The Need to Write

My mother was a compulsive writer. She taught English and French, and she also loved to write in different genres all the way from letters to diary entries to poems. Her brothers would complain that they always owed her a letter, for as soon as she heard from them, she would reply.

Because she died in 1975, she was limited to “snail mail,” but she made the most of it, writing to family members and to her life-long best friend every week of the year. I often think of how she would have loved emailing, by which letters to her family and friends could have been delivered instantly and freely.

Like mother, I’m a compulsive writer, too. I taught poetry writing, as well as other fields of literature for many years at various schools, including Olivet College, and wrote hundreds of poems along with my students. Unfortunately, however, most of my poems sit unread, unpublished, in a manila folder in my den closet.

But after I retired from the college in 1998, I began writing part-time for the Enquirer, and my words were actually published. Most of my early assignments were on subjects that would be considered minor, such as local fund raising events, city government decisions, and the like. But even if they were unexciting reports I nevertheless simply enjoyed the writing process.

Then they began letting me write feature stories. I especially remember writing about a woman who had seven siblings, all of whom had different fathers. There was also the one about the standard poodle who, together with his owner, was said to serve as principal at the elementary school in Olivet. And then there was the one about the Battle Creek Symphony violist and piano-tuning friend who always invited me to his “Piano Burning Party” where, each year, he would select an instrument which was beyond repair to be consigned to the flames.

For some years now I have had the honor of writing a regular column, and I am grateful to be able to indulge myself in my passions, my compulsions, in the Enquirer every week.

This need to communicate is certainly not uncommon among people in general. It was particularly fervent among the Jews in concentration camps. Even though they were weak from starvation and disease and even though they knew they were probably going to die, they would gather up any bits of paper they could to write about their feelings and their suffering. According to Roger Rosenblatt, a prominent American writer, these prisoners “rolled those scraps into small scrolls and slipped the scrolls into the crevices of the ghetto walls. . . . because they had to do it. They had a story to tell.”

True enough, after losing his parents and one sister at Auschwitz, Elie Wiesel didn’t write anything about the Holocaust for ten years. But, upon the urging of French Nobel Prize winner, Francois Mauriac, he wrote his powerful book “Night.” He then went on to write 56 more books, many about the war, and he won the Nobel Prize in 1986.

British writer Vita Sackville-West said it well when she declared, “It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows.”

Harold Kushner on Pain and Goodness

Two of the most powerful books I’ve read in a long time have been “When Bad Things Happen to Good People,” and “How Good Do We Have to Be.” Both were written by the Jewish rabbi and highly successful writer, Dr. Harold S. Kushner.

The first book I mentioned was about the dreadful disease Progeria, which had caused Kushner’s son’s death when he was just a teenager. I was inspired by that book to write not only about Kushner’s son but about others around the world whom he also described as they suffered from Progeria and died young.

His second book, “How Good Do We Have to Be” has been equally profound for me and makes me want to suggest that my readers read both books.

Kushner writes many times in this book about how good we need to be, but he also says just as many times that none of us is perfect. As he also puts it, “The challenge of being human is so great that no one gets it right every time.”

It’s downright sad, he emphasizes, that many people seem to insist that their parents, their spouses, their children and their friends be perfect. This kind of outlook on others is never even realistic, and it can sadly result in lifelong “guilt, anger, depression and disappointment.”

For Kushner, the story of Adam and Eve is not a story of condemnation but rather what he calls “an inspiring, even liberating story, a story of what a wonderful, complicated, painful, and rewarding thing it is to be a human being.”

He even goes on to say that perhaps “God wanted Adam and Even to eat the fruit, though He knew it would make their lives painful and complicated.” As he also puts it, “God didn’t want to be the only One in the world who knew the difference between Good and Evil.”

Because of Adam and Eve eating forbidden fruit, humans began to have “sexual intimacy, parenthood, a sense of mortality, [and] the knowledge of good and evil.” Kushner goes on to say that some on of the new life “may be painful, but it is the sort of pain that leads to growth.”

It’s amusing that Charles Darwin, when asked what was unique about human beings, said, “Man is the only animal that blushes.” As Kushner put it less humorously but more clearly, “Human beings are the only creatures capable of recognizing the gap between what they are and what they can be expected to be.”

