My Maker Has Bent My Knees For Me

So last night at book club one of my friends said, "I read your blog.  What set you off last week?"

I couldn't remember at first, but she reminded me of my post "Who Are The Poor?"  "Oh," I said, "We had a one-time volunteer at Faith in Action who kept making snippy little asides.  Like, 'If they need help on their electric bill, how can they afford all those tattoos?'  When the person in question had gotten laid off two months ago.  It was driving me crazy."  And I did try to say something to the actual person--I'm not always passive-aggressive--but she wasn't hearing it.

A lot of us--a LOT--particularly those of us surrounded by the comforts and security of middle-class lives, with savings accounts, insurance, stable employment and decent health--get all judgy-pants about anyone needing help.  I think we convince ourselves that there is something fundamentally different between us and "those people" because we want to feel that we can never be put in that position of need. (Thanks C for the link.)  We are different.  We are okay.


A woman once sent Faith in Action. a remarkable thank-you note.  She said that she had always been the stable person in her family, the one who helped others, the one who had it all together.  "And now," she wrote, "my Maker has bent my knees for me."

Sometimes being driven to your knees is a gift.  It wasn't until I fell apart, years ago, that I realized I really could rely on others.  I had liked feeling self-sufficient and in control, except that it was also rigid, artificial, and exhausting.  How blessed to know that you are part of a community who will care for you.  And how blessed to be part of the caring.

Yep, everyone can find examples of the "undeserving" poor.  Except, I always want to know, what was their history?  What did they suffer growing up, what did they learn?  What help did they not get?  What might have made things different?  Once another middle-aged woman came in to FIA desperate because she was about to lose her home to foreclosure.  Her husband had recently died and it had taken all their savings to bury him.  This is not something we can usually help with--the amount of money was far too great--but in her specific case, because of details I won't go into, I thought there was probably another way around it.  I called her back to my computer, asked her a few more questions, did a few minutes' work on Google, and wrote down a phone number for her.  "You are automatically eligible for a six months' deferment on your mortgage," I told her.  By which point her husband's pension would be transferred over to her, and she would be fine.  "Call that number and tell them your husband died.  You might have to send in a death certificate, but they have to give you the deferment.  If they give you trouble come back here."

The woman broke into enormous heaving sobs.  She clutched the corner of my desk, bent over, gasping.  Then she said, "My father raped me every day from the time I was nine years old.  I would sit in school and all I could think of was at the end of the day I had to go back to that house, and I couldn't learn.  I just never could learn.  The teachers kept passing me because I was quiet.  I don't know how to do all that with computers, that type-type stuff.  I just never learned a thing."  And she sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.

As did the rest of us.  Good Lord, what a day.

Want to make a difference?  You can give a single mom Thanksgiving dinner here.

Beloved Children's Books I Really Despise

I asked my friend/mentor Jane Yolen what she thought of yesterday's blog post, and she obligingly wrote a comment, which mostly says two things:
1) All reviewers are slanted.
2) If you want to believe your good reviews, you have to also believe the bad.

Of course all reviewers are slanted.  We can't help that.  I'm a sucker for character-driven period pieces, known to many of my friends as "boring."  (My book club still hasn't gotten over my making them read Mansfield Park.  You'd have thought they were high schoolers and I was forcing them to read Tolstoy.)  Writers who are chronically, even racistly, historically inaccurate are very high on my personal shit list (Ann Rinaldi, I'm talkin' to you!).  I'm also offended by any horse book other than The Black Stallion in which any child rides or befriends a stallion.  Because there aren't that many stallions, people.  We cut the nuts early, for good reason.  I'm sure I have other idiosyncracies, too. 

And, yes, if, say, a "good" reviewer, by which I mean someone with at least modest credentials (a librarian, a teacher who reads a lot of your type of literature, a national reviewer) says something negative about your book, there's at least some chance that it's true.  If a lot of not-as-credible reviewers (random people on Goodreads, Amazon pundits) all say the same thing, you might want to start believing that, too.  But if a schoolchild says, "This is the most boring book ever, I HATE spy stories," and gives you one star, you don't need to pay a whole lot of attention to that, no more than you do to the glowing Amazon reviews written by your family members and best friends.

Jane Yolen also said she could give fifteen minutes to her dislike, not to say vehement hatred, of the best-selling children's books "Love you Forever," "The Giving Tree," and "The Rainbow Fish."  To which I say:  preach it, Sister.

"Love You Forever" has a cute cover of a baby shredding toilet paper.  The premise is that the mother loves her baby forever even when he makes a mess--though of course she should be supervising him better so that he doesn't drown in that open toilet.   Sounds cute, but it's creepy.  The mom can only tell her baby/little boy/teenager/GROWN SON that she loves him when he's asleep and she's rocking him in her special chair.  So she crawls into his room at night, heaves him onto her lap, and sings.  Then, once he's an adult, she ties a ladder to her car, drives across town, climbs through his second-story window, hauls him unconscious onto her lap, and sings to him.  WHAT?  The book ends with the man (there are no spouses shown for either character) holding a baby girl on his lap and singing to her.  Which leaves one with the icky feeling that when his daughter is sixteen he's going to be sneaking into her bedroom.  There is nothing remotely right about this book.  I've never understood its appeal.

I hated "The Giving Tree" the first time it was read to me, in kindergarten.  I mean, I hated it.  Maybe people who didn't grow up having their boundaries violated don't see it the same way, but why on earth should the tree be sacrificed so the rotten whining boy could do whatever he pleased?  Why was his search for happiness more important that the tree's integrity?  Sure she could give apples, shade--and then take a big stick and whap him upside the head.  Hate, hate, hate this book.

"The Rainbow Fish" is just such a mess.  The translation (from the original German) is clunky, so the language isn't great.  The shiny fish at the beginning acts annoying, and then the solution--everyone will love you only if you give up everything that makes you unique, and try to be exactly like them--well, isn't that a lovely lesson for our kiddies to learn?  I think this one became popular because of the shiny paper.  And because sharing.  You know.  Everyone should share.  Always, all the time, everything.  The end.

I'm off now to read some more of my book club book.  I only started it yesterday, and book club is tonight (hooray for Kindle versions!).  It's called "Breakfast with Buddha," I'm really enjoying it, and I never would have picked it up on my own.  Just so you know--I do mostly keep an open mind.

