My Ukrainian wheat charm is about to fall off my car’s rear view mirror. On the day after the 2010 elections, even its precarious dangle is welcome. This charm has power to make stuck joints glide, to soothe pain and to turn a pessimist inside out. Here is how it came into my possession:

I did a watercolor workshop at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology at Cascade Head just north of Lincoln City a while back. It was three lovely days of quiet concentration in peaceful surroundings with interesting subjects to paint and an inspiring teacher, Molly Hashimoto. Every day after seven hours of peace and art, I went to a clean, but unimaginative hotel in Lincoln City and dwelt amongst the dogs, sand, salt water taffy, kites, screaming children and yelling parents. The contrast was just right.

But the weekend did not begin with such a balance. My back was bothering me the day I left Seattle. After driving for 6 hours, my pelvis managed to become rotated forward on the right side, and backward on the left. Then it locked itself into place. This is not unlike the current situation in Congress. Or maybe I should say that with some variation, this is always the situation in Congress. In any case, both with Congress and my pelvis, the pain is relentless.

My first morning in Lincoln City, I cried in frustration for 45 minutes before I decided that I couldn’t gut this out. I had to find a chiropractor. In the phone book I found a doctor a block from my hotel. I recognized the name from reconnoitering the town the day before. I hobbled up the street to see if his hours were posted. The ideal was for him to see me immediately. And that was essentially what happened.

But I anticipate myself. His office front looked as though he had gone out of business 20 years ago and had neglected to take down the sign. The office was dark when I got there. Since the door was unlocked, I walked in. A seedy, scruffy guy stood in the gloom, looking startled. My first thought was that the doctor let the construction workers from across the street come in to use the toilet. But no, he was the doctor. He had just arrived and hadn’t turned on the lights yet. He needed 45 minutes to get organized. I agreed to come back at 9:15.

After I left, I started to panic. I come from a long line of robust paranoids and my upbringing kicks in with full force at times, especially when I am traveling alone. I re-visited my first impression that the man in the office was a construction worker come to use the toilet. Or a smooth-talking thief. His appearance certainly didn’t inspire any more confidence than the faded, beat-up office front did. Conceivably, even a decent chiropractor who didn’t know my body could make things worse, as hard as that was to imagine. But I was in pain and desperate so I decided to chance it.

He was professional, thorough, and gentle. He did an exam, an ultra-sound, traction, and the adjustment; and only charged me $60. When I stood up, I was out of the sirening, stabbing pain. There were only varying degrees of inflammation and tenderness through-out the weekend, depending on how careful I was about what I threw myself into.

As I was driving out of town at the end of the workshop, I stopped by his office and gave him one of my watercolors as a thank you. We got to chatting and it turned out that he was born near my grandparents’ birthplace in the Ukraine. His mother made Ukrainian wheat charms, for sale at $10 a piece in the office. I bought one to commemorate my good fortune in finding her son.

The charm has hung off my car’s rear view mirror for years, a reminder of life’s surprises. It’s easy to get stuck thinking change has to happen in certain ways. If you are waiting for Congress–speaking of smooth-talking thieves– to make the changes you want, you need a charm like mine.

Here’s a poem I wrote January 22, 2009

Inauguration Day, 2009
Seattle

A dark, frigid January morning,
Our pilot lights barely flickering,
We’ve been cold with fear,
Frozen with shame,
For a long time.

We shivered our way thro the fog
To Starbucks, to neighbor’s homes,
To be with each other
And to join
The mass on the Mall.

We became Americans that day.
Patriots, some of us for the first time;
On a day
When we reached out our hands
To the world.

We are all alive on earth together.
We all fumble the oath.

Elena Louise Richmond,

Jan 22, 2009

I heard an all Bach concert yesterday.  Bach always feels like a date with the Divine.  I adore his music from start to finish.  I love listening to him, I love playing him, I love singing him.

More than any other composer, Bach’s music seems to me to be always going on.  It’s continually playing in other dimensions and other ages.  Performing him or listening to him involves a tiny opening where I breathe the air of timelessness.  His music condenses to a pure golden filament that musicians pull out of one world and thread back into another note by note.

So I ask you, does a Bach concert seem like the place to lean over to your husband and say, “Did you take the clothes out of the dryer before we left?” or “You have to pick the kids up tomorrow.”  And truly, nobody cares that you heard this partita at Tanglewood or that Penelope and Julians’s daughter played it for her honors recital. My God, you’re missing the presence of the divine right now. If you apprehended that, you wouldn’t be rustling your candy wrapper during the Preludium.

