"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me" has to be one of the dumbest truisms going. To Kill a Mockingbird, the late Harper Lee's novel, begins: "When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow." I was thirteen the first time I broke a bone, but the story of the break isn't nearly as strange as the story of the aftermath. 

 Waiting to be picked up from some after-school activity, my friend Jessica and I were horsing around in the front courtyard of the junior high school. From the main sidewalk, three shallow steps led down to the small patch of concrete, then three shallow steps back up to the main doors. I tripped over a loose metal cap at the edge of the top step and fell, landing hard on my left arm. It hurt, of course, but I'd had falls before, from bicycles and roller skates and the odd tree limb, and I was certain the hurt would subside. Besides, I didn't want to get in trouble.

Astonishingly stupid in the way only thirteen-year-olds can be, I managed to conceal my injury for several days until my parents demanded the complete truth. I remember being (quite rightly) scolded for failing to confess all from the beginning at least as much as I remember having my broken wrist in a cast for a month. 

Given how heedlessly we played as children (my mother would later say that she was glad she never knew just how high we all climbed in the huge poinciana tree in the front yard), it astonishes me how few broken bones my sisters and I collected. But the wrist healed beautifully and has not troubled me since. Ditto the ankle I managed to break five years later.

But decades later, if I wish, I can still summon up some of the words that hurt me. Most of the time, I don't wish to, and time really does heal a lot of those childhood wounds. Life gets a lot easier as the skin gets thicker. Besides - a side benefit of having worked in the letters-to-the-editor department - once a total stranger calls you a lying bitch over the phone, you get really good at not taking things too personally.

Which does not mean that some words are not objectively offensive.

In the divided discourse of today, people are quick to taunt with words that are meant to hurt: "snowflake," "OK Boomer," and similar phrases. When someone says, "That's offensive," it's considered a purely subjective judgment, and many people will deflect by suggesting that the problem lies with the complainer. "If you're that offended...." (Shut up and go away, is the usually unspoken end to that sentence.)

The reality is that part of human society includes sometimes tacit agreements about objective offensiveness. In most cases, when I say, "That's offensive," I don't mean that I am offended. (If I were, that's what I would have said.) Without having discussed it, everyone would agree - for example - that using a yellow cloth Star of David to indicate a non-vaccinated person is objectively offensive. It need not offend any one individual to be so universally unacceptable as to be objectively offensive.

And yet a hat-store owner in Tennessee has made such badges, wears one, and offers them for sale. 

Sticks and stones can break bones, of course. But in many cases bones knit together far more readily than the psychic wounds done by words. 

There's no easy way to change the hot mess that social discourse often becomes, of course. But as for me and my house, as they say, I can acknowledge the lasting power of words, both to wound and to heal, and to choose those words with care and with an eye toward kindness.

The Truman Committee

 By 1941, Harry S Truman had been a United States senator long enough, and brilliantly enough, to erase some of the taint that he carried with him to Washington. He had some associations with the Kansas City, Missouri, political machine of "Boss" TJ Pendergast. It was to his credit that in his previous political roles, which included overseeing and awarding road contracts, he never enriched himself. (In fact, he would be just about broke when he left the White House in 1953).

That's part of the reason that when he orchestrated a committee, within 18 months it was effective and powerful. As the United States, in early 1941, was not yet in the war, it was involved in the Lend-Lease program, sharing military equipment with allies. Truman wanted to investigate waste and shoddy contracting, deeply concerned at the bedfellowship of the military and big corporations. By mid-1943, just the threat of Truman Committee investigators arriving at a steel plant or military base was often enough to make shady practices evaporate. 

Truman, who had been the captain of an artillery battalion in World War I, was generally distrustful of big business and driven by both general agreement with New Deal practices and genuine patriotism. He firmly believed that it was abhorrent to allow substandard steel to be used in ships and planes - potentially killing troops - for the benefit of profiteering. And he firmly believed that the German military and its leader must be stopped. 