Bad Reviews are a Good Thing

I follow writer Anne Lamott on Twitter, though I'm beginning to want to stop following her, because I find her Tweets mostly self-referential and annoying.  Yesterday she was whining about Kirkus Reviews's take on her new book, Stitches, and then about a minute later was saying that most writers found a bad review from Kirkus to be a good thing, a secret sign that their book was actually brilliant.

Sorry.  I review for Kirkus.  If I give you a bad review, it's because you've written a bad book.

Bad reviews are hard for writers.  We pour ourselves into our books.   Some bad reviews are, of course, meaningless:  I read a one-star review on Amazon for Neil Gaiman's Fortunately, The Milk that complained it was a children's book.  Duh.  Read the book description before you buy it, blockhead.  I also don't feel slighted by the sort of reviews written under duress by children who were forced to read one of my books for school.  But the reviews, even on blogs, that complain that you're boring, or not very skilled, or unimaginative, or lying--boy, that last one really burns me, I always have to stifle the urge to send the reviewer a pile of my primary resources--those can hurt.

Bummer.  I'm happy I review for Kirkus, widely reputed to live up to their slogan, "The toughest book critics on earth."  Here's why:  I live in a small town.  With an excellent but small library that must use its money wisely.  My children went to an excellent but underfunded parochial school whose book-buying budget for the year was the profit made off their book fair.  Those places can't afford to buy bad books.  They simply can't.  If you're an otherwise brilliant author whose latest work was well below standard, I want that publically known, so that my librarians can make informed choices about whether or not to buy it.  Similarly, if you're completely unknown but just wrote something amazing, I want that book in my library, in my schools.

I'm sure Bristol's public library will still carry Stitches.  After all, it's written by Anne Lamott.  And stop your whining, Annie, the review wasn't that bad.  Trust me.  I've written worse.

Scarcity, Or, Should I Nap or Work Out?

This morning, after I returned home from taking my daughter to school, I faced a small dilemma.  For the past several days I've been promising myself that today would be the day I'd start working out on our new treadmill.  But also, I have a cold that won't go away, and even though I slept well I was still really, really tired.  Workout or nap?  Workout or nap?

Then it occurred to me:  I have plenty of time.  I could do both.

You can send me that Genius award now.  I've earned it.

Anyway, I took a nap, and now I'm working, and after lunch, when I tend to feel sleepy again, I'll work out.  And the whole reason I'm bringing all of this up is to lead into telling you about a brilliant book I read this weekend:  Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much.  It's by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, an economist/psychologist combo that also formed ideas42, a non-profit organization that studies what actually works to combat poverty.

The premise of Scarcity is that when humans feel an area of lack in their lives--whether financial, emotional, or temporal--their brains function less well.  They focus on what they're lacking to the detriment of both other parts of their lives, and the part that's lacking.  They're more impulsive.  They make worse decisions.  They're more easily overwhelmed. 

Two things especially intrigued me.  The first is that these effects were independent of intelligence, education level, and other variables.  In one interesting experiment, researchers recruited a bunch of Princeton undergrads to play games of Family Feud--only the groups were manipulated so that some of them were artificially "poor" and some were "rich."  "Poor" and "rich" had no meaning outside the bounds of this very simple game, all the players were smart and well-educated, and yet the "poor" groups consisently under-performed the "rich" groups.

In other words, sometimes people aren't poor because they make bad decisions.  Sometimes they make bad decisions because they're poor.

The other is that this suggests for a number of our clients, the work we're doing at Faith in Action is very effective.  When we pay $100 toward someone's light bill because their car broke down and they had to pay to repair it (and so can't pay for the lights), we're alleviating both a financial problem and a mental one.  Because we can provide that bit of slack to our clients, we may be making them better parents, better employees, and better decision-makers overall.  At FIA we're always trying to make a real difference in the lives of our clients, and this book suggests to me that what we're doing is less of a band-aid and more of a real solution than we feared.

Now I'm off to write about obelisks.  Carry on.

Who Are The Poor?

Then I, the King, shall say to those at my right, 'Come, blessed of my Father, into the Kingdom prepared for you from the founding of the world.  For I was hungry and you fed me.  Unless, of course, you were on food stamps you didn't deserve.  Or you used your food stamps for junk food, or expensive food, or any food other than lentils and rice.  Why don't you get a job? Ok, then, why don't you get a better job? 

 I was thirsty and you gave me water; but not Mountain Dew.  I see you drinking a Mountain Dew, you're totally out of the Kingdom.  Or getting a tattoo--where'd you get the money for that?  Cigarettes!  Spend a dime on cigarettes, you're out.  You're wasting your money, or you once wasted it, back when you had more.  At any rate, you don't see me making mistakes like that, do you? 

 I was a stranger and you invited me into your homes; Not dressed like that, I won't.  Not with the poor personal hygiene, the air of desperation.  Don't you understand?  It's your own fault you were born without resources, without expectations.  Abuse, trauma, mental illness--blah, blah, blah.  What do you want from me?  Hope?  Equality in the eyes of God? 

naked and you clothed me; In cast-offs.  Be grateful.  

sick and in prison, and you visited me.'  Here's the thing.  If I did that, if I visited you, I'd have to spend time with you.  I'd have to see you as, you know, a person.  You wouldn't be an abstract anymore, "the poor."  I'd have a harder time dividing you into groups, the "deserving poor," the "undeserving poor," the "lazy bastards who won't get off their butts."  If I got to know you, if I knew your name, I'd start to see your brokenness, and how it mirrors my own.  I'd see that the difference between us is more a matter of safety nets--mine is bigger--and I'd understand that when we stand before God, side-by-side, I'll be the one with some accounting to do:

From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.

And that starts to sound frightening.  It's so much easier to deem myself independent of God's grace.

New Novels, Old Dogs, and Taking the Rest of the Week Off

Recently I read a list--most likely on Facebook, so who knows if it's true--but, on the other hand, this, which I found on Facebook, is both true and fascinating--anyway, I read a list of the 10 happiest jobs.  Number ten was Operating Engineer, because you got to "play with giant toys like bulldozers." 

Number Four was Writer.  The list said, "For most authors, the pay is ridiculously low or non-existant, but the autonomy of writing down the contents of your own mind apparently leads to happiness."

Oh yeah, baby.

My "England book" is, to all intents, done.  I'm very happy with this draft, my editor likes my improved ending, and all is well.  We'll have to run it through spell-check, and the grammar police known as Copyeditors, who've saved me from my own ignorance repeatedly.  But that's all nothing.  The real work is done.