We need security checks at classical music concerts far more than we do at the airport. Leave everything that rattles or pings or plays Maple Leaf Rag on ring tone in a big plastic tub before you walk in.

There are only two venues where I feel safe from extraneous noises: performances of Wagner’s Ring and performances of Gilbert and Sullivan.  The audiences are absolutely fanatical. They would bludgeon you with their opera glasses before they’d miss a single motif or patter.  I, personally, have been shushed in both venues, so I know.

I had a French teacher in high school in the 60s who told us at least once a day, “The television has ruined your ability to listen and comprehend.”  I’ll carry that thought into this century and say that CDs have confused our ideas about what music is.  When you listen to a CD, you hear music being played or sung the same way every time, and often so enhanced, it comes out like an audible hair-do held in its unnatural shape with half a can of Product.

But music is alive.  There is no enhanced.  It’s not about perfect.  Music wants to breathe and to exhale differently every time.  And it wants to communicate.  When we get a chance to hear live music, we might want to keep our mouths shut because even with amateurs, even in “awful” performances, somewhere in there is bound to be something both magical and gloriously human.

You know what else is gloriously human?  The people behind the instruments.  Musicians are people who have spent tens of thousands of hours practicing and hundreds of thousands of dollars on lessons; and who never dreamed that we’d be mistaken for radios or CD players by members of our own race.

Here is where technological advances have not served our society:  we have become a nation of CD listeners, not a nation of music makers.  As a teacher I can tell you that joy is available in the very first attempt at actual music making.  Music is in our bodies and in our souls, not in a box.  When we make our tentative squeaks and plunks, we aren’t supposed to sound like perfected recordings or like our favorite performers.  We sound like us. We fall in love with our own sound and the resonances in our own bodies. Then we always have enough and there’s always more to have.

Jazz musicians have come to terms with this.  They are used to being treated like elevator or restaurant music so they face each other, not the audience.  They communicate with and enjoy each other.  They know they create their own joy.  If you listen to a set, pay attention, express some appreciation, and leave a tip, that’s an unexpected bonus for them.  The real losers are the ones that don’t listen at all or who never learn to make music in the first place.

So everyone, repeat after me: “Live music is not background music.”  Now go sign up for some lessons, join a choir or orchestra, hug a musician.  The laundry will always be there.  And don’t mess with the Divine.

You are about to read a tale told by an idiot.

I got an e-mail a week ago from Dr Micheal Scott who says he lives in a town in Wales.  He is coming to Seattle for a month to do some work for the EPA and will have his 16 year old daughter, Mary, with him.  She wants to take voice lessons and he sees that I am a voice teacher.

He has the English of someone from the Indian sub-continent and his grammar is almost non-existent.  Because I have lived and traveled overseas, because I know a lot of people who first language was not English, and because I know PHDs whose e-mail English is atrocious, I am prepared to overlook this riot of syntax on my computer screen.

Besides, this girl could come several times a week for lessons and I could use a few more students.  It would be a lucrative proposition and it might be a lot of fun.  One of those surprises that Life sometimes hands you.  I never used to be an optimist.  Coming to it late in life, I don’t always know how to work it.

Anyway, the correspondence begins and we iron out my fee and the days and times Mary would have her lessons.  He is planning to send her to my house in a cab because he will be working long hours at the EPA:

“i have negotiate with a cab company that will be driving her down to your  place go and come. So i want you to be taking her for 4 week. Get back to me with total cost. I wait to read from you shortly.”

I ask him several times where they are staying in Seattle,  the name of the cab company,  his contact at the EPA,  and I ask him to give Mary my e-mail address so she and I can get acquainted  before she comes.  His garbled response is loquacious and full of typos, but he is silent on all my questions.

Can ether be transmitted through the ethernet?  Because I am going along as though anesthetized.  I actually think that his responses are those of a busy doctor in Wales who is trying to wrap things up before he comes to Seattle for a month.

The screw squeaks as it tightens but I ignore the sound:  his plan is to send me a money order for $4500.  I am to cash the check, keep my fee, and wire the rest to this phantom cab company.  I am embarrassed to report that I say I would help in any way I can.

I start listening to my gut but it’s still only a leaky gut, not a full-out attack of indigestion.  I ask him why he isn’t doing this by credit card. He says he has a “financeir” in the states who will be covering all expenses and will send me instructions.  I ask why the EPA isn’t providing him with transportation and by the way what is his daughter’s e-mail address?  No response.  Really, when I write this down, I feel even stupider than when it was happening.