I especially liked two quotes which Dr. Kushner used in his last chapter about that gap. “As the folk saying puts it, ‘I’m not much, Lord, but I’m all I‘ve got.’” And, as Mother Teresa said, “We are not here to be successful; we are here to be faithful.”

Dr. Kushner also explained that a Duke University study indicated that “honest, cheerful, generous people tended to be healthier than suspicious, selfish, hostile ones.” That finding alone should make us want to be positive, forgiving people.

I especially love his paragraph at the end of this book: “At the end, if we are brave enough to love, if we are strong enough to forgive, if we are generous enough to rejoice in another’s happiness, and if we are wise enough to know that there is enough love to go around for us all, then we can achieve a fulfillment that no other live creature will ever know. We can re-enter Paradise.”

The Skeleton in the Fish Pond

When my Bellevue friends Amy and Eric Witzke decided to make a small fish pond in their yard, they were surprised to unearth some large bones.

Eric and his friend Danny LaPointe originally intended to dig only about a 200 square foot area, but after they discovered a few of the bones, they kept digging, and eventually expanded the hole to the size of a high-school gymnasium. As they carefully dug up more and more of the ground they found almost 40 huge bones, including ribs, pelvis, vertebrae and scapula.

It turned out that these were the bones of a mastodon, animals which were in existence for over two million years. Though they didn’t date back as far as dinosaurs, they were nevertheless ancient and lived up to the end of the last Ice Age, approximately 11,000 years ago. They were about seven and a half feet tall at the shoulders, and weighed as much as five tons. They were therefore some of the largest of all land mammals.

Mastodons were so called because the name means “nipple teeth” and refers to the cusps on their molars or grinding teeth. Amazingly, unlike our human teeth, the mastodon’s teeth could replace themselves up to seven or eight times. New ones would develop in the back of their mouths and then would gradually move forward to replace old teeth. The mastodon’s tusks, which are modified incisor teeth, like those of modern elephants, were among the largest in the animal kingdom, 14 feet or more. The longest was found in Greece in 2007, and was over 16 feet.

The Witzkes were most fortunate to make contact with Professor Dan Fisher of the University of Michigan, for Dr. Fisher is a renowned expert on extinct animals and has traveled to such a faraway place as Siberia in order to study such creatures. When he heard about what the Witzkes had found, he gladly came out to their property and was truly impressed with what they had found.

As he told them, these animals existed in both North and Central America. Though there were over 350 sites containing these remains in our state, only four had been found so far in Eaton County. He also explained that these animals originally had 280 bones, so the Witzkes might well find more bones if they continue to dig in their yard.

It was fun for me to learn that unlike mastodons, we humans have only 220 bones in our bodies. It was interesting, too, that the bones had been quite dark when they were first found, but when the Witzkes put them in their dry, warm barn, they turned much lighter in color.

Dr. Fisher even estimated that this animal had been about 38 years old when it died, figuring this out at least partly because of its teeth. Perhaps it had been killed by early humans for food, Dr. Fisher guessed. As he explained, the skull may have been broken because those ancient folks would often eat both brains and sinuses.

Eric Witzke and Daniel LaPoint took the bones to Olivet Middle School classes and allowed the children to touch and admire the various bones. 

Eventually these bones may be taken to the University of Michigan Paleontology Lab where Dr. Fisher and his team will continue to study them to learn more about mastodons in general.

There can be harmony between religions

“If there is beauty in the person There will be harmony in the house. If there is harmony in the house, There will be order in the nation If there is order in the nation, There will be peace in the world.”

- A Chinese proverb

I’m sad that many Americans categorically dislike Islamic, Hindu and Sikh folks and assume that they are aggressive and even dangerous.

I have never visited any of the Asian countries where millions of people of those three faiths live, but I have known some truly wonderful, loving Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs right here in America.

In this column I want to tell you about the ones I met to assure you that though it is true there are definitely some reprehensible people who claim to be of various faiths, they are only a small and totally irreligious group.

Some years ago, for example, I met a very nice single Muslim named Abdur Rehman, who came here from Pakistan. He got a graduate degree in engineering at the University of Michigan and worked at Eaton Corporation. Rehman shared an apartment in Marshall not with a fellow Muslim but with yet another very nice fellow, Brijesh Kumar, who was a Hindu from India. Kumar also had a degree in engineering, and they seemed to be close friends and worked together.