Which is so cool, for more reasons than one.  Like, I'll get the second half of my advance.  Always good.  I'll get a real publication date.  Fun.  But also, I can start writing something new.  Yesterday I cleaned off a section of my desk and found a rough draft of a book on Egyptian obelisks.  It doesn't stink nearly as much as I expected.  I'll certainly clean that up in the next week or so, and send it off to Be Considered.  I'll start the true research for my Egypt Novel, too.  And, on the novel writing front, I've planned a sequel to the "England book," my first true sequel ever.  One of the ways I know I'm really done with the first book is that the characters are rushing all over each other trying to tell me how to start the second.  (It's not schizophenia, it's creativity.)  But I've decided not to let them out until Monday.  They can squabble among themselves until somebody wins and I know where to start the story.

Meanwhile, my son is asleep upstairs, though he promised, last night, to set his alarm for 9:45.  His old dog is sleeping curled up on the sweatshirt my son left on the couch last night.  We wondered how the dog would react when he saw my son again--but he was so sound asleep that he only blinked in drowsy wonderment, his ears at half-mast.  Then he curled up on my son's stomach; when I tried to pick him up he went completely boneless in protest, like a recalcitrant toddler.  As he's grown ever older and more senile, the dog has reached a very peaceful state.  He's lost all his anxiety.

Kind of like me.

Today My Boy Comes Home!

Actually, probably not technically today: the plane carrying him and his father is scheduled to land at our local airport at 11:42.  It'll probably land early--the last plane usually does--but they'll have to pick up luggage and then drive home, which will likely put them through the door just after midnight.

I'll be waiting.

It's my son's fall break from his freshman year in college.  It's not like he's been off to war.  Still, I keep wanting to quote Bert Le Clos, whose son Chad beat Michael Phelps to take the gold medal in the 200m butterfly at the London Olympics.  I'd seen Bert on BBC, and thought he was British, but it turns out he's South African (the accents are close).   (At least, Bert's was.)  Live on TV, with tears in his eyes, he kept looking down at his son and saying, "He's so beautiful.  Oh, look at him.  My beautiful boy."

I won't be crying when my son comes home.  In fact, I'll probably be asleep on the couch.  But when I wake up, the first thing I'm going to think is, oh, my beautiful boy.

John Green's Minion and Me

Sometimes I wish I were a little more like John Green.  Not just because his book The Fault In Our Stars was way up on the New York Times Bestseller list.  Not just because he's a brilliant, and can write the pants off most of us mere mortals, myself included.  Because he's got this internet stuff down.

Since fall break my daughter has become a complete John Green addict.  This weekend she was, to use her term, "fangirling," because--I'm going to have to quote her here, it's like she's speaking a foreign language--"I put up a post on Tumbler, and fishingboatproceeds--that's John Green's Tumbler name--"liked" it!  So John Green HIMSELF read my Tumbler post!"

1)  I have no idea what Tumbler is.  My daughter's attempts to enlighten me did not.  All I can figure out is that Tumbler is sort of like Twitter, but not really, and that's a bummer, because Twitter I mostly understand.  Only the kids keep telling me to stop calling my Twitter posts, "Twits."

2)  I have no idea how my daughter knows how John Green refers to himself on Tumbler.  Also, what kind of name is fishingboatproceeds?  Also, turns out it's "Tumblr."  No E.  Because that's more hip.  (Mor hip?)

3)  Don't you imagine that, when authors get all over the NYT Bestseller list, they hire staff to read Tumblr?  I hate to burst my daughter's bubble, but I bet her post was actually liked by John Green's Minion.

4)  If any of my dear readers--or even, both of them--are posting about my books on Tumblr, I will never know.  I feel a little sorry that I can't give them the same sort of thrill John Green's Minion gave my daughter.

5)  Apparently--this is another thing I completely did not know--if you string a bunch of unrelated capital letters together, like this--QHERGCUXPILT--it means you are "fangirling."

6)  I don't know whether or not there is "fanboying."  Perhaps being an obsessive fan considered inherently feminine.

7)  "Fanwomaning?"

8)  I so want to be on the New York Times Bestseller list.  I can't tell you.

9)  First, though, I'm going to have to come up with a title for the new novels.  All previous attempts have been rejected.  I think we're going to have to go with the dart-board-on-the-door-of-my-editor's-office option again.

10)  If you have a suggestion for a title, OR you can explain Tumblr, OR you want to be my Minion, do call.  Or send me a Twit.  I'm up on that.

In Which I Win A Prize (Or Two!)

Books are completely necessary to writers.  I've met writers of all genres from every sort of national, socio-economic, and educational background, and they have exactly one thing in common: they read constantly.  I would almost say that it's impossible to become a writer if you don't also read.

I grew up in a house full of books, and my book compulsion/collection has only grown since.  I revel in books.  I delight in them.  I learn from them.  So it's not surprising that every now and again I need to do some serious investigating at a serious bookstore.

Hence yesterday's excursion to Malaprop's, the pride of downtown Asheville and one of the truly great independent bookstores in the country.  I love Malaprop's, not just for the wide-ranging diversity of their selection, nor for their adjoining cafe (the scent of coffee and books mixed together is one of my favorite on earth), nor for their very knowledgeable staff.  I love them because they are kind.

Once, years ago, when I was going through a very hard time, I spend part of a day at Malaprop's.   One of the clerks approached me unasked and handed me a small card good for whatever I wanted from the cafe.  I think I must have looked terribly unhappy that day, and I remember that while the coffee I drank didn't make me feel better, it made me feel cared for by a kind universe and oddly less alone.

Yesterday I was in high spirits.  I'd brought along my daughter and one of her friends, who didn't find it at all odd to spend several hours in a bookstore.  I did a full, complete, every-shelf browse, and I found some great stuff--a book on the fates of the saints, which I'm sure is somehow going to be research.  A memoir of a well-known British writer's childhood in World War II--be still my heart.  A copy of a book on Egyptian gods first published in 1903, the perfect reference work for the "Egypt book."  Neil Gaiman's Fortunately The Milk, a delightful little froth of a story I read before bed last night, and Why I Jump, the newly-translated memoir by a Japanese autistic teen that everyone's been raving about. 

Etc.  When I went to pay for all these treasures, I said to the clerk, "I bet I'm your best customer today.  I should get a prize."

He said, "You do get a prize!"  Then he gave me my choice of a pile of Advanced Reader Copies, books which are not even published yet.  This is an amazing prize in that it doesn't cost Malaprop's a dime, but is a huge hit with readers like me.  And when I struggled to decide between two of the ARC's, the clerk gave me both.