Finally I copy the entire correspondence and e-mail it to my neighbor Gwen, who knows something about just about everything.  Did she think I was getting into some mafia thing?  She tells me that this guy is probably sitting in his backyard with his shirt off, trying this on 30 other people at the same time.  That is the jolt I need.  I write back, telling him I am out.

He tries again, tacking back to his daughter.  His English is worse.  He is decompensating:

“Mary is my only daughter so i care for her i want you to help me handle her as you child too she really love singing  she want you to teach her how to use good voice, with a good teno

I pass this on to Gwen wondering if I will get an e-mail from Mary as played by some hairy guy sitting shirtless in his backyard.

Gwen writes back:  “Maybe you should ask him for his bank roting # so you can have his $ removed to you “in easy fashon” .  He maybee stop then.”

I know I should just stop engaging but I send one last e-mail telling him I have reported him.  I haven’t, but then he has no contract with the EPA either.  I’m lying down with a liar.

Here’s how the scam would go down:  Dr Micheal Scott tells me he is arriving on Nov 1 so he sends a phony money order on Oct 28, giving me one day to cash it and get the money wired to a cab company which will actually be him.  I have to put the cash into my account in order to wire the money.  By the time the money order is revealed to be fraudulent, the bank will have sent my personal funds to his “cab company.”

It’s been over forty-eight hours since I last heard from my scammer.  He maybee stop now.

Being a musician, I am used to stage mothers, spotlight whores, and microphone monsters, all stock characters at lessons, rehearsals, and performances.  Being a teacher who often runs the show, I exercise a certain amount of control over the egos that show up to strut and fret.  But here’s a tale of an ego so bloated that when it walked into a private party, it flattened the rest of us against the wall.

It was a hootenanny at my friend Davey’s house.  Everyone brought instruments, music, and song sheets; arriving mid-afternoon to sing the sun down.  It was a gorgeous fall day; there was a huge spread of food and many of my favorite people were present.  It was a luxury to not have to direct or accompany.  I sat in the corner and harmonized when we sang together. We entertained with solos and duets, we taught each other songs.  We videotaped us singing “Waltzing Matilda” to send to friends in Australia.

We were entering the third hour of music making when a guest arrived, a friend of another guest.  No one else knew her.  She carried a big music case which housed a Celtic harp.  We made introductions and she got herself settled.

Davey asked her to play something on her harp.

She advanced regally to the center of the room, set up her harp, serenely introduced her song and played.  It was lovely.

It took her five minutes to introduce the next song because she included a short history of the Celtic Harp.

Unfortunately someone then asked her why the harp’s strings were different colors.

Fifteen minutes later, she had given a lecture on music theory.

The same someone, clearly in a romantic trance, asked if she ever wrote for the harp.

“Why yes, of course, I do,” She made eye contact with half a dozen guests.  “Several of my compositions are on my second CD.”

“Would you play one of your songs?”

I looked at Davey.  Was this her idea?  Davey appeared stunned.

Harpzilla played one of her own compositions.  She mentioned again that she had recorded two CDs.

I looked around.  Everyone appeared stunned.

I said in a loud voice, “Rich, when are we going to hear from you?”

Rich didn’t respond quickly enough.  This was Harpzilla’s cue that the crowd wanted another song so she played another composition after a lengthy explanation which included the information that she had several CD’s in her car in case any of us wanted to buy one.

No one moved.  I couldn’t even detect any breathing.

After 45 minutes I walked out of the room. I went to the bathroom. I wandered over to the food table. I went out on the porch and planned my escape.

I sat down on the couch next to Crystal, who sings in my choir, The OK Chorale.  Harpzilla had finished a song and was starting in about her CDs again.   Crystal suddenly turned to me and said conversationally, if just a shade loudly, “We’ve made CD’s.”

I turned to her like this was an act we had rehearsed. “Yes, we have.”

“You have?” Harpzilla’s fingers froze on her strings

“Yes,” I said, “Five or six, I think.”

Davey piped up, “I have one right here.  Shall we put it on?”

“Which one is it?”

“Our latest, when we were on the Intiman stage!”

Now Harpzilla appeared stunned, but only briefly.  “I play for Hospice patients, you know, and it’s always devastating when they die,” she announced.

Another silence.  A resentful silence. Somebody sighed.  Nobody said anything.

I thought, “Well, after you get through with them, I’m not surprised they die; after all, you’ve sucked the life out of a party of thirty people in less than an hour.”

