Gathering Goat Eggs

I have been meaning to write about this experience for months, but the recent uproar over the Jena Six, including the discussion over at the MotherBlog, has moved it to the top of the pile.

Background: I am writing from the perspective of a prosperous middle class white, who grew up in an entirely white town in an almost entirely white county in a very white state indeed, who ended up as an adult in Prince George's County Maryland, the most affluent majority black county in the United States. If the American Dream has been realized by blacks anywhere in the world, it has been here in PG. What I have learned here is that white guilt fatigue over the continuing racial tension in this country is at the same time tempting and dangerous. Blacks in PG are better off than blacks anywhere else in the world. Sometimes they complain about things that make white folks' eyes roll. But to assume that – to take just one example -- just because the county council was crying racial foul because Nordstrom's won't put a store in PG, that there are no longer serious race issues in the US -- is to be very foolish and very clueless indeed.

My family are liturgical tourists. We take our obligation to assist at Sunday and Holy Day Masses very seriously. We also take our weekends very lightly. There are so many delightful day trips in this part of the country that we are seldom in our home parish, and so we have become experts at finding Catholic churches in out-of-the-way places -- the farther out of the way the better -- and we are accustomed to being strangers at Masses where everyone else has known each other for years. Even given that, our experience at St. Peter Claver Church, of Saint Inigoes MD, was eye-opening and a little unnerving.

In most of the US, Catholicism is a white religion. This is less true in large cities, of course, and there are many Asian parishes on the west coast. But it is still true that in most Catholic parishes, there will be at most a sprinkling of blacks, and they are often foreign born. This is not true in Maryland. Unlike the rest of the south, there were significant numbers of slave-owning Catholics in Maryland, and their slaves adopted their form of Christianity. After the Civil War, blacks and whites continued worshipping in the same parishes, and some parishes are remarkably diverse today as a result, and both black and white families can point to three or four generations in the cemetery. Some are not, and it's worth knowing why.

Preparing for a day at Point Lookout, we scoped out a few churches in southern St. Mary's County that had late afternoon Masses, and at random chose St. Peter Claver. We were early, and the first people in the church. As more and more people filed in, we were even more obviously strangers than usual – we were the only whites in the place. But people smiled and nodded to us, and since Mass is the same everywhere, we didn't feel out of place. Much. There were a few parish peculiarities, but we were guided through them. At the Our Father, everyone filed out of the pews, stood in the center aisle, and joined hands in a circle. So we did too, even though I'm the sort of person who can get sniffy about taking such liberties with the GIRM. Afterwards, many people came up to ask us where we were from, to thank us for stopping by their church, and I was left with the impression that it was a friendly and open, if very small, community. But I was puzzled about the marked segregation of the congregation. That is, until I chatted with the priest on the front steps.

St. Peter Claver is a very small parish, and does not get its own priest. Their priest is also the chaplain at St. Mary's College, and the pastor of St. Cecilia in St. Mary City. He is white. And he told me this story.

About 100 years ago, at the very beginning of the 20th century, there was only one Catholic church in that part of the county: St. Michael. St. Michael still exists, and it is entirely white. The ancestors of all the parishioners of St. Peter Claver belonged to St. Michael, and many of them were former slaves and their children and grandchildren – people who had been the chattel property of the white families of St. Michael's less than fifty years before.

St. Michael got a new pastor at the time this story begins, and he took an interest in the welfare of the black families. In particular, he arranged for a black choir to sing at a Christmas service. At the next service the organist, a white woman, refused to play. She did not want to touch the keyboard that had been touched by a black.

This sounds monumentally insulting to us. It was monumentally insulting. But how many insults were the blacks of southern Maryland -- the cradle of Lincoln's assassins -- accustomed to absorb in 1900? This insult too might have been shaken off, except the priest sided with the blacks. They left, en masse, and began celebrating Mass in some private place. St. Michael eventually assigned a new priest, and after some time the blacks of St. Peter Claver were able to build their own church. And so it remains to this day. There are no blacks at St. Michael. There are no whites at St. Peter Claver.

When Tom van Dyke mentioned the detail of the white barbershop in Jena that wouldn't cut blacks' hair, I thought of this story. And I'd like to stress that I have never been able to confirm from another source that it is true. But obviously both the blacks and whites of these two parishes think it is true. Something happened there that was gathered up into oral history and has now become local legend. It was the blacks of St. Peter Claver that told this story to the young white priest, and he obviously believes it to be true.

