Trixie and Truthiness

There’s a couple of things I’d like to discuss with you this week.

I changed my name to Trixie about this time last year and I don’t think it worked. I didn’t do it legally; that is, it didn’t cost me anything but I informed all my friends that hereafter I would be known as Trixie. I signed all my correspondence “Trixie.” I thought of adding a middle name like Belle, Trixie Belle Els. Has a certain ring to it, dontcha think?

As you will remember, this time last year both Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and Camilla Parker-Bowles got new names. They made it seem so easy. You just send out a notice that you’re taking a new name and voila! Everybody is now calling you Pope Benedict or Duchess or whatever you ask. Can I get a tiny little “Trixie”? Not on your life.

And I thought the name suited me so well. Kind of spunky, perky, spicy. Full of personality. I thought it fit me. I thought sure that would become my new nickname and friends would be saying, “Oh, come on now, Trixie let’s not be so radical…” or obnoxious or whatever dark trait would come with the new name. I expected to become more forthright or confident. My new alter ego would be able to send dishes back to the kitchen in restaurants. With a name like Trixie I could get out of speeding tickets and get individual attention at Wal-Mart. I expected my clothes to fit better.

I obviously misjudged my own personality. I guess I’ll have to resume the boring name I was born with.

The other thing I need to get clear to readers of this blog is the issue of “truthiness.” I just love this new word. It sounds kind of cute and playful. Let me go on record that you have come to the wrong place if you want the absolute truth from me. No, I am a hearty advocate of truthiness. I revel in it. I bask in it. I do not apologize for my truthiness. I will never claim that anything I write is accurate.

I think I’m the only person in the US who thinks maybe we’re giving James Frye a hard time about his book A Million Little Pieces. I haven’t read the book but I saw the show when Oprah confronted him for presenting bold lies as the truth. This was probably his main problem. You just don’t lie to Oprah. You’re not supposed to lie to America, either-- though, God knows, we should be used to it by now. Our politicians lie to the American people all the time and we keep electing them to office.

His problem was the lies. But, as a writer and teller of tales myself, I know the temptation. In trying to get to the essence of a scene we sometimes have to magnify the picture. When the facts fail us, we exaggerate. To me the details aren’t all that important and I like to keep facts from blurring my story. Facts have a way of getting in the way when you’re trying to make a point. I get confused myself about the facts. So I will make a solemn vow to you today that I will never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

One last word: Beaven and I are about to go on a trip to Europe. I may be able to send stories of our adventures to you by email. When I’m not able to do that I’ve left a few columns about travel with Elizabeth who will be able to post them for me. I can tell you about our past travels. But I don’t want you looking for the absolute truth in those stories. Just the truthiness.

Blue Bologna

Being at home all day with young children can get pretty boring. Life on most days isn’t usually filled with blood-drenched races to the emergency rooms or projectile vomiting. Sometimes kids really do just sit there and play with their toys or watch TV. I wasn’t working outside the house when my girls were young and I could get really bored. This was especially true on Wednesday nights the year they were five and two years old. Beaven was taking a class at college on those nights and there was no adult coming home at the end of the day. I decided I had to find some way to put a little zip into our Wednesday evenings.

One evening, I decided I would make dinner as different as I could possibly make it. We started out by eating underneath the table on the floor. Not really a picnic, more like and upside down dinner. I turned out the lights and lit candles. Because Emily was so young, we ate only finger foods that night. I chopped up fruits, vegetables and anything else I could find, including Bologna.

During our dinner, Elizabeth asked where Bologna came from. I never missed a beat. “Bologna”, I told her very matter of fact “comes from a shaggy animal with blue fur; kind of like Grover on Sesame Street. They’re very friendly animals. And not very big. But big enough to sit on them. As a matter of fact, my grandfather had once had a Bologna herd and he used to let me ride them. They are very gentle animals.” By the time I got this far into the story, I was off and running. And by the time the meal ended, the girls knew all about Bologna ranches and how they have three horns and one eye, and the story of how my grandfather had once rescued me from a bologna stampede.

When Beaven came home that night he went to tuck them in. He heard all about Blue Bolognas. At the end of the story, he asked them if they had believed me. “No, but we had fun telling stories,” was their answer.