Davey’s joyful hootenanny dried up well before sunset.

This party actually took place ten years ago, but we still talk about; still enjoy our righteous indignation.  It’s a tale of what not to do at a party.  I’ll leave it to you to decide whether I refer to the behavior of the one guest or that of the group who put up with her.

With Halloween appearing a full month ahead of itself, I’ve been thinking about Margaret of Clitherow’s hand.   I saw The Hand when I traveled in England in the year 2005, in the city of York, of a good family, though not of that city, my father being a foreigner of Cornwall.  That’s for you English majors.

Anyway I was up in York, walking on the walls and luxuriating in the services at York Minster and availing myself of every opportunity to walk through The Shambles, the ancient butcher’s street.   In the Shambles I visited the little shrine to Saint Margaret of Clitherow where I learned her hand was at the Bar Convent.

In York, the streets are gates, the gates are bars, and the bars are pubs; they sell a lot of T-shirts that say so. The Bar Convent is a convent outside Micklegate Bar (or the gate at Mickle Street. You get used to the terminology, or after some time in a pub, you don’t have to).

Having a huge capacity for ghoulishness, I couldn’t help wondering what on earth this was all about.  Her hand?  Even more than the Micklegate Bar where they used to display severed heads did I want to see the hand of St. Margaret of Clitherow.   On the Endless Tourist Loop Bus, I asked the driver to let me off at the convent at Micklegate Bar.

“I want to see that hand,” I confided in him.

“Margaret of Clitherow’s hand?”  He asked cheerfully.

Like there might be others.

To my great disappointment, the Convent Museum was closed that day but the girl at the desk offered to show me the chapel.

“I really wanted to see The Hand,” I said wistfully.

“Oh, it’s in the chapel,” she reassured me.

I perked up.

The chapel was a bright, sun-lit, Italianate room.  Before I got to see The Hand, there was an opening act.  In a locked cupboard -a reliquary-were nine tiny items.  One was the burnt flesh of a martyr—didn’t catch the name—that looked like a cigarette butt.  Another was a stained scrap of fabric that had been wrapped around the severed finger of another martyr.  The label noted laconically, “The finger is in Bruges.”

At this I almost laughed hysterically.  I was born in the Pacific Northwest, the youngest coast of a young democracy, our native Totem poles notwithstanding.  If the U.S is adolescent, the west coast is pre-teen.  I did not yell, “Gross!” like some of my students might, but truly, I had never seen anything remotely like this.

Locked in a special cupboard in a reliquary of its own was The Hand.  The girl handed me a velvet-covered, glass-domed cake plate festooned with crosses and a little sign saying The Hand isn’t to be handled.  She removed the velvet and I had a good long look at a shriveled, but identifiably human hand.  It was grotesque, funny, and poignant.

Earlier in the day I had wandered into a church called All Saints Pavement (yes, it is) where the organist let me play the pipe organ. Afterward I sat in a pew and wrote five breathless postcards telling friends in Seattle that I had played the pipe organ in a big English church.  At the Bar Convent I sat in the bright Italianate chapel and wished I hadn’t mailed those cards because playing the organ was nothing next to seeing the appendage of St Margaret of Clitherow.

A few posts ago, I wrote Whining Helps.  I now want to announce that Groveling Doesn’t.

Genevieve came in the other night, apologizing for the second week in a row that she hadn’t practiced and would it be all right if we did sight reading again this week?  The week before she had read through some Satie, discovered she liked the Gnossiennes and wanted to learn more.  I consider it a wildly successful lesson when a student discovers something that piques her interest.

I have known Genevieve since she was three when she came to lessons with her older sister.  At three, she terrified me: she was intense.  She had a more sophisticated bullshit meter than any therapist.  She was worse than a cat whose withering stare sees through the scraps we precariously drape over our human frailty.  She was three.

Now she is a tall, gorgeous high school student who both plays the piano and sings with a voice of unearthly beauty that is as awe inspiring in its own way as her penetrating child’s gaze once was.  So it is a little odd to find her worried about what I think.  She doesn’t realize what a privilege it is for me to work with her.

Some students try to hide the fact that they haven’t looked at their music since their last lesson.  They fumble through something so badly that I can’t tell if the piece is too challenging or if they are having a bad hand day or what.

“So did you play this piece this week?”

“Well we’ve been pretty busy with the new—”

“Whoa!  All I want to know is if this music is too hard or if you spent your time composing a symphony. This is your life, you know. You can spend your week any way you choose.”

