GOOD INTENTIONS

Why is Yoda on my blog? The other day I put that quote from Yoda up on my classroom board—the one about "Do or do not. There is no try"—my quote of the day. 

"You've got that wrong," said a student. "I wouldn't know but my dad is this crazy fan of Star Wars. You know." He laughed and shrugged. It seems like every time I put it up, someone tells me it's wrong and so I make their corrections and I change what I have saved in my computer. 

So this boy and I looked up the movie scene on YouTube, he dug out his earphones so he could listen to it, and we finally got it right. 

The quote is about intentions, and it warns us that it's what we do that matters, and that "trying" isn't enough. "Trying" means we're already making excuses for what we intend to do—fail. 

Three years ago I was given a class with a group of freshmen. They didn't know why they were in the class and I wasn't given much to go on either.

"What am I supposed to do with them?" I kept asking. 

"They are underperforming," I was told. These were students who were not testing well or performing where people thought they could in school. Everyone was pretty sure they could do better. But "everyone" had no suggestions about how I should help them. 

So we looked at reading and writing activities. I tried a packaged vocabulary and spelling program suggested by another teacher, we read stories and essays and books they chose, and we produced a weekly newspaper. There were successes, and I could see the light come on for some of these students. But it didn't go over for everyone. Some students resented the class and me for pushing them to write and read more. 

At one point I talked to a student who had been giving me trouble. He talked back, he talked to his friend instead of participating, he did not seem to enjoy reading. 

"What's going on?" I asked him one day.

"Here's the thing," he said. He looked at me, leaned back in his chair and shoved his feet out in front of me. He sighed and looked me straight in the eye. His body language told me that I clearly needed some basic facts explained. "I don't read, Ms. Priddy. I can read. I can, but I don't. I might look at a page and move my eyes so you think I'm reading, but I don't read." He didn't mean to be rude, he said, he just didn't do school. 

His intentions were clear. Nothing much I did seemed to make a difference with this kid. I looked for drama and we read graphic novels. The class loved Maus. Whatever this young man intended, he had plans. 

"I'm going to college," he told me. 

"What do you want to study?"

He looked confused. Study? "I want to play football." 

This boy is a young man now, and he has bigger goals, more realistic goals about his future. But his intentions wouldn't count for much if his actions hadn't changed too. 

If you’ve just deliberately stabbed your best friend, your intentions might matter to the district attorney. It might make a difference whether you slipped the knife into your pocket to bring with you or picked it up off the kitchen counter—the difference between a crime of premeditation and a crime of opportunity, the difference between life behind bars or getting out of prison in time to see your grandchild start Kindergarten. And either way, your friend is still bleeding to death on his kitchen floor, whatever you claim you intended.

In the rest of your life, intentions mean very little to anyone but yourself. What you intended, what you say you meant to do, is nothing in the face of what you actually do—what you neglect or what you begin, how hard you work at it, whether you persist, and what you accomplish—beyond that, why should anyone care about your intentions?

Students sometimes tell me that they intend to do better. “I’m going to do better than last term,” they tell me. “I’m getting everything done.” Oddly, this statement usually guarantees they will continue to fail in exactly the same way they have in the past. My heart constricts and I have a hard time smiling and accepting their good intentions in a positive spirit. It's not enough, I know, those good intentions that they have just expressed. Too often, nothing is about to change because they will continue to skip class, miss deadlines, and fail to study. They are not lying to me. I understand that. They are lying to themselves. They want to believe intentions are enough. 

We all do this. We buy the diet book, as if having it in our possession were the secret to losing weight. We wake up in the morning and swear we'll never do that—whatever it was we did last night—again. We tell everyone we’re going to cut back on drinking, we purchase vitamins or running shoes or a weighty novel. We behave as if our intentions were the point.

Action is the point. What we do counts. Intentions count for nothing. Even if you lost your temper and the knife just happened to be there on the counter beside your hand, you killed someone, and it’s the death that matters. Your intention only matters when you get to court—either way, you’ve committed the crime. The best of intentions can’t alter that.  

Regret, too, matters very little except to ourselves. We can be sorry, but it’s more important that we act better next time. If we want to change our behavior, we must, as the saying goes: Just do it. And we can if we don't allow our failure to become our future. 

Giving up because we screw up is a cop out. Read Dorianne Laux's brilliant poem: "Antilamintation: A Poetic Antidote to Regret." Or pay attention to Cheryl Strayed, who assures us “The useless days will add up to something…. These things are your becoming”, who knows our mistakes aren't the end of us, but part of the process of living. Our lives wander until we are ready to act on what we intend instead of merely talk about it.

