave and I were escorted privately through the reconstructed building by a very knowledgeable young man dressed in pale blue livery representing the colors of former Virginia colony governor Lord Dunmore. As we walked through the lavishly decorated rooms (by eighteenth century standards), our guide gave us an idea of what life was like in this colony over two hundred years ago.

One thing I learned on my tour of the Governor’s Palace was the in the first room we entered, right off the front door. It was the office of the Governor’s housekeeper. This person was a paid professional who was responsible for not only the running of the Governor’s home but also for all of his plantations in Virginia. Surprisingly this person was a woman. She held all the keys and managed the servants both freed and enslaved. For her time in history, this was a position of great power and responsibility. She would have enjoyed a great deal of freedom, as long was she wasn’t married.

It’s funny, but usually when I tour a historic home, I imagine myself living within its walls. This time, maybe because I received a sharp smack of reality earlier last week when the election results were announced, I instead pictured myself living a much different life in those times than that of a stately lady living in a fine house. To live in a fine home such as this or in most of the preserved homes in Colonial Williamsburg, a family had to be extremely prosperous, either as the result of status of birth or financial well-being. Having seen my family tree on Ancestry.com, it is evident that there was very little of either in my familial lineage. With this in mind, I began to ponder just where my loyalties would have fallen had I lived during the times leading up to the American Revolution.

If I’d been the wife of a farmer, as most of my ancestors seemed to have been, I suppose I would have been far too concentrated on keeping food on our table and clothes on our backs to worry about what kind of government we had. My reality would have been days of hard work followed by more days of hard work until I couldn’t work anymore. Life was tenuous at best. As a woman, I was certainly entitled to my opinion, provided I kept it to myself. And whether the country was ruled by a King or elected body, that wasn’t going to change. I rather think I would be more inclined to stick to the status quo. After all, why would I purposely risk what little security I had? For women of that time, there would be no representative government whatever the outcome of a revolution.

I wonder if women actually felt the lack of inclusion back then. Were there sparks dissatisfaction? History records there were great debates about freeing enslaved people at the time of the Declaration of Independence and again at the writing of the Constitution, but if there was any discussion of the equality of women at that time, it was apparently not worth remembering. To the people of that time, it would have probably been a laughable idea.

Today, it appears as though women have come a long way. We have had the right to vote for almost one hundred years and have just had a woman, backed by a major political party run for President. Some of the rhetoric and mud-slinging that took place during this election process has demonstrated just how much further women have to go to reach full equality because while many votes were cast for her opponent for reasons of policy disagreement, there appears to have been many man and women cast their votes against her simply because she was a woman.

I don’t know what it will take to reach full equality in the perception of the populace of this county. Certainly smarter and braver women than I have tried. My hope is that the dialog will continue. Who knows, maybe in 2020; the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment we’ll finally see a woman in the White House.

November 14, 2016

Grieving the Possibility

Ensign and Mrs. Waugh at the Intruder Ball, 1983

For many, Veterans Day is a day to remember those who have served our nation in the armed forces. Originally known as Armistice Day, it marked the anniversary of the First World War or as it was known hopefully by those who lived through that frightening time; the “war to end all wars”. For me, for the past thirty years it has been the day I miscarried my last child.

I will always remember this event happened on Veterans Day. Dave was on active duty at the time and so we went to the labor and delivery deck at the old Portsmouth Naval Hospital; a scary building which was originally built as the brig. (I’m not sure when it was built, but I’m fairy certain it dates back to when the original hospital was built in 1827.) Because of the holiday there was minimal staff and were not particularly warm or considerate, treating me more like an inconvenience than someone in distress.

I received adequate care but the holiday created enough hiccoughs in services like the unavailability of clean linens, etc., that the fact that my miscarriage landed on a national holiday, has been firmly planted in my brain and so does not slip by each year unnoticed.

So, every year while people seem to trip over themselves to “thank us for our service,” which, by the way, is a relatively new concept in my almost forty years of military wife experience, I instead spend time wondering how our lives might have been different if we’d had a third child as a member of our family.