I had started a family tradition. The girls and I still have Blue Bologna Dinners. It’s probably time to indoctrinate the grands but the girls and I have such strict standards we’ve been wary that the new generation may mess up our routine. A Blue Bologna Dinner is always finger foods but we always try to include a new food that at least one of us has never eaten. We always eat by candlelight, but, now that the girls are grown, it can be a challenge to sit under the table. One year Elizabeth almost caught her hair on fire leaning over the candle. So, a lot of times we’ll put the food under the table and sit slightly at the edge. But the best part is the stories. Toward the end of the meal, we always tell tall tales—the taller, the better. Our favorite is the saga of “Supercat” who always bears a strange resemblance to whatever cat we own at the time. Supercat, by day, appears very normal but rises in the night to fly through the air (with a cape, of course) swooping down here and there to rescue children from wicked mothers who won’t buy popsicles at the grocery.

The girls have grown and so have their stories. Supercat’s latest adventure included reconfiguring a hard drive when it crashed. But, always, always, the stories. You wouldn’t expect grown women with careers to spend an evening on the floor eating chopped up apples and telling dumb stories. But you might understand if you could hear us laugh. Sometimes even a really dumb tradition can serve a most sophisticated purpose. Start a really dumb tradition now.

Louisiana

Here’s a thousand words or so. I’m still typing out the notes I took and can give you more words and pictures than I have here—if you really want them. Let me know if you do and I’ll send you the long version when I finish.
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It’s hard to type the word “Louisiana.” There’s so many “i’s” and they’re in weird places. I have to put a lot of thought to where the “i” goes. I guess it’s better than having to write about Mississippi but I still secretly wish we had gone to somewhere like Utah for this mission trip where the letters line up more easily.

Still, we had a good time even if it is hard to type the state’s name. The people are delightful and we all fell in love with the Louisiana culture. (Please don’t expect me to use this state’s name very much). They have the most delightful Cajun accent. I could sit and listen to them speak all day. And sometimes it seemed like we did because we talked to one guy about “modular” homes for close to half an hour before we figured out he was saying “modular.”

I can say now from first hand knowledge that this was a disaster and it was horrible. We heard enough stories to know that what we saw on TV was only the tip of the iceberg. One elderly lady told of her sister waiting on the top of her house for a day and a half until she was rescued. The drama of the hurricane increases a notch when you hear it in person from the lady who just cooked your evening meal for you and see the fresh tears in her eyes six months afterwards. Elizabeth Lyman, an expert in traumatized church congregations, told us that Katrina was not a “normal” trauma. Most traumas change only one aspect of your life. You get up the next morning and go to the grocery story and the beauty shop and keep going. But Katrina took the hairdresser and the grocer and the doctor. Your whole environment has changed. Rev. Lyman said that the “secondary trauma” is now hitting six months later. Suicides were up in the last two weeks. They are seeing heart attacks in people with no history of heart problems. And people are very aware that the next hurricane season starts in less than 90 days.

This really happened. It was bad. It will take a long time to heal and rebuild. But I have never been more proud to be a Presbyterian than I was last week. And it wasn’t just the cool shirts we got to wear, though I suspect some of us do this stuff simply for the shirts we get. I could look in the parking lot at the volunteer village and see vans from Michigan, Pennsylvania, North and South Carolina and Missouri, all sporting signs that said “Presbyterian Disaster Relief..” I watched trucks deliver equipment to set up housekeeping for 80 volunteers at a time to come to live and work. The church is planning to be there as long as it takes to get people back into their homes. We continue to build new camps and haven’t even started in New Orleans yet.

The two houses we worked on were across the street from each other. Miss Ellen is 76 years old and volunteers at the school during the day as a Foster Grandparent. She is one of those typical southern women whose hug just enfolds you. She’s lived in her house 36 years. Her house backs up to the bayou and this is the fourth time she been flooded. She woke up in the morning and looked outside, turned to her sister and said she thought they had dodged the bullet once again but her sister told her to come look out the back door where the water was rising. By the time she could collect her purse and car keys the water was so high against the door that she couldn’t open the door. A neighbor had to come and help pull on it from the outside. She described the race to get to the top of the hill before the water got too high to drive through it.