When I was told this story, I was completely and utterly flabbergasted. I had thought, living here among the successful professional African-Americans of PG, that I had overcome my childhood discomfort and my insulated, benign Midwestern bigotry and finally knew what it was to be colorblind. I was proud of myself for not being nervous when I went in a liquor store and was the only white on the premises. Hell, I thought I knew what my black neighbors' lives were really like. Now there's clueless for you.

The soil on my property is very acidic. Some plants -- azaleas, blueberries, hydrangeas -- like this, but most do not. There are treatments you can buy to alkanize the soil, but I have a lot of ground and try to do things on the cheap. The best way to raise the pH of soil without spending a lot of money is to mix wood ash into it. For four years now I have been dumping the charcoal grill into what I hope will finally this spring be a rose bed. Every spring I dig a firebreak around the garden, wait for a windless day, heap fallen branches in the middle, and burn them. (I have to be tricky with this, though -- bonfires are technically illegal without a permit, and the fire department doesn't like to grant them. But there's an exemption for cooking fires. So I have to stand out there with a package of hot dogs in case the Brandywine VFD comes snooping around.)

So I've come to look at ashes like fertilizer. They make it possible to grow things. They nourish living things. Before this, they just seemed dead and dirty to me, and wearing them was a penitence simply because they felt gritty and nasty. But now I'm able to see another meaning in them, that makes their connection to salvation and the resurrection clearer.

So last Sunday was "Elbow Sunday" — the one where the second reading is St. Paul's exhortation to husbands and wives. Half the pulpits in the United States choose the shortened version and only lecture husbands to love their wives as Christ loved his church; the other half are full of husbands and wives elbowing each other in turn.

Did anyone else notice that also, last Sunday, the Gospel reading is the one where many of Christ's disciples abandon him because the truth of His Body and Blood is "hard--who can accept this?" This is not by any means the only hard teaching, and the teaching half of us had just heard may, in this day and age, be one of the hardest. But that doesn't prevent it from being just as true, and just as incapable of being rationalized away, as the teaching of the Eucharist.

Now I am not really what people have in mind when they call a woman "traditional." I know some such, and I respect them immensely. Their patience, selflessness, and womanliness are neither weak nor self-denigrating. I have long sensed that there was wisdom in St. Paul's words, and rejecting them as mere cultural artifacts was foolhardy. It's not so easy, though. Maybe if I remember to look at all hard teachings in light of the difficulty of the Eucharist, and the disaster of rejecting that teaching, it will be easier.

Since I've used the blog to whine about my injury, it would be unfair to not also use the blog to note that, in contrast to Logisticare's local Maryland office, the corporate office in Atlanta has been helpful, professional, and competent.

Last night I took the dogs for a short walk, for the first time since I was injured. Walking the dogs is usually my exclusive province, and although I gripe about it from time to time, particularly during howling rainstorms at midnight, it is one of the things I missed most about having my mobility curtailed. (Here strenuously resist temptation to repeat Steven Maturin's horrible pun about the dog watch being cur-tailed.) John had been doing the evening walk, but he seemed very harassed and overworked when he got home from the office last night, and I had been feeling steadier and more confident on my feet yesterday. So after extracting a promise from both the hounds that they would behave themselves, not chase after deer or rabbits, and avoid doing that bit where one circles me clockwise, the other counterclockwise, and they pull me off my feet with their leashes, we set out for the euphemistically named "wildflower meadow" which is really just a 3/4 acre patch of weeds I'm too lazy to mow more than twice a year.

Dogs' promises are not something I'd usually depend on, but they were as good as their word last night. It was a pleasant, if very short, outing. I heard the neighbors' demented rooster crowing again (he proudly announces the coming of midnight and moonrise, but dawn bores him), flushed a couple of mourning doves that the dogs dutifully ignored, and listened for awhile to that one insomniac mockingbird in the windbreak. Made it back up the porch steps without major mishap, and came to bed with a flush of unreasonable pride that I'd managed to do something I've done thousands of times without ever thinking about it.