It was a very good day. 

"The Olde Farm"

Yesterday we got a pretty amusing piece of mail:  an envelope addressed to "The Olde Farm," our street (but no number), Bristol, TN.  Off to one side a postal employee had written our house number and a question mark.  There's a golf club about ten miles farther down our road called The Olde Farm, and I'll send this mail on to them, but the golf club is in Bristol, Virginia, not Bristol, Tennessee.  My town straddles the state line.  So I can see how the post office got confused.

I also think it's funny that they sent the mail to me.  We live on what lots of locals still call The Old Copenhaver Farm.  (It's how you give directions when you're from around here:  "You know the Old Copenhaver Farm?  Ok, turn left there, then go down to the street where the old Cozy-Dozy used to be--" I'm not kidding.  If you don't know where the old stuff used to be, you can't drive anywhere in Bristol.)  Anyhow, the Old Copenhaver Farm once comprised several hundred acres and a farmhouse from the 1800s.  My dear friends and next-door neighbors have the house and 10 acres around it; we have 50 acres that surround them.  The rest was sold off generations back.  Our land had been inherited by 3 Copenhaver siblings; the two sisters lived in other states, but the brother lived here until 2 months ago, when he moved to Atlanta.  I'm sorry about that; I didn't know him well, but his wife worked at Faith in Action with me, and I miss her.

Someone once asked me what we raised on our farm.  At the time I said children.  Now, to be truthful, I would have to say fruit flies and black widow spiders.  It's driving me beserk.

I do not know where the fruit flies are breeding.  I've cleaned out the pantry.  I've washed the fruit bowl, which anyway only contains green bananas.  All around the house we've got fruit fly traps, which is to say open bottles of wine that had gone off.  I usually save these to use as vinegar, but my husband has converted them all to fruit fly traps.  They are working, in that they're collecting fruit flies.  There just always seem to be more flies still flying.

If any of you have suggestions, please, enlighten me.  We're really sick of fruit flies.

The black widow spiders breed beneath my water troughs.  Black widows look like shiny black marbles, only with 8 legs and that distinctive red hourglass marking.  (For those of you who don't think I can identify a black widow, such as my husband, I invite you to upend the troughs and see for yourself.)  They creep me out.  Supposedly if I caught them in jars I could sell them to the local pet store, but to do that I would have to catch them in jars.  Uh, no.  I step on them with my hard high boots whenever possible.  It doesn't do any good.  There are always more.

Maybe the secret is to let the spiders into the house to eat the fruit flies.  Then I can step on the spiders with my hard high boots, and then we can go back to raising only children here, blissfully bug-free. 

WOW.

For the past few weeks I have been away from my novel.  This is not laziness; this is how novels are made.  You send a draft off, and you put the novel Away.  If you read it, pick at it, worry over it, you'll never see it fresh, and without seeing it fresh you can't evaluate it properly, and if you can't evaluate it, you can't make it better.

Now, there was really nothing stopping me from immediately starting work on another novel while the one I was working on rested, but my excuses were these: 1) the next novel will either be a sequel to this one, or what I'm calling my "Egypt book."  (I never have proper titles until the very end, because I suck at titles.  Once one of my novels had its title changed post-production on the advice of the sales department.  I'm not kidding.  It was a good change, too.) 2) I can't work on the sequel to this novel (either the "Ada book" or the "England book" depending on whether you're talking to me or my editor) until I know how this novel ends (I tried that once and it really didn't work).  3) I can't work on the "Egypt book" until I've finished the research for it, or at least gotten farther than I have (this may be a spurious reason).  4) I can't work on the "Egypt book" because it takes place in England/Egypt in the 1920s and the "England book" takes place in England during WWII, and those two settings are simultaneously too close and too different for me to hold in my head at once.

4) is the real reason for not working on the Egypt book.  I have found I can easily go back and forth between, say, The Appalachian Trail during the present day, and WWII France.  I can also shuttle between present time/anonymous American place, and France during the age of Marie Antoinette.  Those are seismic shifts.  You won't muddle the details.  But English society changed a lot in the 17 years between my Egypt book and my England book; the changes are important, yet relatively subtle, and I struggle to hold them in my head at the same time.

That, and I liked having a few weeks off.

What I liked even better, however, was my super-wonderful editor's fast and wholly lovely response to this draft.  She started her email out WOW.  It's hard to imagine a better opening word than WOW.  Even if she had gone on to make a lot of big change suggestions (a favorite of mine, from another novel, was her casual, "I'm not sure first person is the best voice for this.  Let's try it in third."), which she didn't, I'd still be pretty tickled about WOW.

Anne Lamott is a writer I mostly adore, but she does one thing that makes me crazy:  she repeats, ad infinitum, that writers need to cut half the words from their first draft to their second.  I'm sure this is how Anne works, and judging by the results, it's a good system for her.  It is not how I work, not at all.  I add scenes throughout, over and over, layering the story so that each draft gets longer and more complex.  You'd be surprised by what I lever into my manuscripts, if I ever let you see them at their raw, just-hatched stage.

So I'm off to get down to my real work.  I leave you with this line from Kevin Henke's classic Lily's Purple Plastic Purse:  "Wow.  That was just about all [s]he could say.  WOW."

Friends Who Help You With Dead Animals

While I was wondering this morning whether I should blog about my old dog or the pope, a friend texted me.  She wanted to know if I would bury her old dog should said dog die this weekend, while she was out of town.  I said of course.  She said, her animal cemetery or mine, didn't matter.  That's good, because given the size of the dog I'd probably need to use the scoop on my tractor to dig the hole, and I'd rather not take the tractor to her place.  Far easier to transport the dead dog.

If all this seems a bit macabre to you, you clearly don't live in the country.  Long ago, when we first moved out to our farm, my son, then about seven years old, looked up from his dinner and asked, "What are we going to do when Trapper dies?"  Trapper was my very old horse.  I'd always hoped he'd live out his last years on a piece of land I owned, and he did; it was a gift.  "Well," I said to my son, "Lisa knows a guy with a backhoe who will dig a big hole.  And I thought we'd bury him in the low spot beneath the walnut grove, right against the little stand of trees.  That's a pretty place." 

My husband sputtered in shock.  "That's not what he means!" he said.

"Yes, it is," said my son.