I see it all the time—every year I look at some student I've worked with for a while and say: "Wow!"  I said last year to the boy who as a freshman only wanted to go to college to play football. "You are doing great this term!" 

"Yeah," he said. And we both grinned because he knew it and I knew it. He was turning things around.

I asked him just the other evening during Open Library if anyone was helping him apply for college. 

"Yeah," he said again. And he told me more about his plans and taking the SAT. 

Maybe his situation's not perfect, but that's okay, because he's doing it. He's getting the work done. 

We can get up every day and—without even promising anything to anyone out loud, and just in that moment—we can do what we need to do and the next moment we can do it and the next and the next and the next—we can do what we intended, by just doing it. 

KOIGU

Koigu is hand-painted two-ply Merino yarn from a small company in Canada. I have been working with it for as long as it's been around. The colors are marvelous and variable and I began weaving with it to use up my yarn stash (since I was never going to make that many socks). I have put ten warps on my loom in the past year, all but one was mostly or entirely Koigu. Each warp has yielded at least two items—some combination of shawls and baby blankets—which I weave with different wefts so that each is different. The photos do not do justice to the colors, but they provide some idea of what I've been up to. 

Maroon. This was the first Koigu warp I put on and I wasn't sure how I liked it. Weaving with knitting yarns isn't supposed to work well, but Koigu is so tempting, and I had collected so many skeins, and I was so tired of knitting socks. Truth be told, knitting is painful, though I can still manage very small projects. Anyway, I wove a shawl and a baby blanket and they are lovely. The maroon is much darker than it appears.

Sunflower.  This warp combined Koigu with gorgeous 2-ply dyed-in-the-wool handspun, also of merino, mostly in gold with other colors, dyed in the wool. The shawl is also merino, but the baby blanket has a weft of pink merino/alpaca/silk. I had very little trouble with the handspun I used in the warp. I had one break where the yarn was fragile—both plys were thin at the sam spot. But I managed and the result was well worth a little extra care. I wish I had more of the handspun, which is fine but strong merino and marvelously variable in color.

New leaf. This warp is also a combination of Koigu and handspun, and I put two shawls together to make an afghan, and another very small piece with sage merino/alpaca/silk weft. 








Wild rose. THis is mostly Koigu with a lovely handspun two-ply that yeilded two shawls and a baby blanket at right. This was the first warp using red tones because of my granddaughter Ruby.

Blackberry & blueberry. This purple warp goes toward blue-violet in one shawl and then toward true purple. The photo doesn't do it justice. Two shawls in berry stain colors which show up too pale in this photo.

Golden-lichen. This warp is based on Koigu 800, a yarn that travels through gold and copper to purple. Two shawls, one with a weft mostly of one-ply handspun and the other mostly Koigu.

Ruby. This is a pure Koigu warp and weft in gorgeous ruby tones, leaning toward lavender, pink, and purple. Two shawls and a baby blanket. 

Forest blue. This was woven to suit a particular pair of people and I didn't think I would love it as much as I do. I found a sock yarn in Ashland last spring that put a spark of violet and strong green into what started out as a pure blue warp. A shawl and two baby blankets, one leaning toward green, one toward blue. 

Copper midnight.  I ordered some Koigu online that arrived and was so bright I was a little dismayed. But the results in a warp were surprising and lovely. Two shawls and a baby blanket. That's it at left and also at the top, the full length draped on my drying rack, though the weave is distorted on my screen.

Loden green. Here is the tenth warp. One shawl done and a second started. The loom is a four-harness, Baby Wolf, and was gifted to me b a friend who was surprised to find a third loom shoved into the corner of her mother's basement. I had originally intended to weave narrow twill scarves, but instead I am weaving simple tabby full width, with some log cabin pattern, which creates vertical and horizontal bars.

The first shawl woven and rolled onto the front beam. This is the first warp I've woven using something other than Koigu as the primary yarn and it gave me some trouble. I don't think I'll try a non-Koigu project again, though I like the colors. (The colors are better than they appear.) In dozens of Koigu skeins I have not found more than three plys tied in. The yarn is softer, washes perfectly, and has the range of color I am looking for.  

The weaving is satisfying, creative, methodical and relaxing. Watching the colors pass through my fingers, makes me smile. On weekends I sometimes weave twenty inches in a day, but weekdays I rarely weave because I need a nap when I get home and then the light is gone. This last shawl will probably drag on for weeks, and I am anxious to be off onto the next one, which will be Koigu. 

The skein and wound ball, left, are the same color number, but the wound skein has much more violet. This sort of variation is one of the things I love best about Koigu.