The only thing we knew for certain about this child was that it was a boy. There were indications leading up to my miscarriage that his heartbeat was slowing but whether that was indicative of a defect or just part of his passing, we’ll never know. All we can say for sure it that there once was a possibility of a child, his health may have been poor and that even after thirty years gone by, I still look back and wonder just what it would have been like to have been his mother.

This year’s remembrance of my lost child has been compounded by my feelings about the result of last week’s presidential election. Just as I was certain at the beginning of my last pregnancy that I would carry my baby to term, I was equally as certain, based on Nate Silver’s track record and my own hopes, that our country would elect Hillary Clinton to be our next president. Neither happened as I would have expected.

And so this year, I also grieve the loss of what might have been. The potential of what Hillary Clinton could have brought to our county is what we will never know and it saddens me deeply. I’ve never cried after election results were announced before. Since Wednesday morning I’ve teetered on the edge and several times have allowed myself the self-indulgence of a good cry. It doesn’t change anything, it doesn’t make me feel any better, it just is.

Thursday afternoon Dave and I went down to Colonial Williamsburg for a long awaited getaway weekend. As we emerged ourselves in colonial America, I began to regain my perspective. On our visit to Charlton’s Coffee House on Duke of Gloucester Street we were immersed in the year 1765. After our interpreter gave her presentation regarding the “current” debate about the recent Stamp Acts she asked those gathered if there were any questions. A woman asked if there had been much talk of revolution. Staying in character, the interpreter replied no. She went on to say that there was not telling what would happen within the next ten years or so, but for now (1765) the residents of Williamsburg were all good British subjects and happy to be so. And in all reality, if the revolution hadn’t happened, I don’t think our lives would be radically different from what they are today.

And so it goes. We just don’t know what will come our way in the next ten years. All we can count on for certain is that time will pass and things will change, because they always do. Going forward, I will try to wrap my head around our new national reality and continue my work in my community but there will always be that part of me that will wonder about what could have been.

August 18, 2016

church

Last night Dave and I drove over the mountain to have dinner in Harrisonburg. Thirty-eight miles might seem like a long way to go on a Wednesday night just for dinner, but for us it wasn’t as much about eating as it was supporting a friend and fellow Cursillista.

Several weeks ago our friend Jean found herself unemployed following a seriously questionable series of events. A gifted musician, she had worked as music minister in her parish for fifteen years and was deeply loved by the community. But, as anyone who has actually been employed by a church knows, a parish work environment is not always heavenly or even close to being a epitome of Christian virtue. Many times they are anything but which results in individuals feeling a need to seek greener pastures to “avoid the near occasion of sin.”

So it was with Jean. As much as she loved her community, she felt the need for change and applied for a job at another parish. She was offered and accepted a new job. But after informing her pastor she would be leaving, the job offer was rescinded. When she called to find out the reason, she was told her current pastor had reached out to the new one and whatever he said, convinced him she would not be a good fit for his parish. And, to put a cherry on the top of this sundae, when she went to her pastor to let him know she wouldn’t be leaving after all, he handed her a letter accepting her resignation. So, the course of one week, Jean was hired, not hired and fired leaving her unemployed .

This could be the end of a very sad story, but in reality, but the real story lies in how her community of friends has lifted her up both in prayer and financial support. A “Go Fund Me” page was started on her behalf and enough money was raised to prevent her from loosing her house and keep her going.

Last week we had dinner together and she shared how overwhelming it was to be carried by those who love her and how all the potential snags on her horizon seem to be falling to the side; her house has sold and she has secured a new place to live and she is receiving encouraging signs that she will soon be employed full-time. The Spirit is alive in her and around her, and she will thrive.

So yeah, driving thirty-eight miles to eat a seriously good Italian meal and listen to my friend tickle the ivories seemed like a little thing to do to show a friend how much she means to us. And we weren’t alone, in fact the dining room was full of friends and Cursillistas, all doing the same thing.

There is nothing any of us can do to take away the sting of injustice she has suffered at the hands of the institutional church but we, the real church can salve her wounds and help her back onto her feet.