When Trapper did die, my friend Lisa oversaw the burying, because I couldn't bear it.  It was a sort of payback for the day I help wrest the body of a dead foal away from her grief-stricken mare.  (If you don't think animals grieve, you've never tried to restrain a 1500-pound animal that wanted her baby back, right now.)  I in turn paid it forward, standing beside the backhoe while a lovely horse named Templeton was put into the ground.  And while I don't think my friend's dog will die this weekend--he's old, but not yet in extremis--if I do bury him, I'll think back to the cold dark night when the same friend's husband helped me bury a dead sheep.  It seems like a circle of life, but it's not really.  It's a circle of love.

P.S. to my son:  don't worry.  Our old dog is doing fine.

The Virus and I Are Tied

So, toward the end of last week I was viewing the approach of Saturday's Holston Pony Club Fun Show with ridiculous trepidation.  Ridiculous because I've been in charge of this thing for most of the past decade, and because we've always managed to pull it off, and because if you've got the ribbons, judge, concessions, trail class, and Lisa Baker (who owns the farm, Journey's End, where we run the show, and builds the jump courses, etc.) all sorted out, you can't really go wrong, and I had all those things.  But still, on Friday, I was experiencing what I recognized as wholly misplaced angst.  Also it took me a deplorably long time to fill out the judge's sheets, and I still filled them out wrong, and judge's sheets are not exactly rocket science, especially when you've been filling them out for most of the past 10 years.

But I fretted about the show on Friday, and I also fretted about the enormous amount of paperwork I had to do for Bristol Faith in Action's board meeting today, and I fretted about renewing the pony club's paperwork, which is lengthy but again, not exactly rocket science.  Usually my bursts of anxiety are over stuff worth being anxious about.  Friday made no sense to me.  There you are.

Saturday morning, ditto.  Though most of the show stuff was already at Lisa's, I still fretted.  My daughter got up slowly and my horse let herself out of the barn, wandering down the pasture in the dark, and I hadn't cleaned my tack and clearly all was about to go wrong.  My daughter suggested I take my plastic dinosaur out of my pocket and quit taking myself so seriously.

So, she was right.  The show went off beautifully, helped by the camaraderie of our little club.  The pony clubbers were awesome, the parents were awesome, and my darling husband stepped in as announcer and was fabulous.  All went well.

I went home and wondered what all the anxiety had been about.

I woke with a horrible cough and a head full of mucus.

Oh.

My daughter woke with that plus a sore thoat and a feeling of malaise.  I felt fine, so I went on to church with my husband, came home, made a pot of soup and an apple crisp, fell asleep on the couch, and woke 3 hours later feeling like I'd been pummeled with sticks.

I was sick.  It takes me a long time, sometimes, to figure that out.  I spent the rest of Sunday and all day yesterday feeling perfectly miserable. I fretted about the enormous amount of paperwork I had to do for today's board meeting, but did not get off the couch to do it.  I kind of vaguely wanted to make my daughter (who was feeling better, but on her final day of fall break) watch Downton Abbey with me, but I could never muster the energy to wrest her away from The Fault In Our Stars, a novel her best friend had assigned her for Fall Break Reading, which she was weeping over copiously while telling me that I had to.  Read it.  Immediately.  (Except she took our copy off to school with her today, along with The Raven Boys, which she's assigning to her best friend.)  So I did nothing.  My husband provided food.  My daughter took care of the animals.

Today I'm at about 88%.  Much better than Friday, even.  I woke and dashed off the board meeting paperwork with time enough to write this blogpost, because when I'm not sick, it really isn't that big of a deal.  Just like the horse show.  But hey, I survived the show anyhow.

National Coming Out Day

According to what one of my daughter's friends read on Facebook in the car on the way to band practice this morning, today is National Coming Out Day.

I think it's time we all came out.

I don't mean those of us who are gay. I mean those of us who love someone who is gay.
That widens the pool, doesn't it?

I don't out my gay friends. That's up to them. Even if they're clearly and comfortably out, I don't usually bring up their sexuality when talking about them, any more than I bring up my hetero friends' sexuality. "You know Bob--totally straight--but really, he's a great guy. You'll love him."
However, something happened the other day that made me rethink coming out. I was talking to a friend within earshot of another woman I only know slightly. The friend and I happened to discuss something related to homosexuality--I don't remember what it was, maybe something on the internet--anyway, after the friend left, the Woman I Only Know Slightly approached me and gave me a hug. She told me that she'd gathered I wasn't hostile to gay people, and she wanted me to know that she was glad, because she had a relative who was gay.

This was important to her. She's a religious person whose faith tells her that gay people are less welcome in God's kingdom (don't get me started), and that troubles her because she loves her gay family member, but the hardest thing, she says, is listening to people say nasty things about gay people in her hearing assuming that she agrees.

If they knew about her family member, maybe they'd watch what they said. Then maybe, just maybe, they'd watch what they thought. Then maybe what they thought would start to change. Wouldn't that be beautiful?
So I think we need to out ourselves. I'm Kim Bradley, and my beloved great-uncle, John Guernewicz, was gay. He never came out to the family, but we figured it out, since when he died, in 1978, he died of AIDS. I loved him. My love had no more to do with his sexual orientation than it did his height or the color of his eyes. I loved him because he was kind and gentle and cared about me; because when I was five years old and danced for him he clapped; because everyone who knew him loved him, including God, whom I believe, with all my heart, welcomed Uncle Johnny into heaven, and claps for him, and loves, loves to watch him dance.

The Dinosaur Hunt

On Saturday, my dear daughter and I went foxhunting.

When you tell most Americans you go foxhunting, they think three things:  1) Charles Barkley; 2) Downton Abbey; 3) "oh, the poor fox."  I am always having to explain that we don't kill the fox.  If we did, what would we chase next time?  Our particular hunt, like most North American hunts, also chases coyotes.  We've got lots of those, but we still don't kill them.  We are in it for the riding, for the chasing, not the killing.

My horse Sarah was bred and raised to hunt. I bought her as a five-year-old; when she was four, she went out 27 times first-flight with a Northern Virginia hunt.  That is a ton.  Sarah events, also, and she likes that, but she loves riding to hounds.  When I pulled her off the trailer Saturday morning, she looked around with mild interest at the cornfields and the hills, and stood quietly while I tied her to the trailer.  Then, from the huntsman's trailer in front of us, the hounds babbled.  Sarah's ears flew forward: her every muscle tensed, her gaze sharpened.  She stood perfectly still, listening, until she was quite sure we were at a hunt.  Then she took a deep happy breath, looked at me with love, and held perfectly still while I saddled her.  Only the slight quiver of her forearms betrayed how excited she was.