DRUG STORY

I have three true drug stories that I sometimes share with my students. One involves heroin and a toddler; in another a student falls out of a second story window directly onto her head; and the third has a beach and train. Whatever you might be imagining right now about where these stories go and how they end, the real stories are probably worse even though only one ends with someone dying.

These are the exceptional stories, the ones where they are, in fact, stories instead of merely consequences. I know plenty of other events and people involving illegal drug abuse. They all boil down to two outcomes: And then he or she got clean or And then he or she died. The latter are the tales I rarely share because by the time people have been in prison and abused everyone they know in order to get high and then died, they aren’t using anymore and their stories are too predictable to be interesting. They didn’t choose anything, they are just gone.

Choosing to use drugs can mess up your life—everyone knows that—but it’s especially true when the user is looking for an anesthetic. And that’s what I’ve seen a lot of in my life—people choosing drugs to deaden the pain. I get that. I really do. My drugs of choice are aspirin, coffee, and the occasional glass of wine. I don’t let them get in the way of feeling and dealing with my own life. But using illegal drugs or abusing the legal ones, does get in the way and there are consequences.

Our lives are all about choices and I won’t pretend I’ve made the right decision every time I've been faced with a choice. On any given day I could tell you about a half dozen mistakes I’d made in the last week. So mistakes aren't my point. We all make mistakes. No life is without suffering and challenge and hard choices and mistakes and regrets. I’m choosing to write about something else. I want to think about consequences. Like I said in a meeting recently: There are always consequences, but sometimes the consequences are really good.

When I choose goals and work toward them, I can go places.

When I choose to forgive others and myself, I am free to be happy.

When I choose to face the life I’m dealt, instead of pining for what I wish my life was about, when I focus on the good detail over the bad stuff, when I choose to be fair and kind instead of something else, when I make those choices, I get a life I can be proud of.

And when I carry my pain without damaging myself or others, when I can carry pain and carry on, then I am strong enough to live and love, no matter what comes. 

Above: Clam and Mussel by Georgia O'Keefe.

THE WARD

It had been a long time since I was in a psychiatric ward. This one was labeled Behavior Health and it felt more open than the last one I’d visited—smaller rooms, but less obvious restraints once we left the visitors’ alcove and were allowed past the locked doors.

The last time was more than thirty years ago, the day after Halloween of 1977, while we still lived in Seattle. An older friend attempted suicide and my husband, stopping by to visit as he walked his route as a Pet License Enforcement Officer, found her unconscious in an ambulance in front of her house. Gary helped the medics and her Bavarian tenant search the house for whatever she’d swallowed. She would not be grateful to waken in Harborview Hospital, wearing a gown, and unable to leave. There were laws.

We made our way by a series of busses to that enormous pile of buildings on top of First Hill, where it had been since 1931. In those days drug overdoses from public music festivals sometimes clogged their wards, victims of a psychotic break, people unable to afford private hospitals. It wasn’t a place you went to if you had options. The ward we’d been directed to smelled faintly and then more strongly of disinfectant, a scent that burned the inside of my nose.

“She won’t see you,” the nurse said to Gary, but then she turned to me: “She is willing to see you.”

I was terrified. Would she yell, would she blame me, threaten me? I didn't know any "crazy" people and didn't know how to act. But I went down the corridors and through the locked doors to a cold gray room with a woman I barely recognized strapped to a table.

“Why didn’t you let me die!" She kept shouting. Gary would tell me he could hear her out in the waiting room. “I only wanted to die,” she said to me. “What business was it of anyone else?” I combed her hair. I could think of nothing useful to say except, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.” Tears slid across her face and into her ears.

And here we were again, for another reason, to see a different person, and in a different city. Not a suicide this time. We sat in chairs outside the Nurses’ Station. There were patients in gowns and others in street clothing.

One man who was walking by, paused and tipped his head at Gary. “You look like someone I know,” a man said. He smiled and seemed friendly and reasonable.

“I used to live on this planet,” Gary said.

The man, Michael, grinned, then tipped his head again until he seemed sure of what Gary was saying. He was clearly delighted with this answer, introduced himself, and asked who we were here to visit, a person he hadn’t met.

Michael was a chronic delusional and on serious meds, which we learned because his caseworker brought him her written recommendations and he read his entire file aloud, just a few feet from where we were sitting. It didn’t take long. He told his caseworker that he was concerned about what had become of his possessions. He apologized several times for his anger, though he sounded perfectly reasonable to me, not angry at all. He wanted to wear his own jeans. He shrugged with irony about the expectation that he could explain thirty years of illness in a ten-minute interview. “That’s the problem,” he turned and confided to Gary, “once they have you in the system, they have you.” The caseworker assured him that his frustration was understandable. He did not raise his voice. The caseworker left.

