I like Canadians.
They are so unlike Americans.
They go home at night.
Their cigarets don’t smell bad.
Their hats fit.
They really believe that they won the war.
They don’t believe in Literature.
They think Art has been exaggerated.
But they are wonderful on ice skates.
A few of them are very rich.
But when they are rich they buy more horses
Than motor cars.

—Ernest Hemingway

I didn’t know that Ernest Hemingway ever turned his hand to poetry, and on the basis of this I’m still not sure he ever succeeded at it. Nevertheless, for everyone who lives in Maine, coming to terms with Canada is a central fact of life. We border only one state, after all, but two Canadian provinces, French-speaking Quebec and English-speaking New Brunswick.

For most of my life Maine and its Canadian neighbors have gotten along reasonably well, and the border has been, as government officials now say, “porous.” I remember family trips 50 years ago to visit relatives in Fort Kent, where we crossed the St. John River into Clair, New Brunswick, with little ceremony. My uncle Carl was on a first-name basis with border guards on both sides.

People tried to maintain that same neighborliness along the border in the aftermath of 9/11, but our government just wouldn’t have it. Poor Michel Jalbert, a Canadian hunter, crossed a border-spanning driveway in order to fill up his gas tank at lower U.S. prices. He had his deer rifle with him, and U.S. border guards went ballistic. Jalbert was jailed and held for more than a month until a suitable plea arrangement could be worked out in U.S. District Court in Bangor. The story got considerable ink in Canada but was effectively buried here in the U.S.

My own closest brush with Canada was when Marge and I were newlyweds. It was 1968, and I had just graduated from college. My draft notice arrived days after the wedding. Marge’s father was born in New Brunswick and retained lifelong Canadian citizenship, although he lived in Maine from infancy.

This fact, as Marge and I understood the law, gave her the opportunity to declare Canadian citizenship. Like practically every other college student in America at the time, we were opposed to the Vietnam War. Her citizenship option would have given us the right to go to Canada legally, to live there legally. But somehow I couldn’t do it.

God knows, I was frightened enough of what might happen to me in the military. And I really did believe that the war was wrong. But a piece of family history stood in the way. During World War II, my father had tried to enlist. In those days, he was a great bull of a man, physically powerful and bursting with vitality. He had, however, suffered from asthma as a child That was all the military needed to hear.

He was classified 4-F: physically unfit to serve. I remember hearing him tell the story of those war years when he walked to work every day (to save rationed gas) and passed by the wives and girlfriends and mothers and sisters of servicemen. In every face, he saw the same question: why aren’t you there?

The story didn’t mean much to me when I was a boy, but by 1968 I felt that I understood it. I tried to imagine myself in Canada, but all my mind’s eye could see was my father—still going to work every day, still avoiding the faces that now said, “Your son is a draft dodger.” Whatever my problems with him were in those days, I couldn’t do that do him—or to myself.

I joined the Air Force and spent four more or less uneventful years of stateside duty maintaining aircraft survival equipment. Marge and I visited Montreal a couple of time in the 1970′s, but we haven’t been there since. This past January marked the 35th anniversary of my discharge from the military.

June 18, 2008

Dear Fellow Boomer,

I expect you’ll be reading this somewhere around the year 2084. We’ve been told for years that those of us with the greatest longevity will live to be 120. Our generation includes people born from 1946 to 1964. I was born in 1946 myself, and maybe that’s why I’m taking it upon myself to write this letter. I’m guessing that you, as the last of us, were probably born in 1964. One hundred twenty years takes you to 2084.

The odd thing is that if you and I remember our childhoods, we turn out to have more in common than we thought along the way. After all, I graduated from high school the year you were born. That year, by the way, was pretty amazing. I’m sorry that you don’t remember it, although you probably read the books, saw the movies and listened to the music.

The year you were born was just about the time that the generation before us really began to get unhappy with us. No, we didn’t remember the Great Depression. No, we didn’t remember World War II. Our inability to know instinctively about things that happened before we were born somehow made us seem self-absorbed and ungrateful. We were told that we were spoiled, that we didn’t appreciate anything, that we were lazy, that we were going to hell because of the music we listened to.