Miss Linda lives across the street with her son, Charles who is 21. They’ve lived there about 25 years which means that this is the only home Charles has ever known. Charles’ father was a Baptist preacher who died about a year ago. They lost all of their pictures of him in the flood.

I’m not sure if what we did is considered “mucking.” By the time we got to the houses we worked on FEMA had brought them a trailer and people were able to come home from wherever they had been staying. They had new roofs. The carpets had all been pulled up and the furniture was in piles or moved out of the house. The toilets and kitchen appliances were gone or disconnected so the house was basically an uninhabitable shell. Our job for the few days we were there was to pull out the old walls and the insulation. Then we sprayed the exposed wall studs with a chemical cocktail of bleach and Tri Sodium Phosphate. I’m kind of proud of that word.-- Tri Sodium Phosphate. It’s actually much easier to type than the name of the state. No one could remember it so I went out to the trash pile and found the empty bottle and wrote the word down. It’s a cleaning chemical of some sort. This blend of cleaners will keep the mold from growing back. After the TSP dried overnight we put in new insulation and sheetrock and mudded the seams. The walls were ready for paint when we left. Just as a team from South Carolina had brought the house to the stage where it was ready for us, we will leave the next step of rebuilding to the PDA team following us. I was able to tell Charles we wouldn’t stop until his house was finished.

We only worked on the houses for 3 days. The first thing we had to do when we got to the state (you know which one) was finish building our own living accommodations. We stayed in Camp #7 in Luling and drove out each morning to Camp #8 in Houma. Eventually our plan was to work on two houses in Houma but we had to commute for a couple of days until we could get water connected at the camp where we were supposed to stay at night. The camp had tents and utilities. Our guys spent one whole day putting the plumbing together. Our team was a lot more relaxed than some of the others we ran across. It’s one thing to share a kitchen with your sister in Christ or any sister for that matter. It’s a very different thing to try to set up cooking facilities with about 40 women you’ve never met who have different ideas on where the sugar should be stored and who should be boss.

I had brought my dancing chicken with me. I always like to take a tension breaker with me when I suspect things might get too heavy. When you pinch her wing she makes the tune of the Chicken Dance (You know: it from weddings receptions and other silly stuff) and lifts her legs while waving her wings. It’s a fairly accurate duplicate of the real Chicken Dance. There’s nothing like a dancing chicken to perk you up when you’re taking things too seriously. Sadly, few people took the bait. Some people take disasters so seriously that a whole flock of dancing chickens wouldn’t have relaxed them. We have to learn to pace ourselves if we’re going to be any use to anyone.

The food was terrific. Everybody wanted to thank us with food. Charles made us a cake in his tiny FEMA trailer which was about the size of the trailer I’ve been camping in. Miss Ellen commissioned a huge batch of red beans and rice from a friend. This was the same friend who visited one day and sang Amazing Grace for us in the true Gospel style. We had Jambalaya, bread pudding, Gumbo, and a Crawfish boil. I don’t think there was a single local dish we didn’t get to sample.

We stayed in interesting quarters. All the Volunteer Villages used the same kind of corrugated plastic tents. I’ve never seen anything like it before. The idea is that you can run ductwork to six tents from a central unit and have heat in the winter and cold in the summer – and corrugated plastic works better for this than canvas. There were also three other huge tents for dining, storage and a kitchen. About the only thing the camps didn’t have was an oven and dishwasher. It’s kind of interesting to look inside a tent and find a refrigerator. Girl Scout camping was never like this.

I have to say that Beaven was a trooper on his first mission trip. He was a good sport about the idea of mosquitoes which would normally unnerve him. He bought himself a mosquito net and slept like a baby except for the night his cot collapsed under him in the middle of the night and the night the heat went berserk. The heat, which was a great idea and worked perfectly, was set at 60 degrees, which is a pretty conservative way to do things. But what they didn’t know was that the thermostat was Celsius, not Fahrenheit. Sixty degrees Celsius is about 140 Fahrenheit. You can understand Beaven’s concern at 2 am that he had prematurely gone to Hell.