Gary and Michael discussed another patient sitting nearby who had no English and a translator hadn’t yet arrived, then they talked about coffee—they both like it strong—and Mountain Dew and Hank Williams and the places they had each lived—Arizona, California, Washington. They laughed at one another’s jokes.

“Whoever you’re here to visit is lucky,” he said, glancing at me. “I have no one to come.” He explained why he was in the hospital this time. “Someone,” he said, “. . . someone reported that I was a danger to myself and others.” This is the official complaint. What he’d done was begin talking to someone and then refusing to stop. Perhaps he was shouting or argumentative. Now he was distressed. “Once you’re in the system, you’re fucked.”

He had something he wanted us to see and said he’d be right back. "Wait here." He returned with a written one-page “mission statement” and credited his survival to his ability to express himself articulately—his word. He seemed intelligent and even well-read and engaging. He was a year younger than I am, and also seemed fit and in good physical health. But he said he resisted the expectation of “total compliance” which I understood from his point of view, but also the need for compliance from the viewpoint of the people who care for him. He has a sister, he said, but she’s given up on him. I wondered if his family had money even if they did not visit. I wondered if he had periods when he functioned on his own, if medication allowed him to function better or if it blunted his mind and felt too much like another sort of restraint. I wondered about his education. I wondered if his entire life was like this.

Gary was the one to do most of the talking with Michael. He’s always been good talking to people on the edge. He seems completely at ease and he can get anyone to laugh.

Michael said he was arrested for being too friendly. “Yeah, the guy said I was being manic.” He’s paranoid, but like the caseworker said, it’s understandable.

Harborview, if its website is to be believed, is an innovative medical center these days, pioneering new treatments of respiratory distress, trauma and burns; and advancements in multidisciplinary critical care and neurosurgery. Decades after he called an ambulance and our friend was sent to that hospital, Gary gathered the nerve to search for her name in the phone book and call her. Her address was the same, and she picked up. “Well hello!” she said. She was just home from the grocery store. She didn’t drive anymore because of her age, but rode her bicycle around the city. She laughed and they talked for a few minutes, sharing news of mutual friends from back in the day. 

MAKING THEM STOP

“The U.S. Department of Justice has reported that 37% of students don't feel safe at school because of bullying.”—Time

During the 90s and for over a year, I participated for at least an hour a day in an online discussion forum that still exists, called Speakeasy. During that time I was on the receiving end of a number of attacks, that were not always my fault. One example: I responded to another person as “Jonathon” which he took to be a deliberate misspelling of his name, Jonathan. He came unglued all over me. The truth is that I had a student that year who spelled his name Jonathon and I am a careless speller and a lousy typist and I honestly hadn’t intended to offend him by spelling his name wrong.

The bigger truth is that had we been talking face to face, there would have been no misunderstanding. First, he wouldn’t have found my remarks quite so offensive since they would have been attended by facial expression, tone of voice, and come from a woman old enough to be his mother, only shorter. Besides, I wouldn’t have had to spell his name.

Abuse is too easy online, and right from the beginning, the tendency to cultivate an online persona in order to conceal oneself was part of cyber culture. People hid behind that fake name or the safety of distance and said really terrible things they would never say to another human being. Even I could see this and it’s the reason I use my own name and posted anonymously only once. (I still feel guilty about that one time.) If I’m going to say something, I think I should be willing to own it.

This does not, unfortunately, prevent me from committing terrible acts of rudeness. At heart I am socially awkward and tactless, but not unkind. For years I was the only member of my staff to argue with administrators. Other staff members would thank me afterwards, but wouldn't agree with me in public. Now, as I age, I find I care even more about making my opinion heard by my peers, regardless of the consequences. I also now have a principal who usually reasonable and fair, despite everything.

So. Sometimes I cross the line. I don’t do it deliberately or to bully anyone, but with passion, and because I feel a principle is at stake. Yes, there’s a marvelous line early in the novel Wiked about Elphaba caring about justice and how that doomed her. Sometimes I cross the line thinking that's what I'm pursuing. Which is why I need to be especially careful online, right?

Each year, teachers are required to complete a number of state-mandated online trainings—up to ten or so now, I think, including poisons, abuse, harassment—with a series of multiple choice questions at the end of each. A new state law requires bullying awareness and that's one of our new trainings. One "fact" presented was that "cyber-bullying is not as common as face to face bullying." I question that since I know we've had to deal with several incidents of cyber-bullying and what I hear from kids is that it's worse than face to face. During a class training we all had to do with students, the same "fact" came up, and kids immediately grumbled in disagreement. Further, my own experience online suggests that it's easier for normally reasonable people to get out of hand when they are only facing a computer screen instead of another person.