I can understand why this might be news to a kid, but adults are just as bad.  Hell, I am just as bad.  It can take effort to go to my voice lesson and not make excuses.  But it brings up a critical question:  who are we learning for?  Ok, not the most elegant of sentences but I believe that the confusion hovering around the answer is what is wrong with our entire education system.

Some classical vocal and piano pieces are so beautiful they will break your heart.  I love it when that music appeals my students.  But when they walk in the door, it’s not about me and what I love.  It’s not about what I think they should learn.  It’s about what musical potion will draw them to the piano because the music has gotten under their skin, giving them a reason to learn.

The British have a great expression: “Begin as you mean to go along.”  As a teacher, I want to help my students build a house they want to live in.  So I find music they like, and I try to stay with their minds even as I introduce them to notes, counts, scales, and chords.   I want their experience with me to re-assure them that their desires are important and their idiosyncratic ways of learning have power.  I want them to learn for their lives, not mine.

Music is not something anyone ever finishes.  We are used to “learning” being a matter of a teacher or lecturer feeding us information.  We get it in a lump, memorize it and then think we’ve learned something.  I am a great believer in letting a student discover what she can without any direction.  Out of a mass of experience comes the curiosity and the questions that point to a trail-head.  When it’s too late to turn back, when passion is hot, and curiosity is sizzling, a student learns there is no trail.  She gets to build it herself and she can structure it to go anywhere.  How she proceeds connects her on a deep level to what it mean to be herself.  That, to me, is Learning.

I believe this is why the Cheyenne say, “Our first teacher is our own heart.”

So please, don’t grovel.

We observe the ritual:
The washing of the feet,
The anointing with oil and salt,
The baptism into bags of hot paraffin.

She paints a second coat
of Kingfisher Blue;
Toe by toe,
my head bows, my eyes close.

How beautiful are the feet that bring me
thro the valley of incense
Into the sanctuary where
I lay me down on a table.

I hear the prayers of the potion pumps,
Feel the cool blessing upon my face,
After the rooting out of those small sins
of eyebrow and chin.

A sermon about the disciplined life
Is delivered with smooth-faced earnest,
The collection is taken,
I leave my tithe.

Tonight, under a heavy quilt,
With smarting around the eyes and chin,
Deep in the secret dark,
Wiggle my ten toes of Kingfisher Blue.

Elena Louise Richmond
December 30, 2008.

You know what I don’t like?  People who say, “Can’t complain,” and people who wear those buttons that say “No Whining.”  Of course you can complain.  And whining helps.

The British say “whinging.”  Isn’t that a great word?  It’s got the nasal irritation of the word whine, the messy soft g; and in addition, you pronounce the “h” in the “wh” so all that annoyed energy comes through on the breath before you ever phonate.

You know where whining—or whinging– helps a lot?  In singing.  Many singers and students of singing have a narrow idea of what it means to sing.  It’s a montage of what feels easy, what parts of their voices have already been developed and their ideas of singing as garnered from watching performers.  To be blunt, the result is often a nice, insipid sound, incrusted with caricatured nuances.

The actual experience of singing with our own voices is nothing like what we think it is when we daydream about being “up there” on stage, having people listening to us, or more to the point, watching and admiring us.  That’s fantasy.  When we sing we cannot escape our own voices which reflect our entire personalities, both conscious and unconscious.   To sound like who we are and to enjoy the experience of singing, we must bring our own sound and fury.

This is where the whining comes in. Almost all of us have been told since we were very young to not whine.  Some of us were also not allowed to express anger or sadness or even exuberance.  We got so good at not expressing, we finally stopped feeling and as adults we often insist that the full menu of human emotions isn’t even there.  Well, guess what?  It is.  If we can’t bring it into our singing voices, we won’t have a satisfying experience of singing, we won’t sound like ourselves, we won’t be compelling performers, and singing is going to tire us out, not energize us.

When one of my students stops a sound, makes a face, and says, “Ugh, that sounds horrible,” I say, “Make it sound worse.”  I learned this from one of earth’s great treasures, a singer named Tommie Eckert.  She taught me to explore all the awful sounds, to go digging around in the muck and the dark to see what’s there.

Think about what’s in muck: truffles.  In tight, hidden places: pearls.  In the dark: gold.  We mine the richness in our voices when we stop interacting with images of what it means to sing.  We begin wallowing in the experience of our own sound.  We try being goofy or angry or seductive when we sing.  We push the previously forbidden to extreme in order to find its scope in our voices.

