dual personalities

It’s Friday already! I have done nothing noteworthy this week unless you count work (which I don’t). Desperate to find something to watch last night but too tired to bother looking for long, I settled on Netflix’s Misha and the Wolves, a documentary about a Belgian woman who became famous back in the late 1990s-early 2000s with a false Holocaust narrative. (Apparently, her story became a worldwide sensation. I had never heard of her).

Misha claimed to be Jewish and that her parents had been taken off to a German prison camp during WWII. She was hidden by a Catholic family who didn’t treat her well. In an effort to find her parents, she, a mere child of seven, set off into the woods, where eventually a pack of wolves adopted her. Unlikely, you say? From the start, the story seemed preposterous and it surprised me that anyone would believe it. None of the so-called evidence added up. Nevertheless, she wrote a book, became a celebrity, a movie was made and scandals ensued. It turned out that she was Catholic, not Jewish, and that her father, a member of the resistance, got arrested and betrayed his compatriots under torture. Her parents died at Auschwitz, but her father was remembered as a traitor. The child Misha escaped into a fantasy world and eventually cashed in on her fantasies. The whole sordid affair happened because some people, Misha included, got greedy and others just wanted to believe. A holocaust historian who appeared in the documentary had this to say:  

The danger of believing everything (we are told) puts history, as a historical reality of genuine survivors, at risk. I think that we would like to believe that Misha Defonseca believed that she was a survivor of the Holocaust. I think that we would like to believe that we were not so naïve, that we believed it because she believed it, and we would even like to believe that this narrative has a redemptive purpose, because it made right the wrong of her childhood. I think it’s nonsense. There is no redemptive purpose, we were so naïve, (and) it was all a fabrication.

That about sums it up, but it got me thinking about how easy it is to dupe the public these days, especially with all the new-fangled technology. Sometimes people we see in ads aren’t people at all. They’re computer generated.

That’s all well and fine, you say. It’s only an ad. But what about the news? See this, for examples of how easy it is to manipulate the viewer. People constantly demand that we follow ‘science’ and ‘stick to the facts’ but it’s getting increasingly difficult for us to tell what those are.

Well, I guess we’ll just have to blunder on and do our best, but beware — if the truth is out there, it’s hiding.

*Mark Twain (if I can trust my source)

Hello from daughter #2! I am here to provide a fun little update (and perhaps some grumblings and thoughts, too). You might have heard that sweet Katiebelle started walking this weekend.

After taking a couple of tentative steps here and there, she was off to the races with a short trip down a hallway on Friday night. By Saturday, she was walking everywhere. Though still a bit wobbly, Katie goes for it with gusto and is pretty fearless. She wants to walk around every corner of the house, in the parking lot, at the playground — anything goes.

We haven’t quite mastered stairs, but not for lack of trying.

Unfortunately, learning to walk has been a big milestone among many setbacks — Katie’s first ear infection, an RSV diagnosis, and a big molar coming in (with several other teeth on the way). No one has gotten much sleep for a couple of weeks now, and Katie is in and out of daycare. I can tell Katie has been feeling bad because sometimes she doesn’t even finish her banana (“NAAA”) at snack time. Quelle horror.

But we trudge along and I try to embrace the extra time hanging out with the babe. It’s been a busy time at work with the semester starting, so Katie visited my office over the weekend to watch DN help me get a few things set up. Lots of new doors to open — fascinating!

I hadn’t realized that it was a move-in weekend, so we had to navigate the traffic jam of SUVs filled with laundry baskets, mini fridges, and angst. It was a lot, and I’m sure people were confused by the presence of a toddler. Katie was equally wary of them, but here she is, ready for Intro to Literature:

I, for one, have been trying to get myself back in the mood to read something good. My mother very kindly sent me some of the Christian Romance novels from my teenage reading years — as a joke, she insisted, but I couldn’t help but skim one. (OK, I legit read it.)

It was, ahem, not good.

I always turn back to the nineteenth century when I need to read something that will get me to snap out of it. Self-reliance, anyone?

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

But Emerson can be a little much. I always remember the anecdote I learned in a college class, that Emerson would invite Margaret Fuller over for dinner and then walk and talk with her — not his wife — after the meal. When he journaled about his wife’s unhappiness with this recurring scenario, he said something like, “Well, Margaret has things to teach me! There is nothing left to learn from my wife.” Well then.

So I have been thinking of re-reading The Blithedale Romance, the novel of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s that I have read the least number of times. Something about Hawthorne always soothes me, because he wasn’t such a genius as his Concord contemporaries, but he’s still so, so good. I always think he would understand my less-intellectual moments. (Maybe he’d even understand reading a Christian Romance novel once in a while!) He loved his wife and his children dearly.