Then I found an article published a few months ago and they say the same thing and probably based on the same source: "And despite fears that cyberbullying via Facebook and Formspring has exploded, the Bureau of Justice Statistics' most recent figures, from 2007, show that only 3.9% of bullied students say they were bullied outside school grounds." —There's the problem right there! Out of date information. Five years may not be a long time in regards some things, but it's a millennium in terms of social media.

Further, that article cites other statistics from other studies in more detail than I read in my online course. One example:

“In a survey of 43,000 high school students completed in 2010, the Josephson Institute's Center for Youth Ethics found that 47% had ‘been bullied, teased or taunted’ at school but that 50% had been bullies themselves. This suggests a lot of overlap between the two groups, meaning that the world isn't cleanly divided into bullies and victims. Psychologists have long known that those who are brutalized are more likely to strike back than mere bystanders. It's not always easy for a teacher busy in the classroom to distinguish the bullied from the tormented.” 

Now it is perfectly possible that many kids are both bullied and bullies, and it’s even possible that the study found overlap between the two groups, but the evidence presented does not support this conclusion. It could as easily mean that 47% of kids are bullied, 50 % are the bullies, and 3% are not involved at all. I don't think that's what the study found, but it is what is presented. And this is Time Magazine. One thing they might have right is the number of kids who don't feel safe at school. And that feeling may come because people with the power fail to do anything to stop bullies.

The Time article claims to debunk myths about bullying, but it really sets up a few new ones. One myth might be that programs designed stop bullying only make it worse. If you want a really good outline of the myths about bullying, read Black Swan Green by David Mitchell. The chapter called “Disco” practically gets cheers in my classes.

Two myths about bullies are that ignoring a bully or beating him or her up will make him stop. Another is the bullies have low self esteem. The truth is that their self-esteem is just fine and bullies beat on others because they are allowed to do it and think they are entitled to do as they please. They won't stop until someone with authority comes along and convinces them they are wrong.

Online “cyber” bullying is common and has been from the start. It is unlikely to stop. It happens during graduate seminars in educational leadership and between writers at Poets & Writers. It’s unrealistic to hope it will not also happen between teenagers. We make mistakes and assume facts that are not facts. We spout ridiculous theories, repeat gossip, and lose our temper. We make statements hoping to explain poor behavior and end up trying to justify it, which is another animal altogether. We need a higher authority stepping in, or we need our own conscience to make us rethink our words so that we stop.

We all could use a few lessons in literary manners and proper research techniques, a few reminders and refreshers along the way. And that applies to the people who should know better as surely as it applies to the students in my classroom.

THANK YOU, EMMA

For years after my father died of lung cancer it was all I could do not to slap cigarettes out of the hands of complete strangers. There are some subjects about which I find it hard to be objective and calm. I fail again and again to be reasonable and fair. Here’s another example.

I originally found the photo at left, as best I can recall, on a web page titled “50 Photos That Will Make You Cry.”

Well, yes. This one did.

I looked at this photograph for a long time, the tears rolling under my chin, and I thought about that mother returning alive to her child. I don’t know her. I didn’t  even remember whether that first posting included the soldier’s name or the gender of her child or where she was when they were reunited, or even that this is a reunion. But that’s what I see: a soldier home alive, in an airport, grateful to hold her child again. That’s what I see.

It made me think of former students serving in the military today and how I fear for their safety. It made me think of the reasons they joined—usually through financial desperation, but also patriotism. I thought about their parents and their partners and their children. I thought about how their lives are changed forever by what they see and do and what is done to them. I thought about the students whose parents serve, the two students’ whose father returned with brain injuries, the boy with behavior issues believed to be the result of living with a veteran still struggling to overcome emotional damage from a previous war, and the many with a parent on active duty in a very dangerous part of the world today—the ones who hope to have that reunion and worry a little bit every single day. I thought about the obligation we have as a nation to arm our military with everything necessary for them to do their jobs and return home safely. I thought about what we owe them when they are unable to return. I thought about what we owe them when they return injured, even when that injury is invisible. I thought about what we owe them when they return and need to make a life all over again after doing their duty. I thought about the stories I was told as a child by members of my family who served in the Air Force and Army and Marines. I thought about the stories my family would not tell, could not repeat. I thought about the care we should be taking before we send people into danger, how very careful we should be, as if every single one of these men and women were our own child who might never come home again. 

What I saw was a terrible reminder of the horrors of war.

Someone else saw something different. Just the other day I found the same photo in my Facebook feed with these captions: “I made a better America for you sweetie I killed 10 kids of your very same age.”