I snapped this photo in the parking lot as we headed to our car. There will always be storms in our lives, but the rainbow is a reminder of God’s promise that even when our world seems to be destroyed, there will always be new life. DeColores my friend!

July 29, 2016

I’m With Her…. and Why.

Me in my political activity days. (That’s me on the far right – LOL!)

Like it or not, history was made last night when Hilary Clinton accepted the Democratic National Party nomination for President of the United States. Many people don’t like her. Many would probably go so far as to say they hate her. I like her and if you’re interested, I’ll tell you why.

From the time I was a little girl, I was raised in the belief that I could become anything I wanted to in my life if I worked hard enough. Call it cognitive dissonance if you want, but for at least my youngest years, I was unaware that there were limits on what I could achieve based on my gender.

Along with this belief that my possibilities were unlimited, my parents also instilled in my the core value that we should all serve our communities to the best of our abilities. And, for most of my life; from the Girls Scouts to Habitat for Humanity, I have been doing just that.

It wasn’t until I began looking at colleges that I was aware that until my junior year in high school, most of the more prestigious universities in our country were not even open to women. Sure, most had excellent “sister” schools, but having lived through the tumult of the sixties and early seventies, “separate but equal” did not resonate with me very well. In fact, one of the reasons I chose to attend Rutgers College was because they had only allowed women to apply the year before I was eligible; just one year. And, even though my guidance counsellor tried to get me to go to Douglas College, Rutger’s “sister,” I wanted to be among one of the first classes of women to break down the ivy walls of discrimination.

After graduating, I took a job as in a management training position for a lawn and garden company. Almost from the beginning I was told I would never be promoted to a position of management because I was a woman; I was too weak. The men I worked with in the business would never accept me.

Despite being told that over and over again, I persevered. Along with a handful of other young women, we pushed and pushed until a few of us were given management positions. We were not too weak, the opposition made us stronger and we were respected. There were still men and even some women, who believed we were in the wrong line of work. I remember one time as I was loading a 50 pound bag of bird seed into a woman’s car, she expressed concern that I might “hurt my lady parts” by such heavy lifting. I liked being strong and as it turned out, my lady parts were just fine.

In raising my children, I encouraged them both to follow their dreams and I think Dave and I did a good job at instilling in them that gender had little to with personal worth or value. This wasn’t always easy given the fact that in raising them in the Catholic Church,…. well, you know……

Ok, and so what? Why Hillary? For one thing, I see her as a trail blazer for all women. In my opinion, history will place her amount the other great historical women such as Susan B. Anthony, Emmeline Pankhurst, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She is our Twenty-First Century Suffragette. And, like these woman, she has been maligned and vilified.

Throughout her career, Hillary Clinton has been an advocate for America’s children, working to insure that all children in this country are educated, despite their abilities, family income or immigration status. She fought for children’s rights in Arkansas, especially for children who were abandoned or stuck in the foster care system. In 1997 she worked with Ted Kennedy to help pass the State Children’s Health Insurance Program and then went on to work that all eligible children be enrolled. As first lady, she demonstrated that she had a lot more to offer that in choosing china for the White House. According to Wikipedia, “After Eleanor Roosevelt, Clinton is regarded as the most openly empowered presidential wife in American history.”

As a wife, she has demonstrated unwavering commitment to a very flawed husband in a manner that I believe shows grace and great courage at the expense of her own public perception, much in the same way she demonstrates the same commitment to our country. In this respect, I have always admired Hillary. To me, she ranks up there on the list of other First Ladies like Eleanor Roosevelt and Jackie Kennedy whose husbands also strayed while in office. The main difference between Hillary and these women is that the Press had the decency to keep a lid on those stories.

I could go on about how much it means to me that a strong, caring, qualified woman has been entrusted by her party to carry the mantle in this election, but I’ve gone on a bit longer than I’d like already. If you’re already convinced Hillary is not suited for the Presidency, I doubt anything I can say will change that.

On the other hand, if you have something truly positive (that means NO BASHING) to offer about her opponent, that clearly expresses why you think he is a better choice, I’d at least be open to reading it as well.

March 11, 2016

Trump This!