My daughter's horse is a Thoroughbred ex-racehorse turned happy dappy speedy event horse.  I never expected hunting to be his thing.  Hunt horses have to go from dead standstill to dead gallop and back again; they aren't allowed to race each other; they have to cope with bogs, ditches, steep hills, and rough ground; they must never, ever threaten a hound.  It's a tall list for a horse like Mickey.  He went out 1 1/2 times last year.  The first time he pulled one of his shoes partway off 20 minutes in, and had to quit; the second time, he quivered himself into nervous sweat-soaked steaming exhaustion.  I offered to borrow a friend's lovely calm hunt horse for my daughter to hunt this year, but my daughter loves Mickey beyond all reason and declined.

Some hunts are wildly upper-crust.  Some would perfectly fulfill the snobby rich-person stereotypes.  But remember, I live in Appalachia.  We are the Dinosaur Hunt.  The first day Katie and I went out with our hunt, one of the Masters (the leaders of the hunt; we have several) came over to us with a plastic bag full of tiny plastic dinosaurs, and instructed us to each chose one.   We were told that we would be expected to carry this dinosaur in the pocket of our hunt coat at all times: the Masters could demand that we produce it.  "We've found," the woman said, "that it's very difficult to take yourself too seriously if you are carrying a plastic dinosaur in your pocket."

So this was our Saturday:  we circled a cornfield.  Reversed, went the other way.  Reversed again.  Crossed a small stream at the bottom of a very deep ditch.  Galloped up the "Scary Trail."  Stood listening to hounds.  Trotted, then cantered, along some ridges.  Stood listening.  Crossed a river dam.  Went back.  Jumped some small logs, ran around, went back.  Hounds chased a coyote, but we were never in the right place to see him.  My horse behaved impeccably.  My daughter's horse, to my surprise, did too.  A hound went between his legs and he didn't put back an ear.  He went up the Scary Trail and bumped into my mare and got calmer and happier as the day progressed.  As we trotted back to the horse trailers, all of our horses in the low, relaxed, ground-covering trot that is my favorite hunting gait, my daughter brought up the rear with three hounds at her horse's heels.  It was, she told me later, a moment of complete partnership, and complete joy.  And she had her dinosaur, too.

Hard Stuff

Today some of the people I love most in the world are struggling, and I can't fix it.  I wish I could.  It's so nice when problems are actual concrete fixable ones, such as yesterday, when the driver's side window on my husband's minivan (yep, you read that right) fell into the door.  This isn't the first time that's happened, so we knew that 1) it wasn't a window problem, it was a broken bolt inside the door; 2) it could be fixed with 1 day in the shop and $265; 3) twice is way too often for the same thing to break on a vehicle, let alone three times.

I suggested we fix the problem by trading the 2004 minivan, broken window and all, for some other vehicle entirely, but my husband isn't there yet, and I totally respect that.  We keep talking about getting new cars, but the truth is, neither of us cares that much about what we drive, and despite the window issues the cars we have still run, and so we keep driving them.

Anyway, there are problems you can fix and ones you can only be a loving witness too, and today I'm stuck being a witness.  I find it ironic that I keep stumbling upon "struggle" messages today.  I just finished Malcolm Gladwell's brand-new book, David and Goliath, which is about underdogs and also about people who find strength through surviving adversity.  Then I read today's Gospel reading, that I now get emailed to me every morning courtesy of the University of Notre Dame, and it was all, "Woe to you, Bethsaida!" 

Then I went over to Momastery, Glennon Doyle Melton's blog, and got this (it's only part of her post, but I'm going to quote a big chunk because I love it so much:  Okay, it's not letting me post.  Don't know why.  It's seriously not even letting me post to a word document, so I'm guessing Glennon's got some kind of anti-copying mojo on her blog, so just go read it there.  I tried to find a single sentence to type out, to prove my point, but you've really got to read the whole thing.  Sorry.

Then I read today's post by the Yarn Harlot, by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, and while it's a different take on stuggle and suffering, it still fits in. 

So, go.  Read.  Pray.  Or come hang with me if you want to.  I'll be here, wishing I could help the ones I love.

If you ask folks what their wildest dream is many would say: winning the lottery,  even though this is often the kiss of death for families. We want MORE STUFF- even though it’s been proven again and again that after our basic needs our met- more stuff doesn’t make us happier. We collect and hoard and hold on tight to our money- even though we KNOW that giving feels better. We want to be smart- even though happiness and intelligence are inversely related. We  trade our time for cars and fancy clothes and shiny houses and then we realize all we’ve gained is more stress and higher bills- and in the end – we just want all that time back. Stuff that tastes good makes us feel bad, but we eat it anyway. We say things that feel good to “get off our chests” and we feel awful about it later. We want to become famous even though we know that fame destroys. We are desperate for perfectly “typical” kids even though parents with special needs kids consider them the biggest blessings of their lives. We avoid poverty even though God promises us the Kingdom is there. We avoid heartbreak by any means necessary even though that’s where the peace and connection and meaning is. We act like we are perfect even though nobody trusts perfect. We really want to be loved but choose being envied again and again.
I  receive oodles of emails (from non-religious folks) saying: “Why do you think you’re so broken? Why do you wallow in brokenness? You are WHOLE.” And (from religious folks) I often hear: “You need more Jesus. Jesus is all you need.”
But for goodness sake. Jesus promises not to leave us ALONE, he doesn’t promise not to leave us HUMAN. And to clarify – I don’t want to be “whole.” I want to be busted up and beautiful.  While I’m still here, I want to be FULLY HUMAN.
I talk about my addictions because everything beautiful in my life right now came out of the ugliness back then. And still does. I talk about my Lyme disease because I didn’t become strong and peaceful until I learned to surrender to my weakness and mania. I talk about my intolerance and jealousy and sadness and neurosis because those things make me HUMAN and I think that being a messy hypocritical, busted up human is a brutiful honor.
I talk about my flailing marriage because ( and a year ago I’d have ripped your well-meaning head off if you’d predicted this to me) the truth is that my marriage had to be shattered before it could be pieced back together
- See more at: http://momastery.com/blog/#sthash.oYzv43BL.dpuf