Now, off to Lanham to retrieve the x-rays of my leg so that the orthopedic surgeon can look at them tomorrow. I have a feeling I'll be told I've more or less mended without further intervention, although he'd be a sorry excuse for an orthopedist if he didn't at least give me thirty minutes worth of painful exercises to do every morning.

I will practice the harp at least one hour per day. Picking out the choice bits of Planxty George Brabazon or Si Bheag Si Mhor instead of learning the bloody things properly doesn't count.

I will balance the checkbook once a quarter whether it needs it or not. Failing that, I will stop interpreting a bounced check as a personal moral failing. I'm just absentminded; accept it.

I will not order the damn seeds if I'm not going to plant them until June.

I will spend less time listening to Rush Limbaugh and more time listening to the covey of quail in the hedgerow.

I will spend less time reading the Drudge Report and more time reading the Office of Readings.

And finally....

I will stop muttering "Sue the bastard" under my breath and practice waiting -- with patience, good grace, and an absence of greed, malice, or vengefulness -- for a sensible settlement offer.

The police report from my recent accident is a gold mine of amusement, most of it admittedly unintentional. Let's begin with this substantially accurate but hilarious police drawing of the incident, in which I appear to have been flattened by a 2-dimensional Borg spaceship. I told you he was going the wrong way.

The best detail comes from the information on Driver 1, though. Initially I felt kind of sorry for the him. No, really. He spoke very poor English, seemed terrified, and was, the last I saw of him before they strapped me to a backboard and shoved me in an ambulance, attempting to explain to a stolidly unsympathetic Prince Georges County cop why he couldn't produce a drivers' license or vehicle registration. I figured he was an undocumented alien, uninsured, unlicensed, and what guys like my husband call "judgement proof." In the civil liability sense, of course, not the sheep and goats sense.

There was one detail that didn't fit with this size-up, though. He was driving a relatively new domestic sedan, which had the legend "Metro Access" painted on the door. I didn't know what this meant, and figured it for some sort of black market private car service.

The police report explains it all, though. The driver did have a license, and was driving a vehicle registered to Logisticare, Inc. Logisticare is, I am amazed to learn, a nationwide provider of contract transport services, and operates in Maryland under the name Metro Access providing....wait for it....rides for people too disabled to use public transportation. That's right. I was disabled by the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Logisticare/Metro Access have, so far, been completely unresponsive to my requests for information, insurance company details, etc. Nor have they offered any apology. I'm capable of being patient up to a point; it has been that slow holiday week between Christmas and New Years and I understand the offices are understaffed right now. Be prepared for boredom in the new year as I chronicle this idiotic tale to death, however.

I had just left the bank yesterday afternoon, and was walking back to my car across the parking lot, when I was struck by a car. The car hit me in the left side, just below the knee, whereupon I was thrown in the air and landed on my left arm. Luckily I didn't hit my head, lose consciousness, hurt my back or neck, or any of those other traumas that get you confined to a hospital overnight. I didn't even break anything, although the ligaments in my left knee now have the approximate tensile strength of overcooked linguini and I'm in a thigh-to-calf immobilizer splint for at least a week. What is actually more of a bummer is my left wrist, which is wrapped so tightly I can't play the harp, and it would probably hurt if I tried anyway.

So here I am two days before Christmas, with a filthy house and an unstocked refrigerator, and my husband's mother is coming for Christmas dinner. What's funny is that, if I hadn't hurt myself I'd be in an utter tizzy right now. I'd probably had gotten up early to be at the grocery store as soon as it opened so I could snag the best rib roast from the butcher, after which I'd haul heiney all over town finishing my shopping, come home and spend several hours scrubbing the kitchen floor and destroying the elaborate insect ecosystems that occupy all my dormer windows and ceiling corners, and generally making myself miserable. Now Rachel the trainee driver is going to ferry me to the grocery sometime later this afternoon, I'm not going to fuss about cleaning the house, and if we get a tough piece of beef for Christmas dinner I probably won't even notice.

This has nothing to do with intimations of mortality or having one's priorities set in order, although I will admit there were about five seconds when I was lying on the asphalt staring at a tire that was still rolling towards me that I suspected it might be all up. No, its just that I am forced to admit there's nothing I can do about this, and so am allowing myself to quit being such a fussbudget. So apparently the only way to turn Kathy away from Martha towards Mary is to run over her with a car. Well, I always have been kind of pigheaded.

