The Great Green Stamp Caper

In the early '60's, a couple from Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) applied and were accepted to Ouachita Baptist University. Mary Makosholo was a school teacher and Mike was a minister. Both were in their 40's and had 5 children, making them "non-traditional" students in every category I can imagine.

Anyway, they came to Arkadelphia, moving into married student housing. The first Sunday, being good Baptists, they attended church. First Baptist Church was within walking distance of campus and most students didn't have cars, so the vast majority attended there, including the Makosholos.

Now, you have to understand, we had had foreign students there many times before. They were certainly welcome. As guests.

The Makosholos had, however, the audacity to request to become members. In our lily-white church, this was a first. Certainly the Blacks who lived in the "negro" section of town wouldn't have dreamed of attending, let alone becoming members of First Baptist.

Many heated meetings of the deacons and Sunday School classes ensued. In the Baptist Church, one is voted in by the membership. Usually, this is an automatic and somewhat routine voice vote as Yea or Nay at the end of the service. Not, sadly, in the Makosholos' case.

After a great deal of angst, it was decided to have a secret ballot. First and only time in any church I've ever heard of a secret ballot. Perhaps the congregants didn't have the intestinal fortitude to show publicly their racism. Perhaps the church elders felt that people could more comfortably vote in their favor if they didn't have to vote so publicly. Whatever.

The upshot was that First Baptist Church of Arkadelphia admitted Black people for the first time in its history. The first Sunday the Makosholos attended church as members, my mother invited them home to Sunday dinner. That wasn't the last time the Makosholos graced our table. Foreign students were always showing up, invited or uninvited, to share our fried chicken, our roast beef and gravy. We almost always had foreign students at Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner, since they couldn't go home and the college cafeteria closed, leaving them to celebrate Christmas by cooking Campbell's soup on a hot plate.

Visiting over a pot roast, Mom found out that the Makosholos had left their five children at home in Rhodesia with Grandma and that they were resigned to living in the US for four years, never seeing their children. Airfare was just too dear for them to jet back and forth to home. I can almost see Mom's indignation at the thought. She had five children and she couldn't wrap her mind around not seeing us for four years.

In that day and time, gas stations and especially grocery stores gave out stamps, S & H Green Stamps being the most common. For every $x you spent at their store, you were given x stamps. When you'd collected enough stamps, there were catalogs and redemption centers where you could "buy", with books of stamps, tray tables and pots and pans and bathroom accessories and sporting equipment.

So the good ladies of First Baptist decided they were going to save enough green stamps to redeem for cash the amount of money it would take to buy a round-trip ticket for Mike and Mary to go home for the summer.

Many Arkadelphia families were involved in this project, not just church members. When Mom asked the manager of the Piggly Wiggly for some extra stamps to help their effort, he leaned on the dispensing button, emptying his stamp machines into a grocery bag.

But the stamps were required to be in books, both to redeem and to count. So Mom threw a stamp party, providing food and refreshment for a whole day to anyone who could come for a few hours and lick stamps and put them in books. (We discovered very early on that tongues can provide only so much moisture and soon resorted to wet dishcloths and sponges on small plates. Our fingers and tongues were green by mid-morning.)

At last, the collecting and mounting gave way to counting. Our dining room overflowed with sacks and stacks and boxes of books of S & H Green Stamps. Success! We had enough to send the Makosholos on their journey home and then return to their schooling.

Now I can't imagine that Mom was in any way threatening when she talked to merchants about donations. She probably didn't say she would remove her custom from the Piggly Wiggly should the manager not pony up. No, Mom's style was more "I'll be a faithful customer and my whole Sunday School class would be forever grateful." No threat, right?

This story is about race relations in the South, loving thy neighbor (even if the neighbor lives half a world away), the power of community to come together, the inventiveness of using whatever you had to accomplish a major goal. It isn't a story of good vs. evil...it is a story of merely good. Of doing the right thing. Of Christ's admonition that whatever you do for your fellow man, "you do it unto Me."

But I write it because it is quintessentially Mom. .

Pigging Out on Pie

Most every year, I throw myself a birthday party called The Pie Pig Out. Back when I knew lots of musical folk, it was the Goodson Annual Song Fest and Pie Pig Out, my one opportunity to sing Christmas carols and, ecumenically, dreidle carols in honor of Hanukkah. But over the years, I've come to realize that people don't really like to sing when they are stuffed to the gills with Pie.