The reality of our supposedly idyllic childhoods was somewhat different because too many of our parents (the so-called “Greatest Generation”) were emotional cripples. When we were born, child-rearing “experts” advised our parents to ignore us when we cried, to demand rigid conformity and not to be “demonstrative.” They were more than ready to comply. There were so many us, more of us that there had ever been in any generation before, that our parents and teachers must have felt overwhelmed. The result was that too many of us grew up alone because the older generation simply wouldn’t engage with us.

By the time we were in second or third grade, we were being prepped for nuclear attack. “What are these metal name tags for?” I asked. The answer was grim. “The tags will be used to identify your remains in the event you are burned beyond recognition in a nuclear holocaust. Always wear your tags.”

Around that same time Joe McCarthy and his pals started accusing everyone of being Communists. “Commie” hunters of all stripes were in their heyday, pointing fingers and making wild accusations without concern for the lives and careers they destroyed with their paranoid ranting.

When John Kennedy became president, a lot of people told us he would make a difference. But he was assassinated. Worse, his assassin was assassinated on live TV.

Our parents told us we couldn’t tell the difference between phony movie violence and real violence because of the the movies and TV shows we watched, but they were wrong. When Jack Ruby gunned down Lee Harvey Oswald, it was real enough; and we all knew it. It was real-life murder, and the TV stations broadcast it again and again.

In 1964, much of America was segregated, and the Jim Crow laws were in force. Interracial marriage was illegal all across the South. American industries fouled our air and water with impunity. Women were second-class citizens. Gays and lesbians were reviled. The handicapped were on their own. Among the poorest Americans, people were starving to death in “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” With all of this going on, we just couldn’t understand why our parents were more concerned about the way Elvis Presley swung his hips or how the Beatles went around in need of haircuts.

Of the births that took place in 1964, at least two were to girls in my high school senior class. Those girls were hauled out of school summarily and sent in disgrace to what were called “homes for unwed mothers.” The only way for a girl to avoid this humiliating confinement was to break the law with an illegal (and possibly lethal) abortion. Meanwhile, the boys who fathered the babies suffered no consequences at all. They stayed in school. They even received admiring looks from older guys who shook their hands and called them “real he-men.”

The comeuppance for the boys was the absurd horror of Vietnam and a war that no one could explain or defend conhesively.

The details of your experience on the tail end of the Boomer generation may have been a bit different, but as a Boomer you were still subject to endless criticism and disapproval. You were too young to go to Woodstock. The truth is I didn’t go either. Maybe at the time you didn’t pay any attention to Dick Nixon and Watergate. Whether anyone else likes it or not, however, we Boomers did change the world. Others are busy deciding whether the changes we made were good or bad, but the world that was handed to us needed to be changed in so many ways.

In the year 2084, or thereabouts, you are the last Boomer still alive. The events I’m calling to your attention happened more than 100 years ago. Probably no one around you even remembers what the term Boomer stood for. When you pass on, it will mark the end of an amazing 140 year run for our generation, from the first baby’s cry on January 1, 1946, to your own last breath. I hope you think it was worth it.

Frankly, I wish I were there with you.

Two days ago, Marge and I marked our 40th wedding anniversary. When I think about all the things we’ve said and done through all those years, it seems like an impossibly long time. From other points of view, however, the time has passed in the blink of an eye.

On our wedding day in 1968, I was about to turn 22. Yep, that’s me in the Buddy Holly specs and the ill-fitting jacket.

As my birthday approaches again, I’m about to turn 62. If you don’t remember 1968, take a minute to read through that year’s timeline of events. It was both wonderful and frightening to be young then, to dream dreams and make plans for a future that we feared might never come.

I have two memories in particular of our first apartment, one trivial and one momentous.

On the trivial side, I recall that the sewer pipe for the toilet upstairs came down through our kitchen. The landlord, in an attempt to conceal the pipe, had covered it with the same ferociously cheerful wallpaper he had used on the walls. Every morning as I ate my breakfast at the kitchen table, someone upstairs would flush. The pipe was noisy, and the sound was appetite-killing in the extreme.

On the momentous side was the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Marge and I sat holding on to each other in sorrow and horror as the television showed us Mayor Daley’s riot police clubbing our people on the streets of Chicago. We wondered how the generation of our parents (the so-called “Greatest Generation”) could hate us so much. It was a question we never were able to answer.