Because I was doing an article about the two of them, I felt free to ask if there were any religious controversies between them. “Not at all,” said Kumar. “I respect the Muslim religion, and I admire Rehman He is a true Muslim who worships five times per day.” And Rehman said he respected his friend Kumar greatly and felt he had learned valuable facts about Hinduism values from him. Of course there were differences between them. For example Kumar didn’t eat beef, and Rehman didn’t eat pork, but even though they sometimes ordered those meats in a restaurant together, they simply didn’t share their food.

In addition, though both Rehman and Kumar worked full time, they spent many hours helping their friends, Azhar and Yasmeen Pervaiz, a Muslim couple who owned a gas station there in Marshall. I had already gotten to know the Pervaizes and also did an article about them. Though they didn’t know each other at all until the day of their arranged marriage, and though both had been married before, they seemed to be very happy together and had two very cute young children whom they loved dearly. The Pervaizes were also extremely friendly and invited me to have a meal with them in their home near their gas station.

Yet another valuable experience happened when I was visiting my son and his family in Cleveland. While there I happened to stop to see a beautiful Sikh temple. It was just 8:00 in the morning, but as soon as I knocked on the door, a very kind man named Bhai Sahib Suba Singh greeted me warmly and asked if I would like a cup of sweet, milky tea. I ended up staying there for a couple of hours and later wrote a column about their faith.

This man and his wife had two very nice teenaged sons who were studying with their father to become priests and planned to go back to India for official training.

Have you met any kind, loving Muslims, Hindus or Sikhs? I feel most fortunate to have met such jewels, and my life has certainly been enriched by each of them.

Inspiration from Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen is a wonderful writer, and I find that I agree with her on many of her beliefs and preferences. I’ll tell you about a couple of them which she elaborates upon in her autobiographical book, “Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake.”

The first one is about women. Though she is happily married to a fine and loving husband and has two fine sons whom she loves dearly, Anna says, “I think women are superior to men. There, I've said it. It's my dirty little secret.”

I must admit that even though I have a wonderful fiance named Andrew, whom I will happily marry on my 100th birthday and I also have two loving sons and some fine male friends, most of my friends from throughout the years are women. Andrew agrees with me, saying most of his friends, too, are women. As Anna says, “The older we get, the more we understand that the women who know and love us--and love us despite what they know about us--are the joists that hold up the house of our existence. Everything depends on them.”

Whereas male friendships generally involve doing things together and talking about sports and politics, women’s friendships depend much more upon deep, honest discussion of feelings.

The second belief of Anna is about aging. As she puts it, people who are older “feel as if they’ve settled into their own skin, even if that skin has sun damage.” In addition, for older folks, “stress, anger and sadness have all declined.” She refers to a Gallup Poll of 340,000 people which “shows unequivocally that we get more content as we age.”

As part of Anna’s comments on aging, she says, “There was a time when I behaved as though I was the center of the universe. It was a good time, when I was young, and arrogant, and foolish, and eager, and terribly insecure and horribly insensible to others and not beholden to anyone else, without responsibility for houses or children or dogs or the clean up after a disaster. I just like this time better.”

Another aspect of all of this is that people feel younger than their parents and grandparents did. I especially like a quote she uses from the Pew study which says, “Most adults over fifty feel at least ten years younger than their actual age.”

I’m 75, now, and I agree completely with Anna. As I said earlier, I have a wonderful, loving boyfriend who is a much better match than either of my two husbands ever were. Also, instead of teaching college students, I get to teach older people who want to learn, through the Institute for Learning in Retirement. I therefore don’t need to grade any papers or evaluate their work in my class. We simply have fun learning together.

Instead of playing in the symphony, which I did for 31 years and for which I had to practice a lot, I now simply play favorite songs by ear for older folks many times each month. I also love getting to write these columns each week these days on any subject I wish to pursue.

And, finally, I noticed at my 50th high school and college reunions, that people were more relaxed and fun. They didn’t seem to need to brag about their careers any more. They were just happy to be alive and getting to gather once again with old friends.

Anna has definitely inspired me, and I hope my column will have the same effect on some of my older readers, too.