In listening to an unabridged audiobook (56 hours!) on Truman, I've been struck by how basic Truman's patriotism was. He loved his country - and he applauded and encouraged civilian contributions to the war effort. My dad, who was not quite 11 years old in 1945, says that he remembers vividly the unity of spirit, the knowledge that we were all in this together. People saved their fat and traded it to the butcher, used ration cards, avoided making long-distance calls on holidays so that soldiers could call loved ones where possible.

Earlier this week, by contrast, I learned that for some people, gasoline is the new toilet paper. If you remember, in the early months of COVID-19, people were panic-buying toilet paper because they did not know when they would be able to get more. Most people behaved themselves, but some are reporting that they still know folks with excess 24-packs in the garage. When ransomware hacked the Southeastern Pipeline, temporarily disrupting the supply of gasoline to filling stations, most people behaved themselves. Lines formed, but they moved along. When I was low on gas and needed to fill up on Wednesday, there was gas at the pump when it was my turn and I was able to get what I needed. 

But social media has also shown numerous photographs of people filling eight or ten ten-gallon gas cans and stacking them in the back of their SUVs. And multiple reports of people finally reaching the pump and discovering it empty. 

That's panic-buying verging on hoarding. Something that was actually against the law in World War II - and something that comparatively few people engaged in.

Social media has also shown photographs of people endangering themselves and others by ignorance of the principles of chemistry. There's a reason that gas stations have signs about putting gas only in approved containers. And yet, we've seen photos of car trunks filled with bulging, tied-shut plastic bags filled with gasoline. Or people pumping gas into open plastic tubs. And as with the toilet paper, most of us are behaving ourselves, but I'm waiting for a news article about a car exploding because of a trunk full of gasoline.

Obviously, society has changed drastically since World War II. And one of the things I'd like to see make a return is a sense of shared obligation. At the very beginning of the pandemic, it went well for the most part. But after only a few months of sheltering in place, a lot of people, having had enough, insisted on engaging in shopping, dining out, and gathering for motorcycle rallies. During the war, rationing of certain items, including gasoline, went on for three full years. People complained, but they understood.

When the pipeline got hacked, we didn't even wait three days, much less three years. As cyberattacks become increasingly a threat, maybe it's time to bring back the ration books.

Chained and liberated

 Lutherans, it seems to me, ought to feel most at home with technology. Martin Luther explained the paradoxical "Freedom of a Christian" thusly: "I am a perfectly free lord of all, servant to none," he said, and also "a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all."

With each new technology, those behind it optimistically predict our liberty increasing by leaps and bounds. An unintentionally funny 1978 print ad for email showed bright lines shooting all around an office and a startled executive, like the little gold tracks that follow Tinker Bell in the movie Peter Pan. By the time a plurality of people started having desktop computers, futurists were enthusiastically promoting a "paperless office."

We might use a lot less paper -- my last two jobs have allowed me to chart interactions with residents and patients on the computer -- but we're far from paperless. And email, so quickly hailed as a time saver, did not take long to turn into a burden. Articles promote tips and tricks to help harried individuals thin out their email inboxes. Some email services let you select a whole page's worth and delete them at one shot, if you wish to be so cavalier.

Likewise, voice mails. It used to be they were a convenient alternative to calling someone over and over and just missing them. Now we play phone tag, and many people (I'm among them) infinitely prefer to receive a text message. It's like having my own personal secretary. The information is all right there, and I can deal with it in a reasonably prompt fashion. When the phone rings, by contrast, I have to drop what I'm doing and answer it. Sometimes the caller wants information I can't give them at the moment because it's stored on the phone I am on.

So - technology sometimes means we are "subject to all."

On the other hand! Technology is helping us immeasurably in the selling of one house and buying of another. Our Realtor in North Carolina sends an email via Docusign, and we electronically sign everything and send the papers back. Ditto the papers on the house we are buying in Virginia. It's not the same service, it's a similar one, but I'm not sure I will actually lay eyes on the Realtor until we close. Maybe not even then. 