Showing a mother arriving home and holding her child—a real person, a real mother, a woman who served her country and came home to her child in tears. A recognizable actual person. This is really someone’s idea of an appropriate use of that photo? I have been anti-war from the beginning, but it's possible to make that point without exploiting a real person's homecoming photo. It has no need of a caption to make its point.

Had the person who posted that photo been standing before me, I would have had a hard time not slapping her, like the cigarettes that killed my father. Since I never have slapped a smoker, I probably wouldn't have slapped my friend on Facebook. I wrote her a response instead. Some people commented "the truth hurts" and others called the use of the photo "indecent." I suppose I'd have to agree with both those sentiments. 

We are all entitled to our opinions, as a brave student said to me after school on Friday. Emma had said something over the intercom of my school on the anniversary of 9/11, used specific words (not rude ones) that brought up old, painful stuff for me, and I had unthinkingly reacted with rude words of my own in my classroom and before students, then I apologized and tried to explain myself and my reaction. Word got back to the student and she stood before me to say what I should have said first because I am supposed to be older and more mature, what I’d intended to say and not managed to get to between Tuesday and Friday: We are all entitled to our opinions and we can differ without flinging more abuse into the world. We can make our point with nailing someone else to the cross.  

That photo above? That's a genuine person, Terri Gurrola, reunited with her daughter after serving in Iraq for seven months.

SUNDAY SOUP

Saturday we headed north to school, and then the rest of the day flew by in little tasks, napping, and reading. This Sunday morning Gary and I headed south to the Wheeler antique store with old flatware. I used to have a red-handled manual eggbeater and I miss it, but I counted out my ones and bought two forks and a spoon to fill out a couple of mismatched place settings I’ve been collecting over the years. This was my treat for the day.

When we got home I flipped on the television, a habit I have while I’m cooking. I put all the vegetable clippings frozen during this past week into my big green enameled pot with water to boil for vegetable stock. As it simmered I began weaving. I didn’t actually watch the TV much because my loom is in the living room and the TV is in the kitchen, but I listened from around the corner at my loom. After the brides found their dresses, Long Island Medium came on. I’d never heard of this show and I really hate “reality TV” but it was on and I was busy with yarn. It’s only a half hour show, but the new season begins tonight and there seemed to be a marathon of sorts—one episode followed another. Theresa Caputo explains: “I talk to the dead.” Wherever she goes, “Spirit” talks to her. She laughs when she tells people who don’t know her: “I’m a medium.” And yeah, it’s ridiculous. For the record, I don’t believe in magic or mediums, but I do recognize a smart and kind woman when I hear one. Client after client was told that their loved ones who had passed over forgive, love, and watch over them. She also walks up to strangers at the gym or in a shopping center and asks, "Have you lost your mother recently?" and because this is television and editing exists, the answer is always a shocked Yes.

Theresa tells the wife who is thinking about dating that her dead husband supports this because he doesn’t want her to mourn forever, but she should know that he loves and approves of how she is raising their child. She tells the man who held his mother as she died that because he was there for her she was not afraid to go. She tells the child who sat on her grandmother’s bed after school each day that even though she had Alzheimer’s the grandmother heard what her granddaughter told her and is grateful the granddaughter shared her day. She tells the grieving daughter that her mother says everything that needed to be said was said, and that it’s okay to get rid of her old clothes. She tells adult children who were not with their loved ones when they passed that their love made it possible for them to pass over, that if they had been present they would have had a harder time leaving. The dead are in a better place and surrounded by their departed loved ones. The medium tells them precisely what we all need to hear: It's time to let go without regret. “This is to pull you out of that dark place.”

I don’t believe in mediums or magic or the return of spirit voices. This woman was funny and exuberant and entertaining. So I listened as I wove forty inches on my loom, the stock simmered, and cut vegetables for the curried lentil soup I will have for lunch this week. My Sunday soup. And I thought about my mother and how much I miss her.

The rest of the evening I need to prepare for my week at school. But right now she’s telling a man that his dead brother felt supported and loved, always, even though he committed suicide; that he is sorry for the trouble he brought to the family; that the man’s guilt is unnecessary—there is nothing he could have done. Everyone cries. 

Maybe that’s what they want to hear. When you can’t forgive yourself, you do need to hear that you are forgiven in a manner that your heart can accept. I know that too well. I thought about how my father died and my mother, friends who had suicided and other loved ones who died, leaving some bit of business incomplete like a ragged hem on my heart.

Is Theresa a faker or a charlatan? I can’t say. It’s probable. But even if she’s only in this for the money, she might be cheaper than therapy. 