I apologize for going away for so long without saying goodbye. I did not realize just how hectic this Christmas season was going to be. There are now three full-fledged musicians in the house, and the rehearsals and concerts have taken a staggering toll on our disposable time. However, the last engagement of the season (Anne's school concert) is tomorrow night, and I think everything should calm down for a bit now.

There hasn't been any story in the past month that's jumped out at me demanding to be blogged, either. Maybe my fatigue has made otherwise outrageous happenings seem bland, I don't know. But I just cannot motivate myself to fall in line behind Bill Donohue and demand a boycott of Target or Wal-Mart or whoever it is that's dissing the Christ Child this week according to the professional umbrage takers. If Mark Dayton's Mau-Mau Political Theater of the Absurd couldn't pry me away from Target, I don't think the Catholic League's going to be able to do it either.

My advice to everyone whose nose is out of joint because Land's End left the word Christmas out of their winter catalog: spend twenty hours a week from Halloween to the 4th Sunday of Advent either practicing medieval carols on a harp, driving a cellist to and from her Handel's Messiah rehearsals, listening to the drum part of Patapan and the cello part of Daughter of Zion playing at the same time, or sitting in a Beltway traffic jam late for a concert, and the fragrance will be off the Christmas Rose E'er Blooming sometime around Christus Rex.

Hobbit

To which race of Middle Earth do you belong?
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And the quiz didn't even know that I live in Brandywine. I'll bet I couldn't make it come out Elf even if I had a cheat sheet.

I have been taking harp lessons for about a year. Just recently, I have progressed to the point where making my fingers play what is written on the page no longer requires all my concentration. So my teacher is pressing me to bone up on music theory, and begin to study the structure of what I am playing, with a view to eventually writing my own arrangements and compositions.

My teacher has a rosy view of the kind of music education the typical young student received in the 1960s and 70s. I'm not "boning up" on music theory, I'm learning it de novo. I began studying piano at the age of four, and took private lessons for twelve years. I also played woodwinds in high school, and competed in state level competitions on three different instruments. Never once did anyone attempt to teach me anything about music theory, chord structure, or harmonic analysis. We were trained to play what was written on the page, and no more.

So when, preparatory to a Mozart recital in December, I was assigned the task of writing out a chord analysis of a reduction of an innocuous little piano trio, I might as well have been tasked with a dozen pages of Feynmann diagrams or a translation of ancient Sumerian. I didn't have a clue. (OK, that's not quite true. I memorized the major and minor scales way back when, and still remember half of them. I can stagger through the circle of fifths if someone gives me a push.) I did what any befuddled 21st century dilettante does: I Googled up a bunch of music pedagogy sites and started slogging through the chord progressions, and then I hauled out an old Casio keyboard and picked out the chords, and I paged back and forth, and scribbled some notes down, and after a couple of hours I had a set of chords that more or less fit the rules of early classical music, and didn't sound too out of whack.

And then I looked over the whole thing, and it struck me. I have just found a key that unlocks a secret code in the music. There is a structure there. There's a predictable and logical sequence. There is a correspondence between the mathematics of the wavelengths of the notes, and the emotional impact on the listener. It's been there all the time. Thousands of other people knew all about it (and if they're reading now, they're laughing their fannies off that I think this is such a revelation, no doubt).

And now I remembered why I wanted to play the piano in the first place. Most kids who start as young as I did have some innate musicality, some ability to play by ear, to reproduce songs they hear or compose reasonably coherent pieces on the fly. I didn't. I still don't. I was sucked in when I discovered the code of the musical notes. I was out visiting with my parents, and the children of the house had a neglected toy piano. There was a music book on the bench that had the notes written on staves mapped to a picture of the keyboard. I always loved that sort of thing — I'd already been inventing substitution codes and hieroglyphs, writing secret message to my grandmother, fiddling with the cryptograms in the newspaper. So I studied the code for a few minutes and then I started playing the little piano. I played through the whole book, front to back, before I noticed there were six adults standing in the alcove staring at me. The next week my grandmother took me visiting again. We visited the piano teacher.

These encodings, these mappings of a coherent and self-contained explanatory system to the real world, kept sucking me in as I entered adulthood. The same impulse that led me to tap on piano keys and write cryptograms eventually led me to God, but that's fodder for at least a couple more posts.