I’ve heard enough! I am old enough now to have lived through some pretty hot Presidential contests but I have never seen anything like the bitch-slap-fest taking place in full view of the American public as what we are now subjected to on a daily basis.

My first memories go back all the way to the 1964 Johnson/ Goldwater contest. I believe at age nine, the rumors among my group were that if Goldwater was elected, we’d have to go to school on Saturdays! Horrors! As any self-respecting elementary school pupil would do, I supported Lyndon Johnson.

Fast forward to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, I can remember watching TV at my Grandma Gray’s house (she, too was a rebel Democrat in our family) and seeing Julian Bond being barred entry. At thirteen, I thought he was really cute. I couldn’t quite put myself behind someone with a funny name like Hubert Horatio Humphrey, so I became a Nixon supporter. (Silly me!)

My buds and I working to elect someone a long time ago. (Yes, I am aware of the typo in my last name.)

By the 1972 Presidential race, I was sixteen and brimming with idealism. For the previous two years I’d been a member of a special group at my high school, the Multi-District Institute for Political Eduction. During that time I learned quite a bit about how campaigns run, and had done my share of door to door canvassing and stuffing of envelopes. On election night, I remember all too well standing at our local Democratic office, watching the returns and seeing the map turn all red except for Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. It was a very sad night.

I remember another very sad night, two years later when I watched Richard Nixon resign. History was made when a man who had never been elected by the general public stepped up to the Commander-in-Chief position.

By the next Presidential election year, 1976, I was in college. My days of political activity had fallen by the wayside due to some past unpleasantness and I had no real knowledge about which candidate stood for what. Pretty sad given the fact this was the first Presidential election I was eligible to vote in. But I was living in New Jersey and I guess you could say my life was centered around “New York City values”. Because of this, I wasn’t overly fond of the idea of a peanut farmer from Georgia becoming president. So I voted Republican.

Over the next several years, my life was focused on my family. The daily routine of rearing children, mostly single-handedly while Dave was deployed, kept me more focused on PTA agendas than those of the government. Presidential elections came and went, each with its specific brand of rhetoric, scandals, accusations and rebuttals. It wasn’t until my children were out of the house and I had time to really consider the impact of elections from an adult perspective that I became active again.

This time, instead of working for the candidates, I became an Election Official. I was a poll worker for two years and then a Precinct Chief for another two until we moved. In that time I had the incredible opportunity to work the 2008 Presidential Election.

After spending more than one long day at the polls where less than 100 voters came to exercise their right and responsibility, on this special day, when I arrived at the polling place at 4:30 AM, there was already a line at the door and we didn’t open until 6:00.

Most folks arrived before noon, so for a while the lines were long. I was amazed by the number of people, especially middle-aged Afro-American men, for whom this was the first time they had even bothered to vote. Many had just registered earlier that year. The prospect of electing a black man to the highest office was a great motivation to these people, and rightly so. It was a time of hope that change would be right around the corner.

Well, change may not have been right around the corner, and certainly not the type of change that was expected, but we certainly are experiencing a change in the landscape of American political campaigning that I personally am hoping gets nipped in the bud!

I am appalled by the crude language and gutter sniping that is much more reminiscent of the verbal sparing before a WWF match than an election of what some consider to be the “Leader of the Free World”. At this point, why on earth the free world would allow the US to even say that is a mystery.

I am baffled that in a county where children are protected from every threatening aspect of life from car riding to clothing, there isn’t an outcry among the parents of young children in this county. I remember the horror I felt one night when the kids were little while we were eating pizza in front of the TV, that the nightly news did a report about pubic hair on a Coke can during the Clarence Thomas hearings. Compared to what’s being bantered around these days, that was nothing!

I am saddened by the attacks on immigrants to this country. Given the current rhetoric, we should probably at least remove the poem by Emma Lazarus from the Statue of Liberty. Or perhaps add an addendum like “Give us you tired, your poor…” “as long as you are self-sufficient, are fluent in English and are Christian or Jewish.” There is no one living in this country today who can say their family has always lived here, including the native Americans.