Just now, I used an app on my phone to photograph documents and send them to the administrators of my church-based retirement account, from which we are drawing the money for the up-front costs of buying the house. In just a few seconds, I got a check mark on my screen. I didn't even have to mail the documents to Minnesota, wait for them to arrive, and wait some more for someone to process them.

Without the technology, selling our house would mean multiple eight-hour round trips between Newport News, Va., and Greensboro, NC. That's where the "perfectly free" part comes in. For all its leg irons, technology sometimes proves quite convenient. 

Just don't get me started on faxes.

Buying and Selling

 I don't know what makes a buyers' market vs. a sellers' market. I imagine it might have something to do with consumer confidence, but that's only a guess. What I do know, though, is that we are in the midst of a crazy sellers' market.

In the summer of 2019, the hubs and I decided to sell our home of six years to move closer to work. We had no idea, of course, that COVID would eat my job and that we would end up moving to another state, but I digress. Our next-door neighbor was a Realtor, and so with his help we put our house on the market. That was in mid-August. After what felt like dozens of showings, and the usual weird complaints ("too many doors"), the house finally sold, for a good six thousand dollars less than we were asking. We didn't lose money on the deal, but when the dust settled I think we made something like $36.

So here we are in March 2021. When we moved to Virginia, the hubs stayed behind, packing up the rest of the house and bringing the belongings up in shifts. Once he moved out for good at the end of last month, the same Realtor put our house on the market. It will go fast, he assured us. There is hardly any inventory out there. 

We found the same situation, incidentally, in looking for a house to buy here while we waited out the six-month lease on our apartment. I saw a sign in a yard that said, "Just listed," so I called the agent. "It's under contract," she said. The day it listed, someone made an offer and the seller accepted. We quickly learned not to get excited if Zillow showed a house that had been listed for more than a week. Invariably, our Realtor would learn that it was already under contract.

Back in North Carolina, our Realtor flipped the metaphorical switch and our house went live around noon on Tuesday. By the next morning, there would be nine showings scheduled. Turns out we would not need them. We had priced the house for $7,000 above what we paid for it, on the Realtor's advice, knowing that it was a sellers' market.

Is it ever.

Within 26 hours, we had three offers. The one we accepted was for nine thousand dollars above our asking price, which I had thought optimistic.

Meanwhile, after looking at seemingly every house for sale in our price range in the area, we found a house that we loved. Built in 1930, it is sturdy and functional, solidly built, with a fenced back yard. We sat on pins and needles while the seller pondered our offer, which was a hair under list price. 

This morning, word came that the seller has accepted. Break out the boxes.

Many of the houses we looked at were perfectly acceptable and perfectly bland. We rejected one because when we drove through the neighborhood on a recon, the Levittown-ness of it gave us both the willies. Other houses looked bigger in the pictures. I still can't forget the charming doll house that would be ideal for the person with no possessions. Seriously! It was beautifully staged - and there was no room for anything except the furniture. Another house, built in 1912, was too cramped-feeling, but I admit the claw-foot bathtub almost sealed the deal. A third house would have been perfect in another neighborhood, one where there wasn't a vacant lot across the street. As a capper, when we stepped back out onto the porch, a resident of the neighborhood drove by, his car window down, arguing fiercely with himself. 

I don't know why the seller of the house we chose is selling. I do know that in addition to lots of wood flooring (we have dogs), a gorgeous laundry room/sunroom, and a gas stove, the house has that indefinable character. It has individuality. It was the first one we walked into in which we felt at home. I could imagine C.S. Lewis strolling down the stairs, pipe in hand, to lean against the fireplace mantel.

So it's been a busy week here. It took a whole 26 hours to sell our North Carolina house. On the other hand, we got lucky in being able to buy the house we wanted. Here's hoping that we won't have to break out the moving boxes again for a long time.