We got home late Tuesday night, hot, tired, sore, sunburned and emotionally exhausted only to find a plumbing leak in the hall bathroom that provided us with our own little bayou. We were so tired at this point about the only thing we could do was throw every bath towel we had on the floor and turn the water to the toilet off. After turning the water off Beaven stood up and hit his head full force on the towel cabinet above the toilet. That’s when the emotional baggage of the week fell as he loudly broke the third commandment. Who could blame him?

I have often tried to posit that the term “God Damn It” is actually a sort of prayer of intercession but I can’t get anybody to buy it. May God damn hurricanes and tornadoes and earthquakes. May God damn humans who can’t get their act together and rescue people faster than three days. May God damn the whole lousy situation.

Maybe God would worry a little more about the shape of our planet if we took better care of it ourselves. Maybe we wouldn’t have a flooded Ninth Ward if we had left the marshlands where God put them. Maybe we wouldn’t have extraordinary hurricanes if we left the temperature of the earth alone and quit heating things up. Maybe we shouldn’t choose to live right on the coast line.

In the end we can’t call upon God to damn anything. We’re stuck with the earth God gave us. We just have to take better care of it and each other.

Mission- Part Two

I just got back from our trip to Louisiana and it was awesome. Since I knew how tired I’d be tonight I wrote the following ahead of time so I can just post it now and go on to sleep in a real bed. I’ll start writing in earnest over the next few days. I will tell you now that the trip was great and we had fun and we’re glad we went. And we’re already planning the next one. Here’s what I wrote before the trip. Tune in next week for stories of what we saw and did.

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We will be working on a brand new work site in Houma, Louisiana. We are the eighth “village” of volunteers the Presbyterian Disaster Assistance has built in the hurricane area. Surprisingly, most of them are in Mississippi. Apparently there’s a lot more red tape to set up a recovery camp in Louisiana. Our camp will be the second one in the state. The other one is in Luling. While the first six teams are already working on drywall, painting and roofing in Mississippi, the teams in Luling and Houma are just now setting up housekeeping.

PDA calls our housing village “the Good Earth.” Gives it a kind of happy, campy name. We will be the first team to actually stay in it. First we have to finish building it. Once we get it habitable we’ll go out into the community of Houma and start helping with the mucking and demolition. Now, I’m not familiar with mucking. Well, I mean, I know what it means, at least, I think I do. I’ve just never actually mucked before. I hear it is nasty and smelly work.

What we expect to face in Louisiana will be minor in comparison to some of the trips I’ve been on to Guatemala. The beds won’t be what we’re used to at home. We’re not sure if we’ll have electricity. But, actually, we’re the people who are scheduled to install the electrical wiring so that’s kind of in our control.

I said before that mission is not “taking Christianity to the savages” anymore. Mission is now standing alongside others in need and helping them or just being with them. Just “being” with someone is a hard thing for us to do in our action oriented culture. It took me quite a while to understand this concept. It doesn’t seem like much of a contribution. But sometimes it’s all we have to give.

I expect the hardest part will be to see citizens of my own country in the same shape as people in a very poor country far south on the world globe. That’s what I expect. We’ll see what happens.

Mission

Beaven and I are going to Louisiana this week with about 10 other folks from Presbyterian churches in East Dallas. I expect to have lots to tell you when we get back.

One of the first things I learned on a mission trip was a really good definition of what mission is. It used to be missionaries went to take the word of God to a bunch of savages who didn’t know about Jesus. Nowadays, especially in the Christian cultures where the “savages” may know more about Jesus than you do, mission is more of a solidarity thing. Mission is going to people in need and helping them meet those needs or merely standing beside them and holding their hand in their need. And there are lots of ways to do that. A mission trip to the Presbyterians in Guatemala is different from a mission trip to hurricane-devastated Louisiana. But each trip performs the same basic function.

I went on my first mission trip in 1999 and I’ve been going ever since. Many people have asked me why I go and I never could find the words to describe it as well as the short and simple way Ila Hitt did last week. Ila is going to Louisiana with us and here’s what she said when we were each asked to describe why we’re going;

“I have the time and the energy and it would be a shame…no, it would be a sin, not to go.”