I am outraged that the media continually highlights the most horrendous of statements thereby perpetuating them into the national lexicon – I still am aghast by the continued “dick” jokes and the fact that instead of shining a light on the impropriety, they simply make some folks think these candidates are “one of us.”

Frankly, I can’t think of any “one of us” I’d like to see as President of the United States. Clearly the position should be held by a person who is able to rise above, not push others down. And anyone who believes that the biggest bag of wind in this race is just “one of us” because he has the oratory presence and vocabulary of a dock worker, they are sadly mistaken. Just like the Wizard of Oz, there is a very little man, hands and all, standing behind the curtain, pulling strings to produce a great deal of sound and fury and to quote Shakespeare, “Signifying nothing.”

Just sayin’

ps.

After writing this, I realized that my first awareness of a President was of John Kennedy. I was just a little girl when he was killed, but the memories of watching his funeral procession on our black and white TV screen are strong, no doubt reinforced by seeing them replayed over and over again through the years. I suppose those memories play a big part in my image of a President and just like there has never been a man born who can measure up to my Daddy, the same holds true for presidents.

December 7, 2015

Be Not Afraid

“Be not afraid.

I go before you always.

Come follow me,

And I will give you rest.”

Like most people, I have been shaken by the recent events of violence around the world. Bloody scenes of wounded men and women have been brought directly into our home on increasingly larger and sharper HD television screens. It is difficult to comprehend and it shakes our sense of security to the core. It is equally challenging not to respond to these horrific events without fear. Many have chosen to arm themselves and guns sales have hit a new high. Since I can’t see myself buying a gun, I am doing my best to choose to respond with faith and hope.

In a county where people insist on having “In God We Trust” stamped on our coins and including “One nation under God” in our Pledge of Allegiance, we seem to have forgotten that if we indeed believe these things, God should be in charge. Why are we so afraid?

To take this one step further, if we are a majority of Christians in this country, why aren’t we following the words of the Christ? What happened to “Blessed are the peacemakers?” I don’t remember Jesus telling the Apostles to include a knife or sword with them when they went from town to town preaching the Gospel. And from what I’ve read about the Roman occupation, the Holy Land, wasn’t the safest place to be walking around unarmed. And yet they did. They had faith.

So as Christmas approaches, and we prepare our homes to welcome the Christ child, let us also take some time to prepare our hearts as well, to make a place to receive Christ and to try to increase our faith and take those first steps at life in hope and no longer in fear.

February 12, 2015

A Few Measly Thoughts

Can modern parenting get much more complex? It seems every time you turn on the news there is someone offering their two cents about what is and what isn’t good parenting. Lately the debate is centered on inoculating children for measles.

While I can understand a parent’s deep desire to make the best decisions possible to insure their child is healthy and protected from all the dangers of the world, I do wonder if some of the young folks making these decisions have any concept of just what a horrible disease measles is and why it just might be better to take the risk.

I came down with the measles in late April, 1960. My mother first noticed I wasn’t feeling well one Saturday at lunch time when I wouldn’t eat my peanut butter and jelly sandwich. My Aunt Kathy was going to take me to see “101 Dalmatians” and I had to eat my sandwich before she came to pick me up. I couldn’t eat it and began to cry. Since I was such an even tempered child, (I’m taking license here), Mom, checked my forehead, put a nix on the movie and put me in bed.

The next several weeks are a blur. I remember being camped-out on the living room couch with a sheet to cover me and a bucket by my side. My whole body ached and voices sounded hushed and far away. There were glasses of water with paper straws and saltine crackers to nibble on. I had no concept of time, only that my dad would carry me down in the morning and then back up to my bed at night.

Through the course of the disease, I missed almost four weeks of school including the May Day celebration where I had been elected to reign as queen. By my brother’s first birthday celebration on the 11th, I was still too sick to get off the couch. Instead, my parents gave me a couple of balloons to make me feel better.

Fortunately, as soon as I was diagnosed, my siblings received gamma-globulin injections and were spared the full disease and my parents, who were in their mid-twenties, the agony of seeing any more of their children suffer as I did.