Fearlessly wallowing can be frightening.  The prohibition against whining or against being angry or sexual makes a lot of singing students uncomfortable.  Singing is supposed to be civilized; they don’t want to walk in off the street and go all regressive and primal, shrieking and wailing and feeling exposed and foolish.  But to be compelling singers, we must bring some of our underbelly into the tone.  That includes stuff we long ago stopped feeling, but which, not incidentally, is part of what it means to be human.  The very effort to avoid our shadows makes our voices small, complacent, uninspiring, and forgettable.

Those wallowing experiences in lessons or in practice open up new places for our voices to resonate; they wash more colors into our sound, and provide more stability for the weak parts of our scales.  It’s not that we go out whining in public when people have come to hear us sing any more than we take the rage we located it in a psycho-therapy session into the grocery store to buy milk (although it can be forgiven if it pops out at the pharmacy when we first learn that the generic we’ve used for years has been dropped from our insurance formulary.)

I don’t think of lessons, practices, and rehearsals as places to perfect performance. I think of them as places to play and experiment with the every kind of sound we can possibly make, especially whining; to get comfortable with the experience of being inside ourselves, with noticing the gestalt of the inhalation, the support, and the exhalation; with feeling the resonance in our bodies, and with luxuriating in the exuberance of our own voices let loose in the world.

There’s nothing like busting open the head of the Blessed Virgin Mary to remind you to slow down.  Here’s what happened:  I was having one of those mornings when I was not in the moment.  There were way too many moments trying to be represented in every in-breath.  I had a chiropractic appointment and a voice student.  And even though there was no reason why I had to cram all this into one morning, I was also going to do laundry, pay some bills, and run a bunch of errands on my bicycle: get a new watch battery, make copies at Kinkos and take her porcelain statue of the BVM to my friend Joan who had left it in my car the day before. When I got to her house, I dropped Mary on the porch and cracked her head clean off her robes.

Sunday, Joan and I had gone up to Christ the King Fall Festival which they are now regrettably calling Bite of Broadview.  I had been up there once already on Saturday with my neighbor, Gwen, the one who knows something about just about everything. I love this little festival; I’ve been going to it since the 1980’s.  It’s a slice of childhood summer carnivals; I’m certain the rides are older than I am.  They have raffles and bake sales; if you get there early enough, you can get some fudge.

There’s the usual plethora of craft booths, including Catholic ones which seem so exotic to me.  At one table I fingered all the rosary beads and learned how to use them.  Another table, Steps Against Domestic Violence, breaks my heart.  It’s run by the family of a young woman who was murdered by her fiancé.  For a donation, you could pick from a table full of small religious statues.  Joan and I chatted with the family; each of us made a donation and we each took one of the two statues of Mary.

I was raised in the Church of the Miserable Masochists.  We were Pentecostal, evangelical, fundamental, in-errantistical –pretty much everything you see and hear on those shameless religious television channels.  I have tramped through a dozen belief systems since my mother chased me around the house screaming that God was going to punish me; and finally found a home hanging out in the intersection of psycho-analysis, Buddhism and Christianity, trying to not get hit.

Joan, my friend with the theological chops, was raised Catholic, and she can tell you what she believes these days when she gets her own blog.  I enjoy talking religion and theology with her.  We were having lunch one day when she said something that I loved so much I put it in my book, 99 Girdles on the Wall, which is currently sitting in the in-box of an editor at St Martin’s Press. We were talking about Jesus Christ who I never had anything against; it was the hermeneutics people who made it impossible for me to believe what Christians say they believe.

Joan shoved aside her plate and said, “Look.  For Jesus to continue the road he was on, he was going to run into trouble.  He could have avoided it.  He could have gone to Greece.  But to be the person he believed himself to be, he had to do what he did.”

So here’s what I believe:  It’s no different for any of us.  We all either stay on our road, or we escape ourselves and go to Greece.  We are here to be who we are, not to imitate someone else, not to co-opt his vision, reduce it to concrete and bludgeon the rest of the world with it.  I find fundamentalism in any form pretty un-interesting; it kills conversation.  It can also be quite terrifying; it kills people.

If I have any absolutes, it is that I can believe anything I want to believe.  No person alive knows what happens after death.  However I am the only person alive who knows what it feels like to be me on earth right now.

So: frantic morning, broken BVM, Joan, religion, my book (which is in the in-box of an editor at St Martin’s Press, did I say that already?), what I believe, what matters most in life, take a deep breath, slow down.  That was the trail of associations.

I gave my BVM statue to Joan.  She had made the larger donation.