(I almost always capitalize the word "Pie"...it's that important to my diet.)

When I started my annual Pie Pig Out, I invented a mathmatical calculation to determine what the difference was between serving Pie at a party and what was a true "pig out". I decided that 1/2 Pie per person would constitute pigging out.

This year's menu includes pumpkin, chocolate cream, mincemeat, apple, strawberry, pecan, key lime (Kelly's contribution), and a new invention of mine, grapefruit meringue. We'll see if that's a hit or "No seconds for me" addition. Next year's invention might include a meat Pie or two, or bubblegum cream even.

A Pie Pig Out is the perfect opportunity for experimentation. Because, after all, if the experiment tastes perfectly dreadful, you still have all the other Pies to eat. The mark of a successful Pie Pig Out is that there a few, if any, leftovers.

I've dropped chocolate pieces in the bottom of a pecan pie prior to adding the pecans and baking. I've lined the shell of a pumpkin Pie with apricot jam prior to pouring in the pumpkin innards. (That's one I truly like...got the idea from my daughter Becca, but the pumpkin purists rebelled so I won't be trying THAT again anytime soon. You'd've thought I'd killed a baby lamb or farted in church or something.)

I've blended the chocolate pudding with Cool Whip prior to pouring into the shell instead of leaving the Cool Whip sitting on top. (Bad idea, 'cause the pudding never really sets up as it should and the result is something you have to spoon onto the plate.)

This year, as I pondered the intricacies of the menu, my son Benjamin nixed any Pies he personally doesn't like. I think HE thinks that he'll be able to sample every single Pie, more the fool. Since he doesn't like lemon meringue, I invented the grapefruit idea.

I'm a big fan of ALL citrus and think that lemons unfairly dominate that family of fruit. What's wrong with limeade or tangeloade for that matter? If lemonade is a nice summer cooler, so's grapefruitade. When you think about it, we have lemon chicken, lemon bars, lemon meringue Pie, lemon torte, pastry and pound cake. There are a couple dozen entries for lemon this and lemon that in my cookbook. If the grapefruit meringue Pie is a hit, I think I'm gonna break out of the box and make grapefruit chicken or tangerine bars.

Every year, I get asked why I do the lion's share of baking for a party for myself. Why not make others serve you on your birthday, they ask. Because, I tell them, this is my thank you gift to all those truly blessed people in my life who have to put up with me for another whole year.

Judging Monsters

Today, I literally had to pass judgement on a fellow human being...well, maybe he isn't really a fellow human being because of what he did to a precious little girl. I don't think of him as human, anyway.

I have spent the past eight days pondering, with 11 other human beings, some pretty horrible s***. We had four and then three hold-outs on our jury and I was glad we had them. While I didn't rush to judgement, wanting to hear all the defendant's evidence in his favor, his defense team didn't offer much in the way of evidence to prove his innocence. As in, none.

I was very grateful we had those holdouts because they caused us to remember, not that we needed a reminder, that a man's life hung in the balance. They caused us to review, over and over, our own past experiences, the evidence, the testimony, the way we judge if a person is speaking the truth, the definition of "reasonable doubt", the horror of getting it wrong and putting away an innocent man.

We were admonished by the judge that a person is presumed innocent until proven guilty. Since I have trouble holding two contradictory thoughts in my head at one time, I listened to all the State's evidence while trying to keep this man's innocence in my mind. Trouble was, there was the little girl's own testimony and DNA evidence.

When the State rested, I was prepared for the "on the other hand" evidence and what I (and all the other jurors) got was nada. Zilch. Zero. Goose egg. All we got were a closing statement which contradicted the evidence we'd seen with our own eyes. The Defence even said "she asked for it".

Note to attorney: When you said "she asked for it", that implies that indeed something did happen and the child wanted it. Last time I checked, a 47-year-old male, even if the child "asked for it", should have, could have said "this isn't right." The defendant didn't say that.

I tend to be judgemental, while trying mightily not to be judgemental. Let's face it, we all do it. You see a homeless person or a person who doesn't behave how you would, or a parent in a store, or you name it. We see stuff and we judge it. If we see the whole sum of a person's life and circumstance, we tend to be less judgemental. "On the other hand" becomes an understanding (though not necessarily an excuse) of the behavior we have judged.