A lot happened during the first ten years of our marriage. I served four years in the Air Force. Marge worked for a spell as a telephone company service rep. We went to graduate school at the University of New Hampshire. We taught high school English for a year, then moved to Oklahoma.

In 1978, Marge and I were still living in Tulsa. Marge’s dad passed away. She was in her third year of teaching ESL at the University of Tulsa, and I had just completed my first year of law school. We desperately wanted to have children and had redoubled our attempts to solve our infertility problems.

During the next ten years, everything in our lives changed again. Elizabeth was born in 1980. We moved back to Maine, and Marge became a stay-at-home mom. I began practicing law. We joined the church we still belong to and bought a modest home here in Portland.

By the time of our 20th anniversary in 1988, Elizabeth had finished second grade. Marge was teaching ESL at Portland High School (where she still works) and I had opened a small law office of my own.

In our third decade together, we experienced more life transitions. By 1993, I had had to admit that I couldn’t go on trying to practice law. I took me a year to close down my practice. I tried to remake myself as a computer scientist by going back to school full time in the spring of 1994. I gave it up after that semester because it was just too difficult for me. I had interest and enthusiasm, but the math brain cells I once had seemed to have died.

That summer, just days after Elizabeth’s 14th birthday, my father died just before midnight on July 15th. Six hours later, my mother went into massive congestive heart failure. Her life hung in the balance for several days. On the evening of July 16th, my father’s brother died. Marge and I stood in our living room holding each other and saying, “What next? Why us? How long, O Lord?” Nothing bad came next. It hit us because sooner or later everybody gets a turn. And it didn’t last long.

Also in 1994, Marge was diagnosed with celiac disease (gluten intolerance), and that has changed the way we do just about everything in the kitchen.

In the spring of 1996, we moved to our present home, and my mother (identified by then as a dementia patient) moved in with us. I began working for the Maine State Bar Association and drove 120 miles every workday.

In 1998, Elizabeth graduated from high school. In the fall she left for college. The day we drove her to the campus was awful. We cried half the way home. A few weeks later we moved my mother to a nursing home because she could no longer be left alone, even for a few minutes. Our three-generation household had completely collapsed, and just the two of us remained.

Mom lived until the following March when she died gently and peacefully. The cause of death was her 13th episode of congestive heart failure. I think she died when she did because she was no longer able to remember why previously she had fought so hard to survive.

Our fourth decade has been filled with most of the transitions and challenges people our age typically face. I left the bar association in 2001 and became, for a while, a freelance tech writer. In February of 2002, we went on the Caribbean cruise we had talked about for 20 years.

The following May, Elizabeth graduated from college. She lived at home with us for the next year as she worked on a U.S. Senate campaign and planned her next move. That turned out to be teaching ESL in New York City, where she has lived for five years. She’ll be with us again for much of this summer, however, as she prepares to begin graduate school in Boston in the fall. She has been a joy to us from the day she was born. We’ve always considered it a privilege to be her parents.

This is probably why we had unreasonable and unreachable expectations when in the fall of 2003 we became the foster parents of a teenage girl named Ashley. The relationship lasted until last summer when we all had to agree that our differences had become so great that we walked on eggshells around each other all the time. Ashley has now completed her junior year of college. We haven’t heard from her for almost a year. She is probably as sad, angry and hurt as we are that in the end we just couldn’t make it work.

But the wheel keeps turning. Last December, Marge’s mother moved in with us. Unlike my mother, Betty doesn’t suffer dementia. She’s glad to be here, and we’re glad she’s with us because we don’t have to worry about her.

Over the last four or five years, death has begun to claim some of our friends. What was once impossible has become inevitable. Yet as we grow older and aware that the time left to us to be together grows shorter, we also become closer. Our love for each other broadens and deepens.

Joan Didion, in The Year of Magical Thinking, wrote that marriage isn’t just about love. It’s also (perhaps mostly) about memories and time. The incredible richness of a long marriage arises from shared memories and shared experiences.