Maybe by the time I blog next I’ll have actually finished a book. For now, a plan. And until then, a gif:

The only way to maintain equanimity in the face of seemingly eternal Covid Theater is to find a distraction. For example, this recent headline from our local paper made me smile, even as it got my imagination going.

High crime in the North Country! Dying to know all about it, I did some research and discovered  that there’s a big black market in catalytic converters, because they are made of rare metals. The world IS more than we know!

When I wasn’t stewing about mask mandates or learning about the illegal trade in car parts, I read a wonderful book called Gathering of Sisters: A Year with My Old Order Mennonite Family. My DH gave it to me last Christmas and it’s a good thing I didn’t read it right away, because I sure did need it this week.

The author, Darla Weaver, grew up on a farm in a Mennonite community in southeastern Ohio, with her four sisters and four brothers. Now married adults, she and her sisters pack up their children every Tuesday and bike or buggy over to their parents’ farm to spend the day together cooking, gardening, sewing, reading, playing and talking. Nothing dramatic happens, no one ever gets angry or upset, and everyone – children included – works away happily. Even when facing a difficult or unpleasant chore, they just get to it without complaint. It’s a very refreshing read.

The author is funny, thoughtful and self-aware, and she writes well. At one point after singing “This Little Light of Mine” and “Jesus Bids Us Shine” to her youngest son, she muses, “Sometimes I look around at all that is wrong and realize again there is very little I can actually do to make anything better, or even much improved. But I can shine in my one small corner, and there I can serve God faithfully at my simple duties.” The small life has a lot of appeal for those of us who do not enjoy the relentless press of popular culture.  

On another Tuesday, when all her children have gone to school and Darla is the only sister without a child in tow, she consoles herself, “Even if my children are growing up too fast, here are my sisters, growing old, or at least middle-aged, right along with me. The years are passing one by one, a little like the shadows that slip across the mountains each afternoon, but we are sisters still. Even the surprises that the years often bring can’t change that.  Decades ago, when we all still had the same last name, we were sisters by chance of birth and took for granted the bonds of our heritage. Today we are friends by choice as much as we are sisters, and we feel amazingly blessed to have grown from these roots. It’s not something to take for granted anymore.” I can relate to that, can’t you?

Remember, there are plenty of regular people out there getting on with life.  We do not have to get sucked into the media maelstrom. We may not be able to control most of what life throws at us, but we can control how we deal with it. I guess that means I’d better learn to deal with Covid restrictions  — even when they make no sense.

Good Wednesday morning to you. I come to you from my living room couch where it sounds like my upstairs neighbor is continuing her month-long quest to feng shui her apartment while her dog jumps around excitedly, possible chasing a ball.

Here is an actual email subject line I received last week:

Is this as bad as Nordstrom calling me plus-sized?! Maybe this is some sort of weird COVID thing? I don’t know but I hit delete. I’m not helping Wayfair’s Open Rate with that one.

At work, I recently learned that I have to design and build a float for the Bicentennial Parade that’s coming up in a few weeks. I am actually pretty stressed about it because even though I have lots of experience riding on floats, I usually don’t have to construct them! And by construct, I obviously mean find people in the office who can do this for me.

Anyway, last night I was doing some research and I found a great website full of helpful inspiration from a company that sells float decorations. I love these photos of floats of yore:

Sadly, I can’t figure out how to make an Elvis replica fit with the “Missouri History” theme, but someday…

In other news, this arrived in my mailbox today so I can look forward to flipping through some pages of muted colors and advice about slowing down. I kid, but I do enjoy the magazine.

I glanced through it and was surprised that Joanna’s editorial note was a bit, shall we say, it had a tone.

“Part of me wonders if social media, or the sport of scroll and click, has shifted the way we approach understanding one another. If the quickness of it all and the immediacy that we’ve learned to live by–the ability to approve or dismiss with a tap of a button, to comment quickly and without a filter, to click and read only the catchy headline–have weakened our ability to see deeply and hear genuinely what others have to say. More than anything, I wonder if it’s lessened how much we try.

It’s as if somewhere along the way we forgot that we are real and complex human beings whose stories run deep and that sometimes the truth sits below the surface.”

Joanna Gaines

To that I say, welllll duh.

I’ll admit that I thought about ending this blog post here with a pithy comment about humanity, but I think Jo continues and hits the really important point. We can’t accept that this is how we all live now.

“Then there’s me, the one who wants to right the wrong. Who wants to call foul because I thought we all knew to play fair.

I know I’m not the only one who has felt this way–misunderstood, misrepresented, missed altogether. Not by a long stretch. And I don’t know about you, but I’m sick of feeling stuck in the muck and mire of a social culture that is robbing us all of deep and true connection–of joy, peace, honest understanding, and empathy.

Maybe you are too. And maybe now is the time to declare that we’re not willing to give that up. Not yet.”

See what I mean by a tone.