The Feminist Grandma

An Infidel in Church: the Church Search, Part I

I was looking for a church for Amanda and me. I am not a believer, but she attended church sporadically before she came to live with us, and her belief in God and Jesus are important to her.

 
FROM "A CHILD IS BORN" BY MARGARET WISE BROWN.  ILLUSTRATIONS BY FLOYD COOPER
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Amanda has been self-conscious about her white grandparents, and undoubtedly will be again.  I wanted a church where we could both be comfortable, where a white grandma was accepted.  More important, I wanted a church where Amanda would hear more about love and forgiveness, about doing good works and rejoicing in God’s creation, than about possession by demons and the fires of hell.

It was a puzzle.  Where could I find a church for both of us - black Christian child and white atheist woman?  I heard of two “integrated” churches, and went on their websites.  They were big evangelical churches, and their photo albums didn’t look very integrated to me - a smattering of black faces among thousands of white.  And their missions and messages disturbed me, insisting that Jesus is the one and only Way.  Maybe searching for a Christian church that doesn’t focus on Christianity is unrealistic, but it can’t be good for Amanda to think Grandma and Grandpa are headed for hell. We ended by visiting four different churches.

Twenty years ago I took my foster children to a black United Methodist church.  I really like the minister there, who told me, “God doesn’t see color.”  The Methodists seem to accept that there may be various paths to truth, and they sing a lot of the hymns I grew up with.  So on Palm Sunday, Amanda and I dressed up and headed to church. 

Amanda chose a pew in the middle.  At first she sat stiffly, two feet away from me, looking a little worried.  But as the familiar sights and sounds sank in - the praise choir clapping and singing, people waving their hands, swaying - she began to relax. 

PITTSBURGH GOSPEL CHOIR from IMAGES.GOOGLE.COM

I sang enthusiastically.  At home I sing constantly, and it often aggravates Joe and Amanda.  He says, “Please stop singing,” and she simply says, “Grandma.”  But in church she didn’t object, and soon she was singing too.
   
The minister welcomed all the visitors, saying, “You are in the right place, you are where you belong.” She looked right at us.

It was a special day.  They were baptizing a baby, maybe a year old.  She had a great mop of soft black hair, and creamy tan skin.  Her black father and white mother were surrounded by family in all shades. They passed the baby to the minister, and when the water touched her face, she cried.  Amanda watched closely.

The minister introduced Michelle Duster, a descendant of Ida B. Wells.  She told us that while she was proud of her great grandmother, the anti-lynching crusader, all our ancestors were strong.  They were fighters and survivors.  They survived the Middle Passage, slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow.  And none of them did it alone.

IDA B. WELLS      

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As far as I know, these were not my ancestors, but in this church Amanda would learn the values and history I hope she will cherish.  In this church I heard the messages that matter to me - messages about service, community, justice.  Church is for believers and seekers, and I am a comfortable atheist. But gospel music makes my soul sing, and I love to be in a place where people are rejoicing and trying to be good.  Here Amanda could find community and strength, and this is the church I would choose.

Unfortunately, our next visit was a disaster.  The minister called all the children up to the front, and Amanda of course went too.  But they had been rehearsing a reading, and the group leader sent Amanda back because she didn’t have a role in it.  She was mortified, and NEVER wants to go back.  I had to resume my search.

 

NEXT WEEK: One More Day for Thanksgiving

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Why I love Like My Kindle

I grew up in houses full of books.  Book shelves are as fundamental to my sense of home as pictures on the walls.  When I visit a friend, I head to the bookcase, and imagine moving in for a weekend so I can read her books.  When Iris and I, both single mothers, decided to share a house, I was thrilled to see that she had an almost empty bookcase, then dismayed to discover that she considered books clutter, and used the shelves for ornaments and organizing.

My husband is resigned to my clutter, and he himself has shelves of natural history books, but he was pleased when I spent the first week of my retirement reducing the collection by a third.  (Thus making room for more books.)   With less money, I did resolve to rely more on the library, but I still have little bursts of book-buying, and my family gives me books for Christmas. I try to keep the collection culled by giving away anything that isn’t a keeper.
                       
I always pack books when I travel.  I like to take books about the place I’m going, and a fat Victorian novel for a vacation from the vacation.  One is not enough.  Suppose I don’t like it, or worse, suppose I finish it.  Once, alone in Nova Scotia, I found myself on a Sunday with nothing to read.  The only store open in Cheticamp was a drugstore, with a tiny book rack of mostly junk.  I found an Agatha Christie, but it was a quick read, not nearly enough to fill the tired hours after morning hikes, and the long nightly stretches of insomnia.

MY B&B IN BADDECK, NOVA SCOTIA HAD A BOOKCASE

 
L'ACADIEN TRAIL NEAR CHETICAMP: GREAT VIEWS AND MOOSE TURDS, BUT NO BOOKS

When I travel by car, books are no problem - even for a weekend I have two or three in my tote bag.  By air, with a small suitcase, it’s more of a challenge.  In France I had a used paperback of Les Miserables, torn into five sections for easy portability in my purse, though I had to overcome a lifetime of training to mutilate a book.

An e-reader is the obvious solution, but I am a technophobe.  I hate new gizmos.  I grumbled when I had to learn to use a computer for work. Answering machine, cell phone, digital camera - I could write an essay about my long resistance and eventual submission to each of them.