It’s also possible that something else is going on. Maybe this medium picks up on clues that most of us, and even she, can't think about consciously. I have always believed that we observe more than we know—that we are both stupider and smarter than we can know. That’s not magic, but it feels like it sometimes. It’s what some writers call the muse; it’s what happens when you search for an earring for a week and then one day you come into the living room, lift a corner of the carpet and there it is; it’s those crazy times when you seem to know things you know you aren’t smart enough to have figured out in cold blood. It’s your unconscious handing you gifts.

I will probably never watch her show again. By accident or luck I stumbled onto it because the station I wanted to watch wasn't coming in. So I flipped through channels, looking for something to watch. Flip, flip, flip, as I rearranged my funky flatware on the dining table, and then boiling water distracted me. The wedding dresses were funny and then the medium came on and I listened with half my mind for hours while I went about my Sunday tasks. It is absurd, you will say, but I can understand why people have this woman come to their homes and help them let go. “You received a beautiful gift today," she says. 

WHAT'S IN A NAME?

There are several Jan Priddys in the world. One in Alaska is younger than me and is a marine biologist. I’ve never met her, but I like to think that had my father lived, they might have become acquainted since my dad worked for the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries in Seattle and had done some work in Alaska for the Bureau. He was even offered a job in Juneau, but Mom refused to move to that city perched between sea and wilderness.

Another Jan Priddy in England is about my age, but it’s her married name. I’ve communicated with her through Facebook. The Jan Priddy in the middle of the country does ministry—she looks taller and blonder than I ever have been—and I think there are others less visible on the internet who reside in eastern Washington State and California.

When I Google my own name as “Jan Priddy” I get 3430 results. Some of them are me. I drew the image that a German Afghan fancier took to using as his logo. I ran the Bridge Crossing in Astoria in a competitive time for my age and the Hood to Coast several times. I have the only Jan Priddy listing at Poets & Writers. Some of my essays, poems, and stories show up. So do my book reviews on Goodreads and Amazon and Powell’s Book Store.

My husband’s name is Gary Anderson and I like to tell my students how his locker partner in high school was also Gary Anderson. They were in the same graduating class, about the same height, blond and blue-eyed. Since he asked me this morning, I Googled his full name “Gary Charles Anderson” and there seem to be 7860 results. One is on Facebook. One died at the age of three in 1947.

But what got me started searching was my uncle Harry. Harry Aron, like my dad, mom, and aunt, attended the University of California at Berkeley, which is also where a former student of mine is beginning college this year. It was thinking about James that caused me to recall my uncle, which made me wonder what was going on with his life. I assumed he was dead. He is. But he is also the co-author of some important papers and books. There were nearly 26,000 entries for “Harry Aron”, but when I added Berkeley, I found less than a thousand, and these results all seem to be about Uncle Harry. He's a famous man. I didn't even know that until today. 

My aunt Marcia married Harry Aron shortly after the war. (Above is a wedding picture of my father, mother, Aunt Marcia, and Uncle Harry in 1949 in California.) Harry had been born in Mannheim, but emigrated to the United States at the age of about twelve in 1935. Much of his family was less lucky in surviving the Holocaust. Harry Aron served 1943-1945 in the US Army and then came home to complete his education with a PhD. He lived and taught in California the remainder of his life. Marcia (Smith) Aron and Harry divorced when I was still a girl, and her name doesn't even show up in his official bibliography, but I have almost as many good memories about my uncle as my aunt. Marcia sent me some of my favorite books as a child—The Island of the Blue Dolphin and  The Jungle Book. But neither of them were particularly involved in my life as a child.

It was not until I was a mother myself that I realized what a terrible loss this is, to miss being an aunt or uncle. And I haven’t done a very good job of it myself. My husband has several nieces and nephews. Most have visited for the weekend, but I don’t know their birthdays and we rarely send gifts. There are plenty of reasons for this, of course. But I am sorry that in modern society, we have so many reasons to lose touch with relatives.

Last month my husband and I drove to Seattle—our first trip outside the state since his sister passed away the year before. This time we stayed with his sister Janis, and another sister and brother, plus several cousins and nephews and a niece showed up, because Gary’s cousin Barbara had flown up from Texas with the granddaughter she is raising. Barbara is the daughter of Gary’s mother’s oldest brother, and the two had not seen one another since Gary was a little boy and Barbara not much older. It was a delightful time to pass stories back and forth about their childhoods. There were a lot of questions answered, funny memories shared, and laughter over odd coincidences and family traits. Gary and Barbara both pronounce “coupon” as “que-pon” and don’t get me started on how they pronounce “lawyer”.

