Okay, so my plan is to highlight the stories of sexual abuse victims for the month of April.  If you are a private citizen and have told me your story, don’t worry, your story stops with me.  But I do want to honor every last celebrity who has identified being the survivors of rape or child rape as a part of their story because each one has given me strength to tell our story.  Tomorrow I will explain the story of how all that happened but today I just have one word, one name–

Oprah.  I would not have the courage to tell our story without you.  Thank you Oprah, for my voice, my children’s voices, for the knowledge that we are not alone.

Thank you

has haunted me ever since i learned that she was sexually abused by her half-brother(s).

she is forthright about it in a sketch from the past.  i believe this abuse was contributing factor in her struggles.

is April, terribly ironic considering she is a survivor of sexual assault.  She has taught me how to look bravely into the truth, into living through and past what was done to her and her community, her family and her friends.

In honor of this month and all the victims of sexual abuse, I would like to remember some of them each day.

For yesterday I would like to remember three sexual abuse victims from the Bible–Tamar, Dinah, and the unnamed concubine in Judges 19.

you could take a mirror and draw things on your face

smudge out lines,

erase gray hair

or add stuff

like that handlebar moustache you have always wanted?

what would you erase

or embellish?

and how would you face your heart with the truth

of all you had done

hidden

or defaced.

we are constantly required to make decisions, bread or soup? bus or vespa? helmet or baseball cap?

these decisions define us public/publically, private/privately.  the more public our lives, the greater the chances that yahoo will trumpet the strangeness of our latte choices (as in…j.lo, vente mocha chai, who knew?)

but then if our lives are private there are people we abide with who will not only know about the chai, they will know about our control issues, weakness for french fries, our flashpoints of anger.  in other words, our weaknesses, our sins.  they may not know all of them (who knew?) but they will know enough.

i have heard it said both that we are defined by who loves us and by what we love

Who loves you?  What do you love?

Palm Sunday

one day i would like to be secure enough to publish a book of verse called simply “old words.”  I have the ability to do this thanks to J.’s patronage and createspace, and the sheer existence of old words, some of which I have put together in abstrusely meaningful units.

I recently received a great gift in regard to some of these old words.  A dear, dear cousin and I connected and in the connection we have had some wonderful conversations about our family history and literary heritage.  I told her I had written a couple of poems about her mother and unearthed these poems and emailed them to her.

I was surprised at how good it was to share them with her and also to see myself again the way I was when I wrote them.

old words, ordinary words can offen capture beautiful people, eternal stories, lives joined by blood and water.

the homeless man sat on the bench eating cheesy popcorn and wryly discussing police policy. he said, we have been forsaken, forsaken. he talked about the rich & the government & all i could think of was the spa menu–lemon sugar body rubs, something that sounded suspiciously like a pricey shower. it did seem strange the deep divided created by money. i understand some of the reasons we can be forsaken…

So the article was about tracking consumer or human trends and deriving meaningful information from the statistics.  People with customized car colors tend to take better care of their cars because they see the cars as a placeholder for themselves and thus “love” their cars more.  The color they referred to in the article was orange, for all you UT grads trying to resell your funky colored Elements.

The article made a lot of sense but the part at the end that snagged my attention (beyond even graduations in San Jose) was something about Israelis voting for Belarusia/ns in international competitions.  Thousands of Belarusian Jews immigrated to Israel and retain an allegiance to their former country.

Intriguing.  So I started to read about the connection.  First, my immediate prejudice was confirmed–the history of the way Jews were treated in Belarus is wildly painful.  Sentences that have a clerical efficiency catch your eye.  Sentences about people being rounded up and shot by the millions.  The rictus of evil that could make mass destruction a human system.  I can’t even bear to make it a proper sentence.

So first out with it.  How extraordinary is it that people who came from a country where their families were decimated by murder still are so loyal to that country that they vote for it in international competitions?  I would be voting for Spain, Belgium.  Monaco.  Relations between Israel and Belarus are not that great because Lukashenka keeps making antisemitic remarks.  Extraordinary.  (No learning curve for Mr. Lukashenka?  probably the opposite.  I am afraid if he keeps making the statements he must be playing to some crowd, somewhere…)

But enough about politics, hate and loyalty.  The best part about Belarus is the list of Jewish people who come from there.  Understand that if this is the list of some of the famous Belarusian Jews, there are probably a bunch of other non-famous Belarusian Jewish people who are equally wonderful.  These are my favorites:  Marc Chagall, Menachem Begin, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, Chaim Weizmann, Shimon Peres, Irving Berlin, Naum Akhiezer, Bella Chagall, Issai Schur, Yitzak Shamir, Lev Vygotsky, and the founder of Zale’s, Morris B. Zale.

Diamonds.  Treasure.  The symbolism is lovely, and the list is much, much longer than my abbreviate version which veered toward people I knew or people I knew because of home school.  My favorite three favorites in a list that should not have favorites are Chagall, Ben-Yehuda, and Vygotsky.  I will explain only Vygotsky.  In educational theory Vygotsky is a super star because he has a theory that is called Vygotsky plus one.  The theory states that we learn best at the  level one above our own.  So if we  pray, play tennis, or dialogue with people who are a little better than we are, they teach us, they raise our level.

Thanks for raising my level.

i spent a great deal of my formative years reading.  sometimes in the summer i would read for thirteen hours straight.  at the time that seemed normal to me, now it seems a little sad.  but the books did their work, perhaps too well.  it seems to me that i could not have survived without the finches or narnia, Yoknapatawpha or middle earth but heroes in books, characters in general, are different than “real life.”  what happens if aragorn just wants to stay home and build up the kingdom’s infrastructure or if atticus decides he just doesn’t feel like getting the cold shoulder at the country club?  how bout if the world does most severely adhere to faulkner after all?  the loutish brother dominates the family, abuse goes unchecked, and even i don’t have the heart to talk about miss emily.

i am inclined to negative hyperbole but i have to be honest.  there are enough kind and brave and funny and generous people out there who remind me that God loves me and is writing beautiful stories in my life and theirs.  if you have been a part of those beautiful stories, thank you.  you give me hope.

Malachi 3:16