As of today, Marge and I have been married 14,613 days. Have we been deliriously happy with each other every single minute of all those days? Well, of course not. You don’t build and maintain a successful marriage by checking your brain at the door. The road we have traveled hasn’t been any smoother or easier than anyone else’s.

I think what separates us from couples who drift apart is that we have never seriously doubted the importance and value to each of us of being a couple. Like everyone else, we have worked to preserve what we value.

I never wanted to be married for the sake of being married, but for more than 40 years I have wanted to be married to Marge. That’s what I wanted on June 15, 1968 and what I want today. Tomorrow will be day 14,614. I’ll want the same thing then.

DISCLAIMERS:

• Not a single one of the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of friends and acquaintances I have made through the years has been a Jehovah’s Witness.
• I have no knowledge of (or interest in) the inner workings of the Jehovah’s Witnesses organization.
• Jehovah’s Witnesses who have come to my door have never interested me in or convinced me of anything.
• The “Witness Index of Mellowness” is a product of my own imagination.

So, what’s my point here today? It’s pretty simple, really. A couple of JW women came to the door at about 9:00 this morning. I didn’t want to listen to them, and I managed to end their visit in less than one minute. I did it without insults, threats or rudeness and without agreeing to give them my name or to buy their magazine. The conversation went basically like this:

JW: Good morning.
ME: Good morning.
JW: (holding up copy of The Watch Tower and pointing to a headline about Noah) Have you ever wondered why God would want us to know about something that happened thousands of years ago?
ME: Oh, The Watch Tower. You folks are Jehovah’s Witnesses. You should know that I have my own church.
JW: Do you read the Bible in that church?
ME: (closing door and waving cheerfully) Oh, yes. Thanks for stopping by. Have a great day.

For a guy like me, this was a pretty darned mellow way of handling the situation.

Witness Index of Mellowness: 10.

I was especially struck with the contrast between my behavior this morning and the way I handled a similar situation 30 years ago, in the days when no one ever described me as “mellow.”

It was Memorial Day Weekend 1978, and Marge and I were visiting our friends Clay and Judy in Beaumont, Texas.

Clay and I had spent Friday evening methodically working our way to the bottom of a liter bottle of Jack Daniels. We had finally called it a night and staggered to bed at about 4:00 am. I didn’t sleep well because it was hot. Beaumont sits on the Gulf, and Clay and Judy had no air-conditioning. I woke up at about 8:30, dripping with sweat. The light from the window hurt my eyes, and there was a green lizard hanging on the screen.

At 9:00 I was still the only one up. I felt bad and probably looked worse. I had bloodshot eyes and greasy hair. I hadn’t showered, shaved, or even brushed my teeth. My breath could have killed that little lizard.

I was sitting on the living room couch, holding my head and smoking a cigarette, when the doorbell rang.

I looked out the window and saw two women and a little girl on the doorstep. All of them, despite the heat, wore extremely modest and slightly old-fashioned dresses. I had a pretty good idea who they were and why they were calling.

A wild thought came into my mind, and I opened the door. The conversation went basically like this:

JW: Good morning, we’re…
ME: (interrupting and looking at my watch) I know who you are. You’re right on time. Come in.
JW: (looking nervously at her companion) Well, I don’t know that we…
ME: Aren’t you the Jehovah’s Witnesses?
JW: Well, yes, but…
ME: Then you must know who I am!
JW: I don’t think we…
ME: Of course you know! I am Satan’s emissary sent to test your faith! Now come in so we can get on with it!

Their eyes got big, and they backed away. One of the women picked up the little girl, and they ran down the walk back to the street.

Clay later told me that for as long as he and Judy lived in Beaumont, Jehovah’s Witnesses never came to the house again.

Witness Index of Mellowness: 0.

I used to tell this story with great amusement, but I don’t find it so funny anymore. Had I actually been anywhere near as superior to those women as I felt on that hungover morning, I wouldn’t have wanted to humiliate and terrify them. I would also have understood that, as a simple matter of civility, I had no right to do those things to them or anyone else.