If you ask folks what their wildest dream is many would say: winning the lottery,  even though this is often the kiss of death for families. We want MORE STUFF- even though it’s been proven again and again that after our basic needs our met- more stuff doesn’t make us happier. We collect and hoard and hold on tight to our money- even though we KNOW that giving feels better. We want to be smart- even though happiness and intelligence are inversely related. We  trade our time for cars and fancy clothes and shiny houses and then we realize all we’ve gained is more stress and higher bills- and in the end – we just want all that time back. Stuff that tastes good makes us feel bad, but we eat it anyway. We say things that feel good to “get off our chests” and we feel awful about it later. We want to become famous even though we know that fame destroys. We are desperate for perfectly “typical” kids even though parents with special needs kids consider them the biggest blessings of their lives. We avoid poverty even though God promises us the Kingdom is there. We avoid heartbreak by any means necessary even though that’s where the peace and connection and meaning is. We act like we are perfect even though nobody trusts perfect. We really want to be loved but choose being envied again and again.
I  receive oodles of emails (from non-religious folks) saying: “Why do you think you’re so broken? Why do you wallow in brokenness? You are WHOLE.” And (from religious folks) I often hear: “You need more Jesus. Jesus is all you need.”
But for goodness sake. Jesus promises not to leave us ALONE, he doesn’t promise not to leave us HUMAN. And to clarify – I don’t want to be “whole.” I want to be busted up and beautiful.  While I’m still here, I want to be FULLY HUMAN.
I talk about my addictions because everything beautiful in my life right now came out of the ugliness back then. And still does. I talk about my Lyme disease because I didn’t become strong and peaceful until I learned to surrender to my weakness and mania. I talk about my intolerance and jealousy and sadness and neurosis because those things make me HUMAN and I think that being a messy hypocritical, busted up human is a brutiful honor.
I talk about my flailing marriage because ( and a year ago I’d have ripped your well-meaning head off if you’d predicted this to me) the truth is that my marriage had to be shattered before it could be pieced back together
- See more at: http://momastery.com/blog/#sthash.oYzv43BL.dpuf

If you ask folks what their wildest dream is many would say: winning the lottery,  even though this is often the kiss of death for families. We want MORE STUFF- even though it’s been proven again and again that after our basic needs our met- more stuff doesn’t make us happier. We collect and hoard and hold on tight to our money- even though we KNOW that giving feels better. We want to be smart- even though happiness and intelligence are inversely related. We  trade our time for cars and fancy clothes and shiny houses and then we realize all we’ve gained is more stress and higher bills- and in the end – we just want all that time back. Stuff that tastes good makes us feel bad, but we eat it anyway. We say things that feel good to “get off our chests” and we feel awful about it later. We want to become famous even though we know that fame destroys. We are desperate for perfectly “typical” kids even though parents with special needs kids consider them the biggest blessings of their lives. We avoid poverty even though God promises us the Kingdom is there. We avoid heartbreak by any means necessary even though that’s where the peace and connection and meaning is. We act like we are perfect even though nobody trusts perfect. We really want to be loved but choose being envied again and again.
I  receive oodles of emails (from non-religious folks) saying: “Why do you think you’re so broken? Why do you wallow in brokenness? You are WHOLE.” And (from religious folks) I often hear: “You need more Jesus. Jesus is all you need.”
But for goodness sake. Jesus promises not to leave us ALONE, he doesn’t promise not to leave us HUMAN. And to clarify – I don’t want to be “whole.” I want to be busted up and beautiful.  While I’m still here, I want to be FULLY HUMAN.
I talk about my addictions because everything beautiful in my life right now came out of the ugliness back then. And still does. I talk about my Lyme disease because I didn’t become strong and peaceful until I learned to surrender to my weakness and mania. I talk about my intolerance and jealousy and sadness and neurosis because those things make me HUMAN and I think that being a messy hypocritical, busted up human is a brutiful honor.
I talk about my flailing marriage because ( and a year ago I’d have ripped your well-meaning head off if you’d predicted this to me) the truth is that my marriage had to be shattered before it could be pieced back together
- See more at: http://momastery.com/blog/#sthash.oYzv43BL.dpuf

Shutdown

I am an introvert.  This may surprise those of you who know me, because I'm an extremely chatty introvert; I'm also a rather adventuresome introvert, in that I love, love, love traveling to new places and seeing new things.  I love to listen and learn, but I'll also willingly imitate both a vacuum cleaner and an airplane when I can't figure out how to ask in Italian if the vacuum-packed cheeses can be taken onto a plane.  (Answer:  yes.  In CHECKED LUGGAGE ONLY, no thanks to the security guards at Heathrow who pocketed my carry-on cheese.)

Anyway, we've had a lot of "up" time lately: the last several weekends have involved a pony club rally/horse trial, a three-day weekend to visit our son in college, and another horse trial a 5-hour drive away.  We were supposed to have had a four-day weekend in Washington, D.C., starting this afternoon, but the government shut down, and this week, so did my family.

My daughter and husband had colds.  I just had an introvert attack.  I needed to cocoon myself for awhile, and, since I just sent a novel off to a publisher, I'm doing research, which is to say reading books, which dovetails nicely with the cocoon thing.  The dogs and I have been curled up on the couch all week.

The problem with being an introvert who travels a lot is that I forget, sometimes, that I need to make an effort here at home.  I love being with my friends, but sometimes I have to kick myself into gear to make that happen.

On Tuesday night some of my friends hosted a Tupperware party, if by Tupperware you mean "products for adult relationship enhancement."  It was fabulous, not just because of the latex.  Put twenty women together with a heap of tasty snacks and several bottles of wine, add in that I've known most of them a decade or more--in a more formal party, or one with lots of strangers in it, I sometimes feel stressed by the small talk.  I know how to do it, it's a skill I've learned, but it takes effort that for me is draining.  Not with this crew.  They know my eccentricities.  I know theirs (but I've pledged not to write about them).   They understood that, for me, wearing white jeans was DRESSING UP, and complemented me accordingly.  None of them asked if I was "still writing." 

It was six kinds of awesome, and I swear, the next time I hole up in my happy cave, I'm going to make myself remember that there are places just as cozy on the outside.  And ladies, thanks.

I Don't Seem to Meet Expectations

For those of my friends who're logging on here to find out what I have to say about our little adventure last night, sorry.  I'm still processing.  Maybe tomorrow.

Actually I'm busy processing a whole lot of stuff right now.  One of my reasons for writing this blog is so that I have a place to put all the little thoughts that aren't actually a book but persist in going off like firecrackers in my head.  I am always, always a writer.  At every moment in my life, there's a small scribe tucked into the corner of my brain, taking notes like a mad fiend.  I can't help it; I was born this way.  But at least with a blog some of the notes end up outside my head.