We had an afternoon and evening of conversation and laughter and then coffee out the next morning. There was a Farmer at that table, a Priddy, an Anderson, a couple of Apoes, and a Jerochim. We were born all over and live all over this nation. We consider ourselves Christian and Jewish and nothing in particular. We share what families always share—blood and stories. It was a wonderful visit made possible entirely through the efforts of Gary’s sister Jan (Janis) and her husband Pete.

I have never been greatly enamored of researching ancestry, but I do believe in valuing the people we love, the people who become family by chance or by choice. I love you guys. I love you all. 

BEAUTY

“The perception of beauty is a moral test”—Henry David Thoreau (1852)

SURVIVING KOI

A koi named Hanoko lived to be 226 years old, but mostly these colorful carp live to be about 72 in Japan, less in America where they mostly live in less than perfect environments. The Japanese Gardens in Portland, Oregon hope their newly rebuilt environment is perfect and their newly released fish will live lives as long as the people who paid for them.

Koi, or nishikigoi (literally “brocaded carp”), are not goldfish. They show brilliant, spangled patterns in all the colors you might have seen in a dime-store goldfish, but with their substantially larger size and larger scales they do look like silk brocade. Everyone I know who has kept koi in a garden pond has lost them to raccoons, to whom they look like supper.

The first time we visited the gardens, we admired the plants and stones. Eventually we stood on the arched bridge over the upper pond and watched the koi for quite some time. “How do they keep raccoons from getting them,” Gary said. We talked about herons and other birds and wondered about netting the pond at night. Alarms. Traps. We looked up into the mature Douglas fir that surround the gardens, back at the beautiful fish colored gold and orange, silver and yellow and black.

As we were leaving we saw a grounds person and asked him, “What do you do to protect the koi from being eaten?”

He grinned. “We don’t do anything,” he said. “We had a fish last year" he made —a clawing gesture with three fingers of his right hand— "that got slashed and is still in recovery.” But then he went on to explain that the koi are too big for the wading birds and that the garden had added a deep section to the pond. Most of the pond is quite shallow, a couple of feet perhaps, but one section now plunges many feet down and the older fish were quick to recognize this as a place of safety. “It’s too deep for the raccoons.”

As we drove away I suggested that the osprey simply don’t know the koi are up there in the West Hills. These raptors would certainly hunt the koi successfully, but they are fishing the wetlands, which are lower in the landscape.

Last month we returned to witness the release of new, mature koi into the refurbished lower pond which had suffered during an unusually lengthy freeze in 2009 which had knocked out the main pumps and resulted in the deaths of many fish. The newly refurbished pond has a deep well and a backup pump, and, as of two weeks ago, 21 beautiful new koi.

Each of these fish had a sponsor who had paid for the honor of naming their fish. There were to be 22 koi to be released, each well over a foot long, but one wasn’t feeling well. One of the fish was an unsponsored “orphan” and the right to name her (for a donation of $1500) was immediately snapped up by someone present. The fish had been transported in a huge blue plastic tank in the back of a pick-up truck. Each was identified, removed in a special net, and placed in a second, smaller tank before being released into the lower pond. Twenty females and only one lone male koi were released in order, their varietal name—each color pattern is named—and personal name announced. Donors had the close up view and each had their picture taken with “their” fish.

Halfway through the releases, we wandered off to other parts of the garden and then walked back through the trees to our car, having other places to go, and valuing the more typical silence of these gracious gardens over the day’s spectacle.

Koi are cold-water fish and like moving water and space to move. You might find small koi in a local pet store for a few dollars, but older fish of 12-15 inches cost hundreds, sometimes thousands, and must be purchased from importers. They are sold as individuals and may eventually reach three feet in length, given a healthy and spacious environment. Wikipedia has a good entry on koi. They are still bred in Japan, but the fish in the Portland Japanese Gardens’ lower pond were raised to adult size in Hawaii before being brought to Oregon to adjust in quarantine for several weeks before their recent release. The terms of their survival, digging a deeper section of their pool, seems a most elegant solution. 

I have kept individual goldfish alive for almost ten years, but the old plain varieties are difficult to find these days except as dull-colored "feeder fish". In fact, when I last went searching for a pair of ordinary orange comet goldfish, I couldn’t find any at all and had to settle for the fancier fantails, which are pretty but have distorted bodies compared to the elegant, simple lines of koi. Perhaps someday I will have the space to build a proper environment for koi—moving water, 1000 gallons or more, a deep section where wading birds, hungry raccoons, and my cat cannot harass them.

That's the famous Hanoko in 1966 at right. The photos above show the upper pond, a path in the gardens, the man in the pond who made the final release of each new fish into the lower pond, and one lovely koi moseying along in her huge new environment.