The truth is that things like civility and mellowness come hard to the natural-born smartass. I’m thankful to have lived long enough for it to start to happen.

mr youse needn’t be so spry
concernin questions arty

each has his tastes but as for i
i likes a certain party

gimme the he-man’s solid bliss
for youse ideas i’ll match youse

a pretty girl who naked is
is worth a million statues

— e.e. cummings

As I’ve mentioned here before, I have sung in the choir at our church ever since Elizabeth was born in 1980. Through the years, I have often wondered about the expression “preaching to the choir.” The words seem to suggest that choir members are likely to be the truest of true believers and the most pious folks in the congregation.

That hasn’t been my experience.

For example, several years ago all of the U.C.C. churches in the area got together to hold a combined service at Merrill Auditorium in Portland City Hall. In the combined choir seated on the stage there were more than 100 singers. In the tenor section, I was surrounded by singers from other churches. I didn’t know any of them.

The service itself was not exactly my cup of tea and included things to which I have trouble relating. It began with what was called “liturgical dance.” Please believe me when I say that I am a hopeless philistine when it comes to dance of any kind. Yet in retrospect I have to admit that the dance was the highpoint of the morning.

The fellow sitting next to me seemed to find the dance riveting, and he followed one dancer in particular. The dance went on and on, and my mind began to wander. Soon I was wondering why the hell I’d ever gotten involved in such New Age hokum.

As the dance finally neared its conclusion, my neighbor leaned toward me just a little. He continued to watch the dancer and, without moving his lips, said sotto voce, “She has a nice ass…”

He was right, of course. About some things guys are never wrong.

So maybe I’m not the only one who joined the choir because it’s too hard to sit through church without something to do.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light…
— Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach

So there stood Matthew Arnold and this girl
With the cliffs of England crumbling away behind them,
And he said to her, “Try to be true to me,
And I’ll do the same for you, for things are bad
All over, etc., etc.”
— Anthony Hecht, The Dover Bitch

Poor Matthew Arnold. He never had my sympathy for this unprovoked roasting until 2001.

At one point during that summer my task was to write a big chunk of my life story and present it to a group of people with whom I was working. I took the matter seriously and spent a lot of time on the writing. When the time came for me to present what I had written to the group, I quickly realized that I cared about words and the way things are expressed much, much more than the rest of the group. I also used words that the rest of the group didn’t know.

They indulged me for about three minutes before they began squirming in their seats and otherwise signaling their displeasure and lack of comprehension. The group leader cut me off and asked me to summarize the rest of what I had written, doing to me what Anthony Hecht had done to Matthew Arnold. The prose I had crafted with such care dwindled to “etc., etc.”

At the time I was hurt; then I was angry. I’m more or less philosophical about the whole thing now, but a few points stay with me:

• People don’t always really want what they ask for
• The fact that I’m ready to talk doesn’t mean others are ready to listen
• People with limited vocabularies hate to be reminded of it

I’ll draw out that life story another time when I have the right audience. The story of that first audience will make a nice introduction for it.

…I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

—T.S. Eliot

I learned about what was happening on September 11 when I got a telephone call from my brother-in-law who was stuck in a hotel room in New Orleans. He knew that my daughter Elizabeth had spent the summer in Washington and was concerned that she might still be there. I didn’t understand what he was talking about.

“There are planes crashing into buildings–the Pentagon, the World Trade Center!” he said, “Every airport in the country is closed and every plane is grounded! For God’s sake, don’t you ever turn on the TV?”

Well, no. As a matter of fact, I hardly ever turn on the TV. I’ve just never thought of TV as a serious source of news. The events of 9/11, however, turned out to be an exception. I watched until I couldn’t bear to see the towers fall even once more.

In the days that followed I learned that an acquaintance of mine had been on Flight 175 when it crashed into the south tower. He wasn’t my dearest or oldest friend, but I knew him and I liked him. He was on his way to California to open what would have been a national law practice specializing in so-called toxic torts—”sick building” cases and such. We had even talked about my joining in the endeavor to build and run a database website that would have organized court documents, medical and insurance records and science and engineering reports. Had those talks gone any further than they did, I might well have been on the plane with him. I don’t like to think about that.

His death personalized the terrorist attacks for me and made me acutely aware that everyone who died in those attacks had hopes and dreams and plans for a wonderful “someday” that never came.

“Someday” is probably like that too often. That’s why the following spring Marge and I took the Caribbean cruise we had always talked about. “Someday” for us, we decided, had to become today right now, and we were right. A few bills from the trip lingered longer than they might have, but there are always bills.