First time in my life I have been ordered by a judge to judge. Sadly, we had to vote to put this guy away for life. Sadly because we all secretly wished that the guy hadn't done it. We wished he hadn't done it because we didn't want to ponder or imagine or envision what that poor child had had to endure...what he did to her. For over a year.

Someone commented that the guy was probably abused as a child himself. Don't care. Doesn't matter. My guess is that there are plenty of children out there who are abused and they seek help and grow up to be caring adults who don't abuse. The guy had a choice.

He made the wrong choice and lives are forever altered, forever damaged, forever not the same as they would have been if he'd made the right choice. Souls are damanged, sometimes beyond repair. Several of us on the jury, knowing what we know about pedophiles, thought perhaps she wasn't his first victim. But the judge shielded us from any past history.

So it wasn't gleefully or with joy that we judged the child to be telling the truth, the evidence to be irrefutable. The holdouts eventually became convinced as to the rightness of a guilty verdict. Just as soon as we delivered our verdict, we were able to check the news coverage of the trial, something we had been cautioned not to do during our deliberations.

The man we judged today was indeed a convicted pedophile, something some of us had suspected. The saddest part of the whole thing was that he had been released from prison 12 years ago. Since pedophiles don't stop what they are doing, most probably there is a child or children out there who were abused by this monster. A child or children who couldn't speak out or weren't believed. Yes, our judicial system worked. But not soon enough.

So, to our victim today...you go girl. Go have a life that is full and rich and everything you can possibly dream. Living well is the best revenge, so go out there and live well.

Technology 1.0

I got a Kindle for Christmas, generously given by my kids. It was something I asked for, with mixed emotions.

You see, I am a bibliophile. I like having a physical book in my hand...love the smell of a used book store. Love the feel of an old leather-bound book to the touch. I love the excitement of gently cracking the spine of a brand-new book, rather like the excitement of opening a treasure chest. (Well, at least, I assume it is like that feeling, since I've never opened a treasure chest.)

Anthropologists are fond of citing examples of how we differ from the "lower" animals. They talk about speech, and tool making, and sexual mores. How I think we differ from lower animals is that not only do we have speech and tool making but we use tool making to speak to each other, over distance and time. We can speak of philosphy and how-to instructions and stories and political thought and scientific discovery.

I can read, if I so choose, Galileo's treatises. I can look at Da Vinci's notes and drawings on manned flight. I can read the latest novel by a Swedish thriller writer. I can travel in my mind to Hogworts. Or a galaxy far, far away. Or James Bond's British intelligence agency. Or wherever and whenever I darn well please.

Yes, whales and other cetaceans can communicate over long distances. But my guess is they are either saying, "Come on over for a deep sea banquet...food plentiful here." Or "You want to see my etchings?" Or some such. But they can't communicate over time. They can't communicate with Captain Ahab's whale.

That alone is Man's/Woman's abilty.

I like reading books even when I think the author is full of shit. (I've even read Sarah Palin's book.) Even then, I can read a thought espoused by the author and say to myself, "I know better than that...this author doesn't know what s/he is talking about."

So why did I ask for a Kindle? Well, for starters, there are actually many more new books/best sellers available there, for less cost, than I can either find at my local library or at Barnes and Noble. Yes, I'm one of those geeks who is a library patron and I even go there for the books and not for the Internet access. And when I, as an environmentalist, think of how many trees are killed annually to publish all the great books and all the drek, it does make sense to send an author's thoughts through fiberoptic lines rather than Guttenburg's press.

My kids' generation will no doubt see the demise of the printed book and their kids will probably view books as something akin to how we viewed the stereopticans and buggy whips of our grandparents' generation. I tell my kids to hang on to my library after I'm gone until books gain in value as oddities of history and then sell the suckers for beaucoup bucks. It will be their inheritance.

I'm not the most technologically savvy of individuals. Even in my generation, I'm not exactly knowledgeable about all the ins and outs of computers and iPads, iPhones and Blackberries. I don't own a PDA and I don't like being so available to any yahoo who wants to contact me at any time of the day or night in any location.