I use a whole lot more words to say basically the same thing. Here’s my version of why I’m going to Louisiana:

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It all started because Linda Terpstra went to Guatemala. Linda is a nurse anesthetist for a doctor who does cataract surgery. He got interested in a non-governmental organization called Helps. He asked Linda to go with him to assist. After her first trip she came back and gave an excited report to our church congregation. It all sounded very dramatic and dangerous. The country was climbing out of a 30 year old civil war and there were men with guns everywhere. There was a lot of poverty and crime on the streets. There was malaria, dysentery and cholera. But in the midst of all the hazards Linda described there was also the sense that God was at work everywhere she went. And, most exciting of all was the idea that God was using her, working through her simple talents to help the people of Guatemala. It sounded very exotic. Did I mention it sounded dangerous? I thought to myself in a very detached way: How nice of Linda to do this. Maybe I can contribute some money but I’m not at all interested in going myself. I knew in the back of my mind I was afraid to go.
But I didn’t count on the power of the Holy Spirit.

One Sunday in October of 1998, we had a special worship service at First Presbyterian in Garland, Texas where I’ve worshipped since the year Elvis died. (Women my age tend to date things that way.) Marj Carpenter was our guest preacher that Sunday. She had served the Presbyterian Church as Moderator of the General Assembly once, which made her a really important figure to the average Presbyterian. She has a huge interest in the mission of the church and in her year as moderator she went just about everywhere in the world there was a breathing Presbyterian. She’s a mesmerizing speaker. And also one of the most unimposing speakers I’ve ever seen; small, gray haired and very grandmotherly looking. She walks with a pronounced limp and always appears visibly tired. Because she is tired. She’s been all over the world, only spending about 15 days in her own home in a year’s time. She then spent the years afterwards speaking in churches and telling about what the Presbyterians are up to in the mission field.

I knew she had a bad back. By the end of her speech she was literally holding on to the pulpit to remain standing up. I had seen Marj speak before and knew the effect she has on people.

I gave the Childrens Story that morning and I told the kids about the important work Marj does in mission. I tied it into the charge of the congregation we say at the end of worship every Sunday.

Like many churches, we have a charge at the end of our worship. It’s based on Thessalonians with a few instructions added from here and there in the bible and since we’ve said it every week for the last 20 years everyone knows it by heart. We even teach the Confirmation Class how to say it in sign language, which gives it an added boost.

Go forth into the world in peace. Have courage. Hold on to what is good. Return to no person evil for evil. Strengthen the faint hearted. Support the weak. Help the suffering. Honor all persons. Love and serve the Lord, rejoicing in the power of the Holy Spirit.

I told the kids how important mission work is and how hard it is. But, I told the kids, God gives Marj the strength to do it because it’s so important.

At the end of worship that day a friend reached across the aisle and touched me on the back and said to me “You could do that.” In a burst of ego, I readily agreed and thought to myself what fun it would be to explore all those places and tell people all about them. What held me back was the same fear everyone has of under developed countries. Crime, war, disease, poverty…. It was all too easy to cross that project off my list.

But later that day my words came back to literally haunt me. I was driving alone in my car with nothing to do but think. What had I said in my Children’s Story? And did I really mean it? I wondered how much conviction I had in those words. After all, I had said them to the children of our church. Had I told a lie to the children? Did I really mean what I said? Was I a hypocrite or merely chicken?

The words came back to me: “Rejoicing in the power of the Holy Spirit.” Can we really step out in faith and rejoice, depending only on the Holy Spirit to accompany us? The travel Marj Carpenter does is hard but the power of the Holy Spirit helps her. Not only does she step outside her comfort zone, she does it with joy. That’s what I had told the children. Could I do it?

Driving on the quiet highway I moved my hands in the sign I had taught the kids: “Rejoicing in the power of the Holy Spirit”. I moved my hands again, emphasizing the “Rejoice” movement. Then again, exaggerating the “Power” motion. Sign language is a very powerful way to understand what you are saying. At that moment the sign for “Power” sealed the deal.

The next thing I knew, I was waiting for a 5 a.m. flight to Guatemala.

And tomorrow at 7 a.m. we leave for Louisiana.