So.  Last week I was snarky to someone I really like, because he asked if I was "still writing."  I replied that no one ever asked my husband if he was "still a surgeon."  The more I thought about this the more I realized that the "still writing" question, which I get a lot, has to do with people not quite understanding how writers work.  Many people have good ideas for books; the people who end up becoming writers are the ones who stick with it, who are always still writing.  It's a lot easier to stop writing than to keep writing; easier still never to start.  But you can't become a published writer unless you keep writing for such a long time that, once you've finished one book, you might as well start another.  It has become who you are.  It's what you do.

In a similar vein, last Thursday night I went out to dinner with several other couples, most of whom were strangers to me.  They were all gathered for a weekend golf tournament, including my husband, but not me: I was going to a horse trial with my daughter.  This made perfect sense to all the other women, until they discovered that I was also competing, not just my child.  Then there was some confusion.  I rode?  I competed?  Well, once my daughter left for college, I would give that up, right?  No?  I explained that it was me who evented first; my daughter was a more recent convert.  I loved the sport for its own sake, not just because I liked to do it with her.  Odd.

Also--and I'm not sure how all this ties together, although I have a gut feeling that it does--I've become completely in love with Nadia Bolz-Weber.  She's an ordained Lutheran pastor with wild tattoos and a propensity for telling people to fuck off; she wrote a gorgeous theological memoir, Pastrix: the Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner and Saint, which was published 2 weeks ago and has already hit the NYT Bestseller list.  I love her writing and her theology so much that I just spent 40 minutes reading her sermons online.  In the cover photo on her book, she's seated on the floor, eyes cast down, arms around her knees.  A sleeveless shirt reveals tattoos of saints running down both arms.  She's got wrinkles near her eyes and a touch of grey hair at her temples, like me. 

I "liked" her on Facebook, and read this post there from a friend:  The book review (which, obviously, was negative) said that your problem is that you believe God loves people just the way they are.

Maybe that's the string that ties this random post together.  Or maybe not.  Today I just can't tell.
 

Rant: Why I Hate All Politicians

I got a tweet this morning that said, "404: Government Not Found."  It would be funny if it weren't true.

All throughout Banned Books Week I was getting het up about politics; ironic that I'm sitting down to write about politics on the day the government shut down. 

Here's the thing:  I don't like any person in government.  There is absolutely no one I support.  There is no side with which I mostly agree.  I have no good options.  The last presidential candidate I truly admired was Theodore Roosevelt.   I'm feeling relieved I don't have to vote this year.

By nature I am a less-government kind of person.  I like efficiency, not bureaucracy.  I want a small federal government.   No Child Left Behind, anyone?  Ask any elementary school teacher if they think that was a good idea.

So in general I don't agree with Obama, who is above all else a Big Government kind of guy.  Remember when he said that the Affordable Health Care Act would result in no new taxes?  How's the individual mandate tax, the employer mandate tax, the Excise Tax on Comprehensive Health Insurance Plans, the Tax on Health Insurers, the Tax on Innovator Drug Companies, the High Medical Bills Tax, the Medicine Cabinet Tax, the Tax on Indoor Tanning Services, and the Excise Tax on Charitable Hospitals? And a small number of multi-billion dollar tax hikes on things like the Medicare Payroll tax and the “black liquor” tax and the HSA Withdrawal tax.  None of these really surprise me, since the idea that we could all get more and better medical insurance for less money seemed intuitively disingenuous. 

What I hate is the willful blindness of most, shall I say all, politicians to the real-world effects of their actions.  The other night I got home from a long day at Faith in Action to see Obama on television vehemently denying that any employers were cutting employees' hours so that the employers wouldn't have to contribute to health care.

Bullshit.  I could have hooked him up with three separate people from that day at Faith In Action alone, who had seen their minimum-wage jobs cut to no more than 20 hours per week, because 25 hours is the magic number at which the Affordable Health Care Act provisions start to kick in. 

If you are 53 years old and did not graduate from high school, and worked for over 30 years at one of the 1200 manufacturing jobs my town of 40000 people lost in the past 2 years, you've gone from a salary that would support your family to a minimum wage job.  There are very few other choices.  Now you're working 20 hours at that minimum wage job.  Good luck.

Yep, it's true that companies only have to follow the 25-hour rule if they have over 50 employees.  Guess what?  My local McDonald's has over 50 employees.  So does Lowe's, Home Depot, Food City, Target, Pizza Hut.   And they're currently making very sure that they don't give any of their employees more than 20 hours of work per week.  It's far more cost-effective for them to hire 100 people at 20 hours per week than 50 at 40. Meanwhile, places that have, say, 40 employees, and pay decent full-time wages with health insurance and other benefits, are now never, ever going to expand to 50 employees, because of all the extra constraints that kick in at that number (I could give real-world local examples, but I won't.).

Obama's refusal to believe this is happening makes me feel like he lives in some sort of ivory tower.  I'd like him to come to Faith in Action, just for one day.

Meanwhile--same day last week, same television show--a bunch of Republican blowhards, several in a row so I don't even remember their names--started justifying their decision to cut food stamps by averring that anyone who receiving food stamps--1 in 7 Americans--should be ashamed.  That they hoped the social stigma of receiving food stamps would motivate people to go back to work.

This made me want to throw things.  Yes, let's shame those people who are trying to get by on $7.25/hr, 20 hours/week.  Let's make them feel worse about their hours being cut.  Let's cut food stamps, too, so their children can be hungry.  That'll learn 'em.

No matter that the burgeoning number of Americans on food stamps is caused by a decline in wages, not by an increase in benefit amounts.  No matter that food stamps are considered one of the most efficient federal programs.  No matter that children receiving food stamps, and therefore better nutrition, are more likely to stay in school and less likely to receive federal aid as adults.  

I am pretty sure that the Republicans are sharing Obama's ivory tower.  I invite them to Faith in Action, too.

I know that some of you reading this will start to rant about people who don't need federal benefits but get them anyhow.  People who buy steak and lobster with their SNAP cards.  People who trade SNAP for cigarettes.  Whatever.  Justice admits that some people do take advantage, but truth and mercy stand with the poor.  People need help.  They need work, and if they can't find enough work, they still need food.

Meanwhile I can't see a single person in the system who deserves my precious vote.