So I bought a Kindle before our trip to South Africa with great reluctance.  First I borrowed my stepdaughter Leah’s for a couple of days, to see how I liked it.  I was amused to see what an ambitious and improbable collection of free books she had downloaded, including War and Peace, and the complete works of Shakespeare and Dickens.  I read a few pages of the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. I didn’t know whether it was the Autobiography or the Kindle that I liked, but I went ahead and bought one anyway.  And I discovered the appeal and peril of the Kindle.

First, I downloaded a list of free books for Kindle, and a list of free children’s books.  Then I went shopping.  I’d never read any Wilkie Collins - I downloaded the The Woman in White and the Moonstone. Willa Cather’s My Antonia.  Dicken’s Tale of Two Cities. To my shame, Virginia Woolf’s fiction has always been beyond me.  I decided to give her another try, and downloaded Night and Day. For Amanda’s bedtime story I found Lewis Carroll, Frances Hodgson Burnett, E. Nesbit, L. Frank Baum, and Hans Christian Andersen.

A character in The Moonstone uses The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe as his guide in all situations; it’s free on Kindle.  The Moonstone plot turns on opium, so I found Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.  I’d always heard Edward Gibbon was the great prose stylist of the 18th century, so I got all six volumes of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  Now I understood Leah’s collection.

Everything had been free so far, and though I may never read the Gibbon, no harm done.  Then I went on a spree.  I had already read a lot of non-fiction about South Africa, but fiction illuminates a place in a way non-fiction can’t.  I bought thirteen contemporary South African novels.  Amanda is a reluctant reader, but loves anything with a screen. Ten easy-reading children’s books.  I flew off to Johannesberg with nineteen novels and fifteen children’s books in my purse (not to mention Gibbon).

I loved the Kindle, and delighted in its special features. With one click I can look up almost any word in the New Oxford Dictionary. I can highlight and store passages that appeal to me. I can search a word, which helps when a minor character whom I’ve forgotten reappears.  I often mis-lay a book when I’m in the middle of it, and wander the house trying to find it.  If I remember to put my Kindle back in its garish neoprene cover, it stands out wherever I leave  it.

 
MY HIGHLY VISIBLE KINDLE

Buying books on Kindle is easier than ordinary internet shopping.  It may be too easy.  When I hear of a book on NPR, or read a review in the New Yorker, I am much more likely to buy it.  Most of these are happy impulses.  I’ve read a fascinating account of two teachers in Colorado at the beginning of the twentieth century, and a warm and witty novel about a widowed British colonel and an Indian shop-keeper in Sussex. click  click  Nothing I buy is very expensive, but even in 2011 ten bucks is ten bucks, and though I never finished the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, I still believe a penny saved is a penny earned..

So I traveled around in South Africa and Swaziland, with a book always available for me and for Amanda, and thought I would write an essay in praise of my Kindle.  And then we came home.  Blissfully I sat in my ancient La-Z-Boy, early in the morning, lamp over my left shoulder, coffee beside me.  Home at last.  I reveled in the familiar sights, sounds and smells (we DO have a dog), and I looked over at the bookcase.  

Every book I saw called up memories - not only of its contents, but of where and who I was when I read it.  Books are the most reliable companions, more constant than a lover, less trouble than a dog.  But my memories of books are inseparable from their physical presence.  The cover entices me, and the book designer’s choices about typography and placement and proportion become part of the reading. click

When I read a book on Kindle, the design disappears.  All the technical challenges and choices that permit a book to fly through space and arrive on my Kindle within moments of my request are invisible.  The author’s words come to me unmediated, and there’s something exciting about that.  But a book on Kindle is like a phone conversation instead of a visit.
                                       
I wouldn’t give up my Kindle; there’s nothing like it for travel.  Still, when I’m home, I’ll choose the serendipity of a trip to the library or book store, or the familiar volumes that have comforted and nourished me all my life.

 

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NEXT WEEK: Tidy Me

Teachers

Imagine a child who is regularly beaten with a hose.

Imagine a child who is locked in an apartment alone all afternoon.

Imagine a child whose last meal was rice for supper, a child who has not seen her mother in a year, who never met his father, who saw her brother shot, who goes outside and fights all the other beaten children.

Imagine a boy or girl who is all these children.

Then imagine that you are a teacher, and three or four of your eighteen students are these children.  They hide under tables, they knock over desks, they curl into sad balls in the corner.  They scream and swear and cry, bite and punch and kick.

You handle their behavior and its effect on all the others, and you teach most of the children to behave themselves in the classroom, to read, write and do simple arithmetic.  You spend hours of classroom time testing and testing and testing them.  You adopt curriculum changes nobody consulted you about.  On weekends you grade papers, fill out forms, write reports.   

Your reward? You are blamed for all the problems in the schools.  Your salary is tied to the academic success of all the children.  You are told there is no money for glue, paper, and scissors, so you send home weekly newsletters that half the parents don’t read, and beg for donated supplies.  When you don’t get them, you buy them yourself.    Every year you are fired in April, and probably re-hired in July, depending on the budget.  You hear people joke that those who can’t do, teach.

Imagine if it were otherwise. No merit pay based on week-long tests of little children. No special awards for Best Teacher, but good teachers rewarded for helping those who struggle, and irredeemably bad teachers dismissed. Teachers paid as well as the lawyers in the legislature who think they are experts in education, and come up with new policies, new curricula, new standards every few years. 

I bought Amanda’s teacher a button that says “Those who can, teach.  Those who can’t, make laws about teaching.”  I guess that says it all.                    

 click to buy from Zazzle

(Note: The children described above are not Amanda. I have volunteered at her school for three years, and I've seen and heard a lot.)

click to buy from Zazzle