Since that time, I have tried hard to remember not to enthrone caution and prudence above all else. Life is too sweet, too fragile, too brief.

Wrong solitude vinegars the soul,
right solitude oils it.

—Jane Hirshfield

Solitude is important to me for two personal reasons: I grew up as an only child, and I am the father of an only child, Elizabeth.

The arc of an only child’s experience is easy to trace. Solitude begins as a problem and grows into a necessity. The problem of solitude is that it is so easily transmuted into loneliness, boredom and isolation. This is wrong solitude. The necessity of solitude arises from an inability to turn off the “busyness” of other people.

These points will seem obvious to only children. We are the ones, for example, most likely to have imaginary friends who become involved in complex narratives of our own invention. This sort of thing is part of the only child’s solution to the “problem” of solitude, and it can easily ripen into the right solitude of serenity and psychological integration. I am stunned to learn that some “experts” have decided that the imagination necessary to dream up imaginary friends is somehow pathological! I doubt that any only children were consulted in making that determination.

I don’t remember much about my own imaginary friends, but Elizabeth had half a dozen or more, each with a unique personality and voice (she did the talking for all of them). She could play happily by herself for hours on end. As a fellow “only,” however, I put myself in the role of her advocate and protector whenever we were in large social settings because I knew what she was up against—the lack of effective mental filters that would allow her to focus on some things and ignore others.

It was hard-won wisdom, and for her sake I was glad I had it. Both of my parents grew up with siblings. They had, of necessity, developed the mental filters early in life and seemed to assume everyone was born with them. My mother had three sisters. My father had six sisters and a brother, all with loud voices. At family gatherings, I would quickly be overwhelmed by the level of activity and noise because I didn’t know how to ignore any conversation or activity. If someone was talking, I was listening. If something was happening, I felt drawn into it, even if it didn’t interest me. Again and again I would find myself trying to follow several conversations at once and keep track of what everyone was doing.

It was exhausting, and before long I would instinctively seek out a quiet corner. Non-participation, however, was never an option at these events. Invariably, one or more of my aunts would see me off by myself and try to pull me back into the middle of things. They called me “shy” and “stand-offish” and “spoiled.” It made me angry and hurt my feelings. It also failed to answer my most basic question: “Why can’t anybody ever shut up?”

I was an adult before I developed the necessary mental filters, but large groups can still wear me out. These days, of course, I can decide when I’ve had enough. At my best, I can take care of myself without seeming “shy” or “stand-offish” and without hurting anyone’s feelings. It is always a complex dance, but whatever I do I have simply aged out of the charge of being “spoiled.” I will never have to endure it again. That is quite simply the greatest blessing an only child can ever receive.

And anyway, if you think hanging around with large groups of kids is the sine qua non of healthy childhood, please take another look at Lord of the Flies.

To muse and brood and live again in memory,
With those old faces of our infancy
Heap’d over with a mound of grass,
Two handfuls of white dust, shut in an urn of brass!
 
—Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Lotos-Eaters

I’ve been reading over a folder of personal letters I saved from a former job. One of them, dated nine years ago yesterday, came from a former boss who had learned that my mother had recently died. Among the words of comfort he offered were these: “Time does heal a lot of the pain and sorrow. Memorial Day takes on a greater significance.” He was right, of course. I never thought much about Memorial Day when I was younger.

In junior high and high school, in fact, I actively disliked Memorial Day. I was a band member, and there was a long parade to march in every year. The uniforms were hot and ill-fitting—not to mention ridiculous, if the evidence of surviving photographs is to be given credence.

Think of an organ grinder. Now imagine what the monkey is wearing, and (except for the fez) you have an accurate mental picture of my junior high band uniform.

The march ended in the city park where we stood at parade rest to listen to the windy, politically cautious piety of local dignitaries. The ceremony culminated in an uncertain recitation of the Gettysburg Address, usually delivered by a student. My feelings then were appropriate to the energetic impatience of youth, but the time for that passes.