Falling for Free

It seemed too good to be true when I saw it on Facebook yesterday. A post, apparently from Pepsi-Cola, saying that in celebration of its 100th anniversary, it would give a mini cooler, a gift card, and Pepsi products to anyone who shared and commented on this post. It was the quality of the cooler that made me skeptical. It wasn't one of those little vinyl coolers but a metal mini-refrigerator, freestanding, quite nice. I didn't give it much thought as I scrolled on by. Saw two more this morning. One purported to be from Hyundai, saying that one person, of all the people who shared and commented on its post, would win a new car. That seemed more realistic. One chance to win. It still seemed unlikely. Not five minutes later, a similar post from Little Caesar's, promising free pizza to everyone who shared and commented. It seems that this is the latest marketing technique. No one will win anything by sharing these posts except the companies, who will get lots of free advertising. Why are we so quick to accept the idea of something for nothing? Not much these days is truly free. Occasionally, a retailer will offer a buy one, get one free deal, but it seldom nets more than a frozen dinner or a canister of cooking spray. Yet when we come across such offers online, we tend to fall for them much more readily. In the early days of Facebook, a persistent post said that Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, would give money to anyone who shared the post. What possible motivation could he have for doing that? Microsoft was already a behemoth, dominating the computer industry. Maybe it's because so little is truly free. The scarcity is what tempts us. The worst that is likely to happen in sharing a Facebook post is that the organization gets advertising spread all over Facebook. But too often the offer of something for nothing is a scam. We're told something is free, then asked to pay shipping and handling fees. If it escalates, a scammer is draining our bank accounts, often from the other side of the world. I suspect that I will see more similar posts before this particular fad dies down. It's a little disappointing to see how many people appear to be falling for it. Incidentally, Pepsi is a lot more than 100 years old, having made its debut in 1893 as Brad's Drink, invented by Caleb Bradham, a druggist in Wilmington, North Carolina.

Cancel Culture

Gina Carano is the latest public figure to discover that free speech has consequences. Some thirty years ago, it was called "political correctness." For a while, people who objected to offensive speech were derided as snowflakes, an insult that has its origins in the misogynistic and dark movie Fight Club. Whatever it's called, it pops up with regularity. Gina Carano, an actor in the popular Star Wars television series The Mandalorian, posted something transphobic on Twitter. In response, she was fired from her role. I found out about it yesterday on Facebook, and the comments were rapidly sorting themselves out with some predictability. Conservatives were saying that Carano's firing represents "cancel culture," which means that anything that offends liberals gets canceled, rubbed out, erased from the popular landscape. Which is, of course, untrue. Carano is still capable of looking for other roles. Her filmography still stands. The undertone to these comments was a complaint of one-sidedness. Only conservatives are victims of cancel culture, they said. Liberals enact cancel culture on anything they dislike while the liberals themselves are allowed to say whatever they want. Really? One might ask Steve Biko or Harvey Milk if that is true. The secret is that there is no cancel culture. Speech has consequences, as it always has. I have known co-workers to lose their jobs for speaking disparagingly to and about the clients, regardless of political outlook. The most noticeable recent example of the absence of cancel culture is probably the former president. For four years he romped on social-media platforms, notably Twitter, pouring out insults and reversing decades of foreign policy in 2 a.m. postings. It was only after the events of January 6 that Twitter banned him from the platform. Is this cancel culture? Of course not. He has multiple avenues with which to express himself. But Twitter has guidelines, which apply even to presidents or former presidents. When his predecessor took office in early 2009, he was parted from his BlackBerry, which he reportedly used frequently and to great effect. For eight years, Barack Obama did not make a single social-media post. Yet somehow he managed to communicate with the nation and make his opinions known. One consequence for the 45th president of his free-ranging speech, of course, is that he lost the election. Some of his followers have discovered that speech has consequences as well. The attempted insurrection of Jan. 6 was well documented, and as a result a number of people are losing their jobs when it is discovered that they participated. Over the last decade or so, as social media has gained prominence, one occasionally reads of a teacher or law enforcement officer or pastor -- someone in a position of public trust, usually -- losing his or her job because of something they said. For legitimate cancel culture, we probably must look to the former Soviet Union. Writers who spoke out, such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, were sent to the gulag for years or perhaps decades. In the Argentina of the 1970s, under Augusto Pinochet, people were "disappeared" for their opposition to the regime. In this country, people like Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor and Freddie Gray are true victims of cancel culture. Recently, conservative commentators are losing sponsors over some of their more egregious remarks. They are not being sent to gulags, disappeared, or dying while in police custody. They are experiencing the consequences of free speech. There's a difference.