Yes, I survived but the weeks of illness dropped my body weight and compromised my immune system leaving me susceptible to almost every other “childhood disease” over the course of the next two years. Consequently, I was very skinny, scrawny little kid.

As I look back at my experience, I can only wonder what those weeks must have been like for my poor mother. Young and with three other little ones to tend to, I can only imagine the anxiety she and my dad both felt and their relief when my fever finally broke and I began to regain my strength.

These days, parents in general are so isolated from seeing their children suffer from these horrible viral infections. When my children were growing, bacterial infections like strep throat and ear infections were the worse thing I had to watch for and even then, antibiotics and twenty-four hours of rest generally took care of the problem. My children had chicken pox and one bout with influenza, but for the most part, were healthy. As a society, we have forgotten how these diseases; measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, pertussis and polio once ravaged our communities and indiscriminately took the lives of our little ones.

It is not surprising that measles has shot across the country as fast as it has. Our guard has been down for such a very long time and we have forgotten what it looks like to see our children suffer on an everyday basis. Without experiencing it first-hand or knowing what it feels like to be that sick, how could we know?

In the old days, one thing that kept kids safe was the fact that before they went to school, they stayed at home, where they were generally isolated from the rest of the world. Today, it is the norm that little children spend time together in day care centers while their parents work outside the home. The reality is that you simply cannot take tiny children, whose immune systems are not fully developed and put them together in small spaces and expect they will remain healthy unless some precautions are taken. Immunizations are really the only effective way to manage these viral infections.

Again, I’m not about to tell any parent what to do, but, I do feel that if any parent makes the choice to not have their child vaccinated, they should be fully aware of what they are risking. There has been a bit of chatter correlating the MMR vaccine to autism, none of which has been clinically substantiated. We all know what autism looks like and it is indeed a frightening thought for any parent. But now, maybe after parents re-examine what measles look like, they might reconsider why the vaccine was such an important discovery and not discount it.

The simple fact is that I was very lucky. Given the severity of my case of measles, without proper care or a handful of other variables, I could have died. Now that’s scary!

January 21, 2015

If Chickens Can Be Free-Range, Why Not Children As Well?

My friend Louise's hens, Lucy and Ethel — My friend Louise’s hens, Lucy and Ethel

The other day while in the grocery store, I noticed Dave’s furrowed brows as I placed a carton of eggs in our cart. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “I’m just wondering why you’re paying twice as much for brown eggs.” He replied. I explained they weren’t just brown eggs, they were “free-range” eggs and I feel better about buying them. The thought of chickens being treated like machines, cramped in tiny laying boxes doesn’t sit well with me. “It just makes me feel better.” I told him. It is a quality of life issue.

The next day I saw a report on the news regarding a woman who was being investigated by CPS in her town for allowing her two children, aged ten and six to walk together to a neighborhood playground “unsupervised.” The children have been tagged as “free-range” kids.

Like most folks my age, I guess you could say I was raised as a “free-range” child. I’m not sure I like the term which implies I was allowed to wander where ever I wanted, but I was given a much larger area to roam than my children were. Part of the reason I had a larger area to roam was that since as I child I lived in the same town my parents did as well as some generations back, there was a sense of security, of knowing who lived in each house and their knowledge of who I was and who my family were.

But, when my family moved away from our home town when I was nine, nothing really changed. My brothers and sister and I walked to school each morning while our mother stayed at home with our newborn brother. We never thought there was anything odd about our walking the several blocks to our school, rain or shine. We learned how to dress appropriately, navigate the streets and get to school on time.

These lessons were not always easily learned. Sometimes we would get a late start to school or dawdle making us late for assembly. Those times we faced the stern looks and scolding of Sister Veronica. In all fairness, she was not a harsh woman so we were not scarred by the experience but knew full well we didn’t want to have to face her again under similar circumstances.

As a child, walking was my main source of transportation. We walked to our friends’ homes, to the movies, to girl scout meetings and occasionally downtown to spend our allowance. For safety reasons, we travelled in pairs; either with a sibling or friend. These little adventures on our own helped us to build important life skills in time management, navigation and most importantly in dealing with strangers. They were important steps in developing into strong, confident, independent young people with good instincts regarding situational awareness.