I have to have my kids explain to me, when I see a device touting "3G" capabilities or gigabytes of this or that, what that all means. Because, honestly, it sounds like Swahili to me. It could be that everything I've ever learned about computers and technology has been on my own, without benefit of instruction. As a matter of fact, I've learned alot about technology by...wait for it...reading real books. Irony, that.

(Irony, according to the Black Adder, is "kinda like goldy or bronzy but made of iron.")

As I have frequently said, I don't have to know how a microwave works to heat food with one. I just need to know which buttons to push.

I worry that my kids' generation will get so used to Facebooking and texting each other that they will forget how to talk face to face, being able to read nuances of face and hands. Body language doesn't digitize very well.

And of course their kids won't have those skills in the first place. They will never know the thrill of browsing a book store or library and happening on to a book that they would never have thought would interest them. Amazon.com requires one to request the title of the book or subject matter or author's name. One can't really browse.

I'm not a Luddite. I do believe in advancing technology and its ability to enhance our lives. I don't want to go back to the good old days, which in matter of fact were the bad old days. When people died of curable diseases and missed Christmas because their horse threw a shoe and became blacksmiths because they couldn't go to college way far away.

So I keep one foot in the 21st century by reading my Kindle, while cherishing my beloved books. When I turned on the Kindle, lo and behold, the "sleep" mode uses an illuminated hand-written text as the screen saver.

Sigh.

A Christmas Memory

No, this won't be nearly as well written as Truman Capote wrote his Christmas memories. But it is one of the many memories I have where I wish I could say it turned out better.


Years ago, when our children were small, we bundled them up on Christmas Eve and took them out through the snow to the Cathedral, where midnight mass was being held. No, we're not Catholic, but a friend was singing and we thought a celebration of the season was just the thing to put us in the mood for Christmas.


It was. So about 1:30 on Christmas morning, having gotten our sleeping children bedded down for the night and finished last minute wrapping and stocking stuffing, we prepared for bed ourselves. (correction: we assisted Santa in stuffing stockings and wrapping gifts...on account he's so busy, don't you know!)


Just as we were turning out lights, we realized that there was a fire truck just four doors down on our street. This neighborhood was one that city planners like to call "transitional"...that is, it was "transitioning" from crack houses and whore houses to gentrification. The houses in our neighborhood were all architectural masterpieces, with lots of wood carved staircases and mullioned windows. We were part of the gentrification, not a part of the crack houses, just for the record.


So my husband put on boots and tramped through the snow to see what was going on. He discovered a woman and her daughter, both in house slippers and nightgowns, with blankets thrown over their shoulders, standing in the freezing snow. They lived in the apartment next to the fire, but had been evacuated in case the fire spread.


He invited them to come to our house, where at the very least, they could be warm. They came, but the woman insisted on sitting on the boot bench in our front hall, her blanket regally clutched around her shoulders, back ramrod straight.


I offered coffee, hot chocolate, anything warm. She declined, not wanting to "be a bother." From the condition of their clothing and their apartment building, they were obviously not a part of the gentrification of the neighborhood.


I went into the living room and turned the tree lights back on, for the entertainment of the little girl, who couldn't have been more than six. Her eyes twinkled in the tree lights, her mouth forming an "O". "We don't have a tree, 'cause Momma says we can't afford it."


My heart sank. My mind quickly searched the wrapped packages I'd just placed under the tree (correction: Santa had placed), rejecting them all because they were trucks and little boy flannel shirts and army guys. Nothing even remotely appropriate for a girl child.


This woman, asking for nothing but a warm place for her and her child to wait for the Fire Department to complete their work, stayed only an hour or so. She didn't say much, though the child chattered in the way of a child who knows no stranger. I offered more blankets. Declined, with dignity.

The little girl eventually fell asleep on the sofa, tired no doubt by all the excitement of the evening. My husband carefully bundled her up in the thin blanket and carried her home, her mother expressing gratitude just for the warm place to sit on a frigid, snowy Midwestern night. She wouln't take anything else from us.


But til the day I die, I will always regret not having had anything under that tree that a little girl would have liked. I would have told her that Santa, in his infinite wisdom, had dropped off the package for her, knowing that her apartment was filled with smoke and water.


Every year, I donate to Toys for Tots. Let that be my penance.

Constitution/Schmonstitution

I'm deeply amused by the people, mainly Tea Baggers, who claim that the Congress needs to go back to the Constitution and limit its activities to those powers Constitutionally allowed.