The Second One

Recently, I began rereading a classic, Studs Terkel's Working. One of his subjects says in passing, "My second one's a problem with homework." Not has a problem. Is a problem. That would be me. The second of three girls. My older sister, ambitious and Type A, never gave my parents any concern. Straight As, orchestra, marching band, plenty of friends and boyfriends, math club, German club, honor society, National Merit semifinalist. Waitlisted at Harvard, accepted at Johns Hopkins, Brown, Princeton, and Davidson. Degree in mathematics from the University of North Carolina. She busted her neck for right years to pass actuarial exams and is now a bank vice president. Fun act to follow, although she is gracious enough to tell me that she was a basket case in high school. My younger sister was everything I was not, cute and popular with a circle of friends and a string of boyfriends and a clear coloratura soprano. Between the two, I was hard-pressed to find my own niche. I thought I had found it in theater, but my younger sister yook it up and soon eclipsed me. I had few friends, but sometimes my friends became her friends. In school, I usually understood things the first time. If I did not, I had no interest in learning it. My parents had multiple teacher conferences. School was rocky, adolescence was a nightmare. In later tears, my sisters would say that the family dramas usually starred me. They usually did. One evening, at the climax of a homework battle, my father said, "What do you suggest we do?" God knows where I got the idea. I said, "Leave me alone and trust me." I was twelve or thirteen at the time. Maybe I was tired of it. Maybe I was sliwly maturing. But they did, and I started to improve. Slowly. I had a C average in high school, a B/C average in college. Sux or seven years later, when I was taking paralegal courses, I made the Dean's list. When I graduated at 41 with a Master of Divinity degree, it was with a 3.8 average. I have always been a loner and a little quirky. But although it has taken more than fifty years, I have found my groive as the second one.

A Time to Heal

 On November 8, 2016, I had a blanket over my head and was crying by 8:30. My friends gently teased me for being a pessimist, but I was a longtime political wonk and I knew.

It’s just as well I had taken the next day off, because the hubs and I barely slept that night. I cried through the night. We had had what was to have been a celebratory sleepover with our friends. The next morning, as I came downstairs, my friend gathered me into a hug. “Oh honey,” she said. “It’s going to be all right.”

“No it’s not,” I said. My next words were prophetic: “I feel terrible for all the poor working-class people who voted for him,” I said. “They’re going to feel so betrayed.” 

After four years, we have learned the supreme resiliency of our democratic experiment. It has been tested to the utmost. It will be tested still more when 45 Republicans vote against convicting Mr. Trump for inciting sedition, which is precisely what he did.

Mitch McConnell is being blatantly hypocritical. First he said the Senate could not take up the articles until January 19; then he ssaid that since Mr. Trump is no longer in office, there is no point.

There is indeed a point. We must reinforce our democracy. We must ensure that Mr. Trump is never again allowed to hold elective office,