Several years ago, I read an interview with Jonathan Winters. Then in his late 70′s, Winters retained his blazing wit, yet the interview overall saddened me. As a boy and young man, Winters endured great coldness and cruelty from his parents. He had kept those injuries green, although he owed it to himself to allow the wounds to heal. After all, what is the point of long life if at its heart it is merely the sum of our wounds?

Winters’ emotional pain made me think of the old hymn I sing with the choir every year on Maundy Thursday:

Forgive our sins as we forgive,
You taught us, Lord, to pray;
But you alone can grant us grace
To live the words we say.
 
How can your pardon reach and bless
The unforgiving heart
That broods on wrongs and will not let
Old bitterness depart?

Like everyone else, I had my own injuries and wrongs and outrage when I was young, but they have mostly passed. Now, with a simple heart, I miss those old faces.

I belong to a Congregational Church that is associated with the United Church of Christ. The U.C.C. is one of those liberal, mainline Protestant denominations for which many evangelicals feel seething contempt. The U.C.C. is different things to different people, however, and operates without a hierarchy of any kind. The differences between congregations can be enormous.

Here in New England, most U.C.C. churches began life as Congregational churches. Some of the congregations are centuries old. Each individual congregation voted on whether to join the U.C.C. when it was forming in the 1950s. As far as I understand the evangelical position, the chief sins of churches like mine are (1) the great majority of us are not biblical literalists and (2) our doors are open to everyone.

If that sounds easy, be assured that it is not. Opening the doors to everyone just about guarantees that you will meet people with whom you disagree, sometimes people whom you dislike. If you harbor prejudices of any kind (race, ethnicity, creed, gender, age, sexual orientation, political persuasion—you know the list) a church like mine will challenge you.

But each U.C.C. church is in some ways unique. Right now, my church is focused on inclusiveness and community outreach and service. Other U.C.C. churches have their own ideas. Some are so different from mine that members of hierarchical denominations have trouble understanding what the U.C.C. really is at its core.

I’ve been thinking about these these things because the U.C.C. has been in the news recently. The Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, of Trinity U.C.C. in Chicago, has been a thorn in Barack Obama’s side as elements of the radical religious right and the progressive secular left joined hands briefly to condemn Rev. Wright and, by association, his former parishioner Sen. Obama. The whole business was so unsavory that, by supreme irony, it proved Rev. Wright’s point: racism is alive and well in this country, whether we want to acknowledge it or not.

Somehow it’s harder to talk about than in the salad days of the civil rights movement. Well-intentioned people of all persuasions like to believe that the era of racism is behind us, and it’s true that many battles have been won. But the ghosts of America’s past remain.

I suspect that most of us know more about these ghosts than we like to admit, but I’ll speak only for myself. I grew up in an all-white town in the whitest state in the nation and went to an overwhelmingly white college. I was a passionate supporter of the civil rights movement, but there wasn’t much going on in Maine.

After college I spent four years in the military where I finally had the opportunity to put my convictions about racial equality into practice, and I did well. Some of my supervisors were white and some were black. The respect I afforded each of them varied, but not along racial lines. When I left the military in 1973, my credentials as a person free of racism were impeccable.

Ghosts, however, are by definition elusive. When they appear, it is impossible not to be surprised. And so it was for me riding the El in Chicago one day in the summer of 1976 when I looked around and suddenly realized that mine was the only white face on the train.

The stab of fear I felt in my gut was irrational, unwarranted, and somehow overpowering.

At one level I understood that everyone on that train was, like me, just trying to get somewhere. And yet. And yet. They were all black. All of them.

The ghosts had taken hold of me, and I was afraid. The received wisdom of my all-white boyhood (“Eeny, meeny, miney, mo…catch a n****r by the toe…”) contained virulent racism that had waited patiently for decades to show itself. My palms were sweating, my heart was pounding, and I sat on the train shaking with fear and humiliation. My wild emotional turmoil soon coalesced into shame, however, as I realized that for years I had talked one set of values and lived another.

When I got off the train, I began the real work of freeing myself from racism. I’ve come a long way since 1976, far enough in fact that I will never again make the easy claim that I have left behind every trace of that old received wisdom.

My U.C.C. church is almost exclusively white. Rev. Wright’s is almost exclusively black. Our shared motto and goal, “That They May All Be One,” remains within our reach but somehow just beyond our grasp.