Really?

So I guess that means that Congress can't limit drug usage, because I see no authority granted by the Constitution for those august bodies to do so. That would put paid to the illegalization of drugs. Let's all go smoke a bong.

Nor can Congress call baseball players before it to grill them on steroid usage in sports. It isn't in their Powers, as enumerated by our Constitution. I always wondered why, when there are so many really serious problems in our nation they claim not to have time to put to a vote or even to read bills addressing those problems, while they do have time to delve into baseball, our national pasttime.

Witness the new START treaty, which was negotiated April 2010, yet with all the minutes they spend doing their jobs, followed by hours of campaigning, they have been so busy, they can't possibly have read the darn thing. Let me repeat: They haven't had time to read one measly treaty. Since April.

The FCC and the FTC are not mentioned in the Constitution, so let's throw them out. No regulation at all of our airways or our commerce. So what if TV and Radio become all porn all the time, or if any yahoo can start a bank and rip people off. Bernie Madoff, eat your heart out. For that matter, why do we need an Ag Department? So what if the food we eat is contaminated? Congress doesn't have the Constitutional power to regulate that.

They only have to meet once a year, according to the Constitution, so maybe their 120 days of actual work on the business of the nation is sufficient.

The Constitution also states that Congress can't prohibit slavery. You know, where it says that Congress can't prohibit the "Importation" of persons, although it can put a duty on such persons. In other words, you can't pick up a slave in a duty-free shop. African-Americans, beware. Going back to the original powers of Congress means you might be picking cotton in the near future.

These Tea Baggers are very fond of the idea of getting rid of the National Endowment for the Arts, yet that is a Constitutional authority. The framers of the Constitution specifically said that the Congress was to "promote the Progress of Sciences and useful Arts."

In fact, Congress has the authority to make laws in the exercise of these Powers, including laws governing departments or officers of the United States. Which would include the NEA, the Department of Education, the NEH and any number of departments which the Tea Baggers think aren't part of the Constitution.

One could indeed argue that, the power "to provide for the General Welfare" might possibly include education, but evidently the Tea Baggers don't think an education is important to the "General Welfare". I guess they want a populace who is totally ignorant, or am I misreading this?

Oh, and how many Post Roads has Congress built lately? I think they are falling down on the job in that respect. Unless you count a Bridge to Nowhere as a "Post Road". Maybe that's what the Bridge to Nowhere was for.

The Tea Baggers see themselves as Insurrectionists and Revolutionaries, which means that Congress has the right to raise a Militia to suppress their meetings. Wonder what the Tea Baggers would say if the National Guard broke up their demonstrations? Would they still see the need to stick to "Constitutional" powers only?

When Senator John McCain, opposed to "Don't Ask Don't Tell" after he was in favor of it, claimed that "organizing, arming and disciplining" the Armed Services was up to the generals, he evidently hadn't read the Constitution, which provides that power to the Congress.

I'll admit, I'm not a Constitutional scholar, but I can read. Unlike Christine O'Donnell who claimed to have studied the Constitution, yet didn't seem to be aware of the clauses in the Constitution which provide for the separation of church and state.

But I am an intelligent person, capable of Googling "US Constitution" and reading for myself what it says in that document. Which is more than I can say for Rep. Jim Diment, who wants every bill read aloud on the Floor of the House. I guess he's trying to hide the fact that he is illiterate and wants every bill, no matter how lengthy or arcane, turned into "Books on Tape".

The Constitution doesn't provide for electronic voting on bills, and, in fact, insists on voice vote: "votes of both Houses shall be determined by Yeas and Nays." At least that's how I read it. Oh, and they are required to record their vote for posterity, yet aren't requred to put their names on earmarks and amendments.

I am also deeply amused by the fact that members of the most presitious body in the world can throw people in jail for lying to Congress, yet they seem to not follow the same law. They stand in the Well of the House or the Pit of the Senate and lie their asses off, yet never do time.

In the original Constitution, the President was elected by the Congress, not by the Electoral College or popular vote resulting in Electoral College votes. So I guess we've been conducting our elections totally wrong all these years.

Look, you can't have it both ways. Either we indeed go back to yesteryear and adhere strictly to the Powers listed in that document...ALL of them. Or, we recognize that the beauty of our form of government is the fact that we can tweak it, amend it and generally update it to fit our current needs.