Meanwhile, like millions of others, I am healing, but it’s slow. The wounds are deep from five years (including campaigning) of outrage, misogyny, racism, white supremacy, lies, watching a con artist at work, personal enrichment, open nepotism, isolationism, sexual assault, graft, the careless explosion of geopolitical alliances— seriously! Don’t undo major policies of decades with a 2 a.m. tweet, the fawning kowtowing to dictators and rulers who are our enemies and who have nukes, openly craving a Soviet-style military parade, inspiring a million anx a half people to march on Washington and mlions more on every continent... But everything pales next to this heart of darkness. He has blood on his hands. In a ghastly replay of the early 1980s and AIDS, he at first ignored COVID because it appeared to be affecting blue states (that is, more populated areas). Then he said it would go away. Then he played politics, openly helping governors of friendly states and hijacking supplies destined for other governors. In a global pandemic that cried out for federal strategy, he said, "I take no responsibility." He refused to wear a mask and loudly mocked people who did. He threatened and handicapped Dr. Anthony Fauci. He insisted on holding huge maskless rallies, the only thing that would assuage his huge ego. When he finally got up a task force, he put his son-in-law in charge. And when he contracted it, he put people at risk by indisting on an unmasked car ride so he could see the prople cheering the naked emperor. So yes, the wounds are deep. I have post-Trump traumatic stresz syndrome. Every day I have watched him engage in words and deeds, any one of which would have sunk any other politician. And still people voted for him! He has made clear his comtempt gor his fawning supporters. Don't you dare tell me that you're terrified of what President Biden will do. He is a fundamentally decent man with a lifetime of public service. He is already opening doors snd throwing out lifelines. Do not underestimate the significance of having dogs in the White House. It is exhausting to hold on to sustained outrage and grief for so long. Allow us a few deep breaths. The scar tissue will be slow to form. And since I believe in show up, stand up, speak up, speak out, I will continue to make good trouble and hold the Biden administration to high standard. But if we still jump at small noises, give us time.

Ponder Anew

It's been almost three weeks since I've posted. In those three weeks, I have been engaged in packing up a 1600-square-foot house; laying out $2,300 to begin an apartment rental; renting a U-Haul (because that tapped out our savings); putting as much as we could fit onto the U-Haul; driving 260 miles northeast; unpacking the U-Haul; and, oh yeah, starting a new job.

Since COVID ate my job of seven years, I was fortunate to find a new one in my field. And I do mean fortunate. I came within a whisker of being hired to work in a supermarket deli, which is supremely physical work and hard on the feet. 

There is more to the U-Haul saga. The hubs brought another load up this past weekend, and we offloaded some of it into the apartment and some of it into a storage locker. Firstborn and I now have to repack the storage locker to make room for a loveseat and secretary. Seriously! In my next life, I want to be preliterate.

For the best part of thirty years, I have lived in the Piedmont, the foothills of North Carolina. I enjoy the changing show of the trees with the seasons, but other than that, I guess I've become immured to their charms. Changing regions has been an eye-opener.

I am now in the Tidewater region of Virginia, in the southeast part, which includes Norfolk, Hampton, Newport News (hello!), Chesapeake, Suffolk, Virginia Beach, and Portsmouth. This is a part of Virginia that consists mostly of water with a few fingers of land laid over it. The trick is to identify the body of water. This part of Virginia has so much water, I almost always flunk. "That's got to be the bay, right?" I asked a colleague as we crossed a large body of water. "Oh, no, that's the James River," she said casually. Bodies of water I think are the ocean are the bay; what I consider the bay is a river; and if I see a body of water small enough to be a river, it's invariably a creek. I have concluded that this part of Virginia has so much water that residents are casual about it.

The upside, besides all this great natural beauty and being half an hour from the beach, is that so much water begets many, many bridges. I love bridges. I think they're cool and am always glad to go over one. I credit this to a childhood in suburban Fort Lauderdale and Miami, where there was a great deal of travel back and forth over two long causeways. One was a drawbridge, which sometimes was up. Whee! I still miss the Sunshine Skyway Bridge on the west coast of Florida.

The other day, a slight wrong turn led me onto the James River Bridge. The only recourse was to cross it, make a U-turn, and cross back. Which I did. Later in the week, I found myself near the bridge again, so of course I went down and rode it across and back just for the fun of it. Because, of course I did. The bridge is five miles long and takes five and a half minutes to cross. You see why I thought the river was the Chesapeake Bay? The thing had waves!

Even as I am delighting in my landscape, I am pleased to be back to my roots. Not just my own, growing up in a coastal city, but my ancestors, who came from the Tidewater region. I am tempted to re-read William Styron's A Tidewater Morning. 

Too much new stuff can be overwhelming. But if I take my new life in pieces, I expect to find lots of enjoyment in living in a new part of the country.