It’s a tough call to know when to hold children close, and when to let them have some growing space. I know I held my own children to a smaller range area than I had but I also eventually let them go off on their own adventures. To say that they were unsupervised because I didn’t hover over them would be wrong. They couldn’t go off without permission, they had a specific place to go (which I’m now learning isn’t where they always went, but that’s another story) and had to be home at a certain time. To me, this is parental supervision. I suppose the question is at what age letting two children go to a neighborhood playground unescorted is appropriate.

Again, it’s not an easy question to answer, but I do believe that it is one best answered by a parent; someone who knows their children and trusts that they are old enough to handle the situation. In the case of the family in the news story, the parents seemed pretty ordinary. There was no sign of neglect or lack of concern for the children’s welfare.

I don’t pretend to know the answer for all parents, but I think one good way to begin would be to take some quiet time to determine what is tempering your decisions about your children; instinct or fear? Fear is never a good point to start from. Once you find your instinct, you can begin to encourage your children to develop theirs and their confidence along with it.

And Dave, I’m going to continue to pay more for my free-range eggs. I can’t say that I notice they taste any different, but they make me feel better about myself.

August 25, 2014

Can’t Get ‘er Done!

I'm just a bill The other day I heard someone say that the US Congress is considered less popular than influenza by many Americans. Recent years have shown our legislative branch unable to reach a consensus on anything, making accomplishing even the most insignificant of tasks nearly impossible. General cocktail party and barbecue conversation puts the blame on a waning moral compass on the part of the country or more simply put; “they’re all crooks”. The implication is that in order to be elected to office, a person is somehow not walking the straight and narrow. While for some that may be true, I’ve noticed that smaller groups of people, when attempting to work together on a project, can struggle with similar challenges in trying to get something done.

For the past several months, our tiny parish of 150 families has struggled with the task of installing a few cabinets in or social hall to create a small coffee bar in the lounge area to provide more storage for paper products as well as ease the congestion in the kitchen after Mass on Sundays. At first it seemed like a fairly straight forward plan. Our Hospitality Committee requested and was granted the funds from our Parish Council. We even purchased the cabinets, countertop and hardware for the installation. But when the time came to hire a contractor to do the work, that’s when the fun began.

Instead of the Hospitality Committee simply hiring a local contractor with a known track record, folks started popping up with a variety of opinions on how the project should proceed. Members of the Finance Committee felt that we should be required to obtain three written estimates prior to choosing a contractor. Others felt that before we even hired a contractor, we should do a five-year plan on the entire kitchen, to evaluate the impact of putting cabinets on a wall that may be removed during future renovations. Still others felt we should save the money on paying someone to complete the work and have parishioners do the install. All this spawned a flurry of emails back and forth from all the different committees each defending their position and virtually no one stepping back to any point of consensus. The result is that almost ten weeks since the meeting when we decided to purchase the cabinets, instead of having an inviting snack bar in our lounge, we have a pile of cabinets, still in their boxes, stashed in our great hall with a length of counter top perched on top. Indications are that we are moving forward with the project, but making our deadline of September 7th seems less and less promising.

To his credit, our priest, Father Michael has stayed out of the fray, letting us hammer out the details on our own. I sometimes wonder how silly we must seem to him as a newly arrived immigrant from Uganda. Although he never shares any of the strife he’s no doubt witnessed in his lifetime in a country with a government that has been truly unstable at times, I can only imagine how petty this whole debate must seem to him.

I don’t know if it’s just human nature that creates this constipation of progress or if we have evolved into a nation of people who are always looking for the angle, the weak link, that tends to blow even the smallest of projects into gigantic obstacle courses of discussions, emails, hot tempers, hurt feelings, and in this case the opposite of what our coffee bar was intended to provide, a sense of community.

This Sunday, I happened to meet Father as he was coming into the Hall before Mass as I was leaving. He looked at the corner where the new coffee bar will someday be and said, “I thought the new bar would be done by now.” So did I Father,so did I.