I'm for the latter, in case you couldn't tell.

Redistributing the Wealth

"Socialism is a economic and political theory advocating public or common ownership and cooperative management of the means of production and the allocation of resources." - Wikipedia

If I hear one more time that Obama is a "socialist", I think I'll puke.

I keep asking the question of some very smart people "if socialism is taking from rich people and giving to the poor, what is it called when we take from the poor and give to the rich?" Is it "redistribution of wealth" or "redistribution of poverty"? I think I have my answer.

It's called being a Conservative.

In the past decade, the number of billionaires (that's with a B) has risen. Case in point: Oprah Winfrey, who used to be the richest woman in the nation, is a paltry 137th in the recent Forbes' list of the top 400 billionaires. 137th! I remember when Forbes' used to track the top 400 millionaires. They don't do that any more because there are too darn many of them. Ah, those were the days.

If those who posit the idea that Obama is a socialist were to truly adhere to a pure capitalist creed, then perhaps we shouldn't have bailed out BP in the recent and ongoing Gulf Oil disaster. We, as pure capitalists, should have told them to sink or swim (especially the swimming part) in the Gulf. We should have said, "Taking from the poor taxpayers in this country is socialism and we are not socialists...we're capitalists. So take your lumps and pay for all the clean-up yourselves."

We are currently enjoying the lowest tax rates in our history. We have cut spending, on Obama's watch, to the lowest in our history. And yet, in spite of the fact that we have more rich people in this country than ever before, and in spite of the fact that the middle class hasn't effectively had a salary increase in 15 years, we've decided that the rich should get even richer and the middle class should pay for everything.

Witness yahoos who call themselves Senators on both sides of the political spectrum saying stupid things like "We should extend the tax cuts for the super wealthy but we have to get a hold of the national debt." Huh? How do they propose to pay for those tax cuts? With more borrowing, that's how.

Witness the bailout of the large financial institutions which began under George's watch, handing out beaucoup bucks to institutions which took huge risks, then came crying to Mama when they lost their shirts. Or, to be more accurate, when they lost other people's shirts. And yet, no limits were placed on the bonuses given to those very same managers who lost other people's shirts. That's capitalism for you.

Witness the bailout of the auto manufacturers, who ran their companies into the ground, then flew to Washington in their private jets to ask for help.

I guess it's "capitalism" if you get to keep the cash when you make profits, but "socialism" if the tax payers have to bail you out when you lose.

The argument seems to be that the tax cuts would help small business and they would start hiring again. Nope, small businesses aren't in the $250K range for the most part. Because, while their gross profits might be above $250K, they also have the ability to deduct business expenses, making their taxable income considerably less than the $250K ceiling. We generally tend to think of Mom and Pop as a "small business" but the Feds define "small business" as any business with under 50 employees. Anyone who has 50 employees could probably afford a dollar or two more in taxes, particularly since they are already getting special tax benefits for hiring new employees.

We had those same arguments during the Reagan years. They called it "Reaganomics" (or in the case of George Bush Sr, "voo doo economics") and the "trickle down" of largesse from the rich to the poor was a different form of "redistribution".

In fact, economists of every stripe pretty much agree that the "trickle down" didn't happen. Give a rich person a tax break and they'll no doubt go to Europe on vacation. Or buy a luxury yacht in Greece. Or buy more stock in AIG. Or give money to some political PAC. Or something. Not ever having been rich, I really have no experience in these matters.

But they won't hire any more people. Know how I know this? Because businesses aren't currently hiring, despite sitting on some pretty large bank accounts. They won't create jobs (except by investing in China, which results in Chinese jobs, I guess.) They won't donate more of their hard-earned cash to Habitat for Humanity or the Red Cross. They'll party hardy.

So, I'm still waiting for the intelligent debate about "socialism" when the Republicans, in charge of the House, the Senate and the White House, managed to turn a surplus into a deficit. They went to war, they handed out tax cuts like Mardi Gras beads, all without paying for any of it.

If Democrats are "tax and spend", then I guess we'll have to call Republicans "party and spend".

A "redistribution of wealth" did happen during the early 2000's...it's just which direction it went that disturbs me. If you don't like Obama, just say so...and find another, more accurate label.